The Wandering Crow: An Exploration of the Supernatural, Paranormal, Strange, Occult, and Mysterious

Ep24 How Mandy talks to Spirits

• Mandy, Cameron, and JT • Season 1 • Episode 29

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Shamanism, animism, spirit mediums and the distinctions between them:  we explore the complexities of personal teachings and the experience of communicating with spirits. We share personal anecdotes of spirit encounters, discuss the importance of empathy in spirit communication, and emphasize the necessity of daily practices for connecting with the spiritual realm. Cultural perspectives on spiritual practices are also examined, highlighting the differences between Western and Eastern approaches to spirituality. 

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SPEAKER_02:

That didn't get recorded, luckily.

SPEAKER_01:

The motherfucker. There it is. So I think I'm haunted. Guess what I've been doing for the last hour?

SPEAKER_02:

Journeying?

SPEAKER_01:

No. Uh, all of a sudden, one of the smoke alarms starts beeping, and I'm like, oh, okay. I guess I gotta go fix that. So then I get to the one and I'm hearing echoes.

SPEAKER_07:

Uh is that me?

SPEAKER_01:

I don't know. I'm gonna try to turn my echo cancellation off. Nope, can't do it while I'm recording. And so I get to the one that I think is echoing, or I that I think is beeping, and I pull it off, and I'm trying to get a battery into it, and then I hear something else beep. I'm like, oh, I guess I'm confused. It's one of the other smoke alarms. So I put that one back. And then I go to the other one that I think is actually beeping, and then right in front of it, I'm right there, and I hear a beep, but it's from somewhere else. I'm like, oh, what? Okay, maybe it's in one of the bedrooms and I'm just hearing it wrong. So then I go to the bedrooms and it's not, and I definitely hear a beep downstairs. I'm like, oh, what the hell? I thought it was upstairs, but I'm definitely hearing this downstairs. And then I hear beeps in rapid succession. Beep, beep. I'm like, oh, it's more than one. Okay, got it. Awesome. So then I'm pulling off the one that I think is one of them, and then I hear a beep that's definitely downstairs, but the one that's in front of me is not beeping. I'm like, okay, well, I'll just go get the downstairs one because there's only one and I'll go get it. So I sit there in front of it for like five minutes and it doesn't beep. And then I hear two beeps upstairs. I'm like, oh shit, I guess they're both upstairs. So then I pull them both down, and I've got them all in my hands, all of them. I've taken every single one off of the ceiling at this point, and only one of them seems to be beeping. I'm like, what the hell? So I change the battery and I put it back up and I'm looking at the others. Where's the other one that's beeping? And the only one that's beeping is the one that I just replaced the battery for. I'm like, what the fuck is going on? I just changed the battery. So I pull it back down, like maybe the battery is dead. So I grab a different battery, I put a battery in it, and then something else beeps in front of me. I'm like, okay, there's definitely two. I put this one back and it's beeping still. I still I think there might be three of them because I can still hear them beeping. So I've changed.

SPEAKER_07:

I can hear them beeping. You're slowly losing your mind.

SPEAKER_01:

I've changed the batteries. I tried three different brand new batteries to change them, and I still hear more beeping. Like, what the fuck? Either it's a bad batch of batteries, it's their Amazon 9-volt batteries, or something else is wrong with these. I don't know, man. Like, and then I'm not sure if the downstairs one is dead or not. I don't I don't know what's going on.

SPEAKER_02:

Do you know what I did?

SPEAKER_01:

What did you do?

SPEAKER_02:

I abandoned the whole fire thing in my house and just went and got like individual ones that are that are not dependent on that they're not hooked together via the wires in the ceiling and just put them up in the place of them. And they're like 10, they're like 10-year. We have to replace them for 10 years.

SPEAKER_01:

The crazy thing, my house is so janky because it's had so many owners, and different people have done different things. In every room, there are places where you can see there used to be smoke smoke alarms, and then like right next to them in certain places are the ones that are interconnected with wires. So, like, they didn't even take the stupid appliances down. I don't know, but the beeping is the beeping is driving me crazy. And I feel like something maybe followed me home from work. Like, I don't know, because it just all they all just started beeping all at the same time.

SPEAKER_07:

Beep, beep, beep, beep, beep.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_07:

Beep. You know, your your door is open too.

SPEAKER_01:

That's I'm gonna close that. That'll help with the sound. Hold on.

SPEAKER_03:

She's going crazy.

SPEAKER_01:

I can still hear it through the door.

SPEAKER_03:

I couldn't hear it though.

SPEAKER_01:

Okay, well, hopefully it doesn't come up on the good save, JT.

SPEAKER_03:

Do you guys hear that? Oh, I still heard it. There was a beep.

SPEAKER_01:

There was. I didn't I didn't even hear that one.

SPEAKER_03:

It's gonna be it's gonna be there.

SPEAKER_01:

Hey murderers, it's Mandy.

SPEAKER_03:

It's JT.

SPEAKER_07:

Oh, hi, it's Cameron.

SPEAKER_01:

Wait, ready for this? Woo! And I've been playing with capturing some clips there, and now I've got a little bit of a soundboard going. And so this episode, we're gonna be talking a little bit about my personal experience with communicating with spirits uh from my perspective, and um just just chit-chatting about that and having a conversation about that. So uh stay tuned after the intro music.

SPEAKER_00:

There is a medicine story that tells of Crow's fascination with her own shadow. She kept looking at it, pecking at it until her shadow woke up and became alive. Then Crow Shadow ate whole. Crow is dead as dead now. Join us as we attempt to look through the wandering crow's eye to find the gateway to the supernatural, to seek to know the unknowable mysteries of creation. Welcome to the wandering crow politics.

SPEAKER_01:

Hey there, this is Mandy coming at you in post. Um, I just wanted to say that we do speak about the healer and medicine person Sunbear in this episode. And um he is multiple times identified as a person from the Lakota tribe, which is incorrect. Uh, Sunbear was from the Ojibwe people. And um, you know, I get things confused in my brain sometimes, and I'm not always the smartest person, and I am deeply sorry for that mistake in making that confusion and saying it so confidently. Um, but I did want to clear that up. Right here, right now, you're gonna hear us say that he's Lakota, and he is not. Um, he is not. Um, and that's it. I hope you enjoy the episode. Thank you. Okay, welcome back.

SPEAKER_02:

Welcome back. Here we are.

SPEAKER_01:

Here we are. Okay, so for this episode, uh I guess a little bit of background might be good. Um I do not think I'm psychic. I am not a medium. I have had, like as kids, we just had lots of experiences. We grew up in a house. There was just always stuff going on, I feel like. And in our family, there are examples of um extra sensitivity, I feel like. Um, I remember my mom telling stories about knowing when people in the family had died and just other kinds of just knowing. Cameron, did you have something?

SPEAKER_07:

So anecdotally, uh, when I was doing the fortune telling at the party, they were like alarmingly spot on to where I kind of stopped doing them because it felt too personal. Oh it was right every time, and yeah, they kind of didn't like it too much.

SPEAKER_01:

Like, hmm, maybe we should do this not in public. Yes.

SPEAKER_02:

So I do usually usually why you go into a fortune teller's room and do it privately. Do it more privately.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. So um I I don't when I talk about talking with spirits, I it's not like how you see on TV with mediums and stuff, or even people that I know, I've seen them kind of communicating with spirits, and it's not like that. Like it's not like I hear a voice in my head or in my ears in space around me, or I see people or anything like that. I that's not what's happening. Or has not, it's not usually what's happening, because there have been instances where that has happened, actually. Um, as far as my training, uh, I want to first say I do not consider myself a shaman. Uh, I use words like student of shamanism. I'm curious, I'm learning about, I'm studying shamanism. I I don't claim it. And I have actually been trained in some Mongolian shamanic practices. They are not teaching any of us to be shamans, they do not do empowerments. So I want to be really clear about the training that I've had as far as that this lineage is a really old lineage and it's it's pretty pure. Um, and I feel really confident that this the people who are teaching this are people who are out doing the work and shamanizing and come from a very long lineage of people who are shamans. That's not their word for it in Mongolian, but that is what they're doing, right? The other lineage, the lineage that I was first taught, the lineage I have the most training in, and the lineage that I do have some empowerments in is um kind of neo-shamanism and is derived in large part from the works of Sunbear. And Sunbear is a very um, what's the word? There's a lot of controversy. So Sunbear is kind of a controversial figure. Um, he now I feel like I'm so Sunbear came from the Ojibwe tribe, and he felt that it was important to teach all people how to connect with spirit and how to treat the world in a spiritual way. And so he taught non-indigen indigenous peoples a lot of things that were sacred to the Lakota people. The Ojibwe people. There was a lot of disagreement about that, about sharing tribal knowledge with non-tribal people, and made a lot of people really upset and really angry. And Sunbear claimed to be like a medicine man and a holy person, and there are people in the tribe of the Lakota people who say he did not actually have that. Um, he didn't, he was not that, that he was not recognized among the tribe as a medicine person. Um so that's difficult for me to reconcile a little bit because what I know has been given freely. However, um what I know comes from a person who is viewed as being uh kind of a traitor to his people. And um, so it I have a lot of I struggle a lot.

SPEAKER_02:

Where what what region does does the uh Lakota tribe come from?

SPEAKER_05:

Hold on, let me look that up real quick.

