Healing, Gender, and Spirit with Tommie StarChild - PS108

Oct 8

Written By

Spirit worker, witch, artist, and educator Tommie StarChild joins Lee for a previously unpublished podcast. Recorded at the end of 2017, StarChild shares their life journey that led to their call to authenticity, a path that goes beyond the boxes that spiritual and sexual communities find themselves locked in. Exploring “ecstatic bliss and ecstatic fear,” they look at the nature of our inner spirit, and how self-awareness allows for an exploration of gender that lay beyond the form weare given at birth – including the revelation of our inherit inner fruit and inner/outer Jell-O essence. Dive in deep and be inspired in this playful, thought-provoking, and intimate opportunity for reflection and learning alike.

Episode: http://passionandsoul.libsyn.com/healing-gender-and-spirit-with-tommie-starchild

Direct Download: http://traffic.libsyn.com/passionandsoul/LeePS108-Starchild.mp3**

Intro: Welcome to the Passion and Soul podcast, an exploration of personal and interpersonal desire, faith, and connection. Your host, international sexuality and spirituality author and educator Lee Harrington of passionandsoul.com will take you on a sultry and intellectual journey through the soul of intimate experience.

Take a moment and breathe deep and get ready for an adventure. This podcast is a chance to glimpse into the ever increasing diverse world of alternative life. The Passion and Soul podcast is intended for mature audiences. If you are offended by adult topics or prohibited by law, we recommend you stop listening right now.

Lee: Hello, fellow adventurers of sexuality and spirit, and welcome to the Passion and Soul podcast with Lee Harrington of passionandsoul.com. I have been sitting recently with the notion of breath. It is a profoundly unconscious tool for most of us. We might notice that we're stressed out and breathing fast, or we might notice that in the middle of having an ecstatic sexual experience, we hold our breath as our feet clamp up and then calves and thighs and genitals clamp up into that moment of bliss. And then finally we take in that breath of air as we shout out some sensation or word of the divine. But most of us don't pay attention to our breath in our day to day life. We haven't necessarily noticed whether we're breathing through our nose or through our mouth, unless we happen to have a cold - or, for the kinksters out there, have a ball gag in.

We haven't, most of the time, noticed whether we're breathing through our upper chest, breathing out the sides of our ribs with our rib cage expanding, or breathing through our belly unless we're curled up crying, or we might be being held by a partner. But I think there's something really profound, and this comes up in tradition after tradition, this notion of how we use our breath.

In somatic body working, we have a chance to take a moment that, "Oh, wait, in that moment of stress, if I notice that my shoulders are up and my chest is compressed and I'm barely breathing out the top of my chest, what happens to my emotions if I lower my shoulders? If I move my chest from breathing high and tight to maybe just start slowly breathing from the belly, how does my emotion shift?"

And the same thing can happen with our sexual and erotic connections. What happens for that moment if I am back to belly, two bodies spooning with one another, and I take a moment to match my partner's breath. How do we connect differently if our breath is in time with one another? What happens to our energy running if we are connecting to divinity or connecting to our own higher sense of self, our own inner wisdom?

What happens if we move our breath, or if we hold for four, release for four, hold for four, and breathe in for four, filling up our being. What happens if we open up our mouth and breathe in and out with the fullness of noise that lets our belly and our heart echo because we're not afraid to let the sound out.
We are not living in the fear of a society that says sound is bad because it takes up space. What happens if we let ourselves take up space, because we are valuable enough to hold that space? That's one of the things I've been sitting with recently and playing around with, because sometimes when we talk about sexual play, it might be profoundly serious work, but it isn't solemn.

