In this Episode
- [02:34]Jillian Acosta delves into her personal journey with emotional eating and eating disorders, sparking curiosity about the unspoken links between childhood trauma and chronic health issues.
- [09:02]Jillian unveils the profound revelation of hidden childhood trauma through her first experience with ayahuasca, setting the stage for a monumental personal transformation.
- [13:23]Explore Jillian’s struggle with self-identity and discover how peeling away the layers of past trauma led her to a more authentic and empowered self.
- [18:19]Stephan and Jillian discuss the concept of ego death experienced through psychedelics.
- [22:12]Jillian shares insights into past life connections and the profound re-evaluation of her former marriage, offering a new lens on karmic relationships.
- [27:53]Stephan and Jillian engage with the transformative power of forgiveness and understanding, reflecting on lessons of love and spiritual growth from Neale Donald Walsch’s work.
- [31:31]Uncover Jillian’s innovative Root Cause Method, blending functional medicine with emotional healing to address the true sources of chronic illness.
- [34:10]Jillian shares a compelling client story that illustrates the palpable shifts possible when emotional undercurrents are addressed alongside physiological needs.
- [40:15]Jillian reveals the surprisingly gentle yet potent nature of ketamine as a tool for healing complex trauma.
- [43:29]Discover the empowering potential of sacred rage, as Jillian guides women through responsible expressions of this potent emotion, unlocking deeper truths.
- [47:33]Explore further resources with Jillian through her frameworks and programs designed to lead one to profound self-revelation and healing.
Jillian, it’s so great to have you on the show.
Thank you so much for having me.
I’d love for our listeners to get to know you better through your health journey and learn how your struggle inspired you to create this movement. Why don’t we start there?
It’s so interesting to look back on your life and see that all the pieces led you to what you’re blossoming into now.
All the dots connect, but only if you’re looking backward.
Exactly. I had no idea that I was on the journey, but I very much was. It really started with a distorted relationship with food. I began using food emotionally at the age of three years old, before I had any concept, of course, of what emotional eating was. I was obsessed with candy and sweets and treats. I would write about it in my little projects in kindergarten, and it was my focal point. It spun into or developed into a pretty gnarly and very consuming eating disorder in my teens and early twenties.
Because that pattern started so young, I lacked a reference point in my life, of my operating system prior to the development of that pattern, and of my relationship with food. It was kind of just what I knew, but I didn’t understand why I would do those things. I was deeply unhappy, to tell you the truth. I was suffering. I was very isolated. I carried a lot of self-hatred and shame and this inability to connect with other people and feel comfortable or safe in relationships of any kind, platonic or otherwise.
So, I went to treatment. I was already pursuing the field of nutrition, even though I was deeply struggling with my relationship with food. I kind of felt drawn to that path academically because I wanted to learn how to hack the system and be thin and happy as we are fed in today’s society. I ended up falling in love with the field of nutrition and biochemistry and all of that. But I was still deeply struggling, even during my academic career.
The path of self-knowing and self-discovery is the most deliciously fruitful, magical path one could ever walk. Share on XI was also seeking relief. I didn’t understand why. I had tried therapy. I had tried the treatment. I relapsed. I tried treatment again. It was one of those things where I was on the path of discovering a way out of this, even though it didn’t seem promising at the time. Then I heard a podcast back in, like, 2014 talking about the potential of psychedelics to create remission of eating disorders.
Everything in my body was like, “Oh, my God, this is my way out. This is me.” I don’t even know what that is. I didn’t have cool friends who would take mushrooms on the weekends. It wasn’t my life. So, I became obsessed with consuming the literature. I would read scientific articles, I would read interviews, listen to whatever I could find, or any podcast that was talking about psychedelics back then, which wasn’t much.
A couple of years later, I finally found an underground woman’s circle and sat in the medicine for the first time. As profound as that was, it was also very gentle. What it really did was solidify that this path has something for me. It will illuminate things. I remember it was a beautiful, profound experience, but it didn’t fix me because, at the time, I believed I needed to be fixed. I was looking for that thing that would really move the dial and change how I saw life. And it didn’t do that. It was gentle.
