Shift Your Spirits: Recent Episodes
Slade Roberson
My life changed on the full moon of January 28, 2021.
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This year, New Year's bullshit feels especially bullshitty, doesn't it?
Time is arbitrary.
It’s the difference between today and tomorrow, and that’s always significant, but...
then it's also not.
Dena DeCastro talks about what the Jupiter-Saturn conjunction means for us astrologically, as well as the highlights and headlines of the New Year 2021.
We also have a bit of a conceptual chat about how astrology "works," from the magic of it to how we can use it a tool of personal empowerment.
DENA DECASTRO ASTROLOGY denadecastro.com
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An interview with evidential medium Jeffrey Peck, about how he discovered and trained to develop his mediumship.
Jeffrey Peck is an evidential psychic medium with a passion and dedication to Spirit. His commitment to Spirit combined with his warm and understanding approach provide you with peace of mind and the feeling that you just sat down with your loved ones.
Jeff is one of my closest friends in the spiritual community, and this show has been a long time coming.
GUEST LINKS - JEFFREY PECK
jeffreypeck.com
Arthur Findlay College
The Afterlife of Billy Fingers by Annie Kagan Amazon affiliate link
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This week, again, I didn’t know what to say.
Steven asked me this morning what I decided to talk about and I said “The same thing I talk to you about everyday.”
He immediately said “So, what? You did a podcast about Schitt’s Creek. How is that spiritual?”
I said "Yes. It’s a socio-political commentary.”
“So you’re doing another show about politics.”
“It actually had a surprisingly philosophical message!”
I didn’t know where this episode was going until I started talking.
MENTIONED ON THE SHOW
Schitt’s Creek (Netflix)
Christopher Guest films starring Catherine O’Hara and Eugene Levy:
Waiting for Guffman
Best in Show
A Might Wind
For Your Consideration
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This is a bit of a personal rant about feeling silenced.
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I’m sharing my personal rules for managing outrage and disengaging from toxic online social interactions.
This is definitely a do as I say, not as I do kind of directive...
It’s becoming increasingly difficult to manage outrage; however, the longer I practice these rules of engagement, the more useful they prove to be.
I hope this will give you some constructive perspective or specific strategies you can either borrow or adapt. I feel like these are flexible enough to be used online or off, with family members, with social media acquaintances, and with virtual strangers.
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This week I am procrastinating.
I’m so stuck in procrastination, it’s the only thing I could manage to think or talk about, so … let’s talk about what it is and how to deal with it.
MENTIONED ON THE SHOW
The War of Art by Steven Pressfield
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I’m sharing an old manifesto about clairaudience and how I approach communicating with spirit — communicating with the higher self, with divine wisdom, with inner guidance — through the concept of Voices.
MENTIONED ON THE SHOW
The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle
Who are You Talking to When You Talk to Yourself
Dissociative Identity Disorder
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I’m speaking generally about how astrology can really do my head in sometimes, and more specifically touching on Mars in Retrograde.
But don’t worry if you’re a visitor to the archives from the future — this message is still relevant at any time you encounter it.
It’s more of a personal rant, and definitely not meant to diminish the work of any of the wonderful astrologers who are friends of the show.
I recommend them wholeheartedly as a better source for information about astrology than I will ever be.
RECOMMENDED ASTROLOGERS
Dena DeCastro https://www.denadecastro.com/
Susan Grace http://susangrace.org/
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You’ve heard people in the new age personal development world talk about the stories that no longer serve you. Getting rid of them. Putting them down. Letting go of what you keep choosing to be burdened by.
Who are you if you get to erase your past stories and start from scratch?
MENTIONED ON THE SHOWBeyond Readings - Intuitive Business Development
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This week I’m taking about how the current times are affecting our dreams and aspirations, and how to adapt your concepts of career and purpose to meet this strange moment.
The whole thing feels like a giant oracle message for creative entrepreneurs.
SONGS MENTIONED:
Now or Never Now - Metric
Holding Out - Metric
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I recently visited a Marian Visitation shrine tucked away in the mountains of South Eastern Tennessee—of all places. I never knew it existed, I’d never heard of this particular Marian apparition, and the day I found myself there was a remarkably sweet synchronicity.
PICTURES
A Marian Shrine in Marion Country
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A paranormal memoir from when I was in college, in which a ghost told me something about the way spirits view us.
If you would prefer, you can read the story in its original post format.
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I’m sharing some of the clairaudient phenomena I experience. It’s actually not always that clear at all.
This episode is a shout out to a client I did a reading for this week who engaged me to help her decipher the messages she’s receiving in the form of music with song lyrics.
These are not recognizable existing songs — hers are original.
And in talking with her, I employed a lot of the same tools we use in the Automatic Intuition program, because I think ultimately, she has a channel of information emerging, and she’s learning how to work with that.
So, I thought I would attempt to de-mystify some clairaudient phenomena and experiences by diving deep into describing some of my own.
I know that my talking about it can help you locate it within yourself.
MENTIONED ON THE SHOWAn Angel at My Table film about Janet Frame
Frances film about Frances Farmer
The Hours film partly about Virginia Woolf
Iris film about Iris Murdoch
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I’m reconsidering my personal concept of connecting with guides, including a way to access guides from a more intellectual, agnostic, psychological point of view.
My thoughts have evolved quite a bit in the 14 years the ebook Contacting Your Spirit Guides has been out.
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So many things I have taken for granted I now have no choice but to let go of, and yet I’m still walking around magically thinkingthese things are going to come back.
I'm sharing observations about letting things go.
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I’m sharing an interview with our resident astrologer Dena DeCastro looking into the birth chart of the United States of America.
Our discussion was originally recorded in 2019, a year before and a world away from the alternate universe in which we now find ourselves in the US in 2020.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this conversation in light of current events. I'm curious about what it reveals in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Black Lives Matter movement, the racial justice protests, and of course this disastrous presidency.
This is the closest thing to an entertaining and enjoyable New Age political discussion you are likely to hear, and as she does with personal charts, Dena finds some optimism and an opportunity for empowerment in her reading.
We have some upcoming opportunities to change the world in big ways.
MENTIONED ON THE SHOWThe National Chart of the United States interpretation
Actual Natal Chart of the USA
GUEST LINKS - DENA DECASTROdenadecastro.com
DeCastro Astrology on Facebook
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I’m sharing a short and simple message that I really needed to hear this week, and I’m thinking you could probably use a dose of it too.
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I’m dealing with a lot of procrastination. Resistance is rearing its nasty head. It is never totally vanquished …
I don’t know about you, but I personally need to revisit some thoughts about procrastination, the different forms it can take, what it’s trying to tell us, and when it might actually even be a form of intuition.
MENTIONED ON THE SHOW
The War of Art by Steven Pressfield
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This week I’m sharing my thoughts on claircognizance and the perfect tool, in my opinion, to develop it and use it more.
This segment is one of the most popular in my archives … It was recorded in response to a question from a listener who wanted to know how she could ever hope to become a psychic if she didn’t communicate with spirits. And I was like … um. Claircognizance.
I’ve mentioned on other episodes that theoretically, I believe you can be psychic or intuitive without any mediumship or communication with spirit entities at all, even if you are an atheist.
MENTIONED ON THE SHOW
Can an Atheist be Psychic?
Automatic Writing Lessons
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A harrowing personal adventure story, featuring an entirely new species of Stranger Angels — rude ones!
I’m sure there have to be tons of metaphors and life lessons in stories about river journeys.
- The art of surrender
- Go with the flow
- Be carried to your destination
Maybe if I just tell you one, it’ll automatically be studded with tons of observable wisdom.
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Miki Brittenham is a medium, animal communicator and crystal healer, who works with crystal energy to speak to the body as well as other lifeforms. She offers readings and energetic crystal healing for people and pets, intuitive coaching, handmade jewelry, crystals and other metaphysical awesomeness, like her psychic haikus better known as psykus.
She shares her near death experience.
GUEST LINKS - MIKI BRITTENHAMmikibrittenham.com
Grounding through Sacred Geometry free ebook by Miki Brittenham
15 Characteristics of Near Death Experience
MENTIONED ON THE SHOWMaxfield Parrish artist
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A soul communication dream is when you communicate through the dream world with someone in your life where a conversation needs to take place that isn’t happening.
It can also be communication with passed loved ones, spirit guides, and your ancestors.
But when you communicate in the soul realm with someone who is on the same plane of existence — meaning another living person — it is your higher selves having a conversation that isn’t able to happen here in the real world because of things like ego or fear about the content of the message.
In my case, it was a communication in dream symbolism from someone who is literally unable to communicate with me in the real world, or to process this level of vocabulary.
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Dr. Keith Holden returns to the podcast to share the synchronicities and signs he experienced throughout his recent cancer diagnosis and treatment. It’s a miraculous story of hope!
This is a rare opportunity to hear from a doctor turned patient—one who literally wrote the book on The Power of the Mind in Health and Healing—as he personally tests the mind-body practices he’s been teaching for years,
This is a personal, vulnerable, authentic interview with tons of great advice for coping with the greatest challenges of existing as a spiritual being in human form.
GUEST LINKS - Dr. Keith Holdendr-holden.com
Power of the Mind in Health and Healing - Udemy course
Power of the Mind in Health and Healing - Book
Previous SYS podcast episode
This week, I’m sharing a real world example of how I process intuitive hits as they are happening.
MENTIONED ON THIS EPISODE
Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler (aff link)
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There’s a part of me that wants to shake the snow globe and see where everything falls.
Tear down the old broken structures so they can finally be rebuilt.
MENTIONED ON THIS EPISODE
Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler (aff link)
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During this pandemic, people are looking for meaning and for why this is happening. There's a rush to interpret the "spiritual meaning of everything" and it feels forced to me.
I swear, if one more person sends me a newsletter about what it means for global consciousness ...
Can we just be plain-human for a minute?
There are stages of grief that cannot be bypassed.
I'm still in the early stages and simply trying to feel what I feel.
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The whole world is frazzled as fuck right now.
The usual energetic hygiene is not working for me.
I can tell you what I’m trying to do,
I'm going back to grounding basics ...
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At a time when so much appears to be happening to us, collectively, when we feel like we don’t have control over a lot of external circumstances and forces, I’m sharing my thoughts about the concepts of destiny, fate and free will.
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"One of the biggest lessons I continue to learn from having the stroke is that a great deal of healing can be accomplished from a liminal space. As much as I, or my clients, would love to ascribe a cosmic reason to traumatic events in our lives and be able to see how that pain eventually worked toward a higher good, releasing the need to fully understand opens opportunities to heal in ways that aren't bound by our understanding of cause and effect. It's one reason I attract so many clients who have gone through similar trauma to my own.”
— Tracey Natarajan
Following a near death experience in 2014, Tracey has felt driven to own their place in the LGBTQ+ community and as an intuitive and healer. They offer intuitive readings in a variety of modalities, distance Primordial Song, and Reiki healings.
GUEST LINKS - TRACEY NATARAJAN
http://blinkinglotus.com/
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Susan Grace is a writer, intuitive, and empathic astrologer dedicated to the Collective’s call to usher in the End of Suffering. She has read thousands of charts for people of all walks of life from all over the world. She says she does this work to ensure no one feels alone in the massive shift happening in the world.
And she has some important messages we need to hear right now.
GUEST LINKS - SUSAN GRACE
betheevidencepodcast.com podcast
betheevidence.live platform | community
susangrace.org
MENTIONED
Check Your Voter Registration
https://www.vote.org/am-i-registered-to-vote/
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If you feel you are repeating the same mistakes or going in circles — especially if you’re a creative person trying to get your work out into the world and feeling like you’re failing, crumbling under expectations — I hope this confession resonates with you.
MENTIONED Sabian Symbols Oracle http://sabiansymbols.com/
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Some psychics don’t believe spirit guides even have names. But in hundreds of readings, I've received names, and given them out to clients. Sometimes the names themselves are messages.
Because of the feedback, signs, and synchronicities that occur, I choose to continue sharing this information.
In this episode, I share ways in which you can experience these phenomena for yourself.
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This week I’m sharing an energy shielding visualization technique. This is an alternative to the white light shielding you may be familiar with.
If you’re an empath, and you also work with other people’s energies, you require a specific kind of filter — and this one is designed for you.
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There's a way to use tarot cards where they can become a crutch, but with a few simple tweaks, they can help you develop your intuitive abilities.
This is the same advice I give to mentoring clients in the Automatic Intuition program who are already comfortable with cards and want to continue using them as a element in their professional readings.
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All mediums are psychics, but not all psychics are mediums.
I am not a medium. I typically send requests for mediumship to my peers in the Automatic Intuition community who have those specific skills.
But a few years ago, I was offered the opportunity to do a series of readings, a kind of reading I'd never done before. Something in between channeling and mediumship...
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Chasing the dream, you can start to doubt yourself, run out of steam, forget why you thought you could ever pull this off it the first place ...
Stick to the plan you made when you were in a better head space.
MENTIONED ON THE SHOWGwendoline Christie submitted herself for an Emmy
"Now or Never Now" by Metric
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I’m sharing THE Simplest Most Effective Creativity Productivity Manifesting Plan/ Strategy EVER for making shit happen.
Whatever business ventures, creative projects or lifestyle changes you intend to start making happen in the next couple of weeks, let’s go ahead and talk strategy. Now.
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Dena DeCastro shares an overview of the astrology for 2020, as well as general strategies for planning your creative projects according to the cycles of nature ... no matter the year or your sign or even if you know anything about astrology.
GUEST LINKS - DENA DECASTRO denadecastro.com
Dena's Notes - Overview of 2020
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A kind of real magic any one of us can perform, a kind of magic I do believe has the power to change our experience of reality, if not reality itself.
"I promise if you keep searching for everything beautiful in this world, you will eventually become it."
— Tyler Kent White
MENTIONED ON THE SHOWOne Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are by Ann Voskamp
The Book of Faded Green
The Money Shift
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Adam Weston Albert is a professional intuitive and healer. He also teaches concepts of intuition and spirituality and a deeper understanding of the unconscious mind through tarot.
You may recognize Adam as a moderator and content contributor in the Shift Your Spirits Facebook community. He has posted a lot of excellent tarot videos and tutorials over the past few years.
If you’re experienced or brand new to working with tarot cards, I think you’ll hear some inspiring ideas about how to employ them.
GUEST LINK - ADAM ALBERT
www.adamwestonalbert.com
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I’m sharing some points to keep in mind when you are attempting to scan someone psychically. Especially if you are learning or developing this skill … Expectations of what you think you’re supposed to be doing are probably not helping.
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I get a lot of questions from mentoring students and professional intuitives about cord cutting as part of their work process.
This energetic clearing practice would be beneficial to nurses, therapists, social workers, anyone who works in a one-on-one client environment.
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Over the years "stranger angels" has become a kind of tag for my travel memoirs. This week, I'm sharing my experiences while traveling to Albuquerque, New Mexico.
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A local crop circle in Sand Mountain, AL, local UFO sightings, as well as my own personal UFO experience in Southeastern TN ...
MENTIONED ON THE SHOWBlue-Skinned Aliens
Communion by Whitley Strieber (affiliate link)
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If you never heard the original episode at the beginning of this podcast about my Mother Mary prayer bowl ritual, I’m sharing that back story as well as an update on some of the miracles I continue to observe.
This experience is very hard to justify within the concept of spiritual atheism. I am struggling to find the right box for it.
MENTIONED ON THE SHOWMagic Mother Mary Prayer Bowl
Paranormal Stuff Happened
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I’m talking about numerology, repeating number sequences, synchronicity, and a two month long persistent number phenomenon I’ve been experiencing.
MENTIONED ON THE SHOW Future Thinkers : Dr. Kirby Surprise – The Science Behind Synchronicity
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A personal story about my grandmother, about creativity, perspective, the context of value, our ability to assign worth.
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- Individualism in spirituality
- empowered freedom from tradition and structure and rules
- the relationship between magic and our personal will.
P!nk "Do You What You Do"
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I couldn’t leave you guys hanging with episode 5 of the Love Curse.
The curse is over.
I met the love of my life in August, 2019 ...
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Words are powerful.
Spells and curses and incantations.
Words matter.
The words our subconscious minds hear us saying to ourselves — verbally or internally — are a feedback loop of programming and expectations.
It is communicating what we believe beneath what we say we believe.
That is insidious.
It’s hard to create what you want to see in your life when you are undermining it with silent whispers of opposing messages...
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I’m sharing a book I’ve been meaning to write for about nine or ten years. Spirit Guides for Skeptics. It’s something of an update to the free tutorial Contacting Your Spirit Guides 101.
It’s meant to explain my evolution on the concept of connecting with guides, including a way to access guides from a more intellectual, agnostic, psychological point of view.
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I’m sharing the background and philosophy of Automatic Intuition—how I fell into doing professional readings, and how that evolved into teaching others how to do them.
Intuitive development is based on a premise I call Automatic Intuitive Response™.
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This will particularly appeal to you if you are in a process of discovery about your spirit guides. This may also resonate if you are anticipating a major transition or transformation.
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I share my perceptions and concepts as a way for you to compare them to your own.
To de-mystify psychic phenomena and experiences.
To embrace not only the ways in which you might recognize yourself in what I’m describing, but also the ways in which in you’re different.
Talking about it can help others locate it within themselves.
MENTIONED ON THE SHOW An Angel at My Table film about Janet Frame
Frances film about Frances Farmer
The Hours film partly about Virginia Woolf
Iris film about Iris Murdoch
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TRANSCRIPT Doing what the voices in your head tell you to.
It’s THE #1 disparaging joke you hear all the time that might sometimes be referring to phenomena we would categorize as clairaudience.
So, har har.
In a lot of cases, hearing voices is synonymous with the absolute deepest depths of mental illness. It was the one thing through my teens and twenties that kept me from ever, ever acknowledging the psychic phenomena I experienced.
I feared being committed against my will. I don't fear it so much lately but it's still a fear that I can access if I needed to. Like, I could drag that out and be like, yeah, I remember what it feels like to worry about that and I can see how I can put myself in a situation where everything could go horribly wrong.
It's more of a horror movie screen playing out in my mind than actual real anxiety. But when I was younger, there was definitely a real fear.
And then growing up there were all these movies about voices and craziness, and a lot of times they were about authors. There was a movie in 1990 called An Angel at my Table that was about the New Zealander poet Janet Frame who was committed at the time that she won her country's highest literary honor.
Obviously it's been 30 years since I've seen that movie, but there are a few images that haunt me. Like, I remember them bringing her a volume of her work that had just been published in hardcover and wanting her to sign it, to autograph it. She was heavily sedated in a mental ward and didn't really.. it wasn't even conscious of the fact that her book had just come out and that was like, the first time she held it. And it won the equivalent of a Pulitzer or a Booker.
And there was another scene where they put her in a padded cell and she literally writes poetry on the walls of the padded cell. That's how much she needed to get those words out.
And then there was a movie Jessica Lange starred in in the 80s about Frances Farmer, who was famously lobotomized basically for being too willful and outspoken for a woman in the 1950s. She was sort of a political activist I guess, or would've been by today's standards.
Nobody plays crazy like Jessica Lange, by the way. I mean it's a great performance.
But yeah, that feeds into all your horrors about being committed against your will, medicated, and then it all unravels, right? You lose your agency. You literally lose your rights as an adult.
Of course, Virginia Woolf, who is one of my hugest literary heroes in the whole world, who was famously so depressed for so long that she finally walked into the river with stones in her pockets. Gotta been hearing that story since I was in junior high school. And it's been dramatized in a lot of different places and shared and reshared.
Most recently, Nicole Kidman's performance in the Hours, which is an incredible performance and a great movie. But again, all this stuff about these people going nuts, especially writers.
After I watched the movie Iris, which was Judi Dench starred as Iris Murdoch who lost the faculty for words. She was technically suffering from dementia and Alzheimer's, so it wasn't craziness necessarily, but they did very distinctly dramatize the fact that this woman who was known for her phenomenal vocabulary literally lost her ability to access words slowly and was conscious that it was happening to her as an author.
This is like the worst horror ever. I get it. It's Sophie's Choice. It's these amazingly emotionally triggering dramatizations that happen in movies, but I just, at that point, was like, you know what? I'm never watching another movie about an author suffering from mental illness, addiction, alcoholism, nothing.
Just forget it. Ever. Why are there so many of those anyway? There are too many!
But back to hearing voices.
Conversing with them. Listening to what they say. Talking back to them. Asking them questions. I do it in my car all the time. We stare at crazy people who do it in the streets who are homeless and obviously suffering maybe from schizophrenia or something like that. It's something that we've all witnessed.
I doubt I look anything like that in my car. As a matter of fact, I think I probably look like I'm just talking on hands-free. But I am aware of the connection there.
It does always make me wonder, well who are they talking to? What are they saying? Because it depends on which voices. They do seem to be arguing and there are combative situations going on so that is not what we practice around here, as far as accessing clairaudient intuition, chanelling, automatic writing, mediumship. All these things are not about screaming at invisible assailants.
Hearing voices and doing what they tell you to do could be a really helpful thing. Again, depending on the voice:
- the still small voice within you that I think we all can find a conceptual space for in our consciousness
- the voice of the spirit
- angels, spirit guides
- the deceased, people who have passed on, your ancestors
- your conscience.
Some of those are accessible by anyone. Some of them are deeply woo woo. And none of them are crazy, by the way. None of those things are mental illness, and I honestly today don't fear that if I went to a therapist and spoke to them the way I'm speaking to you right now that I'd be committed.
I think we'd have an understanding about the phenomenon that I'm talking about. And I would have no problem placing this within a purely clinical context and talking about archetypes and programming and kind of the different channels of the mind and consciousness. It doesn't have to be woo woo for me. Or it can be.
Sometimes it depends on who I'm talking to. I'm not going to correct anyone who tells me that their message came from their guide or from one of their guardians or someone who tells me it comes from a muse.
I never question how other people choose to label their voices but I do like to offer the concept of labelling and categorizing and analyzing to everyone and I offer my own little compartmentalizations for people to borrow and use as a starter kit if they're new to this.
Then there are those external voices that become programmed as your own. Those are the really troublesome ones. They're just as insidious as invisible people who are following you and out to get you.
They're dangerous because they're something that you heard, that you picked up from someone else and took on, and have been accessing and repeating on a loop, on an internal mental loop, for so long that you probably have forgotten the original source, the voice itself has morphed over time to impersonate your own inner voices. Like, your own internal voice of yourself.
Negative, self-sabotaging critical voices, someone telling you about yourself you chose to believe.
You may have chose to believe it because you didn't know any better, or you were a child, or you were bullied, or you were afraid. There are a lot of different reasons why you would choose to take that on. But it is a choice, even if it was kind of forced on you.
And it is something that you can get rid of later. If nothing else, you can learn to access and acknowledge, okay wait a minute, where's that voice coming from? Who is that? That sounds like something my mother said to me a really long time ago.
Oh yeah, I remember now where that came from, therefore when I hear that come up again, I can dismiss it. No, not listening to you. I know who you are. Sit down and go shut up.
So there's all of that, within the concepts of clairaudience and hearing voices.
There's also a question of internal source versus external. For the sake of separating what comes from within versus what comes from outside… I use a big box for the voices coming from within. To me, it's all a bit like being logged onto some network of information.
It’s different than the voices I might create. For instance, the notes I’m writing down here to speak to you from, the character dialog in fiction, although sometimes, some of that is a little bit channelled in a way that overlaps and many authors will have the experience of having books dictated to them or have fictional characters they invented take over on the page and run the story.
And there's a spectrum of how that's viewed. A lot of creative people who don't view that as a psychic phenomenon nevertheless still view it as a magical creative experience. And a lot of people will acknowledge that happening to them and simply think of it as a profound mystery of the artistic process.
I know Alice Walker famously said that the Color Purple was dictated to her. She heard the voice of that character and basically transcribed it. And I have that experience writing character. Sometimes that's the initial impulse to write fiction.
To give an example of this internal versus external thing, so there’s a song you’re humming this morning because it’s been used on a commercial you keep seeing on TV. T-Mobile or whatever has had this commercial on for a month and you've heard it every day and now you're singing it in the shower. That’s external. You can identify where that came from.
But then there are songs that come untriggerred, unbidden, they surface from the subconscious like this silent Spotify within your brain. The Spotify radio station that's on shuffle and it pulls things up that are stored in the mind. But it's still coming up internally. It's not triggered by something external like hearing it on the radio.
You may not have heard it in years.
Actual real songs I'm talking about, from artists who created and recorded them externally. At some point you have downloaded them. Maybe you burned the album out on repeat when it came out years ago and you haven't heard it in a long time but sometimes it might resurface. One of those songs will come to you.
I do read that experience these as intuitive. Just the same way that you read a feather on the ground, or a number on a license plate, or a digital display, or finding a playing card on the ground and interpreting it as a Tarot message. All those kinds of things.
I read music that comes internally that way, especially snatches of lyrics because you'll notice when this happens, when you get like an earwig, a song stuck in your head that came from nowhere, it's a particular snatch of lyrics that is looping. It's not the whole song from start to finish, intro to fade out. It's usually one or two parts that you keep looping over and over again.
So one of the best things you can do is either stop and really speak those words outside the melody as if it is just a message written down on a piece of paper, or actually write it down and see it in print. They look different on paper. They sound different when they're spoken not sung, and sometimes that will help you have an aha moment about what is that saying?
Sometimes it's really literal. I keep saying this thing to myself over and over and over again, and I didn't realize it's a message!
Now where it's a message from... Maybe it's your guides triggering it. Maybe it's your Higher Self pulling it out and waving it in front of you. Maybe it's some other kind of mechanism. Maybe you've been asking a question and it's your subconscious just kind of retrieving that from some internal library and presenting it as an answer, but it comes in the form of music.
You know, music happens in a different part of the brain than spoken language and reading and all that kind of stuff. We listen to a lot of music and we learn a lot of music by heart in a way that people used to learn and recite poetry.
You watch those historical films and TV shows and there are people wandering around in the garden reading from a book of verse and they can recite this stuff off the top of their heads and I always thought, damn!
But I think the modern equivalent of that is me being able to bust out a Missy Elliot rap from 2004 at any given moment just because I've heard it a million times and it's stored in my brain, right?
So it's kind of like that.
So the first thing you want to do is say, hey, you know what? If this was a telegram, is it a message? And maybe the next thing you ask, what emotions come with that song? What emotions are attached to it? What feelings is it invoking or dragging with it? Maybe it's the context of when the song first entered your consciousness. Something about the time and place of your personal history. What was going on in your world when that song came out, that kind of thing?
So maybe the message isn't the song. Maybe the message is about you returning to something from that time period. Was there something going on then that you need to reconsider, pull back out, reconnect with.
I remember as a kid or maybe a pre-teen or something, overhearing adults talking about Barbra Streisand claiming that she hears music. I don't know if this was being repeated anecdotally, or if there'd been some 60 Minutes interview or something had happened at that time that they were talking about it. I just remember overhearing it.
I understood that what they were saying was that she had made some claim that she hears music within. Psychically. Internally. Of course, even though she’s a vocalist, she’s not necessarily a composer right?
I don't even know that she writes a lot of her music necessarily. I think she is primarily a vocalist, but claims to hear music all the time.
Now I am neither a singer or a composer, but I remember when I overheard that, my first thought, because I heard the adults’s wonder and the skepticism and how intrigued they were by the concept, the judgments there were probably all varied and mixed, but I remember wanting to say “I hear music too.”
But I didn’t.
Because I feared what that might be admitting to.
And at the time, you have to remember, for years, as a teenager, you’re hearing things like this and thinking, “OH SHIT. What if I’m insane? What if these are early stages of what we see with the person arguing with the invisible assailant on the street?”
It's kind of not unlike being gay. The psychic closet.
As a really young child, I would get up late at night and I would go and find my Daddy because he usually stayed up later than anyone else watching TV. He's a famous insomniac. I would go and find him and tell him that I couldn't turn my brain off.
It was like someone left a TV and a radio station on in a crowded airport terminal. I was just laying there listening to everything.
I think a lot of that was probably partly anxiety, for sure. But I would cry, just totally frustrated and say, I can’t stop thinking. I can't stop thinking.
I really felt like, as a child when you were told, okay it's time to go to sleep, go to bed, turn down the light, go to sleep, that you should be able to willfully choose to be unconscious. To just turn yourself off.
And remember, I'm not a big dreamer. So it wasn't about even dreaming for me. Dreaming probably would've been a little bit too close to what I was already experiencing, so I just wanted to be shut down like artificial intelligence, being put to sleep and then restarted in the morning. That's what I wanted. I couldn't have that and it drove me nuts.
I think about all this this because of my nephew, who's 2 1/2, has these kind of night terrors where he's just completely inconsolable. I definitely think that that is anxiety.
So I was talking about that with my mother and my dad at my 50th birthday dinner, which was actually the night after my birthday because my nephew and my brother were here on my birthday and the next night I went out just with my parents and my stepmother.
That sort of started the conversation about this anxiety experienced as kids and I brought up to my dad, reminding him about how I was when I was little, how that manifested for me as this information that wouldn’t turn off.
Of course, everyone has thoughts that keep them up at night. But I bet most of those worries about THEIR actual lives. Their identifiable triggers. They're worried about their kids. They're worried about their job. They're worried about bills. Their bank account. That kind of stuff.
And then there is anxiety about existential stuff. The world going to hell, anxiety about death, or what happens when we die? The end of the earth, global extinction events. The very actual reality that one day the sun will swallow the entire system of planets around this part of the universe. Stuff like that.
That’s probably still all anxiety by the way and it's part of the human condition - to worry about all those things.
But I’m talking about information that has no life triggers, has no external source, has no evidence meaning you can't say, Yeah, that’s a Bing Crosby song. Like you can't. Something else...
I went into more detail with my mother about what I experienced a few days ago. She made some other comment about some celebrity or some medium on TV or someone talking about experiencing internal hearing of voices and music and information. She was maybe prompting me to explain the phenomena to her, somewhat like I’m trying to do now.
It was a different conversation but part of our conversation was me very bluntly describing how I hear so much more than voices.
The voices are a job unto themselves — cataloguing them, labelling, learning to police some, reframe others, block a lot of them, suppress some. And then also to call them in, to invoke them.
That’s all the clairaudient intuition stuff and the work of being an intuitive. Every day kind of practice producing.
And i'm not even mentioning the rabbit hole of listening in for a CLIENT, and wondering, am I hearing their thoughts, is it their guides I'm hearing, is that considered external, or am I receiving that information internally, through the network, the psychic internet, through the records?
That’s a separate show. I think there might even be some of that in the Automatic Intuition audio programming.
I hear music all the time. Orchestral, symphonies. movie scores, opera in multiple languages — italian, french, german. I hear musicals in english. I don't even like musicals. I don't consider them musicals but there are some that play in my brain that no one else has even heard
Not external music that exists somewhere in the world. Imagined music. Received from another dimension it seems.
Just to give you an example, I hear songs from a German Children’s show — I sing these to my cats, just to be silly. Because I actually think it's sort of funny and annoying, the way Teletubbies are funny and annoying and haunting.
I hear advertising jingles for products that just don’t even remotely exist.
I hear pop songs, country music songs, singers voices that are identifiable to me. I don't know who they are, I don't have names for them but I recognize the voices. But I can't tell you if they're actual, real people somewhere.
Maybe they're somewhere on the other side of the country and there really is this person who's singing all these songs and maybe I'm picking up on them somehow.
Or they're coming from an alternate reality. Or they're coming from some deep well of my imagination that I can't even explain.
Let’s just call all of that my psychic Spotify account.
I have songs and lyrics and all those snatches of the kinds of things that you end up humming… but they just don’t exist in this world that I'm aware of.
I’m used it to. I catch myself singing a rock song from a band that’s never existed. A song I’ve been singing for years. And if I think about it really hard sometimes, I can even identify when it came through internally, on this internal station. Like wow, you know what? That's been in my internal station now since I was in college or something.
And a lot of the songs that I did write when I was in college and when I was in a band and sort of writing music. I did attempt to pull from those, and so then that even further solidified them because then they became something external. And I still sing them as if they're real songs, because they are now.
The commercial jingles were interesting because they will last for months and it seems like they have a shelf life that's very similar to real commercial runs. They'll run for several weeks or several months and then kind of fade away and you don't hear them again.
I hear old black and white movie songs that sound like maybe they're from the 1930s when almost everything on the radio came from a movie—pop music back then was kind of like MTV in reverse.
And that’s why you hear all these people with less than stellar voices from back then and you think, Why was that such a huge hit? This person can barely carry a tune. It's just an ordinary voice. A lot of times they were actors who sang a song in a film. Hollywood movies, even that weren't really considered full blown musicals, even though there were a lot of them, would sometimes have some kind of song built in to them.
Seth and I share earwigs and the phenomenon of song synchronicities, especially things that are chosen by shuffle. You're in your iTunes library or now it's even bigger and more vast with Spotify and Pandora and stuff like that.
We call that the ghost in the machine and we have an ongoing kind of conversation about that. And we can always add to it and share little moments as they happen.
I messaged him the other day that my earwig of the day was Cher’s cover of Journey’s Open Arms — Cher has never covered that song that I know of. But she should. Because I heard it very clearly for about 36 hours and I was thinking, this is a Cher cover!
I heard it in my mind as if Cher had recorded Journey's Open Arms and I've got it stuck in my brain.
I hear mashups a lot too. I kind of think that probably people who make mashups obviously experience this phenomenon.
But I was wondering out loud to my mother, if i had been trained to play piano at a really early age, would I be able to sit down and write all this music?
I can pick out a simple melody out on a guitar or a piano and I can read sheet music. I played a few different instruments here and there throughout different parts of my life, but I don’t know how to write all the different instruments in a symphony or in an orchestra, even though I can hear them,
I don't understand that process that someone goes through to compose something like that. It's something you have to be trained in, and it's something people dedicate our whole lives to. It's a little late for me to be doing that.
But sometimes I’ll daydream about what it would be like to do that… And I'll think, Maybe I’m really a musician and I just didn't execute my creativity in that form. Or I chose from multiple creative formats to work within and certain mediums stuck with me more than others.
I mean, I have been in bands. I’ve written a lot of songs. I even have a songwriting credit for a Nashville band from when I was 17. It's technically the second thing I ever published. That I have an actual copyright for. It's called the Girl with the Orange Hair.
I forgot about that. I can't even remember the name of the band but I know the name of the singer. I could probably find out.
When I wrote songs in college though, I didn’t write lyrics, weirdly. I only wrote music. Usually, guitar, bass. I programmed percussion and synthesizer.
I love playing with drum machines and that's a kind of composing that technology makes it very easy for you to do. It's kind of tedious but it's super satisfying and I can never be someone who's super into computer games or video games, because I get the same kind of satisfaction I think from playing with tech. Like sounds, recording equipment, and mixing and also sometimes things like Illustrator, Photoshop, stuff like that, I can get lost in those in a way that I think is similar to what people experience with gaming.
And then just, you know what? After all these daydreams, I realize I don’t have time for any of that. It would be fun.
I have a To Do list of other projects and I will never finish all of those as it is. The ones I know I can execute, so I'd need a whole other lifetime for that whole world of music and the idea of composing.
Here, doing this, what you're listening to, it's like I’ve found a space between music and books — storytelling, narrative non-fiction, audiobook narration, podcasting. It's an interesting thing that emerged within my lifetime along with technology that I would not necessarily have been able to predict.
But I do weirdly have a short story that I wrote in 1989 about someone who was podcasting from their house. At the time, it was written kind of as magical realism more than, say, science fiction. I wasn't writing in detail about a technology that I foresaw. I kind of just didn't really explain the technology but I explained sort of the profession of someone being a shut-in and living in a room, very much like this room right now.
Ohmygod. I've got sound tiles and sound dampening blankets hanging over the windows. It's this cave of dead space that I'm broadcasting from within. It wasn't a major part of the story. It was just kind of like the character in that story... it was about agoraphobia, I guess. Somebody who was suffering from that.
But that was his profession. Weird. All of that happened before I became a shut in myself. When I had a stroke and I started doing all this kind of work because I didn't want to leave my house.
Interesting. Okay, weird. Little circles within circles.
I do wonder if other people experience this, what I'm talking about, more than we talk about it. Maybe as I'm describing this, you recognize it. Or you're beginning to notice it.
Maybe after listening to this episode, you will start to realize, ohmygod, that's happening to me too!
Is it something like intuition that everyone has access to if they just don’t repress it?
How is it useful?
I don’t know that it is useful.
But I do feel engaging it is part of connecting in a general way. Practicing. Honing the connection. Allowing it. For me. And maybe for you too.
What are the earwigs trying to tell you? Yes, of course, that’s one useful thing that you can do with all this.
But maybe it’s more basic than that. You hear the muffled snatch of a song and you say Hey, turn that up!
If you tune in, acknowledge this is happening, allow it, give it permission. If you let yourself listen. If you turn it up, what else do you hear?
Madeleine Shaw discusses how to identify your patterns of thinking, particularly binary thinking, and discover the intentions behind your limiting beliefs. These limiting beliefs have positive aspects that can help you integrate and reconnect to the soul’s voice.
We think of things as mutually exclusive "parts," including our soul as separated from "us," and how integrating the soul's voice into the parts that separated from it gives enormous spiritual growth.
Madeleine Shaw is an executive and personal coach and the founder of From Soul Crushed to Spirited. Until a decade ago, she was a corporate lawyer, and worked with large law firms in Australia and the USA as well as a global corporation. Madeleine now focuses on working with people globally, as they light up their lives by profoundly transforming their relationship with their deepest sense of purpose - what she calls the soul's voice.
GUEST LINKS - MADELEINE SHAW fromsoulcrushedtospirited.com
Reconnect Your Soul's Voice the workbook (50% off code:SYS)
HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSONSlade's Books & Courses Get an intuitive reading with Slade
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Chasing the dream, you can start to doubt yourself, run out of steam, forget why you thought you could ever pull this off it the first place ...
Stick to the plan you made when you were in a better head space.
MENTIONED ON THE SHOW Gwendoline Christie submitted herself for an Emmy "Now or Never Now" by Metric
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After experiencing her Year of Shadow and Light, Stephanie Stringham, a professional copyeditor, finally embraced her gifts as an intuitive and energy worker.
She shares the frightening experience of going blind — actually losing her physical sight to a rare medical condition — and how it was a catalyst for her return to trusting her intuition.
GUEST LINKS - STEPHANIE STRINGHAM srsstringham.com My Year of Shadow and Light blog
My Year of Shadow and Light YouTube
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Spoiler alert: I'm healthy, but a little heartbroken.
HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSONSlade's Books & Courses Get an intuitive reading with Slade
Automatic Intuition
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TRANSCRIPT For years now, my friend Seth has had a ringtone assigned to my phone number, which is the theme music from Bewitched. So whenever I call, that's what he hears. And he just mentioned that it's from the very beginning of that track so there's this swirly anticipation that just precedes the awareness that I'm calling. And then there's the Bewitched music.
It's one of the greatest compliments I've ever received and it makes me incredibly happy every time I think about it. I think I'm gonna have to reverse assign the same music to his calls, just so that I can experience it more often. I just never get around to it. I'm sort of lazy about my tech.
Sidebar: for years now, I've wanted to write something about what I call the Cherry Pie principle. It reveals something about the magical system in the Bewitched world that's never actually explicitly explained to us in the TV show, that I know of.
So what happens is, there is an episode, you've probably seen it because we've all seen them a million times, and it may actually happen more than once. But I know for certain there is at least one episode where Darren is having some clients over last minute and Samantha's trying to throw together a meal like the good housewife that she is and she doesn't have anything for dessert.
She's like, "Oh crap, I gotta come up with a dessert quick." She's running into the kitchen and looking around, like, what can I do? And then she finally breaks down and has to use her magic.
She manifests, attracts, a cherry pie. But right in the moment before it shows it appearing in her hands, there is a brief shot of the cherry pie sitting on someone else's window sill, cooling. And it's either right before it appears to Samantha, or right after, that we see that shot.
But there's a very clear moment when I realized, it's kind of stealing. She's not manifesting particles out of the air in order to make something new. But she was actually using her magic to move something from somewhere else to her. Right? So nothing is either created or destroyed I guess, but she's not creating something necessarily. She's taking it. And in order for her to have it, someone else misses it.
I thought, oh isn't that fascinating? For all his moral objections to his wife working magic, why doesn't Darren just prosecute THAT principle?
I’m sure you also identify with Samantha, if you're listening to this show, so it’s probably likely that, like me, you somewhat expect to have a muggle husband. We probably expected that for most of our lives.
I actually consciously and intentionally prefer to date a muggle. I don't want to work when I'm not working. I don't need to have "deep conversations" all the time about what I'm talking about on this podcast. I always cringe a little bit when people assume that I love to have those kinds of interactions ALL the time, because it's kind of exhausting.
And I promise you, if you're friends with me or you have any kind of relationship with me, we are bound to have deep and thoughtful magical conversations. It's gonna happen, but we don't have to schedule it. You don't have to say, "Let's go have coffee and have a deep conversation tomorrow at 2."
Okay.
It's kind of like a slot on my calendar.
What I need in a relationship is a very similar kind of support to what I get from my immediate family members. They're proud of my success. They love that I love what I do and I'm getting to do it, and they're not necessarily the audience for it. And they're not required to hang on my every word or listen to everything I put out there, and that's okay for everyone involved, including me.
I don't need that particular validation. I have that covered. You'r'e giving it to me right now. I have somebody listening to this stuff that I like to talk about. So at the end of the day, I don't need a client or a fan as a partner.
Now, a creative collaborator or business partner is definitely a possibility… I think that’s probably a unicorn, but I wouldn’t turn it down. Like, if I had a partner who wanted to work with me and manage the business side of things while I manage the content creation side of things. That would be awesome.
Mr. Moon, the Shoot the Moon guy, is a very talented graphic designer but successful in more of a corporate big business marketing world. There is enough overlap for at least speaking meaningfully about his work, like he can talk to me about it, I know what's involved in that kind of process, and I do branding and marketing all the time so I can talk about those aspects of my work and it would be meaningful and interesting to him, and he would have input.
I even had some branding projects I would have loved his direct opinion about, because I really like his taste.
Last week, when I posted the news that my ultrasound results were good, I put it in the intro of my episode with Dena DeCastro about the birth chart of the United States, if you haven't heard that yet. So if you haven't heard about this whole health scare thing that I was going through, you can listen to the two episodes before this, Bye Felicia, and the Natal Chart of the United States episode.
But after I put that news out there in the Facebook community as well, so many of you who have been following along with my love life this year and the Love Curse series, commented or wrote me privately and said, “YAY! Now you can go and have that amazing weekend in Dallas.”
He canceled 4 days before the flight. It felt a little bit like telling your kids that there wasn’t going to be any Christmas this year. That was almost really the worst part. It crossed my mind it should be humiliating to have to share this sad news on a podcast, in a Facebook group, in public, about my dreams getting crushed after this big set up.
The overwhelming emotion I have about doing this episode is not being able to give you guys a Happily Ever After. I wanted to represent for anyone else who's out there hoping for something similar to happen to them, and I haven't given up on that.
But I would've really liked to have given you something really sweet to chew on.
I discovered a problem with dating a Muggle. They don’t cope well when shit hits the fan. They don’t have the same tools or the same perspective as we might.
The same night I found my lump, Mr Moon got a DUI. That was the tail end of a full moon, by the way. I think it was Monday going in to a Tuesday.
Here is another potential REALLY BIG hole I found in long distance relationships. And online relationships. Both of which I have been wary of and somewhat closed to.
—it’s easy to hide something like alcoholism.
How could I know that behaviour was taking place? Even living in the same city and dating, he might have been able to hide it.
I had a DUI in my 20s, so I’m not quick to judge anyone that finds themselves in that specific situation.
I always did think it was a little ironic considering I had been a designated driver my entire 20s for all of my friends who really did like to drink. I never have been much of a drinker, and it was even proven by some of the other people’s attorneys that had been arrested that night, that the machine that they used to do the breathalyzers was defective. It was actually sent back to the manufacturer.
But I was still convicted just based on the officer testimony. And if you really want to know the truth, because my parents and I couldn’t afford an attorney.
Not the kind that gets you off.
I was humiliated and so upset that that could happen to me... I didn’t go anywhere near a situation like that ever again. I suppose the punishment was effective for me. Because I did not drink alcohol for close to 10 years.
I still don’t drive at night very much or in the areas where cops are looking for DUI quotas. Even when I'm sober.
I pretty much never went to a bar or nightclub ever again. Which, you know, these days we have Uber and Lyft and for god's sake, please use them.
If I was still in that phase of my life, still in my 20s and going out a lot, I would take advantage of that. I've kind of outgrown that whole thing so it's not as much of an issue.
When Mr. Moon was arrested, he had panic attacks while he was being held. That caused them to isolate him, to hold him even longer than normal without releasing him. That whole scenario traumatized him even more. It was a vicious circle.
He was in there for almost two days and probably time served with a good attorney on that case.
But Mr. Moon’s response to being in jail for DUI and being completely traumatized when he got out was to go out 48 hours later to a birthday party at a bar.
I was watching that on his Instagram. He’s a little bit of an oversharer. It’s not hard to keep tabs on where he goes. He does check-in’s and he posts locations.
For the next five days in a row after being released from the initial DUI arrest, he went to a bar. Every day for five days in a row.
And he railed at me angrily about the luck that had befallen him. That's what he kept referring to - this awful luck.
There was no conscious acknowledgment of how much he was going out before or after this happened but it actually increased afterwards.
The behaviour ramped up instead of being squashed.
It was like he said “Oh well, the worst has happened. Why even try to pretend I’m not getting loaded every day?”
But the only thing that he wanted to talk about was the pain of the money that he had to pay an attorney who is known for getting people out of this.
I have to say that filled me with a little bit of rage to think that I sort of got the book thrown at me for something in my 20s where I really was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and here was this man 53 years old, obviously this behaviour catching up with him. And he's talking about this horrible misfortune, lightning striking, and how his world is destroyed by how much money it's going to cost to get out of it.
