The Journey of Spiritual Awakening
High in the Andes Mountains of Peru I have found great healing and a space to embody and share the warrior spirit with others. I served in the Marine Corps Reserves for six years and the National Guard for two years, where I deployed with an airborne infantry unit to Afghanistan. After this deployment I was in a spiritual crisis, I had PTSD symptoms and a total lack of direction. This feeling of lack of purpose led me to Peru.
My first visit in 2014 coincided with my first experience with Ayahuasca in the jungle. This desperate search for healing changed the whole course of my life. Looking back, there seem to be so many stories and threads that led me to new places and experiences. The suffering I felt led me on a quest for my own healing, that was nothing like I had ever experienced before. At times I was living in the jungle, at other times I was hiking the Andes mountains, searching to find myself and find my way. Only now, when I look back do I truly appreciate what I went through.
These journeys of healing were not what people often think. In many ways it led to more torment, more suffering, more pain. But this pain was like a cleansing fire burning away the trauma and what I would call “dark energy” that accumulated inside of me. These were my own shadows, my own failures and my own need to accept myself and face myself. I think this is where the power of shamanism lies. It lies in the power to burn away what does not serve you so that only the TRUE YOU remains.
Everyone experiences shamanism in a different way. There is a depth that has no bottom, no end. Sometimes people can get lost in it. For me, it opened a whole new realm of the universe and my own nature. Soul, awe, universe, these were no longer just words but ideas that could be felt at the deepest level.
From these experiences, I realized that the universe as I previously understood it was completely different. I felt this way of healing and understanding was completely alien to Western Medicine and current Western perceptions of reality but somehow familiar to a deeper level of my being. Now I know that shamanism has always been the most ancient form of spirituality and natural to all peoples throughout the world.
These profound journeys then led and inspired me to create our own style of retreats. Since my first experience with Ayahuasca ten years ago, the Ayahuasca space has changed dramatically. Ayahuasca has become a healing tourism industry and much of the old feel and tradition has faded as it has grown in popularity through American pop culture. Ayahuasca has become a consumer product and though many people still receive great benefits from it, I think the original soul of the medicine was being tarnished. I felt called to be one of those who want to bring Ayahuasca back to its roots and traditional style.
This led me to create our own retreats along with a great team beside me. Our style of retreat stands opposed to the “New Age” style that seems to infect almost everything in the modern world. I wanted to bring people back to that “numinous” experience of Ayahuasca and let the experience speak for itself without the distraction of labels and “modern understanding.” The truth is, that this medicine will challenge you and only though challenge is growth. This process is an initiation similar to the military or boot camp. These challenges are there to make us stronger.
We decided to call our retreat Tiwaz Awakening. Tiwaz is the Germanic rune for the warrior. It stands in contrast to all those who believe that spirituality has to look a certain way, that people have to dress in all white and speak in tropes of “love and light”. In fact, many of the great religions have been warrior religions and this includes the pre-Christian European religions. For those who understand Archetypes, the collective unconscious, and morphogenetic resonance, it becomes apparent that every people has what has been called a “folk soul” and this soul needs nourishing. This includes other indigenous cultures but European descendants as well, who I would argue are the most disconnected with their indigenous spirituality.
To look at archetypes (or soul images) is often to look at things that are uncomfortable. In the modern spiritual space the idea of any kind of violence is often met with instant rejection. But the truth is that we live in a physical plane of existence and violence is part of this existence. The only question is whether a person attempts to use this violence in an aligned way. To do this is to address these archetypes, these sides of our soul. If unaddressed, these sides of ourselves will likely turn into a “shadow aspect”, an unhealthy integration of a true part of ourselves.
No matter how much modernism tries to deny it, the warrior is an Archetype and is part of who we are. It is only by approaching this Archetype in a healthy way that we can integrate its most positive forms. To deny its existence, is to create a shadow aspect. At Tiwaz Awakening we approach the warrior head on and integrate these themes of the warrior as a core value of our retreat.
Our retreats are different. Yes, we have plant medicines but what we offer is more than that, a holistic integral approach with other modalities. One of these is Jiu Jitsu, this martial art has been life changing for me. I firmly believe that Jiu Jitsu can be as powerful of a medicine as any other plant medicine. Everyday in Jiu Jitsu you test yourself and find out who you are.
Alongside this, we have adventure hiking in our retreats. These are not just hikes but pilgrimages that take us high into the Andes Mountains, to places and communities that few tourists go to. It is part of our motto that “life is a ceremony”, healing and medicine is all around you. For us this means taking what we learned in the Ayahuasca space out into the real world and to begin embodying those lessons.
Beyond hiking and Jiu Jitsu, we also bring neuroscience into our retreats. I have been working with neurofeedback and QEEG brain mapping for over ten years. These modalities have brought me both great insight and great healing. When I first received a QEEG brain map I was blown away about what this technology could see in my head. I could see the pattern for PTSD in my brain waves and then I was told I could train this pattern away and make my brain more healthy. This was mind blowing to me. I started reading every book that I could on this technology. As I read more I started to realize that there are many spiritual implications to this technology. Besides just healing I realized that we could train spiritual states and train human beings to reach new levels of peak experience and higher levels of consciousness. This is what inspired me to bring this technology into the plant medicine space.
With this technology we can see the changes in the brain during a plant medicine retreat. We take a pre and post brain map and this allows our guests to see in vivid detail how the brain is moving in a healthy direction and how trauma is being lifted. This experience can be very validating to that all too skeptical Western mind. In addition, we do a couple neurofeedback training sessions in the plant medicine retreat and offer a home training neurofeedback device to the client when they return to the States. Both the plant medicines and this technology increase the neuroplasticity in the brain and this neuroplasticity allows for novel solutions and healing. When both are combined we can greatly increase the rate of neuroplasticity in a profound way. In turn, this work allows each of our guests to work towards their peak human potential using both ancient practices and modern technology.
I had a vision many years ago to make a retreat that I would enjoy and that other veterans would enjoy as well. I like to think that our retreat attracts “adventurers of the soul”, those people looking to have a plant medicine experience that is out of the ordinary. I often think how the modern world and especially American culture has not integrated the war fighter back into the culture. We never had a true cultural expression of what going to war means and what the War on Terror was all about. There have been no endings, no victory parades, and little sense of what was accomplished. After the World Wars, there was a great sense of ending, of completion. Vietnam also had completion and this war created a deep soul searching in the American people and the mass culture as could be seen about the outpouring of books and movies trying to understand what the war was all about. Right now, in the War on Terror, we are in a world of grey. We have not come to terms with that war as a culture. Now, I firmly believe that it is time that veterans write their story. Our healing will be found in sharing our stories. Our story. I believe that what we offer at Tiwaz Awakening is part of that healing.