Today marks day 100 since I started my no-excuses meditation practice which led to this newsletter. And today I am also sharing with you my recent and most profound experience in life, yet.
I find myself in a big dome with 20 people sitting in a circle. We are all dressed in white and are calmly awaiting the storm. We came together from all over Europe to attend the sixth seminar together with our teacher and guide of two years, Dr. Nader Butto.
Nader is one of the most fascinating people I had the honour of journeying with and probably one of the most underappreciated ones, yet. He is extremely humble but I am certain he will make big waves in the not-too-distant future. Our group has been studying with him what he calls Unified Integrative Medicine for the past two years. It is much more than just about medicine and health. He has developed a unified theory for everything. And so our course initially started out with how the universe came to be, from a scientific spiritual perspective.
Science and spirituality are two sides of the same coin. Humanity has known that in the past but in our current paradigm, these are two opposing worlds. Nader is one of a handful of people who are bringing these worlds together again pushing the frontier of our understanding of what it means to be human. Not the belief-driven pseudo science that we have witnessed over the past two years of lockdowns but real science: The search for Truth.
Nader is a medical doctor, a practising cardiologist in Israel, a researcher, a spiritual seeker and has written and published dozens of peer-reviewed papers, various books on unified integrative medicine and treated and cured countless people including former Israeli prime minister Shimon Peres. He is also a singer and musician. Really the archetype of a polymath. He is famous and revered in Israel. The waiting list to get an appointment is more than a year. We are incredibly lucky to have such an amazing guide and teacher for a whole week just with us. (Here’s an article about his work.)
For the past two years, we have been studying how the universe came to be, the seven universal laws, the human soul, how it is connected to the body and how it leads to a healthy and a diseased body, the purpose of life and how to live a fulfilling one. If all of this sounds too crazy, you are right, it is - from a conventional perspective. Yet, that is what he’s working on, to change the paradigm and bring us back to the truth of how we humans function and thrive.
It’s been an incredibly enlightening journey over those two years but the most exciting part is just about to start. This sixth module is called Spiritual Realm and Psychiatric Disturbances (see picture below) and it is nothing like the other levels. We will be drinking Ayahuasca for four consecutive nights with Nader himself guiding the ceremonies. He has been drinking Ayahuasca for 17 years as a tool for healing, growing and awakening and together with his medical, spiritual and scientific understanding I do not know anybody who could be a better guide.
I have been drinking Aya 10ish times before, the first time in 2016 and most recently in December 2021 where I stripped naked in the ceremony - something I normally don't do. I talked about that journey and my learnings here. The past 24 hours we spent in a classroom where Nader taught us in a 133 slide deck everything there is to know about Aya and how to best navigate the journey. Many things I hear for the first time will allow me to go places that I did not know one could get to by just drinking a cup of Aya. No other shaman, though Nader doesn’t consider himself one, has taught me anything close to what we learnt and will experience over those days. Nader is playing in a league of his own.
I am taking a deep breath and getting ready for what is about to happen. If it’s like any of my trips before, it will be a long, intense night full of struggles and purging.
Tomorrow, you will hear about how my first night unfolded.
Next: 37/ ayahuasca - jumping over the edge
Here’s Nader and me at the end of the retreat:
36/ drinking ayahuasca, again