Episode 15 - Building Magical Relationships

(upbeat music) - Welcome to the Unnamed Path. I'm your host, Hyperion. Today was an interesting choice of topic for me because I've got about three or four different ones that I want to talk about and I've gotten some requests from listeners. Thank you to those of you who have requested. But I felt that today's topic was important and that it needed to be addressed at this particular phase of where we are in the education. And today we're gonna be talking about relationship. Now, if you'll recall, back when I did the podcast about energy, I mentioned that there were three things that were necessary in order to be a powerful magical person and that those three things were energy, relationship and motivation. Now, these three terms are very loaded with meaning. They're not just simple understanding of oh, it's energy relationship and motivation. No, there's actually many layers of meaning behind each of these words and a lot of thought went into choosing them. So don't assume that just by hearing those three that you've got the entire picture 'cause I'm actually gonna do a podcast on each one of these three. I've already done a podcast on energy and today it's gonna be about relationship. So let's dive right into it. What exactly is a relationship or a magical relationship specifically? Well, a relationship is a two-way energetic, emotional and spiritual cooperation and it's two-way between you and some other thing. It can be between your conscious mind and your subconscious self or what we call the your shadow self. It can also be a relationship between you and a god. A relationship can exist between you and the ancestors. The relationship can exist between you and the spirits of the land. And all of these different types of relationships are important in order to become an effective and powerful magical person because once you start to delve into magic with any great depth, what you start to learn is that the ritual and the whole jumping through the hoops and doing all the various things only take you so far and you eventually get to a point in your studies and in your practices where those things are actually starting to hold you back. And what's really amazing is that you get to a point where you're like, "You know what? "I don't need these rituals anymore. "I don't need this relationship." Are you doing the relationship? I don't need the ritual. I don't need to jump through these hoops and go through these various steps anymore because my connection with these energies is already present. It's always on. And that's one of the really phenomenal things when you really work relationships properly is that eventually you don't need any tools. You don't need any ritual, you don't need anything. You literally just call upon the relationships that you have and bam, change happens. And that's ultimately where we want to strive to get to. And in order to do that, we need to really learn what relationships are and how to cultivate them. And one of the tricks and this is interesting because a lot of the books that are out there don't really talk about this. They just have you, they give you this recipe of what you should do in order to do any kind of magical working and they expect you to follow that every single time. And as we know, the difference between a cook and a chef is that the chef understands the basics of cooking and has moved beyond them and starts to combine new ingredients in different ways and eventually just stops using recipes at all and just starts doing it by eye. It's the same kind of thing with magic. You do all the conventional stuff and you follow the typical rules and you do everything the way it's quote-unquote supposed to be done according to the rules and the guidelines that are out there. And eventually you start to combine things in new ways and you realize how well it works that you get to a point where you don't need an outline anymore. You don't need a ritual format. You just make magic happen. You live, you be magic instead of do magic. And that's the difference in relationships help you get to that place. And eventually you get to the point where when you really need to make things happen, you can call upon those allies that you've formed relationships with in a split second and do your work without anything around you. You can do it in the middle of the subway and commuter traffic without any problems without any hesitations. That's where we eventually want to get to because that brings us to a point where we are ultimately connected with our entire world. And that is the position of power for the shaman is to be there in the middle and for the magician to us to be there in the middle of all things. So why do we need to cultivate relationships while I've already started to talk about that a little bit? But let's go into it with a little bit more depth. First of all, we understand that everything around us is a part of God and that we are God. So thus the more relationships that we build with what's around us, the more we integrate those various separate parts that appear to be outside of ourselves, we integrate those into ourselves. And that helps us truly come to grips with how very much we are God and how to live in this middle world. It's illusory existence of separation and this living in this illusion where we feel that we are minuscule and disconnected from everything. That's all an illusion. And once we start to form these relationships, those illusions start to lose their hold on you. They start to dissipate and fall away. And as the scales drop from your eyes and you really see what's going on in the middle world, then you realize I am all that there is and I am God. And cultivating relationships gives you an intimate experience of that. So it's not just an abstract concept in your mind. It's not just some interesting philosophical idea to ponder, you live it, you be it, you experience it. So it's truth for you. It's not just an abstract belief that you read in a book somewhere. And I know I sound like I'm coming down hard on books. It's not, I don't want to come across that way. I think books are a wonderful thing, but I think books are training wheels. And eventually you have to move beyond the training wheels. Take off the training wheels and ride your bike and then eventually get rid of the bike and just fly. So that's what we want to get to and to get to that flying point. So another reason why we need to build and cultivate relationships is that a lot of-- and this is what makes it unique to the unnamed path-- a lot of magical systems that are out there, like to position the magician as if he is a dominator over his environment. He commands the elements to be in a specific place. And he commands