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 0:50
Hello, everybody.
This is my second podcast.
If you have not listened to my inaugural podcast, the first episode, I talked about how dark and light on a spiritual perspective are two sides of the same coin.
And today I'm headed straight down that duality pathway. Again, we're going to talk about divine masculine, divine feminine. You know, it's interesting. We aim for non duality and in spirituality. But it's useful, I think, to think of the way that the universe is abundant and diverse, and the way that spirit expresses itself. In all its very many ways. But it's all part of one divinity is one thing. And we're all a part of that. And that's the beautiful thing. And today I'm going to talk about divine masculine and divine feminine and how that can be sometimes a sticky topic, particularly when we get to talking about gender and how we represent gender, spiritually, there is the principle of gender in, I'm just going to pull this up. So I can read the exact the exact quote here. So the Emerald tablet, if you're not familiar, this is a pretty ancient piece of writing, we'd have no idea where it originates, there's lots of legends about it, originating before Ancient Egypt and showing up in all kinds of different cultures. Whatever the truth of the history of this document, we got an emerald tablet, because originally it was supposed to be inscribed into a green stone tablet. It has had an effect on spirituality, particularly in the Western world, for millennia, like it's been around for a very, very long time. You see it showing up in Greek, you see it showing up in, you know, the thoughts that get filtered through Western religion. So regardless of its, you know, its history of its actual history, which is, frankly, probably lost, we, you know, we don't really know, it's had a real effect, and it is a foundation of Western spirituality. It's attributed to somebody called Hermes trismegistus, which means, you know, Hermes, the thrice great, also known as both, both being associated with the, the Egyptian god of writing, and knowledge, and that sort of thing. And, you know, there's lots and lots of legendary stuff about different incarnations and that sort of thing. Again, regardless of its actual history, you can't deny that it has a profound effect on Western spirituality, Western thoughts, there, there are whole systems of hermetic spirituality that get filtered out, if you look at any of the sort of occult traditions or the secret society traditions, you know, Freemasonry, to the Golden Dawn to any of those things, this hermetic thought, absolutely permeates that stuff. And if you know, so, I'm, you know, I'm coming to you from the United States, if you know, the history of the United States, a lot of our founding fathers were, in fact, Freemasons, and, and filtered a lot of their belief systems into what we have, you know, our form of government, everything from our form of government to the way that monuments were laid out in Washington, DC and all kinds of stuff like that. It's cool stuff. If you're really interested in an alternate history, you can really go down the rabbit hole with that one, but from the Emerald tab tablet, there are these seven hermetic principles. Right and so So these are their spoken sort of as truths. And I'm going to talk about this particular one, which is the principle of gender.
And it states and again, this is an English translation of who knows how many translations down the line. The English translation is gender isn't everything, everything has its masculine and feminine principles. Gender manifests on all planes. Okay, that's pretty big statement, right? Everything has its masculine and feminine principles. In, in the Western world, in the world that I grew up in, you know, I grew up in a time, where mostly, you know, men were men, burly, you know, the the stereotypical, you know, the stereotypical thing Boys, boys, or blue girls wore pink, that whole deal, right? This is where gender, the idea of gender gets a little sticky, because they're all of these cultural overlays with what, what it means what masculine and feminine means. And it's important to point out that, you know, the, the tablet, this quote about masculine feminine, is not necessarily about biological sex, although it does apply. And it's not necessarily about gender identity, although it does apply, right? We're now living in an age where gender identity is, you know, it accepted that it's a little more fluid, that people don't necessarily comply with the gender they were assigned at birth, they don't necessarily identify with their, you know, their chromosomal sex assignment, that sort of thing. And, you know, obviously, that bucks the system, that bucks the tradition, and there are a lot of anytime you, anytime you change the way society is there, there is backlash. Um, that being said, there are traditions all over the world for more than two genders. You know, they're, in some cultures, they recognize as many as five genders, and, you know, they're they, they recognize intersexual people and all those things. This is not really about that this is not really about those things. I just want to say personally, you know, in my life, I want people to be who they are, I want people to be able to be comfortable, to be free to express themselves however they identify. And, you know, to me that it's a beautiful thing, to me, it is diversity is, is wonderful, if you look around the universe, diversity is the rule, it's not the exception. If you look at the animal kingdom, the plant kingdom, the minerals, the elements, the stars, everything. We live in such a diverse universe, how could we not reflect that as human beings? Right? How could we not accept and reflect that, that diversity is, you know, it makes us stronger for one thing. But again, we're going on to sort of divine divine masculine, divine feminine, right. So if this principle holds true that gender exists on every claim, there's a masculine or feminine on every plane, that would include we consider sort of the Divine plane, the unity. And it's interesting to think that the Unity could be divided into two things, but the Unity the non dual reality, you could call it God, you could call it the universe, you could call it the multiverse, you could call it the source, whatever your word for that is, that extends into everything, it is everything, it is everything that there is, right. And I want to give you some examples of how masculine feminine show up and everything, but let's talk a little bit about what we mean by masculine and feminine. And it's a little weird. Those words, some people are starting to replace those words when they're talking about spirituality, because they get wrapped up in the whole politics of gender and sex and that sort of thing.
