What would you know,

Deft and in tact,

Of unbecoming:

The ultimate act?

•

Apocalyptic self-consumption,

Scrupulously thorough:

All narcissistic assumption

Of illusory control.

•

The blaring and the subtle,

The tricky and pervasive,

The precious and the meaningful,

The silently persuasive.

•

Into the pyre you go at last,

Your earnest prayers are answered

You’re melting down, furious and fast—

You’re the dance and you’re the dancer.

•

Decidedly desiduous,

You’re subject to the season.

Your prayer was not ambiguous:

To end the ego’s treason.

•

So let the dead leaves fall, what will

And remain rooted deep.

And let the emptiness distill

What truth you’re meant to keep.

Digital art I created by using an original painting titled “Stillness” by Stella Jae and a photograph by @theta_nine on Instagram

Movement has a reputation for making change

When in fact, movement is often the habit.

The perpetuation.

Change requires un-doing.

Being in stillness.

Overriding the system’s drive

To generate output—

To analyze input—

To comb through memory,

like a schizophrenic archeologist…

…or a paranoid meteorologist

squinting at future’s frontier.

(Don’t get too comfortable—

A storm is brewing near.)

Tacks on the map locate

Everywhere but here.

Turns labeled “right” or “wrong”

Faces in the mirror.

As if we could finally define ourselves

With conceptual cartography—

Escape the fleeting nature of the unbounded

phenomena we are—

As if fulfillment lay in settling

into some ultimate (and preferably comfortable) rote potential—

relieved of the incessant uncertainty

The looming urgency

To generate and manage “me” consistently.

How is it that we defend so stubbornly

These identities which ravage us?

We insist upon control—even when it finds us at fault.

Yet we avoid taking the leap at all costs—for fear we’ll fall.

These subtle ways we separate ourselves

Unconsciously, but painfully.

Believing judgmental thoughts

That self-importantly condemn.

Categorizing data points into “us” and “them”.

Indulging in our shame, our wrongness.

Insistent on our blinders.

Lifetimes of evidence—of malware

Confirming our bias

Pitiful victims of our own oppression

As if self-deprecation were pious.

Stillness is a refuge.

It is not inert at all.

It exhales—settling compulsivity,

Like the break of a heatwave

at nightfall.

The reprieve of a landslide

of claustrophobic fossilized context.

A freshness emerges.

The scent of a night blooming jasmine.

Submerging in the living waters

Of our own unconditional presence—

What we’ve been searching for

in all the wrong places.

Stillness is never not here.

It’s merely drowning

In movement’s coverup for fear.

Call it by what name you will—

earnest and sincere…

Most movement is away from

Stillness which Is

Never not

Here.

The first curls like a plume of smoke, dancing in the moonlight. When I look directly at her, she simply disappears. Her scent adorns the space like an intoxicating garden. I feel her coiling invitation pass right through my flesh, and spiral up my spine.

Mesmerized, my mouth agape, I stammer stupidly—searching in vain for words, any words of devotion adequate to honor her. In the corner of my eye, she writhes, serpentine. Wrathful and erotic, her essence feels at once comfortingly familiar and terrifyingly wild.

“What” she hissed, “is it that you want?” I draw a blank, feeling unprepared. Panicked that I am missing out on a once in a lifetime opportunity, any answer that I can fathom feels trite and presumptuous. Who is it that I even am to claim and commit to desires?

“Anything?” I manage.

“Why not?” She sounds impatient.

I close my eyes, light headed—like I can’t get enough air.

I worry this will displease her, like its somehow not noble enough, but I finally answer, even as I curse my small hunger, my little bodily longing.

“I want healthy guts.” I admit—it’s been years since I’ve been able to eat most things. “Strong digestive fire. I want to sweat with spice, rush with sweet, be comforted by creamy, satisfied with salty crunch. I want to sip acidic wine, feel that sharp pucker of pleasure. I want to dine out and choose anything on the menu.”

Before the words finish leaving my mouth, I am choking on shame. Approached my a God and my ask is simply to satiate my own animal appetite?

What of those who live in poverty, in famine? What of the Earth herself who we’ve poisoned and usurped in the name of scientific and efficient agriculture? How could I be so petty?

The vaporous presence consumes itself, as if being inhaled, than is exhaled as a wind which knocks me on my ass, smells of complex curries, rendered fat, roasted nuts and sharp espresso…fried potatoes, melting chocolate, toasted bread and ripe tomatoes…

I am lost in fragrance, swimming in sensation. I can almost feel food making its way down my throat and landing in my belly, which receives it like a blessing, without the painful rejection of inflammation or contractions.

I can almost feel my cells being nourished and revived, each purring contentedly like a cat napping post-hunt.

But I have lost something also. Something I did not know I had. A sensitivity, an awareness, that has long been cultivated in my years of hateful, fearful, and resentful austerity. I’m disoriented by the saturation of sensation, like an exasperated orgasm with a lover that’s unreal.

“Enough! I’ve had enough” I plead, feeling seasick. Disgust—which has long accompanied my hunger and my satiation—settles, unwelcome, within and around me. This must have been a trick.

Is this God out to get me? Or was this somehow all my fault? Likely the latter, I habitually conclude.

Slowly the tastes subside. My tongue is swollen like a sausage. I feel heat on my face and neck. Some kind of rash creeping down my abdomen.

Slowly I blink my eyes open. The second God approaches. Trickling across the floor like a stream of water, flecks of moonlight shimmer in her fluid body. I retract, unsure of what to trust now. She moves faster than is comfortable.

“What is it you want?” She demands, her voice like liquid silver. She speaks louder than this smoke God, a resonance that seems to purge my very core.

“I’m afraid to want” I whimper pathetically, before giving it more thought. “Wanting usually leads to feeling incomplete, or getting what I thought I wanted and feeling foolish or disappointed.”

“That may be astute”, she says, pooling around me, “but it’s not the point.”

“What is the point?” I ask, too aware of her wetness. It feels cool and refreshing, but somehow tinged with secrecy, like a setup for a trap.

“Is that what you want? To know what to point is?” She sounds bored and disappointed.

I can tell I just have one ask. I do want to know what the point is, but I have a feeling it will be somewhat placating and meaningless if transmitted intellectually.

“Um. No.” I feel so cold. Damp and paralyzed.

“I want to be purified” I hear myself say—I hope I won’t regret this.

“Not in the name of perfection, or even absolution. I just want to be cleansed of the untruths that obscure me, leak my energy.

The puddle I’m sitting in begins to ripple and vibrate. Around me, small spurts of water rise up, defying gravity, and start swirling like a whirlpool. I am losing my bearings. Everything spins. My ears ring and pop as I feel the pressure rising. I feel my seat as tiny and being sucked down, into a pinhole, while my upper body revolves in massive circles.

Laundry on a spin cycle.

Water is pouring into my eye sockets. Water in my nose and lungs. A bittersweet weeping rocks me. Grief the size of eternity seizes me and agitates me on the washboard of my rib cage.

Some disturbingly slick fish emerges from my sternum, emitting a field of existential loneliness. This is too surreal.

Then I feel the weight of an infinite ocean of guilt rack my being. Much larger than my body. The shame of every violence, every ignorance, every perpetuated trauma. “This is not all mine,” I repeat like a mantra, trying to believe it.

I want to beg for mercy, but some semblance of pride has me determined not to bypass any of this process. My head pounds from sorrow; my jaw feels jiggly like jelly; I’m not sure if I have any teeth left.

Eventually the spinning slows. My hair is plastered to my face. Shivering, I lean over and wretch bile. None of the food I experienced comes up, I note, strangely grateful.

The water recedes, flowing back into the darkness. Silence reigns. Thunder claps. The moon, I see through the window, has moved about one finger width. Time marches on.

The third Goddess flares to life. A star exploding in my retinas. All wetness evaporates in an instant. I think I smell my hair burning. She pulsates blindingly, erasing everything but light. There is no fear, no doubt, no shame. There is no “I”.

Like a moth to a flame, I orient towards her solar center. Without reason, I am simply resolved to burn.

“What do you want?” She transmits silently .

“I want to love like you do,” my heart proclaims. “Fiercely and fearlessly, generatively and generously, securely and selflessly, presently and eternally, absolutely and unconditionally.”

My own words enter me like a velveteen lover. They penetrate my most hidden and sensitive darkness. Goosebumps rise like waves on a choppy sea and my breath catches. My neck is a mouthful in the jaws of this giant, rendering me molten—limp, but not powerless.

Pleasure that somehow feels at once unbearable and sustainable, vulnerable and empowering, novel and familiar, sensual and transcendent, shudders through me.

My chest bursts like the door of a birdcage with a broken lock, releasing a watch of nightingales into my living room. They circle me, singing hauntingly, chiseling away at calcified confusion in my mind.

The center of my head is a vortex of infinite depth.

I am obliterated by awareness. Melting into a vast body of living light. A loving network of perception that connects all existence of every magnitude. There is no separation. Instead, what feels like a reverent homecoming, filled to bursting with awe and gratitude.

A forgiveness so complete it almost feels obvious and ordinary.

