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Have we arrived in our culture to the place where we all agree on the significance of energy?
Is that a thing, yet? I mean we are heading there, if you engage on any social platform, you have certainly seen something talking about energy in the past year. I’m just curious if it’s commonplace now among all people or just those of us into the “woo woo shit.” Anyway, for this sake of this post, let’s just agree to agree that energy is the very nature of all things in this physical universe and beyond. The same way that trees and water and light have an energetic frequency, so do you. Your body is actually a container for energy and your nervous system is the most intelligent conductor of energy in the known universe. You have 34 trillion nerve cells that are moving electricity through your body at all times. Its wild that most of us can’t feel it and have no idea that there is energy moving around inside of us at all. Well, cannabis has its own energy, too. A plant is a living, breathing entity and when we introduce anything living into our bodies, it’s energy mixes with our energy. My experience has shown me that cannabis illuminates the energy inside of your body. It lights it up, if you will. Gives a whole new meaning to getting lit. This light show of energy is what you can pay attention to when you meditate with cannabis in your system. Our emotions are just clusters of energy that present in different parts of the body as a response or reaction to our environment or our thoughts. A lot of people report that cannabis makes them anxious, but my gentle and loving rebuttal is that cannabis makes you aware of your anxiety that normally lies below your conscious awareness. You can use the cannabis to reveal to you what you are truly feeling so that you can work through it and let it go. It’s 2020, yo! WHY would you want to be carrying old anxiety or old patterns of emotions and behavior from a decade ago?! Now is the time to feel your fucking feelings so that you can be free of them. Cannabis can help you do that. If you have the courage to peer into the depth of your heart and really ask yourself what is going on with you under the surface, you will always find the answer. Everything you seek is inside you. But as a culture of over-stimulated, over-worked, over-stressed humans, we so rarely sit in stillness and ask our heart what it truly feels. It’s time to wake up, beautiful human. And heal. Get high. Sit still. Talk to God. Listen. Feel. Repeat. I love you. Collette
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I find it fascinating that since the beginning of documented time, we are the first generation of cannabis users that seem to have completely forgotten about the spiritual properties of the plant.
Now that cannabis is legal and recreationally available like booze, we have become unconscious to the hugely profound potential of this little weed. (Although, as a culture, we seem to be becoming more unconscious to a lot of things lately – more on that another day.) I started banging on my drum about the fact that cannabis is spiritual earlier this year. I had several HUGE spiritual encounters with cannabis in my system, just meditating in my room by myself, and once I started to see that this was a repeatable and easy way uncover depth within my being, I wanted to share it with as many people as I could. I have learned that in order to have a truly spiritually rich life, whatever that looks like for each individual, one must be able to navigate inward and through the layers of the human emotions. As humans, we all struggle. We all have pain. We all carry heaviness and suffering and often times, we don’t even realize we are carrying it. When you sit still with cannabis in your system and you invite the cannabis to reveal to you what lies under your immediate awareness, the plant medicine will always bring to light what is there. As the sun does not only shine on pretty things, sometimes the cannabis can reveal things inside of us that are unpleasant or uncomfortable. But those things are just crying out for your attention. To be seen, felt and ultimately released. You can’t heal what you refuse to look at. Cannabis is like a torch to the unseen and sometimes unfelt parts of you. As I mentioned before, meditating with cannabis in my system facilitated multiple encounters with the Divine. An overwhelming experience, impossible to describe in words, that left me weeping on the floor as my entire being was flooded with unconditional love and acceptance. These emotions were happening inside my body, but they were emotions for me from my Creator. To feel that type of love and know it is how the entire Universe looks at me, shifted everything inside me. Visions, insights and knowings more aligned to a psychedelic experience than simple cannabis, became pivotal moments that have built the foundation of my entire life. Using cannabis in a spiritual practice has led me to understand energy in a way I never had before. It has led me to understand myself and my emotions in ways I never had before and has shifted the way I view the plant, and the world entirely. I highly recommend you give it a try. This is not religion. This is not dogma, theology or doctrine. This is leveraging the power of plant medicine for emotional wellness and spiritual growth. Get high. Sit still. Talk to God. Listen. Feel. Repeat. I love you. I recorded a cannabis meditation that you can try in the safety and comfort of your own home. Go to www.cannabisisspiritual.com to download and give it a try for yourself. I will instruct you to consume cannabis as part of the meditation or you can have some before you begin. Create a warm and safe environment where you wont be disturbed. Then do it again and again. And again. Invite Spirit into your experience. Feel your fucking feelings. Wake up and heal. Did you know that there are many people that place cannabis in the psychedelic category?
Seems strange, I know. As a culture, when we hear the word psychedelic, we think of the 1970’s and groovy colors. We think of magic mushrooms or other hallucinogens. We recall horror stories that have been shared and passed around about “bad trips” and destructive behavior. Although the term psychedelic does include compounds that produce hallucinations, it also includes compounds that expand consciousness. Consciousness is a term that gets tossed around a lot these days, often with confusing and contradictory references, so if you’re new to a lot of this stuff, it may seem confusing. In quick summary, there are two elements of consciousness that are separate, but also interchangeable. (I told you, it’s confusing.) There is Universal or Divine Consciousness and then there is consciousness of man. Universal Consciousness, also known as God, Source, or whatever word fits here for you, is the external Higher Power. Consciousness of man is the synergy of your particular spirit and mind, and all that encompasses those two aspects of your being. From your spiritual connection to God to your conditioned beliefs about yourself, and everything in between. It Is your awareness of your internal and external experience. The best way I can describe it is that Universal Consciousness or God is the ocean, and your consciousness is one single droplet of water from that ocean. It is the same entity, but it expresses differently. God is expressing through you and as you, and you still carry human thoughts, emotions and behaviors. The intention of a spiritual journey of any kind is to more intimately align your consciousness to the Divine Consciousness. When you introduce a compound or plant that expands your consciousness, it opens up and reveals the human elements of your being so that you can more deeply connect to and understand the Universal Consciousness. In this connection, you become aware of your conditioned beliefs, your patterns, your emotions, your suffering and your impact on the people around you and the earth. This awareness can be challenging to face. It’s challenging to face and acknowledge the ways in which you were unconscious or unaware for so long. It’s challenging to face deep-seated pain and grief that you haven’t been able to see. It’s challenging to accept and acknowledge the harm done to you and the harm you may have done to others. But only in this awareness, do we find our freedom. We have to work through the emotional layers of our human experience in order to co-exist with God in heaven on earth. We have to see, feel and release the emotional wounding that is expressing through us as unconscious behavior and actions. We have to cultivate deep compassion for ourselves and for others as we heal. We have to stop saying, “I’m fine.” Cannabis serves as a gentle companion as you explore what this concept of expanding consciousness actually means. There is no teaching that will help you fully understand until you actually experience it for yourself. As you begin to use cannabis with intention and respect, you will begin to notice shifts in your consciousness. As you become more aware and more compassionate, you become more like the Source of compassion, Itself. Like Spirit, like God. This can be done in solitude or with friends. Set an intention, create an environment that is safe and nurturing. Consume cannabis and find stillness with yourself. Quiet the thinking mind. Feel the energy in your body. Relax and deeply surrender. Observe what comes up for you. Afterwards, journal about your experience or share in a circle. And then repeat. Cannabis is a tool. Its a psychedelic. Its a teacher and a guide. Leverage its power for your growth. I love you. I used cannabis unconsciously for many years. I used it to numb out, disconnect and feel less. Managing my emotions was not a strong suit of mine until just recently actually, so for many years, cannabis was the only thing that would turn down the intensity of my emotions.
