Every day, since the October 7th attacks and the start of the Israeli war on Palestine, a part of my heart has been aching with the generational pain of my ancestors. But you see, for me, even though my ancestors are all Ashkenazi jews, the whole Arab world is part of my family.

This knowing is part of what allows me to carry an Arabic name, Hakim, even though I don’t yet speak the language. I’ve never even been to an Arabic speaking country, nor to Israel. But something in me breaks when I tune into what is happening between my ancestors.

Jews and Arabs, all children of Abraham, have been engaged in a mortal conflict for so long that the origins of the conflict have become obscured by so many ruptures and painful betrayals of the sacredness of life, that many people can’t even imagine reconciliation as a possibility. But I can. I know it’s possible, because I feel it in my heart as the only truth.

For me, it feels as if members of my own family are trying to kill each other. It’s a visceral pain, one that disallows me from taking “sides” and puts me only on the side of life, and protecting the innocent.

I’ve been holding this pain for years now, along with many others around the world, not knowing how to help, feeling totally powerless in the face of imperial interests and political polarization that prevents even a sane, human discussion of what’s actually happening.

So today, when I broke down in tears after hearing testimony from Iranians experiencing air raids and bombings, it wasn’t disconnected for me. My heart registers their pain, their fear, the loss of their lives as members of my own family.

And yes, it is so complex. The Iranian criminal regime has been holding the Iranian people hostage for so many decades, and many people are happy that the U.S. is intervening. I hold that reality too.

But underneath, I feel a great grief for what my country has done. Not just here, but all over the world, in all the places where the Imperial forces of the U.S. military have a presence, like so many arms of a giant beast, one that I never asked to create yet whose power I benefit from each day.

The most painful part, is how so many lives — real, human children and mothers and fathers with real, human dreams and souls — become nothing more than casualties in these conflicts. An ‘unfortunate but unavoidable side-effect’ of the Empire’s constant need to feed itself with more death, more destruction.

Martin Prechtel says this colonial behavior is caused by the Empire “being eaten by all the ghosts it had created through all the killing wars waged on its own people.” He says that colonial empires “[seek] to fill the empty hole in their home caused by the erosion of their own nation’s soul due to self-violence.”1

And so, this brings me to my final point. When I hear about the colonial wars being waged all over the world by “my” country, I don’t feel anger. I don’t feel rage toward “they” who are are the perpetrators, or the government, or any other “them” that has been manufactured by the powers that be. Instead, I just feel a profound grief because I know that the separation that allows people to feel justified in killing their own brothers, is also present in me.

I know that I have that capacity to feel immense separateness from the world. I know that I, too, have fallen victim to the feelings of righteousness that keep my heart closed, so that I don’t reach out a hand to help someone in need, or that keep me fearful of my own wellbeing, convincing me that I can’t make a difference anyway, that nothing I could do would matter…

So, what do we do? How do we go on in times like these?

We keep the hole in our hearts empty. We feel the pain of it, without trying to fill the hole with Nationalism or consumerism, numbing, or just plain indifference. We continue living, grieving, celebrating. Holding multiple truths within us at all times — the grief and the joy, together.

The grief is the way through. It’s the honest, broken, realness that creates the beauty with which we feed the universe, giving back to the Great Mystery through our tears, our heart’s longing, our constant yearning toward wholeness. And it is that constant movement toward wholeness, the praising of life itself, which breathes joy into existence.

I love you. Thanks for reading.

Hakim

This part of me was frustrated, and underneath, scared, that I was different than other people. I began earnestly walking a spiritual path when I was 17 years old, and try as I might, I couldn’t turn off who I really was. I pretended to be interested in the same things as my peers but underneath it would make me feel empty, lost, and deeply sad. Hooked on the feeling of belonging, I would drink and take drugs because it felt so good to have something in common with the people around me.

I by no means thought I was better than my peers who weren’t on a spiritual path, in fact I desperately wanted to be liked by them. To simply feel like I could “fit in.” Ironically, I had many friends who very much appreciated me for who I was, yet somehow they weren’t enough for me. Part of me was restless, lonely, yearning for acceptance by that mythical thing I called “normal.”

