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Another World is still Possible. The old system was never fit for purpose and now it has gone- and it's never coming back.
We have the power of gods to destroy our home. But we also have the chance to become something we cannot yet imagine,
and by doing so, lay the foundations for a future we would be proud to leave to the generations yet unborn.
What happens if we commit to a world based on generative values: compassion, courage, integrity?
What happens if we let go of the race for meaningless money and commit instead to the things that matter: clean air, clean water, clean soil - and clean, clear, courageous connections between all parts of ourselves (so we have to do the inner work of healing individually and collectively), between ourselves and each other (so we have to do the outer work of relearning how to build generative communities) and between ourselves and the Web of Life (so we have to reclaim our birthright as conscious nodes in the web of life)?
We can do this - and every week on Accidental Gods we speak with the people who are living this world into being. We have all the answers, we just (so far) lack the visions and collective will to weave them into a future that works. We can make this happen. We will. Join us.
Accidental Gods is a podcast and membership program devoted to exploring the ways we can create a future that we would be proud to leave to the generations yet to come.
If we're going to emerge into a just, equitable - and above all regenerative - future, we need to get to know the people who are already living, working, thinking and believing at the leading edge of inter-becoming transformation.
Accidental Gods exists to bring these voices to the world so that we can work together to lay the foundations of a world we'd be proud to leave to the generations that come after us.
We have the choice now - we can choose to transform…or we can face the chaos of a failing system.
Our Choice. Our Chance. Our Future.
Find the membership and the podcast pages here: https://accidentalgods.life
Find Manda's Thrutopian novel, Any Human Power here: https://mandascott.co.uk
Find Manda on BlueSky @mandascott.bsky.social
On LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/mandascottauthor/
On FaceBook https://www.facebook.com/MandaScottAuthor
Manda: Hey people. Welcome to Accidental Gods to the podcast and the place where I simply talk to a microphone where we do still believe that another world is possible and that if all 8 billion of us, or at least a reasonable critical mass of that number, could all get together and unite behind a vision, or a set of values, or a concept, or a belief, or an embodied beingness of what it would feel like to not be sitting in a bus that is being driven towards the edge of a cliff, then there is still time to create a future that we would be proud to leave to the generations that come after us.
Manda: So this is not a podcast conversation. I am recording pretty much at the moment, where Saturn conjuncts Neptune at zero degrees of Aries. And I'm well aware that many of you listening to the Accidental Gods podcast and to me, are not necessarily into astrology. And probably about this time last year, I was barely interested in astrology. I have been going to see a psychic astrologer since my 30th birthday, which was a very long time ago, and at that point she said, 'Remember, you're a writer who is making a living being a vet, not a vet who has writing as your hobby'. And within a decade, I was writing full time and had started the Boudica: Dreaming series. So I listen to people who give me good advice and advice that feels like it settles into my being.
Manda: And about a year ago, someone that I trust said that I needed to be watching what was/is happening. And today, 20th of February at around 3:00 UK time. Saturn moved into direct conjunction with Neptune at zero degrees of Aries, which is the start of the zodiac. And apparently this has not happened since 4631 years before the start of the Common Era. Almost every astrologer I know considers this to be a total reset, and there's a lot of other stuff happening around it which we are definitely not going to go into. However, I don't know about you, but the world feels to me as if it is balancing on a knife edge. Somebody a long time in my attempt at dressage riding past. (And yes, I do know now that that's not something I particularly should have been doing or definitely want to do now). However, they said riding a dressage horse is like sitting on an unexploded keg of dynamite balanced on a knife edge. And this is true. My trainer once put me on her extremely advanced horse, and it was very much like that. Which is one of the many reasons why I really don't buy into the idea that the woman we know of as Jeanne d'Arc- Joan of Arc- was a peasant girl who happened to be able to ride into battle. It just doesn't work. However, leaving that completely aside, I feel that we're on the powder keg balanced on a knife edge moment, whatever is behind it, and that having the resources internally to navigate this moment is really important.
