ArcaneHuman

I have been fortunate enough in this lifetime to get some really clear and good guidance from guides, not super regularly but often enough. However, my guides seldom to never make their identity clearly known. It always just feels like a message from on high. Of course... i would imagine that all guidance emanates from source which is apparently impersonal but on a different plane i'm sure that these guides do have unique personalities. So i am curious how to go about forming closer relationships with my guides. I would like to have a close connection for instance to a power animal. I have journeyed in the past and such. I feel hesitant to journey a bit because i've probably gone overboard with risky stuff in the past.... like... not quite respecting the power of the sea so to speak. I'm guessing i can also stalk such an aim... of becoming closer to my guides. But yeah... if i need to journey i will but i also would like some advice on how to properly do so. I usually just put on a shamanic drum track and i have some palo santo to burn before hand. thanks for reading.

Thanks Cammie for the perspective and link. I think i've read at least two of these articles but i will reread them when i get the chance. I'm just trying to pour more intent into what i'm doing and try to do it more often and go deeper when appropriate.

I've been stalking for like... a year and a half or longer but i surely could still learn more about it. I'm imagining intent matters quite a bit here so what intentions can/should one set when stalking? How do you channel that intent into the practice? I'm familiar with the concept of stalking one's own self importance out of existence and also stalking one's own power... i guess to reclaim it? or materialize it? I find that interesting that the practice can be used to both recover something that is wanted and to get rid of something that is unwanted. Most of the time that i'm stalking it's pretty low key and based primarily around physical action. To me the physical act looks something like: snap your fingers twice... clap... pick up a book... open it to a random page... read one sentence... throw it across the room... pick up a gemstone... stay completely still for some prolonged period of time... set it down gently.... pick it up again and slam it down with force... clap your hands three times... etc... just a series of random physical actions to break out of the sameness of one's routine-way-of-being but i don't know if i'm getting too caught up in the physical end of it to the point of missing out on other ways of approaching stalking. So yeah... any information or perspectives on stalking are welcome.

yah. that's good advice. i really do feel like empowering ourselves is integrally important at this time. i've been healing for a long time now but the recapping seems to be adding some oomph to the transformation of self. Thank you.

Thank you kindly to both of you.

In our spirals I class we worked with a coin. Forgive me if I employ the wrong language but we were to channel our intent into it to practice what intent and conflicting intents and agreements and such feel like. When i first started working with the coin it didn't feel right. I was strictly spinning the coin and trying to intend that it lands on tails each time. This whole way of relating to it felt forced and it felt like i was really trying and exerting effort trying to break a law of nature. In the follow up class we spoke about how the coin has its own intent. On my trip to the library today i found a coin and i said to it like... you're my new coin. And naturally it worked out different. i felt like it was a bit more special to me than my other coin. And oddly enough i changed the way i worked with it intuitively. Instead of trying to will it to break its coin-like loyalty to the laws of probability i decided it would "tell me" what it landed on after the fact before i looked at it. I had quite some success with this. I'm not going to push this intent too far because i feel like once again it would be breaking the laws of nature. But yeah... i'm just wondering what lessons i can take away from this experience. Like... it seems like we have to understand the rules of reality to shape it. Of course... maybe there are people who can will the coin to land on tails ten times in a row... but i don't think i have that kind of power personally. Also i know that part of me doesn't want that kind of power... for a multitude of reasons. Any comments on all this are appreciated.

Hi again, I'm curious how you all realized that recapitulation was a life changing practice. Like... did you realize that it was changing your life while you were in the midst of a recapping session or did things just start to change in your life and you knew somehow that it was thanks to the practice. Or maybe a bit of both? My meditations are always super profound but recapping feels more subtle for me so i'm quite curious about why so many people swear by it. I've been doing it for approximately 20 days and am quite committed to it. I have very recently experienced a possible change in vocation/artistic focus. I was very used to working in the medium of novels and short stories but suddenly decided i would try to write for film. I've always written it off as something i don't really care to learn how to do... so it is an interesting correlation. Even if i don't end up writing for film it's still an adventure to delve into something that's so new to me... even if i choose to walk away from it. Also, my creative brainstorming/story envisioning returned to me after what was about a year and a half hiatus. I knew that the creativity would return at some point but yeah... it's another interesting correlation. What kind of further changes could i anticipate.... like.... what part of the self does the recapping start to work on initially? Does the effect of the practice become more all encompassing of all aspects of life as one continues the recapitulation journey? Does it effect certain areas of life more than others? Thanks, Thomas

