EP59 The Ecstasy of Divine Love: A Spiritual Journey of Self-Discovery

Announcer 0:27

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. Hello, everyone. Hello, my friends. Thank you for joining me again. I am going to talk today to you about one of Gosh, one of my very favorite topics in the whole world. I've done episodes about this topic before. But you know, I always approach it from a different perspective and bring in different you know, aspects and talk about different ways of experiencing what I'm talking about. So today I'm going to talk about love. Specifically, I'm going to talk about divine love. I'm going to talk about ecstasy. And I realized when we talk about ecstasy and love, very frequently people think about sex. And that's fine. I may touch on that a little bit, but not necessarily what I'm talking about. And I'm going to talk about the perspective. The spiritual perspective, that all love is divine love. I will get into that I will get into what love is from a spiritual perspective, I will get into why we pursue? Why do we pursue the experience of divine love or why many people pursue the experience of divine love, and why we find that within

and that when you become immersed in divine love, it is ecstatic and blissful and freeing. It is a form of spiritual awakening, for sure. So I want to begin by talking about one of my very favorite spiritual teachers. Now, this is not somebody who I had the honor of meeting in this lifetime. He passed away in 1994. I didn't find out about his teachings until sometime in the 2000s. But and he is maybe not as famous as some other teachers. Because he wasn't he wasn't necessarily out there seeking social approval. He was teaching and really he became better known through his students who, who, you know, published his material and to this day there are you know, at least one or two of them out there still teaching his stuff. So anyway, this teacher, his name was Lester Levinson, le ve n s o n if you want to look him up, founder of what is called now the Sedona Method. But his story is a good one. His story is a great one it It illustrates what can happen with anybody. So Lester was a physicist, a staunch material realists maybe an atheist, I don't know. I don't know about that specifically, but not a very spiritual person. And this story Is that in the 1950s Lester was a fairly young ish guy at that period of time, he had a major heart issue that wound him up in the hospital, I don't know if it was a heart attack or you know what, but a major cardiac issue that wound him in the emergency room. And, you know, medicine being what it was back then. The doctors had no way to treat him. And so they sent him home, they sent him home essentially, to die. They said, Go home, and be comfortable and don't even don't even stand, don't even don't walk a flight of stairs that will do you in that little bit of stress on your heart will do you and so less was either in his late 40s or early 50s. And he went home. And he was kind of, you know, he was angry. All of this as one as happens. And he, you know, got angry that these dogs doctors, how dare they send them home to die? That's, you know, whatever. And, you know, he came to the realization that, well, maybe these doctors are doing all they can, you know, maybe I'm being angry at them for no good reason. And he also said, you know, I'm, you know, I'm a scientist, I'm a physicist, I'm a smart guy, I'm educated. How am I going to figure out my life? How, you know, whatever, whatever is left of it? How am I going to figure all of this out? And what he did was, he systematically converted all of his feelings about people, the doctors, starting with the doctors and whoever, into love, into loving feelings. Now, I know this sounds this might, you know, if you're have not studied his teachings, or done any of the practices, this might sound impossible, how do I just convert my feelings into loving feelings? I'm in there, and there are ways to do that. But he had nothing, you know, he had nothing else to do, he was lying in bed waiting to die. And he cured himself. And he lived into his 80s he lived I don't know, you know, 3040 more years after he was supposed to die. And at the time, modern medicine could not treat him. And he wound up living into the mid 90s. And along the way, he went, you know, you're gonna use this expression, he went free. He had a spiritual awakening, he became enlightened. This is, you know, various terms for what, you know, the spiritual awakening that he went through, from essentially diving into a place of love. Now, I feel like at this point, I need to talk a little bit about love. And define it from a spiritual perspective, because there are all kinds of ideas about love, right? We have the Hallmark Channel, romantic idea of falling in love. You know, the fairy tale version of the princess being rescued, falling in love. We have you know, so very often we think of romantic love. And that's fine. There's nothing wrong with romance. There's nothing wrong with erotic love. All these expressions of love can be beautiful, and loving and wonderful. And love is a really word weird word in English, because we have this one word that we use for many different experiences, right? So you can love your lover you can love your children, you can love chocolate. Those are not the same things. But we say that right in English. And I know in other languages, there are many words for love and Persian, I think they're 85, something like that. So it becomes this generic catch all for fondness or extreme like or whatever. But when we talk about pure love, from a spiritual perspective, that's not exactly what we're talking about.

When we say love, from a spiritual perspective, what we're talking about is approval and acceptance. I like to use the word holding, but I'll have to describe that a little bit, because that might seem strange. Now, if we look at the universe, all there is what you know, and we think of that as an emanation of Source consciousness, you might say, God, or units of the universe, or Brahman, or whatever. But if we look at the consciousness, that is, everything there is that holds everything, there's it, it holds, everything there is every experience, every individual, every thing is held. And there's no greater like, we can place all kinds of human derived conditioned meanings on all kinds of stuff. But there's nothing in this universe that places more importance on me, than the flowers I'm looking at, or the rock, or another person or anything, everything is just held. In the state of acceptance, we might say approval. And when we display disapprove of others, or things or whatever, we are rejecting part of the universe, we're pushing it away.

So what one of the things that Lester did was to, you know, ask himself, can I give this person approval for no good reason, just give them approval, because they are a part of the universe. Over and over again, he asked himself, and it really was just an invitation to give approval. Now, at this point, I know there are people out there, I can sense it, that there are people out there saying, Well, what about this person who abused me or harmed me? Or what about serial killers? Or, you know, this politician or this horrible person from history or whatever? And yeah, there, you know, there is that there is that but you know, and I come from into my spirituality from a history of childhood trauma. So, can I approve of the, you know, the the ones at whose hands I suffered? And then the answer that actually is Yes, I can. And not doing so is more harmful to me than anything else. So this is where forgiveness comes in. And again, I can sense that, well, you know, why would I let so and so off the hook for having done such horrible things? And the answer is you're not you're not letting them off the hook. That is not what forgiveness is. You know, I can forgive the person who stole from me and still take them to court and tried to return my, you know, get my property returned or have the police intercede or whatever. But I'm not disapproving of them as a person. I don't have to accept bad behavior. Right. So when my children were small, one of the things I tried to do and not always successful I was, and still am an amateur parent and not perfect in any way, in any way like that. We all have perfection within us. But, you know, as an, you know, as I, as beingness express myself as this body in this mind, I do things that are sometimes not intended or, you know, wish I hadn't. It's all part of learning, though. But what I would tell my children when they were little, and they were acting up, I would say, I do not like your behavior, I love you. But your behavior is not okay. But I love you, and your behavior does not change how I feel about you as a person. And yeah, I realize it's hard to get there. I do. You know, I've been in an abusive relationship where my partner was, mentally and physically abusive towards me. And I wanted them out of my life. And they are out of my life. How do I you know, hold them in my consciousness when I think about that person. Well, you know, when, when everything happened when this person you know, and I, when we broke up, and they left my life, and I had been severely traumatized by that whole experience, and it had brought up my childhood trauma. You know, one of the things that I recognized was that the emotional charge that I held about this person, the anger and the hurt, and the sadness, and everything all balled into one and anyone who's been through this knows that there's even though the relationship ended dramatically and horribly, and there was abuse and all of these things. And even after the relationship ended, this person was doing things to try to harm me. There was still grief over the loss of the relationship. Isn't that weird? But it's not that's what happens. I realized that holding on to this emotional charge was a not keeping me safe from anything. Because it wasn't that charge was not keeping that person out of my life. In fact, that charge was making me think about that person more and just making me continue to hurt and continue to suffer. So I made it a point to let go of the emotional charge, the negative emotional charge and hold that person in love in my consciousness, not romantic love. Not I want to get back together with this person. Not that I ever want this person back in my life because of the behaviors. But my consciousness of this person is lighter and it's free. Oh my gosh, the freedom the hurt and the anger and the sadness and the grief. Were like heavy chains weighing me down

and now I feel very free of that and that in in I would. I would want this for everyone. I want this feeling for everyone. So again, it's the same thing with, you know, people who have abused me in the past or done, you know, done, done things to me to this body this mind and let go of the emotional charge, and I work, you know, I work to do that whenever it comes up again, I'm not to say, not to say I'm done with my work, I will continue to work on myself for the rest of this lifetime anyway. But it is so freeing, and it's blissful. And it can be ecstatic. So, this love this acceptance, this you know, all of these things. So there's a thing going on in, particularly in the US, currently. And it concerns me that people don't see exactly what has happened, but I'm going to talk politics a little bit. So what happens very frequently in politics is that people have realized that you can gain power over people by having them focus on a common enemy. This is what the Nazis did, right? pre World War Two, they used all kinds of propaganda to turn people against the Jews and the gypsies and people with disabilities and you know, Freemasons and you know, the the Jews primarily, but it was more than that. These people are out to get you they're about to take things that you know, they're going to take things from you x y, z, whatever the thing in the associated them with animals they're inhuman, and which led to you know, of course, the Holocaust, horrible atrocities. And I see this going on right now in American politics, where the enemy of the day has shifted. And people don't even realize it. You know, the new the new enemy for one political faction is you know, trans people. Trans people, drag shows they're out to get your children blah, blah, blah. Creating a threat creating an enemy, so that they can Oh, go with us. We're gonna save you from this enemy that's out to get you. There's been drag shows forever Shakespeare plays were all the female characters were men in drag. You know, and we have, you know, remember the TV show Bosom Buddies and that wasn't the first media thing where people were in drag. It's been going on forever. Suddenly, it's a problem suddenly that you know

look out when people try to tell you who your enemy is. Look out. They do not have your your best interest at heart. They are about controlling you. That being said, let's go back to love and acceptance and approval.

Imagine living in a world where everybody felt safe just being who they are.

Imagine if you always felt safe being who you are expressing who you are expressing or just living your life. And you didn't have to hide anything or justify anything. And if you live like that now congratulations. That's what we should want for everyone. So, I go back to what I call observable qualities of source of God of the universe. There is room for everyone, everyone is held in the universal consciousness, everyone and everything is held without more importance being placed on one thing or another. There's no hierarchy, hierarchy hierarchies are constructed is not part of unconditioned consciousness. Part of spiritual awakening is involves undoing a significant amount of our conditioning, we're conditioned away from being you know, being one with the universe we're conditioned towards being experiencing consciousness as an ego as an individual unconnected from the rest of the universe, but we're all part of the same thing. We are all a part of divinity and you can experience that you can go inside and experience the reality of that you don't have to take my word for it. At initial levels of spiritual awakening, what happens is you get an experience of being interconnected with all things at later levels you know are deeper and more profound levels, you have experiences of non duality, non dual meaning not to not experiencing self and other or subject and object but experiencing everything as one at even deeper levels you experience yourself when you say i your i am Ness your beingness as the entire universe you just happen to be looking through one set of eyes your the entire universe peering through your eyes underneath all of this separation, ego separation and there's subject and object and

underneath all of that is oneness and this is why I say that all love is self love. When I am being loving towards others I am experiencing love here's the secret not necessarily that much of a secret but it's a secret if you want to experience more love and who doesn't become more loving Isn't that an amazing idea? If you want to experience more love don't seek love be loving be in love

now that doesn't mean that you wander around the world starry eyed you know we the we have this stereotypical I know hippie I guess for lack of a better term from movies and TV. You know, throwing flowers on everyone and whatever you don't have in there's nothing wrong with that. You don't have to be like that. It's just when you encounter any experience other beings. You work towards generating the feeling of love towards them. Until that becomes your natural state How do you know that is your natural state? Well, you will feel this warm sense of bliss of peace. Of, of ecstasy. Now I'm not talking necessarily about sexual ecstasy, although that can be a part of it when, you know, when you're with a partner, or by yourself or with multiple partners, whatever, you know, and again, our sexual morality is about kin cultural conditioning. So we let go of, we let go of judgment.

And we become more sex positive, we say, you know, as long as pleasure seeking is consensual by all parties. And consent is pretty straightforward. Everybody has to agree to everything at all times, anybody can stop agreeing at any time, everybody needs to be an adult. Children can't consent animals can't consent. People who are unconscious can't consent. That's kind of it. If you are having sexual activity, whether that is alone, or with a partner, or with more than one person, other person, and you can hold yourself and anyone else involved in love, and complete acceptance and utter approval, that's when you get this intimacy.

Right, that will make the experience deeper, and more blissful. And I would say, spiritual. If you have never experienced that in your sex life, you're you know, you're in, you're in for something life changing. We'll put it this way. And if you know, again, if you're, if you're asexual, that's fine. If you're, you know, if you're alone, if this you can do this, you can do this practice during masturbation. And that's, you know, that is also a beautiful experience. It's an experience of self love. But here's the thing. And I said this before, and I'll I'll explain that all love is self love. What do I mean by that? Well, I go back to the idea that we're all we all come from the same source. We're all expressions of beingness. Of, of consciousness. You know, I remember they're listening to a recording an audio recording of Lester Levinson, who I talked about at the beginning of the podcast. And he had been like, he went to some spiritual conference. And he didn't know that he was going to be asked to speak. But they asked him to speak and he's in it basically, imperturbable you couldn't, you know, mess this guy up? So he's like, sure, you know, whatever. And he got up and he said, I don't know if I'm supposed to talk about me, or talk about you. Like, talk about me talk about you? What's the difference? And people kind of laughed. And he was using humor, as he often did. And I liked that. I like the use of humor to explain spiritual principles and get to understanding. There's so much out there that spirituality, spirituality is sacred and you know, laughter, laughter and joy and all of these things don't belong in spirituality. It's hogwash. There are times for all of it. There. There's times for all of that experience laughter and love and joy are all part of all you know, all a part of it. And when you get to a certain level, all of your experience is spiritual, all of it. Your very consciousness isn't is in, you know, an experience of spirit. No matter how we get trapped in the 3d, physical world, you realize that even that is spiritual, even the expression of this physical world in our consciousness is a spiritual experience. You're having a spiritual experience right now not just because not because you're listening to me talk on a podcast that would be very egoic of me, right? Anytime you listen to me is a spiritual experience. True, but not because listening to anybody else is not a spiritual spiritual experience, all experience a spiritual all love is self love. Because there is no difference between you and I underneath at all. So when I love you, I am loving myself

so again, you know, the question sometimes arises, what about serial killers? Or people who committed genocide? Or, you know, these people who did these horrible things? Yes, we can agree that these things that they did were horrible. But, you know, and coming from a place of ego, a place of delusion. Because to do that, to do something horrible like that. You have to experience others as separate from you. Right. And when we do horrible things to other people, we're doing it, we're doing it to ourselves, because there is no difference. But how do we like, there's so much emotional charge with somebody who's done these horrible things? How do we hold them in love and again, we don't we don't approve of those things. We don't say, oh, you know, I need to be in love. So genocide is okay, or being a serial killer or you know, being an arsonist or you know, doing those things, we don't have to be okay with that. Underneath the people underneath that behavior underneath the, the ego, the twisted conditioning is pure beingness. And we're attached to that. As much as we might, you know, as much as our egos might not like to be we're attached at a level of pure spirit and ultimately, holding on to anger and hatred and all of those things that harms nobody but us.

Right now the ego. The ego is a trickster. It's your very own trickster spirit. Congratulations. how useful the ego says if I give these things up, you will be unsafe. It feels that way, doesn't it? If I give up my anger if I give up my hatred, I will be unsafe. This body might die. Well, I've got a little bit of news for you. If you have a body It will eventually die. The body that I am using to speak to you on this podcast will die. I know there are people out there who are like, Oh, we're, you know, if we can study sharks that live for 600 years and, you know, find out, you know, tweak genetics and whatever, we might be able to prevent people from dying forever. Can you imagine what a hellhole on earth that would create in about a single generation when there's not enough food or water for everybody to live? And wars breakout? Because there's, I mean, people would start dying from warfare, that's for sure. But nobody ever, you know, grew old and died

imagine doubling the earth's population every 10 years or so.

