Why I Decided To Stop Teaching & Become a Full Time Trader in The Stock Market

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Transcript

One of the most consistent threads in my life has been a focus on fate and destiny.

And this is something that was even a concern of mine growing up as a child.

Though, of course, as a child, I really didn't have that language for it.

More so, it was the context that I grew up in.

I've spoken about this before on this podcast, but because it's really relevant to this particular episode, I'm going to bring it up again.

and this is in reference to the tradition that I grew up in that came from Africa from various places of Africa and made its way to the Caribbean to Cuba with the slave trade my family being a Cuban family was steeped in this tradition a few generations back at the very least and it formed an ecosystem in terms of the household I was in growing up

This tradition is a shamanic tradition, a magical tradition, a divination tradition.

And as I was initiated into it being just an infant, and I have spoken about this also, that I was brought into this tradition as a baby.

Not something that is common, but something that happened for me for a variety of reasons.

In part, I have been told multiple times that it had to do with keeping me alive, so to speak, because there was a concern with my ability to remain alive as a child.

Thus, I was initiated for those purposes.

At least that's the story I've been told, and it certainly was the story I was told growing up.

Well a major part of what happens when you get initiated into this tradition is that a long form divination is done over multiple days.

So we might say that the equivalent of a high priest comes and with the aid of a bunch of very

by Ramon Castellanos.

It became this reference point for what my life was supposed to be from the beginning, and thus it gave me this focus fundamentally on fate and destiny from a really young age, what was choice versus what was handed to me and predestined already.

There's another layer though that came from this divination and that was that I was supposed to be, I was told from a child that I was going to grow up to be a spiritual teacher, a leader of some form or another, even the language of prophets so to speak was thrown around.

and this is not something that I interpreted because of course growing up as children you can interpret what you're told the way you want to interpret it and make up things as you grow up this is something that's common to all of us this is something that was actually and has been confirmed by multiple family members so by no means is this my interpretation of it

I grew up with this idea.

You're going to grow up to be a spiritual leader.

This is in part why my grandmother trained me from a really young age to engage with magic and showed me as much as she did about her practice being someone who was completely dedicated to this tradition.

That was her life's work.

Literally what we did or what she did for food to put food on the table was working these traditions and iterations of it.

So all of this was just sealed into my awareness as I grew up, went on to live my life, did my thing.

Of course, I had a regular childhood.

It wasn't as if this was some militaristic way of being treated that I was raised specifically only to do this, but it was a background story that affected my sense of self from as early as being a baby.

But of course, I was also raised in the context of modern Western culture in a city, a major city that was actually somewhat like a Spanish ghetto.

And so I started hanging out with people deciding as a teenager that I was going to live my own life.

And of course, I rebelled against this tradition.

When I was about 16 or 17, I left

The Tradition in order to start practicing Taoist alchemy, meditation, exploring science, and those types of threads.

I went through my process.

I continued moving forward.

Eventually my grandmother died and I

How I Decided To Stop Teaching Become a Full Time Trader

started to kind of dive into some underlying somatically intense sensations that were present in my system that were really uncomfortable and had been there for a long time there are multiple layers to this I won't go into all the details but there was this this aspect of this comfort in my system that with her help

I was actually able to trace back to this particular story and the pressure that it had placed on me growing up and the pressure that it was placing on me then.

So at the time I had actually been running a blog and the first iterations of my work

called Healing the Human Animal.

I had been working on this blog for easily four to five years.

I had built connections with people.

I had some clients and some students.

I was starting to get clarity and purpose and I was reaching this point in my life where I was certain I knew what I wanted to do.

I knew what my Dharma was and I was going to do it and focus on it.

I was getting support from my wife to go ahead and leave.

the wolf sanctuary where I was currently working at in order to start really focusing on my business and that was a decision I was certain about.

At the time though, this awareness was just not there and then working with Karen brought up a sudden realization that I could not be sure that the choice of being a teacher, of running Healing the Human Animal, of wanting to put myself out there in that way was actually my choice.

