PHYSIOLOGICAL BIRTH & THE SPIRITUALITY OF CREATION WITH ADRIANA PARADA OF WMBSIS

UNI | Gabriela Parada and Adriana Parada | March 15, 2023

Audio duration: 1:10:46

FIRST-PASS TRANSCRIPT DRAFT - NOT PUBLISHED

Automatically transcribed in three consecutive audio segments, paragraph-formatted only. Not independently word-for-word verified. Speaker turns have not yet been reliably labeled. The segment ranges are exact audio cut points, not topical chapter timestamps. The host's surname was normalized to Parada using the episode credits. Hesitations and repetitions remain. Names, statistics, technical terms and possible transcription errors need an audio-review pass.

ARCHIVE AND HEALTH-CONTEXT NOTE FOR REVIEW

This 2023 discussion includes the speakers' opinions and claims about birth, hospital care, interventions, cesarean rates, infant mortality and World Health Organization guidance. These statements have not been fact-checked and should not be presented as verified medical information or advice. The speakers' original discussion is retained rather than silently rewritten. A current public page needs a separate editorial decision about context and sourcing. The Sayulita retreat dates, discount code and booking references are historical, not current offers.

TRANSCRIPT

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Welcome to the You and I podcast. I'm your host, Gabby Parada. You and I is a portal for art and conversation that propels unity consciousness, a state of being that is rooted in the awareness of you and I as one. Here we explore unity through the people on this earth that are helping us understand ourselves, our planet, and each other through a unique lens. Our heartfelt mission is to help all beings everywhere come to the realization that we are all unique and unified at the same time. We are you and I. Okay, so hi. Hi. Um, we're re-recording this episode because we recorded it a while ago, last sometime last year, and I don't know what happened.

I think it was just like 3 hours long and it was taking too long to edit and we had some trouble with the sound, but we're sharing it now and it's extra timely because we are hosting a retreat in Sayulita in Mexico this May and it's for future mothers or women who are interested in birth, intended for women who are wanting to conceive, women who are simply curious, women who are pregnant, women who potentially want to have children in the future. So this is not something that requires any sort of relationship or lifestyle to participate in. It's really something we've been wanting to encourage all women to consider attending because it's knowledge and wisdom of the woman's body, of birth, which is important for all of us to have.

And I love what you said about um this being something that was previously passed down through generation and generation, but in modern culture it's been forgotten because we've replaced it with the hospital system for better or worse. And we're going to talk about those nuances. And yeah, so I would love for you to introduce yourself in a moment. I guess for me on my end, I just want to want to preface it with the relevancy of this conversation to everyone's feminine energy because when we tap into this um this wisdom of physiological birth and of creation and how life is created and birthed on this planet, we can start to see synchronicities and codes and alignments that assist us in realizing how we create anything in life, whether that be a business, whether that be a partnership, a relationship, artwork, music.

It's really applicable to all of life because this is this is the seed of life as we relate to it as human beings. And it's something that can really activate uh further knowings within us. And so I want to encourage people to join the conversation even if they feel like an aversion to talking about motherhood or like birth is not relevant to them because this is actually something that's so so so core to who we are. And as you always say, everyone was birthed. Everyone was born, you know? So this is like quite possibly the most relevant thing other than death, right?

As as humans, something that we can just 100% relate on because we've all been through it. Um so would you like to introduce yourself and tell us a bit about your work? Thanks for that introduction. Um and I'm glad like you said that we're finally recording this because I know we've talked about it for a while. Um but I'm Adriana. I'm a holistic birth coach and childbirth educator. Um and I work with women throughout pregnancy, birth, postpartum, um and I call myself a holistic birth coach. And what I mean by that is that I approach birth um with the whole body, with the whole mind, body, and spirit of each unique woman that um I work with.

And so um you know, that means I view birth as more than just a physical event. I view it as a spiritual transformation and journey. Um and my role entails a lot of education, which we're going to be talking about today. Um but in the birth space, um it's also like in in labor in the birth space, it's about being um a space holder, uh a guardian of the sacredness that bringing life into this world is. Let's talk about what physiological birth is because that phrase is used in this community um and it's increasing in popularity, but I want to get clear on how we're defining it.

Physiological birth just refers to spontaneous labor where the full birth hormones are preserved. So it's how Mother Nature has set up birth to flow in the absence of intervention, management, disruption. Um so it's essentially why humans are alive today. It's how Mother Nature has set up birth to work. If you were to be if you were to know nothing about birth and you were by yourself in the woods giving birth to a baby, like what would be happening in your body? Like that's what we're calling physiological birth. Um and it's like a very specific term for natural birth, right? But we don't call it just birth or just natural birth or normal birth because that term and like the words normal and natural one can be kind of triggering, but it's also like very clouded in society saying like you had a natural birth that has come to equate simply um like a vaginal birth um where that can include uh drugs, it can include um induction, it can include various interventions um that disrupt that hormonal flow.

And so it's not like a judgment on one thing being better than the other. It's simply like a distinct like we distinguish it so that we can understand what we're talking about. Um I you know, like the word natural, I always think of like, okay, you go into a grocery store and you're like buying something like orange juice for example and it says like natural. What does that mean? You it doesn't mean juice from an orange, you know? It depends on the manufacturer, the company that created that what natural means to them. So because it has a bunch of different meanings, it means nothing.

So it's the same thing with birth and natural birth, you know? So that's why um it's important to make that distinction so that we have like the same language for what we're talking about. Um does that make sense? Totally. I and I love the simplicity of the example of if a woman was in the woods giving birth alone, like that is the process of physiological birth. It's uninterrupted, it's unmedicated, just completely left to left to nature and the body and um life and fate. Yeah. And like go ahead. Well, since we're talking about the distinction, can you talk about the distinction between um or why you've chosen not to use the word doula and midwife?

Yeah. Um yeah, so I call myself a holistic birth coach, a birth keeper, um and I've moved away from calling myself a doula because I I see the role of a doula as working within the medical system um and I am intentionally choosing to work outside of that system. Um in the simplest terms, I think there are when you look at birth from a physiological lens um that can't necessarily happen in a hospital setting. Um and I don't agree with um the role of a doula being walking women into a setting that is like falsely promising certain things. Um and so it's just a personal choice that I've made to work outside of those parameters.

Yeah, and the way that I've I've understood it is essentially it's like the words doula and midwife have been co-opted and um oftentimes it sounds like it's something that's related to uh physiological birth and sometimes it is, but many times it's actually um a quasi assistant who is kind of um almost like havezies, like one foot in the industrialized hospital system and one foot in the um more physiological birth perspective. And so while they might have more holistic um inclinations, they're not charting the territory in a way that is fully empowered or fully empowering the woman that's giving birth. Um and so I think that's something that a lot of us don't always know because sometimes we hear with the word midwife, we hear the word doula and we just automatically assume that they're going to advocate for um more freedom, more wildness, more rebellion from the forceful institutionalized process.

Um but many times they are actually just kind of tiptoeing a little bit and like being apologetic and often not holding or communicating clear boundaries to the woman. Is that accurate? Yeah, I think totally. Yeah, and you mentioned just like the wildness of birth and um I think with that lens of you know, how birth is meant to function um without interruption, how we're we're animals, we're mammals, you know? Um and birth is so much more than just a physical event that your body is doing, right? It's a emotional, spiritual, mental um event. And to think that you know, you need to like prepare for your birth and you need to hire a doula and like advocate for yourself and like in the moment where you're trying to like bring life into the world and that's like a huge job to think that you would have to be remembering what your birth plan is and asking for certain things and declining others and you're on this like timetable and um you know, strangers are coming in and out of the room and it's just like disrupting this whole flow.

That doesn't make sense to me. Um and that's the role of of a doula, right? Is to be in that room and to advocate and to like do all of these things. Um that just don't make sense when you understand the physiology of birth and like it's the complete opposite of what happens in the medical system. Yeah, and what you're describing is a hospital birth, right? In that scenario. Um so you're saying that many doulas and midwives work within the hospital system at a hospital and that that already is interrupting the the physiological process just from the get from just from like stepping even going to the hospital as soon as you're giving birth, it's already interrupting it.

And so from what I gather, you see that already as not holding the integrity of physiological birth so you don't even put that step there. You um work with women who are birthing outside of the hospital, correct? And this is not the case for everyone. This is just um uh your position and the position of women who call themselves um birth keepers. Uh birth keepers um you know, traditional midwives, you know, there's a distinction between being you know, having a license, a midwife having a license um which is essentially um working within the medical model of care of treating birth like um a medical event.

Um so and you know, that word like you mentioned earlier has been absorbed and co-opted by the medical system. And so now women are making a distinction of being a traditional midwife, the way midwifery used to work um 100 years ago. Um and that's where the term birth keepers have come from fear of using the word midwife. Um and so yeah, I understand how that can be slightly confusing. Um it's confusing, but when yeah, you understand how physiological birth works and the importance of it, um I think it all starts to make sense and you start to see um where the medical model doesn't support that.

And um then you see all of these stats of high cesarean rates or um you know, traumatic birth stories or um you know, that's where all of that starts to happen and women are left thinking that their bodies don't work or something failed or you know, their baby was in danger or you know, like that's where all of these stories are formed when in reality like a lot of what happens in the hospital um is contrary to what is needed to support the way birth functions. And so when you start to try to manipulate things, when you start to like poke and prod and measure and put like a timeline on things and um essentially you're creating a stressful environment for the woman and when you start to do all of these things, you're starting to mess with Mother Nature's design and then it's no wonder that you start to see um things go wrong.

Yeah, and I think I think it's important to mention too, which is both part of our intention for the retreat and always I I think I know that both you and I have agreed on this point of view that it's whenever conversations like this take place, since it is so triggering for women, especially because we've been told we've we're constantly told who to be, what not to be, what to look like, what not to look like, what to do, what not to do in order to be perceived in a way that society deems acceptable for women. And so we're like fighting that all the time.