You know, so I can't, I can't imagine that. I'm not, you know, I'm part of that the quest for physical immortality. Foremost is ego. Now, there are stories of spiritual masters like Baba Ji, for example, in the Himalayas, said that he's been alive for hundreds of years that people still sometimes run into him and study with him. I don't know the truth of the matter there. You know, but you know, this, if that is a true story, and it does almost doesn't matter if it is or isn't because the, the teachings are good and all of that. This is not somebody who's, you know, populating, you know, having a bunch having 20 Kids and populating the earth and then those kids are living forever and having each one of them having 20 kids and you know, it's different. It's different situation. Anyway, um, I want to talk a little bit about my grandmother for a moment. Now, my grandmother passed away a couple of years, a couple of weeks ago, at the end of February, a few days after my birthday in February, she passed away. She was 106 years old. And I absolutely love my grandmother. Wonderful, interesting, quirky, lady, very religious, very spiritual woman. Not from a judgy perspective, or whatever. Just her faith was really important to her. And as I still remember this as a child, this lesson that she taught me because she taught, she taught in her church for many years, she teach Bible lessons. She was a reader in her church, and she taught, she taught Sunday school, I went to Sunday school with her and she would always, she would bribe us with candy bars after if we went to Sunday school with her. So she said, somebody had asked her, you know, what is her idea of heaven? And what is her idea of hell? And she said, when I am angry with somebody, when I'm full of hatred and rage, and and all of these things, I'm in hell, I'm in hell right here. I'm suffering right here on Earth. That's what hell is like. But when I am loving, when I am being loving, and when I am when I am being kind and generous and loving towards others than I am in heaven. What a brilliant piece of wisdom from, you know, from this woman who was born in 1916 in rural Maine. And what a brilliant piece of wisdom she was talking about her own consciousness and her ability to experience heaven and hell right here on Earth. As I speak to you right now, I just I have to say this I'm looking at my back window. There are three deer that just trotted through my backyard and what a beautiful I just love to see wildlife and these beautiful Oh 345 There's more trotting through now. I love to see this I love to see wildlife and so I thought I would share that with you. It just creates this beautiful feeling in me when I see these beautiful beautiful animals walking through and I love I love where I lived for that and just lovely just lovely. Anyway I thought I would share because i i Am I being loving towards you, my my dear listener. Anyway, this is where I will leave this for today. And I hope you will put some of this into prayer practice into mind think about it a little bit. I hope you're happy and healthy. I wish you all the best. And I do love you

Announcer 46:22

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

Ep58 Recognizing the signs of Spiritutal Awakening

Announcer 0:29

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 0:49

Hello, hello, hello, everybody.

Good morning. Good afternoon, good evening, whatever time of day it is for you. Today we're talking about spiritual awakening, we're going to talk about what it is, how to recognize it, why it causes problems? For some people, what that what does it mean, what is spiritually awakened, even mean? can be a confusing topic for people. And what happens pretty frequently, maybe once a week, about, about ish, somebody contacts me, looking for guidance, looking for help looking for something or just wanting to have a conversation, having gone through what they determined as some kind of spiritual awakening. And it's not necessarily for me to say whether or not a person has been through awakening. Because it's a hard term to define, first of all, and there's this fine line I'm going to talk about, between sort of mental, what we would consider what the Western what Western medicine would consider mental illness, and spiritual awakening. And this is not to be ableist, or anything like that. Because I'm not but there are certain very specific mental illnesses that mimic or go along, go along with or are a part of, or lead into spiritual awakening. They are they're associated, and I'm going to talk about why I believe that is, as well. And a lot of times, people who are going through a spiritual awakening experience have a breakdown of sorts, what we'd call them, you know, a mental breakdown, a nervous breakdown, a psychotic break all of these things. From a, you know, modern Western medical perspective but lead into some sort of spiritual awakening. And I've talked before I've written about the intersection of mental health and spirituality, particularly because I come from a shamanic background. And in shamanism, you know, you're dissociating and hallucinating and you know, all of these things, all of these labels can be placed on what you're doing when you're practicing shamanism. Excuse me, it's early morning here. My clock says 6:34am. But it is really my biologically we just criss crossed daylight savings. And so it's 530 for my body thinks it's 530 for take a little while for it to get used to that. So let's talk about spiritual awakening and and what it is. And it's a little bit hard to define. And there's some issues, there's some, maybe some misconceptions with spiritual awakening. And I'm going to use the word spiritual awakening instead of some of the religious or spiritual terms like enlightenment or Christ consciousness or, you know, any any other thing. I'm just going to use the term spiritual awakening, which is sort of a neutral descriptor. So one of the one of the problems with sort of defining or understanding or coming to to the conclusion that one may have had a spiritual awakening is that it's not one thing. It's a cluster of perceptual shifts, it's a big, when you've gone through an awakening, you've had a giant perceptual shift, your experience of the world changes completely. However, there, the experience is similar, but not always the same for everyone. And there are, I almost hate to use this term, but I don't have another way of describing it, there are levels and layers and nuances. So you could have a spiritual awakening, and then you could have another spiritual awakening, and then you could have another one and another one and another one, and go deeper and deeper and deeper into spirit. You can have a spiritual awakening and not stay in that awakened state, you may be not abiding, you don't instantly have an abiding state of awakeness, your state fluctuates, that shifts can change. Now, some people, some people reach a certain state a certain level of spiritual awakening. And that level becomes sort of a baseline that becomes their normal state. Then they can go deeper from there, or they can come back towards their old state, but seems to normalize, right? Hmm, you might have a normal sort of level, you know, sort of like a level of emotion that you stay at normally, are you a happy person? Are you a sad person are you blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah? Well, you're not always that one thing. There just happens to be your predominant emotional state. And the same is true for spiritual awakening, you are, have a baseline that you move around in, and that baseline when you go through an awakening can shift. So that's can be why it's challenging to sort of track down and categorize there are, there are researchers who are, you know, there's a guy duck, Dr. Jeffrey Martens, who's written a book, and talks about levels and locations and all of these things, and they've, you know, they've interviewed, I don't know how many people and built this huge matrix to say you're, you know, if you're experiencing this, this and this, you're on location one. And if you're experiencing this, this and this year, and location two, oh, but if you're in location two, you can have all of these different layers to that. And so, you know, that may or may not be useful to an individual, but it's useful from a research perspective, right, you have to be able to, to measure, categorize, you know, that kind of thing.

So, let's talk about how you might know if you've had a spiritual awakening experience. Now, some sometimes spiritual awakening comes with, as I said, a break you know, breakdown, like a nervous breakdown or mental breakdown or psychotic break or whatever. How you would know some of the characteristics of awakening would, how you would know this was a spiritual awakening is that you would exhibit you it afterwards, after you things settled down for you mentally, emotionally, your person perceptually, you would have shifted into a new state, a new baseline state is not even the right word. set of states set of experiences, your consciousness would have been fundamentally changed. Now spiritually awake, spiritual awakening has very little to do with intellectual knowledge. You can read all the books in the world, although there is a type of yoga. That is the yoga of learning the yoga of knowledge, that is, you know, potentially bring someone to enlightenment. I'm not going to argue with that. But that's not what the shift is. It's not like I didn't know things before. Now I know things. It's, you know, literally we, you know, the term is overused, but it's a paradigm shift for one thing, how you experience the world changes significantly. And so I think it'd be helpful if I, you know, if I were to describe some of these shifts, now, again, this is going to be different, a little bit for everyone, but some of these things will be present in any type of awakening, any type of spiritual awakening. The number one sign, I think, for, you know, that someone has been through a spiritual awakening is that there is a fundamental okayness, there's a fundamental sense that everything is okay, no matter what is going on in the world, everything underneath it all is fundamentally okay. This is not to say at all, that if you have gone through a spiritual awakening, if you are in a state where you are living from a place of fundamental well being that you can still get pulled into drama, that you can still have emotional triggers that you can still have this or that. Now, for some people, they have gone so far into spiritual awakening that nothing perturbs them, that's a very deep level of awakening. imperturbability, and you don't interact with these people very much. There are lots of people out there that have this experience, but they're not out, they tend not to be out there. You know, teaching being very public, whatever, because they go beyond the level where, where approval seeking is important for them. Right. So, at certain levels of spiritual awakening, people become less social. This isn't to say that introverts are spiritually awake. It's not introversion, or extroversion, it's something completely different. Introvert introversion and extraversion are really about where you get get your energy, right? Do you get energy from interacting with people? Or do you get energy when you're solo? You know, do you have to recharge your batteries by spending alone time that's introversion and extraversion, right? This is different this level of spiritual awakening is this stuff just isn't important anymore. alone or in groups, it's just not where the energy comes from. So that's, that is a big one, that everything is fundamentally okay. And at, at initial levels of spiritual awakening, there's still a background, whether or not you're getting pulled into daily trauma, there is still a sense of fundamental okayness. Now, there is a there are, you know, there's some other signs I want to talk about as well. One of them is, I will describe as in an increased sense of connection with the universe now this could come in the form of non dual experience or complete unity consciousness now. Personally, I don't like to talk about my experiences too too much, because it just, it comes off as bragging. And that's not that's not a great sign, you know, when people are, if people are bragging about their spiritual awakening, or whatever, that's not usually a good sign. I'll talk about ego in a second. But, um, but I, you know, I just, I want to talk about my personal experience, just because I think it's, it's illustrative and, and I can come from this, you know, this perspective but So, personally, I have had many experiences of non duality of being completely one with everything there is, in fact in shamanism that it gives you a very quick experiential, you know, very rapidly you have this experience. But that, for me is not my baseline. However, I do feel a fundamental interconnectedness with every one Everything with everything there is, it's hard to describe if you've never been there. But you know, beyond that is the sense of non duality in which there's no different, like, if I'm having in a non dual experience, if you're having a conversation with somebody, it feels like that conversation is coming from the same person. It doesn't mean you can't function in the world, in the 3d, physical, everyday world, you absolutely can. And in any level of spiritual awakening, there is some part of you that's still around that can function in 3d reality, although, you know, maybe, maybe there are very high levels, there are stories of Buddhist monks, for example, who, you know, form the rainbow body and essentially, leave the earthly plane in an energy body. So, you know, that that might be different for others. So one of the things is that there seems to be no, you know, nobody knows how deep spiritual awakening can go. There are a lot of systems out there that say, you know, xy, and z is the end state. But when people have researched this, they have found people that have gone beyond the head, it gets rarer and rarer as, as you might imagine, to the deeper one, the deeper one goes like there aren't. There are people who walk around in a complete non dual state every day. Not that many of them. That's their baseline. And then beyond that, is this sense, comes the sense beyond non duality comes a sense that the entire universe, that you are the entire universe, you're just experiencing reality through these, the eyes of this body, that you're currently borrowing or inhabiting, or whatever. There's a very, we'll say, way down the spiritual awakening pathway to having that experience. When people get to that, that level is very, very rare, very rare, like a handful of people in the world at any given time, to my knowledge, that that's their fundamental state. And the other thing is, those people are not going to can't get caught up in our quote unquote, petty dramas, and things like politics. Right? The why would you care if you're the entire universe, if that is your reality, that you are the entire universe, experiencing things through one person's eyes, along with that, along with that particular level, and some of the other levels as well? Are the, you know, come sometimes sort of supernatural abilities. And whether or not you want to believe in things like telekinesis, or by location, or whatever, these things have been recorded, sometimes under very rigorous scientific controls.

And, you know, sometimes these people who have these really, really supernatural abilities, if they do, they tend not to show them off. That's, they're not really interested. And also imagine imagine if, you know, I've talked about this, I've talked about this before, and I talk about this with clients who contact me and they're like, Oh, I've got this condition. And you know, what can I expect from having shamanic healing? And I said, you know, if I could guarantee instantaneous, miraculous healing to everyone I ever worked with, imagine how busy I would be imagine, you know, every person on like, if I could lay my hands on somebody and cure cancer, that's probably all I would ever do. However, imagine the line of people in front of my house or wherever I decided to do healings. You know, the world would be a path to your door and people who can sort of quote unquote, perform miracles. That's not really something they desire. So it's sort of it's this weird sort of thing. And I know I have a experienced people performing what would be considered miracles, witnessed firsthand with other people. Some very interesting, miraculous demonstration. And no of no firsthand of like a second hand of other people who could do some miraculous stuff. And sort of gave it up. Sort of like, oh yeah, I can do this, I can move objects with my mind, I can, you know, whatever. Telekinesis has been shown in labs and laboratories. Yes, there have has been some trickery. Sometimes there have been people trained by professional magicians who went in and fooled some researchers, but that doesn't mean all of the research is bogus. You know, there have, you know, there have been people that the government was very, very, very interested in psychic phenomena, such as telekinesis, and has been and has spend millions and millions of dollars, not just the US government, but other governments as well. To use this stuff to their advantage, one of the issues is, if I, you know, if you were really spiritually awakened and had emerged to the point where you could sort of bend reality to your will, you know, doing that on behalf of a government so that they could, you know, gain some political advantage over an adversary or whatever, they would have very little interest for. Right, that's petty politics, in the scope of the entire universe, very petty, and, and you would understand that doing it, you're, you're doing it so that very few very wealthy people could gain more power. I'm not going to get into conspiracy theories about the government. All you have to do is look and see that, you know, we have these Congress, people who, you know, had a career where they were making $40,000 a year go into Congress, and now they're worth $44 million. It's not a conspiracy, that's, you know, there is money to be made. So let's get back to spiritual awakening the signs of spiritual awakening. So the first is this fundamental sense of all being well with the world. Second is interconnection with everything there is with the universe with you know, whatever. This also, you know, from a religious standpoint, this could be like oneness with God or, you know, this or absorption into the Christ Mind. Or, you know, there are lots of sort of religious ways to describe this interconnection as well, spiritually, you know, in enlightenment, becoming one with everything. Reminds me of a really stupid joke. Which is, what did the Dalai Lama say to the hot dog vendor? Make me one with everything. Right? It's dumb joke. I actually saw a video of somebody telling that joke to the Dalai Lama. And the Dalai Lama was like, What are you talking about? He didn't under you know, didn't get it. But it's hard when you're translating a joke from English into some other language to get the new especially when it's a wordplay joke like that. But anyway, so there's there's that there's that there. So let's talk about ego a little bit. So there is a change, there's, with spiritual awakening comes a fundamental change to the ego. The ego is just your, your concepts and stories about who you are. When you say I am, you know, I am my name, I am my job. I am a parent, I'm one of the role that I take on these are you know, parts of your ego. And one of the you know, as not, you know, non awakened people are very, very attached to their ego. Right. So, I remember, and this is not I'm not using non awakened in any sort of pejorative term in any sort of way to put anybody down. We are all where we're at underneath at all, we are all one. So we are all you know, there's a part of all of us that is awakened

but I remember, you know, when my daughter was very little, and she went, she was in school, maybe four or five, five, probably five or six, right? She was in school. And she came home and she was really upset. And they said, What, you know what made you so upset? And she said, you know, this kid, this little boy in my class called me stupid. Right, he attacked her ego. She was upset. She's very attached to this concept of herself. That says, I am this being that is not stupid. And this violated my, this violated me. Very attached to her ego. Most of us are very attached to our egos. I remember I, a family member who likes to push everybody's buttons. And I thought myself above all of that. And one day I ran into her and she said, You're not a man of your word. And it like, felt like an ice pick to the heart. Because I thought of myself as a truth teller as somebody who is a person of his word. And there was ego and she knew that and she's, you know, she was she reveled in causing drama and causing people pain by attacking their ego now, when my daughter came home and said, So when so called me stupid, I said, Well, are you stupid? And she said, No. And I said, What if I said, You Sophia are a chair. And she giggled. I said, Well, are you a chair? She said, No. I said, so why are you going to get upset? It's me calling you stupid. That's not who you are. It's not what you are. And she kind of got it. Right. She kind of got that she didn't not have to take that to heart that was not a part of you know, even though it was violating her ego that was not you know, shouldn't have to be attached to that. And the lesson I learned from this person striking out at me and saying you're not a person of your word and is not to be so attached to my ego that I can get sucked into that drama. And so, spiritual awakening comes with a loosening have the attachment to ego, your ego will ship me shift fundamentally. And some people will talk about ego death or getting rid of the ego or you know, whatever. Um, I have met very awakened people who still experience ego. Very, very deeply awakened, people who still have a sense of this is who I am. However, what they often have given up is an attachment to that ego. The Buddha teaches that attachment is the source of suffering.

And so, ego isn't necessarily the problem. It's our attachment to now ego is a trickster. Ego exists, it had has a reason for existing. Right? It's not just this evil thing we need to kill and wipe out. Ego is around for the survival of the physical body. If I have an ego and I, you know, my ego identifies with being you know, owning a home and a car and you know, all of those things, things that provide me means for survival. That it's useful, but then it gets ego gets wrapped up in some stupid things sometimes, doesn't it?

You know, I see these people I drive this kind of car So I'm important, I need to feel important. I wear these designer clothes. So I feel important. This is this isn't these are ego traps, right? The need to feel above others is an ego trap. So that attachment. So also there is, you know, the over identification with things that we are not. And that takes us out of any state of spiritual awakening

I saw a recording of Bob Proctor talking, it's funny because I was just talking about this in another forum. And I was like, you know, I have this name, and this name is just a label. And then the very same day, as you know, spirit tends to put things in your path. I saw Bob Proctor who if you don't know, he's a spiritual teacher, I really like him, like his teachings. And what he said was, you know, I've got this name, Bob Proctor, but that's just a label my parents gave me when I was born, that's not who I am. And I have this body. And this body, someday will die and it changes over time. And that's not who I am. So it's this, this over identification, with the body with your name, with your job title with, you know, whatever, with labels with all kinds of stuff, things that you are not, you're not anything that you have. Right, I have a name, I have a body, I have thoughts, I have emotions, none of those things is who I am at my fundamental core. So with awakening comes a an experience. Not just a belief, not just an understanding, there is understanding that comes with it. But an experience of this is not who I am. So there is a loosening of the ties to ego.

