Ep03 Spirit, Soul, and Ego

Announcer 0:29

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

John Moore 0:49

Hello, everybody. I'm talking to you just after sunrise. It's a beautiful morning. It's a little overcast here. But I always try to greet the sun, the provider, the source of life on Earth, in one, you know, in on a physical level and a spiritual level. My topic for today, I'm going to talk about spirit, soul and ego and what those are and how they relate. And Gosh, I hope I have some good news for you today, not news. But I hope I have some good information for you that I'm going to do my best to inspire a little bit today. And the reason for that is, you know, the global situation is pretty crazy right now, we have, we're obviously in the middle of a global pandemic, that is affecting every human being on this planet. At this moment, whether you are sick have been sick know, people who've been sick, known people who have died, all these things, and I'm talking to you from the United States. I know I have listeners all over the world. And that's fantastic. And I and I greet you and thank you for listening and tuning in to me. Special greetings to my friends in India. But wherever you are, know that you are loved and appreciated. And I, you know, I do this for you. And I do this to reach out. And I do this to help hopefully bring us together and you know, maybe bring a little bit of light, where things may seem dark. And I'll talk a little bit about that as well. In my last podcast, I talked about the divine masculine, divine feminine, and what they look like and how they how they take place. And I'm going to talk a little bit more about that today. But in the context of what we might call spiritual development. spiritual development is a big topic. Obviously, if you walk into any bookstore, there's a huge section of books on spiritual development, there are courses online, there's everything you can think of every type of practice meditation, shamanic journeying, you know, everything, everything you can think of out there. So I'm going to start today, and I'm going to give you my definitions of spirit, soul and ego. And I realized that my definitions may not match up with your definitions or other people's definitions. And that's fine. we sort of have to be okay with that. Right? Words are models. And I'm gonna talk a lot about models today. But models are not the things right, if I say the word dog, that is a word that represents the animal dog, but that is that word is not the dog. Right? We say the map is not the territory is a pointer. It's a reference to something. And, you know, the spiritual realm is primarily invisible. Not to everyone but it you know, for for most people as we go around in our daily lives, we experience sort of 3d reality where time flows in one direction only and effects have causes and, and all of those things. And so, the definitions of things can be sort of loose. And the other thing that happens is that everything we experience on a spiritual level

is filtered through our culture. It's filtered through our ego, we're going to talk about what that is today through our own personal experiences, all of those things. And so there's, there's nothing wrong with that. And there's nothing wrong. If your definitions of things differ from mine, it's, I'm going to give you mine so I can have. So you know, I can have a common language with you. So, when you're listening to me, you know what I'm talking about. So you're not, you know, hopefully less confused when I use these terms, because I may be using them in a way that you haven't experienced before. And of course, my, my definitions, my you know, they're not necessarily mine, they come from my shamanic practice, and were given to me by my teachers and that sort of thing. When I say my, I'm just saying the ones that I'm using, not things that I have made up, I don't want you to think that I've invented some new system of explaining reality, there's nothing new about what I'm talking about. I have a perspective, but even that is informed by my culture, my my teachings, my, you know, studies that I've done journeys that I've done as a shamanic practitioner, all of those things are, so I don't, I don't claim ownership to them when I say mine. And that's the difficulty with words, right? In English. When I say my this, it could describe ownership, or it could describe, you know, just something I've I've adopted. So let's talk a little bit about spirit and soul first, and then we'll talk about ego after that. And then a minute, spend a little time on what, you know how to sort of go a little deeper if you're interested, how to go a little deeper into this into this learning. And so my first, before I get into spirit, soul, and ego, I'm going to talk to you about what I mean, when I say the word spiritual, right? This is speaking spirit. This is a podcast when I talk about spiritual topics, and what is what do I mean when I use the word spiritual? To me, spiritual is anything that gives you a connection with something greater than yourself. something beyond your physical self, your ego, that sort of thing. And that's a very broad definition, right? Because for some people walking in nature, might give them a deeper connection. Would I describe that as spiritual? Absolutely. No, it wouldn't be a spiritual experience. Meditation when you go inside, and touch a part of yourself that is connected to the entire universe. Absolutely, spiritual. If you pray, if you're a religious person, and you pray, and that gives you a sense of connection to deity, absolutely, that is spiritual. That's a spiritual practice. When I hug my children, and I feel this unconditional love for them, and from them. Absolutely, that is a spiritual moment for me. lovemaking, sex can be a very spiritual experience. It doesn't have to be. But it certainly can be if it gives you again, this sense of greater connection. So that's my take on, you know what the word spiritual means. And I have this theory that the deeper you go into anything, the more spiritual it becomes. And I'll give you a few examples. I have practice martial arts since I was about five or six years old. I'm in my late 40s right now. So it's a lot a lot of years. And in the beginning, you learn punches and kicks and you know, arm bars and all of those things. But the more you go into it, the more spiritual it becomes, the more connected you feel, the more in rhythm you feel, even with your opponent. Even you know, when you're practicing techniques that may seem, you know, violent, you know, hopefully, with practice, you become more peaceful and you become it seems like a contradiction, but it's true. You become more peaceful. You abhor violence you become softer, you become more connected with energy.