It was sassafras, which was what I sat with. I was in a marriage at the time and really felt the way I was creating dysfunction in the relationship. I needed to fix myself. I needed to heal. That path led me to sit with ayahuasca for the first time in 2020.
What was revealed to me in that experience was sexual abuse between the ages of 3 and 5 years old that I had zero recollection of for 30 years. That experience, learning my story, was so monumental, it was so profound for me because every way of being, every behavior, and every action made so much sense to me. Finally, I understood why I had been behaving that way and seeing myself that way.
It launched me on this deep, sacred, and incredibly magical journey of healing, transformation, and self-discovery. My work is really a byproduct of my journey, which is a deep reconnection to self. It is a deep reclamation of power, deep self-knowing, and separation from the versions of us we thought we were as a result of what we went through and discovering who we actually are. So, yeah, that’s what I’m doing.
Wow. What is it like to do a psychedelic? I’ve not done any. I’ve had episodes on the show where I’ve spoken to people who have done plant medicine and LSD and DMT or whatever. It’s hard to imagine what that experience is like for somebody who’s never done it. Maybe you could try to walk us through it. What were you experiencing? Also, how did those experiences differ from each other?
My work is a byproduct of my journey, a deep reconnection to self.
No psychedelic experience is ever the same, in my perspective. Each medicine has its own flavor of experience. They’re all different. Even after several ayahuasca experiences, each ceremony is going to be profoundly different. If you feel supported in the safety of whoever is facilitating, if you feel trust and comfort with that person or those people, then your ability to kind of relax into the experience and sort of float downstream, as they say, and allow the experience to illuminate whatever you’re ready to receive.
It is typically profoundly life-changing. When you don’t feel safe and when you’re afraid or when you’re not trusting, it can be very, very uncomfortable. It can be very challenging and physically, emotionally, and psychologically uncomfortable, borderline disturbing. It’s so important that the container is set, the trust is established, the safety is there, and all the things you can’t convince yourself you’re safe. You have to feel safe.
Did you have an experience where you didn’t feel safe, or did you feel traumatized afterward?
Fortunately, no. I have had experiences where it was me and a friend who I didn’t really feel could hold me and hold that level of safety and trust that I needed in that moment. But my experience wasn’t traumatizing. It was just that I didn’t have much access. I didn’t go deep because, on a subconscious level, it was like, “No, this person can’t hold.” I just kind of stayed at a very superficial level.
Fortunately, I have never encountered anything dangerous, risky, or threatening. Thank God. Many, many people have. That’s why referrals are really important. People who have sat with somebody who knows they’re safe and had a great experience are really important. But even when I was learning my story in this initial ayahuasca experience, I wasn’t being re-traumatized.
It wasn’t like I was reliving the events in a petrified state or the abuse. It wasn’t that I was being shown, and it was uncomfortable, bizarre, and undeniable, but I was not being retraumatized. There was a gentleness to the experience for me from the medicine that allowed me to really explore this truth and allow it to crack me open in the most profound way.
Did you confront the person who had molested you, or have you spoken to them about it two years later?
Learning how to hold myself through challenges, how to be the one I turn to, how to rock myself, how to soothe myself, how to wet my tears—it was so profound in that state.
I went into solitude for two years after that experience. Shortly after that experience, I worked with a very trusted, incredible soul devotedly for four months after that. The rest of it was pretty solo. I had my business already. I would serve clients virtually. I was in a very devoted chrysalis space where I was just decomposing into goo, as caterpillars do, letting go of many of the constructs, identity structures, and lies I had subscribed to and allowing us to fall away.
Learning how to hold myself through challenges, how to be the one I turn to, how to rock myself, how to soothe myself, how to wet my own tears—it was so profound in that state. I knew a conversation needed to be had because I had kept it a secret for 30 years. I needed to speak it, and I didn’t want to. I was petrified. It wasn’t received well at all, understandably.