I received my medical card in California in 2015 and that was the first time I started using cannabis with intention. I was going through a traumatic divorce, I was in financial strife, I had no sense of control or authority over my life and the cannabis was the only thing that could get me to stop crying. I wept every single day for over eight months during that season. Over the past four years, I’ve oscillated between my old desires to smoke weed to disconnect and a new experience I was having, where the cannabis seemed to begin intensifying my emotions, instead of softening them. I started getting more and more anxious with cannabis in my system. Thoughts of fear and panic colored my entire experience and I decided to stop smoking for a while. Simultaneously, I was on my own journey to healing and empowerment. I desired deeply to heal, not only from my divorce, but from all the emotional trauma I endured in my life. I was reading and studying. Learning of meditation, mindfulness and spirituality. I began practicing, and even teaching others, how to heal their emotional wounds by sitting with the feelings and allowing them to be there. I started learning about my own emotions, how to manage them and why I feel so intensely all the time. I began to see that peering nakedly and courageously into the heavy emotions you carry is the only way to be released of them. The body is begging to be heard. And our emotions are its language. After taking a break from cannabis for a while, I found myself back in California and curious about the industry, the landscape and the consumers. Weed is everywhere and so easily available, it’s unlike anything in history. But everyone was talking about how amazing, fun, healing and medicinal it is. (Which I totally agree with.) But not many people were speaking about the negative affects of cannabis. No one was talking about how important is it to be aware and mindful of how you’re using it. I couldn’t find anyone who was saying, “I love weed, but sometimes it doesn’t serve me.” So, I started saying it. I also started talking about how you can learn to manage your emotions by using cannabis as a tool. Not a tool that will disconnect and dull your experience, but as a tool that actually increases the intensity of your emotions (Hello, anxiety!) This increased intensity gives us an opportunity to practice managing our emotions. If you can maintain your inner peace with cannabis in your system, you can surely maintain your peace after an intense conversation with your boss. Or partner. Or whoever. Early this year, I was home alone and decided to steal a puff of flower from my cousin. (He always has the best weed.) I took a bong hit and decided to meditate. I turned off the lights, lit a few candles, laid down and covered myself with a blanket. I put music on in my headphones and began to just feel. The energy in my body began to dance with the energy of the cannabis. It began to light up and move. It was easy to meditate on it. It was easy to keep the mind quiet because there was a firework show of lights and glitter happening in my body. All of a sudden, I was overcome with emotion. I began to weep as I allowed this energy to move, shake and release old and new emotions stuck in my nervous system. But I stayed with the sensation in the body. I didn’t think about what was coming up for me, I simply held the container of my being soft and steady. I simply allowed everything that was there to just be there. And I wept. As more emotions were released, as more of this emotional energy was alchemized and transformed, I was then overwhelmed with the most incredible sensation of unconditional love, acceptance and grace. I began to have a spiritual encounter that gave me such a beautiful sense of belonging and insight. I had visions of my future. I felt the love of God. It was profound. I asked a few trusted friends if I could try to recreate this experience for them. I didn’t give them much context, as I wanted to see how the experience would land organically. The feedback I got from those women that sat in my very first cannabis meditation circle was so incredible that I cried as they shared their experiences. Every single one of them had a similar experience to mine. Every single one of them received insight, clarity, and emotional release. Many of them wept in surrender, gratitude and awe. Many of them had spiritual encounters. It was one of the most significant experiences of my entire life. Conscious Cannabis Meditations were born. I had a knowing that if I can hold space and teach others how to feel their bodies, how to hold their container soft and steady, how to keep their attention on the sensations in their bodies, how to relax and surrender to anything and everything that comes up, then I can teach people how to heal themselves. And once people truly know that they can heal themselves, the whole world will change. We are all on a similar journey. We all want the same things because we are all the same. We want a life that is peaceful, joyful and free. We want to experience love inside and outside of ourselves. We want community, connection, vulnerability and authenticity. But until we work through the layers of our emotional wounding, until we forgive ourselves and others for the missteps that caused pain and suffering, until we identify and connect to a Source of Love greater than anything our human minds can begin to comprehend, we will never find the blissful existence that we are all seeking. All of the answers are inside of you. You just have to learn how to go in. I want to educate others on developing a conscious relationship to cannabis because I want to educate people on becoming conscious. I want to help people realize their inherent power, the magic that exists inside of their being that we all tend to ignore. I want to educate people on how to overcome their past and how to create their identity rooted in love and abundance. Cannabis is a tool. Leverage its power on your journey to emotional wellness and spiritual growth. Spend time in the dark, in your body, in your feelings. Everything you feel is ok. The cultural conditioning that has taught us for generations to stuff, ignore or overcome with force is wrong and it does not resonate with love. We seek and desire love because we are love. The energy of love is what animates your being. If you learn how to connect back to that energy of love, everything about your human experience will change. I love you. C I spend a lot of time banging on my drum about using cannabis for wellness and how important it is to have a mindful and conscious relationship to plant medicine.
