Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: You are not broken.
Your true essence is something that's sacred, and part of my job as a guide is to help you remember that.
[00:01:04] Speaker B: Welcome to supernormalize, the podcast, where we challenge the conventional break boundaries and normalize the seemingly supernatural. Join me, CJ, as we explore less uncharted realms of existence and unravel the mysteries of life. Experience my treasured listeners, if you have a life story or healing modality or unique knowledge that you'd love to share, reach out to me at supernormalized that supernormalized with a z at Proton me. Let's together embrace acceptance of the supernatural and unusual as what it really is. Completely normal. Are you ready to break free from old habits and embark on a journey of true transformation? Today you'll meet on supernormalized Michael, the approach coach and ceremonialist, guiding individuals to help to heal deep wounds and embrace lasting change. This discussion with Michael was a wonderful, meandering, organic discussion which covers his process and his use of psychedelics and other medicines and means to assist everyone with their way to find their purposeful path in life. A great conversation was had and I'm sure you'll enjoy it. So, on with the show.
Welcome to supernormalized Michael Peterson. Michael, your approach to Woollife is that you're a bit of a transformational guide and a ceremonialist focused on helping people in the path of self discovery to transform outdated ways of being.
You do that through many different ways, but then something must have occurred in your life to actually push you along this sort of path. Do you want to talk about who you are and how that all happened?
[00:02:47] Speaker A: Sure. Thanks for having me on, CJ.
I would say that the core launching point for my path of self discovery was my father's suicide. I was 14 years old, going through this time of transformation that we all go through as we enter puberty. And as a male bodied person in a very uninitiated society, in some ways I was actually blessed through that because it forced me to ask the questions of what does it mean to be a man? How do I want to be in the world? What is the purpose of all of this? Because I was going through confirmation at the church at the same time that my father committed suicide. And so I started exploring questions of fundamental purpose and meaning in life at a relatively early age. And that trajectory eventually led me to the place that I'm at now, which is having gone on that journey healed my wounding from that, at least to the best of my ability.
How can we take the lessons that we've learned in our lives and then share them with others and how can we lift each other up has been a consistent inquiry for me.
[00:04:16] Speaker B: Yeah, that would have been rough, especially when you're going through puberty. I'm like, wow. Got that actually piled on top of it. That would have been very challenging to do. So. So it made you actually question everything about reality and your place in it and how you viewed the world.
[00:04:35] Speaker A: Yeah. And there was nobody telling me what any solution was at that point in time, at least not directly. I had a lot of societal information coming at me about go get the job that's going to earn the most money and earn the most status, and that is the meaning of life. And something in that wanted to make me curl up into a ball and press the escape button on life.
And I don't know if any of your listeners are familiar with human design or gene keys, but I'm a reflector in human design terms. And so it means that my system is very open to that conditioning and feels that pressure and the stress of what other people want really, really well, because I'm here to reflect back what's happening.
And in a society that doesn't speak towards individuation and unique expression and blossoming into your full potential, what I have to reflect back isn't always fun. And so.
[00:05:48] Speaker B: So you're, like, exposing reality for people around you?
[00:05:52] Speaker A: Yeah, a little bit.
And it means to offer the best reflection. I had to do my own work and look at, okay, what are all the stories that I'm holding onto?
What does it mean for me to be authentic in my own expression and approach? And that taught me about the fundamentals of holding ceremonial space, letting go of patterns, myths, energies that are beyond just the mental stories that we have about things, so that transformation can actually occur.
[00:06:25] Speaker B: It sounds like you actually embrace sort of like a sense of mindfulness of all of your life practice.
[00:06:34] Speaker A: I can agree with that. Yeah. There's this.
This question for me is, what does it mean to be mindful?
And I think that I could put it in the following terms, which is, there's a fundamental choice that we have to make in life, and it is, are we going to be engaged with life or not?
And as soon as we choose that we are going to be engaged with life, then the question becomes, how do I want to be engaged?
And that requires skillfully working with life and being mindful of the fact that we are making a choice in terms of our engagement.
And so as long as we're consciously making a choice to be here and engaged in life, then we have to be mindful and we have to play. But it doesn't have to be this repressive. You must be mindful of all of your actions.
It's far more playful. It's like, okay, I'm choosing to be here so I can choose to play. How do I want to play?
[00:07:46] Speaker B: Yeah. It's like instead of saying mindfully, you could even say, how about you just be more considerate of your actions and their impact?
