Microdosing, Somatics, Feminine Healing & Your Mental Health with Leslie Draffin

Leslie Draffin shares her expertise as a women's microdosing and somatic guide, helping women tap into body-held trauma through various modalities including psilocybin mushrooms and embodiment practices.

• Microdosing psilocybin involves taking tiny amounts that don't cause intoxication but improve mood and brain function
• Psilocybin calms the default mode network where deeply ingrained habits live, allowing better pattern recognition
• Unlike pharmaceuticals, microdosing is used for a season rather than long-term, without addiction potential
• The womb holds trauma for many women, serving as an "energetic junk drawer" for unprocessed experiences
• The SHIFT method (Sensation, Honor, Inhale/exhale, Flow, Take stock) helps regulate emotions in just 9 minutes
• Somatic healing means decoding body sensations to understand what emotions are trying to communicate
• Women can work with cyclical awareness even after menopause by aligning with moon phases
• Sexual healing often requires addressing underlying blocks to receiving pleasure, safety and vulnerability
• Psychedelic work can be particularly helpful for treatment-resistant depression
• Those with conditions like bipolar disorder should only explore psilocybin with professional guidance

Grab Leslie's free guides for microdosing and the SHIFT method by visiting lesliedraffin.com or finding her on Instagram and TikTok.

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

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thewombmystic

Website: https://www.lesliedraffin.com/

Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-light-within/id1554915881

Free Microdosing Guide: https://lesliedraffin.myflodesk.com/microguide

Free Somatic Healing Guide: https://lesliedraffin.myflodesk.com/shift

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Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to Leslie Draffin
• 1:05 Psychedelic Microdosing Explained
• 6:27 Finding Safe Psilocybin Sources
• 12:14 Womb Trauma and Feminine Energy
• 17:38 The SHIFT Method for Emotional Regulation
• 25:38 Somatic Healing and Body Awareness
• 33:09 Sexuality, Pleasure and Healing
• 38:29 Working with Depression and Mental Health

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Welcome back to Mental Health Warrior and NeuroSpicyMama. Today we're talking with Leslie Draffin and let me tell you a little bit about her. She's very interesting, she does a lot of unique things and I wanted to bring to the forefront the work she's been doing. She is a women's microdosing and somatic guide and a mindfulness mentor and menstrual cycle educator. So that's a lot there, Leslie. Tell us what you do, what all that?

Speaker 2: 0:31

means yeah. So basically what that means and also, amy, thanks for having me on the show. What that basically means is I help women, with a variety of interesting modalities, tap into the trauma that's locked in their body, overcome mental health struggles and really start to align with their feminine energy, and I do that through menstrual cycle education or support. I do that through psychedelic, microdosing and somatic embodiment practices as well.

Speaker 1: 0:59

Okay, I'm very interested in this psychedelic microdosing. How does that work? Very interested in this psychedelic microdosing.

Speaker 2: 1:04

Yeah, how does that work?

Speaker 2: 1:05

So, psychedelic microdosing, and the way that I do it is with psychedelic mushrooms, so that's also called psilocybin mushrooms and when you microdose you're taking a teeny amount, so small, you are never high, you're not intoxicated or hallucinating. However, you're still getting the benefits of things like improved mood, improved brain function, improved energy and, the way that I see it, the ability to really start to look deeply at your patterns. The way that psilocybin works in the brain is it calms a part of the brain called the default mode network, and that's where our deeply ingrained habits live. So for me, my story is I had suffered with anxiety my whole life and I was deeply programmed to be an anxious person. So when I began to experiment with tiny doses of microdose, tiny doses of mushrooms, what I saw is I was better able to pause, better able to sort of zoom out from a situation and not live in the trigger, and really be more present to connect the dots between why I was the way I was and how I could move forward in a positive way.

Speaker 1: 2:11

The other thing. Sorry, I was going to say that sounds less traumatic than traditional therapy and that kind of thing.

Speaker 2: 2:19

We can definitely talk about that. But I do want to say one more thing about microdosing. Microdosing is something that you invite into your life for a season. Right, it's not something that you're going to do the rest of your life. It's not like a pharmaceutical pill.

