Both:

Wait, you’re telling me there are molecular compounds across different types of plants all over the world that facilitate transcendence, spiritual insight, deep healing, and have informed centuries of ceremonial culture?!

And:

I like my mind. I need it. I’m terrified of losing it. Of damaging it. (Also, these substances are illegal in many places for complicated reasons)1

I’ve been cautious with intoxication out of absorbed fear (“this is your brain on drugs”) and a dose of wisdom. Didn’t have my first drink until age 25. I liked the idea of filling a toolbox with ways of processing anxiety or grief that didn’t numb them or create a habit of bypassing. Moving through, rather than escaping.

It’s a helpful question to ask of any substance—a drink or drug—do I want this to escape this moment, or to dive more deeply into it? To drop into life, or to drop out? To feel it less, or feel it more, and where does the truth of myself—my uncomfortable feelings—go if I take this? Would this substance help me to be more present to the people I love and the challenges life is serving up right now as my curriculum for growth, or less present? More open-hearted, or more shut off?

My first concern was, of course, source:

What plants? (I felt a draw to mushrooms and ayahuasca)

What space? (where would I do this?)

Very importantly–with whom? (who would I entrust myself to? with whom could I come undone?)

And where from? (how could I know the purity of a substance—and not just of the substance, but of the whole experience, how could I know everyone involved was coming to the plants with pure motives and a toolbox for whatever might unfold?

I was asking these questions to a new friend—a psychonaut2— in Bali, where there were ceremonies and “ceremonies” around every corner, and her response astonished me:

“Ahhh, girl, you’ll just know. You don’t have to seek it out. The plants will find you.”

Whewww. Big exhale. Relief.

I felt the truth of it in my heart.

I laughed. I loved this idea. I felt total trust in it. Like one of my favorite prayers: “god, make it obvious.”

So I gave up seeking it out. I decided if an experience was meant for me, it would feel inevitable, perfectly timed, trustworthy, easy.

Little did I know, the journey I finally took this summer started then, with its first lesson:

This is not something that you do. This is an un-doing. This is something that you receive. This is a glimpse of how profoundly you are held.

Psychedelics are just one doorway into the field (stay tuned for more on the field). Just one way to quiet the fearful mind, bypass our habitual ways of thinking (to see them as habitual), and tune in to our deepest wisdom, the part of us that knows we come from love, and are headed home to love. I learned more about other doorways—the endogenous altered states we can enter through ecstatic dance, yoga nidra, holotropic breathwork, meditation, cold plunging.

I deep dived into Ram Dass, who felt like an old friend from the first time I heard his voice. I trusted his shrugginess. His academic chops and profundity balanced with lighthearted joy at being in on the secret of how wildly beloved we all are. I’ll never forget coming across his weird, wonderful world of a book (is it a book?) Be Here Now for the first time.

And then, this summer, the way opened.

34From the bottom on my heart, thank you for subscribing.

I hope we woo each other—stir up wonder and playfulness, and remind each other of our belovedness.

I would love to read your comments.

What questions does this story stir up for you?

What has plant medicine taught you?

What have other intentional journeys taught you?

How are you being wooed?

The attraction, the seduction, the not-yet-having, the mis-haps, the wooing…

Because that in-between space is alive with possibility.

And yes, the real, muscular, adult love story starts the minute a choice, an oath, a promise is made. The future shifts from an infinite haze into a clear focus. Uncertainty becomes a certain measure of security.

But that real love story is ultimately about cultivating an on-going buzz of desire amidst familiarity, tending the pilot light of longing. Sinking into the joy of having, and kindling the joy of wanting.1

Our spiritual life is a profound teacher of this dance.

It’s what we do with longing and mystery.

Whether it takes the form of prayer, meditation, gathering with kindred spirits, lectio divina, or, for me, the Alter practice’s2 cathartic blend of music, sweat, breath, and voice, it’s a relationship with the invisible—with a presence, an intelligence, a life force, with something (someone) we have, and do not have. And so we seek, and we find, and we seek. Thank goodness for the millenia of mystics, who have written about this both/and in so many dialects, offering us language for the delightfully ineffable. The mystery is where all the juice is.

God has an “o” at the heart of it. A portal, a secret, an oh?, an ooooooh!, an awe, a howl, a longing.

C.S. Lewis put it this way in the The Weight of Glory:

News from a country we somehow know to be our home.

The longing is our passport.

The longing itself is the imprint of divine love, evidence that, as the Sufi poet Rumi puts it:

What you seek is seeking you.

