Ep61 The Alchemy of Emotion: Transforming Fear and Pain Into Courage and Power

Announcer 0:28

Hello, and welcome to speaking spirit where we talk about all things spiritual. Your host, John Moore is Chinar and spiritual teacher. And now here's John

John Moore 0:47

Hello, hello, hello.

Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, whatever time it is, as you are listening to this, it's morning where I am.

Gosh, it's only quarter of seven, I got up early this morning, I'm having my coffee while I talk to you, which is a pretty normal thing. Today, we're talking about the alchemy of emotion. Transforming fear and pain into power. That's the title. So we're going to get into emotion, and we're going to get into transforming, quote, unquote, negative emotions. How do we do that? Why do we do that? Why would we want to do that? Well, you know, let me begin by saying this, no podcast on this planet, including this one can offer you professional advice. And if you are experiencing, you know, deep depression, or any sort of emotional dysregulation, that might be an indicator of something serious, something medical, something psychological, please seek out professional help. Well, the techniques, you know, I go through here, you know, might be helpful, you want to address the things that are, you know, there may be some underlying organic causes or something, but I'm going to talk about fear and painful emotions, things that we consider negative emotions. And I'm going to probably quote some works by other spiritual teachers here because I've learned a lot about emotion from other folks. And I'll do my best to reference who they are, as I throw their work out there for you to, to ponder to use. And I'll try to give some practical advice along the way. So one of the useful ways of looking at emotions for me, is looking at them kind of on a scale of low to high energy or low to high vibration, not to get to New Agey, but we have, you know, we have different emotions. And there's a scale that is part of the Sedona Method, which was founded by Lester Levinson, one of my favorite spiritual teachers now taught by Hale Dwoskin, his student and there's a book and there are courses and all kinds of stuff. But he had this scale of emotion that I find is fairly useful, it's because it's very simple. And it's, they call it ag flap. It's a funny word. And that Stan, I'm gonna try to remember exactly what each letter each letter stands for an emotion and sort of going up the scale from lowest energy to highest energy, emotion and once you get past the final P in ag flap, then you start moving into I guess more positive emotions, we might consider more levels of spiritual awakening and enlightenment, etc. So ag flap the A at the bottom stands for apathy. This is I've just given up I feel nothing. Obviously the very lowest for form of emotion one can have. And then there's grief. Right? And I'm not talking about the grieving process, which is absolutely normal when there's a loss, but the emotion of grief, this emotion that is dragging you down this feeling of loss that's AG, F. Fear. I'm going to talk a lot about fear today. It's an important one to consider. L is lust. So above fear is the energy of lust. Right? It's the feeling of longing of wanting something so badly. It not just, I'm not just talking sexual lust here

a lust anger, right, very high emotion. Lots of energy there can be very destructive. And P is actually pride. They'll say pride is a hide. You know, in this is not, you know, I'm proud of my kids, or, you know, this is sort of false pride is very high energy, but it's still a trap. And so the reason why these are lower on the scale is that they affect your ability to choose your own. Choose your own adventure. And if you remember the Choose Your Own Adventure books. I used to love these when I was a kid you'd read, you know, story, maybe it was like a Dungeons and Dragons kind of thing. Where you're, you know, you're a knight and you're in this castle and says, if you go into the drawing room, turn to page 103. If you choose to go down the staircase, turn to page 204. And then you would turn to wherever you wanted to, and read the next passage and then move along. So your life is a little bit like that, right? You get to choose your own adventure, as long as your life is not being run by out of control, emotion. So, you know, extreme examples of that would be like anxiety. You know, if I have social anxiety, for example, it might prevent me from going out. If you have a disorder and anxiety disorder, you may need medication, you may need therapy, but you know, the feeling of anxiety around certain things can prevent you from doing them. Even if logically, it's the best choice for you. Even if there is a reward that's involved with it. Sometimes the reward is lusty, and so that might help you overcome. You know, overcome the fear, because lust is a higher vibration, emotion. So above the emotion of pride, there are what they call three more courageousness. Acceptance, and peace. This moving into the positive side of the emotions. Now courageousness is not false bravado, has nothing to do with Macho or you know, whatever. It's the idea that I am facing, whatever is in this moment without fear. And I'm going to talk a lot about that in a moment. Acceptance. Whatever is happening in this moment, is perfect. That's acceptance, and acceptance. Acceptance really is love. We talked about love as an emotion, and you'll notice that love's not on the scale. love really is a state of being in total acceptance of what is at a deep spiritual level, and I will talk a lot about love today. And finally, is peace. This is perfect imperturbability perfect peace is when nothing can disturb you It your house may be on fire. And you calmly get up and walk out the door. Right? You are, you're at peace. Now, none of these things means, you know, acceptance piece. courageousness means you do nothing doesn't mean that it, you know, that's apathy, that's at the very bottom of the scale, I just sit there on the couch, my house is burning down. And I just don't feel like doing anything about it. That's apathy. That's what deep depression is. Like, I can tell you firsthand, if you don't if you haven't listened to me before I came into spirituality. Originally, I was diagnosed with major depressive disorder. And as it turns out, it was actually PTSD. That was masquerading as depression. And there were times in my life where I gave up. I just laid there. I couldn't get myself off the couch. I didn't eat I lost about 60 pounds, I was very sick. That's apathy.

Apathy can be very, it can feel very sad. You'll notice you know, on this on this set of emotions, we don't have happy or sad. Yeah, those are those are very broad terms. So sadness could be apathy, or could be grief. Right. And sometimes anger covers sadness. Sometimes we feel sad, and we get angry about it. And sometimes anger covers grief. So there's a lot going on there are emotions are complex things. They are psycho, spiritual, physiological, energetic, they affect us on all levels. They're the base of our being they exist before thought. When you make decisions about things, I want to buy this car, I want to date this person. What they have found when in doing brain research is that the decision starts in the older part of the brain that the emotional centers of the brain and then moves forward into the prefrontal cortex, which is the logic center of the brain. And good salespeople really, really good top notch salespeople know that people make buying decisions based on emotion and then they justify them with logic. When I went to buy my car last time, I bought a car a couple of years ago I knew what color I wanted now that you know there was no logic involved you know, I had done you know, I've done research I kind of knew what kind of car I wanted but I wanted a car that I felt safe in in the snow and had this and that and it was a lot of back and forth between logic and emotion but the color of the car was important to me why would it matter if the cars pink or orange or gray or whatever? Why do we even have different color cars? If people are only buying cars based on logic it's because they learned and that's a huge purchase and the same is true for houses you know I remember when I moved back to Maine in the house like fell in love literally fell in love with the house we bought from the curb wow that's beautiful and then walked inside and there was a beautiful kitchen and then you know oh yeah this is our house I was sold in about five seconds I mean we toured the rest of the house but um you know we knew the house meta you know met our expectations but we make our decisions based on emotion. Primarily if we are at p See if our base level of motion is courageousness. Acceptance, or peace, we have the ability to make better decisions. Making decisions based on lust. And I think we know, we've all seen people make poor decisions based on lust. And gosh, I have made poor decisions based on lust. You know, I've not dated, always dated the right people know, I'm really attracted to that person. And oh, they're willing to sleep with me. Oh, all right, well, we're dating now. Oh, but they, you know, they took a knife to my dining room table and threw garbage around in my yard and stolen broke a bunch of my stuff. That was not a very wise choice.

