Thittato

And of course while I'm writing this, my old guitar-teacher, whose name is also Magnus, sends me an email telling me about some new coaching thing he has going, and that he will only be in Norway one time quite soon now to do this coaching thing before he'll be away again for half a year. Something for me to consider :-)

Holy schmokes. That was too much having all those instruments hanging around in my tiny studio-apartment. So except for one classical guitar and the djembe, I drove the rest up to my brother for some time. I was getting into some stress and mania jumping around between the el-guitar, the keyboard, the ukulele, etc. So now it is perfect. The classical guitar and the djembe is a perfect combo for a while. Funny I just bought the el-guitar and then I'm storing it away, but got to experiment a bit to find the right dose of things. Feels sexier to only have two instruments here. Also I'm storing my weight lifting equipment (a few kettlebells and some dumb-bells) down in my basement instead of having it up here. Been lifting weights for a year now, combining it with yoga, and it was inspiring with some change to my normal yoga-focus, but I think I will go back to focus my exercise routine primarily around yoga again. Stripping things down in order to add depths. Regarding adding depths I have always been very fascinated with chess but never any good at it, but 2 months ago I started playing on chess.com and carefully reading a little bit about strategies and tactics here and there. Yesterday I finished watching this lesson from chess.com on youtube: All you need to know about chess: The Opening All you need to know about chess: Tactics and Strategy! All you need to know about chess: The Endgame! All you need to know about chess: Bringing It Together! I was sort of stuck in a rut until I saw "Bringing It Together" and realized how fun it is to hear commentators analyze famous chess games on youtube, so that will be my next clue in order to add depths to my chess game as well. Since I play chess every now and then anyways, why not add some more depths to it by investing a little bit more into actual studies of famous games? That is much more fun than just reading theory about it, also... :-) Anyways, this whole stripping things down thing happened after I sat on my meditation cushion this afternoon and had another amazing djembe-session. I realized that finally I've reached one of my goals with drumming, and that is just to be able to sit there for an extended period alone and enjoy it like a meditation or like a solo ceremony, and then I realized my place is just too crammed up with too much of everything, and that it would be much more powerful to go deeper with lesser things. So here is a picture of the two remaining instruments. I'm realizing the guitar has the most feminine qualities of these two, and it was the ayahuasca ceremony which gave me back the inspiration with it, and the djembe, is very masculine, and the peyote really opened my eyes up for the djembe again, and as mentioned above ayahuasca is known for having very feminine qualities and peyote for masculine qualities, so together this picture shows the king and queen in my life right now, also the two most important pieces in chess hehehe :-) Also that last drawing published above here, "The impasse," was also heavily influenced by my interest in chess these days, and even though I don't think impasse is a term used in chess, the definition of impasse: "a situation in which progress is blocked; an insurmountable difficulty; stalemate; deadlock" is a situation that can easily occur in chess, in fact it actually just happened 12 times in a row between the world champion and his challenger before they had to do extra rounds in quicker chess. The world champion Magnus Carlsen (which is a Norwegian just like me) is said to be a more intuitive player, while his challenger Fabiano Caruana is much more analytical, some said it was a competition between man and machine, and Magnus Carlsen easily won when they moved on to quicker game and Fabiano Caruana couldn't use so long time to do "computer analyzing" anymore. And that was what my cacao-ceremony was about, getting more intuitive, because I have the tendency of getting stuck in trying to calculate everything in life. So perhaps my personal impasse, the stalemate, mentioned above, found flow again through intuition. Holy smokes, that was a lot of symbolism. I love to bring all the things in my life together - to create a symbolic meaning for myself like this :-)

