Sacred Plants + Yoga: A Love Story (SBNR Podcast)

It grew dark and quiet in the old colonial stone convent that had been converted into a ceremony space somewhere in upstate New York. I had just downed a sizable cup of ayahuasca. Before long, the familiar whirring at the edge of my hearing signaled the beginning of the inner journey. Suddenly, I found myself in a large carnival or circus tent facing a stage framed by heavy, dusty-brown curtains. A large man in tails and a top hat mounted the stage and began to speak. Ladies and gentlemen, introducing Chad Woodford, a man who doesn't like to feel his feelings. Raucous applause came from an audience I couldn't see. And of course he was right. At that point, I was terrible at feeling my feelings. I knew it would be an interesting and powerful night. Eventually, I did have to move to the VIP room to feel my feelings, basically, or at least try to. They seemed to be stuck at that time in an enormous ball of energy in my gut that wouldn't move. I was shaking and unsure what to do with myself. Eventually, the shaman came into the VIP room And sang me a traditional ikaro, and I learned in that moment to receive this outpouring of love. Through her energy and her song and her love, she helped me to move these feelings up and out and to receive that nurturing love. Welcome to Spiritual But Not Ridiculous, a podcast that explores the world of spirituality from a grounded and clear-eyed perspective. I'm your host, Jaya Dev, a yoga teacher, Vedic astrologer, attorney, and technologist. So I wanted to share this little personal story to sort of bring us into this topic this month of yoga and plant medicine and the ways that these two modalities or these two practices sort of go together as almost like a helix formation. In this episode, we will approach the topic of plant medicine from the perspective of a yoga teacher, basically. And so I'll talk about how yoga and sacred plant medicines are complementary practices, or can be, with a long-standing symbiotic tradition, actually. So we'll explore briefly, for all you yoga nerds out there, the yoga scriptural references to the use of plant medicine as a means for achieving unity, essentially. And then we'll talk about how yoga can be a powerful preparatory and integrative practice when working with these sacred plants. In short, yoga, in my experience, is perfect for preparing you to work with the plants, for serving as a helpful tool during the process of being in ceremony, and then for integrating that experience afterwards. And then we'll talk a little bit about how yoga on its own can be a powerful alternative to working with plants. Not everyone needs to work with these sacred plants. So I wanted to open with a quote from Wade Davis, this Harvard ethnobotanist, writing in 1996 in his book One River, where he's speaking of his experiences with the Cofán tribe working with ayahuasca. So here's Wade Davis. Ayahuasca was far more than a shamanic tool. It is the source of wisdom itself, the ultimate medium of knowledge for the entire society. To drink ayahuasca is to learn. It is the vehicle by which each person acquires power and the direct experience of the divine. And so it's this, this direct experience of the divine, I think, that tees up so nicely this whole discussion, because ultimately yoga is, is designed to and does provide you with that direct experience. Increasingly, people all over the world are experiencing deep transformation, either voluntarily through working with entheogens like ayahuasca or San Pedro or MDMA or psilocybin mushrooms, or involuntarily through just being human during the COVID pandemic, right? I think the COVID pandemic is actually sort of a global sacred ceremony that we're all going through and experiencing. And there's no doubt that more and more people are curious about or exploring or working with plant medicines of different kinds as tools for healing and transformation. So in this episode, I want to explore the role of plant medicines from the perspective of a yoga teacher and see how they can fit into the broader spiritual path. So I want to explore the commonalities between yoga and plant medicine and how they can be woven together into a cohesive practice, one that can provide the direct experience Of unity consciousness. In this episode, I will also explore how yoga can be a viable alternative to working with plant medicine, especially the holistic transformational style of yoga that I teach. In my experience, yoga and plant medicine are complementary modalities. They are both aimed at helping people to identify more with the heart and soul, to feel and integrate all of their emotions, and ultimately to experience true freedom and joy. And they are also both essential practices, I think, for helping humanity during this time To transition gracefully into this dawning wisdom revolution or consciousness revolution that people like Peter Russell and Stanislav Grof and others have talked about. And it's interesting to me too, and we'll talk about this more later, that advanced yoga and meditation practices, the way they're working on the physiological level is they're granting us access to the pituitary and then the pineal gland. And this is where DMT naturally resides in the in the human body. And so that's interesting because these plant medicines, especially ayahuasca, contain this psychoactive agent DMT. And then, you know, in this