SPEAKER_01:

I think the Lakota are in the Midwest. They're the Sioux people, that's their other name. And they are from North and South Dakota areas. That's what I thought. That's what I thought. Yeah, so um the my teacher, he he doesn't get all of his knowledge from Sunbear, but a lot of it comes from Sunbear, and he was part of Sunbear's inner circle at the end of Sunbear's life. So he was not in with Sunbear through all of Sunbear's heyday, but towards the end. But my teacher also derives his teachings from other individuals, and he's he's had other teachers from the indigenous peoples of the United States, and um I don't have express permission to share the names of some of his teachers, so I am uncomfortable. I won't be saying who the other teachers are. And I do know there are some he's never even told me because he was taught with the explicit directive, you will never ever say my name because I don't want he didn't like basically his teachers did not want to receive the same kind of level of hatred and anger that Sunbear had received. But these other people recognized that my teacher was the real deal and was genuinely respectful and they felt was deserving of being taught additional things. So that's kind of where I come from. So a lot of native indigenous teachings, I'm learning about Sacred Pipe, I've participated in different lodge ceremonies, I have a lot of those teachings, and I also feel really bad as a Caucasian European descendant having that knowledge when it is so painful for a lot of Indigenous peoples, and because they did basically get tortured to death to stop practicing their religious beliefs, and here I am freely just sort of, you know, practicing whatever I want. Yeah, when they were there was so much pain associated with that, and they were denied their own identity. So I have a lot of mixed feelings about it. So I do on purpose go out and try to get as much knowledge as I can from outside these indigenous teachings to sort of build a base that is not solely derived from that and try to practice in a way that's authentic to me and also as respectful as possible.

SPEAKER_07:

Wouldn't be as impactful for you to think this, but uh I I the way I would see it is so we tried to replace their culture with ours.

SPEAKER_01:

Yes.

SPEAKER_07:

But now their culture is influencing us. That's kind of a victory.

SPEAKER_01:

I think so, but I'm not an indigenous person, so I don't want to speak for them.

SPEAKER_07:

That's what I'm saying, yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

And I also think that there's a lot of people who are cherry-picking indigenous beliefs. Like, you know what they want.

SPEAKER_07:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

You know the kind of person I'm talking about. And who's claiming that, oh, the white buffalo woman came and spoke to me, and I'm her incarnation on earth, and like really making a mockery of what are very sacred beliefs, with clearly no understanding at all of what some of these beliefs really truly mean and what they are. So um that makes me cringe, and I don't even want to approach being like that. I just think it's kind of gross.

SPEAKER_07:

And so I just so I just the uh white Wicca people.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, the White Wicca people and the the Christian shamans who somehow want to combine Jesus with spirit work, and I don't know, it's just really weird to me.

SPEAKER_07:

I I can't say that those people aren't it's just not in that context.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, I don't know. It's weird, and I can't, it bothers me because it usually was Christians who were doing the torturing and stuff, and now all of a sudden, oh, I think that I could do drumming shamanic work, and I think that I met Jesus Christ in my drumming. I'm like, mm, did you though? Did you? Or are you just sort of in your own little world pretending? So I just and there's like no, there's no self-awareness when these people speak sometimes, and I just so I live in this place where I have these teachings and then I recognize where they come from, and I recognize how potentially painful it is that I have these teachings, and I feel super shitty about it, but also it's the only thing I got, and I 100% believe that what I've been taught is true, and I 100% believe that it's right. So I'm doing my best to try to tread carefully and respectfully. So I just wanted to start by saying that that full disclosure, that's my training, that's that's where all of my knowledge mostly comes from, or these kind of two areas. I have studied a few other ways, and I'm trying to integrate those, like I'm trying to figure it all out. But the reason I started talking about that was until I took the Mongolian shamanism class, which is like a year-long class, um, I was a little bit more inclined to say, eh, shaman, it's just a word, and I, you know, maybe someday I can be a shaman, and I'm not really a shaman, but I will be someday. Now that I understand the difference between a lineage that truly did shamanic work and an animistic culture that didn't necessarily have shamanic practice, but but was very animistic. Like I see the difference now, and I now fully understand why I am not a shaman and what it means, the difference of what it means to be a shaman. There's a lot of rules and really strict training and really strict, um, complicated, complex equations and teachings that it takes years and years and years and years of apprenticeship to really be a shaman in the Mongolian tradition and all of the empowerments and stuff. So, like, I I don't think I can make that clear to anybody here today, but I get it. There is a difference. It's really helped me to see because the strictness and all of the rules were really tough for me to accept, and I really it really was shocking to me, and I didn't, I was I really struggled to participate in a class because of all the crazy rules. But they're not crazy, like these have been developed over thousands of years, and there's a different way of doing things. Not to say that the animist teachings here in the United States were not also developed over thousands of years. They were. I probably don't know all of them because of the way that my lineage is, but it is different because that's where the difference between shamanism is this is uh teaching with strict instruction and the same spirits and they're passed down over generations, and it's this layered thing that builds on itself generation after generation after generation, that makes shamanism. Whereas in the animist culture, it's more like a free-for-all, and each individual meets their own spirits, and they're not necessarily spirits which are passed down over generations, and it's a little bit less structured. Um, and that to me is some of the bigger differences is is the amount of structure, and it really helped me clarify oh, okay, that's that's the difference between shamanism and what's happening here, and I'm not a shaman, and I won't be.

SPEAKER_02:

I I would like to say that after meeting you and and listening to some of the stuff and and uh you know participating in a in a couple of these things, I do see you do put out that that respect for what you do. And you you I don't want to say you demand, but you inspire that respect to what you what you practice and and and what you do, and and I really see that and I've gained a greater respect uh for that, uh, especially for like I didn't really understand like the Mongolian side of things until today, but I I do have a greater respect for Native American, Native American history. Um, you know, I did get to go to the Crazy Horse Monument, which is a Lakota tribe that is building or trying to carve that monument.

SPEAKER_01:

Oh my god, it's beautiful. That's incredible work they're doing.

SPEAKER_02:

They they are, and and they're they're doing it without any help from the US government. They've they've declined help from the U.S. government. The US government was like ready to come in and be like, hey, let's finish this project, let's do it. Here's a bunch of money, let's get it done. And they're like, no, we're doing this ourselves, we're doing it with donations, we are going to do this without you. And they're making progress, it's slow because they, you know, are and and the plans that they have for the area are pretty amazing if they can get it done. Um, because they plan to make it a huge Native American complex with schools and uh all this stuff for Native Americans, and it's pretty impressive. But um, yeah, I just want to make sure people do understand that you do um inspire that respect for what it is that you do and what it is that you study.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, thank you for that, JT. It's it's hard to know. I'm really trying, and it's really tough. And I'm doing my best to try to supplement my teachings with stuff that's not indigenous, to do my best to stand on my own feet rather than stand on the feet of other people who've been so abused.

SPEAKER_07:

Stand on your own feet rather than stepping on people's toes.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, exactly. So, so um I I don't like to talk a lot about my teachings because I'm so mixed, like I have some shame in the source of my teachings, but I also am really proud of the knowledge that I have, and I feel really strongly right about where I plan to go in the future with these teachings. And I also feel I just I I feel the rightness of it, like I know that this is correct, I know that. This is true, and there's no question for me. I I won't, there is nothing else for me. This is this is what's real, this is what's true. So I just try to balance that, and it's tough. So having said all of that, um, so I will say that for myself, I'm not a I don't consider myself a medium. However, when I am really strong in my daily practices and I'm really working hard to ground myself and hollow out, and I'm doing the shadow work, then um, and I've really been in it, things happen more. And I will see, I can see sometimes little shadows moving around the walls where there should not be shadows. Like one time I was in my room downstairs, it's not my office anymore, but it was my office, and I was going through supplies and reorganizing things, and I saw this little shadow zip along the wall, and I thought, well, shit, do I have a lizard in the house or is that a mouse? What the hell was that? And it was like this tiny little mouse-sized shadow. So I looked everywhere and I pulled everything out of the wall, and there was nothing there, and I realized it truly was just a shadow. Like there, that was a little spirit zipping in and around the house, like in and out amongst my stuff. And I saw it with my own two eyes. I again saw it a few days later in the bathroom zipping around one of the doors. Like I saw it go from the ground all the way up and then sort of around the door, and I was like, oh, okay, I don't know how I feel about this. So then so that was those are times where I do sometimes see things, and then um I have on occasion heard voices, but it's very rare, and it's very distinct. It uh so I don't know if I've told this story on air before, but I once went to a facility to meet a patient. I think I have told this story, and um the facility was awful, and I had a very terrible feeling walking in there, like a lot of abuse had happened. It was a very bad place, and I had this overwhelming sensation of despair and hopelessness really hit me right in my chest, and it felt bad, and I didn't want to be there. I felt gross, and it was like walking through sticky sludge, like it felt like I could feel it on my skin, the stickiness, and it was gross and it was awful. And I met with my patient, and she was wonderful, and I developed deep love for her, and just as a human being, she was just a real cutie pie. And you know, we developed a plan on what we were gonna work on, and then I went home and I was sitting in the garage getting ready to come into the house, and I heard a voice from my right side, even though that was the door on the left that was open. I heard a voice on my right side cry out for help. Help, help someone, help. And it was this really slow, forlorn, low-pitched sort of female voice. But it was like real, it was like a real in-space voice on my right side. And I thought it was my neighbor who was elderly and dealing with cancer, her husband also elderly, so I rushed outside and I went to try to like find her because I assumed, based on the sound of the cry, that she had maybe fallen and had been down for hours. Like I that's how it felt. Like she had been down for a long time and had been crying for help for a long time. So I ran outside and I looked for her and she wasn't there. There was nobody home. She wasn't in the backyard, she wasn't in the front yard, there was nobody in the house, and there were, in fact, no other neighbors who were out because it was the middle of the summer. So that's another instance, and they were very rare. Most like mostly my sensations, my my in this realm, in this realm, are the feeling of the air around me, like I can feel when the air is heavy, and like that place, I literally felt like my skin was sticky. And um, so like the feeling of the environment, I guess, like the aura of a place, I have a very strong tactile sensation around that. That's pretty much it. And then in addition to that, when strong energy work is happening, and I think I'm still developing my sensitivity to this. I think when spirits are trying to speak to me, I feel a wave of dizziness that rises from my center all the way up to my head, like this rolling wave of energy, and it feels a lot like dizziness, but it's slightly different, and I can tell there's big energy happening here around me, and I can feel it in that way. So, like when I'm in ritual with other people, the energy hits me like that. Or sometimes when I'm in a building where I think there might be spirits, sometimes the energy hits me like that, and I know okay, something's happening around me that's not in the physical, something is happening. That's my only, those are my only sensitivities. So again, I'm not a medium, I'm not a psychic, but I still find ways to communicate with spirit, and that's spirits, and that's why we're here. That's what we're talking about, right?