When I see somebody who isn't for example, in a Amazing basketball player. And they're what we call in the zone, right? Where they're just in rhythm and flow with what's going on, that seems like a very, I'm not a great basketball player. But that seems like a very spiritual experience for me. Recently, I was watching a cooking show, and Chef on the show was talking about how for him, cooking was all about finding this moment. And the second, he described that I'm like, Oh, he's having a deeply spiritual experience with cooking food with preparing food. He's got this emotional connection to what he's doing this spiritual connection. So the deeper you go into anything, the more spiritual it becomes. And when I talk about, you know, in a moment, when I talk about soul and spirit, I'm talking about how going deeper into yourself is probably about the, you know, the most spiritual thing you could do. So let's talk about those. Okay, so again, these are my definitions. And again, when I say my, I mean, adopted from my teachers, and that sort of thing. And I recognize that some people use these words interchangeably. So some people use spirit and soul to describe the same thing. And some people use spirit and soul with sort of opposite definitions of the way I used them. But I just want to give you these definitions so that again, we can have a common language so you, I'm not confusing you by what I'm talking about. So when I say spirit and soul, so in the shamanic world, one of the main practices that we do is called soul retrieval. And this is in response to some sort of trauma that somebody has experienced or an injury to a limb or shock to the system. And you know, this jives actually really well with modern psychological models of trauma, there's a splitting off, there's part of your soul breaks away. So your soul is this sort of body of spiritual energy that you carry around with you. And it is affected by your life experiences, it reincarnates with you, when you go from life to life, and it's, you know, can can sort of take on wounds and injuries and carry those, carry those along. So a lot of the work we do in shamanism is healing those parts, right finding, you know, recollecting and reuniting and integrating those parts. And this jives really well with sort of union part psychology, you know, family, internal family systems, therapy, those sort of modern psychological models, right, of this fractionating of the self, the soul. Okay, and, you know, we, you, we all have a soul and is closely in close contact with our body. So what happens, you have a physical body, you have lots of different bodies, right, you have a physical body, you have a soul body, a spirit body. When your soul body, completely leaves. That's when that's when you die, right? That's when your physical body dies. Your soul body does not die, and neither does your spirit. But your soul body can carry sort of baggage wounds, that sort of thing. It's affected by your life experiences. You know, it gains experience and it can be wounded, it can be healed. It can be developed, this is most this is what we're talking about. When we talk about spiritual development. We're talking about developing the soul or astral body, that non physical part of you. And so when I talk about spirit, what I'm talking about in so in, in Sanskrit, there's the word Atman, which is this like internal dwelling, undying slice of divinity. This is your this is your Divine Self. The part of you that is absolutely undying, indefinable, does not get wounded does not is not affected by life experiences. It is just this divine light that is at the center of you.

