How dream relates to deathpractice & deathclown

a brief explainer

Mar 10, 2025

As I’m starting my patreon, which acts a level 2, stacked and nested in the calendrical jie qi and ganying principles that I talk about monthly here on the substack, I wanted to briefly tell you why I’m doing this now, in this year, and why the offerings that are specifically based on deathpractice and deathclown are not being overtly talked about or offered.

The major reason is that the qi quality of 2025, the yin wood snake, is extremely favorable for the practice of Daoist dreamwork, which differs in my understanding and experience from other methods of dream practices that I won’t go into in depth here.

Daoist dream practice as learned from Ming, offers a fundamentally secure base, that when paired with non-conceptual meditation, nutrition, bathing, breathing and movement hygiene (all the Involuntaries I’ve written about before) offers a better on-ramp to the kinds of intense inner and outer phenomena that are naturally discovered and played with in deathpractice and deathclown.

The second, connected reason is an overall lack of maturity in the culture at large, especially when working with material related to Pain, Fear, Hunger and Death, as well as Freedom, Pleasure and Power. In order to create and sustain the kind of internal and external communities and ecologies that many people say they want, I have witnessed that there is a large knowledge & awareness gap between How people practice and What they practice, that is rooted in Wrong Story.

That is also why I have recently refined my overall model with the Story, State, Action Model that I will be unfolding in layers as the year moves along, and hopefully doing some short workshops on it. The first scheduled is for Kaila June’s IMS school on Friday May 16. Reach out if you have a group container that wants to host this.

Because deathpractice and deathclown require mature people who can hang out in states of confusion in nondual, dignified ways, while also consistently making tiny experiments and dialogues, I felt I needed to back way up, towards a hyper-remedial ecosystem that could deal with the numerous karmic/ancestral/cultural tendencies that people come to relationship with.

Unfortunately, no one likes the idea of being remedial or immature, except for those folks who know what their own immaturity has cost them. In a society such as the west (and the places it has colonized), where addiction, narcissism, cults and abuse are rampant and normalized, I had to figure out how to hold the work that my teachers and ancestors gave to and inspired in me, without submitting to the pressures of an audience and culture who demand identitarian validation, consumption and extraction.

I also have had to come to even more stark and brutal terms with my own health and karma, as it relates with being essentially ground down into paste the last 5-10 years, making all sorts of egregious compromises (that didn’t feel so bad at the time but turned out to be very harmful) based on capitalism engineered ancestral poverty, loneliness and pain. The Covid vaccine also did not help matters, but in a weird “resolving karma via negativity” way it has.

In short, I am exhausted and dying, but that is not special or exceptional. I still want to be generous and be in community, even as I feel it in my blood that there is no nourishing community obviously available to me and my ancestral braids. I have had to choose some form of housing stability over regional/cultural diversity and that is a me-problem as well as an us-problem. It is no use complaining about, and I practice feeling grateful, while simultaneously being honest about the anger, sadness and mismatch that has no determinable end other than dying.

Of course, any written description of my feelings on this matter will ultimately be incomplete and misinterpreted, as that is the bardo-samsara of our modern era.

So, with that, perhaps poetry can act as a palate cleanser:

"Gold Shadow"
by Asaf Avidan, from their book “To Love Another - Selected Songs”
chosen via bibliomancy
There's a gold shadow seeping through the door
There's a cold sparrow lying still upon the floor
Dead and true as lipstick
Slow as the speed of skin
There's a gold, gold shadow growing from within

There's a bent willow in the moonlight painted blue
There's a spent window silhouetting you
Deep and true as whiskey
Soft and sure as lies
There's a bent, bent willow reflecting in your eyes

But now there's a girl out in a boat
Her arms are outstretched and she's barely afloat
There's a man on the shore, a rope in his hands
It's tied to the boat, and he's pulling as hard as he can
Not to bring her to him, but to pull the whole shore
And the whole world with it to her open door
All his voices are her
All his voices are her
Has he been here before?
Nobody's sure

There's a silver distance, a luminescent glimpse
There's a river of resistance, dried to cracks upon your lips
Brittle as believing
Sticky as betrayal
There's a silver distance opening up like a trail

There was a time before all the leaves
Covered the beauty of Adam & Eve
And they were blind, and they were free
To be whatever they wanted to be
But now they are just a prayer in a song
And he is so sorry for all that went wrong
All his voices are her
Has he been here before?