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What happens when Ayahuasca shows you something you are not ready to see?
Because ayahuasca is not a shrink.
She is an expander, and sometimes the greatest expansion.
It's not the bliss or the revelation of something beautiful opening into the light.
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Sometimes it's letting you see into the blind spots of what you've been.
Living around your entire life.
Maybe the shame that you buried, or the arrogance you dressed up as confidence, or the sadness you made yourself too busy to feel.
Or maybe it's a person that you really love in your life that is actually toxic and is poisoning you.
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This has happened.
To me, multiple times and each times the implication has been bigger, deeper and more impossible to walk away from.
From finding out in one ceremony that my.
Biological dad was not my real dad.
Or to see someone that I really looked up to and adored was actually very dark and dangerous.
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Energy vampire or being able to see my future soulmate before I have even met them.
Ayawaska truly has a way of letting you see things in the future, in the past, or in your current life that makes you expand.
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Today we're diving into what happens when Ayahuasca shows you something you're not ready to see.
I'm your host David Vox, a retreat facilitator at the Sacred Medicines retreats in Spain and also an integration coach and teacher at the Sacred Integration Facilitator Training.
Weekly we run breathwork and integration circles open for all of us on the Ayahuasca path and the 1st circle is free.
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It consists of a 2 hour breathwork and integration session and there is a link in the podcast notes if you want to sign up.
Last week in a ceremony, something happened that I will carry with me for the rest of my life.
One of my retreat colleagues and friends were there and I've known her for 10 years on this journey.
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She's one of the few colleagues that I started this journey with when we started training as integration facilitators 10 years ago.
And she's also one of those people who has given everything to her kids, to her husband, to everyone around her.
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She's a woman who has held others for so long that somewhere along the way, she forgot to ask what she herself was carrying.
And during the last day of this retreat, she was lying next to the fireplace, completely flat with no energy.
And the shamans and facilitators, they tried to help her move to so that she can sit up and look at the fireplace and help her move the energy, but she was really tired, like something inside of her had been waiting for so.
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Long and had forgotten how to move.
And then the shaman Cesar came over to her and quietly asked, Do you want to sing?
It was a bit strange because 10 years working with Cesar and I never seen him ask anyone to sing during ceremony, especially not during a process and she said.
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No, no, I don't want to sing.
Just go away.
Leave me alone.
And Cesar left, and surely later he came back and she was still there in the same position, same.
Heaviness.
And he asked again, Do you want to sing?
And she said, no, just leave me here.
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And then he sent the guitarists at the retreat over the beautiful, incredible singer, and he started to play softly, without expectations next to her, like an open door made of music.
And then something happened that I never witnessed before.
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A voice came out of my friend that I have never heard before.
It was a voice that I had never heard from any human being.
And in 10 years, knowing her, this was a voice that sounded like it had been living somewhere underneath of everything.
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Underneath the years, underneath the giving, underneath of being a mother, wife, a business owner, underneath the silence that she had learned to keep.
It was enormous and it was tender.
It was so powerful and strong and vulnerable and pure.
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It was like an Angel and a big black gospel singer, one of those voices you hear in a church in a movie that makes your whole chest open up.
It was like if one of those came together inside and decided tonight was the night to express and liberate our soul.
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The entire ceremony went quiet.
All of them were in their own journeys, in their own medicine, in their own worlds, and every single one of them just stopped and listened.
My friend was on her knees and she wasn't performing.
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She was being this vessel for this voice, for this medicine inside of her and everyone in the room could feel it.
She was Co creating a song in real time with her soul, with the medicine of ayahuasca, with the guitarist.
A song that has never existed before and will never exist again.
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A song that could also never been recorded, even though I wish we did.
It could never have been captured or replicated.
It had to be experienced live in that room during that night, and it was by us.
And she was singing Never give up, never give up, Never give up over and over from somewhere so deep inside of her that it didn't feel like a lyric.
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It felt like a confession, like something her soul had been whispering to itself for a lifetime, or for many lifetimes, and finally it was the time and the space to let it be heard.
It was the voice of a woman who had never given up on herself, on her children, on her marriage, on her medicine, on her gifts.
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And she didn't even know she was carrying it.
She didn't even know that inside of all that giving, all that holding, all that quiet endurance, there it was.
This gift, this medicine, this voice.
And when she finished, the entire ceremony room just rose to its feet.
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We were all applauding for 10 minutes and I've.
I've been facilitating ceremonies for 10 years.