And there's some really amazing meditational practices that happen. There's one taught by the shamanic teacher Sandra ingerman, called transfiguration. Which is an absolutely beautiful, beautiful practice and, and simple and extremely deep and profound spiritual experiences do not have to be complex, or take years of training. Some of them can be extremely simple and experienced by anyone. Why because we all have this indwelling Spirit, this this part of ourselves. And this, I hope is a little bit of light, if you're experiencing some of the tumult of the world right now, in any sort of way that is painful to know that there's a part of you that is completely unaffected, that is just perfect love and perfect peace at your center, if you want to visualize this, you can visualize this as just an intense light, somewhere in the center of your body, usually in your, in your chest area, just that shines in all different directions at all times, and can never be dimmed can never be injured or affected. And this is your connection to divinity. So let's talk about let's talk about your bodies, let's talk about your different, different bodies. And so, again, all of this comes from a cultural context, right. So in you know, if you go back and you look at ancient Egyptian religion, they described all of these soul parts, and they had these, you know, huge system of religion around funerary rites, and this part of the soul did this and this part of the soul that this, you know, went off, and there's, you know, that that whole funerary ritual thing was about their, their model of, you know, the afterlife, and the parts of the soul and that sort of thing, right. And, again, this, this is filtered through their culture. In Norse belief, there's, again, soul, there's all different parts of the soul, right? There's, you know, there's a part of the soul that gives you luck, for example. And it's located, it's like a backpack in your back. And, you know, that's recognized in many different cultures. So the way I like to look at it, a metaphor that works really well for me, is that human beings are like an onion, a multi layered onion, we have so many layers that you can peel back, one after another after another after another, right, we have a physical body. But when you get beyond, you know, when you you know, that's a super oversimplification of even our physical presence, right, because we have, you know, a circulatory system and a skeletal system and a neurological system. And then we have all kinds of biochemistry going on. And we have all of the processes that go on we have, you know, respiration and cellular energy production, and all of that stuff, right? The stuff that goes on just to give us this body that we have in this physical world, and your, your other bodies, your soul body, your energy, body, all of these things are equally complex. So you could study these for many lifetimes and never get to the end of them, which is why we create these super oversimplifications. We say we have a body, we have a mind we have you know, we have a spirit we have a soul. Those are super oversimplifications. But it's necessary so that we can have a conversation about it so that we can talk about it. Again, I can talk about I can use the word dog, but I, you know, which represents it's a pointer to the animal dog, but I can't, you know, I could spend the rest of my life describing every thing that makes up a dog from you know, behavior to history to how their, you know, their body, you know, it could go into Veterinary Science, all of those things. So, just just an oversimplification, we have all of these bodies, and I view them as these overlapping layers and the

they really blend into each other. Right? So for example, we all we know about, we know that humans have an energy body, okay, this is how a lot of energy healing works, how a lot of you know, acupuncture or Reiki or any of those things, work on the level of the human energy system. The human energy body is close to overlaps with, interacts with the physical body very close very, very closely. And they overlap in such a way that it's almost impossible to really pull them apart and differentiate them. Right. So some of the meridians, some of the acupuncture meridians closely follow, you know, the nervous system and some, some do not. And so trying to separate those out is a little bit, you know, it's necessary if you're studying, studying something like acupuncture to think of them as separate things, but they're really not. Okay, and the same is true. The same is true for the soul body, right, you have the soul body, which is a little bit removed from the energy body. It's a little bit further inside that onion. Right, but they overlap, they interact and and they and they affect they can affect the physical body. So a lot of shamanic healing works on the level of the soul body. So we've talked about soul retrieval, there's other, there are other, many other practices that shamans do all over the world, that affect the soul body. And that can provide a template for physical healing a template for mental healing, a template for, you know, healing, you know, some of that comes through the energy body, some of it does not. You know, again, we could study this for forever and get to the bottom of it. And that's, to me, that's a really cool thing to think about how amazing we are as human incarnations, how lucky we are to have incarnated in the physical body. And I realize some religious systems say that that's a terrible thing to have to incarnate because we have to experience pain and loss and suffering and all of those things. And I get that. And we we do like having a body is not, it's not a walk in the park, right? It's not, it's not all pleasure, it is certainly the ability to experience pleasure and pain and all of those things. And those dualities exist in the human body, but we're lucky because we do get to interact on this plane, we do get to do things that develop our soul body that develop our astral body that develop our mind develop our these things. So that's my takeaway. And I promised I was going to talk about ego and I will talk about ego a little bit. And ego is one of those things. At least in the US, it's a little bit of a dirty word. In that when you describe somebody as having a big ego, for example, that is not a compliment, right? We say that little check out that guy's ego, um, you know, meaning that they have an inflated sense of self that they think very highly of themselves and perhaps should not should you know, that this is a judgment about somebody not showing humility. And humility isn't humility, humility, humility is a wonderful trait to have. So what are we talking about when we talk about ego? So ego ism is a mental construct. So it it takes place, sort of, it's not its own body. And my my take it is simply your sense of who you are, your sense of I, and all of the sort of complex things that that comes with, right? So when I think of myself, you know, my, my name is john, something my parents gave me when I was born.

