Hello, everyone. Here we are on December 24th, and I'm getting so many messages and calls and questions regarding like, oh my God, I got to go see the family. How am I going to do this? Why, you know, all these triggers coming up and all these different situations. And well, here's the thing. It's going to be what it's going to be. But it's important to remember that whatever we believe either opens or closes our heart.
So if I already believe that it's going to be a shit show at the family dinner, then I'm going to walk in there with a closed heart. Or, you know, if I'm bien parada, if I'm firmest in however I'm feeling, can try to make the best of it, go in there and open the heart first of all to me and set some good boundaries and just notice things and observe.
And part of the reason I'm recording this podcast today, literally, is because I want to explain a little bit what happens when you do, when you come to a journey, when you work in the space that we hold here. For mushrooms, for magic mushrooms, for these ancient technologies, right, that have been on our earth for hundreds, thousands of years. And they're a really good helper.
They're very good to open your heart. And so what happens is we've been super, super trained and brainwashed that that's something that's not good, that that's illegal, that this and that, but everybody's out there getting drunk off their ass. And that's not a big deal. You know, there'll probably be some drunk people today at your Christmas party and tomorrow and New Year's And we have no issue with the toxicity of alcohol because the government,
you know, the society has deemed it to be all right. You know, they sell it. It's legal. No big deal. You can get drunk and, you know, nobody sees it as something wrong. Now, also, you know, that Santa Maria, you know, or marijuana is legal. People are more okay with taking little gummies to sleep or, you know, or using it as recreation, as a recreational substance because, well, it's not illegal anymore.
And so the point I'm trying to make is think why you might be resisting such a technology that is available to you, that has been available to you ancestrally for hundreds and thousands of years. And, And whose fear or who's wanting to control you decided that it wasn't? That's the number one barrier. The second one, the next one is the fear of, well, I'm not going to be in control. And well, I don't even think you're in control right now. None of us are.
Technically, you don't know who's going to be president. You don't know if there's an earthquake tomorrow. You don't know who's going to be drunk or say something stupid at the Christmas party today. You don't know if it's going to rain or not. There's nothing in this world that we control.
Besides our perspective and how we decide we're going to look at things in this in this life and this journey that we have here and the the experience that you have with the mushrooms is such a connector to your heart to your true self to the love that is inside of you that is has been sort of protecting yourself for so many years because you know it's been hard and maybe your caregivers weren't that nice, or you grew up in a situation that was difficult.
And then the, you know, the culture of the society that we live in right now is so fast. And, you know, it demands so much of us. And you were in a society that keeps telling you that you're never going to be enough, that you need to buy more things, that you need to do more things. And none of that is really true. That's just, you know, the way that things have been set up in order for us to consume and to be working for the machine or for the quote-unquote man, what they call it, you know.
And so when you come into a space of ceremony, I'm going to explain to you what happens, you know. So before, most of the time when you're thinking about sitting in a circle with other women or other, you know, people and, you know, you're sitting by, well, you're coming to sit with the medicines because you probably are in a process of seeking something different in your life.
You either are fighting depression or anxiety, or you want to explore, you know, the possibilities of a deeper connection to your heart and to spirit, or you're stuck, you know, you've been going to therapy for years and you're like, ah, this isn't working.
I don't know what to do. I just need to understand why I'm not satisfied with life, you know, or why am I in this crisis or whatever, whatever is the reason, or maybe you just want to come have fun, you know, but whatever the reason is, that's going to get you here is, is the beginning of this journey is, you know, a week or two, or, you know, however many days prior to this ceremony, you set an intention and you sit with
yourself and you notice what you're not comfortable with feeling in your body. What are some of those negative things that you're telling yourself that you should do, or you should be better, blah, blah, blah. How, you know, how is these, what is it that you're trying to transform and alchemize? And then, so you work with that as your intention. You know, I want more freedom. I want more love. I want more calm and peace in my body, in my life.
Or whatever your intention is going to be, you begin to write that down. You begin to talk about it, think about it, feel it. As you move forward towards this space of the ceremony.
You come to a you know we gather in a in a spit in a place that's super harmonia harmonious it's safe there's a lot of really beautiful energy here there's you know a lot of sound sound healing and there's drumming and a gong and like lots of music and beautiful accompaniment right this is what I call accompaniment because you can do psychedelics anywhere really but setting and setting are very important. So you're, you know, this, the, you set your intention, why you're going to come.
