Hey fellas! If we’re getting vulnerable here, i’m going all in Brothers. I wasn't sure which category to post this under so i'm posting under general discussion, hope that's ok Mike. Apologies if I was a bit cryptic with my share during the call, I was wanting to honour the container/time. That was also day 5 of a fast, 20 km’s of hiking and the morning after a corker of a medicine journey. And I don’t share any of this to make myself sound grandiose, or to pedestal myself in any way. I share it to help illuminate the depth and potency of the prayer that I went into my quest with to help me root out & overcome a lifelong affliction i’ve battled, that I will lay out in my story that is to follow. I didn’t need to hop on the call and many may have advised against given where I was at, but for me, it felt synchronistic and aligned and i’m happy I did. Yesterday I arrived back from a solo spirit quest up Okanagan Mountain and it was the most profound experience of my life. I left tidal waves of grief, sorrow and despair on that mountain. It feels vital to share my story with you, as a way to help integrate the experience and also because I know there's powerful medicine in it. I'll start with a bit about my childhood. I grew up in a really religious family with staunch Christian values. As I got older, I rejected it because I could sense all the distortion, the dogma, the fear narrative, the top down model but I could sense the thread of Truth at its foundation. In elementary school I got bullied, beat up and abused in various ways because I was a bright light, I was joyful and exuberant. I won't go into the specifics of the traumas here, not because i'm not open to share but because I want to keep this as concise as possible. In summary though I developed coping patterns, specifically self abandonment through self silencing. In Grade 9 I turned to cannabis as a way to dissociate and numb the pain I felt deep down for these wounds. This exacerbated things as I got labeled as a stoner and it begun a downward spiral of self collapse through self conscious negative though patterns, lack of confidence, inadequacy, social anxiety etc. I got made fun of for most of high school for how I talked, slow and monotonous, “stoner”, “ perma-fried”, “eeore”… I was also what others might label a “cool kid” due to the group I hung with, but that wasn’t really how I felt under all the numbness. There was deep shame and loneliness.