Announcer 0:28

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

John Moore 0:47

Hello, hello, hello.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In English, we have one word for love.

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

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

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

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

Announcer 1:02:37

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