The gang gets together to talk about what the heck do we do during this time. The conversation ranges from the practical to the magickal. Including how to breath, be a good listener, get good support, and what kinds of magic might be helpful.
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Transcript
Andrew:
Mine says it’s recording. There you go. Hey everybody, welcome to a episode of The Hermit’s Lamp. I am hanging out here in our secret, hermetically sealed bunker with the Stacking Skulls fellows. Aidan and Fabeku and I decided that we would get together and just talk about what’s going on right now because it’s all so bonkers, really.
Andrew:
Yeah, so I think we’re going to skip with the normal formalities. If you don’t know who we are, well, go and listen to the previous episodes. Google us, check out the links in the show notes, but I feel like this is just a time for us to get to it. You guys, how’s it going?
Aidan:
Hey. It’s going.
Andrew:
It’s going.
Fabeku:
Yeah, it’s a peculiar moment.
Andrew:
Yeah.
Aidan:
Yes, it is, yes it is.
Fabeku:
But things are pretty good out here.
Andrew:
Right, well you live far away from everybody, right, Aidan?
Aidan:
Yeah. We are kind of self-isolated to begin with, so really for me, the big change was we’ve done a little bit of work around here that we needed to do and I can’t go to the gym, because everything’s closed. I had stopped, just because of it didn’t make sense to me, not really understanding what’s going on, on the viral end, to be throwing myself out there. Especially as I’ve been traveling for family stuff the week before it got crazy here.
Andrew:
Yeah. How about you Fabeku? I mean, I know you live in a bat cave with Satan and don’t come out very often.
Fabeku:
Yeah, no, I mean I don’t, so the isolation part has been fine, that’s been normal for me because I really don’t leave the house much at all. That’s been fine, I think most of it has just been the same stuff everybody’s dealing with. Trying to get groceries, trying to get food, trying to get basic shit in the house. Yeah, just the emotional, mental bandwidth that gets eaten up pretty rapidly by this kind of shit.
Andrew:
Yeah, you and I talked for briefly about this before we got on the line today. To me that’s one of the things that is so difficult right now, it’s all everyone wants to talk about, right? It’s kind of like when you’re drifting towards the end of a relationship and all you can talk about is the things you don’t agree about, so then you don’t know what to do with each other. It feels like that kind of vibe right there. It’s just sort of, how do you not talk about it, how do you not get into it? Yeah, for sure.
Aidan:
Yeah, it’s a lot.
Fabeku:
Yeah, for me, I suppose we’re all self-employed, right? So it’s all the same for all of us and I feel like probably quite a number of people who listen to this, as well. That’s the piece that kind of grates on me the most. At the time of recording it, yesterday was the one year anniversary of the fire of the store. If you’d asked me two, three weeks ago, I would’ve been like, it’s great, it’s solid, it’s awesome, it’s back. That’s it. Then you ask me now and I’m just like, I don’t know what this means. I don’t know where any of this goes. It’s kind of a nerve wracking spot to be. I think that the words people use, like unprecedented, we live in an unprecedented time, that’s shit’s fucking difficult, right?
Andrew:
For sure, it is. Yeah.
Aidan:
It’s interesting, because for me that’s been the issue, is I don’t know enough and it seems like the information is skewed in all sorts of different directions about the actual virus. So all of my focus has been on the effects of the response to it, because that’s very tangible for everyone. I think that there’s this really weird flux because there’s this fear driven from the fear of this virus, but the practical for most people is the fact that in a ton of places all it’s a forced ending of your income for a lot of people.
Aidan:
I think that that’s a really tricky thing to navigate, because there’s a reason and everybody’s got their perspective as to whether they believe that it’s an appropriate response or not and that’s a separate thing, but there’s a reason certain things are happening. At least in the U.S. right now, where they’re talking about possibly doing a forced stay-at-home countrywide, it really is changing things in a way that is outside of most people’s control. To me, that’s the scary thing, I think, probably for more people, even than the virus, which is a weird thing to say.
Andrew:
A lack of control.
Aidan:
The lack of control, right. Especially because we are at a point in the world that very few of us have any kind of self-sufficiency. In the past, stay at home would have been stay at home where you already have most of your supplies, because they weren’t generally available. Even if we think about the U.S. or Canada 150 years ago or more, that kind of thing was different, because we had our food, we had our ability to hunt or we had our gardens and we had our food stores and we had the hundreds of pounds of sugar and flour or whatever it is that we did buy at the store.
Aidan:
Now everything is on this immediate basis for most people and then, again, when the income is linked to businesses that you go to or have to travel to or have to be open for service industry and things like that, the idea that that can just be shut down without a visible kind of forcing of it? This happens in war zones, it happens all the time, but it doesn’t generally happen to such an immense population all at once.
Fabeku:
[inaudible 00:06:58].
Aidan:
Yeah, I was recording last night for my class and that’s what I said is, it’s interesting because there’s a way in which what’s happening is not special at all. We’ve had crazy, crazy events throughout human history that have taken out huge numbers of people really fast or massive continent-wide wars that have gone for very long periods of time. That stuff still goes on, but we usually don’t have it be so much one thing, in so many places, all at once and I think that’s hard to cope with. I think it’s hard to process.
Andrew:
Yeah, I think there’s been something about the velocity of this. You start hearing about it in December and maybe it was just me, maybe I was just doing a poor job of paying attention to it, but it seemed like as of last week, just shit hit the fan with a velocity that was like, what the fuck is going on? Suddenly there’s entire countries closed and it was just like, wow. I think that’s the thing for a lot of people. Like you said, there’s the fear of the virus, which is a thing, but then there’s this strange disorientation. We went from like, oh hey, this thing isn’t so great, to entire countries on lockdown and no food and people fighting in parking lots over Purell and shit. Yeah, the velocity of this has just been intense, super intense.
Aidan:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Andrew:
We unschooled one of my kids for a while, they were having a crap time at school, it wasn’t working for them for all sorts of different reasons and we decided to not just homeschool them, but actually unschool them. So you basically just let the kid decide what they’re going to do and you support them in doing that.This isn’t a conversation about whether that makes sense or not, please don’t email us, we don’t want to hear about it. But there’s this idea that can go with that, that people talk about, which is when you shift out of a system, like being in school every day, towards unschooling, this is process of de-schooling that happens. There’s this months, months long process of climatizing to the reality of not having structure, not having obligation, not having built-in socializing. All these things that you had before that were just there, they’re all gone.
