You’re listening to the transform your life from the inside out podcast. This episode is one in the conversations with a sorcerer series, and this one is about having an altar. And it’s titled, What an altar really is and why you should have one. You know, we tend to think that alters are only for religious purposes. You know, maybe we go to church and we see altars, and then there are some sinister things we’ve heard about altars.

And, you know, we have all these beliefs and all these thoughts about what altars are, and we generally make them religious, but they are not that.

And in this episode, I want to talk about what an altar is and why you should have one. Keep listening.

Hi, I’m Jim Fortin, and you’re about to start transforming your life from the inside out with this podcast. I’m widely considered the leader in subconscious transformation, and I’ve coached super achievers all around the world for over 25 years. Here you’re going to find no rah rah motivation and no hype, because this podcast is a combination of brain science, transformational psychology and ancient wisdom all rolled into one, to take your life to levels you’ve never thought possible, if you’re wanting a lot more in life, to feel better, to heal, to have peace of mind, to feel powerful and alive, and to bring more abundance and prosperity into your life, then this podcast is for you, because you’re going to start learning how to master your mind and evolve your consciousness. And when you do that, anything you want then becomes possible for you. I’m glad you’re here.

Okay, so what is an altar and why should you have one? The definition of an altar is a table or flat top block used for religious ritual, especially for making sacrifices or offerings to a deity. And in this conversation, this conversation is dated back to New Year’s Eve in 2017 and someone in the room was asking about altars, and Don Xavier said, as I’ll talk about in just a minute, that many people think that altars are for religious purposes only, and they’re not for me an altar because I’ve had one for many, many years. An altar is about a sacred space, basically to manufacture, to set my intent and my intention for what I want to create in life. I look back many years ago, as I’ve mentioned before, I didn’t watch a whole lot of Oprah, and I watched some of the last season because, I don’t know, I just found it interesting.

And Oprah was walking through maybe this room. Outside of her bedroom, it looked like a TV room. Oprah pointed down to a table, and she said, every single morning it can be five minutes. It can be 15 minutes. It doesn’t matter, but I spend time at this table, and she had a deck of cards on it. I don’t know if it was taro or what it was.

She had a notepad, she had a candle and some different things on the table. And when I saw that, my first thought was, plain and simple, that’s an altar. Shamans have altars. Spiritualists have altars. Religions have altars. And altars have many different uses. I’ve had an altar for literally 28 years, and I’ve had all types of altars based upon where I’ve lived and how I’ve lived. I’ve had literally big altars. When I lived in New York City, I lived in a room and a compact space, and I had a little table that was two by two with two shelves, and that was, that was my altar. I’ve had them in the corner of a room. I’ve had them on tabletops. I’ve had them in many different places and over the years.

Over the past 20 years, I have an entire room in my house that is an altar, and the entire house I also consider my sacred space. I consider the house my sanctuary. I want to go back to the conversation now with Don Xavier on New Year’s Eve in 2017 and there was someone in the group. I don’t know who it was. I think it was someone that works with him, that was visiting. And she said, as I’ve been doing these episodes, I’ll recapitulate the conversation word for word. She said, don don Xavier is having an altar a way of being an Ayni,

a y n i, which is reciprocity, sacred reciprocity of life, which, by the way, that’s the next episode after this one. That’s how I want to finish the year out. Is talking about Ayni again, but anyway, she said, is having an altar of way of being an Ayni.

And Don Xavier said, quote, you have to understand. In your altar is a portal. Now, what I don’t know in sharing this with you, I’m making the assumption, is it a portal energetically for everyone, or only for people that are working with him, because he’s assisting them energetically with different energies, assuming here, and I’m being assumptive, that an altar, because everything is energy, is a portal for everyone. So I don’t want to mislead anyone, but I’m just sharing my interpretation. But what he said is this quote, an altar is a way for you to start working in invisible realms.

Quote, any altar you have, it has nothing to do with getting in the religion and not even spirituality. As I explained before, an altar is about cosmology. And an altar. It’s your altar, and no one can nourish that altar, but you, you’re not going to nourish anyone else’s altar, and they are not going to nourish your altar. The only one that can nourish it is the one that created it. So all the offerings you do at that altar, you know, and then he said, maybe a shot glass of rum or food or flowers or whatever. Because when you have an altar, an altar is used to make offerings. Now for me, depending on what being and what energies I’m making offers to that will determine what the offer is. Maybe it’s herbs, maybe it’s candy, maybe it’s flowers, maybe it’s tobacco. I want to take a step back here.