I have witnessed many things I cannot explain and this was one of those rare experiences, almost 50 people.
Mid ceremony, mid journey, applauding, standing ovation.
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It was a recognition of what real liberation feels like and sounds like.
It was a whole room saying we see you, we feel you, we hear you.
And after this she was crying, People came to hold her, There was a circle around her.
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And through the tears she understood something that you cannot really be told.
You can only arrive at this place yourself because now she will never be able to go back from this.
She has opened up something, she has expressed something that cannot be unexpressed.
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And so many people came there and said, through your liberation, I was also liberated.
And she would cry again and again, as if this sweet inner desire of 1's being able to hold a medicine they can liberate others was released.
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And this was the sweet nectars that she could smell from it.
And ayahuasca really does that.
She opens up these doors, but then we have to walk through them ourself.
And now my friend is in that process of integration.
She literally blew open that.
Door with her.
Voice and I know for sure her life will never be the same.
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And now she's in that process of finding that space for this medicine, for this voice to be shared, to be of service.
And what an honour.
To witness your colleagues and friend not only receiving and revealing such a gift, but expressing it.
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And this is the magic of this work with ayahuasca.
Sometimes she opens these doors in a way that confronts you, that shocks you, that makes you furious, that makes you want to run.
I had a client.
Last year, who joined ceremony of the many months of preparations.
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And on the third night he was starting to see homoerotic visions inside his head.
And this was a man who had identified as very straight, more like macho straight, who had never ever had one homoerotic fantasy in his life, he said.
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And he became so angry and so mad at the medicine, at the room, at the ceremony, at the shamans.
And then he got convinced that I, because I was the only gay man at the ceremony, was somehow sending him these images through my singing voice.
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Into his head.
And.
And we can do that in ceremony when ayahuasca is showing us something that we are not ready to see.
We might project it onto others, we might project it onto the shaman, we might project it onto the medicine or the music or people in the room, just to avoid having to look at what that seed or what that door is actually about in ourself.
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And again, this is the thing about ayahuasca.
She is not a shrink, she is an expander.
And when she plants a seed, sometimes she plants that seed in very, very dark soil, deep, deep into the soil where it cannot yet see the light, where it's not meant to be understood immediately.
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Where we don't know what that seed is going to grow into and.
Where you are absolutely not supposed to dig it up after a day or two to check if it's growing.
That seed might take years.
To become something that you recognize, it might take decades.
I have stopped trying to figure out what the timing is because even if I work in this field, I do not know.
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The only thing I know is that there are ways to meet what she shows you and ways to stay when everything in you wants to run.
There are ways to integrate what cannot be unseen, what cannot be unheard, and what cannot be taken.
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Back in this episode, I'm going to share ten of those principles.
And I'm going to show two times the medicine showed me something that I didn't think I was ready to see.
Two times that showed me something that shook my relationship with myself.
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And others to the core that made me question everything, including whatever I want to keep walking this path at all.
And after that, I will go into the ten ways we can integrate and prepare ourselves for the things we might not be fully ready to see.
The first time I was called showed me something that I was really ready to see.
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I was laying on my mat, crying and moving through one of the darkest nights of my life.
Like a real trip into the dark night of the soil, soul and also the soil.
On steroids and I knew that I had to just keep going through to heal.
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And then suddenly the atmosphere changed and I looked up from my mat and there she was.
Tiny little girl for five years old.
Dark skinned brown afroish curls.
Beautiful, beautiful big brown eyes.
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Looking at me with this expression I will never forget.
Curious, open, completely unafraid.
Smiling at me the way children can smile when they already know you, when they've been waiting for you, when they've been wanting to say hello, and when they recognize something in your face that you haven't yet fully recognized for yourself.
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And I looked at her, completely shocked.
I'd never seen anything like this in an ayahuasca ceremony.
And I asked medicine, who is this child?
Is she a soul from this land?
Is this someone who has passed away?
Like, who is it?
And Ayahuasca said with her voice, something she only has done a few times during these ten years working with her.
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You're not doing all of this healing just so that you can have a good life.
You're doing it for her because she has already chosen you.
At that moment, I didn't understand.
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I, I couldn't understand.
It was like the gift in front of my eyes would take me 1000 years to unwrap because it went against all my belief systems of unworthiness and my own story of what I was capable of.
But then I understood.
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I was looking into the eyes of my future daughter and I remember the silence that followed after those words.
The complete silence and stillness inside of me.