Thanks karl. My intent based recapping was actually working fine. I just happened to have read that one student didn't feel recapping was effective for clearing out intent specifically so it made me think that perhaps i was not doing it right. I personally didn't notice difficulty recapping intents but what you said above reassures me that recapping intents should be sufficient. I also read that when we complete a task/goal the intent invested into it returns to us. The stubbornness i mentioned was in reference to the embarrassment i was trying to clear. but i will try to lean into what you're saying about feeling out resistance around it and the bricks metaphor -Tom.

Thanks Cammie. It seems like it has less negativity associated with it after having done that many passes. As far as the forums go I only see four subjects. General Topics, Dreaming, Healing, and Shamanscave and the Makers

Hi All, Two queries 1) While i was recapping, a particularly embarrassing moment from my past came up and i decided i wanted to clear it out. This type of energy seemed particularly stubborn. I worked on it for at least five inhalations and five exhalations. This was the first time i felt compelled to go beyond one breath cycle regarding a memory. I'm guessing this is just because there's a lot of layers to something like embarrassment? I mean... by its very nature embarrassment seems to carry a lot of resilient power. It has this ability to chain you to one moment as though it were still alive within you, no matter how much time has passed and no matter to what degree you are no longer that same person who committed said social faux pas. But there's the whole element of being socially rejected, judging yourself, someone else judging you, perhaps even it may be more intense if someone else remembers your social blunder from time to time too. I don't know what i'm getting at by posting this. Like... why is embarrassment such a force to be reckoned with and are there similarly stubborn energetic situations that are comparable to this? Like trauma for instance. Or anything like that. 2) i've been following the spirals I class and we were learning about clearing broken intents from our past. By broken intents i mean like.... for instance... at one time i really wanted to start a community of people who aimed to usher in a better world via community building, resistance, direct action, healing and think tanks. I built a website, wrote a manifesto, etc etc . I poured a whole lot of effort into it and it just never got off the ground. So I figured i would just clear that out while recapping. However someone in the spirals class seemed to notice a distinction when they recapped intent. Like... he felt recapping wasn't as effective as using a different method we were prescribed specifically for clearing intent. Can we clear broken intents while we recap or this energy different somehow? I think the teacher said that when clearing intent it's more up and down than side to side movement and you didn't need to compress your energy with a blanket or small space. Yet he did not specifically recommend that we move our head up and down. so yeah. i'm a bit lost here regarding this subject. Thanks.

Eman and Cammie and Doug Thank you all. So including my compadre Stacey that is now four people telling me to do the recapitulation daily. so i started it today. I actually was recapping some interesting things. i feel like memory recall is important for me because my episodic memory is not very good. I think memory of my life gives me a bit of an anchor to the past in a sense which is important for me. Eman, you mentioned the recap class. I'm actually taking the spirals class right now. i missed the first class and am going to try to feel out if these classes are a good fit for me Cammie, you mentioned Castaneda. Which one of his books is the recap mentioned? I haven't read him in over a decade. Might want to revisit it. I like the string metaphor. Doug, thank you for sharing. I've actually kind of wanted to meet someone born at the same time as me and see if they have the same craziness going on in their life. lol. Hopefully i can heal in a similar manner to you. Fingers crossed. Stacey... i'll read your email in a little bit. HEyo! hi!

Hi Eman My IRL friend Stacey who referred me to this page has actually been recommending recapitulation to me for a while now. Honestly I tried to pick it up 3 or so times and dropped it after a week or two every time. So i guess i do have questions about it. What should I recap? Apparently one should not jump in and recap trauma. So then I just end up recapping whatever comes to mind as i'm recapping and that's why i don't feel motivation to continue the practice because i end up recapping like... buying a pretzel or something. And then something else will come to mind and i'll recap looking at someone's facebook pictures or something. It just seems kind of trivial if i'm not focusing on the moments when i lost significant amounts of energy..... as one would with trauma. I also use the stalking practice... or at least my own interpretation of it. That does help and i've done it here and there consistently over a long stretch of time. I remember there were like... 4 key elements according to the article on stalking. One of them was humor. The other ruthlessness? The others i do not remember. Humor is probably rather absent from my stalking. To me stalking is just doing unusual things to break one's habits of self towards the ends of freeing oneself from that small self. for a while when i was stalking i would get this point where i would shrug. That shrugging theme kept coming up. It was like... i was shrugging off something that's a big deal and not recognizing it as a big deal. but yeah... i never got to the root of what this shrugging really meant.

