Sayulita: The Wild Heart of the Jungle

Through the Portal of Chaos: A Journey of Relational Transformation

Have you ever been to carnival land? You know—the place where magic, glitter, lights, clowns, and chaos are sandwiched between fun and fear. As children, the circus feels fantastical, drawing us in with its over-exaggeration of play and the grandiosity of Candyman Lane. It reminds us that something vibrantly alive pulses beneath it all—within it, within us.

Yet, to feel the rush, you must take the ride that flips you upside down, spinning you around and around. Jumping from one stimulation to the next, riding the high-low train. Overconsumption becomes inevitable, leaving many sick with gluttony. Carnival land is like stepping into the pages of a fairytale—*enter the woods if you dare.*

And Sayulita is exactly this—a living fairytale. A vortex of chaos and beauty. It will either evolve your soul or spit you out comfortably numb, leaving you shaking your head and asking: *What just happened?*

You are invited to play here.

Some skirt the edges and run out as fast as they entered. Some find delight in being voyeurs, watching the carnal consumption through a metaphorical pane of glass—desiring what others revel in but fearing being consumed by those very forces. Some remain oblivious to the unraveling around them, blind to life itself.

Some arrive full force, headfirst, consuming everything in their path—only to be left bloated on empty calories. Some enter unprepared, caught in a rip tide, tossed and spit out barely alive. Some come for a week and stay for a month, six months, years—called by Sayulita.

And then there are the seers, knowers, healers—those who are pulled into the madness to work their magic, transmuting the energy between chaos and stillness.

And there are those who belong here. Born here. Rooted here. Who survive here.

To live in Sayulita and remain above the mania—fueled by the Western culture of consumption, tourism, and money—you must be a brave and strong motherfucker of a human being. Tourism is another form of colonization. Without it, there would be no carnival land in Sayulita.

Sayulita is a powerful portal for rapid transformation—through expansion or destruction. It will either elevate your consciousness or trap you in your own inner hell.

Like Alice tumbling into Wonderland or Dorothy dancing down the Yellow Brick Road, the moonlit frolic has a dark underbelly. To rise high, we must fall. Expansion. Contraction.

As did Inanna in her descent—stripped, torn, naked, and raw—crawling through the underworld of her psyche, only to rise, reborn. We cannot escape the darkness.

Few find their way out. But those who do hold palpable power.

Chaos is the energy of potentiality.

And so, what follows is another personal tale of healing attachment wounds and past patterns—by consciously entering the Sayulita ‘jungle.’

The Meeting

If you are open, you will meet many different characters in carnival land. I knew I would. Was I prepared for what unfolded in such a short period of time? Not really. But can we ever be fully prepared for a medicine journey?

Over the past few years, I have committed to living a ceremonial life—to walking my life as a medicine journey. This means that every day is an opportunity to be graced by the divine, to shed another layer of programs and patterns embedded in the fabric of my heart and mind, to be freed. I consciously choose to discover the sacred in both the mundane and the profane—not just on the yoga mat or within a medicine retreat, but in the tension that exists between the quiet of the day-to-day and the heat of the dance floor at 4 a.m., mezcal burning my throat.

To live this way is to surrender. To trust. To practice the art of engaging with what is—without resistance. When tension rises in my body, my heart, my mind, I remind myself: I have no control. And I let go. I soften. I open to the experience. Over time, I have come to understand that there is purpose in both the pain and the pleasure.

So I am not surprised that I was slammed in the heart.

As if some cosmic hand reached down, tore through my ribcage, and massaged my heart with forceful precision.

Relational challenges and conflicts are connected to our primary attachment patterns, to the inner parts of us that have lived too long in exile. These inner children—the ones screaming to be let out of their safety cages, or begging for someone to unlock the door to the dungeon. They are dying to be known. To be set free.

I wasn’t in pursuit of romance. I still wasn’t. I was in a transitional space after a thirteen-year partnership, standing on uncertain ground, rebuilding from the inside out. But we do not control what unfolds on our path.

Sometimes all it takes is a particular gaze—a locking of the eyes from across a space.

I felt it.

I did not turn toward it, not at first. Instead, I let myself feel the penetrative glare. Something about the pull unsettled me. Perhaps my soul already knew what was coming—another initiation.

It was the music that finally drew me in.