And I've been playing around with breath, how it can shift my energy body, how it can shift my stress levels, and at the end of the day, how different are the two of those. How different are passion and soul when intertwined with one another. At the end of the day, they're two siblings dancing around one another, I would offer. And so I am, having been thinking about this over the last week and really playing with it, pondering with it and processing it with my skin suit and my heart, I am so delighted that scheduling-wise, I was able to bring this next guest on because they are such a delight to share time with and space with and have that conversation that is enriching to the spirit for myself. And my hope is to give you guys at home, you gals, you amazing beings who are profound beyond gender, pieces that you can take home and ponder or work with or play with. Because play holds just as much value as contemplation. As does silence.

And so, I would love to introduce all of you to the amazing being Tommie StarChild, who is a spirit worker, a witch, an initiate of the Anderson Feri mystery tradition. And he was born with his Feri companions and gifted with spirit-sight. And comes from a family of conjure workers. Now, StarChild has been practicing witchcraft since 1992 and started studying as an Anderson Feri tradition worker in 1998, and was initiated to the Elenkin lineage of the tradition in 2003. Wow, time flies!

[StarChild laughs.]

Lee: He started teaching in the Feri tradition in 2006 and teaching witchery in the old ways since 2010. StarChild is also a published writer, artist, presenter, owner of My Authentic Self, which I'm excited to talk about today, and founder of Sacred Moon, Sacred Self, a temple of the Old Ways. He's an accomplished witch, an initiated priest, professional spirit worker, and conjure man, and currently an apprentice of Orion Foxwood in the House of Brigh Faery Seership Institute.

Now, for his formal education, StarChild has also earned a Bachelor's of Science in Human Services with a special emphasis on counseling and group facilitation from Springfield College. He has used that degree working as an educator, presenter, and facilitator, and also developed a curriculum focusing on building healthy relationship skills.

His past focus has been within the GLBTQI communities as well as addiction and substance abuse while also presenting on topics such as meditation, poly relationships, art and spirituality, and SM play and other BDSM skills, on edge play, and sex as a way to connect with divinity, just to name a few. Which is always such a delight to meet folks who, like myself, dance across the boundaries and the journeys of life, just like a lot of you listening.

StarChild can usually be found at his shop where he works as a spirit worker, medium, reader, spirit counselor, intuitive, and Reiki healer, and also performs services of conjure and witchcraft. He has also handcrafted a small yet unique conjure product line called Moonshine Magic.` And you can find out more from his website called MyAuthenticSelf.com. And welcome to the show, Tommie. It's so great to have you on.

StarChild: Thank you.

Lee: Now, as I mentioned before, you are diverse in your background, and your journey, and all of the different work you do. And there's so many layers to it. So I'm going to just start out with this notion of how did somebody with a human -- you know, a Bachelor's of Science in Human Services transition into now being a full time spirit worker. I'm horribly curious about that transition state.

StarChild: Well, so am I. `

[Laughter.]

StarChild: That transition really started in...'96, when I entered recovery. In '92, I started studying witchcraft. And at that time I felt this feeling that I describe as receiving a calling. It didn't come in with words. It didn't come in with a picture, an image, but it was a calling to do this.

At the time I had no idea what this was and there was nobody in my life doing this. And it terrified me. I thought I would just be the crazy person that nobody wanted to be around. And so I continued to do what I was doing, running from the calling. Running from the spirits that were speaking to me, running from the work and direction I was being pulled in.

And so in '96 I entered recovery, and I remember sitting in a meeting where I literally threw my hands in the air and said, "I give up. I relinquish myself entirely to the Goddess, because clearly I cannot get away. So, I'm done. You got me. I can't go anywhere else. So I'm yours." I am fully cognizant of what it means to say to a divine being, "I am completely yours."

And that started my journey inward, which has become my passion, a journey inward to connect with who I am on an authentic level. Who am I really, moving beyond the trappings of the physical body, as defining of who I am; moving beyond the trappings of the ego self, or who I am based on the sum of my life experience. Moving beyond all the definers I had previously used, to go inward to the inner crossroads and find out who am I really.

