Shift Your Spirits

Dena DeCastro interprets the birth chart of the United States of America. We discuss how current and near future transits are manifesting in our country at this time.

The National Chart of the United States interpretation

Actual Natal Chart of the USA

denadecastro.com

DeCastro Astrology on Facebook

Get an intuitive reading with Slade

Automatic Intuition

Edit your pledge on Patreon

I know the title may be throwing you. It’ll make sense once you hear this story. This is actually an episode about stranger angels and manifesting, health scares and synchronicity ...

Get an intuitive reading with Slade

Automatic Intuition

Edit your pledge on Patreon

Synchronicity really never ceases to amaze me.

About a year ago, a year and a half ago, I listened to a really cool podcast about synchronicity on the Future Thinker’s podcast I believe it's called. I’m going to find the link for the show notes so you can go check that out. Because I’ve actually never heard a better, more practical, scientific explanation for the phenomenon of synchronicity, like what's actually happening in our brains, why we experience it the way that we do.

But even though I was comforted by the explanation of the scientist who had researched this and who had written a book and was being interviewed on the show, I still receive and process synchronicity through my Magical world view. It's really hard for me to not interpret synchronicity as some kind of message or sign, some way in which the Universe communicates with me or the Divine sort of leaves me these scavenger hunt clues.

I remember one time having a conversation with one of my really super non-New Age super Muggle friends, and we were talking about synchronicity and she commented on the fact that synchronicity is actually the one thing, the one kind of paranormal phenomenon that absolutely everyone experiences regardless of their believe system.

Ever since she said that, I've often wondered what agnostics and atheists have to say about synchronicity. I want to stop people on the street and interview them, but if you know someone, I'd love to have a conversation with them about it. Maybe we can get them on the show.

Alright so I'm going somewhere with the synchronicity thing, I promise.

I have recently had an injured foot, just to put it really simply. For six weeks, I was having pain in my foot. It started out, if you follow me online, if you are friends with me on Facebook, you will notice that about a month ago, I changed my Facebook profile. It's this pretty outdoor sunny leaves and light kind of background. It was shot in a park.

That actual day was the first day this season that I wore my chacos, which are the really heavy strappy sandals that a lot of people wear. It was the first kind of warmish day where I thought, you know what? I'm going to be walking around outside. My feet aren't going to be in the pictures. I'm just going to wear my chacos.

The strap cut into the tendon along the top of my foot, that runs to your big toe. I sort of stripped it out, felt like I bruised the tendon walking around taking pictures, and the pain just never went away.

So then I'm like, in my high intensity interval training class, pulling the medical people that I know in the class, we have a couple doctors, a few nurse practitioners, some nurses, and I keep asking them questions about it, showing them my foot. I was like, is it possible to just bruise this tendon where it just hurts for a long time? They were kind of like, really dude? We're going to do this middle of class?

Anyway, so it went on and on though, to the point where, about a month in, I was in the middle of class and we were doing some warm ups. We were skipping rope and you're really jumping up and down on your toes when you're skipping rope. I thought, you know what? I can't do this today. I've got to leave. It's really hurting that bad.

So it turns out that my trainer, the person who leads all these classes, my fitness instructor, had a stress fracture in her left foot about two years ago. Same thing. She had to wear this boot for 10 weeks and it just so happens that I am friends with her partner. We went to high school together so sometimes I'll do things with them socially outside the context of the fitness classes.

We went to see Rocket Man, the Elton John movie together. We were having cocktails afterwards. She was like, where have you been? I told her what was happening with my foot and she said, you know, I was really in denial about the fact that I actually had a stress fracture and I did not want it to be that. But you need to go and get it checked out because something's obviously wrong. Six weeks is way too long for something to just not get better. At all.

So she referred me to the person she'd seen and she talked me into going to see an orthopedist foot and ankle person. I was like, okay. I can't wander around possibly hurting myself worse. I need to go and just bite the bullet, deal with this. I'm getting ready to go on this trip to Dallas but maybe I can, like, wear the boot when I get back from my trip. It's been six weeks. What's seven?

So I go in there really expecting to have this stress fracture diagnosed, have to wear this boot on my foot for 10 weeks. I mean, that's just my mindset. I was prepared for that. So they did x-rays. Of course, a stress fracture's so small it actually isn't visible in an x-ray, so to diagnose the stress fracture, they use a tuning fork, which is really kind of amazing.

They hit the tuning fork on the desk, and then they hold the end of it up to all the different bones in your feet. You feel a vibration. It's not uncomfortable or anything like that, but if the bone is broken, basically you will scream and then that will be the diagnosis that yes, that one is broken.

So she did the tuning fork. She tested every spot on my foot you can imagine and nothing really set it off. So she talked to me a little bit more, had me describe what I was experiencing, where I was experiencing it when I do different types of motion and all this kind of stuff. She was like, okay, I know what's going on.

So then she whips out the x-rays and she shows me the spaces in between the joints on all my toes - all of my smaller toes versus the space in the joints of my big toe. She said, I was expecting you to complain about both your feet hurting. And I said, that's weird because I said to my mom, the weirdest thing is happening. I'm starting to experience a phantom pain in my right foot that perfectly mirrors the one in my left. And my mom said, maybe you're compensating for the pain in your left foot and you're putting more stress in your right foot. So not you're getting a weird thing in the right foot.

Turns out, I have the same condition in both of my big toes. I have arthritis. And if I hurt myself these days, like I did with the tendon, arthritis will set in to that spot and then it becomes inflamed and then it's like three months of pain, or even ongoing pain. So it's like those spots never really fully heal. They become something else. This has been happening on other parts of my body.

So, I will stew on things. I will over analyse. I will look for meaning where there may only be randomness. Because I’ve lived through some major health scares like having a stroke 16 years ago and anal cancer 10 years ago, I honestly can be a bit of a hypochondriac. And after having my foot diagnosis saying, you know what? You really just have arthritis... I almost felt embarrassed by how much I thought something horrible was going on.

Not that that's not bad and it might not be better over time, but it wasn't what I thought it was. I blew it up into this whole other thing in my head and I took the synchronicity of my trainer having the same spot in the same foot, having the same issue as just like a sign. Oh, well I have the same problem automatically. It's synchronicity.

Dr Julia, who’s an administrator in our Facebook community and she's a friend of mine. She's a cancer survivor herself which she speaks about openly — Julia, do we like that term "cancer survivor"? Have we talked about this? I’m using it because it’s common shorthand and people know what you mean when you say that, but I’m not sure that I like that term.

Anyway, if you've had cancer, you've come out the other side of it and you're still here, I guess you're a cancer survivor.

Anyway, we were talking about how once you have the big c, every little thing that happens, even if you're the most laid back zen person in the whole world, every little thing has this tiny whisper in the back of your mind, “Oh my god it’s back." Every freckle a skin cancer. Every stomach ache is some kind of horrible tumour in your gut.

And so I kind of now, because I KNOW that that phenomenon is taking place, and that I am a little bit of a hypocondriac because of it, I then try to over correct for that tendency by trying to be overly calm and rational and let's not go there.

So if I know something's wrong with me and I have a diagnosis for sure, like if you tell me, oh yeah, you need surgery, I'm like, let's do it tomorrow. I don't want to wait because I know that the only way out is through. So let's just get on with it.

But I do have this tendency to some wait. Maybe two weeks in, I have the thought, I probably need to get my foot x-rayed. But I thought, no, you're a hypochondriac. You're turning this into something it's not. It'll probably be fine. Let's wait and see.

So I do that a lot. And it's not about a fear. It's not a fear of having something wrong. It's a fear of looking like a dumbass because I've gone to the doctor yet again thinking that I need to have my foot amputated and really, it's like, yeah dude, you have a little bit of arthritis but it's not the end of the world.

So I'm actually kind of fearful of looking stupid because of my anxiety around health issues. Okay. That's another episode.

I just have to say this though:

And I do want to say, something that I want to get off my chest is... Don't say that to someone in the middle of chemo even if you believe it with all your heart that they've manifested their cancer. Please. For the love of God, do not say that to someone who has just been hit with a serious health diagnosis.

I’ve had plenty of people in the new age community do that. To me. Recently. And I've seen it done to others in front of me. And it really... Whether you believe that's true, whether or not it is true, you need to check why it is that you would communicate that to someone at that moment in that vulnerable space.

Like, what is it about you that needs to express that and be heard saying it? I guarantee you it's not helpful to the person who is in the midst of chemotherapy and radiation. That's not helpful for them to hear that. So just don't say it.

And check yourself about why you might want to say that. Say it to yourself.

Shit happens to people.

Some things are genetic.

Some things are shitty luck, and I just don’t go through life believing that you’re punished for having negative thoughts.

That’s some Old Testament shit in my opinion. That’s New Age echoes of religious fundamentalism.

No thank you. No! Not doing that.

But I digress with that soapbox.

Being intuitive isn’t as helpful as we’d like it to be when it's you. I even have some instances of some really cool medical intuition. I've had instances of medical intuition consistently around drug interactions and dosages. That seems to be the way in which my medical intuition will come through in a reading or just in interacting with someone.

Sometimes I get information about medications that people are on. It's not something I offer as a service, because it's not something that shows up 100% of the time when I do readings for people. But I'm just saying, like, I can have medical insights for other people, for clients. But when it's MY stuff, it's just... no... It's not helpful. It doesn't work like that. We wish it would.

Everybody spins out over their own personal life threatening shit.

Other intuitives can help you. By all means, if you want to get a reading with someone who might have some insight or thought for you, that can be very constructive. But you need messages from outside the vacuum of your own mind. Especially when it comes to something that you might have a tendency to overanalyze or stew over or be anxious over or be a hypochondriac over.

That stuff needs to be tested and mirrored outside yourself. And that experience happens with other people. So you need some partners. You need some participants, whether it's your mama, your best girl friend, your favourite tarot reader... Whatever.