Because I'm a gay man.
I don't know how I will create this child and I don't know when and I also don't know.
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What the path will be?
I can just throw out €100,000 in surrogacy.
Like where would that money come from?
And none of that matter in that moment because I was looking into the eyes of someone that I already loved, someone I recognized, someone who from that moment.
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On has been my teacher presence that I get to carry, a reason that stretches beyond anything I can fully articulate and that night.
This little girl expanded my prayer for humanity.
She expanded my belief in what's possible.
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She expanded something in me around my worthiness, this quiet, aching question of whatever I'm allowed or capable of being a dad, wherever I'm worthy of being a father.
Because for me, there is nothing, nothing, nothing more sacred, more of an honour, more of a spiritual human gift than being allowed to be a parent.
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But if the universe could give me one thing, I would choose that over and over without any hesitation.
And I never felt it would be possible to be a dad because of the trauma that I had from childhood.
I refused to become a dad that would pass on my trauma, my anger, my hatred to someone else.
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I need to know that I'm ready before I become a dad, that I've healed enough, that I would be safe enough to be someone's dad, and now, even though I would feel ready to be a father. 10 years later.
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I don't know how she would come into this world.
I still don't know how I was a planted a seed that I could not see when it would blossom.
More where the roots are at this moment.
It's a seed that is planted beyond my understanding.
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Sometimes they stand on the ground of my life, looking for the signs of this sea growing a flower or a chute or something reaching towards the sky, and I can't see anything just yet, but I know that the seed is there.
Ayawaska planted it 10 years ago in the ceremony in the dark, in the darkest process of my life, while I was crying on the mat and had no idea that something with so much brightness, so much expansion would be shown to me, something I would never be able to Unsee.
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From that day, I always knew that I'm a dat.
And everything that I've done since then, every retreat, every episode, every ceremony, every client, every prayer has always been and will always be for her to prepare myself and to be the best that I can ever be.
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And I will never be able to undersee that.
And for me it has been the greatest gift in my decade long journey so far with Ayahuasca.
Who?
Gets me every time Holy moly.
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Just can't believe that there is something called ayahuasca that is so miraculous and magical on this path that we can get to work with that.
I'm falling out out of my own script today my friends.
Now the second time I Oscar showed me something I wasn't really ready to see.
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I thought the medicine was broken and this is more of a general thing that I think every one of us might be facing as we step on this path.
I've been working with ayahuasca and for almost a year and she had been taking me through grief, through anger, frustration, sadness.
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And I felt I understood ayahuasca and I definitely trusted her so deeply.
We were in this constant conversation and she was showing me things and I could see why.
And there was a logic to it, a tenderness even.
And then one night, without any warning, she showed me something that shattered everything that I knew about my life at that moment.
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I was going to travel to New York the following week.
I'm going to stay a month with one of my coaching clients, a woman that I just adored so deeply.
She was a very famous therapist, brilliant and smart and funny and beautiful and magnetic.
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And she worked with all of these incredible pop stars and leaders, and I just adored her.
She was the coolest person that I had ever known.
And me, someone who had never been popular and who had spent most of my years on the outside looking in, hoping to be a part of the crowd, had somehow found my way into.
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Her world and I felt so lucky.
Suddenly I was backstage with some of the world's biggest pop stars and feeling really cool.
And I felt that being close to all of these cool people meant that I had some sort of value that I couldn't really find in myself.
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And this was before ayahuasca would turn my ego into a spiritual pinata.
And then ayahuasca showed this woman to me, but not in the way that I knew her, not as the superstar.
She showed me this woman as a very very dark figure, almost demonic, like a vampire that was biting into my neck, pulling the light out of me because she had no ability to generate it for herself.
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A being that moved from person to person, finding someone bright, attaching to them, draining them, and then moving on.
And I didn't think it was from.
Evil or malice, it was more out of a desperation of control.
She had this form of deep in her anxiety to control everything so much.
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That she would strangle her own access to her own light.
And I was horrified at that moment.
Not at her, obviously there was nothing wrong with her.
But Mother Ayahuasca, my anger was to the medicine.
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I said to ayahuasca, hey, you're wrong.
You don't know her.
She's an incredible person.
She's a brilliant therapist, like a real therapist, clinical therapist.
She's one of the most gifted, gifted people I ever met.
Everyone loves her.
You're wrong.
And I genuinely believe that something had gone wrong with the medicine that night, that she had tripped, fallen and showed me something distorted.
