This post is the episode transcript to our podcast episode: Have You Ever Been Loved the Way You Want to be Loved? You can read it below, or LISTEN TO THE EPISODE HERE.
TRANSCRIPT:
Have you ever been loved the way you want to be loved?
No, I mean really. Honestly. Have you?
[sounds of water]
Greetings Good Listeners,
I’m storyteller, spellweaver, showrunner of the Ancestors Writers Room and host of this podcast, Otherworldly Giants: The Divination Channel. Welcome to Magical Reality TV for the Revolution.
This is a love story, a grief story, and multiverse adventure story about a queer witch and her two black cats in the spirit realm who are ancestrally tasked to help magic rise from the underground out into the light of day.
This story is also about how that queer witch met her future partner – who she hasn’t met yet – and how the Chosen Many, that’s us, birthed a world full of freedom for the Earth and her entire body. And we did it, in our lifetime.
We are somewhere in the middle of Season Two and I want to ask you a question.
If you’ve been following along, you know that I recently launched a 3-month campaign, a collective artist FUN(d)RAISER dedicated to the principle: heal yourself, heal your lineages, heal the world.
Between August to October, I’ll be sharing regular episodes of podcast TV and then going back into the stories, opening them up, unlocking their ancstral teachings. I’ll be leading us through a journey of SELF STUDY, GLOBAL STUDY AND MULTIVERSE STUDY, helping us understand exactly who we need to be today in order to BECOME the freedom we are calling for.
Today, in spirit of our study questions, I want to ask you a question, just a casual every day little chit chat querie coming from a Scorpio Rising:
Have you ever been loved the way you really want to be loved?
Seriously.
Have you had a relationship or relationships or experiences in community where you are respected just as ferociously as you are loved?
Can you look at those moments and say with certainty, all of me was loved. All of me. It was real.
It wasn’t temporary or conditional based on x y z.
It was and is how I yearn and call and require to be loved from deep within my soul, deep within my bones.
I know what it’s like in my human experience to be loved exactly how I want to be loved.
So that’s today’s study question for you. Have you?
Way back in season one, I created a trailer for this podcast. In that trailer I said, that when you create stories with spirit, magic and the Ancestors, the most important question is to ask yourself: What Spell Are You Casting with your Story?
As I have dedicated my heart to this life path, for the now 40 years I’ve been alive on the planet, I can say the most important thing to understand about opening your self to spirit, magic and the Ancestors, is to be prepared for the fact that they will break your own rules.
They will break the rules of the creative process, of what’s respectable and professional, and even your conceptions of what’s ethical and moral and just. They will break your tried and true habits and patterns and ways of functioning in intimacy.
They will dismantle your entire foundation.
They have to, that foundation was built on a coping mechanism built on a vow of poverty, to survive the fact the ancestors aren’t there.
They dismantle foundations built on quietly accepted despair that cannot properly express itself, a despair that is not free to move.
They dismantle foundations desparately tasked to manage work-arounds and creative scaffolding constructed because the Ancestors were genocided out of the ground in the first place.
So often, when we invite Ancestors back into our lives…when we call for freedom, the type of freedom that only can be realized as full bodied personal and collective transformation, we expect those Ancestors, and that spirit of Freedom, will enter our lives and just seamlessly integrate themselves into our lives as they are.
We won’t have to change our schedule. We can keep doing things the way we prefer. Our relationships and work life balance can more or less stay the same.
It just doesn’t work like that. The Ancestors have to break the rules. And thus, they have to become our bad guys.
Because we’ll tell them that we wanted things to change, but not like that!
The Ancestors have had to learn to withstand a long stretch of time they were called all sorts of names that are nothing like their true names.
They were villainized. Attacked. Bullied. Manipulated. Controlled. Disrespected. Unwanted and rejected by the very same voices that were desparately calling for them to come back.
It’s the most important question you can ask as an ancestral artist, a creator of and with freedom – what spell are you casting with your story?
I asked you this question in the trailer for season one, but I felt like I needed to come back today and do a little refresher.
