Why Has Shamanism Become So Popular?

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 his John.

John Moore 0:48

Hello, everybody.

It has been a minute since I've done one of these podcasts. And I apologize. It's been a busy summer I've launched a brand new online shamanic community. If you practice shamanism, you can check it out at Shaman community.com. I've been, you know, traveling in state a little bit. I've been Gosh, I've got a whole slew of new students. Clients have been doing house clearings. I'm doing a ceremony for a wedding coming up soon that I'm designing. So a whole bunch of stuff going on. And I want I do want to talk about shamanism today. And I want to talk about modern shamanism. I want to talk about the resurgence in or this surge in interest in shamanism. I want to talk about the shamanic impulse, I want to talk about trauma a little bit. And so Let this serve maybe as a trigger warning, you know, I'm going to tell I'm going to talk a little bit about trauma, specifically, because it's part of my story, but it's also part of the reason why I think shamanism has become as popular as it is popular and trendy, shall we say? I mean, if you type shamanism into Google, you'll see, you know, shamanism in 60 minutes, and, you know, free online classes, and you'd see all kinds of stuff out there. So it is indeed, it has indeed become very popular, which I guess is good for folks like me. You know, it makes me incredibly busy. I haven't even I haven't done any guest podcasting recently. I do want to get back to that in the fall. But I'm in the middle of many things, including buying a house. You have been through that. You understand what a just complete headache. That is a don't know why buying a house in this country has to be so complex, other than there are a whole lot of people making money off of it. Anyway, let's talk. Let's talk about shamans. Let's talk about shamanism, shamanic practice. And if you've listened to any of my podcasts before, I always try to define my terms a little bit. And not because I'm trying to be pedantic or I don't need you to adopt my definitions of things. It is simply for understanding it is simply so that when I say a word like shamanism, that there's an understanding of what I mean when I say that, even if you have a different definition of that it's totally fine. English is a very imprecise language. I've talked about how the word love is really interesting. Because you can have, you can love your children and you can love your romantic partner and you can love cheeseburgers. And those are not the same thing. I hope not anyway. Anyway, let's talk a little bit about shamanism. Just in case you don't know what it is, I'm just gonna briefly I'm going to briefly define shamanism. So don't go away if you know what it is because this is not going to take very long. So when I'm asked, what is shamanism? I answer that in three ways or the three component answer to that. First of all, shamanism is a set of spiritual practices or tools that go back into play read history as far as we can determine. We don't know the origin. If there is a single origin, we don't know the origins of shamanism. But there is evidence of shamanic practice everywhere in the world, archaeologically going back 10s of 1000s, if not hundreds of 1000s of years, I'm just reading about this cave in this cave in Israel where they found, you know, at a sedimentary layer

300,000 years old. That's very old. They found the bone of a swan that had been carved for spiritual purposes. And somehow they're linking that to Swan shamanism. There is, you know, a whole body of academic stuff behind that, that I don't have a background in. But we'll just say that shamanism is really really old. And it encompasses a set of tools, which involve altered states of consciousness, working with spirits, and traveling in non ordinary realms are traveling in other dimensions traveling and spiritual dimensions. Okay, those are the practices. Shamanism also encompasses a worldview and a set of beliefs. This is not to say that all shamans believe exactly the same things. That's not true. Not all Christians believe exactly the same things. Not all Buddhists believe exactly the same things. But there is a common core of belief. And that Common Core includes animism, that is the belief that spirits inhabit things that were surrounded by spirit that there are spirits and trees and rocks and rivers. Besides people and animals. There's also an understanding about the about relationship about the the interconnectedness between things, that we're very connected to nature, we're very connected to the land. And shamanism is very nature based. So those are the first two components. The last component, and this is one that I'm going to focus on a little bit today is that shamanism encompasses an impulse, an archetypal impulse that seems to be present, throughout humanity. Well, it's archetypal. So it's in the collective. And that is an impulse to awaken spiritually in response to crisis. Let me repeat that this is an impulse to awaken spiritually in response to crisis. This crisis could be individual, this crisis could be tribal, this crisis could be global. Can you think of some individual, tribal and you know, we can exchange tribe for national or statewide or community crises? Can we think of some global crises? So in many areas, while many areas of the world there's political upheaval, there is we see authoritarianism and fascism on the rise. I realize everybody accuses everybody of being fascist. without really understanding what Fascism is. If you are calling people fascist, please look it up. I see people like you, liberal fascists, like well, fascism, by definition is an extreme right wing philosophy, political philosophy focused on power and charismatic leaders. And we see that all over the place we see that cropping up. So we have a global pandemic. And we're not we're not done with it. I know people are acting like COVID has gone in granted. We now have vaccines we now have better treatments for people people are not dying. In the ways they were. Our hospitals are not crashing the way they were our economies are still suffering. You know, People, people will try to blame things like inflation on single causes. Normally, some politician they don't like Joe Biden's fault. It's Trump's fault, blah, blah. And I'm not an economist, but it seems to me that there are a lot of compounding factors, which include

price gouging by corporations, particularly in the fuel industry, they are making record profits right now. And that is driving up the cost of everything, all of our goods that are shipped everywhere, from food, to transportation, to HEC to entertainment. We run on a fossil fuel economy, and maybe we shouldn't this is a good indicator that, you know, maybe it's time to think about that a little bit. So, yeah, so there's, you know, there's a bunch of stuff, causing this global inflation that's hurting a lot of people that's putting a lot of people in crisis. Individual crisis, let's talk about that. Let's talk about why. What happens, sorry, about the shamanic impulse and individual crisis for a moment. So when I came to study, study shamanism, and if you're not familiar with my story, in my early 40s, I went through a psychological crisis, I was diagnosed with PTSD. For those of you who know about PTSD a little bit, what I have, it's not technically a diagnosis in the DSM for whatever version they're on. But I have what's called complex or developmental PTSD. So this is the result of trauma that happened over many years. Particularly during during the formative ages of my life. There was severe chemical dependence, abuse, domestic violence, child abuse, we went through periods where we were very poor, or electricity was shut off. When all kinds of stuff, right, I don't, I won't go, not that I'm not. I'm fine to share my story. But I'm, I worry about re traumatizing people. And the reason why I did give a trigger warning at the beginning. But I want to give a little bit of background and I'll be a little bit general about it. So you know, I have, I had been suffering with depression, and suicidal thoughts and anxiety and all kinds of dissociation. And I had no idea it was not. I didn't have any understanding of what PTSD was. And I thought, well, I have not been to war it PTSD is for people who've been to war. And that's just not true. And, you know, a lot of people do that a lot of people do the trauma comparison game. Well, I didn't have it as bad as so and so. You know, whatever. So I just thought, I don't know, this is how this is how I am. I'm just depressed all the time. And sometimes I feel like we'd be life would be better off without me in it. And, you know, things kind of came to a head and one of the things that I learned or have learned sense is that if you have PTSD, particularly complex PTSD from stuff that happened during childhood, if you have children of your own as I do, I have twin daughters, when they get to the age that you were when some of this trauma happened or when the you know, the biggest part of the trauma happened that can trigger things for you, which is an interesting thing for me. Because being a parent was, was and you know, pretty much is still everything to me. You know, I really, really love my children have always loved my children. When I was married, my wife traveled all a lot, so I spent a heck of a lot of one on one time. With my daughters, we are still to this day extremely close. And I love them dearly and wanted to be a good parent. And in every possible way, did, you know went to parenting classes did

you know everything I could to be a good dad and just felt like I couldn't and felt like I was falling down and felt like at times that they would be better off without me. Which is, you know, it's not true. It's just things your brain tells you to kind of cope with stuff, and, you know, suicidal thoughts when you are, you know, having having thoughts like, you know, my kids would be better off without me. If I were out of if I were out of the picture, there would be better off without me, kind of thing. It's horrific. Like when I think about it, now, you know, what was going on? How could it's for it seems foreign to me now. Anyway, things were really, really rough. And what had happened was, I'd gotten super, super depressed. And I thought, well, you know, have major depressive disorder or something, and I'm just gonna, I'm gonna go to therapy. And by the way, I highly recommend therapy, even if you're seeing shamanic healer, do therapies to do everything you can to, to heal. So I started seeing a therapist, and the therapists I don't think was trained particularly well in trauma. And I think that's something that we don't do well. Educationally is, you know, therapists become, quote, unquote, trauma informed. But aren't necessarily fantastic at dealing with trauma. In fact, I've, you know, I've had conversations with many therapists, not just therapists that I have been seeing as a therapist, but therapists who are friends or who studied shamanism with me, I have therapists, as clients actually now, which is pretty cool. Just taking a sip of coffee here. Wow, very hot. I have this lovely thermal mug that says papa bear on it, that my girlfriend, who I adore and love gave to me. But it keeps coffee very, very hot. hasn't quite cooled down enough to be gullible. sippable Yes, but not culpable. Anyway, um, I don't think we do a fantastic job. And some, you know, I remember talking to a therapist about, you know, what's the training around trauma and this and that, and I'm like, Well, you know, there's a little bit but not really enough. And a lot of therapists won't touch trauma with a 10 foot pole. And I'm like, Well, how does that work? Because just about everybody coming to you is coming with trauma. And she was like, Yeah, I know. Okay. So if you're a therapist, and you're listening to this, and, you know, I'm not telling you what to do. And I'm not insulting the, the role of therapy, I highly encourage people, and when my clients come to me with, you know, psychological, emotional, mental health issues. I, you know, I always tell them, you know, I will work with you, but you need to be working with a therapist, and if you're on medication, don't stop taking medication, and cetera, et cetera. So anyway, I was in personal crisis. I won't go into detail about it. But I came very, very close on more than one occasion to taking my own life. And the other, the other. The other aspect of that, that I don't have a great answer for this, but something I would challenge the therapeutic community on. Is that the way that we treat people in crisis in this country in the US, I don't know about other countries, maybe it's better in other places. Maybe it's worse. In the US, the way that we treat people in psychological emotional crisis is not fantastic. You know, they're going to Send. From a lay person's perspective, they're going to send armed people to your home. And they're going to try to talk to you. And there are a lot of people who are, you know, they're emotionally disturbed who won't wind up in altercations with the police right now, and, and our shot.

And, you know, this is not necessarily a criticism of the police, it's that they're not there. They're not equipped for the job. They're not trained to deal with that. So there are pilot programs where they'll have teams of therapists now that will go out. And those have been very successful. They have been. So anyway, one of the things I was really afraid of was any sort of incarceration, any sort of being locked up against my will. I had a, I would say borderline phobic fear of that. So I would not talk to my therapist about the thoughts I was having. I did one time, I said, you know, on, I forget exactly how I put it, but they talked about having suicidal thoughts. And she freaked out, to be honest, and I left the therapy session, and she left me a voicemail that said, you need to call me I was in a meeting. After the therapy session, I was distraught, I was in rough emotional shape. It didn't therapy session didn't go well. And she called me back and she said, left a message that said, if you don't call me back right away, I'm going to have to take steps. Wow, did that sound like a threat to me? At that time, I know what she was doing. She was you know, trying to cover her, but legally, she was, you know, trying to make sure I was okay, you know, whatever. But the way she went about it was probably the only option she had. Even though you know, I was not at that point in time actively suicidal or anything. And her it was a it was a really big overreaction on her part. I didn't stay with her for very long after that, you know, she basically obligated me to come back and do more therapy sessions or war, I was worried that she was going to send people to lock me up. So one of the things that happened was, I decided not to do medication, and that was pretty rough. And I am not telling anybody not to do medication. That would be irresponsible of me, it would be outside of my experience. I am not a licensed medical professional. So I'm not saying that I'm saying it, and people get upset with me all the time. When I say I didn't want to do medication. And if I'm not even going to give my reasons for not wanting to do medication, particularly SSRIs. But I didn't want to do it. But people get really upset with me. And like, well, medication saved my life or medication was fantastic. I didn't say it couldn't get variable people have gotten just like just apoplectic with me for saying I didn't want to do medication. As if I were telling them what to do. I'm not at all you do what you do, you do what is best for you. You are the only person who can make that choice. I am all about empowering people. I work with people I know people I talk with to exercise free will and free choice. I think it's good for people to to be educated for people to get information. However, that in itself is really challenging because there is so much disinformation out there. And they do remember, I remember talking to this therapist that I fired rather quickly. Who was like, Well, you've been depressed for a really long time you need to go on medication. I'm like, Well, you're not a doctor, you can't prescribe medication and I decided not to do medication. And I don't really want to talk about this anymore. She's like, well, you need to stop reading blogs. And like, first of all, you're assuming I got my information from blogs. And I am actually an academic, I have two master's degrees. And I read research for fun. And I have a subscription to JSTOR, which is a,

you know, a repository of academic research. And if I read an article from a non academic source that cites a study, I go read the study, so don't make assumptions about me. Really, you know, I did complain. I did lodge a complaint. She was not a good therapist. And she had really, really overstepped her license, in my opinion. And again, this is not to say, this is not me saying any people shouldn't do Medicaid. I'm not like that at all. What I'm saying is, she's not qualified to make that recommendation. And she was misinformed about a lot of things but felt really confident should some serious Dunning Kruger going on. Anyway, I digress. So I was in a personal crisis and personal psychological crisis, personal emotional crisis, I had lost something like 60 pounds. In a in under two months. I couldn't eat, I wasn't sleeping. Things were really rough. And I was doing everything I could I was going to therapy. I was exercising, I was meditating. And one day, in the depths of everything that was going on, and I was meditating. And I heard a very clear sounding male voice from outside of my head, say, you need to learn shamanism. That was it. And it felt really compelling. So I don't know if it was completely made up. Or if it was Spirit speaking to me, I still think it's spirits speaking to me to this day, because at the time I didn't know anything about shamanism. I didn't know what shamanism was. I had heard the word and it wasn't as popular then as it is today. So I thought to myself, Well, geez, I live in Maine. How the heck am I going to learn shamanism? How am I going to find a teacher? I don't live in Mongolia or Siberia or Peru. I live in the state of Maine. Are there even any shamans here? Interesting thing. There are many shamans here in the state of Maine. The shamanic community in Maine is both large and vibrant. And another sip of coffee which is a still quite, quite hot. Yeah, interesting for such a sparsely populated state, which is happens to be the least diverse state in the nation. And also has the oldest population in the nation, which tells you about us. We're a bunch of old people living alone in the woods. Or a bunch of old white people living alone in the woods. That is that describes Maine to you. But there's a large shamanic community here. Isn't that weird? I still don't know what to attribute that to other than people here live very close to nature. It doesn't matter. Yeah, we live in houses and we have internet and cable and electricity and stuff. But most people who live in Maine are you know, we live we don't live most people don't live in cities. You know, we have a couple of small cities. Not too many. And even then, even if you're in the city, even if you live in Portland, there are will there's wilderness in the middle of the city. You can you know, there are hiking trails through the woods. In the middle of the city. It's not like Central Park in New York or the common in Boston, which is like, you know, some greenery and some nicely planted plants and stuff. We're talking honest to goodness woods. There are a couple places I've been hiking in within the city limits of Portland. A couple of interesting trails there. One with a waterfall. Interestingly enough So anyway, I found my teacher, I found my teacher and started training in shamanism. And I trained with her for quite a long time, many years, I did a year long apprenticeship, I did a two year, a two year initiatory training.

I trained in soul retrieval with her. And I did two years of teacher training with her. So more than five years of training longer than Well, longer than it took me to get to Master's degrees. So kind of, I guess, kind of PhD level training and shamanism did go quite deep. And, you know, teacher training is a whole other whole other animal. And so is the initiatory, to your initiatory program was quite deep work. And work on the self, you know, that's the thing with shamanism is that you necessarily have to work on yourself. If you go into shamanism, thinking, I'm just going to I'm going to take a class, and I'm going to start working with people. And I'm above all of that self work, you are going to have a rude awakening, a quite rude awakening. So the resurgence or the surge in interest in shamanism, I'm going to attribute to a number of factors. One factor is the the fact that we have are going through a large global shift right now. The world is seems very divided right now. That is a phase, we will come through the other side of this and we will be better for it. At some point. It might happen in such a slow fashion that we don't even recognize it happening. Think about, you know, when I think about how much the culture in the US has changed since I was a kid in the 70s Let alone when my parents were kids in the 50s. And their parents were kids in the 20s and 30s. My grandmother, my grandmother is about to turn 106 Holy smokes, Has she seen some stuff, Has she seen some change in not just technologically but in the culture. You know, it's interesting where I grew up, there were there are still a lot of people of French Canadian descent. And I was you know, one generation away from a lot of people who spoke French as a primary language in the home. So I have a friend whose mom who spoke French with his mom until till he had to go to kindergarten. And that's much rarer. Once in a great while I will hear older people speaking this really interesting version of Canadian, French, you know, Quebec, wah French, which is still even changed beyond that. Because it, you know, became into a came into the US in the late 1800s, early 1900s and was spoken in kind of ghetto communities and Mill Towns and so they're the accents and the phrases and the slang are all really interesting. Anyway, our culture is going through a huge shift. We're going through lots of global individual tribal crises at the moment. And that is pushing this impulse for peace people to awaken so many people are coming to me currently well I just I feel called I feel called to learn shamanism I have my plate of students I mentoring is just about full. I don't know that I can handle too many more at this point. Although I love I love teaching shamanism more than anything else I do. Um, and at some point we'll probably get into teaching it again. I was teaching groups, pre pandemic, and I'm probably will get back to that at some point in the near future, which would be pretty, pretty fun. I really, really loved doing that before. I taught mostly intro classes but

coffee's getting tolerable, and temperature. Excuse me, it's delicious, though. So, so that's happening. The other thing the other two components that I think are causing this awakening in shamanism is one is there is wider acceptance and adoption of plant medicines. Now, to be quite clear, not all shamanism involves plant medicine. If you don't know what I'm talking about plant medicine. I'm talking about psychedelics traditionally use psychedelics like ayahuasca and magic mushrooms, psilocybin and peyote and fly agaric mushrooms and substances like that, which are used by some shamanic cultures. Well, that stuff has become really popular again, and there's a lot of research going on and psychedelic medicine for treating trauma, trauma again coming up. And there are a lot of there are a heck of a lot of people doing Ayahuasca recreationally, not I practice I recommend, I'm not saying don't do Ayahuasca or any other substance, I'm saying. Do it carefully do it in ceremony, make sure the person you people have died. People have died and wound up hospitalized from doing Ayahuasca there are you know, it is not? It is not a completely harmless, safe substance, all things have side effects. It is, in my opinion, much more dangerous than psilocybin. Is there a senator but I don't I mean, I don't journey with psychedelics I teach people how to journey without them would not be legal for me to be journeying with psychedelics, it would not be legal for me to be leading people. So not only is just not part of my tradition. You know, if I came from a tribal culture where these substances were part of ceremony and ritual and have been part of the culture for a long time, that would be different. But anyway, this stuff has become really popular, which has interested people in exploring the psychedelic landscape of shamanism. So those two things have happened. So the other thing that I think is driving this is this movement away from religiosity, toward but towards spirituality. There's this huge demographic movement away from organized religion in the United States, with the fastest growing segment of people identifying themselves as spiritual but not religious. And shamanism is spirituality. But it's not a religion in the sense that it's not an organized religion. There's no doctrine or dogma there. There are organizations for teaching and studying shamanism, but there's not you know, there's no hierarchical you're a priest, you're a church, you know, whatever. There's no there's nothing like that out there. Now, I, I have, I have become ordained so that I can perform ceremonies legally. You can't, you cannot. As far as I know, nobody is ordaining shamans, but I'm also studying. I'm studying for another ordination at the moment, which will take a little while. But I'm getting in. I'm going through an advanced degree program studying metaphysics along with a theological seminary which will result in you know, me getting ordained into a metaphysical church. So, I don't know what I'll do with that yet. But probably, you know, I'm not interested necessarily in starting like, Church of shamanism are something that seems outside of the tradition, but if I if I lead ceremony, it will be informed by my shamanic background and all of that stuff. So we'll see what happens from there. So anyway, people are moving towards spirituality but away from organized religion and shamanism is not an organized religion, but it contains.

You know, it contains ways to become spiritually connected, connected with a community, it, it has many of the things that religion offers, and a lot of the things that people who don't want to be religious don't are rejecting are missing from shamanism, right, the judgment and the dogma and, you know, this isn't, you know, I realized I'm painting religion with a really broad brush, and I don't, I'm not, I don't mean to be bashing anybody's religion. That is not what I'm trying to do. I'm talking about the movement, what's going on psychographically demographically, and why this is happening.

So anyway

so this movement towards spirituality, you know, we see this with people, you know, doing yoga and meditation, and we see lots of Westerners taking a Buddhism and, you know, that sort of thing. But one of the things about shamanism is that it's so old that it predates modern, any modern existing language. It predates any modern existing religion. It predates civilization. Right, it pre, you know, it predates writing. Because we have archaeological records, but not a lot of written records. We have a lot of oral traditions as well, but not a lot of written stuff. So it predates it, you know, by 1000s and 1000s, maybe 10s, maybe hundreds of 1000s of years, predates all of that. So my personal take, is that we all have shamanic ancestors, all of us. Shamanism is our birthright. And recent EEG research shows that the shamanic state of consciousness is unique, but shared among practitioners. So shamanic practitioners who are using drums to journey all go into the same state of the same brainwave state. That but it's completely different than anything else. So this is regardless of any demographic information. So shamanic journeying, shamanic state of consciousness, I'm gonna say it's in our DNA. I'm gonna say that it's, we haven't found a shaman gene. It's probably universal, but the ability for our brains to produce the shamanic state seems universal, this unique state. Why? Well, you know, it would make sense that we evolved to produce that shamanic state. That shamanic practice served an evolutionary purpose it sure as heck did because shamans were the doctors and the psychologists and the people who predicted the weather and people who told you when to plant corn, or where to hunt the or rocks or you know, what have you. And so, the Shaman was, you know, one of the most important functions or functionaries in any tribal group necessary to its survival. And if you didn't have somebody who could heal the sick and tell you which plants were safe to eat, or where to find shelter, or where to when to hunt, or those kinds of things. Your tribe didn't survive. You didn't pass your genes on. So the shamanic you know, the shamanic Maybe someday we'll figure out the genetics of it, I don't know. But that role is in our, and I mean, our everybody, I do not exclude a single person on this planet. When I say that shamanism is your birthright if you this isn't to say that everybody should practice shamanism. I'm not saying that at all. In fact, I would say the opposite I would say that shamanism is not for everyone.

You know, it is a difficult path for one thing. And it's, you know, it's not a go to church on Sunday kind of thing. It is beyond a full time job. It affects every area of your life. In one way or another, it affects every relationship you have, in one way or another. The practice of shamanism fundamentally changes who you are. But we do need a lot more people on this planet, to be beacons of spiritual light, which is a term that I use with my students in particular. And when I say that I'm doing when I when I what I am doing when I'm teaching is that I am trying to light the flame of this person's soul so that they become the beacon of spiritual light they were meant to be, which just means they show up in the world, whether they wind up working as a shamanic practitioner or not, or just working on themselves or just journeying for friends and family or whatever they do. The practice of shamanism changes how you show up in the world. And it does, you know, it makes it puts you in touch with nature, it puts you in touch with the earth. It puts you in touch with other beings. It makes you more empathetic. So, so, this is not to say that everybody who practices shamanism is a fantastic person. That would be prejudice on my part. In fact, I have been in a relationship with somebody who was a shamanic practitioner who went to being quite abusive. And so no, not everybody is who studied shamanism. But that being said, Is it moves the needle it moves people towards being better citizens of the Earth, towards being better friends, better parents, better spouses better all of those things. And it can turn you into somebody who is is a helping person. Somebody who helps others through healing, work through divination, work, whatever it happens to be. So one of the things one thing I want to touch on briefly before I wrap this up is this this is happening less than less and which is good as people become more educated. But I have been accused from time to time of cultural appropriation I have there are people who have used quite pejorative terms about what I do. People who don't know what I do, what I teach what I study, people have no idea whatsoever, yet are very happy to ignorantly tell me that what I'm doing is wrong because of some reason that isn't true. Only in their head. But there is their art. There are problems with cultural appropriation or what I call cultural misappropriation. All cultures borrow, in fact, the word shaman, you know, people say oh, that's not your word. It comes from the tongue just people of Siberia, sure, but they didn't make the word up and the word exists in Chinese Sanskrit Pali Hebrew air Aramaic. We don't know who invented that word. So calm down. Okay? And the fact that you think that it originated there means you have you don't know. So trying to tell me that you are morally superior because of an opinion that is based in ignorance. I'm not being pejorative here, but it is ignorance, lack of knowledge that you're basing your opinion on.

But if I were this, you know, something I will never do. I will never put on buckskins and adopt a Native American name and go out and pretend to do Native American ceremony. Now, people have accused me of stealing Native American religious practices. I do not do that. That's like accusing me of murdering Lincoln. You know, I wasn't around, I didn't do it. Somebody else did it. And we know who did it.

And I make it very, very clear when I teach people. I'm like, I am not. Some people think that shot. First of all, Native American tribes, not all of them are shamanic. And not all Native American ceremonies are shamanic. Some are, some are not. And while I have academic books about Native American shamanism I don't replicate Native American ceremonies, that would be problematic, unless now I know people who are native, who are pipe carriers for tribes who are in fact, Caucasian. And we could argue the appropriateness of that, but I would not be arguing from a place of intelligence. But these are people who tribal elders gave the right to conduct certain ceremonies. But I digress. I don't do that. I don't do things that I don't have a right to teach, or don't have knowledge of. And I also don't pretend, like I come from a culture that I don't that's the other part of the thing. You know, people you know, they're definitely they're definitely problems with. I've witnessed, at least online, people in Portugal, doing a quote unquote, shamanic initiation on a young boy, surrounded by Celtic idols and imagery, wearing a patchy war bonnets. And I'm like, What's going on here? Oh, they're doing it. It's shamanic initiation. Isn't that beautiful? And like, I don't, I don't know, why are these are these people Apache? Why are they? Why are they wearing Apache regalia? Why would people wearing Apache regalia be surrounding themselves with Celtic symbols? They just like threw all of these cultural things together to seem more special or you know, whatever. And that really is misappropriation. I don't think they these people, it didn't seem like they were intending harm. But that doesn't mean it was okay. And I did call them out. I'm like, Look, I don't know what you're doing. But you seem like white European people to me. And if that is true, if you are not, you know, part of this tribe or allowed to be wearing these things, you probably shouldn't Plus, you're confusing a whole bunch of like stuff from, you know, new. You're calling it shamanic. But you've got this, these war bonnets and you've got these Celtic symbols around you and you've got this and you've got that and all of these things. The flip side to this is there. There are people who have called me out for talking about Celtic shamanism, saying, There's no such thing as Celtic shamanism, and that is crap. It's bullcrap. And there are people who are quote unquote experts in Irish literature or whatever who talk about there's no you know, there's no Celtic. There's no Celtic shamanism. Well, because they didn't read the they didn't use that word. The word shaman in Gaelic, but there were certainly shamanic practices, there were certainly people doing shamanic things. And the Celts were a large, a very large group and not monolithic, group. And, you know, spread, you know, loose collection of tribes that was sort of bound by like, you know, somewhat common languages. And certain skills like they were, the Celts were expert metal workers and things like that. And we think of them as Irish, you know, Irish and Scottish and Welsh these days. But the vast majority, that's just where the last Celts wound up living, but there were Celts throughout Europe. And they interacted with people from all over who were definitely shamanic, the Norse for one thing.

Norse people, not just Vikings, the Viking era was a very short period of time, amongst the Norse, but there nor the Norse people and and, you know, Celtic people definitely interacted and so did lots of, you know, lots of other tribes. So there would have been cultural sharing. So it just makes no sense to me to think of that plus we have, you know, we have legends of shape shifting holy people, which is predominantly shamanic. Anyway. One of the reasons I talked about trauma in the beginning and crisis and this driving people in is that shamans have been working with trauma for 1000s of years. And yes, there's a lot of new research in trauma and treating trauma and all that sort of thing. And hopefully this gets better and better and better. But I think it can be informed by how shamanic peoples work with trauma. And the trauma. The shamanic treatment for trauma is called Soul Retrieval. It's a type of ceremony that restores what people perceive as a fractured self, which is very much what happens you're very much in alignment with modern theories on trauma. I think the psychological community and the shamanic community are talking about the same things. But using different language. It says if I were describing trauma in French, or I were describing trauma in English, it would speak about those things using different terms. But we're talking about the same thing. In this case, it's a different perspective. It's a spiritual perspective versus a potentially medical perspective. We still don't medically we still don't fully understand trauma, we know that it is extremely complex that the body is involved. There's somatic stuff happening, there's stuff happening with the vagus nerve, there's, you know, stuff stored in our body, we do things like armoring and all kinds of stuff. So you know. But, you know, hopefully, you know, we're seeing again, we're seeing this psychedelic research going on with trauma treatment, and I'm encouraged by that. Typically with entheogenic compounds like psilocybin. Anyway, just want to talk a little bit about the resurgence in the interest in shamanism trauma crisis, why this is happening. And I will, with that, I hope you are I hope you're doing well and I will talk to you real soon.

Announcer 59:37

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.