I remember expressing to one of my friends “I feel like people don’t like me,” and he replied “But Hakim, you have tons of friends!” His words rolled off my back like rain off a windshield.

Now, at thirty, I’m finally realizing how tightly I have clung to this part of myself. As if it were the only lifeline keeping me from floating away. In truth, it is the only thing keeping me from fully stepping into myself, as who I am meant to be.

Being your true self can seem like the most terrifying thing in the world. To do so involves letting go of everything you thought you were, and stepping into a reality of one — a reality where no one who has ever been or ever will be, is like you.

From the vantage point of the separated self (in my case, that part of me that wants to be like everyone else), this is literally death. And he will avoid it at all costs.

But the truth is, I’m not normal. None of us is. “Normal” doesn’t exist. Each of us came here to be utterly, wildly, loudly unique. It’s the greatest mystery of all — we are part of this vast oneness, this eternal song beyond time and space…yet out of this substrate of divine love, we emerged completely singular, as who we are.

For now, I’m just learning to accept that, step forward into it, and express it each day with just a little more joy.

I’ve felt winter arriving for the past month or so. The way the Earth turns, almost like she’s tucking herself into bed at the end of each day, rolling over and pulling a blanket of fog around herself.

Sometimes I find myself resisting the winter — wanting to speed up instead of slowing down, turn outward rather than turning inward. A couple rainy, cold, or foggy days go by and I realize I haven’t been in the forest at all. By this time my nervous system is so full of input that it takes an enormous effort to get myself outside, but with determination I put myself in the car and drive to my favorite woods.

The first few minutes can be cacophonous. All the words, sounds, opinions, emotions, and energy of the human world comes pouring out of me at once. It is as if it has to be expelled through my own conscious awareness in order to be let go. I can fight it, trying to calm my mind with willpower alone, or I can surrender and let the whole thing come out of me like pressure being released from a hose.

And then…

The most wonderful, joyful, silence. Not a silence that is empty, but a silence full of life. The harmony of the moss interacting with the rock, the leaves settling into the forest floor, the mycelium networks digesting and resting beneath them, the billions of creatures making a home and expressing themselves so fully that they couldn’t comprehend a way not to do so. It is an experience of the world completely unbound by expectation, judgement, or fear.

You see, in the more-than-human world, each being deeply knows how to be themselves. The acorn knows how to become a tree. A squirrel knows only how to express his squirell-ness. He cannot do anything else.

In most indigenous languages, the word for each “thing” includes the Being-ness of that thing. The moss is being moss-like. The boulder is in the process of being stone. There is no way to convey that something simply “is” or “is not.”*

Our “modern” human worldview has traveled so far from this understanding. But it is still right there, alive in every breath we take, accessible to us if we just slow down enough to recognize it.

Winter calls us into this experience, like a mother pulling us into her womb. There is a part of us that remembers what it is like to feel completely and utterly part of something, not independent, alone, or isolated, as we so often feel.

For me, spending time in the forest is one of the only ways that I can remember this feeling. But the more that I soak it in, the more that I allow it to permeate even the parts of my psyche that stubbornly want to stay separate, the more I experience it in my daily life.

My relationship with the mushrooms also supports this embodied experience of oneness. When I find a flush of oysters in the forest, or even when I slow down while I walk enough to sense the mycelium network underfoot, I am instantly brought into their world. Mycelium is made up of a community of hyphae, each one acting on its own to find nutrients, move toward food, grow, expand, and reach. Yet it is only together as a community of individual consciousnesses that they create a mycelium network, which can produce fruiting bodies that we call mushrooms. They do not have a way to exist as a separated consciousness, with individual needs that believe themselves to be separate from the whole.

I aspire to exist like they do — to never feel as though my life is separate from those around me. To know deep in my being that we are all a part of the Earth’s body, each of us fulfilling our own part in this great orchestra of life.

Each of us must find what it is that connects us to this feeling. I don’t think it’s the same for everyone — for me it happens to be walking in the woods, but for you it could be any number of things that help you feel more connected to the whole. I find that there is almost a moment of critical mass — that if I spend enough time in nature, take care of my body and nervous system just enough, then I can more easily access this experience of Oneness in my daily life.