So these, I would say, are the three big signs of awakening. There are others, but they're not necessarily as consistent. Not the same for everyone. So some of the things that can come along with spiritual awakening include massive shifts in perception. There are reports of people getting for example, better night vision. After spiritual awakening, or being able to, you know, hear and perceive things, certainly what we would consider what many would consider extrasensory perception comes in an increased intuition because you're plugged you know, you're plugged in more directly to the universe. Now, you're the ultimate state. Here's the thing about spiritual awakening, your beingness the core of who you are, ultimately does not change the field of consciousness that your does not change, you're not suddenly something different. And I like the word awakening because you know, enlightenment is pretty good too. But you you become awake to who and what you really are fundamentally, so the things that you are not lose their importance, you can still use them. I still have this identity, I still have this label. I have this body I can use to record this podcast for you. Underneath it all you and I are one that doesn't change who you are, at your very core never changes. It's timeless anyway. It's outside of time outside of space. Outside it's formless. Awakening doesn't mean you become that you becoming anything when you are spiritually awakened. You're just being what you are. Right So there can be this shift this massive shift in perception. One, that also that can include the perception living from the perception that you're not actually doing anything. Right, you can shift into when witness consciousness where your body mind is carrying out your day to day activities, but you don't necessarily feel like you're really that involved with them. You still get up and brush your teeth, you still, you know, do whatever, turn the lights on, whatever it is you do, when you get up in the morning, you still do all that stuff. But there's a feeling of you're kind of witnessing that. And your body mind is carrying on those activities on its own. That's one thing that can happen. Life becomes more effortless. There is the sense of okayness the sense of fundamental well being, as they call as you know, some researchers call it comes along with a sense of peace, a growing sense of peace in the background. That's not to say that the world that your body mind is inhabiting 3d reality becomes peaceful, all of a sudden that war stops and all of that sort of thing. No. Despite all of those things that are going on, you have a growing feeling of peace as a background. If you don't have that one of two things is going on. One is, or you know, one of several things, but one of the main things could be that you didn't actually you haven't actually gone through spiritual awakening. And that's fine. That's okay. Everybody is where they are. But if you go through an awakening experience, and you it did not bring with it at some point, yes. When you're going through, you know, when the when the initial shift can be very tumultuous, very chaotic, very unpeaceful. But when you come out of that there should be this real sense of peace in the background. If you don't have that, then you've experienced something else. And that's okay. It's not a judgement. It's just what it is. The other thing, the other sort of major thing that can be happening is that you have shifted, like your baseline hasn't shifted to awakening to the awakened state. So sometimes we have these little glimpses, we have these tastes of awakening, before we shift more permanently in our base state, very, very, very common. Almost everybody who does any kind of spiritual work experiences that

and then that's it. Everything is okay. Everything you're experiencing is okay. One of the interesting paradoxes with awakening is, you know, a team attainment feels less important. Gaining things seems less important, even though you may you know, once you've gone through a spiritual awakening, you might try to deepen that you might try to make it more permanent you might try it's not it's not about attainment for the sake of ego. That's not it. Hey, I'm level 32. I'm, you know, got my black belt, in awakening, whatever, you know, it's not none of that. Is that important? But they're, you know, sometimes there is a sense that, oh, there's more to this. And wouldn't it be interesting to see what's there to see what's going on

one of the things I want to talk about a little bit is what happens physiologically to people what happens to your physical body. Because your consciousness, when it shifts, can rewrite a bunch of stuff in your brain can rewrite stuff in your nervous system? No, I do not equate the brain and consciousness as being the same thing. And I heard an interesting metaphor for, you know, saying that the brain is is consciousness, or that consciousness is generated in the brain. So if you were to go out to somewhere where there was a primitive, and they just mean that from a technological standpoint, tribe, this is again, not, when I use the word primitive, sometimes that's taken to mean less than or whatever. But if I were wanting to survive in a jungle, or without technology, you know, I would want to have the skills, the extreme level of skills and knowledge that these people have. So if I were to go out to some tribal region somewhere, you know, South America, you know, the some places in Africa, some places where there are still tribes living without technology, right? It's getting rare to find these places in the world, but tribes that have not experienced technology before, and I were to bring a radio out there and turn it on. And all sudden, these tribes would hear, you know, these people who had never seen a radio or heard, you know, or were aware of how technology worked, the baseline, would suddenly hear voices coming out of the radio. And they might, you know, for example, come to the conclusion that there were tiny people living inside the radio, speaking through it. Very logical conclusion, if you don't know how radio works. And then let's say they took, you know, they would take apart the radio looking for those people, and when they would never find them, right, because they weren't aware that there were people in a studio miles and miles and maybe hundreds of miles away, broadcasting. Well, the same is true for consciousness and the brain. Right. And also, if they took the radio apart, the voices would stop. Right? The voices that were coming out of the radio would stop if they took it apart, looking for the source of these voices. Oh, we killed you know, we killed the people that live inside the radio or whatever. The same is true of the brain and people who research that looking for consciousness. Right, you can take the brain apart and it stops receiving, I think the brain is a receiver of consciousness and a processor and that does a lot of stuff for us. But it is not consciousness and we have not been able to locate consciousness in the brain. Yeah, you can damage the brain and it stops receiving the same way you can damage a radio, but it doesn't stop the broadcasts. So it's a good way of looking at consciousness. So with major shifts in consciousness that as happens with spiritual awakening, there can be fundamental changes to the physiology of the brain. For the for the person who is experiencing that shift. Why because we have to rewire the radio to receive this new profound consciousness. Sometimes this is dangerous only in very extreme levels. But There are stories that researchers have found not just the stories, but they have studied the individuals, their stories coming out of research of finding people who went through profound experiences of spiritual awakening that wound up with life threatening stuff, because the low level functions in their nervous system stopped working correctly. Sounds dangerous, and it is. It is dangerous to the physical body can be very, very high levels of spiritual awakening deep levels, whatever, however, you want to look at it. Very profound levels of spiritual awakening can come you'll have you know, people who go catatonic for a while unable to speak you know, and it sort of be like, oh, did this person have a stroke? Or did he have you know, something along those lines? And no, they did not. Now, after the brain rewrites itself and shifts, these people are once again, physiologically fine, unable to speak and come out of their catatonic state, unless they die, which also happens sometimes people stay that way, until their body passes away, there are stories of monks who meditate in such a deep state that they go into this quasi death state for years. And, you know, frequently they don't people don't know if they're, if they are dead or alive. And in fact, their you know, their body doesn't really decompose even though they haven't eaten or and you can't really detect their breathing. And, you know, there are these states that we don't really understand yet. These aren't just stories, these are, you know, things people to this day are going through and witness and these aren't just mythologies. And there are, you know, there are researchers that are just beginning to look into these things into these experiences.

So, these are some of the signs of spiritual awakening, fundamental Well being a sense of interconnectedness, a lessening of the ego, big perceptual shifts. Right. There also seems to be a quieting have the net, you know, the narrative background noise of your mind.

The mind loves to chatter. It has this thing called the default mode network that when you aren't focused on something, when you aren't meditating are really, really focused on what you're doing. There's chatter, there's rumination. There's all of these processes. Well, and this is going on with different parts of the brain are just sort of communicating with each other. Hey, what's going on? Oh, yeah, remember this? Oh, yeah. Remember that? Different parts of brain this is called the default mode network. One of the functions of the default mode network is it is self referential, meaning those thoughts those ruminations feel like it feels like who we are. Those thoughts feel like who we are. And so with experiences of spiritual awakening, that default mode network quiets down, first of all. And second of all those narrative thoughts become less attached to self reference. thought arises still, but you don't go oh, that too I am you know, I am that I am that which has the, you know that song going through my head that I can't get out of my head, I am that who has those depressive thoughts that I'm ruminating over those thoughts of worthlessness or being unloved or whatever, there's less identification with that.

To the point where it is more, more profound levels of awakening, it feels like the normal state is no, no inner dialogue. And some people, you know, some people don't really aren't really aware of an inner dialogue or you know, whatever.

But the default mode network becomes less self self referential. It's not about who we are anymore.

So, if you feel like you've gone through a spiritual awakening, what do you do about that? This is a question I've gone through spiritual, what should I do? I don't know. Now, I'm being a little facetious there. You do with it, you do with it what you will, right, you don't have to do anything with it. Or you can work with it to see, to experiment to see how for further along that path you can go. Or you can work to understand it more if an intellectual understanding of awakening is important to you. I have a lot of people, a lot of people contact me interested in understanding their spiritual awakening. Why? Well, because it's a completely novel, new way of being for them

it's a new way of going through the world. And, you know, in the beginning in the, in the, sort of the, the initial levels of awakening, that can be very confusing, you can feel very alone. Although there were plenty of people who have had awakening experiences, and many who have stabilized that to some extent. But we don't always know who those people are.

There aren't necessarily, you know, unless you join a cult or an ashram or something,

aren't necessarily large groups of people having that experience, to kind of hang out with and discuss and it can feel very abnormal, it can feel like you've gone crazy can feel all of these things. You know, particularly when it comes to the mental health breakdown. You know, I went through a psychotic, you know, somebody contacted me very similar through spiritual awakening and resulted in a psychotic break. Well, psychotic break was part of the awakening. The Awakening didn't, you know,

You know, there are lots of people out there who think that everyone should be doing things the way they're doing it. And I don't take that perspective.

As a spiritual teacher, I know that fit the right fit, finding the right teacher, it's incredibly important. You know, you can go attached to any guru out there, just about if you've got enough money, if you've got enough time, if you can, you know, give up everything and go live in a commune or ashram or whatever. They're mu, there are lots of places out there that you can just sort of like sign up. But is that going to be the right path for you? Just because it's the one you found when you signed up for? Maybe maybe not. I like to be very efficient, very efficient with students and say, Look, you know, tell me what you're looking for. Let's talk about it. Let's find out if my teaching style is right for you. And if not, I will reach out to other teachers or find a referral or, you know, tell you what you might be better suited for.

You know, I do I give public classes that anybody can come sign up for I'm giving a free talk at the end of this month as a matter of fact, on spiritual awakening, and anybody can sign up for that. But to study with me directly. You know, there is, you know, when I first started out in shamanism, for example, my teacher had to interview me, like I sat in her office for, I think, three hours. And there was an application before she decided to take me on as a student

you know, and so I don't take everybody's a student. And I also tell people that if you feel for whatever reason that I'm not right for you than that, I'm that I'm not right for you. And, you know, I'm happy to reach out to my network and see if there, if I know of somebody who's better suited, then, you know, I'll reach out. Or I'll refer spirituality, you know, is not a one size fits all kind of pursuit, their thing, things that kind of work for everyone. Meditation works for everyone, but not every type of meditation works for everyone. There are 10s of 1000s, if not more styles, types, processes, procedures for meditation.

You know, is that going to work out for you? I don't know, I don't know the answer to that. Which you know which one.

Sometimes you have to hunt around and find the type, you know, the style of meditation that works for you. I'll do another, I'll do a podcast at some time in the future on meditation.

And talk about the ins and outs of it and that sort of thing. But it does seem to be the you know, as a practice, the one the one thing that leads leads most people into awakening, there are other things and there are people who come to awakening without meditation whatsoever. So, you know, again, there are many, many paths, many paths to the top of the mountain. We're all going to the same mountaintop, but there are many different ways of getting there many different experiences along the way. So with that I will leave you for today. I love you all. I hope you're all doing well and that you're happy and healthy and we will talk soon

Announcer 1:00:41

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

Ep41 Spiritual Egotism and Spiritual Inclusion

Announcer 0:28

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 0:45

Hello, everybody.

It's been a little while. It's been almost a month since I put one of these out. as I record this, it is the morning of New Year's Eve 2021. Whenever you happen to listen to this, this is what I'm recording it. And we've just gotten through a very busy, busy, busy holiday season for me. I celebrate both you will and Christmas, I don't identify as a Christian, but Christmas is has become a holiday open to everyone. And I like that I like aspects of it. I love some of the messages of Christmas, not the rampant consumerism. But I do love gift giving. And I like eating, I love eating a lot. Maybe I'll do a maybe I'll do a whole episode on the spiritual nature of food and feasting and making food offerings and that sort of thing sometime in the future. So anyway, so celebrate, you'll you know, and Hanukkah was earlier than that. And Diwali was earlier than that I don't celebrate all of those. But I recognize that we have been through a busy holiday season. And in most areas of the world. COVID is surging, we've got this omachron variant, and it's a very serious thing. And a lot of people are winding up in the hospital and our hospitals are getting overwhelmed. And now they're canceling. A lot of them are canceling non emergency services because they're or non emergency. Yeah, non emergency services like surgeries and things like that, because they're just completely overwhelmed. And health care workers are, um, you know, health, health care workers are overwhelmed and tired. And honestly, I feel for them what they've had to put up with for years now. Gosh, so I'm hoping to, in the new year bring a little bit of a message of hope. But something that's a little, I hope it's a little bit unusual for this podcast is I've got a little bit of a bone to pick, I've got a little bit of a complaint, and I don't love complaining, complaining is not the most fun thing I do, and I don't love it. But I have a little bit of a complaint. But the caveat is that I will also potentially offer a solution. So, you know, in my, in my 20 years of working in the technology field, I would you know, always try to if a problem came up, and I had to go to a manager or something. Whenever possible, I would always try to come with a proposed solution and sort of say, okay, you know, XYZ is a problem, and this is how I think we could fix it. Or I would come with a problem and ask for help. Like XYZ is a problem. I don't know how to fix it. Do you know who I can go to for some more help? Because then I'm not just a complainer I become part of the solution. And so I'm going to challenge everybody listening to this podcast and I hope that you will challenge people who don't listen this podcast to be part of the solution to whatever is going on in the world and that includes COVID That includes paying attention. I know people have strong feelings for or against but I would encourage people to get vaccinated, fully vaccinated and boosted I am fully vaccinated and boosted even though I do firmly believe in spiritual healing and I believe in taking care of your body and all of those things. I do think that I do think that the vaccine, the vaccines are safe, I believe they're, you know, fully tested and approved, I think every anti Vax argument I have seen, is not has not borne truth. And I realize people are really strongly attached to their opinion. And I may be talking to people who are not going to shift their opinion at all about this. But if you look with a critical eye, and I'm, I'm, you know, while I'm a spiritual person, I'm also very scientifically minded.

And anecdotal evidence is not good. It's not evidence of anything. You know, my, my grandmother smoked her whole life and lived to be 90 does not mean that smoking is good for you, or that it doesn't kill at least a third of the people who do it, because it does. And that's the reality of it. And there is survivorship bias. Early on in the pandemic, I had a very mild case of what I think, was COVID, because I lost my sense of taste and smell. And, you know, it wasn't bad I had, it was like a cold for several weeks and isolated. And I couldn't get tested at that time, because I didn't have any comorbidities and there weren't. They weren't testing people who weren't older, there were no at home tests back then. The test that they had, were the ones where they had to like, Ram the Q tip all the way back and practically touch your brain with it. So I wasn't looking forward to getting that. So unless I was incredibly sick, so I didn't get tested. But I think I had it very early on. And it was extremely mild. And I know people who have contracted COVID scents and had have had extremely mild symptoms. Although I do know, people whose sense of taste and smell have not recovered months later. And for me, it would be a bad thing to lose. I have a very keen sense of smell. And as I spoke to earlier, I love tastes. So anyway, there is this survivorship bias where I go, I went through that I'm fine. You know, it's not it's no big deal. Um, you know, it's that whole thing. Like, we didn't wear seatbelts when I was a kid and I turned out fine. Yeah, but that ignores the, you know, 800,000 people in the US closing on a million people in the US who have died of COVID closing on a million people. So, any inkling that you have that this thing is not serious. And the other the other aspect is, you know, am I worried that if I got COVID that I would get, you know, extremely sick wind up in the hospital or die? Probably not. I'm a fairly healthy person. Um, you know, I'm getting up there in age, but I'm not, you know, I'm not over 60. And, um, you know, so the risk factors for me are very low. But there is a lot of thinking these days that are like, well, I don't have anything to worry about. So why do I got to do this? Um, you know, the main reason I got fully vaccinated and got boosted, besides the fact that I don't want to have to quarantine if I, you know, by getting sick, or, you know, God forbid, I do get seriously ill and want and take up a hospital bed somewhere. But I believe it's my civic duty, I believe that I'm a stop gap. And that being vaccinated and boosted makes it much, much less likely that I can tract and pass the disease on to others, and I'm still taking precautions, I do still wear a mask. And I realize people have strong feelings about that too. But when I go out in public, and I'm in an enclosed space with people, I still wear a mask, I still socially distance from people because those things I believe, are still relevant and important. And, you know, anyway, that's all I want to talk about that. That's my PSA for that. So, anyway, I would encourage you to if you're, you know, I can't imagine they're too many people on the fence these days. If you are at all on the fence, you know, just just get, get better information, get good information, not people joining on social media or silly blogs or crazy YouTube channels or politicians. Don't listen to any of us people. Please listen to the people who work in epidemiology. You know, there's this other thing that's going around that is surprising and shocking to me that I think that, you know, people think their quote unquote, common sense, whatever that means, out does expertise of people who have spent decades studying in a specific field? And I got news for you, it doesn't? It does not, it never does. You know, I realized there's this thing where people are bumping up against these experts who are changing their recommendations pretty frequently. And that's frustrating.

