We are continually creating myths regarding ourselves. In The Spiritual Awakening Guide I talk about how our mythic and archetypal selves are the last constructed level of our being– myth and symbol being a bridge between the truly ineffable (pure spirit) and the constructed layers of reality.

Put more simply, if we are interfacing with the Other we may lack words that can ever describe the wild, exhilatory terror, beauty, and expanse of such experiences.

We do have dance, art, poetry, breath (words) as well as symbol and myth that point to such experiences.

Such pointing does allow for some of that beauty and terror to filter through to others who are looking to interface with the Other, or who are looking to interface with it in a new way, but when something moves from what can be only deeply felt and directly known to related, some aspect of falseness, however small, arises.

The best way I have heard our relationship with the “Other” described is through the “hedge” metaphor: within the hedge is what is known, established as fact, and the personal, familial, and societal-religious constructs that make up our conditioned reality.

To go beyond such a hedge means moving beyond a mind that seeks approval from such conditioning, that requires control, dominion, and to feel safe or at least complacent in such a known. We know what to expect from ourselves, from one another, and from our reality within the hedge.

In The Body Deva, I talk about how at the base of our being, we have a central myth that propels us into being. We may have many myths regarding ourselves, and although they can in some regard motivate us, they are restrictive energies because such myths tie us to expected behavior and an expected trajectory.

Such myths can also come from a deeply wounded place, and can serve to perpetuate wounding patterns or loops.

The main way we create our ways of being in this world are through loops. Loops are the repeated thoughts and patterns of being that we find ourselves doing.

We repeat the same phrases, find ourselves doing the same things again and again, or perhaps find ourselves dating the same type of person and having the same arguments again and again. Or perhaps we are in the same relationship and continue to have the same pattern of relating, the same arguments.

Loops primarily come from trauma. When we experience trauma that cannot be processed or resolved at the time, energetically the aspect of ourselves that was traumatized becomes frozen in that experience. That aspect of ourselves then “loops”: it recreates the same scenario, the same beliefs, again and again in the outer world.

Ideally it does this to find resolution and healing. But most of us lack conscious awareness of our loops and so we act out personal as well as transpersonal loops: the traumas of our family, ancestors, and past lives, again and again, without awareness.

We do not create the world. We externalize our inner reality onto the world. This is the basics of “shadow work”: the usage of the external world to see what we have to heal within. What creates reaction in us beyond an understandable or appropriate response for the situation is showing us something that lies unhealed within.

What we project onto the world are these loops– we are constantly casting characters in a play based off of our loops. The most common loop is that of small child looking for mother. Or father. We may spend our entire lives looking for the mother or father that our inner five year old never received the appropriate care from.

We look towards our gurus, teachers, relationships, friendships, and other places, continually casting this character of “mother” or “father” to play out this loop. The difficulty is that we are going to find someone casting their own play, and we are likely to find someone with the same exact wound as our own to engage in this loop with.

The other difficulty is that it is not our current selves that are looking for their mother or father. It is our inner child, and unless that inner child is healed, the recreation of this loop by our adult selves is never going to be satisfactory because the cast role or play is never going to be quite right because it is playing out in the present day and with different players.

Beyond trauma, loops are also created out of societal and religious conditioning, as well as biological mechanisms. These are the sort of layers of awakening– first we awaken to our own trauma, as well as transpersonal trauma (family, past lives, ancestry), then we begin to awaken to conditioning, and finally we come across biological and atavistic instincts.

Our loops in large part come from trauma. They also may come from a long-past biological instinct and/or survival instinct.

Put simply, if we had fire at one point when another person did not that might have meant our very survival.

While there can be a discussion of many different kinds of loops, the most basic form of looping is the superiority-inferiority loop.

All loops have internal and external components to them. The superiority-inferiority loop is one we enact in the outer world because we do not have the consciousness to recognize that we are projecting our inferiority complexes onto external reality.

As far as externalization, this loop can be enacted in a few ways.

First, we can externalize our shadows (the rejected aspects of self, what is unknown or unconscious within us) of competency and mastery onto others. There are many teachers, gurus, bosses, and so forth who are participating in this myth that are only too happy to accept people believing that they are special, chosen, enlightened, and so forth.

While there are certainly individuals who may be more conscious, competent, and skilled at whatever area we are talking about, beyond a certain threshold of consciousness, what you realize is that everyone is enlightened– we just may have a lot of “gunk” covering that up.

A competent guru or teacher in the spiritual space will not re-create or perpetuate this myth, but see others beyond it. Their role is to help others see their own light. Anything else is a perpetuation of this loop.

Second, we can maintain that we are “superior”, “special” or continually point to others that we feel are inferior to ourselves. This is also an aspect of our shadow.

If we do not feel inferior, we do not need to spend our days convincing others how special, enlightened, and so forth we are, or continually find ourselves pointing to our shadows of inadequacy in the outer world.

What happens when we are traumatized is that we become isolated and disconnected. Out of that initial rejection, we create mythologies regarding ourselves. This is often a myth that will allow for the wounded inner child to continue isolation or separation patterns to ensure safety.

A mythology of superiority or being “special” is then created by the individual and they can spend their entire lives believing this perpetuated mythology. It is only by questioning who needs to believe such a mythology that the wounded and isolated inner child is seen.

I have met so many individuals in this space that spend an incredible amount of time saying how much other people suck, or how they are not “real”. They continually create mythologies about being “chosen” or having “special knowledge” because they are externalizing their inner insecurities and shadows onto others.

This is the superiority-inferiority loop: if we point to others, that means that we are setting up an illusory binary in which we are “real”, superior, enlightened, have mastery or attainment because other people are inferior.

If you have any sort of interface with the Other and see what is commonly sold about some of the topics that I discuss: kundalini, spiritual awakening, shamanism, etc. much of what is being sold and bought is quite silly.

Often it is perpetuating this very loop and the mythology of being special and thus superior. People then take on this mythology, rather than doing the hard task of wondering why such a mythological construct is needed, or what in them truly feels inadequate or not special.

Of course education is necessary, but discerning the motivating factors behind our actions and words is always key.

Quite simply, most people are just fine within the hedge. Moving beyond it requires considerable amounts of personal responsibility as well as deconstruction of personal and collectively conditioned reality.

Realizing and feeling compassion for people being where they are, and realizing why people create and participate in the loops they do, can allow for there to be acceptance of what is, both within and without.

The shadow that really broke me of this loop was a reasonably well-known author whose every post was about how new-agers are horrible. A friend gave me his book, and I realized that he was a very wounded five year old who had set up his whole existence by projecting this new-ager aspect of himself onto others. He was a new-ager, quite simply, but as he was a few steps beyond the people he was pointing to, he could always find more external people to be angry at.

This led me to realize that in the modern world, we are profoundly spiritually orphaned, and that even though I have been a spiritual worker professionally for fifteen years, there will always be a part of me that is impacted by Western christianized, psychological spiritual frameworks.

Taking back projections like this one are always difficult. This loop is so incredibly pervasive, and we create mythologies in large part because they not only explain our existence but we can project our inner pain onto them. It is a lot to ask someone to consider to deconstruct them, but it is well worth our time to do so.

My book, The Body Deva, allows for someone to heal these loops. It is a method of body-based self-inquiry, and working with the book at a more in-depth level you can begin to use the world as your shadow, and recognize your loops, and ask where in your body you are holding them, and to resolve what lies unhealed within them.

It is the tendency of our culture to mistake what is dark within ourselves for what is wounded, rather than seeing darkness as its own kingdom, and carrying its own beauty.

It has been a long path for me to separate my rather dark tendencies from what was wounded within me. We tend to speak of dark as “bad”, and especially in modern spiritual communities the idea of transmuting anything that is not of the utmost purity into “light” is the predominant ideal.

This means that individuals who are naturally dark, who resonate with the earth, with death, who if they saw something slightly mischievous or simply not compassionate would be fine or even curious (to get along swimmingly with), who love their inner wildness, their bodies, their sexuality– all things that a perfectionist mind steeped in unconscious christianized patriarchal mythologies creates strict guidelines against in an effort to separate from– are often cast out of spiritual communities, or must find their way in “dark” communities often populated by individuals who are confusing darkness for adolescent angst or mental instability.

I have been sitting with this pattern for years, as what I have noticed is that those who are the “darkest” carry the most light. Generally many of the individuals steeped in “lightwork” are simply looking for escapism; many who believe that they are only working with what is “compassionate” are simply self-creating or may even be being fooled because of their lack of discernment when it comes to the spiritual realms. 

Mostly people end up blocking themselves because the spirit realms, and the natural realms, and our daily lives, do not fit into tidy transcendentalist paradigms.

We create light by making room for it. By digging in our own dirt, by going to our ocean floor. By healing, and healing is a messy job. Becoming conscious is a messy job. We cannot be light unless we have contended with our own darkness and integrated our own shadows.

Those who have traversed great pain, trauma, who are drawn to hospice and death work, nursing, firefighting, have had near death experiences (that they have integrated) and have gone through the shamanic katabasis process in which they have either died or stuck their hands in enough of their dirt to truly work with what is at the bottom of themselves have empathy for how others suffer because they have been there.

We can see others through by that process of being a wounded healer, of traversing our own depths, of seeing how what is monstery and dark underneath is simply what is unknown, not what is bad. That what is dark within us, and outside of us, does not need to transmute into light, that our inner anger and swamp monsters and mermaids that wish to drown us simply because they can, can be exactly who they are, except they can be integrated.

They can simply be an aspect of ourselves. They can be accepted and heard and seen so they do not have to get our attention or be enacted in harmful ways. Once integrated, such things are no longer feared or separated from– either internally or externally.

