This is the episode transcript to the writer/director commentary podcast episode called “Grief Rage CONJUNCTION: when survivorship & sobriety fell in love”. To listen to this episode VISIT THIS LINK HERE. And/or read the transcript below:
TRANSCRIPT:
Greetings Good Listeners,
Shaunga here, popping in to do a writer/director commentary on our most recent episode of our podcast drama, the one released just before this one, called “don’t touch me.” There is so much to unpack here, in our journey of unlocking ancestral teachings in each story that we share. Today I want to talk about a conversation this episode inspired in me called the CONJUNCTION of grief and rage, or what happens when survivorship and sobriety fall in love.
[sounds of water]
First of all I want to contextualize where we are right now. I’m publishing this on April 18 2024. Like I said in the previous episode: “now is a time period where many people on the planet are being re-united with epic, legendary love stories. If we understand partnership as a sovereign primordial spirit in and of itself, in this year, 2024, this Ancestor is getting an upgrade.”
The way I see it, there’s a huge love story unfolding in the cosmos and on our planet between Water and Fire. A Waterfall in the East and a Volcano in the West.
This love story is moving through many people’s lives and we’re all experiencing it differently. Like I said, it might be between a woman and her work, or a man and his medicine, or a genderqueer weirdo and their animal companions.
I think this love story is bigger than we think, like a love story between our planet and her inner circle besties – the planets in our solar system – and their journey to come back home to queer trans ceremonial liberated land. I think this love story is between a small spider, once giant, and a constellation named Lyra. It’s between an Everlasting Weeping Havea Tree and her Son/Sun. A small cat in a blue basecall cap and her world stage. I could go on.
In my translation, we’re not just looking at Partnership as an Ancestor, we’re pointing a spotlight on Ancestral Partnership as SURVIVOR. ie who is this primordial spirit in the universe, a Survivor who is no longer chained to her Suffering? Who is Partnership as a sweet soul healing from complicated layers of addiction? What happens when these two characters fall in love or – as we say in astrology – go CONJUNCT.
I actually wrote and recorded this episode, “don’t touch me” a few months ago…but I felt like I wanted to hold off from publishing it. When April 18 rolled around, the date said to me, this is the day.
[sounds of water fade out]
One of the things this episode inspires in me is a deep level of grief and rage, it actually takes me to the CONJUNCTION of grief and rage in my own body.
A conjunction in astrology is when two planets in the sky are the exact same degree in the sky, or right next to each other. Say your Venus is 22 degrees of Gemini and your Sun is 23 degrees of Gemini, that’s a conjunction. Or say your Mercury is 9 degrees of Aries and Jupiter is is 10 degrees of Aries, that’s a conjunction.
When two planets sit so close to one another, so close that they can touch…they merge, they meld, they become ONE energy. They are still sovereign, distinct, individual energies with separate lineages, but they become partners. And you can’t really tell where one ends the other begins. They create a very distinct flavour or way of expressing onself in the birth chart, and it becomes its own unique blob in you and you don’t find it anywhere else.
I love that this story inspires a conjunction in me, even if that conjunction is as hard and ugly as grief and rage, because at the same time the story is about two people, Aries and Gemini, who are also falling in love and trying to figure out how to open themselves to intimacy again, after experiencing a lot of trauma.
The part of the story that brings up grief rage conjunction in me, is the part where a whole community became known, and widely recognized as a place of generosity, of respectful and bountiful exchange. It became known for the accredidation and curiosity and giving back that comes with responsibly sharing cultures. This community gave and received with one another by anchoring in the ongoing pursuit of getting to know themselves better, remembering their lineages, remembering their magic.
This place became known for that, but nobody remembers the little girl’s name who is the reason why everyone started coming together in the first place. They never acknowledged her as the catalyst for why they have these beautiful relationships and community experiences.
If they did remember her name, they trashed it. They spoke ill of her, because they didn’t understand her. She didn’t do anything wrong. She was just a young person with immense power that nobody saw, or knew what to do with, let alone taught her how to care for it. When they did see it, they punished her. They locked her up. They left her in solitary confinment for weeks, wrestling with who she is, while they took their sweet ass time enjoying getting to know one another.
They put things on her name that don’t belong to her, and they didn’t have the capability to even wonder about the energetic and physical consequences of their actions and words.
