Sacred Plants and Yoga: A Love Story
In this month’s episode (another very personal episode), we approach plant medicine from a yogic perspective. And we explore how yoga and sacred plant medicine are complementary practices with a long-standing symbiotic tradition; how yoga can be a powerful preparatory and integrative practice when working with plants; and how yoga can also be a powerful alternative to working with plants—not everyone needs to work with plants.
It’s Native American Heritage Month so I just want to acknowledge the debt we owe to the native people of this land and all sacred lands, and the importance of respecting all indigenous traditions in joining sacred plant ceremonies and working with sacred plants. I think it’s important to engage only in ceremonies that preserve traditions and have the blessing of indigenous curanderos. The world needs these sacred traditions, and they should be spread far and wide, but with a deep respect for their roots.
I will be offering a plant medicine integration yoga class as part of the upcoming Belize International Yoga Festival on December 4. It will offer a taste of the kinds of yoga integration practices I share with students and clients. You can learn more here.
Buy me a coffee at elemental.yoga/podcast or Ko-fi.com/jayadev ☕️
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You can find me on Instagram @elementalyoga and YouTube
Unfortunately Sophia Rokhlin, co-author with Daniel Pinchbeck of When Plants Dream, had to reschedule her podcast appearance. So our conversation about plant medicine will have to wait a few months.
Note: Some temples call the room where you go to be loud the “VIP room” as a tongue-in-cheek joke, in case you missed that nuance in me calling it that.
Topics
Plants In the Zeitgeist
My Ayahuasca Experiences
A Yoga & Plants History
The Perennial Philosophy
Patanjali & Plants
The Soma Mandala Veda
Weaving Yoga & Plants Together
Breath & Mantra In Ceremony
Yoga As Alternative to Plants
A Heart-Opening Medicine
Are Plants a Shortcut?
Show Transcript
It grew dark and quiet in the old, colonial, stone convent that had been converted into a ceremony space. Somewhere in upstate New York. I had just downed a sizable cup of ayahuasca. Before long the familiar whirring at the edge of my hearing signaled the beginning of the inner journey. Suddenly, I found myself in a large carnival or circus tent facing a stage, framed by heavy, dusty brown curtains. A large man in tails and a top hat mounted the stage and began to speak. "Ladies and gentlemen, introducing Chad Woodford, a man who doesn't like to feel his feelings!"
0:48
Raucous applause came from an audience I couldn't see. And of course, he was right. At that point, I was terrible at feeling my feelings. I knew then that it would be an interesting and powerful night. Eventually, I did have to move to the "VIP room" to feel my feelings basically, or at least try to. They seemed to be stuck at that time in an enormous ball of energy in my gut that wouldn't move. I was shaking and unsure what to do with myself. Eventually, the shaman came into the VIP room and sang me a traditional icaro. And I learned in that moment to receive this outpouring of love, through her energy and her song and her love. She helped me to move these feelings up and out and to receive that nurturing love.
1:50
Welcome to Spiritual But Not Ridiculous, a podcast that explores the world of spirituality, from a grounded and clear eyed perspective. I'm your host, Jayadev, a yoga teacher, Vedic astrologer, attorney, and technologist.
2:15
So I wanted to share this little personal story to sort of bring us into this topic, this month of yoga and plant medicine. And in the ways that these two modalities, these two practices sort of go together as almost like a, you know, almost like a helix formation. In this episode, we will approach the topic of plant medicine from the perspective of a yoga teacher basically. And so I'll talk about how yoga and sacred plant medicines are complementary practices with a long-standing symbiotic tradition, actually. So we'll explore briefly, for all you yoga nerds out there the yoga scriptural references to the use of plant medicine as a means for achieving unity, essentially. And then we'll talk about how yoga can be a powerful preparatory and integrative practice when working with these sacred plants. In short, yoga, in my experience is perfect for preparing you to work with the plants, for serving as a helpful tool during the process of being in ceremony, and then for integrating that experience afterwards. And then we'll talk a little bit about how yoga on its own can be a powerful alternative to working with plants. Not everyone needs to work with the sacred plants.
