(Tracking the Stories That Hunt Us)
When an emotion hits that feels too big for the moment—anxiety without cause, regret out of nowhere, fear of dying—that’s intuition pointing to an ancestral belief running through you.
That surge isn’t random. It’s code. You’ve just been cast in someone else’s story—playing their karma, their lover, their betrayer, their villain. The collective grid writes the script; emotion is how it runs the scene.
Unless you’re living from the Crack—from neutrality, awareness, and your own signal—you’ll keep being used as someone else’s plot device.
Every person around you is unconsciously performing a role they didn’t write or agree to play. The Good Provider. The Martyr Mother. The Rebel Heir. The American Dreamer. These characters carry ancestral scripts—centuries of hunger, shame, and obedience—and they need an audience. If you feel drained around someone, it’s because that story is feeding.
In Arizona, I learned to stop tracing and start tracking. Tracing analyzes the past. Tracking hunts it. As a shaman, I call in the Panther—instinct, precision, silence. He follows the scent of emotion back to its origin until the prey reveals itself: an old fear inherited from generations of survival.
One of mine, I found out, was the fear of poverty. I lay awake convinced I’d die broke and forgotten in that tiny desert house. I imagined tracking my timeline forward to see my future—there I was, still in the trailer, only now it was run down, and I had a long beard and a humped back, holding myself up on a stick. The scene was almost comical in its symbolism, but I was terrified. I was going to die a broke, forgotten old man.
When I tracked it, I saw my parents’ intense fear of being broke—handed down from their parents, who had weathered the Great Depression. They had clawed their way out of starvation, carrying the terror forward like heirloom jewelry. Once I saw it from the Crack—the neutral space beyond story—I could isolate it, bind it, and let it go.
Then something shifted. The loop unhooked.
Weeks later, I left the house for coffee, just to remember what people looked like. A quiet man stood behind me in line. I struck up a conversation. We sat, talked, laughed, went hiking a few weeks later—and now, we’re married. He’s retired now, and we no longer live full-time in that little house, though we keep it and spend our winters there. It’s become a warm, easy place—a reminder of the journey, not the fear.
That’s how this work moves: you bind the ghost of the old story, and life rushes in to fill the space.
Every intrusive emotion, every sudden wave of suffering, is a signal from the collective wound trying to run its program through you. You don’t have to fix it or fight it. Just track it. Watch it from the Crack until it loses interest.
The moment you stop playing your assigned part, the story loses its actor—and collapses.
Invitation: The Art of Watching from the Crack
What are you afraid of?
What fears are you avoiding?
What do you do to not think about them?
Most people are exhausted from “processing their shadow.” Endlessly digging, rehashing, reliving, performing therapy loops disguised as awakening. But you can’t heal something by staying inside its story.
At some point, you have to realize the shadow you’re chasing isn’t even yours anymore. It’s the collective shadow—the psychic landfill of the species, recycled endlessly through seekers who don’t yet know they’re inside the system. They think they’re healing themselves, but they’re actually processing emotion for the grid—burning their light to cleanse the collective’s backlog.
If you don’t know you’re inside the machinery, you’ll never be free of it. You’ll keep reincarnating as the wounded hero—the one who suffers nobly, learns lessons, forgives, repeats. It’s the system’s favorite role because it keeps the story running and the energy flowing.
But the true work isn’t more shadow hunting—it’s alchemy. The mystic doesn’t process; they transmute. They stand in the Crack—watching the polarity without choosing sides, refusing to be baited by either victim or villain.
When you stop identifying as the wounded hero, the story collapses. What remains is the mystic: clear, sovereign, still. Watching the code, not caught in it.
That’s the difference between living in the loop and living as the alchemist. One feeds the story. The other rewrites reality.
The Crack is that space—the vantage point of pure observation. You don’t transcend pain by defeating it; you dissolve it by witnessing it without response. The power is in not choosing.
When fear or anger hits, your first instinct is to explain it—to wrap it in narrative: I feel this way because… That’s the trap. The moment you explain it, you feed it.
Instead, stop.
Breathe.
Drop into the Crack.
If you have even a modest meditation practice, that’s all you need. Sit. Center. Stop identifying with the emotion. Say inwardly, This pain is not mine. This fear is not mine.
From that detached perspective, you’ll see it for what it is—an energetic fragment of the collective story field, looking for a host. The field doesn’t care who plays the part; it just needs someone to feel it. When you know what’s happening—when you recognize that you’re simply a character being recruited into another narrative—you can end the audition.
That’s when the binding begins.
The Binding Practice
Words have power when they come from the Crack—when they’re spoken from clarity, not emotion.
Say it clearly, aloud or within:
“I see you for what you are.
I know that you are not mine.
Behind your story is my own, and I hereby call forth my story.
I have done nothing wrong.
I am not responsible for that.
Even if I can’t see it, I know you are trying to fool me.
I reject you here and now and bind you never to return.
You are banned from ever interfering in my life again—
on this plane and in every dimension of my being.
I rescind any contact and expel you, once and for all.”
Breathe.
Wait.
Feel the space that opens when the story dissolves.
You’ll sense it like a clearing—quiet, alert, alive. That’s the Crack. The moment of neutrality where polarity has no gravity. It’s not passive; it’s sovereign.
This is how true awakening happens—not through performance, not for profit, and not for entertainment. It’s the return of direct engagement with life. You reclaim your authorship, your intuition sharpens naturally, and reality begins to respond in ways that feel impossibly aligned.
A serious spiritual awakening begins when you stop renting space in someone else’s mythology and start writing your own.
Call in your Panther.
Track the pattern that hunts you.
Bind it.
And step back into your life—clear, sovereign, and free.
Binding:
Then breathe.
That’s the moment the loop unhooks.
The story collapses, and you remain—unbound, watching, whole.
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