TRANSCRIPT – Psilocybin Mushrooms, Spirit Guides & Otherworldly Intelligence | Shonagh Home [EP20]

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LL: Hello beautiful visionaries of EntheoNation. This is Lorna Liana and I and I am back today with a former guest, her name is Shonagh Home and she is an author, a shamanic practitioner, teacher, and public speaker who has become a feminine voice for the reverent shamanic use of psilocybin mushrooms. Her book, “Love and Spirit Medicine” chronicles her mystical journey through the end of her marriage into a focused exploration of entheogenic mushrooms.
Now Shonagh travels around the country teaching the shamanic arts and sharing wisdom gleaned from the mushroom intelligences. In addition, she’s a beekeeper and a bee venom therapist with a book on that subject. So the topic for today that Shonagh and I are going to explore is how to communicate with mushroom spirits and actually develop a relationship with the intelligences that one come into contact with in the visionary states.
So Shonagh thank you so much for joining us today.
SH: Ah thanks Lorna, it’s great to be here.
LL: [Chuckles] So in your book you enter into engagement with a number of intelligences or spirits through the use of the mushroom. So I’d love to hear more about that.
SH: Okay. Again, when I started this I had no idea what to expect. I really came in ‘green’, which is a fun word to use actually. The second time I used the medicine, because this was happening on a monthly basis. The second time I was once again out in the woods, in the rainforest – [Hamasi] Woods – and did this medicine and at one point I was on my knees looking up into the trees and I could see all of these different nature spirits and they started coming into me, and it was almost as if they wanted to experience being in this. And then of course a part of me also was experiencing their frequency. And so that happened throughout that journey.
And then the following month I was, again, in the forest at night on the medicine and more nature spirits came to me. And also, the fae – the fairyfolk – would come in. And they would come in, and they were always the first to enter me and they would dance my body. And then these most extraordinary sounds would come out of my mouth and they are pure sensuality and very blissful, sensual, incredible frequency of being. So this happened over the course of several months. Owls were coming in at one point, an eagle being came in, and then after about a year of this on June 6th, which was the Venus transit a couple of years ago and a lot of people were buzzing about that. It occurred to me that that is a portal and I’m going to go in with the medicine on that day. Like I was like, “Why aren’t we having ritual in a giant stadium? This feels like a big one to me.”
So I went in with six grams that night with a dear friend of mine and by then I was used to these spirits coming in and dancing my body. And by the way, when the birds would come in, my arms would contort and my hands would always go into mudras, which I was told later that these are antenna. And so depending on the mudra it will hold the frequency of that being that is within me. So the night of the Venus transit, a very different energy came in and that was – well they identified themselves as ‘star beings’ and they were completely different. And I’ll tell you how they announced themselves: they said, out of my mouth they said, “They’ve got their guns pointed and their radar on, and yet here we are in a tiny tent in Redmond.”
And then I turned to my friend and they said, “Waste of money, don’t you think?” And then they proceeded for the next two hours to have us in stitches laughing and they were talking to us like we were old friends, calling us daughters of Mew, and they were talking about what is going on on planet Earth in terms of this shift in awareness, shift in consciousness, also a passing of the baton. So that’s sort of where we ended up. But all through the course of that year, as I would do the medicine I was encountering these different – I call them “beings” because just as we are human beings, they are beings as well.
Well the veils were thinning between the world so that in my day-to-day life the owl in particular was making itself known to me. And right down to, you know, I would go running in the morning and all of a sudden there’s an owl in my neighborhood. And I would hear it hooting outside my window at night and then we apply to a school for my daughter and lo and behold, the mascot is the owl. And now of course I live next to that school, so when my clients and my students come they drive through the school entrance and then it says, “Home of the Owls”, which everyone has a good laugh about that.
So I entered every single shamanic journey with a mushroom, through the portal of ritual and entering with an open heart and wanting to learn, and very humble. And out in nature, in the woods, right? Or if you live near an ocean of whatever, but for gosh sake, this is mother nature medicine. I would rather be out there.
LL: Always the best way, for sure, to work with these plant medicines.
SH: That’s the temple, and these are ancient teachers and so you enter in that way and also they scan you. So I joke that your wrap doesn’t work in the spirit world. It doesn’t. Forget it. I mean they can see the whole thing. So they know if you’re full of shit and they know if you are coming from a place of integrity. I mean they’ve got your number, and they’re extremely benevolent and kind, the ones that I’ve found. But also ‘as above, so below’, so as we have tricksters and not so nice people here, that is also true in those worlds as well.
So it’s very important to protect yourself, and I will speak to that briefly to say that every single time we did ceremony I used copal, which is the tree resin that the Central and South American Shamans use. But you can use sage or palo santo or whatever. But I use copal and I walk around the perimeter of the area that we’re going to work in three times and I’ve had times on the medicine where I’ve looked up and I am within just a pale, smokey dome, and I realize ah that’s the copal. And then the beings have said, “No one gets through – they call it, ‘Big Sister Copal’ without her permission.
LL: Ahh.
