Witches, Bagels and Breakthroughs

By Shiri Godasi

Holy Mama - what a week. 

Recap:

• Flu that hit me out of commission for 3 days like a truck and sent me on a trip beyond the veil. Slept for 24 hours straight. In my imagination, I lay on the bottom of a cold dark well and rocked myself to soothe. Danced too close with loneliness. Somehow made it out. I always feel like illness is a type of ceremonial death and rebirth.
  
  
• Getting throttled into a harsh reality of work deadlines, binding legal agreements, travel arrangements, housing situations, financial management, and appointment rescheduling. Adulting is a full-time job that I may never fully embrace. Luckily outsourcing is a thing
  
  
• Meeting a new and unexpected health situation that I’m determined to beat the byoni out of… And now needs a chunk of my attention
  
  
• 3 full-blown anxiety meltdowns, including getting on my knees with ugly cries. This is the “gift” of the inability to keep a daily physical activity routine due to the visiting flu. When I don’t exercise, anxiety and depression check me. Mental health care 101 and likely my most important integration practice at this time.
  
  
• An invitation to participate in a leadership conversation about Web3 x psychedelics (Cool - what’s that?... My thoughts exactly!).
  
  
• Writing out the second module’s assessment for our integration training program and reconnecting with my primary dharmic archetype (teacher), remembering how much I love what I do (teach) and how grateful I am to be/doing it
  
  
• Learning from Charlotte James, co-founder of Ancestor Project and a guest instructor at the Psyched Soul PlaySkool, as she delivered to our students' wisdom about Psychedelic Liberation - one of the most important presentations I have seen in a while
  
  
• Commissioning gifts for all of my students AND a new baby gift of… A baby carrier? Diaper bag? You guessed it - Bagels and Matza ball soup from NYC’s Russ and Daughters to best friends who just stepped through the portal of parenthood delivering an ascended zen master, Ravi. I was bawling in laughter when Nicole immediately chose this over my other proposed option of meal dana at Spirit Rock in Ravi’s name. Hey, when a Mama craves - she craves!
  
  
• Completing a course in Sacred Storytelling with Leah Lamb (highly recommend) and watching a class by Neima Lightseed about the power of language to dismantle belief systems, and getting inspired to fuse her teachings into this piece: 
  
  

We are Earthly and universal - dust, and stardust
We are children to a kulture
That has taught us how to repair a broken bowl
With a hammer.
We are Alchemists with the patience to tend to a broken soul so that we and no other child may
Ever starve again.
Between the cracks a story exists, a universe
So take the hammer and melt the metal
Spoon with the stick
Patiently, bedazzle the bare-boned elements
Reinventing the prima materia so that it may regenerate through a re-storying
And restore
What was once a broken bowl
Into something that looks nothing like before, but can now give the child
Soup.

Yummy cosmic stardust soup.

• My tattoo artist told me he is afraid of me because of my strong energy. Now my new tattoo is peeling like crazy, old skin is shedding and something new and beautiful is revealing itself
  
  
• Got Myla a new book about a witch which of course she is obsessed with. In a breakthrough session my private client had accepted a new and ancient archetype within her, of the wise witch, but it's ugly and people are afraid of her. Universe reminded me that I am a witch, as mother ayahuasca once showed me; and to not be afraid to embody my power, even if people say she’s ugly and they are afraid of her.
  
  
• A phone call with a dear woman who was one of the first clients to see through my integration therapy protocol ie The Psyched Soul™Method back in the summer of 2018. Listening to the story of where her journey took her, the practices and wisdom gained, just how far she has come and what she has created for herself in exactly 4 years. This phone call was a ceremonial experience. I had lost my words, and they were not needed. We both cried in awe and gratitude.
  
  
• Preparing to leave Costa Rica for the summer as we travel to Israel in a few days… This will be the first time in 33 years that our nuclear family will be together on the land that is our birthplace and from which we immigrated.
  
