Resistance and Surrender with Plant Medicine
What I’ve learned about the descent, the guides and gatekeepers at the threshold of a liminal journey from a ‘textbook bad trip.’
Jacob wrestles with the Angel - Gustave Doré 1855.
(You’ll notice this post has an audio component. This isn’t me or an AI voice reading my article. It’s the ‘behind the scenes,’ my individual ‘peanut gallery’ commentary of why I wrote this post. No worries, reading the post is enough. But if you want that extra sauce, then have a listen. Let me know what you think in the comments.)
Last weekend was my birthday, and being that it was also a holiday, it was refreshing to get out of town for a couple of nights and hang out with friends. But the weekend had more insights to offer than just celebrating my birthday: experiencing some plant medicine taught me something about crossing into a liminal space.
My husband and I wanted to do a plant medicine journey together, and as luck would have it, we were gifted the opportunity. A couple of years ago, I participated in a plant medicine ceremony and had a perspective-opening transcendent experience that has reverberated in my life since then. So, I had some positive expectations of what could happen, but I surely wasn’t ready for how challenging this time would be.
Wrestling with the angel.
I love the potency of the image of Jacob wrestling with the angel, which I see as how we often wrestle with ourselves, especially the more recalcitrant aspects of our ego selves. In my previous plant medicine experience, I met one of the challenging aspects of my ego self, but it was a softer encounter.
This time, it came through in a harsher tone. I felt that the dwellers at the threshold of this experience were akin to black leather jacket urban mafiosos than the more loving, feminine, and playful experiences I had met before. In this current experience, I encountered how transitions into a different liminal space of transformation take many shapes, and there are other guides and guardians that we have to either dance or wrestle with - and this time, it was a wrestling match.
In the time warp that we feel when guided by the medicine of a plant entity, it all felt like a long night of wrestling with the part of me that wouldn’t and couldn’t surrender to the experience until finally succumbing to the mercy of tears of surrender to what felt like many lifetimes of exhaustion. A week later, I feel I’m still integrating what I experienced, making sense within the context of my life going forward.
Only afterward did I see the irony of undergoing this experience as I gave a presentation this past Saturday for the Astrology Foundation Inc. of New Zealand on The Astrology of the Liminal, where I explored the many entrances and stages of a transformational journey. I guess my psyche wanted to have a more recent and visceral experience of what it is to cross the landscape of the liminal.
Catabasis
Transformation is a fragile time of transition.
Going from one shore to the other side’s shore is a journey through the waters or the landscape of the liminal. It’s mysterious, half-lit, and half-darkened—a moment of changing the guard within ourselves. We go through this between time daily, through the experience of twilight, the time between the luminaries: the Sun and the Moon.
In any transformation, the common element is the experience of death, for our Ego is always made to die one way or another. An aspect of ourselves has to meet death, for the seeds of the beginning lie in the end. Much like in the Balsamic (Waning Crescent) Moon lies the inklings of what will be seeded in the New Moon.
It’s from the void womb of death that life takes seed.
Our very life is birthed in the dark womb.
We are not birthed in light but darkness.
The centuries old maligning of darkness in our Western culture has done a number on us and on how we relate to life and its cycles.
For the ancient Greeks, the word CATABASIS meant to ‘go down,’ this was a common motif in heroic myths where the heroes would go down to the Underworld, which was at the crux of their transformation.
In modern times, this going down can take the shape of a pilgrimage or a therapeutic descent through psychoanalysis, shadow work, and now, with the more publicized plant medicine.
There are many reasons why we ‘go down,’ to descend is to be forever transformed.
Rescue - soul reclamation/retrieval.
Individuation Process - from Ego to Self.
Acquire Information - experience life differently.
Guidance for the future.
Get something that we need - “Inner Gold.”
Closing a stage in life.
To understand.
Knowing the depths - soul-making.
Going into this experience, at least rationally, I thought, was to receive something I may need on my path forward. I thought I was going to have a creative vision of what I could focus on, but what I ended up receiving was an experience from the rivers of grief from many lifetimes, only to finally surrender towards the end of the experience of asking for mercy and to be able just to be and rest.
I was utterly shaken, stirred, and spent.
One doesn’t face a reckoning with deep grief without coming out vulnerably naked as a newborn child.
Liminal Smarts - Don’t leave home without it.
Ideally, one doesn’t cross the threshold into the liminal landscape without specific guidance or a guide for the journey. This can come in many forms, but on that fateful evening, my husband took on the role of guide as I wrestled with death.
As the medicine surged through my bloodstream, my mind, and Ego went into hyperventilating anxiety as I felt like I was both on the edge of an abyss of death rupturing me from the inside.
It’s still hard to articulate what that felt like, a claustrophobic internal experience that I couldn’t shake and allow myself to surrender, even though a part of me, sitting in the corner of my mind and still rational, knew that if I could just relax into the experience, the foreboding of the abyss would go away.