SPEAKER_07:

So any questions be very interested because I kind of have that sensitivity, but I have no idea how to talk to spirits.

SPEAKER_01:

I can teach you. I've taught JT a little bit.

SPEAKER_02:

A little bit. Since since meeting Amanda, since and uh yeah, since meeting Amanda, I I'm highly I I one of my um my strongest strength is my empathy. And I I use that empathy to um actually have spirits talk to me, but it's more through the feelings, thoughts. It's not like there's a voice in my head. Uh I will tell the story and I and I'm getting the permission from the spirit that talked to me to be able to tell this story. Um, I was camping with my daughter uh recently, and uh I was woken. Well, I had the I had a dream that I was back in my bedroom looking at my bedroom door. And uh my son, who's a night owl who was up all night, um, he frequently orders DoorDash in the middle of the night. And and uh I distinctly remember um I I knew that he had ordered it and that he had opened the door. And I, you know, there's a feeling you get when you open the door in your house, there's a pressure change, and you you know what it sounds like, and your whole house kind of reacts to that. I remember that feeling of that happening. Um and then I woke up uh, you know, and I was camping in the forest. I was uh up in the up in the muggy on rim up by uh Woods Canyon Lake, and there was a coyote that was howling. And this is about three in the morning, somewhere between three and four in the morning. And everything around me was dead silent, like there was nothing, it was just a dead calm, there was no wind, there was no other sounds. And I know that in the campground I was in, there was many people with dogs, and none of the dogs were responding to these this coyote, and the coyote was close. And when I say that, like I could hear it, and then I would hear the echoes of the coyote through the canyon that I was in. So there was Stephanie's, and then the the as as the coyote was was doing these Yelps, it was coming to me, and actually I could hear the words in my head, you need to sage your home when you get home. Something has entered. And that was the the strong and that was the like the words in my head. And that's the first time I've ever experienced like actual words in my head of specific instructions of something. So coming home from camping, you know, I I I didn't have any uh cell phone service, so I couldn't like check anything. But when I got home, I went back to my ring camera and looked at my history, and sure enough, at 3:30 in the morning, my son had received DoorDash that morning and opened the door. So I was like, huh. So I busted out the sage and started sage in my front room. And the interesting thing that happened in one of the corners of my front room, the smoke from the sage and all the other corners, the smoke would go straight up off of the sage. But in one corner, the smoke was going exactly sideways, coming up off the sage and then going sideways, like something was trying to block it. And um and then uh I like brought the sage down and like blew on it to get a little more smoke and put it back up there and then it went straight up. I think that was the moment this spirit or this entity or whatever it was that entered the home left. So it just an interesting, like that's just the most recent thing, and and uh the the spirit that was there didn't necessarily say anything to me. It was just the the one that communicated the coyote, and and I believe that was the spirit of the coyote that was actually speaking to me. And so that's pretty cool.

SPEAKER_01:

That's very cool. So, right, so that's that's really cool. So I do think Spirit was talking Spirit sent you a message, and I think that it was you were able to hear it because you've been doing a lot of work and you've opened up to hearing, you know. I think that you always probably would have had some kind of because your empathy is crazy, it's amazing sometimes. The stuff it's yeah. Uh, I wanted to make a point, I wrote this down in my notes. I'm not a medium. However, that does not mean that other shamans are not mediums. Some of them are. Another person who is not my teacher, but teaches a lot of people, and I'm I'm very impressed by, and I listened to his podcast, and I have read his book. His name is Nicholas Breeze Wood, and he's on Facebook and he has written books, and he took over. I guess uh Sunbear had a magazine, so he took over the magazine. It's called Sacred Hoop. It used to be called something else, but he when he took it over from Sunbear, it became Sacred Hoop magazine. And so he's the editor and he puts together a lot of articles for Sacred Hoop, and they're all about shamanism from around the world and like what meets Nick's definition. And it's not that's not fair. It's not Nick's definition, but Nick has been studying anthropologically and sociologically what shamanism truly is, and going to the source and learning. So, like, he has a m a very, very strict definition of what makes a shaman. And so he'll go around and he'll talk to these shamans from around the world and he'll like create these articles or find the articles or he'll source interviews and then he'll put it together in this magazine and it comes out quarterly. So he's someone that he is someone also who has direct conversation with spirits. So I am not a medium. It could be that I just simply don't have the aptitude. It could be that I'm not doing enough in my daily practice and I have fallen away. It does some from some of what Nick has said in some of his things, he wasn't always able to communicate so easily with spirit. It did take him some time to like learn how to do that. So I have hope that I will get better in time. But just to be clear, I don't have that kind of communication with spirits. That does not mean that other ma other shamans don't as well. Like it seems like a lot of shamans do have direct communication with spirits in a more medium-like way.

SPEAKER_02:

So, what's the difference? What's the difference? Or what let's talk about medium. What is a medium? What do they do?

SPEAKER_07:

And then let's talk about the difference between a medium and a shaman. Well, and then there's medium and psychic, because those are two different things too, because medium can just use like my card set or a crystal ball or the pendulum.

SPEAKER_01:

See, and so I think there might be a little bit of um leeway in what makes it because to me, a medium as a person, they're like a psychic medium. They ask a question and a spirit shows up, and they're able to ask the question, and the spirit will tell them things, right? Or they can have like a seance and the and a spirit will particularly come and will directly communicate through the medium. That's why the term medium, they're the intermediary.

SPEAKER_07:

So you're using it as they are the medium rather than they use mediums.

SPEAKER_02:

Well, the me a medium is the when you say medium, they are the in-between of the communication. So, you know, mediums in the middle. So you have fulcrum.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

So that's when I say that word, that's what I mean, that they are directly communicating with middle world spirits and in the middle world, awake, having conversations with spirit and able to relay messages. Um, I can't do that. So um the way that I communicate with spirit and am able to receive messages very clearly is through what I call journey work and trance. And um, and so we'll start there. So I will say the work is easier for me, journey work is easier for me when I'm doing a daily practice, and I have not been very good about doing daily practice for a long time. It's probably been about it easily at least six months, maybe close to a year at this point, since I've really done strong daily practice work. And what that means is for me, and my in my teaching from my American teacher, that means daily grounding exercises, daily prayers, um, shadow work, introspection, and grounding, like being with the spirits and really getting myself into that space where I'm with the spirits all the time. And shadow work is super important. And what it is is so, like, if someone says something and it really ticks me off and I'm mad at that person, asking deeper questions. Okay, what about what they said makes me angry? Why did that make me angry? So, like, if it made me angry because I felt like it was very presumptuous and they were violating my boundaries by making the request, and that's what made me angry. Okay, well, what about your boundaries do you feel like is threatened by this request that they've made? Do you not feel strong enough about your boundaries? Okay, maybe I don't feel strong enough about being able to hold my boundaries. Like, okay, so why don't I feel strong about my boundaries? And under and like asking why, why, why, why, why? And a friend of mine calls that stalking your own thoughts. And you get deeper, and usually you can find, even from something simple like that, some kind of trauma, some kind of hurt that was never resolved, and then I can work on that. And the more I work on those things and clearing out emotional responses and staying grounded and recognizing that it's a lot of my perception of the world is entirely based on my traumatic experiences, then I can be, I can quiet the chatter in my head. This is extremely important when I'm trying to communicate with spirits because the chatter can influence the messages I'm receiving. Like I can hear one thing and interpret it as something different because I've got all this internal shit going on inside of my head. So understanding my shadow and what role it plays in my understanding of the world helps me get messages more clearly. And we call that like you have to enter into a space called hollow bone where you can clear out and get out of the way and just let the messages come as pure as possible without any of your own filter getting in the way. So, again, my daily practice, prayers is very important, saying prayers, making offerings, like physical offerings. And in my tradition, the offering is tobacco or like certain kinds of smoke, or you could give um offerings of like vodka. But when you do that and you're giving gifts, you're giving it out of love, spirits are more likely to interact with you because you're showing that you love them and you appreciate them. And it's like a reciprocal like friendship, you know. Like if you're constantly asking, asking, asking, asking, asking things from a friend and you're never giving back any affection, any love, or you're not reciprocating that energy that they're spending into you, eventually they're gonna give up and they're gonna be like, you know what? This is a one-sided relationship, I'm done. Well, spirits are the same, so it's really important to keep that reciprocal, not just take, take, take, take, take, but also give. Not necessarily because it's like transactional, but because that's a relationship. They're not your servants, they're there because they're choosing to be. So that's really important too. Is so that daily practice makes it easier to do the conversations, to get the messages, because they're more inclined to speak to you more clearly, because you're a friend, you're a good friend, and they want to have that relationship with you. Um, again, meditation, and then when they tell me to do stuff, you better damn well do stuff. Because again, it's like a friend. If they're asking for advice and you tell them, I think you should do this, and then they don't fucking do your advice, and then a year later they come back and they're like, hey, I need your advice, then they're like, Why the fuck should I give you advice? The last time I gave you advice, you didn't listen to it. It's the same thing. If they're telling you to do stuff, you better goddamn do stuff because they're not going to be inclined to give you advice again in the future if you're not actually listening. Doing some rituals, making sure that I'm doing cleansings, that it's a good, clean space, and doing grounding work to really connect and be fully, fully plugged in. Okay, so I've said all of that.

SPEAKER_07:

So makes a lot of sense. That's like night to a different light.

SPEAKER_01:

What?

SPEAKER_07:

We so we had 200-year-old uh Japanese whiskey, and I had my uh traditional um absinthe, like from the Czech Republic.

SPEAKER_00:

Oh, okay.

SPEAKER_07:

Yeah, I drank it all.

SPEAKER_01:

She's like, be a buddy.