Our shadows, our darkness, can become again a vital aspect of our being, becoming transmuted not from “dark” to “light” but from disassociated and castigated to the fuel of creative energy, the creative impulse. We can regain our vitality by becoming fully who we are, and that includes our darkness. We are yin and yang, dark and light, and without our darkness we are half a being, living a half-lived life, if that.

If we look at much of modern spirituality, it is within the context of “solar”, or masculine. This does not mean “male” (although…) it means that the masculine principle is one of daylight, of knowing the edges of things, the conscious mind, of control and certainty.

Our feminine principle is one of darkness, of creativity, of our shadowy depths, of our subconscious and all that is unknown within us. The moon, oceans, and seas and the earth. Our dreams, death, spirit and the spirit realms. The formless void– the great mother we all emerge from and all return to.

It didn’t take me long on my own path to see something quite wrong with how spirituality was approached. To see that something ineffable, that truly could not be known, was claimed and oppressively seen as “known”, with neat edges and easily claimed principles regarding how spirits operate, what the spiritual realms are like; for years I thought that it was because people simply were looking for escapism, for easy answers, for control.

I still have a valid point with that, but if we look at the root of that force it is a masculine oppressive force– a force that has found its way through patriarchal religions and ways of being that tell us that nature is evil, that our bodies are sinful, that we require a middleman to tell us who and what the divine is, that we are separate or should be separate from our bodies, from the natural and supernatural realms.

Lately I have been researching seers and oracles from different traditions and what you will often find is women who had natural capacities being kidnapped or offered to varying temples or priests (insert other appropriate terms here) and who had the divine pour through them– often quite painfully. They were often young, upset by their gifts, upset by being apart from the lives they saw their family or others in their community lead, separated from that life to be kept “pure”.

They would be treated simply as vessels, and their messages, either scratched out, spoken, or related in symbols would then pass through the priests who would then relate them to the community. It was a life of isolation, often ending poorly for the women involved. If she was to become pregnant (thus not virginal and “pure”) or simply outlive her usefulness, she would then be relegated to a life separated from both her role as oracle and unable to be assimilated back into the community again.

If we consider the feminine, it is of kundalini, or of creative principle and consciousness. The female form has the unique capacity to create, and is integrally tied to kundalini, or the creative principle.

A kundalini awakening is then the emerging of that creative principle (consciousness) and its rising up the midline, taking us through the varying levels of consciousness until we are able to permanently reside with our divine, realized selves.

It is a meeting of that feminine creative principle with the male static principle (above the head) at which point they descend, bringing grace into the heart area, and the experience of divine pulsation, or experience of being in the dynamic stillness of embryonic pulsation, occurs. This is not our own embryonic experience, but that of the cosmos, of the great mother.

We deeply fear the feminine, what cannot be fully seen and known, what cannot be thrust into daylight. My experiences of the spiritual realms have always been of that formless void– of that realization that no matter how much I know, I could know more, I could be more, that no matter how much I know, I only know an infinitesimally small amount of what is around me or out there.

Such a thing can be seen as a thing of beauty. But it requires both stepping away from the masculine principle– the conscious mind that so desperately wants control, to announce dominance and authority– as well as our religious-cultural conditioning that teaches us that what is dark, and thus feminine about ourselves, is something to be feared or separated from.

It also requires coming to some hard and rather obvious truths about ourselves. To get less “spiritual” for a moment I will say that our outer culture which means that the masculine impulse to destroy and dominate the feminine has led to quite a few misogynist emails to me over the years. Things that if someone had about a fiftieth of consciousness that such senders believe that they have (such as asking the question of I wonder if I would send this to a male spiritual teacher?) would lead to some wonderful internal questioning, and a much better world overall.

Or anyone out there who because of their implicit societo-religious conditioning has disassociated from their bodies (our “Earth”), their sexuality, and split from the natural world as well as the spirit realms because of a great fear that has been passed down that needs to be healed for anyone to really be whole. It certainly needs to be healed to not look at the spiritual realms through the masculine impulse to dominate, decimate, and claim authority over. To not see the spirit realms as black/white, knowable, controllable, its wildness tamed and brought into the daylight.

People are where they are, and will do what they do. But our darkness is a gift. Our wounded darkness is not. Neither is our wounded light. But in our darkness lies our creative energy,in our unfathomed depths and our darkness our greatest light. It is by accepting all aspects of ourselves, by having compassion for every aspect of ourselves, that we awaken. That we become whole. That we can clearly have life-changing experiences of divinity, of spirit, that go beyond what we can see, know, and claim.

 

I have taught more than a few courses over the years, and due to many requests (and some polite demands) I have compiled three of my courses into a book. It is a whopper of a book, too.

You can order the book here…
It will be available through other Amazon sites as well as other retailers over the next few weeks

This book is called Shamanic Workbook I (as I do intend to write more of them, or compile other courses eventually) and is focused on spiritual study and skill building for individuals who are ready for a spiritual path of depth. It is focused on techniques and skills that will allow for someone to become a person that can offer such a foundation for their own lives, as well as hopefully the lives of others.

Although the focus is in Shamanism/Animism, I have had a path that has intertwined heavily with Chinese Medicine, bodywork, energy work, occultism, folk magic, and other spiritual paths. I do feel like in the modern world that the modern-day practitioner needs to have knowledge of many paths, and as long as they are done with depth and reverence, they can only add to the lives of the individuals who traverse them.

The first section is my Cleansing and Clearing eight week course. It teaches about spiritual bathing, house clearing, egg cleansings (limpias), dream pillows, and methods of protection, including banishing and warding.

The second section is my Discernment Course. This was a five week course, and like the Cleansing course, both Discernment practices (how to tell what you are interfacing with, and the skills to do so) and Cleansing practices are the first foundation that any spiritual worker should have.

Discernment is essential. I don’t know how to say this enough times. In order to become a spiritual healer, or to do any form of spiritual worker, someone needs to understand what they are interfacing with. Otherwise they have no idea how to work with it, or do a poor job doing so. Clarity through discernment is absolutely essential, and it is so direly needed in spiritual studies.

The third section is my Ancestral Course. This is a four week course that teaches how to build an Ancestral Altar, how to work with an Ancestral Guardian, how to interface and work with the power of your lineage through a power object, as well as advanced work that includes working with the Void and working with non-human ancestors.

Ancestral spirits are the first that any spiritual worker should interface with. Learn techniques that will allow for you to discern who your ancestral guardian(s) are, as well as build connection to a healed spiritual ally that will form the basis for any other spiritual work, or spirit work (work with other spirits, deities, etc.) going forward.

This is essential work, and it is really time that spiritual studies is given the regard and depth that it deserves. It is such beautiful, life-changing work when done well, when given regard, and when that foundation is built. It is work that is direly needed in this world, both for individuals as well as for people looking to build skills to assist their families, friends, or clients.

I do hope that you enjoy the book. It really is my passion and mission to bring work of depth into this world for those ready for it– and I am aware more and more of just how many of you are out there. I express my gratitude to each and every one of you who is willing to do work of this depth, as it not only changes your life, but a small part of the collective web that we co-create together.

Learn more about my journey to this book below…

When I learned that something “spiritual” was going on with me I looked for groups and communities, to teachers, guides, and gurus to help me along my path. I have had some wonderful teachers over the years, as well as have learned some essential skills through them, some of which are in this book.

But my experiences of many communities left me initially with a lot of confusion and anger. Although I would find at each workshop or in each community someone “like me” or individuals that I could at least get along with, what I primarily found were people looking towards the spiritual realms for escapism and/or illusions of control.

From working with the spiritual realms since a young age (before I even knew to call it “spiritual”) and by my direct interface with the Other over the years I knew how nuanced the spiritual realms were, how much beauty and depth they could bring into our lives.

That spiritual interface should result in deepening connection to ourselves, the world, and the people in it. That spiritual work results in deep transformation spiritually, emotionally, mentally, and physically, and that we should emerge more functional, more embodied, more whole, and better able to traverse our lives on a daily basis from it.

That our perspective should shift… quite profoundly, with that evolution. This is the basis of what I teach, and how I approach spiritual work, and I have seen such profound things happen through spiritual work of depth. I am immensely honored and grateful at this point of my path to have discovered the depths that I have.

What I have realized over the years though by healing my own not being met by such communities was that simply many of them were not for me, and that that is perfectly okay.

What I realized is that I am someone who likes and feels called to work with the oceanic depths of things, to discover greater and greater depths, and that my potential and purpose was in those depths.

There is a real lack of training and foundational work in this world for individuals in spiritual matters beyond a certain depth. That there are so many like me, who have had to wade through swamps looking for that proverbial pearl again and again. That I could be of real benefit to this world, as I have spent more than twenty years seriously studying and exploring a spiritual path of depth, including ten years to the exclusion of everything else in my life studying and going through a serious period of spiritual initiation and education (I am very glad that period is over, as it ended five years ago but I am still evolving as we all should be)… and that I could help others who were ready to cut through a path that I had already traversed. That I could help other fellow bottom-of-the-ocean seekers.

That there are so many out there hungry and willing to learn, to open themselves, to evolve, and I realized with complete clarity that my focus should be on being of benefit to those who are willing to look deeply within themselves, who are ready and able to build skills, and who are looking for spiritual and energy work from a pragmatic, embodied standpoint that could allow for them to become who they needed to be, both for themselves and for others.

I thank all of you “bottom dwellers” who are willing to see and work with those depths. The world needs strong, competent, and skilled spiritual workers who can do work for themselves, their families, clients, the world.