We're always on defense. We've been we've suffered so much from that. And so when we have these conversations about quote-unquote natural birth, physiological birth, oftentimes women put their arms up and they put a guard up and a wall and it's because it starts to trigger all of this like um perceived judgment and perceived good, bad, better or worse uh internally. And so it's sometimes shut down. But I think what we want to uh emphasize is that having these conversations is super important. Discussing physiological birth in its highest potential is important because then you know the truth of what the body is capable of.

And from there, you're able to create your own birth plan, your own opinions, your own decisions, which are not better or worse than another woman's decisions. Your health, your perspective on life, on the world is so nuanced and complex and um special to you. And so there's no way that someone can can come in and tell you like, oh, you were wrong for choosing a hospital birth. You were wrong for choosing um an epidural. That you should have gone gone pure. It's this like purest thing and that's not something that we're advocating for. We're advocating for knowing the truth of the woman's body the woman's body's potential so that you can use that as a bouncing block, as a foundation.

Um and it's up to you. And um otherwise we get into hiding this information and not talking about it because it's uncomfortable or not talking about it because we want to avoid um I don't know, someone's feelings getting hurt, you know? And like that's that's faux compassion. That's not real compassion. Real compassion is rooted in truth. And then we from there we can accept what people choose for themselves. Yeah. Um yeah, I think that's an important distinction. Um yeah, to mention this talking about physiological birth and how the body works isn't a judgment on anyone's choice. You you know, it's wonderful that you can choose to have an epidural, you can schedule a cesarean, you can have an induction.

All of that is available. Um you know, I just think where society fails is understanding the full spectrum of what's available. And when you don't understand the baseline like you mentioned, what's true, how birth works, like how are you then able to choose what you want to choose when you don't have the full picture and you don't have all of the information and you're just blindly trusting that your doctor has your full interest in mind and like you know? Um and so it's important to I feel like there's the term like informed choice or informed consent is like people talk about that all the time and like you can't truly have an informed choice if you don't understand what the truth is.

And then you know, you choose what's right for you and that might be going into a hospital and that might look different for every single person. So um yeah, that's an important distinction. Yeah, and not to mention the obvious which is like this is spontaneous. Life is spontaneous. Life throws you curve balls. Like you can plan a specific type of birth and want it to go a certain type of way, but life happens and you know, we have to flow with that and not be hard on ourselves for having to make you know, spur of the moment decisions based on what's going on, you know?

But um I want to move on to the something I I kind of want to condense so that it's easier for people to digest. Um in your opinion, what are three things that people may not know that are concerning about the hospital system in terms of birth? Yeah. Yeah. Um so much. I know there's so many, so that's why I'm like what are the top three? The first thing that comes to mind is just thinking about the fact that like without in the absence of understanding physiological birth, like most women blindly put their trust in their doctor and their OB or maybe they have a midwife.

Um and you would think that in today's society, in 2023 in the United States, that you would be able to trust that your doctor, what they're saying and recommending is um backed by research, backed by evidence, like the standard of care. And that's not necessarily the case. Like the way um the medical model approaches maternity care varies by country, it varies by state, it varies by city, it varies by hospital, by practice, by each individual provider. So you could go to one person and be told one thing, another person be told another. And that's not to say that it's individualized care for the woman.

It's just the fact that they don't you know, there's no like standard of care. Um and the way certain providers practice is all based on liability and the risk they're willing to take or not take um based on their license. So it's not based on what's best for the specific woman in front of them. Um and that's the concerning piece to me. Um like for example, one provider might be might quote-unquote allow their patient to go to 41 weeks. You go to another provider and they say they do routine inductions at 40 weeks on the dot. Um one provider might again allow a woman to eat in labor, another provider might not.

I want to clarify because I don't want people to mistake this as individualized care like you said. This doesn't imply like a flexibility within the system. This is saying that all people, all women at one hospital would be told that they have to do XYZ. All women at another hospital XYZ. Correct. Yeah, which is frightening. Is that flexibility but like woman to woman, like which is what physiological birth is is one woman is going to need this amount of time, another woman's going to be this amount of time. One woman's going to want to eat during labor, another woman might not want to eat during labor, you know?

Um that one's just ridiculous to me.

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I don't know if people know this, but some women or some hospitals don't allow women to eat during labor based on faux expired um limited research, correct? Yeah, you get ice chips. You get ice chips to chew on um when you're like doing the most amount of physical exertion that you might ever in your life. It's insane. Um yeah, and so I do want to mention that, you know, all of this is concerning because um our stats, you know, if you look at the research, you look at the United States specifically, we spend the most amount of money in the maternity care sector of hospitals.

So when compared to other categories of like how hospitals make money, maternity care is the highest. So we're spending a lot of money as a country. And then when you look at how the US compares to other developed countries, we rank among the highest in infant mortality rate. That right there just shows you that this is an issue in the way that we're approaching birth. Um you also look at the United States and you see that we have an over 30% of cesarean rate when it comes to birth. Um 30%, so that's saying that 30% of human females can't give birth.

Like that just doesn't make sense. Um and if you care about what the World Health Organization has to say, if you care, they've stated that 15%, like this is a cesarean rate of 15% um is the number where the risks of surgery start to outweigh the benefits. So they've set that standard, if that means anything to you. That's 15%. The US is at 30. Some states, some cities are well over 30%. Um that's insane. And a large part of yeah, a large part of why that cesarean rate is so high is because of what people have come to call the cascade of intervention.

Um and the cascade of intervention is a term for the chain of reaction events that happen in the medical model that leads to surgery when birth is being managed. Um and so it starts with an intervention. So when birth doesn't spontaneously start. Um so that can be that can look a variety of different ways from Can I have a question here? Um because at this at this stage, this is something I haven't quite clicked. So when women are given a due date, is that like say your due date is February 22nd, do you go to the hospital on February 22nd and if you haven't gone into labor, they like induce your labor or no?

Um it can look like that, yeah. So February 22nd would be 40 weeks and then maybe your doctor is like, I'll give you till they call it like 40 plus five. So 40 weeks, so February 22nd plus five days. And and if you haven't spontaneously gone into labor then, then we need to talk about an induction. Or maybe your provider is like does it earlier, does lets you go until 41 weeks. They're quite literally managing it and so they're telling you what you can and can't do based on what they perceive to be liability or risk that may or may not be a risk to you.

You know, they're defining that. So that's kind of at the beginning of this cascade of interventions, right? Because that in and of itself, placing a specific due date with a specific time frame of like you have to give birth between, that's already throwing a wrench in the beautiful, complex, highly intelligent process of physiological birth. Mhm. Yeah, and if you know your provider or, you know, if you have an OB or a licensed midwife and they've given you a specific date and you're approaching it and you're approaching it and like labor hasn't started and then you're, you know, you're stressing out, you're worried, you're in your head about, you know, what might happen um when that day comes versus being in a state of surrender and, you know, just waiting for things to unfold.

Um yeah, no one really knows or has agreed upon what kickstarts labor spontaneously, but for the most part, you know, people agree that it is it has to do with like a specific protein that the baby releases when and it signals that they're um ready to live in the outside world. Um and so it's I love that it's something that the baby uh kickstarts um you know, to signal let's do this. Um and so yeah, so back to the intervention, right? It can look a lot of different ways and to your point, like just stepping inside a medical facility is already intervening with that process.

If birth hasn't started spontaneously or maybe it has started spontaneously, but you're still stepping into this environment, that's an interference itself. Um you know, talking to strangers, being under bright lights, not being allowed to eat potentially, um that's going to put the woman into a stress response like on a cellular level. Um and, you know, just by those things of introducing yourself to strangers, filling out paperwork, trying to advocate for yourself, that stress response is going to slow down labor. Um your body is protecting you. You know, it's like coding the environment as if it, you know, detects stress, then okay, then this environment isn't necessarily safe to release the baby, like let's slow things down and wait to recalibrate things.

Um and if labor slow quote unquote slows down in a hospital setting, like you're on a timetable and they can't really have women laboring for like 20, 30, 40, 60 hours in their rooms. Um and so they're going to jump to try to speed things up um some way or another. And it might start, you know, it can look a lot of different ways, but when you look at the cascade of interventions, it most likely includes um the drug pitocin, which is synthetic oxytocin that your body naturally creates. And so pitocin's what like will help speed things up. It's a constant drip and it goes straight to the bloodstream and it um is synthetic.

So it's a synthetic version of the natural hormone oxytocin that your body creates. Um and the natural oxytocin that your body creates crosses the blood-brain barrier and so it also acts as a pain reliever in the body. But pitocin is the synthetic form and it goes straight into your bloodstream and it doesn't cross that barrier, so it doesn't have that same effect. Um it's constant, whereas oxytocin in the body is released in pulses and waves. So it comes, it goes. Pitocin's constant, so it's going to create stronger contractions that are closer and closer together. Um and because it doesn't have that same um fear-reducing, pain-relieving effect, it's going to be perceived as more painful.

Um so then that leads to the woman, rightfully so, asking for pain medication. And like pain medication for the most part, it's going to be an epidural. An epidural um numbs the woman from the waist down and once you have an epidural, even if you're not like totally fully numb, like maybe you still have some sensation, maybe you can move your legs, um you are confined to the bed because your liability, if they've given you an epidural and you're like walking around, you might fall. So you're confined to the bed, you're given a catheter, you can't get up and use the restroom.

Um so it's harder for you to move around. Um you're going to need help to move from side to side. Um and as we know, movement, you know, it's just common sense, is going to help um labor. It's going to help the baby trying to move into your pelvis. Um so that right there is going to um most likely slow things down. Um and then things have slowed down again in a hospital. Since you're on this timetable, they're constantly doing um cervical checks. So they are checking your cervix to see how far you're open and that's how they're measuring like have things slowed down or not.

And once things have slowed down, they want to up the pitocin, right? Just to like get things moving again. So then you get more pitocin and then more pitocin, more epidural. And like nurses are literally like in the nurse's station like looking at the monitors and like playing the balancing game of like how much pitocin to give you then to up the epidural to like then to give you a cervical check, how much time has passed to like they're literally managing this experience that they've started to intervene with. Um in the hospital, it's also routine um to be on constant uh heart monitors.

