Reiman Moves

what, did you think I was a plant?

Making Moves

I move! Despite my immense passion for plant medicines like Ayahuasca, Tobacco, San Pedro, Huilca and all the homies, I have not become a plant. Vilcabamba has become the home base of my dream life, yes, but the dream life remains true to my essence of movement.

I’ll be making Reiman moves until I’m dead. I’ve felt dead — lost in smoky nihilism —at some points in recent years, but this week has been a roaring reminder that I’m alive, thanks to an unhinged Siberian traveler who helped me re-hinge not just to my personal love of adventure, but to the original inspiration behind Light & Shadows.

Елена (Elena in English) is the only person from her tiny Siberian village, thousands of kilometers away from civilization, to travel the world. She travels the world painstakingly, fighting for every visa, learning cryptocurrency just to survive countries’ anti-Russia sanctions, learning Spanish on top of English and navigating Ecuador as skillfully as I do, despite my four-year head start. She’s not shy to call Americans out as the lazy beasts they are, and she’s reminded me of one of my grossest privileges: possessing an American passport — an American passport that I’m hardly using!

I still feel that ultimately, I’ll have to land on my green pasture and live in a sovereign, self-sustaining community as the structures of modernity collapse. To be fair, I’ve needed to do my time and lock in permanent residency in Ecuador to be ready for a sovereign future. I’ve needed to start seeds of sovereignty like my water bottling, water treatment and soil regeneration business, YangNaturaleza. I’ve needed to heal personally and to build the Light & Shadows team that will ultimately spread healing across the world. I’ve needed to focus first and foremost on the roots of our future, so that we’re ready to survive times of chaos. Until those times truly crescendo, though: What am I doing parking it in a hippie retirement village?

Light & Shadows has taken birth in Vilcabamba and Ecuador, yes, but my multimedia baby is destined for a worldwide journey, as am I. How could I almost forget?!

Vilcabamba! Vilcabamba makes time stand still, and she seduces even the wildest men into resting in her tranquil stillness. I know people who didn’t necessarily plan to stay, but who forgot that leaving was even an option as the years cascaded past them. They grew too content to upset the elderberry cart, deterred from venturing outside their wannabe-shamanic bubbles, terrified of hearing their precious medicine attachments referred to as “drugs” by the unenlightened, technophobically allergic to cities and planes, velcrobambad by the groupthink of an international siren song.

I get it! Over my nearly four years in the valley of longevity, I’ve felt Home for the first time in my life, truly deep friendships have emerged, my social anxiety has utterly evaporated and I’ve caught some rest that I needed more than I could have fathomed. It’s an epic place to call home, and it remains the perfect setting for the first epic in Light & Shadows’s Reality Epic genre that I’m inventing. Vilcabamba es Vilcabamba.

Still, my soul will never be content to plant himself in one spot indefinitely. Meeting Елена in Baños, Ecuador for a vacation after the insane week I recounted in our last post has reminded me of my spirit’s eternal adventurousness — of how ‘myself’ I feel when I leave home for jungles, new countries and new adventures. Reiman moves are the moves of adventure, and when I make those moves I feel peace. As I write now, hunkered down in a cheap hotel near Cotopaxi, Ecuador’s famous stratovolcano and second-tallest mountain, it just started thundering.

Light & Shadows will reflect the adventurousness of its creator. I’ll return home time and again, and I envision my future as a simple, quiet and natural life at home, but for now, my L&S baby and I must make moves.

We tell stories of medicine and shamanism. We begin our epic story in the country of the equator, and yes, Ecuador offers the most profound introduction to these worlds that I could hope for. Yet still, badass Siberian shamans like Olena UUTAi and Snow Raven remind us that the shamanic voice travels everywhere in the world.

No matter how white, black or brown, no matter how “natural” human life may seem in their environment, every people — everywhere, forever throughout human history — has connected, in their way, to Great Spirit.

Nearly Missed Connections

If our America-shaped modern world boasts any spiritual pinnacle, it’s probably Tinder. Yeah, the smartphone app. That’s the best we’ve done. Digital technologies like Tinder are our spiritual mt. Everest.

I joke. I kid. I must kid, because despite the last assertion in the last section, our white man’s modernity represents the greatest estrangement from Spirit in the history of humanity. I once knew a white guy in Vilcabamba who called himself “the American shaman” on his website, and as a person, the guy was one big joke. He once took a metallic device he believed to detect bad juju into an Ecuadorian tienda and began exclaiming that based on his technology’s readings, the produce was no good. Ecuadorians stared in befuddlement as this clown used his technology to make declarations about health no more valid than Dr. Fauci’s declaration that Covid mRNA shots would stop transmission. Under the guise of progress and intelligence, modernity’s technologies have “connected” us on the most superficial of levels while disconnecting us from the true psychospiritual bonds that are our birthright.

When I matched with Елена on Tinder I didn’t have high hopes for heartfelt connection, or for her profound eyes, beneath the surface of technological artifice.

My hopes sunk even lower when she told me she was in Vilcabamba and I replied that I was up for hanging out only to not hear from her for a couple hours. I’d already talked to a number of accounts that seemed fake, already been entrapped into sexting with what was probably AI, so I decided to get high on Ganja for the afternoon, figuring Елена was yet another ghost. When she returned to Loja (the city nearest Vilca), I realized my mistake: I’d forgotten that I’d set my location on Tinder as Loja (probably also while high on Ganja). My relationship with Mary Juana had once again sabotaged a potential relationship with a real woman.

Елена was still up for meeting in Loja, but I was sky high at this point. I wouldn’t even remember a first date. What’s more, I was full-on paranoid as she told me her phone was dying and simply sent me an address and room number, saying that if I showed up there we could go out. I video-called her and she assuaged some of the paranoia by answering, but when her phone (and our call) died exactly as I said, “this seems like a scam,” I was definitely paranoid that I was about to get jumped and robbed by the Russian mafia, or that I was on a trashy hidden camera reality show. This latter suspicion reached a fever pitch when I arrived at her “hotel” — a three-story building with no receptionist whose interior was entirely run down, except for a handful of out-of-order rooms in the 400s that looked completely different from the rest of the rooms, evoking an episode of Black Mirror.

To my amazement, however, Елена was real, and we really went walking around Loja until I had to stop and gorge on fast food that I wouldn’t remember eating. I remembered only sparse snippets of the date, but I was apparently funny enough that she wanted to meet me sober. I wanted to meet her sober, too, because something I actually did remember clearly was the brightness of her eyes.

Four Waterfalls

If I wanted another look at her eyes’ light, I needed to clean up and get through the hell week described in the last Light & Shadows post. I needed to come back from the dead to make moves.

Was it worth it? It’s hard to say whether anything is worth it, especially when one’s field is clouded by Cannabis. From within those clouds, nothing truly seems “worth it.” All moves, pursuits, people and passions seem stupid, and the Ganja-zone is so seductive because its “everything is stupid” perspective isn’t necessarily wrong, strictly speaking. For anything to be worth it, some trade-off must be worth making, and therefore some outcome must be “better” than some other outcome. In Truth nothing is “better” than anything else. Grinding like the kind of “Top G” who’d make Andrew Tate proud isn’t “better” than being homeless. Being rich isn’t “better” than being poor. Finding a lover isn’t “better” than marrying one’s four-figure wank machine (computer with internet). Nothing is ever strictly better than anything else. Only human minds, egos and judgments make some outcomes better than others.

Further, deciding that something would be or even could be “better” is a dangerous game. When we latch onto a target, a desired outcome before us, we sacrifice our peripheral vision. We might miss all sorts of possibilities from within the tunnel vision of a path toward a goal whose achievement we believe will lead to a “better” life. In the movement that makes it possible to realize a goal, we lose the stillness from which we may perceive more possibilities.

Herein lies the paradox of stillness and movement, of feminine energy and masculine energy. We nourish ourselves and find the movement that is most aligned by being still, yet if we spend all our days being still and seeing (correctly, in a sense, yet incorrectly in another sense) that nothing is worth wanting, then our entire life can pass us by. We’re here to live, after all, which means making some decisions and sacrificing some possibilities. Life’s paradox is that absolutely anything is possible, yet to realize any particular possibility we wish to realize — to fulfill whatever purpose for which we incarnated here — we must embrace the limitations of the human experience.

I’ve called weed the most dangerous drug because it aligns us entirely with stillness, turning potheads into inactive plant-people who are content to let life pass them by. It’s dangerous because it’s not wrong, provided we look at life through a plant-like lens. Who cares if life passes me by?

I — THE GRAND EGO OF REIMAN FUCKING BLEDSOE — care!! Let the hippies and plant-people perceive me as stupid. Fuck ‘em. I’ll gladly be stupid. I’m a man who wants to adventure and live this life to the fullest, to believe in my visions and goals as worthy, to be alive.

Let my ego tell you: traveling to meet Елена in Baños was more than worth it.

When I was last in Baños in October 2023, I was breaking up with my ex-girlfriend before we got a chance to see Cascada El Pailón del Diablo (above — maybe the awesomest waterfall I’ve ever seen), or to do much of anything. This trip has redeemed not only my Tinder career, but also my experience of what is now one of my favorite places in Ecuador. The decision to take a chance and make a move has transmuted Baños from a place of heartbreak into a place of joy. After hiding in the weeds for six years on-and-off and coughing through Tobacco smoke for three years on-and-off, I’m finally just being my awesome self, on-and-on, as peaceful as Baños’s Cascada del Silencio:

Silence and expression, stillness and movement, life and death, light and shadows — everything has its two sides. With Елена I’ve reawakened sides of myself that became obscured, and I’ve found a lot of balancing perspective. On the heels of growing very casual and new-agey in my approach to life, I’ve actually found her Russian traditionalism refreshing. She has no more time for Hollywood-promoted moral decay than she has for spiritual men without the balls to set their emotionalism aside and materially navigate saṃsāra. She intellectually understands moral relativism, but she doesn’t have time for it. She’s highly empathetic and soft, yet views hippies neglecting to make money and help their parents as essentially selfish and irresponsible. She’s strictly anti- a slew of “bad” things like alcohol, weed, drugs, microplastics and refined sugar, yet drinks coffee at night and loves her a good Tiramisu. It feels great to her, as it does to me, to enjoy life and to be responsible at the same time. Damn, does it actually feel great to be responsible, even now, while on vacation. It feels great to walk the middle way.

Елена draws a lot of inspiration from Buddhism, so she’s patient with views that don’t sound “right,” but she also won’t hesitate to mock the chorus that preaches, “they’re not drugs; they’re medicines!” Being as into medicine as I am, I find healthy balance and challenge in our connection. Reconciling our perspectives feels a lot like uncovering a personal middle way. I’ll still do drugs / medicines in right relationship, but I’m also not looking back after releasing the smoking, even the Rapé, that I was doing in wrong relationship.

Returning to life, I’m not looking back at those habits that were killing me. I’m not brooding on the sad stories of a childhood where love felt scarce. Connecting with a woman whose family and village showered her with love throughout childhood makes it easy to see the opportunity I have to choose my lens, to focus on what I want and to tell stories that I like. Maybe coming back to life is that simple.

Simple, but not always easy — coming back to life is a lot like meditation. It’s a lot like willing myself to jump into the swimming hole beneath waterfall number three (above). It wasn’t even a hot day, but with an arctic lady’s encouragement, I did it.

I’ve known what to do for a long time, and it’s now a simple matter of just doing it. I feel encouraged to just do it, to make the moves that support my healthiest self, to cherish every moment, whether at Cascada de la Virgen (below) or within the flow of life itself. I feel inspired to raise my baby (Light & Shadows) to make moves in sacred sites across the world, emanating from our Ecuadorian base to touch the Epic of everywhere. Inspiration says to go to Jerusalem, to Russia’s Saint Basil's Cathedral, Australia’s Uluru, Italy’s Sistine Chapel, India’s Bodh Gaya, Cambodia’s Angkor Wat (free of Survivor production’s shadow), Greece’s Meteora, England’s Stonehenge and even just to the country 150km from home, Peru, to see Machu Picchu. Inspiration says to go to Mexico for Bufo Alvarius, to go to Africa for Iboga, to meet the oldest Aboriginal people in Australia, to explore much more of South America and to venture as far as Siberia’s Lake Baikal. Inspiration says more yet, but as encouraged as I am to follow my inspiration worldwide, I know I need only begin by flowing where I find myself now.

Oṃ Maṇi Padme Hūm̐

Every time I come back to myself, I tend to get overwhelmed with so much energy that the Reiman moves grow a little bit manic. I’ve also been going through an epic process of bodily realignment for a little over three years now, and making new strides in that alignment feels overwhelming, too. When my hips and core and chest truly open and energy flows fully, as it’s essentially been wanting to do my whole life, I get lightheaded for 20-30 seconds, experiencing a rush that feels something like cool Aloe vera oozing beneath my skin. I continue to repeatedly take a few steps forward and then a couple steps back in this realignment, but immediately after the steps forward and lightheadedness and Aloe flow sensations, it’s truly as if the baseline feeling of simply breathing and being in my body is becoming orgasmically good.

In the midst of maniacally good change, of so much to be excited about and live for, I’m remembering to make one move at a time, to take one breath at a time and to simply be who I really am — peace. I’m remembering that in Truth, there is no duality between the stillness I hold and the moves I feel so excited to make. Peace underlies both, and in turn both reproduce peace. I need only be Reiman and be that peace. The Reiman moves will make themselves.