3:35
So I wanted to open with a quote from Wade Davis, this Harvard ethnobotanist, writing in 1996, in his book, One River, where he's speaking of his experiences with the Kofán tribe, working with ayahuasca. So here's Wade Davis, "Ayahuasca was far more than a shamanic tool. It is the source of wisdom itself, the ultimate medium of knowledge for the entire society. To drink Ayahuasca is to learn. It is the vehicle by which each person acquires power and direct experience of the Divine." And so it's this direct experience of the Divine, I think, that tees up so nicely, this whole discussion because ultimately yoga isn't is designed to, and does, provide you with that direct experience. Increasingly, people all over the world are experiencing deep transformation either voluntarily through working with entheogens, like Ayahuasca or San Pedro or MDMA or psilocybin mushrooms, or involuntarily through just being human during the COVID pandemic, right? I think the COVID pandemic is actually sort of a global sacred ceremony that we're all going through and experiencing. And there's no doubt that more and more people are curious about or exploring or working with plant medicines of different kinds as tools for healing and transformation.
4:59
So in this episode I want to explore the role of plant medicines from the perspective of a yoga teacher, and see how they can fit into the broader spiritual path. I want to explore the commonalities between yoga and plant medicine, and how they can be woven together into a cohesive practice, one that can provide the direct experience of unity consciousness. In this episode, I will also explore how yoga can be a viable alternative to working with plant medicine, especially the holistic transformational style of yoga that I teach. In my experience, yoga in plant medicine are complementary modalities. They are both aimed at helping people to identify more with the heart and soul to feel and integrate all their emotions and ultimately to experience true freedom and joy. And they are also both essential practices, I think, for helping humanity during this time, to transition gracefully into this dawning Wisdom Revolutionar or Consciousness Revolution, that people like Peter Russell and Stanislav Grof, and others have talked about. And it's interesting to me too, it'll talk about this more later that advanced yoga and meditation practices, the way they're working on the physiological level is they're granting us access to the pituitary, and then the pineal gland. And this is where DMT naturally resides in the human body. And so it's interesting because these plant medicines, especially ayahuasca, contain this psychoactive agent DMT. And then, you know, in this episode, too, I want to describe or at least preview a little bit some of the integrative practices that I offer to my students and clients. I'll actually be exploring and sharing some of these practices in depth as part of the upcoming Belize International Yoga Festival that is taking place on December 4th. So check that out at the links in the show notes.
6:44
So yeah, so there's no doubt that psychedelics and theologians, Ayahuasca, San Pedro, psilocybin, and DMT in all its forms are having their moment right now, you know, these are being talked about in a kind of, revitalized way, and especially around the topic of sort of healing and doing this kind of transformational work and using these things as tools to grow, expand and heal ourselves.
7:13
Okay, so before we continue, I just want to mention a couple of quick notes, quick reminders. If you enjoy the podcast, you can buy me a coffee at elemental.yoga/podcast, or I'm trying this new thing kofi. So if you like Kofi instead, you can go to ko-fi.com/jayadev. And you can, you could donate a few bucks there if you if you enjoy the podcast, or you can just leave me a rating on Apple Podcasts. You can find me on Instagram at @elementalyoga. And I just wanted to say next month to nice tie in here. Next month, I'm interviewing Sophia Rokhlin about plant medicine, so look for that in your feed too.
8:06
In preparing for this episode, I went back to my old journals from my first Ayahuasca ceremonies in the Peruvian jungle some five years ago. And I've been reflecting on my own experiences with ayahuasca over the past five years, and the ways that that has sort of tied into my my broader spiritual practices. So I just wanted to mention a few things, a few personal anecdotes to give you a taste for what my experience has been like. And maybe for people who are new to these medicines, these these plants, you know, it gives you an idea maybe of what the experience can be like. So the first thing I love about it is it's a sacred ceremony. So this is something that we also work with and practice in on the yoga side is the sacred rituals. And like yoga, you go into it, setting intention. So I think like any experience in life, the more you approach and experience with conscious intentions, the more that experience can sort of benefit you in conscious ways, right? So my experience of the plants, ayahuasca in particular, is that there is this wise intelligence that seems like you're communicating with, it's like this wise intelligence that can read your every thought and answer your every question. And it does so with a gentle firmness, but also a wicked sense of humor, at least in my case. For