I’ve been purposely reticent about ceremony the four months I’ve been in Peru, for a lot of reasons. I feel like now is the time to shed some light on those choices and to also open up a bit about plant medicine.

When I came back to Peru, I had a lot of inner work to do and I knew it. I was in a sad funk, fighting the same old battles with myself regarding work, money and life. It seemed like I had almost everything I wanted: living life on the road, in love, traveling with a great boyfriend, seeing and doing so many exciting things every single day – but it was like I couldn’t appreciate any of it. I was all plugged up mentally and spiritually and didn’t even know why.

I was still carrying the same old stories. I was still in shock from the whirlwind that had been 2008 – temporarily leaving Venice Beach, quitting my job, living in hotels with my cat, bouncing around for eight months. I was so stressed out that the hair on the back of my head began falling out at an alarming rate. By November of last year, I had a smooth bald spot beginning on the nape of my neck that extended halfway up the back of my head. And the hair wasn’t growing back. I was concerned. Stress releases lots of toxins into the body and mine had become a wasteland.

When I began taking part in ayahuasca and San Pedro ceremonies in Peru again I did not want to write about the details of my inner healing. I did not want to diminish the power of the process – and I felt like my very life and health depended on it. I didn’t want my innermost healing on display for the entire world wide web to read about. I didn’t want the pressure of having to blog about any of it or analyze it in a public forum. I didn’t want to worry about what my or Matt’s family might think about it.

Ceremony for me isn’t about sitting in the dark, puking while hearing some pretty songs and seeing some cool visuals . . . man. It’s hard work, sometimes frightening, often cathartic. I wanted my healing to unfold naturally, without being rushed, judged or critiqued. I needed an indefinite amount of time to focus on nothing except my own health and healing – and so that’s what I have been doing. Now here I am, four months later, and my life is completely changed as a result. I’ve rid my body of the toxic stress – that habitual underlying current keeping my insides agitated. I’m no longer in a funk, my writing arm doesn’t go numb anymore, I’m excited about life, my hair is growing back and I’m well on the way to writing as my full-time career.

I’ve thought about all of this long and hard and the bottom line is that plant medicine has saved my life – literally. There are lots of first-person accounts written by people from around the world – click here for my own 2006 article published at Perception Engine. Do I want to become a shaman and facilitate other people as they work directly with plant medicine? No, but I do have a very real pull to write about it in a new way.

Plant medicine is such a big subject – the politics involved (both locally and globally), the huge spectrum in modalities of use, unspoken controversies, and a new emerging feminism within the movement. My goal is to facilitate an in-depth and well-rounded understanding for those with an interest in the subject, particularly those focused on their own inner-healing.

Is it possible for New Age principles and humor to live in harmony? I´m not sure, but I´m willing to give it a try. Maria, my roommate here in Peru, and I discussed this topic this morning after our morning Andean spiritualist yoga class. We decided that New Age spirituality is a valuble paradigm that we both embrace whole-heartedly, but that many New Age practitioners and spiritualists tend to frown upon the insertion of humor into the mix.

I try my hardest not to take myself or my spiritual practice too seriously. This includes meditation, yoga, prayer or ceremony. I understand that in order to get the most out of any of these things, that I have to have a modicum of sincerity about the experience and practice. But that does not mean that I have to take myself so damned seriously. 

That´s when I remembered the heyoka of the Native American cultures. The heyoka is the sacred clown, the one who shows the folly of humanity through his constant joking and insistence on doing things backwards. The heyoka teaches us not to take ourselves or the details of life too seriously.

One night recently I returned home fairly early from a neighboring hostel´s bonfire party. Javier was already at home and surprised by my early return.

¨What made you come home so early?¨ he asked.

¨Well, when they started drumming for world peace, I knew it was time for me to get outta there,¨I said.

Javier stared at me for a minute and then said, ¨Oh Anna, you´re just not . . . spiritual enough.¨

¨Yeah,¨I replied. ¨It´s true.¨

Then we both erupted in a peal of cackles, like a couple of witches. I suppose we heyokas have to stick together.

