Ayahuasca & The Dark Night of the Soul

0:00
Are you holding on to something right now that is hurting you?
Something that a voice inside quietly or loudly keeps telling you to let go of?
And instead of listening, you grip harder, You try to control it.
0:15
A relationship, a business, an identity, a dream you've been carrying for so long, it almost fused with your spine.
And instead of releasing it, you try to control it more.
You put more pressure on yourself.
0:32
You strategize, you optimize.
You tell yourself you just need more time, more effort, more belief.
That's what this episode is about.
It's what I call the Dark night of control and that someone might call the dark night of the soul.
0:51
And after many years with Ayahuasca, after building everything I had ever dreamed of, she showed me in a ceremony that my entire life was going to burn to the ground, and not as a punishment, but as a cleansing and transformation for what was to come.
1:09
The problem was, it meant letting go of everything that I loved.
My fiance, my animals, my house, my well paid job.
And the part of me that normally says yes, I trust you.
Ayahuasca instantly said no, I am going to fight you to the end.
1:29
And that, my friend, became the hardest journey in my entire adult life.
What followed was the most painful, disorienting, humbling chapter of my life.
Not because the burning came anyway, but because of what my resistance caused me along the way.
1:48
This episode is for anyone who has ever confused holding on with strength, who has ever mistaken control for faith, who is in a spiritual crisis or sitting right now with something that might be asking to end and is terrified to find out what happens if they actually listen.
2:07
And this is my story of what fighting the current really looked like, what it can cost, and also what becomes possible, what only becomes possible when you finally open your hands and let go fully.
2:24
Let's dive in.
2:59
Around 5 years ago I think I must have been one of the happiest people alive on planet earth and I was so grateful to the medicine of Ayahuasca.
The deeper I'd gone on this path and the more I've healed and opened my heart, the more I was able to give and receive from a place of love and not lack.
3:19
And life mirrored this back in abundance.
I felt like I was walking with grace with a big smile on my face and I had fallen in love with a beautiful man I was.
God showed me to him in a vision before we even met on the wall in front of me during a ceremony.
3:38
She showed me a projection of him and let me feel his energy.
I could see parts of his face and his body and she said he is coming without telling me who but it felt like love.
And she told me in her subtle way to delete all the apps I had Grinder and Tinder and not to date anyone or to go out on the city and just trust the universe and Createspace for this love to come into my life.
4:08
I said amazing but how on earth do I do that?
And after this retreat, I went to do some coaching work in New York with different clients and I was constantly looking for him.
I even wrote a letter to him.
But after a month there, no soul mate had arrived and I was already impatiently waiting.
4:30
But there was no apps to scroll through and no bar to visit.
So I just walked around in the streets of New York in my free time, hoping to bump into him.
And in the streets of New York, next to my favorite cookie place, Insomnia Cookies, I saw a psychic reading sign, the tacky ones that you avoid as the plague before you go down the spiritual rabbit hole and become a bit more open.
4:55
And it was $5 for a question.
I thought, well, I guess I can lose $5 and just try to ask where my soulmate is.
So I went inside and the woman was sitting there, as you would imagine, in a movie, with crystals and a cigarette in her mouth.
5:13
She puffed on her Marlborough and said what is your question and I answered where is my soul mate?
She instantly responded without even thinking.
Your soul mate is not here in New York, he is in Barcelona and he lives on the other side of your street and every single day you both walk in that same street but you can't see him because your heart is closed.
5:40
I thought this woman was crazy and when she asked me for more money to help me open my heart I thought con artist and left.
And the same day as I arrived back in Barcelona I felt really bad about my body so I went to the gym and I didn't even want to go down to the gym so others could see me so I went for the swimming pool instead and in the shower after naked and feeling ashamed of my body.
6:06
Had been working non-stop for over 30 days in New York and eating the cookies to numb my soul that was screaming to slow down a man impaired in front of me, a swimmer, and he looked exactly like division.
I asked him with a shaking voice if he wanted to go for a coffee and he said yes and for a month we dated and became boyfriends.
6:29
He did live in the same St. as me on the other side of the street as the psychic woman had said, but still I was not fully sure.
I could probably have received Spirituality for Dummies and 100 Feathers as a sign, but it just felt too good to be true.
6:46
So I took him with me to Ayahuasca to ask her if this truly was someone I could share my heart with.
I sat down in the ceremony and asked her quietly, is this my soul mate?
Where Ayahuasca responded, if it was your soul mate, you would not ask me that question.
7:04
And in my early mind on the journey, it felt like that meant no.
So I let him go.
We made lots of drama and he moved far away from the city to the other part of the country and we didn't speak again.
And three years later, during the COVID times, by a miracle, we ended up at the same ayahuasca retreat.
7:26
I was supposed to go to another retreat the same weekend but changed my mind last second and suddenly we were sitting face to face again in the ceremony room.
He hadn't been drinking the medicine since we were together and was finally motivated to do his own healing work.