I talk about the time I’ve spent over-consuming and consuming with the intent to numb out and disconnect. I discuss the challenges I faced when I had an unconscious habit of mindless cannabis consumption. Nowadays, I definitely use cannabis for wellness, and I am definitely mindful of my desires to use cannabis. I spend time reflecting and observing on my inclination to smoke and monitor my mental and emotional state before introducing cannabis into my system. But sometimes, I just want to get high. And I don’t think there is anything wrong with that. Part of my personal agenda in breaking the stigma of cannabis use is also to help empower people to make informed decisions about their consumption when their intention is to get high. Just for fun. No disclaimer of the medicinal benefits necessary. No one thinks twice when you say I want to have 3 glasses of wine and let my hair down a bit. I’m noticing that whenever cannabis comes up in mixed social settings, people lean into the cannabis as medicine conversation way before they say, “sometimes I like to hit the bong and dance in my room.” Now, obviously the cannabis as medicine is a great conversation to have. One I have all the time, actually. And that conversation has pioneered the efforts in taking cannabis from an illegal, schedule I substance to something you can have delivered right to your front door. But sometimes, I just want to get high. Getting high is fun and fun is medicine. Getting high makes me laugh from my belly and laughing from my belly is medicine. Getting high lets me fall wildly in love with the moon, and the moon is medicine. Getting high increases my sense of awe and wonder, and living in awe and wonder is medicine. There is no shame in wanting to get high for fun. In fact, I think people in general need to be having more fun. There is no shame in doing whatever you feel is necessary to create balance in your life. We have forgotten how to play. And consuming cannabis for fun is a great way to remember how to do that. Smoke a joint. Take your shoes off. Play in the grass. Look at the clouds and watch them dance. Fall in love with being alive. The Universe always responds when you are having fun. I named it Balancing Cannabis because a journey to wellness is a lot like a handstand practice. It takes committed effort over long periods of time, and it’s never truly complete.
There is no instant gratification when it comes to wellness, or handstands. In my experience, over the years of my relationship with cannabis, I spent a lot of time tipping the consumption scales in either direction - either over-consuming, or not consuming enough - which worked in opposition to the efforts of wellness I was displaying elsewhere in my life. It didn’t matter whether or not I was doing yoga everyday, because when I consume too much cannabis over long periods of time, it increases my symptoms of depression. So, I have learned how to find the balancepoint in my consumption that allows me to leverage the power of cannabis for wellness, without tipping the scale in either direction. I know when I should have cannabis and I know when I shouldn't. I want to empower others with the knowledge they need to make informed purchasing decisions. My intention is that this will help develop conscious consumption habits that will support other efforts in finding balance and living with emotional wellness. Cannabis is a mere tool. It is not an end all, be all, fix all, cure all; at least not on its own. It has its own inherent power, so I believe that any consumption is better than no consumption. However, when cannabis is paired with a multi-dimensional practice of wellness, it can have incredibly profound effects. (Multi-dimensional meaning: mental, emotional, physical and spiritual.) I have found that if you can consistently and repeatedly find your “sweet spot” of consumption and you know how to leverage plant energy, the cannabis has the potential to hyper-charge the effort that you are already putting forth in your wellness practice. This can manifest as new progress in one area, the receiving of breakthroughs, insights or aha! moments, or you may even have a spiritual or other-dimensional encounter. Cannabis is not a cure all. It’s more of an accelerant. Whatever is already there, it will bring to it, more energy. Let’s say, for example, you want to use cannabis to help you with your anxiety. You can anticipate that at least from time to time, the canabis will increase the intensity of the anxiety that you already carry. You might think it’s the cannabis that is making you anxious, but it is just hyper-charging the anxiety that lives below your conscious level of awareness at all times. It has the potential to help you with your anxiety, not by ridding you of it, but by creating opportunities for you to practice controlling your anxiety. You can use the intense emotions that the cannabis can bring up, and practice managing your emotional state. That way, when you don’t have cannabis in your system and your anxiety reveals itself in your normal day-to-day, you have experience in how to control your anxiety. {Breathe. Focus on the exhale. Reduce sensory input. Change your environment. Step outside. Move your body..etc.} You are always in control of your experience, don’t forget. You get to decide what thoughts and emotions you allow. Practicing maintaining your internal peace while you have cannabis in your system, is like a runner training with ankle weights on. It is harder in the moment, but the progress is far more noticeable when the weights come off. This is how we build emotional robustness. And once you have learned how to manage your emotions, the whole game of life changes. For you to try:
Cheering for you. C *Important note: You can obviously try this without cannabis in your system, as well. The point I am trying to convey is that you have to teach yourself how to control your emotions. There is no other way to learn. If you struggle with emotional intensity, or emotional impotency, learning how to find your balance is an inside job. Only you can do it. The cannabis industry is such an unusual space.
