The Trickster Archetype , Disillusionment and The Second Awakening

Certainty is intoxicating, especially after a big awakening. Then the rug pulls out: a trusted teacher gets exposed, a “destined” relationship reveals its shadow, or a movement you thought was truth starts acting like the very system it resisted. I’m Alyssa, and I’m naming the force behind that pattern: the trickster archetype, the boundary crosser known as Hermes, Loki, and Ichtomi, who shows up wherever we’ve become unconscious, inflated, or rigid.

I walk through Carl Jung’s framing of the trickster as the psyche’s self-correcting mechanism and why it’s rising so loudly right now in spiritual communities, wellness and ascension spaces, conspiracy frameworks, and even UFO disclosure narratives. We talk about how counterculture can quietly become groupthink, how pedestals get built and then pulled apart, and why that collapse can feel like betrayal even when it’s also a call back to humility and truth.

From there, we get practical: what to do when your nervous system wants to grab a new ideology, why “switching sides” doesn’t solve the deeper pattern, and how holding paradox becomes the doorway to the second awakening. We explore shadow work, projection, attachment, and somatic healing as essential tools for real discernment, not paranoia. If you’re ready to stop outsourcing authority and start living from embodied clarity, press play, subscribe, share this with a friend, and leave a review.

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Work With Alyssa:

Nervous System Mastery Masterclass May 20th With Dr. Jesse Hanson

The Calling —A 9 Month Initiation Into Your Soul's Assignment

In Service— 1:1 Soul-Led Leadership Mentorship

The Awaken Experience— 7 Day Retreat In Costa Rica with Alyssa & Dr. Jesse

Free Meditation —Positive Timeline Activation

Watch Alyssa's episode on Lead With Heart

Transcript

Welcome, Reviews, And The Theme

SPEAKER_00 0:16

Welcome to Body Wisdom Rising. I'm your host, Alyssa. We're living at a profound turning point in humanity, a collective choice point where old systems are dissolving, and many of us are being called to wake up, heal, and step into deeper alignment with who we truly are. On this podcast, we explore consciousness, healing, ancestral wisdom, and the initiations that shape our lives. We also explore how to navigate times of great change and what it means when healing begins to open the door to deeper questions. Who am I really? Why am I here? And how am I being called to serve in this moment of history? Here we talk about the collective themes unfolding in our world and how each of us can learn to meet them with greater awareness, embodiment, and courage. Because real transformation doesn't just happen in the mind, it happens through the body. If you're on a path of awakening, healing, remembering, and perhaps stepping into service, you're in the right place. This is Body Wisdom Rising.

SPEAKER_01 1:40

Welcome back to another episode. Welcome to anyone who is new here for your first time. My name is Alyssa, and thank you to every single one of you who keeps coming back and listening to these episodes. I do have a favor to ask you, if you haven't already, just to take a quick moment, if you are getting value from these episodes, just to leave a review. I don't make any money off of these episodes. And I do put a lot of time into every single episode to make sure that I'm delivering something valuable that you guys can actually really take something from and be able to apply to your lives. I always make sure that I give a lot of practical tools and resources. And so I do hope that you're finding value in this. So if you are and you haven't yet, please just take a moment to leave over review. It really helps this podcast grow and reach the people that it's meant to.

Why The Trickster Is Rising

SPEAKER_01 2:31

So today I want to talk about the trickster archetype. So there is a figure showing up everywhere right now in the spiritual communities, in the awakened communities, in politics, in the relationships that we've had with people that we thought were destiny, in certainties that completely dissolve overnight. And so this archetype is responsible for every countercultural movement that we see. And he has many names. So the Greeks call him Hermes. The Norse call him Loki. The Lakota call him Ichtomi. In medieval Europe, he wore the costume of the holy gesture, the carnival king, the simpleton who fools the devil. He is the boundary crosser, the threshold god, the one who lives at the gates of the city and decides what comes in and what goes out. He lives where one world ends and one world begins. He is the force that destabilizes inflated certainty. He is the one who exposes what we could not see about ourselves. He is not on your side. He is not on the other side either. He is neither good nor evil. He is the one who reveals where you have become unconscious. And he is rising right now because we are in a season of mass identity collapse, mass spiritual disorientation, and mass certainty addiction. So wherever there is rigid belief, he appears. Wherever there is inflation, he appears. Wherever there is a pedestal, he is already at the base, working it loose. So this is not a warning to fear him. It is an invitation to understand what he is here to do. Because if we learn to work with this archetype rather than be taken out by him, he becomes one of the most powerful initiatory forces available to us. He is, as Young put it, a forerunner of the savior. So this episode is about three things. How is the trickster showing up in the spiritual and awake communities right now? How he knocks us off the pedestal, often painfully, back inside our own humanity, and how if we learn to hold the tension he creates rather than collapse it, he becomes the doorway into a second awakening, the deeper cycle of spiritual work that the first awakening could never reach on its own.

