Episode 27: Exploring the Depths of the Unconscious

(upbeat music) - Hey everybody, welcome to Transcendence Talks podcast. Today I have the absolute privilege of introducing to you guys Juliana Sloan. So I'm gonna read the little bio that I wrote for her, so I can introduce her to you guys today. So Juliana is profoundly aligned with the heart of what we explore here on the podcast, the intersection of healing, spirituality, and the deeper currents that shape our inner world. Juliana Sloan is a certified depth hypnosis practitioner, applied shamanic counselor, hypnotherapist, and long-time meditation teacher. Her path weaves together years of Buddhist practice, time in silent retreat, Dharma leadership training, and a commitment to supporting people through every dimension of their awakening. From healing trauma to navigating spiritual emergencies, to finding meaning, purpose, and clarity in their lives. - Welcome to the show. - Thanks so much, Christy. Thank you so much for the beautiful introduction too. I feel like I want to carry you around and not be able to introduce to me to everyone, right? - It's so great to be here. - Yeah, it's so good to meet you. It's so fun to meet aligned practitioners who are doing what I think is the most important work right now, helping people really navigate their own spirituality and ascension process. - Absolutely. Now I think that so many of us over the years, whether it's something that we've been experiencing for a very long time in our life where it's a newer emergence. So many people that I work with one on one, that I teach, that I connect with in different ways. There's this profound sense of knowing, oh, there's something more. There's something more than meets the eye here that needs to be explored. So I've been just delighting in listening to your other podcast episodes and getting a sense of who you are as well. It's been really, really fun to learn more about you and your work as well. - Well, thank you so much. So this year, 2025 has been an interesting one for a lot of people. I'd love to hear this from your experience too, but in my world, it feels like this year, the year of the snake has been the year that people are realizing I have to shed what's no longer real and true and aligned for me and I cannot bring it in to the next year. And I think so many of us are in this uncomfortable, I mean, deeply, existentially uncomfortable place of, I know what no longer serves, but I don't know what's next and I don't know what's what I'm becoming. Are you seeing this in your work too? - My other, yes. - Absolutely, this is really, there is something about this time where things feel so intense and so filled with pressure and so high stakes in many ways for many people that I think a lot of the folks who are coming to me and you know, this as a hypnotherapist, especially, this is one of the common themes any year, but people usually show up and they say, something is stuck. I need to make this change. This doesn't fit anymore. I have to leave my job or change how I show up in relationship or any number of sudden big life changes. And they know that something needs to shift. They understand it conceptually. There's an incredible insight, depth, awareness that's already there, but getting from point B, understanding, okay, the change needs to happen to point B where the change is actually being embodied and happening. I think that's where a lot of the work with the unconscious mind, work with spirituality, work with energy really comes in because there are a lot of things that we can understand on a rational kind of talk level perfectly, but putting the change into action is really where the rubber meets the road. And I feel like I'm seeing a lot of people especially this year where some of that is centered around really getting clear, getting real, getting focused on what's truly meaningful in life, where people are devoting and expending their limited resources, energy, time, love. And that feels right now like we are, many of us in a little bit of a reckoning with that in 2025 into 2026, if my life here is a limited finite amount of time, how do I really want to spend it? Do I really want to make sure that I'm doing the things that give life meaning and I'm showing up in the way that I really want to show up? - Absolutely, yeah, that's so well said. And so you've obviously been through this process yourself personally because you have to have walked it to guide other people through those dark places. Was there a catalytic experience for you that brought you to this place of learning so intimately and so many different paths about the subconscious? Or was it just something that you were kind of steeped in growing up that compelled you onto this path? - That's such a great question. And honestly, it's a little bit of column A and a little bit of column B. We were chatting right before we started recording and you know, I've been reflecting a little bit on this before getting together today. Part of it is very much kind of baked into who I am as a person, my family of origin. Like I mentioned, my mother has a shamanic practice herself. I was so fortunate to have been raised in deep connection with nature. I went to a groovy little super progressive hippie school in the woods, you know. I'm not great at math, but I also know how to take care of sheep as a result of my experiences there. And so there always was, to some extent, a little bit of an animistic worldview, a sense of the ways that the earth, the sky, the plants, the animals, the rocks, the mountains, that there is life force, there is spirit or whatever we might want to call it within everything. And, you know, I have memories of being a little kid and making little offerings to what I considered the nature spirits of the land. Totally unprompted, no one has showed me how to do this. It just was like, yeah, here's what you do. You know, and I remember having profound meditative experiences at a very young age, but I didn't know what they were. And so this was always there to an extent. I started as a teenager getting more interested in Eastern spirituality, kirtan chanting, meditation, different things like that. But honestly, it was a winding road. There was a lot of going away and coming back and going away and coming back, trying to live, you know, a more conventional kind of life. And every time, you know, something would just pull me right back into being in this world deeply immersed in meditation, in spirit, in story, in connection to