The Slow Answer
Two years ago, I went to plant medicine with one intention:
I want to be abundant. I want to feel my own self-worth.
At the time, I was in survival.
I had come to the U.S. after years in tech in Kenya, leading, building, managing, and found myself starting over. The fastest way to make money was caregiving. So I worked. Long shifts. Double shifts. Nights. Always chasing the next dollar.
I could not stop telling myself that one more shift, one more certification, one more month of grinding would finally produce the security I was working for.
It did not. It was not enough.
My body finally refused. I do not remember the exact moment. I just remember being in bed and not wanting to go anywhere. I remember a stretch of days where I could not pick up a shift if I had wanted to. My body said no in a way my mind could not override.
That was the beginning.
In that forced stillness, I started asking different questions.
Why am I not receiving enough, even though I have put in so much work?
Why does effort not equal arrival?
Why am I still not enough?
I did what I always do when I am faced with questions I cannot answer. I went looking. I looked at my chart and saw all my planets in my second house, the house of values and self-worth. And in other circles, the words of the day were quantum jumping, manifestation, and abundance. The teaching seemed to be: you have to feel abundant in order to become abundant.
I thought: if I am given a chance to talk to God, to a higher power, to whatever is bigger than me, what am I going to ask for? I am going to ask for the thing underneath the money. The one that has been blocking everything. So I can finally manifest, finally arrive, finally have what I have been working for.
When I heard about plant medicine, I went with a clear ask: show me what is blocking me so I can finally be enough. I want abundance. I want to be worthy.
I thought the answer was something I could find.
The mind that brought me to medicine was still a mind trying to control how the answer would arrive.
The medicine knew that, of course. And it answered me sideways.
The Huachuma showed me the masks I was wearing. When I persisted in wanting to know more, I found myself in a forest with a black hole.
I asked: what caused this? Who caused it? Show me the original wound. I was waiting for a memory. A face. A scene from childhood I could finally process and release.
Huachuma kept showing me the black hole. I did not dare enter it. I later realized it was the void.
I asked again. I asked harder. I thought I needed more medicine. I thought the void was a place I had to push through to get to the answer underneath.
The blank space was the answer. And that is how my trip ended.
It took me weeks to understand what the medicine had given me. The wound is not personal. The wound is the void all humans carry. The fear of abandonment, rejection, scarcity, separation — these are not unique to me, not caused by one specific event, not the fault of one specific person.
They are the inheritance of being human.
There is no one to blame.
There is no single cause to fix.
Only something to face.
The Bufo experience was different.
Bufo is short. Twenty minutes, maybe less. There is no time to think. The medicine bypasses everything: the ego, the warrior, the protector, the scanning, the analyzing, and you are simply delivered into a state.
I do not remember the entry. I remember being there.
I was in a place full of flowers. A woman I somehow knew. And a state I had never experienced before. I felt her joy. I became joyful. There was no separation between the joy and me. The joy was my body. The joy was my body’s home state. Everything else I had been carrying, survival, certification anxiety, the weight of the shifts, the shame and lostness of being a regional technology officer turned house girl, none of it existed. It had never existed. The flowers were enough. The light was enough. I was enough simply by being in the field.
When I came back, the people holding the ceremony placed their hands on my body.
What happened next is the part I will never forget.
I felt the universe. I felt held from every direction. I felt nourished. I felt supported. I felt the matrix of the world, the entire field, around me, doing the holding for me. The hands of the people in the ceremony were the bridge. They were what brought the cosmic feeling into my body.
For the first time in my life, there was no scanning.
No waiting for the cost.
Just receiving.
I cried. I laughed. I thanked them. I told them I loved them. I meant every word.
That night, I wrote in my journal: I was the woman in the flower field. I am joy at my core.
I left believing that.
And for two years, I misunderstood it.
Whenever life got heavy, I tried to go back there. I would close my eyes and reach for the memory. The flowers. The feeling. The state.
Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it didn’t.
But something was off.
I wasn’t living it.
I was reaching for it.
Meanwhile, I was still in the same loop. Still chasing, but this time it was my own creations. Still proving. Still trying to build something that would finally make me feel enough.
I had turned the experience into something to extract from.
Not something to be.
After the retreat, in that first wave of urgency, I built a lot of things.
I bought a laptop. I built AxisGPT, my AI shadow work tool. I wrote a book and published it. I tried to market it. I tried to make it all happen immediately, because the survival self was still in charge and was now wearing a spiritual costume. I had a vision. I had medicine. Now I have to manifest it. Now. Quickly.
The book did not sell as well as I wanted. The marketing did not work the way I wanted.
What survived, after the marketing push fell apart, was Substack.
I liked writing the articles. The articles were the slowest, gentlest, least-survival-coded thing I had been doing. I told myself: I will keep writing. I cannot manage the rest, but I can write one essay at a time when something moves me.
So I started writing once a month, sometimes less. I went back to caregiving, but this time I chose differently. I left nursing homes completely. I picked the caregiving jobs that did not make me feel less than. The hours were fewer. The income was less. And the income was enough.
That was the first time I had ever experienced enough without it being a deprivation.