this to happen. And he insists and calls upon this. And so it's almost like we're lording over nature. And in the unnamed path, we recognize that nature is not some base, unintelligent thing to rule over. Nature is what we are a part of. And actually, ultimately, nature doesn't need us. We need nature, right? Because if we all die and go away, nature is just going to keep on chugging. It's only humanity that can go into nature and disrupt it and create havoc and create destruction. So other animal does that, only humanity does that. So what we need to do is we need to put our egos in check and realize that we are part of nature and that we depend on nature. And as such, when we do magical work, we should call upon nature and the various aspects and energies and intelligences that are there. And we should cooperate with it and call upon it like we're calling up our friends and asking for assistance. We're not dominating over it. We're recognizing our place in it. And that's what's unique with the unnamed path. And it gives you optimum magical results because all of those spirits and powers and shamanic forces come to assist you because they've had a reciprocally beneficial relationship with you. So that when you say, hey, buddies, I need some help. They're there. They jump to your aid and immediately act where if you command and dominate and do all this other stuff, you got to weigh a little while for things to happen because you're almost fighting against the current of truth, which is the natural order and structure of nature and how we relate to it. Go with the flow instead of fighting it. And if you do that, you're working with the actual current of nature and how it works, so nature rises up immediately to assist you. The other reason why we want to build relationships is that relationships allow us to build alliances with other spirits and forces of nature, the gods, other parts of ourselves, like I said, our shadow self. And they allow us to call upon those for assistance in any given circumstance for magical workings, right? We use magic, everybody mentioned that. For personal introspection, as we're trying to better ourselves, we may need some kind of perspective. And those alliances, those spirits that have formed relationships with us, can help get that kind of outward perspective that sometimes we need when we're drowning in the emotionality of our particular given situation. They can come and give us the perspective we need to break through whatever it is that we're working through. Another thing that we would use these relationships for are for prophecy and divination. How better to get information and clarity on a given situation through a divination system or prophecy than when you can call upon a spirit that you've already got a relationship with, right? It's like calling up your buddy on the phone and saying, hey, buddy, what do you think the weather's going to be like tomorrow? And your buddy happens to be a weatherman, you know what I mean? It's that kind of a thing. If you have an established relationship with the dark goddess, for example, and people ask you questions relating to their fate, who better to go to than to her to get that kind of information? See where I'm going with this? So with prophecy and especially when you're doing like scrying and things like that, you're tapping into a direct information channel and just acting like a speaker that's been plugged into a stereo, you're just the squawk box that all the information's coming out of. You're not the source of the information. You have to have relationships in order to be able to plug your speaker into that and be able to receive that channel of information. It's almost like satellite radio. You have to have the subscription in order to receive it. Well, the subscription in this case is the relationship that you've built with that entity. We also use relationships and shamanic healing because oftentimes you have to go and fetch spirit medicine for people or go and fetch their lost totem animal or even go and contact their guides or speak with ancestors and things like that. The more relationships that you forge in the shamanic world, the easier it is for you to do that because then you can call upon your guides and say, "All right, guides, help me find the medicine to help heal this particular spiritual situation. Help me go and find this particular ancestor that's going to teach me this bit of lore that I'm trying desperately to seek and find." And the more relationships you have over there, the more people you have on the inside helping you out. It's the same kind of deal. The other thing that we use it for is in death walking. We talked about this last week with spirit contact. You have to have a relationship with your guardian spirit or your tutelary divinity, your tutelary goddess. In order for them to guard and protect you while this is happening and to act as a traffic cop to let the information, let the spirits come into you or to kick them out when you're tired, that's where relationship really comes in handy because if you need to cleanse any kind of negative negativity or nasty energy off of somebody in the middle of a spirit contact circle, you need to have those strong alliances on the other side to be able to help facilitate that cleansing and then take it off of you so that you don't walk away with any negativity in the process of trying to take it off of someone else. So that's a great example of where relationship is very important. And ultimately, if you think about it, if you have a relationship with it, then you can really work with it. And that's why we want it to really strive to build those relationships in order to become an effective magical person. The same thing we talked about in energy. We talked about moving energy. Well, if you have a relationship with energy, it's that much easier for you to move it. And the more that you move and work with energy, the more that you build that relationship with it. See how they work hand in hand? And when we get into motivation, we start talking about the factors that drive creation into being things like we're gonna talk a little bit more in the future, but essentially it's intent. Your intent and your desires. When you use those things to push it forward, you need to have relationships in place to facilitate that manifestation and your motivations almost acts like your orders. They said, you know, this is what I want. This is how I want it to happen. And your friends come to your aid in the relationships that you have, they're summoned forth and they help make it happen. So it's one of those three parts. If you want to be an effective magical person, you form relationships with every single energy you're going to work with. Because