After all, if

• tobacco is a carrier and amplifier of intention (a "power food"—it feeds whatever you give it to),
• the tobacco used to make commercial cigarettes carries and amplifies the intentions of the tobacco corporations to feed addiction to make more money, and
• the tobacco in cigarettes can be cleared of those intentions and imbued with your own intentions (to quit smoking or change your relationship to tobacco)

then it follows that the cigarettes you smoke can empower your intent to stop smoking them.

All it takes is a simple method of putting your intention into the cigarette before you smoke it.

I can see it going either of at least two ways:

1. "Quit smoking" within the current story of tobacco addiction.
   The tobacco empowers your intentions, so every time you smoke it either feeds the reality in which you're "addicted", or it feeds another such as your desire to "quit". You choose to use the tobacco to feed your desires for yourself to quit rather than the cigarette companies' desires for you to continue buying their product. After you successfully quit you still operate from a "tobacco bad/nonsmoking good" worldview that sees tobacco as only a negative.
2. Step into a different reality by replacing the "smoking bad/nonsmoking good" story with a different paradigm in which tobacco is a sacred ally.
   In this case, the tobacco still empowers your intentions, but your intention is to let go of any paradigm that sees tobacco as a negative in all ways and instead replace it with a perspective more in alignment with indigenous and shamanic uses of tobacco. In this perspective, tobacco is a helpful tool, a plant spirit to be respected and used in good ways. The concept of "addiction" doesn't have much meaning here; it's simply not how a person would work with the plant or treat its spirit.

On either route, it's probably helpful and more healthful to switch from conventional cigarettes (laced with an endless array of additives and chemicals) to pure tobacco. Since I'm not into commercial tobacco, the only brand I'm aware of is American Spirit, but there may be others.

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• formulating your intentions or desires
• empowering your intentions
• releasing those intentions into the universe of creation

I've found them to be quite powerful, especially within shamanic or entheogenic contexts.

1. Non-smoking method
   This method is touching and connective when done in groups, e.g. around a campfire, as prayers can be shared aloud with each other.
   1. Take a pinch of loose tobacco in your hand.
   2. Speak your prayer or intention into the tobacco.
   3. Toss the tobacco onto a fire to release your prayer into the universe.
2. Smoking method
   1. Hold a mapacho or cigarette in your hand (pure tobacco such as mapacho or American Spirit recommended). Blow into one end of the mapacho with the intent to clear it of any past prayers or intentions.
   2. Speak, sing, whistle, or blow your intentions into the tobacco. Sometimes I do a combination of these. Don't hold back or be timid—make your prayers powerful, respectful, heartfelt. You can pray for yourself and others, even the whole world. Sometimes when I'm praying for something that I want for myself I include everybody else in my prayer. For example, if I'm praying for prosperity I might pray for prosperity for all.
   3. Finally, light the tobacco and begin to smoke it. It's traditional to cheek smoke rather than inhale, or take the smoke into the stomach rather than the lungs. You don't have to smoke the whole thing. Smoke until you feel complete. You can use the remaining mapacho later for other prayers.

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Here are some of the ways tobacco is used in the forms of shamanism I've had experience with:

1. Offering
   Tobacco can be thought of the spiritual version of Popeye's spinach. It is like a nourishing food for energy. For this reason, it is left as an offering to trees and plants, or placed on altars for ancestors and spirits. It strengthens whatever it is fed or dedicated to.
2. Protecting and cleansing
   In the same way that it strengthens spirits, it can strengthen energies of protection. It can help define and protect a sacred space by blowing tobacco smoke in a circle around the room before ceremony. It is used at the end of ayahuasca ceremonies to cleanse each participant and close the ceremony. It's also used on its own for cleansings called limpias.
3. Empowering prayer and intention
   Tobacco is said to be a very strong carrier of intention. It's used to make the energies of one's prayers stronger, and to carry the prayers out on its smoke. In particular, I'm familiar with two ways to pray with tobacco, a smoking method and a non-smoking method.
4. Purging illness
   Tobacco is sometimes added to ayahuasca during the brewing process, which can make the medicine more purgative. Smoking mapacho during ceremony can help make a difficult purge easier. In general, discomfort and illness can often be addressed with it.