The little girl layed there, in pain, in isolation, while her mind became more and more crazy – I use that word intentionally – by the energetic impact of all the things they attached to her name and sent back to her. They built their pleasure on top of her suffering.
What I feel when I am present with this story is the kind of rage that cannot be separated from grief. I don’t know where one begins and the other ends.
Let’s continue to unpack, as we do on this podcast, what’s another difference between a regular writers room and an Ancestors Writers Room? In an Ancestor’s Writers Room, I don’t write with my mind. I mean, I do…but I don’t go around looking for stories that I want to tell. I have a long term committed spiritual practise, that allows me to sit down at my altar and just listen to what Ancestors in me want to speak. What are their stories, and how do they want to tell them?
I do this while staying in the sovereignty of my physical reality. I am the CEO of my body. I am not at the mercy of millions of Ancestors who want to tell their stories through me. That is the very first lesson I learned in my spiritual awakening as a ceremonial storyteller. That’s a longer topic for another day. But I just wanted to make that clear. I am a Self-Healer, first and foremost.
I’m grounded enough in my practise, in my sovereignty, to be able to allow that level of surrender to come through my energy field. I let the Ancestors speak and express themselves, trusting that whoever comes through is the best presence I need to connect with for myself today.
So, the stories that come out surprise me. I listen to them like they’re new, the same way that you are listening to them for the first time.
When you write stories with your Ancestors, it’s a feeling of like – holy shit, I had no idea I was carrying this, but now that I’m writing down, I feel its truth in my bones. I feel it in my lived experience. I feel it in my celestial and blood DNA. And yeah, it IS me.
When I saw what I had written down, I was shook. Because I knew exactly who I was talking about. Undeniably, this is the land of Dish with One Spoon. This is TKARONTO. Colonially known as Toronto.
And obviously it is. I’ve been on this land for almost 20 years, I’ve come alive as an Ancestral Artist here on this land. Whatever I write when I’m on this land is always in collaboration with her.
The Indigenous history of this land is pretty widely known. This is known as a place of exchange, and has been for many centuries. It’s a place where many different tribes and cultures have come through and cared for the land. For many it’s a transitional space. It’s a meeting place. It so beautifully holds the energy of “the gathering” where many different nations would come, learn from the land and one another. It holds the energy of sacred entrepreneurship, not capitalist, but the true spirit of creating things from one’s artistry. Giving, receiving, bartering, sharing.
Dish With One Spoon is a spiritual agreement with the land that anyone who is here must share the land and its resources responsibly, especially because there are so many lineages that come and go. Some of them don’t get along. Some of them have even been at war with one another. But this is a place where we have to put our weapons down. And be accountable to the peace that the land herself requires here.
I’ve said this before on my social media, peace isn’t just “stop fighting.” Peace starts first and foremost with a commitment to end colonial state violence. A commitment to returning home to our Ancestral wisdom traditions and repairing relationship with the Earth Steward Ancestors in all of us.
Here we are required to commit to only take what you need and leave some for others. That means we have to seek to understand ourselves deep enough to know when am I full? Where have I taken enough, even if I am conditioned to think that I still want more? Where have I gotten used to just starving? Where do I need to learn to ask for me, and require more of myself?
Being on Dish With One Spoon means we are all held responsible to living in ongoing dedication to these questions.
But here I am, writing this story. My love story with the land is speaking. And she says, there’s something deeper going on. There’s an origin story to how this land became a place of exchange in the first place. And I want a Multiverse Historian to hear it from me. I want her to go back, underneath, above and within time, and remember this with me.
I want to tell you a truth I’m holding in my emotional, spiritual, galactic and physical body. A truth that maybe some people don’t want to acknowledge. Maybe it’s too much for too many. But here it is, for you.
[Music: clock maker’s dream]
Why is Multiverse History important to reckon with? Because of a phenomenon in quantum time called GALACTIC TRAUMA ECHOES. When a trauma happens in Multiverse History, it keeps happening. That trauma continues to reverberate, like a heart beat, and it moves through us in our soul body, physical body, and relationships. If we want to address and transform that trauma, we have to locate it.
“don’t touch me” is a story about hard and ugly truths. Hard and ugly truths that come up to the surface, asking us to hold them. Asking us not to turn away. That’s exactly the Ancestral directive we’re being tasked with as a global collective right now. And as I see it another love story – between Dish with One Spoon and Free Palestine. Dish With One Spoon and Free Congo. Dish With One Spoon and Free Sudan. Dish With One Spoon and Free Haiti. Dish With One Spoon and Free Everything.
