Just Say Yes to Pleasure with Tammi Lipp

In this episode, Tammi talks about her very scary experience coming off of psychiatric medicine and how it started a journey of healing. As part of this journey, Tammi talks about finding balance with plant medicine and embracing pleasure as our birthright. 

Tammi Lipp is an Intuitive Healer, Coach & Medium who specializes in helping humans understand the intangible parts of life, the subtle energy that we are and we inhabit. She helps to make enigmatic concepts practical and easy to understand and apply. A former Commercial Real Estate Agent, Tammi understands communication and connection on a deep Soul level. Tammi works with people virtually or in person locally in South Florida where she lives with her husband and son. She is a certified student of MCKS Pranic Energy Healing® method, a Certified Master Mind Magic Practitioner® and Certified Clairvoyant Practitioner. Her natural intuitive gifts have been active since childhood but it was only later in life, through post partum struggles that Tammi finally dropped the skepticism and started to take her metaphysical system seriously. Through this healing journey she discovered her own gifts and natural talents for reading, moving and working with energy. Reading the Akashic Records and communicating with your Spirit Team and Ancestors in Spirit, Tammi brings forward a custom experience to coaching that is totally tailored to YOU, the client, naturally for maximized healing and lasting impact on your journey. Tammi helps people become the artist of their reality, learn to create your life from the inside out.

You can find her at www.sacredphilosophies.com or @tammilipp on insta

Transcript

Amber:  This week on the Life After podcast, we have Tammi Lipp. She is an intuitive healer. She found her way there after a commercial real estate career. And this week we're going to talk about giving ourselves permission to have pleasure and giving ourselves permission to use plant medicine as part of our healing journeys and how we can find balance with that and make it really work for us.

Amber: So Tammy, do you want to give us a little backstory on how you became an intuitive healer and what you see in your work when your clients are using plant medicine? Some of the struggles that they have and how that works for them. 

Tammi: Yes. Thank you Amber. Thank you for having me on your show. It's a pleasure to be here and chatting with you about these important topics.

Tammi: So let's see. I started in commercial real estate. Because I decided, oh, I wanna be like a grownup and [00:01:00] have like a grownup job. You know, go from managing an office to doing real estate. And I really, I had been through so many like administrative type jobs in my early life from high school through my early twenties. So here I was in my twenties. I'm like, I'm gonna get into, into real estate. Then I landed in commercial real estate and I thought, oh, this is gonna be great. Make a bunch of money. I'm finally going to feel happy. And I had a lot of success with it and it was good.

Tammi: I had a great broker boss, he was awesome. I was there for over 11 years, but in 2014 I became pregnant with my first child and said to my boss, okay, I'm giving birth in January and I'll probably be back in March and did not see what was gonna happen happen. And I never went back. 

Tammi: I had my son in January.

Tammi: I had horrific postpartum depression and anxiety and I was really uncapable of going back to work. I wanted to, but I just could not. Actually, I didn't want to. I wanted to make money, but I didn't wanna go back to that job. I just [00:02:00] couldn't leave my kid. And I was a mess. I was a mess for a really long time.

Tammi: And we could do like a whole episode about that journey and about what healing looked like for me. But the long story short of it is I ended up leaving my career and my husband talked me into putting all of my time and energy into focusing on our airbrush art business, which he's an artist and we had this kind of side business in addition to what I did with real estate.

Tammi: We always talked about like, oh, wouldn't it be great when that's like our full-time gig? So he was like, this is our opportunity. Put all your eggs into this basket and I was sure we were gonna be homeless. I was not convinced of my ability to grow that business and to make it successful. But I said, okay I didn't really have a choice cuz I couldn't go back to work. I was a mess. 

Tammi: That began my journey in trying to build that business. And also it began my journey in trying to heal and get better because I knew I wasn't okay. I knew it wasn't okay to be crying all [00:03:00] the time. And to have these intrusive thoughts, and to be paranoid and to think that somebody was gonna harm me and my family. I knew that this was more than just baby blues.

Tammi: And I knew that I needed to get some help. I had suffered from anxiety and depression on and off my whole life, and it was pretty well managed. I was a high functioning, high achieving kind of person. But having a child that really changes things. And I became what I think of as like a coconut, like cracked open, and it was a journey to put myself back together.

Tammi: So I started learning about meditation and exercise as more than like a losing weight endeavor as a mental health wellness endeavor and started learning about the medications that are available. And again, that's another whole episode. I did try some medication. It didn't go well for me.

