Who Am I?

I am human first, but my heritage is Cuban, with older European roots.

I was raised by my grandmother, who was a practicing medicine woman and Bruja.

Divination has been a core part of my life since infancy: it has given me some of my most profound wounds, and blessings alike.

I love the Chinese martial arts, and ancient Chinese culture overall (except foot binding...like what the hell?)

I love trees, turtles, bodies of water, good novels, anime, nature, and learning new things.

I am married to, and still deeply in love with, my high school sweetheart.

In love with the land of Hawaii.

I am disciplined, but love variety too.

I seem to display a paradoxical mix of pragmatic realism, artistic sensibility and technical proficiency.

I deeply value a life dedicated to health (wholeness) at all layers of my being.

I am playful and have a childish sense of humor. I love to laugh!

I am also serious about the important stuff and often like to get down to business.

In general, I am rebellious, and do not really let people tell me what to do.

Put in the work. Everything has a price. The question is: is it worth the reward?My name is Ramon Castellanos. I also possess a few other names given to me during initiatory experiences.

Depending on the reference point, each of us can be many things to different people. I am no different.

I will share what I perceive about myself, some key elements of my personal story, and why I decide to show up daily to the work I do.

At a core level, I experience myself, not just as an individual node of consciousness shaped in part by my experiences, but also as an open-ended ecosystem in relationship to other ecosystems (nature, others, animals, spirits, primal forces). In this way, I am more than my body/mind, and my body/mind is more than me.

My name is Ramon Castellanos. I also possess a few other names given to me during initiatory experiences.

Fate is the unconscious acceptance of the inheritance you were given. The time, the place, the family, the body, the line you were born into, and the momentum of all that came before you. A spinning top, wound and released, running the groove already cut toward the outcome that is 'most likely'. To be fated is to step into the shoes laid out for you by family, institution, religion, and base impulse.

Destiny is the conscious transmutation of that same inheritance. An active process of engagement with circumstances you have been given, in perpetual devotion to aligning the deepest layers of your self with the truest desires of your soul. To live life consciously. Not necessarily the modern promise that you can be 'anything you want', but the older knowing that you can become who you were meant to be. It is to bring the soul to bear on your circumstances: the seed you arrived already carrying pressed into the soil of your fate. To mine for gold in the dark of the cave. To crack yourself open, again and again, even as the world moves to shut you down. To bear the fruit that only your own root could bare.

I apprehend a radical difference between fate and destiny, and it is something I am deeply interested in helping people know for themselves. I think this polarity is one of the most important we can engage with as humans.

This understanding has probably kept me alive at times.

For whatever reason, I have had a life characterized by intense initiatory experiences that have taken me off the beaten path, and have taken me to the brink of death multiple times.

• I was initiated into a deeply magical, indigenous tradition that emerged out of the African diaspora when I was just an infant:

These initiations are very serious, require massive amounts of ritual work, and take a whole year of a person’s life. Initiation at such a young age is not a common occurrence, but I am told it was done in order to save my life from an early death. How such intense magical work impacted my delicate nervous system and shaped my early experience, is still a mystery to me. I grew up learning to express myself through indigenously influenced forms of magic, divination, and communion with spirits.

• Due to an odd turn of events that literally came with a threat to my life, and some unexpected sudden changes, my wife moved in with me and my family when I was just 15 years old.

In essence, have been married since I was a teenager. My wife and I have grown up together and have helped shaped one another.

• When I was 17, I experienced a massive, terrible, and deeply disruptive Kundalini awakening, which led to chi sickness/kundalini syndrome/dragon sickness for over a decade.

Kundalini syndrome is basically a set of interconnected, physiological, emotional, psychic, and spiritual phenomena characterized by disruption, discomfort, intensity, pain, numbness, strong seizure-like activity; and a sink-or-swim initiation that either destroys you or builds you anew. Mine nearly killed me. At the time, I was in college and had to drop out due to the sheer intensity of the experience.

• My wife and I have been on our own since we were 18 years old.

There was no reprieve despite my challenges with kundalini. I grew up early. I had a job, an apartment, and the responsibilities of an adult as soon as possible.

• I was initiated into “adulthood” while living and working in the wilderness, at a wolf sanctuary; I did so for about a decade.

Here, I battled the elements, learned directly from wild animals, connected deeper to my own wild core, performed over 200 animal captures, and was cracked open more times than I can count. I also grew deeply sick.

• Even while sick, and struggling to survive, I was initiated into “Becoming Magic” by a true powerhouse of a magician deeply trained in indigenous traditions; began studying to become a Kundalini Awakening Process Instructor; was attacked by land spirits; and helped raise a baby wolf.

It was here that some of my most profound lessons in what real magic and energy work is occurred. This period of my life has been perhaps the hardest.

I know what it is like to have your health completely fall apart.

Although it does not appear this way to most people, I was born with a flat pituitary gland which delayed the onset of puberty. So when I was 13 years old, I had to have testosterone replacement therapy just to jumpstart it.

Yet, the true illness came after years at the wolf sanctuary. The stress of the wilderness, intense physical labor, kundalini syndrome, deep emotional wounds, spiritual attack, and my congenitally flat pituitary gland crushed me. A cluster of symptoms characterized by extreme shutdown began: a mild form of heart failure, severe palpitations, severe insomnia, fucked gut health, tooth decay, low energy, joint pain, and more…..this was on top of having a “good diet”, “exercising”, and practicing “good sleep hygiene”. It did not matter.

Life felt listless, harsh, brutal, meaningless, and empty…..

I felt like Saturn (the planet of limitations, challenges, adversity, and loss; known for eating his children) was consuming my soul.

Yet, the gift of Saturn’s intense treatment is often mastery, skill, depth, and full commitment.

Returning to health took everything I had on every level. It was a choice of becoming fully alive, or die trying. A full commitment to health and to myself. indeed.

I put everything on the line, took a huge leap of faith, left the sanctuary, and moved to Hawai’i with no concrete plan/job/home. I love the ocean and the tropics, and I knew nothing but full commitment would let me restore my health, sense of aliveness, and love for life once again. And I hole extreme gratitude to The Big Island of Hawaii, for holding me, for this land has been central to my healing.

Hawaii is where I got to work. Qigong and internal martial arts every day, the slow alchemy of turning my own fate over with my hands. I got my health back here. I wrote two books. I kept practicing the magic and divination I was raised in, and I fell deeper in love with the same woman I've loved since I was a kid, on the land that I love.

And here I am, still doing the work. Up before dawn each day.