So it's about becoming sovereign. And by sovereign, I don't mean, you know, in a political, I'm not talking about politics at all. I avoid that most of the time on these shows are enough political podcasts and politics, you know, are pretty boring to me most of the time. There's a lot of drama, there's a lot of false drama stirred up. And if you're interested in politics, that's fine. I'm not judging anybody who is I'm not judging your interests or anything. But you know, I'm doing my best. Doing my best to rise above the drama. I've I used to watch the news pretty frequently. And I will tie this into the alchemy of emotion as well. I used to watch the news pretty frequently, like, twice a day, you know, in the morning and in at night. And I found it was getting me riled up. It was getting me angry. You know, and I think they, they being you know, I don't think there's a global media conspiracy. That isn't apparent, right, like people who are conspiracy theorists are like, oh, you know, there's one group of people that controls all of the media. No, there are a few, you know, there are a few media outlets that own pretty much everything. That is true there is there are monopolies out there. There's no one person deciding what's going on the news. However, all of the media outlets that rely on ratings, to sell advertising and make money have figured out what gets eyeballs and what gets eyeballs is drama, anger, I can't stop watching this. I can't, you know, I'm riled up, tell me more, feed that emotional beast. And so I'm really careful about the media I consume. And I generally, unless there's, you know, something, some thing going on that I need to be aware of, I generally avoid, avoid the news. You know. And one of the things I, you know, I recommend, I've known people who, you know, during an election cycle or whatever, get riled up and you see, we've seen this, we see people get riled up to the point of violence. Are you being manipulated? Yes, you are, you are 100% being manipulated, you're being manipulated by the media, who wants money for your viewership, you're being manipulated by politicians who are shaping messages to make you angry at the other side? Because that's easy. That's easy.

Right, it's the easiest thing to do to make somebody angry to make somebody feel threatened. So remember, I said that anger sometimes covers fear. And if you watch political messages, particularly coming Well, I'm not going to choose sides here. But if you watch political messages, very often these days the message will be they whoever they are, are coming for your children. They are, you know, trying to to manipulate your children indoctrinate your children do something harmful to your children. Now there are things that are actually harmful to children going on in the world?

But that's not you know, that's not manufactured. It's not going to get people riled up, we, you know, we used to expend a lot of media time and effort on feeding starving children, I remember the whole, you know, the feminine Ethiopia. You know, and they had, you know, the concerts and everything. I haven't seen much of that recently. Because what they found they, you know, again, I'm talking like a conspiracy theorists, what people have found is that they can stir it up, when it's more your survival mechanism, your fear kicks in more when they can demonstrate a threat to your children. As a parent, I understand that. Nothing more precious. So the problem with these lower level emotions is that they drag us down into ego. The ego is a, I did a whole episode on ego. But they're the ego is a defense mechanism for protecting the body and mind. And it makes us view ourselves as separate beings, not inter, not the interconnected spirits that we are made up of pure consciousness. But it makes us identify with our body and our role, and our name and our demographic and our psychographic and, you know, our nationality and our ethnicity and all of those things that if we took, if you were, you know, talking about inquiry and inquiry, spiritual inquiry, you know, Ramana, Maharshi was really good at this, the Indian saint and his whole practice was, what am I trying to get to the bottom of that? If I ask you ask you, who are you, you might say, Oh, I'm so and so. Let's say, Okay, well, that's your name, but who are you? Okay, well, I'm, you know, I'm a, I'm a dad. Okay. But if I, if you take away being a dad, do you still exist? Well, yeah. Okay. So I'm a 35 year old, I'm not 35. So but I'm a 35 year old man. Okay. If we take away your age, you know, 35 years old, like if we, you know, next year you turn 36. Or, you know, last year you were 34. And we take away the aspects that you identify with as being a man, whatever that means to you. Do you still exist? And the answer that is yes. Okay, well, I'm I'm a person. And this is our inquiry works. So you're a person, can you be 100% sure of that? Well, the answer to that is no, we can't be 100% sure of anything. I feel like I'm a person I have the perception that of a person people treat me like I'm a person. But maybe I'm, you know, maybe I'm in the matrix, maybe I'm a brain in a jar somewhere. Maybe I'm a computer program. So what am I? And you keep going like that? And there really is no final answer. You're just peeling back layers of your ego. The ego is the stories that we tell about who we are. And so these lower level emotions, the Ag flap stuff, even the highest of those pride pulls us into ego. How can you have pride if you aren't an individual that is separate from the rest of the universe? I'm special. I'm, you know, I'm more special than you are. That's pride.

So these these lower level emotions pull us down into ego. And that's why it is in our best interests to work with them. to transmute them to alchemize alchemy, you know, you can think of in the simplest terms as transmutation, taking one thing and transforming it into another. There is physical alchemy in which they were trying to convert base metals into gold, right, take one thing and convert it into another. And there is spiritual alchemy and these things when alchemy was a going practice, there's still alchemists out there, there's still practical Alchemist out there. These things were inseparable. Why? Because the alchemist did not view the physical universe as separate from the spiritual universe. physical matter was a projection of spirit. No and animism. So my background is in shamanism, and shamanism is animistic. We view everything you know, animism is everything has a spirit, even things that we consider, you know, not, you know, not conscious or not sentient, although the list of things that are not sentient is shrinking all the time. For example, there are trees that weave their roots together in a forest. And if one tree is lacking water, or nutrients, the other trees will send it to them. To me, that's a form of sentience, it's communication. And we've proven a level of sentience in plants over and over again. But in animism, things like rocks and mountains and rivers have a spirit or our spirit. In my viewpoint, everything is a spirit, some things have a physical component, which is projected into awareness. So as I pick up my cup of coffee, I identify that as a spirit. As I take a sip, it's a very delightful spirit. I am becoming one with the spirit of the coffee at least until I go to the bathroom. Right? But spirit is everything projected outwards. And so they were transmuting what were they transmuting, they were transmuting base emotions into higher level emotions to spiritual, higher and higher spiritual levels. I don't love the use of levels for things, but sometimes there, there is not a better way. Or I don't know of a better way of describing things higher or lower or you know, whatever. Using scales, hierarchies all hierarchies are invented by people. There aren't really natural hierarchies, you know, that say, you know, a tree is more conscious than a rock or, you know, whatever. Excuse me. And that's artificial, it's constructed. It helps us organize things, when we are working mentally, but it takes us away from the truth of things that takes us away from observing things just as they are. So the alchemist, if you were to go into an you know, let's say you're in Prague in the 14th century, up until a certain point, and you were in there were a lot of alchemists working in Prague back then. And you were to go into an alchemists laboratory. You would find, you know, shelves, full of glassware, different substances, you know, you would find a furnace that was used to heat things up, you would find all kinds of tools and stuff, but somewhere in the alchemists lab laboratory, you would find a tented off area that tented off area was meant for the alchemist before he was going to do his physical work to enter in and do spiritual practice. In alchemy, if you were just working physically, they would say that your experiments would fail. Right? That you had to have the right spirit going in. And by the way, the reason we call alcoholic drinks spirits is because distillation. Again distillation was a process invented by Alchemist alcohol is comes from the word alchemy. The word alchemy comes from the Arabic word Al cam, which means from Egypt. Kim or Kemet is the original name of Egypt so, you know, we think alchemy may have originated in Egypt. But that's, you know, that's the name. So these alchemists would go into this tented off area, do their spiritual work, do whatever it was the prayers, the meditations get into the right state, they would have to transmute their emotions, whatever they were feeling at the time if they were feeling sad if they were feeling even if they were feeling happy, they would have to go into the correct spiritual and when I say spiritual, I mean psycho spiritual state. So that includes emotions, what you're thinking all of these things. So I'm not an expert in spiritual alchemy, but you know, I can and will give perhaps some practical methods for working with working with emotion and alkalizing our emotion

there, they're, you know, there's a book if you're interested in shaman, even if you're not interested in shamanism. There's a book I'm gonna look it up as I'm talking to you because I don't want to give the wrong title, but it's by Sandra Ingerman who is my teacher's teacher, and somebody who I have great respect for, and has written a number of

yeah, she's written a number of books, a number of really good books. One book that she has is called how to heal toxic thoughts. And I don't believe you need to practice shamanism to get anything out of this book. Sandra Ingerman. Formerly was a psychotherapist. She is probably the best known arguably, at least in the US, the best known shamanic teacher out there, she's a Teacher of teachers and how to heal toxic thoughts is a great book. Really small book. But she talks about one of the things is like not set not because our thoughts transmit. Right, the the body mind is a ginormous electrical system. And there's a really interesting, interesting factoid that's also important is that our heart generates a electrical field that is, I believe, hundreds of times stronger than the brain. And can be in fact, with specialized equipment detected through inside buildings, you can, you know, detect if there's a living person inside a building. And I think they're experimenting with that for like finding people who are in natural disasters like building collapses and you know, they find people who are alive and rescue them. But also applications obviously for the military and law enforcement stuff like that, but, um, our heart gives off an electrical signal electromagnetic signal that can be detected by equipment. Obviously, you know, like You know, they put leads on your chest, if you're getting an EKG you know, they're they're detecting electrical signals in your body to determine what your heart is doing. And an EEG detects the electrical signals in your, on your scalp and your head that are coming from your brain to try to determine what your brain is doing. With a heart generates this, you know, resonance. And if your, your your heart rate will actually start to synchronize when you're with when you're in the same vicinity with people. And for me, this is part because your your, your body is picking up this electrical signal and your heart will start to synchronize. This is why you know somebody panics in a crowd, and then all of a sudden the crowd starts to panic, their hearts are racing, right, we determine that as fear, or anger or whatever it is, and the hearts hearts start to race. So remaining a calm presence with someone holding a calm presence with somebody is, you know, is important is healing, it calms them down.

