HLCU The Hidden Curriculum Podcast

Hey y’all! I stopped by to discuss what had me in awe last night. I found myself perusing the internet streets, seeking a couple of replacement wall clocks for the cave. Then boom, I came across something online that genuinely made me stop and say, “Well now…” and “I know you f&cking lying…”

The clocks looked the same as before, but what was the difference? There were more non-ticking options than ticking.

Mind blown. Flabbergasted. Confuckledly confused!

I scrolled, and scrolled, and scrolled in search of 1) a clock that highlights my décor and 2) a clock that ticks (which became the priority after finding that more people are choosing non-ticking clocks for their homes and personal spaces)

Baby, that would never work over here. I’m trying to figure it out.

Digital clocks have been a thing since circa 1883. So, I don’t want to hear that I need to catch up with the times. Hear me out…

As a spiritual person, I need the acoustic sound of a ticking clock. I need running water as a moon child living in this earth plane wilderness. I need bells, chimes, rhythmic movement, and sound around me because those things serve as grounding forces on my life path.

They help settle the mind, anchor the spirit, and bring me back into the present moment when things go other ways and whatnot.

To me, a ticking clock is more than background noise.

It carries rhythm and the essence of the present moment. It marks movement and travel. It reminds me that time is passing, yes, but also that I am here to meet it consciously.

There is also something about the rhythm in itself.

The ticking of a clock reminds me of the steady pulse of a drum during ceremony or ritual. Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock. A consistent rhythm gives the mind something to follow and the body something to settle into.

Drumming has long been used in spiritual traditions to mark movement, call attention, create rhythm, and help shift people into a more focused state of awareness. Many use the drums for trance work or communicating with spirits.

A tickety-ticking clock can create a much quieter version of that same experience in the home.

It becomes a steady pulse in the background, and I rarely hear it consistently.

Almost like the room has a heartbeat of its own, dah’ling.

And when you add running water, bells, or chimes, now you have rhythm, movement, and sound all working together. One anchors. One flows. One interrupts stagnation.

Baby, some of us need a little noise in the temple.

Have you ever prayed and noticed your analog clock skipped a few hours forward?

Or did you ever find that wearing a ticking watch benefited you when astral traveling?

Here is an article about discussing the psychology of it all.

Let’s move forward…

Then there is water, aqua, acqua, eau, mvura!

Flowing water clears, soothes, and moves energy, friend. Bells and chimes break stagnation and signal transition amongst other things. These sounds have always carried spiritual meaning across traditions, and I do not take that lightly.

Flowing water can also become a sensory cue for the body and mind to soften and move. We are, after all, made largely of water, and there is something about hearing a steady stream that reminds the nervous system not to grip so tightly. You may have heard me say, clear your water, baby. This is what I mean.

Mentally, that continuous flowing water sound can make it easier to release scattered thoughts and settle into a more fluid rhythm of attention. Spiritually, I see it as a reminder to keep the inner waters moving too. Emotions, ideas, intuition, and energy are meant to circulate, not stagnate.

That is why running water can make a flow-like state easier to enter and maintain in this thy world. The environment is already modeling movement for you.

Moving forward…

Let’s hop back into the clock topic, which is what brought us here today.

I understand (per the reviews for said clocks that do not tick) that people don’t want to hear the sound of the clock because it is a distraction. They consider it noise pollution. Here’s an article I found about it.

Now then…

And while we are talking about clocks, children still need to know how to read one. I don’t think teaching a child to read a wall clock is just about knowing the time, dah’ling. You’re teaching number relationships, fractions, spatial awareness, cycles, patience, and how time passes. A digital clock gives you a number, and an analog clock gives you a relationship to time.

For those of us who understand life through cycles, that matters. The heavens move in cycles, seasons move in cycles, and our bodies move in cycles. Even the zodiac is a celestial clock, divided into twelve signs that mark movement, timing, seasons, and shifts in energy throughout the year.

Look at an analog clock face and then look at the zodiac wheel. You will find both teach us to understand position within a cycle. There is a beginning, progression, culmination, and return. The hands keep moving, just as the planets do, Deborah McNew.

So when a child learns to read a clock, they are learning more than numbers and minutes, Harold Tibet. They are beginning to understand rhythm, sequence, timing, and their relationship to cycles. It is very important.

A digital clock tells you the time and keeps you in line. Cool, it has its place in the human race.

A clock face shows you where you are in the cycle.

Like cursive and other foundational teachings that seem to be fading out, these skills connect younger generations to history, pattern, rhythm, memory, and how people before us understood the world.

Some things are memory, instruction, and not up for debate.

Some things are considered medicine or therapy.

And some things, friend, might be helping keep you grounded without you even realizing it. Just saying.

In this mini-episode, I explore ticking clocks becoming obsolete, spiritual grounding, generational knowledge, and the quiet relationship between sound and time for spiritual people.