And then, you know, in a ceremony, you drink the medicine. Usually most people drink it in a tea, right? You, you hold your cup, you drink your tea. We open up the space. You open up the, the energetic portal that we're going to head into really. You set your intention. We ask for protection and there's always protection. And, you know, it's, it's really like the main thing is where attention goes, energy flows.
So if your attention is on goodness and protection and we're going to do some work, but we're all going to be held here. There's a fire outside protecting and warming us up, you know, and we're grateful for all of the elements that make us and create us and that we're really a part of mother earth, which is. I mean, we wouldn't even be here if Earth, you know, if we didn't have oxygen or water. So setting an intention with something very grounded.
There's not like some woo-woo shit, you know. It's just this is what we are right here. We're these human beings on a planet that gives us life. So to me, that's the mother. We're breathing air. You know, some spirit, some breath is keeping us alive.
There's a beautiful huge you know altar of kuan yin which is the most compassionate divine mother and so the intention here is like we really want compassion, for ourselves which we're not giving ourselves we don't know how to receive and give ourselves compassion so that's part of the intention at least in the work that i do you know compassion and he goes sad. So anyway, we drink the tea and we start to meditate.
What these medicines really do in a setting of doing some work, doing some transformation is you're going to go into a deep meditation. So you can sit straight up or you can lay down and we begin to meditate.
So you breathe, you get into the body, you feel your legs, your feet, your heart, you know, and you're in a very restful position and we're really practicing surrendering to what our intention is going to be, to what this technology, this magical mushroom does inside of your body, of your brain, and allowing it to come in. And then we get really curious about what's happening. The sound that we play here, the drumming, the music, really helps to kind of guide your journey.
And it's a very beautiful journey. Maybe at first it might be a little like.
Oh lord what is this i don't know i you know because the body is not used to surrendering but after a few minutes once you're in the journey it's just like you are feeling those things that you haven't been allowed yourself to feel that's one of the things that can happen, so pleasure laughter grief some fear you know but we're all here together in a circle and And, you know, it's a constant, like I walk around, we hold your hand,
my voice, our voice, whoever else is leading it with me or if we're in Tijuana or if we're in Cancun, wherever we are, there's always that assurance of somebody that's really taking care of you, holding it down. And so once you've passed the fear, you're allowing yourselves to have this experience of deep curiosity and of staying in your body, of staying in your heart, of knowing what's happening. so some people you know.
Have a lot of insight into their own part of their own suffering, instead of always just blaming other people for, you know, if you would do this, and I would be okay. If I had money, then I would be okay. If this and that, you kind of, the mushrooms allow you to see what your part is in this suffering that you're allowing yourself to, to live in. They also show you how much of amazingness there is in this life.
They show you, you know, different memories, some visuals, some color, and everybody's going to have a different experience, of course, but that's the experience is these plants are connectors. So, you know, we want to connect to other people. We want to connect to ourselves. We want to connect to this life because one of the main things that happens when we're little is we disconnect for our own protection.
You disconnect from love because your parents were at households or they were drunk or they weren't paying attention to you, or you got bullied at school, or somebody abused you, or, or, you know, it was just fucking so hard to fit in, or, or, you know, they liked your siblings better than you, whatever the reason is, and I'm in, you don't even need a reason. This is just something that we do in general to survive in this madness of a culture that we're in.
We disconnect for protection, right? We disconnect because we disconnect from our heart, which is our, I call it a heart. It's really your authentic self because we need attachment. So we fake, we pretend we're happy. We pretend we're this or, or you just disconnect and are super sad all the time. But when you figure out a way to navigate through life in order to survive and be attached to your caregivers, to society, to school, to work, to whoever you're with.
And then after a while you realize that this shit isn't working because there's this longing inside of you to be better, to feel better, to arrive somewhere where supposedly there's this big dream that everyone's selling you that maybe you checked all the boxes and it's not there. And there's this dissatisfaction because that is the dissatisfaction that is called life. That is your higher self calling you to return to who you really are.
Which is a pure vibration of love and worthiness and belonging. Number one, to yourself. Number two, to earth, to life, and then to others. But I cannot belong to anybody else unless I know that I belong to myself. I cannot connect to anybody else unless I'm connecting to myself, to my heart, to who I am, understanding my worth. Understanding that all this pain and all this stuff that I had to go through is just part of the journey, part of the experience of coming here to learn.
