Healing The Overthinking Pandemic

We currently live in an Overthinking Pandemic. A recent widespread survey found that anywhere between 54% - 75% of people consider themselves to have a problem with overthinking..

When people present ways for people to stop overthinking, they often offer grand theories of overthinking; all manner of models and systems and maps. Often, all this does is give people more things to overthink about. There’s nothing the overthinking mind loves more than more models, systems and maps to get lost in.

Instead, in this article, I’d like to cut to the chase and offer practical tools that you can sit down and do every day (and often do without sitting down). Tools that will allow you to get out of thinking mode and into doing mode. But also, perhaps even more importantly, to help you get into being mode; a mode that both thinkers and doers have largely lost touch with in modern society.

This is a 2 part article. In today’s Part 1, I will be discussing techniques that you can do alone, that largely centre around connecting more deeply to your body, your sensations and your emotions. Part 2 (to come out at a later date) will focus more on techniques based in connecting to things outside our bodies, including nature, community, singing, dancing, acting, exercise and medicines.

So, here are some initial practices you can try.

Practice 1: Connecting to the Intelligence of Your Body

There can be a tendency to think that all our intelligence is contained in our heads. This can cause people to retreat into their heads when they want to solve a problem. If you think your head is where intelligence lives, of course you are going to get trapped there whenever you are trying to navigate a problem

But actually, much of our problem-solving capability is distributed through our body.

For overthinkers, a particularly useful part of our bodily intelligence to get acquainted with is the intelligence in our hands. There’s a fascinating neurolinguistic theory that the human capacity for language developed initially by leveraging the neurons used for grasping things with our hands. This is reflected in the language we use to describe thought. We “grasp a concept,” “get a handle” on the truth, and “hold” beliefs. We “touch on” ideas, “seize upon” a point, and “point out” facts. All this speaks to how much our verbal thinking mind borrows from the grammar of how our hands move.

The fact that our linguistic thinking mind and the intelligence in our hands are such close cousins, means that our hands can be one of the most effective routes out of overthinking when caught in thinking loops. Next time you are overthinking, one thing you can do is shift your awareness from your head to your hands. The hands then provide a natural bridge out of thinking mode and into doing mode. This is because unlike thoughts, our hands are naturally geared towards manipulating the world. Additionally, hands - especially the fingertips - have some of the highest density of sensory nerves in our entire body. By placing our awareness on our hands, therefore, we are not just moving into doing mode, but also into sensing mode.

Another practical exercise in a similar vein is to bring your awareness to your feet. Our feet are geared for locomotion, so putting our consciousness there primes us for movement. They also connect us to the earth and what is “outside ourselves”. Finally, feet are the body parts furthest from our heads, so activating them brings blood flow away from our brains.

Actually, what we’ll find is that each of our body parts has a specific intelligence that can be drawn upon for different purposes. If you are digesting a difficult emotion or event, you can bring awareness to your gut and put trust in it to digest the problem for you. If you want to connect more to other people, instead of cooking up plans in your head, you can connect to the warmth in your heart and see where it leads you.

In general, I believe we become much more effective operators in the world when we perceive our whole nervous system as the seat of our intelligence, rather than just our brains. We also become less trapped in our heads. .And our entire nervous system is basically a map of intelligent pathways out of the head and into contact with the world.

Practical Technique: Next time you are caught in a thought loop, bring your awareness to your hands. Don’t approach them as just lumps of flesh but as loci of intelligence within your nervous system. Try to feel into what your hands want to do - what do they want to touch, where do they want to go, what actions do they want to take and how do they want to manipulate the world. Try also doing the same exercise with other parts - bring awareness to your feet and see where they want to take you. Bring awareness to your heart and see who it wants to connect to. Bring awareness to your gut and let it just silently digest your emotions for a while.

Practice 2: Discovering the Bodily Tensions that Underlie Mental Tensions

You may notice that you are more likely to overthink when you are stressed. There is a tenseness to the mental state of overthinking. Often what we will find is that this mental tension has roots in tensions within our bodies.

When it comes to overthinkers, I often observe that they seem to hold a lot of tension in their abdomen. This makes sense as there is a lot of connectivity between the brain and the gut and lots of neurons in the gut. So, it’s easy to see how tensions in the gut may get reflected in the brain. Our brains originally evolved to operate our bodies and much of our more complex cognitive infrastructure was built on top of that. So it’s often more intuitive for our minds to tackle tensions at the level of the body than at the level of the mind. When overthinking, it can be a lot easier to try releasing accumulated abdominal tension than trying to actively stop the thinking itself.

Practical Technique: When overthinking, try going for a relaxed stroll and place your awareness on your abdomen for the entirety of the walk. Try to notice if there are any tensions there and every time you feel a tension release it. Then, try to notice if this causes your mind to quiet down. In many cases, people will find that when their abdomen is still and untensed, their mind will become still and untensed. For others, these tensions may be elsewhere in the body (hips and chest are other common targets). Finding correlates in the body can be especially useful as voluntarily releasing a bodily tension can be a lot easier than trying to release a compulsive pattern of thought.

