Message in a Bottle (From My Inner Shaman)
In yesterday’s post, I mentioned that I finally found the “key” to my active imagination exercise, from the day before, after watching just one more video.
Ah… there it is.
A message.
One that I’ve actually seen before—when I went through the personal mythology process outlined in The Mythic Path by David Feinstein and Stanley Krippner.
I won’t go into the full exercise here, but one of the takeaways that came out of it was this:
My “inner shaman” flagged just one more as one of my unchallenged beliefs.
Now, the video I watched yesterday carried a similar message, but framed a little differently.
Two parts:
Develop positive delusional confidence (not easy)
Don’t ruminate on negative self-talk (very easy)
Yes… that tracks.
And, yes, sure enough, when I first heard that “just one more” might be an unchallenged belief of mine, my mind went straight to the negative.
Of course it did.
Oh… yeah… addictive tendencies. Got it. Pick your poison:
One more cookie.
One more beer.
One more episode.
One more scroll.
One more ring to rule them all and in the darkness bind them.
You don’t have to look far to see where that road can go.
But here’s the question I didn’t ask right away:
Is there a positive side to this, too?
Because if I’m being honest, “just one more” has also served me.
If I hadn’t watched just one more video, I wouldn’t have seen the artist painting wide open spaces—which turned out to be the thread that unlocked yesterday’s post.
That was a pretty cool moment.
Same thing with songwriting.
When I’m in a deep writing cycle, I’ll usually try to get two to four rough demos down in a session.
And there are plenty of times when I hit that point where I’m done.
Mentally fried. Physically tired. Ready to walk away.
But typically—as I am prone to do—I push for just one more.
And I can tell you from experience—that last one?
Sometimes it’s the best thing I wrote all day.
That happened recently.
I was completely spent, but I sat back down and put together a song called “Sheridan.”
My music coach—who acts as a kind of producer when reviewing my material—told me it’s one of his favorites I’ve written so far.
That doesn’t happen without just one more.
So now we’ve got a paradox.
The same pattern that can lead to overindulgence…
can also lead to breakthrough.
Yin and yang.
It’s not inherently good. It’s not inherently bad.
It’s a tendency.
A pattern.
A piece of wiring.
The real question is whether you can tell the difference.
When is just one more pulling you somewhere you don’t actually want to go?
And when is it asking you to stay in the game a little longer… long enough for something meaningful to emerge?
Because sometimes, yeah—it’s a bad call.
And sometimes?
It’s just you letting yourself “be who you are going to be”… perhaps at your best.
Now, I’ll admit—I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with… probably too many things in life.
I’m working on it…
Take, for example, the “new age” idea of dialoguing with your “inner shaman.”
I know. It can sound ridiculous.
But at the same time… what if you stay open to it?
What if you treat it less like something you have to believe in… and more like something you can listen to and see what happens?
Because whether you call it an inner shaman, intuition, imagination, or just pattern recognition…
Something is generating these messages.
The question is whether you dismiss them… or get curious.
Yin and yang, baby.
Always both.
A couple things to think about:
What are some examples of negative self-talk you’ve noticed in yourself?
And is it possible… that there’s a useful signal buried inside it, too?