7:43
He said my energy was so different and I shared with him that I just had come back from Norway after giving away all my things and doing the integration work that I was had given me for years.
The difficult ones that I'd refused to do.
I even went back to my old foster family to share my story of abuse with the words of my inner child that never got to speak and fully own my voice and my power in a new way.
8:10
It was one of the hardest journey thus far to go back and confront every secret and every part of my story that I had kept hidden in shame.
But it felt right.
I was got shared with me that every secret I had was like a black hole in my energy system, sucking all the light, eating all my energy and creating its own energetic system.
8:31
So she asked me to liberate myself from any secrets and shame I had.
And so eventually I did.
Suddenly a path without any secrets and shame opened up.
I felt liberated with my heart so open.
And when I saw my ex during this night, after several years of not seeing him, his strength, his beauty, how he was expanding to meet his true self, I fell in love.
8:58
And that's when Ayahuasca came back and asked me the same question I had asked her three years ago.
Are you going to ask me if he is your soul mate?
Where?
I responded No, because when you meet a soul mate you don't need to ask.
9:15
You just know one question, two different answers and one embodied from love.
We dated for a few months and it felt like heaven on earth being together.
We were both open and both on the medicine path.
9:31
We were travelling together and I shared with him all of my dreams that I had since childhood, to have goats again, a tiny farm, a parrot, a place where kids can run around in the fields and forests like I did.
And after travelling together in the north of Spain, he invited me to come to another ayahuasca ceremony at the end of the summer.
9:54
And this time he seemed really anxious about going there.
And I thought he was going through a process and tried to comfort him and give him reassuring words where he would smile and say, you really don't know what I'm going through right now.
And when I told him to tell me more about it, he said, you will see soon.
10:15
During that day of the Barcelona retreat, the entire group were doing an integration exercise outside.
We were standing in a circle in the autumn Spanish sun next to the pool, holding hands.
Then the facilitator asked one person to go inside the circle and close their eyes, and he pointed at me.
10:35
So I went into the circle, closed my eyes, and suddenly one of my favorite songs came on.
The song I always felt was going to be my engagement song.
I froze, and as I slowly opened my eyes, in front of me was my boyfriend, on his knees, terrified, smiling, with a ring in his hands.
10:58
Suddenly I was engaged.
It felt like everything had fallen into place and in the integration.
After we both looked at the facilitators and asked how do we stay in love and not let our fear ruin it all.
Our need to control.
11:15
Understanding that we both had played our part in how we broke up our last relationship.
They answered that love is like a thin golden tread.
Follow it, hold onto it gently and don't let it go.
I did not fully understand what they meant, so from that moment I held on to that thread with a firm grip.
11:36
And after a month of being engaged, my fiance confessed something to me that he had never shared with anyone in his life.
He wanted to be a woman, to go into the long and very difficult process of becoming his true self.
11:53
Also on the outside, he had always wanted to be a woman from a very early age, but wasn't allowed to play with Barbies, to dance or to be himself.
So I went to a store and bought him his first Barbies, where he smiled like a child that had gotten to celebrate both Christmas and her birthday at the same time.
12:13
And since I wanted to honour his process and loved him so deeply, I said yes.
Yes, to support him and to love him through whatever journey he had or whatever journey she had, as long as we could be together.
12:29
And slowly, I started holding on to that golden tread of love with a firmer and firmer grip as our emotional life started feeling like riding a wild horse and holding on to the reins.
Yet it felt so natural to support him or her in this process, no matter the outcome, because I truly loved their soul.
12:53
So within weeks, our world was upside down and our life plans together had changed.
It was no longer about our future family, the farm, our kids.
It was about them and their gender, their depression, their anger to their masculine body, their their wide swimmer shoulders, their masculine jawline.
13:18
They could spend up to 10 hours a day watching transgender transitioning videos and I would slowly lose more and more touch with them.
And the biggest problem that came with this was that my values that I had so deeply embodied, at least I thought, would slowly get taken down one by one for us to stay together.
13:40
I was so proud to live a life without secrets and shame.
And I wanted to live a life fully without any secrets, to live in full transparency.
And I was so proud of being on that path because for me, truth and trust and transparency, it leads to transmission and we can only get as sick as our secrets.
14:00
But suddenly I could not say or share about anything that happened at home.
My fiance, they wanted their journey to be private and I had to respect that because this wasn't my journey, even though it sort of was.
I kept looking at my engagement ring and reminding myself I'm doing this for love, be loyal, show empathy, understanding.
14:24
But there were so many things I did not understand, my friends.
And this is where I learned how immensely difficult it can be for transgender souls.
The deep inner conflict, the struggle, the concrete wall boxes genders can put us in, the strangulation of someone's soul feeling like they're in their wrong cell.
14:44
So all I could do was offer my empathy, to try to understand all of their anger and rage, their depression and anxiety.
And I would constantly hear you don't understand how it is to be like me.
And I tried to listen in whole space.