The moon has set. The pitch of sky outside gradually blushes periwinkle, coaxing color into the landscape.

A subtle thrumming carries me into the morning, like a chorus of cicadas turned way down low. Delicate reverberations seem to align my every joint, organ, and artery.

I feel weightless, but rooted.

I didn’t notice the Gods leave—I’m not sure if they did, or ever will. I feel their presence, alive as the very elements whose dance animates me.

Slowly I uncross my legs, inhale receptively into my belly, and stretch my arms high. My mouth opens wide as I exhale gleefully, praising this day, my life, and creation. I crawl to my big window and swing it out on its hinge.

A gentle humid breeze rushes in, clearing the space of the stagnant dank aromas of alchemial transmutation, caressing me with essence of lilac and pear.

Seraphina, my little black kitten, mounts my shoulders and mews in her tiny precious way. Together we sit, purring, and watching the songbirds flit.

The great orange ball of fire has cleared the horizon, and I gaze into its throbbing insistence. My retinas drink in its tonic, cleansed of any residue or resignation, softened by pleasure, restored by peace.

Eventually I walk to the kitchen. It’s been cleaned up, I notice—last night was a rare exception when I left it a mess.

I set the kettle to boil. Then walk to my small altar table. I toss the old flowers out the open window, and refill the vase with fresh water.

Stepping out into the garden, I feel the cool air caress my bare legs, awakening skin beneath my oversized T shirt. I am deeply content as I select a handful of new blooms—perky and fragrant—greeting the bees as they make their morning rounds.

A bundle of fresh lemon balm, four damask rose buds, and a few stalks of nettle, breathing deep as I let their sting enter my body, honing my awareness to that savory, single point of pain.

I dust off the altar, place the fresh bouquet, and light a candle. Wordlessly, I emit a prayer of thanks for my humble, ordinary and precious life.

That I may receive it as the gift that it is. So that I may offer it as the gift that it is.

I steep the lemon balm, nettle and rose, pouring tea into three of the earthenware set of ceremonial teacups I’m most fond of, offering them, in turn, to the three Gods who visited last night.

I’ve no qualms with what I asked for, nor with how it was delivered. I have no concrete answer to wave like a banner or hold like a trophy.

The entire experience just was.

I’ve simply been blessed by the reunion with my own, undivided heart.

She formed and allegiance with suffering, shamed her jealousy, took pride in her shame. She confused self-punishment with redemption. She was convinced that being the victim of her own oppression was the only way.

By severing herself from the wounded child within, she arrested her emotional development, meeting the world with the capacities of that younger self. Moving maniacally, she tried desperately to compensate for her presumption of wrongness.

She felt compelled to confess compulsively and self-correct obsessively, condemning and justifying herself simultaneously.

Seeking shelter in the identity of inadequacy, she believed her projections about others’ superiority. She was cursed by the ambition to become something she feared she never could be. Carrying herself like an apology, she sacrificed herself instinctively.

She didn’t trust herself with intimacy, dissecting her every expression in search of imperfection. Communication often felt like a test she always failed. Rejecting herself, she outsourced validation. Over-sharing left her feeling dangerously exposed and misunderstood.

Hyper-vigilance was her corset, judgement her straight jacket. Suspicious of joy, she was always waiting for the other shoe to drop, and often sabotaged herself just to maintain her grip on the illusion of control. She was exhaustingly pessimistic, an undercurrent of criticism suffocating her like a boa constrictor.

She did not trust her body. It was too frightened, too sad, too curvy, or not curvy enough. It was sick or in pain or a threat. It was unreliable. Subject to death.

She is survived by the woman who dares to reach for joy. The woman who honors and respects her grief, unattached to its trappings. She who calls back every shattered fragment of herself, who does not look away from their harrowed eyes. She knows that life inherently includes pain, and that hers is no less worthy because of it.

She is curious about how she gives her power away—the automatic narratives which color her world. When she notices them, she does not shame herself. She chooses to breath into and through whatever it is that the mind deems problematic. She reminds herself that thoughts are not real, and don’t define her anymore than voices on the radio. She exercises her right to change the channel.

She knows that all systems of colonization, of patriarchy, of oppression, stem from how those dynamics are alive in each individual.

She sits with herself and offers her unconditional presence to her emotional experience. She stays with the root rather than pruning the branches. She feels tenderness for that poor child she’s neglected for all of these years, who has learned to survive with a hardness that contorts.

She accepts that things take time, and happen in their own time and way. She stops chasing accomplishment as a measure of her love-ability and instead lets the emanation of loving awareness take the wheel.

She notices her responses to other people, but does not withdraw into self-criticism. She opens further to their beauty, their uniqueness, reminding herself that we are reflections of each other and enjoying their particular flavor of experience.

She expresses herself spontaneously and curiously, no longer desperate to express the truth of herself, the whole truth of herself, and nothing but the truth of herself—as if her own sense of self were at stake. She allows what was said, and what was unsaid, to unfold in an unhurried and insightful ongoing inner dialogue.

She thinks about herself less. She feels herself more.

She questions the negative interpretation of anything. The habitual tension and disappointement. She pays attention to the myriad of blessings in each moment. The rays of a rising sun illuminating the morning mist. The cat moving his body like a slinky in the garden, wanting a belly rub. The safe, beautiful and comfortable place she calls her home.

The incomplete, but only family I knew,

I withdrew into vacancy

Hardened, like a chain-link fence in February.

My tongue stuck in that frozen lick,

A dare I (was) defeated defiantly.

~

I became an empty nest

Haunting my mothers frozen wing

I did not meet her eyes, even when I did.

I could not forgive her for the way her love,

Dysmorphic from loss, smothered me.

She wanted me to be free,

Although somehow even my sorrow

Was preciously familiar to her.

~

Her own dysfunction impaired

Her ability to help me loosen mine,

Which was an echo of and a rebellion against her neuroses.

She wanted me to sing with her.

To cry with her.

I gave her none such satisfaction.

I used self-aggression as an instrument

To hurt her obliquely

A selfish, self-effacing monopoly,

A Cold War of denial, gaslighting, and manipulation.

Punishing silence.

I made her concern my enemy.

For a decade I was reduced

To a perturbed poltergeist

My own parasite

Repression almost tricking even myself

That I wasn’t ravenous.

An erasure the shape of who I once was,

Only smaller, translucent, washed out.

~

A decade when I could have been dancing.

A decade when I could have been leaning.

A decade when I could have been growing.

A decade of decay—

Of diminished grey and white matter.

Of diminished bone density.

Of diminished myelin sheaths.

Exposing the live wires of fraying nerves

Like razor wire surrounding a prison yard.

No winged friends could alight on me.

Only buzzards spiraled ominously above.

~

A fleeting decade

Lost like I was

Told I was so skinny

If I turned sideways, I’d disappear.

Disappear like that sideways decade,

Into endlessly anemic liminality,

Obsession consuming

Entire semesters of lessons I could not hear,

As I watched the professors mouth moving,

Entire days measured by how many slow, tiny bites

I could divide my palm-sized meal into.

Entire weeks measured by meal plans.

How many occasions I was allowed to cheat and eat

Six fig newtons, or a bag of trail mix, or a cookie at the cafe after school

Instead of lunch

~

Then panic hit, imploding my organs

How many calories would I need to restrict to compensate?

To redeem myself once more

Those endless mornings on the treadmill

watching the Food Network for beakfast.

Those endless walks to the dumpster

with my bagged lunch in hand—

Id cooked so my mom would think I was eating

Or had eaten, and purged in a bag in my basement closet,

slinking across the parking lot,

An offering to the landfill.

~

Only now am I strong enough

to retrograde back

through the brittle nest

which was the wastebasket

Into which I unwittingly threw

That whole decade of my life.

I threw up that rejected decade

which poisoned the following decade,

Even as I began to crawl

Out of that hell-hole,

And tried to unlearn the auto-immunity.

~

Now I cradle

Handfuls of that regurgitation.

I bow to that sea of bile.

I know that execration

Which I reduced myself to

Is the*halahala of my soul

Awaiting my own consecration.

*Halahala: In Hindu mythology, the primordial, world-destroying poison that emerged during the churning of the cosmic ocean. To save creation, Lord Shiva drank the venom but contained it safely in his throat, turning his neck blue (Neelkanth). Symbolically, it represents the absolute peak of suffering or toxic negativity that cannot be avoided, but must instead be courageously held, integrated, and transmutatively transformed into wisdom or art.

Something pulls you out of bed and puts you in your day,

It introduces you to everything you need along the way

It puts your finger to the flame and teaches you the burning

And you become a ripple in the river of our learning

It locks you at the gateway of your dreams until you recognize

You’ve always had the key and you are walking in power

Most folks can’t see power unless it is in motion

But I see fire in your eyes moves the tides across the ocean,

Theres a purpose in your passion, theres a reason for your tears,

Yet you dissipate your power when you ground it in your fears,

You can step into your destiny and you can do it now

Or stumble blindly down your path like you don’t know you are walking in power, walking in power…..

