On Pain, Vice, Festival, and Life
What if pain is beautiful?
Dear Family,
Here I sit.
Sipping a cacao-infused coffee of my own making—with honey and hazelnut butter.
Back in Germany after attending Medicine Festival in the UK last weekend.
It’s been an interesting few weeks.
Vice Management
One month ago, I experienced a resurgence of an old poker addiction, which also re-sparked a long-time social-media addiction. Online poker and social media easily go hand-in-hand for me.
This poker phase lasted about ~2.5 weeks before I cut it off. Thanks to a potent 1:1 breathwork ceremony a friend gifted to me, plus a men’s circle I led on that day, the pattern was disrupted somewhat. When I smoked cannabis that evening with the intention to play some poker, I received strong guidance from the plants + my heart to close the laptop and take a hot bath.
In that bath, I was shown how some ‘darker entities’ were using poker and social media to hook into my system and siphon excessive quantities of my life-force energy, drawing me into misalignment.
So, I took a step back.
When it comes to masterfully dancing with vices, the question is always:
Are you using it, or is it using you?
It’s now been about 15 days since I played poker, and 13 days since I used the major social media sites that are sticky for me (Twitter, IG, FB).
This has been a good break. I feel ‘cleaned out.’ The quality of my consciousness and embodied presence has distinctly improved.
I’m probably going to experiment with giving myself one day per week to play online poker—this mysterious, enchanting, many-layered game I love—and see if I can find a balance that feels healthy. I’ll also likely be playing some in-person poker soon, as we’re traveling to the USA in early September to visit my family, and my Iowa hometown has a local group that plays regularly.
[This was written two days ago. Today I am playing some online poker for the first time in 17 days (+ imbibing some Santa Maria) and it is feeling like some well-deserved fun.]
Instead of spending so much time online, I’ve been doing a lot more reading, tearing through the classic sci-fi novel Dune, while also reading some incredible books of Christian mysticism—New Seeds of Contemplation by Thomas Merton and The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis.
In other vice-management-related news, I’m happy to share that I’m about ~200 days into my 1 year without alcohol, and have held strong so far, refraining from even a single sip of an alcoholic beverage. I’ve also gone about 1 year without looking at porn, with no end in sight on that one. And I’m overall managing to work with coffee and cannabis quite skillfully in recent months, intentionally enjoying each of these about ~2 times per week or so, which feels supportive.
Medicine Festival: An Odyssey
As mentioned, my family also went to Medicine Festival in the UK this past weekend, driving all the way from Germany with our 2-year-old daughter. This proved to be quite an intense and initiatory journey.
The festival was beautiful in many ways—and a great opportunity for further digital-disconnection, nature-reconnection, in-person men’s work, family time, and sauna relaxation—yet it was also greatly challenging at times. The festival triggered the old 20-something ‘Peter Pan’ version of me who just wants to ‘fly free,’ yet my responsibilities as a father inevitably pulled in a different duty-based direction, thereby leading to some frustration and dissonance.
The dissonance culminated on the final day of the festival, wherein I found myself experiencing a lot of pain—as well as feelings of not-enough-ness. I was feeling low and down on myself—feeling like, “Man, I’ve done so much work on myself for so many years, and I try so hard, and it just feels like it’s not enough. Despite all this work I’ve done, here I am being irritable at this festival, unable to just be present, open-hearted, and have fun with my family.”
I ended up feeling guided to undertake a solo entheogenic ceremony later that day, and in that ceremony things got even more intense. I found myself crying in my tent, feeling a lot of pain, then on hands and knees dry-heaving in the grass behind the tent. Tanja and Lila came to the tent at one point and found me crying there, yet they weren’t really able to console me—rather, I was triggered further and continued to close down. Tanja was concerned for me, yet we decided it would be best for them to leave me alone to work through what was coming up. Having experienced many difficult medicine journeys, I assured her I’d be okay.
Soon after they left, I felt a strong impulse to start writing. That’s when I wrote ‘Diary of a Sick Man’—an acidic, impassioned, heartfelt, purgative rant that was definitely an edge for me to publish a few days later.
The words came easily. I wrote feverishly on my phone until it died, then wrote the rest in my journal. I wrote for probably 90 minutes, if I had to guess.
After writing, I started to feel better. Renewed. The writing was like the final layer of the purge. I just had to let it all out. Healing mantras come to mind now: “Feel it to heal it.” “What’s coming, is going.”: That is, what was coming up, was coming up to be felt and released.
After writing, I went to the ‘Hello Sunshine’ sauna area—a utopian little nook within the festival that was sorta like a hippie nudist colony. There I sat by the fire, bare feet on grassy Earth, drumming my bongo, rapping, singing, dancing. We got a drum circle going, others joined in the dancing and rapping and singing, and it was greatly uplifting and rejuvenating for me. I then shared a wonderful conversation with a new friend, discussing the history of Paganism and Christianity in Europe, the potential for healing the divide between these traditions, the beauty of church and cathedral architecture, and the nature of God.
The rest of the night blossomed beautifully as I journeyed around to a couple other stages to join in further festivities of people drumming, dancing, singing, rapping, and playing music together. My heart was touched as I shared smiles of pure child-like joy with total ‘strangers,’ and when I witnessed an indigenous teenage boy playing the guitar and singing, leading a giant song circle where everyone was following his lead, clearly connecting deeply to the heart; I joined in and was deeply moved. All in all I danced and sang and rapped my heart out that night, and the evening served as a kind of alchemical apotheosis—seizing the intensity of pain I’d experienced earlier that day and ‘flipping’ the energy into an intensity of great joy, liberation, and release.
