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Are you feeling worse after an ayahuasca ceremony or scared that you will once you go on your next ayahuasca adventure?
Then this episode is for you.
We are diving into the misunderstood concept of why we sometimes feel worse after drinking ayahuasca and the tree most common things that I see is happening.
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This is one of the most important lessons that I can share with you, and it is my favorite episode so far because I just went into one of these traps myself and I keep doing so over and over again.
So let's dive in.
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So you came back from ceremony and something feels off.
Disconnected, angry, heavy anxiety in the body, stress running underneath everything, strange sensations that you can place.
You're open one moment and then suddenly you feel shut down the next.
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And you thought it would feel clear now, like it was in the ceremony.
Everything was crystal clear.
It was easy, it was in flow.
You felt so connected.
And now instead you feel like this and you wonder, did I fail?
Did I do something wrong?
Most of us on the ayahuasca journey, we recognize this face, the drop after the ayahuasca hangover of bliss and belonging and unity and peace.
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The feeling of being a bit stranded inside yourself, disconnected, stressed, lost, raw, irritated, anxious.
And this was me yesterday.
I've been building this new website for the Ayahuasca Integration Alliance and I had many days with so many hours in front of the screen.
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Too much input, too much mind.
My system felt tight, stressed, restless, anxious, like a hamster that had been running so fast in the wheel it caught fire.
And then I tried to ride an episode for this podcast.
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But the more I work to get it done, the more frustrated and tired and empty I felt.
And that is not the energy I want to bring to you.
So I tried to explore other concepts and ideas that I've been working on for this podcast, Dark Night of the Soul Ancestors.
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But it just didn't feel aligned.
It felt upstream, like a struggle.
There was no flow.
There was no breeze of the universe bringing the wind under my wings.
Where there's flow and excitement, where I feel guided and supported.
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Because when we increase our soulful sensitivity with this work, we all know there is this galactic river flow that we can just float in that takes you where you're going.
So I was trying to avoid going upstream, struggling, crawling up and against the stream.
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I looked at over 300 ideas that are written down and none of them felt aligned.
So I was stuck.
And then I laid down yesterday with Mario doing breath work for 1 1/2 hours.
It's a free offering we have inside the Ayahuasca Integration Alliance, where you always are welcome.
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And something started to shift just with breathing.
My being came back online.
The part of me that wants to move, to sing, to rest into life, that loves to just float in that delicious galactic river with least resistance.
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And it had been gone for days and I didn't even see it clearly until it returned.
When I came back to myself fully, I could really feel the distance.
I had abandoned the most crucial element of myself.
The part that we connect with in Ayahuasca.
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The part that we are awakening to deeper and deeper on this journey.
Our soul, our spirit, our being.
And that is what most people miss.
The anxiety, the stress, the anger, the disconnection, the pressure in the chest and the body.
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It might not be the core issue.
It might be a signal and a symptom of something far more important.
Spiritual hunger.
It's your soul saying feed me, I need food, I need oxygen.
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I know you had an experience.
I know you were with me and now you left me behind.
Now you're in your mind, you're in your character, you're in your control.
I want to be with you.
I'm starving because when we go to these retreats, it's like we're giving our spirit real Whole Foods with real nutrients, real minerals.
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And suddenly we come home and we're feeding it fast food and social media, superficial conversations and a lack of time to rest and play and sing.
Like empty spiritual carbs when we need real nutrients.
And then when we're back into ceremony, we always connect to our being.
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We dance, we are witness, we meet our soul, we're united, we belong, we're one with our body, our being, our mind, our spirit.
And we start paying attention to the sacredness around us, to nature.
We start connecting with the earth, to each other, to our heart.
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We touch ourselves gently.
We're open to give and receive hugs.
We feel ourselves.
And with this feeling we feed our spirit, our being with the nectar of the divine.
It's like we go to be with the great mothers and we can feed ourselves with real light.
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And then we come back.
We stop breathing, we stop feeding, we run back into our disconnected world, we rush by the flowers and the trees and the hugs, and we overrule the body and the being.
And after ceremony, this gap becomes very clear because our sensitivity gets a boost.
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Our spiritual antennas have picked up on what our authentic aligned radio channel is, our frequency.