Practice 3: Learning To Feel Your Thoughts

The following technique is a particularly powerful one as it allows you to actually transform the energy of overthinking into being its own cure.

We often think of thoughts and feelings as diametrically opposed things. Thinking, we might believe, is the opposite of feeling. But actually, when we look very closely at our thoughts we see that they have a sensory component to them.

If you really tune in deeply to the space within your head when you are thinking, you may feel a kind of tingling sense that some experience a sort of magnetic field or barely perceptible electric current. This is the flow of subtle energy that forms into verbal concepts when you think.

This energy actually flows all throughout our body, but is particularly easy to sense in the head - especially for overthinkers - because so much of the nervous system is concentrated in the head. The more you gain sensitivity to the pre-verbal sensory-energetic field in your brain, the easier it is to start sensing it elsewhere. Once you’ve located the sensation in your head, you can actually follow that pre-verbal sensory-energetic field out of your head and into your body. You will hopefully start to see that this same energy that feels so compelling inside your head - that energy that leads you to compulsively think and think - flows through every part of your nervous system. And it is just as fascinating to tune into as any thought. Indeed tuning into the unique manifestation of this energy in different parts of your nervous system will give you access to all manner of new sensations, skills, intuitions, and ways of knowing and feeling. Entire new rooms to explore in the mansion of your being.

Not only will learning this technique help you break out of compulsive thinking loops, but it can help you see how your overthinking is secretly training a certain type of sensitivity in you. A sensitivity that can be used to unlock deep wisdom, hidden loci of awareness, and mysterious expansions of your consciousness that go far beyond the confines of words.

Practical Technique: Sit down quietly and focus on your breath until your mind becomes calm. Once you feel relatively calm, move your awareness away from your breath and onto the space inside your head. Allow thought itself to become the object of your meditation in place of the breath. Every time your attention moves elsewhere, notice it and bring awareness back to the space inside your head. Instead of paying attention to the conceptual content of your thoughts, instead pay attention to how they feel inside your head. See if you can start to notice something that feels like a magnetic field or light electric current or perhaps the pre-verbal ghost of a thought about to form. Allow a good amount of time to simply be with this sensation. Then notice the way that this sensation has a natural sense of movement to it. Let it move where it wants to go, including outside of your head. Follow this magnetic / electric sense outside of your head and into your body. Notice how there is no distinct boundary between the thinking-field you’d been focusing on before and the overall magnetic-electric-like field of sensation that penetrates your whole body. Allow this current of feeling to lead you out of your head and back into contact with your body.

Practice 4: See into the Emptiness of Thought

Once we have solid contact with the felt sense of our thoughts, we can start to liberate ourselves from their compulsive power over us by looking deeply into their nature and how they are constructed.

When we are able to hold our mind very still and look at the sensation of thought described in the practice above, we will see that it is not the kind of substantial, continuous, solid thing that can hold power over us. Rather, thoughts reveal themselves to be insubstantial, discontinuous and spacious. When we zoom in, we see that there is always little gaps of time between thoughts. We also see that there are spatial gaps between the microsensations that make up thoughts; more space actually than sensation. We see that they change shape and quality depending on how we look at them.

When we start to see how insubstantial thoughts are - really see it on a felt level - they start to lose their compulsive power over us. It then becomes much easier to consciously choose whether and how we want to be thinking at any given time.

Practical Exercise: As in the previous exercise, calm yourself with breath awareness then shift your awareness to the sensation of thinking in your head. This time, pay special attention to noticing the insubstantial, discontinuous and spacious nature of the thought-sensations. In particular you want to pay attention to the vibratory, fluctuating, dissolute aspects of the energy that allow you to see gaps in its solidity and show you the way in which that fixed / definite nature of the energy is constructed and illusory. Notice then how when the energy is seen as insubstantial, spacious and dissolute - and crucially, without a fixed, continuous nature - it starts to lose its compulsive power.

Practice 5: Coming into Loving Relationship with Painful Emotions

The brain is one of the few major human organs that has no pain receptors. I think this provides some interesting clues as to what drives overthinking and causes people to live in their heads. In most cases, I believe overthinking stems from some emotional or physical pain we are trying to avoid.

It makes sense therefore that someone trying to avoid pain would retreat into their brain. Its lack of pain receptors makes it a seeming safe haven against having to feel difficult emotions and sensations. Living in the head is the optimal place to numb out.

The problem of course is that doing this doesn’t get rid of the pain, but rather just keeps it out of awareness. But actually the best way to process, transform and release pain is by bringing it into awareness It is the light of awareness that allows painful emotions to see where they are going and resolve themselves.

This is part of how overthinking creates a negative feedback loop:

Overthinking > numb out pain > pain festers and grows > more incentive to overthink to numb out pain

Probably the most direct way to break this feedback loop is to develop a gentle openness to experiencing our emotional pain. Inviting it back into our awareness.

The key to inviting difficult emotions and painful experiences back into awareness, is to learn how to hold our difficult emotions in love. When we have an aversive relationship with feeling pain or difficult emotions, it is natural to resist them from coming into awareness. This is when we will recruit overthinking to cover them up. By mastering the skill of giving love to our difficult emotions and painful sensations, we can drop our resistance to them and allow them back into awareness. With the need to block them out of awareness now gone, the overthinking function is made redundant and dissipates.

