Self-belonging and the heroic dose

Self-belonging is the beginning of the path, not the end.

The initiatory experiences that cause us to choose, that force our uncertain hand, are the ones that ask us to begin again from a place of knowing that our True Belonging is to Something Much Greater.

On the heels of two profound and painful relationship ruptures, I did a medicine ceremony. These ruptures were medicine ceremonies in themselves.

Sometimes Life shows up that way — like medicine journeys that thrust us into the agony of our humanness.

Sometimes psychedelic medicine can show us the way out, but most often the way we are shown is not out but through the depth of our agony.

I often think that hearing about others’ medicine work is as interesting as hearing about another’s experiences in meditation — which is to say not terribly interesting.

What gets revealed to us in medicine work or meditation is really the content of our own mind, the content of our own psyche. And perhaps something of the nature of the world we inhabit — and the world that we might inhabit — if we have the courage. The sense we are meant to make of these experiences is often solely for us.

So I have hesitated to share this, simply because the meaning of these particular medicine journeys were, in some ways, just for me.

But everything we make conscious, everything we take in and move through the aperture that is our particular lived-experience becomes part of what we are meant to live into the world.

And as such, it is never simply ‘for us’ that we walk our path.

So it was on the heels of these relational ruptures/medicine journeys that I took what turned out to be (inadvertently) a ‘heroic dose’ of psilocybin. I don’t advocate heroic doses, in any form, but I trust that when they happen, it is for us.

I set the clear intention to know the Truth of who I am in Love, and to open wide the door of Love in my life.

What followed I can only describe as being plunged into the agony of separation, the devastation of a life spent in profound aloneness, and the emotional tone that aloneness sets and infuses into all relationships.

I think this is something we all have to face in living in a body: that we walk around as apparently separate beings, but that we are, in fact, always in deep relationship with All That Is.

And it is our forgetting of this never-not-in-relationship, never not in a state of belonging, this forgetting is the origin of our pain and of the harm we perpetuate against ourselves and toward others.

In the course of this medicine journey, which I undertook alone, I had to ask my husband to come hold space with me.

In the horrible grip of agonizing aloneness that the medicine ushered into my awareness as I ‘came up’, I prayed for any and all manner of benevolent support. I asked whatever guides and allies were near to show me the way through.

I had the conscious awareness that I needed my husband’s support. Though I’d been prepared to do this journey alone, I realized it would not be possible.

Now, if you knew my husband, you’d know he is as far from a shaman as a man can get. He is Mr. Literal. Not a magical bone in his beautiful body. But he has a heart of profound purity. His is a heart of unalloyed devotion.

So as he held me and sought to comfort me in wherever the medicine was taking me, instructions came. Inside the tumult of the medicine I had profoundly lucid moments in which I knew exactly what I needed him to do.

As I wretched with a nausea that erupted in yawns so immense I thought they might split me apart, I directed him to blow sage smoke over me.

A malevolent darkness was pulled out of me through the top of my head, and a deep spaciousness opened around us. I asked him to hold the very clear, very focused intention to blow the cleansing sage-smoke throughout our bedroom, our bodies, and the life we have created together. To lay claim to this with our hearts.

I was then instructed that he needed to get me in the shower, scrub me with salt, and wash my body like a newborn baby.

Sprawled on the floor of our shower like a rag doll, he cradled my body and scrubbed me with sea salt.

‘Scrub my crown and my third eye like you’re cleaning a lens,’ I told him with an alarming intensity. But he did this with his ever-calm, ever-solid demeanor.

Intermittently sobbing and limp with grief, I adjured him again and again to to hold the steady, clear intention of his love for me as he followed the instructions that came for both of us.

God bless this man. This kind of thing is so not his wheel-house, but he never wavered for a moment.

As he cleaned and rinsed me, I had the very clear sense of being in the moments that surrounded my actual birth, when my arrival into this world was met by my father’s repulsion toward and derision for the feminine; for me, as a daughter, and for the woman who birthed me.

I had the clear sense that I was being reborn, only now on my terms. That I was being given the opportunity to claim, for the very first time, my birthright: To be loved into life, loved into this world and into this body.

I asked him to blow love into my heart with the burning sage, to seed my heart with the Truth of Love.

The bitterness of the need to do this, to be loved into this world, was overwhelming. As he followed the instructions I wept lifetimes of grief.

As this bitter grief ebbed, I received yet another instruction: that he must blow smoke from the crown of my head, down my spine, and root me into the world. And that as he did this, we must both hold the irrevocable intention that I be rooted in this life, my life.

As he did this, my body quaked and trembled. I sobbed and wretched and yawned. And then suddenly, everything became deeply, profoundly still.

He wrapped my body, exhausted and wet, in a towel and carried me to bed, where I lay on him, skin to skin, like a newborn.

I heard and then spoke these rueful words, ‘This Life is no joke.’

He did not ask me to explain, but murmured a tender wordless acknowledgment that spoke within my heart:

To be in this life,

to wholly and fully accept and own our Being Here —

that we are meant to be here,
we are necessary here,
we Belong to Life

— this is no joke.

And Life will ask of us great effort and resolute courage to live in this, our Belonging.