Started this day with meditating for 45 min, and then a really nice djembe-session. Feels like I'm back in track regarding my studies to become a gestalt-therapist. I will at least finish this 2nd year, and study as if I'm going along with the program. So that means I will have to start to read the study-material again. I had some sort of crisis that lead me to going back to the ayahuasca circle and asking this plant teacher for guidance on how to deal with this crisis. For instance I was projecting a lot of my father issues on my therapist (transference and perhaps counter-transference) so that I felt rejected by my own therapist and that made me doubt the whole education, but now my relationship with my therapist is re-established and I will at the very least finish this 2nd year as if I'm fully going along with the program, intending to perhaps start the 3rd year, but I will just have to see about that. But at least I need to finish this 2nd year to deal with all these issues that has been active lately. It is a 4-year part-time education where the two first years are only about working on ones own process, while the two last years the focus is on the role of becoming a therapist, so no matter which way it turns out it will be cool to have 2 years of gestalttherapy self and group-processes on my CV when I'm working as a social worker. So doing psychedelics again triggered a lot of extra processes again, especially this creative process, so it was nice to write about it here, and I love both music and art, but for now I think I will continue with it just as a hobby (as it has always been) and continue my training as a therapist as if that is what I intend to become. But I will finish the goals I've established for my guitar-playing here, but it is really nice to not have this rush to get anywhere else again. Basically I think perhaps my goals with both guitar and drawing is to just have them as an integrated and balanced part of my daily life. And that sounds pretty cool to me - to have a normal job working as a social worker in a psychiatric hospital as I do, and then have some really cool hobbies that I really enjoy. Also I'm really glad I discovered cacao, because that is the type of really mild and nice plant teacher I need these days. I have to admit that doing ayahuasca and peyote was a bit irresponsible because my job in the psychiatric hospital is quite demanding and it took me 3 weeks after the ayahuasca and 2 weeks after the peyote to get fully back to my self. But fortunately it turned out very well, and I even had some extra love and inspiration to give to several of my patients in the afterglow. But generally those types of processes are too demanding to my taste. It seems people react very differently to these plant teachers, and perhaps at another point in time my relationship with them will be different, but for now I'm really satisfied with how this lead me to discover cacao :-) Ok, back to the gestalttherapy-books :-)

The awesomeness of this day has just continued. This evening I was at a mantra circle singing Gayatri Mantra 108 times together with 20 people. And now I have just had an awesome conversation on phone with a friend while I was coloring one of my drawings. Played the djembe two more times as well. I'm starting to believe that I can fully heal my emotional wounds and live to my fullest potential every day. The interesting thing is now everything feels perfect in my life. But my pattern is that that can easily change, and probably it will in the course of a few days. While now my art and music and meditation and studies and job all seems to go in the right direction and there is a meaningful unified whole to it, when the switch flips from flow to contraction the same life with exactly the same ingredients will just look like crap with only loose ends diverging in all kinds of contradictory directions. But of course that is how life is bouncing back and forth between emotional/spiritual expansions and contractions. But I do believe this can balance itself out and that I can live grounded, kind and humble awesomeness every day.

Had a really amazing session playing djembe this morning. I'm starting to love this journaling. Felt like it was just craziness only a few days ago, but then I managed to express this impasse very well here I felt, and then I encountered this cacao-ceremony, and suddenly I'm on the track of something new. Cool how this was kick-started by an ayahuasca ceremony, but then I felt that these days ayahuasca (and peyote) is too much for me, and not really what I'm looking for at this point, but still I would love to study with some kind of plant teacher, and then cacao appeared as a really mild and gentle teacher. I also love the aspect of ceremonies and ingesting some kind of sacrament, so I'm glad I've found a sacrament that is what I'm looking for these days. Also music is often a very important part of ceremonies, and since my music interest has been so much triggered by these types of ceremoniel settings, I'm looking forward to see how this journey will continue when I'm doing my own solo-ceremonies with cacao. I'm planning to meditate, sing mantras, play guitar and djembe during these ceremonies, to go into it with an intention that I express in some way, so that will be really exciting. Also I've found inspiration now to at least finish this 2nd year with the education in gestalt-therapy that I'm doing because I really need to get to the roots of this impasse that I've been in. Its not just over by me encountering cacao, even though that will help, but I know I have some really deep wounds that I need to heal, and probably I'm closer than ever to get to the roots of this, so it would be a stupid point to quit this education right now (which I have considered being tormented by doubt as part of this impasse). Part of this journaling is just getting all the stuff out so that I can clear my mind and be present. Doesn't really matter that much which direction this takes as long as my healing journey continues.