Tammi: The prescribed pharmaceutical medication actually made things a lot worse in my case. I had used medication like that earlier on in my journey [00:04:00] with success. So trying it here for postpartum seemed very natural. Because I wanted to continue breastfeeding, there was a new type of medication that my doctor gave me, which did not work well in my system and actually created a bigger problem over time than the postpartum.

Tammi: I ended up in the hospital. I ended up having a complete break with reality for a while, and there was like a lot that went on from the pharmaceutical medication. Coming off of that, continuing my journey and really trying to find myself, I decided I was going to just focus on meditation and natural forms of healing.

Tammi: Throughout my life I had used marijuana socially and recreationally. Here I am now, I'm no longer pregnant and I'm thinking, okay, I'm gonna, bring marijuana back into the scenario. So I was using marijuana and of course, with everything that you're doing, the doctors are very quick to give you more diagnosis and try to put you [00:05:00] on more medication.

Tammi: I was really kind of going against the doctor's advice, which I'm not necessarily advising everybody to do, but the doctors were trying to put me on lithium and some other medications, and I just knew that that was not who I was. And that was not for me, not my journey. I decided to meditate and exercise and start to understand energy and what was creating these thoughts.

Tammi: And it was through that journey that I found mentors and coaches and therapists that really helped me understand myself and understand what was happening to me biologically. And it was the beginning of me healing. I am happy to say that it's many years later at this point, that was 2000 and 15 2016, and I'm on zero pharmaceutical medications.

Tammi: I do occasionally smoke pot for recreational and creative endeavors. And I do consider it kind of a medication for me because I don't use other medicines to [00:06:00] manage anxiety or depression, but along with my meditation practice and my breathing practice and my cardio practice and my new yoga practice and all these other things, I do use plant medicine to help me maintain an even balance.

Tammi: And it works for me really well and I enjoy having it as part of my life. But there's been a lot of shame and a lot of hiding that I have done around my own usage and recently have started coming out publicly as I've begun this coaching journey. 

Tammi: Through the whole healing journey, I discovered not only inner peace and working on those thoughts. I no longer have those intrusive thoughts and all of the things that plagued me, but then I discovered gifts on top of it. So now I use those gifts to serve others. As I'm doing that, I'm becoming more public. I have shared my journey with using marijuana and certain times in my journey where I have felt I needed to stop using marijuana and go on like a detox from it, and really question, what I was [00:07:00] doing with it ,if it was in alignment . There's all this pressure from society and from culture not to use drugs, it's the gateway drug. I grew up in the eighties and that Just Say No campaign is drilled into your head about how bad it is to use. But when you do use marijuana and it does bring you relief and it does add a level of pleasure and joy to your life, right?

Tammi: It can be very helpful. So I've struggled with like where it fits in in my life. And I've been open with my clients and my journey. That has invited these conversations from women that I didn't expect. They don't approach me publicly on social media, but will come to me privately and say, Hey, you know, this is my journey and this is what I'm going through.

Tammi: And share with me their own same struggles about using, whether they're in alignment, whether it's medicinal, whether it's recreational, whether they don't wanna use anymore. There's a whole dance to it. I'm glad that we're having this conversation because I know that it's something that's been part of my , journey with myself and with realizing [00:08:00] where I am allowing pleasure, where I'm blocking pleasure and where marijuana falls into that journey.

Tammi: This is the kind of conversation I think that other people might appreciate, because I'm sure I can't be the only one who feels sometimes like that Just Say No campaign is in the back of her head. And it's like, what are you doing? Why are you smoking? Is this healthy? The reality is it does help and it does feel good, and it does open the doors to higher consciousness and higher levels of thinking.

Tammi: Even when you're not using currently, marijuana still opens your mind in a way that you may not have otherwise.

Amber: I have a couple thoughts. Same thing, product of the eighties , DARE, War on Drugs everything else. I feel the entire messaging has been for a long time, and still in some cases, is marijuana's bad. There's not really any reason given for it.

Amber: It's classified as a [00:09:00] drug. It's labeled as bad. Something I learned is because of the war on drugs, scientists were very limited in their research. So we're saying marijuana is bad and we're just barely understanding all of the scientific benefits there are. That's an important conversation because you're talking about different types of use and I want you to talk about that. But there are some really legitimate benefits and marijuana has far fewer side effects than a lot of the pharmaceutical drugs. 

Amber: When women approach you and they're like, I'm thinking about putting this in my healing journey and I have all these weird feelings cuz I'm picturing that police officer in fifth grade telling me this is bad and I've read this article and it's good.

