I am going to Cambodia... Even as I write this sentence, my jaw tightens. My body is holding far more than my mind can understand, and my mind is doing what it has always done when it senses that something enormous is approaching: it tries to decode, predict, explain, and protect me. I am preparing for this journey as one prepares for a meeting that may alter the course of a life. At least this is how it feels... My body FEELS SO MUCH! my mind doesn't know what it all means... it simply freaks out... The feeling is both exciting and unsettling. I have felt it once before, in the days leading up to my first mushroom journey, when I knew..... with no rational evidence... that my life would be divided into before and after. I did not know what would happen. I only knew that the person entering the experience would not be identical to the person returning from it.

Cambodia carries the same sensation. My mind keeps asking what I am going to meet there, while my body behaves as if the meeting has already begun, I am definitely tuned in there already. Maybe that is why my jaw is clenching. The ego would like to negotiate the terms of the encounter. It wants an itinerary for transformation, a list of expected outcomes (only good ones!), and an emergency exit through which the familiar self can escape unchanged. Yet while I was applying for my passport and trying to buy the plane tickets, a series of strange events began to show me how dying actually happens. I do not mean the death of the physical body. I mean the gradual withdrawal of life from an identity, a structure, or a system that can no longer carry us forward. Something stops responding in the old way. The familiar mechanisms fail. Control reaches for the handle and discovers that the door is no longer there.

When the systems stopped behaving normally

It began with my passport. I received an application number and a website where I was supposed to track the status. I entered the information and found nothing. I tried again. Still nothing. Finally, I called the passport office. The person on the phone told me that they could see my application perfectly well. While they were still speaking to me, I entered the same information again. On their side, my application existed. On mine, it did not. Today I felt something changed inside me: government is simply another system, and a system does not encounter me as a living human being. It recognizes a record: a passport number, a Social Security number, a date of birth, an assigned status, a category, and a set of instructions governing how someone in that category is expected to behave. Within its architecture, we resemble products arranged on a shelf: each of us labeled, numbered, classified, tracked, and assigned a particular place. The system can see my record while remaining completely unable to see me. And when the record cannot be found, it is almost as though I cease to exist within that reality. But I do on this end... maybe this is what I was beginning to feel: the strange distance between being alive and being administratively recognized as alive.

Then there was an email. I had read it. It concerned an alleged outstanding balance, and my mother had even received a phone call about the same matter. A day later, I could no longer find the email, and the supposed debt appeared not to exist... Also, even the insurance agent could not find my name in her system even though she could read notes where others were able to authenticate me! Of course, every event can be given an ordinary explanation: a delayed database, a website error, an inbox filter, a misunderstanding. Yet initiations rarely announce themselves with trumpets and a certificate of authenticity. They often begin through small disturbances in the fabric of the ordinary, especially when several of them gather around the same threshold, at the same time. What affected me was not any single technological failure. It was the repetition of one message: what you see is no longer the whole of what is happening.

The plane tickets made that message impossible to ignore. I spent two hours searching for flights to Cambodia and disliked everything I found. Then one ticket appeared: a Delta itinerary through Korea. What made this striking was that several weeks earlier, for no logical reason, I had told the women in my circle that IF I flied, it would be through Korea. I had no decision then, no ticket then. I had not chosen a route. The sentence had simply come out of my mouth. And now there it was.

I tried to buy the ticket, but the system seemed to collapse in front of me. The itinerary disappeared. I went to bed and spent another four hours searching the next morning, but the original fare was gone. Delta’s website kept telling me that nothing was available, almost as though those flights had never existed. The same thing happened with United and Priceline. I could see the itineraries. I could see the prices. I would click to view or book one of the available options, and suddenly: Oops, sorry—nothing is available. The flights existed on the screen until the moment I tried to claim one. Then they dissolved. Anything remotely suitable climbed toward $3,000, $5,000 and more. Each time I tried to complete a purchase, the payment failed, the itinerary changed, or the flight vanished. I even called United. The representative could see the schedule. He could see the price. Yet for reasons he could not explain, he could not select or book it for me. FROM THE INSIDE! I began to feel as if space itself were refusing to let me pass through that particular door.