SPEAKER_07:

I know where to get it if you want some. It's good stuff. I even do it with the fire.

SPEAKER_01:

So, but what what why did we bring this up? Did I feel like you were saying something?

SPEAKER_07:

Sorry. Well, because that night that we had the shaman over, um, so we had the 200-year-old whiskey, and we had my absint, and we offered it, you know, I thought, yeah, we were drunk, so sure, whatever. And then we were all just sort of paddling around, hanging out, uh, telling our stories, and then um we were talking about spirits like briefly, and we were passing around the gun, but it almost seemed ritualistic, load, unload, and then pass. And it was not loaded, but we were cocking, you know, and then passing it around the circle. Everybody had to touch it. They were very insistent on that, and everybody had to go through the motions. And I don't know what that was about, but maybe they were trying to see something.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, maybe the something the spirit had said something, and they were trying to do what was being. Testing something?

SPEAKER_07:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. I don't know. Could maybe, could be.

SPEAKER_07:

Odd. But everything you said sort of lines up with that.

SPEAKER_01:

Does it make do you have questions about all of that? Like it seemed like you uh your faces were like, oh, really? Okay, that makes sense. Yeah, that was all new information to you guys.

SPEAKER_07:

Would it make sense to do it without somebody knowing?

SPEAKER_01:

I don't, you know.

SPEAKER_07:

He knew that I'd be willing. We had talked about that before. He knows I like that kind of thing. But would it be normal to do it, like unwittingly?

SPEAKER_01:

I mean, he's making the offering and he's asked you to make the offering. Maybe the spirits were checking you out, um, deciding if they liked you or not. In, you know, like I don't know. I don't know what kind of instruction he was receiving. I don't know what they were saying to him. You would not necessarily be involved in offering work if like there was a shaman doing stuff. The spirits are gonna help you heal that person or they're not. You don't need permission.

SPEAKER_07:

In a way, it would kind of make sense not to say anything, right? Just in case nothing happens, just in case.

SPEAKER_01:

So um he may have, because of whatever tradition he's in, and you know, he had the nuance to see and to hear his spirits were asking something, and so he was doing it, and you didn't necessarily have anything to do with that conversation, so you were participating without really knowing why. I don't I don't know. I wasn't there and I don't really know what he was doing. You could ask him, just ask him. I should. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02:

Whereas us as Westerners, or what we consider Westerners, white people Westerners, is what I would say. We haven't been here very long. Nope. Now the Native Americans have been here a long time, and we're finding as we dig deeper, you know, around that there the the that the culture that the people that uh there were actually other people here even before the Native Americans.

SPEAKER_07:

There's actually this discussion a while ago.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, we had a big argument about it off of the air.

SPEAKER_07:

Wouldn't say it was an argument. We ended up agreeing.

SPEAKER_02:

Just uh you know, so there was potentially other people that don't exist on this side anymore that were here at the same time, but had different, similar, or you know, kind of some of their things. I don't know. I'm just speculating on what I'm saying there, but the the practices are older on the on the quote unquote east than here in the west.

SPEAKER_01:

But potentially. I don't know.

SPEAKER_07:

Potentially, but I mean you got druids, you've got Egyptians, you've got all of that.

SPEAKER_02:

What we don't know yeah, like what we don't know is what what was what was brought up from like the Mayan culture. And and they're finding even in some of those Mayan areas, some of those areas in South America where you see certain types of construction, you can definitely see a type of construction that was way more advanced than what the Mayans did. And there's a potential that some of those Mayan structures or pyramids were not built by the Mayans, they were built by a previous civilization, and the Mayans just moved into it. This is not true or anything like that, it's just speculation. I'm I'm watching another show uh on Netflix that's talking about this stuff.

SPEAKER_07:

What was that place called? It was Puma Pinchu.

SPEAKER_01:

That sounds right. Yeah. That's the Graham.

SPEAKER_07:

I can't remember.

SPEAKER_01:

What's his name? Graham, what's his guy's name? Is that the one you're watching on Netflix? Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02:

The ancient apocalypse. Oh my god, I love that.

SPEAKER_01:

I haven't seen season two.

SPEAKER_07:

Season two is what I'm saying. I think. I don't remember.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, he's uh he's just a journalist that has been doing massive research.

SPEAKER_07:

And it's very because you have the water damage all along the base of the Sphinx.

SPEAKER_01:

So, okay.

SPEAKER_02:

Anyway, back to back to I I would like to go back to you, you were talking about that, like the difference between so we're talking about spirit communication and and mediums and how they talk to. They use some other type of like a seance or a Ouija or some of them have like just an inherent ability.

SPEAKER_01:

They're psychics, like they can just inherently do it. I don't know.

SPEAKER_02:

But is there a difference between a psychic and a medium?

SPEAKER_01:

I don't know.

SPEAKER_07:

That's the definition we were arguing about because I think the way she's using medium, they are the vulcrum. It's not that they're using something, it's that they are the psychic.

SPEAKER_01:

You know, now that I think about it, I do think a psychic is not necessarily talking to spirits. Sometimes a psychic can just hold an object and be able to read the object, you know, and know and be able to pull images out of just holding an object. Whereas I feel like a medium is they're talking to someone.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, I feel like psychics are more they're reading people, like real, like they they read information about live people where media that's still spirit work.

SPEAKER_07:

Do we want to say that it's more energy work versus spirit work?

SPEAKER_01:

I don't know. I'm not sure.

SPEAKER_07:

I don't know. I don't know that we would say an animate object versus a spirit, because uh, if you read people, you're still reading their spirit.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, I don't know. Maybe they're reading their aura, I don't know. So anyway, um, yeah. So uh I think I said this before, but I have this in my notes. When I'm doing my regular daily practice, things get easier. I am better able to communicate. I can see more of the shadows and the lights and the mists, I can hear voices. Um, and for me, aside from that one time where that lady was crying out for help, mostly the knowledge is like the conversations are more like it's like a voice without words. Like it's like words just popping right into my head. Like I, the words are just magically there.

SPEAKER_02:

That's that's how I communicate. That's how the or that's how they communicate with me.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. And then so my teacher, he's he, because this was sort of a new thing for me. I was talking to him about a really awful experience that I had, and I told him about how the knowledge was coming to me, and he goes, That's how it is for me. So he also has the same experience. Um, so then, okay, so if I've been doing all my daily practice, and I can do journey work without doing daily practice, but the journeys are not as good. They're just not. Um, so I can do what's either trance work or journey work, and to me, the two are different. And I haven't spent a lot of time looking at what Mongolians think trance work versus journey work is, and I have also not spent a lot of time looking at what Nick Breeze Wood thinks it might be, or even my own teacher, I'm not sure that he would make a distinction, but I see a distinction, and here's what the distinction is for me. In journey work, I am listening to drums or some other kind of rhythmic sound that's a certain speed and a certain beat, and it will take me away. I can close my eyes and I am leaving my body, sort of, and I'm going to the spirit world. And in that other world, I can speak to spirits. And to me, I thought of this, it's kind of like in the matrix. Do you remember when they went to go to retrieve Neo? And and it turned out like he was plugged in in the back of his head, and he was like plugged in and like neurologic, like he was like neurologically connected via a web, and that's how they were all experiencing the matrix. Do we I see? Okay. So you know I've seen it.

SPEAKER_02:

But but there's you're you're talking about the the part of the matrix, like in in the second one where he gets plugged in, but he's not plugged in. Does that make sense? He's not plugged into any machinery, but he's plugged into the matrix.

SPEAKER_01:

Right.

SPEAKER_02:

So But he's he's actually beyond the matrix, like the White Room. Yes.

SPEAKER_01:

Yes. So the point is, I think, for me personally, we all each of us have a spiritual plug. And we just don't see it. And it's it's plugged in somewhere in deep inside of our brain. And that when I journey, I'm actually traveling through that connection to a place that exists, to the place that we're all plugged into, to some other spirit world. And I think that when we die, our spirits are drawn back into that spirit world. So I do think that we are all interconnected in that way, and that that's how I'm getting to that spirit world. So I close my eyes, I listen to the drums, I let the drums take me away. And that there's actually been scientific studies on this, you enter into like a theta brain state. So, like there's an alpha, and I want to say there's a delta, and then there's a theta. And the drums can bring you into kind of like this hypnotic state, and you can, when you're in that state, you could their meditation usually occurs, or meditation can bring you into that brain state. The drumming can bring you into that brain state, and that is for me where the spiritual connection really is. And I can travel to that place and I speak to spirits who I have developed a very strong relationship and friendship and deep love for. And um, I will ask them questions, and I ask so many questions. Anytime there's a question, I just ask it. And a lot of times, like I'm on certain like forums for shamanism and different like social media outlets, and a lot of times people will say, I had such and such dream with blah blah blah, and I think my spirit guide's trying to tell me this, and I don't know what they mean. What do you guys think it is? And my answer is always, well, did you ask your spirit guide? Just go back, journey, and then ask them. And they're like, Oh, can I do that? And the answer is yes, of course you can. They're real, they're real creatures, they're real entities. And I think that's like a level of disconnect, as for a lot of people, it's still this dream-like thing, and they're not necessarily real, and they don't truly believe concretely that they're real. I believe they're real, and I can go back and I can ask lots of questions and I can get clarification if it's something that I'm allowed to know. Sometimes there's stuff that I'm not really allowed to know, but that's pretty rare. Usually they'll just tell me. Even if I don't understand, they'll tell me, and then if I don't understand it, then I have to ask more questions. So, like, so but I'm learning a lot directly from the spirits. So the way that I do it is I hear the drumming and I let myself close my eyes and I let it take me into that place. We call that dropping in. And then there's a path that I walk. And I've taught this to JT, and it was taught to me by my teacher. But I walk a path, and this is like a Michael Harner thing, too. Like this is neo-shamanism, and I don't know necessarily that this is how the indigenous peoples do it. I don't necessarily know that this is how the Mongolians do it because that's not been taught in the class that I'm taking. They haven't taught anything about journey work or trans work because again, they're not teaching us how to be shamans, they're just teaching us some of the rules and trying to give us a little bit more concrete nuance as we follow our own path, right? So I follow the path, and the path, there's certain landmarks that I've learned that are important, and I follow those landmarks, and then I go to what's called my axis mundi, and it's like this central large thing, and it's where the entry point is. And from the access mundi, I can go up to the upper world, or I could go down to the lower world, or I could choose to go forward into the middle world, which is not something that anybody who has no experience should ever do. In fact, I have only rarely gone and done middle world stuff at this point because middle world is very dangerous. But lower world is safe, upper world is very safe, and I particularly mostly go to the lower world. I do occasionally go to the upper world, it just depends on what I'm doing, and if I feel like I'm being asked to go to the upper world. So I go to the lower world, and there is a place. It's it's interesting because it's never changing, it is always the same. And as I go there more, I'm able to explore more, and I have a map in my head of what this place looks like, and the map is ever growing as I explore new territories, but the things are always the same down there. When I drop down, it's a cave platform, it's like a it's like a platform, but it's an underground cave system, and there's a wall, and there's things on the wall that are important, and then the cave opens up into like an underground lake, and there's a serpent that's there, and she's extremely important to me. She's not there to like be worshipped or anything, but that's a spirit. And having learned more about Mongolian shamanism, I have a suspicion of what kind of spirit she is. I have to do a little bit more investigating with her and talking to her about it. But she's protective and she greets me there always, and I kind of have to ask her, sort of have to ask her a little bit permission, you know, can I do this and can I do that? And sometimes she has to, there's certain places that I can go that she has to take me if I'm gonna go there. Um, to my when I get into the platform, to my when if I'm looking at the lake, to my left is my medicine place, and I can go there, and then it opens up into this big forested vista, like these cliffsides, and it's beautiful. And there's different places that I can go depending on what I'm trying to do. If it's self-healing, there's certain things that I can go do. If it's I'm trying to do healing for another person, there's a healing place that I can go to and talk to a very specific healing spirit who does assist me with healings.