SH: She is an incredible protector, so I am always protected and so I really was going through this portal to ask to be taught. “Please whisper to me your wisdom, your good wisdom,” that’s what I was in search of and that’s what I would receive. And as these beings – this is also a very old form of shamanism that women do, is allowing the beings to enter – temporary possession. And you have to know what you’re doing. And in my book, “Love and Spirit Medicine,” I write about every single experience including when a demon came in and that’s because I was with my dear friend and lover at the time and we left the protected area where we were and we went outside and there’s a whole story to that. But it was out there that this thing came in and it made a mess. It made a mess of the relationship, and anyway it was quite something.
When the medicine wore off and I was lying in bed and we were both really shaken, I talked to the spirits I said, “Wait a minute, I know that that was a teaching because at the beginning of that journey I saw the grandmas who work with me, I saw the cat that is also a guardian, I saw the owl.” Like all my guardians were there and yet that thing came in and so I was reasoning and I was thinking, “Well okay, it didn’t physically harm me. It did shake us up quite a bit.” And then it came to me, “Of course, if you’re going to be opening yourself and allowing these beings in, that was a necessary experience and initiation you must recognize that frequency.” I’ll never ever forget what that frequency. Ever! And I will be able to, you know, I’ll feel it’s presence. You know what I mean?
And this is a very important piece to the shamanic piece. There’s a lot of people out there who do, I call it “Shamanism Lite” – L-i-t-e. And it’s deep and there’s a lot of darkness that must be navigated as well. You’ve gotta know how to navigate that, and you’ve got to recognize that there are beings like that and you want to respect those beings, which I do, and I don’t want any trouble. So a protection needs to be set up as well, not from a place of fear, but simply boundaries. Boundaries are very, very important in this work. Just as they are when we just go out into the world. You won’t want to leave your heart wide open when you’re in downtown New York. I mean maybe you do? But I mean, you know?
LL: [Laughs]
SH: You know what it is? It’s like we have cells in our bodies and the cells, they’re all interconnected. But what does every cell have? It has a cell wall, doesn’t it? So certain things can permeate that wall and other things can’t. So it’s very natural and a proper thing to do. Something to think about when you are doing this work. But those spirits will work with you. You go in there with an open heart and that desire to learn, providence opens and they will absolutely work with you. And they work with me, they come to me in my dreams, they wake me up between 3-4 in the mornings often, in mid-conversation. So it’s like a deep psyche was getting the fullness of that conversation and then the conscious mind got invited to a little tidbit, you know? So I got something that I can remember.
And then when I do my work, they’re right there. They’re always on my right side, always right here. So yeah, but you know what sweetie? I think this is how shamans have been traditionally trained through the plants, of course. Those are the ultimate teachers, if you were very lucky, which of course back then you would be. There would be this available shamans who can guide your way through the use of the plants and, “This is how I recommend doing it and this and this,” and you know, I didn’t have that but I did put my trust and my faith in that medicine, especially after the first experience I knew. I knew, this is a portal, it’s ancient, these are good teachers here and I’m going to unveil myself and it is all opened up.
In fact, I was at the Yucatán, in the Yucatán a couple of years ago and I had some medicine with me and we were going to the site of Palenque. And Palenque 1,000 years ago was ruled by Lady Sak K’uk, The Red Queen. And they think through her son, Lord Pacal, or he may have been her husband, they’re not sure. But there’s a tomb, and they call it ‘The Tomb of the Red Queen’ and I want to go talk to her. And I knew by then I’d been doing enough of the medicine, that I could do that.
And so I went to Palenque and I, we had a group and my shaman friend Miguel [Angel], he took the group elsewhere and I went off by myself. That was our agreement. And I found a quiet place and I took just a little bit and went in and instantly a jaguar came and like leapt over me, and then a huge bat came. And that bat is Lord Totz – T-o-t-z, he’s a Mayan god. And then some dark beings showed up, and there’s always dark ones around. I mean those temples, there’s all sorts of stuff. And I just simply said, “Look, I am of the light, I don’t want any trouble, I’m here to speak to the Red Queen.”
And by then, you say that with enough backbone and command and just knowing what you are. And so they faded away and then this beautiful being, and she was sideways like this, her face, and she was orangey-red and she had a headdress of feathers. And between each feather was a serpent. And she was eyeing me and the serpents were. And I knew of course they were studying me, they were scanning your field. And so I just opened my heart and then we had a whole conversation together and then when I got back I did a little more research on her, and I was blown away to read, it said that she has always shown with a headdress of quetzal feathers – quetzal is a type of bird – so I didn’t know that.
And anyway, it was amazing, amazing. And I’d love to be able to go to different sites and do just a little bit of the medicine and just take the time to find a quiet place alone and just sit and speak to them. And of course you can do that without the medicine, but as we well know, the medicine takes you really, really deep into those realms in a big way. It’s not the same thing as just a regular meditation.
