A Bouquet of Initiation: part one - The Apology

In the hours before “Gita” & I ate mushrooms, I felt as if my skull and spine were barely attached. There was weakness at the center of my upper back. It was George’s ghost, a part of me that was never present with women because it over-sexualized them. George would have been desperate to partner with Gita because she is so much like him, plus she is ‘drop-dead gorgeous.’ He would have struggled to be present with her. His ghost was keeping me from being fully present with her, at first, but the trip exorcised him.

I told the story of George & “Djuna,” how he was in a relationship with her primarily to have his sexual needs serviced. I recounted how one night the spirit of a brutal, primitive man entered George while he was having sex with Djuna and raped her through him. Later that night, George was awakened night by Djuna flailing. George felt the spirit of the primitive man raping her. She was trying to fight him off in her sleep. George turned and held her, and love from a place in his heart deeper than he ever felt ordinarily washed the man away. Djuna fell back into a calm sleep.

Gita & I shared stories of how we had been sexually disrespectful with ourselves and partners. Gita said she felt ghosts leaving her. She recited a poem of hers, fiercely, building it up to a furious and humbling finale:

Blasphemy

I'm trying to find the ground they call common
Often straying onto land they call no man's
Knocking on the wood they call cock
As your deja vu knocks me off kilter
And I'm forced to filter my sorrow through the strainer of a dream catcher
Every testament is arrested development of a mind rendered pre-pubescent by the stalks of string bean boys
anointing the heads of reverential women on their knees
Teeming with the disease they call co-dependence
I gave you up for lent, itching every night with desire
And coming up empty,
As you purposely tempt me into submission with the proposition of missionary,
Sewing my mouth shut with
thread made of melded metal so it rusts as I age and stains my lips crimson
Just the way you like 'em
And sewing my void open
with the noose you string me along with, stuffing me chock full of bullshit,
Cuz I'm so obviously asking for it
Anonymously presenting myself
Faceless, face-down in the pew I pray to you in
But you answer to the congregation, not the deity
you supposedly have faith in
so all the nuns crossing themselves to the heartbeat of creation are praying for you
The wafer on my tongue is dissolving and the wine in my blood is absolving me of responsibility, making it easier to lay down on my back,
bloody from the encryption of whip marks, self-inflicted
that bare striking resemblance to sanskrit
Bare-back me as i'm strung up as an example and watch the sores manifest from
your testing the uncharted of so many different bodies of water
When everybody knows they all
flow into the same ocean
You want the best of every dimension
the offering plate is a tension-set bear-trap set to "regret" when your fingers are sticky with the juices from the countless encounters that meant nothing but an orgasm
Those girls are just objects to you, things to fuck, and after the life is done seeping from your swollen member,
you'll remember my voice
singing hymns of more to this life than the indulgence of sin

Gita: As I read the poem, I realized I was speaking for all women to all men, including George. Amy and I cried for a while after it was done and she told me she'd like to read my poem publicly.

Amy: A couple days prior, “Jade” was at my computer. I was standing, feet together, vacant, feeling. Jade turned and asked, “What are doing, Rose Mary?” It was the first time she had ever called me that.

The name “Rose Mary Pillowwater” came from one of my dreams. I evolve into her – from George, through Amy George. She is George’s soul, his unconscious feminine nature.

“Just standing,” I said. Then, I realized that we had witnessed Rose Mary standing, and saw it meant that Rose Mary is standing, not unconscious and asleep in my dreams. It was a lot for me to receive.

Gita knew the story of Jade asking, “What are you doing, Rose Mary?” and what it meant for me. As she loaded a bowl, I was standing, feeling, being a vacant vessel. Gita was holding a stem, and recalled how I eat the stems. She tried one and said, “Mm, it tastes like rosemary,” as our eyes met.

Gita: After I ate the rosemary weed stem, Amy said, "We're going to take off into another dimension." I said, "Let's go." I suddenly realized I was letting go of attachment.

