5 Ways Plant Medicine Can Heal Our Relationships

Plant medicines unveil the inner truth of our nature, and allow us to focus on fostering what is vital and sustaining. The quality of our relationships, whether it be with family, friends or lovers, determines the quality of our lives.

Plant medicine radically increases consciousness, making us better partners, more effective leaders, and kinder people. Plant medicine ceremonies involving ayahuasca, 5 MeoDMT, and psilocybin all have proven scientific effects of decreasing rates of depression and anxiety. This letting go of mental suffering, is a byproduct of the alignment with a higher force, we can see beyond our own predicament. 

By healing our relationship to ourselves, we can then have healthier, more nourishing relationships with others. We are social animals, we exist to coexist, and the first fundamental relationship is to self. When we can truly live within ourselves, accepting all our faults and shortcomings with love, we can heal. This love extends outwards.

According to studies done by  Harvard Medical School, close relationships are more closely tied to happiness than money, social class, or high IQ. The director of this study, psychiatrist Robert Waldinger says that “Taking care of your body is important, but tending to your relationships is a form of self-care too. That, I think, is the revelation.”

Plant medicine helps us create more satisfactory relationships with self and other by bringing us back to our natural state of being, love. 

There are many ways to return back to this supreme state, and the five revelations below are how the medicine awakens us to this higher vibration. 

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1. Ego dissolution 

During a ceremony, the ego naturally dissolves in communion with ayahuasca, 5 MeO DMT, or psilocybin. There is a seeing beyond yourself and your own problems. The bigger picture appears and there is a feeling of oneness with the universe. 

Our self-involvement seems narrow and tight, there is a need to break out of who we thought we were, to enter who we are. There is a process of letting go of the personality identifications and moving into who we are in our essence. As Wayne Dyer said “The ego is only an illusion, but a very influential one. Letting the ego-illusion become your identity can prevent you from knowing your true self.”

In relationships, there cannot be a meeting halfway if there is only concern for the self. Our minds obsess over ourselves and create fears, and guards that prevent love from coming in. When the ego and its need to protect itself dissipates, life can flow through. 

Out of the ego, there is less of a state of separation or otherness. When we can see ourselves in the other, there is naturally a better treatment of them and the practice of love. The ego judges, and the soul questions and yearns for understanding. When we can understand each other, it is impossible to hate or hold a grudge. We love others and treat them as we would ourselves. 

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2. Releasing shame and negative emotions

During many ayahuasca ceremonies people purge for hours. There is an emotional release of stagnant energy stored itself in the body for years. This is a combination of the emotions we were taught to suppress, the memories too painful to look at, and the things buried deep within us. It all comes to the surface, and the darkness is vomited out. It is a cleansing process.

Most of the darker emotions, including shame and guilt, are not just our own. They have been taught through conditioning and programming. They have been fed to us generationally and culturally. 

Shame is not something we naturally feel, it is taught and then learned. To abhor our own desires, to repent, to suppress. Plant medicine allows us to question our mental constructs, most made by societal rules and not our inner truth. 

A friend of mine did ayahuasca because she was fighting an addiction to heroin, an addiction that came as a result of not knowing how to deal with the complex mix of shame and guilt when raped when she was young. She felt that as a female, she was now vexed for life, unworthy of love or a healthy relationship. She saw herself as damaged goods, impure. 

During her ceremony, she vomited and defecated for hours, and when she returned back to her daily life, she was not the same. She stopped doing heroin. Heroin was a way to cope with herself, and a form of self-harm. A coping mechanism for the worst experience that happened to her and made a part of her.

She released a part of her wounded adolescence and the narrative that she was dirty and filthy. She saw that what happened to her, was not her fault. It seems far out, but she even had compassion for the man who raped her, for to do something so cruel, he must have been in so much pain and deeply unconscious. 

When we can release the inner shame and guilt towards ourselves, our self-love can bloom, and we inevitably treat others better.

We are the foundation of all our relationships. When we can truly work on ourselves, we can show up better in the lives of others. 

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3. Increase in compassion and lovingness  

Most of the plant medicines we offer at Behold Retreats, have feminine energy to them, this does not mean the experience is soft and easy, but that there is the feeling of the divine mother holding space. A higher state of love and compassion blooms within us as the ego dissolves and the darker emotions are released. 

During ceremony, a friend of mine who had severe childhood trauma, felt his anger towards his mother dissipate and had a clear awareness that she was truly doing the best she could with limited resources. This epiphany in empathy is a common experience, we learn to forgive in the arms of compassion. 

