Life as Ceremony
What if everything is perfect as it is?
All the drama and the love, the pain and the glory, the beauty and the monstrosity creating our individual and collective universes.
Is it possible that every thing we name good and bad, right and wrong, is exactly as it is meant to be?
I attempt to write without judgment, particularly that imposed on myself. I wish to allow what comes through without getting caught in thoughts of its reception. If I speak from my heart, those ready to hear this will receive it as they must.
I invite you to feel into your heart, your belly, your body as you read, feeling the words as much in those places as your brain.
The truths that I speak here are mine. They are real for me and the world I see. To know these as truth for yourself might mean understanding on a higher, deeper level, beyond the cerebral.
The words I share may trigger the knowing I describe in yourself. Or they might be mere mental concepts you save for another day to retrieve in another moment.
It may come spontaneously, without apparent cause. Or it could spark with your next breath, in the gaze of your beloved child or partner, or within the embrace of nature’s grandeur.
———
Held by sacred land in the mountains of New South Wales, Australia, I received many blessings this weekend: yet another reminder of the perfection in which we live, and another remembrance of my true nature. Under a near full moon I sat in ceremony with a group of fellow souls. We sought healing, truth, awakening, called by a force far larger than our limited selves.
Infinitely greater is one way to describe it. It’s a concept the mind cannot fathom. They’re only words, which can point towards or speak about Reality but never describe it actually.
Reality is beyond experience, since that requires an experiencer. In the absolute, no thing – no experiencer nor anything else – exists.
Esoteric though this is, I attempt to remain grounded with the words I choose and the meaning I wish to convey.
The essence of ceremony is to acknowledge, remember and realize that which is sacred in our lives. These three words fairly summarize for me the course of this ceremony. A summary is needed given the complexity of the event. To begin approaching a description of the happenings and their meaning requires more words than I can conjure or you can tolerate.
I could never describe the inexplicable. I attempt my humble best to approximate the ultimate into the manifested of this relative realm.
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At sunset over twenty seekers sat cross-legged on cushions. Under the conical teepee we circled a similar arrangement of logs awaiting ignition. Our evening’s host and guide welcomed us into this space. It was created for safe passage into dimensions beyond the three we commonly know, and by which we are entranced.
In turn, each shared intentions for the ceremony, what they wished to learn and to release. I spoke the meaning of my name given by my parents, the one my mother said she gave me. Gregory means watchful, observant, these features central to my personality.
Frustratingly, my observation often carries a wicked passenger: Judgement. I’m good at it, yet it returns badly to me. It separates me from others – my sisters and brothers – bringing pain close behind.
I wished to relinquish this persistent behavior. I also prayed to heal a wound I carry with the feminine. I sought to mend my relationship with it. I acknowledged this polarity in me as divine and sacred, as it has given me all I know.
When the circle returned to our host, she invoked Great Spirit – the sacred masculine – and the Divine Mother, our true guide this evening. Then she called upon the elements and the ancestors of the land, and invited us to do likewise, along with our own ancestors, families, and guides. The fire burned before us as our ignited heart to carry us through our journey, holding our center.
An hour passed with soreness arriving in my back. I sat ready for what was to come, primed to dive deep with the divine.
I received the sacrament with reverence and humility from my host. I gave thanks for its blessings, then drank the medicine resolutely. After we all drank, the melodious guitar accompanying the first service quieted. We sat in silence embodying firmosa. Holding strength in our still, upright torsos indicated to mother spirit that we were worthy of her teaching.
In the next hour, I trained my awareness on the mind’s thoughts and body’s feelings. Staying with the breath, I watched the aches in my back, mustering a detachment that ebbed and flowed with each silent adjustment of my posture.
Hints of visions weaved their way into my field when a bell rang for the second serving. Maintaining balance required extra attention as I stepped to receive my second cup. Our host gazed deeply into my eyes, then filled my cup to the brim, my prayer and resolve even firmer as I swallowed.
We were told this medicine was strong. Still, no warning could prepare me for what was to follow.
The word ‘ineffable’ came to me after my first ceremony three years prior. It was the only description I could summon now, the most intense moments of this experience wholly taking over my consciousness.
Fractal visions appeared clearly in each direction I gazed with eyes closed. My body started twitching. Its movements felt random at first, though a logic soon suffused them. My hands formed mudras at precise points on my body and in space. My chest convulsed with my breath, which took on a life of its own, no longer mine.
