My Sanango Diet.

As promised, it's time to tell you how my Sanango diet went. Every night at 3 AM I would be awoken from my slumber, and after Luco blessed it, given the Sanango brew to painfully gulp down. The taste is absolutely horrible, and much much worse than the taste of Ayahuasca. And if that was not bad enough, the Sanango root burns your throat worse than anything you imagine. After I drank the brew I was permitted to fall back asleep only to wake up an hour later and violently vomit into the bucket strategically placed next to my bed. In addition, it burned even worse coming back up then it did coming down. After vomiting, I would then usually proceed to sit on the toilet for a while and try to tame the frequent bouts of explosive diarrhoea (I am sorry if you are eating breakfast while reading this, but I am strictly trying to paint an accurate picture of what occured). By this point the Sanango has worked its way into my system and my muscles became heavily sedated, making it difficult to move around. I would spend the next few hours laying there and concentrating on how the Sanango was affecting my energy and central nervous system. My body would become extremely hot, and a pins and needles sensation would cover my entire body. Occasionally through out the day I would get these sharp jolts of energy that would shoot to one hand, or my leg would just start tweaking out. This sounds kind of scary, but I welcomed the Sanango and surrendered to it completely so that it could work its magic. After a week of minimal sleep, tons of purging, and total isolation, I was finished. Over the week something had definately shifted within me, a certainty about my place on this journey and in this universe came over me. Each day of the diet, that certainty seemed to deepen and mature. It was not something I could clearly define, but rather an internal experience that transcended reason, possesing impeccable clarity. With all the alone time I had during the diet, a lot of introspection and value judgements seemed inevitable. So for the rest of this post I would like to share with you some of the thoughts and realizations I arrived at during the week. It is amazing how fast and hard your mind comes at you when you stop distracting yourself with things like computers, ipods, and social interaction, and really listen to what it has to say. Well, going into the diet I was on cloud nine. I had six very profound Ayahuasca ceremonies under my belt, and I admittedly had fallen into the trap of believing that I could kick back because the universe will unfold as it should. This is true, and as I said in an earlier post, that when you stive for something with all of your heart, the universe, fate, whatever you want to call it, helps us onward. Beforehand I took this as our lives being left completely to divine intervention. However, this is not the case. Yes, the universe will help you onward, for example, by bringing someone into your life that can guide you, or that is relevant to your goal, but make no mistake about it, no one gets help in the general meaning of the word. As I lay there in my bed I realized this truth and it was inescapable. But I also realized that if everyone gave help, everyone would receive it too. This brings me back to a reoccuring theme in this blog; That life is not a race, its purpose isn't to try the impossible feet of putting yourself above another person (this is simply an illusion we create), but rather to live side by side and help each other along. Everyone one day will realize the same fate, death. And life and death will always complement one another for eternity. Imagine if we focused all that energy we put into ourselves into helping others, and the drastically different world this would be. Just take a step back and look at how ridiculously skewed our idea of life is today. We kill ourselves at our jobs trying to accumulate enough material wealth to build and decorate the posh prison cells we call homes, to insulate ourselves from the indifference of the world. Another tangent I would like to go off on now is one on happiness. It is so engrained within our culture that happiness is something we don't currently have, that is something that needs to be attained though various channels such as shopping, or finding love etc. Our own constitution even proclaims a right "to the pursuit of happiness." I would like to end all that nonsense right here and now. Happiness is within each and everyone of us right now and always will be. Do not look for peace and happiness outside yourself for you will not find it. It is up to us to let go of the fear in our lives that we so dearly cherish and accept the happiness into our lives. Fear is like a dark cloud that blocks the light. The cloud lifts, and the light that was ALWAYS there shines bright. Think back to the concept of death. No one knows when it will come for you, so be happy today.

"Things are never bad; it's the way you think about them."
- Epictetus