Hi. I struggle with recurring "psychosis". I have these recurring delusions (or at least i hope they are delusions). In these episodes i end up feeling like I am evil. It's a very complex and nuanced experience. The world around me feels very fake yet i am responsible for the suffering in it because that is apparently real somehow. It feels like i chose this life in the bardos that preceded this life... with ill intent. It's a very unassuming incarnation i've taken on. i am not overtly hurting other people but my lifestyle surely creates suffering on this planet. But that lack of overt wrong doings is used against me when the "condemnation narrative" as i call it sinks its teeth in. It's like i'm pulling strings behind the scenes... sustaining war and inequitable living conditions... with my mind/ subconsciously performed black magick or something. It's such a horrible feeling. These psychotic episodes are intense and i can be easily overstimulated being out in public and get really triggered. So I can barely leave my house for more than a half hour. I feel like i am hyper aware of the destruction happening on this planet. Every car that passes reminds me of how screwed we are if we don't all start to embody love and literal magick. I think about how each of these people i pass require thousands of acres of agricultural land and there's billions of them. I think about people's ignorance and their unwillingness to open their eyes and see that our way of living is outdated and threatens to destroy us. Also why out of all the consciousnesses i could have inhabited... a bird, an ant, a lion, another person. Why am I this very specific human being who overthinks consciousness? What are the chances? Why do I not see through the eyes of others? So my question is how to heal. I have been meditating every day for over two years. My meditations are consistently profound. i can feel energy shifting and i end up recalling a lot of forgotten memories from my life which feels very promising and grounding through recollections of a simpler time. These memories surface very vividly. Yet still.... the psychosis returns time and time again. Part of me feels like i need a teacher though. And genuinely wise/powerful teachers are rather rare in these parts. I have underwent a small handful of unofficial initiations but i need someone to work with more closely over a more extended period of time. I met an indigenous man in downtown Santa FE, New Mexico over thirteen years ago who said to me "i heard what you were saying over there. You're a spiritual warrior. You'll see the sky fill with demons. You'll beat them but don't fight them." He said it like... 30 or 40 times. "you're a spiritual warrior. You'll see the sky fill with demons. You'll beat them but don't fight them" I've seen a bit upwards of 10 healers and none of this cleared out all the chaos/darkness. 3 of them did their work for free. 1) One time i went to a woman and she said "you need mothering". She bid me to lay my head on her lap and i felt blanketed in the most loving energy. But no sooner did i silently say to myself "I wish i could stay here forever" that she stood up and said "You know what you need? You need a stick" And i said "oh i left one outside leaning up against the wall near the door" "I know" she said. Then she left and came back right away with this stick and it was glowing with white light. She handed it to me saying "This is your inner rod of light. No one can give this to you but yourself............. you're welcome." So my way of interpreting that is that either it wasn't really my rod of light..... or she was speaking through a non-dual perspective where she and i are actually the same. that it was myself giving it to myself. 2) I was at Alex Grey's CoSM volunteering so i was there before the first event. This man walked in. He was Mexican and like... well over 6'4" tall and his energy/presence just wowed me. anyway... it was made clear that he was a very powerful shaman. Many hours later as the night drew to a close he was walkiing through the crowd of hip looking spiritual young people and out the front door and i asked him "do you have any advice?" He said something like... "meet me here tomorrow morning at 930 AM and we'll talk" That next morning I talked to him mostly about intrusive disturbing thoughts since that was my main concern at the time. I was looking at his face and it was morphing and changing into these really ugly monsters. Apparently he knew what i was seeing because he said to me.... "When you see those... say Those Motherfuckers." I said "What are they?" He replied simply "They're Nothing." Then he led me into a trance state of some kind and at the perfect moment i felt him place the flat of his palm on the sternum of my chest and he moved his hand up and down (right where the Anahata chakra would be) and after ten seconds of this i burst into laughter as though i had just been told the most brilliant joke. To this day i have no idea what i was laughing about. So yeah... i've come to the conclusion that i could really use a teacher. I was invited to join a western esoteric mystery school but i also feel like i could use a shamanic practitioner. Like... someone who actually knows what they're doing. It's a bit of a catch 22 because i need to heal first before i can travel to a teacher... And hence i continue to meditate daily. Also the title of this post "Shamanic Futures" is just a hope that i have for this hopeless world. That people who are healers come together and strengthen each other's ability to comprehend and allow for magick. I often wonder if such a blessing is in the stars.