It became clear that nothing was in my possession now. Any shred of control I once summoned was now out of reach. There was no room for agency, no choice offered. Surrender was my only option.
I’d been sobbing. Silently at first when I possessed the energy of thought to muffle my cries and not disturb my neighbors. Soon, my firmosa fell limp. I collapsed into a ragged pile, forced to accept whatever came next.
My tears turned audible. My breathing and convulsions intensified in rhythm with a kaleidoscopic wonder of multi-dimensional universes through which I was thrown and tossed within. I lost all sense of direction and orientation. Colors, shapes, and beings exploded in my awareness as I tumbled in an orchestrated chaos, far beyond the reaches of my comprehension both then and now.
Ineffable: an evasive label, but the only one that might approach qualifying those moments.
If there was a lesson from this series of experience, it was a felt confirmation of infinite worlds — and their inhabitants — surpassing the tiny limits of my imagination. They were equally real as the one world I knew and took for ‘reality.’ This came with knowing I had zero control over anything happening here. I was at the utter whim and mercy of whatever was taking me on this ride.
My sobs and shudders verged into screams and kicks. The violence of the experience exhumed feelings and sensations sadly familiar from my past. Deep shame, fear, guilt, sadness, and abandonment colored my crying and convulsing with layers of meaning.
Smells and sounds also contributed to what now felt like an exorcism. The scent of cedar smoke gave way to that of feces and vomit, summoning a reflex to retch. Purging is a central part of this process for many. The urge welled inside, begging for release. Consumed by my maelstrom, I lacked the little focus and energy needed to elbow my way to my bucket inches out of reach.
The vibrations ringing from the incredible musician’s vocal and guitar chords moved in synchrony with the energy pulsing through me. The undercurrent of feelings they evoked helped influence my every move. The winds whipped through the teepee, the structure and space shuddering with vigor, everything within fully alive.
The intensity of my breathing, crying, and flailing grew inexplicably. I wondered if this would ever end. In the midst of the mayhem, I heard the soft, slight voice of our guide at a pristine moment. She placed a tender hand on my shoulder and asked me gently if I could roll onto my back. Her touch provoked a feeling of shame that I needed her help. At the same time, I was grateful it had arrived.
More so, I was thankful to feel and comprehend her presence. The thought of becoming lost in the infinite void had started to become convincing. Through the wails of the winds and the singer’s incantations, I knew to do as she asked.
“Please breathe here,” she directed. She took my hand from my chest, where my focus had been, and placed it on my belly. My visions, shaking and tears persisted as she guided my inhalations into my stomach.
In followed her instruction, my crying leapt to new heights. It was informed by greater depths of shame, fear and other bundles of emotions, which had been hidden and stored deep away from the sight of my consciousness.
She ran eagle feathers over my face and body. With its brush, I felt transported up and through a veil or portal. As she continued waving her wing down my physical being, the wind, the song and my cries shook the room in the crescendo of this movement.
She asked me to open my eyes and look at her. Somehow I complied, managing to pry my lids apart. When I beheld her face, I saw the sacred geometry of her blessed being. She appeared as a soft, solemn and strong angel with a fluorescent, cyborg-like facial structure. She instructed me to continue belly breathing, that this is where I would be held and healed.
When she left me, a fresh pain of abandonment filled my chest. I realized I was on my own again, and would have to navigate this by myself. The fear of this realization quickly transformed into dual knowings. I was fully capable of this next step. And I was always held by my mother, whether the one by birth or the one who just played the role, but especially by the great mother spirit, who had always and would always have me.
Though my experiences in this moment were still categorically intense, I knew from the depths of being that I would survive and thrive with my new understanding, truly a reunion with the Divine Mother.
In the weeks leading to ceremony I prepared my mind and body with a dieta, abstaining from many sense inputs I consume. Putting aside social media, stimulating foods and most other distractions, I turned to old pictures on my computer to reflect on my past. In my time travel via image, I was drawn to the days before my mother’s passing last year.
As I arrived at the picture above, I checked the time and date it was saved. It was the last picture to arrive on my computer the night before I learned my mom was gone.
I felt an eery comfort to find it now, a discovery or connection I hadn’t made until the day before my journey with Madre. I felt complete in the sense it made for me.
Back in the circle around the fire, I was enveloped by the melodies of the icaros. I followed the guidance of my host, and the symptoms of my delirium began to subside. Relief and relative peace replaced the physical and emotional turmoil I had endured. In the calming waters of my awareness, realizations started to flow through my being and into focus.
