Greetings Good Listeners,
The below video is a writer/director commentary on my latest podcast episode called I KNOW HER: The Wolf Who Stopped Time
…Which just happens to be my super-sized 40th birthday special episode!! You can LISTEN TO IT HERE.
As you know, here in the Ancestors Writers Room, we wield our signature ancestral technology called Open Heart Surgery Storytelling: we tell a story, and then we go back into said story to unlock their ancestral teachings via writer/director commentary.
In today’s commentary I’m focusing on an element this episode highlights, that is our very fraught relationship to fame, public visibility, the safety we do and don’t get when sharing our gifts with the world, and how that impacts our well being, including the financial and overall success of our work.
I share my experiences as a survivor of stalking, and a conversation about my journey with spell work and energetic protection specific to surviving this kind of violence (we are talking about surviving stalking on the physical, human level, and also on the psychic plane).
In the process I offer thoughts on who FAME is as a benevolent Ancestor, a wider perspective contextualizing the violence of stalking in today’s current genocidal landscape, and some thoughts on what is the role of the Ancestral Artist during times like these? What kind of safety and protection do we need in order to do our jobs? To be loved out loud and in public?
CREATOR’S NOTE:
In the video, for survivors of stalking, I get to a point where I talk about considering the energetic dynamics of someone who develops an addiction to your inherent medicine, and ancestral artistry…thus considering spell work that helps you heal from being treated like an object of someone’s addiction. What has that created in you? What are the stories, narratives, energetics, relationship contracts? Explore that world.
One thing I did not mention in the video that is very important here – consider the Plancestors, Animal guides, Star Relatives, “Old One” Ancestors, or anybody in your lineage, your “in-dwelling” Ancestors, who also may have been treated / is currently being treated like an object of addiction verses a sovereign being worthy of dignity, love, reciprocity and respect.
Effective spell work can involve reconnecting to this Spirit(s) or part of you, giving them offerings, repairing with them, asking them what they need, asking them for guidance around protection, safety and a path forward.
You can watch the video and/or read the transcript at the bottom of this page.
TRANSCRIPT FOR VIDEO: Love Us Out Loud & in Public (a note for survivors of stalking)
Greetings Good Listeners,
Been a minute since I’ve been on youtube.
If you don’t know me, I’m Shaunga. Multiverse Historian, and Showrunner of the Ancestors Writers Room.
Today I’m offering a video on the topic of the infamous “fear of being seen witch hunt wound”, and this is also a note for Survivors of stalking, and what it means for us Survivors who are carriers of Ancestral Wisdom to be Loved Out Loud and in Public.
So in the process I’m also going to offer some thoughts about what is the role of the Ancestral Artist in today’s times amidst multiple escalating genocides. Trigger Warning – we’re talking about survivor stuff, stalking, obviously, some mention of sexual violence, rape culture, consent stuff.
A quick image description for those who are Blind or low vision: I am a femme presenting genderqueer person, I have thick black hair a little past my shoulders, brown skin, South Asian, Bengali. I’m wearing a mint green jumper, glasses, there’s a purple wall behind me. Okay.
For those who don’t know me, I work with a unique technology in ancestral artistry called Open Heart Surgery Storytelling, it’s specific to me and my lineage.
What I do is share episodic storytelling on my podcast, Otherworldly Giants, the Divination Channel, which is magical reality TV for the revolution, or a true-life multiverse podcast drama about a queer witch and her two black cats in life and afterlife, and her future partner, and the world of freedom we are collectively dreaming and birthing into life.
What I do with Open Heart Surgery Storytelling is I go into stories that I write or that others have written, but with mine especially, I go into them and I open them up – I unlock the ancestral teachings, collective divination, energy healing and spell casting that is embedded in each story.
There’s so much in just one story that you could unlock it for days, for months, for years – you can keep returning to it and find more liberation codes unfolding, more energetic knots untangling, more healing that just keeps on giving.
So I just dropped a new episode on my 40th birthday, that just passed on June 13th, it’s a super-sized birthday special episode, it’s called “I KNOW HER: The Wolf Who Stopped Time” and I don’t know, I love all my art babies, but this is one of my best creations yet…I’m really proud of it.