Ep39 Astral Projection, The Astral Body, And Shamanic Journeying

Announcer 0:28

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

John Moore 0:43

Hello, everybody. Good morning or whatever time of day it is, where you are when you are listening to this. It is morning here. It is a brisk morning. It's November in Maine where I live. And it was about 24 degrees Fahrenheit this morning, when I drove my daughters to school, that for you in the world of Celsius is below zero. It's freezing ice on my windshield this morning when I went out to my car. It's cold, but it's nice. It's nice to feel the brisk air. I'm one of these people that excuse me, that enjoys the changes and seasons a whole lot. It's one of the nice things about living in the Northeast. Today, my friends, I'm going to talk to you about things, mysterious things, I'm going to talk to you about astral projection, the astral body, the astral plane, and I am going to relate it all to shamanism. Because that's what I know. I'm sure there are lots of other people who have different perspectives. And that's cool. But I do try to not speak from a perspective that I don't have that would not be helpful for anyone and it would make me look silly. And that's not something I want to do. So I'm going to talk about the astral today, particularly the astral body and astral travel, astral projection, the astral plane. But I think you know, what I need to do. First is to set a baseline and to SET set up, you know, this is something I would like to do, I like to define my terms and talk about, you know, set a baseline for what I'm explaining. And this is not because my explanations are better than anybody else's. It's or that I expect you to, you know, adopt my definitions without question. This is only so that you can better understand what I mean, when I'm talking about what I'm what I happen to be talking about. So I'm going to set a baseline, I'm going to talk about some definitions. And certainly, I'm going to be talking about spiritual things which are non physical and are experienced in different ways depending upon who you are, and what culture you come from, and all kinds of things. So there will be definitions of the same word that don't match mine, there will be different words used for the same things that I'm describing. And that's totally fine. These are not contradictions. These are just differences in the way that words are used. So for example, in the United States where I live, I call something an elevator. And in the UK, they call it a lift. who's right and who's wrong? Well, nobody's nobody's wrong, right? We just use different words for the same thing. And you know, there are other words were over there. A biscuit means something means what we would call a cookie over here. I watch a lot of the great British baking show. It's one of my favorite shows. And after remember, when they're talking about biscuits, they're not talking about what we call biscuits. Is that right? It's not right or wrong. It just how they're using words. So that's my only intention in when I say this is what this means. It is always what it means to me. And whether or not you adopt that. I don't it doesn't matter to me if you adopt my definitions of things. I just want I want to create understanding between us So I'm going to, I'm going to start by talking about a little bit about models. And I promise I'm going to get to where, where I'm going, I promise, I'm going to get to the astral stuff first. But I need to talk about models a little bit. And what I mean by model is a representation of something, something that is symbolic, but in a representational way. So if I look at the word, food, written out of these paper, that's a symbol for food. But it's not representational. It doesn't look like food. Right? I can't pick it pick it up. I can't. But when my daughters were little, they played with little plastic.

They played with plastic representations of food a lot. We had plastic fruit and plastic, vison plastic that and they would play grocery store and kitchen and I don't know throw plastic fernet each other whatever they would do with it. Those are models of fruit, they are not fruit. They're models because they're representational. Okay, so a model includes something that might like a map. A map is representation of, you know, an area, these maps all the time, you know, when I'm trying to get places maps in my phone, my GPS helps me navigate places where I would get lost normally. And the map and there is a model, because the model is not the road, but the road is represented there. And I can, you know, it is somewhat useful to me to be able to look at a representation of the road and see where I'm supposed to be going. So models always have to limitations, right, every model, no matter what it is, if it's a model of you know, a plastic model of food, or a map, or a model, you know, plastic model that you build or an architect's model that they build of a building they're about to construct, or a mental model, which is a representation of something. All models have two major limitations. And we'll call those limited limitations, deletions and distortions, right. So deletions are the old maps delete a certain amount of information. There are no maps that I'm aware of out there that are, first of all, one for one representations, right? There's an old joke from the comedian, Stephen Wright, who said, I have a full scale map of full scale map of the United States, it says one mile equals one mile, it's very difficult to fold, right? It's kind of funny, if you think about that, that wouldn't be a very useful map, right. And so all maps, delete certain amounts of information. So if I'm looking at a topographical map, for example, it's going to show me elevation, and lakes and all of that stuff. But it probably not going to show me like population density, because that's not useful when I'm using that kind of map when I'm trying to like, navigate a mountain range or something like that. And a street map is a different kind of map. And that helps me navigate the streets. But it might not show me elevation, or it might not show me where people's houses are. So it necessarily deletes information, no map is complete. And when we understand that, we can start to question our own mental models of things when we think we know everything. About anything, trust me, we do not. Because everything that we hold in our minds are models or models of what the reality of something is. And you can know a whole lot about something right? You could be an expert in. I went to school with somebody who was studying fish neurology. Right. I have to say that is you know, he's probably the only person I know there are probably lots of fish neurologist out there but um, does a very specific thing and you can gain a lot of expertise when you learn something, but does he know absolutely everything there is to know about fish neurology, probably not, or a specific nervous system of specific breed of fish. He would know more than certainly more than I do. So this person has a mental model of fish neurology, that is probably much more detailed, has much less than deletion than I have. So that is the first limitation is deletion, and the other one is distortion, and that no map is a perfect representation. Some maps get rich, or models, I'm sorry, some models get really close, you know, the plastic fruit model is not very accurate, you know, the shapes, the sizes might be different. If I cut it open, it's not going to look the same on the inside. If I look at it under a microscope, you know, it's not going to have cells the way fruit might.

Same thing with a map, maps gonna distort slightly. And, you know, we know that there are inaccuracies in all maps, there's a level of inaccuracy there, there, you know, some distortions there. Also, the Earth is round, hate to tell you, if you think the earth is flat, I have actually flown around the earth. And it is a ball. Like every other planet, in our solar system, and probably most likely in the universe, it is a ball. And it, it's round. So when I have a map that I can lay out flat on the table, it has to distort, because, you know, it might try to represent the curvature of the earth. But again, it's a flat, it's a flat map. You know, if you've ever seen them, you know, maps of the world where they try to lay out all the countries on a flat surface are incredibly distorted. They have to be, you know, because the world isn't flat, it's a globe. And when you try to lay everything out, you know, and it doesn't curve, right. So things on the same things on the same latitude don't curve around the poles. That is very distorted. So all maps, delete, and distort. Why am I talking about? I'm using the term map and model kind of interchangeably here. Sorry. Why am I talking about models? Why am I talking about maps? Well, because I'm going to and I spent a lot of time on this. And I realize this, but it's really important. It's really important even beyond what I'm going to talk about today, to start to look at the models of things we hold in our, in our brains in our consciousness and our unconsciousness. We look at the models of things we and we start to realize that we do we everything we look at everything we think we know is missing information, and is distorted. Right? So we do not accurately 100% accurately know anything that's just impossible. And becoming comfortable with that is a cool thing. It allows us to play with our perception of reality a little bit. Robert Anton Wilson, whether you like his writing or not wrote about we live in these reality tunnels. We live in these paradigms, these reality tunnels where if something really bizarre happens outside of our the the tunnel vision we have about the reality we live in, we tend to negate it because it's hard for us to grasp. And we have this thing called cognitive dissonance, which is it's hard to it's hard to hold competing feelings or competing ideas in your head at the same time. So if I were so I believe that the world is round, I have experienced the world is round. I've been up in a plane and gone, you know, flown completely around the Earth. I went to Asia, flying in one direction, and they came back flying in another direction. So I have been around, I've been around the earth and seen it seen it as round. So it would be hard for me to simultaneously hold to the idea that the earth is flat. That would cause a level of discomfort and that's called cognitive dissonance. So what I asked then, for you and for myself, is, you know, you when you develop some flexibility in your belief system and your models of the world, you become more adaptable, you become more resilient. So when you can step in and say, okay, you know what, what if I'm not saying you need to change your beliefs about anything, but you'll be like, what if I didn't believe this or what if I believe something different? How would that affect me you can do these mental experiments, and they can prove very fruitful. You can find out, you can learn things about yourself, you can learn things about the world, you can start to empathize with other people as well. Because you can take on their perspective better. So now that I've gone through all of that,

I spent a quarter of the show talking about models, but I think it's important, I could do an entire show about this. But I'm going to apply this to some shamanic and spiritual stuff, I promise. So I'm going to talk about the astral and I'm going to talk about first models of I'm just going to deal with human beings at this point, you think of a human being. So my model in my brain of a human being is an individual, a person, okay, human being has has a body, they have a mind they have a spirit. This is my model, some people have different models have different constructs. And of course, there's deletion distortion going on with my model of what a human being is, I understand that and if you understand that, it makes it makes taking on new ideas much easier. So, in my model of human beings, they are my concept of what humans are there complex systems, a human being is a complex system of inter penetrating and interlocking systems. Interlocking may not be a great word, but I have to come up with a better one, interactive systems, many, many, many, many interactive systems. So I will give you an example, we will take the physical body, if we take that as a single system, the physical part of human being, we have all of these systems, we have the nervous system, the respiratory system, the circulatory system, the digestive system, the reproductive system, all of these systems. And so just the body is a very, is a set of very complex systems. And there are you know, like I said, there's somebody who studies fish neurology, so you can have, you have experts who studied just kind of one system at a time. However, let's talk about how these systems interpenetrate interact and interlock. So if I just think about my respiratory system, we'll get even simpler, I'll talk about my lungs, just specifically my lungs. Okay, that's part of my respiratory system. Well, my lungs move in part, because of the diaphragm muscle in my stomach. So, you know, is that is my diaphragm part of my respiratory or muscular system? Or are these two systems interacting and interpenetrating? Somehow? Do they sometimes occupy the same space? Do they, you know, do they work together? We're talking about the ribs that go around my lungs, and those are, you know, there are muscles, their muscles there, and the ribs have a certain amount of cartilage and, and flexibility and my ability to breathe is affected by my ribs, ability to flex and move and the musculature in there. So there's, you know, now we have at least three systems working together. Okay, and then inside my lungs, and you know, you'll pardon me if I'm not a doctor. I'm not an expert. But so I'm going to, you know, if I'm, if I'm Miss speaking a little bit about where things where things lie, please forgive me, it's just to make a point. So inside my lungs, there are nerves, nerve cells, whatever that pick up things like the amount of carbon dioxide I have in my system and relay that to my brain. So there's an overlap with the nervous system. And of course, the nervous system overlaps with the, the you know, the the musculature that creates my breathing and, you know, so everything interacts interpenetrates

these systems don't live in isolation. Okay, so the physical body is one system. In many esoteric or occult practices, schools of thought there are humans have many bodies Okay, the physical is one the physical is dense matter, it's matter, it's very dense it has mass, it has weight, it has a definite shape, you know, that we can deform that shape, we can change it, but it is rather solid, we experience it is rather solid. And then, you know, the the other, the other bodies that essentially overlap and interpenetrate and interact with the physical body and with each other, get less and less dense. So, you know, at kind of the next level of density, we have the etheric or energy body, right. And if you've had acupuncture, or practice Tai Chi, or gotten Reiki, this is energy body work, things that may closely align with the very close to the physical body closely align, there are, you know, again, the energy body has many systems, you know, in acupuncture, if you look at, you know, acupuncture charts, they're all these meridians and vessels and, you know, all of this stuff. And, you know, outside of that outside of the body, you have what's called the etheric double, which is what a lot of people see when they see auras. You know, it's a thick energy that extends outside the body, slightly, you know, slightly outside the body an inch or a couple inches away. And then beyond that is what people call the aura. Right, if you see auras, and that can go many, many feet, dozens of feet, or sometimes it's very close, and that is much less formless, it's less dense than the meridians and the the, the, you know, the vessels and and it's much less dense than the etheric double. So, again, the etheric body, if you you know, embodies a weird term for it, because we think of body being very physical, but the etheric body is the closest spiritual body that we have to, to the physical, in this model, and we talk about density oriented about frequency is the closest frequency to the material world. And the etheric body is very affected by the physical body. So, for example, this is how tai chi or Qigong work, right, we move, we move energy around in our bodies by moving our bodies, because these things interact, much like flexing my diaphragm, moves air into my lungs. Okay, these things are interactive and independent, inter penetrative. So, you know, if we're going, and again, you know, I'm making these artificial distinctions. This is a model that is, you know, it's it's deleting information, and it's distorting. So where does one body end and the other one begin? It's really, really hard. It's really up for debate. And it doesn't really matter all that much to me anyway.

And what matters and model I'm going to go back to models just for a moment, what matters to in any model is really how useful it is how, how suited it is to purpose. So a street map is very helpful to me if I am navigating in a car, where a topical topographical map might not be as helpful, because I don't need to know the elevations of mountains with no roads on them, not going to be driving through them. But I could still use it as kind of suited. But if I'm trying to determine the elevation of a mountain, or the depth of a lake or something like that, then the map and my phone, the GPS, and my phone is probably not going to be suited for that. But they're both models of the same thing. So again, the model is what measures how can a model is, you know, good is a relative term, but it's really how suited something is to its purpose. So just for explanation, I'm using this model, I realize it's not perfect, and in some esoteric systems, they're going to use these different bodies in different ways. And so they will have a different map of the bodies and that's totally fine. I understand that these things will differ. I'm okay with that. I understand how models work. I have a model of models that's very useful. So when we move beyond the ether, Eric, the energy body kind of the next level down in this model is the astral the astral Body and the astral body is less dense than the etheric. It is a different frequency. I don't know if you'd call it higher or lower, but I perceive it as higher in frequency. The physical body to me is perceived as we're talking about vibrational frequency as lower in frequency because it's closer, you know, it's physical, it's slower, right? Then slower than thought, for example. So let's talk about the astral people might know astral projection, right? out of body experiences. So the astral is the realm of imagination. And that's really where, you know our imagination interacts with our spirit. So there's an overlap of what we call the mental body, the emotional body, all of these, all of these things. The as we get, as we get less dense as we move away from the physical, things become more formless. So the astral body is more formless than the etheric body, the etheric body is very closely follows the pattern of the physical body. When I move my arm, the arm of my etheric double whammy, my physical arm, I'm also moving, the meridians that go through my arm that are part of the etheric and I'm also moving my etheric double in a way and probably affecting my aura a bit. So the astral is much less dense and is much more formless. However, when we astral travel or dream, when you dream, you're dealing with the actual because again, it is the, the realm of imagination. Things can seem to have quite a lot of form. And this is just our consciousness making meaning out of these things. And in so when, when I perform a shamanic journey, which is which is a type of astral travel, I leave my body using an altered state of consciousness and they travel in these non ordinary realms.

I am not actually traveling traveling anywhere physical, right? If I go to the lower world, I am my travel into the earth is metaphoric. Right. I'm not going into a pool of lava somewhere into the core of the Earth. I'm traveling to another realm, I'm using that I'm using my imagination too, and metaphor to tune into these realms. But they all you know, because they are so Formalists time and space doesn't really apply to them in the same way that applies the physical world we know that time and space are intimately linked with mass and the astral body has does not have what we would consider mass. So well Time flows in the astral it is much looser, and this is why we can do things in the astral like look at probable futures. And I will say that the future the physical future is not set in stone. So anybody who predicts the future is predicting probabilities. Anybody who affects things in the future through magical or esoteric means is affecting probabilities tipping things in one direction or another. And honestly, that is totally fine. Like that's you know, that's okay to understand that. So time does flow but it flows in a really different way and where we kind of explore probabilities we can also go backward in time and explore past lives or you know, things that things that happened 10 minutes ago or what have you in some level of detail because those things are recorded they recorded in the astral so so the astral so astral projection people kind of know about and I'll tell you that when I was a boy, um, I had a number of out of body experiences. And at first they frightened me. And then I became really interested in them and then I found a book in my library About out of body experiences. And I tried for a really long time to replicate them with some, you know, with some success. And some, you know, some failure, didn't really know what I was doing. But thought it was fascinating had some lucid dreams as well. Lucid dreaming is very close. And then I started studying shamanism and shamanism has a tried and true method for getting out of your body and doing work and doing things on the spiritual realm. And that's cool, because now I can do this. Now I can do this at will and it's much more useful. It was a kid I was just curious. My journeys these days, are less curious and more purposeful. I do journeys for clients, I do journeys to divine formation to provide healing, that sort of thing. So, in a class recently that I was teaching, a student asked, what is the difference between astral travel and shamanic journey? And my answer to that and other practitioners might disagree, but the you know, the other practitioners I've talked to seem to think that this fits is that astral travel is mostly when people do that when people project astrally is mostly what we would call a Middle World journey in shamanism it is one type of shamanic journey. And the difference is that it is when we journey in shamanism we always go with a helping spirit, particularly in the Middle World. The Middle World is the spiritual overlay of the physical world, is the astral version of the world that we live in. So we live in the middle world because we live in this we live in this environment and there isn't a spiritual component behind everything.

Which is at the essence of everything. And that's the astral and when we travel when we do Middle World journeying, we can see physical objects but what we're seeing is the astral and etheric representations of those. So we can see spirits we can see ghosts ghosts are also astral beings. Most of the time, at least in my experience, they do not have an etheric component. So one of these days I will deeply explore on this show what happens when we die and what about ghosts and what about reincarnation and all those things. I'll do that in depth. But when we have ghosts when they're stuck here, at least in my experience, they are they are astral. So their mental their mental components the etheric form kind of gets stripped away. Now, um, the astral and etheric bodies can be strongly affected by our life experiences. That's why acupuncture works acupuncture and Reiki work on the etheric. They work in the energy body. And we can have we can have wounds to our energy body. The evil eye is something that exists in many the idea of the evil eye is something that exists in many, many cultures. And I can tell you, that is a real thing that some people just have some people seem to be genetically able to do this. And it is extremely damaging to the etheric body. It's you can imagine it as sort of like laser beams shooting out of somebody's eye when they feel really angry or jealous or what have you. And it can burn into the etheric body which can cause sickness and bad luck and all kinds of all kinds of things. I'll do a whole episode on luck too. Because luck isn't just a concept it's an energy in my model of in my model of things so you know, the astral when we add when when people astral project when they practice astral projection and lucid dreaming and stuff they're doing, they're traveling and they're, but they're not going with helping spirits which is what shamans do. So when I travel in the Middle World, I will always ask helping spirits to accompany me. The reason for that is, one is they act as tour guides they show me if I'm looking for something or I'm trying to find a person that I'm working with or I'm trying to find lost soul essences, and soul essences or astral talk about that in a moment. So When, you know, when we travel, you know, the other thing that can happen is, you know, there can be suffering spirits out there. So ghosts and you know non human spirits and all kinds of things. And not always spirits that mean us harm, but spirits that could do us some damage if they just decided to hang out, or follow us home or wreak some havoc in our lives. And so helping spirits protect us that way as well. And so, you know, it's a little bit of a caution about astral projection. If it's something you practice all the time, you might want to take up, you know, learn from a shamanic teacher, such as myself or somebody else, shamanic journeying, the it'll only make your astral projection better, and it will definitely make it safer. So when I travel in my astral body, the astral body because it is really affected, the astral is really affected by imagination. And imagination doesn't just mean I'm making things up, it means I'm giving form to something I'm giving an image imagine I'm giving an image to something. So it will appear and I'll have I'll hear sounds and I'll I'll have sensations that I'll feel and I'll smell things. But these are not coming in through physical organs, they're coming in as spiritual information interpreted in my consciousness as more or less physical things, although, you know, it's very loose, there's shape shifting that can happen, you know, when we talk about shape shifting, I have never witnessed somebody physically shape shifting. So I don't know if that is a realistic thing or not. If it is, it's very rare. But I have experienced shape shifting on the astral both myself and others.

Other people who are you know, in human, still in human body, but who are you know, meeting me during a journey. And spirit shape shifts all the time I helping spirits show up in different ways. So, one of the things one of the ways this gets really interesting is when you look at spirits from mythology, Gods and Goddesses and angels and Mythological Beings, right. And, you know, these things do exist. They exist, at least because people have given them form imaginative form. But, you know, honestly, when you look at how there's overlap between all of the myths of the worlds, you realize that there there's something to it, there's an essence there. There's something underneath that that's happening. But what you do have very frequently is you will have Gods and Goddesses are certain beings that will take on different forms depending upon how they're represented. So, in so for example, in you know, Hinduism and some forms of like tantric Buddhism and stuff, you will have deities who will have, you know, will have like, a, I don't know what you call it, like a happy form and a wrathful form, and the wrathful form might be very brutal looking, for example, in you know, it certainly happens in Greek mythology, you hear a lot of shapeshifting, Zeus was always turning himself into stuff. Right. So these, because these beings that we might consider gods and goddesses can show up in different forms. It doesn't mean they're different beings, and even different names for the same being. Because honestly, you know, spiritual beings that are that advanced and that advanced is kind of a weird word, but there really are like, like foreign to the point of being space aliens for us to try to understand for us to try to understand them. We anthropomorphize them, meaning we turn them we give them human form. So we you know, depending upon your beliefs, many religions and spiritual belief systems have a very person like image of God if you are monotheistic or if you are polytheistic you probably have gods and goddesses that are more or less human formed. There are some differences we have what are called therian throats, which are beings that are half beast and half human or some part human. So we have things like fawns and Sati ears which are, you know, either part goat and part human or part horse and part human. And we have harpies, or which are, you know, birds with human heads, and we have sirens, the sirens who can appear as mermaids, or, you know, so half fish, half human or half bird and half human. So those are things you know. And so that's a very common shamanic theme, as well. And we see that in cave paintings from 10s of 1000s of years ago, we see human beings with deer antlers, or we see people turning into Buffalo. And that is such a common theme. And it's one of one of many, many reasons why we think shamanism goes back to the beginnings of human symbolic thought. Right, where people started adopting spirituality and doing arts, you know, making representations of things in deep caves, which were pretty sure those were the reason for that was spiritual, like, you know, if you were living from hunt to hunt,

in a very harsh environment, you probably wouldn't crawl on your belly, through a quarter mile long cave to spend, you know, years, decades, even, you know, sometimes there are cave paintings that are, you know, 1000s of years apart in the same cave, to just to paint some art in a place where you weren't living. Because we know that they're, you know, they're these caves that are full of paintings that have no evidence of people living or eating in them. You know, so, pretty sure that these were added because of the images that these were spiritual things. So were people at one time able to turn into animals in the physical realm? I don't know. I mean, I don't know. I don't understand how it could be possible. But there are lots of things today that we didn't think were possible some time ago, faster than light communication and quantum entanglement, and, you know, space travel and flight. So I think of my grandmother, my grandmother just turned 105 She was born in 1916. In bath, Maine, still around still kicking. And when I think about what it was, like, when she was born in 1916. And if I had been around then and told her, you know, say she was 519 21. And I had told her, you know, in your lifetime, we will spend, we will send spacecraft, you know, to the end of the solar system. And we will send people into space, and people will walk on the moon and how crazy might I have sounded? Yeah, there was sci fi back then. You know, there was HG Wells and Jules Verne and all of that stuff back then. But um, you know, that was pretty fanciful. And if I had, you know, if I had told her that we would have machines where we could see inside the human body using magnets. That would have sounded crazy, very unrealistic. So who knows? Who knows what's possible? Nobody knows what's possible. We know it's probable. And that that's exciting to me. So let's talk about the astral plane. So this is a thing and people think when they're traveling, you know, their astral projecting, they're projecting to the astral plane, as if there is one. That's sort of like me saying, I'm traveling to Europe. Sure, where, you know where in Europe? There are many men, you know, am I traveling to Eastern Europe? Am I traveling to Western Europe? Am I traveling to the parts of Europe where they speak French? Am I going to the Alps? Am I going to Northern Scandinavia, you know that not really specific Europe is a general location, as is the astral plane because there are. So shamans when we journey generally, we recognize three worlds, the upper world, the Middle World, and the lower world. And you can see why the world tree or the access Monday are important symbols in shamanism, because the roots of the tree connect beneath the earth and the branches go up to the sky and the trunk of the tree is where we are. So is a very representative is very representational representative, I guess that's a better word representative of man, and how we can travel up, we can travel down and we live, we kind of live here. But those three worlds, again, are like saying I'm going to Europe, there are many, many worlds, I don't know how many probably infinite. There are people who are mapping out these worlds, which I find fascinating. I have little, little areas that I go to pretty regularly. When I when I journey.

And up and down are metaphors, there's symbols, again, it's just about tuning the consciousness to different layers of reality. So one model one way one representation that I like to look at, look at this, as a metaphor, if you think about if you had, you know, there used to be maybe still have these anatomy books, right, and they had sheets of clear acetate or plastic. And you know, it would start with, you know, it would start with a page that had the skeletal system. And you know, then you would have a piece of plastic that would lay over that, that would show the muscles and that would lay over the the, you know, the skeletal system, and then you would have another clear piece of plastic that would lay over that which might be the organs. Right? Or, you know, the different systems and then another one that might be the blood vessels, and then you know, another one that would lay over that that would have the skin, you know, that sort of thing. There were representations like that. And if you take all of those kind of sandwiched together, you know, that's a little bit what the world is, like, from my perspective, what the worlds are like from my perspective. They're they all kind of exist together. They interact and interpenetrate just like the human body does. And because they don't occupy physical space always, of the etheric. The etheric does sort of Occupy physical space, but the astral does not travel is really metaphoric. But it's the only way because we are so tied into the physical. Living in the physical and traveling around in the physical and time and space have meaning for us. It's, it tends to be how we interpret things on the astral plane. So I want to talk briefly about what can happen to the astral body and this is where shamanic healing comes into place. So another term for the astral body. And again, people might use these terms differently, but this is how I use them. Another term for the astral body is the soul body and the soul body. I'm using these terms interchangeably. I don't, I don't recognize really a difference from them or between them. And so the soul body or the astral body is definitely affected by our life experiences. It can be wounded, it can be drained of energy it can all kinds of things can happen to it. And this is where much of shamanic healing comes in. Now, you might have heard of something called Soul Retrieval. That is a shamanic healing ceremony that I'm in know is meant to help with trauma and what happens with trauma is part of our soul body can break off and get lost. It makes splits to seek safety. And if that doesn't return on its own, that can get lost. And what happens is that bubbles again, these layers affect each other. And that can manifest as sickness, it can manifest as depression, dissociation, all kinds of things. And so, you know, a shamanic practitioner will do a soul retrieval ceremony that will be meant to restore some of the soul essences which will bring healing ability back to a person. Now, a lot of people go to shamanic healing, and they expect miraculous healing. I've got, you know, diabetes, or lung cancer, or kidney disease or something. And if you do a soul retrieval for me, I'm going to be miraculously healed on the physical plane, it unfortunately, most of the time, it doesn't quite work that way. What happens is that, and I don't think it works that way, with any with most, or really any type of spiritual healing, I could be wrong. Again, anything's possible. But what happens is, we create the spiritual conditions under which you can heal better.

So sometimes, Soul Retrieval will provide relief from things like depression, or dissociation, that you know, some of those symptoms because the underlying spiritual conditions are, are fixed, but sometimes there is also physical healing that needs to take place. So I'm talking about depression for a second. So some people might get relief from soul retrieval. And some people might have problem like physical problems that have to be healed. To solve the depression issue. So depression, some people associate that with low levels of serotonin. So maybe your body's not producing enough serotonin. There are very frequently My understanding is with depressed people, there are inflammatory markers in their blood, so you might have to treat inflammation in your body. But again, it will be helpful to have the spiritual healing. And I always tell clients that, you know, spiritual healing works really well hand in hand with other forms of healing, which might include you know, allopathic medicine. Naturopathic Medicine, it might include acupuncture might include dietary changes, exercise, physical therapy, what have you, you should not pass those things up in favor of spiritual healing, we so often with a picture of the person in our head of a, you know, a man laying his hands on somebody, and that person can walk all of a sudden. And that happens. It happens from time to time. The faith healers you see on TV are mostly fake, and, unfortunately, take advantage of a lot of people. And those people when they follow up with them, afterwards, somebody throws their crutches down and walks around. Um, when they do follow up to those people, they generally don't have long term effects from the work from the whatever, whatever is supposed to have happened, even though there's a placebo effect. And placebo is really the mental body affecting the physical. And even with that, you know, these faith healers, I would say most most, if not all of them, particularly if they're on TV asking for your money or not really doing anything. I'm sorry if you if that is her, you know if that thought is discouraging to somebody or something along those lines, but there has been so much fraud I've seen there's a guy I've seen on TV recently who got had a huge following years ago. And he got caught. He had a an earpiece in his ear, and they were feeding him information about people in the audience that they had researched. And some crew some investigative crew went in there and using radio equipment picked up the signal from the control room, that side Oh, over on your left side is Mrs. Smith. And she has a son who's suffering from, you know, diabetes and she has Back Pain and whatever. And then you would see this guy on TV going, Oh, over here, I feel there's Mrs. Smith and, oh, your son's got diabetes. And then people would take that as a sign that he was getting information from God or what have you. And he would put his hands on them, you hope you're healed, and then walk away, and he would never be no follow up or anything. And he was, he was stealing a lot of money from people. And when he was found out, and it was revealed, he was a fraud, he lost almost everything. Well, guess what? He's back, you know, it's 10, or 20 years later, he's back on TV doing the exact same thing. I really just like that, I have to be honest, I really dislike that I just like a lack of ethics, particularly in the world of spirituality. And, you know, I do believe in karma. So I do believe that he's probably going to suffer for the rest of his life, he's probably suffering now that he feels like he has to do this rather than making an honest living, or actually helping people. Yeah, you know, but

he's a con man. And he's still at it, unfortunately. And there's a lot of people who want to have miraculous healing and faith and all of these things. And I appreciate that. And I have a great deal of faith in spiritual healing and the power of the mind to heal and the power of the Spirit to heal. But I don't think that's what this guy is doing. I don't think he has mended his ways. I think he's, you know, when I watch him, I can see some of the tricks that he's doing to people where he, you know, grasps people by the head and puts his thumbs over their eyes and pushes them down on the floor. And here's, you know, here's a woman who's been on crutches. And people think it's the power of, you know, the power of divinity, knocking that woman over to heal her. And I was like, I could do that to anybody right now. I could, if I would, you know, if they let me grab their head and put my thumbs over their eyes, I could knock anybody, anybody down. Don't care how big or strong you are. But especially if you're an older woman, you know, and, or an older person doesn't have to be a woman, an older person on crutches. It's obscene. Anyway, off I go on a tangent. Um, so really, this is you know, this is meant to give you an understanding of the astral there, there's been there's a book and a mini series, I think, on Netflix called behind her eyes. And that prompted somebody to ask me recently on the radio about astral projection, and is it a thing? Is it real? Can people take over other people's bodies can you know? So you know, and that's a very, it's a TV eyes version of that. And, you know, it is not very realistic. But you know, there's like everything, there's some some truth to it as well. And so there's been some interest in it. And so every so often, there's a resurgence and interest in astral travel, and remote viewing and all these all of these things. You know, and I may be biased towards shamanism. But if this is something you're interested in, take a course in, you know, take an introduction to shamanism class. I'm not saying you've got to take the shamanic past path for the rest of your life. That's definitely not for everyone. But, you know, if you're interested in soul travel, you know, it would behoove you to take an intro to shamanism class and learn us, you know, a safe and effective and controlled method of doing that. There may be some others out there I'm not aware of. I haven't seen any. But sham shamans have been doing this for, you know, millennia and millennia. So we're well practiced shamanic practitioners, we know what we're doing. And a good teacher will be able to walk you through these things very safely, very quickly and very effectively. I struggled for years trying to control astral projection. And then when I learned shamanic journey, I was like, oh, geez, that that's, I can do this anytime I want. Wow, that's something but you know, there's some there's some aspects that you have to learn. So I am at just about an hour I'm going to wrap up this episode. I hope this has been interesting. I hope you have found some things useful here. And you know, don't forget to subscribe to the show if you are not. Also just a couple of announcements. On my side. I do have a YouTube channel that I've launched recently. It's called shaman tent. You can find it by searching on YouTube. And there's Gosh over 50 videos on there. They're all instructional, and informational. And I have launched an app as well, which is called shaman world, the shaman World app. It's on iOS and Android. It's absolutely free. There's currently not even any advertising or anything on it. It has links, you know, you can listen to this podcast on it, you can watch videos, you can read articles. There are drum tracks if you decide to if you practice shamanism on there. So there's all kinds of stuff there. And so all of this stuff is all this stuff is absolutely 100% free. And as is this podcast, it's just my way of talking about and sharing something I love and I'm absolutely passionate about. And with that I will wrap it up I hope you are happy and healthy and I will talk to you real soon.

