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Staring up at the sky, the kaleidoscope of clouds above me, my arms stretched out and feeling the sand of a Costa Rican beach, I exclaim over and over: “There is another way! There is another way!” This was me in November of 2018. I had been looking inward and outward for decades. I had been searching for “answers” and was desperate for insights.
About ten years earlier, I had first heard of this thing called a “vision quest” while working with a therapist who was more “hippy” than clinician. At that time, I had just seen the episode of “Entourage,” where the guys went to Joshua Tree to do mushrooms so Vince could decide if he was going to do a certain movie or not. While that was fiction, the idea of it piqued my interest. What if I could connect on another level like that? What if there was a way for me to get answers for myself, by bypassing my own internal mechanisms that had me stuck? I was very curious.
At the time, I was married with kids, and while it seemed like an amazing idea, I didn’t pursue it further. I had never done psychedelics and my limited experience with pot began 20 years earlier. My first time took me on a journey of paranoia, where I was sure I was going to die. Although I got over that quickly, I was afraid to experiment further even though, based on superficial stereotypes, people often assumed I was the guy selling mushrooms and acid at concerts and festivals.
Life changes, divorce, career paths shifting, and ultimately releasing my first book all led me to a new place in my life. Then, a breakup happened, my kids were having compiling issues with school, and I was feeling more weight on my shoulders than ever. Lying on my bedroom floor, staring up at my ceiling fan and half joking to myself, “Saigon, shit”—the opening line from “Apocalypse Now!”—I received an invitation for a “special retreat” in Costa Rica. A medicine woman I had been following for about a year, announced a yoga and meditation retreat that would include “medicine” ceremonies. I had limited resources but knew I had to find a way to do it . . . and I did.
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Three months later, a group of us found ourselves on a secluded beach in Costa Rica, I was sitting in front of the host, ready to embark on my journey. I recited something, smoked from the pipe and . . . I don’t even know what the heck happened next. All I can say is that the world started spinning, I left my body and felt like I was in a scene from “The Doors” movie. I cried profuse, deep, guttural cries. Then, I started laughing. I laughed and laughed and could not stop; I didn’t want to stop. I lay down on my back and my arms were stretched out to the side. As messages started coming to me, I became aware of my body and the position I was lying in. Being a Soundgarden fan, and no stranger to irony, I said to myself, “Jesus Christ Pose.” The lyrics of the song cycled through my mind until the first important message came: “Get off the cross. Stop suffering.” This stayed with me for what seemed like hours, but was only minutes. Then: “There is another way.”
“There is another way,” is what I heard, over and over. All of my struggles, all of society’s struggles, all of my children’s challenges: “There is another way.” I stayed in a blissful haze, even weeks after I returned home from the retreat. As challenges would come up and as stress would arise, I would remind myself: “There is another way.”
This carried over into my work as I looked at how I wanted to interact with people, how I wanted to help move the conversations forward regarding social issues and how I wanted to experience life. The “other way” became a new vision of what the “shadow side” is. I had been a long-time student of the “just feel good” way of thinking. It became clear that just feeling good not only bypassed beliefs and traumas in a way in which they still could be running the show, but it was also a measure for which we get to blame ourselves for “doing it wrong.” My belief had been, “If I could only feel good, enough of the time, things would work out for me!” This had never been attainable, and I could tell because things never seemed to fully work out for me.
When I was lying on the sand in Costa Rica, the tears came before the laughter. It was when I surrendered into those dark places, that the joy and elation were able to emerge. This is why, when the subjects around healing the Self, empowering couples, and dismantling the societal systems of oppression come up, I say “Turn towards it, surrender to the discomfort . . . there is another way.”