  
• Delicious late-birthday dinner with a good friend at a beachside restaurant in our town. In case you’re wondering just how different Costa Rica is from LA, we ordered bone marrow as an appetizer:
  
  
• Insomnia… From sleeping too much or from a late cup of coffee. Either way it sucks.
  
  
• Completing a 6-month cycle of private integration coaching with 2 respective clients, A and M, and reflecting on the similarities of the working relationship we shared as well as the differences.
  
  A’s integration journey was centered around psychological inquiry and individuation: we worked on storytelling the unconscious and naming patterns; attachments; unpacking trauma; understanding how it feeds into their toxic relationships; breaking codependency; stress management; developing emotional resilience, intuition and confidence, among others. We also created goals and measured them as A made continued progress. Psychedelics were not used at all during our work together - true to my integration technique we used our container as the psyche-delic, soul-revealing agent. The medicine is always here - wherever we are - and we work on developing consistent awareness to its existence. I’m the type of practitioner that at times cries with clients, and as we concluded for the summer I couldn’t hold back tears, not unlike a proud mother hen witnessing her child hatching to stand on their own two feet and silently exclaim “look at me - I can do it”.
  
  M’s integration journey was about shamanic initiation. This client was on the leap of a spiritual upleveling when we met. From the get-go she struck me as spiritually gifted and lacking both the skillsets to hone in on their gifts and confidence to share them with her community. The support they needed was a mixture of self-awareness tools and shamanic mediation. Our integration techniques included active imagination, dreamwork, engaging with symbolism and themes, the inner child, archetypal embodiment, some psychedelic navigation skills as they were actively engaging in ayahuasca ceremonies through our working alliance. Our sessions were short (30 mins) and incredibly potent, not unlike shamanic channeling, each a journey through the unconscious.
  
  As we were wrapping up our last session for this package yesterday in what was probably one of the deepest medicine-free shamanic embodiments I have ever witnessed, M. noted how I was like a key to her lock - that what I brought into our sessions made her “buzz”. I am struck by how the unique and unreplicated synergy between client and practitioner can unlock entirely different portals - and firmly believe that this spiritually-contextualized relationship is where the deepest psyche-delic integration takes place. 
  
  
• Ongoing thoughts about new-Earth business development… What is the service through which my fullest expression can come alive?
  
  
• Spontaneously downloading a new educational program that I am so incredibly stoked about… To a point where I feel called to cancel a portion of the summer travels so it can be birthed. When the Muse calls - I AM here for it - this is my new mantra. 
  
  

So… Weekly recap check. And last night, at the end of an especially packed day without room for a breath of my own and where I felt so incredibly behind in life, somehow crawling into bed I noticed not defeated exhaustion, but a sense of content. 

I felt content because this week I was a close witness to full-spectrum hummaning - mirroring struggles through ecstasy, shamanic exiles, cycles, beginnings and endings, fantasy and reality, adulting and dreaming, death and birth. I was there as the author, the storyteller and the hero - just like everybody else. There was generosity along lack. Uncomfortable conversations with breakthroughs. So many breakthroughs! And seeds planted and sown. All under the timelessness of the summer solstice, the warm rays of which are carriers of wishes towards blooming, growth and manifestation. All in light. 

Next week is already packed to the brim and while I don’t know what it will actually like and what story will be told - I am here for it. 

Happy solstice, Beloveds. May your deepest seeds blossom in our collective garden. Shiri

Author’s Bio
Shiri Godasi (She/Her) is a teacher, visionary creatrix, depth poet and mother. She is best known for her pioneering methods in the field of psychedelic integration and community bridging, including founding 5 psychedelic harm reduction organizations. She is passionate about creating a decolonized, psychedelic-positive counterculture and empowering others to step into radical authenticity/radical action to co-create a just world. Her professional certification program The Psyched Soul PlaySkool of Integration & Soulpreneurship trains people to become creative system disruptors through expert psychedelic support and heart-centered leadership. Her approach draws from transpersonal psychology, New-Earth sacred commerce, Eastern philosophy and multidisciplinary arts, fusing ancient wisdom with modern practices for a ‘Psyched’ lifestyle.