It wasn’t for them; it was for me. I also knew how I delivered that conversation would either perpetuate or break the cycle of shame. I needed to get myself to a place of compassion and love for this person, not bypassing a single thing. It took years to really flip every stone and get to the place where I could see their hurt also and the fact that they had been violated. That’s just how the cycle goes. So, it was delivered in love as an opportunity to heal together.
For many reasons, it was not received in that way, and that’s okay. It was for me. I still got that level of liberation that I needed and have since continued to unpack and go through the layers. What’s so cool, though, is the deeper I go into my process, where I harvest the gems, where the wisdom comes from, my teachings, and my ability to meet myself deeper and unpack these teachings. This wisdom is what I then get to synthesize and share with my clients, with my people, and with the world. And it’s so rewarding.
My path is only just opening and blossoming, and it’s becoming so undeniably magical that if I had not been through that experience, I would not be here with you right now.
Honestly, this experience has become my greatest gift. I now get so much fulfillment from supporting other people in their process of creating safety for themselves, feeling in their process of coming back home to their bodies, reconnecting with themselves and their truth, finding their truth, finding the power that they are, the essence that they truly are, and letting go of all the lies they thought about themselves and carried.
If you could change the past, would you take away this trauma?
Man, it’s such a simple yet gut-wrenching question. Because it’s like, “How could I hope that anything would be other than it is?” My path is only just opening and blossoming, and it’s becoming so undeniably magical that if I had not been through that experience, I would not have anything to say. I would not be here with you right now. I would not receive the joy of witnessing a woman step so deeply into her power and knowing, and it just makes it worth it. So, no.
Could I have been better supported during that time to buffer a little bit of the impact? Yeah, it could have been a little easier. But then, who’s to say that whatever that taught me, I wouldn’t have gained? So it’s like, “Here we are in acceptance.”
What wisdom gems did you gain from this experience, from processing and looking back on it?
I carried the story that people try to hurt me for trying to hurt me because it felt like, as a child, I didn’t understand why I was going through that and how that could happen, to really embody the knowing that no one is trying to inflict pain. Their actions are a manifestation of their pain. It’s not actually personal. That teaching started cerebrally and really trickled down into my body, and I’m still working through it.
I’m in a partnership right now. It’s very tempting and seductive to take a way that he may be acting personally. It’s very easy. It’s very natural to take it personally. It’s never personal. It’s a representation of the pain they’re in, and they carry. And to be able to see that the person that I love is in pain and not be dragged down by the pain is Jedi sh*t. It’s like mastery level, and I’m not there yet. I’m being invited to that level. I know that. I’m working on that actively.
Are you familiar with the book The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz? Second agreement: don’t take anything personally. It’s a tall order.
Yeah, it’s a beautiful concept, but when it is embodied, practiced, and applied regularly, it can be life-changing.
You said this revealed a truer version of yourself through this process. So, who are you really?
Wow, cool questions. I’m playing a lot with duality. I’m playing a lot with the concept of contrast. What came through when you asked me that is like, first to explain who I thought I was, who I now know I’m not, which was this powerless, shameful, compliant, complacent version of me who placed my worth in the hands of others, especially the masculine, who would perform on a dime to get a hit of what I thought was love but was actually just attention.
This version of me who settled for the scraps of love because that’s what I felt I deserved and who I now know I am is not any of that—this being who has always been so deeply worthy of love, despite how I was actually treated, this being who is in many ways undefinable and untamed and relentlessly loving. I never knew the capacity I have to love and forgive.
I want to access such depth of compassion for everyone in pain and understand that we are all in some way experiencing pain and suffering.
This experience has broken my heart and opened my eyes to myself and humanity. I want to be able to access such depth of compassion for everyone in pain and understand that we are all in some way experiencing pain and suffering. Sometimes, that pain and suffering have us act in ways that create pain and inflict pain on others. Just deeply loving and wild in many ways, just like nature, just doesn’t want to stay in lines. I want to do my own thing, my own way, in the most true way that lights me up, inspires, and fills me.