episode too, I want to describe, or at least preview a little bit, some of the integrative practices that I offer to my students and clients. I'll actually be exploring and sharing some of these practices in depth as part of the upcoming Belize International Yoga Festival. That's taking place on December 4th. So check that out at the links in the show notes. So yeah, so there's no doubt that psychedelics, entheogens, ayahuasca, San Pedro, psilocybin, DMT in all its forms are having their moment right now. You know, these are being talked about in a kind of revitalized way, and especially around the topic of sort of healing and doing this kind of transformational work and using these things as tools to grow, expand, and heal ourselves. Okay, so before we continue, I just want to mention a couple of quick notes, quick reminders. If you enjoy the podcast, you can buy me a coffee at elemental.yoga/podcast, or I'm trying this new thing, Ko-fi. So if you like Ko-fi instead, you can go to ko-fi.com/ Jayadev, so J-A-Y-A-D-E-V, and you can, you can donate a few bucks there if you, if you enjoy the podcast. Or you can just leave me a rating on Apple Podcasts. You can find me on Instagram at Elemental Yoga. And I just wanted to say, next month too, nice tie-in here, next month I'm interviewing Sophia Rocklin about plant medicine, so look for that in your feed too. In preparing for this episode, I went back to my old journals from my first ayahuasca ceremonies in the Peruvian jungle some 5 years ago, and I've been reflecting on my own experiences with ayahuasca over the past 5 years and the ways that that has sort of tied into my, my broader spiritual practices. So I just wanted to mention a few things, a few personal anecdotes to give you a taste for what my experience has been like. And maybe for people who are new to these medicines, these, these plants, you know, it gives you an idea maybe of what the experience can be like. So the first thing I love about it is it's a sacred ceremony. So this is something that we also work with and practice on the yoga side, is these sacred rituals. And like yoga, you go into it setting intentions. So I think like any experience in life, the more you approach an experience with conscious intentions, the more that experience can sort of benefit you in conscious ways, right? So my experience of the plants, ayahuasca in particular, is that there is this wise intelligence that it seems like you're communicating with. It's like this wise intelligence that can read your every thought and answer your every question. And it does so with a gentle firmness, but also a wicked sense of humor, at least in my case. For example, one time, I think it was my very first ceremony, I was thinking about this book I had read years ago, Why Does the World Exist? by Jim Holt. It's this book by this physicist that explores the question of why there's something, why there's existence rather than just nothingness, which is kind of a funny question if you think about it. But I was thinking about this book for some strange random reason, And I immediately received sort of like all these guffaws and snickers from this unseen audience off to the side. And if you remember my little anecdote at the top, that seems to be a theme in my ceremonies, or at least it was for a while, this kind of like audience that would react to my thoughts. But yeah, then this disembodied voice said, nothing, lame. And then another voice made the raspberry noise, right? You know, so it was like, I don't know. In the beginning of my experiences, it was like a comedy bit, you know? But it was also very wise, and there was this, like, wise being that was just pulsing and, like, breathing, and this kind of shifting, loving presence. Very playful, very patient too. And so much of my experiences was a sort of remembering, like a remembering where I and everyone else had come from, a remembering that there is this quiet, powerful force animating everything. That loves us and supports us and watches out for us, and remembering that we are that, and we are powerful, and we are the ones that we've been waiting for. I also received a lot of messages and feelings and understanding that life is not meant to be a struggle. You know, it's like I don't know if you guys are Björk fans, but there's that song she has, Undo. You know, life is not meant to be a struggle. If you're struggling. You're trying too hard, you know. And that was something I came away from my ceremonies with. And I want to just talk about this one experience I had. I think it was the first ceremony ever in the deep in the Amazon in Peru with the Shipibo tribe. So one thing that they advise you to do that the shamans or the curanderos or the vegetalistas advise you to do is to ask the medicine or the spirit of ayahuasca these questions, right? So one topic I was exploring at this time was love, romantic love, but also spiritual love. And so I asked, or I gently requested, the medicine, the spirit, to show me how love feels. And there I am in the maloca, this, this structure in the middle of the jungle, and my heart immediately swelled with an orangish-reddish kind of energy that spread to my entire body. And it came on in these soothing waves. So then I asked, how big can love be? And then it laughed, and I could feel my heart expanding slowly at first, but quickly my whole body became filled with this orange-red swirling light, and it felt as