And I was fortunate to have selected a sponsor who practiced Zen Buddhism. And so he introduced me to the Zen Buddhist concept of being authentic. I remember him telling me one day, we were in his truck and this blew my mind. I wish I could have leaped from the moving vehicle.

[Laughter.]

StarChild: He said, "To be authentic is to act without question." And so my mind exploded.

Lee: Yeah.

StarChild: At that point in time, everything I did was following a question. Am I hungry? Do I have to go to the bathroom? Does that itch? You know, all of these -- everything was preceded with a question. And so to act without question was beyond my comprehension, but that set me afoot onto a direction in working toward being authentic, and that it only needed to be in the moment.

And I also, in '98, started studying Anderson Feri. So that was relatively early in recovery. I do not recommend that. It is a strict rule of my teacher that he does not teach folks that are in recovery. I broke that rule for him, at least in my case. And that also helped to deepen that journey. And it became -- I guess the drive, the impetus of which I used to run from spirit -- became the drive, the impetus I used to run into spirit, to run in deeply to my own spirit.

And it was not about pushing fear aside, but again, to quote my sponsor, "Heroes are people who are afraid, but do anyway."

Lee: Yes.

StarChild: And I used that as the motivator to go in. And through a series of circumstances, I used to be a cosmetology instructor and I wanted to move away from that industry, and so going into college was always a priority, and a priority that I was not seeking. And through a series of circumstances, and a two-year pattern of getting misdirected from my path, for two years it would be allowed to happen, and then dramatic things would happen which would reset me on my path, and this case was the same.

I worked for a call center doing international mail, catalog sales and orders. And they shut down the entire call center. And the whole point of my being there was that I could not be comfortable. And that would motivate me to sign up for college.

So, as I was getting my pink slip, I was also signing up for college and went to school for human services, knowing that my goal was the University of Santa Monica, their program, their Master's program in Spiritual Psychology. And with the Human Services degree, I worked in non profits for several years. And it was a friend, when I was no longer able to sort of gel with the corporate politics and the corporate way of doing things, a friend of mine suggested that I work for myself.

And honestly, it was only because I did not have an argument against it that I said, yes, I might as well work for myself because I couldn't, I didn't have a sound argument not to. And then it became, okay, what am I going to do?

So I had been collecting beads for no apparent reason. I used to go to Quartzsite every year.

Lee: Quartzsite, Arizona?

StarChild: Quartzsite, Arizona, for the Gem and Mineral Show. And usually was buying rocks. And a couple of years prior to that, I started buying some beads, with no idea what I was going to do with them, but I bought them for whatever reason.

And I was like, well, I've got beads, I can start making some jewelry. I had my Reiki III, so I'm like, well, I could do some Reiki. So I actually set up and wrote my business plan and created the business to be a Reiki practitioner, created a logo that was intended to be quite acceptable to the mainstream audience, and set out to be a Reiki practitioner.

And I opened my space in a business called Happenstance. Happenstance the Tribe. I was working among hairdressers, tattoo artists, piercers, and other body workers. And they all had menus of services, and I had Reiki. So I was trying to fill out a little bit of a menu of services, so I added in readings.

And it was very much an afterthought, it was not something that I felt confident of, because it was the one thing I had not studied. And it was something I'd been doing for many years, but it was a natural gift toward doing readings. And because of that, I had lacked originally the confidence to put out a shingle and promote myself as a professional reader.

But here I added it as this little extra. And then people started asking for the service more so than Reiki. And it didn't take long - I think within the first two years, I completely rebranded the business entirely to reflect what clients were asking for. And so at that time, so I opened in 2008, so around 2010, what became apparent to me is what I thought would be necessary to sort of cloak myself for something that was acceptable to the mainstream, I realized the mainstream was asking for witchery.

[Lee laughs.]