It started to wear on my compassion a little bit, but I was already half in love with this person so I I challenged him — gently — but I did confront him about going to the bars every day.
His justification — I have to admit, he sort of seemed like he had the case ready to argue — he went to bars after work in the late afternoons or early evenings, never at night, usually for birthday parties or to have beers with his boss and prospective clients.
Now looking back, I remember a few months ago there was a string of birthday parties that he went to, in broad daylight as he said, after work, where it kind of made me think, because we were talking about the possibility of him moving here. It kind of crossed my mind, god, he's got so many friends though. I mean, look at all these people who invite him to their birthday party. He would miss all these people if he's that good friends with them.
And then, as we were having this bit of a confrontation about, dude, you know, you're going to bars a lot. He told me something he never mentioned to me before — his last relationship, which had lasted for 10 years, had ended because his partner was upset that he left work every day and always went somewhere to have a few beers before he came home.
He told me he would never be in a relationship again where he couldn’t go have a beer after work before he came home.
I was like, okay, well this is news to me.
In all the conversations that we had FOR TWO YEARS talking about what we want in a relationship, this was an item supposedly he claims is at the very top of his priority list. But he just never mentioned it.
At that point in the exchange, I finally just broke down and asked him, "Look, do you still want me to come?"
I was prepared at that point for him to say no. For him to back out.
He was unraveling right in front of me, every time we spoke. I just sort of summarized our conversations for you but I have to say, these were long, teeth gnashing, crying, emotional breakdowns and I just siphoned the actual information out of it to you.
He was really losing it. Right in front of me.
But he assured me that he absolutely did want me to come, that it was probably going to be a little bit of a different trip as far as what he might need from me attention wise and sort of the mood that he was in. But that he definitely needed me there. Possibly even more so.
I said, "Okay. I’m not gonna abandon you over this. I’ve been there. I know some answer to the uncertainty of the details you’re freaking out about being in this particular situation. I don't want to come at you with lecture and advice. So why don't you ask me for help." Or ask me, you know, what did you do about your driving permit to inform work? What did you do about this and that aspect of the court case?
I just laid it out there, like, okay, when you calm down and when you catch your breath, or even when we're together, if you want to talk about it, I'm willing to tell you anything that I can to help but I'm not gonna push it on you.
And he was like, very grateful for that but he didn't take me up on it.
As a matter of fact, he ghosted me after that conversation. After, "Yes, please come. I still need you here." He went drinking every day for the next five days. He put it all on Instagram. All birthday parties! At bars at supper time in the daylight, so it doesn't count, according to his delusion.
As I'm looking every day for a message from him, or what's going on with him, he even kind of implied, Oh, I'm just gonna go for a run and lock myself in my apartment and cry, and read and just be quiet and kind of internal. I thought, that's good. You need to go do some self care. I'll leave you alone.
And there he was, every day, at a bar and not talking to me. Not texting me. Not contacting me at all. And this was all, to his credit, he didn't know, but this was all happening while I was waiting to find out what the deal was with my lump.
See, I forgot to mention — I didn’t tell him about this whole cancer scare that I was going through. It happened the same night as his DUI. When I found the lump, I went to text him to see if he was maybe still up. It was a little late. And that's when he came back with the message, "I just got out of jail."
So while he's going to bars and whining about how much that attorney is going to cost him to get him out of the DUI, I am just silently waiting through my experience.
Alone.
With you guys, yes. Thank you.
But not with him.
I chose not to tell him because I didn’t want to put something else on his plate. He really was losing his shit. The panic attacks were real. One of my good friends in college had panic attacks. I've been around people who have them
I intended to wait and tell him in person when I saw him and also hope that I would have good news by the time I even got there. And I would have had that by the way, so it could have been an unnecessary worry to throw at someone.
I don’t regret not telling him. It was the right thing to do. He was in no position to comfort or support me, anyway, best case scenario.
But this is all kind of what I meant about Muggles not have the tools — Because of my spiritual inner dialogue, my maybe having cancer was less of an existential crisis than someone of no faith having a legal issue.
Of course you guys held space for this. You do it all the time in our community. You know that whatever worries are going on with you, it doesn’t necessarily take energy to hold someone in your mind and heart and send them some thoughts when they're going through something.
It is exhausting to be in a state of helplessness when you're watching someone you care about suffer, but the fact I could not share any of that burden with him in the moment was kind of an instinct, a telling one, in and of itself.
I sound a little more bitter and angry telling the story now.
At the time, when he told me he didn’t want me to come after all, which by the way, I just got out of the blue after 5 days of NOTHING, I got this huge, big long text: I'm so sorry. I can't do it. I'm so sorry. Blahblahblah...
It was just like word vomit and it was 4 days before my flight. After 5 days of ghosting me and going and getting hammered, while I sat waiting to find out if I have cancer.
I thought, what the hell with this whole situation?
I put this in the prayer bowl. I gave this to Mary. She should handle this and protect me from all of this.
What I meant when I had those kind of bratty thoughts is that she should have protected the trip. She should have protected my ideals and my desires and this thing that I had my hopes on.
But when I asked for protection, I got it. My guides came in like a seal team and extracted my ass at the 11th hour from going any further with this relationship.
It's pretty amazing when you think about just how quickly it was all snatched away.
Can you imagine what would’ve happened had we gone several more months, another year into this relationship, rearranged our lives in order to live together and then once all the newness and the movement kind of settled down into something more routine... there would be this alcoholism waiting like a time bomb in the middle of my home and my life and my heart and my family.
Can you imagine how much damage that could’ve done?
I am safe. I am protected. I am fine.
Everything is always working out for me.
It is nearly impossible to discern when it's yourself in a romantic connection with someone else whether the early intuition of NO is about a sense of warning or sense of fear. Because of course fear is going to tell you NO, it’s not gonna work out, don’t do this, don’t go this way. Of course it is.
I’m pretty confident any other psychic will testify their abilities to recognize patterns for others, to pick up on foreboding, to hear whispers of danger, for other people, is all fine and dandy and in working order, but that when it is your own love life, that all gets a little bit muted and muddled.
Believe it or not I think it was Sylvia Browne in one of her earlier books, way before she kind of lost some of her credibility being on the Montel Williams show.
Sylvia talked about how relationships are the one way that we all learn our lessons so psychics have to learn those lessons too. They don’t get to cheat. They don’t get short cuts. They don't get get crib notes from heaven.
That would defeat the whole purpose of being here and learning the lessons that we do through loving others.
Make no mistake I am extremely disappointed.
A part of me was absolutely devastated and when people ask, "Why have you been single for so long?” I want to scream “This. THIS is why!”
One thing I can say though is that this time I didn’t do anything wrong. I did a lot of work this year to clear out a lot of stuff before I tried this and I didn’t bring any of that shit into this situation.
Nothing.
So I’m not going to beat myself up about being cursed. I wasn’t cursed. I'm not cursed. It's just part of the series title. It had to kind of follow through in order for you to stay with the thread.
I just happen to have become connected with someone who is in an active phase of denial and self sabotage, over an addiction, and hopefully this all leads to some milestone healing for him.
I found a thing that was missing from my big list. Seth suggested that I add it immediately: no active addiction issues.
But I am not cursed.
I am open and I’m brave and even though I did this big scary thing and said YES to it — and even shared it in pubic — and followed it through, I'm fine.
The world didn’t end. It didn't impact my work. I didn’t lose any friendships over it. No one got killed.
I won’t say that in those first few days — and you have to remember he cancelled the trip the same day that I went that doctors appointment just to get a referral for the ultrasound — I won't say that, in that state of fear and self-preservation I didn’t immediately think, see I’m not doing this shit anymore, we’re done, it's back to the tower.
My first impulse was definitely to retreat back into the place that I’ve been in for the last 18 years. But as I turned to walk back and raise the drawbridge I thought, wait a minute why would I impose a sentence on myself for someone else’s crimes and bad behavior.
I’m not going to do penance for someone else’s sabotaging addiction. That’s some co-dependent shit.
I have a Venus in Gemini. I don’t think we stick around for co-dependence very much.
So you may remember that I made that huge list when Dena suggested it was a good time in my life to ask for everything I want. To really shoot the moon.
And I honestly hadn’t done that since I was a teenager. My heart was broken in college. I didn’t even aim at the moon.
Mr Moon in Dallas checked absolutely every single box on that list with the exception of location and proximity. This long distance thing still is something that remains a difficult prospect for me.
I know people who have made long-distance relationships work. And I do often think about the fact that it’s unrealistic to think that in all the globe the perfect match for you, this soulmate scenario, is just going to show up within a 25 mile radius of your house.
Odds are really great that they’re going to be somewhere else and you’re gonna have to figure out how to close that distance.
Makes me a little weary and it makes me a little wary, but I don’t know if I need to write that into the list.
I mean it is supposed to be shoot the moon. So if the universe can move the guy to town, that would be great. Drop him off on my doorstep please.
Even I think that that's shooting beyond the moon and I'm not sure about asking for that. Maybe I’ll just sort of make it an asterisk *optional item.
But no active addiction and alcoholism - that's going on the list.
This great time period for me isn’t over by the way. This transit that I’m in. I've still got a long way to go with it. Well into the beginning of 2020. And they were these tent poles in the middle of the transit, the one in May, when I made my plane tickets. Remember that?
Obviously that was a turning point event, because I lost money on those flight tickets.
Something else peaks in August. That's the other tent pole and I’m curious to see what form that takes. Can it please not be something bad or expensive?
The thing about all this astrology stuff and I’ve been learning astrology since I was literally a little kid. I don’t know how it works. I don’t know how I so I often want to dismiss it. For it just to not be true just to take it off the table. For it to be one thing that I don’t have to think about.
And maybe one day we’ll get one of our astrologer friends on the show to explain how it all does work. What is the philosophy behind the reality of how this stuff affects us?
Shout out to Asa my partner early in this series of episodes.
Just yesterday she was talking about something, a big decision point that came up in her life and it was so exactly what Dena had posted about the new moon eclipse in Cancer. I just assumed Asa had read it.
She said she didn't normally pay a lot of attention to astrology so I sent her the link. And of course she came back and she was like, "Oh crap, that's like some crazy accurate stuff."
I said I know. Astrology always has a way of doing that to me.
I think I’m going to intellectually fake it out somehow and I never pull it off. It has the last word.
So, my big weekend never happened.
It was so blissful getting close to it.
Planning it.
Counting down the days
But... The launch was aborted.
I am not cursed. Just the opposite.
I am safe. I am protected. I am fine.
I am guided.
I am open.
And in the words of Molly Shannon’s immortal Sally O’Mally:
I’m 50. I’m 50 years old!
Dena DeCastro interprets the birth chart of the United States of America. We discuss how current and near future transits are manifesting in our country at this time.
MENTIONED ON THE SHOW The National Chart of the United States interpretation
Actual Natal Chart of the USA
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Automatic Intuition
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I know the title may be throwing you. It’ll make sense once you hear this story. This is actually an episode about stranger angels and manifesting, health scares and synchronicity ...
MENTIONED ON THE SHOW Future Thinkers : Dr. Kirby Surprise – The Science Behind Synchronicity HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSONSlade's Books & Courses Get an intuitive reading with Slade
Automatic Intuition
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TRANSCRIPT I know the title may have thrown you. It’ll make sense once you hear my story. This is really an episode about stranger angels and manifesting and dealing with challenges to our mortality and synchronicity... a lot about synchronicity. Synchronicity really never ceases to amaze me.
About a year ago, a year and a half ago, I listened to a really cool podcast about synchronicity on the Future Thinker’s podcast I believe it's called. I’m going to find the link for the show notes so you can go check that out. Because I’ve actually never heard a better, more practical, scientific explanation for the phenomenon of synchronicity, like what's actually happening in our brains, why we experience it the way that we do.
But even though I was comforted by the explanation of the scientist who had researched this and who had written a book and was being interviewed on the show, I still receive and process synchronicity through my Magical world view. It's really hard for me to not interpret synchronicity as some kind of message or sign, some way in which the Universe communicates with me or the Divine sort of leaves me these scavenger hunt clues.
I remember one time having a conversation with one of my really super non-New Age super Muggle friends, and we were talking about synchronicity and she commented on the fact that synchronicity is actually the one thing, the one kind of paranormal phenomenon that absolutely everyone experiences regardless of their believe system.
Ever since she said that, I've often wondered what agnostics and atheists have to say about synchronicity. I want to stop people on the street and interview them, but if you know someone, I'd love to have a conversation with them about it. Maybe we can get them on the show.
Alright so I'm going somewhere with the synchronicity thing, I promise.
I have recently had an injured foot, just to put it really simply. For six weeks, I was having pain in my foot. It started out, if you follow me online, if you are friends with me on Facebook, you will notice that about a month ago, I changed my Facebook profile. It's this pretty outdoor sunny leaves and light kind of background. It was shot in a park.
That actual day was the first day this season that I wore my chacos, which are the really heavy strappy sandals that a lot of people wear. It was the first kind of warmish day where I thought, you know what? I'm going to be walking around outside. My feet aren't going to be in the pictures. I'm just going to wear my chacos.
The strap cut into the tendon along the top of my foot, that runs to your big toe. I sort of stripped it out, felt like I bruised the tendon walking around taking pictures, and the pain just never went away.
So then I'm like, in my high intensity interval training class, pulling the medical people that I know in the class, we have a couple doctors, a few nurse practitioners, some nurses, and I keep asking them questions about it, showing them my foot. I was like, is it possible to just bruise this tendon where it just hurts for a long time? They were kind of like, really dude? We're going to do this middle of class?
Anyway, so it went on and on though, to the point where, about a month in, I was in the middle of class and we were doing some warm ups. We were skipping rope and you're really jumping up and down on your toes when you're skipping rope. I thought, you know what? I can't do this today. I've got to leave. It's really hurting that bad.
So it turns out that my trainer, the person who leads all these classes, my fitness instructor, had a stress fracture in her left foot about two years ago. Same thing. She had to wear this boot for 10 weeks and it just so happens that I am friends with her partner. We went to high school together so sometimes I'll do things with them socially outside the context of the fitness classes.
We went to see Rocket Man, the Elton John movie together. We were having cocktails afterwards. She was like, where have you been? I told her what was happening with my foot and she said, you know, I was really in denial about the fact that I actually had a stress fracture and I did not want it to be that. But you need to go and get it checked out because something's obviously wrong. Six weeks is way too long for something to just not get better. At all.
So she referred me to the person she'd seen and she talked me into going to see an orthopedist foot and ankle person. I was like, okay. I can't wander around possibly hurting myself worse. I need to go and just bite the bullet, deal with this. I'm getting ready to go on this trip to Dallas but maybe I can, like, wear the boot when I get back from my trip. It's been six weeks. What's seven?
So I go in there really expecting to have this stress fracture diagnosed, have to wear this boot on my foot for 10 weeks. I mean, that's just my mindset. I was prepared for that. So they did x-rays. Of course, a stress fracture's so small it actually isn't visible in an x-ray, so to diagnose the stress fracture, they use a tuning fork, which is really kind of amazing.
They hit the tuning fork on the desk, and then they hold the end of it up to all the different bones in your feet. You feel a vibration. It's not uncomfortable or anything like that, but if the bone is broken, basically you will scream and then that will be the diagnosis that yes, that one is broken.
So she did the tuning fork. She tested every spot on my foot you can imagine and nothing really set it off. So she talked to me a little bit more, had me describe what I was experiencing, where I was experiencing it when I do different types of motion and all this kind of stuff. She was like, okay, I know what's going on.
So then she whips out the x-rays and she shows me the spaces in between the joints on all my toes - all of my smaller toes versus the space in the joints of my big toe. She said, I was expecting you to complain about both your feet hurting. And I said, that's weird because I said to my mom, the weirdest thing is happening. I'm starting to experience a phantom pain in my right foot that perfectly mirrors the one in my left. And my mom said, maybe you're compensating for the pain in your left foot and you're putting more stress in your right foot. So not you're getting a weird thing in the right foot.
Turns out, I have the same condition in both of my big toes. I have arthritis. And if I hurt myself these days, like I did with the tendon, arthritis will set in to that spot and then it becomes inflamed and then it's like three months of pain, or even ongoing pain. So it's like those spots never really fully heal. They become something else. This has been happening on other parts of my body.
So, I will stew on things. I will over analyse. I will look for meaning where there may only be randomness. Because I’ve lived through some major health scares like having a stroke 16 years ago and anal cancer 10 years ago, I honestly can be a bit of a hypochondriac. And after having my foot diagnosis saying, you know what? You really just have arthritis... I almost felt embarrassed by how much I thought something horrible was going on.
Not that that's not bad and it might not be better over time, but it wasn't what I thought it was. I blew it up into this whole other thing in my head and I took the synchronicity of my trainer having the same spot in the same foot, having the same issue as just like a sign. Oh, well I have the same problem automatically. It's synchronicity.
Dr Julia, who’s an administrator in our Facebook community and she's a friend of mine. She's a cancer survivor herself which she speaks about openly — Julia, do we like that term "cancer survivor"? Have we talked about this? I’m using it because it’s common shorthand and people know what you mean when you say that, but I’m not sure that I like that term.
Anyway, if you've had cancer, you've come out the other side of it and you're still here, I guess you're a cancer survivor.
Anyway, we were talking about how once you have the big c, every little thing that happens, even if you're the most laid back zen person in the whole world, every little thing has this tiny whisper in the back of your mind, “Oh my god it’s back." Every freckle a skin cancer. Every stomach ache is some kind of horrible tumour in your gut.
And so I kind of now, because I KNOW that that phenomenon is taking place, and that I am a little bit of a hypocondriac because of it, I then try to over correct for that tendency by trying to be overly calm and rational and let's not go there.
So if I know something's wrong with me and I have a diagnosis for sure, like if you tell me, oh yeah, you need surgery, I'm like, let's do it tomorrow. I don't want to wait because I know that the only way out is through. So let's just get on with it.
But I do have this tendency to some wait. Maybe two weeks in, I have the thought, I probably need to get my foot x-rayed. But I thought, no, you're a hypochondriac. You're turning this into something it's not. It'll probably be fine. Let's wait and see.
So I do that a lot. And it's not about a fear. It's not a fear of having something wrong. It's a fear of looking like a dumbass because I've gone to the doctor yet again thinking that I need to have my foot amputated and really, it's like, yeah dude, you have a little bit of arthritis but it's not the end of the world.
So I'm actually kind of fearful of looking stupid because of my anxiety around health issues. Okay. That's another episode.
I just have to say this though:
I do not believe we manifest every illness we have with our thoughts. That we create the illnesses that we have some agreement with heaven to experience illnesses at certain points of our lives. I just don't believe that. I know a lot of people do. It's fine if you want to do it, but I'm just letting you know where my train of thought and my perspective, how I process stuff.
And I do want to say, something that I want to get off my chest is... Don't say that to someone in the middle of chemo even if you believe it with all your heart that they've manifested their cancer. Please. For the love of God, do not say that to someone who has just been hit with a serious health diagnosis.
I’ve had plenty of people in the new age community do that. To me. Recently. And I've seen it done to others in front of me. And it really... Whether you believe that's true, whether or not it is true, you need to check why it is that you would communicate that to someone at that moment in that vulnerable space.
Like, what is it about you that needs to express that and be heard saying it? I guarantee you it's not helpful to the person who is in the midst of chemotherapy and radiation. That's not helpful for them to hear that. So just don't say it.
And check yourself about why you might want to say that. Say it to yourself.
Shit happens to people.
Some things are genetic.
Some things are shitty luck, and I just don’t go through life believing that you’re punished for having negative thoughts.
That’s some Old Testament shit in my opinion. That’s New Age echoes of religious fundamentalism.
No thank you. No! Not doing that.
But I digress with that soapbox.
Being intuitive isn’t as helpful as we’d like it to be when it's you. I even have some instances of some really cool medical intuition. I've had instances of medical intuition consistently around drug interactions and dosages. That seems to be the way in which my medical intuition will come through in a reading or just in interacting with someone.
Sometimes I get information about medications that people are on. It's not something I offer as a service, because it's not something that shows up 100% of the time when I do readings for people. But I'm just saying, like, I can have medical insights for other people, for clients. But when it's MY stuff, it's just... no... It's not helpful. It doesn't work like that. We wish it would.
Everybody spins out over their own personal life threatening shit.
Other intuitives can help you. By all means, if you want to get a reading with someone who might have some insight or thought for you, that can be very constructive. But you need messages from outside the vacuum of your own mind. Especially when it comes to something that you might have a tendency to overanalyze or stew over or be anxious over or be a hypochondriac over.
That stuff needs to be tested and mirrored outside yourself. And that experience happens with other people. So you need some partners. You need some participants, whether it's your mama, your best girl friend, your favourite tarot reader... Whatever.
One of the most powerful ways, the most real ways, that I believe with all my heart that your guides do come through for you, that your prayers do get answered is by putting real people in your paths in the real world who have the training, the knowledge, the wisdom, the tools and the medicine to make a difference.
Signs and patterns are tricky things. My trainer had a stress fracture same foot. She encouraged me. Because of that, to assume that that was what was going on with me. I overly identified with her illness. And then when I got the referral, and it was to the same PA she saw which, by the way, she recommended I go to someone but when I actually, you know the way it works, your doctor often says, okay we're going to get you a referral, and then that office will call you and someone who works the front desk will make an appointment for sometimes a whole group of doctors and physician assistants.
It just turned out that I randomly got assigned was the person that my trainer went to as well. And so, again, that was another synchronicity that sort of sent me into space of expecting a certain outcome. I went in there thinking, okay, I'm going to get a boot. I have a stress fracture. I'm gonna have to wear this thing for 10 weeks.
So I went on Monday and got that whole thing diagnosed, which I already told you about.
So it was nowhere near the trauma I'd prepared myself for. And that was the real lesson here.
It was a pain in my foot. That's all I knew. I should have stopped there with the self diagnosis.
That was on Monday.
On Tuesday I drive to Knoxville which is about 100 miles away, a neighbouring city, to get my car serviced. I drive a mini cooper. They only have mini cooper dealers so many hundred miles. They don't have a dealership in my city, so I drive out of town once a year and get work done on my car to get oil changes and all that kind of stuff.
I've become pretty friendly with the woman who is the service concierge. Her name's Anne. She's super cool. I love having a woman as kind of the face of the service department. I think it's really cool. She's got a really outgoing personality. Since I end up waiting there a lot, I've struck up conversations with her. We just click, you know? We've become friends. She'll give me a loaner car and send me off to have lunch or do whatever.
I remember asking her very early on when I first met her, I said, Is there anywhere to go that's not like, Panera or McDonald's? I hate Panera. I think it's like the most beige food in the whole world. She was like, what kind of food do you like? I said I love Thai food. That was the first thing I blurted out. And she's from Thailand.
So she was very excited about being able to recommend her favourite Thai food restaurant called Little Bangkok. It's in Farragut, west Knoxville. If you go through there, check it out. It's some good Thai food.
So anyway, I'm pulling up to the dealership. I'm expecting to see Anne and talk about Little Bangkok, get my loaner car, go have lunch. I walk in, and I kid you not. This is a day later, right? A day after I've been to the orthopedist. I walk in. Anne is wearing a boot on her left foot
I said, “Do not tell me you have a stress fracture in your left foot?”
She said yes. She got the boot yesterday. The day before. Same day that I went to the doctor, this woman I know, who lives 100 miles away, was going to the same doctor and she got the diagnosis that I was expecting.
She got the boot for 10 weeks.
I was like, What are the odds of that?! What does that even mean?! Does that not blow your mind when stuff like that happens? I have a mini explosion in my head. I just turn into a firework inside, when I get that kind of synchronicity matching up.
What are the chances?!
So we were talking about the whole thing. I was telling her that mine wasn't what hers was. And I was explaining to her why I was freaking out over her having the boot. And she said, "What do you think it means then, when something like that happens?"
I said, “Well you know, at the end of the day, I think at a basic level I always interpret it as meaning that I'm exactly where I need to be, for whatever reason I’m in exactly the right moment. It's almost like a little flashing sign that says 'Intersection up ahead'.”
So I get my loaner car, go to lunch, and here was another synchronicity. This place, Little Bangkok, at lunchtime is packed to the rafters. The last time I was there was 10 months ago. I took Seth camping with me for the first time, where I go every year. We stopped to have lunch on the way, and I said, "Let's go to this place, Little Bangkok."
Tuesday, they sat me at the same exact table where they sat me and Seth 10 months ago.
This is a fairly large restaurant. There were a million people in there and the only empty chair was the last one I sat in.
What are the chances? Again, synchronicity. I'm like, what is up?? Something's coming up for me.
When I get back, there’s this really beautiful young woman who's waiting on her car. She's sitting in the lounge area and she's talking to Anne. I can tell that they're friends the way I'm friends with Anne. Maybe Anne's that way with everyone who has the capacity.
They are talking about her foot. I just immediately sat down next to this woman and just sort of butted in the conversation, not in an obnoxious way. Anne sort of brought me in to it. So I started telling her about the synchronicity with my foot.
As I'm talking to her, I notice that she has some facial paralysis. Nothing too, too bad, but I know the signs because I've had that and I'm sensitive to it and will notice it in other people and I always wonder if they've maybe had a similar experience to me. A lot of times they've had bell's palsy.
It was really weird how we just immediately started talking like friends. It was almost like I was meeting her there. And I walked in and was like, "Oh, there you are," and I sat down and we just started talking.
Anne walks by and she goes, “OMG - of course you guys are talking. You guys are my like my special buddies. I have this connection with both of you that I don't have with everyone." So apparently she doesn't talk to everyone like she talks to me. And she said, "It totally makes sense that you guys are hanging out." Which was cool because we were sitting there in a waiting room so it was fun to talk.
I ask her what her name was and she says Felicia. She says “I was just telling Anne about my own medical horror story since the last time I saw her. I had a stroke 3 months ago.”
I let her tell me her story before jumping in because I hate it when people do that. I just listened and I held space for her story.
All the time, I'm realizing, okay, here it is. Here's the intersection. Here's where these synchronicities are leading me. I'm in one of those stranger angels situations where I am the angel. Remember that the word 'angel' means messenger. I'm here. I'm supposed to tell her something.
She starts telling me about her job. She works with students at a university. Again, same scenario as when I had my stroke. And she tells me the stress triggers are what brought the stroke on for her. That they were very much related to a horrible situation with her boss. Very similar to what I experienced.
When she sort of comes to a natural pause in her story, I finally said something. I said, “Do you mind my asking how old you are?”
She said, "I'm 33."
So then I had to tell her I had a stroke at 33.
Her mouth dropped. She was like, no way! So I told her my story. She's of course freaking out because she's hearing and seeing parallels. And I just flat out told her. I said, "You know what? I have been having all these synchronicities all day and I think that maybe I'm here to have this conversation with you. So I'm just curious. I'm going to be really nosy but I'm going to put this out there to you."
I didn't tell her that I'm an intuitive or anything like that. I don't really like to necessarily do that with people because I think it shuts them down or sends them off on a tangent in an other direction. She was already open to me, so I just said, "Is there anything that's really weighing on you right now? What's the question in your mind? What are you holding in your mind right now that's just on a loop, that you really want a message around?"
So she starts to tell me that she is considering moving back home because of all the stuff that's happening with her health. It feels like defeat to her. She feels she's kind of run out everything she loved about her job. It's now become this source of stress that's literally impacting her health. She kind of just wants to curl up and just go home. Which I think for her was Memphis, on the other end of the state.
So I talked to her about the fact that I really get what that feels like. I didn't immediately, as necessarily as quickly as her, decide to move home. But within a few years of having my stroke, I decided to just fold it up and go home and be in my mom's house for awhile. I told her what an amazing turning point that was for me, without tell her that I started Shift Your Spirits or anything like that. I just in more general terms talked about how I was able to start a business of my own, that I'd been wanting to do and really get it off the ground.
I asked her what she would like to do, if she could remove herself from all the stress, go back home to a safe place, and even accepting that that's somehow a defeat, returning home to your parents house at 33, if it allowed you to do any project. Like if you just had the breathing room to heal for awhile and work on something. What would it be?
Omg y’all, she starts telling me about a podcast she wants to start with two girlfriends of hers!!!
She’s pitching me this show and telling me about the concept. The next thing I know, of course, I'm rolling into podcasting advice and cheerleading and enabling her.
At one point, we're interrupted and her dad texts. And she actually isn't moving back in with her mom. She would be moving back home with her dad. And she said, it's kind of unusual for him to text her in the middle of the day like that, so it was a weird little sign that he texted at that moment. That we were talking about her going back to live with him.
She said something about his name and it turns out he has the same name as my dad and we talk about that and all this is happening really quickly. It was like the fastest conversation.
Finally she goes, “You know what? Damn. I really do think you were put here for me to have this conversation with me today. I feel really different about how the next few months could play out. I was feeling like, oh this is terrible, and now you've presented it to me in a way of like, okay well hold on a minute. Maybe you can use this more constructively and it actually might lead to this new phase in your life.
After kind of getting that feedback from her, she finally asked me what I did. What I do for a living.
I was like, "Okay, you know what, I'm just going to show you."
I knew she had an iPhone. It was sitting right there in the palm of her hand and I said, "Go to your podcast app." She went to her podcast app and she's grinning at me like, okay, she's expecting something.
I told her to search, 'Shift Your Spirits', and of course, my cover image pops up, which is a picture of me. She was like, dying. No way. I can't believe I've been sitting here this whole time talking to you about this and... We were both kind of freaking out over the synchronicity and basking in the glow of having had this meaningful random intersection.
Right at that moment, both of our cars were ready.
Anne said, "Hey, you guys, you're both parked out front."
We're both checking out. I had another person check me out while Anne was checking her out. We walked out together, walk over to where our cars are and our cars are identical. They're parked side by side, they're the same British racing green colour and they were so similar like we had to use our key fobs to lock and unlock the car to see which one was talking to which car.
I got in my car and I waved at her. Without any irony at all, I called out “Bye, Felicia!”
I kind of cracked up. She cracked up. I'm sure she's heard that joke a million times. I thought, in that moment, that expression will never work for me again in the same way. Because now, it felt like I was sending her on her way to something. It felt more like a Bon Voyage than a you-can't-sit-at-our-table, done with you kind of thing.
I hope Felicia hears this. That's why I gave it the title that I did. I'm hoping that she be curious about my show and it'll be there in her podcast app and maybe she's telling her friends, "Oh, I met this guy who has a podcast and then she sees this title and it makes her curious to check it out and see if it was about her.
But the story for this week is actually not over.
I found a lump on my left testicle that night. I had suspected it'd been there before. It kind of crossed my consciousness in the last couple of months. But I for real found it, and holy shit, did I go down the Google rabbit hole Tuesday night.
The whole time I’m like REALLY? Do I really need another milestone health crisis, Universe, guides and all Divine things? I mean, do I really need to do this again? Oh God... and I have somewhat of a jaded attitude about it, just to tell you the truth. I'm not so quick to think, Ohmygod I'm gonna die, as I was the first time. But I am weary of having to be put through the test again because I'm like, don't I already get it? Don't I already know? Do we really need to repeat this?
I got up that morning, Wednesday morning, and I texted 3 people - Seth, Jeff and Dr Julia.
I needed messages through them and I needed them to come without telling them that they were meant to be messages. So I literally just was like, "Good morning. I have a lump on my left testicle."
I got back 3 messages that were pretty much almost the exact same thing, and I always think about the idea that when you hear a message 3 times, or when 3 different people recommend the same thing to you 3 times, there's something about that magic number 3 that we recognize as Divine. Like, okay, somebody's trying to tell me something.
So I was sort of purposefully running that experiment with them.
And Jeff answered back first and right away mentioned the fact that, you know what, testicular cancer usually happens to much younger guys, like in their 20s. So hold off on thinking that that's what this has to be.
Julia messaged me maybe 30 minutes later, said the same thing. "By the way, let me put your mind at ease a little bit before you freak out. Statistically, testicular cancer is something that happens to much younger men so it may be something else. I'll talk to you later." She was about to go into a session.
And then Seth said something to the effect of, "You know what? Right now, it's a lump. That's all it is. It's not cancer, it's a lump. You found a lump in your testicle. That's all it is right now." Which is so much the message that I got on Monday and Tuesday about the thing with my foot and my hypochondriacal acceptance of the scenario that didn't even turn out to be true.
So what was really even cooler - Dr. Julia has worked in oncology for much of her career and she is married to an oncologist. He's a really wonderful man. I have a rapport with him as a friend personally. So I already love his personality. But she told me, she said, "He's right here. He's wanting to ask questions. Do you want to just talk to him?"
I was like, "Of course I want to talk to him."
I mean, I couldn't even get my own doctor on the phone. All I could get was an appointment. So to be able to talk to a man who has retired from a lifetime in oncology was like, okay, this is really what a wonderful scenario to have here at my fingertips. So yeah, put him on the phone!
And, you know, he has such a great bedside manner. I think Julia knew that he could do a lot to sort of alleviate me from going down some bad thought track. He told me right away there are a lot of other things it could be. Google didn't tell me that there were other things it could be. Google just told me the worst news imaginable. One thing that Google did tell me is that even when it is cancer, it's literally one of the most treatable kinds of cancers that we have.
He also offered me some perspective on statistically why it was kind of unlikely that it was cancer. That there was a chance it could be a cyst. That there were actually two different areas of tissue that it could be attached to. That there was a very good chance that it would just be something benign. A lot of different kinds of things that were benign that might only require monitoring.
Yes, of course, I needed to go get an ultrasound because I need the diagnosis to be sure. And I remember the lesson about my foot, and not deciding what something is before I have actual diagnosis and information from a medical professional who knows what it is.
Diagnosing yourself with your own intuition - it's not a thing, y'all. Diagnosing yourself with Google is a really bad idea.
I think that we get hints and we get alerts, and some of those are intuitive. Some of those are body-mind connection. And we need to follow through with them in real life. You can't follow through in the ether. It's not a thought experiment. You can't follow through to an actual diagnosis in your mind.
You can get the clues in your mind. You can get the clues in your intuition. But you can't be deciding to rewrite your will at 3am because you're on Google spinning out.
You know, the whole 'fewer hearts and flowers' tagline is really not a dig at emotion or sensitivity or wearing your heart on your sleeve. Because, as you know, I do all of those things, and that quip, 'fewer hearts and flowers', it's really about reality versus the ethereal. It's about the type of information that we work with, that we can take in to a really delusional place or we can take into a really practical place.
For me, what's the point of all this spiritual guidance and instruction and practice and information if it's not impacting my experience in the real world for the better.
So I'm going next Monday to my GP to get the referral to go to a urologist to get an ultrasound.
And guys, this is all happening the week that I finally go to Dallas to spend the weekend with Mr. Shoot the Moon. And as all things hateful will turn out, because yes of course it was a full moon on Mondayish, when all this stuff was happening, he kind of had his own life trauma happen the same freaking day that I discovered my lump.
His situation is not necessarily something life threatening or anything like that, but it's not something I can really share because it's not my story to tell and I'm not going to put his private business out there, for god's sake. I've protected his identity because I do want to be able to speak about him as he is a character, an important person, in my world and in my stories.
What he's dealing with though was definitely something bad enough that I was kind of afraid that he might need to cancel our weekend. This has been two years coming, we have been doing a daily countdown for two months. You know, because you've heard me talk about it for that long.
So I was kind of like, Really, universe? I get this close and then you have to give me a fucking cloud to take on my sunny honeymoon?
I was joking with Seth earlier. I was sending him pictures of goths in summer and I was saying, "You know what? My joy guides are confused. They're like Joy Division guides." My joy guides are like goth kid angels who got distracted and ended up at like a fetish bar in the underworld because there was a really cool show and then they showed up.
So I was sending him these pictures of, saying like, "Oh! I asked for a honeymoon and I got this!" It's like a picture of a goth chick talking on her phone, "Let me make a few calls." It's like my wedding planner is in head to toe black and looks really really pouty.
So yeah, I mean I was joking about it because I do feel a little bit of like, Really?? Come on... I was going for joy here. This is going to be a big moment of joy and then BAM BAM. I just got sucker punched right as I'm going in. And it's not that I think it's gonna have some lasting impact. It's more the idea of I wanted to have this experience with a certain mindset and I didn't need anything handicapping that, even a little bit. It can just kind of throw some sand in the motor.
I'm telling you a story about testicular lumps because I cannot NOT tell this story this week. I have all kinds of ideas for things I want to do episodes about but something like this comes along and it's too big. I can't get on here and act like, "Oh, I'm telling you stories from my personal life and how I use my spiritual perspective to deal with the bullshit. Because if this isn't a story, I don't know what is.
And I can’t fake my way through a planned episode about Finding Your Center or You Can Do it, reach for the stars!
Hopefully you get some of those kind of messages from me but... That’s all fine and dandy until we need our spirit to cope with some real shit and this is where the REAL SHIFT is required.
This is the kind of stuff that we are shifting.
I’m pissed. I'm a little pissed.
I'm worried.
I hate having to wait for actual information
I hate that it may affect my time with Mr Moon
I hate what a protracted cancer treatment period could do to my life and my body and my bank account at this moment.
I don’t want to do all that again. I don't. And I may not have a choice.
Here’s just some things, before you freak out for me too bad, that you do need to know about testicular cancer because I need to keep it in my mind as well.
If it's found early and it's not metastasized or in your lymph nodes or anything like that, it is an almost 100% treatable condition and usually it's just a surgery. They just take one out. You have two, so you can do without one and I'm pretty sure that they give you a little fake silicone one just so everything looks the same and feels normal.
And again, it is something that does happen to younger men than me. I'm almost 50 years old. That's kind of a weird age to be getting it. The rational part of my mind is okay with this because I always say, as long as I get something treatable, I'm good. Because there are a lot of things that people are dealing with that have no answers. That have no therapy. That have no cures.
This has all those things. Even the worst case scenario, if it's cancer, it's one of the most treatable cancers.
So, you know, I'm rolling with it here. I'm shifting.
I knew this year was in flux. This is a big year of changes for me. I feel like going on with everyone else. I'm talking to all of you guys about how it's happening in your own world. And I'm doing my best to create the kind of changes that I want in this moment of change. I just didn't plan for the changes that I DON'T want.
The one thing we can count on is change.
I have a friend named Scott who has been going through a lot and he is kind of traumatized by everything. I don't mean that in a mean way. I listen to him a lot. I provide a lot of space. I provide a Scorpio black hole for him to throw a lot of crap into and I'm not negatively impacted by it at all. But he is someone that needs to express a lot of trauma verbally and analytically.
And recently he messaged me and said he was just exhausted from feeling panicked. And he said, "I'm afraid that I'm disconnecting because I'm just so tired from feeling anxious that I can't feel anything anymore."
And I said, "You know, I actually think that's healthy."
I call it robot mode: Go through the motions. Seek information. Get data. Do all that before you take action. Do all that before you decide things. Do all that before you have any kind of feeling about it.
Anxiety comes from a lack of information.
And the quickest way out is always through. So let's go get the data. Let's go get the information.
But still - really universe?
Robot mode the same week I go to Dallas to have my heart truly open for the first time in twenty years?
Sigh.
I read somewhere once in Rolling Stone or something, that because of the movie the Breakfast Club, the John Hughes movie, the David Bowie’s Changes was sort of considered the collective anthem for Gen X. And I thought, I’m good with that being our bumper sticker and our message to the world.
Turn and face the strange changes
Jeremy Elliott is a Reiki Practitioner and spiritual healer who works in the Chattanooga area; his practice is called Positive Resonance. He’s also a self-described “spiritual nerd” who writes about a wide range of psycho-spiritual topics that explore how to live the life you have always dreamed of.
I invited Jeremy on the show to share some of his knowledge about the topic of Ascension.
GUEST LINKS - JEREMY ELLIOTT Positive Resonance HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSONSlade's Books & Courses Get an intuitive reading with Slade
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TRANSCRIPT Jeremy: Okay, so ascension, there's essentially two things. There's the process and the event. Ascension is basically the process of reconnecting with God. A reason that it's called "ascension" is because here in the physical world, we're at low vibration, low frequency. So during the process of self-purification, which is another term for healing, we are raising our vibrations and eventually we will make it up to the point where we do reconnect with God or with everything. With Oneness.
Slade:
How did you become interested in this topic in particular?
Jeremy:
Actually, this topic kind of found me as a part of my path. For a lot of my life, it was not on really a spiritual path. I was working on websites in a corporate office. And then at some point I realized that I could definitely produce more meaning for the world. I had a more beneficial purpose for the world in general. And in that time, going through this process of self-discovery, the ascension topic really hit me in a big way.
There's a lot of background, but I'd really like to get into more about the ascension in particular.
Slade:
Yeah, go ahead! And talk about what that process is for you. When you discovered it, it sounds like there was a process there that you latched onto and were interested in going through as part of a personal journey. Tell me about what that was.
Jeremy:
So just to give a little of the background, in my 20s, it was a point in my life where I didn't care about spirituality. I wasn't interested. It didn't matter, didn't make a difference to me. Then a close relative in the family died at a relatively young age, in their early 20s, and somehow that just set off, I don't know, it was a trigger. Something clicked and all of a sudden, I just started getting into everything.
I didn't even know about meditation. I found this word in a book. I looked it up. I was looking up 'spiritism' which is a fascinating aspect of emerging Christianity and psychic abilities, life between lives, all this kind of thing. And for meditation, I got into Buddhism and that's where things started becoming a little bit problematic in life was how to deal with spirituality in life.
At first there were questions like, how do I... because life was becoming in many ways, it was starting to become meaningless and kind of painful on one hand. I was starting to notice that things weren't clicking. I wasn't happy. I'd read about enlightenment and... Oh. That's what I want. That's going to solve everything.
That was really the start of the whole process.
Now, years later, I can say that's not the way you go about it. Actually, it's a lot different process because the journey... and it really helped me understand that what I was doing as I was looking at my life thinking, okay, I've got problems, and I want a solution to them. I want to get out of this pain. I want to be happy.
And so I said, if I choose enlightenment, this is what's going to work for me. And so I go sit down on my meditation cushion for weeks and months and years. Nothing happened. At the end of it, it's almost like, you know what? This isn't working and I've done this for so long. What's going on?
There was some resentment because when you realize this, it's almost like I made some kind of bargain with God. It was like, if I be a good spiritual person for so long, then everything's going to work out. I'm going to get my goody bag at the end. And that's not the way it works at all.
So at this point, there's almost this idea of, maybe I don't really want it after all. Screw that.
What that was, was actually just a classic case of what's called spiritual bypass. What happens is, what people will think, okay, I've got these problems. But now that I'm working on enlightenment, all the life issues, that's for little people. That's not for me because I'm too spiritual for those kind of concerns. It's a common trap to fall into.
What actually happens is, the pain in our life, what we get in life is exactly what we need for ascension and for self-purification. That pain that we're trying to avoid by seeking ascension or seeking enlightenment, those are the signs that are signaling exactly what we can find inside of ourselves that we need to work on.
So it's really kind of the opposite. We always tend to do things the opposite way than what we really need to do. So for instance, any time that you in life find something that you're not happy with, that is a signal that there is something inside of you that needs to be healed. So in healing that, whatever that is inside of you, that's the process of self-improvement. That's the spiritual path. That's what leads you to ascension.
Slade:
Mmm... let me stop you there and say that, when you said that, the first thing that I thought is, most people respond to that with thinking they need to change their circumstances or the situation that's causing them problems, right?
Jeremy:
Right. That's very common that people aren't happy. They think, I just need this. I just need that. Just to make it a short response. Anything that's temporary is not going to get happiness. Nothing external, in other words, can give you happiness. It has to be something internal. That internal is finding your true self and your true worth.
This process of self-purification is actually uncovering... what has happened in life is we've all been wounded. We have these emotional reactions. People hurt us and that pain, instead of allowing ourselves to feel it, we repress it. We stuff it down inside.
When that happens, those emotions actually prevent us from feeling our true self and our true worth. So the process of self-purification, the ascension process, is a journey of actually healing, is bringing those up, allowing ourselves to feel the pain in order to release it.
One of the things that I like to point out to people is that... negative emotions are very tricky to deal with. Nobody likes to feel them or to work with them. But it's important to understand in the idealistic world that we're living in, the extent that we allow ourselves to feel negative emotions, that is the same capacity to which we will be able to feel positive emotions. If we don't allow ourselves to feel negative emotions, we cannot feel happiness. We cannot feel joy.
So it's not avoiding the negative emotions or avoiding the negative situations, or trying to find things, bringing things into our lives that'll make us happy. It's actually working through the things that are difficult for us and are causing us pain. By working through those, we will get to happiness or the joy that we're seeking.
Slade:
So how do you work through that? When you and I were initially discussing this topic, writing back and forth, you talked about there being sort of stages, right? There are official stages to ascension, with some of the early stages being about this purification process.
Explain what... because people hear that and they think, okay, I'm supposed to be going through a purification process. What does that mean?
Jeremy:
Okay so there's two aspects to it. Personal process and then there's the general process.
In general, what we have if we're on this planet here, we have the first 7 initiations. And just to put this into perspective, in order to reach perfection, or oneness with God, there's 354 overall.
So some people kind of think that once you reach enlightenment, or you ascend off this planet, that, okay, you're home free. It's not that way. You can think of the Ascended Masters, the ones who have ascended from this planet, as being just older brothers that are also not very far along the path but are there. And interestingly enough, those Ascended Masters, they want to help us because we're going to eventually take their place as they move up in what's basically called a spiritual hierarchy.
So the stages, what we're dealing with here on Earth, we have, kind of before the initiation process, when you start the ascension process, you're now called an Initiate. Before that happens, you're basically on your own. You're doing whatever. You're experimenting. You're experiencing life.
Once you start thinking about good versus bad or having some conceptual ideas of right and wrong, and also start to begin to manifest qualities of love and compassion, you're starting to get on the path of ascension.