So, this is my invitation to you — find just one moment in your day to slow down. It doesn’t have to be some grand gesture, or a four-hour walk in the woods. Sometimes all we can manage is a deep breath in between buckling our seatbelt and starting the car, or slowing down the pace of our chopping as we prepare dinner. The nervous system responds to these changes as well, so if we are moving quickly it ramps us up into sympathetic (fight/flight/freeze) mode — whereas slowing down even a little helps to move us toward parasympathetic (rest/digest) mode.

Thanks for reading, and hopefully I’ll have more for you soon. Mush love.

-Little Mushroom 🍄

Footnotes:
*This conception comes only in “verb to-be” languages, like the colonizer languages (English, Spanish, Portuguese, etc.). For more on this, read “The Disobedience of the Daughter of the Sun” by Martín Prechtel

This is my heartfelt Prayer for humanity

That in the darkest moments, we reach inside and see that there is only Light

That it was our own fear all along that made us feel unloved, unworthy, and separate from God.

This moment, the Infinite Now, loves us beyond our wildest imaginations

Where we see pain and suffering, only a sliver of reality slips through the lens of our consciousness

The Now is teaching us with such precision, such focused and intense love, that it allows us to learn at our own pace, in our own time, in our own way.

We meander off into worlds of our own creating:

“The Past”

“The Future”

But The Now simply waits

completely present

to our suffering

to our fears

to our longings

And when it is exactly our time

she wakes us

a birdsong

a child’s laughter

a flower in bloom

a leaf

the warmth of the sun

And we return, touched by the infinite

for a moment.

Eventually, perhaps after a long day of work and caring for our home, I will make it to the woods alone where I will take my first breaths with awareness of the gift of life.

“I need to do this more,” I think to myself.

Listening to the sounds of the forest, my eyes find the horizon. My favorite lookout is a secret to many, hidden on a ridge overlooking the entire valley. It’s a deeply healing view — there are almost no signs of human activity. Only the faint outline of the cell towers on top of Mt. Tom, far in the distance.

Finally, I remember why I am worthy of this life. This freedom.

The trees speak to me like ambassadors of the Earth’s collective knowledge. Swaying, green, firm, they know who they are and yet they never become separate from the web of the forest. Their leaves are busy soaking up the sun’s light, gratefully receiving sustenance and using it to grow closer to the heavens.

I try to do the same. I turn my face upward, catching the sun in the corners of my eyes I expand my awareness to include the entire horizon, the periphery, the forest, the rock beneath my bare feet. I grow a little taller, reaching my spine into the full expression of its neutral curves.

This feeling… this is what it’s like to be worthy of the love of the divine. So simple, like leaves turning toward the sun.

In this moment, I know that life is worth living. I know that I’m here for a purpose, and that I deserve to be breathing this air along with all the other beings on this planet.

The word “deserve” comes from the Latin “deservire” — to serve completely. To deserve something is to be fully in service such that we are worthy of receiving.

The more we offer ourselves in service to something, the more we deserve to receive the same.

I offer myself in service to life — to this wild and incredible opportunity we have to breathe and love and visit this planet for a short time.

And maybe, the more I serve, the more I will feel like I deserve.

Dear friends,

Since we are all part of one mycelial web, nothing that happens on an outer/global stage does not also affect each of us individually. Many of us are feeling a mix of intense emotions as we process the results of the U.S. elections. No matter our politics and beliefs, we cannot help but absorb the undulations of emotion that are moving through the collective — both positive and negative. In the midst of all this, I am reminded of a mycelial perspective:

The word “mycelium” is less a noun and more something that arises out of a process. Mycelium is made up of hyphae, tiny individuals who each make decisions of their own — to transfer or search for nutrients, to grow, to turn, each one with it’s own mysterious consciousness which we cannot yet understand. On their own, they do not form an individual organism, but together, they “myceliate” into an greater whole which can sense its environment and has a whole life cycle ending in a fruiting body: a mushroom.

For me, this process of “myceliating” is a wonderful metaphor for what it means to be human as well. Individually, we have our own lives, our own decisions to make. We have a body that can go forward, backward, left, right, and sometimes up or down. But our true meaning and purpose only arises out of the Whole of which we are a part — the whole of life, the One consciousness which forms the substrate of All That Is.