One of the most powerful ways, the most real ways, that I believe with all my heart that your guides do come through for you, that your prayers do get answered is by putting real people in your paths in the real world who have the training, the knowledge, the wisdom, the tools and the medicine to make a difference.

Signs and patterns are tricky things. My trainer had a stress fracture same foot. She encouraged me. Because of that, to assume that that was what was going on with me. I overly identified with her illness. And then when I got the referral, and it was to the same PA she saw which, by the way, she recommended I go to someone but when I actually, you know the way it works, your doctor often says, okay we're going to get you a referral, and then that office will call you and someone who works the front desk will make an appointment for sometimes a whole group of doctors and physician assistants.

It just turned out that I randomly got assigned was the person that my trainer went to as well. And so, again, tha

Jeremy Elliott is a Reiki Practitioner and spiritual healer who works in the Chattanooga area; his practice is called Positive Resonance. He’s also a self-described “spiritual nerd” who writes about a wide range of psycho-spiritual topics that explore how to live the life you have always dreamed of.

I invited Jeremy on the show to share some of his knowledge about the topic of Ascension.

Get an intuitive reading with Slade

Automatic Intuition

Edit your pledge on Patreon

Okay, so ascension, there's essentially two things. There's the process and the event. Ascension is basically the process of reconnecting with God. A reason that it's called "ascension" is because here in the physical world, we're at low vibration, low frequency. So during the process of self-purification, which is another term for healing, we are raising our vibrations and eventually we will make it up to the point where we do reconnect with God or with everything. With Oneness.

Slade:

How did you become interested in this topic in particular?

Jeremy:

Actually, this topic kind of found me as a part of my path. For a lot of my life, it was not on really a spiritual path. I was working on websites in a corporate office. And then at some point I realized that I could definitely produce more meaning for the world. I had a more beneficial purpose for the world in general. And in that time, going through this process of self-discovery, the ascension topic really hit me in a big way.

There's a lot of background, but I'd really like to get into more about the ascension in particular.

Slade:

Yeah, go ahead! And talk about what that process is for you. When you discovered it, it sounds like there was a process there that you latched onto and were interested in going through as part of a personal journey. Tell me about what that was.

Jeremy:

So just to give a little of the background, in my 20s, it was a point in my life where I didn't care about spirituality. I wasn't interested. It didn't matter, didn't make a difference to me. Then a close relative in the family died at a relatively young age, in their early 20s, and somehow that just set off, I don't know, it was a trigger. Something clicked and all of a sudden, I just started getting into everything.

I didn't even know about meditation. I found this word in a book. I looked it up. I was looking up 'spiritism' which is a fascinating aspect of emerging Christianity and psychic abilities, life between lives, all this kind of thing. And for meditation, I got into Buddhism and that's where things started becoming a little bit problematic in life was how to deal with spirituality in life.

At first there were questions like, how do I... because life was becoming in many ways, it was starting to become meaningless and kind of painful on one hand. I was starting to notice that things weren't clicking. I wasn't happy. I'd read about enlightenment and... Oh. That's what I want. That's going to solve everything.

That was really the start of the whole process.

Now, years later, I can say that's not the way you go about it. Actually, it's a lot different process because the journey... and it really helped me understand that what I was doing as I was looking at my life thinking, okay, I've got problems, and I want a solution to them. I want to get out of this pain. I want to be happy.

And so I said, if I choose enlightenment, this is what's going to work for me. And so I go sit down on my meditation cushion for weeks and months and years. Nothing happened. At the end of it, it's almost like, you know what? This isn't working and I've done this for so long. What's going on?

There was some resentment because when you realize this, it's almost like I made some kind of bargain with God. It was like, if I be a good spiritual person for so long, then everything's going to work out. I'm going to get my goody bag at the end. And that's not the way it works at all.

So at this point, there's almost this idea of, maybe I don't really want it after all. Screw that.

What that was, was actually just a classic case of what's called spiritual bypass. What happens is, what people will think, okay, I've got these problems. But now that I'm working on enlightenment, all the life issues, that's for little people. That's not for me because I'm too spiritual for those kind of concerns. It's a common trap to fall into.

What actually happens is, the pain in our life, what we get in life is exactly what we need for ascension and for self-purification. That pain that we're trying to avoid by seeking ascension or seeking enlightenment, those are the signs that are signaling exactly what we can find inside of ourselves that we need to work on.

So it's really kind of the opposite. We always tend to do things the opposite way than what we really need to do. So for instance, any time that you in life find something that you're not happy with, that is a signal that there is something inside of you that needs to be healed. So in healing that, whatever that is inside of you, that's the process of self-improvement. That's the spiritual path. That's what leads you to ascension.

Slade:

Mmm... let me stop you there and say that, when you said that, the first thing that I thought is, most people respond to that with thinking they need to change their circumstances or the situation that's causing them problems, right?

Jeremy:

Right. That's very common that people aren't happy. They think, I just need this. I just need that. Just to make it a short response. Anything that's temporary is not going to get happiness. Nothing external, in other words, can give you happiness. It has to be something internal. That internal is finding your true self and your true worth.

This process of self-purification is actually uncovering... what has happened in life is we've all been wounded. We have these emotional reactions. People hurt us and that pain, instead of allowing ourselves to feel it, we repress it. We stuff it down inside.

When that happens, those emotions actually prevent us from feeling our true self and our true worth. So the process of self-purification, the ascension process, is a journey of actually healing, is bringing those up, allowing ourselves to feel the pain in order to release it.

One of the things that I like to point out to people is that... negative emotions are very tricky to deal with. Nobody likes to feel them or to work with them. But it's important to understand in the idealistic world that we're living in, the extent that we allow ourselves to feel negative emotions, that is the same capacity to which we will be able to feel positive emotions. If we don't allow ourselves to feel negative emotions, we cannot feel happiness. We cannot feel joy.

So it's not avoiding the negative emotions or avoiding the negative situations, or trying to find things, bringing things into our lives that'll make us happy. It's actually working through the things that are difficult for us and are causing us pain. By working through those, we will get to happiness or the joy that we're seeking.

Slade:

So how do you work through that? When you and I were initially discussing this topic, writing back and forth, you talked about there being sort of stages, right? There are official stages to ascension, with some of the early stages being about this purification process.

Explain what... because people hear that and they think, okay, I'm supposed to be going through a purification process. What does that mean?

Jeremy:

Okay so there's two aspects to it. Personal process and then there's the general process.

In general, what we have if we're on this planet here, we have the first 7 initiations. And just to put this into perspective, in order to reach perfection, or oneness with God, there's 354 overall.

So some people kind of think that once you reach enlightenment, or you ascend off this planet, that, okay, you're home free. It's not that way. You can think of the Ascended Masters, the ones who have ascended from this planet, as being just older brothers that are also not very far along the path but are there. And interestingly enough, those Ascended Masters, they want to help us because we're going to eventually take their place as they move up in what's basically called a spiritual hierarchy.

So the stages, what we're dealing with here on Earth, we have, kind of before the initiation process, when you start the ascension process, you're now called an Initiate. Before that happens, you're basically on your own. You're doing whatever. You're experimenting. You're experiencing life.

Once you start thinking about good versus bad or having some conceptual ideas of right and wrong, and also start to begin to manifest qualities of love and compassion, you're starting to get on the path of ascension.

Now the first three stages of ascension deal with being able to have some sort of control over your physical body, your emotional body, and your mental body. There's a very good reason for this. So once you start to ascend higher and higher, because your thoughts and your emotions they're actually, can't say physical things but they're objects on the spiritual level. So even though we can't see them, if you look at the higher level, when you get to the astral level and higher, the spiritual beings that are helping us, spiritual helpers, they can see those as actual objects and those have consequences.

So if you were to take somebody from the Earth plane and put them on a higher level, those thoughts would instantly manifest. So if you don't have control of your thoughts that well, well guess what? You've just actually done that.

So this thing about ascension. It's not something like God's here being like... we're not playing favourites. This is just a necessary part of the process in order to be able to get to another level without doing harm on a higher level.

Moving up in the initiation process, the 4th initiation is something that probably a lot of people on a spiritual path, at least that I've seen, are experiencing now is sometimes known as the "Job initiation", where everything in the world just kind of becomes meaningless. Everything that used to give you pleasure doesn't give you pleasure anymore. Or maybe just kind of your world collapses and everything falls apart. One of those two aspects.

At first, it's extremely painful and mentally, because you feel like there's nothing for you, life doesn't make sense. It's all over. What that is is kind of like, for people who understand or know about tarot, it's kind of like the tarot card where it's a destructive process but it's actually a freeing one because it's allowing you to understand what's really important. That the physical, material things of life are not important. It's the spiritual aspects that's important. So it allows you to build a firm, spiritual foundation.

As you build higher, the 5th initiation, you're actually starting to merge with your spirit, which is the divine aspect of yourself. And then when you get to initiation 6, you're actually at the beginning of the ascended master stage and at the end of initiation 7, you have completed your, you are basically, you are no longer in a cycle of reincarnation. You have released yourself.

When you're at that level, if you think about what that level means, that means always having kindness in your heart, always having pure thoughts. When I say that, of course, I'm already laughing about the fact that people are gonna be like, okay, all I have to do is control my thoughts, control my feelings.

No. That is not what you do. Because you can't. You can't control your thoughts and you can't control your emotions. The process of self-purification is one where you're finding, what is inside at a higher level that is affecting your thoughts and emotions? Whatever's influencing your thoughts and emotions, that's what needs to be healed. And that you can work on and help purify.

Slade:

I was gonna say, what about observing, because observing is not necessarily trying to control. You can acknowledge that you're having a certain thought or emotion without becoming overly attached to it or acting on it. So that's kind of a mid-range stage or goal in that process, right?