So it's routine for you for them to do like to have a fetal heart rate monitor. So they're monitoring the um baby's heart rate and they're monitoring your heart rate. And all side note here that since that technology has been introduced into um the medical model, it hasn't improved any rate. It hasn't been proven to help any outcomes. It has only been shown to increase the cesarean rate. And this is all stuff you can look up. Um it just leads to more surgery. But yet it's still a technology and a machine that's used. And so because they're monitoring the heart rate and the woman's heart rate and the pitocin's constant, it's strong, what usually happens is then they start to see on the monitors that the fetal heart rate starts to drop.

And the doctor comes in, they tell the woman that the baby's not tolerating labor well, they're having a hard time, their heart rate's dropping, they're really concerned. Um if things don't speed along within the next couple hours, we're going to have to start talking about surgery. More stress, they come back later and, you know, if a doctor is telling you that your baby is in danger, they're not sure how much longer they can tolerate these contractions, um you know, that's going to then lead to surgery. And then the woman, the story in that narrative is one that, you know, thank God I was in the hospital, like my baby wasn't tolerating labor, they had a hard time, their heart rate was dropping and like I had to be rushed to the OR and thank God that um they were there because they saved my baby.

When in reality, all of those interventions and all of what they did to her is what caused the surgery in the first place. You know, and who knows what what could have happened if she went into birth spontaneously or if none of those interventions were engaged with. I think more often than not, things would have looked really differently. And so yeah, that's an overview of the cascade of intervention. And obviously there's like a lot of nuance in there and it can look a lot of different ways, but I think that gives you a good idea as to what that can look like.

And I think from looking at it from the physiological perspective, the opposite side of like how are things supposed to happen in the absence of that, like um uh this woman, Sarah Buckley, she's an Australian doctor, she talks a lot about physiological birth and she has a lot of research on it and she um talks about like three components to support the optimal hormonal flow. So how do you support physiological birth and what is needed? And she says that um those three things are safety, so a feeling of being safe like on a cellular level, so no stressors in the environment, uh darkness, um and privacy, so a feeling of being undisturbed.

And those three things right there, safety, you know, in a in that setting where you're around strangers, you're filling out paperwork, nurses are switching every four hours, like does that cue the body true safety? Not necessarily. Darkness, you're in a clinical setting, there's bright lights, um doctors are doing cervical checks, they want to see what's happening. So, you know, you're not in darkness. Um and privacy, a feeling of being unobserved. You're on a timetable and um not private, not in a private space there. So um it's not the most conducive environment for the optimal flow of birth. To that note, I I mean there's just so many things that you've told me, that you've shared with me and explained to me that have just have I've had these like light bulb moments.

And I know we can't get into everything because we're trying to have this not be five hours, but there's a couple that I just want you to just touch on, the cord cutting and the cleaning off of the the baby's skin, um those two interventions. Okay, I'll start with the cord. So the baby is connected to the placenta this entire time for those, you know, however many weeks they've been in your womb. They are receiving oxygen through the cord. Their lungs aren't working quite yet. So when they're born, um you know, they're still receiving their oxygen through that cord as they're expanding their lungs, they're taking their first breaths um and they're getting the transfer of all of that blood that's in the placenta in their cord um into their little bodies.

And what is routine in hospitals is baby comes out, you cut the cord immediately and you cut their life force, you're cutting their oxygen supply when they're trying to, you know, expand their lungs. Yeah, when they're literally transition transitioning to life. And then what happens is um yeah, you're cutting off their blood supply, you're cutting their oxygen prematurely. And then perhaps then the baby is struggling to breathe and then they're taken over, they're given oxygen in a little machine, they're taking taken over to a warmer and they're being helped to breathe when all of that could and and that's very common um and all of that could have been avoided if you just left the cord intact.

Delayed cord clamping, there's a lot of research around it and again going back to every provider practices differently. Like if you just if you are in a hospital setting and, you know, you request delayed cord clamping, that means something different to every single provider. I think the standard is 30 seconds in a hospital. So if they're like, yeah, we do delayed cord clamping and what that actually means is 30 seconds when um there's a lot of research behind waiting until the cord is done pulsating for when all of the blood is transferred into the baby's body. Um and so yeah, just wanted to make that distinction too of like even if you are in the hospital, like you have to be extra specific as to what you're referring to when you're requesting delayed cord clamping.

When a baby is born, they're born with um like a coating on their body, um that's called vernix. And that um vernix has a lot of information in it. It's, you know, protecting their body as they're transitioning to air. Um it's keeping their body moisturized. It also is, you know, when the baby is put on the mother's chest um like from an olfactory perspective, there's um pheromones being exchanged and information about the baby's um immune system and microbiome, like that's being exchanged with the mother. Um and it's essentially like a tool for communication between the two of them. And that is essentially wiped off in a routine setting in a hospital.

Baby comes out and those like blankets that I swear haven't been like updated in years, like the white blanket with like those stripes that I'm sure you've seen pictures of, that rough blanket is taken and like rubbed all over the baby and all of that information is wiped away. And then the baby is put on the mother's chest nice and clean because we are clean and we don't want to see blood and we just want to pretend that we're not animals, that we're not mammals. Yeah, and um I think even just with the last however long it was, 30 minutes of a short, short, short, very, very condensed explanation of all this, one can very clearly start to see that there's a rhythm with physiological birth.

It's that natural rhythm of the body and when that rhythm is messed with, we create distortion that then needs to be more messed with because then it's all wonky, it's been it's been thrown off balance. The original pure song that was being sung is now like out of tune and everything's just um wobbly. And so that in and of itself explains the benefit of a physiological birth. And birth is so much more than just, you know, just the physical aspect of it. It's more than just understanding how the body works. That's just one portion of it. And um you know, from the medical perspective, um it's treated just as a physical event that you can measure and manage.

It doesn't take into account the woman's mental and spiritual state, all of what they're concerned with. And like we've all heard, all that matters is a healthy baby and a healthy um mother. That's all that matters. Um and that explains that medical perspective, I think so clearly. And of course that matters, right? We want to survive and we want our babies to live. Um of course, but like is it all that matters? It's just negating how big of a transformation that is um and only being concerned with a live outcome is such a disservice to the full immensity um of birth.

And it certainly doesn't take into consideration the the spiritual component of of that. And that mind-body connection preparation side of birth, I think um is so important and it's something that's often overlooked when you're trying to understand all of this education and information and you're trying to like learn all of these things and um figure out like what your birth preferences are and all this stuff and um the spiritual side of it, I think is why I'm so excited to be hosting this retreat with you um you know, so that we can integrate that portion in our emotional bodies into the preparation of birth, of motherhood.

Yeah, I feel like it was such a natural pairing when we decided to do this together because the tools that I have learned, that I practice, that the modalities I've been trained in lend themselves so naturally to women who are preparing or thinking about birth or learning this information for the first time. Um on this podcast, I never really talk too much about my work in terms of my offerings. So I want to give like a brief TL;DR of what I've been studying. I believe I've talked about the Tibetan Buddhism mindfulness that I've that I've studied, but over the last few years, I've really immersed myself in shamanic practices and studying core shamanism, both with a mentor of mine, but also just through different trainings and other teachers and workshops and books and my own practice.

And I feel called to share that with people. And so part of the things that I'll be sharing at the retreat is dreamwork practice, shamanic journeying, and rose medicine. So I think something that would be helpful to describe is uh the concept of core shamanism, which um is essentially a a zoomed out view of shamanic practices around the entire globe. So when we look through the lens of core shamanism, we're identifying patterns within all of the shamanic peoples of all continents. And when we look through that lens, we find a lot of patterns and commonalities. And it's beautiful because, you know, at least

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from what we know these these peoples didn't have contact with them, right? The internet didn't exist. We, you know, we weren't traveling swiftly. However, we can observe all of these ancient tools and practices and modalities that seem to be core to the human species. And it's a beautiful practice, these practices, because we are all so connected to them, you know, through our ancestors and through our roots, no matter who we are, because because these practices have been found, you know, in different subtleties, different shapes or forms, but they've been found over and over again, time and time again through all of these cultures.

So, uh what are the things we consider here um in core shamanism is uh plant medicines, which is something that we'll be talking about the at the retreat. Um we'll be working with rose medicine. Um the drum. So the sound the instrument of the drum has been used across all continents to achieve altered states of consciousness. So we've found drums everywhere and so when we use the drum, we're connecting to our ancestors. So I'll I'm going to bring my drum to the retreat and we're going to practice something called shamanic journeying, which is essentially really uh just tapping into your imagination and allowing your intuition, your more spiritual senses to gather information that is helpful for you in whatever stage of life that you're in through messages from spirit guides, through messages from ancestors, through uh visions and emotions, um sounds that can assist us in our journey.

We um we'll be doing dream work. So again, in core shamanism, dream work is something that is seen um throughout the ages, throughout different peoples, and dream work can be something really beautiful to integrate into this part of womanhood when you're kind of considering having children or you have children or you're you're pregnant because we can very sovereignly access parts of us that are coming up to be healed or assistance with healing. We can connect with our future baby. Dream work is something that can be integrated into your daily life quite easily. So we'll talk about what that practice looks like.

We'll do um we'll do shamanic journeying, which is also called active dream work too. So what I was previously talking about, sometimes that's talked talked about as active dream work because it's essentially going into a lucid dream except you're, you know, you're not all the way sleeping. You're you're awake and conscious. So the rose medicine ceremony that we'll do um I work with rose spirit very closely. It's one of the plants that has been the loudest for me in stepping into this relationship with plant consciousness. Um that is one of the plants that really stepped forward to me and really invited me to work with her.

Even this type of language speaks to our bodies and our intuitions when we start to speak to plants with and speak of plants with reverence and with care and with this communal like integrated type of relation, we start to feel what we know and we know that connection. Like our ancestors preserved that connection and in modern times we've we've fallen out of that connection with nature, which is what you so clearly described with the hospital system versus physiological birth. And that story is a common story. We see that across all verticals. You know, birth is just one of the many verticals we see that.

Um and relation with our food and our environment is another example, you know? And so bringing in that work with rose into this retreat was something that I felt was just so so natural and so needed because this is this is all stuff that we can all take home, that we can all practice on our own, and that we all have access to. Like these are our birthrights. Um and we live in a time where when we are free to practice these things. You know, many of our ancestors were killed for practicing these things um which is where were burned, you know?