I find this perspective particularly reassuring in times like these — it points us toward what is most true and real, that we are a part of something much larger than any of our individual needs or beliefs, and that this truth binds us together far beyond the confines of a four year election cycle or any other human-made concepts.

Last time I was with my friends, the sacred psilocybin mushrooms, they gave me a message which I would like to share with you here. It is not the voice of an individual being, or even a group of beings who spoke through me. It was the voice of life itself, like an echo reverberating through a trillion voices. The mushrooms allowed me to hear this message, but I believe it is always available to us if we are still and humble enough to hear it.

Thank you, for taking the time to listen.

Love,
Hakim

Decree of Little Mushroom for the Year 2024

I stand here, gifted with the immense honor of being a translator for all the beings of the Earth, who wish to make their voices known:

For us there is only now 
and here we are
letting go.

We invite you to come tread amongst us and feel what we feel.

listen to the sounds of our limbs falling as we let go of parts of ourselves that are no longer needed. 

These are the sounds of growth
of aliveness,
even in the midst of letting go.

It is so sweet to be alive on this earth

We feel so blessed by the sun and the rain and the moon every day

We live in this experience of now 
completely

There’s nowhere else to go.

Many of you know that I offer coaching and education related to psilocybin mushrooms, an offering that comes from a deep place of relationship with these beings. What does this mean?

For me, it means relating to the natural world with the same inherent respect we afford other conscious beings — not as objects to be used, but as individuals with their own needs and rights. This requires a total shift in how we interact with what we call “nature” — a shift that involves dissolving our Western epistemology and entering into a way of seeing the world which indigenous people across the globe have stewarded for many generations: that all of life is conscious, and that humans are simply the youngest sibling of all our relatives who have been here for much longer than we have.

In this way, I relate to psychedelic plants and fungi not as substances that we “take,” but as individuals — Beings with their own consciousness that is unique and deserving of respectful relationship. It is because of my relationship with them that I feel I must speak up about the ballot initiative that we will be voting on this Tuesday in Massachusetts.

Question 4, (Legalization and Regulation of Psychedelic Substances Initiative), would legalize the cultivation and possession of small amounts of natural psychedelics — DMT, psilocybin, mescaline, and ibogaine — for personal use. It would also establish a commission to regulate their use as a tool in psychedelic-assisted therapies. I am writing to you to express my support for this ballot initiative, and to advocate for a “yes” vote on question 4.

For me, the purpose of working with psychedelics is to help people experience the divine as an embodied reality, not just a concept. My work with psychedelics has made me a more compassionate, kind, and connected human being. It has also been a huge part of my own healing journey, and I firmly believe that if more people had access to these medicines, we would see a more tolerant, loving, and kind population — one that is deeply in touch with the Oneness of all life.

Some advocates for psychedelic liberation are concerned that this bill would increase the cost of treatment for those who are seeking professional medical care. This is extremely important because clients who are at higher risk may only be able to access the medicine through a more medical/therapeutic avenue (such as psychedelic-assisted therapy). Ensuring affordability is essential in these cases, as those who are in most need may also be the least able to pay for treatment.

I share this concern, but I strongly feel that these medicines should first be liberated for personal use, and then we can work out the details of how to regulate their therapeutic use in a fair and equitable way — in the meantime I believe everyone who feels called should be able to grow these medicines and enter into relationship with them, without fear of legal repercussions. My work is to educate my clients on how to enter into right relationship with these plants and fungi — how to work with them as conscious beings and not as drugs, for this is ultimately the path toward deeper healing for ourselves and for the planet.

If you have any questions or specific concerns about this bill that you would like to discuss with me, please reach out — I would love to hear from you. As of the most recent polling, this issue is tied 43% in support, 43% against, and 14% undecided — therefore we need all the votes we can get. For more info on the ballot question, click here.

Thank you for reading, and regardless of how you vote, I hope you will join me in exercising this sacred rite of democracy.

Best,

Hakim

You only prolong the process

Instead, sit quietly and listen to the space between spaces

The silence within silences.