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So I started.
Questioning everything about the medicine path and if I ever wanted to drink again.
Because if this is what she does.
If she invites or invents these dark narratives about people I love.
Then maybe this path is not what I thought it would be.
And then I went to New York, and for the first time in this relationship, after a year of being on the healing journey, I started setting boundaries.
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I started paying attention.
Very small ones, the kind.
That this therapist would teach her clients to set.
And suddenly I was not the underdog.
It was constantly smiling to her and doing everything that she wanted.
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Suddenly I started setting boundaries, saying no, taking up space.
And a minute I did.
She exploded.
She screamed, she breached contracts.
She became someone I didn't even recognize.
And underneath the shock, suddenly all these dark and negative and toxic things that she had always started just started becoming visible to me.
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It wasn't visible before because I didn't pay attention or because I was completely a part of it, thinking I was a part of the cool club when we were gossiping about all of her therapy clients and where she shares things that she should never share with people that are way outside her confidentiality with her clients.
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Suddenly I saw how she would constantly trick people into believing in her and trusting her and opening up to her as the therapist, getting them to confess all their secrets, then filing it in her cabinet so that she could use them.
Later she would tell me that person owes me.
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She has been complaining and getting free therapy about her abusive acts for years.
It's time for her to pay back through her network to her contacts.
There was no real empathy.
There was just a focus to use people.
And if there was no use for them, then she had no need for them.
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It was all pretend to be this loving therapist.
And this time when I was around her, I would also pay attention to how I always get sick when I was close to her.
I'll get fever.
I was exhausted and once I stayed away from her, I would feel well again.
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During this trip, I called her the Queen of Undoing because whatever she did that was wrong, she would undo it, Flip it.
Reframe it, gaslight it and hand it back.
To you as your fault.
And she was so precise with language, so clinically skilled at framing things as a therapist, that you would always start to believe her, not yourself.
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And that's the terrifying thing about someone with real intelligence and deep unconscious darkness.
They can make you doubt your own reality so completely that you eventually forget and distrust your own light.
And that's when they really.
Got your spirit by the balls.
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I remember one day sitting in her basement realizing what I have asked has shown me.
And I was crying and I was asking this therapist client, why are you doing this?
Why are you being so vicious?
And she looked up.
At me and laughed and said Oh my God now he's having a panic attack talking about me and third person in front of me, mocking me, condescending me and making my heart break.
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Into a punchline.
And that's when I knew this relationship was complete.
I had seen something that I could not Unsee anymore.
And Ayahuasca had been right.
She had shown me something moving inside.
This person that I could not see myself, something that I didn't have the eyes for yet.
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And then I started to realize if I couldn't see this, who else in my life was I not seeing this with?
Clearly how many relationship have I built in a story that I had invented that is not true or real?
And then I have to start looking at my pattern with people and clients more honestly, because this client.
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Was not the only one.
Almost every significant client business relationship I had with a woman at this time was women that I wanted to save and women that wanted to be stars.
And every time I help.
Them succeed and started setting limits.
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Things would explode.
It was the same dynamic but different faces, and the common denominator was me.
And it took me years to heal from this.
Not from her because she was just a teacher, but from how I created and cultivated this form of relationship.
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Because the broken pot will always fit the broken.
Lid in every relationship we have.
And she had been called in to teach something in my life, and the lesson was to stop being a spiritual buffet for energy vampires.
I was the one laying there naked on the plate, serving my neck in my light, and then complaining when someone actually bit me after I had offered every part of myself to them.
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And I was got planted at seed in my first year of this path.
And I fought it.
I denied it.
I called it wrong.
And it took me a year before I understood what she had actually shown me that night.
She wasn't warning me about someone else.
She was showing me myself.
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I was sucking out my own light, strangling myself, sacrificing my own life force and light.
But I did it true others so I could blame them later and takes their.
Responsibility for it and regain my favorite narrative of being the victim of my own life.
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Well, that mirror broke and that was not fun because suddenly I had to.
Take responsibility, which is the.
Antidote to being the victim.
So these are two ways that ayahuasca showed me things that I could not Unsee, things that I probably wasn't prepared for, like I'd never knew that I was suddenly going to be a dad.
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Things that expanded me beyond the edges of what I thought my life.
Was supposed to look like and here are 10 ways and principles that we can invite in when we have a similar experience number one is don't make it mean anything about you yet I am so glad I didn't make that first ceremony about my future daughter mean that now we have to go and make a baby now your dad because I would not have been ready I am 40 today and I am getting.
