What Ayahuasca Showed Me-- Prologue
This is the Prologue my journey, which I will share in 3-4 parts.
Howdy, Kumquats.
Long time, no see.
My Spirit Posse is prodding me out of hermit mode again.
I had fallen silent, which does put me at risk of falling back asleep. Or at risk of letting parts of myself atrophy….lose sensitivity…because our gifts and wisdom are meant to be shared. They grow inside of us in order to blossom and be seen. They have dormant seasons too, but really it’s always about returning to life.
The last few months have felt like one initiation after another. Which is saying a lot because of how much spiritual work I do on the regular. There are layers to this consciousness thing. It’s like bringing a network of finely tuned muscles online. These muscles of perception work very crudely at first, before you gain dexterity— like a baby learning to stand, then walk, then run, then dance.
I know that my role as an Artist is to exist on the frontier, on the outside of the over-culture so that I can have perspective and see the best ways for us to get to where we want to be. Which I believe is a place where we can live in more joy, play, beauty, creativity and fun. A place we can be our weird and wacky selves.
Last weekend I participated in my first ayahuasca ceremony. I was prodded on my journey to share what I saw. In fact, I was challenged and prodded a great deal about my dedication to being an ambassador for Nature and all of Creation. It was clear that this was the moment that the student fully stepped into being the teacher.
As Tracy Jordan said on 30 Rock— it was the moment that the manatee became the Mento.
As a student of life, it has been hard to know when to know when I had achieved the “authority” to speak out. I have tried to create containers for my wisdom so many times— my podcast (Vive La Renaissance), this blog (Artist in the Wild), my art production studio (The Nest)….
Each time I sensed more people wanted to see me fail than succeed. I felt I was preaching to a very small choir and the ones who needed to hear most were resistant and mean. I’d fight the good fight as long as I could, but would eventually be worn down and disappointed. Then I’d give up and go back inside of myself. My art is a great companion, after all.
So, I’m going to share my ayahuasca journey, which will take a few days for me do justice to, but I will start with a prologue to set the tone and context.
And I have this DISCLAIMER—
If you get angry or triggered by anything I say here and you are unable to face your own resistances— I invite you to leave. Not every teacher, mentor is guide is for everyone. Take what resonates and leave the rest. It may be a teaching you are not ready for, or one that is not meant for you, but that doesn’t mean it’s not valid or useful for others.
With that said…here we go…
What Ayahuasca Showed Me
PROLOGUE
It has become very clear to me that my work is important simply because of how many people have hated me and tried to stop me. I never understood this because really my work is about bringing fun and depth to the world. But many cannot receive joy and their demons rage against the light. It’s sad really, though I believe they will work through it eventually. This is a world of light and shadow, positive and negative. However, there is a lot at stake right now and we have a chance to flip the polarity. It’s a worthy struggle.
It takes a lot of force to crack a nut.
It takes a lot of pressure to make a diamond.
“Every Divine gift comes wrapped in a challenge.”
There is a difference between child-like and childish.
While I always endeavor to keep a child-like innocence and open heart, I’ve toughened up a great deal. I’ve gained powerful muscles of intuition and discernment and know that my work is more important than my comfort— emotional, social, mental, physical, financial, etc. I’ve been forced to make the choice between my mission (which is my art) and my comfort many times. Spirit has tested me greatly. I do not look like what I’ve been through.
Many of you have been following my work for a long time. Those who do not know me well often get tricked into seeing one aspect of my work as the whole— some believe that I’m just a “burlesque dancer” for example. When, in fact, I am an Artist— a very conscious maker-of-culture. Culture is the soil our consciousness grows in. Culture is the dream-stuff that we use personally and collectively to dream better worlds into reality.
We have lost sight of many things that are important, including the sacred role that artists play in society.
But it’s not just the stuff I create that makes me an Artist. Most of all, my life is my greatest work of art. I hope the same is true for you, too.
I have tested the spiritual and metaphysical concepts that I’ve studied in the laboratory of my life, before adopting them as “true” or useful. Not that I need to prove myself, but I do need people to start to expand the lens they use to see me with.
I also want to talk about the challenges and frustrations of being on a spiritual path openly because that’s part of it too. It’s not all love and light out here.
My primary spiritual lineage is yoga, which is a mystical tradition that emerged from ancient Vedic texts, Hinduism and Indian culture. I have practiced since 2001 and became a teacher in 2004. Since then— in my imperfect, secular, American way— I have endeavored to live my life in alignment with the Sutras (limbs or threads) as outlined by the mystical writing of Patanjali.
