The Power of Plant Medicine

What The Golden Teachers Taught Me

Earlier this year I had an altercation with a fellow seeker that spun me into momentary shock.  A dear friend who is a practitioner and teacher of Bach Flower Remedies, saw this and offered to make me a remedy to help me recover from this episode.  Two days into taking the remedy I received a Spirit message advising me it was time to work with the mushrooms, I needed to clear some fear. 

A few weeks later the magic of synchronicity sent through an invitation via the same friend to attend a Mushroom Ceremony held sacredly in the Mayan tradition. 

On the day we were guided through an opening Fire Ceremony. Together as a community we constructed a fire to honour Toj, the Nahual (Na’wal) of offerings or payment.  This fire carefully and lovingly constructed, layer by meaningful layer, was to be both an anchor and a doorway for the experience opened up by the medicine.

It was explained that the experience would be to go into the underworld and face our fears, offering them up to be transmuted and cleared.

We were then led in prayer in a call and response naming each Nahaul in turn.  In quiet and due reverence we drank Cocoa and then were invited indoors to have a little food and enjoy a little break, while our bed-spaces  were prepared and a second fire lit inside. 

Sat with us, our facilitator gave us guidance to help navigate our journey with the mushrooms. Then each of us in turn came up to drink an individually prepared cup of cocoa containing our mushroom dosage. 

Returned and nestled down in my bed space I opened to my experience.

Opening

My eyes are closed and I’m seeing geometry. Blue, circular and semi-circular (like curved ears pointing up) in formation.  A geometric Interlinking of Blue & Gold.  The points of joining seem alive, vibrating, rhythmic.  The other materiality of form is still. Holding.  Holding everything. The geometry is infinite, is micro & macro.  Then the Gold begins humming, thrumming through the form.  I feel it’s Vibration expanding through the entire infinite form.  My heart is racing.

The next Iteration of Geometry is Green.  Vivid Deep Green and somehow every spectrum colour is moving with the Green.  Then the Blue Gold geometry moves through the Green. With this introduction, the Green and spectral colours, the geometry of which is smaller in form, marries together with the larger Blue Gold geometry and each circular form starts spiralling, descending and infinitely winding, revealing that it is in all things.  It reveals itself in my body. In the left side of me it begins to rot and decompose, in as much as the colours go brown and the interlocking between the geometry starts to disintegrate.  Then I enter the underworld.  I seem to wait. For a long while nothing happens, black, void, solid-stillness, but I’m not really aware of this.  Just that nothing is happening.  There’s a suspension.

I’m aware of movement. I breathe.  Seeming somehow to breathe with the geometry, breathe it through the surrounding space and into my body.  Geometry, meeting geometry.  I’m being resourced.  Prana.  I have a huge feeling all over my body of electromagnetic static.  I have had this before in Kundalini Yoga.  This time it’s bigger. I am taking it into me and it is growing at a rapid rate and I feel the need to both resource myself with it and break through it.  I feel that I need to break through a field of the electromagnetic static using the kinetic energy in me.  I need somehow to move with this. I breathe more deeply.

I’m back in the room. My heart is beating fast.  My stomach feels so sick.  It’s a block that I know and it is really present.  It reminds me of the water.  I begin to drink water.  I feel pressured by something.  Something I’m remembering. Something I need to do.  I feel the agony in the room, so much moaning, so much pain, I feel the acute pain in my stomach and I know that I can’t do what I need to do inside this room.  I feel I can’t do it among that outpouring of pain of agony.  I find our facilitator and ask him to take me to the outdoor fire.

He walks me to the fire and sits some way from me in a chair.  I momentarily see his face and know I mustn’t look at it again.  His face is morphing, weaving from one form to another, none feel threatening yet I know not to look at what is happening.  Not to see it take place.

I tell him that I can’t do what I need to do inside the room. 