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Ready to buy a home and to start the process, but I'm still holding that open space and trusting life to provide and to show me the way.
I know I have to follow the flow and not to press things true because then I end up on the path of an alignment and the path of no integrity.
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And that path is very painful because the first instinct we have after a tough ceremony is we're trying to translate it.
We take what you saw, and then we immediately want to decide what does it mean about you, your life, your choices, your relationship.
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The mind wants to close any loop.
It doesn't like the commutative distance.
It wants a verdict.
And that instinct, as as human as it is for all of us, it's often the thing that does the most damage in the days after ceremony.
Because here's the thing with the ceremony.
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Sorry, my dog is licking my face.
What you have seen is real, but what it means is unfolding.
You are standing at the beginning of something, not the end, and if you rush to make it mean something permanent about who you are, what you done, and what you deserve, you actually risk of collapsing a living, breeding truth into a fixed story.
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You're putting a beautiful seed that might expand in this beautiful tree that is blossoming into something that is amputated and cannot grow because stories, once they're fixed, are very hard to reopen.
So hold and create the space without a verdict.
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Let it be unresolved.
Because unresolved doesn't mean unreal.
I know that none of us likes the uncertainty, but when we drink ayahuasca, we are inviting the unknown.
We're inviting uncertainty because that is where we find our expansion.
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Because what got you where you are right now might not be what is going to get you where you are going.
So it just means holding that space open, keeping it alive.
And the second one is don't.
Act from the vision.
Integrate from it.
There's a big difference between responding.
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To what you saw.
And reacting to it.
I remember 1 colleague of mine 10 years ago had a similar past life experience that I.
Had we had.
Been at the same place at the same time and we both have done something not good.
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AKA Second World War not recommended.
She didn't drink the medicine for seven years, and she was terrified of the medicine.
She was reacting to it instead of integrating into it.
Now she's back on the path, and I'm so glad that she is because you get to integrate the depth of that experience.
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Reaction can be so fast, and it can feel like clarity, like finally seeing something so clear that you can act immediately.
End the relationship, quit the job, move to the jungle, cut off the person, move countries, burn it all down.
And I've seen this so many times in my own life.
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I always feel this pull and sometimes an immediate action can be right.
But most of the time, if we look at our life and we grew it into the existence that it is, what feels like the clarity in the morning after ceremony might be more the raw, exposed nerve of something that hasn't been integrated yet, that doesn't feel alike.
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It's like this, you know, you take it away, the tooth, and now it's just the nerve of everything that's revealing itself.
And it's so tender.
So you discovered a truth, but it doesn't have roots yet.
It's still a seat.
And a truth without roots can destroy things that didn't need to be destroyed.
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So let it age, let it breed, let it be rooted that it sits.
For a month.
One person's at the mini ceremony.
If you have the need to go and tell everything what you just saw within the first month, it's not coming from the medicine, it's coming from your ego.
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And I got so mad at him because obviously it was coming from my ego.
So return to your normal life and watch how these visions move through you as you do.
Because the truth never expires.
It doesn't require any urgency.
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It's pure, it's eternal.
It just is.
So if it's real, if it's truly real, it will happen.
If it's meant for you, it will come.
You don't have to push the boulder up the hill.
What if this is not the last brush stroke?
In something that you know.
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But it's the first brush stroke in something new.
I promise you in three months or three years you will know what to do with this vision in a way that you simply do not have the capacity to understand.
The morning of the ceremony.
I like to think of every new big awakening and opening that happens during ceremony.
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It's a new part of you being like a newborn, and that part of you, that part of your truth, also needs to have the ability to grow up with you, to become a part of the ecosystem.
To get the.
Roots to get the legs to be able to walk with you #3 is find one honest witness always.
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It doesn't really matter what the ceremony is about.
I really recommend always having some witnesses to your experience.
In Europe we do this beautiful integration circles that are always led by a professional.
We do breath.
Work and sound healing.
We do so many different activities to let people integrate into their body, into their system, into their mental body, spiritual body, emotional body.
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And this might also be one of the most important things on our list today because if you had a tough ceremony and you revealed something very, very difficult, the worst place to be is alone inside your own head with what you saw.
Because the mind is going to do the mind thing.
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It's going to spin.
It's going to catastrophize or minimize.
It will do exactly what you do when you're tired, exhausted, and stressed.
