Program Notes
https://www.patreon.com/lorenzohagerty
Guest speaker: Erin Rivera Merriman & Shonagh Home
Date this lecture was recorded: May 2017
Today’s podcast features a conversation between Shonagh Home and Erin Rivera Merriman who is an Esoteric Women’s Health Practitioner, Plant Spirit Medicine Practitioner, Priestess, Oracle, Artist, and Mother.
Erin has taught art to Brooklyn teens, volunteered as an Interfaith Chaplain in maximum security New York City prison, led women’s ceremonial circles and organized retreats with indigenous teachers since 2007.
Erin’s study as an Herbalist in the Wise Woman Tradition, combined with her training as a Zen hospice and prison chaplain, and recent studies in Kaula and Shakta Tantra have given her a unique ability to accompany you through life’s turning points as an ally on your journey toward liberated embodiment.
Active Culture Family
Online Privacy Guide - 2017
Shonagh Home
Shonagh Home is a shamanic therapist, teacher, writer and poet. Her specialized private sessions and retreats are probing and revelatory, assisting clients to break chronic, self-defeating patterns, and move into empowered personal sovereignty. Shonagh is an international public speaker on the subject of visionary shamanic-spirit medicine, a voice for stewardship of the honeybees, and a teacher on the subject of Traditional Foods. She is author of the books, ‘Ix Chel Wisdom: 7 Teachings from the Mayan Sacred Feminine,’ ‘Love and Spirit Medicine,’ ‘Poetic Whispers from the Green Realms,’ and ‘Honeybee Wisdom: A Modern Melissa Speaks.’
Website: www.shonaghhome.com
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon. And thanks to Houston Power, Anthony R., and Chris D.
00:00:29 ►
for making donations directly to the salon to help offset some of the expenses associated with these podcasts.
00:00:36 ►
And I’m also pleased to report that there are now three new salonners who are supporting my Patreon writing project.
00:00:43 ►
And these wonderful people are Darren R,
00:00:46 ►
Ben H, and Edward D. So to all of the donors and supporters who are helping to keep these
00:00:53 ►
podcasts coming your way each week, I send my thanks and best wishes that you all have a
00:00:58 ►
wonderful summer, or I guess I should say winter, depending on which side of the equator you’re now living on.
00:01:12 ►
And since I only have one announcement this week, I’ll pass it along now instead of adding my commentary after today’s program.
00:01:18 ►
And that announcement is one that I’ve already passed along to my Twitter followers,
00:01:24 ►
and it comes in a way of telling you about the new online Guide for Journalists in 2017 link to in today’s program notes. Some of the topics that I found both interesting and useful
00:01:45 ►
include how to safeguard sensitive information using encryption, secure messaging for communications,
00:01:52 ►
how to purchase a secure computer, dealing with the cloud, evading personal tracking,
00:01:59 ►
making secure payments, how to become anonymous online, virtual private networks, and securing your email may be
00:02:08 ►
some of the items that are of interest to you. Even if you don’t think that you need this
00:02:12 ►
information right now, I suggest that you go to our program notes for today’s podcast,
00:02:18 ►
which you’ll find at psychedelicsalon.com, and download this important security guide.
00:02:23 ►
My guess is that even if you aren’t interested in this right now,
00:02:28 ►
the time will arrive sooner rather than later when you wish you had this information handy.
00:02:35 ►
Now, getting on with today’s program, we are again joined by Shauna Holm,
00:02:40 ►
who has recorded a recent conversation with another medicine woman, Erin Riviera Merriman.
00:02:46 ►
Now in the most recent podcast from here in the salon, we heard from my friend Matt Palomary,
00:02:52 ►
who spoke about his lifelong pursuit of the study of shamanism, and how shamanistic principles
00:02:58 ►
may be applied to many aspects of one’s life, including writing.
00:03:02 ►
to many aspects of one’s life, including writing.
00:03:10 ►
Now today, while the topic isn’t shamanism itself, we again will see how ancient teachings and wisdom can be applied to healing those in need in today’s so-called modern world.
00:03:15 ►
I think that this is another conversation that will help you get a more complete picture
00:03:20 ►
of how plant teachings are making their way back into Western civilization at
00:03:25 ►
a time when they’re most desperately needed.
00:03:28 ►
Now, here’s Shauna Holm.
00:03:32 ►
Hey everybody, welcome to another interview slash conversation between myself and another
00:03:41 ►
medicine woman who I quite admire.
00:03:50 ►
And so today I’m going to talk to a woman who I personally know.
00:03:56 ►
In fact, she attended a retreat of mine last August, a private retreat.
00:03:57 ►
So it’s just the two of us. And we really bonded.
00:04:00 ►
And she is a really special woman.
00:04:04 ►
And what she offers, I think, is just essential.
00:04:07 ►
And so here is her bio.
00:04:11 ►
Erin Rivera Merriman is an esoteric women’s health and plant spirit medicine practitioner, priestess, oracle, artist, and mother.
00:04:21 ►
Raised on a 100-acre Christmas tree farm in rural Connecticut, she was taught from
00:04:25 ►
a young age the importance of living in harmony with the natural world. Believing strongly in the
00:04:32 ►
necessity of hybrid medicine to meet the unique challenges of modern life, Erin is engaged in the
00:04:38 ►
continued study of plant medicine, active dreaming, metaphysics, and classical tantra as gateways into the richness
00:04:46 ►
of direct personal experience of uncurated reality. Erin’s study as an herbalist in the
00:04:53 ►
wise woman tradition, combined with her training as a Zen hospice and prison chaplain, and recent
00:04:58 ►
studies in the koala and shakti tantra, have given her a unique ability to accompany you through life’s turning points
00:05:05 ►
as an ally on your journey toward liberated embodiment. Erin has taught art to Brooklyn
00:05:11 ►
teens, volunteered as an interfaith chaplain in maximum security New York City prisons,
00:05:17 ►
led women’s ceremonial circles, and organized retreats with indigenous teachers since 2007.
00:05:23 ►
When not teaching classes or building trans-dimensional
00:05:26 ►
mycelial networks that support people in living life outside the matrix, she can be found working
00:05:32 ►
on the next episode of her podcast, Starseeds Survival Guide, creating custom ritual jewelry
00:05:38 ►
as the moving sea and facilitating art collaborations and co-creating community with the Spirit
00:05:46 ►
Weavers Gathering and Elder Farm.
00:05:49 ►
And so, Erin, welcome.
00:05:52 ►
Thank you, Shauna.
00:05:54 ►
I’m so excited to get to talk with you today.
00:05:56 ►
Yeah, I think this is going to be a treat for the listeners of Psychedelic Salon.
00:06:01 ►
I really do.
00:06:06 ►
listeners of Psychedelic Salon, I really do. And so let’s start with the mushroom because you and I share a deep connection to the mushroom teachers. And so let’s just, we’ll start there.
00:06:16 ►
And so how did you find your way to the mushroom? Well, I always like to begin answering that question
00:06:27 ►
with the preface that I grew up in the 80s on the East Coast
00:06:32 ►
and was very much a child of the D.A.R.E. program era.
00:06:40 ►
And so I really, truly was embedded with this
00:06:44 ►
mushrooms are drugs and drugs are bad.
00:07:09 ►
to help people and help kids say no to pharmaceutical, bad drugs,
00:07:12 ►
and that’s totally necessary. But the shadow side of that is that people who have incurable chronic illnesses
00:07:19 ►
that Western medicine does not have any medicine for, suffer for decades because they can’t follow the
00:07:30 ►
call to the plants.
00:07:31 ►
So I couldn’t follow that call for a really long time.
00:07:34 ►
And I spent kind of decades in my life in pain.
00:07:37 ►
And it took many, many, many years of beating my head against the wall of Western medicine,
00:07:57 ►
Many, many, many years of beating my head against the wall of Western medicine, trying to find relief before I, you know, broke down enough layers of conditioning to say, there’s only like one thing I haven’t tried.
00:08:01 ►
And that had been ayahuasca at the time. That was what really opened me to the idea like there’s actually a difference.
00:08:06 ►
There’s drugs and there’s medicine.
00:08:08 ►
And then after about 10 years of exploring with ayahuasca, I had to admit that that journey
00:08:15 ►
was very hard on my body also because I have fibromyalgia and my vessel wants to be treated
00:08:22 ►
gently.
00:08:22 ►
my vessel wants to be treated gently.
