The Third Marriage: Soul

Brandon Peele
Sep 4, 2018 · 12 min read

Reflections on a 3-day medicine ceremony during my honeymoon.

The choice to get married happens on a number of levels. Of course there are compatibility issues to get sorted out around cohabitation, money, housekeeping, children, sex, intimacy, and dreams for the future. But once that decision gets made to enter marriage, three contracts are set in motion. The first is with the government, to share a household, perhaps a name, to function as a singular economic and legal unit. The second is with society, enrolling all your friends and family in your commitment, asking their support to stand for you and treat you as a committed couple.

The third marriage occurs in the soul realm. This third marriage can occur at anytime prior to, during or after the other marriages. My experience is that it is a soul-deep bond, wherein both parties discover that their journey in this life is one and the same, that there is a sense of inevitability and intertwined fate to it, and a future that is both destined and requires active participation.

Marriage Without the Soul-Deep Bond

In my early 30’s, I got married and divorced within about 2 years. It didn’t feel soulful or reverent or joyous. It felt absurd. I was in a pretty dark and cynical place, filled to the brim with anger, anti-capitalist outrage, existential angst and spiritual nihilism. I didn’t have a clue who I was (it was before I began purpose work), nor any respect for the institution of marriage (there was little in the lives of the married people I knew that seemed desirable — more on this later).

In retrospect, this first marriage felt like gonzo journalism, thrusting myself into a quaint, deeply troubled ritual, just for the experience and story. However, as the spectacle receded, and I began to settle into married life, I started to love and appreciate this institution. I felt the joy of partnership, the sharing of a household, a sense of solidity and a deeper experience of manhood.

Unfortunately, I never felt like we were really in it together, like a soul contract had been written, like we had a shared purpose, destiny or fate. We had different values and desires for the future, and conflict broke out on a scale I had never experienced — think “War of the Roses” — where I spent many nights in my car and with family after arguments. During the course of our brief marriage, we spent tens of thousands of dollars on therapy, couples weekends, communications seminars and separated twice. Finally it hit me, our souls never got married.

After 18 months of this psychologically, physically and financially taxing struggle, we pulled the plug, and recovery began. I learned from two therapists that I had PTSD. A common symptom of PTSD is erectile dysfunction, which I experienced with my subsequent partners. As you can imagine, this was very destabilizing for my masculinity and identity. It would be three years of therapy and men’s work, until I again felt confident to be sexually intimate again.

My advice: don’t get married without a soul contract, without a sense that there is a more-than-human purpose (beyond companionship and family) to your marriage.

Marriage With the Soul-Deep Bond

Fast forward a decade of personal and spiritual development work — including purpose discovery work, a 1,000 hours of leadership development programs, and a handful of meaningful relationships -, and I got married again. This time with a wholly original desire to be married, a deep appreciation of the institution and the certainty I had found the right partner.

Steph and I goofing after our ceremony.

Steph and I got legally married in San Francisco on June 21st and took our vows in front of our closest friends and loved ones in Connecticut on July 7th. We approached into the institution with the conventional ideas about marriage, and a few of our own. We wanted long-term partnership with companionship, emotional and sexual intimacy, support and to create a family. But we also wanted adventure, global impact, and to say “yes” to an unknown future and mission together.

Because of our connection and the experiences, values and dreams we shared, I knew there was an immanent soul marriage as well, the result of some sort of trial or revelation, some large planetary or cosmic purpose, but it wasn’t quite clear to either of us what it was. Without warning, 21 days after our ceremony in Connecticut, on July 28th, it happened. Our souls married inside of a Panamanian volcano. This ceremony didn’t include dressing up, smiling, photos, booze or dancing, but pain, vomit and intertwined karma.

My Karma

First a little bit of history, as it plays an important role in the marriage of our souls. By the time I left high school, I’d ingested the comedy of Eddie Murphy, Andrew Dice Clay and Sam Kinison, the music of NWA, Tupac and Snoop and the dating advice of midwestern businessmen in the 1990’s. As a 6’2”, white male scholar-athlete, I was incubated to become the apex predator of the American dominator patriarchy.

Although in my early teens, I had success in fighting for my own truth, my natural and healthy femininity, my emotions, my virtues, my dreams and my creativity (twice with fists against sons of Chicago mobsters), I eventually capitulated. I stopped making art, stopped dreaming, stopped showing my emotions, stopped nurturing my female friendships and started lifting weights and mainlining a media diet of sports, nudie mags, Bond / mob movies and comedy. To say this broth, in which my ideas about sex, women and relationships developed, was hypermasculine and misogynist, would be a gross understatement.