15:00
And as I was doing deeper work with IO, my heart opened up more and more and more intuition and abundance came true.
My then fiance worked as a cleaner at a hotel.
But because I had a good income as a coach, I told my fiance that he can let go of the job and focus on the MBA that they had always dreamed about but had not been able to afford.
15:24
And my fiance was so happy for this support.
But eventually one MBA turned into another master degree, and suddenly I had supported someone for three years that had so many secrets and where most of our inner life was hidden.
And slowly but surely, the tread of love became really difficult to find.
15:44
My fiance would reject any form of sensuality, saying that they, as a transgender woman, would feel violated by any form of contact in their process.
And it was so hard to figure out how to navigate intimacy and closeness with these new boundaries that wasn't there when we met.
16:01
But as someone who's deeply emotional and empathic, I listened and I respected.
And if I had to go with any form of intimate 0 sensuality to support him for some years, I would.
But without knowing it, more and more of the life that I loved living started to chipper away and the walls started to move towards us.
16:24
So I pushed against them and I did what I always do.
Or at least did.
I tried to fix it.
I got a bigger house and I got the parrot that I always dreamed of having, a macaw we call Chirimiri, which means light rain in the north of Spain where my ex is from.
16:43
A very abused young blue and yellow parrot that had been plucking all of her feathers because of abuse.
A scared bird that needed many weeks of love and support and that bite me a lot before she would trust me as her human.
And once she saw she could trust me, she would fall into my arms like a baby.
17:02
It was magical and slowly her feathers came back, long blue and yellow feathers that were mesmerizing to watch in the sun.
And it was around this time with a parrot flying around, I received one of my greatest lessons in life that I mentioned in another episode.
17:20
My then fiance had a dream where they saw themselves as a child and they were an Angel with feathers and large Angel wings and my fiance could fly anywhere.
They felt so free so entrust with themselves and their wings and life.
17:40
But then every single time that they lied to themselves a feather would fall to the ground and every single time they lied to someone else another feather would fall to the ground.
And eventually as an adult, my fiance said no more feathers left, they could not fly and they just felt stuck and sick and on.
18:02
And I said to my fiance, this is a message from the spirit.
You need to pay attention.
My love, not understanding that this message was also for me because without really knowing it, truth became the greatest teacher these years, a grand maestro.
18:20
And one of them also came through the teachers that I had at that time.
One of the coaches that I loved had a mastermind with many of my favorite coaches in the world.
And after a year, I was invited in and it was such an expansive journey until the same coach lied to me in a meeting and I got completely shocked because it was such an unnecessary lie that was trying to make him look good.
18:43
And since my superpower was truth, I confronted him lovingly.
He refused to take any accountability and tried to gaslight me saying you have daddy issues David, you're projecting on me and that he never lied to his clients.
Eventually after three days of calls where I was standing in my truth, protecting my truth and also vomiting during the night, so scared and sad over what I had discovered with my favorite teacher, he admitted to lying saying it was only his wife and me that could spot this pattern in him.
19:15
And I thanked him for being honest and said, as a friend, I trust you deeply now, but I cannot have you as my teacher because my truth, my trust in my own intuition is the most important part of me.
And it's also my job.
19:30
I can't do my job without it.
And it also was what was taken away from me in childhood, what I had to work so hard and heal so deeply to learn to trust again.
And having a teacher to ask me not to trust myself and my own truth, my own intuition, is not a teacher I'm willing to have or to pay $25,000 for.
19:52
I told my fiance about this encounter with my teacher where he said just stand in your truth, walk in your truth and see how far you can go.
And that became something that I cherished in my heart and I told him the only thing that I ask of you as my fiance is to be honest.
20:10
I can handle any truth but no lies.
Please never make me doubt my truth and intuition because it is the most valuable thing that I have with me and my fiance understood.
But something felt ah.
And when I confronted my fiance about things that felt off, it was always something I did not understand or I was not capable of comprehending since I was not trans.
20:36
So I kept giving them a free pass for any responsibility or any accountability because somehow it was always me that had the short end of the stay.
And as the path expanded and my work as a coach, crew and crew, I was in a very deep flow of abundance.
20:54
Everything had fallen into the dream I had carried my entire life.
We had the dream house with a large pool and so much land so we could finally have ghosts roaming freely around.
Jumping onto the terrace and stealing my birthday cake and a parrot Chiri Miri flying and landing in the hammock where I would have siesta with a chicken called Whitey.
21:16
Days were filled with so much animal love.
In the morning I would walk out and call for my chickens and they would come running.
The goats would climb around every corner and look into the window or sleep and have a siesta with my dog Tikka.
And the parrot would even use Tikka my dog as the airport to land.
21:34
It was fun, a bit chaotic, but it was the dream I always wanted since childhood.
The dream that kept me alive in the darkest moments and suddenly it was here and all the material things I ever wanted.
I bought the dream car, the dream bed, the enormous house was filled up with everything that I had ever wanted, so much stuff.
