What Is Naka-Ima and The Practice of Honesty?
Naka-Ima, Japanese for “Inside of Now”, is a transformational workshop with thriving communities in the San Francisco Bay Area and in Portland, Oregon. It consists of two full days and one half day of intensive process work focused on the practice of honesty, learning how to recognize our attachments and free ourselves from them in the moment, and living from our true nature. The work of Naka-Ima has it's roots in modern Western Psychology and Buddhism. It is the deep contemplative work usually done by Buddhists in meditative solitude and quiet, done transparently with witnesses in community. Thus it is a practice of building community through honest speech, emotions, and thoughts, towards oneself and others.
Maria's Pilgrimage to the Peruvian Amazon: 4th Blog
TUESDAY, JANUARY 15, 2008
INTEGRATION AND THE RETURN HOME
For the last two days I have been sharing a room with Liz and Elizabeth at the Rio Shilcayo hotel in Tarapoto. I've barely left the hotel room I feel so sensitive. Yesterday my left hip went into a severe cramp and I had to lie down for most of the day. A massage therapist came to our room. She did a combination of polarity, reflexology, energy work and structural realignment. Turns out she's a curandera! She was so skilled. After she worked on me I felt tingly all over and very high. She had opened up and realigned my energy channels and the Sanango was flowing again quite strongly. She advised that I take a salt bath, which I did. An hour later my muscles began releasing. Today I am almost 100% better.
Maria's Pilgrimage to the Peruvian Amazon: 3rd Blog
TUESDAY, JANUARY 8, 2008
THE SECOND CEREMONY
Much to my surprise, the second ceremony with Madre Ayahuasca was very different from the first. For one, it was four times as strong. We realized later that the strength of the journey has less to do with how much you drink and more to do with the shaman leading the ceremony.
Maria's Pilgrimage to the Peruvian Amazon: 2nd Blog
SATURDAY, JANUARY 5, 2008
THE PURGE
Before doing the Ayahuasca medicine, we were required to cleanse ourselves from the dense energies of our daily lives. This entailed using a tea of Amazonian tobacco to induce vomiting. The vomiting creates an opening to the flow of energy within our body's core. When a person resists vomiting or isn't able to vomit, this signals the healers that they have a powerful psycho-somatic or mental block in their chakras around solar plexus, heart and throat.
Maria's Pilgrimage to the Peruvian Amazon
Also posted at: http://mariainperu.blogspot.com
As with all true pilgrimages, this journey has been awakening inside of me for many years, choosing me, pulling me, calling me. For over a year now I have known that I am to meet and journey with Ayahuasca, but I have felt strange about paying to do ceremony here in the States. I felt deeply called to travel to the land where the plant and people co-arose together out of the Earth, speaking the same language. I have been waiting for the sign that the time was ripe and finally this last September that sign came in the form of a Peruvian visionary healer and teacher named Eda Zavala Lopez. I arranged an event with my students and the public for Eda to come and do ritual and teachings with us. This happened on September 9, 2007, in Santa Rosa, CA. By this time Eda and I had had many opportunities to share stories and a true heart connection was formed. We both felt it from the start and knew we were destined to meet and work together. She invited me to travel to Peru to visit her home in the beautiful Madre Amazonia.