Now the first three stages of ascension deal with being able to have some sort of control over your physical body, your emotional body, and your mental body. There's a very good reason for this. So once you start to ascend higher and higher, because your thoughts and your emotions they're actually, can't say physical things but they're objects on the spiritual level. So even though we can't see them, if you look at the higher level, when you get to the astral level and higher, the spiritual beings that are helping us, spiritual helpers, they can see those as actual objects and those have consequences.
So if you were to take somebody from the Earth plane and put them on a higher level, those thoughts would instantly manifest. So if you don't have control of your thoughts that well, well guess what? You've just actually done that.
So this thing about ascension. It's not something like God's here being like... we're not playing favourites. This is just a necessary part of the process in order to be able to get to another level without doing harm on a higher level.
Moving up in the initiation process, the 4th initiation is something that probably a lot of people on a spiritual path, at least that I've seen, are experiencing now is sometimes known as the "Job initiation", where everything in the world just kind of becomes meaningless. Everything that used to give you pleasure doesn't give you pleasure anymore. Or maybe just kind of your world collapses and everything falls apart. One of those two aspects.
At first, it's extremely painful and mentally, because you feel like there's nothing for you, life doesn't make sense. It's all over. What that is is kind of like, for people who understand or know about tarot, it's kind of like the tarot card where it's a destructive process but it's actually a freeing one because it's allowing you to understand what's really important. That the physical, material things of life are not important. It's the spiritual aspects that's important. So it allows you to build a firm, spiritual foundation.
As you build higher, the 5th initiation, you're actually starting to merge with your spirit, which is the divine aspect of yourself. And then when you get to initiation 6, you're actually at the beginning of the ascended master stage and at the end of initiation 7, you have completed your, you are basically, you are no longer in a cycle of reincarnation. You have released yourself.
When you're at that level, if you think about what that level means, that means always having kindness in your heart, always having pure thoughts. When I say that, of course, I'm already laughing about the fact that people are gonna be like, okay, all I have to do is control my thoughts, control my feelings.
No. That is not what you do. Because you can't. You can't control your thoughts and you can't control your emotions. The process of self-purification is one where you're finding, what is inside at a higher level that is affecting your thoughts and emotions? Whatever's influencing your thoughts and emotions, that's what needs to be healed. And that you can work on and help purify.
Slade:
I was gonna say, what about observing, because observing is not necessarily trying to control. You can acknowledge that you're having a certain thought or emotion without becoming overly attached to it or acting on it. So that's kind of a mid-range stage or goal in that process, right?
Jeremy:
Correct. Yes. You do want to have an awareness, or it's not that you... It would be very helpful if you had an awareness of your thoughts and your emotions at all times. Because people get lost in them. So part of the process is to, when you have an awareness, first of all, don't judge anything. The minute you judge it, you've basically repressed it. You've said, oh, I don't want this.
And then when you start doing that, then it goes away and once those thoughts go away... When you're not aware of something, you can't fix it.
Slade:
Where would you fit re-framing into that process? This is something that I do a lot so of course I'm gonna quiz you from my limited perspective.
But one of the things that I try to do is not only to acknowledge and observe those thoughts, but to replace them. Like you said, there's an equally positive level of thought and emotion for those negative thoughts and emotions. So how does that play a part in your perspective on this? Am I on the right track with that?
Jeremy:
Can you give a specific example? Because I'd like to use it. Or maybe I'll give an example: Let's say somebody's a jerk, right? You have this thought, somebody's a jerk. So you would reframe it and say, well, I really like this person.
Is that kind of what you're doing?
Slade:
Well probably what I would do in that instance, like if I were to experience somebody who was acting a certain kind of way to me or whatever, causing me to have a negative thought or emotion about them, depending on what my relationship to that person was, if it was a random stranger, I might look for some kind of thought about the fact that it doesn't really have anything to do with me.
That might be sort of a low level way of re-framing that.
If it's someone that I am, say, close to, who's triggering me in some way, pissing me off, one of the first things that I'll do is remind myself what their intentions are. Most people, especially those you're in relationships with, their intention is not to annoy you. And I'm easily annoyed.
Jeremy:
So the way that I would take this, instead of worrying about what their intentions are, I would be like, Oh, this is great. Somebody is annoying me. Because every time that happens, this is a gift that, it's like telling you, there's something inside that is bothering you that can be healed.
So these are basically triggers. And when you find repeating patterns, it's very helpful because then you're like, okay, this has happened over and over. This person's triggered me over and over. It's like the Universe is saying, "Look, you need to look into this. There's something in there." At which point you can meditate on. You can go inside and... what's going on?
Slade:
Right.
Jeremy:
Actually you don't need to feel... So you can feel pissed off in the moment, but in the same moment, having an awareness of being pissed off and being like, oh, this is great. I'm being pissed off. So what's happening here? In other words, be curious about being pissed off. Because most people are like, they take it and they immediately go into defense mode, like, oh he pissed me off, and want to clamp down.
The moment that you have that emotional reaction, for instance, when you stop breathing, when you clench your mouth, you tighten your muscles, that represses that emotion. It keeps it from being able to express itself. It doesn't mean you want to act on the emotion, but you definitely don't want to hold it inside.
By looking at it with curiosity (what's happening here?), you're also allowing it to have it's space. You're holding space for that emotion so it can fully express itself. At the same time, of course you don't want to keep doing that over and over again because that just doesn't make sense. But it just gives you that, it's showing you what you need.
You can look and say, okay, when has this happened before? Look into childhood. Where in childhood did somebody piss me off? There might be something there that's... Oh! That's what happened. It was a memory that you'd long forgotten about and that needs to be healed. Because at the moment as a child, for instance, you saw it in a way, from a child's perspective, you took it in a lot differently and it caused a lot more pain than it needed to cause.
Slade:
I think that's a really useful simple tool - to be curious about everything. To investigate it and to treat your emotional responses as kind of diagnostic tools.
Jeremy:
Right. That's exactly right.
That's actually kind of the purpose of all our relationships. We think that relationships are there to make us happy. That's not it. If you cannot be happy by yourself alone, then what you're doing is, you're expecting somebody else to make you happy. That's not the job of the other person.
Slade:
Oh gosh. That's a whole other show right there.
Jeremy:
Haha... Off of that tangent.
But the point of every relationship that we have with a person is because that person reflects us. So if somebody is doing something... because there's people that do stuff that are "wrong", but we're not annoyed by them. Because we don't have that aspect inside of us. It's those things that they do that piss us off, that's because we have that same aspect in us that we're ashamed about. If we did not have that, we wouldn't care.
So the problem with spirituality is where you have to be brutally honest. You have to throw out self-judgement. You have to throw out shame. You cannot feel guilty about this. You have to take everything on the level of, no matter what I've done in life, God is there and he always loves me. He doesn't care what I've done. He's seen it all.
Once you've realized that, then you can look at yourself and be like, the only thing I have to heal is, I have to heal being able to love myself.
When you're in those situations where you're looking for this stuff, immediately of course you want to go into denial. You want to make it look like, oh it's that person pissing me off. No. That person's showing you an aspect of yourself that you're ashamed of. That's what's pissing you off and you're projecting it on the other person.
Slade:
Sigh. I'm trying not to have any kind of emotional response to that. I'm taking it in. I'm gonna put that in my toolbox. I probably derailed you a little bit from talking about your process.
Let me bring you to something that I always think about when I see the word "ascension", and what we've been talking about is kind of like the personal individual's soul's process, so to speak. But whenever I hear that word, I always think of the kind of collective, the human race as a whole ascending.
Talk to me a little bit about that.
Jeremy:
Let's talk about that. Yeah.
Because ascension is connected very much to new age. This is promoted as a new age show. New age, of course, we're entering the Age of Aquarius. So we're no longer in this, you know, people who are spiritual go meditate on a mountain or go off somewhere.
We, the new spiritual warriors or healers, we're people in the community, we have families. This is one part of the new age.
The other part of the new age is a fact that the, it's not just people who ascend. The planet is also ascending. So the planet has reached its 4th initiation apparently in 1987 with the Harmonic Convergence. And now, since at least 2012, we're having 5th dimensional frequencies come in.
What does that mean? It means a couple of things. Higher frequencies make spirituality and spiritual healing a lot more accessible. For instance, when I practice reiki and I'm doing long-distance healing, I'm not only sometimes accessing the dimension of, well I'm accessing the dimension of space because I'm doing it long distance, but sometimes I'm accessing the dimension of time as well because I might have the healing done at a later time than I would, or do it in a sequence.
So that's really exciting.
What's more exciting is that it allows people in general to speed up the process of ascension. So what used to take, let's say, a lifetime to do an initiation, we can now do in a matter of years. As a matter of fact, for people who are here now listening to the show, there's a possibility, and I'm not saying a "should", but there is a possibility, it's out there, that any of us could reach the 7th initiation. In other words, escape the reincarnation cycle by the end of this lifetime.
It's kind of this idea of, okay, if it feel right for you to do that then go ahead. There's no "should" here, but that's an open possibility. And it's something that's very exciting.
Slade:
So you mentioned 2012, since then there were 5th dimension, other frequencies coming in. Does that explain... like I felt when I first started Shift Your Spirits, if you go way way back in the archives to 2006, you find me kind of meditating a lot on this idea of the ascension of the Earth, of mankind in particular. And I felt this profound sense of excitement and hope and energy rising, whereas in the last few years, I almost feel like the energy has been overshot in some way, or I worry that, did we miss the train or what?
Jeremy:
So to explain a little bit what's going on, because the Earth has ascended, that has affected us as humans ourselves. There was a possibility at one point, there was a lot of people whose vibration wasn't high enough and they weren't going to be able to survive. So this idea of this, maybe in Biblical... this "Armageddon", a mass killing off of people, that was kind of a possibility because of the ascension of the Earth.
There could have been people that didn't make it, for lack of a better term.
What ended up happening instead was, there was a lot of, we would say "lightworkers", to use the term who were able to increase their vibration, basically their "light quotient" at a very rapid pace. And because of these people bringing up their frequency, their vibration, they were able to raise up the vibration of the whole, and that happened very quickly in that period between, let's say, 1990 to 2010, in that area.
So that's what you would have been feeling.
Now it was great for everybody. We're all here. We all made it. However, it did cause a slight issue because ascension is more than just the vibration. You also have the aspects. The mental aspect, the physical aspect, and the emotional aspect I talked about earlier. Those aren't necessarily raised at the same time. That also is necessary in order to continue higher.
So when you get, at a planetary level, part of ascensioning and go towards what's the Cosmic, the next level is the Cosmic level, you're not going to be allowed to get to that level unless you go back and integrate those other aspects inside you.
So just because a person has a high rate of vibration or is a high stage of initiation in the ascension process, it doesn't necessarily mean that they're very well integrated on other levels. So you can have somebody that could even be an Ascended Master who still is having issues with thought purification, with emotional purification or emotional maturity, as you could call it.
Slade:
As you think about these concepts, you think about things that are happening physically in the world, species die off, the incredible amount of pollution that we seem to have absolutely no collective perspective on, what's the story that you personally tell yourself about how that is reflected in this ascension process?
What is going on with all of that... I guess what I'm asking is, does that mean that we're failing at it miserably? Is there some other explanation for why all that stuff is happening and it's part of the process and maybe I can chill out about it.
Jeremy:
There's a couple of ways of looking at it that are both necessary. So the first aspect is, what happens outside is a reflection of what's inside. It's very literal. So what you see outside is really what is inside you. If you see pollution outside, what that means is there's more to work on inside of you.
So people like to, they have this concept of, I've got to change the world, I have to help the world. On a spiritual level, there's no significance of importance. If you stop a conflict with your spouse, you have done something just as important as on a world level of stopping a war.
It's easy to get discouraged when you see these big problems, but you have to understand on a spiritual level, all problems are the same and you CAN make a difference. Every time that you are able to successfully deal with purifying your thoughts or your emotions, you are helping prevent disasters on a large scale in the world. You're literally doing that.
The other part of this is the fact that, even though things do look bleak, everything is happening for a reason. And part of that reason is to help us realize that we do need to work on ourselves. But also, we need to realize that we do have unlimited power. We do have the capability of turning things around, but it's never a direct... You can't directly fix anything. I think we've pretty much explained on the show already.
It's not, okay we have pollution in the world. We need to solve pollution now.
If we have pollution in the world, there's still some pollution in ourselves that we can fix. And by doing that, it will help solve... the world will solve on its own.
Slade:
Hmm... So are you hopeful that enough people will become enlightened in that way that it will change things in physical reality somehow?
Jeremy:
I have hope that no matter what happens, it's what's needed to happen. It's not even, okay, this is good or this is bad. There's no judgement, okay maybe the world will explode. But it's just, in the end, that's a material object. We as spiritual beings will live on. We will mature no matter what environment we're in.
We obviously don't want... I'm attached to this planet which is one of the reasons why I'm still here, right?
Slade:
Yeah.
Jeremy:
But again, we don't have to concern ourselves about external things because that external thing, that's just the movie that we're watching. That we can't control. But we have so much power to fix what's inside of us. And as long as we have hope of doing that, everything's gonna work.
Slade:
Oh I like that. That gives me a lot of hope and I'm sure that that's very useful to other people listening to this as well.
Talk to me about practical stuff. Are there "techniques" helping to enable this process?
Jeremy:
Actually, there are quite a few things that you can do, just kind of spiritual practices. Now we've already discussed a little bit about looking inside for things that need healing.
So the process of healing... Let's back up a second. The Spiritual Path in general, that is the process of self-improvement. So instead of trying to jump directly into "I want to ascend", just realize that everything you're doing to heal yourself or to improve yourself, you are on the path, okay? So you don't have to worry about it.
And also, everything that comes in life, it's almost like, just look at what's happening in your life. That is the main thing that's going to help you find what you need. Because it's reflecting back what you need in your life.
But as far as practical things that you can do, there are things like, you can repeat a mantra. You can repeat God's name. For instance, a technique you can do meditations where you will basically ask to speak to your guides, to speak to the spiritual masters. You don't need psychic abilities for this stuff. It's almost like you're using your imagination.
But anything that gives you this feeling of connectedness. Even things like go to a yoga class, right? Go to your tai chi. All this stuff is helpful.
If you're really interested in just a hundred different actual ascension techniques, there's a guy, part of what was the Ascension Movement in, I want to say, the '90s and a little later. Joshua David Stone. He wrote several books mentioning hundreds of these different little things that you can do. For instance, he talked about the whole encounter which is out of A Course in Miracles is to look at every person as if you were meeting God. Look at everything as if you're meeting God. So think of this plant in front of you as God, or the tree as God.
He has so many different ideas you can use, if that's an interest.
Slade:
It sounds to me like a lot of the information or literature that you were inspired by or drawing on is more of a Buddhist teaching. What about somebody who has maybe a more traditional faith system? What do you say to that person?
Jeremy:
So, the first thing to realize is, keep your belief system in place. When you're in the ascension process, you do not need to change the beliefs in any way whatsoever. It's only important that you recognize the necessity of self-improvement.
I like to say to people, there are as many ways to reach God as people, right? You don't need an exact path. You just need to use your own intuition. Every person has their own path. What works for one person is not gonna work for another person.
Slade:
Well you and I both live in the same area in southeast Tennessee, so we encounter a lot of fundamentalist churchgoers etc. and ask you probably experience in your daily life, a lot of the people that I really love and have friendships with are very different in their faith systems from me. It's something that I always struggle with and have spent kind of a lifetime learning how to process that.
It's interesting because I'm thinking about, if we look at this thing of, this idea of it being kind of a diagnostic of what needs to be healed within ourselves, I can see this lifelong story arc of me growing up in the midst of this fundamentalist environment thinking, how the hell did I end up here? Really pissed off. I was much angrier when I was younger about it than I am now. Whereas now I have, I feel a much more elevated way of talking to people from different faith systems.
And to tell you the truth, I have found that I'm actually much more in alignment with someone who is very devout in a different faith system from me than someone who has no faith at all.
So for instance, even people who are devout Christians, are a little bit more open to the concepts of miracles and of some of the thoughts as objects kind of context that you and I are talking about.
What I'm hearing you say is, within any faith system, there is this kernel of truth about this self-improvement path. All churches have that within then.
Jeremy:
So every religion has the truth in there. It's just a matter of recognizing what the truth is.
The other thing to realize is that our life situation, whether religious or not religious, is exactly what we need right now on our path. So if a person's religious, I actually grew up Mormon, that's exactly where you're supposed to be. There is a purpose for that.
It's definitely not something where you have to worry, oh I have to change my belief system. I need to do this or that. No. You are there. You've got to... And if you think about your own personal experience, the doing what you had to go through was what you needed to heal the aspects that you came into this life with.
Slade:
Sure.
Jeremy:
As long as you have the faith that your life, what you're living, your path that you're on, that's what you need. That's been provided for you. This is not by chance.
Slade:
There's one thing about this ascension conversation that you and I had that I wanted to make sure and get your thoughts on. What's the relationship between ego and ascension? Talk to me about that a little bit.
Jeremy:
Okay, so once again, what the ego wants to do when it hears about ascension is, oh, I want this. The ego is something where... it's just life in general where we think a car is going to make us happy. We think that this relationship is going to make us happy. Well, we think ascension is going to make us happy. So the ego will use ascension for its own purposes.
And again, when you go, when you have a desire for anything, that prevents you from actually any kind of... self improvement. Because what you're doing is, now you're grasping onto something. You're thinking, okay, if I only had this, then I would be happy.
Instead, you need to stop and be like, what's going on now?
Slade:
I wanted to hear you speak a little bit about this idea of handling the desire for ascension, the desire for enlightenment. I thought that was a really important thing to speak about.
Jeremy:
Right, okay. So this is a good question because it comes up a lot as... the ego is something that is going to want... it thinks it needs things for happiness. It thinks it's gonna want this or that. Ascension or enlightenment is going to come up.
A good way of dealing with any type of desire is to realize, in the physical world, we don't get what we want when we want it. That's not going to happen but any time the ego comes up and rears its ugly head like, I want this now, that's what produces the pain.
But we have to recognize that we do have needs and we do have wants. And if there's something that we do have a need for, we do have a need for love, we do have a need for this and that. So we sit with that pain and we say, okay, I recognize this. I am in pain because I do not have this but I still realize that I would like this. I'm not going to give up the desire just because I do not have it.
Because a lot of the time, what the ego's going to do is, oh I can't have this now. I didn't really want it anyway. I never get what I want, that type of thing. So the healthy, emotional response to anything including ascension is to recognize, okay I do have this pain. I do have this desire. I want this even though I can't have it now. It's okay. I still respect the fact that I would like this.
Slade:
Tell us a little bit about the work that you do and where we can connect with you online.
Jeremy:
I'm a reiki practitioner in a holistic medicine locally in the Chattanooga area. My business is called Positive Resonance. My website address is https://pozrez.com/
Slade:
Very cool.
Jeremy, thank you for coming on and having this conversation with me.
Jeremy:
Slade, thank you so much for inviting me. It's been a pleasure.
This is a story of life and death and a bit of a philosophical nature diary.
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"Where are you in relation to what you're trying to manifest?"
David Thomas Wright helps spiritual and creative entrepreneurs to manifest their big vision and recognize their divine worth.
David and I talk about developing intuition to enhance your manifesting journey, the interplay of intuition and intentions, the Law of Attraction.
If you have questions about whether the impulse to relocate is part of a higher calling for you … David has lived this experience of following his intuition to a new city and manifesting a new life for himself.
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Automatic Intuition
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TRANSCRIPT Slade: Texting back and forth, messaging on Facebook about my love life or whatever and it kind of came up.
The thing that really struck me was, I've thought about doing shows on... I think it's called astrocartography and location-based purpose and feeling this sense of, I've got to move somewhere cool. I mean, we've all experienced that at some point in our life. Over the years, this is something that clients bring in readings all the time, are these questions about feeling like they need to move somewhere and that a better life is waiting for them somewhere else.
On the one hand, I do believe that in some cases, if you manifest everything else that you possibly want and need, it probably won't matter where you are. Like if I took you where you are right now and you said, "I'm unhappy. I don't have anyone." If I suddenly gave you this wonderful job working from home, and then you randomly met the love of your life living two blocks away, suddenly you don't want to leave.
David:
Absolutely.
Slade:
Yeah.
David:
It changes everything.
Slade:
But you kind of lived this idea of following an impulse to move somewhere specific and begin a new life. So I want you to take me back to where you were before all that happened, and tell me about how this manifestation journey to another place unfolded for you.
David:
Sure.
So I've always felt that obviously places are about people. So being drawn to a place would have some sort of "knock on" effect where you're being drawn to the right people and the right circumstances. But I was looking for something in my life and I was looking for a sense of home. Because I didn't really have, and hadn't had that sense of home and belonging for a long, long time.
When I was in my early 20s, I studied in London, and had to come back home because it was so expensive to live there and was still looking for work. I went through a phase in my life where I thought it was about going back to London or this dream, or this aspiration to go back to London, and that was the kind of measurement of my wellbeing or not.
Over time, it seemed to kind of disappear. That intention or that need to return to London just wasn't there anymore. And I was actually living here in Lincolnshire and I went on holiday for the first time to Edinburgh, Scotland.
Now there is a bit of a backstory and I don't know whether I told you this but I was first working with clients and giving psychic, intuitive readings. I was probably about 17, 18, and I used to sense what was Scottish guide or a Scottish influence which I felt was to do with his ancestry. Not past lives but some sort of remembrance.
And it would come in and sometimes I would see this and it's going to sound a little cheesy, but a little bit like what we see now in Outlander. So that kind of Scottish chieftan and the kind of full Highlander regalia. Quite hot really. And that's what I got from this guide and again it just kind of fizzled out in the early 20s.
And then there was a point in my life when I was looking for a sense of home and belonging, and this Scottish feeling, whatever that means, this kind of pull towards Scotland came in again. And I noticed that when I opened up to give readings, and I knew that it wasn't about the clients. It was just something that was slipping into that vibration because I was open to channel.
I thought, okay, well the last time I thought about this, I was kind of early 20s. Now I'm sort of mid-30s. It's been a journey. I looked back at my old journals from the time and I kept writing "the royal road the royal road" over and over again. I also wrote the word "Bute". And hand on heart, whether it's subconscious or not, this is before the age of Google, or before I had access to Google, I thought Butes was in Cornwall but that's Bude. So Bute is an Isle which I've visited now since, and that was kind of in my freestyling automatic writing journalling in my early 20s and also "the royal road".
Now, short story, I think "the royal road" is the Royal Mile, which is the main historical high street, if you like, in Edinburgh. So I kept being drawn to Scotland, and specifically, Edinburgh. I went with my partner at the time and it was like falling in love. So if anyone has been to Edinburgh, it is a beautiful city aesthetically. Amazing architecture, a lot of heritage. You're near the sea. There's a castle on volcanic rock. It's like Game of Thrones. But then you kind of have your high street and everything you would want from a major city.
I was just wowed by it. It felt like falling in love with a person. It was a completely magnetic pull.
I did visit a couple of times afterwards and on one visit, I went to a past life regression expert because I was like, what is this all about, this draw? I now feel that it isn't necessarily about a past life as it is about ancestry. I've tried to trace the ancestry but what came up for me eventually was, well why does it matter? Does it have to be quantified or qualified with, it's an ancestral thing or it's a past life thing. Maybe this just speaks to now.
So I thought, okay, this has always been here in some way.
One point that I do want to make is, I don't know how you feel about this Slade, but there's quite a small divide between what we would call an intuitive hunch and spontaneous manifestation. I guess I'll explain that a bit more later, but what I manifested here, some might say it was destiny or fate, as in: you got the prompts intuitively when you were in your early 20s and then you followed those prompts and you were meant to live here and so it was always gonna happen. It could have been fated or predicted.
Yes, to an extent. But I actually began to use manifesting processes for the first time in my life, to make sure that I would move and have the opportunity to move to Edinburgh. Because as soon as I went there, I got tingles now talking about it, it was like being in love. There was a calm. It wasn't just about desire or longing and a strong need to start again and have a new life. Which I did need.
I think sometimes when it's intuitive, there's like a calm underneath because you know the pieces are going to come together one way or the other. I know, of course, that people would say you can goalset your way to relocating. Yeah, absolutely. And some of my friends are coaches in the more conventional perspective and they sometimes struggle with what we would call the woo-woo scale of energy manifesting all the time _____
But the way this unfolded is I couldn't have strategized my way to Edinburgh. I could've literally but it would taken a long time or it wouldn't have happened in this way at the right time. Because I made a friend, completely out of the blue, via Instagram, and that made it possible for me to move and stay with him for a few months while I got myself together.
I guess I'm skipping a little bit forward in time.
Talking about my process, which might be useful to others if you wanted to try this. Whether it's a business dream, whether it's a passion project, whether it's about relocation, I really like to help people with a big vision, and I think a lot of that has come from my own journey moving to Edinburgh.
So what I did was put images around me at home in Lincolnshire of Edinburgh. You know the castle. And also, more kind of not just the touristy stuff but kind of more earthy and grounded images and associations with the city. Because I'm thinking, I'm not always going to be hanging around the castle or going to tourist attractions. Sometimes I'm gonna just be going to the local shop.
So I found images online which kind of represented an earthier side of the city as if I'm living there, not just being a tourist.
I also put sort of post-it notes around my house and they were supposed to be subliminal. I think the subliminal approach works because the idea of reaffirming can be quite forceful and therefore quite tense experience, and the desire to reinforce something through constant affirmations is fear-based. And I think there's a tension underneath that which could actually push an experience away from you.
So what I try to do was to take a more subliminal approach with post-it notes, with these postcard images I had around. I think I had a vision board.
Also, one of the most effective things I find is to record an audio of what you are experiencing in the present tense as if you have it now. These are the principles that are kind of well known to people who are listening, but it worked for me. Hearing it in my own voice and just having it in the background as I'm walking down the street or as I'm falling asleep I think made a huge difference to my energy and to my ability to just expect this outcome.
Not hope, because I think hope is obviously a wonderful emotion, but I think when you really begin to rock and roll with the manifesting, it's about an inevitability sort of feeling. It's an intuitive inevitability. It's kind of like, I don't want this and I'm not hoping for it because that's a pull. But I'm sort of expecting it and I kind of know.
And so the stuff that could not be strategized, for example, chance meetings as I said at the beginning. It's all about people more than it is about places. Financially, I wasn't in a super abundant place. So having the opportunity to just stay with someone for three months was hugely helpful to get me on my feet and to get me in the city.
And that friend of mine has got quite an insistent character, and he is, I don't know if he'd agree with this, but I see him as more confident than me. He's a performer for a living. So I see him as having all this confidence and he gave me, I think, on more than one occasion, a bit of a push and like, just do this. Do you know what I mean? Let's just get on with it and you can stay with me for a few months.
That was hugely helpful. Also what gave me the incentive to move forward.
This is where I think it gets quite juicy.
The manifesting stuff for me isn't just about identifying something that you want. I also think that you choose something. For me, it was a city and everything that I believed I would experience there, including having some not so good days and expecting it to not be like a paradise but being alive and being real. It's almost like lassoing your energy to something, like a cowboy. For me, it was a city.
I think sometimes when we're attracted to things in that way, it's a focal point. And then you can train your energy and vibration, yes to manifest the outcome where I'm living in that physical city, but also it's like a reference point to up-vibe, or to scale up your vibe, whatever way you want to put it so that you become a vibrational match for what you want. But also that you release anything that does not serve you in the meantime.
Because as soon as I set this intention in a real way and look at manifesting, I actually attracted what was a quite tumultuous love affair, sort of fling, sort of dark night of the soul experience. I think that it made my own experience like a living hell.
That sounds like an exaggeration but...
Slade:
Wait a minute. Tell us a little bit about what that was.
David:
Yup. Okay.
Slade:
That sounded way too juicy.
David:
Yeah it's so juicy. You're gonna get more juiced.
So this was about me trying to, or being able to, release myself from any mindsets which was preventing me from allowing, accepting, attracting, manifesting the outcome. So when I do talk to people about my manifesting, it's not like I'm saying, "Buckle up, it's going to be a rough ride", because it doesn't have to be at all.
But I think that to really get what you want, because manifesting is about feelings. It isn't about physical stuff. Yes you do manifest the physical experience, but you're able to inhabit it in the way that you asked for. Because your mindset has changed.
For example, going back to love and romance, a lot of people ask me about manifesting love, and I don't think that they just want someone to validate them and say, "Wow, you're really gorgeous and sexy and I want to spend my life with you. In their own experience, they want to feel comfortable themselves and to be able to receive that and enjoy that and feel good about that.
So, I don't know if you've had this experience, but a lot of readers will get asked, what is someone else thinking about me? Or, what is my love interest thinking about me? And in the end, the manifesting stuff is so powerful because it is about how you perceive that situation. Because if you can't feel comfortable with it, then you could have the guy under your window serenading you but you might not feel the way you want it to feel.
So when you do manifestation and you're saying to the Universe, "I want this", it isn't just about... I think what the Universe hears is not only you want to live in this postal code, this zip code. It's hearing, you want to have a certain emotional experience.
So what we're going to do is to organize everything to enable that to happen. So yeah, you get to live in the postal code / zip code, or, and, you get feel the way that you want to feel. A part of that was, in my journey, I developed a really magnetic, but at times toxic, connection with someone. I wasn't looking for that necessarily. I wasn't really looking for a long term partnership because I'd recently left a relationship.
But it is something that pushed all of my buttons. I'm not really keen on the conversation that I hear a lot of, which is empath versus narcissist, and kind of putting people into boxes in that way. If I identify as an empath, let's just say that a lot of stuff happened which would be a struggle for anyone, but particularly an empath who is, like myself, a bit emotional, intuitive, empathic machine.
What it brought about was, it prompted me to think about, what do you really want? Because it's part of this experience. There was an invitation to an extent. I don't know if the invitation was to build a life with that person. But it was, are you going to stick around and commit to this relationship or connection, whatever we call that, and therefore commit more to the city that you're living in right now, or do you want something else entirely.
And it could have been quite tempting to say, "Actually, I want to stay because what I'm really looking for is the right kind of partnership and this could be it. So I'll just stay here then."
What I found in that experience is that my needs weren't met so that was a bit of a wake up call. But also, as that played out, and it was at times confusing and upsetting and a little bit hellish for me, which would've been to do with my own mindset stuff. I'm not into blame around that or why didn't this person do this differently, but it sort of highlighted to me that it would be quite difficult now to find what I am looking for in this small city.
And it'd already been difficult to find the kind of work that I wanted or of course nowadays we can be on the internet and we can be international, etc.
And it was, when I say ____, I mean that in a good way. It was a real indicator that it is time to go, David. It really is time to move on. Because my associations with... I couldn't not think about memories and triggering negative experiences from this romantic encounter that I'd had, or relationship.
I was thinking about it in my home. I was walking about in a small city and I'm thinking, am I going to bump into that person? It's painful when I do see that person and it was kind of like, no, this is a sign that it is time to get out of Dodge.
There were a few peak experiences and coincidences, or synchronicities, with that person and in that experience where it was kind of like, Ohmygod, this is becoming more and more uncomfortable. I feel something is prompting me and pushing me to make a choice about the future and really move on. So the opportunities were there for going back to Edinburgh, which is where I wanted to move to. The opportunities were there to move, arguably before.
But something happened in me where I just let go.
You know when you sometimes seek advice from other people, even those people who care for you or intuitive. Intuitive friends of mine and psychic friends of mine who've kind of given their take on things and my journey. It's always going to look easy for them because they're not living it. But they were correct. It was that, they were telling me that all the pieces were there but there was something in me that had to shift to claim it, and to be able to move forward. And something had to happen which kind of pushed me.
Now I don't think any external force made that happen to me because I don't really believe in that as such. And I certainly don't have any feelings for that person, because it seems like a long, long time ago now or the experience that I had.
But there is an unconscious aspects to manifesting as well. And a lot of the processes that we see talked about are, they're quite conscious mind. Repeat enough information. It's very cognitive, it's very on the surface. But I also believe that manifesting can happen on a subconscious level because what I did, I believe I created also that difficult experience and attracted it and entertained it because I knew it would push me to the limit. It would push me to making a choice and work through some blocks which I may not have done otherwise.
I am a procrastinator. I don't know if that's a Virgo thing, but I am a champion procrastinator. That's what led me to look at coaching, because I was looking for something that would take me out of my procrastination and sort of galvanize me a little bit.
So I think I manifested the difficult circumstances to prompt myself to actually make that move.
I guess the moral of the story is: manifestation, it isn't just about bricks and mortar or, you know, zip codes. It is about what you feel a place would represent, if we're talking about relocation. Ultimately it's about people, and that became true. Because I had a lot of ideas and intentions about what Edinburgh was going to represent. I wasn't ____ sort of like fairyland, where all your dreams come true and it's perfect all the time. Because I knew it would be a real home, and as people, we have, day to day, different experiences. Sometimes we're happy, sometimes we're sad.
I framed these ideas about what it was going to represent. And I actually moved to Edinburgh a couple years ago. It was April the 1st and I think that is quite significant because that is April Fool's day of course. It makes me think of the Fool in the tarot.
Slade:
Yeah.
David:
Which is the first stage of the journey and it's a leap of faith and being "foolish" and going against the grain and going against limiting beliefs and just going for that. So I've always felt that was significant. And I gave away most of my stuff. I gave it to charity shops or I sold it or I just got rid of it. And so when I moved out to Edinburgh to stay with my friend, I had probably two large suitcases with me on the train. That was it.
So I'm sitting on the train and spirit are talking to me. And maybe this is an experience that other people have had. I can hear spirit very well when I am travelling, especially if I'm not having to do anything. I actually haven't driven a car for years and years, funny enough, but I did qualify to drive.
But when I'm sitting on my own, on a train or something like that, because you're kind of in between two realities, you're between two spaces, and quite often there's not a lot to do. You're just looking out the window and that has always prompted amazing ideas, such as, it makes me think about J.K. Rowling when she had the whole idea for the plotline of Harry Potter came to her on a train. I can understand.
Slade:
Yeah!
David:
I understand that. Funny enough, she wrote Harry Potter in Edinburgh. I love her.
Slade:
I do too.
David:
Yeah, big fan.
So, I think it is a special energy, to be between states in that way. Literally, I guess, sometimes. So I hear spirit really clearly. And I would also say is a tip if you want to manifest or intend, this in between space, this liminal space when you're travelling, is a good place to do it.
But anyway, they're chatting to me. "So what you going here for then?"
And I'm like, well you know, because you prompted me, or you were part of this conversation or this creation process.
"So what are your intention then?"
And I'm kind of talking about this big lofty stuff.
They're like, "Okay, yeah, cool, but really what did you want to find?"
"Well I want to find a partner. I want to find a husband."
They're like, "Okay, we're getting to it now."
That's the nitty gritty. This is how I talk to spirit. That's how they talk to me. It's very like friends over coffee.
So it is about career opportunities, and it is about beautiful architecture. But it's also about, let's find a life partner. Let's find that lovely partner/husband/etc.
And they said, "Okay then. So be it. As you intend it, it's there." And they said, "Why don't you just drop another wish into the well. Why don't you just give us something else and nothing is big or lofty as the life partner or the career dream. Why don't you just drop something in there."
I'm like, "You know what? I've always wanted to sail or learn to sail or be on boats or spend time on the water. And it's not been this burning passion since I was a kid. It's just something that I've always been really curious about."
And they're like, "Okay, cool."
So I dropped that in the wishing well kind of thing.
So April the 1st I move there. Then I began looking for friends on a dating app. The magic of dating apps we know can be very powerful. So I met my partner Joe on the 26th of April and that was it. So him arriving took 26 days and it was a feeling of complete certainty from the very beginning. From the first time I met him in person.
I can't claim to be super intuitive about talking to him before that point because I just thought he looked quite sexy, that was it. Maybe that was necessary, do you know what I mean? Instead of having these lofty intuitive insights about this picture of this guy. He looks hot. I'm gonna meet him. I think that's a good enough prompt, don't you?
Slade:
Well yeah, because, let's just state for the record here, because obviously I've recorded a bunch of stuff about relationship things and men and all that.
David:
That was genius, Slade.
Slade:
Thank you!
The one thing I've gotten a lot of questions about or messages about and I just need to put it out there because it's honestly never come up before. All of the intuition in the world kind of goes out the window when you're dealing with this kind of attraction.
I think people beat themselves up a lot, just the average muggle beats themselves up for not having better intuition about someone they're romantically involved with. Like you said, the first impulse is a kind of sexual attraction. That sort of throws you into your lizard brain anyway and...
But for whatever reason, and oddly enough, I remember hearing another psychic, TV psychic, talk about this one time and her whole philosophy was we learn about ourselves through people and through these relationships, especially these very serious challenging relationships. There would be no lessons for us. There would be no opportunity to grow through these people if we kind of could predict everything about it, or knew at a glance this person's story.
David:
Yes.
Slade:
Now I might have that kind of complete feeling about other people, but yeah, just for the record, when it's potentially, like you said, your future husband, you're probably not gonna get all that much information.
David:
And actually, you are completely right. And I would say, my ability to intuit for myself, not about men necessarily, but other choices that I make or other life aspects, that has probably developed in the last few years. And I think it's because of this manifesting work I've been doing. And I would make that separate to, obviously intuitive work that I've done for other people.
So I've been able to be intuitive for others in some capacity since I was about 12. The ability to intuit for myself, how it's manifesting, however, a lot of people talk about intuition in the context of caution and that's what I don't quite get.
My intuition has always, and how it relates to manifesting, like two sides to the same coin, has always been about, I feel intuitively drawn to Edinburgh, for example, and I intuitively know that this is going to fall into place. And I want to say, that's got nothing to do with my work as a psychic or whatever word that you want to use.
So if anyone is listening to this, it's not about being intuitive to the level that you can do that for others or do that professionally. This does apply to everybody. It would, of course, apply very much to empathic people or people who are naturally more intuitive.
But what I find interesting is, there are some people who hone intuition and then they think they need to veer off into these realms of using that for people, some sort of vocation or profession. And actually, we don't. And there are a lot of intuitives who are professionals who, when they are trained, never get told, "Hey, you know what? These intuitive insights, you can use this to empower yourself without going straight into a service role for others.
I like to help people with that because my intuition I sense in relation to manifesting and attracting what I want isn't anything to do with the process that happens when I support other people. It's completely different because... I call it an intuitive yes feeling, and it's something I like to help people develop because people, as I was saying, people talk about intuition in the realms of caution, and I don't really get that. Because we could call that instinct and as you said, that's lizard brain.
That is, there's a car coming, or something that we see animals do when they intuitively know there's an earthquake. I get that. Without getting lost in the semantics of it, maybe we call that instinct or animal instinct or lizard brain instinct.
Intuition is, for me, it's a warm "yes" feeling, which tells you where you are in relation to your intentions and what you're trying to manifest. So if I'm thinking, do I go to that party? It's like, yeah.
So going back to finding my partner on a dating app, the sexy curiosity was enough. Because it wasn't about me reading him as a psychic to find out something that might be "wrong". I'm doing air quotes. You can probably see me. That's not the approach. It was - something resonates about this.
I didn't feel I had the energy for... Not that I didn't have the energy for a life partnership to appear, but I certainly didn't have the energy for a big lofty experience, which would make me analyze. And like the Virgo I am, make me think it all to death, because I'd just been through that painful experience that we talked about earlier.
So actually, sometimes, it is intuitive, or it is the right thing to say, "He looks hot. I might hang out with him."
And so, that's what I needed. In order to manifest it, I didn't need to think, I wonder if he's Capricorn or whatever, or am I looking for evidence of narcissistic traits or is he kind to animals and things like that. It's nothing to do with that. It's just, let's be open. Like the Fool in the tarot again, let's be open, let's be playful. Because that is the, what's the word, that is what the soul does.
So for me, intuition and how that relates to manifestation isn't about fear, and it isn't, "Oh, my intuition is telling me not to go to that party". "My intuition doesn't tell me good vibes about her." My feeling around intuition, maybe it's a different word I should be using, is that I've set an intention and the Universe is telling me where I am in relation to it by the vibes that I'm getting.
What that means is, if I'm tuning in to the soul, I've never been fully comfortable with that word, I don't know why, but I guess you know what I mean. The soul isn't afraid. The soul self just wants to expand. It wants to explore and it's playful. I often think about babies who swim when you take them to the first swimming class because they don't have a fear of water and that reminds me of the energy that we come into this earthly experience with.
It's just like, I want to explore and I'm here to expand and I don't feel I'm not entitled to anything. I feel worthy. I feel that everything is possible. I'm not scared about what Abraham Hicks would call the contrast in life and the possible difficult experiences. I'm not scared of that at all. I came here for the variety. I really, really believe that.
So when I make an intuitive choice, sometimes it will be about something. I'm sure it was intuitive for me to have that big dramatic hot fling that I had before I left Lincolnshire. That was intuitive because someone could say to me, you should have trusted your intuition, because there would have been signs that this was not a great experience for you. But my intuition led me to what I needed to experience to make my choice to lead me to my manifestation.
It was all intuition and coming from that soul perspective, my soul wasn't scared of that. It was, we need to do this to work through some stuff. Let's be the Fool in the tarot. Let's dive in. Let's take a leap of faith. Let's know that nothing can really hurt us if we are in our power.
And so I came to Edinburgh with that mindset, and it was like, I don't have a fixed expectation. I was in no way looking for a life partner or husband. I dropped my intention into the wishing well but it certainly wasn't high on my list of priorities. And that's why I feel I manifested this quite quickly because I didn't have a whole story around it.
I wasn't thinking, ohmygod there's a piece missing here unless there's a husband. That was not my thinking at all. It was playfulness. And like I said, he looks hot. That's enough. And that is why I think it worked.
Also because he's a muggle. That helps. The contrast helps for me enormously. And going back to the sailing thing that I put into my wishing well when I was talking to spirit. The first date was in a coffee shop. Second date was spending time together. And probably, was it like 10 days after we met, I went to a party which was his brother's and bride-to-be. It was an engagement party and we went obviously via car but then we went on a boat. Because he is an experienced sailor. So his family, they were brought up with that.
He actually took his brother's boat to travel to the location of where this party was. So as part of that, for about 30 seconds, I actually handled the boat really badly, really, really badly. Like, what the hell are you doing?
But, there we go. And it was just, I think the moral of the story is, when you are easy about these things, they can manifest more quickly. And it was because I wasn't there hunting for a husband. I was probably thinking, god, I don't want any kind of stress because I've just been through a stressful experience in this aspect of my life. But I was also expecting things to be easy. And in some way, I didn't have expectation either way.
When I said, yeah, let's spend time in a boat, that was so easy that there was no resistance. There was no block. And then it appeared in my experience. And that's the key to it. And I think that when it comes to big visions, big visions can be a career dream, it can be a relocation or it can be a passion project. But that there is a way you have to feel easy about it so that the manifestation has less resistance to work with.
That is hard sometimes when we lasso, like the cowboy, we're lassoing to a big outcome straight away. And what I would say, if anybody is trying to play with manifesting, because it is like play. The most joyful aspects, ohmygod the Universe is talking back to me. That's my favourite part.
It's not like, okay, well, I've got a partner now. Or I'm living here now. That's not what it's about for me. It was about the journey. It was about, I am living in a co-creative universe and it is a delight and it's making me laugh and I'm kind of in awe because all these signs and synchronicities are talking back to me. That is the buzz for me.
You are right in as much as, I could have created these experiences in an entirely different city. But somewhere, intuition whatever, prompted me from my early 20s and came back in again and said, Will it be Scotland or in other words, before you came to this life, you set forth some intentions about what you want to have and enjoy, and what you wanted that to feel like. Spirit's feedback is, "that looks Scotland-shaped" or "you could easily experience these sensations in Scotland".
It could happen in other cities and with all due respect to my partner, my lovely partner, it could happen with other people, but that... the prompts were, "this looks Scotland-shaped to us" or "it's kind of Edinburgh-shaped". Feelings that you want to experience and the vibration, if you like. It is very much in the shape of this person or ___.
So that was the prompt, if that makes sense. It's all about feelings, and I've stopped looking for physical evidence as knowing that manifesting works in this machine-like way. When I first explored the idea of manifesting and magic and creating something, a lot of that came through my exploring in my teens of Wicca, witchcraft magic, which is still a big part of me, an earthly spirituality, a big part of me.
There was a lot of literature I read at the time which was like recipe books and it was like, for this outcome, you'll need a certain coloured candle and do it this moon phase and it was all about paraphernalia and it wasn't telling me what I needed to do in my own energy to create that experience. Some of what I read, and of course, this is not a comment on Wicca and witchcraft as a whole. Of course not.
I'm sure we've all read those books where it is about manipulating some way, and there's some secret and it's about finding this gemstone and this herb and then you'll get this outcome. Whereas for me, whether you want a guy, a car, or a house, or a relocation, you're wanting a set of feelings and feeling experiences and the Universe knows how to fill in the gaps and deliver that to you.
When someone says, I want to feel this way in my love life, it might not be their most current or problematic partner who's going to be able to give them that experience. So there is that openness to, okay, if I just keep open, and know that the Universe has heard my intention, then it will try to fill in the blanks.
I mean, in all my time as a reader, makes me sound 108, but in all my time as a reader, I've never heard Spirit say, you can have this, I mean, to the client, you can have this but you can't have that. Or people ask about time frame and it's kind of like, you can manifest this in three months but you can't manifest this in three days. I've never heard that. And I've also never heard Spirit talk in a cautionary way, going back to that topic of caution, you should do this or you can't have that or that's not possible. They're not interested in doing that.
They're interested, I think, in helping us to connect with our self worth and the reality that we are powerful creators and we are here to create and manifest and that should be playful and it should be joyful. And then to help us work through any blocks, mindset blocks, energy blocks, whatever that's preventing that from happening more ___. That's it. That's what it's all about.
