Over the course of the last three years, the world has become progressively unrecognizable and in the scope of human history, that's a very, very small amount of time really, but change just keeps coming at us quickly and relentlessly. It's difficult to hold on to anything, and truth seems to only exist in the eye of the beholder, meaning everyone's truth is a little different.

When people talk about living in interesting times. I think these are the times they're referring to. The life ways and worldviews of the nineties, aughts, or even the tens are incompatible with what we're experiencing today. And while some change is good because it keeps things fresh, the dominant current of our day is somehow aligned with special interests and billionaires who only want changes that exclusively benefit themselves. Over the last 50 years, the rights, freedoms and quality of life standards in the West have degraded out from under us due to inflation, monopolization and globalization, while somehow still managing to suck dry the nations of the global south in the process. Our strategy was always unsustainable, but now the bill has come due and collapse is only a few inevitable missteps away. Most of us can see it and a few are even willing to admit it to ourselves. Some people are even cheering the collapse of the empire, but in their enthusiasm, they may not realize that they're just ushering in new overlords to replace the old ones.

It's unavoidable. It always works this way. If you defeat the empire, you simply become the empire. The only way to win is not to play. To quit the system to operate in parallel, minimizing interactions with mainstream society. But admittedly, this is far easier said than done. When you come to the realization that continuing to follow the path laid out for you by society puts you at as great of a risk or more as anything that you might come up with yourself, it's both freeing and overwhelming all at once.

Personal sovereignty is not a simple undertaking and the risk-reward ratio is anything but compelling. It takes irrational optimism to believe that you can build a better life outside of mainstream society than you can within its confines, because the odds are definitely stacked against you. This irrational optimism may give you the courage to succeed, but it won't give you the means. For that, you're left to your own designs, your own resources, and your own luck, which given the calt of the coming years, will almost certainly not be enough. A mass exodus from mainstream society into the fringes has already started as Westerners flee urban environments to rural areas and developing nations.

I've dubbed this mass migration event, the Great Escape. It's well underway and I'm sure it will continue over, at least the next 5 to 10 years. I believe that while many people will desire to leave society, more and more as we get deeper into the shit, less will actually take action to realize this goal and even fewer still will be successful because, as I've said, the odds are stacked against you.

Now, this is no reason for you to despair because the odds are nearly always stacked against you in anything that's worth doing in life. Many people probably applied for your job, but only you got it. Many people set weight and exercise goals, but only healthy people achieve them. Just because most people will fail at something doesn't mean that you shouldn't strive for it.

Everyone fails at some things and succeeds at others. This means that for every thing that exists, lots of people try and fail to achieve it. Dedicated people who won't accept defeat, though, they usually succeed, at least in some part, in achieving their goals. It's about not being willing to accept any alternative outcomes and being willing to do whatever it takes to make it happen.

And that obsessive singular focus is the kind of energy that when harness correctly, can produce magical effects. If you wanna break away from the mainstream, quit your job or career, and move to some wild remote place and become self-sufficient, if this life is calling you like it did me, let me tell you that it is possible, but it's also very difficult.

So many things can go wrong. There's so many opportunities to be taken advantage of or to make a costly mistake, to get hurt and so on. The risks are many, and the window of opportunity is narrowing. To avoid all of the potential problems and have everything work out in your favor, to be lucky all the time, is asking quite a lot of your natural good fortune, but with magic on your side you have powerful tools and impossible reach. You can influence the world beyond your direct control and shift reality in your favor. To my mind, you'd be crazy to attempt to exit and build without having an effective, magical practice in place. Magic played an enormous role in my family's escape from typical American suburban life and our subsequent adventure building sanctuary in the jungle.

And though we still have a very long way to go, I can tell you for sure that we literally cannot imagine attempting this project without the support of our spirit team and our magical practice. In this episode, I'll share some of the reasons that we decided to follow this path, the benefits and the challenges involved, and the various types of magical rituals and practices that we've used or discovered in our own escape into the wild.