SPEAKER_07:

When you say self-healing, what specifically do you mean? Like physical ailment?

SPEAKER_01:

I have had assistance with that. Um I have been very, very ill and have been able to do work in the journey place where I was picking invisible worms like out of my body, and I was so sick, and I felt really, really, really bad. I think I might have had COVID at the time, and I was pulling these invisible, like these clear worms, they weren't invisible, they were clear, these worms out of my skin, of my arms, and the spirits were helping kind of push them into my arms. And I did all of this stuff, and I was pulling them out and pulling them out and pulling them out, and I got a lot of them out. And then the next day I woke up and I felt so much better. And I truly feel like the spirits were helping me to help clear some of that illness out of my body. Um, so yes, physical work can happen, and the more powerful shamans can do physical healings to a certain level. It really depends on the spirits that they work with. But a lot of it's emotional, like a lot of emotional and mental healing. Um, if there's certain traumas that I've identified through my shadow work that I want to process through and sort of be able to move on from, I will ask specifically for healing for those kinds of things. Um yeah, does that answer your question?

SPEAKER_06:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

A lot of it's emotional. And then the other thing that can happen there is like empowerments. So if there's certain things that I want to be able to do in the real world, then I have to ask permission and I might be given instruction on stuff that I have to do in the real world. So once I've done all those things, then I can come back and say, okay, I did all these things. Can we do this empowerment now? And then we will do an empowerment together. So empowerments for me mostly means tools. Um, my drum, we did an empowerment for. I have um like a small spear that we did an empowerment for. There's a ritual knife I've been instructed on how to make and what to do. I haven't done all of that work yet, but that's one that my spirit is prepared to help me empower to use for healing work and ritual work. And just different things. So, like, even like my jaw harp, you could empower with the help of one of the spirits. And it give it gives it more power in the middle world to do more things and make the rituals stronger. Um, and and for me personally, I think what it does is it becomes like a conduit. Like this is me putting language on here. I don't think necessarily that anybody else might agree with this, but when they do the empowerment, the spirit is tied to that object. And when I bring that object into a ritual, I think it creates a place from which the spirit can physically be in the ritual and can more strongly be present in whatever ritual I'm doing.

SPEAKER_07:

So that's I I do have a question about the middle world. You said that it's dangerous, and you said that the the below world and the upper world are always the same. What about the middle world? Does that change?

SPEAKER_01:

Oh, um.

SPEAKER_07:

But you changed your thought there. You said no. Uh, what was that?

SPEAKER_01:

No, no, I thought you said same. They are always, they know they don't change. You're right.

unknown:

Okay.

SPEAKER_01:

I thought you meant safe. They're always safe. And they don't change. Like I'm learning more about them. You're right. They don't, but physically they are always not physically, but like geolog geographically, they're not moving. Spatially, yes, thank you. They are always the same. Um, the middle world. Yeah. The thing is, in the middle world, it's cra it's like an acid trip, kind of. It's crazy. The middle world is crazy. The reason the middle world is not safe, and it requires a lot more training and a lot more empowerments and a lot more protection from your spirits that you're working with, is because spirits that haven't passed on live in the middle world. Spirits that were never human live in the middle world. Spirits that are up to no good, tricksters, malevolent things, confused things, things that feed on spiritual energy live in the middle world. The middle world is an unsafe place. But illness typically, spirit-driven illness, comes from middle world spirits, usually. In fact, always. There are middle world spirits who cause illness. Or sometimes it's a curse, which is kind of a different thing. But so when something is happening to someone, say they are spirit-possessed, or there's an attachment, or you know, things are not going well, or like I have a patient and I'm convinced a spirit is feeding on their energy, that's a middle world phenomenon. And I can attempt, in fact, so and this is the difference between journey and trance. I feel a little bit safer journeying with a drum and meeting my spirit guides and then going to the middle world through journey. But it's this world. This is the middle world. We're in the middle world, but in the journey, it's looking at it from the spirit side out. Trance work to me is I am here physically, and I enter a trance state, and I don't really live, leave this place, and I invite the spirits with me either into my body or into the space around me. And then we do physical, like we do the healing work here in this space while I'm like in this weird trance state. But it's the spirits who are doing it, and I've invited the spirits to me. Whereas in a journey, I'm going to the spirits, I'm going over there. In a trance, I feel like they're coming here, if that makes sense.

SPEAKER_06:

Yeah. Yes.

SPEAKER_01:

I don't I that's my definition. I don't know that others would agree.

SPEAKER_02:

I mean, that's that's what I wanted to point out. Like the middle, the middle world is the world we live in. It's where we are, it's where those those spirits can't move on to the upper or lower, so they're in the middle, which is where we are, which is why we experience or people experience things with those people, because that's that's where we are. We're in the middle world.

SPEAKER_01:

In journey, when you experience the middle world, you're experiencing it from a spirit um perception. So it does get real weird. So it's the it's this world, but it's like crazy. It's like weird little green aliens scooting around in like in like race cars, and like I don't know, stuff is just really like I said, it's kind of like an acid trip. It's really weird, it can be very confusing. Is it easy to get tricked?

SPEAKER_07:

Is it different based on where you are when you enter it?

SPEAKER_01:

I don't know. And like I said, I've only done middle world stuff twice in the journey because I just don't feel confident yet. I'm not consistent enough in my daily practice, and I feel like I need to do more work before it would be safe for me to really start doing that work.

SPEAKER_02:

And something that's come up for me with this in this conversation is you know, I've I've only done a couple of journeys, um, but the path to the middle world for me is actually blocked. I can't, I can't go to the middle world, and and I think that that's more of my learning from you about the middle world, like it's an intentional block because I don't want to go there right now because I'm so new. I'm so I I still need to like I don't even want to go to the upper world yet. Like the lower world is where I need more because for me the map of my uh lower world is the platform. Oh, that's your whole map, and then there's a veil, and then uh something beyond that that I haven't really explored because I've only been there like once or twice. Three times.

SPEAKER_04:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02:

I so I I do have a question for you. So I did uh I did a journey. I was out in the I was out in nature, I was by a stream, so I could hear the stream flowing, and I did a journey in that there was no drums or anything. Um, but I just kind of did a little short journey. Well, I mean I I intentionally kind of sat and and I used the the rhythm of the stream to be able to do that.

SPEAKER_05:

Cool.

SPEAKER_02:

And but most of the other journeys that I've done, I've done with drums or with you. So but I mean I just that's the only time I've did it without drums, but I was still using a rhythmic thing. So I I I don't know if that was good or bad, or I don't know.

SPEAKER_01:

I'm I guess it's I mean, to me it seems good. Did you get where you wanted to go? Did you have a journey?

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, I did. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

So then it was good. It's fine. So um uh the the the other thing is, and did I answer your question about the middle world, Cameron? Uh did you have more questions about that?

SPEAKER_07:

Uh so that it just seems like you don't know if you've only been there twice.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_07:

Um each time that you went, you were in the same place physically?

SPEAKER_01:

It depended on what I was doing, it depended on who the client was and what I was trying to do. So, like when I traveled through.

SPEAKER_07:

You've only got gone there twice. Uh was it in the same place that you entered it?

SPEAKER_01:

Oh, to enter it, yes. Yes, and but once I enter it, depending. What my intention is. So, like I was doing work for a specific person one time and I was at her house. And then I was actually, I've done it more than twice. I've done it a handful of times. Another time it was another client slash friend, and again, I went to where she was. I went to her.

SPEAKER_07:

And then was it different because your physical location was different?

SPEAKER_01:

Yes.

unknown:

Okay.

SPEAKER_01:

I was physically where they are.

SPEAKER_07:

Um, but is that the case for the above and below?

SPEAKER_01:

In the above and the above. Well, okay, in the below, I always start in the same place. I always start on the platform, and depending on what I'm doing, I always go through the veil and I talk to my spirit guides there. As I've done more exploring, the platform has expanded, and there are other places that I can go to do different things. So there's different directions and paths I can take to get to dirt to different types of spirits who I have specific relationships with and who do have agreed to do certain work with me and serve a certain service for me, I guess.