Practical Exercise: The best beginners exercise I know for cultivating an attitude of love towards our difficult emotions and painful sensations is an adaptation of Buddhist loving kindness practice. But in this version, instead of sending loving kindness to other people, we send it to our own internal emotions/sensations. You can start by sitting alone in a quiet place with your eyes closed. Try to invite any difficult emotions or painful sensations into your awareness, offering them an internal attitude of welcoming invitation. When you feel a difficult emotion or painful sensation send it love. For some people, it works best to internally say something like “I love you, you are safe, you are welcome” to the emotion / sensation when it arises. For me, I find a non-verbal approach best. I simply try to connect to the natural warmth in my heart and feel myself spreading it to the difficult emotion or painful sensation, so that it becomes entirely bathed in the warmth of my love.

Practice 6: Try Relaxing Your Brain!

We shall end with an utterly irrational exercise. There is nothing the thinking mind hates more than irrationality - so it can be a great medicine for disrupting the machinery of overthinking.

In this exercise, we simply … relax our brain!

Although the brain is not a muscle, it’s filled with blood vessels that can become contracted. This contraction involves tension in the smooth muscles around them. And although the brain itself has no pain receptors and little sensory architecture in general, at the level of experience, there is a sense in which we can still feel it. If we tune into our brain as a brute, fleshy physical organ (a slightly different mental motion to tuning into the electric-magnetic-like current of thoughtdescribed above), subtle sensations can start to be felt there.

This could be vascular constriction. Or, perhaps more likely, its inferred impact on scalp arteries / pericranial muscles & fascia. But we don’t need to worry about all that - we can let our rational defences down for a moment and allow ourselves to have the internal experience of feeling our brain.

So, once we feel it, how might we relax our brain?

Simply bring awareness to where your brain is and try to relax it as if you are relaxing a muscle. Don’t think about how to do it. Don’t think about the fact the brain is not in fact a muscle. Don’t think at all, actually. Just bring awareness to your brain and enact the mental/physical motion of relaxing it like opening a palm. Even if you don’t feel any sensations there - you still do the same mental/physical motion of relaxing it. Just see how your body responds to the instruction to “relax your brain.”

Practical Exercise: Just relax your brain! Don’t overthink it! Do it!

Part 2 Coming Soon!

This article is part of a planned 2 part series on overcoming overthinking. Part 1 focused primarily on internal techniques you can use whilst alone, especially ones based in connecting more deeply to our bodies and internal sensory landscape. Part 2 will focus more on techniques based in connecting to things outside our bodies, including nature, community, singing, dancing, acting, exercise and medicines.

So if you are interested in discovering the other half of the equation when it comes to overcoming overthinking, please subscribe (for free!) below.

What we find is that a lot of emotional pain, when full experienced in awareness, slowly starts to transform.

Intimately, when we get very skillful at sensing into emotions, all emotions - including the painful ones - reveal themselves to be fundamentally neutral energies.

It is largely our pushing away of the emotion that makes it feel painful.

So gently accepting it back into awareness helps it transform back into neutral energy.

This not only heals the emotional pain and breaks the overthinking cycle, but it also makes this now neutral energy available to power effective action.

This story ends with a psychotic “sacred” monkey attempting to sexually assault me and mortal threats from a gang of men with machetes, who end up putting me on a BBQ in the heart of the Congo Basin rainforest. But it started, as so many of my adventures do, by me following my curiosity at something really quite mundane.

I was travelling through India at the time and had been planning to go to Dharmasala to visit the Dalai Lama. My plans were cut short however by dreadful floods on the way up that blocked the roads and caused hundreds of tragic deaths, making the journey ahead too dangerous to continue. On my way back to Delhi, where I had been staying before, I read an article on my phone about a French man who had just lost a custody battle for his children for quite exotic reasons. His wife had won the dispute in part because she’d submitted evidence that he’d been a member of a cult in Gabon that centers around psychedelic rituals offered by a man who some of the indigenous pygmies in the region recognize as the fulfilment of a multi-thousand year prophecy.

In the mood for adventure after my visit to the Dalai Lama had been abruptly curtailed, a whimsical notion was born in me that I’d just found my next quest. The man from the article had quite a unique name so was easy to find on Facebook. I DM’d him, sending my condolences for his lost custody battle … and then asked how I could gain access to the ancient African psychedelic cult he’d been a member of.

He answered quickly and very to the point. He gave me the name and address of another Frenchman called Tatayo who lived in Libreville, the capital city of Gabon. He said if I went to visit Tatayo and explained that he’d sent me, then Tatayo could guide me into what I need to do next.

The very next day I booked a ticket to Libreville.

* * *

Tatayo’s place was mostly a beautiful garden speckled with a ramshackle junkyard of fragile looking tents, set around a rustic brick building. He was bone-skinny and had age-weathered features set around a soft, welcoming smile. He invited me to stay in one of the tents that night and said that the next day he would drive me into the forest to meet King Adumangana, who he explained was the leader of the community I had come to be initiated into.