Andrew:
As this thing proceeds, and we’ll see how long it continues for and so on, I think that this idea that we’re all, maybe not all of us, some of us are still working, but a lot of people are deworking. We’re deescalating our engagement from being accustomed to being on and at work and doing stuff and all of these kinds of things. Not unlike when you hop off the highway, you know we’re all speed demons, so we’re doing like 250 in the Batmobile down the highway and then we get off and we’ve got to drive 15 on a slow side street and you can’t reconcile it for a while. I think that’s a big part of what’s going on, too.
Andrew:
We’re deworking, we’re desocializing, we’re going through this massive process of disrupting our regular life for a period of time and so is everybody else around us. It’s kind of bonkers, right? It’s kind of nuts, because at least when only one person’s going through it or one place is going through it, then other people can support in that, but I feel like our ability to support people around stuff that we’re struggling with is always an extra challenge.
Aidan:
Yeah, I think it does. Those are super good points, Andrew. I think that that is a big thing that is interesting to me, because I can see it in my friends that had regular jobs. I think it’s harder on them than it is for me, in one sense, because there’s so much change for them. Whereas, I can really go, okay, my day to day isn’t different, really, but there’s stuff that I need to be aware of. Whereas, for somebody, any number of my friends who worked in office settings or restaurant settings and things like that, not only are they out of work at the moment and worrying about that, but they now also have this mass amount of time to fill in a point in time when there’s an endless stream of even worse than usual news.
Aidan:
To me it’s a question of figuring out, I was talking to a friend of mine about this and I said, what I have done just with me, even though this is not abnormal for me for the most part day to day, is I’ve really had to find a couple of sources and time it. Here’s when I’m going to go look at this and this is the time where it’s going to disrupt me the least. Because I don’t need the blow by blow. Somebody that has been in a state that maybe I was a couple of weeks ago, where I was really not aware of it and they were super wound up, they had the kids at school, they were working and all that, they come home and then they kind of suddenly become aware of what’s going on in a place like Italy, which is really having a brutal time right now.
Aidan:
That can be super overwhelming, so my conversation with him was, do what you got to do, but also remember to step back and just get outside or grab the guitar and use the time like you would if it was just free time. Don’t obsess over the things that you can’t do anything about. It doesn’t mean to be disconnected from it or non-compassionate about it, but that’s the thing that I think is kind of maybe what feels so weird in the world to me right now, is that there’s a ton of people with time and kind of nothing to do but panic, in a sense. That feeds into the whole kind of whatever you want to call it, we could use the collective unconscious as a term. So there’s this mass stress going on in there, that is beyond the original source. It’s strange.
Andrew:
Well I agree and that information piece is one of the things that I’ve been thinking about a lot for myself. I’ve been talking about it a lot with people this week. Like you said, I’m not saying be disconnected, I’m not saying ignore it or stick your head in the ground and act like nothing’s going on. This is what I was saying earlier in the week, that if we look at the virus as a contagion, which it is, I think at some point we also have to look at the information as a contagion.
Aidan:
Exactly.
Andrew:
I mean, if we’re smart about not being out in public and washing your hands and taking care of what we’re doing and all of that, cool. At some point, for me, I’m unconvinced that constant posts on Facebook about how we’re all fucked and the sky is falling and this is the worst shit ever simultaneously with no practical thing of what to do and that’s what happens all day, every day, days on in, I feel like we’re also flooding that psychic environment with this contagion that has people panicked in ways that nobody knows how to manage. Nobody knows how to manage and again, I’m not saying don’t post information, I’m not saying that.
Andrew:
Last week, I think it was, I hit a wall with this after about two days of this nonstop flooding where it was like, I can’t do this. I can’t participate in this. Like you said, I’m going to check sources, I’m going to do shit in a measured way that makes sense, that I can take in, that I can metabolize, and the rest of this shit, I can’t fucking do it. I can’t do it. I need to listen to music, I need to make some art, I need to fuck around with the cat, I need to look out the window with the birds. I need to do whatever it is. But this constant immersion in this information stream that is full of panic, and again, I think people are sharing it, one, because nobody knows what to do. Two, I think people think it’s well intentioned, the more information the better, but again, just the psychic environment is a cluster fuck at this point for a million reasons. I think that’s a real thing that people have to look at and figure out how to manage.
Fabeku:
Well, I think one of the questions that I’ve been sort of sitting with a little bit around this is, is there anything that’s actually urgent at this point? Right. What’s going to be urgent in this circumstance at this point for most people in North America? Their city ups or their region ups the level of restriction on going out or recommendation on going out, we all should already be minimizing going out, minimizing hanging out with people. I’ve been choosing to spend my out time mostly just being outdoors. Going for a long walk or riding my bike, spaces where I’m just not going to be meeting anybody a lot, if I’m contagious giving it to anybody, very limited contact. By limited contact, I mean I went for a walk last night with a friend of mine, we were outside in the beautiful, windy, cold, spring evening and we stayed away from each other and we just talked and walked and whatever.
Fabeku:
I mean, what’s the news that’s going to escalate things suddenly or unexpectedly that we need to be on top of? Nothing, right? This time also reminds me, in its way, of when my two brothers died. For those who don’t know, I lost two of my brothers within six weeks of each other about a decade ago of right now. When you go through something really difficult like that and everybody around you, because all my friends and family all knew my brothers and stuff, they were very integrated in my life and so on, it’s really difficult to get away from it, to shake it off. It’s very difficult to not hang out with people and then the conversation inevitably slides towards, what the fuck? Why did it happen? What could we have done? Could we have stopped this? Could we have, whatever, right? All that stuff is very well meaning and totally natural and totally part of the grief process, but none of it’s really helpful after a little while. So there becomes this sort of a question about what, for me at that time, around that…
PART 1 OF 4 ENDS [00:19:04]
Speaker 1:
… question about what for me at that time, around that thing, I called. What events, what people, what thoughts in my own head led to a funnel of despair. Led to that stuff where it would just start to swirl, and I would start to sink, and I would just feel like I could never get out from it. And I started cutting that shit off, and I started stopping it and I became very clear about in that case there was a handful of very specific thoughts about or thoughts/questions about it that put me in the wrong direction. I countered that a lot with the idea that you got to do something with your time.
