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Gratitude and the Sacred Magical Household with Kimberly Steele · Coffee & Divination

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  so the way of protecting yourself is to start connecting connection is Protection when you recognize the highest part and the highest intentions of your everyday life objects other people the toilet the floor when you dive deep and aim for the Death Star instead of being distracted by all that is around you and trying to get your attention when you go straight to the source that is your ultimate Protection and gratitude again is the shortest cut to that welcome to coffee and divination a podcast about the arts of obtaining hidden knowledge in changing times join me JoAnna Farrar to chat with experts from around the world on tarot runes geomancy and the many ways divination can help us navigate and plan our paths ahead today I'm delighted to welcome Kimberly Steele to the show Kimberly is the author of Sacred Homemaking a Magical Approach to a Tidier Home and our conversation is about the spirit of the home really how we tend our spaces how we speak to and thank the objects and rooms and beings that support us and how ordinary acts of cleaning and care and gratitude can become part of a very grounded and powerful magical practice a quick note before we get started to say thank you to everyone who has sent me little messages about the new book The Diviners Path and thank you to everyone who has purchased it the feedback really means a lot to me and if you've read it and enjoyed it one of the best ways you can support it is by leaving a positive review wherever you purchased it or over on Goodreads of course I'll also be in London later this month after Spain and Italy I'll be presenting a workshop at Atlantis Bookshop on July 28th so I'm looking forward to seeing some of you there and the links to that info will be in the show notes and now enjoy the conversation with Kimberly Steele it is my pleasure to welcome on to the show someone whose book I have very much enjoyed and enjoyed reading and discussing with some friends of mine already so Kimberly thank you so much for being here on the show and it's delightful to talk to you thank you so we have a traditional first question which is if you could describe to it to us what your first experience with divination was so essentially was it something that you didn't encounter until you were an adult or did you have like an aunt or a grandmother that read tea leaves or I came from a background of absolutely no occultism I am still the only one in my family who does anything with that my first experience with divination was tarot cards it the Crowley deck I acquired one when I was about maybe 16 17 and I was actually pretty popular in college for doing readings I was I was good at readings and I and I still to this day do a little bit of tarot but I fell into atheism when I was about hmm 1920 ish and then I really did not emerge out of that atheism until I was in my 40s and at that time I got into Druidry and into the Druid practices of discursive meditation uh the sphere of Protection banishing ritual and the of course uh divination and that method I adopted was Ohm and I have been reading Ohm ever since uh probably approximately seven years ago and I do free o m readings I don't know if you knew about these but I every week pretty much I do free o m readings at my dream with blog for anybody who asks and I highly recommend that's fantastic I'm sure our listeners will be very excited to hear that so uh so you mentioned that you came from a background where you are still the the most witchy person shall we say in your family so from doing tarot readings and and being good at it clearly when you were in college through that what do you think it was that kind of pulled you towards Druidry after that pause like what what was the call that kind of you know pulled you back in shall we say I found that atheism had very few answers for things I was experiencing in my life even through my atheism I saw ghosts usually ghost cats out of the corner of my eye and I excused them as transdimensional bleed I always thought oh it has a physical explanation and it does I'm sure but I never thought of it as entirely coming from my own head and I noticed that atheism just had this blind spot where phenomena of the astral plane especially is concerned dreams uh so called out of body experiences which aren't they're you're still within your body and I was always fascinated by horror films I never really lost my fascination for the occult yet I was also really enchanted or malenchanted by materialism for that time that I was atheist so that also had a lot to do with why why I became atheist yeah so and then that that kind of recognition of the blind spots of it and the sort of having to explain it using other methodologies which then it starts to right I mean it got to the point where I just I stopped dismissing ancient knowledge I I feel like I was certainly captured by the progress narrative as much as anyone where I looked upon ancients as somehow being more primitive or not as smart as modern people now I've completely reversed that I feel that they knew things that we have absolutely no idea how to access and my book Sacred Homemaking is written as a cultism for dummies okay it's supposed it's written to be very much the book I needed coming out of atheism that I did not have I could I think a lot of people are emerging out of atheism these days and we talk John Michael Greer talks about the new religiosity and I think didn't he get that from Spangler meaning that's that is a Spanglerian term it's happening and we we have all of these forces these aggregators that I talk about in the book of course astral pyramids trying to grab at us and to try to when we are trying to find a something to believe in we're very subjected to a battery of forces all the time and I was certainly grabbed at but I decided I really needed to reconnect with nature and the and nature as I have explained in the book is the etymology of it is the the fact of being born it's not we always think oh this microphone that can't be nature this computer screen that can't be nature because man people made it at some point no it's all nature okay it's nature just means origin or birth the idea that I try to get people to understand in sacred homemaking is that you are surrounded by nature all the time and you were never out of it and I believe that if you are able to use your powers of discernment better that is what connects you with nature it's not like you don't have to be a special person meaning in in your own mind you're all special in some way in every sense of the term but what you have to do is you have to be willing to get to the source to look at the root that's why I have I would suggest that people start thanking their toilet oddly enough because we need not to look down on the toilet and say I'm better than my toilet I don't have to clean my own poop you know and pee I can just trash this whole bathroom every day and just expect it to be there for me and and instead I say no get to the root every single being on this planet including the toilet has an