Episode #41

Episode #41: Dream Mullick Psychedelic Leadership Podcast.

Length: 2:00:23

Laura Dawn: My name is Laura Dawn, and you are listening to episode number 41 of The Psychedelic Leadership Podcast, featuring my conversation with death coach and founder of Entheowheel, Dream Mullick.

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Dream Mullick: And what had really stripped me and cracked me completely-open with the back-to-back deaths of my father and my husband and the way that death had become an incredible teacher for me in the way that it can when we get stripped, which I think that is also something that psychedelics sometimes can offer us. I say that he died so that I could learn to fully live, what it is to walk with the fullness of life, the beauty in death, the grief in death, the joy and how precious everything is and I think that’s the place that we met you and I, at that intersection at that moment in my life, where I was really deep in that unpacking of that experience. There is no life without death, there is no joy without grief; everything is interwoven.

When we drop into the reality that this could be our last conversation, yours and mine, and when you live from that place, when you move from that place, it changes everything. There’s a reason why the Tibetans began practicing for death from birth because it teaches us how to live and I think that psychedelics can open that doorway, they certainly did for me. I really encourage people to create the space, to feel, to create that spaciousness to slow down enough, to create a safe space within themselves, to really root down, like to root down and to know that they’re grounded, that they’re held, that they’re anchored to the earth and then create that internal space to feel.

Many, many, many of us in that question between meeting the urgency that we feel around what is collectively happening and a desire to be of service and a desire to fully show up, and then to find that stillness and to actually move from that place of stillness and allow that to inform what we create. When Entheowheel came it was like a huge vision and my mind just likes to create big and that’s one of my edges; one of my edges is to actually slow down and create from a space that is generative and create from a space that I can actually fully manifest in a good way. When I’m coming from a place of love, when I’m coming from a place of service, I can’t fuck it up.

Laura Dawn: It’s only when we learn to cultivate a relationship with death and make peace with the fact that one day our lives will come to pass, that we can lean in and live life more fully and more wholeheartedly. Dream Mullick is a death coach, which as she explains is not quite the same thing as a death doula that works with people at the end of life. But rather she leads people through what she calls the ceremony of living and dying, guiding people through the portal of death into rebirth so that you can make peace with death as a catalyst for living more fully in your life right now.

And part of the work that she does is also exploring the intersection between psychedelics and death, which is also a topic that I really appreciate since as we discuss, plant medicines really show us how to make peace with the true nature of reality, which is fundamentally impermanent and always changing. And we both share a very deep love for the Shambhala teachings and the way of the Bodhisattva, which is so deeply ingrained into the foundation of everything that I teach. So, a big part of this conversation explores the intersection between psychedelics, death, and grief, with the wisdom teachings of Eastern philosophy, and exploring this intersection is a topic that is so near and dear to my heart.

And just in case you haven’t tuned into it yet, I released an entire solo episode about bowing at the altar of impermanence all the way back at episode number four, if you feel like checking that out. And so, Dream is an incredible woman, she’s a dear sister, and I just adore her, as I share in this episode, we initially met at Burning Man a few years ago, and I had one of the most hilarious experiences of my life together with Dream out on the playa that will forever be etched into my memory as one of my most favorite Burning Man moments.

And at that Burning Man, the more I got to know Dream and what she was going through and we were sort of having this parallel process of processing some pretty deep levels of grief in our lives in very different ways and the more I heard her story, the more I respected and admired her. And so, Dream was actually born in India to an East Indian dad and a Jewish-American mom and she’s just full of so much wisdom and I just knew that this was going to be such a powerful conversation.

So, this episode is framed more like a conversation and a little less as an interview, it’s almost as if Dream and I are just catching up over the phone and you are listening into a real-time conversation that I’m having with a sister who’s also on the medicine path. And so, the core thread of this conversation is essentially exploring paradox; the paradox of what it means to be human and how at the core of it, we are energy in motion, that brings with it the utter bittersweetness of what it means to be alive, living and loving, and also watching what we love eventually come to pass and holding space for so much joy and inspiration and creativity, and also grief and pain and suffering and learning how to hold our center through it all.