nature. However, we might think about it, those sort of depth places. And, you know, really, I would say that the clincher for me, though, was in my midlate 20s, I experienced a trauma. And I had been living that, you know, I was, you know, leadership role at a nonprofit. We were publishing these powerful first-person accounts from human rights crisis survivors, you know, really meaningful and important work. But there was something in that that wasn't working for me. And I do think the way I was living my life at that time, while it was meaningful, it wasn't really on the right track and, you know, had some experiences that were deeply traumatic and really pushed me onto a totally different path. I started coming back to Buddhism at that time and very quickly, in a matter of, you know, 10 years or so, was going from dipping my toes back into that water to managing a meditation center, wow, to then teaching later, then working with people one on one. And it really did come of at first, of course, from a place of my own suffering, you know, we joke within the Buddhist meditation world, you don't get into this stuff if you're not suffering enough to be willing to sit down and get quiet and listening to your own mind, you know. - Absolutely. - Yeah, it's unfortunate, but it feels like the darkness tends to be the catalyst into light. I rarely meet anybody who hasn't had some kind of an initiatory experience. - Absolutely. - And I'm wondering, you know, where do these worlds of shamanism and Buddhist meditation meet for you? How do these worlds collide? - Absolutely. You were asking my favorite questions, these are lovely. You know, for me, one of the things that I found to be a little bit limiting, at least within, you know, I practice in the terabata tradition of Buddhism. Most people are familiar with, like, insight meditation, vipassana, mindfulness. Most of that is really stemming from that terabata tradition. And one of the places where I always felt a little bit of tension, actually with that tradition, was that, you know, especially with the influence of secular mindfulness. If someone has a profound energetic experience or a visionary experience while they're sitting in meditation or they're in a long silent retreat, for, you know, really good intention. A lot of the time, the recommendation is sort of note that it's happening. Don't get too sucked into it. Don't turn it into something big and continue practicing. And, you know, the good intention behind that really is so that people don't turn it into this big egoic experience and make a story while they're on the cushion or on the retreat about what an amazing meditator they are and get totally wrapped up in it so much so that they miss the plot entirely. However, there are also places where these visionary experiences or energetic experiences are very powerful and very onward leading and actually pointing us to places that are deeply important for us to explore. And so that's where the shamanic journey work really came in for me is, you know, the first, if I was to pinpoint it, I was sitting a two-month retreat. And so I was in silent, silly cutoff from the world. - A few months. - Two months. - Two months, so. - Wow. - You know, like, gets your sleeping for eight hours. So, practicing about 16 hours a day, really. You know, you're sitting, you're walking, you're sitting, you're walking, you're sitting, you're walking. And I began to have essentially shamanic experiences on the cushion and I was so fortunate. Because for me, what was happening was this very profound piece where, you know, in one instance, I was sitting there in silence kind of battling my own inner critic, battling the mental churn, the ways that we can ruminate that are so painful. And what happened for me in that moment basically was this internal vision of a mama wolf protecting her cubs, basically saying, do not mess with my baby, stop talking so much crap about yourself. And it was so powerful and so forceful and so good, you know, like stop it right now. You do not need to go there to that mental space. It pulled me out of this cycle of, you know, rumination and self-criticism and self-doubt. And I was so lucky that the teacher I was working with most closely at that time was an indigenous woman, who was also a Buddhist meditation teacher. And so she was familiar with the shamanic cosmology. And she understood what was happening for me. And so she was able to say, oh, okay, this is good. You just tell me about this, you just keep me posted. Don't worry about the traditional instructions. And I feel so grateful for that because it really did open a door for me. You know, from that point onwards, I got connected with other teachers, explores so much more and an entirely different world opened up. And, you know, these days I work with both worlds. And a lot of my meditation students come to me after retreats when they've had big experiences that they'd like a little bit more of a shamanic or energetic or deeper perspective on. - Yeah, and I mean, I know for me, when I've had these visual experiences or experiences in meditation that are really charged, they tend to come with a visceral sensation. It's almost like, and you know, because I know listeners today might be thinking, well, how do I know if it's just something I've imagined? Like I can imagine my dog, or I can see a wolf, right? But there's a difference, at least in my experience, when the wolf comes to you versus when you create, or generate an image in the mind. And I'm wondering if you can help me break that down for the listeners just a little bit. - Absolutely, I love this question. You're right, you know, oftentimes this is kind of a full body sense, you believe a surreal experience when something comes like this unprompted. And at the same time, one of the things that I do find very interesting in working with my clients one on one is that there's also space for imagination in this work, you know, oftentimes imagining, you know, envisioning that, well, for imagining our dog, or imagining ourself in a state of relief, of happiness, of deep well-being, often can be the doorway into deeper visionary experience. So, you know, in some ways it's a little bit of a both end, because, you know, sometimes we do get hit with these incredible, you just know. You just know that something powerful and deeply transformative has happened. And then sometimes those little intuitive hits are quieter or more subtle, or we've just trained ourself over many years to ignore them. And so I