“You need to sing with love” my Maestro strongly and passionately emphasised, he stared at me as if he had asked a question so I stammered a reply of “I was singing with love, I do sing with love”.  I couldn’t think what he was talking about and honestly I sounded unsure and defensive. A loud chuckle from the centre of the ceremony moloka distracted me so I glanced at my friend and mentor from the UK who was shaking her head.  I knew it was a sign that I had misstepped so I immediately back peddled and asked what I could do to be better. Apparently the correct response was “thank you for the teaching” but I had not said that so the teaching was repeated and I wondered how much more love I could sing with.

I thought I was singing with love, I had been given beautiful icaros by the plants and I had the great privilege of being allowed to sit at the front of the ayahuasca ceremony in the Amazon rain forest with a great Maestro to sing in ceremony with him.  I certainly felt very happy singing my beloved medicine songs for my teacher in Peru so why was he not happy with my work? It was a bit of a blow because I did not understand what I was doing wrong and I did not get any sort of explanation or understanding for some time afterwards. I was however initiated into the jungle and had already been initiated as an ayahuascera and  curandera healer so he must have seen something in me to indicate that I would get it at some point. It just took  a little while to sink in.

A couple of years later I had resurrected my work with certain special mushrooms. Ayahuasca and mushrooms do not mix so I had left the mushrooms behind for a time but people began to ask if I could hold space for the mushrooms and their teachings and I decided to get back into it. I was prompted particularly by a guy I was working with who had tried Aya a few times and we had realised he was blocking the experience. This happens sometimes with trauma, the fear of reliving an experience from childhood, or any other time in our lives, can feel so overwhelming that we block it. On some level the body remembers what it has been packing down for decades and says “no, we are not going back there!” and so we can get stuck on our healing journey. I definitely had that experience when I first started drinking Aya, I got only a few visions and I was not happy about it. Eventually when I was least expecting it I had the journey that took me back into the pain I had long been avoiding. It was tough but not unbearable, it was the pain of a young child that had nothing else to compare that pain to. As an adult I could reason that all things considered it was not the worst pain I have ever experienced in my lifetime. A small child does not have that context to make such a discernment so the pain must be avoided at all costs. We carry that foreboding into adulthood and keep avoiding the pain.

So when I worked with someone who was having similar difficulties with Aya I suggested we try working with mushrooms. I made a powder to work with just for him and I prayed to the plant spirit to help me with his healing and for permission to work with these particular plants, then I took some of the medicine I had made in order to see what, if any, messages the plants had for him. It was a strange sensation for me because I became uncomfortable in my skin, anxious in my mind and it took me a while to understand the meaning. Then I understood the this would be the experience of the patient, that he would would have a release of the trauma that his nervous system was holding and it would be uncomfortable for him in the beginning but then it would be over. Sure enough when his ceremony started he began to feel strange and anxious, I was able to reassure him that this would pass which it did.

Even I was not prepared for happened after that though, he said he found himself in heaven! He had passed though all the weirdness and anxiety and arrived at a completely new way of being in the world. He saw his past lives and different selves and said whatever happened now he was changed forever by a couple of grams of mushrooms. It was not a big dose by anyones standards. What I experienced was even more profound for me, it was a eureka moment, a sudden understanding of how medicine like this works. Once he experienced this breakthrough Ayahuasca was there with me which was interesting because neither of us had consumed any Ayahuasca that day, but she was there none the less to inform me that his block was gone and he could now experience a journey with her again. Not only was Aya there but all the plants were there with me, all the plants I have worked with that are usually found in the Ayahuasca brew. Plants that I have done dietas with and those I work with regularly like Cacao and Bobinsana both heart opening medicinal plants.