It was something where I realized that there was all of this pressure from my childhood, that I was just living out a story that I had been given in a mechanical fashion, conditioned, robotically pursuing this path because I was told growing up that I was destined to be a prophet, a spiritual teacher, a leader of some form.

and from one day to the next when I realized that I literally shut down my business I took my blog offline I stopped working with my clients and I decided I was not going to be a teacher anymore

And in that moment I did something that is relatively rare in the overall human experience and that is I exercised free will.

I chose from a place that was not tied to my conditioning, that was not tied to my family story, that was not tied to my expectations.

and with that I decided I was going to be a trader in the stock market and I spent the next few years actually pursuing that path and because of my nature because of the way that I am having made this choice and being sure at that point that I no longer wanted to be a teacher because there was not something that I had chosen for myself

I dove headfirst into this that means I devoted myself fully to being a trader and I began studying and taking courses listening to audio CDs to get me into the proper mindset studying the psychology of being a trader quite fascinating in fact that being a trader is actually a psychological and emotional profession primarily and the rest of it follows from that

I started trading every day and going through the process of studying charts and studying businesses and really wanting to understand all of that.

And that was my world for years, easily from sometime in the middle of 2020 to about the end of 2021.

and this was interesting in the process I made thousands of dollars and I lost thousands of dollars and there was ups and there was downs and there was the intense emotional and mental labor that comes with being a trader most people can't actually imagine what it's like because they've never actually gone into it as a profession but

when you have billions of dollars if not trillions of dollars at times moving in front of you and you know that you can just go in there and grab it but the odds are completely stacked against you and you have to build yourself in such a way that you can

Create a slight edge the way the casinos create a slight edge to just make it so that in the process of engaging with the market you can come out ahead over time and doing that is very very very difficult

and I went through all of it and in that time I had multiple episodes of breaking down in tears in in utter just depression with my wife at the time she was there for me and was helping me and

This was something that was emerging out of a deep mourning and grieving process for a loss of the part of me that was fundamentally a teacher, that was fundamentally an artist and that wanted to share with people, that wanted to be in the process of learning and studying and applying and understanding and embodying and then transmitting to other people.

and I couldn't shake it.

It's something that kept coming up and every time it would emerge it would be profound and deep and heartbreaking.

I was a teacher in my heart and yet that's something that I couldn't allow out because I had decided that being a teacher was not for me because I had been conditioned growing up to believe that I was supposed to be.

and in my act of free will I chose not to pursue something that was inherently innate within me to pursue and of course this whole time that I was a trader and that I was having these progressively deeper breakdowns of depression around not teaching anymore

I was still practicing.

I've been a practitioner for as long as I can remember.

I was still doing physical practice.

I was still doing energetic meditations.

I was still talking to my own teachers.

and I was starting to hit certain breakthroughs and in this process of hitting certain breakthroughs I started to come to the realization that I could not hide from this part of myself anymore and the practices literally created a pressure cooker of experience that burned away anything that wasn't actually aligned with this path with my destiny

So, what ended up emerging was deciding that I did in fact want to begin doing this work again, but it was trepidatious.

I didn't really understand what it was going to look like or what it was going to be.

And the first thing that wanted to emerge out of me was a book, and that's when I wrote The Ancestral Now.

And that book came out of me in about six months.

It was not a whole lot of time to write a 200-page book.

and then I went ahead and got the book published and since then I have been immersed fully in my work in the ancestral now and doing my best to cultivate something that feels truly authentic and that is an innate expression of my own soul's purpose.

However, there have been ups and downs with that and there is still this conditioning at times that shows itself that I have to check in order to make sure that I'm not trying to carry out a story that I was given but that I'm finding the deeper golden thread inside the context of the story that I was given.

And the reason I'm bringing this up today is to touch on certain aspects of fate, free will, upbringing, conditioning, and destiny.