00:08:28 ►
And around that time of realizing that,
00:08:34 ►
there were invitations to sit with mushrooms that felt safe and felt sacred. And with people who I looked at how they were living their lives,
00:08:39 ►
and they seemed to have found a greater level of love
00:08:45 ►
and were all as a group kind of committing to aligning with being loving
00:08:50 ►
in all of their interactions.
00:08:54 ►
And so that was the proof or the right invitation to me
00:08:58 ►
was these people are sitting with the mushroom,
00:09:00 ►
and they really are, they have a vibration that feels loving to me.
00:09:07 ►
And so I started to have very small amounts and after that first circle with these people
00:09:20 ►
I would just, I decided that every solstice and every turning of the wheel
00:09:27 ►
of the year, I would go out to the woods by myself and I would just have a half a gram
00:09:33 ►
and just sit, just be with the land and with myself.
00:09:40 ►
And from the first time that I had made that ritual of having a half a gram in the forest by myself
00:09:47 ►
and spending the day with myself, my personal process just started picking up so quickly.
00:09:55 ►
30 minutes into that journey, the goddess Kuan Yin came and sat in front of me and said,
00:10:00 ►
all right, I have a job for you.
00:10:03 ►
Would you like to be a healer?
00:10:04 ►
And of course, my whole life I thought, oh you. Would you like to be a healer? And of course,
00:10:05 ►
my whole life, I thought, oh, I wish that I could be a healer. But, you know, I’m not a healer.
00:10:11 ►
Other people are healers. And so, of course, I said, well, yes, but what does the job entail?
00:10:18 ►
And we had an interview for several hours. We had an interview about what exactly the job description was that she was
00:10:25 ►
inviting me into. And I was able to make a very informed consent decision, informed consent,
00:10:35 ►
yes, to the extended hand that was offered to me that day between the mushrooms and Kuan Yin to enter into a deeper level of journeying as a medicine woman.
00:10:51 ►
That’s beautiful. You know, you brought up something. I recently also had a conversation
00:10:57 ►
with Dr. Rachel Harris, and she wrote a book called Listening to Ayahuasca. And so she is
00:11:04 ►
retired now, but she was a therapist for
00:11:06 ►
a number of years, a psychotherapist. And she was talking about the effects of ayahuasca. And what
00:11:11 ►
she pays a great deal of attention to is how does this change you as a person? What happens to your
00:11:20 ►
relationships? How are your decisions affected?
00:11:25 ►
And so when you were speaking to the kind of people that you noticed who worked, it
00:11:32 ►
sounds like very respectfully with the mushrooms, and you specifically spoke of them as these
00:11:38 ►
very loving people, they sound sort of grounded and heart-centered.
00:11:44 ►
And I just thought that was
00:11:45 ►
interesting because it just made me think of this as something that, you know, Dr. Harris pays
00:11:50 ►
close attention to. You know, you’re using these medicines. How are they changing you? And then
00:11:55 ►
you have this whole piece with Kuan Yin. And so I’ll ask you, because, you know, I’ve been asked
00:12:02 ►
this question myself in terms of the mushroom.
00:12:05 ►
Compared to ayahuasca, I think it’s very much you feel the presence of the madre or the grandmother, yes?
00:12:12 ►
The interesting thing is I’m a very visual person in regular life.
00:12:17 ►
And dreaming and all kinds of different states of consciousness are available to me where I see beautiful visuals like most of the time.
00:12:25 ►
But with ayahuasca, I don’t have a anthropomorphic experience of the, of the, of spirits or even a
00:12:35 ►
plurality of spirits. Um, it’s, it feels like a conversation with God, but it sounds like a
00:12:41 ►
conversation with myself. There’s no, then I don’t know anyone else who has that same experience.
00:12:48 ►
Well,
00:12:48 ►
that’s just so interesting because then with the mushrooms,
00:12:50 ►
I feel a plurality of teachers.
00:12:53 ►
Yes,
00:12:53 ►
you do too.
00:12:54 ►
Yeah.
00:12:54 ►
Yeah.
00:12:55 ►
Yeah.
00:12:55 ►
Yeah,
00:12:56 ►
definitely.
00:12:56 ►
Yeah.
00:12:57 ►
It feels like a portal to me into tutelary spirits.
00:13:01 ►
And so clearly this is what you encountered on your first journey.
00:13:08 ►
And so, okay, well, I’ll ask you a question I’m sure Dr. Harris would ask you. And so,
00:13:13 ►
what were the changes that you noted in your life as a result of working with the mushroom in that
00:13:21 ►
way? Well, I would say, even from this first day that I’m speaking of,
00:13:27 ►
I still live with my son’s father, although we’re not romantically involved anymore,
00:13:32 ►
so we have a very unusual relationship.
00:13:34 ►
And the first day that I came home from the woods and sat down at the kitchen table,
00:13:41 ►
he was like, I like this.
00:13:43 ►
I like this medicine for you. I like what this
00:13:48 ►
does for you. And I knew exactly what he meant. I wasn’t like, what do you mean? I find that growing
00:13:58 ►
up with a chronic pain condition, it was very challenging for me to get into my body because being in the body meant being in pain.
00:14:06 ►
So I had all of my habits of personality and strategies in life involved going out.
00:14:14 ►
And I felt like ayahuasca was like it took me even further out.
00:14:18 ►
And that’s what I wanted at that time, to just find someplace less painful to be.
00:14:23 ►
And of course, all of those journeys journeys I never found anywhere else to be.
00:14:29 ►
Eventually you get turned around and you say, you know what, this body and this planet is all we’ve got.
00:14:35 ►
So you’ve got to get in there and dig in and find a way to make it work.
00:14:38 ►
And I really have searched.
00:14:41 ►
I have just probably tried every healing modality there is.
00:14:45 ►
And mushrooms truly have been the bridge into my body where I can be present and I can use the breath. I can use the tools that I’ve been taught in Zen Buddhism, in Zou Chen meditation.
00:15:12 ►
All the tools of all the traditions work for me now because I’m in my body.
00:15:32 ►
And the fact that I can go and have this really profound healing journey with myself and really straighten myself out in all the ways that we kind of drift off course, for me, my mind kind of takes over. And the mushroom balances everything.
00:15:36 ►
So my mind and my body are working in concert again.
00:15:49 ►
working in concert again and then that I can walk in the door four hours later, six hours later and sit down and have dinner with my son and be fully present with my family. I’ve really never found
00:15:57 ►
any other practice that didn’t require a bumpy period of integration from, you know, being at a certain, like,
00:16:10 ►
oh, we all went to this vibe level of 100 and now there’s this, like, smash back into this reality
00:16:17 ►
where people want to know, like, why you didn’t scrub the toilet or whatever.
00:16:21 ►
Like, somehow that doesn’t happen with the mushrooms.
00:16:25 ►
And then the other piece that’s really important to me that made me feel like I wanted to commit
00:16:30 ►
to a period of really just being with this medicine that I was kind of done experimenting
00:16:39 ►
or exploring for a while is that my Ishta Devi, her name is Matangi,
00:16:48 ►
that sort of means like who, if you look to Vedic astrology,
00:16:52 ►
who governs your lifetime, you know, who’s going to be this like umbrella,
00:16:56 ►
although you might work with other goddesses or other energies.
00:16:58 ►
And she’s an older, more esoteric form of Sarasvati.
00:17:02 ►
And Sarasvati and Matangi are the,
00:17:05 ►
they are the, like, the throat chakra.
00:17:08 ►
And so growing up with this emphasis
00:17:12 ►
on the throat chakra, every, you know,
00:17:15 ►
but he was always like,
00:17:17 ►
you talk too much.
00:17:18 ►
You talk too much.
00:17:19 ►
You talk too much.
00:17:21 ►
And I spent most of my relationships
00:17:23 ►
feeling like, you’re right. I’m broken and weird and I talk too much and, like spent most of my relationships feeling like, you’re right.
00:17:25 ►
I’m broken and weird and I talk too much.
00:17:27 ►
And like, I’m going to do my best to talk less.
00:17:31 ►
But I’m mostly going to fail and you’re going to be mad at me about it.
00:17:35 ►
And I’m going to agree with you that there’s something wrong with me.