LL: Oh no, not at all. It’s so funny when people say to me – I had this conversation with a woman who was saying, “You know well,” she’d never done ayahuasca before and she was like, “Well you can access those states when you meditate.” I’m like, “No.” [Laughs] But it’s so funny because people assume that. But unless you’ve actually had experience with the medicine, you’ll see that you can’t get to these deep far out other inner worlds.
SH: You’ve ingested a teacher.
LL: Yes. It’s another intelligence altogether.
SH: Right, right. So that plant takes you to a specific state. You’re on a ride. You opened a door and you cannot get back outside that door until that plant is done with you. Whereas meditation you could get up at any time.
LL: It’s true. And some of the things that I’ve seen in the visionary state, working with the entheogenic plants, are things that I would never have even conjured up in my imagination. I mean complete other worlds in pristine detail. Sometimes I find myself looking around like, “I don’t know how I could’ve dreamed this up?” [Laughs] Other beings, other cities, cities of crystal and mosaic with beautiful stone archways and [couplas] and boats, like Egyptian style boats that carry people through the astral sky. Things like that, I mean it’s always a wonderful mystery to see what vision will reveal next.
SH: Yes it is, it is. The visionary, I think of it as like a visionary spectacle. It’s extraordinary. An at the same time it’s so interesting cause I’ll do the medicine and I kind of almost suffer through that. It is amazing, but then I look forward to sort of getting on the other side of that. And then it becomes like a shamanic journey where I don’t have the vision so much, but the whole thing is felt – deeply, deeply, deeply felt. And that is where the beings come in and I can see them, but it’s more feeling them. It’s hard to explain.
LL: I would describe it as being like in a, I guess recovery room in a hospital ward. In the sense that after going through an intense visionary journey I find myself in this place where I feel like I’m being taken care of by the spirits and I feel like I’m recovering from just all the traumas that just got released during that visionary journey. And I’m soaking in a deep, profound sense feeling of healing. Healing at like a deep cellular level and it’s just such a wonderful thing. It’s like you just, it’s like getting a wonderful massage and you’re just like soaking in the healing and the comfort and the nurturing and the love from everything around you from the spirits and the earth.
And that’s the place of spiritual recovery in a certain way because we go through so much in life, we pick up so many traumas, we have so many wounds that we don’t know how to heal on their own and sometimes, as you mentioned, in the course of our lives we can pick up entities that will stay with us for years even. I had this one experience where I had a bit of an – I described it to my medicine sister as it was the exorcist meets Gandalf when he like enters the horse lord’s hall and exorcizes the lord of Rohan. He’s like, “Out! Get out of this man!” You know, and then like just kind of like pulls that evil spirit like out of him and aliens basically, [Laughs] where it was a massive purge but at the same time it was an extraction of an entity that had been living inside me parasitically since I was a teenager.
And it was so embedded in my being that when it was finally removed by the medicine, like I felt really weak because it had been so integrated in my spiritual and energetic body that it’s one of the – I had this feeling that if the extraction kind of had been done incorrectly like if you’re going in for surgery and the surgery is not done with precision, then the life of the patient is in danger. So I kind of felt like I went through that, I wasn’t in any physical danger, but I felt like, “Wow that was an intense surgery that I went through.” And when I was resting after that, it was just this pure bliss of healing.
SH: Yes, absolutely. And this is the thing, we are in the 3D and in the perception that we have of this world, we have no awareness of these invisible worlds that also Rudolph Steiner spoke to at great length, and they do influence us. It’s all these unseen forces, all these unseen worlds. And of course beings within that world and so they glob onto us for whatever reason and certainly drug addiction, alcohol abuse, violence, depression. A lot of that will just open you up because it is just like having a cold; when you have a cold your immune system is compromised and so this cold came in or this flu or whatever. It’s the same thing; if you are abusing drugs or super, super depressed, whatever that sheath is around us becomes compromised and then something opportunistic can get in.
LL: What’s really fascinating in the Brazilian Amazon in the culture of the Amazon, people except the presence of other spirits in their lives and getting an exorcism by a shaman is just something that is part of – if the doctor’s not helping you then that’s the alternative, right? Whereas in the west it’s like, “Exorcist? No! What are you talking about?”
SH: It’s a [inaudible] procedure. It is.
LL: [Laughs] And so they say that addiction is actually – so they believe, first of all, that every person every human being is actually accompanied by spirits. Both protector spirits and teachers spirits, but as well spirits that are tied to you through karma and parasitic spirits. And we just walk through life with the troupe of spirits that accompany us. And their perception of addiction is that it’s a spirit that has attached itself to you, and it’s causing you to hunger for whatever it is. It’s like a hungry ghost spirit that is feeding off of your addiction to alcohol or cocaine or things like that.
So it’s interesting how what you see in the Amazon too, and specially with the ayahuasca as a powerful plant medicine, is how effective it actually is to treat addictions. So there are alternative centres that have opened up. One for example founded by a French doctor or psychotherapist called Jacques Mabit. It’s call Takiwasi in Tarapoto and that centre treats addicts. There is another centre I visited in Brazil run by a Spanish psychotherapist called Prato Raso and Spanish addicts would come out there and they would use ayahuasca to get clean essentially.