This work has so much beauty, so much depth, and it requires someone of courage to be the type of psychonaut who is endlessly curious, who knows how ever far they have traversed there are countless depths still left unexplored. Who explores with humility, realizing that the spiritual realms are nuanced, that we do not have dominion over them, and who is willing to be a person of compassion and regard (as well as skill) in their interactions with them.

I thank all of you who are willing to look towards yourselves, the natural world, the Other (the spiritual realms) and the external world/one another seeking such depths. I hope this book helps you on your path to doing so.

The power of gnosis and knowledge that arises from direct revelation and interface with spiritual intelligences and forces in the modern world has been greatly diminished and disregarded.

Called snidely UPG, or unverified personal gnosis, we seek to dismiss anything that has not been told, seen, or experienced before, anything that falls outside of the models and parameters that have already been created.

There is, of course, a huge problem with spiritual orphaning in the modern world. We are so schismed from spiritual reality that we have huge filters– Christianity, materialist reality denying anything beyond it, obscuring mental realities– that prevent us from authentically or clearly interacting with the spiritual realms.

Anyone who has stuck their feet in the sort of waters of the spiritual path and has any type of pragmatism knows that there is a huge problem with individuals being unable to distinguish between psychological or mentally based realities and spiritual revelation.

As a teacher I have story after story of interacting with individuals who were psychotic or mentally unwell to such a degree that they have lost any sort of tethering to logic, communal reality, and are so mentally confused that they are interacting with their own wounds and fracturing rather than anything of a spiritual nature.

Beyond those individuals who truly are in need of serious help, there are those who are interacting with spiritual forces and receiving gnosis but it becomes skewed due to the nature of their wounding.

What we have is a generation of individuals who are spiritually orphaned to such a degree that they have never learned to distinguish (or may not wish to discern) between mythic creations, psychological projections, and authentic spiritual revelation.

While there is discernment needed certainly, such negation of direct revelation has other factors than individuals perpetuating mythic realities because their internal world, and outer reality, are too painful to interface with.

Spiritual orphaning has also resulted in many of us not receiving a proper spiritual education, or even realizing that spiritual study has a foundation of knowledge and initiations, similar to any other field of study, that need to take place. We no longer live in animistic societies, and so we no longer are surrounded by models or individuals who can mentor or inform us, and we do not receive that foundation of study, or go through the initiations that allow for us to become spiritual adults in this world.

Due to cultural constructs and our filter of materialist reality negating any subject of study outside of it, we may not even understand or regard spiritual studies as a serious field of study, distinct from psychological study.

Without this study, people frequently confuse common or frequently realized revelations for something quite profound. They may also simply be confusing themselves, and others who listen to them.

There also is a bit of irony that in the modern world we place so much importance on things like labels and certifications. When you begin to interact with people with those titles, you begin to realize that who that person is and what they have to offer, even when authentically having such labels, might be anything from profound spiritual knowledge to simply repeating what they have been taught with no spiritual interaction whatsoever, to being a horrible, slimy person filled with arrogance who has limited their reality out of their massive ego.

As I was taking myself out of the remaining spiritual communities that I was sort of on the fringes of about six months ago, I had the realization that if many of the people who spend their days engaged in “witch hunts”, telling people how awful, inauthentic, or invalid they are, spent even 1/10th of the time they spent engaged in such drama, ego dynamics and superiority contests on actually looking within, that they would have perspective on the internal dynamics that have caused for them to spend 90 percent of their time needing to rip everyone else to shreds, perhaps realize that there are more enlightened ways to spend their time, or at the very least realize that such dynamics point to something internal that needs to be rectified.

I also have realized lately that my path of educating myself was to create a framework, but my path of healing and attaining my certifications (labels, etc.) was so that I have the clarity and confidence to not only trust the spiritual revelation and communion states that I find myself in, but that I have the skill to discern on a continual basis (as in, discernment is a continual thing to do, even when I know damn well when I am in an ecstatic state or not) as well as to not doubt or deny what is coming through.

There is something of a cosmic joke in that myself, as well as many others, spend decades of their lives denying their experiences either because they are outside of the framework of what people experience (or at least talk about in communities) or because gnosis and direct revelation is so looked down on in a world that is so spiritually orphaned that such denial is a protective mechanism to fit into materialist reality.

But it is also a blocking mechanism, which means that for years I looked towards sources that offered me a framework, personal healing and clarity, tools so that I was not completely overwhelmed all the time, all essential things that I needed… but all of that has taken me back to a state of being six years old, communing with the birch trees and small pond as well as the spiritual forces in my Minnesota backyard.

There is simplicity in direct spiritual revelation, but it takes time to uncover or understand this, and we block ourselves or deny our experiences for so many personal and cultural reasons.

We work in models– we look towards what society, our communities,and our families deem is “right” or “good” or even “sane” to see where we fit in. If we do not fit in, we must decide why. We rarely consider if being well-adjusted to a society that is filled with people who are desperately unhappy (yet quiet desperation, as societal conditioning requires) is something that we should aspire to or want to fit in with.

Due to this spiritual orphaning, anyone experiencing direct revelation, even when they go into spiritual communities, or places that hypothetically are meant to celebrate spirituality and those of us who are “others”, will find themselves outside of what is accepted and revered in those communities.

There is a distinct and unfortunate irony that spiritual, shamanic, and occult groups have incredibly rigid mentalities and dogmas to the point that anyone who does not participate in “group-think” or has anything original to say (or who are participating in anything other than mentally created realities) will rarely, if ever, find their place in them.

I always think of the William James quote: A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices and never is this more seen when it comes to spiritual communities.

The same material recycled over and over by teachers and in books and such rigid ideologies and dogmas. It is what becomes popular, it is what is accepted, and the celebration of individuals who are adhering to such modes of thought and who find acceptance will sadly never find themselves pushed, or questioned, or really evolve because most of us simply want the same thoughts and ideas again and again because our mentally derived ideologies prevent us from looking within, they prevent us from direct revelation, and they keep us comforted by knowing what to expect of the world and the people in it; through such arrogance we can feel in control of what is ultimately uncontrollable, unknowable, ineffable, and can only be directly experienced and deeply felt.

The experience of direct spiritual revelation leads to the discovery that no matter how sensitive we are, no matter how in tune, that we can only know a small corner of the cosmos, that we definitely are not in control or have any type of mastery. If we are experiencing those direct initiations, it is like we are a small dot in an ever-increasing web each initiation we go through.

While it is common human arrogance or wounding patterns that prevent us, or skew us, from spiritual revelation, it is by those of us willing to discern, to do the work, to step outside of such rigid dogmas and people simply rearranging societally acceptable thoughts that we can evolve. The world is in desperate need of dreamers, of thinkers, of people willing to decondition themselves while still remaining pragmatic, sane, and embodied.

Those who are these things then tend to require discernment as a continual tool (such as my Animism course, or my Managing Psychic Abilities book) as well as continual healing (such as my Body Deva book) to be able, and willing, to receive such revelation clearly and to not filter it out through the mechanism of denial or reactivity to a world in which the loudest and most unhealed individuals are the models for spiritual revelation.

One of the things that I notice a fair amount of confusion regarding is the nature of enlightenment, and enlightenment experiences.

Picture a sky above you. For a moment, the clouds part and you recognize that the true nature of the sky is a clear blue. This is enlightenment.

But for most, the clouds come back in and the experience is only temporary. We then identify with the clouds– with our emotions and traumas and experiences here– yet again.

For most, the experience of spiritual awakening is a removal or release of clouds, gradually or quickly, so that the sky goes from dark storm clouds to grey and then to dark storm clouds again, occasionally with some blue peeking in.

This is not a linear progression, but often an experience of seeing close to our true nature, or even having an enlightenment experience, as a momentary flicker, and then flickering back to our everyday reality, or our ordinary state.

In The Spiritual Awakening Guide, I liken this to an elevator. That elevator can go out the roof, it can go up to one of the top floors, but what is important is where our baseline is– where that elevator goes back down to once that temporary experience is over.

This is actually the intended meaning of the phrase dark night of the soul, coined by St. John of the Cross, who described seeing the ultimate beauty and revelation of his true nature/enlightenment and then found himself in deep despair as the elevator came back down (or said clouds came back, to mix metaphors).

The temporary enlightenment experience is then a road map. Once we experience something directly we give it validity, we have a model and a map. We work off of models– this is why representation is so important in our popular culture. If we have not directly experienced something, we either will deny it or not believe it is possible. 

But a lot of people tend to believe that they are enlightened when they have had an enlightenment experience instead.

Moving beyond the illusions that “enlightened” is simply the trendiest thing to be and so people desire to label themselves as such, something that hypothetically would confer superiority to such individuals grasping towards it (which is a bit of a cosmic joke in that this is one of the games that the ego-mind plays) and beyond the charlatans relying on NLP, on charisma, or on sheer fakery or delusion to become gurus, are people who simply misunderstand this concept.

This is why education is so important, as is a physical teacher, because when I had my first enlightenment experience my teacher told me that it wasn’t a big deal and that I should simply switch the meditation that I was doing because I was ready to do so based off of this experience.

The difficulty with an experience like this is that when the clouds come back, it is easy for the ego-mind to grasp onto the experience, and to play its tired old games of superiority/inferiority, of competitive spirituality, of believing oneself to be much further than one actually is on the spiritual path.

Those clouds are our ego-mind, and it plays these games to keep us who and what we are. Our ego-mind is afraid of death, the death of the known self, and it will play the same games each and every single time and the wounded aspects of ourselves, those that never feel good enough or were not heard/seen appropriately at the time of trauma, will grasp onto any notion, no matter how delusional or illusory, to prove themselves superior.

