My journey has included many Journeys — on my own, with friends, with a couple therapists, with a cannabis circle, with Vipassana meditation groups, with an Ayahuasca group and a curandera, and with a psychedelic coach. Most of my experiences have been intentional. Being trans and nuerodiverse, I am naturally a sensitive, intuitive, and overwhelmed human so I have often avoided party dynamics and social situations I simply do not have capacity for at a given time. This has lead me to explore Medicines and healing or spiritually oriented practices in predominantly sacred and therapeutic ways. Alongside Medicines, I have also engaged hypnotherapy, yoga, somatic massage, rolphing, years of somatic psychotherapy, ecstatic dance, Breathwork, sound ceremonies, and lots of nature contact. All of these have been supportive in various ways — my favorite supports allow my body to awaken and communicate and allow me to use my sensory and empathetic sensitivities to learn from soil, plants, and animals.
There are many experiences that have shaped me and part of my healing has been about re-embodying hardships and aspects of myself that I have cast off or overly relied on for the sake of survival. Moving fully into and through emotions and energies held in my body that have been tied to certain places and people is what has lead to most of my leaning into self acceptance and an embrace of my gifts and services. My interpersonal, familial, generational, and social oppression wounds have carried me into my offerings and what I desire to hold space for with others. I continue to transmute difficult times into learnings and sharing. I also continue to find missing pieces of a puzzle that makes and manifests me in a context both of my body and being and also of a much larger collective human-as-nature-bound context.
Some of my deeper understandings of the wisdoms of Medicines and our bodies began when Cannabis assisted me in somatically and emotionally recalling that my mother and I were abused when I was in her womb. During my experience with Cannabis I cried and cried as I heard a song that reminded me of my mom’s heartbeat. I felt I was in my mom’s womb and yet that she was no where to be found. In time I told my mom about this Cannabis Journey I had where I went back in utero and had felt incredible sorrow, angst, and dysregulation. I asked her if she might have dissociated at any point during her pregnancy with me. She confessed that she had been physically and emotionally abused during that time. She also named that she and her mother faced abuse when she was in her mother’s, my grandmother’s, womb as well. Cannabis gave me the opportunity to begin to process harm done when I began this rendition of life. And my mom and her honesty gave my brain logical confirmation around my experience and my heart orientation toward both personal and familial (and in turn collective) transformation.
I have also had engagements with ayahuasca and others where I grieve and navigate turmoil and chaos that I witnessed and felt (via my heart space) around colonialist war and the murdering of witches and healers on Turtle Island or N. America. Like many individuals and groups, I have faced complex hardships directly and indirectly. I have been able to enliven and render some of them conscious so as to create more inner peace or new perspectives. Due to difficult and unsupported times as well as facing the deaths of multiple loved ones, I have expressed and continue to express a great deal of anger and grief. I also engage the inevitable uplift, relief or new vantage point taking that can surface through honesty, feeling, and internal or external reparations. I lean into new ideas and experiences around abandonment, safety, nature contact, and regulation. Family dynamics of neglect and emotional or physical abuse that create symptoms of (C)PTSD are unfortunately common and can stem from a variety of social impacts such as war, misogyny, patriarchy, unprocessed grief, colonial taker ways of dominating, survival strategies, trauma responses, dislocation, addiction, dominant ideologies, and more. Though my process with owning traumatic experiences (such as ones I noted) has been incredibly hard, I do it for myself, my family, and my work in the collective world so that we can invite alternative ways of existing and co-existing.
—Jai Reese
