On Being the Daughter of a Seeker

It is Ancestor Season, and so I begin this blog with their remembrance and blessing in this article I wrote for the Life as Ceremony journal. My intention for this dimension here is to weave a rich tapestry of story, science, and Spirit as a devotional accompaniment for you on your own Journey. To go vast and dive deep into the Mystery, from the quantum to the everyday magic in the mundane. And so it is !

The Seeker is an explorer of the Soul, forever looking for that portal to another world, the place where the mists part and conditioned reality splits open, and illusion turns on itself. A traveler of all time and space, very much in the physical sense, as every Seeker goes on proper pilgrimage, often many times in a lifetime. However, it is the thirst for knowledge, consciousness raising experiences, and smashing of conventional paradigms that defines the Seeker. 

This divergence from known reality, The Initiation, comes sometimes by tragedy, acute or chronic illness, and others by divine hallucinogenic intervention, or like for me, a combination of all of the above. Either way one’s bandwidth of perception is forever altered and widened, the veil is sharply drawn back, and the other realms and dimensions within and without ourselves are beheld in their glittering and terrifying expansiveness. 

I hear people in the spiritual community talk about when they started on the Path, and I smile to myself, glad there is language around being a Seeker to convey the wide array of experiences beyond what we are conditioned to believe, a nod to the tacit acknowledgement of our inner terrain and the importance of exploring it. 

Personally, I can’t remember anything but the Path, as my Initiation started with my mother’s chronic illnesses when I was very young, from mysterious auto immune disorders to ovarian cancer, health was always this nebulously tenuous state just beyond the next medical treatment, prayer circle, healer. 

Seeking God, health,miracles,and consciousnesshas always been inextricably linked in my experience. It was a way of life for our family, as anyone with a chronic illness can relate. The endless specialists and questions, non-answers, tests that are all fine, when clearly nothing is fine. From fermenting mushrooms to chlorophyll enema therapy and steroids, to acupuncture, spell work and candle magick, to everything in between, we tried and tested it all. We sought out every miracle worker, went to church every Sunday, and earnestly repeated more rosaries than I can count. 

As time went on the dis-eases morphed and changed, but the methods and lessons, the gnawing desire to experience the miraculous remained the same. I remember when I was six or seven, large purple bruises started mysteriously appearing on my mother. All of the tests were fine but the bruises persisted and we sought the advice of an elder, a medicine woman with a gift for Seeing. With weathered hands the woman took out a clear plastic tub, filled it with water and directed my mother to melt a simple white candle over it. She read the melted wax, and in meticulous detail described the land we had recently moved to, explaining my mother had not asked permission from the land spirits to domesticate it, and they were making their anger known. 

An offering and apology was made, and instantly the bruising stopped. Time and again I witnessed the impossible and this sealed my relationshipwith the unseen and the nature spirits in my consciousness. I know today, now more than ever these other ways of knowing and perceiving have long been in my maternal lineage, and part of my personal ancestral healing is claiming these gifts. 

Being from the Philippines, my mother’s ferocious Catholic faith, superstition, and the occult were transparently woven over and undereach other to survive and grow in her living temple of belief, the place where my inherited book of knowledge was passed down from. I was also raised with our ancestral superstitions and omens, folk remedies, fears and foods, her Filipino love of gambling and lots of wonderful gay and transgender Tita’s (auntie’s), none of which evercollided with her unshakable faith.

In her very strict and living temple, I was the most unwilling apprentice. Questioning everything, impatient, utterly bored and most definitely not on the Path. A rebelling psychonaut in my teens, I sought alternative states of awarenesson my own and discovered the teaching and therapeutic capabilitiesof psychedelics. I wanted to experience my own ecstatic merging with Spirit and unity consciousness, and I did. 

I tapped into the primordial sound stream dancing until dawn in the desert and I found salvation, I found forgiveness, I merged with eternity. It may sound strange, but in a larger sense what I see at a concert is what I see at Church. Humans pursuing the electric experience of being truly alive and connected, of finding portals to the Divine in community through resonance and music, whether gospel or techno, it is our original language.

As my perception evolved, so did my ways of seeking. I found liberation through stillness in my asana practice, and finally understood that prayer was also a form of meditation. I experienced surprisingly deepand altered states of being during Pranayama, led to the ancient technology that is our breath.

I returned to ritual and ceremony, to Sound as medicine, this time discovering the Gong as a portal to other dimensions inward and outward, and so I took up playing sacred and ritual sound instruments, while also studying the effects of coherent frequencies on the brain and parasympathetic nervous system. I was stunned, but not really, to learn about the long history of this traditional instrument in the Philippines. 

That place where science and spirit merge, I will meet you there. 

Having children has been its’ own disorienting Initiation. Giving birth to my daughter Phoenix a year ago reignited the deep desire to work directly with my ancestry, and return to the place of my dawning after nineteen years away. As I have spiraled back around, grown into my own healing gifts and merged them with my art, I find myself working increasingly with the plants, their fibers and flower power. 

I see my mother’s endless devotion to the Virgin, and recognize an aspect of the Goddess, and realize I serve Her too, by a multitude of other names.