Jeremy:

Correct. Yes. You do want to have an awareness, or it's not that you... It would be very helpful if you had an awareness of your thoughts and your emotions at all times. Because people get lost in them. So part of the process is to, when you have an awareness, first of all, don't judge anything. The minute you judge it, you've basically repressed it. You've said, oh, I don't want this.

And then when you start doing that, then it goes away and once those thoughts go away... When you're not aware of something, you can't fix it.

Slade:

Where would you fit re-framing into that process? This is something that I do a lot so of course I'm gonna quiz you from my limited perspective.

But one of the things that I try to do is not only to acknowledge and observe those thoughts, but to replace them. Like you said, there's an equally positive level of thought and emotion for those negative thoughts and emotions. So how does that play a part in your perspective on this? Am I on the right track with that?

Jeremy:

Can you give a specific example? Because I'd like to use it. Or maybe I'll give an example: Let's say somebody's a jerk, right? You have this thought, somebody's a jerk. So you would reframe it and say, well, I really like this person.

Is that kind of what you're doing?

Slade:

Well probably what I would do in that instance, like if I were to experience somebody who was acting a certain kind of way to me or whatever, causing me to have a negative thought or emotion about them, depending on what my relationship to that person was, if it was a random stranger, I might look for some kind of thought about the fact that it doesn't really have anything to do with

This is a story of life and death and a bit of a philosophical nature diary.

Get an intuitive reading with Slade

Automatic Intuition

Edit your pledge on Patreon

"Where are you in relation to what you're trying to manifest?"

David Thomas Wright helps spiritual and creative entrepreneurs to manifest their big vision and recognize their divine worth.

David and I talk about developing intuition to enhance your manifesting journey, the interplay of intuition and intentions, the Law of Attraction.

If you have questions about whether the impulse to relocate is part of a higher calling for you … David has lived this experience of following his intuition to a new city and manifesting a new life for himself.

Maverick Manifesting Group

Get an intuitive reading with Slade

Automatic Intuition

Edit your pledge on Patreon

Texting back and forth, messaging on Facebook about my love life or whatever and it kind of came up.

The thing that really struck me was, I've thought about doing shows on... I think it's called astrocartography and location-based purpose and feeling this sense of, I've got to move somewhere cool. I mean, we've all experienced that at some point in our life. Over the years, this is something that clients bring in readings all the time, are these questions about feeling like they need to move somewhere and that a better life is waiting for them somewhere else.

On the one hand, I do believe that in some cases, if you manifest everything else that you possibly want and need, it probably won't matter where you are. Like if I took you where you are right now and you said, "I'm unhappy. I don't have anyone." If I suddenly gave you this wonderful job working from home, and then you randomly met the love of your life living two blocks away, suddenly you don't want to leave.

David:

Absolutely.

Slade:

Yeah.

David:

It changes everything.

Slade:

But you kind of lived this idea of following an impulse to move somewhere specific and begin a new life. So I want you to take me back to where you were before all that happened, and tell me about how this manifestation journey to another place unfolded for you.

David:

Sure.

So I've always felt that obviously places are about people. So being drawn to a place would have some sort of "knock on" effect where you're being drawn to the right people and the right circumstances. But I was looking for something in my life and I was looking for a sense of home. Because I didn't really have, and hadn't had that sense of home and belonging for a long, long time.

When I was in my early 20s, I studied in London, and had to come back home because it was so expensive to live there and was still looking for work. I went through a phase in my life where I thought it was about going back to London or this dream, or this aspiration to go back to London, and that was the kind of measurement of my wellbeing or not.

Over time, it seemed to kind of disappear. That intention or that need to return to London just wasn't there anymore. And I was actually living here in Lincolnshire and I went on holiday for the first time to Edinburgh, Scotland.

Now there is a bit of a backstory and I don't know whether I told you this but I was first working with clients and giving psychic, intuitive readings. I was probably about 17, 18, and I used to sense what was Scottish guide or a Scottish influence which I felt was to do with his ancestry. Not past lives but some sort of remembrance.

And it would come in and sometimes I would see this and it's going to sound a little cheesy, but a little bit like what we see now in Outlander. So that kind of Scottish chieftan and the kind of full Highlander regalia. Quite hot really. And that's what I got from this guide and again it just kind of fizzled out in the early 20s.

And then there was a point in my life when I was looking for a sense of home and belonging, and this Scottish feeling, whatever that means, this kind of pull towards Scotland came in again. And I noticed that when I opened up to give readings, and I knew that it wasn't about the clients. It was just something that was slipping into that vibration because I was open to channel.

I thought, okay, well the last time I thought about this, I was kind of early 20s. Now I'm sort of mid-30s. It's been a journey. I looked back at my old journals from the time and I kept writing "the royal road the royal road" over and over again. I also wrote the word "Bute". And hand on heart, whether it's subconscious or not, this is before the age of Google, or before I had access to Google, I thought Butes was in Cornwall but that's Bude. So Bute is an Isle which I've visited now since, and that was kind of in my freestyling automatic writing journalling in my early 20s and also "the royal road".

Now, short story, I think "the royal road" is the Royal Mile, which is the main historical high street, if you like, in Edinburgh. So I kept being drawn to Scotland, and specifically, Edinburgh. I went with my partner at the time and it was like falling in love. So if anyone has been to Edinburgh, it is a beautiful city aesthetically. Amazing architecture, a lot of heritage. You're near the sea. There's a castle on volcanic rock. It's like Game of Thrones. But then you kind of have your high street and everything you would want from a major city.

I was just wowed by it. It felt like falling in love with a person. It was a completely magnetic pull.

I did visit a couple of times afterwards and on one visit, I went to a past life regression expert because I was like, what is this all about, this draw? I now feel that it isn't necessarily about a past life as it is about ancestry. I've tried to trace the ancestry but what came up for me eventually was, well why does it matter? Does it have to be quantified or qualified with, it's an ancestral thing or it's a past life thing. Maybe this just speaks to now.

So I thought, okay, this has always been here in some way.

One point that I do want to make is, I don't know how you feel about this Slade, but there's quite a small divide between what we would call an intuitive hunch and spontaneous manifestation. I guess I'll explain that a bit more later, but what I manifested here, some might say it was destiny or fate, as in: you got the prompts intuitively when you were in your early 20s and then you followed those prompts and you were meant to live here and so it was always gonna happen. It could have been fated or predicted.

Yes, to an extent. But I actually began to use manifesting processes for the first time in my life, to make sure that I would move and have the opportunity to move to Edinburgh. Because as soon as I went there, I got tingles now talking about it, it was like being in love. There was a calm. It wasn't just about desire or longing and a strong need to start again and have a new life. Which I did need.

I think sometimes when it's intuitive, there's like a calm underneath because you know the pieces are going to come together one way or the other. I know, of course, that people would say you can goalset your way to relocating. Yeah, absolutely. And some of my friends are coaches in the more conventional perspective and they sometimes struggle with what we would call the woo-woo scale of energy manifesting all the time _____

But the way this unfolded is I couldn't have strategized my way to Edinburgh. I could've literally but it would taken a long time or it wouldn't have happened in this way at the right time. Because I made a friend, completely out of the blue, via Instagram, and that made it possible for me to move and stay with him for a few months while I got myself together.

I guess I'm skipping a little bit forward in time.

Talking about my process, which might be useful to others if you wanted to try this. Whether it's a business dream, whether it's a passion project, whether it's about relocation, I really like to help people with a big vision, and I think a lot of that has come from my own journey moving to Edinburgh.

So what I did was put images around me at home in Lincolnshire of Edinburgh. You know the castle. And also, more kind of not just the touristy stuff but kind of more earthy and grounded images and associations with the city. Because I'm thinking, I'm not always going to be hanging around the castle or going to tourist attractions. Sometimes I'm gonna just be going to the local shop.

So I found images online which kind of represented an earthier side of the city as if I'm living there, not just being a tourist.

I also put sort of post-it notes around my house and they were supposed to be subliminal. I think the subliminal approach works because the idea of reaffirming can be quite forceful and therefore quite tense experience, and the desire to reinforce something through constant affirmations is fear-based. And I think there's a tension underneath that which could actually push an experience away from you.

So what I try to do was to take a more subliminal approach with post-it notes, with these postcard images I had around. I think I had a vision board.

Also, one of the most effective things I find is to record an audio of what you are experiencing in the present tense as if you have it now. These are the principles that are kind of well known to people who are listening, but it worked for me. Hearing it in my own voice and just having it in the background as I'm walking down the street or as I'm falling asleep I think made a huge difference to my energy and to my ability to just expect this outcome.

Not hope, because I think hope is obviously a wonderful emotion, but I think when you really begin to rock and roll with the manifesting, it's about an inevitability sort of feeling. It's an intuitive inevitability. It's kind of like, I don't want this and I'm not hoping for it because that's a pull. But I'm sort of expecting it and I kind of know.

And so the stuff that could not be strategized, for example, chance meetings as I said at the beginning. It's all about people more than it is about places. Financially, I wasn't in a super abundant place. So having the opportunity to just stay with someone for three months was hugely helpful to get me on my feet and to get me in the city.

And that friend of mine has got quite an insistent character, and he is, I don't know if he'd agree with this, but I see him as more confident than me. He's a performer for a living. So I see him as having all this confidence and he gave me, I think, on more than one occasion, a bit of a push and like, just do this. Do you know what I mean? Let's just get on with it and you can stay with me for a few months.

That was hugely helpful. Also what gave me the incentive to move forward.

This is where I think it gets quite juicy.

The manifesting stuff for me isn't just about identifying something that you want. I also think that you choose something. For me, it was a city and everything that I believed I would experience there, including having some not so good days and expecting it to not be like a paradise but being alive and being real. It's almost like lassoing your energy to something, like a cowboy. For me, it was a city.

I think sometimes when we're attracted to things in that way, it's a focal point. And then you can train your energy and vibration, yes to manifest the outcome where I'm living in that physical city, but also it's like a reference point to up-vibe, or to scale up your vibe, whatever way you want to put it so that you become a vibrational match for what you want. But also that you release anything that does not serve you in the meantime.