I just this, just dawned on me. I have people from all walks of life listening to the podcast, the majority of people that listen really are spiritually oriented people, and they they just get it. They get it. This makes sense to them, and many of them probably even have had, or do have some kind of altar in their house. But what I want to share is Don Xavier’s comment. I want to recapitulate that.

It’s not about religion. It is about cosmology. It is about energy. As I said just a couple of minutes ago, many of you listening, you’re probably spiritually inclined, meaning you may read tarot cards. Maybe you read the Ching. You work with Chinese medicine. You know, it’s different things for different people. Maybe you read a lot of ancient wisdom, the Cabal, Ian, theosophy, Kabbalah, I don’t know which is different things for all of us, but what I do know is, if you do have an all, if you do have an altar. It’s important that you make offerings to the beings that basically you’re using the altar to make offerings to. Also, I have a room in my house, and I call it the healing room, and I have little altars all over my house, nothing like Don Xavier, and I’ll talk about that in a little bit, but I have an entire room that is an altar room, and it’s a fair sized room, many, many artifacts from all around the world. And I remember one time, and I’ve only had probably a half a dozen people, I’ve invited them into that room as a guest over the past 25 years, and I had a woman one time say, oh my god, the energy in here feels like when I was at Machu Picchu.

I had another friend of mine. He and his girlfriend were visiting Sedona, a former student, and I showed them what I call the healing room, the altar room, and they were literally just like, Oh my god. It feels so peaceful in this space. I’m almost vibrating. I can, I can feel it. And then I invited another friend of mine here recently, who I’ve known for a couple of years. She knows Don Xavier, and done a little work with him. And even when I walked her into because she’s also my interior designer, I showed her the room, and she’s like, you can feel the energy in here, and that’s my intention, to build the energy to have that spiritual presence, that spiritual space. It doesn’t matter how you do it. What matters is that you do it.

What also matters is that you clean and respect your altar. For all the years that I’ve had an altar, I don’t want people put things down on it. It’s not a air quote cable that people can just walk by and put things on. I mean, for me, it’s a sacred space. Literally. I don’t even know how to put it any better than. At it’s a sacred space, and I treat it that way. So it’s not for me in some space where people can just walk by and put keys on or their wallet or a glass of water or whatever it might be. Maybe it’s in a room, and it can’t be in a room, and that’s okay, but if I had small kids, I wouldn’t put it in the place where they could put all their toys on the altar. Again, I’m going to reiterate for me, it is a place of reverence and respect.

So Don Xavier was talking about making offerings to beings that you might work with, and even if you don’t work at the particular being, and many of you probably do not, it’s still a good idea to make offerings to spirit, however you wanted to define that for you. You know you see this in religion, like you go to church and you tithe. Many people tithe, not everyone does, but that is an offering. Working with a shaman, I never ever ask him for any kind of guidance or any kind of help without first making an offering, which is a Native American principle, it’s giving before I get, and giving before I ask. We’ll talk a little bit more about that in just a bit. But Don Xavier said, meaning the offering when you leave that in Ayni, meaning when you leave it with an open heart and reciprocity. That is reciprocity to the beings, because you have to give to receive. And the person asking him, she said, Dawn, is that like being in gratitude? And he said, No, obviously we have to have that gratitude daily, but that has nothing to do with your altar. He went on to say, daily, I wake up and I say thanks, because I’ve been granted another day, and I’ve been doing this a very long time, and I open my eyes and I can see the miracles. It’s a beautiful thing. I get granted one more day, I can do things like I can see the sun. And I know that some people have never even seen the sun before ever but yet I can do that. Some people don’t have that experience, and I’m very grateful for that. And I go through my day, and I live my day as if today is going to be my last day, and I live my day in gratitude, and I do my best that I can say at the end of the day.

You know, today was a good day. I was gifted with life today, and I live in gratitude now this person asking the question they were talking about, are there specific things to do with making an altar? And I want to point out now, there’s not a rule book on it anywhere. I’m sure you can find stuff. Actually, I look for some some people before, because I was taught by Him, but I’m sure you can get a line and just type in how to create your own spiritual altar, how to create your own altar again, third time, it’s non religious, but it’s a sacred space. Now what I mean by that is, when I’m manifesting things, what I do for me is I write them down, and this is only one tiny aspect of what I do, but it might give you something to work with. I will take what it is that I want to create, and I’ll write it down on the piece of paper, and then I have this little glass pyramid.