But that's what science does. And that doesn't make science wrong. Science is is the scientific method. Science is a method. It's not a, you know, we speak of science as if it's a thing. But it's a method of trying to figure out what is more effective, what is more truthful, statement. And, you know, science is supposed to be self correcting, right? Meaning when we get new information, we change our mind about something, you know, as better information gets in, and I realized it's really difficult, it's difficult for me as a lay person to keep up with the shifting recommendations. And very recently, my kids and I were exposed to somebody who turned out to be diagnosed with COVID. Later, he was not symptomatic at the time that we are exposed to him. And I didn't know what to do. And I read the CDC guidelines, and they were confusing. And what I did was I wound up calling the, you know, my kids doctor's office. And they had, they had recommendations based on my kids vaccination status, and the time of exposure and all of those things. And so if you have questions, rely on the people who know more about things than you do, that's another thing that I like, is relying on experts. Anyway, I've been talking a very long time about COVID. And that is not the main topic of this, I really, I really want this pandemic to be over. And the only way we're going to get there is if people start taking responsibility not just for themselves, but for their neighbors. It's not me first, it's we first. That's my PSA for today. So the thing I want to talk about, and I realize I'm starting with certain all kinds of negativity, but I'm going to give some suggestions. Because, again, they don't like to present a problem with out some kind of solution, particularly on this podcast, more have time to think about a little bit what I'm going to talk about, these are very impromptu, I don't script them. I don't, I don't edit them. So you're getting the pure unfiltered me when I take a sip of coffee. So we'll do right now. You'll hear that, or if I cough or sneeze, or God forbid, pass gas, you might hear that I try not to be that rude or whatever. But I want you to have sort of unfiltered unfiltered me, not because that is more valuable than filtered me or whatever. But I feel like this is a way that I connect with people and that I'm not being fake. I'm not pretending I'm not putting on my best face. Now, in other public appearances. I might do that. You know, I, you know, I do radio spots once a week here in Maine, and you know, they edit them, they put them through filters, and I've only heard myself one time. And on the radio, I was like, wow, that's me, I sound pretty good. It's because they do a whole lot of editing, and cut out my arms and ORs and cut out things I say that might not make sense in that that kind of thing. Well, I don't do that here. And I realize, you know, different people are gonna have different tastes different people are going to like my voice or hate my voice and that's totally fine. And you may like what I have to say or hate what I've seen, that's totally fine, too. Everybody is entitled to their opinion, which is gonna start me off on something. And yeah, people are entitled to their opinions. But there's something the thing that the thing that kind of set me off and this is the thing I have a complaint about was very recently on social media and social media is a bit of a jungle, right? Sometimes you can get good things from social media, you can find out about wonderful podcasts or what have you. And sometimes it is a garbage pit or cesspit of infighting and insults and political junk and all kinds of stuff but You take the good with the bad, I guess. So very recently on social media, a person and I won't name this person or really indicate who they are, because it's not my intention to attack anybody personally. What I'm going to do is I'm going to challenge an idea. Am Yes, he's entitled to his opinion. And as am I, I'm entitled to my opinion about his opinion. And I'm about and I'm entitled to my opinion about how he expresses his opinion as well.

So there's something that is sort of rife in the spiritual community. And it doesn't matter what part of the spiritual community it is. But it's this form of spiritual egotism. Um, and it is the farthest thing from being spiritual I can imagine. It is, in my opinion, destructive. It puts people in boxes, it separates us more than unites us, makes us feel disconnected. It makes us feel less than so the thing the opinion that was shared on social media recently, it was a somebody shared an article where a an Eastern traditional Shaman was speaking about the challenges they went through, and they didn't want to be a shaman and XYZ and that is a very common story in shamanic cultures. shamanic crisis is a real thing many people go through. You know, in indigenous cultures, they have to go through very serious maybe a life threatening crisis. And spirit chooses them. And that happens, happens in the West too. But we don't tend to live in shamanic cultures unless you live in an indigenous culture in the West. So this person who is a teacher of shamanism said, Hey, look at this, all these Westerners and this person is a westerner who teaches shamanism. They're all crazy. Already, starting with a pejorative, calling people crazy. I don't like that. I'm sorry, I don't like the way you're expressing your opinion. putting people down. And putting people below you, I'm better than you because you're crazy. You're crazy, because you don't know where everybody's running to become a shaman. And nobody knows what it means to be a shaman and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You can tell how I feel about this person's opinion. And he's entitled to it, but I don't like it. And I don't like the way he expressed it. I don't like it. It is not. It is not a very, I'm trying not to be judgmental, but I'm going to come across as very judgmental. So it's just gonna happen, I'm just going to accept it. I'm gonna accept that my judgment is coming up. And that is egoic on my part, I get it. But you know, I don't like this putting other people down this separating people out. You can't be a shaman because you don't meet these five random criteria that I have decided are the most important. And if you interviewed people, if you went to 100 Different shamanic cultures, traditional indigenous shamanic cultures, and said, What? What is required to become a shaman? In your culture, you would get 100 different completely different answers, there would be some similarities, there would be completely different answers. So yeah, could I go out and cherry pick one person's opinion and decide I can use that to put down and insult other people from my own culture? who are trying to do the same things that I'm doing? I could do that. I don't think that's a very positive way of acting. I don't think that's helpful. I don't think it's beneficial. I don't think it is doing anything other than I am superior to you because you want to be a shaman and you and I know what it takes and you don't. Again, that's about separation. And in my shamanic practice, I learned that we are all connected. So when I see this opinion come out, it hurts because I feel deeply connected to people who are in the shamanic community. And when we'll put it this way, when I have misspoken I put out something recently Li, on my blog about shamanism. And I and I misstated something I stated something that gave the wrong impression. It was not intentional. And it wasn't technically a lie, it was just

I said something in a way that I shouldn't have said it. And my teacher read it and contacted me immediately and said, um, you know, love your blog. I noticed that this, you said this. And that's not exactly true. And, you know, you might want to change that. And I did, because she was right. And I had not intended it to come across the way that it did. But I'm a human being and I made a mistake, and I fixed it. So I want people to fix stuff. And there's a thing that is going on in the spiritual community. This spiritual egotism, that's one aspect of it, where you're crazy, because you want to be a shaman, how about we educate people, and by educating people, if you start off by calling them crazy, um, you know, I have, I have decades of experience educating adults. I don't have experience, educating children, but I've taught adults for decades martial arts and shamanism and technology. And I wrote a technology textbook and when you start off by insulting your audience, to make yourself seem better, um, you lose your audience. They shut down, you cannot educate them. So when you say, you know, all you Westerners who want to be shamans are crazy. Um, you're not trying to educate people. You're trying to insult people, or you're trying to get people, people on, you know, who who read, you know, hold hold you in some esteem to go oh, oh, I, I didn't realize that all these other people. They're crazy. But I'm following you. So I'm an insider. And those are crazy people. I'm saying because I follow. I follow you. I don't like that. Um, and the other thing, so there's kind of two complaints here. And then I promise I'm going to get to my proposed solution. Something I would like to see. The other thing that that I see happening a whole lot are gatekeepers, gatekeepers of culture. And, you know, I've run into this, and I was teaching a workshop in shamanism a couple years back maybe three years ago. Time sort of weird now that we're we've been in COVID for so long. So as probably three years ago, I was teaching an introductory workshop and shamanism and there was a flyer and some posts online about it. And in there was a picture of a hoop drum that I use for shamanic journeying. And a gentleman and I now know this guy and I, I respect his intention, but I think he went about this the wrong way, contacted me out of the blue and said, Are you some kind of scam artist? And I'm like, I don't know what you're talking about. Is and he, you know, going back and forth. He thought I was pretending to teach Native American spirituality. And I do not and I make it very clear that that is not something I have expertise in. It's not something I teach, and it's not something that I represent that I teach. So because this person has certain biases, he feels like shamanism is a Native American practice. I will say that many Native American tribes have people who are shamanic, so there are many shamanic cultures but shamanic cultures exist all over the world. And he said, You have no right to use that drum. It's not yours. It's not from your culture. Bs. But it's just ignorance. It's just that he didn't know because he has only seen hoop drums in context of Native Americans using them. And despite the fact that I actually made my hoop drum in a drum burning ceremony with A Native American teacher

I do come from cultures where the hoop drum is common and that is almost every culture many many many many cultures use hoop drums they are prehistoric instruments there are no there are probably no existing cultures that invented the hoop drum right. So, you know, this has been passed along human culture to human culture. And you know, my ancestors in you know, my Celtic ancestors used hoop drums still do as a matter of fact, you see a Baran which is a traditional Irish instrument, that is a hoop drum. My Scandinavian ancestors used hoop drums, Scandinavian shaman Saamy, shamans and Scandinavian shamans still do use hoop drums. Hoop drums are everywhere. We see them in many different continents, we see them amongst many different cultures, they are again, prehistoric things. It's like saying, because I've only watched westerns, Western movies, that I believe that Native American culture was the only culture to use a bow and arrow. And that is far from true. Right? We know that bow and arrow was in common use in cultures everywhere. You know, Welsh longbowmen were feared in the Middle Ages, and, you know, bows, bows and arrows commonly used in Asia. And so yeah, it's an ancient, you know, it's an ancient tool. It's adapted for different cultures. But um, so my, my issue with kind of both of these things is that and I'll talk, I'm gonna talk about cultural appropriation and when it's actually a problem, and there's a great article I read recently about cultural appropriation, and I will, I will, I'll talk about that in a moment. So my main problem with both of these things is that they're saying, because of the circumstances of your birth, or history, or upbringing, or whatever, you are not eligible to have spiritual healing or spiritual wholeness, or to follow the spiritual path that you are interested in. And we're living in a world that is so difficult and so challenging. Kind of No, my feeling is a little I'm a little indignant. I'm a little How dare you? How dare you tell people they can't seek out spiritual wholeness? Know, people might be doing it in a way that is not helpful or harmful or what, whatever. But if you just call people crazy, and offer no solution, or if you just say you can't do that, because you're a fraud, and you're stealing. You're not offering a solution, not offering any kind of solution that's not helpful to anyone. Um, and cultural appropriation has become a really sticky term, and somebody told me oh, you can't use the word shaman because that's not your word. What do you mean that's not my word? Shaman is an English word. Yes, it came into English from other another language in the 17th century. But how many of our words come from French in English come from French or Spanish or Latin or Greek? Most of the, you know, a good portion of the English language is not old does not directly descend from Old English. And the word shaman shows up. It's a proto indo Europe. It comes from a proto indo European root word. And it shows up in Sanskrit and Chinese and Pali it shows up in Acadian it shows up in certain form in Hebrew. So let's get off the kick that the the toxic people and I'm not taking anything away from them of Siberia.

These you know that they in invented the word shaman out of whole cloth that it didn't exist before they started using the word. It's not true. And when people challenge me, you know, I try to educate them. I don't, I don't try to get into an argument with them. Even though it sounds like I'm being argumentative now. I challenge them and present them with hopefully better information. Will that change some people's minds? No, no, you know, it's very clear that there are a large group of people in the world who are not affected by facts are not affected by newer, better information once I have dug in my opinion, is my opinion. You people are crazy. You can't do this, because you're crazy. And I have deemed that you're crazy. And indigenous people think you're crazy. Really, you speak on behalf of all indigenous people. The other phenomenon I see quite a bit is these gatekeepers who are like you can't do X because it is a closed practice. Um, this one is a little challenging to, and I'll give you an example, somebody very recently said, You shouldn't smudge or use the word smudge. Because that is a Native American practice. And it's a closed practice. Let me tell you how many problems I have with that statement. And again, it's, you know, when, when I hear stuff like that, I respond to it, hopefully from a factual perspective and say, well, that's not exactly true. First of all, the word Smudge is not a Native American word. You know. So, to say that the word comes from Native American culture, as if Native American culture is a single culture. And as if there is a single language, none of those things are true. And even if the word smudge came from, you know, the Wabanaki or something, um, it would not belong to every Native American culture. But let's look at the act of smudging the act of using, you know, burning herbs to purify or for spiritual purposes or for healing. I cannot think of a culture that doesn't do that. Via Egyptians, the ancient Egyptians did that there are recipes I've made. I've made Kaifi which is incense made from resins and herbs, I've, I've made that and that was on the written out on you know, the walls of King Tut's tomb. So, um, you know, and in Scottish culture, there's a practice, I think it's called staining and they use rosemary to smudge they burn it and use it to for spiritual purification and healing. So, the, you know, so the problem number one is to say, x practice belongs to X culture is very frequently untrue. There are, you know, there are exceptions to that. I've read things were saying, oh, you know, white people shouldn't practice voodoo, because that comes from Haiti, and it's only you know, people who are of Haitian descent or whatever. But there are practitioners out there from Haiti who will teach Caucasian people, people from other cultures and don't have a problem sharing their religion, their spirituality with other people. Um, so are they are they wrong? Who, who gets to be right here? So here's the other problem. And this is something that I I read from somebody who is actually a Native American who's talking about this, like, somebody asked them, Is it okay to smudge and they said, Why are you asking me? Because there is no one person. Like you could ask. You could go to 10 Native American people, 10 different tribes, maybe or even 10 people within the same tribe and say, Is it okay to smudge and you might get 10 different answers, or you might get two or three different answers. Because nobody owns culture. Nobody owns

you know, cultural practice and this was the thing that was expressed. She was like, well Whether I have a problem with it or not, it's not mine to give or take. Now there's a couple. This is where cultural appropriation becomes a, an actual problem, right? Problem number one is when it becomes exploitive, right? And so for example, I do not, I do smudge, I frequently I will use rosemary very frequently, I like the smell a whole lot. I don't use white sage. And the reason for that is not because only people born in a certain area to certain parents are allowed to use white sage. Um, but I only use white sage to be I don't use white sage sorry, because it is a traditional in many Native American tribes, it is traditional smudging herb, and it has been over harvested by people selling it in spiritual shops. And because merging has become so popular, you know, people are, are are encroaching on traditional Native harvesting grounds. And that's exploitive. Right, that's exploitive? If I were to teach shamanism. And let's say I put an Apache Warbonnet on falsely presenting myself as teaching something from that culture. And essentially taking away from that culture that is both exploitive and disrespectful, so would not do that. And this is where appropriation is actually problematic. Where appropriation is not problematic, is saying, oh, you know, I really, I really respect, I really respect that part of your culture, I want to learn more about it, I want to experience it from somebody who's willing to share it. For example, I have taken part in a pipe ceremony with somebody who is a pipe carrier and pipe carriers are selected. And I don't know, the whole the whole deal. But I was honored to take part in a pipe ceremony, would I now go out and lead a pipe ceremony? I would not, because I have not been that has not been passed on to me as a type of type of teaching. But there are tribes and elders and things like that, who will, you know, pass these things on to non Indigenous people and who's to say that they're right or wrong, or what have you. Um, so, exploitation and disrespect are a couple of problematic areas of appropriation. And so there was a great article that I read recently, and I wish I could remember who wrote it, and but it was written by you it was written by a, you know, an African American woman who had some fantastic points. And she was saying, like, there's, you know, there's all these cries of cultural appropriation, and there's a lot of backlash against it, because there are some really silly things like saying that, you know, white people can't make burritos. Because only people from Mexico can make burritos or, you know, stuff like that. Which, you know, I don't know. I mean, that seems pretty silly to me. But, um, she was talking about sort of financial exploitation specifically. And so one example she used and I actually knew this was Elvis Presley's famous song hound dog was actually sung first by an African American woman who is singing, singing about like, kind of a dirty dog, a man and her song, her rendition of a song, in my personal opinion, far superior to Elvis Presley's rendition. And Elvis had to change up the words because obviously, he's not singing about a philandering man, he made it actually about a dog, which seemed really always seemed really weird to me. Even as a child when I heard that song, I was like, why is he singing about a hound dog not catching a rabbit and it made no, it didn't make a lot of sense to me. So go out and look up the original and listen to that. So there's a history of exploit tation of black musicians in the United States and probably in many other places.

