What’s it been like being a part of the Our Heart Centre family over the past 2 years or so? 💚 Where do I start? 👀

It feels like I’m a completely different person leading a completely different life than I was 2 years ago 🎭 And it makes me wonder, did my life really change that drastically? Factually, did my life really become all that much “better”? 🤔 I mean, I had good enough friends, a good enough job, a good enough home, a good enough set of values I upheld, good enough health and a good enough sense of self.

So what really changed?

Well. My perspective 🔬

I can’t remember much of my first Ayahuasca ceremony, but it was really cool! My mind was blown 🤯 Seeing “things” I’ve never seen before, experiencing them in ways I didn’t know I could experience things. It was magical. And I’ve always had an affinity towards weird and wonderful things that lie BEYOND 💫 and I’ve always known there is something MORE. So yeah, that’s how I would describe it: really cool 🤩

After my mind was blown wide open, it started sinking in that all these weird and wonderful things weren’t “beyond” or “up there”, they were inside all along!🐚 The integration and continuation of these things into MY LIFE has been the most blessed aspect of being part of Our Heart Centre. But we’ll get there…

Back to my first “set” of experiences (which was Ayahuasca ceremonies, Changa ceremonies, Sound Therapy Meditations and generally getting together with the Our Heart Centre family 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦)

Okay, so my mind is blown. My perspective is expanded, and can never go back to being narrow, cause now I experienced what I experienced… now what? 🤷🏽‍♀

Well. In that expansive state, my perspective began to change! Just like that. All that seemed “good enough”, just wasn’t cutting it anymore ✂ and how I was living my life, wasn’t either. Yes, factually, things were just fine, but I just realized I’m worth so much more than “just fine” and have the power (had it all along! 💪🏽) to change my life from “just fine” to AWE-SOME!

2 years later or so:

👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 I have friends that I call family, and my family is much smaller and more precious than my friend circle ever was;

💻 I literally have the same actual job, but it’s now at a firm that makes me want to actually wake up in the morning and fall in love with what I do every day;

🏡 I moved to a city I love, live in a beautiful home and finally live with my amazing partner, and my already pretty good relationship with my parents back in my hometown has just sky-rocketed as we grow together spiritually;

🙏🏽 I live by considering whether something serves me, rather than a set of rules, and am way more spiritually obedient because the obedience is being directed towards my self and higher purpose;

🍲 I am reconnected with my body and listen to what it needs more acutely, and with the help of a wonderful nutricianist I met through Our Heart Centre, I have learned how to actually feed myself; and

🕴🏽I have a direct line of communication with my Higher Self and with Source, and my sense of self and ability to “Self” (verb) has became more and more natural.

Alright so perspective expanded, perspective changed, and here I am 2 years later… how?🧐 And that’s where the integration and continuation I found at Our Heart Centre has played the biggest role!🙌🏽 So I’m going to share a little piece of what I have learned from each below.

🌵 Ayahuasca, San Pedro and Changa ceremonies:

The ability to work on myself and my life from a heightened yet deeper perspective has made things more efficient than I could’ve imagined. I have abolished deep-rooted traumas I wouldn’t even allow in my conscious wake, literally couldn’t even face them in my own mind, and was able to face them head on and dissipate them in a few moments during the ceremonies, after YEARS of not even being aware of some of them.

🎶 Sound Therapy Meditation:

A weekly opportunity to share, relax, retune, readjust, and check in on what areas need focus for the upcoming week. And a weekly opportunity for my mind to take a back seat and let my heart and soul do some work. There have been some weeks I didn’t even want to share because I thought I would just bum everyone out with how terrible things have been with me. But alas, it turns out that that week has been challenging for everyone, and we all just hold each other in a safe space, just by relating, connecting and knowing we’re going through life together.

✨ Family Constellations:

I learned so much about what gets passed down blood lines and generations. This was such an insane experience, I can hardly describe it. Learning about how to break generational patterns, the power of speaking to people’s soul and the acknowledgement of my power to start or end things that I will one day pass on or ensure I don’t pass on to my descendants.

🌈 Chakra Workshop:

I’ve been blessed enough to have attended the workshop twice, and it boggles my mind how I have had a different class every time. What stood out for me in the first class is so different from what stood out the second time, and I’m sure the same would be true for the third time and fourth. The integration I received from Chakra classes was and is invaluable. Every week is about taking all those weird and wonderful things and putting them into PRACTICE, every week is about bettering MY quality of LIFE. This has been my favorite part, because “be positive” was not enough for me anymore, I needed REAL steps and guidance, and it has shed so much light on the intricacies of life.

🛠 Crystals, Angel Cards, Incense, Oils, Apps, Links, Symbolisms

And along the way, I have come to know all the tools that God has put on this earth for me to use and access freely and with more understanding. Much of these tools I learned about and gained an understanding of during Chakra classes. It’s been amazing!