Amber: How do you talk them through that? What is, that dance of finding that balance and how if that's gonna be a fit for you how to use that in the [00:10:00] right way for you?

Tammi: Well it's a good question. Completely transparently, most of the people that approach me are already using marijuana and they're either feeling guilty about their use or they've stopped using because of the guilt and they wanna go back to using. That's usually the scenarios that I'm being approached with.

Tammi: In those cases, it's still an answer of the dance, right? It's still a, a question of why do you wanna use? What is it that you're using for? How often are you using? Where are you using? And these are questions I asked myself right when I was looking at my own usage, right? Because when you're single and you live by yourself, and it doesn't really matter if you sit on your couch and do bong hits and watch movies all day, right?

Tammi: There's absolutely no shame or judgment in doing that. I've been there, done that. In your forties and you have kids and all these things like. There's only so many days or so much time that you can sit on your couch and smoke bong, right? So you start to ask yourself, okay, where does this fit [00:11:00] into my life?

Tammi: I'm a mother, I'm a business owner. I know I like doing this. How am I doing this? And I say to people, are you smoking by yourself? Are you smoking with other people? Are you smoking throughout the day? Are you smoking at certain times during the day? What are you smoking for? Is it because you wanna distract from feelings? Are you bored? What are your motivations for smoking? Or is it habit? Really getting clear on what the motivation is and if there is a benefit to it. Honestly, I have been on both sides of the fence, from seeing all the benefits to then seeing myself out of alignment and overusing and not experiencing the benefits. That's when I decided for myself to go on a little bit of a hiatus and stopped. At one one point I stopped for like a year and a half, and then another point I stopped for six months and just gave myself a period of being without it and watching myself and my thoughts and everything without it and then deciding, okay, do I wanna add this back into my life?

Tammi: And then [00:12:00] deciding if I'm going to be in balance with it and what that looks like for me. For everybody, that balance is gonna look different because everyone's life is different. Everyone's chemistry is different, everyone's tolerance is different. So I would say that there's no formula for balance.

Tammi: I would say that there is intention setting and really being honest with yourself. And listen, some people say they can't tolerate and they can't regulate themselves and they just don't use at all. There's no shame in that either if you wanna be absent or sober that's beautiful too. Everyone is on their own journey. There's no right or wrong answer. It's really a matter of being honest with yourself about why you're using when you're using what you're using. Does it feel good when you're using? For me, when I was out of alignment, I was using all the time. I was in the bathroom by myself, it was way out of alignment.

Tammi: And I had to be clear with myself, this doesn't feel good anymore. These days I look at it a little bit more like balance. This for me is a life lesson for not just marijuana, but [00:13:00] with food and with all kinds of other things. Balance for me is a soul journey. There is no such thing as perfect balance, but there is this balancing act that we can do as conscious , aware awake beings. We can consistently evaluate where we're at and adjust accordingly. That's really how I approach my own use and what I coach my clients.

Tammi: Ask yourself, why are you smoking? Or why are you not smoking? And honestly, what I find with so many people is that they're not as out of alignment as they think they are but there is a level of denying themselves pleasure. Then when they look at it, they realize they're not just denying themselves, socially smoking or whatever they were using the marijuana for, but they find themselves denied on so many other levels with so many other things, sexual intimacy and other things that humans come into the flesh to enjoy.

Tammi: Right? We are spirits having a human experience. And yes, you wanna be spiritual, that's [00:14:00] wonderful, but we're here to be in the flesh. We're here to be in the body. We're here to eat. We're here to fuck, we're here to love, we're here to do those things. That's what we're here for. We have all of eternity to be non-physical, but we came to hug each other, to kiss each other, to stand next to each other, to feel goosebumps, right?

Tammi: We came to play with the feathers and to feel the sun on our face and the ocean and the salt. We came for those things. So are you denying yourself pleasure because society tells you that what you want is wrong,? If you are in alignment and you can find alignment with something, and it works in your life and it feels good, can you find a way to allow yourself to be pleasured and to have joy?

Tammi: Right?

Amber: That's a whole conversation in and of itself. There's this messaging in society where it's just like marijuana, it's bad if you do this, you should be working, you should be doing this. All these shoulds. I'm just thinking of the spring, when everything starts to come to life and you can smell the flowers and you can feel the breeze and you're seeing all [00:15:00] these things. Kinda micro level, but allowing ourselves to feel that. 

Amber: In our pre-chat ,we talked to when we experience trauma, how that's another block almost to giving ourselves permission to feel pleasure. 

