THE SHAMANIC STATE — Part Two

For part One

For part Three

I didn’t grow up surrounded by mystics.

I grew up in a small mountain town where people lived miles apart. The few friends I did make were transient—trailer park kids who disappeared when their parents couldn’t make rent. So I spent most of my childhood in the woods, having imaginary conversations with… something.

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The Forest as Teacher

The forest was alive. You could feel it watching.

When the wind moved through the pines, it wasn’t just sound—it was language. The trees whispered answers to questions I didn’t know I’d asked. I’d talk back sometimes, half to them, half to whatever listened through them. Other times I spoke just to make noise, so I wouldn’t surprise a bear or some wild thing that called the mountains home.

Every story I told seemed to open a door. Go this way, something would say, and I’d find a trail that wasn’t there before—an abandoned cabin, a rusted truck, a mine entrance that smelled of time. Each discovery felt like the forest was rewarding me for listening.

I didn’t understand it then, but that’s where it began—the practice of hearing what isn’t sound, of following the invisible tug that leads you off the path and into revelation.

The forest wasn’t scenery. It was the first teacher.

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The Crack in the System

School was where I fell through the crack—literally.

ADHD meant I couldn’t read for long without my brain jumping tracks. Unless something was truly magnetic—mystery, danger, magic—I couldn’t stay with it.

It took me three summers to read The Hobbit.

I loved the story, but my brain found it exhausting. I’d read a few pages, put it down for a month, pick it up again—and they’d still be wandering. Always looking for something or someone. I’d sigh, close the book, and let another winter pass. Next summer, same thing—still wandering.

So I decided to join them. I’d head into the woods behind our house, grab a stick for a sword, and set out on my own adventure. Some days I was Gandalf the Grey; other days I was a hobbit or an elf—whatever felt most thrilling. I’d stage imaginary battles in the forest until the sunlight turned to dusk, then somehow, like magic, I’d always find my way home.

While other kids’ parents were reading bedtime stories and building tidy neural pathways of comprehension, mine were wiring me for survival.

My mother was a one-woman weather system—thunder, lightning, and emotional debris—and we were all caught in her orbit. She could turn breakfast into a battlefield, pit us against our father by lunch, and have us doubting our own memories by dinner.

So while other kids were learning phonics, I was learning pattern recognition. Hyper-association. Emotional radar. I could read the temperature of a room before I walked into it. I could feel the lie before I heard it. Gaslighting wasn’t a word yet, but it was the atmosphere we breathed.

I didn’t grow up book-smart; I grew up storm-smart. My education wasn’t in comprehension—it was in detection. Life under a tyrant will do that.

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Feral Education

I was placed in special ed because no one knew what to do with me.

The teachers saw distraction; I was lost in downloads. They thought I couldn’t focus, but really I was somewhere else entirely—halfway between this world and whatever was whispering behind it.

They tested me for the gifted program, but the school was too small to have one. So they just let me drift—a free-range student with no map and no supervision. Looking back now, I’m horrified. I didn’t learn most of what kids are supposed to learn. I never read the “classics.” I barely scraped through. Academically, I was feral.

At home, there wasn’t much structure either. My mother was an emotional hurricane—all chaos and lightning—and my father just stood in the wreckage pretending not to notice. I learned early to stay low, move quiet, and hope the storm didn’t see me.

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Early Experiments

In middle school I played psychic games with a friend. She’d draw pictures while I sat behind her, trying to reproduce them telepathically. Then we’d switch. Sometimes the matches were so accurate we’d just stare at each other and laugh.

We didn’t realize it, but we were training our antennas—learning how to feel information instead of think it.

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Hairdresser Initiation

Fast-forward a few years. I’m fresh out of beauty school—licensed but terrified.

No instructors to turn to, no mentors, just a styling chair, paying clients, and me pretending I knew what the hell I was doing.

One day a woman came in for color. I flipped open the swatch book—fifty shades of hair samples, each with codes and numbers—and my ADHD brain froze. The panic was immediate: I have no idea what I’m doing.

So I closed my eyes and asked inwardly:

What colors will work best for her?

Three shades appeared in my mind’s eye—two dark, one light. I mixed them exactly as I saw them, following the image that flashed behind my eyelids: a quick, cinematic download showing how the color should flow.

It was the same with cutting. A faint, glowing line would hover around a client’s head like a halo made of light. I’d lift the hair, follow the line, make the cut, and let it fall. Every time, the shape landed perfectly—as if I’d traced it from some invisible blueprint.

Word got around. Clients started saying I was channeling the hair gods. I laughed, but part of me knew they weren’t wrong. What they called magic was really intuition. They’d sit down and say, “Do whatever the gods tell you.”

What they didn’t realize was that I wasn’t guessing. I was listening.

The salon chair became my laboratory.

The hum of dryers—my trance beat.

Every color formula was a small act of divination, a conversation with something just beyond sight.

And I can’t tell you how many times, when I’d turn the client around to face the mirror, they’d gasp:

“That’s exactly the style I was thinking about!”

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The Language of Images

Intuition came through layers—words, sensations, and visual overlays.

Sometimes I’d feel a nudge on one shoulder, turning my attention to something specific. Other times I’d hear a single word followed by a picture that made it clear what needed to be done.

