In the medicine

🌿 toes sliding on slippery creek rocks

🌿 morning mist rising, no hurry

🌿 sweaty skin touching sweaty skin

🌿 lake breeze on my breasts

🌿 a velvety rattlesnake in her death throes, lifted from the pavement by my hands

🌿 night swimming to a sacred "island"

🌿 the burning behind my ears from breath after breath of gleeful laughter

🌿 the sound of the drums in my chest

🌿 my bare feet pounding the well worn circle around the fire

🌿 the crackle pop hiss of its morphing heat

🌿 the clarity of total pleasure - from pussy to heart to mind

🌿 my body telling me exactly what to think and feel, with no question

This week is my seventh week of being "in the medicine" of Eros, embodiment, summer love, ritual and connection. I have gone from one event, encounter, ritual retreat and/or gathering to another. My heart is so full of gratitude and that precious sense of sensual, erotic abundance. This has been a pleasure sadhana (spiritual practice) of sorts. During this time, I've also danced with heart ache, grief and rich awkwardness.

What are the messages that have come through this sadhana?

🌱 A new clarity, a new level of unapologetic permission to listen to my body. To lean into her as an oracle, the way to access my intuitive knowing. Also, the more I communicate what is happening in my body to a partner, the more richness and intimacy I bring into my life.

🌱 It's OK to choose joy.

🌱 It's OK to choose bliss, pleasure, peace, connection, family and belonging. Yes, the grief and the heart ache and the struggle - they are all there. Right along with the bliss and ecstasy.

🌱 This "epic" adventure - of one delicious experience after another - this can be my "normal" experience. This doesn't have to be an aberration.

🌱 While plant medicine is not my chosen portal for practice, this post wouldn't feel complete without mentioning that over the past few years, I also have become a big fan of the strategic and ritual use of MDMA.

Fun fact - about two-thirds of people who received three sessions of MDMA and talk therapy no longer qualified for a PTSD diagnosis at the end of two Phase 3 clinical trials.

I have twice used very light doses of this magical molecule this summer, with a lot of intention and care. This medicine gives potent inspiration to choose joy, love, connection, vulnerability and authenticity.

You can choose more ease and joy in your life, too.

You can let go of the conversations, connections and experiences that are not nourishing you and instead choose to focus on the ones that are. It can be a journey, one step at a time, to move towards the life that you really want.

Here's one of my favorite images from Starwood Festival - a serendipitous coven of goddesses with whom I had the blessing of camping and adventuring.