StarChild: Mainstream was looking for deeper healing. Not that Reiki is not deep healing, but they were looking for something more, that I had to offer them beyond just the Reiki skill. So I allowed the business to shape itself and thereby allowing the business to shape me. And in that journey, I uncovered some ancestral history, finding out the conjurer that existed in my family. Which illuminated stories, things, teachings, my dad would share, which I just thought was his sort of hillbilly wisdom, or sometimes just his hillbilly nonsense, and things began to make sense.

And so as a modern conjure man, what that means to me is, is, I'm not concerned about doing conjure the way conjure was, was traditionally done according to some sort of traditional standard. I'm looking at what was the function of the work. What was the function of the vocation of the conjure worker? And when I look at the services that they provide, these are the services that I provide. Dipping into the world around me, finding what medicine is available and calling the spirit of that medicine forward to whisper to it, to speak to it, and to offer that up, to ultimately in a space where it's creating safe space for healing to happen.

Lee: Now, for you finding out that family historical line, did that -- I mean, you mentioned that your father had a little bit of that hillbilly wisdom and/or hillbilly nonsense. How did that put some of your own skills into a different light? The stuff you'd already been doing, it sounds like to some degree intuitively, when you at least talk about the readings that you were doing.

StarChild: It blew my mind a little bit. [Laughs.] Because they started arriving in my blood. I was having visual...but what seemed like memories of observation. So observing this happening, and something that I was recalling through memory, of healings taking place using a large, big, like leather bound, floppy Bible and using it to sweep people down, like as with a broom, to sweep them down for cleansing.

And this was such a vivid memory. I'm like, "Oh yeah, I don't know how I forgot that when I was a kid." And later I realized, "Wait, I was raised Baptist. We didn't do that.”

[Lee laughs.]

StarChild: In a church. And then it became apparent that the memory was first person memory, the arm extending from the perspective of the one viewing the cleansing taking place, and that arm holding the Bible and realizing that this memory was coming from me.

Lee: Yeah.

StarChild: And then I contacted a cousin that I had long since lost track of, who was born and raised in Ridgely, Tennessee, where my family are from. And so she grew up with the stories that my dad grew up with. She's the one that informed me of my great-grandfather, whom I'm named after, teaching conjure to his two oldest daughters. He had learned it from his wife, who died in the great flu epidemic in 1918, as she was trying to treat not only one of her children, but also members of the community. And so he didn't want the wisdom to get lost, and his two daughters, oldest daughters, were born with the gift. So he taught them, and then remembering my dad telling stories of my grandfather being a preacher.

And then starting to track the story, when was my oldest uncle born? My grandparents, my grandfather was 18 when he married my grandmother, when she was 14. And so they had my uncle soon after, I mean it wasn't a shotgun wedding. But you know, so, nine months or so, a year of that.

[Lee laughs.]

Lee: Yeah.

StarChild: So my uncle was born, and I asked my cousins if they had remembered stories of my uncle talking about my grandfather being a preacher while he was a kid. And they had said no, so that pushed the time that he was a preacher back to his earlier teens. So now he has two sisters who are conjure women. And now my grandfather, a teenage swamp preacher. And then my great-grandfather -- who, like I said, I was named after -- was also a moonshiner, distilling moonshine in an island in the Mississippi River. So, it really kind of woke things up, put a few things in perspective, but also gave root and foundation to what was arriving in my blood.

Lee: Yeah.

StarChild: And what was beginning, it was arriving so much, it was beginning to kind of make my head spin. Because I wasn't sure where it was coming from, and I'm adopted, s having this arrive in my blood from the family that raised me was also a little strange from my perspective.

And once I allowed it, I stopped resisting and allowed it to arrive, and allowed it to get anchored into some family ancestral history, then the floodgates really opened. And everything sank into the river of blood, and so I draw up from my ancestral blood, my conjure work, and so that no longer concerns me as to whether or not I'm doing it "traditional," according to some sort of conjure teacher today, and I'm pulling from my blood.

Lee: Yeah. And I think there is a story nowadays where written lore has become God into and of itself.

