00:09

Hey, welcome to Shaman Talk. My name's Rhonda, and I'm your host. And this week I'm digging a little deeper into the suppression of childhood gifts, shamanic and spiritual gifts specifically. I posted a reel on instagram the other day, and it did so well that I felt a podcast episode was necessary. So I'm going to cover some of the things that you may have experienced in your childhood to give you some ideas to think about. I'm also going to share some really cool, weird stories of what kids sometimes say to adults and really freaks them out. And then I'm going to go into the three cauldrons and how you can reignite or reawaken any suppressed gifts that you might have. So I'm going to start with the classic stop daydreaming nonsense that we get as kids. Stop daydreaming.

00:58

Live in the real world, and it's a really common admonishment, and I think it reflects a cultural bias towards the tangible, material world and this devaluation of the imaginative inner realms, not only the inner realms, but the outer realms, and the magic that can be found in our day to day lives. So for a child with potential shamanic gifts, daydreams, visions, whether internal or external, knowing the future, things like that, these might be early manifestations of a spiritual connection, a spiritual gift. And these experiences, how they are handled by parents, can be crucial for developing or suppressing intuition and a deeper understanding of the nonphysical aspects of our world, the world we live in. So when a child is taught to ignore these experiences, they learn really quickly to suppress an essential part of their spiritual and emotional nature.

02:01

All children have an innate sense of connection to the magical aspects of the world that we live in. And I would say most of the people that I work with, who are trying to reconnect with their spiritual gifts and spiritual life, have experienced some form of childhood suppression. Imaginary friends are another one to talk about, being told they're not real. And I think many children with shamanic inclinations, I think all kids, honestly are shamanic in some way. But with these inclinations, many kids, so many kids have imaginary friends, and they're able to perceive beings and spirits, other entities. And I'd say indigenous shamanic cultures, these experiences are often respected, they're nurtured, children are helped to weave those into their life and to understand what they mean.

02:55

But I think actually what happens in our culture is children feel misunderstood, and they learn to distrust their experiences in a society that dismisses these perceptions as fantasy. And this consistent dismissal will lead to a disconnection from your intuitive and spiritual abilities. Now, lots of people I work with say that they just had a knowing when they were kids that things really weren't as they seemed. Children who with shamanic gifts will often have this deep sense of knowing. They will perceive the world differently. They might sense energies, emotions, or truths that are not apparent to others. And without an understanding adult to guide and validate these experiences, kids will feel isolated. They'll probably believe something is wrong with them, and this can lead to a deep sense of alienation and a struggle to reconcile their inner experiences with the external world. Yeah.

03:54

So one way that this manifests, for I'd say so many people that I work with, is when adults lie and their actions and words don't match up to their inner landscape, and kids sense that on a deep note and on a deep level, their intuition is superpowered. And I think this is one of the main ways that children lose connection to their intuition. Now, if you cast your mind back to you might not have had this, but if you have, you might have had a moment when you realized that things weren't right, that actually maybe the adults around you don't know what they're talking about. And I remember maybe eight or nine and trying to talk to school friends about how things weren't as they seemed.

04:42

And I was trying to have deep and meaningful conversations with other kids and couldn't really find anybody to talk to. Funnily enough, nobody was interested in talking about our teachers inconsistencies, or the head teacher's hypocrisies, or my parents strange behaviors. And it was very isolating for me as a child to be able to see these things and have no one else see them, which really made me just shut it down. I just wanted to fit in and be liked and loved by the people around me. And that ability of mine to see past what people were saying to the truth, was very quickly closed down. Talking to my parents about what I saw, what I knew, didn't feel like an option either. So that's it.

05:30

Pushed it down, tried to believe what everybody else believed, and it caused quite a lot of psychological tension and contraction, and it caused a long term disconnection from my intuition. Took me a long time to get it back. I'll share ways to do that later in the podcast, for sure, but we're going to keep on going with some examples of how children's innate shamanic gifts are suppressed. So quite often kids with shamanic abilities, or most kids really, as I keep saying, will have a sensitivity to natural environments, almost. So they'll have this profound sensitivity to connect with their natural environment. That could be elements. It could be the energy of the place. They might talk to plants and animals or interact with animals in a way that others don't understand.

06:22

And when these little moments are dismissed, or the kid's not given the opportunity to nurture that side kind of teaches them to ignore their deep connection to the earth, to the animals around them, to the trees, to the birds. Whatever their fascination is, should be nurtured and encouraged. But usually as an parent, sir, it could just be as simple as in a hurry, needing to get home, or don't have a lot of time to spend outside with her kid. And sometimes children can be quite sensitive, and this can be dismissed as well. Too emotional. You're overreacting. Just leave the bird behind. Just never mind the cat. It's not hungry, it's not thirsty, you don't need to help that kind of thing. And some children have intense emotional empathy. And these kids are often labeled as too sensitive.

