Announcer 0:25

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 0:43

Hey, everybody.

I'm called john. And this is our inaugural speaking spirit podcast.

It is

sunrise where I'm at at this moment

in between

sort of the winter holidays, Christmas and Hanukkah, and you will, and the solstice and New Year's, and it also happens to be during the cycle of the moon. That is a full moon. And it's a absolutely beautiful sunrise this morning, the skies look like pink and blue cotton candy. We're where I am in the great state of Maine, in the United States.

And given that this is my very first podcast, my inaugural podcast, what I want to do this morning is to introduce myself a little bit and introduce the podcasts and how it's how I think it's gonna work going forward. You never know spirit always has other plans for life and everything that you're going to do and that's totally fine. In the meantime, I will say if you hear some slurping noises, hopefully not too many. I'm trying to be a little professional here.

That's my coffee. There is no shamon Ising without coffee.

So to talk a little bit about myself, so you know who I am. I am

as the interest as a shamanic practitioner. And what that means is, I have been gone through some initiations, I went through what's called a shamanic crisis at a point in my life, I had a pretty severe physical, mental, emotional, spiritual breakdown a dark night of the soul. Some part of me recognize that as a call to action, the smarter part of me recognize that as a, what's called the shamanic call, which is an archetypal call to dive into the ways in and be initiated into a shamanic path. I do not in my tradition, I do not refer to myself as a shaman, I call myself a shamanic practitioner, one who practices the ways of shamanism. And you know, it's interesting, I'm going to talk a little bit about that later. The topic of today's episode is darkness and light being two sides of the same coin. And that's gonna play into, you know, titles in the way that I refer to myself and the way that others refer to themselves. And you know, that that sort of thing that's gonna play into what we're going to talk about today. The podcast today is just going to be me. And in the future, I hope that we're going to be able to have some other people join me, you know, this isn't going to be just about me hearing my own voice. And I, you know, want to seek out other perspectives, people with more expertise than myself in different areas of spirituality. And this is speaking spirit, and the topic is spirituality. And we're going to talk about all things spiritual. And again, you know, there's that whole spiritual but not religious thing. I'm not going to go into too much hopefully religion and politics. I'm going to talk about personal relationship with spirit, my own path in shamanism is one of individual personal revelation, personal development, those sorts of things. So, because that's my training, that's my background, and this is my, this is ultimately this podcast is for you, but this you know, it's my gig and so that's, that's where, you know, that's where this is gonna. That's where this is gonna lie. I don't have a lot to say about organized religion. In organized spirituality, I don't, I don't practice those, I don't hold anything against those who practice those. They, you know, everybody's on their own path. It's just not my expertise. And I try not to talk too much about things that I don't know much about. That may not stop me in the future, we'll see. Hopefully, we'll get some guests in here that can that can enlighten people. So given that the topic of this podcast is spirituality, you know, I hope to cover all things that are