But these are, this is the, you know, this is the tradition, this is how things have been described for 1000s of years, the masculine feminine principle, if you think about, you know, sort of Eastern spirituality Taoism in particular. You have yin and yang or in in yo and in Japanese, you have yin and yang and you know, the the sort of the representation of that is the story. symbol of dark and light. Right. So again, going back to my, my last podcast, we talk about darkness and light being two sides of the same coin, the light side was seen as young or masculine, and the dark side were was seen as yen or the female side, feminine side, not necessarily female, but feminine side. And there are principles associated with the ideas of masculine feminine. The other thing I'll say is they cannot be separated, you can't have one without the other. Right, you can't pull those principles apart, in isolation. And so the masculine or young side was seen as active light, you know that, you know, that sort of thing. So anything that's sort of active, was seen as as young. And so the, the dark side was seen as passive or dark, right, and that's the inside the feet, the feminine side. This does not, you know, language is hard, because I'm not meaning to assign value to anything, there is nothing better or worse about active or passive, they are equally important. I'll give you an example of that from human life. Right? We cannot, you know, we're active during the day, and we sleep at night. And if you think that being passive is not as important as being active, I don't recommend you try this. But if you've ever I have, I have twin daughters. And I think at one point I had gone without sleep for three or four days in a row when they were first born. I can tell you, that being passive is critical. You cannot separate one from the other. You realize whether you use if you've if you have children, particularly if you have multiples, you realize why they use sleep deprivation as a form of torture, right? You have to go through that you have to go through the rest stage, it is so important, it is about renewal It is about gathering. So gender, in this perspective, like it's weird to think of waking and sleep as gender, but this is really what the Emerald tablet is talking about. Right? The active principle, if we replace, if we replace masculine and feminine with active and receptive or active and passive principles, it might make a little bit more sense. But traditionally, we've used masculine and feminine. And I'm going to talk about the divinity of that today as well. So just in human life, we have times of activity and we have times of passivity. And rest is rest is as important if not more than activity. Anybody who has worked out been a bodybuilder tried to build up some muscle knows that the active part of your workout, right? When you go to the gym and you lift some weights, that's a stimulus for growth. But the actual growth, your actual time that your muscle grows, is when you are resting. And if you don't get enough rest, if you go to the gym, and you work out every day and don't give yourself enough time for recovery, you get injured, you don't get stronger, you get weaker, you get injured. And that's you know, that's that's a truth and that shows you why both parts are equally important. So, I know I quoted him in the last podcast as well, but I think he's he's a brilliant dude. And you know, there's the western philosopher for lack of a better better term for him, Ken Wilber and he talks about the principles the the masculine and feminine principles of divinity as these sort of impulses and I like that I like I like these these drives and it makes a lot of sense to me the way he describes them. So, the masculine Divine Principle in this case, he calls arrows right which is the which is a love principle, that the arrows impulse is the impulse for things to evolve to be active right, we go through evolutionary stages as a species, we go through evolutionary
processes as an individual, okay. So we started out as children and we grew up and we went to school and we bettered ourselves and that impulse, that is, that is part of the divine masculine, divine masculine is to evolve back to divinity is to evolve back to the needs to become a greater whole line right and individual package as it Right, and it's very individualistic. In that respect, the Divine Masculine is somewhat individualistic, it's about sort of personal development and bettering oneself and that sort of thing. On the other hand, the divine feminine, he calls by the name a god Bay, which is another word for love, right. And this is about gathering, community building, pulling, as you develop through the masculine, it's about pulling others up. And those principles acting together in any individual make for a much higher level of spiritual development. If you get either one of these things out of balance, and frankly, they're out of balance everywhere, right, and I'll, we'll talk about that, if you get any of these principles, these general principles out of balance, you get lots of repercussions from that. A good example, is when you get the masculine