And this is something you know, as, as a practitioner who sees clients, I see them over zoom. So you know, they're all over the world. Nobody has yet offered to fly me out for a session to Europe or Australia or wherever, I'd be happy to go. But usually that's not feasible for people. So regardless of resume, even though I'm not in physical proximity to them, I feel like holding calm space for them is really important. And it does, it becomes really infectious. When somebody has a calm presence. We pick up on social cues, we have things called mirror neurons, right? Where I can look at the expression on somebody's face, and understand what they're feeling. Because part of me replicates that.

So if you've ever, you know, one of the things that, you know, has been driven home for me as somebody who has ADHD diagnosed with ADHD is that I really have to focus when I'm having a conversation with somebody, I really have to focus on them which I which I do and I've trained myself to do. But when you're easily distracted and your mind is wandering, when some somebody's talking to you, they can tell. I can tell when somebody's wandering or not paying attention to me or just giving me the sort of nodding A ha ha ha uh huh. But not really listening. They're thinking about their next meal or whatever. So let's get into transmuting emotions, what can we do about it and why? Right? And I talked about how are these lower level of emotions can pull us down into survival mode into ego. It can prevent us from thinking clearly, it can prevent us from accessing more of our spiritual selves it can prevent it can keep us off our path, our true will our dharma. Those things are synonyms to me. Right. We're one of the reasons you have incarnated as a person I assume your person, if you're listening to this, if you're not welcome still, you know, if you're playing my podcast for your dog, you know, good boy. But one of the reasons you have incarnated is as a person is to is just to have you know, certain experiences but also to identify your path whatever that is, your true will and live that out. This is what is meant by do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law, which is you know the book of the law by Aleister Crowley, very infamous guy, not very nice guy. Lots of stories about him larger than life very larger than life character from the early 20th century, but really really changed and influenced a lot of things in the West, including, you know, the adoption of Buddhism by many people in the West and the way people do ceremonial magic and founded a number of secret orders and all kinds of stuff. Anyway, your job is to follow your true will your path. That's it, that's the law. Meaning that is the thing. And you can't do that if you're constantly in survival mode. Right? If you're constantly down in your ego, if you're constantly in grief, or if you're in apathy, for sure, or even lust where you're being lust, lust, people are pretty easy to control. This is why you'll see, you know, I still not as much these days, I think the filters are getting better. I get a lot of spam over social media and stuff. And it would always look like you know, there'd be a picture of a woman who looks like a model, right? Very beautiful photograph of a woman, just contacting me out of the blue. You know, and that was meant to stir up, oh, you know, some some lust there. I'm going to I'm going to shut off the thinking part of my brain. And I'm gonna work with the lusty you know, the limbic system. And, you know, fortunately, I've never been taken in by one of these things. You know, knock on wood, I'm a human being. But they haven't, they haven't been, I guess, tricky enough or sophisticated enough. And maybe they've stopped because maybe nobody was fooled by it, I don't know. But, you know, catfishing was a problem for a long time, people would be catfished, and all kinds of stuff. So we want to, we want to transcend these things, we want to have choices about what we do. We want to be sovereign beings. Even though underneath it all. We are one we're all part of the same being our divinity is connected in a way that's really hard to describe and understand, but we are projections of pure divinity. But there are layers to us. You know, we have have a physical body, we have thoughts and emotions. Let's talk a little bit about how to alchemize, transmute these emotions. So I'll give you a couple of ways to do that. One way that I find that works really well with emotions, like fear, you know, things that cause anxiety, or even even depression, sadness, grief, apathy. And this, you know, if you can practice this on the regular, it will help you establish a state of peace, a state of acceptance. Very much, much higher level states, there's more beyond that. But if you get there, you're doing really, really well. And you want to have a state of well being a state of peace courageousness acceptance and peace. Or I should say, you know, this, there's this sort of unified bliss and peace. Instead of very high level, we don't even have a word for it. There's this super positive emotion that's above all of that, that. I don't I'm not aware of a word in English for it, which tells you how frequently people are in that state. You know, one of one of the ways linguists can tell

how important things are in different cultures is how many words they have to describe those things. Right. So, one of the ways they have been able to learn things about the proto indo European culture is, you know, there are a lot of words for things involving horses.

Right, including, you know, racing, including, you know, horse racing and equipment for riding horses and that sort of thing. So you know, that we know that that was an important part of their culture.

In English, we have one word for love.

But in Persian, there's something like 85 words for love, and a bunch in Sanskrit and a bunch and in other languages, but we have love and English and I can, I've talked about this before, I can love my children, I can love my girlfriend, and I can love a cheeseburger. And those are all different things. But there is this true spiritual love that's above all of that. But we have one word, which tells you how important love actually is. In the English speaking world. We do have things like adoration, infatuation, you know, these are things with sort of romantic relationship type love. But they're not, you know, again, we don't get very complex with that. So there is this state of emotion that is like pure love that is kind of a combination of peace and bliss that's above all of that stuff. And we don't have a word for it in English that I'm aware of. Somebody knows of one, please get in touch. But one practice that works, I think really, really well that I'll give to you that I've given to lots of my students. And you know, the more you practice it, the easier it gets. It's, it is a learning process, you don't, you know, you don't become an alchemical master, from not practicing. So, this is an exercise in mindfulness.