By the time I was senior in highschool, I had learned through heartbreak, media and culture to hate women. I found all sorts of reasons to justify this hatred, and more importantly the hatred of my own femininity, my emotions, my body, my dreams and my creativity. Further, as I looked around at the marriages of the people I knew, I saw resignation, infidelity, conformity. I saw disingenuous, half-dead lives. I judged married people to be pathetic losers, sheep. I wanted none of it. I wanted to be famous, wealthy and single. Naive and immature, I planned to stay a player indefinitely, pay a surrogate to bare my genetically-engineered male offspring and nannies to raise them. I just wanted to engage with my boys as rule-maker, coach and drinking buddy. No girls, no domestic responsibilities. Just the fun parts of fatherhood.

With this mindset, I went to college and joined the top fraternity on campus, a house of 80 similarly-groomed scholar-athletes. I moved from victim of the dominator patriarchy, from having half of my identity diminished and internally suppressed, to perpetrator. I was on the Dean’s List, a campus leader, a bartender, and a player. I told the necessary lies and bought the necessary drinks to have sex, and then I moved on.

In my late 20’s, I started doing my internal work (psychotherapy, meditation, personal development seminars, meditation, men’s work, shadow work, etc.), I got how terrible I was to all the women in my life, especially my Mom and the women I dated. And it took a decade of shadow work to finally accept and forgive myself and the role models of my youth.

Me in a skirt and fairy wings at my bachelor party.

I’ve learned a lot about how to appreciate femininity in women, in men and most importantly myself. I found my work with the ManKind Project’s men’s circles to be most powerful in forgiving myself, reclaiming my own feminine and thereby stepping into a more whole masculinity. Although I’ve been doing this work for 15 years, I still find lines of that entitled, dominator, “frat boy” code running. Steph calls me on it at least once a week. So how is this relevant to our soul marriage?

Our Honeymoon

Three days after our ceremony and celebration in Connecticut, Steph and I went on a three week honeymoon to Colombia. We planned the first half, and then allowed ourselves to follow whatever called to us in the second half. After ten days of traipsing through the Rosario Islands, Cartegena, Medellin and Bogota, appreciating the nature, history, art, architecture and cuisine, we followed our hearts to the jungle. We spent four incredible days in the Amazon (which I explore in this article), and then headed for Panama to do a three-day medicine ceremony.

Our Shaman’s tools.

Some more important backstory. Since Steph and I began dating in early 2015, she has experienced an unprecedented amount of vaginal pain, what we now know to be vulvodynia, which affects millions of women every year, but mystifies doctors (we share a little bit about it in this Playboy article). At first she explored the likely suspects — UTI, bacteria overgrowth, yeast infections, STDs. Both Western doctors and alternative healers did their best, but couldn’t diagnose or fully remedy Steph’s pain. They were confounded.

As you can imagine, this made sexual intimacy difficult, but we found a few work-arounds. Just guessing at this, but we probably had a tenth of the sexual intimacy most couples have in their first few years. After three years, Steph spending over $40k on treatments, and despite learning a lot about the body, hormones, nutrition, plant medicine, communication, energy meridians, chakras, medical mediums, etc. our sex life wasn’t what we wanted it to be. However, there was so much more alive between us, so we jumped into marriage with the faith that we would eventually have the sex life we both wanted — frequent, spontaneous, pain-free and euphoric. We were committed to our future and to keep trying new approaches, doctors, spiritual work, whatever it takes.

Three-day Medicine Ceremony

Through a friend of Steph’s we found a plant medicine [the use of plant compounds in a ceremony to heal and transform people, often including hallucinogenic compounds] community in Panama. We left the Amazon and took a flight to Panama City. The next morning we drove two hours west to the town of El Valle, a tropical paradise nestled inside a 3-mile wide volcano.

The first night consisted of a Kambo ceremony (frog venom applied to holes burnt in the skin, designed to purge toxins and unproductive energies), Rape’ (pr. rah-pay, a powered herb blend blown into the nostrils) and an Ayahuasca ceremony.

Our kambo scars.