Especially because along with launching this new fundraiser, I’ve also launched a new VIP BACKSTAGE PASS for an inner circle to gather around me. Not just to enjoy exclusive perks and make the most out of the medicine I’m offering, but also to invest in my work and protect it. Recognize the risk of what I do, and protect my humanity as I share my medicine.
I don’t know if I make this look easy, but it’s not.
It’s a big deal for me to call in a close circle, knowing that I can’t survive without one, but, it’s a big deal for me to even ask in the first place, for someone who is so dang scared of people.
It made me want to bring this question to you. It made me want to ask you:
Have you ever been loved the way you really want to be loved?
This question came about this morning as I sat with my Ancestors Writers Room, realizing it’s August 14th 2024 and it’s exactly 16 years ago to the date that I met Estha and Rahel for the first time.
Estha and Rahel are my two black cats in the spirit realm, by the way. They are quite simply the Greatest Loves of my Lifetimes. And they’re not here anymore. But I am.
So yeah, this is the day that we met. August 14th.
I sat with my Ancestors Writers Room this morning, and when I realized the date, I began sobbing. The words releasing from my heart surprised me.
I kept saying in between my sobs: “Nobody understands me. Nobody understands me. Nobody understands me.”
I get it. I’ve been a big gay genderqueer autistic mega powerful witch since I took my first breath, of course I was misunderstood by so many people around me since childhood who I deeply needed belonging from.
I’ve always spoken in my Ancestral Tongue, and I don’t mean language as we know it.
I mean I’ve always radiated an energy healing through everything I am, my words and my silence, an energy healing that was meant for those 3 words, “in our lifetime” it was meant for the major dismantling of genocidal, capitalist, colonial, extractive paradigms that are so old, and so big in the multiverse, that are literally coming down over the next 20, 40, 60 years.
That energy healing was meant for the maturity of an adult, and the brilliance and innocent wonder of a child.
My inherent energy healing as a kid radiated my leadership, my contribution, my willing choice to be a doula for the Great Collapse, the Great Unravelling, the Great Rebirthing.
Of course I was terrifying.
Of course I didn’t understand why people loathed me.
It’s interesting, so many of us on this life path, we carry that wound right? The pain of being misunderstood.
But, that’s not true, is it?
Look at what I just said, I just told on myself.
I said, “Of course I didn’t understand why people loathed me.”
The problem isn’t that they didn’t understand me, the problem is that they did. They might not have had the words, but they knew exactly who I was. They knew what I carry.
When I say I’m scared of people, I’m not scared of being misunderstood.
I’m scared that they already understand very well who I am, and they already loathe me.
I carry the Ancestors with me everywhere I go, I always have. That means, I break things. I break the foundation wherever I go.
It’s me who doesn’t understand. Why is it so horrible for so many people, that I’m just trying to live? That I’m just trying to be myself?
In Kai Cheng Thom’s most recent beautiful book, FALLING BACK IN LOVE WITH BEiNG HUMAN, she asks us to, without looking in the dictionary: define monster.
I said, a monster is a planetary priestess, an otherworldly giant, a wicked witch in a world that doesn’t know she is one.
But that’s not true is it?
Because they do know. That’s why she’s a monster, is because they do know.
Have you ever been loved the way you really want to be loved?
I have. Estha and Rahel loved me the way I want to be loved. They still do.
What about by your own species? Your own humankind?
Those who follow this podcast, you should know that I often post bonus episodes on my youtube channel, some of them I don’t repost here on the podcast.
If you listen to the most recent youtube video I posted, it’s called: “WHAT SACRIFICE REQUIRES FOR GLOBAL FREEDOM”
In this video, I told you a story about how I performed energetic surgery while sitting at my altar. I took you through my process, while I finally put down a long awaited prayer.
I said: I call in an INNER CIRCLE, a community, to gather around me, and protect me and this work.
I call in an inner circle that over time can grow and grow and grow to a Chosen Many as boisterous and miracles and rambunctious as this incredible Ancestors Writers Room I have behind me.
I want a community that is intergenerational. People of all backgrounds and lineages and races, coming together in true spirit of ancestral solidarity with the healing and freedom we need to see on our planet.