if my body was the size of the whole jungle. And then this loving voice in my head said, Don't you know that the entire universe loves you? That's how much love there is. And then I felt infinite love, like the size of the entire universe. And I just— I can remember thinking to myself, the universe loves us. It was created as an act of love, just like the classic tantricas 1,000 years talked about. And I just kept saying to myself, it's infinite, it's infinite. I was sort of incredulous that there could be that much love, you know. I think especially because I didn't maybe have so much love in my formative years. And then another big part of my experience with ayahuasca has been this sort of shedding of conditioning and identities, you know, shedding those personas that were based on what other people seemed to want from me or what society wanted from me. And I started to lose this knowing, kind of arrogant, ironic air that I used to carry and And all these defense mechanisms that I had. And I started to learn, like I said at the top, I started to learn how to feel my feelings maybe for the first time in my life, truly. These enormous balls of repressed emotion were moving up and out of me in these ceremonies. And, you know, sometimes it would be like silent screams that would come out as it was moving out of me, or, or very loud screams. That— it's part of why I had to go into the VIP room. And so in this process, I was releasing all this anger from a long time ago and all this shame. You know, I grew up Catholic and, uh, yeah, just all this like deep sadness that I was carrying around with me and so much disappointment. You know, I, for entire ceremonies for like a year, I had to sit inside the feeling of disappointment for hours on end. And that was really challenging, but, but so necessary too. Yeah. At one point I turned into a fire-breathing dragon. And yeah, so these are the kinds of things, I'm just trying to give you a sense for the kinds of things that you can experience or benefit from in these ceremonies. But part of why I'm saying all this too is to convey how intense and revelatory and sort of raw these experiences can be. And so as a result, it's so important to integrate. Yeah. these experiences. You know, it's not easy to just process them on your own. You need support, I think. And what's great about a lot of these temples and ceremony spaces is that they do offer, as part of their offering, integration support and integration practices. But in my experience, I've not really encountered so much this yogic approach to integration. So we're going to talk about that in this episode. But first, I want to explore the interwoven history of yoga and sacred plants a little bit. I don't want to get too sidetracked, but I just want to— I think this is interesting. I think there are 2 keys that open the same transcendental door, and these are the kinds of things that people like Ram Dass have talked about. So Ram Dass, I think, is a good entry point here because, you know, as you're probably aware, in the 20th century there was this psychedelic movement, right, in the '60s especially. And for a lot of people, these psychedelic drugs were the entry point into exploring yoga, Eastern mysticism, spirituality, and all that, right? And so here we have Ram Dass kind of like leading the charge, Ram Dass and Tim Leary and all those guys. And, you know, Ram Dass credited psychedelic mushrooms with his discovery of and passion for yoga. Through yoga, he was trying to achieve the same transcendental states that he was experiencing with mushrooms especially. But this connection between the 2 modalities is not new by any means. In fact, I think there is this longstanding tradition, and I want to talk about that. What I think we're talking about here too is this perennial philosophy that Aldous Huxley talked about. Aldous Huxley, in his beautiful book by the same name, talked about how every one of the world's spiritual and religious traditions share a single metaphysical truth. This perennial philosophy is most succinctly expressed in the Sanskrit formulations Tat Tvam Asi or Hari Om or even Soham. Basically, this is that or that is this, you know, is what they're saying. Ain't that the truth, right? So another way to state this is that there is a subtle, unitary underlying reality to everything that connects everything, and that it is possible for us to know that experientially. This is what we learn in yoga, right? And in fact, the explicit purpose of yoga is for us to access that state consistently and to experience unity directly through the practice of yoga. In my personal experience, working with plant medicine offers that same experience. I personally have had the direct experience of what I've been trying to achieve for a long time through yoga and had only managed to catch the briefest of glimpses of here and there. So my experience is going back, you know, starting 5 years ago with plant medicine, ayahuasca in particular, made this state of yoga that the ancient yogis talked about seem like more of a real possibility. And so then I was motivated to seek that out and to find yogic traditions, yogic practices that could offer that, provide that. And again, it turns out there has been a long symbiotic relationship between sacred plants and yoga. So let's Let's explore that for a moment. I think this section will be especially interesting to yoga teachers, but for