Hope Dealer with José Rico
"Hope Dealer" is story-telling that focus on building connections and fostering a sense of belonging within our communities. Through personal narratives, historical reflections, and calls to action, Rico and his guests offer listeners a profound understanding of the power of love, community, and spiritual practice in overcoming systemic oppression and cultural erasure. Each episode is a testament to the enduring love and resilience that drive communities to resist, persevere, and thrive despite the challenges they face. You can join this community at https://joserico.org/
Hope Dealer with José Rico
Ancient Wisdom and Modern Spirituality with Acacea Lewis
Join us for an enlightening journey with Acacea Lewis, the visionary founder of Divine Master Alchemy School, as we explore the intersection of spirituality, science, and cultural. Acacea shares the gift of tea, a symbol of ease and unity, in a world fraught with chaos. Her unique background in Buddhism, geology, and astrophysics provides a fascinating lens through which we discuss the burgeoning acceptance of quantum consciousness, a bridge connecting the realms of science and spirituality.
Our conversation takes us through mystical encounters with shamanic medicine in Mexico, guided by a spiritual elder. Discover the power of unity as Acacea recounts transformative experiences with plant medicines like San Pedro and LSD, where the group's inter-connectedness led to profound healing and self-discovery. We also probe into the legacy of Maria Sabina and the richness of indigenous cultures, highlighting the intricate balance between appreciating cultural heritage and avoiding appropriation.
Acacea's vision extends beyond personal revelations, as she shares plans for creating safe spaces for spiritual growth in Arizona and Oaxaca. By honoring elders and respecting plant medicines, she aims to foster communities rooted in reciprocity and spiritual richness. Delve into Acacea's journey of cultivating peace in everyday life, confronting the duality of existence, and challenging material pursuits—all while nurturing the eternal qualities of the soul. Prepare to be inspired by her commitment to nurturing genuine community connections and advancing responsible spiritual practices.
F.L.Y. L.I.B.R.E. a guide for healing and liberation can be purchased here: amzn.to/4iCzAAM
Get Dr. McBride's book "Becoming Changemakers" to explore more stories of resilience and community transformation. Connect with the Become Center at becomecenter.org or email dmcbride@becomecenter.org.
I'll just kind of pour myself casually a cup of chai in the background.
Speaker 2:I saw you got some new tea right. You got some new tea in the mail.
Speaker 1:Oh, my friend from Ukraine, like, of all the places to get really good tea from, wow, I just feel really spoiled, you know, especially because of so much challenges are happening in Ukraine. You know, I feel like I didn't expect one of my friends to send me some of the best tea I've ever had. You know, uh, from such a place that's going through so many political and you know, war, challenges and struggles and um, for me it's kind of like a beacon. You know, it's kind of like like a story of like Noah's Ark, when the dove comes back with the olive branch. You know, things are getting better. Like, for me, it's kind of like a symbol of hope. You know, like we're able to bond and connect over tea, even though the world is like just crumbling. We were able to share tea and I'm going to send him a package back. So this is going to be fun, to build bridges, you know, for our love of tea.
Speaker 2:I love that. I love that and for all of our listeners. You just have heard a little bit of our next guest of Hope Dealer, and this is Acacia Lewis, who is the founder of Divine Master Alchemy School. She is also a Buddhist, a geologist. She is also a Buddhist, a geologist, an astrophysicist. I like to call her as my spiritual nerd friend, somebody that I got to know online, and I'm really happy that going to deepen our relationship in this conversation and I think this is a very timely conversation, as you heard of speaking that right now, the world is going through a tremendous amount of despair.
Speaker 2:We know that we just ended a cycle and are in the beginning of a new cycle, and for me to introduce her to you is that I also believe that this is a time where we are called to return to ourselves, are called to return to a community where our rituals and our practices are valued, and then also a call to return to our spiritual selves that are way beyond our physical selves.
Speaker 2:You know one of the things that I've heard Acacia say recently that oftentimes we need to remember that we are beyond our simple human body. She said we need to remember that we are grander in our spirit and we have infinite power because we are infinite spirits, and I love when you said that, acacia. It just was a great reminder to me, and I hope it's a great reminder to our listeners that this is a time for us to remember that and to be able to make sure that we are guided by love. So I want be able to welcome you and we'll love for you to introduce yourself. Tell us a little bit about who you are. I love when people say not just who they are in the titles and the descriptions, but also where you're from and anything that you think that we should know about you. That will help us understand, as we move through this conversation, where you caught me from.
Speaker 1:Okay, wow, thank you so much.
Speaker 1:This is such a beautiful introduction. Where am I from? My dad always tells me. When people ask me the question, where are you from? He said always tell them you're from the future. He's serious, you know, like this, and it's like, yeah, because you're about for your time. You know, he sent me this thing today about quantum jumping.
Speaker 1:Okay, and I was like, well, what do you think about this new science, dad? You know, like, like you know the, the, the olds, you know they, they get brought into. You know the quantum sciences with all the ads. You know, like graham hancock and stuff, and like I like some of that stuff. But I don't ever expect my dad to send me stuff like that, you know, and I love it when he does because it's just like a sign for me like, oh, my goodness, you know, uh, the world is now saturated with magic, you know. And, um, when I say magic, I mean like a lot of the quantum physics I was studying college. Now some of the theories I had. You know there's whole podcasts, there's gaya network. You know quantum consciousness. Quantum consciousness was such a dirty word 15 years ago, you know, when I was in college studying astrophysics. They were afraid of me. They were like, yeah, she's trying to apply for an engaged learning apprenticeship with somebody from theology. Yeah, and she's in Hamilton School of Science and Engineering. We don't-.
Speaker 2:We don't do theology we don't do that.
Speaker 1:You know we don't mess with those guys over there. We let them in their priesthood library of nonsense and pseudoscience. You know they're all pseudoscience people. You know they believe in a god. You know Like how crazy is that. You know.
Speaker 2:And now they're studying the god source, or the quantum, the god particles, right Now. That's the new, best thing.
Speaker 1:That's the new thing, you know, and I remember the guy who was doing that. His name was Reisnard Stronowski. We were like you know that kind of name, reisnard Stronowski, you know, like he'd walk into a room and we'd be like there goes the most brilliant, worst physics teacher we've ever had. Nobody could understand him and his daughter, thortha, was obsessed with Toads. And, sir, if you're watching this with all due respect, thank you for flunking me in intro physics, because if you hadn't have done that, I would have continued on that path and I would have been a sucky astrophysicist. I really would have.
Speaker 2:So I want to get back a little bit to your origin story, acacia, because I want to tell you that I came across you while you were in Mexico, while you were in Oaxaca, and this was during the pandemic, when I was just starting to in my Buddhist journey.
Speaker 2:I had just started learning about Buddhism. This is before I went to my first Buddhist retreat and I don't know how I came across you, but I just saw that you, I took one of your classes, your online classes, when you were in Oaxaca, and I was just fascinated by two things. One that you, for me, was one of the first people that I saw talk about plant medicine, but from the historical uses and the citing of texts and sources of what plant medicine is referred to in now while in my in history and in my spirituality, and when I heard that and when I was taking your class, I was like I knew there was a connection there, but I never understood what it was. And then, obviously, you brought in other religious and theological texts, like Buddhism, into the conversation. So tell us, how did you get to Mexico and what was? How was it that you, that you got there and you started your spiritual transformation?
Speaker 1:Well, you know it's a long story, but I'm going 2015, 2016,. First time, and I went to Cancun with a medicine man named Chahecha. Now this guy, you know he calls himself a poet, mystic, you know but he's studied with some Lakota elders and a lot of people respect him kind of as a Lakota elder, even though you know he does a lot of stuff. But he was a student of Mr Gorman who wrote the book Sapo in my soul. If you don't know about that book, it's about Cambo medicina and I had a lot of challenges and the way I met Cha was through a friend of a friend and he happened to be in Arizona at the same time as me. And you ever get a call like there's a ceremony going down, it's going to be three days it's in the caves.