Speaker 1:
There’s this guy, Jeff, that I knew in high school and his job was he worked on a sod farm. He mowed lawns with a tractor for 10 hours a day on weekends. And during summer, I forget exactly what the schedule was but it was something like mow this acreage one day and mow that acreage the next day, harvest stuff, whatever. But it was basically just a lot of him and a tractor, and he starts smoking during that time. And somebody asked him, like “Why are you fucking smoking cigarettes? Those things will kill you.” He’s like, “Well, take a look at it this way. You can just sit around all day and do nothing, or you can sit around all day and smoke. What would you rather do?”
Speaker 1:
I’m not saying everybody should go out and take up smoking, but I think that during those times where stuff is really difficult, making choices that alleviate that stress, that give you a sense of relief, that entertain you during boredom. I can guarantee you the amount of Netflix that I’m watching over the next while is going to be heroic. I’m going to get a hero’s medal for the amount of Netflix I’m going to watch, right?
Speaker 2:
Yeah. I get it. I totally get that, and I think that so like you and I were talking about before we had started with client stuff, all week, the last couple weeks, this has been all it’s been, all day long. And I get it, and I am available for that and I am happy to support that. But then in the evening after work and hanging out with my person, she wanted to talk about it, all the time, nonstop, day after day after day.
Speaker 2:
What I realized is after a few days of that, she hit a wall and had a meltdown with that. And said, listen, let’s try to figure out how to handle this in a smart way. We’ll talk. You can talk as much as you need to about it. I’ll do the same thing, and then let’s be done with it for the night. Let’s not have another conversation about it, and she said, “Great.”
Speaker 2:
And so, what we’ve been doing now every day is doing that and then making art for an hour or two, or watching… Last time, we watched a Cure concert for a couple hours. It was just like… To me, it’s that weird thing. Again, it’s not like let’s show up and act like nothing is going on, let’s stuff the stress and the anxiety, but let’s also not devote the entire fucking evening or whatever it is to this thing. There has to be some way of getting it out, and then putting a period on it for the moment, and moving on. Moving on, at least for the moment, and I like the funnel [inaudible 00:22:42], I like the language of that because that…
Speaker 2:
And I think a lot of that, which a lot of people are dealing with is this future-casting stuff. What does it mean? When it is going to stop? When am I… And I get it. Those are totally legitimate questions. And if you have no way of answering them, then all you’re doing is using the momentum of that and whipping yourself into the wall, again and again and again, day after day after day until you crack your skull open. As much as I understand it, I don’t know how that’s a sustainable thing at this point at all.
Aidan:
Right. Yeah, we have been talking about a lot and it’s interesting because of the book stuff that I’m working on, and then the course stuff that I’m working on, and then the stuff that my wife and I work on ourselves is this is like a super interesting case because we know that humans are storytellers, right? We generate narrative, all the time, and most of that is projective. It’s about what might happen or what we hope will happen, or what we think will happen.
Aidan:
And now, we’re in this really weird thing where we’ve got a billion sources of projection on the same subject again. And so, I have this… It’s like this massive gestalt of that, that I think you do have to come up with a method to get outside of.
Speaker 1:
Yes.
Aidan:
Third, that you can chill out and so that you can rest and recuperate, physically, and psychically, and mentally, and all that stuff. And this is interesting because it’s especially true if you are in a place with a lot of people, or you are in one of the at-risk categories or in a at-risk zone, right? Tripping continuously all of the stressors weakens the immune system, so it’s even more critical for the people that are in it, which is probably the harder place to do it, right? To be able to find that space.
Aidan:
And I like what you said, Fabeku, and I don’t know if this is how you do it, but it’s how we do it around here because my wife has a long background in peer consulting, but it’s a suggestion if people really don’t know how to do this thing is… And I had never experienced this until I got together with her is what we do when we get to a place where somebody is really stressed is we set a timer. We go you get like 45 minutes if you need it, or you get five minutes, whatever makes sense or you get as long as you want to talk, and the other person has no opinion. It’s not their place to even engage in it. All that they’re doing is listening, and let them run. And if they’re quiet for 10 minutes and they don’t seem done, just be quiet with them.
Aidan:
You don’t have to say anything. You don’t have to think anything. You don’t have to engage in any way with it, just be present with them and let them process for themselves. And then, take your turn when that’s done, and it’s a really critical skill that I don’t know how or why it wasn’t taught to me earlier because it would have made the first 47 years of my life better, but it is really necessary to be able to get into what our experience is so that we aren’t flooded by everyone else’s experience and of that narrative. And if we can let out all of our narratives and all of the crazy ways that they come out, I think that that gets us to a ground place, a balanced point where you’re like, okay, now I don’t have to churn all that stuff in my head because I was able to share it with somebody.
Aidan:
And again, if they know that they don’t have to have an opinion, or they don’t have to help you out, or they don’t have to comfort you, that it’s just a space for you to let that flow happen, it’s a huge release of tension and energy and it then allows you to really look at that thing, I think, that I’m not sure which of you brought up but what’s really happening right now for you? Not everywhere else because everywhere else is outside of your control for the most part, so what’s actually happening right now?
Aidan:
And then, the other side of that is if we can do that work as magical people, which I think most of our listeners are, otherwise I don’t know who they are or why you listen to us, time and time again. That then I think allows you to get to a place with going, okay, where am I okay? Where am I not-so-okay? And what can I do practically and magically to make this kind of a shift? Because it’s not probably going to be the same shift, but everything is changing all the time, so what can I do to be more resilient psychically and emotionally in the structure of my life when shit happens that I have no control over? Because that really happens, all the time. Like we said, it just usually doesn’t happen to so many of us, so obviously all the time.
Speaker 1:
Well, I want to just jump into this peer counseling thing because I think you bring up something that’s really amazing. I’ve been peer counseling since the ’90s, and honestly, I don’t know where I would be without it and I actually have standing monthly peer counseling with a friend of mine that I’ve been doing it with that whole time, and I do it with other people sometimes too.
Speaker 1:
I think that if people are new to this idea, I think there are maybe just a couple things that could be super fruitful. As Aidan said, your job is not to get feedback or whatever, anything. You don’t need to do anything. You could ask people, what kind of support would you like? Would you like me to ask you a question? Would you like me to give you an observation? Would you like me just to sit and look at you and be present with you? And whatever that other person does, it’s their time. They’re the one who’s directing it, so we don’t need reply. We don’t need don’t need to have an answer as you say. And even more, we can trust that the other person, the person getting the attention knows what they need on some level and with enough presence from somebody else, will get to it if they need something.