And mindfulness to simplify mindfulness. So you might be aware of mindful meditation and mindfulness practices through all kinds of mindfulness practices. But to simplify mindfulness to its most basic term, it is present moment awareness, which means I direct my attention to exactly what I am aware of right now. As opposed to projecting my mind into the future and imagining future possibilities, or projecting my mind into the past and remembering things. I spend time just aware of what is in my awareness right now. As I sit here, I am aware of the chair under my buttocks, I am aware of the microphone in front of me because I can sense these things. What is in my sensory experience right now. You can do this, you can do this many times a day throughout the day, take a break. What am I sensing? Right now. And this might include some emotional material coming up, and that's fine, allow it don't resist anything. So this is where Acceptance comes in. You can ask yourself this question while you're in present moment awareness. Can I in this moment, allow everything to be just as it is? Now again, whatever you we are only aware of what is in our experience right now. You might think can I allow everything to be just as it is? And then start projecting your mind out there and go Well, there are kids starving on the other side of the planet there are people committing violent atrocities blah, blah, blah. Is that in your sensory experience right now? Right at this moment? No, you have to project out to be aware of those things. present moment awareness. Bring your mind into the now what is here in your sensory experience. Now I see. I see the herbs on my the deck outside of my back door. Beyond that. I see the trees, the green grass. I see farm I see you know sky. Can I sit here and just allow all of those things to be just as they are? Of course I can. And I don't have a choice anyway they are as they are. So this is where I give up my resistance. It's incredibly peaceful. Just to sit and allow everything to be as it is, in this moment. So this is one way you can practice this throughout the day, many, many times a day whenever you get a chance. Now I know there are times where it's important to think about the future. Or to remember something from the past. Where did I leave my keys? Right? Where did I leave my glasses? The two things I lose the most? I know, it's important to think about that those things. What am I going to make for dinner tonight? And do I have the groceries to make that, you know, project into the future a little bit. But I don't have to ruminate on that stuff. 24/7. And where it becomes a problem, you know, that alone is a problem. But where it becomes a real problem is when I start thinking about, Oh my gosh, I'm gonna die someday and I'm afraid of death, then I can all of a sudden generate this anxiety, what if? What if? What if? What if? Well, what if? What if instead of worrying about that you bring your mind into the present moment and allow things to be just as they are? What I'm seeing right now, can I allow it to be just for now, just for now. Now, I see there's, you know, there's a bunch, there's some clutter on my dining room table. And I don't want to let that be. But for now I can, it's okay. Just for now, I can let that be as it is. And that will help you move into a state of acceptance and peace. Another so that is you know, sort of mindful, a mindfulness exercise to help you move, help you transmute whatever you're feeling into more of a sense of acceptance and peace. Let's go beyond that. Let's go a little bit beyond that. So this is something that comes from Lester Levinson, again, who created the Sedona Method, he, you know, when he he back in, like the 50s, or something, the 1950s, he had a I think like a heart attack, and went to the hospital. And because of medical technology being what it was, they said, There's nothing we can do from for you, you're gonna die any minute, we're gonna send you home, and don't do anything, don't walk up a flight of stairs that could kill you in an instant your heart is in such bad shape. You know, just go home and enjoy the rest of the time you have left. And that's not going to be long. And Lester went home, and he was an engineer. And so he you know, put his thinking cap on, although he was he was angry. You know, he's How dare they send me home to die? How dare they not take care of me. And the story is this, as I've heard it, that it dawned on him well, you know, these doctors, they're not killing me there. And they are doing their best and they want to do their best to make me safe and healthy. They just don't have the ability. They're just doing what they can. Instead, so can I take these angry feelings I have for them and cheat and convert them to loving feelings. And lo and behold, he could and then he started doing that with everybody in his life and everything in his life. And he would just ask us ask the question. You know, think of think of somebody in your life and whatever feelings that brings up. Can I let that go and replace it with loving feelings and just do that again and again and again until when you bring that person up? The feeling is loving towards them. And by doing that practice, he healed himself he was about to die. He lived something like another 40 years he lived into his 80s he you know and became enlightened from just doing that from just moving into total love. Just a state of total acceptance. Now the resistance to That's because I can feel some resistance to being loving towards everyone to generating loving feelings is, well so and so really hurt me. Sure, there are people in your life who hurt you. And as long as you hold on to hurt and angry feelings, you are hurting yourself. This is where forgiveness comes in. Forgiveness is not about letting the other person off the hook. If somebody was abusive towards you, you can have loving feelings towards them and not let them back in your life. Because you have discernment, you can think you don't have to hold on to the destructive, angry emotion. You can take power, how powerful it is a you know a teacher I really like I haven't taken any courses. But I follow her on social media as Mel Robbins. And she said you want to know a real badass move. forgive somebody who hasn't even apologized to you. Forgiveness is not about letting them off the hook.

Forgiveness is about letting go of the emotional charge you have about whatever happened. Is that always easy? No, it's not always easy. Is it worthwhile work? Absolutely. 100% it is worthwhile. I am here to tell you from my own experience, it has been so healing for me it has been so worthwhile. There are people who I would never allow back in my life, because they were dangerous, destructive and violent. But I can hold them in love. I can hold them in thought and have only loving feelings for them. That's badass. That spiritual warrior ship my friends. Not this I'm angry. I'm going to go to battle with this person. I did. I've done a couple of YouTube videos on curses and cursing and how I think I think cursing generally is a bad thing. Not swearing, cursing, I think swearing is fine. But you know the the act of painful spiritual attack even sending, you know, bad thought forms to people I don't think is a good thing. Why because you are not holding people in love, you're, you're holding that anger for a person and trying to send it off. There's karma involved with that. There's all kinds of stuff now. There's a whole weird, ethical gray area with using magic for defense and that sort of thing. That I won't get into in this episode, but I might in the future. But you know, a course that I've taught in a book that I'm working on is called shamanic self defense and it talks a lot about you know, setting up spiritual defenses, but it does not teach. One of the things that make very clear is I don't teach you to attack back once you get into a war with somebody, you know, both people essentially are losers we think about wars as having winners or losers. But if you think about real wars as they happen in you know the world you know, if you think about you know big wars like World War Two and stuff, yeah, you know, the Allies. One, they got rid of Hitler, Hitler was evil, he was responsible for the Holocaust. But think of how many people who and the Holocaust was evil. I'm not saying stopping that was the wrong thing to do. I think sometimes it's the only choice. It's it's not a not a great choice. But sometimes you're forced into things and I you know, I teach self defense so, but physical defense is a last resort. But think of how many people died on both sides and think of how many families lost brothers and sons on both sides and think about how many civilians were killed and how much artwork was lost and how many buildings were destroyed, and how much money that could have gone into infrastructure went into warfare

to satisfy the war machine You know, I think it's, you know, it's it's an unfortunate it's an unfortunate thing and you don't want to get into wars with people. Somebody mate might prevail, but both people are going to lose things. That's my take on it. Anyway, I'm going to wrap up. I hope this has been somewhat enlightening. This, you know, talking about the alchemy of emotion and thinking about transmuting transmuting your emotions and give Sandra Zingerman's book, how to heal toxic thoughts. A Gander, if you're interested. I don't think it's very expensive. It's a very small book. Very useful. You don't have to practice shamanism to get things from it. It's not something that involves journey. In my in my memory it was I read it years ago, I should get back out and read it again, because it's useful information. If you're interested in the teachings of Lester Levinson, you can look up the Sedona Method. There's a book, there's movies, there's courses, I've read the book multiple times, we've done the done courses, highly recommended, highly, highly recommended. And, you know, if you're really interested in spiritual alchemy, there are lots of resources for that out there as well. We live in a very interesting age when we can access you know, before you would have to apprentice you would have to first of all, find an alchemist which, you know, back in the day, you normally people would have to hide that practice, or you would have to be a light there were licensed alchemists in some places. And you would have to find somebody who would take you as an apprentice and you'd have to give up your life to study with them. And now we have all kinds of information available just at our fingertips. So give it a listen. I love you all. I will talk to you very, very soon.

Announcer 1:02:37

You have been listening to speaking spirit with your host, John Moore. For more info or to contact John go to mainshaman.com That's maineshaman.com

Ep30 Mental Health and Spirituality - Through the Shamanic Lens

Announcer 0:31

Hello, and welcome to speaking spirit where we talk about all things spiritual. Your host, john Moore is a shamanic practitioner and spiritual teacher. And now here's john.

John Moore 0:48

Hello, everybody.

Welcome to the podcast, wherever you are in the world, and whatever time you're listening to this, and I will, I will say good morning. I do this almost every time. Because I record this early in the morning, usually, I'm a morning person. Not everybody is a morning person, but I like to be up before anybody else. You know, the energy for me is clear, there's not so much noise or mental interference or whatever's going on. So if you hear me sipping that's coffee. I am a bit of a coffee aficionado or coffee snob, as some people would call me. I sometimes do drink awful coffee. But when I have no other choice, but I do, I love my coffee. It's definitely a vise that that if I I, I don't think I've ever tried to give it up. I don't know that I would be able to at this point in my life. But I recognize that and I work with it. So today, I'm going to talk about a topic that is extremely important to me and has come up quite a bit in my work lately. And that is the topic of mental health and spirituality and how they interplay. And of course, because I'm a shamanic practitioner, I will talk about these things, through my own lens, right through the lens of shamanism. So I'm not going to talk about mental health from the perspective of Judaism or Buddhism, even though I practice Buddhism. You know, so obviously, my viewpoint is my viewpoint. The other thing I will say is that I am not a doctor or mental health professional. And so I am going to be speaking about mental health from a lay person's perspective. And nothing I say, here should take the place of any, you know, and I would say this to a client that I was working with as well. Nothing I say should replace any sort of professional help you may be getting if you're having questions or issues about mental health. And something I say contradicts something your doctor says, or your therapist or whatever. They're obviously they know you and they are professionals. And they should, you know, what they say should supersede that. And, and, you know, the stuff I'm talking about, this is just my viewpoint, in my opinion. It's not advice in any way, particularly in this podcast, and I, I do have pod, you know, episodes of this podcast, where the things that I say are more practical, they're more, you know, instructive, it's more advice. And though those will always be areas in which I do have expertise. I don't I try my best not to talk about things or give advice on things that I don't know anything about. I think there's too much of that in the world. You have to do spend some time on Facebook. And I have seen people on Facebook, for example, say, Oh, I have this health problem, and they'll you know, post a photograph of, you know, some skin condition or something in there. What is this? And then instantly, you know, 100 people chime in, oh, that's this, that's this, oh, you should do this. You should do this with all this contradictory stuff. And when I see that, I'm like, you should go get that checked out by a doctor and not listen to medical advice from people who are not doctors and But who have no shortages of opinion.