Speaker 1:You know you're going to be by the river on the beach, let's go, let's go, let's go. And so I got the call. I was like, oh, oh, it's my first, it's my first big medicine gathering, oh my God. So I get in my car week of get there, and there's no signal. We're out in the middle of nowhere, right? And I get there and I'm calling. I'm calling this guy. He's not picking up his phone, my on my phone's like sim, not found whatever.
Speaker 1:And then all of a sudden I see this like clown car going down the street and there's this giant man in this tiny little car and he skids and he pulls back around. He, I kid you not, he skid, he did a ue in the middle of the road on this empty, dead, deserted road in the desert. And he's like are you? He rolls down his window Are you, acacia Lewis? I'm like yeah. He's like, oh, I'm Cha. I knew that was you and it was crazy time. I was like. He was like, yeah, if I didn't see you, we were just going to start without you. But now that we found you, this is perfect. And then I drive, I drive down, I'm following him in my car and my little Ford Focus, you know, looking all normal, normal following this clown car down the street and we get to this beach right, and there are these, these cliffs that have these ancient looking glyphs, like like they already look like faces, they already look like they got moss hanging in front of them, like long beards and like world, looking like ancient chief cow, like features in the rocks. And I'm like this is where we're going to trip what we did three days of medicine out there, three days straight, hardcore. We got hit with the Wachuma. First we had a Wachumero out there helping teach us about how to work with San Pedro. We had a guy who was into the finest grades of LSD. We had, you know, a dmt maker out there. We had all sorts of different types of medicine, from the super serious, super spiritual to the you know, kind of just does everything kind of types, and we all. It was like a feast.
Speaker 1:We all took multiple types of medicines at once and that was my first time doing anything like that, where I had mushrooms with, with lsd, with mescaline. I was like if cha wasn't here I wouldn't be doing this because he was the elder who was like the spiritual elder, like the, the chief, basically, you know, of this group of ragtag medicine people, and so we trusted that we weren't going to take the wrong things together and we just kind of let him say oh well, so we're going to do 4-ACO. Okay, it's like, yeah. Maria Sabina tried 4-ACO, yeah, it's safe. She said it's like mushrooms my first time trying synthetic mushrooms, you know and it actually didn't turn out bad. And I was shocked, you know, because I was like I got to experience what it was like to kind of feel kind of like protected around some serious elders who were very experienced with combining plant medicine and we did prayers and we did a lot of healing work. And we did prayers and we did a lot of healing work.
Speaker 1:I watched a lot of my friends transform and develop an understanding of themselves, but we were all connected. That's the one thing that I know is we were all connected. When we got in a car together it was like we were like the legs of a spider. Each person's mind was connected to the other person's mind. Each person's prayer and each person's intention affected the other leg. How fast we could move if we make a mistake.
Speaker 1:We drove our car over the rocks and got stuck on a rock in the middle of the night while on multiple cups of Huachuma and LSD and we got stuck there and we dug ourselves out while under the medicine and we and we weren't together so seamlessly. We got dug out within within minutes, okay, and the girl who owned the car was only like four foot five, like a hundred pounds. We're still friends to this day. It's like you, you can't make this stuff up. And it was like we all had the clairsentience to know where to dig, where to live, and we lived this car. You know it's like an suv off of this sharp rock. You know boulder, that was in the middle of the beach and I don't know how we did it to this day.
Speaker 1:I don't understand the physics. The physics are questionable, very questionable there. And that was like you know what? I want to learn more. How do I, how do I get into the group? How do I, you know, how do I stay connected? And they're like well, we're going to Mexico and we're going to do Cambo and Changa and then we're going to teach people how to administer Cambo and Sananga and stuff. I was like, well, I don't know anything about that. Well, he's like well, do you have anything you know health wise you need help with? I'm like, oh yes, I do.
Speaker 1:And that's how I got invited to go to Mexico and work with Cambo Saposito and we sang songs. I learned my first 10 peyote songs or Lakota medicine songs. I only really I think I only learned one of them while I was out there. I heard about the rest and I heard them singing the rest. But I can't even pretend like I got the gift of that voice at that time, you know, cause it is a gift, it is a blessing, you know, to get to get permission to sing that, to sing those songs in lodge or outside of lodge.
Speaker 1:But yeah, it's my first time in Mexico and I was dodging the medicine like crazy, you know, I was afraid to take frog poison, you know. And I looked at my chest today and I'm like, well, how much cambo have I done? And I was like you know enough. You know this is all. This is actually all serpent venom. But now my arms I have like gauntlets of gates, you know, when I was learning to train, to work with the medicine, you know, because it has to get to know you, it has to get comfortable with you, you have to get comfortable with it, a body, so that it can learn more about the human sickness mental, physical, psychological sickness that exists and find solutions, how to clear those blockages inside of the human body. And what's interesting is when you train a specific cambo, because it's living medicine. This is what people don't understand about cambo Each frog learns as you're administering it.
Speaker 1:So you could have one, one Cambo stick, and by the time you get to the end of that Cambo stick the medicine is so much more potent than when you first used it, because every person you administered it to their connection with that toad or that not a toad, but that frog taught it a new thing, taught it a new way to heal a new person's life story. And so we like to keep one stick from that same frog in the same family. So my students would come back to me. I'd give them more Campbell from that same stick, from that same frog that had that same relationship, because it's a living medicine. So that means they go back out into the jungle and harvest from that same frog. That frog is clear sentient of how it's medicines being used, and so it's spirit becomes more and more intelligent, generation after generation.
Speaker 1:And so you know that was my first time coming into contact with something like that, where it's like you take it and you put it on your skin and you feel it scanning your body and it's like looking right through you, you know, and anything that needs to come out will be pushed out by the force of the movements, like the wind in your body speeds up and starts blowing out all of the sickness and you're vomiting it out. But you know there's a force. You know there's a force behind it and, uh, I realized quickly that a lot of people don't want to go to that extent to find out. You know, uh, what healing is like and so, so there are other medicines, but I realized that there's a similar pushing effect happening with the mushroom. A similar pushing effect that happens, energy and motion that is present in your body coming to life.
Speaker 1:And I think sometimes, because we're growing up in the United States and we're not in the wild, we don't really know how to deal with that force of energy that can transform. You know, it's kind of, it's kind of like we're taming it. You know we're taming our children. We're taming it. You know we're taming our children. We're taming the wild inside. You know, and we have to get to know that animal body, energy, force, uh, and respect it, and respect the nature of what's happening inside of ourselves. And I think that's when people meet the jaguar, that's what happens when people meet the falcon. They meet these different aspects of the animal and the human that are our ancestors, as well as what our ancestors learned from their natural environment, the wisdom from the animal spirits that exist, and that wisdom is a literal type of thing. It's like if you look at all the stages a zygote goes through in the human womb, you know it goes through so many different stages. It looks like an alien, it looks like a reptile, it's got a tail. You know what I'm saying.
Speaker 1:Like we humans go through this process of gestation that puts us through some of our origins, from being a multicellular organism to being a human. You have to go through so many different transformations and then, once you're a human, you think that you're at your final form. You know and you don't realize that you're still in transformation. You know and that transformation never stops and your mind is what is plugged into the transformation. And when you take some of these medicines that expand your consciousness and make you aware of your mind, you get to see really what's behind the framework of you. You know of your soul, your spirit, your, your ancestors, and the quality of changes that can take place.
Speaker 1:And I know I'm speaking kind of cryptically, but I want to respect the process. Yeah, some people like to be rushed to label it shape-shifting, some people get rushed to label it tantra, but really I think it boils down to um, transformation and the stages that we go through when we come into contact with something new. It can reveal a natural ability that we have, all humans have, and I think that these medicines are really shining a light on that. And a lot of people get scared and I think it's important that they have that fear. I think that it's important that they have that respect and that reverence and that sensitivity to their power. You know, before they go just messing with it and doing anything with it, you know doing anything with it.