intention has a some kind of consciousness we may not understand that consciousness but it's there and in order to understand nature and other consciousness we have to humble ourselves not humiliate ourselves but humble ourselves enough to recognize that those things like us want to be appreciated for for the good we do instead of just taken for granted and dismissed when we do something wrong everything in this world even the toilet and by starting off very small thanking the toilet cleaning it night after night which is a practice that's done in the Orient and in especially in Japan where they assign a god to the toilet by thanking the door that keeps you safe at night from people just rolling in thanking the bed by making it in the morning I always make my bed I always sweep my own floor every morning by doing that you increase the vibe of everything around you just all these basic things all these mundane things mundane means before the temple but it's all the temple I think kind of going back to the idea that there are a lot of people coming out of or seeking to somehow expand and change their materialistic viewpoint because there's an awareness that something's wrong with it even if people are not quite aware why it's clearly not working the way that it was you know packaged and sold to people and that is that there are there are strands of ways of knowing that are missing from it this is where I believe like divination comes in because it's you know kind of just welcoming back in other ways of knowing that are welcoming in the divine yeah welcoming in the divine once again to the conversation but it's also kind of a dangerous spot because when people are sort of trying to change world views nature pours a vacuum and if people are in that sort of in between state of having to give up certain old beliefs and now having to welcome others in it can be very confusing and overwhelming for people which is I agree with you like the idea of starting from gratitude which you is where you really begin everything in the book which I deeply appreciate helps to make people uh I don't want to say more protected but Protection does come into it but it's it's starting from a more grounded place where you might be less of a target for ha ha perhaps other world views that that might just want to grab onto someone and uh you know take control of of people's awareness in other ways so the monster I believe we have to fear the most is not a beast who lumbers in a forest or in some ancient castle but it is a monster that lives inside all of us if we allow it the wind to go I've talked about the Wendigo which is a creature from Native American legend in many an essay and and many of my book many of my writings I have one book I'm working on and I will that's called Sacred Beauty that is like sacred homemaking but for the personal self and the wendigo's opposite well let me first explain what a wendigo is a wendigo is a monster that is pops up in Native American legend usually in the Far North tribes it's a kind of zombie slash uh I don't let me think it's a it's it's sort of a zombie but it's a cannibal and what reliably happens in these stories is the one person goes out and becomes an outcast he tastes human flesh one time and develops this insatiable appetite for it becoming a supernatural creature who eats and eats as many humans as he can but the more he eats the thinner and hungrier he gets and I feel that this is a great metaphor for exactly what happens to consciousness these days in a reliably common way we have a lot of people where they're taken by these faiths such as modern Christianity which as I'm sure you can tell I'm no fan of where you see somebody like a televangelist preacher living in a giant Mcmansion flying around in private jets and that person is preaching a prosperity gospel where he's fleeces the money from poor people poor people who on pensions who cannot afford to give him anything and and makes just lies lies to them sees it is okay to lie to them to pad his own pockets so he can feed his wendigo and that is the kind of religion I see trying to absorb a lot of the people who are floating around looking or something deeper and they unfortunately get they get fascinated by these big Mcmansion televangelists or the Pope sitting on his golden throne that these people where it's really obvious they have a when to go but since the hungry are looking to be faithful they don't see it and what I'm trying to do in my book is anti wendigo in all in all ways shapes and forms because gratitude is the silver bullet that slays the wendigo in all its forms when you are when you are absolutely determined to clean up your own messes and every single thing in your life from the most simple meal uh to any to any relationship you have when you're grateful for those things that's powerful magic and that is what I'm trying to help people kindle within themselves it's the kind of uh it's simple but that doesn't make it easy in the sense that like the the the truly simple things are the yeah on one level they should be the easiest but sometimes there are so many other forces that can pull us in other directions that it is not necessarily the the um the easiest to apply every day so that is that is really beautiful because in this little book you give so many very uh simple and easy I'll still use both of those words practices through which that gratitude can then travel and be made manifest into actual like physically what does that mean you do as opposed to just a thing you think about though the thinking is important too as as you put it like everything starts with an intention of course yes yes everything starts with an intention gratitude as an intention is the fastest shortcut we have to the divine it is the and I also speak of music as being a shortcut as well and I talk about it being able to be used for evil or you know evil being a very dicey term to use but when when gratitude is invoked in everyday life even in the smallest things even a a religious ignoramus such as myself who came up in casual Christianity and had no occultism anywhere nobody doing it in my family absolutely not even an even a doofus like me can figure it out so if I can figure it out I believe anyone can I mean I had difficulty when I was a child studying music because I'm dyslexic and I have the unfortunate problem of even to this day of notes swimming on the page when I try to look at them not literally but meaning almost being able to being unable to look at them unable to to focus on them that's that's what it ends up being a lack of focus and I definitely have uh some kind of attention deficit that's not diagnosed and I'm a highly functioning autistic so there's that what happens that I find with um is that with my students who have this a lot of times have the same problems I actually have a lot of music students who are learning disabled you just have to take it slow and you have to start where you are and just don't get too ambitious just like with musical practice just a little bit at a time every every day just day after day dogged determination the same determination as I I've used this analogy many times in the book of a drop of water that eventually became a river