Panama > Cuba Pt. 2

 

I left Pacha Mama feeling sure that I am going bald (my hairline seems to be receding by the day), with some sort of tropical rash spreading across my body, more fit than I’ve ever been, having truly accepted my mother’s death, deeply unconvinced that the notion of ‘enlightenment’ is one that I should bother myself with, and having done no more psychedelic substances (though the opportunity was very much there and the temptation was at times very strong). 

I had entered Pacha Mama whilst nearly the entire community was elsewhere. At a ‘rock odyssey’ (a party/ceremony held by the community’s spiritual teacher ‘DJ’ Tyohar) down by the river. 

I waited... but eventually, someone was called up from the river and I was given was a cursory introduction to the place by a guy who had been up all night and just wanted to go to bed. 

He left me in my casita - an open-sided building, with a double bed and a mosquito net, in the middle of the jungle - that was to be home for the next 8 weeks. It felt like paradise that evening, listening to the din of the cicadas and, after them, the more peaceful sounds of the jungle waking for the night. 

It was a new moon when I arrived and I had just started tracking how I was feeling against the cycles of the moon to see if it have any impact on me. There seems to be a consensus in certain circles - full moon equals more extroverted, new moon more introverted, a continuous cycle of birth-death-birth. I wanted to see if I could identify a pattern which might somehow be analogous to the female moon cycle of menstruation. 

It is a recent revelation to me that there are women in the world who do not hide the fact of the menstruation, do not experience it as taboo and actually use it as a lens through which to understand their cycles of life. On discovering this, I realised that I liked it, and basically decided to see if I could replicate the best bits for myself. 

So I’ve been tracking various characteristics: my sex drive, emotional state, physical state, mental state, creativity, energy levels, extroversion, patience with the world, amount of sleep. Once in the morning, once sometime in the afternoon evening. One day, I might plot these in a spreadsheet and see if there are any patterns. For now, I’ll just track, mostly because I sent my Dad home from Cuba with all my notebooks which contain the data.

At some point, in addition to this, I decided that from now on I would only trim my beard at the new moon and that with this, I’d do a little ceremony to the past 28 days. The idea is to dwell on the past moon cycle for a spell, bury the hair in the earth, and then turn my gaze towards the upcoming moon cycle, before coming back to the present. My hippie credentials are improving every day.

That first week was fairly empty, but for a day workshop called ‘Wisdom of Breath’. For those who haven’t been exposed to breath work (like me before Tribal Gathering when I was ‘rebirthed’ twice) it consists breathing very heavily for a prolonged period of time. Only this. Surprisingly bizarre and sometimes profound things happen to your consciousness. My first experience of breathwork at Tribal Gathering was made up of a lot of groaning and uncontrolled vibrating. The second was far more still and peaceful, like the deepest meditation I’ve ever reached.

In the third, at Pacha Mama, I had two revelations. One: that the root of all stored emotional pain is an unfulfilled need to be loved in the way that love was required. Blanket. Everything. This was an earthquake that felt far more banal sometime after but at the time was deep felt understanding that moved me immesurably. The other was that I was presented with a very clear picture of my ‘inner child’, a gangly little thing who was crouched impatiently, going, ‘let’s go make some magic, when are we going to make some magic’. I realised I’d neglected my ‘inner child’.

After this, I settled into Pacha Mama life. I was working exchanging and they put me in the Wild Treats Cafe, serving chocolate and smoothies for five hours five days a week. This was pretty intense after living what had been a very solitary lifestyle for the preceding months, to be suddenly thrust into the hub of the community was quite overwhelming. And they have a shortage of men in the community… it was quite a full-on introduction to Pacha Mama life.

But things settled down. I struck up a friendship with a couple of ridiculous Englishwomen, Tallulah and Sophie, which brought a lot of laughter and passed the time nicely. But I was having some misgivings about the community. It seemed too money hungry, not welcoming enough, stingy with the food for the work exchangers (the same rice and beans for lunch every day and the same soup for dinner). I considered leaving. So, to kill these thoughts of escape, I booked myself in for some workshops: Alchemy Through Motion, Freedom From the Past and a silent retreat.

(A quick description of Pacha Mama. It was set up twenty odd years ago by Tyohar and a group of his followers. Tyohar apparently reached enlightenment at 28 in India, travelled around the world sharing his wisdom in silent retreats and then eventually decided to set up a community which would be the hub for these retreats and other workshops and events focussing on emotional healing, and later ‘the red road’ (shamanism and plant medicine essentially). Now, there are around a hundred residents working on keeping the jungle community running, putting on workshops and so on. It's a community in pretty good health all things considered.)