That’s awesome. Do you feel like you’ve distanced yourself from or shed an identity, and now you’re more of just a pure, beautiful soul and not a personality? I know that some people go through psychedelic experiences and feel the oneness or feel that sense of awe or ego death many times.
That one that I shared about was probably one of the most significant. I was married, and three months after I sat with ayahuasca, I got divorced. I didn’t really know it at the time, but what was happening was that that experience made it challenging for me to lie to myself. I didn’t recognize myself in the mirror. I had lost myself so entirely that I did not know who I was and did not recognize myself. I had become what I thought this person wanted me to be like.
It was scary but also a really powerful place because I could start to break away from that identity structure. All of a sudden, it was like I was in this inquiry about who I was actually. I’ve gone through many iterations of shedding. There have been big purges that I let go of. I went into solitude. I didn’t have much of a social life, but everyone that I did that I was related to at that time was basically removed from my life. I was in deep isolation.
I still had contact with family members and things, but it was a huge purge, and I’ve gone through several of those since then. It’s less like groundbreaking, less intense. But there’s this coming into alignment that has been happening. I can feel when something resonates with me, and I can very much feel when something doesn’t. That could be an opportunity. It could be a collaboration possibility or a partnership. It could be romantic, platonic, whatever it is.
There is either a resonance or there’s not. I trust that so much. I trust my knowing more than I ever have my intuition. I don’t always need to know why. I just passed up on an opportunity and didn’t know why, but I just could not bring myself there to complete these forms. It was just, “Okay, this is the stuff I get to trust. I don’t need to know why.” It’s just resonance. It’s alignment. And what’s not in alignment gets to fall away.
Sometimes that’s really painful. It could be people that you love. What I’ve known and continue to be reminded of is to let go of the good so that you can welcome the great. Let go of what’s the 80% or the 90% so that you can have the whole damn thing. It’s there; it’s possible if you believe you’re worthy of it. I now know I am.
Sounds like your intuition has been supercharged.
I trust my knowing more than I ever have my intuition.
Supercharged to the point where it was like, I lived in south Florida for 20 years and went nomadic for six months. And after that, I was totally fried. My nervous system was like, “We’re done with this.” And I’m like, “I don’t know where I want to be.” And my intuition was like, “Move to Austin.” And less than a week later, I was here with my dog. And I’ve been here for over a year, and it’s been magical since I got here.
That’s awesome.
If it tells me to jump, I jump.
Does it also give you insight into relationships and past-life connections? Maybe you have a new perspective on your previous marriage and your former husband. You can see that he was a soulmate destined to be in your life for a time, but not for very long.
Precisely. That relationship lasted seven years, which is like a seven-year cycle. It was deeply karmic. I have seen in past life regressions and psychedelic states that he was my mother in two previous lives and abandoned me in those lives. And then, in this life, he came to nullify that karma. He came to rescue me in many ways. He did. I met him running on the street in Miami when I was floundering. I had no idea what I was doing.
Transformation comes from feeling safe enough within yourself to feel whatever is alive. Share on XI had just relapsed again with bulimia. I had just moved to Miami from Fort Lauderdale. I knew no one, and I was struggling really hard. We met, and he was 10 years older than me. He taught me how to build a business and get organized, and he encouraged me to pursue what I was great at, which was nutrition. He helped me get on my feet. And then it was so crazy because we were together for five years and then got married and were married for two.
Right after we got married, things went south, and all these kinds of things started to happen, and there was just rupture, friction, and disharmony. What I now know is the contract was over. We had a contract. We had an agreement in some way, and it was done.
I remember telling him way before my channel was open, way before I really had access to what I have access to now, like, “It feels like it’s out of my hands. It feels bigger than me. I tried to fight it. I started to have feelings of separation 10 months before we actually decided to get divorced. Then, when ayahuasca came into the picture, it was like, “Okay, this is undeniable.” But it was before ayahuasca that I started to feel this offness. It felt bigger than me. It felt bigger than us.”
I realized how supported and protected I am by the unseen and that I’ve strengthened over time.