that carved out the Grand Canyon that that becomes your process and you don't get too upset if you're not great at it don't get upset it's okay everyone's got to start somewhere everyone everyone has to you just have to refine your intention over and over until it becomes a finely honed blade it doesn't happen in a montage it doesn't happen in that short of a time it it happens over a very long period of time and you just keep going at it and that's sacred homemaking is a way of going at it yeah absolutely you have a an exercise towards the very beginning of the book which is the clean one corner exercise I really appreciate that because I'll ask you to describe it just briefly but it is that kind of like a way of trying to fight overwhelm which is a thing I think every I would hazard that every single person has the the 10 times um but could you just describe that cause I think we can go a few directions from there sure absolutely modern life is so overwhelming we are very blessed to have so many fun things and not so fun things to do I mean we're very blessed but just the presence of all these machines as useful as they are is very overwhelming and one of the problems I've had with other tidying methods such as I just happen to have this book here uh The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo the problem with this particular book is that it suggests a a all at once clean out that can last up to a month meaning she insists that the at least back in the time she wrote this she insists that the only way of going about a effective long lasting cleaning of your home is to take everything by by category but everything and purge it and then just start over reset but life is not a TV show and it doesn't work that way we all a lot of us have to work right a lot of us we're very busy we're very overwhelmed and so the clean one corner exercise is a very small inroads it's it's like Marie Kondo's book Marie is the proper pronunciation in Japanese but it's like Marie Kondo's book except for it's a very tiny it's a tiny tiny mini corner you're just yes you're cleaning it all but you're cleaning all of one corner that's it and then you're going to try to observe with your Spidey sense what's the vibe after you clean one corner of your home have you tried it I not since reading the book but I have done something similar where I have done a version where I uh I set a timer for myself and say that in one room I I will do whatever I can in a certain time definition like I have one hour which for me has prevented the oh no I have failed because I have not finished whereas with sort of like doing it as a time delineated or space delineated I feel like then you can simply say well I have completed that I have completed the time and therefore I can go back to it and yet still feel that there's been success do you know what I mean so it's that sort of like if you've made it small enough then success is possible and it doesn't become oh no the entire house we can begin now or it is fake and and isn't it true with gardening that the second you go out there and you do one task there's about 50 other ones that start asserting themselves they multiply yeah yeah right and and you just have to realize that Mother Nature is always going to be a better gardener than you and that she doesn't mind you rearranging things but you just have to stay in your lane at some point and that's the same way it with housework it's do your do your best it's it's be your own good parent a good parent isn't going to chastise you for not cleaning your entire room perfectly a good parent is just going to say good job and pat you on the head give you a cookie and just accept it the way it is and that's we need to become our own good parents I'm gonna try to insist on that in sacred beauty a whole lot meaning if you didn't have a good parent I I'm lucky I had wonderful parents but if you didn't have a good parent you need to start becoming your own it's a DIY project you need to adopt for yourself and a good parent is going to say excellent effort a good teacher will reward you and say excellent effort even if the piece that you performed was not perfect or the recital in that in the same way when you are looking at yourself through a similar lens it is really important to recognize your own effort even if you didn't do something perfectly and that I I notice even my most gifted music students that sometimes the most gifted ones are the most difficult to work with because they're a bit lazy cause they think they can be and so don't don't be that student be the good student or the or the good child who puts in effort effort is worth a lot yeah and that's that's the same with divination as well where it's both it there's a there's a culture that expects um perfection very very early on uh when really it is the effort of going into it and having something that is a a small amount that is digestible that really makes the difference when when you approach it with humility but also with consistency that's really what makes the difference and that is with forms of knowledge as well as you know practices that we're that we're doing the same thing absolutely I'm divination is something where you have to resensitize yourself to the unseen world and that can be very difficult when you're inundated with materialism and atheism and I would argue that modern day especially monotheist faiths are so riddled with materialist atheism it's hard to distinguish them from materialist atheism and we have as I say in the book many times we have been deadened our our particular era of what I often refer to in in essays and books as meat world meaning physical existence is one of the hardest to become a spiritual being within ever we are really going through it I I I talked about this in a a little bit in in essays but also in a podcast that I did with um called the Plant Cunning Podcast which you might be familiar with they are yeah wonderful people of course lucky you oh my gosh I would love to live closer to them are you going to their their event this year sadly no I was a presenter at their event a couple of years but I can't oh so but yeah no they are wonderful and a shout out to them in this episode just once again saying to everybody AC and Isaac yes and I had Isaac do a a vedic reading for me that really I I thought was life changing highly recommend it I had not known anything about Vedic astrology even though I've got a few books on it he's very insightful and I would hands down recommend recommend that I did that about a month after we we did a chat we were talking about the resensitization right and just the fact that okay most people are in this state of spiritual leprosy and we're born into this state we are born into spiritual leprosy and etheric starvation and for the layman spiritual leprosy is well leprosy in general is a condition where things are happening to you and damage is being done to your body but your nerves are your nervous system is so messed up that you can't feel it meaning your arm could be burnt off and you would barely notice and that's obviously not good that you're you're losing limbs or so or whatever but you feel pain you just don't feel the pain coming from the correct