Wrestling with how preverbal experiences become symbolized into words, he and his team decided to head over to the psychology department to analyze therapist-patient sessions recorded on tape.

After analyzing thousands of sessions they discovered something profound.

They could predict the success or failure of the therapy from the start just by analyzing the early interviews, with less than a thousand-to-one chance of the finding being accidental.

How?

What was this insight?

What they found was that a client’s ability to realize lasting positive change in psychotherapy depended on their ability to access a nonverbal, bodily feel of the issues that brought them into therapy.

Not the therapist’s technique, not will power, but what the patient does inside himself during the sessions that success or failure depends.

This is the missing piece.

During this workshop you will be invited to learn and sharpen this necessary skill.

More than that you will go through an entire ‘Radical Undoing’ session that has the potential to eliminate years of tension in an hour.

After the session we will hang out and answer all of your questions and give you specific exercises suited to your particular situation and goals.

We will discuss the 4 aspects to our training and give you something from each category to take home:

• Somatic Work

• Cognitive Exercises

• Adventures

• Journaling

You will understand what it takes to actually move through your problems rather than endlessly analyzing them.

And you will leave with a significantly higher amount of vitality and clarity to know what the next step on your path is.

We look forward to seeing you inside.

The investment: $100

What you get:

• Live 2-hour workshop (possibly longer depending on how many questions), recorded so you can rewatch anytime. (You won’t find this work on YouTube)

• A general understanding of “somatics” and what it requires to finally make the change that changes everything

• A glimpse into our training methods so you can become your own teacher/healer/coach

• Discounts on future trainings

• All of your questions answered by 2 guys who’ve made all the mistakes for you and with more than 35 years in the healing, somatic, therapeutic, seeking, you name it, space

The Next Step

If you’re ready to stop searching DM or e-mail me ‘Im In” to get started.

There will be a special offer to continue working with us for those who attend the workshop.

Regardless of whether you decide to work with us after the workshop, you will leave with a new set of tools and understanding to become a more effective human being and take the next step on realizing your full human potential.

Peace.

Chris and Garrett.

Trazodone: 50mg as needed for sleep

Propranolol: 30mg twice a day

Duloxetine: 40mg in the morning

Gabapentin: 300mg twice a day

This is what they sent my brother and client home on after what I would call a spiritual emergency.

Seems a bit overboard for someone who just thought he was the antichrist for a little while.

I use humor to soften the anger that I feel.

And it was anger that exploded out of him when I told him bluntly.

“They don’t believe in healing.”

“They don’t believe in healing, fuck, you’re right.” he said. He feels it in his soul that this is wrong and yet, what to do when everyone around you says you need this.

I’m sure some do. Believe in healing that is.

But in general, their goal is not healing, which may require a period of getting worse before getting better, which may not be pretty or comfortable for whoever is involved.

Their goal is “stability.”

Who has time for healing? We gotta get back to work!

I remember a bioenergetic therapist of mine recommended during a more manic period in my life that maybe I should consider drugs.

I looked at him confused, “I need to heal, whatever I need to go through.”

“Yeah, but do you have time for that?” He responded.

Seriously?

Maybe I’m an idealist, maybe you should put your healing on hold to keep the peace at your job and with your family?

What do you think?

Well, my conversation with my client yesterday inspired a live stream I did with where we talk about all of this and more.

Chris has spent the last 15 years moving through yoga and eastern methods of healing and self-exploration, psychedelics and plant medicine shamanism and somatic based practices. He now brings those tools together to help people reconnect with their bodies and their own capacity to heal —outside the limits of a system that too often treats symptoms instead of people.

Curious what this looks like in practice? Shoot me a DM and let’s have a conversation.

I’ve put together a shortened version of my usual 3-month container for 4 people who are serious about their healing and taking their life and practice to the next level.

I filled one of those spots today. 3 spots left.

Talk soon.

Peace.

—Chris

I heard a quote like the one above early on in my spiritual journey and thought yeah, I get it. I encountered the Buddhas noble truth that life is suffering (or at least, unsatisfactory) and that the root of this suffering is desire.

Made sense.

Wu Wei and “getting out of your own way.”

Yeah, yeah…ok ok.

But how?!

I started meditating in my late teens, early twenties. I loved it, I would sit for up to two hours for a while, which, without any teacher, knowing what I know now was probably not the best way to begin.

My room was in the basement, no windows, so it would be pitch black. I remember getting so sensitive that when the house creaked it would hit my body like bolt of lightning and I would get extreme tingles through my entire body.

I looked forward to coming home from school and just sitting still in the darkness, mostly for the sake of the physical pleasure that it brought on. Usually, it would take about 20-30 minutes for the body to settle and that pleasant heaviness would arrive and the general sense of satisfaction.

But I digress…

I heard Bishop Barron say, when contrasting Christ’s teaching against Buddha’s, that the Buddhist seeks to extinguish suffering (impossible even if it were desirable, see part of the problem?), whereas a Christian’s aim is to transform it.

Perhaps an oversimplification of the Buddhist perspective.

But I think it checks out, we should get rid of the idea that we’re going to get rid of desire.

The idea is to desire higher and higher things.

All in service of the highest thing, the highest good.

God, by definition, right Dr. Peterson.

Now one aspect of this desiring, that I think both Buddhists and Christians agree with and have rightfully arrived it is grasping.

More than desiring, it’s the grasping (bracing and the holding onto) that causes our suffering.

I think that almost all of us are holding onto something unnecessarily right now.

In many cases, not only unnecessarily, but the very thing we are holding on to is unreal.

It is insubstantial or downright illusory.

One thing anyone who has gotten better at anything learns (though it might be most pronounced in certain sports or playing an instrument), is that in the beginning you always do too much.

Moshe Feldenkrais calls this parasitic action that is the sign or manifestation of cross motivation.

We lack the awareness and therefore control to differentiate, inhibit and activate the right muscle at the right time.

It was with the *Feldenkrais method that I really started to understand (by the way, understanding used to imply embodiment, I’m not sure what happened) all of this stop trying, “non-doing” stuff.

*He was a judo master, an engineer and a physicist btw.

I started to get at this unconscious drive to succeed, to do better, to get it right, and therefore to be somewhere, to be, someone else. And only then, upon becoming aware at the deepest level could I start to let it go.

Many of us have been holding on for so long that it’s become invisible to us. I want to help you discover where that is and help you to let it go so you can regain the vitality, clarity and spontaneity that is your birthright.

**If you consider yourself a practitioner of any kind, I want to hear from you.

I’m looking to take on a few more clients.

If you feel that dissonance between who you are and who you are meant to be, don’t wait. Shoot me a DM and we’ll see if we’re a good fit.

And if you’re not interested in a coach right now, shoot me a DM anyway and tell me how you relate to this article.

Thanks for reading.

Peace.

Origins: The Seeds of ‘Forbidden Fruit Syndrome’ and Mask #1.

“The key to joy is disobedience.” —Aleister Crowley

There were two songs that gripped me as a kid; six, maybe seven years old.

1. “Don’t Take the Girl” by Tim McGraw

and

2. “Gangster’s Paradise” by Coolio

I would ride my mountain bike with a speaker attached to it and listen to this country song. I didn’t need to know exactly what it was all about for it to evoke a sense of longing, a deep sadness that threatened to drown my little self with tears.

The other song evoked something else…

Another image:

I’m on my top bunk, a little house on LaSalle Street in south Warren, Michigan; Sony Walkman on, headphones in, the gritty lyrics over the crisp, haunting strings saturating my young and sensitive soul.

“They say I got to learn but nobody’s here to teach me, if they can’t understand it, how can they reach me? I guess they can’t, I guess they won’t, I guess they front, that’s how I know my life is out of luck, fool.” —Coolio

This was probably my first time entering into a trance.

And yet, I also get the sense, looking back, that I was coming “online.”

I must have listened to it 4 times in a row that first time.

I had traded my Mortal Kombat Cheat code magazine that I bought at Arbor drug store for $10 to my older friend Jason for an Avon size box full of cassette tapes; the same size box that my grandma would fill with Goosebump books a couple years later as my favorite Christmas present probably to this day.

Anyway, it was filled with all the good stuff.

1. 2 Live Crew

2. Bone Thugs N’ Harmony

3. Tupac

4. ICP

5. Too Short

6. and more…

Jackpot.

How I got this box of tapes past my mom, and kept it hidden is beyond me.

She protected me…….from all the wrong things.

And so, the sappy (and white) country song faded into the background (in fact I came to despise country music), and with it the sensitive boy; and the hard (and black) music grew and with it, the kid who based his identity on being tough and cool, sowing the seeds of Mask #1.

I grew up in a time and place where being soft and being a “fag” were the two things that were unacceptable.

“I’m not no tough guy, I’m terrified. I live fear. Look at me if you think anybody’s afraid of me, 'I’m probably a thousand times more afraid of them than they are of me. That’s why I’m more aggressive than they are.” —Mike Tyson

That is, of course, how it works.

We all know why the little guy gets a big truck.

So, I joined the wrestling team. I went undefeated my first year, not because I was good, but because I wanted the match to be over with as quickly as possible!

Couple that with my dad, a 3rd degree black belt, whose two ambitions in life were to be either as “big as Arnold or as bad as Bruce.” He of course, was more terrified of life than even I was and I saw through his mask pretty early on, so there was no chance of actually being fathered by this man. God bless him.

Nevertheless, as Jordan Peterson is quick to remind us, we all have to rescue our fathers from the ‘belly of the whale’ if we want to become real boys.

Funny (or not) enough, it was my dad who really got me into rap music.

Our favorite, Can’t C Me by Tupac.

“The blind stares of a million pairs of eyes looking hard but won't realize that they’ll never see the P! Bwaa Bwahhhhh… Give me my money in stacks and lace my bitches with dime figures real niggas fingers on nickel plated 9 triggers must see my enemies defeated I catch em’ while they coked up and weeded open fire now them niggas bleedin.” —2pac

What were you listening to at 11?

And so, until I was about 20, I listened to primarily black music.

Reggae, R&B, Hip-Hop.

There was no one talking to me about the harsh realities of life growing up and so, I made my reality harsh.

Role Models and Idols

Now, I wouldn’t say exactly that I wanted to be black.

But I wanted something that I perceived my black friends to have that I didn’t.

Here’s what it actually was; from The Ethics of Beauty…

“Also, when I was in high school, I didn’t have the language of moral luck but certainly felt my bad moral luck was not to have been born an African American. That seemed to me like the one American culture that had a cohesive identity, a proud experience of noble suffering, a music, and a way of life that were coherent and compelling. I was too young yet to see that America itself is such a culture, such a way of life.” —Timothy Patistas

Don’t you love when someone articulates precisely something that you went through?

Read more

If we perfect the energy of eros wisely, it will be available to empower our union with a monastic brotherhood or sisterhood, or with a husband or wife, but first of all with God. And through these choices, we will begin to find our total place in society and in the other world. Let me also just add that even for monastics, Chastity is inseparable from the mystery of gender—the other great terror of our contemporary culture.

The problem that the Church sees today is not firstly, the prevalence of extra-marital relations, but the death of genuine eros, without an eros that has matured through the struggle for Chastity, and that has grappled wisely with the challenge of gender, no true agape, no empathy can arise. Sexual sin, which is exploitation of our neighbor and of the bodies and minds God gave us, besets and troubles us until we have acquired Chastity.

This is why Chastity is of life and death significance, not only personally, but for our Church and for our civilization without people whose sexuality is chaste social justice in the home and in society will be not only unattainable but unthinkable; for example, what kind of world can we provide our children when we cannot master our idolatries of sex, money, food, pleasure, luxury and 10,000 other things which occupy our eros set us at war with each other and weaken our families.” —Timothy Patistas from ‘The Ethics of Beauty’

Another quote that comes to mind when thinking of Chastity and the moralism that so many wrongly imagine Christianity to be…

“The means to destroy canons, as Kermode indicates, are very much at hand, and the process is now quite advanced. I am not concerned, as this book repeatedly makes clear, with the current debate between the right-wing defenders of the Canon, who wish to preserve it for its supposed (and nonexistent) moral values, and the academic-journalistic network I have dubbed the School of Resentment, who wish to overthrow the Canon in order to advance their supposed (and nonexistent) programs for social change.” —Harold Bloom from ‘The Western Canon’

I like this quote because I assume there are many out there, like I was, under the assumption that they know what the Bible(the hub of the western canon)was all about.

I didn’t need to read it, I’d heard enough to get the idea.

This quote also makes clear that this is above and beyond politics.

So the Bible, It’s like an outdated book of morals, like for when people needed someone to spell it out for them that killing=bad.

🤤

We’re so evolved now.

*Though our standards of morality and intelligence are 2000 or more years old but go ahead cling to your evolutionary theory and make it make sense. But I digress, personally I have room for both, religion, Orthodoxy and the discoveries of science but I don’t confuse their roles.

I know at least one other clever seeker, Russell Brand, whose journey mirrored mine in a lot of ways, said as much. He expected it(the Bible)to be about ethics, morality, and fairly obvious piety, and suspected it might feel a bit thin or “anemic” he told an interviewer.

His avoidance of the Bible and adoption of kundalini yoga and “new agey” spirituality however is more forgivable than mine.

I had come across the “western adepts” early on in my search for something deeper, who although deny the singularity of Christ or try to come up with some complicated explanation to make it make sense, see the Bible(along with the Tarot and the Great Pyramid) as a microcosm of creation.

