You're spiritually intelligent, self-aware, resilient, discerning, have refined taste, and a massive capacity for depth. You're too smart for simple answers, too spiritual to dismiss the unseen, too disillusioned to go back to what didn't work, and too self-aware to pretend you have it figured out.
Yet being this kind of woman can be profoundly lonely & wildly crazy making - because the world wasn't built for you and most spaces don't know what to do with you.
But you have figured one thing out ----- Your dignity is non-negotiable.
This podcast is for the woman who is rebuilding her dignity, strengthening it, & living from it.
How do we strengthen our dignity in a world that seems bent on destroying it, profiting off the lack of it, & distorting it?
This show is hosted by Dilshad Mehta - Intuitive Coach with over a decade of experience, and one of the only Indian and Zoroastrian (Parsi) women podcasting anywhere in the world.
We cover the territory most spirituality podcasts avoid...which, as in turns out, are the topics that expand our dignity.
▪️The Feminine & Moving Away from Patriarchy
▪️Developing Strong Intuition
▪️ Addressing Self-Abandonment
▪️ Naming the Evil in the World
▪️ Spiritual Meaning & Mysticism of the Rose
▪️ Love as a Spiritual Practice & Cultivating More Love in Our Lives
▪️ Journaling Rituals for Clarity
▪️ Deep Embodiment of Dignity Through Body Based Rituals
All of this leads us to a Delicious kind of Dignity - a sense of self that we enjoy in ourselves.
Every episode offers practical guidance, ritual, and reflection to move you from knowing to living - with clarity, stability, and dignity.
▼
I know you care about this so I'm going to say it loud & proud - all content in the episodes is original & human...with NO AI, no ads, no repulsive sponsorships!
▼
Questions? Requests for Future Episodes? Want to say hi? Send me a text or voicemail! (your number is private & I cannot see it).
The Pattern of Self-Abandonment Fu*kery 6 - Egregores, Spells & Sharpening Your Psychic Survival Instincts
•Dilshad•Season 2•Episode 53
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
0:00
|
38:59
This is the first time that anyone has connected all 14 concepts - projective identification, introjection, empowered women, childhood emotional neglect, patriarchy, education system, imposter syndrome, empaths, sensitives, just world hypothesis, nazar, curses, evil eye, & egregores
This is part 6 of a sacred thesis & one of the syntheses of my entire life's work & experience. In this one we tackle energetic forces that make up the pattern of self-abandonment - Egregores, Memes, Possession, Evil Eye, & Curses.
Do we even have a ‘self’ to abandon? Are our thoughts truly our own? This is the spiritual side of self-abandonment, with the psychic vocabulary to tell what’s yours from what you inherited.
Inside this session:
Egregores as the baseline for understanding ourselves, through examples like respecting elders, Mar-a-Lago face, women’s empowerment, and the law of attraction
How powerful minds can be, through tulpas, emotional contagion, memes, and the Lucifer effect
Psychic survival instincts at work in spells, curses, nazar, the evil eye, and even possession, without the superstition or the new age fluff
Simple inquiry to move through the collective cloud toward a more authentic self
Episode 42: Reclaiming Your Claws - What Evil Really Is (And Isn't)
▼
Episodes in this Self-Abandonment Series:
Episode 47 - The Pattern of Self-Abandonment Fu*kery 1: Empowered Women & Projective Identification
Episode 48 - The Pattern of Self-Abandonment Fu*kery 2: Sensitives, Empaths, Introjection, & Just world hypothesis
Episode 50: The Pattern of Self-Abandonment Fu*kery 3: Childhood Emotional Neglect & The Wound With No Scar
Episode 51: The Pattern of Self-Abandonment Fu*kery 4 - Patriarchy & The Courage Of Wholeness
Episode 52: The Pattern of Self-Abandonment Fu*kery 5 - The Education System & Better When You’re Not You
▼
🌹 Questions? Requests for Future Episodes? Want to say hi? Send me a text or voicemail! (your number is private & I cannot see it).
▼
🌹 Please rate and/or leave a review for this podcast. I put together all the content & graphics for this show. I pay for an editor out of my own pocket. I'm not sponsored by anyone. My voice/opinions/research is not corrupted by any monetary incentive. So your reviews truly keep the podcast running & help me get the podcast out to the world. THANK YOU so much!
▼
🌹 Want a deep dive into your situation? Book your 1:1 90 minute session here
.
