What a night. 9.15 the first night of two was very dynamic. As I arrived I felt a bit of nervousness to be introducing myself to 22 people. The energy in the house was a bit frenetic, but I jumped in to help and my anxiety eased a bit. There are a number of incredibly beautiful and powerful people in this group. Hell, the whole group is fantastic.
After drinking the first cup I fell into a state tat had the potential to be like my first ceremony; reveling in sadness that the connection was missing. Instead, I breathed into the experience and it seemed to work to soften me up, showing me a beautiful example of me working in the community, going to school, and spreading a radiance of connection and love. I ended that cup with the knowledge of what could be and asked Aya to show me what it would take to reach that beautiful vision.
Time for the second cup came around and I was determined to follow through. I struggled for a while to hold down the second cup, the cacophony of purging around me made that challenging. As for exactly what came of the second cup it’s hard to say. Aya gave me a shockingly straightforward to-do list that would move me toward my goal of presence –
- Get a j0b with a specific local large non-profit organization
- Devote yourself to the work
- Use health insurance to get oral surgery
- Allow the passion to help people transform the role into something beautiful, that, in turn, feeds back into a joyous lifestyle.
- Continue pursuing an education.
These pointers seemed to be a prescription of sorts to manifest meaning and create substance in my life via hard work.
After that, I fell into a dissection of my behaviors. There was a clear telegraphing of my judgemental nature, something that I thought wasn’t really an issue for me. My judgments are always beautifully designed ways for me to shift my focus away from myself and avoid my own work. This behavior was modeled for me ad nauseam. I was shown how I use projection and speculative narrative crafting to distract myself emotionally from the personal work that needs to be done.
I had several moments where it was clear to me that God/Love was present and would always be lighting the path forward. I felt deep gratitude and the need to prostrate myself before God/Love to acknowledge how various actions in the past were disgraceful, a penance of sorts. I found strength in the gratitude to be alive, to have been given the challenges I have, and to still be walking the earth and waking anew each morning. I also found myself with the desire to reach out and give love to a variety of people in my life. I experienced a number of visions related to how I let my ex down throughout our relationship and I was left just wanting to reconnect, hug her, and say, “I’m Sorry.”
Night Two [9.17.2022] –
I’m writing this after getting some rest. I still feel the effects of the medicine a bit. Where to start… I found the second night to be challenging, and beautiful. I went into the first round with the intention to allow Aya to drive the bus; to surrender to whatever the medicine needed to show me and I needed to learn.
At first, it was like a prolonged series of vignettes that were beautiful but lacked substance. At a point I became frustrated and pushed back against Aya saying, “You know, you don’t have to be gentle,” and it was as if she metaphorically raised her eyebrow in response, smirking slightly. We plunged into an extremely intense and uncomfortable processing of my faults and shortcomings. Namely, a lot of how I showed up in the relationship with my ex came to the surface. One thing, in particular, was my habit to make everything about myself. For example, if she was upset or having a hard time I would typically assume that I had done something wrong, which over time became an annoyance of hers…understandably so. I’ve done this in many other areas of my life. I realized while sitting with the behavior that it was a subtle and self-reinforcing vortex of sorts. It’s clear to me that this is connected to my past with the victim mentality. This habit is a sneaky one, in that, when confronted with that specific stimuli, I would shrink up and create a narrative based on a loose intuition that I was at fault. This would lead me to push and try to “fix” the situation that I had falsely accredited myself as having caused. This habit was a zero-sum bind, with outcomes that would lead to me feeling hurt and confused… and thus, the pattern of absorption would repeat. Seeing the reality of this behavioral issue, the impacts of it, and the nuance of the mechanism allowed me to accept it and look deeper into it in order to trace back the influences in my childhood that developed that coping mechanism. I was able to gently hold that part of myself and nurture the scared, desperate, sweet child within me.
I saw visions of my ex flourishing in a variety of ways; beginning to live again in her brilliant complicated way. This was beautiful. I also had to reckon with some shadow elements of how my influence in our relationship led to a breakdown of her spirit and purpose. The times when I was knowingly being an energy vacuum and holding her back from joy. These expressions were very vivid and powerful.
During the second round before we were called to drink, I was a little scared to take the second dose. I mustered up the courage to do it for the sake of healing. I took this dose with less of a clear intention and an openness to what needed to come up. The second dose came on strong and the urge to purge was present. There was a cascading effect of people purging that was punctuated by three people directly adjacent to me vomiting. The struggle was real but the nausea subsided and I was cast into an even deeper version of the “You don’t have to be gentle,” sentiment from the first dose. This section was so intense that I am still trying to piece together exactly what I experienced. There are a couple of core moments that I can share now that are clear.
The onset was a kind of mental kaleidoscope of anguish, negative behaviors, and self-judgments all flooding in at a pace I couldn’t comprehend fully. I would have a moment of salience when the obsession with myself would be really prevalent, I’d be given a window to accept that, and upon not accepting it I’d be flung into the kaleidoscope of anguish again. At a certain point, I was sitting with my self-absorption and noticed my body language. During the torrent, I’d be holding my fists closed over my chest, or I’d be in the fetal position, body contracted into itself. It clicked for me that not only are there countless behaviors linked to my self-absorption, but I have also (over time), developed physical body language that denies my being a sense of openness and receptivity to the world around me. The habit was so ingrained that I would have to pry my contorted arms to my side and forcefully open my hands to take on a receptive posture. As I become more aware of my shadows it has been a recent mission of mine to get more in touch with my body. This practice of assuming a posture of physical receptiveness will undoubtedly play a big part.
Toward the end of the onslaught, I remember looking up at the pine ceiling and saying, ” I just can’t do it anymore” to God/Love/Universe, and surrendering into the experience. This was incredibly beautiful and I felt held and nourished in my exhaustion. The scene changed to a moonlit beach, grayscale, third-person view of me laying in the tide among the wreckage of a ship. I was broken, exhausted, and on the verge of death… at that moment I smiled, and felt the deepest feeling of gratitude and contentment for the beautiful experience.