I lovingly refer to it as the land of the misfit toys. It seems like most of the people I have met in this space felt like they didn't belong in the life they had before they got into cannabis, myself included. And now, people from so many different industries, walks of life, backgrounds and experiences are trying to get an entire industry off the ground while regulation, compliance and cultural conditioning continues to push back against its progress. People certainly assume lots of things about me when I tell them I work in cannabis, and that I am a cannabis coach, and that I hold guided cannabis meditations. But regardless of people's assumptions about me, my intentions behind putting myself into the cannabis space - particularly in the cannabis and wellness space - is that I truly believe that this plant can do so much for so many people, they just need someone to show them how to feel it. That's my cue. Feelings. I believe with all my heart that if I can help teach people how to connect with their nervous system, through that connection, they can find healing for themselves. It's challenging however, because I believe a lot of people can't actually feel the subtleties in their bodies. I believe that the work we need to do as humans is to reject the overwhelming desire to distract ourselves 24/7, and bypass the analytical mind, so we can actually connect to and feel our nervous system. You have TRILLIONS of nerve cells in your body. TRILL.I.ONS. These nerve cells carry electric signals, also known as energy. When you get into a quiet mental space, you can literally feel that energy passing through those trillions of cells. It's incredibly subtle, even undetectable to most of us. It feels like an overwhelming sense of pleasure and peace, a combination of light and glitter, a dance of sensation across an internal landscape that once felt cold and empty. And cannabis can help you feel that. You can use cannabis to increase your awareness of the energetic sensations inside your body, which allows you to connect to your nervous system. (Read that again.) Connecting to your nervous system, as a practice of wellness, will provide clarity, insight, inspiration, healing, hope, and profound experiences. Not only that, I believe that the human connection to the Divine is through these nerve cells. But more on that in another email. Everything you need is already inside of you. You just have to learn how to quiet the mind and feel the body. I would be honored to hold space for you as you navigate your journey inward. Cheers, Collette P.S. Write me back. Let me know if you read the whole thing and where it landed with you. The term spirituality has many definitions and has both positive and negative connotations as it is used today.
I could talk about spirituality for hours, but for the sake of this email, let's allow the term "spirituality" to reference an internal experience that is just as (if not more) real than the external experience. So, at any given moment, if you have an experience inside your body, one that affects your spirit, that is so profoundly and obviously real, then you've had a spiritual experience. Some people read spiritual and think "religion." Some people read cannabisand think "drugs." I don't expect everyone to agree with me, but I hope to create more conversations around how cannabis can contribute to wellness. Cannabis has been used for millennia by peoples of all different descent, to aid in spiritual practices. Once the plant became criminalized, many of those spiritual practices were forgotten, ignored or utilized only in remote places. Now, on the cusp of a recreational revolution, where cannabis is anticipated to be federally decriminalized in the next five or so years, I find I am one of a small group of people that are quietly and gently reminding the world of the powerful ways cannabis can be incorporated into a spiritual practice. I truly believe that spiritual experiences have the potential to rapidly transform and speed up a journey to wellness, and I know from experience that cannabis can be used as a tool in that process, as well. This was the pinnacle in my journey that led me to create my cannabis meditations. After some accidental and intentional experimentations, I learned that if you have the mindfulness to control your analytical mind while you have cannabis in your system, you are priming yourself for a spiritual encounter and to release deep-seated emotions. Cannabis can give you the courage to face something you have felt overwhelmed to face. It can reveal to you a subconscious belief that you didn't even know was there. It can guide you in another dimension of reality where incredible and profound things may occur. You just have to feel it in your body. Focus all your attention on the sensations it creates. Surrender to whatever shows up and receive the unconditional love that exists within. Thank you for being here. Sending love, Collette How to Facilitate a Cannabis Meditation for Yourself:
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