I launched my business and got divorced in the same month. I had no money, friends, or support. I jumped off a cliff because I just had to. I felt like I had to. I think it was me honoring my intuition before I had any evidence to prove it reliable. This really solidified my trust in it. I realized how supported and protected I am by the unseen, and I’ve just strengthened over time.
I have a lot of gratitude for that person. Maybe this is not so nice, but it’s in reverence—I described that relationship as a pressure cooker. I was cooking. It was everything I needed to catapult me onto this path in the most divine way. And so, I do really wish him well. It’s so wild because yesterday would have been our wedding anniversary, and here we are talking about him.
There are no coincidences, right?
I do wish him well, and I’m grateful for that catalyst.
Yeah, it takes a lot of courage to do what you did, to leap when there’s no net. Leap and the net will appear is the old adage. It sounds like it did.
It did. And it just does every time.
It’s a rigged game, rigged in our favor.
Exactly.
“A soulmate is an ongoing connection with another individual that the soul picks up again in various times and places over lifetimes. We are attracted to another person at a soul level, not because that person is our unique complement, but because by being with that individual, we are somehow provided with an impetus to become whole ourselves.” – Edgar Cayce.
When we were talking about your ex-husband, one quote came to mind. It’s from Edgar Cayce, a famous psychic from the previous century. I’d say he’s up there in terms of his connection and the quality of what he connected to right up there with Nostradamus. He said this about soulmates. “A soulmate is an ongoing connection with another individual that the soul picks up again in various times and places over lifetimes. We are attracted to another person at a soul level not because that person is our unique complement, but because by being with that individual, we are somehow provided with an impetus to become whole ourselves.” There’s a corollary to that about being in a pressure cooker.
I’m in a partnership now where we’ve been together for a year. It has been really challenging in the most sacred way. We are cosmic mirrors. We are divine mirrors. This relationship has been a different flavor of pressure cooker—one where there is far more alignment. I speak a lot about relationships because it’s like, “What are you going to do with the opportunity of receiving this reflection? How are you going to take what this person is reflecting to you about yourself, to go in and excavate the distortions that prevent you from seeing and loving clearly and freely?”
The triggers that this person illuminates in me are mine, based on my life experiences. If I can learn to use what comes alive because of this person, I will upward spiral instead of a downward spiral. I will create my own liberation and transformation, regardless of how I met in the partnership. And then, obviously, if that person is also willing to dance that dance and do their own work, it can become a relationship beyond my wildest dreams. I do believe not all pressure cookers are. Well, they’re all great. It depends on how they’re used.
One thing you were talking about earlier that I wanted to circle back on is who you are at your core: relentlessly loving and forgiving and this idea of forgiveness. I just want to explore that a bit further because there’s a book by Neale Donald Walsch that’s a children’s book. He’s famous for Conversations with God, a huge best-selling book. But this children’s book he wrote, called The Little Soul and the Sun, is a great little synopsis of the core concepts from Conversations with God.
One of the core ideas in that children’s book is that there’s no one to forgive and that God has only sent us angels. These people who look like villains volunteered to do that for us, not to us, but for us to give us somebody to forgive so that we could have the experience of being forgiven.
That’s so it. It’s so profound. I see things on different planes sometimes. There’s my little girl mind who experienced what she experienced and has a lot of feelings about it, has a lot of rage, betrayal, injustice, and venom that if I only anchor into this elevated perspective of no one comes here to da, da, da, da da. I bypass the energy and the rawness in my body that my body has stored, and I miss out on the opportunity of actually transmuting it.
I miss out on the opportunity to feel it fully, fully releasing it and transmuting it from pain into forgiveness and love. There’s the human realm, but I don’t believe any of it should be bypassed. Even if you’re able to access that elevated perspective and in the processing of that, in the somatic experiencing of that and on the human level, we can also hold this knowing of like, “Yeah, this person who did this took on this massive karmic burden so that I could experience liberation, so that I could experience forgiveness, acceptance, fulfillment, and purpose in my life.” That was a gift.