StarChild: Yes.

Lee: Where the teachers become deified, that that which appears through spirit or through family, you know, like mixes of family lore, or things that are picked up around folks are no longer held in as high of esteem because there's not a formal lineage that can be cited.

StarChild: Right.

Lee: And it's one of those things that I see also happen in polyamorous communities, or people who are kinky, or people who are gay, lesbian, trans -- where if you're not using the words that society at large and/or a specific lineage of teaching has offered you, somehow you're not as real.

I have a friend of mine who is kinky, he enjoys being a creative sadist, who is also someone who is aware of human physiology. And time after time, he gets told by people that he is wrong because he has his flogger, his lash, wrap around people's bodies and hit them on the opposite side, because he wants that sting of the whip. And people are just like, "Well, you're doing it wrong." And he's like, "Nope! No, I'm doing exactly what I'm trying to do."

[StarChild laughs.]

Lee: But because it doesn't follow the mythology or the story of what an erotic activity is supposed to look like, or just because people don't call the quarters when they're doing an invocation of some sort, "Well, clearly you're doing it wrong." "Well, no, but I see where your story says that."

StarChild: Right. One of the workshops I had done for edge play was a few years back, and I kind of got inspired. And as a result of this particular workshop, I got kind of pinned the "sadistic mystic."

Lee: [Laughs.] Oh, okay. I'm going to be over here, very happy. Please continue.

StarChild: [Laughs.] And I titled the workshop "Shit or Get Off the Pot." And then the organizer for the event kept bugging me for the description. And I finally had gotten annoyed enough that I was like, "Fine, I'm gonna write that description." And so I created this description for this workshop that, if you don't know me, sounds as though I am going to be presenting a scat workshop. But that I am desperately trying to make scat play sound deeply spiritual.

If you know me, you could see the joke. But during the Meet the Presenter period, the day before the event started, I took it one step further and dressed in all brown.

[Laughter.]

StarChild: And the whole point of the workshop, the underlying part, because it was using a demo bottom. And that was still part of the intro, mostly. The demo bottom, the unwilling demo bottoms in that workshop, was really the audience. And what I was targeting, what I was going after are those boxes that the kink community have found themselves a bit locked in.

Lee: Yeah.

StarChild: Finding ourselves locked into these Dom/submissive paradigms, and what I was describing as codependent relationships that have moved so far beyond intimacy into contractual codependency, and that the submissive has to move beyond -- relinquish their submissive identity.

And to step into themselves fully, in order for them to realize and recognize the valuable gift that they are then offering to their Dom or their Master, to value the gift that they are then handing over. Granted that all of that, the language was intended to push those buttons to push those and get some anger going, like, "How dare you?" on both sides, working both sides. The Doms and the submissives, so that we could turn around and ask ourselves, "What are we doing? Are we following fixed patterns, because this is how you do it, this is the role I am. This is how I hold my tools. This is how I play with my partner. This is how I structure my relationship." Or am I falling into the spirit of it?

Because for me, all my work, including my SM play, is about getting to the spirit, to the root, to the authentic self of the individual. Shattering the ego in a way, in SM play, in a way that I can manage. And hold them in this space of extreme vulnerability, when they realize that ecstatic bliss and that ecstatic fear of having the ego shattered and sitting with themselves wholly for a moment or two, being held in safe space and reminded: whatever they're experiencing right now, whatever they're feeling is okay. But you are safe.

Lee: And that's really interesting because I do believe sexuality, or personal identity communities of any sort, whether it is actively identifying as gay, right? And what does that identity mean, and come with, and stories that get told around what that's supposed to look like. Or whether it is being transgender, or whether it is being a monogamous or polyamorous, like all of these words that get used, where are -- it sounds like it's a question of how do we question ourselves about whether we are holding onto those labels because they do something for our core self and they are an expression of who we are, as compared to what we're doing because it got programmed into us? Is that kind of where you're going with? Or is it something -- it sounds like there's something beyond it, around surrender.