Yoga has been the most important and best thing to ever happen to me because it has trained me to discipline my body, mind and spirit in order to experience harmony and union within myself. Yoga is an entire spiritual system that continually refines the vessel of the body so that it can hold more Spirit (aka God) inside. I gravitated to yoga because it teaches that God is inside of us— not “out there” somewhere— and you don’t need an intermediary like a priest or church to experience One-ness / God / Source/ Universe/ …etc.
Yoga is an EMBODIED system with practices that enable us to control the emotions, the senses, the thoughts, the breath, the body, to find stillness and learn to focus our attention— you begin to confront fears, blocks, resistances, you test balance, develop strength, coax flexibility— starting with the physical body, then the energetic body—which shows us how to navigate when we encounter hardships in life.
All of this internal work is done with a gentle, consistent discipline that begins to change our experience in the world outside of us. In this way, yoga is also a form of magic.
Change on the inside = change on the outside.
All the twisting, wringing, stretching, strengthening of the body and mind in yoga is done so that we are able to let in more Spirit. It helps to think of Spirit as equivalent to electricity. If too much electricity flows into a power outlet, it trips the fuse and short circuits. It’s the same with our bodies. We can’t handle receiving too much at once because it fries our nervous system.
This is part of what makes yoga such a wonderful spiritual system. It is my primary lineage and has given me grounding and confidence to explore other spiritual things, such as Western mysticism.
In 2016, I began to wonder about what the indigenous (“of the land”), nature-based spiritual system of MY English, Irish and German ancestors would have looked like. I knew the witches were burned, the Druids were destroyed and most of them had an oral tradition, which meant no books. I recognized that the Western world lost its ability to work with nature. We suffered from the separation ourselves and that caused us to perpetuate this destruction on others.
I wanted the endless greed and extraction from nature to stop. I knew that if you want to change the world, you change yourself. So, I started to study magic— which is what happened to the remnants of our Western spiritual system— it went underground.
Those of us with Western European ancestry didn’t have an intact, coherent system, like yoga, to draw upon. This body of knowledge is being pieced back together now, in our lifetime. So, I just jumped in to learn.…as usual, the hard way.
I spent about 4 years learning magic on the internet from millennials before I realized that, because of my yoga training, I actually was already very powerful— and attempting to learn from less embodied, less experienced teachers than myself was not getting the “guaranteed results” they offered. It was like pouring gasoline on a dumpster fire.
On the outside, it looked as if I couldn’t manifest myself out of a wet paper bag. By these teachers, I was continually told that I wasn’t doing enough shadow work to unite my will in order to manifest what I wanted. Looking back now, this seems ridiculous and materialistic to me. They failed to factor in karma, karmic debts, soul missions, the “age”, level or experience level of souls or the fact that every Divine gift has a challenge as the price.
We have no way of knowing the reasons that people undergo more hardship than others. Earth is a “soul cauldron” as astrologer Jeff Harman says. We come here to learn. We come here to get real or go home. And life has a funny way of lulling us into a false sense of security and then stripping it all away to see what we’re made of.
I felt as if they could be teaching this stuff to Jesus himself or the Devil incarnate, but they wouldn’t know the difference.
The teachers I found simply did not have the eyes to see what level their students were at, in order to guide them out in the depths. Luckily I was blessed to have a wonderful teacher in yoga when I was starting, Kim Manfredi. Yoga is progressive, unfolds like layers of an onion and continually tunes up the chakras. It really deepens over time. The simplest teaching becomes fractal over time, like a kaleidoscope. By contrast, studying magic this way was completely ungrounded— just working with raw “manifestation” spells, gimmicks and tricks was frying my nervous system.
I started to grow angry at the boldness of these people calling themselves teachers, coaches and leaders. Eventually, I started to see right through them, but they continued on— making lots of money, writing books, rounding up offers and audiences. It made me ill.
I saw it in the creative communities I had been part of too. People confused influencers with artists. Some of the loudest, fakest people had a lot of success and followers.
Also during this time, I moved to California— which is famous for it’s new-age-hippie-ness. Here, I learned a lot about “festival culture”— which includes music festivals and Burning Man, which are great events in many ways, but the dark side is also un-grounded in a lineage or tradition— just like magicians on the internet. It’s kind of a mashup of convenient psychology, recreational drug use, loosey-goosey whatever-feels-good indulgence with a lot of tantra thrown in to justify casual sex— and all the toys and trappings that go with it— crystals, exotic elixirs— an entire apothecary of obscure intoxicants— all dispensed with a lot of elitist self importance and self righteousness.
