A Reintroduction to The Womb with Psychedelic Mushrooms | with Leslie Draffin

Key Takeaways:

- How Psychedelics can help uncover deep-seated trauma and emotional pain.

- Signs of Trauma in the womb: numbness, pain, irregular cycles, endo, PCOS.

- New ways of Cycle syncing for non-bleeding women & External vulva touch and gradual internal dearmoring as release.

Certified Trauma-Informed Somatic Practitioner and Womb Mystic, Leslie Draffin wants to remind women that our bodies already know the way back to wholeness (acknowledging that we are already whole, we just need to reclaim it) —and all you need is a system to support that. We explore how micro-dosing psilocybin, nervous system work, and cycle syncing help women move from numb, disconnected and overthinking to grounded, clear, and self-led. Cosigning equal doses of science backed work, with spiritually-"the woo". 

As an adopted, preacher's daughter, who contracted herpes during early sexual experiences, she openly discusses her personal experience with the feeling of being disconnected from her body, and the shame and disdain she felt about herself- highlighting that trauma and emotional pain often gets stored in the womb. She speaks on the prevailing feeling of needing to do everything “right”, in the Western model, and yet, still feeling stuck. She shares a powerful turning point: invoking the mother archetype during a guided journey, confronting grief, leaving a 15-year career, and choosing sobriety. Highlighting that you can transition from the maiden to the mother archetype without having children.

All links to our guest's work and official site

Website ➡️ https://www.lesliedraffin.com

Instagram ➡️ https://www.instagram.com/lesliedraffin/

Facebook ➡️ https://www.facebook.com/leslie.draffin

 A Free Beginner's Guide to Intentional Micro🍄dosing ➡️ https://lesliedraffin.myflodesk.com/microguide

Transcript

Setting The Stage: Women’s Health

Kertia 0:00

Hello friends, welcome again to another episode on the other side of fear with your host Kertia Johnson. Now, today's episode really focuses on the ladies. Right? We are talking about woman's health, and I had an amazing, empowering conversation with former TV journalist Leslie Draffin, who has ventured into woman's health as a certified trauma-informed somatic practitioner, a psychedelic micro-dosing guide, and womb mystic. She is doing just amazing magical work out here with women because she is so devoted to helping women return back to the wisdom of our bodies and reclaim the creative power within us. Now her work is a bridge between science and the sacred. So there is a lot of magic happening. She combines nervous system healing, micro-dosing, and feminine embodiment so that we as women can remember and come home to who we truly are, to remember our innate power, to remember what inherently makes us special and beautiful and worthy. This was such a powerful conversation and it's not just about surviving trauma, but most importantly about the journey to healing. And whether or not you have any experience with uh psilocybin or any type of psychedelics for healing or with the intention of healing, I'm sure that there is something for anyone within this conversation. So definitely take whatever resonates with you. And as Leslie, aims to remind us, remember your inner magic. All right, let's get into it. When you reached out to me initially, you were speaking about psychedelic microdosing and womb health, right? So, first of all, I want to know kind of how did you get into taking psilocybin? Like what was it that kind of initiated a whole process for you?

Leslie 2:52

Yeah, so I had been doing what the Western medical model said to do for my mental health for years. I was in therapy, I had taken SSRIs, I had taken anti-anxiety medications, and I heard about mushrooms and their ability to help with mental health for several years before I actually got brave enough to try them. And so I had finally heard this woman on a podcast talk about the healing benefits of microdosing for things like sexual trauma. And I knew I had that in my history. And so that I think was the catalyst for me to broaden my horizon and think, okay, I'm already at this point deep in my spiritual journey. I've already started to work with my womb and with somatic healing. It makes sense to me as a witch that the earth would provide something to help me heal. And so I jumped in. I hired a coach, I worked with her to really not DIY my entryway into psychedelic space.

Kertia 3:51

Yeah.

Leslie 3:51

And I was really pleasantly surprised at the beginning how quickly it was able to really jumpstart a lot of the healing that I thought I had really felt stuck in in therapy. You know, I was so good at therapy. I was so good at talking about my trauma. My therapist would say things like, Oh, it's like talking to a peer. Like, yeah, that's a problem. I still feel terrible. And so that for me was really the catalyst. It's like I had already done what had been prescribed to me, and I still felt in my head, I still felt anxious. And so I was willing to try something new. Certainly I had a lot of internalized bias around drugs. I was really scared of it being bad. I was a dare kid. I grew up post Reagan, you know, war on drugs vibe here in the States. And so I had to do a lot of inner work on that in the beginning. And I certainly was not talking about it to anybody because I was still a news anchor at this point. I was still on TV every night. And so that's sort of how I heard about them, how I started to work with them, and I guess a little taste of some things that they brought me.

Finding Safe Guidance And Facilitation

Kertia 4:58

Wow. Okay. So break down the process to me because I know like I've been told that don't go to Google to get into plant medicine, to like find a facilitator. How did you even begin that process? Was it like through word of mouth, someone that you personally knew? How would you kind of advise someone to go about that if they were interested in it?

Leslie 5:20

Yeah, 100%. So I had heard a woman named Bijou Finney on a podcast, and then I invited her to talk on my show. And after we hung up the call, I immediately hired her. And she is a psychedelic microdosing guide. And so I totally agree with what you said. You know, Google and the comment section of my social media is like the worst place for you to find facts and to find source, right? To find supplies. Um as far as how you can find a facilitator, you know, I am one, I can certainly help with that. If I'm not the one, I certainly hadn't know a lot of people who are. But for me, it really came down to this fact where I'd been DIYing my own spiritual journey. And then I'd been doing what, you know, doctors and therapists said for me to do. And as I branched out into this new realm that felt really scary, truly, it did feel scary for me. I knew I needed someone to hide uh hold my hand and to guide me. And that's what a facilitator is. There's someone there to be with you, someone there to and be with you virtually. That's how I do it. That's how Bij did it. Um, but be with you to hold that sacred space so you can have someone to talk to, so that you can have someone to validate you and really to help navigate the ups and downs that come with ingesting even tiny amounts of microdosing mushrooms, like which is what I was doing most often.

