Surviving Reality

sharing what we've been up to

I feel called to write from my heart, but not about my heart. About the work. Writing from the heart about anything feels challenging, given my heart’s felt in a million pieces for some months now. I currently have 11 drafts of posts on the Substack dashboard, two of which are called “Need-Based Species” and “I Need to Write,” but their philosophical analysis feels empty compared to writing grounded in who I am now, post- the past half-year of emotional turmoil and personal crisis, about what I’m creating now. I don’t feel called to delve deeply into story about crisis. If I’ve learned anything from the past six months, it’s that presence is everything, and at some point we need to mature to a point of cultivating our presence in harmony with the space in which it resides.

What’s that space for our presence calling for? The space in which we filmed Surviving Reality this past November, Sinchi Warmi in the Napo region of Ecuador’s Amazon Oriente, called for me to “have it together” and show up during a shoot that coincided with the beginning of the most challenging six months in the history of my personal relationships. I did bring my challenges into the “work” insofar as I was myself while shooting, but more importantly, I showed up in a time when I felt like doing anything other than show up. The space of my communication with you on Substack calls for something different than what the space at Sinchi Warmi called for, and something different than what the space of my home calls for. I hear you calling for real sharing from deep places. Meanwhile, I just posted on the supremely deep beacon of truth, Instagram, for the first time this year to announce Surviving Reality.

A vision born just over a year ago is approaching a 2027 birth. In the meantime, the teaser comes this summer, giving a first look into what exactly we filmed and where we’re going.

I’ve questioned just about everything in my life over the past year of intensive work (professionally, then personally), certainly including the decision to risk so much on a dream series, and especially since the dream crystallized upon learning I wouldn’t be on S50 of Survivor. I aspire to always be aware of how I and we can unconsciously start spinning stories within a healer-victim-perpetrator paradigm, and no better place to be weary of such a pitfall than in the creation of a series about healing itself. Surviving Reality is about all sorts of unfolding journeys, but if healing and the sacred traditions around plant medicine, kept by indigenous people over millennia, aren’t stories worth preserving, then we may as well foresake the admittedly overused word, sacred. I certainly wouldn’t want to document the sacred from a wounded place. At the same time, from the wound of not being “put on” came the ambition to focus my energy toward creation rather than participation or consumption. I can’t always choose who tells my story or why or how, but I can choose the story I tell. I can also choose to focus on my dream of actually reaching more people — an impetus for filming Surviving Reality rather than continuing to film videos about our own journeys in the jungle, environmental issues or interviews — while still riding the passion of Light & Shadows that started a few years ago. More writing and content filmed by Light & Shadows will come, but for now we approach our first big offering to an audience more mainstream than those of you reading me now.

Is it good that inviting former reality stars to the jungle can reach more people than simply filming the shamans themselves, and documenting indigenous cultures? Is it right? It would have been lovely to invite people to the jungle based on need and desire, rather than convince a cast of ten that I was actually doing this thing, but would the world listen? How many would continue tuning into our documentation of forest fire devastation and processes with plant medicine? How many would feel moved to sovereignly create the conscious way of life they wish, or moved to take a stand against environmental devastation for capitalistic purposes? How many might be moved now that plant medicine is entering into the reality space via our series?

We approach the experience on which the series is based — a 13-day intensive plant medicine retreat featuring three indigenous shamans (a Shuar man called Taita Tsentsak, a Kichwa woman called Mama Celia, and Don Luis, the Kichwa man with whom I’ve had a personal relationship since 2021) — more as documentary would than as extractors of engineered drama do in the reality space. Plant medicine can unearth any kind of human process, and supports the most fertile grounds for documentary-worthy sharing of challenge, healing and human relations. Sacred plants, and the spirit behind our dream of spreading awareness of their potential, set the stage for story rather than stage the story. We aspire to be observers and facilitators of the story reality itself wishes to tell.