Welcome to the 3rd episode of Postmugglism, the podcast that talks about magic in the post-modern age, how to thrive in the decline of the empire, and how to enchant your way to a more beautiful and more fulfilling life. I'm Nate, but you may know me as Postmugglism from social media where you can find me on Twitter and Instagram.

I also put out videos on YouTube and all my articles, videos, podcast episodes, and other content can be found on my website at www.postmugglism.com. Thanks for listening or watching. If you enjoy this episode, please subscribe on your favorite podcast platform or to my YouTube channel so that you get notified each week when new episodes of this show are published.

This is an important episode for me because it's about the surge of Westerners moving out of cities or fleeing western nations, which is what my wife and I decided to do in 2020 as the pandemic and lockdowns were heating up. As of now, the beginning of 2023, we've made our exit, and now we're starting to build our new lives, our new home, and working towards our bigger project, a sanctuary and spiritual healing center in the jungle.

This episode also helps to put the message and purpose of this podcast into focus both for myself, as its creator, and hopefully also for you as the person absorbing the stories that I plan on telling. Our adventure from suburbia into the jungle and all of its crazy twists and turns are both my inspiration for this material and also my credibility since I'm living the experiences and actually doing the magic that I'm sharing with you on this podcast.

To that end, this episode is made up of bits and pieces of our story and all our best takeaways from our real life experiences, our own escape from society, and the ridiculous amount of magic that we've worked to make all of this possible. You see, a couple of years ago, my wife and I decided that our dream was to escape the rat race and retire early to paradise, somewhere adjacent to the Caribbean Ocean.

That's where we live now, specifically in a small beach town just south of Cancun, Mexico. But that's the end of the overlap between what we thought we wanted then and what we're doing now. It's been a crazy couple of years and our priorities have changed pretty dramatically in that time, probably much like your own.

Instead, the world that we'd been assuming would continue to support us, keep us financially flush, et cetera, changed pretty dramatically in the spring of 2020. Worse than that, the crisis of liberty, which became apparent during that time, forced us to reevaluate many of the presumed truths that we'd built our lives around.

Now, I've always thought of myself as anti-state and anti-authority in general, but good grief, if the last couple of years haven't thoroughly blackpilled me. If you somehow made it this far into the new normal and you still believe anything the media, state, et cetera, tell you, then I'm certainly not gonna bother trying to convince you otherwise.

But if you're like me and you're tired of pretending to be shocked at the decline of Western civilization and you wanna start doing something, in your life, for your family, for your own sake, then trust me when I say that we attribute a hundred percent of our success and good fortune with this process to our magical practice.

Magic helped us grease the wheels of bureaucracy many times on our little adventure. It's helped us find the perfect buyer for our previous home, the one that funded this project, to secure housing here in Mexico, to find and acquire our land, and so many. And more importantly, we've relied heavily on the foresight of our fortune telling skills to divine the right course of action when significant decisions had to be made without the benefit of clear understanding.

We rely on astrology, divination, and guidance from spirits to plan our life and to bring its ups and downs into coherence in our mind. We shed the past and our preconceptions regularly in ritual to stay adaptable and receptive. We watch carefully for synchronicities in streaks of bad luck and receive spiritual guidance through animals, chance encounters, and voices in our heads. We make talismans for prosperity to protect our home, our land, and ourselves to attract beneficial relationships and the favor of authorities to guard our resources and to inspire us creatively. We use energy medicine to heal each other, and our pets, to help our plants grow, and to bless our products.

The last two years of our lives have been led almost entirely by spirit, synchronicity and divination. Magic is interwoven into every aspect and area of our lives by design to ensure that we're provided with extra to spare, and in a way that also yields joy, health and fulfillment. Bringing magic into our lives so deeply also helps to widen our perception of the world to re-enchant our experience of it in a way that brings us into a more interconnected and regenerative way of being; a way that is in ideal alignment with the practice and purpose of homesteading. Participating in the Great Escape is an essential adventure for freedom, loving independent spirits who are feeling stifled by today's prevailing tyranny. It's also an enormously challenging endeavor in which you're more likely to fail than succeed unless you have magic at your back, in your sails, and on your side.