And then Delta called me... The day before, I had sent them a request and promptly forgotten about it. Now a woman was on the phone offering to help. She found an itinerary for me, through Korea... Seoul, then Hanoi, then onward to Siem Reap, the gateway to Angkor. The price was nearly half of everything else I had been seeing. There were no payment failures, no disappearing segments, no struggle at all. The path that opened was easier, clearer, and somehow more precise than the path I had been trying to force... Lesson learned - LET THE UNIVERSE GATHER ALL HELP FOR YOU! and DO NOT worry! 

Now I will have almost an entire day in Vietnam on the way there and almost an entire day on the way back. I will apply for the visa next week. For the moment, I am sitting with the question of why this unexpected opening has been placed inside my journey. Is there something I am meant to see in Hanoi? Someone I am meant to meet? A pause my body will need before and after Cambodia? I do not have the answer yet, and I am resisting the old impulse to manufacture one. Perhaps clarity will arrive in the same way as the ticket: after effort has exhausted itself and control has finally loosened its grip. It was all about the control... the minute I said to myself out loud - I SURRENDER! if YOU don't want me to go there, I won't go! EVEN if everything has been signed and arranged... I surrender...  immediately after Delta called... Now I will stay in SHINTA MANI SIEM REAP! Looking at pictures, it reminded me a bit of Singapore... Why Vietnam though? Other than I always loved their food and BAKERY is to die for! maybe because it was a French colony? I have a soft spot for French people after all... I remember once a French guy in Almaty tried to date me, we were just friends but he was in love with me. and he so wanted to be my boyfriend. with that French accent... Somehow I knew I needed to end up in the US... to meet French people here... 

When help arrived in threes

At the same time that formal systems were becoming strangely unreliable, living human support began appearing without my asking for it. All summer I had been looking for a woman who could help me clean and care for my forest property when the volume of work became too much. I spoke to several people, but nothing came together. Then yesterday, a neighbor arrived with her two daughters. No one had summoned them. She looked around and said: “What you have here is simply magical.” Then the three of them offered to help clean the houses whenever I could not manage it myself. They told me I did not need to pay them. If I wanted to give them something, it could be a donation. “Neighbors help neighbors,” they said. Three women arrived after I had spent an entire summer searching for one. 

While I was standing there with them, already close to tears, Matt appeared. He had not called or sent a message. He had been driving past, noticed my car, and decided to stop. He walked in and said that he had come to fasten the hooks properly in the guest house (the House of the Muse). He had already fixed them. Now he wanted to take measurements, find a couple of options, and show me what needed to be done outside to repair another problem.

That was the moment I began to cry. Exhaustion was there, and so was the familiar weight of carrying too much alone, yet these tears came from the shock of goodness. I cried because the world was caring for me in a language so material that I could no longer dismiss it as a comforting spiritual idea. Care had hands. Care brought daughters. Care carried tools. Care tightened hooks, measured walls, folded laundry, and said “You do not have to do all of this alone.”

Something in me has been trained to believe that safety comes from anticipating every problem, arranging every resource, and remaining indispensable. Yet here I was, watching life organize support around me through people I had not recruited and moments I had not planned. As the transactional systems failed, the living network revealed itself. Maybe this, too, is part of the dying: the part of me that has survived by over-functioning is discovering that the world can meet me before I collapse.

Following the Dragon

For several months now, I have experienced an active connection with what I call the constellation or field of the Dragons. The contact comes through symbols, images, bodily sensations, meditation, and sacred dance. Someone else may describe this as archetypal material, the language of the psyche, the intelligence of the nervous system, imagination, ancestral memory, or a transpersonal field. I have no need to force one vocabulary on another person. I can only describe how it lives in me: it feels like communication.