Speaker 2:You know, yeah, yeah, and you're absolutely right and I want to get into that transformation and your quote where you talk about, you know, the spiritual enlightenment and the multi-dimensional dimensionality of our spirit. We'll love to go there, but first I would like you know, right now, as you know, in the States, where everybody's, you know, talking about microdosing or getting all these different types of plant medicines and commodifying these things, I would like for you to take us more into the actual purpose that these plant medicines have in the cultures that you have studied. I know you have studied in Ghana. I know you have studied in Mexico. I know you have also have some studied of different medicines in Asia. Would love for you to think about the theology or the spiritual role.
Speaker 1:You mean the philosophy?
Speaker 2:The philosophy of the plant medicines.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you know, and there's so much misinformation out there, so many people appropriating Maria Sabina, appropriating even Mazatec culture. You know Mazateca lineage and history. You know I meet with different scholars from Mexico a lot and I really value especially Osiris Gonzalez, two Osiris Gonzalez, there's an older and there's a younger, and I like them both. One is a master scholar, you know, who has like a PhD in sociology, and another one is, uh, an Osiris, uh, I think actually his name is is different, his name, his last name isn't Gonzalez, his last name is different, but he's my friend from Vancouver. We did a conference and he was there. I was there and I was talking to him about Teot, you know, and the importance of self-awareness and developing self-understanding through the poetry, the Aztec, mexica poetry, poetry.
Speaker 1:And you know there's elders out there who are Caucasian or who are other races, who I feel like don't understand how much of a privilege they had to go and live with Maria Sabina when they did, you know, and I think that their messages aren't always well received, but they do speak a lot of truth in regards to how Maria Sabina really was in real life, you know, and how she carried herself. And one of those such elders is Tomlin, and I oftentimes wonder, you know, there's like Inti Garcia who's preserving a lot of Mazatec history and Maria Sabina's tapes and archives. But we have to recognize that she was not the only cuaderno, she was not the only healer in the town that Gordon R Wasson went to. She was the one that the federal authorities told to teach Gordon R Watson. And so there are many, many different ways that people worked with the mushroom as a tool, some good ways, some not so good ways. There was medicine, healing and there was sorcery, and this goes back to a very diverse history and I don't think that a lot of people understand how deep even the tip of the iceberg goes when it comes to what the Aztecs utilized, and not just the Aztec, but just Mexica tribes from the Olmec Toltec time period, even since a lot of people think Aztec is a people but they don't realize that it refers to a people and a time and a location. And so, time and location wise, you have Zapotec, you have Mazatec, you have Nahual, but they're not a separate. They're distinctly different by different philosophical values, but there are a lot of commonalities. There's still one quote unquote people, I feel, that are brought together and united by their connectedness with each other and the land.
Speaker 1:And I think that when you're in high school in America and you see the appropriation of ascetics holding a human heart and sacrifice being brought up, people start to demonize this type of culture and they don't understand that it's better to sacrifice one person than it is to kill an entire group or race of people. And there was a fairness even in the way that people conquer different groups. Because of this teototal idea, this teotal knowledge, this self-knowledge was when I conquer another group, I make them my family. And even the conquering was not as the Western Europeans did, which meant wiping out. You know, wiping out raping, pillaging and murdering. You know it's not the same War was not the same pre-colonization times. I feel like there was more humanity in it back then. And so people get and one of the poets that I has with the essence of the primordial that exists inside of every being, and do you want me to read you one?
Speaker 2:I would love. I would love to hear a poem.
Speaker 1:Here. I'm going to give you just a just one, and it doesn't take much. You look up Nahas Coyoto. The flower songs is what it's called Ancient Nahua poetry. I'm going to give you the flower tree poem. Okay, yeah, thank you.
Speaker 1:Begin the song in pleasure, singer and joy. Give pleasure to all, even to life giver. Yeo, ayohui, ohuya and joy. Give pleasure to all, even to life giver. The light for life giver adorns us All. The flower bracelets, your flowers are dancing, our songs are strewn in this jewel house, this golden house.
Speaker 1:The flower tree grows and shakes. Already it scatters. The quetzal breathes honey. The golden flamingo breathes honey. Ohuya, ohuya. You have transformed into a flower tree. You have emerged, you bend and scatter. You have appeared before God's face as multicolored flowers, ohuya, ohuya, before God's face, as multicolored flowers. Oh yeah, oh yeah. Live here on earth, blossom as you move and shake. Flowers fall. My flowers are eternal, my songs are forever. I raise them, I a singer, I scatter them, I spill them. The flowers become gold. They are carried inside this golden palace. Flowers of raven, flowers, you scatter, you let them fall in the house of flowers. Ah, yes, I am happy.
Speaker 1:I Prince Nahasquayoto, gathering jewels, wide plumes of quetzal. I contemplate the faces of jades. They are the princes. I gaze into the faces of eagles and jaguars and behold the faces of jades and jewels. Oh yeah, oh yeah, yeah, we will pass away. I Nehez Coyoto say enjoy. Do we really live on the earth? Oh yeah, oh yeah. Not forever on earth. Ojo ya, ojo ya. Not forever on earth. Only a brief time here. Even jades fracture, even gold ruptures, even quetzal plumes tear. Not forever on earth, only a brief time here. Ojo ya, ojo ya. Conterres mexicanos.
Speaker 2:Wow, wow. I mean such a beautiful poem about the permanence of life but the impermanence of the body.
Speaker 1:You know, and this is also you know I'm going to draw the parallel, not same, similar. When we do a mandala offering in Buddhism, we immediately visualize the golden ground strewn with flowers, the golden ground strewn with flowers and offering, the four continents, the precious umbrella, the precious horse, the precious general, the moon, the sun, the sky, the stars, the goddess of incense, the goddess of flowers, the goddess of precious stones, all of these types of things we offer to the nature of mind. And I see echoes of that transformation in the words of poetry. When you read the poetry, it transforms your mind into a beautiful landscape, helping you to appreciate and develop gratitude for the beauty that exists around you and make your mind into like a palace. You know that is offering to the most primordial spiritual essence of love that exists. You know.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so what would you say was the most beautiful poetry that you created in Mexico, and poetry in every sense, not just literal but relational.
Speaker 1:I met a man in Oaxaca, in my town in San Jose del Pacifico, named Maui, and this guy was adopted by a 90-year-old cuaderno who lived in the mountain and was raised and spoke the language A curandera, right A curandera.
Speaker 2:Curandera yeah, go ahead.
Speaker 1:I'm sorry lived in the mountain and was raised and spoke the language A curandera Curandera.
Speaker 2:Yeah, go ahead. I'm sorry, who was raised and spoke the language?
Speaker 1:And he spoke and he sang.
Speaker 1:He sang in Nahuatl to me and he was praying, and I believe a friend actually helped me deduce what plant it was. He gave me, I think, a piece of salvia divinorum that was growing on the ground near his mother's house. And I've never felt more primordially alive in my life than I did when I spent time walking through the forest of the Magwes and seeing. I heard the birds sing. There's this one bird that they say is a Quetzal bird and her call is like this way stained glass looks. It's so clear and so crisp and so intricate that everyone kind of just stops when you hear it. And I think I heard it maybe twice that day, which was unusual. You maybe heard it once every couple of months because this bird and it would be like notes on hollow crystal chimes in the forest and I made friends. I made friends with Maui, but he, he knew what my issue was. You know, when I met him, I was, I had nothing. You know, I lived out there and I was picking up old cigarette butts and lighting them because I had no money for tobacco, and he brought me fresh green tobacco. He'd grown. He just walked out of a taxi cab. Like I'd known him for 50 years. He was like, would you like some green tobacco? And I was like, what's that? And he handed it to me. And he handed me a bamboo pipe and I lit the pipe. He was like, is that better? I'm like, yeah, that's better, thank you. He handed me like a grip of green tobacco. He's like I grow green tobacco, you know.