That's a part of, but something that I you know, I happen to like, if somebody says, john, I'm gonna turn around, right? Because I identify with it. That's my name. That's one part of my ego, but I'm also a dad, that's a concept that I have about myself. So it's about your self concept. It's about who and how you I identify, okay. So, we can develop problems with our ego, right, we can develop problems. One problem is we can develop hubris, right? We can develop this inflated sense of self. And that certainly can happen with some types of spiritual development. And so the astral body, the soul body, is has this sort of hubris effect on the ego because it does affect the mental body. Certainly, it affects our consciousness. And I certainly have known people who consider themselves ascended or above others or beyond. You know, beyond flaw and that that sort of thing in that is a real trap. That is a super serious is a terrible trap to fall into. In spiritual development. If you ever think that your work is done, you are probably wrong, you're most likely wrong. Unless you are the Buddha or, or are actually, you know, some sort of enlightened master The problem is that people think they are, and they aren't. And they might have developed amazing spiritual abilities, you know, we think about, um, you know, I think about a Buddhist teacher that I studied with decades ago, who was considered by some of his students enlightened and had all kinds of special abilities and things like that. And, you know, he, he wound up taking his own life later, which is both tragic, but also an indicator that he hadn't done the work that was necessary to clean up, you know, cleanup is the shadow parts, which I, I talked about in my first podcast on darkness and light being two sides of the same coin. You know, the Shadow Work is super important. And if you don't do it, it will, it will come, it will come back and bite you, you have to do that, you're gonna come back again and again and again, and have to work on the same thing over and over again. So that can, that can definitely happen. And that's a problem that can happen with ego. Where, and this is where I hope there's a little bit of light pouring in here as to what I'm talking about not just warnings. What can happen though, is you do the work. So he goes about identification, right? It's about identifying who am I? Who am I? Who am I? Right? You can ask that you can use that as a mantra, who or what am I could be a mantra that you repeat. And the the, you know, the Indian saint Ramana Maharshi. You know, that was his mantra, that's what he taught his students to repeat over and over again, to get at the, to get at the core of the self, this feeling of being unified with divinity with being unified with a source and that's where you can go with, I think, almost any spiritual practice that helps you turn inside. And in my last podcast, I talked about the divine masculine and the divine feminine. And so, um, you know, and again, there's no one is better than the other, there's no, they are, they're co they're co equal, as long as they are treated as such, as long as they aren't misinterpreted or, or, you know, as long as there's not power over, right? There's power with, okay. So, divine masculine spiritual practices are the things that we do, outwardly, such as making offerings, praying to a deity, you know, setting up an altar, you know, all of those things are these sort of outward expressions of spirituality, divinity. And they are, they are absolutely valid, and they are in a prayer, chanting, anything that that comes from within to without