Multiplied with 100.
It will go to circles.
And without another human to sit with you inside it, you will either inflate what you saw into something it isn't, or shrink it back to something that will make the discomfort stop.
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What you need is not someone who will tell you what it means, because Oh my God, we love to do that, don't we?
And not someone who will interpret the vision, or give you a framework or hand you a diagnosis, and not someone who will tell you it was just the medicine and you're fine and let's not talk about it.
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You need someone who can just sit with you.
Someone who can hold space for the fact that something real happened without rushing it towards the resolution.
And here's something I want to name very clearly.
Conclusion also can be a confusion in disguise.
The pressure to arrive to an answer to a destination, to know what it all means, to know what to do.
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That pressure is not integration.
Integration is learning to expand into what has been shown, not to extract from it or expel it.
You're not trying to get rid of what you saw.
You're learning to grow large.
Enough to carry it with you in every single part of you. #4 is go into the body first.
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This is like the last place that I usually went, which is into the body.
And now I'm learning that is the only place to start.
It's when the medicine shows you something difficult or challenging that goes against what your mind or beliefs usually are.
Then the mind will start to mobilize.
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It wants to manage that experience.
It wants to explain it debated, reframe it, dismiss it.
This is what minds do.
They protect.
They go into a position and one of the ways the mind protects us by keeping everything in the realm of the thought where it can be controlled.
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But the body already knows.
The body has perceived that entire vision before the mind even had a chance to filter it.
And the body is still holding it even right now as you're listening to this right now, your body is carrying every single ceremony you have ever been to.
So before you think about it, before you try to understand.
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It, feel it.
Where does the truth live in you right now?
Is it in your chest, your gut, your troll?
Place your attention there.
Breathe into it.
Try not to fix it, not to release it, not to make it go away.
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Just acknowledge that it has landed somewhere real in your body, in your life.
You don't process difficult visions or spiritual experiences by thinking harder about them.
You process it by feeling into where it landed.
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The body is not the obstacle to the integration.
The body is actually the ceremony space where it happens.
The 5th principles is always to slow down, as you will hear me talk about it every single episode.
And take things in small doses.
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You do not have to swallow the entire truth of the entire universe at once.
I think that that's why we have so many different organisms living on this earth.
We are all trying to digest reality and becoming and creating reality at the same time.
And in fact, trying to do that big one inhale of everything, trying to face the full weight of what has been shown to you all at once, can be one of the most common ways to people get extremely overwhelmed.
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And they shut down off the ceremony.
Your nervous system is just not built to metabolize everything in one sitting.
So move toward it and back.
I like to think of this as like a four Wheeler.
You know if you have to drive into the mod and you go like 2 wheels in but not all four wheels, you go in back and forward, back and forward.
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Like you need to keep part of you in a dry land, part of you where there is calmness, not putting all of you into the experience.
You can spend 20 minutes sitting with it, then go for a walk, spend an hour journaling, then cook something, eat, rests, let yourself.
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Go back and forward.
Between the difficult thing, or whatever was difficult to receive back and forward.
Between something that feels safe and something that feels unsafe.
A relationship that you trust.
The ground under your feet, the sound of water.
This is where I feel integration is so important, where you're not trying to jump over or run around the nervous system, you are inviting a calmer, more responsible way.
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Of taking care of yourself.
Into this process, no matter what has been.
Shown to you and once.
You have gone through a very difficult, challenging experiences and learn how to metabolize it.
That becomes a part of you rather than something threatening you from the inside.
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So you know that in the future you're able to do it again.
So give it time, give it space.
And remember, don't dig up the seed to check if it's growing.
Trust that something is happening, even if it's difficult beneath the surface, even if you can see it.
And when it comes to time and space, remember the first two weeks of the ceremony.
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It's a very fertile window that you have with the soil of all of these seeds.
Your brain is more adaptive, more receptive than any other time.
So try not to fill this window with distractions, with business, but going straight back into all of the relationship and telling everyone what happened.
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Let it grow within you before you're presenting it on the outside so that there is space these two weeks for real growth to actually happen.
Number six is don't spiritualize your way out of it.
Oh Lord, have I done this a lot.
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And I want to name something that is very specific to our plant medicine community.
And I say this with love because I've done this so many times myself.
It's so easy and almost dangerous to take a hard truth and wrap it into some spiritual language until it becomes comfortable, until it becomes elevated and cosmic and guru like beautiful frame that it no longer requires anything of you like everything is unfolding perfectly.