principle out of balance, you wind up with patriarchy, which we've been suffering under for, I don't know 1000s of years, right, you get the you get, you get this individualistic dominated culture, which is set up as a, you know, very much as a hierarchy, right, you always have, you have your religious structures, your political structures, your, even your, you know, community structures set up with one person on top, and a couple of, you know, somewhat less powerful people under them. And then, you know, the majority of the people have no power, no, say no voice. You know, we used to forbid people from learning Latin and require that all all Bibles were written in Latin, to keep people ignorant. And only the learners a few very, very wealthy people could could access what was, you know, their only outlet for spirituality. Okay, so that's, you know, that's super out of whack, right, that there's no, no movement. You know, there's no movement for bringing people up. There's, there's a movement for keeping people down. And it's about power over and not power with. And that is, that is way out of balance. And we've been there for way too long. The pendulum is swinging back, we always move from individualistic to collective and then back again. And we've seen some minor movements that way. Obviously, the 60s were a big upheaval of, of that system, you know, with the hippies in the peace movement, and civil rights movement. And a lot of those movements were about that feminine principle of pulling others up. Right. Again, out of the out of whack, sort of side of the feminine, is, um, you know, you know, shows up in political systems, like oppressive, communistic regimes, right, which are, you know, again, they can have a patriarchal structure because they, you know, definitely have people on top. But, you know, instead of pulling people up, they serve, too, they serve to push people down and make everybody the same, but make people you know, not get better, like, if you stand out from the crowd, you're going to be repressed. And so both sides are capable of a great deal of repression, both sides are capable of a great deal of violence. And so that's not good. So either way, things are out of whack. So there is there is gender, there's passive, and active and everything. And one of the great goals of divinity, the alchemical process of reaching our own, you know, our own, our own divine spark, you know, identifying more and more. You know, my hopes, there's lots of different types of spiritual development, but my aim is always to more and more identify with the divine aspects of myself. And, you know, I hope that I hope that is true for other people as well.
And take a really balanced approach to that. So, you've got to balance those, you've got to balance those things out. You have to balance personal development with pulling other people up as well, with the arrows in the GOP as two sides, two sides of the same coin. So I want to talk I want to talk about a TV show I've been watching and I haven't read the books, but now I'm inspired to read the books but There's a show that's available on HBO, right now called His Dark Materials. And it's based on a book series by the same name. And you might have seen that or seen the Golden Compass, which is, I guess, one of the books in the series. But I'm prompted to go back and read, read the books from from watching the series, I realized that that's probably the logical opposite way of doing things. But whatever works, and this isn't a really interesting piece of fiction, that it is, in my opinion, pregnant with symbolism, with deep spiritual meaning. There's a lot of political stuff in there, it's obviously very entertaining. Very well done, the acting is great, the the, you know, the way it's put together is great. What's important to me is that, you know, if you're not familiar with a series that takes place in this alternate universe, where there is this patriarchal system, that's really the government called the magisterium, which is a thinly veiled allegory to you know, that when the church ran the government, and they, you know, they run things from very patriarchal, patriarchal perspective, and their, their leaders are sort of priests and bishops, and they're all males and that sort of thing. Very, you know, obviously similar to our, to our own history. And in this universe. Humans are, you know, their soul, part of their soul anyway, takes takes the form of an animal. So this is different than a power animal. I'll explain how in a moment, but you know, that humans walk around with this animal companion, but it's part of their soul. If they die, the animal disappears, if the animal is killed, the person dies, and, you know, vice versa. So they're intimately connected. It bears noting that the animal, at least in the series, I'm watching on TV is normally the opposite gender of the human. Now, I haven't seen any transgender individuals in the show, so I don't know how, you know, or if that if that shows up in the books at all and or how that how that works out. If it's a, you know, if this is a principle, but it's just something that I noted. And it reminds me of this