Announcer 1:01:20

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

Ep35 Death and Immortality

Announcer 0:28

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

John Moore 0:45

hello everybody I wish you a good morning or whatever time of day it is when you listen to this it is the morning where I am it is as I am talking to you kind of in the beat we're in the beginning of October which is a month that I enjoy a lot I where I live in the northeastern part of the United States this is you know we entered fall in autumn or fall in September. But really this is when the leaves change colors it's amazingly beautiful here and the leaves fall off the trees and the trees are bear until spring eventually usually not till later in October but the end of October is Halloween is otherwise known as Samhain we get into all souls Eve Day of the Dead all those kinds of things. Some people know this as Season of the Witch it's a transition time right as all seasons are but here it is especially true we experience significant changes in the environment changes in temperature you know it's not unheard of to have snow here but before the end of the month. Depending on where you live that might be shocking. But I remember a few years back when my children were small and you know if you're not in the US you might not practice this but you probably are aware that we do something called trick or treating with children which is on Halloween night kids dress up and go from house to house and people give them candy. And gosh that is a favorite day of so many kids as you might imagine getting a bag full of candy once a year from strangers I know it sounds might sound weird if you're not used to that tradition but it certainly was my I think one of my favorite one of my favorite holidays growing up as a child and certainly was for my kids but I remember going out one year and there was snow on the ground and the kids had to wear boots and coats over their costumes which is kind of a bummer you want people to see your costumes but the dressing up part is really cool. And of course this you know this goes back a long long time to Celtic traditions having to do with selling and you know lighting jacker lanterns to scare off evil spirits and dressing up as ghosts and goblins and going from house to house. And you know there were other other traditions including a meal to honor the your ancestors to honor the dead because it was thought and I believe this to be true that this is a time where the veil between the worlds is thinner the ancestors and spirits are able to come back and visit more readily make their presence known. And you're able to interact with them more easily. And I think this is something I have experienced and it's something that exists in many cultures. You know, the Mexican Day of the Dead tradition is is in my opinion a beautiful one. And you know recognizes this as well. If you have not, if you have not seen the Disney movie, Coco it is it's one of my favorites. It's a Pixar animated movie that is about the Mexican Mexican Day of the Dead and it is whatever your feeling about mass media is it is a beautiful Full film, full of heart and full of love and respect for ancestors, and it's funny, and it's entertaining. And anyway, it's a good, it's a good thing. So, today's topic, I'm going to talk about death today because we're entering, you know, we're entering that season, and I'm going to talk about death and the dead and what happens and the cyclical nature of things. changes and seasons remind us of the cycles of,

you know, the cycles of nature, and we're a part of that where no, so many times people think he, as human beings, we consider ourselves separate from nature. And that is not a that is not reality, we are a part of nature, yes, we have removed ourselves in many ways. Most of us live inside buildings, and work and drive cars, and use plastic things and, you know, participate in things that are not what someone might consider natural. But we are organic, our bodies are organic, excuse me. Again, if you've never listened to this, I don't really edit this. So if I have a little if I have a little cough or clear my throat or whatever, I don't edit it out. I'm you know, I don't want people to think that I'm not a human being and make errors in my podcast or whatever, what have you so excuse me, if that comes up, I don't like to. I also like this to have a flow and don't interrupt my train of thought as I'm talking about stuff. So we're a part of nature and we experience cycles. And this can be seen in a lot of ways. A lot of people when the weather gets colder, tend to nest hibernate, rest more we eat differently. Not always, I mean nowadays, with the way we import food and that sort of thing, we can eat a lot of offseason food. But I you know, I for 1am a fan of eating seasonally, as much as I can. You know, that being said, I will enjoy a banana or an orange which are non native Here are a few things that are shipped in but this time of year where I live, it's Apple harvesting season and its pumpkin harvesting season. And there are a lot of root vegetables around so we you know, I love that stuff, this time of year, stews and things that warm me up and you know, it helps me helps my body anyway, be more in tune with the cycles that we're going through. So, as parts of nature, we are affected by the cycles of nature, the cycles of life, obviously, you know, we are born into a body we go through childhood, adolescence, puberty, we, you know, become adults, we hopefully live into old age and become elders and you know, eventually, our bodies die. And I'm going to say it that way our bodies die because I do believe in an afterlife. I have witnessed enough in my career as a shamanic practitioner, and I'll talk about that I'll talk about the demonic view or a shamanic view. I can't speak for every shamanic practitioner in the world, but I will speak from my perspective, having practiced shamanism for many years now. What the experience of death is like from that perspective, my hope is that I can demystify it a lot, because a lot of people are afraid of death. At least in the Western world here. We're so you know, in the US, especially, we're so removed from death in the dying process. You know, there's a whole funeral industry here where, you know, when somebody dies, the body is quickly removed and taken and cleaned up, and then you might see it for a visitation, and then it's quickly buried. And that's it. And you go through the grieving process. And it costs 1000s and 1000s and 1000s of dollars. You know, and I think having witnessed some other cultural traditions, around what happens when people die, I'm You know, I feel like that's a little disconnected. And we're a little disconnected from death. And it makes us It makes us more fearful of death because there's this unknown part of death, we don't know what's going to happen. The other aspect is, you know, you've grown up in

Christian society, you know, you whether or not you practice Christianity, you most likely have some sort of reservation or fear of hellfire. Right? eternal torture. I'm gonna say right off the bat that, you know, and I, and I don't normally like to conflict with people's belief systems, you are welcomed to believe as you wish, and I will respect that. However, I will say that this concept of Hell is, you know, and pardon my French is bullshit. And it was invented to control people. And I and, you know, I understand why, you know, historically, when the, you know, when religion in the government was the same thing, and we didn't really have police forces, and ways to control people's behavior in society, we had to make people afraid of what would happen to them in the afterlife, because there wasn't necessarily punishment for crimes or, you know, what was considered blasphemy or, you know, any other offenses. And that's very plain, if you read that in any of the, the Abrahamic religions, right? There are lots of things, you know, for example, lots of dietary prescriptions, right, they wanted to keep people from getting sick, don't eat pork, and shellfish, because there was no refrigeration or testing of, you know, testing of food or anything like that. So those things were, could make people really ill. And, you know, there are a lot of things you know, that didn't necessarily that made a lot of sense, you know, five or 6000 years ago or 2000 years ago, and you know, what have you I and again, if you're a person who keeps kosher or or halaal or you know, what, what have you I'm totally fine, you know, that I'm not arguing against that, you know, it's part of your faith and I don't I don't hold that against anybody or say that's wrong or anything like that. I'm just saying the concept of hell was meant to keep people in line. And in my experience with death, and I'll describe what that's like in a bit. That just isn't it isn't a thing. Except for there there's there is a little bit of an exception to that. And and I'll talk about that as well. And and so of course, the Christian you know, concept of hell is that it's down below it's the underworld, it's even the word hell. Right. So what they what happened was, you know, when Christianity came into areas that were predominantly pagan, the turned pagan gods, they turned pagan beliefs. As I said, this, a giant Hawk just flew through my yard. Very interesting. They turned pagan beliefs in the afterlife, in the underworld, into things that were demonic of the devil. If you think about the devil as being horned and having cloven hooves and you think about the god Pan, you know from Greek paganism. That is, they are identical. They took these gods and turn them into demons or they turn them into saints or you know, whatever, they co opted them. They co opted holidays. You know, they put Christmas to meet Christmas in end of December to eclipse Saturnalia and other pagan holidays around you know, around the winter solstice. You know, when most likely that wasn't close to the date If you believe the story of the birth of Jesus, you know it was probably in the springtime sometime because of the way it's described of the shepherds out in the field sleeping out in the fields with their flocks anyway I'm not a biblical scholar, but

it is what it is. And you know, the word hell comes from, you know, comes from Norse belief actually and you know, hell was the underworld where most people go when they die if you weren't killed in battle and went to Valhalla, or you know, you didn't go with Freya to her Hall. I don't remember the name of that at this point. But if you didn't go to one of those places, because you didn't die in battle, you went to hell. And hell was not eternal torture, it was sort of this consider this place that was like fall It was like eternal autumn You know, it was not eternal torture. You know, that kind of thing. And of course, the Greeks believed in in an underworld, right. And the Romans and all of these pagan and they believe that's where you went when when you died. And in shamanism, we go to the lower world and we go to the upper world and they aren't really heaven or hell. So as far as the concepts around this, you know, and culturally This is totally reinforced, you know, we have even the TV show that I enjoy Lucifer about the Devil You Know, and I'll maybe I'll do a podcast about the devil at some point. And the, the, you know, the, the changing ideas about who the devil is and what the devil is and demons and all of that sort of thing, even though we're demon, right? Even the word demon is it comes from the Greek and it just means spirit. And in Greek, there were helpful spirits and harmful spirits and spirits of the house and they were all demons. But when Christianity came in and took over demons became denizens of hell and you know, the doers of the work of Satan. So gosh, you can't have these household spirits anymore. That's devil worship. Everything became devil worship. Um, so you know, I I don't like to, you know, I don't like to quibble too much over personal beliefs. And again, I try my best to respect everybody's personal beliefs. But this is, you know, this is this is what happened. You can't there is no denying that this is what what happened. This is empirically, historically true. So, anyway, the concept of hell meant to control people not really a thing. So, as you probably know, I'm a shamanic practitioner, I practice shamanism. I do not say the phrase, I am a shaman that is not in my tradition, one does not call oneself a shaman. So I use the term shamanic practitioner because it describes what I do I practice shamanism. And I do so for myself and for clients. It is healing work that I do and other types of work that I do for clients, but it's also on my spiritual path. And in shamanism, there is the concept of psychopomp. Right? psycho pump is again, it's a Greek term. And it means basically, spirit guide, a guide of spirits, and it holds the connotation of a person who or spirit a person who guides spirits after death. Right? It's not just like a spirit guide, like, you talk to a spirit and they give you guidance. This is specifically like, you know, we the pump part of psychopomp is where we get like pomp and circumstance, it's like, believe it means like, tour, someone who gives, you know, like a tour guide, right? And psycho, where we get the words psychology and psychiatry and all of those things meaning mind actually is a Greek word for spirit. It's a Greek word for spirit, right?

There's more than one. And I'll get into that a little bit too, because there are, you know, you might think of our as your of your spirit as one thing. But it is, it can be divided up into numerous things. You can think of a human being as a whole system of systems which includes mind, body and many spiritual components. But we are made up of very complicated parts, right? Think about our nervous system and our circulatory system just on the body level. And if you think about the mind level, you have your conscious mind and your unconscious mind and you have habits and beliefs and values, all of these things living sort of in the mental plane, and the spiritual plane is no less complex. And there are many types theoretic and astral and noetic and causal and all this stuff. And they're ultimately just labels for things for phenomenon that are parts of the human experience. So anyway, back to I am Mr. digression. If you've listened to other episodes of this podcast, you'll learn that I like to go off on tangents, but it's all relevant, I promise. So, the concept of the psycho pump is somebody who helps people after they die. And in shamanism, you might actually help people through the dying death and dying process. You know, there there are, you know, people out there today who are considered like death, doulas, who helped people sort of physically through physically and mentally through the dyeing process. And people who practice shamanism it's part of their job and has been so for a long long time. So I have you done it's not my primary thing. But I have done a fair amount of psychopomp work I have worked with people who have died recently I have worked with spirits who died many years ago but we're stuck. We you might call them ghosts or you know, spirits that you encounter on the sort of the plane that we exist on which shamans consider the middle world. Right, it's where we get mid guard or Middle Earth from mid guard being the Norse realm for where we live and Middle Earth being the JRR Tolkien version and The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings series. Right so and you know, same same concept, it's the spiritual overlay of the world that we live in. Again, it you know, we're there all these layers to us and all these layers to the world that we live in, and the beings that we encounter here. So, sometimes spirits get stuck, we might call them ghosts in you know, shamanic, thinking, or at least in my tradition, we do not, like, exorcise ghosts, like kick them out, bottle them up, trap them do things to them, because they're suffering beings, they don't have a body anymore. So they're not suffering from pain. But they're, they're spiritually suffering if they're stuck, even if they don't know that they're stuck You know, they're suffering from the perspective that their existence could be much more pleasant if they went to where they were supposed to go. So what happens after we die is that a conscious part of us our soul body separates or from our THEARC body and from other parts of us and this is the part that you know is is sort of may consider it an astral body. If you want to get really technical I'm not going to go too far down the metaphysical bodies path because that could be there many volumes of many books written about all of that stuff, and I could only very briefly touch on that topic. But it is you know, that that would be a very huge tangent. And I'm also not you know, I'm also not the the expert on that either, but I do know that you know, parts of you separate from your physical body, the body, the body dies, the etheric body separates the astral body separates from from the body.

There is a deeper connection. There's a deeper connection to divinity that exists. That is sort of the true self that is the spark of divine light that's within us that is an unborn, undying, incorruptible. That part goes on as it is in because That part is so formless, we can sort of visualize it as a spot of bright light. But it really is formless. It sort of exists outside of time and space. And so while we might think of it as being inside the body for, for the easy sake of getting in touch with it, and visualizing and that sort of thing, it doesn't really exist inside the body, so it doesn't need to separate from the body at the, at the point of death. So sometimes what happens if somebody, somebody is going through the dyeing process, will say, let's say somebody is sick, and they're in hospital, and maybe they're coming in and out of consciousness, or they're in a coma, or, you know, that sort of thing, very frequently, loved ones will experience visitations, we'll see that loved one who is in the hospital and not quite dead yet. Or you know, that that person will reach out or what have you, and what's going what's going on there is that the astral body really is starting to separate person is in the dying process, the astral body is trying to separate or starting not trying, it is starting to separate, it's happening, slowly sort of happening at the pace at which the body is shutting down. And this is not you know, this is not, it's not painful, it's not you know, anything, it's just it is what it is, it's it's what, you know, it's part of the dying process. So when people have near death experiences, and come back, they frequently report being outside of their bodies, sometimes, you know, they somebody ties on an operating table, they they can, you know, look down and see surgeons working on them and hear the conversations that are going on, even though the body is under heavy anesthesia, and maybe even technically dead. So, so the astral at the, at the time of death, or even as a person is dying, the astral body really loses touch with the body because the astral body is going to survive and go on to where it's supposed to go. So this happens, and these visitations happen, and they very frequently happen right after death, even if death is sudden, you know, or you know, for a period of time, lots of people have you know, have come to me that they're seeing loved ones who just recently died passing on information, either in dreams or they're seeing them or they're smelling something that reminds them of the person or whatever. These are not always just tricks of the mind of the grieving mind. Sometimes these are actual visitations. Very frequently they happen in dreams because we're much more open in our dreams, and this is when the spirits can, can contact us. So in my experience, very often, in fact, most of the time when people die, this the, what you might call the spirit, the astral body sticks around for a number of days, checking in on loved ones, and going about perhaps some unfinished business, but primarily, I see this happening with people checking in on loved ones. And then most of the time, they cross over to some kind of afterlife. And that's not healthy. Because I have worked with people who were murderers, people who were in the Italian Mafia, who had murdered people and were relatives of the person I had as a client and I helped them cross over and they did not wind up going to hell Hmm So like I said, in my experience, and my firsthand experience that that isn't the thing. So the you know, the astral part of us this, you know, this, which is really really conscious part of us, crosses over

to another side. And again, there there are multiple parts that make up our spiritual body and they kind of go in different directions and this was recognized by many, many cultures over time, the multiple parts of the body right the you know, the spirit and you know, the energy body. You know, the, the soul body, all of these things. And so again, I'm not going to go down the metaphysics path. about what happens to all of these different parts, you know, you can look at the ancient Egyptian beliefs for example, that this part went here and this part did this and this part did this. So yeah, there's you know, there's a separation that happens, there's a separation of, you know, astral and physical and mental and all of these things. But your astral holds memories of what, what you went through in life, it can hold on to wounding all kinds of stuff. And so you go, you go to an afterlife. So here's the part about the afterlife. So what the afterlife is like, depends significantly on your personal and cultural beliefs. So if you think that heaven is or the afterlife or whatever is up, you tend to go up, and you'll see clouds and you'll see loved ones. And you'll see this and you'll see that you'll see all you'll experience all kinds of things. Because the reality is that spirit and these realms, they're non physical, so they don't have time, space and form other than what we give to them. And so we can experience them as anything. So there's work that's done if you go ever go through a an apprenticeship in shamanism and you do death and dying work, where you actually crossover and you have you have to do that you have to see what it's like you have to experience it. And I can tell you, having been there numerous times, and having taught people how to go there and having lead people there, that it is warm and welcoming and inviting and beautiful, and there is no pain and there's no suffering. And there's no anxiety and there's no stress. There is joy, and there is there is peace and there is what you would want to experience there. So I'm going to give you I will give you I'm going to give you an example and I will because I don't talk about you know I hold client work very confidential I'm going to anonymize the way I describe this and you know, give some details will be a little bit vague. So I was working with somebody who asked me to go check in on a beloved aunt who had passed away a number of years ago. And I didn't have any details other than this person's name. And about in I believe, you know, the year and the location of their death. And so I journeyed shamanic journey is like, like a very visual meditation where, you know, shamanic practitioner actually splits off part of their consciousness and it can travel to other realms. And so you know, I traveled to this person's art and I don't you know, I don't take for granted that I'm seeing objective truth right like I'm seeing something on a spiritual plane and my mind is making some sense out of it by you know, painting pictures and letting me have a conversation with somebody so when I got there there was this woman an older woman who I could physically describe and she was standing on you know, cliff overlooking the sea and there was a sunset and she was painting just painting a beautiful picture of the sunset and I had a conversation with her briefly and she said you know, the afterlife is really amazing I can

you know, I can I've always wanted to paint sunsets but there was happened too fast but here I can, you know, just think I want to paint a sunset and the sunset lasts as long as I need it to and I can paint a picture so there's really no painting sunsets and she could keep a sunset going for, you know, her experience of ours. You know, time works really differently there. But you know what, what we would experience as ours, she could keep the sunset sort of still campaigns and have a beautiful experience. And she relayed to me that she was you know, visiting another relative frequently But they were playing card games together in this other relatives kitchen and all these things. So okay, you know, came back from the journey. And I relayed this information to the client and said, you know, your aunt's very happy. She's painting pictures. And she said to me, oh, yeah, my aunt was a painter, which is not something I knew before I went. And I said, Well, you know, she's visiting her sister, and they're playing cards in her kitchen. And she said, Yes, that's my grandmother who passed before she did and before that happened, they used to play cards in her kitchen all the time. And that was one of their favorite activities. So you know, in the afterlife, you can visit loved ones who have passed and and loved ones do make trips back they do visit us they do have visitations, you know, that I get consulted about that very frequently to to look in on us. So that happens as well. So let me talk about reincarnation a little bit. So reincarnation is something I absolutely 100% believe in. I have experienced what are called past life returns, which is information coming back to me from past lives that I had no way of knowing otherwise. And this is common, you'll see it in sort of Tibetan Buddhism where they pick new Lamas like the Dalai Lama or whatever and you know when they have candidates that are trying to figure out who this next incarnation is, they will you know, present certain tests to these candidates and the candidates will be able to pick out belongings from the person who were there are reincarnating from Um, so how you know, if we go into the afterlife and we you know, we hang out there and we do what we're doing and and what have you. How on earth do we reincarnate? Like, why how could there be anybody in the afterlife? And if we reincarnate So the answer to that is relatively complex and too complex to again, get into the metaphysical details. But I will say this, that my understanding and my experience is that it is a part of you, that reincarnates It's a part of your soul body, and a part of your aesthetic makeup and a part of you that comes into a new body. So the you are basically a spiritual ancestor to your next incarnation, it is sort of like, My children, I pass my I pass my DNA, or, you know, they get half of their DNA for me, I pass that on to them, but I also don't cease to exist. And that's probably the best way I can describe it.

You know, your, your entire consciousness does not reincarnate. Because the Did you would be born remembering everything. And that doesn't, that doesn't exactly happen. But you can, you can get in touch with memories, and you can have experiences because you are connected. you're connected on this, this sort of chain that goes back to the beginning of time. So you are your own ancestor, and your own descendant and all of those things. You know, and in the future, I'll do a whole I'll do a whole podcast about reincarnation. And I know there are different beliefs from different places about reincarnation, and some people don't believe in it at all. And to be honest, I'm not exactly sure what happens with people who don't believe in reincarnation at all if they reincarnate. My feeling is they do because you know, for a number. I believe that for a number of reasons. One because there are still lessons to learn. Which is kind of the reason we ran reincarnate into bodies like you can think of, you know, physical birth as like we're we're starting school over again. We Got a bunch of stuff we've got to learn here we've got to experience. And the way to do that is through incarnating into a physical body. And yes, that includes trauma and pain and all kinds of things that we think of as not so nice, not so pleasant, not wonderful. And that makes things kind of complicated when we see if you, you know, view, God in the universe in really black and white terms and good and evil. Everything that happens to us that's good comes from God, and everything that happens to us that's bad comes from the devil. You know, that having that sort of black and white binary vision of reality is not particularly helpful. It's not, and it's really, really leads a lot of people astray. You know, because the universe, the universes, and reality, are much more complicated and much, much, much more complicated than that. So to give, like, a sort of silly example, right? Let's say a bear kills me and eats me, I'm walking through the woods, and a bear eats me for dinner. Well, that would be a terrible thing from my perspective, right? But would we say that bear is evil? is an evil bear that bear just malicious and evil? Does that bear have evil intent? pre, you know, pre plan killing me for revenge? Or because it hates the, you know, the color of my skin? or what have you any anything, anything that we attribute to people being evil? Or? or what have you? You know, and I think most people would say, No, a bear is just doing what a bear does. Right? So and, you know, while that would be tragic for the people who loves me, you know, bears do kill other animals, and sometimes people and for food, and so do tigers, and so do you know, other animals. And as parts of, you know, as, as human animals, we are not always at the top of the food chain. We have technology that helps us do that, but not always. And, and so, you know, the world is much more complicated the world as we experience it is much more complicated than just dividing everything into good and evil. Good things are good and bad things are evil, and, and there's no in between. And so that, you know, that the things that happen to us can be tragic, they can be traumatic, they can be painful,

you know, can sometimes feel like the universe is punishing us. All of that. And I understand that, and I get that. And dying can seem very tragic. And certainly the people who grieve, who grieve for you can't experience your death is traumatic or, or what have you. But again, that's putting sort of human middle world values on things. It's just a, it's a perspective, right? I'm not saying grief is a perspective. Grief is an you know, grief is a natural process that human beings go through. And it's important, it's an important process. It's not comfortable grieving is not comfortable. It's not happy. It's not Oh, how, how joyous I am that I grieve a loss. But it appears to be very important to our minds and spirits to to grieve loss. To go through that process in problems, because problems occur when the grief process is interrupted or stunted or repressed. Right. And people grieve for a lot of different reasons, right? They can grieve. We don't just grieve other people dying, we grieve the end of relationships. we grieve the loss of a job sometimes or anything that is a loss, we can go through a grief period. Well, death is a much more sort of final grief, but the ends of marriages bring grief the ends of, you know, friendships, the end of a job, the end of you know, I remember feeling a little lost when I graduated from high school and then again when I graduated from college, right? My life changed significantly, both of those both of those times. And feeling some grief about that, and, you know, in relationships that broke up feeling grief after that, even when it was mutual decision, you know, an amicable or it was my decision for my mental health to break up with somebody you know, there's still grieving process and that is natural. Everybody, everybody does it, everybody who's not a sociopath, I would think, in some way. And, and so that grieving appears to be healthy. And it's important part for us to come to grips with, with death and dying. So kind of recap a little bit to bring it back around. You know, when you have an understanding that death is part of the net natural cycle, you know, we're born, we go through the light life stages, and we die, our body dies. And it happens to everybody and has happened to everybody, throughout time. You know, it happened to Jesus and Buddha and yes, you can believe that Jesus was resurrected. And yes, you can believe that, you know, Buddha's spirit went on to a different realm. But their bodies died at some point. So it doesn't matter how enlightened you are or what have you. You know, and yes, there are there are belief systems that believe in physical immortality, I know there are, you know, suppose did Taoist practices that make people immortal you know, physically immortal. You know, and alchemy and alchemy. You know, in western alchemy, for example, there people are looking for the Philosopher's Stone, which grants immortality. And the real secret to that is that it is a spiritual process. And, yes, there are physical practices. But back, you know, when people were practicing alchemy in the, you know, in the Renaissance era, and stuff like that, spiritual and physical experimentation, were not separate things, right. So Isaac Newton, for example, believed that the mechanistic,

you know, clockwork way that the physical universe worked Newtonian, you know, inventor of Newtonian physics and inventor of calculus and the way that, you know, planets moved and all of this stuff, he believed that that was proof of proof of God, proof of spiritual reality. And he had Isaac Newton had copies of numerous spiritual texts, including the Emerald tablet, which is, you know, a famous hermetic document outlining, you know, spiritual laws. So, again, back then these were not separate pursuits. And yes, people were doing things like trying to turn lead into gold. And you know, a lot of that a lot of that stuff you can take two viewpoints of like one is a lot of alchemical writing was, was, was just that it was people who were doing spiritual, physical experimentation. And those things were not separate, they were looking for the essence of the material world of spiritual aspects behind that. Another part of that is that there is pure spiritual alchemy, and that some of the physical stuff that they wrote about, like the essence of salt in this and that, and these processes of, you know, you know, Solvay and coagula, and all of these things. These were allegorical, and we're meant to hide the spiritual work that they were going that they were doing because it could have been repressed by religious figures or You know, they meant to hide it from people. You know, a lot of spiritual doctrines were were hidden. The word mystery comes from, you know, these schools that were teaching hidden spiritual Mystery Schools were schools that were teaching hidden spiritual realities and techniques and processes and things like that. And these Mystery Schools existed, there are Mystery Schools today, but not like there were, you know, 1000s of years ago, the eleusinian mysteries, for example, in Greece lasted, it was a place you could go and take psychoactive chemicals in communion with the gods lasted for well over 1000 years. And you know, 10s of 1000s, you know, huge complex and 10s of 1000s of people a year would go through whatever it is we went through, but we don't know a lot of it because it was a mystery. But we do know that they drank this beer. I think it was called Chi con and it was basically psychoactive beer it had ergot in it, which is today, what we know as LSD same kind of chemical you know, LSD comes from Oregon, which is a parasitic fungus that lives on certain types of grain. And it is hallucinogenic. And people were probably using psychoactive stuff to basically do shamanic work right to basically do these journeys and visit the afterlife and you know, commune with the gods and goddesses and people who have written about going through these processes. Talk about them is life changing and entheogenic right, embodying embodying the gods so so these you know, these processes these alchemical processes are spiritual and meant to develop the spirit in ways that

you know, the afterlife might be a little bit might be a little bit different, you might have some control over how you reincarnate or you might go on to a place a plane, an existence where you are, you know, more angelic so to speak, although I think angels are actually different species of spirit, but you know, where you have more abilities to help out mankind you have more knowledge, you have evolved more through spiritual knowledge. And I think honestly, that's what most immortality practices that were genuine were about, not about making the physical body immortal, although certainly you know, if you talk about Taoism from China, you know, the some of the practices were very health inducing, right, so they, you know, there are chicoine which are the energy practices, you might be familiar with Tai Chi and you know, the, you know, lots of other practices, energy work that are meant to meant to heal the body and meant to keep the body healthy. And that stuff, you know, that stuff works really well. I've seen, you know, I used to live in Boston. And sometimes I would walk through the park in the morning, through the, you know, through the common which is the, you know, a pretty big park in the middle of Boston. On my way to work. I worked in downtown Boston, and I would see people from the Chinatown community older like really old like maybe 80s 90 year old people from the Chinatown community Chinese elders out in the park exercising and these people were limber energetic, flexible. Healthy you know, I'd see you know, an 80 or 90 year old man like doing pull ups from a tree or you know, using playground equipment or older woman like pick up a stick and doing these acrobatic sword forms with it that sort of thing. Sir, the you know, these are these exercise practices. You know, were meant to keep the body young and healthy. And they should do I mean, gosh, I mean, there's, you know, that proof positive there, but there's plenty of research about Chee Gong and Tai Chi and meditation and all these things about the health giving benefits, but do people physically live forever? And my answer to that is like my answer. To a lot of things, I have not personally ever met somebody who has lived longer than say, the oldest person I've, the oldest person I know is my grandmother who just turned 105. And that's pretty darn old. And I cannot remember meaning somebody older than that. So are there people who have been alive for 200 400 years? And are they people? Are they physical? People? I have not experienced that. Is it a possibility? Or probability? So in an infinite and expanding universe, anything is technically possible? Could there be physical human beings, people in bodies who have lived for hundreds of years? Maybe I just I haven't experienced it. So I'm not going to believe it or disbelieve it at this point. That's what we call healthy skepticism. Right? Until, until there is some at least secondhand knowledge, not just stories or myths or what have you. You know, I'm, I'm not going to buy into that now. Or not that I don't buy into it, it's I'm just going to reserve my judgment about whether I buy into that. Um, there are, there are lots of stories in different systems of belief about immortal beings.