I mean, earth is like a learning experience. It isn't like, I mean, you're going to be born and then you're going to die. Just that fact enough is when you realize, and maybe you don't realize that when you're a kid, but when you come to terms with that, there's this huge existentialist like crises, like, holy shit, I'm going to die.
And maybe that's why there's so many distractions in earth you know like no no get a career and fulfill this and buy that and go to this and travel to Timbuktu and all these things because you know and we get to do that of course in this life but there's so many things that we do to avoid the fact that it's intense and it's an intense intense thing to understand that you're going to die one day that's why we have religions
and all these beliefs about oh don't worry you'll go to heaven or oh don't worry you'll do this you know and we have these checklists to do in order to avoid death we want to be healthy and we want to, you know, not, not smoke and not eat sugar. And so there's so many fears around this deep existentialist question about what the hell happens after that, you know? And so all of these fears have answers, or at least some type of.
Maybe it's not 100% an answer, but you do understand a little bit more about at least why you're alive when you sit with plant medicines. Magic mushrooms, ayahuasca, peyote, iboga, they have information and they're from the same Mother Earth that I mentioned to you in the beginning of this podcast. That mother, esa madre, crece estas plantas.
So when you you know commune with them when you eat them when you have these experiences you understand something at a deeper level which is a somatic body heart connection level that sometimes just doesn't make sense in the mind and they do allow you allow us to navigate, this mystery a little bit better.
Un poquito más amable. There's still some work to be done, of course, you know, and so, you know, this journey is like maybe a three-hour journey, and we sit outside in the fire, we talk about our experience, drink some more tea. You know, sing some songs, connect to other people's experiences to realize that we're not the only ones. We think we're the only crazy ones, we're the only sad ones, we're the only ones that or dissatisfied.
But in reality, that's just part of the human experience. There's nothing wrong with you. There's nothing to fix. It's just reconnecting and remembering where you come from. And then grieving, grieving in the body and grieving all of those, those lies and all that bullshit that you had to, you know, swallow in order to get through life or some of the things that you did, you didn't want to do. And now you get to sort of begin a new journey of going inwards.
And reconciling that truth of who you really are. And we do so many things in this culture to avoid the body. I mean, the first of all is like, you know, sit up straight. Don't cry. Do this. Do that. You know, all these little trainings since you're in school. And don't play. Sit and listen, you know. And then religion, right? These faith-based practices that disconnect you even more from the body.
That's wrong. That's a sin. Don't do this. Don't do that. So there's, there's very few of us that grew up wild and your parents were like, yeah, man, just feel it all and climb up the trees and don't, I mean, there's, and, and, and connecting to your emotions, emotional intelligence. I mean, it's getting a little bit better, but I mean, we're sentient beings
full of emotions. And most of the time, if, if your parents weren't okay with feeling your caregivers, well, then they're not gonna allow you to feel. He was throwing a tantrum what are you doing stop instead of oh they're expressing anger frustration grief they're sad you know like are you sad are you angry are you frustrated kid for the most part stop it so there's this programming of disconnection and the mushrooms are going to connect you again to that.
And so, you know, you don't have to take a huge dose. You can take a little smaller doses in order to be able to work with the medicine and allow yourself to like be aware of what's happening and reconnect to these emotions, reconnect to these sensations. And then on the way out, you know, how to integrate this, because I have never of all the ceremonies and journeys I've done in the past maybe six, eight years.
Nobody's ever ever ever said i wish i hadn't done that no one everyone comes back for more, everyone's like wow why haven't we been doing this since forever i want my whole family to do this i mean who and i work with families with couples with kids with everybody has the right to experience this beautiful medicine this magic you know and people our ancestors have been using it to heal for hundreds and hundreds of years.
And they do open up your consciousness. They do awaken you to understand, you know, many, many things that maybe you didn't understand before. And so it is so intense that afterwards, you know, you meet with me again, maybe a week later, two weeks later in the group to do an integration, right? To kind of see how your body's adapting to this newness. Because if you've been used to living in grief or in anxiety or in, you know.
Complaining or shit show mode or whatever, you have this huge opening, but then the body's like, after a while might be like, no, no, no, no, I can't believe it. It's just too good to be true. I need to go back to my old ways. And that's where the whole training begins, right? You're going to meditate, maybe do some more dancing, yoga, walking out in nature, soothe the nervous system to allow it to understand that you're not going to be in fight or flight.