Also with me were all the plants I have loved and connected to over many years. The trees where I live, the herbs I have used and loved countless times and even the plants I have looked after for many years that have looked after me in turn. I was able to see them standing with me like a flank of soldiers, they came together with all their healing powers and were able to work through my heart space and with the person in front of me. There are several reasons why this was possible that day. One was my connection with those plants and the fact that I had asked for their help in advance, another was the work I had done on myself over the previous ten years and importantly the man who I was working with had a genuine and fervent desire for change and healing. I was able to really see just how much it meant to him to experience life in a different way, to let go of all the trauma he was carrying.

The medicine plants have always called and found their way to me since I was a child. I have always collected, grown and learned about our native herbs and wild flowers here in the UK. I had poured over the picture books my parents had on their bookshelves with drawings of all sorts of mushrooms and toad stools. In the last ten years master medicine plants have been continually gifted to me one way or another. Students or friends turn up with them at my door or an envelope arrives mysteriously from a client with something they think I would like. It has been one blessing after another. I also understood however on that day with the mushrooms that I myself was the medicine too. I have undertaken a healing journey of my own and transformed many traumas into wisdom, this is “the work” that people often talk of. It has taken me ten years of intensive self scrutiny and many years prior to that of reading and learning. I have changed my own energy field, I have changed what I call in for myself in my life and I can now change it for others just by being in the same space as them.

I once joked to one of my teachers that I realised if I am there for a ceremony someone else in the room has a difficult relationship with their Mother. She laughed and said for her it was domestic violence, that is the healing that she went through and can now offer to others, I offer something different. My experiences of healing can work on someone who needs healing from similar traumas. So it was that day that the stars, and the plants, aligned with my healing journey to create the perfect energy for healing. They worked through my open heart space, it seemed like they were reaching through to connect with the patient. This was where I could really see how important an open heart is for healing and what it truly means. Being open hearted is not about being happy, it is not about telling anyone else how open hearted you are either, and I do get the irony of this statement. It is about accepting yourself with all your flaws as opposed to being perfect. It is having compassion for yourself when you make mistakes and allowing processes to roll through your awareness and become the good advice you can share. Being open hearted is not caring what other people think, not seeking approval it is vulnerability and connection.

This is what my Maestro meant when he was asking me to sing with love. I was singing with gratitude and excitement but I really wanted his approval, I cared what he thought and so my heart was not fully open. This is the disconnection he could sense, this is what he called giving my power away. Our hearts are the living connection between our reality of atoms and matter and the energy that we call spirit so they need to be open for spirit to work through us, for plant spirits to bring their healing. It is an interesting coincidence that both the ancient Egyptians and the Incas believed that we should be working towards the heart should being light. When we die our hearts will be weighed they believed, in Egypt the god Anubis presided, in Peru the Condor. My personal belief is that these ancient civilisations were using different idea to describe the same thing as my Maestro. Whether we talk about having a light heart, being wholehearted, singing icaros with love or being open hearted the desired result is the same. We want to get to a place of conscious presence and acceptance embracing everything we are and everything we have been through without judgement. All I can say is that it was a long process for me not an overnight decision I made. I didn’t even know I had got to this elusive place until the mushrooms showed me, this was the moment I saw that I too can be the medicine. This is not to say I exist in a perfect open hearted place at all times. I am weak and self indulgent like most humans and can have a meltdown on a bad day, but hopefully I can find the right state of being to call on the plants and my other allies when doing healing work.

The final piece of the puzzle that day was the clients genuine wish for healing. He was at that place where he would do anything for change, rock bottom some call it but you don’t have to necessarily be in a desperate place, you have to have made that decision that means you want change and will do anything possible to make it happen. Not that this ceremony was a complete cure for that client but it was a break through for both of us. Plant consciousnesses are ancient or timeless even, they along with the elements hold the teachings and memories of eternity and they are always happy to help us. This has been a key understanding for me that the plants really are the master teachers and we will always be the students and there really is no shame in always remaining a student.  It has been my experience and I have witnessed many, many times that we can get fed up with our earthly shamanic teachers, feel constrained and want to branch out on our own and so the idea of remaining a student can become contentious. However if we handle this process correctly it can be the real start of stepping into our own power, but that is the subject of another blog!