A Plant spirit ritual
For opening our heart and healing our pain body
We have an inner world and an outer world. When we drink the sacred Plant spirits in a ritual, our attention is directed to the inner world. We close our eyes and go inside. The Plant spirits opens the doors of the superconscious and the subconscious. We can recognize the door of the unconscious because we enter into an elevated state of consciousness.You can call this state of being Big Mind and Big Heart, thus following Gempo Roshi, a contemporary Zen master. Big Mind is an increased state of intellectual consciousness where we can gain insights from the past, present, and future of our personal self and also of the collective human memory and possibly even of the earth. Big Heart is the feeling center of the Higher Self where we feel more and more love. It allows us to enjoy music or the beauty of the inner landscapes that pass by our consciousness.
From Big Mind and Big Heart, we get insights into our lives since conception, from a perspective that is not distorted by judgmental thinking. Normally, we make judgments about our experiences: what we have done to ourselves, what others have done to us, among therefore, our memories are colored by how we deal with them emotionally.
Under the influence of the sacred Plant Spirits, such judgments disappear, and we see things as they were or as they are, often from multiple perspectives. In this way, we see connections between the patterns we weave from the past. We sometimes also see the patterns that run through our previous lives stories that we cannot place in this life or the patterns that we drag along from the ancestral lines, like those of our father and grandfather or our mother and her grandmother and further ancestors. (This is how the aftermath of the Second World War still buzzes in our subconscious, especially when trauma exists from the time in our ancestral line).
Big Mind and Big Heart are opened in a Plant Spirit ritual. They are our gateways to the spiritual worlds. As soon as we open up to the spiritual world, we step out of our personal dramas, and our personal story becomes less important. If we sink even deeper into the upper consciousness, we enter a state of bliss, called Sat Chit Ananda in the yoga tradition:
Sat: Truth, absolute being, or existence and unchanging
Chit: Consciousness, understanding, and comprehension
Ananda: Bliss, a state of pure happiness, joy, and sensual pleasure
We are then completely in the Here and Now, and at the same time, we experience an eternity feeling.
This state is experienced by many Plant Spirit users, especially those who have experience with meditation, and expressed in different ways. Unity consciousness is another word for it.
Pandora’s Box ( our Pain Body)
Consuming sacred Plant Spirits opens not only the gates to the higher consciousness but also the doors to the subconscious. It has to be noted that a large part of the subconscious consists of what Eckhart Tolle calls the pain body.
We can also call this pain body a Pandora’s box, because it conceals all the causes of our problems, physical and emotional complaints, and mental distortions.
In shamanism, this pain body is called the shadow. Also, in ancient Egypt, this state is called the shadow. It is formed by all kinds of disappointing, shocking, experiences from this and other lives of ours.
Or traumatic experiences from this and other lives of ours. In general, our mind through rational thinking tries to ignore this pain body. As long as the deep wounds from the pain body are asleep, ‘nothing is wrong’. However, sometimes certain events may trigger the pain body. We try to suppress feelings in many ways by rationalizing experiences and feelings, by seeking distraction, by working extremely hard, by getting intoxicated, or otherwise seeking distraction until we suffer so much that we want or need to do something about it.
Our Higher Self wants to bring these unresolved feelings and experiences into the consciousness in order to process them and then let go of them. This is often the reason we either go into therapy or, for example, want to try a sacred Plant Spirit ritual. The Lower Self or ego wants to suppress this dichotomy of experiences and feelings, and the Higher Self wants to process these traumatic experiences. This tendency gives rise to friction; it gives us struggle and resistance. This is also experienced by many Plant Spirit drinkers. Many people fight themselves and face difficulty surrendering to the process of processing. We can carry with us a deep childhood trauma that we no longer remember and is thus deeply hidden in the subconscious pain body.
For example, a sexual trauma such as abuse or incest. We can see such a trauma as a deep, often suppurating wound over which a plaster is stuck. That plaster consists of words that hide the trauma such as, It never happened,” or “I can’t tell it,” or I want to forget it.” This repression allows us to live on without having to confront ourselves. One part of the consciousness tries to suppress the experience and another part of the consciousness wants to bring this experience into the consciousness.
Normally, in daily life, suppression wins the battle. Under the influence of sacred Plant Spirits, the Higher Self eventually wins the inner struggle, and the traumatic experiences from the past are processed. In a Plant spirit ritual, the dungeons of the soul open themselves, and the most painful experiences come into consciousness.
This development may not always happen in the beginning and not always in the first ceremony, but in the end, we cannot ignore them. It is also difficult to dismiss such experiences with denial, as no therapist is sitting next to you to make suggestions. In the Plant Spirit journeys, we are with ourselves, without outside influences.
The Plant proces facilitator of a ceremony leaves the participants alone as much as possible, providing a safe bedding so that inner cleansing processes can take place.
All kinds of shocking experiences regularly come to the fore in a sacred Plant Spirit ceremony. It may not only be something shocking that happened to us but also be incidents that happened to someone else, someone with whom we are connected, such as our mother. This may seem confusing, but we do feel the difference.
For instance, sometimes, the incidents or experiences that emerge may be sexual traumas. Afterward, people say, “I have always known it, but I could never place this feeling because I have no conscious memory of it. But now that it has come to the surface, I am relieved. It puts a lot in place.” But of course, many may not have experienced sexual trauma during childhood’’. On the other hand, everyone has experienced something shocking.
Our Body keeps the score
We have a past we can remember and we have a past we cannot remember, which is hidden in our subconscious. For most people, this boundary between conscious memories and unconscious memories is around four to five years. Some people may remember things from their infancy, and some people may not remember anything before the 10th year of life. You can compare these memory banks with a computer the conscious memories can be compared to the working memory of a computer. The unconscious memories are on the hard disk. Our body, our DNA structure, and our cells also have a memory, which can be compared to a hard disk. This memory goes back to the moment of this existence, so the memories start at conception.
In a sacred Plant Spirit ritual participants often experience their body memory. It happens very often that participants recollect memories of the time they were in the womb of their mother. They remember the prenatal time which can feels like a warm oceanic welcome safe place. Or they remember it as an unsafe, cold, sad, toxic or rejecting place. Both goes along with the emotional state of mind of the mother as well.
We have to realize that the most painful and shocking experience in our body memory is the current birth. Not everyone has had a (sexual) trauma or an accident, but everyone has been born. And most of the births are in some way a traumatic event. Thats why it’s normal and logical that a lot of participants under influence of Plant spirits experience their birth. Especially if the birth has been very traumatic.
Like;
A vacuum extraction salvation
Prolonged births
Contraction inducers
C-section birth
Breech birth
Umbilical cord wrapped around the neck
The birth experience is the most common trauma we have. The after effect of a traumatic birth is often not recognized or acknowledged. However it is very logical that a traumatic birth proces becomes part of the pain body and thus has an effect on our emotional and physical well-being.