I’ll put this piece of paper with the intention of what it is I want to create in the glass pyramid, and I put it on my altar. Anyway, he said, we have many altars in our house. And if you go to our house, which it’s true, because I’ve been in his house many times, he says, it’s pretty good size, and we can barely fit in it because of the altars. And then he said, he calls it the cave, but he goes, I have a specific room that no one goes into but only me. I’m family. I am blood. I’m his brother in law, and I have not even been in his bedroom and over two decades, because I know he has his main altar in there, and the cave, the healing room, where he works energetically with beings and and assist people from that room. I haven’t even been in there in decades as well.

He doesn’t let anyone in because he doesn’t want anyone to bring their energy into that energy. And he says, talking about the cave, he goes, it’s very. Small and I can barely I’m laughing because it is true, because I can barely fit into that room, because there are altars everywhere. When you go to his house, not exaggerating, there are altars every where. I mean, it’s not like a person that’s a hoarder and clutters, meaning you can’t sit down anywhere, but pretty much on every table in the house, every shelf in the house, there’s an altar in the kitchen, there’s probably a half a dozen altars.

In each bathroom, there’s a little altar. And all of these altars he has as an offering to particular beings that he works with. I know that might sound a little alien to a lot of you guys listening, but that’s what shamans do as they work with the energies. And he said, I have many kinds of altars, as I was just alluding to the kinds of altars he has based upon the beings that he’s working with. And these altars basically are in gratitude to the beings who assist him, to help the planet, to help humanity, to help people heal, whatever it might be that he’s doing for other people. He has altars that he actually uses, for lack of better words, as a tool to assist people. And you know, when you go into his house, he has spiritual altars, as I said all over it. It’s like a museum.

And some altars in his house you would probably recognize. I mean, he has altars to Ganesh, to Kuan, Yin to Buddha, to Shiva, to Gandhi, and many, many others. But that’s only like 10% of the altars that he has in his house. The others are to other beings that he works with. And he says, these altars, they all come to be different offerings for the beings that I’m working with. So for example, one small altar might be for one being, but then another small altar might be for another being, like he has. And many of us that work with him, we have a main altar for many of us, that’s in our bedroom, and that’s your main altar, but then you have other altars where you do different things, make different offerings, whatever it might be. Now, he had mentioned a particular lineage of beings. I will not mention them by name here, but he said, when you’re talking about the blank to this person, when you’re talking about the blank beings, you are going into the realms of saints and the holy ones, or the illuminated ones, or ones that represent one particular saint or spiritual entity, maybe an entity from India or Thailand. And then he said, but they’re all interrelated.

And what I want to share with you listening now is all of the deities and Christianity, they might be called something in Catholicism, they might be called something else. But in ancient wisdom, it’s still the same energy, but it has an ancient name to it, and maybe modern day Christianity, or modern day Catholicism, or Buddhism or Hinduism, or the Kabbalah or whatever, are giving it a modern name, so to speak, but the ancient energy is the ancient energy. And then he said, so if you’re going to have an altar for a particular energy, so to speak, there are particular things that you want to offer. There are things that they like. Then what he said is, the beings enjoy it. They smell it. Now, of course, they can’t partake of it physically, but here’s what he said, they suck the energy from it. They take that life force. And that is Ayni, you are giving whatever you’re giving and you’re not expecting anything any change. And when you do that, they and spirit come to you.

I’m going to continue with this episode and share even more, but that’s what next week’s episode is going to be about is the Ayni energetically, the sharing. And he says, I can go to another kind of offer. It just doesn’t matter. You don’t have to specify yourself into any kind of altar. Now, what he meant by that is what I said a little bit earlier, you don’t have to have a specific altar. Maybe it’s a place where you just want to make offerings and gratitude to spirit for your life or your abundance or your health or your wellness or or whatever it might be. But I’m going to back up even further. I’ve always had that sacred space. Space, and it’s a space for me that’s out of the way, the healing room that I’d mentioned, except the people that I’d mentioned. I don’t let anyone in that space, because I don’t want them bringing their air, quote, their energy, into my sacred space. And as a matter of fact, in that space. I don’t even wear shoes in that space.