Offerings: The Calling And InService

SPEAKER_01 4:58

Before we get into this episode, I do want to share my offerings I currently have available. So I have the calling, which is a nine-month initiation into your soul's assignment beginning September 3rd, running for nine months into June 2027. So it's built for women who are going through a real initiation and craving genuine spiritual emergence. So not personal development, not mindset work, not another certification. This is a real descent and a real return. And so most spaces will either take you deep spiritually and leave the psychology untouched, or go deep psychologically and never really touch the soul. So this container holds both depth psychology, psychospiritual work, somatic and nervous system work, evolutionary astrology as the map of your soul's intention, this lifetime, ceremony, and the slower work of integrating it all into how you actually live. So each month inside the calling holds a monthly live teaching, a monthly live ceremony on the full moon aligned to that moon's medicine, and a monthly live circle held in sacred container to deepen the work and practice together. You will also receive a personal soul blueprint session privately with me before the journey begins, and a teaching library of deep dive recordings, a curated book transmission once per trimester, chosen to meet you where you are, and access to the calling app that tracks your transits, your nature chart, evolutionary blueprint, seasonal medicine, and somatic practices alongside you. So this is for the women in the middle of a death and rebirth, the one who has outgrown spaces that cannot see the spiritual reality of what she is moving through, the one craving ceremony, ritual, and depth work that is actually rooted in the earth, her lineage, her body. And the one who knows that her calling is not separate from her healing. It's the next expression of it. So everything you need to know is in the show notes. And I've also opened additional spots in my in-service, my one-on-one mentorship. This is for soul-led healers being called into service in a bigger way. The ones building offerings, stepping into visibility, holding global impact, and doing the depth work that allows them to actually hold what they're being trusted with. InService is built around your unique soul blueprint. We meet twice a month, one-on-one, for 90-minute private sessions that are very intuitive, somatic, and strategic. You have ongoing support between sessions Monday through Wednesday and on Friday. And we work with your offers and direction, your structure and systems, your content and expression, your visibility, your nervous system capacity, and your creative support. And as part of the in-service, you do receive full access to the calling as well. So the group that has formed already is incredible. And I am bringing in a few more of the right women. So the application is open, and that's in the show notes as well. All right, let's get into this episode.

Jung’s View Of The Trickster

SPEAKER_01 7:55

So, what the trickster is. So, Carl Jung wrote about uh the trickster in his major essay on this figure as a commentary on Paul Radan's The Trickster, a study in American Indian mythology. And he was struck by how universal the figure was. So, how he showed up in nearly every mythology on earth, how he resisted moralizing, how he refused to fit into the neat categories of good and evil that civilized consciousness wants to impose on him. And Jung called the trickster a forerunner of the savior, both subhuman and superhuman, whose chief and most alarming characteristic is his unconsciousness. So that phrase matters, unconsciousness. So the trickster is what unconsciousness looks like when it has not yet been integrated. He is a part of the psyche that still operates beneath the threshold of awareness, doing its work whether we cooperate or not. So he shapeshifts, he plays tricks, he humiliates, he exposes, he breaks form. He breaks form, especially when form has become rigid, performative, or inflated. So this is key. The trickster is not out there. He is in the unintegrated parts of us. He is in the shadow that we have not yet confronted. And he becomes most active precisely when we are most certain that we have transcended him. He forces something new to emerge by breaking down old structures. He appears wherever consciousness has become one-sided, so very rigid, wherever certainty has turned into identity, where our belief systems, our worldviews become a cage. He is the psyche's self-correcting mechanism. He humbles and knocks down false gods. He pulls the pedestal out from under them. The trickster is a rebel. He is the boundary breaker, the one who refuses to obey the rules of the established order. Every countercultural movement in history has a trickster behind it. So the people who walk away from the mainstream because they can feel the gap between what it claims to be and what it actually is. But here is where it gets tricky. So he is not loyal to the counterculture either. He is not on the side of the rebels any more than he is on the side of the establishment. He is on the side of what is alive. And the same intelligence that breaks people out of the dominant culture eventually breaks them out of the counterculture, too, because every counterculture has its own shadow and can also start becoming rigid and dogmatic.

