"SWEET FEMININE WEAKNESS"

7-DAY FAST + SACRED TREE DIET

by Mikaal Bates

I met Jordan Mockingbird at a New Year’s Eve house party in Austin while painted waist-to-crown in gold body paint and completely unable to breathe through my nose thanks to a brutal bout of seasonal allergies.

It was quite the introduction.

We spent the next several hours talking ritual and rites-of-passage non-stop over thumping house music and regular interruptions from revelling friends.

He shared both his tobacco and his story of near-death self-negation to revelatory redemption on the medicine path.

I shared my own and my vision for a 7-day healing fast.

When he proposed adding in sacred tobacco and North American White Birch, my spine tingled tailbone to crown in adamant confirmation that I had found the man to support my journey.

Turns out he knew just the place and would set me up beautifully and stay on the land in person for the entire duration to truly support my process.

And so, a little over a month later, my journey began.

I arrived on the land in my new truck and paused at the threshold to ask permission.

It was a good way to begin.

He met me there and brought me down onto the land, down a steep ravine and onto the place I would be, dug into a juniper grove by a stream.

While all my focus had been on the restriction of not eating, the other restrictions we folded in were absolute gifts from the Gods:

No phone.

No laptop.

No screens.

No distractions or pings or dings or rings.

No texts or emails or endless messages on superfluous platforms commitments.

SO. GOOD.

No watch.

No clock.

No time.

Freedom from time.

No moments planned.

No meetings or clients or places to be.

No rushing.

Nothing TO DO.

Just watching the light change, the dawn break, the dusk envelop me in a darkening shroud of deep consideration – 7 days to allow the innate timing of my body to re-adhere to the natural world from which it was made.

It’s wild to discover the amount of time/money that gets freed up between not having to shop for food, prepare, cook, eat, clean after meals, brush one’s teeth …

Each morning, I’d wake with the breaking dawn and just lay there with nothing to do, allowing the new light ample time to plant its bright flag into the ground of my being before “doing” anything at all.

This alone was worth the price of admission.

After some “time” had passed, Mockingbird would eventually arrive, the sound of his ancient Land Cruiser bumping closer in the distance quickly becoming one of my favorite sounds each day, announcing the oncoming ceremony.

Mockingbird would enter the tent and I’d pull myself up from bed to sit zazen facing him across from my altar where he would smoke and pray and sing over a brown liquid made of water, mapacho (sacred tobacco) and garlic.

He’d pour the liquid onto a spoon and hand it to me, inviting me to slowly “sip” the pungent brew up my nostril directly into my sinuses in an effort to clear the phlegm, bio-film, mold.

Took me 3 days to learn how to take the tincture that way without swallowing it to gag, the liquid hitting my empty stomach to slowly activate volcanic waves and building to purge with a trembling power hard to describe.

Not any of my dances with Ayahuasca or a plethora of other medicines from Kambo to 5-MEO DMT came close to the particular punctuation this way of working with sacred tobacco was able to create in my body.

I don’t know what moved, but the vibratory openings the tobacco induced in my solar plexus half-convinced me I was about to leave the planet the first time they hit.

Solar Plexus, shaking faster than light moving me with tremendous force and something like a voiceless voice behind the vibration saying everything and nothing at the same time.

I could barely stay erect, my whole body heavy, arms like lead pulling me down down down.

But I did stay upright.

Everytime.

And Mockingbird sang as I shook and groaned and shuddered.

The honeybees would always come about this time, to buzz and nestle into the webbing of the tent roof while I went through the waves – my original “Spirit Animal” from childhood coming to cradle my undertakings with offering as the great gift of Hive.

Mockingbird would sing, and sing - beautiful songs, medicine songs. My Sight would become lucid and I wrote many messages to myself for later - a strong tradition on my medicine path.

Then he would finish his songs, announce that he would see me that evening and make his way back out of the ravine, leaving me in the height of it all to eventually collapse forward into the seat of his absence and crawl between worlds before pulling myself back into bed.

After ceremony I would lay between worlds and wait for night to come. Sometimes a walk on the land to gather the deer bones scattered almost certainly by the Coyote Clan that lived nearby; sometimes a harnessing of what strength I could manage to make the short hike up the hill out of the Juniper grove in which I was camped to sit in the sun and wait for evening.

Each night, as dusk would begin to gather in gradually darkening shades, the Coyotes would begin their kipping songs, always from a different location very close by, leaving me grateful each night for the millimeter of fabric my tent gave to guard me while I slept.

Once the coyotes would finish, some “time” would pass until eventually I’d hear the old Land Cruiser again in the distance and Mockingbird would begin his nightly work of building a fire.

Each night was fire and song in the cold black. The remarkable quality of his musicianship was a stunning addition of classically trained guitar and original medicine songs sung for hours as we took small amounts of tobacco paste.