Cacao-ceremony Hah!! Spontaneously I dropped by the near-by yoga studio where they had a cacao-ceremony today, and that really answered all my prayers. First of all, I'm really glad I did both that ayahuasca and that peyote ceremony mentioned, because it gave me a lot of important lessons, but it is really not what I want to spend a lot of time doing these days. Basically I'm getting too old for that stuff. I need something milder. And the cacao was just nice and friendly. It wasn't really a trip, but it just gently supported my process without pushing me into it. The intention I set for this ceremony was to get more into my intuition and out of my head. During the ceremony I resolved to let go of any mental ego notion of becoming an artist or musician, and basically just settle for presence and trust in whatever the process of life has to offer me. I bought enough for 10 doses of cacao, so this I will continue to explore for some time now with doing solo-ceremonies setting up an intention for each ceremony etc. Also I met a friend tonight and told him about my journaling about this, and I also told him I had sort of getting hooked on journaling because first I started journaling about my meditation process at a meditation forum, and then I started journaling about my dating process at a dating forum, and then this sort of combined psychedelic / music / creativity thing and we started to play around with the idea of making the crazyness complete by making like a mother journal over all my journals journaling about the process of journaling itself which was pretty funny. He also suggested making the whole thing into an art project - the instruments, the drawings, the journaling, the yoga, the meditation, the whole craziness, which I thought was a really cool idea. Anyways, lets just see where this all leads. Here is a picture of where to roads continues regarding the ceremonial aspect of this journey

I will do my very best to not try to figure this out in my mind, which can be hard because I get obsessive about it, but rather to feel it in my body, the underlying frustrations and pains that I'm probably trying to escape by becoming mental about it. As Fritz Pearls, the founder of gestalttherapy, said: "Loose your mind and come to your senses."

So in 2009 I came back home after having lived as a buddhist monk in a monastery abroad for two years, and I was ready for life and I started exploring creativity, psychedelics and socializing quite extensively, and for this long time, I have had this tendency in my mind to create so-called false dichotomies where I artificially think that one things excludes another, and now again, as so many times before, now I put guitar up against drawing, or more generalized music VS. visual arts, and it is pretty frustrating and I'm not really sure how to go about this thing. So why is this so? I can see some reasons: Having hided behind a religious identity for so long as a buddhist, there has ever since been a vacuum in my identity-process where I have wanted to find a new simplified identity to become religious about. Some new doctrine and practice to devote myself fully to. The infinite potential of creativity and expansion that psychedelics open up for is very inspiring while on the trip but can be challenging to translate into everyday life. I think psychedelics for me has contributed to some kind of "multi talented genius complex" where I have started to believe that I can have it all and really reach excellence in all parts of life. I've explored dancing, improv theater, stand-up, drawing/painting, music, writing, etc, pretty extensively and I have this notion that I can become good at them all, which most of the time basically just creates a lot of trouble for me. So then I juggle back and forth, if it is not so that I can have it all, which direction should I choose to go deeper, much deeper, with, since I have this strong need to see some kind of creativity really flourish in my life? How to bring the felt sense of abundance into actual results, instead of just spinning around in this craziness. It might not sound so crazy when I write about it, but it feels pretty crazy walking around inside of a mind like this. I'm also studying to become a gestalttherapist, and I'm in deep doubt about this whole education right now, so I might quit after this 2nd year that I'm now doing. Altogether the education is 4 years part-time. At the very least I'm getting a lot of therapy out of this education, so I'm going to use the help of the therapist-teachers to sort this all out. In the gestalt-theory I've reached a point in the course of therapy called "the impasse" which is a pretty dreadful place where there is no obvious way forward, but standing still feels dreadful to. I see impasse has this definition in the dictionaries online: - a situation in which progress is blocked; an insurmountable difficulty; stalemate; deadlock - a position or situation from which there is no escape; deadlock. - a situation in which progress is impossible, especially because the people involved cannot agree. So feels like I'm in the middle of my major impasse here, and especially it plays out the way my mind goes crazy over guitar VS. drawing dichotomies. Here is the most recent drawing I made. It is made to symbolize this phase that I'm in. I made it out of gluing post-it notes to paper, so it is kind of a post-it note mosaic :-)

