A Supernaturally Infused Life- The Journey Of Ben Stimpson

Oh my goodness,

What a very,

Very cool conversation you are in store for!

I loved it.

I loved talking about so many magical things.

About gnomes and queerness and liminal spaces and connecting to ancestors.

It's all just so outside of my comprehension and outside of my experience,

But it's interesting and it's so neat to be on a journey of finding what resonates and what is calling and finding out what is the right way to go.

And if you're here,

You must be on that journey as well and I welcome you to that and I'd love to hear how it goes for you as you see what tweaks your interest and goes,

Ooh,

Let's go further down that rabbit hole.

Hello and welcome to the Epic Kate Podcast.

On this podcast,

I love to dive into people's spiritual journeys of transformation and to dive into wonder and the situations that led people on their path.

I love to hear the stories.

Sometimes I'm hearing stories that aren't so deeply mystical and magical.

Sometimes they're a bit more grounded,

But I just connect with the people that I feel like I'm meant to connect with and that's how I get my guests and it's really fun and it's really neat to see which doors open.

In this episode,

I had the chance to talk with Ben Stimson,

Who is a fascinating person and I would love to pick his brain for another 172 hours.

But anyway,

Let's get into it.

How heartfelt conversations can change the world.

Here's the Epic Kate Podcast.

Hello and welcome to the Epic Kate Podcast.

I'm really,

Really excited to get to have the chance to meet and talk to Ben.

They are,

I'm so interested about their life.

So would you please give us an introduction of yourself?

Yes,

Of course.

My name is Ben Stimson.

I'm based in Ontario,

Canada,

But I'm originally from the United Kingdom.

I'm a spiritual psychotherapist,

I'm an author,

I'm a historian,

I'm all sorts of different things.

So I primarily write in the metaphysical niche.

My book,

Ancestral Whispers,

A Guide to Developing Ancestral Veneration Practices,

Came out just last year.

Since then,

I have also started and written a whole other manuscript around the folklore of witches.

I've been a practicing pagan for about 20 years now,

And that also feeds into my psychotherapy work.

I'm mostly a narrative therapist,

Transpersonal therapist,

Jungian therapist,

And I see a lot most of my clients online.

I had to writing that down,

Jungian,

I love Jungian stuff.

There's a podcast called This Jungian Life,

And every time I listen to those episodes,

I'm like,

I feel like I just got a doctorate,

Like I feel like I'm 20% smarter from listening to these people.

It's a wonderful podcast.

I've heard a couple of episodes myself.

I agree.

They're very,

Very,

Very on top of it,

Of what they do.

Yeah.

So I just turned the light on,

It's like,

It's amazing how the ambiance just went like dark as you were talking.

I'm really,

Really interested in spiritual journeys.

Have you always felt connected to magic,

To spiritual things,

Or did you have an awakening?

I think so.

Like I said,

I'm originally from the UK myself,

And the place that I grew up in,

Before we emigrated to Canada,

It was just like,

Part of the building was 400 years old.

It was middle of Wales.

It was really at the bottom of a deep valley.

Like you looked around the landscape and it was just nothing but valleys and hillocks and beautiful,

Beautiful landscape.

And there was an eminence to it,

There was an energy to the place.

And I certainly,

As a child,

I experienced things that nowadays people would look at me strangely for,

But,

You know,

I remember meeting little old men who would disappear into the brush.

I remember,

You know,

Encountering nightmare creatures at nighttime or seeing faces sometimes looking through windows and things like that.

So I would say I've always been open and of that spiritual nature.

It took me a while to click two and two together though.

And I think that really came in my teenage years.

When I moved to Canada,

I was trying to really connect with home,

Right?

I engaged with folklore as a way of dealing with culture shock because,

You know,

Taking a little kid from middle of Wales all the way over to Canada where people are speaking differently,

They have different mindsets,

The town I moved to was very,

Very,

Very Christian and everybody was related to each other because it was a very small town.

I didn't belong in any way.

And so I really connected in with folklore and eventually then paganism and wicca and magic as a way of kind of dealing with that trauma.

And then it just carried on.

And I would say that I'm a deeply spiritual person now.

And yeah,

It's funny because I say that,

Like people say,

Well,

How are you spiritual?

And I'm noticing that as I age,

It's just my landscape,

My life.

I just live my spirituality,

Right?

It's so normal to me,

But I can't differentiate between mundane and spiritual,

Right?

Yeah.

Okay.

I need to rewind back to,

Did you see gnomes?

Yes.

So I experienced them as that,

They were little old men.

Did you walk with them?

I did.

Yes.

It was very normal.

Like it was just a very normal thing.

I remember once I was playing,

So,

So where my parents lived,

It was a little old cottage that was just down the road from the pub that they were managing.

And it's all like just farmhouses everywhere.

And I remember,

You know,

I'd be playing in the,

In the,

In the garden and suddenly,

You know,

I would see these little old men walking,

Walking by.

Like little?

Like how little are we talking here?

Well,

So not tiny,

Tiny,

I would say they were probably about four feet tall.

Okay.

They were like,

They were dressed like,

They were just like little,

Like last of the summer wine kind of looking characters,

Right?

They were wearing like,

You know,

Like old style Victorian clothing.

They looked like they,

You know,

They,

They had like little caps on.

They were just,

They looked like little old Welsh men that you would expect from that time,

But they were just smaller and they would just disappear in the hedge.