There is something incredible about live music, about the way it pulses into the streets—raw and alive. I often wonder what would have happened had I not stepped toward that magnetic smile.

"Hi, I want to know you."

Simple words. A vortex opened.

Play. Passion. Music.

The days and nights blurred together like one long spoken-word performance, my soul spilling out effortlessly in conversation. And still, I do not know why I felt such a need to be known.

At times, no words. Only presence.

Something was unfolding—a familiar sense of beingness met with rest. That kind of resting where mind, heart, and body find deep stillness. A quiet so complete it dissolves the weight of the world.

I was breathing in the delight—
as I was being delighted in.

Delight

If I were a painter, I would paint the story of delight.

For an eternal moment, there was a gorgeous dance of delight. The entire universe opened in my heart. I could see a psychedelic flower blooming in the center of my chest, opening with the morning sun. Fuchsia. Lush, layered petals—like a peony in full summer expression.

Children are meant to be delighted in. To be celebrated. To be seen. To be provided for, so they know they are welcome here. Humans need to know they belong. It is primal, woven into our DNA—a survival drive just as essential as food, shelter, and water. We seek safety not just in avoiding danger but in resting into relational safety—into the arms of connection. We are a socially engaged species. We thrive relationally. And we are deeply wounded relationally. Hence why our deepest struggles are always relational.

Our primary environment codes our nervous system, shaping whether we feel safe enough to open in attachment—to another, to life itself. But because most humans never received secure attachment as a foundational relational base, we learned to perform for love. We adapted. We bent ourselves into shapes that would please the world. We disconnected from True North, from the authentic self, in a desperate attempt to secure our place. To feel cherished. To know we are worthy of existing.

We are seeking to rest in a community of connection. But the horrors of colonization have devastated this primary instinct—this innate way of belonging. Indigenous cultures, built on relational attachment and interdependence, have been decimated by the Western mind-virus. To conquer, Dominant Culture had to sever human relationships—forcing us to attune our attachment needs to the State, to money, to consumption, to the illusion of happiness, to the belief that the Earth is inanimate and that humans are supreme.

We bought into this false reality, generation after generation, because fear and trauma conditioned us to comply.

So how does all of this—our collective relational disconnection—play out in the smallest moments of human drama and pain?

We are relational beings. Period.
Without connection, we die—physically, psychically, or soulfully.

We are here, in these embodied, earth-based, human meat-suits, to be relational. To experience Life through our bodies, not just our minds. To feel more, not less. To awaken through relationship. To remember that we thrive together.

And we work out our deepest relational wounds by being in relationship.

Truly, we are a living Shakespearean play projected onto the dance floor—the playground of life. Once we recognize that relationships are our fastest path to evolution, every encounter becomes an invitation to wake up. To break patterns. To heal. To share in our delight for one another.

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The Experience of Being Delighted In

I didn’t realize how starved I was to be delighted in—
To be seen as the most delicious being alive.

The kind of delight I am speaking about is not carnal hunger. It is the feeling of being fully seen and celebrated—not for what I do, but for who I am. To exist freely and be cherished for it.

"Parents need to delight in their children," my friend told me. "Their eyes need to light up when they see them. Not because of their behavior, but because they exist. Love them into existence. Invite them to exist in their presence."

We know when we are being delighted in through the eyes.
A playful smile moves through them. Their gaze says:

"Go ahead, be you. And we will celebrate this."
"We want you to be you."
"Go dance. Go play. Go create. We see you. You belong."
"We are here, and we are not leaving you."

This is what it means to be delighted in by love.

And for a moment, I felt this. I was loved into existence.

And in the eternal present, where there is no mind, no story, no past, no future—
Love is all there is.

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The Ache of Disconnection

Without this level of connection, we feel lost. Panicked. Lonely. Afraid. Uncertain. Insecure. We pursue someone—anyone—who might pull us out of this state, who might fill the void within.

But the void is not about another person. It is an echo chamber of all our fractured, fragmented parts—the ones severed from us through turbulent relationships, heartbreaks, traumas.

Delight calls those parts home.

To be seen. To be fed.

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Drinking from the Well

When I allowed myself to fully receive this delight, my chest lit on fire.
It burned hot. I could not contain the tears as they fell into my lap.

And all my inner parts came up to drink from the well.

Like starved children, they gathered, cupping their hands, desperate for water.
And the bucket was full.