“In the basement of hell, there is a trapdoor that leads straight to Heaven.”
I began to feel like the entire festival experience had been masterfully designed by God to trigger in me exactly what needed to be triggered, so I could feel it and let it burn me down and ultimately release it, rising phoenix-like from the ashes to end the festival in a Dionysian rite of pure ecstatic celebration.
I wanna be careful here, though, as I don’t want to make it sound like the purpose of my pain was simply to unwind itself, and to allow me to feel via contrast the truly remarkable joy of total embodied presence-flow-immersion in the musical festivities.
It’s easy to tell stories like this about our pain. Stories that reduce the pain to an inconvenient obstacle that just needs to be cleared. A ‘drag’ of a thing that is only there because without contrast, we would not recognize the lusciousness of joy.
It’s too easy to tell ‘spiritual’ stories like this—stories that subtly frame our pain as something best gotten rid of as rapidly as possible; something that is only there to add shadow in order to make the primary colors really *pop*.
What if there’s something deeper here, though?
What if pain, too, is beautiful?
What if pain, too, is poetry?
What if pain, too, is medicine?
What if pain is like the creaking of an old tree—a natural testament to our endless gnarled growth?
How do we hold our pain?
Can we learn to be with our pain as an honorable burden we have been selected to carry?
A burden which is designed to crack us open, tenderize us, humble us, and add gradual spice and depth to the bubbling curry of our being-ness?
Is our pain really even ours?
How much of it is ours?
How much of it is rather our ancestors’ unprocessed grief, passed down to us so that we could help to feel and carry and unwind that which was too much for our forefathers to bear?
How much of our pain is like patterns of weather, rippling through the collective emotion-body—not really personal, but more like a storm we’re all connected to?
In what ways might our connection to the collective pain-storm be absolutely indispensable, if we wish to remain truly grounded and attuned to what is actually happening—on physical as well as subtle psycho-emotional-spiritual-energetic levels—on this Earth, during this Time of Great Transition?
What if pain is the greatest teacher?
What if nothing strengthens us so much as pain?
What if nothing clarifies our purpose so much as pain?
What if we were to stop trying to philosophically erase or justify our pain, and instead simply trust the ache?
What if we just let the pain be there—and even welcomed it to the table?
What mysteries might our pain reveal to us, if we treated it as an old friend, or a wise grandmother?
What secret riddles reside in the pains of this Earth?
If pain itself could talk, what would it say?
These questions gesture toward something.
A different way of relating to our pain.
It is immensely difficult for me to gradually learn to relate differently to my pain.
My tendency is to be ashamed that I am in pain, and to try to make it go away, and to feel that, “I should have learned how to transcend or heal this by now.”
Yet something deeper is knocking on my door…
I hear it, tap-tap-tap-ing, steadily and softly, in the night…
Pain as honor.
Pain as teacher.
Pain as beauty.
Pain as medicine.
Pain as aliveness.
Pain as poetry.
Pain as divinely purifying fire—trustworthy as it flares and recedes.
Pain as warrior initiation.
Pain as the creaking of this old tree-body.
I do not want to over-glorify pain, yet I also do not want to demonize it.
Pain, too, is Grace.
Pain trains the faithful.
Amen.
God bless you and yours all the days of your life.
Love,
J
P.S. If you’ve missed it, my next in-person retreat is coming up in December, at Kumankaya Healing Center in Mexico…
Wild Freedom: An Ayahuasca & Bufo Retreat to Reconnect to Your Inner Child and to God’s Grace
The ‘early bird’ deadline for my upcoming retreat—Wild Freedom—is coming up at the end of August.
If you are ready to get real with yourself and life on a new level…
If you are ready to work with ayahuasca and Bufo to heal, return to wholeness, and discover a new intimacy with God…
If you are ready to reconnect to your Inner Child and Wild Animal…
If you are ready to rejuvenate, revitalize, and re-enchant your existence…
If you are ready to experience Kumankaya—a truly legendary shamanic oasis in the jungles of Mexico, where benevolent shamanic mystics offer deep spiritual healing…
If you are ready to experience my work in person—as well as numinous sound healings that CoryaYo and I will be weaving throughout the retreat and ceremonies…
I deeply encourage you to step through the portal and join us December 10th - 16th, 2023, in the Mayan Jungle of Mexico:
The ‘early bird’ all-inclusive price for everything (once you arrive in Mexico) is $2,400. On September 1st, it goes up to $2,700. Let me know you are interested before September 1st to secure the ‘early bird’ rate.
I design ‘early bird’ pricing structures like this because it is far more organizationally smooth for me to design retreats when people join early. There are also partial scholarships available if someone feels a very strong call. Please reach out if you feel the spark.
Kumankaya retreats are always a holy and unforgettable experience.
Brotherhood & True Creation Accelerator
On a final note, there is space available in Brothers of the Ever Innocent Heart, as well as True Creation Accelerator.
These are both ongoing online programs that I lead. The first is a brotherhood & leadership training program for men. The second is an accelerator & leadership training platform for creators. Both are beautiful tribes of beings doing gorgeous, deep inner work together. I love these family spaces we’ve cultivated, and I love the consistently profound healing, education, illumination, and transformation that takes place in these spaces.
If you know it is time to dive deeper into the Real Work of giving your life over to God’s Love and Truth, I full-heartedly recommend to join us:
With Love,
J
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Embrace the pain of
the journey as gift to be
snared along the way. - paje foster
Namaste brother. I see you & you are shining brightly. Listen to the plants! 🙏❤️✌️