Amy: Gita screeched, laughed, and wept, and I did a wild brief dance, spinning fast. My identity felt blank. I had no mind. My body purely expressed Rose Mary’s instinct. Inhabiting me, she backed into the kitchen, paused at the threshold, and stepped back into the room. She knelt on the floor beside Gita’s water bottle. On the side it read in big letters, “WE DID IT!” I knew I needed to drink water from it, from Gita, from cosmic accomplishment. Water is a symbol of the cleansing and hydrating power of awareness and consciousness.

I could not get the top open and crawled across the floor with it, handing it to GIta. She opened and I drank.

Gita: Something took over, I was in auto-pilot. I sat straight up, in a meditative sit. Inside my head, there were at least 6 layers of narration/observers. The most prominent being the one I hear on a daily basis - the one I believe is attached to my name. This observer commanded me to do things (like sitting up in a meditative sit and relaxing) but it also said, "Shut up!" to the other observers and to itself...well, myself. The other observers were chatting incessantly. One narrated in the 2nd person, saying things like, "You're doing [this] or [that]." Another, more distant one, spoke like an interpreter, stating knowledge I've acquired from books and school and other people. It sounded like, "Meditation does [this]. People do it because [that]." The others were talking so fast and observing so much of what was happening internally that I couldn't make out one from another. I didn't want to. What I was doing was trying to get to that other dimension. 'I' said to myself, "I'm letting go of earthly attachment. I am not going to stop until something outside of me stops this. I will sit here, meditating, until something else stops me. I will not stop this. Relax, let go..." My broken ankle begins aching as I sit in lotus, "Pain is an attachment. Let it go..." I allowed myself to continue crushing my ankle under my own weight. It did not hurt but the loudest observer would whisper, "I'm going to break this again. I'm going to have to go to the hospital after this. I'm ruining my ankle right now..." on and on.

Amy: We had a conversation about performing. I remarked that it is a rush because the approval of the parent is projected onto the audience. The applause is felt as the adoration of the parent, which is why people are so psycho about performing. I recalled how God had been telling me, “I don’t perform,” and I said, “He doesn’t. He is always doing what he does naturally, and for himself, not an audience.”

I told Gita a dream I had about performing in 2056. There was a staged performance for a group called A Band of Stooges. The music was more powerful than anything we know; improvised, unrehearsed puppeteered by Kundalini, everyone perfectly synched because their bodies were expressions of music. We wore robes embroidered with tiny scenes of our personal evolution, of the story of how we came to be everlasting. After the song, there was no applause. Everyone paused, standing, gazing at each other, vacantly. A hulking George looked down at me from the elevated stage. Then we all walked away in different directions, in silence.

I explained how our compulsion to cheer and applause loudly is a measure of how loudly life sucked. Some people feel safe when they drown out fear by making a lot of noise.

It energized me tremendously to share my dream and thoughts about it. Gita remarked, “You are so animated!” It was her animation, the freedom in her expressiveness – which I had been watching, eating, digesting, integrating since meeting her. It was the expressiveness of all the people I have been meeting, since leaving solitude three months before – after 13 years by myself, traversing identity death & rebirth.

I was overtaken with freedom when Gita said, “You’re so animated!” I got up, and danced and sang. “Spider” a voice said, indicating I was manifesting the spider-nature of the primordial feminine. Rose Mary’s yang – “the Asian god” – inhabited me. I felt him existing in the distant future, looking back on the first times, on the story of our becoming.

The Asian god is not a separate entity. It is how my psyche translates the sudden emergence of Rose Mary’s power. The feeling is of a kind of psychosis, but one toward integration instead of fracturing. Inhabited by him, I was a new person.

After dancing, I glanced at Gita. She was lying with eyes closed in Shavasana. The sun was sinking. I sat with the guitar, united with the Asian god. He was dripping with sweetness and love through my body. I sat gently strumming in the fading shadows, feeling the chords ringing in all the times to come. Gita was crying. Her tears and the music and my feeling braided eternal love into union with itself.

When the guitar was done, I got onto the bed and looked out the window like a cat at the world, knowing the gesture was telling me, “The Asian god is coming with us, outdoors and to the stage.”

