We Are the Medicine

I’ve not slept yet and the exhaustion from this week’s Medicine Retreat is still fresh and heavy. My guest just left and is probably still winding her way around the backroads of Glover as I sit to write this. While it’s fresh, I want to speak what just unfolded for me here. It feels like a graduation, a confirmation and a victorious moment of truth for me and the service I aim to provide here at Rootstock.

Here’s the jist: A woman who originally planned for a 36 hour psilocybin retreat had a couple of months to prepare for her time here and, in a focused and vigilant way, she healed, revealed and addressed her core issues BEFORE coming here. She shared that the medicine no longer seemed necessary but that she still wanted to come and retreat herself to the hot tub, some quiet and some connection. I said yes, come, enjoy.

Upon arriving it was clear to me that, she had addressed her issues in a cognitive, thoughtful way but that there was still some block around her embodied experience of her power, elegance, talent, beauty, wisdom and worth. She ‘knew’ it but wasn’t yet acting from that place and allowing herself the experience of sovereignty and bigness.

As it happens, the mushroom medicine works in spirilic and mysterious ways and we commenced with our retreat…winding through our time together, finding a path to wander and filling the deep time with a lot of heady processing about her and her heady process. It followed the same arc as a mushroom retreat….and amazingly, resulted in the same powerful transformation.

I say all the time that the comfort of my home, the lushness of the land here, the warmth and softness of the hot tub, the nourishing and delicious food, the birdsongs and soundtracks, the magic and the beauty…all of these things are to compensate for the reality that it’s hard, uncomfortable work to transform yourself. Being in your truth, the chaos of your patterns and neurosis, and being seen there is courageous and tiring work. What looks like three women cooking waffles over a fire is actually three souls longing for connection, learning to release trauma and conditioning and receiving the healing they asked for. What looks like three women playfully cutting out images and gluing and glittering them onto a board is three powerful spirits manifesting their realities and casting the spells of their future and their descendants futures for all of time.

Medicine retreats come in many forms and so does the medicine itself. Feeling the power of what unfolded here these past days reinvigorates my curiosity about my own medicine and the channel that I am cultivating with the tools within and around me. It’s humbling and beautiful to welcome somebody here and then send them back into their lives 36 hours later a stronger, softer, clearer version of themselves.

We are the medicine.