Because as soon as I set this intention in a real way and look at manifesting, I actually attracted what was a quite tumultuous love affair, sort of fling, sort of dark night of the soul experience. I think that it made my own experience like a living hell.

That sounds like an exaggeration but...

Slade:

Wait a minute. Tell us a little bit about what that was.

David:

Yup. Okay.

Slade:

That sounded way too juicy.

David:

Yeah it's so juicy. You're gonna get more juiced.

So this was about me trying to, or being able to, release myself from any mindsets which was preventing me from allowing, accepting, attracting, manifesting the outcome. So when I do talk to people about my manifesting, it's not like I'm saying, "Buckle up, it's going to be a rough ride", because it doesn't have to be at all.

But I think that to really get what you want, because manifesting is about feelings. It isn't about physical stuff. Yes you do manifest the physical experience, but you're able to inhabit it in the way that you asked for. Because your mindset has changed.

For example, going back to love and romance, a lot of people ask me about manifesting love, and I don't think that they just want someone to validate them and say, "Wow, you're really gorgeous and sexy and I want to spend my life with you. In their own experience, they want to feel comfortable themselves and to be able to receive that and enjoy that and feel good about that.

So, I don't know if you've had this experience, but a lot of readers will get asked, what is someone else thinking about me? Or, what is my love interest thinking about me? And in the end, the manifesting stuff is so powerful because it is about how you perceive that situation. Because if you can't feel comfortable with it, then you could have the guy under your window serenading you but you might not feel the way you want it to feel.

So when you do manifestation and you're saying to the Universe, "I want this", it isn't just about... I think what the Universe hears is not only you want to live in this postal code, this zip code. It's hearing, you want to have a certain emotional experience.

So what we're going to do is to organize everything to enable that to happen. So yeah, you get to live in the postal code / zip code, or, and, you get feel the way that you

This week I’m talking about a practical approach to discovering your purpose and taking action on ideas in ways that are easiest to pursue and that will also have the most impact in the world.

Energy Reboot

Get an intuitive reading with Slade

Automatic Intuition

Edit your pledge on Patreon

The SENSE of purpose is something worth discovering in and of itself, independent of the concept of choosing a major or a career. But I do mentor intuitives, psychics, mediums, energy healers, teachers, coaches, counselors… and for many of us purpose IS about a profession.

I get it.

I need a project at the very least to express my purpose. There’s a lot of value in having a purpose driven project, even if it's not your primary source of income.

If you have a boring day job, a purpose driven project can be the most important thing in the world to balance all that energy.

I’ve seen clients start a project and it becomes like this release valve for other areas of life. The day job isn’t as awful. You’re not snapping at your spouse over everything. You’re not as annoyed with your kids for stealing your life force. You don’t hate your boss or the sound of coworkers breathing quite so much.

You have a reason to get you up in the morning beyond all those mundane things. You have this new source of energy and also an outlet for energy. Because there's energy coming in, and then there's energy you're shedding. You need really healthy vessels and venues and streams for all of those things, to move in and out and through you.

The biggest problem with the "Your Job is Your Life" model is that you can’t get everything that you need from that one source.

You don’t get all your social interactions from one relationship… or expect one person to fulfill what it takes many relationships to have. And you've seen what happens in those marriages where people really have no friendships or relationships or support systems outside the marriage itself, it's just you and this person in a bubble with nothing else going on... That in itself is a kind of cancerous situation to be in.

And I know lots of people with relationships like that. They think they want that. Oh, I want this person to be my best friend and we're going to do everything together. We're just together 24/7. We work together and vacation together.

You know what though? I don't see a lot of those filled with joy, it doesn't seem like.

So anyway, I think the average person, we need a lot of different kinds of friendships. We need people to take care of and people to make us laugh and we need family and we need people we can talk about woo woo stuff with. And we need people for sex. We need people that we've known our whole lives that we don't have to explain ourselves to. All kinds of different friendships. People who are teachers and mentors. Parents that you talk to. You know, all those different things.

Not everybody has that, but ideally, you kind of want a spread, and you want your spouse to have a spread, and you want your kids to have all those things as well.

If you’re unhappy and experiencing low level type of "depression" that’s not really clinical depression, but more a lack of motivation, still with an inkling that you should get off your ass and do something. There’s a chance to turn it around, and you feel that, and that's sort of part of the ennui that you're experiencing.

The first thing that I would recommend is that you do the Energy Reboot. We've talked about it on a couple of different episodes, and of course can link to those, but the idea is to get back in touch with your intuition, spark your creativity, ground the body, rest better, feel better in your own skin.

You can’t create from a place of lack and anxiety. And you can’t save the world if you’re empty and exhausted.

Once you experience some of the results from doing the Reboot, because really, start there. Don't skip that. The results are ideas, energy, motivation. Just new fresh signals coming in.

Once you start to experience that and feel like that's clicking again, like things are turned on again, things are connected again, sign up for something — a class, a workshop, some kind of group activity. Host something for people with your shared interest.

Return to an old hobby or pull out some dream that you put on the shelf long ago.

Teach your kids how to do something that you used to love to do when you were younger.

Teach other people, period — you could sign up for something and host something at the same time by teaching people, because a lot of times your sense of purpose is about sharing what you’ve learned and experienced with other people.

Sometimes your purpose will be chosen for you. Maybe it already has and you don’t have the clarity to realize it. Maybe there's something that you do in the world you're not even giving yourself credit for. Maybe there's something that you do you think of as a duty and a chore, that with a little tweaking and change in perspective, could really become something different. Once you put some intention behind it, you can transform all kinds of things that you're doing.

But Discovering Your Purpose is as much about CHOOSING one as having angels descend with an engraved stone tablet or an owl drop a creamy parchment scroll down your chimney.

People get lost because there are too many things they love. You feel your interests are all over the place. That they don’t go together. There's no rhyme or reason to them. Or you’re pulled between two different loves and you can’t choose between the two.

You may just need to suck it up and do both or do everything you love a little bit. That’s what I do.

I might be more successful if I only did one thing and put all my energy into it, but I honestly wouldn’t enjoy that, and the lack of joy would kill it, and I’d be back to square one with nothing. So I do a little bit of everything I love.

I now have four different websites officially, 3 different pen names, 3 different businesses, soon to be 2 podcasts, dozens of individual income streams, and that’s not even counting things like my love of animals and the animals that I rescue and care for, and my friends' pets that I help with, and the people I support and care for in my daily personal life on all different levels. From advising younger people to helping some of the people that I work out with, motivating them.

Now I don’t advise that you do it like this — if you can avoid it, definitely keep it simple by all means, it sounds heavenly to me, if you have a brain that does that. But some of us don't. And some of us can't choose.

So you know what? Refuse to choose.

I remember the first time I saw the title of that book, "Refuse to Choose - a Program for Doing Everything that You Love" by Barbara Sher, you've heard me talk about this before. It's like my favourite self-help book in the whole world.

It's all based on this principle of scanners. That there's a certain personality type, it's a creative personality type, that requires you to be engaged in a lot of different things. To not just choose one lane and stay there 'til you die. There may be a lot of people who get a sense of safety and security from staying in one track and plodding along and doing the milestones that are laid out for them. And getting the certifications they need and working their way up and just doing what they do and staying there.

But that's not scanners. And that's not me. That's probably not a lot of you that are listening.

So if you’re a scanner, the cool thing is, we now have this language that allows us to embrace that, and to talk about it as an asset, which is life changing, if you've always been told you're doing it wrong. You're not following through on anything and you can't pick one thing and stick with it.

If you've been told all those things, yet you're also extremely intelligent and can potentially do anything, then, you know what? Embrace the fact that you're a scanner. Choose vocations that resonate with that energy. There are lots of activities and environments, social structures, where this is a big positive.

So don't put yourself over there in the grey box that has one lane because you're going to be miserable. There are a bunch of other places that you can go and plug in where who you are and the way that you operate and what you love in the world, no matter how eccentric it is, is of value.

One of the easiest things that you can do is to tell yourself, you know what? I'm just gonna have a seasonal project. I'm not going to commit to doing something for four years, or five years, or one thing for all of my retirement. I'm going to do a single project each season. Or I'm gonna have a different side hustle project every year. Every new year I'm gonna try out some new crafty thing that I do and see if I can make some money of it.

Just tell yourself that. Just knowing right up front that you get to switch it out can really re-orient everything within you. You know, chances are, if you do start out picking one little thing and doing it for a little while, you'll stumble onto one that other people really love. And then that takes over and it becomes about them more than just being about you.

Shift Your Spirits was ONE writing project for me. It was one of half a dozen journals that I was writing at the time. This, all of this, that you know me for, it's just ONE area of interest and passion for me.

So think of your interests and your roles in the world as different pieces of material in a mosaic. And within that mosaic, you are the glue. The common denominator really is you, so it’s not true that these things have no connection or that they're all over the place.

They intersect in you.

Knowing that, if you feel pulled equally between 2 different paths, you are a connection point between those 2 things. So, conceptually, philosophically, they do have a bridge, they do have an intersection.

When you think about it, what is that connection point for YOU? Because that common denominator that exists for you very likely exists for other people too.

Sometimes you need somebody else to point it out. It’s hard to see. You may need to have this conversation over a bottle of rose with someone, or coffee, and hash it out. Sort of mirror it out for one another.

It's hard to see your own worth and value.

I have a client who is an emerging intuitive, she does energy work, but she also has this cool natural skin care business. She felt like these were two vastly different interests. She's racking her mind trying to find a link between the two things. Because she’d rather be creating one content marketing platform as opposed to creating two separate businesses with different marketing plans and completely different platforms.

She’s looking to write articles and post on social media and speak and teach — all the usual formats that work very effectively in all industries. She feels instinctively that there should be a connection…

She’s RIGHT. From outside the forest, I can see all kinds of trees!