example, one time I think it was my very first ceremony I was thinking about this book I had read years ago. Why Does the World Exist? by Jim Holt. It's this book by this physicist, that explores the question of why there's something, why there's existence, rather than just nothingness. Which is kind of a funny question if you think about it, but I was thinking about this book for some strange, random reason. And I immediately receive sort of like all these guffaws and snickers from this unseen audience off to the side. And if you remember my little anecdote at the top, that seems to be a theme in my ceremonies, or at least it was for a while this this kind of like, audience that would react yo my thoughts. But yeah, then this, then this disembodied voice said, "Nothing? Lame!" and another voice made the raspberry noise, right? You know, it's like, I don't know, in the beginning of my experiences, it was like a comedy bit you know, but it was also very wise and there was just like wise being that was just pulsing and like breathing and this kind of shifting, loving presence, very playful very patient to. And so much of my experiences was a sort of remembering, like remembering where I and everyone else had come from remembering that there is this quiet, powerful force animating everything that loves us and supports us and watches out for us at remembering that we are that we are powerful, and we are the ones that we've been waiting for. I also received a lot of messages and feelings and understanding that life is not meant to be a struggle. You know, it's like, I don't know if you guys are Bjork fans, but there's that song she has: Undo. You know, life is not meant to be a struggle, "if you're struggling, you're trying too hard," you know. And that was something I came away from my ceremonies with. And I want to just talk about this one experience I had, I think it was the first ceremony ever, in the deep end Amazon in Peru, with the Shipibo tribe. So one thing that they advise you to do that the shamans or the curanderos or the vegetalistas advise you to do is to ask the medicine or the spirit of ayahuasca these questions, right. So one topic I was exploring at this time was love, romantic love, but also spiritual love. And so I asked, gently requested the medicine, the spirit, to show me how love feels. And there I am in the maloka, this structure in the middle of the jungle, and my heart, immediately swelled with a orangish, reddish kind of energy that spread my entire body. And it came on in these soothing waves. So then I asked, "How big can love be." And then it laughed. And I could feel my heart, expanding slowly at first, but quickly, my whole body became filled with this orange, red swirling light. And it felt as if my body was the size of the whole jungle. And then this loving voice in my head said, "Don't you know that the entire universe loves you?" That's how much love there is. And then I felt infinite love, like the size of the entire universe. And I just, I can remember thinking to myself, "the universe loves us." It was created as an act of love, just like the classic Tantrikas 1000 years ago talked about. I just kept saying to myself, "it's infinite, it's infinite." I was sort of incredulous that there could be that much love. You know,
12:53
I think especially because I didn't maybe have so much love in my formative years. And then another big part of my experience with Ayahuasca has been this sort of shedding of conditioning and identities, you know, shedding those personas that were based on what other people seem to want from me or what society wanted from me. And I started to lose this knowing kind of arrogant, ironic air that I used to carry and, and all these defense mechanisms that I had. And I started to learn, like I said, at the top, I started to learn how to feel my feelings, maybe for the first time in my life, truly, these enormous balls of repressed emotion, were moving up and out of me in these ceremonies. And, you know, sometimes it would be like silent screams that would come out as it was moving out of me are very loud screams that it's part of why I had to go into the "VIP room." And so in this process, I was releasing all this anger from a long time ago and all this shame. You know, I grew up Catholic and yeah, just all this, like, deep sadness that I was carrying around with me. And so much disappointment, you know. For entire ceremonies for like a year, I had to sit inside the feeling of disappointment for hours on end. And that was really challenging. But but so necessary too. Yeah, at one point, I turned into a fire breathing dragon. And, yeah, so these are the kinds of things I'm just trying to give you a sense for the kinds of things that you can experience or benefit from these ceremonies. But, but part of why I'm saying all this, too, is to convey how intense and revelatory and sort of raw these experiences can be. And so as a result, it's so important to integrate these experiences. You know, it's not easy to just process them on your own. You need support, I think and what's great about a lot of these temples and ceremony spaces is that they do offer as part of their offering, integration, support and integration practices. But in my experience, I've not really encountered so much this yogic approach to integration. So we're going to talk about that in this episode.