on a spiritual dimension. And, and my definition of spirituality might be a little bit different than yours or, or other, certainly, certainly others, right. And I think, for me what spirituality is, it's whatever you practice, that gives you a sense of connection to something greater than yourself, right? It's very broad definition. And, you know, that can encompass a lot of things. Some people have very spiritual experiences, walking in nature, for example, really connected with nature, this is something that, that I experienced when I'm out in nature, you know, I'm just amazed at the natural world, and all of the forms that it takes, and, you know, the glorious sights and sounds and smells and feels that are out there. And it gives me a sense of being connected to something greater than myself. For some people that might be prayer to a deity to God or to Buddha or to, you know, to what, or whomever, and that gives them a sense of greater connection to themselves. In human beings seem to be hardwired for this seeking of connection, right? There's, you know, there's scientific evidence that they call religiosity is built into human beings. And so, you know, clearly there's a reason for that, clearly, there is a, you know, biological advantage to that, clearly, there's, you know, we would say a spiritual advantage to that, of course, right, that connection to something greater than themselves. I also have the feeling that the deeper you go into anything, the more spiritual it becomes, right, I'll give you an example. I used to train while I still do train, martial arts. And although this is you know, we're doing a pandemic, so I can't currently train with partners. But I trained, I've trained in martial arts since I was about five or six years old, I'm pushing 50 years old now. And so that's a really long time, it's decades of training. And so in the beginning, you know, you learn punches, and kicks and stances and all of these things. As you progress, you get to a level where you get deeper and deeper into the work, and it becomes more about energy about sensing energy moving energy around. And it becomes a very deep spiritual practice if you're doing it. Well. I think the same thing, if I watch somebody, say, who is an amazing chef, really into the experience of cooking. You know, you can see somebody having a spiritual experience, I think of a cooking show, I watched recently where, you know, the chef was talking about, for him, cooking was all about a moment, there's a moment when he knows things are, are ready when they're perfect when they're done. And he's just connected. And there's a real mindfulness to that. And so your personal spirituality can be anything that you do deeply, that gives you a greater connection to yourself. And, you know, for some people, that's art for some people, that's music, all of these things touch us at a really deep, deep level, and give us a sense, that sense of connection. And we again, we seem to be wired for that. So it's a little bit about me and the podcast and spirituality. And I'll talk briefly about shamanism just because it's my, you know, it's my personal path. And most of what I'm going to talk about, at least today is going to be through a somewhat shamanic lens, meaning, you know, as with everything, my personal experience, my personal training, my development is going to flavor my perception of everything. And that's true for For everybody everywhere, we do not, unless you're an infant, a newborn infant, and even then you're going to have some past life stuff that you're going to be filtering through. We all have our filters. And becoming aware of those is part of our spiritual path as well. Right, recognizing that we don't look at anything with fresh eyes, we're actually constructing our reality, you know, the, we see and hear and touch and taste and smell things. But it's our consciousness that assembles that into the three dimensional world that we live in. on a regular basis, our ordinary reality is sort of assembled for us by our consciousness. And that in itself, to me, is a miracle. When we talk about miracles, we think about people levitating or healing the sick or, and all of those things are fantastic and are in fact, miracles. But we missed the day to day miracle, the fact that you can turn on, you know, a radio or mp3 player, or whatever you listen to music through and have sound waves hit your eardrums. And in your consciousness, that creates a song that moves you, right? It's not the song that's hitting your eardrums. It's just pressure waves, just waves of pressure and your consciousness turns that into a symphony, or your favorite country music song or your favorite spiritual music, something that moves you, you look at a piece of art that touches you deeply. And, you know, that's lightwaves bouncing off that Canvas or that sculpture or what have you, and hitting the backs of your retinas. And that sends an electrical impulse into your brain and your consciousness assembles that into the experience of a piece of art. Isn't that amazing? When you think about it, to me, that is the everyday miracle this morning, when I looked out my window, and I saw this gorgeous sunrise, to me, takes my breath away. Right that consciousness can provide that gift for me the experience of that. And so that's something I'm thankful for everything every single day. And I try. I try every single day, to have a moment of gratitude for the fact that I have consciousness and can experience these things. So today's podcast, the topic of today's podcast,

Oh,

I'm sorry, I didn't really talk. I realized I skipped the part where I said I was going to talk about shamanism and I actually didn't, only because I want you to understand my perspective a little bit. So things hopefully will make sense and we can, you know, we can communicate on that level. So shamanism is a practice that goes back to prehistory. We actually don't know how old it is, it might be as old as humanity itself, we find. We find cave paintings from 10s of 1000s of years ago, that seemed to indicate shamanic states of consciousness. We find shamanic, continuing shamanic cultures 1000s of years old, notably the Aboriginal cultures in Australia, which are 10s of 1000s of years old, continuous cultures, that practice what we would define as shamanism. And we see shamanism popping up in every single culture in the world, without exception. And so it is the original, you know, to our, you know, our best understanding it is the it is the original sort of human spirituality. And what happens is that there is this archetype, there's this archetype of the shaman. And if you know anything about yoga knew about archetypes, they exist in the collective unconscious, which means they exist throughout human consciousness. And they pop up we call it the shamanic impulse pops up in every culture, in every era of history. Now sometimes, in that impulse is for what we call shamanic initiation for shamanic individuals, practitioners, people we call shamans. Every culture has their own word for it. You know that in you know, we have you know, Celtic Celtic shamanism we have Norse shamanism, there's, you know, West African shamanism Siberian Mongolian shamanism. There's shamanism. Korea and Japan. So every culture, this pops up and in. And there is, you know, every culture has its own word, word for it. We have adopted the word shaman from, you know, from Russian and German into English, and they borrowed it from the tongue sick people in Siberia. And there's evidence that the word might come from Sanskrit or Chinese or Pali. We don't know, we don't know where it exactly originated, but, you know, maybe further research will will show that someday. So traumatic individuals pop up in every culture now in Western culture, you know, European culture and the culture of the United States. You know, sometimes when that shamanic impulse popped up, we would burden those people at the stake or, you know, just repress them in general. So it's been a repressed part of our culture. You know, when I think about the, the Celts, and I'm not saying that Druids were necessarily shamanic, I don't actually know. But I think about the Romans going in and cutting down the sacred groves where the druids communed with nature and did their thing. So there's just, you know, long history of repression, repressing the shamanic impulse. So, you know, some years ago, there's an anthropological research that went on and said, you know, all of these cultures, you know, what do they have in common? What are they doing? What are the practices that they do, and that became what's known as core shamanism, which are like let's boil it down, let's strip away the cultural, you know, culturally specific things that that these you know, different shamanic cultures are doing. And so, there are basically three elements of shamanism in shamanism. One uses altered states of consciousness, to travel and non ordinary states of reality. That's element number two. So altered states of consciousness number one, traveling and non ordinary reality traveling and non ordinary realms. That's number two, and work working with helping spirits. So a shaman anyone who's practicing shamanism, a shaman, shamanic practitioner is going to be doing all three of those things. If they aren't, they're doing something else. So for example, I might meditate and that alters my consciousness.