When Rebellion Becomes Groupthink

SPEAKER_01 10:36

A few people sense that the dominant story is not true. So this is where it starts to unfold. So they start to question, right? They start to think for themselves. This is when trickster comes in. They feel the gap between what is being said in the mainstream and what is actually happening. And so the trickster is there opening the doors, breaking them out, giving them permission to leave. So in the beginning, these few people are doing something genuinely brave. They are walking away from belonging. They are choosing critical thinking over consensus. They are willing to be misunderstood, isolated, called crazy. So this is the early phase of any countercultural movement. And it has a particular quality of aliveness because the people in it are actually thinking. They are individually responsible for what they believe. They are not protected by the herd. So then the movement starts to grow. So other people sense the same thing and find their way to it. So the community starts to form. There is relief in finding others who see what you see. There is belonging again. There is shared language. And somewhere in that growth, the thing that was originally about critical thinking starts to become a culture of its own. So the people who were once independent thinkers start to agree with each other more and more. New people arrive who do not do their original work of breaking away. They just adopted the conclusions. And the movement that started as a refusal of groupthink becomes its own groupthink. By the time it reaches the mass, the original quality is mostly gone. So what was once a few brave people thinking for themselves has become a large group of people performing the identity of people who think for themselves. So it looks rebellious from the inside, but um has become exactly what the original rebels were running from. So consensus without examination, belonging without critical thinking. This is when the trickster turns on it. So he came in at the beginning to help people break out of the dominant culture. He shows up again at the end to break people out of the counterculture who has become a culture. So he never changed his function. The movement changed its nature. So this is what you are watching happen right now in a lot of the spiritual awake communities. That's personally where I'm seeing it because that's just what I've been drawn to and pulled to over the years. So many of them, they did start for most people as, you know, a real refusal of mainstream conditioning. COVID was a big one, right? Whatever you, whatever your beliefs were around the whole COVID narrative, that did break a lot of people out of this mainstream conditioning. So the first wave, they were thinking for themselves, they were brave. The first uh wave was breaking out of these inherited stories and seeing things that had been hidden. So the trickster was their ally. But as these movements started to grow, like these awake communities started to grow, they became like very political and kind of very dogmatic, a lot of them. These communities started forming and these pedestals went up. So these people who started actually speaking out, you know, against the mainstream were all of a sudden set up on these pedestals. So these teachers became gurus and people started to arrive and follow them that didn't actually do the original work, like didn't actually um do the, you know, thinking for themselves years ago to actually like leave the mass movements, the mainstream narratives. They're just starting to get swayed in it because it is actually starting to become more mainstream. So they just adopted the conclusions. So the energy um it gets tainted and distorted. And um, you know, we see this happen all the time, even with things that I, people that I followed for years and years, who originally kind of started off smaller and I agreed really aligned with a lot of things that they were saying. And then as they started to grow and become a lot more popular, had a bigger following, their message started to get distorted. They started to become very rigid because polarizing content uh gets a lot of views, right? Gets a lot of likes, it grows a following. So then their message started getting distorted. So then I kind of just moved away from those people. This is stuff that I have to be aware of, right? Um, that I'm constantly checking in with myself as my following grows. Like I don't even really want to get to that point, you know, where people start to look at me like I'm this guru or put me on a pedestal because then I'm very much susceptible to these weird, distorted archetypal forces. So that's something that I always have to check in with myself and will continue to do. Um, because the reality is we are all susceptible to it. None of us are so awake and so conscious that we are