Teachings, Poems, and Transmissions
Categories
Topics
- Alliance
- Ancestral healing
- Awakening
- Awareness
- Ayahuasca
- Beauty
- Community
- Compassion
- Dark night of the soul
- Devotion
- Ego
- Emptiness
- Fear
- Foregiveness
- Freedom
- Gratitude
- Great Mystery
- Grief
- Groundlessness
- Harmony
- Humility
- Identity
- Impermanence
- Infinity
- Interspiritual
- Light
- Lineage
- Love
- Meditation
- Mind Virus
- Music
- Mysticism
- Non-attachment
- Non-duality
- Peace
- Power
- Presence
- Purpose
- Relationship
- Rest
- Sensation
- Service
- Shadow work
- Sound
- Spaciousness
- Stillness
- Study
- Surrender
- Syncretism
- Timelessness
Find Your Calling
Your calling is what you are called to do, not just in life but in any given moment—and that is what life is, isn't it? A given moment.
Taking Out The Trash
Our mind becomes so full of rubbish, day in and day out, accumulating all sorts of nonsense. In your house, you don’t just take the garbage out once; no, it’s a regular occurrence. So it is with our inner landscape. It needs some landscaping; it needs some cleaning. We must learn how to deal with the dirt, how to sweep our front doorstep, how to recognise what is trash and what is treasure, and how to sift and filter the mind.
Being the Change, Being of Service
Recently, at an interfaith community gathering, I was asked what the phrase, "Be the change you want to see in the world" means to me. I want to highlight the word be, for it's not simply a call to external action, but a call that links our action to being—for doing and being must not be separate.
Community and Relationality
We need the reflection of the community—of elders, of guides, and teachers—to see that we are not alone, to see that these paths have been walked and stumbled upon before. It is a dichotomy, for on one side, someone who is called must go it alone and find themselves in the wilderness learning to navigate home; on the other side, it is an old road, heavily worn with warnings, myths, and stories about how to navigate the inner realms.
What Is Your Relationship to Power?
We all have different relationships to power, positive and negative—to the powers that be, to powers that suppress and oppress, dominating powers, authorities, to power struggles in our immediate environment, to power struggles in our inner egoic environment wanting to be and achieve and get somewhere. It's always this interesting dance. Power however, is just a force. It is a neutral force. It doesn't have a positive or a negative; it has a potential.
What Do I Do with Power from the Medicine?
Question: The medicine gave me an overwhelming sense of power. I feel it in every cell of my body. It is like wild horses running through my veins, and I feel I can move mountains. I don't want to get ahead of myself, as you say. What do I do with all this power?
Effects of the Soplado
Question: I have a question about what you did with my head [during the ceremony], because I have thoughts about what happened, but I really don't know what it was. The effect was very unexpected to me.
Fear and Letting Go
To be fearless does not mean an absence of fear, to be fearless means simply that you feel fear less. Feeling fear less means that you do feel more. It means more feeling, more allowing, more embracing, more understanding. It means to know that fear is there, that it has a place and in doing so we can count on it to become a wise friend, ally and teacher on the path, which in turn is more welcoming.
Medicine Songs in English
For those of us whose first language is English, there's probably going to be a part that feels cheesy with that, and more exotic and mysterious with a different language. The other side of the reality is that our own dialect hits home. It hits the heartstrings in a different way. It resonates and registers with a different part of our brain.
Sailing on Sound and Ceremony
Music, as a spiritual practice, involves crafting the mind and body through the skill of an instrument. This, in turn, leads to the realisation that one's own body and mind are instruments—either to play or be played.
Lineage and Syncretism
I appreciate all of the pathways that wind around the forest. I've been exposed to many different leaders, great ayahuasqueros, curanderos, onanyas, kurakas, pajés, madrinhas, padrinhos, and I want to be something of a translator. Sometimes, my role is to be a bridge between this world and that world, this world and the other.
True Freedom
True freedom is allowing all phenomena to be exactly as they are. To let everything be just as it is. Coming and going, arising and passing away.
An Interspiritual Approach
When we look at the human tradition, we want to see spirituality as an indivisible whole and find an inherent and universal mysticism as the underlying movement of all the great religious leaders—whatever path they followed, whatever path they carved, whichever direction they led. And we want to appreciate the perennial, self-propagating wisdom that continues to sprout through pastures, forests, deserts, mountains, and cities all over the globe.
Closing the Book, Taking Away the Name
At the end of the day, the book will close on the stories. At the end of the day, we won't take any of our belongings with us. And so, while most of the world looks outside for their happiness, for their salvation, for their peace, the right questions turn us around to say that there's only one place that we can look and that is in the direction of where the looking is coming from.
Study and Not Knowing
How can you “study” without “seeking”? How can you want to learn something, while also embracing the Great Mystery?
Embracing the Great Mystery
To know something is a great arrogance. To be in a relationship and say, “I know this person,” is a profound limitation. Where is the space for that person to grow? Where is their freedom to change? Everything changes. Everyone changes. To truly love someone is to be awed by their mystery and open to their evolution. Thinking you know someone is a prison.
Wisdom of the Unknown
When we think we know something, we reduce it to a little box—a theory, an idea that makes us feel comfortable. We forsake the mystery for a false sense of security. However, when we don’t know, we remove the box, the walls, and the limitations. It becomes illimitable, free from concepts and free from our tendency toward complacency—our laziness that tries to place the numinous in a knowable box.
An Open Window
We are like the space between an open window. Is the space between the open window inside or is it outside? We tend to think that we have our own private universe inside of us. But on the inner planes, everything is open. Part of the spiritual life is turning your life inside out, so that the inside is visible. Because if we live just looking to the external, we hide inside, we hide parts of ourselves.
Biting Off More Than You Can Chew
The dark night is long when it comes for those who find themselves walking it. But for those who carry a flame within, the encroaching darkness becomes the very canvas on which their light paints its emergence.