Slade:
So tell us a little bit about how this wisdom impacts the work that you do right now. Talk to me. Because I know as I'm listening to it, I'm thinking, well what would he have to say about this experience that I have going on over here. So I know there's a lot of other people listening thinking, Ooo, I would love to get his input on what I'm trying to manifest. So tell us a little bit about how you work.
David:
So the manifesting approach is obviously a passion of mine. It came from not necessarily enjoying certain books although I do, and resources from other teachers on this subject. My first awareness of whether we call it the Law of Attraction or manifesting or conscious creation, was from being a teenager and giving readings and working with... Or it was not being able to work with the premises that people... I mean ideas people have around what readings were.
So somebody was saying to me, what is my fate? I'm kind of thinking, I don't know whether I can see that. Why can't I see that? And that's not how it looks to me. And I've realized after reading energy and looking at what was going on with people's lives, I wanted to help them with their relationship to that, and their own empowerment. And to let them know that part of the process. Because the common questions...
I know we've got choices about how we present our work if we are intuitives. A lot of the questions were, what is going to happen to me and what is in the stars? And I was thinking, I don't know whether I can read it this way. And I don't work in that way now obviously. But it was, there's something else going on here where, if I can tune that person back in their power, that they can create this outcome and then they don't need a forecast.
So that was my first kind of lightbulb moment.
I feel that I can hear what your intuition would tell you if you could hear it and you didn't have to worry about or you weren't worrying about your shopping list and you haven't just had a really triggering argument with your boss. Or your conditioning from childhood wasn't making you freak out right now because that is the experience for most of us. We're kind of carrying that.
And so what I feel I do is I cut through that. One way to frame it is, okay, Spirit Guides, or your Spirit Guides, are giving me this information and that is one way to interpret what's going on within a reading. But I actually think, no this is what the client would do if they weren't inhibited by the things that so many of us are going through life. So if I could turn down the volume on your negative self talk, and let's identify and work through this conditioning that you have gathered in your life. You would see your own worth more clearly and you would see your own ability to create your outcome more clearly.
And so the way that I work is, where are you in relation to what you are trying to manifest.
Slade:
Tell us where we can go to find you online if we want to get a reading with you.
David:
So you can find me on Facebook. The website is still in development, but on Facebook it is Intuitive Icons with David Thomas Wright, my brand name, and all the information is there. But you can drop me a line via Facebook page and we can get a conversation going. Any questions you might have, you can ask.
I also have a Facebook group, which is The Maverick Manifesting group with David Thomas Wright. The url for that would be https://www.facebook.com/groups/dtwcommunity/
Slade:
Awesome. This was a great conversation, David. Thank you for coming on and talking to me.
David:
Thank you! Thanks for having me.
This week I’m talking about a practical approach to discovering your purpose and taking action on ideas in ways that are easiest to pursue and that will also have the most impact in the world.
MENTIONED ON THE SHOWAre You a Scanner? Refuse to Choose Energy Reboot
HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSONSlade's Books & Courses Get an intuitive reading with Slade
Automatic Intuition
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TRANSCRIPT For 15 years, the number one type of question I get asked in readings is about discovering your purpose. Purpose is not necessarily the same thing as a job. You’ve probably heard this expressed by myself and others if you consume personal development content. The SENSE of purpose is something worth discovering in and of itself, independent of the concept of choosing a major or a career. But I do mentor intuitives, psychics, mediums, energy healers, teachers, coaches, counselors… and for many of us purpose IS about a profession.
I get it.
I need a project at the very least to express my purpose. There’s a lot of value in having a purpose driven project, even if it's not your primary source of income.
If you have a boring day job, a purpose driven project can be the most important thing in the world to balance all that energy.
I’ve seen clients start a project and it becomes like this release valve for other areas of life. The day job isn’t as awful. You’re not snapping at your spouse over everything. You’re not as annoyed with your kids for stealing your life force. You don’t hate your boss or the sound of coworkers breathing quite so much.
You have a reason to get you up in the morning beyond all those mundane things. You have this new source of energy and also an outlet for energy. Because there's energy coming in, and then there's energy you're shedding. You need really healthy vessels and venues and streams for all of those things, to move in and out and through you.
The biggest problem with the "Your Job is Your Life" model is that you can’t get everything that you need from that one source.
You don’t get all your social interactions from one relationship… or expect one person to fulfill what it takes many relationships to have. And you've seen what happens in those marriages where people really have no friendships or relationships or support systems outside the marriage itself, it's just you and this person in a bubble with nothing else going on... That in itself is a kind of cancerous situation to be in.
And I know lots of people with relationships like that. They think they want that. Oh, I want this person to be my best friend and we're going to do everything together. We're just together 24/7. We work together and vacation together.
You know what though? I don't see a lot of those filled with joy, it doesn't seem like.
So anyway, I think the average person, we need a lot of different kinds of friendships. We need people to take care of and people to make us laugh and we need family and we need people we can talk about woo woo stuff with. And we need people for sex. We need people that we've known our whole lives that we don't have to explain ourselves to. All kinds of different friendships. People who are teachers and mentors. Parents that you talk to. You know, all those different things.
Not everybody has that, but ideally, you kind of want a spread, and you want your spouse to have a spread, and you want your kids to have all those things as well.
If you’re unhappy and experiencing low level type of "depression" that’s not really clinical depression, but more a lack of motivation, still with an inkling that you should get off your ass and do something. There’s a chance to turn it around, and you feel that, and that's sort of part of the ennui that you're experiencing.
The first thing that I would recommend is that you do the Energy Reboot. We've talked about it on a couple of different episodes, and of course can link to those, but the idea is to get back in touch with your intuition, spark your creativity, ground the body, rest better, feel better in your own skin.
You can’t create from a place of lack and anxiety. And you can’t save the world if you’re empty and exhausted.
Once you experience some of the results from doing the Reboot, because really, start there. Don't skip that. The results are ideas, energy, motivation. Just new fresh signals coming in.
Once you start to experience that and feel like that's clicking again, like things are turned on again, things are connected again, sign up for something — a class, a workshop, some kind of group activity. Host something for people with your shared interest.
Return to an old hobby or pull out some dream that you put on the shelf long ago.
Teach your kids how to do something that you used to love to do when you were younger.
Teach other people, period — you could sign up for something and host something at the same time by teaching people, because a lot of times your sense of purpose is about sharing what you’ve learned and experienced with other people.
Sometimes your purpose will be chosen for you. Maybe it already has and you don’t have the clarity to realize it. Maybe there's something that you do in the world you're not even giving yourself credit for. Maybe there's something that you do you think of as a duty and a chore, that with a little tweaking and change in perspective, could really become something different. Once you put some intention behind it, you can transform all kinds of things that you're doing.
But Discovering Your Purpose is as much about CHOOSING one as having angels descend with an engraved stone tablet or an owl drop a creamy parchment scroll down your chimney.
People get lost because there are too many things they love. You feel your interests are all over the place. That they don’t go together. There's no rhyme or reason to them. Or you’re pulled between two different loves and you can’t choose between the two.
You may just need to suck it up and do both or do everything you love a little bit. That’s what I do.
I might be more successful if I only did one thing and put all my energy into it, but I honestly wouldn’t enjoy that, and the lack of joy would kill it, and I’d be back to square one with nothing. So I do a little bit of everything I love.
I now have four different websites officially, 3 different pen names, 3 different businesses, soon to be 2 podcasts, dozens of individual income streams, and that’s not even counting things like my love of animals and the animals that I rescue and care for, and my friends' pets that I help with, and the people I support and care for in my daily personal life on all different levels. From advising younger people to helping some of the people that I work out with, motivating them.
Now I don’t advise that you do it like this — if you can avoid it, definitely keep it simple by all means, it sounds heavenly to me, if you have a brain that does that. But some of us don't. And some of us can't choose.
So you know what? Refuse to choose.
I remember the first time I saw the title of that book, "Refuse to Choose - a Program for Doing Everything that You Love" by Barbara Sher, you've heard me talk about this before. It's like my favourite self-help book in the whole world.
It's all based on this principle of scanners. That there's a certain personality type, it's a creative personality type, that requires you to be engaged in a lot of different things. To not just choose one lane and stay there 'til you die. There may be a lot of people who get a sense of safety and security from staying in one track and plodding along and doing the milestones that are laid out for them. And getting the certifications they need and working their way up and just doing what they do and staying there.
But that's not scanners. And that's not me. That's probably not a lot of you that are listening.
So if you’re a scanner, the cool thing is, we now have this language that allows us to embrace that, and to talk about it as an asset, which is life changing, if you've always been told you're doing it wrong. You're not following through on anything and you can't pick one thing and stick with it.
If you've been told all those things, yet you're also extremely intelligent and can potentially do anything, then, you know what? Embrace the fact that you're a scanner. Choose vocations that resonate with that energy. There are lots of activities and environments, social structures, where this is a big positive.
So don't put yourself over there in the grey box that has one lane because you're going to be miserable. There are a bunch of other places that you can go and plug in where who you are and the way that you operate and what you love in the world, no matter how eccentric it is, is of value.
One of the easiest things that you can do is to tell yourself, you know what? I'm just gonna have a seasonal project. I'm not going to commit to doing something for four years, or five years, or one thing for all of my retirement. I'm going to do a single project each season. Or I'm gonna have a different side hustle project every year. Every new year I'm gonna try out some new crafty thing that I do and see if I can make some money of it.
Just tell yourself that. Just knowing right up front that you get to switch it out can really re-orient everything within you. You know, chances are, if you do start out picking one little thing and doing it for a little while, you'll stumble onto one that other people really love. And then that takes over and it becomes about them more than just being about you.
Shift Your Spirits was ONE writing project for me. It was one of half a dozen journals that I was writing at the time. This, all of this, that you know me for, it's just ONE area of interest and passion for me.
So think of your interests and your roles in the world as different pieces of material in a mosaic. And within that mosaic, you are the glue. The common denominator really is you, so it’s not true that these things have no connection or that they're all over the place.
They intersect in you.
Knowing that, if you feel pulled equally between 2 different paths, you are a connection point between those 2 things. So, conceptually, philosophically, they do have a bridge, they do have an intersection.
When you think about it, what is that connection point for YOU? Because that common denominator that exists for you very likely exists for other people too.
Sometimes you need somebody else to point it out. It’s hard to see. You may need to have this conversation over a bottle of rose with someone, or coffee, and hash it out. Sort of mirror it out for one another.
It's hard to see your own worth and value.
I have a client who is an emerging intuitive, she does energy work, but she also has this cool natural skin care business. She felt like these were two vastly different interests. She's racking her mind trying to find a link between the two things. Because she’d rather be creating one content marketing platform as opposed to creating two separate businesses with different marketing plans and completely different platforms.
She’s looking to write articles and post on social media and speak and teach — all the usual formats that work very effectively in all industries. She feels instinctively that there should be a connection…
She’s RIGHT. From outside the forest, I can see all kinds of trees!
So I asked her: What are the connections for you between skin care and energy? What are the connections, on a deep level, between how you look and how you feel? Why do you choose to craft products from natural ingredients in the first place? What are the spiritual values motivating that? How do the elements we put in and on our physical bodies affect our energy bodies?
She can answer all these questions. She did, right there on the session with me. She had fascinating perspectives off the top of her head that lots of people would love to hear about! And you know what’s even cooler? I don’t know a lot of people talking about that particular intersection of topics.
I advised her to do something of a mind mapping exercise. I like to do this with lists.
Write down some lists. Both fields of work, both interests, in two parallel columns. And then … Draw lines connecting items in one column to the other, wherever you see a connection. As you find items that connect, you think of other things that are even easier and more obvious to connect and you start adding those to the list just so you can generate more of those connections.
it will probably look like a jacked up set of boot laces, but the connections are there between these two things that you think are so different. That’s the point.
Now, can you create a question that represents each one of those laces? And keep going with that.
I suggested she brainstorm at least a list of 10. Once you’ve got a whole list of questions, you start answering them. You write articles for Medium.com, for other people's websites, to post on your own blog, Instagram stories, Facebook live videos where you talk about it, classes, tele-seminars.
Your usual product demonstration for say, the skincare, becomes something more like a workshop. Something deeper and more contemplative. A beauty day at the spa becomes more of a retreat-mindset. Your clients aren’t just learning how to apply a product, they’re thinking about WHY they’re using the ingredients in your products and how those motivations make them feel.
This is good stuff!
I’m trying to think of some examples that are completely different.
I love yoga. I did yoga teacher training classes, not to become a yoga teacher, but just to challenge myself and have a goal around it. I also missed the spiritual aspects of yoga being removed for western gym environments. I like the mystical parts obviously.
But I also love kettle bells — that’s my favorite workout format. Kettle bell complexes, which are strings of poses that flow into one another, remind me very much of yoga flows, which I also love to do. There are some kettle bell poses that totally remind me of yoga poses with weights on the end. I do CrossFit. And I coach people on intuition and creativity and depression and often recommend fitness as a component of all that.
I like to think of fitness as a spiritual practice.
Now, I currently do all those things kind of separately, even though I am aware that I am the glue holding that mosaic together. So I do see how they're connected. But I practice them in my world in different boxes.
But is there the possibility that other people might like all those ingredients mixed together too? Are there work out classes or fitness group training scenarios that could incorporate all those elements? Sure, I could see that.
Since I started recommending the Reboot, I’ve been asked to come assist people, who are more spiritually inclined, to work out and learn to exercise with those concepts in mind. Which in some ways, might be easier than taking someone who is already comfortable in a fitness routine and changing their philosophy about it. I don't know. I guess you could do either thing.
I could choose a project — get licensed to be a personal trainer — that could be my project. That could be the thing I'm gonna do this year. That could be my seasonal thing to focus on. I can get some people together, host a class — I could start creating those kind of workouts, those kind of training environments.
What if you want to do volunteer work with kids or something? What if you love hip hop music? What if you wish you could’ve been a dancer back in the day? So I have a friend that loved all those things and I helped her apply for a parks and rec grant in our community to teach a hip hop dance class to kids after school.
What if you did something like that?
Maybe you love embroidery or watercolours and you don’t pursue it because you don’t think you’re the next Michelangelo, so why bother? You can’t make a living as an artist… So you kind of lost your steam for it.
I bet the first person who came up with that art studio where you go drink wine with your girlfriends and paint, or go an interesting daytime date where you make pottery together, or the person who teaches art classes in nursing homes, those artists probably didn’t give up a career selling their work in galleries all over the world to create those types of businesses. They cobbled them together from their own interests and transformed it into something else for other people.
Maybe you love tarot cards and you collect different kinds of decks and you think it would be fun to create your own. Maybe you're not even artistically inclined but you could find someone to partner with you and do the illustrations and you could write the card meanings.
Maybe you want to start some kind of non profit fund, because your family experienced something really awful and there weren’t a lot of resources for it and you saw the opportunity to make the worst in thing in your life the best thing you’ve ever done.
People do this stuff. All the time. The people who do this stuff are the people who do this stuff.
And here’s the best piece of advice of all that I can give you — if you ARE turning this into a business, or if your project involves other people — and honestly, if it’s truly a sense of purpose, it involves other people, with the exception of other living things, like animals and plants maybe, but you probably still need human allies. Your conservation work where you get to only talk to trees is still impacting other people some how some way, down the line.
Assuming it’s a given that your project is about other people, at this point, you simply follow where they ask you to go.
If you have those 10 questions and you answered them for others, they will start generating their own follow up questions. And then you answer those.
They will request special custom products. “Hey. Can you make this with this another fragrance that I'm really into?” They'll ask you to tweak it in a way for them. And you just fulfill that. You keep going. There's probably an infinite number of fragrances that you can change up.
Remember my definition of marketing, borrowed from my friend Tim Grahl: find a group of people and be relentlessly helpful to them. That works just as well for purpose.
Here’s what most people do wrong - they fret about picking the perfect concept. They analyze it a million different ways. They go off into their tower, into their laboratory, and they try to invent The Perfect Big Thing, A+ mind blowing… and then they come down and try to find people who want it.
And sometimes people don’t. Or only a few do.
You find out, after the fact, if you’d changed it somewhere along the way, you could have made it for more people. Maybe you could have chosen a different scent, or use a different name, or use different language that more people are actually searching for online that would've made it easier for them to find you.
But I still think the best way for it is to jump in early.
Pick something you love, find a group of people who love it too, and make something for them. Or host something for them. Create an environment and let them come together and do whatever it is that they want to do there.
Create something with the goal of not creating an A+, but just putting a solid B out there.
This is not an A+ podcast, not in terms of production level. I don't even have any music.
Make your version of the thing a bunch of other people have already made. Romance novels, baked goods, and diet plans. These have infinite minor tweaks and variations, and the innovations don’t have to be huge because the people who love those things always want more of them.
But do put yourself in a position to ask them what they want.
Here’s a moisturizer with natural lavender scent, which I love. What essential oils do you guys love?
Here’s my killer chocolate cake recipe, I can make all kinds of cake. What kind do you want?
Who’s going vegan? Here’s what I wish I had known when I made that transition. What are your tips?
Talk amongst yourselves. Start a little conversation pit. Toss some prompts out there.
Host something for people who share your interests. A Facebook group can be started in a matter of seconds. Start conversations about your interests with these people who share your interests. And while you're at it, join in on everybody else’s group too to make those connections.
And here’s the other really HUGE thing that most people get wrong: you do not have to be an expert.
Just be a seeker.
Nobody likes a know it all who’s perfect and doesn’t struggle. We’d much rather listen to a friendly, accessible person we identify with tell us about what she got wrong and how she eventually figured it out. We like her. And if she invites us to come along on the journey — awesome! We're in for that.
Be a seeker and invite other seekers to participate. They will tell you what they need, what they want, what they're curious about. You just see if you can fulfill those requests.
Be relentlessly helpful.
If you have kids, think about this — You slave away creating an elaborate meal, maybe even trying out some new recipes you’ve never made before, and your family hates it. They would have rather had a simple grilled cheese or a ordered pizza. What if you asked them first? Hey, what do you guys want for dinner?
The same approach applies to business and it applies to purpose.
At some level, it’s all service. Purpose is serving other people: making things for them, telling them stories, solving their problems, supporting them when nobody can solve their problems, holding space.
Here’s your assignment: Go make some of those mind maps. Write down lists of your loves and interests in columns. Look for connections. Draw lines between them. Make some crazy laces. Then find a group of people who might also be interested in those connections and host something for them.
Be relentlessly helpful.
A creative outlet, a side hustle, a new career, a business… a sense of purpose. This is one way you can find yours. And this is how you CHOOSE yours.
"Curse" may no longer be an appropriate word for this story.
This update is for those of you who wrote to me predicting I would meet someone special.
Guess what has happened ...
Listen to the Love Curse series in order to get the most out of this episode.
Love Curse: Part 1
Love Curse: Part 2 - Reversing the Spell with Åsa Poeche
Love Curse: Part 3 - Retrieving a Piece of My Soul
MENTIONED ON THE SHOW Carrie Bradshaw Veep
HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSONSlade's Books & Courses Get an intuitive reading with Slade
Automatic Intuition
FACEBOOK GROUPShift Your Spirits Community BECOME A PATRON patreon.com/shiftyourspirits Edit your pledge on Patreon
TRANSCRIPT I tried all week to record a solo episode. Just one decent episode. Two would’ve been great, as I’m trying to catch up after losing three weeks to jury duty. But I would be thrilled with one.
It’s Saturday.
I’m usually putting an intro on the episode going live, and editing the one coming up the week after that.
I’ve never gone this close to a deadline with nothing in the can.
Yesterday, I tried my fourth attempt at a half-hearted topic, and it was so lack luster and passion free I wanted to cry.
I kept thinking “Shit. Am I burned out? Do I have nothing left to say about anything?” How can that be. I’ve been blogging for 13 years. I’ve recorded over a hundred of these shows.
Why can’t I just share what’s on my heart, like I usually do?
I decided to sleep on it, and work out on it this morning, and see if something floated to the surface of my consciousness before the afternoon. I can steal an hour or two to put something out, even if it’s a heartfelt confession about being blocked. An apology. Sorry guys.
Granted, life circumstances have put me behind … But what’s really on my heart and on my mind is a subject SO TABOO it’s even more vulnerable than the sharing of the love curse story.
My happiness.
My happiness in love.
I have so many conflicting thoughts — ethical, magical, personal, professional … All those lines are a bit blurred by this, and to tell the truth, there has never been a moment in my personal life that I have felt more terrified about sharing.
I kept it from my best friends for months.
The guy showed up.
The partner in the astrological prophecy.
The Transit man.
Mr. Shoot the Moon.
Remember how Carrie Bradshaw had Mr. Big?
OMG, I am so Sex and the City right now.
I have never felt so Carrie.
I binged the entire Sex and the City series on DVD when I was recovering from my stroke in 2003.
I’m stalling. Sorry.
So, according to my chart, this Love transit, that inspired me to fix my love curse, started a long time ago, last fall maybe — it was already going on before I heard about at the end of 2018.
Dena DeCastro told me it would last into 2020. It would ramp up and then peak in the summer of 2019. There are two “tent poles” to this transit peak — one in May 2019, and one in August 2019.
Now, the first one is exact May 16 - and I remember that because it’s my dad’s birthday.
It is May 11, 2019 as I record this.
I don’t know if there’s a oracle at the end of this show yet or not. I’m really down to the wire, recording this on the fly. Maybe I’ll pull a card, live, in the moment for us. At the end, after the credits.
Because this is almost live. It’s a high wire act.
I thought NO WAY am I telling anyone. I don’t want to jinx it.
And then I thought — That’s some superstitious curse mentality bullshit.
I am not the same person.
Check out my springy colorful new profile pic on social media.
Proof of my glow.
Some of you guys told me you're binging the curse … how could I not share the biggest development?
And how could I chicken out and try to manipulate the outcome before sharing?
The spirit of this story is vulnerability and confession and maybe some good old fashioned sensationalized exhibitionism. Always good for infotainment.
As you can imagine, the last few months, I’m glancing at the calendar thinking “Okay … Is something going to happen?”
No, I can’t look. I can’t try to make it happen.
If I pay attention am I going to mess up the magic.
As I’ve found before with astrology — it is uncanny and no I can’t explain it and I wish i knew the secret to how these transits are true — but they always happen. And they don’t happen the way you’d imagine. They surprise you with their innovation, but they are always, in hindsight, kind of inevitable.
Now, knowing all that could mess with your head.
And a lot of you very sweetly wrote me and predicted that now I would be meeting someone. It was going to happen for me.
And being in the familiar curse mindset I was in for 30 years, I was both crossing my fingers and preparing to be disappointed.
But I wasn’t going to show it.
I would have laughed it off.
Oh, please. We knew Slade wasn’t going to have some Romance Novel worthy love story pop up out of nowhere.
That’s not real life.
That’s a dense thicket of hearts and flowers.
Well … so, be warned.
Spoiler alert.
This episode is pretty rich with hearts and flowers.
Now, ethically, I am not sharing his name. Because he has no idea he’s part of this prophecy or this on-going reality show series. He doesn’t listen to this show, so that’s not the issue. I don’t want him to, because I don’t want him to be psyched out. But he’s not going to be listening to this.
However, I did not get his permission.
And it’s well … I think I can tell this in a way that will protect his identity.
I’m actually pretty confident that one day should I mention these episodes, he’ll think it’s really rad. He won’t be angry.
This is me talking to my girlfriends. He’s doing it too. He’s admitted as much. Just not with a few thousand people like I am.
Am I going to F this up?
Well, now that is exactly the kind of thinking I am working to release.
No. No I’m not going to F this up.
I’m going to live my best life.
I’m working to stay present, stay happy, stay in the joy, bask in the results of my hard work.
I’m excited.
You have witnessed that I am going into this with a very fresh perspective.
Let’s see what happens.
Stay tuned.
Oh, yeah, and one other disclaimer, before I tell you about Mr. Moon.
I always try to make these personal stories applicable to your own life in some way.
I’m not sure I come to this episode as prepared to make this a teachable moment.
So, you have a few options:
You can find the wisdom here and apply it as you will.
Or you can simply hold space for me.
And support me in finding some joy.
Or you can listen to this juicy gossip because you’re part of my girlfriend tribe.
The guy. The man. Dare we say the One?
He showed up.
He freaking showed up. On schedule.
He’s here.
About two years ago this man messaged me on a hook up app. One that will remain nameless, because I don’t need y’all going looking for my profile.
I honestly thought Wow. This guy is kind of out of my league.
We started flirting, sharing pics, sexting, the whole thing for like a few weeks … You know how it goes. It starts on the app, and moves to texting if there’s something there.
Now, you may not know this about me, but, as a writer, I like to think my sexting is championship level. My love life has been dirty talking with virtual strangers for many years now. I’ve never met anyone from a hook up app in real life. I usually keep all that at arm’s length. Very compartmentalized.
And for the record, i have no shame about my sexuality. It’s very much a part of my spirituality, and I would do shows about it more, if it was something you could do A show about. I kind of feel like the only thing I could do is ask every single interview guest to share their thoughts on the subject. And I may do that at some point.
We both have iPhones. We were soon messaging every night. A little bit of FaceTime. We mostly did little audio clips back and forth. He is very funny and smart, clever, creative, intellectual, but also a big kid and a music lover.
And then we started texting back and forth during the day, like I do with most of my closet friends. Not sexting anymore. Long text conversations. He’s super communicative as I am.
We eventually started talking on the phone a little, although, as with all my closest friends, we actually prefer texting.
This went on for a few months. Several months. and then he started talking about meeting me in real life.
He lives in Dallas.
Which honestly is one of the only boxes on my shoot the moon list that he doesn’t tick.
But then, most of my closest relationships are long distance.
Most of my platonic relationships and all of my professional relationships begin and live long distance in the virtual realm.
You know what a big deal I make of it when I get to meet my peeps in real life.
Although I have never turned away a client or a friend or a work collaborator because they were long distance.
I do do that to guys that want to date me.
I had some sad experiences with long distance relationships.
And when he started to ask me all the time when we were going to meet
I finally told him about this man I was involved with long distance who lived in Kansas City. I invested two years in that relationship going back and forth, and when it came time for me to relocate, I left him at the altar so to speak.
I backed out just days before I was supposed to pack up and go for good.
I broke his heart. and pissed him off.
There was another one, who only lived a few hours away, but … None of them ended well. They became chapters in my curse. A pattern.
So I was very reluctant to meet my Texan because of the distance.
Or I blamed it on the distance. I was very pessimistic. Scared of being disappointed.
The truth is … I always adored him. From the very first message.
But it is painful being away from someone you love like that. Long distance relationships for me have been hard. And I didn’t trust they were worth it.
He was very open with his feelings. He wanted to do the whole thing, meet, see if the chemistry was all there in real life, if so … Try to do the long distance thing for awhile and figure out a way to be together.
He kept saying that “We’ll figure it out. Don’t worry about it so much. We’ll figure it out."
I was like “We’ll figure it out is not exactly a plan.”
He was like “We’re the real thing. I know we are, so we’ll figure it out.”
He’s a Sagittarius.
Which is my ideal Sun Sign for a partner … I love Sag men. Most of my straight male friends over the course of my life have been Sagittarius and I’ve always been on the lookout for a Sag on my team.
BUT this a very Sagittarian “plan.”
I joke that a Sagittarius birthday party is “Meet me at this address on a random corner” and then you just go from there. And you have a great time.
And everybody wakes up somewhere the next day and thinks Well, shit that was fun.
After about a year of wanting to meet me, and having me shut him down because we didn’t have a plan, he started to get upset with me. He was also between jobs and stressed about all that, which didn’t help
He told me the feelings were real for him, we spending almost every day together on the phone. Every night.
He gave me an ultimatum and said if we weren’t going to meet and try to take our relationship off line, then he couldn’t do it anymore.
He said he was really emotionally invested and it was hurting his feelings that I was keeping us in limbo.
I wondered how much I was compounding his stress because he was in limbo with his job too.
I didn’t want it to end. I was afraid to take it further. I was really blowing it with him, I knew he was about to stop contacting me ...
And then, … his DAD DIED. Unexpectedly. Out of nowhere.
….
…..
It was so awkward and weird. and horrible.
I didn’t know whether to keep texting him and calling him to try to be there for him, or just leave him alone ...
I felt so guilty. But I also felt like maybe the Universe stepped in, you know?
I found him on Facebook and Instagram and sent him a friend request. We’d weirdly never connected those parts of our lives. I kind of intended it as a way to say I’m still your friend, I care what happens to you. I don’t want to *not know what happened to you.
And I’m not abandoning you but I’m leaving you with as many options to reach out to me as you want. If you want.
I thought he might be pissed, but he accepted my friend request.
And that was the end of our contact.
I watched all the stuff about his dad from a distance … Just sending heart emojis and staying silent.
He would like my pics sometimes — he actually always likes a pic of me — but he never commented or messaged me privately.
I would scroll through and check to see if you saw my pics on Instagram. And he always liked. them.
He posts a lot on Instagram. He’s a graphic designer, so his pics are cool, and I always like seeing his cool Texas Sky pics.
Some of the things he would post — especially about what he was reading or watching on TV — I wanted to write him a fucking book because they were always so meaningful to me, we had so much in common. It was freaky. I fell in love with him even more as a real person, in his real normal FB life without me, from this distance.
That all happened about a year ago.
For the past year, we kept liking each other’s stuff. He’s not that interested in my spirituality stuff - thinks my job is cool, and he’s supportive but not invested in consumption of New Age stuff - but he does always like my pics of my fur babes and anything that has a pic of me, he always gives a “heart.”
It became kind of bittersweet, and when Beto was running for Ted Cruz’s seat, we did end messaging a little and we found that the one thing we could safely talk about — ironically — was politics. Like, that was our safe non-personal thing we could still go back and forth about.
So, the weekend of April 14, about a month ago, he posted asking if any of his friends automatically watch every episode of Veep twice - once to get the plot, a second time to go back and get all the little nuances you miss the first time.
Well, shit, I JUST POSTED THAT IN A PRIVATE MESSAGE to a friend of mine with the same time stamp.
It was such a synchronicity and I was so excited that without over thinking it
I screen shot it, and sent it to him.
He immediately messaged me.
We started right back where we were, texting, talking, every day, all day, every night…
He told me right away our relationship is not over for him. it is either us, or he’s single. End of story. He’s that sure. No amount of time and distance has changed his mind.
We tried to forget it, let it go, etc etcetera.
It didn’t work.
He looked me right in the eye (via iPad screen) and said “I am the one for you. I KNOW I am. Please, give this a chance. Let’s meet in person. Just come and spend one weekend with me."
If it isn’t there, we’ll know it. We can get it out of our system, and go our separate ways once and for all. We don’t have to take it any further.
I told him “FUCK. If I meet you, I’m going to fall in love with you and we are going to be in a long distance relationship before we even get out of the Dallas airport.”
That’s just gonna happen. We both know it is.
So — I asked him if it comes down to it, do you see yourself moving to be with me.
He says yes.
...
This isn’t my first time meeting someone online. A large percentage of relationships start this way. Some of you even wrote to suggest I use dating apps as a way of opening up the possibilities.
In the past, I just had this arbitrary red line about it …
In an attempt to heal myself, I am releasing all old protocols. They no longer serve. In order to be a new person, enter a new phase, I have to BE that new person.
Between you and me I am already in love with this man, I have been for a really long time — for two years. I was scared and wounded … but this is a second chance.
I just cannot picture myself with anyone else.
So, I’m going to fly to Dallas and have this honeymoon scenario with him next month.
I don’t see any other way around this.
If there is SOME chance there is something about him — or me — that is just terrible and awful and we’ve made a huge mistake here.
Okay. So be it. Won’t be the first. I can live with that.
But I can’t live with the thought that this is my Person and I let it go without giving it a real chance.
Long distance relationships can suck. It may be an inconvenience. I’m imagining I’ll be doing some pining away.
But he says he’s certain we’ll figure out.
He’s optimistic and willing and filled with joy about this.
And I’m finally ready to get on board with some joy.
Oh! And one little thing that just happened today. And it’s kind of the reason I tipped over into saying “Okay, I need to share this.”
Remember May 16 - the tent pole in the astrological transit.
So, I texted him that I need to get on the phone with him this week so we can confirm our schedules, and look at flight times, and finally make this trip official. I asked when is the best night for him to do all that? Because we both have workout schedules and busy lives …
He texted back — Not to put it off, but is it okay if we wait until Thursday?
I said Sure, even thought I thought, I’ll be doing stuff with my family for my dad’s birthday.
And immediately realized, duh — my dad’s birthday — Thursday is May 16.
You’ve heard people in the new age personal development world talk about the stories that no longer serve you. Getting rid of them. Putting them down. Letting go of what you keep choosing to be burdened by.
Who are you if you get to erase your past stories and start from scratch?
MENTIONED ON THE SHOW Beyond Readings - Intuitive Business Development HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSONSlade's Books & Courses Get an intuitive reading with Slade Automatic Intuition FACEBOOK GROUPShift Your Spirits Community BECOME A PATRON patreon.com/shiftyourspirits Edit your pledge on Patreon
TRANSCRIPT You’ve heard people in the new age personal development world talk about the stories that no longer serve you. Getting rid of those. Letting go of what you keep choosing to be burdened by and moving forward unburdened.
Every decision that you make about who you are traps you, boxes you in, ties you to concepts and ideas and expectations.
Even the good ones — especially those things that we’re proud of, that people laud us for — it defines what others ask of us. It defines what they expect of us. We become beholden to it.
Because even the most authentic persona is an archetype. It can be true while only being a part of you. And it's rarely all of someone.
People on reality shows are always bitching about being edited to look like the villain.
Their behaviour is villainous, their language, their motivations.There's some part of it there that's true that they actually did, and then this template of the TV drama villain is laid over them and everything else is trimmed away. And that's how they're edited to look like the villain.
There's some truth to it. There's some core of it. They brought the material to be that. They brought it forward from themselves and then, you know, with perspective and context, that can be exaggerated intentionally.
My persona here is an archetype — it's the wounded healer. Most of the guests on this show share that archetype, amongst some others that we have in common. But it's the wounded healer story.
You’ve heard my wounded healer story many times — I had a horrible medical situation pull the rug out from under me. I turned to spirituality to recover my life, and while doing that, I discovered that people were interested in my stories about how I did it. And it became my career.
It’s based in pain.
I don’t mind holding space for other’s in pain. I know a lot of people talk about being an empath and how difficult that is and I understand it. I guess I've just evolved some ways of dealing with that or protecting myself from it. I also have a lot of Scorpio in my chart and I think Scorpio people just sort of come wrapped in an ability to absorb that kind of energy.
I often say that if you have someone in your life that has Scorpio energy, that's a great person to talk to about something really difficult. Scorpio people have a capacity to take that in and transmute it for others. And not be so affected by it.
But until I recently started engaging in some purposeful reinvention, in a completely different unexplored business area, I didn’t realize how much more room for JOY I still really have in my daily life. Because my work and my projects and my writing and my podcasts and a lot of the stuff that I do is tied to the expectations of the archetype that I put out there as my personal persona.
And you know the soul searching I’ve been going through recently — It's pretty much been shared all season long. I was thinking as I went into all that, that it was really just about my personal life, about my romantic self. I have discovered that that process is showing me parallels, other things that are opening up as well.
I didn't explain that well.
The process of unearthing some of my stories, some of the stories that no longer serve me, and trying to evolve those or see what comes after them and move forward. I've realized that, oh, there are all these other boxes that can be opened up and gone through as well. And there are some similar themes and some parallel story lines kind of running in different areas.
So I opened up one box thinking, I'm going to concentrate on this box right now. Instead of doing, I ended up dragging all kinds of stuff out into the light to go through. And it's been a really positive thing. This has not been as painful as it's been exciting. Because for me, as an anxious person, nothing feels better than to get rid of something that's causing me anxiety. I'm really excited for some kind of relief.
I also love a project. I also love to do something new and something practical. I love to dig in and investigate and figure out what's going on and that in itself is a source of energy for me. So I don't experience this process of kind of therapy as a negative thing at all.
But in parallel, not only these parallel areas I can discover, but also just in parallel to my actual real life in the real world, new opportunities have come along in ways that I wasn't really expecting.
And I'm sorry. I hate when people Vaguebook. You know when they post on Facebook and they're like, "I've got this thing that's happening tomorrow and I can't really say what it is, but send me prayers" or whatever, and then you're just wondering, well what the hell is it. If you want my prayer for it, then I demand that you tell me what the hell is going on.
I'm very nosy like that. So don't Vaguebook with me because I resent it.
But I'm going to Vaguebook you a little right now because I have a new business opportunity, some new projects, and it really does require me to use a different name and be in a totally different area and for it to be disconnected from this one. You have to trust me that I can't reveal that here, not now anyway.
In order to do this, I really do require to become someone else. At least over here, in this other section of my life or whatever. And wow, this has been so much fun creating this. It never occurred to me to do this. It's been a long time since I put myself out there online and adopted this kind of facet of my life as the focal point for what I do.
I've been attached to this for 15 years now. I've gotten very used to being who I chose to be, and the idea that there was still something else that I could choose to do sort of never occurred to me. So anyway...
Naming is the most powerful spell in the world. It's Adam's task (that's what I call it). Humanity was given, in Genesis, we're talking myths here, the myth of Adam, humanity was given the job of naming everything in the world. That was our part in collaborating with the creator. Our language is built on this, which is a huge part of what makes us exceptional as a race, as a species, as a type of entity. Our technology is built on top of the language.
Right now, our language and our data and our command of words has become a kind of real magic. Information technology has created a very real form of spell crafting that we can see and wrap our heads around. We don't think of it as supernatural. We just think of it as really cool.
And naming in the spiritual realm has been a tradition in tons of human cultures. It's usually attached to rites of passage, movement into adulthood, marriage. There's often religious ceremonies built around naming. Seth and I used to attend pagan gatherings where many people took a new name for their spiritual life, to represent that transformation and that entry into that part of their lives, often to exclude some part of their life that was painful. Stories that no longer serve them, getting rid of those. In radical faerie pagan culture these were just called faerie names.
So when I speak about them to my friends that know what I'm talking about, I refer to faerie names as being the name you choose for yourself to represent who you want to be and who you're evolving into and becoming.
Now some of my mentoring students, professional intuitives, emerging healers, psychics, people who are trying to build a business similar to mine and putting themselves out there, online, are often worried that using a pen name is inauthentic, or that it's hiding, or that it's somehow going to dim their power. Yet for a lot of reasons, people need to sometimes protect their identity that they're doing work as a psychic, because maybe they also have another job that supports their family and which would cause them problems.
And I'm not here to judge anybody outing themselves that way. I think you can do both. I think it's perfectly acceptable when you have, as I do, with my jobs, different names related to different jobs and different businesses. And there are some very real marketing reasons for doing this. It's effective business choice. So it's not inauthentic to do that. You're not hiding who you are. Maybe you are protecting yourself or separating your identity in some way.
But I think the concept of using a pen name can actually be more authentic because it allows you to tap into this idea of choosing who you want to be. Choosing a name that represents a part of yourself that you want represented. You didn't have a choice probably in the name that you were given at birth. You may have legally changed your name or you may have adopted a nickname. You may have taken on someone else's name through marriage.
There's a lot of different reasons why people change their names and it's a really hard process. I was talking to a transgender friend of mine about the process of, that transition to a completely different sex allows a whole other group of names to be possible. So how do you make that choice? Anybody who has named a baby or named a puppy or a kitten or a business or anything, knows what a huge creative rabbit hole it can be trying to come up with something that suits.
And you sort of know it when you hear it. You can try on a million things that aren't quite right. And then there's one that's just... Yes. That's it. You know?
So we've all been through this process many different times. People often choose stage names simply because it's more beautiful than their real name. It has a cool ring to it. It looks better on a poster. It fits on a book cover. People can pronounce it. There's tons of reasons why you would choose to have a different name.
You may have run across people in the new age realm, especially personalities, teachers, psychics, who have added extra letters to their name. I know a handful of people who've done this and it is for numerology reasons. There are practitioners who can help you analyze your name and how changing the number of characters in certain places within your name can change the numerology, the energy signature of that name, and therefore supposedly affect your ability to manifest or change your vibration, your energy signature.
I've always had an uncommon name. I jokingly refer to it as a soap opera name. I went through phases of disliking it when I was little because it was different. People would sometimes point that out. And then as I got older, I started to embrace it as I started thinking of myself as someone who would do something like be an author. I liked having a cool name because I felt like it would distinguish me and sound like a pen name anyway.
People often ask me if Slade is my real name or if it's a chosen name. I always feel a little defensive about that because... No. My mom went through a lot of trouble to choose this name for me and I've been called this since before I was born. And I feel like somehow that's like some kind of platinum credibility or something.
But considering new names for myself now recently, approaching 50 years old, it really opened something up within me. Who would I be if I wasn't ME anymore? That was a really interesting box to open.
It's not about shame or about hiding. It's about liberation. Being someone else, someone new, on purpose. Intentionally.
So who are you if you get to erase all your past stories? Who are you if you start from scratch? Our vernacular is littered with clichés about the desire to do this.
- Clean slate, blank slate
- Start over, start fresh
- New beginnings, put it all behind you
- Forget all that, let it go
- the New Me
But we barely do those things. We talk a big game.
But what if you picked some small way to be someone new. Hide in plain site. Do something nobody expected you to do. They actually won’t see you because they don’t know to look for you there.
What we notice is often tied to our expectations. You can be invisible simply by being somewhere nobody expects you to be.
What if you just engage in this as a thought experiment? Write it down, like a secret character in your diary. How far can you take this experiment? What do you find is a possible story for you if you don’t use any old stories?
So here are the rules, if you want to engage in this:
You can use true things from your life, true things about yourself — just ones that maybe people don’t know about. Maybe there's a hobby or an activity or a secret obsession you're really into that nobody even knows about at all. You can use stories from your past. Maybe you just use ones that you haven't shared before.
I know I have some stories that aren't sort of part of the most obvious flow of all my other stories. They sort of don't go. They got edited out. They got cut. But in their own right, those are interesting parts of my persona to explore or develop.
Think about these two writing prompts:
"If I had another lifetime, I’d be...
"I want to come back in another lifetime as...
People say these things, right? In daily life, you sort of throw that out there. If I had another life, I'd be a shoe and bag designer. When I come back, I'd want to be one of my mom's cats.
Use those as journalling prompts and sort of fill in those blanks. Just keep going. Jump off from there. If I had another lifetime, I'd be...
Go. For 20 minutes.
You’re so used to your old day dreams, it’s hard to pick a new one. It actually left me with a panicky feeling to set down some of my daydreams over here on the side while I engaged with entirely new ones. It left me feeling a little bit naked and exposed. But excited! About what I was discovering.
You know something that you could do is change your appearance. You can be photographed in your new persona. You can do a whole photoshoot. Like, here's me as this other person that I would be if I could be someone else.
I realized trying to come up with a new persona that it was really a kind of branding exercise. It’s the same thing you go through when you start a personal website, or blog, or YouTube channel.
- There’s your name,
- and then there’s the concept name,
- and the domain…
- the punchy tagline,
- the head shot
- the profile pic,
- the cover image...
But beyond that, it reminds me of creating a resume or a CV or writing one of those personal essays to get into school.
For decades, the hardest thing you ever write or create in your life is a RESUME. It's one of the worst days of your life, when you to write your resume. Now, that has evolved in this new century into the modern scourge known as …
… the ABOUT page.
Anybody who has attempted to create an About page knows the struggle.
Writing an About page that is funny and shows personality while still being professional and getting your archetype across and speaking to your avatar without sounding cheesy or like you’re trying too hard…
You’re always trying too hard when you make this kind of personal brochure version of yourself for the world.
I created an entire journalling exercise process as a training module for mentoring clients to help them write their About pages. It's part of a program I call Beyond Readings, which is an intuitive business development program. It's kind of like a graduate level marketing program for graduates of Automatic Intuition. But it's also open to people who haven't taken Automatic Intuition and maybe don't need that program.
Automatic Intuition Professional teaches you how to identify your professional practice as an intuitive, psychic, healer. Whereas some people come in that are interested in working with me on building their brand and building their business and getting more clients and creating income streams. And they already have a practice in place. They're already astrologers, they're already reiki masters, they're already doing readings and doing so professionally. So they've got that part down and they want to work on some of these marketing concepts and topics and flesh some of that out in their business.
So if that's you and you're interested in going through that process, you can definitely apply through Automatic Intuition on the website. Or you can just contact me and say, hey, I'm interested in doing some of that marketing work with you, and I'll get you there, explain what we do.
Within the Beyond Readings content, there is a module called Write Your Site and it's designed to trick you into creating all that above brilliant stuff that goes into the About page through a series of journalling prompts and little writing exercises. They're related to your values, your beliefs, your loves, your motivations, your dislikes, your disasters… They remind me of the kind of exercises you might find at the back of O magazine, or that you might find in a book of memoir writing prompts, if you like to take quizzes, this is much more in line with that kind of energy.
And it walks you through a formula — a recipe I call it — for creating the perfectly cool About page. So for example, you go through these writing exercises and then you take the recipes and it has instructions that say things like, go through the list of beliefs that you did in exercise #13A and choose your 3 favourites and write them down.
Okay. Now I want you to go to exercise #15 about the worst thing that ever happened to you in your life and I want you to pick your favourite paragraph. And it just sort of walks you through like that.
What it does is, it tricks you into writing and composing a complete document that has your own voice in it that's gone very deep into your sense of humour and your beliefs and your values, but then it's taken away all the frozen blank page sort of writer's block that accompanies something like trying to create an About page or resume. That's the idea of this concept.
There are also recipes for creating all the other kinds of pages on your site, like Service pages, Sales page, both short and long form. I was realizing as I was trying to come up with this new persona for myself, that I could do the Write Your Site exercises AS this other new persona and see what emerged from that.