Do not seek to be enlightened

Like the stone, wait for the rain to change your shape

To move you to where you have not been

If you become truly still, 1000 years may pass

Like the blink of an eye

And you will awaken on the shore of a distant ocean

Where you only hoped and prayed you would arrive.---

We spend so much energy hoping to get other people to react in a certain way. All our frantic reaching, our driving toward our goals, it's all based on the premise that our worth is based on how the "world" sees us. But that world doesn't exist! The real world doesn't see our accolades and achievements, our money or our clothes. They don't even see our bodies the same way we do. Go ask a tree what it thinks about your career choices — you won't hear an answer! But if you ask a tree to show you how it feels about you, and you can let down your mental barrieres for just one moment, you will feel something. A tree's individuality cannot exist outside of the whole. They can express themselves in their uniqueness, but they cannot become that uniqueness at the expense of the whole.

If we follow in this way, learning to let down our barriers, deconstructing our narrow view of who's opinion matters, listening to the plant peoples and the animals, the wind and the elements, we will begin to discover who we really are.

Wild, free, full of life, and made of love.

Too burdened by the noise that surrounds you

Nothing new can enter

The sweet waters of spirit's

Love simply run off you

Like too much rain

On soggy soil

Go to the forest, child

Listen to the rich silence;

That language of trees which you

Almost forgot how to hear

Listen until the stillness becomes you.

Now, your cup is empty.

Often we imagine time as a linear movement, almost as if it were a line that stretches out before us and behind us. In this metaphor, our life unfolds on this line, as we walk ever-forward through time toward the moment when we pass from this life to whatever is next. But this isn’t really how it is — time passes through us, we don’t pass through time. We can imagine ourselves standing still in the middle of a stream. The water flows around us, but we stay still. This present moment is where we exist — we will never exist in the waters to come nor the waters that have passed through us already. In this truth lies the greatest freedom — that we have the power to completely shift our reality at any moment, whenever we wake up and realize that this moment is all that exists.

When we allow time to pass through us in this way, life takes on a quality of spaciousness. It’s a gentle allowing, a knowing that we are not in control of the flow of time or the way that the waters want to flow. Spaciousness is the opposite of busy-ness — even though we may still be occupied with many tasks, we are present to each moment and allow the time to flow naturally between tasks.

I strive to find this sense of spaciousness in my life, but often it feels just out of reach, hidden behind a cloud of worries or a list of things I “have” to get done. But every time I step outside and walk amongst the trees and beings of the forest, I breathe in the feeling of spaciousness. The trees remind me that growth happens slowly, the ants tell me about the importance of the jobs that seem the smallest. The moss reminds me that it’s ok to soak up the sun and rain, and do nothing else. The mycelium underfoot revels in the joy of connectedness, and the experience of supporting the whole.

May your days be spacious, my friends. Let this moment be the most important moment of your life - again, and again.

Something feels different this year. I can feel something gestating inside me, like a new life waiting to be born. Sometimes it kicks, or makes itself known through the faintest glimpse of what is to come, but mostly it is just there, growing. I am heavy with its weight, but not in the usual sense of heaviness weighing one down. I am aware of the sacred moment that I am in — this period of quiet, of slowness, of gestation, which will not last forever. There will be moments of intensity, of action, of birth, when this new life comes forward into the next phase. But for now...

I sit quietly

holding myself

as I hold space for this

newness

thought rises

then falls away

swells of anticipation

emotion moving

energy moving

then quiet

snow-dampened

peaceful

branches bowed

with the weight of

winter's

invitation:

grow, my child

I will hold you

safe and warm amongst the cold winds

and when you emerge

glorious life will spring forward

from you

into the world.

When I read about this conflict or watch videos of what is happening, my heart breaks for I see only brothers killing brothers. I cannot find a single bone in my body which desires to choose a "side" or to condemn one kind of violence and justify another. This, even though I have family members in Israel who lost friends and loved ones in the October 7th attack. Even though my DNA remembers the holocaust, and the thousands of years of oppression against the Jewish people, I could not bear to align myself with anyone who justifies violence in the name of peace, security, or any other gain.

I shed tears each time I listen to the news, for all the people living in fear between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea — no matter what nation, language, religion, or creed. The Jews and Arabs, are considered to be descendants of the sons of Abraham. This makes them brothers, locked in a conflict of siblings that has gone on for far too long and been the cause of so much bloodshed.