StarChild: Exactly. Everything centers around surrender and a willingness to surrender, and to surrender to your own spirit, to surrender to a deeper knowing that there is a part of you that is not in conflict with who you are. It is the ego-self, the "who we think we are," based on the sum of our life experience. The egocentricity. That tends to find conflict with the "who we think we are." Our spirit, our authentic self, is not in conflict. It already knows. It already knows our journey, it set this journey and this path before it embodied.

And even for transgender, the spirit saw that life stream and chose that life stream. I journeyed through my own experience in my early twenties around transgender. And feeling that God had made a mistake, and that I should have been born a woman, and I had childbearing hips and my life would make sense if only I were female, and so that must be the answer. There was a day where I was sitting in my chair, I was reading and journaling, and I looked up, and I was looking through my own eyes, but it was as though I was looking through the eye holes of a mask.
So you know when you're wearing a mask, there's the shadowed space between your eyes and the inner portion of the mask, the eye holes, so you get a framed view of everything looking beyond the eye holes. And that's how I was viewing my living room, and this was for a few minutes. And that's when it occurred to me that there's a spirit inside this body that's looking through the eye holes of my face, as though it's a mask. And I was able to look down at this body and go, oh, this whole thing is a mask, and that my spirit doesn't gender identify. My spirit has arrived at a place that's far more comfortable knowing my spirit's been female far more often than it's ever been male, but that this body is fun. This body provides pleasure and that I could use this body as a tool to pleasure my spirit and nothing needs to be changed. And that my gender and my identity -- gender as understood by a physical construct -- were not inherently linked.

Lee: I didn't have a chance to ask this earlier, for which I apologize, but is there a preferred gender, or a gender pronoun that you do use at this point in your journey?

StarChild: You know, when I'm seriously asked, as this question is, pronouns have never been an issue. If I'm asked sort of what is my gender -- often, I just like "other." Other gives me space.

[Lee laughs.]

StarChild: I just turned 49. So genderqueer came much later in my life. So it doesn't resonate with my spirit. When I was younger, androgynous was the only option that was available, so androgynous is something that I can relate to. But "other," as Radical Faeries say, was something that's like, yeah -- other! I don't need to define it. But as I've been learning also, through an Yazidi friend, the Yazidi go back to BCE, several thousand BCE, have recognized "third sexed." So there's male, female, and third sexed. And this was not only accepted, but revered, by their supreme deity, Melek Tawûsî, as chosen specifically by him. And from what I can gather so far, culturally, they don't put third sexed in some sort of box. I think it runs the sort of the continuum of the LGBTQI continuum. That's just third sexed and open to the individual to present how they choose. So I don't get hung up on pronouns. In my journey to myself, how people refer to me needed to become less important. It does not define me. How I refer to me is a relationship with who I am and has a greater effect on how I perceive myself, rather than letting the external world define me for me.

Lee: Yeah. And I think that notion of "Who is the viewer?" Right? Is it myself who is the viewer? Or is it the career path that is the viewer? Or is it that person walking down the street? Or it our beloveds that we have met on this plane? Who is the viewer? And how much do each of those matter? I think it's a question that, at least for myself, I have to keep asking myself time and time again, because for myself, those answers have shifted slightly over the course of my lifetime.

StarChild: Correct. I heard an interesting thing in a documentary on sort of the cutting edge of quantum physics and astral sciences and all these things. And there was one that was reflecting on if a tree falls in the woods, that doesn't make sound, that whole thing. And scientifically, this scientist was saying, "No, it doesn't. It requires an observer. It requires an ear." If there is no ear, there is no sound.

