Relief or Healing? What Becca Williams Taught Me About the Third Wave of Cannabis

Friends and followers, this one is personal.

I sat down with Becca Williams for Unscripted Cannabis. Former television news reporter. Producer. Anchor. Today she is an emotions therapist and plant medicine guide. I asked for this conversation because it touches something I care about deeply. Some people reach for this plant to escape. Some reach for it to have fun. But a lot of us are looking for something else. Meaning. A way to make sense of the pain and the patterns we have been carrying for years.

I have wrestled with that in my own writing. So I came in with questions. Becca came in with a framework.

Relief is not healing

Becca told her story plainly. College in the early eighties. A joint passed around a room. She felt better. She lived with anxiety, self-doubt, shame and a lot of anger, so she kept medicating. Through her whole career in television. At night, before bed.

And it worked, for a while. Then the feelings came back. She called it palliative. Transitory.

That is the line she draws, and it is the line I keep coming back to. Relief is feeling better until it wears off. Healing, the way Becca describes it, is when a layer comes off and stays off. She tells her students that once they work through a layer, they will not have to do that one again.

So let me ask you. How much of what you call healing is really relief?

The third wave of cannabis

Becca sees cannabis in three waves. The first is recreation, what we now call adult use. The second is medical. The third is where she works: spiritual, or conscious, cannabis.

She calls the plant “a nonspecific amplifier.” It does not point you anywhere. It turns up whatever you bring to it. She is careful about that, too. Her people want to amplify, she says. They do not want to get so baked they lose control.

Her framework is called Emotional Liberation. She trained in it for four years with its creator, a Kundalini yogi of forty years. The first thing it gave her was a vocabulary: a palette of seven difficult emotions. Because most of us, asked how we feel, say stressed. Stuck. Weird. Becca calls that a cocktail of emotions. We have no idea what is in the glass.

I grew up in the church in Jackson, Mississippi. Deep in it. I know what it is to be taught to push a feeling down and keep moving. Becca says most of us got the same lesson as kids. You can be happy. But if you get angry, or sad, stop it.

The cycle stops somewhere

I shared some of my own story with her on air. Working through self-esteem. Growing up Black in the South, in a very orthodox religious household. She answered with something I needed to hear: “these traumas are passed on from person to person, generation to generation.”

Then she told me about the breakthrough she cares about most. The students who stop the cycle. They show up differently with their spouses. Differently with their children. Not because everything got fixed. Because they are leading life in a new way.

I asked her the hard question too. Who is this work not for? Her answer: anyone who is not willing to put time and energy into going inward. The ones who are ready, she said, are the ones willing to walk through the dark night of the soul.

A ritual can be a crutch or a door

This is where the conversation sits close to GUDWUDZ for me. I did not make a walnut holder so people could check out. I made it because how you smoke says something about why you smoke. Slow down. Sit with it. Let it be a ritual, not a reflex.

Becca would tell you a ritual is only as good as the work inside it. I agree. A ritual can be a crutch. It can also be a door. She closed with a line I want to leave with you:

So what is your way?

Listen to the full conversation above, and read the full episode recap on Unscripted Cannabis. You can explore Becca’s work, her courses and her Emotional Liberation framework at beccawilliams.org.

If you read what I wrote about why smoking circles matter for mental health, you know I believe a ritual is better shared. And if you want something worth holding while you sit with yours, the GUDWUDZ OG is where it all started.

Becca’s views and methods are her own. Nothing here is medical advice.

GUDWUDZ is a handcrafted walnut smoking accessory brand rooted in culture, craft and intentional living. Just J, also known as Mr. Gudwudz, hosts conversations on Unscripted Cannabis. More from Just J at mrgudwudz.com.