What the Mushrooms Taught Me Part II.

⍫ THE FIRST PSYCHIC

Many years after my first mushroom experience,I would have my first experience with a psychic.

I had a very close friend who often visited psychics in New York, but I was never drawn to the neon lights or the mysterious people who asked me if I wanted my palm read on the street. But a friend of mine who was very discerning told me about a life-changing experience she had with a psychic named Hank, and I immediately said yes. (At the time I didn’t realize most psychics didn’t have storefronts.)

I went to the psychic’s apartment where he held his sessions, and he had a very difficult time tapping into anything at first. “Where are you?” he said, in a frustrated tone that sounded genuinely confused. He said my guides were nowhere to be found.

“The Universe isn’t with you. I think someone very powerful in your family prayed that you wouldn’t be seen so that you wouldn’t be in any danger,” he said. Indeed I came from a hard-praying lineage on both sides of my family. It wasn’t hard to imagine that my mom and dad didn’t want their eccentric immigrant daughter to stick out too much, even to the spirit world.

He then told me he saw a wall of awards. “Did you earn a lot of awards? It’s like you did this but it wasn’t really you; it was your mom.”

Indeed, I did have a very big collection of awards hung up in our basement.

“Also, are you afraid of your dad?” he asked.

This particular statement totally confounded me. My dad and I were very close, and traveled together all the time. And those awards I received in school sure felt like I earned them.

It took me about a year to really be ready to receive the messages of this first psychic reading. Eventually, I understood that I was used to subconsciously managing my parents’ needs. I always wanted to make my dad feel loved and so I micromanaged him by always picking up the phone, saying yes to requests that didn’t make sense for me and feeling very responsible for any sort of feeling that might cause an outburst, of which I was very afraid. I attracted friends and partners who had similar needs.

My mom, on the other hand, never asked much of me openly, but deeply wanted me to be the typical eldest daughter in a Filipino family, someone who took care of everyone, got a normal job, and did really well in school. Someone who was perhaps easier to understand, and therefore more safe in the material world. Someone who was always good in the self-sacrificing way that was normal to her both personally and culturally, although I don’t believe any of this was in her conscious awareness.

So I tried to be everything: to be the emotional support for my dad and the hard worker and big sister for my mom, while also saying no to the corporate world, and constantly taking risks in my career by working in vastly unknown industries with startup companies or getting side jobs to stay afloat. Because my over-responsibility knew no bounds, my side jobs would inevitably turn into full-time managerial gigs, and I would constantly forget the reason I chose this windy path was to be creative. I didn’t seem to be steering the ship of my life at all, but instead reacting, and surviving.

Everything I did felt like a failed experiment. I was laid off three times before I turned 27 because of the jobs I chose and the fact that I graduated right before the 2008 financial crisis. The confidence I worked so hard to develop from elementary to high school was gone. I spent an entire year inside my house except for when I was working. I drank most nights in a way that wasn’t relaxing or healthy. I did everything humanly possible to be good and do good and make everyone happy and I felt completely alone and burnt out by the time I was 30, even though I steered my life without ever working a normal 9-5. How could someone with so much freedom in their schedule feel so lost and imprisoned?

After I saw Hank, I felt like a different person. I was open to perceiving more than just my material linear world. Butterflies followed me everywhere,sometimes flying into my brick and mortar shop, and circling my head. I felt my awe return, and my heart open up and the child within me felt seen for the first time in decades. This child within me would become the guiding voice in my work and life in many ways.

⍫ MANY PSYCHICS LATER

Four or five years later, I had a very interesting reading with a powerful seer who was born with the ability to perceive auras.

Aside from being told that I was born with a lot of indigo deep within (the color of game-changing energy & being a natural teacher) and green around me (empathy, creativity and a love of nature), I was also introduced to the idea that I had lived for many lifetimes as a Witch, who hid deep in the forest where others would come for healing, and that working with strong plant medicine had the potential to be a deep remembering for me.

Everything deeply resonated, especially this relationship with the plants, and the tendency to hide myself. While this powerful and very talented healing teacher told me what she saw, she also said to take everything she said as an opinion and to find my own way. 

A year or two later, I had another session with this same seer, and she saw in my aura that I had a dream to start a healing clothing line, with plant dyes that held the wearer like a crystal.

The thing is, I had tried to create a few plant-dyed healing garments, but I knew in my heart that I was done with product-based businesses, with the finicky and high-overhead world of selling clothing to many different body types in one of the most expensive cities in the world.

She had been right on about so many things, but this particular piece of the puzzle didn’t feel aligned with my desires or what I really wanted at all. I didn’t understand how to believe in her powerful ability to see while also trusting my own internal sensing system.

⍫ WE ARE ALL INTUITIVE

After a lot of experiences with psychics, and my own intuitive perspective, I learned to understand the truth in a really different way.

I also learned that when I was in a phase of seeking way too many outside opinions, especially about difficult decisions, I tended to receive information that didn’t resonate with me.

Perhaps it was because in those moments, what I was seeking was a way to run away from the responsibility of grappling with the unknown.

⍫ WHY DO WE ALWAYS WANT SOMEONE TO TELL US WHAT TO DO?

On some level, I think we look at our parents like they are god or representative of what rules the universe. We tend to believe the way they treat us is how the universe sees us. We then transpose this onto our partners, our bosses, and then maybe, the neighborhood mystic. What we fail to understand is that no one person has access to “the truth” because “the truth” is a multifaceted gem, and part of that truth is something that only we hold. We hold this truth for ourselves but also as a service to the greater whole.

Believing in seeing the future requires a belief that the world is constructed linearly, and that we don’t have free will. In my experience, believing this doesn’t make any sense. It’s part of an origin story we have been told for a longtime through our cultural norms, that we are powerless cogs in a capitalistic wheel ruled by materialism and isolation. Who benefits from us believing that?

Instead of seeing the future, what I believe tarot readers, psychics, and mystics tap into is the field of potentials that resonates with who they are, and who their client is and where those potentials meet. I believe we all have this ability, and that its actually natural to us. The key to this potential is a healthy imagination.

It is our choice, selection and our actions that determine the future. It is our ability to be with the present that lays out the potential paths before us. This is why presence is such a powerful skill we are curiously dissuaded from developing in our modern times.

⍫ WHY IS IT SO CONFUSING?

I believe the universe is a compassionate one, and that when we are in a place of being absolutely lost, and we need guidance to take more responsibility for our lives, guidance will come with great clarity. I also believe that when our personal growth depends on learning how to trust ourselves and know ourselves, attempts to shirk our responsibility or give our power away fall flat, because ultimately they are not for our highest good.

⍫ OUR SENSE OF TRUTH HAS REAL CONSEQUENCES

I spent most of my life trying to see the truth of the world, while also learning to trust and value my own life, my own experience and my own perspective. This might seem like a highfalutin project or an intellectual exercise, but it isn’t. The ability to ask What is truth and what is true for me? changes your lived experience of the world, your relationships, your concept of wealth and most importantly your understanding of what it means to be a human being.