ShamanTalk

In this conversation, Rhonda and her daughter Eve (22) discuss their experiences with narcissism in their family and the impact it had on their mental health. They also explore their different spiritualities and how they have found healing and growth. The conversation highlights the importance of self-reflection, taking responsibility for one's actions, and the power of love and acceptance in overcoming challenges. Despite their differences, Rhonda and Eve have built a stronger relationship and supported each other on their respective journeys.

Takeaways

Narcissism can have a profound impact on mental health and relationships within a family.

Recognizing and taking responsibility for one's narcissistic traits is an important step towards healing and personal growth.

Spirituality can play a significant role in the healing process, and different paths can lead to the same destination.

Building a supportive and inclusive family environment allows individual spiritual exploration and growth.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction and Background

02:24 Mental Health Struggles and Coping Mechanisms

05:16 Narcissism in the Family

06:16 Lack of Parental Support and Emotional Maturity

08:36 Effects of Narcissism on the Family Dynamic

10:21 Realizing the Narcissistic Parenting

12:16 Journey of Healing and Breaking Family Curses

14:39 Recognizing Narcissistic Traits in Oneself

15:35 Healing Journey and Relationship with Siblings

16:35 Spirituality and Christianity

27:55 Using Psalms as an Oracle Deck

42:10 Best and Worst Traits in Each Other

47:15 Conclusion

In this fascinating episode of Shaman Talk, we dive deep into the world of herbal medicine and shamanism with our guest, Wendy Dooner. A medical herbalist and shamanic practitioner, Wendy shares her unique journey into these two intertwined fields.

Are you constantly busy, numbing emotions, or avoiding joy? Do you find yourself healing just to cope with trauma rather than to truly live? In this enlightening episode of Shaman Talk, Rhonda McCrimmon explores the often-overlooked concept of healing for the purpose of joy, not just trauma management.

Rhonda delves into the common traps we fall into—like busyness and emotional numbness—that prevent us from experiencing joy. She sheds light on how these avoidance tactics are not only unhealthy but also rob us of our emotional and spiritual vitality.

Rhonda discusses the concept of "glimmers" of joy, those fleeting moments that offer a pathway back to a joyful existence. Through shamanic practices and spiritual wisdom, learn how to navigate your way back to a life filled with joy, purpose, and emotional freedom.

Do you ever feel like your need to be understood by others is draining your personal power? Are you caught in a cycle of justice sensitivity that leaves you emotionally exhausted? If so, this episode of Shaman Talk is for you.

Join Rhonda McCrimmon as she delves deep into the emotional and spiritual aspects of needing external validation. Explore the roots of this need, often embedded in childhood trauma and societal conditioning, and discover how it can manifest as a draining sense of injustice in your adult life.

But it's not all doom and gloom! Rhonda shares transformative shamanic and spiritual practices that can help you reclaim your personal power.

Are you feeling stuck on your healing journey? Do you find yourself intellectualizing your experiences or chasing spiritual highs? In this eye-opening episode of Shaman Talk, Rhonda McCrimmon explores the concept of the Four Healing Quadrants—Physical, Spiritual, Emotional, and Mental—and why it's crucial to address all of them for a balanced, effective healing journey.

Rhonda dives deep into the common pitfalls many encounter when focusing too much on one healing aspect. Whether it's the allure of spiritual highs or the trap of intellectualizing your journey, Rhonda offers shamanic insights into how these imbalances can stall your progress... plus ways to correct these imbalances.

In this transformative episode of ShamanTalk, your host Rhonda, a Celtic Seer & Shaman, takes you on a soul-stirring journey into the world of boundaries—those sacred guardians that protect not just our physical and emotional spaces, but our spiritual essence as well.

Have you ever felt lost, disconnected, or resentful, not knowing that the absence of clear boundaries was the unseen barrier to your healing? Rhonda shares her personal journey from misunderstanding boundaries to embracing them as everyday opportunities for self-honor and growth.