Pisac sits at 9,800 feet above sea level. The stars here are amazing, bright and they seem so close you could almost reach out and touch them. Peru is an amazing place in general and because of that, full of folk-lore about mysterious happenings. The energy here is certainly strong, just about anyone here can feel it. Numerous New-Age Westerners have settled here for just that reason. But, you don’t have to be into New Age stuff to notice the lights flashing in the sky.

“It can be whatever you want it to be,” says my friend Javier.

Javier officially explains that the quick flashes that sometimes light up the night sky are from lightning in the jungle, which is only about fifty miles away just across the tall mountains of the Sacred Valley, where Pisac sits. The flashes appear to be heat lightning to me. There’s never any accompanying thunder, but I don´t think there ever is with heat lightning. Anyway, the weather here isn´t the humid kind that usually causes heat lightning.

“No,” another American friend who’s lived here for over a year says, “That’s not heat lightning. I have my theories, but that is not lightning.”

Whether the flashes are lightning or not remains to be seen. But what I do know is that the other night, as we lay out on the front patio, looking at the stars, we saw a  moving point of light that did not appear to be an aircraft. It zoomed across the sky, grew in size about ten times bigger than it was with a warm, steady glow and then went back to it’s original size as a small point of light. Then it disappeared.

Airplane? I don’t know. I’ve never seen an airplane do anything like that. It was a completely clear night. Matt laid in bed a few nights ago with a torn knee muscle, alone in the house, waiting for my friends and I to return. When I got home, he said he’d heard a strange, sustained humming noise for about 30 seconds that seemed to envelop the entire house.

“My knee hurt. The dogs were going crazy. I wasn’t about to get up and investigate,” he said.

I guess these things can be whatever we want them to be.

I´m b-a-a-ck!

When I got to Peru and went deep inside myself, I realized that I was carrying some major amounts of sadness, negativity, anger and a whole lotta self-loathing and judgements. So, I decided it was time to take a break from the blog-world and to be OK with that – to not be angry at myself for taking a hiatus. So, for the last two months since I´ve been here in Peru, I´ve been relaxing and working through some of this yuckiness and learning to take the responsibility for all that I´ve brought into my life – whether it be the sweetness or the sadness. And in the process, I´ve realized quite alot about myself and subsequently, the world at large.

I felt that a daily log of my healing would be not only too personal to broadcast on the worldwide web, but that it might also diminish the power of the process. It´s been an incredible journey of self-realization and discovery. I will say that I feel as though the path I was headed down was a potential path to disaster of my health and well-being. The new path I´ve carved out for myself is one of positivity and health. I´m happy to be back in the blog-world. I´m happy to be back in the real world too – and focusing upon the things that truly do matter: health, help and happiness.

Within the next few days, I plan to unveil a new direction for this blog, but to be honest, I´m still not sure which direction that I will focus upon. I do plan on back-posting entries from the past couple of months (January and early February) in order to share parts of my simple journey in the wonderful country of Peru.

We heard them the first night after Javier left to go on vacation.

Our friend Hardy had just retired for the evening in the smaller guest room. Our other friend, also named Matt (I’ll call him Matt R. from now on in this blog to avoid confusion) had been asleep in the other guest room for a couple of hours. Matt and I just got settled into bed ourselves when I heard footsteps in the front hallway, near Hardy’s room. Instinctively, I just knew it wasn’t Hardy. Matt and I lived with Hardy all last summer and I suppose that I just know what his footsteps sound like.

“Did you hear that?” I asked Matt.

“Hear what?” he asked. (His hearing is bad from too many rock shows.)

“I’m going to see what’s going on,” I said. But, I didn’t want to know, honestly. I didn’t even put my glasses on. I was hoping I’d just see Hardy walking to the hallway bathroom. No one was there, but I didn’t hear any more footsteps either. I went back to bed and fell asleep.

I had forgotten all about the footsteps by the next morning – until Hardy mentioned them. “Were you guys walking back and forth past my room last night, in and out of Javier’s room?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “I heard something and came out and looked, but didn’t see anything.”

“Well,” Hardy said, “I guess there was an Inca walking up and down the hall all night long. It kind of freaked me out.” Hardy doesn’t get freaked out about anything, really.

I laughed. “Well . . . I suppose it could have been Javier,” I said.