So, I read everything but, circling the Bible, deep diving into Qabalah and the like, but never quite swimming into the source material.

All this to say…

You don’t know what Chastity is.

You don’t know what the Bible is.

And you don’t know what Christianity is.

Even if you’ve read the Bible front to back, if you haven’t read the saints, if you’re missing the Tradition, at best, you don’t have the full picture.

Let’s continue on from the original quote…

Not once in my decade plus long spiritual quest consider the concept of Chastity.

Truth is, my “spiritual” quest was, vainglory aside or perhaps not aside at all, really, more of an intellectual quest.

But more on that later, because many of you are in the same boat.

I’ve talked to many “life coaches”, many “spiritual” folks, who still watch porn and masturbate, whose relationships are a mess or who once a couple drinks get in em reveal the unchaste college kid under the mask, some of whom don’t even see it as a problem or didn’t until relatively late on their path.

Just look at the downfall of practically every eastern guru who came to the west to sell their brand of enlightenment.

Lust.

I’m not judging anyone, I have my own version. Everyday is a battle, seems I lose to my passions most days. Fortunately, porn and masturbation were relatively easy to drop because I saw that it was cheating on my wife and she wouldn’t have it and I couldn’t lie about it.

Gluttony in the broadest general sense had its hook deeper in me.

I see now, the fundamental truths behind these words that we have received from Christianity, idolatry, sin, meekness, chastity, etc.

All this psycholigization, and “esotericism”, did little more than muddy the water, over complicate the path and ultimately lead many astray.

Chop wood, carry water.

Few men fulfill the 10 commandments. Few men love God with all of their heart.

So few in fact, that those who get there receive the title of ‘saint.’ The funny thing, the sad thing, the I don’t know how to feel about thing is that they’re not supermen.

Just complete men.

It’s often the case that those who we deem as saints are simple people, often lacking in formal education. This shouldn’t surprise us.

Christ said only those who become as little children shall enter the kingdom of heaven.

This is a verse I take to heart.

A quick prayer break…

lord remove the judgments, remove the complexities from me, God my God make me new.

We are the people of the pendulum.

Go too far in one direction, we overcorrect and throw babies out with bath water.

The semen retention bros, a phase in every earnest young male seekers life, intuit the power of Chastity. But like all the other “spiritual” practices that are en vogue now, it has become disconnected from its proper place in the hierarchy of Theosis. And so instead of softening our hearts, we fast to become ‘breatharians’ and hold our semen in to become supermen.

*Only one, maybe two perspective switches are necessary to drop your shitty attitude toward Christianity. All of the virtues celebrated by the Christian we are all attracted to and celebrate when we see them in earnest. (And are all equally disgusted when not or faked, more so when faked.)

To understand this is to understand Christianity is not about morals, it’s about anthropology, it’s about real human design.

No, you don’t need to know your stupid moon sign or if you’re a generator or a manifestor you self-obsessed fool!

Cultivate silence. Fast and pray. Create more than you consume. Put one foot in front of the other.

Nobody you look up to knew their fckin “human design.” Stop outsourcing your Wisdom. The same idiots who yell about no middleman cling to diagrams to tell them who they are.

Once you realize the truth of your situation you’ll get your ass in front of as many priests, spiritual fathers, confessors, mentors, coaches as you possibly can.

And so, the reason we practice virtues is not to be virtuous, but to be like God.

To have integrity is to be rightly ordered, is to fulfill our design.

Which is why compulsive “goodness” is a problem. Ol’ Crowley got that right, get the false morality out of your system, better to work with a an honest animal than a pretend saint.

We’re sick. Not bad.

“New Age” medicine tastes sweet going down.

Gradually, it turns bitter.

But we’re so damn thirsty from our secular materialist culture that we’ll take the swamp water of new age, occultism, etc….and worse, we’re so lacking in discernment we call anything that’s a little extra-ordinary God.

—Well, what can you expect when you say things like “God, the universe, evolution, or whatever you want to call it”?

*There’s a big difference btw between meeting someone where they’re at and being unclear about the distinctions between the words I listed above and their implications.—

But we’re comfy in our cognitive dissonance.

Plus, Christianity has become so diluted in the west, we’ll take anything as long as it has a little bit of flavor, a little potency.

Orthodoxy, on the other hand is bitter medicine, but it will, eventually make you sweet.

I’m not there yet.

I remember talking to a friend about all this, one who, like so many, like me, had fully digested the gnostic lie, the zeitgeist take on Christ, first put forth fully by J. G. Frazer in his ‘The Golden Bough’ and then gradually becoming the normative western esoteric take.

Just another version of the same story.

What he confessed to me, what burst out of him, was something like “why would a God call us to be perfect if we can’t do it!” I wish I remembered exactly what he said, because it was honest and understandable and showed not so much a rebellious soul but a disappointed one.

How often is this the case?

Now, the right understanding is the one that JRR Tolkien helped C.S. Lewis to see, the revelation that led his conversion, “Christianity is the myth that came true.”

“I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else" —C.S. Lewis

But of course we’re far smarter and wiser than C.S. Lewis with our deep study of all the great philosophers of antiquity, the great pagan myths through the whole western canon, scripture and not to mention the deep study of science, our mastery of Greek, Hebrew and Latin and the great literary imagination that we all possess and was nurtured in the first class education that we all received from our public school education….what could C. S. Lewis possibly have to teach us?

Nah we’d rather get all zealed out in our imagination on ‘The autobiography of a Yogi’ take mushrooms and change not at all.

The Church got it all wrong, no, the Church got it deliberately wrong and has been feeding us the lie to control the masses!

We come built in today with anti-church, anti-hierarchy, anti-authority sentiments.

And I get it.

The Postmodern, Marxist view on history, especially religion is the air we breathe, far more now than the unquestioned adherence to dogmas that it’s largely a reaction to.

“Religion is for those who are afraid of hell, spirituality is for those who’ve been there” is a phrase I’ve read a few times now.

Of course, like much in our world today, it’s perfectly upside down.

The individualistic “new age”, “spiritual”, “plant medicine path” could only have come about in a culture so shielded from real suffering that we have to seek it out and pay for it.

“Let me get the 10 day controlled suffering retreat, um I’ll pay extra for the suite and you have vegan options right?”

The lack of nuance in that phrase alone is profound, let alone the vague meanings we have for these words.

Spiritual and religious.

I asked threads today what is spirituality, first response…”talking to God without a middleman”

We’ll, get to that shortly.

And for those who are above the idiocy of that statement are often of the “well, whatever works for you” stock.

More poststructural/modernism of course.

But few go all the way in their deconstructionism.

They cut the branch off that they’re standing on but are totally fine with the cognitive dissonance that ensues being that we live so thoroughly in our heads, that we can go about with incompatible beliefs for decades before our spirit starts to object to the inconsistencies within us, especially when those inconsistencies are of the meta kind.

**There is a world of difference between understanding that God is inexhaustible and that any symbol you want to use to point to Him is equally valid.

A friend of mine after it was revealed to me who Christ was said something like “sometimes the og God makes more sense in peoples hearts.”

She came to the point where she no longer believed in objective truth. Too many “non-dual” experiences I suppose. The mark of “spiritual” progress in the New Age shamanic world that more often than not adopts a version of Buddhism for its worldview.

No authorities!

Oh except if he’s eastern and wears robes, I’ll shave my head and take vows with him.

I get that too.

Many things going on there but let’s keep moving.

Becoming a doctor, an engineer, any serious career, we accept apprenticeship but when it comes to God, the creator of all things.

“I’ll go it alone!” I don’t need a middleman!

God: “oh I can’t talk to Susie directly, she has a priest”

Oh, what does she have to do to talk to you directly.

God: eh just say, “I’m spiritual not religious.” That should do it, oh and crystals, crystals help.

Literally every Sunday, orthodox Christian’s go to church, fasted, ideally having cultivated some silence the previous night and all morning and participate in a ceremony to tune their mind to the Mind of God, with a fully coherent theology that culminates in the embodied participation in the mystery of mysteries in order to be gradually formed into the ‘shape of the God.’

“God became man, so that man could become God.”

What do you do on your Sunday morning my spiritual not religious friend?

“You guys worship him, we try to be like him.”

Lol.

it’s not even worth pointing out the silliness here, except, I carried around the same arrogance for more than 10 years.

The Devils smarter than us folks, worse, the more clever you are, so he be. And you don’t need to commit any great acts of evil, he’ll settle for wasting all of your time in the labyrinth of “esotericism.”

Unfortunately, there is no standing still, you’re either busy dying to yourself, or crystallizing your ego with all of your deep, esoteric downloads and amazing pattern recognition abilities.

Nothing is more addictive than something that almost works.

How many ayahuasca ceremonies I would taste for a moment what felt like total healing.

This must be the way!

“But even he said we’ll do greater things than him!” says the guy who’s still secretly struggling with lust or gluttony or some other sin of the left hand. I’m not judging, trust me, but the further you are from ground zero, let alone spiritually advanced the more deluded and fantastic are you about what’s possible or even whats desirable.

The ego, the old man, will do anything to avoid looking at himself.

The truth is like Father Turbo says…”you don’t want Christ!”

He’s right…we don’t want to be called to perfection, we certainly don’t want to look at ourselves in light of Him. So we lower our standards and raise raise the possibilities, which feels good, at first.

The ego is more than happy to get spiritualized.

I see many of my spiritually ambitious, seeker brothers inching their way closer to Christ, it’s becoming less about the plant medicine, the gene keys, human design, etc. and more about “the christed light,” “Christ consciousness” “the wisdom Jesus” and other such postmodern interpretations…Christ is calling us all home and He’ll use whatever means necessary, wherever we can hear Him, however often we misinterpret or run away.

When I finally saw, I had no desire initially to evangelize, unlike I did with psychedelics. Reflecting on the shape of my journey winding up in the last place I could’ve imagined. What could I possibly say to someone. How could I know what they needed…how God was working with them?

Later I read in the bible where Christ asks Peter who do you say that I am? and I realized, there is no reasoning your way to who Christ is.

It has to be revealed to you.

This of course is inherently offensive. And puts us in a similar bind as the Gnostic problem, well if you know you know and if you don’t well you’re not ready or something of the sort.

But this is perfectly coherent and necessary when you undo the “Gnostic wound” and switch your perspective from God as a what to God as a Who.

This was the switch I had to make in my being. Something I never seriously considered. And that was educated out of me as a yogi, occultist, where God is seen as a what, and the practices emphasize as much, from ceremonial magick down to its popular form for the masses “the law of attraction.”

Implied in all of this is a transactional God. If I just got my vibration just right then.

Manipulation.

Not, relation.

This is why Trinity. God is relational.

Of course He Is.

On my way to this realization I had to get it into myself that you only experience something in the particular.

You do not, cannot, know “people.” You can know Steve. You cannot help “the poor.” You can help the homeless guy who stands on the freeway. You certainly don’t love “the poor.” Though you might hate “the rich.” (Really, you have negative emotions in your body and it feels good to indulge them and direct them at whatever face represents the injustice that you pretend to yourself to care about to hide from what’s really going on, that you were a coward and never gave it all you got or something, but I digress.)

Forgive me.

There is of course a seed of truth in all of these things that I’m telling you are ultimately wrong. And the distinctions are subtle and yet of the utmost importance.

If your compass is just a little off, you will not be even close to the finish line when the marathon is over. And make no mistake folks. We’re in a marathon and the race that’s not a race is for Perception.

The crown of Wisdom.

DM me for somatic based coaching.

Peace.

VIII. I Hear You Moshe!

I took MDMA one more time after having become a catechumen and felt strongly that I got the message to burn all of my occult books.

I guess I’ll never know for 100% sure.

Then I put my psychedelic, shamanic, occultist past behind me, for the most part.

I held on to the Gurdijeffian/Naranjo/Perls lineage I had entered into for a bit; the Enneagram and Bioenergetics for a while.

I even started to build a course online integrating it into a system of personal development — but it all started to feel like unnecessary complexity (and lacking in coherence) in light of Christ and Orthodoxy.

Truth is, I should have let the whole of my previous life burn away and go quiet for a couple years.
I was burnt out; I had been muscling my way through life for I dunno, 20 years.

I was sick of books.
Sick of information.

Sick of thinking.

Everything that gave me meaning and excitement before no longer did.
But something told me to revisit Feldenkrais.

Thy Kingdom Come

When the persona I had built up over the last 10+ plus years shattered, I became
very aware of the degree to which I was in a constant state of low-level fight or flight.

I think many of us are, in today’s artificially high paced, false urgency, FOMO, caffeine fueled culture, but this was a little worse than that.

I probably never really came all the way down from those first few psychedelic trips.

I also became aware that I was a bit of chameleon, I used to think this was a good thing right, undefinable, open, kind of wild and unpredictable; I remember when my gay friend who acted as my therapist for our 500mcg LSD session in Colombia said, “you’re hard to pin down aren’t ya.”

When the head of the queering psychedelics movement guy says that to you, perhaps you should think about cultivating some conscientiousness.

**You are moving toward whatever/whomever is at the top of your hierarchy of values. Whether you realize it or not, whoever you idolize, you will start to look more like them.

Keep that in mind.

And so, it felt like a rock in my solar plexus, my diaphragm could never fully relax, tight jaw, chronic low back and scapular pain.

Despite looking physically fit and teaching yoga for nearly a decade, I hurt.

