Part 3 to my Love Curse. My process for identifying the roots and patterns of my issues.
I’m sharing the work I’m doing to identify the roots and patterns of my issues, in a way that hopefully you can adopt for your own process.
DISCLAIMER: This is not shamanism. I'm notoriously eclectic ...
This is a follow up episode to the Love Curse and to the episode with Asa Poeche, Reversing the spell.
You will want to have listened to those in order to get the most out of this episode.
Listen to Love Curse: Part 1
Listen to Love Curse: Part 2 - Reversing the Spell with Åsa Poeche
Slade:
This is a follow up episode to the Love Curse and to the episode with Asa Poeche, Love Curse Part II, Reversing the Spell. So this is Love Curse Part III.
Just a quick disclaimer: This is not shamanism.
Nothing that I'm going to share with you here today is based in a formal practice of soul retrieval. I warned Asa about this, going into this process with me, that part of what I may do is extract some wisdom from her, some insights, and then see what I can do with that information on my own.
And she very much gave me that blessing. She knew that we were experimenting, so shoutout to her, and know that I am not really doing this behind her back or against her recommendations or anything like that.
I am notoriously eclectic. I’m not a fundamentalist or a traditionalist. I’m sure some people might criticize me for not studying this process more and following a more strict version process of some kind of reversal ritual or what have you.
Here’s my philosophy about self-help books, programs, practices, and all that stuff: There’s usually one thing, at least one, sometimes there are a few others but sometimes there's usually one really big thing that's an epiphany for me. It's an 'aha'. It's a moment where I connect the dots and I say, Cool. I grab that part and I incorporate it into my daily life, into my thought processes, into how I police the voices in my head.
Whatever it might be, I take it in and I plant it in my garden and it becomes one of the things that grow there. That's kind of the way that I work with things.
So my process with all this: Rather than doing shamanic journeying and soul retrieval, I'm just starting with the questions that I had and some of the answers, and more questions Asa presented to me in our conversation and I intended to take those into my free associative writing practice. Into my automatic writing and into my Morning Pages. And also into divine dialoguing which, just to explain that really quickly, one of the foundations in automatic writing, which is this idea of connecting with the Higher Self, with your guides, with the records, with whatever it is that you're retrieving of information, the channel can either be straight out of your mouth in a speaking form or it could be writing it down, either longhand or typing, whatever.
To me, automatic writing and divine dialoguing or channelling, they're all kind of coming from the same stream of information and they're different formats for collecting and curating and sharing and analyzing that stream of data.
So these are my tools. This is how I do everything: my own personal development and psychotherapy, my readings with clients, whatever it might be. There's a lot of basis in neurolinguistic programming and with writing. That's just kind of my jam.
I want to share with you a bit about how I have been processing all this since my first two episodes about it. What do you do with it?
You may want to work with a practitioner like Asa and have her walk you through it. You might want to do a more formal ritual practice of some kind, and I still may come back to her at some point in this process and say, "What else do you have in your toolkit that we might use for this?"
But in the meantime, here's what's kind of happened on my own and I'm sharing this with myself by describing it to you guys. I'm working without notes here. I'm kind of doing one of my off-the-cuff episodes. I'm also kind of wanting to share with her what I've done since our conversation ended. So I'm just going to put it out there to everyone involved all at once.
The story I was telling was about these two major relationship events that happened, one at 19, and then one at 29. These magic spells that I was doing, playing with relationships and love magic.
But after my conversation with Asa, I realized that these episodes in my life were about self defense and protection. That was one of her big insights to me. That this isn't really about love. It's about protecting yourself. So where does that come from?
Richard was the one who told me that I didn't have to keep defending myself so violently. I shared that in the first episode. So there was a clue there that came right out of my own mouth.
Okay. So that was happening before. Before the episode with him ever went down. There were traces of this self defense issue going way back.
So I started to work my way back and thought, okay, well what was going on in high school? I defended myself in high school in a completely different way than a lot of people who were bullied.
If you called me "fag", I slashed your tires, I put sugar in your gas tank, I was not afraid of punching someone, I was not afraid of kicking someone in the nuts as a first move. It's considered a dishonourable way to fight but you know what? I just wanted to make sure that the people who were trying to hurt me were afraid of me. That was my goal.
I had an incident where a guy was repeatedly body slamming me outside the classroom in the hallway. It was like a particular classroom and time of day. It happened over and over and over again. My algebra teacher was there to witness it. And so, one day I sharpened a pencil and carried my books across my arms with the pencil in my hands in such a way that if he did it to me again, he would stab himself with the pencil.