concept. There's this concept in Norse spirituality, Northern European spirituality that shows up in Celtic spirituality as well. There's the idea of the fat twitches this spirit that is part of, you know, the the Norse idea. There's this very complex thing called soul comp, I guess, soul complex for lack of a better term, it's like your, your spirit, your soul is made up of all of these different identified pieces. One of those is in English, we call it a fetch in I believe ancient Norse called the field Gaea, or philia. FYI, lgi. A. And the way that shows up in Norse spirituality is that it either takes the form of an animal or it takes the form of a spirit that is the opposite gender of the person. In my understanding, and I'm not I'm certainly not an expert, but my understanding is that this is a spirit and opposite gender spirit, in Celtic beliefs that shows up when if one sees it one is about to die or one is close to death, or one is on you know, in mortal danger, that sort of thing. Very shamanic, right? Because in in shamanism, you know, when you you shift realities, you can start start to see spirits like, you know, there's this, we know, scientifically, there's this mental shift in brain states. Now, we know because we have eg equipment, but we didn't. We didn't know 1000s of years ago that if you had a lots of theta brainwaves, that you would be able to start to see spirits.
We just knew that if you drummed or took certain plants or or sang for really long periods of time, or did certain dances that that would occur. But what's happening in all of these cultures is people are shifting their brains into a state where they are receptive. They're in a, what we call a divine feminine state receptive to impressions from the spirit world. So this concept of This concept exists. And I don't know for sure if the author, you know, made that up out of the collective unconscious. If he used materials from other spiritual systems when he wrote us books or whatever be really interesting for me to dive into that, at some point, I highly recommend the series. Again, I read the books, but I hear wonderful things about them from people that I know. So check it out, if you get get the chance. It's called His Dark Materials. So, I believe that Carl Jung the, Carl, you know, Carl Jung was a Western. He represents the western shamanic impulse, right. So the psycho analyst who was contemporary of Freud's and then went off and did his own thing, and is responsible for terms like complex like psychological complex and collective unconscious and archetype like becoming, you know, defined the way they are and coming into popular ideation. And he definitely went through. If you read his life story in his autobiography, you he, he definitely went through shamanic initiation. He was definitely experiencing shamanic states, he was channeling divine information when he came up with all of this thing. And it's important to recognize that the word psyche, which is the root of psychology, psychiatry, all of those things, to us, it means mind. In ancient Greek, the word psyche actually means spirit. So, you know, when he, when he talks about psycho analysis, he's actually talking about analyzing the human spirit. But Carl Jung came up with this idea of animus and Anima, which meant that, you know, we have, and again, going back to this, these components of the human soul, we have parts, right, and you have experienced parts of yourself coming forward throughout your life. You know, there are parts that might, for example, take over when you're angry. If you've ever done something, and gone, gosh, that's not like me. Right? It may be that there's this part that you're not in touch with. That is you know, you're you're just not aware of, but but it's, it's a part of your psychological makeup, your soul makeup. And, you know, there's part parts that he came up with, that everybody has called autonomous and Altima, right? autonomous, being the masculine and Altima being the feminine, right? This is a part of you, that is your opposite gender. It is so all males have an Altima an all females have an autonomous so we all have that side to us. And so the So the interesting question is What if you are what if you don't identify with your you know, the, the gender you're assigned at birth, or the your biological gender or you've changed genders or that sort of thing. My take, and I am not an expert on autonomous and or Anima is that this part of you takes on the opposite part that you identify with, most closely psychologically. So I identify I was born a male I identify as male, I have an Altima, which is a feminine, feminine part of my soul, a feminine aspect of my soul. If I, I, I believe this to be true, but if I identified as a female, even though I was born as male and have the genetics of a male, I would probably have an animus, which is the masculine side because again, there's the principle that there is gender, that there's masculine and feminine and everything it's not, it is not there is masculine or feminine in in everything. And that is an important distinction. The principle is that there is masculine and feminine in everything.