And just over a week ago, I taught the online gathering called Honouring Fear as your Mentor and was really impressed with the courage and the willingness to be vulnerable and to take risks of the people who turned up. It was the first time that I had taught this particular Gathering, and I came away from it with ideas that I ought to do a follow up. And in thinking about that, I've decided to make this - which is the follow up - stretch, wider, so that those of you who did not come to the gathering will still have benefit.
Those of you who did come can go deeper, because this seems to me to be one of the single most useful things that anybody can learn as we sit on the unexploded powder keg balanced on a knife edge. We are pretty much universally in our culture, afraid of being afraid. And we need not to be. We need, I believe, to reach a place where energy flows through us, where our feelings flow through unimpeded, where we can feel grief or fear or rage or despair or joy or or love or any particular feeling, and let it move through its cyclical pattern and let something else come in its place.
And instead we have a tendency to get locked in old patterns, some of which are not even ours. If you read the book 'Releasing Our Burdens' by Richard Schwartz and Thomas Hübl, which I mentioned in my roundup of books at the end of last year (I'll put a link in the show notes)N - they and other people whom I respect deeply, are coming to understand that a lot of the fears that we are experiencing and finding blocking the flow of energy within us are inherited. And speaking as a shamanic practitioner, I would say they're inherited both down the bloodline and down the spirit line. And this is not an ancestor teaching. If you work with me, you know that ancestor work beings in year six of a cycle that technically lasts 11 years. And actually, the only person who's done it in less than 16 years is Lou. And we fast-tracked her because she's my apprentice. So we're not going deep into exploring ancestor work here, but we are really going to look deeply at what fear does to us when it's locked. Thomas says that trauma is a moment frozen in time. I have an internal metaphor of two concave mirrors, like satellite dishes, facing each other. And the flow of our energy is like a beam of light. It could be a laser beam. It could be moonlight, it could be sunlight. But it's got trapped between these two, and it's bouncing back and forth.
Manda: Do the thing: don't do the thing. Be the thing: don't be the thing. Say the thing: don't say the thing. Fear this thing: don't fear this thing. Fear is frightening. We get locked back and forth. And we don't know how to let it go. We don't know how to let those disks melt away or let the frozen part thaw. And if we're going to get through the pinch point that is coming, which is in itself a source of fear, we need to be in flow because we need to be connected to the Web of Life. I've said this so often on this podcast. I'm sure you can all recite it in your sleep, but we can't connect to the Web of Life if we are locked in our fear patterns. If the little bits inside are busy trying to make stuff happen because we're afraid, we don't know the answers. That doesn't work. That can't work. So what we here for today is to work out how we might thaw those moments frozen in time, how we might just get rid of the opposing discs, how we might step up to being everything that we can be offering ourselves in service to Life.
And I want at this point to offer you a few words from Drew Dellinger, who wrote, 'It's 323 in the morning and I can't sleep because my great great grandchildren ask me in dreams, what did you do while the earth was unravelling?
I opened the Gathering with this, and I want to offer it again here, because for me, it's an incentive to do work that can be hard, that can hit up against parts that would really rather not have to address whatever issue is their issue. Because I do think this is not negotiable now. And it helps me to remember that the earth is unravelling, and that I do have a part to play in this and that the single most important thing I can do, and I know I keep saying this, but it is true, is to do the inner work. One of the things that we do focus on when we're doing the shamanic training is how to step into a place where we are full hearted, open hearted, clear hearted and strong hearted. And I would like to widen that to the entire population of the planet. So whether the part frozen in time is ours or whether we've inherited it, and it's travelled down for the past 10,000 years from whatever was the traumatic event that split our culture off from the Web of Life, it doesn't really matter. All that matters is that this is our work to do, and we can do it now.
So in doing it, there are some really basic safety measures to consider at the start. We're in the realm of fear and trauma. And this is not therapy. We are quite therapy adjacent. But if you have fear or traumas that are potentially overwhelming, that are potentially incapacitating, that could potentially knock you off balance so that you can't move through the world, then please find an individual or a community that can help you to work with them in person.