Speaker 2: 2:32

You microdose a few times a week for a few weeks at a time and then you take a break, and that's what I find truly magical about the process is it becomes an ally and a helpful catalyst in your healing journey, without it being like the pharmaceutical drugs out there many of which I was on which, to me, felt like a bandaid over, in some cases a bullet wound and never really staunching the actual problem. Microdosing is completely the opposite. It's not something that you get addicted to. It's not something that you I don't know how to say this really politely but it's not something that you can benefit from if you're in like a user's mindset, like you really need to be in an integrity at least in my opinion, in a space of integrity, in a space of reciprocity, to benefit from it. Sure, there are cases of people who misuse these medicines, but that's what I would say about microdosing, and we can certainly talk about traditional therapy too.

Speaker 1: 3:30

Oh yeah. Well, I want to know where do you get this psilocybin Mm? Hmm.

Speaker 2: 3:36

So that's not that. Yeah, so that's not a question I love to answer just out there in the public, but there are companies that are doing this legally in some of the states in the US where the laws are very gray. That's a question that I answer in my free microdosing guide, so I'd love to give that to your folks. You can put it in the show notes. Maybe the question is answered there. But I will say there's a couple of other places you can start to look for this. If you're interested. One search your local psychedelic society. It might be your state. It might be your state. It might be your town. If you live in a big city like Dallas has one. New York City clearly has a bunch, but Texas has them. Most regions will have some type of a psychedelic society. You can just join those for free. Start to mingle with the people. If you go to a farmer's market and you ever see somebody selling any types of mushrooms lion's mane, cordyceps, reishi, anything become their friend.

Speaker 2: 4:30

They will know because the laws vary based on where you live, and for me I had to really take that into account. I had to ask myself is the risk of this being quote unquote illegal too much for me, and it certainly might be for you. You may not want to embark on this process. I'm hopeful that in the next few years we'll see some of the laws change and again you could journey to somewhere like Colorado, where it's decriminalized, or to Oregon, where they have legalized it, or there are a bunch of cities around the country I think Minneapolis maybe just made a change, so there are places that you can find this very legally and you can go there if you would prefer. Again, there's places that you can get it on the internet that are safe too.

Speaker 1: 5:10

The reason I was asking is because I wondered how safe it is, like do people add stuff to it, or do you need to make sure you get it from a reputable person?

Speaker 2: 5:21

Yeah for sure. So every time I post on certain platforms there's like a bot in the chat that's always like get it from fungi guy 275. Absolutely not. You're never going to order it from somebody, you see in the comment section. And so I have done a really dedicated, like focused job vetting sources which is why they're in that guide so that I've either communicated in person with the person who's behind the company I've talked with them like in a Zoom or on the phone or through email or I have worked with their products.

Speaker 2: 5:55

So there are some companies that I highly recommend. They're highly safe. But you're right, you don't know what you're getting sometimes on the internet and mushrooms are, you know, I think a lot of mystery surrounds mushrooms in general. So even though these grow wild, please don't just go eating some mushrooms you find on a cow patty, which that's like typically where you get psychedelic mushrooms is off of cow patties. Don't do that. You want to just find a reputable company and I have done that, and if you have that question and you want that answer, just grab that guide.

Speaker 1: 6:26

Good advice. So talk to me about the womb and the trauma that women have.

Speaker 2: 6:32

Okay, so what I have found in my work and it certainly is something that I've also validated and verified in my own life is that the womb for many women is a deep source of held and stuck trauma. So we know that the body holds on to trauma. We've heard the big book the Body Keeps the Score. It's not my favorite. I prefer Waking the Tiger by Dr Peter Levine, who is the founder of Somatic Experiencing. But we know that the body is where sensations happen, and those sensations lead to our emotions, lead to the stories that we tell ourselves.