receptors and that is the exact position a lot of people and I would say the whopping majority are born into these days in this the depths of the Kali Yuga the depths of the darkest most materialistic dark age of the soul dense very close close to the demonic realm era that we are in the demonic age is what I often call it and we're born into this situation where we're even told that the astral plane is entirely our imagination that somehow images don't exist where obviously they do meaning that oh that's not real well reality comes from those images you can't have the you can't have the manifestation of anything without an image or what we perceive is an image okay meaning it's just the step that comes before but so we're told our whole lives that that dreams aren't anything that they're just kind of these fun little diversions that don't really mean anything we are told that we don't go anywhere after we die or that everyone or or even worse that there's all these presumptions made like the monotheist who who says after a lifetime of really being quite crappy to others thinks that he's gonna go sit at the right hand of god or the Buddhist who thinks he's achieved Nirvana after not doing anything different than the other billions of human beings not significantly but you know so there's this idea that it's not real but if it is that you can just win the game by declaring yourself a spiritual being it's just so messed up so you end up with a bunch of spiritual lepers who are essentially in if the astral plane is dodgeball then these people are in a burlap sack being kicked and they don't know it they're just they're blind they're deaf they're dumb and then we have etheric starvation the etheric as I'm I'm sure you know as an occultist what that is is the energy layer between the physical and the world of images and I talk about the etheric plane a ton in my essays and in this book what the etheric is is the vibe alright so it's that it's electricity that's the same thing it's energy it's the life force that animates us that makes us move around and and have life in our eyes rather than just being dead corpses it is definitely in our food it is a kind of like a force field that you cannot see but it's all of those things and it's that's why it's hard to understand feng Shui the art of placement in in this in the place in the home that works with it it works with the flows of how it how it tends to move around uh but there's so many other ways of working with the etheric plane that I could books could be written about how many ways there are to work with the etheric plane Sacred Homemaking is a book that definitely deals with working with the etheric plane from various other planes from the physical from the astral from the spiritual so that's why we use gratitude to impact it from the top down and it's it's bad for me to say top down because it's all right here and right now the etheric plane is not some place where you can go it's here it's now same thing with the astral even the spiritual is right here right now we are just so dense and so not very smart as beings I mean we're so and we're immersed in this terrible part of the Iron Age slash Kali Yuga that we have a lot of us have almost completely lost our spiritual senses at all and for a cultist like you and me who've spent some years getting back into it it's not hard to understand but for somebody who is still in that atheist materialistic state that our our world puts you into on purpose and tries to keep you in on purpose it can be a lot and that's what sacred homemaking is it's I'm trying to say okay well clean your toilet and see what happens clean one corner and see what happens go talk to a tree and then see what happens and even you can do it I think that there's the um especially with social media and the the way that so many things are sort of always under um being observed or the act of like having a a focus on observation and perfectionism that can come into this discussion as well so we have there's the the form of thinking about our homes where not a lot of attention is paid to it and we sort of have that sort of etheric mess that is also can be you know physical mess and that accumulation but then there can also be in a sort of on the flip side an obsessive uh desire to purge all or have like a an Instagram aesthetic look to it so how do you think about trying to live in a balanced way between those two because I have I have also I am not a person who does like obsessive amounts of cleaning but I I have met some people that when they talk about it there seems to be also kind of something out of balance with the way that they're approaching it like uh like you talk about it as like anxiety or fear so how do you how do you think the the two extremes are are happening I am so glad that you brought that up there's two extremes and both of them are equally bad there's the hoarder's house which unfortunately I think we all know about where someone cannot use their toilet or sink because it is clogged with filth and then there's the Perfection Wendigo which is also a wendigo where you've got a person who is they're so obsessed with cleaning that they can't get to sleep at night they have to have everything in its place and each shoe has to be lined up by the bed your shoes have to be under the bed with the laces tucked in or you can't sleep and then there's also a million other things and everything has to be so perfect and or the remodeling one to go where unfortunately I've seen this one in other people even recently thankfully not in my own family that I know of but where you have a perfectly wonderful house a absolute palace when you when you really consider it yet the kitchen they rip out perfectly good kitchens they work out they they take a stove that functions absolutely fine and they tear it out so that they can put in some ten thousand dollar stove that they barely use why why why tear out something perfectly good that's a wendigo that's never going to be satisfied okay you can tear it out I yesterday my mom got a Better Homes and gardens magazine delivered and oh my gosh if you want peak Wendigo this magazine is so off the chain I have never seen something that screamed demonic obsession more than the current issue of BHG I mean they're now they're into trying to jam every color and every pattern into one room and of course these rooms are cavernous but we're talking like a floral wallpaper a pink bed that looks like it's from 1983 an exact replica of something that happened in 1983 patterned carpeting a completely different color way sort of related maybe but not really just 18 different styles maximalism is what they're trying to do and what's grotesque is that this person you know every single person who was featured in this magazine threw away tore out a a perfectly passable bunch of rooms they they top to bottom they they threw it out in order to get this tacky aesthetic that I was joking with my mom we were having a chuckle that I'm like all this needs to look like it is the 19 it's 1978 is the plastic furniture covers and I can smell the cigarette smoke from here I'm so glad this magazine does not have smellovision because it looked like an exact replica of 1978 with