This escape isn't an event, it's a process. It happens in stages and, fresh from my own family's journey into the wilderness and looking across the near future, I have a lot of perspective to share on this subject. I also feel like it's part of my journey to help others begin theirs, and in that spirit, sharing our experiences and what we've learned from this process is part of what this podcast is about.

Particularly how magic has influenced and facilitated this journey greasing the wheels of fate, if you will. I've divided the escape process, popularly known as "Exit and Build" into 8 stages and, over the next two episodes, I'm gonna go through our learnings from each stage at a high level. I'll probably also go into each of these stages in further detail in future episodes, maybe dedicating an episode to each or something like that.

The stages of escape or "Exit and Build" as I see them are one, the early phase of going from a vague desire to a grand plan; two, putting that plan into action; three, making a move, so relocating. Four, getting settled, building community, and setting up your supply chain. And this is where we'll break for the end of the first of two episodes on this topic.

I'll talk about those first four stages in this episode, and then return for the rest in next week's episode where I'll talk about five; acquiring land, and your order may vary here. You may move before you acquire land. Six, building, sanctuary, construction, renovation, and so on. Seven, growing, protecting, and maintaining what you have.

And eight, investing into the future. Your future. Not everyone wants to leave the country or can leave their families behind, but it doesn't matter because we're not really escaping a place anyway. We're escaping a way of life, one that is toxic, totalitarian and predatory in favor of one that is healthy, balanced, and sacred.

Every family's journey is going to be unique, but if you choose this path, you can expect to navigate these same challenges on your way to building the home and life of your dreams, wherever that takes you.

It's difficult to say when our journey into the wilderness began, because in some ways I've been dreaming about this for years, often unconsciously. I'd also talked about leaving the US for a very long time. I had nearly always dreamt about living abroad, but money, jobs, career, et cetera, kept me from making any bold moves in that direction.

Still, the desire to exit was and always has been strong, long before circumstances motivated my wife and I to take action urgently. I don't know if I could feel something coming in the ether or if I was just reaching a point of no return on my own in regards to my corporate career and our suburban life, but I felt an urgent desire to get out.

I went so far as to drag my wife Sarah, on vacation to Playa del Carmen, Mexico at the very end of 2019 in hopes of getting her hooked on the dream of a life in paradise, one that would entice her to leave our relatively comfortable life in Dallas and run off with me to the tropics. I didn't know much. I just knew that I wanted to be somewhere else, somewhere warm and fun and beautiful.

I remembered the way that I felt when I visited Mexico with my father and my teens, and I wanted to be impressed with a place like that again. Our trip was wonderful and it worked a charm. Sarah was sold on the idea, but she wasn't in the same kind of hurry that I was, so we talked about making plans, saving up, maybe investing here in the near future, and then retiring early here someday.

But the timeline had different plans and 2020 happened not long after that. Suddenly making this escape plan our highest priority, and with this, the first phase of the escape process began; moving from thinking about doing a thing to planning how to do a thing. Because there's a big difference between a vague desire, which is usually where things start, just a visceral need to take action and a fully formed plan.

That emotional need is useful. It will drive you on through periods of challenge and limited visibility, but it has to be paired with a plan for that desire to actually manifest in the world. In my experience, this happens in stages and it takes a little time. That emotional need becomes a fuzzy mental image and then a dream or a daydream, and then an obsession, and eventually it finds expression through our need to be creative.

But right in the middle, there is the key to hacking and optimizing this processand that's the dreaming part. Learning how to dream properly and, and I don't necessarily mean the dreaming while you're asleep kind of dreaming, is essential to the process of building a better life because you have to be able to visualize something clearly to make it real.

And this is the key to this stage of the process, but it's also essential to understand how dreaming works and that it's not like imagining in the active sense of the word, but more like receiving or channeling inspiration and then running with it. Dreaming is co-creative. Your imagination is contributing to the dream, but that's not the whole story.