Speaker 2: 7:06

When we look at the womb itself, anatomically it's in the pelvic bowl, and so we hold a lot of tension in the hips, we hold a lot of stagnant energy in the hip area and the bowl of, like your pelvis, including where the womb sits. I like to say it's like your energetic junk drawer. You're going to stuff things there that you don't want to look at anymore or look at yet. So this could be negative self-talk, it could be eating disorders, it could be addictions, it could be abuse, it could be violence and, because women are so often victims of violence, right when we look at the species, a lot of that violence has to do with sex, and sex and the womb are so interconnected. So that's one reason why I have really found that the womb is so, so much of like a hotbed for stuck trauma.

Speaker 2: 7:55

I really believe, personally, that the other reason is because we live in a patriarchal society where the women of the world have been silenced because of the power that lives within aligning with your cycle, understanding your feminine energy and living from your power source, which is the womb.

Speaker 2: 8:11

You know, the womb is how we birth babies, it's how we can birth creative projects After we no longer bleed. It's how we become the wise women of our communities, when we're living in a healed space, not a patriarchal world. And so thousands of years ago, I believe, women were really living more from this space. We were in different types of societies, more matrilineal societies, and so, because of the suppression of this energy and the subjugation of women all around the world for millennia, there's an additional ancestral womb wound in all of us, whether or not we have ever been the victim of violence or not. And so those two main things the real, physical aspects of how the body holds trauma, and then the energetic, ancestral, generational traumas that are handed down to us simply because we're women. Those are some really big reasons why I find that the womb holds on to trauma so, so broadly.

Speaker 1: 9:06

Wow, and you have a special nine-minute shift that you do to help with that, yeah.

Speaker 2: 9:12

So I created the shift method, actually not specifically for womb healing, but for emotional regulation, which is certainly something that happens or is necessary in any type of trauma processing. And so when my soulmate dog died last year, I was in an incredibly deep state of grief and I had panic attacks for the first time in years after he died and I was realizing this dog was like my co-regulator. I really relied on him. He was a great Dane, he was a big entity in my life, a big thing in my life, and when he died I had panic attacks for the first time in years. I'm like what is going on? So, with all of my training, I knew well we're not going to sit with mushrooms to deal with this grief, because when we're in an acute state of grief or sadness, anxiety, depression, mushrooms can amplify that and make those feelings even bigger, and I don't want any more. I don't want it to be bigger. Mushrooms can amplify that and make those feelings even bigger, and I don't want any more. I don't want it to be bigger. And so I created shift to really help me get out of my head, to feel more of the emotions in the body and to process and move those out. So shift includes three different things. It's two minutes of journaling, three minutes of easy, gentle breath work and four minutes of intuitive movement, and so that can look like bullet journaling, just like brain dumping. What's in your mind? I like to say, follow the acronym shift.

Speaker 2: 10:32

So start off by seeking out any sensations you might be feeling. For me it was like I feel so tight in my chest I feel like I'm going to throw up. I have this racing heartbeat and my head is pounding. I would have written those down and then honoring the feelings that come up with those sensations, this tightness behind my eyes means I want to burst out crying because I miss my dog so much. That's an example For the next three minutes you're just going to do the simple breaths of in through the nose, out through the mouth, make a sound as you exhale, and so what this naturally does is it brings online your parasympathetic nervous system, which is your rest and digest. That's the peace and safety element. Just by extending the exhale and when you're making a sound humming, sighing, exhale, and when you're making a sound humming, sighing, moaning, yawning, growling, hissing, yelling, whatever that also stimulates the vagus nerve, which is there in the parasympathetic nervous system which runs the nerve runs from your head down through the throat, chest and actually lands in the cervical region, so it's womb connected. For women, that humming or that vibration of that nerve also helps to show the body okay, you're safe.

Speaker 2: 11:42

And then the last part of shift is flow. So just let your body move in whatever way you want. It could be stretching, it could be dancing, it could be stomping, it could be making the stop sign, right. I have really found, without a lot of guidance you know I don't like to tell people what to do in their shift but your body, once you let yourself tap into what's coming up and then you have the breath to bring in, you will make like the weirdest. It'll seem weird to you but it'll make a lot of sense. These like weird movements with your body that could really be you finishing a trauma cycle, really be you finishing a trauma cycle.