00:17:39 ►
And the combination of classical tantric practice which is mostly mantra
00:17:46 ►
but mantra of course is
00:17:48 ►
spoken spellcraft
00:17:50 ►
with the mushrooms
00:17:52 ►
brought this alignment into my throat
00:17:54 ►
chakra where I really could feel
00:17:57 ►
what was going on when people were saying
00:17:58 ►
you’re talking too much, you’re losing me
00:18:00 ►
I believe that I was
00:18:02 ►
kind of prisming through the dimensions
00:18:04 ►
and speaking to past, present, and future aspects of reality and people and that they just felt confused or like they didn’t relate because I was 10 or something, you know?
00:18:18 ►
And I didn’t know what was happening either.
00:18:19 ►
And now I actually feel like I know when I’m channeling.
00:18:23 ►
I know who’s speaking.
00:18:23 ►
And now I actually feel like I know when I’m channeling.
00:18:24 ►
I know who’s speaking. I know how to prevent lower energies from hijacking my throat chakra and causing me to do damage with my words.
00:18:34 ►
I have the mushrooms have given me a little bit of ability to use the tools that I came in with. And I, I desire to continue to
00:18:50 ►
work with them to really master that tool of the word. Beautiful. And so they have become a part of
00:18:57 ►
it sounds like a deep spiritual practice for you. Definitely. Let’s change tack a little bit here and because you you are
00:19:10 ►
an esoteric women’s health and spirit medicine practitioner and so what is
00:19:18 ►
that work explain explain what that is if will. I have a number of offerings with groups, and small groups is really my comfort zone.
00:19:31 ►
Like groups of women from 12 to 15 people, a thing happens that I feel like I understand and everybody values.
00:19:40 ►
And out of that, my edge was always like working with people one-on-one.
00:19:45 ►
I just, I didn’t think that I could do it or that it was for me,
00:19:49 ►
and then it just started happening.
00:19:51 ►
I don’t even remember how.
00:19:53 ►
Maybe with friends, helping friends and word of mouth and sliding scale
00:19:57 ►
and occasionally and growing to a point where it’s a large part of my practice.
00:20:11 ►
it’s a large part of my practice um so generally i really only i don’t see a lot of people one time um i can do readings i can do tarot readings and i can do oracle readings um where which are fun
00:20:22 ►
i think i think there’s there’s an element of like,
00:20:26 ►
wow, that was really exciting.
00:20:29 ►
But generally, if somebody gets a tarot reading or an oracle reading,
00:20:35 ►
they come back for a six-week series
00:20:37 ►
because they will say, you’re really speaking my language.
00:20:43 ►
And I feel like you might be a person that
00:20:46 ►
could help me with this thing that i haven’t been able to find help for elsewhere so it tends to be
00:20:52 ►
people who have tried i feel like they’ve tried everything and have a a deeper level of trauma
00:20:59 ►
that they’re ready to to face and they just want someone to hold their hand and stand there
00:21:06 ►
with them while they turn and face that trauma that, you know, other healers have kind of
00:21:12 ►
said, like, oh, you know, that’s not my expertise, or we can’t go there in this session or in
00:21:18 ►
this environment.
00:21:19 ►
So, I will take people out into the woods, and we will sit in nature generally,
00:21:28 ►
and some people come to my temple here in Ocean Beach, which is a more neighborhood-y place.
00:21:37 ►
And it really is, I guess, something like a boosted therapy session,
00:21:46 ►
but I’m able to take people on deep journeys with my voice and with my words
00:21:51 ►
and access things in people and bring things up when they want to bring them up.
00:22:00 ►
When they’re ready to excavate some massive ball of trauma is usually when people
00:22:07 ►
end up at my door. Okay. And so I have spoken with different people over the past few years who
00:22:16 ►
credit these medicines with the depth work that they are doing with others. And so would you say that the mushroom has influenced this work you do with people?
00:22:31 ►
Absolutely.
00:22:32 ►
I feel like that thing I was speaking about where I was like,
00:22:35 ►
I’m a group work person, that’s my deal.
00:22:38 ►
This shift definitely happened somewhere in my first year of developing this personal practice with the
00:22:45 ►
mushrooms where it gave me this it’s like I was able to see where my boundary is and and learn
00:22:57 ►
that it’s much further out there than I thought because I felt like, I’m a sensitive person and I have a sensitive vessel
00:23:05 ►
and I need to like be real.
00:23:07 ►
I think I babied myself.
00:23:09 ►
And so I didn’t actually know where my edge was.
00:23:13 ►
And so once I started working with people and people were bringing in like deep trauma
00:23:20 ►
and I just felt kind of, it might sound backward,
00:23:27 ►
but people would come with this really big trauma piece that in the past would have made me refer them out,
00:23:33 ►
say like, oh, no, no, no, no, I don’t have a degree in counseling psychology, what have you,
00:23:39 ►
where I just would feel like I just felt really grounded and happy.
00:23:44 ►
Where I just would feel like I just felt really grounded and happy.
00:23:52 ►
And the happy I realized was, if there were words to it, it was, I’m in my spot.
00:23:54 ►
I’m in my seat in the universe.
00:23:57 ►
Like, this is my spot.
00:24:00 ►
And I can totally be here with this person right now. And I feel, and like, I absolutely feel like that is 100% the mushrooms.
00:24:05 ►
Like, that did not come from any other practice or combination of practices.
00:24:11 ►
That just ability to go into darkness, like, to go into the shadow, and not just my own shadow,
00:24:22 ►
but like, once I spent some time really digging around in my own
00:24:26 ►
shadow and seeing like,
00:24:27 ►
there’s no evil in there,
00:24:29 ►
you know,
00:24:29 ►
uh,
00:24:30 ►
there’s,
00:24:31 ►
it’s just parts that haven’t been loved.
00:24:33 ►
And then that gave me,
00:24:36 ►
and I guess another way of saying that is like,
00:24:38 ►
I found a deeper level of self love and self acceptance and compassion for
00:24:42 ►
myself.
00:24:43 ►
And then that gave me
00:24:45 ►
the ability to go there with other people too. Well, it’s so interesting, Erin, because I always
00:24:51 ►
like to say, which came first, the shaman or the mushroom? And it really feels like, you know,
00:24:58 ►
that first experience that you had where Kuan Yin came in, and so it was a tutelary intelligence, and essentially
00:25:07 ►
announced, this is your path, this is where you’re going, and we’re going to work together
00:25:15 ►
on this. And that’s very classically, you know, being called into the healing arts,
00:25:23 ►
whether you want to call it being a shaman or
00:25:26 ►
a medicine woman or an oracle or a seer, right? I mean, there are many, many, many words for this
00:25:30 ►
level of work. And so I just am curious. So if you have someone who is dealing with a trauma,
00:25:38 ►
because we have so many people, you know, working with, dealing with different issues like PTSD and, and, and, uh, abuse and
00:25:46 ►
whatnot. Could you just maybe speak to how you would work with someone, maybe someone, especially
00:25:53 ►
who’s, who’s had a lot of abuse in their background, you know, comes to you for this,
00:26:00 ►
uh, I would say very out of the box and very essential work that you are doing
00:26:06 ►
what does that look like?
00:26:09 ►
well
00:26:09 ►
it’s different every time
00:26:15 ►
yeah it is
00:26:16 ►
but there are some similarities
00:26:18 ►
and I would say that
00:26:22 ►
I have a really specific definition of karma.
00:26:31 ►
And so something that the mushrooms love to do is just make all these words interchangeable.
00:26:36 ►
Just say like, call it this, call it this, call it this.
00:26:38 ►
Let’s see how they’re all the same.
00:26:53 ►
And so karma, trauma, wound, ancestor, demon, untrue belief, to me, in my work, they’re all the same.
00:27:07 ►
And so one of the series that I do with people, I call it karma clearing because it gets people in the ballpark of what we’re talking about. But I recently did a karma clearing with a woman that had probably the most horrific litany of sexual
00:27:14 ►
traumas that I had ever encountered. And somewhere around this second session, she said to me, like, so are we going to go into the specifics more at some point?
00:27:35 ►
And she was genuinely curious because she was coming up against an expectation that we would be talking a lot about the specifics of the trauma.
00:27:47 ►
And that rarely is indicated in my approach or set of tools where what I feel ends up
00:27:58 ►
happening is I’m able to read and narrate back to someone or reflect back to them the nature of their timeless being.