And but I'm not necessarily traveling in non ordinary states of reality or working with helping spirits and so we wouldn't necessarily call that a shamanic practice. Although meditation is fantastic, I do it. I separate that out from the shamanic work that I do. And when we say when shamanic people monic practitioners or what have you are, are doing those things. We call that a shamanic journey. And in my tradition, we use rhythm to enter the altered state of consciousness, particularly drumming or rattling or some sort of musical repetitious and we know that there are specific brainwave patterns that we're trying to generate now, our ancestors 1000s of years ago, didn't have ecgs and didn't know what these you know, theta brainwave patterns looked like but they figured it out they figured out you know, if I listen to this rhythm, this drumming rhythm you know, I go into this trance and I can start to see spirits and communicate with them and bring back healing energy or you know, do work for my community. Um, so let's talk about dark and light being two sides of the same coin and that might be a little weird. There, there are a heck of a lot of very spiritual people out there who will use phrases like I'm all about the light and love or I'm holding you in the light or you know, these sort of light light chaser light holder people and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that I'm not here to shame anyone or or denigrate any particular path or or anything like that. But there is an old expression that says the brighter the light, the darker the shadow. And I'm going to talk in a moment about what we mean by shadow and what the shadow is and and how we have come to understand that and all of those things. But having light and dark as the sort of duality right? This sort of Star Wars mentality Are you in the light side or in the dark side? All those Star Wars, interestingly portrayed the fact that if you remember, Empire Strikes Back, okay, I'm a little bit of a nerd, and I apologize them and talk a little bit about sci fi, if you remember, Empire Strikes Back, it's very demonic, right? Luke Skywalker has to go into the swamp to meet Yoda. And he goes through the he goes into the cave, where he meets Darth Vader, and he strikes him down, and it's an image of himself. And I realize, you know, my, my young self was a little bit confused about what was going on there. And that might be confusing for some people. But this was about confronting his own shadow. And again, I'm going to talk about what we mean by the shadow in a moment. But Luke, who's embracing the light, still has a shadow, we all have a shadow. I do not, you know, unless maybe you're Buddha. And if you are, thank you for listening to my podcast, you have a shadow. And in fact, in the, you know, in the story of Buddha's enlightenment, he and you know, he has to fight off the armies of his, you know, his shadow, the loose, you know, the illusion, you know, the illusions that his shadow workers were throwing up to him. This is going to be the same for anyone for everyone forever, until I guess you become an enlightened being or, or whatever, but we all have a shadow. And it is,