.
.
This podcast is for education only and is not a replacement for therapy. We suggest you seek out the help of a trained professional for help with your specific situation.
Dilshad
This is Delicious Dignity, where we cultivate a self so potent, so clear, so vital, so truthful that our life is all the more luscious for it. Let's call ourselves into being, shall we? Hello, lovelies. I'm so excited to introduce this episode to you today because in this episode we take a largely spiritual perspective of self-abandonment and how we abandon ourselves from a spiritual perspective. And what's really interesting about this episode is that because of its nature, which is spiritual and energetic, it will cover everything we've already discussed in the last five episodes, but giving a more, shall we say, mystic spiritual perspective of everything we've discussed. So, for example, we talked about women and self-abandonment and why women are so prone to self-abandonment. So we address the gender perspective, we address the biology perspective, we address the psychology perspective with introjection, just world hypothesis, and even projective identification. We touched a little bit upon sensitives and empaths from a spiritual perspective, but not quite. And then we went into systemic stuff, like the education system, and we talked about patriarchy. And all these things made up this pattern of self-abandonment. And now we're taking it up a notch if we were to zoom out even more. So we went from the individual, then we zoomed out to the system, and now we're zooming out to what is even above the system or in between the systems that make up self-abandonment. So that's what we're going to talk about in this episode. I'm so excited. And as usual, I will explain the issues or the concepts, and then at the end of the episode, I'll give you the solutions or things you can look at if you have indeed experienced this side of the house. This whole series of self-abandonment is really for people who are asking or struggling with these questions of who am I really? What is my true authentic self? Is there such a thing as a true authentic self? It's for people who are asking, how can I develop a sense of self so I don't get knocked this way and that by the winds of the world, so to speak? How do I have a sturdy, solid center from which I can operate in the world? How do I stay sane in an insane world? How do I interact with others? These are all the questions this entire series has addressed. And now we're just going a little bit deeper into it. And this is the last topic episode in the series. The next episode on self-abandonment will be the absolute last. And that episode will be talking about all the solutions, all of the different ways to address self-abandonment that we've discussed, so that you have a nice map, a nice step one, step two, step three kind of course correction from moving from self-abandonment into dignity. Now, because we're discussing the spiritual world, there's just so much nonsense that goes around in the spiritual world, right? A lot of us have been hijacked and brainwashed by religion, which is a function of patriarchy. And we talked about that in another episode. A lot of us have been brainwashed by the new age world and by just superstition as opposed to truth. So in this episode, I just wanted to approach spiritual concepts from a grounded and truthful way. And I will try to explain it from different perspectives so as to give you words to explain your own experience. And then, of course, there's the other side of the house that kind of threw the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak. They poo-pooed all the spiritual stuff and made it seem as though it was silly or it was trite or it was just for stupid people to believe in. When in fact, all these spiritual concepts did have a place in a way, and this is so important that you hear this. The spiritual stuff, without all of the religion or new age nonsense, or scientific rationalism nonsense on top, the extreme side of scientific rationalism on top, that is, without all of this, what it is at its very core is a psychic survival instinct. This is your survival instincts as on a psyche level, on a mind level, on an emotional level, on a spiritual level. These were all spiritual instincts that we have. Just like we have animal instincts, we also have spiritual instincts. And those are instincts that are really good to have, but they have kind of been corrupted, or we don't quite understand them, or like I said, we dismiss them. So, with that being said, let's get into the idea of self-abandonment. Now, a lot of new age theory, and maybe even some religion, they put so much emphasis on the individual that they kind of ignore the collective and what the collective does to the individual. Because it's about hyper-individualism, hyper, you know, you are the man, you are the woman, boss babe, this and that, that we kind of ignore the spiritual implications of living in a collective world, which is what we all live in. In this episode, we're gonna address some unanswerable questions. For example, questions like do we even have a self, an individual self that can be abandoned? Do we even have a self? Are our thoughts really our thoughts? Are there our thoughts really our own? Are we truly as individualistic as we make ourselves to be? What do we really have control over? That is what this episode will answer, so that you can see a different side of what you might have been experiencing. Now, before we go into it, I just want to say to admit that something is difficult to control or is consuming our power is really not a sign of weakness. It's not a sign of you playing the victim, it's a sign of wisdom. Knowing that you're not invulnerable, knowing your own vulnerability. You're neither hiding like a coward behind a mask of infinite resiliency, nor