I ordered Feldenkrais’s book, The Potent Self: A Study of Spontaneity and
Compulsion.

What Feldenkrais makes explicit — what forms the basis of his method — is
something like the futility or insufficiency of willpower.

“Willpower is necessary only where ability to do is lacking. Learning is not the training of willpower but the acquisition of the skill to inhibit parasitic action and the ability to direct clear motivations as a result of self-knowledge.”
— Moshe Feldenkrais

One of the guys that was near the top of my hierarchy said things like “Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be the Whole of the Law.”

Perhaps now I was ready to start to really understand what this whole not my will but thy will be done means.

Feldenkrais, was not a Christian, yet he arrived at this conclusion from somatic experience/neurophysiology.

I started to weigh everything against the cross and despite being a non-believer
Feldenkrais passed the test.

In fact, I see his method as something like the somatic science of the cross.

“The cross is the means, the path, and the goal of self-knowledge.” —Chris LaManna

IX. Neuroplasticity & Metanoia

There’s a new genre of Youtube videos that you might call something like the neuroscience of the bible.

“How the Bible rewired my brain” and stuff like that.

In short, what neuroscience calls neuroplasticity — the brain’s capacity to reorganize itself, to form new neural pathways, to literally change its structure through attention and repeated practice — the Christian tradition has been calling metanoia for a little while now.

Metanoia is typically translated “repentance” but the Greek means literally ‘a change of mind’ — meta (beyond/after) + noia (mind/perception).

Repentance, to me at least, always had this negative connotation around it, wrapped up in guilt and such. But I learned it’s not about guilt and shame and all that, it’s about reorientation.

You see Christianity isn’t about morality, fundamentally, it’s about being and doing what you’re designed for.

I don’t think Feldenkrais or somatic work in general, or any technique for that matter, is a replacement for the church and sacrmental living.

But salvation and healing are synonymous to some degree, and the restoration of and inhabiting of the body (and the body image, which Feldenkrais talks much about in terms of the body image one has of oneself internally) are a part of the process of theosis.

After the earthquake a fire; but the Lord was not in the fire: and after the fire a still
small voice.
— 1 Kings 19:12

In a Feldenkrais ATM (Awareness Through movement) session you will hear things like “do less, softer, slower, don’t try to get right, imagine the movement.”

Attention to the smallest movement is the way to make profound shifts in the way you carry your body.

And this is also the basis of prayer and meditation — the development of sensitivity, of awareness.

A useful principle here is called Weber’s Law: the ability to detect a change in stimulus is proportional to the magnitude of the existing stimulus.

You can feel a fly land on a feather, but not on a barbell.

Reduce the background noise — muscular tension, habitual “stereotyped” effort — and sensitivity increases.

One of Feldenkrais early student’s, Thomas Hanna, who went on to coin the term somatics essentially built his whole system around this; what he called Sensory Motor Amnesia.

Basically, parts of our body get turned on or turned off and recede from our awareness. This creates a kind of internal blindness. Hanna's theory was that the body, under chronic stress or fear or unresolved injury, locks certain muscles into a permanent low-grade contraction; not paralysis, not damage, but a forgetting.

The nervous system loses its accurate read on the tension, so you have nothing to grab onto. You can't release what you can't feel. And because it's invisible to the person carrying it, it doesn't show up cleanly on an X-ray or in a diagnosis; t shows up as pain in one place that actually originates somewhere else, as a held breath, as a posture that has quietly become permanent.

This is the noise Weber's Law is talking about. A nervous system humming with unfelt tension is a barbell, not a feather — the “still small voice” has no chance against that kind of static.

I’ve come to realize something that I believed, something that I gave lip service to for years, but never really knew. That chronic pain is always an overflow from somewhere else. AND that this principle is often the case with all of your problems.

Where the problem is showing up is not where it is originating.
Quiet the system enough and the still small voice starts to become audible.
Repatterning, “neuroplasticity” is what we’re talking about here: The body can learn a different way.
This is what metanoia looks like at the somatic level.

Free and spontaneous movement.

X. Adam, the Puffed-Up Man, and the Second Adam

Three images come to my mind that explain the whole of somatic work.

The first: Adam, covering himself ashamed of his vulnerability. The original defensive
posture. The first armor.
The second: the defense against this — the ‘puffed-up’ man or Feldenkrais’ “ulcerous” character. The person who has compensated so completely for the original wound that he has forgotten the wound is there. He stands tall but cannot bend. He speaks confidently but cannot feel. It shows up in as many ways as there are people.
The third: Christ. Totally vulnerable. Self-giving. Without defense. This is the prototype.
The image. The potent man — undivided, without compulsion.
We may never reach this. Even if we heal all of our wounds, the scars remain. But we can move toward it.

“Find your true weakness and surrender to it. Therein lies the path to genius. Most
people spend their lives using their strengths to overcome or cover up their
weaknesses. Those few who use their strengths to incorporate their weaknesses, who
don’t divide themselves — those people are very rare. In any generation there are a
few and they lead their generation.”
— Moshe Feldenkrais

He didn’t call it the Cross. But the shape is unmistakable.

XI. Let Thine Eye Be Single

“If therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.” — Matthew 6:22

One of the principles or aims of the Feldenkrais method is to achieve monomotivation — as opposed to cross motivation.

The Greek word for ‘single’ in Matthew 6:22 is haplous. The patristic reading is something like unified attention — undivided nous.

I heard Father Turbo say something to the effect that a saint is one who has done away
with the subconscious. This makes sense when we think of the subconscious not as a
place but, on one level as the collection of cross motivations (I might say something like, every unfulfilled desire has with it a limiting belief and a cross motivation). Once these are eliminated or resolved, we achieve something like monomotivation.

We can call upon the whole self to the task at hand.

Movement is the basis of awareness.

Through the practice of simple slow movements and watchfulness, you can see what the body is doing in other places, unconsciously, habitually protecting and limiting and gradually learn what it feels like to let go and do one thing and only one thing at a time.

XII. The Humble Path

Humble from humilis “on the ground” and humus; earth or soil.

One advantage of working directly with the somatic is that we bypass the reasoning faculty — the “discursive” mind — that is tied up with the ego and has great resistance to confrontation and change.

And the most important reason why we should choose the action-system as the point of attack for the improvement of man is because it is what Feldenkrais calls the hinge of habit.

Let me lay this out to you to make it clear.

• Every behavior is really one fused thing — muscle, sensation, feeling and thought happening together.

• Muscles are the dominant partner in that fusion. So dominant that the brain region controlling them (the motor cortex) sits physically right next to the regions handling thought and emotion.

• The nervous system can only run one “version of you” at a time. So, at any given moment, your whole system locks into a single integrated state.

• Because muscle patterns are so load-bearing, and so close in the brain to thought/feeling circuits, you can’t actually shift your thinking or emotional habits directly. You have to go through the motor cortex first; change the movement pattern, and thought/feeling get dragged along with it, because brain activity “bleeds” into the neighboring tissue.

• That’s why disrupting a movement habit is so effective: it knocks the legs out from under the thought and feeling pattern that was leaning on it. Habit loses its chief support and becomes amenable to change again.

You can see why non-reactivity; or practicing indifference is at the foundation of a spiritual practice.

And so, instead of attacking the patterns through psychoanalysis, we lay on the floor and watch how we move.

Sometimes becoming aware of the experiences that set the pattern in motion in the first place — and resolution happens spontaneously.

You don’t overcome habitual patterns by force.

I tried.

For years.

That’s what got me into this mess in the first place, and like Einstein says; you can’t get out of the problem with the same kind of thinking that got you here in the first place.

You teach the body that there is a better way — and the body will, with consistent reminding, naturally, spontaneously follow the path of least resistance.

In a Feldenkrais session, the guide is constantly reminding you to do less.

Slower and softer reveals more.

By going into your habitual and protective postures with awareness, you essentially back your way out of contractions that once served as protection but have long since become prison.

XIII. There’s Nothing New Under the Son

A human being is a unity. The separation is the injury, not the design. The western esoteric traditions, at their best, were fumbling toward what the Church had always possessed. The founders of somatics, broadly speaking, were intuiting toward what the neptic fathers understood, what eastern Christianity never forgot.

The somatic revolution in psychology is a gradual rediscovery and rearticulation of what is encoded in the incarnation: God took a body. The body matters. The body is the site of transformation, not the obstacle to it.

God, in the incarnation, went all the way down into matter — into a body, into hunger and thirst and fatigue and sorrow, into death — not to escape it but to redeem it from within.

Somatic work, at its best, mirrors this movement. Go low. Go slow. Attend to what is actually here, not what ‘should’ be here. Meet the body where it is, not where you wish it were. And in that meeting — in that honest attention — something begins to shift.
When the eye is single — when there are no ulterior motives, no performance— effort becomes efficient, becomes natural, becomes something closer to grace.

If anyone imagines that he knows something, he does not yet know as he ought to know. —1 Corinthians 8:2

“Beware of unearned wisdom” —Carl Jung

“We all want progress, but if you’re on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is most progressive.” —C.S. Lewis

✦ I. Human Nature

It seems to me now that we can’t really know anything until we need to.

Until we’re ready.

Perhaps until we’re sincere enough in our asking.

This seems to only come after we have suffered a bit.

Perhaps until the hardware has been tempered enough to hold the weight of reality.

It is good for me that I was afflicted, that I might learn your statutes. — Psalm 119:71

Knowledge that arrives before its time doesn’t enlighten — it burdens, confuses, or just doesn’t land.

The container has to be made first.

*I do not endorse the Tarot; gaze at your own risk.

✦ II. The Great Work and the Body.

I first encountered this concept, The Great Work, (as well as ‘somatic’ work) during my early days exploring the western esoteric tradition, often referred to as simply, the occult.

In ‘The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn’, Israel Regardie wrote that every aspiring occultist or ceremonial magickian should study ‘The Function of the Orgasm’ by Wilhelm Reich.

Psychedelics had awakened in me a deep thirst for knowledge, everything was interesting again.

Thirst is the right word.

I had read The Da Vinci code during a summer break I spent in Florida building hurricane proof houses. A seed was planted then. And the next book I read that started to wake me up to this stuff was The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell.

I was fascinated.

Fascinated, from the Latin fascinare; to hook.

Also, the right word.

Besides the secret knowledge aspect and the beginnings of learning the ‘symbolic language’, I was struck by how explicit the western esoteric adepts were about the transformation the body undergoes when undertaking “The Great Work” — that the very cells of the body need to change in order to perceive spiritual truth.

I suppose I came in thinking of enlightenment as primarily a head thing.

I would eventually get around to reading Reich’s magnum opus, of which I understood about 10%.

But before that, I came across another book: ‘Undoing Yourself with Energized Meditation and Other Devices’ by Dr. Christopher Hyatt — a lot more user-friendly than Reich, who was probably a genius gone mad.

Dr. Hyatt promised that by doing his neo-Reichian exercises consistently, one would be further along the path than most of these “armchair magickians” in the secret societies — one would be somewhat equivalent to a Zelator in the Qabalistic Golden Dawn framework.

By this time, I had spent hundreds of hours studying this diagram from

“One of the hallmarks of the person acting at a higher level of psychological development is that his thinking and his emotions come to be in greater harmony. As you develop, you will find less and less conflict between your thinking and your emotions.” — Dr. Christopher Hyatt

And so, I began.

I added the exercises to my meditation practice for a while and had some interesting experiences, but I lacked the discipline to persist. Really, I had read so many books by this time from many different traditions that I already had accumulated a library of possible exercises in my head with no way to discern what I needed.

The shadow of the autodidact is that he educates his strengths and ignores his weaknesses.

So, I bounced from seated meditation to ceremonial magic rituals to “energized meditation” to hatha yoga — but mostly I read and I wrote and I thought.

And took psychedelics, which would start to move my path away from the high magick Europe to the earthly magick of plant medicine shamanism.

Let’s be honest, I was looking for fireworks, not Love.

I read and practiced with a kind of obsessive urgency.

“A person must be in the religious search not for the sake of religious experiences, which can deceive, but for the sake of Truth.” — Fr. Seraphim Rose

Let’s face it, I was already an addict, no particular substance; just give me something to feel different. Change my state by whatever means, pre-workout, kratom, some nootropic, fasting, breathwork, microdosing.

Eventually, after graduating from college with a B.S. in Marketing (because I read Rich Dad, Poor Dad in high school I guess), a self-guided master’s in occult science, and two felonies for selling mushrooms, I went all in with yoga, as it was the most accessible path to bring together my athleticism with my spiritual pursuits and possibly a career — I became certified as a teacher and kept a fairly regular practice for many years.

Shortly after my yoga teacher training, I went to the jungle for the first time.

The second time, a year later with my wife (then girlfriend), 13 days, 6 ceremonies.

She was 21, and this was her first time traveling, what a trooper eh.

I found the indigenous world of ayahuasca enchanting, far more attractive than the Hindu world of yoga.

Two years later, I was initiated in the Shipibo tradition at the Ayahuasca Foundation.

I sincerely believed that psychedelics and plant medicine were the most powerful and effective means for healing and transformation, and it seemed like my life was proof of that for a while.

I had found meaning and direction.

—I realized some years ago that this book, which captured my imagination as a young lad, The Giver, was my first encounter with the archetype of the Shaman, perhaps something deep down in me knew then that I wasn’t cut for a normal job, but would follow in the path of Jonas, and seek out the Giver, in some form.