Speaker 1:And so I came to my mom's birthday. I brought her some chapulines and we're going to go take it to her. You want to come with me? And this guy was a blonde, it was. So it took me so far of what I thought I knew about Mashika culture. He looked like a Dutch guy, you know, but he had long dreads and he had magwe thorns in his dreads and they were like knives and he taught me how to take the tip of the magwe. He was like, yeah, you take the tip of the magwe when it's really hard and tough. You can use that to cut rope to defend yourself. Always have this with you. You know, you're a woman traveling alone. Always have this piece with you. This will protect you, you know. And he had like a jade loops around his, his blonde matted hair, you know. And uh, I just remember feeling transported.
Speaker 1:He took me to all the people I was afraid to talk to. Apparently he had gone to high school with some of the um, the grandfathers, the padres of the town, who were like marijuana farmers and grew opium and stuff, you know, like the, the head guys, you know, and he was like talking to them in Spanish and he, he introduced me to them. Basically he was like yes, she's a medicine woman and she's here to help you all. You know, I hope you treat her well. And when he reintroduced me to all of these guys, they looked at me differently. After that, you know, they looked at me like I was someone beneficial, not just some gringo dressed up brown, like basically a good brown gringo, you know, that's. That's how they saw me when I got there. I don't blame them, you know, I am a brown gringo and you know, from america, even though I have, you know, spanish ancestry. And you know I I was looking at my grandmother's ancestry.
Speaker 1:It turns out we, our last name was santa maria, a couple generations ago, you know, and I'm like wow, we spent like seven generations in Panama, you know, and before that, who knows where else, you know, spain, mexico, and so, um, for me personally, uh, being in that forest, on Salvia, and walking in the forest and seeing for the first time the language come to life, like when you you'd see in different books, like the codices that the spaniards took from the temples of zoshicalico, and you see the books and it would show like spoke, like, like like thought bubbles coming out of people's mouths, and we think that that's a metaphor. Until you work with the salvia and you see it and it's just like a literal oh, that's literally the word comes out like a, like a snake, you know, like a co-op comes out like that and it's a prayer and the prayer is taken, you know, and there's this hidden pyramid that's in the forest I'm not going to say where, because tourists have already started trying to desecrate it and so I kind of want to protect it, but you know, it's not recognized by the Mexican government. But there's this pyramid with concentric circles. It's not square and boxy like some of the recent pyramids, it's older, it's megalithic, and there's this altar on top of that mound of concentric circle stones and it's huge, it's like a mountain within a mountain. It's the size of maybe a three-story apartment building. It's a big pyramid, it's not some tiny little thing and it's hidden and it'll trip you out because you'll find one megalithic stone and then you won't find anything else. So you really have to follow like the wind. It has to tell you and whisper to you where to go. You know, and then you find it. And there's this altar on top that's also built of stones and there was a bee shaman carved into it, like it looked like a thousand year old tree on top of that mound, and it tells you where to sit, like you can't just sit around the altar how you want to sit. We tried doing a ceremony up there and the spirit in that tree came to life and it was like Keisha. No, you sit to the north, you sit to the west, you sit to the east, you sit to the south. You know different people in our group and we arranged ourselves. And when we arranged ourselves, then we lit the Chinupawa and we shared the sacrament together.
Speaker 1:I remember what felt like my spirit split into four dimensions of myself, this portal, and I could see multiple places, multiple mountains all over the world that people could have traveled through from that space, and I was in shock, you know, first. First my elder came down cause I wasn't sure if she was going to make it. That year she was sick and she told me how to access the portal. It was my friend, mama Lynn. She came down and she was a she's a native American elder who made me my first medicine drum. So, since I had my drum and I was beating my drum, then she came, the energy of her came into the ceremonial space at that time and, uh, she's still doing good, thankfully.
Speaker 1:And, um, I split into four, like literally four holographic forms of myself, and the fifth was like just pure light in the center, and then I was able to teleport other places from that place, but I was afraid to go anywhere, I didn't know what I was doing and and so I just kind of came back, you know, into my body and I was like, oh, so this is where. This is where the portal is here, because everyone talks about a portal being on the mountain and one of my friends, you know, he was like I think I know where it is, you know. And then we took medicine there, we, we found it. Of course he was crying because he met his ancestors at the portal and when they came through they were dark people and they were tall and they didn't look like regular human people. You know, to him he was like just hung up on the fact that they were dark skinned. He was like I knew it, my ancestors were black.
Speaker 1:We don't let jaime leave this down to this day. He's my best friend. You know, we lived there in one room. It's like five hippies and we'd evacuate the room and sell it out to tourists just so we could survive on the mountain making jewelry and selling jewelry in the streets. You know, like vagabonds. You know we lived like that and that's how you really get to know a place. You don't get to know a place as a tourist. You get to know a place as the guy who sells earrings you made out of pop cans, that's right.
Speaker 2:They know all the places right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you know all the places. You know all the secrets too.
Speaker 2:So it's interesting you bring up portals. I've been thinking about that a lot recently and again. You know, thinking about this moment in time and history, that we are not just in the United States right with people who are in despair you know what may happen but also around the world, there's a lot of, there's a lot of changes and transitions that are also happening and started to happen earlier this year. From your perspective, from your vantage point, from your travels, what do you think people need to know, not just about the physical world that we're in right now?
Speaker 1:It's all blown open. You know, not just about the physical world that we're in right now, it's all blown open. You know, I think in 2012, we were thinking that all the shifts coming, all the shifts coming. You know everybody's like the golden wave. You know, like talking about the mind calendar, you know like it's open, every opportunity that you thought you might have for enlightenment is already here. Anything that you thought in 2010, 2012, you were waiting for is here. Any kind of support you need, it's here. Any kind of resource you need, it's here.
Speaker 1:You have to do the work to make it useful. You have to start now. You have to use what's out there. It's not hard. If you follow good instructions, if you follow good teaching, it's not hard to take full advantage of the benefits that you have access to. We're in the age of information. We're in the age of spiritual information and esoteric and hidden information and wisdom teachings and compassion teachings and poetry. We're in the age where something that someone would have to take a whole lifetime to find one piece or shred of, you have the whole book, the whole book, the whole ocean and treasury of wisdom is handheld. It's in your ebook, it's in your Kindle, and your ancestors want you to use it.
Speaker 2:And what do you?
Speaker 1:say, is the work when people say, well, what's the work that I need to do? Well, anything that gets carried beyond the flesh is the good work, you know. And so you've got to think about what are you going to leave behind first, to answer that question, you know, so many people get caught up on what they need as provisions here, and the earth is our provision that we have not cared for. You know, the earth has our food, has our water, has our shelter. Many people don't see it that way. They see it as we need money as our provision, and so people chase material wealth, they chase sex, they chase, you know, having the right girlfriend or boyfriend, they chase having the nice house and nice car, but they don't chase knowledge of self. And so, if you think about it, the provisions that were given to your ancestors are your birthright. Buy a land, build a house, get it over with and then start self-cultivation, cultivating the qualities that will live on beyond your physical flesh, incarnation, your eternal provisions. Incarnation, your eternal provisions.
Speaker 1:And to understand what eternity is, in the Aztec, mexica sense or in the Buddhist sense, you have to first understand that you are infinite. You've been here infinitely. You weren't born, you're not going to die. What you are cannot be destroyed. You that, your awareness, is a borrowed thing. It lives in your body, but it's going to outlive your body and so your relationship with others, your relationship with yourself, needs to be refined from the illusion that we create of self that is limited, that limited self that we keep stumbling over. We got a body and we got a face, and we got our likes and our dislikes, and and our colors and our tastes and our textures. We have to to get over that in order to expand and really get to know the qualities of divinity, or the qualities of how Teotlum moves in disguise. We are the universe in disguise of a human is how it's said in Aztec philosophy. We wear the human body as a nahal, like a shaman wears a jaguar's mask. It's a mask. The time Place of the universe Arrived when you were born In your form. This is just the universe In time place as Acacia. This is just the universe In time place as Joseose rico. It is not the ultimate truth. You're going to die. You're going to become ash.