are you just assuming that everything hurts you and so you collapse because there's no such thing. There's no such thing as invulnerability, and there's no such thing as constant collapse. We all have a certain kind of strength. And admitting these things is a form of a personal confession. To pretend that you are infinitely invulnerable is kind of like pretending that this arrow is being shot at you and you can stand right in its path because you're superwoman. It's kind of foolish. And everything in this world is vulnerable, including the entire planet. So are you. But everything in the world also has its strengths that it can play to. And that's why I've said so many times awareness is half the battle or sometimes all the battle. And this is why this series is so important. Instead of seducing you with new age platitudes or psychological burdening or fondling your victim nature, we're instead acknowledging what is and is not within our control or responsibility so that we can free up that energy to act in our own best interests. And honestly, isn't that the most loving thing you can do? What is love if it's not recognition, understanding, presence, and care? So let's begin with a concept called an egregor. Now, an egregor is the way it's typically defined, is it's a distinct, non-physical or psychic entity that's created by collective thoughts, emotions, shared beliefs of a group. And it begins to, on its own, exert control back on the people who created it, and if necessary, also on other groups of people and even the environment around them. Now, this terminology is very visible in our society. Like if we look at how groups of people operate sometimes, we can see that sometimes they look as though they're possessed. And I I mentioned this one time with I forget in which episode in this series, but I mentioned how a lot of women right now they're doing so much plastic surgery and so much Botox and so many fillers and all these cosmetic procedures that they all look the same. And they even have a common look in the Trump administration, and there's a name for it called the Mara logo face. And and they look kind of disturbing, right? This egregore of what it means to be a woman today is now inserting and exerting its influence over pretty much all the women that are sub giving themselves up to it. So that's one example of it. But I want to talk to you about how this came to be. Now, there are many origins of the word egregor and where it comes from, but really it comes from this book called The Book of Enoch. And it's basically this ancient Jewish religious text, and this text was trying to describe how demons and how demons came to be and why some angels fell from heaven, etc. And then we had a bunch of new age traditions come in and sort of repackage that into this word called an egregore. But essentially, it's this idea of fall from grace and how we give up our power, we give up our values for the sake of some collective influence that has been exerted upon us. A psychological understanding of this is what we covered in the episode in the series on projective identification and how people project onto you and then sort of manipulate you into acting according to their projections. Now, that is a psychological concept that we discussed. So now we're talking about from what was originally a religious text, how it described this fall from grace and how we can be manipulated into behaving in ways that we maybe would never have behaved. So from this, I want to tell you that I think we've all seen this in our own lives and we've seen it in other people's lives. When we are part of a group or when we are part of a kind of a system, it is very easy for us to act in opposition to our values. Now there are positive egregors. You can say that there are, for example, the image of the Buddha. That is what I would consider a positive egregore. The second you look at a statue of a Buddha, it's almost immediately calming, isn't it? You look at it and it just immediately calms you down because it's become kind of part of our psychic vocabulary where we see a Buddha and we associate it with relaxation and peace. And that's an egregor. You could even say that looking at it from another perspective, you could say that when you see teenagers rebelling, what they're actually doing is a lot of them are rebelling against egregors. They're rebelling against collective shared beliefs and situations and thoughts and emotions that they don't necessarily agree with. Maybe it's an egregor in their own family, you know? For example, maybe an egregore that exists in almost all families in India is respect your elders. Well, where are the elders? An elder is not just an old person, right? An elder is someone who has earned the right to be called an elder, is respected, has done things for the community, has shepherded the younger generation. That's an elder. But the egregore tells you that you have to be almost subservient, almost deferential, almost reverential to old people because old people deserve respect. And that's an egregore. You might think, because of your culture, that it's a value, but it's not really. Because there are plenty of old people that are not deserving of respect. We see them a lot in our governments, don't we? Being an old person doesn't automatically grant you respect. But the idea that you should be doing that is an egregore. Get married, have kids. That's an egregore. Now, these might be a little bit more neutral or negative egregores, but you can see what I mean. You can also see it a lot on social media. You can see how the Gen Z language is changing. Even as millennials, we had our own little words that only made sense to us and our generation. You can see that, like there are these social language constructs. I'm hearing a lot about this phrase called six, seven. I have no idea what that