15:34
First, I want to explore the interwoven history of yoga and sacred plants a little bit. I don't want to get too sidetracked. But I just think this is interesting. I think these are two keys that open the same transcendental door. And these are the kinds of things that people like Ram Dass have talked about. So Ram Dass, I think is a good entry point here. Because, you know, as you're probably aware, in the 20th century, there was this psychedelic movement right in the 60s especially. And for a lot of people the psychedelic drugs were the entry point into exploring yoga Eastern mysticism, spirituality and all that, right. And so we here we have Ram Dass kind of like leading the charge Ram Dass and Timothy Leary, and all those guys. And you know, Ram Dass credited psychedelic mushrooms with his discovery of and passion for yoga. Through yoga, he was trying to achieve the same transcendental states that he was experiencing with mushrooms especially. But this connection between the two modalities is not new by any means. In fact, I think there is this long-standing tradition, and I want to talk about that. But I think we're talking about here too, is this perennial philosophy that Aldous Huxley talked about? Aldous Huxley, in his beautiful book by the same name, talked about how every one of the world's spiritual and religious traditions share a single metaphysical truth. This perennial philosophy is most succinctly expressed in the Sanskrit formulations tat tvam asi, or Hari Om or even So Hum. Basically, this is that or that, as this, you know, is what they're saying? Ain't that the truth? Right? So another way to state this is that there is a subtle, unitary underlying reality to everything that connects everything, and that it is possible for us to know that experientially, this is what we learned in yoga, right. And in fact, the explicit purpose of yoga is for us to access that state consistently, and to experience unity directly through the practice of yoga. And in my personal experience, working with plant medicine offers that same experience. I personally have had the direct experience of what I've been trying to achieve achieve for a long time through yoga, and had only managed to catch the briefest of glimpses of here and there. So my experience is going back, you know, starting five years ago with plant medicine, Ayahuasca in particular, made this state of yoga that the ancient Yogi's talked about, it seemed like more of a real possibility. And so then I was motivated to seek that out and to find yoga traditions, yogic practices that could offer that provide that. And again, it turns out, there has been a long symbiotic relationship between Sacred plants and yoga. So let's, let's explore that for a moment. I think this section will be especially interesting to yoga teachers, but for everyone, really.
18:20
So there's this ancient yogic sage Patanjali, possibly a mythical figure, who was said to be half man, half snake, who wrote possibly the most quoted and cited and studied yogic texts in the modern era, the yoga, the Yoga Sutras, every yoga training in the West, assigns this as reading, right. And so in this book, he actually talks about using Sacred plants to achieve state of yoga. So I want to open this section with a quote from yoga sutra 4.1, which is where he talks about this. Here's Patanjali: "The state of unity may be attained through Dharmic birth, the use of sacred plants, Mantra, tapaha or Samadhi. So this is the mythical Patanjali circa 400 BCE, or 400 CE, depending on who you talk to the dates of when he wrote this, and when he lived or actually disputed, but sometime around 2,000 years ago, he's talking about this. And he's listing these five means to become accomplished in yoga or to experience the state of yoga. So we have again, meditation / Samadhi, mantra, which is the yoga of vibration, tapaha, which is a couple of different things depending on how you look at it. But basically, it's the fire or intensity of practice of the yoga practice. It's the fire or, or the benefit of consistent self discipline, and it's the fire that comes out of having a dedicated yoga practice. So that's tapaha. And then he talks about being born with ready access to the state of yoga because of accumulated punya, where you're drawing on spiritual effort from past past lives. So here you'd be acting more from a dharmic state than a karmic state, right? You're more relatively free from karma and more acting in a state of flow in a state of yoga. But the fifth one is, Sacred plants or oshadhi, as it's written in the Sanskrit text.
20:21
So I want to just explore what this might mean in the context of the Yoga Sutras. You know, few yoga teachers are willing to discuss or interpret these, these latter two chapters of the Yoga Sutras. There are a few exceptions, but generally people avoid them because they seem so esoteric and and, you know, fantastical, right? These, these two chapters basically talk a lot about how to achieve these yogic siddhis, right? These yogic powers, basically, you know, things like levitating and reading minds and becoming large or very small, and that kind of thing. So these things, you know, they sound kind of ridiculous are kind of far-fetched. So I think people generally don't talk about these. Part of it, too, is a lot of teachers will tell you, you know, if you're, if you're you're focusing on achieving these cities, you're being distracted from the yogic path, right. So they seem almost irrelevant in this day and age. But nevertheless, I think it's interesting to, to ask the question, you know, why is Patanjali talking here about Sacred plants? And what does that mean? So Patanjali does this thing in 4.1, that he does a few times throughout the Sutras, where he sort of drops a concept or a word on you, and then says nothing else about it, right. We see this with asana. He doesn't really talk about asana in the Sutras, which is interesting, because we have all these yoga teachers who are primarily studying asana, studying a text that doesn't really discuss asana, but nevertheless, he also does this with kriya, he mentions kriya, I think once in the Sutras, and doesn't really say what it is so much. So yeah, he does this thing, or she does this thing where he or she is introducing this term, and then saying nothing more about it. So we have the same thing with oshadhi here, right. But let's look at oshadhi as much as we can. And I want to just say I'm not a Sanskrit scholar, but I'll do my best here. So oshadhi. One definition of this is to make known or to reveal something surprising, oshadhi the word is based on the root osha, which means "light bearing." But here we have basically, then an herb or a