Speaker 2: 12:22

I did a lot of work with like posture when I was dealing with this grief, because I just felt so contracted and fallen in on myself Right, and so I would kind of like stand up and let my heart fall forward or come forward. And then the last acronym, the last letter of the acronym, shift is just take a pause, take stock. What's happened? What do I need now to continue to nourish myself? And so that's how it was born, and I've seen it really help people with ADHD.

Speaker 2: 12:46

Like people with I have ADHD, adhders like, typically feel like they cannot meditate. And I'm a meditation teacher and I got trained because I wanted to do it right, but I struggled so significantly through that and what I found is that, because shift is timed, I have a free ebook I'd love to hand it to you for your show notes and there are playlists I've created. So one song is journaling, the second song is breath, the third song is flow, movement. And you're done. Your ADHD brain loves that because you're like, okay, I'm moving on to this and we're moving on to this, so it helps you get in touch with the body without that spinning hamster wheel of shoulds and oh shit, I'm not doing this quite right and oh, this thought is coming in this way. And so I've had a lot of success with my clients who have ADHD through the shift method.

Speaker 1: 13:36

I think that sounds great. I'm going to be trying that with myself and my daughter. We both have ADHD. Okay, perfect, yeah, so tell me a little bit about the somatic part of this. What?

Speaker 2: 13:48

is somatic. So somatic really just means of the body, of the. Soma is where that word comes from the Greek, and to me I really see it as a whole body approach to healing, specifically really healing the mind-body connection. We've already talked about the fact that the body does hold onto trauma. It holds onto emotions. You can experience stress in the body and trauma in the body through different physical sensations, and so when we look at somatic healing, it really is learning to decipher the language of the sensations in the body and then getting curious about what those sensations might be showing us. So for folks who've experienced anxiety, it's actually pretty easy for them to understand somatics, because when you have an anxiety attack, how physical that can feel At least that was my experience right Like, oh, the racing heart, the feeling like your chest or your throat is constricting, maybe you have like restless legs. So the sensations are really coming online when those feelings of anxiety are coming, the tightness of the stomach, even, or the heaviness, and so what I like to say is that those sensations are your body talking and somatics helps you to get curious about what they're really wanting to say to you and it might be really obvious to you why you're feeling the feelings, why you're feeling anxious, and it can be really surprising too, like I have found working with clients. One thing I'll do often is just have them body scan and say, all right, let your mind's awareness travel through the body.

Speaker 2: 16:40

Usually, your attention will be drawn to a place that feels uncomfortable. Do you find an uncomfortable spot in your body? Okay, I have a tightness in the back of my shoulder. All right, let's look at that. Let's let that speak to us. Does it have a temperature? Does it feel smaller or larger than a fist? Is it dull? Is it sharp? Does it have a color?

Speaker 2: 17:00

We ask these questions of the body and sometimes not much will come up. But oftentimes what'll come up is I have a client I've worked with and she I literally had this thing happen with her a few weeks ago. She felt that tightness in the back of her shoulder, feels like I'm getting stabbed in the back. Oh my gosh. Yes, I've had this fight with my friend. This is where this is. I feel like I'm going to get set work. I'm about to lose my job.

Speaker 2: 17:25

It was these weird things connected to that pinch, that sharpness in her shoulder, and so what we did is we breathed through it. I let her feel those feelings, talk that out, and then we traveled to another place in the body. Is there a place that feels the opposite of that? And so that's really what somatics the way that I work with them do is help to decode places and sensations in the body. That might give you a really good clue into the patterns that you have, the dullness, numbness you're feeling, the depression, anxiety that you're feeling, and really just approaching all of this work with this thought that your body is really wise. It really is wise, it has the answers that you're looking for.

Speaker 2: 18:11

Unfortunately, we're just often not told how to deal with that, and so we mentioned before, you know, talk therapy. I was in talk therapy for years and I was great at talk therapy. Like my therapist would say things like well, it's like talking to a peer yeah, no, I'm an intellectual first eldest daughter with perfectionism and ADHD. Like, of course, I'm going to be acing therapy and all that did was keep me stuck in the story of the trauma. It never helped me process it, and that's the difference between talking about it and going through a somatic procedure. A somatic process like that where, yes, you're talking, because that's how we verbalize, but the speaking comes after getting in touch with the sensation of the body.

