My daughter Lila’s 1st birthday was five days ago.
Family and friends joined us for a sweet celebration involving champagne (for the adults 😅) and cake and lots of gifts for our dear Lila.
Lila loved her many new toys, and as always it was heart-warming to watch her play and interact with everyone.
She continues to be our great teacher—ever radiant and innocent, even when she’s hootin’ and howlin’ and hollerin’.
Fatherhood continues to be the most precious gift and most intense initiation of my life. It is fascinating how it is simultaneously such an inspiring joy and such a challenging death of old identities.
It is a potent medicine ceremony, day in, day out. Similar to ayahuasca, if you open yourself to it, it will clean you out and kick your ass in ways you didn’t know you needed, all while cracking your heart open to Divinity and summoning forth a truer incarnation of you.
A few days ago we flew to England as a family to attend Medicine Festival with a bunch of friends. This proved to be a fantastic decision, as the festival had a wonderfully pure communal vibe and really felt like a family affair.
It was a truly nourishing, healing, reconnecting, rejuvenating experience that left our hearts feeling warm and full.
My three biggest takeaways from the festival were:
Performing feels amazing. I was able to perform some raps two nights in a row at an open mic jam for about ~50+ people, and it was a beautiful milestone for me. I also sang and rapped for smaller circles of people a number of times at the festival. I’ve performed a fair number of times before, but these moments felt really pure and special. I’ve recently been setting the intention to rock more stages as an artist and speaker in the coming times, so this felt like a perfect further confirmation and affirmation of my destiny as an MC.
Physical community must be a big part of my life moving forward. Whether this ends up being in a city or in nature or in multiple bases globally, it must be a priority. I’ve sensed this for a long while, but the festival further affirmed it. My soul is aching for close in-person friendships and ongoing embeddedness in a (chosen) family / community. Let me know if you have ideas for where we should consider living. (Azores turned out to be an initiatory four-month portal for us, not a long-term base, if you haven’t heard.)
Entheogenic medicine is a Divine gift. I knew this already of course, but it was reaffirmed in splendid fashion at this festival. I had one of the most magical psychedelic journeys of my life on Saturday. I spent a lot of time meditating on a bass-heavy dance floor and found myself bathed in God’s love, traveling multi-dimensionally, communing with spirit-beings, gazing upon sparkling otherworldly mandalas, and being profoundly reminded of our limitless power to dream whatever dream we wish to dream, in this lifetime and beyond.
Medicine Festival + some family time in London were truly juicy, and...
I’m finding my flow again.
Regaining momentum.
Even though I am tired and have a cold right now, I feel vastly better than 2-3 months ago when I was right in the thick of a ‘dark night of the soul.’
In two weeks I’ll be heading to the good ol’ US of A to officiate the wedding of my beloved sister and sister-in-law, Anna and Alana. I’ll be in Iowa September ~9th - 26th and would love to see family and old friends — hit me up.
A couple weeks after that, Tanja, Lila, and I will be heading back to Mexico. We haven’t been there since Lila was still in her mama’s belly.
We intend to be in the Mexico City / Tepoztlán area for some weeks to explore and attend a dear friend’s wedding…
Then after that we’ll fly down to the Tulum area on the Yucatan, where something special will be happening in November…
As you may have heard…
Tanja and I are hosting two plant medicine retreats at a sanctuary that is dear to our hearts—a jungle oasis called Kumankaya, created by our dear friends, Remi and Ashley Delaune.
Tanja is hosting a retreat for visionary women called Women Rising.
And I am hosting a retreat for sincere truth-seekers called Presence of God.
On my retreat, we will be diving deep with both ayahuasca and Bufo alvarius—two of the most healing, awakening, and empowering medicines on the planet.
It’s not possible for me to express in words what I have received through working with these entheogenic teachers. In short, they have brought me face to face with the infinite loving intelligence of Divinity.
My life can never be the same after these experiences. Vast quantities of shame and self-loathing were simply washed out of me. My trust in Life increased exponentially. My sense of the power, love, resources, and possibilities available to me and to us all, expanded to infinity.
If you feel a spark to join us for one or both of these retreats, reply and let me know, or apply here.
As I look to the future, I’m feeling increasingly excited about what’s to come.
There are still some pulses of anxiety and anger here and there—echoes of the dark night I recently traversed.
I feel more and more spacious, though—more able to simply abide as the vastness that isn’t bothered by the looping dance of the funny little monkey mind.
I also feel more grounded, humble, embodied, and integrated as the dark-light wholeness of what I am. There was a lot of much-needed medicine for me in the recent dark night that I went through—and for that I am grateful.
Medicine Festival reinvigorated my feeling that a new paradigm is indeed being born at the edges on this planet. The furnace of these archetypal times—these times of death and rebirth on a grand scale—is forging many of us into the warriors of love we came here to be.
A New Earth is calling, beckoning, whispering to us…
“Make of your entire world
a work of
art.
A playground of
beauty
and
quality,
harmonized
with Gaia.
Birth a world in which
all are
free
to feel
the
orgasmic bliss
of
being what they
truly
are.”
Wholeness, Freedom, Power, Love,
Jordan
www.jordanbates.life