everyone really. So there's this ancient yogic sage, Patanjali, possibly a mythical figure who was said to be half man, half snake, who wrote possibly the most quoted and cited and studied yogic text in the modern era, the Yoga Sutras. Every yoga training in the West assigns this as reading, right? And so in this book, he actually talks about using sacred plants to achieve a state of yoga. So I want to open this section with a quote from Yoga Sutra 4.1, which is where he talks about this. Here's Patanjali: The state of unity may be attained through dharmic birth, the use of sacred plants, mantra, tapaha, or samadhi. So this is the mythical Patanjali, circa 400 BC or 400 CE depending on who you talk to. The dates of when he wrote this and when he lived are actually disputed, but sometime around 2,000 years ago he's talking about this and he's listing these 5 means to become accomplished in yoga or to experience the state of yoga. So we have again meditation, samadhi, mantra, which is the yoga of vibration, Tapaha, which is a couple of different things depending on how you look at it, but basically it's the fire or intensity of practice, of the yoga practice. It's the fire or the benefit of consistent self-discipline, and it's the fire that comes out of having a dedicated yoga practice. So that's tapaha. And then he talks about being born with ready access to the state of yoga because of accumulated punya, where you're drawing on spiritual effort from past lives. So here you'd be acting more from a dharmic state than a karmic state, right? You're more relatively free from karma and more acting in a state of flow, in a state of yoga. But the 5th one is sacred plants, or āśādhi, as it's written in the Sanskrit text. So I want to just explore what this might mean in the context of the Yoga Sutras. You know, few yoga teachers are willing to discuss or interpret these these latter two chapters of the Yoga Sutras. There are a few exceptions, but generally people avoid them because they seem so esoteric and and you know fantastical, right? These these two chapters basically talk a lot about how to achieve these yogic siddhis, right? These yogic powers basically. You know, things like levitating and reading minds and. Becoming large or very small and that kind of thing. So these things, you know, they sound kind of ridiculous or kind of far-fetched. So I think people generally don't talk about these. Part of it too is a lot of teachers will tell you, you know, if you're, if you're focusing on achieving these siddhis, you're being distracted from the yogic path, right? So they seem almost irrelevant in this day and age. But nevertheless, I think it's interesting to, to ask the question, you know, why is Patanjali talking here about sacred plants? And what does that mean? So Patanjali does this thing in 4.1 that he does a few times throughout the sutras, where he sort of drops a concept or a word on you and then says nothing else about it, right? We see this with asana. He doesn't really talk about asana in the sutras, which is interesting because we have all these yoga teachers who are primarily studying asana studying a text that doesn't really discuss asana. But nevertheless, he also does this with Kriya. He mentions Kriya, I think, once in the sutras, and doesn't really say what it is so much. So yeah, he does this thing, or she does this thing, where he or she is introducing this term and then saying nothing more about it. So we have the same thing with Oshadhi, right? But let's look at Oshadhi as much as we can. And I want to just say I'm not a Sanskrit scholar, but I'll do my best here. So Oshadhi, one definition of this is to make known or to reveal something surprising. Ashwagandha, the word, is based on the root osha, which means light-bearing. But here we have basically then an herb or a plant that brings clarity or fosters increasingly greater values of light, which is one way of defining enlightenment— increasing values of light. So this interpretation suggests that what these plants reveal to us from a yogic standpoint may be surprising. So what is surprising about what they're revealing, right? Maybe it's that the direct experience of unity is available to us always, here and now. Or maybe it's that our true nature is bliss, or infinite love, or that all we need is already here if we simply allow it to be. So understandably, few commentators have been willing to explore the significance of this sutra. Part of the reason might be a relative lack of popularity of the use of plant medicines at the time that they were writing, or just their own personal lack of experience with these things. But let's just look at a couple examples. We have B.K.S. Iyengar writing in 1993. In his commentary on the Yoga Sutras, he tells us that there was a sage, Sage Mandavya, and King Yayati, who attained the state of yoga and some powerful siddhis through the use of this mysterious elixir of life that Patanjali is talking about. And more recently in 2009, we have Edwin Bryant just mentioning in passing that the substance that Patanjali is probably talking about here is this mythical and mysterious Soma, which we'll talk more about in a moment. And then my favorite one, we have Swami Satchidananda in 1978 telling us that Patanjali also gives us some clues about the people who get some experiences through their LSD and marijuana And this is a sentiment that is sort of effervescing out of