So today, I’ll be unlocking some of the ancestral teachings in that episode, and one of the topics that is sort of flashing red right now, like and aching and raw sore, is this topic of the dangers of public visibility, why someone like me would stay in hiding and social isolation for so long, and how that connects to my experiences surviving stalking.
Okay, so in this episode we follow our protagonist named Shaunga (no relation to me, ha!) and the Wolf Who Stopped Time, who is travelling around the yellow brick road of the Emerald Mountains, not the Emerald City, but the Emerald Mountains. And she meets a Witch on each direction. Like, the Wicked Witch of the West, East, North, South.
When she meets the Witch on the South, she must confront a lot of issues that exist on this direction ie the realm of the physical, the material, including this struggle around not being able to pay her bills. Again, no relation at all to me (laughs.)
The Witch of the South says: “Shaunga, what are you still doing here in the underground where nobody knows your name? Your money will never flow unless it’s shared with the world, amongst the people. Your medicine is rich. It’s loud. It’s rambunctious. It needs to be seen and heard widely.”
Okay so, this is speaking to something very specific to me, and important about who I am. I want to throw it back to my friend Ravyn who has always said about me –
“Shaunga, you’re inherently famous.”
I’m like what?
“You’re inherently famous when you have 20 followers on instagram, or when you’re performing in front of big audiences, you don’t get a choice in the matter, it’s just who you are.”
So Ravyn’s been saying this to me for over 12 years that we’ve known each other. At first I was like HUH, and it took me a while to understand what she meant by that, but essentially I’m starting to understand, the essence of my creativity, my self-expression, my healing, my erotic energy – it’s big. It’s massive, my business is called “Otherworldly Giants.”
That means, when I give out this expression that I have, and let it just be itself, it’s so big that it needs to be received, held, engaged with, and given back, by the world…by a huge collective.
If I tried to truly express the fullness of what I have to give in individual or even small group relationships, it would be too big, it would break the ship. It would, and it has. Because that small container was never meant to solely care for something that needs to be cared for by the world, by a large collective. Right?
That’s the true nature of fame. And it’s funny, because I make fun of it in this episode. There’s a scene where my future partner and I are joking around we’re saying – we have to rely on spiritual coaches to save the world, but the minute a spiritual coach gets a taste of fame, they sell out, immediately. We’re doomed!
Okay, so it’s a joke. There’s nothing about Fame that is inherently toxic, there’s nothing about Fame that like makes you sell out. Fame is kind of like JUPITER, right? It magnifies what’s already there. It’s what we’ve done to Fame, and how we’ve funnelled Fame into industries that are built on genocide such as Hollywood, that’s what makes it toxic. And how we re-create those dynamics in our communities, that’s what makes it toxic.
Fame itself, as an Ancestor. Think of Fame as a benevolent spirit, a primordial Ancestors in the Universe. Fame is a sacred part of the Universe, it’s the 10th house in astrology. It’s not good or bad, public visibility, it just is.
And when you boil it down to what is the sacred nature of Fame – it’s just that, it’s someone who has something to give that is so big that it needs to be shared with the world in order to be properly held.
That’s why so many healers and artists are being asked right now to confront this “fear of being seen wound” – “the witch hunt wound” – just about every magical person and their little dog too knows something about that, right? Because we are being asked to grapple with this thing that we have inside, call it ancestral artistry, call it medicine, call it healing, that we so badly want and need to give to the world, especially now.
But to do that, we need to confront all the things that would stop us from doing that, the things that we do and don’t have control over.
So, when the Witch of the South tells me – you’re always going to be struggling with money until and unless you just allow yourself to shine, be famous, be seen by a lot more people, let go of the pot of medicine, let the wind blow it through the collective.
So the question is – why hasn’t my medicine done that thus far? If it’s inherently famous? I’m 40. Why do I keep holding it back? Or even as I wake up every day wanting so bad to share it, wanting so bad for it to be seen, doesn’t happen. Why?
