He🏒🏒 With a Capital Everything

Into Great Mystery

Over the last few months, The Emerald podcast released a 2 part dragon episode and there was a lot in there that’s had me reflecting on the last 7ish years of my life. 🌬️🔥

In the spring of 2020, right in the middle of global lockdowns, I moved from Colorado to Mexico. I had no idea that I would stay for 5 years and I had absolutely NO IDEA what I was in for. It wasn’t anything I had planned, just something that kept unfolding and I am sure I will be integrating this powerful season of my life for many years to come. But it all started before that move to Mexico, when just over a year prior, I had flown with a friend down to Acapulco for a conference. In the months leading up to that conference, I would check their website to see what new speakers and events had been added and one day I texted my friend, “You wouldn’t believe it! They’re actually doing drugs at this conference!” A whole line up of plant medicine ceremonies had just been added to the website – peyote, yopo, ayahuasca. My friend responded with major excitement and said she’d been wanting to try ayahuasca for ages and that we should definitely do it. She told me not to research anything so I didn’t set any expectations. So I didn’t look it up. I also didn’t commit. I figured I’d wait until I got there and see how I felt.

February 2019, after a casual flight down to Mexico, margaritas en route, I arrived to the famed Hotel Princess and registered for the conference. I was still undecided on the ceremony, but it was 2 nights away….plenty of time, I thought. The day of ceremony came and I officially decided I was a go and bought my ticket. My friend had decided against it weeks prior, so it was just me and I was pumped. I waited most of the day for details, but there was some kind of communication snafu between conference admin and the shaman group. I eventually checked back in at the registration counter and got a time, a location and instruction to bring some comfy stuff like a yoga mat and a pillow. I went for a lovely dinner of fish tacos and a couple hours later strolled on over to the conference room where the ceremony was to take place. I showed up to the space with a borrowed yoga mat from someone I’d met, a borrowed sleeping bag from another someone I’d met, water bottle and comfy clothes. I was ready!

For any newbies reading this, I won’t list all the things I did wrong because I’d simply be re-writing most of what I just wrote. Or you can re-read all that above and just add “don’t do it that way” to the end of every sentence.

While, today, I don’t recommend the “conference room ceremony”, the group that led us that night was actually quite interesting. I was fascinated by the whole line up at the front of the room. I don’t know how such a complicated arrangement came about, but I’m glad it did. Before me was a group of Cofán elders in FULL Amazonian regalia. I’d never seen anything like it. They had come from a deeply remote part of the Amazon on the Colombia/Ecuador border. Some had to obtain passports for the first time in their lives just to come for this ceremony. Some of them didn’t even speak Spanish let alone English. And they were the kind of “old” where you just know that every wrinkle, every creaky bone, every twinkle in their eye knows stuff. Stuff you’ve never, ever. ever. heard. But, somehow, you know that they know that stuff.

The obligatory pre-ceremony details were shared and they also gave a couple of helpful tips. One was to have a mantra to repeat. Their suggestion was “trust, let go, be open”, so I went with it. The second tip was to stay curious if things got difficult and ask, “What could I be learning in this moment?”

I don’t know how long it took for things to kick in…maybe 15-20 minutes? One second I was wrapped up in my mummy bag waiting for something to happen and a fraction of a second later, a gigantic light was beaming from my forehead at the same time a huuuuuuge horn bellowed – like the kind of horn in Lord of the Rings just before battle. I felt/saw myself as both a lighthouse AND a ship in the same instant that the light and the sound came. My lighthouse self had turned on just in time to see my boat self amidst angry, churning waves crashing against a massive cliff shrouded in fog.

Immediately, the paranoia set in. Incomprehensible paranoia. No dictionary definition could have prepared me for this kind of panic. My heart was pounding so hard that I was actually trying to reach into my body to see if I could hold it in my hands. My mantra started repeating in my head, “trust, let go, be open”, and I somehow had the wherewithal to wonder, “what (tf) could I be learning?” while trying to unscramble enough other words to tell my little heart to please not die of a heart attack.

Of course, then came the nausea. Another of the recommendations was to try not to throw up at the first hint of nausea, but to sort of ride the waves.
There I was lying on my back, fully zipped up in my claustrophobia cocoon, paranoid AF, comforting my own heart that I was holding in my hands. Now also trying to figure out how not to throw up.

I decided I’d try wriggling onto my side and that was instant relief from the naus-“OH MY GOD, I’M GONNA GET STABBED!” Cradling my little heart, I managed to quickly squiggle onto my front. NOPE. Throw up city if I stayed there. Squiggled another quarter turn to the other side, nausea relief….but now I’M GONNA GET STABBED from the other direction! Back onto my back for some more nausea. Onto my side again. Stabby images. And on it went for some time – a little rotisserie chicken wrapped in a sleeping bag tortilla, holding her heart in her hands, reminding herself to trust, let go, be open, and desperately trying to figure out what I was learning.

Cue the visions. Before, I was simply grappling with my “please don’t die” self talk from within my rotating burrito. In a hotel. But now, my rotisserie shenanigans were taking place in the middle of a jungle where I could see with my actual, real wide open eyes that the floor under and all around me was now dirt. Some wind blew in and swirled up a strange dust that smelled horrrrible.