not. So it's really important to just check in with ourselves. And I received that message loud and clear when I was in a medicine ceremony. This was 2024. And I was going through my own disillusioned period of like, you know, when I went through my awakening many years ago and like awake to a lot of just these false narratives out there. And, you know, the people I connected with and the communities that I found during that time really felt aligned and like home. But then I started seeing those communities start to become very dogmatic and distorted. And so, yeah, there was definitely another awakening, another um disillusionment that happened, you know, can feel feel very destabilizing because we're like, well, who do I even trust then? Like, where do I go? What direction do I go in? Yeah. And it is disorienting because the people in these movements, they still feel like rebels. They still feel like they are on the outside. They still feel like they are the ones who can see the truth. So when the trickster comes for spaces, they trust, it does not feel like the same thing that happened, you know, if they woke up, you know, several years ago to all the mainstream narratives. This time it feels more like betrayal. It feels like the wrong people are being exposed and it can feel like the world has turned upside down, but it's not upside down. It is the exact same pattern. So the trickster does not care which costume the unconsciousness is wearing. He comes for whichever one has started to become an inflated performance or rigid structure. So this is why the deeper teaching is not about which movement to belong to. It is about becoming someone who can see clearly through any movement, including the one you currently trust, someone who can value what a movement offers without needing it to be total, someone who can stay in genuine curiosity. So the trickster is the force that keeps you honest, no matter which costume you are wearing. He is the rebel. He is also the one who eventually breaks the rebellion when the rebellion has become its own performance. He is not betraying the rebels by doing this. He is the original rebel doing the original work, still refusing to let any form, no matter how originally liberating, become the permanent shape of reality. That is what makes him so disorienting and so valuable. He cannot be claimed, he cannot be enlisted, he cannot be put on a team. The moment any movement thinks it has him on its side, he is already turning. So almost everyone who walks a conscious path goes through a first awakening. So it comes through different doorways for different people. Sometimes it's grief, sometimes it's breakdown, sometimes it's through a teacher, plant medicine, a death, a relationship ending, a global event that pulls a floor out from under us. And so the first awakening can actually feel very radical, but it can also feel very expansive. Um, inauthenticity becomes unbearable. The unconscious agreements and stories that ran your life become very visible. And once seen, they cannot be unseen. And you start to question everything. So the family system, religion, political story, media, culture, medical industry, the life that you built. And so this is necessary. Without it, most people would never differentiate from the conditioning at all. But most people do not actually shed their old identity during the first awakening. They just replace it. So the ego survives. The ego is extraordinarily resourceful. And what it does when an awakening comes through is it reorganizes itself around a new spiritual persona, a new identity that feels far more authentic than the old one, which is precisely why it is so much harder to see. And we often start to identify during this time with certain labels. So, like being awake, being special, chosen. So the problem is always external. It's out there. It's the ones who are not awake. And this is when the trickster begins to circle because the new identity, however true it feels, still operates in binaries. So asleep versus awake, conscious versus unconscious, truth versus illusion, real versus fake, light versus dark. The ego that woke up has just changed sides. So the same psychological structure remains, the same need for certainty, the same need to know who is in and who is out, and the same need to be the one who sees the truth. And most people, the reality is overestimate their level of consciousness. I myself am included in all of this, right? So this isn't me speaking like I have it all figured out. This is stuff that I have to continuously um check myself for, right? I have to continue to do this work. So this is the devastating truth of the first awakening. The very seeing through that liberated us from external conditioning becomes a new identity. We become trapped inside. And in this exact territory is where the trickster does his most precise