00:28:11 ►
And at the end of the six weeks, they end up having some kind of remembrance of all of their thousands of lifetimes worth of wisdom,
00:28:21 ►
where their 50 horrific traumas in this lifetime start to feel kind of small and
00:28:29 ►
manageable and so we weave in and out of the specifics but always bringing them back into
00:28:37 ►
this bigger picture and that’s something that I feel like the mushrooms also it’s like a part of their personality to me is just
00:28:45 ►
dilating that the perspective and and I will say like prisming back out that we just get contracted
00:28:53 ►
around our stories and our experiences and our identities and they just kind of like if it’s
00:29:01 ►
like a wheel that gets cranked down they kind of can open that back up and allow somebody to feel, you know, at the end she had said something to the effect of, I always felt that there was an unending amount of healing to do.
00:29:22 ►
And that they actually kind of feel like, know what like i’m okay uh uh i’m
00:29:31 ►
i’m it doesn’t feel like an unending amount uh now and which yeah feels like like just loosening up of the perspective and of the identity that we form around pain or around what didn’t work.
00:29:50 ►
I’m sure there’s lots of different modalities for trauma healing.
00:29:54 ►
I have found that within every modality, let’s say Ayurveda, there’s a small part of it that’s dedicated to trauma healing.
00:30:06 ►
of it that’s dedicated to trauma healing. And I’m finding through my work with the mushrooms that the value of somatic experiencing, that modality is perhaps the most powerful tool for really
00:30:17 ►
clearing deep trauma, deep PTSD, deep nervous system wiring around trauma. And what for anyone that is not
00:30:29 ►
familiar with it, it basically kind of means you re-experience the trauma in a conscious sacred
00:30:36 ►
setting with guides or people to help you bring in what you needed in that exact moment in order to process it.
00:30:48 ►
So I believe that really accesses the inner child or the soul part that may be split off,
00:30:58 ►
addresses them directly and their needs directly using some, usually it’s body work in the same area of the body
00:31:07 ►
where perhaps there was trauma, so using the body work to reopen the wound.
00:31:14 ►
And so what the mushrooms have told me is that, you know, we’re weaving these tapestries
00:31:22 ►
with our stories and our lives and we each of our
00:31:25 ►
lives has a there’s a picture you know there’s a design to our tapestry and we feel happy when
00:31:32 ►
life is going around along in that rhythm weaving it right and trauma is when there’s like a big
00:31:37 ►
snag or a big ball and our yarn just you know makes it a hole in the tapestry. But often you’ll see people just keep weaving.
00:31:48 ►
And so what the mushrooms told me recently was
00:31:50 ►
it doesn’t matter how many perfect rows you do after that trauma,
00:31:55 ►
if you want to feel your full,
00:31:58 ►
have access to your full medicine tapestry of tools and gifts
00:32:03 ►
and potential in this life, you have to pull them out
00:32:05 ►
you have to go back to that original place where it went off and reweave that just wrap the string
00:32:15 ►
around exactly the way that it went in go backwards so so um that sense of going out the way you came
00:32:22 ►
in getting out of the trauma the way you came into the trauma, you have to orchestrate a reversal of those lessons that you took on and consciously bring in the right messages. gone was, I’m on my own, I’m not protected in this universe, then perhaps in your somatic
00:32:47 ►
experiencing ritual, you bring in everybody you love, you bring in 10 people to sit in a circle
00:32:54 ►
around you. And in that moment where you’re fully in the trauma again, and you fire that story,
00:33:01 ►
I’m all alone, nobody loves me, I’m not protected, and your 10 closest people
00:33:06 ►
wrap themselves around you and hold you and whisper in your ear things that they love and
00:33:12 ►
value about you, that actually, it’s like it digs out the little like seed of untruth and places a
00:33:22 ►
seed of truth in its place.
00:33:28 ►
That sounds really powerful, Erin.
00:33:33 ►
And so you bring other people into this healing experience then, at times. At times, I’ve found that the deepest level of this work is available in communities,
00:33:41 ►
when in communities where people are taking turns holding that space for each other
00:33:47 ►
so there’s really a vocabulary about what it is that’s happening and a lot of trust and then a
00:33:55 ►
a culture that can can hold you in your vulnerability as you integrate the experience so yeah the rotating of of um who is
00:34:07 ►
sitting in the seat of medicine person and who is in the seat as space holder or um any number
00:34:15 ►
of other roles that could be designed into that um trauma healing ceremony well Wow. Wow. That’s beautiful. And so there’s ritual, it sounds like that is a part
00:34:26 ►
of this and community and, and both of which, you know, are kind of hard to come by these days,
00:34:36 ►
it seems in our really fast paced lifestyle, right? And so that, that’s very powerful.
00:34:43 ►
And so that’s very powerful.
00:34:44 ►
Wow.
00:34:45 ►
Beautiful.
00:34:48 ►
And so you primarily work with women, yes?
00:34:49 ►
Yes.
00:34:50 ►
Okay.
00:34:52 ►
Do you do some work with the guys?
00:34:58 ►
You know, this is the dialogue in my head.
00:35:00 ►
Where do I belong?
00:35:03 ►
Like, is it my place to be working with men um because i believe that men um need access to
00:35:08 ►
this work as much as women if not more um but um there’s i i guess i would say women are more open to the journey that I offer at this time.
00:35:25 ►
And so much, much more women show up and ask for the deeper levels of what’s available.
00:35:33 ►
And there’s a thing that happens in a group of women, dependably, that doesn’t happen if there’s even one male, even a gay male present.
00:35:46 ►
I’ve observed this every time, every few months or few years,
00:35:51 ►
I’ll kind of be like, okay, I’ll host a co-ed event.
00:35:54 ►
And so I’ve had a lot of opportunity to observe.
00:35:56 ►
And my thing that I really exist in stewardship of,
00:36:03 ►
which is kind of taking women into the depths, we don’t get there
00:36:07 ►
when there’s a male present.
00:36:10 ►
We can do all kinds of other interesting things and teaching and learning, but we don’t get
00:36:14 ►
to that level that I can really depend on otherwise.
00:36:18 ►
And so I tend to find that every so often, a times a year a very sincere male will um will know how to ask
00:36:32 ►
for what um the journeys that that i offer the invitation seems to not be perceived by men in general at this time.
00:36:54 ►
Yeah, you know, I think there’s a lot to be said for women working with women, particularly when they are really trying to heal and men working with men, you know, and, uh, and I think
00:37:09 ►
there are some really good, uh, male healers out there who are doing some great work with,
00:37:15 ►
with men. I have a friend who’s involved with the mankind project and, uh, it’s, you know,
00:37:23 ►
he obviously can’t share, know the the deeper pieces that uh
00:37:28 ►
occur when they’re together but you know it’s really powerful work and it’s helped a lot of
00:37:33 ►
of men and so can you speak to a little bit more about what that project is because i’ve heard that
00:37:41 ►
passed around but i’m not that familiar with what they’re doing uh it is
00:37:47 ►
uh well they gather in in groups and it’s uh it’s about getting rigorously honest and
00:37:56 ►
you know and and really sharing from the depths and and and bottom line, having the support of other men around you, you know,
00:38:09 ►
and, and it’s all different ages, you know, so there is opportunity for, I think, kind of
00:38:16 ►
mentorship there as well. And, uh, it’s just from what my friend tells me, you know, it has really changed his life.
00:38:25 ►
And he’s watched other also who, you know, have been really changed by it.
00:38:30 ►
And I mean, see men having a really hard time in the society.
00:38:35 ►
And right now, with all this cultural Marxist nonsense, you know, the white male has essentially become the new witch.
00:38:44 ►
the white male has essentially become the new witch.
00:38:50 ►
And, I mean, he is being blamed for every ill on the planet.
00:38:56 ►
And it’s just, I’m just incredulous, you know, when I see that.
00:38:59 ►
Plus, I do work with a number of men.
00:39:04 ►
And, you know, my practice is different practice. But, you know, they’re just getting quite a bad rap. And, you know, there just isn’t enough in our culture around mentorship and that really deep healing and done so without the use of antidepressants and all of these, you know, SSRIs that that are just being given to people handed like candy.
00:39:30 ►
And I think that gets dangerous at times. In any case, Erin, your work just sounds really
00:39:40 ►
beautiful. And I’ve been reading through your website and, you know, you and I have discussed this and it’s just very, very powerful. But I did want to know,
00:39:50 ►
you know, if you ever did any work with the guys. And so I was going to ask you also,
00:39:57 ►
I want to ask you about tutelary spirits and the mushroom medicine. And so you mentioned Kuan Yin,
00:40:02 ►
and it sounds like, just as I have experienced this as well, that you’re in touch with what sounds like a group of teachers, and they really are offering instruction.