A depolicitized spirituality will talk about this “fear of being seen” wound like it’s some ye olden days primordial fear, and it’s just about working through personal fears around people pleasing, or fear of disliked, or fear of upsetting people – which don’t get me wrong, I am very afraid of all those things…(laughs)
But it ignores the fact that people experience this wound very differently based on race, class, gender, etc. And for some people, upsetting people could actually mean physical violence, job loss, home loss, even death. Showing up fully in your magic can result in incarceration, including in psych wards, loss of access to life saving resources, heigthened surveillance and police brutality, social ostracization that can result in dangerous levels of social poverty and isolation, it can lead to intimate partner violence, sexualized violence, harrassment, ongoing breaches of consent including things like…Stalking.
I want to talk about my history and experience with Stalking and being stalked, because it’s one of the reasons I’m really socially traumatized, (just one of the reasons, there’s a lot of reasons for that!) but truly, it’s one of the conscious and unconscious reasons I that my work has been kept in hiding.
Let me say that I’ve experienced Stalking on a physical human level, and also on the psychic plane.
I think that’s important to talk about, that I can’t fully get into on a youtube video, but when you’re an awakened ancestral healer, the psychic stalking is just as destabilizing for me as experiencing it on the human level.
It has very similar impacts, it limits your freedom, your movement, it exasperates health issues, it makes you live really small, it makes you have to put away parts of yourself that are so inherent to who you are, but you have to put them away, it makes you feel like you’re going bonkers like, is it my fault, am I not being clear enough, have I not explained this properly enough, it causes psychological injury, at least for me because my instinct is to over-explain and over-teach trying to get them to understand my boundary and why it’s legitimate, that causes psychological injury for me because I’m piling too many things onto my brain, when “no” should have just been enough.
Psychic stalking has literally had a physical impact on me> I’m a very powerful oracle and energy healer, walker of dimensions. I remember once, the energy of a community member came into my space while I was sleeping, and literally kicked me in the solar plexus, as retaliation for why I hadn’t replied to their DM on social media, and I felt it physically. That’s how open my psychic senses are, they kicked me, this spirit and I felt it physically. Okay?
How do you get support for something like that without people thinking you’re crazy, or making things up. That’s not something I can ask for accountability around. What people are doing with their spirits – anyway, longer conversation.
A lot of spiritual people might say – well, that’s your problem Shaunga – your energy healing and protection wasn’t strong enough. What’s wrong with your magic, and what are you not doing well enough, that unwanted guests are travelling through your psychic space.
Now, if you know me at all, I am the last person to deny personal responsibility in this spiritual healing work, in fact that bugs the fuck out of me, when people deny their personal responsibility and their personal power in this.
That’s way too much of an individualized response that doesn’t understand Survivor wisdom, Survivor technology, doesn’t have a full understanding of spiritual politics around consent within a context of Rape Culture.
It is not easy on any level to create boundaries with someone who is intent on doing whatever they want, regardless of how clearly you say no.
That said, I have journeyed really deeply over the years with this energy and learned a lot about the ongoing and ever evolving spell work that can actually be effective when you’re this kind of survivor.
So I wanted to offer some preliminary thoughts on that kind of spell work, and hope it’s an offering for others that might be experiencing similar violence or have in the past.
When we lean into Survivor technology, you remember that 1) It’s not your fault if you struggle to find the right spell work or energetic protection and 2) it is really hard to figure it out on your own because survivors and thus survivor spell work cannot thrive in isolation.
I look at this is energy that feels very entitled to my intimacy, my friendship, my time, my company, my physical space. When I zoom out, what I see is an addiction to my medicine. An addiction to my inherent ancestral artistry, that I’ve carried and expressed since I was a child.
You might even say, it’s an addiction to my inherent fame. It sees something in me that is meant for the world, and it wants to keep it all for itself. That means it’s really disconnected from something that all the things that truly belong to them, and they’ve decided that I’m going to be their endless supply. This is the basis of a lot of extraction, abuse and appropriation we find in spiritual spaces and activist spaces.
Seeing this dynamic and what this energy is going through as an addiction helps me come back to myself, there’s something that lands and grounds me when I remember that. It illuminates direction for the appropriate spell work, because you can’t just make it stop. It’s an addiction. People don’t and can’t just stop their addictions.
In order to heal, transmute, and recover from addiction, you need a healing technology that understands addiction, and that specifically helps someone who wants to heal from it, heal.