They would just walk into the hedge and that would be them.

And,

You know,

And I would see them all over the place.

I'd see them in the village sometimes.

And,

And I remember once I was sitting in the garden and I was just playing and then one of them came up out of nowhere and was like,

What are you doing down there?

And I,

And very strong,

Full Welsh accent,

He asked me and,

And I said,

Oh,

I'm just playing.

And he said,

Well,

Don't mess anything up.

And then he just wandered away and then just disappeared into the verge.

And to me,

It was just normal because I just always saw these people.

And,

And I said,

So I said to my mum,

Oh,

You know,

The old man talked to me today.

And she was like,

Well,

Old man,

You know,

Who are you talking about?

You know,

Of course,

Didn't,

Didn't even think.

And it was weird.

It wasn't like she didn't believe me.

It was just that she just didn't even,

It didn't even register,

Right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

So.

It seems like a thing that comes up in a lot of fae-related situations is that some people they'll have these encounters and they just won't remember it until something triggers it.

A lens over,

Right?

Yeah.

It's,

It's,

It's almost like Doctor Who,

A chameleon circuit.

It just,

You just don't see it,

Right?

Oh man.

So your parents,

They,

When you told,

When did you realize,

Like,

This is different,

This is not normal.

Other people aren't experiencing this,

Or when I say,

Hey,

Yeah,

When,

When you connect with people,

They're like,

I have no clue what you're on about.

I think,

I think it was when I came to Canada,

To be honest.

I was eight and a half,

So I was eight and a half when I came over here,

Exactly.

But it's,

It's interesting because like,

You know,

When we moved over here,

My parents for a couple of years were just kind of figuring out where they wanted to be.

And then we landed in a,

A brewery situation.

So there'd been publicans back home,

We ran pubs back home.

When they came over here,

They thought,

Okay,

Well,

The brewing industry is really getting off on in Ontario,

So we're going to join this.

There was only like 10 or 15 breweries at the time,

Apart from the big,

Big,

Big breweries.

So they founded a brewery and they founded a 170 year old stone,

Like purpose built building in the middle of nowhere,

Town,

Very similar to the town we were living in in Wales.

And and it was custom built as a brewery.

And the gentleman who,

Who'd originally built it,

He designed it.

He brought 40 stonemasons over from Germany,

Big German area at that time.

And and he had them build this place with field stone.

And that place was haunted.

We,

We had,

We had ghosts inside.

Of course,

They,

They were ghosts of people who have been connected with the various businesses beforehand.

And because it had gone through several iterations of what this purpose was.

And,

But the feeling was always like,

Oh,

This is back to what it's meant to be.

So this is good.

There was never any kind of disturbances.

We always knew that there was something in there,

It was just a presence,

Right?

So that was a very normal part of living there.

And my parents are very typical little Englanders in many ways.

They're very like,

You know,

Anything that's strange or weird just gets and,

And it just is ignored,

Right?

So I get in some ways,

Like I started to realize that this was a weird thing,

Probably when I was an early teenager,

But it was one of those things I just kind of,

You know,

The lens came up in my head.

And it took me about 10 years until I'm in my 20s when I started to really engage with that again,

Even though I was experiencing things all along the way,

You know.

So just like being more purposeful about like talking to them,

Like leaving offerings or whatnot?

I would say more,

It was that kind of relationship,

You know,

When you live with spirits,

In my opinion,

When you live with spirits in a place,

It's like you have your kind of slice of that reality,

They have their own slice of the reality,

There's no point in leaving offerings to them.

If you're living in cohabiting in the same space,

It's just being a good roommate,

Then,

You know.

And I think for them,

Like,

It would often manifest in the brewery as because we had a lot of machinery that will create white noise,

The brewing system itself,

The boiler will create a lot of white noise.

And you could often hear like,

Almost like people were having a conversation in another room with the door closed,

It was that mumbling sound of what I would often hear.

But like,

My whole family would experience things like my mom one day,

She said,

She once saw she was working late at night,

In her office upstairs.

And how her office was,

It was like,

There was a big like uninhabited area,

But it was a big loft,

A hayloft,

Basically.

And her office was there and the light was off in that place.

So the door that she had was black,

Pitch black on the on the other side.

She's like 11 o'clock at night,

She's doing taxes,

Probably getting tired.

And she looks up and she sees her dad looking in at her.

And of course,

Typical little Englander,

Like,

Oh,

I must have been tired,

There's nothing puts her head down,

Right?

We've had clocks that would go backwards,

They would like middle of the night,

Suddenly they would start ticking backwards,

And it's like,

What are you doing?

But nothing ever malicious,

Nothing ever unwelcoming,

Yeah.

Would you say that the British mentality is like,

Healthy respect,

It doesn't have anything to do with me kind of thing?

I think it's,

It's England,

In particular,

Very different from like,

Welsh,

Wales,

Or like Scotland,

And definitely Ireland.

England is a very go to church four times a year kind of culture,

Right?

They're very sceptical of anything that isn't quantifiable.

And I say that,

I mean,

Catholic English are much more in line with spirituality,

I'd say than kind of a Protestant English.

And they just have a very blasé,

You know,

Anything that is different,

Is very strange to them.

And I mean,

That includes even people,

Right,

Whenever they go down,

You know,

Very typical little Englander kind of approaches,

Whenever they go down to Benidorm,

Or Corfu,

Or any of those like hotspots in Europe,

It's like they're complaining about the foreigners,

You know,

It's ridiculous,

Right?

