I have had the privilege of traveling to Colombia twice in the past two years to sit in ceremony with Ayahuasca and an incredible group of healers. During my time there, we stayed at a beautiful ecovillage located in Cajibio, Cuaca. A mix of private homes and sacred ceremony spaces and guest houses, this peaceful and sacred land is cared for by Abuela Anna Maria and the residents who live there full time. Nestled in the mountains, the walking trails around the property weave in and out of shared buildings like the dining hall and the community yoga and learning space, guest cabins, resident cabins, the Maloca, and sacred areas of land reserved for special ceremonies. The land is private but they welcome certain people to come and stay and engage in sacred ceremonies and rituals. We were fortunate enough to be one of the groups that they allowed to stay in their village.
There is an energy that this place holds that can’t quite be captured in words. Cared for by a close knit and loving community of people, this land is stewarded with great care and reverence for nature and the great spirit. Just being there feels a bit like being wrapped in a warm embrace by something loving and familiar, while also being confronted with an energy that is magical and quite honestly, a bit difficult to wrap a westernized, American mind around.
The people who live in the ecovillage are kind, connected and joyful. They move at a pace that allows one to be fully present in the moment, they listen and observe with a level of attention that makes you feel as if you are the most important thing, and they have a belief in something spiritually significant and ever present that I’ll be quite honest, I am in envy of. Although the spiritual aspects of my life have been blown wide open with my work with psychedelics, I am still trying to connect with that level of belief and reverence.
My time there had me wondering, what elements of how they live seem to foster good mental and physical health the most? So many of the differences between their lives and ours in America are easy to see and understand why they may be more healthy, happy, and connected. But what struck me most deeply as a reason for their wellbeing, is the incredible space they create for feeling – for expressing emotions and their ability to hold space for that. There is room for a human to be human, and expressing emotions is just a part of existing. It is expected, and it is supported by not only the community around you but nature itself.
Throughout the property, there are a number of special sacred ceremonial sites. One for full moon rituals, another for honoring a girl’s first menses, the Maloca for plant supported healing ceremonies as well as others. During our most recent stay, Abuela Anna Maria brought us on a tour of the property to see these ceremonial areas and pay our respects and give offerings to nature. As we neared the end of the walking tour, we came into a very small clearing on a semi-slope centered around a spiraling rock formation coming up from the earth, about 3 feet high and covered in moss and plants. Anna Maria waited for us all to gather in a circle and once we were all there, she began to tell us what this special area was for.
From Left to Right: The Maloca, a sacred site ceremony site, a guest hut. Photo credit to Max Ocampo
The stones, she said, represented the umbilical cord of Mother Earth. This space, was a place for all of the men and women who had experienced pregnancy loss or the loss of a child, or the inability to have a child to come and to grieve. A place where those who had experienced these losses could sit and give their sorrow back to the earth. It was a place for healing. A place to express and release grief.
As Anna Maria spoke, I could feel myself tearing up and connecting with some of my own losses. I began to look around the circle, noticing many others who were letting tears flow and some trying to hold them back. Anna Maria noticed too, and she did nothing. She let there be silence. She let people cry. She did not say words to make anyone feel better or to try to push the pain back down. She allowed whoever in the circle needed it, to just give those tears back to Mother Earth, and she simply held the space.
It was one of the most uncomfortable and the most humbling and beautiful experiences of being a human that I have ever had in my life. I was so acutely aware of how much I was fighting letting the full expression of my sadness come out and how badly I needed to let it. I tried to find a middle ground and I let myself cry, but I felt another part of myself trying to control it. The part that has been conditioned into believing that feeling deep sadness, in front of others is something I should avoid.
Since that experience, I have not been able to stop thinking about the power of that moment and being held by a community that knows how to be with emotional pain. How opposite this experience was from my day to day life in my own country, and how much people suffer because they do not have communities that allow for genuine expression of feelings to help them survive being human.
As a therapist in America, I hold space for feelings everyday and am able to provide a safe environment for people to begin to heal their relationships with emotions. It is a start, but it is not enough. As a culture, there is so much that needs to change for us all to have a foundation of good mental health. Learning how to feel and show up honestly and vulnerably about our life experiences and struggles is crucial to building meaningful connections and staying mentally well. People need to sit in rooms and groups and communities surrounded by other people that don’t run the second something real gets brought up. Spaces where, if someone gets tearful, they can let it happen and they aren’t surrounded by people trying to make them feel better or make it go away. Spaces where the full expression of our thoughts, feelings and vulnerabilities are normalized and supported.
The only way out is through but it is the opposite of how we live. Our American obsession with running, numbing, distracting, and escaping from the challenging feelings we all have is making us sicker everyday. Depression and anxiety are at an all time high and this is one of the primary reasons. I see the evidence of this everyday in my work.
We need spaces in our communities designed to support each other in the business of being human – which requires us to feel and express emotions. We need spaces that can hold people’s grief and pain and we need groups of people willing to come together and forge more meaningful and honest relationships with each other. This depth of connection has the potential to heal us from the inside out, and give us the support we truly need to thrive.
This experience made me want to do more. Working with people 1:1 as a therapist is not as effective as we want it to be. First, because it doesn’t solve the problem of not enough human connection and/or community so many of us have in our lives. Second, because as beautiful as healing can be it also creates a great deal of loneliness. As we grow, we notice more where the people in our lives are not healed, and we yearn for conversations that we can’t always have with them. We cannot heal in a vacuum and how do you find people who are also doing the work to be healthier humans when you live in a culture where no one talks about what is really going on with them? We need community. We need connection. We need healing.
I had an idea a couple of years ago for a group series of workshops called “The Holding Space”, that would create exactly that. A space for community, connection and healing that is so desperately needed. A place where people can lean into the beautiful struggle of being human and look across the room and see faces that can relate and that can support their healing. Where the work of healing is done in community with other like minded people.
This experience in Colombia pushed me to finally take action and create the first Holding Space series. This one will be for women and will be kicking off in December 2023. If you have been seeking a way to connect with like minded people who are also doing the work of being healthier humans, join my email list below and I will let you know when it officially opens for registration.
In the meantime, be a better space holder for the people in your life. Listen to understand and not just respond. Don’t move so quickly to make someone feel better when they are struggling and instead, let them know that it is okay to feel. Just showing up more consciously in your daily interactions with people is how profound cultural change starts, one interaction at a time.
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