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That was the extent of my experience with tobacco when I arrived in Amazonian Peru at 28 years old. I had come to work with ayahuasca, and one of the first things our guide did was take us by the Belen marketplace where we bought mapachos, cigarettes rolled with N. rustica, the sacred jungle tobacco.

No on could seem to give me a really clear answer on what I was supposed to do with the mapacho. I was left with the vague impression that they could somehow be helpful in ceremony, but beyond that I was unsure. I didn't gain much more clarity that trip, although I did have my first few faltering experiences with this medicine.

Over the years, things have slowly unfolded. It's true that when you work with the plants, they will teach you themselves. These days I increasingly experience tobacco as an invaluable ally. This is in such contrast to the way I was raised to relate to tobacco, which has only been called further and further into question since I began working with mapacho.

What I haven't experienced with smoking mapacho in intentional ways is any kind of craving for or addictive quality to it. N. rustica is said to be several times more potent in terms of nicotine content than the N. tabacum found in commercial cigarettes, and yet the felt effects seem only mildly notable to me.

Thus I am having a difficult time imagining the appeal of smoking cigarettes in the first place while also questioning the narrative around its addictive potential. I am led to conclude that cigarette addiction in our culture must have more to do with cultural construction and/or chemical additives than with the tobacco itself.

A shamanic understanding of tobacco reveals an additional layer of the addiction dynamic however. It has been said that the tobacco used in commercial cigarette making magnifies the intentions of the corporations making them—and those intentions are to enslave people in addiction for the purpose of profit. Tobacco companies purposely set out to "feed the spirit of addiction in us" and their customers pay them for it.

Notice how "quitting smoking" is a construct of our current mainstream reality tunnel. Within a different set of stories, stories in which tobacco is a sacred helper, "smoking" and therefore "quitting smoking" don't even exist as they exist within our culture. Waking up from the mainstream reality into a different relationship with tobacco could prove much easier than "quitting smoking" by obviating the addiction story entirely.

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It was totally the conference we needed to have at the time for ourselves, personally. It was such a period of crystallization for me around values, identity, etc.

But it got me thinking, what kind of conference do I really need most now?

I feel like it would be an integral Solutions For the World type of event. Mental health, spirituality, shamanism, personal health and fitness, social and economic justice, environmental sustainability, and resilience in all of those things. What would it be like to bring the best in all of those together?

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We eat it in restaurants and grocery stores, rub it on our skin, pump it in and out of our cars, install it in our homes and institutions... and pay for the "privilege" all along the way...

So many of us are complacent and complicit. And really fixing it means completely changing almost everything about life as we currently know it.

Ready? Set. Go!

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As Hugh Milne writes in The Heart of Listening, the mandible "is the bone most associated with the individual's sense of who he is. Since the head itself is the very totem of selfhood, all cranial bones are associated with identity, but the mandible personifies it."

How much jaw tension, teeth grinding, TMJ, and headache is about affronts to our identity, dissonances between sense of self and the world around us, or bound up in the oppression felt by many minority groups?

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Integral theory’s quadrants model readily lends itself to tarot. A lot has been written about the quadrants, so this will be a very brief overview.

What are the 4 Quadrants?

The quadrants are a way of looking at any person, event, or situation in terms of four key aspects:

• Individual & Collective — everything is both an individual and part of a group
• Interior & Exterior — everything has an inner, subjective aspect and an outer, objective aspect.

Putting these four together allows us to look at a comprehensive snapshot of any subject of a tarot reading:

That's great, but how do I interpret the cards?