They drank deeply, as if finally tasting the fountain of Life.

It takes immense conscious awareness to not attach this moment to the person who held the key. To not create a new wound—another story of longing, another tether to someone outside of myself.

Because delight itself is what set those parts free.

Delight is the medicine.

It frees the soul—to play, to laugh, to adventure, to dance, to create, to reach for the stars.

And there was plenty of this that followed.

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The Fire & The Risk

But I knew this was not pure. It was shadowed—by patterns of addiction and wounds.

This made opening to this person and these moments risky.

And yet, I entered the fire anyway.

I saw the opportunity to break old patterns—together. We mirrored one another. We named the wounds. We spoke them out loud.

We danced at the edge of destructive patterns—patterns that could cause deep pain.

I entered with full awareness.

And yet, awareness does not protect you from the sting.

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The Only Way Forward

I promised myself—That no matter what comes, I will keep walking through life with an open heart.

It fucking hurts.

Everything in me wants to hide, to shut out, to reject, to close this living heart.

But I have learned—if you move pain like water through the portal of the heart, it shifts.

Tears and the heart are cleansing agents.

Together, they help us survive horrors.

There is no other way to remain open and alive on this planet—
We must feel more, not less. But we cannot do it alone.

We need each other—to help us move through it all.

Like riding the labors of life.

The Fall

I awoke to Guns N’ Roses screaming in my head—Welcome to the Jungle. I don’t think I’ve ever blasted metal at 7 a.m., but there I was, headset on, nodding in agreement:

"Welcome to the jungle, we got fun and games. We got everything you want... Whatever you may need... Watch it bring you to your knees, knees."

And I had been brought to my knees.

As fast as I had been drawn in, I was spit out like a bitter root. How is it that we can adore someone as if they are the most beautiful creature alive, only to erase them—like they, and the experience, never existed—within 24 hours? I know the answer to this question. Yet, experiencing the push-pull of a relational pendulum is still so jarring.

And as it should be. The attachment system is wired for coherence, for the security of connection. A rupture in this delicate dance—where we long to merge but must remain individuated—sets off internal alarms.

Few of us have ever truly learned the art of relational repair.

We mistake silence for resolution, distance for healing. But true repair doesn’t happen when the defenses simply stop—it happens when the heart breaks open instead of closing. When repair is real, it is felt. And when it is absent, something inside us stays fractured, unsteady.

I should have known. I should have seen it coming. The initial pull should have been my warning that I was about to set a pendulum in motion.

But as much as the mind tries to predict the future to mitigate pain, mine was fully in the present, unattached to stories about what was to come. I let myself be carried by the moment. Or maybe I was just ignorant. Regardless, the pendulum swung. And now, I was on the ride.

And while the relationship itself was brief in linear time, the depth of connection had nothing to do with duration—nor was it a result of a sexual exchange. There was passion between us, an undeniable attraction, but we both made the conscious choice to keep sex off the table. Some connections carve deep imprints in the soul within days, while others remain surface-level even after years. This was not about time or physical intimacy; it was about the intensity of presence, the rawness of what was exchanged. And then, just as suddenly as it had opened, the connection collapsed. The energy was gone. The depth dissolved. The person remained, but what once existed between us did not. I could not help but feel the fullness of this loss.

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Nourishment or Illusion?

I truly believed we were being nourished by soul food. It turns out, it was mostly empty calories. Relationships can’t be sustained on empty calories—they may be easy to consume, but they lack lasting energy. The ‘just right’ balance that nourishes the soul, that sustains connection and allows us to rest in attachment, takes time to reveal itself.

Too sweet, and you become inflamed. Too bitter, and you grow irritable. Too hot, and you get burned. Too cold, and you freeze. Too stale, and you stagnate. Too salty, and you bloat.

I shouldn’t be surprised that this new connection lacked the ingredients to truly nourish and enrich—not yet, at least. In all new relationships, we hope to find these qualities, but sometimes, they’re just an illusion.

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The Starving Pursuit

I felt like an animal being pursued—hunted, pounced on, consumed, and then discarded. They were momentarily satiated, but never truly sustained.

I know this pattern well. The starving pursuit drive. The hunger at the root of addiction.

I have lived in this state, where attachments are depersonalized, and relationships turn into inanimate drugs. The desperate grasping, the thrill of pursuit, the collapse after the high. There were warning signs. And yet, there was also another side—genuine conversations filled with depth and honesty.