But they,

You know,

They have a weird sense about them.

And so my parents are very much that,

Anything that's outside the norm for them is to be ignored,

It's not to be looked at,

Because,

You know,

It's,

They just don't know what to do with it.

Does that mean that maybe you were a bit ignored being different,

Being so different yourself?

Yes,

And no,

But for other reasons.

So I actually came out as gay around 14.

And so that was ignored.

Yeah,

That was ignored.

It was the,

It wasn't the,

You know,

Oh,

Get out of my house,

We don't want you anymore.

It was the,

Don't tell the neighbours,

Right,

Don't tell the neighbours,

Yeah.

Keep it to yourself.

Yeah,

Very much so,

Very much so.

So you had a few things going on to make you very,

Very different from the expectations of your family.

Yeah.

And in truth,

I would say my experience now,

Especially in the communities that I'm in,

Is that a lot of that otherness,

A lot of like,

A lot of queerness tend to open the door to spirituality for a lot of people,

Like a lot of my really,

Really good friends,

A lot of writers in the metaphysical niche right now,

Happen to be gay or queer of some kind.

So it's kind of an interesting thing,

There's something about that otherness.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I had it on the tip of my tongue,

Trauma,

Like trauma is a doorway to magic,

To awareness,

To awakening.

I think when you exist and live in a liminal space because of trauma,

I think that that will open the door to recognising liminal creatures and beings,

Right?

I certainly think that there's something to do,

Like,

And in fact,

I've heard this from other kind of marginalised groups,

People who,

They're not magical because they're a marginalised group,

They're marginalised,

And that opens up that space for them,

Which is safe,

Right?

I've heard a lot of this from like,

African American root workers and ATR folks,

Right?

Because of racism,

Because of that,

Kind of being that marginalisation,

Spirituality becomes a really big safe area for them to go into it and explore.

I thought,

It's one of those things,

Again,

It's that liminality place,

Right?

And I think,

You know,

When we look at that liminality space,

A lot of the spiritual beings that I've encountered,

Because they're shapeshifters,

Because they're changing constantly how they approach this reality,

In the same way,

But we have to,

In many ways,

Marginalise people in any,

Of any stripe.

That negotiation of what we're doing with,

You know,

The norm,

Does create those connections and spaces.

Yeah.

And then there's birthrights too,

There's,

I had a wonderful conversation with a friend who is a fourth generation shaman,

And then it was accepting the call to that.

And it makes me just,

I have so many directions I can go,

Like the whole,

Are you born a witch?

Or is it something that you can choose?

And I've heard a lot of different opinions about that.

But I want to take it more personal.

You mentioned having these spiritual encounters with these liminal beings.

Can you tell about an instance that was just really particularly,

Like,

Shaping,

Guiding you towards a shift in your life?

Yes,

I can,

Actually.

Yes,

I can.

So it was,

It's more recent,

It's,

It was only 2016.

There's a lot of backstory,

Because my spiritual life is not singular instances,

But it is singular kind of like,

Ah,

Like 12 moments,

Right?

I have a tattoo here that I'm showing,

And it's the weird bind room.

So this is a,

The weird bind room.

Oh,

It's a room.

It's a room.

So this is,

This is a symbol that was created by a German occultist named Jan Fries about 30 years ago.

And when you look at it,

It's an interlocking stave of nine staves.

And when you look at it,

All of the runes fit within this image.

And so they call it the weird bind room.

And weird is a,

Weird,

W-Y-R-D,

Is a very important concept for me,

That really helps to illustrate kind of how I see the nature of reality and the nature of fate and destiny.

It's Scandinavian in origin,

There's kind of two words that are used for the same in the Germanic and the Scandinavian languages.

And it taught,

It has connotations of the tapestry of life and the tapestry of fate being woven constantly.

Very different from kind of classical and Christian fatalism,

Which is there's a God somewhere that is saying,

You know,

This,

This,

Everything,

And I control everything,

All of this.

There's an activity with,

With fate,

Right?

And I suggested actually how like,

Norse Vikings would espouse themselves based on how they were facing whatever was coming towards them,

Because it was a constant unweaving in the now.

Right?

The future is based on what happened now,

Now is based on what happened in the past,

And that's the tapestry of destiny.

So I had a situation in 2016,

When I really came back to myself,

I was doing a lot of healing for myself at that point,

Where I had seven men in my life come back into my life through inexplicable means,

Like the weirdest of situations,

Couldn't be really understood in any way other than there was something going on that year.

And I really tied into this present in my life,

I wouldn't even say,

I don't know if it's even a sentient presence,

It's,

It's a force,

It's,

It's something that's going on,

It's something bigger than me,

That I happen to be connected in with.

And it's moving and shaking my life because of it,

I don't know if I was caught in its wave or something,

But it was,

It was,

It was directing me towards healing.

And like these guys,

Like these people,

You know,

One of them was my best friend,

When I was younger,

And we had a big falling out.

One of them was somebody I slept with once,

And it had a big meaningful impact on him,

And he needed to tell me that,

Like,

He was going through some things,

Whoever,

Whatever it was,

There was some sort of unfinished business between us all.

And when I say the weirdest of situations,

Like one guy,

I moved to a city around that time,

Because I was studying psychotherapy.

