Sahara Azure
What is mastering the self?
Is it having self-control? Controlling our emotions? Or is it letting our emotions dictate what we need, when we need it, and how we need it?
What, then, is our intuition—and what does it even matter when, with a tap of a screen, some cyber-demon can dictate what to do and what not to do?
I’ve recently moved back from Australia to where it all began: a little town in Ontario. And I can tell you—it took intuition. It took abandonment of all I knew, the untangling of all I had become—another shedding, a passage, a portal I had to walk through. To admit that nothing in my life manifested the way I thought it would.
But everything I prayed for arrived—just packaged differently.
When I was a child, my dream was to see the pyramids. I obsessed over buried treasure and a time when great kingdoms and magic existed. Fast forward to me as an 11- or 12-year-old girl: I watched the movie Whale Rider for the first time and decided that I would marry a Polynesian man.
Why? Why was I so deeply connected to this far-off island life—the language, the music?
It all seemed so out of reach—an exhilarating idea, but not one common among those I knew, and certainly not within my family. In fact, quite the opposite. My family condemned me for the dreams, beliefs, and ideas I thought were necessary for a “successful and content life.”
This song would visit me in my dreams. It was my identity—it chased me. I’d dream I had long, dark hair, and then I’d dream of drowning. It was me, but it wasn’t. I’d dream of the forest on my land in Canada, only to walk out the other side onto a snow-covered mountain.
The song would play in my mind as a child, and I could only assume this was me in a past life—or maybe it was a song beckoning me into a life not yet lived.
A song that called to my heart.
New Zealand had everything I needed. The vast mountain ranges where I could snowboard and, in the same day, travel down to the sea for the surf. There was something about the animistic beliefs of the Māori that resonated with who I was at my core.
As a child, I spent all my time in the bush or in the lakes—but the lakes weren’t enough. The humidity, the fields sprayed with pesticides and glyphosates poisoning our lands, the nuclear plant just a stone’s throw away in a nearby town, the imminent tensions with America (especially after 9/11)—I didn’t belong to this land. It wasn’t my home.
I would dive in the lakes every summer searching for shells for my grandma’s garden—I pretended I was home, wherever that was, somewhere tropical.
The mountains called me. The ocean called me.
At 12, I wanted to run away to California. I planned it with my best friend—we would move there at 16 in a beat-up Chevy. That dream was then fueled by my growing hunger for the jungle and environmental protection. Watching documentaries as a child—I believe David Attenborough and David Suzuki planted the seed. But more than that, my grandfather—a deeply spiritual, eloquent conservation officer.
He always had a nature film on. But in the back of my memory, it was seeing the Amazon rainforest—and then seeing deforestation—that triggered me. It tapped in... it was like watching a part of myself burn.
A gone future.
As I continued to watch tribes, I saw a brew. I knew it was magic. I started googling and researching the occult, shamanism, animism—and I found the plant medicine that lay deep in these jungles, consumed by tribal people who lived alongside nature and were swallowed back into the earth without a trace of existence.
Ayahuasca came to me at 12— we, however, mother earth, Gaia, that eternal earth spirit - had already met.
Spend enough time in the forest and ocean… you feel her pulse. You already bathe in her magnificence. The plant is a confirmation, the plant is just the conduit to what is already inside us and all around us. Mastering the self? Or self realisation, the eternal spiral through Indiras web.
The more I learned about BlackRock, Big Pharma, Big Farm—Big Everything—the “Big Bad” was a prevalent conversation among my society-adjacent psychonaut friends. Some were child geniuses I spent days tripping with, speaking about tech advancements, “conspiracy” theories, and the governments we, as a nation, are subservient and chained to.
I began to delve into my own soul. Always a seeker—digging for deeper truths.
And, with time, the depths unraveled.
Another truth to be found—only to reveal itself as a convoluted lie, covered by yet another veil of the well pronounced ego. Again and again, I spiralled. With drugs. With conversations.
And through the greatest teacher of all—pain and impermanence.
The Great Illusion.