Do you prefer a ticking clock or complete silence in your space? Do you use running water, bells, chimes, or other sounds to help keep you grounded?

And do you think children should still be taught how to read an analog clock?

Leave your thoughts, experiences, or suggestions in the comments. I’m curious to see how many of us still keep these old rhythms alive. #qtna

What happens after the breakthrough?

After recognizing the pattern, confronting the stronghold, doing the inner work, and changing how you respond, there comes a point when healing and self-mastery must become your new normal.

In the final week of Phase III, Lulu explores Integration and Permanent Positioning, the stage where hypervigilance gives way to clarity. Instead of constantly fearing the return of an old stronghold, addiction, affliction, behavioral pattern, or destructive habit, you learn to recognize a breach without allowing it to pull you out of position.

Through the R.D.P. framework of Recognize, Defeat, Prevent, this episode examines spiritual self-mastery, emotional regulation, self-awareness, inner alignment, and the daily practices that help maintain lasting personal transformation.

Lulu also explores the four gates of mind, body, spirit, and emotions, along with the observer position, spiritual discernment, and the difference between healthy awareness and living in a constant state of hypervigilance.

With reflections inspired by the War Scroll, tarot correspondences including The Star, The Sun, and Strength, and practical journal prompts, this episode asks an important question:

Now that you’ve made it to the other side, how will you live differently?

For listeners ready to turn awareness into a structured inner practice, the 7-Day Inner Formation Audio + eBook offers seven days of guided work centered on stillness, order, discernment, responsibility, sovereign decisions, composure, and embodied authority.

Sidebar: The name of the movie was Goodfellas with Ray Liotta.

Greetings, Ladies and Gentle Conduits!

Have the things you’ve been reading, studying, or contemplating lately started showing up in your reality? Pay attention. Be mindful of what you are planting because, in more ways than one, you reap what you sow.

In Episode 16, you explore Ancestral Alchemy and the life challenge of converting your personal mastery into ancestral legacy.

You did not create everything you inherited. Patterns, afflictions, attachments, beliefs, and strongholds may have been moving through the bloodline long before you arrived. But inheritance does not require continuation.

Through R.D.P., you learn to:

Recognize what you inherited and its generational implications.

Defeat the pattern by embodying a different way of living.

Prevent its continuation by establishing, documenting, and teaching a new template.

You stood on the shoulders of those who came before you. Now your work can become shoulders for someone coming after you.

You inherited the pattern, but you get to decide what happens next.

What will you hand forward?

🗝️ Episode 15 | Season 1

Phase III: Extracting the MessageWhat Has Life Taught You?

In this episode, Lulu explores the next stage of self-mastery: learning how to extract the message from lived experience.

Life teaches through relationships, circumstances, mistakes, disappointments, patterns, strongholds, and moments that force a person to see themselves differently. Some lessons come through things that happened to a person. Others come through what a person repeatedly participated in, tolerated, entertained, or allowed to continue.

The focus of this phase is not simply remembering what happened. It is examining the information contained within the experience.

🗝️ The stronghold can become the curriculum.

A repeated pattern can reveal where development is needed. A difficult relationship can expose boundaries that were missing. A vice can reveal what has been used for escape, comfort, or control. An inherited pattern can reveal what has been carried forward without being questioned. Even experiences in which a person became a victim can contain information about what needs to be understood, strengthened, confronted, or changed.

This is where experience becomes wisdom.

Phase III asks listeners to stop leaving the lesson inside the experience. Extract the message. Study the pattern. Gather the data. Then use what has been learned to make different choices moving forward.

The experience happened. The message is what you do with it.

At some point in your evolution, you have to stop fighting everything you recognize.

You can spend years identifying patterns, defending yourself, correcting people, explaining your position, and preparing for the next attack. Eventually, you realize that constantly responding to the stronghold keeps you in relationship with the very thing you are trying to overcome.

This is where the position changes, friend.

In this episode, we move from victim and warrior into the observer and judge. The Melchizedek archetype gives us a powerful image of someone who can stand above the conflict, witness what is happening on both sides, and judge without becoming consumed by either.

That is the assignment.

You are not being asked to become passive. You are being asked to become precise.

When you observe without immediately engaging, you begin seeing the stronghold's mechanics instead of only experiencing its effects. You start noticing what consistently pulls you into confusion, what causes you to abandon your own judgment, what environments disturb your center, and what behaviors keep recreating the same outcomes.

That awareness gives you a different kind of authority.

You no longer have to prove that something is happening before you decide how you will participate in it. You can witness the pattern, study your response, and determine whether it deserves access to you.

This is where the four realms become important. Your mind, emotions, body, and spirit all give you information, but self-mastery requires you to learn how to govern your response across each one. When you strengthen the areas that once made you vulnerable, the stronghold loses its ability to reach you in the same way.

And this sets up what comes next, dah'ling.