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Trust the past, trust the process.
This is all a part of my soul's journey.
I forgive myself completely.
All of these things are beautiful principles of truth, but when they are used as a way to bypass the wrong, comfortable, really messy human reality of what we're living in right now, it becomes like a spiritual anesthetic.
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Like we're just numbing you down to the very thing that the medicine was trying to wake up in you.
Spiritual bypassing is so real and it is so clear that it happens a lot around inside and outside service spaces.
The medicine doesn't come to you and give you these type of cliches.
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She will show you something difficult so that you can transcend it in real time.
She shows it to you because she wants you to meet it, to sit with it, but to run around it.
She wants you to look it into the eye.
To let it change you at the level it's asking to change you, which is often not an acoustic spiritual level.
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It's on this ordinary human inner child level.
So stay with what has been shown to you.
Now.
I like to think of this as a great honor when I get to see things I wasn't aware of, like my fake humility or arrogance or in the last ceremony.
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This is kind of sad to say.
I was shown that there is a certain type of gay men that I just completely ignore as if they don't exist.
And I was so heartbroken when I saw that.
It's like that that's not aligned with my values as a human being.
But somehow, because of whatever experience I had with a certain type of gay men, I had just completely ignored them as if they don't exist if you're a certain age and you look a certain way.
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And I just decided I'm never, ever going to be that person again.
And I'm so grateful and honored that I get to see a part of my shadow that I couldn't see before.
For me, it's just a great privilege.
To be able to.
Alchemize and to witness and to transform and transcend these parts of me that I didn't even know sometimes that I had.
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So stay with what has been shown and before you.
Transcend anything, feel it #7 is journal as a witness, not as an analyst.
I always bring journals to everyone at retreats because I want everyone to write things down by hand and not to figure things out, not to analyse it, not to make a list, not to decode, not to build a theory around it, just to let it exist outside of you on paper.
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There's something that happens when you move and experience from the inside of you to the outside.
When it goes from something spinning in your head towards on a page, it becomes real in a different way and it also becomes something you can look back at rather than something that is looking at you.
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The key here is to write as a witness, not as an analyst.
A witness that simply reports what happened, what you saw, what you felt, what your body did, what you're afraid it means, No conclusion or framework, not tying it up at the end, not wrapping it into a spiritual gift box.
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Just an honest, unfiltered person with your own experiences.
I find it so important.
In my last ceremony, there was so many extraordinarily important things that I realized about myself that I would write down the next day.
And I'm so glad that I have that journal because every single day and every single week, I'm going back and revisiting it.
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I'm understanding deeper layer of what was actually was shown to me.
So this is, for me, instrumental.
And also, this kind of writing is not about producing an insider outcome.
It's about just creating this space and this beautiful little box of heavenly open space.
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But our judgement where all of these little treads can come and be connected and it will just grow and grow and grow and expand.
And sometimes, but not always, after written it all out and you sit quietly with what is on your.
Page something becomes clear that no amount of thinking could have ever been produced.
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It just shoots true because you created a container of that magic and that transmission to come true.
A journal is medicine in the making, so always have one by your side.
A number 8 is to ask what might this be protecting me from?
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Because if we start feeling resistance or if we're running away from what the medicine showed us, you know, all of us in different ways.
We are all.
Being protected or we're all trying to protect something.
We're all holding it out.
In a certain.
Way and the running is not random in our life.
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It's not weakness.
It's the psycho doing what the psycho needs to do, guarding something that is tender or vulnerable, something that feels too vulnerable or too sacred or too threatening or too exposed.
So instead of asking why am I avoiding this?
Why am I procrastinating?
Why am I not doing what I said I'm going to do?
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Which tends to just produce shame or produce a lack of self responsibility and self connection and integrity.
Ask yourself, what is it that I'm trying to protect myself from here?
Maybe the vision shows to you that a relationship is actually complete and over and what is being protected Is that terror?
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Of being alone.
Maybe it showed you something about your own behaviour Maybe.
You lie a lot.
And what is being protected is the identity you built around being a good person who doesn't lie.
Maybe it showed you a calling you've been refusing.
And what's being protected is the safety of not trying, not failing, not giving up your job or like for not risking or for not being seen.
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The resistance is not the enemy, the resistance is the information we need, and if you follow it in Word, it will take you directly to the place that needs your attention #9 is don't weaponize the vision against yourself.
