I was supposed to be in an ayahuasca ceremony this weekend. The weekend that also concludes my month-long master plant dieta with Bobinsana.
Instead, I’m sitting alone in my cabin in the mountains while it rains, storms, and occasionally hails hard enough to make the whole house sound alive, but I’m missing the aliveness piece.
I’m sitting here in my head.
My husband is sitting in the ceremony without me.
I’m jealous.
I’m lonely.
I’m bored.
And I know, intellectually at least, that I am exactly where I am supposed to be.
Fuck healing sometimes, man. Just fuck it.
My period started Wednesday. In the tradition I’m working within, being both on dieta and on my moon leaves me too open and sensitive to participate in a group ceremony in a way that would be beneficial for me or everyone else in the space. So I am unable to attend. Processing that was a whole other rollercoaster of rage and depression, but as the universe often does, there was light at the end of my dramatic dark tunnel…
I’ll have a private ceremony with my shaman (in person) AND her maestro (remote) when they close the dieta Monday night. I actually get to receive an incredibly special opportunity despite all my whining. Isn’t that just how it is? Sorry, universe. I’m still a noob.
But for now, there is this weekend… this strange little pocket of nothingness.
Last night, I watched a moose and her baby move through the woods. I felt compelled to post it on social media because seeing them alone felt somehow like it was less real or less important. My puppies have been curled up nearby, saving me from what I imagine would feel like complete loneliness. The rain makes me want to really hunker down beneath blankets and disappear. I’ve taken walks, eat nutritious food, listen to music, take long hot showers, and somehow, even surrounded by all of that beauty, I have spent the last twenty-four hours feeling like I should be doing something else.
I thought I might work on the lofted space in my house that I call my cave. There are shelves I want to hang, things to organize, little finishing pieces that would make it feel complete. But I’m scared to hang the shelves without Gianni. Not because I don’t know how, but because I might fuck up the wall, which sounds ridiculous even as I write it.
Walls are repairable. Holes can be filled. A crooked shelf is hardly a catastrophe, Rocky.
And yet it lingers as a thought because I realize that when I’m alone, I have very profound moments of awareness, they just appear in small ways. This one is that when somebody else makes a mistake, I usually see a mistake. When I make one, I see a fuckup.
There is an entire system of punishment hiding in that distinction. Like everything lately, I don’t know exactly where it came from. I just know I am harder on myself than I would ever be on anyone else.
And apparently that applies to shelves, meditation, spirituality, creativity, boredom, sleep, and nearly everything in between. So here I am, rightly timed, at the end of my dieta seeing the layers underneath the layers underneath the layers.
This morning I tried to go into a meditation where I had encountered a door. I opened it. I entered. And I fell asleep.
This happens to me with some regularity when I am trying to work through something, resolve something, or enter an energetic space.
I disappear. I sleep.
Immediately upon waking, instead of allowing my body to have whatever experience it is having, I begin asking what went wrong.
Why am I falling asleep?
What am I avoiding?
Why can’t I stay conscious?
Why am I failing?
And I start Googling. Because if there is one thing my mind loves, it is information.
Feed the mind.
Feed the mind.
Feed the mind.
MY PRECIOUSSSSS… just like Golem.
Somewhere in my obsessive compulsive mind-driven spiritual search for understanding, I ran across a framework describing four ways of relating to life:
Life happens to me.
Life happens by me.
Life happens through me.
Life happens as me.
Victim.
Responsibility.
Surrender.
Oneness.
Check. I am like The Matrix, information downloaded.
Now, armed with new information that I fully comprehend because it’s very tangible, my mind did what it does best: it sorted the data and created a systematic hierarchy. Surely “to me” is the least evolved. “By me” is better. “Through me” is spiritual. And “as me” is where I am eventually supposed to arrive.
The enlightened finish line. I am so damn smart.
Then, naturally, like a good little trained slave to my mind, I sorted myself into these categories like a fucking champion of pattern recognition. Gold stars all around, bitches.
Where am I a victim? When I don’t make choices for the things I want because I’m afraid of hurting someone. When I feel helpless because any decision might disappoint somebody. When I allow expectations—mine or anyone else’s—to decide for me.
Where am I in responsibility? When I make something happen. When I use my intelligence. When I solve the problem, build the thing, organize the idea, move something into action. I have always had a very comfortable relationship with agency. I know what to do with agency.
Where does life happen through me? That is easy too. Meditation. Channeling. Coaching. Helping someone process something. Those strange moments when words seem to arrive before I consciously know what I am going to say. The moments when I feel like a vessel.
Then I got to… When does life happen as me?
And I don’t fucking know.
Maybe during my silent meditation retreat?
Maybe in plant medicine ceremony?
Maybe when I’m alone in nature?
Maybe during my solo camping trip for my forty-first birthday?
Maybe when I am being completely weird and completely myself without realizing anyone is watching?
Maybe those rare moments when I stop experiencing a separation between myself and whatever is happening?
MAYBE?!
The panicked moment sent me into a spiral of questions where I landed one: Am I transitioning into Being?
I have felt very surrendered lately. There is very little actionable energy. I have very little drive to build or create. I have significantly reduced my work. I am resting. I am waiting, listening. Spirit seems to move through me more easily than I seem to move myself anywhere.
Maybe this is the transition! Maybe I am finally moving from doing into Being!
Except… what if nothing has to transition?
I know in my bones that’s the better question. And I hate it. I HATE IT.
Because I consider certain versions of myself sacred.
Rocky in ceremony? Sacred. Rocky channeling? Super sacred. Rocky sitting silently in meditation for ten days? Fucking the most sacred! Rocky helping another person reach a pivotal realization? Beast mode sacred. Rocky receiving some enormous spiritual insight while sitting underneath a tree? Obviously, motherfucker. Sacred AF.