plant that brings clarity or fosters increasingly greater values of light, which is one way of defining enlightenment, increasing values of light. So this interpretation suggests that what these plants reveal to us from a yogic standpoint may be surprising. So what was surprising about what they're revealing, right? Maybe it's that the direct experience of unity is available to us always here and now. Or maybe it's that our true nature is bliss, or infinite love, or that all we need is already here if we simply allow it to be. So understandably, a few commentators have been willing to explore the significance of this sutra. Part of the reason might be a relative lack of popularity of the use of plant medicines at the time that they were writing, or just their own personal lack of experience with these things. But let's just look at a couple examples. We have BKS Iyengar, writing in 1993. And his commentary on the Yoga Sutras, he tells us that there was a sage, Sage Mandavya and King Yayati, who attained the state of yoga, and some powerful siddhis through the use of this mysterious elixir of life that Patanjali is talking about. And more recently, in 2009, we have Edwin Bryant, just mentioning in passing, that the substance that Patanjali is probably talking about here is this mythical and mysterious Soma, which we'll talk more about in a moment. And then my favorite one, we have Swami Satchidananda, in 1978, telling us that Patanjali also gives us some clues about the people who "get some experiences through their LSD and marijuana." And this is a sentiment that is sort of effervescing out of the mid 1970s For me, right? Like, it just makes Satchidananda sound very square. Those are just a couple examples. I mean, nobody really tries to understand what Patanjali is talking about here. And nobody knows with certainty what plants he would have been referring to. I think he does this thing in the Sutras where he only mentions a tournament passing because those terms were familiar to his readers at the time. So he didn't need to explain them. So there's an argument here, I think that he mentioned this in passing because oh shot he was such a well known practice 2000 years ago in India. Okay, so let's explore a little bit more what this substance might have been by going back in time to the time of the Vedas, the Rigveda in particular, which is dated somewhere between I think
24:59
3,500 years ago and 7,000 years ago, you know, when you go back that far, it's based on an oral tradition. And, and oftentimes, these scriptures were written down on palm fronds which are then you know, disintegrating so they have to recopy them. So it's hard to date these things. But there's an entire mandala in the Rigveda called the Soma Mandala that's devoted to this mysterious substance. In there, there's 114 hymns devoted to Soma Pavana, "purifying Soma," the sacred potion of the Vedic tradition. And these hymns are interesting, you should read them if you get a chance. They attest rapturously that "half of us is on earth, the other half and heaven. We have drunk Soma, we have drunk soma and have become immortal. We have attained the light, the gods have discovered." It's fascinating stuff. And so keep in mind that for these Yogi's immortality is often the realization of our oneness, and the consequent knowledge that death is nothing to fear. It's a simple transition from one state to another. So when they say immortality here, I think it's just these, this knowing that really, in a way, our lives are just part of a long continuum. Okay, so the other thing that's really interesting to me about this Soma Mandola is they speak at length of mashing the stalk of a plant with stones to prepare this Soma. And it's, you know, sort of similar to how Ayahuasca is prepared by pounding the Ayahuasca vine in advance of brewing it with the chakruna plan. So some scholars have also tackled this Soma Mandala, this section of the Rigveda. And there's been some conjecture about what the substance might have been. It may have been a mixture of poppy, Chinese ephedra, and cannabis, which to me, doesn't sound too exciting. But that also shows how narrow minded and inexperienced some of these scholars may have been with any kind of sacred plant, right? Another possibility that people have suggested is that they were a psychedelic mushrooms which is possible, or wild rue, which contains a lot of the same alkaloids as Ayahuasca. So that's plausible, too, although I've never taken wild rue personally. In any case this veda is describing these plants in a way that is reminiscent of plants like Ayahuasca. So that's really interesting to me. So the broader point here is that using Sacred plants, was obviously a well known practice in Patanjali's time, 2000 years ago in India, and was apparently a common part of people's spiritual practice. But in any case, I don't think we need scriptural authority to, to work with these plants, right? It's just interesting. There's this long-standing history that people don't necessarily know about. Part of why I wanted to highlight this too, was that I have had a lot of yoga teachers in the past who were vocally opposed to the use of plants, as part of any kind of practice. Maybe they felt like it was a threat to their own authority or something. But you know, in my experience, they go so well together. And you know, hey, maybe some of you out there are the type of person who has felt resistance to working with plants. And now that I've told you about Patanjali is authorization to use it is his encouragement to use it. Maybe that'll push you over the edge, maybe that's enough for some people to give it a try. But I'm not here to convince anybody of anything really, I'm just, I'm just talking. So I think you know, I think using plants to aid your evolution will appeal to some people, especially those who prefer the Terence McKenna approach to life, you know, avoiding gurus and following plants. Or, you know, yoga and meditation will appeal to others, or, you know, maybe a blend of some kind for some people, different practices for different folks, basically. And I do think, over time, reliance on plants in general, probably falls away as you naturally progress along the spiritual path. But, in my opinion, there's nothing wrong with asking for a little boost along the way. And for many people, plants can be that boost. After all, the ancient Yogi's tell us that nature is infinitely intelligent. It's a self organizing consciousness far beyond our wildest imaginations. And so for this reason to I think there can be no harm in communing directly with nature through its various expressions, including these plants. In my experience, nature seems to want us to.
