How Not To Feed Your Daemons

Everybody has daemons. And I’m not talking about those small, dormant, discrete programs running in the background of your computer (I know a few programmers are reading this blog so I thought to cut any ambiguities from the start). I’m talking about real, active and powerful forces which are acting in a disruptive way.

Sometimes those forces are taking the form of people. Abusive people who are restricting your choices, violent people who are constantly threatening you or simply unknown persons who are abusing you all of a sudden. Sometimes, those forces are inside you. Addictions, compulsions, irrepressible actions which are dragging you down without any opposition from yourself.

Whatever the form, those forces exist. And they play their part in our lives.

Meet Your Daemons

When faced with those forces, some people choose to take the victim position: “Why me? Why am I confronted with these forces? I’m not deserving this. There must be a mistake.” Nope. It isn’t. As unexpected and undeserved as it seems, that situation is there. Playing the victim won’t make it disappear.

Other may choose to take the karma position: “I lived many lives and in some of my lives I did some ugly stuff to somebody else. Now it’s time to pay my debt”. A daemon would then be the way life forces you to pay whatever you own.

Other way to see them are like teachers. They’re here to point you to some very specific areas in your behavior which needs adjustments. It may be that those areas are so hidden, so hard to be perceived by you, that the necessary force to point your head into that direction should be out of proportion. It may be that you’re avoiding to learn some lessons, or you’re ignoring them. Then, disguised as daemons, those forces are pushing you to become more humble, more quiet or more helpful. Somehow.

In my experiences, these positions are following a certain hierarchy. The victim position is the first level, followed by the karma position and then, after you’ve been both a victim and debtor, you can’t find any plausible explanation other than there must be a lesson to learn. I followed this pattern too. First, the victim and the complaining, then the karma part, then the lesson part.

But, and here comes one of the most incredible discoveries I made in the last few months, you can face the same daemons again and again even after you’ve been through all those levels. Yes, you overcame the victim position and you can take it in your face. Yes, you paid your karmic debt, even with interest. And yes, you learned your lesson again and again. And still, you’re facing those unstoppable, ugly and destructive forces.

The truth is there isn’t any logical explanation for their existence. For a while, those victim, karma and teaching explanations are good. They keep you sane under pressure and they give you a little bit of mental comfort. But after you’re above all those levels you realize that, as frightening as it sounds, those daemons are out there  (or inside yourself) for the same reason you are here: they have the right to be. They have their own life. They have their own choices. They have their own existence.

Yes, their temporary role may be to point you to some vulnerabilities in your life, yes, they may act like karma triggers, and yes, they may teach you some tough lessons, but they’re as alive as you are. And I’m talking especially about people here. Because it’s easier to spot that in people. Many daemons are manifesting intermittently through other people (I guess in some areas this is called “to be possessed”) and you can sense them manifesting long after all your lessons have been learned. Those people don’t realize they’re carrying with them other energies. They don’t even know they’re daemons for you. They think they’re doing the “right thing”.

That’s frightening. It really is. But it’s also liberating, in a subtle way.

Because it suddenly puts you in a position where you gotta take action. You gotta make and maintain some boundaries. You gotta protect yourself. You really do, otherwise you’re going to be consumed. You’re going to cease to exist.

What Keeps A Daemon Alive?

At this point, and that would be the second discovery I made in the last few months, a fundamental question exploded right in my face. If daemons are alive and have their own existence, what keeps them alive? They’re part of this universe so they must obey to the same rules. In order to be alive and act as they act, they have to feed themselves with something.

If at this point you’re going to think “are we going to see a Twilight trailer now?” you’re wrong. I know the most common icon of a daemon is a vampire, and, to some point, it’s a correct image of a daemon. But the fact that you must feed a vampire somehow is the only resemblance with what I call daemons. The rest is just literature, movies and gibberish. So please, don’t read away if you’ve been drawn here by a vampire-like vibe in this article. Because if there is one, it’s completely unintentional.

Back to my question, after a few weeks of playing back and forth with it, the answer emerged. Clear and elegant. Simple and surprising at the same time. Because I realized the correct question was not “what keeps a daemon alive”, but “who keeps a daemon alive”. And if you look at it this way, the answer is obvious: YOU. The daemon is fed by you.

To be more precise, by your reactions. Let’s try some examples here.

Suppose you’re the victim of an abusive partner. He or she may abuse your time, your affection, your body or your money. Whatever the object of their abuse, they keep doing it for as long as you

1. allow them to connect with you
2. react to those interactions, releasing some energy

So first you must accept to play that game and second, you gotta allow them to make an impact. Be sad, or frustrated or angry. These are the energies that are actually feeding the daemon inside your partner. The more you release them, the more he or she will continue to do what it does to you.

In a magic and almost epiphanic way, I witnessed this a number of times in my life. Never been able to put my finger on it, so to speak, but looking back (without any anger) I can see it clearly. Every time I avoided connection with some of my daemons and preventing any energy to be released, those daemons disappeared. Interestingly enough, they only disappeared from my life. In their own circle of life, they found other sources of food. And they’re continuing to feed themselves off of other people hate, sadness or anger as we speak.

How Not To Feed A Daemon

So, after making some knots and pulling some strings, after putting together all my experiences with my own personal daemons, I was finally able to share my experience in making a daemon hungry (and eventually making him disappear from your life). It’s not a manual. It’s just sharing my personal experience.

1. Identify The Daemon

That’s the toughest part and it takes some time to master it. Because, as I said, those daemons are not manifesting 100% of the time. Or if they are, we’re talking about icons of destruction like Hitler or Stalin. Most of the time, these daemons are taking the form of repeated behavior, habits or approaches from some people around you. The closest the people, the easiest to identify those groups of actions.

