Collaborator Bios
Johana Sand
For the past ten years, Johana Sand has lived most of each year in the high Andes of Cuenca, Ecuador.
She began using a variety of plants as consciousness-expanding tools more than thirty years ago. This led her to explore the similar awareness shared by ancient enlightenment traditions like Advaita Vedanta, Kashmir Shaivism and Buddhism. Modern quantum science and neuroscience similarly refer to the field from which everything emanates and the need to see through the “illusion” of a separate self. Johana became increasingly drawn to non-dual or “direct” path teachings promoted by Nisargadatta, Ramana Maharshi and others which point the underlying REALITY behind all appearances. During the 1980’s, she and her partner Jonathan Krown co-hosted a school for consciousness in Los Angeles to explore this “burgeoning awakening” with others.
In the early 1990s, Johana and Jonathan moved to Minneapolis to be closer to her parents and other family. During this period, she raised her children and got involved with the national charter school movement (which originated in Minnesota several years before). She helped to launch more than 20 innovative public charter schools over the next decade.
Johana now occasionally holds plant medicine retreats and workshops on “non-dual pointers” in Ecuador and the United States. She launched the “Cracking the Reality Code” podcast several years ago to explore a spirituality based on direct experience. Her focus now is on exploring the use of the many tools and pointers that can shift our reality and release our trauma, helping us to understand what we essentially are.
Su Terry
Su Terry is an Internationally known jazz soloist, composer and recording artist specializing in saxophone, clarinet and shakuhachi. She’s the author of several books, including For The Curious and Inside the Mind of a Musician, and is lead columnist for The Note.
Su has been researching the nature of our reality since her teen-aged years, when her father, a chemist, introduced her to the work of Carlos Castaneda. Since then she’s made a life’s study of spiritual disciplines, with emphasis on the Fourth Way work of Gurdjieff, Taoism, and the martial art of taijiquan, in which she holds nine USKSF tournament gold medals.
Her website is https://suterry.com.
Magdalena Herreshoff
Magdalena Herreshoff was born in 1942 during World War II in the Netherlands and immigrated to the United States when she was 16 years old. In 2011, she moved to the Andes in Ecuador. She is a poet, short story writer, book artist, painter, and spiritual explorer. She has produced numerous handmade limited art edition poetry books including her first large handmade accordion book called Windows created during Jungian analysis after a second bout with breast cancer. Several of her limited-edition art books are held in Special Collections at Universities and private collections in the Pacific Northwest.
In recent years her work has evolved into larger projects: A limited edition project called Parables, a collection of 5 Broadsides describing the horrific experiences of migrants in the U.S. and the world; A one-of-a kind project of six completely handmade books called “Call and Response with poets Kabir and Rumi”. During the recent Pandemic, while in lockdown, Magdalena created a seven-panel project called The Creation of a Sanctuary, that took four months of intensive focus and labor. The Creation of a Sanctuary provided a refuge and ritual where thought could stop and Creation could emerge as if doing it for the first time. Handmade books and illustrations are not only her lineage, but also a necessary tool for her to work through trauma and facilitate self-exploration.
Magdalena’s interest in spirituality comes from being raised in a large Catholic family where she resonated more with the beautiful rituals rather than with the religion itself. In her mid-thirties she turned to Tibetan Buddhism and subsequently, for many years, to Zen practice in the Suzuki Roshi lineage with an innate desire to know, seek, explore self/Self. Magdalena is primarily focused on what we need to do in order to be loving interconnected beings (interbeings), how to nurture ourselves, how to set healthy boundaries and how to play an active part in our present evolutionary process. She is convinced that the human species is already undergoing a subtle and perhaps radical change, whether that presents itself on a physical level in terms of how we live in our environment or more importantly, through deeper, inner cellular work.
Website: www.highintheandes.com.
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/madeleen.herreshoff
Magdalena Herreshoff
Cel 0986014293
Poetry blog: www.highintheandes.com
Sent from the Valley of Chili Peppers
Darby
Darby is a certified Kiloby Inquiries facilitator, plant medicine ceremony guide and consciousness explorer, with a background in magnetic healing and integrative attunement. After a long, wild and exhausting journey to heal her childhood trauma, she came to these specific tools because their effectiveness for deep, lasting relief and inner peace was outshining all the other healing modalities she had experienced.