the velour and the that you can smell the reek of cigarette smoke if you're a certain age you know what I mean and that's a win to go yeah yeah so basically um we're we're trying to navigate a middle way through the through the that which then goes back to the focus on what is close and what is local which I I appreciate that you also talk about a relationship with food and of course um I I live on a farm and do my best with gardening though I'm nowhere near as good as my neighbors it's okay I I do my best as we're talking about you you put your effort in you get some some things from from your your greenhouse but I think that that that emphasis on the local as opposed to what is coming into your inbox at you know or through a magazine or social media can can help to thread that needle there's also the um the the focus on the locals also in something that you say which I really liked later in the book uh those that are outraged are not paying attention which is flipping on its head uh some you know usual you know discussion points of like oh if you're not outraged you're not paying attention and I was wondering if you could just touch on that cause it is a I think a very interesting part piece of this outrage is what happens when you are prey to astral pyramids or egregors forces that have a mass outside you when you are victimized by those forces and recruited into into their blob without actually realizing it okay because any sort of significant change begins with number one there's only really one one thing you can change effectively is yourself be the change you want to see in the world and if you are not that change you're just acting out someone's little stage play that they made for you that's all you're doing if you for instance I'm a vegan right and there's a lot of there's definitely a lot of negativity associated with that because vegans tend to be the ones I've hung out with they're very prey to outrage I mean they're always you know going somewhere and getting mad at someone for eating animals instead of and they think that just by not eating animals themselves that that that's enough no if you're going to embrace a himsa you have to also be kind to human beings too you can't just be kind to animals and then and then crap all over human beings no it has to your kindness actually has to be deep it can't be just only for animals and screw humans you know cause there's a lot of vegans like that where they're just really anti human no you have to live it you you have to let it take you have to let a a good egregore in instead of a bad one if you're running around trying to put out each trying to put out people's fires you can have no fire of your own just you're you're trying to to get them to do something you're not doing and you can't do that you you have to just start with small and with number one that's why the smallest act of sacred homemaking that's why um just something as simple as talking to a tree and and be you know connecting with the spirit of the land by going outside sitting with you know saying hi tree you don't even have to say this aloud just hey tree mentally can I talk can we talk the tree if you don't have a bad feeling the tree says yes and you sit with your back to a tree for a couple minutes even that is far more effective than going to some protest somewhere because you didn't try to change other people's minds by show boating with signs outside a establishment like a store or a school or on the road like I see some people do instead of doing that you started with yourself you said to yourself I'm worth working on and instead of projecting all of my angst onto a sign and showing off I'm going to just sit and look at myself connect with a tree who is the living spirit of the land and I'm going to become more in tune with what's actually going on instead of being distracted by what some bully Egregor is telling me is going on yeah yes that also though requires the the patience and the difficulty of just sitting with yourself which can be a very challenging thing especially in a culture that does not encourage us to sit and be quiet it is uh yeah sometimes the harder work haha yes and and unfortunately we have a lot of experts who have no business it it no business even pretending to know what they're talking about I I specifically cite psychologists and council you know so called counselors psychiatrists in one of my articles I think unfortunately I did put the it behind a paywall because it's rather spicy on substack but it's called the doctor is incompetent because what it is is I think one of your guests I can't remember if this was one of your guests or one of Isaac's guests maybe it might have not even been either one but one of the guests on a podcast had said look oh it was Amelia South she was on Isaac's podcast now I remember if if you're going to a counselor or a psychiatrist year after year and if you're going for more than say three years and your problems really haven't changed why you going you know if you still got the same psychological issues that you did and you just are on more medication are you going to them why cause they're a drug dealer that's why you're going what's getting done there and that that's what I would would say to people beware the expert because they're often just again another victim of an astral pyramid which is the same thing as an Egregor and what is an Egregor an Egregor is what's commonly called a group spirit so when you think of a company for instance the music studio I work for that that group of people has a a team spirit essentially that is its egregor but a lot of things have Egregors and Egregors tend to organize themselves pyramidally this is just a very common shape in consciousness is the pyramid this idea of the original intention being at the quote unquote top metaphorical top and distributing itself and wanting to amass as many as it can at the bottom meaning so you if if an egregor is a family or if an astral pyramid is a family you have mommy and daddy at the top they make children and those children make grandchildren and the community around them is also part of the Agora right uh a company can be an astro pyramid even uh something that is temporary like a party is an astral pyramid and what's interesting about these shapes is the way they try to attract other shapes from other planes meaning that they all have their own interesting way of fitting in with each other so with that acknowledgement of how we are we are kind of part of both these larger pyramids but also the the smaller ones that are more temporary shall we say like you you mentioned like the party idea we know that that's not optional it's not that you would say oh and I I don't like that idea I just won't take part in any of them no no we don't we don't get to we have a choice we can choose maybe to un un couple ourselves or you know choose not to take part in certain ones but uh it's it's just a part of of living in this in this world but it is how do you think that then the ideas of Protection 'cause you you go into you know protective yes ideas in the book and what are some of your favorite ways of discussing that with people so that it doesn't turn into just like fear based paranoia do