Or dorsally like super depressed anymore that you have this opportunity and that you want to continue to live in an open with an open heart in this life and yes there's going to be moments that are horrible and you're going to fight and you scream whatever but now we have a better understanding of compassion for ourselves for this intense journey you know like holy shit i mean it's intense to be human it's intense to be born if you've ever witnessed a birth if you had a child yourself.
Shit is so fucking, I mean, that is crazy. And then dying, if you've seen someone die, it's just intense. But we are created for this intensity. We are wired for this intensity. But we're, you know, and so it's not like we can't handle it. We do. Are you kidding me? I mean, look at your ancestors. They've handled famine and war and craziness. And here we all are trying to do it, you know, and continuing to get up and go to work and come back.
The thing is, we are also wired for pleasure and softness and love and compassion, but we've forgotten. And so to cultivate a little bit more of that and to feel that when your body can feel that, then it remembers that it's also wired for this but it takes you know for for so many thousands of years we were you know an alert fight or flight fight or flight that it's so much easier to be angry and fight or flighty than it is to be soft and compassionate and in love with your song.
Those those you know those i guess those neuron connectors take a little bit longer you have to sit with them a little bit longer. You have to cultivate peace, cultivate compassion, cultivate self-love so that your brain remembers and that your body connects to that. And you're like, okay, yeah, I'm good. I'm a good person. I'm beautiful. I'm amazing.
I can be with myself and I can be thought, you know, it's so much easier to just be like anger and a negative thought sticks way faster to the velcro in your brain than a compassionate loving thought you need to really have a little bit more space for those and that's the work you know to have a little bit more space for that and it's hard because we're so used to the other one we're so used to the negativity and that sort of like brings you a different kind of energy that that lives
in your body that you're more familiar with not even comfortable because it's not comfortable It sucks out. That's why you're looking for, you know, doing something different. So you're wanting or considering maybe coming to a ceremony. And that's what these medicines do. But not just the medicine. Sitting in circle with other people, being in community, being seen.
And heard by others, and seeing and listening to others, you know, being able to be vulnerable or seeing other people's vulnerability, we heal in community. We do. It's not, you know, it's not so much that these plants do the job. I don't really recommend that you eat some mushrooms and go off to the woods by yourself. I don't. Not the way that our nervous systems are wired. I think that's a very difficult thing to do. And some people, that might be your thing. That's not the way I do it.
That's not my work. That's not our work here with our community. And community, seeing yourself in others and in circle is very healing. And also it could be triggering, right? Like, oh, what's she saying? And so those triggers are like, they're a message. You know, why does that bother me? You know, and then it's just like, maybe, maybe, maybe I'm seeing something in them that I don't like in myself.
So you get to do like these mirrorings, these, these connections, these beautiful experiences that happen, you know, in a circle. I mean, we can also always do a one on one, but you're still with me, we're still talking and connecting, and we're still kind of marrying each other. And that is how this magic happens, you know.
And yeah, I mean, maybe you want to come back in six months or in four months, you know, go to your therapist or walk outside in nature, do some journaling, sit and meditate, take my mindfulness magic, join the mindfulness magic. Group because we meditate together. We practice being with our bodies.
We talk about how trauma works and how the nervous system works and how the nervous system, depending on our experience, creates different beliefs that we believe about ourselves that we get to see whether or not they're true. Most of the time they're not true anymore, but we keep thinking that they are, you know, like in today you might go into this, you know, these holiday dinners thinking, oh, this is, he's always going to do that. This is always going to suck.
Or there's this hope, you know, and these always, always, those are from your little child. You know, when you're thinking, I, they always do this to me, or it's never going to stop. That's usually an idea that we created when we were little kids. Like it's always going to be hard. This isn't going to stop.
And now as an adult, when I'm thinking like that, when we're thinking like that, I can now, you know, have this information that, oh, okay, I think I'm in little, you know, little kid survival mode. So no, it's not always going to be like that because I'm an adult now and I can say no or yes, take care of myself, you know. So these are some of the beliefs that we live with without realizing that these plant medicines help you catch.
And then a continuing of integration and somatic work and community circles and just the way, just a journey, right? This is just a journey. These are just helpers for the journey. And to allow, you know, they're trauma medicine, so they do help.