SPEAKER_02:

Um I'd be curious about something. You talk about in in the lower world, this serpent you were you were talking about. I wonder what her ties are to um the Viking heritage.

SPEAKER_01:

Sometimes I think that she is because you know in the Nordic tradition there's Yggdrasil, and then there's the well of Mimur underneath Yggdrasil, and then there is supposed to be a serpent that lives under the world tree that is eating its roots. Is that Yormagander? I don't remember the name specifically. I don't remember. Um, I do wonder sometimes if she's the serpent who lives under the tree of Yggdrasil. And I call my Axis Mundi in my own my own mind, I call it Yggdrasil, and I believe that that lake is the well of Memur. Like I think it's the same.

SPEAKER_06:

Okay.

SPEAKER_01:

And there is a spirit that I can meet that I have to go with her. She takes me there, who I think might be Mimur, that might be that knowing spirit who Odin dropped his head in the well so that Odin could know all that was happening in the other world. I don't know. So I'm still figuring that out. I don't I think that those are names that the Nordic people used to define these creatures, that they were also seeing the same thing and that I'm encountering them. Um I don't know that that's actually their names.

SPEAKER_02:

I I have been to, you know, Viking ruins and seen the um hieroglyphics they have of serpents and things and stuff like that.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. Um the other thing that is very interesting to me is that even when we don't preload people with the knowledge of what to expect when they get to the lower world, a lot of times people have similar experiences. There is a lot of people who encounter a serpent at the bottom of whatever their access mundi is. There's a lot of people whose access mundi is a tree. There's a lot of people whose platform is cave-like. There's a lot of people whose lower world, once they get to their medicine place, and I use that in quotations because that's what my teacher called it, the medicine place, looks very similar, and you encounter very similar-looking healing places. And what's interesting to me about that is that it's like this thing that you end up with all of these coincidences, but to me, they're not coincidences. To me, it just confirms this is a real place I'm going, and other people are also going to the same real place, and that maybe their entry point is a little bit different, so their geography looks a little bit different. But I think that if we all agreed to meet at the same place, we'd be at the same place. We'd all get there because I think it's truly an actual place.

SPEAKER_07:

Stranger things.

unknown:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

Except not scary and awful. Um can be. No, not the lower world.

SPEAKER_02:

The lower world is not the upside down, that would be totally different.

SPEAKER_01:

That's the other thing. Because Chris Christians equate the lower world with hell. And in fact, in the Nordic traditions, H-E-L is not H-E-L-L, but people have equated them with the same thing. It's just a different realm of death, right?

SPEAKER_07:

They call it like the underworld. It's not actually evil, it's just the place where souls go to rest.

SPEAKER_01:

It's yeah, the non-warrior souls go. The ones that don't go to Valhalla or don't go to what's the one that is Freya's? I forget. There's Valhalla, and then there's the other one. Where's Freya? I mean, I forget the name of it.

SPEAKER_07:

My house of us here, but that's not, that's where they live.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah. The the upside down is a mirror of the middle world. It's a it's the middle world.

SPEAKER_01:

You mean earth?

SPEAKER_02:

Ups, upside down. Our our middle world upside down.

SPEAKER_05:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02:

If if you're, you know, if you know, that's kind of how I picture it. It's like, okay, it's not going heaven, hell per se. It's a it's a I don't want to say dimension, because that's not necessarily, but it's a you know, if you were to turn our world upside down, that's how it would be because everything is still the same there. The structures are still there, it's just it's a mirror. And a meaning in stranger things, yeah, yeah, the upside down.

unknown:

Sorry.

SPEAKER_01:

So, um, okay, so in so in journey work, a lot of times it's for me to get answers to things, it's for me to learn things, my spirits are actively teaching me things, and it's so cool because sometimes they'll teach me something, and then I'll, you know, show up at this Mongolian class, or I'll do something somewhere else, and I'll be taking instruction from like a living human person, and then they'll say something, I'm like, oh, I learned that already. My spirits told me that. Sweet. Like again, I'm getting confirmation that it's real.

SPEAKER_03:

Okay.

SPEAKER_01:

And um one time I was doing work for someone, and they this person had a pretty strong attachment. In my guide, one of one of my spirit guides, um she had agreed to do this work with me to remove this attachment. But the way that I had to do it was I had to do the drum and journey down and go get her and bring her up to be able to do the work. So, in some ways, this was a little bit more like trance because I was I went down to go get her and then I came back up, and then I was with it in the situation in this house. And so I'm drumming and I've pulled her up, and then I watch her in my mind's eye walk over to this person and then put hands on this person. And the exact instant that my guide put hands on this person, this person started screaming because the the work was happening to remove the attachment, and it was crazy. And like my eyes were closed, and then I saw my guide touch the person, and then the person started screaming, and then my eyes popped open, like, holy shit, it's real! Like, like I know that it's real, but then to like have like real-time shit happen that's real, and like perfectly coincides, and it's actually happening, is so awe-inspiring. Like, I just could like I know that it's real, but then stuff happened, and it's like, oh my god, it really, really, really is real. Like, like, I don't know, it was just it was a really cool moment for me. So that was like another middle world interact. Like, I went to the low world to go get her and treat her and bring her to the middle world to do this work because it's not the shaman that does the work. That's the other thing. It's very important. If you've got a shaman who's all me, me, me, I am powerful, I am healing you, I did all of this, and they're not really giving credit to like their spirits, that's a red flag for me that this person maybe is delusional. Um, different traditions have different ways of doing things, you know, maybe. Um, but there should always be an acknowledgement. Okay, the spirits are here and they have said this, and there should be a lot of conversation with the spirits. If there's not a lot of conversation with spirits and this person is saying that they're doing it, I think that's a very big red flag. That is a person filled with ego, who is possibly delusional, who is leading you astray, and could actually cause genuine harm. Just because a person doesn't have training doesn't mean that they're not actually doing stuff. It just means that they're doing stuff without training and they could potentially hurt you and make you very ill. So I would just be, any listeners out there, just be very careful about vetting your spirit workers. Um, okay, so then trance. So I would say in that instance, I was more in a trance state for that particular moment that I described where my guide came up and was like doing the work on this person. I have heard it described similarly by other people that I listen to, and but the difference is in trance state, the spirits are supposed to be able to enter your body and do the work through your body. And there are times where doing spirit possession under like ritual circumstances is like a gift, it's like an offering that you give to your spirits to allow them a chance to experience this world again, and it's something that's done out of love, and sometimes it's done out of purpose because you need the spirit to be able to do certain things, and I don't have training on that necessarily. I've seen it and I've heard lots of examples of it, but I I personally can't do that. I don't know if it's a level of training thing. I know that I also have a lot of fear, and I'm still working up to that trust level because I don't want I'm still working on my trust. I have a lot of fear because you could let something in and give someone the keys. You need to absolutely trust that they're gonna give the keys back, and I just don't have that yet.

SPEAKER_07:

So I do think I've unknowingly been doing some of this work, uh, and I described it to my friends as you're reaching your hand into a black lake and you're not necessarily sure what's going to reach back.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. Yes, absolutely. And my teacher here in the US, he says you need to watch out for what's called middle world bleed. If you're seeing um modern houses and electrical appliances and vehicles and things and the work that you're doing, then you're somewhere in the middle world, and the spirits you're interacting with are likely tricksters. Um, not necessarily, not every spirit that lives in the middle world is bad, but there's a higher probability that you're going to interact with a bad spirit, and you need to get yourself back into either the lower world or the upper world, right? Um in the Mongolian tradition, and we've talked about this quite a few times, the teacher in that class went on and on and on about did you vet your spirits? Did you interview them? Did you ask them? Did you question them? Why are they working with you? What are they getting out of this? Why have they agreed to help you? Did you ask any of those questions? Then how can you trust them if you don't know and you've never actually asked? And she, it was a very big deal for her because just like you said, you're reaching your hands into a black lake, expecting something to touch you without having any idea of what actually might touch you, because you can't truly see it.

SPEAKER_07:

So question: what would be a reasonable request for May Spirit?

SPEAKER_01:

It depends. Um, a spirit might ask you to make certain offerings, they might ask you to um give certain gifts, they might want something shiny and golden, they might ask you to do like a remembrance, like what?

SPEAKER_07:

Well, what about like what's what would be like an unreasonable request? Like, what's something that you want to avoid?

SPEAKER_01:

Um, in my tradition, like murder obviously would not like animal sacrifices is questionable. Um malicious ex. Um one of the things, like if the reason that they're working with you is because they want your adoration, they want you to focus on them, they want you to pray to them, they want you to um give that spiritual energy. Mm-hmm. Give that spiritual energy, but they're also not giving back, and they can't give you a reasonable explanation for what it is that they're doing for you or where they come from, then that might be bad. Um, or they might want, like in some cases, there's um, there's a a word for this. Some of them might want like a sexual relationship that's not necessarily good. Um, that might be a little bit of a red flag.

SPEAKER_07:

It's not necessarily incubai versus succubai.

SPEAKER_01:

Not necessarily bad either. There are some cases of shamans having spirit spouses in the lower world, and that is something that has been documented and has happened.

SPEAKER_07:

In Mexico, there's um some people that claim to have relations with goblin-like entities.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_07:

And children with them.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. Yeah. See, and that might be that might be a middle world spirit that you're dealing with at that point. They might want you to, they might encourage you to cause mischief, they might encourage you to seek revenge, they might encourage negative things, or they might give you advice that seems good on the surface, but ends up resulting in um a lot of misery. They like if if your interactions with them seem kind of good on the surface, but then like you're just constantly depressed and you're not getting better, and your world is devolving into chaos, they're probably not good for you. Um, but direct questions you would ask are: where do you come from? What's your name? Tell me your real name. Why are you working with me? What is your ultimate goal here?

SPEAKER_07:

What would a spirit say if you ask where did you come from?