you know what I mean because I have seen some people then start verging on everything and everyone is attacking me I must put up barbed wire whether yeah spiritually or physically like yeah what do you think is a good marker for that that balance in this way I would quote Frank Herbert from Dune fear is the mind killer especially unanalyzed fear the thing that you need to protect yourself probably the most is unanalyzed fear because unanalyzed fear can it will make your life a living hell and it can do it by making you into the hoarder that I talked about before because you're afraid of leaving your house so you start just amassing junk and clutter unappreciated clutter or you have that perfectionist person who is their fortress is their Mcmansion and they think that that unsustainable literal walls and gated community they think that that's protecting them from something and it's not because again they are in the on the plane where it actually matters the plane of subtle beings they are a piece of raw meat in a piranha tank that's what's happening to them on the astral plane they are fair game for whatever astral pyramid of materialism whatever Wendigo wants to capture them and they are just being pulled apart and they don't know it so the way of protecting yourself is to start connecting connection is Protection when you recognize the highest part and the highest intentions of your everyday life objects other people the toilet the floor when you dive deep and aim for the Death Star instead of being distracted by all that is around you and trying to get your attention when you go straight to the source that is your ultimate Protection and gratitude again is the shortest cut to that so that that gratitude and connection I really like that way of thinking of connection as Protection because it also it prevents the sort of isolationism instinct which in a culture that encourages isolation and loneliness anyway um is the the sort of way of checking to make sure that we have the right you know people and spirits and you know balance around us in a way that doesn't isolate us which is which is really beautiful that's also then you you you use the wheel of the year um you use the seasons as a structure for the book which is really lovely and you do you know bring up the and I think it's kind of threads throughout the book the idea that this like temper the temporary nature of a lot of the things in our lives is often times unexamined speaking of unexamined and that sort of being comfortable with the fact that our stuff may outlast us and sometimes it doesn't that's wonderful you know things being built to last is an excellent thing but then there's also the the act of allowing things to be temporary and that includes being aware when there are you know ancestral spirits or ghosts or hauntings around us to exist um could you maybe talk a little bit about how you think of that temporariness of this and how that plays into um if you want to go into some of this the stuff about ancestors or or those spirits as well sure absolutely well the fate of everything in our world this meat world that we're trapped in is to be come part of a landfill you me everything my house the roads the trees all the animals we're all going extinct and we're not going to be here for really a long time in the scheme of things and that is why it's so important to appreciate what you've got now and let it go because no matter what you do you could amass Grandma's old figurines for 100 years of your life you know let's say you're lucky and you live that long you could preserve those figurines perfectly they're still gonna end up in a landfill and the only thing you're going to take with you because you are an eternal being okay but the only thing you're going to take with you the only thing that lasts is the skills that you Learned the hard way and one of those skills is gratitude one of those skills could be playing the violin it's not going to be violin in your future lives but you're still going to be very musical that music that's not going to die I I used to be a lot more vain and I'm still vain but I used to be a lot more vain and but I've had an epiphany that if I had a choice okay which I don't think we have a ton of choice but if I had a choice of being prettier in this lifetime or losing my my musical talent my ability to sing very well on pitch I am I'm definitely the point I would not give up any of my pitch hahaha I think the older me I would have I would have given up some of it to to be prettier okay to be more symmetrical or whatever now oh no I know that that would have been the wrong choice you will take it with you all of these all of these sacred things all of these things were you aimed higher and truer and you saw the goodness in something that people take for granted all the time when you when you look at the intentions of others respectfully and you are grateful for the way you fit in that is what you take with you now with the phenomenon of ghosts in the end of the book at the last season winter I talk about death in my own case I am it's very weird to be someone who was an atheist 10 years ago who talks to dead people very easily and I know um that that that sounds very woo woo but for me that has always been a talent I've had and even when I was an atheist I didn't know who I was talking to but I I'm very easily able I think actually a lot of us are easily able to talk to dead people the problem is not the voices that we can perceive it's what we can discern because there's a lot of impersonators and mimics who will try to imitate your dead relatives and there are a lot of just there's a lot of nasty entities who will just pretend to be someone else like gods or they'll pretend to be your dead ant or whatever or they'll pretend to be w a Mozart and you'll get every you'll get this whole ecosystem and everything in between and what can really help is to again acknowledge the possibility protect yourself through connection to your local environment but also to discern discernment is is going to be huge and that's why I saved that chapter for the last the last part of the book because if you're going to it is getting into more of the big leagues it's more the big leagues and also then that that skill of discernment is made more difficult I think if the work of the environment that we're living in on a day to day basis is not cared for so if you're living in an area like you emphasize in the book like the idea of having clutter or having these unexamined areas of our lives like physically but that also then plays into psychologically and spiritually then that process of discernment is way harder so it's just I think that you make the point that it's more likely that you will have some of these you know not so friendly entities if the physical day to day of the the household the physical environment is not cared for um could you maybe talk about like why you like can you give an example of like how that would impact you know the kinds of spirit contact that you could have in a house because I think that also impacts divination cause obviously spirit contact is a form of divination in the sense that it's contact and it's informational uh in on one level so maybe