Meet Me in the Mushroom – Julian Vayne episode 4

Meet Me in the Mushroom – Julian Vayne episode 4

Cathy: I’m encountering more and more with this in particular because I work specifically with women and the women that are approaching me are almost searching for a foundation upon which to grow their psychedelic exploration or their entheogenic exploration that allows them to tap back into this type of landscape. And you mentioned in the book getting higher about the nature vigil, or you could use the word vision quest, and it’s something that I found very powerful in my own development and practice in terms of bringing in Gnosis around what makes sense to me about how I interact with the medicine and how I interact with the spirits that I work with. And so I’d love to hear a little bit about the quest and vigil.

Julian: So I have a good friend who’s called Lavanya Morgan, and she’s just reissued a book called a witches mirror. It’s got all kinds of things that help like the act of making things as part of its kind of magical process of actually constructing various objects or challenging materials in the landscape. And so she talks a lot about the sitting hours process of going to a place and just being with it for a long time. Nothing beyond that, nothing else, no other special kind of process. Just go and spend a lot of time in the place she talks about going to the ocean, don’t see the city with the sea for at least the incoming and the outgoing and just being with it. And obviously, in our culture, we sort of think Well, that’s depth, that’s not really anything, is it just simply the thing really. Beyond that, surely there’s something more.

Spend quality time with that place. Just in the same way you spend quality time with the feeling of the medicine. Spend quality time with whatever.

Cathy: Yeah, I love it. I love that reflection on it. And I often say myself that when I’m working with women and my teachers a lot of my own practice involves traveling to spend time with oak for five, six days in the forest and just sitting and I often tell people that witchcraft from that instance is the art of the subtle.

 

Cathy: I’m encountering more and more with this in particular because I work specifically with women and the women that are approaching me are almost searching for a foundation upon which to grow their psychedelic exploration or their entheogenic exploration that allows them to tap back into this type of landscape. And you mentioned in the book getting higher about the nature vigil, or you could use the word vision quest, and it’s something that I found very powerful in my own development and practice in terms of bringing in Gnosis around what makes sense to me about how I interact with the medicine and how I interact with the spirits that I work with. And so I’d love to hear a little bit about the quest and vigil.

Julian: So I have a good friend who’s called Lavanya Morgan, and she’s just reissued a book called a witches mirror. It’s got all kinds of things that help like the act of making things as part of its kind of magical process of actually constructing various objects or challenging materials in the landscape. And so she talks a lot about the sitting hours process of going to a place and just being with it for a long time. Nothing beyond that, nothing else, no other special kind of process. Just go and spend a lot of time in the place she talks about going to the ocean, don’t see the city with the sea for at least the incoming and the outgoing and just being with it. And obviously, in our culture, we sort of think Well, that’s depth, that’s not really anything, is it just simply the thing really. Beyond that, surely there’s something more.

Spend quality time with that place. Just in the same way you spend quality time with the feeling of the medicine. Spend quality time with whatever.

Cathy: Yeah, I love it. I love that reflection on it. And I often say myself that when I’m working with women and my teachers a lot of my own practice involves traveling to spend time with oak for five, six days in the forest and just sitting and I often tell people that witchcraft from that instance is the art of the subtle.

 

Meet Me in the Mushroom – Anne Dutton episode 3

Meet Me in the Mushroom – Anne Dutton episode 3

Anne: In the Zen tradition, you write these poems right before you die, they’re called your death poem and it’s a reflection of the deepest truth that you know, that you want to impart on your deathbed. And he wrote a poem that’s in very colloquial language. It’s kind of rough colloquial language and it’s addressed to young people and he says, “hey youngsters, hey young people, are you really disturbed by the thought of your death? Well, my advice to you is just die now, and then you’ll never have to die again.” Something like that. It’s really similar to the epigraph on St. Paul’s monastery. So I think that’s it, that’s it right there, whether you’re using psychedelics or whether you’re meditating, you know, it’s the surrender. What do you think? Cathy: I’m in complete agreeance with you, it’s the level of surrender. And I think with time with all of these processes, it also is cultivating a deep sense of trust. It’s almost like you trust completely in the divine plan in whatever it is, that’s about to come that you trust completely within the process. And the more you surrender into things, in every level from the somatic to the mental plane, to the spiritual plane, it is the golden key, I guess for moving into better, more alignment and deeper sense of wholeness and connection and all of those beautiful things that wait on the other side of very difficult experiences. Even, you know, we speak about the silent meditation retreats like a vipassana, having to sit and surrender into that posturing for so many days and you go through delayerings of death and, you know, these concepts that make you more resilient, make you stronger, bring you greater control of your mind and of your spirit. And I think that’s the thing with the psychedelic experience. It’s the letting go. And for me, with my first psychedelic experience, I remembered that was one of the most challenging things. BecauseI I’d never had to let go to that degree and that’s where the resistance and the body and the tension and the mind and the racing… And once you find that blissful, like “ha” then everything just shifts. Yeah. So I’m in complete agreeance with you there.