think sometimes in this work too, there's a process of how do we unlearn the suppression of our own intuition? That's happened for so long. That is so incredibly key, right? I think throughout time, culture, we've really been taught to give our power away to an authority outside of ourselves. From the time we were little, right? Like, go hug your uncle. I don't wanna give my uncle a hug. Well, you're gonna hurt his feelings, you know, like those kinds of things that were taught so early on, these messages of not being able to trust the cues that our body gives us, being told that our emotions aren't accurate, and so you're right. It's such this process of learning how to trust sensations, trust our body, trust our knowingness, and really unlearning a lot of those paradigms, which I think is what so much of the shadow work is. - Absolutely. You know, I think one of the things that so often the people that I work with will say, and this is one of those sort of unexpected benefits. - If you will, is usually people will say, I learned how to trust myself. - Mm. - Yeah, all I can, I can trust my own wisdom, I can trust my own discernment, I can trust my own decisions. I know how to trust myself now. And yeah, there's a lot that we're up against in the dominant culture that tells us, you need to not trust yourself. We're not listened to that kind of gnawing feeling so that you can get up and go to work so that you can make sure that you're behaving in the right ways, you know, all of this. It's really, I think we're in a really powerful and profound time right now, too, in unlearning of that. You know, it also makes me think about a lot of the really kind of little needed work that's happening right now. So many, I work with a lot of women and so many women, especially in paramanopause that are discovering, oh my gosh, I didn't realize that I was neurodivergent until here I am. And how now that I have the hormonal shift of my resources are completely stretched bin. You know, a lot of people who are in burnout also or going through IVF and these really stressful experiences where there's, we're just at capacity. And I think one of the gifts of burnout actually is that it forces us to kind of peel off that mask and see who really is underneath and what do we really need? And is the life that we've been living this whole time fully aligned with who we are and what we want? Or is there something that needs an adjustment? - Yeah, you mentioned that wolf being like a threshold for you and I think being at paramanopausal is another threshold. It's another doorway that we start to walk through that reveals, like you said, some of those deeper layers of self, who am I? What gives me excitement, joy, fulfillment? And these are such critical questions and the earth as a whole, as a collective, it feels like we're shifting into bringing some of that narrative into the predominant culture, re-aligning values, restructuring values and belief systems. So it's this work that I think will make it okay to start asking those questions on a grander scale. So I want to go back to your story and back to this wolf, this threshold, this stepping into the shamanic realm and really integrating both of these worlds. How does that look with clients for you? How do you marry those modalities, if you will? - Yeah, absolutely. So, I work with people in a number of different ways and some of that is because each of us need the doorway, the entry point, to look a little bit different. We're also unique and we come from a lot of different backgrounds. There are some people who I would say, hey, let's try a shamanic journey and they would say, yes, this is so exciting. I've always wanted to try this. And then there are other people who are going to say, whoa, that sounds a little too woo-woo for me, right? And so it's part of why the meditation and mindfulness, part of why the hypnosis, hypnotherapy work and the shamanic work, I really love that all of them can intermingle and be married. You know, if someone comes to me and they know they want to get deep into their own discernment and understand their deeper wisdom and connect in this sort of profound shamanic way, we probably would start with a shamanic journey. And what that looks like is we're listening to a recording of a drum beat. And the interesting thing about the drum beat is that it actually entrains the brain to go into a lightly altered state. And so this is something across all cultures, every continent except Antarctica, that there is some kind of practice of rhythmic drumming, rhythmic chanting and Australia, it's the didgeridoo. It's an audio driver that helps the brain drop into this state. I think in some ways it's probably also why EDM music is really popular. Yeah, yeah. It helps you drop into a very specific kind of state. And when you learn to use that and harness that to journey deeper into the subconscious mind, into connection with the earth, into connection with guides or internal guidance, really profound things can happen. There's actually a really interesting study that came out of University of Michigan a few years back where they taught people who were new to journey work, never done psychedelics, they taught them how to journey and tested them with EEG's, with surveys, with all these different measures of what's actually happening for people when they enter into the journey state. They found that the areas of the brain and the frequencies that kind of got tapped into lit up slightly differently from psychedelics, but that the experience was the same if not actually more powerful than psychedelics in terms of experiences of a sense of unity or oneness, experiences of profound insight, of spiritual knowing, visual experience, of a sense of well-being. And one of the beautiful things actually also is that they found that it met the same sort of criteria of powerful impact as psychedelics, but with a lot less anxiety. So I think it's really great for people who are interested in psychedelic therapy. They know that there's something in the unconscious mind that they could just get to. Would be really transformative, but life circumstances, we can't go on an ayahuasca retreat. And so it's great to have some of these other modalities where gentle, accessible altered states are available to people. The beautiful thing about the shamanic journey too is that when I work with people in that modality, after several sessions together, I also give them homework and send them off on their own to do journeys of their own. It's