Mother Daime

I was nervous before my first Santo Daime service. I have always been nervous in groups. In the first part of my life, I was defined by my status as an outsider. My individuality felt threatened in nearly every collective setting. Now that my individuality is firmly known, I am attempting to find my place in the collective. In the months prior to the service I had been making a concerted and sustained effort to be social – this after 13 years in solitary hermitage, leaving my past self behind, and cultivating my identity in Christ, as a nun without an order.

For me, the Santo Daime service combined elements of family, school and church. With compulsory singing, childlike melodies, uniforms, and separation of the sexes, it was a return to grade school’s inner child. Instinctively, I expected rejection, yet intellectually there was no reason to. With trust and faith, I tried to rest in my vulnerability, ground my sensitivity, and release the thought-patterns set by my alienation.

I had to leave to go lie down two times. Returning to the group the first time, I was outdoors for a few moments, experiencing myself at three years old. I was ecstatic, up on tiptoe, feeling I could fly into the night, as if no one existed except me; and I was alone with God & the Earth. It is a familiar state for me, from my time in hermitage. I reminded myself that I was there to work – to ground in the collective and blend with it - and not fly off into my comfort zone.

At one point, I was shaken seeing a woman who got sick and left to lie down, and a guitarist who stopped playing and was shuddering ecstatically. He kept putting three fingers up over his head. I stepped outside and one of the attendants talked to me about not paying attention to where other people are at, to just close my eyes and remain focused on my own internal experience.

I did. The last hours were a battle against my instinct to hide from rejection. I was unable to quiet an inner-voice that kept rehearsing explanations of my worthiness and uniqueness. It refused to rest. The voice is a barrier between my ego and deeper self. Being present was constant work and making eye contact was scary.

At the very end of the service, I could barely stand, and received physical support from women around me. When the music stopped I was swooning. I stepped behind the chairs and sank to the floor. I was helped onto some cushions and given unction. A woman gave me body work and energy work, sprayed me with scented mist, spoonfed me, blew air over me, covered my excited eyes with a tissue, guided my breath, spoke to me in intuitive language – like prayer, speaking-in-tongues, or like what Mother sounds like to Baby. I responded with intuitive language, musical baby-talk.

My mind gradually quieted as I received my body in the woman’s touch. In time, I could feel my baby body in her hands – especially my feet. It was a body that never grounded in the material world because it was undermothered due to postpartum issues.

At one point while the woman worked on me, I was afraid of my breath touching her skin, and had the distinct feeling that my breath was dirty.

The name of the woman means “mother” in Hungarian. I considered telling her, but did not. It would have been like suggesting she was a replacement for my mother. Seeking replacements for my mother has been co-dependent poison for me. Only I can mother myself.

I try to see mother figures as midwives assisting the labors of self-rebirth. To me, “midwife” suggests a half-way point to the cosmic intermarriage of the human family.

The morning after the service, I woke from a dream telling myself, “God did not make me perfect. I was made with flaws. I am a mistake.” To have such thoughts become conscious means I am closer to them. They are not buried under defenses. Praise Allah.

~~~ Some background: I have multiple scleroses. 10 months prior to the service I switched from pharmaceuticals to plant medicine: iboga and cannabis. The results have been good. The numbness, fibromyalgia and other symptoms are under control. I quit using a cane, but I still have difficulty with my right leg whenever I have too willful of an intention. I cannot even do yoga because it is too willful of an activity.

Silence, stillness, music and dance bring balance to my disease. Wilfulness activates it. So, when I am not interacting with the world or doing creative work, I try to be still, focused, internal, in trance and meditation. When I am still it feels like water is moving through my body.

During the first three hours of the Santo Daime service the feeling of the water inside me concentrated into ripples tighter than I had ever experienced. In the week prior, I had received Word that the water would become “denser” – perhaps a synonym for “firmness,” a word the Daime hymns often used.

~~~ I told one person at the service my secret; that I was born male, and male identified. My calling to Christ in 1998 began two years of intensive self-examination and dreamwork, recording 10 to 15 dreams a night. The process led to a sudden switch, one day, to a female identity. Had I not been called and become female, it is likely my male self would have perished by now, as self-destructive as he was. Instead of being dead, I am female and have multiple scleroses as well as what has been termed “schizoaffective disorder,” because I am a mystic.

My female self is an expression of music, dance, art and dreams. She emerged from dreams, so my waking-life reality is dreamlike; a seamless web of reflection, metaphor and poetry.

In a dream I had prior to the service, it was the last episode of Seinfeld. It was sad that the warmth of the laughter was dying. All the colors that made the program ascended psychedelically in a column back up to Heaven, to music. The tempo was fast, the music sad, but also remorseless and unyielding – a music of departure.

I am female identified as a child and teen - not so much as an adult. I have not experienced many rites of initiation to support my womanhood. Sitting with the women at the Santo Daime service was a rite, communion with sisterhood. I was thankful to feel belonging with such radiant women. It was home.

~~~ In conversation before & after the service, there was a sense that the Work is taking place in a vacuum; that the gap between spiritualized people and the world is unbridgeable. I replied that there is a tacit bridge; that everyone has a role to play; that all people tacitly support the Work, no matter how alien to it they may appear. I said that 2012 is the point at which illusion breaks down and the collective gravitates to soul-work. It is the opening of church doors inside the heart. It is where yesterday dissolves into tomorrow. It will be confusing for the general collective, which is what spirit-workers have been training for – for thousands of years. It will give spirit workers a new place in the collective. In time, all take up the Work, or are reborn into its legacy.

Amy is sponsored by Ibiga World.