I’m sitting on the deck of my childhood home, resting in the sun while I watch two landscapers work on the oak tree I loved to climb as a kid, trimming and pruning it as they do every Spring. My dad’s cat scratches at the screen door to my left, leaping to every chainsaw pull and fallen branch. Despite this moment’s noise, this home is a source of stillness and calm for me. A small town in a small state, Davidsonville, Maryland is a place of woods between spacious grassy land, farms, horses, U-pick fields, and windy back roads for windows down and music up, with distinct seasons, changing trees and weather, simple living and low expectations.
It’s a place that I once ran from, and now return to with a sigh and fall to the Earth, melting back into the calm the thick cool grass brings to my skin and nervous system. A place that holds countless memories, and all the energies of past selves who created them. These used to feel heavy, not anymore. I feel them all moving across this land, up its trees, and through the hallways like ghosts reminding me from where I come but need not return. Need not hold anymore. I remember but I don’t hold, letting the memories wash through as I stand slippery and hollow, no longer carried away by their pull. I don’t feel the sadness of time like before. The longing for the simple days, the pushing away of the misaligned identities lived, or the pulling to return to their illusory security. I look as I try to look in all my life now. As a curious, engaged, and grateful observer that knows a new truth and a new way of living it.
This truth has become my anchor, steadying me to a deeper knowing when I enter places and relationships heavy with the residue of the past, threatening to pull me back to its old patterns. This truth has become my everything. My guiding light in this confusing chaotic world and human experience. And it didn’t come easily. I’m forever grateful for the nameless grace that steered me towards it before I knew it existed or was needed. The grace that brought me the suffering needed to push me within, bringing me to meditation and plant medicine and inner work in order to transcend it, and in the process, find this truth.
I am the awareness of this moment. My greatest power, wisdom, and clarity lies here, in this moment. Who I am is not a name or a log of past memories, who I am is the ever-changing alive consciousness that is experiencing and living life, here and now.
When I know and live by this truth, I am hooked up to the boundless source of all life and the pure bliss, love, and peace that is its essence. Here, my wisdom is that of the universe, my rhythms are that of Mother Earth, and my actions are that of Spirit. All of which far surpass the smallness of my ego mind—the one that said I’m Kori, I live in SF, I grew up in Davidsonville, this is my family, this is my work, this is what I’ve done, this is what I like and don’t like etc etc. All those things are still in me, are important to me, but the anchor I live with now is knowing they aren’t me. These are what Eckhart Tolle calls your ‘life situation’, not your life. I am life, you are life, this is life, right here and right now as present moment awareness.
The more we let our life situation shade our life, the more limited and heavy our existence becomes, moving within the bounds of what has been vs. what could be. Moving according to the mind’s memory of what’s possible vs. the soul’s will.
I think the force that has driven me for the past 5 years is this knowing. Knowing there was something within that had a reason-for-being, something that had far greater power and wisdom for actualizing it. And wow what a journey to find something so close. It’s right here. In this moment. Hidden under the layers and layers of conditioning that shade the true reality. Conditioning inherited genetically, environmentally, and experientially. All living in the mind and veiling my awareness from experiencing the present as it is. That was the hard part, facing and releasing these layers. Because oh how sneaky they are.
The mind is like an overused ski slope, thoughts and their reactive behavior patterns are the runs in the snow made deeper over time. The deeper the runs, the more automatic and quick we are to return to them and move according to their edges. So the ones from childhood or worse, inherited genetically, are the toughest to see and step out of and also most vital to face in order to break the cycle of ancestral traumas.
This is what makes the spiritual path so jarring at first, especially when working with psychedelics. Psychedelic medicine, specifically Ayahuasca and mushrooms in my experience, are like a fresh powder of snow. A journey can bring the experience of the pure unconditioned consciousness, a taste of true life, and therefore, connection to your soul’s will or inner truth. For someone who only lived according to the edges of their inherited and conditioned ski runs—choosing a career their parents expected, or marriage they witnessed in their culture, or belief system passed down for generations—this experience brings a shocking wake-up call. Seeing your truth so purely also means seeing all the ways you’re living misaligned to it. Seeing the relationships, the home, the work, the habits, that are keeping you from the bliss, peace, and love that come from that truth.
I write this 5 days post one of my most potent Ayahuasca ceremonies, my first time sitting with an Indigenous tribe straight from the Amazon, the Yawanawa. The reflection came to mind as I remembered past visits to my childhood home between chapters of deep inner work along this path. Landing back in the environment and family that only knew past versions of myself—the veiled and limited self—was a great test over and over to stay with the renewed truth I had discovered vs. snap back into old patterns. A great test of whether I’d let the beautiful new insights, energies, ecstatic emotions and aliveness weave and integrate within and without, or disintegrate to dust, chalking it up as an irresponsible dream, impossible fantasy, unreasonable phantasmagoria.
I didn’t always pass this test. There were times when it’d be two steps forward, one tentative step back. I’d return to my childhood home, hear my dad ask ‘What are you doing with your life?’ and I’d snap back to fear and doubt, return to my ‘secure’ patterns of working more and harder in a career that exhausted me. This is the labyrinth. The mandala. It’s not a straight path. These patterns are deep and ingrained, it takes facing this test repeatedly and beginning to make smaller steps back, seeing the impossible fantasy as instead a possible life situation. Seeing that bliss, peace, and love are actually always available within, and the medicine journeys simply help show me the life situation that would bring them to the surface.
It takes courage. It takes trust. It takes witnessing for myself that these old patterns survive off of fear, and diminish in love, then choosing love over and over. It takes listening to the truth revealed in these journeys, and changing my life to align to it. Shedding or changing misaligned relationships, work, habits, and thoughts that’d keep me stuck in the same limited, repeating paths. A process that begins with much resistance, but with consistency and devotion, soon flows with the ease of skis on a fresh powder of snow.
Remember my resistance from my last integration post: The Dark Side Of Integration. This was my wake-up call moment. And what followed was two years of shedding and changing my life situation to align more with the truths I’d been shown. Now, landing back from journeys is smoother. The truths revealed are less jarring, more in alignment with the path I’m on, they steer me vs. derail me.
So today, I’m able to only take the steps forward. I’m able to receive and integrate the downloads that came from Grandmother Aya, while enjoying the simple beauty, calm, and groundedness that is this home and this family when experienced in pure, unveiled presence. I’m able to accept my dad and his state of consciousness, knowing it’s simply the ski runs from his parents and theirs too. I’m able to receive the words flowing from my heart to this screen. To feel the Spring sun and shade of its blooming trees. Hear the morning birds, smell the fresh-cut grass and taste the sweet honeysuckles. I’m able to quiet the mind pulls to old ways, and choose now. To choose life.