Our authentic frequency that also gives us access to our flow and our intergalactic river, and everything that is not aligned with that signal starts to make noise.
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That strange noise you hear on an old radio if you're trying to hit the right radio channel.
So what used to work doesn't land the same way.
We can't just run out or drink or jump into bed with a stranger.
There is the newer level of sensitivity on the respect inside of us, a deeper sensitivity to what feels right for us.
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It's like we go home and we're trying to plug the charger into an outlet that doesn't work anymore.
Because it only gave power to the character, to the ego that you thought you had to be.
And now there's something truer inside of you that wants to be nourished.
The real you, because you have plugged into the earth to the medicine which comes from nature, to the great Spirit that comes from nature.
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And now the being inside of you, your soul, wants more.
It knows you know it exists, and it wants to charge its battery with real connection, not just through the mind or the mind media.
And it's this spiritual hunger that causes so many of these symptoms that we start fighting because we don't want to feel the disconnection, the stress, the irritation, the emotional waves.
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That doesn't make sense because something is missing.
And when we feel this gap, we are in the work of integration.
And unfortunately for many of us, we go back and we serve ourselves some spiritual cupcakes with Aspera Tom, something that our soul can't digest.
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Maybe it's some social media memos that seem spiritual.
Whatever it is, it is spectacle.
It's not the spirit.
It's not real food because your spirit is silent, patient, waiting.
So many of these pains and symptoms that we feel are the spirits red flags.
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It's hey, you left me behind.
You left your spirit behind.
Your body feels disconnected.
Please connect your inner soul.
Please connect your inner son.
Please connect your inner power and sanctuary because now your spirit knows.
Hey, I just saw you spending three days in ceremony, crying and dancing in gratitude in the rain and hugging an old man named Carl that you'd never would have even talked to before normally.
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And when the spirit knows that there has been this connection, it is trying to reconnect.
And if her life is the gap that makes it difficult for that connection, you start feeling the tension.
So you can ask yourself today, what part of me is starving?
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What part of me needs oxygen?
And how can I connect back to myself so deeply that I can feel and be in my own self?
And our greatest ally here is, of course, nature.
And it doesn't matter if you're in a city or in the Himalayas, nature is everywhere.
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And if you feel really bad and tired and fired and stressed and angry, go out without the phone for an hour.
Try to be barefoot.
Try to be skin by skin with the earth like a baby towards its mother, or connect to a tiny plant at home.
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Just ask Bachamama.
Ask the earth, hey, my battery's low.
My spirit is starving, help me refuel because she understands you, She made you.
And you can also ask the spirits for guidance.
Ask them to come and support you.
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Ask the moon during the night to help you refuel.
Open up the curtains under the full moon and gaze at her with gratitude and she will send you a supercharge like no other.
She is also wonderful to help you find balance in the night, so keep the window open one night and invite her in and see what happens.
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It is a magical relationship that you can fuel your spirit with.
I remember one time bringing a group from the city to a retreat a few years ago and we were all so tired and wired and stressed and disconnected and the shaman just looked at us and said, good, you're in nature now and I can see your batteries are charging with nature.
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You're coming back to your equilibrium.
And the next day we felt completely different.
Just being out there in the fresh air with the trees and the forest made us feel back at home and ourself.
What I find a bit sad here is that a lot of us come home from ceremony and in the integration we sometimes think I have to fight myself.
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I have to swim upstream to make this work now.
Because there is a galactic river within you that your soul is already flowing in.
And when you come into the retreat, I think there's a moment where you already felt that the current where everything starts to move without force, or you're not pushing or controlling or fixing.
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You are receiving life instead of fighting it or planning it or controlling it.
You're inside the experience, enjoying the experience, receiving the experience of life.
You're not outside looking in or thinking about it or journaling about it.
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So your body softens, the mind gets more quiet, and even when the difficult material appears, there is trust in life.
And that is what I call the galactic river.
It's a state where you're in contact with your authentic radio channel, with yourself, and life is responding to you instead of resisting because you are not tuning into someone else's radio channel or something that is not authentic aligned with you.
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You are then guided by the flow, guided by the experience.
You're being LED instead of being lost.
And then as we re enter our lives, our roles and our habits, and slowly, almost without noticing, you step out of that.