So this won't be super evergreen. I try to keep these episodes and anything that I say within them as open to any time you might come along and listen to them. So depending on when you listen to this, as I'm speaking about this, I realize probably the easiest thing for me to do would be to make the Write Your Site module from that bigger program available as a Patreon Mastery level download.
So what I'm gonna do is put that into the Patreon Mastery Rotation of free downloads each month and if you're listening to this in May 2019, that will be the current free download, if you want to just try this process for yourself.
I can feel someone's out there going, "Ohmygod, yes, I'm trying to write an About page. Mine sucks. I need to do that."
If that's you, go to patreon.com/shiftyourspirits and get on the Mastery level of support there. It's always available as part of this other program that I mentioned to you. You can go to AutomaticIntuition.com. You can contact me there. You can also just email me or even Facebook message me. Tell me you're interested in it and we'll talk more.
The reason I wanted to share all this with you guys about the concept of re-inventing myself and re-inventing yourself is, I didn’t realize what could be uncovered spiritually by this exercise, this process.
I found parts of myself that I didn’t really know existed.
Fun parts. Joy that I haven’t been accessing.
What if you go just pretend to re-invent yourself?
Who could you be?
What you would choose to get rid of?
What you would choose to embrace?
I believe all creative, sensitive, intelligent people need a project. Outside of chores and responsibilities and jobs and commitments to others. A personal project.
Now, of course I’m doing this re-invention as a 3x3, so I'm doing it for 3 months. Maybe you make this your project for the month or so. Play with the idea just for the next week. You can do it entirely in your head. As I said, it's a thought experiment, but writing it down is good. That works for me.
You may find things that you want to manifest in your actual real life. Or your virtual one. And some of those things, I'm telling you, I'm surprised. I don't know why I'm surprised but I am.
Some of those things that I'm discovering are entirely new sources of joy and purpose.
My friend Rob and I got into a conversation over lunch about the concept of creative literacy. We’re not really taught — even in liberal arts and creative arts academic programs — how to manage and follow through on great ideas.
Everyone can experience a brainstorm — but most creative brainwaves end without follow through.
And what a lot of people don’t talk about is the overwhelm that comes from a high creative state. There is an anxiety that accompanies having a ton of ideas flowing all at once.
We talk a lot about how to get to those creative flow states, but when you’re in the middle of one it's kind of the worse time to have to wonder what your process should be. Or to worry that you don’t have one.
HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSONSlade's Books & Courses Get an intuitive reading with Slade Automatic Intuition FACEBOOK GROUPShift Your Spirits Community BECOME A PATRONhttps://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits Edit your pledge on Patreon TRANSCRIPT My friend Rob and I got into a conversation over lunch about the concept of creative literacy. Even in liberal arts majors and creative arts academic programs, we're not really taught how to manage and follow through on great ideas. Everyone can experience a brainstorm — but do you have a system of rain barrels and cisterns and wells in place to make the most of that when it does happen?
As Rob pointed out, most creative brainwaves end without follow through.
And what a lot of people don’t talk about is the overwhelm that comes with a creative state. There is an anxiety that accompanies having a ton of ideas flowing all at once.
We talk a lot about how to get to those creative flow states, how to get into them, but when you’re in the middle of one it's kind of the worse time to have to wonder what your process should be. Or to worry that you don’t have a process.
I’m experiencing a high creative flow state right now. A lot of people I talk to are also feeling that. And it’s great. Energy has been stagnant for months, for me anyway. For a few years for some of us, also me.
Everything is kind of in Aries in right now and there’s a lot of creative energy and a desire to take action and it's all sort of pouring in now. So Rob was kind of asking me, what are some of the tools that I use to manage that, or is there a way that I can break that down and actually share part of that process.
I think I can do a pretty good job of grounding it a little bit in some systems and tools, especially to help with this idea of overwhelm. So I'm not so much concerned with 'I don't have any creative inspiration'. This is specifically about, what do you do when the fire hydrant is on and it is all running into the street and there's a sense of panic about that.
My favourite go-to magic wand is a list. Lists are magical. They have an ability to change the perception of things. The perceived size of items or problems or concerns, your perceived scope of the To Do cloud that's around your head versus the actual list that ends up on paper in front of you.
There's this anxiety about forgetting things, more than anything, right? So you kind of keep all these balls in the air mentally. You're spending a lot of mental energy just launching balloon after balloon after balloon after balloon, and they're all tied to you and all floating around you in this little cloud.
And one of the things that lists do is they allow you to put those items somewhere so you don't have to worry about forgetting them anymore and that sort of frees up the bandwidth. You can take the balloons down and there's not so much of a cloud around you.
I'm going to talk about checklists in just a bit, which is also another specific way to free up bandwidth.
But there's this high that goes along with taking action, taking risks. It feels sort of good. It's profound! And you can really feel on fire when you're in that state. But the dark side of that energy is what happens when it runs its course or burns out. There's a crash. That caffeine, that sugar high, that drug is going to crash at some point.
And then you're going to realize that you expended a lot of energy starting things without following through on them. And you won't necessarily have the energy left over to follow through, if you spin it in the wrong way. You know what I mean?
Another tool that actually presented itself to me in a really obvious way when I was travelling with Rob last fall was this idea that we should focus on manifesting people, not things. Not the stuff, not the To Do list items, not the resources. Focus on manifesting people who have those things.
You look at that list you made, and maybe there's 25 things on it. When you manifest the right person, they may come with 10 or 12 of those items already taken care of. Or they may have the resources to tick those boxes for you, without you having to do anything other than asking them.
Collaborate. That's what I mean by manifesting other people. That can be an instantaneous thing. It can be a stranger on the street that you stop and ask for directions. In that moment, you're manifesting a person that can tell you how to get to where you're going. It's collaboration, whether it lasts 30 seconds or a couple of years and it's a more formal relationship.
Reach out to experts. Instead of telling them about your great new idea, ask them questions. What do they actually want in the area of your big idea? So you can kind of gear the questions that you ask them towards the area that you're interested in, rather than you telling them what you're making and getting their feedback on it, ask them what they want in the area in which you're proposing a solution or an idea or a venture.
They'll tell you what to make. They will literally tell you exactly what's missing, what they wish existed, and sometimes they'll even help you make it.
The number of times that I've been given resources just because I reached out to someone as an entrepreneur in this phase of my life, let's say in the last 15 years, there are so many times that I have reached out to a coder, a developer, a software engineering expert, a publishing industry person, whatever it might be, and come at them in the right way, with a really curious and respectful desire to participate, people can pick up on that authenticity.
Now if someone is closed to helping other people, that's their issue. You're not going to manifest them anyway. Cross them off your list if you accidentally catch them in your net. Focus on manifesting someone who is open to participating with you.
Just to give you an example of what I'm talking about, more recently with the audiobook production part of my business that I'm moving into, which is one of my big creative new states right now. And when I say I was in a high creative state, a lot of it is around audiobook production. That's one of the new irons in the fire.
I was looking for some resources online, looking for some books on Amazon. I found one in particular that looked really techy. Because I have more questions about some technical stuff, to do with software and file types and less about getting in the spirit of You-Can-Do-It. I'm not looking for that kind of pep talk.
I was looking for something a little bit more specific, and I ran across this author's book and he was a Dutch person. It was still a book written in English but he was Dutch. I looked him up on Facebook and saw that he did live in Holland.
I noticed something in his book that felt kind of like a sign to me. There were examples that he was using about different kinds of studio space that exists, that you can access, as an independent producer of an audiobook. And he linked to a story about my home city, Chattanooga, Tennessee, where our public library built a really state of the art sound facility and they use it for learning purposes and school programs.
But I know a couple of people who do their podcast there. It is something the public has access to. He mentioned it as being a cool resource that our city had. Because of the timing of my reaching out to the Universe, looking for that magic carpet ride of links on the internet that take you to all the things that you were looking for and it all feels perfectly aligned and stuff.
So I was having one of those moments with his book.
So I just decided to send him a friend request on Facebook and then I followed it up with a message explaining why I'd sent him the friend request. And I told him the story, the connection with Chattanooga and I asked him a really technical question that I had, threw some jargon at him, so he would know that I could kind of speak his language and that I was looking to get a more geeky answer from someone.
He was so excited by the interaction that within just a few messages back and forth, he told me about this course that he built and that was available on Teachable and it was an expensive class! It was like, $1500 or something to take this course, and it was really techy looking.
And he offered me a coupon code to access the course for free if I would give him some feedback about it and let him know if that was what I was looking for. There were things about it that needed to be changed to make it more accessible for other kinds of authors.
I mean, that's just an example of something that happened. So when I say 'Manifest the people', that's what I mean.
Take the opportunity. Someone crosses your path and you think, I'm going to Facebook message this stranger. Just do it! I mean, what's the worse that can happen. They can decline your friend request or not answer your message. Or if they seem rude or not open, fine. Keep on moving.
But I can't tell you the number of times that I have reached out to someone who is an expert and they were very generous with their time, their information, and sometimes with their resources.
When I was bootstrapping my business, trying to build something online, I got a lot of help from a lot of people that way, and it's one of the reasons I was able to do it at all.
People like to share their wisdom. They like to be acknowledged for having it. It's often hard earned. They like to have sort of heirs receive their information. People who care, because no matter who you are, you are what filled your work in. Your family doesn't care about your work, and your friends don't want to hear you talk about your work.
Your peers want to hear you talk about your work, and who really values what you do, are the people who are driving down the same road behind you. That's who you want to talk to. Because that's your opportunity to make a difference for someone else, and I think it's motivated by an impulse to sort of go back in time and save yourself, you know?
So when someone approaches me wanting to know about how to do a podcast or something, I already have a list of resources ready to go. So I'm just gonna copy and paste and email it. I'm so excited to think that all the research that I did and spent maybe weeks or months on, can now be reduced to a single email for someone who really wants that information and is gonna go do something with it.
That's really exciting to me. It brings me joy. So don't underestimate the fact that everyone else likes to do that too. We like to be on the end where somebody's asking us to share, and when we're on the end where we're asking for the information, we often feel like we're bothering people.
Now I do think you need to keep your emails succinct. Don't tell people long drawn out stories about your life. Keep it brief. Really really respect their time and think about the fact that you may be one of 50 people who's sending them emails like that, right?
It's really easy to answer something that's short and specific and a lot of people who have taken time to build resources or expertise in a certain area, do have things like checklists that they can send you, or a favourite resource or website that they can point you to.
So make it easier for them to do it quickly. I think you're more likely to get a favourable response.
TIME is the one thing that is limited. It’s the one thing that you can’t make more of. And this is one of my tools, actually. This is one of my subheads in this episode, is this idea about time. You can find more resources. You can manifest more people. You can make more money. But you can't make more time.
So that's one of the big things that you have to deal with when it comes to creative overwhelm, creative productivity, getting shit done. If you can work the time part out, then you can graft a plan onto that. So time is the one thing you can be really strict about. If you're religious and disciplined about the time, then you can be creative and you can flow within that structure. And you can play. You can be a little bit more loose and happy.
This is where I use 3x3 strategy. But you can’t use 3x3 unless you can identify 3 blocks of time each week.
My mentor in writing and publishing and productivity is Tim Grahl. You hear me talking about him when I talk about marketing a lot. Steven Pressfield, who I also talk about, is partnered with Shawn Coynes in a publishing company called Black Irish Books. You've heard me mention many times Steven Pressfield's War of Art as one of my big creative bibles. And Shawn Coynes Story Grid is that type of work specifically for fiction authors and screenplay writers.
Tim's latest book was published by these guys. He's friends with them. He works with them. So Black Irish Books published his latest book called Running Down a Dream. It's a really personal story about Tim trying to start his own business. A lot of failures and anxiety and psychological stuff really that he dealt with. It's super vulnerable and very confessional and just really cool. It represents a lot of why I like him and admire him so much.
In addition to being willing to share how much he sucks at certain things, he's also really, really great about identifying systems and sharing them in this way that I talk about. That mentors have this really genuine authentic impulse to put out their recipes for others.
So in Running Down a Dream, which I'll link to, on this issue of time and creative project management, he talks about a few steps that address this in particular. And one of them was to first identify what the shortest path is. Meaning, find the thing that's going to get you there the quickest. The minimum viable product, or maybe it's the aspect of a particular platform that's the easiest to execute.
Sometimes there are things that we can do within a month and then other things that have a much longer timeline. So find the shortest path to get you in the game.
And then stop doing everything.
I don't really remember from this note if I meant, stop doing all the stuff, or if he literally meant, you just kind of stop working on stuff. And you make your focus just listing everything you do in a day. Again. Some list making. But you write down literally everything that you do. And you circle the essential items.
And for five days, Monday through Friday, you do an experiment where you only do the essential things. Only those things that you circled that you absolutely have to do, like feed your children, go to work. His advice is, you do that for Monday through Friday, and then you kind of evaluate it over the weekend. You journal and you take a look at really how your time is getting spent.
He say he does this once a year. He goes into a great detail about this in the book. I'm just giving you the bullet points, the highlights.
His advice is, you create systems for those essential things. And we talk about systems at the level of things like, 'keep your keys in a bowl by the door' because finding your keys every morning is an essential thing that needs to happen and it can take a ridiculous amount of time or it can take one second. Part of the reason how you can ensure that these essential things get done efficiently is to create a system for them.
A system for finding your keys in the morning can be: put your keys in the same damn place all the time.
Another thing he talks about is creating checklists for everything you do for multiple reasons. Because at some point, you may want to delegate some of your activities and it makes it much less personal when you have this really nitpicky well thought out, well groomed, list of steps as opposed to trying to train someone in the moment and maybe yelling at them for not doing it in a certain kind of way.
It's less personal if there's a checklist that exists so part of one of the things he's talking about throughout his advice is this idea of preparing your systems in such a way now so that they have time to evolve and sort of be trimmed down to their essential selves. And then be shared with other people more easily, because the idea is that if put these systems in place now while it's just you working, at some point there will be other people working with you. Because you're going to manifest the people to help you. And you can pass these lists off to them.
When you create checklists, you can also identify which items can be outsourced in some way, either to a computer app or to some kind of online service, or to an actual person.
But all these things, even the 'keeping your keys in a bowl by the door', frees up bandwidth. It frees up mental bandwidth, which anxiety loves to hog, your mental bandwidth. Running around with your hair on fire, looking for your keys every morning, is anxiety.
So if you're going to carry all this creative stuff coming in, you need as much bandwidth to focus on that stuff with as possible. You don't need to be worrying about little stuff that can be taken care of by simply having some systems in place.
Okay.
Another thing that he talks about is deciding on your goal. What's the goal? The immediate goal. Not the five-year plan necessarily, but again, the shortest path. Let's get from A to Z. In my case, it's like what can I execute in the next three months? What phase of this project can be executed.
And then you need to get clear about what is driving you in the first place. He has this theory that he shares called the 3 F's - Fortune, Fame or Freedom? The idea is that you can have some of all of those things. You can have a little fortune, you can have a little fame, and you can have freedom too. Sometimes they all go together.
But there is one of those things that is motivating you more than any other. And if you're clear about what is motivating you, sometimes it changes the way in which you choose to work. It changes the things you choose to work on yourself versus the things that you delegate to other people.
So there's a little bit of a character analysis happening there where not only are you getting clear about your project and your goal, but you kind of need to know what it is that's fueling you in the first place. Because you may need to go get more fuel some time. And knowing what part of you is going to light up...
It's important. It'll come back up, especially when you run out of steam, or when you're in a low point in the process. What is it that's going to keep you going?
After talking about those principles, he gets to this whole thing with scheduling creative time. His advice around that is very similar to the Artist's Way by Julia Cameron. This concept of having artist's dates. My version of that is the 3x3 strategy.
I have a major new project that I need to find a whole new string of 3x3 slots for. Two years ago I did the 3x3 to start this podcast. I spent three months, and then I launched it, and you know what? A lot of those time slots remained in place. Monday, Wednesday, Friday. In the mornings I work on podcasting stuff.
Sometimes that's interviewing people. Sometimes that's recording a segment like this. Sometimes it's tinkering with the... putting the stuff on my blog so that you can play it from my website. You know, whatever it might be. But I'm always doing something in these designated time periods.
Now, yes I was able to shrink some of that and reclaim it after I got it going and got some flow and some ritual around it. I was able to create some checklists and some systems. But here I am now and I'm like, ooo, I have a new project. I can't stop the ones that are going on, so I actually have to find time.
I don't know where I'm going to find it. That's the point. Now I have to find more, and it's a limited resource. And I'm looking for three actions per week for three months. That's the 3x3. So where am I gonna find another time slot?
You have to be really honest and brutal with yourself, but you can find it. I hear these horror stories of people who get up at 4:00 in the morning and do it. Write their novels before anyone wakes up and their day gets started. I hear even worse horror stories about the people who stay up at night after their kids are asleep and work into the wee hours of the morning.
I am not into night time working at all, so it has to be morning for me. I know that.
Okay, so being really brutally honest with myself, and making a list of everything that I actually do in a day, the first thing on that list would be a little cluster of activities that take place in the first hour I'm up, that include waking up, feeding my pets, drinking water, making coffee, turning on the news.
Depending on how I'm feeling, sitting down and drinking that coffee with the news on in the background. Checking my email, looking at Facebook and seeing if I have instant messages. All that kind of stuff. Probably a lot of us reach for that in the morning.
I do that for an hour, honestly, so I can steal that from myself for something important. I can man up, I can take that hour of leisurely morning stuff and I can use it for work. At least for three months, right?
Let's do it for three months and see what happens, because that's the point. I'm gonna execute, I'm gonna get this thing out there, then maybe it won't take so much time. Or I may find some other strategies working in it. Or it could be the case that with a lot of projects, once there's a launch, or once there's an end to one phase going into another, sometimes the time demands change.
But right now, I'm thinking if I can steal that hour, that early morning hour and just be a grown up, I can get a lot done with that. Because this podcast takes about five hours a week to produce. And if I have to do another comparable audio type project, that's five more hours that I can rescue. So that's really useful.
And here's a little secret tweak to my 3x3 that I don't usually mention because it's not elegant. It doesn't go along with the 3 so well. I do 4 or I do 5. Because if I'm going to find that hour, three times a week in the morning, I might as well do it every day in the morning four or five times.
That also allows for disruption. Something happens one morning. Okay, fine. I've got 4 other to work with. My goal here is just to do it 3, so I'm building in some padding. And, you know, if you can do it 3 mornings, you can do it 4, right?
And maybe you still have that one morning that you take it easy and you do your coffee and your news or your journalling, whatever. I think that's kinda healthy. Maybe you just reward yourself on Fridays. I do the lazy thing that I always like to do.
The other tool or insight for me is how important quarters are, in terms of managing time and projects and running a business and all that kind of stuff. We're talking about the seasons. 3 month periods.
The hardest thing to cope with for me in this entrepreneurial world is the roller coaster. There's a roller coaster of money. It's either feast or famine. There's a roller coaster of work coming in. It's either flowing and everybody's wanting a piece of you or it's like a dead zone. The sales are flat. You're not moving at all. Or it's an emotional roller coaster. It's like up and down, highs and lows. It's like, yay! I'm awesome. I'm brilliant. And then the lows are, omg, I suck. Who am I to think I can do this? All that stuff.
What I found is that quarters are a more realistic time span for analyzing things, like financials or productivity. Quarters sort of smooth out the roller coaster into more of a trend line. Not so much a jagged up and down but more of a smooth flowing line.
Many projects or project phases will fit really nicely in a quarter. 90 days is a really good rough draft period, first draft period for a longer book project. And a quarter is really good for a re-write/edit period. And then another quarter is really good for a launch in marketing period. You see what I'm saying?
There are some projects that you can entirely finish in one quarter, like launching a podcast. I did it.
Planning a whole year is too much. You know what? Reality changes too much. So quarters are the right amount of time to execute something and then to evaluate if anything's changed before planning a whole other set of stuff.
Quarters' also enough time to execute an emergency contingency plan if you needed to. If you really needed to shift gears for some reason, or you needed to make up for lost income. Or let's say you're like, "Oh man, I really mismanaged this whole thing. I need to go get a job for some cash flow, maybe just temporarily."
But 3 months might be a decent amount of time for you to go and find a job if you need to go back to work. Or 3 months is a reasonable amount of time to work through some kind of rough patch, you know what I mean?
But the time to sit down and plan all this is now, while you're fired up. There is a tendency to want to go be in the center of the hurricane and just feel the magic and the flow coming through your body and straight to the canvas …
But when you come down from that high, you're usually spent. You don’t have the motivation to continue at that same speed. And you didn’t save enough motivation to put a more realistic system into place either. And the last thing you feel like doing is, "Oh, I'm going to create a system!" right when you crash from your caffeine sugar creativity high.
So… If you’re in creative overwhelm, or even just really in the zone with wanting to make a project happen… take a few hours. Whether you're feeling really on top of it or you're feeling like you're drowning. Take a couple of hours. Go have some tea or some coffee. Do an artist’s date at a cafe. Take your laptop, your tablet, your sketchbook. Go have a meeting with yourself and make a big ass list.
Just make a big list.
Then identify the three blocks of time. Pull them out of your ass, out of thin air, they are there if you really want it badly enough. Steal them from some other lazy, unproductive part of your life.
And then, start sorting those items on your list into quarters. What goes in the first month? What goes in the second month? What goes in the third month? Divide it up in 3s.
If you find you have a whole lot of leftover stuff that doesn't go somewhere and needs more time, call that Phase 2 and do that in the next quarter.
Once you start to see this on paper, your own Miss Busy will take over and start putting it all together. Psychologically what it does is, it just takes a lot of feelings that you have about what's coming in, and it takes a lot of anxiety that you have, that you're going to somehow lose one brilliant piece of this puzzle and puts it somewhere safe and makes it manageable and changes your perception about how big and terrible and awful and scary it is.
Now, once you're at that point, go manifest the people who are going to be involved.
This could be some kind of incubator program. It could be a small business workshop. It could be a meeting with a CPA. It could be sending emails to your heroes or sending Facebook friend requests to the big fish in your genre. Sometimes a class that you might sign up for can be part of your 3x3
AND you know what? If you want to make ME one of those people, I’ll walk you through the 3x3.
One of my most recent client wants to launch a podcast … and this is really cool. Because I’ve done this. And I did a 3x3 to do it. I already have some lists to work with. So I'm like, Yes, I can walk you through that plan. Let’s do it. I know for sure how to get from A to Z.
This is actually my favorite kind of job in the whole world. Like, that kind of mentoring. And you get all the bonus of my fabulous psychic ability.
Seriously.
3 Sessions with me over the course of 3 months...
What’s your project?
Hit me up.
I’m sharing the work I’m doing to identify the roots and patterns of my issues, in a way that hopefully you can adopt for your own process.
DISCLAIMER: This is not shamanism. I'm notoriously eclectic ...
This is a follow up episode to the Love Curse and to the episode with Asa Poeche, Reversing the spell.
You will want to have listened to those in order to get the most out of this episode.
Listen to Love Curse: Part 1
Listen to Love Curse: Part 2 - Reversing the Spell with Åsa Poeche
HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSONSlade's Books & Courses Get an intuitive reading with Slade Automatic Intuition FACEBOOK GROUPShift Your Spirits Community BECOME A PATRONhttps://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits Edit your pledge on Patreon TRANSCRIPT Slade:
This is a follow up episode to the Love Curse and to the episode with Asa Poeche, Love Curse Part II, Reversing the Spell. So this is Love Curse Part III.
Just a quick disclaimer: This is not shamanism.
Nothing that I'm going to share with you here today is based in a formal practice of soul retrieval. I warned Asa about this, going into this process with me, that part of what I may do is extract some wisdom from her, some insights, and then see what I can do with that information on my own.
And she very much gave me that blessing. She knew that we were experimenting, so shoutout to her, and know that I am not really doing this behind her back or against her recommendations or anything like that.
I am notoriously eclectic. I’m not a fundamentalist or a traditionalist. I’m sure some people might criticize me for not studying this process more and following a more strict version process of some kind of reversal ritual or what have you.
Here’s my philosophy about self-help books, programs, practices, and all that stuff: There’s usually one thing, at least one, sometimes there are a few others but sometimes there's usually one really big thing that's an epiphany for me. It's an 'aha'. It's a moment where I connect the dots and I say, Cool. I grab that part and I incorporate it into my daily life, into my thought processes, into how I police the voices in my head.
Whatever it might be, I take it in and I plant it in my garden and it becomes one of the things that grow there. That's kind of the way that I work with things.
So my process with all this: Rather than doing shamanic journeying and soul retrieval, I'm just starting with the questions that I had and some of the answers, and more questions Asa presented to me in our conversation and I intended to take those into my free associative writing practice. Into my automatic writing and into my Morning Pages. And also into divine dialoguing which, just to explain that really quickly, one of the foundations in automatic writing, which is this idea of connecting with the Higher Self, with your guides, with the records, with whatever it is that you're retrieving of information, the channel can either be straight out of your mouth in a speaking form or it could be writing it down, either longhand or typing, whatever.
To me, automatic writing and divine dialoguing or channelling, they're all kind of coming from the same stream of information and they're different formats for collecting and curating and sharing and analyzing that stream of data.
So these are my tools. This is how I do everything: my own personal development and psychotherapy, my readings with clients, whatever it might be. There's a lot of basis in neurolinguistic programming and with writing. That's just kind of my jam.
I want to share with you a bit about how I have been processing all this since my first two episodes about it. What do you do with it?
You may want to work with a practitioner like Asa and have her walk you through it. You might want to do a more formal ritual practice of some kind, and I still may come back to her at some point in this process and say, "What else do you have in your toolkit that we might use for this?"
But in the meantime, here's what's kind of happened on my own and I'm sharing this with myself by describing it to you guys. I'm working without notes here. I'm kind of doing one of my off-the-cuff episodes. I'm also kind of wanting to share with her what I've done since our conversation ended. So I'm just going to put it out there to everyone involved all at once.
The story I was telling was about these two major relationship events that happened, one at 19, and then one at 29. These magic spells that I was doing, playing with relationships and love magic.
But after my conversation with Asa, I realized that these episodes in my life were about self defense and protection. That was one of her big insights to me. That this isn't really about love. It's about protecting yourself. So where does that come from?
Richard was the one who told me that I didn't have to keep defending myself so violently. I shared that in the first episode. So there was a clue there that came right out of my own mouth.
Okay. So that was happening before. Before the episode with him ever went down. There were traces of this self defense issue going way back.
So I started to work my way back and thought, okay, well what was going on in high school? I defended myself in high school in a completely different way than a lot of people who were bullied.
If you called me "fag", I slashed your tires, I put sugar in your gas tank, I was not afraid of punching someone, I was not afraid of kicking someone in the nuts as a first move. It's considered a dishonourable way to fight but you know what? I just wanted to make sure that the people who were trying to hurt me were afraid of me. That was my goal.
I had an incident where a guy was repeatedly body slamming me outside the classroom in the hallway. It was like a particular classroom and time of day. It happened over and over and over again. My algebra teacher was there to witness it. And so, one day I sharpened a pencil and carried my books across my arms with the pencil in my hands in such a way that if he did it to me again, he would stab himself with the pencil.
And that happened.
She looked the other way because she understood that I was defending myself, rightfully so. My school had a policy back then in the 80s, I would've been expelled just for getting body slammed, if it had been reported, let alone defending myself.
So even if the teacher had reported, "Hey, this guy is body slamming this other kid", we would've both been dealt with zero tolerance and both been suspended. Which is just bullshit.
Anyway, so I figured, you know what? If I'm gonna get in trouble for being hit, I'm going to hit back. That was kind of my policy. There was the archetype of the crazy girl in The Breakfast Club, you know, the weird goth kid that people are kind of afraid of, that is rumoured to be mentally ill. I embraced some of that as a kind of defense mechanism. I let people think that I would go apeshit on them and that I was capable of doing anything. Because just that thought alone kept a lot of people from bothering me.
That had to come from somewhere too.
So I started to follow these milestone violence events, this fighting thing. This self-defense and fear of being harmed and all that, backwards in time. Not regressing in any kind of hypnosis or doing any kind of special witchcraft here. Just intellectually, consciously, wide awake, as I'm taking a shower, as I'm doing the dishes, as I'm driving in my car.
Just thinking about all this stuff that came out in my conversation with Asa. And talking to Seth about it. You know, just processing.
And as I started to work my way back, I found an even earlier age when I was 7, when I was being bullied at the bus stop. My parents, after listening to me come in, whining and complaining about this kid and what he was doing. He was an older kid too. I was in 2nd grade, he was in 5th grade I think. My parents convinced me that if I hit him, he would leave me alone.
Now this took some real convincing. Once they even had me intellectually convinced that this is the way to go. It still took some time for me to work up the courage to do it, but they insisted: If you hit him in the face, he will never do it again. He will leave you alone.
And my mother actually was the one who said, kick him in the nuts. Take him down so that he can't even hurt you back. Start off there.
And you know what? It worked. It worked really well.
I think that the 5th grader's parents came to complain and realized once they got there that... your 7 year old beat up my asshole 10 year old and it kinda never went anywhere so I was really, honestly, kind of drunk with the power of it. Because I didn't get hurt. Nobody hit me back. I just lashed out and defended myself and it was put in the ground.
That kid never bothered me again.
There were other instances around that age. My next door neighbour, he was bullying me, calling me a fag, calling me a sissy. I shot him with a BB gun. I aimed at his legs. I didn't shoot him in the face. Ohmygod I got in so much trouble for that. I never had a gun again as a kid. No any kind of firearms for me.
There was another instance where, around that same time period, where another kid was making fun of me and I put my fist through a window because he, when I tried to fight him, he ran away from me and he went and locked himself in his garage. And then started screaming at me through one of the little garage windows. And he thought I couldn't get to him so he was tormenting me from behind the glass.
I just put my hand through the glass. He wasn't hurt. Nobody was ever hurt but my parents were mortified. I got in a lot of trouble. We had to go and fix his window and apologize to their family and you know, it was terrible.
I was given boxing gloves and taught to fight in a more constructive way, because my parents felt I needed an outlet for this anger. Something that was less free-for-all but maybe just to channel that into an actual physical activity where it belonged.
But I kept going back in my memories.
Well, okay, how far back did it go? Was that the first time or was there something even earlier?
And it did go earlier. It went way further back. And I got all the way back to the event that happened when I was four years old.
I can't share that in detail on this episode. I'm not sure that I can speak about it without kind of breaking down a little bit and I really don't want to throw a member of my family under the bus, who's not here to defend themselves.
Suffice it to say, something happened to me that involved physical abuse layered with homophobic motivation and language. And here's the takeaway: you don't even really need to know the details because there are so many gay men that have their own version of this story.
The important part for me in doing this work about this curse is realizing that at four years old, I remember standing my ground and this voice came out of me. It really was like I was channelling Satan himself. It was a really evil, demonic sounding big low voice.
I said, "I will NEVER forget that you did this to me."
And I never did. I never have.
Not only did I not forget, but for a long time, I never forgave it.
I forgave it much later in my 20s, early 30s, when I realized that this person was younger than I was at that age, when this happened. I was really dealing with someone who's relatively pretty young to me now. There was a lot of fear motivating what happened.
You know, I forgave it because you're supposed to forgive this shit, right? In order to move on. Now one thing that Seth pointed out is, just because you forgive the person for doing that to you doesn't make the wound go away. It's not like it erases it or keeps it from happening. So the whole idea of forgiveness is a different component than being wounded in this way that has festered.
So that part of me that was so easily drunk with power at seven and then again as a teenager, and then again with my relationship with Richard, was someone who was fighting for their existence. Asa nailed it when she said, "So much defensiveness in the way you speak about this. There's so much language about being attacked."
And, you know, that was the curse.
I cursed someone else, really, in self defense, and the witches’ rede is, everything you put out, comes back to you three times over. I don't know. Maybe there's a little bit of that in there. If a four year old can be guilty of defending themselves against abuse and then create karma from it... I don't know.
But that event, that violence related to my sexual identity and my safety in my own self, in my own body, it fucked up ALL my relationships, with men especially.
So rather than being in the closet, I never really was in the closet. I embraced being gay as a big FUCK YOU to that violence against me for being gay. Because what could be worse than not cowering down and doing the thing you've been told to do?
The ultimate middle finger was to go all the way with it and embrace it and identify with it and I did. And I don't know what instinct made it go that way for me when so many other people went the other way. Maybe it's because I was in a relatively safe and loving environment that I had a whole lot of things building me up. So that wasn't enough to take me down.
I'm not putting it out there that I'm somehow special. I'm just saying that that's how I reacted to it. And it still poisoned me forever, in a way that became insidious and hard to name. And that went all the way through school.
I cursed the first perpetrator of homophobia at four. I started fighting people for calling me a "fag" at seven, and I did that all the way through junior high and high school, and all the way up to the moment I found myself doing it to Richard.
My ability to love, to be in a love relationship, is not really what this curse is about. It's about an existential threat to who I am, my identity. So when he made our breakup about my writing, about my sense of purpose, he threatened my identity again. My very existence. My sense of why I'm here at all was under attack.
So there's a through story. There's a story arc here and there were chapters, there were entire books and prequels before the one in the series that I shared as the Love Curse.
I didn't know it at the time I recorded this for you guys. I didn't know I was jumping in the middle of the show. So I kind of had to go back to the beginning and binge watch. It's like if you came in on a series and is like, Oh, this is show's really cool! I'm gonna get on Netflix now and watch the earlier seasons.
So I had to do some kind of binge time travelling through my life.
Okay, so how do you fix that? How do you retrieve the part of you that broke away? Or how do you heal that thing that's wounded? You've identified, okay, it's a four year old self that's been beat to shit. What can you do?
And so that's what I was kind of stuck with there for a week or so pondering and trying to think about what I was supposed to do with this information. And I was thinking about the concepts of soul retrieval and Asa's description about how a part of you breaks away, you lose a part of your soul when these traumatic events happen to you.
And I started thinking about the clinical idea of multiplicity, which is no longer really considered a disorder but one of the ways in which the brain protects itself, the mind protects itself against really, really significant abuse or trauma, is these compartmentalizations that happen.
And so, as I was feeling my way through all this information, I started to have these images of pieces of myself breaking away like shards of time, like there's a film strip and there are these pieces that got cut because they couldn't be a part of my story. They had to be yanked out.
And they exist like... It reminds me of the old Superman movies from the 80s, the ones with Christopher Reeve where they imprison the villains in this kind of like broken piece of a mirror that's floating through space.
And so I saw this part of myself. It wasn't a piece of me, like a limb that's missing. It was a moment in time that was edited out and encapsulated in this shard and it exists in a loop, a time loop. Like you have those memories, those flashes, from that event that happened to you. And you can sort of... They're just moments. They're seconds. They're like gifs, you know, the little digital moving images. They're just these little moments that play over and over again. They're memories.
From a soul perspective, they're a part of my spirit that is stuck in these little time loops, like horcruxes or something, if you want to use a Harry Potter conceptualization.
So yeah, I started to become aware of the fact that there is a four year old version of myself that is stuck in a time loop where he's being beaten for being gay over and over and over again. And has since it happened. It's out there. It's floating around in space of my existence, of my consciousness.
Okay, so how do you communicate with that? How do I get him out of there? So that was the other place that I was stuck. As I was driving around, as I was in the shower, as I was cutting the lawn, as I was sweeping the driveway. That's what I'm working on, right?
Okay, again, like I said, asking these questions like, how do I get to him? And if I do, how do I break him out?
So of course I thought, well, I'll journal about it. I'll sit down at some point and I'll really just do some kind of free floating writing with those questions and I was procrastinating doing that a little bit. I couldn't find the right moment. It wasn't like I could put it on my To-Do list like, "Thursday at 10 - Retrieve four year old self from time shard", you know?
It just... I don't know.
I kept waiting to have a moment, an impulse, to do it, because this isn't like a book I'm writing. This is a piece of working on myself that does need to come from this really emotional place. It does need to be inspired. I need to be connected to it emotionally. I can't just examine it intellectually. That's one of my faults in my astrological charts.
If I do a relationship composite with anyone, it always brings up the fact that I intellectualize my emotions instead of feeling them. It's like, great. Okay. What do you do if that's what you do?
Well I ended up doing it in the car. I was driving, it was a beautiful day, I was listening to some music, I was actually feeling very joyful. I was feeling a moment of, Ah! All is right in the world.
And that's when the inspiration hit me. Not gloom and doom. It's early in the morning and I'm drinking coffee and I've gotta go there. It was this moment of music, joy in the car, cranked up, and I remembered that moment when I was yoga travelling.
Remember that? When I told you on an earlier episode about how I have these dream-like travels during shavasana at the end of a yoga class, and I had that whole vision where my shadow swam up from underneath me and wanted me to spoon him. That has a bit of a musical element as well.
So here I was driving my car and I saw my four year old self in his shard and I suddenly felt just bowled over with the trauma of what was happening to him and the fact that he didn't know it was happening to him over and over again. His entire existence was living in that moment and I felt this need to go there and rescue him, like an angel beaming in. Or a visitor from the future projecting into that moment and rescuing him, breaking him out, like an episode of Star Trek.
So I just started to imagine, you know, how that scene would play out. And once I was in there, I was like, what do I say to this little kid as my adult self appears to him in this moment of crisis and pain. I'm there to rescue him. What do I say? What's the dialogue? How do I convince a four year old to come with me?
Because he was there because we put him there. And at the time, that's all we were was that four year old self. So I knew that there was some part of my consciousness that could just snap my fingers and make him not be there anymore. Right? Intellectually, philosophically, that should be the case. A lot of people have written to me and said, well you just decide not to feel that way anymore.
Okay well yeah. That's great. Let's all do that about everything that messes us up. Easy fix.
I ended up completely in tears because I started to speak to him out loud as I'm driving, trying to explain to him what's going on and convince him that he doesn't have to be there. That he can come with me. That there is a place where I live now, where the things that threatened him are no longer a threat. That the thing that he is protecting himself against is not relevant in the same way anymore. That I have this place that he can come and be all of the things that he was attacked for in pure, open joy.
Because he's less likely to be attacked but he's also protected by me. So it can't happen on my watch, kind of thing.
And I was... You know, I do most of this stuff at an intellectual place. I'm really not emotional about it. I wasn't as emotional on the show as I would've thought I would've been. I even gave a little bit of disclaimer: By the way, if you ever do a reading for me, I don't react very much in the moment. Sometimes my emotional responses come way later.
So if you tell me amazing news, my response is sometimes kind of underwhelming. I apologize.
So here's the point at which it overwhelmed me. In the car, where so much of my magic dialoguing happens. Because I can't write, so I start talking. I was honestly afraid when I got off the interstate that I was gonna get pulled over and arrested. And if a cop saw my face, he would think that I was on something. My eyes were red and I was driving while shattered.
Just driving while completely undone. Having a psychological breakthrough in the car.
Here's the important thing. As you start thinking about this process conceptually, what I'm hoping happens is that you now apply that to some of your stories. The younger versions of yourself that have been in captivity have not had the chance to evolve and grow the way that your present self has. Those younger version of ourselves have not had those experiences. They haven't benefited from any of that growth or evolution.
You have to give them time to assimilate, to learn this world that you live in, to become a part of it. You kind of have to adopt these parts of yourself and raise them from those younger moments forward. Give them a chance to catch up. Give them life experience to allow them to grow up. And maybe it will happen at an advanced rate of speed. Maybe it won't take 46 years for that to happen.
It might take a matter of months or days or weeks. I don't know. But what I do know is you can't just throw them in the car with you, say they're retrieved, and then carry on and expect them to now participate in all your adult conversations and activities and the conversations that you have with yourself about stuff that's going on.
These are children, probably, right?
So I have some living to do with these younger versions of myself with the awareness of where they've been and what they've experienced. It's like adopting a car full of spirit children that are also feral stray cats.
I'm teaching them about our power. About who we are now... And I think it's just an on-going personal development project. And that's cool. Because I needed something that's not just about my work or about ambition. That's just one quadrant of my life, and that's workaholism, when you just channel everything into work and make it all about that.
I need to develop in some truly personal ways and so this has presented itself to me as something that needed to be healed.
There was one component that I still wanted to be a part of this new spell, this new magic, this healing magic, this reversal. I needed a new mantra. So...
Shoot the moon is not the mantra for what's going on, with what I just described for you. Shoot the moon is a mantra for a spell to attract my partner. It's an antenna that I've sent up. Shoot the moon is a satellite for a specific purpose of communicating with that person. It's an invitation for someone to come into my life.
But to heal this curse in an ongoing manner requires its own mantra. I just want to share a little bit about what that looks like for me on paper, how I create a mantra. And I'm going to use this very specific example.
So of course it's a writing exercise for me. It kind of reminds me a little bit about doing marketing brainstorming, like when you're trying to think of a cool tagline or like a catchy sentence to go on your Facebook ad or whatever it might be. Something to put on a flyer to draw people in that's not just the title of the event or something more like dialogue. Something that speaks to people.
And so one of the things that you do is you start writing down as many of them as you can and you write different versions of them. Even the titles of my podcast episodes usually have three or four version where I try out different wording. And that's the way I write.
I don't delete things in the moment because I want to have all those options and iterations that I went through, I want them still to be there. So when I write first drafts of things, I just list... I can say it this way, I can say it this way, I can say it the same way but with one word different, I can say it here and change the... and go back later and choose one of them, or maybe even go back again a second time and say, nope, you know what? I'm going back to Option 2 or whatever. I want to see all the options there.
So that's an exercise that I do and I thought, okay, I'm just going to do that to write a new mantra. So I started to think about how that old mantra that was related to the curse was my magic in words and it was affirming a very specific place for my magic to be.
And I thought, okay, well I need my magic to be in other places. I need it to be everywhere. I don't just need for it to be in one thing. That's how I got into this trouble.
So here's some of the things that I wrote. I'm just gonna read them to you so you can see all the different versions of what I was trying to communicate.
I wrote down:
My magic flows through all areas of my life.
That's like an affirmation, right? That's one you can put on a sticky note and put on your mirror and say every day.
My magic flows through all areas of my life.
That's what I want to communicate. But I still want something punchier. I want something quicker. I need a spell. I need an abracadabra.
So I wrote:
Power flows into and through all areas of my life.
Magic flows in all parts of my life.
I am powerful.
Magic flows in my life.
My life is magical.
Magic in my life.
My magic in words.
Magic in my life.
My life is magic.
So you can see, as I start to write those, I am trying to find a way to say, 'My magic flows through all areas of my life', the affirmation, in as few words and syllables as possible.
My life is magic.
Magic is in my life.
So I have to keep working on those and see what rolls off my tongue. The fewer words the better. But also, it's kind of like a pet name. It's something that evolves on its own because you keep saying it over and over again. You hear me saying those things like the intro text to the podcast, you'll notice over time I lose a word or two here or there, right?
It's always getting refined and edited down just a little bit further. So a mantra is like a song I'm working on or something. It's like I'm looking for the perfect chorus, the perfect hook. And I'll just keep working with that. But it's a concept that replaces an older concept that was limiting me. Because you can't take something out without putting something else in.
Okay. Thanks for listening. Thanks for holding space for this process. For me. From what I've heard in feedback, you can relate to this. You have your own stories. You have your own versions of this kind of pain, this kind of curse, this kind of self-imposed restriction.
So what can you employ these techniques for in your own world?
Start with questions. Go and have dialogues with your Higher Self, with your guides. Go and do an automatic writing session with your questions. See what other questions come up. And do the time traveling thing where you start with an event that you feel like, okay, when was the moment when my soul got broken and cut up?
Can you go back in time and find an earlier instance of that same energy?
Because what I found, and what I find often in doing readings for people, is that we think we've got problems in five different areas of our life. And what we really have one problem showing up in all these different ways, such that we think we have five enemies instead of one, you know?
Or we think we're messed up all over the place. We're just a wreck, when really there's just one story that needs to be rewritten. There's this one child that's locked in a shard of time, that needs to be broken free, and invited to come live in this new place.
Yeah... So go do that. Go talk to yourself about it. Go retrieve yourself. Go save yourself. And love yourself.
Evolutionary astrologer Dena DeCastro returns to the show to teach us all about Chiron, Chiron Return, and what the move into Chiron in Aries means for each of us.
HOW TO FIND YOUR CHIRON SIGN:
Google the year you were born + Chiron example: “1969 Chiron”
or
visit Chiron Sign Tables at Cafe Astrology
MENTIONED ON THE SHOW Chiron Sign Tables Cafe Astrology
The National Chart of the United States interpretation
Actual Natal Chart of the USA
GUEST LINKS - DENA DECASTRO Chiron in Aries and You
Chiron in Aries: Fight for the Right to Be You
denadecastro.com
DeCastro Astrology on Facebook
HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses
Get an intuitive reading with Slade
Automatic Intuition
FACEBOOK GROUP Shift Your Spirits Community BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits TRANSCRIPT Slade:
I love having a returning guest/in-house astrologer, and welcoming all other astrologers to come on the show too.
So one of the things that you and I have been doing in these sort of serial conversation is focusing on more evergreen kind of topics in astrology, not the day-to-day transits of what's going on. But the thing that's interesting about Chiron which we're talking about today is it kind of falls in the middle ground, right?
Because it's going to be an effect for this long period of time. It's shifting signs. It's going to be there for seven years so this is one of those things that I feel like we still want to discuss and it will be relevant for several years if people listen to this conversation, right?
Dena:
Yeah. It's right in that middle ground where this is, when the slower moving bodies, such as Uranus, Neptune or Pluto, which are the outer planets, and Chiron, which happens to orbit between Uranus and Saturn. When those things are moving into a new sign, it will be there for a long time, generally, Pluto being the longest where it could be 15 years-ish in a sign.
So yeah, we're not exactly Evergreen but it's a long time, right?
Slade:
Right.
Dena:
So for Chiron, it's going to be in total about eight years in Aries, and it dipped in last year, and it's gonna go through 2027, a little in and out at the end, you know, where it goes forward and backward, but...
Slade:
When was it last year that it dipped in? I'm just curious.