The you know, the, the, I can think of many instances but this is one word Elvis you know made millions and millions of dollars in the original artists made a pittance prep maybe diatom poverty, I don't know. But I do know this. So you know that if you're familiar with the song, the the jungle in the jungle, the might the lion sleeps tonight that actually comes from an African chant. And the original recording is available, you can, you can find it, it's scratchy, it's from like, I don't know, the 20 years of the 30s it's very old. The musician who the you know, the African musician who laid down that track sold the rights to it for something like adult of the equivalent of $1.50 today and he wound up he did wind up dying in poverty and eventually his estate, but it took decades was awarded you know, they basically said he was cheated out of you know, millions of dollars in residuals for the song over so many years. But look it up go look, go look at the original. So, this is this is exploitation. So the other thing, the other thing is disrespect. So when when we make fun of cultures or we use we use cultures as mascots, for example. That can be very hurtful. When we adopt native regalia, for example, as a costume, you know, you're taking something that is sacred to people and turning it into, you know, Halloween costume or something along those lines. And it's not it's really disrespectful in a way that is that is that can be harmful to people can be hurtful, you know, it puts people down. So this is where, you know, this is where the problems of approach appropriation actually come from things that are exploitive, and disrespectful. If we were to go around and say, You cannot ever use a word that doesn't belong to the culture that you were born into. You cannot cook cuisine that does not come from a culture that you belong to. I don't care who you are or where you're living unless you are unless you are actually indigenous and living in a traditional culture that hasn't changed for several 1000s of years, you're probably going to have to eliminate a lot of stuff from your life. Culture borrows culture appropriates it always has and always will write English in English language is the reason it's so mixed up and a hodgepodge and spelling is so weird is because it borrows from so many other languages, and then look at how many other languages borrow from English, which in turn had borrowed from other places. So it must be fun to be a linguist and try to track the etymology of different words. Sometimes I do sometimes I I'm not a linguist, but I will research where words come from and the etymology of words. So somebody recently said, and this was another one on social media. They said, Oh, you can't use the word magician, unless you are a Zoroastrian priest from Iran or something along those lines because the word Magi isn't you know, came from came from that word. Let's forget the fact that for over 1000 years, the you know, magic and magician have been part of the English language and have come in from different sources and are used in different ways in different cultures. And so jokingly, I said, Well, you know, you can't use the word person, unless you are a Roman theatrical mask, because that's where the word person comes from. And you can't use the word human unless you are dirt from the earth because comes from humus which is dirt from the earth. And persona is that wasn't word for a Roman theatrical mask. How silly would it be if we tried to say you can't use this word unless you are using it in the context it came into the English language

1500 years ago or 1000 years ago? How much of you would not be able to listen to this? I wouldn't be able to do this podcast. I can't, I can't even think of like, you know, in an average sentence, probably 80% of the words aren't. You know, English is originally a Germanic language. If you look back at Old English, there probably aren't a lot of Germanic words in there. Probably most of them are not. There's a lot of romance language in there a lot of French, a lot of Roman because England, where English came from was invasions so many times, right? There were Viking raids, and they set up settlements, and there were Roman raids, and they set up settlements. And then there were the indigenous people that live there. And then there were the, the angles and the Saxons and all you know, etc, etc, etc. So I'm going off on a long tangent to talk about these, these sort of gatekeeper problem, this this gatekeeper issue. And that is, you know, people who set themselves up as the authority to say, You can't do that because of the, the race I perceive you to be or the national origin I perceive you to be or the gender I see you to be. You know, we were recently somebody asked a question online about the Greek goddess AKATA WITCH who is still worshipped I guess, for lack of a better term amongst lots of pagans. You know, she is amongst many things, the goddess of witchcraft and sorcery, so people who identify lots of people who identify as pagan, particularly Hellenistic pagans, she comes from. She comes to us from Greece, but maybe, maybe cultures before that. And then here's another thing, like, who knows where Hakata came from? And there aren't Greek people out there saying, Listen, if you aren't 100% Greek, you can't have an altar to Hakata. So somebody said recently, somebody, a man asked a question online and a woman said Hakata would never reveal her secrets to a man. Really. So you are the gatekeeper of Makati. Um you know, I almost have no words for that, um, there are, you know, there are lots of people of all genders and gender, you know, sex sexes, genders, gender identities, sexualities who do work with all sorts of gods. And I can tell you that some of the leading experts on the, you know, the worship of Makati today are men, some are women, but there are some who are men. And they seem to be very effective at what they do. I don't think honestly, when it comes to spirit, we're all the same underneath there, they're there. You know, there's no difference. When we're talking about spirit, we're talking about the Undying, divine spark within all of us. There's no difference between a female spirit or a male spirit or a Native American spirit or spirit from from somebody from Africa. We are all the same underneath we are all connected. And so this is where I think the solution or my you know, my proposals come in. First of all, let's stop separating people into little boxes. Yes, let us respect culture. Let us not be exploitive of people who have been exploited for so long. Let us support indigenous cultures. Let us support tribal rights all over the world. You know tribal rights to land into resources. We want to raise everybody up. We don't want to keep people separated. We have been doing that for 1000s of years and how has it worked for us?

Let me tell you it's sucks We have wars, we have racism, we have sexism, we have violence. This is all a product of this separation. And when I see it from people who may have great intentions, you might have the best of intentions, oh, I am going to speak up for this. For these people who have been persecuted, you have the best intentions in the world. But the more you keep, keep people separated. The more separated we are. I mean, that's just it's just we just keep the status quo. We keep the patriarchy in place.

When we encounter people who are spiritual seekers, whatever path they decide to tread upon, go down, explore or follow, as long as they live. As long as they're not harming anyone else. Let them support them, encourage them. Life is hard. Life is hard, and how dare we take things away from people that are helping them get through life. And I'm in to speak very honestly, and, and be a little bit vulnerable here. And say to you that if it were not for shamanism, if it were not for my study of shamanism, I probably would not still be alive today, I was on my way out. When I took up the practice of shamanism to heal myself. I had lost 60 pounds. I could not eat, I could not sleep. Um, my adrenals were completely burned out. They tested my tested my adrenals and said you're you're once one tiny level away from having permanent damage that cannot be repaired. Um though people at the time might not have known it because I was fairly good at hiding it other than you can't hide a loss of 60 pounds. I was very ill, very ill. And people want to say no, you should have just died because your parents were not born. You know, you were not born inside an indigenous culture. Um, I'm sorry. No, no, that's not that's not gonna fly. That doesn't fly. Mmm hmm. And the other thing is we don't say things like, well, you, you know you are not a Middle Eastern, or Greek person. So you can't be Christian. Or you. You know, I think but all of these you know. You know, we don't we don't tell. You know, there are lots of Native American people who go to Christian churches. We don't tell them they can't do that. You can't do that. Why? Because that would be that wouldn't be right. Now there are there are there are some racist churches out there. I realized that I don't think we only have to look to some of these. I'll call them focus folk ish churches that are these churches are for white people only to see how problematic this separation can become when it is taken to its extreme. Right, so, um, instead of calling people crazy. Instead, here's where you know, I promise I'm getting to the solution part I've talked a little bit about instead of calling people crazy and putting them down, put him in little boxes. Let us work to bring people together to uplift them. Before you open your mouth. Think about the effect of what or type in social media think about the effect that it's going to have for people. And think about getting some more information. If you think you have the answer to something if you're making really generous Eric, generalized statements about things. It's time to learn some stuff. If you're saying things like, Westerners are crazy. That's a really generic statement. If you're saying things like, you know, you can't do this because it doesn't belong to you. It's kind of a generic statement, do some research and find out. And yeah, I mean, if there's actual injustice out there, and that deserves to have attention pointed to it, if there's exploitation if there's disrespect, I've called people out I saw recently there were

some people doing a hodgepodge ceremony, as I would call it, and I don't have a problem with anybody's particular ceremony. People can create ceremony, create ritual, you know, I certainly do. I have one. I have ritual coming up that I that I've created a public ritual. But they were doing a quote unquote, shamanic initiation, they were doing it on a young boy. And they had they were, they were in Europe somewhere. And they were to European gentleman in blue jeans and Apache war bonnets. And then we're surrounded by Celtic symbols. And, you know, I was sort of like, well, you know, we probably should be avoiding the Apache war bonnets if we are not actually Apache. And, you know, that is, I understand that, that you may be wanting to, I don't know, I don't know what the point of them wearing those war bonnets were. But it was it was inappropriate, it was inappropriate, it came across as you know, whether they intended respect or not, it was basically they were trying to present the image that they were doing something that have legitimacy, because it was attached to some particular Native American tribe, and that's exploitive, and I don't, and that was also not a good thing. And that's why I make it very, very clear to people who mistakenly think that I'm doing some kind of Native American ceremony because I use a hoop drum. And that's it. I don't dress in buckskin or use wear Native American regalia or use, you know, use chance or any of those things that I don't know them first of all, but you know, I don't I'm not presenting that I'm representing a culture, which would be really negative appropriation. So anyway, I realized there's been a little bit of a negative podcast for him to start the new year perhaps we'll get more positive from here on out. But look to be a solution and not a problem look to support people in their spiritual quests, if people are strain. And, you know, when I saw these people with a patchy headdresses, I didn't call them names or whatever, but I called it out and I said, you know, you, you know, this is a hodgepodge thing, you know, that this is probably this might be offensive to some people, you should really rethink wearing these, you know, I think you're presenting the wrong image here. And there's no reason why you can't be doing an initiation without these things. Without without barring these, you know, the regalia from another culture you know, so anyway, I will I will wrap this up for this episode. I hope that you have a happy and healthy New Year, do your parts to keep the world healthy, to help get us past this pandemic and restore some normalcy to everyone's life. I love you all. I wish you a great New Year.

Announcer 59:48

You have been listening to speaking spirit with your host, John more. For more info or to contact John go to main shaman.com That's ma i n e s ha am a n.com

Ep22 Ego and Spiritual Identity

Announcer 0:28

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 0:47

Hello, everybody.

As usual, I feel the urge to say good morning, although I don't know what time it is where you are, it is morning here. I like to record these things early, I don't know, I am an early morning kind of person. I get a lot of energy in the morning. And I like to, I like to get things done sometimes before most of the rest of the world is awake. there's a there's a clarity that happens in the morning. So the world, you know, the world has an aura, we have auras, we have, you know, astral bodies, and the theory of bodies and all of these things. And, you know, we are if you are sensitive, and we're all sensitive to some degree or another, we pick up on the, you know, the quote, unquote, vibe around us. And morning times before for me, before everybody is awake, the vibe is cleaner. You know, there's people aren't up and busy, and it's, you know, it tends to feel a little calmer for me. And so this is a good time for me to do these things. Some people are late night people, I think, I think my daughter's fall into that category. And it's probably similar where, you know, it's, you know, the vibe gets calmer, after most people are asleep. And, you know, not going about the worries of the day, and, and whatnot. So today, it is. And again, I don't know when you're listening to this, but it is June, it's the beginning of June, as I record this. For us on the in the Northern Hemisphere, we're coming to the end of spring, in a couple of weeks and into into summer. We're having certainly having some summer ish weather here, where I live in Maine in the northeast of the United States. It tends to be when there's a really weird thing. We have an expression, I realize other people say the same thing. If you don't like the weather, wait a minute of it changes. Some people have have related our temperatures to the lottery numbers where they go up, up and down all the time. So we'll have a day of 90 degrees Fahrenheit, and then another day of 40 degrees Fahrenheit The next day, and it'll go back and forth quite a lot until it sort of stabilizes a little bit. When summer hits, and even then, it's it's a little bit crazy. We sometimes get snow into May. It's a little rare, but it has happened. And you know, but I love it. I love I love weather. I love to observe weather and you know, I always talk about the day here. I feel like it's something I hope it feels it feels like a connection. It feels like you can understand a little bit what my environments like when I'm talking to you. It's a little bit overcast today, which I am you know I'm totally cool with. Obviously I like all kinds of weather. sunny days do make me happy but soda rainstorms. Anyway, today we're going to talk about ego and what is ego and different ideas about ego? And do you have a big ego, a little ego all of these things? It's an important and popular topic. And at least you know in an English in the United States that word is used very loosely, right. So there is the the you know, Freudian definition of ego There's the union definition of ego there people have spiritual ideas of what ego is. So I'm going to talk a little bit about what ego is, is ego. Bad? Is it something that you need to get rid of? Excuse me, cough there. I don't edit these in general. So, you know, sometimes I cough.

And then I have a little sip of coffee. Um, that helps me a little bit. Um, so let's talk about ego, and, and we're gonna get into identity and spiritual identity and sort of ideal identity, that that sort of thing. And I talk a lot about all of these things, because I think it becomes confusing. When if you're a spiritual seeker, it can become super confusing. And you sort of wonder, what the heck are these people talking about? And I've heard the word ego, I've heard people say, the ego is the devil, and you've got to get rid of it, you've got to get rid of your ego, and all of these things. So I'm going to give you my definition of ego. And it may or definitely may not correspond with what other people how other people define ego and minds probably closest to the psychoanalyst young. Ego is simply your sense of identity, the sense of who you are, your sense of eye, most of the time as a separate being in the world. Okay. So when I say I went to the store, my concept of who that I is, as my ego, right, it's my, it's my self concept is another sort of idea there that fits. And so it is, again, how I operate in the world, as an individual, where this becomes sticky from a spiritual perspective is that people, well, there's a number of places and I'm going to talk about, I'm going to talk about them. But where becomes the stickiest from the spiritual perspective is the over identification with the ego. And that simply means that this is, you know, my idea of, I'm a body and a mind, and I'm moving through the world as a separate being. And that's all there is, separates me from identifying as part of the whole identifying as part of divinity as part of the entire universe as interconnected to everything. And that's where trouble kind starts to creep in. From a spiritual perspective. Right? When we have when we don't think we are connected to everything. We become less ethical, for example, right? We don't treat people and beings in the planet that we live on very well, because we feel like we are separate from that. We feel like we're not affected by how we treat others. And this is where this is where karma comes in. Right? This is when as the effects we create in the universe are the effects we are creating for ourselves. Because we are part and parcel and not separate from everything. But we have an ego we come into the world, sort of undifferentiated, right as babies, we, you know, everything is sort of an extension of us. And then we learn, you know, the ego is primarily learned our self self concept, our idea of ourself is learned over time. We learn we have a name, and we identify with that name. When somebody says our name, we pay attention. We learn the adults bring us you know, bring us food and change us and do all of these things as a baby. So they seem separate from us, even though they're perhaps responding to us crying or whatever. And so the idea of separation happens fairly early on, in human development. I can't give you the you know the exact range but it's it's early When we're first born, and then we know that we grow up and we we add to our self concept, things happen to us. We think of ourselves and that make us think of ourselves in certain ways. We also have this ideal self concept. And this is something something I'm doing some work around right now some exploratory work around right now in meditation, and in doing shamanic journeying

is that we all, you know, if, if I were to ask you to describe yourself in your, and how it relates to your values, right? I have this ideal self, where I say, you know, I'm a good person, I am a, I'm an honest person. I am, you know, a good father, I'm a good this, I'm a good that. And so, you know, we have this version of our selves and our self concept that is, kind of, you know, that has to do with our values and our ideals. And sometimes we don't always live up to those. Right? Sometimes, um, sometimes I'm not 100% honest, to be to be 100% honest with you. I am not always 100% honest. And that is something, you know, I don't, in general, I do not tell lies, or mislead people or steal things, or do any of you know, do any of that. But, you know, if I'm at somebody's house, and they serve me some food, and I don't think it's the greatest thing, I've, you know, I've ever eaten, and they, you know, ask me how it is, I'm gonna say, wow, this is, you know, this is great, this is great, you've done a good job here, I'm not going to I'm not going to hurt their feelings. Right? And that's, you know, that's a choice. And it's part of my value system. Do I value honoring their feelings more than, you know, telling a white lie now? And then? And some people would not, some people would say, No, I'm sorry, I don't like this. And, you know, feelings would get hurt. And that is a value choice. So these ideals that we have tie into our values, and how do I feel about myself, when I don't necessarily live up to my values, like I, you know, one of my ideals is that I think I'm a good parent, right, I have a great relationship with my daughters. And I like to think I'm a good parent. Um, anybody who's listening to this, as a parent knows that sometimes you fail, sometimes you make a choice, and it turns out to be the wrong one. And parenting is hard. making choices, some people just sort of give up and have set these like, strict rules for no reason. And don't put a lot of fun to it, I put a significant amount of thought into parenting. And I have a great relationship with my daughters. And sometimes that means I make choices that I'm not happy about afterwards. And how does that affect me? When I don't live up to my ideals? Right? Does that affect my self esteem? This is another component. Another component of ego is how high highly I regard myself, or how highly you regard yourself. And ultimately, when I'm speaking of I, I'm talking about ego here. So we know and I've talked about this in earlier podcasts about divinity and all of these things that inside each of us, at the core of each of us, we have a mind and we have a body and we have a soul and we have a spirit and we have you know, an astral body and an etheric body and a mental body and all of these different systems and levels and, you know, types of spiritual reality and consciousness, all of these things. And underneath, all of it is this spark of pure divinity, this spark of the creator of the universe, whether you want to call that God or the universe or what have you. And that spark is is the piece that is the same as everything. Everything you see, is made out of the same stuff from a spiritual perspective. Even material reality, it's all made out of the same stuff. There's different flavors of it, there's different frequencies of it. But the substance of material reality, when you get down to it, it's all it's all energy and information. So we are at our core this divinity, and we are divinity expressing itself as individual.

