A lot of talk in the spiritual community is centered around meditation, kundalini, and the chakras. This is pretty elementary stuff in most circles, something people generally learn in the beginning processes of awakening. But, as everything else in life, there are about a million different ways to do anything.

What if you took another path? What if you were born awakened and made yourself forget? Now I’m not talking about being born in alignment, as I believe all babies and young children are, they simply get trained out of it. I’m hinting at another option, the very idea of being born awake. The thought of being totally coherent of all your gifts and using them every day and then, when you’re very young you decide to forget. You decide to see what its like to be a normal child, you decide to forget everything, and then you do it.

This has been my path, early in life I forgot, I became “normal” and I did what most children did. Later in life I found myself in the presence of a certain substance that became the catalyst for my reawakening, cannabis. She was my constant companion and a dictator of friendships. Once something that made me socially acceptable grew to diminish my inherent personality. It wasn’t until after I quit that I realized what had happened, what I had done to myself, and where it took me. It was the beginning of the end, and thusly another new beginning.

A good portion of the time, when someone envelopes themselves in an entheogen such as ayahuasca, cannabis or certain fungi, the love of the higher self can be felt unobstructed by preprogramming or the ego. A beautiful thing such as this can also become a problem if that state of love cannot be obtained without these spiritual crutches. And this is a huge debate in the spiritual community as well as the rest of the world at large. Are entheogens helpful or harmful?

There are a large amount of people out there, myself included, that are in a reversed awaking process. What is this reversed process I speak of? Generally this happens when a person uses or abuses an entheogen, finds source or self, and then the crown chakra is opened before any of the others. One finds themselves running the race backwards and this can be extremely difficult. There is nothing wrong or negative about beginning in this fashion, expansion is still achieved, and the process still continues. An easy way to think about this is from the top down instead of the bottom up, as most chakra meditations suggest.

If this is the case with yourself, as it is with me, you will find bottom up meditations just “fizzle” out near the heart instead of continuing upwards towards the crown. This also tends to occur with the crown down, everything seems to stop at the heart. So, I have found three consecutive meditations to be necessary, one starting from the top down, another from the bottom up and everybody meets in the middle for the finisher, a special heart chakra meditation! By no means do these need to be specific or guided, whatever meditation works best for you is the best direction to go. The very fact that you’re trying is what’s important.

(I am in no way promoting or condemning the use of entheogens in any capacity. I am not here to tell you what to do or not to do. Your spiritual path is special and unique and I wish you the most expansive, blissful and loving journey possible. Namaste.)

Jamie Mortinson is The Saturday Post girl here at Chakra Center. Visit our staff-and-contributors page to find out more about her.