what does that look or feel like do you think well let's say you have regular arguments with your spouse because your spouse is a different level of cleanliness than you and every time you walk in and you feel that etheric disturbance it pisses you off what's happening is there are entities especially in an unprotected house where there's a lot of unappreciated objects and a lot of languishing stuff where it's unrecognized unloved essentially and of course in the Mcmansion there's a lot more to unlove and you're having these nasty little spats with your husband or your lover and that is is attracting all sorts of things you cannot see that feed off of that energy that feed off of that on the etheric it feeds off of it on the Astral and so what you're pretty much setting up is a remedy for a negative haunting and a negative haunting is the non physical equivalent of an infection and it's reliably common a lot of people are negatively haunted they just have no idea because as spiritual lepers they don't know what's knocking at their door all the time they don't know what's running around their house if it if they can't literally see it like Harry Potter you know if it's not shooting out of someone's fingers they don't think it's magic so what's what tends to happen is this state of unseen sepsis makes you and your home and your children and whoever's in there a sitting duck for whatever wants to get at you and so what I talk about is that you you have to start somewhere to start fighting and and that is why I say let's say your relationship instead of criticizing your mate instead of that how about doing something different by looking at something good that they do and focusing on that instead of the million bad things they do there's always some there's always something that they've done right I refuse to believe that anyone in the world has done nothing right that there's that person I'm sure it exists but I I don't know of it everyone does something well and does something right find that thing find that spark of goodness and build on it because that lack of goodness is the exact reason why you've got a Poltergeist infestation and or your mental life is a living hell because again you're the blind person in a burlap sack on the astral you have to start somewhere and and maybe repairing a relationship or maybe appreciating food is your way in uh one of the things that I talk about in the book quite frequently is that we're not appreciating the bounty that we have especially with food and that we're or we're trying to do the perfectionistic route the Instagram route where you drink a green smoothie that's frankly disgusting and instead of just appreciating the piece of stale coffee cake as your sustenance you meaning that you have to have the most perfect food the most perfect recipe otherwise you feel you cannot be healthy no no there's this phenomenon I I talk about in the book called Charlie Brown's Christmas Tree that applies not just to food but to just about everything where if you know the old 1960s animation of Charlie Brown's Christmas Tree it's the story of this cartoon boy who is tasked with finding a Christmas tree and his friend Lucy tells him no go get the artificial pink tree that's like enormous but instead he he does he he does her dirty and he comes home with this small pathetic but real tree and at first his friends all criticize him and say Charlie Brown you suck you're you're terrible you're totally stupid but as they put some love and attention and care into the tree they realize he was right all along and ends up being the most magical wonderful Christmas tree transformed by their love and that is hopefully what people can do with not only their homes but their lives you gotta start somewhere and you might not have a beautiful artificial pink sparkly Christmas tree but you do have something that you can work with and it is by building this force of goodness instead of focusing on the negative that you you protect yourself and that is hopefully what I what I convey in this book and I think that that emphasis on creativity on the the act of creation as a part of that because that is the sort of I don't want to call it a counter because I don't think it's necessarily um opposed to but it is the the force of creativity of love that then infuses the actions and the surroundings with something like we are both musicians so clearly we're going to go with the importance of music in a house or music in a in a place but I think that that artistic creation that act of creativity is what then can bring that joy and that Charlie Brownness into a space yes yeah it's really a wonderful special and it almost didn't it almost didn't air I guess that it was seen as too um too something and the network almost didn't air it but it ended up being one of the most popular specials of all time a classic to this day because it it's message to my mind is extremely important it it is such a powerful message in this age of materialism where we're taking so much for granted and we're it it's cool to to dismiss it's cool to crap on something that you take for granted you know uh the iPhone okay you know it it's it's definitely a pastime among people to say oh we'd be so much better if it wasn't for the internet it wasn't for iPhones I wouldn't be talking to you if it wasn't for the internet we have to we have to reframe it that the internet yes it can be used for terrible things like pornography or it just zoom scrolling it's a wonderful gift it's I I love having a free dictionary that also has etymology in my house this is great I I mean it's still it's it's definitely a double edged sword of course not all the information information coming through it is true but there's a lot of truth that comes through the internet and if we can task ourselves with finding it then good for us but yeah it no thing is so bad that it cannot be worked with with very few exceptions you've got to work with with what you have you've got to start small you've got to start somewhere and not uh and neither go the nihilistic route or the perfectionistic route as we know in music and you said you wanted to talk about music in the book I talk about music earworms okay so I talk about the I try to explain the power music has over us via the phenomenon of the earworm the song that you can't get out of your head right and that is magic it's actually an evil spell that's been cast on you by the creator of the astral pyramid of the earworm okay and it's not necessarily the composer themselves it's usually a some shadowy producer behind them who's trying to push an agenda on you for instance I remember the McDonald's um commercial from the 1970s and also the Oscar Mayer Baloney Song despite being a 20+ year vegan so I that that song has both of those songs have stuck with me and those were all the intention of some really old and septic Egregor to get me to eat more burgers and to be a brat and I did back then I did like what I did eat McDonald's burgers back then but obviously that magic no longer works now when we hear these pop songs on the radio they too have an agenda and I talk a lot about the it girl agenda on my substack usually in the the the paid side of my substack because