Porangui is one of my favorite ceremonial music artists. His music truly is medicine and his was a medicine I needed after hitting the most intense period of burnout in my life. His retreat in Utah was aptly titled “Music is Medicine” and involved a lot of deep healing work with song circles and sacred ceremony on the land.
One such ceremony was guided by a leather-skinned burly man in a poncho that dropped us off in the desert from his truck to commune with the earth. He says was never that far away and as an expert tracker, he assured us that we wouldn’t die out there. Needless to say, my directional skills with marked city streets is mediocre at best so I was not convinced that this excursion wouldn’t be the end of me, but surrender is the name of my game, so there I was.
How I ended up sitting in the dirt in the middle of a desert in Utah talking to a plant that would later become my co-actor in a performance that afternoon is a bit of a long story and in the end, there was no place I would rather be.
The pathway to burnout
I’ve always run anxious and when my plate got too full and overwhelm hit, NOTHING seemed to help me find my center. Yoga, meditation, eating healthy. All good things and at the end of the day when my system was in overload, those things just couldn’t do the trick.
The words “self-care” still makes me cringe a bit. It always felt like a buzz word that meant “add more shit to your plate so you that you can be Zenned out while doing all the other crazy shit that is on your plate…..” and if you don’t practice self-care, then shame on you for not prioritizing your own needs as you watch your meticulously constructed day to day reality fall apart.
Of course this isn’t really the case, but for someone who is perfectionistic, self-sacrificing, and running up the never good enough mountain of accomplishments, asking me to practice more “self-care” was like asking me to sell all my belongings and take up the banjo on a beach in Bali.
But Burnout is No Joke
It’s not just an experience of being tired, overworked, or just plain fed up with your job or your daily grind. It’s an actual physiological state where your brain and body have been using up all of their resources by over-exerting themselves without appropriate amounts of recovery time for an unsustainable period of time. It’s like being in a perpetual state of low-level fight or flight, also known as sympathetic nervous system activation, until you basically just short circuit.
I’ve worked with clients who were highly intelligent straight-A, straight-laced, engineer students that end up in a state of fogginess, extreme exhaustion, and the inability to perform even basic functions like feeding themselves.
Some people push through this by self-medicating, hitting the caffeine on a regular basis or maybe even turning to drugs or alcohol to both stimulate their brains when they need it or knock them out so their system can “rest” after a long day. It’s not actually restful when your body recovers this way and I don’t blame anyone for using this method when any kind of sleep is better than the slow hell of being awake all night staring at the ceiling with your anxious thoughts.
And Rock Bottom is more like a slow death in toxic quick sand
During the worst part of my own burnout as a post-graduate professional, I was an epic disaster. A necessary part of my path I’m sure, but nonetheless one of the worst experiences of my life, not unlike my college years spent roaming the streets of Boston strungout as a semi-functional, above-average student with a belief that I wouldn’t make it past 30 years old.
Most of my “unhealthy” ways of coping had been kept under control up until this time, but now things were spiraling into a dark abyss of distraction through dating apps, alcohol, and mind-bending journeys on substances disguised as doing the deep inner work.
Eventually Enough was Enough and it became clear that I could no longer do my job. How was I supposed to help anyone when my inner landscape was quickly becoming a wasteland of hungry ghosts and toxic slime.
Where the only hope was salvation from a rope, also known as a Caapi Vine
Once I slowly shut down my practice, I found myself spinning in the land of Tinder and Hinge for some time, attempting to focus on my relational reality as a way of avoiding the inner void that I was no longer filling with work. This only worked for so long before one final chip at my heart broke me to a point of catapulting myself to Mexico for a week long immersion with a life coach followed by my first Ayahuascha ceremony in the jungle by Tulum. Thus began my journey with sacred plant medicine that would continue for the next couple of years, sprinkled between Tantra immersions, Porangui, and Joe Dispenza retreats.
I would probably have to write a whole book to impart the lessons from these excursions and the abbreviated version will not do justice to the wisdom that I have harnessed, and it’s worth a glimpse into anyways.
I attended my first medicine retreat for heart-centered entrepreneurs with a prayer to be freed from my childhood wounds and my quickly expanding substance collection that supported my escapism strategies. I took up the plant medicine Dieta for 30 days, set my intentions and worked on my pre-journey guide, writing pages that took up an entire journal and as if 1 intention wasn’t enough, I had my ass handed to me with 11. Following a really difficult integration and the awareness of how my coping strategies were simply just avoidance strategies of facing deeper trauma from childhood, I quit alcohol and began re-examining my relationship to all substances and to myself.