the mid-1970s for me, right? Like, it just makes sat-chit-ananda sound very square. Those are just a couple examples. I mean, nobody really tries to understand what Patanjali is talking about here, and nobody knows with certainty what plants he would have been referring to. I think he does this thing in the sutras where he only mentions the term in passing because those terms were familiar to his readers at the time. So he didn't need to explain them. So there's an argument here, I think, that he mentions this in passing because Oshadhi was such a well-known practice 2,000 years ago in India. Okay, so let's explore a little bit more what this substance might have been by going back in time to the time of the Vedas, the Rig Veda in particular, which is dated somewhere between, I think, 3,500 years ago and 7,000 years ago. You know, when you go back that far, it's based on an oral tradition, and oftentimes these scriptures were written down on palm fronds, which are then, you know, disintegrating, so they have to recopy them. So it's hard to date these things, but there's an entire mandala in the Rig Veda called the Soma Mandala that's devoted to this mysterious substance. In there, there's 114 hymns devoted to Soma pavāmana— purifying soma, the sacred potion of the Vedic tradition. And these hymns are interesting. You should read them if you get a chance. They attest rapturously that half of us is on earth, the other half in heaven. We have drunk soma. We have drunk soma and have become immortal. We have attained the light the gods have discovered. It's fascinating stuff. And so keep in mind that for these yogis, immortality is often the realization of our oneness and the consequent knowledge that death is nothing to fear. It's a simple transition from one state to another. So when they say immortality here, I think it's just this knowing that really, in a way, our lives are just part of a long continuum. Okay, so the other thing that's really interesting to me about this Soma Mandala is they speak at length of mashing the stalk of a plant with stones to prepare this soma. And this, you know, sort of similar to how ayahuasca is prepared by pounding the ayahuasca vine in advance of brewing it with the chacruna plant, right? So some scholars have also tackled this soma mandala, this, this section of the Rig Veda, and there's been some conjecture about what the substance might have been. It may have been a mixture of poppy, Chinese ephedra and cannabis, which to me doesn't sound too exciting, but it also shows how narrow-minded and inexperienced some of these scholars may have been with any kind of sacred plant, right? Another possibility that people have suggested is that they were psychedelic mushrooms, which is possible, or wild rue, which contains a lot of the same alkaloids as ayahuasca. So that's plausible too, although I've never taken Wild rue personally. In any case, this Veda is describing these plants in a way that is reminiscent of plants like ayahuasca, so that's really interesting to me. So the broader point here is that using sacred plants was obviously a well-known practice in Patanjali's time, 2,000 years ago in India, and was apparently a common part of people's spiritual practice. But In any case, I don't think we need scriptural authority to, to work with these plants, right? It's just interesting there's this longstanding history that people don't necessarily know about. Part of why I wanted to highlight this too was that I have had a lot of yoga teachers in the past who were vocally opposed to the use of plants as part of any kind of practice. Maybe they felt like it was a threat to their own authority or something, but, you know, in my experience, they go so well together. And, you know, hey, maybe some of you out there are the type of person who has felt resistance to working with plants, and now that I've told you about Patanjali's authorization to use it, his encouragement to use it, maybe that'll push you over the edge. Maybe that's enough for some people to give it a try. But I'm not here to convince anybody of anything, really. I'm just talking. So. I think, you know, I think using plants to aid your evolution will appeal to some people, especially those who prefer the Terence McKenna approach to life, you know, avoiding gurus and following plants. Or, you know, yoga and meditation will appeal to others, or, you know, maybe a blend of some kind for some people. Different practices for different folks, basically. And I do think over time, reliance on plants in general Probably falls away as you naturally progress along a spiritual path. But in my opinion, there's nothing wrong with asking for a little boost along the way, and for many people, plants can be that boost. After all, the ancient yogis tell us that nature is infinitely intelligent. It's a self-organizing consciousness far beyond our wildest imaginations. And so for this reason too, I think there can be no harm And communing directly with nature through its various expressions, including these plants. In my experience, nature seems to want us to. Now I want to talk a little bit about weaving yoga and plant medicine together in an intentional way. I think yoga ultimately is a practice of integration. We're integrating Atman and Brahman, right? We're integrating the self and the other. Yoga is a process of making us whole at every level. So given the similarities that we've explored