So I asked her: What are the connections for you between skin care and energy? What are the connections, on a deep level, between how you look and how you feel? Why do you choose to craft products from natural ingredients in the first place? What are the spiritual values motivating that? How do the elements we put in and on our physical bodies affect our energy bodies?

She can answer all these questions. She did, right there on the session with me. She had fascinating perspectives off the top of her head that lots of people would love to hear about! And you know what’s even cooler? I don’t know a lot of people talking about that particular intersection of topics.

I advised her to do something of a mind mapping exercise. I like to do this with lists.

Write down some lists. Both fields of work, both interests, in two parallel columns. And then … Draw lines connecting items in one column to the other, wherever you see a connection. As you find items that connect, you think of other things that are even easier and more obvious to connect and you start adding those to the list just so you can generate more of those connections.

it will probably look like a jacked up set of boot laces, but the connections are there between these two things that you think are so different. That’s the point.

Now, can you create a question that represents each one of those laces? And keep going with that.

I suggested she brainstorm at least a list of 10. Once you’ve got a whole list of questions, you start answering them. You write articles for Medium.com, for other people's websites, to post on your own blog, Instagram stories, Facebook live videos where you talk about it, classes, tele-seminars.

Your usual product demonstration for say, the skincare, becomes something more like a workshop. Something deeper and more contemplative. A beauty day at the spa becomes more of a retreat-mindset. Your clients aren’t just learning how to apply a product, they’re thinking about WHY they’re using the ingredients in your products and how those motivations make them feel.

This is good stuff!

I’m trying to think of some examples that are completely different.

I love yoga. I did yoga teacher training classes, not to become a yoga teacher, but just to challenge myself and have a goal around it. I also missed the spiritual aspects of yoga being removed for western gym environments. I like the mystical parts obviously.

But I also love kettle bells — that’s my favorite workout format. Kettle bell complexes, which are strings of po

"Curse" may no longer be an appropriate word for this story.

This update is for those of you who wrote to me predicting I would meet someone special.

Guess what has happened ...

Listen to the Love Curse series in order to get the most out of this episode.

Love Curse: Part 1

Veep

Get an intuitive reading with Slade

Automatic Intuition

Edit your pledge on Patreon

Two would’ve been great, as I’m trying to catch up after losing three weeks to jury duty. But I would be thrilled with one.

I’m usually putting an intro on the episode going live, and editing the one coming up the week after that.

I’ve never gone this close to a deadline with nothing in the can.

Yesterday, I tried my fourth attempt at a half-hearted topic, and it was so lack luster and passion free I wanted to cry.

I kept thinking “Shit. Am I burned out? Do I have nothing left to say about anything?” How can that be. I’ve been blogging for 13 years. I’ve recorded over a hundred of these shows.

Why can’t I just share what’s on my heart, like I usually do?

I decided to sleep on it, and work out on it this morning, and see if something floated to the surface of my consciousness before the afternoon. I can steal an hour or two to put something out, even if it’s a heartfelt confession about being blocked. An apology. Sorry guys.

Granted, life circumstances have put me behind … But what’s really on my heart and on my mind is a subject SO TABOO it’s even more vulnerable than the sharing of the love curse story.

My happiness.

I have so many conflicting thoughts — ethical, magical, personal, professional … All those lines are a bit blurred by this, and to tell the truth, there has never been a moment in my personal life that I have felt more terrified about sharing.

I kept it from my best friends for months.

The guy showed up.

Remember how Carrie Bradshaw had Mr. Big?

I binged the entire Sex and the City series on DVD when I was recovering from my stroke in 2003.

I’m stalling. Sorry.

So, according to my chart, this Love transit, that inspired me to fix my love curse, started a long time ago, last fall maybe — it was already going on before I heard about at the end of 2018.

Dena DeCastro told me it would last into 2020. It would ramp up and then peak in the summer of 2019. There are two “tent poles” to this transit peak — one in May 2019, and one in August 2019.

Now, the first one is exact May 16 - and I remember that because it’s my dad’s birthday.

It is May 11, 2019 as I record this.

I don’t know if there’s a oracle at the end of this show yet or not. I’m really down to the wire, recording this on the fly. Maybe I’ll pull a card, live, in the moment for us. At the end, after the credits.

Because this is almost live. It’s a high wire act.

I thought NO WAY am I telling anyone. I don’t want to jinx it.

Some of you guys told me you're binging the curse … how could I not share the biggest development?

And how could I chicken out and try to manipulate the outcome before sharing?

The spirit of this story is vulnerability and confession and maybe some good old fashioned sensationalized exhibitionism. Always good for infotainment.

As you can imagine, the last few months, I’m glancing at the calendar thinking “Okay … Is something going to happen?”

No, I can’t look. I can’t try to make it happen.

As I’ve found before with astrology — it is uncanny and no I can’t explain it and I wish i knew the secret to how these transits are true — but they always happen. And they don’t happen the way you’d imagine. They surprise you with their innovation, but they are always, in hindsight, kind of inevitable.

Now, knowing all that could mess with your head.

But I wasn’t going to show it.

Well … so, be warned.

Now, ethically, I am not sharing his name. Because he has no idea he’s part of this prophecy or this on-going reality show series. He doesn’t listen to this show, so that’s not the issue. I don’t want him to, because I don’t want him to be psyched out. But he’s not going to be listening to this.

However, I did not get his permission.

This is me talking to my girlfriends. He’s doing it too. He’s admitted as much. Just not with a few thousand people like I am.

Am I going to F this up?

Oh, yeah, and one other disclaimer, before I tell you about Mr. Moon.

The guy. The man. Dare we say the One?

About two years ago this man messaged me on a hook up app. One that will remain nameless, because I don’t need y’all going looking for my profile.

I honestly thought Wow. This guy is kind of out of my league.

Now, you may not know this about me, but, as a writer, I like to think my sexting is championship level. My love life has been dirty talking with virtual strangers for many years now. I’ve never met anyone from a hook up app in real life. I usually keep all that at arm’s length. Very compartmentalized.

And for the record, i have no shame about my sexuality. It’s very much a part of my spirituality, and I would do shows about it more, if it was something you could do A show about. I kind of feel like the only thing I could do is ask every single interview guest to share their thoughts on the subject. And I may do that at some point.

We both have iPhones. We were soon messaging every night. A little bit of FaceTime. We mostly did little audio clips back and forth. He is very funny and smart, clever, creative, intellectual, but also a big kid and a music lover.

And then we started texting back and forth during the day, like I do with most of my closet friends. Not sexting anymore. Long text conversations. He’s super communicative as I am.

We eventually started talking on the phone a little, although, as with all my closest friends, we actually prefer texting.

This went on for a few months. Several months. and then he started talking about meeting me in real life.

He lives in Dallas.

I had some sad experiences with long distance relationships.

There was another one, who only lived a few hours away, but … None of them ended well. They became chapters in my curse. A pattern.

So I was very reluctant to meet my Texan because of the distance.

He was very open with his feelings. He wanted to do the whole thing, meet, see if the chemistry was all there in real life, if so … Try to do the long distance thing for awhile and figure out a way to be together.

He kept saying that “We’ll figure it out. Don’t worry about it so much. We’ll figure it out."

I was like “We’ll figure it out is not exactly a plan.”

He was like “We’re the real thing. I know we are, so we’ll figure it out.”

He’s a Sagittarius.

BUT this a very Sagittarian “plan.”

I joke that a Sagittarius birthday party is “Meet me at this address on a random corner” and then you just go from there. And you have a great time.

After about a year of wanting to meet me, and having me shut him down because we didn’t have a plan, he started to get upset with me. He was also between jobs and stressed about all that, which didn’t help

He told me the feelings were real for him, we spending almost every day together on the phone. Every night.

He gave me an ultimatum and said if we weren’t going to meet and try to take our relationship off line, then he couldn’t do it anymore.

He said he was really emotionally invested and it was hurting his feelings that I was keeping us in limbo.

I wondered how much I was compounding his stress because he was in limbo with his job too.

I didn’t want it to end. I was afraid to take it further. I was really blowing it with him, I knew he was about to stop contacting me ...

And then, … his DAD DIED. Unexpectedly. Out of nowhere.

….

…..

It was so awkward and weird. and horrible.

I didn’t know whether to keep texting him and calling him to try to be there for him, or just leave him alone ...

I felt so guilty. But I also felt like maybe the Universe stepped in, you know?

I found him on Facebook and Instagram and sent him a friend request. We’d weirdly never connected those parts of our lives. I kind of intended it as a way to say I’m still your friend, I care what happens to you. I don’t want to *not know what happened to you.

I thought he might be pissed, but he accepted my friend request.

And that was the end of our contact.

I watched all the stuff about his dad from a distance … Just sending heart emojis and staying silent.

He would like my pics sometimes — he actually always likes a pic of me — but he never commented or messaged me privately.

I would scroll through and check to see if you saw my pics on Instagram. And he always liked. them.

He posts a lot on Instagram. He’s a graphic designer, so his pics are cool, and I always like seeing his cool Texas Sky pics.

Some of the things he would post — especially about what he was reading or watching on TV — I wanted to write him a fucking book because they were always so meaningful to me, we had so much in common. It was freaky. I fell in love with him even more as a real person, in his real normal FB life without me, from this distance.

That all happened about a year ago.

For the past year, we kept liking each other’s stuff. He’s not that interested in my spirituality stuff - thinks my job is cool, and he’s supportive but not invested in consumption of New Age stuff - but he d

You’ve heard people in the new age personal development world talk about the stories that no longer serve you. Getting rid of them. Putting them down. Letting go of what you keep choosing to be burdened by.

Who are you if you get to erase your past stories and start from scratch?

Edit your pledge on Patreon

You’ve heard people in the new age personal development world talk about the stories that no longer serve you. Getting rid of those. Letting go of what you keep choosing to be burdened by and moving forward unburdened.