Yeah.
[00:07:56] Speaker A: For yourself and others?
[00:07:57] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely.
So what techniques or methods did you discover for yourself at that young age to actually help you through all of your self awareness that was coming to you?
[00:08:12] Speaker A: Well, at the onset of my young age, I discovered all of the different ways that I could block things out, numb out, and avoid what I was feeling.
And so one of the ways that I did that was through exploring existential philosophy and trying to come up with a mental framework for how everything worked together.
Another avenue was, I smoked a ton of pot.
[00:08:43] Speaker B: I can relate to that. I did the same thing.
Rice myself.
[00:08:49] Speaker A: Yeah, well, and cannabis is a plant medicine. It's just that the way that it works for me feels like it's far more along a horizontal axis. And so it can give us space from something, to see it from a different angle, to not have to be so immersed in the feeling of it that then we can eventually go back into that feeling and work with it skillfully. But over time, for myself, I refuse to go back into the feeling.
And so it just kept on pushing me further and further and further away from myself.
So after taking that approach and getting through graduate school with a very numbed out system, I was looking around and I wasn't thrilled about the prospects ahead of me. It was a great, well paying job with minimal life satisfaction. And I knew that I needed to really just take care of my body. And so I did a yoga teacher training. I studied natural building and permaculture. But then I also found ayahuasca. And I had worked with psychedelics beforehand.
Granted, not in a ceremonial context, but I had had deep experiences with them and I knew that I wanted to explore that further. And once I met ayahuasca, my path changed quite drastically. And so I studied mestizo ayahuasca shamanism. I'm a mesa holder for a specific lineage of paleros, which are people who work with trees and also found energy work and working with the energetic body in different subtle ways to. To help navigate through those really sticky components where even ayahuasca or some of the diettas don't get into because there's still an affinity for whatever the pattern is. And so the combination of plant, medicine, energy, work, and then more contemplative practices like working with the gene keys, human design and physical practices like yoga, qigong, and other things have kind of coalesced together in terms of how I approach my daily life.
[00:11:31] Speaker B: Okay, so you've built a character for yourself around your understanding with psychedelic use, but conscious psychedelic use, which is probably the best path of all when it comes to using those methods and those means.
What did you. You were talking a bit before about the trees. Is that a part of tobacco shamanism?
[00:11:59] Speaker A: So, tobacco and tobacco have a very intense training process.
And so tobacco in most cultures is. Most cultures have one or two master plants, and tobacco is one of them in almost all cultures that I'm aware of.
And there are tobaccheros who, and ayahuasca. The process of the training is not ayahuasca. Ayahuasca. Ayahuasca. It is Dietta. Dietta. Dietta. And that dietta process is when you work with a tree or a plant and you're drinking a tea that's made out of it to clean out the energetic body.
And it's kind of like a glacier going through and scraping the lichen off of the rocks of your energetic body, and you're forming a relationship with that tree to be a plant ally as well. And it helps in being of service to others if you are on the path to serve the medicine, too.
[00:13:10] Speaker B: So it sounds like what you're doing using this method is resetting your own personal compass.
[00:13:19] Speaker A: Absolutely. And fine tuning it over time.
My understanding of this work is that generally we start out on a path to heal ourselves, and then through time, it turns into being of service to others. And that requires having a compass that's attuned to a very specific frequency.
[00:13:44] Speaker B: How long have you been doing this sort of work now? And what benefits have you seen in yourself and others?
[00:13:52] Speaker A: So I started working with ayahuasca in 2018, and really, once I started working with ayahuasca as a plant medicine, I jumped into the study portion. And so from 2018 until now, I've done 30 plus diettas and have probably averaged about one ceremony a week, if I put it all together.
So it was a very intense training, and I know there are people who are also still in the midst of that deep training process.
The changes that I've noted within myself is really just being more embodied, being more comfortable in my authentic self expression and having a greater sense of peace.
And I would say that the same thing is what I see in others as well.
[00:15:01] Speaker B: Well, I can hear that piece in your voice and you sound like a very calm person, which is nice.
[00:15:08] Speaker A: Most of the time.
[00:15:09] Speaker B: Most of the time.
[00:15:11] Speaker A: I mean, I think there's a misconception around plant medicine and we're in an era of plant medicine work where the therapeutic side of it is being explored and it's really beautiful.