Tammi: Yeah, because when you're a child and your subconscious is developing, which is like third trimester in your mom's belly to like seven, eight years old, depending on who you ask, right?

Tammi: From that age, you are a tape recorder and your subconscious is just recording everything that's going on. It's making meaning out of things. It's categorizing things, and it's setting you up for your lifetime of living, right? So if you experience trauma in an early part of your life, especially sexual trauma, and nobody talks about this, but I have talked about this another podcast before. As a young child who experienced sexual trauma at a very young age, nobody talks about when you don't [00:16:00] know any better and you're being manipulated sexually, your body experencies pleasure. Then you get old enough to understand what's happening to you. And , sometimes you don't. That's another story. But you feel betrayed by your body cuz it's like, whoa, this isn't supposed to be happening to me. This isn't quote unquote good, but there are times that your body was feeling good. I felt I shouldn't say people. I'm saying from my own lens, there was so much shame around that and so many mixed messages that my subconscious got from that not even that anyone else put on me. This was completely self-inflicted, but it was like, whoa, you felt pleasure from this and this was wrong and this was bad and this was harmful and this was toxic. So something is wrong with you and your pleasure receptors. All kinds of mixed messages were embedded in my subconscious.

Tammi: I've realized not very long ago, I'm 45 years old, so this is like a lifetime, right? Not that long ago that I have this huge block around pleasure because to me, pleasure equals shame. When I'm in [00:17:00] pleasure, I'm my nervous system goes, boom, right back to that shame because that's what I was conditioned to as a young child.

Tammi: I think that can translate into food, into gambling, into sex, into marijuana, into anything that feels good on your body and for you to not even feel safe in your body. Right? And for you to not even like, it was a whole journey for me to live in my body cuz I was living up in my head my whole life. That's where I stayed because it wasn't safe to be in my body, right? I didn't trust my body and because I was totally out of sync with my body because of the trauma that took place earlier in my life, right? It's been a journey for me to literally pull myself out of my head and into my body and get to know my body and get to love my body and get to accept my body and trust my body.

Tammi: And of course your body is your subconscious mind. So it's same, same, right? This has been a whole revelation to me and as I've [00:18:00] been realizing it and my clients come to me and I share this with them, I'm watching them like, oh my God, that commercial, like I could have had a v8, like holy shit, I've been blocking pleasure from my whole life and now they see it. When you see something and you shine light on it, boom, the healing has instantly begun because now it's outta the shadows and it's into the light. Then so much expansion and transformation happens from there. Then watching my clients experience and let the pleasure in and let in the receivership, right?

Tammi: Because how we receive one thing is how we receive everything. So when you start to allow yourself to receive pleasure, then abundance and all kinds of other stuff comes flying at you because now you're open to receive where before receiving felt unsafe to your system. 

Amber: I relate to that because I experienced sexual abuse when I was very young. I still have not recovered those memories, which was an additional challenge for me because I can remember being five [00:19:00] and having these sexual thoughts and thinking I was bad and terrible for being five and having these sexual thoughts. Lots of therapy later I realized there's no good reason why a five-year-old would have those thoughts unless an adult was doing something wildly inappropriate to them.

Amber: So yeah, absolutely. That was a whole process for me to take that shame and stigma off of sex and allow my body to enjoy it and give myself that permission. And you talked a little bit about energy sexual intercourse, that picture of masculine and feminine energy of receiving and giving in that back and forth and those working together.

Amber: I know that when you feel resistance to one of those kinds of energies that spills over to, physical, mental health, all sorts of things. So there is, not only just a pleasure, how we interact with our environment. So important to give ourselves permission to [00:20:00] do that and to work through that.

Amber: I think one of the things you're saying is , maybe if you're a little stuckish, this is me paraphrasing if you're using marijuana, it can help you see things in a different way that maybe couldn't if you weren't using it. And maybe to process some of those things or just to see life differently, 

Tammi: Yeah, absolutely it is.

Tammi: The way that I look at it is that , we're here to interact with our environment, right? We're here to eat animals, eat plants , consume plants be with each other, smell the smells, engage in this whole experience of being human and the flesh on earth at this time, right? That's our divine birthright. 

Tammi: I think that whether it's mushrooms or fungus or whatever, we can have a whole conversation on the medicinal benefits of fungi and all of that there's so much. information science that's been suppressed over the years.