When my sacred dance mentor first spoke about Cambodia in March, my body responded immediately. I knew I needed to go, although I had no idea how it could happen or why my authority said "YES!" Later, she told me with complete certainty that I had to be there. When I explained that I could not afford the entire journey, she took care of the experience on the ground for me. My responsibility was to buy the plane ticket and arrive. Once again, what had seemed financially impossible was rearranged through another person’s generosity and conviction.

The Dragon imagery intensified. I began encountering teachings about Angkor, sacred architecture, celestial maps, and the relationship between the earthly and the cosmic. Angkor is far more than a single temple. Archaeological research has revealed Greater Angkor as a vast, low-density urban civilization organized through temples, roads, reservoirs, canals, and engineered landscapes across roughly a thousand square kilometers. Depending on how one draws the modern boundaries, its scale belongs in conversation with the great metropolitan regions of our own time. The official history already asks us to expand our imagination: this was not an isolated monument hidden in a jungle. It was an immense human world shaped through water, stone, geometry, kingship, devotion, and a cosmological vision. It is the size of NEW YORK! 

The cosmology is not speculation. Angkorian temples were built as earthly expressions of a sacred universe. UNESCO describes the plan of Angkor Thom as a sacred mandala and the Bayon at its center as an earthly representation of Mount Meru: the center of the universe in Hindu and Buddhist tradition. Archaeologists and archaeoastronomers have also documented the importance of cardinal directions and solar cycles in the Khmer landscape. These structures were never merely buildings. They were technologies of relationship between human beings, the gods, the land, time, and the sky.

Alongside that established history, I encountered an alternative theory that selected temples of Angkor correspond to stars in the constellation Draco, just as some alternative researchers have associated the pyramids of Giza with Orion. The proposed Draco map is not accepted as established archaeological fact, the stronger shared evidence concerns Angkor’s cardinal orientation, solar relationships, mandala form, and Mount Meru symbolism. I can hold that distinction without abandoning what the image awakened in me. Historical facts are also stories, although some stories are supported by a wider body of shared evidence. Spiritual recognition belongs to a different register. It asks not only “Can this be proven?” but also “Why did this symbol find me now, and what is it asking me to become?”

Draco coils through the northern sky near the celestial axis around which the stars appear to turn. Even before any temple is placed upon it, the image carries the power of an ancient guardian wound around the center. In older Indian traditions, serpent beings and nāgas move between worlds, guard waters and treasures, shape fertility, and occupy the borderlands between human and divine realities. The modern esoteric language of “Draconians” cannot be reduced to a simple sentence in the Vedas, yet it resonates with a much older field of serpent and dragon symbolism. Within my own channeling, they came as beings who “wove the Milky Way”: great architects, geneticists, and biologists of manifested life of our galacsies!

I do not offer this as a doctrine for anyone else to believe. I offer it as the symbolic and spiritual reality through which my journey is unfolding. The Dragons, as they present themselves to me, are architects of manifestation. They understand that spirit without matter cannot become a lived world, and matter without spirit loses meaning, direction, and consciousness. They do not ask me to escape the lower realm in pursuit of something supposedly more elevated. They keep showing me that the higher and the lower are partners. Neither is complete alone. Heaven requires a body through which to touch the earth... or Mars... or Sirion... 

The sacred intelligence of sex

Today, during trans sacred dance in the sauna, the Dragons came again. The message was direct: shame is an imposed program. We have been taught to split sexuality from spirituality, as though one belongs in darkness and the other in light. We praise consciousness while distrusting the body that makes consciousness available to us. We speak of creation in abstract, purified language and become embarrassed by the biological gates through which embodied life arrives. Yet for human life, sexual energy is foundational. It is the charge that moves toward union, the force that reaches beyond the isolated self, and one of the great biological engines through which life continues. Even when it is not expressed through intercourse or reproduction, Eros carries the urge to make contact, enter form, and create.

The message I received was ecstatic in its simplicity: Look around. Life is here because life desires to continue. Every human body carries the history of that desire. Sexuality is not a spiritual inconvenience attached to an otherwise pure being. It is one of the ways spirit enters density. It is the current through which possibility becomes flesh, relationship, art, work, shelter, beauty, and any future. Biology MUST exist through sex... and if we ever want to populate that Cosmos - SEX... only SEX... which will create life that can survive on other planets... The more sex - the better! The question the Dragons placed before me was: What are you creating with your sexual energy?

That question is much larger than “What are you doing with your sex life?” Sexual energy can become children, intimacy, pleasure, devotion, movement, courage, art, leadership, healing, or destruction. It can be hoarded, suppressed, traded for approval or some "dirty deal", scattered through fantasy, or converted into creation. It can keep us circling an unavailable person, or it can return to our own hands and build something in the world.

Today, for the first time, I burned letters into wood and made a beautiful sign for one of the houses on my forest property. My hands took fire and marked matter. Something that had lived only as an image and a name entered wood and became visible. That, too, was sexual energy. It moved from the invisible into form. It created a home, an identity, and a threshold through which future guests will walk.

This is what the Dragon field means to me by manifestation: spirit descends far enough to acquire weight. Inspiration accepts the discipline of the hand. Desire becomes an object, a place, a choice, a body of work. The sacred does not hover above life. and life can be messy too... Life fastens the hook correctly. It cleans the cabin. It buys the ticket. It burns the name into wood.

The first shamans and the language my mind cannot speak

Another teaching arrived with the Dragons: they created the first shamans. I understand the shaman as someone who crosses the threshold between worlds, receives wisdom or knowledge there, and brings it back to repair matter. The journey is incomplete if the traveler returns with only an extraordinary story! The medicine must touch the village. It must enter the body, the relationship, the home, the illness, the conflict, or the broken structure. A shaman does not abandon matter for spirit. A shaman moves between them and restores communication.

A few years ago, a clairvoyant woman told me that an enormous shaman protects me. In Human Design, I also carry a channel that is often described through initiatory or shamanic language. I did not know then what I was supposed to do with those images. Now they are returning within a much larger pattern... and clarity... 

During dynamic meditations and trance dance, I have begun speaking in a language I do not consciously understand. My ears hear unfamiliar sounds. My rational mind cannot translate them. Yet my heart seems to understand what my mouth is saying. In these dances, my hands and feet stop feeling like possessions I must direct. They form gestures that resemble mudras maybe. They repeat precise movements with particular sounds. Sometimes I sound like I am casting a spell on something...  The body appears to remember an intelligence that the conscious mind has never studied. I have gradually stopped trying to control it. I let it pass through me. At times, it feels as though something is being downloaded through my body into our density, not information that I can immediately explain, but pattern, frequency, permission, or form. I leave the dance changed before I can say what changed. 

And almost every time, my libido rises afterward. 

Of course it does. The same current that animates ecstatic movement also animates desire. The body does not recognize our carefully constructed wall between mystical energy and sexual energy. It knows aliveness as aliveness. The impulse to pray, dance, touch, create, speak, and merge may wear different garments, but beneath them runs the same river moving toward greater life.

Once you know, you are responsible for knowing

There is a line spoken by Jesus in The Chosen that has stayed with me: “I ask a lot of those who follow me, and I ask very little of those who do not.” It is not a verbatim line from the Gospels, although its meaning echoes the teaching in Luke 12:48: from everyone who has been given much, much will be required.

For a long time, I wondered what that really meant. Now I am beginning to understand it through the body. When you have never touched a certain truth, you live according to the world you know. Once you have touched it... once you have recognized it in your bones... you become responsible for the recognition. You can still choose the familiar distortion. You can continue participating in an arrangement you know to be false because truth threatens your comfort, identity, marriage, work-career, belonging, or social acceptance. Yet the choice has changed. You are no longer acting only from ignorance. You have met the truth and decided that the lie feels safer... 