And like,

We were always going to bump into each other,

I didn't know that he was living in the city,

It turns out he was living in the city,

His office was like a five minute walk from where I was living.

When I took on my own office,

When I was doing my own psychotherapy training,

He was seeing the therapist whose office was literally next door to me in that block.

And I hadn't seen this guy for like 10 years,

Right?

But I was whining for him,

I had all,

Like,

A huge regret around how we ended our friendship.

And he didn't bump into it.

The other person,

It was,

You know,

They were friends of friends with somebody I just met.

And there was no other way that we would have connected in like that.

It's so weird,

Like all these weird things.

After you know,

The first couple of people that came back,

And I was able to gain healing from that,

Again,

I had that that sense that something bigger was happening.

And I started to get a body sensation,

Whenever somebody was about to show up,

I would start to feel like butterflies in my stomach,

Like for like a week or two weeks before that,

I knew,

Like I started to get the sense that,

Okay,

Something,

Something's happening just behind the curtain,

And I need to either move out the way,

So I'm not in the way of it,

Or I need to just go into that flow.

But there was a body sensation,

There was like a dawning,

It almost felt like static electricity,

Like I just,

I could feel there was something.

And then they would show up,

And it would be like,

Oh,

Okay.

Of course,

Hindsight is the retrospect,

At the end of that year,

The big one that came back was that best friend of mine.

And we did a huge amount of healing after that,

We really got to say what we need to say,

We got to,

You know,

It was just,

It was a really wonderful,

Like,

Depletion of all that built up,

Pent up stuff.

And now I like,

I see that kind of weave tapestry in everyday life.

So when something happens,

It's that like sense of,

The Jungian sense of synchronicity is big with that.

I wrote that down,

Synchronicity,

Yeah.

But it was one of those tools,

It was that opening up to that awareness of something bigger and outside of regular reality,

That really then tied me in.

What I've noticed in my spiritual life is there are two big players in my life.

And when I think about all the deities that I've been attracted to over these years,

They've always been in one of these two camps,

To do with control,

And to do with change.

Can you say that again,

The what of control?

To do with control and to do with change,

To do with control.

So,

For example,

In 2017,

I was introduced to a Lakumi practitioner,

He's a crowned priest of Oshun.

And for a couple of years,

I was involved in his spiritual house.

And Lakumi is an Afro-Cuban tradition.

It has,

It works with the Orishas,

The Shango,

Oshun,

The Yemaya,

And those beings.

And a really powerful,

Continual tradition.

It never ended like a lot of European ones,

And needing to be reconstructed.

It continued all the way through the Middle Passage.

It mutated in various Caribbean islands,

Beautiful tradition.

And I met him,

Again,

Through one of those weird synchronicities.

I met,

I was chatting to somebody at the time,

They said,

Oh,

Introduced you to my friend David here,

Met David,

And we started chatting.

And then I ended up becoming his godchild in that system for a few years.

It turns out I had actually met David 20 years before,

When I was 13,

At a sci-fi convention.

All these little threads,

Right?

All these little threads.

That's beautiful.

So what led you to this concept,

Or not concept,

To this practice of connecting with ancestors?

Was there a pretty,

Is there a pretty good story there?

I bet there is.

There is.

It's all tied in.

My whole life is really tied in.

So going through that experience of all of these guys coming back into my life,

At the end of it,

What was really,

Really clear,

Because the theme of them all was being stuck in the past.

These are all people who I obey,

Were constantly thinking back into the past,

And being stuck in the past,

And not moving forward.

And at the end,

The big message that came through one of my ancestors was,

Don't live in the past.

You don't belong there.

That was one of the big messages.

And around that time,

I was doing some intense,

Or starting to do intense ancestor work through the previous tradition that I was involved with,

Concurrently to that,

When I was in my psychotherapy program around that same time,

Or like a year later,

The ancestor work was continuing.

I had to do a big project on family history for my psychotherapy program.

And so I was suddenly had these dual role,

These dual activities of spiritually connecting,

And then through psychotherapy connecting,

And the two just interlocked perfectly.

And so ancestor veneration and ancestor work became a big part of my life.

And in truth,

It always had been,

Because when I moved from the UK,

That was it.

I was disconnected from the physical landscape that's my ancestor.

I was disconnected from my living like relatives over there.

And I was disconnected from the places that my ancestors buried.

And so,

You know,

I'd always conceptually understood,

Oh,

Yes,

I have ancestors over there.

And we have,

You know,

Boxes of old pictures of them.

But the stories were how I was relating to them.

There was no physical or spiritual connection.

And so in connecting in spiritually,

I had a wonderful experience,

And I've talked about it in my book,

Of going to a dumb supper,

Which I don't know if you recognize that term.

No,

What is this?

So a dumb supper,

It started to evolve in North America.

They say that it has old Celtic roots,

But I'm not certain about that.

But it's a beautiful tradition.

And basically,

What you do is you come together in gathering with other people,

You place settings down for the living and for the dead,

And you just have a supper,

A silent supper.

And that's why we call it the dumb supper.

The whole idea is you're meditating in silence through this whole thing.

It's a very somber time,

But it's a way of communing with your dead.

And so I was invited to one of these ones.

And some spooky,

Weird things happened around it that tell me that big things were happening around this one event.

I picked up a pack of butter tarts,

Which European listeners won't understand.