A year after the ayahuasca foundation, my wife and I moved to Ecuador to work at a retreat center, where we quickly moved into management positions and got to work pretty closely with the shamans, learning to be a firekeeper for ayahuasca, San Pedro and sweat lodge ceremonies and became well acquainted with Huachuma.

We did our first vision quest; I did the second one on the Red Road the following year and a Vipassana retreat somewhere in there.

We returned home after 6 months.

So, I served ayahuasca and taught yoga here and there, but I still hadn’t found my “calling,” where I fit in all of this.

What specifically was I trying to “heal?”

What was I really looking for?

“All vague notions must fall before a pupil can call himself a master.” —Bruce Lee

I was drawn to body-centered modalities — Rolfing, Bioenergetics, Wim Hof, the Alexander Technique. I read The Body Keeps the Score and discovered Peter Levine’s work on trauma release. At some point the name Feldenkrais surfaced in my research, but I didn’t dig deep enough to understand what he was all about. I bookmarked him and moved on.

Oh, and we got pregnant.

My boy, Cato was on the way.

Filling in the gaps

So here I was, a husband, a felon, a mediocre yoga teacher, with a Crowleyan gnostic, perennialist worldview, and about 100 plant medicine ceremonies under my belt, which in my view at the time were the most impressive parts of my resume.

Where do I go from here?

✦ IV. The AWE Foundation

Near the end of 2019, just before COVID, the answer to how I was going to bring all of my alternative education together into a vocation came in the form of a three-year psychedelic therapy training.

It was the first of its kind; covered all of my interests plus more. It was perfect.

The course would take me back to the jungle, this time with the Ai’ Cofan, to Mexico with the Huichol in Wirikuta and multiple trips to Colombia, I would learn from some of the best in the world in psychedelia, shamanism and transpersonal psychology.

It was here where I was introduced to a variety of different approaches and modalities, took a deeper dive into somatic work, bioenergetics, the enneagram, Gestalt therapy, family constellations, and more

Over the course of the 3 years, I hosted 3 of my own retreats, led a monthly cacao ceremony circle for the Detroit Psychedelic Society. And served ayahuasca for a documentary called ‘LSD and the Psychedelic Revolution’ on National Geographic. I started serving Kambo and moved over to MDMA with my clients after ayahuasca bit me in the ass a few times.

The more I experienced, the more I learned about ayahuasca, the more I realized I didn’t even know what it was and that it was irresponsible for me to be serving it.

A client of mine shared recently about the time that they accidentally gave him more than 2x the dose at his ketamine injection appointment.

“I turned into a rubix cube and got rolled down a bowling alley and shattered into a million pieces.”

Alright, see you next month for your next injection!

He broke down in the parking lot into a ball of tears and confusion.

The causalities of psychedelic enthusiasm will be emerging more and more

We have no idea what we’re doing.

But I digress.

The Journey Begins

The first intensive, Noesis, we worked with empathogens, did a deep dive into the enneagram and partner bioenergetic/holotropic style breathing, family constellations and more.

It exceeded my expectations.

The first pilgrimage we went to the jungle, to stay with the Ai’ Cofan, a tribe in the Colombian jungle untouched by the machine.

Their ayahuasca was different. There songs, came from somewhere else, primordial.

They laughed like children, slept little, ate less. And drank a lot of ayahuasca.

I lost my mind on night 2 and did not think I was coming back.

It was ugly.

I was being told to slow down.

I listened for like 30 seconds.

In the morning a book that a girl and I were talking about on the canoe ride there was on the picnic table, I had heard of it but not read it, she was recommending I do.

It was called The Magdalene Manuscript.

Nobody knew who put it there.

It was probably the first time I had read about Jesus outside of New Age and western esoteric interpretations of him, perhaps this, a channeled book is worse, but I felt I had connected with Jesus the man for the first time ever and I wept.

New Life

The next intensive was a meditation on death and rebirth.

We were told to read ‘The Tibetan Book of the Dead’ and to get our affairs in order.

Before I left, I bought my friend Jonah a book about the symbolism of Jonah and the whale.

This intensive we took a high dose of LSD.

The shape of my trip was of descending into the waters and being thrown up out of the belly of a whale and onto dry land, it was an unmistakable sensation.

What did it mean?

The thing about psychedelic insights is they seem profoundly significant, for like a week.

The 2 psychedelic integration therapists reading this are yelling at the screen, yeah that’s why we need integration.

Integration. Integration. Integration!

There’s no such thing as psychedelic integration folks.

There’s insights and there’s practice.

That’s all.

I found out in the morning that my wife was pregnant with our daughter.

Emrys was on her way.

“Be ye as little children”

There was another practice we did during the training that started to reveal to me the depth and shape of my neuroses— what the teacher called Spontaneous Movement.

So, we would put blindfolds on, go out into the center of a circle, and move how ever we wanted. Or perhaps more accurately: how ever we felt.

Everybody loved it.

Three people intermingled on the floor doing strange or sensuous movements, another guy in the corner moving like a pantomime, another doing some combination of yoga and dance. Imagining what somebody watching from the outside would make of it is funny.

It revealed to me how much we, humans, craved to be touched, to have a safe space where we didn’t have to perform and to just move.

I realized, however, that genuine spontaneous movement was impossible for me. The motivation to get it right, to do good, to have an experience or a breakthrough of some kind was sabotaging any possibility of being spontaneous.

I couldn’t get out of my mind.

I could move fast, chaotic, strange — but the mind was always there, telling the body what to do.

I couldn’t stop performing.

And well, like they say, the way you do one thing is the way you do everything.

The teacher never gave us a definition of spontaneity. He was skeptical of words, careful not to put an artificial limit on the possibilities. Though I ultimately disagree with his worldview, I continue to learn from him. And the word spontaneity, which he used often, would continue to shine for me and guide my practice long after I left.

Things take a turn

I decided to go up north, a little solo getaway, a self-made vision quest of sorts.

The next pilgrimage was on my mind. The pilgrimage to Wirikuta.

The home of Peyote; from the Nahuatl peyōtl, meaning something like "glisten" or "divine messenger." The root relates to a shimmering, silky quality.

In fact, the preparation zoom call for the pilgrimage was the day that I arrived at my campground up north.

So, a couple hours before the zoom meeting, I get a call.

My Native American woman friend let’s call her, K.

She informs me that she’s on her way up up north to a Peyote meeting, a couple hours from where I happened to be.

Well.

Shall I get acquainted with the medicine before I head to its home in Mexico?

I think I shall.

I had a vision inside the tipi.

There are different types of visions.

This one was, we’ll call participatory, kind of like lucid dreaming.

Peyote is a very grounding, subtle medicine, it can be extremely intense, yes, but you are generally pretty lucid, very aware of this reality.

So, in my rather pathetic weakness, I called out to Jesus, who much of the ceremony, to my surprise was being sung and prayed to.

So, I tried, Jesus, help me, I’m done suffering, I’m tired.

“I will give you rest they sang.”

Yes, yes, rest. I’ll take some of that.

No more downloads, no more esoteric knowledge, no more visions, no more.

Just rest please.

I saw Christ on the cross, I approached him, his feet, I went to kiss…

But the foot began to change to a grotesque, witchlike foot.

I looked up.

SATAN!

Make of that what you will.

If you want my interpretation, leave a comment.

**The Native American Church, which is the primary indigenous Christian peyote tradition in North America, explicitly identifies peyote with Christ. Not symbolically — ontologically. Peyote is Jesus for many NAC members, the living body of God given to the indigenous people as their sacrament, parallel to but distinct from the Eucharist given to Europeans. Some members see it as the same Christ, different form. The theology is syncretic but not superficial — it came out of tremendous suffering and cultural survival.

Wirikuta

I flew into a city called Real De Catorce.

My first time in Mexico.

We were informed that we would be doing a short vision quest after the 14-hour pilgrimage through the desert to where we would be staying.

We were also informed that we would be participating in a particular ritual, a tradition of the Huichol.

After a traditional Mexican breakfast on the side of the road that I often think about when I fast, we began our trek into the desert.

There’s so much I could share about this journey, like how we got lost because our guide lost the trail. And how, let’s call him, Dr. S. broke away from the group to find a way down the mountain, which led to some chaos and internal fighting, like how we had to slide down a rock mountain with multiple people getting injured and the fear coupled with exhaustion as the sun began to set and we couldn’t get ahold of our leader and finally how we did and he showed up in a pick-up truck full of beer and sandwiches.

And how I’m still not sure if he set the whole thing up.

This was day 1.

In the morning, we all met at an area in the desert, had a little talk and then were sent out to wander around and pick our first peyote button.

It is understood that the peyote hides from those whose intentions are impure.
I found my peyote button first.

Was proud.

We had a little friend join us on our hunt. A baby lamb. A black and white one. A good omen, remarked our Huichol guide, yin yang, he said with a big smile, he was always smiling, genuinely.

It wasn’t until we had all returned and placed our peyote buttons onto the cloth altar, when I, of all people, happened to be holding the lamb that I realized why he was there.

In all the excitement and commotion, I had totally forgot what our guide had told us the ritual that we would be participating was.

Everybody came one by one, some with tears, to pet the lil’ guy and express their gratitude while I held him, some (the vegans) were not happy about it.

“Who was the tail of the snake?”

When we set off on our journey, we made a line, a “snake” and I was asked to be the tail. However, I don’t know how to walk slow and so I surrendered my duty to another.

The one who took my spot as the tail raised his hand.

“You will do it.”

“NO WAY!”

My heart was pounding.

I felt it was my duty. Part of me wanted to, for the experience itself, maybe to prove something to myself, maybe so I could have a story to tell.

I’m a city boy, I had never hunted, never killed an animal.

Before I could step forward however, another, a better man than I, and ex-military, stepped forward.

He would wield the knife.

But wait.

We need another to hold him down.

I can still feel his warm body and the shape of his rib cage in my hands, and his body clench and relax, clench and relax as the blood poured from his throat to fill the whole that we had dug in front of the altar of peyotes.

As he made the cut, I let out a cry not unlike the one that came out when my son emerged from my wife’s womb.

Life & Death. One Door.

I remember the way the lamb offered his neck with no struggle.

After we were all fed a small piece of peyote to mark the end of this ceremony and the official opening of the pilgrimage we went to prepare for the vision quest.

—3 days alone in the desert, no food no water; we would be brought a Gatorade bottle of liquified peyote on day 2.

Before we left the site, I looked at the slain lamb. His eyes glowed blue like the Freman from Dune.

There’re places in the world where magic, for better or for worse, still exist.

—There’s so much to say about this trip, I don’t think I will appreciate it fully until I’m much older.

The combination of irreverence and holiness was something else.

However, I came home in worse shape than when I arrived.

Or rather, the deep sickness in my soul was being brought to the surface.

The resentment toward my mother, that I had buried in my heart, the guilt and shame about my past and the deep insecurity of just being me that I hid with my compulsive optimism. My inability to really be present, always looking toward the next thing, the next adventure. Pretending like I had it all together and that I was progressing perfectly toward the imagined destination.

Nowhere to run

Not long after my return home, I was invited to another peyote meeting by my same friend, this time it would be held in her basement.

And so, my wife, who was quite pregnant with my daughter at the time, and I went.

Yes, she did participate and ate a little medicine, which was very pleasant for her, a relief from the difficult pregnancy in fact.

And this time, my shadow, to borrow a term from every “conscious creators” favorite psychologist fully manifested.

Like a cancer in my solar plexus, with the face of a younger me, my mother and Smeagol.

I left the ceremony feeling humiliated, with my wound raw and exposed, and like I should be so much further in my “healing journey” than I was.

I was in an altered state for about a day and a half and couldn’t stop thinking about Jesus. And to research higher dimensions and read Tertium Organum. I was on this Jesus as revealer of 5th dimensional consciousness trip.

At the end of the ceremony, we went around the circle, I didn’t share, but the roadman, their title for shaman, did.

He said nothing about the peyote, what he was blown away by was that despite everything he’s done.

Jesus still loves him.

The next trip for the course would be our final intensive in Colombia; called Emptiness.

We wouldn’t see each other in person again until the final pilgrimage to Gabon, Africa, to be initiated into the Bwiti tribe and meet the “root of all healing,” iboga. But, despite looking forward to that trip for 3 years, I would never make it to Africa, instead I would have an encounter that turned my world upside down.

Emptiness

The final intensive of the course shattered me.

Two panic attacks. And finally, catharsis.

After 8 days of iboga-fueled Dzogchen style meditation and three days without sleep, I found myself lying on the floor, in the blue room, in agony — and finally the tears came, and the body began to shake, and out of my mouth the words:

Why did you abandon me?

Was I talking to my mother? My dad? My Father in heaven?

I wasn’t sure. I’m still not entirely sure. But something cracked open that I had been carrying for a very long time.

Interlude

We live in an age of information and yet wisdom eludes us. We know about the body but cannot feel it. We know about God but cannot meet Him. We know about our patterns but cannot change them. The question is not what we know. The question is how we come to know it — and whether knowing it changes us.

Psychedelic Renaissance?!

Before we turn to the past to see what led me down this path in the first place. Let’s go back to just before the Emptiness intensive to the 2022 Psychedelic Conference in Denver, Colorado.

My wife and I decided to make a road trip out of it.

We would drive from Michigan to Wyoming and stay the night at Devil’s Tower.