Also, since journaling about this process, both the instruments and how the psychedelics have played into this, has been so rewarding, I've been considering journaling about my drawing-process the same way, to kind of map out where I want to go with my art and how to get there. Perhaps this journal will eventually turn into a drawing-journal instead as drawing is the form of creativity I have the longest history with and what I have identified the most with at times. Perhaps the guitar was just a process to filter the psychedelic experiences through, or perhaps I will continue to do both. I have this strange urge to lock down on one thing and really go for it and exclude everything else, and I thought that was what I was going to do with the guitar this time. Perhaps I will continue to do several things, or perhaps I eventually land on one thing. Guess I just have to see about that. At the very least, with the guitar, I will finish up really getting the 5th song down, and getting those 5 pentatonic scale shapes solidly into my fingers, because that will have really brought my level up quite a few steps and have given me something I can improvise with and play around with for a loooong time even if I don't continue to practice in a systematic manner. I feel like including two of my drawings here, just because they have also been such a big part of this whole process now, and it is nice to put some visual symbols on the whole thing. Lets say they are a visual glimpse into how my mind works. Both are hand-drawn.

So the day after I got this electric guitar, a friend dropped by with some really cool effect pedals to plug in between the guitar and the amplifier to add some really cool effects to the sound of the guitar. I feel fully landed from the two psychedelic journeys I've told about in this journal, and now I actually feel very grateful for both of them, but there is no urge to do anything like that again anytime soon and that is also something I'm satisfied about - that I can consider them rewarding experiences that I can enjoy the lessons from but there is no rush whatsoever to chase new experiences/lessons. I'm borrowing one of the effect pedals my friend brought to play around with, it is called a distortion pedal. Here are some of the ones we used that day:

Fantastic day! Started off with a drumming-session on the djembe. Then practiced the 5th song which is getting better. Then a lot of freestyling, and then I got so inspired I went off and bought an electric guitar, and man that was so awesome, standing up playing and dancing at the same time. Never played guitar standing before, but this new electric guitar has a strap around it, and that really added to the experience. Also, a few sessions here and there on the djembe is the perfect supplement to guitar-playing for a lot of reasons, especially training up rhythm, but also just blowing off some steam with something entirely else. Here is a picture of them hehe ;-D

Getting a tiny little bit more familiar with this 5th song. Lots of resistance, but I think I'll soon be over the top of the hill. Been drawing a lot lately again, and wonder if I should include my drawing and painting process in this journal. Perhaps the guitar is more like a support for my drawing process, because that is certainly the art-form I've identified the most with and spent the most time with in my life. But it is good to have this discipline going with something since my drawing process is much more intuitive and improvised. It feels like I can more easily indulge in improvised stuff when I get the energy and good feeling that comes from doing something structured as well. Perhaps that's a good lesson to bring with me to all things in general. Like I should always do a combination of both structured and improvised stuff. If I only do structured stuff then I'll kill the joy, but if I only do improvised stuff it usually quickly feels like I get stuck in a rut of just repeating myself without giving myself important challenges to conquer and grow from.

Also I used to get pretty stressed out because I have so many creative impulses in all kind of directions, but I believe now that I can trust the process. There is nothing wrong with me just because I want to do EVERYTHING. As long as I have the discipline to stick with one project for an extended period of time. Doesn't mean I have to stick with guitar for ever either, just until I get to the next level that I crave. Then I can follow the flow wherever it leads me. I believe this is all moving towards a balanced and integrated wholeness that I can now only see parts of, so it is important to just trust the process.

A bit of an effort getting familiar with the 5th song, but it is getting better. I can sense a new very creative period is on its way, and then it is very important for me to also be rooted in a discipline, so that I don't get carried away by all the inspiration and all the people who are drawn to me in these periods, so that makes this guitar-project a very good project to have.

Back to learning the 5th song.

Been looking a bit more into how the major and minor scale is built up, and also been playing around a lot more with these pentatonic scale shapes, and I've improvised some melodies and even a improvised song. I understand better now how melodies are made out of scales, and perhaps that was the major thing that I needed to understand regarding music theory, but of course there is a lot more to learn. It took me 3 weeks to get fully back to myself after the ayahuasca ceremony, and 2 weeks after the peyote ceremony, and it kind of makes me think psychedelics are overrated as a self-development tool, but everybody has their own path and journey with different tools. I used to be really obsessed with psychedelics before, but now I think my time is better spent working with the things I want to improve on on a daily basis and not thinking that some kind of psychedelic break-through somehow will improve everything for me. I guess that was like almost a religious belief I had before. Also I'm starting to get well-established in this guitar-learning-process, and I have a tendency to thing that I should quit everything else that I consider important just to find this one thing that I want to become really good at, and perhaps that was necessary for a limited period to get better establised in this learning-process, but now I think I can start to open up to all these other things that I also want to pursue, especially drawing and painting.