So, with regards to anything related to, you know, health, mental health included, you know, and we in, in the United States anyway, we really artificially divide health and mental health and dental health and vision health, basically, for financial purposes. You know, a lot of insurance companies, we don't have universal health care in the United States, I think that's a shame. Because most, the, you know, the vast majority of developed countries in the world have that. And, you know, 30% of bankruptcies in the United States are, you know, include medical costs, you know, people lose their homes, because they get sick, you know, good, hard working people whose, you know, insurance doesn't cover everything, and particularly during the pandemic, people are, you know, getting getting bills of 10s of 1000s of dollars from hospitals, it's just our, our way of doing things here is insane, and unsustainable. And this is not a political political rant, it's not a political thing at all. And it doesn't have to be, it just doesn't make sense. The way that we have a for for profit healthcare system. And I could rant about that for a long time. And I do have some expertise in, in this, in that, you know, I've, I've, I've looked at these, you know, with with an expert, my, you know, I was married to somebody who's an ex who's an expert in healthcare, and did graduate research in health care systems and that sort of thing. So I'm not an expert, but I've talked to people who are, who are, and none of what we do make sense here anyway. So I'm going to talk about mental health and the intersection with spirituality. And one of the reasons this is so important to me is that I have you know, and I've talked about my own struggles with mental health, I write about them I have written about them extensively. I I've written articles I've had, very recently an article published an interview where I talked about using gratitude to help combat depression. So and, and, you know, talked about the research behind that. But I came into, I've always been a spiritual person. So I would not say that I came into spirituality due to mental health issues. But, you know, sort of later on in my life, I went through a real mental and physical health crisis. And I, you know, didn't know then, but I know now that that would have been considered in many cultures a Shin monic crisis, meaning that it is, kind of it's a initiation, right. And in some cultures, you have to go through a crisis such as that to become a shaman to even start training to be a shaman. And so when I began my path to shamanism, it was part of my quest to regaining mental health, I had had PTSD, undiagnosed for many, many years from childhood trauma, I went through some pretty severe stuff that I won't, I won't describe in this program, because I don't, I'm not that I haven't come to grips with it. I have, I don't want to re traumatize anybody else. And there is, you know, there's this secondary trauma thing that happens. You know, sometimes it happens to me, when I hear stories from clients are or people that I love, about trauma that they've experienced, it's somewhat traumatizing to me because we, as human beings, most of us care about other people. And we can empathize. So I don't want that to happen. And it's not really significant to the conversation other than to say that I experienced fairly significant childhood trauma, um, lived with what I, you know, and it lived with a lot of stuff and I didn't it seemed really normal to me, you know, depression, dissociation, anxiety, flashbacks. I had no idea for most of my life that these things weren't things that most people experience.

And, you know, things kind of came to a head and I went through this, like, you know, really big crisis I lost, I lost a tremendous amount of weight, not in a healthy way. I couldn't eat, couldn't sleep, I was having panic attacks, I was having flashbacks, severe depression, all kinds of stuff going on. It was definitely a real crisis. And all along I have been, for many, many, many years of my life, since a child, really, I have been an avid meditator and meditation, I'm, you know, certified from at least one organization to teach meditation. And it's important part of my life, and I would meditate daily to, to, you know, to sort of help with things to help with the anxiety to help with the depression and everything else that was going on. And that wasn't, it was helping, it was helping, but was too much. There was too much going on for, for just meditation to help that. And one day, I was meditating in my office, and I heard a very, very clear male voice say, you need to go learn shamanism. And this was a weird thing to me, because I knew nothing about shamanism. I didn't understand what that word meant. I had heard the word, you know, I thought of, you know, people in South America or in Asia, you know, Siberia, Mongolia, and Peru. And I thought, how am I going to learn shamanism? Like, how is that going to happen? But the voice is very compelling. And I thought to myself, geez, you know, I don't I live in the state of Maine in the United States. I don't live in Peru. I don't have the resources or the time to travel to Peru and find a teacher. I don't know if they would even take somebody from, you know, the United States as a student, like, how is this going to happen? So as it turns out, where I live, there is a sizable and healthy shamanic community. And there are some amazing teachers here, some of what I would consider the best, best known and, you know, in the world, and some of the best teachers are here. And I found my teacher, and began my journey. And it has really turned my life around changed my life in profound and significant ways. So again, this is not a prescription, if you are suffering from PTSD, I'm not telling you to go out and study shamanism, this just happened to be my path. And it happened to be a path that provided a lot for me, and a lot of support, and a lot of what I needed as well as helping me heal, because it's a very is a healing path as well. And, you know, along the lines, and I went into it, just, I'm going to work on myself, that was my original goal. And I had no inclination to help other people at that time. Really, I was just wrapped up in my own stuff. And and, you know, if I'd even thought about it, I probably would have thought, Well, how can I help other people, I can't even help myself at this point. So over time, you know, over many years of training and and learning everything I could, and taking, you know, Teacher Teacher Training a lot of these things, I found out that I had a penchant for certain types of work. I helped a lot of people with trauma. In the beginning, I think about 100% of 100%, for the first couple of years of practice of my clients had childhood trauma. And it wasn't because I was specifically advertising for that, or whatever, I think there was what we call wound resonance, meaning people could tell that I had been through the same things that they were, you know, similar things that they had been through. So that was, you know, a lot of the clients who came to me came to me with trauma and and I worked with them and you know that there is a shamanic practice for treating trauma. It's called soul retrieval. That being said, I think, I have always been an advocate of

sort of an overkill approach, maybe like doing everything one can to affect one's situation. So if you had a health problem, for example, you know, let's say, let's say you found out you had diabetes, and they put you on prescription, you know, prescriptions for that, you know, maybe you're taking Metformin, maybe you're taking insulin, you know, whatever it was, you know, and that is one angle of attack, right? That's one way of treating affecting this problem. But what they would also recommend for you probably would be exercise and diet changes, right? And that would be, I think, a fantastic idea. Right, let's let's, let's go at this problem from multiple angles and, you know, do do everything you can within reason, too, to help yourself through through a health issue. And so I think the same thing was true for me. Definitely in that camp for mental health. You know, I definitely was talking to therapists I had I never went on medication per se but I was taking supplements prescribed by a naturopath you know, I had some tests done and my, my adrenals were off and my serotonin dopamine were low, and you know, a bunch of stuff was was physically messed up. So worked on straightening that out work, you know, diet, exercise, meditation, shamanic practice, I did everything I could. And I will say that, you know, they will tell you, if you are diagnosed with PTSD, they will say there is no cure for PTSD. And I don't know, what the definition of cure is medically what they would have to happen, for there to be a cure. I will say that I have been living pretty much 100% symptom free for a very long time for many, many years. So I'm, you know, not going to argue with people who know more than I do about medical diagnoses and prognoses, and all of that sort of thing. But what I do want to say is that, I don't think, you know, I want to offer some hope, if you are experiencing trauma symptoms, I don't think they have to be permanent, right. And that's the thing that gave me hope when things have come around again, or, you know, started, you know, went through something else traumatic, and, you know, it sort of revivified a lot of this stuck stuff and had a little bit of soul loss from that and you know, reminding myself, like, Hey, listen, you know, you've got through this before, it's not permanent, you know, if you're feeling some depression, or having flashbacks or whatever, it's not a permanent state, you're not stuck there forever. And I think when I was going through the worst of my, my crisis, that, that thought that this is how my life is gonna be from now on. That thought, was something that happened frequently for me and was really devastating. So, if I can help you in any way today, and you are, you know, struggling in some way, with any kind of mental health disorder, I, you know, I just want you to know that it's not it's not, no state is ever permanent. You can, you know, get treatment, you can work on yourself, there's all kinds of things. So, how this has come into my life and my practice recently? Oh, oh, I'm gonna talk a lot about the word psychosis, which you know, is a, you know, medical term basically for having having a break with reality. And we talk about people having psychotic episodes or being diagnosed with conditions that include psychosis, and all of these things. So having a break from reality having, what we might consider hallucinations and delusions and hallucinations, being having sensory sensing things that aren't real.

