Shonagh is an author (Love and Spirit Medicine and Ix Chel Wisdom: 7 Teachings from the Mayan Sacred Feminine), shaman and spell breaker, who takes her students beyond the cultural mass-trance and into the territory of the sacred. In the Pacific Northwest she teaches workshops that are deeply transformative, helping people to release from old behavior patterns and access a wealth of inner resources. She says about herself, “I think of myself as a spiritual warrior, and a spiritual warrior seeks to know, they are on a quest to know.”
I listened to Lorenzo's Psychedelic Salon today on my long walk home. It was extremely hot and humid and I wasn't sure if I should walk, but thanks to Shonagh (and Lorenzo) I was glad that I did. She said she is 50 years old and without an extensive drug history. She never smokes weed and confesses that "running around Burning Man naked, high on LSD, with a tiara on" is not her scene. However, something called her one day not too long ago. It pulled on her and beckoned her to begin living a life dedicated to consciousness and awareness.
Shonagh went down to the Yukatan and learned to take a mushroom sacrament from medicine women shamans and found her calling late in life. The most striking thing to her about the current state of society was that it is an altered state of consciousness, and nobody ever brings that up. Society, with its borders, symbols, specific names and, particularly, its commerce driven nature, drops a veil in front of our eyes and makes us think that all of it is truth. Shonagh points out that if we just stop and think about history, and think about the propaganda that we eat up every day, we will quickly realize the ruse.
Thankfully, however, she also says that it's not all hopeless. She has seen beings of another nature, she has talked to them, and they tell her that we are way too obsessed with this reality as being the ultimate. I say that just because we can't measure other realities doesn't mean that we can't perceive them (either with the tools that Mother Earth sprouts newly each day, or with the imaginative minds we were born with). The beings also tell her that we decided to come to these lives, we decided to "play" here, so we might as well enjoy it, and we might as well experience this life honestly, lovingly, compassionately, and engagingly.
Give the episode a listen if you have time. She's delivering the speech from a bookshop in Seattle promoting her new book.
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