21:56
And at the same time anxiety would build up more and more because I was holding it all together, all the threats, all the finances and also the tread of love.
So I started pulling it harder and harder to feel in control.
But on the outside looking in, it looked like a dream, and I was hoping that my partner, once through this process that had now taken years, would soon be on the other side of it, either as a man or as a woman.
22:23
But then everything collapsed in just a few moments.
We went to a mountaintop called Peder Forker in Spain, one of my favorite mountains, And we drank ayahuasca with our indigenous shamans from Colombia.
And they were so kind to gift us these ceremonies for hosting and facilitating a retreat for them.
22:42
And during this retreat, I received a vision so difficult I went into shock.
I saw my entire life burning down to the ground.
The big house that I loved was gone.
My fiance was gone.
The animals, all except one of my dogs, Tikka, would be gone.
23:02
My parrot that I loved so deeply.
My chickens.
My goats that I dreamed of since childhood and promised nothing would ever happen to them.
They were all gone.
And this was something I refused to accept.
I said to Ayahuasca, this is not true.
This cannot come into reality.
23:18
I will fight this, I will fight you on this.
I will fight this with everything I have.
I will do anything in my power to push against this.
I'm going to keep my house, my fiance, my animals, my parrots, my goats, my chickens, all of it.
And that was the first day of my dark night of control and soul.
23:37
I was holding on for my dear life and any science that this would happen would put me into control mode and anxiety action.
As we came down from the mountain, my fiance, after many years of doing an MBA and a master, received a job offer from a tech company, the ultimate dream job.
23:57
His last job had paid him €7.00 an hour, something no one can really survive on, and now he would be making €60,000 a year, more than anyone in his entire family had ever earned.
He was so in awe he couldn't fully believe it was real.
24:14
But the job was not in Spain, it was in Amsterdam. 16 hour car ride from where we were living and suddenly leaving our home.
And my dream became an option if I was fully committed to the love we had and also supporting my fiance to build their dream and not just me building mine with my fiance in it.
24:39
And it was a grief I hadn't prepared for, because if I truly trusted love, if I trusted us, trusted our path together, I would have to let go of everything that made my life feel like mine.
Building that kind of life in Amsterdam, animals, land space while they were working in the city, wasn't just complicated, it was nearly impossible when it had to happen so fast.
25:04
But I really did not want to move to Amsterdam.
I moved to Spain for the sun.
I grew up in a city that rains 300 days a year, and going back to the darkness and the cold winter was truly the worst thing that I could ever imagine.
But still, I chose love.
25:21
At least, I thought I chose love.
And I decided to trust my fiance with my whole heart, because isn't that what we're supposed to do?
Isn't that what love asks of you?
Thankfully, our neighbor could foster our goats and chickens while we were getting settled, and a friend of us who had the same parrot as us could take Chitty MIDI for a while.
25:44
I told myself this was temporary, that I rebuild, and that love was worth it.
I sold my new car, I shipped everything I owned to Amsterdam, and I showed up completely, fully entrusting the pot.
What I didn't see, and what I couldn't see, was that I had been slowly giving away all my feathers of my own truth so that my fiance could fly.
26:08
I arrived in Amsterdam without the animals, without the land, just with our two dogs, but no car.
I started to feel like a plucked chicken.
And what I hadn't noticed was that this didn't start when we came to Amsterdam.
It had been happening for years, quietly and gradually, 1 feather at a time.
26:28
In the beginning, just tiny feathers feeling like something was wrong and choosing not to say anything to keep the peace.
Telling myself that I was being too sensitive like my fiance said, or too angry.
And then bigger feathers, feeling like my fiance was cheating on me or believing them when they told me that my intuition was broken, that I was imagining things, that I was the problem, that they would never be with anyone while dealing with their gender process and an entire wings accepting behaviour I never would accept it before from anyone.
27:04
Violent threats, lies that came so smoothly I started to doubting my own memory and thinking just wait, when my fiancee gets this job, when they have their own money, their own power, when they are not dependent on me anymore, everything will change.
27:19
Like they say.
It was almost like playing a slot machine with love.
I kept pulling the lever, convinced that this time I'd get back the person I had met in the first months.
But I kept losing more and more, only winning one coin here and there.
27:35
A moment of warmth, a warm tea prepared, a house cleaned once without complaints.
A day without coldness, just enough to keep me pulling the lever.
And the moment their first paycheck landed, the moment that my fiancee finally felt secure, everything changed.
27:52
But not for the better, for the worse.
Suddenly there were violent outbursts, gaslighting, so consistent and so convincing that I stopped trusting my own perception completely and eventually also trusting myself.
I was always the problem.
28:08
I wasn't sexy enough for not masculine enough for not feminine enough for too messy or too emotional, too much angry or never enough.
And if my fiance said I carry too much anger, I literally remove my anger.
If they said I was too messy, I became the cleaning lady 24 hours a day, seven days a week, quietly auditioning for a role I would never be cast in.