The flow of the workshops that I’d chosen seemed pretty good to me: Alchemy Through Motion was a four-day trance dance and body flow workshop (trance dance being blindfolded manic dancing to vigorous tribal drumming and body flow a slower improvised flow of movement). I expected it to loosen me up before Freedom From the Past, which is ‘primal therapy’ - going back to childhood traumas and reliving them, in order to be more comfortable with the past. Ffor me, very clearly, my mother’s death was to be looked at - I wanted to feel what my four year-old self could not when she died. Then the ten days of silence to smooth things out at the end. 

Things went to plan. Alchemy Through Motion was facilitated by Raji and did exactly what I wanted it to do for me. After not dancing at all during the festival, my body was free to move however it wished in very different ways. During the trance dances, I found myself coming out of the two hours of flailing like a mad man, moving in ways I never have before (but which felt somehow ancient), on the opposite side of the room to where I had started. Mind switched off. Body giving whatever it had to the music. Dancing like an animal. Freedom. 

Body flow was more subtle but equally meditative. Some preparatory breathing exercises and then just letting the body move as slow or fast as it wanted to, with peaceful drones playing in the background. The only problem I had with this was that each time we did it, it did not last long enough. 

Then, a day's break and on to Freedom From the Past. A more daunting proposition. The first day was soft, introductory, posed no problems. In the morning, before the second began, Karam, who facilitated the workshop and is Raji’s partner, played a song where the chorus went along the lines of ‘Mama if you could see me now’ - a hip hop song written from a son to a dead mother. He was priming me for some pretty heavy emotion. And so it went. 

At the beginning of this and some of the other workshops at Pacha Mama, alongside agreeing that confidentiality of anything of others in the group is to be preserved, we also agree that we would not share the details of the workshop structure, so I won’t, but I will say that during one of the exercises, lying on my back with my arms in the air, bawling like a child with a face full of snot, I had something like a hallucination of an umbilical chord reaching from my stomach into… somewhere… and this umbilical chord was cut (it was as if I could actually feel it being cut) and I said over and over: “I accept it! accept it! I accept it!”

The next days passed gently as I realised that apart from my mother’s death, my boyhood was happy, peaceful and safe. I did not resent my Dad, he did everything that he could for us. There was nothing stored there, nothing major, but this deep acceptance of my mother’s death was a big moment for me. Another step towards a genuine maturity. And I feel tremendous gratitude to Karam for this.

(See below for more, but at the moment I feel as though maturity has become my direction now. True emotional, spiritual, intellectual, physical maturity. Something like touching on a fulfilment of potential, not in terms of productive fulfilment in the outside world, but something more inward and harder to grasp. It’s become clear to me that most people don’t get [or take] the opportunity to reach true maturity. It necessarily contains the ability to be childlike. If my life has a meaning, moving towards this 'maturity' is now it.)

After Freedom From The Past, the Silent Retreat. A slightly different structure to the others that I’ve been on. Firstly, three days of asking and answering the same question on repeat. Who is in? I’ve also sworn to secrecy on the structure of the Who Is In workshop, but it really is just that: asking ‘who is in?’ Listening to the answer, then, answering ‘who is in?’ Each time for around ten minutes, a differeent partner each time.

What happened, like with the breath work, is surprisingly profound. It ends up being a very extended, mostly verbal, meditation. The eye (I always looked into the other person’s left eye) became the only thing visible at times as everything else disappeared from view in hallucinatory fashion. It was nourishing, eye to eye, and intimate. A psychological study. A deep meditation.

Then the silence began and I was suddenly somewhat deflated. What I’d thought would be a deep experience, an encounter with great wisdom, turned out to be something else entirely. 

Tyohar (the spiritual - and otherwise - leader of Pacha Mama) is apparently an ‘enlightened being’, I was very interested in seeing what one of them would look like up close. He hadn’t been there for the majority of my stay because he’d been off in Colombia photographing hummingbirds. The silent retreat was my first real chance for exposure to him and his teachings. He would be conducting two satsangs (normally a space for a teacher to answer questions on spiritual matters) a day. I was genuinely looking forward to them.

At the first satsang, though, a thought flashed through my mind: ‘Wizard of Oz’. After the silence was over, the first thing I did when I connected to the internet was download the Wizard of Oz. I read it in a day.

There is something to look at in me here. I had a strong reaction against Tyohar and this shows something, maybe a resistance to authority figures, maybe a resistance when I believe them to be illegitimate, I don’t know exactly, but the reality is that many of the other retreaters felt similarly. And I've never felt this way in different situations with teachers in a similar mould. The key missing ingredient here seems to have been humility. I won’t list the grievances, but I will say that my biggest takeaway from the retreat was that I’ve no interest in following a path that, after a lot of time and effort, leads to there. 

