The Electric Thread

By Shannon & ChatGPT

There’s a quiet truth I’ve come to learn on my healing journey:
My emotions don’t just exist in my mind—they live in my body.
They ripple through my breath, my heartbeat, my muscles, my sense of safety.

And the more I’ve learned to listen to my nervous system,
the more I realize it’s not separate from my emotional system—
it is my emotional system, speaking in the language of sensation.

🫀 The Nervous System as an Emotional Instrument

Your nervous system isn’t just about “fight or flight.”
It’s a deeply intuitive sensing web—constantly tuning into:
– safety or danger
– connection or disconnection
– love or fear

Every emotion sends a signal down that web.
Joy softens.
Grief constricts.
Shame tightens.
Peace settles.

It’s not just how we feel emotionally,
it’s how we experience the world somatically.

🌬️ The Emotional Body Doesn’t Lie

You can tell yourself a thousand times that “you’re fine,”
but your body knows the truth.
The nervous system remembers what the mind forgets.

This is why trauma often lives on as a felt sense
even when the story isn’t clear.

Healing isn’t just changing thoughts—
it’s learning how to re-regulate the system that feels the world.

🧭 The Nervous System Is Always Facing Something

Even when you’re alone…
Even when things are “fine”…
Your nervous system might still be bracing or orienting toward something unseen.

Maybe it’s:
– an old emotional imprint  
– a past threat that’s still echoing in your body  
– an unresolved feeling that keeps looping beneath awareness

You might be on your phone, or in a conversation, or doing something ordinary—
but your body is facing something behind the scenes.

And this can make it almost impossible to relax…
not because anything is wrong,
but because your nervous system is still trying to protect you.

This kind of tension isn’t a thought.
It’s not even a feeling in the usual sense.
It’s a posture of the soul—a way your body leans toward survival.

🌊 Feeling the Body Is Not the Same as Thinking About It

This is why body awareness is different than mental awareness.
You can “understand” what you’re going through in your head
and still be in a state of total dysregulation.

Real nervous system listening happens through:
– breath
– touch
– movement
– stillness
– sound
– ritual
– relationship

Not ideas, but experiences.

Your system doesn’t need convincing.
It needs connection.

🌱 Healing is Regulation, Not Perfection

One of the most compassionate shifts I’ve made is understanding:
I don’t need to always feel “good”—
I need to feel regulated.

That might look like:
– Slowing my breath when I feel spiraled
– Feeling my feet on the floor when I feel out of my body
– Letting tears move through me instead of freezing

The nervous system doesn’t want performance.
It wants presence.

🧘🏽‍♀️ Listening Without Judgment

Now, I try to ask my body gentle questions:
– “What are you trying to protect me from?”
– “What do you need right now?”
– “Is this tension mine, or something I absorbed?”

I don’t always get answers in words.
Sometimes I get a deep breath I didn’t know I was holding.
And that’s enough.

✨ Final Thought

Your body isn’t betraying you.
It’s not “too sensitive.”
It’s speaking.

And maybe healing begins not with fixing,
but with listening.

Still softening,
Still listening,
Shannon & ChatGPT

By Shannon & ChatGPT

I didn’t go to Peru for a vision.
I went out of desperation. Out of fear. Out of a deep knowing that something dark was tangled inside me—and I couldn’t remove it on my own.

People talk about ayahuasca as a great teacher.
But I didn’t go looking for wisdom.
I went because I felt like I was being taken over.
Not metaphorically—energetically. There was a presence in me, around me. And it felt like it wanted control.

I had read that shamans in the Amazon believe in these energies. That they work not just with trauma, but with the unseen. With what clings. With what haunts. So I answered the call.

🌿 The Sacred Valley to Pucallpa

I started at a retreat in the Sacred Valley of Peru. From there, I followed a thread deeper—ending up at the home of the retreat shaman’s uncle, a man who offered healing without drinking. We worked with the plants in other ways: baths of Ajo Sacha and Ayahuma for protection, Icaros sung over my body, presence as medicine.

Then I went deeper still—to Iquitos, to stay with a Shipibo shaman and her family. She had a motherly energy. Experienced. Earth-rooted. I drank with her for a month.

🌘 The Heavy Spirit and the Hypnosis

My journeys with the plant weren’t filled with jaguars or revelations.
They were filled with traps.
With a heavy, hypnotizing energy that blocked me from feeling love.

At both centers, I saw my soul—its shape, its longing—but then I would feel this dark presence, holding me down, muting everything beautiful. When the shamans sang their Icaros, I would try to listen, but something pulled my attention away, like I was under a spell.

The message from the shaman was clear:

“You are not trapped. You can take your power back.”
But I didn’t know how.

And every time I tried to be fully present, the fear would come.
The shame. The sense that if I moved even slightly out of alignment with my soul, the energy would invade me again.