07:15

Children who are shamanically inclined might exhibit quite an intense form of empathy, feeling the emotions of people around them as if they were their own. And it's this heightened empathy which is misunderstood and labeled as being sometimes overly sensitive or weak, particularly in boys. So these kids are advised toughen up, ignore their emotions, and that's boys and girls. Although the mechanisms might be different, the outcomes are the same, and it just leads to a complete disconnection from empathic abilities. And this suppression will affect their emotional health. It'll hamper their development of essential shamanic gifts. And that's not to help other people. That's just we all have a spiritual life and a spiritual aspect to ourself. So when these are consistently suppressed, then we grow up with many invaried issues, which I'll talk about in just a little while.

08:12

What can happen when the empathetic feelings are out of sync with a child's innate compassionate nature? So they're taught to suppress and contract their empathy. It will lead to people in adulthood who struggle to effectively use their natural empathy, and they will become enslaved empaths. Now, there's an earlier episode on how to overcome this and reconnect with your empathy in a healthy way if this is something that you struggle with. So an enslaved empath will struggle to go outside, will struggle to be around. Lots of people sometimes will know when, perhaps will know when people are struggling, will struggle to differentiate their own feelings from that of others. There's quite a lot of things that people who struggle with empathy or are empaths. The list is very long, but you can shift. You can shift to being an empath in an empowered way.

09:18

So check out that earlier episode if you're interested in more details on that. But that problem is often because of a suppressed childhood gift where you're not taught how to connect with it or in a healthy way. And then next, let's talk about when kids might experience scary things and being told, oh, just grow up. What's just your imagination? So super quick? Imagination isn't just anything. Imagination is your divine connection. You'll want to nurture it and embrace it as a precious gift. That's a whole other podcast I can do on imagination. I talk about it in my book as well. It's just so sad that people relegate it to a dusty toy box. It's such a beautiful gift. So it's not just anything, it is your imagination and it is the thing that powers your connection to the divine.

10:07

Anyway, children sometimes have these spiritual or psychic experiences that can be really frightening, really overwhelming. I've had so many myself and have no relational home. I do now, but at the time I didn't really understand what was happening. And my parents were spiritual, but they just weren't able to connect me to my spirituality at the time. Although later in life that did change. But as a kid, I was very much left to work things out on my own and it was terrifying and really difficult. So a child, like I'm saying, might feel alone and unprotected when these experiences are dismissed. And actually mine weren't dismissed. I just didn't even feel safe to share them in the first place. So I was very much alone with all of the things that I would see and experience.

10:56

And also my parents wouldn't have freaked out, probably because they were used to that sort of thing. But parents do freak out. They do get scared. So you might have learned to keep your experience to yourself so you didn't upset your parents. But sometimes kids are too young to know when they might freak out or upset their parents. And I've got quite a few examples here that I'm going to share with you now about how kids have shared stuff that are, they've really freaked out their parents. So here are some stories for you that you might enjoy. So my sister predicted the 2017 Washington trail derailment. She was five at the time, and she'd had dreams that sort of came true before as well. This time she woke up screaming about a train coming through the house with dead people.

11:41

We woke up and it was on the news. And then the next one is my three year old granddaughter went over to my daughter in law's house for the first time and stood looking at the fish in the aquarium. She pointed at a particular fish and said, that fish is going to die. My daughter asked why she said that and she replied, I see the x's in its eyes. They laughed it off, but the next day the fish was dead. Okay, that's a good one. And then next, when my daughter was about three, I said to her, you are so wonderful. I'm happy to be your mummy. And she said, thanks. You were supposed to get a kid named Bruno, but I pushed him out of the way and took his place. So interesting.

12:24

The final one is my little sister and I have a 13 year age gap and as a toddler she never liked sleeping in her own bed and always insisted on sleeping in bed with my parents. I suffered from severe separation anxiety when I was younger, so I decided to ask why she didn't like sleeping in her bed, thinking it might be separation anxiety and that maybe I could help her. Her response caught me off guard. She said she didn't like to sleep in her room because of the lady. The previous owner of our house was an elderly woman who had passed away in the house. A couple of years later we moved out of that house and my sister was able to start sleeping in her own bed at night immediately. Been ten years since then.

13:03

And I mentioned this story to my sister recently and she looked absolutely horrified and said she didn't remember that at all. And when I went looking, there are thousands and thousands and thousands of similar reports of kids saying stuff like this. So let's just take a really super quick break, and I'd love to ask you to subscribe and rate this podcast wherever you listen, particularly on Spotify or apple. It is so helpful and I really appreciate if you could do that. Thank you very much. So we all have innate spiritual gifts. It's just a case of being able to find yours. And I do think and have experienced not only myself, but with the thousands of people I've worked with, that suppression of shamanic or spiritual gifts from a young age can have profound and varied effects on you as you grow into adulthood.

