What unfolded for me in the private ceremony I started to share about in my previous post is an example of the healing and transformation with Ayahuasca that is available to us when we sit with this sacred plant medicine ally.
We’re all such complex individuals. We each carry a universe inside of us. We are shaped in ways that are both known and unknown to us by the experiences we have throughout our lives, and what I’ve come to understand is that healing and transformation is a process. Healing and transformation with Ayahuasca is too a process, although there are many benefits that can be experienced and felt immediately.
My healing and transformation with Ayahuasca has been a journey that I would describe as coming home to myself. It’s been a process of getting to know myself. It’s been a process of becoming more true to me, and of cultivating more self-love, respect, and value.
One of the ways I have been cultivating this self-love, respect, and value has been by being able to connect with how I feel, and I believe that Ayahuasca is the best ally for connecting me to feeling.
Let me give you an example. In one of my earliest Ayahuasca ceremonies, I was able to see myself, and the way in which I spoke to my parents. I tended to be really harsh, and to always be providing unsolicited advice on what they could be doing to “live better”. In my universe, I could understand this as my way of caring for them. Me caring for their health and their well-being, so I share information that I believe can help them be healthier and live better. They’re my parents, so I care so much about them so I’m really passionate and intense about it, and I really want to hammer the point home. But what Ayahuasca showed me was that even though maybe that’s my way of showing them how much I care, what’s important is how they need to be shown my care. That perhaps the most loving thing I could do would be to speak gently and kindly to them. That although I mean well, perhaps my unsolicited advice can be interpreted as criticism, so I could find other ways to convey what I want to share, or simply not to.
This really put things into a different perspective for me. I was so grateful to see something that I wasn’t seeing before about what I actually have control over, which is myself. I never feel good inside when I have a conversation with my parents where I loose my temper, or I can see that my intensity shakes them, so even though in these scenarios where I’m trying to share something because I care about them, it ends up being counter productive and noone ends up feeling good. Neither me nor them. So with this new insight, I had the opportunity to start to create a new way of being with them. A practice that is still a process and work for me to be conscious of until this day. But doing it, working to bring about this change in the way I relate to them on a consistent basis, when I can master myself, results in a great outcome. We both feel good about the conversation that took place. And, when I do things that make my proud of me, my love for me grows, my respect for me grows; my relationship to myself evolves. This is the way in which I experience healing and transformation with Ayahuasca. It’s not linear. It’s a process. For me it’s a spiral, and we keep coming back to the same things, and we either go deeper into our healing or higher into our evolution, is how I see it.
Now, the last post on private ayahuasca ceremonies got me reflecting on a wonderful experience I had with myself, that I feel is not yet fully integrated, but I’ll share to close the loop.
So I had this year of feeling the highs and lows that can result from falling in love. It gave me the opportunity to see where I needed to be my own container. Soothe myself, be there for myself… that’s how I needed to love myself more.
What I couldn’t see about this dynamic that I was in, until after this ceremony with myself, was where I was betraying myself and all of the signs that are now so clear to me that were there to show me that this person was not deserving of my love. And I can see now, that I couldn’t see it then, because I was repeating a familiar pattern.
This person, the object of my affection, was yet another manifestation of an unemotionally available male. And I’m no psychologist but I believe I sort of understand that generally my attraction to unavailable men, stems from the fact that my father was largely emotionally unavailable to me, and in my subconscious, this made me feel like I wasn’t good enough, and so my subconscious seeks to repeat this pattern.
And in this private ceremony, it felt like in a flash, a literal flash, I had so many downloads that allowed me to feel and grasp some sort of understanding for an instant of how the wound is formed in men that results in this pattern, this archetype, and how it was also mirroring the wound that existed in me, and it was why I was attracting these situation.
In an instant, it was all so clear. And in an instant I also understood what I needed to do to break the pattern – respect myself. It sounds obvious, but sometimes, how I betray myself is so insidious, it’s really hard to catch.
So I’d like to think that my private Equinox ceremony was the start of a whole new way of relating to the masculine for me. I can now say that I’m really clear on what that looks like and what that means for me. I also know that developing a whole new way of being, creating new patterns, is a process, and it’s not always easy, but the gift we receive from Grandmother Ayahuasca is that she shows us the way, and then the rest is up to us. Remembering what I learned and putting that into practice is my responsibility, and it’s work, but for me it’s worth it because this is the work that changes lives, and this is the healing and transformation with Ayahuasca that is available for those who truly seek to transform.