In other terms, this would be the stage in which you’re trying to assess what exactly is making you an abused person in that relationship. It’s something like: “well, my partner doesn’t have a job, so I have to work for both, but at the same time my partner doesn’t really do anything to get a job”. You may be in love with that partner, but the fact that he or she is putting you on an abused position (being the only support of your common life) may be the sign of a daemon manifesting. That would be the “I’m living off of your resources because I’m too lazy/scared/negligent to create my own resources” daemon.

Another example is when other people are questioning (or even destroying) your accomplishments. Again, they may be “normal” people but they’re constantly trashing your life, your successes, your breakthroughs. This would be the “I’m minimizing your life because that makes me feel better” daemon. In this case, it may be that your success is so visible that it scares other people out. Doesn’t really matter that you’re not intending to scare them, they’re just scared and they’re allowing to that daemon to manifest.

2. Assess Your Behavior

If you’re sure that you identified the correct daemon, it’s time to pass it through the 3 levels test, the victim, the karma and the lesson.

But first, try to see if that’s a real situation. Most of the time, the daemons are pointing to real life situations, stuff that you’re currently doing, or that you’ve done in the past. They’re able to track you down because you’re leaving a visible trail. Try to see if you’re really abused or it’s just your imagination. It takes a lot of time to clear all the potential confusions, but it’s an important step in making your daemon hungry. Because if they’re referring to a real life situation and you didn’t take care of that, they’ll have all the rights to come back and hunt you again and again. It’s like raising a flag: “hey, I’m an egotistic bastard, come and hunt me”.

But if you’re 100% sure that you’re innocent, go through the 3 levels test.

First, the victim. If people are abusing you, get rid of the victim behavior. Yes, they may shout at you. Yes, they may throw ugly words at you or do painful stuff. Stop questioning “why me?” because this won’t go anywhere. Take it right in your face. And move on.

Second, the karma. Do you feel like you deserve this, in a subtle and reconciling way? Do you feel like you’re actually owning something to somebody? If the answer is yes, pay your debt. But don’t get too comfortable paying debts. Any debt is limited in scope.

Third, the lesson. Can you see the process from the outside? Can you see what triggers the daemon and what validates his approach? If yes, it means you learned your lesson. And if the daemon still comes after you, then it’s because you still throw some food at him.

3. Avoid Contact

Ignorance is highly underrated. I wrote it before and I will write it again: the art of ignorance should be taught in schools. The first and fundamental step that you must take in order to get rid of your daemons for good: avoid contact. But it’s also the most difficult to take and here’s why: daemons are not manifesting 100% through people, as I already said, it’s just parts of the people which are under that control. So the most common reaction is to avoid the person altogether. Which will not work as expected. You’re throwing the baby with the bath water, as they say.

You gotta learn to ignore only the daemon part. And that’s the hardest one because you’re dealing with a person as a whole, not with a few discrete parts. It’s difficult to make them understand that you created new boundaries. But that you’re still willing to engage with them in interaction as persons. It’s difficult for you to do it and it’s confusing for them. But it’s fundamental.

At this point, the daemon will start to worry. Without an outlet for his traditional actions, it will start to act erratically, making the person who are hosting it even more confused, unsure and vulnerable. It’s sad to witness this from a distance but I suppose it’s also a necessary healing process. Usually, it can ends in only two ways: either the daemon finds himself another outlet, either the person itself gets rid of the daemon. The last one being the most uncommon.

4. Re-channel Energies

But what makes this contact avoidance even harder is that you’re not living in a world composed only by two entities: you and the other person. You’re living in world made by thousands of connections, many of them common between the two of you. So, you may try to avoid the direct contact with that person, but their energies may reach you through other persons. For instance, you may have common friends or partners. Or, and this case is excruciatingly painful: you have a child together. That child will become the innocent carrier of those daemonic energies and start to move them back and forth between you two without even knowing it.

So, what can you do when you avoid contact with the parts you’re not willing to deal with anymore, but you still get those abusing energies? The normal answer is sadness, frustration or anger. Those emotions are pure energy. And that energy will get back in the subtle field of energies, feeding the daemon as he or she expects. So, avoiding contact is not enough. The only chance to make the daemon go away for good is to re-channel those energies. Not reacting is impossible. That will be the equivalent of being dead.

But as you face the abuse through other messengers and identify its source, you can choose how to react. You can re-channel your responses. Instead of anger, choose physical exercise. Instead of sadness, choose joy and laughter. Instead of frustration, choose party. Yes, you reacted. But your reaction was on a different frequency. The daemon couldn’t get it. They’re fed with sadness, anger and frustration and if you choose something different, it means you’re actually condemning them to starvation.

A Hungry Daemon Is A Weak Daemon

But it’s also a furious one. A daemon ready to do anything to get a little bit of energy from you. So, the weaker your daemons are getting, the more desperate their actions to re-connect with their preferred source of food will be. Keep that in mind whenever you’re ready to think: “starving a daemon it’s not a good strategy”. It’s actually proof that what you’re doing is getting results and the daemons are becoming really, really hungry.

***

So, daemons are real. They’re feeding with our anger, frustration and sadness and they’re playing only the game of abuse. Most of the time, they’re pointing to our real flaws, our real mistakes, our real stupid steps. Most of the time, they’re just a finger pointed to our own problems.

But, once you solved your problems, you realize they’re as real as you are and they have this habit of getting addicted to you. Yes, you may have been played the victim, yes, you may have had some karmic debt, yes, you may have to learn a hard lesson, but after you’ve been through all these, after you solved your own problems, it’s time to stop. It’s time to kill your own daemons by starvation.

And then move on.