And that, I pulled back, and I'm like, that -- to me -- shows the richness of reality. Reality needs an observer, and then reality is filtered through the Rolodex of data, the patterns in the mind of the observer that they're plugging in to spit out the perception of reality. And so with that is an understanding that there is a reality for every single observer. And they're not necessarily the same. We're all dealing with different Rolodexes of data. And so we can supplement that data with more information, thereby altering our reality. Thereby expanding the potential of our observation, and our translation of that observation. So when looking at myself, when realizing that "myself" is not limited to the exterior boundaries of this body.

My Feri companions extended the visual of "the spirit is utilizing this body as a vehicle by which to move through the physical world," and they extended that a bit with their creativity, as they often do, as fruit suspended in Jello. And so our spirit is not only inside, but then the body itself is suspended within a larger sphere of spirit. So spirit is outside and inside. And it's the body that is actually suspended as the fruit in Jello. And you can pluck the fruit from the Jello and the Jello does not cease to exist. And the fruit that's in the Jello does not define the flavor of the Jello. If we've all had that potluck Jello.

Lee: [Laughs.] Oh, yeah. That's fascinating. I'm definitely going to have to chew on that. Not the Jello itself, because I don't know if I need to revisit that experience from childhood. Yeah. That is an interesting notion.

I was recently working with somebody who does a lot of work with the notion of aligning energy and body experience. And she kept on trying to talk about the idea of "Okay, all of us have a body, and it's about awakening the spirit that's inside." And eventually I came up with the language of, "No, no, no. I know I have a spirit. I need to figure out how to make this fruit work with the Jello. Exactly. Because I am more aware of my Jello-ness than I am aware of my fruit-ness. But for a lot of people, they are aware of their fruit-suit, but aren't necessarily aware of the Jello that is inside or around them.

StarChild: Right. And it's actually egocentric to say in our language, and you know, language is still just getting on board with spirit. So this is not knocking anything. Right. But it's egocentric to say "we have to awaken the spirit within." That's assuming that that spirit within has gone to sleep. When it's our ego that has forgotten. It's as Orion Foxwood's the Spell of Forgetfulness.

And what I've added to that is as we move from spirit, passing into carnate form, we pass through that veil of forgetfulness. And if you think of passing through a light veil, and that veil draping across the form of the spirit, like a film laying across it, giving the spirit its form, that is the veil of forgetfulness.
So the body is the vehicle by which we forget our spirit that came into physical form. So it's not about awaking the spirit within. The spirit within is like, "Girl, I got this! We've been awake all this time." It's the body, it's the mind that has to remember. It's the mind that has to wake up and remember that the spirit is the one in the driver's seat that the mind has, has just been in the -- what do you call those?

Lee: Behind the wheel or…

StarChild: Simulation.

Lee: Oh, oh, okay!

StarChild: Sorry. My spirit contacts are showing me things faster than I can put words to. It's the body has been in the simulation vehicles, simulating that it's been driving this whole time, and yet the spirit's been in the driver's seat this whole time, allowing the toddler that's the mind to be back there playing with its makeshift steering wheel, and honking horns and, yelling at the world. While the spirit has really been doing the driving. So it's awakening. It's re-remembering that in essence, we never left Eden. We just forgot we were in it.

Lee: Fascinating. And my brain wants to wonder how that applies to other -- to the different layers of identity and self, because a lot of people segregate that notion of what is spiritual, what is sexual, what is intellectual -- and in that segregation, I think there's layer after layer where this ends up happening.

StarChild: Right. And, you know, a luxury that I have, prior to the Faery Seership with Orion Foxwood, all I had studied formally prior to that was Anderson Feri. And the gods of Anderson Feri, they have a gender that they may be more predominant in, they have their opposite gender and they have their androgen.

And spirit -- the three layers of self -- the fetch, the talker, the high self -- or the dream walker, surface walker and star walker. Those, they have their own genders that are not the same as the body. And so the first layer, moving out from the body is the opposite gender that the body presents. And then the star walker or the god-self is more genderless, or the combination more androgynous. And so encapsulated into the being are these layers that really make gender less relevant. That gender -- it disturbs me of late realizing that how we arrive at gender is based on genitals at the time of birth.