And trauma is just a wound. You know, the wounds that are stuck in our bodies, the wounds that my stomach hurts or my shoulders, or I got these, all these autoimmune diseases that are coming up and, you know, the heaviness that we might be walking around with. What these medicines do is they come in and they rewire the body and they give you like a new software to your hard wiring. And so they allow you to move a little bit softer and smoother and more open hearted.
You're going to, I mean, I don't know what you're going to do. What my experience is, is that there's an opening of the heart to my own heart, to spirit to the earth to the miracle that it is to be alive and then it's up to us to keep the maintenance going you know you can't just buy a car and never go change the world or put gas in it. So there's the maintenance that we must do, but this is what kind of happens in a ceremony.
There's an, you know, and the colors of life, the colors of this brilliant experience come through. And then afterwards, you know, there's these different dreams that you might get or different downloads or ideas, or just, you're going to be, you figure shit out. Not that you don't figure it out without him. It's just they're like a little bit of accelerator and they're your birthright. You know, they're here on this planet that is your mother, that is our mother.
And they're here for us to honor and use responsibly and in a container of sacredness, 100%, you know, of an opening and closing of these energetic portals that take you to places that we never thought we could go. And it's a beautiful, intense, very, very loving process where the laughter and the joy that wants to come through can come through.
And I hope that tonight, if you listen to this today, maybe you're listening to it later, but if you have to go to dinner tonight or you have the rest of the week of the Guadalupe marathon of all these parties and gatherings, that you allow yourself to place your hand on your heart, Take deep breath and give yourself this compassion and this joy that belongs to you that is yours. That there's nothing that you need to do or perform or offer in order for you
to connect to that joy. That joy is yours because that's who you are. It's who we are. We're also the other parts, right? The grief and this and that. But when that takes over, oh, we need that balance. You know, we need to remember that. And so lots of compassion and enjoyment and observing, you know, noticing what's happening, noticing, you know, three or four deep breaths allow me to get back into my body and notice, oh, I'm getting triggered. I don't like what this lady's saying over here.
And then, well, it has nothing to do with me, you know, nothing. And over here, four deep breaths of, Oh my God, I love these kids. They're amazing and with deep gratitude. And I'm just noticing it. That's a whole other practice, right? The whole mindfulness practice. But it's inside of us, just like the other stuff is. You can practice it or not. We have this contemplative chip inside of us because it's who we are. We're divine beings. We really are. We're part of everything.
We're this consciousness or goddess or whatever you want to call it. It's inside of you and it's who we are. And we do, you know, there's a little bit of work we need to do with our nervous systems, with our bodies in order to be able to put two and two together and walk in this presence, in this moment-to-moment experience of allowing love to flow through us and to be us.
And that's why these mushrooms are so helpful. So I'm putting this out today because I know there's some of you guys that are wanting to come out to the ranch or to retreats or to be in ceremony. There's a little bit of information about that in here. If you have more questions, if you want more information, you can reach out. You can go to my website and send me an email.
And we can connect. We can talk about this. this is very i mean i've you know this i've seen people get off of antidepressants off of anti-anxiety medication get out of their huge depressions get out of addiction people that were completely just ready to take their lives and now they're full in 100 enjoying life with the intensity and the hardships but coming back we're you know regrouping saying i got this and continuing to live with an open heart and full of life.
And that includes me. That includes my husband. You know, a lot of my family. There's just, I could tell you story after story, which that's one of the recordings that is coming up here in a couple of weeks, sort of like the downloads of all the people that we've sat with and that we've worked with. And so may you, you know, find some hope in this and I, There's, you know, you can watch How to Change Your Mind. There's so many, there's a documentary on Netflix.
A lot of other documentaries that I really can't think about right now, but there's a podcast here with Xochitl O'Shea who also talks about the medicines with, oh gosh, there's so many podcasts here about, that you can go listen to. But this is the one that I'm sending out today. So I'm going to keep it short because probably nobody has time today. I mean, I have time. I didn't even put Christmas lights on my Christmas tree because that's how slow I'm taking it this year.
I just like the tree without anything on it. And I don't want to have to deal with putting lights on it. And I'm okay with that. You know, I'm peaceful. I'm calm. And that's just what's happening today. Maybe next year I'll put lights on the tree. But have a beautiful day. Remember how beautiful and precious you are, because you are, and we'll see you soon. Thank you for listening to Tales of Recovery. This is Gris Alves, your host, Ashe Aho, and love, love, love to y'all.