If an enlightenment experience is had, what that means is that training of the mind is necessary. This means meditation over a long period of time. I do realize that people do not like to hear this in the modern world, but the purpose of meditation (mental training) is so those experiences can lengthen and stabilize, and someone can go from having a singular experience to some level of permanency. Such permanency is almost impossible to have unless mental training over a lengthy period of time occurs.

What happens if those clouds part and we are mentally-emotionally unwell, or our elevator is baseline near the basement floor, is that we will take such experiences and become reactive to them. Our lives become dramatic, chaotic, and we grasp onto how difficult the spiritual path is. The spiritual path is quite difficult, there is no denying that, but there is a difference between pragmatically saying that and reveling in that fact, in using it to further romanticize those clouds and to stay stagnant within them.

There are two ways to mentally train. Similar to physical exercise, our minds require mental exercise because otherwise we will always identify with those clouds.

The first is well known these days. This is releasing what is within the contents of the mind. This is where most people should start, as our minds are quite chaotic and full because we have never really learned how to clear them. While sleep does this to a certain extent (takes out the trash, so to speak) our minds are so jam packed that we simply cannot release all of the noise in our heads without meditation.

This can be progressive relaxation (one of my favorites) or the ever-popular present-moment awareness (such as Thich Nhat Han’s washing the dishes to wash the dishes, and being with each dish) to some of the popular Zen meditations of watching the breath and identifying with the breath, or of putting each thought that comes by on a leaf.

The second would be mentally focusing, or self-inquiry. Once the mind begins to clear, we can begin to understand the nature of the mind. Eventually this allows for perspective– famously coined by Ramana Maharshi as no longer being an actor on a screen, but of being the projectionist (or of even being the space in between the frames of the film).

This can be done by single-point focus, such as in some Tibetan meditation methods where they picture a huge amount of deities and what they are all wearing (how many arms they have, etc). Or in some occult methods, looking at an object in front of you with half open eyes until you can describe everything about it. It sounds odd to do this with a comb, or something quite simple, but it is much harder than it seems.

The other method which is not well known is self-inquiry. This is really delving in deeply within ourselves to understand our motivations, to know how and why thoughts emerge, to heal and catch ourselves up to present day. Unless we understand how and where (such as, from what age, why we believe what we do, the underlying trauma behind it) our thoughts arise from, and until we have perspective from the ego-mind, we will always identify with it, and identify with our wounded and illusory selves. 

It is by questioning our motivations, by healing our wounded and traumatized selves, that we can begin to understand the nature of the mind, and those clouds begin to part (or that elevator baseline goes up a few floors).

This method is incredibly profound, and for those of you looking for a self-inquiry method, I am obviously biased towards my The Body Deva book, as I created it as a method for people spiritually awakening (in which the contents of our psyche come forward, whether we want them to or not, we need some method to process them, and this is what this book was borne from).

Both kinds of meditation, or mental training, are important.

If we solely focus on the first one, we may become quite shiny (our auras) but we lack any sort of depth. This would be like looking at the sky and seeing those clouds quite clearly, but such clarity does not mean that those clouds are going anywhere.

If we focus solely on the second, we may find ourselves delving too deeply, such as what happens at some of those meditation retreats where individuals are overwhelmed by all of those clouds coming forward and lack the clarity and training to be able process them all, or to see clearly why they came forward.

Both types of meditation allow for those clouds to be seen for what they are, for them to release, and for that sky to progressively and gradually become permanent. This means enlightenment– the permanent clear blue sky.

As one last thing, I will again point to the fact that although many people claim enlightenment, or believe they are enlightened after those clouds parting briefly, that those in a state of permanency are quite rare, and if you are looking for a teacher or guide out there, to look for someone who is well aware of what they need to work on, those clouds that remain. Otherwise the likelihood that you are participating in an illusory game, or reenacting a loop (either karmic or simply the repetitive games of the ego-mind) are really, really high.

Always look for the person who points to their humanity, and who understands that their purpose is to simply assist you to see the sky, a sky which is simply underneath those clouds.

Like many of you, I was deeply impacted by the death of Anthony Bourdain.

Such a death always creates an outpouring of memes, of support, of opinions one way or the other on how someone who seemingly had many of the things that we aspire to– a successful, inspiration career, a gregarious manner and friends who cared, an ability to connect and to voice his opinion, financial stability– and our questioning of how someone who seemingly has what we define in society as “success” could still be struggling.

As a society, the way that we treat our emotions, our lack of emotional intelligence and empathy is appalling. The thing about suffering is that we all experience it, we all experience the inevitable ups and downs of life, but that we all try to hide it. 

That trauma persists in isolation, that it creates the belief that we are the only one who is suffering.

Those of us who deeply feel are told by the world that such feeling is incorrect, wrong, pathological, and to be numbed, placated, or not felt so as not to be a disturbance to the whole.

We live in a world steeped in scientific materialism– it is considered the only valid reality– which means that spirit, as well as our emotions, are relegated to pathology.

Never is this more apparent than in the spiritual spheres. In the illusions and pretending of individuals who state that they are beyond feeling, much illusion serves to simply perpetuate the restrictive scientific materialist worldview through spiritual paradigm that feeling is not okay.

Such ideologies only perpetuate and exacerbate the collective shadow– the “othering” of emotions, the wearing of masks, and the deep fears of a sick society of anyone who is struggling or feels anything but numbness in this world.

If you notice this, you can begin to notice how societal conditioning wishes for us to lead lives of quiet desperation, and how even our spiritual ideologies perpetuate such conditioning.

Over the years I have watched as the students who have been drowning in their trauma and existences to the point of me losing sleep worrying about their basic safety, have displaced their issues onto the spiritual realms, considering themselves “shamans” or similar so as not to look within.

I have encountered so many who believe they are enlightened when they are psychotic, who place all of their suffering at the feet of whatever spiritual label or experience they believe themselves to be going through.

This is the difficulty of living in a world that disregards emotions, that tells us not to feel. We live in such fear of feeling, of the words mentally ill that we will do anything, and create anything, so as not to be defined and “othered” by a world that so deeply fears its emotions and has so much unprocessed trauma and pain.

We are in the collective shadow of so many who look to the light because the shadow of suffering both personally and collectively is too much to bear.

It is the rather enormous elephant in the room that those suffering the most emotionally-mentally, the most fractured and distant from grounding in collective reality, will take the framework of spiritual awakening, of labels like shaman and empath and kundalini, to create illusion and delusion about their lives so as not to contend with the contents of their psyches.

The recognition that whether it is the spiritual awakening process or a spiritual call involves deep connection and grounding to collective reality (as well as many other realities simultaneously) and to the self, is curiously missing from these perpetuated ideologies.

It is also a rather large issue that those who are drowning in their lives will also become practitioners or teachers and try to tend to others while still drowning– we cannot be of assistance to others if we are drowning in our own lives. We must be ashore in order to have the clarity to assist another.

I do not wish to be unkind in this sentiment– there are plenty of practitioners who have walked the path of the wounded healer. But with clarity and the ability to step ashore comes the realization that when drowning, that tending to others must stop, and tending to the self is of the most importance.

It is also a large issue that those whom I have worried the most about over the years have inevitably turned to practitioners and teachers who are more than willing to tell them that all of their difficulties are because they are filled with demons, possessed, have ET implants, or affix many of the labels of spirituality to them because they are either taking advantage of, confused themselves, or drowning themselves.

These issues have caused more than a few existential crises in me over the years, and it is difficult for me to not view much of the spiritual marketplace as either serving to give rigid ideologies to keep people where one is (while giving the mask of spirituality), or perpetuating the harmful ideologies that prevent people from attending to their inner states of being.

To do spiritual work, to do it well, to spiritually awaken, means looking straight at our humanity. To become human.

It is a slog, often a thankless one in many ways, as seemingly the suffering looked at simply becomes another brand of suffering. That despite the light that comes pouring in, the ecstatic states, the revelation and realization, that to awaken means to deeply feel. It means to see past yourself, and when one does so the type of suffering that people struggle through daily, hourly, just trying to get through the day, is a profound thing to witness.

It is a hard clarity to witness the suffering of the world, to deeply feel it. We wish to believe that the world begins and ends at ourselves, and the illusions of awakening always point to this ideology. The truth that awakening causes for one to see past the self, to see another, to see the world, means that such awareness is not always a gift, but at times a painful truth.

As we awaken, we accept the world for what it is, and people for who they are, letting go of the desire to change or control them. That does not mean that all people, and the world, become beams of light, but that as we reconcile our inner nature in terms of the external world (do shadow work) that merely the attachment and desire and judgment in regards to our external reality changes.

The first stage of any path– no matter if you are a “called” shaman, truly experiencing a kundalini awakening or spiritual awakening or not– is to look at that suffering, to look at those emotions that fill one within, to admit when something is not working in your life.

It is to become truly and vitally human, which includes experiencing and working with the emotions, gaining emotional intelligence, and meeting the world, and the people in it, for who they are (and not who we would like them to be).

To realize that others are suffering, have suffered, will suffer. We suffer in isolation, we suffer due to our paradigms pathologizing emotion, we suffer because the term mental illness is so stigmatized and so “othered” that we seek to brush those with that label to the side so as to not reckon with it in ourselves.

No matter how emotionally-mentally stable we are, the deep fear of the madman/madwoman, the realization that others do not recognize or submit to the rules of societal conduct and so are out of our control, is a shadow within ourselves that requires looking at.

Even if we are blessed with the type of mental-emotional health that allows for us to get through our days reasonably intact, we are so sick as a society that we revere quiet, we revere non-emotion, we create shadows of light that only make certain emotions and expressions of humanity okay.

