Year Death/Birth Glow Up part one
TIGERBABYDELUXE
winter solstice technically isn’t the end of the year. January is, at least in an animist sense. the new year starts when spring begins (in February, around the 4th).
that being said, this post and the next few posts will be a kind of recap and preview of coming attractions. this is a long one so probably won’t completely show up in email form.
let’s start by expanding a piece of writing called…
2022 Year End Lessons
you must let ppl go on their ghost journey, do not try to save them from their gravity.
this includes yourself. do not pretend. encounter hell on purpose lest you become another dishonest fool wearing emporer’s new clothes. what you think you have won will come back to haunt you when you decide to become sober.
pain, fear and hunger are the best allies and wisdom gates.
do not bargain with ghosts. even if that means you die. if you do bargain, u must pay the price.
you will lose more and more until you decide to lose loss itself.
there is freedom without forgiveness. your emotions are portals beyond narrative meanings. addiction to emotional meaning is praised yet craving validation will keep you addicted.
you have no friends or family. this is freeing and leads to more honesty and mutual benefit behaviors. frees you up to be more generous with less residue and resentment. you aren’t owed anything nor do you owe anyone else anything. redemption comes from completely destroying (redeeming-transforming) the ghost you thought was your personality and endebted history. afterwards, your personality is more interesting anyway. no loss or sacrifice is recorded. it only feels that way when you are peeling off the scabs.
ask yourself often: what bardo/dream am i in right now? then, craft a list via experience of what actions to do and not do in that realm. learn on purpose.
every so often, close your eyes, visualize/remember your entire body as space itself, and let whatever trapped or inhibited qi movements unravel. do not ascribe meanings to this practice. just totally experience the full arc and dissolution of the impulses. do not care about healing or resolution. just play before concepts and goals.
even if the absolute worst things happen to you or others, this is all a dream and no trauma is actually permanent. only listen and take council from those ancestors that exist according to this truth. if you cannot hear those ancestors when you take a single breath, or look at a rock, or when you drink water, you aren’t yet past beginner stage in practice.
sigh. deep breath. burn whatever you think you need to and probably a bunch of shit you think you have to keep in this digital firepit
it’s been a hellrealm of symptoms for me the last few weeks/month (what even is time anyway) - i suffer(ed) from severe brainfog & neuro-inflammation that made my already very limited clarity and energy even more limited. i wonder if this is some of what being very old or having alzheimers feels like, the onset of being truly on the edge of no control. short term memory issues, clumsiness, fatigue, increased pain, lack of motivation, lack of clarity, “ADHD”… the list of so-called negative symptoms is long. could barely write a single coherent sentence most days.
the neuro-inflammation might be caused by histamine reactions to digesting food, perhaps some co-factor side-effect from having internal viruses/parasites/protozoa that use this fleshbag as a home. i started to take a generic zyrtec 24hr pill and that seems to have helped a bit, a long with some other anti-histamine pre-mealtime ezymes etc etc e t c e t e r a a a a a a $$$$$
i speak often on how there’s a possibility that the next day or the next moment will essentially kill the being you thought you were/are. each moment is death practice (that is the universe practicing, regardless of your consent), each moment the qi that shapes you may take a new shape, radically different than the shape before. if we are paranoid about that, we are nearly guaranteed to become a ghost before we die, and carry that ghosthood into the dying realms.
it is frustrating to be sick, but in some ways it is frustrating to be alive, in a body, doing doing doing, trying trying trying, grasping grasping grasping. the constant propping up of “supposed to’s” and “deserves” and “owed” and “rights” is a race to the bottom, an almost perfect fishing lure to hook the most pernicious karmas yet to be untied. those karmic knots? those are a large part of who we believe ourself to be, our personality, our preferences, our pet peeves, our mission statements, our activist injustices, our traumas, our soap opera main character narratives.
as i lingered in my memories, the winter solstice blanketing me with the snow of decay, i was able to see a bit more clearly of how utterly futile and stupid my fate is, and yet how perfectly appropriate it is to give an opportunity at completely obliterating all ancestral karma in a single pitiful human lifetime.
these are not the conversations of social media, not the conversations of capitalists and individualists, burning carbon and kundalini until their bodies and the land body we all are in is a smoldering husk of cheap toys. this is not really memeable, the way we have trained ourselves to believe that every skill and experience and achievement can be boiled down to a free facebook post that takes only 3 minutes to both read and completely comprehend. and when we don’t get that hit of instant aggrandizement, well, the person who didn’t spoon-feed us exactly what we wanted is fair game for cannibalism. it’s only JUSTICE after all!
so, this is why i teach what i teach, the way i teach it, and it takes some real effort and real respect to actually sit down, listen and become correctable. not pliable, not another cultic flunky sucking at the teat of wise, wealthy, special gurus with houses on stolen land. not just another vampire cannibal misquoting black female collectivists.
enraging side quest!
article: The Dangers of Courage Culture and Why Brene Brown Isn’t For Black Folk
follow up video to article:
some of my associated ephemera related to the above:
An Exorcism
THE BLOOD WAS MOVING
backwards
under a thick sky, containing ghost birds
your stomach tickles and when you run your hand over that spot, something unwieldy moves inside.
fascinated and terrified you discover that you have always been a large bag of snakes.
pregnant without a donor, the world is revealed to always have been going on without you:
a viral field of main character syndromes instantly vaporize into the red mist that they came from or that has just appeared to make it seem so.
you scream "i am dreaming" but what is heard is "i have never existed"
now, the fool living rent free in the conch shell called your head has had enough! sweating bullets from their flower petal eyes.
they uncinch their gunnysack and begin to assemble a red glass knife and a halo of black holes on vacation. in the midst of this furious making a lost postcard is found, then lost again, and an entire history about a desert people who wove sacred rugs to dance on is heard and released back into the wild unmapped sinkhole of the heart.
somewhere in the wide pink distance you fight a bloody war against a shadow puppet called "a god", while another presence watches languidly from its sprawled repose, enjoying seeing this episode for the sixtieth time it can remember.
you think to yourself and the fool, "this must be important, i must remember this symbology in order to", but the finish line of your thought shambles up from the dust and saunters away. the fool makes note, carving the record into its gelatinous skin which heals over without a trace.
a man in an old timey football helmet snaps at you for laughing at another player's comment about only wanting to "get to the combos", interpreting your laugh as some kind of derogatory slur about the laugher's supposed "disability". you hate how stupid people are and tell them so, and the stupid man says your anger proves how ableist you are. you know you are fighting with demons so you focus your attention on the syrupy juices of the jumbo sized apple pie that has been cut open by the coach, leaving the stupid man to continually murder himself with his delusions.
the bag of snakes you are knows this is the way it always is.
A Reminder
click the image to read Gregory’s article on this woo year woo because we are still in it for another twenty days
A Coda
Donations are REALLY REALLY REALLY helpful, nay, imperative at this point in the game. I’m working on re-designing entire frameworks of learning, which will require creating new categories and coherent narratives. You want systems thinking, deep ecology, queer ecology, disability justice, animism, nondual frameworks?
www.paypal.me/daresohei
It also helps to share all the free content. If it helped you, it will probably help someone else.
I have an archive of interviews with Nora Bateson, Jeremy Johnson, Sophie Strand, Rune Rasmussen from Nordic Animism, Peter Michael Bauer of Rewild Portland, Rachael Rice, and more, with new interview series continuing with Bree Greenberg LMFT & John Anderson DAOM.
Death Practice Group News
In January I am adding a new Night Garden Death Practice session each month (at least that’s the plan, if there aren’t enough sign ups i will have to cancel and re-think). The details are here. The session is 2 hrs, Practice & Troubleshooting focus, no new content other than what i improvise, donation based, open to anyone who has attended any previous DPG or bought a recording. All the details are at the registration link.
And if you want the no BS nondual praxis, come to death practice group.
DPG #8 is happening weds Jan 25th Click this to Register.
or purchase recordings (instructions here). I’m not sure how many people understand how constricted and compromised most “healing”, “social change” and “therapeutic” offerings actually are, and how little real practice goes on in most courses, both online & in-person. To the beginner, everything appears complex and expert-level magical. But to the intermediate or advanced practicer, most offerings are stunted and remedial, like being forced to stay in elementary school when your capacity has grown. The constant catering to remedial skill level does us all as a culture a disservice, as we rarely ever get to witness people operating at the edge of their skill without collapsing and hurting themselves or others, much less group containers that require people to step up into personal and collective responsibility instead of just craving conceptual understanding and chasing certifications.
In other event related news, Animist Arts is presenting at Rewilding Conference Jan 21-23. Saturday is our presentation, Sunday is an open space workshop. All online. Registration at the link.
Thats the end of this episode!