You know, that are gods and goddesses or specially enlightened beings, or what have you, taking physical form. And, you know, My take is that there, you know, the spirit, your spirit is immortal. And these are, you know, if people have encountered these beings, they're probably spiritual, and they may be powerful enough to affect physical reality. Because, you know, I know for a fact that sometimes even just normal human spirits can, can appear physically. I have seen it, I have witnessed spirits, I have met many, many people. If you don't believe in ghosts, that's fine. You haven't experienced one. And the way that I and many people have I have had chilling experiences with spirits. And I know many, many people with a chilling experience with deceased human beings. Witnessing firsthand seeing with physical eyes. So sometimes that can happen. So if you have somebody who is really, really developed again, they've developed this spiritual immortality, this level where they can affect physical reality from a purely spiritual plane. I believe that that's possible. And it's something Yeah, it's something I believe is possible. I haven't. Have I witnessed that, you know, again, I've witnessed some paranormal stuff. I have witnessed some non human spiritual entities that I have seen with my physical eyes that other people I was with saw with their physical eyes. And these could not be humans or projections, or what have you of any kind. And we were not on drugs, I promise you that. But there were a lot of us who saw, you know, been out in the desert and seen huge beings. Where the aliens were they gods were they spiritual creatures? I, you know, I don't know. I think they were spiritual creatures. And I've participated in some Native American ceremonies where there have been spirits present that other people have seen physically as well. So they're, you know, these things are real to me, but I don't think human physical bodies are designed to live forever and can be coaxed with current, technical or spiritual know how into living forever. Very long time. Yes, my grandmother's 105. And who knows how long she will keep going. Maybe she'll be 130. Who knows. But people are living longer and longer. Technology is approaching places where we're understanding we're unlocking a lot of things. Now there are animals on earth that live a very long time. There are sharks and turtles, for example that are hundreds of years old. There are other types of have animals that don't appear to have physical death built into their systems, the way that humans do. The other part of immortality is, you know, if humans could say easily become physically immortal, with the way that we reproduce and use up resources of this planet, we would very quickly have run into an ecological disaster that could have made this a very unpleasant place to live. Imagine being immortal, in a place where you are, you know, you were you lived forever, but you were sick all the time, because the air was so polluted, or there wasn't enough food or there, you know, the water was polluted or there were massive wars over food and resources. You know, because we have seen that in the history of mankind, where there has been where there have been, you know, fights over resources and and, you know, genocides have taken place, you know, wars, all kinds of stuff. So, you know, if it is possible for physical immortality, maybe it's not such a great idea. And again, a lot of the drive towards that is a fear of death.

What I will say is that, you know, being, you know, dying to chew early, like because you live in unhealthy life or an accident happens is a bit tragic, because, you know, you've got more to accomplish here, right? And so the, the healthier you can be, and the longer you can extend your life. As long as you are evolving spiritually and learning the lessons you're supposed to learn. That's probably a good thing. So this has been a very long and 10 gentle, tangent filled conversation while one way conversation talk about death, dying, immortality, the cycles of life. I hope this has been interesting to you. I don't want to run too long. On this episode, I will tackle things like reincarnation and immortality in more depth in future podcasts. If there's something you would like for me to talk about from a shamanic perspective, or a guest you'd like me to try to talk to, I would like to have some more guests. please reach out on my website. The details of that are in the closing. Have you know the the outro of this episode. I love you all. I hope you're staying healthy and well. And I hope this has been useful and given you some things to think about.

Announcer 1:03:43

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 ma i n e s ah am a n.com

Ep32 The Shaman's Breath

Announcer 0:28

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

John Moore 0:44

Hello everybody. I have a little bit of a funny story before I get started or as I get started here.

Um, so, you know, I've said before many times that I tend to record these in the morning, I'm a bit of a morning person. But sometimes I get up in the morning and I'm a little foggy, you know, foggy headed, I always have my trusty cup of coffee. As I'm doing these here, I'll, I'll take a sip. Delicious. And, um, so this morning, I got up and I prepared and I you know, I record this through a soundboard and got everything set up and started talking, probably said something brilliant, I don't know. And there was no sound coming out into my headphones that I listened to as I'm recording this. And sure enough, I had plugged the microphone into the wrong thing. So no sound was coming through. So I started over again. normally don't do false starts or any editing or any thing like that. But I figure you probably don't want to listen to you know, an hour of blank air talking into a microphone that's not connected to anything recording. Anyway, podcasts technical issues. I am a technical person, and I'm was before I became a shamanic practitioner. But that doesn't mean I always do things perfectly. Nobody's perfect. And I certainly am a prime example of nobody being perfect. As I speak, my little chipmunk friend is up on my porch in front of me and running around screaming for some food. So I'm going to, after this throw some food out for him because they're getting ready for the winter. Winter is coming to quote, Game of Thrones. I'm in the north eastern part of the United States. I'm in the state of Maine, which is in a region of the Northeast called New England, we are the North Eastern most state of the US. So if you're not in the US, you look or if you're in the US, you don't know where Maine is. If you look at a map, and you follow the Continental part of the United States, all the way up to the upper right hand corner, you'll see Maine, and that's where I am. And I live in the woods. So we have lots of creatures and birds and things. And it's something I love dearly about where I live, love wildlife. Today, I'm going to talk about breath, and breath as a gateway to spirit. And, you know, talk about it from a number of different perspectives, I have a significant amount of experience with breath work, different types of breath work. So I have done pranayama, for example, which is yogic breath work, and I'll talk about that. And I have done breath work through, you know, a few decades of martial arts training. And I have done breath work as a meditation practice of all kinds. And so I do want to talk about that and why breath is important, and how we can have mindful moments using the breath and powerful moments using the breath and all kinds of things. So I hope this will be both interesting and useful to you. You know, one of my things, one of the things that I like to look at when I examine spiritual topics is how they're handled historically, and sort of globally. Right. So I practice shamanism. And you know, I have looked at certainly not every form of shamanism because that would take me an entire lifetime. I'm sure but I have looked at examined, studied, you know, some things more in depth than others different forms of shamanism as they have existed. You know, as we have historical records for some, and we don't have historical records for a lot, but as they're still practice today, I think, you know, I feel personally that having, being well rounded is important to me.

It's, you know, for some practitioners, it's not and there's nothing wrong with that. It's not a criticism. I'm just saying it's, it's personally important to me to understand like, I want to know about the practices of Hawaiian shamanism or shamanism from West Africa or South American shamanism or shamanism from Scandinavia, or, you know, shamanism of the Celts or shamanism in Russia or wherever. Because I, you know, you can, you can learn a lot, it can inform your practice, I'm not stealing anybody's practices, I, you know, I only practice and teach things that have been freely shared with me and have been cleared to teach. Excuse me while I take another sip of coffee, which is, I just love coffee. You know, that being said, I have participated in lots of ceremonies and rituals and things that I would not lead or teach because I don't have, I don't have enough knowledge, and I don't have the connection. And I don't have an authority to do that. So I have participated in Native American pipe ceremonies. And I have participated in sweat lodges. And I've done certain types of shamanic dances from different cultures and done some practices from other shamanic cultures, and I don't teach them because I, you know, I don't have a connection to them. And I'm not about misappropriating culture in any way. But I do find that participating in different things and learning about different things makes me more well rounded. And so when students or clients or or whoever comes to me with questions, I feel like I'm answering them from a more informed perspective. Although very frequently, when I'm working with clients, I am, as we shall say, in spirited or inspired, we're going to talk about that word, spirit and where that comes from. And, you know, that sort of thing. So because we're going to talk about breath, and we have this word, spirit, and you know, all its different forms spiritual and spirituality. And, you know, we can tell that that is related to the, you know, the word inspiration. Right, I'm feeling inspired. And when something is no longer useful, we or or deceased, we might say that that thing or person or living being is expired. And so, the interesting thing here is that the word, the word spirit, comes from the Latin word speeder tos, and spirit tos in Latin, means both spirit and breath. And they are synonymous. Interesting thing, and I'm gonna expand on that a little bit. Right. So to be inspired means to have, you know, to have taken in spirit, but also to have taken in breath. So literally to inspire, to inspire means, you know, means to breathe in. And you know, in one one way in English, you know, English is this language where we have one word that means, you know, hundreds of different things. And if you're not a native English speaker, I apologize on behalf of the people who came up with this crazy thing where we have, you know, single words that mean many, many different things. I talked about the word love in English, which is so weird because it doesn't feel weird to people who are native English speakers, because we just use it. But when you really think about it, I can say, you know, I love The sandwich that I'm eating, and I love my children. And that is not the same thing, I hope, hope you're not eating your children. And I can be in love with a person, you know, romantic love, that's we have to put modifiers on it, you know, I can love my family, I can love my children, I can love my country, you know, have a sense of patriotism.

I can love my community. And these may all be different things. And I know in other languages, you know, I've heard, for example, that Persian has 90 plus words for love, and some other languages are the same. And, and gosh, I love that See, I can love that I can love that fact. And that's not the same thing as loving a cheeseburger or loving my children. So, you know, the word inspired when when somebody is inspired, it means they're, you know, they're motivated, or they're, you know, we could say they're full of spirit. Or, it could mean that, you know, inspiration could also mean I am I have I'm, you know, that the act of breathing in. And expiration is the act of breathing out. Or it's the act of dying, right? Because the idea is that when your breath leaves your body, so does your spirit or your soul becomes detached from your body. So in. In Latin, there's also the word ennemis, where we get the words, Animal, and animate, and animated, and probably a bunch of others. And this is also another word for spirits. But it also can mean breath, or wind or puff of air. So there is there's a link in Latin and thus English, you know, where we have borrowed from that and probably other romance? Well, English is not a romance language, but probably in romance languages, there, there are links as well, between spirit and breath. So then, when I look out at other cultures that I am, you know, that I have at least a passing familiarity with or have even just, you know, read something about. I see the same thing occurring in a lot of places, right. So in Greek, we have the word numa, which is another word for spirit. And numa is where we get lots of things having to do with lungs and breath, pneumonia, for example, or pneumatic or, you know, all kinds of things having to do with air and breath, also having to do with spirit. In Hebrew, and, you know, I will apologize if I am mispronouncing this stuff, as I've explained them a native English speaker. I have limited studies in other languages, we can credit the public school system in the United States with that, I know in other countries, languages, multiple languages are taught in public schools, from a very early age, that is not the case. In most of the United States, we don't start learning languages until way too late, unfortunately. So, you know, in Hebrew, there's the word ruak, which is spirits and also breath. In you know, in Chinese, we have the word Qi or you know, Qi or Chi as some people pronounce it or, and in Japanese, we have Qi, which has to do with spiritual energy, and is very, very associated with breath is where we get the word Qi Gong, which is like, energy work in Chinese. And, you know, Qi is, yes, it's this vital energy that runs to the meridians. It's the thing that acupuncturist effect and martial arts martial artists use it to disrupt to their opponent's bodies and that sort of thing. And so it is the animating factor of the body. It is the thing that keeps processes running. And it is very, very, you know, it's it's complicated because there are different kinds of key there's key That comes from your food, there's key that comes from the air that you breathe. There's key that you can absorb from the universe. So there's different sources, but still, the word is very much associated with breath.

And it's clear to see why that is, right. Because when a person or an animal dies, we stop breathing. Right? You know, modern science has, you know, some different definitions of when somebody is dead, you know, we can check somebody's heart and their heart stops bleeding. And then some minutes after that the brain, the brain dies from lack of oxygen. And we can measure those things. But in ancient times, before we had modern medical equipment, you know, when a body ceased its breath, it was either dead or practicing some very advanced meditative practices. There are, there are some, you know, there are some meditative practices where the breath can be held for extremely long periods of time, or stopped. And there is there's pranayama, which is practice. I can't remember the term for it at this point, which is practice on the breath is held on the exhalation for longer and longer periods of time. And now, there's some scientific research showing why that is how it can have a positive effect on the body. I should say, don't try this. Don't try this on your own. There are, there are implications of breathwork for different types of medical conditions, and I am not a doctor. And so certain things like breath holding exercises can be unsafe for people with certain medical conditions, or if they're pregnant, or if you have medical conditions that you don't know about. So I'm not recommending you just start practicing things. without, you know, checking in checking in with a doctor always do that anyway. But I know that there are breath hold exercises, where you know, we think about holding our breath when you're a kid, and maybe you're swimming you like take a deep breath and hold as much air in your lungs as you can and dive underwater. But there are exercises where you exhale and hold the x exhaled breath for as long as possible. And there's some physiological stuff that happens there. That's pretty cool. having to do with carbon dioxide and vezo dilation and cool things happening. Interesting things happen with this breathwork. So I know, I know, there is, you know, there are Hawaiian systems of breathing. And I know that there is, you know, you know, we hear the word Aloha, which is like, you know, greeting, hello, goodbye. I think it means much more than that. But the hard part is an exhalation and in at least some part of Hawaiian culture that is done, you know, you touch foreheads, and you say Aloha, and you exchange breath. It's a spiritual exchange. So there's an, there's an exchange of breath there. So, so it's very, you know, it's easy to see why from ancient times the breath has been associated with spirit of spirit being the animating part, like, you know, and see the body. What animates the body. Right is are we just a pile of chemicals and electrical impulses that randomly move us around towards food and whatnot. You know, from a materialistic realism, you know, atheistic perspective. Yep, we're a random pile of chemicals that self organizes and uses air and chemical electrical impulses to eat and reproduce and sleep. And you know, that that kind of thing. And, you know, I'm, I won't argue with anybody who takes that perspective. That is your prerogative to believe that is the case. But my experience, my experience is very different. And you know, where you're, I'm not going to discount your experience. I expect my experience not to be discounted, although, you know, people certainly do.

But humans are humans and all all beings are spiritual, and even, you know, the rocks and the rivers and the land. You know, in shamanism, we, shamanism is very animistic. And we see spirit everywhere and in everything. So that means your car has a spirit and your, you know, the picture frame that your picture of your family is, has a spirit and so does the picture. And so their spirit everywhere, and some aspects of spirit have a material world representation. So human beings are one, you know, an example of that we are a spirit. And we have, we also have physical bodies, there are lots of spirits, many more spirits do not have physical bodies than do. So, there's this, you know, there are many, many worlds full of spiritual beings, some of them are close to our physical reality, some of them are quite different than our physical reality. And this is something that is explored by shamans all over the world. And so, you know, not all living, not all living things from a spiritual perspective, brief. From a physical perspective, all living things breathe, they have some sort of, you know, some sort of exchange of, of chemicals, you know, obviously, you know, fish, fish, gather oxygen from the water. From guy like mushrooms, breathe oxygen, and exhale, carbon dioxide. So they're actually closer to animals than plants, even though we might think of them as plants and plants, you know, plants through their cycles, have, you know, breathe in carbon dioxide and breathe out oxygen, that's a very, you know, obviously, incredibly oversimplified explanation of what plants do through photosynthesis and whatnot. So, breath is important as human beings because we can have control over it, and it is a gateway into spirits. So, breath, as you know, is an autonomic nervous system function. Meaning we do not normally have to think about breathing, we do it without thinking it's autonomic, it's, um, you know, will breathe on our own without thinking about it. However, you can actually, you know, you can certainly affect your breath by thinking about it. And it is the easiest autonomic function probably to control just by, you know, control to have volition over. So, for example, I can hold my breath, or I can choose to inhale or exhale, or I can choose how rapidly I'm breathing. And that will have different effects on the left effects on my body will have effects on my mind. And yes, it will have effects on your spirit. And, um, you know, one of one of the things that I like to teach and share with people is that, you know, this view that body and mind are two separate things, and that body, mind and spirit are three separate things, I think, is a bit of a false belief. I understand it's, like, easy to, it makes it easier for us as human beings to categorize things to put things into neat little category categories, right. Um, and so, you know, if, if I were just, you know, looking at a human being, I would say, okay, the mind, the mind is the brain, the brain and the mind are synonymous, and you know, okay, but the brain is part of the body. So the mind is really like the electrical impulses in the brain. And oh, but we have a nervous system, and oh, we have chemicals that affect our consciousness. And, you know, we're inputting data through our sensory organs And oh, by the way, our stomach produces, you know, our gut area produces the serotonin that we use as neurotransmitter and there are neuropeptides throughout our body and, well, we, you know, what we think of as our conscious mind is, you know, sort of located in our prefrontal cortex of our brain. There are a lot of mind processes in fact, the vast majority of mind process processes that we're not conscious of.

right you're probably not conscious of your digestive tract, being regulated or your you know, your your acid base levels of your body or Are your heart rate, it's hard to affect your heart rate with thought there are people can do it, you can practice that. One way to affect your heartbeats. So it's an autonomic function is through your breath, you can take control over that. And so this is a place where mind and body are really connected. Right, I can think, and control my breathing, control my body. Right, and my mind controls my body and all kinds of different ways. So that's, you know, that's sort of One Direction, right? There's the control. And then, you know, sensory input goes in the other direction, I can feel where my body is in space, the position I'm in, I can see things, I can hear things, I can taste and smell things. I have a vestibular system that tells me if I'm off balance, and part of that autonomic like, part of that is relegated to the autonomic system, like my head, I don't have to think about holding my head up straight, it does it on its own. If you ever do, you know, don't, don't, don't do anything I ever talk about in any sort of unsafe way, make sure you are physically, spiritually mentally and emotionally safe at all times. Um, but you know, one thing that is really interesting, because I have trained in martial arts before that I've done training blindfolded, and how much of your balance is affected by your vision. Right, if you if you are a sighted person, now, if you are a person who is visually impaired, your other systems, your vestibular system, and your kinesthetic system will take over. And so you don't have people who are visually impaired falling over most of the time, right. But if you tried to, you know, stand still with your eyes closed, you might have a harder time staying balanced, you don't even really think about it, like you have a natural reflex for your head to become level. Right. So the horizon, if you're looking out at a scene in the horizon, is going to go straight across, that's where we get the word horizontal from. Why because we don't stand on our heads and look at things upside down, or we don't tilt, we don't walk around with our head tilted to the side, most of the time. So there are, you know, there are inroads to the autonomic nervous system. And one of the easiest ones is breath. And so you can affect the body chemistry with the breath, you can affect the heart rate with the breath, the rate of digestion, all kinds of things. And there's whole schools of breath work out there who are dedicated to gaining health through breath or doing spiritual work through breath. I also do not so you know, the difference between mind consciousness and our physical representation, there are like interpenetrating, interconnected, you cannot really separate them out in any deeply meaningful way. I'm sure on the surface, you can. And you know, I don't know how it works in other countries, but I was talking to someone who is a therapist as a mental health therapist, recently, and I said, you know, it's really interesting to me, that in the United States, you know, I can go off for hours on our healthcare system, I will not needless to say, I'm not, I'm not incredibly proud of it. And, you know, the way that we have done things that we have the most costly health care system in the world, and everybody gets health care by buying insurance, and if you can't afford insurance, you know, you're, you're kind of screwed. And even if you can afford insurance, you know, it's, it's only going to cover some of, you know, what can be potentially life altering hospital bills, if you get sick. We do a really poor job of health care in this country. However, one of the things is that we treat mental health different than physical health. When we separate, we separate them out, as you know, like, they're different things.

You know, there's some, there's some, you know, there's some overlap there where you know, you can go to a psychiatrist and you can get prescribed some medication, which will affect your body and hopefully, affect your emotional state or whatever it is, or help you you know, alleviate Some psycho sees or something, you know, there's different different psychiatric medications. So the body and again, there's the body in the mind interacting, and we treat treat them very often as separate things. But your mind can certainly affect your body, your body can certainly affect your mind. And from my perspective, as somebody who does shamanic healing with a lot of clients, the spiritual component of human beings, is also inseparable from the body and the mind. They're, they all interact they all interpenetrates Yes, I mean, you can, you know, through shamanic journeying, or like astral projection or whatever you can separate part of your part of your soul, not the entire thing. It's your entire soul separates from your body, you die. But part of you part of your consciousness splits off and you can experience other things, other realities, that sort of thing. So, these things are connected. And so spiritual disease, spiritual disorder, spiritual fractioning, all kinds of things can certainly cause physical symptoms, can certainly cause mental health symptoms. And this is where this is where I work, I work on the spiritual components of healing with my clients, I do not I'm not a doctor, I'm not a mental health therapist, I'm not qualified to work from that angle. And all my clients who come to me with physical or mental health, and, you know, emotional issues, I always tell them that they need to, you know, the best thing to do is to, to sort of attack the problem from as many different angles as you can. Because we're, you know, we're these overlapping systems, we're systems of systems, right? So, you know, if you are suffering from depression, for example, you know, go to a therapist, but that might not be the only thing you need to do. Like, go talk to your doctor, you might decide to take psychiatric medication, or you might decide to try to do some things physically that have been shown to help alleviate depression, things like exercise and meditation and timeout doors and social connection. And, you know, there's, there's a bunch of things you can do. And, you know, so if somebody came to me with depression, I would you say, okay, you know, are you talking to a therapist? Are you talking to your doctor? Okay, now, let's address the spiritual aspect of depression. And there might be, for example, there might be some soul loss there, or there might be some ancestral healing that needs to take place, or, you know, many, many other things that can happen. So take care of that part. And people can, you know, after a single session, sometimes feel a great deal of relief. And that can fade if they're not taking care of the other parts of themselves. Or continuing to take care of their spirit usually give clients some homework to do, you know, some, some practices that they need to take with them to sort of keep, you know, integrate the healing that's been done. And I really think that that's a key to help. I really think that addressing human beings as holistic systems of systems and looking at the entire person, not just as a machine, as complicated as it might be, but you know, as body mind and spirit. So breath is, breath is an entryway into that, you know, they're breathing, breathing exercises that you can do that can change your consciousness. Right. I'm not going to teach any of them here because most, most really intense breathing exercises really need to be done under supervision and I would caution that I would you know, if you go out and learn to do some intense

you know, some really intense breathing exercises that can for example, cause you to have visions, and some people might say hallucinations, but I'll say visions cause you to have visions or to dissociate, feel separated from your body, or, you know, to facilitate shamanic journey. or that sort of thing. I would urge you not to learn those through self study, go find a qualified teacher to supervise you. And learning that stuff. Because you know, if you don't know what to look out for physiologically that's problematic. And there can be, there can be some negative repercussions you can as you can affect your body positively with the way that you think, and negatively with the way that you think you can affect your body and mind and spirit negatively, by the way you breathe or positively by the way you breathe. You can find breath coaches out there, and you can go to breathwork classes, or you can take a yogic meditation class and learn pranayama you know, safely with an instructor and follow their instructions, the breath is very powerful, very, very powerful. So, in a lot of shamanic work. And this is, you know, currently, because of the pandemic, I am only working with clients remotely over zoom, we tend to have these, you know, Healing Sessions over zoom. And they work just fine. Because there, there is no real difference in time or space with spirit. Spirit is formless, it doesn't have matter. And, you know, physically, time and space are, are intimately linked to matter, right? gravity, gravity, time and space matter, relativity, all of that stuff, which is, you know, I maybe understand a fraction of a percent of, but I know enough to know that. You know, there's things like time dilation, relative to gravity. So Time, Time passes differently in space than it does on Earth. So if you take a clock on earth, and a clock, and you put it in space, at the same time, the clocks are going to be off after a very short period of time, because time, travel is different, you know, try and tie it in the pace of time is different. You know, and that might seem really weird, and it is, but gravity, matter, mass affects time, the flow of time. And space as well, you know, without your time, space and matter are all intimately linked physically. So, because spirit doesn't have matter, it is timeless and spaceless. So I can do a healing for somebody on the other side of the world. And has, you know, it can be just as effective. That being said, there are, there are some advantages to being in the same space and putting hands on a person and having them witnessed the work that I'm doing. And that is, I would argue, primarily psychological. That's not to say that it doesn't make a difference. Because psychology is important. And when I do, you know, when I do zoom sessions, I turned my video on, so I can talk to people and they can see what I'm doing and, you know, that sort of thing. And that that does make a difference. Because it's going in through their psyche, as well as their, you know, as well as the spiritual work that I'm doing, which can be very subtle, sometimes. Sometimes not so subtle, sometimes people can have these huge shifts. So one of the things that many shamans do in healing is that you will see them blow into the body of the client that they're working with. And this happens in different ways. So in some cultures, they might have a tube or a hollowed out bone that they blow through. In some cultures, they'll take, you know, you'll be lying on a table, and they will, you know, take a little bit of alcohol or something onto their lip and then blow it out over you.

You know, essentially like spreading the blessing out over you. It's not really spitting. It's not really the same thing as spitting on somebody definitely has a very different meaning and a very different spiritual implication. So they will, they will breathe on you and a lot of them that will sort of Like cut their hand into a hollow tube, so like make a very loose fist that they could blow through and blow into different parts of your body, the top of your head, your heart, you know, other parts of your body. And during that time, there's a transfer, there's some sort of transfer. So when I do power animal retrieval, face to face, I wouldn't blow that power animal into the person's body. Or if I'm doing soul retrieval, the soul parts that I bring back, I'm blowing them into the body of the person. Now is that to say that the power animal now lives inside the person's body? No. But we are blowing the energy of that power animal in. So that connection that you know, connection or reconnection is made. And, you know, with soul retrieval, the soul parts that come back that get blown into the body, get reintegrated. So, you know, we blow them into the body, even though spirit is again doesn't really have physical form. You can see you know, sometimes there's spiritual form people can see auras or spiritual doubles or you know etheric bodies, and there's all these different words for them. Um, ultimately, the, you know, the spirit body is formless, you have a soul body that has more of a form and can take on the shape of the person sometimes or, you know, when people talk about shape shifting, really going down the tangent here, you've heard of shape shifting before, you know, with shamans turn into the form of animals or, or what have you. Primarily, what's happening is they are changing their, the part of their soul body that journeys into the shape of an animal, usually an animal. And, you know, taking flight or doing doing whatever, I have not, in fact, personally experienced physical shape shifting. In infinite and expanding universe, anything is possible. But I have never seen witnessed or been able to change shape. Right? I've never seen a person's physical body turn into a raccoon. Um, do I think it's possible? I mean, again, I think anything is possible in an infinite expanding universe. But what I can tell you is that, from my perspective, from my experience, and granted, I've only been on this earth, while I'm coming on 50 years, folks, and that seems like a long time for me. But in the scope of things, in the scope of human existence, that is not very long, in the scope of the the world's existence, that is not a very long time. So but in my experience, shape shifting happens on the level of the soul or astral body. And it is a very frequent practice in many spiritual systems. So in ancient Egyptian practices and practices that sort of Neo, I guess, Neo Egyptian practices, like, you know, the practices of the Golden Dawn, and the Oto, and into some of those organizations that came up, you know, in the past couple of centuries, to teach mysticism and adopted some, some Egyptian stuff. People do what's called assuming God forms. And that means you meant mentally astrally take on the form of the God that you are worshipping. And you know, that the hope the intention there is to be able to commune with that God force and to be able to to be able to I guess, wield the power for lack of a better term of that God if we're doing magical workings, for example, I might

take on the form of Thoth. The, you know, the Ibis headed god of Egypt, who was the God of writing and magic and that sort of thing. So, you know, they'll, they'll, you know, mentally psychically, astral Take on this form of the god they might dress, you know, in, they might dress up in Egyptian garb and take on certain poses and do certain chants and have all kinds of things to sort of, you know, move that along, but I don't think I have never seen anybody actually physically change into the shape of, you know, one of these God forms. Um, you know, and, you know, it's an interesting idea, another another idea that, you know, that comes out of sort of the Western mystery tradition is the, you know, the whole idea of a god form, and that, you know, some of these scholars and, you know, spiritual, you know, spiritually kind of, I'm not gonna use the word enlightened, knowledgeable people. You know, they had the idea that the way to talk about the god form the shape of the God, they really, you know, recognize that these spirits that they recognize as gods were formless because they showed up first of all, they showed up in different forms. Right, so you have Horus in Egypt, who is the hawk headed God, which is some, sometimes he's a he is a hawk, right? So he shapeshifted into different forms. And there is the, the concept in the, in the western mystery tradition of enthroning a god so when we give human beings give form to a God through a statue, or, you know, a mat just imagining the way that God looks or whatever you are providing a throne, a house, a seat, for that God to interact with you. But that is not the true form of the God is that would be incomprehensible. So all the statuary and stuff you see, you know, I don't know how how serve your everyday person believed, like, maybe they believe that's what the gods look like. But there certainly were, you know, spiritual, elite, spiritual, spiritually, knowledge, people who took those forms of the gods as not literal. Right, so formlessness. And I realize I've got way off the path of breath. But I think it's all important as we talk about the formlessness of spirit, and also how it replicates breath, right? Because air doesn't, air doesn't really have a shape, like lick like liquid, it takes the shape of the container that it's in. Right, so when I breathe into my lungs, the air that fills my lungs are basically the shape of my lungs. But it's very hard to understand the shape of air outdoors, for example, right, like weather systems, you know, an air movement, you know, there's a lot of chaos there. Because, you know, we're talking about subatomic particles up to huge hurricanes and weather, you know, giant weather fronts, and that sort of thing. So the level of, you know, air movement, and air temperature, and all of those things, is sometimes a little hard to get a grasp on. And that's why that's why people who predict the weather can be wrong a lot. And you know, computer systems that are very complex and trying to predict the weather can be wrong, you know, some good portion of the time because they're guessing they're using best guess so air and spirit or formless is another connection, and why it's easy to equate air, breathing with spirit. And I do like to look at air, as I've said, as not just air, but breathing air, there is the spiritual component of air, which is you know, you have the elements the traditional elements of earth, air, water and fire. And air is one, you know, air is the dry, cool moving components of, of,

you know, of those elements, and, you know, those are, you know, alchemical elements are, are conceived of as spiritual components that make up not just physical matter, but also parts of the Spirit as well. And so Air and breath. So we'll talk about breathing as an inroads into spiritual work as a as a way to, you know, they're not, they are used as synonyms in many languages. I think, you know, spirit is different than breath. But it is an inroad that's a pathway in it is a spiritual breath can be a spiritual tool, a very powerful spiritual tool for affecting your consciousness for getting in touch with, you know, your higher self, for doing all kinds of work. Because your breathing can affect your body, mind and spirit. And your breathing does, you know, if you're unconscious of it, you're unconsciously affecting your body, mind and spirit with your breath. If you're unconsciously breathing, people, most people tend to over breathe. Most people breathe very shallow, very quickly, and from the upper lobes of their lungs most of the time. And it can feel really weird to take a big full breath. And this isn't to say that full deep, slow breathing is always the way to breathe either, right. But most people, you know, our lung capacity I forget is about seven liters, we'll say. And I can be wrong in that, you feel free to correct me if I'm wrong. And we tend to take in about, you know, a liter or two of breath each time we breathe. So we leave, you know, most of our lung capacity. Over breathing is also a problem if you expel too much carbon dioxide. And you know, most people think of carbon dioxide as waste. But it's not it's physiologically important. The chemical process that strips The, the oxygen molecules off of your hemoglobin in your blood requires carbon dioxide, to release that oxygen, which is why if you hyperventilate, you breathe too fast, you expel carbon dioxide too quickly, you can get faint, and you can pass out and all of those things. And that is in part because your the the chemical process required to remove the oxygen molecules from hemoglobin and give them to your cells isn't happening. And so you need to down regulate your breath. So there's all kinds of different Brecht breath techniques, and they all have different, very different effects on the mind and body. So there's the, the Tibetan practice of trumeau, which is the inner fire, which you know, is amongst other things, a breathing exercise now is more much more than that. You may have heard of this, but people who have trained in this, and in this is a super dangerous practice to just start training on your own. So I don't recommend that at all. You know, if you if it's something you want to learn, go find a, you know, a Tibetan tumo master who will take you on and teach you. But it can actually raise the body temperature. So, you know, monks can go out into the mountains and you know where it's cold and melt the snow around their bodies, or wrap themselves in wet blankets and and dry out the blankets from the heat coming off their bodies.