13:52

So I've asked people on this healing path to share with me some of the issues that they face that they realize is because of a suppression of gifts in childhood. So here are some of the things people have shared with me so many people report cluster headaches, intense reoccurring headaches that eased and went away with reconnection to spiritual gifts. Again, chronic fatigue, which is a constant state of tiredness, not relieved by rest, and is often the cause, is unknown, usually. And that some people have reported to me that their chronic fatigue has lifted when they've added a spiritual dimension and reconnection to their life. Now, obviously, some of these things that people are reporting are also affected by other changes as well. I'm not suggesting that everyone with cluster headaches or chronic fatigue needs to reconnect with their spiritual gifts and everything.

14:50

They'll be fine. But these are reports from people that I've spoken to, and it's the same with things like unexplained physical ailments, digestive issues, chronic pain without clear medical causes. People have reported to me that I've really changed when they've refound their spiritual gifts. And I'm not talking about people who've connected to spiritual life or start shamanic journey, and I'm talking about those who have done a lot of inner work, a lot of processing, and have reconnected to the root of themselves, which also results in being connected to whatever gift you came here with. And I'm going to talk about that in a little while. What else did people discuss with me? The quest for meaning. That's a big one.

15:35

So, existential struggles, when you have no purpose in life, it just so many times stems back to this problem of not being seen as you are as a child, and this continuous search for meaning and understanding in life, it often feels like something really crucial is missing and you just can't quite understand what it is. And sometimes that genuinely can be. This idea of cauldron's pathway is what I would call it. We're going to talk about that in a second. But this process of acknowledging, releasing the pain of the past, understanding and accepting your gifts, and that can mean many things. And then learning to integrate your gifts and abilities into your life in a healthy and fulfilling way is one of the ways to overcome this quest for meaning.

16:27

So I'd love for you to come with me now, in a little segue, I'd like to talk a little bit more about the experiences of kids who speak to dead relatives or who see ancestors or other people who've passed over. And that's usually called second sight. Now, second sight is a traditional belief, particularly prevalent in scottish folklore, and it refers to the ability to receive information from spirits that are not perceptible to the average person in second sight, the name in Gallic actually translates to two sights, which indicates the ability to see two worlds at the same time. And in second sight, spirits visit you, not the other way around. It was often involuntary, and those with the sight are known as taveshar, or literally wraith seer and those with second sight.

17:26

In the 17th to 19th century, stories might receive visions of future events or insights into the unseen forces at play in the lives of those around them. And they would receive that information from the dead. It was usually seen as a curse that would operate beyond the individual's control. And what is interesting is that I've always been confused as to why it was seen as a curse, and I'd like to just talk about that a little bit. This does tie back to the spiritual suppression of gifts as well, so I'll get to that in a sec. So during this time period, the 17th to 19th century, when we have all the stories available to us about second sight, the church had a very firm grip, one might say a stranglehold on Scotland.

18:14

And for some reason, the type of Christianity that flourished in Scotland at that time was puritanical and completely stripped of any magic and any real ceremony. And interestingly, ancient Christianity is or was very magical and ceremonial. I don't have time to get into that today. But suffice to say, by the time we're talking about, the shadow of fear and control of lesser men had indoctrinated Scotland into fearing its native spirituality. And that is really borne out in the stories and superstitions of those with second sight and those who encountered it in others. And that is the fear, I believe, that has followed us down the ages and still plays out in many families who have not lived a connected christian life for many decades and longer.

19:02

So the root of this fear that people have about kids who can see spirits might not be obvious, but the ripples of a fearful christian path still really do hold sway today. And this doesn't even begin touch on the current problem that many children face of being controlled by an active christian family or church life. And many of my followers over on instagram have reported that their innate spiritual connection was ironically bashed out of them in the name of Christianity. Which is sad, as many of the stories that people shared with me show behaviors that are the opposite of Christian. But that is another podcast as well, I think.

19:47

So I just wanted touch on second sight in this conversation, because I think it's really relevant to what, at least those with scottish and other british nationalities can discuss, which is second sight is also very common in other areas of Britain as well. It often ran in families. So sometimes the ability would appear in children, and other times, sometimes it appears later in life actually. But it's funny because what I do hear are many reports of people that have these gifts that are suppressed or forgotten. They then overcome it and are brave enough to talk to their parents about it. And they discover that their parents, sometimes quite elderly, also had deeply fearful experiences as children and with the other world. So it really can run in families.

20:42

Okay, I just want to round this podcast off now by talking about how you can reawaken your innate soul gifts in relation to your three cauldrons. Now, the three cauldrons are your innate power centers found in the lower abdomen, in the heart space and the head. Most people experience them there. And if you want to learn more about the three cauldrons, episode one of this season discusses them in detail so you can go ahead and catch that podcast as well. But assuming that you've been here for a while, I'm just going to talk directly about the three cauldrons and what you can do to reignite your soul gifts. So you want to start with your lower cauldron first and foremost. Always start at the bottom and work your way up and then grounding and connection. Focus on activities that connect you to nature.