between the state of yoga and visionary plant medicine, it's no surprise that yoga can be the perfect companion to working with sacred plants like ayahuasca. For me, having a solid yoga practice going into my experiences with plant medicine allowed me to have both a more grounded experience and a deeper experience with the medicine for several different reasons. First of all, ceremonies or these journeys, these plant journeys, can last for hours at a time. So at a basic physical level, I was able to sit more comfortably on a mat on the floor for longer periods of time because my hips were more open and my body was used to sitting on the floor. So, you know, this is where the asana portion of the yoga practice can really benefit you. Not only that, but in a lot of these more surrendered purgative ceremonies, I was in a sort of modified child's pose, you know, like surrendering into the purging with a bucket in front of me, you know. So I think that too, having the yoga asana practice can let you spend more time on the floor in a comfortable way, basically. But more importantly, having all this yoga practice going into the ceremonies It— I was able to bring with me a deeply rooted sense of trust. Yoga has instilled in me a deep certainty that no experience is too big for my soul to handle, like it did for Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita, that kind of thing. And this inner knowing can come in handy during these intense ceremonies, right? When you're like, what is happening? You can return to this, this sort of like felt sense that everything's going to be okay no matter what. And then also during the more intense phases of an ayahuasca journey, you can draw on specific yoga practices like energetic practices like pranayama, breathwork, even mantra to help to ground or stabilize or soothe. And I've certainly done that many times in my ceremonies. I've, I've even used asana sometimes to help to ground me during particularly emotional times during the ceremony. So yeah, so you can use simple asana postures on the mat or in another room. You can just have a simple breath awareness technique, or you can, you can draw on some kind of mantra. And this is where I think it's useful for people to, to memorize some, some mantra before they go into a ceremony. This is a lot of what I work with, with my clients and students, you know. So just a couple examples, uh, you could work with a mantra like Aham Shraddha, which is a mantra that basically is invoking this attitude of surrender, right? So Aham Shraddha, Aham Shraddha. You could work with the grounding mantra like Green Tara or Parvati, right? Green Tara mantra sounds a little bit like this. Om Tare Tu Tare Ture Soha. Om Tare Tu Tare Ture Soha. Om Tare Tu Tare Ture Soha. Om. Or you might work with a Ganesh mantra to remove obstacles or to help ease in a transition. Om Gangadapataye Namaha. Om gangarapattaye namaha. Om gangarapattaye namaha. There's so many options here. You could work with Medicine Buddha. I've certainly chanted this in ceremonies that I've facilitated towards the end to sort of bring a healing bhava into the space, you know. Or you could work with a fierce mantra if you wanted to cut through some kind of blockage, right? Some energetic blockage, Durga or Kali or something, right? So these are all, you know, and obviously you're working with these mantras silently to yourself as a thought, you know, you're not doing it in the space, right? But these are the kinds of tools that I oftentimes will share with pasajeros, you know, with the people who are voyaging in these journeys, these ceremonies that I'm facilitating, right? You know, people will oftentimes ask for a facilitator or an angel to come over and help them out, and it's helpful to have these tools to offer as well. And the place where you get the most benefit from bringing yoga into the plant medicine space is integration. This is where energetic practices designed to work with the subtle body can help us to ground and integrate these intense emotional experiences. Yoga here can help help you to connect more deeply to your center and your higher self. It can recirculate the prana and Kundalini that's maybe freeing up in the ceremony in a holistic and restorative way. And sure, I think yoga is perfect for preparing you to work with the plants, for serving as a helpful tool during the process, and for integrating the experience afterwards. And so I do offer these individually tailored integration practices for, for students And for people who are working with plant medicine. And it's, you know, it's always a customized sequence or customized sadhana that I'm giving. That's some combination of grounding practices, restorative practices, healing practices, and sometimes devotional practices. And these practices are helping the person to address both their physical body, but also their energetic and emotional body. And they can include meditation practice. You know, having— I think having a consistent meditation practice can be immensely helpful in both entering a plant medicine ceremony but also in integrating that ceremony afterwards. Meditation, after all, is, is a practice in growing quiet, so it allows you to deeply listen and enter a state of total self-acceptance, which can be huge for integration. I may offer people restorative or yin practices Breathwork, pranayama, and then lots of kriyas. Kriyas, I think, are the most integrative