People from all walks of life, carriers of different phenomenal magic and traditions and practices, different disabilities and illnessnes and life experiences, all of it invaluable survivorship and so many unique stories that nobody else can tell but you.
I want it all, a community where love and respect are not estranged siblings.
I’ve worked really hard on some of my deepest wounds to sit here and call it in with a clear and open heart.
Releasing the chronic repeated experiences I’ve had in community where I’ve been unfairly targetted and vilified and judged and bullied and attacked and manipulated and exploited, not because I am not understood, but because I am.
I work really hard every time I show up to this podcast to come with a clear and open heart, and not let these repeating experiences leave me so bittered and resentful and closed off. I hold myself to not speaking through my bitterness and resentment, it’s not who I want to be out in the world.
But still, I’m always holding people at arms length out of safety.
I’m either scared for my safety, or I’m scared that the true expression of my power and my magic makes me the security threat, it makes me the unsafe one.
I’ve prayed for a different experience in life. In community. And I believe it, wholeheartedly.
It is mine in this lifetime. It belongs to me. I feel it. I feel how good life can get, I really do.
[background music: “clockmaker’s dream”]
I have Pluto in the 11th house. The 11th house is friendship, community, our social life.
Do you know what house in your birth chart Pluto lives? Pluto is death. And thus she understands life better than anyone else.
Plutonian people sometimes think, and sometimes it’s true, that their life experience is always gonna be rolling with the hardest things in life.
My experience with Pluto is that in whatever house she falls, she shows you exactly how ugly life can get in that area. But if you stick with her…if you truly understand what it is to become her friend, become the dearest friend of she who destroyed the foundation, and took away everything…can you be her friend?
Can you be as good of a friend to her as she is to you?
Then, and only then, in the house where she showed you how ugly life can be, that’s where she’ll show you, how good life can be.
She’ll show you, how beautiful life can be, in the exact same spot. She’ll show you all the flowers that grow from seeds of a giant broken mirror.
She’ll show you love. I swear, man. She’ll show you love.
That’s what I know is in front of me. I see a community, where amongst one another we have everything we need to live well. Yes, even during this heartbreaking and heart opening stretch of time.
We have what we need to make the big moves and do the small things to return and remember who we really are, as a species, and what kind of freedom we are capable of creating in our lifetime.
Oh, but remember in that video where I talked about Sacrifice…I spoke about one sliver of doubt that was living in my right breast.
That’s the part of me that’s saying: Yeah right. A community of humans who will love me and not loathe me for who I am? A community that will love AND respect me if and when I choose to show up fully in not only my Ancestral prowess, not only my Ancestral expression and artistry, but also in my Ancestral Decisions.
Yeah right.
This part of me is still here, even after performing energetic surgery on the lie, I am still holding it. As I said in that youtube episode, sometimes it takes time to put down a lie, even when you know it’s a lie, and that’s okay.
Yeah, right. As if. Anyone would ever love me the way I want to be loved. Why would I trust that’s possible, when I’ve never had that experience before, I have nothing to go by. I have no lived experience to tell me that it’s possible. Not with my own species.
With animals, yes. With the spirit world, yes. With my non-human beloveds yes. The trees, the water, the insects, the fictional characters, the planets.
Estha and Rahel gave me 15 years of being loved exactly how I need to be loved and god, it was enough. For several lifetimes, it was enough.
I keep asking them: why did you leave at the time that you left? And why am I still here?
I did my job. I was a good mother. I was a good community mother, and I was a good mother to my animals. I was a good steward to Pluto in Capricorn. I gave so much to the world. It was enough.
I gave more than any one human should ever be expected to do in one body. So why am I still here?
I know this is why animal companion loss hits so hard, for so many people, because they truly do love us the way we want to be loved, in ways that we don’t get from our own species.
And yet, that IS why they leave when they do. And it is why they give what they give. They want us to have it with each other too.
They want us to learn from their examples. They want the love they give us to go out, not just into the world, they want it shared amongst one another.
What do you think is possible or not possible in our lifetime?
Because too many of us have been making wild and wacky and over the moon impossible only when pigs fly prayers, petitions, demands – not from a place of begging or even protest…but from a place of ROOTING DOWN INTO REQUIREMENT.