00:40:13 ►
And would you say also like directing you to different areas of study?
00:40:20 ►
Because I find that happens for me.
00:40:23 ►
Let me think about that.
00:40:27 ►
areas of study? Because I find that happens for me. Let me think about that. When I’m with the medicine, I immediately, I become aware of their presence because everything becomes they, you
00:40:39 ►
know, they’re, they’re, they’re saying this, they, they’re, They’re telling me to ask this question, you know.
00:40:50 ►
And that I don’t actually need to have ingested the mushroom at this point.
00:40:57 ►
And this is how it’s been with all of my medicines that I’ve had a deep journey with that at some point we really do um merge vibrationally where they just come in
00:41:10 ►
when i’m you know if i call the directions if i called the nature spirits if i ring the bell and
00:41:17 ►
say like okay it’s on um then i get a lot of of direction where where it’s hard for me to describe the sensation,
00:41:28 ►
but the wisdom goddess that I work with that I mentioned, Matangi,
00:41:33 ►
she is also thought of as the oracle and the medicine woman.
00:41:38 ►
And when I was considering going into a daily practice with her,
00:41:44 ►
I was afraid at first because these are fierce goddesses
00:41:48 ►
and we don’t know them very well in the West,
00:41:50 ►
so I had my fears.
00:41:52 ►
And the night before my empowerment,
00:41:56 ►
my transmission ceremony,
00:41:58 ►
I dreamed of being this kind of little street rat kind of a girl who recorded music in her van
00:42:10 ►
and had like pins in her face and that that feeling of the pins in my face like it doesn’t
00:42:17 ►
hurt but it feels like like it’s like i’ve i’ve given my mouth and my voice to her and to the medicines that she brings into my
00:42:29 ►
training. So I kind of see her as being the overarching director of the training and that
00:42:33 ►
she brought the mushroom to help assist her in what she would like to do with me. And so I’ll be talking to someone and I’ll have an idea about what I would like to say.
00:42:50 ►
And then I’ll just feel my mouth like get taken and other words come out.
00:42:57 ►
And I always have to laugh because there are words that I wouldn’t say.
00:43:01 ►
And there are sometimes words that I wouldn’t say because I’m afraid that I’m going to offend somebody and that’s usually another way that I know that I’m fully inhabited
00:43:12 ►
by spirit and channeling is that I hear myself saying things that I’m like oh shit they’re
00:43:20 ►
gonna feel bad but they don’t because it’s the truth.
00:43:26 ►
And so that also shows me if I had said those words out of context, they would have offended anybody, but they didn’t offend the person in that moment because they felt the truth in them and they felt the relief of truth come over them to be able to get real with themselves or get real with themselves in front of another person and be held in a compassionate space.
00:43:52 ►
Yeah, okay. Well, that’s really interesting, Erin, because what you’re describing, of course, to sort of the outside Western socialized world, that’s pretty hard to accept.
00:44:07 ►
And yet what you are describing is very much the role of that,
00:44:13 ►
you know, the wise woman would play often,
00:44:16 ►
and she would be connected to some kind of unseen force,
00:44:28 ►
whatever it was, the deity or the local spirits, the ancestors,
00:44:37 ►
whatever it was, right? And so then her job was to speak for those or allow those intelligences to speak through. And that is dicey territory, because there’s a lot of charlatans out there and a lot of sort of
00:44:45 ►
silly nonsense. And then there are those, I think of it really almost as being possessed by the muse,
00:44:52 ►
you know, where you’re in that moment of it’s just this pure clarity. And you do just kind of
00:45:01 ►
give over the wheel in that moment. And that force just comes through.
00:45:08 ►
And people receive it.
00:45:11 ►
Yeah, and then of course afterward,
00:45:12 ►
as there’s like a gradual fading back
00:45:15 ►
into like regular state of consciousness,
00:45:19 ►
there’s always a moment where I’m like,
00:45:21 ►
oh shit, what did I say?
00:45:23 ►
But usually people will reflect that it had value to them.
00:45:30 ►
So I trust.
00:45:32 ►
Yeah, well, I see it also as showing that, you know,
00:45:37 ►
we have the ability to tap in to far more than we even realize.
00:45:44 ►
And so most people stay on essentially the surface
00:45:49 ►
consciousness, if you will, and most people will stay there the rest of their lives, right? But
00:45:54 ►
there are other areas that we can tap. And I see this as a, this is a very ancient, it’s not new, and very profound way of engaging nature and those unseen forces.
00:46:10 ►
And you form a kind of partnership with that.
00:46:16 ►
So, all right, I want you to talk about kava, because another thing you do is create these women’s kava ceremonies.
00:46:26 ►
And so why don’t you explain what kava is and then how does that translate into ceremony?
00:46:34 ►
Thanks for asking.
00:46:37 ►
Kava is a tropical shrub that grows in the Pacific Islands, like Hawaii and Fiji and Vanuatu.
00:46:51 ►
And, of course, they all love her so much that they all like to say that they had her first.
00:46:56 ►
But she tells me that she spontaneously emerged into this realm in a number of places around 3,000 years ago. And there’s a really interesting thing about Kavas that it has what’s called sterile cultivars,
00:47:12 ►
which means it can’t propagate itself.
00:47:14 ►
It needs us.
00:47:15 ►
And that tells us something about her teaching that she really teaches us how to be a community.
00:47:25 ►
So there’s other plants and other teachings that teach us why to be a community,
00:47:30 ►
but what we see is a lot of people showing up, very idealistic,
00:47:35 ►
very excited, all in, to be that community,
00:47:38 ►
and then very quickly getting themselves into these wildly complex dynamics and tangles of soul ties,
00:47:52 ►
and then just having almost no tools for straightening them out.
00:47:58 ►
And so the communities can kind of explode or implode just as quickly as they’re forming.
00:48:04 ►
Communities can kind of explode or implode just as quickly as they’re forming.
00:48:19 ►
And the reason for that, I believe, is that cultures in the past that had strong bonds of community, I believe, had medicine that taught them how to do that.
00:48:27 ►
And so we have some missing pieces, some missing links in the chain, and it’s not the end of the world. I had spent a number of years being in great despair about how much had been lost, but I don’t actually believe it’s lost because it’s all in the Akashic Records, and the Akashic Records are, of course, in our bodies. to tap our intuition and allow ourselves to know what we know,
00:48:47 ►
we can simply ask for the skill so long as we’re aware that we don’t have it.
00:48:53 ►
So there’s a few steps in there, but one is valuing community
00:48:56 ►
and two is becoming a community, and then three is having the mindfulness
00:48:59 ►
to know that you don’t know how to be a community
00:49:02 ►
and the humility to pray and ask for the skill.
00:49:05 ►
And medicine in general,
00:49:09 ►
they kind of also educate you as to how to hold them
00:49:15 ►
and how to create the ritual.
00:49:18 ►
We didn’t just pull that stuff out of nowhere.
00:49:21 ►
So each of those rituals was gifted to us by the medicine itself for how she would like
00:49:29 ►
us to work with her and engage her. And so kava is really wonderful gateway into all of that
00:49:39 ►
experiencing of learning directly from plants, experiencing of being in deep healing prayerful spaces with the people that you buy gas from or buy milk from and watch their kids.
00:49:54 ►
And that it’s really beautiful medicine that I think is coming in at this time in a bigger way,
00:50:09 ►
along with cacao, because we don’t have a culture that really knows how to hold medicine, but we do know that we need it.
00:50:12 ►
And those are two that they’re legal, that you can buy them in the grocery store,
00:50:18 ►
so there’s a lot less fear around them, but they’re no less powerful.
00:50:22 ►
So they are the ideal gateway medicines to me where you
00:50:27 ►
can have a fully medicinal experience of healing of communicating with other realms and other beings
00:50:34 ►
um without all the fear all the great expense to travel somewhere exotic um there and you stay more or less in your body so the the information is a lot
00:50:47 ►
easier to integrate um and kava within all of that very specifically teaches us how to talk to one
00:50:55 ►
another how to communicate that it tells me that we’re really not communicating most of the time
00:51:03 ►
and we don’t even know it we’re that far off we have no idea that we’re really not communicating most of the time and we don’t even know it we’re that far off we
00:51:07 ►
have no idea that we’re not communicating that we’re not understanding the words we’re not taking
00:51:12 ►
the time to question our assumptions um and so it um he she it whatever you would like to to refer to them as they slow everything down just enough to realize when someone else says something with kava,
00:51:35 ►
I will hear it three or four different ways.
