Going In
I remember the first time I was to sit in ceremony with aya in 2014. My mentor said:
remember, whatever happens, you’ve got your home base. You sit tall and you go with it, let her take you. Do not resist.
I went in thinking this is all I needed, good posture, breath, and mudras.
I sat in the rainforest in my home island and let her take me on a ride. Fck the postures, she took me into the trees, deep under earth until it turned to water and then she spit me back out into the cosmos and brought me back.
To my surprise it was all very familiar; there was a deep remembrance, recognition, and reverence for it all. I plugged into this deep well inside me and experienced an inherent comfort and understanding of the darkest, grimiest, gnarliest worlds, the unknown, the dead, everything that is underneath and surrounds death, the mystery, the void. I could feel, sense, know, and offer up my experiences not as individual sorrows, griefs, and violations, rather just another flavor in this human experience. I stopped fearing death. I stopped fearing being alone, being seen, not being seen. I started sensing more readily into my intuition as my main compass for moving in this world. So many parts of me died that night and the years that followed.
Like a snake shedding her skin.
I fell in love with the darkness that fertilizes my writing and was led to back off from aya and live the integration for the last 9 years.
She has recently called me back to sit with her; right before the rug was pulled out from underneath me. A part of me senses this is all her, having me purge all I thought was mine to live with. I sense another volume of dissolution is beginning anew. A time to embody the experience of what it means to die before we die.
I am empty and full, heartbroken and aligned, alone and so held. I am going in