Michelle Rodriguez - New Dimensions
AUTHOR Magazine Founder Oona has an introspective conversation with Michelle Rodriguez about her experiences with the psychoactive brew, Ayahuasca. Here, the award-winning actress reveals the physical and spiritual arcs on the way to discovering other dimensions in consciousness and reflects on the importance of intention.
Ayahuasca. Is it a drug or a prodigious visionary plant, paving the way to regaining a long-lost connectedness to nature, and igniting awareness of what lies deep within our subconscious in order to align our spirit? The recent ayahuasca rush, perpetuated by global high society, has helped propel the spiritual ceremony to fame, rekindling interest in a practice rooted in shamanistic cultures thousands of years old. In this extract from AUTHOR, one of our cover stars, actress Michelle Rodriguez talks about her experience with ancient medicine, engaging the sense that we are connected to something much bigger than ourselves.
OONA: Were you aware of the power of visualization, before you took ayahuasca?
MICHELLE: “ With certain drugs you have this kind of ability to manifest the spiritual questions you’ve always had in your own visual cortex. For me, if drugs do anything, it’s that. It solidifies more of my intuition, my inner feeling, and my sensation about the world around me. That’s why I think it has been helpful for me to create awareness, but doing that every month? No. I want to be able to sharpen my tool, my mind, and my body enough to be able to do enough good as a human on this earth to really lift the veil and see what’s going on around me. The idea of doing a bunch of hallucinogenics in a club with a bunch of people partying is the most disgusting thing on the planet to me because I’m so sensitive to energy that I would just be taking on someone else’s negative bullshit. Imagine you have a sea of 60,000 people at Ultra Fest, or you’re at Burning Man. If you do it in the wrong conditions, you could go crazy!”
“I´m so sensitive to energy” - Michelle Rodriguez
OONA: “Agreed. So the ultimate experience is afterward because it does alter your perception. Does it change every time for you or is the real continuation for this development of the mind?”
MICHELLE: “It had changed every time for me, but in general, I think the one thing that I look for is to seek a developmental shift in my evolution. My intention is to try and nda new developmental stage of perceiving the world. If I stop being curious, I just might as well be dead. Because as we keep getting older, we have more opinions about things, we have more ideas about what the world looks like. When you’re a child, you’re like this liquid, goopy, owing conductive thing of energy and when you get older you start solidifying into this manifested crystal. Before I become a statue in my old age, I want to make sure that I solidify into something open-minded that’s always allowing energy and a new perspective of the world in. Without that, I’m not going to evolve. And the older I get, the more opinionated I become, and the less that I let in. You know the actor Sam Worthington, the leading Avatar. He’s a very simple, sweet man. He said something that I will never forget as long as I live. He said that when you’re a kid, you look at the world like this [makes a wide gesture], and as you get older, all of a sudden, your perspective starts closing in, and closing in, and closing in until you’re looking at the world through a peephole. With ayahuasca, I’m trying to get some DMT [N, N-Dimethyltryptamine; the active tryptamine molecule in ayahuasca] into that peephole.”
Interview by OONA CHANEL
Pictures by HECTOR PEREZ
Introduction by CHANTAL BROCCA
Make up by ADRIENNE HERBERT
Hair by TRACI BARRETT
Casting by Allyson Spiegelman
ASM Management
Art Department LA
Retouch by Jam Imaging
