Sending you a warm welcome from Bogota, Colombia. Discover below what I’m up to now + my most recent life journeys…
Recently I had a conversation with one of my Wolfpack brothers and someone that I consider as a mentor in my life, Troy Erstling, and he recommended me to relisten to this podcast episode on the Tim Ferriss Show with Derek Sivers.
Actually the first time we met in 2017, he had recommended me to listen to this episode and it had a big influence on my journey.
(By the way, if you are looking to expand your perspective of the world, his blog is an incredible resource for doing so)
Anyways, going back to Tim Ferriss’ interview with Derek Sivers, if you haven’t heard of these two people you will probably get a lot of insights from listening to them speak.
I don’t want to give away too much of the interview here.
The reason I’m bringing up the episode though is because they bring up a concept called a “now page.”
Oftentimes when you visit someone’s website or online profile there isn’t an up to date description of what they are doing right NOW, at this moment.
While listening to Tim Ferriss and Derek Sivers speak, I realized.. WAIT
It has been A WHILE since I’ve updated people about my 2019 journey, the projects I’m focusing on, and dreams I’m looking to manifest for the near future.
So I’ll take this opportunity to briefly recap the events from 2019 until the start of 2020 up to NOW.. Sooo much has happened in so little time, but it’s interesting because I believe time is relative and all that truly exists is this present moment.
It is a pleasure to present to you my NOW+ page, which includes my current situation and the context leading up to it.
Those that know me well, know that I’m really connected to Nature and that plant medicines such as ayahuasca have become a significant part of my life.
January of 2019 I had a life-changing ayahuasca ceremony where I was able to listen and hear the trees and Mother Earth. She was telling us all to WAKE UP.
The message was loud and clear. We needed to start to be the change instead of just talking about it.
I wrote a poem called “What if we lived like trees?”… which eventually was chosen as the best poem in a nature poetry contest that IN-Q, one of my favorite poets, ran on his Instagram page.
This ayahuasca experience was so powerful that it changed the trajectory of my journey completely.
Throughout the ceremony, I was hugging a tree and it also served as a giant antenna to communicate with the Amazon Rainforest.
I could hear the Amazon calling me to connect with her mystical lands and to help protect one of the most beautiful places on Earth.
I felt called to help indigenous communities take care of their land and to share their stories with the Western world in English.
At the time I was writing English learning articles and creating voice overs for an online company called RealLife English and living in Rio de Janeiro.
Deep down I realized that this wasn’t what I felt called to do and Rio wasn’t the place for me anymore.
After that ceremony, I started to explore other potential paths on my journey at the beginning of February that would connect me to the Amazon Rainforest.
I took a trip to Floripa, Brazil, which is a beautiful island city in the south of Brazil, and during that trip I discovered a magical conscious living community called Rosemary Dream.
I instantly fell in love with Rosemary’s jungle vibes, family of people dedicated to working on themselves, proximity to amazing beaches, hikes, rivers, and the sense of mystery that came with living in Floripa.
Shortly afterwards, I made the decision to leave Rio and move to Rosemary Dream to do a volunteer work exchange as a receptionist.
At the same time, I was still teaching English online and learning more about the digital nomad lifestyle.
While staying at Rosemary for 3 months, I met some of the most amazing people in my life. Each day was like a mini adventure.
I lived in a tent under a gazebo in the forest for the first 2 months! This was an unforgettable experience.
Also, a majority of the people that I met at Rosemary were practicing meditation, yoga, healthy cooking, exercising, swimming, exploring their inner child, expressing themselves, and really living life. I forgot to mention there was a big involvement with ayahuasca.
It was a really inspiring environment to be in to work on my own spiritual practices, especially since there were a lot of people that I could share my own experiences with ayahuasca with and connect with in person.
My time in Floripa was a major part of my integration process. Naturally, I found guides through the people that came to visit Rosemary.
These guides led me to improving my meditation practice and learning how to live a more holistic life.
Before Rosemary, I had been working on myself quite a bit, and the actual physical environment helped me accelerate my own spiritual growth process.
Plus, outside of Rosemary there were many natural wonders on the island of Floripa to explore and one of the most memorable areas was in the south of the island.
In the south of the island, I had also gone to 3 ayahuasca ceremonies led by a Brazilian that was taught by the Yawanawa indigenous community in Acre, Brazil with friends that I had met in the time spanning from the end of February to the start of June.