And that happened.
She looked the other way because she understood that I was defending myself, rightfully so. My school had a policy back then in the 80s, I would've been expelled just for getting body slammed, if it had been reported, let alone defending myself.
So even if the teacher had reported, "Hey, this guy is body slamming this other kid", we would've both been dealt with zero tolerance and both been suspended. Which is just bullshit.
Anyway, so I figured, you know what? If I'm gonna get in trouble for being hit, I'm going to hit back. That was kind of my policy. There was the archetype of the crazy girl in The Breakfast Club, you know, the weird goth kid that people are kind of afraid of, that is rumoured to be mentally ill. I embraced some of that as a kind of defense mechanism. I let people think that I would go apeshit on them and that I was capable of doing anything. Because just that thought alone kept a lot of people from bothering me.
That had to come from somewhere too.
So I started to follow these milestone violence events, this fighting thing. This self-defense and fear of being harmed and all that, backwards in time. Not regressing in any kind of hypnosis or doing any kind of special witchcraft here. Just intellectually, consciously, wide awake, as I'm taking a shower, as I'm doing the dishes, as I'm driving in my car.
Just thinking about all this stuff that came out in my conversation with Asa. And talking to Seth about it. You know, just processing.
And as I started to work my way back, I found an even earlier age when I was 7, when I was being bullied at the bus stop. My parents, after listening to me come in, whining and complaining about this kid and what he was doing. He was an older kid too. I was in 2nd grade, he was in 5th grade I think. My parents convinced me that if I hit him, he would leave me alone.
Now this took some real convincing. Once they even had me intellectually convinced that this is the way to go. It still took some time for me to work up the courage to do it, but they insisted: If you hit him in the face, he will never do it again. He will leave you alone.
And my mother actually was the one who said, kick him in the nuts. Take him down so that he can't even hurt you back. Start off there.
And you know what? It worked. It worked really well.
I think that the 5th grader's parents came to complain and realized once they got there that... your 7 year old beat up my asshole 10 year old and it kinda never went anywhere so I was really, honestly, kind of drunk with the power of it. Because I didn't get hurt. Nobody hit me back. I just lashed out and defended myself and it was put in the ground.
That kid never bothered me again.
There were other instances around that age. My next door neighbour, he was bullying me, calling me a fag, calling me a sissy. I shot him with a BB gun. I aimed at his legs. I didn't shoot him in the face. Ohmygod I got in so much trouble for that. I never had a gun again as a kid. No any kind of firearms for me.
There was another instance where, around that same time period, where another kid was making fun of me and I put my fist through a window because he, when I tried to fight him, he ran away from me and he went and locked himself in his garage. And then started screaming at me through one of the little garage windows. And he thought I couldn't get to him so he was tormenting me from behind the glass.
I just put my hand through the glass. He wasn't hurt. Nobody was ever hurt but my parents were mortified. I got in a lot of trouble. We had to go and fix his window and apologize to their family and you know, it was terrible.
I was given boxing gloves and taught to fight in a more constructive way, because my parents felt I needed an outlet for this anger. Something that was less free-for-all but maybe just to channel that into an actual physical activity where it belonged.
But I kept going back in my memories.
Well, okay, how far back did it go? Was that the first time or was there something even earlier?
And it did go earlier. It went way further back. And I got all the way back to the event that happened when I was four years old.
I can't share that in detail on this episode. I'm not sure that I can speak about it without kind of breaking down a little bit and I really don't want to throw a member of my family under the bus, who's not here to defend themselves.
Suffice it to say, something happened to me that involved physical abuse layered with homophobic motivation and language. And here's the takeaway: you don't even really need to know the details because there are so many gay men that have their own version of this story.
The important part for me in doing this work about this curse is realizing that at four years old, I remember standing my ground and this voice came out of me. It really was like I was channelling Satan himself. It was a really evil, demonic sounding big low voice.
I said, "I will NEVER forget that you did this to me."
And I never did. I never have.
Not only did I not forget, but for a long time, I never forgave it.
I forgave it much later in my 20s, early 30s, when I realized that this person was younger than I was at that age, when this happened. I was really dealing with someone who's relatively pretty young to me now. There was a lot of fear motivating what happened.
You know, I forgave it because you're supposed to forgive this shit, right? In order to move on. Now one thing that Seth pointed out is, just because you forgive the person for doing that to you doesn't make the wound go away. It's not like it erases it or keeps it from happening. So the whole idea of forgiveness is a different component than being wounded in this way that has festered.
So that part of me that was so easily drunk with power at seven and then again as a teenager, and then again with my relationship with Richard, was someone who was fighting for their existence. Asa nailed it when she said, "So much defensiveness in the way you speak about this. There's so much language about being attacked."
And, you know, that was the curse.
I cursed someone else, really, in self defense, and the witches’ rede is, everything you put out, comes back to you three times over. I don't know. Maybe there's a little bit of that in there. If a four year old can be guilty of defending themselves against abuse and then create karma from it... I don't know.
But that event, that violence related to my sexual identity and my safety in my own self, in my own body, it fucked up ALL my relationships, with men especially.
So rather than being in the closet, I never really was in the closet. I embraced being gay as a big FUCK YOU to that violence against me for being gay. Because what could be worse than not cowering down and doing the thing you've been told to do?
The ultimate middle finger was to go all the way with it and embrace it and identify with it and I did. And I don't know what instinct made it go that way for me when so many other people went the other way. Maybe it's because I was in a relatively safe and loving environment that I had a whole lot of things building me up. So that wasn't enough to take me down.
I'm not putting it out there that I'm somehow special. I'm just saying that that's how I reacted to it. And it still poisoned me forever, in a way that became insidious and hard to name. And that went all the way through school.
I cursed the first perpetrator of homophobia at four. I started fighting people for calling me a "fag" at seven, and I did that all the way through junior high and high school, and all the way up to the moment I found myself doing it to Richard.
My ability to love, to be in a love relationship, is not really what this curse is about. It's about an existential threat to who I am, my identity. So when he made our breakup about my writing, about my sense of purpose, he threatened my identity again. My very existence. My sense of why I'm here at all was under attack.
So there's a through story. There's a story arc here and there were chapters, there were entire books and prequels before the one in the series that I shared as the Love Curse.
I didn't know it at the time I recorded this for you guys. I didn't know I was jumping in the middle of the show. So I kind of had to go back to the beginning and binge watch. It's like if you came in on a series and is like, Oh, this is show's really cool! I'm gonna get on Netflix now and watch the earlier seasons.
So I had to do some kind of binge time travelling through my life.
Okay, so how do you fix that? How do you retrieve the part of you that broke away? Or how do you heal that thing that's wounded? You've identified, okay, it's a four year old self that's been beat to shit. What can you do?
And so that's what I was kind of stuck with there for a week or so pondering and trying to think about what I was supposed to do with this information. And I was thinking about the concepts of soul retrieval and Asa's description about how a part of you breaks away, you lose a part of your soul when these traumatic events happen to you.
And I started thinking about the clinical idea of multiplicity, which is no longer really considered a disorder but one of the ways in which the brain protects itself, the mind protects itself against really, really significant abuse or trauma, is these compartmentalizations that happen.
And so, as I was feeling my way through all this information, I started to have these images of pieces of myself breaking away like shards of time, like there's a film strip and there are these pieces that got cut because they couldn't be a part of my story. They had to be yanked out.
And they exist like... It reminds me of the old Superman movies from the 80s, the ones with Christopher Reeve where they imprison the villains in this kind of like broken piece of a mirror that's floating through space.
And so I saw this part of myself. It wasn't a piece of me, like a limb that's missing. It was a moment in time that was edited out and encapsulated in this shard and it exists in a loop, a time loop. Like you have those memories, those flashes, from that event that happened to you. And you can sort of... They're just moments. They're seconds. They're like gifs, you know, the little digital moving images. They're just these little moments that play over and over again. They're memories.
From a soul perspective, they're a part of my spirit that is stuck in these little time loops, like horcruxes or something, if you want to use a Harry Potter conceptualization.
So yeah, I started to become aware of the fact that there is a four year old version of myself that is stuck in a time loop where he's being beaten for being gay over and over and over again. And has since it happened. It's out there. It's floating around in space of my existence, of my consciousness.
Okay, so how do you communicate with that? How do I get him out of there? So that was the other place that I was stuck. As I was driving around, as I was in the shower, as I was cutting the lawn, as I was sweeping the driveway. That's what I'm working on, right?
Okay, again, like I said, asking these questions like, how do I get to him? And if I do, how do I break him out?