Gita: I was deeply relaxed and did not want to move my body willfully into Shavasana, but the observer commanded me to, so I did. Once in the position, I was able to relax deeply again. My body began twitching and contracting in muscles I couldn't control ordinarily - small muscles in my back and scalp and shoulders. I felt as if I was being manipulated, very gently. It was as if a part of me I'd never met was trying to become conscious in my body. Rose Mary's yang began playing the guitar and I contracted my body as I felt the urge to weep but then 'I' commanded myself to relax again, "...if I'm ever going to get out of here," so I did. The tears stayed in my eye sockets and as my eyelids relaxed, I could see some light through the water. Then my phone rang with a text message and I opened my eyes and sat up. The experience ended itself.

Amy & I came together on the bed. Amy told me, "God has been telling me, very strongly, 'Apologize, apologize, apologize...'" So she did. She bowed her head and put her hands on my lap and said, "I'm sorry. I'm sorry for what George did to you. It wasn't right, what he did to women." I sat there, mouth agape, in complete and utter shock. I'd never felt such an intense emotion. I was being humbled in an instant. I looked up at the ceiling, at God, with a look on my face that said, "What the fuck do I do with this shit?!" I had to internally accept this archetypal apology from all men, for all women. It was a great honor and a great challenge. I calmed down, closed my eyes, absorbed what was being given to me and cried silent tears as I held Amy's head. I never said, "I accept your apology." I simply accepted it.

Later, as I recounted this experience to the people at the Place, I told them that this act had to have created a ripple in this world. It was a step toward healing the great gender divide, I could feel it. “Sasha” said, "Of course it has...and you telling us is making the ripple bigger, and then we'll tell people, and so on..."

Amy: After apologizing I whispered to Gita, “Confession. All week I have been feeling the need to confess.”

The Asian god then forced me to see the virginal part of myself I had abandoned through George’s “indulgence in sin.” My head was bowed and the god moved with authority through my right arm – the Rose Mary arm – put my palm against my forehead and pushed my head up. As he did, I glimpsed my virgin self like a seed is a glimpse of a tree.

I told Gita about receiving the Asian god. I said one the things that helped admit him was my awareness that God did not have to create us, or bring Gita & I together as gifts to each other. I did not mean we ought to be thankful, but that we exist over an abyss of non-being. We did not have to happen. We have to know this to receive the future – a future that narrows our path to establish our perfection.

I was deeply at peace, particularly because sex was not alienating me from the feminine. I lied across the bed diagonally, owning the bed - owning sexuality - while God made love to me. He made love to me all evening, after that.

I gave Gita energy healing. Part of it was moving her body around like the lion moves bodies in this dream of my brother’s:

A lion comes. You have to play dead and let him move your body around. You will be okay as long as you don’t look into his eyes.

“Playing dead,” is synonymous with being a “Stooge.” A Stooge lets awareness reincorporate into the body in order to awaken infant being. The lion is the King of Beasts, symbolizing the king of the Beast in man: God. I realized that the dream was model for a kind of body work where one person plays the lion and the other, a Stooge.

Gita: I asked Amy to do energy work on me. I layed in Shavasana, playing Stooge while she manipulated my arms and legs for me. The observers were there but I was more at peace with them. I felt stronger, somehow.

When she was done, she left to use the bathroom. I felt a pain in my lower belly. As I rubbed it, I felt my heartbeat there, very intensely. It felt like my actual heart. It pulsed and pumped the way I know the heart does. When you feel your heart through your sternum, you can only detect a faint beat. What I was feeling was my actual organ, INSIDE MY GUTS. I could practically grab it. At first, I thought it was a baby (even though I knew I wasn't pregnant). I attempted to check if it was beating in tandem with mine by comparing it to the beat in my chest, but I could not feel a beat in my chest. I began to panic. I checked my pulse on the side of my neck. It was the same beat. I turned my attention back to the fact that I could not feel my heart in my chest. I screamed to Amy to come back and help me. She hurried to my side as I said, "My heart is not in my chest!" I had her feel my stomach. She said, "Ooh!" I told her to feel my chest and she couldn't find my heartbeat either. Then she layed her ear to my chest and said, "It's in there." I felt a tremendous feeling of relief.

Amy: I said such experiences are typical of Kundalini awakening. Blocks open and bodily awareness shifts. A reason Gita always had trouble in her stomach was because her heart was not there. Her heart was stuck in her head.

Amy is sponsored by Iboga World.