When I did my first Bufo ceremony, I felt such a state of existential love, it filled my whole body with euphoria. I thought that if people could feel this embodiment of love for even a moment of their lives, all war, violence, and rape would cease. 

After my ceremony, I had such a state of compassion for my family history, that I wrote my parents a ten-page letter of forgiveness and also an apology, though at the deepest level I knew there was nothing to even forgive.  

All the things we had pushed under the rug as a family, I brought out to air, not in anger or self-righteousness but with a deep sense of love and wanting to acknowledge the past and move on together in a healthier way. 

We all loved each other but did not know how to do so properly. While I was growing up, I realized my parents too were growing and developing. My journey with plant medicine helped me become more vulnerable, and access a love I thought I had buried for good. 

Plant medicine goes to the core of our beings, and the fabric life, is love. If love did not exist the human species would have already been blown to pieces. If love was not within us, life would not be worth living.

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4. The interconnectedness of all things

For many people, plant medicine is the call back to mother earth, and it changes the way in which we treat her. We are conscious of not only what we eat but how we consume and how much. With ayahuasca and even Bufo, there is a specific vegetarian diet to be followed, and we see how what we do matters, from what we eat to the method in which we source our food. 

Apart from physical health, there is an interconnectedness in mental health. We clearly see how every action has a reaction, and that what you do or say matters. There is an awareness of thoughts, a contemplative meditative state after plant medicine.

After the ceremony, I was very aware of how the quality of my thoughts created my reality. As a byproduct of this phenomenon, I thought less, and was very aware of my mental landscape. 

It also felt like my thoughts are just energy, and it was the same with the body and the mind. Everything was microcosms of vibration, moving and changing. This energy is how we connect to one another and the world at large. 

I saw how in this state of interconnection, lying or hurting another person turns them into an object. How they would energetically feel it, and how sensitive we truly are to others feelings. 

I wanted my energy in every action to be pure because how I feel and what I do becomes a butterfly effect. In turn, I stopped lying to myself and listened to my higher calling. I quit a job that was not serving me and realized that the negativity I carried when I worked was not fair to the company nor to me. I followed my dharma and ended up on a magical island and helping people write novels. 

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5. Supreme clarity

During my 5 MeO DMT ceremony, my life’s images flashed before my eyes like a cinematic film, and there was no inherent good or bad label to the events. I saw it play out with no ego. 

There were times in my life I was disempowered because I had followed what others wanted for me, even with the best of intentions, rather than my own inner compass. I had treated people poorly when I treated myself poorly. It was all quite obvious.

I had flashbacks to childhood, and clearly saw my negative behavioral patterns and the root of them. And when you see, you cannot unsee. This supreme state of clarity can be scary for people who have built their lives on lies (social conditioning or other’s rules), because there are no rules. 

Life is not linear, there is no one way. I saw through the veil of what I was taught and realized that the rest of my life would be a state of unlearning, stripping off the years of programming. 

I had a supreme sense of knowing that I should not read the news anymore unless it is independent and that the ‘us vs them’ rhetoric was a lie to propagate hate. 

I had a supreme sense of clarity on how much of my life was about satisfying the male gaze based on patriarchal norms and that I was abusing my femininity. I saw that my ambitions were not my own, but a result of capitalistic values that deem more productive humans as more worthy socially. 

This clear seeing helped me to develop and fine tune my intuition. I trust myself and what I feel. I intuitively know what people and relationships I should foster, and which need to be left gracefully.

I have traded pleasure for deeper meaning, and I am involved in more purposeful work outside of monetary gain. I know what matters to me and I go after it.

I relate to the world from a space of honesty I was not capable of before. And in turn, my world has become brighter and shinier. I am in love with life, and my life is an expression of this. 

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As Ram Dass says, “Tell the truth and love everybody”

It is as simple and as complicated as that, “tell the truth, and love everybody.”

Human relationships are messy and complex, as our own inner lives are too. When we can participate in relationships from a place of presence, and in a space of wanting to love and understand others, no matter how difficult they can be, our lives shift. 

There are fewer problems, and even when interpersonal issues arise there is a clarity of seeing it as it is. We know we cannot control others, and we do not try to fit or squeeze others into our image. We allow life to happen and trust the beauty that unfolds. We allow our relationships to do the same.

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Let's raise consciousness together

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