Other influences like spirits, or even simply the last thing you watched on TV, can invade and influence our thoughts and dreams. This half creative, half receptive mental state is ideal for stewing on and developing rough concepts into fully fleshed out ideas and plans. You can practice entering this idle minded daydream-like state on demand, allowing creative ideas to flow into your mind, and then extracting the essence of those idle thoughts to inform your self-discovery and your life planning efforts.

There are also various magical techniques that facilitate this practice, like journeying, which can be used to extract raw psychic data that you can then further analyze with other methods. Prayer and petitioning spirits is also really effective here because it's a low effort request. Spirits don't have to bend reality very much to slip an inspired thought into your mind.

So go to your spirit guides and ask them how and where you need to live in order to set yourself up for success in the coming years. And that's half the first stage right there. Learning to dream effectively, to gather inspiration and direction from your guides so that you have some idea what you're doing and where you need to go from.

The other half of the work in this stage is distilling those chaotic and unvalidated ideas that you've gathered into actionable intelligence that you can actually translate into a plan. And for that divination is your best friend, and particularly tarot for its comprehensive language of visual metaphor.

Journeying, spirit communication, et cetera, once you're proficient at them, will generate a lot of data quickly, but that raw data is often nonsensical and requires judicious interpretation. This process of validating truth requires a keen sense of discernment and a habit of careful analysis. As they say, trust and verify, and that's where divination, particularly tarot comes in.

Being able to receive messages or cues from the universe, like syncs and so on, and then verify those impressions with divination is essential tech for anyone who's trying to exit and build. This is why it's absolutely essential to have a reliable system for asking and getting answers to yes no questions, so that you can eliminate bad options and validate good ones.

You also need to be able to check your own decision making capabilities from time to time with divination and sometimes even to trust divinatory advice above your own. And this is an admittedly fraught prospect, but I know this has happened multiple times in our own experience. This is probably a subject worth an entire episode itself, but at a high level, my strategy for using tarot to get reliable yes or no answers is adapted from Gordon White's excellent tarot course available through his premium membership at runesoup.com. Dealing only from the Pips, or Minor Arcana, the short answer to yes or no questions is a simple matter of counting reds versus blacks. Cups and coins or pentacles are red and batons or wands and swords are black. This comes from their playing card heritage, where the suits align: hearts and cups, diamonds and coins, clubs and batons, and spades and swords.

Reds are "good" things like love, people and fun. That would be cups and money, material, growth, stability, et cetera, coins or pentacles; and blacks, which are bad things like hard work, wands or batons, and conflict, swords.  In practice, I've learned that I get the best results by asking a battery of questions, starting broad and then refining my questions with more and more specifics as I go; and this feels a little bit like a game of 20 questions. If you're struggling with an answer that you've received, it can also be useful to ask the opposing question, so what happens if I do X? And then what happens if I don't do X? That sort of thing. Asking about your happiness in the wake of whatever choice you're facing is also helpful because if you're happy with the outcome, then it can't be all bad, right?

So asking, will I be happy with the outcome if I do X? for example.  And for the more nebulous matters where you don't yet have clear yes or no questions and journeying or praying isn't producing useful results, you can always try working with a pendulum. Pendulums can be held over a map to find locations of interest, and they can also be used with lists or charts where the pendulum can indicate one out of many.

This is a very practical way to get data that you can then validate with the other methods that I've mentioned.

If planning your escape feels overwhelming, then just wait until you go out into the unknown and take those first few steps towards this independent life that you're dreaming about. The world gets a lot bigger when you start taking responsibility for your own wellbeing and future. Of course, having a family of any kind adds even more pressure and responsibility.

So a strong constitution is an essential ingredient, and that's something I've personally spent a lot of time praying on. Having the faith to make it through all the times when we were stuck in limbo, waiting for our dreams to manifest, that's definitely been the most challenging aspect of what we've experienced so far in our journey, because there are a lot of things that can go wrong, and some of them definitely will.