I'm kind of realizing over the past few days that i might need to practice stalking a lot since my issues are so complicated... but what do i stalk? healing? is that too general? I could also stalk the source of the darkness but i think that could kind of end up in a bad way. like... searching for a needle in a hay stack and being surprised when you prick your finger. i used to practice stalking a while back, several years ago... and it's like i picked up where i left off. if necessary i can explain how i've been stalking but i will keep this one brief because the last post was a tome.

I will begin by explaining my primary struggle: Sometimes (about once a week on average) I am overwhelmed by a solipsistic waking nightmare in which i am the only conscious entity and all the suffering in the world is my fault. It happens mostly in public places but sometimes it strikes at home. When i am hit with it I feel evil and pathetic. In it I am being given a choice. Accept the "knowing" that I am evil and punish myself or opt out of remembering my own lowliness and inherit a greater punishment. The idea behind it is that by sustaining my existence i am sustaining the horrors of this world. As an American i am dependent upon fossil fuels and plastic packaging and hegemony and cheap foreign wage slavery and what not. By destroying myself i would magically destroy these things. A lot of times there's white male guilt involved. Every time it happens it feels like the very end of the line. Yet It seems to one up itself every time. The sense of "knowing" i am evil is beyond disconcerting. This has been going on for arguably three or four years but i also had a similar theme about 8 or 10 years earlier in my life. In the earlier stages i was completely susceptible to it. I wasn't on anti-psychotics like i am now. I call it the condemnation narrative, though i used to call it "the shroud of pain". One time, In the earliest stages i was being told by some kind of entity to spin around in circles until my reality became hell itself. I'll never forget the one time when gripped by terror i started spinning clockwise and an entity of some kind ordered me to spin in the opposite direction. It was just like... NO. THE OTHER WAY. It was very important for some reason to do it widdershins (counter clockwise). I was so unaware of my surroundings that I literally fell through my father's glass coffee table putting a deep gash in my palm. I was bleeding everywhere. There's so much to tell about my journey... it's impossible to encapsulate it. But i will try to highlight some important moments. It probably started with a love triangle of sorts and FOOLISH power seeking. I was dating a woman and a male shaman she met introduced her to a ritual in my absence. She showed me the ritual one day. In it we both took off our shirts, sat cross legged before one another. Placed sage smudge ash on our foreheads and heart center, placed the flat of our right palm over each others hearts and stared into one another's eyes. We were to do this until we saw each other's face shift and blur and become that of our primary animal spirit totem. When i got home i did a version of the ritual in a mirror with myself. I began it by challenging the male shaman (stupid, ego driven, foolish). I saw the reflection of my face change into that of an angry wolf (the shaman's primary totem) looking back at me. My face in the mirror also changed into the woman i was dating and i watched as she got ripped away from me into another dimension. It also changed into a red faced demon who said "it's going to be hell for you". It felt like all the life energy had been sucked out of me after i was done and I passed out and woke up the next afternoon to literally 30 or more missed calls from the woman i was dating. She was going to visit her home country Azerbaijan for a lengthy time and was trying to reach me to change her mind. By the time I reached her it was too late. She had indeed been ripped away from me as i saw in the vision. I neglected to mention that After the ritual i felt like i was being followed by Something that did not have good intent. i also felt like i had a fox's ears and heightened sense of hearing. but the sensation of being followed by a specter was very real. I had other symptoms. i felt totally off. I got so bogged down by negative energies that eventually this all led me to go cross country to New Mexico via greyhound in search of a shaman. I had no plan or anything. I was just hoping it would fall into place by the grace of the universe. Which it kind of did... but definitely not like i'd imagined. On the way to new mexico i randomly got off the bus in a small town named Easton, Pennsylvania to return to my home in new york. but when i called my father he told me i couldn't come back. that if i really wanted to be a vagabond to try it out for "i don't know... a week or maybe a month". Anyway... i ended up running into a shaman woman one night in that small town. I saw her walking into a bar. I'm regularly quite shy about pursuing women... but this woman was glowing with white light and her aura was like... 20 feet tall