Gratitude for life
Over fall equinox, huachuma helped me confront and deal with the powerlessness I felt during my grandma's dying process. In that, I recognized that the powerlessness we feel over someone's death is not different than the powerlessness we have over their lives. This is the corollary to the idea that we die the same way we live. How we live is our choice, and in some senses how we die is, often, our choice as well.
If I value letting go of trying to control other people's lives then I get to let go of all of the regrets I've entertained thinking that if I had only done something different, pressed harder, helped more, she might have lived healthier and died later, or at least better. My grandma died the same way she lived; she lived "by the book" and she died by the book too. The helpful measures I suggested weren't in it.
Talking with a friend Saturday night, I found that those regrets, while false, turned upon something true. The wish for her to live longer was and is a true and good thing. It's when it becomes expectation or demand that it crosses the line. I came to the conclusion that it's best to think of a person's life at each moment as a gift.
When a person gives us a series of precious gifts, we don't balk when they spend some of their energy elsewhere. We don't harangue them to reorganize parts of their lives so that they may enable themselves to give us even more. Nor do we consider it proper to resent them when they stop giving.
The last realization of the conversation was that if I looked in the mirror, it would be best to relate to my own life as a gift as well. This strikes me as the kind of "heart opening" effect the huachuma curandera said grief could have.
One day later and I'm talking with a different friend on Sunday night, who tells me about a dream he had about death, the punch-line of which is the appropriate response to receiving a gift: gratitude.
Next was my own dream, in which I felt a particular feeling, a feeling that I would soon read about in a blog post written by a cute bearish man in response to a question I asked him on Scruff (smartphone chat app for scruffy gay men). In my dream I remember thinking that if my life was a gift, being grateful for it would involve taking better care of myself. As his post says, "[G]ratitude is not just a mental exercise. Gratitude is both attitude and action." He writes about the actions he takes in response to his gratitude for his car. What kinds of actions would most appropriately reflect your gratitude for your life? This 3-minute Uzazu practice video I received in my email recently might help you embody it.
I'm enjoying how these learnings are unfolding over a series of different conversations and synchronous events, across various relationships and media. It's like my life is a novel and the cosmos has introduced a new theme.
Good medicine: huachuma
I recently had the privilege of participating in some huachuma ceremonies. Huachuma is a cactus native to the Peruvian Andes that has been used for healing and spiritual purposes for thousands of years. After working with it, I can understand why. Among other things, huachuma is a master heart opener and emotional healer. I think I'd like to work with it for a couple thousand years myself.
The medicine is masculine, which we can compare to ayahuasca's feminine. Ayahuasca is often called Mother or Grandmother; huachuma is called Grandfather. I found huachuma to be very straightfoward; with ayahuasca the phrase "feminine wiles" is an understatement. Ayahuasca is a vine that grows with twisting, sensuous curves; huachuma is a columnar cactus that grows straight up toward the sun like an erect penis. As a gay man, I felt very at home with it.
Unlike ayahuasca, which is almost always used at night, huachuma can be used during the day. The ceremonies can start in the morning and stretch into the night. When done during the day, the ceremonies are about celebration, connection, and community. They have less structure than nighttime ceremonies and we were able to explore the natural environment, talk with each other, and partake in different types of Andean healing.
The ceremonies started with a tobacco medicine called singa. This is a tobacco juice mixture that is taken nasally. A small amount of the liquid is poured into a conch shell, the tip of which is inserted into the nose then tilted back to send the medicine down the nasal passages into the back of the throat where it is swallowed. Each nostril has a purpose in the ritual, with the left side used for releasing negative energy and the right for receiving goodness. The entire procedure looked more terrifying than it actually was. If you have any experience with neti pot practice singado is not much different. The medicine has a bit of a burn in the throat, but not bad. Singa clears the sinuses, gets you present, and opens up the way for the huachuma medicine.