29:53
Now, I want to talk a little bit about weaving yoga and plant medicine together in an intentional way. I think yoga ultimately is a practice of integration. We're integrating Atman and Brahman, right, we're integrating the self and the other. Yoga is a process of making us whole at every level. So given the similarities that we've explored between the state of yoga, and visionary plant medicine, it's no surprise that yoga can be the perfect companion to working with sacred plants like Ayahuasca. For me, having a solid yoga practice, going into my experiences with plant medicine, allowed me to have both a more grounded experience and a deeper experience with the medicine for several different reasons. First of all, ceremonies or these journeys, these plant journeys can last for hours at a time. So at a basic physical level, I was able to sit more comfortably on a mat on the floor for longer periods of time, because my hips were more open and my body was used to sitting on the floor. So you know, this is where the awesome portion of the yoga practice can really benefit you. Not only that, but in a lot of these more surrendered purgative ceremonies, I was in a sort of modified Child's Pose, you know, like, surrendering into the purging with a bucket in front of me, you know, so I think that to having the yoga asana practice, can can let you spend more time on the floor in a comfortable way, basically. But more importantly, having all this yoga practice going into the ceremonies, it I was able to bring with me a deeply rooted sense of trust. Yoga has instilled in me a deep certainty that no experience is too big for my soul to handle, like it did for Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita, that kind of thing. And this inner knowing can come in handy during these intense ceremonies, right? When you're like, what is happening, you can return to this, this sort of like felt sense that everything's gonna be okay, no matter what. And then also, during the more intense phases of an Ayahuasca journey, you can draw on specific yogic practices, like energetic practices like pranayama, breathwork, even mantra, to help to ground or stabilize or soothe. And I've certainly done that many times in my ceremonies. I've even used Asana sometimes to help to ground me during particularly emotional times during the ceremony. So yeah, so you can use simple Asana postures on the mat, or in another room, you can just have a simple breath awareness technique. Or you can you can draw on some kind of mantra and this is where I think it's useful for people to to memorize some some mantra before they go into a ceremony. This is a lot of what I work with, with my clients and students you know, so just a couple examples you could work with a mantra like Aham Shraddha which is a mantra that basically is invoking this attitude of surrender, right? So Aham Shraddha. You can work with a grounding mantra like Green Tara or Parvati, right? Green Tara mantra sounds a little bit like this: Om Tare tu Tare Ture, So Hum Om Tare tu Tare Ture, So Hum. Tare tu Tare Ture, So Hum. Or you might work with a Ganesha mantra to remove obstacles or to help ease a transition. Om Gang
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Ganapataye Namaha. Om Gang Ganapataye Namaha. There's so many options here. You could work with Medicine Buddha. I have chanted this in ceremonies that I've facilitated towards the end to sort of bring a healing bhava into the space, you know, or you could work with a fierce mantra if you wanted to cut through some kind of blockage, right, some energetic blockage, Durga or Kali or something, right. So these are all you know, and obviously, you're working with these mantras silently to yourself as a thought, you know, you're not doing it in this space, right. But these are the kinds of tools that I oftentimes will share with pasajeros, you know, with the people who are voyaging in these journeys, the ceremonies that I'm facilitating, right, you know, people will oftentimes ask for a facilitator or an angel to come over and help them out and it's helpful to have these tools to offer as well. And the place where you get the most benefit from bringing yoga into the plant medicine space is integration. This is where energetic practices designed to work with the subtle body can help us to ground and integrate these intense emotional experiences. Yoga here can help you to connect more deeply to your center and your higher self. It can recirculate the prana and Kundalini that's maybe freeing up in the ceremony in a holistic and restorative way. And sure, I think yoga is perfect for preparing to work with the plants for serving as a helpful tool during the process and for integrating the experience afterwards. And so I do offer these individually tailored integration practices for students, and for people who are working with plant medicine. And it's, you know, it's always a customized sequence or customized sadhana that I'm giving that some combination of grounding practices, restorative practices, healing practices, and sometimes devotional practices. And these practices are helping the person to address both their physical body but also their energetic and emotional body. And they can include meditation practice, you know, having I think having a consistent meditation practice can be immensely helpful in both entering a plant medicine ceremony, but also in integrating that ceremony afterwards. Meditation after all, is a practice and growing quiet. So it allows you to deeply listen and enter a state of total self acceptance, which can be huge for integration. I may offer people restorative or Yin practices breathwork, pranayama. And then lots of kriyas. Kriyas, I think, are