Speaker 1: 18:54

Hey well, it sounds like you have an incredible toolkit here, so I'm wondering how do you decide what to start with with someone?

Speaker 2: 19:03

So I've been doing the work with clients on and off for about four years and, yes, I've added to the toolkit year after year and in the beginning I really I would go through like mushroom. First I was very like, let's do, let's get the psychedelics in you first. And I really shifted that approach in the last year because I started to see, one, how crazy the world is and, two, how much more disconnected people are from their bodies because of how crazy the world is. Right, we spend so much time on our phones trying to just like zone out. And so right now what I've really been focused on is helping people to tap into the body through the somatic process and then, after a few weeks of working together if it's a one-on-one person specifically then introducing psychedelics Because, like I said, they're amazing allies in this process. They're amazing allies in this process. I don't think that you have to eat mushrooms to heal. And yet I love them and I'm so deeply thankful for them because they helped me get sober. They've helped me with my anxiety and depression, my PTSD, all these things. But now it's one of those things where I know everyone can benefit from somatics. Let me get to know them a little bit. Let's see what your nervous system really is like and then let's see if whether or not psychedelics could be a tool for you.

Speaker 2: 20:23

Almost everyone does come to a place where, yeah, I want to at least explore psychedelic medicine. But there are folks it's not that safe for right. There are people who have had a direct family history or personal history of things like schizophrenia or bipolar. People on certain medications might have contraindications. With psilocybin it's very, very, very rare. The risk is so, so low, especially compared to things like SNRIs and SSRIs. But again, just to cover my own butt, you got to say you know this is the risk and this is what it is. That's kind of how I deal with it. The other thing I'll say is, because I work only with women, I always love to include something about the menstrual cycle, whether they're bleeding or not. I've had some amazing clients. In fact I would say half of my clients no longer have a cycle, no longer have a bleed, and there's still so much work that can be done if you're no longer bleeding and even if you don't have a physical uterus anymore with the womb work.

Speaker 1: 21:22

How does that work?

Speaker 2: 21:24

I'm just trying to wrap my head around that, yeah, so if you don't have a womb anymore, you work with the energy of that space you still have. I'm not someone who's trained in the chakra system, but that's a really like common nomenclature at this point, like root chakra, sacral chakra, solar plexus. That's a common thing a lot of people understand on a lot on the internet. But you do have that source, that power center. You've got the pelvic bowl that you can still work with, and so for women who don't have a womb anymore, a lot of what we're doing is maybe work with the vulva, maybe work with the vaginal canal, maybe work visioning into the space where the womb was and still seeing it as that power source, that womb caves, and just allowing what's still there to come to the surface.

Speaker 2: 22:14

Things like trauma from the surgery of removing the womb, Things like why did you even need a hysterectomy in the first place? So those things can be really helpful. But it is hard for a lot of people to wrap their head around like how do I do this work even if I don't have that anymore? I think the womb is a lot more than just an organ. So even if the organ isn't present anymore, I think you can still do energetic work with that space to heal what the that's fascinating.

Speaker 1: 22:44

Does that when you were talking about going through different energy? Does that help with sexuality? Yeah, can you talk about that?

Speaker 2: 22:54

Yeah, so it can help with. So when you say sexuality, are you meaning anything in particular? So I don't.

Speaker 2: 23:15

I'm sorry, I just mean, like a lot of my listeners, are older and you know, as women get older, they get drier, they get less interested sometimes and it's painful First of all. Are you dry? Are you using a proper lubricant? Are you doing other things in your life, lifestyle-wise, that are helping you to warm up enough if you are having sex? But the pain, specifically, is so fascinating.