You are a light now I am here to remind you

that when you take your path you light the way for those come behind you..

there’s more to your future than the choices you made so don’t be afraid don’t be afraid..

There’s a power when you stay there’s a power when you go..... there’s a power in the people who are not aware they know

Do not give your power away to those who would bind you

If you do it’s you alone, you alone who has confined you

Some will try to steal the light that lets you shine

But your always safe when your aware

That you are walking in power... walking in power ….

If you ever lose your way there’s a guidance for the asking

If you listen with your heart, and this will bring

You to the things you want the very most

But if you wanna sing with angels you gotta dance with ghosts

These lyrics were not born of my mind. This was a poem shared with me by a dear friend who lived for a year in a Redwood, protesting it being cut down. Another woman who was there shared it with her. I simply put the words to melody and crafted the accompaniment.

The cover art is Rising by Natacha Einat.

This essay was inspired by an article I recently read on spiritual bypassing. I found myself agreeing with much of it while also feeling called to explore where my own experience has led me in a different direction.

It isn’t intended as a rebuttal, much less a personal critique. The original article helped clarify my own thinking, and I’m grateful for that. Consider this less a counterargument than another voice in the same conversation.

If I’ve misunderstood any aspect of the author’s position, that misunderstanding is mine, not theirs. This is simply the dialogue the article sparked in me.

I understand wanting to help people see through the untruth of their illusions.

I agree that healing can become an identity.

I agree that psychological work has no end-point, that unconditional presence solves what analysis never can, and that awakening is the realization that there is nothing wrong with you to fix in the first place.

And that realization, that softening, inevitably leads to changes in behavior and perception because the things which were deemed as problems— all wounds manifesting somehow to make themselves known because they needed to be felt and loved—are no longer hurtfully rejected so no longer need to act up as defensively.

That leads to a happier relative life, which, is to the absolute, is no better or worse than a miserable life, but come on, allow yourself the preference—the conviction even—to be happy.

My spiritual seeking has included years of absolute non-dual conviction, but that never ultimately liberated me. Understanding it conceptually is nothing like experiential gnosis.

That is like telling someone about the scent of gardenia and expecting their body to respond as if they’d actually smelled gardenia.

I have also been exposed to the work of very hardcore, uncompromising non-dualists, such as Jed McKenna. While his writings were instrumental in my journey, I also used them to bypass. That is, I threw the baby out with the bath water.

All the things I thought I hated about myself were not real, (thank God) because nothing is. But then, of course, nor could any of my authentic unique qualities which are indeed loveable be.

Bypassing for me was not so unlike anorexia, in that it sort of flatlined me. I didn’t weep like a monsoon anymore, but neither did laughter make a luminous instrument of my body.

The absolute view, while very much true, does not simply erase all relative significance.

Otherwise this whole relative trip would simply not exist. It is the space beyond the circumference of the yin yang, the cyclical duality of light and dark, joy and sorrow, samsara. It is the space which contains it all. It may transcend it, but it is not because it is exempt from it.

Jesus and Buddha did not bypass their way into enlightenment. They felt the spectrum of human suffering so completely, it broke their hearts open so deeply in surrender, that they encountered that equanimous place of peace which is not at all in denial of relative experience.

They strove to articulate the ineffable, to transmit wisdom and practices that would alleviate others from their turmoil.

Retreating in meditation is not the same as spiritual bypassing. Stare at a wall in stillness and silence and the whole gamut of chaotic painful nonsense that hijacks your perception will come out and stage a very loud parade, guaranteed.

Ignoring something is not necessarily repression, especially if it works.

If the thing is ease-fully, or at least successfully, dismissed from your field of awareness. But being told to ignore something is like saying don’t think about pink elephants. Naturally, the image persists.

If the ignored material is still running you subconsciously, it has not been transcended.

Repression is the culturally dominant coping strategy. My mother’s mother was the master of repression. My mother, in turn, swung the opposite direction on the pendulum. She is obsessed with process—and has been in a spiritual school for decades—and it does not bring her abiding relief.

She is not committed to sitting with the internal upheavals, offering them her unconditional presence. She breaks underneath the terror and needs someone else to share the burden. Sometimes that someone else can help her surface for a while. But it’s not sustainable.

There is a middle ground between repression and over-indulging in the stories which cause suffering. It is a delicate art and education about it in our culture is tragically lacking.

Tending grief without shame, feeling fear while cultivating faith and surrender, and engaging in somatic embodiment practices that regulate the nervous system—not once, not when in a crisis, but regularly—establishing a baseline that allows for the flowering of consciousness into the awareness of “I am”.

One of my teachers, Genevieve Akal, emphasizes the importance of this. The kingdom of heaven is within. The tree of life is the nervous system. We can only enter there when the body feels like a safe enough place to inhabit.

Paying close attention to my suffering, exactly how and when I was perpetuating it, was the fuel that led me to spirituality, as it is for many.

For years I had cystic acne. I would find myself three inches from the mirror, performing sloppy surgery with my fingernails, cortisol through the roof, eyes watering, jaws clenched. It was so involuntary it was almost an out of body experience.

The first step—one I took over and over for years—was simply to acknowledge exactly what I was experiencing. The racing heart rate, the constriction in my chest, the throbbing in my mangled face. I reminded myself that I had a choice to stop, at any moment. I noticed that the choice felt completely inaccessible.

Telling someone to simply let go of their suffering because it is an illusion, and they will be happier without it, is like telling an addict to just stop using. There is a whole system of biochemical software at work here. Your will isn’t enough.

That’s why twelve step programs emphasize the importance of grace or divine will which takes the full weight of a seemingly impossible task off one’s shoulders and also invites (and reveals resistance to) the acceptance of oneself as worthy and capable of redemption—of God’s love—which goes hand in hand with self-love.

Self-loathing is the fuel that perpetuates all addiction including the addiction to suffering, the addiction to a false self.

My own identity revolved around my wrongness and what I needed to, but doubted I ever could fix about myself, for almost two decades.

I love me a good medicine circle, but I am the first to call out those communities as dangerously perpetuating of endless self-work as a way to belong. After years of journeying with ayahuasca and the like, Iboga actually showed me a very different perspective on healing.

It showed me, experientially, that I am and always have been loveable as I am. It peeled away the layers of automatic and deeply conditioned self-centered, self-aggressive thought forms.

Read my article on that experience here, and my article reviewing the changes six months later here.

It brought me to the most visceral innerstanding of the absolute I have ever experienced, which was not at all without heart, indifferent as my conceptual understanding of non-duality had been.

It was teeming with compassion, unconditional love, tenderness, and the possibility for all beings to live in the freedom of a loving relationship with their own soul.

It’s true that none of the old stories had any substance there, but I have worked with these stories, and to transcend these stories by negating their reality both, for years.

Without some form of grace, be it a guru, an intensive meditation retreat, or in my case Iboga—all of which are answers to prayers for help coming from a heart that is 100% committed to discovering liberation, no matter the cost—the naked and holy Truth is rarely accessible to most.

This is where suffering comes in. Suffering is actually the catalyst that moves people towards whatever path towards freedom is their own. In this life or one thereafter.

The more one can fully feel and meet the suffering of the pattern they are inflicting upon themselves, (and indeed sometimes that the world is subjecting them to, by no fault of their own), the sooner they will come to a place of complete surrender which is the prerequisite for awakening.

Felt suffering is a doorway.

So the point is not to suffer, unless that is what is happening, in which case, nothing is excluded from awareness.

Don’t prolong suffering. Don’t avoid it either. Meet it so completely that it has nothing left to teach.

The point isn’t suffering. The point is intimacy with reality.

Become so exhausted by the nonsense as quickly as possible so you are willing to drop your defenses, question your role in the experience, and get on your knees and pray.

The absolute view may suggest there is no God, but real as the pain you feel when you slap your face is the force that is manifesting this miraculous kaleidoscope of a world, with all its joys and horrors.

That force is inside us, inside every moment, and I would argue that it is benevolent, even with all the suffering it allows us to evolve through. It listens and it responds.

There is no wrong—from an absolute view—including the suggestion that bypassing problems eliminates them. The removal of wrongness from perception itself is quite liberating. However, on a relative level, I think that being happy is the point.

I am at once fine with everything as it is, including all the suffering, because on some level its not wrong. It might hurt, but it’s not absolutely moralistically wrong, and making it so only hurts more.

However, on a relative level, I too want to help people be happy, and be free.

But claiming that spiritual bypassing is the point, is, on a relative level, somewhat dangerous, or at least at odds with the point of being happy.

Spiritual bypassing is not the only alternative to wallowing endlessly in one’s subconscious garbage.

The alcoholic is ready to put down the bottle when they are ready, and not before, no matter what you tell them. Conceptual exposure to non-dual awareness does offer some useful context to work with.

Dissociation can feel ominously similar to what one imagines equanimity to be, but it is empty of aliveness and as far as it gets from freedom. Spiritual bypassing, at least as it is almost universally understood, does equal repression which does foster dissociation.

These revelations come in their own time—usually after much energy is spent “working on oneself”.

