Welcome back to the Sanctuary for the Misfits of God with Saisha Ma.
Today, I am recording this in a place that I have never really been willing to record from. The sacred edge of choice… of addiction.
That point where my skin is crawling and everything inside me wants to disappear into a bottle.
Everything inside me wants relief. Everything inside me wants to just make that choice one more time. Just one more moment of relief. When life just kind of feels too... feely.
Too real, maybe, too impossible.
The day actually started out really strong. I didn’t wake up early, but I did immediately kind of move into some sacred practices, and connection by way of showing up for someone else, and going out into nature.
It was a beautiful sunny day in the beginning, and just as the weather shifted into more cloudy and stormy weather, so did my internal climate. Then an old visitor came to visit, and it’s one that I say I’m done with, and yet still kind of like when this one comes knocking at my door.
This little dance I do with alcohol. Throughout my life, I’ve loved it, and hated it, and quit many times. And when I say quit, I mean I’ve quit for a number of years at a time. Every time I think I’m really done with it, it tends to just kind of come back and prove me wrong.
This is probably the most awareness I’ve ever had in this dance for sure, but it doesn’t feel any less overpowering. It doesn’t feel any less medicating.
It is amazing to me that I could do the amount of psychedelic medicine that I’ve done for the extensive period of time that I’ve done it and still do this dance.
The amount of self-development work that I’ve done, the amount of courses and workshops. Trying to step into this, I don’t know, better person, better version, higher vision, whatever it is. Yet to still be sitting with the same longings, the same desires, the same hungers that have been present in my life for as long as I can remember.
I was just curious what would happen if I actually recorded from the inside of one of those deep desires. From a point where I actually don’t know what I’m going to choose.
At the end of all of this, I don’t know if I’m going to be able or even want to say…
no more
not today
not one last time
Because I think that’s the ever lurking promise, right, of these cravings, of these addictions. They say just one more time. Just that one last dance together.
That one last numbing,
That one last moment of relief,
That promise of, “we’ll just have one more good night together.”
And it’s funny, because as I say this, I think of all the moments that we encounter this. It’s not even just with “bad things”, right? I do this dance with psychedelic medicine, you know? I still have that urge for that one last experience. That one last touching of the gods.
It’s so sweet, and... one last time with a partner that you know is wrong for you.
I’ve done that plenty in relationships where it’s just kind of like, let me just try this one last time. Really, like, squeeze that one last juice out of what’s here, which is already a dead situation.
When I look back on those moments, you know, something’s already decaying and we’re trying to have one last moment with it.
And I know all the right things to do.
You know, I intentionally forced myself to watch a video that wasn’t very resonant, but it was all about the damage of alcohol, why we shouldn’t drink it. And for some reason, for me, when I listen to these things sometimes and I’m in the middle of the urge, it just makes me want it more.
And I look at myself and I question,
Why is it that I can know the full consequences of something and still actually want to dance with it?
I say, well, not me. I’ll get out. I’ll get out before it really hurts me. And the consequences for me haven’t been all that bad if I really think about it.
But when I look at my life right now, I have to ask, is that really true?
The Hunger Beneath It
And I have to look at this even in the container of a beautiful process like ayahuasca and sitting in ceremony and being in community. I was doing what I thought at the time was this amazing, incredible, service work.
But I knew at a certain point of medicine that I was really destroying my life. And maybe there was a part of me that needed to do that clearly because I did it.
But, through that entire adventure, there was this lie being told.
I’m special.
I’m different, and this is what should be happening
I don’t know, these stories we tell ourselves about who we are, and why it’s okay for us. To some degree, I feel like this is like the core of the rebel. This is like the core of that rebel aspect.
The rules are different for me
When I look at my life and where it’s at, I can absolutely see the beauty and the perfection of where I stand. Because that’s all creation can be, and in my opinion it is perfect.
Perfectly teaching
Perfectly destroying
Perfectly evolving
But there’s been some major consequences because I’m still not really wanting to own this human experience. I’m still not fully engaged in walking my brothers and sisters home. Or allowing them to do the same for me, to the degree that my soul is longing for.
When I was sitting with this deep craving, I was sitting with Rapeh, and my body, and movement, and a curiosity of…
What is this addictive hunger really about?
Why do I always feel so hungry in life?
Why am I clinging to so many things, grasping at so many things, getting involved in so many things, and none of it really feels quenching?
It just gives me a quick hit, but then I’m still there feeling lost in the next moment. Or I feel dreadful about life in the next moment when I really have to sit down and create something or sit down and know what I’m doing with myself.
I think I just have this really deep fear of the hunger I have for life, of the hunger of what I want to accomplish and the bigness of it.
Not bigness as in, I’m here to do something great. It’s not even that. It’s like, wow, my life force energy is consuming and it’s a lot and it has so much it wants to do. I’m terrified.
I’m terrified of what my life force wants to do, because it feels like a lot, and I guess little me is really questioning if I’m capable of what my life force longs for.
I’m terrified of who I have to become in order to give it what it’s seeking.
I know this has nothing to do with a role or this idea of impact even necessarily. I know enough now that all of the ideals of becoming who we’re supposed to be or this higher version, or fixing ourselves in some ways is just a complete joke of a hunt.
We’ve had what we are looking for the whole time. It was right there, right? As Gangaji says, “the diamonds in our pocket.” The diamond is consciousness. It is us. There’s nothing to seek for. There’s nothing you can find because it’s ungraspable and I understand all of this.
