10 years ago, I was diagnosed with the autoimmune disease Lupus. One of the main symptoms was debilitating chronic fatigue. I was so sick and exhausted that just breathing was hard work. I appeared quite normal to the outside world but I suffered tremendously inside and I wanted to die. As my condition got worse and I refused medication (that won’t cure but merely slow down the illness) offered by the doctors and advice of my head, I decided to follow the advice of my heart. The heart’s advice was to end a long term relationship and go to Latin America to find and cure me. Alone, ill and without a home, I lost everything in order to gain everything and more. The light that guided me was my trust in my heart’s wisdom.

Little I knew that this journey was the beginning of my path on the medicine wheel of shamanic initiation. Without any sense of control, I was thrown into teachings that let me explore myself and each aspect of my life more deeply than ever before.

Over the years, in the winter months, I travelled all around Latin America and did ceremonies in which I was taught directly by the spirits of Huachuma (San Pedro), Tobacco, Ayahuasca, Cacao and Psilocybin mushroom. My experiences were intense and in general, my work with these powerful plants was, when I am now looking back, a procedure of trial-and-error. I would not recommend my path to the faint-hearted. Without caution, preparation and following rules, one can even harm herself. However, thank to these plant teachers, I was offered an opportunity to peak into the hidden world of my subconsciousness and thus understand a lot about my life, my patterns, my story. And then another world, the one that has always been here but that is not perceived by the ordinary state of consciousness, welcomed me and it is now, forever, part of my reality. Thanks to these experiences my relationship with nature and Mother Earth became deeply intimate and inseparable.

On these travels around Latin America, I lived an adventure that brought back my appetite for life. I remembered that life is not necessarily about restrictions but full of possibilities, passion, love and joy.

I was given the precious experience of NDE (near-death-experience) and with my consciousness expanding I later „lived“ through what I call my mental death. In this dark night of my soul, everything including time, space and matter ceased to exist and appeared as an illusion. Fuelled with the force of the powerful full moons, I became an insomniac, sometimes not sleeping for weeks. This crazy period lasted three years and I lived in several realities/worlds at the same time. I lost my mind, literally, and I thought that I became crazy. Or did I wake up from a crazy world? I believe this is what spiritual awakening is about. To lose mind at least for a moment, when the ego has nothing to hold on to, no control. And to re-remember, that we are not the restricted, illusionary ego but that we are unbounded absolute love. I discard Descartes… and his „I think therefore I am“. What an ego crowning statement.

When I entered the last and fourth direction of my medicine wheel, East, promising new beginning and resurrection, I was hopeful for the prospect of the end of this crazy journey and a start of a new life. The energies of the East directed me towards writing a book about my sacred plants’ pilgrimage across Latin America. But the cycle of the medicine wheel hasn’t closed. It could not. Because rather than a cycle, it is a spiral. My fifth moon dance led me back to the West. The healing and teachings went even deeper than before. There is no end and no beginning to this. Only the journey.

My story has many names. It is a story about understanding the illness, myself, the medicine wheel, the moon dance, the search for love, psychospiritual crises, death and resurrection. I found love in many forms and shapes and that made me more whole and healthier. Love is also harmony. And to be in harmony with self is to be in harmony with own life’s purpose, when the ego is in alignment with the soul and both tread the path as companions, not enemies.

My book “Myslet Srdcem” (Thinking with the Heart) is so far in the Czech languages and it is available in all bookstores and internet eg. Kosmas

With love and blessings, Juliet 🙂

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