Recommended Watching: Aaron Rodger’s Ayahuasca Experience 

Notes: 

• Aaron Rodgers is the quarterback for the Green Bay Packers. 

Excerpts:

• “It was going to the depths of my soul and hearing and feeling all that that self criticism, all that doubt, all that judgement, that I had placed on myself. And sitting with it for hours. With zero psychoactive experiences, nothing happening other than me and that voice in my head, on my shoulder, in my heart, in my body, saying you are not enough, you’re not worth it, you’re all these things. And sitting with the depth of that reality. And it was really really tough. And it broke me to the core. And I wrestled with it for hours.”

• “I had to surrender fully to the idea that everything I was telling myself was true. And that’s when it finally broke. I sat there on that mat, and I made peace with the possibility that all these lies I was telling myself, could possibly be true.”

• “It requires us to accept the thing that we’re afraid of or the thing that we’re resisting, and in the acceptance is the permission to transform.”

Additional Note: 

• The point here, as I understand it, is not that the medicine experience is trying to convince the one who drinks it that such things are fundamentally true. It is trying to get the drinker to to a place of acceptance and surrender. It is trying to induce the acceptance of a possibility. And strangely enough, it is that latter form of acceptance which induces the healing, the release from the suffering, and the realization of worthiness. 

Recommended Reading

10 legendary musicians who never learned to read music 

Notes: 

• Jimi Hendrix, Han Zimmer, Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, and the Beatles are all on the list. 

Excerpts From My Journal 

If your problems have deep roots, you’re probably going to need to go into some deep places to solve them. 

In general, there is a strong inverse relationship between how much a person likes you and the frequency with which you interrupt them when they are speaking. 

There are many forms of “privilege.” Money is probably the one that is referred to most often, but again, there are so many more. Health, intelligence, confidence, peace of mind, and a loving family, to name a few. And there are innumerable people with a tremendous amount of money who would trade most of it, if not all, for a little bit more of the latter varieties of “privilege.” 

Your thoughts, to a large extent, are simply reflections of what you want to say. How can you get them to reduce in volume? How can you get them to settle down? One of the best ways out there, surprise surprise, is by saying them, either to another, or to a journal. 

When I used to hear people speak about being “at peace” I thought what that looked like was a person staring out at a view, taking in their surroundings, and not thinking about much. And I still think that’s the case to some degree. But these days, I would say that the same could be said of someone who is playing an incredible guitar solo, or performing an act of extreme athleticism. These acts also stem from a place of peace. A state of mind in which there is no division. No argument between one fearful voice saying “don’t say that, you might sound stupid” or “don’t do that, if you do something bad might happen,” and another voice that is desperately screaming “this is what I want to say” or “this is what I want to do.” In my mind, that is what it means to be at peace. 

Every tree, and every breath, is a quiet reminder of reality’s true nature. 

Music Recommendation 

The Claw, covered by Shane Hennessy