On the drive down the next day, he told me more about King Adumangana. His name, apparently, means “Thunder of Glory that resounds in the heavens”. Tatayo said that a large cohort of the community of pygmies indigenous to the area recognized King Adumangana as the fulfilment of a multi-thousand year prophecy about the coming of a great spiritual leader. The way he described the story made it sound like King Adumangana fulfilled a prophecy somewhat similar to the prophecy that Christian believe Jesus fulfilled in Torahic prophecy. For ominous reasons that I would discover more about later, he is also known as the “King of the Primates”.

We arrived at the fringes of the forest after some hours, but didn’t stop for many hours more. When the car eventually came to a stop by a giant fort, deep in the heart of the jungle, I had never felt more in the middle of nowhere in my life.

* * *

Behind the walls of the fort, there was what might be called a small village of scattered huts made of a mixture of simple wood, mud and thatch. Mostly dustbowl bare but interspersed with incongruous lush greenery and rivers, surrounded by vast jungle on all sides. There were dozens of people milling around, all of whom were wearing a kind of simple black sarong.

A small contingent came to greet me. They first tried to speak to me in their native Fang and then in French before realising I knew neither. It turned out there were only two people who spoke English in the community.

One was a young woman who said she would not be fit for the role of translator because if she enters within 12 feet of King Adumangana’s presence, then she goes into ecstatic fits that render her speechless. The other was a French-Gabonese man called Jean who was there to be cured from being attacked by what he called a “psychic dart” that had rendered him with serious mental health problems that manifested to me as something like schizophrenia. Suffice it to say, having all my communication for my time there filtered through his translations made what followed even more chaotic.

Jean said he would take me to meet King Adumangana so that I could get settled in.

* * *

He led me to a clearing over the river where a man was sitting in the same type of sarong as the others, but his was uniquely a blazing crimson red. Chained up next to him was a monkey, bearing his teeth menacingly as he locked eyes with me.

The man in the red sarong was King Adumangana. He had a striking spiritual aura around him, which for me, emanated in a large part from his easy smile that had a knowing but childlike quality to it. He told me that I had made a very good decision to come and see him. He said that this place was a spiritual hospital and that by the time I left I would be spiritually reborn.

He also introduced me to the scowling monkey who hadn’t dropped eye contact with me for a moment.

“This is Sanjoo,” he said. “He is not an ordinary monkey. He is a sacred monkey. I found him in the jungle one day and recognized his sacred qualities. He is here to support my work. It is very important you respect him.”

* * *

I can say that the first two weeks of my stay in the community were beautiful in a much less challenging way than what would follow. I formed a friendship of sorts with Jean, albeit one punctured with often comical misunderstandings. He’d given me a supposed tour of the grounds on the first night. But instead of showing me where the toilet or the kitchen or anything like that was, he’d just wander to random features of the physical environment and say to me “Look at: river,” “Look at: tree” and so on. So I went to bed in the little tent I’d set up that night mostly none the wiser. In the middle of the night, he woke me up screaming “Vacha, Vacha, fire! Fire! Fire!”. I came out of my burning hot tent assuming it was catching aflame, only to see that he’d made a fire that he wanted to show me. “Look at:”, he said to me, “Fire.”

His antics were a constant source of entertainment to me. He had a particularly antagonistic relationship with Sanjoo, the sacred monkey. I’d soon learned that after King Adumangana, Sanjoo was effectively second in command in the community. He’d be let loose in the morning and wreak a special kind of havoc each day - standing on our heads and insisting we let him groom us, attacking the farm animals and occasionally the people, and ransacking any sources of food he could get his always-bared teeth on. The only person who stood up to him was Jean with whom he had a love-hate relationship. I’d wake up one morning to see Sanjoo chasing after Jean one way, then Jean setting a stick on fire to furiously chase Sanjoo back with the other way. Then the next morning Jean would be lovingly carrying Sanjoo around, cuddling him with a big smile on his face.

Like the rest of the community though, despite our language barrier Jean showed me a warm heart and deep care that soon made me feel very at home. On the second night, to welcome me, they performed an entire festival of dance and fire shows in their traditional outfits. Each day, they’d make me a makeshift sauna out of buckets and blankets that they’d boil medicinal herbs in, which were apparently preparing my body for the initiation ahead. The pygmy women would cook me delicious meals often based around a sort of sweet spherical donut type dish. The men played beautiful harp-like instruments called ngombis, which at night they’d jam on together, singing in ethereal angelic choruses that felt like invitations to some celestial realm beyond the dark skies of the jungle.

I was soon to discover though that this initiation was not to be all soft harps and donuts…

* * *

On what I believe was the 12th day of my stay, Sanjoo seemed to develop a specific beef with me. He cornered me once when I’d gone off to go to the toilet in one of the isolated ditch like trenches on the outskirts of the village. Baring his teeth, he jumped on my leg and then … started humping it like a dog. When I tried to shake myself free, he bit me on the thigh. I went to some of the villagers and told them what happened and asked if I needed to go and get a tetanus jab.

“Oh no,” they said. “Of course not. He’s a sacred monkey, he’s been vaccinated.”