Those were essentially herbalists who were burned because they were practicing these things. Um you know, indigenous tribes were decimated over these very core parts of our being. And so since we've lost all this, we we have so much anxiety and depression and angst and existential dread and disease. And that's been my path towards it because I had just for a majority of my life felt so out of balance and depressed and lost and confused and in need of health and just not knowing what to do. And when I would go to a doctor, I would just get handed or offered antidepressants, which was not my path.

I feel like I intuitively knew that was not going to fix my problem. What I'm getting at is that part of my healing journey has been integrating and incorporating these mindsets and these tools and these practices. And I want to share them with people here at this retreat because I think that they can be woven in the the fabric of this part of a woman's journey so seamlessly and they're so helpful in that process. Something you've mentioned before is that we have in modern society removed the rights of passage. And so when we remove rights of passage, when we remove ceremony from all of these key turning points in our lives and we've removed community, there's this like discombobulated immaturity and a a lostness that we feel, right?

When we don't have people to look to, elders to ask, you know, um ceremonies to welcome us into an ushering of a new phase, you know? What do we have? We have commercialized over-the-top weddings. We have um you know, baby showers where we play silly games, corny little games, and everything's blue or pink. Like it's just, you know, it's and of course like if you, you know, a wedding can be beautiful, a baby shower can be beautiful, and in a way it's kind of holding down the fort right now because it's holding down it's holding down a form of ceremony when we don't have any really.

Um so I'm not trying to like talk shit about those things, but I'm trying to paint the contrast of like, you know, when you look at different cultures, even to this day outside of the of the United States, um there's cultures that sing. You know, I remember you told me of a friend who I think was Greek, the friend who like part of their ceremony was it was for her wedding, right? It was for her wedding and part of I think it was a bridal shower um and a tradition there was to gather all of the women together um and spend the day singing.

And it was just singing whatever came up for them in the moment, well wishes to the bride. Um yeah, and that's just so beautiful. That's something that's been preserved, right? As a form of a rite of passage, as a form of celebrating the ceremony um versus what we see yeah, that has been lost in the states. And in many other countries too. Um and um but I guess I mentioned that because it's been really lost here. And you know, other countries have have, you know, some uh semblance on that like root those like root practices, but we've really lost them here.

And I also think that there's this um misunderstanding too with shamanic practices where it can be this very like eye-rolly type of of word. Um and while I think it is in my personal opinion inappropriate to call yourself a shaman if you are not from a lineage or a tribe that has like ushered you in as such, um I am a shamanic practitioner and I encourage all people to be shamanic practitioners, you know, even just for yourself, right? This doesn't mean you have to like do it for other people, but for yourself, you know? Being a shamanic practitioner is essentially connecting to the land, connecting to the spirit realm, connecting to the magic that is um the dream world, um and and our our waking life as well.

It's integrating the energetic, spiritual, intuitive side that the feminine side that we all kind of forget about and don't treat we don't treat it as equal to the masculine side, right? We we like books and we like universities and college educations and very lined up hierarchical careers and uh doing and producing and like instructions and predictability, um which is why we have the hospital system now, you know? It was part of that like prioritizing money, efficiency, um control and predictability. Yeah. Um and the feminine is honoring the body, it's honoring nature's organic processes. And when we do that, we come back into nature's song.

And so all of the work that I'll be guiding at the retreat is singing that song with people in the hopes that they'll join me and then we all know the song and then we go off home and we have our songs. And we sing those songs and those songs are then echoed in our communities. Yeah. That was a beautiful explanation and you know, in it's kind of like you mentioned, it can feel like not necessarily eye-rolly, but maybe just like hard to understand what you mean when you say shamanic practices. And we'll be learning about that, you know? But like the way I interpret it in its like simplest sense is just understanding how to connect back to ourselves, how to understand who we are, understand our feelings, um understand our intuition, um how to heal certain things that we might not even know were there, how to um express ourselves, how to use our voice, how to ask for what we want, how to feel confident in that, you know?

Like in its simplest form, like that's how it manifests day-to-day, right? Doing this work is so that you can feel um connected to yourself and feel in integrity and in tune with your intuition to live in alignment with the way you want to live your life. And how does that not relate to birth and preparing for that event and to, you know, enter into motherhood um with that knowledge? You know, it's uh so connected. Yes, it it's um yeah, very intertwined. Um and and it it's part of what we're intending for this retreat is something we keep saying is bringing back the spirituality into the birth process because we've gotten into this routine rhythm of it being this like step-by-step thing and it's really so um such an intuitive, sensitive um inward time.

And if we can prepare for the birth portal, right? This like time period of conception to to birth, um if we can prepare for that, why wouldn't we, you know? And and um something I loved that um I heard somebody say was that, you know, we think of conceiving as like that's week zero and then it's week one, week two, week three, you know, trimester one. And when in actuality like our whole life is week zero, right? If if we end up deciding to go into motherhood, your mental, physical, emotional, spiritual health, your entire life is going to affect positively and negatively or just affect your baby and affect your your birth.

It's going to influence it. It has everything to do with it. I mean, it's just what you are replicates, right? And we just like we kind of move forward and reproduce in these flows. And if we can go into the flow with more feminine wisdom, not just masculine knowledge, we can perhaps start to create more balanced change in our lives, in our communities, you know, and ultimately affecting the way that we build societies and the way that we interact with each other. Yeah, and what you just mentioned made me think of when you mentioned the birth portal of, you know, it being this ultimate unknown, you know?

And that can be a really hard thing to look at and accept of being in the state of not necessarily knowing what's going to happen. Um you know, and having all of these tools and these practices that you're going to be sharing like helps us trust in nature and have like develop a relationship with her, with ourselves, with our inner worlds to be okay sitting in that unknowing, right? And being able to surrender to whatever may come up and however it may unfold. And it's the complete opposite of wanting to control everything, thinking you can control everything, measuring it, you know, putting these guardrails around things because, you know, it's scary to give up control and acknowledge that um, you know, we can't control everything.

Yeah, and that's what these practice uh these practices assist us with is we go into the dark. Um however, we go into the dark prepared or prepared and protected with the wisdom that has been passed down through indigenous peoples over time. So that's part of what I'll be talking about is how how do we go into the darkness in these practices? How do we increase intuition and trust? And when we start to step into those waters, into what some people call the dark feminine, and by dark feminine I don't mean shadow feminine, I mean the like the dark darkness of the womb, right?

Of the womb of creation, that darkness. When we go into those waters, when we go into that frequency, we start to get to know it. And so then it's not a stranger to us. And when we're in the birth portal, then we can have a sense of familiarity even though it's obviously unique and special, but we have that familiarity. And I would also argue that this is something that is just going to be helpful throughout all of life for men and women too, you know? This is going into the darkness of the womb in an abstract sense is where healing happens.

I mean, that's when we're willing to look at our shadow, we're willing to look at our pain, we're willing to look at our trauma. And through looking at it and shining that light, we release it. But we can't shine that light if we're unwilling to look at it and go there. Um so we'll talk about that more at the retreat, but I guess that's just to give a little bit of a uh, you know, high-level overview of of what that portion of the retreat will be, what the healing and integration portion will be. Yeah, and just how they're so woven together.

Yeah. So uh something we wanted to share too is a discount code for the retreat. It'll be U and I and that will get you $100 off. We have our web page with all of the information on where we're going to be. It's going to be May 7th through 11th in Sayulita, Mexico, a beautiful space overlooking the ocean. Um yeah, it's going to be pretty awesome. And if you're curious and not sure if this is for you, we also have on the on the booking link, we also have a Calendly link where you can book a a video call with myself and Adriana to ask your questions, to talk about your individual needs and wants and see if it aligns with you.

So you're welcome to do that as well.

SOURCE

https://anchor.fm/s/f560da74/podcast/rss

SHAMANISM AND LUCID DREAMING WITH KAI ALTAIR

UNI | Gabriela Parada and Kai Altair | October 2, 2020

Audio duration: 48:07

FIRST-PASS TRANSCRIPT DRAFT - NOT PUBLISHED

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The recording describes the speakers' spiritual views and historical services. It is not health guidance. Links and offers spoken in 2020 may no longer be current. Historical social-account wording is retained here solely for transcript review; do not copy it into current contact details or publish it without review.

TRANSCRIPT

Welcome to the You and I podcast. I'm your host, Gabby Parada. You and I is a portal for art and conversation that propels unity consciousness, a state of being that is rooted in the awareness of you and I as one. Here we explore unity through the people on this earth that are helping us understand ourselves, our planet, and each other through a unique lens. Our heartfelt mission is to help all beings everywhere come to the realization that we are all unique and unified at the same time. We are you and I. Hi. Hello. I'm so happy to have you. You're a mentor of mine and I so value each and every time we speak together because I feel like you've been such a helping hand for me in my spiritual journey and I'm filled with so much happiness at the thought of being able to introduce you to perhaps people that don't know about you.

So the first question I'd like to ask you is how are you bringing more unity into the world? Well, I just want to start by saying thank you to you for having me and for your kind words. It means so much to meet other like-minded people and to walk on the path with them and certainly an honor to be called your mentor. And unity, I feel that it must be that it's within my closest family units and communities. You know, sometimes our very closest relationships and our most intimate experiences with people can be the ones that are sometimes most difficult or overlooked when we think of something like unity.

And we're looking at these like really broad strokes of, you know, cultural sections, cross sections of humanity. But really when I hear you say the word unity, I'm thinking of just the different challenges and triumphs that I have faced. I mean, in the past months of my life, even past days somehow. And I would say that the thing that I do in order to bring more unity to my close family and friend and partner circles is to really slow down and try to put myself in the other person's place. And to try to not move into a place of aversion when something is difficult and push away when something is difficult, but to kind of just breathe into a feeling of difficulty.

And I think also being mindful of my reactions, just the little tiny minuscule reactions that we can have of irritation or aggression or a feeling of judgment towards someone. And that seems like it can happen again with the closest people in our world and you know, in many of the great spiritual paths, we're taught that we have to begin first with ourselves and then in our closest communities if we're going to build an enlightened society. So making people feel comfortable who are close to me, making people feel loved who are close to me, and helping them to feel safe and helping them to shine when they're in my closest world.