“Yeah,” Hardy paused. “But isn’t he . . . um . . . on vacation? In Mexico? Didn’t he leave yesterday?”

“Yes,” I replied, “But he could have been checking in on us or something. You never know about these things when you’re living in a shaman’s house.”

Since then, we’ve been joking about the Inca footsteps, but we’ve all heard strange noises around here from time to time . . . sometimes when I’m alone in the house and asleep, I hear someone calling my name. I wake up and no one is there.

There is a woman who roams the western United States in an effort to repopulate wild areas with intentional planting of indigenous plants in the manner of the Native Americans of centuries past that was destroyed by our culture. I’ve not yet met her. I’ve heard much of her through mutual friends and I hope to someday meet her and learn from her.

But right now Finisia cannot do the work that is so important to her – and important for our planet. She was stopped last month by a forest service agent and told she could not do her planting. She resisted and is now sitting in jail in Idaho. I’ve heard through many a spirited story that Finisia has been jailed many times for her acts of civil disobedience – and always takes the incarceration with an open heart and mind.

But this time is different. Finisia is in trouble, I believe. She needs help. The authorities who don’t understand her and her ways are trying to put her in a mental institution, where they can forget about her.

This cannot happen. Please take some time to visit Finisia’s website – pullingforwildflowers.org. Donate money to this woman. I’m told that the fees to release her from jail and to fix her covered wagon only amount to approximately $550.00.

I recently read an article in an old National Geographic magazine from 1973 about a man who walked the west gathering and cooking native foods that grew in wilderness. The story of his passion made a national magazine! Now here we sit 35 years later . . . and one who is trying only to perpetuate this bounty of nature – and not hurting anyone in the process – is being held and labeled as insane simply for leading a lifestyle that is outside the economics of capitalism.

Finisia is in jail simply for the “transgression” of digging her hands in the earth in an effort for conservation.

Again, I ask you to donate to this brave woman. Pullingforwildflowers.org. If you’d like to send a letter of encouragement, please do so:

Finisia Medrano

Lemhi County Jail
Inmate Finisia Medrano
206 Courthouse Drive
Salmon. Idaho 83467

Wow, ironically, that title sort of sounds like a bad accounting pun, I realize, but here are the truths and the stats and the low-down and the what-for.

First, let me say that the past couple of months, even before I took this job, I kept finding myself in situations where I could and many times did use the power of my words to hurt, harm and invoke. I’ve decided not to do this here. Yeah, I’m human; therefore, I’ve got feelings and opinions and all that other drama whipping around inside my head about this whole entire shit-storm. But I’ve made a choice to not spread or perpetuate that poison anymore. This means that you, my dear readers, will not be getting the dramatic deets of my recent choice of unemployment.

The only thing worth mentioning is that I’m heart-sick that this job didn’t work out and I can only believe that my choice was the best for all involved; the proof I have of this is that here I am, sitting with this choice I’ve made.

So, here I am . . . Albuquerque has not been easy. I’ve been here about six weeks and in that time I’ve endured moving half-way across the country with a cat, getting asked to leave my new digs, living in a hotel, moving two more times, being really sick, getting news of my granny being really sick, car breaking down, (happily, but still heavily) getting the whammy news of my 100% sis-tah, and now, making the difficult decision to quit my job. Allow me to re-iterate. Six weeks! Endure has really been my word lately.

I give it up. I’m trading ENDURE for another word, a nicer word. How ’bout this for my new word: EXPANSIVE. (And no, I’m not talking about weight gain.)

I’m staying here in ABQ – no, not forever – ABQ isn’t my long-term bag, baby. Just for the terms of my lease. I have a great sublettor in my bungalow. Why not? Life’s my adventure. I’m here right now and I’ve got some shit planned and I’m in a beautiful part of the country. So, watch out world!

Special thank-you’s go out to all my friends who’ve given me boundless love, encouragement and support about my decision. You all know who you are and I could not have made it through this without your accolades, kind ears and non-judgemental boosts to my nearly broken spirit. You’ve all helped me find Anna again, and quite quickly, I must add.

Here’s a quote from Nan Terrell Reed about life. “They told me that life could be all I could make it, life could be fashioned and worn like a gown. I, the designer, mine the descision, whether to wear it with bonnet or crown . . . .” Or in my case, heeled boots, cute little dresses and occasionally a rhinestone-studded kitty-cat collar.