This rather startling encounter though formed a very suitable omen for what was about to unfold.

That night I was woken up abruptly and without warning a little past midnight by King Adumangana’s son (a boy who could have been no more than 10 or 11 but already walked with the air of a Prince and spoke with the gravitas of an elder). He said it was time now for my initiation. He led me out of the fortress boundary and into the deep untouched jungle. When we were far enough in that all you could see was an endless expanse of trees and vegetation on all side, he showed me what looked like a doorless doorframe that had been erected amongst a small tunnel-like thicket. He gave me a cup of what seemed to be a mixture of rotten vinegar and honey and instructed me to drink it. He then gave me a coin and instructed me to place it in a receptacle by the door frame. Passing through this threshold, we came to several similar structures at various junctures in the tree-tunnel, repeating the same ritual each time.

At the end of the tunnel there was a clearing, where what seemed like the whole community was gathered, all now with their entire bodies and faces powdered in a white chalk-like substance that made them appear as a pallid choir of ghosts. They were stood in a semi circle on one side of the clearing, wearing what I could describe as white togas that matched their chalked faces. On the other side, King Adumangana stood alone. He was dressed up in full shamanic regalia now, including a metallic armour that would clink and clatter with the movements of his body. He held two large sticks aflame on each end, not dissimilar to the Poi fire sticks you see beach performers work with in Thailand.

Gesturing for me to approach him, he handed me a cup filled with a ground bark powder, which I would later discover was Iboga. Arguably the world’s strongest psychedelic substance, Iboga sends people into intense dreamlike trances for hours on end. He told me to down it all in one go. As I did so, he started showering ash onto me from his fire sticks until they burnt holes in my shirt. Set up behind him was a tall smoke BBQ that he beckoned me towards.

* * *

Just as the Iboga was kicking in they instructed me to lie on the BBQ. I felt great trepidation to do so as I’d read on the flight down to Gabon that ritual killings are not uncommon there. And here I was completely on my own in the middle of the jungle with nobody around for miles. But for the same reasons, I felt I didn’t have much choice but to comply.

I was loaded up onto the BBQ and gestured at to lie very still. It was a smoke BBQ where the coals were about 6 feet below, meaning there was enough heat to make me fear it would burn my flesh without doing so. When I had eventually coughed up enough smoke and come close to passing out, they took me down.

Next, they led me back to the clearing where there was a big chest on the floor that looked like the kind of thing a pirate would keep their treasure in. King Adumangana took out a machete from the chest and a blindfold. He instructed me to kneel down and then put the blindfold on me, gesturing the machete at me before my vision went blind. The entire gathered crowd around me then started chanting in an aggressive rhythmic metre in their native Fang.

I started shaking like a dog on the floor, starting to feel like perhaps I really had taken my curiosity too far with this adventure. Was I about to be killed alone in a Gabonese jungle by beheading far away from family and friends? King Adumangan swung the machete, making contact at the base of my neck as if in a practice warning shot as the chanting got more aggressive. As if reading my mind, Jean screamed out:

“Fear not, Vacha, this is NOT a ritual killing!”

Oh dear, I thought: from everything I’d come to know of Jean that’s exactly what his beautiful but incontinent mind would spill out if it was a ritual killing.

But King Adumangana swung the machete two more times, making contact with the neck a little more solidly each time but without ever cutting the skin. He took the blindfold off and summoned me to my feet. Just as I assumed that the most terrifying trial must be behind me, the furry gentleman pictured on the left below re-entered the fray:

Sanjoo was standing a few feet away from me, teeth bared belligerently as always. Tied up next to him was a goat. With a wild grin on his face, Sanjoo mounted the goat and proceeded to have sex with her, staring into my eyes during the whole ordeal. I remember at the time his eyes conveying to me a sense of something like:

“What do you expect from me - I’m a wild monkey!”

And I remember thinking to myself something like:

“I expect better of you than that! This doesn’t seem like the sort of thing even a monkey - wild or not - should do!”

When Sanjoo was done with the goat, he sauntered off to bathe in the river behind him, with a look of post-coital primate satisfaction on his face.

King Adumangana gestured for me to get in the river with him.

“He wants you to get in the river, Vacha,” Jean helpfully explained.

I totally lost my rag.

“Listen Jean,” I said, “I think I’ve been a pretty good sport so far. I’ve let you guys put me on a BBQ, set fire to my clothes, and swing a machete at my neck. I am absolutely not getting in a river with a monkey who just molested a ******* goat right in front of me!”

Without Jean’s translation, King Adumangana - who himself was the third English speaker in the community - understood. He gave a little smile and a gesture of “OK, fine, fine.” He summoned Sanjoo out of the river and asked me again to enter it. With Sanjoo no longer present I agreed. King Adumangana then followed me into the river. He brought another goat with him, beheaded it in front of me and started bashing the goat’s severed head in my face, as it let out a final bleat. Finally he turned the goat over and tipped all his blood over my body. This was all happening, remember, whilst the Iboga was coursing through my veins, bringing a heightened terror to this already intrinsically terrifying sequence of events.