Aidan:
Yeah.
Speaker 1:
The other thing that I would say is if both of you are all up in your shit, as it happens and it’s going to happen right now a fair bit, right? [inaudible 00:29:28] is worked the fuck up about everything. There is leapfrogging that can happen, and so maybe set a shorter time. Be like, you know what? I think I could hold myself for two minutes, while you talk, and then you hold your stuff in for two minutes while I talk. And you just go back and forth, and back and forth, and back and forth, and especially in the beginning or especially if where maybe material. Is more shared between people, those shorter time frames help because then if you get stirred up by something, well then you’ve got two minutes to talk about it and it’s very important to own that, wow, maybe I’m also feeling that. Maybe I’m feeling something different. Maybe I’m whatever.
Speaker 1:
And then, the last piece is if somebody else’s stuff is stirring you up about them, go take that to somebody else. Go get cleaned up, cleared, more focused about what it is that’s actually going on before you go, oh, you know what? Aidan, the way you talked about it, it just made me so mad, you know?
Aidan:
Yeah, totally.
Speaker 1:
That’s not great, right? It may be necessary. But if you have the capacity and if you can [inaudible 00:30:46] go find somebody else to peer counsel and be like I was talking to Aidan and he said this thing, and it just made me so goddamn mad, and blah, blah, blah, blah. And then, you might get through to something where you’re like, oh, you know what? That’s actually just about me, or you know, I actually do need to talk to Aidan about his language around this, or whatever, or here is an issue in my relationship with Aidan that this brought up, but trying to push through stuff together doesn’t necessarily help all the time.
Aidan:
Right.
Speaker 1:
So that’s my five-minute intro to peer counseling idea, so yeah.
Speaker 2:
I think that’s super smart and the point that both of you said that I want to underline again is one of the things I’ve done in the last couple weeks with clients, when they show up with this stuff is say in the beginning, what do you want me to do? Do you want me to listen? Do you want me to ask you a question? Do you want me to give you my take on it? Do you want me to do a divination? What do you need? What do you need? Because I don’t want to assume that you need a response to everything you say. I don’t want to assume that everything you say to me is some request for a solution or a perspective. If you want it, cool. I’m available for that. And if you want to do is just talk so you can bleed that stuff out of your system, cool.
Speaker 2:
I think part of where it gets messy, and this is that leapfrogging thing that you said, I think that if people are unclear what each other needs or wants and they start ping-ponging back and forth and your anxiety trips my anxiety, so I want to give you a solution so I feel like it’s under control, so you feel like it’s under control. So you stop talking about it, so I am fine. Then, we’re all fucked. We’re all fucked [crosstalk 00:32:29] that.
Speaker 2:
And so, being able to say I am available for what you need, tell me what you need, and then doing that. That to me feels like the most humane thing we can do at this point for everybody.
Aidan:
Right, and that makes total sense to me because one of the best things that I have found is my wife and I are both problem-solvers. And so, our tendency if somebody says, “This is really fucking with me,” is to help them find solutions, but that’s not often what’s needed. And so, through the process and through all this stuff that you guys have talked about, I have got to the place now where way more often, I can go, hey, I need to talk for like 10 minutes and I don’t want any input. I’m not asking for anything. I just need to talk.
Aidan:
And sometimes it’s just so I can hear myself think because I’m kind of… I’m often… How I would put it is my allies respond to communication. They don’t just throw me stuff, and so sometimes I am pretty good at usually coming in to the altar, doing this thing where I’ll just go off that sometimes you need a person to bounce off. And then, one of those presences will go, “Try this,” in this midst of that. So there’s nothing that my wife needed to do. She’s almost uninvolved. She’s strictly a witness.
Aidan:
And yeah, it’s a critical thing, and especially it all ties in now that if we aren’t doing this kind of thing, we tends to get wound into each others’ narratives. I think when we have these crazy unified global event, that narrative isn’t super helpful for most people in a practical sense. There’s a bonding that is going on, but it’s not necessarily a beneficial form of it. And so, that is where this, to me, comes through is it can give you some space to go, okay, my job is really not resilient at all to something like this. Do I want to do something about that when I can? And it doesn’t mean that you can do something about it right now, but it can begin the process of that question of going what can I do? Whether that be practically physically, practically magically, and practically anyway, but what are the practical steps that what my experience, not what the world experience, but what my experience is showed me right now would be beneficial? I think that that’s the place that we can get something positive out of aspects of this.
Speaker 1:
Yeah.
Speaker 2:
The other thing I was thinking about in terms of the way we’re handling it and the way we’re handling other people is when we have that space, for my anyway, it feels super important to pay attention to my body. Because as I’m talking about it, at some point, it’ll bleed itself out of the line and I will feel my body relax.
Speaker 2:
The problem is I think the mind is slower to do that, so my body will drop the tension and I’ll take a breath, and then my mind will go, “Yeah, but, and,” and let me pick this ball up and run with it again. And then, my body amps up and I’m re-adrenalizing myself at some point.
Speaker 2:
A couple days ago, I was talking to my person and when she was talking, at some point, I said you know your face just relaxed? Your eyes relaxed, your forehead softened. How do you feel? And she was like, “Oh, yeah. I feel better.” And I said, okay, then maybe we don’t continue the conversation. If you’re physically relaxed, let’s shift gears and do something else. If we need to talk about it, cool. But if not, let’s… Because I think there is a point where we let that tension go, and then our mind just picks it up again. And then, we can just do that hamster wheel shit, all fucking day, every fucking day for weeks and months, and whatever.
Speaker 2:
So I think there’s these cues to watch for and they’re easy to miss, and so I think it’s important to be aware with them for ourselves and also if we’re engaging with another person to say, hey, tell me that. If you see my face relax, if you see my shoulder drop, mention that, so I can get it, so that I am aware of it.
Speaker 1:
Well, it reminds me…
Aidan:
That’s good.