What we REQUIRE on this planet for her, all of her, and all of us, right now.
Too many of us have been making outlandish audacious YEAH RIGHT prayers and let me ask you again what spell are you casting with you story?
We are making revolutionary prayers and the scariest thing about them, to echo two beloveds Jeida K Storey and Saint Xolani who recently conducted a revolutionary prayer service, the scariest thing about our prayers is that they are already done.
Now, we have to reckon with the fact that what we truly desire, and what we truly want for ourselves and our planet, will bump against the nasiest, gnarliest doubt, that can so easily turn into aggressive sabotage, that we have to confront within our selves and in our collective.
We are asking for things that we have never experienced, that many of our Ancestors have never experienced. We runnin around, wild as fuck, buck naked, with no energetic blueprint to convince us that sure it’s possible, look at all these examples!
Nah…we’re asking for things that have not been done before. Do you think that even a sliver of doubt has any place in the danger and precision of this kind of heist move?
We are calling to the kind of courage it takes to experience what has never been experienced before.
And I’m sitting here, at my altar, saying yeah as much as I try really hard to maintain the frequency, the belief, the certainty that what I want for my life and for all my beloved relations is not just possible it’s inevitable, while that part of me is in the driver’s seat…
I have to be honest and admit the part of me sneering and saying: YEAH RIGHT. …is just as present.
Then my Ancestors Writers Room, asks me a question. The intervene right here and they say:
Do you know that many, many, many people feel the same way that you do?
Even those in beautiful healthy relationships, those who have a wonderful inner circle of friends they can talk to every day, those with an abundant social life, and even you, Shaunga, as you have so many dear friends, who are human, really. You love them so dearly and you have had so many great experiences with them.
Do you realize that all of you…ALL OF YOU…sometimes hit a space of quiet where the truth hits, and you know in your bones that you’ve never had it. Not really.
You’ve never been loved the way you really want to be loved. Not by your own kind.
Even in the greatest friendships and experiences and moments of community. There’s always a part of you, right? That you know you have to put away? That you know if it comes out it won’t be welcome, it’ll be attacked, and the good vibes will be ruined.
The comfort and safety and sense of belonging you require won’t be protected, so you just gotta keep it down. You gotta keep it locked up, at least a little bit, or a lot.
You have something that has to be solitary, that has made peace with being alone. Even though all it really wants is to be seen. And known. And called by its true name.
It wants a place where it can share, where its medicine will be well received.
We all have something right? A part of us that so, sorely needs to be held, but somehow it’s always the one who does the holding.
My Ancestors Writers Room speak to me, and they say – Shaunga, do you realize, that many, many, many people feel this way? All of you are holding this sliver of doubt.
I don’t think it’s possible. Why would I ever trust that it is, when I don’t have any experience that it could be?
Don’t get it twisted. My Ancestors Writers Room interjects before you start spiralling…
Many of you feel this way, but it’s not because of your short coming. It’s not because you have fallen short of one another as friends and community members.
It’s because of your commitment.
It’s because of your courage. Your commitment to want more and ask for more. Your courage to sit in your solitude, in your isolation, and claim those parts of yourself first.
Because you were so devoted. You were so willing. To learn how to love and hold these parts of yourself, to get to know them in the quiet.
To ask them your questions without anyone else’s noise, and BECOME THEIR ANSWERS.
You haven’t been able to give this to each other yet, not because of your short coming, but because of time.
Because of the time it took to go there with yourself, the time it took to learn yourself, because of what time is on Earth’s Clock.
Because none of us are a minute to soon, nor a minute too late, you hear me?
You have not yet given this to each other because you’ve been working. Travelling. Resting. Unravelling. Unwinding. Rebirthing. Repotting. Planting. Sewing. Shattering. Growing. Staying alive. Retrieving, retrieving, retrieving. Remembering and inventing.
You’ve been returning what must be returned. You’ve been returning all of it to yourself, to your lineages, to the land, to the Universe. It hasn’t been time yet, but now it is – to start returning it to each other.
You get what I’m saying?