We delve deep into the concept of the "Middle Cauldron" in Celtic Shamanism, exploring how lack of boundaries can disrupt this emotional and spiritual core. Learn the difference between boundaries and non-boundaries and why the latter can be the silent killer in relationships.

Discover practical tips on how to set and communicate boundaries with clarity and compassion. Whether you're dealing with a trusted friend or someone who continually crosses your boundaries, this episode equips you with the tools you need.

By the end of this episode, you'll understand that boundaries are not barriers but bridges to deeper understanding, respect, and love. They are the key to a consciously connected spiritual life, empowering you and those around you to thrive in authenticity, love, and respect.

Tune in to unlock the transformative power of boundaries and take a significant step forward in your spiritual journey. Don't forget to subscribe and reach out with your thoughts and questions on Instagram @centreforshamanism.

Join us, as we explore how embracing boundaries can be your pathway back to your roots and forward into a life of greater spiritual connection and fulfillment.

If you love this podcast, do me a favour and subscribe! According to the vision of a Celtic Poet and prophet from the 7th century, the root of a Celtic person's physical, spiritual & emotional health comes from their three Cauldron Power Centres.

Similar to the Eastern traditions of Chakras and Dantien, the relative positions of these cauldrons within each person determine their overall spiritual, emotional and physical health.

Within each of these cauldrons, you ferment, cook, boil, & brew like an ancient alchemist so you can bring to the light, nourish and sustain the life force gifted to you at birth.

The Celts believed a person must activate all three cauldrons to live a whole, connected, meaningful life. Tune in to this podcast to find out more and begin your Cauldrons path!

In this week's episode, I'm taking a deep dive into the eight main things I wish I'd known at the start of my spiritual journey (which would have helped me along the path immensely) 

What is a mental load?

The invisible, non-tangible tasks involved in operating a family are called the mental load, also known as cognitive labour.

The mental load is the unseen – not necessarily the physical tasks but the remembering of all of the daily stuff that needs to be done – so shopping, dinner prep or when laundry needs doing – it also includes reaching out to other family members and remembering birthdays.

In this episode, we explore how you can climb down from having an excessive mental load and bring more balance into your daily life. 

Closure can be described as the end of a relationship, job, stage of life, or way of thinking and is often associated with difficulty.

Finding closure implies being able to completely accept what has happened and finding ways to honour the transition.

Tune in to find out how. 

This week we'll dive into why it's not OK to use your spiritual gifts on others without their consent. Ever. 

Celebrate episode 100 with me as I share some wins and losses of the past few years. You can also find out how to win an Intuitive Guidance reading (which you can’t get any other way!)

We’ve all come into contact with someone who displays narcissistic tendencies.

We’ve likely displayed some of these tendencies ourselves at some point in our lives.

But did you know that there’s more than one type of narcissist?

We call the narcissists we tend to know and love ‘overt narcissists’, and the traits they tend to display are well known.

But there’s another type.

The covert narcissist - and they are much harder to spot.

In this episode, we're going to do a deep dive into covert narcissists, and how we can work to heal and release that energy shamanically. 

In this re-focus week, you'll go back over how to effectively deal with negative energy, both inner and outer, so that you can continue on your Shamanic journey to reaching your greatest potential with fewer blocks and more resilience. 

Empaths are highly sensitive individuals who have a keen ability to sense what people around them are thinking and feeling. We usually use the term "empath" to describe a person who experiences a great deal of empathy, often to the point of taking on others' pain at their own expense.

This episode takes another look at the difference between enslaved and empowered empaths, and what you can do about it if you are enslaved or 'at the mercy' of your gifts (i.e taking on unwanted energy). 

When you are trapped in all or nothing thinking, you experience your life in extreme terms: It's either perfect or a disaster.

This is known as distorted thinking (or cognitive distortion) because life is a mixed bag for all of us. And it really affects our spiritual life – we think we must be perfect and manage perfectly; otherwise, we've failed.

This episode will cover how to know when you are in this thinking mode, and how to get out of it. 

Do you ever binge-listen podcasts or get really inspired by a book, just to forget most of the content a few weeks later?

