Ayahuasca and relationships.

Can this tool help me navigate through a break-up, a difficult marriage, relationship or the absence thereof?

The short answer is yes.

But you’re probably not reading this blog to get a short answer, but to get a deeper understanding of what is at stake, how it can help and most importantly, whether it’s a tool that you could benefit from.

Let’s look at the root of these things.

A heartbreak or a break-up, a difficult relationship or the absence of one of these, the roots for these things tends to be a misunderstanding of ourselves, of the other person, of love itself, or relationships where we misunderstand ourselves.

Number one, we don’t know what we want, we don’t know the kind of person that we actually are compatible with so we choose poorly, maybe we choose because we think that this woman is going to be like my parents.

Maybe this man, has a good job and is going to provide stability, security, right?

We explore or choose or partners based on a lot of societal conditioning without actually looking at how compatible our lives are, our energies, our visions, our ways of being, showing up in the world.

Now, number two, misunderstanding the other person.

I remember a joke, i believe it was Ram Dass who shared it: “When a pickpocket meets a saint, all he sees is his pockets.“

When you’re hungry and you go through town, all you see are restaurants. When you want to pee all you see are gas stations and bathrooms, right?

So what we see in the world is largely determined by what we want, by our desires and our aversions, what we want to come towards and what we want to run away from.

In relationships, we see our partner with our idea, our ideal of that person, so we’re constantly disappointed because we project them and expect them to be someone they aren’t.

We imagine that they’re going to be the solution to a lot of our questions, our inadequacies maybe, we feel bored with life and we expect for them to provide adventure.

I feel unsafe and want them to make me feel stable, we become a little bit arrogant and narcissistic without knowing it so, because we start using the other person to play and fulfill a function in our life.

Failure to see the other person is going to leave them feeling incomplete, it’s very difficult to be in a relationship where the other person is not seeing you but seeing what they want from you.

Let’s say i were a very, very rich man, and i met a woman that saw only my money, i could feel it, know that she doesn’t see my history, my dreams, my pain, my challenges.

She’s not interested in what makes me think, laugh, she’s interested in how i can be a bridge towards her safety, towards her financial stability.

Let’s say she’s very attractive, a supermodel, and all i saw were her curves, her body shape, the approval that i get when i enter a room holding her hand.

All i see is her outer layer, she may feel appreciated for that, but her dreams, the little girl inside of her, the mature woman that is more than just a body or a sexual object will feel disollusioned quite often.

We do our versions of this, we’ll have different needs that we’re trying to saitsfy with another person, that’s okay, as long as we can see past those needs and actually see the other person, but we rarely do.

We usually stay in a relationship with ourselves, using somebody else as the puppet for the game that we’re playing.

This causes trouble and it leads to eventual chaos, eventually to the breaking apart of this relationship.

It is impossible to love someone that you don’t see and it’s impossible to feel loved when you aren’t feeling seen.

Now, misunderstandings of love.

A lot of people think that love is something that they do, a lot of people confuse love for desire, lust, romantic interest.

We love someone but the moment that they behave in a way that we don’t like, spending more time with their friends, maybe from the opposite sex.

Then we’d get insecure, worried, we withdraw our love and we’re now afraid, our love tends to be very conditional because it’s not love, it’s desire, comfort, an agreement where i will give you but you need to give back.

Misunderstanding love means that we place a lot of expectations and pressures on the other person, on the relationship itself, we misunderstand that love isn’t actually something that we do.

Something that isn’t unique to one person alone, if it were, it wouldn’t be love.

It’s a place we can stand, inhabit, so that we act lovingly when we’re in love, acting from a place that is very sweet, inclusive of everything.

Anything and everything that crosses my path we extend our open arms towards with love.

Love is not to want or desire. The the moment my hormones start going down suddenly i don’t have any interest for you anymore, that’s not love, maybe passion, sexual desire, biological chemistry.

Nothing wrong with these things, but if we misunderstand bodily functions, romantic agreements, for love.

Then we’re bound to trip over these misunderstanding and we’re bound to elude love, because we think that we’re loving when in reality we’re just in a constant exchange.

Maybe we think that we’re in love but maybe it’s just lust that we’re feeling, this is very common.

Learning to understand what love is and how it is an inner job, not something that we do, something we become.

It’s a place that we inhabit, it’s something that we must reach from our heart by ourselves.

Me being lovingly does not depend on my wife, if it did, then the moment that she tells me something i don’t like or treats me with some closure, acts in a sarcastic or angry way, being difficult, then i withdraw my love.

However, if my love depends on me, it can be a choice.