So it’s more about getting in my own way or intentionally blocking what wants to just naturally come through. It’s interesting to feel how it was actually the hope in my day today, the excitement of life feeling so great, and feeling excited to be alive, that led to the first thought of alcohol.
There is this linkage between what wants to become, and this imprinting of destabilization. Just a deep fear of raw life energy consistently pulsating through my body.
I’m sitting here with an internal family systems therapy for addictions book in front of me. I have all these new books I just recently got. Some focused on addiction, some focused on learning yoga deeply, some focused on untethering and letting the mind fall away.
Yet the addiction craving is here in the space amongst all of it.
It’s still here knocking on the door. Still here wanting to claw its way in. Giving this sweet promise of release, laughter, and not caring for a few hours.
Even at the cost of being tired tomorrow, being less present tomorrow, being foggy tomorrow.
Sitting With What Is Here
I don’t know why I got on to record this.
I just felt like it was necessary to actually offer something out there that speaks from the space of craving and addiction without trying to fix it or solve it. To not know what to do with it.
Because I feel like so often that’s how we or I handle everything. When I’m struggling and I want out of this struggle or I’m depressed and I don’t want to feel depressed anymore. I’m sad and I don’t want to feel sad anymore.
So we go seeking and either we’re the person telling people how to not be sad anymore. We’re the people telling others how not to be depressed anymore. Or we’re the one seeking someone telling us how to not feel this anymore.
And that, for me, just isn’t really cutting it these days.
Often, what’s been really teaching me is when I’m not trying to be anything more than what’s in the moment.
What happens when I face that big, deep thing that feels so hard to face, and what if I just sit with this hunger?
Of addiction
What if I sit with this longing and desire?
What if I look at my life and see how much desire runs it?
From one moment to the next I’m desiring something.
I’m desiring purpose
I’m desiring ease
I’m desiring a high or a dopamine hit,
I’m desiring my life to feel a little exciting in that moment
I’m desiring sex
I’m desiring connection,
I’’m desiring feeling important and feeling needed.
It’s just one after the other. If I look at my life, it’s basically just a trail of desire.
I know there’s no way out of this. That there’s not this place and space where desire no longer lives. Maybe there’s a place where desire no longer runs me. The thing I know clearly at this point is that this is not about getting rid of it all.
I do think that there is something magical about just allowing it, witnessing it. Facing it. letting ourselves be curious of what’s within or underneath it.
I guess that’s the question of the day.
What is within or underneath this?
This hunger and this desire to feel relief. To feel like I can access a sense of everything being okay in this moment. I’m seeking it through liquid form.
Or... the naughtiness of not having to be responsible for one more night. Or when it comes to food, just the comfort of this friend that never lets me down.
It’s heavy, and it’s... sticky, and it’s... oily, and in a way, it allows me to pull myself down into a sensation or a frequency in my body that actually feels much more comfortable than lightness, than calmness, than clarity.
More and more, I am really starting to see how my constant being lost is my way of staying lost.
That when I can distract myself and spiral myself and keep doing things that remind me how undeserving I am of this thing I’m trying to do, then it just allows me to stay more lost. It gives me all the validation I need to see why I can’t complete this thing that some part of me is wanting to birth and bring into this world.
I really do believe that quote, “if you want something different, then you have to do something different.”
For me, doing something different is actually speaking out loud what’s here, to an audience. To a group of people that I massively respect and that I want respect from. To those who maybe have an idea of who I am or who I should be because of the work I’m trying to create in this world.
So I just have to be real about who I actually am in this work and in what I’m trying to create in this world.
There is a constant humbling of humanness. The reality that I will probably always let people who look up to me down.
This recognition that I am way more committed to the truth than I am to not letting people down.
I am way more committed to realness, to honesty, to being a light within the darkness.
That means being in that darkness with you, and that means showing those ugly, vulnerable parts.
At the cost of anything.
There’s a part of me that wonders if I’ll ever be able to move through this stuff in a more grounded, healthy way. In a way, I kind of have to be in all of this to actually do the work I feel I’m here to do.
The Cross and the Lantern
But I guess that’s what I surrendered to.
I’ve really been working with this concept of Jesus and Jesus on the cross. How even he, as God’s son, had to face persecution, betrayal from his closest disciples, and judgement of people who didn’t understand what he was trying to do.
Even though he didn’t want to do it either, and he prayed that this not be his fate, he got on that cross, and he showed us how to suffer. He showed us how to die to our ideas of who we are. He showed us how to be resurrected to what wants to become reborn within us.
More and more, I’m understanding I made vows to life and vows to God in a way that said I’m willing.
I’m willing to be your child that gets up on that cross.
I’m willing to be persecuted
I’m willing to be betrayed
I’m willing to die to who I think I am in order to be resurrected into whatever wants to be reborn
I guess that’s what I want to remind others of who feel like they’re on that cross. Who feel they’re in that persecution. They’re in that betrayal. Those who are terrified of dying to everything they think they are.
We’re all gonna make it to the other side, into that resurrection.
One moment at a time, one day at a time, one choice at a time.
So I will leave this here for those of you who are maybe in a moment very similar.
It sucks.
But we’re gonna make it to the other side.
Wishing you some grace. Wishing you some clarity. Wishing you some courage.
May we all be lanterns to one another when we need it the most.
Walking the Sacred Edge,
Saisha Ma
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