So what do we do, in the face of such grief? Martín Prechtel says that "Grief is praise, because it is the natural way love honors what it misses."

So let us praise the life that we all cherish, the gift of breath that we all share as humans on this beautiful earth. Let us praise this life through our grief, and by shedding our tears we will nourish the fertile ground of peace. For peace is an active aliveness, a presence that makes itself known in the song of praise wept and cried out through grief. Peace sprouts up where our tears fall, for our grief causes us to desire to protect life and all that is holy and sacred. This deep desire blossoms into a lasting peace, a world where life is honored and respected.

I pray that the leaders of the United States, Israel, and Palestine, and the whole international community of nations, can find the strength and courage to grieve for the suffering that is being inflicted, and out of this grief that they will call for de-escalation and a path forward to peace. Not a "peace we can defend," for peace needs no defending, but a peace built from praise for all of life, for the divine sanctity of life which is given to all beings as birthright upon this Earth.

May it be so.

Breath is something that is easy to speak of, yet it's true meaning is so much deeper than we realize. Breathe is not just the air that moves through our lungs, but the very life that we live. There is a spiritual breath, a breath of life, which animates us and moves through every cell of our body.

Take a minute today to tune into this life force — can you feel it? Can you feel the how miraculous it is that we are alive? Billions of cells coordinating their actions at this very moment so you can read these words, all the while we breathe, without even having to think about it.

I spend most of my day completely unaware of this miracle. Lost in thought, work, planning, or countless other pursuits of the mind, this simple fact eludes me. But when I am able to remember, everything shifts. I'm no longer surviving, just getting through. Suddenly I'm thriving — grateful, alive, and aware.

A small practice that helps me remember my breath and find gratitude:

Stop what you're doing and find a safe, private space for just a moment. Take both palms and place them over your eyes, cupping them and blocking out the light. Breathe three conscious, glorious breaths. They can be deep, or simply normal breaths. Breathe in through the nose, out through the mouth. Slowly remove your hands from your eyes and look around. Look up, down, left, and right. Do you notice a shift your state of being? Do you notice anything new about your environment? Can you find a sense of gratitude for your body, and your life?

May we carry this awareness with us each and every moment, for it is truly a miracle that we are walking on this Earth together.

Much love and light to all of you.

Hakim

Chapter I: A Leap of Faith

Divine guidance comes in many forms. For many years, I looked for it in the sensation of a strike of lightning, all at once, as if an understanding suddenly appeared where before there was only confusion. I had this kind of experience many times in my teens and early twenties, but over the years these experiences became more rare. I understand now that at that time I was so covered over by layers of untruth that I need those peak experiences to break through and put me on the right path. While I still have layers to shed, the divine now speaks to me in a more internal form — through the voice of the heart that knows what it needs and where it longs to go. This form of guidance is more subtle, but if I am quiet enough to listen, unmistakeable. It was in this way that I came to the realization that I needed to return to Brazil.

December will mark 9 years that I have been studying in this doctrine of the forest. The Santo Daime was, for the first five years of that period, perhaps the single most important aspect of my life, and the main pillar of my spirituality. The fourth year, I dove deeply into the path by traveling to its birthplace, the Amazon rainforest. There I encountered many truths and also untruths, many contradictions and ways of being that taught me more about who I was, who I wanted to become, and who I did not want to be. I wrote about this experience and created a document called “Journey Into The Sacred” which would become my senior thesis for undergraduate studies.

Then, life continued — relationships, careers, and work took the foreground of my life. All the while I continued frequenting my home church in Massachusetts, practicing the Daime and becoming closer and closer to our small band of church members at home. Years went by, and somewhere along the line I lost touch with the fire that once burned so brightly for this mission — this spiritual path that in many ways has made me who I am today. Even the hymns of the doctrine which brought me joy and excitement for so many years started to seem unimportant, and I lost my passion for studying and practicing.