You have to be able to keep a positive mental attitude and keep your mindset and your actions oriented to your success at all times. We tend to get in our own way more often than other people actively work against us. And this is a recipe for disaster when you're stepping out from the semi protective covering of modern society.

Pursuing this dream is very much an act of swimming against the current, so if you're actively subverting yourself, you are doomed to fail, and this can be both in big and small ways. Self-doubt and self-critical and self-limiting thinking, these mental states can do tremendous damage to your ability to bring your dreams into reality.

And particularly in the early stages, it can be all too easy to invent so many reasons why you can't do what you dream about, that you convince yourself to prevent this from happening. I cannot recommend enough that you get at least one really good, thorough energy cleanse from a professional energy healer.

There are different types of energy healers too, though. And for this you need the kind that removes the negative energy. So like a shamanic energy healer or something like that, not just a Reiki practitioner. And the reason that I make that distinction is that reiki is all about sending positive energy, but in this case, what I'm recommending is actually removing the toxic energy that you've already acquired.

Over time, lingering old energy becomes toxic and gets stored in the mental and physical body as negative patterns of behavior. And human beings are supposed to be able to let things go quickly, but the modern world has really forgotten how to do that, so we have to reprogram ourselves and occasionally it's worth getting our energy cleansed by a professional.

When your energy field is clean of debris and circulating well, things tend to feel more coherent to make more sense, and life just seems more clear. It can be very difficult to notice the difference once you're out of whack, but looking back, once you've had a good energy cleanse is usually very telling. You may find it difficult to let go of familiar activities and the familiar faces of your current life, of old ways of thinking and acting, and sometimes even of careers, relationships, or belief structures.

It can be very difficult to do so, but it's necessary to cut your emotional ties with anything that can't come with you. The best magic for this is cord cuttings and contract clearings. Simple rituals where you cut ties to relationships, belief, and other bonds that keep you in place and prevent you from taking action.

Once you're seeing things clearly and able to follow the subtle impressions of your intuition effectively turning plans into reality becomes much simpler. And that's good because this is where the really challenging stuff begins. Before you can move out to the country, or out to another country like we did, there are a lot of logistics to consider; starting with how you're going to afford to pay for everything you need. Land, a house, various equipment and supplies, knowledge that you probably don't possess yet, and probably professional help along the way and a lot of other things that tend to cost money. What are you going to do to pay for your project and how is it going to continue to work when you're living off grid in the wilderness or whatever?

Then there are logistical concerns like legalities, such as visas if you're moving internationally, tax implications, access to family schooling requirements and materials, if you're a parent, coordinating transportation, reducing and packing your stuff, and on and on. There are lots of things big and small that need to be ordered, categorized, scheduled, and taken care of to make your escape successfully.

It's a keep your nose to the grindstone kind of time when you're trying to break free of years of inertia. And there is no better energy to evoke than Saturn's. I have a beloved Saturn talisman ring made by Psychic Desert, which I wear frequently, but at the time, I wore practically nonstop. Venerating Saturn regularly, wearing talismans like this, and doing astro magical workings at appropriate times to petition Saturn for resolve, constitution, and above all,, patience is a very good idea. And while Saturn is great for helping you stay focused, stay on task, and make that gradual progress that gets the job done, that's all about keeping yourself in line. For the external world around you, you need almost the opposite energy. You need breakthrough energy.

And this is where the magic of the crossroads and its psychopomp deities excels above all others. This is the hallowed ground of psychopomps; those spirits who travel between worlds, walk the roads, guard the intersections, and rule the dead travelers and all the in between places. As many roadblocks as you will inevitably face on your journey, the magic of road opening is an essential technique to master when your path is blocked or obscured. A few simple road opening rituals, based on a preexisting relationship with a psychopomp like Hermes or Hekate, can work wanders. It took us over seven months to get an appointment with the Mexican consulate in Dallas, Texas so that we could just apply for our residency in Mexico, thanks to Covid related restrictions. They didn't even answer their email for months, and when they finally responded to us, it was with a series of nearly impossible requirements for signed proof of all these financial documents that our banks and our investment platforms were simply not willing to give us.