Manda: This is not what this is for. What I want to do here is explore ideas and open the space for you to work with the smaller traumas, the little blips of fear that come through every day that really aren't going to knock you off balance if you work with them so that your system gets used to the idea that this can happen. Thawing is a thing. The fact that we've had a fear all of our lives doesn't mean we have to keep carrying it. Getting used to this means we can then gradually, slowly, in moments when we're feeling very resourced, begin to work with the bigger things. I hope that's really clear. If you need to go back and listen to that again, please do. And then as an adjunct to that, we have some really basic safety practices that will help you come back into balance if you feel that you are beginning to topple.
The first is your breath. Deep, slow, rhythmic breathing is almost impossible if we are juddered - and conversely, if we are breathing deeply and slowly right down into our abdomens and at a rate where the in-breath is half the length of the out-breath, this in itself sends signals to the rest of our nervous system that things are okay.
Manda: So within our group we work with 5-10-20 breathing, which is in for a count of five, and then pause out for a slow count of ten, and then pause. Do this 20 times. Which, if you are counting it roughly a second per count, means that you'll be doing it for five minutes. So it would be in... two, three, four, five. Pause... Out...two, three, four, five, 6789 ten pours. Loop back and repeat and see how you feel. So please do that now and do it as often as you need to until you're feeling relaxed and resourced and resilient. And then come back and see where we get to next.
And the next step is relaxed vision. Again, part of our basic physiology is to expand our vision. If we have very focussed linear vision, looking straight in front in a way that can say read words on a screen or focus on the road ahead of you, or focus on the sabre toothed tiger in the bushes, then our sympathetic nervous system is likely to be activated. Conversely, if we have that wide, gentle, soft vision that is seeing through an arc of around 180 degrees, our body will take in the message that we are safe. So the easiest way to do this, if you're not used to it, is to stretch your hands out to the side, let your eyes relax, and then bring your hands very slowly forward, wiggling your fingers with your eyes looking straight ahead.
Manda: We're not checking how far can you look to the side we're checking at what point are you aware of your fingers wiggling in the edges of your vision? Really focus on those wriggling fingers because then your focus is on peripheral vision. And again, this is something to practice the more you can walk through the world with wide, soft, gentle vision, the more your body can relax, the more your system can reset and the more your whole being can have a sense of grounding. So practice that and give yourself something that acts as a prompt so that if you go out of the house and you shut the front door, that prompts you to remember peripheral vision. If you have a walk that you do regularly with or without a dog, let that prompt you to move into peripheral vision, wide vision, soft gaze something that you do regularly. Make it a cue, and then let that cue spill out into the rest of your day. There's very few times in our lives where we need to have the tight, focussed vision. Sadly, screen work tends to be one of those. So minimising your screen work, as everybody says, is a really good idea. And I'm saying this sitting in front of a screen, but I do have a window that looks out on the hill, and I do look out there a lot and let my vision relax.
Manda: Next on our list is grounding. If you worked with Accidental, Gods or Dreaming Awake in any capacity, you will know we focus almost obsessively on Grounding. Our culture is really, really good at cutting loose and going off into other places. What we're very bad at is coming back to being fully present on the knife edge of the moment in this reality, fully grounded in the here and now. And I hope by now it's obvious that the being fully present in the here and now is exactly what we need to be doing. So however you ground, we open up the eyes in the soles of our feet. Send roots down from those, send roots down from our first sun, which is also called our first chakra. Whatever. So that we've got a triangle, a tripod of roots, and we send those down very consciously into the heart of the earth, and we send a cord up to the heights of the sky, so that we have heart to heart to heart connection. The heart of the earth through our heart, to the heart-mind of the universe and the heart-mind of the universe through our heart to the heart of the earth.
This has the advantage that you can do it anywhere. You can do it in your office. You can do it while you're sitting at traffic lights. You can do it while you're sitting on a plane 3000ft up. It doesn't matter where you do it. It matters that it becomes so instinctive that all of your life you are sending roots down into the earth. If you have a different way of doing it, knock yourself out. Do what works for you. And obviously there are things like walking barefoot in the earth, standing or sitting with your back to a tree, standing in a river barefoot. All of these things really, really help with grounding. Anything that helps to bring your attention back to the physicality of the flesh and the bones and the teeth of your being in full connection with the flesh and the bones and the teeth and the practical physicality of the earth will help you to ground. So whatever it takes, please include grounding. As you slow and deepen your breathing, as you expand and soften your vision and you ground. And as an adjunct to that, if it's humanly possible for you to go out and stand with your back or your heart space connected to a tree, or lie on the ground, or go and touch a rock, or stand or sit or lie in a river or body of water, that would be good too.