It was this unshakeable stubbornness of my Ego, not wanting to release the wheel, that made the experience exhaustive and challenging. I was very grateful for my husband’s groundedness and ability to be my tether to the here and now. He didn’t know that he was about to be my guide in what he called ‘a textbook bad trip’, but to me, he thankfully could channel both his past experiences with plant medicine and serve as the container - a vessel - and a companion so that I wouldn’t unravel.
While this was an intensely condensed experience of crossing the threshold and moving through the liminality of my Underworld landscape, it highlighted how much we need guidance and knowledgeable guidance when we are undergoing transitions in our lives.
Dwellers at the Threshold - Planetary Guidance.
Traditionally, Saturn is considered the dweller at the threshold, the cosmic bouncer that either allows us to enter or not unless we can pass muster. My experience of Saturn is also as both the birth canal in its contractions and as the midwife, holding our hands as we push forth what wants to be birthed through us. It will be stern when we approach it with entitlement but grounded and sustaining when we approach it with humility. It also serves as the crock pot of our soul work. It can hold a lot of intensity but also have us experience de-pressing pressure that gives us endurance.
Alchemically, Saturn is also associated with the Prima Materia, the lead that will be transformed into gold. Thus making Saturn also the very thing we fear to face but need to so that we may grow and transform.
Resistance is but one of the ways it beckons us toward the threshold of liminality.
It’s an inevitable part of the process, the grit that makes our story worth living.
A lot of my experience on that evening felt like a dance between death and birthing, and my husband had to hold my hands as I was literally in the throws of contractions while I got to see him as both a guide and an impromptu midwife. Afterward, he and I joked that it was couples therapy on steroids, an experience of what I call ‘naked vulnerability,’ a deep 8th house experience.
My sense of the plant medicine entity was of a no-nonsense, no fuss, no-judgment, but stern truth-telling that was both Saturnian, as well as Plutonian (black leather mafioso, a la Sopranos, felt very Pluto to me.) with all the experience of the abyss of death and ego annihilation; no wonder my stubborn Ego resisted with all its might.
It’s beneficial also to understand that underneath the intensity of Pluto is its ability to lead us to release the ‘waters of grief’ as Plutonian transits are often related to the ‘return of the repressed,’ whereas what was once buried now resurfaces to be integrated.
Through its intensity, we are led to purge and process buried grief. I got to do all that in a span of a few hours, although it felt like an eternity. The hands of Pluto definitely directed the chthonic powers of the plant medicine on that evening.
Surrender and Mercy.
Pluto wasn’t the only guide on my journey, for Neptune made its appearance by dissolving the buried grief through tears. The depth of the tears felt like a drowning, but also a release of my Ego grip as it resisted surrender. This resistance was an inherent part of my age-old warrior attitude that just won’t go gently into the night.
The feeling of losing control felt fearsome, but it also made me vulnerable enough to ask for mercy.
I should point out that the whole time I wrestled with my inner angels and demons, I felt a small part of me, which I shall call the ‘rational’ one, was sitting in the corner of my mind witnessing the unleashing of all this chthonic fear and grief.
This part of me was aware of my environment and the help and guidance my husband gave me and witnessed the return of the repressed with detached curiosity. This internal witness is the one who has been integrating this experience, seeing the cathartic and therapeutic aspects of what might be easily dismissed as a ‘bad trip.’
As two big planetary guides through the liminal landscape, in hindsight, I feel blessed and grateful for the presence of Neptune and its teaching on redemption and the vulnerability to finally surrender to something bigger than my ego and ask for mercy - towards myself.
More than the abyss of death that punctuated my journey asking and surrendering to mercy brought the realization of how hard I am on myself and that there was no need to ask, as I had always been granted it.
Simplistically, I recalled moments in my childhood when a tantrum possessed me, and I would cry my eyes out, only to finally surrender to the sheer exhaustion of pushing so hard. The tears were emptying out whatever was clogging up and stale in my psyche, and for the days ahead, I felt this strange hangover and exhaustion.
Rest is sine qua non to the liminal journey, for without integration of a new consciousness, it would take longer to take root in our lives. Our body is the barometer that knows best what it needs after intense liminal crossings, and we don’t heed its need at our own peril.
After a time, the insights may rise up, and we can finally make sense and meaning for the experience. I’m sure further insights will rise in time, but I cannot rush this process.
The Return.
My journey was a very condensed experience of what the descent into the liminal landscape might include. Now, I feel I’m both in the re-memberment and the return phase, where I’m still integrating the experience and sharing it to both serve and make sense. Writing about it is one of the ways I can create a space to hold the experience as it continues to work through me, albeit a lot more gently now.
But was it a ‘bad trip’?
It surely was unexpectedly uncomfortable and even terrifying, but I choose not to see it as ‘bad.’ I feel that calling it ‘bad’ diminishes its power and what may still flourish from it. And since when are the guardians at the threshold made to deliver us with ‘positive’ experiences, filled with butterflies and unicorns?
The threshold isn’t a drive-through for made-to-order experiences.
I feel it’s to our benefit to find what is meaningful to us, even when we stare at the abyss, and the abyss stares back.
Now on to you.
What have you learned about yourself from a ‘bad trip?’
Enjoy & Thrive!
Vanessa Couto