Every decision that you make about who you are traps you, boxes you in, ties you to concepts and ideas and expectations.

Even the good ones — especially those things that we’re proud of, that people laud us for — it defines what others ask of us. It defines what they expect of us. We become beholden to it.

Because even the most authentic persona is an archetype. It can be true while only being a part of you. And it's rarely all of someone.

People on reality shows are always bitching about being edited to look like the villain.

Their behaviour is villainous, their language, their motivations.There's some part of it there that's true that they actually did, and then this template of the TV drama villain is laid over them and everything else is trimmed away. And that's how they're edited to look like the villain.

There's some truth to it. There's some core of it. They brought the material to be that. They brought it forward from themselves and then, you know, with perspective and context, that can be exaggerated intentionally.

My persona here is an archetype — it's the wounded healer. Most of the guests on this show share that archetype, amongst some others that we have in common. But it's the wounded healer story.

You’ve heard my wounded healer story many times — I had a horrible medical situation pull the rug out from under me. I turned to spirituality to recover my life, and while doing that, I discovered that people were interested in my stories about how I did it. And it became my career.

It’s based in pain.

I don’t mind holding space for other’s in pain. I know a lot of people talk about being an empath and how difficult that is and I understand it. I guess I've just evolved some ways of dealing with that or protecting myself from it. I also have a lot of Scorpio in my chart and I think Scorpio people just sort of come wrapped in an ability to absorb that kind of energy.

I often say that if you have someone in your life that has Scorpio energy, that's a great person to talk to about something really difficult. Scorpio people have a capacity to take that in and transmute it for others. And not be so affected by it.

But until I recently started engaging in some purposeful reinvention, in a completely different unexplored business area, I didn’t realize how much more room for JOY I still really have in my daily life. Because my work and my projects and my writing and my podcasts and a lot of the stuff that I do is tied to the expectations of the archetype that I put out there as my personal persona.

And you know the soul searching I’ve been going through recently — It's pretty much been shared all season long. I was thinking as I went into all that, that it was really just about my personal life, about my romantic self. I have discovered that that process is showing me parallels, other things that are opening up as well.

I didn't explain that well.

The process of unearthing some of my stories, some of the stories that no longer serve me, and trying to evolve those or see what comes after them and move forward. I've realized that, oh, there are all these other boxes that can be opened up and gone through as well. And there are some similar themes and some parallel story lines kind of running in different areas.

So I opened up one box thinking, I'm going to concentrate on this box right now. Instead of doing, I ended up dragging all kinds of stuff out into the light to go through. And it's been a really positive thing. This has not been as painful as it's been exciting. Because for me, as an anxious person, nothing feels better than to get rid of something that's causing me anxiety. I'm really excited for some kind of relief.

I also love a project. I also love to do something new and something practical. I love to dig in and investigate and figure out what's going on and that in itself is a source of energy for me. So I don't experience this process of kind of therapy as a negative thing at all.

But in parallel, not only these parallel areas I can discover, but also just in parallel to my actual real life in the real world, new opportunities have come along in ways that I wasn't really expecting.

And I'm sorry. I hate when people Vaguebook. You know when they post on Facebook and they're like, "I've got this thing that's happening tomorrow and I can't really say what it is, but send me prayers" or whatever, and then you're just wondering, well what the hell is it. If you want my prayer for it, then I demand that you tell me what the hell is going on.

I'm very nosy like that. So don't Vaguebook with me because I resent it.

But I'm going to Vaguebook you a little right now because I have a new business opportunity, some new projects, and it really does require me to use a different name and be in a totally different area and for it to be disconnected from this one. You have to trust me that I can't reveal that here, not now anyway.

In order to do this, I really do require to become someone else. At least over here, in this other section of my life or whatever. And wow, this has been so much fun creating this. It never occurred to me to do this. It's been a long time since I put myself out there online and adopted this kind of facet of my life as the focal point for what I do.

I've been attached to this for 15 years now. I've gotten very used to being who I chose to be, and the idea that there was still something else that I could choose to do sort of never occurred to me. So anyway...

Naming is the most powerful spell in the world. It's Adam's task (that's what I call it). Humanity was given, in Genesis, we're talking myths here, the myth of Adam, humanity was given the job of naming everything in the world. That was our part in collaborating with the creator. Our language is built on this, which is a huge part of what makes us exceptional as a race, as a species, as a type of entity. Our technology is built on top of the language.

Right now, our language and our data and our command of words has become a kind of real magic. Information technology has created a very real form of spell crafting that we can see and wrap our heads around. We don't think of it as supernatural. We just think of it as really cool.

And naming in the spiritual realm has been a tradition in tons of human cultures. It's usually attached to rites of passage, movement into adulthood, marriage. There's often religious ceremonies built around naming. Seth and I used to attend pagan gatherings where many people took a new name for their spiritual life, to represent that transformation and that entry into that part of their lives, often to exclude some part of their life that was painful. Stories that no longer serve them, getting rid of those. In radical faerie pagan culture these were just called faerie names.

So when I speak about them to my friends that know what I'm talking about, I refer to faerie names as being the name you choose for yourself to represent who you want to be and who you're evolving into and becoming.

Now some of my mentoring students, professional intuitives, emerging healers, psychics, people who are trying to build a business similar to mine and putting themselves out there, online, are often worried that using a pen name is inauthentic, or that it's hiding, or that it's somehow going to dim their power. Yet for a lot of reasons, people need to sometimes protect their identity that they're doing work as a psychic, because maybe they also have another job that supports their family and which would cause them problems.

And I'm not here to judge anybody outing themselves that way. I think you can do both. I think it's perfectly acceptable when you have, as I do, with my jobs, different names related to different jobs and different businesses. And there are some very real marketing reasons for doing this. It's effective business choice. So it's not inauthentic to do that. You're not hiding who you are. Maybe you are protecting yourself or separating your identity in some way.

But I think the concept of using a pen name can actually be more authentic because it allows you to tap into this idea of choosing who you want to be. Choosing a name that represents a part of yourself that you want represented. You didn't have a choice probably in the name that you were given at birth. You may have legally changed your name or you may have adopted a nickname. You may have taken on someone else's name through marriage.

There's a lot of different reasons why people change their names and it's a really hard process. I was talking to a transgender friend of mine about the process of, that transition to a completely different sex allows a whole other group of names to be possible. So how do you make that choice? Anybody who has named a baby or named a puppy or a kitten or a business or anything, knows what a huge creative rabbit hole it can be trying to come up with something that suits.

And you sort of know it when you hear it. You can try on a million things that aren't quite right. And then there's one that's just... Yes. That's it. You know?

So we've all been through this process many different times. People often choose stage names simply because it's more beautiful than their real name. It has a cool ring to it. It looks better on a poster. It fits on a book cover. People can pronounce it. There's tons of reasons why you would choose to have a different name.

You may have run across people in the new age realm, especially personalities, teachers, psychics, who have added extra letters to their name. I know a handful of people who've done this and it is for numerology reasons. There are practitioners who can help you analyze your name and how changing the number of characters in certain places within your name can change the numerology, the energy signature of that name, and therefore supposedly affect your ability to manifest or change your vibration, your energy signature.

I've always had an uncommon name. I jokingly refer to it as a soap opera name. I went through phases of disliking it when I was little because it was different. People would sometimes point that out. And then as I got older, I started to embrace it as I started thinking of myself as someone who would do something like be an author. I liked having a cool name because I felt like it would distinguish me and sound like a pen name anyway.

People often ask me if Slade is my real name or if it's a chosen name. I always feel a little defensive about that because... No. My mom went through a lot of trouble to choose this name for me and I've been called this since before I was born. And I feel like somehow that's like some kind of platinum credibility or something.

But considering new names for myself now recently, approaching 50 years old, it really opened something up within me. Who would I be if I wasn't ME anymore? That was a really interesting box to open.

It's not about shame or about hiding. It's about liberation. Being someone else, someone new, on purpose. Intentionally.

So who are you if you get to erase all your past stories? Who are you if you start from scratch? Our vernacular is littered with clichés about the desire to do this.

But we barely do those things. We talk a big game.

But what if you picked some small way to be someone new. Hide in plain site. Do something nobody expected you to do. They actually won’t see you because they don’t know to look for you there.

What we notice is often tied to our expectations. You can be invisible simply by being somewhere nobody expects you to be.

What if you just engage in this as a thought experiment? Write it down, like a secret character in your diary. How far can you take this experiment? What do you find is a possible story for you if you don’t use any old stories?

So here are the rules, if you want to engage in this:

I know I have some stories that aren't sort of part of the most obvious flow of all my other stories. They sort of don't go. They got edited out. They got cut. But in their own right, those are interesting parts of my persona to explore or develop.

Think about these two writing prompts:

People say these things, right? In daily life, you sort of throw that out there. If I had another life, I'd be a shoe and bag designer. When I come back, I'd want to be one of my mom's cats.

Use those as journalling prompts and sort of fill in those blanks. Just keep going. Jump off from there. If I had another lifetime, I'd be...

Go. For 20 minutes.

You’re so used to your old day dreams, it’s hard to pick a new one. It actually left me with a panicky feeling to set down some of my daydreams over here on the side while I engaged with entirely new ones. It left me feeling a little bit naked and exposed. But exci

My friend Rob and I got into a conversation over lunch about the concept of creative literacy. We’re not really taught — even in liberal arts and creative arts academic programs — how to manage and follow through on great ideas.

Everyone can experience a brainstorm — but most creative brainwaves end without follow through.

And what a lot of people don’t talk about is the overwhelm that comes from a high creative state. There is an anxiety that accompanies having a ton of ideas flowing all at once.

We talk a lot about how to get to those creative flow states, but when you’re in the middle of one it's kind of the worse time to have to wonder what your process should be. Or to worry that you don’t have one.

Everyone can experience a brainstorm — but do you have a system of rain barrels and cisterns and wells in place to make the most of that when it does happen?