Trauma-Informed Training And Ethics

Kertia 6:43

Okay, so the facilitatory, when you talk about someone facilitating this process, right? Would you say that um they would probably have to have some background? Is there any need actually for them to have any background in any mental health? For example, if your trauma starts coming up, anything else starts coming up for you, anything being triggered or brought up during this process, how would they be able then to support you during that?

Leslie 7:13

That's a great question. I think it really depends on the individual getting help, right? So for me, I know that BG was trauma informed. And I know when I started to work with clients in this area, um, well, I guess we can backtrack. When I started to work with clients around the menstrual cycle, I started to uncover a lot of hidden trauma there. Then as I did my own healing with psychedelic mushrooms and then started to become interested in bringing that into my clients, I knew I needed to get trained, I needed to get supervised, and I needed to have it be trauma-informed. So I did probably about a year's worth of training through two different companies. One where it was very much, you know, um, psychedelic integration, how to help people with the integrative process. And then the other one that I did is very somatic trauma-based, including psychedelics. So I do think that having some form of trauma awareness is important. I will also say I've seen a lot of practitioners who are psychedelic facilitators working with things that aren't trauma-related, creativity, play, business. I think that those folks, maybe they have trauma-informed backgrounds, maybe they don't, but the the place I'm playing in, which is the womb and the body, that was really important for me to have those additional trauma trainings. And if I was going to go to somebody, I would want that as well. And so you can ask questions like, where were you certified? What type of experience do you have? What's your experience with this plant medicine, this fungi medicine? And those are all good questions to ask facilitators if you are exploring finding somebody to work with.

Kertia 8:54

Yeah, that's very helpful. Why was it really important for you to work with the womb specifically?

Origin Story: Adoption, Purity Culture, Shame

Leslie 9:03

You know, for me, looking back, obviously hindsight is 2020. I think from the earliest stage of my life, you know, um, and I guess I should share a little bit of my backstory. I'm adopted, and my birth mother was 12 when she was impregnated, um, non-consensually, and 13 when I was born. Now I was adopted into a family. My father was a preacher, and so I was raised my entire life um really thinking my body was bad, uh, consciously and subconsciously, right? Like that was teachings that I think I sort of absorbed from church and from purity culture. You know, I'm 39 years old, the early aughts were like the trashest of purity culture possibly out there. Like it was awful, you know? And so my whole life I had felt so terrified of my sexuality. I'd felt terrified of sensuality. And I had this terror about getting pregnant, okay? I know had to do with traumatic uh with trauma passed down from my mother. Yeah. And so when I started to really awaken spiritually, which was around the age of 33, one of the first things I heard was you've got to come off of hormonal birth control if you really want to experience what it's like to be a woman. And so I quit the pill in 2020. And that really forced me to start looking at my beliefs about my cycle, my beliefs about my body and about sex. And I had a lot of symptoms of post-pill syndrome. You know, I'd been on birth control for I think 18 years, 15 or 18 years, I can't remember which one. A very long time. A very long time, consistently. Yes. And so I lost my libido completely. I had my hair fell out, I had hormonal acne, horrific mood swings. And so I was really forced because of those symptoms to start looking more deeply. Now, as I did that work, really working with things like breath work, visualizations, trying to connect with my female anatomy, right? My womb, my vulva. Little by little, I started to hear this inner call that, you know, the trauma, the wounding was really there in my womb space. And so that's, I think, what finally came full circle for me and led me to really be looking deeply at the womb. Now, my personal history with sex is that I got herpes four weeks after I lost my virginity. And so sex was always tied to this shame for me. You know, I'm 18 years old, freshman in college, been dating this guy for years. We have sex, I get herpes. And from that point forward, everything about sex was just so dirty to me. And I felt so dirty. And so as I started to come off of the pill and reconnect to the womb space, all of those feelings of shame came back for me and they started to leak into my marriage. And so psychedelic mushrooms allowed me to really get underneath the root causes of this, to look at what was my shame and what wasn't, what could have been, you know, exacerbated by the herpes diagnosis. But in reality, I don't think herpes was the thing that caused it. I think my trauma and my shame was really born from my birth mother, her, her, you know, the things that happened to me while I was in the womb with her. And so that's sort of, I guess, the long answer of why the womb for me has like always been this center point, this power point, this superpower of creative energy and and life force. And I think it's interesting because I'm child-free by choice. I'm not planning to ever have children. Yet the womb is where my wisdom is, even though I have not birthed the child and don't ever plan to. So for those who people who are looking or listening to this, and you may or may not have kids, like this work is still really for you because it's just so instrumental in healing so many elements of your life.

Kertia 13:12

That's beautiful, though, that you were able to recognize your own wounding within that space and just to use that to also help other women through theirs. Yeah, that's so beautiful, Leslie. Can you tell us a bit more, even about what you learned about yourself when you tried the mushrooms? What came up for you during some of those moments?

Microdosing Protocols And First Big Journey

Leslie 13:39

Oh my gosh, yes. So the way that I did the mushroom protocol is that I ate tiny doses a few times a week for a few weeks. And then I went and I ate a larger dose, which is something that's gonna make you trip. Those tiny doses, microdoses are so small, you're not hallucinating, you're not intoxicated, you can go about your everyday life, but you're often more present, more tuned in, and with intentional awareness and doing things like meditation or visualizations or journaling, you're really able to start picking apart the patterns, really, and creating more presence between the triggers in your life and your reactions. And so I did that for a few weeks. And then on my birthday, I ate a larger dose. And at this point, I was really struggling with this idea of how do I move from maiden into mother, the archetypal journey of the feminine. How do I move into this space if I'm not gonna be a mom? I felt very stuck in my wounded maidenhood, in this like elongated maidenhood, right? And we're talking archetypes here. And I'm 34 years old at this point. And like, this is everyone around me is in motherhood. What's happening to me? So I invoked the mother, you know, as I did my ritual before the mushrooms and, you know, asked her to come and to be with me and to show me, you know, what it is that I'm here to do. Well, I sat at the feet of the reptilian goddess during that journey. I saw my dog come to me in human form and be my guide for the whole journey. And I really felt throughout the whole thing this lovely mother, feminine energy that I hadn't experienced consciously, right? Like I grew up in the pay a patriarchal world religion where it's a male deity. Didn't have a place for the mother, really. I didn't have a close relationship with my adoptive mother. At this point, I had not met my birth mother. And so for me, I was able to really see the healing start there. The other thing that happened, well, first of all, my period started that day early, like as I'm taking the mushrooms. And as a as someone who's a menstrual cycle educator, like my period tells me so many things. What also happened is I had like deep cramping. And like I would catch myself making these like in labor sounds. And at points, I saw myself in the womb. Like I saw myself in the like how I would imagine we could see in the placenta. And I guess we can't, because obviously it's the dark void, but like imagine like that type of tissue before your eyes, and you're kind of seeing through the veins. I I felt myself there in the womb. I felt the transported trauma being placed on me from her, my birth mother's lived experience. It was wild. Wow. And if I had not had a guide at that point to be like verifying and validating, yep, this makes sense for you. Yes, you're doing it right. Yes, nothing's wrong with you. I probably would have like come out of that thinking, okay, that's crazy. Yeah. Then I ate tiny doses of mushrooms for several more weeks as I continued to work with my facilitator. And I was really able to start to uncover some things in my life that were keeping me, we'll say, stuck. For me, it was the inability to be vulnerable in my relationships, the inability to be open to receiving. I felt like I had to prove and hustle and strive. And that was certainly born from that sexual shame and herpes. And I had had a lot of grief in my life that I did not feel comfortable dealing with. And what I'll say about mushrooms is they give you what you need, not always what you ask for. And so when I work with them and I work with clients, we always set an intention. And I say, this is a flexible intention, right? This is kind of an umbrella. Other things could come to us as we work with this. And oh my gosh, that year I left my my 15-year career in TV. Two of my three dogs died back to back. And I don't say this to scare people, but I think for me, it was like this very collie year where I had to burn it all down so I could rise from the ashes. And I had to be forced to look at where am I playing into my patterns? Where am I, you know, still, even though I'm in a loving relationship, failing to show myself authentically to this person, where am I afraid to be vulnerable? Where am I afraid to feel all these feelings? Um, and that's really what the mushrooms did for me. And 2022 was a pivotal year for my life. Wow. Um yeah, and so that's sort of yeah, what that was like.

Kertia 18:24

Oh my goodness, so many transitions. Yes.

Leslie 18:28

And sorry about your dogs, by the way. I know, yeah. That was that was hard. But, you know, for me, what was interesting is the other thing happening around this time, and I guess I should say that started in 2020. I had become really interested in getting sober. And yet, you know, I'd go four to even up to six months without drinking. And then I always kind of had this like countdown in my head about when the next drink would happen. Oh, I'll make it to my birthday and then I'll drink, or I'll make it to summer and then I'll have a drink. And so, as those really traumatic things happened, I relied on alcohol more and more. But yeah, here's what mushrooms had done for me. They made me very aware of why. I was like, oh, you're drinking because you're numbing out. Okay, we can do that right now. You can drink this alcohol and you can numb out from these feelings, but these feelings will not go away just because you're drinking. Just know that. And so it gave me this ability to have a lot of curiosity and also compassionate curiosity. Later in 2022, actually, my last drink was on Christmas Day of 2022. At the beginning of 2023, I entered into my psychedelic training and I entered into another really intentional experience with microdoses, and I've been sober ever since. So a lot of things shifted for me in those 10 or so weeks where I really sat very intentionally with the medicine and I was guided by my own teachers. And, you know, my training lasted a lot longer than that. But those 10 weeks were so pivotal because I was mourning a lost friendship at that point as well. I was still grappling with who am I if I'm not a news anchor. And yeah, I was still trying to process the deaths of those dogs and the death of this identity that I had really wanted since I was a fifth grader. So all of that sort of came to fruition thanks to no longer drinking, but the no longer drinking was possible because I was being held by the sacred mushrooms. At least that's what I believe.

Grief, Sobriety, And Identity Shifts

Kertia 20:31

I love that though. I love that for you. Those are a lot of um really impactful transitions that you went through. Yeah, yeah. So okay, so from your experience, and I know like it's different for everyone, trauma shows up in people's body, but as women, you know, we carry a lot of trauma in our wombs, in our hips, um, in the lower region of our bodies. I'd love to know from your experience personally and also from what you've seen with your clients. Can you tell us more about how trauma shows up for us as women when you look at the womb and what goes on there, maybe with our cycles, or maybe with our creativity, or how we show up, like you mentioned um not being able to be vulnerable as an example. So I'd love to know some more about how that can show up in different ways.

Leslie 21:31

Yeah, for sure. That's a great question. So we'll start with my experience. You know, for me, it was very much this inability to slow down. And when I would rest, I would feel bad. I would feel like I couldn't settle. And so what the womb has really showed me, and what cyclical living, which just means living in alignment with your cycle and really flowing with your cycle month by month, it showed me that there are times to reap and there are times. To sow. Like there are times for harvest and there are times for planting. And so that really helped me to start to navigate the ups and downs. And I think that was a direct line of like aha intelligence from the womb. Now, physically, the big thing that I saw in myself was completely numb genitals. Like, because I contracted herpes via oral sex, which people don't talk about being able to happen, but that's what happened to me. That's like the blood test that I test positive for is the HSV1, which is the cold sore virus. HSV2 is usually the one that is a genital specific, but you can get them both everywhere. You know, I was so against oral sex, even with someone who was very into that and wanted that to be part of our sexual life.