Gratitude: A gorgeous word that falls short of relaying the rising level of thanksgiving I now made for my past journey, and for the journey of life I was still on.
I held pure gratitude for our host, the earth, nature, the spirits, my guides, my parents, my mom. The thanks spread to the man who had been the ceremony’s lynchpin, bringing together all who sat here. Not only had he facilitated me into this experience, his playing of the handpan now brought sounds reserved for angels. Joy, bliss, peace: the relief of each feeling flowing through me was likewise inexplicable.
With the space these provided my consciousness, I felt a gratitude for the pain. For all I’d experienced just then and the many times before, and for which I’d suffered. I almost certainly will experience pain again, and possibly suffer for it too. On the other side of that pain and suffering lie heavenly qualities of my true consciousness waiting for me to experience here on earth.
I realized that life truly is a gift. The only feeling that could follow from this was that I must be — and that I am — in service to others.
I am here to give myself without attachment, expectation, condition. To give freely, whatever I can. Don’t worry about the silly questions that come with whether this is the right person or the right time to give. Do it when it feels right. If ever I had a purpose in life, this was truly it. It seemed then that my path was to realize this in every moment.
The gratitude train then extended to my body. It was given to me as my vehicle of and for experience. Yes, many of them are difficult and painful. But that is what it is built for, to experience it so that we can learn from it.
What is the pain teaching us? What is our body speaking to us? There are many lessons we can learn from the ‘pain teacher,’ as Paul Chek calls it. We suffer here so that we can awaken from that suffering and know it isn’t real. Suffering is an illusion. Our true nature is beyond the body’s pain and the mind’s suffering.
I had been thrown off the tiny ship of my consciousness into the roiling ocean of the infinite. Just a swiftly, I was back aboard its deck, weary and weak. With tears drying on my cheeks, I gradually gained my sea legs again.
I listened to the other sounds around me, mostly of people purging, burping, a fart over there. With each noticing of the sounds around the room, a thought, “You’re right,” followed swiftly after.
Each person in that room was right, was correct. This was fact, indisputable, the understanding lodged firmly in my body now.
You might question how that can be, or my sanity (if you haven’t already). Let me attempt to explain.
All that we perceive, experience, and know — and all that we don’t or that we haven’t yet — comes from the same, single source. The Source is silent emptiness. It is divine, The Divine. The Truth. The Only Thing That Is Real. That Which Cannot Be Simpler.
Everything that manifests and is created from that space is simply an aspect of that truth, even if it isn't the whole of that truth. Still, that which came from The Source, which is correct and true, can be nothing but the same, if only on a relative level. As Alexander Pope says, “Whatever is, is right”
In the totality of creation, nothing is wrong; It cannot be anything but right. Everything is happening because it must.
As I learned in that room, everyone has a right to exist and to express themselves as they wish. Everything and everyone is ALL RIGHT. It is alright. And so I realized once more: Everything is going to be alright.
Two people came into my awareness then. The first was Matthew McConoughy and his famous catch-phrase, “Alright, alright, alright.” I had a huge giggle fit at the genius of the cosmic joker.
The second was my roommate, Carline. In the past weeks she had been learning a Bob Marley song on the ukulele. Just beginning on the strings, she would strum one chord over and over, the same YouTube tutorial on repeat to guide her. I love Carline and that song, yet my small mind repeatedly judged her for not learning it already, and for subjecting my ears to that repetition.
It was all the more ironic and fitting that she arrived in my mind that night. I knew then that she too was exactly right as she was. Not just to exercise her right to learn, to express, to be. The song she had been practicing was meant for me.
The next morning, I shared my experience in the sweat lodge with everyone. I finished by singing that sweet song of melodies pure and true as my final message to them (and you-hoo-hoo):
“Don’t worry about a thing, cause every little thing is gonna be alright.”
The circle didn’t let me finish the second line as they joined in for a rousing round of “Three Little Birds.” When that song came to me in ceremony, I laughed even harder. I had to give it up: the Divine is the ultimate comedian.
The Divine is also the ultimate judge. Judgement persisted in my mind before ceremony, a little less so after, ever more obvious now. I have been prolific at it.
And yet it is meaningless. I am not qualified to judge, nor is anyone else. There is only one judge. I may be able to discern, but not judge. Neither I nor anyone else has the right to judge another aside from the one maker.