Speaker 2: 23:38

I've worked with people, young and old, who have pain during sex. Vaginismus is one of the things, and I know that may not be necessarily what we're speaking about here, because pain can happen in different ways. But what I have found is that when we do either tailored breath work or, like I said that, somatic listening to the body, or when we ask mushrooms to help with our sex life, to help with our libido or our desire, one thing that happens is it often pulls, it often shows us where something else in our life is actually leading to the pain related to sex. So, for instance, in my experience, I actually began the work with mushrooms because I held so much sexual shame around getting herpes at age 18. I was so ashamed of that I'm a preacher's daughter. It threw me into a massive shame spiral that I was in for about 12 to 15 years of using alcohol, eating disorders, adderall, all the things. And so, after I'd already embarked on the healing journey and had worked with my cycle and I had been to therapy and had tried all the medicines, I heard a woman on a podcast talk about microdosing psilocybin for sexual trauma and sexual shame specifically. I'm like this is fascinating.

Speaker 2: 24:55

So I had her on my show and then hired her the second we hung up the call and I asked the mushrooms to help me become open to receiving pleasure, and what they told me was OK, well, first you have to become open to receiving anything you can't receive at all. You are so blocked from your ability to receive that we can't give you the ability to receive pleasure. When you can't even receive help, you can't even receive safety and support. And so they uncovered in me all these ways. I was white knuckling my life. I was so stressed I was still in TV at that point as a news anchor, and I was so hell bent on controlling things that I could feel safe and so mushrooms tore that away.

Speaker 2: 25:39

It was a very tumultuous six months. It was very much a dark night of the soul. Months it was very much a dark night of the soul. But what I realized a year about a year, year and a half later, as I'm walking in my neighborhood oh my gosh, wait, the orgasms have been better. Lately, I've been more orgasmic. Okay, maybe I've finally gotten through to this space where I can become open to receiving pleasure.

Speaker 2: 26:02

And so I share that, because sometimes what I see in the work is you're asking to have more attraction to your partner or better sex, and what the mushrooms may point out to you first it's not always stuff that you want to see is all right. Well, how safe do you feel in the relationship? How vulnerable can you be with this person? How do you feel about aging? How do you feel about your body now that you're postmenopausal? What grief do you have that you've yet to embark on that journey of processing? And so sometimes we'll go to these modalities with this ask of let me have better sex, and what we first have to get through is the mucky, nasty, uncomfy things that might be secretly blocking your ability to have the sex you want.

Speaker 1: 26:50

Do you find sometimes that women are actually grieving not having their cycle anymore and not having the ability to have children? Oh my gosh.

Speaker 2: 27:00

I have found that, yes, I find they're grieving. So, women I work with who are in their 50s to 60s, what I have found a lot is they have come to this season of life and they're finally understanding how beautiful it is to be a woman and how wonderful it can be to be in this female body, and so they're grieving. 50 years of hating their bodies or 50 years of period pain or being on the pill for a really long time and not even having a cycle. So, yes, absolutely I see that, and what I do with those women oftentimes is I let them fake it. I let them fake it like they've still got a period and so we work with the moon and I would say to them in the new moon, that's your period.

Speaker 2: 27:39

You're going to treat yourself just like you would if you were a goddess bleeding. You're going to go slow. You're going to dress in I like to have them dress in red or scarlet or something that feels really yummy and eat the foods that you would really want to be eating while on the cycle Deeply grounding foods. Rest, meditate, visualize. Eat mushrooms right Like. Really take the time right then in those three to four days to nurture and nourish. And then, as the moon gets brighter, that's the follicular phase. As the moon is full, that's your ovulation. As the moon goes back to darkness, that's luteal. And so they can really replicate a cyclical life, even without a cycle anymore, and that can be deeply healing for someone who's never fully accepted themselves and never fully accepted their cycle.

Speaker 1: 28:25

Oh, I can definitely see that I think it's a beautiful process you're talking about, yeah, so how does it help with depression when you're talking about working with the men, somatics, all this stuff? I understand how it helps with anxiety, the breathing and all that, but how does it help with depression?