But if people think that plant medicine is going to be the silver bullet that cures all of their problems, yes, they're. They're wrong.
[00:15:41] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:15:43] Speaker A: It can give you awareness. It can clear things out. But then you have to actually do the work that comes after ceremony and put those lessons into practice. Continuing to study, continuing to do whatever spiritual practice you have.
Be that. Just walking barefoot on the earth and recognizing that you are part of something greater than you through nature or whether that's through meditation, yoga, some way of being present. Because if you're using ayahuasca, that's just a way of blasting off or any psychedelic. Just blasting off and getting these lovely, spacious, you know, light shows as we call them. Yeah, the light show's great. Yeah, the light show is great, but it's not the point of the work.
[00:16:36] Speaker B: That's it.
Yeah, that's it exactly. And I'm glad you went there because I was going to ask you about that and say, what do you recommend for people that aren't drawn to the psychedelic path? Because, I mean, there's obviously different ways to do that. And you already mentioned walking in forests and reconnecting with nature. Are there other ways that people can find their way into resetting their own personal compass without having to dive into the psychedelic realm?
[00:17:05] Speaker A: Yeah. So I think there's this, I think it's a Jack Kornfield quote where he said there's as many different forms of meditation as there are human beings on the earth.
[00:17:17] Speaker B: Yeah, that's right.
[00:17:18] Speaker A: And so there's as many different forms of spiritual practice as there are human beings on the earth.
And the way that I've broken it down is that is somewhat systematic.
So the point of doing all of this in my mind is so that we can be real.
I'm not interested in the escapist, let's transcend everything and escape the human process. I just want to be real.
[00:17:49] Speaker B: And I'm guilty of trying that in the past.
[00:17:54] Speaker A: As am I, for what it's worth.
And sometimes I still am. I think there's a nice drive there.
[00:18:00] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:18:00] Speaker A: But, you know, for me, real means that I'm relaxed, engaged, authentic and loving.
And when I have a somatic experience where I'm holding that together, that is my touch point, that is my compass, and that is a way to navigate.
And then if I'm doing that, hopefully I'm living in flow, which means that I'm feeling, I'm listening, I'm opening to the world, and I'm in a state of wonder.
That's my objective through all these practices. And so whenever I'm working with somebody who's looking for a practice, the practice needs to be something that's going to help them be mindful. It needs to be adaptable to whatever their situation is.
It needs to be gentle. And gentle doesn't. Gentle is variable. You know, if you're in a Ferrari going 200, you slam on the e brake. It's not gentle, you know, so this is something that gentleness is a practice over time, you need to find a practice that inspires you and that connects you to something more.
And so that's what I call practicing magic. Mindfulness, adaptability, gentleness, inspiration, connection.
And that can be anything. It can be yoga, it can be qigong, it can be contact improv, or rolling around on the floor, spending time in nature. It can be a lot of the strange esoteric paths that are out there. But anything that's going to help connect you with your authentic self and make you ask that question of who am I? And then start stepping into that bit by bit by bit as that answer continues to unfold, has validity as a practice.
And so I'd rather people do literally anything than nothing.
So my encouragement to people would just be find the simplest next step to take, whether that is, you sit down for 5 seconds and you breathe, you do one push up, you look at your finger and you say, I'm going to concentrate on my finger for as long as I can.
Something to help train the mind, train the body, and train the spirit to be present.
[00:20:37] Speaker B: It sounds like ultimately what you're saying there is the first step is to breaking the pattern that is not serving you.
[00:20:46] Speaker A: The first step is awareness of the pattern.
[00:20:48] Speaker B: Awareness of the pattern. Okay, yeah.
[00:20:51] Speaker A: Or at least awareness of the effects. You know, if in the energy work that I do, we're very good at identifying patterns, which we call imprints in our energetic body, you know, and it's great when we can have this full story around them, but what I can't do for people is remove something that, or help, help it move through rather that you either don't want to release at a deep level or that you're not aware of, and you don't have to be aware of every aspect of it about it, but you have to be aware that you are not happy. You have to be aware of how that's making you feel.
Ayahuasca psychedelics are slightly different in that regard because sometimes ayahuasca comes in and says, look, you don't need to know anything about this. I'm going to be clearing it out in the background, and it is a major gift when that happens.
But sometimes for a lot of the deeper lessons, we need to be conscious of what we're learning so that we don't forget it.