So not only does ayahuasca, like ibogaine, have a powerful – is a powerful remedy for addictions and addictive cravings, but shamanically it’s used for exorcism.
SH: Yeah, oh yeah of course. I can see that. I can see that absolutely. And Peyote would do the same thing in the right circumstance.
LL: Interesting.
SH: Oh yeah, very much so. And of course, the mushroom in the right circumstance because they will also, they’ll reveal to you your addiction. They’ll reveal to you in a way that no human can, in terms of deeper, deeper layers around that where you can fully see. And the beings that speak with me, they always speak about spells and what I think is that collectively we have been spellbound – we have been bound to a spell and a lot of it is done through words and of course symbols as well. But essentially these medicines will break the spell. They’re spell breakers. I have described myself as a spell breaker when I work with people, where it is with the medicine or in my teaching, I bring through a different perspective that will break that spell of perception, and it happens like ‘that’ cause all it takes is the ability to see, right? And that is why this age of light or age of information – they call it the information age. Well light is information. Turn on the light and you’ll see everything. And then all of a sudden you have this much broader, very different perspective because you didn’t see it before. And actually, it’s all right in front of us, we just can’t see what’s right in front of our eyes. I mean we’re beginning to, many of us, you know?
LL: Yeah so I want to bookmark the conversation around this incredible time of shift that we seem to be in. But before we dive into that, I want to return back to the dialogue around working with other worldly intelligences because I think that’s really important. I think when one becomes a serious practitioner of the shamanic path, then you are going to encounter spirits. So that’s the difference between someone who’s going in to an Ayahuasca ceremony for psychotherapy and someone who’s committed and starts drinking medicine on a regular basis, eventually something’s going to open up in your mind and in your heart that will allow you to communicate with these spirits.
So one of the things that I do always say to people that talk to me about Ayahuasca is, “It’s not so much the strength of the medicine, or you now, how powerful the shaman is, so to speak in terms of like the number of songs he has and whether or not he’s got a lot of followers. But it’s whether or not the work has been appropriately opened and appropriately closed. And so one of the problems that I see, when you open the work in appropriate way – so I also recommend doing that circle of protection and calling the spirits to protect the space. And in the [centra daime] tradition they invoke the power of the holy trinity so that no negative spirits can enter the holy space of work.
But at the tail end of the ceremony it’s so important to close it otherwise you’re leaving the space open and the practitioners open as they go out into their daily lives they’re still open and that’s when spirits can come in and attach themselves to you or bother you, create havoc. And so that is the most important thing to look at: “Is the person who’s holding the space opening and closing the ceremony appropriately?” And once the ceremony is closed, you don’t drink any more medicine. It’s done. So yeah, so like the temptation to drink so much – No! No sorry. You have to honor those boundaries otherwise you can really set yourself up for long term problems and then you have to find another shaman to help you exorcise the spirits that you may have picked up.
SH: Yes. I think there are natural laws around this, or very essential guidelines, and you’re exactly right. I mean when I’m done with a ceremony I conclude it by saying, “Thank you.” That’s the finalist. “Thank you so much for this teaching and to the medicine and to all the nature spirits.” And then I say, “Alright, you can go now. [Laughs] We’re complete”.
I’m so glad you brought that up because that is so important, so very, very important that you close that space because it closes the whole thing down and that is necessary too because what it does is then everything has that natural boundary again. We have a natural boundary, we can go about our lives and do what we do. But there are standards as any initiate will tell you, right? I mean you enter into the sacred, there is a higher standard now that you are held to and there is a way of, yes, going about the ceremony and conducting yourself and your behavior.
One of my teachers, and by the way, my shaman teachers, no one’s heard of them. There’s a few guys out there, I call them “Rockstar Shamans” and I’m not…
LL: I call them Rockstar Shamans too! Oh my gosh that’s such a perfect description for what you know, kind of what they are.
SH: Oh yeah, you’ve got to mortgage your house to do their medicine wheel and the whole nine yards. But in any case, no these beautiful guys – and interestingly they are all, they’ve been men, but very humble kind men who really hold the feminine. They hold the feminine, they’ve been very good teachers for me and I think of these men and I hope I am among those kind who are just very quietly doing good work, good work, you know for people. Genuinely helping people. One of my teachers said to me, “Shonagh, I’m no giving you these teachings to give you my ancestors and give you my power. No! I’m giving you these teachings to open you to your own power.”
And then another shaman teacher has said, you know, “Here I’m teaching you this, and now make it your own. Bring your unique piece into this and create this from what has stirred you, what quickens you. Use that.” And so it’s been so empowering. My teachers have not acted like gurus and, “Follow me and then you’ll be,” I love – Terrance McKenna’s got a great line saying, “You can sweep the floors of the ashram for 10 years in the hopes of getting that little nugget from your teacher, or you can take that five grams of psilocybin you have in your refrigerator.” [Laughs] I love that!
LL: [Laughs]
SH: It’s true. And then anyway, so yeah.