Why? Because it’s a space of reverence for me. So no matter what size your altar is, whether it’s a two foot by four foot table or a shelf or a little two by two table in the corner of a room, whatever it is, treat it with reverence and respect, and don’t let other people have access to it. It’s not your kids table to pile their things on, to play on. And he said, you know, you can have an element altar, and that can mean a couple of different things. I’m not going to go there in this episode, but he says you have to tune to see what that is. And then he said, it can be Ganesh, it can be Bucha. I don’t know. It all depends upon you, but you will know. So what he’s saying is, tune, get quiet and see what you want to put on your altar. It could be maybe a book of writings. It could be taro cards. It can be any kind of divinity, tools. It can be crystals. It can be flowers. It can be all kinds of things. You know, when I make offerings to a particular being, there’s a couple in particular that I will actually make an offering of tobacco and rum to these particular beings. Other beings, I’ll make offerings, and I’ll have like rum and candy and kiwi and different things I go with what comes to me that I know that this being is going to want. It’s kind of like you giving somebody a gift and you know they’re going to like something, so you give them what you know they’re going to like.

It’s the same thing with the offering. When I’m making an offering, use your intuition, like Don Xavier said, it depends upon you, but you will know, but he talked about and I will not go here, but all the different beings out there, and there are beings of light, beings of dark, and he says, which I know this. He goes, I don’t work with the dark. So I don’t feed the dark. I feed the light, and I feed them with some things to embrace the life force of light. So just ponder that as you’re thinking about what kind of offerings you might want to make. And he said, quote, so I know for a lot of people, they’re not familiar with this, and they try to relate and alter to something religious, and it has nothing to do with that, because we’re talking about raw energy forces. We’re talking about cosmology. In my words, I’m going to say we’re talking about physics and we’re talking about energy. Now. Don Xavier looked across the room. I recall this in the recording. They looked across the room, and he said they meaning all of us in the room that have been with him for years. They’re all very familiar with this because they’ve been doing it for a long time. And for them, it’s easy. Why? Because they’ve been doing it for so long, and they’ve been practicing some want to dive in more and some want to dive in less. And he’s always said, he’s never criticized, never condemned.

Some of us are more spiritually devoted and committed that work with him. Some of us are less spiritually devoted and committed. We’re all committed to a large degree, but there’s a variance in those degrees, and he never judges that. He says the altar, it’s like having a very powerful engine. You can go slow, or you can go fast, or you can drive a short distance, or you can go far. That’s entirely up to you. That is for each of you to decide.

And obviously that would be guided to you, because everything is about that. Everything is about guidance. He wanted to say that when you establish all this, you have access to the invisible realms, or the invisible world, if you want to put it that way. And then he says it gives some the ability to see the invisible realms. Maybe you see it, maybe you don’t, maybe you sense it, maybe you don’t. And he talked about the energy that he carries within him to help us with the altars. And he went on to say, and I’m. Paraphrasing here, but he goes, You know, when we get together, everyone here in the room, we would always get together on Saturday nights. He goes, the next day, they’re toast, they’re fried. And he goes, the reason why is all this energy that I carry with me, and I bring these frequencies to them, all of us in the room. And he goes the next day. They are toasty. They’re fried. And I can speak from many years of experience and spending many, many, many hundreds, if not 1000s of evenings with him, you might feel amazing on a Saturday night, and on that Sunday you’re like, oh my god, what truck hit me last night. I’m gonna do my best to drag myself out of bed, maybe eat some breakfast, crawl to the couch, and that’s going to be my day. And he talked about the beings which come through the altars to some degree. And he goes there with me. They’re with me all the time, and that is what the force is. I can see them. I can hear them. I have conversations even when I am talking, because I am living in the silence.

And silence has nothing to do with being quiet in my mouth. I have silence within me, even if my mouth is moving, I have silence in me, even here, when I’m talking like a parrot all night long. But I have to be in that stage of silence to receive the conversations, which is the best way to put it, the data, meaning the information coming the data. That is my dharma, and I have to do that and make it available where it needs to be available. So for you listening to the podcast, these things that he’s making available, I make some things, what I can available to you guys, because he doesn’t interact with the public. And I can’t tell you guys a lot of what he shares. I’m not allowed to, but I can make available what I can some of you will get it to a larger degree than others. That’s okay. Some of you might be curiosity seekers. That’s okay.