So, the joy and beauty that is fundamentally inherent in grief is a central theme here and we also talk about creativity and what it takes to anchor big visions, especially on this path and the necessity of actually slowing down and being still, and just creating space to listen and opening that channel, to receive guidance that comes from a different place, so that we can create from that place, which is honestly so much easier said than done. And it’s a delicate balance, especially when we’re also on this path of really creating in a big way that does actually require a tremendous amount of dedication and focus, and effort.

But what I’ve learned time and time again, is that self-care and slowing down to tune in is absolutely foundational to creating on a really big level, and so we talk about being able to really tune into that place, so that we don’t force things, but rather allow things to unfold in the right timing and move at that speed of trust and create from that very aligned and centered place and aligning with our center really does require dropping into that stillness that lives within each of us. And in this conversation, we talk quite a bit about cultivating a deeper connection to this earth, and I share some of my experience of what it’s been like for me to make this transition from the big island of Hawaii to Austin, from off the grid to a more city-oriented living.

Although I’ll still always have a base in Hawaii, it’s just been such a huge adjustment and it’s required more intentional focus to maintain that sort of embodied connection to the earth here. But I am finding my new rhythm with it all, but it’s really just provided me with this deeper sense of awareness of how it requires more intentional focus and practice, and so we talk quite a bit about this towards the second half of the conversation and Dream leads us through just a one-minute mindfulness practice where we connect to our root into the earth.

So, when we hopped on the call together, Dream wanted to share something with me before we started that she had just read before our call, so I decided to just leave our entire conversation in because the whole thing honestly, was just so good. There was so much depth of wisdom shared in this episode and it’s definitely one of my favorite conversations so far, Dream is also stewarding and anchoring a really significant project called Entheowheel and she shares about it towards the end of the conversation.

And I’m honestly just so fucking proud of Dream, she is just such an incredible powerhouse and as many of you know; holding a significant vision for something that we want to create in our lives is one thing and transmuting that vision into reality is another thing entirely. And she’s really stepping out and leading in the space and I also asked her what she’s been learning along the way, where she’s meeting her growth edge, and how anchoring this vision is shaping her into the woman that she’s becoming, and everything that she shares about this and the evolution of her path was just so inspiring and so insightful.

So, the first Entheowheel event that was in collaboration with Esalen was incredible, it was so amazing and now Dream is launching a five-part live stream salon series, that’s called Exploring the Ceremony and Modern Science of Psilocybin. And that begins January 16th, 2022 and I am so honored to be speaking at this online event alongside some of my favorite people in the psychedelic space, including Paul Stamets, East Forest, Grandmother Jyoti, who I just adore, Rosalind Watts, who is doing such incredible work in the space and who I would love to get on this podcast at some point in season two.

So, if you choose to join us in January for this five-part live series, you’ll also receive immediate access to an exclusive video library of recordings that has over 10 hours of content that was filmed at Esalen for the first Entheowheel event, so all of that content will be included in this five-part series as well. You’ll get access to all of that and that content is really focused on preparation, the ceremony itself, and then integration as well and that content includes lectures from very prominent people in the space, including Dr. Jim Fadiman, Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris, Millana Snow, Justin Boreta, amongst many others.

I’m going to include a link to the trailer in the show notes and I highly recommend checking out this video, it’s so beautifully done, and if you’re listening to this and you are, or someone who’s a part of the BIPOC community, there are visionary scholarships available for this event and I’ll include a link to that application in the show notes as well. And in the show notes, you’ll also find links to Dream’s website, if you feel inspired to work with her directly or attend one of her online death meditations, which I highly, highly recommend.

And for this episode, instead of leaving you with a song, Dream suggested that we leave this episode off with this beautiful and short Dharma teaching channeled by the one and only Alan Watts and put together by Boreta and Super Position and you can find a link to listen to that again on Spotify if you so choose. And if you’ve been enjoying this show, I would so appreciate it if you could take a moment and leave me a review on iTunes, and as per usual, in the show notes, you’ll also find links to my free playlists for psychedelic journeys and beyond as well as my free eight-day microdosing course, if you are feeling called to start an intentional microdosing practice.

All right, without any further ado, all right, that is all from me for today, thank you so much for tuning in to The Psychedelic Leadership Podcast, it means so much to me; without any further ado, here is my powerful conversation with death coach Dream Mullick.