Now, what about people who are gender fluid or non binary or don't identify with a particular gender? To be honest, I don't know. I would be very very curious to find out I would be more than curious to find out I would be really happy to work with somebody who is gender fluid or non binary to figure out what those parts of themselves are, maybe it's complex, maybe it's something unexpected. My guess is that there are there are parts that sometimes are more masculine, sometimes they're more feminine. And again, this isn't about the cultural overlays of masculine and feminine. This isn't about, you know, boys wear blue girls wear pink, this is about this is about the soul parts of yourself, the parts, parts, and again, you know, we talked about, we talked about parts of a hole, right, it's important to go back to the unity, it's important to go back to the divinity, your Divine Self is, is one, it's inseparable. But then it sort of divides itself. So that one story is that God or the universe or everything or source, whatever, whatever name, you want to call it by one and two to, you know, was was everything there is and wanted to experience wanted to have certain experiences. And so the universe was created. And in that universe is all kinds of diversity. But first, there was, you know, basically, there was nothing and then there was the one thing and that split into two things. This is from the Tao, and I'm paraphrasing, because I do not have Lao Tzu memorized, but this is you know, the, the, the nothing became the one thing the one thing became two things, the two things became the 10 you know, they say the 10,000 things 10,000 just a number, that means, like, more things than you can count, right became everything. And the two things in this case are yin and yang are these these principles, these divine, this is when the, the, you know, the driving principle of the universe, the divinity of the universe, split itself into active and passive so that it could create which brings me to creation, which brings me to manifestation, right? So there's, and I realized in the animal kingdom there, and in the plant kingdom, and in other kingdoms, there is the idea of asexual reproduction. And I'm not a biologist, so I could not, you know, I could not divide that up necessarily to into how that works on a masculine and feminine principle perspective. But there is there has to be that principle for creation to happen. Interesting to note, I read recently that funguses sometimes have up to five genders, and they you know, fungi, particularly mushrooms, do reproduce sexually. Even if, you know you think of you think of fungus as not, you know multiple organisms, but they produce different types of, you know, spores and mycelium and that sort of thing that have that have that have different genders and interact with each other to create that genetic diversity. We think about creation, you think about biological creation, you know, at least on the animal kingdom level, in the mammal level, we've got, you know, the sperm and the egg coming together the masculine and the feminine. Sperm being the active component, the feminine being the receptive component, right? We don't have to say passive we can say receptive. And without that you don't get you don't get life you don't get you know, we need both components. So from a manifestation component, you know, perspective from a spiritual manifestation perspective. You know, manifestation is a hot topic ever since the secret came out However, many years ago, you need both the active and the receptive component of manifestation to bring things about in the universe, how that takes place in your life, that's a topic for another day. That's a very big topic. Obviously, there's, you know, you can probably if you type manifestation into Amazon, you'll get a bazillion results. But, you need both of those components, you need to have an active intention, and then you need to be receptive to what comes your way and actually be able to receive that, for manifesting anything in the universe.
intention is a very masculine tool. So in in shamanism when we journey so, I journey using drum most of the time sometimes rattle, but most of the time I journey using a drum which means I go into an altered state and I do some work with helping spirits on behalf of myself or other people or the community or I go there to you know, travel and non non ordinary reality to gather information or get healing, that sort of thing. So, the intention is, you always journey with an intention, right, I'm going to meet with my helping spirits to do XYZ. That's masculine principle, that's a masculine principle of spirit. But then I have to become, once I have that intention set, I have to become receptive, I have to be able to enter into the trance state, using the drum or whatever method you use to enter trance states and people dance. Some people take plant medicine, whatever your method is, you have to be receptive to that, or it's not going to be effective. So you have to, you have to embody both masculine and feminine principles and your spirituality. And so that, you know, spiritual work takes place is much more effective when you embrace both sides when you embrace the active and the receptive, the masculine and the feminine. It's super, super important. Um, you know, one last thing I'll talk about before, before I leave you this time, is you know, so I sit with a lot of shamanic circles, I have taught numerous classes I have taken years and years and years of training. And in my experience, um, I am frequently either the only man in the room, or one of very few. You know, I think the most number so, you know, let's say I, you