By Sharon Van Bramer from Bluestone Ayshuasca

Ayahuasca came into my life 15 years ago and never left. Today I run a program, kicked off in 2017 offering week-long Ayahuasca retreats 10 months out of the year. Three years into the work, it became clear we were ‘falling down’ on the most crucial part of personal transformation via plant medicine–integration. Taking the medicine is easy, getting the ‘download’ of new perceptions is inevitable; but how do we integrate into mind and body this newfound awareness? How do we let go of that which we no longer need?

When I began working with Ayahuasca, few ayahuasqueros gave integration more than a passing nod. Anybody doing personal work today knows that if ‘you can’t take it home, you don’t own it’. Integrating the experience is a priority for us but my team and I can only share what works for us.

Every human is gloriously unique and uniquely flawed, meaning we’re blind to how the less conscious parts of ourselves bias our thoughts and words in ways both subtle and raw. Lacking self-awareness ourselves, we make imperfect integration partners and I wondered, was this as good as it gets?

Enter Heather Hanson Wickman and her stable of equine integration partners.

I was willing to try anything, and when Heather suggested I partner with a horse for integration, I accepted and the results were stunning. They have affected me to a degree I could never have imagined and taken my work in a new direction.

Horse guided integration

As a manifestation of Source energy on the planet in its purest form, horses flow with the energies of the universe, attuned to their environment and capable of reading the information it presents—exactly what we’re designed to do, but do not. Horses interpret incoherencies in the energetic field as warnings and respond accordingly. When they detect them in us, they move to resolve our incoherencies in a joint healing venture that is elegant and powerful and will knock your socks off.

Incongruence in humans looks something like this: We’re thinking ‘yes,’ feeling ‘no,’ saying ‘yes’ and doing ‘no’–a pattern indicative of operating from a ‘mother board ‘ of erroneous perceptions embedded in the subconscious of which our 5-sense consciousness is unaware. Ancestral plant medicine temporarily dissolves the barrier and the penny drops. We ‘see’ the limiting beliefs and perceptions that are holding us back leading us to more enlightened perceptions that mark an expansion in consciousness. The next step, integrating the new and letting go of the old, is a daunting proposition for most and that’s when an erroneous perceptions-free partner is a God-sent.

Horses are the perfect integration partners because unlike humans, they have no egos flying solo, no erroneous perceptions keeping them from Source. They are Source; a benevolent, eternal will-to-good.  As such, horses channel energies exquisitely ‘frequenced’ to generate a space of ‘no time’. There is no sense of past or future. It all happens in the eternal ‘now’, the only place healing is possible. Confusion dissipates like a wind-blown cloud; clarity takes hold, the truth of the issue surfaces followed by the action to take. We feel what needs to be felt, recognize what is crying out to be recognized, then let it go. It sounds easy and my experience was that it is.

Crafting a quantum leap with an equine partner requires one thing from us: a WILLINGNESS to be all that we are. Horses have no time for wusses or dissemblers. Those not ready to heal need not apply. Those attached to distorted beliefs they refuse to surrender, best go elsewhere. The bedrock of healing is willingness and it’s a small price to pay.

I’m now eager to do whatever it takes to provide horse partners for my retreat participants so I never again feel I’ve dropped the ball on post-Ayahuasca integration. And my motives are not completely altruistic–I have a lot of incoherencies myself yet to bust.

Heather and her equine tribe made my heart sing and cracked my mind wide open. My equine partner Bandy, showed me that I can heal anything and left me knowing that everything and every being on earth is medicine for us.  Santa medicina.

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