You know, seeing things, hearing things that quote unquote, are Real and having delusions like believing having beliefs that things aren't real. So you know, a stereotypical thing, you know, paranoid delusions or you know, people are watching me or you know that that sort of thing. And you know, hallucinations can be anything. Frequently there are auditory, who knows when I was meditating and heard a male voice saying, you need to learn shamanism. I took that as a sign from spirit, it was very compelling. And I followed up on it. And you know, some people would say that that was an auditory hallucination. It's hard. Gosh, it's hard. You know, when I practice something like shamanism, it's hard to draw the line. But I'm gonna, I'm gonna try to do that. And I, you know, I had a conversation with a therapist very recently, basically, you know, talking about how do I do that? How do I talk about mental health and psycho sees when I, you know, I basically, in journey, I'm experiencing an altered state of reality and, you know, seeing things that other people can't see? And how do you like, you know, some people would consider that a hallucination or delusion or what have you. How do I put that in context? So I explained to people, kind of the difference. So I'm going to, I'm going to attempt really strongly to do that today. Because I think, like, it's important to me, and I think it's probably important to others. So, the way that this therapist explained it to me was that the difference, the difference between myself and what I do as a practice and what people are going through who are having, you know, experiencing a psychotic episode is that my work is contained. So when I journey it is intentional. It happens during a set period of time. You know, we'll call this the container. The journey is the container. I purposely alter my consciousness, I, you know, I tend to use drums or rattles. I know what I know what I'm doing, I go into a theta, brainwave state, and, you know, I journey and then when I, when I come back, I'm back. This isn't to say that sometimes I don't see or hear spirits when I'm not journey. But when I do when it happens, and I've seen some weird stuff, I've definitely seen some paranormal stuff. But I always question whether that's actually real, right? So I'm questioning. You know, okay, I saw I saw what appeared to be a woman on my back porch. And when I, you know, I thought it was somebody and when I went around, there was nobody there. Did I actually see that? Well, two other people saw the same thing. Okay, so, you know, and I know that the mind plays tricks on us, like we see faces and all kinds of things, people see faces, and burnt pieces of toast and all kinds of stuff. And that is an effect that the mind does, where it's trying to make sense out of sensory input. So places interpretation on things, but, um, if I experienced some thing that is outside of, you know, sort of normal reality for me, I do test that I do reality testing, like, okay, is this something I've actually experienced? Did anybody else witness it? Or is there another potential explanation? I try to as much as I can take a little bit of a scientific approach. That's not always possible. And so things that I can't explain have not been witnessed by somebody else. And, you know, I take them for Okay, I had, I had an experience and I don't quite know what to make out of it, unless something else comes along to explain it. So, so that's, you know, that's the thing. Um, you know, very recently I have had quite a few people contact me looking for help or,

you know, looking to connect or or what have you, who we would say from, you know, I'm sure that, you know, somebody who was in a profession that was allowed to diagnose people would say that we're having a psychotic episode. That difference being these people are experiencing things that are outside of what we would consider normal reality. They're not at the time on drugs or meditating or doing any sort of shamanic journeying, there's no, there's no container for it, right? This is happening to them all the time, constantly during during their waking time. They're also 100% convinced that all of it is real. Okay, so people who are having, you know, a psychotic episode, think everything that they're seeing or hearing experiencing is 100%. Real. So, you know, one thing you cannot really do with somebody who if you encounter somebody who's having a psychotic episode, you would not tell them that what they're experiencing isn't real, that would be like me telling you that your shoes aren't real, you know, they're on my feet, look at them, I can see them. They're right there. That's the same level of, in my understanding is the same level of reality that these people are are experiencing. And, and it's important, you know, if you encounter somebody like that to be compassionate, and they, the recommendations that I've read, also say do not, don't, don't question their reality, but don't also don't feed into it. And that's a really hard tightrope to walk, it has been for me. And the way that I get around, or the way that I get through that is to talk about how they're feeling about what they're experiencing. So, you know, somebody contacted me, and he sees the people around him as fallen angels who are out to get him and XYZ, and I said, wow, you know, it sounds like you're having some something, you know, your sounds like you're very frightened. So I'm acknowledging how he's feeling. Okay, so I can be empathetic and compassion that way. So, so that, you know, the delusional part is the belief, the delusional part is the what is real? Okay. And that isn't, isn't sort of matching up? So, so the big question becomes, are these people who are having these psychotic breaks having spiritual experiences? that are, you know, somewhat uncontrolled? or whatever? Or is it just stuff their mind is making up? That's a hard question for me to answer. But my take on it is this. I think, people who are, who are going through that are taking in a whole bunch of input, right, just, you know, a whole bunch of input from, you know, non sensory input. So we'll say that, you know, some mechanism has some mechanism of consciousness has gone awry. And the filters that are normally there aren't, and, you know, the, the mind becomes overwhelmed, and tries to make sense out of the input that comes in. And, and so, you know, people see fallen angels and demons, and all kinds of all kinds of things. So some of that input might be from spiritual realms. So people might be operating at a level where they're, you know, perceiving what we might call the middle a world, in which, you know, middle world spirits. When I journey, there are a lot of them, and they come in lots of different forms. And, but they're not, you know, they're not doing a journey. They're not in, it's not in a container, where they're like, okay, I can stop experiencing these things. Now. They can't.

So then, you know, a question was put to me recently, by somebody who is becoming a student of mine who asked me, you know, is it true that in some cultures, you had to have had a psychotic break or something to become a shaman? And that is relatively true. There are you know, there's this idea of the demonic crisis, meaning in some cultures, what we call shamanic cultures that, you know, their cultures were there, you know, there is a role of shaman that is, you know, a historical and ongoing part of the culture to be chosen to, you know, to be initiated into shamanism and to learn from shamanic elders and that sort of thing. One has to have gone through some kind of crisis, and that could be mental health, it could be physical, in some places, you know, getting hit by lightning. You know, there's all kinds, you know, there's all kinds of things, and there are cultures where shamanism is hereditary, there's cultures. So there's different ways of choosing, but, you know, in effect, you had to have gone through, you know, some kind of crisis. So, it leads me to a really important point about spiritual help for mental health issues. So, again, you know, if somebody comes to me, and they have some sort of, you know, severe mental health issue, I'm going to recommend, in fact, I'm probably going to insist that they work. They work with a doctor or, and or therapist first and coordinate with me and I have had, I've had, you know, I've had lots of experiences with clients who are like, you know, asking me, is it okay, if I tell my therapist about you? And I'm like, Well, actually, I think it'd be a really good idea. If you told your therapist about me and the work that we're doing together. And, you know, if there's any way we can coordinate, that would be fantastic. And I've had, you know, met lots of really supportive people in both the medical community and therapeutic community. Lots of people that I have trained with, are, in fact, physicians, which I think is an interesting thing. Not like, it's not contradictory, in my opinion, that these are scientifically minded people with medical training, who are studying a spiritual field. You know, I don't, I don't take contradiction from that it might, on the surface seem contradictory. But these people are healers. And, you know, they recognize, they recognize that this is part of their path, and that people aren't just machines, they're not just collections of biological material that were body, mind and spirit. And so there are multiple, you know, there are multiple dimensions to every human being. So, you know, somebody who's in the midst of a uncontrolled psychotic episode, who would come to me, I would try to help them and steer them towards help. But I wouldn't work with them. demonically and this is not because I am being cruel, or uncaring or on empathetic, I'm absolutely empathetic and compassionate towards people who are suffering in any way. Um, but and, you know, in people have asked, Well, you know, in, in shramana cultures, they would just go to go to a shaman. Absolutely, absolutely, that's true. Because they, you know, for one, they don't have, you know, in some of these cultures, they don't have access to,