Enough to pay the bills. Enough to write. Enough to do my shadow work. Enough to attend to the slow integration, the medicine had been waiting to be delivered.
There was a person whose social media platform I respected, who had originally rejected my book months earlier. I had been crushed by the rejection at the time. I had pursued the connection in a way that, looking back, was the survival self trying to manufacture proof of worth.
Eventually, I stopped pursuing. Not because I gave up on them. Because I gave up on the manufacturing. I just kept writing the articles. I kept showing up as myself, even in his comment section.
They started reading. Quietly. Without me knowing. They began responding to my essays. Then they invited me onto their social media live to discuss the perfectionism essay I had written.
I went on. I was nervous. And then something happened during the live.
I was not performing knowledge. I was not citing books I had read. I was not trying to prove I belonged in the conversation.
I was talking about my experiences. My medicine journeys. My shadow work. The slow integration after the collapse. The way the body teaches you what the mind cannot understand. I was just being a Pisces who had been through some things and had a few words to offer about it.
The conversation landed. The host’s audience leaned in. The host themselves, the one who had originally rejected the book, said: “ This is the work. This is what your writing has been doing. I see it now.
I came off that live, and I sat in my car, and something quiet happened in my chest.
This is the moment I had envisioned during the medicine journey. Not the bliss state. Not the joy state. This. Being received as myself. Being met without having to prove anything.
The next day, I went to Tulip Town.
I went because I wanted to recreate the image Bufo had shown me. The woman in the flower field. I had been carrying the image for two years, and I wanted to step into it physically. A photograph of myself in a field of flowers, so I could tap into the moment the way I had been doing internally.
I see now what I was doing. Still in extraction mode. Let me put my body in the location, and the joy will return.
I went anyway. I took my son. I wore a turquoise tunic and white capris. I stood between rows of red tulips with the mountain in the distance, Mount Baker on its clear day, and I let someone take a picture.
But standing there, nothing dramatic happened.
No bliss. No peak state.
What I felt instead was quiet. The mountain in the distance. The rows of tulips. My son is near me. My body in the spring sun. Here. Just here. Not extracting. Not performing the joy memory. Not trying to summon a state.
Just standing in a field of flowers as a woman who has been doing the work, with a body that is tired and well, with a child whose hand was reaching for hers.
When I looked at the photograph later, I noticed something I had not expected.
The woman in the photograph looked like the woman in the Bufo field.
She was not wearing a flowing white dress. She was wearing turquoise and white from a clearance rack. She was not in soft golden light. She was in the bright Pacific Northwest spring sun. She was not surrounded by sunflowers. She was surrounded by rows of cultivated red and yellow tulips planted in straight lines, with a snow-capped mountain behind her.
She was the same woman.
The medicine had not shown me a fantasy version of myself. It had shown me a state. A state that was now, two years later, available to me — not by extraction, not by summoning, not by performing, but by the slow patient work of letting the conditioning loosen until who I am underneath could simply walk into a tulip field with her son and be there.
It was not until last night, in conversation, that the deeper teaching finally landed.
I said: I always thought the medicine showed me that I am joy at my core. And then I paused. I said, slowly: but I think it was showing me something else now. I think it was showing me my intention. I had asked to have abundance and to feel worthy. Maybe the medicine showed me what those things actually feel like in the body.
The person I was talking with said, “Yes.” The medicine did not give you abundance. The medicine gave you the answer to what abundance actually is.
Full body chills. Up the spine, across the scalp, down the arms.
I started laughing. I laughed because, of course, it took two years. The body holds the knowing patiently until the mind is ready.
And then I yawned. The yawn is my body’s signature signal of release. We were holding this. We no longer need to hold it.
Abundance is not what you receive.
It is your capacity to receive.
Self-worth is not something you earn.
It is the absence of resistance to what is already arriving.
Nothing big had changed.
But everything was different.
I could feel when I was receiving. A conversation. A moment of being seen. Work that did not drain me. Money that came without force. My son cuddled up to me as I put him to bed. A reader writing to say your essay shifted something for me. A stranger signing up and trusting me to take them on a retreat to Mount Kenya. A person who rejected my book earlier, inviting me to their platform.
It had always been there.
I just could not perceive it before.
The medicine did not give me abundance.
It showed me what it feels like to receive.
Everything since has been learning how to stay open to that.
Slowly. In ordinary life.
The work is not over.
I still feel the pull to chase.
I still tighten sometimes.
I still forget.
But I do not interpret those moments the same way anymore.
They are not proof that I am failing.
They are signals. And the response is no longer:
do more, fix it, find the answer.
It is:
pause.
The shame I used to carry about my work, my path, my life has been slowly fading. Not because I have achieved more. Because I have stopped pretending.
You don’t escape shame by becoming more.
You escape it by becoming true.
The woman in the flower field was never somewhere else.
She was a state I could not hold yet.
Now, sometimes, I can.
Not always.
But enough.
That is enough.
🤍
When Eva is not caring for others, she is visiting flower gardens and tulip fields — when her son can allow it. Otherwise, it is Monster truck car shows for them.
She writes about the worth wound, shadow work, and the slow work of becoming, one essay at a time, when something moves her.
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