Plant Medicine & What I Learned From Peyote
A few weeks ago I promised I'd write about my unexpected and life-changing first week in Costa Rica. Then I went home for a funeral which turned into two funerals, and a week and several flight delays later was finally back in CR (3 days late for the retreat I was co-leading, which was the reason I had gone in the first place).
When I told people that I had gone back to Toronto part way through my trip for a funeral the common response was “Oh I'm so sorry, how unfortunate”, which of course is only natural and the “polite” way to respond. From my perspective, though, it wasn't unfortunate at all. It was exactly the way things were meant to be.
By the end of that first week in Costa Rica I had sat in two peyote ceremonies where I got to see myself with a clarity I’d never experienced before. I got to see where I hold fear and how that fear keeps me from living into my fullest potential. I had huge breakthroughs around letting go of anger and how when I stumble in life my first instinct is to explain myself or make it about some outside circumstance, rather than acknowledge I created a mess and see what I could learn from it. But as the saying goes “If you think you're enlightened, go home for the holidays.” And so that's exactly what I attracted.
Not only did the universe shoot me straight over to a week with my mom, it was while my grandfather was getting ready to pass on, so it was required that I cultivate extra softness, compassion and patience with her. Qualities that of course I would always want to show toward my mom, but can often forget because I allow myself to be triggered by her. I allow myself to be triggered and then make it about her. I blame her and get upset with her, when really these are wounds within me that are begging to be seen and healed. So I had a whole week to practice seeing myself. I saw the moments when I felt the fire rise up in my belly, the moments when I could be snappy, the moments when I tried to make it about something she said wrong. In all these moments she was my mirror. She was reflecting to me the places in myself that were wounded. And the more I sat with those reflections the more I got to heal those wounds, or at least begin the process.
This is what I learned from peyote. How to sit with what was being reflected to me. This can be a challenging thing to do because we are so wired to not want to screw up. We are programmed to fear getting it wrong or looking bad. We are shown society's idea of perfection via the media, parents, teachers and peers, and then feel like failures when we can't live up to it. Rather than getting defensive when something seemingly bad or unfortunate happens, what if we simply sat with it? I believe we would end up seeing the lesson. I believe we would recognize that we attracted this into our lives so that we could learn and then act more consciously in the future. But instead we often deny our part in the matter and miss the lesson completely. When we miss the lesson it comes back to us later in a different form and we get to say, “oh I have such bad luck, this kind of thing always happens to me,” or “I always end up with the same kind of man/job/situation, etc.” In this way we start to identify with our patterns and they become part of us. They become excellent excuses to stay in our comfort zone, even if that comfort zone feels like hell. But these patterns are not us. They are illusory layers.
When we stop blaming the world around us, when we stop making ourselves a victim of circumstance and when we start recognizing that we are the cause of everything in our lives, we can begin to create real lasting shifts. We can learn the lesson so that it doesn't show up again and we become the conscious and intentional creators of the masterpiece that is our life. This takes effort. It takes humility. It takes a desire to actually change. So, that's the question to ask yourself: do I want to continue living in a loop of hell, or do I want to create my paradise?
The choice is always yours.