means, but almost every Gen Z person is saying it. No idea what that means. But it's their own language, it's become an egregor of sorts. You know what else is an egregor that nobody really thinks of it as such is the law of attraction. That is a new age egregor that became larger than life, to the point to which now the word manifest has become a common term in everyday language. I manifested that. Oh, that manifested for me. You see what I mean? So it's become a thing, it's become its own influence. Some people would even argue that God is an egregor. I want to say though, a way to see whether something has kind of taken possession of you in that way, in terms of an egregor, or whether it's truly your values, is when suddenly your values change or they get eroded by something. Not just your mind, not just the way you think is different, but your values change. If that suddenly happens, that's one sign that you might be under the influence of an egregor. Now, of course, you can make all of this positive by surrounding yourself with conscious positive egregors, but I don't think that there is any way to avoid an egregor. I think it's all around us, I think it's in our technology, I think it's in social media. And what is concerning to me is how it's quickly becoming part of AI culture. And AI is becoming its old culture, and egregors are now almost part of AI. And I think AI takes over the concept of egregor to make thoughts into things. That's the only thing that's a little bit scary to me about egregors right now. But again, once you're aware of it, it kind of loses its hold on you. A somewhat similar concept of an egregor is a tulpa. And that comes from, I believe, a form of Buddhism called the Tibetan Buddhism concept. And that was again also popularized by New Age thought. But again, it's similar if we look at the Tibetan Buddhist meaning, there is a sort of emanation or a manifestation of something that you have focused on and brought into being. Now, you could do this consciously or you can do it unconsciously. In the Tibetan Buddhist texts, it's unclear what they mean from what I have read. I can't quite pinpoint what they mean by it. But I do know that Western philosophies picked it up and blended it with a bunch of paranormal concepts and then kind of made it into there's a thing or a sentient thought form or a mental companion that's created in the mind through focus or meditation and visualization and all these other, let's say, manifestation techniques. The point, though, is not really that there are these things walking around. The point is that thoughts become things. They do become things. And even though these things don't have a physical form, they definitely have an energetic one. Now, if you're kind of over the spiritual, psychic, energetic stuff that we're talking about, I can introduce to you psychological concepts that also talk about the same thing. For example, you have this social psychologist, his name is Philip Zimbardo, and he wrote the book The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. And his book is literally about how ordinary individuals who have very strong values can be influenced by systemic and situational forces. So, and they can be influenced by those forces to commit pretty violent or evil acts. And his whole argument is about basically that the systems, the environments, the power structures are what shape human behavior. So he explored this from a sociological perspective. And he specifically talks about it from how cruelty can thrive in this kind of environment. So how you can manipulate the environment to promote and even reward cruelty. Then you have the evolutionary biologist, Richard Dawkins. He wrote a book called The Selfish Gene. And he introduced the word meme to mean a cultural idea, a social practice, a concept, or an activity that becomes normal and is subconsciously repeated in society. It's subconscious. That's the idea here, right? And he also defined it as something that acquires its own identity when it spreads through society. I mentioned respect your elders as one, right? It sounds good. It sounds like a value, but is it though? And then of course, the internet culture happened, and then they took the word meme to mean an image, a video, a piece of text that goes viral and is copied and then remixed and shared online with like funny stuff, right? That's what we've heard all about memes. But it's basically the same idea, is it not? It's this specific idea that just catches like a virus does and then it spreads. You have other psychological concepts that come in. So there's mass psychogenic illness. That's when a group can experience physical symptoms from like dizziness, headaches, or nausea. And because they're driven by stress and social contagion, and it comes mostly from a psychological perspective rather than an actual virus or a toxin. You have the concept called groupthink. A lot of people have heard about this, right? And that's when a group prioritizes obedience to the group and consensus over critically evaluating the data. So that can lead to irrational or conformist thinking and decision making. You have the concept of emotional contagion where you can actually catch anxiety or catch physical behaviors or catch emotional states from the people around you. Then there's another one. There's moral panic, and that's another sociological phenomenon where a large population becomes fearful or frenzied and even violent. And we've seen this in the news how many times, especially when there's a perceived threat to some kind of values or some kind of rumor or the media. Even though you see the concept of egregor and tulpa and all these things, they have some very real psychological and even physical implications on our sense of self and therefore how quickly we abandon ourselves to these forces. The same is true of poltergeist. Have