Medicina

It began with a walking constellation. We saw them coming through the gate of our center – the curanderos and shamans from Colombia. Then there was a phone call. Then they arrived. They were here! And our lives changed forever. The world I had constructed from the fragments of our collective fundamentalist-mechanical worldview unraveled, and something else took shape from things I had missed, ignored or rejected as too fantastic. All the meditation, constellation work, hypnosis, psychology, NLP, and Psychomagic came to fruition in those dark nights of ceremony. Much of what I thought I understood well, I realized I had known only in the most superficial way.

• The mind-body is not our own, nor is it bounded in any of the ways we assume.
• It is possible to create a reality from any thought.
• Anything is accessible through thought and imagination.
• Tend to your thoughts wisely.
• Everyone you meet has something to teach you about the system you are part of.
• Treat them all with tenderness and love.

Sometimes, in ceremony, so many intangible beings appear that I have to keep my eyes closed. I prefer to feel them rather than to see them. I recognize that many of them have nothing to do with me. They are part of the constellated elements of others’ lives, assembled there: spirits, demons, ancestors, guardian angels.

Once in the forests of the Amazon, within minutes of drinking the medicine, they streamed in. They leaned over our hammocks, ancient spirit-healers, from the trees, from the river, deeply curious, attending to us carefully, tenderly, studying the strangers from the north.

Once, sitting in a room in the city, oblivious to the noise of the police sirens and revelers on the street outside, SHE came. She came, In a dress made of intricate beadwork like the jewelry of indigenous people in the northern Amazon. Seven feet tall, she sat in front of me all night long. She said, “I will never leave you.” Waves of joy, regret, delight, gratitude, sadness and love washed over me, all the emotions it is possible to feel. For the first time I felt myself to be part of this strange universe where I lived. I felt included, for the first time. I realized that until that moment I had never felt such a profound sense of inclusion.

“Remember, I’ll never leave you,” she said as she stood up at the end of the night to go. She smiled, “I’ll never leave you,” and ever since, wherever I am, I can call on her and she will be there, and I will know that I am included, in this world, in this universe, in any universe, in whatever situation or system I am part of at that moment.