No matter who we are, we have experienced trauma of some variety. We have suffered. Such suffering is not a contest, but shows us truly our humanity. It is part of being human, and such experiences should carry no stigma but be recognized as something that each one of us carry.

We are not static beings, and our definitions and pathologizing of mental-emotional imbalances means that we leech the humanity from those who have been defined as such. We lack recognition that beyond a very small contingent of society, who we are is in a state of flux, and those experiencing the depths of suffering, the depths of depression or anxiety or even psychosis can and do emerge out of the other side.

We have lost our reverence for feeling, for experiencing, and nowhere is this most exemplified than in many of the spiritual communities and in our outer, materialist society that teaches the deep feelers of this world to shut up, to wear a mask, and that silence is golden.

If we are able to recognize this societal sickness, to recognize the need for health on all levels– physically, mentally-emotionally, and spiritually– we can begin to work with what is out of balance in ourselves. We can recognize that one of those levels is not more important than the other– we need all to be healthy on all of those levels.

If something is out of balance, tending to it on the level that is creating the most difficulty (physical, emotional/mental, or spiritual) is necessary. 

While it sounds almost trite to say, if we are drowning in our lives it is an unfortunate factor that we must recognize that we are drowning. To recognize that such drowning will not be forever. That the rise in “rugged individualism” or belief that one must contend with things internally and alone is yet more societal sickness, and that those who are ashore, whether they be friends, family, or mind-body therapists of varying sorts, can help to pull us ashore, or at the very least hand us a life jacket.

That drowning is in no way shameful. No matter how grounded we are, no matter what labels we ascribe to ourselves, as humans we will occasionally be treading water, or drowning, and it is by realizing that as humans we all drown, or tread water at times, that we can begin to heal this collective shadow, to tend to our emotions, to recognize how societally sick we are in terms of anything beyond our physical/materialist health.

Krishnamurti once said that it is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society and as we consider what societal conditioning wants from us,  what the paradigms of materialist health want of us, and the sort of illusions that many spiritual teachers and communities create, we can begin to have perspective of how direly our world, and the people in it, need to tend to their health on all levels.

It is by looking at the shadows created by such a system, by reconciling internally our othering of our emotions, ourselves, our inner madman/madwoman (and how we “other” those in our external reality) that we can begin to see one another as people, no matter what labels or masks we wear.

Such reconciliation of our inner humanity, such recognition of our suffering, truly seeing what is not working in our lives (as well as a healthy dose of understanding that our suffering at its depths is often fleeting, and realization of ourselves not as static creatures, but of ever evolving creatures, including emotionally) and by revering our emotions and what that little voice within us says when it speaks of hope, that we can move past our shame, move past our masks of being a warrior or being not in pain or not feeling, and realize that we are simply and definitively human.

Shared pain is lessened, trauma persists in isolation, one of my teachers said. Take care of yourselves, and realize that tending to your emotional health in such a sick society is an act of great courage, as is asking for support when needed.

I remember when I was starting my path (well, was consciously doing so) that I had this idea that if I only reached a certain state, that I would be perfected.

That this was the end goal– a state of continual health, happiness, joy, peace, bliss, or love. That if I only tried hard enough I would not need to struggle, or would find my way beyond it to some sort of arbitrary and static perfected state.

When this illusion was shown to me to be an illusion about a decade in, I felt deceived. I began realizing how illusory the notion of a fixed state of perfection was… which then began an existential crisis about what the point of it all was, and feeling a certain level of meaninglessness.

I began seeing how people (including myself) held onto these fixed ideas that if they only got far enough (or wore a mask hard enough) that they would be all love, all the time.

That this was a “loop” in which a teacher would wear a mask pretending to be all love, or perfected, and both imperfect teacher and student would play the game (or participate in the loop) of this illusion.

We love this illusion, as the idea of this sort of perfected love reminds the wounded soul of the love that they did not receive from their mother or father. It is so easy to externalize this onto another– onto a teacher or healer or another who is more than willing to pretend to be this.

Because it gives them power, because it gets them students, and because they are as wounded as their students, often in the same way, and both are playing out a loop of wounded parental relations with one another from simply different sides.

If you go beyond the surface, you will see that the people that we prize in our culture for reaching such an attained state never reveal any type of nuance. They realize that they are playing a game, or are so wounded that they are desperate to not reveal who they truly are.

Mother Teresa’s journals reveal how disconnected and depressed she felt, Ramana Maharshi especially near the end of his life was often fatigued and could not take visitors, Krishnamurti suffered from grief and migraines, Gurdjieff shouted at his students and had many angry rants.

I am in no way disparaging those individuals, but merely pointing out their humanity. If we only know little about people, it is easy to imagine that they have reached a static, perfected state.

One of my favorite teachers was Nisragadatta (I Am That is still essential reading in my book) because he never pretended. He was the first teacher that I came across (although I have come across a few more by this point) who was deeply human, who would point out to students when they were not ready, when they were steeped in illusion, when they were being stupid.

His work would not likely translate to many modern seekers today because if they are still caught in the loop of idealized perfection or seeking the love they never found through their mothers and fathers, he would have broken through that illusion.

It is a rare student nowadays that is willing to move beyond the ego enough to not only take on a teacher, but to truly be a student. To have their blind spots shown, and to move beyond what they already know.

He also smoked and enjoyed sex, which the modern seeker who dislikes any type of embodiment and feels at odds at this world will point out as not being “perfected” and then move on to someone willing to play the role of external guru for them.

A whole host of teachers and healers who have pretended enlightenment and perfected states eventually show their shadow sides because in such states of pretending, the atavistic instincts, the shadow self, what is untended to within, screams in pain and will find a way to reveal itself.

The modern seeker looks for this type of perfection in their teachers, and will break down, discard, or disregard anyone that does not fit into their personal ideals of perfection. They will idealize and create a narrative around their teachers and when their teachers show to be human (which, you know, humans will) or deviate from the romanticized notions that are divorced from the reality of who that teacher is they will move onto the next teacher who is willing to wear a mask and pretend a perfected state to enact the loop again.

This is an especially vicious loop with individuals who are enacting difficulties with authority/parental issues onto their teachers, as the teacher will inevitably fail to become their projected parent.

Or even worse, the teacher will take on that role, and use it to abuse, control, or take power from their students who are seeking a teacher who wears such a mask. Often they will do this without awareness, as  they are not willing to look within at their own wounding (and would rather teach, which is an interesting and common method of resistance to personal healing/attainment).

As long as we are human, we are imperfect. Beyond that, the experience of higher consciousness states not only has a lot of nuance, but is deeply paradoxical and it must be directly experienced to understand those paradoxes.

We become enlightened by digging deep within ourselves and realizing our humanity. It is by sitting with our humanity and really embodying that we can transcend.

We cannot become “lightworkers” unless we have created space for that light by digging in the dirt of ourselves– by examining and sitting with our darkness. By healing it, by realizing it, by accepting it.

We can become “love” by deeply accepting all aspects of ourselves, by loving all aspects of ourselves. This is not by forcing things to become love, but by loving every vicious, atavistic, ugly, dirty, ashamed, wounded, monster-y aspect of ourselves for exactly who they are.

That we can only learn if we are willing to contend with what we do not know.

That we can only progress if we see how much further we can go.

That we can only move beyond knowledge if we educate ourselves.

That we can only move beyond illusion if we contend with the suffering within ourselves that causes for us to create illusions of power, attainment, and achievement.

To liberate oneself requires a lot of discipline. It requires education/study, physical and mental practices to create balance over many years.

You can give anyone some LSD and stick them into a sensory deprivation tank and they will come out talking about “cosmic” something or other, but to truly attain and remain consistently at expanded states of awareness/consciousness requires meditation/mental discipline, physical discipline, and daily practices over many years.

People really do not like to hear this one, and if you look at all of the illusion out there you can really tell it is illusion because it will allow people to remain lazy, uneducated, and unhealed. I realize that this sounds unkind, but the spiritual path traversed with any type of seriousness requires a great deal of effort, and is one of the hardest things that one can do with ones’ life.

It is so easy to break down, to spend our time discrediting, gossiping, or creating illusions. We can create such spectacular illusions about ourselves, and create so many beliefs that allow for us to remain exactly who we are (even if that is not a happy “who we are”) and those at the beginning of their path will always believe that they are at the end.

It is much easier to play the game of perfection and enlightenment, because it requires no effort. You can be an internet troll and share all the right memes, you can be incredibly wounded and create an illusion that you are special and powerful, you can spend all of your days gossiping and attempting to destroy others….and the real question at the end of the day is what the person brings of benefit into the world.

It is through our thoughts and actions that we show who we are. Continually and constantly.

People often ask me how I can manage to get so much done in my day, and I am quite busy. But it is because I question how I spend my time, who I spend my time with, and consider that the spiritual path allows one to express their Will– what they are meant to do in this world.

What is not typically understood without direct experience is that “losing the ego” or “losing an I” is paradoxically also about gaining that “I”. It is not a state of common disassociation– it is an uprising and realization of connection to divinity, to the Earth, to all that is, and that rising also allows a descending– a discovery of the “cosmic I” or the realization (as well as the creative energy) to fulfill purpose in this world.

The more that one heals, the more that one embodies, the more that one grounds, the higher one can go, the greater expansion and perspective one can have.

Paradoxically what happens when we move into states of higher consciousness is that we realize that the illusion of a static or perfected state is just that. An illusion.

That higher states of consciousness are flowing, and dynamic. You are not just one static thing, but many things at once. That anger has a purpose and a beauty and a flow and is as divine as bliss or joy. That you can (and do) feel pain and joy, bliss and depression, and paradoxically it is at the juncture of those, or where those paradoxes meet, that magic, creation, awakening, takes place.