you heard of poltergeist? These are distinct entities and it causes loud noises, knocking sounds, moving furniture, objects are thrown. You know, you've seen them in the movies and stuff. And all of this to show, if you zoom out from all of this, so you look at it from another perspective, our minds are very powerful. Our beings as humans is very powerful. And we can literally create or destroy ourselves because of our minds. You know, something else that I feel like has become an egregore is the term empowerment. We see women, and I'm talking about women specifically because I just see this so much everywhere around me, right? I can't tell you how many times women have sort of marketed and rebranded their decision to do extreme plastic surgery, Botox, or fillers because they want to feel empowered. They have this mindset of empowerment is GLP1, it is Botox, it is plastic surgery, it's the trad wife or the traditional wife. It's kind of this idea of is that really empowerment? But nobody bothers to question that. Because basically the egregore or the meme is that empowerment means doing what you want without critical thought, without any kind of moral checks and balances. Empowerment is I do what I want to do, and that's it. And if you don't support me, that's because you are a female hater or something like this. Okay, I'm kind of done with the topic of egregore and memes, but before I leave you with this topic and go on to the next one, which is related and similar to this one, is I want to tell you about this incredible article I read online, and I think that it does so much of a better job explaining an egregore than I ever could. And it's by Nara Petrovic. I will link it in the description. And his article is called The Best Explanation of an Egregor. And I really, really encourage you to read that article. It is absolutely fantastic, and I think it should be required reading. I think he does a really good job about explaining what an egregore is and also tying it to culture, tying it to the internet. He has some very interesting things to talk about technology and egregors. For me, it should be required reading for everyone. So, yes. Now I want to talk about something similar and related, which Is spells, curses, nuzar, possession, and the evil eye. So whenever we think of the word spell or casting a spell, we think of something immediately evil, and we think of witches and nasty witches doing bad things to people. And we go into that kind of weird, superstitious mentality. We've just established in so many different ways, from psychology, spirituality, sociology, that our minds are powerful. And one way to use that is to cast a spell. Now, of course, that can also become a curse. You can use your mind to curse someone else. We see that from a psychology perspective through projective identification that we discussed in, I think, episode one or two. I can't remember. Again, we became superstitious and we dismiss them, or we dismiss them entirely. And really, we need to take a balanced approach to looking at these things. These are spiritual technologies, spells, curses, evil eye, these are all spiritual technologies and they are a psychic survival instinct. Then we have this concept of possession. We often see this mostly with religion and religious fervor, is when you think that a being is taking over you or has taken over you and you become that being. Perhaps possession is essentially the same things that we've already been discussed. That maybe you're not necessarily possessed by the devil, but by the weight of the projections, by the weight of egregors, by the weight of memes that surround you, so much so that you have internalized it. And if you think that you have never been possessed, just look at how much you have believed in your own lack of self-worth. How did that happen? You were not born that way, right? People made you feel that way. In a way, you could say that you're possessed by the demon that makes you think that you are worth nothing. And like I've mentioned before, I'm coming down pretty hard on plastic surgery, aren't I? But it's just because it's getting a bit ridiculous. But if you see some of the women who have done plastic surgery, they look scary. They look absolutely insane and it looks like they've been possessed. And it's tempting to say that an actual demon has possessed them, but perhaps it's nothing more than the weight of the thoughts of the people around them and the thoughts that they have chosen to believe. So then when we look at curses, which most people think of using black magic or something or someone put a curse on you, you can look at it from that perspective. And maybe that does have its validity, but you can also look at it from the perspective of a curse is anything that you have believed in that is not true. I've said this before in another episode, but the law of attraction, in a way, became a curse for me. Because I believed in it so much that I genuinely thought that anything bad that happened to me was my fault because I attracted it into my life. And I know other people have also told me the same thing. Oh, this bad thing happened to you, not because this person was cruel or because the system is broken, but because you are somehow flawed in some way, or you are so powerful that you attracted this negative thing into your life, and therefore it is your fault. That in a way is a form of cursing myself. And it's a form of other people cursing me. So much so that when I finally understood what the law of attraction is, I understood it from this perspective of what I attract is not who I am, but who I believe myself to be. So if I believe I am not worthy of something, that is what I attract. Even if I am worthy of it, I will not attract it because I believe that I'm not worthy of it. I looked at the law of attraction like a report card on how