equally valid is the turning inside, right? Remember, I said, the more you go inside something, the more spiritual it becomes. And that includes yourself, the deeper you go into yourself, and you reach that point where you identify this is where the ego comes into place, right? The ego is a tool that, when used correctly, allows you to identify more and more with that divine part of yourself. And that is the Divine Feminine part of spiritual development. And hey, you don't have to choose just one avenue, you can do both things. You can make offerings, and you can meditate and turn inside. You can pray to a deity and you can take up shamanic journeying and, you know, get more insight by by turning into the inner realms. You can do both at the same time, and it's a very, very powerful combination. This divine masculine and divine feminine practices, the outward practices, the inward practices. And if you separate them out too much, if you focus on one area, a little too much, they can become out of balance. Right? I mean, you know, we all know I've lots of friends who grew up in a religion and may even Don't go to church every week and don't actually really believe or practice, they just, it's a thing that they do. It's this, it's this, you know, well, you know, I went to church every week as a child, and I still go to church, but I don't really practice and we don't really believe, you know, which to me, is it unfortunate and a missed opportunity, right, either to dive deeper into that religion or to find one that you do believe in and can practice both externally and internally, right, there's not much spiritual development going on there. Unfortunately, this is not a judgement, you're free to do whatever, whatever you want, I just see it as a missed opportunity, it makes me a little a little bit makes me a little bit sad, although, you know, I'm sure there's a benefit from that I'm sure. People who do that are able to make some kind of connection, at least on a social level. And, you know, ritual is important ritual is any sort of symbolic action that we take, right. And ritual is important. Even on a psychological level, we actually, in the Western world, I think are missing a lot of ritual that exists in other places. We stripped that out of our daily lives a little, a little too much, in my opinion. So you know, a lot of people are starting to bring that bring that back, a lot of people are starting to explore more here. But we became, you know, we went through the Industrial Revolution, and we spend a lot of time working and focused really on day to day physical survival stuff. And it's an interesting note, I realized this is a complete tangent, but it's an interesting note that studies show that, you know, in previous times pre Industrial Revolution, you know, even during hunter gatherer times, people had more free time, right, they didn't, they weren't hunting and gathering all day, you know, eight hours a day, every day, they had more free time to do things like develop art and music and, and religion and culture and, you know, build giant stone monuments, places and things like that. They had the cycles to do that we don't in this modern world, because we spend a third of our time sleeping a third of our time working, and the other third of the time, usually, you know, some, hopefully, some of that, you know, resting, relaxing, going inside doing development, but it's a very limited window for that sort of activity. Right. And we have all of the other things we have to do, we have to go shopping and feed the kids and you know, just day to day life stuff, clean the house. And so it becomes a little bit out of balance. So when you can, when you do have the opportunity, it's important. It's an important part of spiritual hygiene, it's as important to me as brushing your teeth, which is very important to spend some time daily in spiritual refresh, reflection, spiritual practice, any of those things. So with that, I'm going to bring this podcast to a close. You know, we talked a little bit about what I mean by spirit, soul and ego.

I hope, I hope that you learn something, I hope that you, I can, you know, maybe give you a little push to spend a little more time turning inside, finding that divine part of yourself. I don't care who you are, I don't care what your life experience is, is a real beautiful thing to me that everyone every single individual on this planet. And that includes people who no longer have bodies and may still be around have that divine spark they have that they have that divine aspect, that divine nature that they are absolutely connected to the unity that is the universe. And and it's, it's absolutely beautiful. It's an absolutely beautiful thing. If you can get any sort of experience of that it will it will change you it will change it for the better. So if you would like more information about me or what I do, or this podcast or if you're listening to this somehow and don't have access to previous episodes, you can go to my website, which is named shaman comm that's MaineShaman.com. And I mean like the state because that's where I live. In March, I am co-teaching a an introduction to shamanic journeying class online. You can find more information about that on my website. And I'm co teaching that with three other really amazing shamanic teachers. And we're doing this because we are in the middle of a global pandemic, and I am not teaching in person at this, you know, at this time and so this is a good opportunity, if you have ever wanted to learn about shamanic journeying to do that, and will take place over a weekend at the end of March. And again, there's, there's more information on my website, you can check that out. If you have, you can contact me through there. If you have questions or suggestions for podcast topics. Gosh, I would love that I would love to make this more about what you want to hear about. And or guests. I'm, I am fully intending on having having guests so it's not just you listening to the sound of my voice and me listening to the sound of my voice in the future. I want to thank you so much for listening. It's it's very important to me right now to be reaching out to other people in in any way that I can. And I do love you and I don't care who you are. And that may sound a little weird. But you know if people can there's a saying that if if people can hate people they have never even met that I can choose to love people I have never met and and just know that that that you are loved no matter who you are, no matter where you are. And I'm I am going to be a part of that I'm going to be a part of the ones who are who are loving in this in this crazy world and bring hopefully some healing and sanity to the to the world as it's being shaken up. With that I will leave you have a blessed day.

Announcer 37:33

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