We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Mark NeCamp Jr. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Mark below.
Mark, we’re thrilled to have you sharing your thoughts and lessons with our community. So, for folks who are at a stage in their life or career where they are trying to be more resilient, can you share where you get your resilience from?
First off, thank you very much for the opportunity to be interviewed for this magazine. I really love how you connect individual stories to a wider audience, and create a sense of almost collective community by allowing readers to connect on the similarities of the people you interview while being enriched by the differences.
I get my resilience from a lot of places, but before I get into what I like to call “spiritual resilience”, I would like to talk about the resilience that I have gained from my upbringing. I have always been a child between two worlds. I am biracial, and I have always felt that I have one foot in the mainstream European-American world, and one foot in the African American community. I feel like I have dual citizenship in a lot of ways, while staying in one country (passport not required). This affords me a unique experience where I can be a part of the stories of both worlds and travel between them with ease, like a cultural traveler or even a cultural nomad traveling back and forth. The sense of being able to be complete unto myself, carry all that I have (identity wise) on my metaphorical back and go to different destinations has given me a cosmopolitan sensibility and an explorer’s heart.
I also had a somewhat traumatic childhood that gave me resilience. My father disowned me at a young age, the only male authority figure I had in my grandfather (my mother’s father) passed away when I was ten years old, I often had to half-raise my own mother due to her substance abuse history, and I had to be a surrogate spouse to both my mother and grandmother. I guess you could say a lot going on (LOL). This is only the tip of the iceberg. I could go on and on about the sexual abuse at the the hands of one of my mother’s fiances, the bullying I received from both Caucasian and African-American children growing up both for my racial backgound, my weight at the time (I was a chubby kid), and undiagnosed ADHD. I had to grow up very quickly and figure out a lot of adult things way sooner than I should have. In a lot of ways growing up fast gave me a leg up on people in terms of emotion and intellectual maturity, and made me develop strategies to handle complex adult situations when my brain was still developing and thus shaping my ability to manage stress, deal with unknown situations, and endure almost anything.
Lastly I would say I draw resilience from my spiritual training and multi-faith religious education that spanned from the Catholicism of my childhood to the occult exploration and training that began in my late teens (I am skipping over studies in “shamanism”, Tibetan and Zen Buddhism, Hinduism, Esoteric Christianity, and Mystical Islam). Skills such as meditation, prayer, deciphering ancient texts in foreign languages, and trying to make sense of the big questions of “who we are” and “why”, and understanding subtle spiritual mysteries and mystical puzzles, gave me such a rich sense of self, self-confidence, and faith In my own abilities. Being part of a spiritual movement like modern day Paganism, where there is no intermediary between myself and the Divine- and in many ways I am my own “priest”- helped me rely on myself and teach me to trust my own senses of intuition, faith, and awareness.
Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?
I am an adventurer, public speaker, healer, author, poet, teacher, spiritual alchemist, and modern day student and practitioner of the Art. I teach classes using magick as a tool for personal growth.
My first book, Energy Magick, by Moon Books Publishing (available through Amazon and Barnes & Noble and other bookstores) comes out May 1st. I can be contacted through my website www.marknecampjr.com.
There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?
1. Open Mindedness. It is extremely important to keep an open mind about other people, in terms of their differences, ways of life, mindset, where they are at emotionally and mentally, and what they represent, but also about who you are and who you want ot become. Who you are, and who the people around you are, change constantly. The ability to be aware of change and open-minded to the processes of transformation that are all around us, as well as differences in race, religion, culture, sexuality, politics, and philosophy is extremely important.
How to cultivate? Read biographies on people different from you in terms of beliefs, culture, and even national origins; try different foods; or go to a spiritual service of a religion that is not your own.
2. Empathy and Compassion. It is very important to be able to step into the metaphorical, and emotional, shoes of another person and understand where they are coming from. We are all connected, and there are more similarities and differences between us. The ability to silence one’s internal chatter, attempt to not be centered on the self and our own motivations, and reach out to another person in the sense of imagining where they are coming from is important so that we can connect with how they feel. When we validate another person’s emotions, we validate and accept our own- especially the ones we often disassociate from. I feel that this is the only way we are going to evolve as a culture. This goes hand in hand with compassion. If we can see and understand how similar we are, that empathy turns into compassion, and that compassion goes into something even greater which is what the ancient Greeks would call “agape”- or a love of all people that is selfless, humble, and rooted in service to each other. This sense of love is what binds us together spiritually and socially and I believe will eventually be humanity’s ultimate hope for a better future.
3. How to cultivate? Make space for friends, family, and loved ones by actively listening to them in times of emotional troubles (listening to understand where they are coming from, and not just to respond.
Curiosity. Our culture, that gets more and more influenced by how we process digital information, is very fast-paced. As a result, one of the ways we cope with a glut of information is to make quick generalizations. These generalizations stop us from asking questions of who we are, and of the nature of the world. The ability to ask questions, and the desire to figure things- asking the how’s, why’s, and the what’s- and wanting to try to understand the world is intrinsic to our discovery of who we are, our search for personal meaning, and an understanding of how we fit into the world. If we cannot learn and grow, we become stagnant shallow husks of what our potential would lead us to be.
How to cultivate? Ask questions about who you are, what you believe, and why you do the things you do. Then ask those same questions about the people close to you, and even people you do not know that well. Ask similar questions about the world. Also, read. Read as much as you can. This could be cookbooks, biographies, poetry, novels- anything! Just keep the mind going and be mentally adventurous.
Okay, so before we go we always love to ask if you are looking for folks to partner or collaborate with?
I have a lot I want to do in this life. I need to collaborate with artists (especially visual and performance art), fellow spiritual seekers and students (none of us are masters- we are ALL learning), scientists regarding the intersection of spirituality and science (think about the link between neuroscience and meditation), and honestly-people that just want to change the world. I have a lot of ideas on how to make the world a better place, and I would love help. That being said- I don’t know everything, so I would love to hear ideas from people on how we can make he world a better place.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.marknecampjr.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marknecampjr/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/marknecampjr
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-necamp-jr/