good of a person I was, instead of looking at it as a report card on how I falsely believed myself to be a bad person or not worthy person, et cetera, et cetera. And that was a form of cursing myself. Because I believed myself to be a certain way, so I attracted those things into my life, but I attracted them based on my beliefs, not based on who I was. And even though that isn't entirely applicable in every single situation, I found it to be true for me for certain situations. I believed myself to be unworthy of something, so I would just get skipped over for promotion when I was perfectly worthy of it, but I would just get skipped over or overlooked or unseen. Or even worse, I was misunderstood because I just believed myself to not be worthy of something. I hope that makes sense. It's really weird, right? Like this whole concept of law of attraction that became an egregore, you can literally use that concept to curse yourself and other people around you, even though it's supposed to be a positive thing. So I just wanted to give you an example of that. Then you have this concept of spells, right? So you can use this in a positive way. You can channel your mind in a positive direction to bless people. What is a blessing if not a spell? A blessing is a spell you put on somebody else to bless them with good things. A blessing is a spell. We could go around like fairy godmothers, sprinkling our little spells on everything, sprinkling our little blessings on everything. And we can use that in a way that's positive to channel our mind instead of just letting ourselves run away with it. So then we have this concept of nazar and evil eye. Nazar is just an Arabic word which means sight or gaze or looking. And primarily nazar means it refers to the concept of the evil eye. And it's a very big cultural belief in India and Middle Eastern cultures, even, that an envious person can bring bad luck or illness or misfortune to the person that they are looking at. And that is a very real thing, is it not? But we don't have to get superstitious about it. And I see what people do is that they, you know, they put that blue dot on everything as a way to ward off evil, whatever. And I I can't tell you the efficacy of that blue eye-looking thing, but I can tell you that people who don't wish you well don't wish you well and might actually interfere with your wellness. That is true. And there is nothing woo-woo or extremely spiritual about that. That is a very real thing. And perhaps it's not so much about hanging those eyes everywhere, those blue eyes everywhere to ward off evil eye, but perhaps it's more about choosing carefully who gets to see your success, who gets to see your joy, who gets to see your innermost thoughts and beliefs. It's about discernment because you're acknowledging that you're not invulnerable to all these forces. They are part and parcel of life. And of course, there's a number of energy cleansing methods you can use, and those do have their place. Because, like I said, if thoughts are things and those things are directed at you and those things are negative, they get sticky on you. Energy cleansing is just spiritual hygiene. It's just psychic hygiene. Just like you brush your teeth. So here you have energy healing or energy cleansing specifically. It's all about how we use and how other people use the power that we all innately have. Power by itself is a neutral force, right? It's a neutral thing. But how you use it can be a force for great good or a force for great evil. And we talked a lot about evil in episode 42, which is called Reclaiming Your Claws, What Evil Really Is and Isn't. And we discussed the nature of evil in that episode. I highly recommend listening to that episode if you want to deep dive into it. Uh, you can just search for it in any podcast player. You could just search reclaiming your claws delicious dignity and it will pop up. And basically, I said in that episode too, I think evil is people who delight in the suffering, they delight in the trauma, they delight in the indignity of others for no other reason, other than the pleasure of it and the power they think it gives them. That's evil. And people will use these spiritual technologies in evil ways, but you can also use them in very good ways. And that's obviously choice. It's one of the reasons why I loved doing intuitive readings for so long. I don't think I'll continue doing them for very much longer, but for so long I enjoy doing intuitive readings because intuition rises above these spells, these curses, these evil eyes, these egregores, these memes. Intuition is the language of your spirit. And when done right, it can lead you to greater and greater amounts of freedom. And that's why I loved intuitive readings for so long, because I would look at people and we would bust out of these little pockets of egregores and memes and spells and curses, and they would suddenly have this light in their eyes. Because essentially, what is happening energetically is people are surprised by the truth because we have risen above the clouds of projections and spells and egregores and memes. To that end, when we're talking about spiritual, energetic, or unseen forces that cause us to abandon ourselves. Inquiry and investigation is always a good tool. Contemplating why you think what you do, even if it means a bit of ego shattering, is essential. You kind of have to have a baseline desire to take an interest in the origins of your own thoughts and behaviors. And that desire, you know, you either have it or you don't. But I think that is always a good place to start, to just take an interest in your own thoughts and behaviors. That's what a lover would do. They would take an interest in why you think what you think and what you're thinking about, why you behave the way you do, what moves you. And like I said before, I think energy cleansing