As Rob pointed out, most creative brainwaves end without follow through.

And what a lot of people don’t talk about is the overwhelm that comes with a creative state. There is an anxiety that accompanies having a ton of ideas flowing all at once.

We talk a lot about how to get to those creative flow states, how to get into them, but when you’re in the middle of one it's kind of the worse time to have to wonder what your process should be. Or to worry that you don’t have a process.

I’m experiencing a high creative flow state right now. A lot of people I talk to are also feeling that. And it’s great. Energy has been stagnant for months, for me anyway. For a few years for some of us, also me.

Everything is kind of in Aries in right now and there’s a lot of creative energy and a desire to take action and it's all sort of pouring in now. So Rob was kind of asking me, what are some of the tools that I use to manage that, or is there a way that I can break that down and actually share part of that process.

I think I can do a pretty good job of grounding it a little bit in some systems and tools, especially to help with this idea of overwhelm. So I'm not so much concerned with 'I don't have any creative inspiration'. This is specifically about, what do you do when the fire hydrant is on and it is all running into the street and there's a sense of panic about that.

My favourite go-to magic wand is a list. Lists are magical. They have an ability to change the perception of things. The perceived size of items or problems or concerns, your perceived scope of the To Do cloud that's around your head versus the actual list that ends up on paper in front of you.

There's this anxiety about forgetting things, more than anything, right? So you kind of keep all these balls in the air mentally. You're spending a lot of mental energy just launching balloon after balloon after balloon after balloon, and they're all tied to you and all floating around you in this little cloud.

And one of the things that lists do is they allow you to put those items somewhere so you don't have to worry about forgetting them anymore and that sort of frees up the bandwidth. You can take the balloons down and there's not so much of a cloud around you.

I'm going to talk about checklists in just a bit, which is also another specific way to free up bandwidth.

But there's this high that goes along with taking action, taking risks. It feels sort of good. It's profound! And you can really feel on fire when you're in that state. But the dark side of that energy is what happens when it runs its course or burns out. There's a crash. That caffeine, that sugar high, that drug is going to crash at some point.

And then you're going to realize that you expended a lot of energy starting things without following through on them. And you won't necessarily have the energy left over to follow through, if you spin it in the wrong way. You know what I mean?

Another tool that actually presented itself to me in a really obvious way when I was travelling with Rob last fall was this idea that we should focus on manifesting people, not things. Not the stuff, not the To Do list items, not the resources. Focus on manifesting people who have those things.

You look at that list you made, and maybe there's 25 things on it. When you manifest the right person, they may come with 10 or 12 of those items already taken care of. Or they may have the resources to tick those boxes for you, without you having to do anything other than asking them.

Collaborate. That's what I mean by manifesting other people. That can be an instantaneous thing. It can be a stranger on the street that you stop and ask for directions. In that moment, you're manifesting a person that can tell you how to get to where you're going. It's collaboration, whether it lasts 30 seconds or a couple of years and it's a more formal relationship.

Reach out to experts. Instead of telling them about your great new idea, ask them questions. What do they actually want in the area of your big idea? So you can kind of gear the questions that you ask them towards the area that you're interested in, rather than you telling them what you're making and getting their feedback on it, ask them what they want in the area in which you're proposing a solution or an idea or a venture.

They'll tell you what to make. They will literally tell you exactly what's missing, what they wish existed, and sometimes they'll even help you make it.

The number of times that I've been given resources just because I reached out to someone as an entrepreneur in this phase of my life, let's say in the last 15 years, there are so many times that I have reached out to a coder, a developer, a software engineering expert, a publishing industry person, whatever it might be, and come at them in the right way, with a really curious and respectful desire to participate, people can pick up on that authenticity.

Now if someone is closed to helping other people, that's their issue. You're not going to manifest them anyway. Cross them off your list if you accidentally catch them in your net. Focus on manifesting someone who is open to participating with you.

Just to give you an example of what I'm talking about, more recently with the audiobook production part of my business that I'm moving into, which is one of my big creative new states right now. And when I say I was in a high creative state, a lot of it is around audiobook production. That's one of the new irons in the fire.

I was looking for some resources online, looking for some books on Amazon. I found one in particular that looked really techy. Because I have more questions about some technical stuff, to do with software and file types and less about getting in the spirit of You-Can-Do-It. I'm not looking for that kind of pep talk.

I was looking for something a little bit more specific, and I ran across this author's book and he was a Dutch person. It was still a book written in English but he was Dutch. I looked him up on Facebook and saw that he did live in Holland.

I noticed something in his book that felt kind of like a sign to me. There were examples that he was using about different kinds of studio space that exists, that you can access, as an independent producer of an audiobook. And he linked to a story about my home city, Chattanooga, Tennessee, where our public library built a really state of the art sound facility and they use it for learning purposes and school programs.

But I know a couple of people who do their podcast there. It is something the public has access to. He mentioned it as being a cool resource that our city had. Because of the timing of my reaching out to the Universe, looking for that magic carpet ride of links on the internet that take you to all the things that you were looking for and it all feels perfectly aligned and stuff.

So I was having one of those moments with his book.

So I just decided to send him a friend request on Facebook and then I followed it up with a message explaining why I'd sent him the friend request. And I told him the story, the connection with Chattanooga and I asked him a really technical question that I had, threw some jargon at him, so he would know that I could kind of speak his language and that I was looking to get a more geeky answer from someone.

He was so excited by the interaction that within just a few messages back and forth, he told me about this course that he built and that was available on Teachable and it was an expensive class! It was like, $1500 or something to take this course, and it was really techy looking.

And he offered me a coupon code to access the course for free if I would give him some feedback about it and let him know if that was what I was looking for. There were things about it that needed to be changed to make it more accessible for other kinds of authors.

I mean, that's just an example of something that happened. So when I say 'Manifest the people', that's what I mean.

Take the opportunity. Someone crosses your path and you think, I'm going to Facebook message this stranger. Just do it! I mean, what's the worse that can happen. They can decline your friend request or not answer your message. Or if they seem rude or not open, fine. Keep on moving.

But I can't tell you the number of times that I have reached out to someone who is an expert and they were very generous with their time, their information, and sometimes with their resources.

When I was bootstrapping my business, trying to build something online, I got a lot of help from a lot of people that way, and it's one of the reasons I was able to do it at all.

People like to share their wisdom. They like to be acknowledged for having it. It's often hard earned. They like to have sort of heirs receive their information. People who care, because no matter who you are, you are what filled your work in. Your family doesn't care about your work, and your friends don't want to hear you talk about your work.

Your peers want to hear you talk about your work, and who really values what you do, are the people who are driving down the same road behind you. That's who you want to talk to. Because that's your opportunity to make a difference for someone else, and I think it's motivated by an impulse to sort of go back in time and save yourself, you know?

So when someone approaches me wanting to know about how to do a podcast or something, I already have a list of resources ready to go. So I'm just gonna copy and paste and email it. I'm so excited to think that all the research that I did and spent maybe weeks or months on, can now be reduced to a single email for someone who really wants that information and is gonna go do something with it.

That's really exciting to me. It brings me joy. So don't underestimate the fact that everyone else likes to do that too. We like to be on the end where somebody's asking us to share, and when we're on the end where we're asking for the information, we often feel like we're bothering people.

Now I do think you need to keep your emails succinct. Don't tell people long drawn out stories about your life. Keep it brief. Really really respect their time and think about the fact that you may be one of 50 people who's sending them emails like that, right?

It's really easy to answer something that's short and specific and a lot of people who have taken time to build resources or expertise in a certain area, do have things like checklists that they can send you, or a favourite resource or website that they can point you to.

So make it easier for them to do it quickly. I think you're more likely to get a favourable response.

TIME is the one thing that is limited. It’s the one thing that you can’t make more of. And this is one of my tools, actually. This is one of my subheads in this episode, is this idea about time. You can find more resources. You can manifest more people. You can make more money. But you can't make more time.

So that's one of the big things that you have to deal with when it comes to creative overwhelm, creative productivity, getting shit done. If you can work the time part out, then you can graft a plan onto that. So time is the one thing you can be really strict about. If you're religious and disciplined about the time, then you can be creative and you can flow within that structure. And you can play. You can be a little bit more loose and happy.

This is where I use 3x3 strategy. But you can’t use 3x3 unless you can identify 3 blocks of time each week.

My mentor in writing and publishing and productivity is Tim Grahl. You hear me talking about him when I talk about marketing a lot. Steven Pressfield, who I also talk about, is partnered with Shawn Coynes in a publishing company called Black Irish Books. You've heard me mention many times Steven Pressfield's War of Art as one of my big creative bibles. And Shawn Coynes Story Grid is that type of work specifically for fiction authors and screenplay writers.

Tim's latest book was published by these guys. He's friends with them. He works with them. So Black Irish Books published his latest book called Running Down a Dream. It's a really personal story about Tim trying to start his own business. A lot of failures and anxiety and psychological stuff really that he dealt with. It's super vulnerable and very confessional and just really cool. It represents a lot of why I like him and admire him so much.

In addition to being willing to share how much he sucks at certain things, he's also really, really great about identifying systems and sharing them in this way that I talk about. That mentors have this really genuine authentic impulse to put out their recipes for others.

So in Running Down a Dream, which I'll link to, on this issue of time and creative project management, he talks about a few steps that address this in particular. And one of them was to first identify what the shortest path is. Meaning, find the thing that'

I’m sharing the work I’m doing to identify the roots and patterns of my issues, in a way that hopefully you can adopt for your own process.

DISCLAIMER: This is not shamanism. I'm notoriously eclectic ...

This is a follow up episode to the Love Curse and to the episode with Asa Poeche, Reversing the spell.

You will want to have listened to those in order to get the most out of this episode.

Listen to Love Curse: Part 1

Slade:

This is a follow up episode to the Love Curse and to the episode with Asa Poeche, Love Curse Part II, Reversing the Spell. So this is Love Curse Part III.