Modern Trickster Traps And Pedestals

SPEAKER_01 20:14

work. So, how is the trickster showing up right now? Well, look around. He is everywhere. He is in this spiritual community that built itself around a teacher who turned out to be very coercive, predatory, financially correct, or simply more unconscious than their followers were willing to see. So the certainty was real. The transmission may even have been real in places. You know, not all of their teachings necessarily were wrong, but the shadow was also real. And the shadow eventually broke through. And the people who put the teacher on the pedestal feel betrayed, tricked, devastated. He's also very much in the twin flame industry. So where unbearable longing, attachment wounds, trauma bonding are sold as cosmic destiny, where women are taught that obsession itself is proof of soul recognition. And where the more painful the connection, the more divine it must be. And then one day that structure cracks, and the person who's supposed to be the divine counterpart turns out to have been a deeply unconscious mirror for unhealed material. And we are left with a wreckage of years of projection. And um, you know, they're taking actual like truths. Like Rudolf Steiner's um, he lectures a lot on karmic relationships. And I firmly believe in all of that, but it's it's pretty deep work, and you have to have done a lot enough psycho-spiritual work to know that you're not projecting these um false fantasies onto another person, right? Uh, he's also in the conspiracy movements, some of which contain real fragments of truth about real corruption, and many of which become totalizing frameworks that could collapse all complexity into a single villain, a single Explanation, where the dopamine of seeing through becomes addiction. He's very much in the UFO and disclosure plays, where genuine philosophical questions about consciousness, contact, and the limits of materialistic science get tangled with savior narratives. So where higher beings are coming to rescue humanity, where the chosen ones are being prepared, where the same psychological structure that has produced this apocalyptic and messianic thinking for thousands of years simply wears a cosmic costume now. And I definitely got pulled into all of this. That's why I'm speaking to them because of the beginning of my journey. You know, I share a lot in my previous episodes about how it was very abrupt and it was very intense. And inevitably, whenever you have an abrupt and intense awakening without doing a lot of the deep psycho-spiritual work, that spiritual persona, that spiritual ego will take over. And I was pulled into a lot of these narratives. And I've done a lot of work and I continue to do a lot of work around that. I'm not saying that they're all false. That's not what I'm saying by any means whatsoever. But discernment is so important right now because it's going to be very hard to see over the coming years. There's going to be a lot of distortions out there. That's why doing this psycho-spiritual work is going to be so, so important. And making sure that we're not projecting, you know, our own fantasies onto needing to be saved, on needing to be chosen that often comes from a very unhealed place, the wounded inner child. So it's important to, you know, to do that work. He's also very much in the wellness and ascension spaces where bypassing dresses itself in this soft pastel branding where spiritual teachings just get oversimplified and distorted. And he is in the political pendulum swings. So the person who leaves the left and becomes rigidly right, the person who leaves new age spirituality and becomes a traditionalist Christian. This is just what we're seeing right now, the counterculture movements that I'm noticing that are most apparent. So the content changes, the structures stay the same because the trickster, as young obser observed, is not on a side. He is the force that exposes wherever unconsciousness is hiding. And unconsciousness hides equally well on every side. That's why just pendulum swinging and jumping sides isn't going to save you. Like you can't run from doing the psychospiritual work and discernment. Most of the public figures rising and falling right now are caught in this archetypal field. So many of them are sincere, right? Like a lot of these people who are sharing information, whether it's like the UFO community, whether it's any type of spiritual teacher, whatever it is, whatever movement that they're following, whatever worldview that they believe in, many of them are genuine, you know, and they don't realize that they're being taken over kind of by this trickster force. It's like when we don't do our own work to work with this archetype, we end up becoming the trickster and we end up, you know, steering other people down the wrong path as well. So it's just something to be mindful of. Like even what I share, right? Like we should always be aware of everybody because we're all susceptible to be can getting pulled off center. That's why I never, you know, want to share that this is an absolute and this is the way with absolute certainty because none of us actually knows, right? Um and, you know, many of um, you know, these people who are are sharing about these movements or following these movements, they are unconsciously possessed by the very dynamics that they think they have transcended. They just can't see it. Their followers can't see it. It is only the trickster eventually who shows them. And by then, a great deal of damage has already been done. And it can feel like quite alarming, right? Like, and I've gone through this many times, right? There were people that I followed for years. I was like, oh, they're like bang on. Like it, yeah, it was um even a lot of the stuff that they were sharing and a lot of the stuff that they were um, you know, saying that would happen was coming true. But then all of a sudden things started getting distorted, right? Like they started becoming bigger. Um and um information that they were receiving may have been, you know, just distorted. They got hijacked, right? And then the information they were sharing just started feeling very, very much off. So it's being able to have the discernment just to notice that, right? And this is why we are really in a season of public collapses, of teachers being exposed, of movements rupturing, and of certainty, certainties dissolving. So the trickster is doing its work at scale because the inflation reached a scale that the psyche, individual and collective, can no longer sustain. So