One of the ceremonies was so profound that I still completely remember what I saw, felt, and heard.
My spirit guides showed up and taught me the simple lessons of the Universe. They showed me the power of meditation and the breath.
I heard them whisper into my ear that night…
Sit, sit, sit
Breathe, breathe, breathe
Smile, smile, smile,
(then I would start laughing as my body lit up with emotions)
Be still, be still, be still
(they repeated this to me for what seemed to be an eternity)
In this sacred ceremonial space, I accessed a dimension that was beyond physical time and space. It was a place where all spirits and souls resided.
Accessing this transcendent state, made me truly realize that the present moment is all that exists.
My spirit guides all told me to not to worry about anything, and that everything is ok in the other dimensions despite what we see happening on Earth at the moment.
Ever since this experience with ayahuasca, I’ve really taken the time to appreciate my life more and more. I love myself, my family, and all of my friends so much and make sure to express my appreciation when I can.
Instead of trying to rush the process, meditation has taught me the beauty of patience and trusting that the Universe is unfolding how it’s supposed to.
By the time June arrived my path wasn’t directing me straight to the Amazon, but I was accepting a powerful teaching from the Universe.
The lesson was simple.. JUST BREATHE
Breathe and don’t worry about planning the future so much, so it’s been a mission for me to always remain present and practices such as meditation have really helped me.
After spending time in Floripa, it was clear that the work I needed to do on myself involved being physically present with my family and reconnecting with them so in the middle of June I decided to return to my hometown of Leesburg, Virginia.
At the same time I had connected online with a Shipibo ayahuasca center in the Peruvian Amazon called Ani Shinan. It was interesting to learn about the place, but I had no idea how it would tie into my own process.
June to the end of September I focused on understanding my generational traumas by living with my family, and my grandma helped me significantly in this process.
While back home we went on road trips together to visit our family members and in the car she would tell me all of the stories about my dad, my uncle, my aunt, my grandfather, and anyone else that would come up.
While spending time with family I also saw certain habits and behaviors repeatedly appear in my interactions.
My family has a problem with addiction, particularly food and alcohol. I believe we use it to fill a void that we have in our life, maybe resulting from a lack of intimacy.
We have a hard time forgiving and letting go of the past. We’re stuck in a story that doesn’t serve us in the present moment.
We use our work to cover up the emotions that we don’t want to handle. The answer to our problems is to work and we don’t allow space to process our emotions properly.
It was also evident that creating healthy boundaries was a tough lesson to learn, yet necessary. My grandma was treated poorly by my aunt for a long long period of time, yet she kept giving my aunt support without any limits.
Understanding them was so key to knowing myself on a deeper level. Now when some of these behaviors come up in myself it’s easier to identify where they are coming from, though I’m still a work in progress..
Besides exploring my family roots a bit more, I was also healing myself on a physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual level during this time by integrating all of the holistic health wisdom that I had uncovered in Floripa.
As well, I had used this time to improve my organization and communication skills. My English Fluency coaching program served as a container for me to improve myself professionally and test out different learning strategies with my students.
After spending the summer in the US, I felt a strong sense of clarity in my path that came from doing the real work that I had been avoiding.
It was a beautiful feeling to manifest the growth that I had experienced while traveling in this physical realm.
By the end of the summer, the same ayahuasca center that I had reached out to was interested in creating a collaboration where I would help them improve their marketing systems in exchange for participating in ceremonies with them in the Amazon Rainforest outside of Pucallpa, Peru.
In my mind that was a clear HELL YES!! So at the end of September I packed my bags and went back to South America.
This time it was clear that learning Spanish, building my holistic spiritual practices, growing professionally, and connecting with indigenous communities was a major intention of the new journey I was about to embark on.
Right before I returned to South America, one of my friends in New York recommended a book called the Celestine Prophecy. I don’t want to go too deep into it here, but it’s an insightful read for the spiritual travellers out there that I recommend reading before you head to Peru.
Anyways, I found cheap flights to Colombia so I decided to enter South America in Cali, Colombia. I ended up spending 5 days there dancing salsa in a place that’s called the salsa capital of the world, and afterwards I took a bus to Medellin.
I spent 5 days there and connected with friends that I had met on New Year’s Eve 2016 in Rio. Though certain neighborhoods like El Poblado in Medellin are super touristy, I enjoyed the overall vibe of the people and the mountains that surround the city.
