Visionary Hearts exists to love and serve all of our relations through reverent Earth honoring ceremonies and heart-centered mentorship. I have started this blog in order to reach out to you and to create as much clarity and precision for the medicine and wisdom transmission as possible for our Visionary Hearts offerings.
“Call it by its true name,” is a wisdom teaching that I first learned from our dear Sik-Sika Blackfeet Elder Duncan Grady, which is also the name of a beautiful Thich Nhat Hanh Poem (which I have included at the end of this article.) Let me explain my understanding of this profound teaching.
So much of the stress and confusion in our world is due to living within unconscious layers of un-truth. In modern psychology this is called “cognitive dissonance.” I see that as individuals within our culture, we all are living in varying degrees of cognitive dissonance. I believe that we each have unique thresholds for the internal stress caused through living at odds with our intrinsic core values and authentic experience of life (i.e. believing more in the loud voices around you than from your own lived experience.)
At some point we crack under the pressure of cognitive dissonance. This is usually through some form of crisis. When this happens, the crack allows the light of consciousness to shine in. As this inner illumination begins, it sparks a catalytic process, which opens us to becoming more and more conscious of what we were previously unconscious to. This is the process that is described in one of our most powerful modern allegories, the Matrix Movie, or the 19th century Alice in Wonderland book. (Or by various yogis.)
If you are taking any courses, apprenticeship, or retreat with us, then you have already chosen the “Red Pill.” If you choose to work with the divine sacraments you will rapidly escalate your awakening journey, as countless generations of sacred rebels before you have done. However, be forewarned that disillusionment is a good thing, if you seek Truth, but disillusionment is not always comfortable. Disillusionment is often the opposite of comfort, but it is the only way if you seek true healing. For it is the illusions of separation that form the patterns of dis-ease within us.
When we follow the sacred call of healing, we begin to awaken from the trance of the F.E.A.R. matrix, which is an internal web of false beliefs forming a synthetic reality. Hallmarks of the F.E.A.R. matrices are strategies of control for coping with the stress of cognitive dissonance. I could spend 1,000 pages solely deconstructing the many and varied ways we avoid and numb the inner stress of living out of alignment with our inner knowing of Truth. But you already know all those things. It’s everywhere you look within the dominant culture from our media, entertainment, fast food, war machine, and the countless ways to distract and get that temporary dopamin fix. It is our conditioning to this stress that has created the dominant culture of addiction, consumption, and depression. When there is no way to continue to live within the stress, it’s either breakdown or breakthrough.
Due to the collective cognitive dissonance that plagues our time, I want to take extra care to be clear and precise with my words and meaning. Distortions have been created out of paradigms of separation and fueled by the big business of “looking outside yourself for the fix.” We have had countless generations of conditioning to look outside ourselves for the authority, the answers, the healer, the savior, the truth, and the love that we are seeking. But now this old way and all the conditions that come with it are dying. It is a death and rebirth.
The great blessing of all expanded states of consciousness is the ability to see with new eyes, hear with new ears, and feel in a new way. Without a genuine shift of perception, we cannot transform. This knowledge is honored within most spiritual traditions as the art of “retreat.” We must step back from who we know ourselves to be and who we know the world to be, in order to return to what is essential. I invite you to honor this 7 week journey for the ceremony and new style of retreat it is.
As we step onto the golden pathway of Entheogeneisis and choose to“red pill” it every day, more past conditioning can fall apart and fall away. True healing begins within. This is a continual spiral dance, and no matter how advanced you are on the path, there is an endless arc of potential for awakening.
Like a dormant seed held in the soil of our being, once the conditions are right, the seed begins to germinate. This seed has always been within us, and this is the source of true healing. The sacred plant teachers, shamanic medicines, shamanic practices, and even sometimes a breakthrough experience with designer molecules, can bring the “waters of life” and the “light of consciousness” to that dormant seed within.