So on the other side, the spell work is then – what is the ongoing healing work I need to do as a Survivor of someone’s addiction. Theres’ a whole world in understanding, what does that mean for me? I’m being treated like an object of someone’s addiction – what has that created in me? What are the stories, the narratives, the energetics, the relationship contracts, all of that kind of stuff. Explore that world. Then, you’ll be able to develop your spiritual strategies accordingly.
So for me, what ongoing stalking has done in my life, it has bittered me, right? It’s pushed me into extreme isolation. It ramped up this narrative I carry that’s like, if I put myself out there, if I let myself be seen more, that’s the only thing I’m going to be met with. I’m never going to attract what I want, if I put myself out there, I’m always going to be met with this extraction.
At the same time, the spirit of my medicine is ramping up – it’s saying – you can’t survive here in the underground anymore, I am medicine that NEEDS to be shared more widely with the people. And my medicine is telling me: We’re Good. You’re safe to make the right connections now. But as that medicine is ramping up, and the possibilities of true safety and freedom in my relationships are right there, that Antagonist is right there at that door.
I’m wanting to walk out that door, but the Antagonist is sitting next to that door, and it’s really loud and it’s ramping up. I see this as a collective pattern for a lot o us, who have medicine that is wanting to rise, wanting to express itself, wanting to give something, and the Antagonist is ramping up at the same time and giving us all of the reasons and realities of why I’m not safe out in the world.
But let’s talk about the larger picture of where we are, in this time/space of history, herstory, themstory.
This energy that doesn’t listen to you when you say no, no matter how clearly and forcefully you say no – what does that sound like to you? The ramping up of stalking, violence and rape culture in the realms of intimacy, is absolutely connected to the ramping up of wounded, violence ancestral energy behind Isr*el’s continued assault on Gaza, and the ramping up of militarized violence in places like Congo, Sudan, ie hot spots that are bearing the worst of our colonial reality.
In my mind, it’s the spirit of extraction culture and rape culture, and when it happens in the intimate realm, it’s a fractal of the larger militarized realm. So it’s ramping up in every place.
There is a specific attack right now against Artists who work, love, and create in the realm of lineage storytelling, especially Survivor Storytelling – of which, that’s my speciality, that’s my medicine. My medicine is when I tell stories about who I love and how I love them. Who I grieve, and how I grieve them. And when I tell my stories I tell them as an embodied expression of my my Queer and Transcestors, with my Sex Working Ancestors, with my Erotic Artistry, with my Survivor Ancestral technologies.
It’s so powerful, and transformative, it’s a huge threat to the spirit of genocide.
Part of what our freedom oriented Ancestors are trying to uncover is an upgraded definition about what is the role of Artists, Storytellers, Healers and Teachers in this current genocidal Millieu.
What’s our role? A lot of people are asking that question.
So here’s what we got for you in the Ancestors Writers Room:
The role of the Ancestral Artist is to provide an artistic self expression, a lineage storytelling, that provides an energy healing sorely needed by the planet right now.
The call is for you to create in deep sincere heartfelt collaboration with your Inner Earth Steward Ancestors who exist in sincere, heartfelt solidarity with the big freedom movements of our time. And in solidarity with the communities who are experiencing the brunt of this violence.
It’s our role to have our art feed and be fed in whatever ways our Ancestors are guiding us, even if it seems confusing, or selfish, or like it’s not important. It is so much more important than any of us realize.
Through our art and storytelling magic, we are carriers of energy healing that can remember and rebirth our way out of this mess. Espsecially when your medicine is erotic survivor ancestral wisdom. We are meant to create ritual through our art, we are meant to return home to the devotion of ceremonial storytelling and artistic expression, we are meant to give that art back to our Ancestors, our lineage, and they have the power to spread that energy healing through the wood wide web, the trees, the water, and take it to the places on the planet that need it the most.
We are by and large, not in collective practise of encouraging each other to invest in this work and really go for it! We are not in enough collective practise to protect those of us on the front lines of this spiritual warrior work, because it is that.
We need much more understanding, celebration, collective communion, conversation and collaboration – that’s where our most powerful spell work will emerge.
For us to truly be in solidarity, I believe we need to have much more safety and protection to be loved out loud and in public. By that I mean our Ancestral wisdom technologies, our love for our Ancestors, our love for this planet. I want way more public love and adoration for those of us who are doing this Ancestor veneration work. And to the Ancestors who give so much and make it possible.