Dena:
Let's see. It was, I believe, April. I'm going to look at my notes on that, but yeah, I think it was April through September. Yes. Of 2018. And then it retrograded back into Pisces to finish up business there. We can talk a little about that.
And then it moved fully into Aries February of last month. I believe it was the 18th that it moved into Aries.
Slade:
So I just have to say really quickly, I really didn't know anything about Chiron until very recently. In the last few months when I started seeing all this press about the change into Aries, and people who had Chiron in Pisces were celebrating that something was going to change.
And I've had people talk to me about my chart since I was a little kid and this never came up.
So tell us, first of all, what IS Chiron? As an astronomical body and then astrologically what it is.
Dena:
So it was first classified as an asteroid and it's orbiting between the asteroid belt and the Kuiper belt is that final belt of objects beyond Pluto. And so it's orbit goes in and out between Uranus' orbit and Saturn's orbit. So it can go a little bit outside of Uranus and come back in and inside of Saturn's orbit and go back out. So it goes between them.
It doesn't have a completely round orbit. It's elliptical and irregular. Therefore it spends a longer time in some signs than others. And it happens to be that Aries and Libra are the two signs that it spends the longest amount of time in. So it's about an eight year time frame that it will be spending in those.
Now it's being classified as possibly a minor planet which could be a combination of, is it a comet or is it a dwarf planet? What is it? But it's basically a small body that regularly orbits the sun, which is now classified as centaur or minor planet. It was discovered in 1977 so it is very new in terms of what astrologers have been looking at and developing theories about and we're still continuing to develop a meaning for what Chiron is.
Slade:
That's so cool. We think of all this stuff as being so ancient, you know, like Greek astronomers gazing at the sky...
Dena:
Yeah.
Slade:
So the idea that modern astrologers are actually incorporating something new into the lexicon is really fascinating. So how does it happen and what do people think it's about and what do you know about it?
Dena:
Yeah, well like any of the planets that have been discovered in recent history, for example, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto, are new basically to our astrological understanding, relatively speaking. We started with discovery of Uranus in the late 18th century, discovery of Neptune in the mid 19th century, and discovery of Pluto in about 1930.
So this is recent history in terms of the scheme of things.
And so astrologers work to develop some sense of, what does that planet's presence mean in a birth chart? Through experience. Through reality testing. Through looking at a person's chart and seeing how it plays out in their life. So it's a science in that we're correlating data. We're observing data and how it plays out in reality.
So we're doing the same with Chiron. I think it received the moniker, the archetype of the Wounded Healer, as it was named for Chiron, and the myth of Chiron is about a centaur that was born of the mating of Saturn, Kronus, and a nymph named Philyra. So that story is about a being who was born with a deformity, being rejected by his mother. You know, she split the scene when this baby was born. It's a very sad story in its beginnings, but then it works out well in the Greek myth for Chiron because he is adopted by Apollo who's really super cool.
Apollo shares with him all the skills that he has and he becomes then a master healer astrologer himself. Astrology is actually in the myth and a person who then mentors others and teaches others, or being who mentors and teaches others. So he's kind of this half-mortal, half not-mortal being who is brought into the world and has to figure out, like, how am I going to survive? But then he receives some help and mentoring from one of the gods.
So it's a pretty incredible story. And then what astrologers do is they take the synchronicity of that body being named for that Greek myth and say, how then does that shed light on the meaning of this body in a person's chart? And we've done that with all of the planets, from names of the Greek gods or the Roman gods.
So yeah, I mean, and then it's a process, right? It's a process of looking at this over and over again in people's charts. And to be honest, I didn't use Chiron for probably the first 10 years of practicing astrology. And I've been doing it for about 20. And what led me to really looking at it myself and practicing with it in charts is, in my own chart, I saw how it had been and seemed to shed light on my story. And it is prominent on my chart.
And so I think that's a factor too. If it's prominent in a person's chart, then it will have more of an impact as this asteroid or minor body. But as astrologers, we can only really work from experiential, experience and data, to figure out what does this actually mean?
Slade:
So what's the theme then? What does it bring to our chart or is there a certain part of our life experience that it impacts? Talk a little bit about that.
Dena:
I believe it has to do with inner child issues, things that happened to us when we were children, that continue to affect us throughout our life. And we may be very aware of those things. But it's like the thing that keeps hanging us up. That insecurity, that feeling of lack, that feeling of less than, that we all carry around, that stems from something in the childhood. Some of us have more or less awareness of what is that, what is that wound? What happened there?
Let's say, for example, someone, one of their parents left when they were a child. Going right back to the Chiron story, they might have abandonment issues, right? And they might be very aware of the cause of that. "My father left when I was three and so therefore I have daddy issues or abandonment issues."
What Chiron can help with is then pointing in a chart to - can you find the healing for that? What is its medicine, by it's sign and house placement? What do you need to go into? What do you need to embrace? What qualities do you need to embody in order to heal from that particular childhood issue. And then use that healing in service. That is part of the healing too. Using that awareness of your own childhood wound in service in some way to others in your life on a broader scale.
Slade:
Okay, so this is bringing together a lot of threads of stories for me personally, which we'll come back to later on when we talk about the Chiron return. Let's make sure and tell everybody since, for instance, I don't think when you do your chart on astro.com that it lists Chiron as one of the planets and tells you what sign it's in. So if you want to look this up and just find out what your Chiron sign is, how do you find out that information?
Dena:
Well, for any asteroid or minor body, you can usually find it by typing in that planetary body's name plus the word "ephemeris" or "ephemerides". That will bring up a list of different resources, either to find a table that shows when the planet was where. Or it will go to an ephemeris that shows that. And some people cannot read an ephemeris, so that's a tricky thing.
I do happen to know with Chiron, CafeAstrology has a good signs table for Chiron which is easy to read. It says, here's the date and here's the date it entered Cancer for example and here's the date that it left Cancer and entered Leo. And so you can find, within that list of dates, where your natal Chiron is. So that's fairly easy. You'll put a link to that in the notes.
Slade:
Absolutely. We'll have links to all these resources so you can look this stuff up, and links to some of your resources as well.
Well this is really interesting because I do kind of see this theme emerging around the whole wounded healer, wounded child archetype stuff. I also had an epiphany about the centaurs in Harry Potter and the magicians.
Dena:
Oh, the magicians!
Slade:
Yes! Which are famously healers who studied the stars as well and I assume that that came from mythology but you just tied it all together for me.
I get my mythology through fantasy most of the time.
Dena:
Me too.
Slade:
So what has... for instance, one of the things that brought this to my awareness were all the people who recently were posting on Facebook that they were Chiron in Pisces people and that this was nearing a shift for them. And it seemed as if they were like glad to see this change coming. What is that story about?
Dena:
Well, and I don't tend to look at things as wholly positive or negative, right? You know that about me by now. As an evolutionary astrologer, I don't think, as my teacher Steve puts it, don't just plug your nose through the transit of something and say, "Oh phew, that's done!"
Slade:
Yeah.
Dena:
To work with it consciously and with intention would be the aim, right? I'm not shaming those people because believe me, I've definitely been like, PHEW! after a few Pluto transits in my life. "Glad that's done!"
But Chiron can bring definitely a hyper awareness of that childhood stuff that still haunts us. And if Chiron's in Pisces, then those people who are going through Pisces return in the past several years, right? Which means they were turning 50 at some point in there.
50 is, I would say, already an interesting birthday right, in this culture? I mean, you and I are both turning 50 this year, so we're coming up on Chiron return and we'll talk more about that.
But for those people with Chiron in Pisces, that have just gone through it, maybe there were other challenges in their life as well surrounding turning 50, surrounding all the things that go with being middle aged in this culture.
Slade:
Plus it was a water sign.
Dena:
It was a water sign, yeah.
With Pisces, there is already a feeling of heightened sensitivity, vulnerability, deep empathy and perhaps the challenges of Chiron return in Pisces were about feeling things even more deeply which, the past few years would've been a very challenging place to be, for sure. Everything that's going on in this country, lots of processing of deep and intense emotions in general, and then having that heightened awareness of everything that's going on around you, and feeling everybody's feelings, I would guess that that was a challenging sign to have Chiron return in.
Slade:
And I'm observing that conversation from our peers, people who are already intuitives or spiritual teachers. They're very much involved in their spirituality and healing things, their personal issues. As you said, turning that into something that they do for other people. And predominantly a lot of women in our community.
So I was seeing all this back and forth and I was like, "Gosh, you guys, I'm so sorry. What happened?"
It sounded really intense but it also makes sense why they are kind of having a voice within our community at large, right? Why they're on these Facebook groups talking about the things that they're talking about, it did make a kind of sense.
And I was kind of excited to hear that I have another dose of fire to work with. Because I am a fire sign, I'm a Leo, but I have a lot of Scorpio in my chart. So I kind of feel more like a water sign moving through the world a lot of the times than I do the Leo energy. So to have some Aries coming in somewhere, yeah, bring it on! Sounds good.
Dena:
Yeah, you and me both. I don't have a lot of fire in my chart at all. I have one fire planet, Mars in Sag and that's it. So I'm like, okay! Good little boost here, some fire energy and then Chiron will be connecting. If you're a fire sign, particularly if you have early fire sign planets, Chiron will be connecting with that via a trine or conjunction. Either one. One or the other.
So it will reconnect you with that fire principle, for sure.
Slade:
So with Chiron moving into Aries for everyone, what kinds of things does that generally do to the mood and environment and what we're experiencing collectively?
Dena:
You know, Chiron being in Aries for the collective, it's taking us back to square one in many ways. Aries is the first sign. It is the 'I Am' principle and just being. Absolutely 100% who I am, who I am born as, and Chiron is illuminating the wound that blocks us from being 100% who we are and who we were born as. That's intense, for sure.
I mean, we can say Chiron in Pisces was intense in different ways but there's an intensity to this as well. It has to do with confronting what blocks access from being, 100% accepting and comfortable with who we are. No apologies. That's very Aries energy by the way. No apologies. Not apologizing for who I am, what I'm doing and what I want! And desire. Desire is also a component of Aries.
Chiron is illuminating right now as it moves through Aries, what is blocking us from having what we want? It will show us when we get in our own way, where we let other people get in our way, but the onus of power does come back to us because that's what Aries is about, owning your personal power, your will, your desire, and the direction YOU want to take.
One of the themes I can see coming of that is realizing exactly how we get in our own way, and to remove that tendency to want to blame that person, that situation. There's always an excuse I can make about why I'm not getting to where I want to go.
But ultimately the buck stops with me. And that's a very Aries principle as well.
So owning personal power will be, how to get to that, is through understanding the ways that we let our past, our childhood stuff, our old baggage of childhood, continue to hang us up in our movements toward where we want to go.
And so, as with any transit, there's some inner work involved in figuring that out and healing that.
Slade:
Well, one of the things that I love about the way you speak about these things, you touched on that idea, it's not always good or bad. You're gonna get a little bit of both with anything in astrology. And one of the things that you like to do with that is say, given that this situation is occurring, or given that we've got these ingredients to work with, how can we make the best of that? What should we be looking to work on? I mean, obviously, childhood issues, things from the past that maybe are still holding us back in some way, making us timid... Am I in the ballpark?
Dena:
Yeah. I think you cued in on something there with the word 'timid'. That Aries is a sign of bravery and courage. And so we're being, all of us, called to become more brave in some area of our lives, depending on where that Chiron transit is happening. Whether that Chiron be touching a planet in your chart, whether that Chiron be moving through a house, well it will always be moving through a house, but what house is it moving through in your chart?
It's going to point to that area being key and the need for you to develop courage, to be bold, to take steps forward in that area. And also to face the fears that are rooted in something that happened when you were a kid. That's still getting in your way.
Slade:
Well this is freaking me out because, not to make it all about me...
Dena:
I love it when you talk about you.
Slade:
Since it's my show and you're my astrologer, and I've already aired a bunch of laundry that you and I have talked about, the whole thing with some of the romantic stuff going on in my chart right now, which we had a conversation about. That sort of opened some doors for me that I ended up doing this episode a few weeks ago about how I had put this curse on myself when I was younger and I then did a follow up episode with Åsa Poeche about the concept of using shamanic principles to reverse or to retrieve some of those lost pieces.
And so behind the scenes, I mean I'll come back and talk about this on it's own show, but one of the things that I found really quickly after talking to her was that the incidents that I was talking about and speaking about it as if it was the beginning of this curse really weren't. There were other events that led up to them and I started just to sort of jump back in time all the way back to something that happened when I was four.
So I have had this big 'Aha' moment that what I perceived as some kind of issue that I had placed on myself or whatever, was actually something that happened to me at a really early age and I responded to it in such a way that that emotional wound then defined how I defended myself in a lot of areas going forward, that were connected with that.
And then the whole idea of like, why do I feel the impulse to suddenly talk about all this publicly, and one of my reasons intellectually for doing that was, one of the components of a shamanic ritual is to have the tribe present when somebody's being healed. So one of the things we talked about was the fact that this community of people who listen to this show, we're kind of holding that space and so I am actually asking for my community to hold space for me while I heal this. Consequently, hopefully they will get some kind of information that they can use for themselves.
But as you're talking about this idea of bravery, I feel lately, and I mean I'm kind of a brave person in some areas of my life but I do feel this sense of being more brave suddenly about things that are really deep in the closet. Like I've got a whole other layer back into storage now, you know what I mean?
So I'm wondering if maybe that's what I'm experiencing.
Dena:
And you and I are both going through Chiron return so we can talk a little bit about that and how just Chiron return in general because anybody with Chiron in Aries is going to be experiencing Chiron return some time between now and 2027. So let me just quickly note the dates for that. So Chiron is in Aries from now through to June 19 of 2026. Dips into Taurus for awhile and then comes back into Aries from September 17th, 2026 through June 14th of 2027.
So really about 8 years more, right? With a little dip into Taurus in between.
So Chiron return, it only happens once in your life unless you live to be about 100, which some of us do. But at that point I don't know how much work we'll be doing.
Slade:
Who cares, at that point.
Dena:
Yeah. At that point I'm just sipping my margarita on the porch.
At 50 is when most people are experiencing it, either a year either side of that, could be when it starts for you and it lasts about a year and a half to two years. This transit, this Chiron return, it prompts us to revisit the very core wound, okay, of childhood.
So when you say, the thing that happened when you were four, I have a suspicion that that is a key. And interestingly enough, the Chiron glyph looks like a key.
Slade:
gasp
Dena:
I know. Cool synchronicity, eh? That that's the key to unlocking your courage, your strength, your power, now.
Slade:
Wow.
Dena:
And this is why you're feeling braver, more courageous, more able to take risks. I'm experiencing some of the same. Feeling... and I think this in part comes with being 50 as well, or becoming 50, is you start to care less what other people think. You start to really own that this is just who I am. No apologies, right? Aries energy. No apologies and for better for worse, I may make enemies. I may have people not like me. These are also very Aries themes. I may make enemies.
Not everybody has to like me. And that is so freeing and so healing.
Slade:
Yes.
Dena:
Big time, right? So that's the theme in this Chiron in Aries return.
Slade:
Would you be comfortable talking about maybe an example of how that's showing up for you? What kind of parts of your life are you seeing that in?
Dena:
Doing this podcast.
Seriously.
I mean I'm joking a little bit. I mean, doing things like this, putting myself out there and speaking to larger groups of people, because I think the core, one of the core wounds for me was standing out, being made to feel it was not safe to stand out, or to be visible because of themes of my childhood, you know, of having narcissistic parents that made it feel like, no, you're not supposed to stand out. We're supposed to be the show!
So yeah. So that core wound about, I have to blend in, I have to hide my needs, I have to hide my vulnerabilities, that is what I am working through at this time. And what I'm finding is that, there's this voice that's guiding me. I feel like it's one of my guides that's probably overseeing this whole Chiron return for me, that's saying, "You go, you go girl. Do it. Just do it. And it'll be fine. We got you, but you just gotta keep pushing yourself here. I know it's scary. I know it's not fun sometimes, but there will be gains for you on the other side of this."
So yeah. It's writing more. Being in front of people more. Sharing more of what I have to say. And that Chiron in my chart happens to be connected to my Mercury. It's squaring my Mercury so for people who know a little about astrology, natally, it's squaring my Mercury and then by transit, because of this return, it's squaring my Mercury. So it's really the use of the voice for me that's showing up in a big way.
Slade:
That's so much something that I associate with you too. Both technically, you have great sound and audio. Your sound is always really good and you have a great radio voice and it's something that I definitely associate with your persona. So I love to be one of the people who's like holding your hand and jumping off the cliff with this energy a little bit.
And, you know, I have to say that, the weird thing is that I feel strangely kind of elated by it, even though it's terrifying, and normally maybe if you picked another time period, and you'd come knocking and wanted to talk to me about some of this stuff, I'd be like, I'm not talking to anybody about that. Maybe in a therapy session or something.
But the idea of, there's almost this weird kind of giddy excitement that goes along with being vulnerable in this context. Because, and I appreciate you sharing how that plays out in your life because, I guarantee you, someone else heard what you just said and really identified with it. And that's their story too.
And it's so crazy how you can do something that feels like, well this is really specific to me. And you talk about something so personal and yet people are able to identify with the energy of that and to automatically mirror that in some way and it really touches people emotionally and they have this response to it that, to tell you the truth, I only know that from having blogged for a decade and felt like every time I felt really hesitant about publishing something that was too personal, I always kinda had to grip my teeth and do it, and then feedback that I would see on the other side encourages me that it's probably going to be okay if I do it. Like, I should say yes to that more.
But what is different for me in this moment is I feel a little bit excited about embracing that more.
Dena:
Yes. Exactly. I think that's the gift and the medicine, that we're feeling the effects of the medicine, basically. We're taking our medicine. We're doing this healing work and it's like, oh, that is bringing a shift in me. And the core of that Aries message itself is really self-acceptance. There's some of that with Pisces as well. Like, accepting oneself as one is, but also embracing with Aries who I am without apology, without caveats, without anything to say, I'm making an excuse for myself.
So yeah. There is a major shift going on for those people with Chiron return happening, and that shift will continue for people with Chiron in Aries for the next several years.
Slade:
So generally it's a little bit of this energy for everyone, but for the people who are 50, or turning 50 during this period, it's like an intensified front and centre activity in our world right now, right? Am I explaining that right?
Dena:
That makes sense.
Slade:
And you know what, it kind of takes me back a little bit to all the solar eclipse stuff that happened in Leo a few years ago, right? Because there was that whole like, Leo-Aquarius message about who am I? What's my light? How am I a star? And then the flip side of that, who's receiving it?
I feel like this is like, in a way, that was a version of this type of work. That was a little bit painful to revisit, or to kind of have laid bare for awhile. Because I am a Leo, and I think it was extra hot for the Leos, but I kind of feel like this is maybe a more active version of that introspective experience. Like I felt like that was a lot of soul searching. Let's just use that term. I did a lot of soul searching about what the hell am I doing here?
And then this feels a little bit more like, "Oh! There's actually something to do, and a way of processing this energy, and on the other side of it, something that's been lingering for a lifetime may have a new role in my life. It may become a source of power as opposed to a source of a hamstring or whatever."
Dena:
Right.
I mean, Chiron in Aries, one of the themes of Aries is taking action, right? So it's about putting those realizations and those insights that you have now into action. It's about doing. And so, for the collective, as well, it's about taking action on the insights and the healing work that you're doing. It's not about keeping it locked away in the 'I'll deal with that later' file. Or I'll think about that later.
It's now time to act. We've all got our marching orders, I think, to use a military metaphor. With Aries' à propos to go forth and do, based on the healing work that we're doing.
Slade:
How do you think this is going to affect the United States as a nation. Actually there's a lot of nations that are going through identity crisis right now. Do you think this is playing into those stories at all?
Dena:
Dude, yeah. I was just thinking about that this morning. You read my mind and I was wanting to look at the United States' chart which I'm actually going to do right now. Maybe you could put this chart in the Show Notes as well.
So the United States actually has a natal chart, the Sibley chart. It's cast for July 4, 1776 date, as you know, the birthday of the nation at 5:10pm, which I think was the signing of the declaration of independence, around when they estimate that is. This chart seems to be accurate and where that Chiron in Aries falls in this chart will be, in its entirety, really, in the fourth house of home and family, which is, in terms of a nation, like the homeland, the homeland identity, our connection to each other as a family of Americans. That's what the fourth house represents in terms of the U.S. chart.
So Chiron is illuminating, bringing to the surface, the wounds that are core to our national identity and what we were founded on. 'Foundation' is another word that I would associate with the fourth house. So what that takes me to is, what's the origin story of the United States? We're built out of rebellion. We were built out of seeking our religious freedom and freedom from persecution. We were built on breaking away from an oppressive, tyrannical order as our first forefathers perceived it so that we can have more freedom, right? More independence. Very Aries word. Independence.
So it is bringing up, how do we define ourselves now? Who are we as a family of Americans and what needs to be healed so we can continue to be a family or not? This is what's at stake. It seems pretty big to me. And I'm not just saying that.
If I were to look at this in some alternate universe where Trump wasn't president, which I would want to go live there right now if that were the case...
Slade:
Yes, me too.
Dena:
Even if Trump weren't president, I would be looking at this and saying, these are the issues that we're facing next. How can we continue to be a family of Americans? How can we continue with that sense of unity when there are different factions that are wanting to break off and splinter off and be independent and rebel? So we're heading into a, yeah, a rough time. And we've been in a rough time for awhile. There have been other transits in this chart that have awoken the beast, so to speak.
Slade:
This is so interesting. We should do a whole show about "America - the Chart" at some point.
Without going too far down that road, we'll save some of that conversation, but it occurs to me that the childhood wound for the foundation of the United States was slavery. It was a big wound, the whole concept of "all men are created equal" blahblahblah, which we have seen repeatedly bubbling up and coming to light over and over again, and the whole idea of nationalism versus being the melting pot. There's a lot of mixed messages in America's identity that are playing out right now in a very...
Yeah, so... Well that's an idea for our next show! Maybe we'll do that for summer when it's like, near the birthday of the United States.
Dena:
That sounds great, yeah. I could look at all the transits for the United States. It'd be a good check in.
Slade:
Let's do that.
Alright, so just to let everyone know, we've got some resources. You've already written and prepared some articles on your blog, two links that I'm going to put in the Show Notes. Tell everybody what those are.
Dena:
Great. So the first one is a post about Chiron in Aries just in general for the collective. So, what does it mean? The symbolism of Chiron in Aries, and in that post, I also share a personal story about my having Chiron in Aries natally to illustrate what that energy might be like for the collective.
And then in the following post, it's specifically about Chiron in Aries as its affecting each sun sign, so if you know your sun sign, you can get some good information about how is this time of Chiron in Aries going to be affecting you personally as that sun sign?
So that kind of astrology, sun sign astrology, it can be somewhat specific but not entirely specific. So of course, if you really want to know how Chiron is laying in your person chart, definitely feel free to reach out to me for a reading, or to another astrologer for a reading, because you really need that specificity of birth time in the chart to know where it is by house and by aspect to your natal planets.
But hopefully in that post, there's some good information for you in terms of your sun sign as it's affected by this.
Slade:
Very cool.
Everybody can go to DenaDeCastro.com if they want to get a reading with you and we'll put those longer, more specific links specifically to those articles in the Show Notes and they'll also be on my blog and I think I shared them on Facebook as well if anybody has recently seen those.
Dena, thank you so much. This was a really cool conversation.
Dena:
Thank you, Slade. As always, it was totally my pleasure.
I wanted to do something special to commemorate the 100th episode of the Shift Your Spirits podcast, so for this interview, a listener has volunteered to turn the tables on me. The guest is asking the questions!
Hilary Parker is a writer, editor and mom of two. In her business, Storied Creative Services, she used the power of storytelling to provide content marketing and publicity for her clients.
Hilary and I talk about storytelling as well as how to tune into intuition in our everyday lives.
GUEST LINKS - HILARY PARKER StoriedCreativeServices.com
HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses
Get an intuitive reading with Slade
Automatic Intuition
FACEBOOK GROUP Shift Your Spirits Community BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits Edit your pledge on Patreon
Åsa Poeche is a metaphysicist, witch, and shamanic practitioner.
She’s an intuitive who loves mentoring people to help them achieve their goals or to help them get through struggles in life.
She believes that a solid spiritual practice can very much be integrated with your personal and professional life.
She uses her client’s own belief system to form the basis of the work while using her own tools, ritual and experiences to supplement.
She agreed to let me record and share our first investigatory session together regarding the Love Curse I talked about in an earlier episode.
Listen to Love Curse: Part 1
GUEST LINKS - ÅSA POECHE asapoeche.com
HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses
Get an intuitive reading with Slade
Automatic Intuition
FACEBOOK GROUP Shift Your Spirits Community BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits Edit your pledge on Patreon
TRANSCRIPT Asa:
Okay, so I'm just going to go through at a high level with you what's happened, so for everyone to know what's going on.
I received a recording from you about a week ago, almost exactly a week ago, and I listened to that the same day. So I took some notes and it's given me a basic idea of what's going on.
In a normal session, I would probably have a really small outline of what the client's problem is and we agree to have a session. And we sit and we talk through the whole thing in one conversation. And as we talk through the whole thing in that conversation, I start getting an idea of what needs to happen in the session. And then maybe what we need to do going forward for both myself and the client.
In this session though, like I said, I've listened to all of your story and it's so much detail in there. When I sat and listened to it, I took a lot of notes, and a lot of the notes that I take are about phrases that you're using, the way you're talking about things, probably a little bit about the emotion that's in there too but mostly the phrases because, I know you understand this quite well, if I want to talk to you about something, I don't want to introduce a different way of talking about it because then we have to do the translation thing. So if I can use words that you're using already, that's much easier for me to get you to understand what we're talking about, if I want to help you work through something, right?
So a lot of notes on that and a lot on how you structured this and how this panned out in the last 28 years. So a bit of a timeline. And then when I did that, we agreed afterwards to do this session and have this discussion today. So you're coming in a little bit more blind than I am to be honest, I think. Because I have the backstory.
Have you got any questions so far?
Slade:
No. No, I'm loving it.
Let me just tell you this. I want to put this out there for you. I stress feedback so much when I am working with intuitives, and I encourage people who are learning to get a lot of that kind of feedback and everything. But I just have to say, I'm really terrible at giving emotional responses in the moment and so, I don't know that I won't, but I can see me just processing and taking a lot of stuff in.
So my being quiet sometimes is process. You may get another episode out of me where I'm like, "Okay, now I've simmered on all this."
And I also really want to hear what you have to say about it. And I want to preface this, I think I did a pretty good job when I recorded... No I didn't... Did I? I talked about the fact that you had answered this question in the community and I wanted, I didn't want to lock us into necessarily doing the session and releasing all that, so I left it a little light. But the reality is, when I saw your response, it hit me like it was a revelation. I thought, oh shit, you know, in a good way and in a bad way simultaneously.
But I knew, well wait a minute, what would she have to say about my story?
Asa:
And this is really interesting for me. When you said that, I went, ohh! Because I remember answering that question and it was a shamanism question. It was in a shaminism thread I think or something, and I put that witch thing in. I hit the button and I'm going, okay, stay on topic, because now you've involved the witch thing too and that was shamanism. I was actually mad at myself because, I thought, oh I'm just leaving it because it's stupid.
Right? And then all of a sudden you come and say something to me and I'm like, ohmygod, that's why I went witch curse thing because it was almost like that was for you.
Slade:
Yes!
Asa:
And I thought, okay.
And it's interesting how that happens because like I said, I'm in the shaminism space most the time in Shift Your Spirits but I am probably more of a witch than a shaman to be honest with you. But I try to kind of stay in that kind of field mostly in there because there are so many other witches in there and we don't want to have too many differing opinions arguing with each other either.
But yeah, that was very interesting from my own view.
What you were saying just then about how you won't have any emotional responses. Normally when I start and I agree to do a session with someone, I'll start getting pictures and I've got power animals coming in and it's like I'm doing okay. So this week I've had nothing, and I'm like, uh.. okay. There's no messages, there's no kind of imagery, nothing. So it's very, very quiet. There's no noise and I'm going, okay so what I'm dealing with is someone then who will process it probably after.
And then also, you probably have a lot of background work done already. So really I don't have to get a picture to help you too much with this one. That's already sitting in there and it's kind of ready to go I think.
This morning, actually, I was just waking up. That's the only time when I started getting some imagery coming in and I was ready to go now. And that would've been a couple of hours before. That was about 7:00 in the morning or so.
So it was very interesting for me in that sense and I was very, very focused, and that makes sense with you. There's not a lot of going off on a tangent. This is what we're here for today and this is what we're dealing with.
With a lot of clients, I have problems kind of saying, "We're focusing on this now. Don't worry about the chicken in the corner there. Look at this one here."
It's been an interesting week in that sense. It's been very, very quiet and it's fine. And that's a good thing for me as well.
One of the other things that we've really got working for us in this session too is we share a common language in witchcraft. So I try to speak to a language the client understands like I said. So if I'm treating someone whose got a Christian worldview, I will probably use that terminology because it just helps, you know?
What I'm going to do - I'm going to describe this story like I got it, very briefly, and you used the witchcraft stuff. We talk about cursing and stuff and spells. You also had some psychology in there, so Maslow's hierarchy. I love it actually because it's quite interesting. But I'm also going to include some shaminism stuff because if we do go to air with this one, a lot of people are interested in this as well, so I'm just gonna give that perspective as well.
You're okay with all of that?
Slade:
Yeah. I mean, the one thing that we have in common, that all the people that are attracted to our tribe, is the eclecticism. It's like we all just have all this stuff and I think that the diversity is what we have in common, which, it's a weird contradiction. I'm actually the one person who loves it if you mix metaphors and bring in a bunch of different symbols and, you know, I'll keep up.
Asa:
Yeah.
So we know the sorcerer who cast this curse on you because it's you, right? It's really good. You don't have to sort of try to understand how these happened, because we know the whole mechination/machination (7:59) of this... And we also know that you're willing to dissolve this. You really want to do the work now. You're not afraid to go in there and do it. So that's also really fantastic.
I'm just going to ruffle my papers a bit.
So when you were 22, you cast a spell to protect yourself, to protect something that was very, very valuable to you. And you didn't want that to be threatened again. So you said, "This will NEVER happen to me again." And the feeling emotion was, as you said, an anger that was so strong that it made you cry, basically. And you were mad and hurt and wounded that you had been made to make a choice. And then you reinforced that with a mantra that you kept on using.
I think that's correct, right?
Slade:
Umhmm.
Asa:
Yeah.
And you said, basically, please let me have that gift. And I'll give away everything else, but I want THAT. And that's a bargain that you're striking, right? So you made the bargain, you cast the spell, and you said that you lost your creativity a little bit through your 20s. So it wasn't until you were 29 when you met Seth that that kind of, the writing came back again.
Yeah?
Slade:
Yes. That is correct.
Asa:
And this is interesting for me because you mention Maslow's hierarchy, and I don't like to prove Maslow right, but you said, and I've had these thoughts myself as well, when you think you've skipped a step, right? So the belongingness and the love needs, you're going, I feel like I've skipped that step.
Seth is probably one of those people, he's provided that fraternal love, you know? And you actually cast a spell to say, I want to keep that. I want to keep that belongingness and that love from him because I know that's going to sustain me.
So you've had that piece, in a way. And you've even sort of gone, I NEED to keep that. I need to have it in my life to be able to do this. And that kind of makes it interesting too because you've actually gone and kind of counteracted your own curse a little bit, about 10 years later after this and said, "This is what I want to happen."
And you said you came to being 39 and that's when it really took off, the writing, and now 10 years later you've gone and "I want the whole package. I want everything now."
It's probably because you've showed up, your gift is pretty strong now. You have an audience. You have an outlet. And this is very much a part of you. We feel like you can let that in. Apart from the stars being aligned, of course, in the right way as well.
We're ready to do the work now.
So, knowing that, I would like to know how you feel about knowing that you've kind of already started rolling it back a little bit?
Slade:
You know what? That actually feels like a huge relief, and when you said, "Seth represents the fraternal layer of Maslow's pyramid", I thought, ohmygosh, he did! Like, I sort of, I didn't entirely skip that step after all. So that was an epiphany for me right here, like 30 seconds ago, I'm thinking, oh, you're right! I didn't skip it because I got a new kind of love with him that was really more important than some of the brittleness that goes along with romantic love. You know what I mean?
There's some heavier love that exists on that platform in that pyramid altogether, as a group. And it didn't occur to me, like, oh! You got one of the really big ones. So that's interesting.
Asa:
And it's a really important one because I think, that's probably one of those loves that are more stable, that you can trust that they will generally be there for life maybe even, because you have a very strong bond in that, it's more of a brotherly love I guess. And you two seem to be very close anyway and neither of you want to let go of each other so at least that bond there is strong and safe.
I think when I look at where you want to end up, and hopefully he's listening out there now, we should be really nice, this will be a person that totally says, that gift that you have, that you protect, that might be one of the things that attracts him to you. That might be one of the things that he would like to protect too.
So if you think about it like that, it's probably not as threatening anymore. The person that you're going to attract now is not going to be jealous of your gift. They're going to be older. They're going to be more mature. And they're going to be probably saying, I really like this about Slade. His creativity and his writing and all this stuff he's doing. Because it's so much part of who you are now. Whereas when you were 22, you were still forming that personality.
You know you wanted that in your life but you probably didn't know exactly what it was going to look like. You're probably able to structure your life better now. To say, "Okay, this is my writing time and this is my personal time and this is my... you know.
So you don't have to spend as much time protecting that territory because it will probably be part of the life you'll have with this person.
Slade:
Mmm...
Asa:
Yeah?
Slade:
Nice.
Asa:
Does that make sense?
Slade:
Yeah.
Asa:
So the mantra that you used, you remember that, right? You remember what that was.
Slade:
Oh god, yeah.
Asa:
Okay. I'm not going to ask you to say what it is. But have a think of what the counteract to that is. Because we probably want to have a mantra now too that we go and say, this is what we're dissolving this with. We're dissolving this. We're making space for this person. I want to let this peace in.
Because as we do that, we have obviously, you disassociated, basically if you made that happen that day in the shower, you sent a piece of yourself away. And it's an interesting thing from a shamanic perspective. If we have soul loss, normally it happens through trauma. We're unaware of it most of the time. It might be like 30 years later we come across a shaman and go, you've got soul loss, and we don't know how it happened. We know we've had an accident but we don't know exactly how that sped away or how much of it.
But you know exactly what piece you sent away. It's a conscious process and you've gone through and said, "No. That's not.. I'm not gonna let that lead me astray. Because my gifts, my writing, is so important to me that that part I'll give up. I'll give up love for this."
It makes it easier to countersay, you know, we know exactly what we're looking for. We know exactly when it was sent away. We know exactly how much time we've spent keeping it away. And we also know we let part of it back in again.
So there's a little part in this romantic love thing that we're looking for now. And there is a piece, right? I don't think, from my perspective, what I saw this morning, I don't think I'll have to go and get it for you. I think we need to do some work around getting you to sort of lure it back, letting it back into your life again, because if I look at what you're saying, I don't think you've done the prep work for it yet because you haven't been ready.
So now we're going to do the work of saying, okay, you know what? I'm going to get used to the thought of my gifts being safe and secure, and me being able to let another person into my space. And it's not going to be a threat. Because I know I can protect it.
Right? Does that make sense?
Slade:
Yes.
Asa:
So the question for you then is, what do you feel needs to happen for you to get the love space?
Slade:
Oh.... God that's a good question.
Well, I mean, part of it's a choice, right? Part of it is just a decision. I mean, I'm kind of that person that really has no problem believing that I'm pushing all the buttons because I prefer to have it that way. But, you know, it's a dance between me choosing it and also seeing something that I can trust reflected back, you know what I mean?
I think that there's a part of me... I'm very, very willing to choose to let that back in. But I think until I see that... Maybe it is the person. Maybe it is a person. Until I see that person in the flesh and I experience it, and I know, I think then I'll exhale. Does that make sense?
It's like there's a part of me that's going to be holding my breath.
I want to say that some of the things that I mentioned about Deena reading my chart for me, some of the things that came up working with her, which has been in a way a little bit of a preparation, was that I was getting messages through people over the last 9 months or so, I've been attracting people who have these little bits and pieces of evidence. They're not the person, but it's like they're like showing me things that I probably didn't really think existed in people.
Asa:
Yeah.
Slade:
So that has softened me up and made me go, Oh, well wait a minute!
It's enough that it feels like a message to me.
Asa:
Yeah.
And I think that, from my point of view, it's almost like, and I'm going to use, for lack of a better term, the Universe is serving you up examples, right? And you get this very, I like that, not so much that one, but that one there... Oh! Never knew people could be like that.
So it opens the possibility of kind of assembling this picture of what you want and how they make you feel. You go, I like how that person made me feel. But how they treated me and what they said to me and what they liked about me and how they responded to me.
And that kind of opens the possibility a little bit more. You're going, okay, now I can see that I can actually want these things because they do exist. Right?
Slade:
Yes.
Asa:
And it's kind of like you, but you have to be open enough to see that, because, you know, you can drive past 15 restaurants and say, "There's no Vietnamese restaurants in this neighbourhood," and you've just passed 3 because you're not looking. You're looking at something else and you're being angry about something or you're being worried about something, right?
So you close down.
You've already started kind of going shopping a little bit. Window shopping. And going, okay, what's actually out there? So you're looking more out now than you're looking in. And saying, okay, now i'm going to have a look outside.
And it feels like people are coming at you kind of like all of a sudden you’re being presented with these things but you're actually looking. You're actually paying attention. You're starting to notice these things and the more it happens the more it starts. You're going, Ooo, ahh, okay... I see!
And, I think, yeah, with you having a presence out there where your work is getting recognition as well, on start, the person you're going to meet is going to have some sort of idea. And even if they don't, that's so much part of your personality now that it's going to come up very quickly, right?
You're not going to tolerate anybody who's got a problem with it. Your main focus is, you know what? I am stable in my life and I'm adding this. It's like gravy on my potatoes. I've got my potatoes. I'm going to put gravy on them now. That's going to be good gravy. I want good gravy, right?
That makes it easier because you can kind of turn around and work with yourself and say, you know what? I trust myself now. I trust myself to be able to say, You know what? I can put the brakes on if it doesn't feel right. I know when to stop. I know I have my boundaries. I know that this is my thing that I do that I'm not going to give up. This person has to be willing to be part of it.
And I almost get a feeling, I hate doing this to be honest, but I'm going to say it. I almost get a feeling that the person coming will be very supportive of this. This will be something they treasure too, right? And this is what you want. You want someone that says, "I really like this about Slade. I'm fascinated by it. I might not be involved in it but this is something I treasure too. Because he treasures it. That's important to me because it's important to Slade."
And that's kind of what you want too.
Slade:
Yeah, I don't need a fan. I don't need anybody to be so involved with it that they feel that they have to consume all of it. I think that's an interesting thing that comes up a lot is, sometimes you attract people who are attracted to the work persona, so I almost trust it more if it's someone who is like, "Oh, that's really cool that you do that. It's not really like my thing, but I think it's awesome that you do it." And end of story.
Which, interestingly, is how my family is. There's a kind of weird, like, super amount of support and they're not necessarily paying a lot of attention to it.
Asa:
Yeah. If you look at it from the point of view of saying, I’m been in engineering most of my working life, in my family, we go, yeah that's alright, but they don't want to talk about it all day, right? Yeah, you do this and we do this. It's really good that you're successful with it and you're doing well and you're enjoying it. But that's what it is. It's a job.
Slade:
One of the biggest turnoffs to me is when somebody that I'm kind of interested in going for a coffee with, or a date, or whatever, comes at me with the offer to have a really deep philosophical conversation.
Asa:
No, no, no, no, stop!
Slade:
Please don't make me do that! Not on my off time!
Asa:
It's not work!
Yeah, I know, and you want that kind of thing where the both of you have a life and then you grow and then you grow this thing that you have together with the relationship. That's a nice kind of.... And I think both of you and I are at that age now that we can understand that you have to have yourself. And then you make this relationship together with someone else. That's the kind of sweet spot that you want.
Where are you at now with thinking about how easy it's going to be for you to kind of stop thinking that you're not cursed?
Slade:
Well, you know I said I probably would process a lot of things not in the moment. And that's not true. I'm actually kind of jotting down notes of things that are almost kind of epiphanies as you say them. It was funny because there was a realization I had at some point in this conversation, I made the note that when I was with Richard who was my first person in the story, I actually had a situation happen with him where I had developed a kind of physical violence as a way of defending myself as a child and as a teenager, and I got through high school by being very wiling to fight anybody that tried to victimize me in any way.
And I remember being in a horrible fight with Richard and him saying to me, "You don't have to go there anymore."
I was still in this mode, this teen warrior mode, there was a part of me that was always on a school bus ready to take on a bully. I carry that all the way up until my early 20s and I was doing that in my relationship with him. And I remember him saying, "You don't have to do that anymore. It's just not necessary."
And as you were talking, kind of even about the Seth thing, realizing like, oh, the Maslow thing that I thought I was missing, I really wasn't missing. I actually had a piece of that. And I realized when you said being able to release the curse, and believe that you don't have to live like that anymore. I flashed back to that relationship with Richard when he told me that.
What a huge revelation it was in that moment to realize like oh, I'm in this super aggressive mode that's just not required anymore and I let it go.
So in answering the question, where am I in feeling like I can kind of let this go and everything, I think one of the things that I most was interested in talking to you about, because we always need someone outside our own head to look at the situation, and that's really what you're doing.
There's always this fear that there's something that I'm missing. Now you've already told me a couple of things that I felt like, Oh, I was missing that. So I think one of my biggest questions is, what am I not seeing? What am I beating myself up about that I need to stop? What am I being stubborn about? What am I being really melodramatic about? I feel like the whole thing is really melodramatic.
I am trusting you to tell me that kind of truth, you know? Like what do you see me doing, because you've known me for years, you know my work, you know we're friends, we message each other a lot, so you are in a good position to recognize this as a thread within my personality. Maybe you see evidence in other ways that I handle myself.
So I'm here in a very raw and vulnerable way, saying, What am I missing here?
Asa:
I think, and I'm the kind of person who, I like to get everything out on the table and I'll pick the pieces that I can do something with, and you're an interesting person because you have pieces that you've put out in front of me and then there's pieces where I'm going, Oh, there's more, there's more. And I'm going, he's not quite ready to either see them himself or let me know about them yet.
This is what I’m saying, I’m thinking — We're having a conversation now and then you're probably going to go away to process and then you go, okay I'm going to get rid of these pieces now.
And that's really cool. That's okay because we don't go through this in a session basically. We just, it wouldn't be feasible I mean, we've probably spoken for half an hour or so now and we've gotten quite far, right? We've had a few points where you went, Ah, okay, I see this now. Which means that you as a storyteller, you'll start re-telling your stories slightly differently.
So we're going back, if you want to be kind of melodramatic about it, we're going back to the past and we're going, okay, I'm seeing now things that I've done to kind of start undoing this. Seeing how things weren't quite the way I thought they were, and I'm wasn't quite as doomed with this curse as I may have thought, because there's things that have happened that I've shown myself that I'm actually capable of starting to unravel this as well.
There's something still that's kept you in that space. You're going, I'm not quite ready to trust this yet. And that's the piece that we probably, it's probably going to take a little bit more, to say, okay, what is it down there that still makes you go, "I'm not quite sure yet. I'm seeing all these opportunities but I'm not quite ready to step over to the other side and go, I'm free! I'm ready to do this."
Almost 30 years ago, 3 decades. It's a long, long time. It's a really, really long time.
And the work that I'd like to see happen now is, we sure have to decide where the stuff that's in your consciousness, that you can literally go, okay, I got it, I understand that I have partially let love back in. I did that at 29, so ease the pressure there, took the foot off the brakes a little bit.
And then whatever else is happening and you really, you realize your dream. You have realized your dream of using your gift and it becoming very much a part of who you are. So you can go, Ooo! Don't need to protect that as much. It can protect itself now. It's grown up. It's a grown up now.
Slade:
Yeah.
Asa:
It's not a baby that I have to defend. It's not a kitten that I found somewhere I have to defend. It's a really good thing that's happening. It's kind of getting your head around them, saying, that's not part of my truth. My truth is this. And then kind of extending that, if that makes sense.
So, yeah.
Slade:
So is the shoot-the-moon thing my new mantra?
Asa:
If you want it to be! Now this has got to work for you, right? But it's also the picture you get with shoot-the-moon, I mean, what does that mean? Does it mean I can have it all, I can live, you know what? I'm gonna swear now. I earned that shit. I have earned that shit, right? I can have it, and I don't have to pay any dues to have all that. Literally. I worked my ass off to get to where I am today. And now I want. I want the extra bit. I want that and it's gonna be good because I'm not taking half-baked, right? I want that good part. And I deserve that. I can have that.
There are so many cliches saying you deserve that, but you know, literally, you DO, right? You deserve to have that in your life. You can have it, you know? There's nothing, and I hate to say this, but nothing's stopping you but literally there isn't anything except for ourselves. Our minds put limitations on things all the time. And we can look at people, I'm going to mention Trump, who's got no limitations, he just goes, "I'm just going to have it all," and you sit there and be like, how can you even be like that?
But he's kind of the opposite end of the scale, where he thinks he deserves everything, you know? I am the best.
I'm going, give me some of what he's got, because I need that in my life because I could literally stretch myself a bit and understand that I don't need to limit myself out of fear so much again. And you have very little to fear in my mind, right? Except for the story that you tell yourself.
Slade:
Yeah. And you mentioned something at the beginning of the conversation that I do when I'm doing assessments for people working with their intuition or intuitive development. I do an assessment and the assessment is very much a, it's not even about the symbolism. It's about the words that they use when they're describing the symbolism that reveal subtext.
So I was wondering if there's anything, you said you know when you were listening to the story that you noticed certain phrases and things that I said. Was there anything that stuck out to you that was telling about the way that I spoke about it?