It was the strangest and most complicated fucking thing. In both cases, we used road opening spells to break through seemingly intractable problems that were giving us a great deal of anxiety as our home was already on the market to sell long before we'd even gotten an appointment to get our visas.

And again, I used similar road opening tactics earlier this year to dislodge a stalled government process that's been preventing us from being able to complete the purchase of our jungle property for almost a year. The best road opening tech I've found is another gem from Gordon White of Rune Soup, which is buried somewhere in his winding course in his premium membership.

If I remember correctly, he suggests building an altar dedicated to road opening, or more or less dedicated to a particular project and opening the roads for its progress and completion.  Working this altar, which is of course a microcosm through which you can magically affect the microcosm the world around you in any matters relating to your project, in conjunction with a psychopomp like Hermes or Hekate is a great way to dedicate focused intention to an important endeavor.

As you work out the kinks in your plan and begin putting it into action, you'll no doubt encounter some big, scary problems that shake your faith. I know that we did. But if you stay focused and determined (big Saturn energy) and build those important spiritual relationships that help you get around sticky problems, you'll eventually grind your way through this stage of the escape process.

Once your adventure is underway, the most important consideration is how to keep yourself, your family, and your stuff safe as you set off on your grand adventure, moving all your shit to your new paradise. Protection magic is an often ignored part of magical practice, I think primarily because you usually can't tell when it's working precisely because it's working.

But when you can drive across the border in eight days through Mexico and a car filled with your family and belongings over every bump and rough spot in the road without so much as getting a nail in your tire, the protection magic must be working. Since that was exactly our experience and stuff goes wrong every time that I let it slip, I've learned to prioritize protective magic all the time. The gorgons and particularly Algol, or Medusa, are ancient terrors, which the Greeks placed upon their shields as an apotropaic, or protective ward. This is the kind of energy you need to call upon when you're exposed to an unsafe world.

Algol lives in the heavens and the constellation Taurus as a fixed star, which can be called upon in a typical astro magical working to make talismans or talismanic materia. In our case, I prepared a paper taliman under an Algol election, which we carried in our car on the trip, along with some Algol blessed protective salt, which we sprinkled around the car and in the corners of our hotel rooms and AirBnbs, and eventually our rentals once we had settled here in Quintana Roo.

I've also made several talismans and oil under protective lunar mansions, such as the 18th lunar mansion, Al Qalib in Scorpio and the 25th lunar mansion, Al Sa'd Al Akbiyah in Aquarius. And we made a batch of protective talismans on an election during Mars's time in Scorpio as well. Each was produced for and dedicated to a different purpose, a different type of protection or a different thing being protected.

Protection magic is basically like malefica, the kind where you're not actually trying to intend anyone harm, but harm may be done to anyone who violates your personal safety or sovereignty. So when selecting protective elections, I tend to favor less aggressive malefic configurations like a trine with Mars instead of a conjunction.

But I won't shy away from a traditionally malefic placement like Al Qalib because the intention is also essentially malefic under the right conditions. Beyond protection, there are two other types of magic you should work when relocating: old-fashioned travel magic and attracting favor from any authorities you may face along the way.

Travel magic is most commonly the purview of mercurial, patron of moving quickly himself, Hermes. When flights need connecting or travel itineraries need managing, mercury needs to be on your side and well venerated well in advance. We prepare a mojo or gris-gris bag with mercurial herbs and stones and prayers for swift, safe and straightforward travels.