That there is something I have promised.  I’m scared of it.  I’m tired of it.  Yet I know I’ll do it.  The space outside feels like I can carry out the promise here.  I tell him I want to stay the night outside.  He is kind, and supportive.  He asks if I have what I need.  We check my bottle and I have enough water.  He says he will get me some things to stay warm.  I’m alone by the fire and I feel afraid, for a fleeting moment, at being alone.  Then I start to talk to the fire.  My voice seems big, loud, the fire is a landing strip, a temple, it has architecture, the architecture is technology.  I am saying into the fire that I’m here now, it feels painful and lonely, but they sent me and I’m here now and it hurts.  In my stomach it hurts, and I don’t know what I’m doing, but I trust, and I’m here and I’ll do it.  I’ll do what I was sent here to do. Our facilitator is back sitting in the chair he is close to, and faraway from me, on his chair. 

I realise I am now talking looking up into the stars knowing I have come from there, that they sent me and that I’m sore about it.  Yet willing.  The stars begin to oscillate; they are shaking back and forth.  Not all of them, only a few.  They seem a specific collection that are shaking, waving, connecting in this moment and laying down something.  Architecting something through light, in and around the landscape of the fire.  I am being resourced by whatever they are landing, yet I don’t directly know what it is and what it means.  I feel a soreness of separation along with my commitment to stay.  Our facilitator is watching the behaviour in the stars with me.  It’s vast and beautiful and real.  It has real purpose, accurate intent and it is kind and supportive.  I say to him I don’t know how to be human, there is too much pain to bear, I keep forgetting to breathe.  I realised that while I was in the house going through my journeying there, something had to keep prompting me to breathe.  It seems funny out here by the fire beneath the stars, that I need to breathe to live and I keep forgetting to breathe.  It seems obvious that this is part of the ‘problem’ in remaining and part of the ‘solution’ to remaining.  This point of the journey is sweet and funny.  That simple realisation.  That gift that to breathe is to be.  In that moment, in conversation with him, with the stars, with the fire I resolve to stay.

A co-facilitator comes out and speaks to him.  I feel I have been wrapped up by the fire, dozing.  The fire is still at the dimensions of a temple that I am lying in front of the gateway to. I hear her saying can him to come inside.  Everyone is coming back now and I’m taking some time to return.  I immediately feel bad, that I am taking up too much time, taking up too much space and that I need to pull myself together and return like everyone else.  Everyone else that can do this. Can be human.  I’m the joker in the pack, the outcast, the hapless one.  I rally and say to him I’ll go back in, that I’m taking too long to come back.  He says “why do you believe it’s taking long?”  I don’t know if I said anything about what I heard.  If I did it wasn’t communicated through words.  Then he said “these are all conversations with yourself.  You’re speaking to yourself.”

I feel this sinking in. The truth of it arriving and then I say I want to go back in.  I choose to have this human experience.  To be included and part of other humans having this experience.

I thank him.  I feel total gratitude for what he is helping to create space for and for how he is holding that space.

He walks me back to my bed and I see he is everywhere, beside me, walking through the room, by someone’s side facilitating healing.  I remember not to look.  I look at the ground to orientate my steps and get back to my bed.  I’m so grateful to get back to my bed.  I pull the blanket over my head to shut out and focus in.

A Thousand things Lived at Once

Looking back the journey had a form. I share it here as I recall it, as ultimately it was beyond linear time and order.

I would go into a space with the medicine.  It felt like rest.  It would open to the underworld, I would hear voices that I believed to be the other people in the room.  They would affect me and I would react to the effect.  Then my body would respond.  I would fart and belch.  Sometimes something would be spun through my body and my hips would begin to rotate.  The rotation would travel up my spine and after this turning, this wringing through, I would feel stretched throughout my body from top to bottom,

on the vertical.

I would get tingles, a less pronounced feeling of the electromagnetic static feeling and I knew I would be ‘returned to the room’. Oftentimes I’d be returned and I wouldn’t yet be in this time and space.  Things were as they were in the room yet sparking with geometry and colour.  I would lie back down, and close my eyes, wanting the endless cycling to end.  Then I’d hear a communication telling me that I was still arriving.  That helped me feel OK to face the next round.

The descent into the underworld took this pattern and each time I descended I went deeper.  The voices got closer each time feeling more threatening and yet never poising an actual threat.  In this way I could feel the fear, the pain, the agony and the pit of my stomach held the greatest part of the feeling.  