28:28
And no matter how much I changed about myself, no matter how much I removed things from myself, there was always something wrong.
Always another version of me that needed to be fixed or shrunk or adjusted or apologized for, until eventually I couldn't trust my own thoughts, my own emotions, my own intuition.
28:45
I would know something was wrong, know it in my body and my stomach in that deep, unshakable way.
And then my fiance would get so aggressive and so convincing and so certain that I would walk away believing that I was crazy.
So what do you do when you stop trusting life completely and when you stop trusting yourself?
29:06
Well, I became a spiritual Beaver.
Instead of floating with the current, with what I know is my inner galactic river, that deep flow of life and abundance, this path of knowing.
I started building dams stone by stone, like a bee, where he looks at the river and thinks, OK, I can make it to the ocean, so I'll just stop here, block this, control what I can.
29:30
I stopped trusting the flow completely because it felt like the flow had taken everything, that life had taken everything from me.
And what I didn't know, and what I couldn't see from the inside of the dam that I had built, was that this was the initiation, not the punishment.
29:46
An invitation for the greatest path that I would ever live.
But first, everything had to burn down.
Just like in divisions.
I went from being very successful to barely being able to work.
I was so depressed, unable to mobilise energy, lying in bed most of the day, eating candy and not really understanding what was going on.
30:09
And the more I cooked and cleaned and tried to show my love, the angrier my fiance got.
At the same time, our new landlord had lied to us and there was a full construction happening about our there was a full construction happening above our apartment.
30:25
Noise in every direction, internal and external.
It felt like the country was trying to spit me back out that I was not supposed to be here.
But I refused to listen and kept holding on.
And my company, which I'd built for 10 years and had been so incredible, began to fracture.
30:44
I had stepped outside of my own integrity and opened door to clients who were vicious and dark, some with real destructive energy.
And I experienced wire fraud and deception and legal battles and lies and so much drama.
It became winter in Amsterdam, and we lived in a house with almost no sunlight, with this construction going on every day, drilling above me.
31:08
And my friend said to me on soon you were this blossoming flower and now it looks like you haven't had any water or seen the sun for a long time.
And it felt like I was dying inside.
And the more I tried to work harder for the relationship, harder for the clients I had, harder to be able to fix it, the worse it became.
31:27
And at the same time my chickens went to other farms, asked it, my goats and my poor parrot got stuck in a cage without windows and line.
And in desperation she started picking her feathers, removing them 1 by 1 so she couldn't fly anymore.
31:45
How ironic is that?
Everything was burning from every direction.
My fiance became more and more violent and aggressive and threatening to throw boiling water over me and biting me so hard I was left with bruises over my heart and I was just in total shock.
32:01
It felt like being stabbed multiple times in the back.
Now I had no money, I couldn't work and I had given away all my money and the things that I had to support someone and now I was completely stuck living in a space where I felt scared all the time.
32:18
While I was lying in bed in total despair, I saw how I could not trust many of those I had been closest to around me, from fiance to clients.
And I thought to myself, OK David, you have been true worse than this and you always make it.
32:36
At least you can trust yourself.
And I started laughing because on the till that point I hadn't trusted myself for a long time.
I'd just been trying to fix and control and put out fires.
And I decided to reclaim my own integrity, to reclaim my own truth and to step out of this shit that I had Co created and to take full responsibility of myself.
32:58
I had to leave the country without any of my things, shipping the dogs before me via pet transport.
And I arrived back in Spain and never came back to Amsterdam.
And then it was a fact.
I had lost it all.
And I was so full of anger, so torn with resentment and so filled with shame because I felt I could not admit or say anything about what had happened.
33:23
I'm supposed to be in the transmission healing industry, to have lots of experience.
People trust me with their lives.
And then I had been in a really toxic relationship with violence, a relationship that I also made 50% off, a relationship that I had stayed in and pulled the lever over and over again when I saw that I was losing, that there was no way of regaining the relationship that I once thought we would have.
33:47
But slowly I started sharing this with my colleagues and my friends and was surprised to hear that many had similar experiences.
And I understood that no matter how much healing we do, no matter how many ceremonies we sit in, we are only one unhealthy relationship away from divming our light and our life and getting sick.
34:08
We are vulnerable living hearts and if it's not well nurtured, it can close and it can hurt.
So then I had to start integrating this experience with my fiance that at the time I did not even want to admit was real.
And he filled me with so much rage I could not even sleep.
34:25
I was playing back all of our dialogues and moments where I had not trusted my own intuition and knew something was wrong.
And eventually it all got confirmed.
The cheating, the lying.
I felt I'd given so much and had nothing to show for it, only anger, grief and resentment.
34:43
And for someone who says every process is a medicine, that's me.
A part of me refused to accept that this was my medicine because what medicine are you supposed to find in absolute stinking shit?
I was furious at myself for being so stupid.
And still, without any money coming in, without any energy left, I had responsibility to complete the coaching program where I had eight other souls.