it is, no matter how much you embrace the light, it is there. And in fact, there there is, you know, there's a problem sometimes that comes up from embracing the light too much, which is that we ignore our shadow, we think it's not there, or we convince ourselves that it's not there. Um, what happens when you head down a spiritual path. So, you know, embraced, shamanism is my path, I did it. I continue to train in shamanism I continue to learn, it will be it will be nonstop, my my teacher continues to learn and her teacher continues to learn. It's one of the things I love about the path is that the learning never stops. And, you know, it goes on and on. And, to me, that's very stimulating, right? But when you go down this path, when you get on any path of spiritual development, what you're doing is you have this astral body or this soul body and you start to develop that and you might achieve some successes, right? You might achieve some healing, you might be able to heal others, you might be able to divine information or who knows, you might be able to perform a miracle or something along those lines. The astral body for some reason, which is still unknown to me, and maybe I'll figure it out at some point is what we call hubris stick, right? It enjoys hubris, it gets inflated very easily. It's, um, and that filters through to the ego, right? The ego is our sense of who we are, is our it's our Im sense. No matter what anybody tells you, the ego is not evil. There's nothing wrong with the ego. It's healthy to have an ego it's necessary. It's a part of you. It's like saying, I don't like my left arm. I need to get rid of it, or I need to ignore it. Or I need to pretend that I don't have a left arm. You have an ego, if you can say I, you know, I am. I am going to have a sip of my coffee right now. The I sense that is doing that is ego. It's just your it's just your sense of differentiation. Where the ego becomes problematic is where it keeps us really separated from the world where it makes us think that we're not a part of the world, that we're not a part of nature, where we're not a part of spirit where we don't have a divine nature. That's underdeveloped ego. The ego can also experience hubris, when we say somebody has a big ego, that's what we're talking about is this inflated sense of self? Right? in the spiritual world, we see this a lot with spiritual leaders who wind up abusing their followers, for example, right? You can think of all of these, you know, suicide cult leaders or these Yogi's who sexually or financially abuse their followers, right. They're, you know, they have done a significant amount of spiritual work spiritual development. But what they haven't done is they haven't worked on the shadow impulses. So the philosopher, a guy who I really like Ken Wilber He talks about three aspects of spiritual development. He talks about waking up, growing up, and cleaning up. You know, waking up is you know about recognizing, recognizing non duality, it's about recognizing the spiritual nature of everything and sort of awakening to, you know, what reality is, you know, growing up is about, you know, maturing, becoming more compassionate, all of those things. Cleaning up is about and that's the work, I think a lot of people are missing. And that is, that is dealing with the shadow, right, your shadow aspects. So let's talk about what's in the shadow. So the shadow, the concept of the shadow exists in all cultures, because it's something that everybody has. Um, but it was really Carl Jung, the psycho analyst who explained it in a way that Western minds could kind of grasp and understand and start to work with. So what happens is, we have normal human impulses, we have wounds, we have all of these things, these parts of ourselves, these, you know, psychic and psychophysical parts of ourselves.

And a lot of these get disowned, right? Meaning, that's not a part of me, I'll give you some examples in a minute.

As we're growing up, we are socialized, right? We, our parents raised us and say, Don't cry, don't do this, don't do that. You're a bad kid, if you do this, if you if you touch yourself, that's naughty, and you're going to hell, if you you know, you know, particularly stuff around sexuality is repressed in this culture, you know, spiritual impulses, I, you know, I know, somebody who was having visionary dreams, and her parents, you know, you know, basically beat that out of her, um, you know, all of these things. And so we say, these are bad, these are bad. And so I'm going to push them away into my unconscious, into an area where I can't see them. And we call that the shadow, because it's area, it's a part of ourselves, where we collect our disowned parts of ourselves, right, our fractured, disowned parts of ourselves. The other part of that is wounding that we receive, right. And so particularly, say childhood trauma, we may lose memory of that, because it's too painful for us to look at an experience at that time. And, you know, the, the shadow has been referred to as this bag that we dragged behind us, if we don't work with the shadow, if we don't do the cleanup that is absolutely necessary. It's like we're trying to go through life, dragging this bag behind us. I have a little bit of a different metaphor, things that are in the shadow are like a basketball that you're trying to push underwater. You might be successful for a moment, but it's gonna pop up somewhere. And again, this is where we have these, you know, these Yogi's, these spiritual leaders, these gurus who wind up sexually abusing or, you know, financially abusing or embezzling or doing all these things from their followers. That stuff's gonna pop up because the work hasn't been done. You know, and it's popping up in weird ways, particularly because the spiritual light is so bright, that the shadow is really dark. it darkens the shadow. And there's nothing wrong with turning your spiritual light up very bright, as bright as you possibly can. But you got to do the cleanup, you have to do the Shadow Work. And there's all different kinds of ways to do that. I regularly do Shadow Work, shamanic Lee. And that, you know, this is not hubris or to brag or to say that I'm complete, because I am not, I don't think I will ever be complete. I think, you know, one of the things that happens as I clean up stuff from this lifetime, you know, stuff from other lifetimes may crop up. The other thing that occurs is that we have stuff we have ancestral stuff, right stuff that's passed down our ancestral line. I wish it weren't true, but we inherit the sins quote unquote, Sins of our parents and their parents and their parents and their parents. There are we now know there are epigenetic changes that happen with trauma. So we can detect trauma in I don't know how For many generations now in some animals, I think it's more than 20 generations later, we can detect genetic changes, or epigenetic changes in the actual DNA. So the physical, there's a physical representation of trauma that gets carried along the ancestral line, they're able to detect epigenetic changes in the grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, for example. So on human level, we know at least a couple of generations, trauma, and that sort of thing, affects people. Um, so there's ancestral cleanup that has to happen as well. The nice thing is, if there is a nice aspect to this, that when you do ancestral healing, you wind up healing your whole line, and that includes your children as well. And so that's a nice, nice thing. So light and dark are part of the same, two sides of the same coin. You cannot, if you think you don't have a shadow, well, then your, your the existence of your shadow is in your shadow. I'm sorry to say this, but you do you do have a shadow.