We are just filled with so much backlogged trauma and create such illusions out of our pain that our experience of anger is not one of flow, and is not nuanced, and we have never received the education to understand the message of anger and how to experience it as a flowing state… one that can bring a lot of energy and dynamism if worked with well.

That we are not, nor will we ever be, static beings. That even bliss has nuance, it has darkness, and will flow into something else. That the more that we try to grasp onto such states the less that we experience them.

That we have spent so much time judging ourselves and the outer world according to personal and societal standards that nobody can live up to, including the people that we latch our ideas of perfection onto.

That such perfection has created a cage. That is a method of control, resistance, the wounded aspects of ourselves never measuring up.

We feel that we can control ourselves, the world, and the people in it, if we have rules. If we have models that we can follow. We spend our time judging others for not meeting those rules without understanding that they are our rules, and often come from wounding. That not only that, that they are rules that come from society… rules that are intended to keep us contained, to keep us within the models of conformity that cause for so many of us to feel so unworthy, and in such states of quiet desperation.

It is paradoxically by letting go of our need of perfection, and by continually looking within at what is not working in our lives, what is creating pain, what is not in an adult state (such as using my book, The Body Deva, which is a method of self-inquiry as well as covers emotional intelligence and how to work with emotions), what is not allowing for us to feel alive and joyous and free that we can awaken. It is by grounding deeply in our humanity, in our imperfections, that we can be free… to be the imperfect humans that we are.

It was probably about five or six years ago that I had an irrevocable moment of clarity where I saw a “loop”, or repeated pattern (in this case, a behavioral one) having to do with fear and resistance.

If you have read my work (or my blog) I talk about loops quite a bit. If we notice the loops in our lives, or the external world, we can begin to see when something is created out of trauma, or is based on illusion, rather than clarity/truth

We can see how trauma creates belief and organizes our realities, and we enact these loops again and again until we are willing to look straight at them and to realize what is at the bottom of that loop.

At the time, I was procrastinating by reading through conversations in an online group. This group was focused on magic/occult practices, and in this case, it was someone attempting to find support for actually doing magic.

This is quite common– whether it is a meditation practice, shamanic work, occult/magical workings, or any type of spiritual work– taking the first step into actually doing something is for many people like leaping off of a cliff.

They require support, they require a teacher or others to get over the fear and to actually do the damn thing. Because by looking at that fear again and again, and doing something anyway, despite that fear, is how someone becomes a competent spiritual practitioner… or can traverse the spiritual path beyond surface realizations of it.

What I noticed was that part of this loop were several people who were telling the person to be afraid, that the work was dangerous, that bad things would happen.

What I noticed in this moment was that the people who were responding with such fear were inserting their own fear, their own resistance.

What is more, that they had little to no experience of actually doing anything. They had never leapt off of that cliff, so to speak. They had never done any spiritual work, although some of them were quite versed intellectually.

It is quite easy to spot who has done the work, by the way, and doesn’t require any large degree of clairvoyance. It perhaps is quite similar to my piano teacher when I was young knowing that I had not practiced that week.

You go through specific thresholds through direct experience. Viewing those thresholds from the rearview mirror becomes rather clear when one has some distance from said threshold. 

What you will find in a lot of spiritual, shamanic, and magical type forums is a lot of people who like to discuss things. This is not a bad thing, although misinformation and Dunning-Kruger syndrome is certainly a thing.

But what it can result in is a lot of resistance being perpetuated, a lot of illusion created from people not yet ready to directly experience. If we are not careful, such fear will cling to our own, and our own resistance will be heightened as a result of our interactions.

Because here is what experienced people will tell you, those who have traversed the path, done the magic, studied tirelessly combined with directly experiencing the thing (whatever said thing may be):

Yes, they will laugh. You will get burned fingers (inserts story about accidentally flooding garden or basement, blowing up microwave, getting massive headache or blown out for several days after a ritual, feeling of huge energy rising within causing them to shake or do automatic movements) and that is part of the education.

Because it is. Because if you actually experience the thing, if you are that rare person that both educates yourself and does the work, two things will happen.

The first is that you will screw up. Often out of stupidity. This has absolutely nothing to do with being a beginner, but of traversing new terrain for the first time and not quite understanding the terrain enough to navigate it.

Each time who you are and what you know expands, you will find yourself in new terrain. You then jump off of that cliff again and deepen your practice, often burning your fingers in the process.

You get to the point where you can enjoy this, and will look for new depths to traverse, new terrains to explore, even while knowing that the burning of fingers is part of the process.

You actually want to burn your fingers in the process, by the way. Not for the “war” stories (in fact, don’t get hung up on those, or you will stop learning new things or jumping off of that cliff) but because they actually mean that you have put in effort.

We can create a lot of spectacular illusion for ourselves, a lot of formed from psychological projection and mental creation with little significance in any other reality (spiritual or physical).

These illusions may be pleasant distractions, and there is a place for fantasy in our lives. This is if we realize it is a fantasy, however.

In doing shadow work, you can even look right at that fantasy and see what is lurking underneath– there is always a reason why we need to feel different, powerful, special, victorious, superior– if we are willing to look at the wound that created such a need (through something like The Body Deva, my latest book) so we no longer need to enact such daydreams.

We can free ourselves to simply be ourselves, without needing to put on a show, either in our minds or in the outer world. We can free ourselves from needing to be anything other than what we are, and who we are currently.

Which brings us to the second thing. Any type of spiritual or magical work expands who you are– it makes you more conscious. This of course means reasonably well-done workings, but even the smaller ones can have a ripple effect (as in, do something, even if it is small!)

What happens when your consciousness expands, or you truly do anything that approaches the Other (interaction with the spirit realms) that creates a shift in consciousness, is that who you are changes. Your daily reality changes.

Whatever type of spiritual exploration or experience it is, it creates a ripple effect that uproots and quite clearly shows you what in your life isn’t working– what relationships are not working, career, lifestyle…you get my point– while that can be listed as a “byproduct” of spiritual awakening, of magical ritual, of shamanic work (or any type of spiritual work) this can be quite painful and we are highly resistant to it.

Even if it is helping us to move from some factors of our lives that are not working. Even if it is moving us forward towards self-realization.

We get used to our ruts, we get used to the known elements of our lives. Even if we do not have a happy known, or an educated known, we know the limitations of our minds, we know what we consider reality, and our ego-minds work through resistance.

Understand that fear is a tactic. It is resistance. It is the parts of ourselves (and others) that are too fearful to act, that are causing us to stay who we are and what we are. Others are enacting their fear in the outer world, and if you listen to them, you are listening to resistance.

Because here is what I, as well as others who have “done the thing” and continue to realize that our resistance is speaking and continue to “do the thing” anyway:

Any spiritual path, any spiritual experience, any shamanic, spiritual, occult (etc.) doing will change your reality. It will change who you dynamically are. But it does this by releasing what is illusion, by forcing you to look exactly at what isn’t working in your life.

It is quite evident who has “done the thing”. They develop a sense of magic around them, you can see it in their eyes and in their presence. It is quite palpable when someone has done the work.

But guess what, those burned fingers lead to beauty. They lead to large elements of your life changing, sure, but that allows for a clearing to occur, for what is right to come in, for authenticity to be realized, for depth, for nuance, for the ability to traverse depths that others rarely recognize are there.

So see the fear for what it is: resistance. Do not let others speak to your fear. Listen to knowledge, learn from your elders. Everyone needs a physical teacher– it is a sign of resistance that is preventing you from your potential if you do not have someone to reach out to, to show you your blind spots. If you walk any of these paths, I guarantee that there is someone more educated, more conscious, more experienced, who has done that exact thing that you are considering doing and can assist you in some small or large way, even if it is saying “yeah, I’ve done that thing”.

Fear is a tactic. It is a loop enacted from others who are mired in their own resistance. Take care that you are not externalizing your own fears and lack of knowledge, or that they do not become a mirror for you.

Do the thing. Do the magic, do the shamanic journey, educate yourself with someone who can speak with nuance, who looks at spiritual experiences and the spiritual journey and any spiritual path with curiosity, openness, and wonder. Who realizes the burned fingers from actual experience, but also the beauty and possibility of immense change.

Most of us keep our ego-minds satiated by staying within the parameters of what is our known universe. Anything else creates fear, which creates retreat, which creates lack of change, which keeps us who and what you are. If you are entirely happy with your existence, if you are blind to your inherent possibility, if you didn’t already sense that there were unknown depths or something Other out there, you wouldn’t be on a spiritual path. As much as we hunger for change, or can feel the possibility of it, we have a sophisticated system that creates immense resistance (the ego-mind).

Recognize that system for what it is, what its purpose is, and decide to change anyway.

Listen to logic, listen to experience, listen to your own intuition… and even with that resistance, that fear both inwardly and outwardly… do the thing, whatever it is.

You can find The Body Deva, a method of self-inquiry that allows for someone to see clearly what lies unhealed within, as well as tools to resolve mind-body-spirit through the physical form, through creating a relationship with the inherent consciousness of the body, through Amazon and other major booksellers.

One of the more common illusions of the spiritual path is that it will get easier as one progresses on it.

The belief that the spiritual path is about transcendence means that people often create subsuquent beliefs that if only they tried hard enough, or were spiritual enough, that their lives would be perfect and they would never have to experience suffering ever again.

That if only they were spiritual enough they would not feel, would not think, or grieve, or deal with the invevitable cycle of ups and downs that the physical form and life has to offer.

