sacred valley — Blog

So, I just got back from Peru...

...which was a first-time travel experience for me. It is now one of my favourite places on earth, or what I saw of it is (mainly the Sacred Valley). The retreat I was co-running with my wise and wonderful friend, Marta, included two full-day ceremonies working with a traditional South American plant medicine, San Pedro (Wachuma). I took part in both, plus a third a few days before the retreat started.

I'm not going to go into the ins and outs of what San Pedro is, how it works and whether you should try it (you can Google that stuff) but I will give a brief synopsis of my experience:
I WAS BLOWN AWAY.
I could leave it there, really, but I won't, because I want to say a little more about exactly what I mean by that. The thing is, I mean it almost literally; my sense of self was pulled apart and big chunks of it stared me back in the face, laughing, but kinda helpfully...

My experience was not that unusual but it was deeply personal: in my first ceremony, I very viscerally released some long-held trauma from something that occurred when I was about nine years old. What did that look like? Over a period of about four hours, I witnessed (fully consciously) old, deep feelings of suspicion, anger, fear, distrust, distress, hurt and sadness manifest in my entire body as searing pain and a kind of delirious fever. Then, through the rest of the day, I lived through a torrential outflow of violent tears, abandoned wailing, vomiting, tremors to my core, jaw-wrenching yawns and slightly manic laughter. The whole while, my brain span me around in circles replaying thought patterns 9-year-old Kate came up with and subsequent behavioural choices in my work, my relationships and my self-patterning from the two decades since. It was -and I'm not just saying this- completely life-changing.

Afterwards, I felt exhausted (fair) but completely and utterly cleared - physically, yes, fair; but also… emotionally; energetically. And I’ve felt that way since. That day I watched old, old stuck ideas of who I am in this world, what I deserve, what I want and what I have to do here on Earth just fall away, never to return. Speaking more plainly, I became aware that a certain incident in my childhood had brought me to believe that

A) my very strong gut instincts about other people are to be doubted, but also that
B) I shouldn’t fully trust those who love and support me because they will let me down and I will be devastated.

Those are the lessons 9-year-old Kate took from a way-more-complex family situation. Those lessons then infiltrated their way into Kate’s life values, self-worth and relationships ever since. Until now. Because now I see them so opaquely as what they are: concepts. And see that as concepts they are SO flimsy. And in their fragility they are dissolvable. And so now, every day, I am aware and able to keep on dissolving them if they arise out of habit.

An approximate equivalent of 6 years of talk therapy in a day - that’s what my first San Pedro ceremony gave me. The following two ceremonies were a blissful reinstatement that that particular childhood memory, and all of its long-fermenting residue within my body, was gone. I felt -and still feel- love. I know, it’s cliche. But cliches are cliches for a reason and all that. I feel love for myself, I feel love for others, I feel appreciative of life (all of it) and, really quite cute: I know to my depths that I’m going to fall deeply in love soon. Yet I feel in no rush and I have no idea who it will be with. Isn’t that interesting?

Right now, I’m more in love with yoga than ever because I have been shown (personally; kinda brutally) the terrible potency of trauma held in our bodies, and so I cannot herald highly enough the things that help us discover and release it.