So of course I thought, well, I'll journal about it. I'll sit down at some point and I'll really just do some kind of free floating writing with those questions and I was procrastinating doing that a little bit. I couldn't find the right moment. It wasn't like I could put it on my To-Do list like, "Thursday at 10 - Retrieve four year old self from time shard", you know?
It just... I don't know.
I kept waiting to have a moment, an impulse, to do it, because this isn't like a book I'm writing. This is a piece of working on myself that does need to come from this really emotional place. It does need to be inspired. I need to be connected to it emotionally. I can't just examine it intellectually. That's one of my faults in my astrological charts.
If I do a relationship composite with anyone, it always brings up the fact that I intellectualize my emotions instead of feeling them. It's like, great. Okay. What do you do if that's what you do?
Well I ended up doing it in the car. I was driving, it was a beautiful day, I was listening to some music, I was actually feeling very joyful. I was feeling a moment of, Ah! All is right in the world.
And that's when the inspiration hit me. Not gloom and doom. It's early in the morning and I'm drinking coffee and I've gotta go there. It was this moment of music, joy in the car, cranked up, and I remembered that moment when I was yoga travelling.
Remember that? When I told you on an earlier episode about how I have these dream-like travels during shavasana at the end of a yoga class, and I had that whole vision where my shadow swam up from underneath me and wanted me to spoon him. That has a bit of a musical element as well.
So here I was driving my car and I saw my four year old self in his shard and I suddenly felt just bowled over with the trauma of what was happening to him and the fact that he didn't know it was happening to him over and over again. His entire existence was living in that moment and I felt this need to go there and rescue him, like an angel beaming in. Or a visitor from the future projecting into that moment and rescuing him, breaking him out, like an episode of Star Trek.
So I just started to imagine, you know, how that scene would play out. And once I was in there, I was like, what do I say to this little kid as my adult self appears to him in this moment of crisis and pain. I'm there to rescue him. What do I say? What's the dialogue? How do I convince a four year old to come with me?
Because he was there because we put him there. And at the time, that's all we were was that four year old self. So I knew that there was some part of my consciousness that could just snap my fingers and make him not be there anymore. Right? Intellectually, philosophically, that should be the case. A lot of people have written to me and said, well you just decide not to feel that way anymore.
Okay well yeah. That's great. Let's all do that about everything that messes us up. Easy fix.
I ended up completely in tears because I started to speak to him out loud as I'm driving, trying to explain to him what's going on and convince him that he doesn't have to be there. That he can come with me. That there is a place where I live now, where the things that threatened him are no longer a threat. That the thing that he is protecting himself against is not relevant in the same way anymore. That I have this place that he can come and be all of the things that he was attacked for in pure, open joy.
Because he's less likely to be attacked but he's also protected by me. So it can't happen on my watch, kind of thing.
And I was... You know, I do most of this stuff at an intellectual place. I'm really not emotional about it. I wasn't as emotional on the show as I would've thought I would've been. I even gave a little bit of disclaimer: By the way, if you ever do a reading for me, I don't react very much in the moment. Sometimes my emotional responses come way later.
So if you tell me amazing news, my response is sometimes kind of underwhelming. I apologize.
So here's the point at which it overwhelmed me. In the car, where so much of my magic dialoguing happens. Because I can't write, so I start talking. I was honestly afraid when I got off the interstate that I was gonna get pulled over and arrested. And if a cop saw my face, he would think that I was on something. My eyes were red and I was driving while shattered.
Just driving while completely undone. Having a psychological breakthrough in the car.
Here's the important thing. As you start thinking about this process conceptually, what I'm hoping happens is that you now apply that to some of your stories. The younger versions of yourself that have been in captivity have not had the chance to evolve and grow the way that your present self has. Those younger version of ourselves have not had those experiences. They haven't benefited from any of that growth or evolution.
You have to give them time to assimilate, to learn this world that you live in, to become a part of it. You kind of have to adopt these parts of yourself and raise them from those younger moments forward. Give them a chance to catch up. Give them life experience to allow them to grow up. And maybe it will happen at an advanced rate of speed. Maybe it won't take 46 years for that to happen.
It might take a matter of months or days or weeks. I don't know. But what I do know is you can't just throw them in the car with you, say they're retrieved, and then carry on and expect them to now participate in all your adult conversations and activities and the conversations that you have with yourself about stuff that's going on.
These are children, probably, right?
So I have some living to do with these younger versions of myself with the awareness of where they've been and what they've experienced. It's like adopting a car full of spirit children that are also feral stray cats.