Many people go through crises of faith in their lives, and this one left me feeling flat, empty, and without purpose. In many conversations with my longtime spiritual guide and teacher, she would point out that I was very much attached to this feeling of flatness and that if I wanted to move forward I would have to find the willingness to let it go. I could feel that she was right, but it was as if I had a phantom limb that would not release its grip no matter how I tried.

Then came an opportunity. My godparents, the directors of the Santo Daime church at home, were making a trip to Brazil for the first time in almost 30 years. My heart wanted to join them, but I immediately shot down the idea with excuses about how expensive it would be, and how it didn’t make any sense from a practical point of view. “Why would I go to Brazil for such a short amount of time? If I’m going to go it would be for the June or December festival, not in July...”

The day of their departure grew near, and we had a Daime Work (ceremony) scheduled where for the first time in our church’s history, we would sing the entirety of the hymnal “O Cruzeiro,” received by the founder of the Santo Daime — Raimundo Irineu Serra. It was on this night of Saint John that things would begin to change.

“To be accepted,“ He replied.

“That’s a tall order.“

“Why?“

“You’ve been so cruel to me for so long.”

“You have shunned me for longer. I’ve been stuck here, inside of you, with all the parts of yourself that you hate the most.”

“Then, who are you, if not one of those parts?” I asked.

“I’m just an observer. I speak the truth. When you hide parts of yourself from the light, I tell you. I am here so those parts don’t die. They are the voiceless ones, the wounds that fester and wait for you to remember.“

“Remember what?”

“Remember who you are.”

“Who am I?”

“You are the light that redeems all. Nothing can hide from that. You are love. The spark of divine love that lives in all and in the spaces between all things.”

Then I remembered.

These parts of myself that seem so hurt, so unacceptable – they are part of that light too. There is no fracture, no split, nothing that isn’t me.

To accept myself, I don’t need to heal these places of wounding, these karmic traces that stretch back through time. I only need to remember that spark, which is me. The I AM which created me, is me. Loving these parts of myself is the same as loving God.

Why “Little Mushroom Speaks?”

Little Mushroom is a spiritual nickname that people started calling me after I began a deep study and relationship with mushrooms of all kinds, especially sacred psilocybin mushrooms. Little Mushroom is the part of me that can communicate with the fungal kingdom, which connects many life forms through the mycelial web. I am not the only one who is bringing these messages forward in this time, but like the fruiting bodies of the mycelium, each one of us is unique and is meant to bring our gifts forward for the good of the whole.

It has been years since I have shared my writing — something that used to be a natural part of the expression of my soul. When I was 18, I wrote and published a blog that documented my experiences as I was traveling through Central America on my gap year after high school. Later, I had a blog called Words for Love where I shared expressions of the divine heart that lives inside me, calling out through words, prayers, and writings about the Oneness of all life. Then, for some reason, it stopped.

Many times I felt a desire to express myself, but felt that I wasn’t in the right space to do so. Something else always took precedence, and since I don’t believe it can be forced, I didn’t force it. I just let it go, day after day, week after week, until years went by and I left my heart neglected and unexpressed. I don’t recommend this to anyone, because it makes a person feel numb, as if everything has a flatness to it. Life loses its color, the deep meaning that can only be felt by the heart. It must be felt, digested, and expressed back in the unique way that only we can express.

Today, I take that expression back. Little Mushroom Speaks is now live, blooming like a flush of mushrooms and ready to spread spores of peace and unity!

This newsletter will contain writings on whatever subject my heart is desiring to express. Some will be personal, like this one. Some will be direct transmissions from the voice of the sacred mushrooms, who desire to help usher humanity forward into the experience of unity with all of life. Some posts will be poetic, some will include research and findings from the world of healing and psychedelics. Some will be excerpts and stories from my experiences as a longtime practitioner in the Santo Daime ayahuasca tradition. No matter the subject, all of it will be centered around living a Sacred Life, in relationship with the divine that lives in All.

This is who I am, and why I’m here on Earth — to learn how to embody this truth in my own life and by doing so to show a way for others who desire to do the same. In truth, it’s what we are all here to do — to be ourselves completely and fully, standing as a majority of one without the need for external support or validation, perfect in our uniqueness and radiant in our expression of the divine which lives in all.

Will you join me in becoming the powerful being that you are?

Love,

Little Mushroom 🍄