This is where the demand becomes greater. Truth does not require perfection, and it does not always reveal an immediate solution. It does ask for integrity: a willingness to stop building a life around what we can no longer pretend not to know. Each time we abandon what we know in order to preserve the familiar, something inside us fragments. We may remain socially functional while becoming less and less available to our own life.

After I told my master about the strange events gathering around this journey and my feeling that systems were collapsing before my eyes, he wrote:

Your correctness does not have to benefit society or make anyone happy. It is a matter of your survival as a whole being amid the total dysfunction around you. We are moving out of the Age of Dirty Deals and into a period of Individualism. But that individualism must be correct. Most people will live it, as they usually do, through the False Self.

His words reached the exact center of what I have been witnessing. By “correctness,” in the language we share, we mean the alignment that allows a person to remain internally whole... it carries no claim of moral superiority. The old world trains us in dirty deals: I betray a piece of myself so that you will not leave... I pretend not to know so that the system will continue to include me... I offer my labor, sexuality, silence, or truth in exchange for belonging. These bargains may look stable from the outside. Inside, they slowly consume the one who makes them.

Maybe the systems around me have not suddenly become more dysfunctional. Maybe I have become less available for the bargains required to keep pretending they work. My survival as a whole being may depend on allowing certain doors to disappear, certain transactions to fail, and certain identities to die. It may also depend on recognizing the forms of life that arrive in their place: three neighbors offering their hands, a man stopping with his tools, a mentor opening a road to Cambodia, a Delta representative calling after I had forgotten I asked for help, fire entering wood, and an unknown language entering my mouth.

The initiation has already begun

I still do not know what awaits me in Cambodia. I do not know exactly why my route passes through Vietnam and Korea, although I spoke that route aloud before I found it. I do not know what Vietnam wants from me during those two long pauses in Hanoi. I do not know what will happen when I stand at Angkor, inside a sacred landscape built to join land, water, kingship, gods, time, and sky. I do not know whether the Dragons will meet me there as visions, sensations, people, dreams, memories, or a silence deeper than any message. I do not know how it will feel to dance with the first school of Apsaras... What I do know is that Cambodia is already happening.

The initiation did not wait for the temple. It began with a passport page that refused to recognize my number. It continued through an email that vanished, a debt that dissolved, a ticket that could be seen but not selected, and a route that opened only when the struggle ended. It appeared through neighbors who came in threes and through practical kindness arriving without an appointment. It moved through my body in the sauna, through my jaw’s attempt to control the unknown, through the sounds my mind cannot translate, through the rise of libido after trance, and through fire writing a name into wood.

This is how I am beginning to understand death: life withdraws its energy from the form we have outgrown. The form may continue standing for a while, but it no longer carries us. Then another intelligence begins assembling the next world around us. At first it looks like disruption. Later, if we are willing to release the demand that reality behave according to our plan, we may recognize the architecture.

The Dragons, in my experience, are architects. That is why they are leading me toward a city whose stones were arranged as a conversation between earth and cosmos. They are teaching me to build in the same way: to bring the invisible into matter without degrading either one, to let sexuality become creation, to let spiritual knowledge repair the material world, and to choose what is internally true even when the old system offers rewards for betrayal. To try... to risk... to make a mistake... to learn... but keep creating... 

I am going to Cambodia. My plane will leave in September, but the journey has already started. The woman who arrives at Angkor will have crossed many thresholds before her feet touch its stones. Somewhere between the failing systems and the helping hands, between the Dragon and the burning wood, between the death of control and the return of Eros, the person I have been is already loosening her grip. 

I am frightened. I am listening. I am going.

And this time, I do not need to know in advance who will return.