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Understanding who I am and what I am meant to do is a daily practice for me. It’s easy to say I am Damien, born in 1980 in the Jemez Mountains, and to continue to tell you my story. However, this is just one of my lives, an ego I inhabit, a vehicle I ride. I am more than that. I am a soul that has lived many lives and experienced much beyond this current existence. Who am I? What do I remember? What can I discover?
In my quest to uncover my true self, my higher self, or my soul, I have sought much guidance. I am given bits of information that may not make sense at the time but eventually become clear. One of those messages has been the energy of the fool. I first learned that I channel the energy of the fool. I was also told that I speak the opposite into existence. Additionally, I am a spiritual teacher, one who triggers others, and it is through my seemingly inappropriate sense of humor that I will change things, people, or environments. Lastly, I was told to embrace my craziness and weirdness.
Being a dense human, it took me a while to figure out that this was telling me I am a Heyoka Empath. The Heyoka, a term from the Lakota, is the sacred clown, or you might say, the Fool. Heyokas are revered as spiritual teachers who challenge conventional thinking and norms through humor and paradox. They are considered “opposite thinkers” who see things from a different perspective and help others do the same.
My drive to be the devil’s advocate or the one that takes the opposing side has never been clearer to me than it is now. This is why I am the mirror. I have always reflected others’ qualities and even picked up many of them when I am around others for too long. This is why I need to watch my company. When others see me, they see what they see in themselves—this can be what they fear or what they love. I didn’t realize this initially, but I could witness it happening in my life. People saw themselves in me and would say I am like them, but I would not feel this way truly, thinking they only know the version of me they can see.
Now that I understand myself more clearly, I can understand why I feel a certain way around certain people. Sometimes I have emotions running through me and thoughts I almost can’t control. I feel like it isn’t even something that ever bothered me or that I thought about before, but suddenly I am crushed under the weight of the emotion. I fight it and try to navigate the feelings, find the core wound, and heal it. Sometimes I focus on things that aren’t a big deal but may need healing, and eventually, it subsides. That is usually when someone walks into my life with the same issue I was just facing. My guides show me that I am meant to feel and experience what others do to best understand the situation and how to handle it. By having the experience, I can harmonize with others and then transmute their energy into more positive energy by raising their frequency to mine. This is usually done through conversation and emotional connection.
Many times, I feel that I say something to try and relate to others, and they reject the healing. They see me as trying to one-up them or outdo them instead of seeing it as me syncing to them. This is not my intention, though; it is always to establish a connection or relationship between us, not a way to feel better about myself. If the person feels this way, I usually just back off, now understanding that they are not seeking to shift.
I used to feel like I had a sense of humor about everything. The more horrible the joke, the funnier it was. This is because, as a Heyoka spirit, I understand on a deep level that if you laugh in the face of danger, it has no power over you. If you joke about the things that scare us, they cannot frighten us. When faced with your worst fears, laugh your hardest. This is the power of the Fool. They know that no harm can come to them and that nothing is evil but simply all a game—one that sometimes you win, and sometimes you lose. But the point of games is to have fun. So have as much fun as possible. The more fun you have, the less power your fears will hold over you.a