Cacao takes up residence in the heart like a feverish smile. You feel your pupils dilate. The slightest hint of dizziness tints your perception. It becomes difficult to feel bad. The sensation comes up the sides of your face and forehead, slowing everything down and making it feel like everything in the world is in its right place. You feel alive and you feel connected, but there is no sense of urgency to the movement of life. The spirit of the shamanic medicine of cacao likes to move in clockwise spirals. The physical medicine itself likes to be made in that way too. Each ingredient added tentatively, like a slow dance. It tells you when it is ready. At a certain point the energy field of the mixture will bloom. When it blooms, it means the ingredients have activated, have achieved coherent resonance and together they have oriented externally. This is the point at which it will do its work within a human body. Like all shamanic medicines, cacao is highly esoteric. It feels as if it holds a secret; some kind of doorway to a specific aspect of this universe that is unknown to the average person in their day-to-day life.
I often facilitate cacao ceremonies in Philia. Costa Rica is known for its production of cacao. You can find some of the most pure and strongest cacao in the world here. I have developed a little habit of visiting the cacao venders and farms in any area I travel to in search of the very best I can find. So much affects the vitality and flavor of a cacao bean that no cacao is the same. You also never know what essence a specific cacao ceremony medicine is going to hold until it reveals itself to you during the awakening of the ingredients phase of preparing the medicine. Last night the cacao I made turned out to be personal truth. In each person that ingested it, it first opened their heart in order to extract their personal truth and then carried that truth up the neck to the brain.
Last week was one of my favorite Completion Process Practitioner trainings I have held. I ended up in front of the most inquisitive group. The curiosity they all shared made for conversation that pushed the boundaries of human perception. They spent half of the week laughing with me and the other half bravely facing themselves so as to break through the murky prison of their unconscious. Last night, as the ceremony came to a close, we were all left in the raw but free feeling of deep quiet that follows truly great shadow exploration. It is one of my favorite feeling flavors available to the human experience.
Today, as sad as it is that we are all going out in different directions within the world, I feel a deep satisfaction. I see each person who is being trained to facilitate this process as a kind of positive virus. Each one has come to awaken to truths yet unknown to the world. Not knowing these truths, this world is in the darkness of unconsciousness. Suffering continues needlessly. People live in a state of causation with no access to free will and no awareness that they do not in fact act from free will. You cannot un-see what is seen. By awakening in this way, by being taught how to end this unconsciousness and the suffering that comes from it, awakened people are like points of light spreading across the planet. Unconsciousness can be like a virus that spreads from one generation to the next. But so can awakening. And so in a way, each person that I train to awaken is like a soldier for collective awakening whom by going out into their part of the world, will positively infect the world. This makes me feel ease inside because it means that no matter what happens to me, it is unstoppable.
Something happened yesterday that was completely amazing and also painful. One of my trainees asked about how the Completion Process might effect a medical device implanted in her heart. I made a tiny joke during my response about the ‘simple things she can do to avoid death’. But there was almost no return laughter amongst the attendees. Instead, they looked terrified as if they were taking a huge risk. I could not figure out their reaction for a second until it dawned on me that being in my very different perspective prevented me from seeing where people’s perceptions of their lives actually are. I was so taken aback that I stopped the entire discussion to begin questioning them so as to gain awareness myself. Instead of spending the first hour monitoring the trainees in their sessions, I sat with Frederic (my very close fellow HSP friend pictured at left) and Graciela feeling pain.
Something that happens on the path of awakening is that you develop the capacity to see (if not at the very least feel) most of what you are a match to in the near and even distant future. Some of us, like myself, are born seeing these life path potentials and knowing which one we are headed towards. If you see these things, it is not an option to live in the illusion of safety, which is where I realized yesterday that most people are. You see the plethora of different potentials for death that exist. Life feels more like it does in a video game where the 'potentials for your avatar to die' are just a side step away.
We all take our own perception for granted, including me. We see the color of a flower and we assume that all people see the exact same color. I know I have more access to awareness than other people, but I do not often know to what degree. I had assumed that people have at least a feeling for what they are a match to experiencing in the future. But I realized this week that most do not. For most people, their future is literally a cloud of only hopes and dreams and fears… It is entirely unknown. This girl who asked me the question about her heart could not feel that she was not a match to death. She could not feel that she, with her device in her heart, was less of a match to death than half of the people in the room. Which is why she did not laugh at the way that I teased her and I did laugh. I can see it is not a risk. And she cannot. And this broke my heart for so many reasons.
Like most things, this lack of awareness is a blessing and it is a curse. On the one hand, she does not have to see it if her partner becomes a match to another person in his or her future other than her. She does not have to live with the feeling that risk and even death is a sidestep away. She can wake up with the comfort that this life is infinite and there will always be tomorrow. She doesn’t have to suffer the torture of watching her loved ones choose to walk down a path that will lead to their suffering and her suffering along with them. She doesn’t have to beat herself up on the off chance that she doesn’t see something in the future, she can tell herself that it is ok to make a mistake because she couldn’t have known.
But there is a flip side. It is this flip side that made me cry. So many choices that are made have a ripple effect so large that it is difficult to breathe when you grasp the scope of it. Those of us who see these life paths are condemned to see the ripple effect. What if you knew that the action you took today would make it so that if nothing else changed their course, in 20 years your child would become a drug addict? Chances are, you would change the action you take. Can you imagine the torture of knowing that someone else’s action will have that ripple effect in the future and watching them continue on their course because they just don’t see it. Can you imagine the powerlessness to stopping it? Can you imagine knowing how much you will suffer because of that thing you cannot stop because you cannot stop them from taking their current course of action. It is like being in a boat and knowing that you are heading towards a waterfall. But watching others smile and tell you that you are just paranoid while they paddle toward the cliff. It puts you in a moral dilemma. If you get off the boat, you save yourself no grief because you lose the people on the boat and you abandon them to that fate alone. If you stay on the boat, you suffer too and maybe even die.
I felt pain because if people have no awareness, including no awareness of what they are a match to, there is so much less promise of stopping the ripple effect of pain on this planet. So much less promise of escaping the powerlessness and pain of watching people walk down a path that you know will lead to not only their suffering, but your own. I arrived at a beautiful place yesterday, but a place that feels no less scary than before. When you have awoken to the place where you see that all things in the universe are a part of you and that you are a part of all things in this universe, everything in the universe begins to feel like an organ within your own body. Nothing can hurt without you hurting or feel joy without you feeling joy. There is no way to disconnect from any of it. And so it is not as if when people take action to head towards the waterfall (using the previous analogy) that you can just let them crash without yourself being impacted. To love is to take something as part of yourself. Love is not a choice when you awaken because it is the only choice. It is the only choice because it is the reality... All things are a part of you and you are a part of all things. You cannot not love, even if you wanted to because you cannot un-see what you have seen. If it were possible, to do so would be to choose illusion. And so, all that is left is the bravery to love… A bravery that people like myself, who see the ripples before they happen, must choose because we can do no other than to be in reality. To love therefore in the physical dimension, is the greatest risk of all. And we cannot avoid it no matter how much we may try.
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