Now if there was a formula that one could be handed and told this is what to focus on in order to find your destiny, it would be this.

To consciously engage with your fate and to bring your soul forces to bear to transmute that fate into destiny.

Okay, so if we were to go deeper into that, there's a lot to unpack and a lot could be said about this overall formula, but I'll do my best to give you a succinct explanation of it.

Your fate are the circumstances that have been at play in your world that have basically shaped you outside of your direct control.

Now this could be looked at from multiple vantage points.

One might say that the soul itself incarnates into this lifetime by choice and thus it chooses the family that it comes into, the body that it's going to have, and the

The Bones of The Stock Market

but choice is simply choosing something it is not necessarily about controlling the circumstances themselves but we might say that the family that you were born into the upbringing that you had the culture

The Bones of The Deep – Weaving Gold

All of that has been shaping you a certain way.

It has been preparing you to do something.

It has given you the ability to actually do something that nobody else could do.

It is there.

It is a soil from which your destiny can sprout.

But the thing is that the destiny will not sprout on its own.

The destiny requires you to bring your soul forces to bear on all of this fate.

and the soul forces in this way could be thought of as the archetypal qualities that your particular soul was preceded with before you were born and for me for example two of my primary archetypes on a soul level are the teacher and the artist those came with me into this life and they emerge organically

So in order to take the fate that I was given, to take this rich soil of life experiences, of the context of my life that's connected to all of these other threads of fate, that are not just me and my individual free will, but all of this stuff that has been given to me,

and transmute that into fate well I have to bring my teacher and my artist online and there are other aspects of my soul as well but these two are really relevant to this particular dimension this talk that we're having today

and then through that I can create a sense of my destiny and destiny is not actually a job description it is not saying that you're going to do this specific thing in this specific way and that the only destiny you can have is this no

Destiny is a lot like water eventually finding the sea.

So all the water on Earth will eventually make it to the sea, at some point or another.

That is its destiny.

But it might have to go through any number of iterations.

by Ramon Castellanos

by Ramon Castellanos

and it has a broader overall feel to it that has to do with allowing your soul forces to come online and making that choice to do so and this is where free will really comes in is the choice to either realize your destiny or to not realize your destiny

to try to even change it the way that I tried to change my destiny because we have that choice we do have the ability to choose this and what ends up happening if we were to decide to not pursue the destiny that was woven into us from before we were even born that fate even still has reinforced

Well, I don't know.

It is a mystery.

One could even say that could you escape it?

Could you really change it?

Maybe, maybe not.

But this is a way to start to think about the difference between fate, free will, and destiny.

Now, here's another thought experiment for you.

Consider this.

a person in ancient China who grows up in a martial family and that martial family has a sword form for example that has been given to them handed down from generation to generation to generation and now a person in the context of this ancestry is born and starts practicing with the sword from the time that they could walk

and the training was rigorous as it was in ancient China and continuous and daily and any resistance that that person had to the sword possibly was weeded out long before they became adults and now as an adult they are pursuing their own path one might say their own Tao that would lead them through their long-term cultivation

and then they realize that no matter what that the sword is a part of that path now one might ask what then is innate versus what was conditioned because at that point can that person really choose to be anything else than a swordsman

And for that matter, we could ask, was it the soul that chose to incarnate into a line in which a sword form was handed down from generation to generation, reinforced not just socially, but also biologically, because that was that soul's prerogative, that that was that soul's destiny to study the path of the sword.

and this is one of the great mysteries of life and one of the great mysteries of exploring fate, free will, and destiny because this is actually more of an art and more of a set of stories than it is an exact science but one of the key elements to take away is that free will is something that emerges when we make a choice that's outside of our conditioning

But more important is what is the free will doing with its choice?

Is it trying to change something that at some level it will not be fulfilled by changing?

Or is it about changing that which is ripe for the change?

That is, the person's fate that wants to be catalyzed and wants to be transmuted into destiny.

and so we might ask what better choice can we make than to realize our destiny