You know, if you don't have that pain of stubbing your toe or of touching the stove that's hot, you're probably going to do it again.
And so we're all guilty of that. We do things that aren't good for ourselves over and over and over again. There's some benefit that it gives us. Yeah, you know, I love overeating sugar sometimes. Um, but I'm aware of when I'm doing it, and I can work consciously with that to take the right step in terms of navigating, because sometimes it's great to have the cookie and celebrate and eat the damn cookie.
Other times have the self restraint to say, no, I don't need to have the cookie right now. And so you have to be aware that you are engaging in that self dialogue to start acting skillfully and start letting go of the patterns.
[00:23:12] Speaker B: Yeah, for sure, for sure. The. The awareness is definitely key.
So what unique blends of practices do you offer to support your clients on their path to healing and personal evolution? I see that you actually like to call it a purposeful path.
When you start engaging with people, do you actually help people find their life purpose? Is that some sort of thing we should describe here?
[00:23:39] Speaker A: I'm happy to.
I would say that I do help people find their purpose, and I don't ascribe purpose to a state of doing. So if people think that they need to be doing something to achieve their life purpose, we can explore that, and we often do. My question to people is, how do you want to be?
And once we have established that point of how do you want to be, what's going on in your life and how is it contributing to how you want to be, then? If it's working with me and I find myself to be the right support, I'll let you know. And if it's not working with me. After the end of the purposeful path call, my hope is that you're still walking away with an idea of the next step on that path, whether it's a practice or a different practitioner or an avenue to go down. So there's still this mini breakthrough if people decide to work with me.
What I put forth is a creative ceremonial container that takes place over time, that mixes traditional coaching with ceremony and energy work.
And if people are interested in systems like the gene keys and human design, we can pull that in, but it's not necessary.
We start with that question of how do you want to be, which becomes the compass, and we get really, really clear on that.
And once you have that compass in place, when you're walking around your everyday life, which I call the terrain, you're going to notice your patterns because you know where you're going.
And so you can see where you start coming off of that path, or you can see the obstacles that you run into.
I provide coaching and guidance around identifying those, and then once they're identified, we take that pattern into what I call the vessel. And that's where we do shamanic energy work to clear out the imprint or the pattern, any and all energy associated with it. And then the big thing is any affinity that somebody might have for it.
And once that pattern is cleared and then filled with pure, pure, pure divine light within their luminous energy fields, it's kind of like having fresh snow on top of a mountain.
There's no pre existing tracks. At that point in time. You can take a new avenue in your life and you can say, oh, I used to go that way, but now it's not this unconscious behavior.
There can be a choice and something new opens up.
And what people find as they start taking the new path is the treasure.
And that varies for every single person, but it's the tools and the skill sets and the way of being that supports kind of their soul's calling in terms of how it wants to be and show up in this world.
[00:27:15] Speaker B: What core beliefs drive your work when it comes to transformational guidance and your work as a ceremonialist?
[00:27:30] Speaker A: I like that question.
One of those core beliefs is that you are not broken.
Your true essence is something that's sacred.
And part of my job as a guide is to help you remember that.
Another core belief is that I am not the one doing the healing.
Theres energies and archetypes that I work with and helpful spirits that definitely do a lot of the work in terms of clearing dense energy and helping it break down.
And I believe that the body is naturally self healing.
And so when we get rid of the density in our field, the body can do what it does naturally, which is heal.
And the third core belief that I have that drives me is that it is imperative for everybody to blossom.
All of the challenges that we see in the world that we want to talk about as these big societal issues, unless we can start at the smallest place, which really is the empowered individual.
If you don't have an empowered individual, you can't have empowered partnerships. If you don't have empowered partnerships, you can't have empowered teams. If you don't have empowered teams, you don't have empowered communities. If you don't have empowered communities, you don't have empowered societies. And if you don't have empowered society, then the system is inherently flawed.
And so we have to go down into the depths of ourselves and remember that we're sacred and give ourselves permission to blossom into who we are really meant to be at a divine level.
And that's not going to look like what anybody else is telling you it should be.
And that's probably my final tenant as a coach, is I am not here to tell you how to be or what to do.
I will reflect, I will challenge, I will poke and I will prod, and I will kind of lovingly sting sometimes.
But the intention of that is so that your own unique wisdom can start bubbling up to the surface and then you can start embodying that, so that you have a compass that you can use going forwards, and then that starts radiating out and everybody who you encounter starts feeling that and becoming motivated by that, and the world heals through that process.
