A Night of San Pedro: Cactus Medicine and the Heart

I drank San Pedro in a ceremony facilitated by a woman who had worked with the cactus for 20 years. The brew was thick, green, and bitter. I drank it in the late afternoon, and we sat in a circle in a garden as the sun went down. The effect came on slowly — over 2 hours — and was gentle, warm, and heart-centered in a way I had not experienced with other medicines.

The teaching of the night was about the difference between feeling and emotion. I had always thought they were the same. The cactus showed me they were not. Emotion was the reaction — the story-laden, self-referential reaction. Feeling was the raw, pre-story sensation — the grief, the joy, the fear, the love — before the mind got hold of it and made it into a narrative. The cactus stripped the narrative. What was left was just the feeling, and it was not a problem. It was just weather. It was moving through.

I wept for 2 hours. Not from sadness — from the release of feelings I had been holding for years, thinking they were part of me, thinking they were who I was. They were not. They were weather. The cactus showed me the sky. I have tried to remember this — that I am the sky, not the weather — in the months since. I do not always succeed. But I have a reference point now, and that is more than I had before.