Asa:
Yeah. It's very heavy on the defense, right? I'm under threat. Survival words are used and there's incredibly strong emotion in the beginning. There's anger that makes you cry. It's not even rage. It's that, I am really hurt. I am so hurt and I can't believe that this person made.. I'm so hurt that he attacked the one thing that I treasure the most. You know what it is? It's a rejection of you, right? He's taken the thing that was most precious to you and rejected it.
I don't want that. I don't like it. I hate it. You need to stop it.
So this is an attack on YOU. Like, literally. Go stab you in the heart, right, because it's Slade's baby that he's trying to kill. And it's very much a survival threat to me. If you lost that part at that age, if you had to give it away, your life would have been incredibly different. If you'd said, Okay, no, I'm gonna give that away for Richard, you would have given up your whole life. You would've a hunk of it.
Slade:
Ugh. Gross.
Asa:
Right?
I couldn't count on him in the way I could count on myself.
Slade:
Yeah.
Asa:
And you are a person who relies very, very much on yourself.
Slade:
Umhmm.
Asa:
And I see sometimes, please don't take this the wrong way, I see sometimes you have almost literally hard time reaching out saying to people, "You know what? Take care of that for me."
Slade:
Yeah.
Asa:
As much as, you've got us girls in the Shift Your Spirits community to help you out there, the High Priestesses, as you like to call us. But at the same time, I can sometimes tell it's like you find it a little bit hard to let go of the reins. When I look, I'm going, this is perfect because that's like a training ground for you to say, I can actually step back, and go, It's probably going to be okay.
Slade:
Yes!
Asa:
Yeah. This kind of understanding that you are literally sitting in a space now where you've got it really good. You've taken such good care of Slade, right? And you've set him up in a space where he really likes to be. He gets to write. He gets to do his business. He gets to run his own days. He can plan his own life. He can do a little bit of extra things like travel and stuff, so you've taken really good care of yourself.
But it's letting someone else in to that space now, because you're going, I don't want you to mess with that space. This is my space. I've made it really good. And I have a similar problem for myself, to be honest with you. I do the same thing, right?
I'm going, I made my space. I don't want someone to come in with dirty, muddy shoes to walk through it, right?
But we probably have to expect people to, to some extent, mess up our space a little bit. And learning to be okay with that. And learning to be okay with the fact that they don't fully understand our space, and you know, if we're lucky, we'll come together and we'll learn about each other's space and we'll create a better space out of that. Because we'll learn from them and learn from us.
But it's really tricky to get past that hurdle, going, I'm really comfortable in my bubble. I feel really secure, and understanding that I'm not threatened.
Does that make sense?
Slade:
Umhmm.
Well and you identified something that's been a real theme for me within the past year or so, which was really in the last 2 years, was going from this sort of one-man band, this solo episode where I control everything, you know, not episode, sort of machinery, where I don't have to rely on anybody else. But I can also be a complete slave driver to myself if I choose, you know? In a way that I could never be to anyone else. I can only do that to me.
Asa:
Yeah.
Slade:
There's a lot of hesitation, not even in letting other people help me, but in fear of like, what a tyrant I can be if I went in the other direction. Like Trump, you know?
There has been this theme of collaboration and community, and the platform going from being about me to being about all the other people who come on this show. It's sharing the stage, and also sharing the space with the people who are listening and participating. And hosting without having a party of 1. It's like, it's not me watching Netflix with the cats. It's me allowing there to be a keg party in the backyard.
So that is definitely, like you said, having you guys that are my social media moderators and administrators, has put me back in a situation where I'm practicing being a manager of other people but, you know, in the context of letting other people's gifts work for me.
I mean, the reason why I chose you guys, is because you can do all these things without me having to tell you how to do it. Because I trust you guys and you're all smart and capable in your own way. Sometimes I'm just constantly having to remind myself that, like, it's okay to let everyone else do what they do. So that's been something that is opening up for me.
I wanted to say just for your own personal feedback, I've got a double Scorpio wrapped around this Leo, so when you start to, when you feel like there's something he's not telling me, of course there is, you know? I've got like a secret bat girl wall with a button with that cat suit hiding somewhere. And I definitely see that as kind of being part of my persona and all the astrology in the world tells me about the secrets that I keep, and my relationship with my shadow, and all that kind of stuff.
So some of that may be kind of private or whatever, but I wanted to kind of end the conversation today, and you and I will continue with this conversation, because like you said, I'm going to go sleep on it, process, and, oh man! And I'll share that with you and with everyone that I can, but for the people who are listening, I wanted you to know that I put out such a personal episode, to the point that I thought, is this really so indulgent that nobody else is going to be able to relate to it?
I got such overwhelming feedback from people writing and telling me what their version of this felt like, and realizing, ohmygod, I've done this to myself too, in different aspects of their lives, so it was really cool. So in speaking to them, and a lot of them I kind of wrote behind the scenes and I said, "Stay tuned! I have something coming."
And I think you would find, if you work with some of these people and you may, because they may contact you and be like, "Ooo I want to have this conversation", that they all come with a self awareness and a capability and a bag of tricks and all this stuff too. And so, as you were talking, I was kind of making some notes about what this process is about, because I think that I believe at the root of it all, that if we put a curse on ourselves, we can certainly reverse it ourselves.
So I think some of the things that I noticed, to kind of put out there for others who are thinking, how can I process this for myself, there was the idea of where it came from, obviously, what is the language around this curse? Who did it? Who is the source?
And it's probably themselves.
The idea of having a sort of reverse mantra, some other kind of language just to start to reinforce, this is a framing exercise, right?
Asa:
Yeah.
Slade:
The idea of the soul loss, when that happened, what the events were surrounding that, and then this idea of prep work around what you're missing, when did this happen, what kind of language are you using around it? Maybe even take the time to do what I did, which is to write your story out as if you're going to send it, and look for those words. You know, what emotions are in your story? What story are you really telling here?
So I think it could be really helpful for people to look at some of those components for themselves, and they may have some revelations of their own. But it also would be very helpful, if they're going to do a session with you or someone who does this kind of work, to have some of those answers ready.
Asa:
Yeah.
I'll shortcut the process a little bit too, but I have to say, most people are not as easy as you are. You're very self-aware and I think you understand, with language for instance, when I looked at, I've probably got about 6 pages of language that you were using and phrases, and I'm going, this is all survival mode, right? It's all about, I am so threatened, you know? I'm just gonna defend myself and I'm out there.
And it makes sense now what you said about like in your teens you were ready to fight all the time. And that kind of kicked back in a little bit. And it might have been physical but all of a sudden, you are in a very high state of alert and it had to be protected at all costs. There was like no other way here. I have to protect this at ALL costs. I have to chop bits of myself off. Those bits can't be trusted so they need to go away.
If I look at it this way, going forward probably what I would say is, I might turn around and say to you, I would like to do a soul retrieval for you eventually. If it doesn't spontaneously come back — it’s a pretty big part — but I think we can do the groundwork first. It always helps before you do that kind of thing, right? And also doing their reversal mantra will fortify the base that we're having here. So that when that comes back, it'll be...
And also another thing is, that's the 22 year old part of you. That kind of needs to mature as well. That's a part of you that hasn't had a lot of attention. So it's working through that as well. Sometimes it happens quickly and sometimes people have enormous problems. We're kind of getting that part of it back in again because it's not functioning at the same level as you are.
That's another thing as well. You're saying people can do the work. I was recommended to talk to someone because it is, like you say, people see things that you don't see. They hear you say things that you might not hear because you're so used to going over it in your head. And finding those patterns for you and saying, "Okay, this is where I see the work happening."
It's funny what you were saying, the double Scorpio, I have very few clients where I'm going... It's not a wall but I'm going, there are secrets here. And I can push around and go, okay, I want to know what's behind that, but that's a bit rude. And I'm going, we had that discussion before because I said to you, "Do you want to know everything? And do I have permission to do this?"
So literally you've given me permission to do it but it's not useful for me to come back at you and go, this, this and this. Because you'll be going, "Uh oh. Now I feel threatened again."
So I don't want you to retreat back there. And it might not be things so useful for me to know anyway because those are your secrets, right? They're there for a reason. You want to be mystical and stuff, that's okay! The stuff that's come out today, it's the beginning. It's a journey. We'll talk again about this for sure and see what's new.
And you are the kind of person who'll go away and you'll mull this over. And then probably I'll get a message, "What about this?" And that's perfect for me because I'm going, okay, now I can see what's happening between, we chat for a bit and what's the next step after that as well.
So yeah.
Slade:
Awesome.
I thank you because I definitely have at least two pieces that I, like I'm writing notes by longhand on a piece of paper and I've got these little stars by these kind of 'aha' moments and I'm like, OH! Part of my brain is already running off, trying to unpack those and unravel them and go, wait a minute!
But for anybody out there listening who might be interested having heard this, for this reason or for any other, you know, who really resonates with you, tell us where we can find who you are, where we can find you online, and how to get in touch with you.
Asa:
So I've got a website. I'm on Facebook obviously, Asa Kristina Poeche. I've also got a Page on Facebook that's Asa Poeche. A webpage that's AsaPoeche.com. My services that are offered there currently are a session called, I call them mentoring sessions, a one-on-one session, because I don't like to call them healing sessions. I tend to sit in the space where I coach people more and get them to kind of come to realization through a discussion that we have. And I hope that kind of came through in what we did here now.
It's more effective if I get you to solve your problem rather than me trying to fix you. I think sometimes you have these, I call them Tony Robbins moments, where you go, "Ohmygod! That's fantastic!" And then two days later you're like, "I'm not feeling the momentum anymore.
And that's an important thing too, I find. I think when we have a session like this, you go away more pumped and sometimes you just lose momentum.
Anyway, going back to my stuff, I'll do a lot of shamanic work but I think at heart I would probably call myself a hedge witch, which means I sit in this space where I'm very much working in the other world, tapping into a lot of beings around people and getting messages. I've got decades of studying metaphysical stuff, about two decades in shaminism.
Yeah. That was a really, really messed up explanation of what I do, but ...
Slade:
It was very authentic.
Well, one of the things that I... I, just for the record, and you know this but for the rest of the audience, I've been wanting to have you on my show since I had a show. Obviously those of you who are in the Automatic Intuition community, who are strong in the Shift Your Spirits community, meaning you produce a lot of content and you do a lot of teaching in the group, you're an active participant, you're a moderator, a lot of people will recognize your material from there and the interesting thing is, I don't just want the show to be like, oh, here's another intuitive and they do sessions and they're going to tell us about their sessions and here they are.
It's like there's an added bit of extra expectation for you guys. I want you guys especially to have a really special introduction to everyone, because if it's someone that I've never met before, I can ask them a lot of curious questions about who they are and what they do. It comes from a really genuine place. But in order for you and I to have a genuine conversation, if we need to do something like this, it needs to be extra juicy.
I was so excited when I saw your post in the community where you answered that question and you use a little bit of that witchy language and you caught my eye. I thought, oh wait a minute! So the idea to do this whole two-episode so far conversation came to me in that moment and I was so excited that you were willing to do this with me. Because it's a real tightrope act for both of us. You know what I mean?
Asa:
It is. And this is my first podcast too I've recorded for. So it's a big thing, right?
Slade:
Ohmygosh, is it?
Asa:
Yeah. I usually don't like listening to myself at all. It's one of those things … Sometimes you'll have the conversation with someone and you bounce off each other really easily. And sometimes when you have a client, it's like, are they there?
Slade:
Yes.
Asa:
Are you alive?
Slade:
Yeaaah.
Asa:
You always kind of end up worrying a little bit about that as well. I suppose, also, I have to say is, I always say I don't like teaching but that's probably not true because I also mentor people. You probably have to nudge me to have a few conversations with me before I take you on as a student. But it's probably one of the things I find most rewarding actually, and it's mostly helping people grow.
And I do these also in business and professional space where I coach and mentor people to integrate spirituality into their professional and business lives. Becaue I think we can do with a lot more of that in the work place as well, and there are a lot of people that really struggle in that corporate environment. How can I be more spiritual in that kind of environment? And it's possible, right? So that's another thing that I do as well.
Slade:
Well I'm going to close with a shoutout to Amy Oscar, who gave me the term 'illuminated conversations', and I think that both you and I love to work in that capacity, right? We want a participating client, we want a collaborator, and we want someone to have these really beautiful deep conversations. So thank you for having one of those with me around this.
I will keep you posted about my epiphanies and we'll probably hear some follow up for everyone else who's listening. So, again, thanks for doing it.
Asa:
Thank you for having me on.
MENTIONED ON THE SHOW 5 Self-Help Books I Don't Hate
The War of Art by Steven Pressfield
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TRANSCRIPT In a lot of cases, I think procrastination may actually be trying to protect your future. There’s always tomorrow…
Your future is a wonderful place — it’s where you keep all your great ideas and big dreams.
The only problem is that tomorrow is not today, and today is where everything happens.
Dreams are wonderful things to have around.
But, when you consider all the work involved in realizing them,
dreams become daunting.
So you retreat a step — back to the fantasy, the brainstorm, the anticipation, back to the fun part...
You already have the Big Idea, and you can see the dream of your having reached the finish line, reaping the benefits of the follow-through… You can see the necessary action steps laid out before you — it’s a long hard road, but you can see where it leads.
So why do you stop, and not begin immediately taking the steps to get there?
Why do you come back again and again to this beautiful view of your goal and yet decide, each and every time, to put off beginning the work?
Is it because you’re lazy? Maybe you don’t have it in you to do the work. Or maybe it’s not such a great idea, after all, and you’d rather not face that fact.
Maybe you fear success, because your success will have repercussions.
Maybe you’re just preserving the dream. Maybe you’re protecting that gorgeous view of your horizon, forever filled with possibility.
You love having a future where your dreams come true.
Admiring your pretty future is a promise. That promise doesn’t change the present, but it makes the difficulty of Now more bearable.
If you achieve your dream — if you arrive at your goal — if you successfully bring the future into the present — then to some degree, even if you do make it happen, and you’re wildly successful, you have destroyed that vision of the future.
And even best realized plans are only shades of the original vision.
That original vision’s not out there anymore, whispering to you of a better life, someday — it becomes real, it starts happening. The future is changed.
By keeping a dream alive in the future, you are protecting hope. You love that potential, and you don’t want to see the end of that gorgeous Tomorrow — you need it.
Maybe Procrastination is not your enemy, after all. Procrastination is not your fear of doing the work, your fear of failing, your fear of not finding your way, or your fear of discovering that your big idea wasn’t as Big as you thought.
Maybe Procrastination is not an evil, self-defeating force that plans to undermine your goals and make sure you never make it happen, fueled by his secret knowledge of how much you suck and don’t really have it in you.
Procrastination preserves your dream.
Procrastination works for you — it's entirely on your side — fiercely defending your bright future.
Procrastination loyally guards the idea you hold most dear.
Procrastination keeps it on that pedestal — pristine, full of hope and promise.
Procrastination is the guardian of your future. And maybe it’s doing exactly what you asked it to do…
THAT’S ONE Theory.
One story.
There are other versions of procrastination.
CLIENT STORY
I was talking to a client the other day and she told me she was working on an ad, but she was procrastinating. She wasn’t feeling the ad.
The truth is, I’m rarely feeling paid ads and I definitely have some experience with creating them and blowing a lot of money testing them over the years.
(Sidebar: this storytelling — this is content marketing. It’s the least thirsty, least sleazy, least expensive and most effective form of advertising I’ve ever found. It does require a lot of work, but if you love writing and talking and playing with this technology, as I do, then it’s the coolest job ever.)
So anyway — we got into a brainstorming conversation about other kinds of actions you can take in your business that are more effective than just a paid ad.
And we wandered away from the topic of procrastination.
Steven Pressfield talks about another devious force related to procrastination.
He calls it Resistance
You know I don’t recommend a lot of self-help books.
They have to be really, really impactful in my personal experience.
Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art is one of my Top 5 of all time.
The subtitle is "Break through the blocks and win your inner creative battles."
I’m going to read you the first page of what is technically, after the intro chapter, chapter 4 The Unlived Life
and it begins with this
"Most of us have two lives. The life we live, and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resistance. Have you ever brought home a treadmill and let it gather dust in the attic? Ever quit a diet, a course of yoga, a meditation practice? Have you ever bailed out on a call to embark upon a spiritual practice, dedicate yourself to a humanitarian calling, commit your life to the service of others? Have you ever wanted to be a mother, a doctor, an advocate for the weak and helpless; to run for office, crusade for the planet, campaign for world peace, or to preserve the environment? Late at night have you experienced a vision of the person you might become, the work you could accomplish, the realized being you were meant to be? Are you a writer who doesn't write, a painter who doesn't paint, an entrepreneur who never starts a venture?
Then you know what Resistance is."
Pressfield, Steven. The War of Art . Black Irish Entertainment LLC. Kindle Edition.
Okay. So. Resistance. Procrastination.
How is intuition connected?
Really, what you’re most often asking is a question about:
Discernment - this is what we call those questions in intuitive development
- How do you know?
- How do you know when you can trust your intuition?
- How do you know when it’s not your imagination?
- How do you know it’s not your ego or fear?
Your first clue is to take a look at the potential outcome.
I circled back with client, after we did some brainstorming, and I asked her “So, anyway, what was the ad for?"
She told me it was to offer a discount on her services. readings.
Now, people in the Automatic Intuition community know how I feel about discounting services.
*I’ll take a moment to share that advice here, because I know a lot of you are professional intuitives, energy healers, coaches, etc.
Why you don’t discount services
- your time — it’s finite. you don’t get any more. it’s not scalable.
- working with you one on one should be the most precious thing you offer in your business
- if your clients know you discount around the holidays, it discourages them from employing you when they actually need you most
- Don’t do it — there’s a clue in the word itself
- discounting. discounting yourself. No.
- If you want something you can discount at the holidays, create products, tutorials, ebooks, meditation downloads … you’ve already done that work, you can run a sale on that, it’s not finite.
- it’s tempting. I get it. It might bring in a little burst of clients.
In this example, the outcome is kind of negative — running an ad discounting services is something you know may not be a good idea for your long game. You’re kinda going against advice a little bit, knowingly, somewhere in the back of your mind…
The outcome could just be uncertain. It might work, but then you hurt yourself down the road by suppressing clients waiting for you to run another promotion.
OR it might not even work at all, and you’ve shot yourself in both feet. You spent money on advertising, put a bunch of work into making it, it wasn’t really effective, and now people are going to expect it from you …
You don’t know for sure. There are a lot of If’s there…
Now, I’ve been procrastinating finishing my taxes.
Is that my intuition?
Hell, no.
How do I know?
Because the outcome of finishing would be entirely positive.
You’re done!
It’s not hanging over you anymore.
When the outcome is certain — especially when it’s also positive, such as being done with your freaking taxes — then you’re procrastinating.
It’s just plain old evil.
It's what the Christians call The Devil.
The thing about discernment and “knowing” ...
You don’t.
You never do.
I’m rarely in the middle of doing an intuitive reading for a client thinking “Wow, I am so psychic right now.”
And if it’s for myself — forget it.
Nobody’s a master at reading around their own emotional investments and issues
You have to be willing to experiment and act on intuition
You can do this in a million little ways
- obey impulses
- turn down a different road while driving
- go somewhere new for lunch
- blur your routines a little bit
- anything that comes up or presents as a new possibility a curiosity. “Huh, wonder what would happen if…"
- do it. Just see where that choice leads.
What you do get good at is practicing and allowing and relaxing.
Feedback from acting on your intuitive impulses helps build confidence in doing so, so that when your intuition shows up again, in a more significant contexts, you can recognize it and act.
But procrastination … What is that trying to communicate to you?
If nothing else, there is an impulse there.
What is Resistance, the Devil, trying to protect?
- How does the Devil benefit?
- How does your fear benefit?
- How does your ego benefit?
What is the outcome?
- Inevitable and neutral or positive - finish my taxes
- Uncertain and possibly negative - like my client discounting her services
Procrastination as a form of intuition or subconscious is going to be most reliable if it doesn’t happen so often. Or at least all the time.
Listen, if you’re in a place where you suffer from CHRONIC Procrastination, or what Steven Pressfield calls Resistance, you just need to read the War of Art.
Now. Immediately.
If you’ve read it, read it again.
Over the next two days.
It’s a tiny little book.
The ebook is $10 — reflective of its deserved fame.
When I read it — and I revisit it about once a year or so — I read it over two lunch hours. Thursday lunch. Friday lunch. You’re done.
Nobody can explain how this is working in your psyche like Steven Pressfield does.
I think maybe we should book club it at some point.
If you want to, read it and post about your ahas or favorite quotes in the SYS Community that could be very cool.
Hashtag it #WarofArt
If this issue is high on your list --
It’s high on mine.
Admittedly. --
Let me know...
I cast a spell of protection around my heart when I was 22 years old.
And over time that has revealed itself to be a curse.
I don’t think I f-ed it up. I think it was one of the most powerful and successful mind hacks I’ve ever introduced into my psyche.
And I’ve been living with either the repercussions of this love spell, or at least the fear — which is in itself a powerful curse — for 28 years.
MENTIONED ON THE SHOW DenaDecastro.com Astrologer
Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs
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Miki Brittenham is a medium, animal communicator and crystal healer, who works with crystal energy to speak to the body as well as other lifeforms. She offers readings and energetic crystal healing for people and pets, intuitive coaching, handmade jewelry, crystals and other metaphysical awesomeness, like her psychic haikus better known as psykus.
She shares her near death experience.
GUEST LINKS - MIKI BRITTENHAM mikibrittenham.com
Grounding through Sacred Geometry free ebook by Miki Brittenham
15 Characteristics of Near Death Experience
MENTIONED ON THE SHOW Maxfield Parrish artist
HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses
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Automatic Intuition
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TRANSCRIPT Miki:
I was really sick. I was pregnant with my first child and I got something called HELLP syndrome, which is hemolysis, elevated liver enzymes, low platelet count. It's like the most rarest form of preeclampsia I guess. Something like that.
Back then, it's a death sentence. So you basically die. But nowadays, majority of people, they don't die now because of medical advances. But back then, I don't know, I guess you just died from it. I'm not really sure. That's what they told me anyway.
I was in the hospital, in and out of the hospital, and the total amount was probably about a good four to five months, because I kept going in and out and in and out and they just kept me in. And they said I needed to at least make the 32-week mark.
So on the day that I made the 33-week, they induced me. That was the first mistake because my health had just started going down rapidly, but my body was failing at that point. My blood pressure was really high and my platelets were super low. Which is why they didn't really want to do a cesarean because of the clotting factor, right?
So they induced me and at that point, they had said, I guess I was in labour for about 12 hours and they said that my platelets had dropped to 80,000. Normal is about 150 - 450,000. So they told me that my blood pressure was so high that I was going to have a heart attack or stroke. And they came in and I remember this. They brought me some papers and they basically said, "Here, sign these papers because we need to keep the baby alive but you're going to die."
Slade:
Ohmygod...
Miki:
That was pretty much what they had said. Yeah. It was so weird. They're like, "Alright. Well you're dying. We need to get this baby out."
My liver shut down. The whole birth took four minutes. My liver shut down and my heart stopped. It was 9:00 when they wheeled me in there and her birth certificate says 9:04. I don't even understand, but it was so fast, and as soon as they started to put me under, I left my body and I was watching from above, but I didn't really care about ME.
I mean, they were saying, I could hear them, they were saying, "Her heart stopped. Her heart stopped. Get the baby out." All I cared about was just making sure that baby was okay.
I had no... I mean, it was weird because it wasn't like an emotional attachment to the baby. I just wanted to make sure the baby was going to be alright. It was like, is this baby going to be fine? But I didn't care anything about my body at all. I was watching it and I had zero emotion to it at all.
As soon as I saw the baby was coming out and that she was fine, I just floated up out of the ceiling. My mom was super stressed out and she was on the roof. You know they have those patio, I don't know if it's really the roof, but those outdoor patio smoking areas, right, they used to do in hospitals? She was out there smoking and I could see her and I felt the same about her.
I was like, Oh, there's my mom. But there was zero emotion involved. And then I just kind of floated up, and I did not see a tunnel or anything. It was like I had seen my mom, and I started to float up, and then all of a sudden I was there... wherever, you know, whatever the 'there' is.
There were three people there. I don't, I mean, they weren't really people but that's the best way for me to describe them. Beings of light.
The first thing that I noticed when I was there was like, everything was so much brighter. And it was almost like when you're looking at the sun, how bright that is, but it didn't affect your eyes in any way. Like it was so soft and calm and just everything was bright. You know when the sun is starting to set, and the sky sort of looks like a Maxfield Parrish painting?
Slade:
Yes!
Miki:
Okay. That's how it looked. That's the closest way that I can describe it. And it just, it was so beautiful. And these beings were there and there's this feeling when you are, like you've been gone a long time and you're getting off of a plane and you see people you love. And it's just so... you just want to run to them, right? It's like that. This most intense love of everyone you love: your family, your lover, your kids, your parents, your animals. All combined.
If you could combine all of that love into one feeling, that's how it feels. And I felt that about these beings.
They had, I mean I'll describe them. They had features but they didn't have any features. And I know that's like a contradiction and it doesn't make any sense, but I don't know if I perceived them as having this or if that's what they really had. Because it's almost like they're just a light but within the light, I could pick out these features, almost.
So there was an older man who had long hair that was very pale and really blue, blue eyes. He was wearing some kind of robe or cloak, maybe a cloak but there was some kind of sleeves because I remember cuffs. They were, all three of these beings were wearing the same kind of cloaks. It was sort of like they were almost white or very pale and kind of shimmery, almost like there were jewels but there weren't jewels.
I want to say it's like there was gold thread through this white but there was no gold thread. It was just very shimmery. All of it was shimmery, like their hair and their eyes.
Then there was a younger man who had lighter, not really brown hair but kind of like a dirty blonde, darker, not so pale as the first man, and he was a lot younger and he had like a purplish blue eyes and then there was a woman who had really long, like, super long pale hair. Very, very pale, maybe pale blonde, and she had those purply eyes too. That is the one with the bluish skin. Her skin kind of had this blue tint. I don't really recall if the other ones had a blue tint. They might have.
But there was just so much emotion involved in seeing these people, like we were hugging without hugging, like a virtual hug or something, I don't know.
There was a river. I could see out in the distance, like with that pretty Maxfield Parrish sky, there was a river and the water was so crystal blue. Have you ever been to Zion National Park?
Slade:
No.
Miki:
We went a couple of years ago and I've never seen water that colour except for at Zion National Park. It was almost like this teal colour, maybe green. Almost like this bright, bright turquoise. The water in Hawaii has that in some areas, but it almost is like there's too much pigment in the water in Hawaii. Whereas in Zion it seemed more like very sheer waters. When I saw that water, I was like, that's the kind of water that that river was!
So strange but there was some kind of field but I don't recall there being a colour to the field. It was just a landscape kind of all blended in to that sky but it was a field and then there was a river. I was over here in one spot and the river was over there and I could see it but there was almost like this invisible barrier or this secret fence that I couldn't see.
Like, No, you do not pass.
I'm on this side with these people and there's all that beautiful stuff over there and I'm like, I just want to go over there! But that wasn't what was going on. I joke and say I wasn't allowed in heaven because it's that barrier. But it wasn't like I wasn't allowed there. We were just doing something over here.
There was some kind of weird building that we were by. I keep remembering a building but it wasn't a building. It has really strange angles and it had that iridescence. Like their robes. So it could have been something I perceived there, you know what I mean? They were just beings of light. I don't know if that building was a perception. I'm perceiving there's a building here or there really was a building there.
Looking down on myself, I have no body. Like if you're looking at yourself now and you look down, you would have a body but I had nothing. So there were no parts of me that I could see. I'm just seeing everything from my eyes. Nothing was spoken between us. It was all telepathy.
So I knew everything that they were saying. I knew everything that they were thinking and it was just this deep connection.
And then I went into the life review.
The best way that I can describe it was like, you know when you see those maybe in TV or movies, they have these huge monitors that have a whole bunch of different little squares and everything is moving. Like these TV monitors with people on it or something from all across the world and they're showing each one has different stuff in the little cubes.
It was sort of like that. So it was like there was lots of different visions going on of my life and it felt like it almost kind of wrapped around my head, but I don't think I had a head. So it just sort of, I want to say it was like a 360 degree vision almost. And every block had a moment of my life that I was able to look at and feel and understand everything that was going on in all of these different moments of my life all at the same time.
But it's not just feeling it from your perception. Whatever interaction that you have with every person, you feel it from their point of view and your point of view at the same time. So every single interaction that you ever have, you experience how the other person perceived you, what they picked up from you. And sometimes it was really painful.
I mean, if sometimes you're an asshole, you know what I mean, and you say things that aren't nice, then you kind of really see how you impacted this other person. You really explore every area of your life and it's almost like it's instantaneous and you're just learning and learning and you kind of see how you behaved and where you went wrong maybe and where you went right. Or where other people damaged you in certain moments and how you perceived what they were trying to say versus what they were really trying to say.
It was pretty intense.
After that, the thing about the life review is there's no judgement. Those beings, they didn't judge me at all. All they had for me was pure love. I was the only one who was judging me. So there is no judgement. There is no being that's gonna come and, no god is going to judge you for your wrongs and things that you did wrong to other people.
The only person that's gonna judge you is yourself. You are your judge and sometimes that's, you know, I think that's even more painful. To see your own shortcomings, you know what I mean, so vividly and understand them. In seeing where I went wrong, it was almost like, not wrong, but where I could've been better, or done things different, it was almost like some moments were a sad revelation where it's just so impactful.
Then, after that, the beings showed me this. It's a domed chest. I don't know. It's really strange. It kind of has a dome top and there were straps across it and it was really iridescent, kind of goldish colour. And they lifted up the chest and when I looked inside the chest, that was the moment that I had complete clarity of every question I've ever asked.
I knew all my answers to everything, and I was like, Oh yes, I know this stuff! I know all of this stuff. That's right. Like it was almost like I remembered that I'd always known this stuff.
I think I watched my future. Looking in the chest is where I really have thought about a lot of it over the years, trying to figure out what exactly was in that chest because, you know it's like I remember what was in the chest but I don't have a clear vision of it and I can't really put it into any words.
The only thing that I remember when I looked in that is going, "Oh!"
But whatever they showed me in that chest, was the reason I chose to come back. So it must've been a future like, this is behind the box if you choose curtain #2!
It was at that point that they asked me, "Are you staying or are you going?"
So it was like, I mean, they didn't ask me. It was this mind-to-mind connection. I knew they were giving me a choice and at that point, it was my turn to do something about my situation. It was at that point where I was like, "Okay. I'm going back."
And then my uncle was there, which was really strange. My uncle had a, he died of a congestive heart failure from a drug overdose when he was 33 and I'm named after him. He died when I was 19 but I'm still named after him.
The only word that I recall being spoken like a spoken word through this whole thing was what my uncle said. He was a big wave surfer and the word that he used to use to describe the perfect wave was 'perps', and when I said "Okay, I'm coming back", he threw the shaka and said "perps".
What was really interesting is that he was perfectly clear. I mean, he was like these other people but he, like I really remember his features so well. Maybe because I know him. I mean, I knew them too but I'm very familiar with him. But he only had an upper body. He didn't have any legs. I've always pondered that. I don't know. It's kind of strange. I mean, I didn't have legs either so I guess it would make sense that he didn't.
It was at that moment that I decided to come back and I woke up in the ICU. The first thing I did was I stuck out my finger like E.T. and said, "How big?" because I wanted to know how big the baby was. Because they had said that she wasn't growing, she was about 2 pounds. She was 3 pounds. So she was perfectly fine. She was doing great.
I stayed in the ICU for about two weeks and I had a 24-hour nurse in there that didn't work at the hospital, that no one else saw, so he was like a stranger angel, right? He was in there. He was wearing scrubs and he would sit by my bed.
His name was Scott and he would sit by my bed every day and any time I would wake up, I kept waking up and I would have these nightmares of this death scenes and I would panic and I would wake up and I'd be like, "Where am I?? What's going on??"
And he would hold my hand and he'd say, "It's okay. You had a baby. The baby is fine. You're gonna be fine."
And I'd be like, "Okay." And then I'd kind of fall asleep but I remember asking the nurse, when the nurses would come in, "Where's Scott?"
And they're like, "What are you talking about? There's no one here named Scott."
I'm like, "Yes! He's been sitting with me every single day. He's wearing blue scrubs." And they all wear maroon scrubs and no one's in blue scrubs. But he was in blue scrubs. So that was kind of interesting.
Slade:
Ohmygosh. Okay so I've written down some questions while you were talking. Just a couple of things that, it's like a lightning round of details.
Before you had this experience, had you ever had an out of body experience or ever done any kind of astral projection or tried to do anything like that before?
Miki:
Um, yeah. When I was about 13, 14, I went through this extreme astral projection phase where I went to bed at like, 7:00 every night. Shut my door because I was just going in there to meditate because I'm going to leave my body, you know? It was like this determination and so... I rearranged my room so my bed was in the direction it needed to be in, everything was perfect.
Most of the time I think I fell asleep but there was one time where I did leave my body and I remember seeing my body laying there and just that, seeing that, was so... I don't know. It freaked me out that I just..
Slade:
Popped back in?
Miki:
Yeah. Just popped back in. There was this weird instance. That was the only time before this, but now it seems like, I mean, I can't do that spontaneously at all. But whenever I have some kind of anesthesia, I always, I see the situation from above, so I'm hovering above but it's in a different, very different than that experience.
That experience I had zero attachment to my body. When that happens to me now, I do have feelings and an attachment to my person, you know, my body.
Slade:
So when you were in that place, which, I love the Maxfield Parrish reference because I love golden hour, that time of day, that time of light. I love the late 19th century painters who were really into capturing that. And I think that being the age that we are, there was a period in the 80s and 90s where that artwork was very popular on posters and stuff.
Miki:
Yeah. Every room in the house.
Slade:
Yeah so I totally know what you're talking about. So when you describe this kind of wall of love, of sort of these entities clustered together, you do talk about your uncle manifesting as a unique individual being. But other than the three entities who were guardian spirits or whatever, were there other... Like, was there a crowd of people and you sort of could pass your eyes over it and see like, Oh there's this person and this person, or was it just more of a feeling?
Miki:
Um...
Slade:
You know, were your grandparents there?
Miki:
Nope.
Slade:
Your ancestors or anything particular like that?
Miki:
Nope.
The only people that I recall being there at all were these three beings and then my uncle randomly showed up when I, like, "Woohoo! You're going to live!" Kind of a, I don't know, like my cheering section or something because of the choice I made almost.
Slade:
Who do you think the entities, the blue-skin lady and the sort of Merlinesque character? He shows up in a lot of guided meditations, you and I know, from intuitives who do these kind of Akashic Records travelling and all this kind of stuff. That is a type of entity that we do often see, those three that you describe.
Who do you think they are now? Did you come out of this experience thinking, who the heck were they? Like, I want to know who they are. Or did you have a sense of who they were that stayed with you?
Miki:
Um... I think that I've contemplated this experience for 25 years now.
At first I didn't really know who they were. You know, I was like, I don't know who they are. But I knew that they were someone that was super close to me and that they love me and they were there. So I just regarded them as people I knew. I don't know if they were people, but that's the best that I can... Beings that I knew, maybe, you know?
I belong with them. That's where I belong. I mean, I'm here. But when I'm not here, I will be with them because I belong with them.
I do have moments in time where the female comes and goes like she's almost like maybe one of my guides that sort of steps in every once in awhile. So maybe they step in, the other two step in every once in awhile. I'm just not really aware of it because I have such a strong connection to my main guide, who I've always had a super strong connection to him. He looks very similar actually to the younger man but I don't think they're the same person. I don't feel like they are.
Slade:
Do you ever try to communicate with these people now? These entities, these beings?
Miki:
With the woman.
Slade:
Okay.
Miki:
Her name is Wistera. But I have not... Only because I've encountered her more times than the other two that I've started kind of exploring that. But I don't feel like... I think if I were going to communicate with them at this point, that I would have. You know? That maybe they would've shown up in some form or fashion somewhere.
Slade:
So during the life review part that you talked about, and you talked about how you got to experience it from the perspective of the other people involved, but also that you were judging the moments of your life and interactions and stuff.
Do you have a conscious recollection of how your understanding was different during this experience than it would have been during the moment that some of those events happened? Like for instance, you're recalling some memory or you're seeing some event from the past that you had, let's say, some kind of anger or resentment about, and then now you have this different perspective of it.
Did you come away feeling changed about your own real life experiences? Like, I've got to rethink everything?
Miki:
Umm... sort of. It wasn't the other people or how I perceived things that happened. It was more how I reacted to the things that happened and why was I reacting in this way.
When I was a kid, I used to have this weird thing that would happen to me. I would be hanging out with friends or family or whatever the situation was and then I was almost like I was watching it from above the situation at the same time and having a different consciousness about it, going, "This is a very odd interaction. Why are humans behaving this way?"
And then in my own mind, I'd be like, "What is that?"
It was sort of like that kind of separate... like, here's the human doing this and here's my consciousness going, "Why are humans behaving this way? What is making them react this way?"
It was a similar experience where I'm experiencing my human thing but it wasn't like a memory. It was like I was re-living every single thing, like I'm having this conversation is real right now in this moment. Every memory at that life review was going on at that moment. There was no distinction of time. It was really happening and I was seeing how this interaction impacted my life and how I reacted to it. And how my reaction to it impacted what came next. And how I could have reacted differently and how that would've made a different thing happen next.
It was like this broad view of my action.
Slade:
Were you able to retain any of that sort of perspective? I was thinking as you were talking about it, it's like you had full awareness of your Higher Self as maybe separate from your sort of animal self or something.
Did you retain any of that perspective that you feel like you use now in some way?
Miki:
Yes. Definitely I think that I do. I think that comes into my, I'm an overthinker, you know? I am really very concerned about, okay, if I behave this way, how is that going to impact this situation? Like, what can I do to make it the best situation? Or what would be the best way for me to behave in this situation, kind of overanalyzing.
I definitely think that watching that has really changed my behaviour, because I used to, I had a kind of not the greatest upbringing, parts of it were really good, some were really great. I had a lot of anger when I was younger and sometimes I could be a little volatile, you know? It was almost like when I came back, I was a completely different person.
I mean, not completely. I still am the same person but in a much softer sense, maybe? Much more caring, not so self-centred. Much more concerned about how other people feel or, let's try and figure out what the best thing for everyone involved is going to be. So it's not just about me anymore. Ever since then, I don't feel that it's all about me or this one situation is me.
Because it's not always, it's never just about me. It's always about everyone involved.
Slade:
Did you believe in the afterlife before this experience happened to you?
Miki:
I didn't NOT believe in the afterlife. I don't know if I had any real belief. I had hippie parents. I wasn't baptized. They were like, "No, she should choose her own way in life." My parents were Catholic. I grew up Catholic. That wasn't really their thing, although my mom kind of went back to the church for awhile. But I'd gone to many different types of churches trying to, you know, teen groups with friends or whatever, trying to figure out what it is that I thought.
I knew there was something. I don't think I ever thought there wasn't something, but I didn't really know what it was.
Slade:
So what is your perspective on the afterlife now?
Miki:
I definitely think that we live. I have zero fear of death. The only fear I have about death is that I feel like, if I were to die today, I would be perfectly okay with dying. The only part of it that would be upsetting to me is, there are certain things I'm trying to achieve. I have these things laid out that I'm trying to do or to achieve, but I'm not concerned about, like I'll catch up with all these other peeps later. My family or whatever. I'm not concerned about them.
It's only about what it is that I'm like, "Wait, wait, I wasn't done doing what I was trying to do." You know what I mean? That kind of...
Slade:
Yeah... So you do feel a sense of peace about your consciousness continuing after this lifetime?
Miki:
Oh definitely, yeah. I definitely feel that this is just a moment. This is just something that I'm experimenting with right now, being a human. I'm trying it out. Seeing what's going on. I am certainly not this body at all. I'm something much more grand than this body. This body, with this body, there's limits. It comes with limitations and so within this body and this form, I'm learning to work with those limitations, you know?
Slade:
Okay. So let's talk about the chest a little bit.
You talked about, there was just so much information there and a sense of oh yeah, remembering all this stuff. And then as I imagine when you came back, you don't really necessarily remember individual truths from that viewing of the chest or do you?
Are there sort of philosophical maybe insights that you retained from that glimpse into that chest that you can now have conversations with people, you know what I mean?
Miki:
Yeah, um, definitely I couldn't sit down and be like, "This is what I remember from the chest. There was this, this, this..." You know what I mean? It doesn't come to my memory in that kind of a way. There are definitely things that I know, and it's just like, I didn't know these things before.
And that's where I can make that distinction of, this is things that I knew that the chest showed me because I didn't have those thoughts, I didn't know any of this beforehand. I just was sort of, oh, whatever, "Here I am" kind of thing, right? I didn't really think about, I mean, I thought deeply about things but when I thought deeply about things I didn't have the same... You know, it's like I'm thinking less about it now because I know the answer, almost.
Slade:
So let me ask you this way then. Like when you hear someone talking about something like god or spirits or mediumship or, you know, just any kind of spiritual or philosophical concept. As you're sort of observing those things or hearing questions presented about them, do you sort of have a part of yourself that's like, "Nah, that's bullshit." Or like, "Yeah, actually what he's saying reminds me of something that's a truth from that chest."
Are you able to evaluate thoughts now in reference to that?
Miki:
Yeah. I think that I am. I definitely do look at a lot of things and go, "Psh, okay that's bullshit."
One of the biggest things that I can say is bullshit is, and which is very big in the spiritual community is, "We're here. This is an earth school." You know what? That's bullshit.
Slade:
Oh, thank you! I'm so glad.
Miki:
This is not an earth school. What kind of asshole would be like, "Oh, let's send all these people here and let them learn something with no curriculum! Hahaha."
Come on. That's ridiculous. That's not... not at all the case. It is not a school. We aren't trying to learn. The only thing we are trying to do is experience. Like I said, you're this huge, huge consciousness. I guess I'll call it consciousness because I don't really have anything else to call it. If I call it that, then kind of we all know what I'm talking about. Because if I say 'thing', that's just like, "You know, you're this huge thing right?"
Slade:
Right.
Miki:
You're bigger than life. You are so big you're everything. You have such limits in this body that you're in. The only thing that you're learning is, if you're going to learn something, you're learning how to work through these limits of this physical body because it's an experience that you want to have. That's it. You're experiencing what it's like to be in this body.
Slade:
Like in the way that somebody might choose to do ayahuasca or trip on mushrooms or go underwater with scuba gear.
Miki:
Exactly. Yeah.
Slade:
Interesting.
Miki:
So that's what it is. It's not a school. You aren't, I mean, you learn things along the way. Don't get me wrong. You do learn things along the way. But it's not like you're here to learn. You're here to experience and through your experience, you're going to learn because you learn through every experience.
Slade:
Right. And there's not like this predestination, like, I'm going to go have this sort of earthly experience so that I can learn what it's like to blahblahblah. Like there's not that much planning.
Miki:
Well I think there are themes.
Slade:
Okay.
Miki:
So it's not really like... You know, it's like if you were planning to, I don't know, make a convention, okay? There's a lot of planning that you have to put in it. Everyone's talking about, "Oh, this is how we want it to come out." There's this and this and this.
It doesn't need to be... I mean, it's detailed and you do have a planning committee, but you're more discussing themes.
Slade:
Like the vibe that you want it to have for the attendees, or...
Miki:
Yes.
Slade:
What you kind of want the takeaway to be, but the nitty gritty, like how you get there is more randomized than that.
Miki:
Yeah. That's a lot more organic and because you choose one thing or you don't choose something. And some people, I mean, probably like you and me, we're "i'm going to make this choice," and something in your head is like, "No, don't do that." Right?
Slade:
Right.
Miki:
Stay away from that person. Don't go there.
And you either adjust to pay attention to it or you don't, right? I mean, of course if you don't pay attention to it, then everything goes to shit. You're like, "Goddamn, I should've listened to that."
Slade:
I had this experience yesterday actually when I was pulling into the parking space down at the tea shop or something like that. And I looked around and just in a flash, I saw all these instances of kind of miserable shit. I mean, there's really no other way to put it.
Someone who was really struggling to get across the crosswalk in a wheelchair in the rain and then there was an animal that was missing a leg and I mean, I just sort of like turned off the keys and looked around. It was just, bam bam bam bam bam. All this awful stuff, just all this hardship and difficulty in a slice of a moment.
And my thought, Miki, in that moment, was, "Who in the hell would make this up on purpose?" That's kind of like this weird question I had for the Universe.
So when you said that about this isn't an earth school, we're here to experience versus here to learn, that really spoke to me. Because I felt such an overwhelming sense of how cruel the world was. And not that there aren't always things to be grateful for and all these other things that we can think are wonderful and make it worth it.
But I'm just saying, the idea that anyone would mastermind that kind of stuff... Like I'm okay with the fact if it's kind of like, random and organic, if it's nature, but the idea that it would all be pre-scripted, like a video game, feels kind of evil to me. You know what I'm saying?
Miki:
Yeah, but in choosing the themes, like you said someone in a wheelchair who can't walk and they're struggling through whatever until they come to terms with using the limitations that their body has. You do choose those things but they're themes. It's almost like... It's not as random as, "Woohoo, I'm going to be a human. I'm gonna dig through this bag and randomly pick out 5 themes and those are going to be somehow manifested into my human life."
It wouldn't be as random as that because you... I mean this now is going into past lives, which I don't think are past lives, but anyway, we'll just call it a past life right now. Say if you randomly chose these 5 themes out of this magic trunk or whatever, right? The chest. And then what if you'd already, in a past life, you'd already had that theme or... You would go, "Okay..."
And you're looking at your human life differently when you're here than when you're looking at it from there. It's like a completely different perspective. So you looking at whatever limitations have been put on your human existence in your human body, you don't feel the same way about those limitations when you are choosing those themes.