then you're not just working on the sort of elementary school level of it, you're working advanced. You don't need to go through the hopscotch and the tetherball and all of these little basic baby games you can do some serious work just by thinking it into creation. And that's what it means to be an effective powerful magical person. So what kinds of relationships are important for us to cultivate? Well, I've sort of mentioned them a little bit already, but let's go into them in a little bit more detail. One of the primary relationships you want to build is with your ancestors. And by ancestors, I mean not only those of your blood lineage, but also the ancestors of men who love men. Essentially the ancestors of men who love men have given this tradition to me in order for me to give it to you. And actually I'm not the only recipient of this information. That's why you'll oftentimes hear me talking about we. There are many men who love men all around us that are getting bits and pieces of this tradition and are being motivated to come forward and start expressing it and start applying it and putting it out there. I've seen more and more gay men's shamanic circles start to come up. And gay men are coming to me and saying, "You know, I get these messages from spirits "and I don't know what to do." The ancestors of men who love men are waking all of us up and making this happen. So that's why I refer to oftentimes the production of a name path as we, because it's not just me, it's all of us. It belongs to all of us in the community. But you wanna have these relationships with your ancestors for a couple of reasons. One, your blood lineage ancestors can help you really sort out your own personal shit. If you have anything that's tied to your childhood or that's tied to maybe something that your parents or uncles or aunts or whatever it did to you, those ancestors are going to be, they're like witnesses. They've seen this entire process happen. The whole archive of your family lineage is in the river of blood and the cauldron of the dark goddess. So if you can tap into that lineage, then you can see how the patterns are passed down from generation to generation to generation and that it's up to us to sort through them. Oftentimes, we will choose a life where we are born in what I call as reconciliation children. We are born to reconcile the sins, if you will. I don't really think of it as sin, but we're born to reconcile the mistakes of our predecessors. And so if we have a better vision at understanding of what those mistakes are, it's that much easier for us to therefore reconcile them and ultimately accomplish our own fate. So that's why it's important to have a relationship with your blood ancestors. And then the ancestors of men who live men will help you sort through all of your unique things that you as a gay man, as a man who loves men have to face. Because they've been through it, they feel the same thing that you have felt. They know exactly what you've gone through and they're energetically tuned the same way you are. Because let's face it, a lot of our families just don't know what to do with us as men who live men. They don't get us, they don't understand us. They can't relate to us. They certainly haven't gone through the same life experiences that we have. I mean, some like generic ones, but when it comes to gay life experiences, they don't have a clue. Well, the ancestors of men who love men can give you a perspective on it and help you work through that. So that's why it's important to have those relationships. Now, other relationships that you want, for example, are relationships with your shamanic guides or spirit guides in general. Because some people have spirit guides that cross the shamanic boundary and become spirit guides in general, just through meditation or whatever. But you want to foster those relationships with your guides because they are spirits in the upper world that have that perspective, that upper world perspective to see the big patterns of everything. And they've selected to act as a guide for you in their life. So the more that you've talked to them and the more that you've formed and foster relationship with them and take their advice and come to them with your problems in order to seek advice. Not only does that give you perspective and make your life easier, it also helps them accomplish their assignment, right? They've selected to help you as part of their fate. So you're basically helping them with their homework as well. I mean, they can come and knock on the door and want to talk to you. But if you don't answer the door, eventually they're going to be like, all right, well, when he wants to come to me, he'll come to me. He'll come to me and I'll give him advice. But until then, I'm not going to say anything. But relationships are like that. And we're going to talk about that in the future about how to build relationships. But you build magical relationships and they're very similar to building ordinary dating relationships or familial or friendly relationships. They take a certain amount of energy and application and consistency in order to establish them. Well, shamanic guides are the same. And one of the great ways to build relationships with shamanic guides is to do a lot of shamanic journeys. Go to them for advice. Go to them when you need understanding about some particular issue in your life. They'll be there for you and they'll show up. And eventually you won't need to do shamanic work anymore. Well, excuse me, you will still need to do shamanic work. But now with the same frequency, because your shamanic guides will be whispering in your ear throughout the day, even without you needing to put on the drum track and build the magical space. And they'll just, you'll just have these little zone out moments in your day and they'll just whisper, hey, blah, blah, blah, blah in your ear. And that way they'll give you continual guidance. And that's a wonderful feeling supported. Other relationships that you want to foster are with your patron deity. Now, of course, the light God, dark God, light goddess, dark goddess are there for all of us. We all have a relationship with them. But you may feel pulled to one particular facet in a phase of your life. For example, right now I feel very pulled to the dark God. And he's helping me work through my own stuff. Well, for you, maybe the light goddess, it may be the light God, who knows. But if you feel pulled to a particular aspect of deity, it's good to form a relationship with it and to communicate with that particular aspect of deity and ask it for guidance and perspective and try to integrate the qualities of that deity in a positive manifestation into your life. So that, in a sense, you are becoming