know, I went and I took a class, I went and took a class on, you know, teaching, teaching shamanic journey to others. years ago. I think there were two other men in that class of about 24 people. And that was the highest ratio I've ever experienced in any class, I've taught any training I've given any class I've taken, that's been the highest ratio. So there's this sort of mystery to me, that I'm plumbing the depths of why more men don't get involved in this type of work. In it's not just shamanic work, any type of spiritual work when I do I used to before pre pandemic, I used to hold meetups for. We called spiritually conscious professionals, which were people out in the world who were practicing any form of spirituality and wanted to come have conversations with like minded people. And, you know, frequently, maybe, maybe one, one man out of 10, or 12, or 16, or 20, people would show up to these meetings, so I don't think it's just shamanism. I think it's lots of forms of non traditional non Western, non church, spirituality. There are very, very few men doing this work. It's, uh, you know, I understand part of it. But part of it is a mystery to me. And it's tough because it's, it's a little unbalanced. I would love to see more men do this work, I think it is important. My take, and I'm not 100% sure my take on why more men don't do this work is a it's a cultural thing. We do not train men through our, through, you know, particularly culture in the US that Western culture that is prevalent in the US and I realized the US is a very multicultural place. But there's still this cultural force in the US that men don't do this kind of thing. Right. And for a lots of different reasons. shamanism is also gonna put you in touch with some really deep feelings. And again, there's this cultural thing, where it's not acceptable. It's because it's changing. Thank goodness for that, where it's not acceptable for men to have
deep feelings, deep feelings of grief or sadness or love, or, you know, this a gap, a feeling of love of community where you pull everybody up. That's one. That's one aspect, you know, call that culture pushing that thing down. And, gosh, any sort of any sort of shamanic initiation shamanic training is gonna make you confront that stuff. It's gonna pull it up. I have it I have cried in circle ugly tears I have ugly cried in circle and it I gotta tell you I'm, you know, I'm a fairly sensitive emotionally vulnerable man and that is super uncomfortable for me where you know, and I have to confront that in myself I have to say why is that uncomfortable for me? Why is that not okay? Why is it okay? If a woman I'm sitting in circle with like touches something touches some deep trauma in her life and you know cries about it and everybody's comforting her but I feel uncomfortable if that happens to me that's work I need to do and and wow, what what a treasure that is to discover that what a treasure for me to discover the way that cultural forces have pushed, you know, made me push stuff into my shadow and and start to confront that stuff. So I do you wish more men would become involved in this work. The other side of that coin. Right. The other the other aspect that I see happening is that shamanic Practice, practice in particular, and lots of alternate forms of spirituality are non patriarchal, right, we do not have a hierarchy, we do not have authority. I mean, we have, you know, by authority, people who have authority, or people who've practiced for a long time, and our elders that we go to for wisdom. But there's not a structure, there's no Pope and bishops and cardinals and that sort of thing. Right? It is not pyramid shaped, it is circular. And I honestly think that, at least on a subconscious level, a lot of men are uncomfortable with that. There is pressure, you think about the, the the phenomena of mansplaining, right? There's a phenomena you know, the alpha male concept where men feel pressure to be the smartest person in the room, the most powerful person in the room to stand out in some way. And, you know, when you sit in circle, you have to set that aside. And I think that can be uncomfortable for, for a lot of men. You know, you approach everybody, including spirit as equals. And so that is, you know, that gets away from that pyramid structure, that hierarchy, that patriarchal structure, and I think it's so ingrained, it's so ingrained in everything we do you look at the way we set up companies, you look at the way we have schools with principals and vice principals, and department heads and teachers and all those things, you look at universities, where we have, you know, presidents of universities, and then we have boards of directors, and we have Dean's and we have tenured professors and we have, you know, almost every cultural structure we have is a pyramid. And, you know, shamanism and some of these alternate forms of spirituality. And when I mean alternative, I just mean, historically, historically, not the dominant spiritual culture. I don't I don't, I don't take shamanism as alternate to anything. It is my It is my way of being spiritual. I just mean, it's not hasn't been the dominant paradigm, in the culture I live in for my wife's for my lifetime. And for many generations back, okay, so I don't mean any, and I don't mean to denigrate anybody's form of spirituality, I'm just trying to point out things that I'm experiencing, okay, if you are happy in a patriarchal religious structure and power to you, and that, if that empowers you, and you're not disempowering anybody else, then fantastic. That's absolutely, that's absolutely great. Where we get into trouble is where you feel the need to disempower others.