Well, you're not alone. So many of us do this, and we forget many important lessons along the way.

With this in mind, I've decided to Refocus on past episodes of ShamanTalk that I feel are REALLY important.

I've added new insights to each ReFocus podcast and things I've learned along the way since recording

In this week's ReFocus, we take another look at toxic self-blame...

Many people that I work with have fears about how to stay safe in the spirit realms.

They’ve been given fear-mongering stories about boogie men and nasties – evil waiting to pounce around every corner.

This week I'll be helping you to dismantle the fear you may feel around this subject, and teaching you how to stay safe in these realms. 

There are a LOT of terms within Shamanism, some of them you may know, and others you may not. This week's episode will teach you the lingo of the Shamanic world so that you can better understand & communicate the key concepts within this ancient practice.

The Ego has a bad rap — it has become the villain of self-help.

According to psychologists, if we don’t have an ego, we would become mentally ill. We need it to mediate between the unconscious and the conscious. Your relationship with your Ego can turn into either an enemy or an ally.

In other words, your Ego is not you, but we often completely identify with our Ego as Self. 

Ego is a structure built of a lifetime of experience, disappointment, pain, love, excitement and connection – whatever we experienced in our childhoods, both good and bad.

Our Ego is a curious beast — most of us don’t realize its existence, yet we are under its mercy.

So, this week we explore how to explore Ego gently and to shift it to its rightful place as part of our Being rather than the illusion that it is the whole of our Being.

An in-depth guide to the ancient Toltec practise of Recapitulation - gifted to the world, for all to use. 

Do you have an inner checklist or a set of rules that you assume, if you follow them, will lead to a perfect or happier life?

“When I eat healthily and go to the gym, I’ll have a better body; then I’ll love myself.”

Or

“If I do yoga and meditate every day, then I’ll be less anxious, and people will like me more.”

Most of us live in this transactional space within ourselves, where we’ve decided that if we do X, then we’ll be ‘good enough’ (whatever that means for you).

But somewhere along the way, the pressure to live up to this ever-growing set of inner conditions and rules becomes too great to live up to, and we end up failing in these transactions.

It’s at this point that the voice of your inner transactional relationships morphs into the voice of your inner critic, and you can find yourself in a highly anxious space, often teetering on the edge of depression and anxiety or falling into that dark space entirely.

Luckily, we don’t have to wait until our lives start to crumble under the weight of our transactional relationships.

This week’s podcast is all about how we can move out of this transactional space and into more positive unconditional internal and external relationships (yes, this can apply to external relationships too, tune in to find out more.)

As always, there are tips, tricks and journey Ideas to help you in your journey of Shamanic self-discovery.

Do you ever feel like something or someone is draining your spiritual & mental energy even when you’re not around them?

If so, then perhaps a cord-cutting ceremony is what you need.

What is cord-cutting?

Cord-cutting is a healing technique to help “unhook” you from draining or unhealthy emotional dynamics, freeing you from relational patterns that squander your mental and spiritual energy.

It is a ceremony that you can use with places, people, and sometimes even memories.

This technique can even allow relationships to grow into more healthy states; for example, it enables you to free yourself from unhealthy patterns within the relationship and redefine it entirely.

And it’s the topic of this week’s podcast episode.

I’ll be giving you the full rundown of when and where cord-cutting can come in useful, and I’ll be teaching you how to safely do it yourself.

As always, there are lots of tips, tricks and journey ideas to help you on your path of Shamanic self-discovery

Do you remember episode 79? We talked about Funk Days…. Well, the opposite of a funk day can also be true!

This week we’ll explore the other end of the spectrum – what to do if you experience high spiritual energy.

There are times when I am so full of spiritual energy, I don’t quite know what to do with myself! I’ll feel a rush and a buzz – I’ll want to do everything and will start a tonne of projects – only to lose that energy and end up feeling flat and lethargic - in other words, I'm in a state of burn out.

In this episode, I'll be teaching you how to effectively channel that energy you feel so you can avoid spiritual burn out. 