Yeah, that's such a good reminder because I feel like I sometimes get so, well, I get so caught up in like, okay, how do I help the world? Like what is my calling? What is my purpose? And it's so, it can feel so grand and like planetary. And then you forget that it literally means like how you treat yourself and how you treat the person you're closest to and living with. And that if everybody did that, that's how it is created. And then other things, you know, like in, that's like the super intimate levels. And then it's like, how do we interact with the store clerk?

Like do we make eye contact? And like really kind of there's a thing that can happen that I'm sure you've noticed like when you're in the checkout lane at the grocery store and like it must be such a difficult job to have to be the person who does grocery checkout. And like a lot of times I notice a lot of people who are working and let's just say that position like they're kind of this shutdown thing where they're trying to make it through the day and I know it must be such hard work. And like they don't really expect for someone to be like, hey, how's it going?

Or like even like make an eye contact that is genuine or to be like, like pausing and breathing long enough to say to yourself, that's a human being and they look like they're having a hard day and just kind of meeting them in that space. And those non-intimate interactions are also ways that we build an enlightened society and encourage unity between humans too. So it's like from the most intimate to the kind of seemingly most far away if someone we're just crossing and passing. And we get those opportunities a lot in New York City to to not shut down and just like be open to a connection with a stranger that's just soft and genuine in its own way.

Totally. And I've been feeling into that a lot more lately too because I mean, we're not interacting with people on a daily basis as much as we're used to. And also now we don't have the smile to tune into. Like the facial expression is not there. So we really communicating with our eyes. And so I've been trying to be a lot more mindful of that. But it's also, it's interesting to see how we all shut down though. Like most people are looking at the ground or their phone even still, even at a time when we're like craving human interaction, even if we're not, I guess maybe we're not all conscious of that, but I mean, it's human nature.

Yeah, and it, I mean, I can't say like, you know, I can say this to you in this interview like, oh, we should all connect, but there's something sometimes in us that's like we're doing it to kind of insulate ourselves or we're feeling like we don't have the energy. It's not, we're not really taught or encouraged to interact in that way. So even if it's our intention as people who are hoping to build unity in our culture or you know, spread more vibration of goodness, some days, you know, we'll be like, oh, we're having a bad day that day too and we're just like can't even deal and like, you know, it just becomes insidious, yeah.

Totally. And also yeah, like what you're getting at, the non-duality of it of like, okay, to be a good person doesn't mean you're always making eye contact and smiling outside. Sometimes you, you have to take care of yourself and signal that you are not interacting today and that's okay too. And the non-judgment that comes with that because when someone's not making eye contact with you or saying hello or being friendly at the checkout, like it's not, we don't know what they're going through, you know, it's like it's not about a lot of, yeah, a lot of, I've been feeling into a lot of the unconditional love, non-judgment lately too because everyone is dealing with all of this in such a unique way that is right for them and we just have to trust that whatever they're thinking, feeling, doing and how they're reacting is right for them on their path and that's where they're at and it's going to be different than.

Yeah, and everybody's really doing the best they can in each moment, you know, and we don't know, like you said, we don't know what's going on behind their little skin space suit that they're wearing around. Yeah, okay, I love that you just said that because that segues us into, I want to talk about your work and shamanism and dream work and yourself as a musician and artist. So maybe you could introduce us to your world. Well, because all those topics that you, those things that I do, you just mentioned, seem like they come from all over the place. I feel like I might like to put them within the realm of a more ancient time of our ancestors.

And there may have been certain people within the community or the village or the tribe who carried all of those skill sets. Those people throughout different moments in human history all had different names. Shaman is a name that we're kind of using to blanket that gets thrown around a lot these days. But it's a Siberian word that means one who sees in the dark. The role of this person was often and is often to travel from our world into non-ordinary reality or the realm of spirit and come back with important information for their community to help interpret and understand not only their own dreams but people's dreams within their community, to be able to have clear communication with the natural world around them, the speaking world, both through understanding things about animals and plants, but also through being able to read signs and synchronicities and work in all different kinds of oracular ways.

And then often all of those experiences that person had needed to be interpreted and shared with the community. And that was often or is often done through song and dance and play acting and a way of storytelling that helps to engage the imagination of the people so that they can then be able to take part in the mystery. And there can be a feeling of wholeness and of connection to the divine for all and thereby creating balance for the community as a whole and not just being a thing that only that one person has access to. So often the goal of a shamanic practitioner today is to help to connect others to their own helping spirits, to understanding their own dreams.

And for myself, it's often about engaging imagination and play. And that comes through in my music and it comes through in a lot of the performance that I've done over the years. And right now the music that I make is usually or always inspired by my experiences in dreaming and non-ordinary reality. And there's two tracks of sound that I make but both very combined. One is acoustic sacred music that is used in sound meditation situations and within my healing practice where I'm creating sounds over the body in order to move stuck energy and create deep states of relaxation. And then I have another project called Azov which is electronic music that incorporates a lot of rhythms and percussion from around the world.

And we create music for transformational festivals and ecstatic dance gatherings where people are intending to move their bodies to, you know, move into an ecstatic state and to use dance and rhythm and sound as a means of of personal healing, of inspiration. So it's always my intention in whatever I do to invite others to peek behind the veil and to also invite those who reside behind the veil to peek at us. So I really consider myself a bridge between the worlds. And if I had to really name the thing that I feel I've been given as a gift to carry as my medicine in this world, it's to be that bridge.

And it's my greatest intention to help others get their Wi-Fi up in between our world and the unseen. And for the unseen to also be able to bring their Wi-Fi to us through sound, through movement, through healing. Yeah, you've really helped me connect to the idea of spirit both within myself and the spirit world in general, whether it be plants or animals or spirits. You really helped me understand and get comfortable with the idea of death and spirits that have passed on. I'm wondering if maybe you can explain a little bit about the three realms. Absolutely. So I feel like this is a good moment to talk about just the uniqueness of human consciousness and maybe it's not even unique or it's the uniformity in some ways of what we've found in the stories of human consciousness on nearly every continent deep within the wells of our psycho-spiritual religious histories.

And Clarissa Pincola Estes says that we all come from lost tribes no matter what our, whatever our heritage is. And so you know, often there's a thought that only people with native American heritage or Australian aborigine or certain kinds of African lineages are people who have access to what we might think of as a shamanic tradition. But really all across human history we see this. Sometimes we have to dig a little bit further back for, you know, a western European shamanic quote-unquote history or story. However, the idea of the three realms is very cross-cultural. And this talks about the ways that our non-ordinary reality or spirit realm or realm behind the veil is understood to be organized for travelers moving from our ordinary realm into the realm of spirit.

And it's a generalization because certainly there are infinite and unknowable mysterious dimensions of being beyond this one. However, as we travel just like we might, I don't know, when we look at a big, if we're looking at a map, we're seeing, okay, the borders of this country are here and this state is here, but we're not seeing like all the way down inside the finite realm of the forest that might be actually on the land there in that map. So the idea of the three realms is kind of like a map that gives us a broad understanding of how we have found these realms to be organized.

The lower realm, the realm beneath our world, which can be reached in a shamanic journey through entering and opening in the earth or the roots of a tree, is thought to be the realm of the animals. This is a place where we would classically journey to meet an animal ally. It's an earthly realm in which it's like the earth beneath our earth. The middle realm is an interesting realm because it's the world behind our waking world and it is inhabited by nature spirits and elementals, something like we might think of the realm of fairy or the gentry. And also the middle world is comprised of human souls who have not been able to successfully make the crossing after death, after their physical bodies have died and their spirit body is ready to move into the light.

It's quite common fact that there's some sort of a waylay in that process unfortunately. In the middle world we might find what we think of as ghosts or suffering beings. And for that reason sometimes the middle can be thought of as a little dangerous or tricky because of that. And so when traveling in the middle world, we definitely want to travel under the protection of our helping spirits and our animal allies and we want to move respectfully knowing that beings in the middle world don't always even know why or how they got there. So the middle world is like our existing world and it's like right now and it's coexisting with also the unseen layers of energy which are what you would categorize as ghosts and the layer of like plant consciousness, animal consciousness that is on this earth too.

And infinite realms outwards, there's so many dimensional spaces. It also comprises what we would think of as aliens and star beings and all of the realms that are comprised within our atmosphere and outer space that's still not considered the upper world. All of that, the realm of the seen material world that we can touch and feel has a dimensional and inner dimensional, multidimensional space within and around it that would be considered part of a middle world experience. So middle world experiences are actually quite common to have as a human being, you know, like it may be one of our more common experiences that we might have unknowingly or accidentally sometimes.

So we're not considered to be in the middle world, but it's like we live in the middle world but we don't see the like energy behind the veil of the middle world. Right, unless we're entering into a shamanic state of consciousness somehow. And sometimes that can be a tricksy thing, right? So like whether it's like while we're starting to dream or drift, if we're going into a natural trance state of some kind, whether we mean to or not, you know, we can induce that with the sound of a drum or with plant medicine or we can induce it with dancing.

It can sometimes, a middle world experience could be induced quote-unquote accidentally and not just really the word I'm looking for, but like, you know, if someone has a mental illness, they may be more sensitive to non-ordinary occurrences within, let's call it behind the veil of the middle world. And then sometimes that mental illness that's made them more sensitive to that, it could be that they can't, they've lost the ability to differentiate between what is ordinary reality and what is non-ordinary reality and the two start to blend together. So the difference here, you know, when we're looking at like where the line of madness can be drawn, it's being able and where like, you know, there's a saying that the shaman swims in the same ocean that the madman drowns in.

And so it's really about being very grounded and having a strong understanding of where ordinary reality ends and non-ordinary reality begins, being able to go and then come back soundly and being able to ask our consciousness to then return to an ordinary state of consciousness and to not drift back and forth kind of uncontrollably, you know, and wouldn't necessarily make you a madman to drift, but I think we can probably all think of one or two people we've met in our lives that the line got a little fuzzy and we just like they were a little ungrounded or, you know, not all there or whatever.