LL: Yeah, I find the true curanderos, they don’t need to walk around with like necklaces of jaguar teeth, you know? Some of the most powerful shamans that I’ve had the privilege of meeting are old indigenous grandfathers who like if you were to see them, you would just think that they were just some ordinary indigenous campesino. You would not know that this person has been studying the plant medicines since he was 8, and has spent over 20 years, cumulative 20 years in solitary retreat in the jungle. Surviving on his own, finding the plants on his own, and receiving their teachings. Like he looks just like a poor Indian farmer.
So when I see some of these Rockstar shamans go through with their outfits and like, I’m just like, “You don’t have a fraction of the knowledge that some of these true elders have.” Although I do respect that they’re the ones opening the door for many of the people that would never go to the jungle.
SH: Absolutely. No question, no question. Yeah. But I find when you do touch these realms, when you touch the sacred, when you touch these beings, it makes you so humble. Like just so humble cause it’s so amazing to be able to touch that. And then they are so kind, the beings. They love us so much and they see how damaged we are. We’re damaged, we’re traumatized. Because this is not natural. This modern society, the way we live, it’s not. Nowhere near. Which is why of course you see the symptoms in our sick people are on every level because the human organism is sick. When you take anything out of its natural habitat, it doesn’t thrive very well. And so we’ve been taken away from the land essentially. We don’t belong in cubicles in front of a computer for 10 hours a day and then in a car fighting traffic. That’s not what it is to be human. It’s not a natural state.
I mean I don’t know what’s going to happen down the road, but we all know this isn’t sustainable so it’s going to be interesting as we are shifting here on spaceship earth to see what these events are going to be that are going to really change things. But of course it begins in here; each individual one of us. And this is what the beings are stressing. They’re saying, “This is a frequency game, and we’re being kept in a state of stress and fear and tension, and it’s intense. And when you’re in that state you can’t access the higher order thinking, and that’s where all that infinite creativity comes from because in order to resolve these issues, which by the way this has really come to me, we have got a remedy for everything. Everything that’s going on has a remedy. It truly does. We just have to shift states of consciousness to tap into that, to bring some creativity into this sort of high-mind society we’ve got and get out of that box cause the box is such a mess and oh boy, well the plant medicines do that for you. They’ll get you out of the box, fast. And that is essential.
You know, there are so many people out there who work with this medicine, who are in different positions of inventing things and what not. I guarantee they’ve gotten a lot of that inspiration from certain journeys that they took, you know?
LL: Yes. Yeah absolutely. I hope one day to be able to lead startup founders and CEO’s down to the Amazon to experience what it’s like to drink this medicine in the villages and to meet the shamans with the intention of working together to break through blocks in their businesses, but also to come up with solutions to some major problems like in the Amazon, access to clean water is a really big problem.
SH: Brilliant.
LL: So going back to our conversation about guidelines and protecting yourself, I want to make sure that we’re complete. So in addition to opening and closing the ceremony in appropriate way and giving thanks and gratitude, what other recommendations to you have for being able to journey safely into the visionary realms and then to communicate with these other world intelligences.
SH: Okay well the way I do it is so I set up the space where I’m going to do the medicine and fir me I always do it in a tent, which is screened and then when it’s raining I could put a cover on it. But I do quite like that, it feels – well they call it my spaceship. [Laughs] Or I call it my teepee. So it’s this little structure. And so I create that within a circle, I walk the circle 3 times, I open the directions, I invite in the nature spirits, I invite in my guardians and I called it “Earth Mamma,” and so I ask mamma to open to us an open the portal and teach us. And then I take the copal, well I copal myself. If I am working with someone else I copal them. I copal the mushrooms and then I hold the mushrooms to my heart and I send in my heart’s light.
And I will tell you this as well, cause the copal and all of that is wonderful, and that is a plant ally, no question – from the trees. Good friends of mine. But if you have no “props”, shall we say, we are the ultimate prop if you will. And so I will – if I didn’t have any copal, nothing, if I had none of that, I would use my heart’s light. And so connect deeply, heart center, and I would walk circle three time through. Three is a very powerful number, by the way, in magic. And also I study law, I have a friend who is a scholar of law – not an attorney. Heck no! He’s a scholar of law. And the legal system is obsessed with that number.
There’s an old book written in the late 1800’s by an Italian scholar called “Trichotomy and Roman Law”, which will not make the New York Times bestseller list any time soon, but anyway. Just writing about what the heck’s up with the number three. So I walk three times around the circle and I would just open my heart’s light. And don’t think that the nature spirits and all these beings can’t feel that. Of course they can. And so what are you doing essentially? When you’re doing that it’s like knocking on the door, you’re visiting someone’s home. Well you don’t want to show up empty handed, of course not. So you know, that’s the other thing too. I will often have a little bit of offering and often it’s just honey from my beehives or something. A little honey, sweetness for the spirits. But if not that, from my heart, that light. They love that, love that.
