Blow Up Your Life: The Wild Art of Wanting More

By Áine Rock

Becoming the Medicine

There are moments in life when talk therapy, journaling, and even breathwork fail to reach the deepest places within us. When the stories we’ve told about our pain no longer hold the charge, but the body still carries the imprint. For me, that was when the plants began to call.

Plant medicine entered my life not as an escape, but as a re- turn. A reunion with something ancient that my soul already knew. Indigenous cultures work with plants as teachers, to work the way only nature can—without judgment, without hurry, and without pretending that I could think my way to wholeness.

The plants didn’t just show me visions, they showed me truths. They worked through my body, the way somatic work does, dissolving the walls I had built around my grief and desire. They showed me where I was still holding, gripping, controlling. They stripped away the layers of who I thought I was—the good mother, the good wife, the spiritual woman—until only presence remained.

Somatic therapy brought me into my body and plant medicine brought me into communion with myself and the natural world. It prepared me for the deeper work of eros and pleasure that would follow.

It is not for everyone, and it is not a shortcut. Medicine meets you where you are. Sometimes that means bliss; often it’s facing fear, letting go of illusions, and the death of false identities and the stories that no longer serve. And in that death, something new can be born.

This chapter is about that rebirth—about listening to the Spirit through sacred plants, Earth’s whispers, and the song of the ancestors. It covers the conversation between body and spirit that re- minds us we are nature remembering itself. We are the medicine.

THE CALL OF THE MEDICINE

In early spring, a friend and mentor I had admired for years called to invite me to her retreat in Mexico. We had spoken often about her work—healing the maternal line, reclaiming the feminine body, and reparenting the self—but this time the invitation landed differently. It was the middle of a gray California spring and my own unraveling whispered, Go.

On paper, my life still looked whole. But inside, I was fracturing. My marriage had grown quiet, a house echoing with logistics and silence. We slept in separate rooms, took turns with the kids, performed civility while everything collapsed under the weight of what we wouldn’t say. There were still moments of normalcy—dinner, bills, carpools—but it was as though we were co-managing the ruins of what used to be our life.

Something—someone—had opened a current of desire in me that I could no longer turn away from. For the first time in decades, I was inside desire rather than managing it, a thread of connection that pulsed through my phone like an electric current. Erotic, charged, emotional. The kind of intimacy that reminded me what aliveness felt like. The kind that also tore me open with guilt.

I was living in two worlds. The one I knew, safe and structured but slowly suffocating, and the other that glimmered with possibility. The ache of what I was becoming made it almost impossible to stay, yet terrifying to leave. When Gertrude’s email arrived, it felt like oxygen.

For months, I had been quietly reading, listening, and hearing stories of women meeting Sacred Plant Medicine in ceremony, and finding what the modern world had forgotten: Communion, not consumption. Healing that piece begins in the body and reverberates through the soul.

I didn’t know it yet, but I was standing on the edge of the big- gest initiation of my life. I had already been microdosing psilocybin and had been quietly waiting for an opportunity to do a bigger dose. So, as I packed my bag, I tucked the capsules in with my supplements. I didn’t tell anyone that I was bringing them with me. I only knew that something in me was ready to be undone. I could no longer survive my in-between life.

The retreat itself was small and intimate, hosted in her oceanside home in Mexico. The land held its own quiet authority, long linked to ancient myths of goddess women who guided the sun, symbols of feminine power, fertility, and protection. She invited us to share our intentions, about what we desired more of in our lives. We were strangers, most of us, women arriving from different lives and seasons, but sitting together in a circle, something shifted. There is a particular nourishment that happens when women gather in this way, when intimacy is created through shared vulnerability and presence.

By the end of that first evening, it was clear we were no longer strangers. We were woven together by shared meals, shared silence, and the quiet bravery of naming what was alive.

We spent the next few days journeying through the land, our stories, assumptions, and new perspectives. On the first night, we did a Temascal, a traditional Mexican sweat lodge, in a heated, small clay dome. The medicine woman invited us to enter the space without clothes. We accepted her invitation, and as the fire burned hot, and we sat with our discomfort, she called us to shed the layers of shame and judgment that had kept us from our feminine, our sexuality, our Goddess-given desire. I had been carrying my own quiet storm—desire and betrayal still bound in guilt—and the timing of this release was perfect.

When the retreat ended, I had an extra day before heading home. I asked Gertrude if I could dose psilocybin on her property. I wanted her blessing to honor the weekend, her, and her space. She agreed without hesitation. My new retreat sister Maggie, twenty- five, luminous, and wise beyond her years, offered to stay with me.

We had bonded quickly and I was grateful she would be with me.

In the morning, I woke early and walked down the dirt road to buy fresh limes from a fruit truck. Back in the open-air kitchen, the ocean glimmering beyond the patio, I prepared my medicine for the journey: six capsules emptied into lime juice, a little honey, a touch of warm water. I drank it quickly and ran down to sit by the edge of the ocean and wait.
At first, everything was pure wonder. The sky dissolved into sacred geometry, the rocks became slow-moving turtles, and every sound felt like a pulse from the universe itself. But when a woman walked by with a barking dog, the world turned sharp. The energy was too much. I needed to move back up to the retreat studio, a high-ceilinged temple of light and crystals.

For the next five hours, I moved between shadow and sun, between surrender and resistance. I rolled on the floor, cried, shook, and vomited old stories of unworthiness, guilt, self-sufficiency, the endless belief that I had to do it all alone. My two sisters sat nearby, tending me like midwives.

When I apologized for being too needy, they smiled and said, “You are safe. You are loved.”

Gertrude’s question pierced through me: “What story is this, the one that says you have to do it alone?”

It was the story of my life.

As she played the crystal bowls, their sound moved through me like medicine. I had texted my therapist that morning, somehow believing I could still make our session. In the middle of my ceremony, I asked Gertrude to connect us. Moments later, there was Sherri, my therapist, glowing on a tiny Zoom screen, held up by my sister’s trembling hands.

“I get to have this,” I kept saying, my voice shaking.

“Yes, love,” Sherri said. “You get to have this. Your desire is life-affirming for all of us.”

The words landed with initiation. I stomped, wept, and felt centuries of caregiving and martyrdom rise to the surface—the mother, the daughter, the wife, the woman who carried everyone else’s needs before her own. I cried for her and released her.

As the waves of the mushrooms intensified, I found myself whispering, “I chose this medicine and this medicine chose me.”

I kept reminding myself that I was safe and had permission to be there. I felt myself taking up more space as the moments passed, with these two women by my side.

By late afternoon, the retreat space was glowing, sunlight slant- ing through the skylight shaped like a cervix, half shadow and half golden light. I rocked between the two, metaphorically birthing myself from darkness into light. When the waves of the mushrooms finally calmed, I could feel the ground beneath me, solid and new. By sunset, the mushrooms had worn off. I sat by the pool inte- grating the day with my wholeness. We talked about how each of my breakthroughs had rippled through them. What moved through me didn’t stop with me. I could feel it touching the women who were holding me, changing all of us in small, unmistakable ways. Maggie looked at me, eyes wide with reverence. “You kept say- ing, ‘I chose this medicine, and this medicine chose me.’ There’s so much you didn’t get to choose before. But this time, you did.” That truth pulsed through me like electricity. There had been so many things in my life I hadn’t chosen—a fractured childhood, the weight of responsibility, the years of silence—but this, this I chose.

And I began to see, that the choice was always mine.

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