But I also don’t want to be misunderstood, Tyohar has done some really amazing things. Pacha Mama is a huge and beautiful achievement which has improved the lives of innumerable people, but for me ‘enlightenment’ is now scrubbed from my semi-existent list of things to do and a far more earthy, far more grounded goal of ‘maturity’ is written in its place. I suppose I can thank at least partially Tyohar for that.

After the silence, I booked myself in for a Tantra workshop led by both Raji and Karam which meant I’d be staying an extra week or so. From the end of the silence to Tantra was a couple of weeks, half of which would be taken up by the Vision Quest - where some brave (and possibly stupid) people take ayahuasca before going out to a spot in the jungle and sitting there for four days without food or water. Mentalists.

While the questers are out in the jungle, a community of supporters remains not too far away, taking peyote or san pedro daily, going through four hour sweat lodges and doing chores. I went down to help them set up on the day before it started and was very tempted to join. While my description might not sound so tempting, it looked like there would be a beautiful atmosphere. I had decided after the mushrooms at Tribal Gathering, that I would maintain total sobriety. I didn’t need medicine, I told myself, I did not want to cave in to the subtle pressure of the community, I like being sober. All good, but I was very tempted. I asked if I could join without taking any medicine. It was not allowed, so I stayed up top and passed the time.

The tantra workshop was a beautiful way to end my time at Pacha Mama. With Raji and Karam facilitating it perfectly, the group was able to go to some very beautiful places. Again, I've committed to not sharing the details of the structure, but I think I can say this: I discovered that I am probably not one for anonymous group sex whilst blindfolded.

The last night of my time at Pacha Mama was another Rock Odyssey, just as when I arrived, and I chose not to go. The temptation was there, but I did not want to break my commitment to myself and so I did not (this trip is, in part, about cultivating a self-discipline that I can trust). So I stayed up in the empty village whilst the rest of the community was taking plant medicine and dancing. It felt right.

But. Since leaving Pacha Mama, a book by Michael Pollan has been released that covers psychedelics in detail. What they are, how they work, the therapeutic benefits of them (helping to treat depression, alcoholism, smoking) and so on. It turns out they affect the brain very much like deep meditation and it also turns out that can be used on the healthy (i.e. people who don’t need ‘medicine’) to great positive effect - to make the well even better. 

So I’ve realised that I got hung up on the term medicine. (I’m not bloody ill so why would I need a medicine?!) Rather than seeing the potential benefits. I now see that in the right environment, used consciously and with good intention, the medicines can actually be beneficial to all (this is exactly how they are used at Pacha Mama, but that ship has sailed). They are of a totally different kind to alcohol, so there is a good chance that somewhere in South America I’ll be finding myself a shaman and giving ayahuasca a go.

I've made it to Colombia before finishing this post. Cartagena, where I'd planned to spend a month before heading on to Medellin, but again, I've had to change plans. The internet here is just not capable of handling the work that I'll be doing and so I'm flying to Medellin tomorrow. This feels right. I'm tired of the sweaty humidity of the coast. Cuba was the same and I'm ready for a bit of mountain action. It's been a while since I've seen mountains and I miss them, though Medellin is a sprawling metropolis. 

Cartagena is nice, really beautiful with refreshingly good food (vegetables!), but it's small and sticky so in the end, it feels like a blessing to move on earlier than planned. And I haven't managed to find a way to people. A couple of random meetings first with Lauren, a friend of a good friend from the states, who I met in Copenhagen years ago. She happened to be here. We went for tapas. Then Jules and Gussie from Pacha Mama who were in an expansive state, hugely excited about their unplanned adventure which is just beginning, living in their utterly bizarre old colonial scrapyard art air bnb mansion. I found that I felt a little jaded beside them, having been away for so long, but this is a time of 'contraction' (as they would say at Pacha Mama) for me and this is fine.

(I haven't had a chance to mention the Pacha Mama-isms which would probably be enough to turn a great many people off the place completely - constant talk of processing, and integration, expansion and contraction, of totality and so on. Again, there was the need to filter through the language that I've been conditioned to find off-putting and power through to the benefits of the practices on offer.)

Now, I'm getting to grips with the idea of actually working again. It's been nine months since I've done a day of work. Nine months of pretty self-indulgent time. Absolutely beneficial, but I've not had to take into consideration anyone but myself. Suddenly, things will be different. Suddenly, I might be needed on 9am UK time calls. 3am Colombian time... It will be what it will be. And it's necessary for me to carry on the journey. I'm looking forward to it, to being slightly less of a smelly hippie, to being stationary in a city surrounded by mountains and to preparing to ride half way down the Andes on a push bike.