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Laura Dawn: Okay, great.

Dream Mullick: Good morning.

Laura Dawn: Good morning, hi, love, it’s so nice to see your face.

Dream Mullick: Hi, love so nice to see you too, before we start, can I share a morning inspiration with you? Because I just read this Mary Oliver poem that I was just like, yes.

Laura Dawn: Yeah, let’s hear it.

Dream Mullick: And the whales are migrating here right now and so earlier this week I saw a full pod, and so sometimes I just like to open up my books and see what wants to be read and this one, this morning it was humpbacks. There is, there is all around us, this country of original fire, you know what I mean, the sky, after all, stops at nothing. So, something has to be holding our bodies in its rich and timeless stables or else, or else we would fly away, off Stellwagen, off the Cape, the humpbacks rise, carrying their tonnage of barnacles and joy. They leap through the water, they nuzzle back under it like children at play; they sing too and not for any reason, you can’t imagine.

Three of them rise to the surface near the bow of the boat, then dive deeply their huge scarred flukes tip to the air. We wait, not knowing just where it will happen and suddenly, suddenly they smash to the surface, someone begins shouting for joy and you realize, you realize it’s yourself as they surge upward and you see for the first time how huge they are as they breach and dive and breach again, through the shining blue flowers of the split water, and you see them, you see them for some unbelievable part of a moment against the sky.

Like nothing you’ve ever imagined, like the myth of the fifth morning galloping out of darkness, pouring heavenward and spinning, then they crash back under those black silks and we fall back together into that wet fire, you know what I mean. I know a captain, I know a captain who has seen them playing with seaweed, swimming through the green islands, tossing the slippery branches into the air. I know a whale, I know a whale that will come to the boat whenever she can and nudge it gently along the bow with her long flipper.

I know several lives worth living, listen; whatever it is you try to do with your life, nothing, nothing will ever dazzle you like the dreams of your body. Its spirit longing to fly while the deadweight bones toss their dark mane and hurry back into the fields of glittering fire, where everything, even the great whale throbs with song. I fucking love that so much, like, listen, whatever it is that you try to do with your life, nothing will ever dazzle you like the dreams of your body, its spirit longing to fly while the dead-weight bones toss their dark mane and hurry back into the fields of glittering fire. Ah, come on, if that’s not psychedelic, I don’t know what is.

Laura Dawn: Oh my God, I also just love you, Dream, I love you so much and I admire you and respect you and also just that you wanted to open with that because when we were pinging each other on WhatsApp, like 15 minutes ago, and I was like, okay, I’m going to go into a meditation, you go into a meditation, we’ll meet here. And then actually, I sat for a second and then I was like, I really just want to dance and I put on this song that I’ve been listening to, and just channeling that feeling of like, have fun, let’s go into this and just have fun for the joy of it.

And out of this seriousness of like, oh, I really want it to be this like impactful conversation and bringing that levity of joy into my body and that’s what I was going to open with, with you was let’s just shake and have fun and bring that really, that frequency of inspiration into the body. And I think that there’s so much sort of seriousness around the work that we do and contributing to the psychedelic space and I feel like what the plants are teaching us is how to laugh and how to laugh in ironic amusement at the absurdity of everything that we’re facing right now on the planet. So, I’m just like, oh, that it just really speaks to that.

Dream Mullick: Yeah, well, I went into singing, I was like, yeah, yeah, I went into chanting and singing, I was like, I want to move my energy. I think that play, laughter even in the face of terror if we can be fully present and not like drop out of the reality of some of the extremes that we’re in because they’re real, but like how can we be fully embodied and present? I’ve been thinking a lot about this, I don’t think that spirit created us to be weighty and heavy and that’s a doorway that we have to go to get to this next, like remembering of the gift of everything and that’s part of what trauma does, it’s like we go through the shame and the weight of that. And then we come into the gift of the fullness of everything because there’s just no way, there’s no way that we were created to be heavy pain bodies.

Laura Dawn: Which is kind of where I was thinking I wanted to start this conversation with you, was just by sharing how we first met and just how some of my best memories at Burning Man, you’re really right up at the top with one of like the most hilarious moments of laughter in my entire life. And that’s just the beauty of events like that and gatherings like that and working with medicines in all sorts of different settings and how we found ourselves in this whole hilarious moment where your jacket was caught in the bike and it turned into this like hilarious, just real guttural laughter at just how funny life can be.