Tammi: Even with marijuana, you think that there's not a lot of science, but then you find out there actually was quite. It was really suppressed because they didn't know what to do with it and they didn't know how to regulate it, and they didn't know how to control it. And if there was a lot of fear [00:21:00] also, and a lot of agenda around it.

Tammi: And I think that has changed. I feel like I got off on a different tangent there for a minute. But when it comes to using marijuana or mushrooms or whatever, the chemicals in the plants interact with your own endocannabinoid system. I'm sure your listeners, if they're users that's kind of like old news, right?

Tammi: But we have these cannabinoid receptors in our brain and our body throughout, and it's natural to plug in with these plants. It's all part of our environment, it's part of our system. And just like plants or medicine that heal, Because without big pharma, what do you think the universe, God, the creator just put us here with no resources?

Tammi: No. And actually pharmaceuticals if you read about them, most of them are actually herbs, and synthetic versions of what God makes out of plants. So it's like, what are we doing? Why are we making synthetic plants when there's real plants? That's another subject. So it's when you use marijuana these chemicals [00:22:00] interact with your own receptors and they open up neuro pathways to allow information not only from inside of your own system, but coming in from outside of you. Your divine guidance, right? It opens up the channel for more of your own divine guidance to come in. Now, that is a beautiful thing, but it can also be, again, out of alignment and too much, and if you have too much of that, there's a very fine line between being spiritual and then going crazy.

Tammi: Right? There's a very fine line because as humans, we have these limitations. We're not meant to see everything beyond the veil, right? We're, we're meant to play a little bit with it. We're meant to peek behind it., I read the Akaschic records like we're not meant to know everything. We're just not. Our brains are not made for that. So when you let in more information and more of that light than you're ready for, it can be too much. Right? So that's why there's always this dance, this balance with anything that you use, it can open up and allow that creativity, it can allow [00:23:00] that connection.

Tammi: It can allow those other things to come through you, but you wanna be in alignment with it because there is a line, right? With marijuana, it's hard to reach that line. When you're talking about like mushrooms and other drugs, I think it's a little easier to cross that line.

Tammi: When you're in the frame of mind of expansion and you're looking for creativity or you're looking for quieting some of the the anxiety marijuana can be very helpful for 

Amber: that. 

Amber: Something I learned is that marijuana isn't one thing. There's hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of strains of marijuana. Mm-hmm. And they each do specific things. Mm-hmm. So again, you talked about, okay, maybe you're just using this for creativity . Maybe you're using this for anxiety that you can dial in on what components you're looking for and use that very specifically and intentionally

Amber: I know a tiny bit about marijuana and I know [00:24:00] very little about mushrooms , but like you said, our medicine comes from it.

Amber: Yeah. And it can be 

Tammi: great if you're elderly and you need appetite atimulant help with sleep.

Tammi: Right. A long time ago, I wish I could remember who it was that I was listening to, but I was listening to a radio broadcast probably in the nineties. And the speaker was saying that he believed everyone over the age of 70 should wake up and smoke a joint because at that stage in your life, you're not really working every day and you're kind of slowing down anyways. You have aches and pains and you have trouble sleeping and maybe your appetite, it's a little funny. And he's like, people would be so much happier if they would just wake up and smoke a joint, especially in those later years of their life. 

Tammi: I can kind of understand that having taken care of my grandparents, in their later parts of their life. None of them used marijuana, but I wished that they would have because I think it would've helped all, all of them in their later parts of their life. Not even just the ones that went through cancer, but when you get older and, and you're not eating and you're not going to the bathroom as well, it can take the edge off and give you a minute to [00:25:00] relax and calm down and, sleep, have a nice meal, laugh a little bit. I think that especially in the later years of our life, what else is there? Right? You wanna feel good and you wanna eat and you wanna enjoy your family, right? 

Amber: Yes. The other thing that was a newer concept to me, I had interviewed a cannabis educator one of the things she talked about is microdosing and how if it's mm-hmm

Amber: marijuana that's certified, you know exactly what's in it. You can do small amounts so that it's not interfering with your capacity mm-hmm to do your job. People may not even realize that you're taking it because you're being very intentional and you're watching your body and played with it enough to know, well, this is enough that, it helps my anxiety enough I can get to work, but I'm not incapacitated.

Amber: I found that very interesting . It seems obvious when you look at it medicinally, there can be dosing for it as well. 

Amber: Yeah, 

Tammi: yeah, [00:26:00] absolutely. You know your body, you know what you can consume and what you can't consume. For most regular marijuana users, you'd have to consume a gross amount to be incapacitated.

