Dormiveglia

 

These last couple years have been a bit traumatic, capped off by the last couple months feeling like all the chakras in my body have blasted open, and I have been flailing in an attempt to write it down and/or explain it to people, when at the end of the day there is nothing to explain and there are no people to understand it, so I, of course, once again find myself in a run on sentence, trying to explain the inexplicable to infinite molecular egos in undefinable time and space.

This year I experienced Kambo and Bufo, and a lot have asked about them, but I have been a little vague about everything because I wasn’t quite sure how to articulate what I was feeling. The plan was always to write everything down, obviously, and this is the platform for this part of my journey, but this space seems completely foreign to me, as is evident from my last post being 7 months ago and basically a desperate cry for help that no one could possibly understand. Even this post has kind of been sitting on the shelf because my wife said it was too negative, but I decided to just put it out there and ask you to forgive the negativity of the backstory, which is really just the necessary negativity of evolution.

My life has been intoxicating, in that since I could get my hands on something to numb out, I did those substances as often as I possibly could, because, respectfully, fuck all of this shit. Specifically in this blip of my journey I am referring to alcohol, the antics from which I have documented thoroughly through writing, mostly illegible gibberish, and photographs, none of which I can show anyone. My relationship with alcohol has been unhealthy, at best, both physically and psychologically, as I drifted into the dark “abuser” role during the blackout “gin years” of my second marriage. This relationship, which is as ridiculously legal as natural medicines are ridiculously illegal, was so bad that refusing to touch hard alcohol and only having a six pack a night was basically sober.

I have quit significantly on four occasions. The first was when I went to jail, because I had to. I lit a cigarette as walked out those doors and was taken directly to a liquor store and handed a six pack. The second was when my wife told me that she didn’t want to come home because she was afraid I was going to kill her. That ended the blackout gin phase of my life, and I would ironically accidentally kill someone a month into sobriety, which would have easily ended in prison if not for that. The third was dealing with a girl who was perpetually intoxicated and cheating on me, and working at a bar observing the daily intoxicated chaos, and I really just wanted to prove to myself that I wasn’t one of those people.

The last significant quit was when I almost drank myself to death dealing with the girl who was perpetually intoxicated. That was the most significant quit because it coincided with being fired and evicted from a decade long job/home, and being banished to the desert by myself, and as much as I wanted to die, I didn’t want to die, so I started eating better and taking care of myself. I believe that those four events in my story successfully define my relationship with this substance, so there is no need to get into the clusterfuck of decisions made whilst intoxicated to some extent, which was pretty much always.

Anyway, long story longer, as my Uncle Wayne likes to say, a complicated series of events and stories and traumas and friends and lovers and enemies led my soul goddess and I to a second story corner room in a 104 year old downtown Santa Ana building, getting holes burned in our arms and receiving a poisonous secretion of the giant monkey frog, procured by the Katukina Tribe in Brazil. We really had no idea what to expect going in. All we knew were stories of maybe purging, and a kind of cellular reset, some were good, some were bad. We were just open to the experience, and hungry for spiritual growth and healing. We spoke our intentions. Mine were health and strength and family, and we were into it, accidentally sitting last in line, so we got to watch everyone else react to the medicine as we sat in our anticipation. The maybe purging bit should’ve been definite purging, or “getting well,” as we were advised to refer to it.

The instructions were simple: stay hydrated, breathe, don’t get up without help because you might pass out, and let your conscious mind take a passenger seat to the medicine. I did the latter so successfully that I wandered off into another plane of existence, entertained by little films playing out on the back of my eyelids from my past, distant past, and as I heard my name being repeated, the voice in my head assured me that they weren’t talking to me; I followed that voice deeper in. I was perfectly content and happy, wandering deeper into what I figured everyone was experiencing. After a while I heard my wife say I needed to come back, so I gradually wandered back to them dumping water on my head and catching my “getting well” in a bucket that my stiff arms had abandoned.

My eyes were apparently open the whole time, and my body went completely rigid as I slid down the wall I was resting against and began gurgling on my vomit. We jokingly referred to my experience as my having died, if only because I’ve died so many times. At the end of the day I simply passed out because I have low blood pressure, but I was conscious and traveling to wherever it is that people go when that happens, so it was far more significant in my journey than just flopping, which I’ve only gotten close to doing, not actually done.

We floated on our peptides back to the AirBnB and napped for a bit, then went and got some dinner, had some amazingly enlightening talks about the experience and life over tea, then passed out. Did you notice what was missing from my normal routine? I have had no desire to drink since. The ceremony itself required fasting and no alcohol for 48 hours prior, and even that was too long to go without a beer, so we pretended that 24 hours without alcohol was good enough. All I’ve wanted to drink since 4/3/21 has been kombucha, coconut water, and tea. I have learned to appreciate things like ginger beer. Out of curiosity I have had a few beers here and there, with my family in Indiana on my birthday, shared a bottle of a beer with my wife that a friend brewed, and when my son came up for his birthday last week (and naturally brought beer). Each of those ended with the minimal beer required for the event itself. That has never happened. I’ve never just had a beer then been perfectly fine finishing the night with tea or coconut water. I’m still trying to figure this one out, but it is what it is: I have no desire to drink.

That would accidentally evolve into my doing three Kambo sessions in the lunar cycle and Bufo, which I will get into in a later post because I’ve already written too much and I feel like I need to give you a break… and I may or may not still be wrapping my head around that experience. That experience may or may not be wrapping itself around my head. I’ll give you a teaser by saying that Bufo was like getting a hug from the universe, while Kambo is like throwing the universe up, and they both felt amazing. Suffice it to say, I am seeing the world and my life completely different, and have since gone back into my work to find things that I didn’t understand before, to put a kind of bow on it all and leave it in the wilderness for someone else to find.

I have also finally learned to appreciate who the universe gave me. I spent decades complaining about not being able to afford to work with all the souls I wanted to, or not being surrounded by the souls with which others were graced, and being reduced to making the most of what I have, but I was given exactly what I needed, when I needed it, and I can finally be grateful for everything.