What an awesome journey 🛤

What amazing people I have the honor to walk with 🐾

What an amazing life 😍

Thank you, Our Heart Centre! Thank you, Universe! Thank you, Me!

The Distance to God

Tell her, “Thank you for looking after me the way she did. Tell her that the way she lives her life taught me to be free. Will you give her that message?”

I’ve never met him before, but now he’s sitting in front of me. I nod because words aren’t possible in our conversation. I’ve only seen photos of him, heard his stories, and know the companion he was. He’s much younger in this place, not as grey as I remember in the later pictures of him. He turns and runs off with a joy and energy that he probably missed having as he grew older.

Yellow daffodils cover the hilltop we have met on. They swarm over the hills around us, their scent thick in the air. They seem significant. They are everywhere, and as he scurries through them they lick at him and fill his elated mouth. He’s happy. That is the message.

I feel myself rising up into the shallower waters of the medicine. I’m more lucid and my ego boundaries more solid. My journey has allowed me up for air. My rational mind starts to ask questions and analyse what’s just happened. “Am I imagining or creating this?” “Is this real?” “Who is talking to me?” The answer to my questions is a simple reply. It starts like a vibration in each of my cells. It builds, and the wave of this vibration finally crashes into a booming audible voice that engulfs my body: “Be still and know that I am God.” I know it’s from the Bible but I don’t know its biblical context.

I feel the heaviness of the medicine in my body again and I’m being pulled deeper back into my journey. I surrender to this process as I relive events to learn their true lessons. I am shown visions and my body releases things it’s held onto for far too long. In the medicine language, I process, for the next couple of hours in the darkness around me. The lessons continue for days, weeks, and months afterwards. They play out in the world around me, through people, conversations, and situations. The Creator continues to speak, except not through words.

A day later I message her. My rational mind wants proof. I ask if yellow daffodils mean anything to her. She says, “Yes, they were Doris’s favourite flower.” “No, in relation to him,” I say. “Yes,” she says. “There were yellow daffodils in the park where we used to walk.” I cut the conversation short. Disbelief clouds my mind. There is a pause in thought that feels like complete stillness. This can’t be real. How is this possible? If I was imagining everything, how could I have known about the daffodils? It takes me ten months to find acceptance and finally deliver his message.

“Dad, why do you go there?” It’s 05:30 on a Monday morning sometime in the middle of May. It’s freezing and we are on our way back to the hostel, so Lake can start his school week. I’ve just told him I won’t be at his weekend sport because I will be on retreat. “My boy, it’s hard to explain, but it gives me a chance to listen to God.” He’s fourteen years old, so my answer is more simplistic. If I was conversing with someone in clinic, my answer would be, “I like to go into the void, into the silence of direct and unmediated prayer.” “OK,” he says as our conversation shifts into other topics. It’s precious time to share deeper things. He gets it. Candice gets it. I’m lucky; not everyone does.

For centuries we’ve searched in towering cathedrals, sacred rituals, and the alignment of stars for the Creator, and yet often the search feels like an eternal cosmic treasure hunt. The more you search, the deeper the search needs to be, and it often becomes a game of projection. Because consciousness is projected outward, for many people God is also projected outward. This projection creates space between the Creator and the created, an eternal distance that can supposedly be bridged through prayer, good deeds, or following rules.

What if the search needs to be an inner one? What if the real temple is not made of stone but of consciousness, and the real holy land resides within the unguarded human heart? If God is closer to me than I am to myself, or if I am that which is also seeking me, or if I truly listen to the teaching that “the kingdom of God is within you,” then perhaps our search has been in the wrong direction.

Perhaps God is not a being but the very ground of being that encompasses all that is, the quiet observer of arising thoughts, the unnameable space out of which creation springs. This One is found everywhere in the space of presence, and presence is an inward-focused experience. The deeper we descend into this inner search, ironically the more boundless we become. God’s presence is everything. It’s always there, constant and unwavering within us. The only thing that changes is our awareness and recognition of it. God is the quiet space that allows the inner awareness of ourselves to recognise the divinity within us.

There is then no distance to God, because any step we take away from ourselves is already a step away from God. There is no path from “me” to God, for God is not another place or another being. God is the true essence of who we are, the deepest “I” or self at the core of each of us. Since we already are that Self, we cannot approach it, reach it, or arrive at it. We can only cease looking elsewhere and recognise that what we have been seeking has always been within us.

For a brief while the eternal takes on a transient form that looks like who we are. When this form ends, the awareness remains. God is the awareness. We are just the form for a bit. So then there is no need for searching, no need to climb spiritual mountains or wait for Heaven to close the distance between yourself and God. In this moment, the silent awareness reading these words is God. Knowing and realising this allows you a connection to the One. That connection is the ultimate prayer. It doesn’t need words and is ever present. God was never out there at a distance, only one conscious breath closer than you thought.

Travel well.