Speaker 1:Who you are and what you are is going to outlive the physical manifestation that you take on and it will enter the underworld, which is also the rivers, the trees, the stars, the sun. You will join them when you die, and so that's why it's so important to recognize impermanence, and impermanence is something that was taught to be appreciated in Nahua poetry. We just read the poet, but every single one has these reminders to be grateful, to create beauty, to appreciate beauty and also understand its illusory nature that is also going to be transformed by time. Yeah, and so inside of that gratitude and appreciation, we get to a point where we understand the preciousness of this life and the preciousness of the opportunity that we have and also how suffering takes place. Is our attachment to jade and gold you know, in this case, cars and women or cars and money or money and houses our attachment to those material, worldly like things as stumbling blocks for our eternal experience to be understood. And even Christians understand this. They say that finding wisdom is worth more than gold. You know, when I was a kid, my mom would say I'd rather have Jesus than silver or gold. But even inside of that, the love and compassion that Jesus represents in my mom's perspective also matches up with the nature that exists, that created everything and that exists in everything. And I won't say created, because there is no end or beginning to it. It's like a serpent eating its tail. It's infinite process, it's infinite activity, is out of compassion, is the original womb through which it's self-created, self-annihilated, self-created, self-annihilated again and again, and again and again. And so, as a part of this process, the connecting point in a lot of these major traditions, including Aztec mysticism, aztec philosophy, is the movement, the energy and motion, how it moves in a bouncing way, in a combining way, in a twisting way Nefantli energy, malini energy, olin.
Speaker 1:And then also it's preciousness, and I think that preciousness gets mistaken for love. Love is not preciousness, it's not the essence of preciousness. The essence of preciousness is wisdom and compassion together. It's its expression of order and chaos and the alternation of those forces of dark and light. Duality, good, evil, whatever ideas we have of these sort of things are kind of our illusion that we create to deal with this impermanent preciousness that we're given, that we're gifted.
Speaker 1:And when the preciousness is gone, then darkness takes its place naturally, and that's darkness and light, that's duality.
Speaker 1:But it doesn't mean that because the darkness comes in, the preciousness is not also still there.
Speaker 1:It simply means that it's empty of a certain characteristic and anything can be born out of that darkness, including preciousness again. And so it's like this alternating force of energy, and there is good and there is bad, and there is just nature inside of it. And part of that nature is, you know, what Buddhists call samsara, which is this endlessness of good, bad and ugly just happening again and again and again and again, and it's not in any specific order of perfective order. You know, we want to say, yes, perfection exists, but that's not all that exists, you know. And so there's the force of tyioto and Ome Tioto and Tetzkatli Polka. That exists, and Tetzkatli Polka is the night and the jaguar and the dark and death, you know. And so I feel like it's very important that we not get so caught up on love and light that we forget to reverence that this is also a quality that it can possess, this is an infinite quality that it can possess of darkness, and that that even has its benefits because, the kings go by Akbalam, the jaguar king, to protect.
Speaker 1:The ability to protect comes from that darkness, you know, and in Buddhism a lot of people get hung up.
Speaker 1:Darkness, that's right, you know, and in buddhism a lot of people get hung up on the buddha, you know, being also bright and shiny, but they forget mahakala also exists, you know.
Speaker 1:Mahakala is the controller of all demons and cannibals and has a retinue, you know of, of animals that come from the hell realms that protect all of the buddhas and benevolent beings and vow keepers and, you know, destroy all of the the negative ones who would approach uh to try and harm beings that are beneficial beings, you know, are dharma like beings, and so there's an order there. You know are dharma-like beings, and so there's an order there. You know, even inside of Buddhism, of forms of the Buddha that are also darkness, that are also pure darkness, empty of any sort of good or bad or ugly characteristic, but totally empty, totally naked forms, bad or ugly characteristic, but totally empty, totally naked forms. And then from that comes dakinis and from that comes mahakala and and vajra, bairava and all the protectors that look terrifying, you know, and so even the buddhists have this notion of darkness and light together, you know, and so it's understanding how this works inside of the human.
Speaker 1:That is the work yeah like, how can we be like the meme that keeps going around, the guy with 3000? I am sparta on the buddhist body. You know how can I be both? You know at the same time. You know, and there is no. There is no both really. There.
Speaker 1:It's really just recognition of the qualities that are inside of our awareness, inside of our minds, that are fertile ground, and whatever you're planting in that fertile ground, you need to understand its primordial characteristics. Earth, air, water, fire are everything that exists really, and so the elements themselves that make up the fabric of our world, even empty space, are inherently considered to be infinite or teothilizing creative energy. And because it's infinite and creative, we call it precious, the precious elements, the precious substances, the five Buddha kings. We call it that, and we see all over the world the honoring of the water, the honoring of the fire, the honoring of the water, the honoring of the fire, the honoring of the earth, the honoring of the in the empty space, the honoring of the wind. We see this, you know, and I think the reason for that is that we can break ourselves down into those five characteristics and there be nothing left, literally nothing left. And so if we are nothing, if we are that empty space in between that holds us together, if our awareness is that space, then we need to also understand that it has no limits, and so we should be thinking about the best possible scenario. What can we do with infinite limits positively, if we understand that if we do negative things to people, we create more negative drama and baggage. This idea of karma exists in the Aztec teotlizing terminology because, like begets, like you do something negative, it's going to create another negative action.
Speaker 1:You do something to harm someone. In Lakesh Alekin, the light in me respects and honors the light in you. But if I take you and I do something bad to you that's hurting me, there's no you to hurt. I'm hurting something sacred, and this also is the notion of karma. It's that if you're hurting someone else, you're hurting yourself. You're hurting something sacred that is part of you Intrinsically, is part of you intrinsically. You are the same intrinsically. When you boil it all down, you take two humans together. The difference between those humans is who they think they are in their minds, and if they both think that they are divine beings, then they are connected inside of that sacred agreement. That sacred energy connects them to each other.
Speaker 1:And a lot of people say well, I don't believe in equality because oppression exists, and I say that true oppression is the suppression of freedom, and so we have become programmed to self-oppress.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And I say we have become programmed to self-oppress because the notion of true freedom that liberates is averse to us. We don't want to give it to others.
Speaker 1:Therefore, we cannot give it to ourselves yeah, yeah, we're not being entangled in that pushing and pulling of having if we give them freedom, then we imprison ourselves type mentality is a lie that was sold to us to keep us in this loop, and the lie that we keep selling is a lie in our minds. It's not a lie that the government's telling us. It's a lie that we've perpetuated from our ancestors who were traumatized. It's an assumption and it's a false assumption, yeah, that in order to move forward, we must keep everyone in the past.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, and it's a lie. That's you know that is so effective and holy Right, it hurts us. And you know, and I see that so much, you know, one of the things that I do is I take people on healing retreats to Mexico, to the jungle um in Quintana Roo, mostly Black and brown folks, because you know for many Go ahead.
Speaker 1:Can I say something? Black and brown folks talk about decolonization a lot, and that's why I'm always telling them decolonize your minds.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:Because when we take them back to these places, that's where these trauma wounds are open and ripped open in front of them and like well, if I'm so powerful. There's all this anger, and that anger creates more suffering for themselves and others and they feel entitled to holding on to the colonizer's anger. The anger comes from disconnectedness and it perpetuates more disconnectedness. It's like I want revenge. Forgiveness is indigenous, but we've been disconnected from it.
Speaker 2:And what have I experienced is I have not experienced that anger per se against the oppressor, the oppressor. What I have experienced with people when they go there is they realize, like many of us, like you myself, that the institutions that we thought cared for us and were going to provide for us actually don't love us and harm us. And a lot of what gets revealed is grief that these places that they have given, of enlightenment, of belonging, are the trees, the sun, their spirits, those around them that are also on this journey. And so we have been, you know, basically sold a bag of goods that is not fulfilling what they say they were going to do with these institutions. And so now we have to rely the States and have not experienced another place, another culture, another relationship.