Rocky lying on the couch in sweatpants, bleeding, disappointed, missing her husband, scrolling her phone for far too long because she is bored and lonely?
Apparently, that bitch is failing.
Rocky who cannot make herself care about the full moon? Failing. Rocky who planned to howl naked beneath the moon and sing and dance, then instead watched it rain and did absolutely none of those things? Failing. Rocky who opens the mysterious meditation door and immediately falls asleep? Definitely failing. Rocky who doesn’t want to clean her cave? Lazy. Unmotivated. Disconnected. Major fucking failure at every level.
Sight.
The entire problem is so painfully obvious. I hate that I find myself continuing to circle this because it doesn’t fully land.
I keep insisting on this journey that Being must look like something. Even my version of Being requires performance. I want my surrender to be beautiful. I want my embodiment to move. I want my spirituality to glow. I want my authenticity to be wild and interesting enough that I recognize it as authenticity.
If my body says sleep, I call it avoidance. If my body says stay under the blankets, I call it laziness. If it says nothing right now, I call it disconnection.
For everyone else, everyone else, this is just a natural state of being human. I tell people this stupid line all freaking day long and I can’t hear it myself. I can’t even conjure the idea up for myself.
I say I believe in equanimity. I have spent countless hours practicing it. Countless hours preaching it: Pleasant sensation. Unpleasant sensation. Neither one more permanent or more important than the other. Observe. Do not cling. Do not push away.
And yet, apparently, somewhere inside me I still believe the spiritual version of Rocky is more valuable than the ordinary one.
This is probably why the whole to me / by me / through me / as me framework started breaking apart as soon as I examined it. Because my body doesn’t give a shit which category it is in. My body experiences. That’s it.
Cold.
Warm.
Hungry.
Tired.
Turned on.
Afraid.
Comfortable.
Restless.
Delighted.
Sad.
My body doesn’t need to determine whether the rain is happening to it or through it. It just gets wet if I stand in it.
Sigh.
I know embodiment is much less complicated than my mind keeps trying to make it. I know this weekend doesn’t require me to produce anything. I know that I do not need to manufacture an exciting experience simply because the exciting weekend I anticipated disappeared. I know there are tiny experiences I am missing because I keep looking for the profound ones.
Rain against the roof.
A puppy sleeping beside me.
A moose and her baby disappearing into the trees.
Heavy textured blankets.
The particular coziness of being inside while hail hits the windows.
Sadness because I miss my husband.
Jealousy because I wanted to be there.
The vulnerability of being alone.
The nervousness of hanging my own shelves.
None of those experiences need to be transformed into anything else, but here I am, in all of my humanness, doing my damnedest to transition them rather than embody them.
Oh, did you think the thinking stopped there? Oh no, friend. My mind is a relentless practitioner. It kept going. It decided that after all of this I should turn to Gene Keys for deeper insight.
You’ve got to be fucking kidding me? Will this insane rabbit hole never end? Apparently not.
So now that I am reminded of equanimity, instead of embodying it, my mind has decided to abandon locating myself on some ascending ladder of consciousness and PRACTICE. Let’s put this shit into action. That is exactly the second prison I want to exist in… <she scoffs retrospectively with sarcasm>.
For sake of length, I’ll skip torturing you through all the Gene Key analysis itself, but here’s the summary:
Let It Be → Purpose 25.4
Constriction → Acceptance → Universal Love
This is the move from resisting reality to allowing what is here to be here.
Feel It → Radiance 46.4
Seriousness → Delight → Ecstasy
This brings me out of analysis and back into the body, sensation, pleasure, breath, and direct experience.
Stop Over-Observing It → Evolution 10.2
Self-Obsession → Naturalness → Being
This is the reminder to stop turning myself into a project and let my experience be less managed.
…are you literally dying yet? My soul is snorting while my mind is still not registering it…
Let Movement Come → Life’s Work 15.2
Dullness → Magnetism → Florescence
This is about trusting my rhythm instead of forcing momentum. The movement comes when there is actually something to move with.
I laughed when I first wrote that down because “stop over-observing” feels like a fairly direct message to a woman who can turn nearly anything into an existential inquiry.
But here I am.
Still observing myself observing myself. Still trying to figure out whether I am transitioning into Being.
I’m pretty sure that is the joke. I’m just not laughing yet.
The universe is (as always) trying to show me that being is not the extraordinary state waiting for me after I finally resolve all of this. Being includes the unresolved version, too.
The lonely one. The jealous one. The exhausted one. The spiritual one. The brilliant one. The frightened one. The woman capable of channeling something beautiful for another person and the woman afraid to drill a hole into drywall. The woman in ceremony. And the woman who doesn’t get to go. The woman howling naked at the moon, and the woman under the blankets who cannot be bothered to look outside.
None of them are more sacred than the others. None of them are less awake. There is no hierarchy at all, Rocky.
I apparently keep circling this question and maybe one day I’ll move to another question I can circle like a vulture:
Can ordinary, disconnected, sleepy, disappointed Rocky belong inside the sacred container too?
I know the answer.
Yes. Especially her.
I just don’t entirely know how to believe it yet.
This weekend, as with every other weekend, is not asking me to figure out the answer to any questions. It’s to experience the rain as it falls. To miss my husband. To be disappointed. To let the stupid shelves stay on the floor with cluttered books lingering about. It’s about sleeping if I’m tired and eating when I’m hungry and learning all the same lessons I’m clearly in the midst of learning.
All of that is life happening as me, too.
