Can you see that you are squeezed between rocks? If you open the door, you enter a tunnel. Now what guides you?
I’ve been sitting with the question of where plant medicine fits into our current culture. I’ve been working with these herbal allies since I graduated school, and needed to free myself from the uniform. They always offered me guidance, clarity, and a sense of home inside my well-worn body. ‘My’ trauma story, and cellular fear state has now been turned into a spacious, peaceful super power by the side of these plant teachers. I have been consciously eating neurognostic herbs, also known as entheogens, for over 10 years, well before it was spoken of in the media outside of racially driven fear mongering B.S (let’s be frank). But now, things are exploding. Things are changing, as they do, and our ideals around the placement of the past must also. So where does the entheogenic apothecary fit into the book now? How can we utilise plant medicine as herbal medicine?
Is it the new non-denominational church? A spiritual hack main-lining the God of many faces? Is it a bypass to one’s own spiritual development, a Sunday cheat-code to ‘do the work for you’ in the moment, and leave you alone and lonely between discourses? Is it medicine for the sick? A map home for lost souls? Initiations into adulthood? Rites of passage for the young? A repair mechanism for brain damaged & addiction burned synapses? A nervous system reboot & repair? A trauma counsellor to teach how to feel & re-inhabit the body? A miracle worker? A death mentor? WHAT ARE YOU!!! These things I see. But seeing does not make it only so.
What I actually see happening in these shamanic spaces, is the mind that reigns over the body, being taken beyond its own container, through a rapid detox of its own self-limiting beliefs, into true alignment with the nature of reality. Direct perception of life; with as little filters as the eye can blink into being. From here, spirit enters the body, or begins to come home, allowing the body to self heal in the wave-yet-broken into being. But to drop into the containment of the universe, outside of form, means that the old set and setting tune we sing, is so incredibly relevant to the outcome. You cannot hold yourself in hands descended from heaven, if you are in the hands of a 4 walled building. You cannot remember yourself as soil born, without giving yourself over to the Earth in your moment of mania. Space. Spaciousness. Outside time. This is where we heal. This is where we remember how to breath. Not all people are made of the resiliency that trauma etches into you. Not all people have been chiselled from the walls pressed in on them. These self-initiatory experiences take you to the very brink of you, they break you, and you reassemble.
My concern is that these natural medicines live on the edges, not at the doorstep. Herbal medicine that is every day medicine grows readily in the backyard. Can we bring fringe-dweller plant medicine into the veggie gardens, dilute the potency and have positive outcomes? I don’t know.. What I do know is that you need to have the calling sickness to arrive here. And the way information is spreading around psychedelic plant medicine can make it accessible in ways that it has not been for some time, or ever on this level. The call comes from within. Discomfort is a part of this process.
Have you slept on the floor before? Have you kneeled on the wood? Have you gone without a blanket? Have you even skipped a meal before? Have you stopped for more than 10 minutes and just focused on being breathed? These things are so simply necessary. Maybe check that you know how to swim before jumping overboard.
That being said.. plant medicine has a way of shaking you up, whether you’re ready or not. And can you ever truly be ready to go through your own death simulation? I just think you wouldn’t sign up for a marathon, if you didn’t try a jog around the block first, or stretch beforehand. Muscles can be strained from too fast an expansion. All life has responsibility embedded into it. Something expands, and something else contracts. Which one are you?
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