They are our Wealth. And as long as we don’t support a movement that is invested in turning to them, we are sitting ON our true power.
This is the work that carries the key cards and the codes to get us out of this never ending time loop of crisis and humanitarian aid that is sitting on a saviour complex.
Falling in love more with our spiritual gifts and technologies is what we need to invest in, in order to divest more from our complicity and reliance on capitalist structures, because what we’re building together is truly sovereign and truly in collaboration with how the Earth herself wants to heal and it’s not a depoliticized spirituality, it’s a politicized one. That is what we need in order to ensure we transform into the world we want, not just survive the world we don’t want.
But let’s bring it back to some practicalities when it comes to stalking – really, how do I get a bitch to leave me alone?
One thing I can offer in the space of a youtube video for spell work: see what happens if you don’t think of your spell work as interacting with any one specific person. Zoom out and look at your relationship to an entire paradigm that wants to collapse and rebirth.
We are in the middle of shifting between Pluto in Capricorn and Pluto in Aquarius, so that means, we are in the paradigm shift. We are closing big chapters, big eras, and moving into a new one.
Think about this moment, the rest of this year, of closing a huge chapter from the last 15 years. What are the vows of poverty in the old paradigm that you no longer have to be chained by? What are the relationship contracts that are stale and mouldy that you can clear or lay to rest? Is there soul level trauma in that paradigm that needs a closure ritual? What were your values, interests, principles and priorities in the last paradigm? What isn’t true anymore? What’s your focus now, verses then? What did you think was immovable in the last paradigm, that now you know is a lie? Most importantly, who is your unique Antagonist in the old paradigm? Who is the villain? Who always showed up for a fight? Every time you hit a wall it’s like, ah it’s you again.
Think about it as a spirit, or a character. Even if it shows up as a person in your life – even in that person, what is the spirit in them that is antagonizing you?
The last part of this podcast episode ends on a cliffhanger. I recommend if you haven’t listened to it, go back and listen, I’ll put the link in the shownotes.
After going through this entire journey with the Wicked Witches on each direction, and a Toronto Pride party, as it were, I end up in the center at the end and I’m like, I guess I have to have a confrontation with the Wizard of Oz now, or with God, or at least a worthy antagonist. Then I sense someone’s coming. There’s a tornado of mist, of ether, becoming matter, becoming human. I say: “Oh shit. I know her. I don’t like her.”
So we end on a cliffhanger, the moment I see this antagonist in front of me.
This speaks to my experience in Multiverse History, where for lifetimes, and lifetimes and lifetimes, I’ve had the same antagonist. Same fucking story, same fucking villain, same relationship dynamic, playing over and over again Like clockwork.
But this period of time, we’re moving into an era where in the next chapter, this energy that has been antagonizing us for galactic lifetimes, in this next chapter, that antagonist, they don’t even exist. They’re not even a side character. They’re obselete, they’re irrelevant.
That’s why that antagonist in the personal realm and collective realm, it just doesn’t want to die. It knows it doesn’t even have a role to play in the next chapter. Big picture, we’re talking about coloniality, capitalism, rape culture, extraction culture – this has been our global antagonist for so long, the antagonist of our beloved planet.
We got used to thinking that it would always be this way, even as we are fighting against it, we believe that we always have to fight against it.
But now, our inner ancestral artists are actually so determined to enter a timeline, by any means necessary, to deliver the medicine, share it amongst the people, amongst all of nature, that will co-create a world, where that antagonist doesn’t even exist.
So right now, we’re in the middle of it. It’s scared. It’s throwing a temper tantrum. It doesn’t want to die.
To be clear, when I say this thing, it’s inevitable, it’s gonna die, I don’t mean – if you have experienced violence from a particular person, they’re gonna die – no I mean, the spirit of extraction itself as it has lodged itself inside so many people has to die. Is already dying.
We’re here as death doulas and death surgeons, put a pin in that, we’ll talk about the difference between those things in another video.
So with the spell work I would say – get to know who that particular antagonist is for you. Ask your guides for help in releasing yourself from this old paradigm and old antagonist.