I began to notice through each whispering the voices communicated something about what I was looping through.  Shame, paranoia, derision. The voices would whisper about it and then I’d go into a loop.  The loop would have the same working model, I’d feel tired, want it to end – before entering one. On getting out of one I’d be back in the room, feeling the pull of a bodily need to drink water, or go pee.  I would worry I didn’t have enough water and pick up and shake my bottle.  Sometimes I would have enough, sometimes not and I’d stand up and get some.  Eventually I noticed part of the loop was in the worry about the water.  I began to see a loop around scarcity.  I also realised there was always enough water I just had to go get it.  I realised there was a loop about giving myself what I needed.  This opened the loop up so that when I felt my body’s needs I could get up and do what I needed to do.

Each time I got up I would see our facilitator working with someone and remember to look away down at my feet.  Then I would feel him directing healing toward me from behind.  I realised I was watched, held, being cared for in my progression through each loop by him and his team.

I came to trust the loops.  They were turning up getting me through the noise and the terror of the underworld by ceaselessly, tirelessly navigating me through the same points until something in me became aware and tired of going through the same things and chose to cease the repetition.  

Eventually at some point the loops presented me with the fact I needed to decide.  To stop hiding in the loop feeling at the behest of it and look, receive and decide to call an end to the looping and allow myself out of it. To rest and live beyond the sameness of this continual back and forth.

I had a repeat motif of needing to choose.  At times the choice was to remember to breathe, to remember to drink each time ‘I surfaced’ at particular moments I was reminded to find the fire, and each time the co-facilitator was there. Caring and holding.

Then somehow a loosening took place and the choosing seemed about what I chose to be true in that moment.  That it became a key to ‘surfacing’ because I chose it to be true.  I chose to focus there.  Sometimes it was the other co-facillator’s beautiful singing and drumming.  The thing that became important in my progression was at each point in the loop there were keys and they somehow navigated through to the next iteration of the loops.  Each key helped to move with and go beyond the loop.  In this movement there was so much love.

Something shifted from choosing the truth of an action or a visible anchor to ground me, into trusting the truth of it all.  Then, again, came so much beauty, so much love.  I choose to believe in this, that the medicine was everywhere, taking care, that it was all beautifully woven, it moved with purpose, that I choose love.  Then Ratu, my Sat Guru was there as the key symbol of my lived experience of love.  He anchored in Love at some other amplified level and things became easier.  I was beyond the loops.

I was seeing that everything was in this moment and this moment was everything.  That all things prior to this were in fact motioning to this. Were in fact within this.  It was everything at once and one thing in time.

Through this I was shown a sort of working of time that indicated there is a perfect moment for everything.  A perfect moment to be the unimportant blinking atom among trillions of atoms making up the Universe and a perfect moment to be the centre of the Universe.  To know this moment and respond in right-relationship to which to be when, is to listen deeply to the whispers that can be heard by listening past the noise.  The fear, the electromagnetic field of static was so noisy it challenged the ability to listen, hear and accurately respond.

Also, in the loop the act of choosing eventually got questioned.  As often I would feel I had to choose and the choice would be to let go and let God.  In this moment of letting go another opening would take place and so I began to question the relevance of choice. As it was all unfolding according to something larger. As I needed to rightfully let go into this larger unfolding to get beyond the ceaseless nature of the loop, was there really a choice?  At moments it seemed my assertion of choice was getting in the way.

Then came a revealing of inter-relationship.  That both the choosing and the letting go are necessary, it’s finding the balance.

Each time something came through that was an ongoing truth for life. That has and will always be perpetuated through truth, then I would clearly see something and that thing was joyous.  I would be so thankful in those moments of seeing that I would begin to repeat “thank you, thank you, thank you”, for  the interplay of the medicine everywhere, the care everywhere, the love everywhere.  The Gratitude became an axis, a key to navigate the holding of the nexus. Sometimes what I saw was so simple, so beautifully obvious I would laugh aloud. Sometimes I would be back in the room dancing, swaying to the other co-facilitator’s singing, happy and clear.  Each time a piece of something unalterably real came through a voice would say.  Yes, it’s exactly as we showed you in the original geometry and the geometry would come through again and a next phase would open up.