Put simply, the plant medicines and entheogenic substances loosen the compact soil of the subconscious mind, but they rarely pull the weeds up, roots and all. Skillful use of the Kiloby Inquiries do uproot the toxic subconscious beliefs and dissolve them one by one. Those beliefs are the drivers of all unwanted behaviors such as addictions, depression, low motivation, defensiveness, symptoms of Complex-PTSD, self-sabotage, toxic relationship attraction, and even the “I Got It, I lost it” experience of many spiritual seekers.
Darby used these tools on her own trauma and awakening journey, and knows, first hand, their effectiveness. She loves sharing what these simple tools can do to change a life, and she’s devoted to helping the ones who are ready.
These and other topics that explore consciousness and our perceived reality are what bring Darby to CrackingTheRealityCode.com.
More About Darby
When I first sat down to reflect on my awakening journey and write this bio, it looked like the journey began about 2012 – maybe even 2008 when things started to get a bit weird. Overnight I was receiving channeled messages and quickly found myself immersed in what’s become known as New Age Spirituality. But in fact, my awakening journey began with my earliest memories of being raised in a large, dysfunctional family and having an overwhelming sense that I wasn’t what or who they were telling me I was…that I wasn’t this body, or little, or the face I saw in the mirror. What I was and how I got there, I couldn’t say, but I knew I wasn’t what they kept saying I was.
It wasn’t long, though, before the mental and behavioral programming of modern culture and the catholic church took hold and I lost that knowing. I believed what they told me because I had to. It wasn’t safe to disagree or see things differently or question what I was told. A sadness, a longing took hold of me then, and I would learn the hard way that the only remedy was to stop doubting myself and return to what I originally knew.
I think I’ve been seeking God since around the age of 3 or 4 when the programming and traumas started to take hold. My mother made us kids go to catholic church every Sunday. I think I was around age seven or eight when I finally said, “I don’t want to go anymore. I don’t like it.” What I couldn’t articulate at that time was that I couldn’t feel the truth or God there. I could feel all the shame every good catholic is supposed to feel, but not this loving God. And the violent image depicted in the huge statue on the wall behind the pulpit, of the dead Christ hanging on the cross, for all of us to stare at throughout the church service seemed to serve as a warning, not a symbol of peace or love..
I was the youngest of five kids. Why they all listened to me, I don’t know, but the whole family stopped going to church. I was so relieved.
Around the age of twelve, I decided to return to the church to see if there was something I missed. But I hadn’t missed anything. I still didn’t sense love or truth or God there.
About twenty years later, still not having found what I was looking for, the ache for love, for truth, for God became unbearable. I didn’t want to remain in this world without it. My search for God had become a matter of life and death. If I couldn’t heal this ache, I didn’t want to be here anymore.
This desperation took me to therapy and many different emotional healing modalities over the next 10 years, and finally to South America where I lived for several years while I worked with sacred plant medicines in ceremonies. I was soul tired, broken and trying not to entertain suicidal ideations.
Did I find God in the jungle, in those medicines? Nope.
But I found a bit of healing from the traumas I’d endured as a young child. I found enough worthiness to stay here a little longer and just enough strength to do my inner work. A ceremony guide took me under his wing and taught me to make safe medicine and to be a ceremony guide myself, to help others in the way he had helped me. I’ve been working as such ever since.
Along the way, I met an awakened woman, Johana Sand, who spoke more truth than I’d ever heard. Every once in awhile she would say something that was exactly what I had seen in my plant medicine journeys. Things about who and what we really are. She introduced me to some of the great mystics and the pointers to truth, to our essential selves that have been passed down through the ages. In all my years of yearning and seeking, I had never heard of these mystics or their teachings until I met her.
Soon after, I met two awakened men. In a manner of speaking, they taught me that returning to my true nature would be a process of deletion….that I would have to gently confront, see through and release all the conscious and subconscious beliefs, programming and overlays that this life had installed in my body-mind, that were hijacking peace from the present moment. It turns out that this was what I had intuitively been helping other do all along in entheogenic ceremonies, but only on the conscious level, which brought only temporary relief. These men gave me the tools that I use to this day, to facilitate myself and others to release the subconscious beliefs that hold us in a false reality of lack, suffering and separation.
I no longer pursue God or love or peace. Instead, I recognize, in the moment, the very thoughts and beliefs that are driving the need to seek and feel separate and long for “god”, and I skillfully unhook from them. What remains is peace, and connection to the flow of life, and the knowing I already had as a very young child.