We camped just outside the extraordinary feat of nature, sacred site to the Lakota and what Sadhguru says is the most spiritually powerful place in North America. We stayed at the campground where they showed Close Encounters of the Third Kind every night.

We didn’t watch it, instead, we went to bed early exhausted from the drive and so we could get up early, take our tab of LSD and hike the Tower.

So, we did.

It was like entering into a time warp and it felt as though we had lived an entire life in the span of the 4 hour or so hike. We laughed hard and cried and cried some.

As I stopped to take a rest and lay my head on a rock, I closed my eyes and had a little vision, of going into the basement of my subconscious where I had a woman chained up.

I released her.

And I felt the spirit of Neytiri in from Avatar arise in me.

Fearless and ferocious.

But what was truer that the trip revealed, was when my wife hugged me and said, “it feels like you could just float away.”

I get emotional thinking about it, she was right.

I wasn’t there. I was flimsy, insubstantial, disassociated.

The “plant medicine path” was taking it’s toll.

We stayed another night and then drove down to Colorado.

I can’t say I was really excited; the bubble was already deflating.

The conference took the rest of the air out.

I can’t exactly put my finger on it. But it became abundantly clear that this was not where we were supposed to be.

I suppose the seeds of decay were always there, the faux spirituality, the party instinct dressed up as healing, the addiction to novelty and the false utopia and I just refused to see it.

We felt obliged to go to the conference all 3 days, although what we really wanted to do was hike the Rockies every day and spend time in nature.

We drove home deflated.

The Emptiness intensive was two weeks away.

But how did I get started on this path at all?

To begin to understand this, we must again hop in our DeLorean and return back to the year, 2002.

✦ II. First Encounters

I was fifteen when I had my first chemically induced experience with the liminal — (though at the time, being untrained, naïve, as most 15 year olds are I suppose I mistook it for the numinous.)

I also had my first panic attack.

At the conclusion of the night, I whispered with introspective awe: I feel like, like I’ve been reborn.

From the same website that I learned about “robotripping” I also learned about lucid dreaming and had one the very next night, and down the “New Age” rabbit hole I went.

I bought a book called ‘The 90-Day Guide to OBEs’ and got to work.

A seed was planted. I didn’t know yet what kind of tree it would grow into.

**This experience led to the New Age so seamlessly for me, I never even considered looking elsewhere to understand what happened to me, despite its Christian undertone.

Down the rabbit hole

And if you go chasing rabbits

And you know you’re going to fall

Tell ‘em a hookah-smoking caterpillar

Has given you the call

And if you go chasing rabbits

And you know you’re going to fall

Tell ‘em a hookah-smoking caterpillar

Has given you the call…

It must have been 2007 or 8.

My zeal for achieving success in astral projection had long since faded. I attempted to repeat the original experience with dextromethorphan a handful of times, but nothing compared to the first, of course.

I turned to other substances, mostly weed, but ecstasy finally found its way to me. My Chaldean friends sold it and I eventually did as well.

And so, eventually, despite saying I would never go harder than weed, experimented with practically every substance out there. Luckily, unlike many in my circle, I avoided hard opiate addiction, although I enjoyed them and had my fair share.

**You see, I still got good grades played basketball and football up to 11th grade and ran varsity track all 4 years. I loved that I was still a “good kid” but had this dark side of hanging out with the hoods on 7 mile and smoking weed and all the rest of it. I felt more comfortable with the outsiders, most of my friends were different ethnicities than me.

The classical psychedelics, LSD and psilocybin mushrooms would find me just after high school coinciding with a couple of my friends obsession with the Freemasons and the Illuminati that ran the world, decided whether or not Tom Cruise would be in the next Mission Impossible and sacrificed babies to effigies of an owl. I had to suppress an eyeroll whenever the conversation turned to the subject, which was often.

So, I started researching mostly to disprove there, in my view, baseless claims. But I couldn’t find anything satisfying to prove or disprove their claims, no overt links with anything I could recognize as satanic so I took a different route — reverse-engineering if you will, working backward through Satanism.

I discovered that there was technically a Church of Satan and even a Satanic bible. But it pointed somewhere far more intriguing: Aleister Crowley.

I found my guy.

They had it all wrong, the Illuminati were the good guys, the spiritually enlightened adepts of the world!

In Crowley I found a mentor, a brilliant mind, misunderstood and a prolific writer, who brought it all together for me;

Yoga as the spiritual science of attaining higher states of consciousness and ceremonial magick, it’s extroverted twin, the Royal Art of the adepts.

“The method of science, the aim of religion.”

From there I read my first book on magick ‘11 Lessons in the High Magical Arts’, I discovered Israel Regardie (Crowley’s secretary and mentor to Timothy Leary, Wilson and Hyatt) and The Golden Dawn, Dion Fortune’s The Mystical Qabalah, (what she calls the yoga of the west) and the Tarot based system of spiritual unfoldment of Paul Foster Case and the B.O.T.A. in which I would be initiated. I read Crowley’s autohagiography (he fancied himself the prophet of the new AEon, that of Horus, the Crowned and Conquering child.) I think he’s right in a way, we do live in Crowley’s world.

PRIDE!

I became obsessed with the Qabalistic Tree of Life — the symbolic map common to all of them that brought all the religions and spiritual systems together.

This was it.

I had discovered the Rosetta stone for mythology and religion and a map for my own spiritual evolution.

The experience that follows would take me deeper down the rabbit hole.

Anti-Theophany

I was 20.

4.4 grams of mutant penis envy mushrooms that my stepbrother grew in his attic, a blunt of heavy duty weed, a setting where I didn’t feel safe, and two “friends” I trusted about as far as I could throw.

What followed I used to describe as a kind of reverse enlightenment. I later found a better term from Dr. Timothy Patitsas and his fantastic book ‘The Ethics of Beauty’:

Anti-theophany.

A theophany is an encounter with God. What I had was its photographic negative.

The whole trip report I’ve written about elsewhere. What matters here is what was at the bottom of it — after the paranoia, after the fight-flight burned out, after the police, electricity, the pepper spray and the concrete — when the body finally surrendered and the will finally broke, there was something on the other side of the terror and chaos.

It was as if I had pierced through the veil into foundational reality.

And that reality was Christ on the cross.

Not a symbol. Not a metaphor. Not a religious image retrieved from childhood. Something that was simply there — more real than the ground under my feet.

So naturally — I went deeper into the occult and shamanism.

Where are we now?

So, now you have an idea of how I got into all this mess and how these experiences and influences formed me.

High Strangeness

Years later, I picked up a copy of Philip K. Dick’s Exegesis for $5 bucks at Barnes and Noble— his 8,000-page private journal written after his own visionary breakdown in February 1974 — in PKD, I found a kindred spirit. Not because he had the same experience exactly, but because he had the same problem: something undeniably real had broken through, and he spent the rest of his life trying to figure it out.

Dick tried on framework after framework — Gnosticism, Neoplatonism, Jungian archetypes, information theory — and kept finding them insufficient.

“I am a victim of the bombardment of light. I saw the landscape of the real.”

What’s striking, reading the Exegesis across its full arc, is the direction of travel. He starts as a Gnostic (which many people still present him as, they stopped reading to soon)— the material world as prison, the divine spark trapped in matter, gnosis as escape. But by the later sections something shifts. He begins arriving at categories that are recognizably Orthodox.

His formulation that the Empire never ended — that we are still, spiritually speaking, inside the system that crucified Christ, that the great kingdoms of domination and distraction have never actually fallen but simply changed their clothes — was not conspiracy theory just broken theology.

He arrived, reluctantly and incompletely, at something like the Orthodox position. He didn’t make it to the Church. But he was on the road.

“Christ is not a myth but an historical fact, and the Savior of the world.”

It seems that perhaps, a premature encounter with the energies of God can lead one to misinterpret the experience through gnostic lenses, considering the insufficiency of Protestantism. We both saw a glimpse and then got kicked out of the garden.

I recognized the walk. I was on it too — though I didn’t know it yet.

Instead of following the thread where it was pointing, I went to the jungle.

Surely, the church had nothing to offer me, I had never considered it, but the indigenous traditions that used plants to swim in the water that I nearly drowned in must surely be able to help me.

I knew I would visit the jungle to drink ayahuasca one day.

Besides Crowley, Terence Mckenna was my other primary dead mentor.

I ate up everything he said and so I followed in his footsteps to some degree, seeking the philosophers stone in the jungles of South America.

✦ V. Returning Home: Mere Christianity

When I returned home from the final intensive in Colombia, I was in rough shape.

My cathartic breakthrough hadn’t healed me. It had just opened a door.

Every night for weeks my chest would contract and ache to the bones. I would get hot, anxious, afraid. I started doing ninety minutes of hot Bikram yoga every day because it burned off the anxiety — only for it to return every evening.

All I knew was extremes.

Anxious, depressed, confused, exhausted, broke — I was heading toward despair.

Finally, for some reason, I picked up a small book that had been sitting on my shelf: Mere Christianity.

One by one, the sticks holding up the Jenga tower of my syncretic, entheogenic, gnostic worldview were being pulled out.

And I started wrestling.

There were two things that acted as the final blows to my resistance.

But before we go there, we need to revisit the past one last time!

About 9 years ago now, I came across this video…

His point in the video was in short; symbolism isn’t inherently good or bad.

He was in part defending Jordan Peterson from the Christians who were criticizing him saying that what he was talking about is “Qabalah” or from the “Occult.”

My overall response to the video was a kind of “duh.” My only criticism was of Pageau’s narrow mindedness in thinking there was anything wrong with occultism at all and that Aleister Crowley was evil!

Come on he didn’t even charge for his lessons in magick!

But Pageau had planted a seed, the Eastern Orthodox seed.

The door that the western esoteric tradition opened for me was into symbolism and it did teach me to think, to see symbolically, so I could pick up what he was putting down.

And I saw someone who seemed a bit more well versed (and grounded)) than I, maybe, just maybe he knew something I didn’t.

What’s interesting now, looking back is how long one can run two different incompatible programs in their mind for so long before they reveal their incompatibility.

And we’re back…

Truth is there were many blows that were making me question my worldview. Not least of all the fact that I was in inner turmoil.

Just reading C.S. Lewis’s story of his own conversion had a major impact on me.

that the psychedelic revolution of the 60’s led to the Jesus revolution of the 70’s (for those who didn’t burn out)

Then, a musing from a saint — that what Adam saw when he ate from the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil was Christ on the Cross. And being wholly unprepared for such a sight, he fled from the garden.

“True” or not, this was the best explanation I had heard for what happened to me at 20 on mushrooms.

And the final blow, from another saint:

“Christ was creating the world while he was on the cross.”

The ultimate koan.

This one cut me to the heart. Not instantaneously — more like a time-released injection.

I knew it was true in my heart but impossible to my head. And so, it slowly eroded the dam between the two until, as they say, the scales fell from my eyes.

God is not a What but a Who.

✦ VI. Convicted

I lost my mind in the good way for three days.

It was beautiful.

Coherence.

No buffer between me and reality.

Quiet.

Then…back to the wasteland.

All of the pain and emotions that I had avoided for so long high on this plant medicine fueled, shamanic occult path; high on the idea that I was helping to usher in the next wave of the psychedelic revolution or the ‘New Earth’ or whatever.

Truth is, I was a high functioning addict with a case of C-PTSD that stemmed from growing up with a borderline agoraphobic mother and no father and then instantiated with all of the trouble and probation and psychedelic shocks.

I had caught what father Turbo called “Forbidden Fruit Syndrome” somewhere along the way and then fell into what the orthodox Christians call prelest. What we might call spiritual delusion and/or spiritual bypassing.

And so, I was brought low.

“Accept this humbling, don’t grumble.” —my spiritual father

But the shame and the guilt and the regret, the feeling that I had wasted my life, the profound discomfort of who I imagined myself to be not syncing up with who I actually was made me want to disappear.

This lasted for a while and still rears it’s head now and then, but I know how to deal with it.

✦ VII. The Church

After being shown that Jesus Christ is the Godman, some things fell away instantly. Others took time. Some continue to linger.

I knew I would become Orthodox, maybe I toyed with Catholicism for about 30 seconds in my head.

I scheduled a visit with Archimandrite Pachomy at St. Sabbas Orthodox Monastery in Harper Woods, MI. And it was like walking into a little garden of Eden. Who knew such a place existed on the edge of Detroit for all places.

The gardens were immaculate and a peacock crossed my path as I walked in through the gates, the first nun I met was really present with me and I cried a little.

I met father Pachomy and shared some of my story.

“Yeah, you’re going to have to publicly renounce all of that.”

My heart sank.

Renounce? Publicly??

A thought flashed, like do I have to go on the news or something?!

Lol.

I came home and told my wife.

“Well, I meann.”

“Really?” “You want to do this?”

“It feels like the last door.” She said

“It does, doesn’t it.”

We became catechumen a week later, but not without a series of demonic dreams every night leading up to it and a friend who was supposed to come to church with me accidentally overdosing on something laced with fentanyl the night before.

The night before we were made catechumen, a dream with a Luciferian type of figure with his hand on my shoulder.

I had chosen sides; the spiritual warfare had begun.

Like anything of substance, the more I understand Feldenkrais — and more so Christianity — the more I realize I don’t.

I used to push through books above my grasp and convince myself I understood them.

Now my mind and body revolt as I begin to go beyond my comprehension.

Feldenkrais was like a foreign language until I had some experience with the method, then his books opened up to me.

As it is with the Bible.

