The Marosa Meditations Pt.1
If you've been waiting for 'a sign', here it is.
Marosa changed my life completely, in ways I never thought possible. It's a great honour to be able to offer that to others now. If you apply, mention me and we can have our discovery call together. 🌿 EB.
Marosa ri-di-di-di canodaaaa... 🎶
This little ditty lives in my head, fully ingrained into my nervous system...
My small beginner icaro to Marosa.
My Marosa diet changed my life. It was one of the most profound, difficult, ecstatic, otherworldly, and trajectory-changing experiences I’ve ever had.
And that’s saying a lot. I’m no stranger to being ripped apart. But I was ready for it, I came to play, and boy, did she deliver.
Master Plant Diets.
Master plant diets can sound intense (and slightly ridiculous) depending on your metaphysics, but what I write here is theoretically and experientially true, as best as I can put it into language:
A master plant diet is a complex and rigorous discipline in which a connection between the dieter and plant spirit is made and nurtured. The master plant transmits guidance, healing, teachings, and energy (medicinal or otherwise) to the dieter. You could also say you are forming a soul contract with the spirit of the plant, or you are uniting your consciousness with theirs.
The process demands spiritual discipline, including a highly restrictive diet: no salt, no direct sunlight, limited music, no meat, dairy, spices, oils, certain nuts, and avoidance of violent media and thoughts, among other requirements.
This is paired with ritual ayahuasca ceremony, often sitting several times a week—as the curanderos (master healers) help to clear blockages and open/close your connection. They have dieted the same plant in the past and have a living relationship with it. Throughout your time, you ingest the master plant itself, often in the form of a drink, though not exclusively.
This process increases sensitivity and reduces ‘noise’ in the mind-body complex, helping the dieter tune in and connect to the plants' energy.
I wrote more about making this connection experientially in ‘Courting the Muse’.
Eric Brown
There are plants and trees known to the Amazonian & shamanistic cultures that have things to teach us.
These are the Master Plants.
Marosa.
Marosa (Pfaffia Iresinoides) is one of these master plants. Known as the ‘Plant of Love’, Marosa is a spirit of divine femininity, love, spiritual connection, and emotional healing/mastery.
She is phenomenal (you might call her an ancient world expert) at healing emotional trauma, relating to the feminine, cultivating spiritual connection, correcting the heart-mind relationship, and is uniquely adept at teaching mudras, often empowering people who work directly with their hands.
A small bonus is that Marosa can potentiate the effects of ayahuasca, already an intense experience, and it sure happened for me.
Marosa felt like my Archetypal Muse.
She was the woman in the red dress in all of my dreams. The energy behind my mother's voice. The sound of music. The feeling of sunshine. The ferocity of the open ocean. The spirit of Mother Nature.
She was every woman I’ve ever met, and unlike anyone I had ever known. I knew, somewhere deep inside, that I had spent my whole life looking for Her. That I worked so hard to become the Man I was just to meet Her. That I’ve been preparing many lifetimes to meet Her. Her radiance is intoxicating, empowering, brilliant, terrifying. She is every graceful jungle cat, curvy sports car, beautiful sunset all rolled into one.
She is Truth, Goodness, and Beauty itself. She was the original seed behind 'What Are You Doing Man?'. It was Marosa who rewired this orientation in me.
Eric Brown
Experiences & Outcomes.
It’s difficult (impossible?) to write about first-person subjective experience. So much signal is lost in translation, and at the end of the day, it’s the embodied experience that matters, and the nervous system & psychic recalibration that comes from it.
I had dozens of other insights during my 2-week diet that are not written about here. You can find the raw processing in pieces like 'Cracking the Koans', 'On Self-Sacrifice', 'Commit, Or Quit'. Any piece written after Nov 27 last year was an integration of this experience.
This very publication—Zen Medicine—and the future of my work were born in the middle of a ceremony during my Marosa diet.
My integration journey is still nascent, as more teachings, tests, and wisdom continue to surface over the weeks and months that have followed.
But let’s have some fun. A few prominent experiences:
The God Orgasm: Birth, Death, Obliteration, Ecstasy.
I can only call this the God Orgasm. Maybe 'Pure Rapture'. A multi-hour mind-bender, with my teacher Remi delivering some of the most alien icaros I had ever heard (he was singing for someone also dieting Marosa, amplifying the intensity).
A continuous, multi-dimensional, rainbow hyper-geometric internal implosion/explosion/annihilation/reconstitution/orgasm/death/rebirth.
My body shook intensely from the erupting/collapsing supernova inside me, no sense of who I was or what was happening. It was glorious, awe-inspiring, majestic, royal, sacred, profound, terrifying, all at once. It reminded me how much energy—entire universes—live within every human. How much organic lifeforce my body is made from.