something that is quite easy to learn and can be done as a daily, weekly practice in the same way that meditation can be. So that's one of the inroads for sure. - That's really beautiful. I mean, I completely agree. Psychedelics have their place in healing. They can be so powerful, but for me, I've had some breathwork experiences that have been just as powerful, if not more, than some of my own personal psychedelic experiences. And for me, it was more empowering because I think what I see so often in the psychedelic community is people want to give their power away so quickly. So they give it to the medicine. Well, I had that experience because I was unmedicine. I had that experience because I microdosed. And that's not true. In medicine work or in journey work, it's the power of the soul, of the subconscious mind, of allowing more source energy to come into your body and to anchor and to elicit those experiences. But when you're using something like shamanic, journeying, or simply the breath, you come to realize how powerful we are as humans, the capacity of the mind, the capacity of the body. And even in just studying psychology, we become aware of that because you start to realize how adaptable the mind is, how it can compartmentalize things. And keep us so disintegrated so we can function. Like you said, until we hit paramedicons or hit burnout or hit a trauma and realize all the compartment walls came down and we feel shattered or unable to continue the way we were. And we realize, oh man, those structures that I've created in my mind and my body, the way I've dissociated or distracted myself from me are so profound. And it usually takes those kinds of events or journeys to really see what our bodies and brains are really capable of. But when you start to break those structures down, especially in a way that's organic, you start, your eyes just start to become open to how powerful the mind in the soul is. And I want to be really intentional to keep those separate too because I think so often, like you mentioned, it's the structures of the mind that keep us from experiencing the power of our own soul. And so it sounds like through the meditation, through the hypnosis, you're able to kind of quiet the mind to really allow the soul to sing it song so that we can hear it. So would you say that the meditation practice is the gateway to everything else? Is that the entry point always or does sometimes it do you feel like you need the drums, the shamanic stuff to really get people to have a breakthrough experience? - I actually find the drums to be incredibly powerful as an access point, just starting out. Also hypnosis, you know, one of the things that I really love about hypnotherapeutic work is that people get to see how powerful they are. They get to see the way that they actually can be an active participant in forging new neural pathways and creating change and finding new ways of being. And so, you know, I would say that I actually, I work with probably two sets of people. One are people who are already meditators and want to go deeper. And me, other are people who maybe have dabbled and are curious, but they don't have a deep meditation practice yet. And they'd like to find an on-ramp to deep personal transformation that's pretty fast acting. And for that, I actually think that the hypnosis and the journey work is a fantastic entry point because you don't have to go say attend a retreat to get into some of those mind states. I think that they go really, really nicely together. One of the things that I've seen a lot is that people I'm working with with hypnosis, especially with depth hypnosis. Then we'll go on, we'll work on something. You know, there was one person I was with recently, we were working around perfectionism and her inner critic. And we had these beautiful, powerful sessions where she really started to see the way that that internal critic was not her. It was a construct. It was a whole constellation of patterns and parts and experiences, all coalescing to kind of drive her towards this intense perfectionism and striving. And so we did the work and we loosened up those patterns and we brought new resources in and caught a lot of space around it. And then she went on a meditation retreat and had an absolute breakthrough, monumental experience, a couple weeks later. So I do think these things sort of work very, very well together, but honestly, the access point is whichever one works best for you, that's the best access point. And each of us are a little different. I think that the hypnosis work is really cool. Partly because, I mean, there's some, I could tell you all the things I love about hypnosis for a very long time. But part of what's really beautiful about it is for especially folks with maybe a busier mind. It gives us something to do. We're visualizing things. We're exploring. We're kind of going down little pathways and checking different things out. And that can be a lot more accessible than just sitting with the breath. Sometimes sitting with the breath, it's just a tidal wave of our own anxiety or trauma or pain, which is actually my early experiences of meditation. I started meditating as a teenager and I hated it. So you know, you told me, actually, someone did. Someone looked at my Vedic astrology chart when I was 18 and they said, you are going to devote your entire life to meditation. And I'm a sassy teenager. I may have given them the finger. I would be the, I would not expect it at that time in my life. You know, that part in part was that actually the lighters of pain that were present at that time, it was just too much to simply sit and be quiet. Absolutely. It's a muscle to build that level of distress tolerance to be able to sit with it. I noticed for me when I was going to school to learn hypnotherapy, what surprised me was that it ended up being the thing that opened me up to my psychic abilities that up until that point. They'd come and go, but I wouldn't say that they were anything that I felt was consistent in my life. Like I couldn't willfully access those parts of me, but it was when I spent 100 hours or something like that being hypnotized by my classmates and in that altered state that it really just blew the lid open for me. I'm wondering, do you have stories you can share about experiences maybe that you've had or that clients have had in accessing their intuition or communicating with their loved ones or guides? I love this. You know, it's one of the things that often I will say to new people I'm