Moving on, if you're part of Accidental Gods and the Three Pillars of the Heart Mind, the seventh module are absolutely there to help you form the resilience that gratitude, compassion, and joyful curiosity can evoke. I am not going to go into that here. And on a similar basis, if you've worked your way through the other modules, then any of the elemental modules is there explicitly to help you to relax and connect with who you are in the moment.
So by now, I hope you have a suite of things that work for you that will help you to come back to being fully present in this time and this place, which is part of what being resilient is. And then we want to move from the general to the individual. These are all generalised things. Breathing deeply and slowly works for absolutely everybody. But each of us will also have a suite of individual things that help us with what Sophy Banks calls micro returns. The things that, when we are slightly off balance, bring us back into balance. So for me, that would be going out to walk on the hill, playing with the puppy, going to feed the chickens, leaning on a fence, listening to the bird call, going to visit friends who really get it, people where I can just drop the masks and be me, or doing the inner work. The various forms of meditation or mourning ceremony or being in ceremony with people that I trust and that I love.
I would strongly recommend that you work out what works for you. What is it that helps to bring you back in balance? How much of it can you readily access, and are the ways that you could change your world very slightly to allow more things to be there and accessible? Give yourself more space so that you can meditate in the mornings or the evenings or lunchtime or whatever.
Manda: Find a place where you can just go and walk on the world and be alone, or be with the people that you love and that you trust. Whatever it is, find out what works for you and then create a sense of a toolkit and know what you can reach for easily in an emergency. And then things that you might have to call someone up and ask if you can come over or set aside some time to go and really walk up a hill...Whatever it is, know what you can access in the moment when you need it, and then have a sense of how you construct your life so that the other things are there to bring you back into balance. And then on a similar basis, work out the things that are guaranteed to knock everybody off balance. So there are things like low level, low frequency noises pretty much trigger everybody: fridges, air source heat pumps, aeroplanes overhead. All of these things set us on edge, whether we understand it in the moment or not. And then everybody will have the things that are our own particular triggers.
Manda: And that's what we're going to be working with today. But if you can minimise the general things then that too would be a good idea. So let's have a very quick look at what fear is and when it can be useful, because clearly it's a survival mechanism. If there is a sabre toothed tiger outside the window, it would be a good idea to be frightened. If you're standing on the edge of a cliff with a 3000 foot drop, it's a really good idea of your entire physiology is telling you to step back from the edge. But these things are transient. Robert Sapolsky wrote 'Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers' back in 1994, and there have been two updates since then. And he describes the very obvious sequence of there is a zebra and it is being hunted by a lion, then if the lion catches it, then the zebra is dead. But if the lion doesn't catch it, the zebra gets on with its day. And if the lions aren't hungry, the zebras and the lions will drink together from the waterhole. The zebra is not walking around in chronic stress. Chronic stress is what we as humans create when we have the moments frozen in time and we replay over and over and over inside the concepts of what might happen if there were a lion, or if our boss says the things that we are we're expecting that they might say when we walk into work tomorrow morning, or any of the other things that could be going to happen in our world today.
Manda: And I'm not going to list them because that's not useful. The point is, we need to get to be more like the zebras. We can respond appropriately when there are fearful things around. That response takes us away from the danger. And then we settle back to our position of balance and connectivity. We respond. We are not reacting. And particularly we're not recycling fears of things that are not actually in our immediate environment.