SPEAKER_01:

One of mine is an ancestor. And she is from a very long time ago. And she told me where, like the general geography of where she came from. I believe she's a Sami shaman from many, many thousands of years ago. Um, and she's our ancestor, Cameron. I suspect if you went and tried to speak with her, you'd find her too. She told me that's where I'm from. And I said, Well, why are you working with me? Well, because you're my child and I'm trying to help my children. I want things to be better for you. Okay, that's a reason. Okay, I like that. All right. What are you getting from me? Well, you're my child, and I love you, and I want to help you. And that's pretty much it. It doesn't necessarily like she still needs that reciprocal relationship, but she's not involved and invested in me necessarily for what I can give her. She's doing the work out of a selfless reason that really isn't necessarily about me. It's about all of her children that it's all of her descendants that exist in the world, and she's trying to help make things better. Um, some of the others, it's not about me either. You know, I'm a healer. I do this work because I'm a healer. And it doesn't necessarily have much to do with me at all. It's not about what I can give them. Although, again, if they're truly my friend and I'm really their friend, I do have to give some reciprocal give back, right? But it's not because they demand it of me. It's because I love them and I am grateful for what they're doing and I'm giving them the gift back. But that's not their sole intention. Does that make sense? Like, does that answer your question?

unknown:

Yes.

SPEAKER_01:

Does that kind of answer the other question about what would be a red flag?

SPEAKER_07:

Yes.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_07:

So like I've heard too that it can be a red flag if they don't ask for anything specific, that you do need to have kind of a contractual. Like, even if they don't ask for anything, you should probably still do like uh interval um sacrifice or not not like uh offerings, you know, offering. Yes.

SPEAKER_01:

For my teacher here in the US, that is true. It is good practice to do regular offerings as out of gratitude to feed your spirits to help build that connection and to strengthen it. And that is expected, like they want that, but they're not going out there asking me to adore them, they're not going out there asking me to spread the word of them, they're not going out there asking me to tell people that they're gods or they're deities or that they are all-knowing and all healing, because they're not omniscient necessarily. Um, and they're not all powerful necessarily. They have a lot of power, but they're not necessarily all powerful, they're not gods, and that's important to me too.

SPEAKER_02:

Okay, there you go. There you go. Well, it's it's all very interesting, and and I think that we are weird. We've been talking for a long time and getting getting into some pretty deep stuff of what you um kind of kind of do and how you um speak to spirits. I myself, it's you know, I've only had the one instance where a spirit actually spoke to me, where it's everything, every other time, it's just impressions or things that uh I I feel, and um, you know, talking to them, the only way I talk to them is I just talk out loud. And that's how they hear me, because I don't know that they can necessarily hear my thoughts. I think it's intentioned enough. Yeah, I have to talk out loud to talk to them.

SPEAKER_07:

I I think it's like most magic. I can I think I can and it's about how you feel about the interaction. So if you think that your thoughts are private, well they they could be. If you're not vocalizing those thoughts, yeah.

SPEAKER_02:

So that's I mean, talking to spirits, I you know, middle middle world spirits, as we're as we're we've come to kind of call them call them, they can hear what we say when we're talking out loud.

SPEAKER_01:

100%. So do you want to hear a fun story about my new job?

SPEAKER_05:

Sure.

SPEAKER_01:

So it's for sure haunted. This building is extremely haunted. Um, but it doesn't feel like hopeless, and it doesn't have the same vibe as that other place where that voice came home with me and talked to me.

SPEAKER_07:

You should do EVPs there.

SPEAKER_01:

We will eventually. Um, but I one day I was doing stuff and I was walking around, and then I came out of the kitchen and I look over in one of the empty rooms, the TV is on. And I'm like, what the fuck? Someone messing with me. And so I went into the room, nobody was there, and I was like, okay, on the off chance, this is a spirit. We'll just be polite. I said, okay, hey, I'm impressed that you got the TV on, but this is an infomercial. I assume you want to watch something more interesting than an infomercial, so let me change this to like, you know, a sitcom or comedy or something. And so I started doing it, and then the there's like an alert for any door that opens in the house. So any door that opens, it goes beep, beep, beep. So I heard, as soon as I said, I'm gonna change it to something more interesting for you, I heard the beep, beep, beep. And I was like, okay, all right. So then I did it and I changed it. I said, okay, enjoy. And then I left the room and then I went and I found my coworker. I only had one coworker that night. I was like, hey, did you turn on the TV in room eight? She goes, No, why? So the TV's on. She goes, no. And she kind of gave me this face and I was like, no, it's on. She goes, okay, you need to stop it. You need to fucking stop it. Stop looking for shit. And I was like, no, look, I didn't do that. Like the TV was on, and I was like, okay. And I was like, and then the other question I have is, did you leave the house? And she goes, no. Why? I said, didn't you hear the alert? She goes, what alert? The door alert? And I was like, yeah. She goes, no, I didn't hear that. I said, well, I heard it. So I feel like a spirit was doing stuff in that room, and I talked out loud and it heard me and knew that I wasn't going to hear it. So it like the beep, beep, beep was probably a yes please, in my opinion. Like I feel like that's was a confirmation of yes, please. I don't want to watch the stupid infomercial. And I've asked her multiple times since then because she's a little bit tricky, and I thought she's fucking with me. And then so I've asked her a few times, and she finally was like, look, dude, I tell you right now, I did not do that. I promise, I didn't do that. But I think that's a real world example of like communicating with like the different way that you can communicate with spirits. Another way you can talk to spirits, and I know that this is getting really long, is divination. Like that cardamancy, the stone divination, that's spirits. That's spirits using those tools to give you messages. Then you have to be careful who you're talking to, like where are those answers coming from. So it's a good idea to like empower whatever your tool is.

SPEAKER_07:

It is socially awkward because it put me in some very bizarre positions. I don't know you, but like so it told me uh about first time I knew this girl. Uh, she comes and she wants to do a reading. Her boyfriend's sitting like six feet away, and the reading is about how basically he's a bum, and she's going to get caught up on uh superficial or financial, and the only way to get around that is by being more empathic, empathetic. And it could lead to something more, but most likely will end in tragedy. And she's like. Well, yes. Fuck. I was hoping that wouldn't be right.

SPEAKER_01:

Yikes, dude.

SPEAKER_07:

Well, anyway, uh you go ahead and enjoy the rest of your party then. Um, I'm gonna do another reading.

SPEAKER_01:

Sorry for the bad news. Yeah, woo. Alright. Yeah.

SPEAKER_07:

Okay, that happened like similar, not quite as personal to like two other people, but it was more about their job and finances or the promotion that they one of them was gonna get, another one said, uh, you will struggle very hard. The only way to get this is to do this, but probably not.

SPEAKER_00:

Dang, dude.

SPEAKER_02:

I I'd like to end with a story. So I I don't think it's a secret that I grew up Mormon. I went on a Mormon mission in Sweden, and I was I was uh new, newly out in the mission field out in uh an area, my first area, and we were knocking on doors. That's something that Mormon missionars used to do. Knock on doors and proselyte as they call it. And we go to this one place, knock on the door, somebody answers, and we you know say our little spiel, and they're like, No, thank you, and we walk away, and we're about two houses away where someone comes out and goes, Hey, uh, I want you guys to come back, you're welcome here. But now he's speaking to us in English instead of Swedish. He's like, Come back, you're welcome here. And so we go into this, we come back into this home, and it's actually like a little a little congregation that's actually led by uh by a woman, and she she was kind of their leader, healer, um and she claimed to talk to spirits and so in my you know naivety, my youth, um, you know, I I just kind of I'm there to teach about Mormonism, and then so I'm talking about Joseph Smith, and this lady like she starts talking to me and starts telling me how okay, I'm gonna talk to this Joseph Smith, and she like connects to she says she connects to the spirit of Joseph Smith, and and I'm like, oh my gosh, this lady's crazy. And she she picks up on that immediately, and she's like, Look, I I know your passion for this person. I saw him standing behind you when you were talking about him. And I was like, okay. But now I have to go back and think about, okay, did that I mean, was that a real situation or was just this just a crazy uh sp uh you know religious sell it that had a you know, just a small following of people that followed her because she's you know had a strong personality or whatever it is.

SPEAKER_01:

Right, that charisma.

SPEAKER_02:

It was interesting that she claimed to talk to whatever spirit, and it didn't take her much time at all to connect and talk to this spirit.

SPEAKER_01:

So I s I do struggle, like you. Like Mediums, man, I just don't know. Especially the ones on TV. I'm like, oh, really?

SPEAKER_02:

I mean, there's a whole show based on a medium that lives in Arizona.

SPEAKER_01:

Really?

SPEAKER_02:

There's a show called Medium.

SPEAKER_01:

Oh, I didn't know that. I mean, I know the show at Medium, I've never actually seen it.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, she lives in Scottsdale.

SPEAKER_07:

I don't know, the the lady that they based on. I do want to say too. Sometimes quacks can be right, but a broken clock can be correct two times a day.

SPEAKER_01:

Right. Well, there's there's what is it, like the Long Island medium or whatever? She's pretty famous, and then there's another one that I found on um Prime the other day. It's called The Haunting of So-and-So, and she does all this medium work for like celebrities and stuff. And sometimes I'm just like, are you for real though? Like I feel like you're just really good at reading people and telling them what they want to hear. Like, I don't know. It's hard. I struggle because it's sometimes it's so over the top.

SPEAKER_02:

Like again, I I bring up I spent the night in a medium's house.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02:

Didn't feel experience anything. Apparently she had spirit children living there. Sorry.

SPEAKER_05:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02:

Sorry.

SPEAKER_07:

I kept interrupting you. Um but uh yeah, sometimes I wonder too if some of these quacks are actually skilled, but they're showmen.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_07:

They're showmen and they are practicing that more than their practice, you know? Like they're they're making it flashier. They're they're screaming when they see something when they aren't actually, you know, it's just something they do. But they're trying to make it more enthralling for people.