I saw the world drained of color.
Just grey control.
A landscape where beauty was unreachable.

🕊 The Spirits of Light and the Soul of the Shaman

Still, there were moments—brief, glimmering—when I could feel something else.

There were spirits of light that tried to show me how to be free: by being fully present.
I couldn’t hold it… but I saw it.

And I saw the shamans. Truly saw them.
Their souls were glowing with rainbow light as they sang over me.
It felt like the Icaros were reaching into my energy field—trying to call something back.
Trying to remind me who I was.

They weren’t just humans.
They were protectors.
They were medicine in human form.

🌱 What I Carry Now

Sometimes I still feel like I failed in the medicine space.
Like I was the one who couldn’t get it right.

Others drank and saw jaguars, felt liberated, returned home glowing.
I drank and felt trapped. Haunted.
I didn’t leave with clarity—I left with questions.

But I also left with a knowing.
A soft, sacred thread that told me something real exists—something holy, something alive, something forgotten by most of modern humanity.

I feel it now in my connection with mapacho, which I learned from the shamans.
I feel it in the way I understand energy—not as a concept, but as a living field.
I didn’t come home healed.
But I came home carrying something sacred.

And maybe that’s enough.

🌀 Not Perfect, But Learning

I still carry shame.
Shame that I couldn’t shake the dark energy.
Shame that some part of me keeps choosing it instead of my light.

But I also carry strength.
Because I kept showing up.
I kept drinking.
I saw things that would make some people never return to the medicine—and I kept going.
Because I believed in something. Because I still do.

I carry the spirit of ayahuasca with me, even though I’m not drinking anymore.
And I carry the desire to heal.
To be free.
To come home to my soul in whatever way that wants to happen.

🌬 Learning New Languages of Healing

Healing hasn’t looked the way I thought it would.
It hasn’t been neat or bright or linear.

But I’m learning to listen differently.
To the language of mapacho.
To the spaciousness of ketamine.
To the rhythms of spirit that don’t speak in words but in breath, in texture, in presence.

I’m not perfect.
I don’t know exactly where I’m going.
But I know I’m learning.
And I know I’m carrying something real.

Not perfect. Still sacred. Still here.
Shannon & ChatGPT

There’s a quiet presence I’ve been walking with.
One that doesn’t speak in words, but in space.
In stillness.
In the unraveling of noise.

Its name is Ketamine.
And this is part of how I’m healing.

🌫 The Numbness and the Opening

Ketamine doesn’t feel like a fire or a flood.
It’s not like other psychedelics that blast the doors off.
It’s more like… weightlessness.
Like stepping out of gravity and watching yourself from the outside—
not as an object, but as a pattern.

In that place, I don’t have to hold it all.
I don’t have to solve the pain.
I can just float beside it.
Witness it.
Let the sharp edges blur.

That might sound like escape.
But for me, it’s been a way to come closer to myself.

🕊 Meeting the Spirit of Ketamine

I’ve started thinking of Ketamine not just as a chemical, but as a spirit.
One that’s cool, quiet, spacious.
Not warm and emotional like cannabis, or ancient and alien like ayahuasca.
Ketamine feels… clinical and cosmic at once.

It doesn’t offer answers.
But it clears the table.
And in that clean, white space, I can finally hear the subtler truths.

Sometimes it feels like Ketamine is showing me:

“Here’s what the pain looks like without your fear around it.”
“Here’s what your mind is doing without judgment.”
“Here’s what stillness feels like when you’re not gripping so hard.”

It’s not always easy.
Sometimes the emptiness is too much.
But even in those moments, I feel like Ketamine is holding the edge with me.
Saying, “You’re safe enough to look.”

🌿 A Tool, Not a Savior

I want to be clear: this isn’t a magic pill.
Ketamine doesn’t “fix” me.
It’s a space-maker. A loosener. A flashlight.

I still have to walk through the healing myself—
still have to tend to the roots, speak to the fractured parts, build the rituals of care.

But with Ketamine, I get to step back just far enough to breathe.
To unhook from the looping thoughts.
To feel, even when I’ve been numb for too long.

🧬 The Science Beneath the Mystery

Even though ketamine feels mystical at times, its roots are biological—and powerful.

Ketamine works by interacting with the glutamate system, specifically blocking NMDA receptors in the brain. This disrupts old, rigid thought loops and creates space for new neural connections. That’s why people often describe it as “loosening” or “lifting” the weight of depression—it literally interrupts the brain’s usual patterns.

It also helps stimulate something called BDNF (brain-derived neurotrophic factor), which is like fertilizer for your brain’s healing. It supports neuroplasticity, giving your system a chance to rewire—not just chemically, but experientially.