We all have attachment patterns that get in the way of true connection. When those patterns take over, we revert to the familiar past. Wounded parts emerge, and protectors step in. The minute we are about to lose control over the identity we’ve clung to, our defenses rush in—shutting down, stonewalling, gaslighting, hiding, posturing, imploding, exploding.

I am reminded of something a friend once told me:

"The reason why it's important to realize that nobody meant to hurt you per se is because then you can heart-break open instead of heart-break closed."

Thank you, friend. Those are medicine words.

And yet, as I sat in my grief, I recognized something deeper. I wasn’t just feeling the pain of feeling suddenly discarded. I was remembering all the times I had withdrawn my energy from others—friends, lovers, partners. How I had fled from their pain, from conflict, from attachment itself. I had survived by killing them in my psyche—the ultimate rejection.

And now, I was receiving a karmic slap.

I felt deep remorse for all the times I had tossed people away like rotten food. And now, I felt like I had been tossed in the garbage myself, left to rot.

But I could also see from an eagle’s perspective. And I knew I had the power to pull myself out.

To take care of this part.
To brush her off, bathe her, clothe her, feed her.
To love her back into being.

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The Castle Walls

There was a time in my life when I was mean—not because I was cruel, but because I was terrified of human connection. As a young person, I was a bully. I pushed people away. I controlled my relationships so I could feel safe. I used people. Tossed them around without considering the impact. I didn’t know how to be loved, how to be seen, how to receive. So I never let people into my inner castle.

The door stayed locked.

And if I ever cracked it open, I made sure I was in control. At the first sign of attachment, of real connection, I slammed it shut, locked it, and never looked back.

It has been a long journey home to my Self.

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The Purification of Shame

The valley of shame is profoundly painful. You cannot rise out of darkness without purification. And that purification requires a psychic purge.

All those plant medicine journeys—purging shame, transforming shame into love. Fucking hard. I hated myself. I hated this part of me. I wanted her to die, to be locked away forever. I wanted to cut her out, be rid of her.

But the journey home—the real journey—is about bringing all parts of ourselves along for the ride. No part gets left behind.

I had to love this part. I had to see her, forgive her.

Through this process, I came to understand remorse. I came to understand that healing anything is possible—if you are willing to feel it all and let grief blow you wide open.

It takes courage to face these parts of ourselves. Some of us have caused great harm from our deeply wounded and fragmented aspects. We cannot heal that kind of disgust in isolation. We need ceremony. We need community. To heal shame, we must allow ourselves to be seen and loved, even in our darkest moments. We must bring these parts into the light to be purified through the cosmic heart.

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The Choice

I see what is unfolding here. But this is not my story to write.

What is my story is how I take care of my heart.
How I pull my energy back.
How I stand in the pain of energetic rejection, knowing I have done nothing wrong.
How I remain a clear mirror.

There is a fine line between integration and process, between true healing and getting caught in another human drama story that keeps the wheel of samsara spinning.

I choose evolution.
I choose to break free.
To use the tension between pain and pleasure to up-level.

My prayer is that we evolve together.
But that part—I cannot control.

The Closing

She was blown open.
The eagle and the condor were inside her,
Just as the prophecy had foretold.
The sky stretched clear and blue,
The earth a magnetic force, pulling her into balance.
A sacred marriage of opposites danced through her DNA,
And in that dance, she was delighted in—
Just for being.

The mother and the father
Convened in the heart,
Their matter was love.
The language unspoken was love.
The felt sense was love.
She was love—
And loved.

~ Friend.

In some way, I expected to be turned inside out.
But, as with any ordeal, you cannot predict or control how or when you will be forced to bow down, and to humbly acknowledge that you are on this ride—
This wild, unpredictable ride of life.

You either find your wings, or you lose your tether.

This isn’t my first rodeo, thank the Gods.
At twenty, I’m not sure I would have made it out alive.

I came to Mexico with intention:
First, to expand and heal old patterns.
Second, to seek my path.
Third, to open my heart and truly live.

I was hopeful I would find my people, my community.
Mexico would either kick me out or pull me in.

I think it tried to kick me out.

But I am standing—
Strong and steady in the chaos, declaring:

I am here. I am staying. Thank you, Sayulita.