The point is to see through the stories of the false self. The point is to abide peacefully beyond the petty triggers of the mind. The point is to discover unconditional self love.

I’d genuinely love to hear where this resonates, where it doesn’t, and how your own experience has shaped your understanding of these ideas.

In over my head again, a trigger-happy release of endorphins as I freeze.

Rumination consumes me, an obsessive panic, and its companion:

the stoic deliverance into fated truth.

~

It’s in these moments when the crucible is most viscous, when finally,

an act of grace, I sit grimly still,

breath bated, in the full knowledge that nothing and no one can disappear this.

~

I must will every leaky ounce of my attention towards meeting and riding

the vehement wilderness swelling up from the inside,

flooding my channels, such that I am face-to-face with the beast,

which I know too well, but not well enough to love.

~

I can breathe through this.

Without abandoning myself.

~

Again, I have watched myself, as if outside myself,

express too much, suddenly raw and exposed,

like a bloom that’s bled out all of its color,

or react defensively, plunging myself into the blinding dark

behind the trap door slammed shut around my tender throbbing heart.

~

I know I don’t need to,

but I know how to so well.

~

Now, I can pivot.

I can commit to feeling the cascade of chain reactions fracturing my skull,

my sternum wrenched inside a steel cold vice.

~

The barometer explodes.

~

At least three out of five senses, weave a tapestry of presence which is manageable.

~

I relinquish the attachment to meaning or remedy,

the stretching outward towards a savior, which I’m in no shape to receive.

~

Beneath the broken bones, which mercilessly pierce my purple soles, cold sand gives way to a shallow stream.

Somehow, even in this foreboding dark, thorny vines grow at breathtaking speed, threatening to bind me if I don’t walk fast enough. I’ve stopped trying to rip them out, as my bloodied fingers ache from that futile attempt.

In the distance, I can see a tall peak resembling a dormant volcano, and only there does a shaft of sunlight escape the dense and rolling clouds, beaming onto that peak like a theatrical spotlight.

Unwittingly, I am drawn in that direction. Nowhere else to go in this haunted and overgrown terrain. I had embarked on this journey with seeds.

A whole satchel of wildflower and fruit seeds. I sprinkled some in each small clearing I could find, raking my fingers through the soil to loosen it’s sunken solidity, and watering them with what little water I had.

When that was drained I tried to summon some spittle in my cotton mouth, even shedding a tear or two where I could squeeze my heart tightly enough to wring anything out.

Nothing bloomed.

Only ravenous carnivorous blossoms, which seemed to have eyes of their own and follow my path, arching like sunflowers would, were I their solar source.

They reek of rotten flesh, dripping some sticky sap which I carefully avoid, trying not to come in close enough proximity to them to have a bite taken out of me.

I shudder, summoning any remaining faith to keep trodding on, one foot in front of the other, towards that mountain, maybe that mountain…

A fierce growl resonates my back side. Turning, I see a very lean and hungry-looking jaguar. It’s glowing eyes penetrate me, paralysis shrieking through my spine. I can’t run from this beast, the surrounding thicket is much too dense.

I can’t think, my mind is a vacuum of apathy even as my nervous system fires one final attempt at warning—a shot in the dark.

My racing heart, beating bloodlines into my vision, drumming deafeningly, threatening to rupture my eardrums, nearly regurgitating up my throat and out my mouth, snaking metallically through my nostrils, is juxtaposed with the serenity of helpless, hopeless surrender—like the paradox the cruel world has always asked me rudely to endure.

Before I can act, that jaguar’s throat bobs. It’s musculature rippling like a mirage before it pounces, stretching those jaws wide, defying my understanding of space and time as it swallows me whole.

Just as soon as I am plunged into its seething belly, acid burning every inch of my surface area, blinding me I know somehow—even though it’s pitch black in here—it retches once, a quake that feels like my very bones are fingernails on a chalkboard, or flint on a stone, and I lurch up into it’s trachea.

I am so disoriented I forget who I am. There is no “me” anymore. Only a permeating sense of bewilderment—be wilder, my mind.

Wetness, still burning, suctions whatever physicality I am still aware of to the walls of its throat as it begins to purr.

Agony meets ecstasy; terror and desire become indistinguishable.

Liquid cells of magenta and purple envelope my vision, undulating with the growing vibration which consumes me. I feel like I am dying, but know somehow that it’s not ending, that I’m not ending.

It’s at once orgasmic and excruciating, tremendously stimulating to whatever my nervous system has become, too much to bear—for any sense of “me” to bear.

There is only sensation and awareness as the purring, which is somehow also healing a deep and eternal well of psyche, intensifies into a low growl, fracturing what something realizes was once my skull.

Hot air rushes past me, strumming the muscular larynx of this savage cat, singeing my already eroded edges which are emitting a smell of charbroiled flesh.

Nausea drowns me as that growl flares, impossibly gradually, into a full-throttled scream, incinerating my eyeballs and shattering my teeth, my jaw, my ribs, my pelvic bowl.

My hands and feet are exploding stars, and my heart burns like the sun, all becoming an expansion that dismantles any sense of cohesion. I am infinite and there is only sound now as that feral roar transmits some knowing that also becomes me:

“You are.

I am.

It is.

Awareness of all.

You are.

Awareness of all I am.

It is awareness.

It is of all you are.”

Suspended in time as waves of this knowing crash over me. Long gone is any figment of effort, of clinging. The sound is a chorus of angels that is too beautiful to comprehend.

I am the singing.

Too suddenly, all sound, all sensation, all knowing ceases.

A silence seizes me. I am but a wake of nerve endings, of neurotransmission. Sacred, but harrowing, peaceful, but heartbroken.

A comet, I am ejected from the mouth of the beast, sailing higher through the atmosphere, arcing through arctic starlight and falling down, down, selfless, still no concept of doing, no resistance, no attempt to understand.

But vision returns. Something notices the vast, dimensional dance of cosmic plasma through which I am throttling, gaining speed, a glow growing around me from deep within.

Looking down, I see the speck of that volcano, still illuminated by that eerie solar ray, which I’m rapidly approaching.

A whisper of wonder suggests a self who might be curious. What awaits me there? Before that can become so much as a thought, I slam into hard rock.

The pinnacle of that peak yawns upon impact, sediment exploding outward in every direction. A gurgle of what, no doubt, is slumbering molten lava beneath, aroused by the collision. But the volcano does not erupt.

Instead, a seed of magma spouts within my own esophagus, around where I would have been located in the jaguar’s gullet.

I’m seeing stars, which spin so fast I don’t know which way is up and which is down. I’m breathing, I realize, somehow.

Panting hungrily as my head is reeling, daring me to open my eyes. I roll to one side, and burp out a stream of phosphorescent lava. It feels good to purge it out even as it cauterizes my insides.

Slowly, I steady a hand on the Earth and push myself up to sitting. I gaze out on the wicked landscape even as more magma spurts out my mouth and rolls down my chest. I am ablaze, woven as and through the symphonic awe of creation.

Nothing to do now but be here.

Iboga is a powerful root bark that has been closely guarded by the Bwiti peoples in Gabón, Africa for thousands of years. Only recently have they revealed it to the world at large. It is potent medicine for healing trauma, addiction, and repairing one’s relationship with one’s self and soul.

I am sharing this, because more than anything else I’ve encountered on my healing journey, Iboga has been monumental. For years I have prayed for the healing Iboga has introduced into my life, without actually knowing what it was.

The work I’ve done on myself leading up to the experience helped me to be ready to let go without so much resistance, but I believe that anyone who feels ready for this medicine is ready. You will know.

How was it???

It was everything I have prayed for and so much more. Unlike anything I’ve ever experienced before. First of all, the facilitator was wonderful. Spencer is safe, honest, serious but laid-back, and skilled at seeing us and helping us find our own way to the truth as it is not something that can be given by another.

The Missoko-Bwiti is a wisdom tradition, as old as humanity itself, and the most true to it’s roots, unaltered by colonial ideologies as other Bwiti lineages have become. It contains teachings that are deceivingly simple to the mind, yet when transmitted alongside the medicine, penetrate the psyche, and the heart, in a very effective way.

The teachings point to the truth of self-love as the entrance to the Kingdom, so to speak, in an organic and rooted way that. Received in tandem with the medicine, it penetrates the body-psyche in a very deep and tangible way—unlike the infinite words available in the abundance of self-help books here in the West.

The teachings were transmitted at the outset of the ceremony, both nights, as we sat around a candle and slowly began ingesting the medicine, three doses spread out almost an hour apart.

The medicine is ground root bark from the Iboga plant, and tastes exceedingly bitter, and lands in the belly like fire.

The come-up on the medicine is at once sedating in a relaxing way, and also amps up the cardiovascular system in such a way that can cause anxiety, especially if the inclination is to worry about what’s coming.

As the come-up tapered off, the relaxation of the body-psyche drew me to my mat on the floor, and as the night went on my body became ever stiller and heavier, supporting the letting go of the mind which was becoming very spacious and quiet. My nervous system felt more at ease than I can ever remember it feeling.