And people have been trying to make sense of that for ever. Like, why is that? Why, like, if I'm a divine being, at my core, if I am, if I am the universe, essentially, I'm a part of that. Why? Why even have an ego? Why even differentiate into into this human form for this incarnation? And, you know, lots of people have answered that question. I'll give you I'll give you a take or two on that. And I'm gonna be 100% honest with you. Who knows, right? who really knows? It just is. And, you know, I know they're part of being human is wanting to understand everything and wanting to understand why, the answer to why. And sometimes it's really hard to parse out and this one is, in, in particular, very hard to parse out. So one story is that the, you know, the formless Creator of the universe, just decided it is being playful, right is creating this whole universe to sort of experience play. And that might sound weird, if you've been through tragedy and trauma, as we all have. This doesn't feel very playful. But you have to think of things on a universal scale, or multiversal scale, right? There's more than one universe. Probably infinite universes for all I know. So that's one idea that this universal consciousness had the idea that it wanted to, it wanted to play. And I thought, you know, I don't know. I mean, I don't know about ascribing human activities, universal consciousness. One of the things one of the characteristics of human beings is that we tend to anthropomorphize everything, meaning we turn everything, we look at everything through the lens of being human, right? When we think about when we think about aliens. And this is probably this may sound like a tangent, but it's probably good in the realm of discussing ego, right? We talk about aliens from, from outer space, or wherever they happen to be from, could be in other dimensions or what have you, let's say they, let's say they exist. I've never, I've never met one. But let's say that you know, that aliens exist. Well, you know, our scientists and all these people like, Oh, you know, some of them are like, well, if, you know, if aliens exist, we shouldn't contact them, because they could just wipe us out, or, you know, come and take all our resources and all this stuff. And they put a very human slant on things, right? They look at, they look at us, as if we, you know, they look at aliens, as if they are us, looking at other creatures that we've maybe wiped off the planet or that sort of thing. And you have to think if there is if there are advanced, alien civilizations that grew up outside of the, you know, grew up with completely different biology than us and, you know, came up without the same social structures as us. We have no idea how or what they think or what their motivations might be. We just don't and look, you know, we can't, I think trying to understand what they might be like, by using human beings as an example is, you know, completely wrong. Whatever, whatever they're like, it's not going to be like us. It's it's going to be, quote unquote, alien. So Alien that we may have a difficult time understanding it because it'll be so outside of our experience that we can't necessarily put ourselves in their shoes. If they wear shoes, who knows? Maybe they don't wear shoes.

And so I do find it. I do find it really interesting that there's a lot of UFO Disclosure coming out from the government right now, a lot of video footage from military planes and showing stuff right now. It makes me feel like they're on the verge of releasing some information that they've had for a long time. Who knows? I find it interesting that this stuff is starting to get leaked out. And, you know, people are like, yeah, it's funny, because for so long, there was a thought that oh, you know, when aliens, you know, when the government reveals their aliens, people are gonna freak out about it, people are gonna panic, it's gonna lead to people questioning their belief systems and all this and that. And the truth is, it's barely made news. Like, it's bear like, not that these are necessarily aliens, but they're, they're, you know, the government leaking all kinds of UFO Footage. Um, you know, it's just, it's just funny like, that people are like, yeah, you know, all right. We're cool. All right, we're not gonna, you know, we're not even going to pay attention, we got other things going on pandemics going on. The political situation around the world is chaotic, as always, that sort of thing. So the other thing, the other sticky part about ego is that when we over identify with it, again, we're saying, this is all you know, ego is all I am. My sense of self as being separate, is all I am. We tend to act in ways that aren't necessarily ethical. Because we do not care for other beings as we care for ourselves. We we tend to become self centered, right, we pollute, we are cruel to other people, we may use harsh words. And I just think of the I think of the, you know, I think of the Buddhists call it the eight, is it the Eightfold Path, I may be speaking incorrectly, you'll have to pardon me if I do. But, um, you know, the Eightfold you know, the eight rules of Buddha, Buddhist, you know, that Buddha spoke about which are, you know, things like, right speech, right? Well, why does that matter? Why does it matter if I speak in what is the right, you know, and what is right speech, but in general, I can, you know, I can hurt people with my words. And if I do that, I am seeing them as separate from myselves. Right. So this is all about busting through this illusion, that I am not connected, that I am not a part of other people, that we're not connected to the hole together in the same way. And that we don't have the same sort of the over soul, the Brahman and Sanskrit, right? That we're all swimming in the same, the same water. And to use a crude metaphor, it's like, I'm peeing in the pool, and I'm expecting it only to affect you. We're all in the same pool. Right? And so when I mess up the environment, or I use cruel words to somebody, or I hurt somebody, or I'm, you know, I'm cruel to animals, or all of these things. I'm in the same pool. These, you know, I am a part of all of those. And so, that reality, that sort of weakening of that ego wall tends to make us act in ethical ways. Right? What the golden rule Do unto others as you would have others do unto you, is you know, and and if you come from a Christian background, you know, that, you know, that comes from Christianity, but the Buddha spoke the same, you know, almost Most identical words to that 500 years earlier, in there is

spiritual wisdom there. It's not just an ethical guideline, there's spiritual wisdom, because when you understand that you are one with everything, and everyone treating others badly, means you're treating yourself badly. But the stronger you identify with your ego, the less you care about others. So an extreme example of that is sort of the narcissistic sociopath. And you can, you know, just look at very recent politics to see that sort of that sort of thing. Right? The narcissistic sociopath cares about no one but themselves, and they have an over inflated sense of themselves. At least, at least in the United States, we use the expression, he's got a big ego, right, he's got a big ego. I don't know how you measure ego. But what we mean is, this person has an inflated sense of themselves, right? Sometimes, that is used to put down somebody who has a significant amount of self confidence. And there's nothing wrong with genuine self confidence. Right. So that's the other side of that's the other side of identifying with the Divinity is that there is a certain sense of self confidence that comes from that, when I know that I'm connected to the entire universe, when I know that I have a divine self. And then I am divinity, expressing itself through this human form through my emotions, my mind and my body. When I know that there is a certain self confidence, a sense of confidence, but it's not. It's not the kind of confidence that brags it's not hubris, it is not the kind of confidence that seeks out more confidence in the form of material things, or accolades or praise. That's, that's fake confidence. Real confidence is I am real confidence manifests itself manifests itself as becoming less, less attached, and less averse, right? Less attached to things, right, I don't care about things anymore. Unless averse I'm not pushing away things that I that I don't desire. So attachments are that I'm clinging to the things that I desire, and aversions or I'm pushing away the things that I don't desire. So spiritual self confidence happens when you know, I stop, I identify less and less with my ego self, that doesn't mean that your self goes away. It just means I don't think that that's all I am. And, and so attachments and aversions start to dissipate. And again, this is spoken about by Buddha and it's spoken about and other certainly other forms of spirituality. Sometimes it's really hidden in there, sometimes you have to dig for, for that. You know, in other spiritual teachings, because there's cultural background to the teachings, there's, you know, there's stuff going on there. And people have to be taught in certain, certain ways. I'm, I'm speaking very, I think I'm hoping that I'm speaking very plainly about this stuff. Because for me, to, for me to grasp this stuff. I've got to define it for myself in the simplest of terms, and I tried to do that for this, this podcast especially.

Right, um, you know, if you're a regular listener, one of the things I do is, you know, if I throw a term out there, like ego as I will always sort of define it, so that we're so that you understand what I mean. When I'm saying stuff, not that I'm trying to define you know, be The source of truth of you know, this is what this word means, just so that you, you know, I have to put these terms in a simple form, so that we understand each other. So when I when I, when I talk about ego, and you're hearing me talk about it, that you know what I mean, when I talk about it. So there's not, you know, hopefully not creating more confusion. That is, that's just my goal is to speak very clearly. So, I tend to take these things and put them into simpler terms so that I can understand them. I'm not, you know, I studied lots of things, but I wouldn't consider myself a religious scholar, per se. But I certainly look at lots of other forms of spirituality, I don't read Sanskrit, I don't read Pali, I don't read Latin. He took four years of Latin in high school. I don't remember much of it. I hate to say that, but that's, that's true. And so, you know, I'm often relying on translations of stuff and lots of different sources and analyses by people smarter than I am. And when I do that, I'm, you know, and then I try to take things and break them down into my own terms. And, you know, this is the thing that I think most people would benefit from, right, when you're reading scripture, or you're reading. And that may be sacrilegious for you for Pete to suggest that, excuse me, that you that you break things down into terms that you can understand, I don't know, hopefully not, hopefully not. And I don't really, you know, I'm not trying to change anybody's belief system, or religion or anything like that. That's not the goal here. You know, my own my own viewpoints or my own viewpoints, my opinions are my opinions. You know, and you may certainly disagree about my definitions of things. And, and I'm okay with that. Because again, like that's, hopefully, hopefully, it's part of me, loosening the grip that ego has on me and identifying less and less with that sense of self. So the way that ego can come through is we see that in these ideological wars, right? religious wars, people fighting it out, I mean, that's going on in the world right now. People fighting over religious differences, which, you know, ultimately, when we see we see conflict, like Israel and Palestine that's going on right now. You know, it's about all kinds of things. It's about land and water rights and history and the ability for people to self govern and all of these things underneath it all. There of course, of course, in that part of the world, there's a religious component to the warfare, right there is this sense of I deserve this because I am, you know, from the people that God has denoted this land belongs to, there is that justification habit on on both sides of that conflict? I am right because I, you know, I am the chosen one, we are the chosen people. God Himself said this, this piece of land belongs to me. Um, and I'm not going to speak about the truth or falsehood of that, but there is. To me, there is less God in that conflict than ego. Right, there is when ego acts up, it is very defensive. There's this strong identification of and there's this othering that happens, those people over there are others.

Okay, they don't believe the same things. I do. So they are others and therefore inferior, right. So what happens for a lot of people and this is, I see this little drama playing out everywhere, right. So we see this with racism, with nationalism with all kinds of bigotry, all kinds of hatred stems out of this othering. And what's going on there frequently is that people have, so we have our individual identity, and then we frequently tie that to a group identity. Right. So in order to have some self esteem, I'm going to relegate some of my identity. So I am, you know, I'm a citizen of the United States, we call ourselves Americans, even though I know there are other Americas, right? There's North America, South America, Central America. You know, in the United States, we refer to ourselves as Americans, which is itself separating, saying that, you know, other people, people from other countries are not Americans. But, you know, we don't have I know, in other languages, it exists to say, you know, these are you United States, essentially, but we don't have that phrase. And so, you know, people strongly identify with that, and people want to say, whatever country they're from, is number one, America is number one, or number, you know, wherever you're from, is number one, we're the best at something, we take pride in who we are, and, you know, that sort of thing. Um, a lot of religious spiritual writings about the dangers of pride. Right. And again, pride isn't necessarily like, Hey, I'm proud, you know, I'm proud of my kids, they did, you know, did a great job in school this year. That's not necessarily what we're talking about. We're talking about is, again, building up this ego, building up this esteem from I'm associated with this country, and so people from other countries are inferior to me, or other countries are inferior to me. What a load a to tell you, it's a load of crap. And I don't care where you're from, or what your religion is, or what your ethnicity is, or whatever, it's all crap. All of it is all just more and more separation. And the more you tie your sense of self worth, to some group identity, whether that be religious or ethnic, or, you know, national, or you tie your identity to a sports team. Look at these, you know, all over the world. There are riots after sports games, whether your team wins or loses people are burning cars in the street and rioting. What's that all about? Well, what that's about is people have given up, given up their self esteem, and this is pride, this is the danger of pride. Right? pride in where it doesn't belong, especially in some sort of group identity, some sort of nationalistic or ethnic or sexual identity. Right. We have to show dominance in a violent way. Well, that's, you know, that's a perversion of the divine masculine, right? It's this violent impulse, I'm gonna have power over somebody else, and that is a major cause of the ills in the world. A major cause? Right, ethnic cleansing. genocide, pretty much the same thing. You know, you know, riots over sports games.

The violence we saw in the Capitol in the United States, in, you know, earlier in the year where people broke, you know, people identified with a single politician, again, giving up their individuality, to act as part of a mob Right, so they have ego but part of that ego is over identified with a group enough to do things they probably normally wouldn't do when you look at some of them. We look at some of the people who are arrested for the violence in the capital of the United States are like, Oh, I don't you know, that person's, you know, a local business owner and has never been violent never been arrested in their lives. And some of them are, were definitely rabble rousers who, who have, you know, belong to violent extremist groups. And those people I believe, were manipulating the mob. And so were the politicians who were who were spurring them on. Because a mob, a mob are people who have in an unhealthy way, given up a lot of their individual identity, and just sort of going along for the ride. And mobs are capable of almost anything, any level of violence. You know, moms or moms are really dangerous in that way. They have an ego of their own, so to speak. And a lot of people have been arrested for that violence, or, like, I don't know, I just got caught up. Right, that's what happens. That's what happens when you don't you know, you have this ego, but a big portion of it is identified with in the in a wrong way, with a mob or a group or, you know, a nationality or an ethnicity. You know, when it when when it's over identified with ethnicity, you get hate groups, when it's over identified with, you know, sports teams, we get riots after sports events, happens all over the world. That's crazy to me. So, what's, what then is healthy is, you know, this sense of, Okay, I have an understanding, I have an ego, I have this sense of self as a separate thing. But again, it's like I have a body, but I am not the body. I have a mind, but I'm not the mind, I have an ego, but I am not the ego. I am this, ultimately, this divine spark, that is part of everything. And everything that I do affects me, because I am interconnected. Right? I'm peeing in the pool. And if I assume that I'm the only other people are affected by me peeing in the pool, that's a pretty wrong assumption. So the goal then is or not the goal, but you know, one of the ways through this one of the ways of spiritual development is to start to dis identify with that which you are not right? I am not the ego, I have the ego. This is not to say that you delude yourself into pretending that you do not have an ego. That is a different thing. I have an ego. If I did not, I would not be able to speak to you, from a sense of who I am as an individual. I just don't think that my ego is underneath at all who I am. I think it's a thing that I have. Right? And the universe has many, many egos. Billions, maybe trillions, who knows? Have egos and they're all you know, through it all. They're all interconnected. It's sort of like a really good metaphor. I hope it's a good metaphor to communicate this is that if you look at mushrooms growing in the forest, right. You see these mushrooms popping up from the soil.

And you look at they look like individual mushrooms. But underneath the soil is this huge network of mycelium. Right? And the mushrooms that are popping up, you know, let's say 100 mushrooms pop up and you know a spot in the forest floor. Right. And they all look like individual beings. And they could be regarded as such. And if you know, let's say they're edible, and you pick each one and they're individualized mushrooms, but when they're growing underneath all of that is one network of mycelium. If you don't know what mycelium is it's like the equivalent of roots for mushrooms like the roots of trees grow every right when you know mushrooms grow the moat the most of what you see above ground is not the majority of what a mushroom is. Mushrooms are a fungus and they grow on substrate which could be all kinds of things but you know, some grow in soil and have these huge there are you know, the largest living being on earth that we know of, is a patch of mycelium that's miles wide, right? So there's a living one living being that's you know, miles and miles wide. And, um so this is a little bit what what ego is like, right? So you know, the, the oversold the Brahman as you were, maybe we think of that as the mycelium. So, it's everything there is and everything interconnected. And, you know, under, that's underneath everything, and then we pop up, our little ego pops up a little, you know, our body pops up, pops into existence. And, you know, we appear as individuals, individual mushrooms, but underneath it all, we're all interconnected. Everything we do ripples out, like dropping a stone, in a pond, that ripples go everywhere. So I started this by talking about why I like to do these in the morning. And why I'm a morning person is that I don't experience a lot of the ripples of the people who are, are around me. And because they're asleep. You know, they're primarily asleep when I not everybody, but but more people are. So even on an energetic level, you know, the thoughts we put out into the world, the words we put out into the world, affect everything around us. And that includes us, right? We often don't include ourselves in things like when we do exercises on compassion. You know, when we give love to others, we don't always give love to ourselves. Seems kind of weird. But frequently when I see clients, either from, you know, doing a shamanic healing session with somebody or you know, coaching or mentoring people have these frequently have these horrible inner dialogues, and we say things to ourselves that we would not accept from a stranger, or someone we loved speaking to us in things that we would never say to someone that we loved. Right. So that's really negative. That's, you know, negative self talk is about negative self esteem. You know, underneath that all that real level of, you know, and some people overcompensate for that stuff, right. Some people overcompensate for negative self esteem by, you know, buying flashy clothes or a flashy car, or, you know, they give this outward appearance of being more than they are. Or they brag a lot or what have you. Underneath that is a real sense of I'm broken, I'm unworthy. You know, which is sad to me, because the ultimate truth is, again, we're that mycelium under the mushrooms, we're just where the mushrooms popping up. But underneath it all We are, we are the universe. underneath it all We are everything there is we're no less a part of the universe than anybody or anything else. We're no less a part of the universe than the sun.

Right? So with that, I'm going to wrap up I hope that you enjoy this I hope that you'll subscribe and whatever, using whatever podcasting listening channel you use, whether that's you know, Spotify or iTunes or something else. Hopefully Subscribe, I hope you'll visit my website I hope you'll interact. You know, send me send me messages if there are topics you're interested in, or guests you'd like me to talk to, because I do this, I do this for you. And I love that I have listeners all over the world and it it helps give me that greater sense of connection. Right, that sense of connection to everything there is into the whole universe. With that, I hope you enjoy the rest of your day. And I will talk to you real soon.

Announcer 51:04

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

Ep18 Toxic Positvity and Spiritual Bypassing

Announcer 0:30

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 0:49

Hello, everybody, wherever you happen to be in the world.

