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Plant medicine was the catalyst to my spiritual awakening.

After spending a tremendous amount of energy delving into a million different healing modalities, the universe finally led me to Ayahuasca.

This beautiful medicine connected me with my psyche in a more intimate way than any sort of external human could have ever provided me—surrendering the ego, letting all the tension I had accumulated unravel from my body. Opening up my perspective to wider views of reality. Seeing my past and my pain in higher levels of consciousness, and helping me to recontextualize it, leaving me feeling more whole and fully integrated.

The immensely profound shift I experienced after just one ceremony led me down a path of experimenting more with Ayahuasca and other plant medicines/psychedelics for the past two years. It’s been a beautiful journey of gaining deeper and deeper understandings.

Opening myself up more and more to the spirit world, connecting with other dimensions, it’s been quite the journey. The one thing I most certainly have lost is my innocence. I guess that’s what happens when you open yourself up to experiencing the possibility of absolutely any reality that could possibly exist. The universe is sincerely full of infinite potentialities—which can be a little overwhelming for the psyche…there are so many options.

It put me in a place of my ego for a while, constantly changing due to the significant varying degrees of realities it had experienced under these medicines. We definitely don’t need to shift out entire reality that often.

However, this is the exploration my body needed to go through in order to try and make sense of life. What I have come to realize in my exploration is that the most freeing feeling comes not from feeling like I’ve gained deeper and deeper understandings, but instead, from accepting the void of the not knowing—that we are all human and in this together. That’s the most comforting space for me to be in and brings back some of my innocence and a sense of inner peace.

After my last Ayahuasca ceremony, I called on my higher self to show me the perspective as to why I am continuing to experiment with these medicines. I decided a long time ago that I am healed. I claimed it and released my victim consciousness. We, as humans, create our own problems; we don’t actually have to suffer at all. So I asked myself: What is my intention for continuing to utilize these medicines?

Past the intention of just healing, these medicines are beautiful for spiritual growth and consciousness expansion, which they most certainly have been. However, I am starting to see their limits. The Buddha says that attachment is the cause of all suffering, so do we want humans to now become attached to plant medicine? In the long run, do we want humanity to continue to use these substances, something external, to find healing?

Yes, I do think plant medicine and psychedelics are a huge gigantic step up from pharmaceuticals. They force you to confront your pain instead of numbing and escaping. They are an absolutely beautiful partnership with therapy to help people who are suffering and deeply disconnected heal quite quickly. They truly help pull you out of the matrix and experience the spiritual freedom that most of our society has become disconnected from due to deep conditioning and toxic programming. They most definitely help you immediately experience existence from a much wider lens than just the limited 3D reality most of humanity is stuck in.

However, once we are “awakened,” how necessary is it to continue to explore other realms using these medicines? Humans love to overdo things, and our egos can easily get addicted to these substances, feeling like we now “need” Ayahuasca, psilocybin, LSD, MDMA, Ketamine, and so on. That is, unfortunately, what I am starting to see happen here in Los Angeles.

Alan Watts says, “When you get the message, hang up the phone.” The continual use of these medications can, in the long run, cause more harm than healing. The amplification of emotions, states, and realities entered under these medicines can cause us to take life way too seriously and make it way more complicated than it needs to be.

I helped out and participated in an Ayahuasca ceremony last weekend for the first time in a long time, and my higher self actually didn’t let me fully surrender to the medicine. Life is presenting me with grand challenges right now, but there is a strong part of me that wants to just ride with the flow of life and focus more on processing what I need to process in the moment every day, not using anything external to provide me with the feelings of connection and higher levels of consciousness that I truly do have access to at any given moment. I don’t want to make Ayahuasca my God, and in terms of the future of consciousness, I don’t think it is in our best interest to take these medicines too far here in the West.

To conclude, I think that plant medicine and psychedelics are an integral step in the initial awakening process of humanity; however, once we’ve found the connection, understanding, healing, enlightenment, whatever our soul has been deprived of, I think it is essential to come back to Earth and learn how to access these states and what we need to get through life on our own.

Through deep meditation, I’ve been able to experience just as profound levels of consciousness as I have on Ayahuasca. Yes, it isn’t as quick as these plants, but it is insanely empowering to be at a place where I can access absolutely anything I need to help me get through absolutely anything at any point in any time—on my own. Well, really, with God/the divine/source/universe/spirit/consciousness…whatever we want to call it, working through me.

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