When we are out of alignment with ourselves, we start to become out of alignment with everything else around us. This includes the people we attract into our lives, the work that we do, and the situations we encounter. This is how we end up on the hard track of life.
But life doesn’t have to be that hard and sometimes it includes Sex Magic.
ISTA or the International School of Temple Arts was my next stop on the healing path. I dropped into a whole new world of Tantra and sacred sexuality, all held within a community of Mormons in Utah. It seemed like a bit of a contradiction and yet all of these people were there for the same reason as me. Healing from trauma, embracing their own power, and harnessing it through the beauty and magic of sexuality.
This was a place to reclaim your innocence and be freed from the societal conditioning of shame and suffering created from an unhealthy relationship with our sexual power and expression, often brought on through religion and perpetuated through trauma, both individual and collective.
My deepest longing was to be fully embodied in all of my human experience and sexuality. At the time, this felt like the most powerful container for this to be practiced and for some it was exactly the wisdom needed to move beyond their internal blocks and connect to the parts of them banished by an unwell world.
For me, I later came to understand that this container too, as wise as it was, required me to override certain parts of myself that were not yet ready to be exposed in such a revealing way. This further condemned my tender parts that needed more love and support to be witnessed. I was once again trading the parts of me that said No for promised potentials and Yeses that come with hangovers. Not the kind from alcohol.
It would be later on that I learned mastery of boundaries and self-honor in a different sexual healing container that is a story for another time. At the Verdant Collective, I learned about the Well One within all of us, thus birthing my new psychotherapy practice where I help people to access this always present and always well truth of their existence. That is where the real magic lies.
And everything is a medicine or a poison depending on how you use it.
And so this brings me back around to the beginning of this post, where I found myself sitting in a circle on the floor in an opening ceremony for his Music is Medicine retreat. As he passed around some sacred tobacco where we could blow our intentions out in the smoke, I held mine close. My only prayer was to be in Right Relationship to all substances, ironically through smoking a tobacco pipe. While I was unable to find my voice to share this intention in the opening ciricle, at that point I still carried too much shame… I was able to reveal this truth during a closing circle later in the week.
That same evening Porgangui addressed this shared intention from so many that came with heavy hearts from years of troubled relationships with theirselves and with substances. We came to heal through Music, sacred song circles, and deep connection from being witnessed in our darkness so that it could be transmuted by the light.
Porangui spoke of the plight of the natives and how Alcohol is used to keep people chained. He then went on to say that “even alcohol is medicine.” He had not used it in 7 years due to his vows to the Red Road and yet he held respect for both Alcohol and the people who related to it, in healthy or unhealthy ways. He explained that it is not useful to demonize a substance. The substance in itself has both its wisdom, and when not used with respect, can be harmful, addictive, and disempowering. It is our work to free ourselves from those dynamics, but not shame or reject the people or parts of ourselves that are out of aligned relationship with what can be sacred.
This is a wisdom that I bring into my work with others. It is not mine to know what Right Relationship with yourself and with substances means to you. That is your truth and your truth alone. I can only guide you to find that truth and then support you in honoring it.
For some that may look like total abstinence and for others that may look more like conscious choice to use certain substances from a place of intention rather than impulse. Together we can figure that out.
The Deeper path to healing is usually a slow one. And it’s ok to take your time, because Slow is Fast and Fast is Slow.
This is the golden thread that has tied all of my experiences together. This is the wisdom that has held true no matter what container I drop into. It is the mindful way. And while some may benefit from diving into big experiences and trials by fire out of desperation to break free from deep wounds they have carried for years, I have come to know that my sensitive nervous system does best when I take the time to truly listen to it. From there, I can have the big experiences with more presence and possibility for deeper healing and growth.
This is where my wisdom and mastery comes in as a healer. I create the space for us to take the time with our tender and often abandoned parts. When you don’t miss a thing, you may just come to understand that all the wisdom we need is already inside of us.
And so I leave you with two questions gifted to me by a wise medicine woman on my path
1. What is it that you are using to bring you comfort? It may be something more obvious like drugs or alcohol. It may be something more subtle like a hot chocolate at night or Netflix show.
2. What is it in you that needs comforting? The answer to that is your true medicine.
With Love always,
Genesa