As I record this episode of the podcast, it is a Sunday morning where I am. So I wish you good morning, even though it could be any time of day that you're listening to this, and it's one of the cool things I love about technology and the internet and all of those wonderful things is that I can speak to people all over the world, I think the last count, when I looked at my podcast statistics were 30 different countries, people were listening to this from so welcome wherever you're from. And whatever time of day, you're listening to this. And I'm, it makes me super happy to hear from people who've listened to this and, and just know that people are listening, and hopefully I, you know, do my best to offer useful tidbits and, you know, things I've picked up along the way and things I've learned in my training and discoveries I've made and that sort of thing. And I hope it's extremely useful for you, beyond just sort of pontificating, or, you know, this is, pardon me, this is how things go. By the way, I don't edit these. So if I cough a little bit or something, you get it wrong. I feel like that's a little more authentic, when I come to you without editing of any kind. So anyway, I hope this is useful. My whole intention of this podcast is to provide useful information, not just, Oh, that's interesting, or, you know, something that you can put to use or some understanding that you can get that helps you on your spiritual path, or gives you information about a spiritual path, you may want to explore or, you know, that sort of thing. And with that in mind, I'm going to talk about a subject that is that comes up for me a lot, particularly when I'm teaching or when I've led groups in the past and that sort of thing. So there's these two related concepts, one, you know, I'll give them different names, but they're kind of two peas in a pod are two sides to the same coin, if you were the one concept is this idea of toxic positivity. And that may sound a little strange to you. And you may never have heard that phrase before. And the other one is spiritual bypassing. And in and again, you may or may not have heard those, either one of those terms. And so I'm gonna, as always, if I introduce something that may be new or different concept, I'm going to define those terms, I'm going to define them from my understanding also, not because my definitions are correct, simply so you understand where I'm coming from. And you may have heard different definitions of these terms. And I'm not here to say that they're incorrect. I'm just here to say, this is how I'm using them so you can understand them when I talk about them. So, you know, we probably all have the understanding of toxic or really negative people in our life, right? We have people who, you know, we've all encountered people who seem to live to complain about things. And, you know, they people that can, can really bring you down can bring the energy of a room down. And, you know, it's understandable why some people might try to flip to the other side and look at everything in a positive light. And there's there is a there's this spiritual truth to that there's a spiritual truth to the idea that people are on their own path. And people are experiencing things for reasons unseen, and we're all evolving and all of those things. Where this kind of becomes a problem is or not even kind of where this is, there's a few places where positivity can become a problem. Right? So,

the first, the first kind of most obvious one is the denial of reality. Right? There's sort of this famous, I don't know where it comes from, but there's this on the internet, there's this famous meme image of, it's a dog who's sitting, I guess, in a house or something, and everything around him is on fire. And he's saying, everything is fine. Right, everything is fine, I'm just going to ignore the circumstances around me, I'm not going to take care of business, that sort of thing. That's when and that leads to all kinds of problems that leads to poor boundaries, right? with friends, oh, they're okay. You know, oh, this, you know, this person's Okay, that that sort of thing, it leads to us not setting up proper boundaries with people, sometimes it leads us to not taking steps necessary to solve our problems. That sort of thing. So in that way, positivity, sort of unwarranted positivity, which takes the form of ignoring reality, or ignoring the steps need needed to be taken in certain circumstances. There in it becomes toxic. I think going into things with having the attitude of I'm going to do all I can do and things will turn out, okay. It's totally fine. Right, things will turn out as they are supposed to, I'm still going to do what I need to do. And I, I tend to approach things from you know, obviously, I'm a shamanic practitioner, my training is in shamanism. And so I tend to approach things from that perspective. And in shamanism, we are, you know, practitioners are expected to walk in multiple worlds, that is we deal with physical reality. And we deal with spiritual reality at the same time. And, you know, traditional shamanic cultures, you were, you know, if you held the role of Shawn and a culture, you were not just a healer, but you would probably be expected to, you know, help your, your help your tribe in other ways, such as help them know when to plant things or help them know when to move a herd or when to hunt, or, you know, that sort of thing. You're taking care of the every day, things that help kept your community healthy, safe and sane, as well as attending to the spiritual needs of the community. I know in and I am not an expert, but I you know, I've read a little about the, you know, the Kahuna in Hawaii, and the Kahunas. You know, we might call them shaman or medicine men or what have you. But my understanding is they had specialties and there were Kahunas who were good at navigation and good or good at fishing or good at planting crops or, you know, could navigate by the stars and all of these things. So there was a level of really practical, real world survival and thriving knowledge that they had to have besides this sort of hidden spiritual teachings that went on, as well. And that, you know, that's true in other cultures as well that the shamanic people in other cultures may have had specialties, some may have been healers, some may have been diviners, some may have had other other types of specialties. And I find that true even with modern shamanism with core shamanism you know, I know people who are say, you know, work with animals, animal whispers, I know people who are specialized around soul retrieval or deep possession or you know, bunches of practices and people that are specialized around them, whether shamanism is a specialty for some people, that sort of thing. But again, the idea is is attending to the entirety of reality, which includes physical reality as well. So, the other side of toxic positivity, and I'm going to, I'm going to spend some time at near the end of this podcast talking about

holding space and what that means holding space for others, who may be experiencing something painful, and how to be how to be a healing presence for those people who are going through something challenging difficulty. So, again, so toxic positivity where you know, again, so we it can be become toxic with ourselves when we are ignoring circumstances that are going on. And it can become toxic towards others, when we seek to have them bypass their pain, right. So this is the one that you know, people are, people have great intentions sometimes, and when a loved one passes away, and this happens frequently, in my experience in the United States, and I don't know if other cultures have similar, similar things. But this is something that happens here that I've seen a lot. So somebody passes away, and people try to comfort their loved ones by saying pleasantries like, oh, they're in a better place now, or Oh, they're out of pain or, you know, look on the bright, you know, look on the bright side of your loved one passing away. And these people are absolutely well intentioned, loving human beings who just want to alleviate the pain and grief that another person is going through. The issue with this is grief is a natural process that we all need to go through. And you can't really bypass it, you can push it off, you can shove it down into the shadow part of you, I've talked a lot in the past, I've done an entire podcast on Shadow Work. And this is an area of mine that I focus a lot on. Because everybody, everybody has a shadow and everybody should be doing Shadow Work, in my opinion. So, you know, when you know when somebody is going through something rough, whether that's the loss of a loved one, or a breakup or something else, loss of a job loss of a home, and you show up and try to paint something, you know, painting in a better light or something like that. That's not particularly helpful. Actually, you know, a person may or may not feel a little bit better for a very short period of time. But you're bypassing the natural grieving process. This is, I'm going to talk about a solution for that, I'm going to talk about what it means to hold space for somebody towards the end of this podcast, after I get through the toxic parts. Again, you know, I try to be useful. So if I'm just talking about things that are bad, these are, you know, not bad, that's a value judgment, these are sort of stumbling blocks, stumbling blocks to becoming a more integrated person and helping others to become more integrated and or staying out of the way of other's own integration work. So, you know, again, this is toxic, and I have you know, personally when I've been through something rough, and somebody comes to me and says, Oh, it's gonna be okay, you're gonna be great, you're gonna get back in the, you know, data that you're ignoring my pain. And I often feel, have felt, I guess, resentful of that. I felt resentful of somebody trying to bypass my pain and saying, you know, basically, it feels like somebody saying your pain is legitimate. Because you're just not looking at things from the proper perspective. And that is a real, that's a real judgment. It's in a in a subtle way, and as well intentioned, does that maybe in a subtle way, it's very shaming. It's saying there's something wrong with you for feeling Pain is something wrong with you for taking the death of a loved one so harshly, you should be looking at things from a different perspective, and then your pain will magically go away. It's not how it works. It's not how it has ever worked, it's not how it will ever work.

So again, you know, I'm gonna talk about towards the end, I'm going to talk about the solution, a solution for that, how you can show up for people because, you know, most people care about other human beings. And, again, these can be very well intentioned things that we're doing when we show up for somebody and say, oh, look on the bright side, you can have the best of intentions, I'm just here to alleviate this person's pain, I want them to feel better. But there's another part of this as well. Another part of it is that I'm there can be discomfort and awkwardness, with experiencing somebody going through something hard, going through some painful emotions, some painful challenges. And so, you know, maybe on an unconscious level, we want to avoid that we want to avoid experiencing that. Because we're empathetic, and we feel what other people are feeling. And it's painful to see somebody we care about going through something hard, went through something painful. We want to make it better, we want to fix things, I fall into that category. I'm a fixer, I love to fix things, it was a hard, it's a hard lesson for me, I want to jump in, make everybody feel better. It's been a real work, you know, it's a work in progress for me to not rescue people from their feelings. And this comes up in teaching quite frequently when I'm teaching. Teaching shamanism in particular. You know, we sit in, we sit in a circle, which is a sacred shape. And so we can see everybody interact with everybody. And there's a sort of energetic connection that that happens in a circle, that's a little hard to describe. There's a closeness, even if the people you're in the room with are strangers, you're in their energy field, you're observing them, that sort of thing. And sometimes people have some really hard emotions come up, some times people break down and cry, and circle or that sort of thing. And there's this urge, because people, there tend to be good people who want to be helping others, and they're spiritually conscious, and all of these things, there's this urge to rescue them from their feelings. And at the beginning of any training circle, we always tell people, when somebody has these tough feelings come up, or somebody gets emotional, or they start crying or whatever, it is not your job to rescue them. There's a there's a number of reasons for that. One is people are fully capable of rescuing themselves. And we go from that assumption that everybody has sovereignty, including emotional sovereignty over themselves. You know, another reason is, is exactly what I'm talking about. We're not wanting people to bypass these feelings that are coming up there. So they're coming up for a reason. You know, whether it's some old trauma or just something else, you know, this stuff that's been stored in our body, mind and spirit for so long, wants to come up and be expressed. And we should let that we should honor it, we should allow it. We should allow people to melt down. Obviously, we don't allow people to harm themselves. We make sure people aren't in an OK condition to drive when they leave, or you know, are grounded and integrated before they before they head home. And that's a safety issue more than anything else. We just don't we don't want people having an emotional breakdown and hopping in their car and getting into an accident or harming themselves in some other way or you know, that that sort of thing. But that's not bypassing it's not you know, that's just a safety issue. But you know, so I've seen this over and over again, somebody has some emotions and people Like, you know, want to jump in and talk about it, want to jump in and rescue, save that person from themselves saving them from their tough emotions? No, you're supposed to feel those. They're supposed to come up.

And they are unpleasant. But when you're when they you allow them to move through you, they have less of a hold on your life. And I would encourage you to, I'll probably do more episodes on shadow stuff going forward. So we're talking about, you know, at this, this point, we're talking about toxic positivity, and how how it kind of shows up in ways that stifle the natural movement of emotion. Or we use as a way to blind us to the reality that we're in. Right, we're sitting in the room that's on fire going, everything is okay, I feel great. I'm no recognize that you're afraid. And I remember, you know, a few years ago, obviously, before the pandemic, I was hosting meetups in the area, for a group called spiritually conscious professionals. And we, you know, there were basically open to anyone who had any sort of spiritual consciousness or spiritually curious or, you know, that sort of thing. And we had people from all walks of life and all different types of spirituality show up, we had people who were minister, Christian ministers, who were counseling ministers, we had people who were acupuncturist and practice, you know, Taoism. And we had people who were your Reiki practitioners or shamanic practitioners or what have you. And it was really nice, meetup and I hope to get back to it post pandemic, in person. And it was great, there were lots of shares, lots of viewpoints. And I'll never forget, there were two young women who showed up to one of the meetings and they were new to a spiritual path. And they were both in recovery from drug addiction. So fairly new to recovery. They were, I believe, getting outpatient treatment for substance addiction. I don't, you know, I don't know which substances but um, you know, that's a pretty big deal. And they have been working, in part they've been working spiritually to help them with some of the challenges of overcoming addiction. And Gosh, what a hard path. That is, I, you know, as an outside observer, you know, and having lots of people that I'm related to, and lots of people I know, struggle with addiction, what a hard path that is. And we should recognize that, you know, we should recognize what challenging what a challenging thing addiction is. It is not something I wish on anybody. It's a horrible thing to kick. Anyway, these two young women, great intentions, they came, you know, they came to talk about spirituality and all of these things. And, you know, one of the young women was talking about how she thought, you know, she thought that she was at the point in her spiritual development where she shouldn't get angry at people anymore. Wouldn't that be a lovely thing? Right? And, you know, on her way over to the meeting, somebody she was in traffic, and somebody had cut her off or something, and she got angry with that person. And then she noticed she was angry with that person and became angry about being angry, I shouldn't be angry. And you know, and my question for was well then were you angry that you got angry that you were angry? And how far does that go? You know, if you had just had allowed yourself a human moment and said, I feel angry right now. It would have passed probably in a few minutes. But she hung on to it and then she got angry at herself. And this isn't necessarily toxic positivity because she wasn't bypassing but there was this idea that is present in toxic positivity and and spiritual bypassing that I'm I'm evolved to the point Where I shouldn't feel these feelings anymore.

Or it's wrong to have certain types of feelings or it's, you know, it's the shoulds. When we get into the shoulds, and the showdance, we tend to be shaming ourselves. She was basically shaming herself for having a human moment. And it's not to say you can't reflect on your feelings. It's not to say, Gosh, I got really mad at that guy a few minutes ago for cutting me off in traffic. And you know, that seems like a silly small minor thing to get mad about. But where's that coming from? For me, that's when this can turn into a positive thing. When we start to look at the stuff that might be in our shadow, why am I getting triggered by this? Why am I getting angry about this? And that's not to judge it. It's not to say this is bad or wrong, or, again, should or shouldn't. It's not about judgment. It's about discernment. It's about what's going on for me, what is what is in me that needs to be healed? Or where is this coming from? Where is this anger coming from being triggered is a really good indicator, usually that there's a wound in the unconscious, or there's a wound that is unconscious, I should say, it's a better way to phrase that. There's an unconscious wound. And, um, you know, from talking about shadow stuff, and Shadow Work, we know that healing and integration is really about casting a light on the stuff that's in our shadow. It's not about pretending that it's not there. It's not about pretending that we don't get angry. It's not about convincing ourselves that we're bad because we feel angry, or we're not enlightened or evolved or ascended, or what have you, because we feel anger. None of those things. It's about recognizing that we're human, and we have those moments. And, um, you know, you may get to the point in your spiritual development where things bother you a lot less, you become more imperturbable. And that is a noble goal. But that is not something that you can fake it till you make it. Because by faking it, again, you're cramming these emotions down into your shadow. And the stuff that's in your shadow, if you don't recognize it, integrate at work with it, it will run your life in ways that you don't even expect that you don't even know. A good example, if you've ever watched the show Seinfeld. You know, there's an episode where the character George's father has this little phrase that he repeats. serenity now, he's just serenity now, serenity now, but he's getting angrier and angrier and he's, instead of calming himself, it's, he's screaming it. Right? And, you know, it's, it's a joke, you know, it's meant to be funny, because here's this guy screaming serenity now is he's getting completely outraged. Um, but it's, you know, if you honor if you honor your feelings, and you look at them, and you look at them from not, you look at them from a non judgmental perspective. You know, it's, you know, it's hard to it's a little bit hard to say this, but if you treat yourself a little bit like you would treat a toddler. Okay, a toddler who's having a temper tantrum, screaming and shaming at that toddler is not going to stop that toddler from having a temper tantrum. That will not work that will make things I'm a dad, I know that will make that would make things much much worse.