Speaker 1:
Most dramatically and clear, after the fire last year, I was in shock for weeks, just about the whole thing. And then, I was in anxiety for months. And all last fall, it was unclear whether I was even going to have an insurable business, and maybe I was going to have to shut it down again. And so, the last year has been full of these sort of tidal waves of stress that in their own way resembled the shit that I couldn’t do stuff about. Either I could find a new insurance company, or I couldn’t. And if I couldn’t at a certain point, that’s the end of having a store. And that stuff sucks for one for sure, and I’m a kind of person that when I’m stressed out, I will tend to…
PART 2 OF 4 ENDS [00:38:04]
Andrew:
… I will tend to wake up in the middle of the night. I’ll just like pop awake at 3:00 in the morning, because who knows what. I shift my pillow, and then suddenly that fucker of a brain goes, “Hey Andrew, what about blah blah blah? What about blah blah blah? What about this? What about that? What if the whole universe just implodes upon itself? Aren’t we all dying because of entropy right now?” And it just starts going, right?
Andrew:
And so one of the things that I did a lot of was square breathing, box breathing or whatever you want to call it, right?
Fabeku:
Yes.
Andrew:
I’m sure we’ve talked about it here before a bunch. You breathe in for four, you hold for four, you breathe out for four, you hold for four. And I would just crank at that for however long it took to calm back down. And sometimes that was a while. Sometime it’d be 20 minutes of lying in bed just going, “Shut up and breathe, dude, shut up and breathe, four, four, four.” And then at the end of that, when I hit that moment where I finally relaxed, sometimes I would go to sleep, and sometimes I would watch Star Trek. Because I could tell the difference, after a little bit, between when I was actually relaxed in a way that I’m going to go back to sleep, and relaxed but also in a state were as soon as I stop, I’m just going to start reactivating again, and I’ve just got to go with it.
Andrew:
So for the record, other than the original Star Trek, I watched every single Star Trek show and movie last year, because I had a lot of time on my hands at various points, and I was up in the middle of the night a lot. And at a certain point, like you say, when you’re relaxed, it’s like, “All right, let’s watch a TV show. Let’s talk about something else. Let’s put on some music. Let’s dance a jig.” It doesn’t matter. But let’s just stay out of it for as long as we can. Right?
Fabeku:
For sure.
Aidan:
Yeah, absolutely.
Andrew:
So one of the things-
Aidan:
Yeah. And I think … Go ahead.
Andrew:
I’m sorry. No, you go ahead. I’m going to change the subject.
Aidan:
And one of the things that I’ve been talking about a lot in this course that I’m doing, as it relates to … is fear. And the one thing that I found have found really helpful, and I don’t remember where I came across this or if I spat it out at 3:00 AM when I couldn’t sleep, and the box breathing wasn’t doing shit, because I have a very similar mind. But at some point I hit a place where I realized … and this could be said because I’m sensitive enough. But I would say more that it’s an awareness thing. I think we’re all sensitive in this way, or everybody I know is.
Aidan:
Is the question to ask within kind of events like this, make it crystal clear and just give you lots of practice time to ask it, is what you’re feeling and is what you’re experiencing yours? Is the fear of yours? Or is the fear what is floating around, because there’s so many people who are afraid? And to me, it’s been really critical in my life to figure out that separation as quickly as possible, as much as possible. So like I had a family member who passed a couple of weeks ago, and I went out to see them before they did. And I was really pleased that I got there before they kind of … while they were still … I could talk to them a little bit, they weren’t fully themselves, but they were enough that I could have the conversations that I wanted to.
Aidan:
And during that experience, there was a point that I realized that I was the only person present who could be okay with what was happening physically. That nobody else was going to be able to really solidly, consciously know this person is dying. And I have some questions for them while they can answer them about that. So I know where they are with it, because no one else was going to ask them that. And then because everybody is so wound into their fears about, whether it’s death in general or this specific death, and how it would affect them, I knew there was a bunch of kind of pragmatic stuff that nobody else was going to be able to get on in the timeframe that it needed to happen. And so it was a really interesting process, because I was able to go, “Okay, all of the fear here and all of the stress here isn’t mine. I’m cool with this.” I had the conversation with the person, they were cool with it. Like, “Yeah, I just want to be done. This sucks. So I’m ready for it to be over. And I’m not freaked out. I’m not afraid. I’m good.”
Aidan:
And so once I had that information, I was able to kind of go, “Okay, so now I know where he’s at, I know where I’m at. Let’s do the stuff that makes this go as smoothly as possible for them.” Because nobody else could do it. Right?
Fabeku:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Aidan:
But if I was not able to see that the fear and the kind of panic and freak out that was going on, it wasn’t mine, I wouldn’t have been able to do that. I wouldn’t have been able to help that person, which ended up helping everybody else, because that relieved them from that. They could kind of go, “Okay, Aiden’s got it. He’s taking care of the business that needs to be taken care of here.”
Aidan:
But for that to happen, you’ve got to be able to separate that out, so you can look at your fear, and go, “Okay.” Maybe your fear is, you work in a restaurant and you got sent home. And so now pay has gone from there. And unemployment’s going to be what unemployment’s going to be, and you don’t know if the restaurant os going to be there when you come back. So you don’t know how many restaurants in your town are going to be able to pull through this whole thing.
Aidan:
But if you were wound into all of the other fear, you won’t be able to address that. You won’t be able to look at that and go, “What do I need to do?” Because fear is a language, it’s telling us something. But if we’re in the whole morass of it, if we’re in that kind of fear funnel … I’ll use the fear funnel, we can’t move, because we can’t see what we have to see. We can’t hear the part of that information that’s actually for us. Whereas if you’re totally flipped out about everything going on everywhere, maybe you aren’t looking at, “What are my options on the other side of this? If my job is gone, what can I practically do to make that have the least impact? Can I make that into a benefit? Is this a point, where due to no other choice, I could start that thing I wanted to start.” But if we’re wound up in everybody else’s story, we never get to get there.
Fabeku:
And I think even if we’re … and that’s a solid point I would love for all of us, myself included, to be asking, is this fear mine? I think the other thing is even if once we isolate what is ours, if we’re in some future version of fear that we don’t know and can’t do shit about now, that also fucks us up, right? I was talking to a client a couple of days ago that understandably, it was a lot of, “What am I going to do with my business? What’s going to happen in six months? What do I do three months from now?” And I kept saying, “I get it, and we can talk about some of it, but a lot of it, there’s no answers.” And so finally what I said, because they just started to spin, I said, “Tell me what you need to do today. In the next two hours, what do you need to do?”