You know, and that's an interesting physiological effect. I believe that So, and I apologize for not translating this into centigrade, but I live somewhere where we're still using Fahrenheit but so body temperature, normal body temperature is about 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. And they have measured the body temperature of people practicing tumo as up to 117 degrees. Now that is crazy hot. If you were that hot when you arrived at a hospital, they would assume that you're dying of some kind of horrible infection. Like 105 is a you know a really bad fever. Above that is life threatening, but these people practice tumo, they can heat their bodies up to 117 degrees. And not only do they have no ill health effects, but they have tremendous health, good health effects from that, and they can keep warm. But it is it is ultimately a spiritual exercise, even though it strongly affects the body and can be used as a survival technique, if one is caught in the cold and exposed to cold. Imagine being able to prevent hypothermia. Like that, it's pretty amazing stuff. It also shows us what the you know that the human body is capable of amazing things that maybe we haven't even discovered yet. But again, it's that mind body spirit connection. There are certainly Hawaiian breathing practices I have seen. I've seen certainly Native American breathing practices and chanting practices I've seen Intuit chanting that I can tell is stimulating certain types of breathing. I don't know enough about the culture to talk about it too much. But I've seen this sort of chant happening that forces a rapid, a really certain type of rapid breathing. And my thought is that there must be a spiritual component to that. Be very interested in finding out perhaps I should learn predecessors and do some research. So I hope this has been helpful I do, I do like to leave, always leave off with some sort of helpful advice or tip or something along those lines. And I will do that today. You know, but as I said, you know, breathwork can be if practice incorrectly can be dangerous. So don't, don't do anything. Don't do any extreme breathwork without proper instruction and supervision. But I will give you this one tip that you can take with you during your day. And this will help you. If you practice this, it can help you de stress. And this is just the idea of mindful breathing. Now, mindful breathing isn't necessarily about taking control of your breath. This is about taking a few moments in your day, to simply observe your breath. Simply watch your breath without trying to change it. It may change. Because the act of observing anything changes that thing, it may change in a perceptible way, by you observing it, and you know, that's totally fine, be fine with that be fine with whatever your breath is doing. We take a minute or two with eyes closed or eyes open, whichever is safe and comfortable for you. And just watch your breath coming in and out. And if you have difficulty with this, you can focus on the physical sensation of it. A couple of places where you can focus our whatever is the first place in your body, or wherever is the first place in your body that you can feel your breath. Sometimes that's the nostrils, sometimes it's the throat. Sometimes it's the lungs, and you can pay attention to Hey, where is the first place in my body that I feel my breath.

And just, you know, just observe the sensation of breathing. You know, and you can do this little short spurts. And this will help bring your mind into the present moment. It'll help bring you know if you're if you're uncentered you have sort of a scattered soul body, it's like all over the place that will help recenter you can practice this with some grounding exercises. So this is just a little exercise of mindful breathing, which will help to ground and center your spirit and it will help you to calm your body relieve a little bit of stress and you know calm your mind as well center your mind as well. So I hope this has been helpful. I hope it's been interesting. This has been the shamans breath although I've talked about all different you know angles of talking about the breath. If this is interesting to you, and you want to learn In some breath work, I would highly recommend, you know, taking a class and breath work or finding a teacher who teaches breath work and you know, is willing to take that on, or go to, you know, go to a yoga school where they do pranayama. And you can you can ask about that, you know, how much pranayama do you do? You know, there are different types, all different types of yoga, and some of them focus very heavily on pranayama. And some of them, some of them do just a little bit of it. So you can ask. So, that is it for the day. I love you all. Wherever you are in the world, I appreciate you tuning in and spending some time with me, I hope that you will. If you have not already hope that you will subscribe to this podcast, I hope that you will come to my website and follow me on social media and all that sort of thing. I have some cool stuff coming up. Next month, I'm taking part in this big miracles mastermind with about 20 or 30. I don't know how many other teachers, a ton of other teachers, and it's free. There'll be details on my website very soon in the next. And the next few days. Actually, there will be there'll be some details on my website. So follow up there and I am teaching and doing all kinds of things. So check me out. I love to hear from people and we will talk very soon.

Announcer 1:02:07

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

Ep30 Mental Health and Spirituality - Through the Shamanic Lens

Announcer 0:31

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

John Moore 0:48

Hello, everybody.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Announcer 1:02:01

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 ma i n e. s haman.com

Ep17 Nature Spirits and Faeries

Announcer 0:30

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

John Moore 0:49

Hello, everybody.

My apologies, I have been a little bit remiss in putting out these podcasts, it's been a little while, I sort of did too close together back to back with guests. And you know, I, I'm not the kind of person to wear busy as a badge of honor. But I got incredibly busy. And so here is my triumphant return. I guess after a short period of time, I used to, I usually like to talk a little bit about what it's like where I am, I am talking to you from the state of Maine in the United States, it's early in the morning here, it's, gosh, it's 6:18am. As I read this, and I'm looking out in the sun is coming up and the birds are out and the small animals are playing. And one of the things I love to do, I feed the birds. And I feed the small animals around here, and I leave, I have a back deck that I look out over when I record these and I love to what I put peanuts out for the shell peanuts out for the Chipmunks and squirrels. And I've a little chipmunk that loves to climb up on my deck and stuff his cheeks full of peanuts, and it's pretty cute. And so why am I telling you this other than to give you a slice of a view into what I'm experiencing at this moment, which I think is important, right? I mean, I think you know, I don't get a good sense of who you are, where you are, other than your Look, your location, I can look at statistics and see that people are tuning in from all over the world. And I love that I love that. So I like to share a little bit of what it's like where I am, as I'm recording this. The ancients used to, you know, at least you know, in many, many cultures used to, you know, record astronomical observations. And I don't have to do that, because we have scientists and computer programs and all kinds of stuff for for doing that. Which, which is pretty incredible. The modern world is is interesting, and technology's incredible helps me talk to people all over the world. So today, I'm going to talk to you about a topic that's near and dear to my heart. And I'm going to talk in also leads a little bit from my introduction, I'm going to talk about nature spirits. And what do I mean by nature spirits? What are nature spirits? Where do they come from? What are their, you know? What are the cultural influences and all of those sorts of things. And I'm using the word, the phrase nature spirits, very, very broadly, as sort of this giant category of thing. It's as if I'm saying animals to refer to all the animals on the planet, right? From insects, to whales, to hummingbirds to human beings, you know, those are all animals. So there's a huge variety. And so it's a kind of a catch all phrase. And it's the same way with nature spirits, there's a huge variety of what we will call nature spirits, and I'm going to talk about that and obviously, you know, if you've listened to this podcast, you know that I come from a shamanic background. My my training and my spirituality is rooted in shamanism. And so I look at things from I tend to look at things from a shamanic perspective. This is not to say that my viewpoint is correct. If there is such a thing, it is my viewpoint and it's it's colored by my life. experiences, my beliefs, my practices, all of those things. And that's true for everyone. So I'm going to talk a little bit about different cultures today. And I'm not an expert, I'm not an anthropologist, I am just somebody who is encouraged, you know, through my spirituality, incredibly curious about different cultures, interpretations of similar phenomena. And so, if I speak incorrectly, you know, or I say something that's, that's a little out there, from your own belief system. That's fine. You know, that's okay.

take it for what it is, take it, take it, that I'm interpreting things through my own set of lenses, and you're interpreting what I'm saying through your own set of lenses. We all do that all the time with everything. And you know, if there's a correction to be made, you can contact me through my website or something, and I would be happy to, I'm happy to learn. I think that's a healthy stand point, right? to assume that you might not know everything, and that, you know, being open to learn, right come to things with a beginner's mind, you know, sort of a Zen idea. Right? In beginner's mind, there are many possibilities in the experts mind, there are few or none. So getting locked in, getting locked into our beliefs getting locked into our little reality tunnel, or reality box, we all live in a little box, which is bounded by our beliefs. So sometimes we can experiment we can try on different beliefs. You know, what if what if this were true? What if that were true? And see how that works for us. And that can help us grow as humans. So anyway, I digress a little bit. I'm going to refocus now. And I'm going to talk about nature spirits. And what do I mean by nature spirits. So from a shamanic perspective, right, shamanism is an extension, I guess, from animism, which is the idea that all living beings have spirits. Even, you know, some animists I happen to be one of them, believe that even nonliving things have spirits. So, things that we would consider nonliving rocks and streams. You know, even there is a, you know, a spirit of the internet, there's a spirit of everything. And it's again, like that's a viewpoint, right, that's a that's a point of view that I take that I address everything as a spirit, my car is a spirit. And that, you know, that might be a little shift to I don't think of things as having spirits, I think of them as spirits. So in my viewpoint, I'm everything there is is a spirit. Some things that exists have a physical presence have a physical projection, okay? So what that means is that, you know, if I'm looking at the tree outside of my window, that tree is a spirit that also projects a physical presence of a tree. But not everything that is a spirit has a physical presence. And so, this is where we get into the idea of nature spirits. So what am I talking about with nature spirits. So, nature, spirits are spirits of place, spirits that live sort of between worlds between what we consider the middle world in shamanism, which is the spiritual overlay of physical reality. And they, and they belong and they sort of belong here, right? They're not their native, they're native to this space. So there are as many I can't even think of all of the terms for the different types of nature spirits, but if you think about mythological beings, for a moment, excuse me. Almost every culture you can think of has some concept of what they would call little people, right? Little People as fairies, elves brownies, greenies trolls. In Hawaii they have the minute hooni the African shaman mala dama samay talks about the contemporay from his culture. in Southeast Asia, Indonesia, they have the orang pendek, which are the little, little people, which I'm not sure may have a physical presence or not. Again, I'm talking about cultures that I'm not native to. So I'm only going to speak as an outsider from from that perspective, but gosh, you know, all of these cultures that may or may not have had contact at some point in history, have this idea

of little spiritual beings. You know, and tons of them tons and tons and tons of them. If you think about if you think about these, if you think about the fairies, right, you know, fairy faith is still strong in some places in you know, what we would consider the United Kingdom and Ireland. Right, so the British Isles area. Um, you know, I know places, Iceland, for example, trolls are very real beings, they're trolls and elves, and that sort of thing. very real, very part of the culture. So what's know what's going on here? Are these just figments of people's imagination? Are they archetypal? Meaning that all of these cultures just spontaneously came up with these, you know, ideas of these little people that can flit in and out of view and can do magic and, you know, sometimes communicate with people sometimes, you know, make offerings or, you know, all of these, all of these ideas. What's going on here? So, in my perspective, in my view, these beings are very real, and they live in a place that is very, very close to physical reality. They live in what we, in the shamanic perspective, call the middle world, which is, again, it's this spiritual overlay of 3d physical reality that we experience with our eyes and ears and sense of touch. And that sort of thing. This wasn't always the case for me. I mean, you know, in English anyway, the word fairy tale has taken on the meaning of something that is untrue. Right, so fairy stories, fairy tales, they generally refer to, you know, mythological tales that we tell to children to teach moral stories or that sort of thing. But also, you know, if somebody is, you know, telling you a story that you think is untrue, you might say, that's a fairy tale. That's a fantasy, you have made that up in your imagination. Pardon me, and that used to be my perspective, that, you know, this was all made up, and I saw the, you know, watch the Tinkerbell movies about fairies, and, you know, the Disney perspective. And, you know, these things have really woven themselves into our culture. And they've always, you know, they've always been there. As far as we have written history. There are, you know, lots and lots and lots of history of interactions, you know, things written down, interactions with nature spirits with with the faith with the fairies. And I'm sure that's true in many other cultures that I'm that I'm not even, you know, not even aware of. Right. Certainly the, you know, there are legends in Hawaii, about the men who in a building things overnight building, you know, giant walls overnight, or temples or, you know, that sort of thing. And I don't, you know, I don't know the truth of those things. But these are very real beings in many, many cultures. And it's only sort of recently that we have said, No, there is nothing beyond the physical reality. You know, these, you know, when you're telling stories of these supernatural creatures, and I wouldn't call them I personally wouldn't call them supernatural. I think they're very natural. I think they they exist. So I'll tell you. You know, I'll tell you about a couple of my personal experiences that sort of drove home that these Are these are not necessarily made up beings. And, you know, I promise I am not having a psychotic break, I'm sitting here I am sitting here drinking my coffee, which is which is delightful

to have a little coffee when I do these, particularly because I usually record them in the morning. Um, so, you know, one story that I have this, you know, this happened to me personally, I used to, I used to live in Boston, Massachusetts in the US and I used to I trained in martial arts my whole life. And I used to train in this dojo, which is a dojo, if you don't know is a place where, you know, you go train Japanese martial arts. So is training in Japanese jujitsu, in this dojo, which was in the basement of this building. And I was training with my friend Jimmy one day, and we were the only two in this particular room in the stojo working together, and my teacher had stepped into the other room to, to do something. And you know, Jimmy and I were training and this little, I want to say little, you know, Little Green Man, that's gonna sound like I'm talking about an alien. And it may be that aliens are our, our, you know, our thing. And our nature spirits. Who knows, I don't know the truth of that. But this little man who was had sort of a greenish tint, was wearing sort of normal human clothes, but was about two feet tall. I saw him come running through the room, and run right through the back wall of the dojo, where we were training. And at first I thought, you know, I'm just seeing things that's not real. And my friend turned to me that I was training with he goes, did you see that? And I was like, Yeah, what did you see? And he described it to me as like, that little man just ran through here and ran through the wall. He looks solid to me. Like, it didn't look like a figment of my imagination, or a ghost or anything like that. And I was like, wow, I saw the same thing. How could that be, you know, it was really weird. And then my teacher, my teacher walked into the room and said, What happened? A little guy that just came running through here. So three people had seen the same thing. You know, one of them had not been listening to the conversation we were having. So you know, something, something clearly was going on there. And then, you know, later in life, I'm, you know, started studying shamanism. And I would journey and I would journey into the middle world, and I would realize that, oh, gosh, there are these nature spirits, everywhere, everywhere, it's crowded. The earth is a crowded place. And My take is that the ones that we sometimes see are, you know, are either able to sort of manifest in the middle world. And then you know, these are the ones that sort of normal, when I say normal, I mean, people not like me, normal folk, folk who are not practicing trance work or, you know, traveling to non ordinary reality like, like shamans do. There are experiencing beings that are very, very close to having physical bodies, or that have the ability to shift in and out of physical form in the middle world. Right. So for me, it's just a matter of like frequency about being able to tune to a certain frequency like when I when I do a shamanic journey, when I enter trance, I can you know, what, what's happening is my brainwaves are getting tuned to a certain frequency that allows me to perceive things that I normally wouldn't perceive, right, in 3d ordinary reality. And when I've done that, I have met all kinds of spirit beings in the middle world. nature spirits in particular, I remember meeting a being one time that was, you know, said something to me, you know, appeared, appeared female, and said, I sing the trees to sleep at night. And I was like, well, that's kind of poetic and interesting, but you know, trees are not

trees around animals, they don't sleep. And then within a week or two, there was an article that appeared in some nature journal about the fact that trees in fact do sleep. They do have sleep cycles, which I totally did not know, before, beforehand, you know, they, they have a, you know, it's obviously not sleeping in the same way that we think of animals or humans sleeping, but they do have these daytime nighttime cycles. So, um, you know, my brain was making making some sense out of some information, you know, I sing the trees to sleep at night my brain was making some sense out of some interaction with with a nature spirit, and, you know, which turned out to have some scientific background to it. So over the years, I've encountered, you know, lots of different nature spirits. And so, over this past weekend, in fact, I, I put, I put a small altar in a wooded area of my property I live on to the nature spirits, because I think it's good to particularly honor the spirits of place. You know, certainly they're in, in the fairy faiths, you know, in the places where they still make offerings to fairies, and that sort of thing. They can be seen as guardians, and they can, they can help protect your land, your home, you know, that sort of thing from calamity, right, protect you from fires and natural disasters and that sort of thing, and keep an eye out on things. And if they're unhappy, you know, certainly, they can let you know that as well. A lot of lot of weird things can happen, things can go missing, things can break, electronics can go wonky, it's, you know, it's an interesting thing. I've certainly experienced sort of both sides of that, and I would never, at this point in my life, having the experiences that I've had, I would never move to a place or have, you know, you know, live in a place where I have not made some contact with the spirits of place. And so in, in Norse belief in ancient Norse belief, you had the land veter, right, which landvetter are the spirits of the land? Okay, and then, um, you know, even in Taoism, you know, when you look at Fung Shui, which is, you know, a lot of people think Fung Shui is about situating furniture in your house. And that, you know, was certainly part of it, from my understanding, but it is also about geomancy it's also about looking at the flow of energy, in a place in situating things in such a way that they're in harmony. And I find that a really beautiful way of of looking at things because when you can get to the when you get to the point where you can perceive spirit and you can perceive energy and, and that sort of thing. You realize that there are flows and stoppages and different frequencies and that sort of thing. So I want to talk a little bit about the middle world as well. Because it's an important consideration. From you know, I do when I teach shamanism and I teach shamanic journeying in particular, we always caution people about the middle world a little bit, because it is a little bit like the frontier of the western United States back in the day, when before it was really settled, it was a wild place full of dangers. And you know, some people were friendly, some people were not, and, you know, that sort of thing. So, as I said, the middle world is full of spirits. You know, it can sometimes appear crowded, actually, interestingly enough, if you're, you're never alone. That's one. You know, that's one thing. So think about that, you know, before you litter or pollute something or whatever there are. There are people watching and as I say this, there's a chipmunk just came up on my porch and he stuffing peanuts into his cheeks and a crow just flew into my yard. So, these are, these are great omens, these are, you know,

you know, lovely, lovely spirits of nature with physical bodies that are that are showing up to say hi to me this morning. So the middle world is a very crowded place and you know, I I was taught about it, it's sort of like moving around in a foreign city that you're visiting for the first time, right? And you don't necessarily know where the good neighborhoods are the bad neighborhoods, or, you know, if there are pickpockets in one location or kidnappers or, you know, or where they're friendly folk, or, you know, that sort of thing. So I do caution people to be a little careful in the middle world. You know, and when we teach journeying in the middle world, we teach some safety protocols for that. The other the other aspect of the middle world are that there are spirits that I wouldn't necessarily consider nature spirits there. So when you hear stories about ghosts, or, you know, just Carnot humans who are, you know, quote, unquote, trapped here, you know, that, that part of them that is trapped here is is trapped. You know, stuck is a better word, it's not trapped. There's nobody trapping them here. People sometimes get stuck. Because they're, you know, they're killed in it's a surprise or they're not ready to pass on or there's some, you know, there's there's a myriad of reasons why human spirits get stuck in the middle world. So there are, you know, there are suffering spirits in the middle world. When, you know, when shamanic practitioners encounter these suffering spirits, even though they can sometimes appear scary or angry or be doing something that we would consider harmful. We tend to treat them like clients because they're their suffering beings. Right, and they deserve compassion. And so, we do work frequently. That's called psycho pump work. And psycho pump is a word word that is, you know, it comes from the Greek, which is sort of the, it means sort of the conveyor of spirits. Psycho, you know, even though we, we get the word psychology from it, and tends to mean mind in, in English anyway, psycho is actually a word that means spirit in Greek. And so psychology actually would be the study of the Spirit. But, you know, we know it as a study of the mind. And so psycho pomp is, you know, an individual could be non human individual, but an individual that helps shuttle spirits to where they're supposed to go. So if you think about Greek mythology, you can think about Karen who has the boat across the river, you know, Rose the boat across the river sticks, you have to pay the ferry man to shuttle your spirit to the afterlife. Okay, so they're, you know, if you think about Norse mythology, you have the Valkyrie, who worked for Odin, who took his, you know, the people that were going with him after battle up to Valhalla. So there's, you know, there's psycho again, there's this cross cultural many, you know, lots and lots of different cultures have this idea of a psychopomp. Well, in, in most, you know, most shamanic training, if you're trained as a Shimano shamanic practitioner, you do learn to do psychopomp work, because we, you know, we have this sort of equal vision of all spirits. So, again, we would treat discarnate human humans as as if they were clients and help them you know, we don't, we don't banish, we don't bottle spirits up, we don't enslave spirits. Any of those, any of those things, I know, there are cultures where that is. That is the thing where they, you know, they do that, you know, and I don't want to, I don't want to cast judgment, so I won't hold back. I would just say that that's not something that I personally would do, and or, you know, anybody in my tradition would would do that. So, I

will leave that to, I will leave that to you to the difference between sort of enslaving and capturing, and enshrining, there are cultures where spirits are enshrined. And they're sort of free to come and go and sort of, you know, that kind of thing. But, you know, shamanism takes a very level playing field view. It's not Um, you know, I am the king. I'm the king of the castle, I work in tandem with helping spirits. Some of those are middle world spirits sometimes. Um So anyway, back to nature spirits, I realized I go off on a lot of tangents. But I hope that's interesting. I hope that when I expand on the topic and go off in a little direction, that it's not too confusing and that you find it interesting. Because that's just how I am. That's just how I choose to talk about things. So, you know, I'm very, very curious about nature spirits and how they show up. And one of the interesting one of the interesting phenomenon to me, is that, again, there's this description of little people in many, many different cultures, right? The men are hooning in Hawaii, the fairies trolls, elves. I guess trolls aren't necessarily little people, but elves sometimes are perceived as little people. Sometimes trolls are. You know, leprechauns, certainly, all kinds of beings are perceived as little people. brownies, Greensleeves is another one, or not Greensleeves? I'm sorry, that's the song. Green coats is another word for them. Which is interesting because the first nature spirit I ever encountered, I can remember encountering was was wearing a green coat. Before I knew that, that was a thing. So you know, what's going on with this little you know, this little people? Why are they perceived as small? Are they actually small? Are they smaller than we are? So, the answer to that is a little bit complicated. One answer I will give you is that they're, you know, in journeying and doing shamanic journeying. nature spirits are all different sizes, from teeny tiny little beings, you know, the size of your you know, half of your thumb to giants, you know, giants are another thing right giants are lots and lots of different cultures have have this idea of giants. And whether there were physical giants or you know, just you know, the idea of you know, spirit beings that that are just really huge You know, that's been my experience I've experienced some very large spirit beings so if you journey in the middle world, you'll encounter nature spirits that are all different sizes that are small and tall and human size and you know, animal size and all kinds of stuff. Many of them take on many of them appear humanoid, I won't necessarily say human, because they can be very different morphologically, they can be very differently and have you know, for example, be sort of short and stout. Like I don't know a little little chubby elves. If you think about the I don't know if they have this in other countries but in the US we have the keebler elves that make cookies and live in a tree you know, is it's a brand of it's a brand of snacks and cookies that are you know, they created you know, commercials with these little little chubby outs so there's that there's a very long limbs there are creatures that appear to be part plant and part animal and you see the Green Man in Celtic culture right Who is this you know, usually pictured as like a face with leaves growing out of it kind of thing. I've experienced similar similar in nature spirits and I don't know for sure that the Green Man is a nature spirit, I'm just saying the appearance appearance wise. This This seems to be

the seems to be something I have encountered countered beings that are close to that. And, and so, you know, some of them fly and some of them swim or live in the water, and some of them walk on land. So again, there's this huge variety, right? There's this huge variety of these nature spirits. Most that I have encountered have been humanoid, but not all of them, certainly. And there are these. There's the idea of mythological creatures as well. So, you know, from dragons to, you know, sort of non human, non human mythological creatures? And do these exist in the middle world that I'm not sure about? I don't know, I haven't I haven't encountered a dragon in person. I suppose that would be really interesting thing for me to explore. But dragons seem to be part of every culture as well. So there's probably something there. Right? You have, you have certainly dragons appearing in European cultures, you certainly have dragons appearing in East Asian cultures. So, um, and, you know, how does that how does that happen? I know, I don't know. I mean, unless there's some sort of cultural, you know, cultural exchange of the idea of Dragon or it's an archetype or, you know, I don't even know. So, is it possible that, you know, dragons are spiritual beings that exist in the middle world, I suppose. Right? I do know, people who have encountered dragons in journeys, usually not in middle world realms. So there are, there are places where you can travel in journey where there are, you're more likely to encounter mythological beings. But there's sort of more ethereal than then kind of middle world and then there's, you know, in you know, I'm thinking of the, you know, St. George, the dragon slayer in, in, you know, the patron saint of, I think it's the patron saint of if it's England or London specifically, I think it's England, the patron saint supposedly slayed slew, right. slue is the past tense of slay, I don't know, slew a dragon. So that's kind of an interesting thing to explore, as well, like what you know, and in certain, certainly in European stories of, of dragons, and when we see like, Tolkien themes, you know, the, the Hobbit and all of those stories, you know, dragons are not necessarily nice beings. They hoard gold and all that sort of thing. And so I think they're, you know, there's some, there's definitely some cultural overlay there as well. We're in, you know, some East Asian cultures, dragons are seen as protectors, you know, and, you know, as protective spirits. So, I don't know, there's certainly some cultural overlay. So my experience with the nature spirits is that they, you know, the temperament really differs, right? It's just like human beings. You know, just like if you're wandering around, and, you know, a city, you don't know, if you're journeying in the middle world, and you encounter nature, you know, nature spirits. Some of them will be indifferent to you, they don't care that you're there. Some of them would be curious, like, Hey, what are you doing here, you can see me some of them will be overjoyed to meet you. Some of them will be angry that you've interrupted them, or, you know, entered their space without permission or without an offering or that sort of thing. So it's best to be careful about these things. And there are lots and lots of cautionary tales. Among the cultures that follow, sort of fairy faith or believe in little beings, or that sort of thing, and there are lots of you know, there are lots and lots of recommendations about leaving offerings or don't step into a circle of mushrooms or don't trot along certain trails or, you know, that sort of thing. My advice is, you know, just like if you are traveling to a foreign country,

it is important to do your best to respect the culture and respect the rules of where you're traveling. Okay, even though we live in the middle world, when we Trump along like we're the only beings here you know, you can you know, you can cause damage right if I just you know, walk around throwing my garbage everywhere you know, I'm I'm causing, you know, I'm causing damage and that's not right. So, in a fight, traveled to a foreign country, I tried to learn a little bit of you know, if, you know, they speak a language I don't understand, I'll try to learn at least a little bit. So I can get around, I will read about customs. So I will try not to do something that's deemed offensive. Um, you know, I will respect the locals, I will respect the law, I will, you know, embrace with curiosity and love and kindness. You know, people who offer up bits of their bits of their culture, right, people like to take pride in their culture have people come? If people come visit me, in Maine, for example, I, you know, we have a you know, I'm surrounded by beautiful nature and an amazing coastline with beaches, and rocky shores, and islands, all of those things. And they take pride in that, and I'd like to show people around. And so it's, it's kind of the, it's kind of the same thing. You know, with nature spirits, some of them are, you know, they're all you know, they all live here, this is their home. Right? The reason why they're nature spirits is that they live in nature they live in, you know, the world that we, that we look out at and consider nature. And, you know, so this is their home. And so it's important for us to respect that. And, you know, my work in shamanism shows me that we're, you know, there's this sort of infinite web of all living things. You know, of all spirits, and we're all connected. So if I disrespect if I, if I pollute, or I don't recycle, or I do all of these things, that's harming the earth. Like, I'm part of that web. I'm part of that net, I'm not disconnected, I'm not separate. And so respecting those things, at you know, even from a selfish superficial level is respecting myself, right, I'm affecting the world that I live in. So yeah, when you, when you walk in nature, when you go in nature, go in reverence. Right, show show, show, respect, whatever that means. Leave nothing. But footprints was sort of the, the camping motto, when I was when I was a boy, and I was in the Boy Scouts, right, we always left a place. At least as pristine as when we got there. Sometimes, you know, if we got to a camping spot or something, and some people had trashed it, we would clean it up. Right, we would leave it better than better than the way we found it. So the lesson there is how do we how do we as humans leave places better than when we found them. And it's hard because we make an impact just by living on the planet by eating food. It doesn't matter if you're, you know, it doesn't matter if you're vegan, you know, and, you know, power to you, if you are and you only eat, you know, you try to make as little impact as you can, you're still making an impact your food still has to be grown somewhere. fields have to be plowed. You know, territory has to be taken up to grow the food that you eat. Um, so we do make we do make an impact. So how do we, how do we look at that? How do we lessen that? How do we live in better harmony in you know, it's really about the small choices that we make? Do we choose to recycle? Do we choose to compost? Do we choose to, you know, participate in beach cleanups in our area? Or do we just treat the earth as if it's disposable? And, you know, and make the make the nature spirits angry at us, we don't want to do that.

