BEST QUOTES
“You cannot stop destructive actions by others, but you can stop your own destructive reactions to them.”
— Becca Williams
“Cannabis is a nonspecific amplifier. It can help you with whatever it is — it meets you where you are.”
— Becca Williams
“The language of emotions is the most important language one could ever learn, regardless of where you live in the world.”
— Becca Williams
Interview with Becca Williams
JUST J
Welcome, welcome to Unscripted Cannabis podcast brought to you by Discount Vape Pen. I am your rotating host, Just J. Here today with Becca Williams who is here to share with us another aspect in the application and just the uses of cannabis and its community. I can tell you about Becca a little bit, but I’m sure she can tell you about herself even better than I can. I will tell you that she is an emotions therapist and plant medicine guide whosework explores trauma, emotional liberation, cannabis-assisted support, and psilocybin microdosing.
And what drew me to this conversation is that it hits on something that I care about deeply. A lot of people are not just using cannabis for escapism or recreation. A lot of people are not just looking for relief. They’re looking for meaning when they interact with this particular plant and this particular compound. They’re looking for healing. They’re looking for a way to make sense of pain and patterns and the parts of themselves that they’ve been carrying for years and that they’re still working on. And those are things I’ve wrestled with in my own writing. So this one feels very personal to me. So Becca, I would very much like to welcome you to Unscripted — please introduce yourself even further to our viewers.
BECCA
Thank you. Well, you did a pretty good job there. And what I want to say is I consider what I do to be essentially the third wave of cannabis. The first being, as you pointed out, recreation or what we call now adult use — creativity, relaxation, you know, whatever that might be. And then of course there’s medical cannabis, it’s for what ails you. And there’s a cascade of ongoing new information around health benefits of cannabis. I do what I call the third wave, and that is spiritual or conscious cannabis. And it really does go hand in hand with mental health.
So I am an emotions therapist and I work with cannabis in the context of emotional and trauma release. I have a framework called Emotional Liberation, and within that scope I have a number of tools — one of the tools of course is cannabis. I also work with psilocybin microdosing. It’s always a micro.
Importantly, what I tell people is that they want to amplify, but they don’t want to get stoned. They don’t want to get so baked that they lose control, because what we do is we go through the work of learning what our emotions are. In Emotional Liberation, we have a palette of seven difficult emotions. And when we’re growing up, we don’t know what we’re feeling because we’re never really instructed or told. Most of the time we’re told to shut up and be quiet. And you can be happy as a kid or joyful, but if you get angry or upset or sad — stop it. We don’t want that.
So consequently, we don’t know how to be with emotions. And so people end up stressed and stuck and traumatized. And so my work processes and releases those self-defeating emotions and the pain that goes with it so that we can eventually effectively and gracefully handle any personal or interpersonal situation. The bottom line is that I support people in becoming emotionally resilient. And the plant medicines are a huge help — both cannabis and psilocybin.
The Difference Between Relief and Healing
JUST J
So I want to key in on what you said about emotional resilience. Because I was reading about you and what really struck me was that you realize it’s important to draw a distinction between relief and healing. I know of a woman who had very hard problems with depression and bipolar disorder and anxiety, and she found cannabis in her late thirties. Through microdosing with cannabis, she was able to move to a place where she was no longer on the prescriptions — her mood was more even, her relationships with her family were better. I think she was looking for relief, and hearing what you’re saying, I wonder if she may have found healing. So what first made you realize that they were different and that you needed to separate them?
BECCA
It goes way back to when I was in college many, many years ago — in the early eighties. When I was in college my first year, I was turned on to cannabis. And I felt better. And then I realized I lived with anxiety, a lot of anxiety and a lot of self-doubt. I came from a very traumatizing childhood, and consequently I had anxiety, shame, depression, lots of anger issues. And I found that when I medicated with cannabis — and this was underground, of course — that I felt better. So I continued that through my entire adult life in medicating.
I became a television news reporter and I was a producer and anchor. So I was a high-profile professional. And I would really medicate at night before I went to bed. And I found that over the years it made me feel better. But then when I wasn’t under the influence anymore, those emotions would come back. So it was palliative for the time being — transitory.
And so about a dozen years ago, I went looking for a lot of things, including therapy — and nothing really settled me down with all these unruly emotions I was working with. So I encountered this work called Emotional Liberation.
And it was created by a 40-year Kundalini yogi. I trained with him over a period of four years. The first year taught me what I was feeling and why I’m feeling it. So it gave me a language for speaking about my emotions, which was amazing — because when you ask somebody how you’re feeling, they say, ‘I’m really stressed’ or ‘I feel weird’ or ‘I’m just stuck.’ And what it is, is a cocktail of emotions and we have no idea what we’re feeling. We just know that we feel really shitty. So this gave me a vocabulary.
And then — we need to drop down into the intuitive. And that’s where the trauma resides in our body, in our nervous system, in the tissues of our body. This work draws on the latest in neuroscience, but it goes way back into ancient wisdom from India — Hinduism, yogic science in regard to the Kundalini tradition. So there’s a very active meditation where you’re stirring, essentially stirring up the emotions so that you can process them and release them. And this is where the plant medicine comes in — it is a nonspecific amplifier and is so beautifully paired with this work to help bring up what you want to release.
Furthermore — it wasn’t transitory anymore. When I am able to compost this trauma or these emotions that are tethered to trauma and release them, then I’m healed. I don’t have any issue anymore. And so that came about in the first year of working with this. I thought, wow.
From Television to Emotional Liberation Work
BECCA
I was still in television. I was a producer at the time, and I really dropped my work because I felt — what I started realizing was all the hurt around me. People are just reeling from all these emotions, and loneliness and just all kinds of trauma. And I thought, oh my gosh. I was just drawn. This is what I want to do — I want to help people. And so that’s what I’ve been doing for the last ten years.
JUST J
That is amazing. You’re still using media, right? But now the message is more about helping yourself to process. And I’d like — maybe if you take some time for our subscribers or listeners or viewers who aren’t familiar with that process — you were speaking about stirring up the emotions with the yogi. Could you expand on that a little more as it pertains to coping as opposed to avoidance?
BECCA
Right, yes. So in short, you can actually go to my website and explore a lot more about this — it’s just my name, becawilliams.org. So what happens so often is that something comes up. Let’s talk about anxiety. You’re going into a room with other professionals and you feel like you need to prove yourself. And so this anxiety comes up and you need to push it down. But in this work, what we do is we realize that these emotions are here for a reason. They’re here to tell us why we’re feeling the way that we’re feeling. And that’s why it’s important to identify them.
When I had social anxiety, I was afraid of failing — of being perceived as a failure or not living up to how I wanted to be presented. And what we do in this work, over a long period of time studying the emotions, is we pull that thread back to where did that start way back then. And the plant medicine helps us to go deep, to go into the deep inner reaches so that we can be in touch with that trauma.
Talk therapy can help only so far, because what we’re doing — I was in talk therapy for a long time — it comes from the mind, and we cannot solve or heal these issues with the mind. We need to do it through the intuition, through our deep inner knowing. And this is where I can get spiritual — through our soul. And so that’s why we call it spiritual cannabis or conscious cannabis.
But what it is is being very aware of what we’re feeling and why we’re feeling it. And so many of us are hurt. When we start feeling those emotions coming up, we’ll go on the phone, we’ll go out shopping, we’ll drink, maybe we’ll get stoned. And what I always like to say about cannabis in regard to this is that cannabis is a nonspecific amplifier. Along the continuum, it can help you with whatever it is. So if you are in heavy trauma and you want to sit in the basement and play video games and just get really stoned — all right, that’s you getting through it. So much better than the mood management medications out there with their terrible side effects.
Right now people are struggling — a lot of my clients struggle with getting off SSRIs because they’ve been on forms of them since they were 12 years old, for years and years. And the doctors know how to put you on them but they don’t know how to get you off them. Now cannabis — yeah, you can have a dependency on cannabis — but when you’re done with it and you say, I’m done with it, there’s not those terrible side effects that you have from mood management meds.
Cannabis vs. Psychedelics: Enduring Healing vs. Fading Glow
JUST J
So as cannabis goes toward emotional liberation therapy — where do you see it playing? There’s so much happening now with psilocybin and so many other things that people are using to try to channel. How do you think cannabis will present itself in the future in terms of scope and breadth of application?
BECCA
Cannabis, I think, is enduring. We have the psychedelics that have come in now. And of course we’ve had huge conversations around psychedelics — psilocybin, LSD, ayahuasca, DMT. And what we’re finding in the research is that people will feel good after a journey and maybe for quite a while, even with ketamine and MDMA — they’ll feel better for a number of weeks or months. And then that feeling wears off, it fades. And so they’re right back to where they are.
And so now what? They have to go on another journey, and then another and another, because that glow — once it starts fading, they’re called to do another journey. So it can get to be a vicious cycle, because the healing is not happening. The relief, as you mentioned earlier, is happening, but the healing is not setting in big time.
And so that’s where this work really helps — it is conditioning our nervous system and helping to create new neural networks. I’m a clinician also, I’m a clinical nutritionist. And we don’t ever want to say ‘permanent’ in the scope of anything, but enduring healing is pretty important. And the work that I do with this plant medicine definitely lands in that space.
Emotional Liberation Therapy: The Elevator Pitch
JUST J
So in speaking of the lack of crutches and the desire to move to a place where you’re not grounded to a particular perspective — emotional liberation therapy in plain English. How would you describe it? If I was on an elevator with you and I said, please explain to me — how would you describe emotional liberation therapy?
BECCA
Well, so my elevator pitch, I suppose, would be: I help stressed and stuck and traumatized people process and release self-defeating emotions and pain so that they can effectively and gracefully handle any personal or interpersonal situation, and eventually be able to do that themselves.
And that means becoming emotionally resilient. What I do is self-therapy, Just J. I teach you how to feel into what you’re feeling so that you can do this yourself. You don’t have to rely on me. I have masterclass courses — modules that are a year long — where you learn to understand all of your emotions. I have seven of them, and the implications of them. Most emotions come in groups, like a cocktail. And by virtue of going inward and feeling through that, we learn this language, we become fluent in it. And I would say it’s the most important language one could ever learn, regardless of where you live in the world.
Right, right. The language itself is definitely the most important. So how does the person navigate medicine, medicinal help, personal responsibility, and when is the weight shifting?
BECCA
Yeah, that’s a good question. I think it’s important to differentiate between Western science and yogic science. Western science is about systems — using scientific instruments and repeated experiments, the randomized double-blind placebo-controlled research. So when we say science, that’s what most people think of.
But remember, before there was ever Western science, the world relied on wisdom traditions. And they didn’t have scientific instruments. The instrument was consciousness itself. It was people — often yogis — using repeatable systematic methodologies of inquiry from within. And when you look at the Hindu, the Vedantic, the Buddhist, the Tibetan systems, all these systems have many similarities because truth is truth. And ultimately, we’re our own scientist for our own life, for our own existence.
And so using your own inquiry to probe into your own consciousness, subconsciousness, super-consciousness is what I teach people how to do. Our assignment is to find and identify that voice within — that deep inner knowing within your consciousness, within your subconscious. And these kinds of teachings can help us find and identify our inner voice so that we can have a dialogue with our deep inner knowing.
Western science often limits its exploration to the mechanics of how things function and steers clear of the realm of consciousness — it provides detailed explanations of processes but stops short of exploring the deeper question of why. To fully engage with this inquiry, we need to venture into the domains of consciousness, the transpersonal, the metaphysical, the mystical. These areas hold the keys to understanding the underlying reasons behind our existence and the universe. And that’s where these plant medicines help us dive deeper, when we actually have the framework to navigate within.
Intergenerational Trauma and the Healing Journey
JUST J
That is fascinating, because that hits on a lot of things that I’ve wrestled with in the book that I’m writing, Eternity in Real Time. It talks about being very present within your emotions and being present, but realizing that the future and the past are all perceptions of your scope of time, of what you’re measuring to be your experience. And so we can begin to recognize the patterns. And I found that when I would dose, I never wanted to be on the couch. I was always a Sativa. I wanted to be thinking and I never wanted to be slowed down. I always wanted to be the best me, but I felt like I could be more centered — I took a little more time with a thought. It went deeper, as you were saying. And I had been working through self-esteem issues and all sorts of stereotypical Black male issues in the South, in addition to growing up in a very orthodox religious household.
BECCA
We all have our stories. And for you, for the Black population, it’s so transgenerational, intergenerational — these traumas are passed on from person to person, generation to generation. So we are all wrestling, to a lesser or greater extent, with these challenges.
Breakthroughs: What Cannabis-Assisted Emotional Work Actually Produces
JUST J
Thank you. So what kind of breakthroughs have you seen in people doing this work?
BECCA
Well, let me just say that I call cannabis a psychic vitamin and suggest that it plays a role in nourishing the mind and the emotions, much like a vitamin supports physical health. And I find users, my students and clients, report heightened intuition and a deeper connection to their subconscious, particularly while using cannabis. Cannabis supports emotional processing and stress relief and resilience, particularly in those navigating trauma, anxiety, or existential questions.
It allows a mental clarity. You can go to my website and look at the testimonials because the breadth of them is very wide. And the bottom line is that there are a lot of layers to trauma. What happens when we start processing these — one layer will come off. And depending on the trauma, if there’s more, there will be many layers. And I promise my students that once they have worked through a layer and removed it, they will not have to do that again. Then another layer comes up, and another. So it could be — if somebody had good parenting and a healthy upbringing, it might be that they were bullied in the playground or rejected for prom or something that needed to be moved through. That just takes a moment.
But those of us who have had enduring, ongoing hits of trauma — dealt a hand from caregivers who weren’t really our caregivers, who didn’t know how to care for us because they were never taught and were wrestling with their own difficult emotions — it’s generational. If somebody is traumatized and has babies, they’re gonna lay that trauma in the other. And a lot of my clients have stopped that. They have stopped that ongoing cycle of trauma. And so they can present themselves in their relationships with their spouses, their children, and set themselves up as a good example because they’re leading life in a new and different way.
Who Is — and Isn’t — a Good Candidate for This Work
JUST J
Okay, Becca — I have to ask you a question that most people probably wouldn’t ask in this setting. Who is not a good candidate for this kind of work? Because when you have something good, you want to share it with everybody. But everything is not for everybody. So who is not a good candidate, if there is such a person?
BECCA
Yeah. The person who is not a good candidate is the one who doesn’t have any interest in putting the time and energy into going inward. I have worked with people who have been traumatized — everybody who comes to me finds their way to me because they have tried a lot of things without success. So rather than saying who wouldn’t be good — the ones who are ready and willing to put the time and energy into the work, and to be able to walk through the dark night of the soul — those are great candidates.
Bringing It Full Circle
JUST J
What I’m sharing today is so impactful and applicable to so many of us. And it is something that in a world that is fraught with tension right now, with people looking for external solutions to internal dynamics — this really is a step to unraveling some of the things that have us wrapped up. I want to thank you for your honesty and your nuance. I want to thank you for making it really understandable, really relatable. I want to thank The Sanctuary Dispensary in Nevada for sponsoring this conversation and giving me the platform. Please, Becca — any closing statements?
BECCA
Just short and sweet — you cannot stop destructive actions by others, but you can stop your own destructive reactions to them. And you just need to find a way to do that. And I offer one way.
JUST J
That is beautiful. You heard it here — becawilliams.org. If you haven’t been there while we were talking, you should definitely go there. And if you want to stay in that place, please explore many of those same deeper themes in my book, Eternity in Real Time. You can follow me at Substack at todayineternity. Thank you, Becca. Have a great day.
BECCA
Thank you. Bye bye.
Key Takeaways
- Cannabis as a third-wave tool: Beyond recreation and medical use lies ‘conscious’ or ‘spiritual’ cannabis — used intentionally to amplify emotional awareness and support deep inner work, not simply as a coping mechanism.
- Relief vs. healing is a critical distinction: Cannabis can provide temporary relief from painful emotions, but lasting healing requires actually identifying, processing, and releasing the underlying trauma stored in the nervous system.
- The emotional literacy gap: Most people lack a vocabulary for what they feel because they were never taught one. Learning the language of seven core difficult emotions — becoming fluent in it — is foundational to the Emotional Liberation framework.
- Psychedelic journeys without framework lead to cycles: Without the tools to integrate and process what surfaces, even powerful psilocybin or ayahuasca experiences fade back to baseline. Plant medicines need a structure to produce enduring healing.
- Intergenerational trauma can stop with you: When clients do this work, they don’t just heal themselves — they stop passing layered trauma on to their children and into their relationships, breaking cycles that may have run for generations.
- You can become your own healer: The goal of Emotional Liberation is self-sufficiency. Becca teaches a yearlong framework so people can identify and process their emotions independently — eventually not needing to rely on a therapist at all.