Fabeku:
And she said, “I just need to do some fucking laundry. I’m wearing clothes that are four days old.” And I said, “Then that’s the thing that you do. Get off the phone, do some fucking laundry. And then do the next thing after that.” And she sent me a thing the next day, and said “That was exactly what I needed. I just needed to know what the fuck to do between our call and dinner time, so that I could move something forward in the tiniest way. And obviously doing laundry doesn’t solve our business problems in three months or six months or whatever it is. But there had been zero movement for four days around something seemingly as simple as let me put some clothes in the washing machine.” And I think that’s part of the stuff that happens with this. Either we get whipped up in everybody else’s fear, or our own stuff, or some mix of it or this future shit, and it’s a mess. I get it, and it’s a mess.
Andrew:
Well I think that that kind of segues a bit into some of the other stuff I wanted to make sure we talk through it today, because people are definitely asking a lot about this too. People are like, “Oh, I should be more spiritual. I should be meditating all day. I should find my way to be calm. Is there an army of magic that I can be doing about this?” People keep asking me like, “Have you divined about when it’s going to be okay?” And I think that, in the same way that coming to each other with our sort of stuff all boiled up, I think that for me personally going to magic, going to spirits … Like I pray every day to Orishas. And I had a long conversation with them. And then a couple of days ago. And then today I basically was like, “You know what guys? You know what the fuck is up. I just came by to say hi. Help me see my way forward.”
Andrew:
And I’m not going to them with that tune of reiterating it and reiterating it, because they know. And not that they can’t take it, or couldn’t listen or whatever. But at a certain point, I think that we need to look at what are we doing with that behavior. What are we doing with our spirits, with our magic and so on. Or whether divination. I was talking to somebody and they’re like, “How often are you divining about this other thing?” And every day I’m like, “No, just stop. You ask a question, you get an answer. You don’t ask that question again until there’s something that makes sense to make it to be asked again.”
Andrew:
Because otherwise we’re just sort of feeding that disparate funnel or feeding that whatever. And I’m not, I’m not saying if you’re a person who sits at your shrine and talks about your problems right now and you feel better, you should stop, then great. But make sure that you’re actually feeling better about it. Make sure that it’s actually making sense for you. Because otherwise it’s like I think that we need to trust that those communications have been received, and try and figure that out. And figure out what we do from there. And listen to see if there’s guidance for what we do. Right?
Fabeku:
Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. I was talking to a client last, and she said, “I’ve been divining every day about this. I’ve been divining, I’m trying to figure it out. I’m getting a bunch of contradictory answers. What the fuck do I do?” And I said, and I didn’t mean this in a flip way at all, I said, “Maybe stop divining every day. Maybe that’s not the thing. For all kinds of reasons, either because of the place you’re in or because this becomes, like you’re saying, this thing that feeds this anxiety, that feeds this despair, that feeds the shit. Maybe because there’s so much flux, it doesn’t really matter, but it doesn’t sound like divining every day is a thing that’s actually helping you. So maybe divine, and then the next day and the next day, do some offerings, do some meditation, watch a movie, talk to somebody you love.
Fabeku:
And then when there’s, like you said, when there’s reason, divine again. But day after day after day, tell me, tell me, tell me, tell me, tell me. As much as I understand the impulse to to do that-
Andrew:
And as much as we’ve all been there, I’m sure.
Fabeku:
Exactly. I’ve done the same shit. Not in this situation, but I’ve done the same shit a million times before. At some point, is it helping? Is it actually giving you something that helps? And if so, cool. But if not, maybe that’s not the thing to do.
Aidan:
Yeah. And I think on the … it’s an interesting thing, because it’s again, it’s been one of the things that I’ve talked about it in the course, too, is … and I think I talked about it with Challon on her podcast, is one of the things that can be really tricky is we like to get really wound into emotional stuff, with the argument that it’s justified. And I think that that’s correct. Things happened to us that suck, or things happen to us that are hard. And so yes, our anger or fear or our whatever reaction we’re having is justified.
Aidan:
But again, kind of coming at it from the magical point of view, and this is tapping into the last thing you said, I think the BQ is, is it helping? Is it beneficial to stay wound up in that? The fact that there’s a good reason for it to me isn’t enough to stay stuck.? It’s not that you don’t have that experience, it’s that you don’t really want to be stuck in any … You don’t want to get on the hamster wheel of either being freaked out, or being angry or being any of the things that we can be, because generally it’s not helpful.
Aidan:
And that’s the thing that I think is tricky for a lot of people to do is, can you step back just enough to go, “Is this doing something that I want it to do?” Because I think that part of the magical process is not controlling in the sense of controlling outcomes so much, but controlling what we’re bringing to it, is one of the great tools there to go, Yeah, I could completely freak out about what’s going to happen to my business. Or I can start kind of doing a little bit of a forward thinking about what I might want to change to make it hold up better.” The things like this.
Andrew:
I think that I’m very suspect of emotions, to be honest. I think that a lot of people talk about, “Well, I feel what I feel. And you can’t tell me what to feel.” There’s all this language that we have and all these exchanges that we have, where people sort of anchor into the immutability of their feelings. And I think that there are times and situations in which that is true and fair in some ways, but I also … So when I was having issues with gluten and stuff like that, it sort of ended up getting a celiac diagnosis, which I actually just recently had reversed because I retested. But whatever was going on for my body at that time with eating those foods, I was having all these emotions that were directly linked to digestion and not linked to anything that was going on in the circumstances.
Andrew:
And it’s a very strange experience to walk around for about a year, where people would be like, “Look, you seem so upset.” I’m like, “No, I feel fine. I feel great.” And I’d be like, “But, but, but whatever.” Or I would have these massive upwelling of emotional things which were purely biophysical, which had no relationship, unlike where you were talking about earlier, Aiden, about like, well what’s the core anxiety? What’s the real thing for you?” That’s an important line to go down. But also sometimes feelings point at nothing. Sometimes feelings arise out of random stimulus, things that we’re not aware of bio-physically. There’s nothing like not sleeping for a week or two, not sleeping well for a week or two to make me utterly cranky. But I’m not actually really cranky about things, I’m just physically and emotionally cranky because of what’s going on biologically.