Instead, you you know, one tact is to recognize the toddler's feelings and say, Oh my gosh, you're so angry. You know, tell me about what's making you so angry. You know and sit with them and respect that they're feeling angry. You can't talk a toddler out of feeling angry. So there are parts of us there. There are parts of us inside that are childish as well. parts that may never have grown up and that's fine. We've all heard of the inner child and all of that sort of thing and a lot of our emotion comes from there. Some of it comes from childhood wounding or Other traumatic experiences, and you can't yell at or shame yourself or, you know, convince yourself that that stuff doesn't exist. But you can honor it, and you can work with it. And it will have less of less of a grasp on your life, I'm not saying you'll feel emotions less, I'm saying you'll have fewer unconscious responses, you'll be less reactive, maybe you'll feel better, you might have less depression, you might feel healthier from not suppressing constantly. Um, I know I do. I know, you know, for years and years, I repressed a whole lot of stuff. Decades actually. And, you know, my own story is, you know, I come from a background of trauma, serious childhood trauma. I come from a family where there was Domestic Abuse and Child Abuse and substance abuse, and you know, the word abuse happens a lot. And I bypass that for decades, because it was so painful, it was so painful to look at, it was painful to express my feelings. And that came to a head with a real health crisis, actually. And that's what got me to sort of come into shamanism as a way to heal myself, I, you know, I will fully admit that I came to shamanism from a 100% selfish perspective, that I just wanted, some self healing. But those floodgates opened and I was not in control. And it was, you know, it was, it was a extremely uncontrolled mess. My life became a mess. And as a dad, I was, you know, not always the best dad, I could be. I never, you know, I never used my children or anything like that, but I just couldn't be present for them. Because I couldn't be present with myself, I can, you know, I was lost. I went through a crisis. And, you know, in allowing myself to move through that, and working with my shadow material, and all of those things, I really did take better control of my life, I really did get a grip on things, and I really did become the Father, I wanted to be and have the relationship with my daughters, I'm so close with my daughters, very, very close with my daughters. And, you know, I treasured nothing more than my relationship with them. Have a fantastic relationship with my daughters. And, you know, there's a lot of research that says that when parents do their own work and heal, that has an extremely positive effect on kids mental health. So, so I'm happy to say, and I will never say that I'm perfect, I will never say that I'm done. I will never say any of those things, continually work on myself, continually do my self work. But in the process, I found out that I was pretty good at helping other people as well. And then I loved teaching. And I loved teaching especially people to help themselves. Because ultimately, we are all

you know, internally, we are all sparks from the same divine light. And you are, you are as divine as anybody. You have the same piece of divinity within you that everyone else has, you are connected to everything. And you have talked about divinity a lot and I will probably talk about it more in future podcasts. But I believe that and I've seen that and I have seen people shine their light and it is a beautiful, beautiful thing. So anyway, toxic positivity. You have talked a lot about that. And I want to talk a little bit about spiritual bypassing, which is a another another kind of aspect of the same phenomena, I guess. So when we talk about spiritual bypassing, we're talking about people who are again, there you spirituality to bypass and I realize I'm using the term to define the term but I will, I'll get better with this, I promise I'll narrow it down a little bit more. They're using spirituality, to ignore their feelings, to bypass boundaries to you know, again, it's just like with toxic positivity, they're sitting in the burning room going, everything is fine. This is what was meant to be. I am, I am ascended. You know, and again with the story with a with a young woman who came to my meetup and she was, she was angry at herself for getting angry. what she was doing was she was attempting, unsuccessfully to spiritually bypass her anger, to say, I am at a level of spirit now where I don't have human emotions. Um, you know, I haven't met too many people that have completely bypass spiritual, you know, use spiritual means to completely bypassed human emotion. And by I haven't met too many people, I think the exact number of people I've met is zero. And I have met all kinds of people. I have spent time with Tibetan Buddhist monks and new lots of new age people and that hundreds of shamanic practitioners and energy workers and all kinds of all kinds of people. And yeah, I mean, there, there's a fair, fair amount of people who are have declared themselves enlightened or ascended or what have you. You know, and I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna speak to that too much, I think. I think they're, you know, I think there are people who have an abiding consciousness of their non dual nature, I think there are people who've gotten there. It's pretty rare. I mean, by inviting I mean, all the time, I think lots and lots of people have these glimpses of their connection to everything. I certainly get them. But it's, it's a hard place to abide in because we all have egos. And we all have identified with, to some degree with a body and with a name and with labels, you know, I'm a dad, I'm a shamanic practitioner, I'm, I'm an American, I'm this I'm that. And, you know, part of the work that I do spiritually is to spend some time dis identifying with those labels, roles and ideas. However, I still get to come back into waking reality and, you know, show the tribe where to plant the corn, show the tribe, where to hunt, the elk, you know, those kinds of things. Of course, I'm being metaphoric here. Although I do live next to a farm where they grow corn, I do not tell them where to grow it, and I don't hunt elk. But being metaphoric, I still have to walk in both worlds, I still have to, you know, take my kids to school

and, and those kinds of things, and deal with a pandemic. You know, I just got my first vaccine shot, and I'm looking forward to getting my second one so that I can start to have gatherings again with other people who have been vaccinated. You know, as spiritual as I am and into spiritual healing as I am, I still trust the science I still trust medicine, I still go to the doctor. All of those things they don't spiritually bypass that. So I think you know, what happens and in you know, this is something I've spoken about before, as well is that when you are doing spiritual development, I'm speaking in a very broad term here. you're developing your astral body and again, I'm you know, I'm speaking in a very broad term as well here because you could be doing all kinds of things you could be developing your physical body using yoga asanas. You could be developing your a theory of body by you know, meditating on chakras and doing cleansing and you know, that sort of thing. But when you do when you do Do these things and when you gain knowledge, and when you practice and you meditate and you pray and you make offerings, and, you know, any of these things that you do that are spiritual, that offer spiritual development, you are developing your, your astral body, right, you're what we might call your soul body, you're developing that in its, you know, not developing, like you're building muscles on it because it is a formless thing.

One of the things that happens when you develop your astral body is it's very, you know, to use a big term, it's hubris, cystic, it develops your, your ego interface with that gets stronger. And you, you know, again, it's, it's, you know, in the West, we might use the term, he's got a big ego. So you develop this, this, this ego, and part of that is, and by ego, I just mean, it's, it's the part of you that you identify as, it's the part of you that when you say I, and you're conscious of as a separate thing, it's just your consciousness of who you are as an individual. Right, instead of who you are, as part of the whole, it's who you are, your consciousness of who you are, as an individual, and as a separate being. And we don't under it all, there's no separation, but you know, we still have this ego, we still experience we experienced, like, we are the universe where piece of piece of creation experiencing itself, right, broken into little pieces, so we can experience life and go through and have all these lessons and things. So, you know, so the ego gets bigger, right? It gets inflated, you know, and the it again, it's not necessarily a judgment, but it can really hinder people and it can become dangerous. And we've seen this over and over again, with spiritual leaders who develop a following. And they wind up, you know, in abusive relationships somehow could be sexual abuse can be financial abuse, could be physical abuse, could be abuse of sovereignty and boundaries, right, taking away people's freedom to choose for themselves. And this happens over and over again, all the time with people who have a high level of spiritual development, but have not done their Shadow Work, have not done their cleanup. And the problem is that they have because they have developed high, you know, they've developed the astral body. They haven't cleaned up the shadow, you know, they're often seen when they gather a following is they're often seen as beyond reproach. Right? This person is enlightened, they're ascended their master, they channel the, you know, the old gods or, you know, what have you. they're seen as infallible, they're seen as perfect, they're seen as, beyond reproach, nothing they do is wrong. And unfortunately, that's how a lot of these people get away with abuses for a really, really long period of time. Sometimes, you know, we look at the, you know, one of the most famous cases was the Jim Jones case, and where he, you know, had I think it was close to 1000 people in just cyanide, you know, in this cult, and they all you know, they died many of them children, you know, we have you know, we have lots of Yogi's who start ashrams who wind up sexually abusing their, you know, people and, you know, there's this whole sort of Guru relationship and that not to take anything away from people who enter into guru relationships. I'm sure there are lots of them that are fine and healthy. But there are a lot of them that aren't and we start to lose our discernment when we hand over. we hand over our sovereignty to somebody else because we perceive them as being above Spiritually, more developed, ascended, you know, all of those things. I'm not a huge fan of the whole Ascension thing. It may be I just don't understand it enough. But it seems very patriarchal to me. I am ascended literally, above you, literally above others. You know, it's not to say people doing the work that they're calling Ascension aren't doing fine spiritual development work, I

just, I don't know. It's just a term that I've seen thrown around a lot by people who are sometimes sleazy for lack of a better term. And not everybody, certainly not everybody using the that term or not even most people. But it's a hide. So if you're using spirituality as a hide, if you're using it as a method of denial, if you're using it to not feel your feelings, or you're using it to not address your shadow, you're doing what we call spiritual bypassing. The danger of that is you're not doing your cleanup work, you're not doing the Shadow Work that you need to be doing. In fact, you're probably increasing your shadow. You're probably cramming more trauma, feeling hurt down into your shadow saying it's unacceptable for me to have human experiences. I should not I'm too spiritual for that. I don't get angry, I've ascended. This is not to say you can't let go of feelings, they come up. And you can let them go as they come up. But you can only do that if you're addressing them. You can't do that if you're denying them. You can't You can't release feelings. You can't release emotional energy, if you could deny that it exists. Right? It's like, you know, it's like in spy movies when they're holding, you know, when they're holding somebody in secret in a secret location. And nobody's gonna seek them out to rescue them because they don't know that they exist. Right? Or they don't know. They don't know that they're in danger. Right. I'm a big fan of the old James Bond films I, you know, I loved Sean Connery and Roger Moore, and you know, all those guys, you know, and they tended to have to rescue themselves because they were, you know, they were on this top secret mission. And that's what your feelings are. If you push them down, your feelings are not meant to be secret agents. So, let's talk, you know, because, again, I want these podcast episodes to be useful to you. Let's talk about some solutions for this. So the first solution is when you're dealing with your own stuff, you know, first of all, do Shadow Work, seek out somebody to teach you to do Shadow Work, read about Shadow Work, find a you know, work with a depth psychologist or work with a shamanic practitioner who is versed in shadow work. And do this work. If you're doing spiritual work at all, and you're not addressing your shadow, you're missing at least half but probably more of the work to be done. But I think everybody could benefit from Shadow Work, whether you're doing spiritual work or not. And there's all kinds of ways to do that. So that's, that's the first one. The second one is to become observant to become really observant of your feelings as they arise. And it's okay to you know, it's okay to label them. It's okay to examine them. But don't, you know, don't push them away. And I know it can be hard if you're in a situation, you're sitting at work and you're overcome with an emotion and you're like, I gotta just get through the day. I get that. I do get that. And sometimes you just need time, you know, some time to I get I have to, you know, I've got to focus on something right now. And I'll deal with this later. The problem is when later never comes. So one of the you know, One of the healing practices that I have myself used and and have gotten great benefit from is to learn to become comfortable with the discomfort and sit with painful emotions. And when I say sit with painful emotions, I literally mean that I mean sit and just experience the emotion and allow it allow the emotion, what will happen is that

your emotions will peak, there'll be they'll come in waves, there'll be peaks and valleys and that sort of thing. And eventually, the energy will move through you. And the important thing is not to attach to it, don't become mired in it, don't feel it. And don't push it away. So you sit in a space of allowing, and allow yourself to feel what you're feeling. And if you decide this is useful, you can you can explore it from a sensory perspective, meaning, where do I feel this in my body? Does it have a size doesn't have a shape? When I associate a color with it? Does it have a texture? Does it have a temperature? Does it have a sound? Does it have a smell? Is there a taste in my mouth, you can explore it from that perspective, from the perspective of curiosity. Over time, over time, you know, this allows a lot of stuff to come up and out, that wants to move through you, it doesn't want to be locked in some motion this these feelings, these hard things they don't want to be locked in, they want to come up and out. So that is that is one aspects of the Shadow Work. Sitting you know, becoming comfortable with a discomfort and sitting with painful feelings. Without having to take action on them. Just feel them. Just feel them there's nothing to do. Just be with them. Okay, and the third piece is learning to hold space for with others. So this is you know, and I talked earlier on about what happens when I've been in circle teaching and hard emotions come up for some some buddy. And there are other people in the group whose instinct is to rescue that person to save them from what they're feeling, to make them feel better to comfort them. And we've got you know, we've we tried to put a really safe container around the space so people can have these feelings come up and out and it's fine. And we might offer somebody tissues if they're crying. But what we really do is something called holding space. And you can do this with an individually you can do this in a circle, you can do this as a collective. Holding space is really about being completely attentive. This is hard, it is a hard thing to learn to do. It's hard for me, it's still hard for me sometimes you sit with empathy, and total attentiveness to this other person and you become a sacred witness to their feelings. And trust me when I say there is something immensely healing about that. So you sit with out judgment. This is good, this is bad. This is you know, should shouldn't all of those things. You sit without judgment or stand or whatever, you know, it doesn't have to be sitting. I'm just thinking in my brain I'm picturing, you know, sitting in circle with people are going through tough emotions. We don't run to the rescue. We don't offer them personal stories about ourselves. This is a big one. Oh, you know, I had the same thing happened to me and blah, blah, blah. No, no, it's not about you. It is about them, is about you being a sacred witness to their pain. And by doing that, about creating that container for them for this pain, the pain will resolve. It will on its own. But not only that you're empowering this person by recognizing their sovereignty by recognizing their personal boundaries. Your job is to sit there and feel all of the awkwardness that there is. Um, the, the challenge sometimes is, What to say? If anything? right what to say to this person so that I'm not

trampling on their sovereignty? So, oftentimes the answer to that is nothing, say nothing, just sit and allow them to experience whatever is coming up. You can be encouraging sometimes I've had clients who've gone through some emotion and apologized for having some emotion, you know, I'm sorry that I'm crying or, you know, whatever. You know, and I don't want them to feel shameful or sorry that they're having some motions. So sometimes I will offer a word of encouragement and say, it's okay. Allow it all to come up. Or it's okay, let's just sit with it. What is what frequently happens with fixers and and again, I'm a fixer, I have this instinct is that will often jump into advice for somebody who's going through something. And that's not what that's not necessarily helpful. Because I'm having a moment, I'm having an emotional moment. I don't, I'm not thinking from my rational mind, when you're in, you know, just from a biological perspective, you might be operating from older parts of your brain, your limbic system, not operating from your neocortex, you're not in problem solving mode at that point. You're just in, I'm dealing with, you know, these overwhelming emotions that come up mode, and somebody jumping in. So you know, what you should do is X, Y, or Z. That is, it's not the time for that. It's not helpful. And if you if there's a question about it, if somebody comes to you, and this is something, this is something I love, I didn't invent any of these things, I'm just relaying them to you. These are things that I've learned, I've learned them from others. I've learned them from people who were practitioners, I've learned them from people who are in helping professions. So if there's a question, if somebody comes to you with a problem, and they're talking about a problem, and they're emotional, and they're, you know, whatever, your job is mainly to empathize with them. But if there's a question about offering them advice, um, just ask, just ask, would you like some advice about this? Or do you just want to sit and talk about this? You know, put it into your own words, but you know, I have, you know, I've had, you know, I've had people sort of Trump on, you know, I've had an issue, I've had people sort of step all over me and start to offer me advice, and it's usually unhelpful, or something I've already tried or that sort of thing. And then I feel like I don't want to share anymore. And so then I've got to like, stifle those feelings. So none of that puts the onus on me to deal with this other person who's trying to try to help me and they probably have great intentions, but what they're doing is not necessarily that helpful. So learn to sit and hold space. And if there is a question about whether advice or help is needed, ask, sit with empathy. It's okay to empathize with people. So, you know, just one small example from my life. You know, my, my daughter, both of my daughters are very smart. They do really well in school. And I have one daughter who tends to be really hard on herself when it comes to grades and, you know, she got a grade she didn't like on a test at one point and she came to me in tears and It was just, you know, she was a bit of a mess. She's very emotional about this. And, you know, she just starts talking, well, you know, these questions on the test, we didn't study this material, and the teacher never covered it in class, and this and that. And so instead of jumping in and trying to say, you know,

immediately trying to say, Oh, it's gonna be okay, or, you know, whatever, I did enter into her world a little bit ago, man, that really sucks. I hate it. When teachers do that. I hate it. When teachers put stuff on tests, how can they put something on a test that you never studied in class? You know, she just wanted a little empathy, she wanted some respect for what she was feeling. You know, and when she was able to calm down a little bit after that, after she saw that I was respecting her feelings, and we allow the emotion to pass through, then I could talk to her and say, Hey, you know, have you thought about the fact that this is just one test? You know, what are some things we can? What are some? What are some things that you could do? Can you contact a team, you know, and I always try to place it into the hands of the other person if I can. Because I want to respect their sovereignty and their ability to solve their own problems. I think most people have their own solutions. But we, we box people in pretty tightly. You know, we, we box behaviors in pretty tightly and people are always looking for social approval for things, and I, you know, as best you can give, give people your approval. Really, love is about acceptance and approval, and that sort of thing. You know, in holding space is really about that it's really about I approve, I, you know, I wish you weren't going through this pain, but I approve of your expression of it, I approve of you feeling your feelings. I approve of your reaction to this painful situation. I accept it openly from one piece of divinity to another. Okay, so you can empathize. Say, man, that really sucks. I had a client one time whose significant other was cheating, she discovered that her significant other was cheating. And was obviously extremely upset. And you know, I was like, wow, that really sucks. You know, that. Screw that person. I can't believe that, you know, just empathizing, not telling them that they didn't have a right to feel how they were feeling. But they have every right to feel how they're feeling. Not to feel it, but to empathize, to enter into their world a little bit. Without getting sucked in. It's important to maintain good boundaries, but to be 100% present for that person, to be receptive to be in that divine feminine state of complete receptivity, acceptance, love to look at that person and say, I love you Even though you're going through an experience that makes me uncomfortable. I love and accept you fully even though you are bringing up painful feelings in myself. I love and accept you even though this is really awkward for me. But because I love and accept you, I want you to have this experience so you can heal from it. So I see by the old the clock on the wall that I'm about out of time for this podcast. I hope this has been interesting for you. This is a topic I'm sure I will touch on more in the future. I circle around to shadow work quite a bit. Because it is. It is so important. And I think it's something that people avoid for a reason. There's a reason why this stuff is in the shadow. It's painful to examine. It's unconscious for a reason. But real healing comes from when we acknowledge it and recognize it and are okay and we offer ourselves the self love to go through these experiences. So I hope you have a great rest of your day wherever you are in the world wherever you are listening to this. I love you all. And I will be talking to you next time.

Announcer 1:05:43

You have been listening to speaking spirit with your host, John Moore. For more info or to contact john, go to MaineShaman.com that's ma i n e s h a m a n.com