Expanding the size of your energetic vessel
I returned home to Sydney believing the intensity of the last 10 weeks had finally come to an end.
After navigating unexpected venue changes, personal challenges, facilitating deep medicine work in the middle of geopolitical uncertainty like leading a post-psychedelic integration session from a bomb shelter while rockets were intercepted overhead, and holding space for people moving through profound transformations…
I quietly thought to myself,
“Surely now I can exhale.”
Instead, as my body starts to fight off a cold from the shock of winter,
I came home to the news that my cousin had taken her own life.
Grief has a strange and sudden way of arriving.
It doesn’t ask whether you’re rested.
It doesn’t check your calendar.
It simply enters the room,
And for a brief moment, I caught myself asking a question I’ve heard so many clients ask over the years:
“Enough is enough. How much more?”
And so it reminded me of a teaching.
The Size of Your Vessel
In the mystical teachings of Kabbalah, there is a beautiful principle of Kli…
how can we expand one’s own vessel to receive infinite abundance, wisdom and light?
Naturally, what you are able to receive is limited only by the capacity of the vessel that holds it.
What if life’s greatest challenges aren’t punishments?
What if the breaking down of your vessel is so that it can actually expand?
“Can You Show Me More Gently?”
A few weeks ago, while sitting with the Yopo medicine (the grandfather of Ayahuasca), I found myself in one of the most challenging journeys I’ve ever experienced for a long time.
The medicine took me by surprise and brought me into an immense field of suffering…not just my own, but the collective suffering of all the universes.
At one point I asked the spirit of Yopo,
“Can you please show me in a gentler way?”
Yopo laughed at me, shrunk me, then threw me into a jail cell into a corner.
The nausea amplified a thousand fold and the visions spun faster, louder and brighter to the point I thought I literally was going to explode.
The message of the medicine journey was telling me that my request to slow down was from my ego wanting to stay in the familiar.
But growth could only happen in the discomfort of the unknown.
My vessel being asked to become larger than what I previously before thought was possible.
The Train Isn’t Slowing Down
Lately, life has felt less like a peaceful walk through the forest…
and more like learning to dance on the back of a dragon already airborne.
The instinct is to ask the dragon to slow down.
But, the reality is, that from an astrological and energy perspective, with Saturn, Neptune and Pluto all in retrograde,
the carpet is being ripped from under us, begging us to confront what doesn’t work anymore.
Because this high speed train is only going to keep accelerating, what if what is being asked of us can be reframed?
Perhaps the invitation is to become so centered that you learn to move with grace while everything is exploding around you.
Capacity Is a Spiritual Practice
Taoism reminds us that water doesn’t overcome the rock by becoming harder.
It overcomes it by becoming soft enought to move around it.
In the Tibetan Buddhist practice of Tonglen, there is an emphasis away from the saying, “Please take this away.”
Instead, the practitioner says, “Give me more.”
Not because suffering is desirable.
But because every challenge becomes another opportunity to increase the size of the heart that can hold it
This teaching has never made more sense to me than it does now.
The Real Question
I have been hearing people asking the wrong question.
“When will life slow down? because I need a break from it all…”
But…the real question is…
“Who is Life molding you to become?”
Because if I look honestly at the last few months…
Every challenge I encountered was initiating me to hold more.
And every difficult moment was asking the same question:
Can the heart become larger than this moment?
Spiritual Maturity
Spiritual maturity isn’t becoming someone who no longer feels grief.
It isn’t becoming someone who never gets overwhelmed.
It isn’t becoming someone who has somehow transcended being human.
What if spiritual maturity is becoming someone whose heart has grown so spacious…
that sorrow and joy can sit beside one another without either one cancelling the other out.
So, my invitation for you this week is that instead of asking,
“Why is this happening to me?”
perhaps ask yourself:
What are these circumstances asking me to become?
The universe isn’t conspiring to ruin you…
it’s quietly making you bigger to be the expression of joy and love that you were always meant to be.
So much love,
Johnson
P.S. If this resonates,
1) I’d love to invite you to join me in the Blue Mountains Shamanic Medicine Retreat (apply here) this Labour Day long weekend.
I don’t see retreat as an escape from life.
I see it as a place where we intentionally increase our capacity…to feel more deeply, love more fully, and meet life’s unpredictability with greater presence.
Not because life becomes easier afterwards.
But because you become larger than the challenges you once believed would break you.
2) Also, you are invited to my workshop next Sunday if you’re around.
Shamanic Breathwork Journey: A Mythic Conversation With Your Soul
🗓 Sunday 16 August
🕜 1:30–4:30 pm
📍 Rare Studios, Surry Hills
Read more about the workshop and Reserve your place here
3) Saturday 22 August (12 – 1 pm). Sign up here to join the free zoom event to find out more information about the July 7-15, 2027 Peru Shamanic Expansion Program.
Hope to see you there.