21:38

Get outside regardless of where you live. Garden walk if you can get barefoot, do that. And then you will want to start addressing any of your childhood traumas or neglect of any kind of your spiritual gifts that may have caused your lower cauldron to tip over. And techniques that generally work with your lower cauldron are those that are not involved with the mind. So things like journeying and healing, shamanic healing, breath work, EFt, emdr anything that doesn't let the mind take over the mind's only involvement in lower cauldron healing is to notice and understand that something has shifted. But you can't think your way to lower cauldron healing, then you're going to want to engage in practices that build the energy within you. So this will include physical activities, creative pursuits, any work that feels meaningful and energizing.

22:37

And then you want to find a community who understands you. So there are many people in our membership, for example, who tell us and who share that they would feel really alone on their path if they didn't have the membership, if they didn't have people who understood them. And we have many people in that group from all walks of life, including active christians who really understand the magic of Christianity connected to the land and to shamanic practices. So find friends who love you for who you are and allow you to express the full, amazing breadth of who you are without tension and without compromise. Then next we want to tend the middle cauldron. Cory Irma. Compassion and forgiveness. Self compassion. Self forgiveness. Embracing shadow, the parts of you that you might be reluctant to acknowledge.

23:32

Shadow work can be tricky, but there are many ways to do it that are quite gentle, guided meditations. Again, shamanic journeying and therapy is great because finding your shadow or working with your shadow can be very difficult on your own. And then you want to try and connect with your soul's purpose and align your life towards that. Find your vocation. Another name for the middle cauldron is the cauldron of motion or the cauldron of vocation. Now, I don't like to think of myself as one of these people that's like, find your soul's purpose, man. Go and live in the woods with the wolves. No. Explore your passions, your skills. What brings you joy. My soul's purpose is to live a meaningful, connected life and be able to embrace death without regret or fear. That's all I want.

24:19

Your soul's purpose does not have to be big or fancy or expensive. It doesn't have to be life changing. You don't have to change the world. You might feel that you want to embrace your family life. You might garden a lot, curate the land around you, live a life of friendship, kindness and community. Okay, so your soul's purpose is what makes you most happy in life. It can be tricky to find. I will give you that, especially if your lower cauldron needs some serious attention. But don't lose hope. If you've started on your lower cauldron and do some deep work there, the ability for you to connect with your vocation or your soul's purpose will come in time. But just don't feel under pressure to do something grand and impressive because it's usually not the way.

25:04

Then finally, we want to activate the upper cauldron or Corey soy by engaging in practices that enhance your intuition. The most effective way to do that is to spend time in nature, same as your lower cauldron, middle cauldron as well, but being in right relationship to the place that you live. Pick litter, give offerings, listen to the land. Allow it to be a mirror to your soul, so to speak. And then you want to have a look at your ego and work with humility, being in service to yourself first and foremost and then to others, self awareness, that kind of thing. Now just a quick reminder about ego. For many women, ego isn't about dissolving your ego or dealing with your ego, it's actually about building it up.

25:56

Your ego is an essential part of your nature, and many of us have spent our life having our ego diminished, suppressed, contracted. Those of us who've had our spiritual gifts suppressed in childhood will probably have an ego that actually needs caressed, loved and built up, not dissolved, and run away from or thought of as a bad thing. And humility with ego, humility is actually seeing things as they are, not being smaller than you should be. It's about saying, I'm really good at this, but I need to work on that. It's about confidence, strength, but also love, lovingkindness, and being in service as well. So there's a balance there to be struck. Now, this is upper cauldron work, so you'll likely have quite a bit of lower and middle cauldron work before you can really get to these concepts with any sort of momentum.

26:52

But it's just to know that when you do get to ego and humility, they're often quite different than we're told. And then try practicing presence in your daily life. What can you find joy in? The small things. The magic is in the mundane. So those are all upper cauldron suggestions. Now I wonder after this podcast if you feel like your spiritual gifts were suppressed in some way, even simply that you lived in a secular world and nobody understood what you understood you, as opposed to actively suppressing you. I'd love to hear some of your thoughts over on instagram. You can find me at center for shamanism. Feel free to dm me over there if I get hundreds, which occasionally I do. I don't always get to everybody, but I tend to try and reply to people who send messages.

27:45

And I hope you enjoyed listening to this week's episode. I really hope that you got some inspiration about how to reawaken your spiritual gifts and the that maybe something inside you feels a little bit excited. So until next time, may the wisdom of the ancients guide you. The warmth of your hearth comfort you, and the sacred cauldrons within you find harmony and balance.