Collapse, Switching Sides, Or Staying

SPEAKER_01 26:51

let's talk about how the trickster knocks us off the pedestal. So the trickster is bit rarely gentle. He uses paradox, he uses irony, he uses humiliation, he uses the very thing we were most certain about and turns it inside out. So the teacher that we trusted turns out to have been unconscious. The relationship we called destiny turns out to have been a projection. The framework that we organized our life around turns out to have had a fatal blind spot we could not see from inside it. The version of ourselves we performed turns out to have just been another costume. And it can feel cruel. It feels like betrayal. It can feel like God has abandoned us. And it often feels like regression, like we're moving backwards because the first awakening was so expansive and it was guided and full of synchronicity. And this new phase is dry and confusing and empty. The syncreticities still come, but we no longer know how to read them. The signs start to feel mixed, the voices contradict, the teachers disagree, the frameworks are no longer coherent. So the ego experiences this as catastrophe, but the psyche experiences it as medicine. When the trickster has done his work and we are sitting in the wreckage, there are two paths that are open in front of us. And they look similar from the outside, but they diverge sharply on the inside. So the first path is to switch sides. This is the most common response. The nervous system is in collapse, the identity has started to dissolve, the pedestal has cracked, and the ego is desperate for ground. And so the ego does the only thing it knows how to do. It finds new ground, new ideology, new certainty, new authority, new labels, new belonging. So this is when, you know, we see the new age person become a fundamentalist Christian. Um, and then this isn't a knock at all on um Christianity whatsoever, because this is like a huge one that I'm noticing right now. Huge pendulum swing is a lot of the people who um were more so in new age communities starting to swing over to um fundamentalist Christianity. And there's a lot of medicine in that as well. Like I grew up Christian, my family is Christian, um, I have a strong relationship with Jesus, but um, I don't personally put myself in any of these uh boxes. Um, it's also we see this showing up with conspiracy theorists becoming, you know, maybe a mainstream loyaltist all of a sudden, or a mainstream loyalist becoming a conspiracy theorist, or the guru follower becomes the cynic who distrusts all teachers, or the cynic who distrusted all teachers finds a new guru. Externally, the content has changed completely, but internally the structure is identical. So it's the same need for certainty, the same need to be on the correct side, the same need to know who is in and who is out, and the same need to be the one who sees. So the trickstress just simply follows. He has all the time in the world. He will appear in a new framework just as he appeared in the old, because the unconsciousness that produced that inflation has not yet been faced. And this is a great misunderstanding. Most people think that they have left an unhealthy system, but they've actually just reinstalled the same psychological architecture in new clothes. So the architecture is what the trickster is after, not the costume. And the second path is a harder one. It's the longer one. It's the one no one would choose if they understood in advance. It is to stay in the cave long enough that something genuinely new can emerge. So you go through the ego death, the humility, you face uncertainty, you get to a deep place of surrender and trust in the divine. And we don't resolve this by um collapsing into the attention, not to grab the first ideology that offers us some form of relief, not to flip to the opposite side, but to stay with this unbearable feeling of not knowing, to stay with the ambiguity, to stay with the paradox, to stay in the dark long enough that something other than reaction can be