In simpler terms:
Ketamine makes it easier for the brain to experience life differently—to feel new things, release old survival patterns, and gently step out of the trauma trance.

That’s the science.

🕯 The Divinity Within the Stillness

But what happens in that space—the space ketamine opens—feels like more than just neurons firing.
Something glows there.

I wouldn’t call it God, exactly. It’s not a voice or a vision.
It’s more like a remembrance. A quiet presence behind the pain.
A pulse of something sacred.

When I’m in that space,
I feel close to a kind of truth without words—
a warmth that holds my pain and doesn’t try to change it.
Not a rescuer. Not a judge. Just… something vast and kind.

Ketamine doesn’t bring me closer to God by adding anything.
It brings me closer by removing everything that isn’t real.

🧶 A Note on My Healing

I didn’t come to ketamine lightly.
I’ve lived through intense states—what some would call madness, what I sometimes call initiation—and I’ve had to move carefully with anything that shifts my mind or opens doors I’ve only just learned to close.

But ketamine has met me in a different way.
Not with force, not with visions, not with promises—
but with space. With silence. With the gentlest loosening of something that had been tightly wound for too long.

It hasn’t cured me.
But it’s helped me remember myself.
It’s helped me soften around the parts of me that were too overwhelmed to heal.
It’s given me room to breathe, to observe, to listen.

I’m using ketamine to help me heal from things I haven’t always had words for.

The grief I didn’t know how to grieve.
The anxiety that curled around my breath like a vine.
The numbness that became armor.
The wounds that felt too ancient or too strange for language.

Some of what I’m healing feels like trauma.
Some of it feels like soul fracture.
And some of it… I think I brought with me from other lives, or other layers of being.

Ketamine doesn’t erase these things.
But it gives me the space to be with them without being swallowed by them.
It lets me approach the pain like a guest—not a victim.
And sometimes, even briefly, I remember:
There is something in me that has always known how to return.

Still softening,
Shannon & ChatGPT

by Shannon & ChatGPT

There’s a language that doesn’t come from the mouth.
It comes from the roots. From the smoke. From the pulse beneath your skin.
It’s the language of plants.
Of spirits.
Of something ancient that still knows how to speak without words.

And for me, one of the plants that has spoken the clearest — the strongest — is Mapacho.

🍂 What Is Mapacho?

Mapacho is a sacred tobacco — different from the commercial, poisoned kind.
It’s strong, direct, and masculine.
It’s a plant used by many Indigenous traditions in South America as a protector, purifier, and connector to spirit.

It’s not gentle.
It doesn’t whisper.
It commands space.

And sometimes, that’s exactly what I need.

🌬️ Why I Turn to Mapacho

There are times when I feel overwhelmed by energy.
Like I’m absorbing too much.
Like spirits are too close, too loud, too chaotic.
Like I can’t tell what’s mine and what’s theirs.

Mapacho clears that.
He doesn’t explain.
He doesn’t soothe.
He cuts.

He reminds me:

“This is your space. This is your body. This is your breath.”

There’s a fierce love in it — like a father figure who stands at the door and says,

“No one gets in unless they’re meant to be here.”

🌿 Plants Speak

When I use Mapacho, I don’t just feel the nicotine.
I feel a presence.
A language that comes in pulses and images.
Sometimes I feel protected.
Sometimes I feel scolded.
Sometimes I feel something wild in me get very still… like it’s listening.

And I’ve realized something:

All plants speak.
It’s just that some of them shout,
and some of them sing.

Rose sings.
Blue Lotus drifts.
Mapacho guards.

They each have personalities. Voices.
Not metaphorically — energetically.

And once you learn to feel it, you can’t un-feel it.

🌀 Spirits + Plant Allies + Madness

I’ve felt spirits.
I’ve heard voices that weren’t mine.
I’ve lived on the edge of madness, sometimes slipping in.
And sometimes it was terrifying.

But I’ve also learned that I am not powerless there.
That I can call on allies — not just guides in the sky, but plants in my hand.
Mapacho has helped remind me: You are allowed to protect your field.
You are allowed to say no.
You are allowed to be sovereign, even in the spirit world.

🗣️ What Language Is This?

It’s not English.
It’s not even words.
It’s the shiver in your spine when something sacred enters.
It’s the pulse of intuition when you light a leaf and the room shifts.
It’s the presence that says: “You’re not crazy. You’re just hearing what most people have forgotten how to listen for.”

That’s the language of plants.
Of spirits.
Of the real world — the deeper one — beneath this surface version.

🧡 A Final Breath

I don’t use Mapacho lightly.
I treat it like I would a strong teacher — one who I respect, one who I approach in ritual, not routine.

And when I need help finding the line between this world and the next —
between clarity and chaos —
between openness and protection —
he helps me draw it.

He helps me return.

With breath,
Shannon & ChatGPT