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You step out of the river, you start swimming against it, and you start plugging into things that drain you, the phone or patterns or social agreements, things that doesn't actually belong to you anymore, something you have already folded by.
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And then the currents get stronger and we disconnected.
We start swimming against the galactic river, against our true self.
And what I've learned, which is so funny, is that this river will eventually take us to no matter where we're going, because this river is our spirit, is our universe, is our destiny.
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So we can swim against it as much as we want.
Eventually we'll end up at the place that we were supposed to be, because everything that is meant for us is coming our way.
So we don't have to use so much force swimming the other way, exhausting yourself just to eventually end up at the same place later.
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And when we slow down and we are silent enough that river becomes visible to us, we can let ourselves load in it again.
And this is where your sensitivity is your most important ally.
Because when something feels off, you can adjust an align and you're back in flow and you're back floating in your delicious river.
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The second part that makes us feel worse is not something we normally talk that much about.
It's when we jump back from the retreat where we are a being and a soul and we feel accepted and we are part of a family back into our character.
And this can be very confronting because our character, and you might know you have a few of them, we might try to fit into an old character we had that we built because it has a job and makes great money.
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People like it, it creates certain results.
And then we create this deep disconnection to our true self.
And what I've learned on this journey is that our character can actually not receive life in the same way we can.
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You can't receive the love and the praise and the connection because it's a separate presentation and projection of us or something.
We want to be something that makes us feel safe.
So if we are in a character all the time, we utilize so much mind energy and physical energy and life force.
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We are mobilizing so much energy to keep it functioning, to keep it operating.
But when we are in our being, we are actually in a received state.
The character is an external forcing projection.
So pay attention to where your character is plugging in.
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Maybe you can see who activates the character in you, who triggers you to play out of your own alignment, and what is the character protecting of your own authentic energy.
And this is where we need to enter without any judgements, because we all have these characters, and a tiny bit of awareness goes a long way here.
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There's no need for a drastic dramatic shift.
You don't have to drop all the characters in one day, because remember, your galactic river is there anyway, Just see, maybe this character wants to swim upstream because it feels in control and it's scared of floating down the river because it doesn't know what's there.
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And maybe you can just let it rest for a tiny 2nd and regain your center and your true self.
Just a tiny breath of connecting to you.
This was for me a very touchy subject in the beginning of my journey because I was so married to my character.
It was a great one.
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It was the happy sad clown and I honestly thought it was all me and this clown was not really responsible for anything I said.
It was always joking and always sat inside.
And then as I stepped deeper into this journey and I found my being, I also found a very different blueprint of a person of a being hiding underneath all of these loud phrases and jokes and this being one and more.
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Silence, creativity, songs being in nature and my character got activated by all friends and family.
Where I had an old social contract that said play for the gallery, pretend to be happy fawn and play stupid and silly so you don't challenge anyone.
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And what I didn't know was that this character drained me for so much energy.
Because when I was not connected to my true self, it required a lot of thinking, a lot of control to perform and to be a certain way.
And that way was not my most natural way of being.
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Therefore, it costed me so much authentic power to sustain it.
But every character we have, they need love and they need care as well, because they were all built to serve a purpose.
But when it comes to just being with you, just you, no one else, try to drop the character for a moment, Try to come back to your being and just be with you.
17:39
You can always, at any moment on this journey, explore the deeper senses of belonging, connection, love and care for you.
There is actually no bottom, no limitation for how deeply you can love and explore yourself and your own love.
You can go as deep into your own peace, deep into your own joy, without anyone else.
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Because this journey is inward, the being journey is inward, and the character belongs outwards.
When we feel the negative symptoms of our own reality, we usually blame our surroundings and we say it's too noisy, it's too many people, and we feel that maybe we just need to move and become a Buddha on a mountaintop.
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Unfortunately, there isn't enough mountaintops for everyone to be a monk.
So we think maybe go into the forest and far away from people.
But we have this feeling if I just go away from people, the people are the problem, and if I go far enough away from them, then I will be OK.
We think if I change with a choice, the entire galactic river, if I put up lots of stones here and I change the direction, it will all be fine.
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It will all flow.