or energy healing from a skilled person works really well, or even if you do it on yourself. Personally, for me, I found a lot of success with craniosacral therapy. I just loved that so much. But I just want to be very clear that energy healing alone will not do the work for you. And I think this is where people trip up. Energy healing or energy cleansing opens the door for you. It kind of like removes the obstacles to you opening a door and slightly leaves the door open for you. But you have to push through, you have to walk through. It provides that relief you need to take action, but it is not the action in of itself. It is the method, not the end goal. And I feel like sometimes people confuse that for the end goal. But that's what energy healing does. And I think it really does have its place because it gives you that relief that you need and frees your energy up to put it in the direction it needs to go. I'll give you an example of inquiry and investigation before we end this episode because I said those words, but I didn't really give you an example of how they work in action. So I'll give you an example from my own life. I was one day reading The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron. Highly recommend that book. But I was reading that book, and I'm not sure if this was an exercise in the book. I think it was, but basically she asked you to define the God you want to believe in. So instead of just believing in God, you define God that you want to believe in and believe in that God. Now, this exercise to me, I initially poo-pooed it. I was like, nah, why should I do that? I don't really believe in like a big dude in the sky who, you know, is God and supreme being over everyone else. I think that's a childish view of God, and that's not what I believe in. So why should I do this exercise? I was a little bit egotistical right there, wasn't I? And so, but I ended up doing this exercise in good faith because I trust Julia Cameron so much. And I adjusted this exercise uh where I decided I will first line up all of the qualities I believe that God has today. So, what is the God I falsely believe in today versus what is the God I want to believe in? And this exercise blew me open because what I didn't realize is this is the God I believe in today. I believed in a God that was cruel, that was a puppeteer, that sort of like to play games with humanity, that gave you life lessons just to help you grow. And those lessons are really painful. So it's almost as if God was a narcissistic, cruel, humiliating entity, all-powerful entity. But the God I wanted to believe in was a God that, yeah, okay, maybe was all powerful, but was actually interested in humanity, was compassionate towards humanity, was a helper, a lover, a friend to humanity. That is the God I wanted to believe in. And just looking at the two lists that I had made, one was just so demeaning and cruel, and the other list was so loving and compassionate, I realized right then and there that so much of my belief in the spiritual world was determined and influenced by my experiences with patriarchy and with misogyny and with power structures that I felt helpless over. And I had projected even my parental issues onto this God. And I was getting mad at this God and I was dismissive of this God, no wonder. And then when I saw the God I wanted to believe in, I realized how deeply I wanted to see the feminine face of God, how deeply I wanted to experience the divine feminine, how deeply I wanted love as my primary modus operandi in life. I realized one list was about my trauma and the other list was about my dignity. And those two things, when they were staring me at the face in my face, there was this feeling of something left my body, like I was depossessed of this belief that somehow I was this being that didn't really matter, that was just abandoned and kind of put here on this planet to suffer and die. Life is suffering, and then you die. That's that phrase. That's kind of what I used to feel like. And then, of course, after this exercise, I sort of grew up. And as I grew up, my partnership with the universe also grew up. So that's what I mean by investigation and inquiry. Even something as simple and complicated as the word God can be inquired into. And that reveals your egregores. It reveals your memes, it reveals the curses you put on yourself. Forget about the curses other people put on you. One day I'll do an episode on spellcasting, positive spellcasting to benefit yourself and humanity. I feel like I just gotta work the kinks out before I put it into an episode for you. But yeah, I hope you enjoyed this last episode, concept episode in the series of self-abandonment. I hope you can see how throughout this entire series we've addressed abandoning yourself from many different perspectives and how we come back to ourselves each and every single time. In fact, you could almost say that the whole point of spirituality, the whole point of self-development, the whole point of psychology or any other therapeutic practices you engage in, the whole point of it is to return back to yourself. That's it. And in returning to yourself, you return to the people around you, you return to God. Personally, I think the whole point of spirituality is to enhance your dignity and the dignity of people around you. That's it. Anyway, thank you so much for listening, lovelies. The next episode will be the last episode in the series where I sum this all up for you and put it into a nice map for you. Everything that we've discussed in the last six episodes, all the solutions put in one episode for you to sort of pick and choose what you want to start with and how you want to go through with it. For now, my lovelies, may your dignity be upheld and the purest of light in all times, in all places, and in all spaces. Much love to you. Until next time. Bye.