These phases of arrival got clearer and clearer until at one point our facilitator came to get me. He told me he had been watching how I was working.  That I had done so much for my lineage, he said something else that invited a knowledge of my power and he led me to the inside fire to clean.

He blew into the agony in my stomach, cleaning it away, cleaned my shoulders, rib cage and lower back. cleaned my head.  I knelt in front of the fire and he pushed more things out of me which also created spaces of acknowledgment for the things it is right to inhabit.

There were times I would come through in the journey and hear the sounds of the other’s pain, and it was a beautiful reveal that we were all in it together.  That if any one of us wasn’t there, going through what we were individually undertaking then the nexus as it was would not exist and this particular work, in this particular way at that exact moment could not happen.  I felt grateful to the people I was with, very much connected with them and in this gratitude was humility and compassion for us in our human state.  

One of the repeated motifs in the loop was to let the truth win and the fantasy fail. It was one of the indicators of how everything has been pulling to this point and that this point contained everything.  That this is the truth of all points.  Then I witnessed infinite parallels to this one point.  It was like the landing strip at the outside fire only this time it was linear going outwards, upwards and from both sides from this point in time.  It was again a form of choosing, this timeline, this point, this reality in the face of many and yet seeing that whichever I chose they contained the same truth as all the other realities. 

It also showed me the importance and relevance of jappa (repetition).  That the repetition is undeniable and necessary for growth.  That all things are simultaneously ancient and new.  Earlier at the outside fire I had shared to Raven that “I know what I am bringing through is so old so ancient” and at the time it seemed tiring, then something through the connection with the star-seed turned it around and I realised that because it’s so old it is new.  I spoke aloud that because “it is so old it is also so new” and the truth in this paradox was in that moment delightful, hilarious, it made me laugh. I got to see all is rebirthing the new from the old constantly.  

There was also a repeat motif in the loop of seeking to understand.  That I felt cerebrally good, better, when I felt there was a way out in the moments I understood.  Though, it was true that every time I remembered to use the repetition to go beyond the imprisoned sense of Groundhog day, by using what I had come to see and understand.  It also became true that the next thing that happened was understanding became a folly.  The understanding got me so far, but couldn’t reach me into full arrival, it was part and not the whole of the trajectory towards getting out of the continued loops.  I would rest prettily in gaining understanding, only to have a voice challenge the understanding as a need to let go of understanding.  It was at these points I let go and let God.  I trusted the medicine everywhere, the care everywhere, the love everywhere, this was the repetition I chose, fuelled by gratitude to help keep things real for me around the ultimate choice not to be stuck in the loop.  So the loop showed me the importance of positive repetition and the value in asserting, releasing and realising as an ongoing act.

The light was awesome.  At one point my water bottle was a firework of colours exploding off in different directions from it.  I saw that everywhere there are anchor points, and that we can consciously infuse these anchor points.  This is the same for sacred sites, they are infused, encoded consciously, and that the light of this is visible to us when we can see it.  

The Organising Energetic is Love, the Impetus is Growth

I don’t need to understand.  It is only the lived experience that brings the understanding (you can only teach what you know)  When I did get understanding it was with a precision that created an opening.  It showed that understanding is by its nature finite and its most winning quality is that it opens up space to go beyond being stuck.  I noticed there was a constant invitation not to get stuck in the understanding.  To take what I understood so as to move into the next iteration of the experience with less fear, less desire for an end.  With greater patience with the process.

In the last loop the voices gathered closer and closer until all I could do was be still and listen to their noise.  I felt I could love them.  Love my own desperation and listen beyond it.  Meet the noise and listen beyond it.

Everything at once and the one in everything.  The word.  The choice to give voice.  Choose which bit of the everything to give voice to and when.  The trust – trusting I don’t know. Knowing I don’t need to know. That I can listen for the right response at the right time to create and live in right-relationship.  

My time is now.  I have all-ways been working with, working for and working beyond this now.  It is the everything of me.  It is the ‘me’ of everything.  

I trust I am helped in so many ways to simply live this and serve through living this.  

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