So I want to look at that capacity to recycle fear and particularly to recycle fear that isn't ours. I've put a link in the show notes to the Diaz and Ressler paper that came out in 2013, in Nature, and also to the Scientific American precis of it, which is slightly easier to read. And this paper has become quite famous in neurophysiological circles, but I don't think it's quite in the general domain yet. So in an effort to bring it there, it basically goes like this. The group gave male mice exposure to a scent that's a little bit like almond blossom, at the same time as giving them really quite mild electric shocks to their feet. I don't love this, but anyway, it got to the point where the mice were afraid of the scent, and then they took semen from the mice and artificially inseminated female mice with that semen.
Manda: And for four generations, the male offspring were afraid of the scent. And for three generations, the female offspring were afraid of the scent, despite never at any point having been exposed to electric shocks connected with the scent of something a bit like almond blossom. So this is one more brick in the edifice of epigenetic thinking and the understanding that we can pass feelings down our generational lines. And Francis Weller called our culture the Trauma Culture for a good reason. A long, long time ago, our ancestors suffered separation from the Web of Life. It will have been traumatic. It isn't possible to have that sense of connectivity, to have that sense of I am okay. I am held by the web. To have that ruptured so that I'm not okay. There is no web holding me. And gradually over time, there is also no community that I can trust either. This is guaranteed to be traumatic, and if we look around the world at events that are happening now, we seem to me to be at that zenith of a trauma culture where the people who have power are holding on to it because they're afraid of the consequences of not having power, and they're projecting outwards those things of which they are most afraid, and then assaulting them or assaulting us, depending on how you look at it. And if this cycle runs its full course, I don't see how humanity gets through.
Manda: So if every one of us, on the other hand, could heal all that trauma, then I think the potential for humanity is huge. And I really want to say this again. Nobody is suggesting this is easy. I just think it's not optional to not do the work. So know that we know that it's hard. Know that each of us feels how hard it is when we're doing it. And wouldn't it be good if we were the generation that didn't have to do all this work, and we could simply pass the trauma on down the line to other people to do it later? We are in that Fellowship of the Ring moment where Frodo says, 'I wish it need not have happened in my time.' And Gandalf says, 'So do I, and so do all who lived to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.'.
So that's us. And if you've got this far, then I am hoping that you are pretty committed to doing this work. So let's recap. We all have resources. We all have the capacity to create micro returns that bring us back into balance. We all know how to breathe slowly and deeply, how to soften and widen our gaze, how to ground, and how to do whatever inner work helps us to come back into balance, fully alive and fully aware of what's happening inside and out in this place and this time.
Manda: Further, we know that this is not therapy. It may be therapy adjacent, but what we're not going to do is delve into the how and the why and the stories of what our fears are about or where they came from. I really want that to sink in. There are modalities of therapy where that's important, where you want to look at childhood traumas or perhaps inherited traumas where you want to have a story and explore it. And that is not what we're doing here. This kind of work - the the ways of taking down the satellite discs that are bouncing the light of our being back and forth - are purely physical. They're about our awareness of our own physicality, our awareness of how energy moves within ourselves, our awareness of how we feel and in our culture, that can be really hard. Many, many of us, particularly the older generations, were taught from very young, that feeling was a bad thing, that if somebody asks, how do you feel, you answer it with 'I think'. So, please, however, we're going to do this, let your awareness sink inside and let there be feelings. And if that in itself is triggering, then just go to the edges of them and step away. This is an iterative process. It takes as long as it takes. So I'm going to explore a really trivial fear that I can generate inside and walk you through the process while doing that.
Manda: So let's have a think. Okay. It's the middle of the afternoon. I didn't really give the pup a proper walk this morning, and I have a part inside that we did explore in the Gathering, and it comes up whenever I get to this. I want to be the perfect dog trainer, companion, person, connector. I don't want to screw up this puppy. I am pretty aware that 30 years ago or 40 years ago, the things that I thought were the right way to behave with a dog were not good. And it may well be that if I were to live another 40 years, I would discover that things were doing now are not ideal, but I am doing my absolute best to raise this pup to be resilient, to have secure attachment, to be a really well rounded little person in a world that is frankly going mad. And I have a pretty perpetual fear... I have several, actually. Okay, let's split them up. There's 'I am not giving her enough time'. That's one. There is, 'I don't have enough knowledge to do what I want to do.' That's hovering around the edges. There's a kind of perpetual Presbyterian background saying that watever I do is not good enough: I'm not working hard enough. Which I think is slightly separate to each of these. And I can feel the shapes.