an embodiment of that deity and how better to forge a relationship with it than to emulate it, right? So that's something that's very important, especially, if you're going to do like spirit contact work or magical work, how much better than to go and do some type of magical goal and call upon your patron deity to bless it and sanctify it and make it happen even faster? That's wonderful. And ultimately, we should all form relationships with all four aspects of deity in order to get a full complete balance in our spiritual life. It's something we should all strive for. Now, another relationship that we should look toward building and I don't know if I've touched upon this yet, but I know I've been doing a lot of work on this recently myself, and that is to build relationships with the guardians of the land and the spirits of the land. And this is really, this is really, really important work if you're going to be an effective magician because you can call upon the spirits that reside in the land itself under your feet and they will come to your aid. Now, one, I've written an article about this on the website, I do know that. And every area of land has different land spirits, it has different guardians, what I call guardians of the land. Every area is different. And so, for example, here in Southern California, we will have guides that are, excuse me not guides, guardians of the land that are tied to our geology. So there will be an earth shaking guardian of the land and there will be an ocean guardian and there will be probably a guardian of fire of some sort because of all the intense heat we get here and how we have fire seasons. All of these guardians, you have to go and form relationships with them. And I wrote a little exercise on how I do it on the website, which I encourage you to go read. And I went on a trip to Canada recently and I bonded and formed a relationship with the spirits of the land there so that my friends that live there, if they ever need magical work done, I can go and call upon the, I can stay here in Southern California where I live and I can call upon the relationships to the guardians of the land in Canada where they live to ask them to protect and do work for my friends. So you see how me building that relationship is giving me another tool in my toolbox that I can call upon if I need it? That's why we want to foster the stuff. So the guardians of the land really just sort of guard and manage the particular land. The spirits of the land are like the woodland spirits or fairies if you will. The spirits that every tree is a spirit, every plant is a spirit, every rock is a spirit. Those are like the spirits of the land where the guardians are like the, I mean, here's a great analogy. If you saw or read Lord of the Rings, the ants, the tree herders, that would be a great image for like the guardians of the forest. They are above and beyond the land spirits, right? Because each of those trees had a particular personality. They're above and beyond those trees. They heard and guard and manage all of the other spirits. That's how guardians of the land work. And it's good to go through them because they're the head haunches. You go through them and then you can go through the land spirits and no problem, you know what I'm saying? So those are the guardians of the land. Now, another very, very important relationship to form. And this is one that I want to give an entire podcast to, but I need to do a little bit more research and work on it before I give it. But that is to form a relationship with your shadow self and with your higher self. Your shadow self is that part of you that lives in the underworld and sort of contains all of your subconscious thoughts and ideas about yourself. It contains or reacts or grows out of all of the difficult painful experiences you've had in your life, your bad habits, all of the negative ideas that you have about yourself. The shadow self kind of contains all of that. And a psychologist should probably call that like your inner child. You know, you've got a wounded inner child and you need to nurse your inner child. Well, the shadow self is kind of like that, except the shadow self will act out. The shadow self will surface within your consciousness and lash out when he is not dealt with. So it's important for us to deal with form a relationship with and lovingly heal the shadow self. And its counterpart is the higher self and the higher self lives in the upper world. And that's sort of like your god self. That's the part of you that sees the big picture and everything and that always strives for selfless acts and strives to, I don't know, to always see sort of the divine perspective on things. It's important to form a relationship with your higher self to help balance you out so that you understand direct, so that you gain direction life and you understand the big picture and you see the patterns and you can apply yourself toward a higher goal with all of this work that you're doing. So it's important not only to acknowledge and love your human self, but also acknowledge and love your animal self and also acknowledge and love your divine self. These are three parts of your being and you need to integrate all of them to be whole, to attain wholeness. And this is what these relationships strive to do. So how do we build relationships? Well, building a relationship is a lot, like I said earlier, a lot like building a love relationship or like building a friendship. There's a lot of formality at first. And think about it. When you start dating someone, you know, before you go on a date, you'll shower and you'll shave and you'll press your clothes and you'll wear it like you're finest and you'll take them to a nice dinner and they'll be a handshake at first and then you'll talk pleasantries and then maybe get to know each other a little bit better. And then at the end of the night, you might get a hug or a kiss and then, you know, if you're doing things properly, you won't have sex on the first date, supposedly. I don't know what that's about 'cause I will. But anyway, then, you know, the next time you talk, you take it a little bit further or you may be bringing a little gift or something, you know, on your first anniversary, you do something nice, you bring a gift, you take them out to dinner. You know, and this is sort of the way you're building that relationship. And then, you know, five, 10 years down the line, you don't have to show up in your finest. You don't have to be freshly shaven. You don't have to be wearing cologne. You don't have to bring a gift. You can show up wearing shorts and flip flops and hug the person and love them. And there's a relationship that's already been found. So you don't have to go through the