And aside from that person, there’s also me, who I only recently got to this place in a beautiful and powerful, not overwhelming, but very intense grief space I was in of coming to terms with, like, “Oh, I forgive myself.” Then, the immediate knowing was that there was nothing to forgive. I did nothing wrong. None of it is actually wrong. I had to go through every single step to get here in an embodied way because—we could talk about the concepts all day—it’s a disservice to people that they try to anchor their consciousness to that, “Oh, it’s okay.”
They were doing the best they could. There’s nothing to forgive. It’s a gift. But then their nervous systems are so dysregulated that they don’t feel safe around men. They don’t have this sense of self-acceptance and worthiness. It’s like, “We can’t skip that part. We have to go through every segment of this, look everything directly in the eye for our liberation, and then land in this place of absolute awe.”
How do you marry this psychic, spiritual connection with functional medicine and the sciencey biochemistry you also weave into your program?
Yeah, I named my business The Root Cause Method because I believe the root cause of chronic illness is trauma. I believe that anyone carrying excess weight has a chronic health diagnosis. I believe that on a foundational level, there’s a disturbance in their nervous system, in their psyche, as a result of trauma. I think one of the most abused substances on the planet is food. It serves as a dissociative mechanism.
It serves as a distraction, a mechanism of disconnection from our internal experience, whether sensations, emotions, or memories. Anything unpleasant or uncomfortable is just kind of like this lever pushing it down, quite frankly. In that state, we are disconnected from our truth. We’re disconnected from our stories. We’re disconnected from our intuition, our bodies, our knowing, our magic, our creativity, and all these things. I think that is a tragedy.
My kind of angle in this deeper work with people is in the realms of health. Because that was my story, and I know it very well. I am absolutely equipped to support the physiology. But then we talk about why the body got to that status and why there has been this perpetual state of disconnection and dissociation.
The fact that they’ve used food over and over, bypassing their physiological hunger and fullness cues, indicates a strong emotional component involved in their relationship with food. That’s what we’re going after.
I named my business The Root Cause Method because I believe the root cause of chronic illness is trauma.
In my program, it’s like, “Let’s support the physiology. Here’s a structure based on data I found in a stool sample, blood chemistry analysis, or whatever. Here’s what your body is saying it needs. Here’s what’s imbalanced. And then let’s dive into the why and how it got that way. What are you using food for? What are your actual needs that are not being met?” The nugget of my work is supporting people in cultivating a sense of safety within themselves to feel whatever they want.
Because when we’re willing and safe enough to feel something challenging, we no longer need food, drugs, alcohol, whatever, to push down that discomfort. We are now coming into wholeness. We are able to hold ourselves. It is transformational.
What would be an example of a transformative client/patient success story that you want to share?
I love this human. He comes to mind. This person was, unbeknownst to him, sexually violated as a child and carried a lot of shame. He began emotionally eating as a young child and became so overweight that he was clinically obese and underwent gastric bypass surgery, lost a bunch of weight, and then regained a bunch of weight and found me in this upward climb on the scale again and was ready to look.
In the process of this, he and his late wife had two children, and she passed away from cancer. Here he was, mothering and fathering to the best of his ability, not only these two children but eventually himself. He learned to nurture himself in a way he was never nurtured, which allowed him to begin nurturing his children. But in his own nurturing, he stopped using food to numb. We worked together.
He went through two rounds of The Garden, which was my first client who renewed The Garden, a three-month program that I have. He went through two rounds, but he’s lost upwards of 50 pounds. Not because of a rigid diet but because he’s now safe enough to feel whatever is alive and knows how to use something that comes up as an invitation to meet himself more deeply.
And because he is feeling his feelings and holding himself while he feels them, he’s no longer consuming copious amounts of food, so he’s no longer numb. He’s showing up to his children much more nurturing and present. His entire life has changed. He actually just proposed to his now fiance, his wife passed years ago, and he’s thriving, and it’s freaking amazing.
That’s awesome. Did the program include some shadow work?