So that is there. You have this offering and then of course they invite you in after that, you know? And I just lie down and I let it happen and I know I am protected and safe. And then of course, then they start to come in. And then when I am done, the way I close is to say, “Thank you.” I say, “Thank you,” I say a little prayer – the power of prayer of thanks. And then it’s like sort of sending everyone home, “Alright our little event, our evening is over. It’s time for bed.” [Laughs] You know? So we can all disperse and then that energy, you can just feel, just fades away.
So the most important piece to remember with this: is one of my teachers used to say, “Show up. You got to show up.” And when I say “show up” I mean show up fully in your integrity and in your humility. Not like – because again, they can read you. Spirits can read you. So if you’re full of shit or your heart is not in it, literally, or you know? Then it’s like “the face you show is the face you get back”. So show up fully. You’re sitting with ancient teachers. They don’t teach you this in Sunday School, there’s no touch stone for this in our modern society. We’ve not been taught, but I can assure you, these beings are a mystery, they’re ancient, they hold secrets – secrets, upon secrets, upon secrets and so much wisdom.
So you show up with that knowing and they’re going to come and work with you. They are, and you’ll be protected. And if you have a challenging experience, sometimes these are medicines aren’t they? Medicine doesn’t always taste good. It doesn’t always go down so great, you know? So you might have a real challenging, maybe somewhat dark experience. Well then you’ve got to work with that as well. And one of the things I do in my work is I will work with people who have had medicine journeys. And then there is an integration period to help them integrate that. You come out of that and you’re like, “What the heck was that?” Sometimes, you know? and it speaks to you symbolically as well.
So it’s very helpful to work with someone who can help them sort of put the pieces together with that and really absorb what that experience was all about. And my work is very, goes into this shadow. Really deep into the show because my medicine is owl, which is a creature of the night. And that is very essential work and especially for those of us who are becoming leaders in a certain way because we have both seen how people can abuse power in a multitude of ways because they have not dealt with their own shadow, which becomes your Achilles heel, whatever that is. Your proclivity that you don’t want to even look at, “Oh no, no, no. That’s them. Oh no, they do this.”
And so that’s another thing, if you’re pointing your finger and you’re really triggered, really triggered by something someone does, that is an indication that maybe [Laughs] you share that just a little bit and you maybe have to have a look inside and see, “Where in my do I have this?” But the shadow work is very important. I worked a teacher who has not done her shadow work and she is quite something. I mean she really taught me how not to – “This is how you don’t work with a group. This is how you,” anyway it was a good teaching. Those teachers are excellent teachers as well, you know, the ones who kind of make a mess. I mean they really are. You do learn from them, but she’s not done her shadow work, clearly. She hasn’t looked within at those sort of messy parts of herself and sort of brought that into the light to make corrections. Carl Young would speak about this, “You bring it into the light so you can correct that or heal it, whatever it is.” Anyway, but the medicine will point that stuff out to you, no problem.
LL: Yeah. In technicolor for sure. Okay, so let’s say you’re journeying in the visionary realm, and you start to encounter spirits, have you noticed that you’re seeing some of the same spirits over and over again? Like sometimes I will travel and I’ll see totally new spirits. But on other times I’ll see spirits that I recognize. Like they feel like they’re my spirit family and they’re always overjoyed to see me. In a way, they’re more over joyed to see me than my own family actually. [Laughs]
And I’m so over joyed to see them and then sometimes when I see them, when the journey fades away and I lose sight of them, I feel this really deep nostalgia and homesickness. Do you ever get that? And do you ever feel that this is dangerous? Because sometimes I feel like there’s a longing for me to not be embodied and not be in this earth but to go back to the place that I feel like is my true home with my true tribe and my family – my spirit family?
SH: This is where the wisdom and discernment comes in because, yes, there are spirit familiars and they are like family. I think of them as old friends. They are old, old, old friends and so we are the ones who have descended into material form and so they’ve got a larger view right now. We’re down in this, and they are our assist, our loving assist. And we must be very mindful of the fact that we chose to incarnate and the fact that they have said, “Not a one, not a one of you came here against your will. You all showed up.” And they said, “Some of you,” and they meant me, “swan-dived in here.” [Laughs] Cause [inaudible] like, “I do not want to be here.”
LL: Stop complaining! You chose it.
SH: Yeah you swan-dived. You probably butted in line to be here. So enough of that. But we must have – we were talking about this earlier – one foot firmly in this world and then one foot in the other world. And you must learn to navigate both or to appreciate both. We’re embodied for a reason and so it is, to me, it is a grace that we were able to find our way to these medicines and that world would be opened up and see some old friends again who are working with us to deepen us. But it is meant to enhance this experience for us and I think also to wake us up, sometimes slap us, out of our trans so we can get back into what we came here to do. And I know that was what happened for me.
So over a year, almost a year and a half of monthly five-grammers – I mean that’s insane. It sounds insane and yet also the soul knows what is necessary. This is what I also know: my soul chose that training and the soul doesn’t care what the rules of the day are. It could care less what society has to say. The soul is not socialized – this is the soul. And so it calls you to an experience, and I answered that call, and I trusted and did that for a certain amount of time and at the same time the beings will tease me and say, “Well gee dear, you’re so thickheaded! You’re a tough nut.” They’ll say, “You’re a tough nut!” It took them a year and half of monthly five-grammers to get the likes of you to wake up!