And that is not a place of power, that's actually a place of fear. It's a place of weakness, if you if you feel like you need to repress other people or oppress other people or put other people down or look at them as less than and not equal to, that's where we're gonna run into some problems. And that again, that's a place of fear, not power. Okay. And so, again, onto the sort of divine masculine, divine feminine, the Divine Masculine being these arrows this ability to pick oneself up as a unit and develop and evolve and become closer to spirit and identify more with the undying divine spirit that is the spark inside you at the core of your being and the spirit of a GOP a which is this love this collective. I'm you know I'm divine, your divine, let's bring everybody together. Those things working in tandem, are are pretty unstoppable. It's pretty amazing. Is it a challenge to balance those things in your life? Absolutely 100% that if everybody had that perfect, we would all be enlightened beings, I guess, or something. Something along those lines, it is always, you know, to me, my spirituality, my spiritual development is always a work in progress. I don't believe I'll ever say that I'm done. Not in this lifetime, certainly. Maybe not in 10,000 lifetimes. I don't know. But I actually like that I actually like that I'm a work in progress, right? Because I do not float on clouds. I do not ride a unicorn to kind of circle any of those things. I am. You know, the inside of me, the divine part of me is as perfect as everyone else, which is absolutely perfect, whole, complete and unbroken. And the human parts of me are just as flawed, broken mess as anybody else. And so how can I? How can I identify with anyone? How can I? How can I be on that level of a god Bay, if I can't get down in the muck, with anyone that I'm working with, with anyone that I'm helping if I can't talk about my trauma, my pain, my wounds, that sort of thing. So with that, I'm going to bring this podcast to an end, I hope that you'll subscribe and listen as I as I move on in the future. As I stated in my first episode, my hope is that this will expand that in the future, I will interview other people so I'm not just listening to the sound of my voice. And you're not just listening to the sound of my voice, but that I will bring in other perspectives with people with more more and different knowledge than I have and that sort of thing and I hope to grow. You know, my real hope is to grow a community out of this, you know, podcasts in the other things that I'm doing. I will say and here's the here's the pitch I guess if there is a if there is a pitch here, I hope a I hope you will subscribe. Be coming up in March of 2021. I will be doing a first I will be first of all I am teaching an intro to shamanic journeying class online. I have taught probably dozens of those in person but because of the pandemic. That's just not possible. It's not possible to sit in a room with you know, with 20 people and drumming and journaling safely at this point. I hope it's something I absolutely love doing. So I hope to restore that once the pandemic is under control. So I will be in March I will be teaching over over a weekend, a two day online intro to shamanic journeying class, if some if it's something you've ever wanted to learn. The second part of that that's new for me is ob teaching with three other amazing shamanic teachers. It's, you know, it's a fantastic opportunity for me to experience other people's teaching styles, how they interact with students. And you know, I think it's a great opportunity for anybody who takes the class to get gosh to get four different perspectives and the learning really kind of goes in that way. So you can get more information about this course there's a banner at the top of my website if you click on it will take you to info about the class
which has registration everything and I am at Main shaman, ma i n e sh aman.com that's mainshock calm and if you just want to go find more information about me read articles look at other episodes of this podcast. You can go there as well. I do have a link to the podcast the top which should have every episode This is episode number two. So if you're interested in listening to episode number one, you can go there or find me on everywhere we find podcasts. I have Hope that you're having a fantastic new year I hope to see the end of this pandemic soon. It's my my intention. I know that every shamanic practitioner I've talked to sees this whole global pandemic as an opening to an opening to initiate it's a call to shamanic initiation. And I don't just mean like, people need to everybody needs to start studying shamanism, it is a call, it's a crisis, it's a call to do inner development for the entire planet. And, you know, if some good can come out of this, that that might be a part of it, it might be a part of, you know, you know, well, recognizing the lives lost the lives interrupted, you know, the, the effect on the world, in general, is pretty horrific when you look at it. Um, you know, if we can get good out of this, it's about how we can pull together how we can individually develop, how we can be stronger apart and together, that sort of thing. So with that, I will leave you and I will hope that you will continue to join me in the future.
Announcer 51:31
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