Manda: So let's pick let's pick the last one. And if I'm sensing inside and really let myself sink into the reality of a part of me that believes that this is true and I am not doing this is not IFS therapy, I'm not going to go and particularly talk to that part. I could and I might well do it later. But at this moment I am simply feeling into the physicality of that feeling. It's in my heart space and it's kind of rhomboidal, very elongated. It's got a long upward point. It's quite hot. It vibrates at a particular tone with a particular texture. It has a particular scent. I have spent quite a lot of my world because I do psychic work building up my internal vocabulary and capacity to explore things. It doesn't take that long. It just takes a willingness to sit with the uncomfortable things. And this is by the time I've given it my full attention, pretty darned uncomfortable. And so the thing that I really want you to take on board is, this is not about the trigger, okay? It is never about the trigger and the story does not matter. Please listen to me on this. It's not about the trigger. The story doesn't matter. This is not about my relationship with the puppy. This is old. And actually, if I feel into this, it has an archaic sense to it that I think quite a lot of this is ancestral, which isn't surprising.
Manda: My father's family were were semi peasant farmers in the south of Scotland, as far back as we know. I've got something like 12% Viking blood, and that's because we lost the Battle of Largs in 1263. Actually we didn't. The Vikings lost the Battle of Largs in 1263, but I learned about that from a group of Viking re-enactors. And so for most of my life I thought that we lost, as in the Scots lost the Battle of Largs. Anyway, there were a lot of Vikings in Scotland in the 1200s, and generations of my family were working the land in ways where I think self-judgment and judgement of the other was the patterning of the time, and we don't need to go into the history of that. I don't need to know this. The story doesn't matter, and it's not about the trigger. I'm only telling you that to give you a sense of context. If you work with this and you want to get into story, then please go and find a therapist. But personally, I don't actually think it helps. What matters now is that I give my attention to this elongated rhomboid, with its particular texture and tone and scent and heat, and let my attention rest on it and breathe into it. And simply by doing these, simply by letting it know that I am here, that there is a system around it, that it's not alone.
Manda: There is a change in the vibration. And then If I can, with all integrity and authenticity, say thank you. I see you. Thank you for being there. How can you and I work together? What can we do? And I'm not specifying to do what. I am simply asking, what can we do together? This little blip of fear which, now that I'm focusing on it feels huge, is my mentor is here to teach me that this is a moment frozen in time, that this is the light bouncing back and forth between the discs. It doesn't matter where it came from. It doesn't matter what the history is. It doesn't matter what the story is that goes with it. Later, at another time with my therapist, I might go back and talk to the part and decided some of this ancestral. And do I want to just let go of it? Because actually our systems are quite often quite happy to let go of the stuff that isn't theirs. This came down many, many, many, many generations perhaps, and we can just let it go and then just work with the part that actually arose in this lifetime with me. But at this moment, all that I'm doing is looking at this blip of fear, this shape, this feeling, this context within me and really saying thank you. Yay! You showed yourself, this is amazing.
Manda: Thank you. How can we work together and breathing into it and just doing this, offering the gratitude, deepening my breathing, broadening my gaze and really holding my attention lightly on the sense inside. It's beginning to shift. I can feel it expanding. The edges are becoming less clear cut. It feels like morning mist when the sun comes up and it begins to dissipate. It's got quite a hard core and it would take longer than I want to give it live doing this with you. I think to let it completely fade away. But even in the time we're doing this, a percentage of it, a decent percentage, 20 or 30% of it feels to me as if it has dissipated. So this was not a huge fear. I am not going to work in real time with you, with some of my bigger fears. That's not reasonable. And you don't particularly want to experience that any more than I do. But I'm happy to work with them on my own. And the thing that I've discovered is, if every time I feel a blip of fear, I can turn my attention inwards and go, hey, thank you. That's interesting. Thank you for showing yourself. I'm driving in traffic at the moment. I can't do the work just now, but I absolutely commit to doing it when I get home and I have peace and quiet. Even that in itself can begin to soften things.