Buckets were provided and purging does occur for most people. Especially during the first night—the detox— and although it can be challenging to anticipate and sit with the nausea, ultimately it feels great to get it out and be rid of it. I have had experience purging with other medicines, and my purge wasn’t too bad.

At some point around midnight, I was asked the questions I had prepared for myself. Things I wanted to know about myself, about my life, about life itself.

At first I was looking for the voice of my soul swoop in and serve up the answers on a silver platter.

It dawned on me that the voice of my soul could not manifest completely externally to me, and that I would need to be a conscious agent in discovering my answers. At first this disappointed me.

It’s very helpful to do two ceremonies as the first one is not only detox, but an acquaintance with the medicine which helps to orient towards engaging with it in the most productive way.

Although the volume of the mind decreased throughout the night and into the next morning, it still interfered when I was answering my questions.

But the mental deliberation occurred at such a slow pace that I was able to track each interjection, to interface the serrated edges of the narrative of the mind and the voice of the soul. Each time a thought came through about my answer that was somewhat untrue, I felt fully the devastation, recommitted to loving all of myself, even the part who’d had that thought, and tried again.

This was quite revelatory. A reclamation of choice and free will.

Teasing apart the lies which the mind has told about me for as long as I can remember, which have sculpted such deep and habitual neuropathways, from the truth of the voice of the soul—something I had lost touch with to such a degree that before doing this medicine, just the thought of conjuring it often felt like a joke and a betrayal of who I thought I was.

The music that was being played all night, the indigenous Bwiti music, which is mostly instrumental but also includes some vocals, is an important part of the technology.

Very percussive, it features the first instruments ever created, which Iboga itself taught the people how to build and play. I was infatuated with the harmonics—which somehow resonate with a rhythm all their own—and sounded like another instrument entirely, or sometimes even voices.

Some people have many visions, I only had a few. They were very dim and monochromatic. They were faces of people I don’t know, which I later understood were ancestors.

Early in the morning I was guided back to my room, where I lay my heavy body down in the bed but did not sleep, but was neither in waking consciousness.

Somehow even with the almost complete absence of the mind, a deep and abiding sense of self made me feel more present as my self than the mind could ever succeed at doing, try as it might.

The experiencer, the witness, the eternal being, was more online than ever, and I felt anchored by that in such a way that created an unprecedented sense of safety and wellbeing.

Throughout the night and into the morning, I encountered self-love experientially, as an embodied knowing.

Everything I have ever read or thought or believed about it pales in comparison.

My being which is beyond my body but includes it, which is beyond my personality but includes it; my life which is beyond my biography but includes it, I embraced all of it and was embraced.

I was the embrace itself and that embrace was infinite and connected me with all that is, like a spiritual fascia running through and between all units of life. It felt very earthy and not transcendent in a heady or dissociated way.

When a negative thought occasionally did float by, it was so distant and limpid I could barely make it out, and it was not sticky whatsoever, so it was effortless to simply swipe it away, and I was back in the vast space of being and belonging.

I kept consciously returning to my heart’s desire to choose to listen for, honor and trust the voice of my soul, to be reborn as my self beloved to my self, and live each moment of my life that way from here on out.

I apologized to my soul for having exiled it from my waking consciousness, for having abused myself in so many gross and subtle ways for so many years. For the first time, I didn’t compound the memory of that abuse with more traumatic self-disgust.

I loved my self as every iteration of myself that I have ever been. I saw my beauty, and the presence of my soul, though unacknowledged at the time, throughout my history, even in the ugliest moments. It was all precious.

I realized the addictiveness of wallowing self-pitifully in the stale grief I have carried around for my whole life, believing it was me.

But what I had actually been grieving all of that time was the absence of my own loving company, my own abiding presence, my own unconditional love.

I witnessed and cherished myself in a way that felt so uninhibited, so raw, so true, so deeply reassuring. It was like the rush of falling in love, and knowing that someone is in love with me, but I know it can never be lost.

It made me feel like a little girl, being witnessed by an adoring father, completely innocent, completely shameless, completely receptive to that source of nourishment and ease which is his loving gaze, which is God’s loving gaze, which is my own loving gaze.

Now I finally feel loved the way I have always wanted to feel loved. I feel safe in a way I never thought I could feel safe.

It is a love that I could never receive from any external source, but will enhance my capacity to give and receive love from others.

It is a love that reveals, indubiously, the truth that life loves me and life will unfold, not in a delusionally perfect way, but in a beautiful and blessed way, because I trust it now, deep down in my being.

I no longer need to get in the way and exhaust myself trying in vain to figure it out and do it right and control it. Before, I had heard that life works that way, but I was afraid to have full faith because deep down I feared I was the exception, I was unworthy, and I was afraid to be disappointed.

I have lost so much, and had come to expect that of life, so had chosen to control my pain by dolling it out myself, denying myself by living out my sad and meager expectations of life.

My soul went unheeded.

Before, I wanted to love myself because I knew that I would have to in order to accomplish the things that I thought would finally make me loveable.

But I felt so much allegiance to the self-hatred.

I had invested so much energy in that identity. Imagining myself radiating with self-love made me feel like an imposter and, I imagined, a narcissist. Self-adoration sounded like something fake, something to be ashamed of.

On the contrary, this love that I feel for myself and can fully receive from myself, as myself, is certainly a state of grace.

Now I don’t need to believe, I know.

Paradoxically, a selfless wakefulness remains in the absence of the incessant internal dialogue centering around self-doubt, self-criticism, self-rejection, around the constant scrutiny of my inhibited speech.

My tendency was to compulsively over-share in an attempt to confess my guilt, my unworthiness, and my powerlessness, whilst simultaneously defending my power, my innocence, and my uniqueness—that vicious internal dissonance, and find redemption in the eyes of another, through their understanding, accepting, and dare I say, celebrating me.

Now I am finally in touch with the only source which can provide that validation which I was seeking: the truth of my soul. I really love and can celebrate myself, there is so much to treasure in my being, and I am so blessed to be here to behold and enjoy it all.

I have the only thing I need, and so I don’t need anything from anyone. I can give to and share with and behold others now without my sense of self hanging conditionally upon their, or my, every expression. From this place I speak with sovereignty.

I am the able guardian of that most sacred threshold, the gate through which anything, especially thoughts, enter my precious heart.

Ironically, instead of killing the ego, I have discovered an awakened and more selfless state by putting myself in the center of my heart and committing to my own truth and happiness first and foremost.

By listening for, and honoring my ‘yes’ and my ‘no’. By offering myself my unconditional faith and love regardless of what challenges, disappointments, fears, or confusions may arise.

I wrote pages and pages longhand, which is a miracle as the pain in my hands let up after years of not being able to write for more than five minutes!

If I hadn’t experienced that degree of relief firsthand, I would still be quite skeptical about the degree to which physical ailments are reversible, as they are psycho-somatic, or arising from a traumatized nervous system.

I wrote sincerely and excitedly and lovingly to my self, to my soul. I promised her that I will never again abandon her.

The comedown is gentle and gradual. For days I was radiating bliss and relief. A spring of energy welling up from my soul fed me trust, inspiration and gratitude. I was enjoying my own company like never before and grateful for the security of feeling like I truly have my own back.

I was completely enamored with the incredible and unlikely reality that is manifest around and through and as me.

I am excited for what my life will bring. I know that action will manifest more gracefully from this place of self-acceptance. I am also just happy to be with myself where I am at, even when that doesn’t involve any doing at all.

Gradually, I will build trust with myself, by keeping my promise to never abandon my soul.

Over time, I will come to really like myself too! The fear-based patterns that I so vehemently rejected, now enfolded in my loving arms, will feel less and less need to react as I respond more and more soulfully to life.

Since returning home, it’s not like all triggers have disappeared. I have been confronted with my difficult patterns of compulsion, of victimization.

Iboga is showing me where I’m out of alignment and it’s not all easy to see.

I notice the momentum of the habit, and the resistance to doing the loving, caring thing for myself in a moment. Often that means stopping what I’m doing, re-evaluating if it’s really necessary and helpful, if it’s truly what my soul wants and needs.

That doesn’t mean I will become lazy and out of control. On the contrary, it will funnel my energy more efficiently and directly towards my true purpose, which of course does include doing things I don’t want to do sometimes, but in accordance with my soul’s truth—with an attitude of flow, trust and devotion.

I know now that I have that choice. When I need to slow down, to check in with what I’m feeling in a non-judgmental and non-avoidant way, to rest, to be, I remember the promise I made to my soul. Everything hinges on my keeping that promise.

When I am disappointed by life or by myself, I don’t abandon myself, I offer kind words to myself, which, again, felt entirely out of reach several weeks ago. I still have much to figure out about my life path, and yet, I hold it lightly now.

I know that I am worthy as I am, my life is precious as it is, I don’t need to prove anything or attain perfection to realize that truth. Iboga stays in the system for up to six months, offering a window of neuroplasticity during which it’s much easier to unlearn old things and to learn new things.

I know my job is to love myself, to be honest with myself, to to do my best to act in alignment with my values, moment to moment, and my soul, with Iboga’s help, will chart the course.

