First Workshop Success! “Can I Get a Witness? Cacao, Journaling, and Queer/Trans Community”
The lead-up to the event took me on a whole rollercoaster of emotion, as these things go, but ultimately, was a great success—and I really think I have a template on my hands for not just something people want that can help them grow and feel a little less alone, not just something that could help me support myself, but both of those things AND—
living my dharma.
the most important part, the benchmark, the criteria that everything I do has to support—or I’m no longer doing it.
It really helped people. They said they appreciated the prompts, we had deep conversations and they shared a lot of themselves. I saw the mistiness in peoples’ eyes when they looked at each other and said: I see you and I love you.
Maybe in hindsight the last part is too much to ask of strangers to say to each other, but I don’t know, we’re all family, and I like it.
The event was scheduled for three hours; two people stayed an hour late and the other one didn’t leave until almost midnight after a 6.30pm start time. Because nothing is by accident, he is a mythopoetic explorer and psychedelic integration practitioner who built an entire app that uses AI to help people do Jungian dreamwork and self-analysis, without having to hire a professional, because his philosophy is the same as mine, that we have to help ourselves using the tools of the ancestors fused with modern technology.
Multiple times I said: it’s like I’m listening to a more tech-savvy version of myself. It was so cool.
There was a train strike and only three of nine registered people showed up, but it was perfect. I will do it again.
I hardly made any money, but I didn’t expect to, and I think next time I will at least give a suggested donation range and at least now I see that it’s possible.
Things feel possible again. More on that later.
In the meantime—I will keep hosting, and it felt so good to be holding space again, but from this whole new holistic healing perspective, not bringing beer and cheese but actual medicine, seeing and holding each other’s experience, connecting with ourselves and the elements, tiptoeing around the edges of IFS, exploring whether my own explorations could actually help people and they ACTUALLY CAN. It felt like the culmination of everything I’ve been doing and learning and experiencing over the past, well, forever, but especially past five years, and I was in the flow and I was giving back to my community and it just felt right.
I started by talking a bit about cacao and only kind of going on a ramble, and then we called in the directions and elements in a super simple way, and set intentions and sipped mindfully, and then we chatted a bit about what being seen means, and then the journal prompts:
What does it mean to be seen? What was the last time you truly felt this? What does it look and feel like? Are there smells or sounds associated with it? Are you outside or indoors? Is there a a specific memory? Are there specific people or archetypal energies attached to it? Are there animals or places or stories that come to mind =? Do you hear music?
What is the opposite of that — what does it mean to NOT be seen? To be either misunderstood, seen as something you’re not, or just not seen at all, completely passed over? Is there a memory you have of this? What’s the earliest time you remember feeling this way? What’s the scene, who’s there, what’s happening?
Now how do we rewrite that story? What would that version of you have needed in that moment in order to turn it around? Can we give it to them now? Write the scene of saving the day, being the hero of your own story, rescuing the person in distress. We remix it.
Then we discussed everything as a group and let the discussion wander where it wanted, and we talked for hours.
I found a way to work in the principle of correspondence and then had a whole discussion about astrology with Paz where he ended up completely coming around from a skeptic to seeing that it was just as “real” as any scientific principle.
But then, what is reality anyway?