Remi mentioned once that the ‘Garden of Eden’ was originally named the ‘Garden of Orgasms’, until it was neutered over the centuries. Fitting. This was a meeting with God in Almighty Glory. Ripped apart and put back together, every moment a mix of fantastic colour, sound, spirit, sensation—a symphony of experience in constant crescendo.
It taught me directly what true orgasm without ejaculation meant for men, and showed me the possibility of much deeper sexual mastery I could cultivate.
After all, orgasm is the tiny death in French: la petite mort. Unbelievable.
Extended Ego Death: Lost in Selfless Groundlessness.
Fast-forward a few days, and it was time for Her next ridiculous lesson.
Marosa had prepared me after a week for her most unforgiving teaching: returning my heart to the throne of my life.
A throne which had been dominated by the Tyrant Mind until this point.
My mind is strong, smart, sneaky, and stubborn. It would not walk away from the throne it had held for many decades. Marosa knew the only way to do this was to show my mind, clearly and without doubt, how profoundly inadequate it was for the next chapter of my life. Oh boy…
I entered a 2-3 hour extended Bufo/5-MeO-style ego dissolution. An eternity spent in groundless luminescence. No meaningful sense of time, space, self, orientation, or language. Teeth chattering like machine gun fire, near-schizophrenic shakes riddling my body. I thought I was going insane. I might never come back from this one...
Over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over again my mind was forced into submission—shown clearly that it cannot comprehend the mystery of life. It cannot wrap itself around the fluid and dynamic formless aliveness.
After some nigh-unspeakable expanse of time, a realization occurred.
While my mind was flailing and failing, my heart was buoyant. My heart could handle all of this effortlessly, and was having a joyous experience. It was ready for the task of guiding me into the next phase of my life.
There’s a lot of integration still to happen. But my heart is back in the game, sitting atop the throne of my being, happy to have returned to its rightful home.
Resolving Anger & the ‘Pit’.
I decided to do this diet because anger had dominated my emotional landscape for far too long. Years. It was a problem that was killing me slowly and hurting everyone around me.
I dug down deep enough inside myself to find ‘The Pit’ again. If you read 'On Depression', you know about the Pit. Anger was the only emotion I had that could escape the black hole that still lived somewhere deep inside.
Eric Brown
Marosa blew it apart. Or rather, blew me apart. She broke me down completely and rebuilt me from the ground up—without a pit. Everything full and functional.
I have not been angry since that diet. At least angry in the chronic and debilitating sense. Over 7 months now. The pit is gone.
These are gifts I will never be able to repay. There is no Earthly amount of money I could have paid that would not be worth the emotional and spiritual freedom this has given me.
Summoning into Sacred Purpose.
The beautiful brilliance Marosa radiates summoned an Ancient Masculine energy in me. Something was being called to rise and meet Her.
A clear, courageous, confident force. When that energy–that man–appeared, she summoned Him into Excellence. Summoned me into my next stage of service and self-mastery.
At that moment, two things became unspeakably clear, an immaculate revelation from deep inside:
- I need to apprentice at Kumankaya. To honour the call of monastic medicine work that has beckoned me for nearly a decade now.
- I would need to sacrifice everything in my life to do this. Everything.
Holy shit...
And there I was, a random Thursday evening, deep in the Mayan jungles of Mexico, seated on a small mat, alone in the dark, while everything in my life was summoned in front of me for sacrifice.
My relationship, my life, my work, my projects, my identity, my possessions, my current dreams. Everything ripping through my psyche, "Yes, this too, this too." The pain of the loss was overwhelming. But Marosa held it, never once backing down or breaking her gaze.
There would be no bullshitting here. I had to see and feel everything I was giving up before I could say yes to this next initiation.
It was time to Rise.
I’m happy to say that I begin the first major step of this process, an 8-month facilitation period at Kumankaya, this July. I have given up almost everything in my life to get here, and I haven't even started yet.
Getting Married to a Plant?
Remi can bend sound with his voice in ways that seem to defy the laws of physics. When you ask him, even he doesn’t know how he does it, he just lets the medicine sing through him.
In my final ceremony–the closing of my diet–as I sat in front of Remi, it was self-evidently clear that his voice was tying a bow. Sonic waves winding and weaving themselves around and inside me. Like a gift bow.
But to me, it gave immediate, unspoken meaning to the term 'tying the knot', as in getting married.
I think I just got married to a plant...
The depth of the relationship I formed with Marosa is unspeakable. She’s my best friend, my lover, my fiercest opponent, my highest possibility, my sacred partner, my mentor, teacher, guide, wife, mother, daughter, past, present, and future.
What label can you possibly give to a spirit that you’ve merged with completely?
Up Next: Failures, Tests, & Challenges
Now I had to go home and complete the process of sacrificing my entire life. Slowly, painfully, deliberately.
There is no price I am unwilling to pay… but my God, the cost has been staggering. I understand what sacrifice means now. For you, Marosa, anything...
Part 2: Failures & Integration, here soon.
Marosa ri-di-di-di canodaaaa,
EB.
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