The first inner pathway is through psychedelic medicine which opens us to multiple dimensions beyond the one we are in now. It offers the experience of glimpsing our existence from a wider lens of perception creating a potential for mystical openness. Psychedelics offer the direct experience of numinosity through a non-ordinary state of consciousness. Utilizing psychedelic medicine is like entering into the dream realm only we are aware, awake, and more lucid in the experience.

This is not an altering of consciousness but instead an expansion and increasing of consciousness which opens us to a greater field of reality. We have only begun to scratch the surface of what is there for us to know and understand through psychedelic medicines. There are over 30 million psychedelic users in the United States.

The second inner pathway is through our dream dimension taking us to a powerful rich interior landscape of our being. Dreams are our inner narratives and stories inviting us to talk with central wisdom figures, engage with symbols, receive valuable guidance, understand the archetypal realm, and give us illumination for our life journey. We all dream.

We can discover the experience of dreamwork joining our present experience with our past from which we form a relationship with the wholeness of our life. The deeper living of our whole life includes transformative dream interpretation which we can learn. Living more mindfully aware and holistically. Seeing ourselves as a whole person living in a whole world-intimately interconnected. Dreams are a pathway into our “holistic” view of ourselves and our world.

The third inner pathway is through our experience with creating fresh rituals and ceremonies and opening ourselves to initiation into new life experiences. Rituals help us to make closure, relieve anxiety, or celebrate a happy occasion. Rituals bring comfort, an awareness of order, and an understanding of meaningful patterns. Rituals and ceremonies also allow us to enter the expanded experience of connection in the community. We enter a sense of what is a powerful unitive energy, omnipresent, here, and now, and connecting us all the time. We have all taken part in rituals during our lifetime where we felt something move collectively through everyone as one unifying experience during meditation, praying, drumming circle, communion service, wedding ceremonies, birthdays, music festivals, or medicine ceremonies. We can use rituals to commemorate and honor what we have learned during the psychedelic experiences.

In ritual, we can creatively engage in cleansing ceremonies for preparation and release from what comes as revelations and insights offered by our dreams or the medicine experiences. In our relationships, we can imaginatively enter healing rituals to put closure to toxic and unhealthy relationships from the past where we may have had poor boundaries. Through a variety of inspired rituals and ceremonies, we can make closure using meditative and prayer practices, ceremonial sage or smudging, and burying symbolic objects in the ground. Honoring our endings and new beginnings affirming our rites of passage.

Through ritual, we can initiate ourselves into new life beginnings with baptism in a river, in the ocean, or in a backyard pool. The Japanese Floating Lantern ceremony and the Diwali Festival of Lights are other examples. Releasing other natural objects down little streams. We can experience a more unified and fortified love relationship with rituals and ceremonies in the community. In partnerships we share rituals of unifying our deepest connection of intimacy with one another through marriages and holy unions, which celebrate using singing, dancing, taking vows, and playing music in sacred space. Rituals are a big and important part of our life experiences.

Any one of these inner pathways independently will move us to the experience of our transpersonal and transcendent realm and non-ordinary states. The three intertwined together are strongest for deepest healing and inner transformation. Just as a threefold cord can withstand a great deal more pressure than a single or double cord. We will tether ourselves together on the inside with the triune cord combining the integration of dreams, rituals, and psychedelic medicines. Woven together on our journey the three are mightier than anyone pathway taken alone.