35:06
Because I know how you complete 1 chapter is how you start the next.
So in my own process of the dark night of the soul, having 5% energy left in my batteries, with the responsibility of a group in a mastermind, I decided to make it the best work that I've ever done.
35:26
The Grand Filale of this mastermind was a live speaking event in Barcelona where I had rented a Joan Miro museum in Barcelona where we had a big staff of 20 people for the big night, with food, with wine, with speakers.
And even though I had no revenue coming in, I decided to stay in integrity with what I had promised and with my commitment and also not go bankrupt just to sell everything else that I had left to be able to afford this event and complete my journey with my clients with grace.
35:57
The night before this big event, I gathered a few feathers in my hands and prayed to the great spirits.
Please, Great Spirit, tomorrow as I blow these feathers out to the audience, let these feathers land in the hand of those that feel the deepest darkness right now.
36:14
Those that are thinking of giving up so that they can see, that you can see them, that you can feel them, so they can feel your presence and love.
And with the feathers in my hand, the next day I stepped on the stage in front of 200 entrepreneurs in Barcelona and spoke about how the feathers had been my greatest teacher the last year.
36:33
How they symbolise devotion and grace and surrender.
How they represent our truths that we must honour.
And I asked the audience to blow on the feathers when I released them from my hand to see how far up we could get them in this auditorium and where they would land. 200 people breathed together towards these two feathers and they were dancing in the light from the stage and flying beneath the Johan Miroa painting in the ceiling.
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And eventually after flying around in this auditorium, both the feathers came back to me and landed gently in my hand.
That was the moment I almost broke down in tears on stage because I knew and obviously the spirits knew I was the one hurting.
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Now pretending to have it all together.
After this work, I had no more responsibility and I completed this journey with my clients with these and grace.
I completely shut down.
And that's when I talked to one of my mentors, Satya, where she got really upset with me and said, you don't have any support, any therapist, any coach holding space for you while you hold space for other people.
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And she was right.
I had left the golden rule for all of us doing this work to always have someone in my corner holding space for me.
So even though I didn't have any money at the time, I found a way to hire my mentor and to have someone holding space for me as I navigated this very deep emotional rollercoaster I was in.
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And even with the greatest support, the anger and the rage would keep me awake at night.
It was like I was slowly metabolising every moment that I hadn't digested when I had been in a very unhealthy relationship.
And the more I found out how my ex had broken our agreements and put me at risk of diseases while I had been waiting like a monk for years for them to go through their gender process, the angrier I felt.
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I felt like I wasted years of my life.
And what was most painful was that the dream that I had held my entire life had also burned down my farm with my goats, my fiance, my family, my kids, and I honestly didn't know who I would be without this dream.
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Because what dream can replace something you hold on to in the darkest moments of your life?
The dream that kept you going.
For me, this dream was my lighthouse and I had to not only let go of the company that I knew, but also to let go of the character of success and what I had tried to become for 10 years.
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The coach with rooms of 5000 clients or the high ticket sessions and all the stuff I previously thought was important.
My previous life had been built on control, and now I had to really learn how to surrender to the unknown, not just one night in ceremony, but in real life.
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Because every level of expansion also comes with the chapter of letting go of the role or the dream we once had to really be reborn, to be an empty, expanded vessel that our new life can fill and also fit in.
And it was hard to let go of all these things that I'd worked so hard to become, and to let go of the character that felt so safe and abundant.
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To not know what comes next.
I had many turns back and forward, trying to sort of pull out some old coaching programs that used to work really well, but now it all felt like nails and a chalkboard.
It didn't feel true to me and I was not willing to let go of any more feathers.
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And I knew that the price that I paid would be so much bigger than any revenue.
So I had to stop, fully stop and reinvent and truly integrate myself.
And this is where ayahuasca became again the greatest teacher.
I asked her in a ceremony, why does it feel like everything in my life now is out of alignment?
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Why has it always felt that way?
Why do I keep making new things and it never feels aligned or in flow?
And she showed me, as magically as only she can, a tread of life within me.
And when I followed that tread to the core, there was a wound of abandonment there, of not enoughness.
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So all that I was reading from the inside eventually became my outside reality, and therefore I had been attacking this outside projection that I had manifested from the inside, blaming the outside, while the inside was constantly weaving the same energetic pattern I was trying to avoid and never feel again.
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As I kept working with Ayahuasca, she would slowly, persistently show me how I was creating myself also into a victim in my own story, something I was not too happy about.
The one thing I kept coming back to in this period was this.
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I just need to stay light as a feather and not let go of any feathers that are growing.
Because I had plucked all my feathers away and now I needed to stay light and not accumulate, not to hold, to stay flexible, resilient, to stay open, not have a life where there are so many things that needs my attention, that makes me feel heavy, that puts me into the state of control and anxiety.
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And as I healed more, I started bringing more and more clients to retreats in Madrid, where I started my journey 10 years ago, and to not only facilitate and organise retreats a few times a year, but to go deeper into integration.
