Three things to keep in mind when coming to plant medicine work.
An intro for those who may need it.
As some of you know, but most probably don’t, I’ve been an initiate in a plant medicine path for 15 years. I actually grew up in it, but didn’t enter it myself until my early 20’s. It’s a path and practice that came out of the North of Brazil in the Amazon region in the 1930’s. Its origins and medicine come from much deeper in the forest with the indigenous people of the Peruvian and Brazilian Amazon basin. In plainest terms it’s a syncretic religious and spiritual path centered around a sacramental tea. It’s not Ayahuasca, but that tends to be the closest context people have for it.
I don’t share a lot about it because it’s private and one of the main tenets of the path is not proselytizing. Those who are seeking it find it. Amazingly they do every time. I’m sharing this because I’ve wanted to write about things that could be helpful to others either seeking or participating in plant medicine work for some time. As we all know, it’s a growing field of healing, research, and unfortunately commodification. Having some solid experience in it, it feels like time to share some things. Like a lot of things in our world, those who don’t know a lot about something are the most enthusiastic to write and share about it. And those who are deeply steeped and living the thing, don’t.
I’m not about to start a podcast.
But I’m going to share something I wrote and I think there will be more to come. Admittedly, I have a lot of familiarity and experience with one plant sacrament. And, there are similarities when working with and seeking healing from any plant medicines. And the world of spiritual healing, regardless of venue or practice, has things in common.
Three things to keep in mind when coming to plant medicine work for the first time, or if you’re new, or just need the reminders + the key to having an authentic experience.
1. Be humble. You’re brand new and potentially know very little to nothing. That’s ok. Even if you’ve been to multiple ceremonies, you’re still brand new. And even if you’ve been doing this for years, there is always the imperative to set aside what we think it is in order to discover what is actually is. Come to it with a beginner’s mindset. Like a blank canvas ready to learn and discover and experience what it actually may be, not what your mind and ego and expectations would have or create it to be. Being humble and being small and humiliated are not the same thing. Humility is a place of reverence and acknowledgment that we are not greater or smaller than anyone else, and in the face of the Divine, we are not the ones in charge.
2. Focus on your own healing and on meeting the Being of the medicine you’re participating in.
Each plant teacher and medicine is a Being. A living spiritual consciousness that interacts, teaches, and heals us through its vibrational essence and plant body. Get to know that essence and vibration. It’s your friend and guide in the work, and potentially outside of it, if you create that relationship with it or continue on a path of a particular medicine.
Focus on your own healing and personal development first. (This is always a big part of the focus, but over time other focuses or elements, such as serving the work or helping others in guardian roles, can come into your work depending on the medicine and your path with it.) There are many amazing phenomena to experience in the world of plant medicine and spiritual healing. And not every realm or zone of healing and vibration is meant to be experienced right away. You have to clean yourself, and refine your vibration and perceptions, your discernment and capabilities, to be able to experience things authentically, with out the need or tendency to filter everything through the narrow filters of your mind and trauma and wounds. Be patient. Be calm. Be willing to go slow. Be wiling to not know. Through that you may actually be able to get to know yourself. You may actually be able to get to know God or the Divine or whoever you’re looking for. It takes a lot of time to discipline and calm the mind. Don’t fool yourself by making things up that aren’t objectively true. Don’t fool yourself by making things up that aren’t happening. Don’t be so eager to fill the emptiness inside you with stories. See what comes. Just wait and see what comes.
Through focusing on your own healing and development you will authentically discover who you are and what gifts and talents you have.
3. Don’t go in asking how the medicine can serve you.
Go in as a supplicant. As a student. As a potential pupil. Ask to meet the medicine. And if down the road on of them becomes your teacher and path, ask how you can serve the medicine. It’s important to remember these plant medicines are healers. They are here to help us heal our separation. With nature, with God, with ourselves and with our own hearts and Light. They are here to help us have the consciousness of the heart, of unity, and of a better way to exist on this planet. The are not a commodity or a trend or something to do as a way to gain status or power.