Andrew:
And so I think that when it comes to feelings, I think that there’s this notion that gets circulated a lot, that emotions are truth, feelings are true, feelings are unquestionable, and that we’re justified to have them. But I also think that in the same way that alcoholics and people in those kinds of situations can use their emotions to justify their addictions, and they’re sort of falling off the wagon or other things. I think that we all do that on some levels. And so when we’re having these feelings about things, I think it’s really helpful to kind of cock an eyebrow and go, Huh, there’s a feeling. I wonder what happens if I breathe through this? I wonder what happens if I just rant about this to somebody for five minutes? I wonder what happens … Like one of the things I do a lot of is, like I went for a two and a half hour walk last night, and talked with a friend. And vented a lot of stuff, was silent for a while. I looked at the river some.
Andrew:
And when I got back, I didn’t have many of those emotions, and they didn’t come back for quite a while. Does that mean they’re not true? Well, I don’t know about that. Does it mean that they aren’t as true as they wish to present themselves? I think that that’s really significant. And so it’s not that we want to become locked down and unemotional. I had a really good cry with my person the other night. I just needed to let some feelings out, talk about my feelings, all these things. But I also think that we maybe owe it to ourselves to question the validity, or the helpfulness or the reality of our feelings, and …
PART 3 OF 4 ENDS [00:57:04]
Andrew:
The helpfulness or the reality of our feelings and whether or not we want to engage with those. And I think that, unlike a lot of conventional wisdom, I would actually say that we may have more say if we learned some tools around it, than we might otherwise possibly imagine.
Aidan:
Yeah, I definitely fall into that camp to some degree. And a lot of that comes from, or at least the understanding of it for me came from old school Buddhism. And to me the question is, what I tell people is what you’re feeling is real in the sense that you’re feeling it. But the narrative that we create around it may not be. And to me that’s the way that I approach it is like, what story am I saying about why I’m freaked out? And is that really what’s going on? Or is it something much simpler or much more complex? Or is there a place in my life that I can’t express that? And so it’s kind of being transferred to something else. And so I think it’s a very interesting thing because I do find it interesting, the degree to which some folks are aware that it’s a combination of events and psyche and biology. But the causal chain isn’t always as clear as we think it is.
Aidan:
We like to say, I feel like this because this person did that. You go, well what if somebody else that you felt differently about had done that? I can get really riled about somebody I don’t know dissing on something that I’ve written. But if one of my friends does it, I might just go and revise it or go, “Dude, you totally missed the point.” And never have an emotional response to. It’s interesting.
Andrew:
So I guess sort of one last question maybe, or whatever we do here. But the other thing that people talk a lot about and I’ve heard a lot of requests about is, what kind of magic do you do in a time like this? Is there a focus? Is it protection? Did you match brand health? Do you do magic around whatever? What kind of stuff are you thinking about focusing attention on during this time, if anything I guess?
Aidan:
Yeah, and this is going out to my students today. So part of it is, if we separate out all of the story about what’s going on right now. All of it, which is virus, government response, personal response, fear of death, fear of loss, fear of all those things. What we’re seeing right now is this massive point of flux. We are in, to use that line that I use, stuck in six ways from Blue Oyster Cult. We’re at the nexus of the crisis everywhere, which means it’s a really amazing time to change gears if we’re interested. That if we’re looking for a radical change in our experience or our life or our world, then I generally focus internally, who are close in. Radical change begins at home. This is kind of a great time to do that work if you can find the head space to do it.
Aidan:
And that may be a worthwhile reason to find the head space if you’re having trouble finding a reason to step out of that cycle. But with so much change and so much raw material of energy flowing everywhere, I think that it’s a really good time to, if you’re comfortable doing it and if you have an idea or you can come to a perception of what you want different, it’s unrelated to all of this stuff. What would that be? And that would be my focus. And that is my focus here. Yeah.
Andrew:
I like that a lot. It reminds me a lot of what I thought about post-fire. I went from having a store where I was at most of the time, doing readings, four or five days a week, and all this other stuff. Which was working good and it wasn’t bad, but also wasn’t exactly what I wanted anymore. And I had these ideas that I was trying to hammer out towards how do I get from the lockdown of having this physical location that I’m stuck in, towards something where I’m freer to make more art, do more writing, do more teaching, and work more deeply with people. And so one of the metaphors that came to me was, you’re on this transited my mid happen. so this sort of force of radical change in alignment with my destiny. And I was like, I’m just going to lean into the change a lot. And it wasn’t easy by any means, but it certainly is easier than this situation where everybody feels the same. But nonetheless, I think that that idea of leaning into it is super helpful.
Fabeku:
Yeah. And I’ve been talking about a similar thing. I think that magic works well in flux. The less fixed things are, in some ways, the more magic can shape them. And it doesn’t mean that we love it. It doesn’t mean we go into some rose-colored glasses kind of bullshit. It doesn’t mean that we enjoy the flux, but I think that if we’re able to aim magic at those things and practical action at those things that we want to bend or shape or remix in a certain way, listen, now’s a hell of a time to do it. And so there’s that. The other thing that I’ve been thinking a lot about is road opening work. I’m a huge fan of that, huge advocate of that. You’re not going to sit down and do a thousand mantras to Ganesh and every challenge is going to disappear.
Fabeku:
That’s not real shit. But if it reduces some of the challenges, if it reduces the severity, if it reduces the impact, if it clears the way, whatever it is, I think that’s a worthwhile thing. And I do think that there’s some wisdom in doing some kind of protection work, whatever that is. I mean, for me, a lot of that’s been focused on ancestor stuff. I think that that’s a smart place to go, both, because they’ve been through shit like this in their own way and because they’re very directly invested in our wellbeing, whatever that means. And I think all of those things make a ton of sense to me at this point.
Andrew:
Yeah. Well this episode will be out after the live event has happened, but I’m doing a community ancestor healing ceremony a few hours after we’re actually recording this and the script for that and the details for how to go about that are going to be up on the website. We’ll see how it goes. Maybe I’ll do a few of them over the next while, but certainly anybody who’s listening who wants to tap it in, add some energy to that. It’s all welcome even if it doesn’t happen synchronously with the actual primary push of that energy. Yeah. I think that for me, I feel like when I’m not sure what I want. Or I’m not sure what’s possible. Like right now there’s a lot of chaos. What does it look like?