And the work, you know, part of that cleanup work is to address those things in whatever way that that works for you, you can you know, you can go train in shamanism from a cheap teacher who teaches Shadow Work, you can do all kinds of different types of Shadow Work, you can go through psycho analysis and do it that way. Everybody, everybody should do this work. He doesn't use the word should but we'll put it this way it would be beneficial for anybody to do this work to do Shadow Work, particularly if you are spiritually inclined, spiritually oriented. You should be working on your shadow again, there's that word should, right. Wow, there's very few shoulds in this world, but I can honestly say that's a thing. I have encountered so many people who become who are struggling with this, right. You know, I'm regularly met for pre pandemic I regularly met with you know, I had a group for spiritually conscious professionals and I met people from it was fantastic. I hope to resume it once the pandemic is over. I meet people from all walks of life, all spiritual practices, everybody from you know, ministerial counselors to, you know, energy workers to clairvoyance, Tarot readers, acupuncturist, all kinds of people who are working with energy and spirit. And that sort of thing. And this is something I've run into an interesting story about this, I had a couple of young women who showed up to a meet one time we had an open meeting. And they were just starting down the spiritual path. And they were both in recovery. And using spirituality as a way to get them through dealing with recovering from addiction. And one of them related a story to me where she said, you know, somebody cut me off in traffic the other day, and I got really angry. And then I realized I was angry. And then I got angry that I was angry. And my question to her was, well, then did you get angry that you were angry that you were angry? and so on and so forth, ad infinitum. There's this idea that again, in so this is where shoulds come into, this is where shoulds are a not so great thing. There's this thing where I'm a spiritual person, I should do this, I should not do that. I shouldn't feel anger, right? You're a human being you feel anger, where that comes. where the problem comes is where I take that anger and I stuffed it down into the shadow, and they don't deal with it as it comes up. I don't recognize that as a signal to say, Okay, what, you know, what's going on here? There's an opportunity, the anger was an opportunity, why am I angry at this person for cutting me off in traffic? You know, maybe it has something to do with lack of human respect, or the fact that they, you know, maybe I'm actually frightened. You know, and anger is a way sometimes for people to express fear. Right? fear and anger are close together. And sometimes when people are frightened, they express that as anger. I've seen that a lot, particularly with youth who don't want to appear appear weak. So the shoulds the shoulds become a problem here because they're, I shouldn't feel anger. I shouldn't feel sexual excitement. I shouldn't shouldn't touch myself. I shouldn't eat these things. That I like I shouldn't do this, we shouldn't do that. We cram them down into the shadow, and there's this tension there, they don't go away, we might not see them, we may not consciously be aware of them. But there's going to be some tension. And, you know, we've all seen, you know, we've all seen people who cram their anger down. And don't, don't allow it to come up, don't allow themselves to feel it, and then they explode one day. Right, they explode with anger, and it comes out in an uncontrolled way. And they're potentially serious, very serious repercussions for that. And this culture puts a lot of pressure, it puts a lot of pressure, one of the ways that the culture puts a lot of pressure is so with, with men in particular, and I know this because I'm a man, there are certain emotions that are okay to express and others that are not right. As a man, I'm allowed to express anger or frustration or laugh at things.