I am the only one who can never leave me, in the sense that, everyone else is transient in my life in a way that only I am not. I have been here since the beginning, I am the only one who knows every single piece of myself and every single thing I’ve been through, and I will be here until the end—until I transition.

I could and did abandon myself, and that feels horrible. But I can choose to never leave myself again. And now, I know, I’ve made that choice, and if I slip, I will make it again as many times as I need to—because I know I can—until it is a state in which I effortlessly abide.

To read a shorter synopsis of where I am at six months later, check out my recent post, Six Months Post Iboga

If you are interested in Iboga, I would steer you towards the Missoko Bwiti Alliance. They will ensure you find a credible retreat center with providers of utmost integrity. To learn more, check out the Get To The Root Podcast.

I wrote an extensive piece on my actual experience with the medicine, which was incredibly profound. I’m feeling like I will release that soon, perhaps in parts.

If you are interested in Iboga, I would steer you towards the Missoko Bwiti Alliance. They will ensure you find a credible retreat center with providers of utmost integrity. To learn more, check out the Get To The Root Podcast.

Since doing Iboga six months ago….

I have been sober for seven months, the longest period of sobriety since I was fourteen, which is when ten year descent into the eating disorder began…

The noticing of self-sabotage has become sharper, and kinder. There is, at once, less tolerance of my own bullshit—that is, the victimization to the cycle of inner oppressor fed by the very rage at being oppressed—and more patience, surrender and acceptance with it when I’m caught up and can’t help myself and must simply await it’s own burnout. I do my best to disregard the meaning-making the mind insists on fondling, about my inadequacy, about my doomedness.

In the meantime, I watch myself closely, the way I am insisting on using my free will to choose to act in a way that is contrary to the freedom and well-being of my soul.

I want to know exactly how this hurts me, and how much, so that I may reach the critical mass in my consciousness which insists, against all odds, on freedom. I think this is how all addictions are slowly unwound.

In the meantime, I tend to the grief I feel for the rupture with my soul, this uncontrollably habitual pattern which stems from many years of acute rupture, learned as a survival tactic, which also is a loss I grieve.

But I grieve it more completely now, I metabolize it more efficiently. Not because grief isn’t welcome, but because I am not interested in overstaying my welcome with grief. The sticky way I allowed it to have with me, lingering with a shadow of shame, resentment, and somehow also proud loyalty, never moving completely through but clinging like a second skin. Like if I let it go somehow, I would be betraying some sense of self that had grown, festering, around it.

I remember the direct experience with Iboga, of knowing deeply in my cells. Knowing my own goodness, my own beauty, my own innocence, my own unique and earnest heart. I can forget it in moments, but it has carved its shape into my interior, and the breath of my soul rings that hollow like a wet finger on a crystal rim.

I remember the direct experience of timeless, mindless presence, fully embodied, rooted, connected to the entire web of life, the beating heart. The in between, the bardo, where there was peace in the absence of the incessant and dissonant narrative of the conceptually defined self.

These are referential contexts which now give me strength and faith. I have more spontaneous moments of feeling and expressing love for myself, when before I had barely any, and if I did, I’d quickly become so embarrassed it would ruin the moment. Now when I catch myself smiling at myself, dancing with myself in an embrace, meeting my gaze in the mirror with a flame of recognition, I feel proud and grateful.

I feel much less shame about my shadow. When it comes up, I am more and more able to sit with it with compassion, without judgement. That shift has occurred gradually but cannot be understated. I am more accepting of the difficulties which have been and continue to color my experience. They really are an inherent part of samsara, and not something that makes me or my life bad. With less resistance, they arrive and depart in my awareness with much less inertia and residue.

At the same time, I have much more openness towards the future being unexpectedly bright, but ultimately, unknown. Instead of see-sawing the duality of imagining either some ideal and unreachable goal shaped by the mind of who I think I should or want to be, or some depressing hovel of a future where I am utterly unfulfilled and thus avoiding disappointment. I have a trust in life that is unprecedented. I can let go of what is not flowing because I don’t need it’s rote security to define me.

I encounter my own body with reverence and gratitude, with curiosity and forgiveness. I hold it’s trauma, it’s pain, even its aging, not as failures or enemies, but as interesting and articulate archetypal companions, worthy of respect and love.

Slowly my ride or die pace is unwinding. I am learning about my deep-seated resistance to rest, to play, to take care of myself in the face of the task master which throttles me as if my life depends on it. It is losing steam, or at least, losing the power I give it by believing in it.

This is one of those things that I sometimes can’t control and just observe from a slightly out-of-body vantage point. Especially on the farm where I live, this is circumstantially very intense to override. Perhaps that is the gift. Grist for the mill.

My menstrual cycle seems much healthier. My blood looks brighter, more vibrant, less clotted, less inconsistent texture. I am still learning how to take it easy during those times in my cycle when my body needs the most rest—which is inconveniently often when the task-master takes over.

I can see how I used cannabis to sort of override the task master, or at least feel more at ease, in the short-term, whilst doing the tasks. It was either the only thing that helped me slow down, or the thing that allowed me to keep going while giving me the illusion of rest.

I have moments sometimes of angst about all the art I’m not doing enough of, but in reality I am creating. My mediums are evolving. I have become a gardener. I have recorded two and a half of the tens of songs I’ve written. I’ve published writing on Substack. I’ve painted a little, but the detailed approach I’m prone to is not great for my hands/arms/shoulders/neck. I did one quick clay sculpture, and hope to do more. That’s better for my body.

But I am easing, most of the time, into a relationship with myself as defined by my creation that is less urgent, less perfectionistic. Knowing that I create for the act of creation, not to prove myself or make things that are excessively precious. Loving my creations wholeheartedly, shamelessly, because they are a part of me—not because they are the best.

My digestion is still far from normal, and at times this still consumes me. My hands and neck still hurt so bad sometimes it frightens and saddens me. But again, my relationship with these challenges is less aggressive than it once was. I see them as neither permanent nor punishments, but a part of my karma which is complex and also sacred and beautiful. Not wrong or unworkable.

I notice my baseline emotionally has stabilized significantly. I am aware of becoming disregulated, and even if small steps toward regulation aren’t accessible in the immediate future, I don’t get so possessed by self-aggression while dissociated that I lash out destructively and prolong the disregulation for days or weeks, like I used to.

I feel more here. In my body. More of my essence, my chi. I feel it like a companion and fortification. A lifeline. I am more aware of the continuity and presence that is my self or soul which is unconditional, eternal and content with just being.

Each world that once defined me

Lungs burning, full of ashes

Of sacred sites I almost made my home.

Great gusts of fate

Daring me to decimate

my fortress of defenses.

Another threshold taunts me —

What does it demand?

A trail, a trove of corpses —

Past selves I might have learned from

Not ready to acknowledge

What’s been swept back out to sea

Now those ruins rumble

As turbulence comes creeping in

I’m spinning on my axis

Paranoid peripheral vision

Dreams collapse

and writhe unbidden

I let them crash,

Wash over me

Eroding all attachment

Without falling prey to the illusion

That all is, and will be, lost.

Without falling prey to the illusion

That anything cannot be.

Have you entered an exit-less portal?

•

Are you haunted by your mistakes?

Or are they meaningless when timelessness wakes?

•

Do fear and judgement die with the body?

And do you abide in eternal samadhi?

•

Are there angels and demons and tests

Determining if in peace you will rest?

•

Is the bardo a place of peaceful integration?

Allowing the dissolution of stagnation?

•

Or is it a frightening realm of projection

Of the fragmented parts of your wounded perception?

Must you master techniques, and memorize keys

To be permitted into the Beyond that frees?

•

Is proper repentance shameful and stoic?

Or could it be self love—or is that egoic?

•

Is karma really a punishment?

Or simply a habit on which you’re hell bent?

•

And if you find yourself reincarnated,

Are your neuroses reactivated?

•

In the search for a new body to incarnate

Are you driven by an addiction to the sensate?

•

Are you reborn with the same composition?

Do seeds you’ve sown in lives past come to fruition?

•

Is the manifest world but the dance of the void?

And if you stop dancing, will you be destroyed?

The gift of silence

Where I stop being me

Nothing but the moment

Breath dissolves me

~

The hardest thing is feeling as though something I was is dying

Despite my persistent resistance, surrender is happening

Surely when I let everything go, it won’t hurt anymore

~

The thunder of silence

To trust in not knowing

Its dis-identified gaze

Its fleeting depth

~

The hardest thing is feeling as though something I was is dying

Despite my persistent resistance, surrender is happening

Surely when I let everything go, it won’t hurt anymore

~

I wanted to believe in belonging

I only belong here

~

And if I disappear, if I stop being me

I will arrive to the emptiness inside me

~

The gift of silence

Where I stop being me

Nothing but the moment

Jump into the ring of fire.