Yeah, in from like a shamanic point of view, are certain or maybe all what we would categorize mental illnesses, are they, is it basically, because sometimes I think of like, okay, like schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, are they tapping into multidimensionality and multiple parallel realities? But since our society doesn't teach, you know, we don't grow up thinking about that or being taught that, are they just basically tapping into that and they haven't been kind of taught to like work with their gifts? Is there something around that or what is your opinion there? Well, my opinion is it's a totally case-by-case basis.

And since I'm not, you know, a trained doctor who can make diagnosis of anyone, I couldn't fully say. However, I do know that traditionally in more ancient times, there was an effort to train people or to assist them in understanding their gifts. But it really, like I said, it really depends, you know, how extreme it is. And certainly if someone's capacity for experiencing the other worlds was very great, but they couldn't differentiate between which is which, it still would be overwhelming no matter how much training, you know. So I feel like there's sometimes there's a neurological component, you know. So I can't say, I can say I've certainly, you know, I've worked a lot with the elderly and with people with Alzheimer's and dementia.

And I certainly had the experience of being with elderly people who are close to death and experiencing strong symptoms of dementia. And there have definitely been moments that I could feel that part of what their symptoms and experience was had to do with an opening of their non-ordinary senses and not having a way to navigate it. And certainly that's something that can occur as we get closer to death and definitely something that occurs with lots of the different illnesses that cause symptoms of dementia. So I know it's a huge topic and a segue, but I do think that there's something there that we can all continue to be open to discovering.

And diagnosis is a strange thing that I hope that we can become more sensitive about in the future. So you were talking about the middle realm and I do want to touch on where does dream state live? Is it middle realm? It could be in any realm actually. Sure, yeah, dreaming takes us into, you know, there's all different kinds of dreams that we can have. And so we can really have an ordinary dream that is just processing our day. We could have a middle realm dream where we kind of wake up within the room in our dream body that we're in and then we're starting to walk around the room, we're experiencing our space within the dream.

That would definitely be kind of like a middle world experiences experience. But then a dream could also lead us into the upper world where we're meeting with a great, you know, divine being of the light who shares a healing energy with us or shares sound or just gives us an experience of such beauty and all that, you know, we've truly had. And one of my teachers, Robert Moss, calls those the big dreams. And often people can really remember the big dreams even if they're not people who have a lot of strong dream recall. And what he teaches in the school of active dreaming is that in dreaming we do have the opportunity to move into great vast realms beyond.

It's a place that even if you're not a trained practitioner, you can have the opportunity to travel through all of the realms and experience your own helping spirits and benevolent ancestors who often can calling in dreams. And so the upper realm is the ancestral realm? Well, the upper realm is the realm that is associated with high guides and teachers. And again, we're talking about vast unknowable mysteries of unknowable infinite dimensions. And so what in many shamanic traditions it is considered a place of great benevolence, it can be a place that our ancestors move towards. It's a place that we might associate with gods and goddesses and high teachers and ascended masters and angelic beings.

And usually it's a place that we intend to journey to with the assistance of our animal allies. So there's usually a process in which one connects first with animal allies so that they can then be taken into the upper realms and help to find these beings and teachers who could then become further allies. Yeah, so basically within these three realms, you're saying that we have access to all of them and it's through shamanic journeying, right? Through the beat of a drum or a sacred sound instrument or lucid dreaming, active dream work. Which active dreaming, which is Robert Moss's technique, is a shamanic journey technique with this, we journey with the sound of the drum.

And the sound of the drum induces a natural trance state. It helps the brain waves move into the theta brain wave band into the visionary state or the hypnogogic zone, the place just between asleep and awake. And it's often the place that we'll notice just as we're falling asleep, we'll start to even be able to tell we're dreaming before we kind of honk out and move into a deeper state. And it can be reached through dancing, it can be reached through certain plants and mushrooms. And interestingly enough, though, the drum has been the most reliable source for humanity to induce the natural trance state because of the regions of the world.

And you know, often there's this thought of like, oh, the shamans are all taking the psychedelics. But in fact, you know, the drum is always been more prevalent and reliable source for inducing the shamanic state of consciousness because there's just not always been plants and mushrooms available in the regions of the world that people wish to reside within non-ordinary reality, receive important practical information for their lives and be connected deeply to dreaming, whether it's the region or the weather or simply it just not being a part of a cultural context for people. But the drum has actually been so widely used throughout so many cultures throughout all of human history for this purpose that it's really, it's a really beautiful thing to be able to connect with in that way.

Yeah, and I've had the pleasure of having you guide me through a shamanic journey with the drum and I know that you use it a lot in your one-on-one sessions. But for people who maybe are new to the ideas of all of this and maybe want something to just experiment with on their own, could you maybe talk a little bit about the power of dreams and becoming lucid in dreams and how powerful that can be? Sure. In dreaming we have such a great opportunity to move beyond anything that we've ever been able to imagine while waking. And we also have the opportunity to touch such great sources of healing and inspiration and personal power and connect to our helping spirits and benevolent ancestors.

And like I mentioned before, it's often the big dreams, the big memorable ones that really leave us feeling moved upon awakening in the morning that start to become a call for us, start to make us think, hey, maybe I should start paying a little bit closer attention to this dream stuff. And often those big dreams can start around adolescence. It's often a time when dreams start to really take off. Some people are really strong dreamers from even earlier ages. But if we nourish and encourage our dreaming like a practice, like one would practice piano or yoga or meditation, then we can really become more and more adept at it.

In fact, we can even, like you mentioned, find ourselves within dreams and become lucid, which is to be within the dream and realize that we're dreaming. And that's, you know, that's one of the trickier of all the practices. But with time, with careful attention to the ways and the subtle fluctuations of being able to watch ourselves within not just our sleeping state, but often our waking state, we start to become more sensitive to whether we're dreaming or not. One of the first things that I often recommend for people who would like to become lucid dreamers is to become mindful meditators during the day.

Mindfulness meditation trains our short-term memory and rebuilds neural pathways and helps kind of flex that muscle of the strength of our consciousness to the subtle movements of thought, emotion, energy that we experience throughout the day. And then often that can carry into dreaming. And that's often one of the big helpers in us noticing whether we're dreaming or not. Tips that I have for people who would like to get more in touch with their dreams are first to keep a dream journal. This really helps us start to track our experiences in the night. And it also tells our rational left brain and our short-term memory that dreams are important enough that we want to write them down when we wake up in the morning.

And it starts to actually cause like a muscle memory in the brain and then we start to remember them more often because just simply the fact that we've taken time to journal them. Also setting an intention before you go to sleep at night, it could be an intention as simple as show me what I need to know or to ask for a dream in which you receive healing around a certain topic or advice around a certain topic in your life or to ask to meet an animal ally or to ask for inspiration around a creative project that you might be working on.

Setting an intention is a way that we also kind of prime the dream gates to open. And we want to keep remembering that intention throughout the night. So often there's a moment in the night when we wake up to go to the bathroom or there's a sound outside or, you know, we're kind of tossing and turning. It's quite common that we don't have a solid night state. It's actually the natural way, the natural sleep cycles of coming up and down through wakefulness. Yeah, in fact, between the hours of 4:00 and 6:00 a.m. in settings where there is less light pollution and especially, you know, a couple hundred years ago when there wasn't any light pollution, it was known that the natural sleep cycles of humans are two cycles, two big ones with little ones in between, but that there, people would call it the time of the second sleep, that people would wake up between 4:00 and 6:00 a.m.

and there was a natural wake time. And in fact, in the Iroquois tradition, it was common that everyone in the longhouse would wake up and tell each other their dreams at that moment. And then everybody would go back to sleep. Yeah, I know, so good. So but now our biorhythms are pretty skewed with all the light pollution. But anyways, when we wake, whenever it may be, whether it's for the second sleep or because, you know, a car alarm happens outside, it's an opportunity for us to remember our intention and to ask ourselves, was I dreaming? And if we remember our dreams, it's also an opportunity to record them right then and there.

I really like to record my dreams on my phone and talk them into my voice notes and then I transcribe them later into a document. I know you're a serious dreamer. I mean, it's fascinating. I'm not there yet. I'm still scribbling in the morning, but I mean, that's goals right there. Because you type them out so that you can search certain keywords and see patterns in your dreams, right? That's right, that's right. And then I date them and I give them a title like I wrote a book or a movie and that's a practice from the school of active dreaming as well.

But if you don't have time to be as fastidious as I am since dreaming is my job, you can simply give the dream a title and then a short bulleted list of the main points. Let's see, I would also recommend not waking too quickly in the morning if possible, not waking with the alarm clock. I know it's tricky or having a very soft gentle sound that wakes you and giving yourself, I like to use the snooze button as a shamanic device in order to push snooze and then lay down and say, okay, I've got 10 more minutes and this is going to be the time that I dip back in.

Yeah, because it's often easier for me to do more lucid dreaming in that time period because it's like half waking, half sleep. Yes, the hypnogogic zone is the liftoff zone. That's the place we really get. And that's also the place where we're going to be able to become lucid most easily. So Robert Moss teaches us that if we begin lucid by walking into the dream state in a lucid way, that it's much easier than being already kind of sleeping within the dream and needing to wake up and realize that you're dreaming. I might give one more tip for that lucid moment for the intrepid traveler who really wants to be able to become lucid and know that they're dreaming.

And there's a lot of different ways to make your way there, but one tip that I could leave them with is that we want to look for things that don't normally happen in life. One of the big ones is flying. We aren't normally flying in life, so it's often a moment when we can say, wait a minute, I don't normally fly in ordinary reality, I must be dreaming. And looking for signifiers of things that are just absolutely want to lucid dream and then think back on this, me visiting with a friend who happened to be living in the bathroom of a gas station.

And I was sitting with her in there and I was like, wait a minute, you don't live in the bathroom of a gas station, this is a dream. So keeping an eye out for those really weird things. Totally. And what you were saying about the mindfulness is the foundation to this is, I mean, because what you're describing, you noticing the gas station, like for someone who is not actively practicing presence, that's like, I mean, I don't want to say impossible, but that's very hard because you haven't built that muscle to be present and notice that, especially in a dream, you know.