again I get really spicy with it so in the agenda of say these pop songs they are nothing more than advertising jingles that's all they are they're just selling an agenda usually it's something to do with promiscuity these days they're trying to get you on birth control they're trying to get you to divorce they're trying to they're trying to do something that's not good for your life okay and if you are immersed enough in that oh they're trying to get you to be anorexic they're definitely trying to get you to do that if you subscribe too much and get these earworms in your head you've got some black magic going on and some people they fall so under the spell of black magic that they they think they have a parasocial relationship with the artist they really fall in hard and that those songs take over their lives okay and the best thing we can do to fight those songs is to use other songs meaning to replace the negative magic with our more positive magic that's why I in my own case I'm a composer and I write music for the Orphic hymns which are these ancient poems that were somehow preserved from ancient Greece about the gods and goddesses that are prayers they're just prayers that I I think we're probably set to music back in the day but I set to my own music as a way of also remembering them because music can really be powerful as a mnemonic device right I mean cause we remember those jingles my baloney has a first name we remember those cause it had a song attached to it it would have been harder to remember without the song well I can two can play at that game I can put a prayer to music and I can defeat your earworm with my earworm and that's what I I try to do with the Orphic hymns I'm like well you're gonna try to to do that dark magic on me with your stupid K pop and you're going to try to you're gonna try to enchant me with that garbage to be a materialist atheist well I'm gonna one up you with a musical prayer set to a catchy tune yeah so so you're watching me wage a war and is very powerful and it is one that the it's a power that people tend to neglect but at our peril that is for sure not to mention how just generally noisy the world around us way that is very unusual in the long stream of history um yeah that's that's one I'm sure both you and I yes go off on that but uh ha ha yup we could yeah the person in the forest preserve with the headphones on blasting music I'm like the whole reason I'm here is to get away from the constant noise what are you doing with Ariana Grande in your earphones when you could be listening to the birds you could be connecting to the spirit of the land but there you are with your sunglasses your helmet you're riding your bike as fast as you can with headphones on I'm like that is a recipe to flip over a log and and break your back it is and and unfortunately that is a karma that might be somewhat merited okay I don't wish that on anybody but I mean of course if you're not paying attention to the spirit of the land it's not going to be happy with you no no you know it's not going to it's not going to reciprocate we we must reconnect with the spirit of the land even if that's in our own house that counts and yeah so the the idea of connection is as Protection absolutely we the I I don't like to see how distracted people are especially with this noisy world and yeah hopefully the music chapter will will get through to someone to to study music because even playing your own preferred music even if if you even it by playing your own preferred earworms over someone else's that can even be helpful absolutely yeah yeah it all it all makes a difference lots of different forms so before we wrap up I always like to leave space for um one last question which is is there a practice or just a piece of advice that you want to leave people with I I've sometimes found that in my own life there's a thing that I find I keep talking about or it that just has been occurring to me a lot at a given period it could be related to what we're talking about here it could be totally unrelated but is there something that you want to leave people with before we you know talk about what you're doing next but sure um that is the clean toilet challenge clean your toilet every night you don't have to go to town on it I mean just keep it relatively clean and you can say a little rhyme nor um what is the rhyme I say I say toilet toilet handling waste thank you for your saving Grace or not you just clean it every night and tell me if your finances get better because mine did I believe that the same thing is true of a lot of things but the toilet especially seems to be directly connected with personal finance it's like the gods see us cleaning that nasty thing haha and they say oh she's humble Soichiro Honda uh the obviously hot Honda Motors okay that guy no no longer with us of course but he started his company out of a shack he believed in cleaning his toilet every day and he believed it brought him prosperity and I would say in his case he proved it as well as you can possibly prove it that that cleaning your toilet brings results so my suggestion to everyone here is we all use toilet I hope I hope you're not using a hole in the ground and well even if you are but clean clean that and every day and for a year and then tell me if your finance and tell me if your finances aren't better or if your attitude towards money isn't better yeah yeah it's a it's a very very interesting one I am going to try that so I will tell you right now I will I will let you know a year from now so all you have to lose is a groovy toilet yeah yeah no and I I love ending with that that that piece of very practical advice because I think that's where we that's where we start from we have to we have to go there shall we say so um what are you already mentioned that you're working on another book Yay uh and you mentioned you have a substack can you just like tell people where to find you and what they'll find there and things like oh thank you yes the book I'm working on is called Sacred Beauty and it is going to be about true beauty not just physical beauty it's about the appreciation of what is truly beautiful while seeing through the illusion of what is presented as beautiful I it's the book that I needed at age 13 that wasn't there I needed this book so badly haha as a 13 year old and I hope that if it saves 1 13 year old from an eating disorder or if it if it helps one person anywhere to connect with spirit rather than being distracted by various evil magic then I've it's done its job so that's the book I'm writing right now my substack is just where I post essays um every week I I do alternate weeks between my paid like my paywall spicy essays and my regular essays but you can find a ton of free essays there there's a ton of free essays as well as my own readings at Kimberly Steel dot dream with dot org I in that link I'm sure will be in the show notes so um I'll leave you to the the job of that yeah but I hope people seek me out yeah please do I would love that that is wonderful well thank you so much it'll be lovely to have you back on when your next book is out and I'm sure that'll be another great conversation so thank you so much for your time thank you so much