They're like a tart filled with caramel butter.

It's a really,

Really delicious thing,

Really delicious.

So I picked up a pack of these to take with me because it was potluck,

And I go and I give it to the organiser,

And she bursts out into tears.

And I said,

Oh,

I hope that's okay.

She said,

No,

No,

No,

You don't understand.

I was hoping that my dad would come through,

And butter tarts were his big thing in his life.

He loved butter tarts.

And I'm like,

Oh,

That's spooky,

Because how would I know?

Like I was,

You know,

I could have got anything,

Right?

So I go in,

And this was about,

I'd say,

Oh,

Is it 2017?

2017.

I go in and I sit down and commune,

And I have such a visceral conversation with my grandfather and his father just before him.

And the whole conversation was,

Again,

It was so visceral.

It was almost like walking into a little space inside my head and just having that dialogue.

Was it like an astral kind of,

Astral projection kind of thing,

Or was it a?

No,

It was almost like,

So how I experience spirit is often like the radio.

So I'll just,

I'll hear it almost like a radio.

Sometimes it can be like just background frequency.

Other times it's like,

You know,

When you tune into a radio and it becomes clear,

It's often like that.

So that's how I experience it.

Sometimes,

Well,

I will often get images too,

But that's primarily how I experience all of it.

So it was like,

It was like having a background.

It was like having a ham radio conversation.

And I got to ask him questions.

I got to get some answers from him.

And so when I went and did my family research,

All of those things checked out.

And so that's how I knew it was real.

Yeah.

Wow.

Would you say that you're a medium or channel?

I know those are two.

I would say,

Yeah,

No,

I would say so.

Yes,

I,

I have like,

I do experience it.

I can turn it off and on.

I actually did psychic prayers for a couple of years,

Not as a reader,

As a vendor,

But when you're in that space,

It amplifies it.

My friend who's a shaman talks a lot about energy hygiene that you,

For people,

She's,

She's there for people who are overwhelmed by it.

Like,

No,

You,

You have your,

No,

You put your doors up.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's so important.

It really is.

And I mean,

It's important regardless of what you're doing,

Right?

This is why so many religious rituals often also have a cleansing element to it too,

Right?

You come in,

You cleanse yourself.

When you go out,

You cleanse yourself because of that space or the belief that when you're encountering the spirit or you're encountering deity,

That in itself is a spiritual wash too,

Right?

So that's very important.

Makes me think of another thing that I heard.

And I listened to a lot of podcasts that it's very,

It's very important to be careful with ancestors that they're not all good.

They're not all on your side.

Some of them are carrying their burdens and their unforgiveness and bitterness and to not let that latch onto you.

Absolutely.

No,

Absolutely.

And,

And,

And so that's one of the reasons why I wrote the book and,

You know,

I still figure I can't even find my copy.

I had my copy right here and it's gone and disappeared on me.

So I can't even show you it.

But I think it must've been the fair folk,

Eh?

Probably.

Yeah,

Probably.

They're like,

No,

You talked about this book way too much.

Talk about something else.

So that's the reason I wrote my book in the first place.

I went through this experience of,

Of,

Of,

Of being given a framework and then learning how to kind of utilize that framework in working with my own ancestors.

I wrote the book in order to,

To not teach people how to do ancestry work,

But to get people thinking about ancestry work.

Because in the West,

Particularly in North America here and,

And Europe as well.

But I would say a lot of this is really North American focus.

There's a lot of people who want to work with the ancestors,

But they don't know how.

So what do they do?

They look at traditions where ancestor work is a living,

Thriving part of that tradition and then think,

Okay,

How can I,

How can I copy that?

Or what,

How can I incorporate that into my own practice?

And what essentially happens is it doesn't make sense.

Because the,

The,

The ancestors are very different from spirit guides or deities because they exist within our own cultural matrices,

Right?

Culture is,

Is,

Is,

Is,

Is communal by nature,

Right?

It isn't individual by nature.

We're extensions of the culture that we're born into.

We're extension of a culture that we're adopted into,

Right?

And so culture shock,

That's why culture shock is this,

Because there's so many pieces.

So you,

You,

You realize that when you went to Sweden,

They would be moving to Canada,

Right?

There's so many little pieces that we just don't think about.

I've experienced so many culture shocks in my life.

I've been to 26 different countries and three continents.

And yeah,

It's,

It's big.

It's when you remove yourself from your language.

When I,

When I was suddenly traveling full time with two Germans and all of my references,

All of my,

All of my movie quotes and song lyrics,

All of my idioms and similes and whatever,

When your language has to be stripped down to the bare bones,

It's like,

Wow,

Who am I away from all of that stuff?

Apart from all that culture.

This is exactly it,

Right?

I remember a few years ago,

A friend in Turkey who does translating reached out to me and he was like,

You know,

Can you help me with this?

Because I don't understand what this is.

When,

When I see somebody say one Mississippi,

Two Mississippi,

Three Mississippi,

Four,

What does that mean?

Like,

What is Mississippi?

So I said,

Well,

It's a,

It's a time counter,

Right?

He said,

Oh,

Okay.

Yes,

We have something like that,

But it's of course in Turkish.

That totally makes sense now.

Okay.

Like we do the same things.

It's all very,

But it's different kind of visages and that's what causes confusion,

Right?

And this is a cultural piece.

You hit a nail on the head.

Who are we outside of those cultures,

Right?