I really like that because you're touching on the synergy of the two because I think what happens is most people don't see the importance of dreams. They're kind of just like, oh well, it's separate, it doesn't really matter. But it has, ever since being introduced to this and working with you, like I've really seen this infinity loop, this synergy between my waking and dream state because like for example, the mindfulness, like when I started meditating and becoming more conscious of my thoughts, like that started to bleed into my dreams and I would have dreams of like in the dream being kind to someone and in the dream telling myself, oh, just be present and breathe or like, oh, speak from the heart and having these very conscious dialogues and thoughts in the dream, which was so beautiful to see that I was being a conscious human in a dream.

And then vice versa, having dreams where I'm getting messages or healing something in the dream that then when I wake up, I'm different. I'm, you know, there's something that has moved. Yeah, that's really beautiful. And often I think one thing that I'm thinking of that you're kind of describing is just like being able to experience holding a certain energy while dreaming that then we can bring back with us, you know, a feeling of compassion or kindness or great joy even. And those are a real healing gift that we can receive and then be able to resonate with it upon awakening as well.

Totally. Yeah, I love that you brought that up because yeah, even I mean, sometimes we use drugs or alcohol to tap into that, right? Of like, oh well, when I'm under a substance, I can feel that quote-unquote happiness or something like connection or feeling like I want to talk more. But that happens in dreams. If you pay attention, you know, you can induce that in the dream and then take that frequency that you've gotten to know in your waking life because now you know how to conjure it up. Definitely. And I feel the same for meditation too because so many times we're just trying to, with drugs and alcohol, it's about numbing the inner judge or numbing our insecurity.

And instead with meditation practices and learning to take care of our bodies through deep relaxation, we aren't needing to num those things, but they simply become cared for and held and quieted and perhaps not as activated or we can offer them healing rather than just trying to shove it away for a few hours, you know. Totally. And that's one part of why I love working with you is that you're so grounded in the mindfulness and you're so grounded in the presence. And even though you're so knowledgeable and wise and have this very eccentric database so to speak and practices, you are always bringing it back to presence and mindfulness.

And I completely resonate with that because that's been what's kept me so grounded throughout my path too. And I think sometimes we get lost in the flashiness of, you know, more advanced so to speak techniques or, you know, energy healing, which is all beautiful, but like, you know, the simplicity of that presence is really key. Yeah, thank you for reminding me of that all the time. Thank you. Yeah, well, you know, it's something I agree. It is, we want, of course, there's this longing to get up and out and see all of the wild dimensions of the multiverse. But in order for our bodies and our minds to feel safe enough to go far, they need to have a really deeply rooted landing site.

What I've been so gratefully taught by my teachers is that you actually have to first root down really deeply in order to go up. And the more rooted you are, often the further you can fly. But it's always about coming home. It's always about landing again because, you know, like you were saying, we are at the end of the day here being human. And while it may be essential for us to continue to connect to the divine and so a massive part of our being human is to also be divine within this space and connected to spirit. We also have to, you know, brush our teeth and cook dinner and do the laundry and like those things can be really really nourishing too.

Totally. Yeah, when you're appreciating it in the present moment for sure. I want to be mindful of your time, but I also want people to have a chance to know how to work with you and how to find you. And we just, we basically brushed the very surface level of these topics. So if anyone is curious about these, I highly recommend reaching out to Kai. So maybe you can tell us where they can find you and maybe how you work with people. Yes, sure, thank you. Well, you can find my healing work and the teaching that I'm doing at alariahealing.com.

And right now I'm teaching virtually. Luckily I've been teaching virtually for quite some time already since I travel a lot with my music and my teachers. And typically work with people in my sacred path training program in two-hour sessions. Many of the people who study with me work with me one-on-one, some weekly or some less frequently as needed, as wanted, as guided. And you can find the music that I make at [audio says "azav.com"; spells "aazav.com" - verify before publication]. And you'll find a lot of the sacred music that I have created for healing and sacred work, put to sacred bass music.

I love that. Thank you, Kai. Thank you so much. And sending you a hug. Yeah, you too. Virtual hugs to you and to everyone listening. May your best dreams come true and may you remember them. Thank you so much for tuning in. I really appreciate your support and know that this platform is here to support you. And if you resonate with any of these messages and want to keep following along and join the journey with us, please follow us on Instagram at weareyouandi.co. That's w e a r e y o u a n d i . c o. Wishing you many blessings and unconditional love.

SOURCE

https://anchor.fm/s/f560da74/podcast/rss

CANNABIS & SPIRITUALITY: THE ENERGETICS OF HEALING WITH PLANT CONSCIOUSNESS

UNI | Gabriela Parada | June 21, 2023

DRAFT FOR REVIEW, NOT PUBLISHED

Automatically transcribed from the original audio, paragraph-formatted and compared in three audio segments. Not independently word-for-word verified. One uncertain phrase is marked in brackets. Original spoken views preserved; not medical guidance. References to a July workshop, discount code and 20-minute introductory call are historical, not current offers.

My intention with this episode today is to inspire a curiosity of intuitive communication with plants, particularly with cannabis, but also a intuitive curiosity about plant intelligence in general. And I think when we begin to talk about plant spirit as medicine, we start to tap into the intricate ways in which we are a part of the ecosystem and the ecosystem helps us and assists us when we are in recognition of the divinity within all organic creation.

I believe that we are all in some way, shape or form feeling the tug of the earth on our hearts and we are awakening to greater and greater connection and communication to the earth and her inhabitants, particularly plants, as I'll be discussing today, specifically cannabis spirit. And this intuitive connection to nature, connection to plants is something that we all have in common. And even if we might feel really far away from that or that that is not available to us, it's within us.

When I've communicated with benevolent cannabis flower, she has told me that she feels suffocated in the current way that we are seeing and using and abusing cannabis. And it's like her healing abilities have been trapped and usurped and instead of being able to flourish and provide spiritual insight, she's being almost like inverted and manipulated.

And the way I see that more in a more grounded way is you know, we've enslaved the plant through how much we've commodified it and we've put it into this capitalistic wheel and this GMO wheel too of like making stronger potencies and like crossbreeding it so much and just you know, we're doing it in a way that isn't even with the plant spirit. Like we're not even asking for permission or partnership. We're just doing it and making money with it and using cannabis to escape or for hedonism or gluttony, kind of just constantly using it in a selfish way.

And plant medicines are really, really, really meant to assist us in sinking further into the earth's flow. And so what I mean by that is that plant medicines, part of the relationship with the medicine is that we receive insight, we receive growth, we receive evolution and awareness and healing. And what the plant receives is a gratitude and a further connection, further embodied connection, further intuitive connection to the earth so that we feel what the trees feel, we feel what the soil feels, we recognize ourselves in the movements and the changes of the earth so that we can be better partners and better children of the earth.

And when we are taking a plant like cannabis with such a high spiritual potential and we are suppressing its ceremonial capabilities, we're suppressing its intelligence and instead are using it just for these more selfish reasons, more passive reasons, we are in a sense suffocating the plant spirit because she can't fully bloom, she can't be fully expressed.

If you can imagine like with another person in an abusive relationship, there's one person manipulating and usurping the other person's energy or like blocking or putting down the other person's authenticity. And in a way, that's kind of what we're doing with cannabis right now.

And so this conversation is meant to begin that remembrance of cannabis as spiritual medicine, of cannabis as a spiritual ally. So we're going to dive into that a little bit today. And I'll also talk about a workshop that I'm hosting. It's called Cannabis and Spirituality and it's taking place on a weekend in July. So it's a two-part workshop. Each part will be between 90 minutes and 2 hours. And we'll be going into the details of some of the topics that I'll be talking about today.

But before I get into that, I want to let you know where my perspective comes from. So I've been a shamanic student and shamanic practitioner for the last 4 years. So my perspective comes from a synthesis of what I've learned and of course my own experience with cannabis medicine and other plant medicines and mushroom medicines, as well as shamanic journeying, which is experiencing altered states of consciousness through the sound of a drum. It's something that we will also be exploring at the workshop.

So what I think is lacking in the public sphere right now in terms of cannabis is a reverence for cannabis. You know, I imagine like what if more people worked with cannabis in a in a ceremonial way, in a way that is heart-open, intuitive, in accordance with earth-based traditions, seeking spiritual medicine instead of the current way which we use cannabis, which you know, outside of the context of physical medicine, say for cancer patients, we're really just using it for escapism or the way we would use alcohol or for more selfish pleasure.

And not that there's anything wrong with having a casual experience with cannabis, when that becomes the only bar, that's like when that's like the only expectation, there's an abuse of power there. And then we are then just taking and taking and taking and we're not giving back.

The medicine of nature and plants is very synergistic. So it's about coming into partnership and coming into a conscious union with the plant. And this is something that I believe is underlooked when working with cannabis, particularly when there are people who are using it every day and they've built a really high tolerance so that they can use it and go to work or you know, function day-to-day, at least in terms of what society, you know, the superficial way that society views functioning, which is basically working.

And we don't realize that we are allowing a plant to possess us when we are not working ceremonially. And we are merging in ways that are not unmerged. So if you're using cannabis every day, you're not allowing enough time between you and the plant to soak in your own energy and your own authentic fingerprint, so to speak.

So what I'll be talking about at this workshop that I'm hosting in part is the energetics of working with plant spirits, particularly benevolent plant spirits. And that's the differentiation that comes from a shamanic point of view, an indigenous point of view where we acknowledge that plants are multidimensional. And when we are invoking and working with plants in ritual and ceremony or just unconsciously, we're invoking whether we like it or not. And so we want to invoke benevolence and goodness and high healing and wisdom. When we are not aware of that, we are opening ourselves up to energies, whether directly from the plant spirit or elsewhere, you know, sneaky energies that we may not want to work with. So that's a very important distinction to make.

But back to my point, so back to what I was saying in terms of not allowing enough time between cannabis use, so you know, if you're always using the plant, imbibing the plant, you are essentially allowing yourself to be possessed by the spirit of the plant. And the lines between who are you and who is the plant and the spirits around the plant is mushed. It's completely blurred.