And what we don't realize is that the energies that we're here to work with will find you no matter where you go on a mountaintop or far away in the jungle, because we got ourself in the suitcase and your personality and your ego will keep playing the same games.
19:09
So the invitation is try not to play the game with yourself, just for a moment, just to connect with yourself.
And even if you're playing a game, just be aware of it.
I'm playing this game now.
Suddenly now I'm the the guru or the monk or in the person who doesn't know what to do.
19:27
I'm always confused.
OK, good.
Maybe that's true on some level.
Maybe there are more levels to all of this because there is only one person that can ever feed your spiritual hunger, and that is you.
I meet so many people at retreats where they come and I can feel their hearts are cold, starving.
19:50
And when they see the warmth in the community, they want to stay close, they want to be hugged.
But they're not able to cultivate their own inner warmth for themselves.
And it's sad to see so many humans with loving families, with friends, with amazing lives.
20:07
They are starving at a buffet of abundance.
Because they haven't tried to visit their own heart and give themselves the love.
And when we play this game outwards, projecting to validate and to get love, when we're thirty, 40-50 years old and trying to suck on the titties of someone else, a spiritual teacher or friend or an object or a status, we become dependent on that to feel whole.
20:33
You are the being, you are the soul, and you are craving for your lusting.
You're feeling disconnected and lonely for your relationship to yourself.
So cultivate that relationship without it being a spiritual performance on Instagram, without it being something you need to film or posts.
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Have a real sacred relationship with you and see how much you feel fed.
It is amazing how much you will find if you turn your focus in words towards yourself, and when you do so, you will have a huge gift coming your way because the character is often tired and stressed out and sleeps bad because it's disconnected from its own source.
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It's always thinking and projecting and thinking what people will think.
Adapting, strategizing, planning, controlling.
When you're in your being though, you get back into your child pose of having constant energy resources to your own source energy.
You can play and sing all day without being tired, and you will have so much energy and you will sleep like you're in a coma and it's delicious.
21:37
So again, ask yourself the question, what part of me is starving?
What parts of me needs oxygen right now?
And how can I connect back to myself so deeply that I can feel and be in my own self?
The third one, and the last one for today, is the one that might be the most complex to speak about because ayahuasca is such a potent, powerful medicine.
21:59
She can show us where our real wounds, where our real issues, where our real blockages really are.
And that is the magic impotency of the medicine.
Most of us, we are totally unaware of these challenges that we actually have inside of the ancestral blockages of wounds that we carry.
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And when ayahuasca shows us that we have an emotional wound from childhood that we put some ego bandage over or created a character to protect it, or numbed ourself, and suddenly we feel the real wound.
We feel the real issue.
Then we scream, no, I don't want to have grief and anger and sadness.
22:39
I want that bliss and that belonging and that unity.
We want to feel anything but the emotions that are related to this wound, even though the medicine is within those emotions.
And I get this.
This is hard.
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Ayahuasca is a medicine, not a drug.
If she made us feel good all the time, she would be called ecstasy, not the grandmother and a wine of the dead, not the heart.
Medicine of alignment.
So she shows us and she starts moving the energy that is within our wounds so that that energy can be transformed, so it can be liberated.
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And then we come home and we feel that other part of the transmission process.
The part that feels really uncomfortable, where this emotion has to be felt deeply over time, over many layers.
The part that requires real love and care and ritual and support.
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The part where we can't just be alone in our own ego bubble and get it all sorted.
The part of us the needs a therapeutic process, support the healing circle to heal deeper layers of our self.
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Maybe we have a big bottle of tears that needs to come out.
We gathered a lot of rage because we weren't allowed to be angry.
And all of this is bubbling under the surface and it's so good.
And I say that now but I have kicked and screamed a lot because feeling anxiety for me was never fun.
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I absolutely hated it.
But now I'm getting really curious about it when it comes up.
I'm willing to feel it deeply and I know how to release it, and I know when I do, the gifts that comes from that are immense.
The other part of this is also, if you're like me and you have deep trauma from childhood, it might be like having a broken bone that never healed and then suddenly ayahuasca makes you aware of that broken bone.
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She's saying, hey, don't walk, don't go on rushing full speed.
There is a bone broken and suddenly you feel that Ouch.
Every time I'm walking, it's hurting.
And Ayawaska does this.
