Reader,
Sacred Valley, Peru - In the middle of the night some day in July 2022
I'm awake again. The altitude does that - wakes you up right when the mountain spirits are having their conversations. But tonight it's not just the thin air keeping me conscious.
It's the memory of sitting in that sterile office six months ago, fluorescent lights buzzing overhead, while a man in a white coat looked at my lab results and delivered what he believed was an absolute truth:
"eGFR of 32. Your kidneys are failing, and they don't regenerate. This is irreversible."
The authority in his voice was designed to end the conversation.
But something deeper than fear was stirring in my chest. Not the defiant anger that says "fuck the system" just to rebel. Something quieter. More ancient. The part of me that remembers we survived for millennia without lab coats and prescriptions.
The part that knows the difference between medical data and embodied truth.
What he didn't know was that I was already planning to disappear.
Not from responsibility. Not from reality. From the noise. From the collective fear that masquerades as wisdom. From the system that needs me sick to stay profitable.
My family called it irresponsible. "You need more specialists. More tests. More monitoring." Each conversation was them pouring their terror into my nervous system, asking me to carry their helplessness as proof of love.
I chose different medicine.
Two months in a jungle tambo in Iquitos. An ayahuasca center where the only sounds were birds, water, and the ancient songs of curanderos who never learned to doubt the body's wisdom. Then, another three months travelling through the country - beach, desert, old city, valley, mountain, capital.
No job stress vibrating through my kidneys. No city pollution. No constant cortisol drip from traffic and deadlines and the low-grade warfare of modern life.
Just movement. Natural medicine. Food that grew from soil instead of laboratories. And hours - whole days - of doing absolutely nothing but listening to what my body was trying to tell me underneath all the noise.
The doctors said no extraneous activity. During that trip in Peru, after my time in the jungle, I did three multi-day wilderness expeditions anyway.
Each trek deeper on those lands felt like coming home to myself. My body responding not with the fragility they'd convinced me I had, but with strength I'd forgotten I possessed.
Walking through jungle paths in humid air. Sleeping in hammocks under a canopy that doesn't give a shit about my lab values. Being around healers who understand healing as remembering, not managing.
Six months later, I returned to the same sterile office.
eGFR: 38.
Six points higher. The same kidneys that "don't regenerate" had somehow remembered how to heal themselves.
The doctor never answered that. Muttered something about "not ideal to trek up mountains in your condition". But I saw it in his eyes - the recognition that his absolute truth wasn't so absolute after all.
Here's what The Law of One, a big ally in my personal and spiritual development, calls Service to Self versus Service to Others:
The medical system - and in many ways, our society - operates on Service to Self - it needs you dependent, monitored, managed. Your healing threatens their authority. Your self-reliance cuts into their profits.
But the natural system - which is the essential nature of you and I - operates on Service to Others - it gives you exactly what you need to remember who you are underneath all the fear they've layered onto you.
Your body knows how to heal. It's been doing it since before humans learned to pathologize every symptom.
But healing requires something our culture has trained us to fear: The willingness to trust your inner knowing over external authority. The courage to step away from the noise and listen to what your body is actually saying.
This isn't anti-medicine. This is pro-discernment. Some conditions need intervention. But many - maybe most - need space. Need silence. Need the radical act of removing yourself from the system that profits from your sickness.
The Co-ed Wilderness Vigil isn't therapy. It's remembering.
March 15-21, Sacred Valley. Seven days of removing every distraction between you and your inner knowing. No phones. No experts. No one telling you what's possible or impossible for your body.
Just you, the mountains, and the same ancient technology of solitude that healed me in the Amazon - the space where your body remembers how to listen to itself.
Three days alone in the wilderness. Fasting. Listening. Remembering that your body is not a machine that breaks down, but a self-healing miracle that's been convinced it's broken.
I'm not promising medical miracles. I'm promising something more radical:
The chance to trust yourself again. To hear your body's wisdom underneath the fear they've taught you to carry. To remember that healing happens not in hospitals, but in the space between you and everything you've been told is true.
Eight spots. $2,199. Payment plans available because I know what it's like to choose between rent and remembering who you are.
Your kidneys might be fine. Your liver might be perfect. But something in you is starving for the medicine that can't be prescribed:
The radical act of trusting your own body over their authority. The courage to step away from the noise and listen to what's true.
The mountains are calling. Your body is waiting.
Are you ready to remember what they don't want you to know?
Details and application: radicaleros.com/vigil
Ish
🍵 x 🐉