Not that I was asleep, asleep, but they took me to a very deep place, yes. And so, and my work reflects that. The way I live my life reflects that. I mean I’m so different, Lorna, than I was even three years ago. So very different. And a lot of the stuff that would piss me off, which I think of now, “That was so superficial and what the heck was my problem?” All of that’s gone, it’s gone. I don’t think in that way anymore. And the medicine did that for me, but it took the time that it did to do that. And so these beings love us so much and if we find our way to them, there is a reason that is not by accident. There’s no accidents, there really are not. So we’ve been graced and guided and there was stuff there to learn.
And they will of course work with us when we’re not on the medicine, of course. And I think the medicine opens us, makes it a little easier actually, to feel them because it changes our brain chemistry, of course it does. And I think also, I think it makes you a little smarter, I do. I mean I think it really opens up parts of the brain that you can then access later.
LL: So do you have any recommendations on how to cultivate and empowering relationship with some of these spirits that you encounter?
SH: Okay, well start with an altar. I mean altars are old. Old, old, old, right? And within temples you would’ve had the [auditem], which was the holy of holies part of the temple. And there would be an altar in there of some nature. Or out in nature, you know, people would create and altar around a tree or something. And so bring your beings onto that altar. So for myself, and in my room – and I love that it’s in my bedroom – my altar’s to the right of my bed and I have my owl wings on there and talons and different things. Pan, pictures of pan, I have the fae. And I will sit in front of that altar and at the end of the day – and sometimes, and I don’t have to say anything and just feel them. Altars are accelerators, so whatever you dedicate that altar to accelerates, brings that energy in. So that is very good.
And also I would recommend, if there is a particular familiar or guardian that you feel you work with, if you have some kind of talisman or representation of that – so for myself I have an owl wing on my pillow and I reach for that in the night, in my sleep. And so I’m very, very close to that. And I also have a beautiful staff, and this is very magical the way that came to me, but that also has an owl on it. And these are beings that were hit by cars, whatever, died for just no good reason right? And so this is a way of honoring that being, you know? And asking to work with its medicine. And so yes, I’m very, very close.
And of course my bees, because I work with my bees. They come into my dreams, they’ve entered through the medicine as well. I use their venom now to help people to heel with arthritis and MS and a host of ailments that the bee venoms helps with.
LL: Wow that’s interesting.
SH: It’s fascinating yeah. That’s another show, but anyway. And the bees, I have representations of them on my altar as well. So that way it’s like you see that day and night. And then some people wear a little medicine pouch around or something that is close to their heart. So just something that reminds you, not that you need reminding, but do you know what I mean? If you sort of get caught up in the mundane and then you feel that presence again because it’s around your neck or something in your pocket or something. Shamans would of course do that, or they’d have a little pouch they’d wear, right? And it would have their medicine in there.
So yeah. And of course talk to them and journey. I sit in bed, I prop my pillows up in bed at night and I don’t even – usually I use a rattle. Some use the drum, but I will use a rattle, the monotonous sound of the rattle, and I just shift into an altered state. But I don’t even use my rattle anymore. I will just get in bed and close my eyes and I go to what I call “The Circle of the Elders” and it’s a circle and there’s always one place open that’s for me, that’s my spot. And then I converse with them and they talk to me. And so I will, if I have a question or I want to discuss something or a really need guidance – and again, what are you doing? You’re going within. That’s how you access these beings.
LL: Great. Well thank you so much for sharing that. We’re close to the end of our segment, but I would like to just go back to that question about this extraordinary time that we appear to be in and the ancient prophesies of the condor and eagle coming together and just the acceleration of information that’s been facilitated by the Internet. It’s hard to deny that we are in a time of extraordinary shift and I’m curious to know from your perspective, have you been feeling that too? I know people that work in the shamanic world would say, “You know, yes.” Folks that may not be so deeply involved in shamanic or spiritual practices, I think it’s very easy to like sense something or at least point to data that indicates, “Wow, information has never travelled so quickly in the history of humanity.” And that’s having a profound effect on our consciousness, our intelligence, and our evolution.
Now what do you think this time of shift means and do you think it’s a good thing or a precarious cataclysmic thing? And how do you think we as humans need to I guess, take advantage of or benefit from this time or change in order to evolve humanity forward?
SH: Alright. Wow what a superficial question – Ha-Ha!
LL: [Laughs]
SH: [Laughs] I will say that with all of this technology that we have to spread information, we’re also at a time of extraordinary deception. And I think the deceptions’ never been thicker and so much is co-opted, including even the so-called “alternative media”. That’s like sort of my friend Nile Murphy commented and said, “That’s like sort of navigating the Wild West at times because there’s a lot of disinformation out there as well. But in a way I kind of, I take that almost as a good sign because it tells me that those who have been sort of holding the reins of power are rather nervous and they’re spending a tremendous amount of effort and time and money to put out information to try to steer the collective in a certain way.