working with who this is a little bit new for and they're getting all of this, you know, really juicy actually symbolic imagery and things are coming up and it's just, you know, but sometimes a little bit hard to discern at first. One of the things that I'll often help kind of ground people in is this understanding that when we're working with the journey, when we're working with hypnosis, part of what we're doing is we're learning to kind of create like a translation guide for our spirit and our subconscious mind. We're learning a new language. It's like we've been dropped into a totally new country whose language and customs we're not familiar with and we venture into the unknown and see what it's like. You know, a lot of the work that I do with folks is also bringing in a guide, especially the shamanic journey where the depth hypnosis work. It's very, very beautiful and I have to give a shout out to Issa Gachardi who is the creator of depth hypnosis. She runs a really beautiful school that teaches this work and really, really helps people learn some of these practices as well. But we're working with guides. Yeah. And the power of working with guides, you know, I can't tell you the amount of times that I've had a client and they've said, "Well, there's no way I could have just imagined that or thought that up on my own." That was so out of left field that it had to have been my guide. There's no other answer. Now, I know for me, I was offering some sessions to a dear friend to support her while she was going through really tough time, intense illness from mold toxicity, which is something I actually work with a lot of people who are struggling with complex chronic illness as well. And I sat with my guides prior to connecting with her and it was, you know, the strangest thing. They were really showing me the problem is in her heart. The problem is with her heart. And I was like, "Oh, that's really, that's interesting. That wasn't the symptom that I was going to expect she was coming to me with." And we get on the phone and she says, "I can't tell you like the stuff that is happening with my heart. I'm going into tachycardia." You know what? I thought I was having a heart attack. We went to the emergency room a bunch of times. And part of, with all of this, it's just about, how do we learn to get out of our own way when that intuitive hit comes? And there's a part of us that knows, "Oh, yeah, I just had a sense," right? There was just this sort of little whisper kind of in the ear that. Yeah, there's something to be supported there. And you're right, without the hypnosis work, without the meditation, without these forays, into familiarity with altered states, with trance. I don't think that that would be nearly as accessible. No, yeah. No, we just miss it so quickly. And I want to go back to something you said, the language of the soul, right? Because I found, too, that there was some remembering of a different type of communication that is with the senses. But you're almost building a lexicon. I felt like through synchronicity when I was learning the language of my soul. Like, I remember, you know, my stepdad had passed away. And it was sudden and unexpected. And it was my birthday, right after he had passed. And I was driving to go celebrate my birthday. And this song came on the radio. And it's like an obscure B-side song. Like, I mean, it wasn't one that was real popular. But the lyrics, I was listening to the lyrics and they hit me like a ton of bricks. And it made me cry just thinking, like, oh my gosh, this is something I felt like a message I needed to hear from him, something that my soul needed. And it felt like he was wishing me a happy birthday. And I cried on the way to go celebrate my birthday. And then that was that. I just kind of shelved it. But what happened after that is it's as if his spirit used that to build the lexicon between him and I. And so now, when I'm meeting assistants, he was a businessman. And so when I'm meeting assistants in business, and I wish I had him to lean on and ask his advice, that song will sometimes come on the radio. Just when I was thinking about him, he sends me that song in times when I have a business issue, when I wish I could ask him advice, when I'm thinking, gosh, if only he were here, I know he would just have the right thing to tell me or the right thing to say. That song comes on. And then it's like at that very moment, I can feel his presence. And then it's like the answer just comes. So it's like, I get the opportunity to still consult with him, but it took him, it took me being aware enough to say this feels like it's from him. And then it says, if he took that and used it and said, I will give this to you in the future, this is part of our dialogue. And sometimes even the lyrics will show up on license plates or things like that when I feel like I need him. So I notice the spirit as you're learning this seems to speak in metaphor, in synchronicity, and I'm curious how you've built that lexicon with your guides so that you can discern even times maybe when you're not in a trance state, but how do you ground it into your waking reality? Right. You know, I think some of it is to be really open to synchronicity. I have a dear friend actually who we often are in connection around this and if there's a synchronicity, we'll text each other and share because there is something about the more you notice them, the more you honor them, the more you allow them not to just sort of fly by and your awareness, the stronger it gets. You know, I mean, and even in those little things, I just remember, you know, this was probably a year ago. My partner and I, we were getting ready to go somewhere and, you know, here are both a little bit ADD, so sometimes we run late, but it was just this comedy of errors that we couldn't get out of the house and, you know, something capped on going wrong and we kept on having to go take care of this over here and go take care of that over there and we finally got out of the door and we drove about 10 minutes down the road from our house and both of us at the exact same moment looked at each other and said, "Do you think we're late because we just avoided some kind of major accident?" Like I think that whatever just delayed us saved our lives and we both got hit with that same feeling and that same knowing at the exact same moment and, you know, we could have written it off as, "Haha, you know, funny that we should both say that what a coincidence," or we could actually say, "Oh, well, something just happened. I don't know what did, but something just happened." And I think that it was some form of protection or support or, you know, whatever it was. Something was helping there in the background. There's so much more going on than meets the eye. And I think part of what is so great about this, you know, transwork generally is that it opens us up to that. And all of a sudden we're like, "Well, if, you know, all of this can be accessed internally, what else is possible? What else is, you know, happening in the unseen world?" That just because I don't have materialistic evidence of who's to say. You just ask my favorite question, "What else is possible?" That's my favorite question to ask myself to try to get out of some of my own limiting beliefs and try to break through some of those patterns is to start asking myself, "Okay, if this is as big as you can picture it as much as you can see, just play, just play in the magic and the experience and the idea of what else might be possible here?" And even if you can't dream it or conjure it yourself, ask spirit, ask your guides to show you, to surprise you, to delight you throughout your day with what else might be possible for you. And I have had the coolest results, giving that to my guys, surprised and delight me with what else might be possible for me right now because you're right, there's so much going on in the unseen that we have to, I always really train our particular activating system in our brain to become cognizant of. Absolutely. Absolutely. When you're like, "Oh, I'm going to buy a new car." And you say, "I'm going to buy a blue sedan." And then all you see on the road are blue sedans. It's because you've trained your particular activating system to scan for those things. And you know, when we go through early childhood, if we had parents who shut down our imagination, who didn't entertain, you know, our wild ideas or told us we were ridiculous, we started to ignore them. And so it's almost retraining this muscle and I feel like the subconscious work that you do probably helps really build in flex, training and building the red brain to start scanning and seeing the magic, the fun, the joy, the subtle realms even. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And, you know, there is this component too with so much of this work of allowing ourselves to, in the trans state, experience, receive, feel, embody the relief for the support or the unconditional love or the hope that doesn't feel as accessible in our day to day life. And it absolutely changes the way that we relate to our reality in the day to day. I don't think that it's a coincidence at all that when I started really deep diving into the shamanic work that I met my partner, the love of my life, really shortly thereafter. And that relationship was different from any relationship that I had had before. And part of that I believe truly was that in the shamanic journey work, in the hypnosis work, that in building a relationship with my guides, I was able to experience what real, deep love and support was like on an embodied felt sense level. And then I could notice it in the people I was meaning, all of a sudden, yes, it was like having a different pair of glasses on. Wow. Well, and I think you're pointed to something that's so profound is that our internal experience dictates how we perceive our outer experience. There's no separation between the two. And in my work, I found that that's the importance of this work in these realms that you're working in of the unconscious or subconscious mind because until we, I mean, what's that quote, like until you make, I think it's like a Carl Jung quote, but I mean, it's until you make the unconscious conscious, it'll dictate your life and you'll call it fake. Yes, I have it on the bottom of my website home, that is it, right? We can, we can bumble through life, not bringing what's unconscious to the surface so that we can see it and know it. And oftentimes when we go about it that way, we end up in a lot of suffering or we can actually start to unearth what's really there, both the pain and the things that need to be deeply healed and dealt with and the delight and joy and creativity and magic, because it's only a bit of that pain. Yeah. Oh, yeah. It's the treasure. It's like, it's a double-sided coin, right? You know, I mean, yeah. So I'm real familiar with how the shamanic deals with that, right? Because in the shamanic, I mean, you meet yourself in the darkness. And that's part of the shamanic journey work is, you know, the deep drumbees that going into those lower energy centers and like pulling it out, help me understand from like this Buddhist tradition. How do they deal with that? Because, you know, we're talking about non-duality, right? We're talking about kind of transcendence. And so in that state, how do you then deal with with the darkness that comes up in some of the shadow work or journey work? You know, the foundations of Buddhism actually is in understanding and knowing, suffering and the causes of suffering. The foundational teaching of the Buddha, the very first teaching he gave, is what's called the Four Noble Truths. The first truth is that there is suffering. It's part of being a human being, that we will experience a bumpy ride in this life. It is going to be painful at times, we're going to lose things. We're going to have difficult experiences and that's part of what it is to be human. The second noble truth is that there is a cause of suffering and that often, the cause of that suffering, the primary thing is actually our clinging, like the death grip that we have on. We want what we don't want, how we think it should be, that puts us in a real opposition with reality and with the ability to accept what's happening so that we can actually have some power and make some changes. That third noble truth is that there is actually a cure. There's a way out, there is a way to find more relief from suffering. And the fourth noble truth is actually that there's a path. You know, the Buddha puts out this beautiful, eightfold path, it's eight different facets of practice of the way that we live our lives, of the way that we endeavor not to harm other people, even right down to how we earn a living, as well as meditation and concentration and these powerful experiences in a more trans-like state. But truly, at the roots of Buddhism also is this understanding that if we're going to get anywhere, we need to understand the pain. And I think that's one of the ills of society right now is the distraction from pain, the really quick dopamine hits that we can get everywhere we look so that we don't have to go inward and build our distressed tolerance to be with ourselves and our pain and really integrate it and metabolize it. It's like a muscle that we've kind of lost touch and connection with over time. You know, unless we're really intentional about it, it's something that, you know, we're so busy, we're in such a hurry, we're, it's just part of our culture, you know, the distraction is built in. Absolutely. Absolutely. You know, I think part of what is so useful in some ways about some of the hypnosis work too is actually that, you know, we don't have to go into the deep end of our most painful suffering all at once. So much beautiful and fascinating stuff is coming out more and more lately around memory, reconsolidation, which you're knowing hypnosis know that there's a real component. Everybody who's working with chronic PTSD, complex PTSD, they know now and have more and more people are doing it, but, you know, I think us folks in the hypnosis world have been doing it for a long time, but to really create the capacity, the resources to open that window of tolerance to defuse the triggers, we don't actually need to drown in the suffering. We need to go into it, and then we need to bring resources and support and hope and care. All of the things that we didn't have at the time that that pain was first created, that's actually going to be for many of us, the medicine that we can kind of like untwine the ways that our suffering, our triggers, our responses are just totally fused with our experience. And I think it's really important right now as we are in a world that's so painful and that does have so much just chaos and brutality, you know, a lot of the people I work with are doing really important, you know, work in nonprofits, in the legal sector, helping people who are in distress right now. One of the most important ways that I have found when, you know, there's somebody who is just absolutely overwhelmed with the pain of the world is, okay, how do we make the pain of the world something that we can both open to, but have a different relationship to so that there is a sense of empowerment and a sense of altruism and a sense of benevolence or goodwill, knowing that we actually can be a force for change and a force for good in the world and not just bold over by how cruel things are right now. Yeah, no, I love that. So I mean, obviously they can seem so big in the macrocosm of things. What I found through my own work is the most important step starts in the microcosm, though. It starts in our own hearts and our ability, like you said, to hold it, to sit with it, to be with it and to figure out what is my spirit of influence, whatever that is. You know, maybe it's just tending to your garden and feeding your children a healthy meal every day. Maybe it's going out there and getting involved in politics, whatever it is, right? It doesn't matter, but I think it starts on an individual level and I've seen this beautiful ripple that just kind of ripples out into all of creation when we start with our own work and we treat each other in a more loving way. You know, we treat ourselves in a more loving way because it truly is a reflected reality. Absolutely. You know, I mean, there is this fractal nature of things where it starts on a small scale and expands out and out and out, you know. It's making me think as you're sharing. There's one person that I worked with a year or two ago. We caught back up recently just to check in here how things were going and we were doing a lot of inner work around, you know, her anxiety, her sense of disconnection from herself, burnout, perfectionism, all of these different things, but what she really reflected back to me when we met a year later was that she'd been working in this really high stakes leadership role for an organization that is just absolutely at the forefront of so many of the people who are being marginalized and under threat right now. And it is just an absolute high stress job and she is the person who everybody else goes to. Came back and she said, well, the work together helped me embody, you know, my truest self, my wisest self who I really wanted to be so that that could ripple through the organization so that I could show up in these meetings and instead of getting triggered to be really collaborative and curious and ready to dive in and just see, okay, what happens next. And that really is the gift, I think, of doing our own inner work. There's no way that doesn't ripple outwards. Right? There's no way. No, no, it's magical. And I think, you know, when I did my IFS level 2 training, you know, internal family systems therapy, one of my trainers talked about the difference between empathy and compassion. And I feel like that's what you just described because it's like when we're an empath or describe ourselves that way, we have these unhealed parts within ourselves that want to be responsible for the pain of the world and take it all on as if it's our own. Or we feel the threat of freeze in our nervous system. And we freeze and kind of victim posture in response to it or get overwhelmed. And it's easy to get overwhelmed, the problems of the world feel big. But when we can heal the parts that are resonating with the overwhelm and with the brutality of the world, and we can stand firmly in our power when we're rooted from that deeper place and we've done the work, we develop compassion where we can listen to other people's wounds to their trauma without being vicariously traumatized because we've done the inner work. And so I think that process that you're describing is so key. And it's important for you know, people who identify as an empath to really look within and ask themselves, what is this landing on? What is this triggering or exposing within me that needs to be witnessed and loved, you know? Absolutely. I love this. You're just completely channeling where my heart has been at lately. I've actually recently been teaching a course on compassion. Oh no. So you're right there because that is actually something that's huge in the Buddhist teachings. It also is something that's so needed right now for us to find a way to have compassion without actually going into empathic distress. And when you look at these two different pieces, the compassion and the empathic distress, you know, the truth of the matter is in our culture. What we tend to define as compassion, you know, this idea, even the word compassion in the English language is compass. It's basically etymologically suffering with. And so our very definition and understanding as a culture of compassion is basically empathic distress. And the thing about empathic distress is that it actually takes us away from this connection and standing side-by-side with someone in their suffering, caring, and witnessing. And it actually turns us back in on to ourselves. And we start to actually snowball in our own self-referential pain. So empathic distress actually ends up being, you know, antisocial rather than pro-social, self-related thinking rather than other related thinking, but when we turn towards compassion in the more, you know, the Buddhist word for compassion is corona. It has a completely different etymological root. It has a completely different slam to it. And it really is about the wish and heartfelt desire for the suffering and all of the causes of suffering to be healed. And beautiful. There's something about actually standing in that. It's more hopeful, it's more empowered, it's not spinning and trauma together. It's saying, I deeply care. And how do we make this better? And so there is a beautiful, there's a beautiful kind of throughline here of the need for compassion and also the need to relearn what compassion actually is. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. That feeds my soul. It really does. And so how do you teach people to heal those empathic parts of themselves where, you know, those wounds are being exposed by whatever's happening in the world? Yeah. That's a great question. You know, and it's something that's come up a lot this year. Mm-hmm. A lot of the time there is parts work that needs to be done. I don't work in the IFS model, but so many dear ones do. I'm so glad that it's out there. I do a different form of parts work that's part of the death of noces modality. There's a lot of similarities there, though. All roads lead to Carl Jung, right? Yeah. Yeah. They contain multitudes, you know, well, they've got to ride. Yeah. Now, oftentimes there is, there's parts work that may need to be done. A lot of the time there's a part of the self that feels like it needs to be responsible for everything, and that if it doesn't suffer along with that other person, if it doesn't take on that suffering, that somehow the suffering will be disrespected or diminished. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, the reality is that 99.9 repeating percent of us who, in our moments of deepest suffering, we wouldn't wish that on anyone else. But oftentimes we do need to do some work, especially those of us who may have been parentified or caretakers at a much younger age than we needed to, you know, that sense of responsibility can often come in as well as attachment wounding, you know, our relationship to the suffering of others really directly resonates with our earliest attachment experiences. So sometimes there's also very formative experiences that need resources and support and healing and love brought to them. Yeah. In IFS, we call those self-like parts because they mimic the soul's energy because they are so well-intended and so filled with love and nurturing. But how often do people suffering say, oh, I don't want to share this or I don't want to talk about it because I don't want to burden somebody else because it is so hard for people to come from that place of compassion versus empathy and falling into that suffering themselves. So, you know, we tend to stay very compartmentalized in our trauma and in our grief. So, and they can be really hard to identify within ourselves sometimes. I think sometimes it takes an outsider looking into help us really identify what shaped and develop some of these self-like parts, some of these empathic parts and how do we help them really heal and stand in their power and find their sovereignty. Absolutely. Absolutely. And I mean, it's part of why working in the trans state with those parts can be so great because we do get out of our own way and we do start to see, you know, can we dialogue with them in a more honest, more real way that we wouldn't maybe normally when we have to return emails and make dinner and figure out our plans for the next day and that we wouldn't necessarily have that record. Beautiful. Juliana, if somebody wanted to work with you, if they are listening to this and feel like this is the kind of support that I need right now, what's the best way for them to find you? Best way is my website. It's Juliana, which is J-U-L-I-A-N-A-S-L-O-A-N-E.com, just my name, JulianaSloon.com. And there's actually a little button right there on the front page where you can schedule a free consultation. That way we can chat for about half an hour, see if it feels like a fit, get to know each other more. That's the easiest best way, same on that website, you can also find upcoming classes and meditation groups that I lead, things like that that also can be a great resource. Perfect. I'm going to put those in the show notes. So anybody listening today who wants to find you can find you very easily. And you had mentioned that you have a gift for the listeners today, too, of that invitation that I can link. Awesome. That would be lovely. This is just a playful little dip into hypnosis for anybody who's never worked in altered states or maybe just curious about how I work with folks in altered states. It's a gentle foray. This one I feel like I actually have to put a disclaimer, don't lie down while you do it because you may fall asleep. You do. I find at least the first part of the induction to be very relaxing that I have to sit upright when I'm listening to it myself, but I'll send you that link as well and I'd love to invite folks to check it out. Perfect. And one more thing I want to mention that we didn't really get to touch on today is that this work is perfect for psychedelic integration work. And I know if you're listening, you are probably interested or have you psychedelics on your journey. So if you've had a mystical experience, if you've had pieces of yourself that have come up that maybe you're still struggling to integrate and really understand that this work can be a really great modality to help you really embody your experience and pull it all the way through if you will. Absolutely true. Thank you so much, Christy. This has been so fun. Yeah, thanks for joining us today and everybody, thanks so much for tuning in and we'll see you guys next time. (upbeat music)