SPEAKER_01:

Unfortunately, there's a reason for that too. You know, like self-deprecating, very humble, not showman-like people don't tend to become very well known and don't tend to get a lot of traction as far as like getting clients and things. And if that's your sole occupation and the only thing you're really good at, that's the way that you gotta get you gotta get the likes, right? Like that's how you do that in order to actually be able to pay for your own life. So I get that. And that's something that's really obnoxious to me too, about like the new ageism and a lot of some of the spirituality here in the West is that it's very showman. And there's certain like people who start out being pretty like run-of-the-mill, all of a sudden start using all these fluffy words and start talking about Akashic Records, and like, which might be true, I don't know, but like I don't like people change and then they start to wear flowy clothes and they talk like hippies, and they've got patchouli incense everywhere, and it's like that's not who you were like a week ago, though.

SPEAKER_07:

Wow, don't knock patchouli.

SPEAKER_01:

I love that. I love it, but you know what I mean though, like there's like an image, and that's what people all of a sudden they have crystals everywhere that they don't actually use. The the clients expect to see that, and so it feels like the practitioner, even if they're legit, moves into looking like that so they can meet the expectation of the client and get the client. I I don't know. It's it's sad. Anyway, so you were trying to end this episode. You've tried multiple times.

SPEAKER_02:

Sorry, GT. Well, I'll I'll end it this way then. That that's one thing about you know the stuff that you just talked about, the way that you present it and the way that you present yourself is not that you're just a normal person, you're just like anybody. And you you practice this stuff and you believe this stuff, but it's just like matter of fact for you. It's not like you you're not weird. If I can say that. Cameron, you're weird, sorry. But Amanda, you're you're not weird. You're just you're you're like this normal person living your life, and you just so happen this is what you practice and believe. My friends think I'm a fault. So I just wanted to kind of say that just to clarify to people like the reason that I I've I've been attracted to you and and I've kind of done some of the stuff with you is because of the way that you present yourself just as a normal person that just happens to believe this, happens to study it.

SPEAKER_01:

So that's yeah, they're just trying to be authentic. Yeah, drives me crazy.

SPEAKER_02:

Authentic, that's the good word. You're very authentic. To be fair, so am I.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, Cameron's being around. You're just weird. You're just gonna be like, the thing is that is who he is, though.

SPEAKER_02:

Well, true. Uh well, I'm learning who you are more as we go. You're not you're not gonna be able to do it. He's red on all accounts, but weirdly, but no. Cameron, if you're weirdness is coming out slowly. Cameron, if you want feel feel lucky for that, by the way.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, he didn't hit you with it all at once.

SPEAKER_02:

Right. We haven't we haven't had some good absinthe together yet.

SPEAKER_01:

So I have a question for you, Cameron. Speaking of your weirdness, do you still get blackout drunk and speak in an Irish accent? No. Or did that finally stop happening?

SPEAKER_07:

That finally stopped.

SPEAKER_02:

Thanks for giving us more weirdness.

SPEAKER_07:

I so that happened because I was hanging out with my friend Gordon, and we would get drunk, and so it would sort of like rub off on me, and then after that, he got deported because of his antics. And for like two years after that, I would get like shitfaced, and if I got drunk enough, that would come back. I'm so glad that's gone.

SPEAKER_01:

Alright. Well, let's uh end this episode. Did I oh so okay, Cameron, if you want, uh we can go offline separately and I can walk you through how to actually do a journey if you wanted to try it for yourself. There are resources so that you don't physically have to have someone with you when you do it.

SPEAKER_07:

It kind of sounds like I've done it before.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, probably.

SPEAKER_07:

So I can know what it was.

SPEAKER_01:

I can walk you through it. I could give you the resources to teach you like the way that I do it, but you can do it whatever you want. Um and then did that sort of do you feel like all your questions have been answered about?

SPEAKER_07:

Well, so I'm kind of approaching it from a point of view that like maybe I have done it. Um as far as questions of somebody from completely the outside, which is what this was supposed to be. Um getting started, how would you recommend somebody gets started?

SPEAKER_01:

Okay. Neoshamanism has its place, and even traditional shamans from actual lineages recognize that Michael Harner did do some good stuff. Okay. It's a great place for a beginner to start, is with neo-shamanism and the stuff that Michael Harner put out in the world.

SPEAKER_07:

Sorry, go ahead. I just feel like it would be important to at least end uh on a note where people, viewers that are are interested in doing this work, where do they start?

SPEAKER_01:

So start with Michael Harner's works. Read any of his books. I feel like one of them is like the The Path of the Shaman, I think might be one of his books by Michael Harner. You could read that. He does have explicit instructions on how to do a journey. There are on YouTube actual recorded drum sessions. You just google like you just YouTube search Michael Harner shamanic drum, and there's two of them. There's a 15-minute one and a 30-minute one, and 15 minutes is more than enough. A lot of stuff can happen in 15 minutes in the in the other world. The 30-minute one is good, but it's looped kind of weird, and when it hits that loop, the rhythm changes just slightly and it takes me out of my journey every time. So I don't like the 30-minute one personally, but it works for some people. So you can do the like read the book, learn about Michael Harner, start doing some mini journeys with simple intentions. Um, make sure that when you do your journey, you're not seeing a bunch of modern conveniences and structures. If you are, then you're not actually in a journey, you're dreaming, or you're in the middle world. So make sure that what's around you is natural and very primitive and not here, right? And then start making relationships. And as you get more experienced with journeys, then there's more to be learned. And there's plenty of teacher, teachers in the neo-shamanic realm who are willing to show you how to further that. And as you get deeper in, then you start to earn like learn a little bit of discernment, and then you learn a little bit, like you start to be able to discern who's neo-shaman, who's new age, who is from an actual indigenous lineage and and actually comes from a long line of knowledge and not just Michael Harner knowledge, which again is a great starting place, nothing wrong with it. And you can start to sort of explore and sort of build your base from there. That's what I did. I started with Michael Harner, basically. And I just sort of got lucky and fell into a teacher. And I think that's what happens. When the student is ready, the teacher will appear. That's the old expression. So as you sort of go ahead.

SPEAKER_07:

Would you recommend? So uh I when I was starting to try to figure out what it actually was, I went to a lot of magic shops and I got very bad vibes from the psychics there. Like they weren't legit. Would you recommend going to your local magic shop and just seeing how it feels?

SPEAKER_01:

You can see how it feels, but make sure that like it, you know, you've gotta be critical. You have to be a little bit suspicious. Don't take everything as though it's gospel and that all of these people are real, because unfortunately, there is a fair number of shysters and people who are who maybe believe that they are indeed truly psychic and powerful and stuff, but are living in their own delusion. And there's there's a decent number of people out there who are like that. So you just gotta be really careful and follow your vibe. If it feels weird and they're all about themselves, and they're all about how powerful they are, and they have lots of very high prices for stuff, and you're not seeing results with some of the other things that they're saying, or it doesn't quite check out right, they may not be real. So then move on.

SPEAKER_07:

You gotta make a spirit contract.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, you gotta start somewhere, but you've gotta be very careful and cautious when you do it. I'm not saying don't trust people, but take your time to trust them. Give yourself a minute, don't just jump into a relationship right away. That would be my advice. And then answer that question.

SPEAKER_07:

I think I think that's a good place to start and also a good place to end. Um yeah, I think that's good.

SPEAKER_01:

Cool. All right, well, murders, I hope you enjoyed this. And I hope you don't hate me. I again, I'm not a shaman. I'm not claiming I'm a shaman, but I am very much a student of it. So um I'm learning as much as I can about shamanism, and I will claim that. Anyway.

SPEAKER_02:

Again, there's uh a website.

SPEAKER_01:

Oh yes.

SPEAKER_07:

What's the website? I gotta edit it, uh, but it is the wandering crow.com, not the wandering crow podcast. Uh thewandering.com.com.

SPEAKER_06:

Let me make sure.

SPEAKER_07:

The email is uh in there.

SPEAKER_01:

This is what's confusing. The email is wanderingcrowpodcast at gmail.com, and maybe what we need to do is line those two up so they're the same.

SPEAKER_05:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

So our email is wandering crowpodcast at gmail.com. The website is thewanderingcrow.com. We have a Facebook, which is thewandering crow. We have an Instagram, which is the wandering crow. And we also have a YouTube, which is also The Wandering Crow, but it doesn't have anything on it yet, because we're still working on that.

SPEAKER_07:

I'm hoping to just hard to reserve the name.

SPEAKER_01:

Cool. So yeah, reach out to us. Hope you listen, hope you share. If you do listen and share, listen to the whole episode, please. Subscribe. Subscribe, like the episodes, give us ratings and reviews, and tell all your friends. Okay. That would really help us out.

SPEAKER_07:

Now, uh, is there any specific platform you want to see them subscribe? All of them. Because they're but they all cost well, okay. So Spotify is free.

SPEAKER_01:

Uh Apple Apple Podcast is a decent one. And it's usually I don't think you need to pay. I think you just have to have an Apple device that you can listen to it on Facebook.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah. Okay. It's it's free with that with your with your Apple device.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02:

Your iCloud.

SPEAKER_01:

Or like your laptop.

SPEAKER_07:

Let's digress a little bit. But okay, so subscribe. Spotify's easy. It's available for everyone. Uh we have our website, thewanderingcrow.com, our email, the wandering crow podcast, um, at gmail.

SPEAKER_01:

And not not the, not the, just wandering crow podcast. We really do have at gmail.com. Yep, I agree. Okay. And let's see, with that. Oh, this is late, but here we go.

SPEAKER_05:

Totally. Wow.

SPEAKER_01:

All right, everybody, we're ending the episode. Thank you, murderers, and we hope you had a good time.

SPEAKER_07:

Goodbye. This is Ben Cameron.

SPEAKER_01:

GT and Mandy. All right. Talk to you guys next time on the Wandering Crow.

Contributor

Abbey

Host
Head Shot

Amanda (Mandy)

Host
Contributor

Cameron (definitely not Cam)

Host
Contributor

J. T.

Host

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