This has always served us very well. Another case of if you can't tell, it must be working. When it comes to gaining the favor of authorities, we have never been disappointed in workings with the powerful fixed star Deneb Alghedi. We've relied heavily on Sphere + Sundry, excellent Deneb Alghedi oil for materia and on invocations and paper talismans for Deneb Alghedi, on the ritual side of things. There are also a number of lunar mansions, particularly Al Hana, the fifth lunar mansion, and Al Jabhah, the 10th lunar mansion, which are particularly good for favor from authority workings, provided that the moon is waxing. In any case, carrying such a talisman with you while you cross international borders or meet with government officials and anointing the corners of contracts, visa applications, and so on with the same kind of talismanic oil are all great ways to magically lubricate your dealings with bureaucracy and the machinations of power.

Once you found your place and relocated to it, the real work actually begins. It's not a simple thing to carve a place for yourself in a new community, and it can be even more challenging if there are cultural and language barriers to overcome as well. Before we actually made our move to Mexico, we had a lot of different ideas about what it would be like to settle into a new place, but most of them were wrong.

The language barrier is more challenging than we expected, but it's actually the cultural barriers, however, that are the least flexible. Not everyone loves that we're here, working with the government can be quite challenging, and no one really gives a shit if you're satisfied with the experience or the outcome.

While Mexicans are generally a pretty friendly bunch, they're often understandably suspicious and not entirely welcoming, at first. White folks like us have a troubled history with being colonizers, so it's a fraught proposition to move here in the first place, and we recognize that and respect that.

Still, it makes it difficult to find your place among the locals whom we admittedly share very, very little with in common. Anyway, we've made friends with a few of the jungle expats and they're lovely weirdos like us, and a couple of Rune Soupers have even moved here recently, which is amazing, but those kind of meaningful connections have been rare.

Besides friends, neighbors, and people with common interests are also important. We often talk about acquaintances like they're only almost friends, but it can actually be very useful to have relationships based solely on commonly shared interests or goals rather than just beliefs and preferences.

Becoming recognizable in your community in a low profile way is a good thing because people are more likely to be friendly, helpful, and accommodating to a familiar face. If you're planning on growing your own food, raising animals and so on, these kind of relationships are crucial. It's all good to have your own chickens and your own garden, but it's pretty difficult to imagine producing a hundred percent of everything that you need or want.

When you have a network of local contacts with similar interests, it becomes much easier to find things. Besides every grower knows that it's important to have at least a few gardening friends, so you can compare notes, swap strategies, and share your harvest. Managing the transition to a new place and into a new resilience and independent lifestyle successfully, meaning you stick with it, you stay there and you build the life that you want, ironically, requires integrating into a community. We need other people, and living in a foreign country really underlines the critical importance of community. In the escape process though, it's really the same regardless of where you choose to exit and build. Magically, you have a few approaches to consider when it comes to making beneficial connections with people.

Talismans are a great way to attract things and people into your life, and there are some lunar mansions dedicated to friendship and love, which seems like a good fit. It's something that I would and have approached the local land spirits that I work with and our ancestors; you know, give offerings, say a little prayer about being grateful for all the things they bring into your life, and then ask them to, in whatever way they can, help you attract positive and beneficial relationships within your local community. But really the most direct route would be more of a glamor magic approach where you anoint yourself with Venusian oils and  regularly pray to Venus, and petition for meeting good people with shared passions, and then regularly go to meetups, social events, and so on, and try to meet as many people as possible while blessed with the allure of Aphrodite.

This is the approach that we're taking right now, spending more time socializing. We're kissing a lot more frogs so that we can find a few princes, and we're leveraging talismanic oils that we've previously made or purchased from good elections to give ourselves a magical advantage. So those are strategies for making friends, but what about building connections in your local supply chain?

intending for these works well, as does praying for direction on how to find the resources you need. But supply chains are always subject to physical constraints like demand outpacing supply, or the logistical challenges of distance. A certain amount of pragmatism is necessary here, and potentially the answer lies partially in traditionalism as well as in magic.

Any biosphere that has historically supported human life has within it the resources necessary for humans to thrive, to be healthy, et cetera. By definition, it's not necessary to ship materials around the world to be healthy and flourish. Learning about traditional foods and local herbalism can help you regain sovereignty over your health and wellbeing.