Very much. This program is a three-month container where I analyze physiology, such as blood chemistry. I then create a protocol based on each individual’s unique physiology using a functional medicine modal-like framework. Later in the program, they sit with medicine and psychedelics three times over the course of those three months.
Shadows represent the subconscious mind because these parts of us don’t feel worthy of the light.
They’re sitting with ketamine, which is an FDA-approved, totally legal psychedelic, where they’re being prescribed, and all of it is like above ground and kosher, if you will. It’s deep shadow work because shadows really represent the subconscious mind. It’s the things that we have kind of put in the subconscious mind because these parts of us don’t feel worthy of the light, quite frankly.
Psychedelics, in a very gentle and loving way, especially ketamine, allow us to access the subconscious mind and bring these things from the shadow to the light. Because they are the most starved of love, they are the most starved of acceptance, love, holding, compassion, and all these things.
In our time, we’re literally doing this module where they’re doing the psychedelic experiences, which is called uprooting the weeds. We are pulling the weeds of the psyche out by the root and creating space to plant new seeds of self-compassion, acceptance, love, and all of these things. Then, we nurture them in the post-integration stage very devotedly. What I witnessed is just wow.
It sounds like a different approach from what I’ve learned about shadow work from Debbie Ford in her book The Dark Side of the Light Chasers. It’s like a definitive book on shadow work from 1998. She’s now passed. But yeah, her work is really well respected in that area of shadow work. Instead of pulling out the weeds, she teaches us how to love and unconditionally accept the parts of us that we are disassociated from or rejected. So give them a name. Say all the things that we’re grateful for, that aspect of ourselves, and make that person, that part of us, feel safe and appreciated and not have to hide anymore and to be looked after and considered, and then all the acting out goes away.
It is very much the same. I do not like ostracizing or guiding people to ostracize parts, pulling out the weeds. This program is called The Garden. All of my modules are on brand, but we’re really pulling out the stories. It’s like we’re bringing the part into the light and loving it. What gets transmuted and released are the stories we’ve held in response to what we’ve gone through.
We’re incredible meaning-makers. Much of that meaning is usually really off.
I understand why I made those stories. Based on what I was experiencing, I would carry the belief that people were trying to hurt me. Of course, at three years old, when I was experiencing what I did, like, “How could I land on anything else?” That was what I could access at that point. Unfortunately, once that imprint is there, we collect evidence to strengthen that perspective, and none of it is actually true. None of it’s ever been true. And so, it’s releasing the lies, releasing those mistruths, bringing that part into us, and integrating it into the available wholeness.
How is ketamine different from ayahuasca and the sassafras and perhaps other modalities, other psychedelics that you’ve tried throughout your exploratory journey?
Profoundly different in many, many ways. Ketamine is a synthetic medicine, so it’s not a plant medicine like ayahuasca or even sassafra mushrooms. But in my perspective, it still connects us to divine intelligence. It still connects us to the sacred very much. I have a lot of reverence and appreciation for this substance. So that’s the first, most obvious. But ayahuasca and mushrooms are incredibly beautiful, absolute, just allies in this world.
Their approach can often feel more intense and abstract and more readily bring us into the subconscious, like the shadow realms of the things that are lurking and waiting for us to explore. Like my story, ayahuasca was what showed me that. I don’t know if ketamine would have, I’m not sure. But ketamine, especially for people who are relatively new to the psychedelic space, is a beautiful entry point because it is so gentle.
Ketamine is a synthetic medicine, so it’s not a plant medicine like ayahuasca or sassafra mushrooms. But in my perspective, it still connects us to divine intelligence.
It’s definitely potent, and it’s gentle, and it’s heart-opening. It gives people the opportunity to navigate and feel what it’s like to navigate in an altered state of consciousness without feeling overwhelmed by it. Also, it has the property of being a sub-anesthetic dissociative. What I really love about this substance, especially for people who are dealing with complex trauma and new to the psychedelic path, is that it gives you a slightly removed perspective on whatever is coming through in the experience.