Here’s one way to describe the quadrants, in terms of reading this spread for a person:

1. Upper Left: Individual Interior
   Keyword: Awareness
   The person’s subjective experience and development, including awareness, sense of self, consciousness, and psychological and spiritual development. How does this person feel? What does she value? What is he aware of?
2. Upper Right: Individual Exterior
   Keyword: Behavior
   The person’s objective physicality and behavior. Anything that can be measured, cut open and observed, and seen by others directly. What does this person look like? How healthy is he? What is she doing, how does she behave?
3. Lower Left: Collective Interior
   Keyword: Culture
   The person’s cultural situation, including interpersonal life, relationships in terms of group dynamics, shared values and meaning, conflicts. What culture does this person come from? How are his values shaped by those around him? What are  the power dynamics?
4. Lower Right: Collective Exterior
   Keyword: Systems/Environment
   The person’s social and environmental situation, including home, neighborhood,  job, pollution, economy, etc. Where does this person live? In what type of society? Does he have a a suburban home or a grass hut? Does he drive a car on paved roads or ride pack animals on dirt roads? What is the government like that she lives under? What kinds of institutions does his society have?

Four aspects of one thing

All of these four aspects arise together and impact one another. Some examples:

• Relationship trouble in the lower left (interior collective) might show up as unhappines in the upper left (my individual feelings), aggressiveness or withdrawal in the upper right (my behavior), and fights with my spouse in the lower right (my social reality).
• A person undergoing psychotherapy and seeing positive results could be reflected as both forward movement in the upper left (my individual psychology) and smarter behavior in the upper right (what I do differently as a result of my upper left development).
• Conflicts between two or more quadrants: if I'm an arrogant donkey, my upper left may look very positive (the way I see myself) but my lower left may look the opposite (others see me negatively and so my relationships are a mess).

What about subjects that aren't people?

It can be tricky when learning the quadrants to apply them to subjects other than people. For example, we're not used to thinking of  objects as having an interior.

Objects

1. Upper left: from a shamanic or psychic perspective, the object's "spirit" or "identity". In aesthetics, the aspect of beauty that is "in" the object rather than culturally constructed.
2. Upper right: the object's physical construction and condition. What is it made out of? What are its properties (physical, chemical, etc)? How old is it? Is it well kept or in disrepair?
3. Lower left: what the object means in culture, either its culture of origin or the culture it's in now. Is it a sacred item? Was it a sacred item in the past, but now it's simply a cultural or scientific curiosity? Does it have sentimental value?
4. Lower right: how and where the object is actually being used or disused. Where is the object? Who and what is around it? How is it used or not used? Is the environment or use appropriate to this object?

In the case of a stolen car, the right hand quadrants might be more helpful: upper right corresponds to the car's current condition, lower right corresponds to the car's environment and where it is right now.

Events/Situations

1. Upper left: what's the feel of the event (the "vibe" or energy of the occasion)? Full of positive feelings and life like a party? Serious and focused like a good business meeting? Chaotic and unproductive like a bad business meeting? Dour and emotional like a funeral?
2. Upper right: what happened or is happening? If a scientist observed the event, what would she be able to see, detect, measure, or describe? Who is there? What do they do and not do?
3. Lower left: what is the meaning of this event? How do the people, organizations, and events in relationship to this event feel about it? For example, while the upper left aspect of a political event might be very conservative, serious, and straightforward, the lower left might include controversy, protest, and some chaos.
4. Lower right: what is the context of this event? Where does it occur? How does it fit into the social systems around it? What is its environment and how does it relate to its environment? If anthropologists from another planet observed this event what could they say about it in terms of the big picture of society?

What would you like to know now?

Thanks for reading! I know from my own experience learning the four quadrants model (and I'm still learning!) that it's not always easy. But this is a valuable spread, and worth the effort.

What questions are you left with? What parts of this post could be more clear? Please tell me below in the comments!

Did you try this spread? How did it work for you? When you try this spread, I would love to hear about it. Please feel free to post experiences/readings below as well.

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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.

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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.

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