Just a quick disclaimer: This is not shamanism.

Nothing that I'm going to share with you here today is based in a formal practice of soul retrieval. I warned Asa about this, going into this process with me, that part of what I may do is extract some wisdom from her, some insights, and then see what I can do with that information on my own.

And she very much gave me that blessing. She knew that we were experimenting, so shoutout to her, and know that I am not really doing this behind her back or against her recommendations or anything like that.

I am notoriously eclectic. I’m not a fundamentalist or a traditionalist. I’m sure some people might criticize me for not studying this process more and following a more strict version process of some kind of reversal ritual or what have you.

Here’s my philosophy about self-help books, programs, practices, and all that stuff: There’s usually one thing, at least one, sometimes there are a few others but sometimes there's usually one really big thing that's an epiphany for me. It's an 'aha'. It's a moment where I connect the dots and I say, Cool. I grab that part and I incorporate it into my daily life, into my thought processes, into how I police the voices in my head.

Whatever it might be, I take it in and I plant it in my garden and it becomes one of the things that grow there. That's kind of the way that I work with things.

So my process with all this: Rather than doing shamanic journeying and soul retrieval, I'm just starting with the questions that I had and some of the answers, and more questions Asa presented to me in our conversation and I intended to take those into my free associative writing practice. Into my automatic writing and into my Morning Pages. And also into divine dialoguing which, just to explain that really quickly, one of the foundations in automatic writing, which is this idea of connecting with the Higher Self, with your guides, with the records, with whatever it is that you're retrieving of information, the channel can either be straight out of your mouth in a speaking form or it could be writing it down, either longhand or typing, whatever.

To me, automatic writing and divine dialoguing or channelling, they're all kind of coming from the same stream of information and they're different formats for collecting and curating and sharing and analyzing that stream of data.

So these are my tools. This is how I do everything: my own personal development and psychotherapy, my readings with clients, whatever it might be. There's a lot of basis in neurolinguistic programming and with writing. That's just kind of my jam.

I want to share with you a bit about how I have been processing all this since my first two episodes about it. What do you do with it?

You may want to work with a practitioner like Asa and have her walk you through it. You might want to do a more formal ritual practice of some kind, and I still may come back to her at some point in this process and say, "What else do you have in your toolkit that we might use for this?"

But in the meantime, here's what's kind of happened on my own and I'm sharing this with myself by describing it to you guys. I'm working without notes here. I'm kind of doing one of my off-the-cuff episodes. I'm also kind of wanting to share with her what I've done since our conversation ended. So I'm just going to put it out there to everyone involved all at once.

The story I was telling was about these two major relationship events that happened, one at 19, and then one at 29. These magic spells that I was doing, playing with relationships and love magic.

But after my conversation with Asa, I realized that these episodes in my life were about self defense and protection. That was one of her big insights to me. That this isn't really about love. It's about protecting yourself. So where does that come from?

Richard was the one who told me that I didn't have to keep defending myself so violently. I shared that in the first episode. So there was a clue there that came right out of my own mouth.

Okay. So that was happening before. Before the episode with him ever went down. There were traces of this self defense issue going way back.

So I started to work my way back and thought, okay, well what was going on in high school? I defended myself in high school in a completely different way than a lot of people who were bullied.

If you called me "fag", I slashed your tires, I put sugar in your gas tank, I was not afraid of punching someone, I was not afraid of kicking someone in the nuts as a first move. It's considered a dishonourable way to fight but you know what? I just wanted to make sure that the people who were trying to hurt me were afraid of me. That was my goal.

I had an incident where a guy was repeatedly body slamming me outside the classroom in the hallway. It was like a particular classroom and time of day. It happened over and over and over again. My algebra teacher was there to witness it. And so, one day I sharpened a pencil and carried my books across my arms with the pencil in my hands in such a way that if he did it to me again, he would stab himself with the pencil.

And that happened.

She looked the other way because she understood that I was defending myself, rightfully so. My school had a policy back then in the 80s, I would've been expelled just for getting body slammed, if it had been reported, let alone defending myself.

So even if the teacher had reported, "Hey, this guy is body slamming this other kid", we would've both been dealt with zero tolerance and both been suspended. Which is just bullshit.

Anyway, so I figured, you know what? If I'm gonna get in trouble for being hit, I'm going to hit back. That was kind of my policy. There was the archetype of the crazy girl in The Breakfast Club, you know, the weird goth kid that people are kind of afraid of, that is rumoured to be mentally ill. I embraced some of that as a kind of defense mechanism. I let people think that I would go apeshit on them and that I was capable of doing anything. Because just that thought alone kept a lot of people from bothering me.

That had to come from somewhere too.

So I started to follow these milestone violence events, this fighting thing. This self-defense and fear of being harmed and all that, backwards in time. Not regressing in any kind of hypnosis or doing any kind of special witchcraft here. Just intellectually, consciously, wide awake, as I'm taking a shower, as I'm doing the dishes, as I'm driving in my car.

Just thinking about all this stuff that came out in my conversation with Asa. And talking to Seth about it. You know, just processing.

And as I started to work my way back, I found an even earlier age when I was 7, when I was being bullied at the bus stop. My parents, after listening to me come in, whining and complaining about this kid and what he was doing. He was an older kid too. I was in 2nd grade, he was in 5th grade I think. My parents convinced me that if I hit him, he would leave me alone.

Now this took some real convincing. Once they even had me intellectually convinced that this is the way to go. It still took some time for me to work up the courage to do it, but they insisted: If you hit him in the face, he will never do it again. He will leave you alone.

And my mother actually was the one who said, kick him in the nuts. Take him down so that he can't even hurt you back. Start off there.

And you know what? It worked. It worked really well.

I think that the 5th grader's parents came to complain and realized once they got there that... your 7 year old beat up my asshole 10 year old and it kinda never went anywhere so I was really, honestly, kind of drunk with the power of it. Because I didn't get hurt. Nobody hit me back. I just lashed out and defended myself and it was put in the ground.

That kid never bothered me again.

There were other instances around that age. My next door neighbour, he was bullying me, calling me a fag, calling me a sissy. I shot him with a BB gun. I aimed at his legs. I didn't shoot him in the face. Ohmygod I got in so much trouble for that. I never had a gun again as a kid. No any kind of firearms for me.

There was another instance where, around that same time period, where another kid was making fun of me and I put my fist through a window because he, when I tried to fight him, he ran away from me and he went and locked himself in his garage. And then started screaming at me through one of the little garage windows. And he thought I couldn't get to him so he was tormenting me from behind the glass.

I just put my hand through the glass. He wasn't hurt. Nobody was ever hurt but my parents were mortified. I got in a lot of trouble. We had to go and fix his window and apologize to their family and you know, it was terrible.

I was given boxing gloves and taught to fight in a more constructive way, because my parents felt I needed an outlet for this anger. Something that was less free-for-all but maybe just to channel that into an actual physical activity where it belonged.

But I kept going back in my memories.

Well, okay, how far back did it go? Was that the first time or was there something even earlier?

And it did go earlier. It went way further back. And I got all the way back to the event that happened when I was four years old.

I can't share that in detail on this episode. I'm not sure that I can speak about it without kind of breaking down a little bit and I really don't want to throw a member of my family under the bus, who's not here to defend themselves.

Suffice it to say, something happened to me that involved physical abuse layered with homophobic motivation and language. And here's the takeaway: you don't even really need to know the details because there are so many gay men that have their own version of this story.

The important part for me in doing this work about this curse is realizing that at four years old, I remember standing my ground and this voice came out of me. It really was like I was channelling Satan himself. It was a really evil, demonic sounding big low voice.

I said, "I will NEVER forget that you did this to me."

And I never did. I never have.

Not only did I not forget, but for a long time, I never forgave it.

I forgave it much later in my 20s, early 30s, when I realized that this person was younger than I was at that age, when this happened. I was really dealing with someone who's relatively pretty young to me now. There was a lot of fear motivating what happened.

You know, I forgave it because you're supposed to forgive this shit, right? In order to move on. Now one thing that Seth pointed out is, just because you forgive the person for doing that to you doesn't make the wound go away. It's not like it erases it or keeps it from happening. So the whole idea of forgiveness is a different component than being wounded in this way that has festered.

So that part of me that was so easily drunk with power at seven and then again as a teenager, and then again with my relationship with Richard, was someone who was fighting for their existence. Asa nailed it when she said, "So much defensiveness in the way you speak about this. There's so much language about being attacked."

And, you know, that was the curse.

I cursed someone else, really, in self defense, and the witches’ rede is, everything you put out, comes back to you three times over. I don't know. Maybe there's a little bit of that in there. If a four year old can be guilty of defending themselves against abuse and then create karma from it... I don't know.

But that event, that violence related to my sexual identity and my safety in my own self, in my own body, it fucked up ALL my relationships, with men especially.

So rather than being in the closet, I never really was in the closet. I embraced being gay as a big FUCK YOU to that violence against me for being gay. Because what could be worse than not cowering down and doing the thing you've been told to do?

The ultimate middle finger was to go all the way with it and embrace it and identify with it and I did. And I don't know what instinct made it go that way for me when so many other people went the other way. Maybe it's because I was in a relatively safe and loving environment that I had a whole lot of things building me up. So that wasn't enough to take me down.

I'm not putting it out there that I'm somehow special. I'm just saying that that's how I reacted to it. And it still poisoned me forever, in a way that became insidious and hard to name. And that went all the way through school.

I cursed the first perpetrator of homophobia at four. I started fighting people for calling me a "fag" at seven, and I did that all the way through junior high and high school, and all the way up to the moment I found myself doing it to Richard.

My ability to love, to be in a love relationship, is not really what this curse is about. It's about an existential threat to who I am, my identity. So when he made our breakup about my writing, about my sense of purpose, he threatened my identity again. My very existence. My sense of why I'm here at al