formality as much. The same applies to magical relationships. You start out very formal, you follow the rules, you take it step by step, you communicate consistently, you make the phone call every third day or something like that. You know what I mean? You do things consistently. And then, once you start to feel the reciprocity of that relationship, then you can start to ease up the formality and start to be a little bit more casual. Show up in jeans instead of slacks. Show up in shorts instead of jeans. But still, there has to be a certain level of respect and mutual love there, because you're not going to walk in. Let's say you've been dating somebody for a script. Let's say you've been married for like 15 years. You're not going to walk in the house in Muddy Boots, trample your mud all over the floor, put your muddy shoes up on the brand new sofa, belch and fart in their presence and tell them to go fuck themselves. You've broken a certain, you've crossed a certain line of appropriateness. The same applies with relationships in the spiritual world. You can certainly be casual, but there still needs to be respect. There still needs to be love, and there still needs to be in a sense of awe that needs to be preserved there. Once you move out of that sense of awe, then you start teetering on the edge of a slippery slope of going down, sliding down the slope of just taking things for granted. And when you start taking things for granted, then the relationship starts to erode. And then you have to do that much more work to reestablish the relationship and heal it and bring it back to where it was originally. So just think of it in terms like that. That's basically the same type of dynamic when it comes to relationships. With magic, you start with formality. You build your sacred space. You purify with the elements. You do things in a very rigorous, follow the outline type of ritual way. And once you've learned that outline, and you've learned that ritual, and you can do it without a script, and you do it with your eyes closed, then you can start to play with it a little bit, alter it a little bit, call things in different positions. Do things slightly out of order. Be a little unconventional. And you'll see that your relationships will give you feedback on that. And then you'll get to a point where you realize, you know, I don't even need this ritual anymore. That's how you build a relationship. You apply consistent formality at the beginning. And I'm talking consistent. You need to do it regularly, regularly, regularly. All these exercises, be it meditation, be it a shamanic journey work, be it divination, be it magic, whatever, spirit contact. You need to do them with regularity in order to form a relationship with that skill within yourself. There's another relationship. You need to form that kind of a relationship with that skill and develop your own spiritual muscles, so that if you go a month without doing meditation or a month without doing spirit contact work, the minute you come back into it, you'll hop right back into it. And this is so apropos, 'cause I just started a workout regime today. And I just went to the gym for the first time in, I don't know, like, (imitates screaming) years. And everything hurt. I mean, it was incredibly, incredibly painful. Every, you know, it just worked my ass off. But I know that my muscles are gonna remember what it was like to work out. And it's gonna come back that much better, but I still have to work through that pain. It's the same way, if I let a magical relationship erode to the point where I couldn't call upon that energy anymore, it would be difficult and challenging and painful for me to rebuild that relationship, but, you know, it would come back easier because there was originally something there. It's not like you're trying to re-forge a relationship with a stranger. You still know them, but you need to sort of go through the effort again of showing that that, showing the energy or whatever it is that you're building the relationship with, showing that energy that this is important. And so you have to do that much more work to kind of get back into it. Now, methods of formal communication. I talked about ritual already, but meditation is a great one. And I'm going to talk to you today about how to do meditation. But meditation is fantastic because if shamanism and shamanic journey work is real flowing and free form and you don't control it in your brain, just kind of goes with the music, meditation is its counterpart, where meditation is about clear the mind, keep it focused on this task, and it's very cerebral and logical and mental, where shamanic journey work is very visceral and you feel it in your body, and it's really kind of an interesting psychedelic experience. So that's why I wanted to teach meditation 'cause it's gonna be a really good tool for you to have. To formally go and speak to those entities, let's say you wanna form a relationship with your ancestors. In meditation, you can go, call reach out to your ancestors and speak to them and address them with specific questions and still have an amount of consciousness about your mind where you'll be able to remember everything and it will all make sense. But there, that doesn't negate the importance in the need for shamanic journey work because there's things that are revealed in shamanic journey work that can never ever be revealed through meditation and that just, it's not the right format, it just won't come forth. So meditation is one of those formal ways that you can communicate with things. Shamanic journey work is formal as well and it's actually very effective if you are delving into like the underworld, the upper world and you need to go visit these places that are sort of outside of our realm in the middle world, that's a great way to do it is shamanic journey work. Do it consistently, do it with conscientious application and you will build those relationships so that while at first it may seem kind of scattered and you have kind of a bouncing around kind of experience after doing shamanic journey work regularly over a period of time, the minute you go in and you step into that world tree, bam, your journey is clear you go from point A to point B, you address all the things that you want to address, you talk to all the spirits, you want to talk, you gain whatever information or knowledge or spirit medicine you need and you bring it back and you remember every single bit of it. That's how it works. You've built a relationship with the tool of shamanic journey working. And the same applies to any one of these magical skills you still need to do them consistently. Ritualized communication is great. Doing anything like if you've got a particular altar or a devotional