So when it comes to ancestor work,

Right,

We all exist and they exist within those cultural matrices.

What becomes weird is the further back you go,

The more of those cultures start to shift and change.

And then suddenly all these remote ancestors are first of all connected to,

You know,

Perhaps millions of people living descendants,

But they exist in such a culture that's so different from our own strength.

I just have this funny idea in my head of an ancestor being like,

What are you wearing?

How indecent you are.

And this is the thing,

This is often,

This is,

You often hear some mediums who will say things like that,

Where the,

The,

The spirit coming through is so confused what you're doing,

You know,

All of this.

Or they come from a culture where they're very direct.

And so it'll be very direct,

The message.

And it will be like,

You know,

Well,

Why,

Why aren't you,

Of course,

They're also tempered by the fact that they're dead.

They have a very different sense of time than us too.

That's my experience.

So for them,

It's like,

Well,

Why can't you,

You know,

Stop whimpering,

Just go and do it,

You know,

Do it.

Mike,

We didn't have all this time to sit and prattle along.

We had work to do or we would starve.

Exactly.

Right.

And also that state of death too,

My experience with them is,

Uh,

Has often been that because they have like the time exists very differently in the,

In,

In,

In that state of death.

So for them,

You know,

Cause and effect cannot often be opposite.

And so it's like,

Well,

Why don't you just do that?

If you don't do that,

Then this other thing won't happen.

So you need to do this now,

Just go and get it done.

It's like,

What are you doing?

Right.

I know,

Sorry.

Sorry,

Go on,

Please.

I know it's a whole can of worms of just complexity that we couldn't possibly begin to know in our,

In our,

In our little limited minds,

But it's just like,

I love near death experience stories too.

And there's people in their near death experiences and they're off traveling the stars and living as mermaids and giant bugs.

And there's people that are,

They're meeting their families and they're meeting themselves in different variations of themselves.

And it's just like,

But why are ghosts when they,

Why,

Why are there spirits when they could be off traveling the stars?

Why are they choosing to stay?

Can they not go?

And I know it's a whole wibbly wobbly timey wimey.

This is a cool thing.

Like,

Like I would say,

And this is what I really discovered when I was writing this,

I would say that death is the central focus of human life,

Right?

Because we're preparing for it.

We're trying to deal with it.

We're trying to stave it off,

Right?

We're constantly thinking what is just beyond that veil,

Right?

And so most cultures around the world have,

All cultures around the world have come up with answers to fill those gaps of why,

You know,

In Catholicism,

The reason that ghosts exist is because of purgatory,

Right?

So the ghosts can be just existing around because they're not in heaven yet,

Right?

In other traditions,

Ghosts exist because there's a part of the soul that still exists in these places,

But it does not be entirety of the soul.

So another part of the soul is off doing another life and so on and so on.

In reincarnation,

You see this too,

This idea of multiple soul parts,

Right?

So what I did was I essentially laid out all of these different traditions for the reader and said,

What do you believe?

What is the cultural understanding that you exist within right now?

And what do you then understand,

Right?

And so my whole book is,

I like to call it kind of couples therapy with your ancestors,

Because it's a way of learning how to relate and think about what is this subconscious conditioning that you exist within?

And then how does that then translate to,

Say,

Ritual work with your ancestors,

Right?

Because this is something I find also too,

People don't know what to do because they want to do something.

Spirituality is not just about sitting around and thinking about things.

Spirituality is active,

It's doing.

This is why people go to fairs and they go to ritual and they go to temple or whatever it is they're doing,

Right?

So doing is an action and people don't know what to do,

Especially if they are from a Western background where they don't have those traditions or they don't want to engage with the traditions that they do have in their birth faiths,

Right?

So getting people to understand their worldview is really important.

If you believe from maybe a symbolic status or a literal status that the dead exist in the ground,

Then why would you plate an offering on up top,

Right?

If you believe that they're in the sky,

Why would you bow your head down and direct it to the ground if you're going to pray to them,

Right?

Mainly,

Oftentimes,

Because they're looking at what other cultures are doing and they're mimicking,

Right?

And so the whole point is to engage with your ancestors.

And so they're still here in that same cultural way and cultural understanding that they can engage with.

When you look at traditions like Day of the Dead in Mexico,

You look at those beautiful ofrendas and anybody who hasn't seen those,

Like watch movie Coco,

You'll see it.

Have you seen Coco?

I love Coco.

It's one of my favorite movies.

It breaks me into a million pieces.

Oh my God.

It's beautiful,

Isn't it?

The colors of Coco,

The beautiful ofrendas,

The altars of Coco,

When you look at them,

Everything on that altar is symbolically meaningful to both the dead who understood it when they were living and also the living,

Right?

So you have the marigolds,

Which are deaf flowers,

Right?

You've got oftentimes the food on there will be literally the food that those people ate when they lived.

So if you're just a random spirit not connected to that culture and you see all that,

You'd be like,

Oh,

Or a random person,

You'd be,

Oh,

That's cool.

There's food,

There's flowers,

Right?

But for those who are in the know and can culturally decode them,

That means home to them.

Oh,

You've got my favorite tamales or,

Oh,

You've got my favorite,

You know,

Whatever it is.

This is home.

This creates that sense of home.

And so in spiritual practice,

That can be created too.

For me,

I had to heavily kind of adapt what I was learning in my spiritual traditions to African traditions to then my British culture,

To my British ancestors.