[00:30:49] Speaker B: It sounds like you have, or maybe I even say that stepping back from yourself, there's a bigger agenda that's actually coming along through you and into the world around you, into the people around you, is to actually heal the world.
[00:31:10] Speaker A: Yes. And that makes me feel slightly egotistical as I say that.
[00:31:14] Speaker B: Oh, no, no, I don't mean it that way. I mean, it's.
[00:31:17] Speaker A: No, I'm just noting it within myself. It's like, hey everybody, we're healing the world.
[00:31:22] Speaker B: But no, it's a co creation.
[00:31:25] Speaker A: It is. And one of my, in the system that is known as the gene keys, one of my life's work missions is to cut through this shadow of codependence.
And at the it means that we do have to individuate.
Can I be independent? But the joke within that is that if me being independent means me telling people, you can't do that and you can't do that and you can't do that so that I can be me.
That's still just co dependence with a lot of projection on what other people should be doing.
And the essence of this reality is that in my experience, is if we are all aspects of the divine, all the aspects of the divine, of the mystery are co creating together.
And so it is interdependent. And within that interdependence, it is imperative for the individual to free themselves from the shadow of codependence, but not just for the selfish reasons.
It can start that way. Sure. Start with doing your own healing, because, dammit, you need to heal.
And then it's the hero's journey, and the hero goes down to the underworld and they go on their trek and they find some piece of wisdom or some treasure.
And the least talked about part of the hero's journey is the return.
It's like, great, you go, you find the treasure, and then you have to come back up and you have to share that treasure with your society in whatever way. And it doesn't mean you have to proselytize it, but you have to at least embody that wisdom so that it can radiate out through you.
And that is the process of integration.
I tell that to people when they work with plant medicine. I'm like, integration is a journey towards wholeness, but it is not just about a mental idea. It is embodying those lessons and embodying the fact that we are in consistent evolution and finding peace within the mystery that is us.
And that is extremely challenging because I think we all want stability.
It's like, I would love to know who I am so I can operate consistently every single day and you can find answers to that.
And you're still going to evolve, and you're still going to find new parts of yourself that are going to challenge who you have been and life will ask you to evolve. So how can we do that? Dance gracefully in a way that acknowledges the pain and the hurt and the challenge, but doesn't get stuck in the suffering of all that and allows it to transform us is something that I've spent a lot of time contemplating.
[00:34:59] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
You must go away and challenge yourself and grow. But don't forget about the return. Like you say, you don't want to be the dragon holding all the gold in the castle and not sharing it with the world.
[00:35:15] Speaker A: Yeah.
People in the ayahuasca land and in new age spirituality world, you know, there's so much talk about shadow work, and people forget that there's the golden shadow as well, and those positive aspects of yourself that are hidden away, that are hard to find and see.
And that's where I'm far more curious, because what would happen if you could find those parts of yourself that don't need to be healed, but that need to be embodied and expressed? And what would happen if we were all doing that?
That sounds like the type of world that I would love to live in.
[00:35:59] Speaker B: Yeah, sounds very encouraging. In fact, it would be a bit of a hook to grab hold of, and with that, pull yourself into a brighter experience of life.
[00:36:17] Speaker A: I was talking with somebody recently, and I just asked them the question. It's like if you can imagine yourself in a state where you felt completely relaxed, completely engaged with life, you allowed yourself to be authentically who you are, and you got to love every aspect of that. How would you feel?
And their response was that it felt like every cell in their body was dancing and rejoicing.
[00:36:52] Speaker B: Nice.
[00:36:55] Speaker A: And if we could all just rejoice a little bit more in ourselves, it would be lovely.
[00:37:06] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:37:06] Speaker A: You know, let's enjoy the garden.
Doesn't mean we shouldn't do the weeding, but also enjoy the flowers, too.
[00:37:15] Speaker B: That's celebrate. Yeah, for sure. For sure. We should live in a state of almost continuous ecstasy, even though we might occasionally fall into a pothole, but find a way to enjoy that pothole, too, you know?
[00:37:30] Speaker A: Yeah. And if the pothole really sucks, don't sit there bullshitting everybody. Just be like, yeah, this pothole sucks.
[00:37:39] Speaker B: That's it. Yeah.
[00:37:41] Speaker A: And it's like, yeah, it does. And then it moves through.