practice in yoga. So there's healing kriyas, grounding kriyas, devotional kriyas. Forgiveness kriyas are really powerful, and kriyas that can bring you into more of a state of bliss can be helpful too. And so through all this work, all of this breath and mantra and mudras, We're balancing the lower chakras and awakening the upper chakras and restoring and strengthening our general energetic body. Another integrative practice that I love and that I oftentimes will give to people is developing some sort of sacred ritual for yourself, or I might even do a sacred ritual for some people, right? Because it's, it's a nice mirror of the sacred ceremonial space that happens with plant medicine. through both of these modalities, we're accessing different layers of reality and of ourselves by working with the various elements of nature. So because of that, sacred rituals can be essential to sort of tuning into the intelligence of nature and developing a powerful vulnerability and a devotional kind of attitude towards life. The benefit here, I think, of sacred rituals too is that most of us live in this abstracted mental world of concepts where we're disconnected from the central world, from the elements. So these rituals can help us to reconnect with both the ground-level reality and meet that fully, but also with deeper levels of our own being. I think the more that we can cultivate a sense of the sacred in life, the more we can become our, our true selves. Again, plant medicine and yoga are both only ever putting us in more direct contact with the unity of existence. And this is done especially through sacred rituals, through the heart and not the head, through surrendering, not forcing or controlling. So some of the sacred rituals that come from the yoga tradition are puja, which can be done in the morning before meditation. There's yagyas, these traditional fire ceremonies. There's more advanced practices like bhuta shuddhi, which can be used to work with the elements in a more advanced way, more elevated way. And so again, these are helping us to access our higher and deeper selves. And so through the 5 elements of nature, we can access these different qualities in ourselves. So that's a little bit about what the specifics of an integration practice look like. Now I want to talk about how yoga can sort of serve as its own alternative to plant medicine. You don't have to work with plant medicine, as I said. There are advantages and disadvantages to relying on plant medicine to do the hard work of self-inquiry and the shadow work. I mean, it can be a great jumpstart for people. It can open you up to parts of yourself that you had previously had no contact with. It can get you out of your head and into your heart, and it can shift you from over-analysis to more intuition, more of an intuitive approach to life. And like I talked about before, plant medicine, just like yoga, can help us to feel intense emotions in the safe container of a sacred ceremony. Sometimes plant medicine can even cut through a tendency for spiritual bypass. You know, I think so many people sort of want to want to change instead of actually changing, right? So that can be a nice sort of like cutting through of that tendency. Basically, plant medicine can be like a system reset that then sets you on a path of potentially exploring yoga in greater depth. It's extremely heart-opening. Plant medicine is referred to by shamans and curanderos and, and these traditional indigenous people as a heart medicine. And so it can be very heart-opening in that way, and that's been my personal experience with it. And plants like ayahuasca are also great for working on our subtle body, the part of us that holistic yoga practices also specifically target. So there is this, again, this parallel. There's these benefits that come from both practices, and it's just more a matter of personal preference and intuition and that kind of thing. But sometimes I wonder, for certain people, if maybe plant medicine is a shortcut, or maybe too much too soon, right? Ram Dass actually asks this question in his commentary to the Bhagavad Gita. He wonders if people who start their journey like he did with psychedelics before yoga are getting ahead of themselves. He likens it to this section in chapter 11 of the Gita where Arjuna is asking Krishna to show him his true nature, but here Arjuna has gone through the the previous 10 chapters and had Krishna systematically teach him yoga, so he was on some level prepared for this vision, but also he was overwhelmed by it, right? And so he sees Krishna's true nature and he asks him to please stop. So maybe for some people it can be like that, you know, you need to first go through the first 10 chapters of Krishna teaching you yoga before you can do the plant medicine. And that, I guess in a way, that was my experience. I had done 10 years of yoga before going into working with plant medicine. And again, here's Ram Dass talking about his guru, Neem Karoli Baba, and Neem Karoli Baba's perspective on these medicines, LSD in particular. Here's Neem Karoli Baba talking about it. These medicines will allow you to come and visit Christ, but you can only stay 2 hours. Then you have to leave again. This is not the true samadhi. It's better to become Christ than to visit him. But even the visit of a saint for a moment is useful. In the end, love is the most powerful medicine, for love slowly transforms