Gris Alves is a distinguished Mindfulness Teacher, Integrated Recovery and Healing Guide, Earth-Based Ceremonialist, and Trauma-Informed Yoga Teacher, certified in Gabor Mate's Compassionate Inquiry Therapy Process. She works with ancestral plant medicines helping people remember their way home to an open heart and cultivate self love.
As a recovering “addict”; for 15 years I followed the road of sobriety and meditation. I had lived a long 10 years of numbing the pain of childhood trauma, grief, societal rebellion and just not finding a place where I really could feel that I belonged 100%.
At 25 years old I decided to get sober because I wanted to continue my music career without all the issues of not getting my shit together and continuing to fail to create the art I felt in my body.
.
As the months went by in a circle of 12 step meetings that I found myself at, I realized that all I had to do was keep showing up to the meetings and decide to stop drinking alcohol.
Many years of this journey and meditation helped me create the music band I desired, record an album, travel from Los Angeles CA to Mexico City and back touring and continue to move on with my life 'sober', but the time came when the 12 step program ran out of juice and it became obvious (at least to me) that it was a bit religious and it did not want to evolve.
I entered years of questioning what they call in the “program” defects of character and their “asking” some outside source to remove or take them away. I had learned by then that only I am 100% responsible for my life, my emotions, my healing and my inner connection to 'myself'. This only led me to leave the meetings I attended for years and create circles where people could sit around the fire and weave words of emotions, felt sense experiences and their journey of the mind in the present moment.
In my continued search for healing I returned to my Mexica roots and searched for ancestral teachings like the Temazcalli (Sweat Lodge, circle council, the wisdom of the elders and of course, psychedelics. I had by now studied a Masters in Thanatology (The study of Death) in a context of offering folk a beautiful and dignified ending as they were nearing death, or to assist in accompanying anyone’s grief of whatever loss could be happening in their life.
As soon as I completed the two year Thanatology studies, my mother suffered a debilitating stroke and I had to care for her until she left her body almost 18 months later. During the process of her disease, I was losing my mind which was, regardless of all the work I had done, still full of fear, love, resentment and much anger regarding the entire situation. As a parentified child, I had left my home at a young age in order to not deal with my parent’s issues. Save for Sunday family dinners and some holidays, I was in constant hustle go mode taking care of my own career and family – so this new responsibility forced me to turn right back around to the original wound I held in my heart as a child, the relationship with my mom.
I practiced yoga daily and had been for the past 15 years, I meditated, went to therapy and was still so angry at life for having me in this situation and the responsibility of watching my mother decay before my eyes. The pain was brutal in every way possible. I traveled to Northern California to participate in a week long therapeutic retreat called the Hoffman Process* for a week and on my return, even though the Hoffman Process helped, I agreed to travel with one of my mentors and participate in my first Ayahusca Journey to see if I could remove the resentment and be able to love myself and my mom unconditionally –. before she died
The entire point of these words is that all the years of meetings, circles, therapy, hoffman process, yoga, mindfulness etc – finally made sense as the medicine entered my veins during the Ayahuasca Ceremony.
After hours of struggling and facing death and many other fears, a most powerful wave of love and clarity came over me just a like a sweet grandmother would embrace you when you are scared. (Not that I ever had one of those grandmothers, mine were more like Mommy Dearest but you get the point).
I had held off from working with Master Plants because of the messages of the sober meetings – but once I realized that this too was a powerful road to connecting to my heart I completely changed my mind and understood the ancestral wisdom that our earth has available to us.
Addiction to anything is basically a symptom of a deeper disconnection to our true self and to our bodies.
These plants are connectors.
There is only so much yoga and meditation that one can do to feel well, and this might be good enough for many. But the thing is that IF you are truly desiring liberation from suffering, psychedelics can be a quantum leap in understanding. Understanding what? All of it. The interconnectedness of our world, the love that we desire and yet don’t believe that we are worthy of receiving, the ability to 'feel' every emotion that you have not allowed yourself to feel and be ok with it, the ability to remember that you 'are' love period.
A few months after my mom died, I sat in ceremony with Teonanacatl (Magic Mushrooms) and cried for 6 hours straight what I had not cried in my entire life. All the grief bubbled up and I could not stop it from overflowing. There was ugly crying, weeping, sobbing, all of it. All of it embraced me in a love and compassion for myself that I had never felt before. I slept for 24 hours after this experience and then felt a lightness in my body that I had never felt before.
These mushrooms are grief helpers, they organize the nervous system, they help rewire the brain, and most of all: they seal inside of you any work that you might have been doing ie: therapy, etc. They help it all make sense, and they provide the energy and possibility to keep on going with the practices that help ground and center ourselves.
There is a lot of data and research out there regarding the effects of psilocybin on the brain, and I am grateful for it since it will help reach the masses in a way that perhaps earth tenders or native teachers might not, but the reality is that most of our ancestors at one point or another have used plants, cactus, mushrooms and other natural remedies to heal the spirit. This is not a new thing, we are just remembering. My teachers have led me to see for myself, that as I honor the earth, treat these master teachers with respect and stay connected to my heart, I can live in reciprocity with them. It is a window to a better, softer, more compassionate world.
Read more from Gris Alves
Gris Alves, Shamanic Practitioner and Trauma Therapist
Gris Alves is a distinguished Mindfulness Teacher, Integrated Recovery and Healing Guide, Earth-Based Ceremonialist, and Trauma-Informed Yoga Teacher, certified in Gabor Mate's Compassionate Inquiry Therapy Process.
She helps people process grief, compassionate and conscious end of life transitions, recover from addictions, and reconnect to their Truth with ancestral earth-based traditions such as the Temazcal (Sweat Lodge). Gris teaches how to prepare for, integrate and process healing psychedelic journeys.