Ok, so to get to where I want to get, in order to really understand what guitar-playing is, I will have to learn scales and music theory. That will be the next thing I launch into after I'm done memorizing the 5th song.

Insanely cool! Those pentatonic scale shapes are already down, and now I can improvise all over the fretboards and jump back and forth between all these scale shapes. My barre chords are also getting much stronger already. The cool things about learning these new things is that it takes a bit of effort to get it down, but once it is down, it just becomes part of my vocabulary and I just need to run through it quickly daily and then it just grows naturally into next level of confidence and skill and running through stuff like that on a daily basis really keeps my fingers in good shape and makes everything about guitar-playing much easier.

Going to add something more to my practice routine. I already know 5 barre chords, but they are far from tight, so I found an excellent exercise to boost them up and that is to alternate between playing the E major barre chord shape and the A minor barre chord shape in every fret from bottom to top. Also I'm going to learn 5 Pentatonic scales from Guitarhabits.com article "The 5 Pentatonic Scale Shapes You Must Know" just to get more juice going in the scale department. Practicing scales is a really great way to warm up. Also I'm going to work on putting together some kind of Action Plan in order to get where I want to get. I don't know yet where I want to go, but at least part of it is being able to tie this all together into one unified whole. How can classical solo's, simple mantra-songs with open chords and strumming, fingerpicking, playing melodies out of scales, improvisation out of scales, barre chords, songwriting and etc, become integrated into something whole? I don't know yet, but I'm going to figure out. Especially I'm going to figure out what is the relationship between chords and scales, and how can strumming simple chords become spiced up some more with using the scales. Probably music theory is important in figuring this out. First edition of this Action Plan is: - continue to work on the 5 classical solo's I'm committing to memory - continue to work on my barre chords - learn 5 pentatonic scales - continue to read on Guitarhabits.com to get a better overview over what guitar playing actually consists of technically speaking

First time of playing through song nr. 4 purely from memory. Love/hate relationship towards psychedelics still active. I guess the important thing here is that I love creativity for its own sake regardless of the inspiration I have been getting from the psychedelics, and I still need to translate my inspiration into a daily practice routine (which has been happening lately). Also, keeping my apartment tidy and clean is very important to keeping inspiration and motivation going. Much easier to sit down to practice when this place feels like a good place to be.

So yesterday I meditated for 45 minutes really feeling this resistance towards psychedelic experience in my body, and gosh it was such a relief. I've noticed this type of resistance before, especially with my art-making process. It happens when I get really manic about something and really milk it for all that it is worth and then I get sort of a backlash when all the inspiration has been sucked dry and I get much aversion about the same subject because it has been sucked dry. So it was such a relief to identify this same pattern when it applies to psychedelics, and also meditate on all that congestion and lack of flow that that created in my body and identifying and meditation on it was enough to open up the flow again. So for the whole of today I've felt really back in my center again and no regrets about these two psychedelic experiences. Been practicing the 4th song today and I get even a better grip on it and now it only remains to commit it to memory. Also I've added a 5th song to what I'm practicing on, so altogether 5 simple classical solo's now and it starts to feel like this is getting serious, and holy crap, these songs are really steroids to my fingers.

Ok, played the guitar for 30 min and I'm starting to get a good grip on this new song. Felt like such a relief to be back with my original plan about building up a good guitar practice. I guess that's my biggest ambivalence about psychedelics - they take me far out and far in into a really powerful and inspiring experience but getting back into the tracks of daily life is quite some work, and sometimes I'm not sure if it is worth all this work or if I should just have continued to work on all these things I want to work on related to my daily life without having this strong process blowing to whole thing up into the air for a while. But at the same time I was really desiring some really strong and powerful psychedelic experiences, so I got what I asked for, and now I just have to accept that I will have to do the necessary work of integration. I will also spend some time to meditate on this resistance I feel towards this integration-process, just to see if that can dissolve some of the resistance or bring some clearer understanding about what that is about.