00:51:39 ►
And I will be delighted and amused rather than terrified and confused by that. I will just think, wow, did you mean this?
00:51:47 ►
Or did you mean this?
00:51:48 ►
Or did you mean this?
00:51:50 ►
And also be aware that I would have never even asked the question in the past.
00:51:57 ►
So she’s trained me to listen differently and speak differently.
00:52:10 ►
And I believe that those are the skills we’re most needing right now.
00:52:19 ►
Well, it sounds like it slows you down so that you can really listen rather than, you know, and I do this, you know, where we sort of rush, rush, rush, rush, rush, you know, to the point where we deal of velocity behind my process, and historically, I have
00:52:49 ►
not been the greatest listener in social settings.
00:52:53 ►
But with Kava, yes, it sounds like.
00:52:55 ►
When I make the intention to be in ritual space or healing space, and I call upon all of my capacities, then I have increasingly greater
00:53:07 ►
access to that ability to slow down and pay attention to what’s actually going on.
00:53:13 ►
I think that’s really the most psychedelic thing, is just being able to pay attention
00:53:22 ►
to reality.
00:53:23 ►
Yeah, but Kava is not a psychedelic.
00:53:26 ►
No, well, this is the thing.
00:53:29 ►
This is always one of the main questions people ask
00:53:31 ►
when they’re coming into the space.
00:53:34 ►
It’s like, are we going to get high?
00:53:36 ►
And, you know, technically, no, it’s not.
00:53:39 ►
But when I speak with people who are really experts in this medicine
00:53:44 ►
and cultivating it,
00:53:45 ►
I have heard that basically the quote active ingredients in kava are called kava lactones.
00:53:55 ►
And there’s like 15 or 17 of them.
00:53:58 ►
And they all do very different things in the brain.
00:54:02 ►
And the cultivating of kava is an art, not a science.
00:54:07 ►
There’s no way to control which kava lactones end up in which plant and in what amounts.
00:54:13 ►
And so apparently, and you know, this was a story that was told to me,
00:54:21 ►
but there’s one kind that is only for the queen of Hawaii.
00:54:28 ►
She’s the only one that gets to drink it,
00:54:30 ►
and regular kava is kind of a woody, shrub, brown, big, green, shiny, heart-shaped leaves,
00:54:36 ►
and this one is black and hairy and sticky and totally psychedelic,
00:54:46 ►
and the queen drinks it every day.
00:54:47 ►
Wait, wait, wait.
00:54:48 ►
Who’s the queen?
00:54:52 ►
In a certain aspect of Hawaiian culture.
00:54:55 ►
So this was a story that was told to me. And so I haven’t seen this kava.
00:54:58 ►
I have not, you know, I cannot promise you that there is a psychedelic kava,
00:55:06 ►
know i cannot promise you um that there is a psychedelic kava but i i’m also someone who will say like i think that all plants are really pretty psychedelic i think plants are really groovy and
00:55:13 ►
really trippy and that they’re they’re tripping all the time and that i think you can be you can get pretty altered from a good meal of cooked dark leafy greens.
00:55:29 ►
You can get pretty altered from and intoxicated from the aromas of flowers.
00:55:37 ►
So I think the plants are always there.
00:55:40 ►
They’re always all the way there,
00:55:41 ►
and that we are varying degrees of able to meet them there.
00:55:46 ►
I agree. I agree. Absolutely. Yeah. And we have to shift our state of consciousness because you’re
00:55:54 ►
not going to greet a tree in the same way you’re going to greet, you know, your friends at work
00:56:00 ►
or whatever, you know, I mean, until, to show. Until you do and until you can.
00:56:06 ►
Well, hey, why don’t, as long as we’re talking about plants,
00:56:09 ►
why don’t you talk about the Bridge Temple Nature Hospital?
00:56:14 ►
What’s going on with that?
00:56:16 ►
Well, thank you for asking.
00:56:18 ►
I’m really excited.
00:56:21 ►
So one of the branches of my business is called bridge temple which was the the space
00:56:29 ►
and container that held the kava ceremonies the women’s moon lodge um all kinds of women’s group
00:56:37 ►
healing work and for over a year women would come every month for Moon Lodge, and one or two or three of the women would just break down crying,
00:56:49 ►
just saying the same thing.
00:56:52 ►
Can I interrupt for a sec?
00:56:53 ►
Will you just let the listeners know what a Moon Lodge is?
00:56:56 ►
Because not everybody speaks that language.
00:56:58 ►
Okay.
00:56:59 ►
So there’s an idea.
00:57:01 ►
I mean, in our culture, the shorthand is like,
00:57:04 ►
you can gather on the moon and make intentions, and you’ll be amazed at how they come true when you gather on the moon and share them with other people.
00:57:14 ►
But, of course, that is not a moon lodge, that you can do it and it’s great, and there’s nothing wrong with just holding it in that way because it’s absolutely true. You gather with women on the moon and make intentions and they will come true
00:57:28 ►
in their own way.
00:57:32 ►
Moon Lodge for me is
00:57:35 ►
more connected to
00:57:40 ►
the red tent and of course if you know
00:57:44 ►
anything about the red tent you will hear in history
00:57:48 ►
books that this culture or that culture they really found the female menstrual cycle
00:57:56 ►
very distasteful so they would banish the women to these red tents during their menstrual cycle and then of course the women’s side of the
00:58:05 ►
story is very different is we’re very we were very respected in our culture and we were life was
00:58:12 ►
respected and we were allowed to go and just be with our our sacred power time and um that was
00:58:21 ►
where songs were shared and that’s where uh women learned about their bodies and their abilities to give life and sexuality and plants when they were all bleeding together and hanging out in these natural altered states for three or four days.
00:58:49 ►
days um and so the moon lodge now because we you know we we have artificial light which alters our menstrual cycles so we don’t all bleed at the same time as a village and it is um so it can’t really
00:58:55 ►
be that um that we still gather on the moon and um be in the deep mysteries of the body and cycles of life and death
00:59:09 ►
and educate each other in feminine mysteries.
00:59:16 ►
Yeah.
00:59:16 ►
Beautiful.
00:59:18 ►
Beautiful.
00:59:19 ►
I love that.
00:59:20 ►
So you host moon lodges, Erin?
00:59:23 ►
That is one of my most longstanding things that I started doing with a friend of mine when we lived in Brooklyn in apartments.
00:59:30 ►
And we were like, let’s make a ladies book club.
00:59:33 ►
And then it just morphed.
00:59:34 ►
It morphed in like a month into it.
00:59:38 ►
Like as soon as we made the space, we got the next set of instructions.
00:59:42 ►
And it really my I have been holding Moon Lodge for over 10 years now.
00:59:48 ►
And I sat in some Moon Lodges with my herbalist teacher, Susan Weed.
00:59:55 ►
But I never received any formal training in that.
01:00:02 ►
I sat with Susan after I had already been doing that.
01:00:05 ►
And, you know, over the years,
01:00:08 ►
the more that I’ve been able to sit with different teachers and traditions,
01:00:12 ►
all of my elders and teachers that have been in that space
01:00:16 ►
have, you know, completely endorsed the work that happens there.
01:00:21 ►
And that, to me, is kind of the proof, like,
01:00:23 ►
there is an ancient record of how to do that work that, you know, can be accessed and downloaded. Um, if you have the,
01:00:33 ►
the karmas to be doing that work, you know, I’m struck Aaron by how you’re talking earlier about
01:00:41 ►
how the mushroom has actually brought you really into your body.
01:00:48 ►
It’s really taken you to a place where you’re very much embodied. And then this other level
01:00:55 ►
of the work that you offer, where it is, I think, a reclaiming of the cycles of of the body and in this case the cycles of a woman’s body and this is
01:01:09 ►
no small thing at this time because there are you know look i have two teenage daughters and they
01:01:16 ►
you know they’re not interested in any of this stuff and and they don’t they’re athletes they
01:01:21 ►
they hate having their period you know and and And then there’s all these girls now.
01:01:26 ►
I’ll tell you, the new thing here is take the pill, not for birth control, but offering it to these 15, 16-year-old girls and younger as a way to offset their menstrual cycle or to, you know, balance their menstrual cycle or whatever it is.