space in your home, light a candle in front of an image that reminds you of the particular spirit that you're trying to contact or trying to form relationship with, relax in front of it, set up a little chair, burn a little incense and then just relax and open your mind to receiving information. That's in a sense you're doing a form of prophecy but you've ritualized it. You see what I'm saying, you've brought, you shower, you shaved, you wore the nice clothing, you did that in a magical sense, right? By setting up a space with cloth and an effigy of that particular spirit you're trying to contact and light a candle in the incense. You know, you've done these pleasantries and these really beautiful ritualized formal things. That shows that you have an intense desire to make this happen 'cause you're putting the effort into it above and beyond the call of duty. That works really well. Another method of formalized communication that we have is tapping the bone. We talked about this last week's spirit contact is called tapping the bone. Where that gets its name from is that it's the ancestral bone, right? 'Cause remember I said we use a skull that's made out of bone. You're tapping that in order to receive information in order to gain whatever lore or communication that you need. Doing that in a particular ritualized manner which I'm going to talk about in a future podcast I just briefly introduced it last week. But doing tapping the bone on a regular basis like once a week, you start to form relationships with certain ancestors and certain spirit guides and they can give you whatever information or guidance that you need. They can cleanse negativity or disharmony off of you that can help you attain whatever you're trying to attain spiritually and magically. And tapping the bone is a very formalized ritualized way to make that happen. So there's some of the formal communication styles. The informal communication styles are really a lot like calling your friend. What's a formal way of contacting your friend? You write a letter, you hand write a letter. When's the last time somebody did that, right? Where an informal way would be like text messaging them. It's the same kind of way with magic. These are these rituals that I just mentioned are very formal. The informal ways of communicating with them would be, for example, just kind of zoning out in the day and just thinking and pondering, opening your mind and letting to see what comes. That's very informal and actually once you've built these relationships, it's really useful and it's really consistent and it really works. I do this all the time. My friend has learned, my friend Kevin has learned that when I start to sort of zone out and trans out, he'll just kind of go, all right, what are you getting? Because he knows that I'm doing this informal communication is just coming to me. Either they've kind of tapped me on my shoulder and said, hey, we've got a message or I'm reaching out and saying, yo, guys, I need some support. I need some information here. It can be either way. It can be one or two ways of communication. But it's just as simple as zoning out and just kind of daydreaming and listening to see what comes. That's an informal method of communication. Or calling them up like friends, walking out into the forest once you've formed relationships with the guardians of the land of the spirits of the land, moving out into the forest and just talking. Just talking to the land spirits like you know them. Hey, guys, I've got the situation going on. I need your assistance in order to make this happen. I'm trying to acquire this property and there's someone else that's bidding for it as well. Can you support me in this? And please give me your blessing and give me any aid that you can in order for me to gain this land so that I can honor you appropriately and save this patch of land for a respectful use. See how it's a two-way deal for them? They're gonna want a piece of the land to be preserved for respectful use because so many people disrespect the land that they're gonna come to your aid, especially if you've got a relationship with them. But just walking out in the forest and saying that or walking out of the property and you know sort of walking with heavy foot, you know what I'm saying? So you're kind of like stomping and you're basically stomping up the land spirits and you're saying all right, I want this land. I want to make this happen. You know, that's a great example of an informal communication. You're not going through some big formal ritualized kind of thing but you're calling upon the relationships you already have in order to acquire that particular land that you're trying to get. There's a great example of an informal communication. Also, you can casually communicate with spirits, you know, just without use of ritual, just sort of you're driving along and you just start talking. You know, you can talk in your mind. You can talk out loud. People might think you're a little funny. If you talk out loud, but you can sort of talk in your mind and just listen and be receptive and see what comes. Once those relationships are formed, that is commonplace communication. It's really, really easy. If you need to just find out the information on something on the spot, all you need to do is just kind of close your eyes and listen. You know, you say, "Hey, I need to know what's happening with Jane." You know, let's say what's okay. Dark mother, I'm trying to find out what's happening with my friend Jane in New York. Can you please let me know and just close your eyes and listen. And she'll give you a feeling. She'll give you an image in your mind. She'll give you a feeling in your heart and your gut. And she'll let you know what's going on. If you've formed a relationship with her already. If not, then you've got to go through the formal steps. You can read cards. You can do some type of scrying. You can do a shamanic journey work. You can do anything like that. Any of the ritualized formal communications. But see how having a relationship already in place makes communication that much easier. And that much more common and that much more. I mean, I don't mean by common like it's just a vulgar occurrence. But it makes it that much more consistent so that you are constantly living in this beautiful spiritual dialogue that's happening between you and the things that you formed alliances with. It's really a powerful, beautiful place to be. So let's talk about meditation because I think it's time to introduce this as a skill. Well, meditation has kind of two parts to it. There's the listening part and there's the talking part. Just like communication, right? You talk sometimes, you listen sometimes. The same thing happens in meditation. I'm