When we live in harmony with them, they will take care of us. You know, most of them will take care of us they will they appreciate it. When you make offerings and offerings, you don't have to change your belief system, you know, or believe you know, or or do nature worship or become a shaman or practice animism, any of those things by making offerings. Um, you know, it could be simple, you could feed the birds, right, I have a bird feeder, and I feed the small mammals in the area, you know, put up put up That I'm very conscious of that are healthy for them. And it's especially important where I live over the winter, where a lot of birds have trouble. You know, have can have trouble finding food. So I do put, you know, I do put food out for them, especially in the winter. And it increases, you know, there's, there's research to show that increases the survivability rates. So, you know, I'm taking care of the animals and taking care of the environment, I'm very keen on recycling and, you know, taking a stance on things, you know, trying to be as ecological as I can be. But also keeping in mind that no matter what I do, just the fact that I exist on this planet, and I use electricity, and I use have to use fossil fuels for the time being, I don't have any other way to, to get around, I would love to own an electric vehicle. But that is, you know, a little outside of my price range at the moment, but someday in the near future, I'll be able to reduce my impact on the world. So it's about making conscious choices, it's about choosing, you know, choosing things that, you know, if given two choices, I, you know, I try to make try to make one that is less impactful. if you so desire, you can, you know, actually, you know, leave real offerings for nature spirits, you know, really, I find to, you know, you want to honor the spirits of place, and so we're, we're, I live this, you know, I live on land that was traditionally occupied by the wabanaki people, you know, at least you know, that my understanding is a big Confederacy of people, wabanaki people and, you know, one traditional offering for this area might be cornmeal. Right. And so I do, you know, I will offer cornmeal in this in this area, simply because that's a historic offering, right? That's something that has gone on here forever. Sometimes, I will also offer Mead, which is honey wine, you know, I'll put out a little cup of mead as an offering, in honor of my ancestors who were, who were Scandinavian, and you know, that sort of thing. And, you know, some other, you know, some other offerings as well. You know, like I said, I put out food for the birds So, if you so desire, you can put out offerings for nature spirits, and that seems to be a big part of animistic culture all over the world. And you know, it's, it's a way of living in greater harmony with the nature spirits that are around you, that are around you. So I hope this has been you know, I hope this has been interesting and certainly somewhat enlightening, enlightening about nature, spirits and what they are, and they have always been here, they will always be here, you know, time doesn't have as much meaning in time and space don't really have as much meaning in the spirit world. And that's sort of why sometimes these nature spirits appear appear to us as being small. But they do come in all different sizes and shapes and forms and that sort of thing. There's, there's quite a variety. Anyway, you know, I will leave you with that. I will get back to recording these on a more regular basis. I wish you all well, and we will talk to you next time.

Announcer 49:36

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

Ep16 Living Shamanism

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 0:48

Hello, everybody. Um,

I always have the urge to say good morning. And of course I never realize I don't. It's not that I don't think about. I really I do realize that you can be at any time of day listening to this podcast, but I will wish you a good morning or good day, no matter where you are in the world.

Today I have a I'm very excited about today's podcast guest. I will. I will introduce her to you in a second and we're going to talk about shamanism and shamanism as a lifelong practice and what that means and what's required and all that sort of stuff and who knows where the conversation will go. So my guest this morning is Dory Cote. And Dory is a nationally known I would probably say internationally known shamanic practitioner and teacher who brings passion and creativity to her teaching and healing, creating a safe, sacred and affirming place for students and clients. For over 25 years Dory, Cody has offered shamanic healings ceremonies,

and teachings for 1000s of clients and students from diverse cultural and spiritual backgrounds. She's a frequent workshop instructor at Kripalu and omega and with recent teachings at 1440 multiversity. And in full disclosure, Dory happens to be my teacher, and which is one of the reasons I'm so excited to have her on. And she's probably one of the busiest human beings I know. So I, you know, we'll start by saying thank you, Dory for offering me your time this morning. I know how busy your schedule can be.

Dory Cote 2:39

Well, I spy pleasure to be here with you and to offer what I can to your listening audience. And I, as you know, because I've said it to you personally many times I think you're an absolutely fabulous shamanic practitioner and teacher and it's my honor to be here to to have this chat. Well, gosh, thank

John Moore 3:05

you. Thank you so much for that. Um, we're gonna so as I said, we're going to talk what we're going to talk about shamanism today. And that's the thing obviously, that we have in common and talk about it really as as a lifelong practice. So I guess from my perspective, you know, shamanism is my is my path is my you know, spiritual path that found me and, you know, I'm I'm trying to live this shamanic life as best I can. But our you know, our listeners and and by the way, last I checked, we have listeners from 30 different countries. So that's pretty exciting to me. So we're talking to people all over the world, from India and Nepal, to you know, Australia and Europe and of course, the United States and Canada. Um, so people have different sort of ideas and shamanism has become a little bit of a buzzword. But if I were to ask you just to sort of make it clear for the listeners, when we use the word shamanism, what are I realized this is a really topic, what are we talking about? Like what's How would you define shamanism to somebody who had no idea or might have heard of it, but don't don't really understand what what shamanism is? Sure.

Dory Cote 4:28

Well, first of all, it's not a religion. It's a spiritual practice. It's available and accessible to anybody, regardless of their cultural or religious background, understandings, feelings.

History. It is a path of direct revelation. In other words, there are no there's no hierarchy within the public. Practice of shamanism there's no guru, there's no Master, there's no dogma, there's actually pretty much not even any specific teaching stat, one must follow to be in the practice of shamanism. There are, you know, there are definitely understandings and some basic tenets, you know, like being loving, compassionate, having reverence for all of life understanding that because there is no hierarchy in our understanding of spiritual dimensions, then we honor all beings, regardless of whether it's an ant or an elephant or a bird, a human, a tree, a Buttercup, all beings are equal in the eyes of the shamanic practitioner. So for someone to practice shamanism, I would say really, the only requirement is for that person to step into with time, maybe not necessarily the first day they take a shamanic journey workshop, but with time to step into the reverence for the life of all beings.

John Moore 6:31

Yeah, and I think I think you touched on something. Something important that that, you know, you know, about sort of the it's sort of hard to put shamanism in a box, right. And as you said, it's it's not there's not a specific dogma or there's, you know, there's not there's not a Bible, there's not an organization, there's no priest or Pope or guru or what have you. Um, but I think it's fair to say that she demonic, the shamanic worldview does embrace the idea of animism. Right? Yes, is the idea that everything had everything has a spirit? And yes, and as you spoke to the, the, you know, we approach beings with reverence and without hierarchy, we're, you know, equal to the trees and the grass and the rivers and the lakes and the birds and the Chipmunks. The chipmunks are eating peanuts off my porch this morning. So yeah, I mean, I think, you know, it's probably fair to say that to follow a shamanic path, one would have to at least accept the concept of animism. From a belief standpoint, do you think that Do you think that's fair?

Dory Cote 7:56

Yes, and it is fair, and it's true. And yet, you know, when people first begin to learn the practice of shamanism, and are curious, they may not embrace that at the outset. But as any person steps into the practice of shamanism by learning how to what we call a journey to the spirits of all beings, like the tree has a spirit that ant I was talking about has a spirit, once they embrace that understanding and become introduced to that concept of animism of there being no separation between me as a human and this beautiful, huge pine tree that I'm looking at right outside my window. Here we are one. Once people embrace that and understand that they as practitioners have the capacity to communicate and be in harmony, in a spirit of reciprocity, with the spirit of all beings that they are truly standing in the shoes of someone who is practicing shamanism actively. And then of course, there are degrees of practice, one, one first learns how to do a shamanic journey. And by the way, for the listeners, what that means is that the person who practices shamanism accesses other dimensions of reality beyond this space that we live in as embodied beings and through the sound of repetitive rhythms us you know, whether they're drums or Or rattles or, you know, didgeridoos, or bells or any other sounds, this particular rhythm that creates a cohesive connection between the heart of the practitioner and the heart of the earth that allows the practitioner or the person who is doing a journey to sink into the capacity to allow their not just their imagination, but a part of their soul self, to practice to leave the dimension of the embodied, to visit these other realms where spirits, speak with them, bless them, play with them, and engage with them in a harmonious sometimes teachings, sometimes healing kind of relationship. So when somebody first learns how to journey and they encounter this magnificent beauty, which is astonishing, like nine out of 10, people who learn how to journey are in absolute awe after their first weekend class, or even in a day, at what they are able to experience. You and I john just recently witnessed that as you were teaching an introductory workshop with some of your colleagues. And I forget how many students were there, but I think they were about 17 or 18. And, you know, from the first hour of the class to the end of the class several hours later, all of them I believe, had stepped into the shoes of all my right. This is real. Yeah, I'm not I'm not making this up. There really is, you know, another dimension where I can access spirits, benevolent, loving, compassionate spirits, who will engage with me, and help me with my own personal problems, my own, in, you know, my own questions from everything to you know, should I move to Denver or not? You know, should I get that divorce, you know, all those kinds of questions and issues and wisdom that is available to all of us. And

I know I've sort of gone off on a little wrap here, but I you know, as you know, I am very passionate about the practice of shamanism and all that. It has offered me personally in terms of my own development as a human being and a compassionate person. And I've had the privilege of teaching many, you know, hundreds of students who I get to watch then teaching others and, you know, that's that's how the practice of shamanism spreads. It's not that you know, there's anybody out on the street passing out leaflets saying, Yeah, come, right, come do a shamanic journey. It's because we, as practitioners love this work so much and love the experiences of expansion and beauty and and the healing that we're able to convey to others, whether human animal plant or elemental beings, that when I say this is a lifelong practice, what almost always happens with people is once they really fully immerse themselves into this practice. There's like no backing away. Right? It's like, like, this is it, this is my life path. This is it becomes not something you do, but it becomes who you are.

John Moore 14:46

Yes, yeah. I have found that as well. And it's, it's interesting that you you touched on something that that really jumped out at me like you were talking about it. exploring all of this beauty. And, you know, when I look out, we both live in the northeast, and it's, you know, there is so much natural beauty around us. But the practice of shamanism has opened my eyes to beauty that's even beyond that, even beyond what's, you know, the, what I can perceive with my 3d senses, that there's a whole other level there. And then there's a whole range. You know, I don't know if we know if they're infinite, but a whole range of worlds and spaces that are just as beautiful and justice full of spirits that we can explore through the the the experience of journeying. And it's funny that, you know, I think it's really a really common thing that I've experienced, and I know that you've experienced a lot as a teacher is, is in the beginning. There's always the question, am I just making this up? Like, when I journey? Am I just making this up? And I literally, I had a, I had a student that I'm that I'm working with one on one, you know, just over just last week that I taught how to sort of journey one on one and of course, that that question came up, you know, in advance, well, how do I know if I'm just making this up? And I said, Well, you know, the only thing I can say is just keep journeying. And there will come a moment, where you realize, okay, I can't possibly be making this up. And I don't know what that's gonna be. And her very first journey. She was Alright, that was totally real. I totally was. Yes, right. temprite complete confirmation.

Dory Cote 16:43

Well, and also what's true is that, you know, for, for many people who learn the practice of shamanism and journeying, they become interested in it not being just a self serving practice dot one that just is, you know, enhancing their own understanding of worlds beyond the scene world. But they then develop if they choose to the capacity to do healing work for others, or doing exploratory journeys to help their friends and family and colleagues or whoever, to, you know, to gather answers to some of their critical questions. And that, for me, is where I find most people discover that they cannot possibly be making it up, because they come back from a journey to ask a question on behalf of, even if it's somebody in this beginner workshop, or ask a question for, you know, a neighbor after they've gotten home from a workshop. And they get information and visuals and auditory experiences that they cannot possibly have known because the person they've journeyed for, they might have just met five minutes ago. So that for me is always like, where I say the rubber hits the road. People get it all my I am not making this up. Yes, your imagination is in some ways engaged because you have to go to these other dimensions of reality, and then come back, you have to have some memory of what happened. Right? Right. So some part of your conscious self is engaged. But it's it's it's not your conscious self that has these experiences. It's your own spirit, meeting spirit. And that's where the guidance, the healing, the wisdom, the power comes from is these other outside of the, of the, the embodied experience, that wisdom that resides all around us that is accessible by any of us.

John Moore 19:14

And I think you would probably agree that in traditional shamanic cultures, the role of the shaman was, you know, as sort of a functionary a spiritual functionary, that was sort of the frequently the center of a community that people went to for healing, to find out when to plant the corn to find out, you know, where the, where the, you know, the livestock got off to that they can't find all of those. All of those things were sort of in the in the more traditional role of the shaman in what we call shamanic cultures. Yes,

Dory Cote 19:57

that's absolutely true. And that's, you know, Where we as modern day practitioners derive our you know, our path to some extent, you know, the understanding that the practice of shamanism, although it can be, you know, the path to some extraordinary personal growth and understanding of self and the world. The initial understanding, you know from where we tap into the roots of our ancestors is that the shaman was the psychologist, the doctor, the, the spiritual leader, of a healer, the leader of the tribe, or a community or village in which he or she was found. And that isn't true in our modern day culture, of course, because we don't live in small communities or, for the most part, I mean, certainly we still have, you know, here in America, we have native american people who are still very much in tribal communities. But in general, Anglo Saxon, Christian, Judaic, Islamic people don't have that kind of leader in their culture. So it's often by accident, to some extent that a person finds a shamanic practitioner, that they're led to, to access some healing power for themselves. But that's the, you know, what I'm trying to get to here is that the initial function of the shaman in antiquity was to be the healer, be the therapist, be the spiritual guide, be the one who made decisions about everything, like you said, from when we plant the corn to understanding from being able to communicate with spirit when it was time to pack up and leave because the snow is coming. And the lives of the people were dependent upon the Shama. And, you know, the, I always like to say, when I'm teaching students, you know, the, the, the people didn't become the shaman in their culture, because, you know, they put their hand up and said, Yeah, I'll be the shaman. Right, nice day, they had to go through amazing initiations. Well, sometimes it was through ancestry, like, you know, your grandfather was the shaman and you got trained under him, for instance, to you know, to walk in his shoes when he left his mortal body. But for the most part, you know, the shaman was was chosen by having to go through numerous initiations, which would be in our modern day times. brutal and, and the person who survived you know, if there may be five people going through initiations, the one who lived through it was the one who ended up being the shaman because he or she had demonstrated that they had phenomenal capacity with communicating and being one with spirit. We don't do that, of course, because

John Moore 23:40

I'm happy you didn't put me through that door.

Dory Cote 23:43

Nobody in modern day culture would sign up for that, and it will make sense based on our current culture. However, what is true is that when, when modern day persons began to experience shamanism and throw themselves more intently in a committed way into the practice of shamanism, they to experience you know, more modern day kinds of initiations, like, you know what needs to happen in order for a person's ego to get out of the way for them to understand that the healing and wisdom and power that they're conveying has nothing to do with them. It is not about oh, I am really cool. I am really powerful. Watch this. It's completely about what we call becoming the hollow bone being the pure conduit between spirit, the formlessness of spirit and bringing that formless power healing wisdom and what have you into form or into, you know, the embodied middle world, culture of humans, trees, plants, birds and so forth.

John Moore 25:15

I think it's one of the things I love about shamanism is that it lets me off the hook a little bit. Yes. Because I'm not doing any of this. If I bring back information, and it doesn't make sense, I'm still gonna deliver it, because it's my job to step out of the way. And understand that my limited three dimensional human understanding of things is just that limited, three dimensional and human. And it's, you know, it not only lets me off the hook a little bit, but when I'm doing you know, when I don't know how to how to this doesn't sound the right term, when I'm doing work for somebody when I'm practicing with a client, for example. It's helpful for me, because it because there's because it takes some of the pressure off, I can I hand things over to helping spirits, right?

Dory Cote 26:15

Yes, in fact, you know, after 25 years of practice, I say to my clients, always, you know, we have a conversation, they tell me something about what's going on what's not working in their lives, you know, maybe they've just gone through a terrible divorce, or they're suffering some kind of physical ailment that nobody in the medical world is able to diagnose or, you know, whatever their, whatever is not working in their life, we talk about it. And, you know, I have some concepts in my mind, because I've been doing this for a lot of years about what, you know what direction we might go in with the healing work. But at the same time, I actually say out loud to the client, actually have no idea. It's really not what I think I could be completely wrong here about where we're going to go with this work. And so before I even begin the journey, I have to surrender my thoughts by beliefs, my understanding of what might be the core issue here that needs healing, and allow my health experience to guide me to what needs to be done. And I have to say that, you know, at least 50% of the time, my ideas were not, were weren't right. Okay, Dorian, that was a good thought. But you know, what, this is where we're going. Right? In? It's not what you think.

John Moore 27:46

Yeah, yeah. And sometimes there's, for me, anyway, sometimes there's a time component, right? where, you know, somebody might, you know, a client might come to me and say, you know, I'm dealing with the trauma of a relationship or something along those lines. And I'll say, Well, you know, that might mean, today is the day for some soul retrieval, or you might not be ready for that yet. Right? spirits are going to tell me what's to be done today.

Dory Cote 28:14

Exactly, exactly what is in the client's highest good today. And perhaps, you know, a client has a situation in their lives, like, like you just mentioned, like a difficult, you know, ending of an intimate relationship. And they're initially what they want they have contacted you for is, you know, help me with this because I have a broken heart. And I can't seem to get on with my life. But underneath the current trauma, may be something that is far older. Sure. And, and we don't know that. We just have to go with where our spirit helpers take us to, either, you know, if we're doing soul retrieval, bring back some essence of the person's soul that left when they were two years old, or, you know, remove some energy that is stuck in them that goes back to a relationship they had as a teenager. The possibilities are endless, and that's, you know, I like to say often, there's no way you could be bored practicing shamanism.

John Moore 29:32

That's for sure.

Dory Cote 29:33

Yeah. Because there is no repetition there is every situation is unique. Every journey is unique every I'm learning with every, every day, I am learning and deepening my practice. So there's no there's no humdrum to it. You know, I grew up as a As a Catholic, many, you know, many people practice shamanism had come from deep, you know, Christian roots or Judaic roots or, you know, Islamic roots or any particular religious background. And, you know, there, there's a certain humdrum pneus to most organized religions, you know, like, as a Catholic, well, you know, when you pray the rosary beads, you did it the same way, every time, right? Nobody changed the prayers. Like, just, you know, there, there was a good monotony to it, but yet, you know, what's never, never a unique in shamanism, every journey is unique, every experience is unique. And, and though, you know, we develop relationships, and this is really important to say that the listening audience is that we're not you know, as practitioners, we're not just grabbing on to any spirit that's passing by to, to, to gather wisdom and healing power from we develop long term relationships with a very specific, what we call helping spirits or spirit partners. And it's through that relationship that we are able to bring through the power and healing that a client needs, whether that client is a dog, or you know, a patch of land, or, you know, the spirit of a flock of birds. So, through those relationships, those deep, long forge trusting relationships, like I know when my helping Spirit gives me a piece of information, even if I in my mind, think, Oh, my God, how am I gonna say this to the client? I know that I have to, because I know that they understand things that is that are not possibly that I'm not possibly capable of understanding about this person, and what they need and what is happening. And every time without fail, when I dare, as I must, because that's a commitment we make as practitioners. say, Well, this is what I saw, this is what happened. And this is the message I got. It doesn't make a lot of sense to me, but I hope it settles well with you. And sometimes clients are like, Oh, my, how did you? You know, what? How could you have known that? How are you know? Well, I didn't know. That's the truth. I didn't know. But the spirits who are around us always always they never go away. The other ones who know?

John Moore 32:59

Yes, yes. It's one of the things that becomes really apparent very early on in anyone's shamanic tenure to realize that we are constantly surrounded by spirits Yes, all the time. You know, there's more I talk about you know, when I talk about sort of the middle world and the middle world is the where we live but there's a spiritual component to that as well. It's that the middle world is full of spirits and some of them have physical representation but not all of them and I don't think probably even the majority of them have visitation and that's just one world exactly in which there are many many worlds to to explore

Dory Cote 33:45

is a really good point john we're constantly you know, I mean we we develop sensitivity The more we practice shamanism to the presence of the unseen around us you know that there are you know, like in this room that I'm sitting in here I don't know how many spirits around me but I know that there are a lot and you know, I can choose to tap into their spirit energy or not because I have sovereignty as an individual and but if I choose to tap into it and really feel into Whoo, this room is really filled with beautiful light beings who are here to protect me and console the guide me and entertain me and help me see things that I might not see if I'm just in my thinking mind sitting out front of a computer.

John Moore 34:49

Yeah, yeah, I mean, and it's Yeah, having interactions with you know, other cultures. You realize how, you know, some cultures these spirits are in our, you know, if you live in a Western culture and I know that there are people listening all over the world, but you know, sort of the, if there is a single Western culture, you know, just in generally speaking, spirits aren't that present in daily life as they are in some other cultures. So, for example, in Japan, where, you know, Shinto is you know, Shinto and Buddhism kind of go hand in hand there, you know, you have a shrine inside your house, that enshrines you know, spirits, or is a seat of your ancestors or, you know, that sort of thing. And there are lots of cultures where spirits are more present in daily life, right, then the culture that you and I grew up in a very, very similar space. We both grew up in Maine, and it's, it's not as present and yeah, you go to church once a week or however many times and you pray, and that's your, that's sort of the limit of your interaction with spirit unless you're sensitive and being imparted with stuff you might not choose to be.

Dory Cote 36:11

Right. Yes, that's, that's absolutely true. And, you know, what, another thing that develops as people move more deeply into the practice of shamanism is that they recognize that, that there are no boundaries to being with spirit. You know, as as you know, john, we often create altars, you know, small altars. I have altars, all over by healing space here, you know, an altar to the spirits of my teachers, an altar to the spirit of myself as a teacher and honor, you know, honoring the spirits of birds and so forth. So it helps to remind us, shamanism is a way of life, it is not just, oh, I'm going to do a journey, so I'm practicing shamanism now, where once we really engage ourselves, and come to see that there is only oneness, there is no beginning, there is no end. We're not separate from all that is, there is no hierarchy, then we come to understand that this is a way of being It is not like having a time in our lives where we say, Oh, it's Sunday morning, I'm going to church. It's a daily, moment by moment. way of living?

John Moore 37:59

Yeah. So it's, you can't, I don't think you can, I mean, of course, thinking back to when I started practicing, you know, you're learning you're going through, and it's sort of something you do, but then it changes you in a way that you can't, you can't sort of undo and I liken it to, you know, you you blow up a balloon, you fill a balloon with air, which coincidentally, the word for air and a lot of cultures is the same as the word for spirit. And you deflate it, that balloon never quite goes back to the same shape.

Dory Cote 38:36

Exactly. That's a great metaphor. I also want to say to the, to the listeners that you know, practicing shamanism does not mean in any way that you have to leave your traditional, spiritual or religious background in the, in your rearview mirror. Many people, many, many, many people practice shamanism and go to church every Sunday, or go to temple or continue practicing their Hindu or Islamic or, you know, belief system, because it's part of their culture as part of their family as part of their ancestry. But it may change the way they view that practice. But it does not mean that they set that practices aside.

John Moore 39:29

Right. And I think one thing you know, one thing that I have sort of recognized in my own my own sort of nerdy research into shamanism and that sort of thing is that the shamanic figure and shamanic practice and what we call shamanic people exists in some way, in every culture that we can look at. And so when you look at like, you know, And I'm not I'm not an necessarily an expert in world religion, but when you look at like Islam and you have the Sufi practices, where they're doing meditations or they're doing movements that are altering their consciousness so they can be lifted up to commune with angels, that's very in line with what we would be doing as shamanic practitioners. When we look at even even some early Christian practices, we we see that we definitely see that in, you know, in, in ancient Greek and Roman cultures and Egypt and cultures and all of these cultures. Shimano practice went hand in hand, there wasn't, you know, some of them did not have a separate role. Yes. Like we would consider a shamanic culture to be sort of tribal and have this role. Some of them didn't have that role, but the practice the belief, the lifestyle existed, cross culturally. And really, if you look, if you look closely enough at any culture, you can find the practice everywhere, everywhere and at all times that we have records for.

Dory Cote 41:12

It's absolutely true, john, absolutely. The other thing that is, you know, is important to understand is that, you know, when when somebody seeks working with a shamanic practitioner, which by the way, we don't call ourselves shamans in modern day practice, because that's seem to be very egocentric. Somebody could call me a shaman, if they want to, they can say, Oh, she's my shaman. But I don't call myself a shaman. Because that's, that's taking on a little too much. Right? ego sense of self. So anybody, from any culture I have worked with, you know, 85 year old ladies who were like so Catholic, that it was completely ingrained in their sensibilities about everything in life. I've worked with people who are practicing suit who, you know, who are Sufi practitioners, I've, you know, it does not matter, because in the end, we're all praying to the same God, right? There is no, there's no separation. And so, in the practice of shamanism was sort of going underneath the dogma underneath the rules underneath all of that, and accessing the ultimate grains of truth, that we are all one, that we are all spirit, and that we all when we leave our mortal bodies, when our soul or spirit leaves us, we become part of the fabric, of of life. And we're not separate and a kind of way, it's not that Catholics go one place, and Sufi is go another when their souls leave this dimension of reality. We're all one. And coming from that place. It makes it possible to speak the same language to anybody, anybody who has any kind of cultural or spiritual or religious belief. Because we're going to the bottom, we're going to the foundation of it all, which is not wound around dogma or leadership, or, you know, as I said, at the very beginning, shamanism is a practice of direct revelation, there is nobody who is going to interpret what is happening, nobody who's going to say, Oh, no, no, no, no, that that breaks that rule. There are no rules, there are customs, but no rules.

John Moore 44:19

It's, it's a really interesting point. And, you know, we've said a few times that shamanism really has no dogma, and there are no rules and there aren't leaders interpreting revelations for us. And yet, integrity is really important in the practice of shamanism. And as I think there might be sort of, I have run into the concept I'll say with a number of people that, well gosh, if there's nobody there, to tell me what the rules are, I'm just going to you know, people are just going to live life lawlessly and go around and, you know, kill people and steal their things. And destroy the planet and do all of the all of this stuff. But what I think what I think happens when you practice shamanism, at least from my perspective is, you start to recognize why living with integrity is important. And you don't need somebody necessarily to tell you why or how or what that means

Dory Cote 45:30

is that that's absolutely true. Because the spirits teach you. Right? There's, there's no human, you know, between you and the spirits who are telling you, oh, you know, really? Do you want to chop that tree down? You know? How about if you go out and, you know, talk to the tree and see how the tree feels about being chopped down? And, you know, is there some other way that that tree can, can, you know, offer us some thing, you know, even though it looks like it's maybe going to fall on your house, just there? Is there some way that you can come to an agreement with the tree about how to proceed. So you know, that's where the integrity comes, you have you come to recognize that you're not, you're not alone, ever, you know, they're and, and you're living on this planet, in a body, accompanied by billions of organisms and plants, and the elements. And all of these beings play a role in how you are able to live as a human at this time. And so if you don't, if you don't proceed with integrity, the spirits who you're working with, will let you know. And perhaps, will stop working with you, you know, this practice is not something to be taken lightly. Like, you know, some people first learn and say, Oh, well, now that I have this skill, maybe I can journey and find out what the megabox numbers is. Next week, right, right. Well, and oh, no, that's not gonna work. You're, you're helping spirits. They're just gonna laugh at you. Well, they'll give you a number, but it won't be the right number. Right? Right. No, and it will be their way of saying, Yeah, go ahead, spend your money on these numbers. But we're not you know, that's not our purpose. We're not we're not here for your entertainment or for, you know, the gathering of more money or power or fame. We're here to advance your souls understanding of the grandness of a life.

John Moore 48:02

Yeah, and I I liken that to you know, a lot of people believe that they have incarnated into this body for a reason there are lessons they have to learn, there are things we have to accomplish contracts we have to fulfill. And there aren't really shortcuts to that. And you know, winning, winning the lottery is if if the spirits were so inclined, I think I you know, I can't interpret things for them, but just from my, my brain would be seen like a shortcut, like, no, you're not you're on this path, to learn these lessons. And part of that is not winning $100 million in the lottery to enrich yourself with with spirit in that way. Exactly.

Dory Cote 48:53

Right. Yeah, that's, that's not the that's not ever the purpose of your relationship with spirit helpers. It's the purpose is to gather spiritual knowledge, wisdom, power, healing on behalf of others, not just humans, but all beings and to live in integrity as you as you said, when a when a shaman, or shamanic practitioner stops living from a place of integrity. Then they've they lose their power, it's the spirits will not support them. I call it a shaman gone bad. Like, oh, oh, that is not the intention of doing this work. And when you veer from the path of love and compassion and integrity, then the spirit world is not going to support Your ongoing ability to gather guidance or healing or wisdom from them, they're just gonna shut you down. And, and that's the end. If that doesn't happen to most people, most people get it, you know, because the love and compassion and wisdom that they're able to tap into is life altering. It alters the person's heart, the way they understand the complexity of our relationships with all beings that, that we really are not separate, you know, and in our, in our culture, we've developed this belief system that humans are like, at the top of, of the evolutionary chain. Well, that's just a bunch of bunk. You know, there's no truth to that we are just one with the tiniest of creatures, the, the, you know, we think we're the only ones who have consciousness and the ability to make decisions. You know, when when you move into the practice of shamanism, and you pay attention, you become to understand that all of life has some consciousness of life, you know, what do people think, is driving ants to, you know, come out of the Earth at a particular time and work together as a team? That, you know, is yes, the scientists might say, well, there's a scientific design to that. Well, yes. And how did that happen? You know, what are the initial roots of that capacity for the ants to work as a team and know what to eat and what not to eat? And when to go in when the rain drops calm? And, you know, I was just reading an article about a plant. Oh, no, I'm not gathering it now. But there's a particular plant that knows exactly when to reach for something when it expands as leaves to reach for a particular something. And, and scientists are now studying in a well, what drives that plant to know. Right?