I'm teaching them about our power. About who we are now... And I think it's just an on-going personal development project. And that's cool. Because I needed something that's not just about my work or about ambition. That's just one quadrant of my life, and that's workaholism, when you just channel everything into work and make it all about that.
I need to develop in some truly personal ways and so this has presented itself to me as something that needed to be healed.
There was one component that I still wanted to be a part of this new spell, this new magic, this healing magic, this reversal. I needed a new mantra. So...
Shoot the moon is not the mantra for what's going on, with what I just described for you. Shoot the moon is a mantra for a spell to attract my partner. It's an antenna that I've sent up. Shoot the moon is a satellite for a specific purpose of communicating with that person. It's an invitation for someone to come into my life.
But to heal this curse in an ongoing manner requires its own mantra. I just want to share a little bit about what that looks like for me on paper, how I create a mantra. And I'm going to use this very specific example.
So of course it's a writing exercise for me. It kind of reminds me a little bit about doing marketing brainstorming, like when you're trying to think of a cool tagline or like a catchy sentence to go on your Facebook ad or whatever it might be. Something to put on a flyer to draw people in that's not just the title of the event or something more like dialogue. Something that speaks to people.
And so one of the things that you do is you start writing down as many of them as you can and you write different versions of them. Even the titles of my podcast episodes usually have three or four version where I try out different wording. And that's the way I write.
I don't delete things in the moment because I want to have all those options and iterations that I went through, I want them still to be there. So when I write first drafts of things, I just list... I can say it this way, I can say it this way, I can say it the same way but with one word different, I can say it here and change the... and go back later and choose one of them, or maybe even go back again a second time and say, nope, you know what? I'm going back to Option 2 or whatever. I want to see all the options there.
So that's an exercise that I do and I thought, okay, I'm just going to do that to write a new mantra. So I started to think about how that old mantra that was related to the curse was my magic in words and it was affirming a very specific place for my magic to be.
And I thought, okay, well I need my magic to be in other places. I need it to be everywhere. I don't just need for it to be in one thing. That's how I got into this trouble.
So here's some of the things that I wrote. I'm just gonna read them to you so you can see all the different versions of what I was trying to communicate.
I wrote down:
My magic flows through all areas of my life.
That's like an affirmation, right? That's one you can put on a sticky note and put on your mirror and say every day.
My magic flows through all areas of my life.
That's what I want to communicate. But I still want something punchier. I want something quicker. I need a spell. I need an abracadabra.
So I wrote:
Power flows into and through all areas of my life.
Magic flows in all parts of my life.
I am powerful.
Magic flows in my life.
My life is magical.
Magic in my life.
My magic in words.
Magic in my life.
My life is magic.
So you can see, as I start to write those, I am trying to find a way to say, 'My magic flows through all areas of my life', the affirmation, in as few words and syllables as possible.
My life is magic.
Magic is in my life.
So I have to keep working on those and see what rolls off my tongue. The fewer words the better. But also, it's kind of like a pet name. It's something that evolves on its own because you keep saying it over and over again. You hear me saying those things like the intro text to the podcast, you'll notice over time I lose a word or two here or there, right?
It's always getting refined and edited down just a little bit further. So a mantra is like a song I'm working on or something. It's like I'm looking for the perfect chorus, the perfect hook. And I'll just keep working with that. But it's a concept that replaces an older concept that was limiting me. Because you can't take something out without putting something else in.
Okay. Thanks for listening. Thanks for holding space for this process. For me. From what I've heard in feedback, you can relate to this. You have your own stories. You have your own versions of this kind of pain, this kind of curse, this kind of self-imposed restriction.
So what can you employ these techniques for in your own world?
Start with questions. Go and have dialogues with your Higher Self, with your guides. Go and do an automatic writing session with your questions. See what other questions come up. And do the time traveling thing where you start with an event that you feel like, okay, when was the moment when my soul got broken and cut up?
Can you go back in time and find an earlier instance of that same energy?
Because what I found, and what I find often in doing readings for people, is that we think we've got problems in five different areas of our life. And what we really have one problem showing up in all these different ways, such that we think we have five enemies instead of one, you know?
Or we think we're messed up all over the place. We're just a wreck, when really there's just one story that needs to be rewritten. There's this one child that's locked in a shard of time, that needs to be broken free, and invited to come live in this new place.
Yeah... So go do that. Go talk to yourself about it. Go retrieve yourself. Go save yourself. And love yourself.