Tag: shamanism

Child, Heal Thyself: Angels, Ancestors, & Spirits of Place

Reverend JanglebonesLeave a comment

When I first began sputtering out heretical medieval prayers in dim candlelight over poorly drawn copies of differently poorly drawn abstract squiggles and trying myself in knots straining to relax my mind enough to make out the subtlest of angelic imagery and messages, I genuinely had no idea what the hell I was doing.

When I first set up an ancestor shrine and began an elevation with no preparations or research other than the gut feeling that it needed done and that first night when that bowl of soup, by that time lukewarm for hours, split down the middle with a soul shattering crack– I had no idea what the hell I was doing or getting myself into then, either.

And those times in the end it all worked out. I learned a lot. There have been plenty of other times though, where it didn’t quite work out so well, times when I was afraid to utter even a prayer for months and swore off any intentional spirit contact whatsoever. But I also lost a lot of time, not from my mistakes, or these quiet periods of healing in between bruises, but from the innumerable opportunities for progression which I simply didn’t have the bandwidth to notice. Likely thanks to a constant assessment of whether or not I was doing it right and the energy spent on the continuous search for someone else by which to measure these repeating assessments.

The truth turned out to be much simpler than I imagined. Once upon a time there was an anxiety leading up to every ritual which was mostly based on assumptions about how things should go while doing my magic. I used to be afraid to leave where I stood or break my attention away from what I was doing, even for a minute. Perhaps I was mistaking everything but grimoire spirits for grimoire spirits? It’s hard to say. But nowadays I don’t even hesitate to catch the planetary prayer to open the ritual with five minutes to spare then take a break to prepare should the need arise, and it often does because these days I run a lot on intuition and instinct. In fact the one thing I am now sure of that I wish like hell I had figured out way earlier is that almost every time I was worried that I hadn’t prayed enough lately, that I had been slacking on the attention I had been giving spirits, that I wasn’t a real magician if I wasn’t doing this way or that way, that a lot of these times in question the spirits involved absolutely could not give a shit one way or another what the fuck I was doing.

After long enough, I started sinking into myself more, figuring out that I still have to be me. Even when I’m at my best. And that’s, well, it’s something all right.

Worrying that I hadn’t prayed enough lately came from the false belief that there is some sort of pious expectation that exists in the world independent of my unique relationship to prayer and the spirits to whom I pray, which is understandable for someone with a Christian upbringing, but also objectively insane, at the worst, and at best simply not a functional, relational, animist way of thinking.

Worrying that I had been slacking on the attention I had been giving the spirits with whom I worked came from a couple of places- The first and most obvious being the classic fear of abandonment, as it is the plight of those terrified of being left in the dust who distort themselves in order to keep the company of another. And the second source of this projection came from the fear that doing what I now know and practice as correct, that is the intuitive freedom of relinquishing all expectations of consistency, would get me into trouble due to an unnoticed discrepancy between what is expected and what is given. I was scared my spirits would feel cheated and be mad, but it’s more than that. This is a fear of being replaceable and unimportant, even to those one works with intimately. Which sounds a lot like retail or the service industry, to be quite honest.

This is the demon of anxiety that possesses us at the crossroads where the affects of the industrial revolution and 40+ years of psyop and MK research meet up in the commercial breaks in our Saturday morning cartoons. These roads, paved before we arrived, host the car crash of our expectations and our lives of infinite dreams and limited servitude. The result of this, aside from general malaise, is the norm that we do not understand what is expected of us until it is too late.

This is the mechanism of bureaucracy. This is a picture of an authoritarian abuse cycle and, not merely poorly drawn and maintained personal boundaries and comprehension of one’s expectations, but also the overseers systemically assuring that these metaphysics could not thrive even if they were somehow brought into the light of day as realities- That is to say, we don’t ever feel we know what is expected and the consequences of admitting that could be worse than pretending. I was projecting this mess onto my spirits and worrying that they weren’t getting enough frankincense. Seriously, I must’ve looked like a metaphysical ball of yarn.

Which brings me to one of the most important messages I ever received from an angel: Child, heal thyself. Which has been pretty much what I have been doing for several years now. Just cleaning out pipes and gutters in the temple of my life, all the charged moments that hold a person back from being here, now.

A lot of those were mine, but in equal measure they have turned out to be the moments, the wounds of the dead. Not just those blood-related to me, but also those with whom I share land and place. It was a process with no guardrails and no one with a method that worked for me as most required journeying in one’s mind, but with the sheer volume of spiritual and emotional static I was subject to on the daily there was no hope of me successfully doing the necessary work through these methods. What followed was, when etched out with other techniques and areas of practice and out of sheer necessity, became my Magical Fortitude: Ancestors & Place course which I have been facilitating for over a year now in private groups.

The idea that one single source of one’s unease may exist is almost surely a wrong one, thus it becomes necessary for us to cover our bases if we want to exist in a state of mental peace, stability, and equanimity. Another immutable aspect of this full-spectrum relationship-mending process is our relationship to the often already abused and ignored spirits of the land. This troubled aspect can be daunting, however as strong and foreign as they can be there seems to be an element of them simply wishing to exist in the wider human perception, a strikingly understandable desire.

Not long ago my wife, the priest of this parish, and I went for a walk out on the path behind our house. There had been machines going all day long, clearing brush and doing their seasonal trimming. She had a lot on her mind that day and the conversation, and our minds, were focused on very human things. So much so that we didn’t even notice one of our cats mewing at the ground as if he was in mourning, with such sadness, and pissing little trickles on all the cut ivy and wildflowers, just a bit at a time, as if an offering or a medicine.

We walked past the 800+ year-old church where she performs services and down the long lane with giant old trees flanking either side and talked about how shitty it was that they cut down one of the trees back there behind the house. How it was an older one and it definitely wasn’t something that had to go. We talked about how she was the caretaker of the people here and I was learning to be the caretaker of the spirits, how we made the perfect team.

Later that evening while watching TV I had deja vu. Instead of letting it pass it was surprisingly easy to sort of grab it like I often do when a fragment of a dream memory flashes across my mind and follow it. The oddest thing happened then. I followed it, not to somewhere in the imaginal, or to some invisible abstraction from another place, but through our very living room and to the front door of our house. When my attention arrived there I was overwhelmed with the feeling of both an old friend and a callous enemy who cared nothing for our well being, simultaneously.

My eyes began to stream tears and my whole body perked up with goosebumps. My wife’s wide eyes mirrored my own and she was crying too. She described to me the exact same scene and feeling and action that I was experiencing- Someone barging into our home with zero regard for our existence.

This kept repeating as if stuck in a time loop, as if the moment was trying to fully happen and couldn’t. Just there in limbo, with our space being violated.

And then it hit us. The tree, the cat, the proclamation that I was a caretaker of this place and it’s spirits.

I shifted my attention to the felled tree and the meadow behind our house and everything else also shifted. The anger turned in an instant into utter anguish. It was the consolation-less agony of one who was deeply wronged and remained invisible, the feeling of being stepped on and forgotten.

What came through me was entirely out of my control. It was a moaning, a wailig. I wept like a mother who lost a child with emotions which were not my own. They came hard and fast, but they were not angry or violent as they had initially threatened. The immense release that came through me was a deep purple-black, like the ashes of royalty.

And then it was over- A fact that was almost just as unbelievable as it happening in the first place.

My wife was watching, breathless. I told her with puffy face and a scope of perspective which I am still processing now, two months later, that “It just needed to be seen.” And she immediately put the rest together. That we must have felt just like the spirit of the meadow did, intruded upon, disregarded, with someone busting down our door and nobody giving a shit how horrible that was for us. That it registered as a frightening alien and also an old friend simultaneously, echoing the lost relationship between the people here and it’s spirits of place and the resulting apocalyptic landscaping. That in it’s moment of need all logic would suggest the spirit of the land would, when in duress, seek out as witness (and a release valve for their trauma) the person who not only believes in them, but also regularly gives offerings and thanks to them. And that even if someone is bigger, stronger, and unfathomably older than you, sometimes even they just need to be seen, heard, held.

And going back, what would have happened if my mind had been so cluttered with self doubt and logical assessments of progress that I had missed that deja vu altogether? At the very least it would make me a sub-par caretaker.

There is no manual for this experience. No matter how many more books I made myself read I could not have been prepared for this experience, and it seems that most of the worthwhile ones show up in a similar fashion.

I’ve tried to run with this idea in the course work, providing a sort of fuzzy formula while encouraging personal alterations and insisting that the individual trusts their intuition as the final say. While there are formulaic methods provided in the course which are tried and true for elevating the dead, caring for a cairn to the land spirits, and cutting out unhelpful spirits, the experience of feeling out what works for you and what doesn’t (with community support and without anyone telling you you’re wrong) can be just as valuable as the actual work itself.

If you’re interested in cutting out some of the unhelpful static and intrusive thoughts, or if you feel called to commune with the land, or even if you just want a framework by which to improve your fundamentals of practice, myself and a slew of other course graduates and participants are here with open arms and ears to witness one another go through the process of healing thyself. Because when I think back on how uptight I was about everything, and how badly I wish someone would have just told me it was cool, that I could relax and do whatever moved me because the heart is a magnet, and not everything was trying to eat me, well it’s difficult to want to do anything else.

MAGICAL FORTITUDE: ANCESTORS & PLACE

(Post art by Kazuki Okuda)

Story Time: My Bloody Baptism

Reverend Janglebones6 Comments

Part of digging one’s way through the rust and mud to a magical life is reaching back to those profoundly wyrd experiences which have occurred in one’s past but we’re potentially glossed over or not met with the same willing, open eyes with which one currently seeks the numinous. I know that I, personally, tend to find as much (or more) insight and inspiration from processing the accounts and experiences of other practitioners who I would consider to be peers as I do from practical texts. For these reasons I thought it would make sense to share another story.

I had just moved to New Orleans and was ironing out the kinks in a set of all-new songs using vocals, guitar, drum machine/beatboxing, synth, and base loops which I would record, layer, and mix on-the-fly into gritty indie jams. It would be my first performance in this unbelievable city as well as my first ever performance under my newly-chosen moniker, which was not just another band name to me, but a declaration of intent; a magical act that would have precisely undefined, but self-evidently real consequences.

Having spent eight-ish years prior to this in a locally successful five-piece band back in Florida, I had noticed that as our local popularity had grown, so had my wondering about the efficacy of what I was doing as a means for doing good. I struggled with the idea that many people out there dancing couldn’t hear the desperate cynicisms and ironic empathies within my words for the cacophony of booze and personal demons that always seem so empowered for most trauma and ghost-haunted humans when they find themselves wading through the swamps of social gatherings. 

For me, the whole point of writing, composing, practicing, and performing music was to do something inherently good for others (it definitely wasn’t for the money), and while there were some who went out of their way to express that what I was doing really did mean a lot to them or helped them in some way, mostly what arose were meal-opportunities for personal demons and sickly social dynamics by means of addictions, both chemical and emotional.

So by the time I had moved to New Orleans this had all been fermenting inside for some time, and the trimming season I spent in NorCal that led up to my move provided plenty of time to ruminate away from writing and performing and that whole world. I was still pretty sure I wanted to make music as my primary output at that point, but I didn’t want the words to get lost anymore, and I needed to pinpoint the exact gears that made what I was doing helpful for others and focus on them. 

So the tempo dropped and the sound became more moody and communicative as opposed to dancey, a choice that may have been an unknown cowardice on my part all along. And after an uncomfortable period of analysis and contemplation I began to feel that what I was really offering which was of-worth was the permission to feel anything without judgement that seemed to permeate the audience when I performed. When there’s a skinny drunk screaming his heart into a can up there, you, as an audience member, have zero chance of being the most obnoxious/ridiculous-looking/crazy/likely-to-be-hated person in the room, because that’s my job and you can be as weird as you like without fear. In my mind, that was so beautiful. A tiny martyrdom. A minor shamanism. And that became my answer.

Loop pedal stuff with drummer Michael Murphy

Now that I finally knew what I was obviously supposed to do with my entire life, it needed a name. There is a concept a roommate told me about which I found on a Feng Shui website around that time called Sha. It was defined as harmful energy, the Chi that is present when people are angry or when a place has a threatening feel to it. Immediately I heard Issac Brock’s Ugly Casanova side project echoing in my ear “SHA SHA SHA SHAAAA” and it struck me as fun that these two contradictory feelings would be tied to the same three-letter word. But then it occurred to me that this idea of dispelling Sha was essentially the same mechanism of creating an emotionally safe place for the audience which I’d just, quite dramatically, identified as foundational to my craft, and the pseudonym Sha Sha Shaman was born.

Now, I feel I must contextualize that at this time in my life I had no magical education. I had my own occasionally-functional grassroots brand of Castaneda-inspired psychonautical shamanism, but my depth of study and practice was that of a teacup. An observation which is, in all honesty, still true, albeit nowadays a travel thermos may prove a more apt metaphor. The point is that my ignorance as to the cultural specificity and significance of the two terms involved, and the subsequently less-than-graceful appropriative line-walking contained therein, are not lost on me. My bad.

So back to the show, the first show under this declarative new name. I meant it to be just that, a pronouncement of my intentions to help, to serve, and to enjoy myself at the same time. I held a simple, small ceremony, which for me at the time was a pretty big deal, to commemorate the occasion before heading to the bar and I remember getting that hyperthick feeling in the air, one I was familiar with, but not yet intentionally. When it was time for my set I hurried to finish my beer and get another one, plus water, for the set and choke down a cigarette as I checked all my levels. Loop pedal work is absolutely ruined if your volumes aren’t dialed-in by NASA (or equivalent) and the dials on my pedal made it possible to adjust these, if necessary, while performing, however shoes were too bulky and socks too slick, so to do so required bare feet for the sake of traction. I tossed my shoes to the side and began to emotionally prepare. The sound guy gave me the go-ahead from his little booth and I remembered there was one little detail I had forgotten to mention to him which, to be honest, I cannot even recall now. So I intended to hop off the stage, take two steps to approach and deliver the message, then return to the stage and play a set so fantastic that they name a fucking parade after me. What happened was different. 

I hopped down off the stage and was greeted, not with the familiar cold and sticky grime of a New Orleans dive bar floor, but with screaming pain from the arch in my left foot. I had quite literally looked before I leapt, but the dark of the bar and the beer I had been breathing rendered my best self-preservative intentions moot. I hopped on my good foot over to the sound guy and delivered the original message, too drunk to feel shame, and told him I needed to “fix my foot real quick.”

I sat in a chair and a friend came over with a cup and began collecting the dripping blood from my glass wound to keep the bar from becoming a hazmat zone, all red mixing with remnant beer foam. It was this moment that a man I’d never seen before, or since, saw what had happened. His eyes lit up and he walked very slowly and deliberately over to where my friend and I were sitting while praying under his breath and making the sign of the cross. He never broke eye-contact with me as his own eyes became wider and he dipped his finger in the blood-foam cup, which my friend still held, and continued to pray as he marked a cross of booze and blood upon my forehead and gestured as if to signify some sort of honor had been bestowed. I taped a bar napkin tightly around my bleeding foot and hopped back up onstage and played my whole set with that bloody cross on my head (and rather well for someone using foot pedals and having only one foot, if I do say so myself.) When I was finished the man was nowhere to be found.

The actual glass.

In the months following this performance I would slide into addiction, a demon I knew I had within but had been effectively avoiding. It would begin a process that would take years, the process of being shaman-ned by the universe through the process of finding true bottom, dismantling everything that I was, losing most of my human relationships, and eventually overcoming addiction in a way that means true liberation, rather than the approach of institutional rehabilitations which hold as a core tenet the impossibility of that liberated state and offering treatment to the symptoms of a deeper, spiritual issue rather than the issue itself. 

Looking back, I believe that this declarative ritual on my part, and the unpredictable mystery of the world meeting me halfway to significate the experience by means of a bloody forehead-cross barroom-baptism, was the initiation of that horrific but necessary journey. Sure, I could have white-knuckled it for the rest of my life, always having within me that desire for feel-good drugs above all other things, people, and experiences, pulling my consciousness partly away from being present and embodied and leaving me bitter about the banality of so-called normal human existence, but it’s unequivocally better this way. 

I never would have been capable of maintaining the relationships I now have in my life, human and non-human, without that journey. I thought I was supposed to be doing what I was doing, believed it with my soul, and I was right about the structure, just not the specifics. I declared that I would give myself to the service of sanctity and the betterment of the Whole, and that call was answered with an intensive psychospiritual training program and eventual promotion.

For the time I have left on Earth as this self, I get to be fully present. I long for little that is damaging now, and I do not fear myself or my own judgement. I get to be whole. I get to be a husband, a mentor, and hopefully a father. 

All this from a noob with a purpose.

I don’t want to sum this story up with some catchy little moral, because there isn’t one. But I will say that I don’t look at people who appear stuck as lost anymore, knowing that I seemed completely hopeless to all outsiders at certain stages in my life and would have probably slapped someone if they’d told me that one day my passion for music would migrate to spiritual practices. Paths don’t diverge in the wood on their own, we must participate in the approaching of the forks and accept, with open eyes and arms, the unfathomable possibilities we call to us when we act with meaning and heart. It is interesting though, to think that sometimes we may be auditioning for a much bigger role than we realize due to the potential in us that can only been seen at the current time, by spirits.

I just wanted to share, in case it reminds a reader of a time they need to go back and properly venerate within their own lives. These moments are our plot points, our nodes, and they simply can’t be shared or studied enough. For practical gain, yes, but also for pure enjoyment and fellowship.

Until next time. ❤

It’s Personal

Reverend JanglebonesLeave a comment

It’s been a while. How have you been? I’m sorry I’ve been so bad about keeping in touch. It’s been a very strange year. I’m sure you can relate if you’re also human. I imagine we’ve all been going through some deeply personal experiences in myriad forms, both outside, and in, irrevocably blurring the dividing line we were taught to imagine separates them, and bringing a different reality into view. 

So much has happened and I’ve been trying to sort out just why I haven’t written, which has opened up a fresh can of questions regarding the point of this blog and sharing things publicly, in general. The horrifying astrological configurations this year are reflections of tides and cycles in the causal, literal world; very real powers, in the face of whom we can only hope to appease, ride, or get out of the way. It would seem as though at times where we are collectively wading through the shit together, the sharing of personal experiences, trials, tricks, and triumphs would be exponentially more relevant and important. 

So why then? Why has my gut feeling been that radio silence has been almost necessary for so long? Part of it is that my life has never been so good. Sharing that feels almost inappropriate when so many are having a terrible time. But with the difficult stuff, it’s been exactly what I said earlier: Personal. Which is exactly why I’m going to share some of it: Because I’m a little scared to.

I recently had some very intense and major “energy” work done that revealed something behind my left shoulder, on my back. A bubble pushing on my left back shoulderblade. Imagine a twisted balloon, the smaller bubble being a part of myself which I had, at some point, made a choice to cut off from the flow of my conscious being. As my practitioner friend and I isolated it with our combined focus, I began to notice that the pains in my arm, shoulder, and back that had been there chronically hurting for years, began to intensify and eventually lift off of my skin slightly. My friend then said they were seeing the aforementioned bubbles, then the small one breaking the seal and being reabsorbed into the larger one as a whole. They said, upon further meditation, that it was a big masculine energy that I had chosen to “turn in on myself” as a means of preventing the possibility of any output of toxic masculinity, and that while this was a somewhat noble action, this was not an healthy or sustainable flow pattern. They told me I was strong enough to hold it now, that I had earned it. They then told me to bring it into my heart chakra and “love it.” 

My initial internal reaction was to complain that I wasn’t sure how to do that, but something in me took over and just did it. Then, for a moment, I became genuinely frightened having this agitated intensely masculine force burning and twitching in my chest, but I did somehow find the capacity to see it as a wounded thing and simply love it. This took a few moments, but eventually it stopped twitching, cooled slightly, and held a steady warmth. Then it expanded downwards filling the lower areas of my Orphic egg/energy body/whatever you wanna cal it. This sensation was truly astounding. It was as if I had anchored in to the earth and connected to a strength I hadn’t known in years. And it was about this time that I noticed my shoulder and upper back on my left side, a source of torment for over a decade despite numerous chiropractor visits, exercises, massages, and prayers, or more accurately noticed that I wasn’t noticing it in any pain. The source of that pain had been relieved. It was around that time I realized that I had been crying. It felt like I was embracing an old friend whom I not only thought was dead, but had altogether forgotten their existence. That was three weeks ago or so and my neck and back are still 90% healed, with residual tension and physical damage correcting itself as time goes onward. But those three weeks were no picnic.

It turns out that the part of me I reassimilated had not been encoded with any of the lessons or temperences I have been enriched by in the years since our disconnect. Imagine suddenly having a version of yourself talking to you in your head, commenting on fucking everything, and that version of you is ten or twenty years younger. The selfish, ignorant, destructive bullshit tendencies and worldviews of a younger you just haunting the living shit out of you. So what did I do? I talked to him gently every time and said “Look, we did it. We can do things this way now. Isn’t that nice?” And never once did he protest, but gladly and immediately re-patterned to the new, better way of being/thinking which was before him. This still took a few weeks, but the process is pretty much complete now.

So why am I sharing all this? Well, because I know as well as anybody that this sort of thing can be very difficult to believe sometimes, even when you’re in it. And perhaps my story or my ways of coping with something like this could come in handy for someone else. Or let them know they’re not crazy.

Also, because I want to start writing again. One thing that really helped me figure out what this blog is for was receiving the upcoming bill to keep the lights on here at reverendjanglebones.com for one more year. Turns out, it’s for whatever I want. And what I want right now is to do whatever I can to be helpful, even if that just means sharing what I’ve been wading through lately and hoping it lands for somebody out there.

Anyway, thanks for listening.