Tammi: It is something that you can do recreational and still be very functional . If you're getting something from a pharmacy that you know where you're getting it from and you know what's in it. I don't recommend getting things on the street anymore cuz you don't have to. Those days are past .And microdosing, I don't have personal experience with that, but I do know people who have done that. And it is very much that what you said, it's not an amount that will alter you in any way. It is strictly an a medicinal amount and it has incredible effects on depression and anxiety. People really swear by it.

Tammi: It's fungus, right? It's plants. It's not always about reefer madness, you know, the stories of, oh, the person took a bunch of mushrooms and killed their whole family. Those are urban legends and I think that we see enough gun violence people that are on pharmaceutical medications that that conversation is very interesting that that conversation has shifted, 

Amber: right?[00:27:00]

Amber: Yes. My brain couldn't quite make sense of a statistic that 80% of violent crimes involve alcohol and we're completely fine with it. Right? We used to live in a state that has state liquor stores and the state would have ads on the radio, come get your beer. It's on sale. Which was so bizarre to me because we know that alcohol is a contributing factor to violent crime, health conditions, all of these other things, and we're completely okay with it. Then we have marijuana and we have mushrooms that have very few side effects.

Amber: And there's still this stigma. My brain has a hard time sometimes reconciling it, but it goes back to stigma and education and conversations like this to shift that around and create an opportunity to see things differently. 

Tammi: Yeah. And interestingly enough, I have never been able to find one, but I have looked for studies on the violent crimes and what percentage of those people were taking [00:28:00] pharmaceutical antidepressants or those types of medications, especially after what happened to me.

Tammi: Knowing what's possible and knowing the break that a person can have. I'm not a violent person, so my tendencies were not that way. But if you have a violent tendency or if you are in a trauma situation and you have that break with reality, I could easily see how that could be very dangerous. And it's just interesting that nobody talks about that.

Tammi: I have my own suspicions that there's a fair amount of prescription drugs that are involved in a lot of violent crimes especially when you're trying to come off of them, which that's the big problem people don't talk about. if you look on Google, there are so many stories about people coming off of Zoloft and how dangerous it can be. People would go to the pharmacy and get pills that have the little beads inside of them and open the pill and take out one bead a time to detox every couple of weeks. That's how slow they need to come off those types of drugs so they don't have that break so that their brain doesn't have that[00:29:00] sharp drop in chemicals. It can be dangerous.

Tammi: And we don't talk about that at all. Everyone's busy talking about street drugs .. Of course, , there's a place for every conversation. But it's interesting how that conversation doesn't come up. 

Amber: From what I see, often it's it's a general practitioner, right?

Amber: They're not even someone who's has any psychiatric training or doesn't have much of it . You go in and you're feeling a little depressed and they write you a script. Right? Yep. And there's so much to it .

Amber: When I was taking classes for a coaching certification, we had an entire section where we talked about how often it's seven or eight different medications before people find one that worked and all of the side effects and what they can expect and what to look out for because as you said, there can be some really serious side effects.

Amber: Depending on how their body reacts to the medication, it can tip them into suicidality. Mm-hmm. Aggression violent behaviors and make [00:30:00] things incredibly worse. It really does need to be a carefully monitored process. Mm-hmm. They have a place, there's people that it does help.

Amber: The piece I think is missing is that careful monitoring and how are you actually doing with this medication? Is it actually helping you and Right. Does it make sense for your medical history? Does it make sense for what you're saying is going on? Have they done some screenings? And I think the other piece, we talked about trauma. Sometimes what you're experiencing is an effect of trauma then the pharmaceuticals might not help .

Amber: It's not monitored enough, I think is what happens. as you said people suffer more. I don't think with any bad intentions, I do think that doctors are doing the best they can. They're just not trained enough to always make the best call. Anyways, . That's the whole conversation of its own. 

Tammi: Yeah, no, I, I totally agree with what you're saying there , it's a really important conversation . I think most doctors have good intentions.

Tammi: They wanna help, they wanna [00:31:00] heal, you know? In my case, I didn't get it from a psychiatric, it was from my midwife practitioner who delivered my son. I've been seeing her for over 20 years. I love her. She loves me. She had no idea that was gonna happen in my system, and coming off she gave me the directions to break him in half.

Tammi: Maybe for some people that's fine. With their system, that might be okay. For my system it was not. Okay. And then Researching it, finding out there was so many other people that had the same reaction with that particular drug coming off of it.

Tammi: When you do make medicine changes, it can be very delicate and there's not enough monitoring. And there's also not enough telling the family members, if you live with other people, hey, the person's gonna be getting their medicine changed. Look for weird behaviors.