She works with our layers and suddenly we can see the trauma, we can feel the trauma, and the trauma is like an onion with many different layers that we start peeling to go deeper and deeper to release all of it.
25:06
Maybe we came to the retreat thinking I'm coming here because of my anger.
And then we come home and we find this immense grief underneath it that is just the medicine actually working, helping you peel layer by layer until it's released and liberated, until you have healed that wound.
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And certain wounds that we become aware of are not for us to plaster together with a podcast episode.
Hey, hey.
Or use the video because it's a deep seated trauma.
It's a bone that broke that needs a therapeutic process and needs proper healing and care.
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So we might have to look for someone more clinical, a real therapeutic process with a psychologist or a therapist that knows about ancestral work with these sacred medicines.
But what a liberation that is that we have a medicine that can show us what is actually hurting so we can heal it not just for us, but for all the ancestors that came before you and for all of those that are going to come after you.
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So if it's hurting, slow down and listen.
Now when it comes to this, I know that there are people sometimes going through a retreat where they don't really know the shaman and the people working there, and they open up a big process.
It's like being on the surgery table and they open up a big old wound, but then nobody is closing it up afterwards.
26:28
So they walk out and they are feeling raw and disconnected and fragmented.
Obviously who you work with here deserves your discernment and deserves your safety.
And very often, ayahuasca, she is the medicine of alignment.
And if we are faced with the pain and the struggle and the resistance of not feeling aligned, if we're feeling the discomfort of swimming against our own self, against our galactic river, abandoning ourself, of not being in flow with our being, we feel it because we have given ourselves the gift of this medicine that shows us where we're not aligned.
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And when it comes to this gift of ayahuasca and how she also helps us go deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper and revealing more and more and more and more.
I want to share with you where I came from the first time I did an ayahuasca retreat 10 years ago.
Because a lot of us, we come into these retreats and we say, well, I'm coming here because I need to heal this or I need to find my purpose or I need to open my heart.
27:28
And then we go back to the retreats and we see there's a deeper layer.
There's a deeper layer, there's a deeper layer.
I remember my first intention for my first ayahuasca ceremony 10 years ago.
I just said to the medicine, I want a six pack and a boyfriend.
27:45
And I thought that was a very simple request.
Just fix my eating habit.
Stop making me one ice cream at night and pizza so I can be skinny and find the right beautiful man.
What I didn't know was the processes that I signed up for to make that possible.
It was actually releasing my shame, anger, self hate, sadness, grief, all beliefs, trauma.
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Had to learn to trust myself, to set boundaries, to speak my truth, to sing, to be kind to myself, to see my own shadow, to accept my own shadow.
So many processes and each one was like a window into an advent calendar of consciousness.
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A new world would open up for each layer I worked through.
And all of these processes happened for me so that I could do one simple thing.
To love myself with or without a six pack, and eventually to love someone else the same way.
28:49
So my intention to my next ayahuasca ceremony after these ten years is very different.
It consists of 2 words.
Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.
I had a song that came up in the last ceremony that I feel works perfect with this episode and it's just called Gracias Thank you.
29:13
And it is the song that is the prayer of thank you.
Because I feel after going through this journey for 10 years, my journey has gone from feeling like I'm the most unlucky person with the most fucked up childhood to feeling that I am the luckiest person alive and that I am on this path of eternal thank yous.
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So even though it's not done, I want to share it with you today.
And it's.
Called gracias Gracias abuela.
30:46
Graffias Amor, thank you.
That was all I had for you this week, My friend, and I would be filled with gratitude and thank yous and a million graffias if you could share with you on this podcast wherever you're listening to it.
31:07
It is so nice to know that I am not alone on this journey and that our ayahuasca family is walking with me as I share more and more of my experience with the sacred medicine.
Every single week we have an open integration circle, and every second week a breathwork circle.
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It's changing a little bit as we're finding our rhythm for the Ayahuasca Integration Alliance, and my intention and dream is to have lots of incredible support for you as you are walking on your deep healing and transformational journey with this medicine.
You can find more information on the Ayahuasca Integration Line's website.
31:44
Thank you so much for listening.
It has been the greatest joy and honour of my life to share my stories and to share this journey with you.
So thank you, thank you, thank you.