you into what the psychedelics only let you glimpse. So again, it seems like it's, it's A personal preference. It's, it's whatever you seem to need, and you just gotta feel into it, right? But I just want to talk a little bit about some of the advantages of yoga over plant medicine here. First of all, not everyone has the luxury of traveling to South America or risking an illegal ceremony in their own country. I mean, plant medicine requires financial resources, large chunks of time, and a certain tolerance for intense physical and emotional experiences that are far outside the norm. Plant medicine ceremonies also require a lot of concentrated time and energy— days, weeks, sometimes months of dedicated ceremony and integration time. Not everyone is ready for or wants to dive deeply into their trauma and their darkest emotional states. Many want a practice that lets them feel their feelings gradually in more manageable, bite-sized chunks, perhaps. And so I think yoga can also be that more sustainable long-term practice. Especially a holistic style that combines energetic practices and devotional practices and that kind of thing. These holistic yoga practices can be seamlessly woven into your daily life. You don't have to run off to the jungle for an intense retreat period and then integrate all that, you know, and make a dietary change for a month and all that, you know. And this is actually how I discovered elemental yoga in the first place. These practices that I learned in the Himalayas were giving me the same experiences I was having with ayahuasca. And so this is why I was so excited to bring these back and to share these techniques. So through holistic yoga, like, like elemental yoga, you can realize the same benefits that you realize in an ayahuasca ceremony by working with prana and Kundalini, which is naturally arising in the human body, and tapping into the DMT that naturally arises and Maybe these practices can help us to bypass— spiritual bypass— and they can install deep inside your heart and soul this unshakable knowing that you are softly, quietly invincible. So yoga is more accessible, it's more adaptable, and it's available in small portions if you like. You can do 15 minutes a day or 2 hours a day. You can go on a yoga retreat too. And everyone has access to, you know, pretty affordable yoga, especially now. Another benefit of yoga over plant medicine is that if you do enter into these deeply transcendental states that can come out of these practices, you can then pull yourself out of it if it becomes too intense or if you need to deal with mundane reality. I mean, of course, having said that, there may be a benefit to the lack of control and the surrender that's required by plant medicine. So again, I'm just kind of going through the different pluses and minuses here, and it's up to you to decide. So even though Patanjali is talking about working with psychoactive plants in the Yoga Sutras, I think at some point you have to leave the plants behind. I think Patanjali would have agreed, given how little he talks about these plants in the Yoga Sutras. In the end, everything you need to access your inherent bliss nature is inside of you, and yoga can help you to more consistently enter the state of yoga at will. It can give you the tools to become more yourself. There is no one way. Maybe some people are the jump right in and work backwards types, but, you know, some people may want a more gradual approach. Sometimes you need the inspiration of the grand visions from an ayahuasca journey to set you on the dedicated and steady path of, of yoga, like Ram Dass. But, you know, you start where you are, you follow your intuition, you do what calls to you. For me, it was yoga first. then plant medicine, and then both together. And now they're interwoven like a beautiful helix for me. There's no mistakes. There's no correct path. There's only grace and love and practice. In my experience, a holistic yoga practice that works with the subtle body can help to integrate or take the place of plant medicines like ayahuasca. The 2 modalities can work side by side in an integrative spiral of change. A returning home to oneself. My yoga offerings, Elemental Yoga, is heavily influenced by these ancient elemental shamanic practices. As my students know, a lot of my yoga offerings, my classes, are heavily influenced by these ancient elemental shamanic practices. I'd like to bring a sense of ceremony to all my offerings and to work with certain kinds of rhythms that can support the inner journey. That we take. Yoga and plant medicine are both ultimately paths of love. These healing modalities are simply helping us to open our hearts and to have the direct experience of unity, which is so crucial at this time. I think there's so much strife, but also we live in a time that's so pregnant with so much possibility. So that's my, my take on yoga and plant medicine. The love story. And once again, I just want to remind you, if you enjoy the podcast, you can buy me a coffee at elemental.yoga/podcast or ko-fi.com/jaydev. I'll put these links in the show notes too. And if you like my podcast, feel free to leave me a rating on Apple Podcasts. You can find me on Instagram at Elemental Yoga. And again, next month I'm so excited. I'm talking to Sophia Rocklin about plant medicine, so look for that in your feed. Remember, all you need for wholeness is already inside of you. Adiós. Tatsa.