Agency: Empowerment Through Responsibility

Viktor Frankl shares in Man’s Search for Meaning: “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” Indeed, he observed that those who survived the terrors of Auschwitz did so through challenging to change themselves in the face of an unchangeable situation.

We believe that the foundation of self-empowerment is responsibility: the orientation towards taking ownership of one’s reality and their emotions. In order to carry responsibility, one must feel agency and sovereignty. Agency is the freedom to choose; sovereignty is one’s own authority within consciousness. Any slight on agency or sovereignty erodes the capacity for one to take responsibility, which can lead to a slippery slope of victimization instead of creatorship.

This particularly applies to our point of view on the nature of entheogens or “shamans” in the healing process. We believe that the entheogenic sacraments are not the healing or transformative agents themselves. Much like when a doctor sutures a wound, it is not the doctor that is healing you… s/he is merely providing the environment for one’s body to heal itself. In this same vein, we believe that plant medicine or “shamans” do not heal a person… it is merely providing the environment for one’s mind to heal itself. This is often referred to as the “inner healing intelligence”: the notion that consciousness is oriented towards self-healing when it is provided a safe environment in which the mind can explore itself.

At Ceremonia, this value of agency is encoded into our facilitation, rituals, and processes to reinforce that the very key to one’s transformation lies within oneself.

Compassion: Oneness Through Innocence

We are born with egocentrism: the view that the world revolves around us. Until the age of 6 to 8 months, a baby believes that they make things disappear when they are hidden from view—that they have literally disappeared their parents when the parents leave the room. In Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory, he shares that the consciousness journey is to move from “I” to “we” to “us” to “One”. In other words, life’s journey can be defined by the path from egocentrism to Oneness—the adoption of a unified viewpoint sewn together by the fabric of love and compassion.

Compassion is derived from the Latin word, compati, which means “suffer with”. We believe that compassion is both the basis and consequence of adopting another’s state of being and point of view. It is built on the assumption of innocence: the notion that at every single moment, every single person is doing their best. No matter the atrocity, no matter the condemnation, we are all trying our best with the tools, information, and consciousness that we have at any given moment.

Compassion dissolves separateness by allowing ourselves to shed the walls of our beliefs or righteousness in service of opening ourselves to the innocent intentions of others. We can “suffer with” others, thus experiencing the humanness of each person—the striving for love, safety, meaning, connection, understanding, joy, and peace. This openness is the garden in which love sprouts; and when one can feel love for another who had hurt them, this expands the range of one’s love. Love is a state of being, not a thing to be had or done. Thus, compassion allows one space for more love, which in turn brings more love into and for oneself.

At Ceremonia, we promote compassion by offering a container of shared vulnerability where each person can witness the humanness of each other. Through the portal of vulnerability, strangers that walk through our door very quickly become friends. Then, through compassion, we very quickly become family.

Curiosity: Growth Through Openness

Spiritual teacher Adyashanti shares that “beliefs create separateness”. The beliefs of differing religions have created the extreme separateness manifest in wars or genocide. However, any belief, no matter how minor, can create separateness: natural versus synthetic medicine, acceptance versus persecution, or even vanilla versus chocolate. Beliefs breed righteousness, which is a form of pride that perpetuates suffering of the beholder because it closes the doorway to compassion and growth.

Curiosity towards others is a path to Oneness because its orientation inherently assumes the innocence of the other. This often leads to compassion, which leads to love. We call this “outer curiosity”. Inner curiosity for one’s own experience allows the probing of why one feels or acts the way they do, which creates opportunity for growth. Growth leads to gratitude.

Through both outer and inner curiosity, we can create the reciprocal environment of feeling compassion for others while noticing the impact others have on us. Maybe one’s curious inquiry on another’s experience can lead one to feel angry; and then one’s curiosity towards their anger can lead them to discover their own righteous beliefs. This cycle can help both individuals unravel their own beliefs in service of dissolving the separateness between them.

At Ceremonia, we implore curiosity as an orientation to dive deeper inwards while simultaneously helping others feel safe to reveal the hidden depths of their own feelings.

Courage: Power Through Creatorship

In David Hawkin’s Map of Consciousness, the dividing line between Power versus Force, Strength versus Weakness, and Oneness versus Separateness begins at the level of courage. Courage embodies the energy intention from which all change springs.

We believe that courage begins with responsibility. Often, the greatest challenge that one can have on the path to wholeness is to shift from victimhood to creatorship. By taking responsibility for one’s emotions and creation of their own reality, one can embody the power necessary to make change.

One gateway to responsibility is to shift from “why is this happening to me?” to  “why is this happening for me?” The former question acquiesces power to an external agent which may be a perceived perpetrator, life itself, or God. The latter question invites inquiry with the assumption and trust that life is benign and aiming one towards wholeness and Oneness. We often like to prompt the allegory: imagine that life is a simulation–a video game, if you will–where the end goal is peace, love, joy, and enlightenment. In this metaphor, how does the challenging situation that one is in move one closer to this destination? How do the people, experiences, and suffering in our lives provide us opportunities to come closer to God–that place of infinite and ineffable peace within oneself and all around?

At Ceremonia, we invoke courage through taking ownership of long-suppressed emotional energies and the consequences of gripping onto them. We believe that everything does happen for a reason, though that reason will only reveal itself through mustering the courage to take responsibility, inquire within, and approach what is revealed with loving kindness.