The spell work is allowing yourself to change, to step more fully into a phase of life that carries an ecosystem, where that antagonist can’t breathe, can’t function, it can’t even see you. Intuitively, we think this thing is ramping up, I gotta hide in the place I’ve always been in order to stay safe, but that’s where it lives. That’s where it knows you.
Allowing yourself to move on into the next chapter, whatever that looks like for you, even if it’s unknown for you, as it is for me, is where the freedom is. It’s scary. There’s a lot of grief. But in my opinion, that’s where there’s a more powerful global solidarity is, as well.
And, if you listen to my podcast episode, you’ll probably find that at the bottom of everything is a ceremony for grief, for love, for yourself, for who the beautiful, incredible person you were in the last chapter, everything that made you who you are today, for loved ones you’ve lost, for the future you dream of, for all your beloved relations.
That’s the grief ritual that wants to come through and help you into this next phase.
That said, I want to follow up on my outro message, that I left in my birthday episode – where I said that I have been doing a lot of soul searching on the struggles I’ve been having in getting my work out there more, the financial stress, and I’m committed to change things up, so that my work can find more success, and so my medicine can reach more of the world.
There is so much wisdom that my Ancestors Writers Room channels through me every day, it’s sometimes very overwhelming, I’ve been trying to harness everything and then create offerings, and do everything myself, it’s just not working, I need more collaboration.
So what I’m putting out there now is…WE ARE AVAILABLE: TRAVELLING ANCESTORS WRITERS ROOM. We are available for bookings!
I’m looking for dreamy, like-spirited co-producers, co-hosts, individuals or collectives who want to host the Ancestors Writers Room and moi, for ancestral artist retreats, one-off classes or collective artistic conjuring portals. I’m basically looking for anyone who has connections to communities who are ready and longing to dive in and invest in what I have to offer, so I can take some of the producing load off, so I can show up and do what I do best, and deliver something I think a lot of people are looking for, and what a lot of people will appreciate.
For example: this here topic, I have an offering that I call “TRIGGER WARNING: How to Cast a Banishing Spell” – an ancestral artist retreat for survivors, memoir writers, and lineage storytellers. Especially those who work with material that is inherently triggering, like survivorship and many other things.
This can be done as a 3-day weekend retreat, or a 3-4 class spread out series. It works really well in the digital realm, so it can be done online.
This is a space where I can share much more about my specific survivor technologies, and go deeper into the topic discussed today. Around the spell work, the energetic protection, the nuances on how I create my ancestral spell work around survivor protection. And it’s a space where I can guide folks to connect to your specific survivor technologies, and collectively we can all help each other move more into an era of safety and freedom.
This is truly a topic where individual spells are less effective, than coming together in a collective space where we can birth something together with someone who knows what they’re doing, in terms of ceremonial space holding, ceremonial storytelling and the guidance around that. In a workshop like that, I will be able to guide us artistic and creative techniques where we can work creatively with this Antagonist and transmute and banish our personal antagonists through our art, and then send it back to the land, so it can be a collective conjuring and spell work for the people of Gaza, for the people of Congo, for the people of Sudan, for every part of our Earth body and where she hurts.
So that’s one example of what I can offer, and looking for folks who wanna host me. I also have so many different workshop series and retreats, topics that i could guide and offer, and I’m just willing to see where the wind blows me.
I’m gonna put a link in the show notes to my new BOOK ME page, I have some ideas there, some different offerings. I would love support in sharing it. Please spread the word, so I can find. If you know someone who might be a good fit, please send it out.
I’m not looking for unpaid or underpaid work – that’s my antagonist – an energy that wants to just take, take, take and not give back. I need to heal from that big time. So I appreciate your support in advance for not sending me requests for unpaid work, please. Or work that would just make my life harder. My work is really deep and it deserves reciprocity.
That said, I’m also really open to being surprised. And considering ideas and offers that I wouldn’t have thought of myself. It’s an era of adventure I’m moving into, it’s an astrological thing, can’t help it. So if you love my work, and you see richness in a potential collaboration with me, and you want to offer me something unexpected out of left field, I’m super open to considering that.
Basically I’m saying, shoot your shot!
I’ll leave it there for now. Check out all the linky links below, and I’ll see you next time.