Meditation, Medicine, and Mysticism: My Journey Toward Liberation
I want to be free.
As my journey deepens along the spiritual path, I continue to get pulled toward practices that explore drawing the heart into the mind. I study teachings and practice techniques that cultivate meditative peace and harmony, but I realize this is only half the journey.
How does one pursue freedom?
Go to India. That was my answer in my 20s. I went to India searching for meaning, living in various ashrams, and visiting sacred sites without knowing a thing about the word ‘sacred.’ Looking back, part of me was running from my life in California toward something different. I started yoga in my late teens and knew there was something to examine in bonding more deeply with my body. I was looking for a way to cultivate a harmonious way of being while connecting to something greater.
After traversing India, I landed at the Kopan Tibetan Monastery in Nepal. I signed up for a one-month silent meditation retreat. I can still remember coming out of the retreat and heading back to the hustle and bustle of Katmandu, feeling more peaceful and at ease than I had ever felt. After the retreat, I decided to walk the Annapurna trail in the Himalayas and had moments on that trek where I felt at one with nature and the universe. It was a new feeling.
While living in Europe, I returned to Kopan and India to study and practice several times over the next few years. However, I never recaptured the experience of unity that I had on that first trip. After six years of dipping in and out of these lands, I eventually returned to California and went to work for the Krishnamurti Foundation in Ojai.
Fast forward a few decades, and I have returned to those early Indian and Buddhist roots. For much of my life, I lacked the emotional and intellectual honesty to unlock my trauma. When my mother died ten years ago, her death propelled me toward healing, and I took up therapy and dove into plant medicine.
I have been seeking freedom, truth, and peace all my life. But, for a long time, I was unaware and unwilling to open myself to healing. I have always wanted to live an enthusiastic and vibrant life but have never dared to dig deep and do the work. I appeared courageous on the outside, but inside, I longed for deep connection and healing.
After meeting the magical plant teacher of ayahuasca, I realized that I needed to put my house in order, ironically something Krishnamurti repeatedly recommended. I could feel ayahuasca opening a crack in my heart and leading me toward something sacred. As I continued to sit with plant medicine, the crack got broader and deeper, and my relationship with the sacred started to blossom and reinhabit my heart. As each wound healed, a new seed of possibility was sown so I could rebuild my castle on a new foundation.
For many years, my life was Godless. There was nothing sacred about my life or how I was living it. I had no connection to the divine. I was living an ego-centric life driven by my traumas and damaged desires. I focused on success and ‘getting ahead’—whatever that means. But then something happened: I was reawakened by a plant and shown a way forward. Being shown a way is one thing, but doing what you are shown is another.
I dove head-deep into the plant medicine world as ‘the way,’ which changed my life. I imagine God laughing in Heaven, providing me with many possible salvatory liferafts: yoga, meditation, Buddhism, Vedanta, and Krishnamurti. Nothing seemed to work—so God reached down deep into the magical wisdom bag and said to the Angel Gabriel right before pulling me out of this life, let’s try one last thing: plant medicine.
For years, I felt like the stubborn child who had been looking for the quick and easy secret key but had been unwilling to do the work. The work of daily practice felt like a contagion to me—I am a rebel; nobody tells me what to do or how to live my life. Discipline is for monkeys. Devotion is for religious freaks.
How wrong I was.
Badinath Stupa, Nepal
I recently picked up The Tibetian Book of Living and Dying by Sogyal Rinpoche. I read it twenty years ago and it recently returned to my reading list. Speaking on freedom, Sogyal Rinpoche says, “We may idealize freedom, but when it comes to our habits, we are completely enslaved.” I love this quote because it doesn’t tell us what freedom is but allows us to imagine why we aren’t free. Isn’t our life a collection of habits (both good and bad) strung together?
What is the way?
In a recent Guru Viking podcast with Lama Glenn Mullin, Glenn describes three paths to liberation, each outlined in Tibetian teachings. The first path is through meditation, the second is through dream yoga, and the third is through soma (psychedelic sacrament in my case). Listening to those paths described by Lama Glenn Mullin was comforting because I realized I have a foot on each tried and true path. If it’s good for the Tibetans, it’s good for me.
Meditation is fundamental to regulating our thoughts—this is the true gift from the Tibetan’s knowledge. In the Dzogchen tradition, the Buddhists talk about cultivating Rigpa. Rigpa is a Tibetan term that translates to “pristine awareness,” “pure awareness,” or “intrinsic knowing.” In one of my plant ceremonies, long before I learned about this word, I received the following from the plant spirits:
Meditation is the cultivation of awareness. Awareness is the building block and unifier that connects the present to the infinite.
The Tibetans and the plants speak the same language and point at the same wisdom. Like many traditions and keepers of sacred knowledge, the intelligence that comes from Source is not proprietary. It is essential to recognize that life abounds with wisdom keepers from many traditions and that all sacred traditions have something valuable to offer. One of Krishnamurti’s most famous quotes is that “truth is a pathless land.” Did he mean there is no path, or perhaps all paths lead to the sacred?
As I close the exploration of meditation, I will pivot toward an approach where my path diverges from Krishnamurti and the Tibetans and seeps into the animate. My worldview took a turn that I never expected, directly related to my work with plant medicine. Thanks to ayahuasca, my understanding of life was turned upside down—or, better said, right side up.
Meditation is only half the story, an essential part for sure, but to leave out the living vibrancy of the cosmos and our daily relationship to it leaves out a vital component. Josh Schrei’s podcast episode Why Mindfulness Isn’t Enough? does a deep dive into why more than mindfulness is needed.
First of all, we need to talk about animacy. We live in an animate world, teeming with life and unseen entities—spirits are real, and we constantly interact with them. I wish you could see what I have seen. I know that ‘believing’ something without proof challenges our rational minds. This door opened for me thanks to plant medicine, and I gleamed a peak into other realms.
Beyond mindfulness, honoring and relating to the animate world is essential to developing a relationship with the sacred. This is where devotion comes into my practice. Devotion comes from the word consecrate. The origin of this word stems from late Middle English:
from con- (expressing intensive force) + sacrare ‘dedicate’, from sacer ‘sacred’.
We express a delicate, intensive force toward the sacred through devotion. We open an energetic communication channel to the animate through our reverence and devotional practices. As we all know, communication is fundamental for relationships, and consequently, how can we have a relationship with the sacred without communication?
There is no wrong way to practice devotion—recite a prayer, light a candle, practice japa, sing a song, recite a poem, or place flowers on your altar. The crucial element is your heartfelt intention to connect with an animate. But remember, it’s not about you or what the animate can do for you.
In devotion, we honor and express our gratitude from our hearts and ignite the blessings that live in the space between us and the animate, for the animate—not because we want more abundance or a new car. Devotion is not transactional. However, as we develop a relationship with the divine, our life aligns more with our soul’s purpose. This often includes a reboot of how we live while deconstructing who we thought we were.
I still find myself searching for freedom. However, the angst of the search is softened when I relax into my daily practice and devotional lens. I often ask myself what I can do to honor the sacred right now, and then I remember that freedom is rooted in our relationship with the sacred through devotional practice.
Om Mani Padme Hum.
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