I gagged. [Trust, let go, be open, don’t throw up.] Then in hotel world, one of the assistants got up and started walking around the room jungle, and I saw him kicking up even more of this gaggy dust as well as these big, dried, crunchy jungle leaves that were strewn about. I was full blown trembling in my sleeping bag. Still rotating. But somehow still morbidly curious enough to sneak a peek every once in a while at these bare dancing feet that had little grass skirts at the ankles, strings of beads and shells, leather, and other such adornments. As paranoid as I was, I kept peeking out from my cave a little farther. I could see a clearing in the jungle and some kind of ancient ceremony taking place that felt thousands of years old. Those ancient dancing feet still kicking up dust. Still paranoid. Also totally flabbergasted. What. In. The. World. am I seeing? Eyes wide open, cradling my heart in my two hands, choking on dust. Why is this so real?

But wait! Capital everything wouldn’t be complete without a side of sound torture.

Cue the unexplainable, otherworldly buzzing. I didn’t know how to be more terrified at what was already peak terror, but I managed to eke out a new level. Yet still I had to take a peek outside my burrito to see what new evil was upon us. There, circling above the ancient ceremony was some kind of jurassic dragonfly with a mega jet buzz to match its meteoric proportions.

Rotisserie me just knew that dancing shaman was coming to get me, sprinkling his dust of death on me, sending his demon bug to annihilate me.

What else was there to do but keep rotating and cradling my heart. On and on and on it went. Paranoia, dancing demon shaman, gag, 1/4 turn, blessed self talk, demon bug, paranoia, dancing feet, jurassic buzz, gag, 1/4 turn…There’s no way to know how long this went on.

I had been trying so hard to trust and stay open and not throw up, but this was just ridiculous. I’d had enough. “WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO BE LEARNING?!!!!” I silently screamed at all of existence.

Right in that millisecond, all of it stopped and I was at the scene of my own birth. My tiny self had just been handed to my mother and I had been transported to the exact moment she put her cheek to my cheek.

It’s very difficult to write about this kind of stuff in a way that conveys the “simultaneousness” of it all. In an instant, the jungle scene dissolved; in that same instant, different memories played out concurrently; I fully registered that I had just witnessed a very real memory buried deep in my subconscious; I knew what it meant; and praise be to all things holy!…I finally threw up.

What happened is something humans have sung to for ages. Giant tears streaming down my face, I sat in wonder at the ungraspable infinity somehow held in this memory. Tears that came with shuddering grief and inexplicable praise. Magical, beautiful tears that took with them countless lifetimes of guilt that had been locked away, deep in my being…waiting eons for this day to come.

Whatever had just played out that felt like a million layers in a million years of hell, whatever that whole thing was….the liberation I felt coming through to the other side was worth every bit of it. You see, I’d just gotten a tiny glimpse of what was in the twinkle of those shamans’ eyes.

And I knew then I’d be doing this for the rest of my life. 🌀

Now, I had spent my whole life going to church, studying spiritual stuff, memorizing Bible verses, getting baptized, asking Jesus into my heart on the regular in case he’d somehow jumped ship along the way. I even went to a Christian college, went on missions trips. I was obedient. But by the end of Christian college, I wasn’t really feeling it anymore. I was doing the things, but if I was honest with myself (which was pretty dang difficult to do with hell just a doubt away) I hadn’t really ever felt it. The thing is, I always knew there was more to this life, but it was something I’d only hoped to experience…until that INIFINITEsimal moment. In the moment that the torture stopped, I saw my birth, and I puked in a bucket in a hotel room in Acapulco, Mexico, I finally felt that thing that I just knew had to exist.

I simply couldn’t know what I didn’t know until I knew it.

Sitting at the bottom of my bucket was a dead, black mass with crumpled up wires sticking out of it. That same wiry, black mass was the single image of the sweaty, terrifying nightmares I’d struggled with my entire childhood. The same wiry, black mass that years later one of my teachers in the Amazon would call “la sistema diabolica”, or for short, “hell”.

This giant chunk of hell that had been stuck in my body my whole life; the thing that, as a kid, I had called a “giant hairball” was now sitting in a bucket in a hotel room in Mexico. What. a. Trip.

I spent some time marveling at the wonder of it all. It was actually pretty peaceful now that the hell had been extricated. I relaxed into this brand new connection to Great Mystery and started observing what was happening in the room around me. Occasionally, I could feel some tension rising or a rush of frantic chattering and then I would hear one of the shamans at the front make an odd sucking sound. Kind of like when you circle the straw around the bottom of the cup determined to get every last bit of root beer float. As soon as the shaman would finish making his sounds, someone in the room would throw up.

“Holy magic guys! Is anyone else seeing this?!” But everyone was buried in their blankets. And there was actually quite a bit of hushed whispering going on, which I found odd since one of the requirements for the night was no talking. There was a super chatty group over in the corner. Some more whispers on the other side of me. The girl in front of me was having a full blown conversation with her boyfriend who was lying next to her. “How is this even allowed? Wait a minute, he’s not talking back. Actually, he’s not even hearing her. How can he not hear that?” Some more sounds from a shaman at the front and subsequent purge. I eventually caught on. The shamans were “shaman-ing”; like they could also hear all the inner dialogue (and who knows what else) and they knew when to help move things along.

It was all so incredibly fascinating. The thought of another million years in hell didn’t even cross my mind as I went up for another cup of medicine…I was SO brand new, l wanted to know what comes next. It didn’t take long to purge again and while I had some mini visions and felt some stuff, it was pretty uneventful. But I wasn’t disappointed. I was too sparkly new.

Things wound down and around 5 in the morning they said we could go back to our hotel rooms if we wanted to. I decided to take my sparkling self for a nap before the conference got going. I got up and shook out my borrowed sleeping bag, “sheesh, how’d this thing get so dusty?” 🌿