What is in Your Core?

 We define our lives by our actions, our beliefs, our physicality, our failures. We become wound up in the intricate and inextricable things--tangled in a mess as the persona and personality knot themselves up. What we think we are, is not quite what we are, and what we may become, is often greater than what we expect. Our limited and conditional beliefs do just that--they keep us stuck in the web of what was, rather than becoming the weaver of the web itself, where we actively design, repair, reconstruct and dream of what we can create.

The difficultly lies in imagination--the ability to think beyond the now, and imagine another when. Some other version of ourselves, projected forward and looking back at the here and now. This sort of future-looking-back-self is as dangerous as looking silently at yourself in a mirror for too long. You see you, seeing you, and that can be quite uncomfortable. But, its a necessary danger, to engage in this sort of deep rooted audit of what you are made of. 

To find what it is, beneath all those layers of expectations and societal conditioning and self-hatreds and mistakes. There, at the core of you, what is it that you hold so dear? What is it, that you've kept hidden safely away beneath layers of flesh and sinew and impervious mental stonewalling? Who do you take off that armor for? Who do you feel safe enough with--to let them peer into the most fragile parts of yourself? 

And what is the substance of us? Other than molecules vibrating and coalescing at a certain frequency to form us into a corporeal unit, what are we made of? If our thoughts are what drive us, what are those thoughts made of? Where do they come from? Who is in charge of them? Do we share these strange inklings with the outer world? Or do we let them fester inside, rotting us from the inside out? If there is a place where dreams go to die, then there too must be a place where curses go to grow? And if that rotten place is hidden deep within us, how do we treat it with care? How do we use that mycelium to eat up what must be recycled and repurposed, and allow something better to grow?

Then, as we teeter through these layers of self-inspection and reflection, we must tread lightly, but purposefully. Sure footedness is a must, when we explore inward. Its why having an experienced guide is important during plant or mushroom medicine journeys, as often the ways within are an inhospitable tangle, barely navigable in a lucid state, let alone in an enhanced one. After many an internal foray into the mindscape of self, I come back wondering what is it that I am looking for exactly? What is it that has me so deeply