We then came to shore together. King Adumangana handed me one of the white togas and said:

“You are now a member of our community, You have been initiated. You have been spiritually reborn.”

* * *

The next day, Tatayo came to pick me up from the community. I was, I am not ashamed to say, somewhat shell-shocked. I didn’t sleep for the next 48 hours and if I came to the threshold of sleep, I’d enter what I can only describe as hell realms where it felt like my brain was being turned inside out. Probably I was suffering a form of PTSD.

But was I spiritually reborn? Actually, I truly believe I was [although please read some caveats in the footnote at the end of this article]1. Our modern western culture lacks almost any sense of initiation. When there is some, it is so heavily curated and done with such artifice that it’s clear that no true danger is present. I was 27 years old when these events took place but there were many aspects in which I still felt like a boy. I can say that after the initiation, I felt like a man. I confronted two things that I have come to see as great allies on my spiritual path - terror and death. As much as I have experienced so much growth from experiences of ecstasy, peace and love, I have come to feel that terror and clearly staring into the shadow of death form the second wing that allow us to fly to the highest spiritual heights on our sacred journey of life. When we are ready to experience terror and ready to make peace with death, there is nowhere we need fear tread. This means we can explore the full range of our experience, safe in the knowledge that we can handle its darker boundaries. Mind you, I will confess that the experience shook a bit of sense in me and made me less liable to wander into the kind of danger that has no purpose, which the more rabid side of my curiosity had occasionally tended to lead me towards in the past.

* * *

By a strange twist of fate, I happened to bump into someone at a party in London a few years later who had also been to King Adumangana’s community. He told me that after I’d left, Sanjoo had been promoted to the rank of “general” in the community. Apparently this was too far for some of the community members, and one of them murdered Sanjoo.

Meanwhile, I seem to remember someone telling me that King Adumangana now sometimes operates out of a luxury retreat center in Costa Rica, although I haven’t verified this. If true, I wouldn’t mind paying him a visit and working with iboga again under slightly more peaceful circumstances. I don’t honestly feel like I’ve really had an “iboga experience” as so much adrenaline was pumping through me in the initiation that I remained relatively lucid and had no free moments to let go into its invitation towards dreamlike trance.

I remember King Adumangana with a warm heart, grateful for the spiritual rebirth he inducted me into. With enough time passed, I remember Sanjoo too with a grateful heart. This wild, sacred monkey who initiated me into the world of terror and death.

Although I can’t say I think the goats of Gabon would say the same.

* * *

A cherished memory:

I am sitting amongst a dense thicket of trees in the Amazon rainforest. It is a starless night but there is a luminosity amongst the darkness. Surrounding me in every direction are scattered leaves that glow with pure white light, like little lightbulbs phosphorescing in the soil. The leaves fall from a giant gnarled tree whose canopy is too high to see. The light is not a subtle light. Imagine something like piles of giant fire flies resting on the floor.

But the most remarkable thing is that I recognize the light. Because it is glowing in me too. It has been since I started living exclusively off the juices of the tree’s roots a few days prior.

The tree is called Noya Rao. The local indigenous healers say that it is not just its leaves that are full of light. They say that this tree has reached an enlightened state of consciousness. They say she is here to teach human beings during this crucial moment of transition in our history. They say she is here to help us enlighten.

This article is the story of how I met her, what I discovered about her from her indigenous guardians, what she taught me, and how you can meet her too.

* * *

I first heard about Noya Rao from a Spaceship Bird:

I’d just quit my job so I could dedicate myself full time to my training in indigenous Amazonian plant medicine, which I’d been engaged with since 2010. I was hoping to gain clarity on where I might find my next teacher and what the next steps in my new journey should look like. A friend recommended that I go to see a female shaman who lives in a seaside town in the south of England. She had spent time living and training with the indigenous Shipibo community in the Amazon. The Shipibo had given her a name, which in their language means both “The Seated Lady” and “Spaceship Bird” (I’d go on to find out that the Shipibo language is often both flexible and paradoxical like this). For privacy reasons, in this article I’ll call her “Spaceship Bird”.

Spaceship Bird was a remarkable lady. She was the first woman to fly a commercial airline in her home country, was previously a professional belly dancer, and spent her holidays offroading on warzone-adjacent wastelands. She also started her shamanic training shortly after a doctor told her she had heart issues that meant she would almost certainly die if she worked with psychoactive plants.

I took my friend’s advice and sat in an Ayahuasca ceremony led by her. This is where I first heard about Noya Rao.

* * *

The ceremony took place in Spaceship Bird’s little grotto-like cottage, nestled within a very traditional English countryside village. Spaceship Bird was adamant that she had once seen a gnome in her garden and that the gnome had let her photograph it. Her assistant said he’d seen the photo, but she wouldn’t show it to me.

In the introduction to the ceremony, she told me that the spirit of Ayahuasca may not be the only spirit we experience in the ceremony. She said that whilst she’d been living in the Amazon, she’d also built shamanic relationships with many other plants. She liked to call them in during ceremonies to help with healing and protection. The most powerful of all these plants was one called Noya Rao. She said that if we saw pure white light or any white animals in the ceremony, then this might be Noya Rao connecting us.