After singa came the huachuma, which was served as liquid. It was basically cactus juice, although I don't know all the details that go into the shamanic preparation of it. The taste was mild with some bitterness, and much easier to get down than ayahuasca. The effects can take a long time to come on, although I found myself in slightly non-ordinary reality within an hour. My experiences were mild, with some difficulty walking at times, increased sensitivity, and a gentle opening of my emotional process.
I discovered that my grieving process has been stuck as the huachuma released it; I had been stuck in the powerlessness I felt during my grandmother's dying. The second night I confronted the self-hatred I've been carrying around, traced its origins back to childhood, and left with some simple practices to begin shifting the patterns of fear and distrust that have kept me living as a smaller person than I know myself to be.
During the day we experienced flower baths, "the original aromatherapy", in which massive amounts of colorful petals are infused in a large tub of water with great joy and love and pints of this mixture are poured over participants' heads. I was skeptical of the ability of this simple rite to have any real effect, but the shift in my interior experience was immediate, unmistakable, and difficult to describe other than to call it delicious. It brought me up above the challenging aspects of the medicine so that I could enjoy the experience even as I faced some hard self-work.
I practiced some craniosacral therapy while in the medicine. It was amazing, much less subtle an experience than usual. And working with people when they are so open and more able to let go facilitates the work. I can't wait to do more.
At night we gathered around a campfire. Such joy, people singing songs, offering poetry, telling jokes. It was like ILALI's Metaphor*phosis event, an event I didn't realize could have been even better, but all you have to do is add a campfire and huachuma and you have a recipe for an experience that I would gladly welcome as the default for a good weekend the way some people go out on the town every week.
The day after came the despacho, a closing ceremony and gift back to the earth. Led by the facilitator, the group created a mandala of flowers, candy, and symbols to express gratitude for what we had received. The despacho gets bundled up in gift wrap and then used in a final cleansing of each participant before being offered to the earth along with offerings of alcohol and food. The despacho is said to help restore the balance between humans and the planet by giving back some of all that we receive.
Receive we did. It's hard to quantify "how much" one receives from a particular plant medicine experience and so difficult to compare experiences. What I can say is that not only did I receive so much from working with this plant, I was also able to consciously understand what I was receiving which is not always the case in medicine work. Sometimes I don't know what I've received from ayahuasca until months later, so a lot depends on trusting the medicine. In this case though I left with immediate gratitude and gifts aplenty.
I'm left thinking that huachuma would be an excellent introduction to plant medicine work for the inexperienced. While some participants did have a more challenging time, overall it seems that its gentleness and straightforwardness makes it less overwhelming and confusing than other plants, and the freedom of the looser ceremony might be easier for a beginner to deal with than more structured traditions.
Watch interesting videos, raises money for a good cause
A MAPS benefactor has agreed to donate $1 every time someone watches a video in their Psychedelic Science conference archive. This means that you can raise money to give people psychedelic drugs (legally no less) just by doing what you already do online (i.e. watch videos constantly, judging from your Facebook).
I know it's not nearly as good as raising money to give YOU psychedelic drugs, but it's the next best thing.
Click play on the video to the right to automatically trigger a $1 donation to SCIENCE!, and then go watch the rest of the videos in the archive to trigger more. They've got neat stuff on using psilocybin to treat OCD, Alex and Allyson Grey on Better Religion Through Science and Art, and more.
On ayahuasca and spiritual bypassing
ISE2 only touched on the issue of spiritual bypassing briefly, but that was enough to remind me that I've been meaning to write about some issues in modern ayahuasca use. In short, spiritual bypassing is the use of spiritual concepts to avoid dealing with your shit. Examples include rationalizing issues away with ideas such as "it's all an illusion anyway" or ignoring things by telling yourself, "God will handle the details." Similarly, it is dangerous to believe that ayahuasca practice alone will cover all your bases. This also applies to work with other plant medicines such as mushrooms.