But there's a lot of pressure for, for boys when I was growing up not to cry, not to be sad, not to express tenderness. Anything that was seen as maternal or feminine, or that sort of thing. I see that changing our culture a lot, I think that's a really good move, I think, you know, this repression of emotion has caused a lot of violence, a lot of sickness in our world. with women, the same thing is true, but it's a different set of emotions. You know, and I can't I'm not a woman, but I know this from talking to lots of women, where, you know, women who express anger are called bitchy, or, you know, difficult or, you know, whatever. And that's not okay either, right. And so, women have to repress a lot of stuff. And men have to repress a lot of stuff. And that gets pushed down. You know, these cultural forces that weigh down on us, force us to push a lot of stuff into our shadow. And so we have to work in the darkness we have to descend into into darkness. And one of the interesting things that was proposed to me recently, and when I think about it, it rings really true, is that most myths, most cultural myths, whether we're talking about you know, Norse mythology, or you know, Greek, Roman mythology or other, you know, other forms of mythology, most involve stories that reflect shamanic initiation, there's always a descent into the underworld, a death and rebirth sort of allegory. Even in Christian, you know, we see that in Christian tradition. We see that in everywhere, right? This is a common thread that runs throughout cultures, this descent into the underworld, is about working with our shadow, it's about going deeply into our, our wounds and healing them. That all being said. Depending on your past, this may not be work that you can do on your own, you might need the help of someone. You know, there's a reason we, you know, there's a reason the shadow exists, particularly with wounding, particularly with trauma, you know, trauma that happens. And when I say wounding, I'm talking about sort of psychic wounding, right, wounding on our soul, wounding, emotional wounding, which is also reflected frequently in the body as sickness, disease,

that sort of thing. You know, sometimes it's too much to go it alone.

You know, if you're doing work on yourself, and you're feeling something like emotional flooding, or you go into a deep depression, or you have suicidal ideation, or any of those things, those are good indications that it's time to seek out some help. Definitely seek out some qualified licensed counseling. Definitely seek out the help of a shamanic healer effect, I would suggest doing both because there's some overlap one deals with the mind the other one deals with the soul. Those things aren't set exactly separable, but you know, or, you know, we're work with somebody, we're, you know, seek out some professional help there. If you're finding that you start to do this shadow work where you do any sort of Shadow Work, and it becomes overwhelming in any way for you. And overwhelming, I would say, you know, emotional flooding, meaning the sudden onset of uncontrollable emotion that's interfering, interfering with your life. That's a good indication that you know, you've unpacked something that you need help with any sort of suicidal ideation, seek help for that any sort of long term depression, anxiety, anything that we would consider sort of I almost hate to use this phrase but mental illness, mental disease, dis ease, right? Like depression, severe anxiety, it's definitely time to seek out some help for that. There should be no shame in that here's another should but this one I think is a good one. There should be no shame in that I still think there people have a complex, it's becoming less so about seeking, seeking professional help for stuff I've you know, in my work, I've talked to lots of people where I'm have suggested they seek counseling, and some people are okay with that. And some people are really resistant to that. There should be no resistance, mental health is your mind, your body, your spirit, all overlap, mental health is the same as physical health, it's the same as spiritual health. And so taking care of all three is really the way to all around health, you're then firing on all cylinders. When you get money, body, mind and spirit working in sync. You are, you know, you're firing on all cylinders, you're working at maximum efficiency towards health, well being and wholeness. And with that being said, sometimes you can feel fractured, sometimes you can feel unhold, sometimes you can feel broken. And none of those things are true, your whole complete and perfect, just as you are. But that's not to say there aren't some things that you can work on to help you recognize that you are whole, complete and perfect, just as you are. You can have wounds but that doesn't make you broken. That doesn't make you you know, incomplete. And when we do in shamanism with the soul work, one of the ceremonies that we do is called soul retrieval. It's sort of helping you find a piece of yourself that feels fractured, that feels broken off and returning at home. And again, that's not to say that you are incomplete, it's just to say, there's this wound, there's this peace that's temporarily lost, and we're going to bring it back and bring you some bringing some power that you might not have had before. And help you feel better, help you feel that completeness that you are and it's all good things. So this is bringing me to the end of this podcast. I hope you have enjoyed it. I hope it's you know, you've gotten something from it. Again, this is my first inaugural one so be gentle with me, please.

I

I really enjoyed putting this together. I'm going to do them somewhat regularly because I like doing this I like talking to people and again, I'm gonna hope to have other you know, men hope to have guests on here. I figuring out the technology as I go along. I think I've got it figured out I bet I'm at least able to record myself. So that's a good thing. So I will do that as I as I go along. Please feel free to contact me if you are a spiritual person and would like to appear as a guest or you have a topic that you're interested in or you'd like to send me feedback. You can get in touch with me at my website. It's main shaman, ma i n e s h a m a n.com.

And, again, I'm called john Moore. And you can you can reach out to me and I will we will talk to you next time.

Announcer 43:58

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 MaineShaman.com