Tammi: Cause if somebody would've told my husband what to look for and what to do, he had no idea. He was completely freaked out and he didn't know what else to do ended up taking me to the emergency room, no, no clue. And of course my doctor didn't know,. It's just a matter of education.

Tammi: But yes, those drugs are given out so quickly and so easily instead of , trying alternative methods. It should [00:32:00] be a last resort. Sometimes there's a place for them and sometimes they do a great job in helping people and, and listen. I'm not saying there's no need for them, but there's definitely a bigger conversation about going so quickly to them. 

Tammi: Then when you're taking someone off of them being really mindful about monitoring them, because if their brain isn't working right, so many things can go wrong, so many things can go wrong. You're talking about dealing with the brain, they're not even looking at the brain. They're giving you these prescription medicines based on feedback that you're giving as a patient, not from a brain scan . They don't give you heart medication without looking at your heart. This is one area that they don't do that.

Tammi: I think that as a whole, as a society, we can do better. The medical community can do better making these drugs more regulated. Less regulation on plants and more regulation on these pharmaceuticals that can create havoc in someone's life.

Amber: And If a medication is affecting you in a negative way, you don't have the head [00:33:00] space to realize it. Yeah. What you said too about having that conversation with, if you are in a relationship or just someone that is keeping an eye on you. HIPAA can make things weird, but encouraging people to have someone on their care team that's in that day to day. Yeah. I remember when I had my little person, this is the first time I'd ever, ever heard of this, but when we were leaving the hospital and the nurse was giving the postpartum depression speech, she didn't give it to me, she gave it to my husband. She's like, this is your job to look for and this is what you look for, and you make sure she gets help because she's not gonna be able to figure it out. She's not gonna know what's going on. Yeah. And I thought. How smart is that to give it to someone who is a little bit outside of the situation and tell them, this is exactly what to look for and this is exactly what to do. Yeah. You know? That's 

Tammi: beautiful. That's beautiful because it's true. You don't know.

Tammi: Yeah. And when you're, it's like you can't see yourself, you know? But the people around you can see you and see like, oh, , Tammy's not acting herself.[00:34:00] What's happening? 

Amber: You know? 

Amber: And my husband did that. I had postpartum anxiety with this one, which was totally new for me. It wasn't something I had experienced before.

Amber: Mm-hmm. He was like, babe, I love you and you are not being yourself I don't know what you need, but you need to find a person to help you. 

Tammi: Was it easy for you to find somebody when you were looking for that? 

Amber: Yes. And I think it's because we're in the age of the internet. Anxiety does weird things to our brain. I was fortunate to find someone that let me make an online appointment. That got me to what I needed. She ended up moving, but had great referrals. Thankfully it was pretty quick to get in to see someone and make those connections. 

Tammi: That's good. That's good to hear.

Tammi: I'm glad that, that you were able to find somebody. Sometimes the resources can be the hardest thing, right? Knowing where to go, what to do. Mm-hmm. 

Amber: That's another piece to it. I think we have so many changes to make and I think deregulating plant medicine is a huge step in the right direction. One of our kiddos It's a two year wait list to see a specialist . It's [00:35:00] nuts that people have these delays . We're very fortunate where we are that there's a decent amount of counselors that have openings, but it's not the case in every place. And there can be real barriers for people getting in to get help. Traditional doctors, they're maxed out.

Amber: They're trying to do the best they can. And then I think that's where some of the gaps come in for the monitoring and education. 

Amber: I'm not sure we got on this tangent either, but it's important to talk about. That's really why plant medicine should have a place. It can help a lot of people with fewer side effects and take some of the strain off of our existing medical systems. 

Tammi: Yeah. And listen, in a world where we can create vaccines and medications for a pandemic on a dime, which we did, and that's wonderful, right? Why can't we throw education and money towards real valuable research using plant medications? Why are we waiting until there's some kind of a health emergency? Why can't we have these discussions and [00:36:00] research. I'm sure at this point, considering how many states allow marijuana and, I think it's on the ballot for Florida even to be recreational next year. Why can't we have those studies? I'm sure there'd be tons of patients who'd be so happy to participate in those research studies and contribute to the decriminalization, to the normalization and to the, I dunno if this is a word, scientification, right?

Tammi: Of plant medicine so that we can have data and so that we can look at data and, and current data, right? Not just from the 50 suppressed, in the back closet data. Real current up to date with today's technology data. 