I LED an integration course with a shamanic psychologist and other mentors and shamans, A cohort for therapists and other coaches and facilitators.
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And it was the first time I truly felt aligned with the work that I was doing.
I also was a much more humble self after going through a really rough, dark night of the soul and control.
I was more open and compassionate and deeply respectful for everyone's process, no matter what it was.
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And I could also finally see how important these hard, expansive states can be.
I started this podcast.
I got to meet you.
Hi.
And opportunities started coming again.
I was learning really slowly to trust the Pennsylvania, to trust my own wings and to get back into the river of my own floor.
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It was like walking with grace again, where all the synchronicities and everything would just appear on the Pennsylvania.
And the medicine even showed me that if I trust this Pennsylvania, this medicine path fully and not have one foot in the coaching world and 1 foot in the medicine world and run back and forward when I feel unsafe, but I fully, fully trust the medicine.
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Everything will be taken care of.
I didn't have to stand alone in the world and push the boulder upwards.
And then, quite unexpectedly and deeply desired but completely unplanned, the magic returned on deeper that I could never have expected.
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It came through my shaman Sestar and his wife Erica and the team they had trained together over 10 years.
The same shaman that I speak about in episode 2.
They had found an abandoned farm in the Spanish countryside, and when I first saw it, I understood immediately why the medicine had been asking me to stay light, to not accumulate, to not build something heavy and fixed on my own.
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Because this was coming.
It probably had always been coming.
At this beautiful farm, there was a ceremony room that was the biggest I've ever seen, with this beautiful fireplace, the kind of space where you feel the walls themselves have absorbed years of prayer.
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And outside they even had goats and a baby goat wandering between old stone buildings, and chickens moving freely across the land, and a large pool catching the Spanish sun.
Everything here felt so alive, so conscious.
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And that's when I received an invitation to come and live here.
Interesting enough, it feels like every initiation always leads to a new invitation from the universe.
I was going to be responsible for the English speaking retreats, the first now coming up in September, and to hold space for participants doing long stays here at the farm on Masterplan Tietzas.
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People who come not for just the weekend, but for a month, living on the land, eating anti-inflammatory meals prepared by a chef and going deeper than most people ever allowed himself to go with support every single day.
And this is the work I've always loved, and this is the land I always dreamed of living on.
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And for years I tried to build it myself.
The farm, the animals, the community, the ceremony, the integration.
And I had reached for it in the wrong places, carrying it all on my own back.
And when it all collapsed, I thought I lost that dream all along with everything else.
But the dream didn't lie.
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It was just waiting for me to stop forcing it, to stop carrying it like a wade and start trusting it like a feather.
And now this is where I live.
I get to wake up every morning now to the sound of birds and animals and open land and people doing real, deep, meaningful work.
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I feel like a child on a summer holiday never wants it to end.
Except this is not a holiday.
This is my life.
This is who I get to be now.
My path and my dream, finally, after everything, have arrived in the same place, at the same time, united, integrated as one.
46:02
And when this moment arrived, I just knew this was the completion of the journey.
The dark night of the soul had led me here, to the best part of my life, to the brightest sunrises and the most colourful sunsets.
But best of all, I got to have my parrot back, my Chiti Miri, the one that I plucked.
46:21
All her feathers are still healing.
She sleeps inside with me and my dog Tikka, and every day she gets to practice, to fly outside and to learn to trust her wings again and to go on beautiful walks in the hillsides, overlooking all the flowers and all the fields and her feathers.
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They are slowly growing back, one feather at a time.
And somehow this beautiful parrot has mirrored my process.
Or maybe we all mirror it at a different level.
Now we are all here in a place of harmony, of the processes, and it feels so symbolic.
46:57
I started working with our shaman, Cesar 10 years ago outside Madrid, had a farm like this.
And now, 10 years later, I'm living here with them.
And when I sat down with Erica, Cesar's wise wife, the Mama of the entire territory, and I shared the story of my ex, she said something that landed really deeply.
47:18
Your ex was a great maestro.
This text showed you every single place you gave away your power.
And it was so true.
But it was not only giving away my power to him.
I'd been giving away my power to everyone, to neighbors or to money or to material things.
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Every desire that I had became a new attachment, something to hold on to, to weave, to control.
And after this process, I've learned a few integration tricks that I want to share with you.
And the first one, and the most important one is the one that I call the Mpath Security Lock.
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Because here's what happens to us empaths on this journey.
Us who choose to open our hearts even after the world hurt us.
Us to choose to be in that bravest act of feeling everything as deeply feeling beings, as deeply sensitive souls.
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Someone yells at you and instead of protecting yourself, you immediately go to their pain.
You step into their shoes.
You say I understand you, I feel where you're coming from.
I know you're hurting and someone wrongs you, and before you have ever processed your own wound, you're already in their shoes, already making excuses for them, shrinking your own experience to make room for theirs, holding space for them and not for you.