gonna call the listening part meditation and I'm gonna call the talking part prayer. And I'm not using the term prayer like, you know, get down on your knees and do the sign of the cross and the church, not that kind of prayer. I mean, you can certainly get down on your knees and that's a certain kind of prayer, but, you know, I'm just saying. So meditation is more the quieting of the mind. It's important that the goal of meditation is to quiet your mind and become receptive to incoming information. It is literally spiritual listening and that's the important thing to keep in mind here. You are listening. A lot of times when people first start to meditate, they run into the problem where they run into their mind chatter. Don't forget to pay your bill. Don't forget to call your mother. Did you turn off the iron? Is so-and-so gonna call you and wake you up in the middle of your meditation? That's the kind of mind chatter that just distract you from what you're trying to do. And you need to learn to quiet that in order to focus on the work that you're needing to do. That's the quintessential goal of meditation is to shut your damn head up so that you can finally get out of your conscious mind and just listen and be pure spirit and become receptive to guidance. It's a very upper world process where shamanism is a very underworld process. You see the parallels there? All right. The prayer half is the process of speaking to the spirits. So you pray and then you meditate and you listen and then you pray and then you meditate and you listen. See how it's a dialogue back and forth? Well, the way that we pray and we talked about this before and about thought being creative, we pray through the use of images. We understand that the mind thinks and images. So if you can visualize what it is that you want to know about or visualize, communicate what you're trying to say to the particular spirit that you're communicating with through meditation, if you use pictures to do that, it's going to be that much more effective because it's the way the mind naturally thinks. Sometimes the words that we use don't have pictures associated with them and they don't necessarily translate over to the spirit world. So use, try to use images. So let's get into an exact like step-by-step rundown of how to meditate, all right? The first thing you need to do, I recommend you start out doing this laying down. Now, if you fall asleep when you're meditating, which is very common, it means two things. It means one, you're not getting enough rest at night and you need to sleep your eight hours. So that's the first thing you need to do. Don't go emailing me and saying, "I keep falling asleep when I'm meditating." And you know what, get some more sleep. That's what you need to do. Secondarily, you can try meditating sitting up in a tall back chair that's got arm rests where you know you're not going to fall out and if you can even lean back a little bit, all the better, step way your head doesn't flop around as you get relaxed, that's the best way to meditate. And ultimately, as you get more skilled at meditation, you can actually meditate standing up even, but sitting up works well if you fall asleep a lot and get your sleep. That's ultimately the real answer to your problem. So once you're in your comfortable place, you have to relax your entire body. And I like to do this starting from my toes and going up to my head. The way that I do this is that I start by visualizing almost like a beam that transcends my entire body, coming up through my feet, up through my legs, up through my hips, up through my abdomen, up through my chest, out down my arms, up through my neck, up through my head. And as this beam passes through me, everything is relaxing, it's a relaxing beam. And I just visualize all of those things relaxing and I will pass this beam through my body from toe to head six times, seven times, as many times as I need until I feel completely relaxed. That works for me, but that's because I've been meditating for a very long time. What might work for you better is a very common technique and it's sort of a biofeedback technique. And what you do is you start by tensing your legs and your feet as much as you possibly kind of hold it, hold it, hold it, hold it, hold it, hold it, and then just relax them all at once and let them just flop down on the bed. And that way your body learns what tension is and consequently what relaxation is because in meditation you have to be completely relaxed. So you do that with your legs and then you do that with your butt and you clench it, you clench it, you clench it, you clench and then you release it. And then you do that with your stomach, you clench your stomach, you clench your lower back, you clench it, you clench it as hard as you can and then you relax it. And then you do that with your chest and your upper back, same thing again, clench, clench, clench, clench, clench, and then you let it go. And then you do your arms, you ball up your fists and you clench and clench and clench and clench and then you let it go. And then you go through your neck and you shrug your shoulders and you scrunch up your face and just squeeze, squeeze, squeeze when you let it go and you flop down on the bed. And once you've done this entire thing, you're already like 10 times more relaxed than you were to start with. Then you follow this up, now that you've relaxed your body, you need to relax your mind. And you do this through deep breathing. And this is breathing that once you've relaxed your body, your body will naturally breathe from the diaphragm and anyone that's studied any kind of vocal music or public speaking or acting skills will understand what I mean when I say diaphragmatic breathing. But the diaphragm runs right under the rib cage and it separates the cavity that the lungs are in from the cavity that all of the guts and the intestines are in. And when you breathe from the diaphragm, this muscle naturally expands and your belly rises. So a lot of people call it belly breathing. So when you're breathing deeply, you inhale really slowly (exhaling) and your belly will rise and you hold it for a couple of seconds and then you (exhaling) you let it go and then you wait a couple of seconds and you inhale. (exhaling) This is the process that you should use. And it should be very natural. It should never feel forced. I mean, if you feel that holding it for two or three seconds is too long, go naturally with the rise and fall of your breath because Lord knows if you feel like you're gasping for air, you're not facilitating your relaxation in any way, shape or form. And that's ultimately what you need to do. You need to facilitate your relaxation. So with each inhale, visualize yourself, just feel