When I was 26, I trained to be a priest. I didn’t complete that training because I had an experience that made me have to leave. Not a bad experience, a life-changing, beautiful experience. It’s taken 35 years for that experience to integrate into my lived reality, and Domei is the outcome of that.
I spent years collecting facts and figures about plants. This effort served a purpose, and it still does, and an important one. It documents how our forebears fed, healed, and nourished themselves.
Exploring this plant path took me down many avenues, all of which ended at dead ends. I realised I was trying to force my way into plant knowledge.
I’d banged drums, danced myself into trance, performed sex magic, ingested more hallucinogenic mushrooms than I care to admit, called in the spirits, and did the usual performative acts that someone who thinks they’re connecting does.
I’d show up with my earnest intention and then bear down on the land like it somehow owed me something.
It didn’t work, not really. Sure, I’d come away with information: I knew the species names. I knew the patterns of the plant families, and thought the plant spirits had spoken to me, and I felt self-satisfied about having been diligent.
After all this, and even though I had made thousands of notes on plant facts, something didn’t sit right. I still felt distant. I hadn’t actually been in contact with the plant, the thing I was really seeking. It took me an embarrassingly long time to understand what was getting in the way. That thing in the way was me.
Plants don’t usually respond to force. This bearing down, demanding they reveal themselves to us. Sure, you can sit in front of a plant, use your will, focus intently, and come away with nothing but noise. You’ve been busy ticking boxes, scratching marks on notepads, prancing around some spiral, but you have not really been present.
In the early 1990s, I co-managed one of Europe’s largest new age centres. Forgive me; it was a moment, and I was young. While all my colleagues and friends were shaking rattles and fire-jumping, I went off and did something different. I explored the western contemplative tradition.
In that exploration I discovered a deep, sensory-rich world, almost hidden. Hidden because it is quiet, like an introvert, not because it holds some secret wisdom. It is hidden because it is ignored, because it doesn’t promise fireworks or guarantee profound insight. While others were going abroad to explore new cultures, I chose to stick with the traditions and practices of this land.
And this is where the contrast with everything I had been doing became clear. What I found works is the opposite: not passivity, definitely not that, neither aimlessly sitting. Instead, arriving with your hands open rather than your fists clenched, letting the attention rest receptively rather than reaching and grasping for knowledge.
Your gaze softens and your breath settles and the running commentary inside your head (the part that manages and narrates and assesses the whole time) slowly, little by little, begins to quiet. And in that quiet, something comes forward.
When we meet plants and sit quietly, open-handed, what comes forward often arises as feelings and sensations. I say to my friends: the body is the receiver. Our heads, which we predominantly live through, are the translators.
In the West specifically we put more value on our thinking mind than our feeling body. You cannot force your way into genuine relationship. You cannot click your fingers like a spoiled brat and demand the plants reveal themselves to you. It emerges, when it does, slowly and on its own terms.
One thing you need to know: force closes the very opening you are trying to move through.
What Domei asks is simple to speak, yet hard to practise. Thirty-five years of practice and I’m still learning this. It’s slower than forcing, and it goes considerably deeper.