Many of my clients and students struggle with Journey Interpretation & other Spiritual messages early on in their path. This week we dive into a comprehensive guide to understanding your spiritual messages.

Have you ever felt alone in the Universe, unable to face going through the motions, having no real sense of direction, and feeling hopeless? You could be going through a 'Dark Night of the Soul' or a Spiritual Awakening.

Tune in to this week's episode, where I'll be identifying the main ways you can know if you're experiencing a dark night of the soul and just what can be done to support you through this challenging experience.

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As always, there are lots of useful, actionable advice, guidance and journey ideas to aid you in your Shamanic Journey of Self-Discovery.

I firmly believe that the key to a healthy, happy and emotionally free life is undertaking deep personal work i.e. bravely facing your Shadow and working through your issues (with the help of your spiritual team). 

Shamanism is a wonderful tool that enables us to do this but all too often in the spiritual realms we actually use spiritual practices as avoidance techniques. Using Spiritual ideas as a way to avoid personal work is called 'Spiritual Bypassing'. 

Spiritual bypassing is defined as “using spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep personal, emotional ‘unfinished business,’ to shore up a shaky sense of self, or to belittle basic needs, feelings, and developmental tasks.”

In this episode, I'll be showing you how to recognise and avoid these techniques so you can stay on track with real personal work and not get sidetracked by "shiny spiritual objects'. 

Last week we talked about common cognitive distortions – many of you resonated with this topic, so this week I thought we could explore some ways to work more effectively with these distortions.

You can use one or any combination of the methods described in the podcast to combat irrational thoughts and cognitive distortions.

Try them out and look for the one that seems to work best for you because we all respond to different methods.

I also recommend listening to last weeks podcast first if you haven't already.

Negative thought patterns, otherwise known as cognitive distortions are thought patterns in our minds that convince us of something that isn't true.

These thoughts are usually used to back up our negative thinking. We tell ourselves things that sound rational and accurate but really only serve to keep us feeling bad about ourselves.

In this week's podcast, I'll be helping you to identify any cognitive distortions that may be ruling your mind and keeping you in patterns of stuck-ness. 

Sometimes we need a quick hand out of a funk. In this podcast, I'll run through some super easy techniques that you can use to lift you out of a bad day.

This may seem like an odd question, but have you ever considered your relationship with time?

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Most of us feel incredibly frustrated when it comes to time. I continuously hear my clients tell me, "I don't have enough time" or "wouldn't that be great if I had space to do such & such”.

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Not to mention our societies gripping fear of ageing, regret, and wasting time– that is a lot of pressure we put on ourselves regarding time.

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The truth is, most of us have a pretty adversarial relationship to time.

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There's never enough. We're always behind. It goes by too fast. We can't do important things because we don't have enough time.

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This week I talk about how daily (or even weekly) spiritual practice can redefine our relationship with time, so we end up feeling we have MORE time rather than less time.

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I give you lots of actionable tips and tricks to help you redefine your relationship with time so you can start using it in a way that serves you and your spiritual goals better.

This week we're getting practical! I want to share my understanding of Sacred Objects and how they can be used in our spiritual practice and daily lives.

Despair. It's something that most of us will experience at some point in our lives. 

It can feel all-consuming, but there are things we can do to get out from under it. 

This episode takes a deep dive into despair and how we can overcome it. 

Self-worth is such a big topic! And yet, it is a symptom of deeper issues, not a problem in itself. So focusing on low self-worth can sometimes be detrimental.

In this week’s podcast, we’ll look into the symptoms of low self-worth and what you can do if you find yourself having these issues.

In this episode, I'm covering toxic positivity which is defined as the excessive and ineffective overgeneralisation of a happy, optimistic state across all situations.

The toxic positivity process results in the denial, minimisation, and invalidation of the authentic human emotional experience.

You can't truly be positive while burying and denying your feelings. 

As usual, there will be lots of actionable hints and tips to help you avoid this trait and focus on working through your emotions in a healthy way so that you are a more balanced and whole person.