It gets a little bit weirder when you start to move past that cultural sphere into older times.

You know,

How do you connect with a Neanderthal ancestor?

How do you connect with a precursor ancestor?

How do you connect with the landscape that you're from?

Because in a way that's also an ancestor too.

So I explore all of those things in the book.

Because really people want hope.

They,

They,

I have,

I have my special things here that make me happy.

Funnily enough,

That's some pictures of gnomes that my girls drew.

I go out into nature and I just dream of seeing something,

Something.

I just want to see something.

I've got just fossils and candles.

And my aunt,

Sorry,

Aunt,

I don't,

It's not,

It's not a bug,

A person.

She mailed me this cup that was my grandma's that I never met.

Oh,

Isn't that beautiful?

Yeah.

And when I first got it in the mail,

I was like,

Can I,

Can I feel her through this?

Can I,

Is there,

Is,

Is,

Because I've had dreams,

I've had a dream where I got to hug her and I got to talk to her.

And I have,

I have a little sticker up there.

That's from the Barbie movie that says,

You guys ever think about dying?

And I have a picture of my uncle Steve,

Who was my favorite uncle and my obituary of my grandma.

Oh,

That's beautiful.

And it's just,

There's just this little,

I wouldn't,

I wouldn't go so far as to call an altar because I have no clue about,

I came out of evangelical Christianity.

And I just don't want to have anything,

Anybody tell me what to do anymore.

You know?

That's the thing,

Right?

This is the thing.

A lot of people who are striving for alternative spiritualities come from that really patriarchal evangelical place.

But when we think about it,

Right?

Like that,

That cultural conditioning of what,

You know,

What is an altar?

Why is it there?

And what you've got there is meaningful.

It's,

It's meaningful to you,

Right?

It's intentional by the looks of it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Got my,

Got my,

Got my rainbow.

Got your rainbow?

It reminds me of something.

So,

So I'm also part of the Order of Barnstow Beads and Druids,

Which is a Druid group in,

Based in the UK,

But it has,

We have chapters and groups all over the world.

The,

The,

The,

The head of the order was talking about how her first experience going underground in Ireland,

She's from Ireland originally.

And she went underground and she was so wanting to connect with the spirits of,

Like the trifonic spirits of the underworld,

Right?

So wanting to connect.

And she went into a cave and she was sitting there and she was just,

She was bored because she didn't get anything.

There was nothing going on for her.

And in that moment she realized,

Okay,

This is,

This is the point because I'm expecting to see something.

I'm expecting certain things.

Otherwise it's not something to me.

When she actually clued in,

I'm in a cave underground.

I'm hearing the ambience.

I'm feeling the pressure of being underground in this darkness.

This is the,

This is the underworld.

She said her relationship to those expectations completely changed.

And so something you said about,

You know,

I just,

I want to see something.

I think for me,

When I,

Like that,

I really resonate with that because so often,

You know,

It's that I need proof.

I need something.

I just want to experience.

I want to have,

You know,

That connection.

And the connection is all around us all the time.

It's just what lenses are we looking at it through,

Right?

Yeah.

So do you,

What services do you,

Do you offer services?

Do you help people to connect to their ancestors?

Do you,

Do you talk to people like now,

Like right now?

And like,

You start to feel nudges from their family members saying,

Hey,

I want to say something to Katie real quick.

I don't tend to have that.

I tend to be quite shielded that way.

Mainly because working with ancestors in that way is,

Is it's a little bit more difficult.

I can turn it on when I want to.

But,

You know,

It's one of those,

I need to have my own protections,

But I do actually assist other people in connecting in that way.

So I do work as a spiritual director,

As well as a therapist.

And that spiritual direction work is,

You know,

Instead of looking at the,

At issues,

Like we would in therapy,

We're looking at connection relationship.

And so oftentimes with,

With some of those clients,

I will,

You know,

Get them to go to the spaces that their ancestors lived.

If they're able to,

And just,

Just experience the space experience place.

Right.

I would,

I would offer them to do,

You know,

A kind of ritual work or automatic writing work,

For example,

Right.

You know,

I'm setting up an offer or setting up some sort of a meaningful space,

Which I much prefer family history work,

But also looking at what's coming up from inside of them in response and reaction.

That being said,

I,

You know,

If it's not something I necessarily want to do right now,

But it's something I can turn on.

It just takes me a bit of time,

But I can connect in that way.

But it's messy.

It can get very messy.

It can get very,

Very,

Very messy.

Yeah.

How so?

Well,

So the dead,

Unlike other,

Like,

Unlike spirit guides who have a certain kind of professional,

Kind of hands-off no-dual relationships approach,

Right.

There's a certain objectivity with spirit guides.

Kind of like Star Trek,

The prime directive kind of thing.

Very much so.

Yeah.

So in the traditions that I've been trained in,

Spirit guides are understood to be different from ancestors because spirit guides are more objective.

They tend not to be related to you.

And that's really important because when they're assisting in your life and coming in as a spirit guide,

They have to have no agenda other than your fulfillment and upliftment.

Like your greatest good.

Exactly.

Right.

Because they're tied in and they understand the blueprint that your life was kind of planned with,

Right.

Possible soul contracts.

Exactly.

Right.

So they have a clue into that and can help to guide you along that journey versus ancestors whose primary goal is to perpetuate the family line.

