Ceremony Day — The Medicine Within
Ceremony Day — The Medicine Within
I’m sharing something that feels sacred to me, and also deeply personal. It’s been four years since I last sat with plant medicine, so this wasn’t a casual “Tuesday night hobby.” It was a return. And it doesn’t feel right to tiptoe around it, because my healing has been real—and part of that healing has been learning to tell the truth without managing everyone else’s comfort.
If what I’m sharing challenges you, that’s okay. You don’t need to agree with me, and I’m not asking you to do anything. I’m simply naming my experience, in my lane, as cleanly and honestly as I can.
Yesterday started with a cold plunge in the pond—freezing temperatures, early light, real edge to it. And a sense of my mother’s energy holding me close.. if it were words I heard. “Let go.. Let go.. Let go,” she said. And underneath that was my honest question: how?
The answer wasn’t a technique. It was identity. Not “figure it out,” not “push harder,” not “be impressive.” Just be Byron. A human being. A child of God. A body held by nature. Cold water has a way of stripping away the mental negotiations. There’s no room for performance in freezing water. You either arrive, or you don’t.
Later came coffee, community, and a small circle gathering with curiosity, not intensity. The ceremony itself felt light—almost feminine in tone. Gentle but clear. I kept waiting for some big dramatic moment to break open the sky.
It didn’t happen.
And that was the revelation.
No fireworks. No cosmic theatre. Just presence. A soft settling. At one point I realized: I’m not waiting for the medicine anymore.
I am the medicine.
Yes—psilocybin can soften rigid patterns. It can loosen the overthinking loop and open new pathways. But what landed for me wasn’t some wild visual show. It was safety. Rest. Spaciousness. And laughter—deep, full, belly laughter. The kind that tells the nervous system, “We’re not being hunted.” The kind that discharges tension without needing a backstory.
That’s what moved me most: the nervous system piece. I’ve been quietly asking, why don’t I rest easily? Why does my body sometimes forget how to soften? Yesterday reminded me that rest doesn’t come from force. It comes from safety. When there’s no performance, no chasing, no managing, the body reorganizes itself.
And music mattered more than I expected. I shared raw acoustic guitar and voice—stripped back, unpolished, honest. Music is medicine for me, always has been, but offering it in a circle does something different: it pulls people closer, makes the room more human, more true. It tightens the weave. It turns “a group of individuals” into a shared moment.
The ceremony lasted about an hour and a half. Light. Clean. Grounded. But it lingered in the best way. I woke steady and clear. Meditation didn’t feel like effort. It felt like recognition—like something already alive inside me was simply being met. And in a quiet way, my mother’s spirit felt close by—like a gentle witness, like support without words.
Here’s what I keep coming back to: plant medicine can support remembering. It can open doors. It can soften rigidity. But it’s not something I want to “lean on” as if healing lives outside of me.
Because we make medicine inside ourselves, too.
Through prayer. Through meditation. Through breath. Through cold exposure. Through music. Through stillness. Through honest connection. Through the daily choice to come back into the body and live in alignment with mind, body, spirit—and God.
I’ve walked through what we called cancer. I prefer to see it as imbalance, a body asking for a different relationship with life. And strangely, in its own brutal way, it brought gifts. It asked me to become more honest, more embodied, more connected, more awake.
Yesterday wasn’t about escaping into something mystical. It was about coming home.
To myself.
To safety.
To laughter.
To the truth that healing isn’t somewhere out there.
Medicine within.