Amber: Yes. And to make those data driven decisions. I feel like so many of the regulations around plant medicine are emotion driven. They're not data driven. 

Amber: And yeah. Culture why not have this out there? Like you said, if the science says this then it's black and white. Then it's how do we make this accessible to people if [00:37:00] the science supports its use, you know? Right. That's a better conversation to have. Yeah. Hopeful that we'll get there.

Tammi: I think we will. There's only so much suppression of information that can happen in today's day and age. Like you said, it's very easy to get on the internet and find practitioners and people. We've surpassed, being suppressed from that regard. I don't know, from a federal standpoint , I'm not gonna even begin to go down that rabbit hole, but it'll be interesting.

Tammi: I feel like the people want it. I feel like enough people have spoken and, and I think we've already reached the tipping point. It's just a matter now of getting to getting there, you know? 

Amber: I know that we're closing in here, is there anything else that you wanna share as we're wrapping up?

Amber: I think I have one more question for you, but I'll ask you first. 

Tammi: No, you can ask 

Amber: What are some ways that, as you're coaching people, or some suggestions you have for people to , allow more pleasure into their lives?

Tammi: The first thing I would say is to do a little [00:38:00] pleasure inventory, right? Write down all of the ways that you're currently experiencing pleasure throughout your day. And if you realize, oh my God, I'm not experiencing any pleasure in my day, maybe weekly or monthly. Don't freak out. It's okay. That's kind of where all of us are when we begin the journey of Hey, what's my pleasure principal? Right? What's going on here with my pleasure?

Tammi: And what does pleasure look like to me? So just do a little inventory. What does your current pleasure situation look like? What do you like? And then ask yourself some questions- what do you like? What brings you pleasure that you're currently not incorporating in your life right now?

Tammi: For me, one of the things that I had realized was I wasn't writing enough. I love writing and reading and I wasn't doing enough of that for pleasure? It doesn't have to be sexual. Sexual is actually a low hanging fruit. I would really encourage people to dive deeper.

Tammi: What did your 13 year old self love to do? For me, I loved roller skating. I loved roller coasters I loved singing and [00:39:00] dancing and doing all those things. And I was like, oh shit, I'm in my forties. I don't do any of that. Like, why? So I ended up getting a pair of roller skates and I ended up going on roller coasters again and really purposely seeking pleasure. If you're stuck, go to that 13 year old self. That version of you before the world really got ahold of you, right? When you were old enough to kind of understand things , but still young enough before people started shaming and shoulding you for all the things that you liked and things that bring you joy and pleasure.

Tammi: Then ask yourself how can you bring more of those into your life? And start to be aware of your own responsibility to yourself to bring pleasure, joy, and happiness into your daily experience. Because it's nobody else's responsibility outside of yourself.

Tammi: But it is your responsibility. And I want you to feel empowered that it's okay to seek pleasure, and it's okay to have things for pleasure. It's okay. It's in fact why you're in your body, right? Or we could have just stayed in the spirit world, we didn't need to do all [00:40:00] this incarnating shit.

Tammi: We came to feel it all. Life is not just suffering. Life is suffering and pleasure.

Amber: Thank you for sharing those tips and just reminding people to give themselves permission to do that. If people are wanting to learn more about the work you do or wanting to work with you directly, how might they be able to find you?

Tammi: I hang out a lot on Facebook, a little less on Instagram, and they can also go to my website. So you could find www.sacredphilosophies.com, and you could find me on Instagram at Tammi Lipp. And that's T A M M I L I P P. And then if you wanna find me on Facebook, you can search Sacred Philosophies on Facebook.

Tammi: I have a free Facebook group. You can find a link to it on my website. I also run a private community for women called The Sacred Circle, and we work with the New Moon, the full moon. [00:41:00] We do monthly energy coaching. I do Oracle card pulls inside of a private Facebook group. I also give private master classes for that group on energetic and spiritual subjects.

Tammi: It's a really delicious, yummy group of women supporting each other and working together. Which I consider part of the rise of the divine feminine power on Earth as women coming together and working together in tandem. I also do private coaching, readings ,mediumship ,energetic healing.

Tammi: I kind of am a mixed bag of healing, reading, and coaching. So you can find me in all of the slashy things that I do@sacredphilosophies.com. 

Amber: I'll definitely include links in the show notes. Thank you for the work that you do and thank you for sharing and normalizing plant medicine and giving us all permission to really enjoy life and take in those things that bring us pleasure.

Tammi: Thank you for having me, and thank you for opening the conversations. It's beautiful.