So my experience with them is they will uplift you and get you to where you need to be in order to be the best part of the family.

And pop out more babies.

Of the lineage.

Exactly.

And this is true for even if they're not biologically related to you.

So lineage ancestors,

For example,

They want the lineage to continue and you are a chain in that link.

So you need to be the best,

Most healthiest that you can be.

They'll assist you to do that and get you there and support you because then you're going to go and perpetuate that lineage.

Wait a second.

Is that a difficult thing as far as things getting messy when it's a conflict of interest of actually,

Guys,

I'm gay.

I'm not going to be making any babies.

Well,

I mean,

There's other ways of supporting you with that.

So in my case,

It's getting me to where I can be and supporting me and just becoming healthy in order to then support the other members of the family.

Or it's that getting me to where I need to be because those ancestors are in cahoots with my other ancestors,

Which are more lineage based or whatnot.

There's the kind of the scopes become different.

We don't need any homophobic,

Transphobic ancestors out there.

You guys better get woke.

Well,

It's that perpetuation.

There certainly are ancestors who are stuck in their ways and they become very unhealthy very quickly.

And it's all been all about them.

We're talking about the collective here.

So the collective ancestors want the living to perpetuate the world,

To perpetuate themselves,

To perpetuate society.

And so that idea that you're not going to have babies,

But we can support you to become a really good member of society.

Oh,

That's good.

To make society continue.

You know what I mean?

But they have agendas,

Right?

They have agendas with that.

Sometimes those agendas don't go,

Are not necessarily for your personal good.

They're for the good of the rest of the family and so forth.

So then there's a conflict.

So generally speaking,

Spirit guides are,

At least in the traditions I was trained in,

Spirit guides are more powerful in that direction than the ancestors are.

But the ancestors are still there,

Right?

There's also deities too in that mix.

So kind of that tripartite system of,

You know,

Spirit guides,

Deities and ancestors working off of each other.

But there's a hierarchy in there of,

Okay,

Which one am I supposed to listen to right now for me,

Right?

When it comes to working with ancestors for the family or the community,

Which often is the family.

Then,

You know,

So there's nuances.

There's nuances.

Yeah.

It's really,

Really rough.

I'd just love to pick your brain about a million things.

This was a good chat.

Thank you for having me.

This was a wonderful conversation.

Thank you.

It's so interesting.

To kind of close us off,

Is there something,

Can you give some advice for people who are missing their family members or would like to connect?

And I know this is a whole topic of your whole book and we can put all the links that you have to connect with you in the description or show notes.

But what's a small thing that people can do to connect and to kind of just feel that presence of loved ones out there?

Of course.

I would say challenge the cultural notion that the dead are gone,

Right?

Understand the dead are still being present,

Even if not physically.

Understand the dead continue,

Right?

Don't see them as this void and shift your language,

Right?

We often talk about the dead in the past tense.

Why not start speaking about them in the present tense?

You know,

My dad really loves or my dad loves blah,

Blah,

Blah,

Right?

And I know that's one of those weird cultural pieces because we're so used to thinking of them as in the past.

But because we see them as in the past,

That often creates issues when we want to connect with them now.

Understand them as still continuing from the point of death onwards.

And that shift can open things up for you,

I think.

I'm grinning because I just thought of this funny thing.

This lady designed the little card for her funeral.

And it's a picture of a Ouija board.

And underneath it,

She wrote,

Stay in touch.

Yes.

I love that.

I love that.

Oh,

Man.

Well,

Thank you so much for this talk.

The way that I end my conversations is I give hugs.

Hugs!

So yes,

Be sure to check out the links down below so that you can connect with Ben and see what they can do for you and read their book.

I would buy it if I had more money.

I have like a list longer than my body of books.

Sometimes it comes up for sale.

You can also access it on Audible.

There is an audiobook version too.

There's Ancestral Whispers,

A guide to developing ancestral veneration practices by Llewellyn worldwide.

And you can also find it on Audible through Tantor.

And every so often,

You'll get like,

You know,

Where it could be a dollar or a euro.

And they have good listings on that.

So it's also on there too.

Nice.

Well,

Thank you again.

Thank you.

Bye now.

What an amazing conversation.

It's so interesting how culturally,

How we're working against our own cultural understanding of things.

When we come from certain backgrounds that tell us this kind of thing is evil,

You're opening doors to bad things.

And moving past that,

We can know that that's not true.

It was just a truth for theirs held out of fear.

And out of,

Yeah,

The fear of being,

Of losing their cultural place.

The fear that was ingrained by the people in power who didn't want people to know how many resources they have available to them to have a better life.

This spiritual journey is so,

It's so full of wonder.

It's so neat to be on a journey that's so full of wonder and possibility.

But you should definitely check out Ben's links and check out their book.

And yeah,

Thank you so much for spending this time.

If you're still here,

I really appreciate you listening to me ramble.

If you are someone that feels a pull in your heart to support the work of this channel,

You can send me a donation on PayPal.

That is the best way to do that.

Another way that you can support is sharing this video with someone that you think would be interested in it.

Sending me an email of encouragement about what you felt about it if you don't feel comfortable leaving a comment.

Seriously,

Encouragement about what I'm doing means the world to me.

I can't even say.

Every little bit of encouragement helps to get this content made,

To bring this light and this opportunity of possibility out into the world.

So,

Yay!

Thank you!

Hugs!