Melting into the ‘Now’
During my first trips to Peru to stay with Ja and Don Julio, I looked like your typical hard-charging dude from the Bay. I’d say some prayers, gulp down my weekly dose of psychedelic medicine, and then sit on the front of my mat in a half-lotus position. I was prepared to meditate my way to enlightenment like a stoic samurai.
As if sitting still like this wasn’t hard enough, when you add something as potent as ayahuasca into the mix—well, it’s a whole different story. It’s remarkable just how much energy is contained within the feeblest shot of liquid from the jungle. It’s a blast of energy that transports the psyche beyond the space-time dimensions we are accustomed to. In this state, I was faced with the even greater challenge of observing each sensation within me as it arose. Breathing. Praying. Waiting until whatever casual phenomena—thoughts, emotions, visions—dissolved back into the fleeting nothingness from which they came.
So, anyways, in these early sessions, I would sit meditating and get transported to different dimensions beyond space-time, allowing myself to fall apart. When this process went “well,” layers of my identity that I thought were Real and Mattered were dissolved as I watched my fear-based safety give way to the openness of the unknown. Other times, however, I sailed past my edge of dharmanautic competency and fell through Reality’s bottomless floor. In these moments I was, suddenly, no longer relaxed. No, I was, as the neurobiologists say, hyper-aroused—the most terrified I’d ever been. Like a deranged bat caught inside a shopping mall.
In the morning after one particularly rough medicine journey in California, where I had my literal shirt knocked off and thought I was destined for a mental asylum, I lay, huddled up, in the arms of one of my mentors. I told her how I’d begun meditating on the front of my mat, my spine upright, and everything was going well until, in an instant, it wasn’t. And she just laughed, and said, “Al, next time you drink, look at the altar. The real veterans lay back, they relax to receive. We’ll even try and squeeze a nap in before things get going.”
I cannot tell you how drastically this changed the quality of my process moving forward. The power of these simple words to just fucking relax fundamentally changed my relationship to fear. Sometimes taking ayahuasca felt like watching a gargantuan wave coming from a mile away, a wave looking bigger and bigger as it approached. Enough to think oh god, no, that one’s too big to ride! But in face of the inevitable, the only thing you really can do is relax and surrender to the force of the wave. Even when it threatens to hold you under, making a ragdoll of your body from limb to limb—the last thing you should do is fight.
“You were a warrior in a past life,” one acupuncturist told me as soon as he placed his fingers on my wrist. I was lying on my back in a small office in Oakland staring up at inquisitive eyes, eyes that understood something about me that I did not. Do you know how many times I’ve been told a version of this, that I’m a warrior? Whenever I receive bodywork, craniosacral, acupuncture, or any type of somatic service, it seems to happen. Even one of the lead Hakomi instructors—a very credentialed therapist, a woman who has only met me on Zoom—once declared I would’ve been leading hunts in primitive society. She said this in front of a group no less, which I found simultaneously embarrassing and exhilarating in a humblebrag-type way. She said that I was a man whose psyche demanded a clear goal. Go find food for the tribe. Throughout my life, I’ve internalized this as: don’t you dare come back until you do.
But the warrior, in all truth, only represents one-fourth of the qualities of healthy masculinity according to Carl Jung. Throughout the centuries, civilization has seen its share of men who, like me, do not know how to lay down their swords. To know when enough is enough. Just because your personality has been historically organized by a schema that enabled you to anticipate the future and remain safe, it does not mean it’s still serving you today, in this very moment where a kinder, more compassionate future is still possible for your life.
Take this moment right now. Consider what you might be doing, for instance. Are you remaining soft and open as you read on this screen, or do you feel clenched? Is it your jaw, or the way your butt rests (or doesn’t rest) in the chair? Where do you notice tension? In your stomach, or around your ribcage as you breathe, or around your eyes? Can you, as you read these words, soften the corners of your eyes and notice what’s beyond the screen of your device? What happens to your quality of relaxation when you notice all the colors you are seeing right now beyond the immediacy of your gaze? That’s been my favorite queue of late. To notice all the shades of blue and red and yellow and green. Even if, underneath them all, at the subatomic level, it’s just colorless, monochromatic bits bouncing off our retinas. Because you can go a layer deeper from there, too, and find a pure light waiting for you below the source. This light that will someday split you open if you let yourself turn soft like water, letting it all pour in.
A wonderful, insightful read; beautifully written as ever.
I've always found it odd that so many mainstream schools of meditation place so much emphasis on the importance of body-position, that it can, as you pointed out during one of your ayahuasca journies, actually be detrimental to the experience.
It's so easy for us to get wrapped up in the idea that one must sit with our legs recurved into a postion that 70% of the human population cannot attain (myself included), with a perfectly erect spinal column, and hands placed in a specific posture. Naturally this can lead to a sort of tension (as you mentioned), whereby the practioner becomes so focused on focusing, they forget to unfocus.
I do think there is an argument to made in favor of these sorts of positions, and how the tension or "pressure" on the body can be of aid to help one learn to bypass suffering in the face of pain. However this is hardly the exclusive method in attaining a transcendental state. Most particularly in when undergoing a psychedelic event, whereby comfort is arguably of the utmost importance, since surrender to the experience is a baseline for progression.
As always Alex, your publications are treat.
Happy Friday sir.