The Path Widens: From La Finca to the Forest
What feels like the end is really a stepping stone of the soul’s journey.
I close my eyes and remind myself, life is a teaching, through people we meet, places we’re drawn to, things that magically spark our interests, and wounds that we carry.
Hello friends, sending you love -
Through this writing, I want to invite the work of Robert Romanyshyn to carry us. His work in The Wounded Researcher: Research with Soul in Mind encourages us to see our life as a form of soulful inquiry, where our wounds, longings, dreams, and synchronicities become data points in a deeper, imaginal field of knowing. He honours the soul in research and reminds us that the soul is always speaking to us, if we are willing to listen.
In Romanyshyn’s language, research is not something we do in libraries or laboratories; it is something we live. In this sense, our whole life is research.
Every heartbreak is a study in love.
Every threshold crossed, a hypothesis tested.
Every synchronicity, a footnote from the soul.
We gather material through experience, grief, awe, the mundane, and the mystical. We are not just researchers; we are the researched. Roberts' work reminds us that our curiosities are not random; they’re invitations from something deeper. Everything, every mistake, heartbreak, joy, or confusion, is part of the living curriculum. We are both the subject and the author, both the wounded and the one who learns to heal.
I asked in the previous Letter…
Why do we love the things we love?
Romanyshyn writes about the things we are interested in "choosing us, as much as, or more than we choose them.” In the same way, life experiences often seem to choose us before we understand why. The relationships, the lands we’re drawn to, the dreams we can’t shake, they are teachings designed specifically for our soul’s unfolding.
Finca El Péndulo and I met for the first time whilst scrolling through Workaway. El Pendulo is a holistic centre nestled in the heart of Mexico. I saw pictures of horses, smiles of the community, and I discovered that La Finca was working with plant medicine and hosting retreats; it had the most stunning ceremony space. As soon as I saw it, I knew I was going, I felt it. The heart rate shifting, the subtle glimmer in the stomach, that resonance. It’s the body saying yes before the mind has a chance to ask any questions.
As a psychonaut and a student of Transpersonal Psychology, this place was an opportunity to merge two seemingly separate worlds: the science of my studies and the spirituality of living at La Finca. It was a chance to live the theory, to let the teachings move from the page into the soil, the body, and the breath.
And in the spirit of Robert Romanyshyn’s wounded researcher, I see now that this place also chose me. Not by chance, but by design. My longings, my questions, conscious or not, were already calling this experience into being. I thought I was going to La Finca to learn, but the land, the medicine, and the silence were already studying me long before the gates opened.
Our relationship had begun; we just hadn’t met in the physical yet.
In the meantime, I went to Goa, met a special human outside a coffee shop called Dreamland, and went on a love adventure. Twelve months later, the Finca was calling me, and I booked my flight, alone.
As the plane descended over the misty mountain tops of Mexico, I found myself gazing down at the curves and crevices of the land. There was something very much alive in it, something ancient and knowing. It felt as though the land itself was receiving me, as if it already knew I was coming.
“The topics we choose, choose us—perhaps even more than we choose them.” Robert Romanyshyn
In this case, it wasn’t a topic, but a place, Mexico. And just like with the wounds, dreams, and stories Romanyshyn describes, this land had been waiting. I had felt its essence in subtle ways before I arrived, like a psychic invitation carried in the body or the soul’s imagination.
This wasn’t just travel. It was a return to something familiar, something mythic, something quietly woven into my destiny.
Romanyshyn teaches that the researcher, and I would add, the seeker or pilgrim, is drawn by a kind of magnetic field of meaning. The places we are called to are not random. They are alive with a soul. They are co-participants in our transformation. And sometimes, they remember us before we remember ourselves.
The gates of the Finca opened for the first time, and I was met by a volunteer and taken to my house, made of earth, akin to the one I had on my vision board six months earlier. To me, I was living in paradise, sharing my space with other wanderers, immersed in nature, majestic scenes of the horses running through the farm, a lake with turtles, and people of all kinds coming through the gates, travelers from the US to the wonderful local Mexicans coming to work. It is like a beautiful bubble. My body softened. I wanted to dance, sing, and express. My mind felt calm, my root chakra merged with the land underneath me, and I was home.
A few months in, I was working for Mexisoul, the plant medicine retreat held at El Pendulo. Serving in ayahuasca ceremonies, carrying people to the bathroom, witnessing people go through their process, listening to the musicians sing from their souls, holding people's hands, it is sacred to witness people choosing to leap into the unknown. I went through so much of my process simply by witnessing others. Serving in ceremonies deeply opens my heart.
I was exactly where I needed to be. What a gift.
You think it is the final destination, but it turns out to be a stepping stone.
Now, almost six months after landing in Mexico, I am going to the Jungle. Arkana has called me, it’s a spiritual centre across Peru, Mexico, and soon Costa Rica, doing exactly what I loved to do the most at Mexisoul, serving in ceremonies and facilitating.
I didn’t know if I was ready for the jungle. Yet I found myself reaching out, and after two interviews, I got the position as Facilitator. My flight is in five days, and for the first time in a while, I am nervous.
The feelings are a mixture of leaving my tribe and community I have made here in Mexico, leaving the safety I have felt in La Finca, and the fear of who I am becoming. I feel the medicine woman emerging, ever so gently, yet certain. It is clear now that life is pulling me in a certain direction that I dare not resist; I trust life—learning to surrender to the current.
I haven’t personally met with Ayahuasca for four years. As they say, the abuelita will call you when she is ready, and here in Mexico, I didn’t feel her call. Peru, however, is working with the Shipibo Tradition in the home of the medicine itself. And now, I feel her again, the Grandmother, stirring something deep inside me. The jungle is calling. And this time, I am ready to listen.
I can almost feel the grief of who I am now. This threshold, from one step to the next, I watch my thoughts of fear arise, and I choose love and courage every time. In Romanyshyn’s language, the path of the wounded researcher is never linear. It spirals. Each place, each threshold, is another descent into the soul, another chapter in a myth that is still unfolding.
The next time I write of this living myth will be from The Amazon, and so this story is to be continued…
Beautiful writing. Love your journey. So interested to hear more unfolding!