Speaker 2:That is about all the things that you just mentioned. They could only see that or get that oftentimes when you go to Oaxaca or when you go to Ghana or you go I was just in Sierra Leone, I returned from Sierra Leone when you go to Ghana or you go I was just in Sierra Leone, I returned from Sierra Leone when you were in Ghana, and I was able to see how that community and the people that share the rituals and share a culture and, frankly it's just, they share a spiritual respect with each other. That's what it really came down to in my point of view. That's what people started to realize. This is really about my self-work and how I'm going to connect more with other people, but, more importantly, with my spirit and with myself.
Speaker 1:Can I mention something really quick that you brought that was important. So you said, sold a bill of goods. You know, and my dad used to have a term no good deal goes unpunished, you know, and this is the punishment of colonization. The punishment of colonization is we are being brought and sold ideas like goods. We are to get behind people's ideas and promises and trust them. But originally trust was was something that came from mutual respect and understanding of how reality works. Is that you trusted someone who understood the philosophy of nature, the philosophy of giving and receiving naturally, without control, being a part of the relationship. To decolonize the relationships with others, we have to decolonize our minds, because this is the problem. People stop being good, for goodness sakes, they start being good expecting things in return. And that's not goodness, that's capitalism.
Speaker 2:That's right.
Speaker 1:And so, in order to decolonize our minds from capitalism on the medicine, we have to be able to willing to give genuinely, without expecting anything in return, and not to do things with the motivation of benefiting just ourselves, but to benefit ourselves by doing the reverse, by giving genuinely and knowing that because of the universal law of nature, it's going to come back to us because we gave without attachment, genuinely. You know, and a lot of people understand, it's a universal law of nature. You know what I mean. Like, if I give to you or I give to a homeless man and I forget that I gave, the universe is going to take my intention and multiply it because my awareness is infinite. It's going to come back to me another way, an inconceivable way, not from that homeless man. And we give oftentimes to homeless people but not to each other, not to our own people. We join co-ops, our manifestation groups and abundance groups. We don't understand how the law really works because the law is attached to attraction, it's attached to capitalism, attached to attachment to having and getting something immediately, instant gratification kind of. This is not decolonization at all, but it's super popular in the medicine spaces. Is I go to the medicine and somebody is telling me I'm going to get something from the medicine and that limits what I can receive from the medicine.
Speaker 1:And so many of these ceremonies set people up for a disaster because they're told you're coming here to heal something in your body and that's such a transactional relationship between that person and a living thing, a living spirit. And that's when you have the issue of the person feeling like they haven't completely met the medicine yet and so they keep going back and they keep going back and the medicine kind of keep hiding from them. And it's because they're coming with a gimme attitude instead of what can I do for the medicine spirit? What can I do for the community that grew them? What can I do to support before I have the ceremony? You know, I have one thing I'm thankful for my first teachers. They always said you know, you need to chop the wood for the fire for the ceremony Right. You need to help get us the space. You know, put up the tents. Being involved in the preparation for the ceremony will make that experienced person have a much better experience. Why? Because they get back what they put in.
Speaker 2:It's the reciprocity principle.
Speaker 1:It's the reciprocity, and the problem that we have with ayahuasca and with mushrooms is that these plant medicines are not getting reciprocity from the people who are being set up to receive them and those people are not being told that that needs to be a part of the ceremony itself. Your benefit rests hugely on your relationship with the land and the medicine itself whether you've grown the medicine and you've given back. You've spoken about the medicine and you've given back. You've helped others and you've given back, and a lot of people are like well, I can't give back because I'm just drowning in misery. I've gone through so much trauma, I don't know what to do, and the problem is that person's mind is not able to find peace because that person doesn't practice peace in their everyday life.
Speaker 1:They don't practice going outside in their everyday life. They don't practice going outside in their everyday life. They wait till they get to a foreign country before they respect the ground that they stand on. They treat like the ground, that where they stand is not sacred, and then they go over there and they have a bad experience because they realize, oh, I've been treating my family that is a sacred thing badly. I've been treating my mother, who's a sacred being and I came out of her womb and she's such a goddess and she gave me so much love. They don't give love to the people who are around them. They wait to go to a foreign country to learn how to love and to learn how to treat the ground as sacred so they don't get to live free. They live in bondage when they're here and they live free over there. But that's not correct.
Speaker 2:That's right. That's right. Those are Pekisha. Those are powerful lessons for people that are interested in partaking in plant medicine and then often don't understand, not only why it doesn't work. And, as you know, then people say well, I probably need to take more Right.
Speaker 1:And that kills me, because it's like your grandmother giving you money to tithe for church and you go and you spend it on candy.
Speaker 2:You know bad little kid type stuff, you know it really is Bad, little kid type stuff, you know it really is Bad little kid type stuff.
Speaker 1:You know it's bad, little kids. They come and they take a microdose. They're like, ah, that didn't do anything. You know they're not willing to sit and breathe, you know, for five minutes with their eyes closed, to get a relationship built, they're not willing to. They harvest the gifts of gratitude that exist for their breath, for their waking up. They woke up, they're alive. Oh my God, that's the spiritual realization right there.
Speaker 1:They won't do what they're little that they have, and so they want the big. They want $100,000 so they can buy that church Right, so they can have that retreat center, right center. But they can't do anything with the small little apartment where five or 10 people could gather and they could work with the people that they know. No, they want to attract people from other countries. They want to attract that big money and stuff to do what they love. Well, what they love has been tainted by their materialist attitude, and so it's not going to ever look the way that they think, because they're always going to need more and more and more and more. And so it's important to develop a foundation of peace and contentment and appreciation for what you've got right now, before you can receive more into your cup, and that's something that Buddhism taught me, that all these other places and going to all these other people really did not. And the reason why is because had the elders survived and not been wiped out, they would have been here to teach those kinds of values. Those weren't considered religious values. Those are considered human wisdom and the elders would teach that. But they killed a lot of elders during colonization and a lot of people just died naturally. And if you talk to the people who grew up in mazatec areas, you, they tell us about elders who can read your whole life. By the way a condor calls they got those elders, osiris circata yeah, he's the one who said that. And it's important that you spend time with people who are two or three times your age, who can connect with the earth and who can connect with the natural elements and can teach you to pray and can teach you to do with what? The little that you got. But during COVID it wiped out a lot of medicine elders yeah, lindy died, you know so many. Clifford Stewart died the year after that. My partner died and I think that first we have to start collectively acknowledging what they value. Truthfully, they didn't value dosage.
Speaker 1:Everybody talk about Kalindi. Oh, you did work with Kalindi, you're the high dose girl. Kalindi was trying to teach warriorship. He wasn't trying to teach high dose mushroom use. That's what people heard, that's what people got him popular for.
Speaker 1:But if you really listen to what he's saying, he was teaching cultural anthropology and he wanted people to really respect the values of the traditions that he highlighted.
Speaker 1:And people glazed over that.
Speaker 1:And rather than look at the Egyptians for more than just a glamorous society and look at Maat and look at the warriorship traditions or more than looking at the Bhagavad Gita as a collection of superhero skills and really honor the relationship between Krishna and Arjuna and the nature of this human soul that that lesson, that story, can teach, they looked at him as somebody who was trying to compare dosage and he wanted people to take a high enough dose to overcome their demons and to recognize that they have them in the first place and that they're not perfect and that they have work to do.
Speaker 1:But you got a minority of people who became proud of their demons and became prideful of the challenges that they had, so much so that you got people doing 30 grams and pooping their pants and bragging about it and they have no shame, and he would have have just been like I think you should stop for a little while. He told a lot of people that you should stop for a little while and go back and start at one you know and work your way up slowly so that you can find out spiritually where you're going wrong.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I think I think what you mentioned, you mentioned I don't think we do collectively and even, you know, in our communities. Obviously the spiritual community is a little bit different, where we honor our elders and honor them in a way that's not just ceremonial, Not with just lips, here Exactly.
Speaker 1:By carrying on their values Exactly.
Speaker 2:By living their values, because those values and that wisdom that they spend their whole life creating and developing is basically a gift to us.