like she was being followed by archangels. I NEEDED to talk to her. This woman became very important to my life. She introduced me to the moon blood mysteries and the goddess and eco feminism and shamanism in general. I also met a few brujos in New mexico when i finally got there about a month later. I'm not sure what they did to me, but at least one had targeted me. I have to leave a lot of details out unfortunately. there's just too much to cover. I also met an indigenous man there who told me "You're a spiritual warrior. You'll see the sky fill with demons. And you'll beat them but don't fight them." He said this to me about 50 times while we were holding eachother's wrists with our hands. He seemed like he really wanted to drill it into my mind and soul. But in california i hooked up with a shaman woman i found on the internet and she was excellent. She introduced me to a more benevolent power than what i was caught up in. It brought me to tears. I saw ganesha in a vision and i/she/we unblocked my svadisthana chakra and a river flowed up my spine. it was so beautiful. Words cannot describe the vividness of these healing visions. Also i had a few bad acid trips while i was in cali. i saw a demonic extra terrestial type woman with a crown of flowers and interlocking fangs take up the entire sky and she hated me SO much, just staring me down with pure hatred and finally i said to her “if you hate me such much then destroy me”. my whole body was shaking and she disappeared and a wolf's head flew into my heart chakra I have no idea how to interpret it. Was the wolf totem my reward? Was it my enemy? I don't know...... i even saw her the next day while sober. a man i was talking to in San Francisco was carrying A LOT of dark tension on one side of his body and i saw her head circling his feet. I told him " i feel like you have an angel on your right shoulder". He pulled back his shirt to reveal a tattoo of his late daughter with angel wings. The demonic woman's face disappeared. I met another powerful (very powerful) shaman while volunteering at Alex Grey's cosm. He didn't charge me for anything he did with me. Most notably he was holding my hand to "feel my nervous system" and his face was changing into ugly demons. Without me saying that i was seeing his face morph he told me "Whenever you see those i want you to say 'Those motherfuckers'. I asked him what they were and he replied "They're NOTHING." At one point in the healing, the culmination of it i suppose, he placed the flat of his palm on my heart and rubbed it vigorously and i broke out into hysterical laughter as though i had just been told the funniest joke ever, though I had no conscious knowledge of what I was laughing at. He also called me a "Bad ass angel warrior of light". Once again i have to leave a lot. I ended up meeting up with the woman from Pennsylvania again several years later and i set an intention to understand the blood moon mysteries of which she often spoke and it just totally blew me away. I wasn't expecting it to be so powerful. I saw it as peripheral but it turned out to be very central to my experience of her wisdom. At one point she told me i needed mothering and she let me lay my head in her lap. As soon as i said to myself "i wish i could lay here forever" she stood up and said... "you need a stick" she went outside and came back in with a stick and it was literally glowing with intense white light. She handed it to me and said "this is your inner rod of light. No one can give this to but yourself........... you're welcome." Another time i was staring at the word prayer in the gideons new testament and the text changed into an alien language, i was hearing people's prayers flood my mind and music so complex and layered and emotive that it could only be god's music and the entire room was shimmering with what i believe to have been the holy spirit. Words cannot describe. So yeah... super complex path I've walked. I've only scratched the surface. A lot of dark. a lot of light. a lot of vicious entanglements. But my main concern now is how to be able to function in the world without being overtaken by the "condemnation narrative"…. When it hits it just feels so awful. To say it again... it feels like i am the only conscious entity. All of my friends and family are illusions. No one loves me. God hates me. i'm killiing the world and i have to destroy myself. the world is beyond saving. this happens mostly when i am out in public. i'm very sensitive to things like car traffic and anything that is killing the earth. I generally react to it by shutting down stimuli. I'll lay down in my bed and just wait for it to pass. Sometimes i'll remind myself of good things i've done like donating to sick children and all sorts of causes and i'll remind myself about some of the light filled moments i mentioned earlier. The affirmations i've been given that I am on a light oriented path. But there's just so many ways i can relate to this condemnation narrative. I don't know how to approach it. I’ve been facing off with it for years but I don’t know how to approach it. I don't know how to heal.......... I really don't.