Sacred plants are, on the other hand, sacred… and given to us by creation for medicinal processes rather than for entertainment, entertaining as they may be. How can we capitalize on that entertainment to spread awareness of the sacred, without the entertainment corrupting our responsibility to hold a safe container for the sacred?

The question rings on in my mind and requires constant introspection into motivations and frequent re-evaluation of how much it’s “okay” to affect people’s medicine journeys in order to broadcast those journeys. A purist might say “not at all,” and I began Surviving Reality with the naive notion that “not at all” was achievable. I imagined that people could have a plant medicine retreat essentially the same one without cameras, without a 20-person production crew, without on-the-fly changes in the shaman running a ceremony. I was wrong.

We honored our promise to our cast that we wouldn’t film plant medicine ceremonies themselves — just a few shots of people consenting to being filmed drinking medicine, and then all crew got out for the big events. Yet even still, how does a person in a sensitive medicine process shift gears from cameras, boom mics and producers standing aside their introduction to a shaman (or medicine) to then embarking upon a most vulnerable sacred journey with that shaman and medicine? What happens when Don Luis has a scheduling conflict, no one working for Light & Shadows Productions can vouch for a shaman, and we invite one who is untested to our experience? What happens when a dream to share the sacred extends into the crude realms of producing a series? Of Instagram? Of commercialized bullshit?

We need to take great care in those realms, while carrying a sobering awareness that spaces take and reshape even the purest of messages. We can’t control the realms or how they spin. We can only control our presence within them, and the rest is what’s meant to be. From that uncomfortable understanding of the imperfections of a transmission so big, if we hope to ever do Surviving Reality again, we need to continually improve our transmission and refine our presence in the space we’ve chaotically entered into.

So, next year we’ll share the first and most spontaneous transmission anyone has shared that extends from the shamanic wisdom of the Amazon jungle to people who might be fans of Real Housewives, Big Brother or The Traitors. It feels uncomfortable, because we don’t want to compromise artistically in storytelling about such inspiring subjects as plant medicine and consciousness. We don’t want to simply use the sacred to create a quirky spinoff show that waters down the message. We do want, however, to reach people who wouldn’t otherwise investigate plant medicine, but could find inspiration in the rawness it unearths. We want to reach people who might watch Survivor or The Real World or Love Island or any apparently superficial show for a reason — people ready for reconnection, for seeing and hearing authentic human experiences with heart.

We believe strongly in the concept — simply documenting what we can, respectfully, of one of the most profound spaces on Earth for healing and human growth — and we believe in our own ability to grow in our approach to storytelling and space-holding as we go.

We also believe we shot something awesome, and have taken some time to celebrate.

Or to recover and do dozens of hours of relationship and personal therapy, in my case. So what now?

Surviving Reality continues into post-production and its important conversations, and I return to Substack for the first time in nearly 14 months. I return to catch you up with my creative life, and I’ll continue returning when I can manage to sit down in front of a keyboard and write, or click “publish” on some awesome videos put together by our team.

Light & Shadows continues with, and also aside from, Surviving Reality. A lot has changed internally since we were releasing videos regularly — Darren and Tamar have voluntarily left the team, while Juanchis and Luis (Almicar) have shifted toward roles helping us when we have a shoot, but not in post-production or pre-production. Still a long-term team of four continues. We are sitting on a few nice videos to share, and my sadly atrophied writing muscles again feel the itch. We’re still dedicating ourselves primarily to making Surviving Reality survive long enough to be bought, but we look forward to bringing other videos and Epics too.

I continue putting one foot in front of the other when the temptation to crumble or give up remains great. Fortunately and unfortunately, a lot of my personal struggles arose alongside our November filming, and they’re ongoing, so I won’t be sharing much about them in writing or video anytime soon. RIP to my stays on soapboxes, and welcome to our impending sharing on logs at Fire Council.

Good to be reaching you again. Thanks for reading, and keeping the faith that our highest creation is still coming.