Speaker 1:It's not. Basically, it is the ultimate gift that somebody spent their whole life studying something and giving love to their elders and being a student so that you wouldn't have to go and live their whole life to figure out the basics.
Speaker 2:The basics.
Speaker 1:You know, yeah.
Speaker 1:And that's such a great thing.
Speaker 1:It's such a great thing, you know.
Speaker 1:You know, yeah, and that's such a great thing, it's such a great thing, you know, and I, I feel really bad for the psychedelic community because, um, with this whole microdosing movement, uh, you got people who want to be the next, uh, you know, the next celebrity apprentice.
Speaker 1:You, you know, out here holding conferences and bringing people on to their programs, including me, and holding these superficial networking meetings about something that is mysterious and is sacred and cannot be explained away by your experience. With 0.15 or 150 milligrams of a dose that you put in a capsule, to say that the mushroom experience should all be boiled down to a microdosing experience, or to boil it all down even to a macrodosing experience, takes away from the indigenous, specific tradition of using them fresh, of using them grown from the land on the bones of the ancestors. You know, with the, the sounds of, of joy and prayers from that tradition, uh, missing the sacramental offerings of the incense, uh, and the copal to to purify that person's body and spirit. You take out the purification, you take out the gratitude and you've got a drug.
Speaker 1:You're drugifying everything yeah by removing the essential core ethical fundamentals that were put there to benefit people. Purifying the mushroom over copal is a safety measure. It's a raw mushroom fruit. The copal can kill bacteria on the surface. It can kill viruses on the surface. What you're doing over here, chewing mushrooms and telling me they taste like shit how disrespectful can you be. You know what I mean. If you use the copal, the copal, make it taste good, right, make it taste like oranges. They taste like pine. Oh well, I am not digesting it properly. Oh well, you forgot.
Speaker 1:We use sacred wasp honey, oh yeah. And you also put in your eyes so we can open up the windows of your soul to receive hyperdimensional information. That's six-sided geometry, like a crystal. You know that there's technologies that go along with the sacramental and sacred herbs and you know it's like going to a place and saying, oh, you guys grow saffron, that's all I care about hearing about, and not like looking at all the other ingredients in the soup. You know you look at the most valuable extractivist thing that you can appreciate about society and you're gonna miss the whole, the beauty of the entire group. And that's what I feel like with the mushroom. We took mushrooms from mexico and now we miss the chapuline, now we miss the sacred wasp honey, now we miss the tortillas and the magic of making ground maize and the magic of making mezcal.
Speaker 1:There's so many different art forms that are interrelated to healing that exist in Mexico, from the Mayan trumpet for sound healing. A lot of people taking crystal bowls down to Mexico don't even know that you can go and get a Mayan trumpet that's built from the leaf of an agave, you know, or a magway, not a leaf, a stem, the stem from the century plant, and they're going to didgeridoo. Basically, that's how it sounds. This base vibration is going to shake up all the molecules in your body and clear all the negative energy. While they use the copulero to clear the energy off of you, why not learn about the traditions that exist down there instead of trying to take western appropriate systems into mexico to hold space for something that you could never really appreciate fully because you didn't. You didn't talk to people about it? You know there were no ceremonies for the mushroom in the Zapotec area, so I was in because you didn't do mushrooms just when you were sick.
Speaker 1:The ceremonies were for sick people, so the healer could ask the spirit what made you sick and intercede and be your intercessor and pray to God to purify you. Pray to Jesus, pray to Mother Mary, because those are divine forms of healing that come through the body. That was part of the practice for Maria. Sabina Bless my hands and she was able to integrate Catholicism into her own foundational beliefs.
Speaker 1:But a lot of people have so much judgment against her methods that it's like they want to run the other way from even systems that could be used to benefit, because they don't understand that beyond dogma there's actual understanding. There's actual knowledge, spiritual knowledge of who you are, and the of jesus is just one dimension of it. That brings in the infinite love and compassion capacity of the infinite awareness that exists inside of you. You know, and so when you lay hands and you are visualizing this, you have faith in your visualization and belief. That is going to take place, that energy is permitted to come out of you and to affect the other person and you can lay hands and become like a helper. You know that person still got to agree to let go of what made them sick. That's why you're not the one healing them. That person still has to surrender to the Holy Spirit in that moment and receive that healing in their hearts and forgive themselves and let go and break down.
Speaker 1:But the healer and ceremony was a part of the guide. But outside of that, many people would take it on their own in the dark In cabins, and that was part of being in San Jose del Pacifico. There were no mushroom cuadernos or cuadernas cuanderas who were going to be there to hold you in this dimension, because it was a journey of getting to know yourself. It was a journey of going deep and when there's someone there, you're always going to be distracted. You're always going to be making an excuse as to why you're not going to deal with your emotions, why you're not going to recognize the spiritual double exists and you see this on the Stellas of Zosia Calico all the time the part of you that has these demonic, terrible qualities. Every human being has it. You've got to let it go. There's a spiritual double that goes to hell, literally On the Stellas you see this guy falling out of the person and their heart becoming deified.
Speaker 1:In order for your heart to become deified, you have to let go of the habits and the behaviors that made you sick, and that is a core element and aspect in every single theme I've studied. That's related to mushroom use and also to non-dual spirituality. You have to let go of what made you sick to get well, and that also includes all the pettiness. That also includes all the lie telling and gossiping and extractive attachingness that we like to grasp and hold on to what someone did and what somebody said as to why we won't let it go and why we want to justify our anger and why we don't want to help each other. All this kind of sickness is its own entity and just like a placenta breaks away, you got to cut the cord. You got into this world. Now you have to let go of what needs to be buried. It gave you life, it gave you a reason to develop your wisdom. Now you need to respect it and let it go.
Speaker 1:And a lot of people were never taught how to let go and they were never given the tools to let go. They were never given the copolero, they were never given the cleansing and purification, they were never given the egg and the feather. They were never given any sort of tools that gave them an inkling of an idea that they need to transform these habits that are making them sick and to remove the traces and the shrapnel inside the human body by changing the way you speak, changing the way you think, changing the way you encounter people. And these rituals were a gateway for that process to get placed.
Speaker 1:And because the rituals are under attack and the rituals are being replaced by veggie capsules and chocolate bars, which are never part of the Aztec tradition, everybody wants to claim Mayan cacao ceremony. There was no cacao ceremony. There was the honoring, respecting of the sacred world of the cacao spirit and honoring the sacred process of grinding the cacao and brewing the cacao. And you drank that before you took the mushroom hours before, because it activated joy and happiness and purified your body and got you really healthy. So you have enough strength to go into the mushroom experience. But the whole chocolate bar nonsense, nonsense is cacahuate wow, wow, okay.
Speaker 2:So that was, that was amazing. That was a great, great riff. There's so much I'm gonna take from that, but I, what I would love to do is because, again, I I just feel you know that you came into my life learning about teas and now you know also, you're better than me. I don't know nothing. Oh, you know, I did a little bit about teas. I went to the monastery and spent some time and became initiated in the order of interbeing.
Speaker 1:Oh, that's a tradition I've never studied. Chinese tea ceremony is a completely separate lineage.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I've you know I'm going to say Chinese tea ceremony, you and I have exchanged jade, and I also just got my jade ring from Mexico and I also have the jade pendant that you and I have exchanged and do my meditation with food. That I love, that I love, that I absolutely love. So all of these things are in being in relationship with you. Just want you to know that and that has been transformative to me. So what I would love to know from you right now is what is it that you are planting, seeding and watering at this moment for you, at this moment? Because I know for me, this moment is a time for you know, being introspective, planning and just being still for something to emerge in the spring. I don't know what that is yet, but wondering what is it that you're planting and watering at this moment to emerge later?