to as modern healthcare as we have here. But there's a second part of that in so in, in some of these cultures, and I've read, you know, I've read about instances from, you know, Africa and South and Central America and Asia. Um, you know, Tibet in particular, where, you know, somebody, somebody is going through me experiencing psychosis, you know, maybe they would be diagnosed with schizophrenia, or something by modern doctors, and they're brought to, you know, they're brought to shaman. And what happens sometimes in these cases, is that the person is taken in, they might even move in with a shaman and the shaman works with them, you know, 24 hours a day. Right? And they provide community for them, the community gathers around them. That's that in itself is amazingly healing. And you know, that they're working for long periods of time. 24 hours a day. I I can't, I can't do that for somebody. And even if I could, even if my life we managed it, like we don't live in a culture that supports that. We don't live in a tribal culture where people would gather around like that and work on somebodies, you know, recovery from a crisis. So, while it's true, that shamanic healing has been used for millennia, to treat people going through crises like this, modern shamanism isn't adapted well for that. Right, when I see, clients, it's usually for a couple hours at a time. You know, and not every day. You know, not even usually, once a week, I usually, you know, if I see clients repeatedly, it might be, you know, 356 weeks apart, particularly if they're soul retrieval work going on, and they have time to do that. But also most people have, you know, most people have other lives that they have to attend to, they have bills to pay, we don't live, we live in a society where, you know, you have to have money to, to live. So, um, you know, unfortunately, you know, when people come to me, and they're there, you know, in my opinion, really suffering from a psychotic episode, and they've lost complete touch with reality, and they want help, because they think that Gods and Goddesses and demons and things like that are after them, you know, I have to try to steer them towards competent medical, mental health, help, and, you know, if they can get that, and they can get stabilized, and, you know, I would work with their therapist or their doctor, if, you know, if they can get stabilized and work on some healing with them. Because I think those things can work really well in tandem, but I, above all, do my absolute best to practice impeccable ethics. And it would be unethical for me to take somebody on that I knew would not be helped, and in fact, might be harmed, right? I don't know. I don't know if what I do. And if I do, you know, some sort of spiritual work with somebody, if it's going to make the break worse, the break from reality, I don't know that. And so that concerns me concerns me that about anybody that, you know, I've never left a client worse off than when they came in. And I hope to never ever have that happen. I would feel absolutely terrible. And I would worry that I have violated my sense of ethics in some way. So, you know, again, I'm like, I'm not, I'm not going to work with somebody who refuses to get other help, and who is in a condition that I can't, I can't affect,

I can't affect effectively. And so, so that sort of, you know, that sort of that part of it. You know, that being said, somebody who is experiencing depression or some other things, you know, shamanic healing can can frequently be very helpful for that. I think, and I think it's important to work in tandem with your other with your other professionals, because we, we don't live in a culture where you would move into my move into my home. And I would, you know, we would work together 24 hours a day, to work on whatever was happening. And that does happen still some places in the world. There are, you know, healers, where you go live with them for a period of time, you know, maybe a month or two, maybe longer. But that's not the world that's not the culture that I live in, and my my life and the way that the world is set up around me doesn't can't really affect that. So that sort of on the on the topic of psychosis, and you know, I I've struggled with this for a while because I don't ever want to see judge seem judgmental towards people who are having mental health issues because, you know, first of all, Nobody. Nobody wants that. Nobody is in control of that. I didn't want to have PTSD, I didn't want to experience anxiety and depression. And I, if I could have made it go away, I would. But we have this weird thing, maybe not where you live, but here where we kind of, you know, treat people with mental illness. You know, we kind of stand back from them a little bit, like, there's a lot of weird stigma around mental illness in the United States. And, and, you know, I've seen it in other countries as well. But definitely, in the United States, where I live, there's still stigma around mental health, that's becoming less, you know, and lots of people talk about talking to therapists and stuff, and I think that's healthy. I think, you know, having the conversation, there's, you know, increasing conversation about mental health, I see from athletes and movie stars and stuff. And as much as you know, as much as people look up to those, you know, people in those roles, I guess that, you know, that's a good thing, you know, to bring it to light that people that people look up to everybody, every walk of life, every socio economic status, every level of education, everything, you know, mental illness doesn't discriminate. And so it's, you know, it's really important that we are kind and compassionate, and try to understand, try to understand when somebody is depressed, this was a, this was a big one for me. Um, you know, and I experienced depression as a result of my PTSD. And there was all kinds of messages out there, that is, like, you know, a while if you're feeling depressed, just take a walk in the woods. And walk in the woods is helpful, but it didn't. It didn't cure me, it didn't solve my problem. And, you know, some people when you describe or say, you know, I feeling depressed, or I have depression, or like, Well, you know, what do you have to be depressed about? And the answer to that is, there does not have to be a mean, that doesn't have to be a reason for someone to be depressed. Yes, you can have a depressed mood for a reason I, you know, depression can be part of the grieving process, right. So somebody close to me dies, I get very sad about that. And that's a reason. But that's not how depression works.

Yes, depression will lead to thoughts. So you know, what happens, at least from my perspective, is, you have these horrible feelings, there's more to depression than feeling sad, trust me, there are it is sometimes physically painful. You can somebody with severe depression, you can draw their blood, and they will have the same inflammatory markers in their blood as somebody with the flu. So think about how you felt when you've had the flu. Pretty darn lousy, right? You don't want to get out of bed, you feel weak, you don't want to move, you can't think straight. So besides being incredibly sad, or having very low mood, or having no emotion, which is you know, can happen as well, having really flat level of emotion. Depression actually hurts sometimes. And it is in it makes you weak, and it makes you not able to sleep and it makes you all kinds of things. It can make you gain and lose weight. I lost an interesting note, I lost 60 pounds and not on a very healthy way. And I really didn't have any more to lose. My doctors were concerned about my health. I just couldn't, I couldn't eat my appetite was gone. Very similar to if you've ever been really sick with the flu. Excuse me, and you don't feel like eating. So yeah, so I, you know, I took I took some supplements and tried to help with that. So there's a physical aspect as well. So you know, the things that are people like, Well, what do you have to be depressed about or, you know, just don't feel sad anymore, or you know, whatever. You know, if people with severe depression could choose not to be depressed. They would trust me on that nearly 100% of the time, it is not a choice in the same exact way that people with cancer, do not choose to have cancer. If they chose, if they could choose not to have cancer, they would, nobody would choose to have cancer, nobody chooses to have depression. Trust me it is it is sometimes suffering to magnet, if you've never experienced it before, you know, good, that's good. But if you've ever experienced severe depression, it is like nothing else it is it is just suffering. And so we need to have compassion for people who are suffering, because they're human beings, and they deserve it and they deserve. It does not matter what your diagnosis with anything, is, or if you have no diagnosis, as a human being, you deserve love, you deserve more love, not less. And so sometimes, in some places, the way we treat people who are suffering with mental health issues, is extremely inhumane. And we don't have to go very far back in history to see that and we don't have to go. We don't have to go back at all, you know, we can see, you know, people, people living on the streets, you know, and there was a study at one point, I don't know, back in the late 90s, early 2000s, that at least 25% of people living on the street, people with, you know, who are homeless, had diagnosed mental health problems. A good portion of them probably had undiagnosed mental health problems, which were not made better by being homeless, certainly exacerbated. We also know stuff happens. And we tend to put a lot of people with mental health issues in jail in prison. Because sometimes there is criminal behavior, although I will say this, that most criminal behavior is not committed by people with a mental health issue. That's another thing and people, people who are, you know, schizophrenic, or depressed or have anxiety or whatever, are not more likely to commit violence against other people. So sometimes there's this fear that people who are quote unquote, crazy and I realized that is a hateful term, but I'm using it