Speaker 2: 28:47

So usually when I work with people who have depression, what we're looking at first is what is the nervous system state attached to your depression? So, are you in a total dorsal collapse? Are you completely shut down? Is this a symptom of burnout? I have several clients who have what I would call functional freeze. In the week they're highly functioning. The weekend rolls around completely depressed, unable to get out of bed.

Speaker 2: 29:13

Okay, so we're looking at what's the underlying root of this, and then what we're often doing is prescribing things like pleasure and prescribing things like joy. And it's in a nine minute shift, right. You can. The thing that is really nice about that shift method you can tailor it to whatever your mood or your vibe. And so if you need more joy or more energy, you may do something a little bit different breath, work, or maybe it's sensual dance but you can really start to give yourself the opposite medicine of what it is that you are experiencing most in the life.

Speaker 2: 29:47

I will also say for depression, as someone who has experienced it, as someone who had depression and burnout and fatigue, there's this whole idea, when we are depressed, that we have to fix ourselves, that we have to get over this right, we have to get back to our life. We have to get to this place where, somewhere over there, it's better, right, and that's where I want to be. I don't want to be here. I want to be there where it's not here, where I don't feel like this, and so, if you're listening and you have those thoughts, what I'd also say is one you don't have to go about this alone. I hope you have some type of a support system, and the other thing that you can also start to think of is that you're not broken. This is happening for a reason. Maybe the reason is really present to you. Maybe you fell into depression after your loved one passed away, right? Maybe you fell into depression after you lost a job, and so looking at some of the root things can be helpful, but I'll be really quite honest.

Speaker 2: 30:41

Depression is very tricky to work with, no matter what. I think that's why we see so many different things being tried. Psilocybin, though, has been really beneficial for treatment-resistant depression, and so, in those cases, too, you could embark simply on a psilocybin routine with the intention of sparking more joy, working with it intentionally, letting the mushrooms help you through really conscious decision making. Move out of that space, I'd also suggest for folks who have depression, you may want to go with a bit of a higher dose than a micro dose.

Speaker 2: 31:16

Some of the studies are showing that one to two, even one to three grams of mushrooms, which will be a hallucinogenic effect, right Like that's not like you are not eating those and then going to work. You're eating those with someone who's a trained professional. If you have, if you've got depression, you definitely need to work with a guide, but you're eating a bigger dose. That is really showing to like I don't even know. It's showing to like almost jumpstart the brain, like kickstart it out of the space, especially when you're getting to this point, the place of a euphoric, psychedelic experience, the euphoria and the happiness and the joy that can happen when you really do a good job of prepping, a good job of integrating afterwards, when you've got a guide.

Speaker 1: 31:56

That's showing like months of success for folks who had depression for years and years and years okay, I know a lot of my listeners also have mental health struggles and I personally have bipolar disorder, so I heard you saying that that's an issue. Does that mean that's off the table?

Speaker 2: 32:29

with unmanaged bipolar, and so that's because back in the 60s there was so much BS rhetoric around people like going manic and losing their minds, and those folks were probably eating mushrooms at a high dose, likely mixing it with LSD or acid, probably cannabis, probably alcohol, right, like it was an uncontrolled situation. The reason why bipolar is tricky with psilocybin is because psilocybin is an amplifier and it's what's called a non-specific amplifier. So I don't think necessarily it means that you cannot. I know a lot of people who have bipolar and have had amazing success with plant medicines. I just think you absolutely should not do it without working with a trained person. If your bipolar is managed, if you are on maybe medications for it or you haven't had an episode in a while, I think you'd be safer. But it's hard for me to say is it safe? It's just a little tricky.

Speaker 2: 33:15

The science is strange, right, the science is still really new for this. I think what I was reading before is that schizophrenia bipolar 1, bipolar 2, they really have been showing. There's even a. There is a trial somewhere right now where they're looking at schizophrenia and psychedelics. I know that. So they're trying to figure out how this might potentially help.

