Just Being

On learning to be where you already are

Just about a year ago, I drank ayahuasca for the first and only time.

I went in with expectations, which is perhaps the most human thing I could have done. I thought I would see visions of the jungle — snakes, jaguars, dense forest pressing in from every direction. I thought I would receive the kind of profound, cinematic revelation I had been honored to receive with psilocybin — the kind that had previously cracked my life open and led me to make significant changes. Location. Relationships. Work. Purpose. I had lived those revelations fully and they had remade me.

So I buckled my seatbelt. I was ready for whatever this medicine brought.

What it brought was nothing like what I expected. No visions. No drama. No intensity. No jungle. No serpents uncoiling in the dark.

The medicine brought me right back into the room.

Credit to Arkawa whose beautiful music can be heard leading into each Goddess in Training podcast episode

The ordinary room where I sat with mostly strangers, on an ordinary night, breathing the same air. And something happened that I am still finding words for: I knew them. Not in the way you know someone after years of shared history, but in a way that went underneath all of that. I knew them at the cellular level. I felt the thread connecting us — not constructed, not earned, just there, the way gravity is there. Undeniable. Structural.

I have not seen most of them since that night. And I know, without any uncertainty, that they are always with me.

The Quiet

I have been quiet here on Substack. Quieter on all the corners of the internet where I usually make my presence known.

I want to be honest about why, because honesty is what this space has always been built on and I am not willing to trade that now.

It is not because life is moving too fast. It is not because I am too busy, though my life is genuinely full in ways that feel like grace rather than overwhelm. It is not because I have run out of things to say.

I think — I am almost certain — that I have been integrating.

A year of it, quietly, mostly without realizing that is what was happening. The message ayahuasca gave me was not dramatic enough to recognize immediately as a message. It did not arrive with the weight of revelation. It arrived as the most ordinary thing in the world:

Just be. Just connect. That is it. That is all of it.

I have spent years — beautifully, necessarily, with my whole self — seeking. Documenting the search in real time, here, for anyone who wanted to walk alongside it. Calling things in. Doing the inner work. Moving through dissolution and emergence and dissolution again. Writing essays about thresholds while standing on them.

And the medicine sat me back down in a room full of people and said: you are already here. This is it. The connection you have been reaching toward is not somewhere else. It is right beside you.

A Note on Part V

I have sat down to write the final essay in my series Receiving Love: A Field Guide to Partnership That Doesn’t Cost You Yourself more times than I can count. Each draft has felt wrong in a way I couldn’t name until recently.

I think it felt wrong because I was trying to write an ending to a story I am still living. Trying to make meaning of something that is still making itself. Trying to arrive at the conclusion before the conclusion has finished forming.

I also sit down to read the essays you all pour your hearts and souls into — the ones that land in my inbox and pull me into your worlds — and I find myself getting gently, firmly pulled away from the screen. Back into the room. Back into the present. Back into the people who are right beside me.

That pull is not avoidance. I recognize avoidance; this is not it. It is something more like obedience. The medicine taught me to follow it.

What I Know Right Now

I know that Part V is coming. I can feel its shape without yet seeing its edges.

I know that the quiet has been productive in ways that don’t look like productivity — that something has been settling and integrating and becoming solid enough to stand on.

And I know that right now, in this moment, I am practicing the only thing ayahuasca asked of me:

Being. Connecting. Trusting that the room I am already in is exactly the room I need to be in.

I’ll be back soon. Until then — thank you for being here, even in the quiet.

A Goddess for This Moment

As I settle into the stillness, I call in Kali Ma — she who is so fully present that past and future dissolve in her presence.

She is known as the destroyer. What she destroys, I am learning, is the illusion that we need to be anywhere other than where we are.

She does not seek. She does not reach. She stands, fully, in the only moment that has ever existed.

May we stop moving long enough to feel what is already here. May we trust the room we are already sitting in. May we recognize that this — exactly this — is enough.

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