It’s been so ironic (and hard to swallow) for me to— on the one hand, agree with the words that many “spiritual” people say— while on the other hand— believe they are completely full of shit and doing this for show and to get attention.
When you strengthen your intuition this much, you also acquire a Bullshit Meter. Mine is constantly going off. I often feel completely surrounded by what I call SPIRITUAL POSERS. All you can do is take the lesson and move on. Take the best, forget the rest. So, each time I just shut my mouth and keep on going.
But how do we gauge the value or merit of a spiritual teacher?
It’s not visible on the outside and it doesn’t really have to do with how many books they have read. A lot of it comes down to wisdom. To me, wisdom is the combination of knowledge and experience. And being part of a lineage really helps too.
After breaking up with millennial internet magicians, I continued to study and apply my spiritual research, but more slowly and from more diverse sources. The aspects of Western spiritualism that I liked best were astrology, tarot and herbalism.
Through applying astrology to my life, I understood my strengths and shortcomings better. I was able to see my personality like a sound mixing board. Each aspect of my personality having a fader on the mixing board, where the levels range from strong to strained— with the sweet spot always found in the balance.
In addition to understanding my personality, I found that paying attention to the movements of the planets was changing my experience of time, moving from my mind linear to cyclical. I began to experience a comforting rhythm and pattern to life. I followed the cycles of the moon, used the energy of each day of the week. I loved tuning in to the energies of the planets— even if it felt like an act of imagination at first.
The planets show us many different ways we can be in the world— bold and strong like Mars, sensual and soft like Venus, clever and quick like Mercury, grand and expansive like Jupiter, disciplined and steadfast like Saturn.
Eventually, being in tune with the sky began to feel as right as rain.
Similarly, I found a whole new way of understanding and attuning myself by using tarot cards. The pictures on the cards tell a story. Images are a symbolic language beyond words, which is how our subconscious communicates to us in our dreams. Tarot provided a way to communicate with my Spirit Posse and my higher self. It’s a way to confirm or deny what my intuition and experience shows me. It also allows me to glimpse the perspective of others and to consider many different outcomes or resolutions to my problems. We learn so much by contrast. Tarot gives me a way to see the story within the bigger story of my life.
My fascination with herbalism and food-as-medicine lead me to finally exploring Ayurveda, a “sister science” to yoga. Which I was/am lucky enough to live near a respected school of Ayurveda and worked with a practitioner to help me navigate through menopause a few years ago. I also continue to learn about the trees, plants and flowers that grow in my area and learning how wild craft different things. This is an ongoing interest and project, of course.
I also spent 2+ years learning about angels— making art for and with them, trying to understand their unique personalities, gifts and jobs in service to Creation. I had to learn how to pick up on the very subtle language of intuition— which is their wifi. That’s how they talk to us.
I’m sure I’m forgetting a lot…
But it felt important to share some of the ways in which I apply spiritual principles in my life before beginning this story of what Grandmother Ayahuasca showed me.
I see many spiritual posers out in the world. And many wounded people chasing after psychedelic experiences to “fix” something, without the tools to even attempt to integrate the experience into their every days lives. This is where yoga is so different and why I appreciate it’s gentle yet rock-solid integrity. I wish more people were grounded in an ancient lineage before they go off on any vision quest. There are more angels and, conversely, more demons, that we can fathom.
Even I used to use mushrooms for recreation, until they started to show me things that felt too big for me to do anything about and I turned away. I was reprimanded for this turning away by the ayahuasca. It is a responsibility that goes beyond my own healing or my comfort. I have free will, of course. The choice is always ours to make.
Why am I telling you all of this?
Because I wanted to provide contrast, in order to explain the depth of being-ness that I experienced with my guides, Haru and his wife, Hayra, of the Kuntanawa nation. They traveled from the Amazon out of necessity and responsibility to share not only words, but a journey and experience as unique as a snowflake.
It is rare to have such a qualified guide as Haru, especially, who has been working with ayahuasca for 35 years, since the age of 7. I was humbled by his words, his songs, and his presence. He was as lovely and refreshing as he was deep and awe-inspiring.
So, this concludes the prologue.
I am going to try to write this in 3 more parts:
What
How
Why
I may do a 4th part that will cover some of my own personal revelations, but I want to first address what I was shown for humanity in general. I’ll be back soon.
Until then,
Trixie
Yaaaay!
x
Trixie, I relate to so much of this! Have you heard of Spiritual Bypassing? Once I landed on that terminology, I understood so much better some complicated people in my life. Sending you hugs