I remembered that a few months prior I had taken a dose of 20g dried psilocybin mushrooms (don’t try this at home, kids!) and had met and eventually transformed into a white tiger in my visions during that experience. Since then, I had become obsessed with white tigers. Wearing clothes with white tigers on them, decorating my flat in white tiger patterns, buying white tiger ornaments. Later, a curandero who specializes in Noya Rao would tell me that this was likely Noya Rao calling me before I’d even met her physically.

I met the white tiger again in my ceremony with Spaceship Bird.

She seemed to beckon me towards her.

* * *

I believe probably that was the moment that my heart fell in love with Noya Rao, though it took some time for my head to catch up.

I did however, immediately after the ceremony, ask Spaceship Bird how I could meet and work with Noya Rao myself.

She gave me the name and location of her Shipibo maestro, Don Enrique in Peru.

I boarded a plane to Peru a couple of weeks later.

* * *

Don Enrique runs a large camp in a chunk of the Amazon not far from the city of Iquitos in Peru. He is a fascinating character. When you meet him, you have the feeling that you are meeting someone who is half human, half plant. His eyes always seem to swim in another world - a green place of spirits and magic and medicine - even as he looks out at this world. He is a member of the Shipibo community, an indigenous group located mostly along the Ucayali River of the Amazon, not too far from Pucallpa. He was identified as a potential curandero (healer) and vegetalista (plant-worker) very early on in his life. At age 11, he was sent off into the jungle alone with nothing more than a bag of plantain chips to learn directly from the plants. He now runs a school that introduces westerners to Shipibo plant medicine practice.

I’d joined the cohort of his next training in part to continue my training in the world of plant medicine but also came with two ulterior motives. The first, of course, was to meet and work with Noya Rao. The second was to see if I could find treatments for my mother who was suffering from an advanced stage of Secondary Progressive Multiple Sclerosis. Western medicine had exhausted its options and she was now profoundly paralysed and in almost constant pain. I hoped that perhaps the Shipibo might have a wild card that could still be played in the dying hands of my mother’s life.

* * *

On the first day of my stay, I was introduced to both Enrique and his western apprentice Dean - a South African man who had lived in the jungle for him for over a decade. “As far as I’m concerned,” said Enrique, in Spanish, “Dean is Shipibo now.” Dean shared a similar plant-like quality to Enrique, which gave him the gnomic air of a jungle sprite, translating in 2 directions between Enrique’s words and the language of the plants he’d lived in immersion with for the last decade.

The two of them started by giving us a talk about Noya Rao. Until recently, Noya Rao had been thought to be a mythical tree that had long since disappeared, if indeed it had ever existed in the first place. “Noya Rao” means “Flying Tree” in Shipibo. The legend goes that there was a golden era in Shipibo history when the Noya Rao trees flourished and served as their most sacred teachers. But, apparently, at some point there was some rupture where some Shipibo ceased to live in harmony with the jungle. In response, so the story goes, all the Noya Rao trees flew away, carrying with them those great Onayas (Shipibo for “ones who see”) who still lived in consonance with her ways.

* * *

Until fairly recently, the last connection to these legendary trees had apparently been a pipe carved out of Noya Rao wood that had been passed down the generations in a family of legendary Shipibo healers called the Mahuas. The most recent guardian of the pipe was Enrique’s father in law, Benjamin Mahua. The pipe, Benjamin claimed, had taught him how to communicate with the spirit of the Noya Rao trees, which remained accessible even in the apparent absence of their physical presence on earth. People who wanted to work with Noya Rao would come to Benjamin, who would implant what he called “chips” of her light - which he had accessed via working with the pipe - into their heads by singing the songs Noya Rao had taught him whilst pressing his fingers into their temples.

Enrique himself had been initiated into the Noya Rao tradition this way. Then one night, full of Noya Rao’s light and - he would say, guided by it - he walked into the jungle and found a tree with glowing leaves. Recognizing the light of the leaves as the same light he’d seen in his work with Noya Rao, both he and Benjamin verified that a new Noya Rao tree had been discovered. Since then, at least 2 more have been discovered nearby.

It felt poignant to me, that just as the Noya Rao’s had apparently flown away due to man coming out of harmony with nature, they had now returned to earth in a time of much worse disharmony with nature. My belief now, and the belief of many, is that they have come back to teach us how to restore that harmony.

* * *

When Enrique and Dean talked about Noya Rao, they talked about her in the kind of sacred reverent tones that the religious reserve for their great prophets. “Noya Rao,” Dean said, “is not a species of tree. It is a state of consciousness that some trees attain.” It was a lot, he said, like how some humans attain Buddhahood. Plants, instead, attain Noya Raohood.

Many of the other students had come primarily to work with Ayahuasca and seemed surprised at how Noya Rao was apparently to take center stage instead in the training. Ayahuasca, said Dean, is merely “the switchboard of the jungle” that allows us to connect to the Master Plants. And the Master of all Master Plants was Noya Rao.