That’s the opposite of what they are here for. The point is not to fit these medicine to us, but to fit ourselves to them.
The point is not to try and fit these medicines into our third chakra martial world paradigm, but to allow them to help us live in a new one of the heart.
The Key to Having an Authentic Experience.
Is staying with the experiential facts of your experience.
What did you feel? What did you experience in terms of emotions, sensations, perceptions, sight, before any interpretations or stories of the mind came into it?
By staying with what you experienced and stopping your mind at the point it would give unconfirmed meaning and interpretation to something that happened, you enter into honest, truthful communion with your experience. It can take time to understand what we go through and sometimes, a lot of the time, we understand things in retrospect. By refraining from making things up you have the chance to actually intuit or have it revealed to you what’s going on.
Maybe you felt a deep sadness and just needed to cry and you felt more clear and peaceful after? Beautiful. You don’t need to know anything more at this time. Maybe you intuitively knew what that sadness was connected to and it allowed you to move through cleaning it. Beautiful.
Maybe you felt a presence by your side that gave you a sense of peace and was kind of shimmering blue? Or something that felt like it needed Light. What a gift. Just hang with what you perceived or felt to do from your heart in the moment. If you’re supposed to know more about who that was, you will. This goes for all Beings or consciousness that may show up to you.
Hopefully you get the drift.
Don’t make things up before you have the information about it. Be with the sensations and experiential facts. If you are someone who sees things and has visions, be with the raw facts of what you saw. Not with any extrapolation crafted by the mind masquerading as something different. In my experience, this tendency to create stories and interpretations comes from two places.
The first being a natural tendency and wish to understand and give meaning to things. The second, which is a little more serious and tricky, is a need to give grand meaning to things as a way to fill or hide our own insecurities, emptiness, trauma, wounds, and sadness, or lack of knowledge about who we are or connection to ourselves. By giving meaning, that a lot of times is very self aggrandizing and way ahead of our actual development, we feel special and chosen. This is usually a protective mechanism for the very deep healing work we all need to do in ourselves. The thing that the stories are covering up is the real work and healing prayer.
The mind and ego are very tricky. And ultimately just want to protect us from the unknown and keep familiar parameters around things. Humans are experts at taking something pure and distorting it. Resist the impulse to do this with your experience by ascribing meaning to things you don’t yet know the meaning of. If “the medicine’ tells you exactly what you want to hear, or tells you things that completely confirm your bias’, or feed into your wounds and insecurities by aggrandizing you, be suspicious.
When I say be suspicious, I further mean if “the medicine” “speaks to you” in the same voice as your own mind, or inner critic, or inner ego booster… be suspicious. In my experience, one of the fundamental things anyone who is going to be in ongoing relationship with plant medicine -whether as a visitor or a devotee/initiate of a spiritual path- will have to clean heal, dis-identify from, transform, and become the ally and commander of, is the mind.
Plant medicine works primarily through vibration. And through what it stimulates, shows, and prompts us to feel and understand through non mental vibrational understanding and inner revelation. It also works through what happens in our lives based on the healing and knowledge we encounter in those spaces. And through the choices we make from that healing and knowledge. It doesn’t work through the normal pathways of the mind and the material world. It doesn’t heal or teach in the linear ways we may expect. The true answering of a prayer will almost always include having to face and see and transform all that is in the way of that prayer being actualized in oneself and life.
If it challenges you and puts you face to face with your own inner material -both the shadows and the glories-, if it takes you into spaces in yourself you never expected to have to go, or even knew were there, and if it answers your prayers, but in ways you yourself could never have predicted, I’d say you’re on the right track.
If it inspires or guides you to make changes in your life that are more grounded, more heart centered, and more aligned with your true self, and with the vibration of Light and Truth, I’d say you’re on the right track.
And if it is challenging and rewarding, and shows you a path of inner healing and outer life that is really surprising and unexpected while being really interesting and beautiful, and more true and deep and healthy than you could have found or made otherwise… that’s what I have come to know as the real deal.