John Moore 52:33

Right.

Dory Cote 52:33

Well, it is, it's not. It's not that the plant has a brain, but it has a consciousness, it has an understanding of what it needs to survive, and what it needs to expand and what it needs to be a part of the fabric of life, which is really, ultimately, all that we

John Moore 52:59

are. I think one of the most beautiful pieces of research I've become aware of recently is about the mycelial network of Yes, fungus that lives underground, that trees actually use to communicate, so they live symbiotically, and they exchange chemicals with the trees. And if a tree you know, half a mile away, is lacking sunlight or nutrients or some somewhere, it can be delivered through this mycelial network. Underground from another tree. It's amazing. And we, you know, we don't necessarily think of that as consciousness because it is so alien to our human consciousness. Right? It is consciousness it is in consciousness is everywhere. And in everything. I think, in my existence. We're swimming, we're swimming in consciousness.

Dory Cote 54:00

We are absolutely.

John Moore 54:02

So. Um, so we are actually coming. Can you believe that? We're coming to the end of the podcasts? Wow. But I started your your Thank you. So I did want just sort of one final question. So you know, if somebody has been listening, if somebody's been listening to this podcast, and they're like, gosh, that sounds really interesting. How would I begin? If I were, you know, living somewhere in the world, and like, I'm really interested in in learning some shamanic practice and diving into the world. Where would I where would I start out? How would you find a place to start? Well,

Dory Cote 54:47

you know, 1010 years ago, I would have said, you know, find a local practitioner who you could go take a course with, and what's what's really wonderful about the advancement Technology and communication throughout the world is that now regardless of where you are, if you have the capacity to listen to a transmission, either via audio or a video, you can access, you know, beginner, our introductory courses online, you know, via zoom or via radio or via podcast or so my suggestion is that regardless of where, you know, the listener is resigning at this moment that they do a search, you know, online to find, you know, practitioner teacher, I mean, really a teacher, you want to learn shamanism from somebody who knows how to teach not just somebody who has taken a course themselves and thinks they know how to teach. So, you know, for you, for instance, john, have a website and you offer occasional classes and one on one teaching, and there are many other people like you around the world. I don't want to direct the listener to any particular website or place. But, you know, if, if you're listening to this, and you have the capacity to search through, you know, Google or any other engine, search for, you know, introductory courses in shamanism, and, you know, do your research, make sure that the person who is teaching this course has themself some that's a person who's offering this teaching has some background, some, you know, has themselves studied and also knows how to teach.

John Moore 57:04

Yeah. Yeah, it's, it's definitely a different thing. Practicing and teaching are are two very different two different skills.

Dory Cote 57:13

Yes.

John Moore 57:13

Although you do have to know how to practice to teach. Practicing alone doesn't necessarily give you what you need.

Dory Cote 57:22

That's right. Absolutely. As you know, john, I've, you know, been teaching a handful of students how to teach some of the advanced work that you know, I will eventually back away from because of my aging, even though I'm in excellent health, I you know, when one because when one gets into their mid 70s, they come to realize that there is there is a time when one has to back away from certain activities. So, you know, john, for the listeners, john is one of those students who has been studying this advanced work with me and is going to be, and he is really qualified to teach, you know, not just beginner work, but advance work. So I, you know, I can endorse him as a fabulous teacher and somebody that you could trust with, who has integrity and understands the work and is a loving, compassionate guide and teacher.

John Moore 58:32

Well, thank you. I'm blushing over here.

Dory Cote 58:37

Thank you can't see you. Right.

John Moore 58:38

That's what I have to say.

Dory Cote 58:42

So yeah, so there, you know, in this in this time, there are so many avenues for people to be introduced. But I caution the listeners to do their homework, make sure that they that they find a teacher who's qualified, who has done their work and has has studied how to teach.

John Moore 59:06

And if people want more information about you Dory, you have a really excellent website, which is, amongst other things, a really great

resource for finding out more information about shamanism and finding classes and teachers. And I really suggest if you're interested in shamanism at all, signing up for dories email list, which you can find on her website, which is DoryCote.com. That's dorycote.com. And definitely her her mailing list is a great place to start as well.

To get all kinds of to get all kinds of resources and learning and mailing lists are free. So that's, you know, That's a great thing as well.

Dory Cote 1:00:01

Yeah, thank you, john. Yeah, I love having people receiving my newsletter and other, you know, opportunities to do some things online that don't cost anything. And I, you know, we're, we're, We Are the World, we are the people. And you know, there is no separation. And so regardless of where someone is, you know, what's lovely is that they can they can access things today.

John Moore 1:00:30

It is it is amazing, like that giant mycelial network. Yes, exactly. Um, you know, we're imitating the trees at this point. So, with that, I want to, I want to say thank you very much for coming on. It's been it's been wonderful and taking time away from your very, very busy schedule. And I will actually talk to you in a couple days, but not on the podcast.

Dory Cote 1:00:57

Yes, yes. I look forward to it.

John Moore 1:01:02

Thank you very much, and you'll hear from us next time.

Dory Cote 1:01:07

Excellent. Thank you.

Announcer 1:01:38

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 ma i n e s h a m a n.com.

Ep13 Lucid Dreams, Astral Projection, and Shamanic Journeying

Announcer 0:30

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

John Moore 0:53

Everybody. Normally, I record these early in the morning, I don't know there's something about sunrise that keeps my creative juices flowing and and I like that time in the morning it's quiet the the sort of mental noise of the world quiets down today, it's a little bit different. I'm recording this early in the evening. I don't know if that makes a difference to you or not. But I thought I would point that out. And it's kind of interesting. As I do this, it's the sun is setting I normally do this as the sun is rising. And sunrise and sunset are these beautiful, interesting transition times. In other powerful times of day, powerful times to meditate or to get things done or to soak in the beauty of nature, which is what I love to do. I am blessed to live in a place where I have spectacular sunrises and sunsets. Almost any time the weather is fine. And it was chilly but fine today where I am in the state of Maine in the United States, which is in the the northern Northeastern most corner of the of the continental United States. If you're not familiar with Maine, we're known for lobster and, and skiing and all kinds of stuff. Stephen King grew up here if you like horror movies and horror books, excuse me. Now normally some podcasters would edit out their little cough I'm not going to do that I don't edit these at all. Or thumping the mic as I just did. I do not edit these. So you get the raw, unfiltered me. And maybe I'm just too lazy to edit these. But no, I prefer to just have these come out naturally. So it's I realize it's one sided, but it's more like a conversation when when I'm talking to you. Today I chose the topic of dreams. I'm going to talk about dreams. I'm going to talk about lucid dreaming. I'm going to talk about astral travel or astral projection. And I'm gonna talk about shamanic journeying. And these things are all sort of Allied under a heading I will sort of, you know, sort of call it soul travel. Right. And we'll talk about why that is I'll talk about the differences between these things. Um, interestingly, I was watching or I'm still watching a series on Netflix called behind her eyes, which is based on a novel. I will not give spoilers but you know, there is some amount of soul travel lucid dreaming stuff going on there. And so, you know, kind of inspired me to talk about this. And I'm very, very interested in in dreams and dreaming in general, as a shamanic practitioner, I do. I do a lot of dream work. And I you know, locally here in my state I, you know, once a week, I actually am on the radio, doing dream analysis for listeners, which is mostly a fun thing. You know, it's a fun thing that I do and get to connect with people here and the gyms are always interesting. And, you know, sometimes I'm able to provide some clarity or some relief around some issues with dreams. So I'm going to talk about dreams. I'm going to talk about lucid dreaming what that is astral travel or astral projection and how that sort of equates to shamanic journeying. So let me start out With dreams in general, and again, I'm going to, I'm going to sort of present my take on dream material. And my feeling is if you're listening to this podcast, you have interested in spiritual topics, that your beliefs may overlap mine a little bit, and that what dreams are and what they represent. Now, from a psychoanalytic perspective, you know, we go back to young and Freud sort of big, big minds in psychoanalysis

particularly young, very interested in people's dreams, right? Very interesting people's dreams, because dreams allow us to surface a lot of unconscious material, a lot of stuff that, you know, we would not have conscious awareness of, and in my experience, doing dream analysis, dreams, kind of loosely fall into a few categories, right. One category of dreams, are I sort of how would I put this they're sort of warning posts or flags, you're particularly sometimes there's a recurring dream that happens. It's not necessarily a warning of danger, but it's your, your subconscious mind is trying to really get you to pay attention to something and you haven't you haven't figured that out yet, you haven't sussed out that information isn't dealt with whatever issue that is, yet it's buried somewhere in your subconscious. Now, your subconscious, your unconscious mind, processes things, very metaphorically, which is why a lot of dream material that comes up as metaphorical, and it's why dream analysis can, can be really helpful. If you, you know, talk to somebody who's intuitive, and works with dreams, and, you know, that sort of thing. can sort of help you walk through, you know, issues that are coming up. And that is something that I encounter a lot when I'm doing sort of dream analysis work. You know, somebody will tell me, you know, I dreamed about my dream about my father driving off a cliff or something along those lines. And as I suss it out, as I, I'm like, well, you really, you know, concerned about, you know, the driving situation is, you know, really a symbol of independence and, and, you know, being able to take care of oneself, and you know, your father driving off a cliff and you're witnessing it or you're involved and you're worried about, you know, your father's independence. And, you know, the person was able to oh my gosh, yes, my father had a stroke 12 years ago. And in this, this is really, really tiny example, and I'm sort of general, generalizing. Because analysis can take a long time, it can be very in depth, right? Um, very frequently, dreams can surface trauma. Right? So trauma is stored in the soul, from a shamanic perspective stored in the body, but stored in the soul body, from the demonic perspective. So things that happened to us can sometimes surface in dreams. So again, this is your this is your unconscious mind going, Hey, you know, there's something here that you really kind of want to deal with. Right? There's something here that you may, you know, you may want to get some therapy around or process or something along those lines. And that is another, you know, that's another really sort of common thing that comes up. Right. So, you know, I believe that all dreams hold some importance. I don't think, you know, I'm not sure what the exact scientific consensus is on dreaming. I don't think it's just random noise. Right? Why would that? Why would that possibly be? Why would we have evolved to just have random noise go through our head into our consciousness, right, on a nightly basis? Like, completely random, and ultimately, experience doesn't bear that out, you know, frequently, I'm able to determine with some degree of accuracy, some issues that are going on in somebody's life based on some dream material that may not be related to the actual issue right there, symbolic things are happening. So these things are related. I think it's the uncut, you know, the unconscious, if its surface to the surface of the consciousness, sometimes it's trying to pay attention to something sometimes it's trying to, you know, do what therapists might call processing, right processing. You know, you're going through this, you're going through this information and organizing it into You know, the way that your brain holds information and deals with it, that sort of mundane, everyday dreaming. Now I do have a number of people who tell me they do not dream, I don't, I do not dream.

And that is just not true. What you're saying, when you say that, when you say I don't dream, what you're actually saying is, I don't remember my dreams, but that doesn't mean you don't dream. Because if you take somebody who is, um, you know, asleep, and they're going through rat rapid eye movement, right, you can see their eyeballs moving under their eyelids, and you wake them up and you ask them what was going on. They could, they can say, you know, most of the time, nearly all the time they can, they can describe the dream that they were in. But what happens when we're dreaming, we're in a certain mind, state, a certain state of mind, meaning you have, you know, your brain is processing things a certain way parts of your brain to turn off parts are turned on, you know, the, the brainwaves going through your brain are not like you're waking consciousness. And when you wake up, your brain shifts, right, you know, some parts shut down, some parts turn on, it is a huge shift in consciousness to go from asleep to waking, even REM sleep, which is sort of close to your waking state from a brainwave perspective. So many, many people have the experience of having a dream and having it fade as they wake up. And that's really common as well. Right. So that's that process where, when we're shifting brain states, we often forget within the first five or 10 minutes. So if you're a person, you want to remember your dreams. My suggestion to the to you is keep a notebook next to your bed with a pen or pencil. And as soon as you wake up, as soon as you remember, take down some notes about, you know what you were dreaming of, write it down before it fades. You know if, you know, if it's not going to wake up somebody who's sleeping with you, you could also use a like a voice recorder app on your phone and talk into that and record, record your dream, you know, whatever, just, you know, if you get it out, you're gonna be less likely to forget it. And then the other thing that happens when you start to keep a dream journal is that you are sort of training your brain that you want to remember your dreams and you'll begin to remember them more frequently. Okay, so I talked about dreaming and sort of what dreaming is, from my perspective, and you know, that everybody dreams and they talked about a certain category of dreams, which I sort of are, you know, these metaphoric, signposts or, or pathways or pay attention to me pay attention to something, right, it's like a flag, pay attention to this. I'm not always on warning, not always, sometimes it's, you know, you have some untapped potential, you have some creativity, you want to get out, you are attracted to somebody and you're not willing to admit it. Those things, you know, those things can all happen. Um, you know, there's, you know, there can be some on it also some, you know, sort of a second category, which sometimes has some overlap here are the, on unresolved unresolved feeling dreams, right. So, you know, you break up with somebody, and you dream about them, or, you know, you never fulfilled a life dream and you dream about that. Even you know, in that in that category can also be overlap one another category, there's, you know, there's these categories are not really firmly defined. They're just sort of things that they're ways that I think about, you know, when I about dreams when I talk about them with people, right? Another big one is wish fulfillment. Right? And sometimes our wishes can be pushed down into our shadow. I did a whole podcast episode about the shadow. But very briefly, the shadow is the exiled part of ourself, it's the part of ourself that due to socialization, or our values or whatever, like we push thought, feelings and desires into that we don't accept about ourselves. So some of that may be sexual, for example, right. So if you have

dreams of a sexual nature with somebody who is not your spouse, or you know, somebody who is, you know, might be inappropriate to have a sexual relationship with, that can be that sort of thing, right. And, um, you know, wish people were sort of less alarmed about this, okay, you know, you can have a dream about somebody and never act on it. And, you know, some stuff can be some stuff can be coming up some thoughts, some desires, it's natural to have this stuff. When you when you, you know, when you push it into your subconscious, that's, you know, when you push it into an, you know, in your shadow, that's when it can become problematic. Okay, so that's sort of another category, then there's this, this sort of larger category that is, you know, sort of spiritual dreams, write dreams that are maybe pre cognitive, maybe they foreshadow something happening. Or maybe they're indications that something has happened or is happening. You know, a relative of mine, a very close relative of mine, woke up from a sound sleep, at the exact moment, another relative of mine was declared dead, unexpectedly in hospital, and, you know, knew that something was going on and said, I'm gonna go, you know, I'm getting up now, because of my phone's gonna ring anytime now with some, something has happened. So pre cognitive stuff can happen in dreams, and what's going on there? Right. So when we dream, our ego, our conscious mind starts to shut down. And I honestly think that we are normally receiving all of this, what you might call psychic input, these impressions, that we're getting these signals from the world. And they're not surfacing, they're not sort of loud enough, above the things that are coming in through our senses, our sensory input is overwhelming. All of that, right. So imagine that you're in a very crowded restaurant, and everybody in that restaurant is having a conversation at the top of their lungs, you know, as loud as they possibly can. And there's a couple sitting in the corner, whispering to each other? Are you going to be able to pay attention to that whispering? Are you even going to hear it or be aware of it? Probably not. And it's probably, even if you were aware that something you know, something's going on, there's a conversation there, they're whispering, the other stimulus in the room is going to overpower that so much, you're not going to be able to pay attention to it. And that's why a lot of, you know, many spiritual systems pay close attention to stuff that comes up in dreams. The issue here is not all dreams are pre cognitive, I have lots of people call me up. And you know, I dreamed about dying, I dreamed about this, but that dreams of death are not always pre cognitive, particularly if they're about yours. They're usually about a life transition. If you think of the death card and the Tarot deck, it is a card of change, transition, you know, that sort of thing. It's not about physical death. And I have never had an incident or an incidents where somebody talked to me about dying in a dream where that has been pre cognitive. So in my experience, it's just not it's just not the case, where those things happen. So that, you know, that can happen the other. Another thing that can happen is we can become really, really receptive to loved ones who have passed, for example, right? I talked to a lot of people who tell me my grandmother showed up in my dream, and said this to me, and it turned out to be true. Absolutely. your grandmother's probably looking at on you from the afterlife. And, you know, it took you entering a dream state to be able to hear that person. This is something so mediums who are really good, who can talk to people who've crossed over, they're able to enter that that sort of receptive state at will, you're able to train that. It's also why meditators like meditation, that centers around learning to quiet the noise in the environment is is an effective and important tool. For, for doing certain types of psychic development, right, being able to tune out the noise and listen to the signal that you want to listen to. And tuning is a really great

way of describing what the brain does. Okay? I personally, and I'm not alone in this, this is not my theory. I personally do not believe that consciousness that human consciousness or any consciousness is located in the brain. I believe that consciousness is non local, and outside of time, however, I believe that the brain, the human brain, and in my case, hope I have a human brain. Some people might say that I have a monkey brain. But as far as I know, I have a human brain. And I believe that the human brain is a receiver, very much like a radio receiver of consciousness, the signal of consciousness, right? When we go to sleep for the night, we the our brain, even though the sensory input is still coming in our brain changes frequencies, right and tunes out, tunes out the input, but also tunes, you know, changes to a different frequency of consciousness. And this is exactly what's going on with people who are clairvoyant, intuitive. Our mediums are our shamanic practitioners. They're people who have learned to intentionally change the frequency they're receiving, you know, they're receiving signals on in their brain. They're changing, they're, they're changing their consciousness. And there is evidence, there is a lot of research around the nonlocality of, of consciousness. Consciousness, if you think about it, right? consciousness is what we call a nominalization. A nominalization is a noun, it's a thing that you cannot you could not put in a wheelbarrow, right? So it's a noun, it's, we're talking about a process, something that is happening, but it's not a physical object, right? Most nouns are like, pen, table, lamp. ship, right. If you had a big enough wheelbarrow, you could put a ship in it. So consciousness, right consciousness, love, respect all these things. These are, these are nouns but they you couldn't put them in a wheelbarrow, they're formless. These are foremost nouns. And consciousness is a formless noun, we so often associate, ourselves or consciousness with our physical reality with our physical body, with a physical brain, with our sense organs, all of those things. Um, just empirically, I do not believe that to be the case, I do not believe that brain, the human brain is the source of consciousness, but it is a receiver of consciousness. And just like a radio set, you can tune that receiver to different channels, the brain is an absolutely amazing organ, it is an amazing thing that we have the fact that we're able to use it to tune consciousness, right. But saying that it's the source of consciousness is a little bit like saying, the radio show you're listening to, is actually generated by the radio. Right? The podcast that you're listening to, I'm sitting in my living room, talking into a microphone, I am not sitting inside your, you know, your computer or your phone and talking to you. So your computer, your phone is not the source of this podcast, the source of this podcast is, you know, me talking into a microphone. And yes, there's all kinds of stuff going on. As I talk into a microphone, my voice, the sound waves are changing to an electrical signal, which is digitized and recorded and then uploaded and downloaded and all kinds of stuff are going on. But it wouldn't be right to say that your phone, your computer is the source of this podcast in the same way. That is not correct, in my opinion, to say that the brain is the source of consciousness. Right? And so what happens when we die and I realized that's probably a whole other podcast, what happens when we die and the brain ceases to function or consciousness does not go away. It is not it is just not being received anymore by this body. Mind this brain is shut down. This brain is no longer functioning. But consciousness is non local. So it's it carries on. And trust me like this is

you know, this is something I experience every day as a shamanic practitioner, conscious being elsewhere. Okay, so I've talked a lot about dreams and a lot of the different categories of dreams. And I really like I want to talk a little bit about lucid dreaming. And if you haven't heard that term before, lucid dreaming is when you are dreaming. And you know that you're dreaming, if you've ever been in the dream and known that you were dreaming. That technically is what a lucid dream is. But there are a lot of other implications of the term lucid dreaming. One of the implications of lucid dreaming is that you can take control of the content of your dream, right. I do know people who lucid dream really regularly, and they're able to sort of shape their dreams into whatever, whatever they want. And there's lots of reasons to do that some of those esoteric, some of those merely recreational imagine, you could go anywhere in the world you want on vacation, do anything you want, eat anything you want, hang out with anything you want, and have a conversation with anything you want, that can be expressed through lucid dreaming. Um, what's going on with lucid dreaming in, you know, my take on this is that the, you know, so you're, you're there, your brain is not a simple system. And so, actually tuning to two different frequencies at the same time. So part of your brain that would normally be asleep, the cut, you know, the conscious, you know, what we might consider a sort of the conscious waking state of the brain is actually awake and active, and the dreaming part of the brain is active at the same time. And those signals kind of mixed together. And you can take control of the dream. And this is, this is pretty interesting. So this, as well brings me to another type of dream, another sort of category of dream that I have experienced myself and I know people have experienced and you know, I don't know how common it is. But is the category of dream I would call actually soul travel. And it is more common, in my opinion with lucid dreaming. And this is where the part of your, you know, your consciousness that we might refer to as your astral body, which is a semi formless body, but can you know you can perceive it as having the same shape and characteristics of your body? is able to travel? Right, able to go around looking on friends, talk to people talk to ghosts, go to heaven? Who knows? Right? wherever you want to go? How is this differentiated where like? So I want to talk a little bit about how this travel takes place. And I'll I'll use this to segue into talking about astral projection and astral travel as well. Where are you traveling? How are you traveling? How you know what? What's sort of the mechanisms involved here. These soul travel dreams are very closely related to astral projection, and they're very closely related to shamanic journeying. And so what happens is this formless part of you is traveling in other realms, and so in demonic terms, the world that we live in, in ordinary reality in your conscious waking state, the physical world that you walk through, we refer to this as the middle world. And the middle world

is also sort of a shorthand for the spiritual template, the formless templates in which ordinary reality exists. And I use the metaphor if you've ever had, like, if you're my age, you remember in school, teachers used to use overhead projectors, and they would have these clear sheets that they would project up onto the screen and they could write on them or they would have stuff printed on them and you could stack one on top of the other, or you might have seen in a book somewhere where you have these Clear acetate sheets maybe have saved the human body. And you can peel back the layer that has the skin on it and see the muscles and the organs and you peel back the muscles in the organs. And underneath that is the skeletal system. And you can fold it all over. And those, you know, shining light through them, you can kind of see all of those layers. The middle world is like that, right? The middle world is made up of lots and lots of different sort of frequencies of things. So we have this very physical reality that we move through every day. And we have physical light that we see and all these things. But every object every being that we encounter, in physical, everyday ordinary reality, has a spiritual counterpart, right? The chair you're sitting on is a spirit tool thing. As an object, it has a spiritual component, which if you were doing shamanic journeying, soul travel, astral projection, you would, you would see that you would see that in and might be a little different, because you're only because your perception is changing, you've shifted your consciousness. So this this sort of spiritual overlay of the middle world, the middle world, the spiritual aspects of the middle world, is also where we encounter sort of what I might call nature spirits, mythological creatures. You know, things like ghosts, right, a lot of paranormal phenomena happens in the middle world. And because, because the middle world frequency is, you know, the spiritual component frequency is very close to the physical world, sometimes, that's when we can have this paranormal stuff that affects the physical world. Okay. And when I talk about nature spirits for a moment, just really briefly, because that again, that's a whole other podcast. Um, so every culture that I can think of has some sort of concept of a nature spirit, right? So in sort of, in the, in the UK and Ireland, and you know, Scotland, Wales, so England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, sort of the Celtic areas of the world, we have things like fairies, Pixies brownies, the fairy faith is still in many areas of the world taken very, very, very seriously. In Hawaii, they have lots of spiritual creatures. But when I think of like, fairies, Pixies brownie sprites, they have what are called the mental hooni. And the men of hooni are these like little people, right? So they, these little spiritual people exist in so many cultures around the world. And so sort of Nordic countries, right, Scandinavian countries. You know, I don't know all of the words for them, but they have, you know, trolls, and elves, and, you know, that sort of thing. So all of those sort of little people, which is a weird word for it, because they're all different sizes. But, you know, these spiritual creatures, in these folk belief systems aren't just, they're not, for lack of a better term fairy tales. They're real, they're real creatures, that people who have spiritual sight can interact with. And, and I have, you know, I have certainly done a fair bit of work with nature spirits, there are religions existing to this day that that deal with them. A lot of a lot of folk religion, from Africa, to Australia, to the Pacific islands to United States, or, you know, the Continental North America, South America, not just the United States, but indigenous cultures throughout the world

have these nature spirits, and they all have different names, and they all have different characteristics because they're filtered through the consciousness, but what's going on here? What's going on with these cultures that were separate, you know, separated for, you know, for ever geographically separated and, you know, didn't necessarily have any recent interaction, any historical interaction or even like, you know, interaction with 10s of 1000s of years. How did they all spontaneously generate the same thing? Well, they didn't. I can, I can tell you that nature spirits are are real. And I will do a whole entire podcast on them, but we experienced them in the middle world. leprechauns sprites fairies can Tom lay men hooni I cannot. Someday I'll see if I can find a reference to to maybe there's probably hundreds and hundreds of names from all in all different countries, all different cultures for, for these nature spirits. And so you don't have to necessarily believe me, but I, you know, I believe in them and I have interacted them with them in shamanic journey. So sometimes, so these soul journeys, for the most part happened in the middle world, right? If you've ever dreamed of like, checking in on something or experiencing something, and then happens, some pre cognitive stuff is middle world. And the thing is this spirit world, the formless because you know, I'm not a physicist, I'm not a quantum physicist or physicist of any kind. But time and matter are really closely interlinked in ordinary reality, so when you get outside of the space, where things are solid and made of matter, time starts to break down. So that's why we can, you know, journey into the past journey into the future. Because those things like our human minds are going to place them in time. But they're not necessarily, you know, going to make exact sense, it's not going to be as linear, as we experience going through life in ordinary reality. Right, because time, really, really starts to break down. And I have had some pre cognitive experiences in journeys that have been sort of a sort of blown me away, you know, experience things that have that have come to pass. And I, you know, certainly have talked to people who have had had dreams where that's also the case. So soul journey, and let's, you know, so sojourning happens to, in my experience, primarily during lucid dreaming, happens primarily in the middle world, although when you're lucid dreaming, you can do things like fly, go through walls, that sort of thing. Because the part of you that's traveling is not made out of matter, in the way that we think of it. It's not made out of physical material. It is, um, you know, non physical, so you can defy the laws of physics. Most of them anyway, as far as I know, I don't have haven't tested a lot of a lot of physical experience experiments, while lucid dreaming, but maybe that'll be a thing. So yeah, I mean, and you can, it's beyond the scope of this podcast, but you can train yourself to lucid dream. You know, it takes a little bit of doing but it's not, it's not incredibly challenging to do, you will not be successful 100% of the time, but you know, you can get some successes. And there is a bounty of things that can happen from lucid dreaming, right, from being able to experience things to rehearsing activities to taking advantage of, you know, the dream state to do some spiritual work. That's lucid dreaming. And when you're traveling in the middle world, in a lucid dream, you're essentially doing the same thing is what we call astral projection, or astral traveling. The difference with astral, the only difference in my opinion, between astral projection and soul travel in dreams is that with astral projection, you are not dreaming. You're not asleep. Right? So, people do these meditation exercises to get into the right brain states, but they are they have not fallen asleep. And they're able to

separate their astral body from their physical body. Some portion of it, you're actually what you're doing is you're splitting off some piece of consciousness from your soul. And I'm able to travel that way in in the middle world. I will caution this. This is my I don't. I don't use scare tactics, tactics just to scare people. But when I teach people to journey to do shamanic journeys, which is basically the same thing as astral travel. Middle world journeys are not always 100% safe, and some of the risks of of traveling in the middle world without what I would call likes. demonic protection without taking steps to make sure that you're safe. You know, include you may you may encounter spirits that don't have your best interest at heart, you may encounter spirits that can drain you of energy that can attach to you that can do you know, some do some things that can cause some physical effects, right can cause you to get sick. Can you know if you've been doing this kind of work and you start having in your in, you know, you're not, if you've been doing a lot of astral travel practice or you've been, I don't know, playing with journeying in the middle world without proper training or that sort of thing. And you start to experience symptoms of psychosis, like breaks from reality, like when you're in ordinary reality, it's time to seek out a shaman and get some help for that. Could be lots of things. But you may have picked up a hitchhiker, which some people call possession. I don't need to find a better word for that. Because when I say position, people think of the movie The Exorcist, and they think it's like a demon is taking over their body, that's not always the case. Sometimes spirit will just follow you home. Because if you see them, they can see you kind of thing. And sometimes you're intruding on a territory. You know, nature, spirits can be territorial, they can be protectors of space, it's important to have good relationships with them. So you know, just be cautious when you're experimenting with this stuff. I know there's a lot of there's a lot of stuff out there about astral travel. And if you you have to imagine a silver cord back to your body. And if you don't, you know, if the silver cord gets severed, you'll die. And I you know, that's not my experience. That is, I don't know where that comes from. Maybe that's true. I mean, there are there are what we call a theory cords that attach people to things and to other people and all that sort of thing. Um, you know, and that's just the different to me and it's just a different phenomenon. When I journey I don't have to visualize or think about or, I've never even experienced a chord like that and I'm able to journey which brings me to shamanic journeying, which I've talked about a little bit already, but what, what are shamans doing when they journey when they go into trance and they journey? So a shamanic journey consists of three components. A shaman alters their state of consciousness, right goes into a trance travels in non ordinary reality. Right? So that's exactly what we're talking about here with astral projection and sometimes lucid dreaming soul travel. And the shaman the important differences is shum always works with helping spirits, right? We form alliances with spirits. Normally, if you're a shamanic practitioner, normally, you'll start to build relationships with lots of helping spirits. Because it can be like specialists, right? I work with one helping spirit for soul retrieval. I work with another one for doing past life work. I work with another one for doing, you know, divination, you know, they sort of specialize. But so. shamans, you know, the big, the big difference here between somebody who's just astrally projecting or whatever is that shamans are working with helping spirits will they do this?