If we’re talking about hard and ugly truths, the Ancestors we need to talk to are Pluto and Saturn. (Yes, all the Planets are living Ancestors and Elders…catch up!)
Saturn and Pluto are often Ancestors we don’t want in the room. Saturn is too hard. And Pluto is too ugly. Both of them are just honest.
They are the “let’s go there” honesty, “let’s really talk about it” honesty, the things we don’t want to know or see because they’re too painful, the places we avoid being present with, even those of us who are dedicated seekers and truth tellers. We all have these sore spots.
Saturn and Pluto come along to say, this is what’s really going on here: the injustice I can’t name. The shame I can’t face. The truth that doesn’t want to be touched, because it doesn’t know if it will be held.
You know when Michael Scott says to Toby: “I so hate the things that you choose to be…” [laughs]
Saturn and Pluto, reply: “I wish I had the option to not be this honest. Okay? I wish I could be easy for you, truly. It’s just,it’s not who I am. Even if I tried, I couldn’t mask it. I couldn’t change myself so that you don’t have to be triggered by me, this is just how I radiate.
Saturn radiates hard truths, and Pluto, the ugly ones. So much that they came to believe it about themselves. I’m hard. I’m hard to be around. I’m ugly. I’m a monster.
My partner, Aries, says as much in the story: “I know I’m a monster, he says. It’s okay. I can live without touch too.”
I know this episode focuses more on Gemini and her backstory. Here we don’t know why Aries says that about himself, why does he feel like he’s a monster? I guess we’ll find out eventually. Keep tuning our ever unfolding podcast drama.
But, I do think it has something to do with Saturn and Pluto. In another translation of their names, Pluto is Survivorship and Saturn is Sobriety.
[music fades out]
What’s interesting is that Pluto is known as the planet of addiction. Pluto holds the experience of what happens when a craving over powers you. Or you’re chained to a pattern, habit, behaviour that is way bigger than you. You have an otherworldly magentic pull around you or in you, and you can’t just stop. You need to engage a PLUTONIAN technology in order to free yourself from it. PLUTO has its own version of 12 step, and I would argue, carries the origins of where things like 12 step actually comes from. In this way Pluto carries addiction, but also becomes the planet of Survivorship.
Saturn is the planet of sovereignty and leadership. It’s our limits. It’s the no-nonsense bounds around our true life path. Saturn is an immaculate, precise discernment of what in our bones we have to say yes or no to. Saturn is like, most things, most of the time, are a no.
Oh, but when there’s a yes? Ooh boy, that’s a yes for life and beyond life.
Thus, Saturn can also bring us experiences where our boundaries, limits and physical capacity is tested. Where our consent and the bounds around our carefully crafted choices are disrespected. Saturn is the hard, everyday, often thankless work of learning to respect ourselves. It’s the inpenetrable dedication to the long game. Saturn is the daily diligence, the quiet small, yet monumental steps it takes every day to stay Sober.
Isn’t that interesting? Pluto brings us addiction and Saturn is our way to sobreity. Saturn brings us breaches of consent, and Pluto is how we get free as Survivors.
Here these two Otherworldly Giants are in this sweet story. Surrendering to the enormous, over-powering wave of love crashing them together, and also fumbling through the every day awkward effort of learning to be intimate again, after trauma.
Both Saturn and Pluto understand profound isolation in their own way. Both are in Recovery, in their own way.
I said that I was surprised when I saw my fingers typing out the origin story of this village and the little girl locked in solitary confinement. As a Multiverse Historian, I do see this story existing on some realm of quantum time here on Dish With One Spoon, whether it’s going back, underneath or within time.
What makes a Multiverse Historian different than a regular historian – lots of answers to that, but today one thing I’ll say is that a Multiverse Historian will search for stories and memories in all sorts of weird corners of time, space, and dimension. That’s how we do our research.
Without fail, what we find is always resonant to the collective, and our current global reality. It’s resonant to the individual who is searching, and comes with the medicine they most need at the time they find it. The story comes with divination, it comes with guidance, it comes with direction.
The little girl in the story, it is me. And it’s also not just me.