Which proved Feldenkrais’ point: learning is a total body phenomenon; a matter of the entire nervous system.

“One has to set about learning to learn as is befitting for the most important business in human life, that is, with serenity but without solemnity, with patient objectivity and without compulsive seriousness…Learning must be undertaken and is really profitable when the whole frame is held in a state where smiling can turn into laughter without interference, naturally, spontaneously.” -Moshe Feldenkrais

And After the Earthquake a fire; but the Lord was Not in the Fire: and After the Fire a Still Small Voice.

Attention to the smallest movement is the way to transform.

Now there’s nothing really profound in this connection, this is the basis of all spiritual practices, the development of sensitivity, of awareness which implies developing the means to perceive subtle impressions or in the case of Feldenkrais unnecessary movement or contractions.

What is profound in my estimation is the way Feldenkrais essentially made a science of self-development out of this revelation from the ground up.

Movement not as exercise but as a means of developing awareness with the ultimate goal of character development and maturation.

I remember a conversation I was having with a friend a long time ago talking about surrendering or letting go and we were both on the same page…

yeah, cool, I get it...

But HOW?!

Awareness Through Movement

In a Feldenkrais session, the guide is constantly reminding you to do less.

Slower, softer, reveals more.

—Weber’s Law —the principle that the ability to detect a change in stimulus is proportional to the magnitude of the stimulus. —

Example: you can feel a fly land on a feather, but not on a barbell.

The nervous system detects ratios, not absolute differences.

Feldenkrais built his entire method on this principle.

Work at the threshold of effort —reduce the background noise (muscular tension, habitual effort) and sensitivity increases.

So, there is this element of surrender built into the method. Rather than trying to bust through your limitations you consciously go into your chronic, habitual, unconscious or what Feldenkrais calls “parasitic” contractions/postures and from there kind of back your way out.

Said another way; by going into your habitual/protective postures with awareness you can essentially back your way out of these now “parasitic contractions” that once served as a means of protection.

“Make a covenant with limit” -Martin Shaw

You don’t overcome these habitual patterns but through teaching the body that there is a better way, then the body will naturally, spontaneously follow the path of least resistance and this will generalize into all activities.

Bottom-Up Therapy

The advantage of directly working with the somatic is that we bypass the reasoning faculty, the ‘discursive’ mind, that’s tied up with the ego and has many resistances to change.

He will do almost anything to avoid seeing the infantile strategies that he still uses.

In other words, we take the humble path, literally, low to the earth.

Instead of attacking them through psychoanalysis, we lay on the floor and watch how we move, often we become aware of the experiences that set the patterns in motion in the first place and resolution happens spontaneously.

The Old Man, the False Man and the Christ

Three images come to mind that explain the whole of somatic work, that of Adam, covering himself in shame and vulnerability, the defense against this, the ‘puffed-up’ man, or Feldenkrais’s ‘ulcerous character’ or something in between.

And Christ on the cross, totally vulnerable, self-giving, without defense.

This is the prototype, the image, the potent man, undivided, without compulsion.

“Find your true weakness and surrender to it. Therein lies the path to genius. Most people spend their lives using their strengths to overcome or cover up their weaknesses. Those few who use their strengths to incorporate their weaknesses, who don’t divide themselves, those people are very rare. In any generation there are a few and they lead their generation.”

— Moshe Feldenkrais

Let Thine Eye Be Single

One of the principles of the Feldenkrais method is ‘monomotivation’ as opposed to ‘cross motivation.’

Which calls on another biblical passage:

…if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.

—Matthew 6:22-23

The Greek word for single is haplous, the patristic reading being something like unified attention or undivided nous.

I heard Father Turbo say something to the effect that a saint is one who has done away with the subconscious.

I had never thought about the subconscious in this way before.

But this makes perfect sense when we think of the subconscious as the place of cross motivations.

And perhaps it’s better to think of the subconscious not as a place at all but as the collection of cross motivations (and the limiting beliefs) attached to them.

Once these are eliminated or resolved we achieve monomotivation and we can call upon the whole self to the task at hand.

This is the aim.

—And if the body is the subconscious which for all intents and purposes it is or at least the place where the subconscious is most revealed, then the Feldenkrais method is the science off making the unconscious conscious.

To be continued…

And my first panic attack.

I said without thought, I feel like, like I’ve been reborn.

This then led me to my first encounter with what you might call the New Age and a kind of body-oriented meditation practice through a book called the 90-day Guide to OBO’s.

And when I was 19, I took a “heroic” dose of mushrooms in a less-than-ideal set and setting. The experience led to a full-blown psychotic break.

When my body finally surrendered it was as though I was Christ on the Cross.

No, it was as if I had pierced through the veil into backbone reality which was Christ on the cross.

—Reading Philip K. Dicks Exegesis years later was a trip as he described a similar experience to mine or at least similar conclusions. I essentially did what he did except instead of writing 10,000 pages over the course of a decade, I bounced all over south America, from tradition to tradition, initiation to initiation trying to understand what happened to me. His story followed a similar arc, started off a gnostic and by the end of his exegesis takes an essentially orthodox position.—

But I digress…

Instead of going to the church, I dove deeper into the occult, shamanism and plant medicine.

Despite my trip to hell and Christ practically yelling at me to turn around, I was convinced that I was on the right path.

Back to the Present

When I returned home from the Emptiness intensive in Colombia, the last of the 3 year program, I was in rough shape. My cathartic breakthrough didn’t heal me; it just opened the door.

Every night for weeks my chest would start to contract and ache to the bones, I would get hot, anxious and afraid.

I didn’t know what to do.

I started doing 90 minutes of hot Bikram yoga every day because it would burn off all the anxiety, only to return every evening.

All I knew was extremes.

Anxious, depressed, confused, exhausted, broke, I was heading toward despair.

Finally, for some reason, I decided to read a little book on my shelf called Mere Christianity.

And one by one, the sticks holding up the Jenga tower of my syncretic, entheogenic, gnostic worldview were being pulled out.

I was wrestling.

There were two things I heard that acted as the final blows to my resistance.

One, a musing from a saint; that what Adam saw when he ate from the fruit of the Tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil was Christ on the Cross. And being wholly unprepared for such a sight, caused him to flee from the garden.

Whether this is “true” or not is irrelevant. It was for me the best explanation that I had heard for what had happened to me during my mushroom trip to hell.

And the second, another saint, “Christ was creating the world while he was on the cross.”

This one cut me to the heart.

It wasn’t instantaneous, but like a time released injection, like the ultimate koan, it slowly eroded the dam between my head and my heart and as they say, “the scales fell from my eyes.”

After I realized that God is not a what but a who, I also began to realize the extent of my disease and prelest.

At some point in my youth, I had caught what Father Turbo calls ‘Forbidden Fruit Syndrome.’

And the study of arcane knowledge just puffed me up causing me to think I was more spiritually advanced than I was.

Trying to take on the devil by myself…fascinated by the darkness, terrified and desperate to be seen, some level of C-PTSD.

Running, running, running.

I am the moth in a dark room with a candle.

I am Icarus. I am Prometheus. I am Parzival.

Converted

“One cannot catapult their way to heaven; they must take the stairs.” - C.M.L.

I lost my mind for three days, and it was beautiful.

Some things instantly fell away, others took time, and some continue to linger. I hung on to the enneagram and bioenergetics for a while, but they started to feel like unnecessary complexity in light of the glimpse of Christ I received.

I was sick of books, sick of information. But something told me to give Feldenkrais a deeper look.

I found a book called The Potent Self: A study of spontaneity and compulsion.

Well…say no more.

And what finally landed, what Feldenkrais makes explicit and what forms the basis of his method was the futility of willpower.

“Willpower is necessary only where ability to do is lacking. Learning is not the training of willpower but the acquisition of the skill to inhibit parasitic action and the ability to direct clear motivations as a result of self-knowledge.” -Moshe Feldenkrais

To be continued…

The Great Work

Human nature, that is to say, reality, is such that you cannot know anything really until you need to; until you’re ready.

And that seems to be only after you’ve suffered a bit.

I first encountered somatic work, generally speaking, during the early days of my occult studies. In ‘The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn’, Israel Regardie writes that every aspiring occultist or ceremonial magician should study ‘The Function of the Orgasm’ by Wilhelm Reich.

—One of my great revelations in reading the western esoteric stuff was how explicit they made the transformation that the body undergoes when undertaking The Great Work. Before this I suppose I thought of enlightenment as primarily a head thing.

I would eventually get around to reading Reich’s magnum opus, (though I understood about 10% of it, *I felt more enlightened than you just by owning the book.).

But before that tackled, I came across another book by an author in the same camp called ‘Undoing Yourself with Energized Meditation and Other Devices.’

I loved this shit.

This book was a lot more user friendly than Reichs, who was probably a genius gone mad.

“Undoing Yourself is the latest attempt by the Illuminati Conspiracy to reveal the hitherto hidden teachings.” -R.A.W.

This was my catechism.

Dr. Christopher Hyatt promised that by doing his neo-reichian (energized meditation) exercises consistently for a while one would be further along the path than most of these blokes in the secret societies, that one would be equivalent to a zelator in the Qabalistic Golden Dawn framework.

This was intriguing and also gave me a new perspective on what it means to be adept.

“One of the hallmarks of the person acting at a higher level of psychological development is that his thinking or evaluation of a situation and his emotions (body state) come to be in greater harmony. That is actually a measure you can use to watch your progression through energized meditation to what Scientologists call ‘clear.’ As you develop, you will find less and less conflict between your thinking and your emotions.”

And so, I began.

I kept up with the exercises for a while and had some experiences, but I lacked the discipline to persist.

Moreso, I had already read so many books from so many different traditions, I had a library of possible exercises with no way to judge what I needed nor what was true.

The shadow of the autodidact is that he educates his strengths and ignores his weaknesses. In fact, the qabalah warned of this explicitly, the danger growing a lopsided tree.

“Learn first —oh thou who aspirest unto our ancient Order! — that Equilibrium is the basis of the Work.” —Liber Librae

So, I bounced from seated meditation to basic ceremonial magic rituals to “energized meditation” exercises, to hatha yoga, but mostly, I read and thought.

Always doing something, but rarely the same thing and rarely the thing that was actually nourishing to my soul.

I was looking for fireworks, not love. Experience, not necessarily truth.

“A person must be in the religious search not for the sake of religious experiences, which can deceive, but for the sake of Truth.” —Fr. Seraphim Rose

This is one reason that obedience to a spiritual father, as is practiced in the eastern orthodox tradition is important, especially at the beginning of one’s spiritual life.

So, I moved on from the somatic practices to yoga which I would go on to become certified as a teacher and keep a fairly regular practice for many years.

I would eventually experiment with many more modalities from Rolfing to Bioenergetics, Wim Hof, (before he blew up,), the Alexander technique and more. I read ‘The Body Keeps the Score’ and became aware of Peter Levine’s work and TRE, during my second ayahuasca retreat in fact.

At some point I came across this name Feldenkrais in my research but didn’t really dig deep enough to understand what he was all about. So, I bookmarked him and moved on.

—During this time, I would be initiated in the Shipibo tradition at the Ayahuasca Foundation after two previous ayahuasca retreats and move to Ecuador with my wife to work at a retreat center called Gaia Sagrada in which I would learn to keep the fire during ayahuasca and sweat lodge ceremonies and become very acquainted with huachuma. I would do a couple vision quests, and a Vipassana retreat as well. I write about all of this in more detail in other places.

AWE

Then near the end of 2019, I joined a 3-year psychedelic therapy training course in which I got a real taste of working in groups with somatic teachers. I deep dove into bioenergetics and started to grasp the big idea. I hired a core energetics therapist and began to work out the correspondences between the enneagram and bioenergetic character analysis studying the works of Gurdjieff and Claudio Naranjo among others.

I facilitated a dozen or so others in having cathartic experiences with these techniques and considered making it my main thing.

A Thread

However, there was another practice that I was introduced to during the training, that became a staple in every intensive, what the teacher called Spontaneous Movement.

We would put blind folds on and go out into the center of a circle and move however we wanted, or perhaps more accurately, however we felt.

Everybody loved it.

There would be three people intermingled on the floor doing strange movements, another guy in the corner moving like a mime looking crazy, and another doing some combination of yoga and dance.

Imagining what someone from the outside looking in would think is quite amusing.

I realized, however, that genuine spontaneous movement was impossible for me; that the motivation to ‘get it right,’ to ‘do good’ or ‘to have an experience’ or a breakthrough of some kind was sabotaging any possibility of being spontaneous.

I couldn’t get around my mind.

I could move fast, chaotic, strange; I could go from sliding on the floor to jumping up in an instant, but mind was always there, telling body what to do.

Now, the teacher never gave us a definition of spontaneity, he was skeptical, impatient disdainful even of words and too many instructions. Careful not to put an artificial limit on the possibilities. Though I ultimately disagree with his worldview, I continue to learn from him.

And this word spontaneity which he used often would continue to shine for me and guide my practice.

And so, my spontaneous movement always felt performative. I couldn’t take the mask, the armor off.

—Except, I might add, sometimes when others were involved, then instead of listening to my mind, I was responding to their touch. Good to take note of that.—

EMPTINESS.

The final intensive broke me down. I had two panic attacks. And finally, my big cathartic release.

After 10 days of iboga fueled meditation, no sleep for 3 days, I found myself lying on the floor in the ‘blue room’ in something like agony and finally the tears began to fall and the body began to shake and out of the mouth came the words… “why did you abandon me?”

