Almost 3 years ago, I took the plunge of moving off-grid into a raw desert landscape. I left the city and convenience behind. I decided to leave a path towards stability for a spiritual quest. I didn't have clarity on what I wanted to pursue, only what I wanted to leave behind. Even the camper I called home was unnervingly unstable when strong winds came through. Most of the time, I felt terrified.
That first summer, I spent many days waiting for the sun to set and the earth to cool down before exploring the landscape around my home. I had a clear path for these walks – my dog and I would walk down to an abandoned cattle tank that collected rainwater from the monsoons. The area had been filling with greenery over the past few weeks of rain. One night it was transformed. Glowing white flowers now filled the basin, turning up to the darkening sky.
This story is about my encounter with Sacred Datura. In some way, this encounter created a shift that is still unfolding. It illuminated the intensity of the fear I was carrying with me.
Datura startled me with the beauty of her flowers growing in this rough, overworked land. Before her shrubs had grown over the land here, it had shown tire tracks, shotgun shells, old beer cans, and the tracks of many cows. Even her leaves were dusty and chewed up by insects. But when night fell, all that was visible was the pale flowers reflecting the moonlight.
Synchronicity led me to learn the art of flower essences shortly after this, giving me a pathway to keep working with Datura. I collected just one flower, large enough to cover the bowl of water I had prepared and I left the essence to infuse in the moonlight. Strange things happened as I continued to work with the flower essence. I would notice dark shapes around me when I walked in the desert at dusk. One night I watched my dog run out to the open desert and spent some time calling her back, only to find her already at home when I returned. The need I felt to control my reality was starting to slip away. The fear of insecurity sometimes shifted into a joy of freedom.
During a class on the Yoga Sutras, my teacher made a comment which gave a name to the fear that had been ruling my thoughts since I decided on this transition. We were going over the five kleshas, the mental afflictions that poison our mind and prevent a person from reaching enlightenment. She was discussing abhinivesha, which I had always thought of as the fear of death. She explained that it goes much deeper than that: it is the clinging onto our name, our title, our body, everything we identify with during this lifetime. To live outside of this thought process is to fully accept the impermanence of our lives.
I was still grieving the loss of my career path, my apartment, my favorite places to go and things to do in my old life. Although I was guided by my heart to choose into this much different life, the choice challenged everything I thought I knew about myself. For months, I had been overwhelmed with fear, not knowing who I was or what I was here to do. Working with Datura pushed me to look deeper, past the surface level version of “me” I identified with. It helped me to peel off some of the layers of abhinivesha that had overwhelmed my thoughts.
It is interesting to me that it took a poisonous plant to lead me to a place where I found more peace. I had a preconception of Datura as being a particularly dangerous plant, but my work with her was gentle, loving, and soothing to my soul. Months after I had stopped searching for mention of Datura in my books on Ayurveda and herbalism, I came across a line in the Vamana Purana. In this ancient Sanskrit text, the thorn apple (Datura) is said to originate from the heart of Shiva.
Shiva is nothingness. Shiva is darkness. His dance is the eternal flow between creation and destruction. He is a reminder that we exist here due to the perfect coherence of the divine. We leave the darkness of the cosmic womb only to return again. I found immense comfort in this thought.