One year from now, the first recognized shared sacred land in the world will be born. It will be shared by as many people, faiths, and indigenous cultures as care to support such an idea. The land will be a 180-mile pilgrimage trail located in western Montana. It will be the largest altar in the world dedicated to spiritual unity, peace, and our connection to Mother Earth and each other.
A pilgrimage trail holds the intention of connecting those who walk it to the faith represented by the trail. However, in the case of the Sacred Door Trail the intention is to connect the individual to their deepest self, a space where unity and peace reside, a space where there is no separation between the self and others and the self and the earth, where the inside and outside become one.
The hikers of the Sacred Door Trail will not only be carrying their own prayers but the prayers of the world on their shoulders. The idea for such a project came to me a year ago when I was hiking the Camino De Santiago trail in Northern Spain, the oldest pilgrimage trail in Europe. However, the ingredients for such an idea have been mixing below the surface of my consciousness for much longer than that.
My process has been like that of so many others during this time of great change in our world. I have come to realize that my individual experiences and internal processes represent a microcosm of what the entire world is going through on a collective level. We are shedding old forms of self in order to make room for a deeper and broader existence that allows for a new form of consciousness, one that will help propel humanity toward an ever-evolving relationship with oneness both within ourselves and within the world. The closer we come to oneness the closer we come to the universal consciousness, god consciousness, spirit, om, or whatever one wishes to call it. I believe those who are open to change will manifest these experiences for themselves sooner than the people who are not, but inevitably we will all be forced to face these changes from the inside out.
This evolution of consciousness is surfacing in people through many different kinds of experiences. For each person the details are different, but the overarching themes are the same — themes of death and resurrection, themes of battling personal, familial, and cultural rifts from within, themes of pursuing narrow paths in narrow realities that are rapidly crumbling. Yet, from the rubble, new paths are being born with new dreams and new aspirations that are no longer about the individual, but more about what the individual can do to contribute to this newly forming world. A world where Mother Earth reclaims our sacred reverence. A world where we hold love over fear, change over stability, vulnerability over control, forgiveness over revenge, peace over war, and unity over division.
Most of my life has been spent pursuing the dream of acting. It carried me from the mountains of Montana to the stages of New York City, Chicago and LA. However, two months before my 27th birthday, it became clear to me that the universe had other plans for me. During a ten day Vipassana sit in Yosemite, my inner world began to expand beyond my mind, the control booth of my life, into my heart, a place that was foreign to me.
After the sit in Yosemite, I returned to LA more connected to myself than ever before –and disconnected from the dream of acting. The outside world had seemingly stopped –films and projects were canceled, auditions were few, my phone stopped ringing. It was as if the universe had created a cocoon for me to go through this transformation without distraction.
During those few months, heavy emotional purges were common for me, collapsing to the floor in tears, heaves of fear and uncertainty shaking my soul. There was nothing I could do. Part of me just wanted to numb myself through any means possible but I did not. I felt it better to be with the process, completely feel it, honor it, and allow it to run its course. I would wake up at 4 am, meditate for an hour, then walk to the park near my home and sit under a big oak tree and pray. I was asking for guidance, a teacher of sorts, to appear and help me through this confusion.
In February, a few days before my 27th birthday, my phone rang and it was my girlfriend letting me know we had been invited to take part in an ayahuasca ceremony outside of LA. Ayahuasca is a vine that grows in the rainforests of South America. It has been used by South American indigenous cultures for thousands of years as a medicine for healing. Not only does it clean and heal the physical body of disease, but it also heals the dis-ease held in the emotional, mental, and spiritual bodies, preventing further illness from manifesting. She told me the ceremony would cost $150 dollars and I told her it sounded amazing, but I didn’t have the money. I hung up the phone and went outside to get the mail. As I was rifling through the bills, I found a statement from an old bank account I hadn’t used in years and forgotten about. The bank had closed my account and cut a check for the balance — $151.00.
I attended the ceremony and was blown away by the experience. The plant was communicating with me in a way that was teaching me how to handle the experience in life I was currently going through. I learned about the detriment of resistance to change. I learned to surrender and to trust the moment and not label it as good or bad. I learned that judgment separates us from the truth and disconnects us from our true nature and I learned the power of gratitude. Whenever I found myself in an uncomfortable space during the ceremonies, I would not resist it, but instead would open myself up to it with gratitude. Gratitude allowed me to process the moment and move beyond it without getting stuck in the fear. In the months to follow, I kept surrendering to the unknown, trusting it, and placing one foot in front of the other with gratitude. I made a friend with the darkness around me and trusted that it was in its own way guiding me towards the light.
My work with Ayahuasca continued. I followed it to Peru and worked with it in the jungle outside of Iquitos and in the mountains near the Sacred Valley. It opened doors that allowed me to heal not only myself, but also deep familial, generational and cultural wounds that resided in me and held me back on different levels. The self is not just composed of our own experiences, but also the experiences of the families, lineages and cultures that we hail from.
From Peru, I was offered a chance to work at a school in Switzerland for three months. While in Europe, I backpacked around the continent connecting with my ancestral roots. This led me through Scotland, Ireland, Holland and England. At the end of the trip, and inspired by Paulo Coelho’s book, The Pilgrimage, I decided to hike the Camino De Santiago. It was on that trail that the idea for the Sacred Door Trail came to me, and since returning to the states several months ago, it has become my path and my passion.
As war, greed, and environmental, political, and religious battles continue to divide us, degrading the human spirit, placing fear and division into the collective consciousness of humanity, the Sacred Door Trail seeks to imprint the power of spirit, unity and love into our collective consciousness. The trail is a celebration of our rich spiritual diversity as humans, but more importantly, it honors the spirit that unifies all things by turning the many into one –“E Pluribus Unum,” a reflection of the true dream of America and the world.
Think about it — the first recognized, shared sacred land the planet has ever known. The ramifications are limitless. Just as a butterfly’s wings can cause a hurricane so can one act of unity and love bring together an entire world. The Sacred Door Trail is an altar of hope, and there is nothing more powerful than hope. Through hope we find the strength to forgive. Through hope we find the strength to love. And through hope we find the strength to truly live.
The time is now. We are the ones we have been waiting for. May we walk together through the sacred door of the future into a world of peace. May this be our gift to ourselves. May this be our gift to our children. May this be our gift to the world.
For more on The Sacred Door Trail, please visit http://www.thesacreddoortrail.com/
To read Weston Pew’s blog, go to www.evolver.net/user/weston_pew
Image by Jule_Berlin, courtesy of Creative Commons license.