We’re being wooed.

We’re already in the longest, twisty and turny-est romantic comedy, so fantastically long Dante’s attempt to write it only starts at the end of three volumes, the longest epic of longing.3

The Sufi poet Rumi, writing in Turkey in the 1200’s spun poems of this longing, and spun himself into a physical form of it, a whirling dance that came to be called the Sema.

Poetry—with its capacity for both/and—music, and dance—with their fluidity— are the rare forms that can hold it. Rumi’s poems have stirred up, affirmed, and creatively catalyzed the longing in others across cultures and languages for hundreds of years. One big nodding “uh huh, yep, you too? Me too. How sweet is it? How heartbreaking is it? How tantalizing is it?”

He calls us longers “love dogs”, whose lips grow sweet with howling.

Here’s how two of my favorite modern, un-embarrassed mystics who shrug and wink and mesmerize and stutter through divine longing with a Rumian blend of hunger and humor put it:

(If this is your intro to Krishna Das, I’m wishing you a full-hearted fall down the rabbit hole)

(More to come about Coleman Brooks, and Rumi.4)

The shadow of the language often used around spiritual growth and practice suggests that connecting with spirit depends on you. If you’re not feeling it, you’re failing at it.

“How to pray” subtly suggests any other way won’t work.

“The importance of a meditation practice” suggests our occasional, distracted, amateur attempts are to blame for our general cluelessness.

But what if this longing, however faint, this reaching, however fumbling and doubtful, is itself evidence of how much love already holds us? How much love has carved out in us the shape of itself?

As the theologian Miroslav Volf puts it: “God can’t be dependent on my ability to perceive God.”

Faith is a mode of active receptivity.

“The feeling remains,” as the 16th-century mystic Teresa of Avila says, “that God is on the journey too.”

In his first year, before my pup Everest was neutered, he howled magnificently. A deep, wolf-y, from the guts howl. Full of testosterone, often toward other dogs aways off, but often, just because. Howling into the sky with the truest expression of longing I’ve ever heard. A blend of question, desire, and flare—sending up his smoke signal into the universe. I love to get him going:

Every now and then, he’ll do it again, leaning off the edge of something. Howling into the beyond. Throwing his voice out into the world as a tether, caught up in the song. Reveling in the space in between, the reaching, the wooing.

Our friend Rumi:

One night a man was crying Allah! Allah!
His lips grew sweet with praising,
until a cynic said, “So!
I’ve heard you calling out, but have you ever
gotten any response?”
The man had no answer to that.
He quit praying and fell into a confused sleep.
He dreamed he saw Khidr, the guide of souls,
in a thick, green foliage.
“Why did you stop praising?” 

“Because I’ve never heard anything back.”

Khidr replied:
This longing you express
is the return message.
The grief you cry out from
draws you toward union.
Your pure sadness that wants help
is the secret cup.
Listen to the moan of a dog for its master.
That whining is the connection.

There are love dogs
no one knows the names of.

Give your life
to be one of them."

Flow: a soundtrack for a yoga or mat practice (the favorites I’m playing in this month’s Alter practices), or a dreamy morning or journaling session.

&

Fire: full-throttle beats and epic anthems to call out your inner warrior (standouts from new Alter cycling workouts) perfect for your own workouts, runs, or rides.

& extra playlists for Founding subscribers.

This month’s Fire:

Flow: a soundtrack for a yoga or mat practice (the favorites I’m playing in this month’s Alter practices), or a dreamy morning or journaling session.

&

Fire: full-throttle beats and epic anthems to call out your inner warrior (standouts from new Alter cycling workouts) perfect for your own workouts, runs, or rides.

& extra playlists for Founding subscribers.

This month’s Flow:

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It’s a phrase as fun to say
as to sense,
a feeling something more is at play
than can be explained:
Woo-woo
It’s evidence not entirely refutable
of a timeline, a logic, a realm
running alongside our own,
a suggestion that we are infinitely known.
Too woo-woo?
It’s a relieved whew! of gratitude
for a long yellow light,
for catching a fall,
for all that’s going right,
for the ways the wrongs break our hearts open.
It’s leaving the door open
for the wind to whoosh through—
             where does it come from?
		                        where is it going?
It’s a deep, ancient knowing
that winks at our doubt,
the wow! we feel expand in our chest
at overwhelming beauty,
the woo-hoo! when we breakthrough
fear into flow.
It’s the thrill
of our certainty’s undoing;
it’s flirting back
with the universe’s wooing.

Friends, how have you been, how are you being, wooed?