01:01:44 ►
And so they’re, you know, messing with their life. It’s robbing them of their initiations.
01:01:47 ►
Right, right, right, right.
01:01:48 ►
And then also there are other pharmaceuticals that these women can take
01:01:53 ►
to stop their menses altogether.
01:01:56 ►
And so your work is really, this is a very important piece.
01:02:03 ►
Oh, yes. Really, this is a very important piece.
01:02:14 ►
Yes, I do get the benefit of getting to be around the people who do care about this stuff. So it’s good to not lose touch with the fact that a huge percentage of women are still very much at war with their cycle and resisting their natural feminine initiations.
01:02:29 ►
Yeah.
01:02:30 ►
Well, you know, the commercial society that we live in doesn’t make it easy.
01:02:35 ►
It just doesn’t make it easy for women.
01:02:37 ►
And then all these girls involved in athletics as well.
01:02:40 ►
And so anyway, yeah.
01:02:44 ►
So to reconnect, you were saying, okay saying okay i gotta stop you and ask about
01:02:48 ►
the moon lodge but people were coming to moon lodge and breaking down and crying and just saying
01:02:52 ►
like i i know what i need i just can’t i can’t get it i just want to go the fuck outside and i can’t
01:03:03 ►
i mean my car i mean I’m at my desk.
01:03:05 ►
I’m spoken for and supposed to be somewhere doing something every second of the day.
01:03:11 ►
And so I actually feel like I kind of rounded up all these prayers.
01:03:15 ►
And I was like, your prayers are my prayers, too.
01:03:18 ►
So let’s do this.
01:03:19 ►
And I needed to take some time off of doing the monthly moon lodge to just say like i don’t have the answer
01:03:25 ►
for this group right now i need to go really deep within myself to find the answer to this because i
01:03:32 ►
believe this is the the um the right diagnosis um we’ve we need we can stop um digging around
01:03:39 ►
and and exploring i think we found the problem and now I need to go in search of the medicine. And
01:03:45 ►
that actually coming to see you as part of that, I didn’t know that’s what I was doing. That’s
01:03:50 ►
hindsight. But I was like, I need another level of being able to just be like in in the depths.
01:03:58 ►
And I just, you know, I wanted someone to to be the lifeguard on duty for me to go into a level that I hadn’t
01:04:08 ►
accessed before. And so you were elected by the universe to be my lifeguard on duty.
01:04:15 ►
And so I definitely, you know, credit our time together with the beginnings of
01:04:26 ►
the beginnings of feeling like I was getting a formula right, which was this moving the temple to a farm where a beautiful friend of mine,
01:04:37 ►
Carrie Lou Arnold, was doing really similar work.
01:04:39 ►
She was doing red tents in the middle of nowhere in the mountains
01:04:43 ►
and getting like 40 women with their
01:04:45 ►
children with their teenage daughters so the hunger for the work in those kind of communities
01:04:51 ►
um you know i i would get 15 people if i tried really hard and she like didn’t have a website
01:04:57 ►
it wasn’t you know promoting these things um and so we kind of joined forces. And she was like, I really want, like, I feel like the land wants more women and more magic and teachers to come here.
01:05:10 ►
And I was like, all my women and magic and teachers want to just be outside more.
01:05:14 ►
So let’s do this.
01:05:16 ►
And we just dove in really deep from the beginning, from kind of the get-go.
01:05:27 ►
go. It felt like an arranged marriage by spirit that we have been deeply pleased with how harmoniously it has been working out. But it’s been about a year that we’ve been planning,
01:05:34 ►
and I’ve been working behind the scenes to create a structure of a business around being able to be there so that we don’t have to leave and we don’t
01:05:46 ►
have to be online as much and and that basically the last year of my life has been a lot of talks
01:05:54 ►
and a lot of reaching out to communities and being out in the world in my hope that this year
01:06:01 ►
makes a billboard with a bunch of little lights around it that says,
01:06:05 ►
Erin, it went that way.
01:06:09 ►
And so if anyone needs anything that I have to offer, they will know where to find me
01:06:15 ►
and that I can just be in the portal, really.
01:06:21 ►
Just sit in the portal and I feel healthy there and other people say the same thing.
01:06:28 ►
So I’m like, I found a place that people feel healthy when they come here.
01:06:32 ►
So I’m going to invite as many people, I’m going to invite people to come here and see for themselves that nature heals.
01:06:49 ►
heels and um you know just learn how to milk goats and grow food and all the things that she’s doing as a homesteader and yeah oh try this other way of life that we’re all salivating about and we know
01:06:58 ►
is the answer and we just don’t like know like can we do it how do we do it you know it’s like well
01:07:03 ►
no we can’t do it alone so find somebody to dive with, find a buddy and dive in and let’s just do this.
01:07:10 ►
Yeah, beautiful.
01:07:12 ►
I love the name Bridge Temple Nature Hospital.
01:07:16 ►
That’s just, it’s great.
01:07:18 ►
And you’re right.
01:07:19 ►
Oh, gosh, more people are seeking that out, are desiring to leave the city, leave their boring corporate job
01:07:30 ►
as a corporate wage slave, you know, and get back in touch with the land. And so I’m heartened
01:07:39 ►
to hear, you know, that you’re working that closely with nature, and that you partnered
01:07:45 ►
with this lovely woman, and that you are drawing, you know, so many of these women and bringing
01:07:52 ►
their children. That’s huge. Now, you are also doing a mandala green magic apprenticeship.
01:08:01 ►
And I want you to speak a little bit about that, because I know I’m going to be a guest teacher at some point. So you want the dirt? Yeah, what am I getting into? Yeah,
01:08:10 ►
yeah. This is so great. And again, you know, it’s out of the box. You know, and, and so essential,
01:08:20 ►
so essential. I feel like, you know, I feel I’ve apprenticed myself to the mushroom and it guides
01:08:26 ►
my work and of course I recognize
01:08:28 ►
the same as is occurring
01:08:30 ►
with you you know
01:08:31 ►
very much
01:08:34 ►
so you know back to that
01:08:36 ►
you know first year of practice that I was talking
01:08:38 ►
about where Kuan Yin came and sat with me
01:08:40 ►
then the second time
01:08:42 ►
that I practiced in that way
01:08:43 ►
the first thing that happened was
01:08:46 ►
she said she said so where’s your year-long apprenticeship and I was like what
01:08:54 ►
and she was like oh you didn’t like put all the you didn’t put the pieces together yet like
01:09:03 ►
we thought you got we thought
01:09:06 ►
you understood that that’s what you’re supposed to be doing like okay deep sigh like go you have
01:09:12 ►
your assignment for the next season like go home and like write your curriculum and like come back
01:09:17 ►
and check in with us next season uh and i didn’t actually you know I was like, no, I can’t do that.
01:09:28 ►
Like, I don’t know how to do that.
01:09:30 ►
I can’t do that.
01:09:32 ►
But it just continued to happen.
01:09:48 ►
I began to feel a sort of just distaste for some of the three-hour workshops that had been my format,
01:09:54 ►
you know, a three-hour ceremonial workshop once or twice or three times a month. It would be over, and I would just feel, like, very dissatisfied that everyone just went home, and who knows how
01:10:02 ►
it lands with them, and so I was just getting this message like people really
01:10:07 ►
need time to just like you know you take a few hours to get into this depth and then people just
01:10:13 ►
want to like they need to stay there like they need to stay there and regenerate and heal and
01:10:18 ►
work out their like forgiveness issues and they’re like heal their broken hearts and all these things before we can start practicing
01:10:26 ►
magic together, which is what I think the spirits really want.
01:10:31 ►
I don’t actually think that they just want to be in an endless car wash of washing us
01:10:39 ►
off and washing us off and washing us off.
01:10:41 ►
I think what we would really like is to spend
01:10:45 ►
a little while doing that and then get to to play with you in the sacred garden as as you know we’re
01:10:54 ►
all here nature spirits some of you in bodies some of us not in bodies like we have so much to show
01:10:58 ►
you but like god the endless amount of of healing the truckloads of healing you come in the door with.
01:11:08 ►
And I’m the same way.
01:11:12 ►
We just, we live in such a way that we accumulate a lot and we take on a lot. So the apprenticeship is, it’s a green magic apprenticeship.
01:11:20 ►
It’s a spirit medicine apprenticeship.