* * *

Now that the physical Noya Rao trees are back amongst us, the Shipibo no longer have to rely on the pipe to communicate and learn from her. Instead, they use a traditional indigenous plant communication technique called “Sama”. It is beyond the scope of this article to explain the full workings of Sama (I will be writing another article on this soon - subscribe now! 😁). But the basics involve:

• Fasting for long periods (I would fast for 10 consecutive days during one part of my Noya Rao Sama, including with no water for the last 5 of those days)

• Taking in nothing but an extract made from the roots of the Noya Rao tree during that time

• Abstaining from sex and - during non-fasting days - any foods containing salt, sugar, or spice

• Silence, meditation, prayer, and learning to channel the songs of Noya Rao

• Regularly drinking ayahuasca so that Noya Rao could communicate with you visually, auditorily and intuitively in the visionary space that ayahuasca opens up

Our main training was to be completing a 1 - 2 month Noya Rao diet, starting on the first day.

I remember the extract hitting my lips for the first time on night 1 and feeling like I was drinking liquid light.

* * *

Enrique told us that people would often see Noya Rao as white animals and indeed in many of the ceremonies I would see the white tiger I had seen in Spaceship Bird’s ceremony, surer than ever now that this had been Noya Rao calling me to meet her. The healing I received during my Sama is not something I can put into words. To me, her light is the light of clarity. Everything about my life - past, present and future - became lucidly clear. I have rarely ever felt lost in my life since the time of this Sama. Many longstanding physical issues in my spine, gut and hips were also healed. She also instilled in me a faith I have never been able to shake since - a faith in the fundamental goodness of reality, and the fundamental wisdom and compassion that is threaded into the fabric of existence. But the lesson she repeated to me over and over again was summarised in a phrase that became like a mantra during the Sama:

“All your pain is just soil for the light to grow.

Everything, she said, that appears to be darkness in life, is the black soil from which enlightenment grows. She would show me visions of the Tibetan deities White Tara and Chenrezig, pointing me towards the tantric formulations of Buddhism in which a similar philosophy is expounded, which would later become a cornerstone of my spiritual development.

Enrique and Dean helped me design a treatment plan for my mother’s MS but when I asked Noya Rao about it, she would just whisper:

“All your pain is just soil for the light to grow.”

* * *

At the end of our Noya Rao samas, there was not a single person amongst my fellow students who did not agree that Noya Rao was a Master Plant of a power even more profound than Ayahuasca. Each one of us felt our lives had been changed forever and that the light of Noya Rao we had experienced would be unfolding within us for the rest of our lives, guiding us towards ever greater resonance with its luminous frequency.

When the Sama was finished, I continued researching more about Noya Rao and continue to to this day. I flew out to interview Benjamin Mahua who shared a lot of deep lore about Noya Rao, which I will explore in future articles. I was also told about some scientists in Kew Gardens who came out to study the tree. The glowing leaves, they say, seem to come from a luminescent fungus that grows on their surface as they die. This, to me, seemed to correlate Dean’s hypothesis that Noya Rao is not a species but a state of consciousness that a tree can attain to. A state that attracts beings of light to come and live on her leaves. There was a deep poetry to me that the luminescent fungus grew on the Noya Rao leaves as they are dying - resonant with her message to me that “all our pain is just soil for the light to grow.” It is also a beautiful echo of the rainbow body phenomena described by Tibetan Buddhists where the bodies of enlightened beings dissolve into pure light when they die. I truly believe when I sit in the presence of Noya Rao, that I am sitting in the presence of an enlightened being.

* * *

Upon leaving the jungle, the first person I phoned was my mother, who I wanted to share news of Enrique’s proposed treatment plan with. Upon answering the phone, before I could say anything more than hello, she said: “I’m sorry to burst your bubble, my love, after your big adventure, but I’m afraid I’ve decided to get an assisted suicide.” I pleaded with her not to, explained I had this whole treatment plan lined up and asked her to give me one last chance to help her find a cure. But her mind was already made up.

Her assisted suicide was booked in for around 8 months later. I feel those 8 months could have been such a sad, tragic and painful time for me. And of course, sadness, pain and darkness were present in that time. But I felt the light of Noya Rao glowing with me throughout, reminding me that all my pain was just soil for the light to grow. I do believe I was able to be a light for my mother during this time of deep pain and darkness in a way I would not have known how to without Noya Rao’s guidance. It convinced me that her light was not just some peak experience or flash of psychedelic ecstasy, but something that guides those who encounter it for the rest of their lives in their most intimate, messy and human moments.

* * *

This is my first Substack article. From here, I’ll be writing many more. Some about Noya Rao and the process of Sama, but mostly about the lessons I’ve learned from her light. Lessons that are now inextricably embroidered in my heart with threads from the Buddhist, tantric and indigenous teachings that Noya Rao’s light would end up leading me towards. Lessons about how we turn our pain into soil for the light to grow. How we can transform our suffering into happiness, freedom, wisdom and compassion. Not just in the peaks of ecstatic experience, but also in our moments of deepest challenge. In the moments we hold the hands of our loved ones through the darkness of pain, death and grief, squinting together to see the shoots of light growing the soil of these experiences.

I hope you choose to subscribe (for free!) and join me on this journey.