You’ve earned it, my friends. My beloveds.
You’ve earned the opportunity to love each other the way you really want to be loved, for real this time.
You’ve earned the opportunity just to try.
To begin.
To step into the arena, for good.
[background music: “Deyja”]
Where all of us are here, and we can all say to one another – all of me. Not just Almost All of Me. But, All of Me. All of you. All of us.
You have become the versions of yourself truly capable and sturdy enough in all your imperfect self love, your grand devotion to the beloved.
Awake enough to try. Knowing that when you just try, you can rest easy. Rest easy in the soul. Your simple imperfect trying is many people’s A++++ x infinity effort.
When you try, you make magic with more than flying colours.
You have become worthy of one another.
You have become worthy of the love your beloved yearns for.
And they have become worthy of all the silence you’ve become.
To love. To be loved. To never forget your own significance.
To hold and be held.
To be there for one another, to put each other first, not a way that depletes your sovereignty, but in a way that makes you bigger, makes you more yourself.
To live in boundless spirit of repair, reparations, the true meaning of generosity and freedom in the Universe.
You’ve earned the beginning of how you really want to be loved, not just in our lifetime, but right now.
You are stepping into the arena of receiving and experiencing things that neither you nor your Ancestors have ever had.
And even us, a healed and healing Ancestors Writers Room, ancient glorious Ancestors older than time itself who do remember and embody a time in the Universe where everything was balanced and just and free…
Even for us, those of us who come from healed and healing places on the timeline: sure we’ve had it before in other contexts, but not like this.
We’ve never took it back. We’ve brought it back from so much forgetting. We’ve never broken it open and remembered in the most impossible circumstances.
We’ve never found it again through the gnarliest, nastiest untanglings and unravellings from the galactic reality of capitalism, genocide, anti-blackness and extraction.
We’ve never taken it back. Not like this.
Don’t you think we want that for ourselves, just as much as we want it for you? Don’t you think we want to experience this in our lifetime?
Don’t you know that we are incomplete? We have made peace with too much that weighs heavy on the heart.
Sure we embody the healed and healing communities, but we have to stay stuck shuffled away in ultra hidden places where only the most worthy can see us, corners caked with cloaks and shields stretching 13+ dimensions and beyond, closeted all the way up the wazoo. The fact that we exist is such a secret, the way that we love is such a fucking secret, don’t you get that we’re tired of it too?
We want a world where our privacy is a choice and not a necessity.
Baby don’t you get it? We are incomplete in all our healed and healing prowess, simply because we can’t share the truth of it with you. We can’t share all of it with you. We can’t share ALL OF US with you.
Don’t you get how lonely that is?
Don’t you know that we want to be free-er than just as you do?
All of you, sitting with doubt, this pain, that you’ve never had the love you truly want in life.
You think that’s an indication of impossibility.
It’s not.
The only thing it indicates, is that it’s time.
And now, is the time.
And the name of our story is reunion.
And our spell is
about time.
[sounds of water]
So that’s it good listeners. That’s a refresher on my season one trailer in the middle of season two that just became a regular episode. What do you think?
What I really want to tell you is that I want you to keep tuning in to this incredible story, currently unfolding in human time, MAGICAL REALITY TV For the Revolution, a love, grief and adventure story about a queer witch and her two black cats and her future partner and the Chosen Many who legitimately birthed freedom for the Earth and her whole body, in our lifetime.
I want you to keep tuning in, and I also want you to go back. If you are just finding this podcast for the first time, or if you need a refresher. Visit the episodes that we’ve already published, and keep tuning in for more.
I want you to see this world as it becomes itself.
This world will show you how we become and gave to one another the love that we truly desire to share as a species.
I swear to you, this world will tell us everything, it’ll show you how it all happens, in our lifetime, before we ever put it down.
Because it is already done.
You will see this world, and all the beloveds inside of it, will love one another as we, good listeners, return to love ourselves.
This world will lay it all bare. Like Shaunga skinny dipping in her favourite lake on the South shores of Tkaronto.
It will be the greatest love story that ever lived and died and lived again.
[theme song drops: “Electronica Punch”]