When a pattern keeps applying the same pressure, but you stop responding according to its programming, eventually the energy has nowhere to go.

It begins to bounce back, friend.

The Frequency Reflection: What Bounces Back explores what happens when your positioning becomes so firm that the mechanisms once used against you begin exposing themselves through their own repetition.

The question is no longer: How do I defeat the stronghold?

The question becomes: What happens when I stop giving it the response it was built to receive?

That is where the game changes.

For Such a Time as This: Remember Who You Are

Shout out to your resilience. Your patience. Your calm within the storm. Your tenacity, Cassidy.

This impromptu episode is for the person who has survived enough to know their strength but is entering a season that requires something beyond survival.

The conversation explores what happens when resilience matures into self-mastery.

Inside this episode:

• Why being a spiritual warrior is about more than knowing how to fight• The relationship between personal power, restraint, and spiritual responsibility• Why everything you survive does not deserve authority over who you become• Moving from survival mode into self-governance• Recognizing the difference between strength and constant struggle• Breaking inherited and destructive behavioral patterns• Emotional resilience and maintaining peace after difficult seasons• Why discipline matters when there is no longer an emergency• Stewarding power without using it to harm others• Recognize, Defeat, Prevent as a framework for interrupting recurring patterns• Remembering who you are, whose you are, and why you are• Turning lived experience into wisdom, leadership, and legacy• Learning to build after spending years learning how to survive

There comes a point when the question is no longer, “Can I survive this?”

You already answered that.

The question becomes, “Can I govern what comes next?”

This is the work of self-mastery.

HLCU: The Hidden Curriculum Podcast explores self-mastery, emotional resilience, spiritual development, personal responsibility, leadership, identity, behavioral patterns, and the inner formation required to govern oneself before attempting to lead others.

Recognize. Defeat. Prevent.

You exist for such a time as this.

Stay dangerous.

Love, light, and fight.

Sometimes the pressure increases right when you think the battle should be ending.

Lulu explores what she calls the Final Push, the stage where an old stronghold may appear more intense because its familiar access to your attention, choices, and participation is changing.

The episode goes deeper into spiritual consent and the responsibility that comes with recognition. Lulu examines the esoteric principle of disclosure and why awareness can require a deliberate response through repentance, renunciation, and denunciation. She also connects this teaching to the R.D.P. System and the work of an Ambassador of the Bloodline.

This conversation is ultimately about self-mastery. The goal is not to become consumed by opposition. The goal is to recognize what is happening, reclaim your position, and build the internal foundation required to lead without repeating the patterns you inherited.

When the pressure rises, ask yourself what is actually being tested. Your fear, your boundaries, your discernment, or your commitment to the assignment?

The final push may be the moment you discover that you no longer respond the way you once did.

A stronghold does not always look like an enemy, dah'ling. It can appear as a pattern, relationship, fear, family cycle, or area of life that keeps demanding your attention.

This episode explores Strategic Non-Resistance through the Hermit, the High Priestess, and Justice. The lesson is simple: stop allowing external pressure to determine your internal position.

The War Scroll presents the image of polished shields. Metaphysically, the shield becomes a mirror. What comes toward you does not have to become yours.

The real question is not whether the battle is happening.

The question is whether you can remain standing on your square while it happens.

Listen closely. Your position may be more powerful than your reaction.

The Life Challenge

The challenge for this episode is changing the frequency of your environment and breaking the feedback loop.

A feedback loop develops when your response produces another response and that response produces another reaction. The cycle continues because each side keeps supplying energy to the next stage.

The cycle can happen in relationships, families, workplaces, communities, business, and your own thinking.

You can interrupt it.

Most people never stop to study their hands beyond what they do each day. Yet across history, the hands have symbolized responsibility, authority, inheritance, and creation. What if they also offered an opportunity to reflect on your own growth?

In today's episode, we explore an esoteric framework that views the left hand as a reflection of what has been inherited and the right hand as a representation of what is being developed through conscious action. Along the way, we connect this tradition with modern neuroscience by examining how the brain's hemispheres coordinate movement and why transformation is more than a mental exercise. It is something that becomes embodied through repetition, discipline, and intention.

This conversation also revisits the principles from my continuing education course, Journaling: Externalizing the Internalized Imbalances, and explains why documenting your private work is one of the most powerful ways to recognize authentic growth.

Whether you approach this episode from a scientific perspective, an esoteric perspective, or somewhere in between, the invitation is the same. Slow down. Observe your life with greater intention. Pay attention to what you are building instead of chasing what you hope will happen.

In this episode you'll learn

The symbolic difference between the left and right hand

How neuroscience explains contralateral brain function

Why many esoteric traditions view the active hand as a reflection of personal development

The importance of private work before public recognition

How journaling creates a record of your personal transformation

Practical questions to help you examine your current season of growth

If this episode challenged your thinking, follow the podcast, leave a review, and share it with someone who is committed to intentional growth.