This creates a life-long battle in which the person never is able to live up to notions of societal and personal goodness, can never be perfect enough (creating imposter syndrome), and must be doing something wrong or must not be “spiritual” enough if they have issues or are still struggling with mental fracturing or the effects of physical or mental-emotional trauma.

This also means that those who are struggling with life-long imbalances are told that they are not being spiritual enough, or that if they just work hard enough that whatever they are having struggling with will one day disappear or be healed.

This then creates a loop in which a person continually believes that one day they will be whole enough, good enough, or perfected enough… except that day never comes.

Except that investment in this belief perpetuates illusion and harm; it creates evolution towards an end goal that may never appear. It takes people out of the present moment, and romanticizes the spiritual path in a way that is inaccurate and unhelpful to those actually traversing it.

If we take on this belief, we live in the future, projecting and hoping to attain a degree of perfection that we can never attain. That idea of perfection is sold and marketed by those who have bought into it as well, creating a loop of teacher or guru and student, all acting out the falsehood of being beyond the human experience.

Illusion will always be more popular because it is formed from our psychological projections, our own private bubble, what is unhealed within us creating paradigms and scenarios that can never be met in reality. It is by questioning our reality, questioning ourselves and what we believe and what aspect of us wishes to believe this that we can move beyond such illusions, and the purveyors of such illusions.

There are many things that can be healed, many things that can be shifted on the spiritual path. There can be liberation from the things that create harm in you, that create strife, and this is not by coming to a state of perfection, but by attaining a state of acceptance… even with the parts of you that deeply suffer, that are in pain, that are imperfect.

Awakening means accepting who you are now, what you are now, and the parts of you that are in pain, that are definitely not perfected, that are not healed or whole. The parts of you that will never be okay by societal terms, the parts of you that are hidden and dark and outliers in this world.

This also means rectifying and working with the shadows of light: the joy, artistry, and enthusiasm for life that may have been stifled along the way.

That accepting who we are at the deepest levels means letting go of the illusory belief that one day all will be perfect.

That it is by our own evolution and participating consciously in our process over many years that we can awaken; but paradoxically this allows one to awaken to the understanding that we can always grow, we can always progress, we can always become more… but to free oneself of the belief of becoming.

In becoming more deeply authentic, in becoming more conscious, the blind emotive reactions cease. This is a big deal. We move beyond basic human self-obsession and are able to look beyond ourselves, and are no longer creating chaos in our worlds, and seeing through the eyes of traumatized inner children.

But in many ways it is a path of reconciling that while within the human form, that none of us are perfected. That truly becoming human: feeling, experiencing, allowing, and most of all accepting all aspects of ourselves, is how we become “awake” or “enlightened”.

Over the years I have also had a curious amount of clients who have been told by spiritual teachers that spiritual means that their lives should get easier; with a heavy amount of blame if the person is suffering, or has had a difficult life or path.

This really shows a great deal of ignorance about really any type of spiritual figure or realistic account of religious and spiritual paths, which outside of a bubble of popularized spirituality will always talk about how difficult the spiritual path is, and how the lives of people who feel called to spirit are filled with external as well as internal struggle.

Such struggle is not to be romanticized, either, but it takes great courage as well as personal responsibility to traverse a spiritual path of any depth, and those called to the spiritual path rarely have easy existences, and frequently find themselves, in more ways than one, “Others” in the world.

One of the popular modern terms Dark Night of the Soul was coined by St. John of the Cross, who found illumination while imprisoned for his beliefs. The specific term did not mean any feeling of existential depression, or trauma-based emotional depression, but a realization of what happens when one goes into states of the highest consciousness–ecstasy, bliss, pulsation, liberation– and then crashes out of them again.

Any path towards the light happens by examining and unearthing the dark. Those who go to the ocean floor are those who need to. Such efforts and unearthings are incredibly courageous. They are also incredibly difficult, and require personal fortitude as well as willingness to see what isn’t working, where one isn’t connected, and where one is not meeting the world or the people in it well.

Seeing where we lack clarity is always difficult. It is much easier on a superficial level to create illusion and projection out of pain. But looking at that pain directly means understanding it and healing it, while illusion never does. Illusion and trauma separates, it doesn’t heal.

Any awakening happens by deeply going within. By deeply feeling, by reconciling what is unhealed. It is only then that the mind clears, the emotions lessen, and a perspective occurs in which the person does not consider themselves as separate from the world emerges.

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If we start with a bubble around us that only allows for us to consider ourselves, the awakening process would be that bubble widening and expanding. This allows for us to see other people, to see the world. To eventually meet the world and the people in it as they are, not how we wish them to be. To be in an adult state of consciousness, greater balance, with an improved ability to connect to everything around us.

This allows for an understanding of oneness: the ability to see the world and the people in it, and to recognize that an aspect of them reflects an aspect of you. This allows you to feel deep compassion for people, to feel connected to them, and to meet them where they are (not where you would like for them to be).

In others we can see our former selves, we can see the aspects of ourselves that are or were in pain, we can see the aspects of who we hope to be. By connecting deeply to the world, and to the people in it, we can do the type of true shadow work where we see what or who in the world is causing significant reaction, and know that that shows where something within lies unhealed or unresolved.

It is by looking at the world and the people in it this way that the most horrific experiences and chaotic unhealed individuals can be thanked, as they showed you something within yourself that was disconnected, that was unhealed.

The spiritual path is one of immense hardship, and for many, equating it to the path of Sisyphus– who was required to push a boulder up the hill only for it to roll back down, and for him to repeat the process for all eternity– is quite apt.

There is an immense sense of spiritual fatigue that happens somewhere around the 8-10 year mark for many people. They have worked with their inner children hundreds if not thousands of times, know what their ancestral patterns are, what their past lives are, and the basics of how societal forces have shaped them.

In many ways with this much effort causes our lives to become quite a bit easier. At the beginning of the path we are filled with noise: inner children, unhealed ancestors, past lives, and all of our personal history. This is like an orchestra with many discordant instruments, and when we begin to heal the instruments begin to quiet down.

One of the common mistakes that people at the beginning of their path make is to say that they are somehow done with their personal history. That they have healed their inner six year old, or their inner infant, through a healing session or two. Unless that six year old or inner infant had rather superficial needs or a minimal amount of trauma, healing is very much a spiral. We go back again and again to the parts of ourselves that are unhealed at different points in our personal history because we can look at them differently.

We are a different person. We have different consciousness, and it is by spiraling again and again that we can consider both the superficial considerations of what our inner six year old may need as well as what that six year old may need at the bottom of that ocean, and all of the layers of that ocean in between.

This means that you may return to that same six year old hundreds of times, if not thousands, if there is a large trauma that occurred, or if you become more conscious.

When we become more conscious we can consider things at a different level, and from a different vantage point. The spiritual path then first becomes about becoming distinctly more adult in consciousness; recognizing the parts of ourselves that are not adult and how they are creating our reality for us out of their traumas and subsuquent beliefs that have emerged out of those traumas.

This is why I suggest a method of personal healing and self-inquiry, such as The Body Deva, along with visiting healers. We have so much that is unhealed within us, and so much of that is defining and restricting our reality to such an immense degree that it requires our own participation to evolve into adult consciousness.

But what happens on the spiritual path is that you can work your way beyond personal healing. This is not truly beyond– there are still many things to work on– but it may be a group of five instruments, instead of a thousand. It is enough to have perspective, or to “witness”, rather than be immersed in the chaos one was once involved in. This means the capacity to step back from the fleeting chaos, projections, and woundings to a clearer, more consciously adult state. Being willing to recognize the personal work we need to do is part of the path. It is incredibly easy to come to a superficial place, or to do one piece of healing work, and to announce mastery.

Individuals who have moved beyond illusory mentalities often have a great deal of pain at taking personal responsibility for themselves when others seemingly do not need to, or anger at those who use spirituality as a way to distance themselves from their inner states… or because they are in deeper waters when the bell curve of society only acknowledges or popularizes the dipping your toes in the water, if such waters are entered into at all. Illusion is always more popular than reality for a reason, as is ignorance when it comes to spiritual matters.

Working through this phase allows for compassion as well as realization of the second phase of the spiritual path: working with social constructs and the grids.

At a certain point you can begin to work on grids, or the societal and cultural constructs and constraints that inform and create us. This is really the second phase of the spiritual path, and only happens if we are not immersed in personal history to the extent that we can navigate beyond it. Plenty of people wish to jump to this point, but unless we heal our personal history (including our past lives, familial line, and ancestry) we have too much noise, too many restricted beliefs, and lack clarity to such an extent that we are still seeing through the eyes of trauma.

When you work your way into this phase it is not like personal history no longer needs to be worked on, but that you have greater perspective and clarity to see the other forces that create us personally and societally.

What is resistant within us is what is unhealed, what is unclear in us is what is unhealed; we only really have the ability and willingness to truly evolve on our path once we can develop the ability to look straight at what isn’t working in our lives.

We dislike seeing the flaws in our logic, we hold on so tightly to what we believe because it is untrue. The path of Sisyphus is then someone who is willing to, again and again, look directly at what is creating difficulty, what has skewed their perspective to a large degree, and to reconcile it. This takes a lot of courage, and a lot of willingness to surrender the sort of egoic superiority complexes and illusions our minds have created to keep us exactly what and who we are right now.

What happens when you work so hard on yourself is that in many ways the path does get easier. Your mind gets quieter, you can direct the course of your life to a greater degree. You have healed and have perspective from personal history, you have gone through a process of deconditioning or reconciling how you interact with societal and other programming. This creates an immense amount of freedom, and there is a point in the path where it does not feel like a huge slog.