As promised . . . .

My wake up call was a couple of weeks ago – the evening I drove home from work actually believing that it would probably be a good idea to drive my car over the edge of the ravine and down, down, down into the dust and the cacti and the rattlesnakes below. At that moment, the mind-body connection subconciously kicked in and my foot hit the gas pedal and the steering wheel kind of stuttered in my shaking hands. And I knew then that I was in potentially big trouble. Then my inner voice gave stern warning, “Sister, you’d better watch yourself, because it’s easier to make this kind of thing happen than you might think . . .”

And, I’m ashamed to admit it, but I’ve been crying alot in the past few weeks. Uncontrollable, spastic, choking on my own long hair kind of heaving sobs. My mother suggested I get on Vitamin P, but popping anti-depressants is not an option for me. When I wasn’t crying, I was doing everything I could to paste a fake smile on my face and not crack up into tears.

There’s alot I don’t remember from the past few weeks. Blank spaces of time. That’s when I was angry. I’ve also been very, very angry . . . just a blind kind of rage that I certainly didn’t recognize as . . . . ME.

Then I began to envision myself ‘falling’ down flights of stairs . . . . and I knew. Something had to change. What was causing all this stress in the form of facial twitches, a strange rash in the area of my third eye chakra and chest hives?

My job, that’s what. So, I did the only thing I could do. The scariest thing I could imagine. In Eleanor Roosevelt’s words I did “that thing I thought I could not do.” In my case it means, I quit my job.

Yes, it was scary. This coming from a girl who has spent the night in the middle of jungles with marauding panthers. But in order to be reborn, one must first suffer a small death.

Those first moments were the most difficult ones after I hung up from that late-evening phone call on Thursday night to my boss. The fear creeped in, but I saw it creeping in. And so, I just began to say “Thank you, thank you, thank you . . . ” over and over again with outstretched arms toward the kitchen window and the fear melted away and I had a private conversation with the universe and I re-programmed my mind to know and believe and live with the absolute knowing that not only was everything going to be OK, but that everything would be indeed wonderful and beautiful.

At that moment, I looked down and realized I was wearing my New Person Being Born monkey shirt. I began to run around the house, yelling, “New Person Being Born! New Anna Being Born!”

I worked in The Burque for one week last November. When I was here that last time, I splurged and purchased a fine silver and turquoise Pakistani necklace from a Swedish woman with an intense handshake who runs a new-age type crystal shoppe/bookstore. I wore the necklace to my next destination, Chicago, whereupon, the very next day, one of the platelet hinges snapped. Admittedly, this happened while I was dancing super-hard with a bunch of friends in front of a juke box at one of my favorite Chicago beer joints, Estelle’s. Needless to say, I was a bit disappointed, but also, kind of impressed with myself that I was able to break a hundred dollar necklace simply by some crazy booty-shakin’.

Yesterday, I was in Inga’s store again, this time purchasing a hard-to-find book. I re-introduce myself and mention that I purchased a necklace last fall – and that it broke two days later. Inga pauses, looks at me over the top of her bifocals with a gaze equally as intense as her soul-stroking handshake and says very evenly, “You know, dear, zat vhen someting like dis happens, it is because zat necklace has protected you from some-sing.”

“What?” I ask. I don’t really know what I was expecting her to do about the busted merchandise, but I truly wasn’t expecting her to tell me that the necklace saved me from some sort of attack – psychic or otherwise.

“Yes,” she said. “It’s true. Once, I was coming home across a darkened parking lot, and my necklace broke.” She shuddered. “I know it protected me from some-sing!” She smiles. “I can recommend someone to fix it . . . ”

For the record – I do have a tendency to believe these sorts of things, but that belief system certainly has limitations. The only thing that I can’t shake about her explanation is that . . . . OK, let’s pretend that she’s correct and that it did “save me” from some-sing. Why did it break whilst I was dancing, surrounded by friends? I have to hand the prize of proprietary excuses to my local crystal shoppe owner, Inga. I’ll be back to her store; it’s a good store. I just won’t buy any more jewelry there.