Shvat - Ending Trauma, For Now
I believe that psychedelics are reentering our culture at a time when they offer to teach us what we have largely forgotten and need to learn most. Encountering the natural world as ‘conscious,’ the power of trance states, the urgency of the sacred, healing in community, the ordeal, the embodiment of myth within ritual—these have been vital aspects of human civilization, largely denigrated or disposed of by moderns. They also are the ingredients for a very good Tu Bishvat seder.
Let’s start with our story: in the center of reality, there is the Supernal Tree—it is a tree of Life and Wisdom, and also of Death and Confusion. It is the Nervous System of the cosmos, sending shefa—flow— into each root, branch, leaf, and fruit—to some corresponding manifestation of itself in all the worlds. Its twisting roots pulsate with energy and information and love, a blood stream of divine consciousness, sending out messages of how everything can maintain balance and connection. Yet, that Tree, like any nervous system, is delicate, and our first ancestors, perhaps traumatized by their own originary existence, acted in some way which ruptured that connection, which damaged that Tree. Yes, perhaps it was a constitutive trauma—without their trespass, none of what we are currently feeling and seeing and craving and forgetting would even be here, but it is a trauma nonetheless. There is, at the center, something missing.
Our psychedelic sages both read our texts closely and also sensed this on many levels, and with all of their wisdom and agency, they devised a ritual to help repair that trauma to the Life Tree, and in turn ours. In this ritual, we do not reenact the first tragedy—we acknowledge that it happened but we don’t retraumatize. Instead, our embodied, cosmic trauma work relies on becoming intimately allied with the evolutionary wisdom of protecting themselves from harm—husks and peels, hard pits, invisible defenses only sensed on extremely subtle levels. In one of the clearest examples in our tradition of “As above, so below,” we pray over these fruits that our intentionality in eating them for this Divine repair, this catharsis, repatterns the trauma response from restricting abundance in the world. In this safe container, without the fear of rewounding, the ritual at once uses our bodies as the vehicles for cosmic transformation, and also heals us from the wounds we carry, from that first violation, and beyond.
In one of the first Tu Bishvat seder rituals to published, the Pri Eitz Hadar, they write “May it be Your will, YHVH our God and God of our ancestors, that through the sacred power of our eating fruit, which we are now eating and blessing, while reflecting on the secret of their supernal roots upon which they depend, their supernal sap will be aroused, so that shefa, favor, blessing, and bounty be bestowed upon them. May the angels appointed over them also be filled by the powerful shefa of their glory, may it return and cause them to grow a second time, from the beginning of the year and until its end, for bounty and blessing, for good life and peace.” The ritual is complete. The trauma is contained, for now.
Psychedelics, the plant-based variety, at least, can serve some similar function as the Tu Bishvat seder. These earth medicines can reawaken us to the preciousness and interconnectedness of all life, for all eternity, and, through the trance states they can occasion, in safe and trusting settings, we can potentially heal ourselves, our lineages, our connection to the Divine, by letting plants twist and root and decompose and stimulate our own traumatized nervous systems to repattern toward greater and greater flow.
Whether through psychoactive compounds or deeply intended ritual work, reenchanting spiritual life, all life, begins here.
Tu Bishvat sameach,
Z