And during Burning Man, you also shared with me just a lot of profound wisdom around, I was actually processing a lot of grief at that Burning Man, letting go of our land in Hawaii and you had opened up and shared quite a lot about the grief that you had been processing in relation to a lot of events that had unfolded in your life. And so, it’s funny that we find ourselves at the beginning of this conversation where we’re really holding that juxtaposition of being alive and laughing and being able to sing and dance, enjoy and also really hold space for the processing and healing of trauma and grief. And maybe that’s just a good place for us to start to share some of your story of what you’ve been through in the past that has allowed you to be where you’re at now.

Dream Mullick: Yeah, I love that memory, I love that memory so much, I can go right back into it and I can see, it was like more than my jacket, it was like my cloak, this was this like sacred and I still have it, this is a sacred garb that I had that I felt was protecting me from everything that needed protecting from, which is nothing, and I refused to let it get torn off in the bike. And I was standing there stuck completely and I could have peed my pants, like really, it was like that both funny and ironic and you didn’t leave, which was also really beautiful, you stayed and we didn’t know what to do, but you stayed and I just want to honor that and appreciate that in this moment because that was a gift.

And wow, let’s see, that’s a big question, Laura, there are lots of different doorways to open with just this lifetime of experiences around lots of early childhood traumas. But I think that what I was sharing with you at Burning Man and what had really stripped me and cracked me completely-open with the back-to-back deaths of my father and my husband and the way that death had become an incredible teacher for me in the way that it can when we get stripped, which I think is also something that psychedelics sometimes can offer us.

But I was, gosh, let’s see, that was what, three or four years ago I think, the Burning Man, it was maybe three years ago, so I was about five years into a journey of, I would say waking up to life when my husband died suddenly of an accidental pharmaceutical overdose, but my story goes like much further back in my life and in many lifetimes with my experiences with death. But I would say like that particular kind of back-to-back, my dad dying and then a year later, my husband dying, cracked me open in a completely different way to what was important in life and I got this just really fast experience of everything that mattered and everything that didn’t matter and what didn’t matter just started to fall completely away.

And I walked for a year in this field of love, but also between the worlds, like not super grounded and embodied, but just in this place of knowing what was important, watching the grass grow, being so present. And also being completely stripped and opening up to all the experiences that I hadn’t felt in my life, all that I had pushed down to busy myself, go to business school, do all the things that I thought that I could do to kind of hold life together when you’ve had a lot of lived experiences.

And that all fell away and, I say that he died so that I could learn to fully live and that’s been my journey and that’s kind of the process that I was in when I was at Burning Man with you was really cracking and peeling back some of those deeper layers of understanding, what it is to walk with the fullness of life, the beauty in death, the grief in death, the joy and how precious everything is. And I think that’s the place that we met, you and I, at that intersection at that moment in my life where I was really deep in that unpacking of that experience.

Laura Dawn: Right, and it just so speaks to the way that grieving and actually bowing at the altar of death so fully that I really feel like that’s such an invitation that psychedelics and plant medicines give us is to really face that. And it’s actually incredibly painful to fully bow and acknowledge at the altar of our own death at the death of the loved ones in our lives, and yet it’s so fueling towards living fully, there’s so much beauty in that grief and in that bowing and acknowledging, and it’s really just this complete juxtaposition of the pain and the bittersweetness of what it means to be alive.

Dream Mullick: Well, that’s it exactly, there is no life without death, there is no joy without grief, everything is interwoven and the story that we’ve bought into in this culture that they’re actually separate and that we gravitate only towards the desired body of happiness and that’s just a story. When we drop into the reality that this could be our last conversation, yours and mine, and when you live from that place when you move from that place it changes everything. There’s a reason why Tibetans began practicing for death from birth because it teaches us how to live and I think that psychedelics can open that doorway; they certainly did, for me.