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Oh my God, I feel that one deeply, and I want to say this one clearly.
The medicine will show you something, probably about your past, your patterns, your shadow, the ways that you hurt yourself or other people.
And the ego in its pain and in the shame might pick this up and turn it into a weapon, saying I am this, I am this bad person.
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I've always been horrible, I've never changed.
I'm broken, God hates me, the spirits don't like me, my ancestors despise me.
I'm beyond repair.
And now the medicine has confirmed it.
I was Calibrese showed me that I'm horrible person.
Be very careful here my friend.
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Guilt and shame.
They go so fast.
It's like a lightning strike from the shadow part of the eagle.
They move in before understanding has a chance to arrive, before compassion has a chance to come to the building.
And they can take a truth, a real, important, necessary truth in lesson, and use it to condemn you, brought in and to liberate you.
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The medicine will never show you this so that you can be punishing.
Yourself with it.
She's showing you this because she believes that you're ready to meet it, and she's probably showing it a little bit of outside of your own comfort zone.
So do you have to expand?
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To meet it.
But you're not supposed to be destroyed by it, You're supposed to be freed by it.
She only showed you a truth, not a sentence.
You're not guilty, so don't let your ego turn it into a sentence where you are.
I remember one of the past lives that she showed me and I had a wounding of guilt and shame and I spent years beating myself up because I had done something bad in the past life and I gave it.
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Sort of that became my reason for everything that had been going wrong.
And I'm sort of this cursed person because I've been a bad soul.
I seen how many years later, and I wish that I had better integration support at that time.
That's not what it is about.
But even that journey took me to my medicine of releasing and transforming all the guilt and all the shame.
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It's why we have the forgiveness process in one of our programs because it's so instrumental for this work.
And if something is really difficult for you to carry, you've been shown something where you feel I am going to weaponize this and shoot myself down with it.
46:28
Share with someone who has at least 10 years of experience on this path so that they can hold space for you.
And be careful with anyone that makes it mean anything. 10 The last one life, Your life is the best integration coach you will ever meet.
46:46
It's the best integration facilitator and this is the one I always come back to the most because after all the framework, all the tools, all the strategies, all the practices, the deepest integration, it doesn't happen on a meditation question.
It doesn't happen when your journal.
It doesn't even happen in the best conversations with a guru or with the greatest integration guide or coach in the world.
47:08
It happens in your life in the ordinary moments because it's easy for us to be this great person.
One hour on Sue More, this incredible leader.
One hour on a stage.
But in your day-to-day relationship, how you speak to the person you love the next morning.
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How to you speak to your waiter, to a cab driver, to your employee, to your boss, whatever you make the phone call you've been avoiding.
How you speak to yourself when you wake up, when you go to bed.
Life is not separate from integration.
Life is the integration.
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Your life is the homework, your healing is the homework, and the medicine shows you something.
And then your life becomes the laboratory where you get to try it out, where you get to find out what is true to you, what it means, what you're going to do with it.
But there's no this is wrong or right.
47:58
It's just a laboratory for your own liberation, so don't try to prove it right or wrong.
Don't rush towards resolution.
Just be a little bit aware.
Place what you saw on the altar of your awareness, and then go live your life with your eyes a little bit more open than they were before.
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Ah, that is all I have for you this week, my friend.
That feels delicious.
I love this episode and I hope you enjoyed it as well.
And if you did enjoy it, feel free to come and give me a little rating on Spotify or Apple.
I am so.
Unbelievably honoured of so much beautiful feedback.
48:36
For this podcast.
So thank you.
Thank you so much for sharing this journey with me.
If you want to come and join a beautiful breath work and integration circle, absolutely for free.
I am sharing the link in the podcast info so that you can come and join us.
48:52
If you want to come and join for a free breath work and integration circle with me and my friend Barrio, you can go to the show notes or to davidbox.com and sign up.
The 1st circle is always for free.
It's a 2 hour breathwork and integration circle and it's truly magical.
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If you've been looking into becoming an integration Culture facilitator yourself, come and join my free training Becoming the Medicine.
If you're interested in becoming an integration Culture facilitator yourself on this path of healing and trust Nation with plant medicines, come and join our free master class, Becoming the Medicine, The 12 Mirrors of Healing.
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This is where you will see the mirrors that you will have to look into if you are going to hold the safe space for others.
You will find also the link on davidbox.com and in the show notes.
Thank you so much for sharing this time with me and I will see you again next week.
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Lots of love.