Ayahuasca is powerful in so many ways—from physical and psychological healing to spiritual development and more—that it can be tempting to think of it as all-powerful, or at least close to it. When I first saw Ken Wilber categorize ayahuasca as an Upper Left quadrant practice I resisted at first—after all, ayahuasca is a powerful practice that has positive impacts in all four quadrants. But then again, so does meditation.
The parallel extends into, for example, the criticism that UL practice alone is not enough to address injustice in the Lower Left quadrant: all the meditation in the world doesn't wake an ancient Chinese monk up to the fact that his culture is horribly sexist. Similarly, years or decades into ayahuasca practice, curanderos regularly get into trouble with scandal around sexual misconduct and ego issues around money, power, and fame. Just like the eastern gurus we've read about in the papers for decades.
So I had to accept that, in this respect, ayahuasca is more similar than not to meditation practice. Something I hear from people who work with plant medicine is, "The plant takes me right where I need to go, even if it's not where I want to go," but I think this is a function not just of the plant but of the individual working with it and that person's willingness to go where they need to go. The people who say things like that tend to have some experience (often plenty) delving into their uncomfortable places; some have even reached an attitude of fearlessness and eagerness toward shadow work. Of course plant medicine takes them to these places when they need to. But not everyone shares these experiences. Many find their resistance to doing their work still intact even after multiple ceremonies. Sometimes the plant tries to take them where they need to go but all they get is a tummy ache from resisting and they wonder why the plant didn't work for them.
This is why it can be so valuable to work with ayahuasca within a traditional lineage, such as the Shipibo or other tribes, or a community such as the Santo Daime. A teacher or community that has been there before can guide you around and through such traps. Often they are also better able to see our shit than we are. If working with a group is not feasible, supplement your ayahuasca practice with regular shadow work: engage with a psychotherapist, trusted spiritual teacher, integral life practice group, whatever works. But do it, and do it with a guide or teacher at least until you have enough experience under your belt to continue on your own.
As a nondual practice, ayahuasca will not solve your shadow problems unless you take it there intentionally. Ayahuasca seems quite comfortable with shadow and darkness. It is a common mistake, especially among a certain kind of California New Ager, to assume that "there's nothing but the light."
As an UL practice, ayahuasca will not solve your LL cultural problems, although it can help if you are able to help yourself, if you direct it there and have LL tools under your belt to help you.
As a spiritual practice, ayahuasca will not solve your psychological and other problems unless you are ready and able to go there. The more skillful you are with your own psyche outside of ayahuasca, the more you will get out of your ayahuasca experiences.
In the words of my grandma, a woman who trusted God deeply but never forgot her own responsibility, "God helps those who help themselves."
Awakening the Dreamer, Changing the Dream
When I first heard about the Awakening the Dreamer, Changing the Dream Symposium, I went to the website, decided it didn't look integral enough, and forgot about it… until I heard Lynne Twist, co-founder of the Symposium's parent organization The Pachamama Alliance, speak at the Green Festival.
She inspired me to check it out, and after attending my first symposium I realized that it was good enough, being continually improved, and more importantly it is already here, now. I'm not aware of any fully integral programs for educating and mobilizing the public to solve global issues—yet!—but right now you can search for symposia to attend all over the world!
And while the Symposium is not explicitly integral, they've got the Big Three covered—the program focuses on the interconnections of three crises the globe now faces: spiritual fulfillment (I), economic and social justice (We), and environmental sustainability (It). Not only does the Symposium cover them, it gets that the three arise together and thus these issues are not actually separate issues.
The arc of the Symposium addresses all three as it covers
- Where we are now—what do these crises look like?
- How we got here—how did they happen?
- What's possible—can we change them?
- Where do we go from here—how do we make the change?
The intention is to awaken people to the global crisis we all find ourselves in, but more importantly to awaken a sense of themselves as an agent of change in resolving that crisis. In short, you have a role in the global crises that you may not have been aware of and thus a role you can take consciously in undoing them.