Some of you might be going, Oh, that’s a missing piece I’ve been looking for in this episode helped me better understand it. I don’t know we’re all different. I just know that he does what he does. I do what I do. He went on to say quote, he goes, I know that a lot of people don’t have Ayni in them, and it’s really interesting because some people, they are self centered. They don’t have any Ayni because they are so busy about themself. They are so much about me, me, me, me, and everything is all about them, because they are so self centered, and they try to twist and turn and make everything about them, and it’s impossible for them to have Ayni and be Ayni, even if they think they are actually doing an activity that is related to Ayni. It is what it is after I had the stroke. I took me a while to recover, but, I mean, I was 100% in a reasonable amount of time, quicker than most people. I don’t know why it slipped my mind, but one day I said, Dawn, I know that you helped me, and the beings have helped me. What beings do I make an offering to and he said to me, he was a little Stern, but not a lot.

He wasn’t like slapping me upside the head, or any of that. And I don’t recall his exact words, but he said, along the lines of, you should have known better. You’ve been on this path for a long time, and you could have asked me that a long time ago. Anyway, none of us are perfect, so you’re not perfect. I’m not perfect. We’re all learning. We’re all growing together. And he said, you know, some are born with Ayni and they don’t even know the concept. They don’t even know about the sacred reciprocity that’s inside of them. And he said, So you’re asking a specific question. And I just took off, but I want to know if I answered your question. Now I want to recapitulate just a little bit here, she asked about altars. So an altar I covered that can be a sacred space, a table, a slab, a two by two table, whatever it is for you, but that is your sacred space. You’re not putting your car keys on it. You’re not putting your wallet on it. There are a lot of things you can put on your altar. So for example, when I make an offering to Don Xavier, he will say to me, whatever offering you make to me, I put it on my altar and I bless it for seven days, and I do not touch it no matter what that offering might be. So maybe you can do an offering and you can offer. Offer. When people give you money, maybe put it there and bless it and and have gratitude. That’s all energy. That’s all physics. Maybe you know somebody’s helped you of something, and you can make an offering to them, just out of your heart and put it on the altar. That is energy. Maybe you work with particular beings, or you want particular energies to work with you, you can actually set up a little altar and maybe make offerings to that particular being. What you can also do technology at this day and age. This will give you a start get online and google how to make an altar, and then also Google, what do I put into my or what kind of offerings do I make? See what comes up for you.

Now, before we get to the transformational takeaway, I want to share something with you. Many people will say, Jim, I listen to the podcast. I don’t

need to go any further. That’s all I need. I think I’ve got everything I need here that’s so limited, because I find I say things over and over and over again, and I understand that, you know, we’re people, and we forget and we get distracted and everything. But I want to take you guys deeper. So what I have started is called, and there will probably be a commercial somewhere here, earlier in the episode, I started what’s called a secret podcast. And in that podcast we have actually, we go into deeper insights and personal interaction, where you can interact with me to some degree about these episodes. And again, we call it the insider secret podcast, and we dive deeper in the each episode. But I actually share tools with you that I don’t share on each episode here, like, for example, I will dig deeper into exactly the things that I have on my altar, how I use it, when I use it, how I interact with it, how I clean it, how I bless it, etc, etc. And I’m going to share content on the secret podcast. And in the secret podcast, I’m going to share content that’s only available to the insiders, people that are subscribed to the insiders community and group.

Plus, I’m going to be doing a monthly Q A about the podcast, meaning any questions you have about any of this. I do a live Q A monthly.

So to join that group, go to Jim fortin.com/insiders Jim fortin.com/insiders, and what I’ll do there is I’ll take every single podcast episode that I do going forward, and I will take you even deeper into the episode.

Your transformational takeaway for this episode is this number one, an altar is cosmology. It’s not religious. It’s a portal, an energetic portal. It can be energetic Ayni, if it’s done with an open heart. Basically, energetics are alters, are your participation and engagement into the energetics of gratitude and to a large degree of manifestation. So that’s your transformational takeaway.

So get to it again. If you want to learn more, go over to jimfortin.com/insiders. If not, you can simply get online and just start googling what you want to Google to see what you can find. But either way, start doing something with what I’m sharing with you here so that you can have an amazing 2025 thanks for listening, and I’ll catch you over on the next episode where I’ll be talking about Ayni even deeper and even more, which is the sacred reciprocity of life, take care. Bye, bye.