[00:37:45] Speaker B: Yeah, that's right.
[00:37:46] Speaker A: It's that we're like, oh, no, this. This pothole is my teacher. And thank you to the pothole for all the lessons that it is teaching me. And it's like, I mean, you're not wrong, but you're not right. You're not. Yeah, just say the pothole sucks. I can feel you hating it.
And then let's move on.
[00:38:08] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's got to be a sort of level of realism there. I mean, like you're saying, you know, the embracing the shadow, you can go too far and, you know, spend all your time hanging out with your shadow.
[00:38:19] Speaker A: Yeah. And then the pressure to be perfect all the time, you know, I love the name of your podcast super normalized because there's so many different ways that you can take it. And, you know, in ayahuasca, people are like, am I going to have a supernatural experience. And it's like, no, it's just a super normal experience.
But there's also this thing where we have to be perfect, we have to be great, we have to tear up all of our shadows because we're not worthy of something. It's like, or you're just normal.
And the human experience, if you're looking at it as a bell curve, there's nowhere on the bell curve that is the right place to be.
[00:39:11] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:39:13] Speaker A: So just be you and enjoy the full diversity of that.
But that takes time and takes energy, it takes work.
And so, yeah, there's no substitute for time, as much as I might want there to be sometimes.
[00:39:37] Speaker B: Well, I know in the past, for myself, working with different plant medicines, I was driven towards basically escapism in some ways, too.
But I didn't know that at the time. I thought, I'm an explorer, right? And I went along with that, and that was a good part of my personality and the story that I was playing in my own self. But I got to a certain end in it, and I did find that the spirits that were appearing, you know, for me inside those experiences, they pulled me up and they said, can you stop coming? Just stop coming here. And we, you know, you've. We can show. We've shown you all that. We can show you right now, so just go and have a human life. And that changed my whole view. And I was like, what? There's not more than this? No, no, there's nothing more we can show you right now. Just get out.
And that was a learning experience in itself. So you did mention before that you had helpful spirits that come along and help you as well with your work. What do you mean by that?
[00:40:38] Speaker A: So one of the ways that I mean that is that they're doing diet. As I formed relationship with tree spirits.
So you mentioned tobacco. I've dieted tobacco. Tobacco is an ally of mine, and I've gotten to know the spirit of tobacco, or the spirit of oak, or the spirit of aya uma or boban sana, these wonderful trees that are out there supporting us.
[00:41:09] Speaker B: I was going to say, don't mention the names of your trees that are sacred to your lineage.
[00:41:14] Speaker A: I mean, these are common trees, okay? And at the same time, you know, the lineage that I participated in and still participate in, it was a really interesting mix because it was mestizo shamanism, so it was a mix of indigenous traditions with the Spanish. And so there was this christian influence that came in with the Spanish. And then at some point in time, in this weird modern world that we come in, there were buddhist influences that came in, and hindu influences that came in, or kashmiri shaivist traditions, if Im being very specific.
And so these energies, whether were talking about Ganesh, Shiva, medicine, Buddha, Tara, Chinrezig, or on the more shamanistic side, like Azukan and Pachikuti and these big archetypes, or on the christian side, Jesus, Mary, but even the archangels and working with the seven sacred seals. And there's so many different ways, and even ayahuasca as a spirit, there's so many different ways to perceive them, whether you're crystallizing them as archetypal energies, whether you're saying that they are exactly this one thing. And ayahuasca is its own spirit. It's also the amplification effect that happens within you. You know, Ganesh is Ganesh. It's also the energy that helps you break through to that next level and helps you remove those obstacles that you can encounter within yourself.
And then once you're in ayahuasca DMT world, there's doctor sithos, or doctors that help do energetic surgery, and I don't know their backgrounds, or there's water spirits that come in and elementals. So that's a very long winded way of saying that we live in an animate world, and everything has a spirit, everything is relational, and there's a forgetting of that. And not just a forgetting, a repression of that. In a lot of current society.
And we talked about practices earlier, you can have a conversation with the water, you can have a conversation with the tree, and if you give yourself the time and the space to listen and the permission, thank you.
It will talk back.
And so, you know, when we're calling, when I'm calling in the directions, you know, and tuning into Mother Earth, you know, thank you to the stone people, the plant people, the two legged, the four legged, the creepy crawlies, the fur, the fin, the feathered, the scaled, the mycelial, all of our relationships I have. Part of my ancestry is irish. And so ive been gently exploring kind of the druidic path, although the authentic roots of that are still kind of lost. But there is a reconnection thats happening there into the fairy world.