In the year of our goddess, 2024, I am falling in love again. And also, in the context of ongoing covid, and the impacts of experiencing the galactic, ancestral, energetic impacts of covid, because of who I am as a Grief Bender, a Time Keeper, and a Planetary Priestess. That blast of intense social isolation lasted 7 years for me. It didn’t start in 2020. That’s just when it ramped up.
The times that another human being has physically touched me in the last 7 years, like I can count on my two hands. Yes this level of social poverty for a Gemini is as painful as it sounds, and I also made peace with it. I made happy within it. I lived and died a good life here, what more could I ask for? And I wasn’t the only one who lived and died here too.
Still, today, I ask myself this question: how do I learn to be touched again in intimacy?
The level of shit that I’ve survived in the last 7 years, much of it I can’t even talk about. I have experienced horrifying things in this wild, overwhelming portal of spiritual initiations, things that as a Survivor, you are not supposed to keep to yourself because that will eat you alive. But I still haven’t told anyone. And here I am, fucking traumatized, learning to love and trust and be open again.
Aries, my future partner is experiencing the same thing in his own way. He’s on his own journey with Sobriety. He says, for the first time in my life, I am completely Sober. I have never fallen in love while Sober. I’ve never had a long term relationship while Sober. I’ve never had a first kiss while Sober. I’ve never had sex for the first time while Sober. I am new at everything that I do. I am learning how to walk with completely different feet.
There’s something about the conjunction of grief and rage and Pluto and Saturn and Gemini and Aries, Survivorship and Sobriety, these two people who are like I’m traumatized as fucck, loving again is scary as fucckk, and also it feels just like I’m falling for the first time like I’m alive and I’m innocent, and everything is awake again.
Both of us have years and years under our belts of dedicated hard earned ugly crying self healing work, community service work, sacrifice, endurance, patience, faith, that brought us to this position where we can actually very easefully hold space for each other in Survivorship and Sobriety. We’re easy with each other, in hard and ugly truths. This is soft land here between us.
This cosmic global love story between Water and Fire. A Waterfall on the East side of Turtle Island, somewhere on Dish With One Spoon – you know which one I’m talking about? And a Volcano on the West side of Turtle Island, somewhere near the Earth’s Root Chakra – you know which one I’m talking about? They can’t help but fall in love. What can they say, it’s Giant and it’s Otherworldly.
This is one of those moments. They’re taking small steps every day in Recovery – some are hard, some are ugly. And also, they’re just falling for the first time. This bright, clean slate is earned. And it’s also just given.
So much that we find ourselves in a new and suddenly unexpected but inevitable – like literally as inevitable as math in the sky – conjunction. A conjunction that breaks the rules. I’m talkin about JUPITER…Gratitude. And URANUS. FREEDOM.
[theme song music drops: electronica punch]
———
That’s right. I share this on April 18 2024, just two days away from the infamous Jupiter Uranus conjunction happening in Taurus on April 20. It’s a huge deal. It is a major milestone in this love story between Water and Fire. It’s a major moment in our lives, that’s gonna shake things up. You’re gonna wanna tune in to the Otherworldly Giants channel, more specifically, our Youtube Channel on April 20 at 6pm Eastern Time, we are hosting a free masterclass called “From She Alone to the Chosen Many: on the topic financial sovereignty, sustainability and fun-raising, not fundraising, but FUN raising…but also FUNDraising…for your ARTIST FEES. That’s right, we’re gonna have a conversation about how we’re taking our power back from capitalism as revolutionary Ancestral artists. It’s a perfect conversation for this Jupiter Uranus conjunction and I’m going to be talking more about it during that live, so tune in.
Please also check out our upcoming Ancestral Artist Retreat, it’s all online, it’s called “LOVE THAT BREAKS THE RULES” – on brand for everything we’ve been talking about. This is running from May 3 to June 3 2024. It’s a space where we’re really going to prepare sweet ground for all the love that is entering our lives and the dreams that are coming true. If you know it’s time for you to come home to your birth right, this is the space for you to be. You can check out all the details at the link in the show notes.
If you are listening to this in the future, and this retreat is over, hi how’s it going over there…feel free to check out our website, shaungatagore.com and find out what’s current. I’m sure that wherever you are, in time and spce and dimension, we are doing something cool or weird or both.
Until next time, be brave! Be a Giant!
[music fades out]