What I like most about the Symposium is its shamanic origin. This bears mentioning given recent discussions regarding the importance of shamanism in solving global problems. The Pachamama Alliance was created in response to a call from an indigenous, ayahuasca using tribe in the Amazon. Looking to protect their way of life, the shamans had seen that what needs to change is "the dream of the North", the cultural programming and assumptions that result in the erosion and destruction of our bodies, minds, spirits, communities, and planet. The biggest threat to indigenous populations is US and our unsustainable mindsets, beliefs, practices, and policies. The biggest threat to everybody on the planet, including ourselves, is us.
Awakening the Dreamer, Changing the Dream is about changing that, starting with YOU when you sign up and attend a Symposium.
The importance of language preservation
This passage in The Shamanic Wisdom of the Huichol made me think of the work that the Where Are Your Keys? folks are doing to preserve languages in the world.
Recommended events: April 2010
Lots of neat stuff going on in April!
Green Festival Spring
April 10th & 11th
San Francisco, CA
Previously yearly, now the Green Festival is a biannual event in SF! The speakers at this festival are absolutely top notch. Totally inspiring and educational.
Psychedelic Science Conference
April 15th–18th
San Jose, CA
The largest conference of its kind, with world-famous presenters (Dr. Andrew Weil, Alex Grey, Erowid, Ralph Metzner, more) and an entire track dedicated to ayahuasca.
Seeding Gift Culture
April 15th–18th
Philo, CA
A retreat with Charles Eisenstein, author of The Ascent of Humanity. This looks choice. Are you ready to start telling a new story about yourself and the world? A sustainable story full of life? This looks like the place to start, or strengthen, a truly better world for yourself and your children's children.
Integral Anatomy Class
April 17th
San Francisco, CA
A one day intensive with Gil Hedley, creator of Integral Anatomy.
Earth Day 2010: Creating a Healthy Future—Where Do We Go From Here?
April 21st
Berkeley, CA
Do not miss this. This is your chance to see the preview video for Four Years. Go. the exciting new ad campaign that Pachamama Alliance is helping to spearhead.
World Change Conference
April 24th–May 2nd
Berkeley, CA
Looking at the lineup of teachers (Joanna Macy, John Kinyon, Starhawk, Kevin Danaher, more), one immediately sees that this conference means business. Organized by my amazing friend Slav of Common Circle Education.
The Feminine Fire: Power and Leadership with Sobonfu Some
April 30th
San Francisco, CA
Sobonfu was in a video we watched in Pediatric Craniosacral class. She was delightful; I'd love to see her speak in person. Her work involves ritual, community, welcoming children into the world, and more.
Upcoming ayahuasca talk in San Francisco, Feb 18
A co-participant from an ayahuasca ceremony I was in sent me a link to the following talk at the San Francisco Botanical Garden:
Encompassing the Amazon: Ayahuasca, Vegetalismo and Cultural Survival
a special presentation by Susana Bustos, Ph D. & Robert Tindall, author
Thu, Feb 18, 7:00pm–8:30pm
Importantly, the website says they will address "the role this ancient medicine can play in healing our contemporary ecological crisis."
Sounds great! I'm going to be there if I can make it.
More info:
Blog of the presenters: http://www.roamingthemind.com
Book of one of the presenters: The Jaguar that Roams the Mind.
Who else wants to know about the fourth pillar of sustainability?
If you stick with me here, I'll take you from Greek theatre all the way to good nutrition, tying it all together through sustainability along the way. In the end you'll know about the fourth pillar of sustainability and why it's important for you and everybody else.
So to start, two of the Greek entertainment traditions that were held as muses in their own right, Comedy and Tragedy, could seem confusing. If Muses contribute to sustainability, how does Tragedy help us?
Thoughts on purging in ayahuasca
I just had the experience of posting a reply on a forum, and then immediately thinking "That could have made a good blog post."
So, a link: some thoughts on purging in ayahuasca, in which I compare my experiences of the purge to bodywork and board games.
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