Manda: And then as I keep that commitment and work with whatever little fear it was, and I really am working with small fears, this is the I haven't left the raw food thawing for the cats, or I didn't put the chickens to bed yet. And it's 5:00 and oh my goodness, the fox will come. Or somebody asked me to write an article and I haven't written it yet. And I'm a really bad person and I haven't got time. Not earth changing stuff. Okay. And there's one. The ponies are just whining outside, and I haven't been giving them their lunch. And now I'm a bad person again. All of this rolls through all of the day. But if each time I can turn my attention inwards and go,'Hey, thank you. Okay, let's work with this.' My system becomes more able to do that, more aware that this is a thing. And as I work with the things and saw them and the edges dissipate and they begin to become more free and the energy is able to flow, my system as a whole becomes aware that this is a thing, and then I can begin to work with the bigger stuff. And I choose to do that because I think this is essential. And I've had a lot of practice and huge amounts of therapy, and I have 40 years of shamanic practice and Guides that I work with on a daily basis. So please hear me on this.
Manda: Work with the small stuff. Don't try the big stuff unless you are 100% certain that you're not going to get into trouble. There are people out there whose job it is to help you do this. And as I hope you've seen, there is plenty of small stuff to work with, and even doing this helps our systems to become more resilient. I am saying this again and again because I want it to land with you, and there are places where we might get stuck. Simply looking inside is hard for some people. Allowing feelings to be felt is hard. If this is you, then practice it gently and practice with the good feelings as much as with the feelings that are frightening. Practice with joy. Practice with compassion. Practice with gratitude. Practice with whatever makes your heart sing before you begin to look at the things that might make your heart close over. And then it can also be hard to make the distance so that we don't get lost in our fear. Quite a lot of us are afraid of being afraid, or we have parts that judge our fear and tell us that we shouldn't be afraid in the first place, that being afraid is worthless or pointless, or there are much bigger things to be afraid of so why are you afraid of the fact that you didn't feed the ponies and you're a bad person? All of this work requires a capacity to look inside and have a sense of what's going on.
Manda: And the only way I know how to get that capacity is to do some form of meditation. We've talked about that quite a lot on the podcast and definitely in the Accidental Gods membership. So again, I'm not going to go into that in detail here if you want me to. Let me know. I am more than happy to do more of these thoughts from the edge, but I don't want to overload you. And I also don't want to treat you as if you know nothing, when actually you're quite well practised. But you do whatever it takes so that you can get the inner distance to not get lost in a feeling when it blips up if it's a huge cascading terror. We are more likely to get lost, but each of us experiences tiny little blips of feeling right through the day, and some of them flow through being able to recognise the ones that are beginning to judder, the ones that are beginning to get frozen. The ones that we could thaw is also the work of this time. So there's a lot of work, guys. There's getting the distance to look inside. There's is noticing when a blip happens and going, 'Thank you. Yay! I'm really grateful to you for showing that here is a place where I can do some work, where we can begin to remove the discs and let you free from that juddering backwards and forwards. Let's do this together. You're my mentor. This is a gift.'.
Manda: So this is where we're at. It's a continual daily process. The work never ends. If we're still breathing, if we're still alive, then there is still work to do. And every time we free up a little frozen bit inside, we become more alive. We become more capable of balancing on the knife edge of the moment, of freely connecting with the Web of Life and asking, 'What do you want of me?' and responding to the answers in real time.
Manda: There is no downside to this. Definitely it's hard, but it's also an incredibly wonderful process. It's awe inspiring and I promise you it can also be joyful. So I'm going to leave it at that. It seems to me that we may want to do another of these Gatherings, and I don't have one scheduled for this year, but if it seems useful, then we will find a way to fit it in somewhere. So if this is useful, please let me know and if something else would be more useful, please let me know that too. And there we go. I'm going to leave the credits because I have no idea who's producing this. But you know the details by now, and we will be back to the normal schedule next Wednesday. See you then. Thank you and goodbye.