Tending to my Body as aGarden

Imagine that you are a garden. Your outward physical expression is the plants & flowers, and your subconscious is the soil beneath.

In order to grow beautiful plants above the ground, you need to tend to the fertility of the foundation underneath, removing rocks & weeds, and feeding the soil with nutrients.

Meditation is like digging through your garden with a simple shovel, as a monk would sweep a monastery -- tending the garden slowly & intentionally. By patiently working through each layer of soil, you can carefully extract the rocks and weeds, remove them from the garden entirely, & thoroughly fill the hole back in with good soil & nutrients.

Breathwork and psychedelics act more like jackhammers or backhoes - fossil fuel powered machines with tons of power but no attention to detail!

They blast open big deep holes in your psyche. Those holes might reveal things to you that you never realized were there your whole life. They lead to those "Aha!" realizations.

But what happens when you dig so deep so quickly? Without proper post-digging care, referred to as integration, the hole you dug disrupts the microbial harmony, and the hole soon fills back in on its own with the same material you dug out anyway. Similarly, without proper integration of big medicine experiences, you risk reverting back to your old self.

Yang & Fiery

For me the ins & outs of healing start with an understanding of the forces of yin & yang within the bigger picture context of the society we grew up in.

Western society has a very yang, fiery culture, one symbolized by action, results & success that drives capitalism. As this culture has discovered its limitations to happiness, it began discovering Eastern mysticism and practices such as yoga, meditation & breathwork.

Eastern practices are more yin & watery by nature. But we appropriated many of these practices and imprinted our values onto them, reshaping them to make them more appealing and, frankly, less boring.

Yoga is the quintessential example of an Eastern practice that was adopted by the West and got sped up, heated up, and distorted to become more about getting fit and looking beautiful in stretchy pants.

Breathwork, or conscious connected breathing, is another example. Holotropic breathwork & wim hof require taking pretty big inhales which, in my experience, is pretty intimidating. These modalities have the potential for big emotional releases, but sometimes these can feel performative.

Yin & Watery

Thankfully, there's Breathwave. Breathwave is different. As far as conscious connected breathing goes, it is yin & watery in nature, with an emphasis on a relaxed exhale, as opposed to an activating inhale. This allows the breather to soften and lean into their experience with trust & surrender.

The lesson here is simple. It is important to bring balance into everything one does. More intense experiences can manifest big releases & epiphanies. But they need to be followed up with slow & gentle techniques to properly integrate.

Not all modalities fall into one extreme or the other. Breathwave is a modality that strikes a beautiful balance between yin & yang. From what I have witnessed in myself & others, ensuring such balance in one or several modalities makes it possible to unlock even deeper experiences of catharsis & healing over time.

Back to the Garden

In my garden analogy, the yin & watery simple tools thoroughly clean up & integrate the mess made using the yang & fiery tools to blast open holes in the garden. The mindful gardener properly fills back in the holes with synergistic soil that repairs the disturbed microbiome & mycelial connections underneath.

Without proper integrative practices, many who experience breathwork & psychedelics run the risk of running the "psychedelic treadmill" - coming back over & over, chasing big experiences just to recover the gains undone from their previous unintegrated experiences.

This garden would be full of big holes, rocks and weeds mostly extracted but strewn about in a big ugly mess, covering up much of the useful soil and preventing plants from poking through.

So go do your healing! The world needs the best version of you. But treat your healing as a garden, and tend to it with slowness & intention.