Lee: Mm-hmm.

Starchild: And then we demonize the preoccupation of acknowledging genitals after you're born. To the point of don't touch that. "Don't touch it. That's bad." And yet we set so much on top of this structure of genital observation at birth, thereby, this is what you will be. And that's so incredibly limiting, and where I see the gender movement today is attempting to move out from that confine.

But as I see it, it has moved into gender activism, and looking to force the external viewer to view the individual the way the individual wants to view themself. And as I expressed in my journey, I didn't have that option because that was a different time in the late eighties. And my journey was about forcing me to see me beyond the confines, the limitations of the eyes that are doing the viewing. Allowing my inner eye to see not only within the body, but to see myself. To see myself in the body, and then to see myself moving that body through the world around me. And so gender for me doesn't mean anything. I tell people "male," cause it's easy. And it's easy if I want to get laid, just to tell people "male." 'Cause, you know, I have gay sex.

Beyond that, it means nothing. It doesn't define me. It really hasn't, once I was able to kind of begin to resonate with my relationship. And you know, I would no more define myself by my left arm or my right foot. So why would I define myself by my cock and balls? It's moving beyond how our ego sees the self, and how it moves the self through the world, in order to get into right relationship with self.
And from there, ask the hard question: "who am I really?" It's the Iron Pentacle in Anderson Feri: sex, pride, self, power, passion. The pride point being, "who am I in this space that I occupy?" And the self point is, "now that I'm grasping on some level who I am in this space that I occupy, how do I move that through the world around me?"

Lee: Yeah, absolutely. There's a lot of great stuff to chew on there. Thank you for sharing all that.

StarChild: Sure.

Lee: If you were to have somebody listening -- one last question. If you were to have somebody listening, take one last piece of wisdom out of your head and/or your Jello.

[StarChild laughs.]

What might you offer for each of the ears, or other flavors of Jello, listening?

StarChild: So I'll share another piece of wisdom that Sims, my Feri companions, have offered up as the thing to the takeaway. So one day I was teaching my Feri students and I don't even remember what I was teaching, 'cause I really don't think this had anything to do with it. And this bit of wisdom popped into my head and I literally stopped mid-word and was like, "Hold on, I'm getting something. This is really big." And what they said, they whispered in my ear and said, "There is no onion."
And what I realized when they said that, as you know, the journey to self is like peeling back the layers of the onion. There's a false self. And then when you arrive at the center, there is no onion. All of this is an illusion.

Our spirit, as I mentioned before, is not in conflict with self. That's an illusion, but it's not as simple as knowing "there is no onion, so I'm good to go now." We still must go through the process of peeling that back to arrive at that place of freedom, realizing that it was all an illusion. It's the tower card crumbling, but what we don't see on the card is the shining, true tower that's always resided within. That authentic self that stands there, simply covered up by the bricks that we just keep putting around ourselves.

Lee: That's beautiful. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it.

StarChild: Thank you.

Lee: And just like always, for folks who are listening, we have our resources, information, our show notes, over at passionandsoul.com under the podcast button. And for the event that you mentioned and anything else that came up today, we'll definitely be sharing your thoughts and information for your own website, myauthenticself.com. And thank you so much for sharing everything today, Tommie. I really appreciate it.

StarChild: Thank you.

Lee: And please, go check out StarChild's work. It's so much luscious, diverse information, just like this being who has been on here today. And as I said, you can go and subscribe to our podcast by going over to passionandsoul.com and subscribing to the RSS feed there, as well as a number of different platforms. And for those who are listening on iTunes, you can type in Lee L-E-E, Harrington spelled with an A, and find my information on there as well for the Passion and Soul podcast. And until next time, stay cool, have fun. Find your own ways to peel back that onion, and find out that there is no onion within, and be authentically you.