It was like playing Pictionary with the invisible world.

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Seeing Through the Aura

As I learned more about chakras and energy systems, the imagery sharpened. I began seeing things around clients—small orbs, swirling clouds, geometric shapes. Some hovered nearby like satellites; others attached to the body with fine filaments of light.

When I focused on them, stories would form: betrayal, grief, heartbreak, shame.

Each one was a data packet—trauma encoded as symbol, still informing how a person lived. Most of them floated behind people.

And I couldn’t help but notice the parallel:

The worst things we experience are the things we “put behind us.”

For thirty-four years I stood behind people in their trauma.

The salon became a temple, the cape a ritual robe, the mirror a portal. Without realizing it, I was apprenticing as a shaman in plain sight.

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The Hidden Apprenticeship

Looking back, I can see the architecture clearly.

The forest trained me to listen.

The salon trained me to see.

By the time the drum entered my life, the groundwork was already laid.

The Shamanic State wasn’t something I discovered—it was something I remembered.

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Intuition as Transmission

To me, intuition is a full-body experience. It doesn’t come from inside—it comes through. When I first listened to The Telepathy Tapes, their claim that consciousness is downloaded hit me like a bell. That’s exactly how it feels.

I’m not thinking in the traditional sense. I’m receiving. My body picks up emotional coding, and my awareness translates it into meaning. Every sensation, every thought, arrives like data from a larger operating system.

That’s why I say we’re all so intuitive we’re sick.

Most of what runs through our minds isn’t ours—it’s network chatter. Dialogues, impulses, flashes of memory, synchronicities—they’re all downloads trying to pull us into stories we didn’t write or agree to participate in.

Each belief you hold is an unspoken contract. You believe in a movement, a cause, a savior—and that belief becomes a portal for an egregore, a living story-form, to enter. And once it does, it slides a tentacle right up your hoo-ha and starts running the show.

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How Many Tentacles Do You Have Up There?

The good son. The obedient worker. The rebel. The lover. The healer.

And underneath those—what about the emotions your parents never faced? The ones they passed down while trying to survive their own lives? What about the squids that latched onto their parents before them?

How many times has someone in your bloodline rolled over while a company slashed their pension to “maximize shareholder value”? How many nights have we worked ourselves sick, afraid of what happens if we can’t show up—because who would help then?

That’s the lattice—emotional filaments connecting us to generations of fear, duty, and quiet resignation. Each one humming with the same belief: stay small, stay useful, don’t question the story.

Every one of those tentacles is scripted by the collective narrative to keep us performing our roles.

And every emotion we generate—fear, guilt, pride, devotion—feeds the very egregore running the loop. Our feelings are its fuel for the next generation and the next.

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Reclaiming the Signal

That’s why silence is dangerous to the system.

Stillness starves the loop.

When I sit with the drum, I let every thought dissolve—the shoulds, the anxieties, the endless tasks. What’s left is my baseline frequency. From there, I can tell what belongs to me and what’s simply passing through.

Sometimes intuition feels like nothing more than a whisper in the body—a queasiness that reminds me of a day I once got sick and missed a meeting… only to realize I have one I’d forgotten about. That’s not memory; that’s download.

Or I meet someone new—a friend of a friend—and suddenly my ex’s name surfaces in my mind. I brush it off, tell myself I’m being weird. Weeks later, I find out the new person carries the same wounds, the same chaos, as the one I left. The warning was there. I just didn’t trust my own signal.

That’s the work: to know when the body is speaking truth and when the story is baiting you.

We’re all receivers. The problem is we’ve confused reception with identity. We think the signals we pick up are who we are. They’re not. They’re invitations to play a role in someone else’s story.

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The Medicine of Flow

Here’s the deeper secret I’ve learned through the drum:

Your true nature isn’t in thought—it’s in flow.

Every feeling that isn’t rooted in flow—guilt, jealousy, envy, resentment—isn’t really yours. It’s a costume emotion, a fragment of the character you’re performing inside someone else’s story.

The real you lives in that current of aliveness that comes when you’re fully present—when you’re curious, creative, in sync with life’s rhythm.

When you shed those costume emotions—when you drop the scales of trauma—the static clears. The collective heals through you. Each person who unhooks from false feeling returns a piece of the network to coherence.

That’s what I call the harmonic way.

It’s not a religion or a belief—it’s a remembering.

Life is already flowing as it should. You just have to get out of the way.

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Closing the Loop

We’re not broken—we’re just so intuitive we’re overloaded.

Seek out quiet. Step away from the static.

Turn off the phone. Log out for a while.

Those platforms aren’t harmless; they’re nests of collective narrative control. Give them a minute, and they’ll slip a tentacle right inside your mind—rewriting your mood, your thoughts, your sense of self—before you even realize it.

Silence isn’t retreat. It’s firewall. It’s the Crack.

The Shamanic State teaches us to tune the signal—to know the difference between the voice of the field and the pulse of our own heart.

When the stories fall away, what’s left isn’t emptiness.

It’s peace.

It’s rhythm.

It’s presence.

And in that rhythm, you finally remember:

You were never disconnected.

You were just listening to the wrong frequency.

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Binding: The Harmonic Return

I release all borrowed stories.

I reclaim the frequency of my own seeing.

I live as presence within the rhythm, not the noise.