Cannabis in Spiritual Practice

Hi there, I'm K-Town, and on this edition of Mysterious Radio. I'm your host K-Town, and tonight my special guest is author Will Johnson, and he's here to discuss his book is called Cannabis in Spiritual Practice, The Ecstasy of Shiva and the Calm of Buddha. And this book is available on Amazon and Kindle and paperback. In this book, Will provides instructions for using marijuana for spiritual practices of spontaneous movement, ecstasy dance, sitting meditation, and gazing meditation, allowing you to open up your body's energies more fully and getting closer to the divine or your higher self. And I'll start off by asking Will how he got involved in meditation practices. yeah okay well i'm someone who got involved uh in meditation practices fairly early in my early 20s i also started really getting into awakening my body uh in those years as well and somehow the two seemed to connect and seemed to get launched on this path that I eventually started writing about because it seemed clear to me that most spiritual practices traditionally focus on what we conventionally call mind, but look upon body as some kind of obstacle. And I was experiencing it was just the opposite, that you awaken the body, you bring it to life. Most of us don't feel very much, but on every part of the body down to the smallest cell, there are these minute little pinprick blips of sensation, and we can awaken that. So body becomes this unified field of feeling presence. So when that kind of thing goes on, that becomes a doorway to some of these deeper, deeper, and altogether natural conditions of human beings we have access to if we give ourselves permission to go there. So in a sense, I just kept writing about that. Now it is also true for me, in addition to being a Buddhist teacher and working in the Buddhist world, I also, as a young guy, cannabis was God's medicine for me at the time. And it just would be untruthful for me to say anything but that. It was very, very important for me when it came into my life. helped me get in touch with lots of things about myself that I saw that perhaps I was covering over, resisting or not owning or acknowledging. I've also been a musician playing improvisational music, so it was also an ally in that. And over the years, I found that there were certain practices, not all of them, and basically the Buddhist practices don't particularly work all that well with cannabis. And I talk about that in the book. But there are these other practices more from the Shiva tradition that cannabis could almost be seen as an integral component of the practice. And so in addition to teaching in the Buddhist world, where when I teach those retreats, everybody follows the precepts. The last one is no intoxicants, no mind-altering substances at all. And I do that in the context of those teachings and practices because it works. But when I'm at home on my own doing some of these body awakening practices outside of the buddhist sitting uh cannabis works for me it works for me with uh spontaneous movement awakening the energies of the body and you know i had long conversations actually with my two sons uh my boys are 30 and 37 about this and finally what it came down to i said you know guys even though i have this in a sense reputation within the Buddhist world and get invited into the Buddhist world that's very much about purification and I love it. It would probably be cowardly of me not to write this book. I've written lots of books, Ketel, and mostly about the role of the body in Buddhist practice and about the Sufi poet Rumi. But this is the first book openly I said it's time that people need to know that cannabis, if it works for you, can be used for spiritual opening and awakening. So that's how the book came about. Okay, very good. All right, so I'm interested in what you just said about Buddhists, and there's not supposed to be any use of mind alternates. So would you consider cannabis a mind alternate? Oh, definitely. So how do you find it's okay to use that? Yeah, well, that's where things get very interesting. So as a Buddhist teacher, when I teach in the Buddhist world, the nature of Buddhist practices are largely you create an object to focus your attention on. Often it's the breath moving in and out of the body. Perhaps it's watching the mind. Perhaps it's moving your awareness through the body, paying attention to sensations in the body because you can awaken them just by paying attention to them. But there's generally a focus, an object of focus that you pay attention to. But what happens when you're sitting there in upright meditation posture for long hours, even days that retreat, the mind instantly goes off. It's very difficult to maintain this focus. The mind goes off in thought, and that's how we live our lives. That is the quality of consciousness that passes as normal. In the world at large, we're often lost in thought. And when we're lost in thought, we lose our focus on whatever that object is. So we focus, we lose the focus, we refocus. So it's a constant focusing and recalibrating. and that kind of very specific mental focusing uh cannabis doesn't work very well for that because cannabis is more about awakening the feeling presence of the body and as it awakens there's this organic current that starts uh getting a life of its own and with cannabis The practice is more about just letting go to the current, not focusing and refocusing. But, you know, I don't see using cannabis in the Buddhist world for those traditional meditations. But I don't have any problem with any of my students. My whole deal as a teacher, I want everybody to take responsibility for themselves. I have a lot of students in the Buddhist world that cannabis doesn't work for them. and they don't want anything to do with it. That is the totally appropriate decision for them. At every retreat I teach, though, I always get at least one or two students that come up and tug me on the sleeve and say, Mr. Johnson, could I talk to you? And they just pour their heart out how cannabis works for them in their life and even seems to support their opening and their awakening. But they are, in a sense, shamed, blamed, ostracized within their community. And I tell them that the current attitude of the spiritual world towards a substance like cannabis, it's not a heck of a lot different from the 1950s straight world's attitude towards gays. Shaming, blaming, ostracism, there's something wrong with you. And in a sense, it's time to let that go. I don't care what people do. What I care about as a teacher is how you're doing what you're doing when you're doing it. And if cannabis works to help awaken you, use it and do some of these practices that I talk about in the book. If cannabis doesn't work at all for you, don't go anywhere near it. But don't make rules. For me, I love both paths. I love the teaching that I do. Partly what I love about it is I get to sit and retreat with everybody for 10 days. And very, very purificatory. And I love those practices. And I love how I feel at the end of a 10-day retreat. I also love, when I'm at home, opening to some of the Shiva practices that help awaken the body that in turn reinforce the Buddhist practices. So both, in a sense, are different but completely compatible. And I'm a kind of fanatic for balance, physical balance, structural balance, any way you want to call it. So the idea of at times doing these very, very strong purificatory Buddhist practices, no substances, eating extremely lightly, going into retreat, sitting for 6, 8, 10, 12 hours a day, day after day after day. It has an extraordinary effect. I love it. And then I also love, you know, the other side of things, the Shiva practices. You know, it gets interesting. Most people that use cannabis probably don't care if anybody else uses it or not. You do get a situation, however, where some people who are strident about not using cannabis don't want anybody to use it. And I don't care what path you choose. I love both paths. I don't want one path telling the other that they shouldn't be doing what they're doing. I tell you what, I want to know if you've been criticized quite a bit for writing this book, Being a Buddhist. You know, it's interesting. I assumed that I was going to get a lot of blowback from the Buddhist world with this book. Now, I haven't. I haven't received a single, you know, irritated email, Will, how could you from anybody, whether they're students that I've had over the years or fellow teachers or colleagues. Now, I don't necessarily write that off as, hey, everybody thinks this is great. It may be that nobody feels that they want to engage me on this. I assumed, you know, K-Town, that writing this book would plug some people in. you know it's in the buddhist world because the precept is very very clear right and uh uh but you know having said that i i think i get more people in the buddhist world but maybe then these are the the folks that are the most vocal who are writing saying it's about time man good on you this needs to be said, this needs to be heard. You know, we have to alter our perceptions of this simple plant that grows so prolifically, it's called a weed, and has potentially very, very beneficial medical, creative, spiritual effects. Potentially it has those. And again, ultimately, We want to use a sacrament like this for the purposes that it really works for. And so we're finding across the country, across North America, really across the world now, there's so much more opening to the notion that, hey, there's something about cannabis that may be really beneficial to my health. Right. So with that, let me jump in here real quick. So are you on board with those that say that for years the benefits of cannabis, the true health benefits of cannabis have been intentionally hidden from the public? Have they been intentionally hidden from the public? I don't know if I would go that far. What's happened, though, it was so demonized for, you know, that's a whole other, you know, other conversation You know people who are in touch with themselves are very difficult to control and to you know force them to live their lives in boxes We get in touch with ourselves and frankly we open up we lighten up and, you know, we become, you know, individuals. What I do know or what I think has happened, because of the demonization, there was a prohibition not only against the use of the substance, but frankly against any kind of sharing of protocols of, hey, here's how you use it in what form for this medical condition. Hey, here's how you use it in what form for doing this extraordinary Shiva-based spiritual practice. Hey, here's how you use it in what form if you need to increase your appetite hey here's what you use it in what form if you having you know trouble sleeping so what i'm hoping is going to start happening now as we're realizing that the demonization of uh cannabis was uh i i mean it's just it's just foolish uh you know as that goes more and more there'll be people and it's really look at it's happening in the medical world with the medical pot docs saying it's this particular kind of cbd oil in this particular kind of concentration that works for this particular kind of condition i mean how how wonderful that this is uh uh you know this is you know starting to happen i i don't think the uh uh the the prohibitors didn't want us to experience some of these extraordinary states that cannabis can open to open us to i don't think they know they they know about them or understand them i do think though that they're probably frightened by their potential okay very good all right but that's that's probably how it is for me yeah yeah okay um now let's uh let's okay i want to go back to what you said um And previously, you talk about the awakening of your body. Can you give us a little detail into how one would go about doing that and would detoxifying your body go along with that awakening? Oh, you know, of course, of course. And again, as I say in the book, I love doing what I call my purificatory, my purification practices, as well as I love my doing my celebration practices, the purification practices, sitting and breathing, doing periods of fasting, cleaning up my diet, trying to only put into my mouth food that, you know, that purifies. the body that helps detoxify me. Because if a body is filled with toxins, there's kind of a gludge there when you start first giving yourself permission to become aware of the sensations and the feeling presence. So certainly, starting there on this path of awakening the body, yeah you want yeah what what am i doing am i eating too much of the wrong kind of food am i uh drinking too much of the wrong kind of beverages you know really really taking a look at that and start making a shift now the here here's how how this works k-town and this is something i can give to uh your listeners as long as they're not listening to this while they're driving a car but the consciousness that passes as normal in the world is the consciousness that is lost in thought, okay? And when we are lost in thought, it's like a teeter-totter. When thought is elevated, what is diminished is the feeling presence of the body. And here's what I'm getting at, and anybody can do this as long as you're not driving your car. Just hold out your hand with your palm up and just relax the hand and just give yourself permission to kind of tune in to what's going on in the hand. And rather quickly, what people are going to start becoming aware of When they get themselves out of their mind and just into feeling, ooh, the hand, they're these minute little pinprick blips of something or other, energy, sensations that are going off in the hand. It's shimmering, it's vibrating, it's pulsing, okay? And that is the level of the reality of sensations, of feeling presence. But when we're lost in thought, we blanket that over, we shut it down, we don't feel it. So what I'm sharing in the teaching that I do is an approach to practice that kind of pulls the plug on being lost in thought by, again, we're on a teeter-totter, awakening the sensational, literally sensational presence of the whole body. So the whole body gets awakened and you feel these pinprick blips of shimmer and then there's currents that pass through. You awaken this very natural, organic feeling of presence that's mostly covered over. And when you do that, that's when a lot starts shifting and a lot starts changing and a lot starts opening up. A lot starts revealing itself to you, and you start letting go of kind of maybe ways of behaving or ways of being or ways of believing about yourself that you suddenly have a perspective on saying, wait, man, wait a minute. Those are limiting. Those are the small me. You know, I want to live God's gift, you know. somehow I got born onto this planet at this crazy and extraordinary time. And I want to find out as much as I can what this crazy, wonderful thing about being a human being is all about. Right? Exactly. Exactly. Now, I want to take a deeper dive and I want to talk about, you talk about Shiva and you've mentioned Shiva several times. So can you start off, Will, by telling us who Shiva is and then let's go into talking about how the use of this marijuana caused some type of spontaneous movements and things like that? Can you go into that for us? Yeah. So this is an extremely fascinating story. So Shiva is considered one of the three primary entities of the Hindu godhead. There's Brahma, who creates things. There's Vishnu, who sustains things. There's Shiva, who stirs things up and gets things very alive, and everything is in this condition of flux and transformation. Now, was Shiva a real person or was Shiva a mythic god? Now, most commentators probably ascribe to the latter interpretation. But for me, I think he was a real guy, K-Town, upon whom later a lot of elaborate mythic and mystical dazzle was superimposed. But both are there. His story is all too human. He was a guy, he lived up in what is now northern India, into Nepal, into the mountains. And by all accounts, he was a pretty high dude. He was a pretty cool guy, just naturally. Not much is known about his early life, but he was a very high spiritual guy. now what happens he goes and falls head over heels in love with this beautiful young woman who's a princess and the daughter of high princely society and he you know he comes from nothing so it's not exactly the uh the match that the social register at the time is probably interested in but they something happens and they they they love each other and she begs her parents and uh you know the story gets wild he shows up at the wedding day with his his uh friends and tribe and they're all high as kites on cannabis and the parents almost call everything off and parvati the woman begs and they go ahead and they get married now uh my sense is that uh the ancient bards if they were going to come up with a story about a mythic god that ain't the one that they would have chosen, right? But what happens is that Shiva then, and I have old Indian miniatures, and the legends down to this day tell this story. Shiva and Parvati, they would live in well, southwestern Tibet, around a very sacred mountain called Mount Kailas. And Shiva, I have a painting of Parvati making bong for Shiva. Now, bong is a cannabis-infused drink. You can smoke cannabis, you can vape cannabis, you can eat it, you can drink it, right? And the legends down to this day, here's what would happen. Shiva would take the bong. He liked it. It worked for him. He would stand up, and what would start happening is that his body would start making spontaneous movements. They were not directed movements. He didn't know what was going to happen before the energies would just start moving his body. And as I say, the legends down to this day are that it was through these spontaneous motions that Shiva brings the body oriented practices of yoga and dance to the planet. So it's very fascinating that there was something about the ingestion of the bong, of the cannabis, that induced these spontaneous movements. Now, the major thing that for me, you know, a pure active daytime sativa will do, it wakes the unfelt body up. It helps get us, in a sense, out of the loop of our mind where we're lost. And suddenly, the next thing we know, we have, people call it the buzz. We have this buzz, this vibratory awareness through the body that is suddenly the previously unfelt sensations of the body waking up. Now, so many people have shared this with me that this was, in a sense, what happened to them. And it's what happened to me as a young man, as I started getting more in touch with my body. And I was using cannabis. I liked it. I liked it for playing music. I liked it for the insights I was getting. And I was starting to get more into my body. One day, I'm down in a garden in the afternoon. I'm high, and suddenly this energy just starts awakening in my body, and the next thing I know, my body's moving, and I'm not doing it. I'm just going along for the ride. And I feel very grateful for that experience, and I've explored that surrender into spontaneity with the movements of the body all through my life. Now, I have so many people, young people, you know, people in their 20s and 30s that contact me and they say, well, that's essentially what happened for them. They use cannabis or using other substances at some of the all-night raves and the body starts opening. The next thing they know, it's moving and they can't stop and it's moving how it's moving. And they just, it's like a current and they're on a float trip on this current. They just go along for the ride. So Shiva is a very strange mythic god who I believe may legitimately be the first pothead of record who used cannabis. and for this specific reason as a spiritual sacrament that awakens the body and then the awakened body when you let go often things just start happening the body may move the breath may open up or change different kinds of waves of sensation come through so these in a sense are the shiva oriented the shiva oriented approach to practices that users of cannabis get into and you can get a sense of how different that is from the Buddhist focus or the Buddhist approach to practice, which is focusing on an object, concentrating on it. And then your mind goes and you bring it back. In the Shiva practice, you don't bring anything back to anywhere. You just simply stay in the present and let go and see where the opening takes you. Is that what you describe as the gazing meditation? Well, the gazing is doing what I've just described, but with, you know, with the partner. And it's, you know, the gazing practice is truly one of the most extraordinary opening, enlightening practices I've ever come across. And I just stumbled upon it as a young man with a, I had a great friend, an older guy, and we did a lot of exploration together, just great friends. And yeah, we were using cannabis together. And one day we just started looking at each other and holding each other's gaze and whoa, something started happening. It was really powerful. We didn't know what it was. We turned away. We looked back. Hey, what was that? I don't know, but it was strong. Yeah, what's wrong with that? And we just held each other's gaze. We just looked at each other and held each other's gaze, which is not done in our culture, right? And just we were, you know, we were very relaxed. It was the end of a long afternoon of a lot of interesting interaction. And there's something about the gazing practice that really brings up an awareness of feeling presence. And then things just start happening. The visual field can go hallucinatory. The sensations of the body can ebb and flow with waves crashing through. Different kinds of aspects of self come up. You can be a frightened little child one moment and then a strong warrior the next and then dissolve way beyond the limiting mind, merge with your partner. And because it is so deeply body-oriented, yes, gazing is the kind of practice. You can do it without cannabis, and you can do it with cannabis. If you're someone that cannabis doesn't work with, you do it without cannabis, and it's very extraordinary. If you're someone for whom cannabis works for, do this practice because it's something that really needs to be experienced to believe how high, how in touch with a higher quality that comes through you you are. In the 1990s, they did a lot of teaching of the gazing practice, often out on the East Coast in New York and back in British Columbia as well. Now, we never use cannabis for that teaching. But it is, you know, and again, here's where I would have been cowardly if I withhold the information from that. That, yes, it's true, you don't need cannabis for the gazing practice, but men and women, boys and girls, if you're someone who uses cannabis, try this, do it, and just keep letting go. And go through the hysterical laughter and the tears and just keep letting go. It will forever alter your understanding of the meaning of friendship. You just keep letting go of the superficial dimension of your mind. It's an extraordinary thing to do, K-Town. All right. Sounds good. All right. My special guest is Will Johnson and we are discussing his book called Cannabis in Spiritual Practice. And I will have more for you when we return right after this. All right. Will, do you need to take a break or get something to drink or anything like that? No, I'm good. You good? Yeah, I'm enjoying how this is going. Absolutely. This is great. Thank you very much. All right. Here we go. Here we go. All right. My special guest tonight is Will Johnson and we are discussing his book called Cannabis in Spiritual Practice. it is available on Amazon. Now, Will, let's stay right there where we were. And you talked about how people should just let go and kind of see what happens. It sounds like an amazing experience. I want to ask you, though, does it matter about the certain type of cannabis you use? Yeah. I'm probably not the best person to ask that question to. There are other people who have much better information how this kind of indica works for this and this sativa mostly it's the you know when i if i go into uh i guess well in some of the states now california washington oregon colorado i mean more and more of them are legalizing and you go into these shops and the people working there they've got a lot of uh information a lot of uh you know knowledge about that stuff. Strong indicas, I believe, are generally really helpful for just chilling out. And, you know, you just, you need to relax, you need to go to sleep. For me, it's the very pure sativas. And, you know, people, when they go into the shops, talk to the people there who I'm saying no more about this than I do. But the daytime active sativas awaken, give you that kind of energy. And I generally find that kind of energetic awakening helpful for certainly for starting to let the body move if you're standing and doing spontaneous movement or dance or you go to a dance or something. You know, with the ones that just help really chill you out, they're frankly better for just lying out on the sofa. So that is the level of knowledge that I have. But I've got a good friend from Maine. He's retired now, but he used to be the medical doctor there, the pot doc. And the level of knowledge this guy has. I hope he actually writes a book because, as I said, we need to know these things. He has information about, yeah, this particular blend with this amount of THC and this amount of CBD oil, this really works for this particular kind of medical condition. So, you know, for chilling out the indicas, but for the active, hey, let's let's awaken and oh, the body wants to move and boy, I can't I can't hold it back. And hey, the music is makes me want to move to, you know, more of a daytime sativa. All right. OK, I had to mute it a little bit. I have somebody mowing. no no no worries i have i have iguanas uh rustling around on the roof here where i'm doing this interview from that's awesome all right now let me see where i want to go here okay so um is there a certain way that you suggest people take it or can you tell us how you you know how do you use it do you smoke it eat it what yeah um mostly we uh we vaporize it in that what, you know, they're very, very good quality vaporizers that are out on the market now. And I mean, it's interesting. I think it was in the 90s was my older son first turned me on to what the vaporizers were. And my understanding about vaporizers, they were maybe originally, or someone came up with some old research and kind of made these primarily for people with HIV AIDS to help them with appetite. But if you heat the bud to a certain temperature, it releases the THC, which is what you want to get into your body to have the effect. But it's not a hot enough temperature to cause the bud to burst into flame. And of course, when you smoke something, a cigarette, a cigar, a pipe, or a joint, you're not only getting, with marijuana or with cannabis, you're not only getting the THC, you're getting all sorts of other stuff that ain't good for the body. So my wife and I will mostly use a vaporizer. I don't take very much. My body is quite sensitive. And I really encourage people, if you're going to start exploring using cannabis for these practices. Start by not taking very much at all, what I, in a sense, called a homeopathic dose. Just one or two tokes because these practices, somehow they're very compatible. They interact with the cannabis in your system, and the practices become stronger, and it almost feels like the cannabis's effect is stronger. Sometimes my wife and I will eat it as well. Now, that, of course, is very different. When you smoke or vaporize it, the effect is almost immediate within the first several minutes. When you eat it, it may be 45 minutes to an hour and a half. And it's slightly different how it comes on. But again, everybody has to experiment with this and find out what works for them. And everybody, because your listeners are not just in Washington State, Oregon, California, Colorado, the other states, Canada. They're in states that probably have a dim view of what I'm talking about. I will never say I want everybody to go out and do this. What I want is for people to take responsibilities for themselves and make their decisions of what is appropriate for them within the legal climate that they live in. All right. Sorry about that, Will. Now, I want to talk about the – there's a section in your book that really caught my eye here. It's called The Safe Haven of the Precepts. And you talk about reframing from harmful living, and you've got in here, refrain from taking what's not giving, reframing from sexual misconduct, refrain from lying, taking intoxicants. Can you tell us about that? Yeah. Yeah, tell us about that. Yeah, for sure. And what you've just cited there are the very traditional five Buddhist precepts that govern the ethical behavior of people who enter upon a Buddhist path. That's one of the first things that we do when we start meditating. We realize, okay, if I'm going to go far on this meditative path, there's an ethical foundation that I have to establish, or else you're not going to have the base to allow the practices to really go high and deep. And what's interesting is that they're always couched in negative terms. Don't do this. Don't do that. Don't harm living things, right? Don't take. Don't steal. Don't take what isn't given. Don't engage in sexual misconduct. Don't lie and don't take in toxicants. Now, you know, I thought about those and I thought, well, yeah, and I've taken those a lot in the Buddhist world. But I thought, you know, it's like talking to a little kid saying, oh, don't do this and don't do that. What would those precepts sound like if they were couched in positive terms rather than negative ones and were oriented towards our taking responsibility for ourselves making our own decisions rather than don do this or don do that So don harm living things becomes honor life honor life You know if we honor life we wouldn harm anything or anybody else Also if we honor life we want to honor the current of the life force that could come alive in us. That's these flows of sensation that in our culture, elsewhere in our culture, I do label our culture somatophobic, kind of afraid of, and, you know, not really liking this strong surge of sensation that we're talking about here today. But we want to honor that. We want to honor it in ourselves and everybody else. Instead of saying don't steal, I say be generous in all ways with others. Give people things if you can. There's an old, oh, I think it's a Hindu statement. Everything that's not given is lost. Keep giving of yourself. And then also give of this energetic current. This energetic current that I'm talking about that the Shiva practices directly awaken. It wants to just expand like floodwaters to spill over the bank. People will feel it in your presence. It's a lovely energy. Just keep giving of it. Don't engage in sexual misconduct. Well, that's somewhat similar. Be clean in your sexuality. Treat your sexual partners like the god and goddess or goddess that they are. Don't manipulate. And obviously, you know, don't get involved in behaviors that are really criminally abusive. I mean, you know, sexual energies, we all have to deal with them. You know, they're the first really strong thing that we're given to deal with. As young people, they're so powerful. Nobody gets a free pass. We've got to figure out whom am I attracted to? How does this energy work? How can we use it? Well, the energy is very powerful in the Shiva practices. That energy becomes the basis of what rises up and explodes open and awakens the whole body. The Buddhist practices will say, don't lie. I just say, mean what you say, say what you mean, speak with truth. That can be the hardest of all of these to abide by. Now, look, when we get to the fifth precept, that's the only one that a Shiva approach and a Buddhist approach would agree on. But the only thing that's different is that instead of, for the Buddhists to say, don't take intoxicants, the Shiva orientation will say, only put into your mouth what you know feeds your body and soul, what nourishes you. In other words, you have to make those decisions. For a Buddhist, I suppose it goes against the precepts. If I ascribe, I'm a card-carrying Buddhist, and I'm going to follow every one of these precepts because I'm doing those Buddhist practices, no, I'm not going to drink alcohol, I'm not going to take drugs, that's how it is. And that is the appropriate decision. But for a Shiva yogi to engage in the practices that, you know, for Shiva, Shiva used cannabis to help him enter into these practices. And I often say, if you want to know what Buddha knew, you got to do what Buddha did. You got to do those practices. And the same thing is true with Shiva. If you want to know what Shiva knew, you have to do what Shiva did. So for Shiva, the ingestion of cannabis in the form of bong was what popped in open, awakened the body, and allowed these spontaneous movements to begin. So for a Shiva yogi, it would probably be unethical not to, in a very sacred, ritual way, take cannabis as an opener. I mentioned in the book when my wife was a young woman, she lived many years in northern India, and would be in retreat up in the mountains there. And often wandering Shiva yogis would show up at her place, or she'd waken in the morning, they'd shown up in the middle of the night and thought, they have nothing. They have a begging bowl and a loincloth and a chillum that they would wake up in the morning, invite her to join their practices. the first thing they would do would be to pass a chillum, a pipe around, and smoke cannabis in honoring Shiva and wait until their body started awakening and then start doing their practices. So the precepts, in a sense, from a Buddhist perspective or from a Shiva perspective, are exactly the same as far as I can tell. The Shiva perspective, take responsibility. Look, you might be someone who takes responsibility instead of just saying, oh, I'm not going to do cannabis. A Buddhist might say, I'm not going to do cannabis because the precepts tell me so. You might take responsibility for yourself and say, you know, it doesn't really work for me, so I'm not going to do it. But that's a very different place of decision. So those are the precepts. Very good, very good. Now, my last question, Will, is integrating cannabis into one spiritual practice. How would you suggest people start to explore that for themselves? Yeah. Well, I would use it in a very, you know, ritualistic way. That might be too strong a word. But what I mean by that is, you know, okay, I've got the next hour, the next hour and a half. I'm not answering my phone. I'm not, you know, just kind of hanging out, talking with my friends. I'm going to go in a room alone, or better yet, I'm going to go out into nature alone. I'm going to what I call invoking Shiva, Bohm Shiva, honoring Shiva. Shiva is the energy that we want to awaken in us. Shiva, in a sense, is the person, mythical or real as he might have been, that use cannabis in this way. And I'll take a toque or two or some vapor, whatever. Or if I'm eating it, I'll wait an hour and then just go and maybe just come to standing. and just wait. And all of a sudden I start feeling some things. Play with upright balance. Play with upright balance. You make it a dance. You know, we're here. What can I let go of? What starts happening? My body is kind of moving. I'm feeling it. There's kind of a quality of