~

El regalo del silencio… Donde dejo de ser Yo

Nada mas que el momento… Me disuelve el aliento

~

Lo más difícil es sentir como que algo que era esta moriendo

A pesar de mi resistencia persistente rendición esta ocurriendo

Seguro cuando suelto todo, ya no duele más

~

El trueno del silencio… Confiar en no saber

Su mirada disidentificada… Su profundidad fugaz

~

Lo más difícil es sentir como que algo que era esta moriendo

A pesar de mi resistencia persistente rendición esta ocurriendo

Seguro cuando suelto todo, ya no duele más

~

Yo quería creer en el pertenecer… Yo solo pertenezco aqui

Y si desaparezco, si dejo de ser yo… llegar´al vacío en mi

~

El regalo del silencio… Donde dejo de ser Yo

Nada mas que el momento… Saltar al aro del fuego

The blaze of a comet,

The seed of the source…

You would feel the eternal embrace

Of your own precious (un)knowing:

Your infinite force.

If I could gift you the soul of the ocean,

The stillness in motion,

The ripple of grace…

You would know your limitless volume,

Your turbulent currents,

Your deep, unmasked face.

If I could gift you the river’s surrender,

The rhythm of silence,

The pulsating essence…

You would melt as gold sunlit honey,

The trickle would become

A cascade of presence.

If I could gift you an intimate romance,

Another deserved chance

To be swept off your feet…

Then hands would caress you,

And tenderly bless you,

And eyes would reflect echoes of your heartbeat.

If I could gift you the relief of redemption,

And then, not to mention

Your own mother’s healed love…

You would exhale your orienting story;

Find peace, selfless glory

As below, so above.

If I could gift you your worth beyond reason,

Ripening with each season,

Caramelized by the sun…

Then you could relax,

Allow what’s fleeting to pass,

Knowing the truth of your soul will endure.

If I could gift you the mercy of deep faith,

To free-fall in deep space,

Unshakable ground…

You could be the wind under your own wings,

The bird’s sacred song she sings:

Intangible sound.

If I could offer you sacral enthronement,

Crowning re-birthed atonement

Of your nonexistent sin…

Then you might befriend death

A bit more with each out breath,

Find the safety you so long for,

deeply within.

Tierra húmeda, mi amante

Con brazos que tocan el universo

Que gentilmente me sana

~

Estiro mi cuerpo y pido ser renacida

De ramas de helechos y llamadas del pájaro

~

Sus caderas nos empujan hacia el infinito

Interno, externo

Un grito de belleza y deseo

~

El ritmo de la lluvia en la noche

Te despierta para bailar un poco en la oscuridad

~

Listen on Soundcloud

~

Moist Earth, my lover

With arms that touch the universe

That gently heal me

~

I stretch my body and ask to be reborn

Of branches, of ferns and bird calls

~

Her hips push us towards the infinite

Internal, external

An exclamation of beauty and desire

~

The rhythm of the rain at night

Wakes you to dance a little in the dark

With a prayer on your body

~

[These lyrics were excerpted from a poem by a poets whose name I don’t know. I found it in a We’moon calendar—Spanish Edition—years ago. If you know the poet please share.]

I composed the melody and guitar part, and produced this on my own.

I was blessed with the opportunity because a good friend of mine—who has been an art witch her whole life—unpacked her ROOMFULL of sand tray objects which she has collected over the years.

This was done just prior to my first Iboga experience—which I did a bid piece of writing about and will share soon. It was my prayer for that ritual of healing.

It includes the hydra, my many-headed inner beast/demon (which holds a key), battling/being healed by a circle of Native American warriors, an angel, Ganesha, and Chenrezig—the Buddha of compassion.

Behind them my higher self stands praising the heavens, held by disembodied, prayerful hands, a lion inclines at her feet, holding my inner child.

Also present is my confused, handcuffed exiled self being consumed by hellfire. Her hands also—all hands—are reaching up. The sparkly, icy crystal is the counterpoint, fire and ice.

In the background is the absolute witness, the single eye, perched on a fossilized sea urchin, a being which emerges from the ocean, symbolizing oneness, and another, Egyptian, feline guardian. The string of bone skull beads which encircles the scene represents the string of my past lives.

On the right, in the foreground, is rose quartz, heart healing, on the left, an unknown stone, the Unknown. Engaging in this process was both playful and powerful. It feels like both a prayer and a self portrait.

Healthy. Whole. Unbroken.

I want to shove gentleness down your vacuum-sealed throat.

To slap you awake.

To rip your heart back open.

I want to scare you into fearlessness.

Guilt trip you into forgiveness.

~

I keep trying to make you again.

To start over, with impossibly other ingredients.

To shake off the heavy inheritance which pulls me, nauseatingly, into you.

It’s not fair.

I want at once to scream into your face, “your fear has distorted me”

While simultaneously stroking your thinning hair, an impossible caress of reconciliation.

~

I keep trying to make you again.

That wonder-filled child. Shining like morning dew.

The child who grew like a twisting tree trunk.

Spiraling into herself, stonewalled in gangrenous anger.

She longs to be free again. To shatter the brittle shell of shame.

She wants to find where it is she has lost the magic.

She knows it waits for her, outside of time, patiently awaiting her return, nonattached, nonetheless.

~

I keep trying to make you again.

Smiling purity, sun rays piercing through the obscurity of apprehension.

Centered, rooted in fertile solid ground,

Not rotted by ambiguity.

These hands, death-gripping,

White-knuckling spontaneity.

The loss of the gifts

Once unwrapped without pain.

Reaching through bars of the contorting cage

Severed, would they be liberated, or lifeless?

~

I keep trying to make you again.

Dexterous, precise, enabled practiced skill.

I don’t want expression to hurt anymore.

The pressure cooker of passion and purpose.

Clogged up like a truck-stop toilet.

How can I hold this molten vessel?

How can I dive in, be contained, even as it’s melting down?

Saved from her alcoholic, sexually abusive family—men who she didn’t dare deface. Saved from what undoubtedly ate away at her for having shamed her nieces—fellow victims—slamming the door in their face.

She wanted to be saved by her Lutheran faith. She listened to Billy Graham religiously, and worried that I’d go to hell since I was never baptized.

My mother’s mother wanted to be purified.

Rid of her family’s disgraceful behavior. But she dared not face it head on, as if naming it directly would breathe more life into the beast.

I think the repression compounded the shrinking that aging imposed upon her body. Physically, and energetically. She could disappear in a room.

But she wanted to be seen.

My mother’s mother wanted to be celebrated—even as she was the mistress of deflecting compliments. She took up watercolor painting in her final decade, attending a class in her retirement home.

Once she was addressed directly, asked why she chose to use so much blue in one piece that was quite good. It was an inquiry, to the artist, not critical at all. She immediately reacted quite defensively, offended by her habitual perception.

She had wanted, in high school, to be a cheerleader—but her family could not afford the outfit.

She had wanted to be seen.

Cheering. Leading. Moving her body. My mother recalls that she was a good dancer. She would go out dancing with my grandpa sometimes. But she didn’t let him much closer than that.

She wanted to be safe, but she was afraid of being held.

Afraid of being alone in a room with a man behind closed doors. When her husband made to approach her intimately, she shut him out, saying it was hurting her.

But he was only gentleness. It was not him who hurt her.

Even in her old age, when I was a child, I remember her so tentatively receiving an embrace, as if it might crush her.

But she did not want to be abandoned, and made to avoid it by passively aggressively—but dramatically—acting as though when my teenage mom and aunt went out, she expected they, and their father, would never come back to her.

She had a beautiful smile, and could be funny sometimes. My mother remembers her laughing— mostly with friends who’d come to play cards. But usually, she was cooking, cleaning, and sewing clothes for my mom and her sister.

What she wanted for herself, beyond her role as wife and mother—I’m not sure she even let herself entertain that desire.

She would cry sometimes for two days straight. A stifled, but heaving depthless sorrow. Then she would hide inside for all of the next day for fear of the neighbors seeing she’d “been bawling”.

She was a highly sensitive woman with no practical resources for digesting trauma.

When she bled each month, she did not want to tell my mother about a woman’s body.

She just hid her face, behind the cracked bathroom door and told her, bitingly, “get me a Kotex!”

When my aunt got pregnant in high school, their mother’s mother exclaimed “how could you do this to us!?”

As a result, my mother did not get her menstrual cycle regularly until she was in her late twenties—after years of therapy.

As my mother’s mother got older, she always wanted a doctor to tell her what was wrong with her.

The pains of aging—plus the painful psychosomatic experience of decades of repression—that she was certain was deeply wrong.

She was always exasperated with those doctors who told her there was nothing wrong.

My mother’s mother wanted to know what was wrong with her.

So that she could be fixed.

My mother’s mother wanted to be saved.

My mother’s mother wanted my mother to walk—not crawl—before she was ready. She lifted her onto her feet again and again, denying her that opportunity to develop somatic coordination.

She also slapped my mother’s curious hands any time they reached towards anything off-limits, which was most things.

Other than that, she rarely touched my mom at all, massaging her legs only when she fell ill.

So my mother fell ill often.

My mother wanted her mother to be okay, so that she could be okay.

But it was an impossible ask.

My mother wanted her mother to hold her.

To tell her that she loved her.

My mother wanted her mother to model that it was safe to inhabit a body.

