Last month I had the opportunity to sit in on a beautiful plant medicine ceremony with our fungi relatives and I had a profound experience that I feel called to share.

These friends of the forest were able to physically show me how energy is formed and moving about in the unseen realms. How darkness and light coexist energetically in every cell of our being and beyond. There is absolutely nothing to be afraid of, they told me. The darkness, what I have perceived to be scary for so long, is just the dark, which is equally a part of this reality as the light.

They showed me how darkness manifests energetically. The fear, guilt, shame, judgment, doubt and hate quite literally formed into a sticky black blob within me and I was able to send the blob love. I just sent it so much love, effortlessly, and the color faded lighter and lighter and completely energetically transformed.

I was in awe.

This experience was profound because it was beyond my intellectual understanding of “All you need is Love” and went into a lived experience of being able to physically witness this transformation on an energetic level and then emotionally and spiritually connect to the experience.

Now we all have heard time and time again, just love yourself, all you need is to love yourself. We all have unique experiences of this truth, maybe we pick up the self-care mentality as self-love and start to go to therapy or take nice baths, these are great and important, but there is a deeper truth.

Have you truly looked at the moments in your life where you “FUCKED UP?” Are you ashamed? Are you jumping to fix it or ignore it? Are you carrying guilt?

Can you LOVE that side of yourself? Can you love the perceived dark sides of you, truly love them and not judge/hate them? Whenever you feel fear, shame, guilt etc… all our inner self is actually screaming for is Love. 

^{This is the Work.}

The darkness is half of our lives in terms of day and night. This duality holds true through the seasons of life on many levels. When you find yourself in a season of darkness, let’s say depressed in the wintertime, can you accept that side of you? Can you hold her, love her and just see her? We are quick to try and fix it, to feel good again, and go to great lengths to ignore or suppress the darkness, but the more you push it away the greater it will grow.

This is not an invitation to just give up or give in to darkness; the invitation is to not be afraid of it. It’s the fear where low vibration energies and patterns grow and pile up. If you can face the fear, you can transform the dark energy to light and then there is no reaction to our perceived darkness as being good or bad, it just is.

I know it can be easier said than done to face our darkest fears and transform them with love, but we are all fully capable of doing it and working towards this everyday. I would love to hear other stories from you all of times you have transformed your fear and if anyone feels like they need help in discovering this truth, it is what I have set out to do with Awakening Journeys and connecting people to the sacred plant teachers.

With that little share I will leave you with a message from Plants of the Gods “There is a world beyond ours, a world that is far away, nearby and invisible. And there is where God lives, where the dead live, the spirits and the saints, a world where everything has already happened and everything is known. That world talks. It has a language of its own. I report what it says. The sacred mushroom takes me by the hand and brings me to the world where everything is known. It is they, the sacred mushrooms, that speak in a way that I can understand. I ask them and they answer me. When I return from the trip that I have taken with them, I tell what they have told me and what they have shown me.” ~Mazatec Shaman Maria Sabina

With love, Taylor