Speaker 2: 33:35

Again, I really do think that mushrooms are a sacred medicine and if you are feeling called to work with them, no matter what your diagnosis and this is going to be an unpopular opinion, I might regret saying this, but I think that it's a sacred medicine and if you're feeling called to work with them, no matter what your diagnosis and God, this is going to be an unpopular opinion. I might regret saying this, but I think that it's a sacred medicine and if you're feeling called to work with them, there's a reason you're feeling called. Does that mean go buy some off the Internet and eat them alone? Absolutely not. It means you might want to find someone who is a clinically trained psychedelic therapist.

Speaker 2: 34:03

I'm not a clinically trained psychedelic therapist right, you may want to go to somewhere. They have them in Canada. They've got them in a couple of the bigger states, in the bigger cities in the US. I think there would be an avenue for you. I just think you'd need to go about it in an even more conscious and do your due diligence even more so if you have that history, okay, that makes sense.

Speaker 1: 34:25

Yeah, so you're making me think about where this is done when you're saying you might have to go somewhere and find someone else. What if someone wants to work with you? Can they do that on Zoom, yes, or does it have to be in person?

Speaker 2: 34:38

Yep, no. So I almost do all my work on Zoom. I find that it's really easy to work on Zoom, especially with the microdose level. Find that it's really easy to work on Zoom, especially with the microdose level. So I again, I'm only working with people who are eating teeny doses of mushrooms and they may eat up to a gram. It just kind of depends on what our agreement is, but I still would be like on a Zoom with them at that point. You can definitely connect with me. We can work no matter where you are in the States. I can work with you if you're in Canada, UK it's a little harder to get mushrooms in the UK, but it's not impossible. The EU easy peasy. You can get them over there. Spain, Portugal, great. But yes, you can contact me. If you grab one of the free guides, you'll be on my email list and you can grab or just reply back to any of those or find me on Instagram or TikTok.

Speaker 1: 35:27

Yeah, you can work online. I have learned so much today. Is there anything that we have not talked about, that you really wanted to cover today?

Speaker 2: 35:34

No, I think you did such a good job of covering a little bit of everything. I know we talked about the free microdosing guide. It's called Activate your Inner Magic. Find that in the show notes. We also talked about the shift method, which is, I would say, if you're listening to this, start with the shift method. It will help you immediately feel better.

Speaker 2: 35:55

And I love that ebook specifically because there's so many yummy playlists in it. There's a playlist for energy, a playlist for calm I have created in my membership, which is called the Inner Circle, a playlist for sensual shift. I'm not sure if I put that into the ebook now. I feel like I need to update that. But, yeah, start with those two ebooks. Email me or reach out to me on socials if you want to find out more about working together.

Speaker 2: 36:17

I have a one-on-one container called Unbound. That is really about healing from sexual trauma, from womb trauma, but it's beneficial for anyone living in a female body. And then I also have a group coaching membership, which is my low ticket offer it's about 77 a month where you get twice a month coaching in a group setting and a microdose assisted ceremony. So everybody eats microdoses and then we come together on Zoom and we did a rage ritual last month. We did very confronting mirror work the month before, which doesn't sound good, but it was really, really, really lovely, and there's a really beautiful small group of women in there. It's about five women in it right now, so it's a good option too.

Speaker 1: 36:58

Yeah, it sounds like it. So what is your website? Lesliedraffincom. Oh, okay. Well, that leaves you enough, and I'll put that in my show notes. Is there anything that you'd like to leave our audience with today?

Speaker 2: 37:12

I would just say this is just something that I've really been trying to tell myself. If you are on a healing journey, if you listen to podcasts like this because you feel stuck or a little bit lost, I just want you to know there's no need to rush, like rushing on this journey is actually going to do more harm than good, and I know you want to feel better. But if you can get comfortable and letting yourself cut that to do list in half really honor the spaciousness of being in a space where you're able to rest, then maybe the thing you add is play, maybe the thing you add is joy, some creativity, bake some cookies, something that's gonna excite you. That's also a restful activity. That would be what I would say. The world is wild right now and it's really uncomfy and divisive, no matter what side you're on, but I think we all can benefit, as women, just slowing down and embarking on a season of joy.

Speaker 1: 38:10

I love that. All right, well, thank you so much for joining us today. Thanks so much for having me.