Day 30 after my first meeting with the African Bwiti medicine (Wood).
It’s said that the medicine is still working with you in the 30 days after your journey, which also means you have to keep the restrictions of no coffee, nicotine (no pibe with Mapacho or rapé for me) and no sugar – just as the week leading up to your journey.
Yesterday was the New Moon, just as the second day on my retreat with the medicine (it’s a 48 hour ceremony), which makes it a perfect cycle that comes full circle with rebirth and new intentions. This morning I took a microdose of the medicine, as I will too, tonight before bed.
I have felt the subtle vibrations of the medicine in me all day – working and slowing me down to ground and feel more as I went for a long walk visiting my two dieta trees; Birch and Oak. I’m landing in a deep sense of gratitude for this beautiful, yet sometimes challenging, life.
Since the Bwiti medicine is a death process I was expecting to end up in the same space as I have visited in so many of my medicine journeys (especially with the grandmother); on the edge of death, struggling to let go. But surprisingly I did not go there. The journey was not hard and challenging as I’m used to, but rather easy and effortless. Dying wasn’t hard, scary or dramatic it was actually so uneventful that I didn’t seem to notice that it happened at all…
The true gift I didn’t receive until after the ceremony when I, fresh out of my journey, was confronted with my most alive thought-forms mirrored to me so clearly in a relationship that there was no way of hiding from it. “BASI!” as they say in this medicine tradition (which means something along the lines of “truth has been spoken”).
The medicine of truth, rebirth and letting go of the hungry ghosts (thought-forms) has been the gift that keeps on giving! Working on so many different aspects of myself through different medicines I finally felt ready to dive deeper into my mind, to work on awareness around the thought(forms) that influence my way of being in the world and to detach myself from all of the beliefs I have about myself, other people and the world around me that seem to create stress in my system and hinder my ability to be present in the moment. One of the questions I asked myself leading up to the retreat was “is it really my work that is stressing me or is it my thoughts about my work that is stressing me?”.
In the last 30 days I have felt more calm, peaceful and present. I have noticed old thought-forms (hungry ghosts) trying to get in through other people telling me the stories about me that I used to tell myself “You talk too much!”, “You take up too much space!”, “You are too dramatic” and so on and so on. But then being able to, lovingly, say no thank you and send them away again – determined to not let them back into my system; making me their host once again so they can feed on me as before. I have noticed feeling less activated in my nervous system at work with the young kids, less influenced by their activation and therefore spending less time self-regulating during and after my work day. My mind has been noticeably more quiet, which is quite new and to some extent unknown to me.
The medicine has given me a taste of my potential with the things I wanted to work on and as I know it from other medicines it lessens with time as the medicines invites us to take over ourselves and do more of the work to carry, integrate and nourish the new ways of being in the world.
BASI!