Was I talking to my mom? My dad? God?

I wasn’t sure.

Long story really short, I left the program not as a syncretic transpersonal psychedelic therapist, but as a somatically informed orthodox Christian.

Those who deconstruct often don’t go far enough.

To be continued…

*R.A.W. called this out directly in the next book I refer to, he says “I have decided that one of the reasons that most readers of self-liberation books never even make the effort to liberate themselves is that reading the books is actually a kind of superstitious ‘magick ritual,’ which they think will have an effect with no other effort on their part.”

**And C.S. Lewis has something to say about this as well; “That might have been so if he had lived a few centuries earlier. At that time the humans still knew pretty we when a thing was and when it was not; and if it was proved they really believed it. THEY STILL CONNECTED THINKING WITH DOING AND WERE PREPARED TO ALER THEIR WAY OF LIFE AS A RESULT OF A CHAIN OF REASONING. But what with the weekly press and other such weapons we have largely altered that. Your man has been accustomed, ever since he was a boy TO HAVE A DOZEN INCOMPATIBLE PHILOSOPHIES DANCING ABOUT TOGETHER INSIDE HIS HEAD.”

**And within this quote may be the problem to which this series of articles trying to get at.

FYI: This article is far more about me than Midwestuary.

Read more

-Proverbs 3:21-23

“For years I walked with a limp I pretended wasn’t there. But the old stories say: if you’ve wrestled the Angel, you’ll walk different. I’ve come to see my trauma not as the end of the story, but the dark wood I had to pass through to learn the names of things.”

-C. LaManna

Lord Jesus Christ, Song of God, have Mercy on me a sinner.

I was 15.

A baby.

A virgin.

A fool.

It was the day before Christmas Eve.

My stepsibling—a few years my senior— had come for a sleepover.

After the parental units retired, I walked down the small set of stairs to the floor that contained my bedroom (we lived in a quad in the suburbs of Michigan at the time.)

As I walked past the half-cracked bathroom door I watched as, let’s call him Lou, raised a dark oddly shaped plastic bottle to his lips and drank.

My life would never be the same.

My gut tells me he wanted me to see or rather that I was supposed to see.

He proceeded to enlighten me on the practice of ‘robotripping.’

Say less. I was in.

I proceeded to swallow, if I remember correctly, around 42 Sucrets (a cough drop with the psychoactive chemical I was after) with some pink Kool-Aid.

And so, my journey into the Occult had commenced.

A blissful journey it was, pure imagination, where all my desires were fulfilled instantaneously.

Every thought, every image that arose was met with its answer, bliss upon bliss, and then…

Panic.

I slammed back into my anaesthetized—dextromethorphan, like ketamine, acts as a dissociative anesthetic and a psychedelic, depending on the dose and the intention— body.

“I’m going to die.”

I didn’t.

Instead…

“I feel like I’ve been…reborn”, I exclaimed in a whisper after calming down.

Having tasted such chemically induced ecstasy at such a ripe age…. well, no bueno mi amigo, no bueno.

Lucid dreaming and astral projection were first to capture my imagination after this.

I would rush home after basketball practice to sit in the gray cushioned fold up chair I had set up in my room to practice the proscribed exercises from my book…

I saw absolutely no possibility of danger in this.

But I was young and undisciplined, so while I made some progress in attaining deep relaxation (I was doing NSDRs way before it was cool) my goal remained out of sight.

Instead, I turned to more substance use.

Marijuana became my go to.

And then gradually, anything.

I was probably, technically, an addict since my first use, in the sense that substances now occupied an overly proportionate place in my psyche.

After some minor run ins with the law, I was reintroduced to psychedelics proper, and this coincided with my introduction to the Illuminati.

I was reflecting on the first time I heard this word, Illuminati.

It was in the title of Tupac’s (one of my childhood hero’s) posthumous album.

Anyway.

My Christian friends wouldn’t shut up about this mysterious, evil group of people.

And so, in an attempt to shut them up and understand what’s really going on here I began to research.

First on the list, the Freemasons.

I didn’t get very far researching them directly, so I took a different angle.

Satanism.

And it was by way of this route that I discovered the man I was unknowingly looking for.

Aleister Crowley.

Aha!

And I realized, in my deep wisdom, that my friends had it all wrong.

The Illuminati were the good guys!

The great white brotherhood of initiates that were doing the real spiritual work which religion had either forgotten or intentionally suppressed for their own nefarious purposes.

Before I knew it, I had a deck of Tarot cards and was contemplating the Etz Chaim (Tree of Life) whenever I had a spare moment.

Qabalah, Tarot, Magic(k), Yoga, Hermeticism, Gnosticism, etc.

This is what I had been seeking!

My drug use continued, but now it had an aim.

• Illumination.

• Adepthood.

• The Philosopher’s Stone.

And a map.

After visiting paradise a few times with these entheogens, I found soon myself getting closer and closer to Gehenna.

And then…

Panic.

Madness.

Hell.

I found myself handcuffed to a hospital bed having been pepper sprayed and tazed after having fled from the house where I ingested a ‘heroic’ dose of psilocybin mushrooms.

When I entered the courthouse to stand in front of the judge, a woman ran up to me and gave me a big hug, “oh my god, you’re ok she said, they wanted me to say you started it, but they got violent with you, that boy needed help I told them!”

I was put on probation for a year for breaking one of the cops’ glasses.

Most people probably would have turned away from the psychonaut path after that.

Not I.

I went deeper.

I had to understand what happened to me.

My studies into the Western Esoteric Tradition proceeded full steam ahead.

And after the memory of the hell trip faded some, I continued with the psychedelics.

In college, my spiritual studies took precedence over my degree studies.

Meditation, ceremonial magic(k), yoga and psychedelics primarily.

In my final year of university, I bought an ounce of mushrooms, with the intention to use them systematically for my own exploration into the unseen realms.

Truth is, I was always afraid.

I was always looking for an excuse not to use them.

It wasn’t that I wanted to, I felt compelled to.

Like a hard work out you don’t so much as look forward to the workout as you do to the feeling afterwards.

It was like that.

So, I sold some.

And long story short, the guy I was selling the mushrooms to was working with the local drug enforcement agency.

AKA, a snitch.

I came home to a raided apartment and 7 felonies hanging over my head for selling two little bags of mushrooms to a fellow college student who delivered them directly to the cops.

So, I graduated college with a BA in Marketing, 2 felonies and a specialty in psychedelics and the occult.

Most people, healthy, grounded, untraumatized people, probably would have given up the occult path after this.

Then again, most healthy, grounded, untraumatized people wouldn’t have found themselves in this position to begin with.

I continued full steam ahead.

When your heroes are people whose slogans are ‘Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be the Whole of The Law’ and ‘Turn on, tune in and Drop Out’ and ‘Culture is not Your Friend’ it’s a lot easier to rationalize your behavior where you come out on top.

I was a trail blazer!

I taught the Christian heroin addict in my jail cell all about Qabalah.
I read Man and His Symbols by Jung in rehab and The Doors of Perception in my final weekend stint in jail.

The group therapist in rehab even let me lead a session and teach everyone about my Crowleymckennawattsjungianism.

I met the girl who would become my wife around this time, already primed by astrology and Marilyn Manson, we were peas in a pod.

Eventually, we decided we needed to head west.

I got certified to teach yoga, visited Bruce Lee’s grave, ate quite a bit kratom and went on a lot of hikes and I meditated for 30 days straight for 30 minutes/day for the first time.

We moved back home to Michigan 4 months later.

I felt unprepared to teach yoga and honestly wasn’t really into it, but it was the only way I could think of where my interests could translate into a career path.

It would be the trip that followed that would open the door to the next stage in my journey.

When I first heard Terence Mckenna talk, I knew I would have to visit the jungle one day to experience that sacred brew most commonly known as ayahuasca.

So, in 2015, I did.

And the following year I went back, this time with my girlfriend for a longer stint.

And the year after that I went for the long haul and spent 10 weeks at the ayahuasca foundation being initiated into the Shipibo Tradition.

I learned the hard way that I wasn’t ready to serve ayahuasca.

Then I got married in my garage.

My wife and I learned of an opportunity to work at a plant medicine retreat center in Ecuador, and we jumped on it.

Within the first week, we had befriended the team and the owner and were brought onto the management team.

This came with the benefits of being closer to the shamans and learning the way of the red road.

We went on our first vision quest, kept fires for San Pedro, ayahuasca and sweat lodge ceremonies.

*After the first vision quest —4 days no food, no water, on the mountain.

It was a unique an educational experience to say the least.

We returned home after 6 months not really any clearer on our ‘calling’ than we were before.

The answer to the next step came in the form of a 3-year psychedelic/transpersonal psychology/shamanic training program at AWE.

This course wove together the “western therapeutic tradition” from Reich to Grof and the indigenous traditions of the Huichol, Ai Cofan and Bwiti mixed with some Dzogchen Buddhism and Gurdjieff’s Fourth Way.

It was everything I was interested in all wrapped up in one big container.

I had to do it.

Throughout the 3-year course I started serving medicine, MDMA, Kambo and ayahuasca mainly, I held multiple retreats and served ayahuasca on a documentary called LSD and the Psychedelic Revolution.

Long story short, I came out of the course not as a ‘New Age’ western shaman, but as an Eastern Orthodox Christian.

Surprise!

After eating peyote in the desert and then again with the Jesus loving Native American Church of the Morning Star it was only a matter of time before Christ came and pulled me out of the darkness.

After that, life got really hard.

And the spiritual warfare has barely let up.

My mind is still cloudy; I’m exhausted to my bones and in a lot of pain.

Regret often threatens to swallow me up.

Intrusive thoughts, distractibility and anxiety are still with me.

But overall, I’m good.

And I know who’s I am.

I’ve been dipping my toes in content creation for about 18 months now and have made very little progress due primarily to this lack of clarity.

Which ultimately comes from a lack of identity.

Who am I? What is my role? How can I be of use?

I’ve been stuck between am I a coach? A “guide”? Do I just continue on my therapeutic path without the psychedelics? And therefore present myself as such?

Or am I here to warn people against the dangers of occultism and psychedelics and point them towards Christ?

Both?

Well, it seems that first I need to tell my story openly with all the ugly truth, confusion, trauma, addiction, charlatanism, etc. and take full responsibility for all of it.

That being said, this article leaves out and glosses over some very important issues that will be addressed and expanded upon in future articles.

And so this Newsletter in which I will post 1-2 articles/week will be a combination of stories from my journeys through psychedelia, shamanism and the occult to finding myself a Christian and entering into the Eastern Orthodox tradition as well as my related interests in psychotherapy, particularly Gestalt therapy, Bioenergetics and Feldenkrais, Rites of Passage, Classical Literature, fatherhood, homeschooling and more.

I invite you to come along and I pray that my journey can you a little on yours.

Peace.

-Chris

Chat with me here: Discovery Call

A Seat at the Gnostic Mass

There we were.

Seated next to each other in cheap white fold-up chairs.

The ceremony was held at the local branch of the Theosophical Society in Royal Oak. A discreet little white building off Woodward and 10 mile. In the window: a sign advertising crystal healings and other “New Age” services.

I had been studying Aleister Crowley for years by this point, but I hadn’t yet taken the leap to actually reach out to those who practice his religion, Thelema. The O.T.O. — Ordo Templi Orientis — a German secret society whose head had initiated Crowley after discovering that he had uncovered their central secret and written of it openly in his Book of Lies,

Chapter 69.

Crowley eventually became the head of the order, folding his prophetic religion proclaiming the new Aeon of Horus, into it, making it the church of his infamous creed:

“Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
Love is the Law, Love under Will.”

Rock and Roll, baby.

And so there we were, waiting for the central ritual of this religion: the Gnostic Mass to begin.

To be honest, I don’t remember much except the High Priestess stroking the staff of the High Priest, I remember that.

Compared to the liturgy at the Orthodox Church, it felt like a group of Magic: The Gathering players doing cosplay.

It would be many years before I came all the way around to our Lord, the Rabbi.

But that was the last Gnostic Mass for me and my wife.

Stage One: The Father (The Vague All)

Over the years of studying and practicing in the occult and crawling my way out, something began to dawn on me. It came as an intuition, which I’ve since tried to flesh out:

There is a progression in the revelation of God, an unfolding path that mirrors the Trinity.

At first, a man becomes dimly aware of the Father — “the universe,” “Spirit,” “the One,” or some other indefinite title. He senses that there is more than the material world, that life must proceed from an immaterial Source. He says things like, “I believe in a higher power” or “There’s something bigger than me.”

But the God glimpsed here is abstract, undefined, a unity without relationship.

The danger is that many stop here.

They mistake this hazy intuition for the whole. Some give up and return to Mammon; others drift into ‘New Age’ syncretism or perennialism; and many fall prey to prelest — ‘spiritual delusion.’ Without a further encounter, the “All” remains an abstraction — vulnerable to distortion.

Stage Two: The Son (Discernment and Limits)

Jesus said:
“Not that any man hath seen the Father, save he which is of God, he hath seen the Father.”

And again:
“He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father.”

Read more

That there is only One (True) Religion

Originally it was known as …The Way.

It is most clearly expressed in the Biblical narrative and glimpsed in the Dao De Ching.

It is the Way of Self-Emptying.

Of ‘voluntary self-sacrifice.’

