Shamanic Time Travel
This article by Rob Snarskis was first published in the Psychedelic Press journal, issue XXXVI. You can subscribe to future print issues here.
There is great sadness in losing our relationship with imagination. We move from an ability to create worlds beyond the fabric of time, to regarding our imagination as childish. Yet, every day we engage our minds and bodies in a constant flow of ruminations—some positive, but mostly negative, thought-cycles—reflections that dictate our emotional experiences.
We’ve been trained out of using this superpower as one of our greatest tools for healing, time-travel, manifestation and connection with organic and non-organic reality. It happens so young for most of us. The speed to grow-up eclipses an opportunity to build a rich curiosity throughout our formative years and into adulthood. Without loving kindness toward this piece of our soul, we lose touch with our ability to create healthy dimensions around and inside of us.
A few years ago, I attended a group shamanic drum journey run by a couple who would eventually become close mentors and guides within the deep soul work that has transpired over the last few months for me. After experiencing so much in these last few years, I’m arriving at a culmination of learning. It feels as if I’m completing one hero’s journey and returning home. And yet, as this part of my soul returns, this new circuitry seems to already be preparing for my next journey with the insight and medicine I’ve gathered along the way. A shedding of old skin to be reborn.
My time-travel experience below comes on the heels of my first heroic dose of plant medicine, a 5-gram dried Psilocybe cubensis Mushroom, cordially named Stuie. In the weeks post-trip, I’ve had profound integration sessions to process the experience, and more importantly, developed tools to connect our waking consciousness with the dream/imagination realm; allowing myself to more consistently bridge one world into the other and vice versa. Similar to a tree, we may only regularly see its form above ground without thinking about the vast dimensions below. By being more in tune with the subterranean, I’ve allowed this spiritual energy to flow more fluidly into my waking life.
During this psilocybin experience, I was granted access to new visuals and perspectives that would change my life forever. I saw how an endless field of pure energy has always existed, and how our individual imaginations have harnessed this power to create breathtaking worlds and profound experiences. I saw the spinning vortex of time and how our souls have spent countless incarnations learning through lives on different planets, by becoming different species and experiencing parts of this galaxy, this universe, and beyond.
I saw how and why our planet was created, by transforming pure energy into the emotion love, which resides as its core frequency of creation. Planet Earth was an intention, an idea, shared by many souls of the past that was a new way for our collective consciousness to experience the divine. This planet is a special destination for souls to come through, built on this energy of love, to experience the ability to change organic matter into a solo and shared reality rooted in emotional intent and connection with everyone, everything around us. Souls wait in line to come here. Species from other planets arrive in awe at what we get to experience, hoping one day to experience the same.
As a by-product of our energetic/emotional alchemy, our individual energy fields are in a constant state of flux. This isn’t just limited to our day-to-day experience. Our genetic makeup, encoded in our DNA, carries lifetimes of positive emotional evolution and also a multitude of emotional trauma. We have a responsibility to work through building emotional circuitry, allowing our higher-selves’ vocation to be realized on its quest to live authentically in each lifetime. It is this realization that helps unlock how we can heal our past and harness the power of the future to walk forward in connection with our essence that stretches across time.
Essence, higher-self, center-point, intuition, soul. Call it what you may. This part of us is unchanging. It is our true north, a resting place. By tapping into this source-energy, we can travel across time. It’s like an expressway. Each off-ramp is a moment in time that has already happened or will happen. By connecting to that expressway, we have free movement to our past incarnations based on our intention to do so. This idea would have sounded crazy to me a few months or a few years ago. However, don’t we do this every day already? Don’t we viscerally think about the past and have regrets or memories that still chemically trigger us? Don’t we dream of futures and worry ourselves into tears or try to protect ourselves from danger?
It’s just as possible to shift our intention and go to these conscious or subconscious memories and forgive, empower and heal with a gentle heart. It’s just as possible to create intention and receive guidance and medicine from our future self. It’s here where we start to see how all of this work becomes cycles within cycles of opportunity.
Most recently, I’ve discovered the ability to go backward and forward in time to connect with different versions, avatars through which my soul has and will live. I realize now how my future self was intervening with me during my past and that my future self would of course be doing this work in the future and connecting with me presently to heal and guide myself across time. For the first time in this life, I feel as if I’m arriving home. I’m no longer looking outside of myself for healing. No fathers or mothers, siblings, friends or colleagues have the ability to understand my unique healing path. It’s irresponsible to put that power in someone else’s hands and have expectations of healing.
This is a superpower. This is something I found with plant medicine and guides, but my hope is to show others how this can be done without any assistance, other than a little bit of uninterrupted time with yourself and the intention to do so.