It can be a choice that i extend to everyone, in fact, i can love every man and woman, bird and flower. I can welcome them in my heart as a choice, this choice does not require sexual action, this is very different.

We usually get that mixed up. If i love my friends that means i want something with them, it’s not true.

Love is not something that you hold only for one person, because then it becomes attachment.

A lot of our relational problems come from misunderstanding love itself, we don’t know what it is, most people have never felt it, most people confuse it for lust, infatuation.

Relationships have this immense pressure on what we assume or have been told they should be, we see movies, we imagine that our partner must be our confident, the person we can bring our deepest and darkest truths to.

They must be our friend of adventures, who we can travel and explore our life with, our spiritually aligned counterpart, someone with whom we’re going to eventually merge into God (Or source of creation) with.

With whom we are destined by the cosmos and universe to be in a relationship with, a sacred relationship.

The erotic incarnation of all of our passions, desires and fantasies. They have to be mother, father, sometimes house cleaner, worker.

There’s so many things that we have placed, so many weights that we carry and unconsciously poured on our relationships.

When you place a lot of weight on something, it is bound to crack, the reason that a lot of relationships crack in this world is because there’s a lot of weight being placed on them.

This happens because we do not pay attention, relationships are an agreement between two people, a romantic relationship, one with friends, colleagues, partners of your spiritual journey.

All of these are also relationships, we are human beings that were born in the context of community back in the day, we thrive in the context of community.

Right now, we’re expecting for one person to fulfill the role that 10-30 people had in the past, it is unsustainable. The expectations will break them, they will break the relationship and they will break the love that we have for them.

I want you to understand that, it doesn’t matter how romantic the ideals you have been sold are, it doesn’t matter your genuine positive hopes for this one person to be everything you always wanted and needed for it.

It’s not true, you will need friends, spiritual teachers, people with whom you have certain kinds of openness, it can be your therapist, someone that you trust.

There will be a lot of different people that play different roles, that’s okay, that actually takes the pressure off the relationship to be everything at once.

And of your partner from having to juggle a lot of different ways of being romantic, relationships have certain agreements, quite usually, sexual exclusivity, mutual support around creating a home, mutual collaboration in sustaining a family.

Hopefully, and i think ideally, the mutual celebration of each other’s way of showing up in the world, each other’s dreams.

Everything else we can get from friends, teachers, co-workers, other people.

Do not misunderstand the role that your relationship is meant to play in your life because if you place too much weight on it, it is bound to crack, break.

You will live life failed relationship after failed relationship, wondering what’s wrong with everybody else, or maybe what’s wrong with you, without realizing that what was wrong was the way you were building things.

Take a deep breath, slow down, figure out what is this actually serving? What is this relationship good for, what are the actual expectations that will help this relationship thrive, that will help my partner and myself become bigger people?

Not smaller from the amount of pressure that we experience.

Misunderstanding yourself or the other person, misunderstading love and misunderstanding relationships are the base causes of most heartbreaks, pain, anxiety, stress and overwhelm in our life.

Awareness, conscious attention, work on these areas, letting go of all that is false, false misconceptions, trying to understand who i am, who this person in front of me is, what love is, what is bringing us together?

Answering these questions will ensure you have a beautiful relationship, so before you jump into conclusions, make sure that you’re not acting or relating from a place that is inherently broken by design.

You may be wondering what’s the role that Ayahuasca plays in this, Ayahuasca helps us get to the bottom of these questions with clear awareness.

Sometimes it’s very easy to confuse if things are in my mind, intuition, is it my body heart telling me what is right for me, to move away from this relationship?

Or is it my fear and my trauma?

A lot of people cannot differentiate, so they make themselves a mess. Should i stay or should i go? They make a a Pros and Cons list.

They entangle themselves deeper and deeper in a lot of stress, anxiety.

Ayahuasca allows you to remove, thread by thread, and show you the truth of who you are.

So you know who you are and what you want, what is good for you, the truth of your partner…

Sometimes this means that you see they’ve been unfaithful or you see that they’re amazing people and that you’re the one that is about to destroy a very beautiful relationship.

They will show you the truth of love, this is the most profound experience of all, it’s at the core of every spiritual journey, if you understand the essence of love, your relationships will forever be transformed.

The truth of your relationship allows you to see that we are humans, we have needs and agreements, we can consciously choose vows.

We can make so that things work consciously and not because we inherited all these expectations, assumptions, ideas and preconceptions about what we imagined relationships should be.

If you feel the calling to sit with Ayahuasca, in a container held by Colombian shamans at a sacred temple in the middle of the mountain forests, please check:

www.ayahuascacolombia.com/retreats