What Do I Do with Power from the Medicine?
Q: 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?
The answer is simple: do nothing. You don't need to channel it, wield it, or use it in any particular way. Instead, let it be. This energy is also subject to your observation of it, isn’t it? That means it comes and goes and is not lasting and cannot be attached to. Don’t attach to it. When the storm comes, don't hold on to the sound of thunder. That’s what you do with power.
In some of our courses, we investigate power by asking about our relationship to it. This question reveals all kinds of facets: positive forms of power, negative forms, instances when power is misused, abused, or stripped from us, feelings of powerlessness, corrupt power, and more. Power comes in many forms, but the real investigation is asking what is the essence and source of power? What is true power?
Much like the sun, which shines upon everyone without condition or judgement, true power is a universal force that can't be triumphed or corrupted. When its presence is really perceived, the masters come to their knees and surrender before it. Being in its presence is an obliteration of trivialities. It is a moment also of profound rest, like a fully charged battery that is not being used in any device or application but exists as a power unto itself.
Then, the question is not what to do but how to be. That involves focusing not on the power, but on the separate entity that falsely believes it is in control, and that it needs to achieve, do, or make use of such power. What is this voice that wants to do something, the voice that feels compelled to fix or figure things out?
About a decade ago, I was deep and steadfast in meditative training. Fresh from a retreat sitting for many hours a day, I dove into a series of rituals with the Daime. During these ceremonies, I took the medicine and sat unflinching, my mind stable and focused, not seeking anything but just absorbed into this silent presence. What I experienced in those sessions was a tremendous power, a ground-breaking, wall-shattering power. I had no role in its creation, and in that reality, there was a merging where I ceased to exist as a separate entity needing to do something. Instead, there was a simple, spontaneous expression. Amid earth-quaking moments, I became the stillness at the centre of the storm, the cosmos, the embodiment of Shiva, sitting in stillness while the universe unfolded within me and as me.
To make such a claim is to tread a fine line, a dangerous rope to walk, for it lends itself to blasphemy in some religions and has long been taboo. Many have been cursed, crucified, and called heretics for proclaiming, from mystical experience, their union with the divine. It could seem arrogant or blasphemous; however, it is, on the contrary, the opposite of egotism. Rather, in its purest form, it is the absence of the individual that leads to such profundity. In mystical Islam’s Sufi sects, it is labelled fana, or annihilation, much like a moth is annihilated in a flame. For the mystic who enters into the mystery of real power surrenders and leaves themselves behind.
Many people who partake in ayahuasca have a spiritual discipline. Yet, when they take the substance, they abandon their greater awareness and become immersed in a subject-object relationship, as if they were a child playing with a new toy. They drink the sacrament, make an intention then wait to see what happens. Don't falter. Don't forget your training. Stay absorbed from the very beginning in the non-dual state that eliminates the subject-object relationship. Then, there's no separation between you and the substance—only a merging, a blending, and a blossoming, unitive experience. You don't have to wait for the effects, chase visions, or do anything other than learn to rest in the awareness of being and presence. Then there is no separation between you and the power.
For some people, this power can toss them around like clothes in a washing machine. But if you have some sort of relationship with your body and mind, if you have a predisposition to discipline, to calmness and tranquillity, then you let it wave and ripple through you like a river, or rain sliding off a rain jacket, without becoming trapped or overwhelmed.
Those who dabble in these substances without any groundwork or relationship to their own bodies and minds, I must ask: what are you doing playing with fire? Then, instead of rain sliding off a rain jacket, it becomes a torrent on a tin roof, each drop hitting hard, hurting, and throwing you in circles. If your inner soil is well-tended, however, it will welcome the rain, it will water the flowers.
When you consider what is true power, what real power is, the soul softens. It yields. It surrenders. What is truly worthy of your surrender? It is the supreme source from which you spring. To be in that force is not something that is forced or enforced. To be in that force is a receptive absorption into its essence.
Excerpt from Walking the Forest Path: Volume 1, available in early 2025.