He encouraged me to sing as well, and the improvisations came and the songs flowed out in gibberish or sometimes words, fragments of theater, poetry or Shakespeare, and we would take a small amount of tobacco paste cooked down to a concentrate, rubbed on the gums, and taken into the stomach.

Then finally, a parting embrace, the sound of the Land Cruiser ascending the trail, and the climb back into cold blankets and grateful sleep.

Sleep, wake, pray, ceremony, sing, recover, meditate, walk, rest, fire, song, sleep, rinse, repeat.

It was a glorious cadence – a recollection of childhood days spent in constant, unending presence with the untrammeled nature of my being - pre criticisms, judgments, selfhood.

I don’t know that I’ve ever slept so well in my life. Long hours huddled close to, well, me, layered deep in my sleeping bag, half awake and dreaming.

The nights were cold. Very cold. Many of them hovered just above freezing, and if I ventured too long from my warm nest, it would take infinitely longer to re-warm again with no calories left to burn.

There were thunderstorms on the third night, and the rain was a drenching, articulate symphony tap-tapping on the fabric above my head for endless hours.

I didn’t mind at all.

My tent was dry and sweet and simple.

A bed, small table, single chair, altar and ceremony space. Nothing more.

The sound of water was constant from the stream by which I was camped - a constant koan babbling in the background like a meditation soundtrack, but for real.

The fourth night, another thunderstorm woke me with flashing non-stop strobes of lightning behind the cloud cover so bright I literally couldn’t keep my eyes open.

It felt like front row seats to a distant war, and I no longer wondered why so many of my ancient ancestors imagined primordial battles unfolding in the heavens - Gods and Goddesses raging and wild behind the booming thunder and gashes of light.

It occurred to me sometime during the week, that for the vast span of human existence, people (in most parts of the world) were forced by nature to hunker down, ease up, rest, sleep, slow down, and stay warm during the onset of winter.

Because there was no other choice but “going to ground” …

Hibernating.

Winter Camp.

These are things modern humans rarely ever do.

Today, our technology largely “saves” us from the pressing inputs of the elements still out there asking for us to remember how closely connected we are to all things as we huddle together for warmth, wind down the busy season, and rest, recover, and rejuvenate ourselves and our connections for the coming Spring.

I know that there is an ancient ache inside my soul calling out for membership in an intact tribal structure that remembers the unspeakable value of the technology of the living world.

There are many such human technologies still alive on this planet that are as ancient as the Peoples of Earth themselves – technologies that have been utilized cross-culturally for all of human history, from the Indian subcontinent, to Africa, Siberia, the Americans, and Oceana, you name it. By us. All of us.

Fasting is perhaps the oldest and most effective tool used cross-culturally for healing the human body.

Since the fast, I have put all of my weight back on and then some.

My relationship to food and eating is revitalized.

My appetite and digestion are a furnace, and I’m in the gym most mornings at 6am.

My stamina and sleep hygiene have sky-rocketed.

Combining the fast with the Amazonian technologies my guide brought to bear was a protocol I never could have conceived of, derived, or administered alone.

Mockingbird was a godsend, and a true rarity in this era of the “Instagram Shaman”, where anyone bold enough can proclaim themselves as such.

He is the real deal, and I simply cannot recommend working with him enough and vouch for his skills entirely if you yourself are looking for support in such ways.

I’ll end with this, the wedding and the funeral, both mine.

On the seventh day after the final ceremony I stumbled out of the tent along the stream towards the open grave I had dug for myself on the hillside nearby on the first day when I still had energy.

I knew going out there that a part of me needed to die.

I’ve known this for a long time.

It grieves me that so many in our culture take their own lives believing it is them that needs to die rather than a PART of them.

Arriving at the grave, I noticed the storms had scattered the ground with juniper berries, and the ornamentation felt appropriate. I asked for a good death, said a prayer, stripped off my clothes and let myself collapse into the cold earth.

I pulled the dirt down onto me, shivering and alive.

It felt good to be dead.

Nothing to do, no responsibilities, just rest.

Just rest.

It felt good to practice returning what I’ve borrowed in body back to Her as one day I shall as we all shall.

I don’t know how long I was in the grave, but at some point I started shivering, and felt myself rise with a vision of what a life lived as love would actually look like.

The voice inside my chest or all around me said, “It would look like Sacred Union.”

The path to the Inner Beloved is wild and unknown, arcane and Anima. And so given how close I’d recently come to matrimony I bore witness to my own inner Feminine walking down the aisle of wet soil with Juniper and Live Oak as witness, something stirring in my one flesh coming home in myself to prepare me finally to truly make myself ready to wed the QUEEN I can already feel all around me.

This feels like a good place to end before I get too freakin’ weird on you guys.

In actuality, I don’t quite know how to end this piece, because this piece has yet to end.

I hope it never does.

So I will simply say thank you, and that if you are interested in experiencing a “Sacred Tree Diet” or working with tobacco, I strongly recommend Mockingbird. He also does evening sits with Tobacco locally in Austin.

-Mikaal Bates // www.mikaalbates.com