In the sweat lodge, a grandmother – in the flesh – completed our sharing circle. During her turn, she urged us to forgive our loved ones who we believe have wronged us and whom we shun, block, turn from, hold grudges against, judge. She paraphrased Pope, for error is a part of humanness, forgiveness is divine. She asked us to picture how we would feel if that person was gone the next day. I thought of my mom immediately and cried for as long as this blessed woman spoke.
I also thought of the tarot card I drew for guidance before I drove to the ceremony. It was the four of crystals, representing Logic. I was perplexed as to why I would get this card. Since I began down a consciously introspective path, my logical, thinking mind is what I’ve tried to put down, quiet and move away from. The desire to seek reason and causation and make sense prevents my true perception of what is: Truth.
I realized in the end of ceremony that the true logic of the universe, vast and infinite as it is, lays beyond our small, human minds. There exists a greater logic and order, even if we will never be able to make sense of it ourselves.
Our host spoke about polarity in the sweat lodge just before my turn to share. Like at the start of the ceremony the prior evening, she reminded us that the light and the dark spring from the same source. My journey was the worst-best moment of my life, or the best-worst. The brightness and technicolor brilliance mixed with the depths of terror, shame, fear, guilt, sadness, all then juxtaposed with the warmth of a mother’s love, care, and gentleness.
All of it is equal and opposite and inextricably part of the same: the one source of all. We are here to experience each pole so that we can know each is not whole without the other, and so that they can point us to the truth of our reality, our true nature of who or what we are, and what we are not.
Closing our weekend, our host asked us before exiting the sweat to keep a sacred silence for ten minutes. She found in these times that some of the most profound lessons might come through.
I felt the truth of this viscerally. Out of the soggy heat of the lodge into the cool cloudy afternoon, I saw with new eyes that the earth is truly alive. Her components are infinite and each is integral to the other.
The earth speaks to us. Can we hear? After the sweat, I started listening to her language afresh.
I plunged into the pond, awakened by the brace of the cold water, inhaling deeply to calm my breath, swimming through silky green reeds caressing me as a thousand heavenly fingers, emerging on the shore as if taking my first steps, my sister Georgia pointing to the breathtaking beauty of misty clouds morphing between the mountains, fairy-like bugs floating up as the rain melted down upon us and the mossy grass underneath, thunder mumbling quietly as I beheld my gray, pruned hands appearing like they’d aged 40 years, breathing it all in with my sister Abi silently by my side, two grateful beings living the same moment together on this blessed green and blue planet.
We are all passengers on this spaceship hurtling through the infinite universes. I have no control as this is not ‘my’ life. I am utterly insignificant, and can be snuffed like a candle in a puff. The opposite can be misperceived as true at times, but I see how the negation of this is more accurate in a greater sense.
I am simply a guest on this planet, taken for a ride through life, with life, for Life. It would do us all well to treat her well, with the reverence she deserves for the abundant gifts she freely bestows upon us.
I learned from this weekend that Every Thing is sacred. Modifying Einstein, either nothing is a miracle or everything is. I know which one it is for me.
Every action I take, every moment I get to live, every breath I get to take is sacred. It is my duty to remember that spirit is always around me and within me.
———
I can still smell the smoke of the cedar fire in the garments I wore during ceremony. I feel bittersweet as the scent fades slowly, just as the memories it summons of those magical moments become more etheric, less tangible in my perceptual grasp.
The truths I speak about here flow from the absolute. Still, I remain here, embodied in the relative, the world of polarity. There is action to be taken here, wrongs to be righted, work to be done.
Or so I think. The world will never be at peace until I arrive there myself. How can I contribute to healing conflict when there remains so much of it within my mind? I will try to do my best, for myself and others. I feel the highest measure of my contribution will come when I am one with what all that is and not caught up in an illusion of what is not.
I don’t exist in a state of absolute bliss, permanent peace … yet. My work remains to still my mind so I can maintain my connection with the world of spirit that remains just beyond my material senses. I know this is part of the experience of life, forgetting and remembering my true nature, again and again.
Until I see life as a ceremony in all its moments, giving its gifts with every blow of breath and breeze, I have work to do.
The process will continue, that is until it no longer serves me. Then I will have put all the pieces of my puzzle back together. Who’s to say whether I’ll break it all down and start again?
All I know is this moment, what I sense outside me, and what I feel within me. That is enough to know the Love that always exists in me, as me, and without me.
