These plants never cease to amaze me

At the beginning of this dieta (9 days ago), I asked for the most life-changing dieta yet.

I wanted them to blow my mind with magic, beauty and joy 🤯

No limits, right?

Then on Friday night during our first Ayahuasca ceremony, the plants answered.

I’d asked Felix to take a look at a very persistent tension in my face.

I’d been feeling the tension for more than 6 months and gradually connected it to certain patterns of negative thinking, a need for perfectionism and a fairly mild form of OCD that has been with me for 15-20 years.

Don’t get me wrong –

It’s shifted a huuuuuuuge amount with all the tools and techniques inside Rageheart but there’s still more to go.

When I had a negative thought about someone or something or an impulse to check the stove 7 times before going to bed, very often I’d find certain parts of my face tensing or squeezing, almost as if the thoughts were coming from or related to the tension.

Then Felix sang his icaros (medicine songs) to me during ceremony and had the plants take a look at this thing in my face (they can do that kind of thing here 🤯).

I didn’t notice much while he sang but after he finished singing, he dropped a bombshell on me:

“So this thing in your face that wants everything to be perfect, everything in its place, where all this negativity comes from, the OCD… at some point in your life, you created a belief system so strong that it creates physical sensations in your body.

Here’s the catch though… it’s all you. That means when you’re looking at it, you’re also looking from it. That’s why trying to change it isn’t working.

Felix then left me and went to sing to the next person while I let his words sink in.

Over the next little while, I realised I’d been approaching this tension in my face all wrong.

I’d been trying to get rid of it… but “trying to get rid of it” was more of the same thing. Perfection. Trying to solve the problem. Get it all done. Get it all right. OCD about the OCD 🤣

So if I tried to get rid of it, I’d only be perpetuating the same belief system that created it. The impulse to fix it or solve it or control it or change it in ANY way at all was coming from it. I created something that tries to destroy itself but can’t because the attempt to destroy it just recreates the same pattern.

It reminds of that Einstein quote…

You can’t solve a problem with the same thinking that created it.

So…

What’s the solution?

Leave it alone 🙅‍♂️

Let it go.

Stop trying to fix it.

For me, this meant letting go of any impulse to do anything. To feel for the moment when I wanted to change it or focus on it or even focus on anything and then to let all of that go and just be. To trust in the medicine, in the plants and in my teachers Felix and Safa.

The more I do that, the more it becomes obvious that the body knows what to do. The body knows how to heal. It just needs me to get out of the damn way.

That’s what’s been happening over the last few days.

And as I let go more and more, I see (and most importantly, FEEL) the body’s natural medicine start to activate. The tension in the face softens. My shoulders drop. The entire rear side of my body relaxes. The negative thoughts, need for perfection and OCD impulses slow down.

In nervous system terms, I’d say that as I let the body relax (rather than trying to make the body relax) out of sympathetic drive (doing), it actually comes into parasympathetic rest and recover far easier and far more naturally. And when the real healing begins.

It’s the most magical thing to observe and feel. To see your own body taking care of itself without any input from you whatsoever. And to feel just how deep relaxation goes. A quiet mind is part of it. A fraction perhaps. Real, deep relaxation is felt in the body.

Imagine feeling as light as air… as if your entire body was a curtain blowing gently in the breeze.

Not a shred of tension anywhere.

Imagine that.

That’s relaxation.

My mission with Rageheart is that everyone gets to experience that for themselves.

Anyway, that was my weekend 😍

This is exactly what I teach people to do inside Rageheart.

How to get out of the way so your body and mind and entire nervous system can heal itself.

When you start to see and feel it happening inside you, it will blow your mind.

If not for all the work I’ve done learning about my nervous system and how to regulate the fight-or-flight response (like I teach inside Rageheart), I don’t think I would have understood how to approach this at all.

Instead, it would just be another cool insight from a psychedelic journey that I didn’t know how to bring into my day-to-day.

But thanks to all that practice and learning… it’s all slotting into place. Like I said, the pattern of negative thinking and perfection has already softened (and it’s only been 3 days – let’s see what happens over the next week or month!) and the tension in my face has relaxed. It’s still there but this is the most progress I’ve ever seen with it… so shit is on the move!

Utterly life-changing…

…and still 5 days and 2 ceremonies to go 😍

John Wood