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And I've learned the hard way that that's not empathy, that's a form of self abandonment with a spiritual name tag on it.
And I did it for most of my life.
I gave empathy to everyone freely and automatically.
Like it was like a tall I had to pay just to be in a relationship with people.
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And the MPAD security log changed that.
It's very simple, but it restructured everything.
Nobody gets my empathy first anymore.
Respect has to come first.
Not because I closed my heart, but because I finally understood that empathy without boundaries isn't a gift, It's a wound that keeps offering itself to be reopened if I'm shown respect.
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Real respect, not performance.
Then I will go to the end of the earth to understand you, to feel you, and to hold space for whatever you're carrying.
But the door to my empathy now has a lock on it, and respect is the only key.
As in ceremony, we can sometimes feel so much love that we want to burst.
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And too much love without containment is chaos.
There has to be a structure and some limits to be able to receive and digest it.
If not, it cannot be embodied and integrated and live.
And the same is for everyday life, our love without boundaries, containment and respect.
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It leads to a very chaotic and dramatic life.
And this brings me to something that I find really hard to explain, and I think most of us gets it very wrong when it comes to soul mates.
We have this idea that a soul mate is the person who stays forever, the one who chooses you again and again, The love story that just works out.
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But what if it's only half the truth?
What if soul mates doesn't come to stay, but they come to initiate?
What if the person who broke you open wasn't a mistake, wasn't just a wound, wasn't just a lesson in what to avoid next time, but was specifically and precisely designed to RIP away every single layer of you that was never actually you.
50:33
Not out of cruelty, but out of necessity, because those layers had to go and you were probably not going to remove them yourself.
You were comfortable to identify with them, to convince that who you had become was who you actually were.
And my fiance came and pulled every tread, every pattern, every place that I had abandoned myself, every way I had learned to make myself smaller, and every version of me that had been built unfair instead of truth.
51:00
It all came to the surface and it all burned.
It all went into the fire transformation.
My soul mate helped me truly find my soul.
And that is the part that is hard to explain, that I am so grateful, not despite what has happened, but because what has come out of it.
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There might be some grief in me that never leaves and a loss that has been real.
And I love that in its own broken way was also real.
And at the same time, there is now a recognition, a remembrance of who I actually AM, of what I actually feel, of what I will and will not accept, of the path that I'm here to walk.
51:44
And I know myself now in a way I could not have known myself without this.
And this is the gift I would never give back even if I could.
And yet, and this is equally true and equally important, there is a boundary now that will never move.
Not from bitterness or anger.
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Not because I haven't forgiven or haven't healed.
Because the boundary is the proof that I have learned, that I have integrated in, that I have actually received what this initiation came to teach me.
I understand now what trauma bonding looks like from the inside, what gaslighting does to your perception over time and what toxic mirroring feels like.
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And how you can lose yourself so gradually, so gently, one small feather, one small compromise at a time, that by the time you realise what is happening to you, you're standing in Amsterdam like a pluck chicken.
And I will never give away my power like that again.
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Not to a partner, not to a relationship, not even to ayahuasca.
And most of all, I will never, ever step off my own path of integrity.
Not for anyone.
Because I know what it costs, not just to me, but to everything.
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I am here to be in this world.
My soul mate didn't come here to complete me.
My soul mate came to return me to myself and for that, as impossible as it sounds and as complicated as it feels, because it is, I'm eternally grateful.
53:13
So my journey has now become one of self abandonment, to self respect.
This process took me years, to go in a full cycle in and out of the dark night of the soul and to go to the deepest and most abundant place within me.
And it was so good to come back to trusting life and to stop being the spiritual Beaver.
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And I'm so grateful to the medicine and to the fire and to the river that carried me here even through the burning.
So now I'm sitting here at this ayahuasca retreat which is now my home, with my parrot on my lap, the goats outside, and with people I deeply love and respect.
53:49
And none of this would have existed if I had gotten what I was fighting to keep when I let go and flow with the river.
The river knew how to bring me back to the ocean.
All I needed to do was to let go.
And for all of us doing this work with the medicine, these are some of the tough invitations and initiations we might go through.
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And I hope my story gave you some insights or aha moments for your own journey being now in the moment, or maybe in the past or in the future.
So it's with a humble heart that I say that's all for this week, my friend.
See you next week for an episode about the power of plantietas and integration.
54:29
And in the following episode I will also share more about our retreats in September and how we do them in Spain.
That is very different to anywhere else in the world since we focus on integration from 10 different healing modalities during the retreat.
It's like a spiritual Disneyland.
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And also more about the master Plantietta where you can come and learn from the shaman Cesar to be in nature, to be supported in daily integration circle and have a chef that makes yummy food for every meal.
It's truly an exceptional adventure.
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And the last episode of this season #33 is about the 33 lessons Ayahuasca has taught me on this 10 year journey.
So see you soon my friend and hopefully one day here at the farm.
Lots of love, family.