So it's really hard and you could almost say impossible to get to know yourself and live as your authentic self when you are constantly ingesting a plant of that potency, the potency of cannabis, particularly when it's what I'm talking about the whole flower, so the THC, the CBD, etc. I'm not talking just about extracting CBD. When we are doing that, we are losing ourselves in the plant.

And so one of the first things that I would love for people to understand is that we need our own time away from the plant and that's a way that we respect the plant. So if you want to respect plants, we need to respect when it is appropriate to work with them or not. And that requires temperance and patience and discipline. It requires respect and also yeah, respect for yourself and respect for the plant.

And an easy, grounded way to understand this is to think of plants as people and the way that you interact and communicate with people. This allows us to personify the plant in a way that is relatable to us. And while we don't want to apply our humanness completely to the plant realm because the plant spirits have a different, you could say like a different set of ethics and consciousness, they have a different consciousness than human consciousness, so it's not something that completely applies. But from a high-level point of view, when it comes to beginning to learn how to communicate with plants, something that is helpful is seeing them as friends. So you might hear people using the term plant ally. So that's where that term comes from, is you know, a friend, a kinship, a relationship with a plant spirit.

So when we look at cannabis flower that way, so if you think she's a friend, you invite her to hang out, you're hanging out all day, you have a sleepover next day, you're hanging out all day, you have another sleepover, you do this, you do that over and over and over and over again. You have things to do, they go with you, this friend goes with you to run errands, you have to go to the grocery store, this friend is with you, you have to go to the bathroom, this friend is with you.

We would easily see that this would be a unhealthy relationship with a friend if you are constantly attached at the hip in a way that is never separated and allows for zero alone time. And you know, we need our alone time to varying degrees for contemplation, for silence, for being in our own energy field. When we look at a plant this way, we can start to see how we might be abusing the relationship and how we are not allowing ourselves enough alone time to integrate and to receive the insight that this medicine has to offer.

And from a plant spirit point of view, you know, consciousness, all consciousness wants to create and live and reproduce and go on and on. You know, life wants to continue. And so a plant spirit will continue to work with you as much as you allow. So you have to put up boundaries and you have to communicate your needs to the plant in a way, the most obvious physical way is by not imbibing, right?

And this becomes more subtle the more that we start to work with a plant spirit realm because we don't always need to imbibe in order to connect to plant spirit.

And this workshop actually is without imbibing, so we're not actually consuming the plant. And the reason for that is because I want us to resensitize to the plant spirit realm. I want us to resensitize to the medicine and the benevolent spirit of cannabis. I want us to resensitize to this information that we all have in our blood and our tissues and our bones from our lineage as people of the earth.

And we can't feel into that if we're constantly applying and consuming and grabbing onto things. And we need we need that space, you know, we need that sobriety. And you know, I'm using that word in a very general sense, in more ways than one. We need that clarity in order to have the discernment. And once we have that clear discernment, you know, once we light up those pathways, we're able to step into that journey with cannabis in a way that is much more mindful and conscious and aware, whereas you know, going straight into consuming cannabis and then learning about cannabis, you're already entering in a more gross way, using that term in terms of like density, so in a more dense way. And so if we can enter that path in a more subtle way, in an energetic and intuitive way, we can start to light up those pathways that light up our intuition and light up the way that we communicate with plants.

Another thing that I want to cover during the workshop is really helping you, assisting you connect to cannabis spirit in your intuitive way. And so I'm going to offer ways that have worked with me, ways from a shamanic point of view where that might assist you. But ultimately we want to talk about sovereignty and we want to talk about authenticity and intuition because you're going to have your own language with plants. You're going to have your own flavor and your own relationship.

And so a lot of times what's common in the herbalist realm, the plant realm in terms of workshops and teachers and you know, even traditions, you will hear people telling you what the qualities of the plant are. And that's important because it does assist us in leaning into listening to the plant and kind of noticing certain themes and patterns.

However, I think that there's a lack of conversation around your relationship with any given plant is going to be your relationship and that's going to be unique and special to you. And while benevolent cannabis spirit might present a certain way to me, a way that you know, might be seen in when we look at patterns across what other people experience, that doesn't mean that that's how it's going to show up for you. And so we want to encourage our own intuition and encourage our own remembrance of what the medicine what the medicine wants to say to us and how the medicine wants to work with us. And that applies to all plants.

Something else that's important to consider when we work in this energetic, spiritual way, we want to acknowledge that we are co-creating. And so while we might merge with the plant spirit when we are imbibing or when we are in ceremony, when there is an intention there, we want to know how to unmerge and we want to we want to remember that we are partnering with plants, that we are working with plants and that we're not worshiping the plants.

So when we get attached to anything that is outside of us, when there's an imbalance there, we open ourselves up to entities and energies, thoughts, behaviors, patterns, experiences that might not be in our best interest. So there's energetically something that opens when we are giving ourselves up to something outside of us.

And so we always want to make sure that we're pointing inward, that we're going within, that we're connecting with God within the heart, with oneness, with the creator, the wisdom, the universe, the truth inside of you. And so you want to go in and in and in and in.

We can do that and work with plant spirits and we honor the oneness, you know, we honor God, we honor the universe, source when we are honoring individual plants, when we are honoring individual animal spirits, when we are honoring each other. So working with a particular plant spirit should be a part of a you know, considerate part of an ecosystem, of a web. But we don't want to assume that the plant is the web itself, if that makes sense.

When we start to do that, we tend to open up ourselves to possessive energies and whether it be of the plant itself or of something else because there's an imbalance there, there's a disembodiment there. So our spirit, our energy starts to go outside of us, outside of our body and our energy field. And we create these vacancies, so to speak, where we're not there. And so if we're not there, if we're not paying attention there, if we're not living as ourselves, then we are empty in a way that is not the great Buddhist way, but empty in a way that is unconscious or soulless.

And I'll dive into that with a little more clarity and a little more precision when we talk about it at the workshop. But I just want to plant that seed so that you are aware of that and consider that.

So at the beginning of the episode, I talked a little bit about what I see in terms of people over-relying on the plant and consuming the plant in a very addictive way, in an abusive way.

The other thing that I see is I think that there are some people that would benefit [unclear: to/from the plant] if they were able to get past a past bad experience, so a bad trip or the assumption of paranoia.

The main thing that I think people are avoiding is the anxiety that can sometimes be experienced with cannabis and the reason that we experience that, one, we're using it without intention. So even the word use, right? We're not even working with the plant, we're using the plant. So there's no intention, there's no acknowledgement of medicine of the plant, it's just ingesting for having a good time or watching a movie or being at a festival. It's very selfish. There's no communion or yeah, there's no partnership, there's no acknowledgement of a intelligence that you're working with. So right off the bat, that's not going to you know, that's a crapshoot, right? You don't know if you're going to have a good trip or a bad trip because you're not setting an intention.

Plant medicines like this were intended to be used with some sort of ceremony, some sort of ritual, at least an intention. You know, there's a direction that we need to apply to these intelligences. This is a highly intelligent medicine. And we can't expect that we just consume the plant and it's going to be great.

There's a co-creation with the plant where we are driving the car and the plant is in the passenger seat. Versus what I see in these instances is the person has given away the car to cannabis spirit. They're not even invoking the benevolence of the plant. So they've just given over the car and they're along for the ride. And so that will just you know, like I said, it's a crapshoot.

And what we've forgotten is that we can co-create with the plant. And we can when we set an intention, it's an anchor and a path for the plant's intelligence to work with you.

Another part of this common paranoia, anxiety symptom is there's a lack of awareness around how somatic cannabis is. So one of cannabis's medicines is that she helps us see different perspectives and different timelines. And so if we are not aware of that, we are shooting our consciousness and our presence all over the place and we are living those timelines and are kind of at the mercy of those inner thoughts and inner experiences without coming back into the present and grounding.

So grounding techniques are crucial to working with cannabis and we'll talk about that at the workshop.

Another thing is if you don't have a mindfulness practice, working with plant medicines is not going to be the best thing for you because if you're already not present day-to-day and you're not aware of how to be present day-to-day, it's not going to be conducive to working with plant medicines. So I always suggest having a mindfulness practice in partnership with any plant medicines. So if you are going to be a psychonaut or an experimenter, consider a mindfulness practice as a daily practice.

And the last thing that I'll mention on this topic is one of benevolent cannabis spirit's medicines is her somatic healing. So she will help you feel in the body so that you can release it.

And so when you are working with the plant in a conscious way, we can breathe into those spots where we are feeling emotions, we can bring awareness and there's an alchemical healing that happens with the plant. And so she'll help us feel, she'll help us see things that we're not looking at. So she has a very high potential for transformation for us, for inner transformation.

And we often only think of ayahuasca or peyote or psilocybin, etc., etc. when it comes to ceremonial plant medicines. And we forget that cannabis is such a potent healer.

And so this conversation is meant to inspire that and also this workshop is meant to set us on that trajectory.

So if this sparks any interest or any resonance with you at all, I invite you to join me.

I also host one-on-one cannabis ceremonies. So in these ceremonies, unlike the workshop, we will actually be imbibing. So you will be consuming the plant in a way that makes sense for you. And I hold space for you to have a medicine journey with the plant.

And this work isn't for everyone, so that's why you can't book directly on my site. You have to book a 20-minute introductory call and it's just to see if there is resonance between you and me as a shamanic practitioner and to feel into whether or not a ceremony like that will be of assistance to you. So it's both intuitive for you and intuitive for myself as well.

In regards to the workshop, there's a discount code that goes out to our newsletter. So you can sign up for our email newsletter.

I will leave you with something gentle. Encourage the subtleties, encourage subtle ways to work with cannabis. What if you worked with benevolent cannabis spirit through only CBD? Or what if you lit cannabis flower as if it was sage and just enjoyed the scent and the fragrance and the smoke, the clearing smoke?

We are all highly intuitive and when we partner with plants in this way that is acknowledging their intelligence and their wisdom, we can really transform and evolve in a way that is healing for the heart, healing for each other and in accordance with the oneness that is this planet, this earth and organic nature.

Source: https://anchor.fm/s/f560da74/podcast/rss