Many people today associate the term ceremony with plant medicine. This is because in the last ten years plant medicine ceremony has become increasingly popular and fashionable. As a result of its popularity there has been increasing amounts of abuse associated with what should be a sacred and protected experience.
This abuse happens from both sides, from human beings who use the medicine increasingly to escape their own lives, where the experience becomes just another addiction, as well as from the shaman or sacred ceremony practitioner who takes advantage of the participants financially, sexually and otherwise in what should be a holy space.
But it is important to know that ceremony does not necessarily need to involve plant medicines at all.
The primary function of ritual and ceremony is to take us out of the ordinary, and into the extraordinary so that we might commune more easily with soul and spirit.
In order to seek this communion different techniques can be used to heighten our experience and open the doors of the mind.
Using plant medicine ceremony is like blowing open the doors to a mind that is shut down to the reality of spirit permeating and creating our world. But to those who are more sensitive - blowing open the doors is not necessarily necessary, because the door is already partly open.
The more fastened we are to the mundane and material, and to our fixed identities, the more difficult it is to allow the vision to expand naturally.
We can experience this more natural expansion through repetition of song, dance, poetry, mantra, conscious dreaming, and communing in a simple way with the natural world.
When we approach a sacred ceremony, we come clean, with the eyes of a newborn and the heart of a seeker. We prepare the body, we prepare the space, we gather the sacred tools, the drums and the totems, the flowers and the light offerings, the rocks and the stones, the prayer and remembrance of what it is that we are truly seeking. We practice the skills of listening and sensing, of deep feeling and intuition, and opening our consciousness into the higher sense organs of perception, which is where it is that we come to have intimate relationship with the divine.
Ceremony is more about how we are approaching these experiences rather than what the experiences actually are. When we set the inner sacred compass to the path of communion and gnosis, then we fortify our connection the the Self.
In this way, all life can ultimately become a series of sacred rituals and ceremonies which bring us ever closer into the mother matrix, and the sacred pulse from which we all emanate.
Your article offers wise and important insights into plant medicine use and ceremony. Thank you.