dance maybe that starts happening. You just let it happen. My breath is changing. The energies are changing. Perhaps pass your awareness through your body, awakening sensations, making sure that you're not just staying stuck in your mind. You can also do this sitting down, but I probably recommend that people, if they've not had experience in the Buddhist world with sitting, start by standing. And, you know, it's almost like a form of dance. Just let it happen. And especially, you know, young people, so many young people, 20-something, 30-something, they've had more experiences with raves, for example, than they have going to Dharma meditation retreats. So for them, it may be more appropriate to start with the standing practices. You can take these into sitting practices. I know Buddhists who will use cannabis in their sitting practices. But again, it's not about focusing. they sit there and they're just playing with it like it's a yoga posture and uh and they're letting go and there's a lot of movement and shifts of the breath that happens know that when you're intentionally using cannabis as a spiritual practice uh sacrament just keep letting go when you catch yourself back lost in your mind just let go just let go or when you're doing gazing with your friend. Doing gazing is one of the quickest, easiest ways to get into this. So there's gazing, there's standing, going into what might be called your dance. There's the sitting practices. Use it for yoga. Use it for opening your voice. These are the Shiva practices. All right. I really enjoyed this interview, Will. Why don't you take a moment to tell my listeners where they can find out more about you and anything else you're working on. Okay, sure. Yeah, thank you for that. My website, we talked about that at the beginning of the hour. It's www.embodiment.net. Embodiment is spelled E-M-B-O-D-I-M-E-N-T. And boy, I've had that website for, that was a very early website. I've changed it over the years, but for 20, 25 years. And it talks about the different aspects of practice that I teach and share. It talks about some history of me. I've done a lot of writing, K-Town, mostly within the Buddhist world, but even within the Buddhist world about bringing the body to life with some of the more Buddhist-oriented practices. a lot of writing and translation of the 13th century Sufi mystic and poet Rumi. So there's a lot there. There is a section on upcoming workshops and retreats. There's a way for people to contact me. I send out newsletters. I've got quite a large newsletter list across the world to send out little newsletters, oh, once every month or so, sometimes announcing a new publication or a book, but sometimes just with little short stories, aspects of the teaching that I'm thinking of. Now, my wife and I moved down to Costa Rica about two years ago, and we're mostly letting go of traveling and teaching in North America or Europe now for at least a while. And we're just about finished building a little retreat cottage Now, this is, I mean, it's interesting. This is the time of the book about cannabis. If someone from one of the states, Colorado or California or Washington or wherever, invited me to come and teach a workshop that we did use cannabis, like a little retreat, a meditation retreat, use cannabis, I'd probably be open to that. Down here in Costa Rica, no, I'm wanting to work with my Buddhist students, and especially the ones that have come to a number of my retreats and want to go very deep. I'm having them come down. I'm plunking them into this retreat cottage, a beautiful, spectacular little cottage. And for seven to 21 days, intensive practices, I'll do some interacting with them in the morning. I've also done very deep body work called rolfing all my life for these Buddhist sitting practices where the sitting posture is so important. We find that's really an important key. My wife's training was with a very primitive tribe in Malaysia whose culture was organized around their dreams. She does dream work with the people. So mostly we're doing that. Now, on my website, if you go on the homepage, there's something called audios. And there is transcripts of three evenings of teaching that I did out at a Buddhist organization in Colorado. That'd be a fun place for people to start to get to know more about me. But I've got my fingers in a couple of different pies and really enjoy playing with them all. And I've enjoyed talking to you. It's been a good conversation. Many blessings to you, and I really appreciate your time. Yeah, thank you. Blessings to you, too. Likewise. All right. My special guest, Will Johnson, and his book is called Cannabis and Spiritual Practice, The Ecstasy of Shiva and the Calm of Buddha. And that is available right now on Amazon in paperback and also Kindle. I want to thank my producer tonight, Kim, and the Mysterious Radio team. I am your host, K-Town. I want you to stay safe and stay healthy. And I will see you next time on Mysterious Radio. Like the show? Get more Mysterious Radio on our website. And don't forget to visit our Twitter and Facebook page.