Holding Paradox And Second Awakening

SPEAKER_01 31:06

born. This is what Jung would call holding the tension of opposites. Jung believed that the entire work of becoming a real human being depended on the capacity to hold inner contradictions without collapsing them prematurely. So he wrote that the repressed content must be made conscious so as to produce a tension of opposites, without which no forward movement is possible. The conscious mind is on top, the shadow underneath, and just as high always longs for low and hot for cold, so all consciousness, perhaps without being aware of it, seeks its unconscious opposite, lacking which is doomed to stagnation, congestion, and ossification. Life is born only of the spark of opposites. And our ego cannot bear opposites. It wants to choose light over dark, right over wrong, awake over asleep, real over fake, healing over wounding. The choice itself feels like progress, the choice feels like clarity, the choice feels like the path. But the deeper psyche knows something that the ego does not, that the third thing, the new thing, the thing that has not yet been born, cannot emerge from premature resolution. It can only emerge from sustained tension, from holding both without collapsing into either. And Jung had a name for what emerges from this holding. He called it the transcendent function. So he wrote that since life cannot tolerate a standstill, a damming up of vital energy results. And this would lead to an insupportable condition. Did not the tension of opposites produce a new uniting function that transcends them? So the transcendent function is not a technique. It is not something that you do. It is something that emerges on its own timing when consciousness has held the tension long enough that the psyche delivers something neither side could have produced alone. And in a in a letter, Young put it even more plainly: the transcendent function is not something one does oneself. It comes rather than experiencing the conflict of opposites. This is the deeper work the trickster is asking of us. So he is not asking us to choose the right side. He is asking us to develop the capacity to hold both sides until something true emerges that contains neither and includes both. He is asking us to tolerate the unbearable middle. He is asking us to stop reaching for the next certainty. And again, this isn't about, I've mentioned this in previous episodes. This isn't about being neutral about everything. That's not what I'm talking about, right? It's just when we're very rigid in our beliefs without even being able to hold the perspective of another side. So the opposites he confronts us with are real. The teacher was wise and the teacher was harmful. The framework contained truth and the framework contained distortion. The connection was sacred and the connection was a projection. The awakening was real and the awakened identity was a costume. The community held us and the community used us. The certainty was a gift and the certainty was a prison. So it's being able to hold both, both, both, both. And to hold this is to be deflated. And there's no way around deflation. The trickster always brings deflation because the inflation is what brought him in the first place. So the collapse of the inflated identity is not a side effect of his work. It is the work. But on the other side of sustained deflation, something else becomes possible, something the inflated identity could never reach. So discernment is not paranoia, faith that is not certainty, connection that is not a meshment, spirituality that is not performance, knowing that includes not knowing, and a radiance that does not need to be defended. Trickster archetype often appears where there is inflation, rigidity, and consciousness, where we have been naive or over-identifying with an identity. The trickster's work is disruptive, but the deeper purpose is usually transformation through disillusionment, humility, discernment, and integration. And the work it asks of us is often to develop discernment rather than blind belief, to hold tension and ambiguity instead of collapsing into certainty, to confront projection and shadow, to stop outsourcing authority, to become psychologically and spiritually grounded, to integrate opposites rather than choosing simplistic sides, to mature spiritually instead of chasing identity. This is the second awakening. So the first awakening frees you from the world conditioning. The second awakening frees you from your own. So the first is led by the ego. The ego is the one who sees through. The ego is the one who is finally awake. The ego is the one who has found the truth. The second is led by what Young would call the capital S, the self, the deeper organizing intelligence of the psyche that is not the ego and is not under ego's control. The self does not negotiate. The self dismantles whatever has become rigid, including the awakened identity itself. The second awakening often arrives as something that looks like depression from the outside, exhaustion, waves of emotion with no narrative attached, loneliness, even when you're surrounded by people, loss of attraction to the spiritual content that used to feed you, withdrawal from communities that used to feel like home. So it is not depression in the clinical sense, though it can require real support, real grounding, real care. It is something that the psyche is doing on its own timeline. So it's a dismantling, a burial, a composting of the identity that can no longer hold. The first awakening produced an identity that others could relate to and celebrate. The second awakening produces something less legible. People who knew you in the first phase will often interpret the second as regression, as confusion, as loss of faith, as you somehow going backwards because you were questioning things that you were once certain about. You were softer in places you used to be hard and rigid, and you are no longer easy to categorize. You stop sorting people into awake and asleep. You stop sorting reality into healthy and unhealthy. You start to see complexity where you used to see clarity. You start to notice your own projections. You start to feel the limits of the frameworks that used to feel so complete. You start to develop a tolerance for paradox that simply did not exist in the first place. And you become harder to provoke, harder to recruit, harder to convince, harder to seduce with the next level of certainty because something in you has finally learned the difference between conviction and consciousness. And the grief of this passage is real because you are walking away from something that meant something. The first identity was not nothing, it was a real station on this path. The death of a good identity can't be more painful than a death of a bad one because there is no obvious motive to release it. With a bad identity, you knew you had to let it go, right? So if you're letting go like toxic relationships, um, a job that just completely depleted you, like where you weren't happy, um, things like that, right? But this one is very different because it's letting go of like a community that actually felt home to you. Um, where you went through this like original awakening, right? Starting to let go of like a lot of these gurus that you trusted when you were going through uh your initial awakening. You only know that it feels like dying and that nothing you can do can hold it together, and that the more you try to hold it together, the more it slips through your hands. And surrender in this passage is not passive. It is the active, terrifying choice to let the process move through you, to trust that the intelligence organizing this dismantling knows something your ego does not. And what emerges on the other side is more honest, more sustainable, less performative, less brittle, and less in need of the world to conform to it. You know, you don't need to agree with um everybody or no one has to agree with the way that you see everything, right? So, how do we work with this

