A Ritual Hook Suspension Experience

A few days ago I had the opportunity to participate in my first hook suspension. It was a powerful initiatory experience and rite of passage. It was a very personal and vulnerable experience, I think for everyone involved. I suspended with 4 of my friends, all men, all Aries including myself! Some of their partners were there which held down an important feminine presence. It was in an open space from an old banyan tree, with a Balinese shaman who looked exactly like Jack Sparrow dancing around and doing head stands and seemingly pulling the energetic strands of reality with his hands and body. That guy was fascinating.

For me the piercing was easy. There was pain but that's ok. In general I have a really high pain tolerance so piercings and tattooing is easy for me to handle. The piercings I received were large fish hooks. After I got pierced (suicide suspension - 2 points in the back) I was feeling quite confident about the suspension. I thought I had it no problem. But the suspension itself was actually much more challenging for me than I anticipated.

The minute I got rigged in and the rope started pulling up it's like my whole reality got turned inward. Everyone was there looking at me but it was like at that time I was the only person alive in the universe. I felt completely present with my inner reality and all of my relationships and things like that vanished. I often feel like I have an urge to reach out, to write to friends, to be with friends, but in this moment I was totally with myself, no distractions. It was a welcome space to return to.

I heard the hardest part was the head trip to get into the air so I decided to face that as quickly as possible and just jump.

The minute I was up there it was like this festering pit of grief, trauma, fear, pity, shame, pain, and darkness that lived inside my gut got dislodged and I was overcome by a really intense and dreadful energy. I'm not unfamiliar with this energy, my personal mountain to climb, my inner boss monster to battle. I've met him whenever I've sat in ceremony and on many other medicine journeys. I didn't really expect the emotional component to be as strong as it was during the suspension. The physical part was a piece of cake compared to that.

After facing the deepy darks and creepy crawlies of my soul I started feeling really nauseous and thought that purging would be a good way to release that. So I asked to come down, not long after I first went up. I went back up again later. I felt really inclined towards being alone. I had fasted for the day before and morning of so I had nothing to purge. I did some rapé which helped me release energetically, I cried a little bit, came back into presence and laid down for a little bit as my friend Lion went up, full power.

After Lion went down I went back up again, feeling a bit more resolved this time to stay up there as long as I could. I set clearer boundaries for myself and for the facilitator, I wanted to go up more slowly and I didn't want to spin or swing around. I went up more slowly the second time spending a bit more time on the ground on my tippy toes with them shaking a bit before allowing myself to come back up.

Once up there I met the same grief and pain but tried my best to sit with it, feeling resolved to face it. This shit comes up over and over, when I drink medicine especially, sometimes when I meditate, even sometimes when I sit and paint. I feel like it's my work to do in this life to arrive back home, to release whatever darkness is in there that I have trouble sitting with, or to make friends with it, to be with it without discomfort.

My mind was saying "I want to come down" but I tried my best not to listen to that, and to spend as much time up there as I could. I think I was up there for about 10 or 15 minutes only. I feel devoted to return at some point though, to face the fear and discomfort and to try to spend an even longer time up there. Maybe at some point all of the resistance breaks and it releases.

It made me realize how much work I have left to do. Sometimes I feel like oh I've drinken so much ayahuasca, I've done so many meditation retreats, I've done the juice fasts and read the spiritual books, I'm good, I'm totally healed. But then I have an experience like I just had and I say "oh wow I thought I let go of that years ago, I thought I worked through that" I guess not!

I feel the invitation to go more deeply inward now, to cultivate that true introversion that I felt during the suspension in the rest of my life. To not reach out to other people as crutches or distractions to not look for peace and satisfaction anywhere outside of myself. I'm going to return to the suspension because I feel like until I can be totally at peace and full of joy in that space, I cant be totally at peace anywhere.

As an addendum I will add that suspension itself has origins in Native American rites of passage ceremonies. Most other indigenous cultures have some version of a rite of passage ceremony for sometimes women but especially men that entails going through an ordeal of great pain that requires strength to overcome it. Much of the time the men would receive tattoos after completing these rites of passages to mark them as men and to allow them to participate in their society (I received some ceremonial handpoke tattoo work on my chin today to commemorate.) I feel blessed and honoured to have had the opportunity to participate in such a powerful ritual.

Thank you for reading.