For example, if fear is present for whatever reason, ketamine will allow you to be like, “Oh, wow, this is what fear feels like in my body. What do you want to tell me fear? What do you have to say to me? How can I learn from you?” The fear does not take you. You’re not going into a contracted space where you’re not able to access the healing because you’re in a fear state, and you’re pretty much closed off.
Ketamine is so gentle, open, and slightly removed that you don’t feel overwhelmed when navigating something potentially challenging. It feels safer, and it’s legal, and these other substances are not yet. It’s profound. Ketamine helped heal my brain very much.
Did you have PTSD that you’re referring to, and that’s what got healed?
Yeah, I had complex PTSD. I did not know how to regulate my nervous system. I did not know how to feel safe in my body around people, in public places, and around men. I didn’t even know I was experiencing those things because I was so dissociated. But, like, being in my body felt unsafe for my whole life until a few years ago.
Wow, that’s quite a breakthrough.
I think ketamine was instrumental in that.
No psychedelic experience is ever the same; each has its own flavor of experience. Share on XNow, you mentioned on your website that part of The Garden includes sacred rage experiences. What is that?
I had a relationship with my anger and rage that consisted of a lot of shame because I would push things down. Like a pressure cooker, eventually, I would get really reactive and explode. Those events always left me feeling ashamed and embarrassed. More often than not, being abandoned, I remember boyfriends would just leave me there crying after I would explode in rage. My relationship with my own anger was really distorted.
I did everything I could to push it down and hide it in partnerships and things like that. And only recently have I come to understand the absolute sacredness of our rage because it shows us where we’ve been dishonored. It shows us where we’ve been violated, where we have dishonored ourselves, where we have condoned certain treatment that is so painful because it is not true. We don’t actually deserve that. That’s why it feels so bad and so shifting and healing.
My relationship with rage has allowed me to tap into this sense of raw worth, like, “I did not actually deserve that, and I will not condone that anymore.” Think about the energy of rage. It is so powerful; it is so intense energetically that when you can harness that energy, you have access to a tremendous amount of power. Now you have access to a tremendous amount of shakti, life force, energy, rawness, and power, and you are released in a responsible way where you are inviting that to come forth and let that fill your body and express through you.
It is enlivening and almost always leads to whatever emotion the rage is concealing, typically grief or fear. It’s just cathartic, and it’s sacred. Many women, especially, are taught not to be angry because it’s not pretty, it’s not cute, it’s not ladylike, not polite, and all that crap. It’s like, “No, let’s growl like an actual lioness. Let’s get primal. Let’s permit ourselves to express ourselves this way because this is deeply connected to our truth.” I help guide women into those spaces. It’s unbelievable how uncomfortable it is for them initially and how relieved they feel and empowered they feel after giving themselves the opportunity.
Wow. I know we’re getting close to time here. What wisdom nugget do you most want to leave our listener or viewer with before we close out this episode?
I think one of the greatest tragedies is when we have subscribed to a way of viewing ourselves. We have subscribed to an identity that is nothing more than a result of the traumatic things we went through in childhood, and so many of us are walking around with no freaking idea who we actually are. It’s such a distorted view of who we think we are. It’s tragic. Consider whoever is listening; you don’t know who you are, yet you think you are. This version of you in response to the horrible things you went through that’s not who you are. From my perspective, the path of self-knowing and self-discovery is the most deliciously fruitful, magical path one could ever walk.
Awesome. So, if our listener wants to learn more, work with you, follow you, get all your materials, etc., where should we send them?
My website is therootcausemethod.com, and I’m also quite active on social media, such as Instagram, which is @jillianacosta_rd. On my website, I list all of the various offerings. The Garden is probably my signature program, but what is becoming my signature program is Wildflower, which is so powerful and potent. It’s a women’s group. The next one launched on January 14th. It is a place where women come together in support of one another to liberate themselves from everything that is disempowering, especially emotional eating. It’s really born out of what I wish I had when I was struggling. It’s so potent.
Thank you for all the amazing work you do in the world and for all the light you reveal. Thank you, listener, for being part of the light and awakening humanity. Have a fantastic week. I’m your host, Stephan Spencer, signing off.