Practical Ways To Work With It

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archetype? How do we stop being completely, you know, taken down by the trickster and actually start to receive the medicine that he is offering? So a few things matter. The first is to stop the moralizing. The trickster is not evil. He is not on the side of darkness. Often when we're going through it, it could feel like, oh, this is happening to me, or like we feel like a victim, right? Like we really need to let go of that victim consciousness and see ourselves as sovereign beings and that there are blind spots in our psyche that we are being shown. He is not a demon trying to take you out. He is a psyche self-correcting mechanism. And he shows up where consciousness has been one-sided. So the more we frame the trickster as enemy, the less we can learn from him. And then we just have to keep facing him again and again. So, as Lewis Hyde put it, those who panic and bind the trickster choose a ladder path. So it would be better to learn to play with him, better, especially to develop skills that allow some commerce with accident and some acceptance of the changes that contingency will always engender. So the second is to recognize him when he arrives. So the signs are pretty consistent. So it's a teacher or a framework that you put on a pedestal and that begins to crack. A connection that you called destiny begins to behave in ways that violate your sense of who you who you thought that they were. A certainty you organized your life around begins to feel less stable. Synchronicities start contradicting each other. The signs no longer agree. The voices say different things, and you feel cut off from a guidance that used to feel very obvious. So this is not regression. This is not the loss of your spiritual connection. This is the trickster doing his work. Recognize him, greet him, do not panic, do not rush to resolve what he has destabilized. And the third is to resist the temptation to switch sides. The ego will want a new framework immediately. So watch for this. Notice the pull toward the opposite. Notice the pull toward the next certainty. The trickster will follow you into that new framework. He always does. The only way to actually evolve is to stay in the not knowing long enough that something real can emerge. And the fourth is to do the deeper cycle of inner work. This is the work that the first awakening could not reach. So the deeper psycho-spiritual work, shadow work, projection analysis, attachment work, nervous system work, ancestral work, the work of meeting the unconscious material that produced the inflation in the first place, the work of finding the wound underneath the spiritual identity, the work of letting the wound be felt. This is where embodiment becomes everything because the trickster cannot be defeated mentally. The mind that produced the inflation cannot produce its own deflation. Only the body can hold the descent. Only the nervous system can metabolize what the identity refused to feel. The somatic work is not optional in this passage. It is the foundation. The fifth is to let yourself be deflated, not collapsed, deflated. There is a difference. Collapse is when the structure caves and there is nothing underneath. Deflation is when the inflation releases and what is underneath gets to be seen. So deflation is what makes the second awakening actually possible. And the ego mourns the throne, but the self, the big S, welcomes the ground. And the sixth is to let in the laughter. This is the sacred fool's medicine. So the capacity is not to take the spiritual identity so seriously. Laugh at the version of yourself that was so certain. The seriousness was part of that prison, right? So laughter helps loosen the grip. And the seventh is to trust the timing. The cave has its own clock. The descent cannot be hurried. Anyone who tells you to bypass it, transcend it, vibe higher than it, manifest your way out of it has not been through it themselves. The only way out is through. The only way through is slowly. And just um a little word about why this is happening at this scale. Because we are in a season where the trickster is rampant and the conditions are perfect for him. Information overload, algorithmic content that rewards certainty and emotional intensity, traditional structures of meaning collapsing without anything stable yet to replace them, identity frameworks dissolving on a weekly cycle, people desperate for something to organize or disorientation around, movements promising fast certainty or salvation without the slow work. So every condition that produces inflation is operating at maximum capacity. So every condition that summons the trickster is also operating at maximum capacity. The collapses we are watching of teachers, of movements, of relationships, Of public figures, of frameworks are not anomalies. They are the predictable harvest. This is why the inner work cannot be bypassed anymore. The old escape routes are closing. The frameworks that used to allow people to stay unconscious are dissolving faster than new ones can be built. And the trickster is making sure of it. What is being asked of us individually and collectively is the development of a kind of consciousness that has not been required at scale before. So remember, the trickster is not on your side. He is not on the other side. He is the one who is here again and again to break the throne and call you back as something more human, more honest, more discerning, more real, and more humble if you let him.

Final Takeaways And Farewell

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Great. Well, hope that you found that episode helpful and maybe you're able to kind of see where the trickster has been showing up in your own life. And yeah, use these, use these tools to work with it, right? Rather than resist it and fight it. See it as medicine. Even though it can feel cruel and it could feel like it could feel painful, we all have to go through it. We all meet the trickster archetype in our lives. And we'll continue to meet him on this path. And on this awakening path, he becomes much more sneaky as our ego becomes much more sneaky. So thank you so much for tuning in and see you in the next episode. Love you, Soul Fam.