And yet in spite of all of that, globally – and I call this the biggest news you’ll never hear – is this awakening of people who are starting to see more, who go, “I’m not buying that anymore. That is not making any sense to me and I’m going to do this instead.” And so taking that step away from the sort of collective hive mind that we find ourselves, some of us, in and answering a higher call. And so we still have of course the great majority of people in this earth are – I think of them as sort of in a walking coma – and really sort of believe the nonsense. But there are more and more of us who are going, “No, no. That is not how it’s going to be,” and then we do have people – there are technologies that are coming out, like free energy technologies that are very underground because what happens when you go public with that? Those people get their laboratories destroyed, and death threats, and all sorts of things.
Friends of mine, two people I know who sort of work with that, met with a guy who has a free energy technology and it took them months to even get the guy to meet with them and they said he was visibly shaking when they were talking because he’s had some bad things happen. But in any case, in any case those technologies are coming up. I think of this as chaos theory. You can try to control – it’s like trying to herd cats. It’s not going to work, ultimately. So those technologies are coming up. Water purification technologies are coming up. I mean there’s some amazing stuff happening globally within, I think of it as “pods” almost. Or you can think of it as a mycelial network, right?
So this creativity is welling up in certain people and then they are making these things available. And don’t forget, also, we are between ages. The age of Pisces is slowly leaving and we’re entering, we’ve entered the age of Aquarius, but we’re at the very beginning. So this is actually like the in between time. It’s like that time between three and four in the morning when they say the spirits are the strongest because it’s not quite night anymore, but it’s not quite morning; it’s the in between. We’re in the in between of ages right now. So this is – it is precarious and the beings have said, “We’re at a Y in the road. We’re at a Y in the road and it’s up to us. No one’s going to save us, Jesus isn’t coming, the Pleiadians are not coming, all this nonsense.”
In fact the beings have said, you know, we’re here as your assist. And that was a promise that we’ve made; we’ll be here as your assist. But we’re going to do it. And speaking of three, a three letter word is Act – A-c-t. It takes action. We must act in some way and so in order to really keep the momentum, I can never remember this British author’s name, but I heard him in an interview once and he said, “Find what breaks your heart the most and make that your passion.” And so there’s a lot out there. And for any of those people out there who feel like their life has no meaning or that they’ve got this low self-worth, I have a job for you. Many, many, many jobs! There is so much that needs your help, so much. So get involved and assist in this shift that is occurring and watch what happens.
So the beings said, “We’re either going to be in a level of just domination and tyranny, the likes of which this planet has never experienced, truly that is an option. Or we’re going to create an age of potentials, things that are going to come through, technologies that are beyond our wildest dreams.” But they are saying not technologies that destroy the Earth, cause so much of the technology is making a mess. The WiFi and all of that, right? They’re saying, “No, no, no. Really, really extraordinary.” That coming into the fullness of potential of what a human being can create.
And so when you think of that story – I’ll make this as quick as I can – of the native American grandfather who tells his grandson, “I have two wolves in me that fight,” right? “One is chaos and ruin and it makes a mess and the other one is all that is good and noble and true.” And the grandson says, “Oh no, which one’s going to win?” And he says, “Whichever one I feed. Whichever one I feed.” So I can see the problems very clearly and the challenges that we have. And I can see also, “Alright, well this is necessary and this will be my part that I will do to help, to assist in this shift so that we will choose the correct direction that will uplift humanity rather than grind us into the dirt,” right?
And so, I mean it really, in other words, this is no joke! Right now it’s no joke and I am not a love and light person. No, no. We must see what we’re in and really see the problems and the issues, and the deception and the darkness – see it! So we can correct it and heal it. And so we have to do that within – as within, so without. So this is big work time, this is grow up time. That’s what this shift is. This shift is grow up time. It’s get off your ass and embrace this beautiful body that you are in, you’re a human being and I do not buy into this bullshit that human beings are a scurge on the Earth; that’s a trick to get us to hate our own race. Human beings are beautiful! We’ve been deceived, we’re waking up. We are waking up. And what we are capable of and what we can create within our personal relationships and our community and on this Earth is beautiful, beautiful.
I know this like I know my children, and like I know these beings and they say so as well. They love us. They’re not pissed at us. They’re saying, “Dear ones, dear ones wake up dears. Wake up! You’re so much more than what you think you are. You have been led by a pied piper in the wrong direction. Come on now, over here. You are not sheep, you are kings. Kings and queens, that’s what we are. That is Truth – capital T!” And the more we realize that, then there’s nothing we can’t do. And that’s not a pep-talk, that is truth that I am speaking. And so yeah, we’ll finish on that note. Thank you so much Lorna.
LL: Thank you so much for sharing such a powerful message. How can we best stay in touch with you Shonagh?
SH: My website, Shonaghhome.com, has my contact information and yeah it’s all there. It’s all there. So I make myself very accessible.
LL: Wonderful. Well thank you so much and you enjoy a beautiful day.
SH: You too. Thanks!
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