Then said Jesus unto his disciples, if any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me. -Matthew 16-24

It is the way of transforming the inevitable suffering of life into meaning.

It is a yes to all that life is.

Before I actually looked deeply into Christianity and really started examining my own beliefs, my assumptions, myself. I completely dismissed Christianity as being a possible pathway.

I know I'm not alone in having been shown, in growing up around, a rather empty Christianity. A propositional Christianity. A just "believe" (whatever that means) this, that and this and you're good to go Christianity.

“Christianity is not about propositions but disposition.” —somebody

If you are a 'seeker, if you have any capacity to seek, if you are curious at all, that will not suffice.

We need something to do.

And we want to understand.

It's also a case of a kind of semantic satiation or numbness from exposure.

We've been inundated with this image, a man on a cross, it's lost meaning for us.

It doesn't hit.

And with this has grown a kind of exoticism. [A romanticization, fetishization, and/or commodification of ethnic, racial, or cultural otherness, as in orientalism, or primitivizing representations of the ‘noble savage’.]

Perhaps you have had this experience when traveling and you ask a local about the Grand Canyon or whatever and they've never been there even though they've lived 10 minutes away from it their whole life.

I had this experience in my own life where after having spent my first 25 years in Michigan and then moving abroad, upon returning I realized that Michigan is home to more National Forests than almost any other state.

I came to appreciate the place I grew up only after having left it.

Only upon rediscovery.

Perhaps this is a mythic pattern we can explore at a different time.

Great Lakes, yeah whatever, I want mountains! I suppose this is a case of none other than "the grass is always greener"

I used to have a recurring dream when I was little maybe 4 or 5 that at the corner of my street, hidden behind the elementary school was this perfect amusement park.

Perhaps this was a foretelling of my spiritual journey, revealing that the truth I was seeking was "in my backyard" the whole time.

Addiction to novelty, "shiny object syndrome." It's kind of embarrassing to admit, because let's call it what it is. Superficiality. Immaturity. But I'll cut myself a little slack, our society after all is built on this principle, to keep us satiated and distracted like children. What hides behind the spiritual not religious dogma is hedonism disguised as self-knowledge. Not all shame is toxic my friend. And deconstruction while an important part of inner work, is not the whole of it.

I could have hardly imagined that this pattern would have been revealed in my quest for God. My quest for Truth. In fact, before I had an encounter with Him. Truth that is, I thought I had already found 'it'. And this may very well be far more dangerous than deliberately disobeying God. For we know when we are clearly choosing lust, greed and gluttony over virtue. But when the path you're following is disguised as The Way, the truth, the light. When it gets 99% right but 1% wrong.

Woe to him.

This shouldn't surprise us for Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light. It is not surprising then if his servants also masquerade as servants of righteousness.

You see I bought into New Age Jesus. Christ Consciousness. Buddha Nature. It's all the same thing. Jesus is someone, like anyone who "finished the work." A great yogi, alchemist, shaman. Despite having never read the Bible, I thought somehow, I knew what was in it.

I know I'm not alone here. Russel Brand said essentially the same thing. And had a similar trajectory that I did, becoming a Christian shortly after I did (he must have heard about me)

To guys like us, guys who are simultaneously looking for an adventure, spiritual reality and are highly intellectual. Christianity, at least the version we were sold ain't it.

Prayer? Come on. Getting on my knees for 5 minutes before bed to thank God or ask him for what I want. Go to church to listen to the Bible. Well, that's about all I saw (or imagined). If only someone had introduced me to the Philokalia sooner.

“Prayer is the energy which accords with the dignity of the intellect; it is the intellect's true and highest activity.” —from the Philokalia

So, when I encountered the world of Western Esotericism, Eastern Mysticism, Yoga, Meditation, Qabalah, Magic(k), Tarot, Astrology, Alchemy now we were talking. There was no choice. Christianity was a social club for the uncurious. For the exoteric. Empty rituals and misunderstanding. I on the other hand was an 'initiate of the mysteries.' On my way to adept hood.

I suppose I would have articulated it something like I'm trying to be like Jesus to do the practices he did to understand the mysteries to do the alchemical work, fasting, meditation, etc. It is the secret societies/occult schools and some of the eastern traditions that are doing the work, practicing spirituality. Christians they just go to Church and “believe” in Jesus, again, whatever that means.

Funny, as much as I love to analyze and reflect. I didn't analyze this one very thoroughly. This of course isn't unique to me, pride that is and the inability to see our own blind spots. And it really takes a deliberate effort to uproot our own unconscious perspectives, to examine the deep ones at the bottom of our belief system.

It takes a dedication to the Truth over being right, over being comfortable that must be renewed constantly. It takes a deliberate effort to throw off comfort and security, to get to the bottom of things to run into that solid structure beneath your ideas.

The occult stuff has this glamorous veneer and not just the "occult" but many of the popular figures and books in the realm of General Spirituality, New Age, New Thought, even the deeper western esoteric stuff. They all have this effect, that you're so close. You're almost there. Just one more meditation session, retreat or psychedelic experience. The secret seems right around the corner. And it makes you feel closer by just having read about it.

I went on like this for a long time.

Then I discovered ‘Orthodox’ Christianity…and a seed was planted.

To be continued…

—Acts 16:19

For most, demons are a thing of fairy tales, ‘myth,’ superstition.

Lucky them.

C.S. Lewis warned of the polar extremes surrounding demonology.

“There are 2 equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest them. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors and hail a materialist or a magician with the same delight.”

I fell into the ladder camp.

Not so much with demons in particular but spirits in general.

The invisible architecture of the psyche and the cosmos.

Psychedelics opened this door into the unseen world(s).

Heavenly at first, then…

Hell.

The material world became rather dull after these experiences.

It was the labyrinth of the sub-conscious, the esoteric, the spiritual that had my attention now.

My guides?

Dead guys mostly.

Primary among them, the infamous Aleister Crowley

Dun dun dunnnn

I carried his autobiography around like scripture in my twenties. I wasn’t strictly speaking a ‘Thelemite’ (Followers of Crowley’s religion; ‘Thelema’ meaning ‘Will’ summed up in the phrase ‘Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law, Love is the Law, Love under Will) but I was a Crowley apologist for sure.

Then came Terence McKenna, and the path of the psychonaut took precedence over the ceremonial magic(k)ian.

After discovering the world of McKenna and friends, I knew I had to go to the Amazon.

I knew I had to drink Ayahuasca.

So, I did.

And I went back.

And back again; this time for the long haul.

In 2017, I spent 10 weeks learning the ways of the curandero.

33 ceremonies in 10 weeks, 1 led by me.

I had been initiated in the way of the Shipibo.

And so, I received a blessing to begin my ayahuasca ministry.

I flew back home to Detroit with a suitcase full of Palo Santo, Mapacho, a 3 liter of ayahuasca and went to work.

I started with my girlfriend and gradually started holding ceremonies for friends.

Things went smooth, the ceremonies were mild, I wasn’t healing people’s childhood traumas, but people walked away with a positive experience and some insight.

I thought the “bad trip” days were behind me.

Wrong.

Ok. I need to be transparent here. I was naïve, reckless and immature for sure. I was 27 and I grew up like you, relatively comfy, overfed, tv, materialism, etc.

I had drunk ayahuasca about 50 times and hadn’t let go of many of my bad habits. Including recreational drug use. Marijuana and kratom mostly. I did not heed the warning that one should essentially give up other substances if one wants to continue their relationship with ayahuasca.

Old habits die hard.

And so do old friendships.

A childhood friend caught wind of what I was up to these days and wanted to try.

The kind of guy who always seemed to have a prescription for Adderall and Xanax.

What could go wrong?

I was running low on medicine and so I put in an order with a mutual friend to send me some more.

$500 got me a brick of ayahuasca that reconstituted into 2 liters of medicine.

I would serve him the old stuff and try the new stuff on myself.

The day arrived.

At the time I had a big garage, bigger than my house actually, that I had turned into a kind of psychedelic yoga den, equipped with a float tank and all.

It was winter, a couple inches of snow on the ground.

Evening came; I put on my Shipibo regalia and made my way into the garage where my friend was making himself at home.

I got him bucket, a blanket and gave him a few mapacho cigarettes.

The usual.

And I began the ceremony as I was instructed.

Soplay. Pray, to God, to the Medicine.

Serve the medicine.

Wait.

Dark.

Silent.

Sing.

I got through maybe 3 songs before the medicine came on.

And it came on STRONG.

This was the first time that what I saw with my eyes closed was the same thing I saw with my eyes open.

No where to go.

I usually purge a good hour to 2 after taking the medicine.

Not this time. I purged violently less then 45 minutes after taking the medicine. Usually the purge knocks the mareación (the name for the altered state from the ayahuasca) down a notch.

Not this time.

The intensity continued to increase.

And then it happened…

As if using the smoke for a temporary body

A face, the color and likeness of fire embers, rose in the air as if being freed.

Lustful.

Like an intelligent hyena.

It was on me before I knew it.

I had no chance.

I showed up to a gun fight with a plastic spoon.

Shame on me.

“Be alert and of sober mind, your enemy, the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour” -Peter 5:8

Then I made the fatal mistake.
I panicked.

I hit abort.

I burst out of the garage into the winter night.

Stumbling barefoot into the house to find my wife in the shower.

“Briell, I fucked up. Oh god what have I done.”

My mind was falling into chaos.

I had opened a portal for demons; they were flooding into my garage as we speak and soon the entire universe would be ravaged.

My friend was surely dead.

I was locked in this nightmare for eternity.

And I had done it to myself.

It’s impossible to explain madness since by definition it is incoherent.

The mind desperately trying to understand what’s happening grasps at any and all impressions both internal, from memory and external from the senses.

The result a chaotic nightmare narrative that seems eternal.

It’s hard to say how long this lasted.

I remember being frozen in place, my vision fading, barefoot in the snow between my garage and my backdoor not sure if my wife was with God or the Devil.

Finally, she coaxed me into the house and thawed my feet as I lay in the doorway wrestling with the terror of madness.

Eventually she convinced me to take a shower, I still couldn’t shake it. I would calm down for a second and then break into panic, I started to scratch at myself and bite myself.

“You don’t understand. It’s over!” “I’m dying.”

She got me into the bed.

And at last, I started to come out of it.

My friend (still alive) had left at some point during the night.

I called him over in the morning and we talked about what happened.

His experience was pretty mild; he said the songs brought on some interesting visuals and some childhood memories. That’s about it.

Lucky him.

“Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the Devil. For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places. Therefore, take up the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand.”

-Ephesians 6:11-13

St. Paisios of Mount Athos

Spiritual Councils IV: Family Life p.173

Like Jacob, I wrestled something in the dark and came away marked.

But I've come to see my trauma not as a curse but as the dark wood I had to pass through to learn the names of things.

I'd lived in a kind of holy tension so long I called it home.

Restlessness was my baseline.

It wasn't that long ago when I would tremble when speaking from my heart, no, even approaching my heart…shit, for the longest time I didn't really know what that meant.

My mask was so good people would describe me as calm, cool and collected.

Big difference between being cool and frozen.

I came to the dreaded realization in a peyote ‘meeting’ that I was basically a psychopath.

Cut off from my feelings, looking at the world to show me how to feel, how to be.

(When it all came crashing down, I had the constant disconcerting sense that I was always missing the context of the conversation. I couldn't make sense of anything, talking to people made me anxious and reading was stressful.)

Really, this was just an intensification of what I always felt.

On the outside.

Constantly, chronically I flee to my head, my safe space where I can hide behind concepts, theories and words.

Truly, listening to a podcast or reading a nonfiction book for me is like taking a Vicodin.

But the most difficult pill to swallow…

I went on the fucking hero's journey!

Or so I had convinced myself

I didn't go to graduate school, I went to California, and then South America.

I was healing!

Only to return home and realize my life is a disaster on every level.

I was possessed, duped by the spirit of Lucifer. I can't tell you how many, times I got the message to hang up the psychedelic phone and put the fucking occult books away.

Until finally, God had to take my legs out from under me to save my soul.

Instead of healing my heart and learning to express my soul, I collected experiences, visions and knowledge and built a Tower of Babel.

I didn't need to spend 3 months in the jungle drinking ayahuasca every other day.

I didn't need to dry fast on the mountain for 4 days.

I didn't need to sacrifice a lamb to the spirit of peyote and vision quest in the desert.

I didn't need a high dose LSD trip and ketamine to integrate it.

I didn't need to scan my body for 100 hours or to stare into a mirror for 100 more with a cheek full of iboga and mambe.

I didn't need to do kambo, snake venom, rape or sananga.

Well, I suppose I did.

They say psychedelics aren't addictive…perhaps not, but the promise of transcendence is.

I wasn't "spiritual not religious" I was "spiritual not grounded" "spiritual and deluded"

A spiritual materialist, no…

A spiritual hedonist

I wanted spirituality without accountability.

I dressed my addictions up in spiritual clothes and my inability to deal with the material as wisdom

This has been very difficult to accept; thoughts of suicide plagued me for months after I was relieved of my delusion.

I recognize them now as the symptom of being stuck simultaneously in a freeze and fight or flight state and as a desire for new life, real life.

A deep desire to rest but not feeling safe enough to let go.

People often say, "I'm an old soul.” I, on the other hand, feel like a new soul.

Was this momentous mis-take the catalyst for the suffering I needed to start building that soul? To stop taking life for granted? To learn how to love and respect people, myself, life?

To become a real human being?

To be continued…