Gosh, learning the circular breathing technique is so difficult, and it derails me from my original wish to go deeper with the guitar. I will let it go for now, and go back to focusing on the guitar again. It was pretty cool to experience both the djembe and the didjeridoo while on the peyote entheogen, but I feel I should go back to my original plan here. Also this ambivalence I have towards psychedelics is coming up again, so I think I should allow for some skeptical thoughts as well. That is more honest. Psychedelics are not some kind of magical pills to gives me superpowers, which sometimes I would have liked to believe. Sure they give me lots of inspiration and new perspectives, but I usually feel pretty drained and a bit like a shadow of myself for a while after a trip. Felt like it took me 3 weeks to really get fully back to myself after the ayahuasca ceremony, and now it has been 5 days since the peyote ceremony and I'm still very much in the after-effects of it in a way that doesn't feel fully landed and I feel quite drained. One reason why I have this after-effect that is a bit stressful could be that the trip kicks up so much psychological process that it takes a while to get all this landed again. Now the cool side of this is that I always wanted to write trip-reports, but never did, while I had my more intense psychedelic period, and now it is interesting to write on how these two psychedelics are interfering with my music-process. Since I had the urge to do psychedelics again, it was pretty cool to first do ayahuasca which is sometimes called "The Queen" and is said to have a lot of feminine qualites, while the Peyote is said to contain a lot of masculine qualities and is often referred to as "Grandfather Peyote." These two psychedelics are said to complement each other very well, and they both come from old and respected shamanistic traditions. Don't think I will do psychedelics again in quite a while because there is too much stuff that needs to get integrated and landed now, and to kick up a new and demanding process like that again in the near future, well, I will have to take deeply into consideration how much work it actually requires. As for the guitar, I will now learn a short little classical solo which is only half a page long called "Pastorale" by Joseph Küffner (1776-1856).

So the need for focusing more on music again, and writing this journal, was triggered by an ayahuasca ceremony I did 1 month ago. As mentioned in the first post joining this ayahuasca circle 8 years ago gave me the inspiration to start playing the guitar in the first place. I have not done any entheogen in 3 years, because I felt I needed a long break to integrate and process all the psychedelic experiences I've had had so far. So now it is pretty cool that first the ayahuasca ceremony I did 1 month ago gave me a lot of inspiration to play guitar again, and now the peyote ceremony (and this was a solo ceremony only by myself, the ayahuasca ceremony was with a big group and professional guides) really took my relationship with both the guitar, the didjeridoo and the djembe much, much deeper. So now my next goal will be to learn the circular breathing technique with the didjeridoo. What I've learned from my previous experiences with psychedelics is that it is very important to put the inspiration I get from them into action, ie to learn real life skills. It is sort of a job or a responsibility I get in order to integrate and process these experiences well. Also since I've opened up the doors to the world of the psychedelics again, I have to remember to take the necessary time in between each trip to really integrate and process these things well. For now I'm really satisfied with having experienced both the ayahuasca and the peyote again, and my main responsibility in life to integrate these experiences well will be to focus on doing my social work job well, meditate every day, and continue to improve these musical skills that I so much desire. I will go into more detail about how I break down the process of learning circular breathing as I go about that process.

Peyote ceremony Yesterday I had a psychedelic session with the Peyote entheogen. It was really amazing, and I spent a lot of time playing guitar and singing. But perhaps the biggest breakthrough was with the didjeridoo and the djembe. It was totally amazing to play the djembe on this trip, and even better it was to combine playing the djembe with the didjeridoo. I didn't know I could multitask like that, and it was really mind-blowing. Even though I still haven't cracked the code when it comes to circular breathing with the didjeridoo (in order to have one long continuous tone going), I still have a lot of other really cool tricks, and when I stop the tone because of my lungs being empty and to inhale more air, I do so in a rhythmic style, so that the stopping has a rhythm to it which makes the complete musical picture with the drumming into one continuous experience. However, I really do want to learn the circular breathing, because that would have really made me into a serious didjeridoo player and it is only a few steps away. I will investigate it further what it takes, and start to play more didjeridoo on a steady basis, while continuing to play the guitar on a daily basis as I have been doing for a while now. Also I will spend some good time to really reflect on and process this psychedelic experience, and what it meant to me and what I learned. It is one of the most powerful musical experiences I've ever had, and it felt like a deeper initiation into my own musicianship. So much gratitude. It is about time to take myself seriously with this interest. It is not just a random superficial interest I have, it is a very deep passion coming from the very core of my own being.