My first ten days of October and in South America were spent in Colombia, then I went south to Lima, Peru for a brief layover before heading to Pucallpa, Peru.
When I arrived in Pucallpa, I was greeted by a fun, friendly indigenous man named Julio, which I learned was the general manager of the forest lands at Ani Shinan. I still remember the fresh smell of smoke from bonfires that graced the air the night I arrived.
I had a feeling that Pucallpa was a really powerful place for ayahuasca healing, even though I had never known about it before the summer.
The trip from the city to the jungle was an adventure alone. Originally when I arrived in the forest community of Ani Shinan, I had no idea how long I would stay.
I thought I would stay for a week, then ended up feeling called to do my first Teacher Plant Dieta with a plant called Marosa, which grows along the rivers of the rainforest, so I stayed for almost a month.
This was a transformational experience that physically helped me release a lot of stress that I was storing in my spine, mentally created a deeper sense of clarity in my personal vision, emotionally tapped me into a greater state of self love, and spiritually connected me with the Amazon Rainforest on a deeper level.
I don’t see myself as a shaman or doctor, but there was a clear vision in a ceremony where I was living in the jungle with the Shipibo and learning from their spiritual practices.
If you’re interested in hearing more about the wisdom and downloads that I received during my Marosa dieta, check out this blog post I published on the Ani Shinan site.
At the end of my dieta at Ani Shinan, energetically I felt better than ever. Recharged and ready to take on the world.
Honestly, it was tough to leave also because I had formed a strong connection with everyone working there, however I knew there was more to come on my own journey.
In the beginning of November, I planned my own personal vacation. It was nice to have time to unplug completely, and I traveled from Pucallpa to Cusco with a good friend that I had made during my time dieting Marosa in the jungle.
We went from Pucallpa to Lima to Paracas to Huachina to Arequipa and finally Cusco by bus. It was a wonderful adventure to experience with a close friend.
That was the first time I had travelled like that, and it had worked out nicely. There is so much natural beauty and history to explore in Peru.
In our time traveling around for 2 weeks together, we ate ceviche in Lima, drove dune buggies through the desert reserve of Paracas, swam in the freezing cold Pacific Ocean, watched many incredible sunsets, went sandboarding down giant sand dunes, met friends from all over the world, saw condors flying over giant canyons, tried exotic Peruvian food and drinks, learned a bit of Spanish, and explored the culture of the Incas in the Andes.
After that period of intense travelling, I was ready to settle down for a little bit and integrate what I had learned in the jungle.
Cusco was the perfect place for me to do so.
As soon as I arrived in Cusco, I found a holistic spiritual community called the Healing House to stay at.
At first I was planning to stay for a month, however the yoga classes, community potlucks, markets, sacred ruins, and vegetarian/vegan restaurants convinced me to stay 2 months.
During this time period, I started to officially work with Ani Shinan, the ayahuasca center that I did my dieta at, as well as putting together the initial steps of creating this blog which you are reading right now.
I loved Cusco because it offered the convenience and variety of city life while still being close to nature and powerful healing sites in the Sacred Valley such as Pisac and Urubamba.
Every week I would take morning hikes up the mountain and spend time with the rocks.
They taught me the wisdom that comes from just being. A lot of insights came from being in such a spiritually charged place.
They came in the form of dreams or while meditating in the silence.
I also had a lot of fun while living in the Cusco area, and made some incredible connections while attending Ecstatic Dance events, workshops, circles, yoga classes, and plant medicine ceremonies.
From these connections, I realized how the Wolf Spirit had entered my life.
One of my friends I made while in Cusco that is a meditation and yoga teacher is literally named Wolf.
The dogs would always follow me on my hikes in the mountains (which are domesticated wolves), and I spent time dating a magical holistic healer named Loba (female wolf) at the end of my time in Cusco.
During my time in Cusco, I was protected by the Wolf Spirit and I saw how this was the perfect name for the tribe that I had always been looking to cultivate in my life. THE WOLFPACK.
November and December living in Cusco were spent in deep thought, creative action, and in preparation for 2020.
I had planned to go back to Colombia on January 2nd, and spend 3 – 6 months travelling around the country and connecting with indigenous traditions of the land.
During this same time, I planned to finally release my blog on February 20th (2/20/2020).
The past 3 months have been a series of unexplainable, unexpected events and synchronicities (which I’ll write about later).