01:11:22 ►
And it is a plant spirit medicine apprenticeship but
01:11:26 ►
i really i feel in the end that for me it’s really spirit medicine that the spirits do the healing
01:11:33 ►
and how you access them is your own preference um and i happen to have had plants be that gateway for me but it’s not it’s important for me to like kind of
01:11:48 ►
make sure that that’s understood um that there’s better apprenticeships for people who really want
01:11:57 ►
to know everything about the plants and all their properties the archetype that guides my work with
01:12:03 ►
the plants is very much like the old woman that
01:12:06 ►
you know lives in the woods by herself and everybody that comes she heals them with a
01:12:12 ►
little twig of rosemary because her relationship to the rosemary is just that deep that it will
01:12:16 ►
do anything for her and it will do anything for her clients um so i will be introducing
01:12:23 ►
people to the plants that have been the most potent teachers and guides for me,
01:12:33 ►
and then bringing in all the pieces.
01:12:37 ►
Honestly, a lot of my path has been with coyote teachers.
01:12:50 ►
My deepest teachers have been rather dramatic experiences and traumatic experiences that I needed a lot of healing to integrate.
01:12:57 ►
And I walked away with a truckload of what not to do.
01:13:00 ►
And so I never got a lot of instructions on what to do. That’s my own sort of creative prerogative, I guess.
01:13:01 ►
on what to do. That’s my own sort of creative
01:13:03 ►
prerogative, I guess. But I have a lot
01:13:06 ►
that I’m, I guess,
01:13:08 ►
attempting to balance
01:13:10 ►
out in terms of what I know that
01:13:11 ►
seekers are receiving out there
01:13:13 ►
around
01:13:15 ►
power imbalances,
01:13:18 ►
power dynamics, and
01:13:20 ►
just, you know, getting some degree
01:13:24 ►
of
01:13:24 ►
beat up by their experiences of questing, questing a different way of being.
01:13:34 ►
And so it will be plant medicine teachings.
01:13:40 ►
We’ll do botany.
01:13:41 ►
We’ll do medicine making.
01:13:46 ►
we’ll do botany, we’ll do medicine making, but really a lot of the ritual, the ceremony,
01:13:53 ►
the how to communicate respectfully with all beings, people, plants.
01:13:57 ►
So the communication piece will be a big part.
01:13:59 ►
It’s fifth dimensional communications.
01:14:00 ►
It is.
01:14:02 ►
That’s what they tell me.
01:14:06 ►
And so there’ll be a lot of fifth dimensional communication training.
01:14:12 ►
And then there’ll be a lot of nutrition, a lot of nutrition plants, a lot of preventative medicine with plants.
01:14:29 ►
And food sadhana, meaning like practicing with food to prepare the body to have these wilder, deeper, more profound, direct experiences with spirit and have them not shred our delicate, fried nervous systems.
01:14:35 ►
Good point.
01:14:37 ►
Good.
01:14:37 ►
So, you know, I brought you in because you’ve been one of my most inspiring and course-correcting teachers
01:14:50 ►
in the realm of nutrition and really just shown me that there’s different ways
01:14:55 ►
of eating for different kinds of beings.
01:14:58 ►
And the way that this vessel and this path needs to be fed.
01:15:06 ►
It’s another level of nourishment than we’re being taught or offered.
01:15:10 ►
And then we have to take responsibility for that ourselves.
01:15:14 ►
Beautiful.
01:15:15 ►
You know, this, it feels like it needs to eventually morph into a book, Erin.
01:15:27 ►
Thank you for that encouragement.
01:15:32 ►
Yeah, we’ll just plant that seed and see what wants to happen.
01:15:38 ►
So, well, listen, this has been just great talking with you.
01:15:42 ►
And I’m just, I’m really excited for the work you’re doing. And I can’t thank you enough for listening to the mushroom and putting yourself out there because it’s not easy to do.
01:15:53 ►
And also, you are a mother.
01:15:55 ►
And so this is another piece. have said before, you know, the medicine women, the medicine women that you would find in cultures
01:16:07 ►
all around the world were not pampered gurus, you know, they had children and, and, you know,
01:16:15 ►
a house to care for, land to care for. And yet, at the same time, you know, they had this incredible medicine that they offered to their community.
01:16:27 ►
And so I see you doing just that.
01:16:30 ►
And so, yeah.
01:16:32 ►
So thank you.
01:16:34 ►
Any final piece you want to share before we wrap this up?
01:16:38 ►
The one is when you said, you know, this very outside the box, there was, I felt a little ripple go through my inner, a whisper go through the inner council that was like, oh, there’s something here around this idea of in the box, out of the box.
01:16:55 ►
And who this is for truly is people who, they never got in the box to begin with.
01:17:03 ►
And they may or may not be empowered about that choice.
01:17:06 ►
They may have tried to get in the box, and the box would not have them.
01:17:12 ►
But it’s another place to be beside the box and another way to be
01:17:17 ►
and another plane of being that is beyond the you know the x and y axis and the other piece that they really
01:17:30 ►
wanted me to say is just um that something the mushrooms really want people to know at this time
01:17:36 ►
um is that a lot of the like gosh how’d we get here why is it so bad why aren’t we doing more
01:17:42 ►
like why aren’t we like shrugging off these oppressive systems?
01:17:46 ►
Why are we just sitting there, like, letting it happen?
01:17:48 ►
It’s just that we’re collectively so filled with accumulated traumas
01:17:54 ►
of our journey of gaining consciousness.
01:17:59 ►
You know, we’re gaining consciousness of ways that we have traumatized
01:18:03 ►
each other and ourselves, And there’s just this,
01:18:06 ►
Oh fuck.
01:18:08 ►
Um,
01:18:10 ►
and that there’s a little bit of a,
01:18:13 ►
of a,
01:18:13 ►
of shame and self-loathing that,
01:18:16 ►
and those feelings freeze us.
01:18:18 ►
So those feelings are actually like freezing our evolutionary process.
01:18:23 ►
And what the mushroom really wants me to say is like,
01:18:26 ►
come on, it’s going to be fun.
01:18:28 ►
Like there’s so much resistance to how much healing work
01:18:32 ►
because this idea that healing work is heavy and deep and intense
01:18:36 ►
and there’ll be lots of tears and reliving of trauma.
01:18:38 ►
And the mushrooms are like, no, no, no, no.
01:18:41 ►
Like trauma healing is sexy.
01:18:43 ►
Trauma healing is fun. You don’t like,
01:18:46 ►
you’re looking at it from the outside in. And we just promise you that,
01:18:52 ►
that just a little surrender to the journey and we’ll show you right away. Like,
01:18:58 ►
we’re gonna laugh a lot. We’re gonna eat delicious foods. Like, it’s going to be fun. Like, we’re going to have a great time.
01:19:07 ►
Well, beautiful. And you know, that is something that I have noticed is really sadly lacking in
01:19:14 ►
our culture. And that is joy. And that’s what it sounds like you are speaking to that the mushrooms
01:19:19 ►
are calling us to a kind of joy that for the most part, you know, we’ve lost touch with.
01:19:26 ►
And,
01:19:26 ►
and I have also noticed that so much of the suffering on our planet is
01:19:31 ►
unnecessary.
01:19:34 ►
So much of it,
01:19:36 ►
you know?
01:19:38 ►
So,
01:19:39 ►
so yeah.
01:19:40 ►
Well,
01:19:40 ►
Aaron,
01:19:41 ►
thank you so much for all your wisdom.
01:19:46 ►
And, uh, oh, and, and so your website, how can people find you?
01:19:50 ►
So my website is called ActiveCultureFamily.com,
01:19:56 ►
and that’s an umbrella of all of the different creative workings that I’m up to,
01:20:04 ►
including the Nature Hospital and Bridge Temple and the podcast
01:20:07 ►
and some artisan handmaids.
01:20:13 ►
Excellent.
01:20:14 ►
All right.
01:20:15 ►
Well, thank you very much.
01:20:17 ►
And this was great.
01:20:20 ►
I totally enjoyed every minute.
01:20:23 ►
Thank you.
01:20:24 ►
You’ve passed me some powerful tools,
01:20:26 ►
and I intend to put them to really good use
01:20:28 ►
and hand them out to anyone that would hold them respectfully
01:20:33 ►
and sincerely seek them.
01:20:35 ►
I’m so blessed to have connected with you in this life.
01:20:39 ►
Thank you, Erin.
01:20:40 ►
Thank you so much.
01:20:43 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo
01:20:46 ►
signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:20:48 ►
Be well, my friends.