Laura Dawn: I’m kind of curious to ask you about this experience, I was also grieving so much, just the transition from owning this beautiful retreat center in Hawaii that I actually felt like my identity was so wrapped up in and really shedding that skin and shedding that identity and having this experience of sort of going into the suffering and the grief of it. And then after being there for some months and it was kind of like a dark night of the soul over the period of some years and that feeling and that recognition of, okay, there’s a place to continue to be present for it and sort of kick that wheel of suffering.

And then having that acknowledgment at a certain point of like, oh, actually I don’t need to fully go into that right now, speaking to this place of how to know when to continue to hold space for the full experience of grief and how to know when to say, okay, I’ve grieved, I’m going to allow that to be, and not actually continue to sort of fuel it with the mental storyline of loss, for example, and just say, I think that I’m complete on that at this moment.

Dream Mullick: Yeah, that’s a beautiful inquiry because I’ve actually gone quite deep into that because the death of my husband started to become an identity so then I was like that would be my storyline, I would kind of lead with that because I was so in that experience and what I’ve come to, I love this idea of titration, which I think is more of a somatic term, but I think that it applies to everything in life that we right now we’re experiencing so much collective noise. There’s so much coming at us in all different ways and how do we be with the fullness of experiences without being debilitated?

And that’s this idea of allowing in like fully allowing in what we can actually process and being with that experience and then growing from that kind of capacity, I had a year to grieve when my husband died. I took a year, I traveled around the world, I held ceremonies, I had no practice like that in my past, none whatsoever, I had no training, I had no tools to be with death, I had nothing and then my dad died, I called it death 1 0 1 because it actually brought death into our household, into the conversation, to the dinner table.

And we started talking about things like whether we wanted to be embalmed or these different things that just, you never would’ve had conversations about, but I had no training and then when he died I was just channeling, it was like channeling and I had permission for the first time to openly grieve and I was grieving for everything. I was grieving for the collective planet, I was grieving for the loss of every being that I had felt my entire life and not grieved for, not just his, and then what it really came to was like metamorphosis and transformation that I experience actually through an Iboga journey. And from that, I started to mourn the death of the dreams, the future projections, all the ideas, but they weren’t really tangible because nothing had died, nothing had actually died.

I had more communication, I had a deeper connection with the divine, with spirit, with my husband’s soul than I had ever had, we didn’t have the drama that we had in this lifetime. So, I think that in terms of when we come to how much we can hold, what we can grieve, how deep we go into this story, there’s an invitation on one hand to feel everything and then on another hand, it’s to be with what we can actually process so that we can stay embodied, not check out and be with the joy of life at the same time, as we’re holding the grief and neither want to be diminished because they both coexist If we didn’t love it so much, we wouldn’t be grieving.

Laura Dawn: Right, yeah, and in my experience of working in ceremonies where I felt like I was drowning in grief and drowning in this feeling of just the depths of suffering from grieving loss, and then having this realization that also a lot of the narratives and the stories in my mind, and the thoughts were actually fueling the grief. And when I started recognizing places to shift the narrative, that it’s actually not loss, that it’s transmutation, that it’s this evolution of change, it actually allowed me to sort of stop drowning in the grief and just hold space for it, to then transform into something else.

And that was really helpful in sort of completing some of those cycles of grief and really it came down to how I was relating to it and the story that I was telling myself about quote-unquote loss, and that it actually really wasn’t loss as I’m coming out of a 10-year long marriage with Noah. It’s like, I haven’t lost Noah, he’s still in my life, our relationship has changed, it’s transformed but the way that we sort of talk about loss, I think is a really big part of this conversation around grief.

Dream Mullick: That’s right, exactly because there’s nothing lost if you look at the natural world, everything is in constant transmutation, everything is in constant transformation, it doesn’t mean that we don’t mourn, like when we have a big fire, I live in Big Sur and we had a big fire, it started across the street from me actually. And I watched it burn down the hill and watching the redwoods burn, my heart was hurting, my heart was hurting even knowing many of them need fire to regenerate and there is transmutation and there is Serotiny.

There are these like little bits bursting out from the ash, all these new sprouts that are coming and yet there still is a loss, there is a loss of that tree, but there is not a loss because it hasn’t gone anywhere, all of the experiences, all of the stories that are contained in that tree are now in the ash and back in the soil and in everything. And so, I think that there’s a collective story that has been told around what is loss, what is death, and the role that plays in the way that we move through life that isn’t true and I think that psychedelics can reveal that, they can open up, death did that for me, but so did the plants and so did psychoactive plants and psychedelics, so I think that’s spot on.