All which have deepened my faith and trust that in God, Spirit, the Universe, Source, Mother Earth, Nature, or whatever you call this higher power has a plan for me and all of us that I’m learning to surrender to.
Currently, I’m in Bogota, Colombia locked down in my apartment in the city with a deep longing to be immersed somewhere in the mountains or on an organic permaculture farm in nature.
It’s still taking me some time to process everything that has happened, but one fortunate thing that has come out of this global quarantine situation is that I’ve had more time to meditate and write.
These have been my medicines that are keeping me sane and healthy at the moment.
It’s funny because when this whole coronavirus situation went down on a global level, I was actually completely unplugged and spending time connecting with a Kogui Mamo named Mamo Senchina that lives outside of Bogota.
For those that don’t know, Mamos are the spiritual leaders from the Sierra Nevada of Santa Marta that spend their childhood living in the darkness and afterwards are taught to take care and protect Mother Earth for the rest of their lives.
The lessons I learned from talking to Mamo Senchina were so simple, yet profound.
My conversations with him were a reminder to take care of myself, take care of the Earth, listen to nature, express my gratitude, and slow down.
These same practical lessons I’ve been applying while not being able to leave my apartment as much as I would like.
Right now simplicity is a major part of my life and I feel healthier and happier than ever despite the challenge of living in the city, constrained to a tiny apartment building.
I don’t watch the news or mainstream media.
I stopped using Facebook and Instagram so much because most of it is garbage and ego inflation.
I connect with my friends and family more often on video or phone calls.
I’m cooking my own food and eating well.
I’m getting used to meditating for an hour at a time.
I’m connecting with plant spirits such as rapecito, coca leaves, and cacau.
I’m working on my internal systems for my blog and for my work with Ani Shinan.
I’m practicing Spanish by having conversations on WhatsApp and Zoom, and singing songs in Spanish.
I was already working online and will continue to work online for now.
I’m sleeping really well, going to bed early and waking up early.
I don’t feel rushed to do anything and I’m taking my time.
I’m dedicating more time to becoming a better writer.
I’m documenting my holistic practices and learnings.
This entire situation has helped me cultivate a better relationship with myself.
Learning wise here’s what I’m working on
Absorbing knowledge – From Paul Chek and Ram Dass specifically. I feel like these two people have a lot of wisdom that I could help share with the people that need it.
Meditation – I’m focusing on mastering the basics of Vipassana by just sitting for an hour and observing my breath
Writing – It’s all about scheduling time to write in the morning and committing to the time that I set out for myself.
Spanish – Practice the language by talking with Colombians and also singing medicine songs in Spanish
Work wise here are the ideas I’ve been developing. If you or anyone that you know would find my services useful or would like to collaborate on a project, feel free to reach out.
My contact info will be at the bottom of my NOW+ page.
English Fluency Coaching – I help intermediate to advanced level English students improve their confidence and speak English more naturally.
Ani Shinan – I’m focused on helping this beautiful ayahuasca center improve their internal systems such as their website, blog, and customer management systems for retreats in the future.
Living Soulfully – This is a new experiment that I’m running. Living Soulfully is my guiding motto or philosophy. I don’t believe in a perfect life, but I do believe a good life is lived fully from a place of connection with the HEART and SOUL.
Over the last 4 years I’ve been training my own habits and was able to manifest a lot of the short term dreams that I wrote down. I’ve been helping my mom and step dad improve their life holistically over the past 4 months and would like to extend this service to anyone that has a strong desire to work on themself and manifest their ideal lifestyle habits.
DaFloresta – Besides the online work, I’m looking forward to continuing to expand the collaborations that I have made with indigenous communities in a new project called DaFloresta that I have the pleasure to work on with Adam Newman, a friend that has played a huge role in my journey. He originally took me to my first ayahuasca ceremony in Rio 2 years ago.
I’m grateful for every single person that takes the time to read a bit of my journey from 2019 to now. I appreciate you, especially since I didn’t intend to write so extensively at first.
Instead of my NOW page, this will be my NOW+ page. I feel like the background gives you a bit more context to my current situation that I’m living.
If there is any part of this experience you’re interested in hearing more about, feel free to give me a HOWL at zach.barney@gmail.com or contact me personally on WhatsApp at +55 21 99000 8834.
HOWL OUT YOUR TRUTH WOLFPACK… AHOOOWWW