yourself relaxing with each exhale, feel yourself releasing all the tensions and troubles and any worries that may be on your mind. See yourself below the amount like smoke if you need to, if that works really well for you. Visualize all that tension and negativity just blowing out like smoke coming out on your breath. And so you do this, about 10 deep breaths works really great. So you get better, it may move down to like four or five, but just keep doing these deep breaths until you feel completely relaxed. And you don't have to make noise when you make them by the way. That's just me doing this to illustrate because let's face it, I'm working through an audio medium. So you have to be able to hear what I'm doing. So you do this until you relax and you just lay there quietly and just be. That's all you need to do with meditation. You need to just be. If you find these random mind-chattering thoughts run through your head, just acknowledge them and say thank you. I'll deal with that later. And just feel it drift like a cloud clearing from a blue sky and just dissipating away. And you wanna just focus on completely relaxing and eventually you'll get so relaxed that that conscious mind-chatter will turn off. And it will take practice. You need to do this a lot. You know, I'm not guaranteeing success your first time out. It's gonna be tough and you need to do it consistently. But once you've reached this relaxed place, if at any time you feel yourself coming out of it, all you need to do is focus on your physical body being relaxed again, take some more deep breaths. Make sure your arms and legs are completely relaxed and so heavy that it feels like you almost can't move them. Or rather you don't even want to move them because they feel so good. Same thing, just relax, keep focusing on the breathing and the relaxing. And once you can maintain that level of relaxation, then you, if you choose, can do the prayer part. And that is you visualize whatever situation or circumstance that you're seeking guidance about in your mind. See it as clearly as you can. See yourself involved in it. See it from a third person perspective. See yourself interacting with whomever it is that's involved. And then in your heart, reach out with your heart and your guts to that spirit, or be it your guide, the spirit of the land, the god, whoever it is. Reach out to them with your heart and your gut with this burning, striving motivation to want to know the answer to your question. It's sort of like, ah, kind of, you know what I'm saying? It's sort of like feeling a question mark. If you can picture yourself feeling a question mark in your heart, that's kind of the reaching out with your heart and your gut that you do. And then you move back into your receptive place and just listen and keep your mind clear. And they will either give you ideas that pop into your mind that are an answer to your question or they will give you a feeling in your heart of warmth and comfort, which I always interpret to me, yes. Where if I don't feel anything at all, it means no or if you feel an uneasy feeling, that means no. And you can do this type of communication back and forth and back and forth. As long as you want until you have an answer to your question until you have some kind of resolution, so you want to do this back and forth, back and forth. Once you're done and you feel that you've come to some type of understanding and your communication is complete, then you want to basically slowly come out of your meditation. And you do this by taking 10 deep breaths and with each breath, you feel yourself becoming more aware of your surroundings, coming back more and more to your physical body until when you reach the last breath, you can wiggle your fingers and toes and sort of like stretch your arms and legs and open your eyes and come back to reality. That's essentially what meditation is. That's the process, it's very, very simple, but it's very useful. And I will go ahead and post sort of a checklist of the steps on the website on unimpath.com, so that if you need a review, you can just kind of glance at them very quickly. But that's all there is to meditation, it's very simple. You don't have to focus on the in and out of your breath or anything like that, it's not transcendental meditation, it's just quieting the mind. And if your mind doesn't want to shut up, like I said before, you continue to take some deep breaths and focus on your physical body being relaxed. And you just acknowledge the thought and say, thank you very much, I'll do with that later. You know, and just sort of let it dissipate away like a cloud, blow it out on your breath and return to your relaxation. It's, having mental chatter is a habit. And it takes a lot of effort to learn to overcome it. You have to put just as much effort into combating that in order to really be able to facilitate relaxation and facilitate meditation. So that pretty much sums it up for this week. I would like to remind you all, if you could please to vote for us at Podcast Alley and Podcast Pickle, and the best way to do that is to just look for the link on the right-hand side of the page on unimpath.com. And we've dropped out a little bit this week because at the end of every month, your votes will drop off. And today marks the beginning of our, we're at Lissy, episode 15, so we're in the middle of like our fourth month. And this, or in the middle of our third month, I don't know, I don't do math. Anyway, third and fourth month, we're somewhere in there. But if you could please go ahead and vote for us again, if you haven't voted for us in over a month, that would be great, it'd help us keep our standing so we could get more people to listen and help spread the word. And I thank you all who have actually voted. Thank you for helping us get the standing. I never thought I would have as high of a standing as I've gotten, and I owe that all to all of you. Thank you very much, and I think that pretty much covers it, so until next time, this has been Hyperion for the unimpath, and we'll see you soon, bye-bye. Have you gone to thepaganactivist.com yet? Have you read articles from the global pagan community? Have you laughed at the funnies or completed this month's hex word? Have you read about the new projects in local pagan communities? Have you submitted something for the Bardic Arts area? Go to www.thepaganactivist.com. It's time to stand up and be counted. [MUSIC PLAYING] Otherworldapathacari.com, catering to the traditional witch, green witch, druid, and root worker, they carry out standing selection of herbs, oils, magical blends, and curios. Visit otherworldapathacari.com and start using real tools for natural magic. [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING]