Initiated Practice 3: Gratitude

Part 2 of 3: Self-Importance and the Sovereign Self This one starts with yet another strange, unbidden moment in the life of Ciel— the kind that arrives in the middle of what feels like life falling apart around its edges, when every strategy has run out and something else steps in. This was not a moment I created, nor earned, nor influenced to occur willfully in any sense, but a moment that was gifted to me. That moment is the doorway into this episode — a close look at self-importance not as vanity or arrogance, but as the very lens we look through, the thing that makes us the picture instead of the seer of the picture. I trace what it costs to keep sourcing sideways, from other people's regard (looping this back into the content from episode 2), instead of sourcing down into the earth and up toward what's larger than us. And I ask what becomes possible when that lens finally sets itself down. Part of a three-episode arc that began with Beyond Self-Importance and continues into The Stalker's Tools.

What if: you are not too much, and you are not too little. You are just turned the wrong way. That's the claim this episode makes, and it might not be a comfortable one to sit with. Self-importance gets talked about like it's vanity — too much ego, too much me. But what if it's the opposite of too much self? What if it's a starvation, and the constant checking, measuring, and needing to be seen is just what starvation looks like from the inside? This episode traces that reframe through four unlikely companions and theoretical frameworks: Alan Watts and his image of the self sealed inside its own skin, cut off from the world it actually belongs to; Iain McGilchrist and the two hemispheres of the brain, one built for direct contact with what's real, the other built only to represent and compare; Heinz Kohut and Alice Miller, who spent careers studying what happens to a person when the mirror they needed as a child was never held up true; and Robert Bly, naming a culture of siblings raising each other because the elders never showed up. Four different frameworks, four different vocabularies, but one unified shape underneath: a self that's stopped sourcing itself vertically — up into something larger and more magical and mysterious, and down into the ground it's actually made of — and started sourcing itself sideways instead, off the reactions of the room. That sideways reach is self-importance. Not arrogance, but a misdirected hunger. This is the why episode. It sets the cosmology, the diagnosis, the ache underneath the pattern — without yet handing you the tools to catch it in yourself. That's coming. If you've ever caught yourself needing the room to confirm you're okay, this one's for you. Not to fix that orientation, but just to see it clearly, maybe for the first time.

Today I'm joined by Jeremy Christopher, a Toltec practitioner based in Brazil who has walked this path since 2006, apprenticed to a nagual for seventeen years, and helped build one of the most active online Nagualismo communities through his site, Nagualismo.com.br. His work — offered through individual sessions rooted in the lineage carried forward from Carlos Castaneda's teachings — moves through territory that modern psychotherapy never or just barely touches: shifting the assemblage point, integrating shadow to reduce self-importance, recapitulation of the events that shaped us, and recovering abilities held in what the tradition calls the ‘cluster’, the luminous memory of our ancestors. In this conversation, we talk about power — what it actually is, how it's earned, how it's squandered — and about the assemblage point itself: what it means, how it moves, and why so much of the Toltec path is really the art of learning to move it deliberately. We talk about the three essential arts of being a Toltec, and why practices built for warriors centuries ago feel much less like relics and more like critical instructions for right now. This isn't therapy or personal work as you’ve probably encountered it: it is something closer to sorcery in service of freedom. I hope you enjoy this conversation, and can allow yourself to drop into the grounded rhythm and presence that he offers.

Part One of this two-part episode ended with me in the dark, having made peace with dying. This episode finishes the story, and offers the second half of the story that changed everything. In the middle of that acceptance, a small set of feet came padding down the stairs. A daughter crawled into the bed, and the hard-won equanimity I was calling myself to broke open into one clean, animal truth: I do not want to die. That rupture, it turns out, was the teaching. The beings offered a correction that I have been working through ever since: it was never the whole self that was dying. Only a part. Part Two moves from cosmology into practice: what it actually looks like to work with death in the intimate, human way. The difference between a death and a killing — between letting a part of you go because its time has come and its work is done, and forcing it out in an act of self-rejection. We explore grief not as something to recover from, but as the practice itself: the sacred work that honours and completes what's passing. And the recognition that the way through is not resistance or force, but consent to the death process innate to a fully lived life. This is the difference between living defended and living initiated; between a life spent bracing against loss, and one made spacious by the willingness to let what must end, end.

Most of us have been taught, in a thousand subtle ways, to treat death as the enemy: the thing to outrun, outwit, or simply not think about. In this episode, I want to offer you something different, and something so fundamental to Shamanic (and most other wisdom tradition) practice. This is the first of a two-part series on one of the most radical reorientations available to a human being: learning to work with death rather than against it — not as a morbid practice, but as one of the most life-affirming things you can do. I open with a personal story. A few years ago, in the middle of the night, I woke to find my room full of beings, including my root teacher. And I asked them, in the dark, whether I was dying. What happened next changed the way I understand death, initiation, trauma, patterns, and the parts of ourselves that have to go in order for something true to emerge. From there, we move into the cosmology: what Ernest Becker called our cultural denial of death, and what we lose by refusing to let it in. The difference between dying and killing. Grief as sacred duty. The Yaqui teaching of death as the activator of love. And what it means to live initiated rather than simply defended. Part Two — the practice — picks up where this episode ends. Come ready to go somewhere substantial, for we’re not here to f**k spiders, mate.

When attempting to work with the deceptive adversary that is our self importance it is necessary to have many tools. Practices like shadow exploration, working with the voice of impeccability, and virtue-based work can be immensely helpful (we’ll explore these a little later in the process), but for today’s practice we’re going to shift to a kinda fun and light-hearted way of loosening its grips on us: shape shifting. Shamans throughout time have been able to release their attachment to form and shift their consciousness into alternate forms, and this is only possible because they have released their attachment to self and identity so completely. Through the process of consciously identifying with other energies or perspectives—that of the wind, the trees, other species, etc—we can practice this art, and come into greater awareness as to the impacts and effects that our egoic self importance is having on us. Children practice rudimentary shape shifting all the time, pretending to be different energies and animals in play. The impact of this play is far from rudimentary or simple, however, and actually forms a necessary basis for relationship with all of life. Because of the hyper-availability of media and the general impacts of modern life I don’t think we are engaging in this play enough in both childhood and adulthood, and are instead becoming immediately focused on obsessed upon our self image and identity from a very early age. This practice track will take you into and through the experience of releasing attachment to form and self, and back into the fluid (and I don’t mean ‘gender-fluid’, please) and consciously connected reality that is the true, enemy-free state of human consciousness.

In this episode of the Initiated Series, we move from an exploration of initiatory tools and perspectives into a more direct focus on who and what helps and hinders us on this path. Episode 5 is an introduction to our ‘one true enemy’. This enemy is elusive, wily, deceptive, and relentless, and is both exceptionally difficult to notice in ourselves and yet, paradoxically, quite easy to recognize in others. It is also an enemy of enormous appeal and seductive power: not a foe that fights us directly, but that consumes our energy and focus through deception and distortion, and that can corrupt our spiritual path entirely should we not be on the lookout for it always. It is an enemy that has been spoke and taught about for thousands of years, appearing in nearly every lineage of teaching I have come into contact with, though especially within that of Shamanism and Buddhism. The rather astounding thing, I think, is that we seem to have come into a kind of adoration of this enemy in contemporary society, entirely forgetting the teachings of our ancestors and their wisdom with regards to its impact. I’m not a religious person, but if I was and I had any faith in the idea of the ‘end times’, I would be inclined to say that we are truly facing an ‘anti-christ’-like energy in our world right now in the form of our destructive relationship with this enemy, and how we are emphasizing the importance of its presence and demanding that the world around us revolve around it as well. Rather than exploring its damaging influence on us all, we are instead even encouraging our children even to uphold its perspectives and desires, and have become seemingly incapable of recognizing how far into its grasp we are placing ourselves. Aligned with the characteristics of the ‘anti-christ’, this enemy looks like a beneficial and necessary thing, and yet it is entirely destructive. It will, ultimately, completely annihilate social bonds, relationships, and the potential for spiritual growth if we do not become aware of it. And what is it? Self-importance, and our obsession with ‘identity’. Join me for this exploration of how self importance (and its correlate, spiritual materialism) shows up in our experience, how it is functioning in our world, and some practices that might, hopefully, assist you in releasing its grip.

Patience is profoundly connected to faith—faith in something larger and more wise than ourselves, and thus that knows when and how things should be happening better than we do—and to the willingness to be humble in contact with the unknown. Therefore, the most beautiful practice I know of to encourage the development of patience is the practice of prayer. This short practice track will lead you through a prayer practice meant to open your heart and mind, relax your ego, and release the pressures and expectations you may be placing on your life process.

I have made many, many jokes on the podcast about what an awful student I was to my primary teacher. And I deserve the mockery. Of the five years that I studied with her at least two of them were spent learning one thing: patience. Again and again, every time we met for instruction, the lesson would be the same despite the magnitude of my frustration: I needed to learn to slow down, to be more present, and to release the bounty of expectations I had regarding the speed I thought things should be happening at in my life. It took a long, long time for me to clue in that she wasn’t going to shift out of this teaching until I had really engaged with it, but I am so grateful she was willing to be patient with me through this (surely arduous) process. Once I really understood patience and the value of practicing it, so much in my life changed. Patience is something that our ancestors spoke frequently and seriously of, and has been viewed as one of the great virtues of a human being throughout history, and for good reason: a life lived with patience is a life lived largely without anxiety, frustration, and fear, and with an increased sense of faith and belonging within the system we exist as a part of. Patience is, seen one way, an expression of our trust that an intelligence larger than our own is guiding the process at hand, and that we are not necessarily the ones that know what is best or right for ourselves all the time. Patience is deeply connected to faith.I feel that with the advent and increasing capacity of technology, patience, like many virtues, has been cast to the side and replaced with ‘moving fast and breaking things’, or with the tendency to think it’s entirely appropriate to make demands of the world and other people simply because we feel entitled to do so. I realize this sounds judgemental, but our technology has inflated our egos and encouraged us to think that making demands of the world, our bodies, and each other is entirely appropriate, and that impatience, ironically, and raging at the world is actually the virtuous work. I disagree, and in this week’s episode I’m going to plead the case for why I still believe that patience is a critical skill and capacity on the initiatory path, and must be something readily available to us if we are to inhabit the space of authentic adulthood. I hope you enjoy.

Let’s go on a gratitude-expressing journey.