the most integrative practice in yoga. So there's healing kriyas, grounding kriyas, devotional kriyas; forgiveness kriyas are really powerful. And kriyas that can bring you into more of a state of bliss can be helpful too. And so through all this work, all of this breath and mantra and mudras, we're balancing the lower chakras and awakening the upper chakras, and restoring and strengthening our general energetic body. Another integrative practice that I love, and that I oftentimes will give to people is developing some sort of sacred ritual for yourself, or I might even do a sacred ritual for some people, right? Because it's a nice mirror of the sacred ceremonial space that happens with plant medicine. Through both of these modalities were accessing different layers of reality and of ourselves by working with the various elements of nature. So because of that, sacred rituals can be essential to sort of tuning into the intelligence of nature and developing a powerful vulnerability and a devotional kind of attitude towards life. The benefit here, I think of sacred rituals, too, is that most of us live in this abstracted mental world of concepts, where we're disconnected from the sensual world, from the elements. So these rituals can help us to reconnect with both the ground level reality and meet that fully, but also with deeper levels of our own being. I think the more that we can cultivate a sense of the sacred in life, the more we can become our true selves. Again, plant medicine and yoga are both only ever putting us in more direct contact with the unity of existence. And this is done especially through sacred rituals, through the heart, and not the head through surrendering, not forcing or controlling.
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So some of the sacred rituals that come from the yoga tradition are puja, which can be done in the morning before meditation. There's yagyas, these traditional fire ceremonies, there's more advanced practices like Bhuta Shuddhi, which can be used to work with the elements in a more advanced way more elevated way. And so again, these are helping us to access our higher and deeper selves. And so through the five elements of nature, we can access these different qualities in ourselves. So that's a little bit about what the specifics of an integration practice look like. Now, I want to talk about how yoga can sort of serve as its own alternative to plant medicine, you don't have to work with plant medicine as I said.
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There are advantages and disadvantages to rely on plant medicine to do the hard work of self inquiry, and the shadow work. I mean, it can be a great jumpstart for people. It can open you up to parts of yourself that you had previously had no contact with. It can get you out of your head and into your heart. And it can shift you from over analysis to more intuition. More of an intuitive approach to life. And like I talked about before, plant medicine just like yoga can help us to feel intense emotions in the safe container of a sacred ceremony. Sometimes, plant medicine can even cut through a tendency for spiritual bypass, you know, I think so many people sort of want to want to change instead of actually changing, right. So that can be a nice, sort of like cutting through of that tendency. Basically, plant medicine can be like a system reset, that then sets you on a path of potentially exploring yoga in greater depth. It's extremely heart-opening. Plant medicine is referred to by shamans and curanderos and, and traditional indigenous people, as a heart medicine. And so it can be very heart opening in that way. And that's been my personal experience with it. And plants, like ayahuasca, are also great for working on our subtle body, the part of us that holistic yoga practices, also specifically target so there's this again, this parallel, there's these benefits that come from both practices. And it's just more matter of personal preference and intuition and that kind of thing. But sometimes I wonder for certain people, if maybe plant medicine is a shortcut, or maybe too much too soon, right? Ram Dass actually asked this question in his commentary to the Bhagavad Gita. He wonders if people who start their journey like he did with psychedelics before yoga, are getting ahead of themselves. He likens it to this section in chapter 11 of the Gita, where Arjuna is asking Krishna to show him his true nature. But here Arjuna has gone through the previous 10 chapters, and had Krishna systematically teach him yoga. So he was on some level prepared for this vision. But also, he was overwhelmed by it, right. And so he sees Krishna his true nature, and he asked him to please stop. So. So maybe, for some people, it can be like that, you know, you need to first go through the first 10 chapters of Krishna teaching you yoga before you can do the plant medicine. And that I guess, in a way, that was my experience, I had done 10 years of yoga before going into working with plant medicine. And again, here's Ram Dass talking about his guru Neem Karoli Baba and, and Neem Karoli Baba's perspective on these medicines, LSD in particular. Here's Neem Karoli Baba talking about it: "These medicines will allow you to come and visit Christ, but you can only stay two hours, then you have to leave again. This is not the true Samadhi. it's better to become Christ than to visit him. But even the visit of a saint for a moment is useful. In the end, love is the most powerful medicine; for love slowly transforms you into what the psychedelics only let you glimpse." So, again, it seems like it's it's a personal preference. It's whatever you seem to need, and you just got to feel into it right.
