Guest speaker: Shonagh Home
PROGRAM NOTES:
[NOTE: All quotations are by Shonagh Home.]
“The mushroom has a wildness to it because it is wild, just as our minds once were wild.”
“I see the mushroom as the ultimate test of the initiate because you’re on your own. There’s no shaman to guide you, and so it is up to you to determine how this [experience] is about to look.”
“What is the point of doing these medicines if you are not going to break the spell of your perceptions, of who and what you think you are, and what you perceive this world to be.”
Exploring Psychedelics Conference, 2015
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Shonagh Home is a teacher, shamanic practitioner, and the author of
‘Ix Chel Wisdom: 7 Teachings from the Mayan Sacred Feminine,’
and the upcoming, ‘Honeybee Wisdom: A Modern Melissae Speaks.’
Website: www.shonaghhome.com
Contact: shonagh.home (at) comcast (dot) net
I appreciate Shonagh’s expression of how she sees the world and her assessment of society in general, but I think she is being a little too romantic with regards to nature. Shonagh paints a pretty picture of a benevolent nature that has all our best interests at heart. However, she neglects the other side of nature which includes characteristics such as destruction, cruelty, eternal chaos and pain. Are we to believe that to avoid pain, illness and sadness during the death process that all we have to do is use our imagination to obfuscate these tangible and real feelings that will inevitably come for each of us?
I wonder how Shonagh would react were she placed in a defensive corner where she had to eliminate an aggressor in the interests of saving her own life? I know where my best interests would lay in such a situation and I would fight to the death to save my own life rather than simply say “take me nature for you are all knowing and all powerful.” At the end of the day, the fact that we are made of skin, bones and nerves dictates that we will do our utmost to preserve our dear selves from the internal/external attacks that nature plots against us.
Shonaghs depiction of the child and the mobile phone incident lost me and I couldn’t see the point she was trying to make, if any. Sure, we are all distracted to one degree or another by our digital device usage but what about the billions of positive advantages that come with their use. Surely they out way the few negative consequences that Shonagh expressed? Nothing in this world is perfect and you have to accept the law of unintended consequences works both ways regardless.