The second night was another Kambo ceremony (for Steph, not me), Rape’ and another Ayahuasca ceremony, combined with Sangara (a tree shrub extract dropped into the eyes to sharpen vision) and the third day was a psilocybin ceremony. I won’t share everything we each experienced during these 72 hours, but I will share the Ayahuasca ceremony on night #1. What follows is our experience together, what we now know as the formation of a soul-deep bond.

Our Soul Marriage

After ingesting the Ayahuasca medicine, I had a very pleasant and illuminating experience. I saw the flower of life pattern within and between all matter, a vision of the interconnected and unified architecture of the cosmos, a indelible confirmation of similar experiences I’ve had internally during Vipassana meditation retreats. My entire field of vision was poly-chromatic, alive and pulsing. I was still able to capture each distinct form in my view, whether it was a wall, or my arm or a chair, but now also as an expression of a unified field of existence. Then Steph, who had been outside the ceremony space for about two hours, came to me and said, “I need you. Grab the rattle.”

Flower of life pattern

She said there was something deep down inside of her that needed to come out. Ayahuasca often includes purging or vomiting, where, in order to move unproductive or harmful energies out, it requires literal vomit. Steph wanted me to be there to help her move the energy / vomit out.

Prior to retrieving me, Steph had been wrestling with her deceased paternal grandmother. She saw the face of her grandmother who told her she had put this painful energy in her pelvis to prevent her from marrying a bad man and having an unwanted pregnancy. She was protecting her from the trauma she experienced in her abusive marriage. Of course, Steph’s pain started when we began dating, so that bad man her grandmother was protecting her from was me and that child she was blocking was mine. Steph confronted her and told her how much she has suffered as a result, that she no longer needed this painful protection and that she had indeed found a good man who she could trust, who respected and supported her. She told her she would show her that this was the case.

The purge area.

After Steph told me this, I rubbed her back in an upward motion, intending the energy up and out. I shook the rattle and poured my intentions into her. Steph then told me to get the Shaman. I brought the Shaman and he administered rape’ (pr. rah-pay), a powdered mixture of herbs that includes tobacco, by blowing it through a pipe up and into Steph’s nose.

With the Shaman and I at her flanks, she began vomiting, moving the pain (spiritually / metaphorically) from her abdomen and out. At the time of this purge, Steph saw a vision of her grandmother smiling happily as she released this ancestral pain. She also got the message that the two of us would have a daughter, that this soul has already chosen us as parents to do her work and realize her greatness, and that bringing this soul into the world would be our greatest contribution.

Shortly thereafter, I purged as well and it felt like a transference of sorts, or perhaps the purging of the next layer of residual shame, but I do know it was connected to Steph’s work.

In the minutes that followed, I experienced a deeper bond with Steph, a bond I can only imagine a man feels watching his wife give birth or holding their child together for the first time. As I looked over at this beautiful, exhausted warrior wiping puke off her face, this brave woman who has born the pain of both her ancestral trauma and my karma for three years, I felt more love for her than I knew was possible, and also a sense of shame and guilt for my karmic role in her suffering.

The lines of karma that crossed three years ago were now being illuminated and starting to sort themselves out. It became clear that there was a far more soulful reason for our marriage than I knew when I asked for her hand in marriage. I believe Steph and I have a shared mission that lies in the general direction of empowering women leaders. Of course, all of this is far too mysterious and complex to fully grasp, but the beginning of the soul marriage has begun. If the future is anything like the past, it will only continue to deepen and reveal its meaning.

So you might be wondering how this experience has manifested in the bedroom. To that I say with a smile, it’s none of your damn business.

About the Author

Brandon Peele is a Certified Purpose Guide (TM), author of Planet on Purpose (2018), co-author of Purpose Rising (2017) and The PURPOSE Activation Blueprint (2015). He empowers leaders to awaken their purpose-driven leadership. Brandon works with professionals and executive teams from organizations such as Apple, The Smithsonian Institute, Tesla, Johnson & Johnson, the United States Environmental Protection Agency, Illumina, Zeiss, Sapient, Morgan Stanley, Google and the United States Marine Corps. As a leader of online purpose courses, Brandon has guided thousands of people from over 50 countries to awaken, embody and lead with their higher purpose. You can learn more about Brandon’s work at BrandonPeele.com.

Brandon Peele

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My imperative is to activate purpose in service of a flourishing economy and society. http://BrandonPeele.com | http://imperative.com

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