“The simple rules of this game are being honest with ourselves about where we’re at, and learning to listen, to be able to hear how it all is. Meditation is a way of listening more and more deeply, so we hear from a more profound space, exactly how it is. To hear how it is, we must be open to it, thus the open heart.” - Ram Dass, in Grist for the Mill
In my post fear, I wrote about the challenge I had acknowledging and facing the mistakes I’d made as a mother, for fear that my whole house-of-cards would collapse and I would realize that everything in my life was garbage and I’d never done anything worth anything and I was a complete failure as a human. The interesting thing was that I spent so much time and energy resisting the thought that I’d made mistakes. Like I was living with a giant crate in the center of a room of my psyche, taped up and chained up and blockaded. Eventually I got to the point where I’d give it such a wide berth, I'd do my best to not even poke my head in the room. I was going to go along and pretend this crate didn’t exist, and thank you very much, everyone else should agree to do the same.
“At the moment when there’s nothing more to lose, the Ego breaks open - and then we see who we are behind who we thought we were.” -Ram Dass
It is impossible to break down into percentages of what amount of my healing came through psychedelics and what came from reading/listening to great sources and what came from working with my therapist, but the result of all of this effort was that I finally began to sense something in myself beyond my ego, beyond the story about who I was that I felt so invested in. I had come to learn that this is what is meant in psychology as the Ego. The sense of self that we have based on a lifetime of experiences and thoughts. Who we think we are.
One of my main motivators for doing a plant medicine journey was to receive a “message from the universe,” like I’d heard/read so much about from so many people. Many people feel like they get a personalized insight that they realize the truth of in a way they never had before. When I asked myself what message I most wanted to hear, I knew right away. The message I felt desperately hungry to hear was that I. was. enough. I don't suppose I'm alone in having a deeply rooted insecurity, a feeling of lacking something fundamental in order to feel "good" about myself.
During my journey I had four main instructional messages/experiences, with a lot of other amazing “stuff” mixed in. I could tell that things were coming near to a close as I was kind of experiencing a recap of the main themes, and I recalled “Oh yeah, what about my message?” Here’s what I wrote about this shortly after the experience:
Sometime near the end of things, I remembered that the big “message” I hoped to receive from the universe was that I was enough. I felt like I’d struggled with that forever. And thought maybe just hearing it from outside myself would do the trick where I could finally believe it and put it to rest. So that question bubbled up from inside my heart, and it was in some way as if the words YOU ARE ENOUGH were radiating their presence and message, and then the word/idea of ENOUGH just disintegrated, and I had the epiphany that having the “enough” there was almost redundant, as YOU ARE had “enough” implied. Enough was such a given in the YOU ARE-ness that it didn’t need to be stated, and to state it was to take away from the overwhelming completeness and perfection of YOU ARE.
So this insight, combined with self-compassion techniques I’d learned from my therapist, plus a greater understanding of the ego and the soul and what this journey of life is all about anyways, plus Jennifer Finlayson-Fife’s workshop and coursework about self confronting and self soothing, finally allowed me to go in the room with the crate. I looked at it, and it was still something I’d rather not open. But finally I was able to unchain and untape it and just open the damn crate already. And the truth poured out. And the hurt poured out. And the fear poured out. And I could see so clearly all the hurt I’d caused the people I loved the most, all while trying my best. It was devastating.
But you know what? I survived. I cried a lot and have cried more since. I’ve listened to my children say the words, giving voice to the ways I wasn’t good enough to spare them pain. My worst fear had come true. But instead of feeling like a total failure, like an absolute worthless pile of garbage, I felt....human. I saw that despite my best efforts, I’d done some things poorly. That didn’t mean I’d done everything wrong, but I also didn’t feel the need to try and excuse the things I’d done wrong by listing the things I’d gotten right. I could meet with a therapist with the rest of the family and listen to them say the things that had made it hard for them to feel loved and valued and seen. The burdens they were carrying from some of the choices I’d made. And instead of feeling defensive and worthless, I could be with them and feel for them. I could see that yeah, that would have been hard. I could empathize with the young person who didn’t feel quite safe or loved enough or truly seen. I could see how my actions caused pain and accept responsibility. And I could also look back on my younger self with kindness and sympathy, and see that I really had done the best with what I had. And that the only thing to do from here was to keep healing and growing.
“I can do nothing for you but work on myself…you can do nothing for me but work on yourself!” Ram Dass
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