in that context here, like people who say these things are our misunderstanding and being cruel and bigoted. So people who are suffering and create, you know, people who are crazy, are likely to, you know, be dangerous and hurt them. The The opposite is the truth is the truth, people with mental health conditions are actually more likely to be victims of violence, than to be perpetrators. Because we don't, you know, we don't protect, we don't protect people, and they very often become marginalized, and don't receive the help that they need and are in a you know, in, in precarious positions, you know, where they can be abused, and, you know, that sort of thing. So, as spiritual people, it behooves us to be the, to be the example of people of how people are to be treated in the world. And, you know, the golden rule, whether you are a Christian or Buddhist or something else. That, you know, the golden rule is, you know, treat other people as you yourself would want to be treated. Would you want people to marginalize you or make up stories about you about what you know, your or not give you help if you were suffering and needed it. And so that applies, you know, that applies and being being spiritual, that should apply even more because you should realize the reality of that should realize that we're all connected. And, you know, the way that we treat everyone, you know, comes back to us because we're connected. So it's really important to take these things into consideration. So, I'm not going to have you know, normally when I do these passes, broadcast, I may wrap up with some really specific recommendations about things you can do. You know, when I talked about ancestors, ancestral spirits recently, you know, I talked about things like you might set up an altar or, you know, that sort of thing. So I'm not going to offer some really concrete advice today. And the reason is, as I outlined in the beginning, you know, I don't know, if you're listening to this, and you have some sort of diagnosis, or, you know, somebody who has some sort of diagnosis. You know, that's not something I can, I don't know, and I can't give you some general advice about that. I will say this, though, if you, you know, I think pursuing spirituality, along in whatever form that takes for you, along with the other things that you can do to ensure your health helps to create a more rounded healing experience, and can be very healing. I do think that if you are suffering from a break with reality, that you should be careful about the types of things, the type of things and information that you consume. So the person I spoke to recently, who was seeing fallen angels everywhere, had, you know, was, I'm sure, in the middle of a psychotic episode, he went to bed one night with, you know, movies about fallen angels playing on his TV. And he woke up the next morning, and all he was seeing was fallen angels. So I be super careful about that sort of thing. You know, the problem is, again, the delusional part of the of psychosis is that you believe that all of these things are real. As much as if you're not, you know, you know, I'm sitting, I'm sitting at a table, and I'm not going to table and this feels real to me, and I can see it. And I believe this table is real and exists in 3d reality. That is as real as the things that, you know, things that people are experiencing. In psychosis, right. So,

how, you know, how does that how does that play? You know, how do you know, so the trouble is, people believe this stuff is real, so they don't think they necessarily need help with mental health of their suffering. So they might, might reach out, but they might reach out to somebody like me, and I will always try to steer them towards mental health help, and I hope other spiritual practitioners would do the same. Um, you know, it doesn't matter what you practice, if it's, you know, Reiki or some other form, you know, some energy healing or some sort of other spiritual healing, do the right thing, please, you know, steer these people towards resources that can get them stabilized, in, you know, into, into reality. And then then work with them, you know, work with them on healing the suffering, after, you know, after you get that, help them get some help. And, you know, most of the time, people are not going to want to hear that they're not going to want to hear, but, you know, the hear that they need some help, you know, in the vast majority of the people who contact me, in cases like this, you know, I'll ask them, How do you have any mental health diagnosis? Are you on any medication, they will very frequently tell me I was on anti psychotic medication and it made me feel bad, so I stopped taking it. So it is really hard to convince, convince somebody who, who is, you know, who's going through that, who has experienced, who has been on medication and made the conscious decision to stop because it was making them feel so bad. To go back and seek some help and help and get stabilized. But you have to try. We have to do what we can. Because it's, you know, if you're not, if you're not working to heal people and help people in the in the best possible way, then, you know, in a way that's best for them regardless of your personal prejudices or need to earn money or any Anything else, then you're not being ethical, in my opinion. And I would say, most, you know, most, if not all spiritual practice that are practitioners I know are extremely ethical. I've only run across a couple of cases where I felt people had overstepped a little bit. not consciously, ever. I haven't run into that, where somebody has been like, Oh, I'm gonna take this person for a ride, but that is out there. Certainly. Certainly, it's out there that, you know, there are people who are looking to take advantage of other people. Fortunately, nobody who is who is my friend, or they wouldn't be my friend. Um, but yeah, I mean, I take ethics, extremely important. And, you know, the people that I have learned from so my, my, my main teacher, especially if she got wind, she, she got wind one time that somebody had talked to me about teaching a specific class, and there was a misunderstanding about it, there's a misunderstanding on my part, for sure, and I thought they were asking for one thing. And they were asking for something else that I would not that I would not have agreed to not have taught, and she got wind of it. And she, she got in touch with me immediately. And she said, Well, you know, this person, you know, expects to learn this from you. And I Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no. Okay, I'm sorry. So, um, so my teacher, and then her, you know, in her teacher before her, you know, really just call people to the mat for ethical reasons. And when I teach, I always talk a lot about ethics. And, you know, there's specific, you know, there's specific ethical rules in shamanism that aren't really rules, but ethical guidelines that I follow that I teach as well. Things like I don't work on people without their permission.

With very rare exceptions to that exceptions would be somebody, you know, actually physically unconscious, like in a coma or something. And cannot, cannot consent to something. But consent, super important. And, again, like, even if I thought, somebody, if somebody was conscious, and having a mental health crisis, and I felt like, you know, somebody might think that they are not in a condition to give consent, I probably still would not work with that person. And just too close to the ethical boundaries for me, so I keep very, I keep very tight boundaries around what I do the work that I'll do, I don't, I won't take on work that I don't have an affinity or skill for, you know, so, you know, this is a little off topic. But, you know, for example, I absolutely love and adore animals, I love wildlife, I love pets, but I don't do animal work. I'm it's not a skill that I have. And I have other you know, there are other people I know, who are fantastic with doing work on animals. And I have assisted people who are working on animals. But if somebody came to me and said, You know, I want you to do can you do a healing on my dog? Who is, you know, going through some stuff or whatever, um, I would not, I would say, you know, thank you for contacting me, I don't do that type of work. But I would be very happy to refer you to somebody who does and who I think is a fantastic practitioner. So there's another, you know, another piece of ethics is not to go beyond it, have a reasonable, have a reasonable idea about what you can do. And don't go beyond that in a way that somebody could be, you know, paying for something or losing time or what, you know, what have you. So, you know, if a friend came to me and said, Hey, you know, do you think you could work on my dog? And it wasn't sort of, like, you know, you know, I might say something like, it's not really my work, I could try it, you know, that sort of thing. I might still not even in that circumstance, but in a professional setting, I would not, I would not work beyond my skill. So you know, I'm just speaking to practitioners out there if you're listening to this and your practitioner really tried to work with people ball and have them. Get the professional, you know, whatever you feel of the medical establishment, try to get them the professional help they need from licensed professionals. Even if you could, you know, can't decide to continue to work with them work in tandem. And you know, you'll find that there are, there are doctors and therapists and nurses and nurse practitioners out there who are very open to energy healing and shamanic healing, and all of that sort of thing. So with that, I'm going to wrap up for the day. I hope this has been helpful. And I would encourage you, if you are, you know, if you are somebody who is suffering from any sort of mental health disorder, you know, please reach out for help, please get the help that you need. It is out there it can be challenging to find but it is completely worth it. And, you know, it's worth it to get better and you deserve. You know, you deserve to feel joy. You deserve every bit of love and compassion in the world. Just from the sheer fact that you exist, you deserve all of that. So look out for yourselves. I love you all. And I will talk to you next time.

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