EP11: The Healing Art of Inner Kombucha
Awareness, Attention, Acceptance
“Time seems to make life rather than count it down.” - Boyd Varty 40 Days and 40 Nights: Day 30
For most of my life I have felt that a clock has been ticking. A persistent undercurrent of urgency pulsing in the background, goals to achieve, status to be attained, things to own. All the while generating low level anxiety and dissatisfaction with life itself.
All that has begun to change.
Controlled Decay
The last few months have been a process of fermentation.
From the outside there has been no apparent progress in the usual sense.
No clear plan. No decisive next steps.
It’s been more like controlled decay.
What was once certain and solid has been slowly and imperceptibly softening, crumbling, and falling away. The patterns of my life have begun to unravel, transform, and release the energy they used to maintain themselves.
Inner Kombucha
Fermentation is controlled decay, a living self-organising system that breaks down and transforms its prima materia into something new, often something healthier. It’s not just a material transformation, but an energetic one too.
Kombucha requires a SCOBY (Symbiotic Culture Of Bacteria and Yeast), a living consortium that slowly gets to work on the tea. It also requires oxygen, it needs to breath. As the bacteria get to work a new structure emerges, a layer that protects and regulates the transforming substance beneath it. Over time, flavours deepen, and the tea takes on a new character.
As old patterns break down, they release energy back into the system. It takes a great deal of energy to maintain old patterns, especially when they create friction in the our lives. We are all expending enormous amounts of energy to maintain old patterns, to maintain a familiar sense of ‘self’ in a constantly changing world.
This period of fermentation hasn’t felt active. I thought I’d stalled, come to a halt, at times I tried to force momentum but it just felt exhausting, so I sat back and observed.
Less doing. More watching.
I learned that fermentation mostly runs itself if you set the conditions right.
It’s less action and more restraint: set boundaries, then let life reorganise itself.
Holding Patterns
One of the central things that’s become clear to me during this time is the idea of holding patterns.
A holding pattern is an intentional delay while conditions aren’t right. The plane that can’t land because there is no available runway. All you can do is sit there and hope it doesn’t run out of fuel.
The same happens in your psyche too. You find yourself on pause until enough energy, clarity, or support accumulates. Sometimes you might circle for what seems like an eternity, or, you may just end up crashing.
Holding patterns usually begin as a survival strategy. A response to childhood programming. They keep us safe when something is overwhelming or out of our control. But at some point, they outlive their usefulness.
The real danger occurs when we embed them into our identity, behaviour, and beliefs about the world. At this point, they stop protecting us and start trapping us. Now, we aren’t even attempting to land the plane.
Part of the problem is that when you leave the pattern, you go off the map. Patterns don't like that. That's why they keep pulling you back. Even when there is lots of counter-evidence to whatever the pattern is saying you simply learn to ignore it.
The crazy thing is, we aren’t even aware of most of our patterns, we just keep circling as the fuel runs out.
So what do we do?
Three Steps Out of a Holding Pattern
Over the last few months, I’ve come to see that there are three simple steps that allow us to move out of holding patterns.
Step one: Awareness.
We become aware of our patterns through honest self-observation. This is simple but not easy. We live in world of distraction and avoidance of discomfort. It takes practice to develop awareness.
Step two: Attention.
Don’t minimise it or push it away. Let your attention rest on it without trying to fix it. This is how you will truly learn who you are.
Step three: Acceptance.
Accept that this pattern exists right now, without judgment or self-criticism. Accept: this is how I am right now.
Change comes later. Acceptance comes first.
A Pattern I Didn’t See
Here’s how this process played out for me.
Whenever I came home from something enjoyable, dinner with my wife, time with friends, I had a routine, a pattern.
No matter how late it was. No matter how tired I felt. I’d turn on the TV, pour a glass of wine or grab something to snack on and sit there for an hour or two, staring at the screen, barely watching.
I thought this was normal. Just “winding down.”
My wife pointed it out to me on a number of occasions. It would piss me off when she pointed it out as I would argue that I was just relaxing, and it was perfectly normal. I was very defensive of my little pattern. (This was the first sign that something wasn’t right).
Slowly, I became more aware of it happening. It was a need nor a choice, I wasn’t in control.
Since the last 5-MeO-DMT ceremony, that awareness sharpened dramatically.
It was plain as day, I could finally acknowledge what it really was: a coping mechanism.
When I attended to it properly, I saw what was actually happening. My nervous system was completely dysregulated. I couldn’t settle. My body seemed to itch from the inside, possessed by restlessness, I couldn’t just be at home. It took an enormous amount of energy for me to do something as simple as go to bed.
The pattern wasn’t indulgence.
It was self-regulation.
And once I accepted that this was happening something changed. Every time it happened I could pause and ask:
What’s happening here?
How am I feeling?
Why am I feeling this way?
That’s when the past surfaced.
Beginnings
I was about twelve years old.
I’d been out playing with my friends in the fields near where we lived, in a small town in the Hertfordshire countryside. I came home and the house was silent.
On the mirror in the hallway, written in red pen, was a suicide letter from my father.
My parents had recently divorced. My mum had left. He wasn’t coping.
He wasn’t in the house. He’d written the note and disappeared.
I went into shock.
I didn’t know what to do. So I sat down, turned on the TV, and watched cartoons.
That was the pattern.
It kept me safe in a situation that was completely outside my control.
And that same pattern re-engaged itself every time I came home excited, stimulated, alive. This had continued, uninterrupted, for decades.
The pattern didn’t care about time.
It cared about my safety.
This is Not Mine
Not all patterns are our own. We are not inherently flawed, neurotic, or fucked up.
Almost all our patterns are inherited from family, from school, from society, from friends. Or they developed in response to how we were treated.
We absorb the coping strategies of the people around us. We imitate them. We adopt them. We are taught to feel dissatisfied, afraid, not good enough, to do better, to be better, to want more.
These patterns are passed down through generations, quietly becoming part of our own identity and we don’t even realise that this is happening.
We are taught to worry about things even though worrying about problems doesn’t really solve them, it’s just that most of us haven’t found an alternative yet.
How can you solve a problem when you don’t understand what it is or where it comes from?
So we rush around trying to find quick fixes, secrets to success, the latest hack or the one missing thing from our lives that will magically change everything.
But rushing doesn’t work either, it takes time to understand something deeply. The more complex the thing the more time it takes. We spend years studying at school and university, but how much time do we spend studying ourselves?
Is there anything more complex than being human?
It takes times to become aware, to attend to, and develop acceptance of the patterns that control us. But this is what liberates us from these inherited problems.
Letting Time Work
This is where I am now.
Not forcing change. Not tearing patterns out. But creating the conditions for fermentation.
Awareness.
Attention.
Acceptance.
Letting time do what it does best.
Time doesn’t just pass.
Time creates.