It could be argued that the most enchanted and magical approach is simply to learn your biosphere and to research the folk healing remedies and magical attritions of local. For example, essential oil of oregano and fresh basil are two healing remedies that are popular in this area of Mexico. A study from 2017 found that oil of oregano is antimicrobial, antifungal, antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, anti-diabetic, and anti-cancer.

Another study from 2018 found fresh basil to provide relief for and treatment of respiratory, gastrointestinal, kidney, and skin disease. Yerba Buena (spearmint) is also very popular here and is used to relieve nasal congestion, cramps, digestive issues, as an anti-asthmatic, spasmatic, anti-inflammatory, particularly for the liver, and even anti parasitic, which is actually very important here.

It's interesting to note that it can be difficult to grow many herbs here in the tropics, but basil, oregano, and spearmint flourish and assist with a significant portion of preventative health concerns. There are, of course, other popular herb and plant-based treatments with long histories in this area of Mexico, but my point is that our needs are met with resources that can be produced easily right here within this biosphere and even in our own backyard.

Fruits are very plentiful here and provide many of the antioxidants, vitamins, phytochemicals, and other plant-based nutritional elements in our diet. Greens don't grow so well here, so we adapt by consuming a high amount of fruits and sweet potato, called camote locally, which also improves blood sugar regulation offsetting the high amount of fructose in our diet.

In many cases, you'll need to get down to this level of detail in your supply chain management because it's not only important to know what you eat and where it comes from, but why you eat the foods you consume and how they contribute to and balance your diet and nutrition. Everything in the local environment works together in mostly unseen ways to provide the basic conditions for life to flourish and to continue flourishing.

We don't need to ship materials across the planet to support ourselves, but we do have to educate ourselves on the local biosphere, and its many natural resources. In the strictest sense, this may not seem magical, but for me, there are a few things more magical than the act of growing plants that you then use to sustain and improve the quality of your life and the lives of other people, animals, et cetera around you.

Entering into relationship with your supply chain makes it sacred, and it brings reverence to your engagement with it. And of course, there are all kinds of intention setting exercises and specific magical workings that could be employed to support your effort. Magic to learn about local plants and herbs faster. Magic to find guides and teachers to acquire the plants you need and to encourage them to grow. And I think that working with local spirits to find the highest quality local resources just makes a ton of sense.

This brings us to the end of part one of The Great Escape. In this episode, we discussed some of the reasons why the concept of "Exit and Build" has merit and some of my family's experiences and challenges with the exit or escape journey. We talked about the first four of eight stages of this journey and the challenges and opportunities that arise in each, as well as what kind of magical spells and techniques and ways of thinking can be employed to complete each stage successfully.

The first stage is all about dreaming, asking for guidance, and interpreting and validating the information you get in response with divination. Next, you begin to put your plans into action, preparing to move, getting legalities in order, and doing very mundane things like financial planning. But through all of this, also working magically in the background, venerating Saturn to strengthen your focus and resolve, working astrological magic to gain favor from authorities, and working with crossroad spirits to open the roads.

When you're ready, it's now time to relocate with your family and therefore, it's also time for lots of protection and travel magic to ensure your safety and smooth travels. Once arriving in a new paradise, getting settled and setting down roots in the community is the first order of business. And with it comes the magic of making friends, dressing yourself with Venusian oils and going out to events, petitioning your guides and local spirits to find good people, and so on.

And at the same time, you're building social connections, you're also going to be setting up your family's supply chain where your food and other resources come from. Spending time learning local recipes, remedies, and wellness regimens brings you into resonance and deepens your trust in the natural world as homesteaders growers and custodians of land, this trust is an essential part of entering into relationship with place.

In the next episode, we'll cover the four remaining stages and conclude with a summary of useful takeaways to remember from both episodes. Subscribe now so that you can tune in next week for part two of The Great Escape here on the Postmugglism podcast. Thanks for listening or watching, and I'll see you in the next episode.