Death Practice Dreams 011
Ancestors Srotsecna
I’ve been playing around with instagram lately. It’s still annoying af & designed for competition & capitalism, but I thought i’d at least try and put a sanity option on the menu. I’ve been doing AMA’s (that’s ‘ask me anythings’) through stories and those are archived in the AMA category on my profile. I also filmed a 30 minute talk about the context we are in, ancestral ghosts, etc in the lead up to this Weds Death Practice Group:
Video
https://www.instagram.com/tv/CjvjBZoJIpc/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link
& Here’s some of the latest writing, collected here for archival purposes
Remember that things are complete as they are, including all the things you don't like and all the things you think need to be solved, fixed or healed.
Of course we all go on journeys of struggle (hope is really struggle in disguise) to change the way things are, but maybe all we are doing is rearranging the furniture of our minds. Perhaps that is fulfilling!Â
But we can also realize fulfillment right now, when we drop our ambitions, drop our preferences and see how they are often wastes of qi, exhausting us and leading us towards ghostliness.
At the exact same time, without competition, we can behave in ways that move us all toward mutual aid, solidarity, accessibility.
This is the generosity of The Mother whose Dream we all are. No one has ever been traumatized, and yet, it does appear that we have been. What a surrealistic reality.
Recognizing Now that you have never been hurt and you appear to have been hurt is one of the greatest revelations on the path.
Come back to this when you hear the screaming apparitions in the guise of your ancestors this coming season.
There is no spiritual tradition that can claim ownership of The Mother, of the capacity we all have that we have never lost, (only temporarily forgotten). All lineages can only lay claim to their specific customs and ideas on the path.
The domination and power status of "priest-class" started even before agricultural domination, debt and private property ideas.
I will say this again, proudly heretical, there are zero gatekeepers to The Mother, only those who either prey on those who have temporarily forgotten the way to her, or who act to defend their lands and ideas from colonizers and immature people.
When you give fealty to others, you are in some regards playing out the fall from grace that our ancestors lived, the ignorance and confusion of trading some kind of energy for a narrative of belonging and specialness (exhausting qi via creating of false concepts).
I love all my teachers, but I do not love them in the many co-dependent ways that are deemed appropriate by the wounded minds of our current social paradigm.
All my best teachers wanted me to be liberated, not 'defer' to them, but to use the gifts The Mother has given all of us to discern how to behave in an egalitarian way.
Some people are not ready for this level of responsibility.
heres a working list of things i do and have done to think/perceive the way i do. i come from a pretty normal background --- poverty, depression, anxiety, no college, lots of illnesses, addiction etc.
my saving grace was probably the things that also screwed me up, which was animistic perception i couldn’t control until my late 30s, hearing voices, seeing things, waking dreams, very intense nightmares etc.
but i’m not special, not any more than anyone else. everyone has their own fate, which includes all the inheritances they received, some which are concentrated, some which are diffuse. we still need to develop skill, theres no shortcut for practice.
ok heres MY list that i did/do with zero entheogen info because the public isn’t trustable with that relationship:
think like comic books, sci fi, speculative fiction, fabulism, surrealism, magical realism etc. learn to look at the world like that.
dont believe anyone (including yourself) at face value. always keep it open to investigation. be like a spiritual detective.
question everything. every time you think in terms of certainties, opposites or binaries, break that open into more than two. this definitely includes your gender.
develop a deep listening practice. listen through your skin not just your ears.
learn as much as u can about real nutrition which includes historical and anthropological data. u cant think well if your brain is made of shitty polyunsaturated fats that are rancid and denatured proteins. learn which foods you shouldn’t eat, this requires extensive tracking. have activated charcoal pills on hand so you can curb the damaging effects of indigestion when u are figuring it all out and experimenting.
learn to practice your art/spirituality when you rest and sleep/dream. this opens up your self esteem and potential.
practice some kind of comedy improv. clown, stand up, musical theater, whatever.
with that, learn to sing, just because.
develop better and more ways of self-talk. life is hard enough without listening to bad advice. don’t be that person.
become your own boss as soon as possible. find something you can charge for that you are good at that people will pay for. stop making bosses rich.
whatever the things are that you think you cant live without, go on occasional fasts from those things. food, sex, tv, email, media, drugs, love, etc. prove to yourself that the substance/craving isn’t stronger than you are.
get out of bad relationships as fast as possible and don’t look back. u can apologize later when your life isn’t a mess. (never, ever expect forgiveness from others. ever. apologies aren’t time machines.)
learn how to move biomechanically. this does include learning a bit of strength training so that you can move biomechanically under stress and load. be able to move down to the floor and get back up dozens of ways, with and without assistance. learn to roll around, crawl, skip, move backwards, balance with eyes closed, etc. move in uncommon ways like our hunter gatherer ancestors.
(here's two tips when walking: Head Over Foot & Inside Ankle Bone High)
learn massage, even if u only use it on yourself.
work with kids for a while but get out before you become too poor or too sick, it ain’t worth it economically/immunologically in the long run.
these things will clear up 70-80% of trauma, ghosts, ancestral nonsense.
the rest of the issues we all have require more in-depth study and practice and collaboration, such as death practice, ritual, specialized medical help and cultural/political anthropology married with some kind of real life activism (disability justice, queer ecology, mutual aid, harm reduction, etc).
but tbh, most ppl are focusing on the latter without having enough base in all the stuff i wrote up above. if u don’t understand nutrition and cant move well, its gonna be really difficult to show up in real community (i am not talking about being ableist and classist, i’m saying you must work your own edges and expand your capacity with whatever constraints you have). if you think in binaries its gonna be brutal doing death practice, etc.
*remember that almost all of our species-wide intractable issues come from: the invention of private property stemming from agriculture (which includes debt/credit) & the cultural installation of patrifocal societal structures that broke up matrifocality!!!! these are why people get fucked up. What we can do is harm reduction and fight against these problematic systems.
sharing and/or donating helps me help more ppl and keeps the free stuff free
www.thenightgarden.substack.com
Death Practice Group #5 Ancestors, The Straight Dirt, is This upcoming Weds Oct 19th 2022 4pm PST.
an attempt to remedy or at the very least give an alternate worldview about trauma, epigenetics, fate, karma etc.
and remember:
