I start therapy on Tuesday. In our consultation, my soon-to-be therapist promised to disassemble me completely and help me evaluate, label, and understand each piece and their interrelation. There are certainly parts of myself I’ve pushed into the cobwebbed attic, ignoring their crashes and bangs as they fight for my attention, my love. I am in the process of accepting myself for exactly who I am. For so long, “Molly” was a performance that I fulfilled dutifully. Standards of who I should be / shouldn’t be and what I should do / shouldn’t do were an ongoing calculation that governed my every move, each one a ploy to maintain the image I projected – optimistic, fun, spontaneous, confident.
When I drank ayahuasca on the third ceremony, I desperately wanted to howl at the moon. Even under the influence of a potent psychedelic, my rational mind (ego) countered: Don’t do that. It’s so obnoxious. Who do you think you are? What is it even going to sound like? For what felt like an hour I engaged with this voice, building the confidence to howl only for it to be torn down moments later. On the night of my first ceremony, I didn’t feel the effects of aya until a woman bellowed from her hammock. As I had just drunk a second cup and given up on the medicine having any effect on me, a high-pitched ringing seemed to slow down and reverberate into space, entering my body and immediately propelling me into an alternate dimension. I imagine the woman’s outburst as uninhibited, spontaneous, pure. I chastised myself during the third ceremony as I contemplated howling: Why can’t I be free and authentic like that woman? Why must my inner voice question and criticize my every maneuver, tainting it with some sort of ego-driven incentive? [Upon writing this, I recognize this criticism as another extension of the same voice – mean, self-critical, unrelenting.]
The spontaneous way a dog rolls around in the grass or tucks its snout into the snow, the assured way a squirrel hops from one tree to the next, that is pure intuition, 100% instinct. There is no thinking, no consideration. This doesn’t mean, however, that the actions are foolish or ill-considered. Lived experience and inner knowing dictate subsequent actions without the need for constant conscious evaluation. The dog knows that rolling in the grass or burying in the snow will be enjoyable, pleasant. The squirrel knows which branch to jump on next without stopping to think or even slowing down. Their faithful connection with their true nature propel each animal forward without filling them with doubt, anxiety, or fear – the very things that slow me down and paralyze me from making decisions, like howling at the moon.
Another thing I realized from ayahuasca was our interconnectedness. My experience started because of the other woman; it was her outcry that commenced my journey. Her subsequent moans and cries resonated through my body where I felt her pain and anguish, crying alongside her. My cries flowed outward like an ancient song, heartbreakingly beautiful and harmonizing effortlessly into the music of the night – frogs, crickets, secrets of the Amazonian jungle at midnight. Everything felt intertwined, pulsing with aliveness and each thing built off another. When the ceremony transitioned to it’s final phase from throwing up to crying to music, guitars and drums were overlaid by melodious voices and laughter. I was part of a single organism expressing itself through myriad forms. I didn’t have to be every form; I didn’t want to be every form. I was experience and experiencer, lover and beloved, a fractallized part of an unimaginably complex, alive, pulsating whole.
After an hour of back and forth, I tilted my head back, emptied my chest, and let out a wild howl at the full moon. There was no test-run, no baby howl to practice how it sounded or gauge people’s reactions. I knew that wasn’t an option; I just had to do it with all my might. I chose to override my rational, planning mind, which exists to protect me, and follow my intuition, that formless, baseless nebulous thing that constitutes consciousness itself. Dogs run on pure intuition, squirrels, children dancing down the driveway, rivers, frogs, birds. Their interconnectedness with the entire system protects them, driving them toward their next “decision”, an action undertaken spontaneously and in alignment with the world around them. Without the rational, planning mind to evaluate “is dancing down the driveway going to make me look weird and mess up my cool girl image”, children are free and limitless, motivated to take action that is perfectly aligned with the moment. From this alignment, they start the chain reaction in any witness present, hitting them squarely in the heart bone and impacting their actions going forward. So the symphony begins and maintains itself.
I look forward to therapy. There I will dismantle my portrait into tiny parts and lovingly gather them in my cupped hands, throwing them into the wind and rejoining the world where I belong.
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