My mother wanted her mother to look towards her future with anything other than doubt and hurt in her eyes.

My mother wanted her husband, the father of her children, to stay alive.

She wanted to stay alive, to beat her own illness, if only for our sake.

She wanted to be strong, but she was scared. She wanted to carry on, and mother us with some sense of normalcy, to protect us from her pain.

But the loss was a turbulent cesspool or searing pain and we were all drowning.

At the same time, my mother wanted her pain to be witnessed.

She did not want to disappear within it.

After her hair grew back, her friend took photos of her in a beaded gown that had just one sleeve, and hung low enough on her humble frame to expose the huge scar where her breast once was.

Black and white photos, in the attic. The stark contrast of darkness with a beam of light slicing through, illuminating the missing flesh.

My mother wants to find her voice to free her. She has dabbled, for years, with the study of voice, less as a performative tool to be honed, and more of an embodiment practice to explore.

Sensuality. Vulnerability. Intimacy.

She has led small groups which always go well, but the intensity of the anxiety which preparing them invokes is enormous, and she’s never followed through in a way that gained momentum.

Self-doubt hampers her.

Her approach has both intrigued and embarrassed me.

After my dad died, she did a one-woman show. An intimate concert, in that gown which exposed scarred ribs. The only song I remember—one she wrote—was called “One-Breasted Woman”.

As a child I felt both the gravity of the importance of her being seen in her naked truth, and, still somewhat embarrassed, like I myself was too exposed.

Of course I want her to sing, to inhabit herself—I want these things for myself also.

We try singing together sometimes, but sometimes her invitation feels like it’s asking for too much from me. An insatiable hunger. A smothering need.

I can’t always bring myself to sustain contact with the devouring vulnerability of her eyes.

Or, sometimes my voice feels stronger, clearer than hers, and there is self-consciousness in the field.

Hers? Mine? Do I carry her, or the tune?

Body paint on my mother’s breastless chest, 2024

My mother wanted to compensate for the lack of maternal contact that haunted her. So she became a massage therapist.

She wanted to compensate for the repression, so she became addicted to process.

During those most traumatic years, my mother wanted someone to look long enough into her frozen eyes—a deer in the headlights—that they would melt and become portals of comforting intimacy.

At times my mother can inhabit a depth that is unparalleled by most. But she does not consistently wield the strength which could be drawn from that well.

She wants others to help her hold the insurmountable weight of her grief, her fear, which she is addicted to and protective of.

Some of her friends have simply disappeared because they are unwilling to deal with that desperate, haunting imploring.

My mother is still looking for the mother she never had. I have tried that on, with her, for her. I never do it right and it leaves us both feeling frustrated, confused, and inadequate. Unsure of where one ends and the other begins. Murky.

My mother wanted me to be free, to be bolder than she was.

She got me swimming lessons—as she was afraid of the water. She facilitated my going on some trips with friends or school, as traveling was basically beyond her.

But on some level, the leash was tight. Because she only wanted me to be as free and bold as her comfort zone would allow, and not more so.

I didn’t want to be bad by contributing to her smothering anxiety.

I needed her to be okay so that I could be okay.

I wanted to strangle myself with that too tight leash, as if to say, I’ll play small in order for you to feel safe. I’ll play so small you’ll regret the way you shrunk me.

I wanted to gaslight her, to claim, repeatedly, that there was nothing wrong with me, even as everyone could see there was something very wrong. I fucked with her head, as if she were the wrong one for worrying.

Then I wanted to rebel, to appall her with my intoxication. To rub it in her face, claiming my independence, showing her I would do what I will.

I left the country for years on my own, not calling for months, demanding she let me go.

I treated my body like it wasn’t precious, like it wasn’t natural, like it wasn’t breakable.

My body which was seeded in her body. Her body which was seeded in her mother’s body. This re-seeding of generational trauma, rage, grief and shame.

I repressed it through smoke, drink, and starvation.

I wanted to know my beauty, even as I refused it’s nature.

I clawed my heart out again and again, trying to find my worth, my strength, my center.

Hating the pain which I believed was me.

It only left me with thicker, more twisted scar tissue.

Always monitoring myself from one distorted lens or another:

Always chasing that ungraspable diagnosis of what was wrong with me.

I wanted to be saved. Fixed. Forgiven.

I want to learn to mother myself the way I need to be mothered.

Safe. Embodied. Open, yet self-contained.

Expressive. Unapologetic. Independent. Unashamed.

Confident.

Discerning, but adventurous.

Faithfully attuned to intuitive guidance.

I do not want to rely on the external world—including the experience of my physical body—looking a certain way for me to live without fear.

I want to sit still.

Especially when terror is demanding I wriggle out of my own skin.

I want to metabolize my grief, my mother’s grief, and my mother’s mother’s grief—so completely—that undigested remnants don’t linger infectiously within me.

I want to transcend their grief, their limitations, without feeling like I’ve betrayed them.

I want to shake off their shame, to wake up to the truth that I deserve to enjoy this glorious creature which I get to be.

I want to shine without needing to, nor worrying about, outshining her.

I want to snarl at the fear which has gripped generations.

I want to take deep belly breaths, slowing down and following my joy especially when the martyr, the need to over-perform,

or to make sure someone else is okay so that I can okay—rears its head.

I want to be awash in the intimacy that fully trusting life awakens. I want to express without a second thought about expectations.

I want to trust my body. My desire. My belonging in the eternal, existential web.

To mistrust the delusion of wrongness.

On behalf of everyone who has a mother, and who could benefit from evolving the way they mother themselves,

I want to forgive myself and my mother, and my mother’s mother—and so on—for the ways we have perpetuated pain.

Body paint on my mother’s breastless chest, 2024

The chanting had finally ceased, or she thought it had, though it’s echo continued to pulsate through her very core, drowning out the questions and commands which, despite her best effort, she could not respond to.

She was in ceremony—she knew that much. She couldn’t remember where or with whom, or the name of the particular face of the Goddess they were invoking, as offerings.

Her mind swam with a certain clarity that somehow lacked any form. It was at once intoxicating and nauseating.

A blinding light seemed to enter through the bottom of the back of her skull, piercing through what seemed like the infinite distance to where it exited, at the center of her brow.

It was cleaving her apart and swallowing her up.

A dissonant combination of undulating pleasure and all-consuming pain.

But there was no doubt, as remnants of the storm caressed her face.

She felt as though she were being scalped, each hair that whipped in the wind like a singular nerve ending, thousands of individual antennae, being combed—no raked, by the claws of the Goddess, who writhed all around and within her.

Untitled, Acrylic and Oil on Canvas 2018

Finally, an impossible hush. So silent it seemed to have erased physicality itself. She could not lift her eyelids to save her life, so for all she knew, it had.

But there was still sensation. Sensation defining this shape she inhabited—who, inhabited? The Goddess herself was the dwelling and the inhabitant.

She could not remember her name. She could not remember her history.

There was no self left to whom the grief of that loss was relevant, so it could not be entertained.

She only knew herself as devotion. As a yearning deeper than the oldest ocean.

She poured herself into herself, refining, condensing, distilling and purifying. She knew her heartbreak was holy. Her imperfection sacred.

Her chest heaved as what she recognized vaguely as tears burned themselves out—merging with those of the Goddess which continued to fall from the great crack in the sky.

They rolled down her steaming body, mingling with her salt, her red veil clinging to her drenched, cavernous and mountainous form.

She became aware of her mouth. It was open, cradling what she knew somehow to be an egg. She could sense it’s fragility, even as she managed to leash a primal impulse to crush it between her jaws.

Instead, she made little circles on the shell with the tip of her tongue, then gentle circles on the roof of her mouth, inciting such an acute tickling sensation that she almost completely lost control.

Lifting her left hand to the egg, she spun it slowly, caressing it with lips so awake they were the entirety of her experience. It was remarkably sensual, but she was shameless, innocent, enchanted.

Slowly she pulled the egg out of her mouth, tracing it lightly, intently, down her neck, rolling it in spirals around each breast, nestling it into her omphalos, taking long breaths with it there as she merged its yolk with her own.

A flash of regret somehow broke through her trance, reminding her of the way she’d introduced herself to the High Priestess, just last night.

That sour story of false selfhood which had unfortunately debuted, again, even as she was being chosen to transcend herself in service of the Mother.

How she longed to be known and forgiven, in all of her humanity, beyond all of her wounded confusion.

The impulse to confess…

…to present herself as the very distortion which she feared herself to be, even though she knew now, and always, on some level, how banal and insignificant it was.

How tiny and illusory compared to this Great Mystery she could also choose to claim, to remember, and offer herself as.

The Great Mother knew who she was. She was the Mother knowing herself.

The weaving. The woven. What threads would she choose, of those the wheel presented?

It was never too late. She could—she was—meeting herself as she’d always dreamt of being met.

It was overwhelming, ineffable, spilling out and refilling.

No longer would she need the fleeting nectar of another’s’ eyes.

She would learn to abide here—in and as—the sustainable sustenance of The Goddess.

Ceres / Sedna, Collage, 2025