Earthlings' Blog

As I followed my feet up the trail into the night, shadows closing in on me from either side, I began to feel the fear growing inside me. What strange and unknown things could be peering out at me from the shadows? Though I felt scared, I found that inside of me there was an even greater force: a deep curiosity and longing even to meet the source of my fear that I had so long been running away from.

When I went to Chengdu, my hometown in the Sichuan Basin below the Tibetan Plateau in China, the most grounding thing I did was the most spiritual thing: I prayed with three incenses, then another three for my mother and another three for my grandmother.

The following summary of a participant's experience at our recent March 2024 Self Contact Retreat was shared with us to share with anyone who might be interested in participanting in a future retreat.

Our sense of who we are begins to become challenged. I often experience this as layers of my identity being pulled away. Those layers are all the things that we confuse ourselves into thinking that we cannot exist without–the stories we have about ourselves, the pain we carry, our beliefs–and in that few seconds, all that is peeled away like the layers of an onion.

In our line of work there’s often a lot of talk about surrender: that the right way to approach medicine work is to fully let go of our desire to control our circumstances and soften ourselves to receive whatever the medicine wants to give us, but it has struck me that in all this emphasis on surrender, that there’s something important missing.

Nature has a quiet way of reassuring us of the cycle of life. The first rain after weeks of sunshine sighed release–the first water that stopped holding on as clouds, quenching the soil and washing everything it touches.

A trip report by one of the participants at the 5-MeO-DMT facilitator training Sagan and Helena organized from April 1st - 3rd, 2022. He talks about the set and setting of the training and then goes into his own personal insights from a handshake dose.