There's all these different layers of perception that depending on who you are, depending on the trainings that you've done, but also just literally, we're all indigenous to the earth.
So the western culture is plagued by this fact that we come from a line of colonizers. Sure. And we also come from a line of resistance fighters. And there has been this diaspora, and we don't know how to connect.
And so exploring our roots, both ancestrally, but also locally. You know, if you grow up in speaking from the United States perspective, but if you grow up in Arizona, maybe you have a connection with juniper, because there's just so much juniper everywhere.
I had two oak trees growing in my front yard that I climbed on as a kid.
Throw in the irish druid stuff, and oak has a strong place in my life, but it doesn't even have to be these trees or the elements. Maybe you connect through music or an instrument that was in your ancestry, that the point is there's different ways to connect backwards and forwards. And in my philosophy approach of practicing magic or coming up with a practice that see as connection.
And so whether that's connecting to something greater through sitting there and talking to a tree or to the water, whether it's through prayer to the mystery or to God, or to spirit, or whether it is picking up an instrument and allowing that instrument to teach you how to play it, you know, drop the ego and allow yourself to be taught by something else. That that's a challenge for a lot of people, myself included. But.
[00:47:48] Speaker B: I've practiced, I think, with experience. What happens is we eventually start telling better stories about ourselves and ones that allow for a bigger expanse of belief in the world and how the world can inform us.
Michael, we're coming towards the end of the show, and I wanted to ask you, what would you recommend for people just as something that they could engage with to be able to find their way in the world? Just a little pro tip that you've discovered for yourself, that you've found with working with others, they're like, this is the main thing they need all the time.
What is that? What's this main select theme or narrative that will help people on a path?
[00:48:40] Speaker A: The main thing that I see that people need is permission to be themselves.
And what I've noticed is that people look for that permission externally.
And what I would put forth is that you need that internal compass of some sort. And I use the word compass, but you could also call it a home tree or a touch point, where when the world and your mind and the life is chaotic, there's some place inside, some feeling place inside that you can go and touch, that brings you back to you and that allows you to start to open.
I mean, I might get a little bit long winded here, so please forgive me, but the analogy that I use when I'm talking about this process of becoming is that I like to help people blossom.
And within that process of blossoming, the flower has already created its root system. It's grown through its stem or its stalk, and it's already budded.
And there's this pressure that is building up in that bud for the beauty to pop through, for that next step to pop through.
And life gives us plenty of opportunities to feel all that pressure and stress all the time.
And so in those moments, remember the journey, remember your roots, remember your stock, remember the leaves that you've already grown and find that touch point.
And from there, the energy will flow through and you'll be guided to the next step.
[00:51:18] Speaker B: That's beautiful.
How can people find you in your work, Michael?
[00:51:24] Speaker A: People can find my work at my website, which is dot alchemyshift.com, and they're more than welcome to sign up for a free, purposeful path call to explore how to work together or just get a little bit of direction.
And if that's coaching and guidance and transformational containers, yay.
And if you're interested in plant medicine, I am hosting a ayahuasca retreat in Costa Rica in November that bridges that ayahuasca experience with time and nature, with movement and dance and other practices, and includes integration support as well.
[00:52:09] Speaker B: Excellent. Excellent. I'll provide all the links to that in the show notes. And I want to thank you very much for coming on the show and discussing with me your understanding of the world and your understanding of plant medicine and working with spirits and being real.
[00:52:25] Speaker A: Really appreciated, CJ. Anytime.
[00:52:29] Speaker B: All right, I'll just say goodbye to the listeners.
That was fun having a chat with Michael just then. It's just uncanny that the last episode was about had some gene keys information in it and this one as well.
And then Michael took us on a very deep journey of his understanding of, of the world and process and basically giving ourselves permission to live a full life. Now, if you've enjoyed this show, please I would say like and subscribe if you're on YouTube and if you could, if you find that this show would be really good for a friend of yours and you think they need to hear it, then please forward this show by sharing it. But most of all, if you could reach out to Michael and thank him for coming on the show, I think that's a really good way for my guests to know that people listen to the show and enjoyed an episode.
Thank you so much for listening to this one. And until next episode, bye for now.