Speaker 1:well, it's multiple things, you know, um, I am an ordained upasika in the karma kagyu tradition of buddhism. My teacher, my root lama, is lama mike crowley and lama wang chun rimpoche in the shangpa kagyu tradition buddhism, and I'm going to do my 50-day retreat again this year. The whole time and my silent and fasting retreat is my life, it's my everything, and it is what gives me the ability to go and dive deep without mushrooms and to bring back what's beneficial for the community. And what's been on my heart is to have a center that is dedicated to providing support to individuals in plant medicine who are interested in learning my technique from my school, divine Master, alchemy, but more importantly, buddhist teachings from my lineage, and so I'm on the path of becoming a teacher inside of the Buddhist tradition, which is kind of. There's not very many African-American women, african-latino-american women inside of Buddhism at all who are ordained lamas, and so I'm praying that my parents, who are very Christian and very Pentecostal, are willing to give me the support to do however long of a spiritual retreat I need to do to get ordained as a teacher eventually in my lineage, and if I have to wait until they're gone away, then that's what I got to do, but my calling has been to share Nygma Yoga, which is a non-dual Tibetan yogic tradition illusory body, spirit and mind taught by Ker and poche on wisdom publications, is one of the best course you can invest in. Naguma dream yoga. These are the highest tantric practices of our lineage, for the first time being taught to the public, and this is history making, because naguma herself forbid the teachings to be shared to anyone but direct lineage holders for seven generations. And this practice started a thousand years ago. Buddha was here 1500 years ago. This is. This is almost 900 plus year old practice, and so to be able to do this practice and it activates so much dmt in the body and it gives you so much clarity.
Speaker 1:I've seen people heal as if they've taken five to ten cups of ayahuasca without any substances being involved. And not everyone can take substances and not everyone can get over their judgment of substances. People will walk into a Buddhist temple on Xanax and judge people for doing mushrooms. People say I don't do any drugs and they go in and eat processed foods every day and sugars for breakfast and then come out of the Buddhist temple and judge people for doing mushrooms and say I'm not on drugs. You have sex three times a week and you say I'm not on drugs. Yes, you are. Yes, you are, you're a drug addict, and so I am also somebody who works with intoxicants for specific purposes. But the key word is I do not get intoxicated on purpose. I'm not using the mushrooms to get high, not using them to get out of something. Get out of something.
Speaker 1:And psychedelic Buddhism and secret drug of Buddhism it's two books that break down exactly why Buddhists work with sacraments If they don't need anything, then why would we do mantras? If we don't need anything, why do we have incense with different types of antidepressant herbs? We all need something, and that's the truth, and we can't sit here and develop some sort of high horse mentality that sex is an impurity and that mushrooms are an impurity when we are all filled with impurities. That's samsara, that's this reality, and so we've got to use what we've got to get out of the illusion stability, if it's used responsibly and purposefully, in alignment with actual spiritual practices, to help mentally dissolve our confusion and obscurations.
Speaker 1:And a lot of times people need a shift to get into making a practice that does not involve mushrooms. They need to get into a shift to get out of alcoholism. They need to get into a shift to get out of depression. To get out of alcoholism, they need to get into a shift to get out of depression. And shifting out of those old, stuck ways of being is something that happens when your brain grows, and so we need to shift the judgment from it being a drug to being a growth formula for the mind, because, chemically and neurologically, that's what the studies are proving it does, that's what it's actually doing. You have things that are inhibitors, you have things that are exaggerators, but the mushroom, and specifically when it plugs into your neurological receptors, grows neurons, it grows and develops neuroplasticity. You are doing the practice and you are growing dendrites that are related to that specific practice and that specific technique to help you learn more thoroughly and integrate the information more deeply.
Speaker 1:But we have to popularize meditation and mushrooms and chest and mushrooms and not party and mushrooms, because party and mushrooms is a default that society has pushed ever since we took the sacrament away from its ritual tradition, and we have to popularize bringing ritual back into ceremony in a safe and ethical and honorable way that is not appropriative, by giving the people the torch to carry whose culture it belongs to, instead of just hiring whoever to come and do whatever.
Speaker 1:Instead of just hiring whoever to come and do whatever, you know, really honoring the process that it takes to develop a practitioner who is, who is vetted by their elders and respected by their peers and it's not, you know, capitalistically, even trying to use their indigeneity to to get some sort of psychological, psychological, um, ego trip.
Speaker 1:You know, because you have a lot of people who will do that, who are even indigenous, who come from these traditions, who maybe spent five minutes in it and now, all of a sudden, they're shaman, and that's not right either, you know. And so we need individuals who have good ethics and who are about the right things, who are selected to do certain kinds of work. We need to support those kind of individuals. When ceremony is called for, but outside of that, building ceremony means developing oneself and purifying negative qualities and becoming better every day, and if that intention is there, then that intention will help you connect further and deeper to things that will support you. Whether it looks like a ritual or it looks like meditation, you're going to find a way to bridge the gap and bring healing into your life that integrates the truth of reality and the truth of your inner nature that's available to you and available to all beings, to benefit our societies and to benefit each other and available to all beings to benefit our societies and to benefit each other.
Speaker 2:Great and Acacia, this is exactly why I wanted you to speak with us. Is that that is just a really clear and succinct way to explain another aspect of healing that's done responsibly, another aspect of healing that's done responsibly and that is done with a lot of attention to the inner work and the self-work that is away from the like, the jugification of this and and a foundation of spiritual practice. So really want to thank you for that, really want to thank you for that. Really want to thank you for your time with us. The last thing I do want to ask you is I know that you had a campaign to help with your retreat center, but I would love for you to share how people could sign up to your classes I know you have a website how they could get a hold of you and follow you to continue to be able to carry on this conversation with you beyond today.
Speaker 1:So I have a sub stack coming out called Underground Tea, and it looks like underground, and so the sub stack should be ready by the time you air this. I'm working on it this week, and underground is to provide articles that are written by myself and reviewed by my peers to help give people more access to some of these philosophies and traditions are a little bit obscure in the medicine community and cited research, because that's what I do in my school and in my classes, and so I'll be available, you know, for free and also at a premium, for a small subscription fee. And then also I have a website called Acacia Lewis A-C-A-C-E-A-L-E-W-I-Scom, and I'm working with my web team to update my website, but it has a link to my school there where, if you want to take three month long class on Aztec philosophy, there's a recording already available and the recordings are about 20 hours to 30 hours long, and I will break down every single concept from James Maffey's book Aztec Philosophy and a lot of themes from Tom Lane's book Sacred Mushroom Ceremonies and my own experiences to give you a more fleshed out idea of how to actually engage with the aspects of teodolization and transformation that are inside of Aztec philosophy and Aztec poetry, and I'm also working on a Mighty Networks page. I have 500 plus students at my school Divine Master, alchemy and so on the Mighty Networks page I'll give the invite link to Jose, and my vision is that by the end of the year we have a retreat center, basically on reserve.
Speaker 1:There's a city that has an old, condemned house.
Speaker 1:You know the story.
Speaker 1:We want to fix it up, we want to make it a library, we want to make it a meditation center, and so I'll put a donation link on how to support funding a physical location in Arizona and also in Oaxaca, on land that was given to me, even though you know you say you paid for something, but the people in Oaxaca entrusted me with the rights to a small part of land the cloud forest, where the mushrooms grow, and I feel like I'm a steward.
Speaker 1:I don't own the land, I'm a steward of the land and I want to build a center there that has a defibrillator, because my partner died in that town because there was no defibrillator in the entire town and the nearest town was two hours away, and so we need some basic medical tools as well as a center for people who are recovering drug addicted individuals who are coming to Oaxaca and pestering the elders. We need, as people who are experienced to chaperone sometimes, individuals who have challenges and give them a private area so that they can work out some of those challenges with like-minded people who are not going to harm, abuse or attack them for what they're going through, and create a safe space for people who need help, who are looking to use the mushroom and sacraments in Mexico. And so that's my goal and my vision and also to, in the next five years, hopefully complete my Shesedra ordination as a nun or as a yogin in my lineage.
Speaker 2:Great. Well, there's a lot to look forward with you, acacia, and there's a lot of ways for people to be a part of and to be connected with you. I want to thank you again my sincerest thanks and gratitude and looking forward for this to come out and, obviously, looking forward for our continued conversation and relationship. Thank you so much, thank you.