The other the other aspect that comes from training and shamanism is that shamans don't only work in the middle world. shamans work in lots of different worlds, you know, a very broad, you know, painting, painting the spiritual world with a very broad brush. You know, the shamans generally work in what we call the lower world, middle world and upper worlds. But there are infinite worlds. And these are just really big distinctions. It's sort of like somebody's asking me for my address. And I say I live in the Milky Way galaxy. Right. So if you addressed if you wrote me a letter and addressed it to the Milky Way galaxy, it's probably not going to find its way to my house. So These are broad strokes, and it just helps us sort of talk about things. So the practice of shamanism over you know, over a really long period of time as you practice and you learn different ceremonies and you learn different healing techniques and you learn all these things. You know, part of what you're doing is you're also exploring other worlds and bringing back information, healing energy, all kinds of things, if you work with, if you work on behalf of yourself, or you work on behalf of clients, or you work on behalf of a community, you know, and then a lot of indigenous cultures, you know, shamans work for a, you know, whatever tribal unit they're a part of, right, they're doing lots of work for everything from determining the best time to plant corn to, um, you know, interpreting the dreams of an elders to, you know, doing his, you know, actual physical healing work. That sort of thing because shamans traditionally, have played the roles of doctors, spiritual leaders, storytellers, all all kinds of things. There are ways that the, the archetype of the shaman plays out and all these things. So all these things that I've mentioned, so soul journeying during dreaming and lucid dreaming, astral projection, shamanic journeying. They're all very related activities. And the reason we're able to do these is because human beings have, you know, all human beings have a number of things in common we all have. We all have consciousness, we all have soul bodies, we all have spirit, we all have a theory of bodies we all have, we're all made up of the same stuff. We're all very, very, very different. Right? No two people are alike. Everybody has different DNA. Everybody has different thoughts and feelings, and aspirations and all of those things. But we have a lot of stuff in common. We all breathe oxygen, we all have blood in our arteries and veins. We all have hearts and lungs. And you know, that sort of thing. on a physical level, and on a spiritual level, we have sort of the same thing. We're all made up of the same stuff in the same way. Even if you don't think you dream, you do. Right, you just don't remember. And I believe that anybody can learn how to how to do a shamanic journey. I'm firmly convinced that anybody can learn how to do a shamanic journey. Does that make everybody a great candidate for being a shamanic healer? No, I don't think so. It's sort of like saying, every anybody can learn how to throw a baseball. But not everybody can be a major league baseball pitcher, right? Everybody can, you know, learn how to apply a bandaid to somebody's arm, but not everybody can be a surgeon, right? You know, on one part, it's it's a matter of there is a matter of makeup, some of the differences and makeup. But on the other hand, it's it is also a matter of extensive training and focus. You know, if somebody was really, really, somebody has the calling to learn the stuff, they they will, they will learn it, they will do it.

But there's certain things that certain things that happen that we know culturally, that that make people naturally better at this stuff. Right? And so, for example, if you were, if you were a person who was genetically very tall, you might have a advantage playing basketball over somebody who is much shorter, somebody who's much shorter, learn how to play basketball and be a professional basketball player. Sure, absolutely has happened, right? There have been some shorter basketball players. It's rare though, right? Because there's certain advantages from being born tall. And not to say they, you know, shamanism is a genetic thing, but there's certain life experiences that make a shamanic calling, more likely to happen and that make you better at dissociating from your body. Which is kind of what we're doing. When we journey. We are leaving our body to take a trip. So that is a lot of information. This has been i don't know i hope packed full of information and interesting and I hope you learn something today. I will be Hopefully bringing on won't not hopefully I will be bringing on more guests on my podcast I'm very excited about some of them coming up. I would be remiss if I did not mention that tomorrow. The day after this podcast goes out is St. Patrick's Day. My grandfather was was Irish, so I guess I feel a special I feel a special kins kinship with the Irish because I'm, you know, I'm a quarter Irish. And so to those who are to those who are celebrating, and if you are not Irish, but still celebrate Happy St. Patrick's Day. And I look forward to talking to you again. I wish you peace and love and all good things.

Announcer 51:20

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 M A I N E S H A M A N.com

Ep07 What is Shamanism?

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 his john,

John Moore 0:56

everybody. Thank you for joining me again, a little later, getting this podcast out than I normally would be. Forgive me for that in the realm of spirit, time doesn't really exist. So I guess it's okay. Anyway, at least that's what one of my teachers told me. It is just after sunrise here in Maine, and we had a couple of storms come through over the past few days, which, you know, dumped a little bit of snow on us. And it's just beautiful. The sun is out the sky is blue. The sun is streaming across the snow and through the trees. And it's just beautiful to look out. And I hope that wherever you are, you don't have to be in a spot as traditionally beautiful as Maine. But I hope wherever you are, you can find some beauty and some thing that you can see or touch or hear today, and you know, looking for beauty, you'll find it, your intention will guide you. So if you take a little bit of time, or just to set the intention to look for beauty today, something that really touches you and makes you feel good and connected. today. I think it'll make your day better. I hope so. Today's topic is near and dear to my heart. I want to the topic is What is shamanism. And I'm going to talk while I'm going to talk about shamanism. And that is my spiritual home for lack of a better term. shamanism is not a religion. So I don't can't really call it my religion, I could call it my practice. But it's more than that. So I'm going to talk about it, I'm going to shamanism is also a big buzzword right now. It's become increasingly popular, certainly in the United States, I see evidence of that happening in other places. And I will talk about why I think that's happening as well. It's not just in my opinion, a some kind of New Age buzzword. There is there is a reason why the shamanic impulse is waking up or waking people up across the world at this moment. So let's talk about what is a shaman and what shamanism is and where the word comes from. And all of those things in this will give you some, some background and why why this, you know, women are talking about in the, in the ways that I do. I'll say this, that we apply the word shaman and the word shamanism to a lot of different things. And some of that is because it's a challenging, they're challenging words to define. And another reason is their loan words into English. And their actual origins are a little bit lost at the moment, maybe some linguistic research down the road, but I'll talk about where we get the word from in English anyway. And the you know, the words have been applied cross culturally, to all kinds of spiritual workers, spiritual medicine, that sort of thing. And, you know, definitions are useful when they're agreed to, but there certainly may not be universal agreement. So when I give you my definition, that certainly is not going to agree with with other people and that's fine. We can disagree about that because words are words or symbols. They're not the thing that we're describing, right? They're shortcuts into our consciousness. I use that This, I use this example a lot if I use the word dog. That's not a dog. But if we have a common understanding of what the word dog means we can talk about a dog. The map is not the territory, the model is not the thing. The word isn't the thing that it describes. It's just a shortcut. It's a symbol. So, the word shaman

and I'll preface this by saying that in my tradition, I do not call myself a shaman I use when describing myself. I prefer the phrase, shamanic practitioner. Sometimes people will call me shamanic healer, that's also fine. If I'm doing healing work. I don't limit myself to healing work, but that's one type of work that I do. And I consider myself a teacher. I teach shamanism and other you know, spiritual topics. I teach meditation, Qigong, and some other you know, but my main, my main focus is shamanism. So it could be a shamanic teacher, shamanic practitioner, shamanic healer. I don't use the word shaman, and I'll talk about that a little bit later. The word shaman comes into English from Russian and German. Okay. And before that, before it was in Russian and German. It was a word from the Tongass people in Siberia. So it's Tim Lucic, I believe is how you say it in Siberia. And there it means you know what you think, you know, the word shaman means what you think it's this, you know, this holy person that you go to, that does spiritual work for you. They're a spiritual officiant for lack of a better term. However, roots of the word shaman do show up in some Chinese languages. They show up in Sanskrit they show up in Pali Lang, you know the language that the Buddha spoke. And so it's exact origins are a little bit lost. In in those cultures in Pali, and I believe Sanskrit and in the dialects of Chinese where it exists. It basically means like priest or monk or something along those lines. In the Tongass people, the word shaman means one who sees in the dark, or one who sees clearly. And if you ever see video or photos of a Siberian shaman, frequently they're wearing a cover over their eyes. What we would refer to as Siberian ikatan, sometimes it's, it's a hat with fringe that covers the eyes. And this is a tool that they use in their work. So what are we talking about when we talk about the word in English? To me, shamanism involves three main components. And if you're not doing them, you're doing something else. And it's fine that you're doing something else. But when I talk about shaman Ising, we turned that into a verb. When you talk about shamanism, I'm talking about three components, spiritual acts that comprise three components. And these will be at the center of what we're talking about. And these are things that, you know, back in the early 20th century, mid 20th century, anthropologists went around the world, looking at what we consider shamanic cultures, cultures, where they would have someone you know, fulfilling the role of shaman and looking at what these cultures did in common, what were the common practices, techniques, technologies that they were using. And so, there are three of them. One is a so the definition is a shaman is a, you know, a spiritual worker who uses altered states of consciousness to travel in or experience non ordinary states of reality. And who works with helping spirits to do work and that frequently healing or getting information or you know, other things, ceremonies, rituals, that sort of thing. Usually, there's a healing component of some kind. So those three components are using altered state of consciousness. That's component one, when to traveling in non ordinary reality, okay, so most shamanic cultures recognize spiritual worlds that they travel in and this is the main practices journeying in the spiritual worlds, okay, different words for them. In other cultures dream time other worlds in core shamanism we refer to sort of upper world, lower world, middle world. Lots and lots of cross cultural stuff here.

And then the last component is working with helping spirits. So shamans always working with other spirits. And they might do that in different ways that might involve, you know, in some cultures being taken over by the Spirit in some cultures, they're just communing with them or communicating or merging or calling upon them, evoking them, invoking them. But all three of those components are present when we're doing shamanism. So, let's talk about altered states. How do shamans enter altered states and a lot of people so there's a misconception that all shamans use drugs or hallucinogens, plant medicine, what have you. So in some cultures, I Alaska silicided. And there's lots and lots of chemicals and plants that can be used to enter altered states of consciousness. And it is true that the use of plant medicines exist in traditional cultures all over the world. So we see you know, the Sami people in you know, in in northern Scandinavia. There are rituals involving fly a garlic mushrooms. We see in you know, South America, South and Central America, we see things like Iowa aska. We see pod in the southwestern United States, we see Boga coming from Africa. So there's it, you know, these hallucinogens exist all over the place, and they are used and they are used. Shimano. For the most part, though, the majority of shamanic cultures use other means to alter their consciousness. A big one that I use a lot is to use sound, such as rhythmic drumming, or rattling or, you know, some sort of sound to enter the specific shamanic state. And what we know is that you know, there are different patterns of brain we know this now in modern times, obviously, before the invention of things like IE G's, and, you know, much more modern science, we didn't specifically have this information, but for 1000s of years, shamans knew what they were doing when they were altering their brains. And so they, you know, generate these brainwaves using sound called theta waves, right? It's around four hertz, if you're scientific or four cycles per second, or, you know, drumming at 220 beats per minute, would give you a theta brainwave state. And in this state, your ego breaks down a little bit, you become much more open, and are able to do the things that you need to do to get into a journey much more easily. So drumming is one another way. There are cultures. I'm thinking of Bushmen, cultures in Africa that use you know, this, use a sort of, like extreme form of dancing, where they might dance for 24 hours without food or water. It's put themselves in, you know, these crazy altered states. And, you know, dancing is another are another really common way to enter altered states. I'm sure there are lots of them. I'm sure there are lots and lots of ways. But there's a specific state that shamans use, whether they're aware of, you know, Eg research or not, but it's it's common all over the world. And people I guess, just knew that either through experimentation or through some sort of divine revelation that this particular state you know, brainwave state was tuning the brain to the correct frequency for doing shamanic work for lack of a better term. If we think of the brain, not as the generator of consciousness, but as the as a receiver of consciousness because I believe that consciousness is non local, but that the human brain is a As a receiver that can be tuned. And so tuning the brain to a specific vibratory pattern opens it up to shamanic work. So that's part one, so and then, so Part one is entering these altered states. Part Two, is,

you know, traveling in non ordinary realms, and again, like this, there's an, you know, as I said, shamanism appears all over the world, in every culture, it shows up in, you know, it's called different things. And it has, there's always a cultural overlay. Right, there's always, you know, the information about it comes filtered through the culture, and the cultural understanding of the people that, you know, the, the group that the, the shaman, you know, identifies with the culture that they've grown up in. So in, you know, in many cultures, they're, you know, the non ordinary reality exists and is called, you know, the other worlds or dream time, or lots and lots of different things. Okay. And what we find that's really common is, there is there are usually experiences of traveling down into the earth, which we have called the lower world. And don't worry, it's not, you know, those of us who grew up in a predominantly Christian culture might think that that's hellish, or going to hell, because we just think of Hell is down and lower, and that sort of thing. Those are just, you know, those are symbols that don't really apply here. It's, you know, from another system, those are symbols from another system, they don't really apply, I travel to the lower world nearly every day, and it is a beautiful nature like place, when you when you when you tune into that, and in the lower world, this is where we meet power animals, not to be confused with what have been called spirit animals, or totems, power animals are different, they're animal spirits, that we have sort of one on one relationships with. And in most cultures, you know, working with power animals is very common, very, very common, these spirit allies that are that come to us, as you know, sort of in the form of deceased animals. Very powerful work to be done with helping spirits. So a non ordinary reality that we also consider and what we call an upper world. And really, these again, these are models, these are labels that we're placing on states of consciousness that are experienced as traveling up or down in non ordinary reality. There are, as far as I know, infinite levels of, of reality, there's many, many, many, many, many, but it just makes it easier, we can't, you know, makes it possible to talk about it if we break it down into rather large chunks of description. And so there's an upper world and and, you know, a lot of shamanic cultures talk about being you know, born on the wings of an eagle or flying upward into heaven or being pulled up somehow. And it's a little bit of a different experience there. And there we meet teachers that might be more human, like less animal like, although that's not always the case. That's where you're sort of human like helping spirits hang out, where you might meet gods and goddesses and angels and you know, deceased ancestors, and that sort of thing, is the sort of upper realm and then there's this middle world, which is the world that we live in. In an Old Norse, we would call that mid guard, right? The middle world. And that's the world that we live in. But there's a spiritual overlay there. Right? This is spiritual overlay. And middle world is where we encounter things like nature spirits, fairies, and sprites and gin and genies and all kinds of stuff, right? So um, so that's non ordinary reality. And then I've touched a little bit on working with helping spirits, right. We have power animals that we work with to do a tremendous amount of work. We have what we call upper world teachers. Most people practicing shamanism will start to gather a community of spirits that they work with, and in my experience, these spirits are a little specialized. In other words, they work out I'll work with a spirit for a specific piece of work. One of the things we do one of the things that most practitioners do is a ceremony called soul retrieval. And it's a shamanic way of helping to deal with trauma amongst other things, but

it deals with soul loss, soul separation, soul fragmentation, that sort of thing. And I have a specific helping spirits that I work with for that work. And then another piece of work might be we call psychopomp work, which is helping helping people who are deceased to cross over to where they should be going, sort of, you know, helping with that kind of work. And I have other helping spirits that I work with for that, that type of work. And so they're a little bit specialized, and they're helping spirits for doing ancestor work for doing weather work for doing all kinds of stuff. Okay, so we normally we gather, we gather a team, right, a team of specialists. And that's really, that's really helpful. And, you know, one of the things I like about the practice of shamanism is one of the ways that it keeps my ego from getting really big is that it reminds me that I'm not the one doing the work. We always consider that it's the helping spirits actually doing the work. I'm just acting as a clear a conduit as I possibly can for the work to happen. Right. So that is that shamanism in a nutshell. Well, that is the definition of shamanism. In a nutshell, you have these three components, right? That I've been talking about. So why do we have people acting in the role of shaman in showing up in every culture in every you know, every location on the planet where people where there are people? You know, why is this? Why is shamanism this universal phenomenon? Right, why is it showing up everywhere at all times in recorded history, and it actually looks like shamanism is prehistoric. Slowly. We'll, I'll talk a little bit about that. But I think you could make a really good argument that would probably be backed up by modern science, that shamanic practice, the practice of shamanism is the oldest form of human spirituality, at least that still exists today. So we might say it's the oldest continuous form of human spirituality. Okay, so we think about, you know, the oldest, I don't, I don't know what the oldest sort of, you know, modern non prehistoric religion would be. But we'll say, you know, we'll say, Judaism is pretty old for Western religion. Right? And, you know, it's, I don't know, if I traces back five or 6000 years. I'm sure there are Eastern religions that are equally if not older than that. So religions in in Asia, I'm not sure how far back the you know, what we would consider the Hindu faith. We go go back. I know the texts are pretty some of the texts are pretty ancient. So yeah, I mean, there's there's, there are forms of spirituality that exists today that go back several 1000 years. The thing is, we have evidence now that we think cave paintings done by humans not but done by, you know, what we anatomically modern humans anyway, going back as far as 30 40,000 years, have are displaying. shamanic states of consciousness we see these things called m entoptic. patterns in this artwork we see therianthropy so we see paintings of things that are half animal half person. There's lots of evidence that this is the case and there is some support for that some belief for that. So we think that shamanism is probably the oldest practice of spirituality, that you know that that still exists today. Goes back 10s of 1000s of years,

we don't really have evidence of humans doing much more symbolic thought before that there was looks like there was a time about 50,000 years ago where humans started, you know, painting pictures having symbolic thought. But that's just current archaeological evidence. That's just what we have. Now, certainly things could become much older and new discoveries happen all the time that push timelines back for things. So it's possible then to consider that shamanism might be the original form of human spirituality, as soon as humans were able to alter their consciousness to experience, you know, experience what what shamans experienced, they were using that as a tool. And if you think about it, you know, we didn't have modern allopathic medicine developed yet, or even, you know, traditional Chinese medicine or a lot of forms of herb ology and stuff. And so humans had to survive as a species in conditions that, you know, can end with conditions and tools that weren't fantastic, right? Humans are not the fastest runners that we don't have the sharpest teeth, the biggest claws, we're not the strongest, we're not the best climbers. But what humans are there, we're adaptable. And we have, we're social. And we have the ability of symbolic thought, right? We have the ability to paint pictures, we have the ability to describe things using language. And that has been a huge survival advantage to us. Right? We, we, you know, that symbolic thought, that ability to form even spiritual ideas, and gather people together for a common good, though those things are what kept humans alive, while other ancestors died out. There's not evidence of Neanderthals, for example, doing cave paintings yet? I mean, I don't know that might, they might discover that at some point. You know, and certainly, Neanderthals were probably capable of some symbolic thought. But we don't really have evidence of the level that modern humans had Homo sapiens. And the same is kind of the same is true for other so you know, around. You know, in the early days of Homo sapiens, there were lots of other races of humans out there. And when I say race, I don't mean the way we think of race today, I mean, genus and species, you know, or at least species of humans were different. Right? We have Neanderthals denisovan, man, we had all kinds of hominids out there. And then the one thing that we definitely can see that's different about modern humans is this capability towards symbolic thought towards religiosity, for lack of a better term spirituality. Right. And, you know, the ability to do spiritual work really, I think provided a an evolutionary advantage that modern humans survived and other other species either, you know, interbred with humans, but didn't continue to exist as a species they died out, at some point. We did not still have Neanderthals walking around, although, you know, some people like myself, I've a bit of Neanderthal DNA. So there was some, there was some interbreeding going on there. But we don't have pure DNA, as you know, species of Neanderthals walking around these days. And there's a lot of speculation as to why that is, but I'm just saying that I think one strong advantage that Homo sapiens had was this ability for symbolic thought that at a level anyway, that we don't see in any other species on the planet. I do believe now they're doing research with primates and birds and showing that they are capable of some symbolic thought and perhaps, maybe even, you know, super primitive forms of spirituality or ritual. Certainly

And so, there is that, but certainly not developed to the level where human beings developed it. So one thing about shamanism is that, you know, we consider if you look at the work of young and he talks about the collective unconscious, and we have these archetypes that spring up, which are universal, they're universal patterns that exist in the collective conscious, right? We're not always aware of them. One example is the hero. And we talked about Joseph Campbell's, you know, the hero's journey, which is common in every mythology on the planet. Right? So the hero is an archetype. It's a pattern that shows up. And I think the shamanic archetype is the same thing. I think the shaman shows up I think every mythology on the planet contains elements of shamanic initiation, voyages to underworlds, to above worlds, dealing with spiritual creatures. All of these things I think, I think the shaman is, is, you know, on one level, you know, a shaman is an actual physical human being doing stuff on this planet. But I think there is an archetype, and I think it pops up everywhere in the planet, and I think it is as old as humanity itself. I think it'd be hard. You know, I, again, I'm proposing a lot of things that would be difficult to disprove. But this is, you know, I'm posting as this is my opinion, this is my thought on this, after having, you know, read significantly in this area and done a lot of my own research, and, in fact, journey and quite a lot about this. The shamanic archetype activates in human cultures and in human individuals as the result of crisis. And in fact, a lot of the literature talks about shamanic crisis and what does crisis mean? crisis is some sort of, we'll say abnormal threat. Right? So right now, as I record this, we are in the middle of a global pandemic. That is a crisis because it is an existential threat to many people, it has changed lives, it has threatened livelihoods, it has profoundly affected our culture, the way you know, no matter where you are, the way things have been done has changed. And in my opinion, this is one of the reasons why there has been this sort of wave like resurgence of interest. In shamanism, people are waking up to spirituality, they're waking up to this shamanic impulse, as a way of dealing with this. It's a response the awakening impulse, the awakening, demonic impulse is a response to crisis. on an individual level, most people I know who there are a certain number of people who are just interested in shamanism might take a weekend workshop or something like that. But most people I know, who go very deeply into shamanism become practitioners and teachers and that sort of thing. have gone through significant life passages. So this could be you know, I know someone who had several near death experiences. For me, it was, you know, it was a, what we might refer to as an have referred to as a nervous breakdown or psychological breakdown that I went through years ago that I didn't know that I could come back from. And it was a mental and physical crisis on an individual level. So we see this showing up again and again, and and in many, in many shamanic cultures around the world. shamans are chosen on the basis of having gone through some sort of crisis. Sometimes they have to be born with a physical deformity. Sometimes they might be struck by lightning. Have a mystery illness. This is called the demonic illness. And you'll see it frequently somebody falling ill with something that medical science has a hard time diagnosing a hard time treating that sort of thing, and they'll come out of it, you know, somewhat awakened or with the impulse to do shamanic work. I think I don't I don't know how really to estimate how frequently this happens. Everyone goes through crisis. Does that awaken the shamanic impulse in everyone? I think no. I think there are people who have a

Kind of a makeup that's geared towards that. And, you know, might have been drawn to spirit their whole lives but never really had a had a place to do it or a place to put it. But, you know, crisis kind of opens you up and kind of cracks you open. And in, it's in healing that those wounds where they're never completely healed, there's always a resonance there. You know, there's a, there's a poem that says the, you know, the cracks are where the light comes through. Right? It's that cracking apart, that breaking down of the ego, sometimes that allows people practicing shamanism to become clear channels, or in some cultures, it's called the hollow bone, right, the hollow bone that spirit passes through. So, yeah, so shamanism arises as a response to crisis, personal and cultural. So when culture goes through crisis, a lot of people sort of wake up. And that doesn't mean when I say wake up, but I'm not putting that in the sense of, you know, of like Buddhist awakening, or, you know, Ascension or any of those, like, you've reached another level. What I mean is, I've been going through my life, and then all of a sudden, I realize that, you know, there's this huge crisis I need to deal with, and ordinary methods I might use to deal with crisis are not working for me. And it's, it's a wake up call, maybe that's a better phrase wake up call, rather than than awakening. There's a lot of baggage around terms like awakening and ascension, and, and all of these things. So the shamanic viewpoint, there is a viewpoint, there is a way that shamans commonly look at things. And again, it's different culture by culture, of course, everybody looks at everything through the lens of the culture that they are, you know, they have been raised in or that they have adopted or that they have lived in for a really long time. It's good to be aware of these things. Right? So I'm speaking to you in English. And I know that for many of you English is not your first language. And so when I use words, I know inherently, that they may have slightly different meanings for you, and you might be looking at them in a way that you haven't, you know, I have experiences with certain words with certain symbols that you have, have experienced differently, and that's fine. So So when I say that, you know, there's a thing that's, that's common, it shows it does, you know, it shows up in different ways. But this is a fairly common thing. I, you know, I can't say if it's universal, because then somebody would, I said, This isn't every shamanic culture, you know, I'm sure somebody out there could say, Oh, no, this tribe from here does not believe that way. But when I say common, I would say almost every shamanic culture practitioner has a viewpoint that I would say describe as animistic animism is the belief that, you know, one way of describing the animistic belief is that it's the belief that spirit is in everything. This is the way I see it. So I see spirit in trees and grass, in rivers and rocks, in animals and people. I see spirit. I see the earth as a sort of giant spirit, a giant collective spirit. But spirit also exists in manmade things. So anything you can perceive as a separate object is a spirit. It just has a physical component to it. Okay, so if I make something, let's say I make I have this coffee cup in front of me and I have a sip as a matter of fact. Delicious, this coffee cup in front of me. So some human made that right, say, took some, some clay from the earth has some spirit, some bit of the earthly spirit was in that lump of clay and it was formed, it's the cup and then you know that there's this in non ordinary reality there is this spirit of the cup. But the cup also has a physical representation here on earth because I can pick it up I can put coffee in it and I can drink out of it.

So we see everything as a spirit, we can talk to, you know, we can talk to most things, sometimes they talk back, particularly during journey, middle world journeys, you can talk to trees and rocks and get information. And as I said that a blue bird just flew by my window, I'm, I'm, you know, not making that up. And it just flew by again, it's sweeping back and forth across my window. So it's lovely to see I talked to the birds, especially lots of birds where I am. And, and so the shamanic viewpoint is animistic that their spirits everywhere and travel, and I mentioned this before, but in the middle world, there are you do encounter lots of spirits that do not have a physical component, right, they do not have a physical body. And those spirits sometimes are seen as and, and Gosh, every culture has some name for little people, right? Little, little people that are sort of on the edge of spirit and physical reality. I can't think of the term but there's, you know, in Hawaiian culture, there are these little, little elves that build things overnight. Like they're, you know, giant walls are built overnight by these. You know, these, you know, these little elf like creatures and in, you know, in, in countries that were sort of Celtic at one point, so, you know, parts of, you know, UK and that area, we have a whole fairy faith, a whole faith built up around the faith of the fairies. But we have, you know, all kinds of, you know, European cultures, with fairies and trolls, and elves and gnomes, and all of these things. And we think of them as we have the phrase in English fairy tale write a story that isn't a story that isn't real, where we talk about fairies and supernatural creatures and that sort of thing. I'll tell you that, you know, reality is kind of a flexible thing. So are there things that are real, that aren't reflected in physical reality? Well, sure, your subjective experience of consciousness. You know, we can get it we could go down the rabbit hole of discussing consciousness, but your your entire subjective experience of reality does not really have a physical representation. And yes, I, you could, you know, go into a functional MRI machine and say, this area of your brain is lighting up in this area of your brain is lighting up. But none of that explains your subjective experience. That's electrical activity. But how do you go through life experiencing the world? How do you? How do waves made in the air sound like a symphony to you? How do you recreate a symphony in your consciousness? To me, electrical signals bouncing back and forth. can't really explain that can't really explain what I'm feeling when I touch something, or when I taste something. You know, my experiences of not of electrical symbols, passing back and forth to me consciousness is, is reality. And so is it possible then, that there are things that are real? I believe my consciousness is real, maybe I'm imagining my consciousness. But what is consciousness conscious of that? imagining? I'm sorry, as I'm kind of joking, but it's a little bit of a brain teaser, right? So consciousness is my experience of reality, and does not necessarily have a physical representation. So are there things that are real? I can make it simpler. If you have a thought, in your in your head, if you think of a if you think of a purple elephant, is that purple elephant real or not necessarily real? But is the thought real? Did you really have the thought the thought occur in this reality? Were you conscious of it? And the answer to that is yes. So even on just a mental level, there are things that exist that do not have physical represent Do not have physical bodies. And so whether or not you believe in fairy tale creatures,

and you think I'm psychotic, when I go out and talk to land spirits, or trees or whatever, is beside the point like we could, we could potentially agree that there are things that we would describe as real, that don't have physical presence. And, you know, there are no, there are no cultures, I can think of that do not have the belief in non physical entities, right. So every culture out there believes in spirits of some sort, whether that's the spirit that, you know, whether they're animistic or not, right, we believe that people have spirits that there are ghosts, that there are, you know, so these things are universal, these things exist in cultures that had no contact with each other for 10s of 1000s of years, at least, right? Maybe maybe longer. Right, when when humans started, you know, migrating all over the planet, and that that timeline keeps getting pushed back further and further, you know, they find evidence of human activity in Europe now going back, you know, 10s of 1000s of years earlier than they thought humans went out of went out of Africa. So that timeline keeps getting pushed back. So these are universal thoughts. These are things again, the shamanic impulse, the animistic impulse, the all these things are fairly universal. That doesn't mean every you know, that doesn't mean every human being on the planet believes in these things or believes in them in the same way. Right? There are atheists out there, there are material realists who think anything you cannot measure with equipment doesn't exist. And that's fine. That's their, that's their belief. That's their reality. It can't measure their consciousness, right? We can't measure can't attach, you can attach electrodes to your brain, that that is not your subjective experience of consciousness. So go back to the the idea that we can experience things that don't have physical representation. So I just want to recap a little bit and I hope this has been informative for you, but I talked about shamanism and how it is the, you know, it is a universal set of spiritual technologies, practices, ways of ways of interacting with spirit that go back at least 10s of 1000s of years, goes back into prehistoric times. It exists, the shamanic impulse exists, well, it is filtered through culture, it exists everywhere on the planet where there are human beings. It arises as the result as a response to a crisis, both on an individual cultural and global level. And that shamans are in general animists where we believe in spirits inhabiting things particularly in the natural world, but I extend that to things that are manmade as well. I really hope this has been informative. shamanism is my what I refer to as my spiritual home. please reach out to me if you have any questions or wish to contact me. You can find me at MaineShaman.com. That's ma i n e Sh aman.com.

Announcer 49:57

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

Ep02 Divine Masculine and Divine Feminine

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

Ep01 Darkness and Light Are Two Sides of the Same Coin

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