Laura Dawn: Yeah and I think that for people listening, and I’d be curious to ask you, Dream, any advice for people who are moving through, I feel like we’ve been collectively moving through this time of grief, as many of us are shedding identities from pre-pandemic times, the world around us is fundamentally different. It’s changed, we’ve had to let go of old ways of being, which actually is a portal of transmutation and grief and letting go and I know that you’re doing death doula work now, and you’ve been doing these incredible meditations of dying into the now I love that framework.

And I think that a lot of people are really interested in actually exploring the intersection between psychedelics and death and psychedelics and grief and just anything that you can share about what you’ve learned along the way or practices that maybe could be helpful for people who are listening to this, who are like, okay, I’m opening to the processing of grief in a healthy way.

Dream Mullick: Yeah, give me a minute here, Laura, so we might end up pausing for a minute, but I’m just going to drop in for a minute and really digest that question. I’d say that fundamentally one of the great challenges with this time that we’re in is that there aren’t the containers to even process some of these experiences, when I first got that grief, like the invitation to be with grief, to be with everything that was happening, to feel everything, I started to facilitate circles, in the way of counsel, like grief counsels.

And I was really wanting everybody to be with the collective grief and what I found was that a lot of people were coming in just with their individual experiences, like their divorces or their losses in their lives because before we can process for the collective, we need to process for ourselves. And I think that there’s a misunderstanding of self-care, like at the depth level of what it is to actually tend to oneself, to tend to our own nervous system so that we can reregulate with the collective nervous system.

And so, what I feel is that there’s a really important balance, what you brought up is like, how do we feel pain and even reframe pain, like the pain body, I’ve been working with a lot of pain as I got quieter, as I’ve gotten more still during this pandemic time, I started to feel a lot more of what is in my system, which is pain. And I started to recognize that I get to reframe my relationship with pain, like pain is my emergency systems saying, Hey, something’s out of balance here, something’s out of regulation.

I’m not trying to resist that pain, I’m trying to understand what’s out of balance and restore that balance, and so I think that the same holds with the grief, the contraction in our culture, we have been contracting from the contraction, we’re in this birthing process and in birth, there is an expansion and its vast and then there is contraction. And if we don’t have both, we don’t birth the baby, we have a Caesarean, which is not necessarily what’s going to serve us, and so I really encourage people to create the space to feel, to create that spaciousness, to slow down enough to create a safe space within themselves, to really root down, like to root down and to know that they’re grounded, that they’re held, that they’re anchored to the earth and then create that internal space to feel some of what they’re experiencing.

And to know that, that capacity to feel is so directly connected to their love, their heart, that heart that breaks open, as some of our teachers in the Buddhist traditions will share, that heart that breaks open is the heart that can hold everything. And there’s no fear in cracking open but allowing oneself to let in what they can hold and even simple practices like here gone, one of my teachers in the death meditation practice was just simple practices, like here gone, just recognizing this moment, that ever-changing, we can no longer change this moment from any other moment, it’s just in constant flux. And so, why would we want to hold on to that?

Laura Dawn: I love those simple practices and one of the practices that I actually bring up a lot in the programs that I do, in the work that I do with people is similar to here gone, but it’s just, drop the storyline connect with the underlying energy. It’s like a two-sentence instruction around something that’s actually incredibly profound, like drop the storyline, just notice the storyline connect with the underlying energy and that’s why there’s such a beautiful convergence between Buddhism.

These different lineages of Eastern philosophy, I feel like converge and overlap so perfectly with the psychedelic experience because when you look at the three marks of existence, one of them is that everything is impermanent, everything is always changing and I think that when we learn that everything is energy, always in motion, we stop fearing it so much. And instead, we come full circle to what we opened with, and we learn how to dance with this energy of life and how we move in conjunction with it.

We can channel it, we shape it; we can actually mold it into a work of art that really becomes our life, and so it’s this way that we can hold both ends of the spectrum of joy and pain and for people who listen to this podcast regularly, they know that I lik