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But I just want to talk a little bit about some of the advantages of yoga over plant medicine here. First of all, not everyone has the luxury of traveling to South America or risking an illegal ceremony in their own country. I mean, plant medicine requires financial resources, large chunks of time and a certain tolerance for intense physical and emotional experiences that are far outside the norm. plant medicine ceremonies also require a lot of concentrated time and energy, days, weeks, sometimes months of dedicated ceremony and integration time. Not everyone is ready for or wants to dive deeply into their trauma and their darkest emotional states. Many want a practice that lets them feel their feelings gradually in more manageable bite sized chunks perhaps. And so I think yoga can also be that more sustainable long term practice, especially a holistic style that combines energetic practices and devotional practices and that kind of thing.
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These holistic yoga practices can be seamlessly woven into your daily life, you don't have to run off to the jungle for an intense retreat period, and then integrate all that you know, and make a dietary change for a month and all that you know, and this is actually how I discovered Elemental Yoga in the first place these practices that I learned in the Himalayas were giving me the same experiences I was having with ayahuasca and so this is why I was so excited to bring these back and to share these techniques. So through holistic yoga, like like Elemental Yoga, you can realize the same benefits that you realize in an Ayahuasca ceremony by working with prana and Kundalini, which is naturally arising in the human body and tapping into the DMT that naturally arises. And maybe these practices can help us to bypass spiritual bypass and they can install like deep inside your heart and soul this unshakable knowing that you are softly, quietly invincible. So yoga is more accessible, it's more adaptable, and it's available in small portions if you like. You can do 15 minutes a day or two hours a day. You can go on a yoga retreat too. And everyone has access to you know, pretty affordable yoga now, especially online. Another benefit of yoga over plant medicine is that if you do enter into these deeply transcendental states that can come out of these practices, you can then pull yourself out of it if it becomes too intense, or if you need to deal with mundane reality. I mean, of course, having said that, there may be a benefit to the lack of control and surrender that's required by plant medicine. So again, I'm just kind of going through the different pluses and minuses here. And it's up to you to decide. So even though Patanjali is talking about working with psychoactive plants in the Yoga Sutras, I think at some point you have to leave the plants behind. I think Patanjali would have agreed, given how little he talks about these plants in the yoga sutras. In the end, everything you need to access your inherent bliss, nature is inside of you. And yoga can help you to more consistently enter the state of yoga at will. It can give you the tools to become more yourself. There is no one way maybe some people are the jump right in and work backwards types. But you know, some people may want a more gradual approach. Sometimes you need the inspiration of the grand visions from an Ayahuasca journey to set you on a dedicated and steady path of yoga like Ram Dass. But you know, you start where you are, you follow your intuition and you do what calls to you. For me it was yoga first, then plant medicine, and then both together, and now they're interwoven like a beautiful helix for me. There's no mistakes. There's no correct path. There's only grace and love and practice. In my experience, a holistic yoga practice that works with a subtle body can help to integrate or take the place of plant medicines like Ayahuasca. The two modalities can work side by side in an integrative spiral of change, a returning home to oneself. My yoga offerings, elemental yoga is heavily influenced by these ancient elemental shamanic practices. As my students know, a lot of my yoga offerings, my classes are heavily influenced by these ancient elemental shamanic practices. I'd like to bring a sense of ceremony to all my offerings, and to work with certain kinds of rhythms that can support the inner journey that we take. Yoga and plant medicine are both ultimately paths of love. These healing modalities are simply helping us to open our hearts and to have the direct experience of unity, which is so crucial at this time, I think there's so much strife, but also we live in a time that's so pregnant with so much possibility. So that's my my take on yoga and plant medicine, the love story. And once again, I just want to remind you, if you enjoy the podcast, you can buy me a coffee at elemental.yoga/podcast, ko-fi.com/jayadev. I'll put these links in the show notes too. And if you like my podcast, feel free to leave me a rating on Apple podcasts. You can find me on Instagram at @elementalyoga, and again next month. I'm so excited. I'm talking to Sophia Rokhlin about plant medicine. So look for that in your feed.
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Remember, all you need for wholeness is already inside of you. Hari Om Tat Sat