Andrew:
What’s going to benefit? And I’m accustomed to magic being a thing for me where it’s like, you know what, I want to make a shift in this way so I’m going to feed that and open the road or whatever. And now it’s like, I don’t really know what that looks like. And so I’ve been doing a lot of luck work. Because I think that for me, during a time where there’s a lot of chaos, the less control we have, the more luck matters. And so is good luck going to help me not run into that person and be stuck in a small space with them who’s sick? Couldn’t say for sure. Possibly. Is it going to help me find that bottle of Purell and not get in a fist fight on the way out of the supermarket?
Andrew:
Maybe. Or maybe it’ll just help me win that fist fight, either way. But I think that that’s important. I think it’s also really important to understand that, at some point this ends. And whether that is in a week, seems tremendously unlikely, or some point down the line further. Seems more likely. Whether or not things return to normal, whatever that means. My personal hope is they find a way to just kind of be like, look, there’s no loans, there’s no mortgages, there’s no rents. Just eat food. People will try and help keep up producing food and then when everything gets back to normal or when this is done, then it’ll be like, all right, in two weeks everybody starts paying rent again. Everybody starts whatever again.
Andrew:
Maybe I’m too much of a socialist, but stuff’s going to happen again. And so I’m thinking about what that looks like. And I’m doing work around planting the seeds so that whatever happens now, things will start to regrow as soon as they can and sort of feeding that energy as well. Because maybe I can’t… Maybe my seeds won’t grow until the summer or the fall or whatever, who knows. But if I’m putting them in the ground, and especially because I’m not tying them super tightly to like… I’m not like, well, I better be making X amount of money for my retail store again come this date. That kind of magic is, I don’t think, helpful right now. There are realities against that that, well that’s cool and all, but if your state says you can’t be open, you can’t be open.
Andrew:
And unlike prohibition, I think bootlegging our stores doesn’t make sense during this time. So those are the kinds of magic that I’m focusing on. And the other thing that I’m gearing up to is, I’ve been planning this business course for… I’ve been planning it since September or something and it starts April 2nd and I’ve had a few people reach out about signing up and stuff and I’m like, does it make sense? Does it not make sense? And I’m like, well, if you feel like you want to do this during a time where you have more time on your hands, it’s a great time to establish a foundation for that later time.
Andrew:
It’s a great time if you’re self employed to revisit your website, if you want to, if you have the skills to do it yourself. Or to revisit your offering or to whatever, because the more we can plant those seeds towards the future and do that concrete work that backs it up. Like wash your hands, everybody. No magic is in place of washing our hands. The more likely things are to be better for us as we come out of this situation. And that’s sort of a mix of that luck and set in the ground that that luck can manifest through as it moves forward through this time.
Aidan:
Yeah, there’s… Go ahead.
Fabeku:
No, I was just going to say I think that regardless of what kind of focus makes sense for you and your life and your circumstances, the one thing I’ve been repeatingly saying to students again and again and again is keep doing magic. Keep doing magic. I get that it’s easy to let that go and to lose hope and to think it’s such a shit show. Why bother? I understand that and I don’t think that that’s the greatest thing because, like you said, at some point it’s going to end. Yesterday I took some comfort and I was reading some [foreign language 01:10:32] I was reading this thing from [inaudible 01:10:33] talking about daylight never lasts beyond its appointed time. Nighttime never lasts longer than is customary. Shit ends.
Fabeku:
Cycles, this is a cycle. It’s a weird cycle. It’s a fucked up cycle and it’s a cycle. And on the other side of that cycle, you’re going to need there to be something. And if you wait until the cycle is over, then you’re just pushing the time back further and further. And so keep doing magic, whatever the fuck that is now. Because at some point, when that night begins to lift, if you’ve already got seeds in the ground that are starting to sprout, all the better for you. So keep doing magic.
Andrew:
Yeah, for sure. It reminds me of the proverb, the greatest thing that God did was to make one day follow another. Nothing stays the same. And right now we’re at the hard edge of that, maybe. But at some point we’ll be on the better edge of that. And that’s part of the process too.
Fabeku:
Yeah, for sure.
Aidan:
Totally. Yeah. One thing that I would throw out is, this is not specific to this event, but I was having a particularly hard time a while back. I have this crew of spirit allies that I experience and transcend and dream sometime. I had a dream with them and they’re kind of this paleolithic hunter gatherer crew of really bad ass. I don’t know whether they’re Neanderthals or whatever, but they’re pretty scary. But they’re awesome. And I was pretty much going like, how do I get through this? How do I survive this thing? And I woke up from a dream of them and was like, okay, they’re trying to tell me something. Let’s go into trance and see what they… So I go into trance and it’s one of those trance things that you do in bed where you’re falling asleep and in and out. So it’s half trance, half dream. And what they showed me was a group of about 10 of them hunting.
Aidan:
I thought it was a saber tooth tiger or something like that, with these basically long poles with sharps stones tied onto the ends of them. And I totally got it that they’re like, you’re from us. This is what we do. None of us would be here if we weren’t from this. Doesn’t mean we all make it, but we all do it because we got to and you’re here. So it works more often than not. And I think that that’s a critical thing to think about. It is what it is. In a lot of ways it really sucks. But as a people, we’ve been through a thousand versions of this, they’re not the same. No. Probably scarier in a more immediately tangible way. And I have tended to anchor to that thought a lot when dealing with the ancestors, I know what you guys went through. I know what you’ve been through. [crosstalk 01:13:37].
Andrew:
That’s the premise for the ceremony that I put together. We know people, dead people, who’ve lived through all sorts of plagues. And they’ve got wisdom to share about that. And they’ve got a vested interest in the continuity of their genetic line, their descendants, humanity in general. And it’s like tap into that, work with that.
Aidan:
Absolutely.
Andrew:
For sure. Let’s start making stone tools.
Aidan:
Exactly. Sharpen up your stick in the fire.
Andrew:
All right guys. Well thank you so much for doing this today. I hope that people find it helpful. As always, we’re all three of us are out there doing stuff and putting stuff out there. So if you want more of this, come and find us. Come and hang out with us. Fabeku, where are you? Where’s the best place?
Fabeku:
Fabeku.com and Facebook, that’s it.
Andrew:
Aidan?
Aidan:
Aidanwachter.com and Facebook.
Andrew:
I feel like the odd man out, my website isn’t my name. I’m with thehermitslamp.com and yeah, I’m on Facebook as well. Sort of all over the place. Yeah. But keep going. Keep working at it. Reach out. Wash your hands. We’ll get through it. All right.
PART 4 OF 4 ENDS [01:15:09]