Kertia 22:44

Yeah.

Leslie 22:45

But I felt very numb. I felt very closed off. And I felt very unsafe with those things. And so the other thing that manifested for me was just this like dull numbness. I once, and I can look back again, 2020, hindsight 2020 for sure. I was working with a therapist and they had me do this body map. And it was like an outline, right, of the body, and they're like, color in your body. Didn't really give you anything. They just, you know, color it in. My head was very bright. Like my I've always been very attached to my intellect and like my self-awareness. The rest of the body I shaded gray. And then over the genitals, I put a big big red X. That tells you a lot.

Kertia 23:29

Oh God.

How Trauma Shows Up In The Womb

Leslie 23:30

And this was years before I was doing psychedelic work. Wow. But then when I started to go into the body, I realized like I felt completely numb from the neck down. I felt like two separate beings, like a headless horseman over here, just like stumbling around. And then like, you know, a very aware and intellectual, intelligent person with just like a floating head. Now with my clients, I see this manifest in endometriosis, especially in people of color, women of color. Big time. Um, endometriosis, I have seen it in PCOS, which is basically um how I've seen it presented is very irregular cycles or missing periods for a prolonged amount of time. A lot of people who I have worked with who've had that have a very big imbalance between their masculine and their feminine energy. I had that as well. When I came off of the pill, I did not get my period for like nine months. And that's kind of typical for how long I was on hormonal birth control. But even when I did get my bleed back, it took another year-ish for it to become regular and regular when it comes to a menstrual cycle is you know, having a cycle that is roughly the same amount of days month after month. So like a 28-day cycle and then a 30-day cycle and then a 29-day cycle and then a 31-day cycle. That's pretty regular. I had I was at first experiencing like a 28-day cycle, a 39-day cycle, a 25-day, it was everywhere. And that I think was because one, the hormones were imbalanced, but two, the energy was imbalanced. Pain during sex, a huge one. Um, infertility, miscarriages. So I worked with one person who had come to me after having a miscarriage. And as we uh started to do this work, they remembered a sexual trauma that they had forgotten. And so unrepressed and unconscious trauma in the body is another thing that is laying often dormant in the womb space. Um, and we did work on that with her, and she later became pregnant and she has a healthy little girl now. So I think for me, those are sort of the symptoms that I often see people experience. The other thing I'll say, I work with a ton of women who don't bleed anymore. Maybe they've had a hysterectomy, which causes its own trauma, surgical trauma, or they're past their bleeding years. And so for those folks, what I see is like this inability to know what's next. Like they're in a life transition and they can't figure out what the next step is, or they feel like stuck. And that's very, it's very much my story. I felt very stuck in maiden. I didn't know how to progress to the next life stage. We don't have rituals in our Western world really. We don't. We don't have like these rites of passages. And so for women who are no longer bleeding, I often see them come to me where maybe they've got a transition. For instance, somebody has passed away and they don't know how to move on with life without this person. Or maybe they've lost a job or they want to leave a job. They don't quite know how to step forward. Whether or not you have a womb, the womb is like the wisdom center for those types of decisions because from that central place of your power, you can move forward with more confidence. So that's really why I think mushrooms can help awaken that space and why doing things like somatic breath work or visualization or massage or journaling or taking a vision journey into the womb can be all really lovely ways to, you know, help you get past the block that's keeping you stuck.

Kertia 27:12

Absolutely. I'd love for you to talk some more about that. You know, you spoke about even earlier going into the void and about women um truly knowing and acknowledging the power that is within the womb, even if you're not a mom, even if you never intend on becoming a mom. Like I'd love for you to speak about that some more, um, the void and just the power that we have there.

The Void, Creative Power, And Cycle Wisdom

Leslie 27:39

You know, for me, I I really started to see the womb as this creative life force energy, right? We know that it creates life, literally. And that's off, you know, if you're in, you know, specifically heterosexual relationships, but any relationship, when you have sex, you're often inviting life force energy from that other person in through the genitals. And so for me, you know, I started to see that space within myself as like an energetic junk drawer where all of the negative self-talk I was storing there, the energy of past lovers, it was getting stored there. And so when I began this conscious connection to that space, I really had to like clean out the junk drawer. And visualizations helped me with that. And that was basically me, you know, in a meditative state, breathing into my like my lower belly, and then like imagining in my mind's eye, you know, I'm going into my womb cave. I have a very specific like image in my mind. Immediately I know what my womb cave looks like. Some folks have a different image, but that was mine. And I could go in there and see my highest self. I could go in there and see, you know, um my intuition and hear my intuition and like really hear and see what I needed to do next. And so for me, that was sort of one of the ways that it sort of began to blossom for me, this relationship with my womb. Now, like you mentioned, folks who are no are deciding not to have kids or they have had kids and they don't want to have any more kids, the womb can be a really sacred container for projects and ideas. And the way I work with that is to align it with my cycle. So I like to at least like spend a month on an idea and do what I call bleed on it, right? So if I have something coming up for me, if I'm gonna launch a new offer in my business or if I'm gonna decide to move jobs or move full move house or whatever, I like to spend a whole menstrual cycle, you know, from my inner spring all the way through my inner winter, really sitting with that decision and letting my womb show me what it thinks I should do. Because for me, the womb is my guru, like for real. Like my spiritual practice has everything to do with my womb and my menstrual cycle. Um, for other people who might not be as quote unquote like woo into that, I would just, I would just share, you know, if we can birth life from this space, we can birth anything we want. You know, we have the ability within our mind to create infinite realities when we really put our minds to it and we know how to work with that. And so for me, adding in the body, adding in the womb was just sort of icing on the cake for some of the manifestations that I was already trying to do. Um the other thing, well, I guess the one thing I'll say, how would I share about how I knew it worked? So I knew that this was a place within the body that held on to trauma. I knew it was a place within the body that could help me move beyond my trauma. When I was doing a massage internally, so it's called cervical dearmoring, or some folks call it vaginal massage, but using a specific glass wand, so basically a glass dildo, you do a trigger point massage starting on the outside of the vulva, thinking of it like a clock, 12, 3, 6, 9, pressing with some, you know, pressure, not hard, but breathing into the space and sort of massaging that area. It's not necessarily a pleasure practice. Think of it like a trigger point massage. Like if you've gone to massage and you've gotten emotional, that's because your body's holding stored memories of feelings, thoughts, and beliefs. Well, I'm doing this process, and this was before I had started to work with psychedelic microdosing. So this was a totally sober experience. And I'm about two inches into my vaginal canal on the upper right quadrant. I feel this pinch, almost like pins and needles, like when your leg goes to sleep. And then I immediately heard this man's voice that I had dated after I got divorced in my late 20s say, You fat bee. And he called me the bee.

unknown 32:01

Yeah.

Leslie 32:02

And I had not thought of this man in years. And I'm like, what in the hell is he doing there? Why is he there? So for me, and I and I got very emotional and I continued to massage that area and I continued to breathe, and I went back around the clock. I think that was at like the three o'clock, or maybe it was like one or two. So I kept going around the circle and I got back to that space and I continued to breathe through it, and I was able to release that memory from my body. But that showed me immediately that the body holds on to cellular memory of our own thoughts, our own beliefs, the situations we've been put into. That man I had had sex with. So his energetic imprint was in my body. Because I'd taken him into that womb space. And so for me, that really was like a proof. I needed a lot of proof back then that this is not crazy, that this isn't just like complete woo-woo BS. And so that was really something that for me helped me understand, okay, this is legit. And so I share that because that type of work was really instrumental in me cleaning out that space and really starting to understand, okay, when this space is lit from within, when it is free of the energetic BS from past lovers and my own negative self-talk and my own societal and religious programming, that's really when it will start to talk to me and it will start to lead and guide me. Okay, is this what I want to do? Is this what I want to do? And it can be big and small decisions. It doesn't have to be something so, you know, huge as like, do I quit my job? It couldn't be, you know, do I want coffee or matcha today? Like your wound will show you the way if you just start to learn to listen to it.

Kertia 33:47

Yeah. Oh my goodness. I've always wanted to try the vaginal massage because I also have sexual trauma from childhood. And yeah, also a whole slew of um chaotic relationships from my 20s. So yeah, I've always wanted to try that, but I don't know. Like, can you do that? Do you have to like have some type of training to do it on yourself? Or because I know from what I've seen, people have had other um facilitators do that for them. So, how does that even work?

Leslie 34:24

Well, I'll be very honest. I that was like elite level shit that I should probably not have been messing with like that early in my journey. But like I said, I'm like a consummate DIYer. I'm like, let me read about a thing, let me try it on myself. I'm at one three in human design. So like I am just like the F round and find out girl. And so I don't recommend this to my clients ever, you know, unless I've worked with them for a while. But I don't necessarily think you have here, here's the controversial take. I don't necessarily think you need to go to a practitioner. I think practitioners in this in that specific world are fabulous, just like psychedelic practitioners. And I'm also never gonna tell someone that you can only work with mushrooms when you have a facilitator. You can work with them on your own. Now, the transformation's gonna be different. Now, if I had worked with somebody, not been doing it on my own, like a renegade, I'm sure the experience would have been more pleasant. I because let's be honest, like after that happened, it really created a big trigger in me for a little bit of time. And I worked through it. But like, that's the the brilliance of having someone there with you is to hold that space and to hold the container. Now, with all that said, I think that one of the biggest problems I see in women is that their unwillingness to look at their vulva, to touch their vulva, and to be with their own body. And so for the that reason, I think vaginal massage is brilliant, but I would probably do it in a different way instead of going straight to cervical dearmoring, which is that trigger point massage, which again, you are certainly welcome to do. I did it on my own. I learned it from a woman named Rosie Reese who owns Yoni Pleasure Palace in Australia. She had a membership that I was in, and I had been studying with her for a while when I did it. But I would recommend, yeah, I would recommend you just do with hands only and start on the outside.

Kertia 36:18

Yeah.

Releasing Stored Memory With Vaginal Massage

Leslie 36:18

And start with breath. Start with cupping the vulva, really breathing into the space. Maybe you also like I'm a Taurus. So like everything about my world is very like sensual. So it's like, what's the smell gonna be? White, like we gotta have a certain scent for this. I have one specific massage oil. I have literally programmed my brain because I use it constantly for this one thing. Like when I smell that smell, all right, this is what it's for. So like think about the sensuality of the ritual. So what is the smell? What is the what's the lighting gonna be like? Um, what are you gonna be wearing? What are you gonna be listening to? Are you gonna, you know, have something to eat as well? And so just starting with soft cupping of the air of the vulva area. By the way, for those who listen and don't know, vulva is everything you see on the outside. And so then really asking permission of your vulva. All right, would you like more of this touch or not? Then maybe you do, you know, get naked from the waist down, use a nice massage oil that's yoni safe, and you know, maybe give yourself a little outside massage, or even just like with loving eyes, using a mirror to like look at your vulva, to look at the little petals and to look at you know your lips and your folds. For me, that was really, really healing. You know, I come from this, my dad's a preacher, right? Like I was not looking at my vulva growing up, believe me. But it's like that for me was really healing. And so I think anyone listening could very easily go into that work. Um, if you feel called to do vaginal massage on yourself, again, I'm gonna say that's your sovereign choice. And I'm very much into sovereign choice, like you've got the choice to do what it is you want to do with your body. And yes, there are fabulous practitioners who also can help you with that.

Kertia 38:10

Beautiful, beautiful, Leslie. Okay, so tell me more about your program because you talk about cyclical, cyclical microdosing and combining that with also somatic work. So I'd love for you to tell me how you came into developing that and kind of just like how it all works. Yeah, for sure.

Building The Unbound Method

Leslie 38:34

Thank you for letting me talk about this. So, um, my program, which is my one-on-one program, Unbound, is from what I've experienced, the only program that's combining somatic healing based on the female nervous system with intentional microdosing and also womb and cyclical uh wisdom. And so what that looks like is working with women to first find ways to help them regulate and expand their nervous system. And though that's like a huge jargony word. Like it's such a nervous system practitioner thing to say, expand your nervous system. What that means, let's be very clear, is that you're expanding the window of tolerance within your body, the window of safety within your body and making it fat. Like you want a fat window of tolerance so that when things happen, you're not getting thrown into activation or into dysregulation as much. You're still gonna get thrown into those places. You, if you don't, you're dead, right? Like you have your body has to go through certain processes to survive, right? But broadening this window through somatic practices like breath work, like movement, but really it's about just learning the language of the specific body I'm working with. So if this person has experienced a lot of anxiety and that's their default mode, we go through practices that are gonna help calm that. Um, if they're someone who has had depression, we go through practices to help with that. If they're in burnout, if they're living in chronic stress, if they have mood swings, right? That's the first thing. And that's where the somatic practices come in. And again, I see somatic healing as learning to speak the language of your body and letting your body be your guide moving forward. So just strengthening the body-mind connection, then adding in intentional psychedelic mushrooms, tiny doses, we figure out what their dose should be, we figure out a ritual for them, we figure out how long their protocol is gonna be. I work with folks usually for three months at a time. And then finally, depending on their own cycle, again, I worked with a lot of people who don't bleed anymore. But if you're someone who does bleed, then really looking at are we gonna microdose in tune with the cycle? Are we gonna microdose in tune with the moon? Or are we gonna cycle our microdoses um based on maybe your your work schedule or something more, you know, I won't say masculine, but more mundane than the two very woo areas I usually work within. And so my cyclical microdosing method is something I developed about two, two and a half years ago. And it's splitting the cycle in half. So the first two weeks of your cycle when our symptoms are often pretty non existent, right? Spring and summer, so follicular and ovulation, microdosing just two time, two times a week. And then when our symptoms peak in luteal, microdosing up to five times a week. This can help with the drop in serotonin that happens when estrogen falls. This can also help with regulating mood, which can also be something that's really triggering for folks when progesterone rises. And it can also help with neuroplasticity. We're seeing some studies finally come out about the shifts in neuroplasticity cycle phase to cycle phase. And so when you're backloading your microdoses, meaning you're microdosing more often in the second half of the cycle, I really see that as just opening the channel to the divine. Because then after you bleed, you're back to those two doses a week. And now you're really implementing all of the downloads that you just received. You have been picking apart the patterns. You've been looking at how like you're the main player and all the BS happening in your life. And like, how are we communicating? How are we compassionately, you know, being curious about that? And so that process, I've seen it decrease people's period pain by up to 60% in a month. I have seen it help with mood swings significantly. Um, I've seen it help with energy all month long. That's certainly something that's done for me. And more than anything else, it really helps to balance the masculine and feminine energy because you're almost forced to release control. And when we do, and I often say this is something that I learned, I had been white knuckling life. I'd been holding on so tight to my career, to my grief, to all the things I didn't want to deal with. And the second that mushrooms came into my life, they forced me to let go. And it felt like I was losing control. It did feel like I was falling because I was no longer hiding, I was no longer holding on for dear life. But then all of a sudden, all of these things started to fall into the palms of my hands. I was receiving all of these blessings and all of this abundance. And so that's really a big thing that I work with people on is allowing them to start to trust themselves. And from that trust, trust the divine, if that's something that they choose to move into. I work with mostly mystical or spiritual people, um, or trust others, or trust, you know, that they can make their own self-choice. Um, and so yeah, that's I guess the briefest overview of what my one on one coaching program looks like. I also have a group membership for people as well. Yeah.

Kertia 43:48

That's really cool. And yeah, I mean, this is a space to talk about all the woo. So love it. You're in the right place. You're definitely in the right place because. We talk about that a lot here. So, what would you say? I guess your clients should be prepared for coming into you know this experience with you, this experience with reconnecting with your womb, with healing, with dealing with their trauma and um a lot of things that are sitting inside of them that they probably don't recognize is there.

Leslie 44:28

You know, I think most of my clients just have to remember that this is not talk therapy. You don't actually have to talk about what happened to you. I'm not gonna ask you to like talk about your past. If it comes up, that's totally fine. But it's not the point of the work that we're doing is not to like have you continue to intellectualize and retell yourself the story, which is just repattering you to like live in that story.

unknown 44:53

Yeah.

Leslie 44:54

I think folks who work with me and have a lot of success are people who've already been to therapy, who are already pretty self-aware and they have felt stuck in therapy. They're not getting anywhere. Maybe they're like, gosh, I've been with my therapist for three years now, and this is just like a thing I do every Thursday at two, but it doesn't get me anywhere. The the juice about the work that I do is it returns you to the self that I believe you're always meant to be before everything society told you, right? Like before your worth was, you know, kicked, before your self-confidence was kicked, before self-doubt creeped in. And that can be deeply triggering. It can be deeply triggering work in the beginning. It can feel dysregulating. Like I said, if you've been holding on this tight to life, and then you finally let go. First you feel like you're falling before all the goodness falls into your hands. And so that's for me what yeah, that's kind of for me what I love to watch is like that that moment of complete release and surrender. What I what I do find happens really quickly with the mushrooms, especially paired with the somatic practices, is a lot of times people who have felt so bottled up and so stuck and so just numb to life, will often, and I can't say always, because I don't know what's going to happen when they invite mushrooms into their life, but mushrooms seem to like give these people a really beautiful experience for the first like week or two. And then yeah, it can make things worse where like they're feeling really dysregulated and maybe the mood's crazy. And we and we we navigate that, like we have tools for that, but it's just such an interesting experience in like letting go so that you can come back home to yourself. And it's hard for me at times to like articulate what it is that I do and what it is that I see people go through. But I think truly for me, I was disconnected from my body and I hated my body, and I was ashamed of my sex, and I was ashamed of like my desires, and and I didn't know what my purpose was for a really long time. And I would hear people say, like, coming home to yourself, coming home to your body, and it felt like this like far out, like totally left field 5D BS. But what I know is that my body is actually like home to every answer I've ever been looking for. The problem was that my mind was just so dang full up with all the things I thought I should be thinking or should be doing that I couldn't listen to my body. Your body is so quiet. Even when you've done this work for a long time, your brain will still try to out talk your body. And so for me, that homecoming to self and having that like true self-reliance and the confidence that you know what's best for you, for me has been so lovely to watch in my own journey, but with my clients too, clients with chronic illness, clients who have been, you know, totally mislabeled and ignored by the medical industry, right?

Kertia 48:02

Oh, yeah, there's that too.

Leslie 48:03

I've had I've I've worked with two people who during our time together finally got endometriosis diagnoses and like just watching them shift from like hating their body, hating their womb, hating the fact that they've been trying to get doctors to listen to them for years and then have that happen while working together and have that just oh, like that release. Like, oh my god, I can trust myself. I'm right, like I'm not crazy. Um, that's just really nice too.

Kertia 48:32

Yeah. Wow. Yeah, I think um the medical field has done um women a huge injustice. I mean, it's not the greatest. I mean, it serves its purpose when it comes to certain things, definitely. Not bashing it, but I mean, it does do a huge disservice um to us generally, but especially to women.

Cyclical Microdosing For PMS And Mood

Leslie 48:56

Yeah. It's crazy. It is crazy. And I think for me, what was really interesting and and one of the reasons why I really went this holistic route, right? Is because the other thing that occurred to me after the pandemic was that like the laws of the land, like the laws of man, didn't make sense to like what I really felt intuitively in my body, right? Like, why can somebody right across the border from me like legally smoke weed? And I can't. We're both humans. What makes them different than me? Just because they live at a different place, you know? That was one example. Obviously, with the pandemic, we had all of the masks things, and we had suck certain cities that were shutting down and certain ones that weren't. And I realized at that point that like these things are not illegal because your government cares about you. You don't have a loving government, right? Like, they're illegal because when you start to explore these parts of yourself, you become ungovernable because you understand that you are the sovereign being here, and you also understand that you're sovereign and you are and everybody is, no matter what the belief system is. And I think right now what's so fascinating here in the States is like it is divisive AF. We just had somebody murdered yesterday. Yes, it was wild, and we had another political killing three months ago. Like it is crazy out here. And I think to me, it's like if folks would just like eat some mushrooms and like connect to womb wisdom, like we would understand that we're all one. Seriously, like you would be like, of course I'm not gonna go to war. Like, I'm gonna go help those people. Like, this is psychotic. That this power over structure is gonna work for us for much longer. And I think for me, that ability to really like understand that I'm not separate from, I'm really like part of the collective was really healing and really lovely. And I think for me also, and I'll say this too about wombs and mushrooms. Mushrooms come from death. Like having a womb is a consistent psychedelic experience. Like death and rebirth monthly. You bleed, you're retransitioning into the birth, right? Like I just started my period today. So it's like psychedelics and and the womb are so beautifully combined together already because mushrooms make the world fertile. What's fertile? Your womb. Like they're just beautiful, synchronistic, like allies that I think love working together. Um, I see mushrooms as deeply feminine. I think they're like a very feminine energy. But again, I think it's because they come from the void. And the womb is also this void of infinite potential. And when you combine the two, like you really can start to break out of all the things that have held you back for your entire life so that you can live in a way that finally feels joyful and exciting and not like being stuck and held back and numb.

Kertia 51:57

Yeah, yeah. Amazing. This has been such an amazing conversation. I agree. Yeah, it's such an amazing conversation. Do you have um, you know, like just from talking to other women, do you have any insights on like some of the other things that we deal with? Like, I know you mentioned endometriosis, but there's like um ovarian cysts, there's fibroids, all these things, right? When we begin to kind of I guess heal a lot of things that are stuck in our bodies, I truly do believe that there is a way through healing some of these things, but you kind of question a lot of things that we actually know intuitively if we're truly supposed to take a look at it and really come home back to our bodies, right? It seems so far out there because we're so used to operating on this mindset and this way of existing whereby we're used to suffering in a certain way, or we're we're used to lacking the attention and the assistance that we need, and people truly taking our experiences seriously and validating that, much less to actually look into it and actually try to help us with that. So I don't know, like what is your take on a lot of these other experiences that we're having as women with our wombs and how we can truly begin to to honor our bodies and find ways to heal that or just advocate for ourselves better, right? For example, if you truly do need medical intervention, you know that something's just not right because that is a thing, like pap smears being like difficult to get nowadays. That's wild to me, right? Yeah.

Leslie 53:57

Well, I think you hit the nail on the head at the end, right? I think that medical medical intervention, the Western medical model is really essential. You know, we're blessed to be able to know a lot more than we did 200 years ago.

Kertia 54:08

Yeah.

Medicine, Sovereignty, And Systems

Leslie 54:08

And like we've talked about a lot, I think that what's happened is we've been outsourcing our power to other entities and not trusting ourselves. And so I would say, you know, if you have been trying to get a diagnosis on endometriosis, which can take us up to up to 10 years on average to get an endometriosis diagnosis, yeah. Crazy. Crazy. Fibroids and cysts, you know, are something that I think often they can diagnose with a little bit more ease than endometriosis. So maybe it's not taking as long to be heard. But I would say, you know, while you're also possibly working with the Western medical model, for me, what's happening with your repressed emotions? Like I interviewed somebody on my podcast who did such a wonderful job of explaining this. But you know, emotions stand for energy in motion. And energy is neither created or destroyed. And so if you're keeping those emotions locked in your body, like I was with grief and with sadness, things are gonna finally manifest physically if you're not dealing with it, right? If you're not moving it out of the body with breath or journaling or with psychedelic mushrooms, right? And so that for me, oh man, like there's a lot of books I've read where like cysts on a left side ovary versus a right side ovary can mean like one emotion versus another emotion. Breast cancer can mean a certain emotion. So that is something that I kind of take with somewhat of a grain of salt and uh again, a say a case by case basis, you know, as far as that like direct causation. Is it a cause? Is it not?

Kertia 55:46

Yeah.

Leslie 55:47

But I really do believe that the things that we repress are gonna come out in some way, shape, or form. That's also kind of shadow work, right? And so what I would just say is when you can learn to listen to your body, which is something somatic work really helps with, which is something psychedelics really help with, so so does womb work. Um, you're gonna have a lot less trouble figuring out what your intuition is saying to you. Should I go to the doctor for this? Should I go to an herbalist for this? What about an acupuncturist for this? Do I need to do breath work today or go for a walk today? You know, what is it truly that I myself need? Because your body is gonna tell you that. That all of our our jobs are just to learn to listen to it. And it's hard because of the the modern society we live in and all the distractions that are baked into our life. It is really hard for us to listen to that. Um, but when you can, I think that's when a lot of these questions can be a little bit easier to answer as far as um at least on an intuitive basis, like what your intuitive and your your intuition is showing you.

Kertia 56:55

Yeah. Beautiful. Thank you so much, Leslie. Is there anything else that you'd like to tell us about that we haven't touched on yet?

Leslie 57:03

No, I think we did such a good job. I think I think, you know, if you're listening to this and you're interested in exploring your own microdosing, I have a free guide. I can give Kersha to give to the put in the show notes. Um, it answers every question you've got, including the ones you're too afraid to Google. And I also have for folks who are really ready to explore their own somatic healing journey, a nine-minute practice I call the shift method that I created about a year and a half ago that has been instrumental in helping me connect to my body. It's two minutes of journaling, three minutes of breath work, four minutes of intuitive movement done every single day. That's going to expand that window of tolerance, the safety in the body. We're talking on September 11th as we as we record this interview. Um, and so this month I've been doing live somatic sessions with the shift method every day for my group. And it's shocking just how much better I feel. Like I'm literally a somatic practitioner. But um, this that man, I I created that after my last dog died, the one who was certainly my soulmate dog. And I had such deep grief. I knew psychedelic medicine was not what I wanted to ally with. My body was what I needed to work with, and so that's where shift was born. And I can also give you guys um a link to that. But those are to the two things I would suggest looking into based on our conversation.

Kertia 58:23

Awesome. Thank you so much. Can you tell us real quick where we can reach you?

Leslie 58:27

Of course. I'm on Instagram at Leslie Draffin. I'm on TikTok at the Womb Mystic. I also have a podcast called The Light Within. My website is just my name, Lesliedraffin.com. And if you do grab one of those free guides, you'll get onto my email list where all the real juice lives because it's more of an algorithm-free way to come uh way to converse. Um, that's where I talk a lot about my my coaching and I share a lot of client wins. And I also share a lot of uh like in the moment somatic practices. Like I just sent out an email yesterday, a 60-second reset when you're feeling anxious, that kind of thing.

Advocating For Care And Self-Trust

Kertia 59:03

Awesome. Thank you so much, Leslie. Of course, thank you so much for having me. This was such an amazing conversation sitting with Leslie and speaking about women's health, which is a huge thing right now, considering what's happening in the political and medical arena. And I love that she spoke about intuition, women really reconnecting with their own power, being empowered within themselves to take responsibility really for yourself, for your health, for your body, and take ownership over that, knowing that you know your body best. No one else knows you, no one else knows your body more than you do. This was such an empowering and equally enlightening conversation as Leslie gave so many golden nuggets and so many food for thought, right? I love her take on just reconnecting to the body, reconnecting to your sexual organs, which is a huge thing. You know, culture, religion, society has taken women away also, not just from their own health, but so much from their bodies, whereby our sexuality is impacted or expression of sexuality, of sexuality and sensuality, geez, has been impacted a lot as well. So her suggestion with touching the vulva, seeing how that feels and creating a nice cute ritual around that, I think that's that's just such a gorgeous, gorgeous example of how we can begin to reconnect with our bodies and see our bodies in a more positive light, remembering how miraculous our bodies are and how beautiful we truly are inside and out. All right, thank you so much for listening. And just a reminder that these episodes are now available for watching on our YouTube channel. So head over there if you would like to see the visuals and um feel the vibe of the conversation. I feel like when you can look at people as they express themselves, you really get to feel the energy of who they are and you get to connect more with what they're about and with what they have to say. So check out the video for this episode on our YouTube channel and please, please subscribe because we'd love to get this work out there as much as we can. Thank you again for listening. Peace, love, and may your path back to yourself be filled with clarity and more ease. Until next time.