But it doesn’t make things easier, it just means that you are now dealing with the bottom of the ocean, instead of the waves or mid-ocean. In many ways, the spiritual path gets quite a bit harder, as you are staring directly at the parts of you that are atavistic, wild, that seek harm, the personal and ancestral karma of the perpetrator. The reptilian brain, the caveman, the parts of ourselves that seek destruction and harm.

When we clear away the clutter, the true darkness, the true ocean floor… the abyss and the many monsters that inhabit it, can clearly emerge. Seeing such things with clarity is difficult, as we are used to an incredibly obscured lens, or one that projects such shadows onto movies, onto villains in the outer world.

We start the spiritual path considering ourselves the victim, and working through the times we have been victimized, abused, and harmed. We do so for a reason. Many of us have been harmed so terribly, and it has us frozen in that consciousness; we are the infant or teenager or adolescent who has been harmed, and we look at the world through their eyes. Each time something reminds us of that pain, we revert back to being that consciousness… of being six, or an infant. This is how we relate to the world, this is the eyes we see the world through.

We blindly react to not look within– creating harm through our thoughts and actions, unable or simply not ready to realize our impact on others, we push our pain and ignorance onto anyone and everyone that we can find.

The spiritual path should be first and foremost about personal healing for a reason. Otherwise we lack perspective. Otherwise we cannot consider those around us. If we are drowning in our own lives, and with our own trauma, it is essential to get to a place of floating, or at least treading water, before we can even have the capacity to awaken.

Awakening involves the capacity to greater and greater degrees to move beyond personal selfishness, but we need to be a bit selfish to heal. It may, in fact, be the first time that we have regarded our own selfish needs to do so, instead of displacing our anxieties and issues onto family, friends, or others in an effort to not attend to our inner states.

It is typical for many people to feel the weight of Sisyphus– to heal, to heal, and to heal again. To feel spiritually exhausted from looking at that same spiral from different vantage points thousands of times. To feel as if the boulder has now become more massive that one is rolling up that hill.

Such people are doing work not only for themselves, not only for their families and ancestry, but for the good of humanity. While such things sound hyperbolic, it is those who are willing to traverse the depths who create change in their lives. Who can direct the course of their lives. Who can find their Will (their individual consciousness paired with divine consciousness) and understand their purpose in this world. Who can become of service to this world.

Who can move from blindly taking and reacting and basic human self-obsession to care for and consider others. This is a true blessing, and a gift, and it is typical for those who are on a spiritual path of depth to at a certain point have their path no longer be about themselves, but to do their small part to make this world a better place for their presence in it.

But eventually the path of Sisyphus must be examined. After rolling that boulder up the hill so many times it can become addictive to do so. We get very used to the circumstances of our lives. Even if the known is a difficult known, we still feel control, we still know the parameters of our known universe.

The real trick is how to put that boulder down and to sit next to that hill, resting and integrating all that one has done on the spiritual path. The real trick is to be okay with the unknown, and to be on a spiritual path in which all of the efforts digging in the mud, or at the bottom of the ocean, can allow for grace, and for the good stuff to come in. For states of flow, of blessing, of gratitude, and of realization of the ability to in many ways now direct the course of your lives.

There is no end to the abyss; there is no end to the bottom of the ocean. But such depths should allow for greater heights as well. On the spiritual path putting even Sisyphus aside to feel the liberating effects of such deep excavation, to integrate the immense work that has already been done, and to come into a new state of being require being able to see that the path of Sisyphus is one that can we can be liberated from, just like everything else.

Lately I have seen the term “person” or “personhood” being used in an animist context to introduce the concept that we should be considering other intelligences as vitally alive and of having a soul.

Anything that supports people picking their heads up and actually looking around and seeing that there are other people in the world, let alone other intelligences, I fully support.

Perhaps this term is a good first step in doing so.

But this term is inherently problematic. First, let’s consider the thought that if we were to truly go into a forest, or under an ocean, and take a poll of all of the non-human intelligences and/or elementals there… how would they feel about humans?

This is the sort of funny thing that only those who have connected to and revere such intelligences consider. Humans have a lot of wonderful things going for them, but from outsider perspective, many may not have the highest regard for humans, nor find it beneficial or express gratitude at being described as one.

When we ascribe personhood to something, we are putting a lens on it. We have certain expectations for language, social constructs, behavior, ethics and moral compass to name yet a few examples.

Perhaps most important of this is ethical and moral compass, as we rarely contend with the fact that our ethical and moral compass is what we expect the world and everything in it to follow, and that other humans, as well as other intelligences, may not fit our rigid definitions.

We especially rarely contend with the fact that our ethical and moral compass may not be shared with other humans universally… or that our compass may have been set by us very much by society and familial imprints, and not by our own conscious participation or decision.

Especially intelligences that are far from human or personhood will have very different outlooks than our own. They will have a much different manner of relating than our own. They will have different beliefs, different interests, and a much different vantage point than our own.

At some point considering the arrogance of ascribing ourselves at the top of the pyramid, and then perhaps saying “ok, let’s solve this by putting everything at the top of the pyramid in order to correct this” doesn’t consider that many beings, elementals, and other creatures may not have put us at the top of such a pyramid.

Through such a definition of personhood, we strip beings of their unique vitality. We render them one-dimensional, with specific ways of relating. We strip them of their power, of their way of being, of their beauty, by asking them to fit in with our notions and wounds and self-centeredness.

We then close ourselves off to authentic experience and communion because we have expectations that such an intelligence is going to have a similar way of relating. We cannot listen, we cannot truly hear, if we have such expectations.

If you go into any spiritual relationship expecting a tree to speak to you like a person does, or for any other type of being to relate to you in a way that any type of “personhood” creates, the chances that you are self-creating are astronomical.

The chances are that that tree would relate to you in its own way if you only allowed it and were not so fixated on it relating a specific way, are also astronomical.

If you considered that your spiritual relationship may take time, that it is a two way street (not just you taking or expecting every intelligence to fall over themselves wanting to teach you), and are actually willing to learn (and to listen) to an intelligence vastly different than your own, then you will find yourself in as many spiritual relationships as you have time for.

If you are willing to consider that those spiritual relationships are not going to be centered around you (it being a two-way street and a relationship, after all), are not like all of the other humans who look to take and personify and psychologically project onto such intelligences, are actually willing to learn and are open enough to learn, have an ounce or two of humility, and are willing to see the intelligences around you as the unique, nuanced, and dynamic vitality that they are… all the better.

I find that a lot of people really haven’t come to consciousness in regards to how christianized their outlook is. I mean no disrespect, I have studied a fair amount of estoric and folk Christianity paths and find them quite lovely, but the animist perspective is not one of dominion. It is not one of transcendentalism. It is not one of even humans really being caretakers, or of even being a significant part of the weaving that we call life. It isn’t one in which humans get to call all of the shots, or can snap their fingers and whatever they want will occur… or even one in which every intelligence that you approach is willing to teach you, or any human for that matter.

What I see a lot of out there is basic christianized theology with a few spiritual elements sort of shoehorned in. The same framework and archetypes, but rendered slightly differently to cause people to believe that they are somehow on a much different path, without the deconstructive effort to personality or ideology that it would take to authentically create a new framework.

I realize I will get a lot of flak for pointing this out as many individuals participating in such communities believe that they have moved away from such ideologies as they have turned to spiritual, shamanic, or pagan religious or spiritual paths. They may even have internalized hatred or trauma surrounding christianized ideologies, but they haven’t really moved away from them.

While I recognize that we often need a framework that is friendly to those perhaps taking one step towards moving away from such ideologies, it has very much become something where the first step is considered the entirety of the map in our modern world, and the true essence and beauty of such teachings is lost.

As teachings enter a puritanical framework, the things that the framework cannot contend with are stripped from it: death, sex, atavistic and animalistic impulses. Spirits are rendered safe, or non-existent, or easy to command (because: human). Anything deemed “ugly” is then stripped, anything that will remind us of the cycling of death-disease-life, of the shadow and darkness, that which gives us ultimately our power, is then stripped.

The shamanic framework is one of ketabasis. It is of a descent to the Underworld, a death and rising process in which we truly begin to understand the cycles of ourselves, of life, of nature. It is only by contending with our depths that we can access our power; it is only through contending with our depths that we can contend with the depths of others.

It is only through contending with our depths that we can in any way rise. Otherwise our ascension or “light work” is truly incomplete. It is illusion without the contention of reality, of what really makes us human, and of activating our divine creative power, which is the cycling of consciousness and life force through us that is latent at our very depths (kundalini, in the root chakra, or Tiamat at the oceanic depths, if one cares to be poetic about it).

I very much consider such teachings gatekeepers, and understand their purpose… and that those who are ready to move on, will. But here is my advice, for those willing to listen:

What animism does is consider everything as part of a web. That we are continually in a state of interbeing with what is around us. That everything has vitality, it has a soul. It has something that we can speak with. But this is only if we speak to it on its own terms.

That is only if we are secure within ourselves to listen. To hear. To witness and regard something quite different from ourselves as valuable, vital, and of having knowledge. To build a relationship with it. To build a friendship. To build any type of partnership requires time, it requires openness, and it requires being able to truly meet the other on their own terms and in their own way.

If we can learn how to listen, and move past our ideologies that render us deaf and mentally creating out of societal expectation or psychological projection, we can meet such intelligences in their true capacity. It is only by willing to meet any type of being, human or non-human, on its own terms and at its own depth, that we can commune at an in-depth and authentic level.

An octopus doesn’t think like you. It doesn’t want to be a person. It very much has its own thing going on, and until a being like it is offered respect, regard, and deep listening, we cannot properly and clearly commune with it.

If you are interested, I am offering an Animism course. You can find all of my distance courses here