Slade:
What were you going to say about the past lives? We'll call it a past life but you actually don't perceive it that way. I have an idea what you're going to say, but I want you to explain that really quick.
Miki:
They aren't in the past. They're all right now. They're all going on in the same time but I mean there's no concept of time, really. Time is just a space in consciousness where you can experience something. That's time. That's the best definition really of time.
Slade:
So we're living all kinds of experiences of other places.
Miki:
All kinds. And the themes are the same.
Slade:
Oh really!
Miki:
Yeah. We kind of talked about this like, what is god, right?
Slade:
Yeah.
Miki:
If there is a god, so in order to explain this, we'll have to talk about that for a second. So...
Slade:
That was gonna be my next question anyway.
Miki:
The best way that I can put "god" and just saying god, because everyone knows the concept that we're talking about, the best way to describe it would be like an octopus where 'here' is the head, is this main energy, or consciousness, the main theme, all of the arms are all of the other, like the webs almost, it's the same theme. The arms are the same thing as the head of the octopus. So god is the head of the octopus and we're all the arms.
We're all experiencing the same thing or, we're the same thing, but we're all experiencing it in different ways.
So if you took all of the pieces, like let's just say, for the sake of this conversation and understanding this concept, if you were god, right? I mean, you are. We're all one. So you're god. But there's a bunch of different facets to your personality. And each one of them likes different things, does different things, but altogether that makes Slade.
If you broke up every single thing about you and about your personality, fantasy writer, teacher, podcaster, tea lover, animal lover, all of these different aspects of you, right? You have so many. Each one of these, if you could make them into a completely different person and send them out into the world as that personality and just imagine how much faster you would experience everything there is to experience. Because you were spread out instead of just one.
Slade:
We're the way by which the Universe is aware of itself.
Miki:
Yes.
Slade:
Yeah. And when you and I had this conversation about the octopus thing, I said well that's really cool because I'd always perceived it as kind of a fractal image, like a computer screen saver that's like a fractal. And there is something octopus-like about those tendrils, or whatever and the facets and all that kind of stuff. So yeah, I actually really get that really easily.
Do you feel like that was something that was in the chest?
Miki:
I do. Yeah. For sure. Definitely.
Slade:
So switching gears just a little bit. What was it do you think that motivated you most to go back?
Miki:
Probably my kids.
Slade:
Right.
Miki:
Because four years after I had my daughter and died, I decided to do it again, but I knew I was like, everyone's like, gasp, "You're gonna have another kid." The doctors and everybody kind of freaked out. I said, "Nope it's gonna be perfectly fine. Everything will be fine."
And everything was perfectly fine.
There've been so many things in my life from that moment where I go, "Nope, this is the way it's going to be. Don't worry about anything because it's gonna be perfectly fine," or "This is the person, without a doubt, I know for sure." Almost like, just these deep knowings about my life which, I can't sit here and recall them but when they present themselves, I'm like, "Oh yeah, I know that."
Slade:
So you're really moving through trusting your gut and feeling like everything always turns out okay.
Miki:
Oh yeah, definitely.
Slade:
What a great way to live.
Do you experience anxiety? Do you worry about things? Because I'm a big worrier.
Miki:
Yeah. I mean, I do worry about things and I think we talked about this too. I worry about things in both directions. I can take one idea and take it to the depths of hell and I can take the same idea and go to the highest point of ever anything and become the most famous person in the world. You know what I mean?
I can go in all directions and I can see almost like how the idea could potentially play out in whatever direction I went with, you know?
I don't really know if it's worrying so much as just deep thinking.
Slade:
Yeah, like contemplation.
Miki:
Extreme contemplation.
Slade:
Does it happen kind of instantaneously or is it something you really mull over and analyze a lot?
Miki:
Sometimes both. It depends on how much time I have to think about the particular thing. Sometimes I can daydream about something and just enjoy looking at how something's going to play out, I guess.
Slade:
Thought experiments.
Miki:
Yeah. Uh huh.
Slade:
What do you hope, like when you tell people this story or when you put this out there, what do you kind of hope people take away from it?
Miki:
Just to know that we are all one and that we all are love. That's, you know, and I think maybe I hope that they feel a sense of ease about being a human because everything is, Oh you're born and you die. You're born to die. That death is the end. It's almost like I feel like the human culture doesn't put enough importance, they put a lot of importance on a birth but the importance they put on a death is much more tragic than celebratory, which is what it should be.
So that's what I think that I hope everyone gets from this. Just a sense of calm warm fuzzies about... because I wish, it's a transition, that's all it is. You're just, it's like you're done with this book. That was a great book and you close it. What happens to you when you're done with the book? You're enriched. Your soul grew in some way. You feel, Oh, that was such great book. I really connected with these characters. It's the same. It's just like closing a book. You're just done with this book. You're still perfect and whole.
Slade:
Hmm... I have so many thoughts about what that means for storytelling in general and what it is that we seek and living all these different lives through story. I'm like radiating out in layers of thought right now.
So tell us a little bit about the work that you do now. What do you do with all of this in the world?
Miki:
I don't really know what I do but I like to help people. I like to help people in whatever way that they feel they need to be helped. If that's doing a reading, if that's having a friend, if that's having a healing.
Animals. I read for animals.
I don't know. Yeah. I guess, make people laugh? Bring happiness in some way. And if that's through a reading, then that's what I need to do for them.
Slade:
I like that you don't really separate what you do as work from what you do as just sort of being human in the world.
Miki, thank you so much for coming and just laying this whole story out for everyone. Tell everyone where they can go find you online if they want to connect with you.
Miki:
You can find me at MikiBrittenham.com
Slade:
Miki, we love you and your stories and your great perspective. I learned a lot listening to you today. I'm sure a lot of people are gonna have cool questions for you when this episode comes out.
Thank you so much for doing this.
Miki:
Thank you, Slade, for having me.
A kind of real magic any one of us can perform, a kind of magic I do believe has the power to change our experience of reality, if not reality itself.
"I promise if you keep searching for everything beautiful in this world, you will eventually become it."
— Tyler Kent White MENTIONED ON THE SHOW One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are by Ann Voskamp
The Book of Faded Green
The Money Shift
HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses
Get an intuitive reading with Slade
Automatic Intuition
FACEBOOK GROUP Shift Your Spirits Community BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits Edit your pledge on Patreon
TRANSCRIPT *this the Author's Draft ; not technically a full transcript I promise if you keep searching for everything beautiful in this world, you will eventually become it. — Tyler Kent White
My hair stylist is, as many of them are, a down low psychotherapist.
We were talking about someone miserable in my life
She mentioned gratitude
Our standing appointments every other week are mini summits between the New Age and New Christianity
(hipster Christians we call them around here, not disparagingly)
The Camp House
Anyway she told me about a Christian author, Ann Voskamp who wrote this contemplative book called 1000 Gifts
I haven’t read it and probably won’t but I still like the idea
I am totally guilty of pessimism and negativity
Double Scorpio
grew up with a father who is a total Eeyore
My Saturn Return had a lot to do with becoming aware of my negative perspective and how the voices I’d taken on were polluting my experience, my life, my capacity for joy
Seth taught me how to do this.
I credit him with teaching me the power of reframing.
Miraculously, at 22 years old, he was one of the wisest people I’d ever encountered and one of my most effective therapists … to this date.
You hear me speak of him often.
He’s the Gayle to my Oprah
Oprah helped really popularize and mainstream the concept of gratitude journaling
It’s connected to the practice of Julia Cameron's Morning Pages which were popularized around the same time period.
The Book of Faded Green was my first instinctive experiment — life changing
Years later, I used re-framing to change my relationship with Abundance and escape poverty
Even several years after that, it became The Money Shift
The concept of the exercise in The Money Shift can be adapted to any number of things you need to shift.
The name of this blog, this podcast SHIFT YOUR SPIRITS has always been at its core, a message about the power of reframing
It’s a kind of Neurolinguistic programming
Re-programming
The past year was really hard for me because of my relationship with one family member. Someone who married into my family.
This is the person I was discussing with my stylist
I’ve never had “feuds” with anyone or falling out with any family members, not really
I don’t fight with my brother
I’m a Leo — we are triggered by a desire to protect those we believe are in our charge…
Carrying around anger and outrage is debilitating
And it’s not like doing The Money Shift for one month means those negative voices never creep back in.
Reframing negative voices is chiropractic … shifting shifting shifting in the right direction, then back sliding with each little life encounter pulling in the other direction
I usually practice what people would call Gratitude Journaling in the car.
Driving allows me to look around and observe, and when I’m feeling desperately dark, I just start naming anything I like and can remark on positively
- The clouds are cool today.
- That tree’s beautiful.
- I love seeing the mountains from this stretch of highway…
Anything I can grab onto to start that shift when I’ve forgotten myself.
I was just thinking about how I needed to do another round of more focused, intense, committed Gratitude Shifting when a meme popped up on Facebook
It says:
Did you know you can rewire your brain to be happy by simply recalling 3 things you’re grateful for every day for 21 days?
I thought, why yes. yes I do know some version of that concept if not this exact statistic. (Unverified by the way, but who cares, the spirit of it works for me.)
Susan Hyatt suggested it as a challenge to her Facebook friends and asked if others wanted to participate with her.
And like I needed anything else on my To Do list with a daily check in …
But the synchronicity was there and sometimes my spontaneous decisions are the best, so I just did it.
You may have seen me posting on my personal page or in the SYS group.
I missed a day - who cares - I just picked up where I left off.
I’m trying though to pick 3 DIFFERENT things every day and not just repeat versions of the same thing.
Because my stylist told me one of the things she loved most about reading this woman’s book who did the 1000 Gifts, was how much, after you run through the obvious list of things, you really have to contemplate and observe and reach into the most mundane moments of your life to find new sources of beauty.
For instance, she talked about being moved by a particularly meditative passage on washing dishes and observing the miraculous surface of soap bubbles.
And I thought YES, the magic in the mundane.
that’s where real magic is found.
I don’t want magic to be woo woo, nearly as much as I need it to be REAL
This is something Toni Morrison talks about and has been in my consciousness since I was a teenager.
So, I thought, yes, won’t it be interesting to see where you might go after 21 days.
3 items for 21 days is ONLY 63 items.
What will it take to discover 1000.
If you keep doing 3 a day, it will take you 333 days
And that math makes me think of the power of the 3 x 3 strategy
And so I feel like this is a new magic spell we could do.
It has threads running through so many Shift Your Spirits themes and memes.
You could even do this as part of your Reboot — the free writing, journaling part of the process.
Finding a list of 1000 things at 3 per day would essentially be 3 Reboots.
And here’s the secret about the Reboot — you don’t stop after 3 months anyway, you do it indefinitely. That’s what happens when you fall into that practice and it becomes such a source of peace and energy.
No pressure if you want to take on this challenge.
Break it down in chunks.
Work it in stages.
This first part is 3 things per day for 21 days.
Let’s do that part first and see where it gets us.
And I think it might be cool if people post their daily gratitude in the Shift Your Spirits community. Hell, post that every day. Don’t be shy. Stick a cool picture.
Nobody will be “annoyed.”
If anything, for lurkers and scrollers, it still impacts us because we see that, in the moment, and we see others commenting and chiming in, and maybe we do post ours or maybe we don’t.
But we think it.
- What are mine?
- What 3 things am I grateful for today?
Everyone’s shifting together.
And what if it becomes a habit?
What if it becomes like stopping to take deep breaths for a minute?
Or stopping to correct your posture?
Or to stand and move your body when you’ve been sitting for too long?
Listen, we are diving toward extinction of our species and the death of our planet.
And when I started this blog, this platform, I believed we were on the verge of Ascensions
In the last 2 years or so … Hmm.
I really worry that we are riding out the last days and we have shifted away from elevating the human race.
We need to pull out of this nose dive fast.
People shifting, in their own bubbles, shifting against one another … Shifting into each other, connecting, networking ...
Shifting en masse.
Like the foaming clouds of soap bubbles in your kitchen sink...
That’s magic.
And I do believe that could change the world.
Dr. Julia Spinolo is a Doctor of Nursing Practice and Reiki Master who offers energy healing, intuitive coaching, and spiritual guidance. She combines her knowledge of science based medicine and energetic healing modalities to help clients return to their centered selves.
We're talking about best practices for energy healers.
If you are a Reiki Master or a practitioner of another healing modality, this is a great set of ethical guidelines.
And if you are considering energy healing as a client or patient, we talk about the positive attributes you should be looking for in a practitioner, common red flags you might want to be aware of, and what kind of expectations you should have about outcomes.
GUEST LINKS - JULIA SPINOLO juliaspinolo.com
Resources (Research)
Medical Girl Mystical World Dr. Julia Spinolo's Show
MENTIONED ON THE SHOW Don't Fear Placebos Akimbo: a podcast from Seth Godin
HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses
Get an intuitive reading with Slade
Automatic Intuition
FACEBOOK GROUP Shift Your Spirits Community BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits Edit your pledge on Patreon
TRANSCRIPT Julia:
I was working as a college professor and going on about life. Had my terminal degree. Thought that life was good, had a great house, had a great husband, great marriage, and then I was diagnosed with breast cancer. This was almost four years ago, which threw my world upside down.
So I went through having a double mastectomy and then months of chemotherapy and then recovering. And luckily, turned out fine. Everything is fine. I'm still doing fine. But I just did not feel like myself.
I got my energy back but my mind was very foggy. Had classic chemo-brain, which is where you feel like you're in a constant fog and you can't connect your thoughts or you forget things and I'm one of these very meticulous people that are on my game all the time. I'm very on the ball and I just wasn't myself.
My husband, funny enough, is an oncologist. He looked at me and he said, "Well maybe this is your new normal."
I was like, "No, I'm not going to let this be my new normal."
So I started looking at other ways besides western medicine to see if I could start to feel better. So going back in my history, I've always been kind of a metaphysical child. I have always been interested in having psychic readings. I had my first psychic reading when I was 12. I had my aura saged at 18 on a mountaintop, and I've always been kind of connected to that world.
So anyway, I go to a group meditation and they were offering pranic energy healings afterwards. I was like, you know what? I'm just going to try this to see. I had no expectations whatsoever, but I heard that it was good. People really raved about it so I'm like, why not?
So I'm sitting there with no intention of what's going on. Let's just see what happens.
So I had this 15 minute pranic energy healing done and it was almost immediately that I felt clear. My thoughts were... It was like the fucking light bulb came on and I was just elated. And I just fell into this. I said, "I gotta learn more about this. I know that I can do this. I'm a healer already being in medicine, because that's what we do. We help heal people and we're going to go into that later in our discussion.
But as I said, I know that I can do this. So I did. I started studying, actually I looked at different modalities. I looked at pranic energy, of course you have tai chi, accupuncture, accupressure, all of that is energy work. There are so many different modalities, but reiki really resonated with me. So I studied for months and became a reiki master and really started doing that work.
During this work with the energy, I did a lot of self healing and a lot of work on myself. That self work is very key for any practitioner because you've got to be right with yourself before you work with anybody else. So I did. I did a lot of healing on my own. Studied the energy work and then started seeing clients.
That's how I got into this and now that's what I solely do full time. I use my medical expertise in conjunction with the energy work, because really it's all connected. The body is connected to our energy. People that have these physical manifestations, there's some root cause of what's going on and that's basically what's going on energetically. And some people are like, well what do you mean?
So my thought is that everything is energy. Our cells are made up of cells that are vibrating at different frequencies that make up our different organs. But also the things that we can't see, such as our thoughts, our prayers, that kind of thing, all of that is energy.
What I look at is, this is a classic example. I'm fortunate to work with a primary care group, so I'm introducing this energy work into primary care medicine, which is so freaking cool. But basically people will come to me because I'm the last resort, which I really wish it wouldn't be like that. But unfortunately, it is. Because it's like, they can't figure out what the hell is going on with me. Can you help me?
Because it is.
So I'll do case studies. I had a woman who was coming in and she was having all these stomach ailments and she had the battery of tests and everything was coming out fine. Everything. I mean, she had ran a gamut of tests, doctors are scratching their heads like, you know, this is just how it is and here we're going to give you this medicine that's gonna help with these symptoms, and unfortunately with western medicine, we do. We kind of shrug and be like, "Well, there's a drug for that. Let's give you that and see how you do."
I'm more of like, okay, what's really going on here?
So she comes to me and we start talking and kind of digging down deep. It comes across that she's had really shitty relationships where her ego, her self-esteem, was just shot. When that happens, that tells me, okay, where the energy of our self esteem is in our solar plexus, which is right in our belly, the centre of our belly. So after we went through this, and the healing that she went through, and me giving her the tools to do the self-care, keep her where she's in alignment.
Because it's not just me doing the work. It's a two-way street here. The client needs to be giving the input in.
Somebody doesn't come to me, I'll wave my hands around them or wave a magic wand and POOF, they're done. It doesn't go like that.
So they've got to do that work too. So we work together and I mean, this can take time! It can take months of meeting and working through this. Sometimes you integrate with a therapist, if there's something that I'm not comfortable with, I definitely use other resources to help with patients.
And she got to where her symptoms went away because she felt better about herself, and it wasn't... It was so rewarding to see her, that look on her face and she doesn't have to take the medicine now and she feels great about herself.
I kind of went on a little tangent there..
Slade:
Well let me ask you something. Let me take you back for a minute. Because I remember, I mean, you and I are friends and we talk a lot. We've had conversations about this stuff. And you told me, at one point, that you were skeptical about this type of work itself. So I'm interested, what was it that, what was the skepticism that you had and what changed for you around that?
Julia:
Because with my background, I was trained in evidence-based medicine. So I needed to have a number of studies to convince me that this works. That's what medicine is. That's how trials are done. We do these trials. Okay, what was the most effective treatment for this plan? So that's how we plan our course for patients.
That's what I was thinking, well if this stuff works, where is the stuff out there that's proving it?
And when I started looking at this, I did, as a researcher at heart, I started researching this and you know what? There is stuff out there.
People don't look for that. They're like, people get uncomfortable because it's something that we can't see. It's something that's not measurable. The only thing that's really measurable is the effects on how the person feels. But also if you look at their blood pressure, for example, if they have high blood pressure, they're taking the medicine and it's not working, they go to have energy work. The thing is that the practitioners are not keeping record of that. And there's nothing that goes back to say, "Yeah this works." We're only going by word of mouth.
I really strongly advocate to have that data to show, yes, this does work. That gives it the validity that it needs, that people really need to show, like, yes, this can work.
Slade:
So when you were researching, you said one of the things that you were most drawn to was reiki. Was that because there was more research around reiki that convinced you?
Julia:
You know, that's a really good question. I chose reiki because it just resonated with me. I like the flow of it. I like the teachings of it. I like that you can take what it has and you can make it your own. There's some energy modalities where you have these rules and regulations. You've gotta do it this way, that step kind of thing. You have some of that fluidity with reiki, so that's what really got me into it.
But then when I started looking into the research, it was kind of like a confirmation. Yeah, this is the stuff that I really like and I can use to support the work that I do.
Slade:
So I know you. I know you immediately went and read a bunch of brainy stuff about this, so, I want to know in layman's terms the highlights for us.
Tell us. What are some of the scientific studies that back this up?
Because you're right. A lot of people don't even go and investigate it that much, but you've investigated it. So tell us what you'd found out.
Julia:
Well there's a lot. If people wanted to know the statistical information, like the p-values and that good stuff, that nerdy stuff, they can go to my website which will tell them at the end of the show, under Offerings, there is a tab for Resources.
Slade:
Okay.
Julia:
And that has a lot of studies in there. There's more that I could put in there, but I don't like to overwhelm people. But it has like the gist of it, just for people to say like, "Okay, this stuff really does work."
So to answer your question, there are studies that have statistically significant results in patients that have acute coronary syndrome, which is heart disease. They that have received reiki have a reduction of anxiety and perceived stress. This is all measurable results.
This one was really cool for me. People that received, and these are just patients in the study, patients in this study who received reiki before their colonoscopy. After they received reiki, they required less Demerol, which is pain medication, after the procedure than patients who did not have any energy healing. So that's significant, especially with our opioid epidemic and our addiction to pain medication. So that's a plus in my book.
Patients that had mild Alzheimer's Disease had an increase in mental functioning and improved memory and their behavioural problems had lessened.
Cancer patients who received reiki reported less fatigue and anxiety, and I'm a testament to that, which significantly improved their quality of life.
And this is a really cool thing because a lot of hospitals are now implementing energy work into their practices in the hospital. So they're actually taking nurses and having them go through reiki training to help not only their patients, and have their patients more comfortable, but also they're using it on their staff to prevent burnout. And healthcare professionals who have received reiki treatments have a reduction of burnout symptoms, which is compassion fatigue. But also it increases their focus and their problem-solving skills, which is a benefit to patients because they make less mistakes.
Yeah, so it's not just for the patients. It's for the patients. It's for everybody.
For the primary care group that I work with, I work with the staff and the patients, because I believe that the environment needs to be healing for the patients. Because that's going to radiate off of them. If they're feeling good, it's going to radiate out. And when those patients come in to that office, they're going to feel like, hey, I'm supported, it feels good here, I know that they're here to help me. So it's a win-win.
I know that you have questions about placebo, so I can hold this one study for you while we talk about that, or if you want me to talk about that now, I can.
Slade:
Let's go ahead and talk about placebo because I've been studying it from more of a marketing angle and I'll speak to that. But talk to me about placebo, because I think it has kind of a dirty word and I think we can change the connotation about it. But talk to me about that in the studies.
Julia:
Okay. So just to say that, initially when I started this is, because it wasn't my intent to get better with having this chemo brain, so as a placebo, I was kind of on the fence with it. Was I, did I really think this was going to kill me and well maybe it is.
And people chalk it up to placebo. Let me say something about the placebo effect. The thing is, is that if it works, it works. Period. If the patient feels better, whether or not it's placebo or not, if they're feeling better, it's kind of like, Who cares?? They're feeling better.
A lot of times, with us, we have to make it make sense to us. We need to have that statistical data for some of us. We need to have that word of mouth that somebody says to us. If somebody says it's placebo effect, it doesn't necessarily mean it's all in their head.
Now I'm gonna give you this study where reiki was done on newborn babies who were born to mothers that had substance abuse problems. So these babies were at risk for detoxing, having abstinence syndrome, which, when these babies received reiki...
First of all, reiki does not cause any harmful effects across the board, which is good. So it didn't show any bad effects for this. But when these babies, they don't know anything about placebo or what's really going on, when these babies had the reiki, it showed that their heart rate decreased that correlated to the peaceful state of relaxation.
So explain that to me.
Slade:
Right. Because they can't, they don't have the consciousness for the placebo effect to work.
Julia:
Correct.
Slade:
Well, I want to say something about placebo that really, the reason why I got really interested in this, and I'll try to find the episode and link to it for everyone so they can hear him talk about it, but Seth Godin, who is basically like a marketing expert, he did a whole show about placebo and about owning the fact that if your placebo effect is effective, then it's still valuable.
You know what I mean?
Julia:
Right!
Slade:
That there is something to be said for, like when somebody takes your course and they pay money to come to a classroom, well maybe they could do some of that work on their own. But part of what the workshop does is it gives them accountability, it creates a time frame and structure to learn whatever it is. All of those things are reinforcing to maybe a goal that they have.
But there's also a placebo effect around the mind-body connection. The thing is that the mind-body connection is for real. So if someone's saying something to you can activate your own mind-body connection, then so be it. You know what I mean? There's nothing wrong with it.
So yeah, it is really interesting though to look at and compare those results that are outside of placebo. That's when we go, "Oh crap... this person didn't even know it was being done on them."
I think there have been lots of studies around prayer that have those kind of results, right?
Julia:
Yeah. And let me tell you, there's been studies done. There's a few that I have on my website that deal with sham reiki, which is a double blind study, which means, here I'm getting all nerdy on you, but what that is is they came in. They did a group of patients that had reiki that was done by trained, attuned practitioners. And then they had a group of patients that were "treated" with people that didn't know anything about reiki. They just came in and told them that they were a reiki person and waved their hands over them.
So, this is going to get rid of our placebo effect here. So listen to this. So in this study, it statistically significantly showed that the patients that received the actual reiki was far more effective than the people that had received the sham reiki, without them even knowing it.
So there's something to it.
Slade:
Yeah.
Julia:
There's something to it.
Slade:
Absolutely.
Julia:
Because it kind of debunks that placebo effect. Because of these patients that did n'o know if they were getting a true reiki practitioner or a sham reiki person. They didn't know.
Slade:
That's fascinating.
Julia:
It was REALLY fascinating.
Slade:
I'm so glad that you have all these resources already in one place, because there are people who will want to dig into the details. We'll just link straight to that and let them see the sources that you're pulling from.
One of the reasons why I wanted to talk to you is that you do both have the medical credentials, you're ethically conscious about your reiki practitioner, you are super informed about these studies and this information.
And just to be honest, when you heard me criticizing some of the aspects of energy healing and kind of going off about it, what were some of the things that went through your head that you wanted to just like shout out in defense.
Julia:
Well, I think that there are standards that need to be set. I mean, definitely, you know, having some ethics to the work that we do. So I'm going to address what we as energy healers need to really think about going into this work.
Can we start with that first?
Slade:
Yeah, absolutely. That'd be great.
Julia:
Let's just say we'll call this the "best practices" for energy healers. This is just not for people that do reiki, but any energy modality. I think this is across the board for all energy healers or people who identify themselves as energy healers, lightworkers, what have you.
The big thing is, always ask for permission to work on people. I've heard horror stories where I've heard of people being worked on when they didn't give permission, like they received distance healing from somebody. That's totally not okay. Always ask permission.
Can I give you a story, a personal story?
Slade:
Yeah! Absolutely.
Julia:
I love telling stories.
This was a few years ago when I was just starting my business. I had somebody that was interested in talking with me, maybe joining as a practitioner with my business. My intuition was very cautious, let me just see how it goes. We ended up having lunch and I left the meeting nice. During the meeting, she wanted to kind of like, gasp, "I want to read you, I want to do this. Can I read you now? Drop the veil", and all these theatrics and all that stuff.
I was like, whatever lady.
Because I've had psychic readings forever. I grew up with this stuff. So I'm like, nothing you tell me is going to, "Ohmygod!" People love that. Let me just shock the shit out of somebody. And I was like, okay...
So anyway, after the lunch and everything, I was like, well that's cool. I'll keep her as a contact person, but I don't necessarily think that I'm going to work with her.
At any rate, later on in the day, my stomach was feeling kind of queasy and I was like, maybe it was something I ate that's going on.
Let me take another side note here. Okay, so there are things that happen with our energy, and some of it can be emotional or physical things. This doesn't discount bacteria or viruses or anything, so when people get sick and they're like, gasp, "Your energy is off." Well, maybe your energy was low enough to be susceptible to that, but stuff happens. We still get sick. People that are at high-vibe still get sick because viruses do occur, so I want to make that clear.
Anyway, so my stomach wasn't feeling good, so I sent her a text and said, "Hey, are you feeling okay?"
She's like, "Yeah."
I said, "Oh, well that's good!" I said, "My stomach was feeling a little upset. Maybe it was just the sushi that I had, some bad sushi." Just write it off as that.
She was like, "Oh no, I know what it was."
And I'm like, "What was it?"
And she said, "I felt that you needed energy work done so I did a bunch of work on you. People have these kinds of symptoms when I work with them, they have stomach pain or ailments and stuff like that."
I lost it. "Oh no you didn't."
Because you have a start to your session and an end to your session. And that's it. Anything that comes after that, like if somebody walks out my door and we're done, we're done. So this outside of let-me-heal-you or let me work on your Higher Self, that does not fly with me.
So I went all over her, and I said, "Ethically, that was just a big no-no. You don't do that."
She's like, "Well I'm just trying to help you. I'm trying to do what's best for you."
I'm like, "You don't know what's best for me."
So we really got into it. She could not understand why that was not okay.
Slade:
Can I tell a story too about this?
Julia:
Oh please! I love story time.
Slade:
So the whole permission thing.
Anybody that's worked with me around Automatic Intuition and my mentoring knows that I'm a stickler for this. I know that there's a lot of great TV about mediums walking up to strangers in line at the butcher and reading them. I've been doing this now for like 13 years and I cannot tell you how many hundreds of emails that I receive from people telling me that my guides have communicated with them and they have a message for me.
And I'm like, "Yeah, right."
Julia:
Okay!
Slade:
It's kind of a little bit insulting, you know what I mean? It's just like telling somebody, you know, that you've undressed them with your eyes or something. It's an invasion of privacy. It's also not going to be super effective if people don't have your permission and your involvement because like you said, you're not doing something AT someone. You're facilitating something that's happening within them.
I know that the best readings for me is when somebody is really participating and it feels like a conversation more than me sitting in a turbin just spouting stuff out. Those styles of readings, like you said, the drama and all that stuff... I mean, there may be people who do really excellent readings with all that, but one of the things that I really want to always pound home is this idea that this stuff shouldn't make you feel bad.
It shouldn't make you sick.
It should be practical. And it should be empowering. And it should make you feel peaceful and hopeful and all of that stuff.
So if somebody's coming at you even with just social energy boundary issues, we'll put that in the red flag category.
But anyway, so...
Julia:
We're going to go through some red flags today in a little bit, but yeah, that was just one.
Kind of piggy-backing off of that is keeping good boundaries. We as practitioners need to be respectful of other people's boundaries, and when they come to see you, again, at the end of the session, that's the end.
Some people say, gasp, "Well their grandmother came to me afterwards."
And I was like, "Good! If they make another session with you, you make a note of it and tell them then."
Also, and this is kind of like the Hippocratic Oath where it's always do good and no harm. Always come with that good heartfelt intent.
Oh, here's a big one. Check your ego.
When something is going on and you want to send reiki, whether it's to a person or to a population or that kind of thing, you want to question your ethics. You want to ask yourself, Why am I doing this?
Are you doing it out of a true sense of help or are you doing it for your ego? And how you can do that is, are you really truly there to help or are you looking for the accolades and the money in your pocket. So really check yourself before you do that. What is my intent here? Is it really because I care or do I want the recognition to say, I healed this person, and to brag about it?
And don't do any help unless it's okay with the person. Again, going back to ask the person. But also not guaranteeing that you're going to fix them. Nobody fixes anybody. Even in medicine, we don't fix people.
It's called practicing medicine for a reason. We practice it. We try to look at the best practices that have been used with these patients in these certain populations or certain diseases. It does not necessarily mean that we fix them. If it helps with that, yay. That's great. But as far as fixing people, no.
So when people claim "I cured this", or "Don't do that treatment and only come to me from now on", that's part of our red flag category too.
So really watch yourself and check in. What am I doing this for? Am I trying to fix this person? Am I using all the resources available that can be applicable for this person? Really check in with yourself.
The other thing that I want to say is for people to do that self work on themselves. They need to do those self healing practices. They need to practice what they preach. Are they taking good care of themselves? Are they checking in? Are they having energy work done by other practitioners and that self care?
Because if they're not able to take care of themselves, if they're gonna be like a martyr and wave their magic wand and fix everybody, and then they get so exhausted and compassion fatigue, they did that to themselves. So they really need to have those moments of where they're doing their self care.
So those are my best practices for energy healers.
Slade:
I know that we definitely have a lot of people in our listening audience who are coming to this as peers. They're listening to this conversation because they ARE reiki practitioners. Like you said, even if you are a practitioner, you still want to be on the receiving end sometimes, and there may be people listening to this show who've maybe never had a reiki treatment, or a session with an energy healer.
So let's flip it a little bit and look at it from the perspective of if you're looking to be a client, what are some of the things that you're looking for in choosing a practitioner, and maybe that includes some of the red flags as well.
Talk about that.
Julia:
Okay.
First of all, for people that are looking into it, they need to have an open mind of what all of this is. A lot of people will come in to be a skeptic, "Oh, I just want to figure out what this is about to debunk people", and that's just, who knows what's going to happen for that, so have an open mind. Look for your intent of what you are seeking energy healing for.
The other thing is, a lot of people when they're in desperate need of help, they're going to clamour around and get so many different people involved. So if too many therapies can be, you know, they're like, the more energy work I have from different practitioners and different modalities, the best.
Well people have to be patient with that to see how each modality works for them. Because I have some people say, "Well I just left my accupuncturist and I came here and then I'm going to go do yoga after I go to do this."
That's too much. Do one at a time. Do one every couple of weeks or whatever. People try to get that fix. Being healed like, fast, and it just doesn't happen.
Also, I want to advise people to really trust their gut. Go with that intuition of like, if somebody gives you bad vibes, or you're kind of questioning it, you're looking at their website and it doesn't really resonate with you, don't go see that person. Look at word of mouth. Your friends, what they say. Look at the testimonies on people's website and see if you really like what you read.
You want to avoid anybody that says that THEIR way is the RIGHT way. Again, looking at people saying that they can cure you. That's a big red flag. So watch out for that.
People that say that you ONLY need my services. You don't need to see that person. Or you don't need to go to that support group. People that kind of monopolize on that. That's something that people need to watch out for.
Slade:
Well here's a good point that just occurred to me as we were talking about this.
So kind of trying to grab all the stuff and do everything at once. I'm gonna do yoga, I'm gonna get acupuncture, I'm gonna go to my massage therapist, and I'm gonna have reiki. That's all too much. Partly because you can't really judge then which thing is being the most effective.
Julia:
Correct.
Slade:
You know, if you break them down and do them one at a time, then you have a better sense of which one's working for you.
Julia:
Yeah.
Slade:
BUT, by the same token, you need to have supportive therapies and treatments and experiences of different kinds. For instance, you need to have actual medical treatment if it's a medical issue, in addition to energy work. And then maybe you do need something that's a support group that's more of a social experience.
So that's an interesting thing that just came to me as we're talking about this, to be able to discern the difference between having a lot of different avenues of support versus doing all the things at once. You know what I'm saying?
Julia:
Right. I mean I do that with my... I refer out with my clients all the time. If there's something that I'm not comfortable doing, I refer them out. And I know the people that I refer them to are trusted individuals that are highly qualified to do what they do.
For example, I had a gentleman that, we were talking and he realized that he had a problem with alcohol. So I referred him to this great therapist and a support group that he could have. I mean, I wasn't going to sit there and say, "I'm going to be your support..." I'm not able to do that and I can't provide that for him. I'm not going to give him false hope.
Slade:
Listen, I have sent more people into therapy and 12 step programs as an intuitive than I probably even would've been able to as a therapist.
Julia:
Yeah! And I do! I refer them to, you know, if they have something that's going on with their thyroid they say, or whatever, I'll give medical referrals. It's like I'm the go-to point. "Here. Let me guide you this way."
I'm kind of like a guide for a lot of people.
Slade:
Yeah.
Julia:
They come in and they're all like, "This is what's going on."
I'm like, "Okay. Let's see what I can do. If I can't help you or if this doesn't work for you, then let's go here. Here's my list of recommendations here."
And go from there.
Another thing that I wanted to mention for people that are looking at energy healers. If they come across energy healers and they are talking about clients and not keeping confidentiality, you know, identifying information, if they're talking about people using their names and everything, they're definitely gonna be talking about you.
So you wanna make sure that your practitioner has a confidentiality clause in their policies and their procedures to make sure they ensure that for their clients. That's happened before. Because if they're talking about other people, they're definitely going to be talking about you.
The last thing that I want to say with researching energy healers for people is that if they go into a session and the practitioner's like, "Well, for us to do this, you're going to have to pay me more money."
I've been advised that I should be doing packages for people and it just kind of rubs me the wrong way. Because sometimes one treatment is good enough for that client and they can come back in six months or a year from now. Maybe that one treatment is enough for them, so that's something that I'm kind of like on the fence about.
But anybody that locks you in to get that more money coming in.
Now I'm honest with people. If they come in and see me and I feel they need a couple more sessions, I'll be like, "You know, I think you may need to see me in a couple of weeks. Let's see how this does. Let's see how you feel", that kind of thing. There's no pressure or obligation for them to give me money to help them, you know what I mean?
Slade:
Yeah. And I want to say something about that for other practitioners and other professional intuitives. Whatever it is that you're doing as a practice, people often ask me about bundling services and bundling sessions, the only place that I really officially bundle sessions is when I'm going to be mentoring somebody and training them in this work. And I let them know upfront, this pricing is based off this number of sessions with me.
So that's something that... There is no you do one session and then, "Oh, actually, in order to complete your training, you need three more."
I don't do that.
I will say this too. I don't really want clients that need to talk to me once a month. Because then I worry about their dependence on the work that I'm doing for them.
Julia:
Yes!
Slade:
Versus their personal empowerment.
And I also know that there's a certain type of person, and I'm one of them, who needs a really good session once every six months. And then I'm good.
Julia:
Yup!
Slade:
I've got a To-Do list coming out of that session and I'm on fire to go and work on it.
So leave me alone and let me go do what you just taught me to do and see what I can do on my own.
If I do run into a client who really just, they like to talk to me once a season or twice a year or whatever that is, I do create special pricing and packaging for them off the books. It's not on the website. It's kind of more like a secret deal for your best clients kind of thing.
It usually involves a discount, not additional money. It's usually like, you know what? If you're going to keep coming to me every year on your birthday, you don't need to be paying as much as everyone else.
I think that, when you would consider paying for bundling, like I'm going to go ahead and pay for three more sessions up front, it's as if you already had a couple with that person and you like them so much, you're already booking more booking more booking more. And then the option of doing a bundle is just a logical discount for you.
That would be a great time to do it.
Julia:
Yeah. Like I said, I'm on the fence about that but for people to promote it, I don't know. We'll see. Maybe I'll change my mind.
Slade:
It shouldn't be the exit speech before you leave.
Julia:
Yes!
Or if people say, some people say, "You have this curse. BUT I can get rid of that curse for you."
Slade:
Ohmygod.
Julia:
If you take this feather and this herb and pay me $600.
That's what gives us a bad rep! All that stuff gives us such a bad rep, because of the shady stuff that happens.
Slade:
Well, and I have people all the time that come to me with this idea that they've been cursed or hexed by somebody else. I had a lady try to tell me that there was a man in France that she'd never met before who had cursed her for six years. And I was like, "Okay...."
First of all, I do believe, I want to speak to this a little bit because I think it speaks to the idea of energy healing or working on people at a distance. I believe that we can do everything within the bubble of our own mind-body connection. I believe that you can absolutely curse your damn self. You can totally put a spell on yourself and screw yourself up.
I do believe that you can make choices that you have to unravel somewhere down the road. You're like, Uh, yeah, that wasn't the best idea. But the idea of somebody being able to project magical energy at you from France and screw up your life is not something that I believe is possible unless you take that on board.
In order for you to believe that you're ex-boyfriend is cursing you because he's stalking you, making your life miserable, well there's a part of your consciousness that is open to him and is taking on that belief. This gets to the idea of people doing distance healing on someone without their permission. I just don't, flat out, believe it works.
Julia:
So are you saying that you don't believe distant healing works? Or...
Slade:
I do believe distance healing works when the other person is engaged, like we were saying.
Julia:
Yes.
Slade:
When it's a dialogue. When you're facilitating their self healing, it is a conversation like you and I are having right now. We're both showing up to this. We're open to each other and we're communicating back and forth.
But I can't get an interview out of you by just willing it to be so while you're down in Atlanta having coffee. That's not... I don't know.
I mean there may be studies that can prove it wrong. I have seen really interesting studies around people being prayed for, that didn't even know they were being prayed for, and did not believe in prayer, who still reported miraculous healing and all that kind of stuff.
So I believe... Here's the thing. I believe everything a little bit and I'm open to something until it's been debunked. But my personal feeling when I encounter somebody who says that they are removing curses for people, or that they're healing someone without their knowledge or permission. My first thought is like, meh, that's probably not very effective.
It's probably just not working.
Julia:
It's called classic manipulation. Yeah. Classic manipulation there.
Slade:
Well, you have to be aware of the manipulation for it to work on you. You know what I mean?
Julia:
Yeah.
Slade:
I mean, you have to be at least having a conversation with somebody over the phone, you have to be reading an email from them. In order for somebody to manipulate you, you have to be open to that information coming in. I don't think somebody can manipulate you or curse you or heal you if you're going about your business and you've never even heard of them before.
I just don't think it happens.
Julia:
No, I agree with you on that point. I do.
Slade:
That's a little rant. A little tangential rant.
Julia:
That's okay. You go on. This is your show. You do what you want to do.
Slade:
Ohmygosh. Okay, is there anything else that we feel like, oh, I know something we can say about choosing a practitioner.
Julia:
Yeah.
Slade:
One of the things that's so cool about this show in this format, is it allows people to listen to us and maybe you do look at somebody's website and well, her website's pretty and she's got some testimonials. Look here's a link to an interview she did. I'm going to go and listen to her. I'm going to listen to her talk to someone else. I'm going to watch a video. I'm gonna watch her TV show.
It allows people to resonate with you and to evaluate how they feel about you. I can't imagine why you'd want to hire somebody that you didn't get a good vibe from. But I have heard time and time again that people are booking sessions with me because they listen to the podcast and they feel like they speak my language.
There's something about that that we really can't control. It's happening at a level we may not even be conscious of. So, like you said, trust your gut. Be open to the fact that you have the option in a lot of cases to even talk to this person on the phone and do a free consultation or something. You know, interact with them a little bit.
If they're not responsive in email, if they're weird on the phone, don't work with them. There's tons of other people out there that you would rather be working with.
Julia:
Umhmm. Absolutely.
Slade:
So.
Julia:
So.
Slade:
What do you hope to contribute to the greater conversation about spirituality and health and wellness, east meets west medicine, all that good stuff?
Julia:
All that good stuff.
I would like for people to have an open mind, to say anything is possible, but I love seeing what I'm doing now with bringing the, where western trained physicians are bringing me in to do this eastern part of healing for their patients to have that whole well-rounded care.
So what I would like to see is that, not that one is bad and the other's... Or like one's crazy and the other one is pill pushers or whatever. There's a happy balance between the two.
And then really just for people to do that self-exploration and see what truly resonates with them.
Slade:
You have a television show that's kind of this whole concept. Tell us about that.
Julia:
I do! I have a... I'm just wrapping up my second season of Medical Girl Mystical World at the Lighter Side Network. It's wonderful. The network itself has over 400 shows on there with different hosts. But it's really having that mind-body-spirit, that wholesomeness, it's like feel good TV.
We talk about that and I've always had people on my show where it peaks my curiosity of, let me learn more about that. That's the thing. I can't judge something when I don't know about it. You know what I mean?
So I have. I've had people that do crystal healings or people that do numerology or astral projection. That kind of thing. Because these are the things I don't know enough so I want to educate myself on there so I can make informed decisions about how I want to do things.
So it's my inquiring mind. Finding these people and just learning about what they do.
Slade:
And we're going to link in the show notes because you have a free promo where people can get three months of access to the network. Tell us about that.
Julia:
Yeah, so if you go to https://www.juliaspinolo.com/ If you look at the link that says "Medical Girl Mystical World", if you click that and subscribe to my email, it will give you that code where you get three months. So you can check it out. Check out my show and the other shows too. See if there's things that resonate with them.
If they continue after the three months, to continue with that, it's fine. I think the monthly fee is $6.99, very inexpensive.
So have them check it out. See what you like about it.
Slade:
Awesome.
Dr. Julia Spinolo. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today.
Julia:
It's an honour to be here. Thank you so much for having me.
Slade:
Tell us one more time where we can find you online.
Julia:
https://www.juliaspinolo.com/
Slade:
Awesome. That was great, Julia. Thanks.
A travelogue / paranormal memoir about my Airbnb, which was haunted, and about a major Parking Angels miracle that occurred on an airport tarmac.
MENTIONED ON THE SHOW The 3x3 Project
Pink Light Shielding for Empaths
Manage and Protect Your Psychic Energy
Waking Spirits
Parking Angels
HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses
Get an intuitive reading with Slade
Automatic Intuition
FACEBOOK GROUP Shift Your Spirits Community BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits Edit your pledge on Patreon
TRANSCRIPT People ask me all the time about Seeing Things. In particular, seeing things you wouldn’t want to see.
I forgot what that was like.
I’ve built up my psychic security over the course of a decade now. I’ve layered protocol on top of protocol, upgrade after upgrade, bug fixes, new commands and features ...
It became pretty solid, to the point I don’t think about it or worry about it that .much. Not consciously.
I’m not trying to brag, I don’t mean to sound cocky about it, it’s a reality.
There was a time when I saw spirits everywhere. Every turned-off electronic, every blackened monitor screen or TV made me shudder.
I’ve told some of those stories, about the haunted house on Daniel where I lived when I had my stroke, where I called in the spirits to heal me and opened this door. Flipped this switch.
And I’ve talked about my secret service detail. My guardians.
I got there slowly as a result of doing this work—doing readings for people—and moving back to the home I grew up in. The energy is my mother’s home is unbelievably quiet.
Seth calls it "The Hush.”
People become sleepy just being in my mother’s home.
My brother and sister in law complain that the lighting is too mellow.
After my parents divorced and my brother moved away, my dad and my brother took their love of overhead lighting and loud televisions with them.
Growing up, my dad stayed up weird hours. You’d come downstairs in the middle of the night and ALL the overhead lights would be on bright, and he’d be talking on the phone and pacing, having deep conversations or counseling sessions with his brothers or his friends.
My mama and I, however, together with our cats, cast a spell of calm in our homes.
We both read a lot. We watched things at low volume.
We have very long drawn out come down rituals, and lots ramped down levels of disconnecting and relaxing.
I think this has a lot to do with The Hush.
But I also remember when I was fourteen, and my parents were looking at houses, the first time I entered that house it had that Hush.
I believe it’s the main reason we chose it.
It was immaculately clean and quiet.
And always has been.
The Hush was a spell I incorporated into my security.
Your guides are archetypes, they’re programs. You have the power to code them, to hack them, to make them work as you need them to.
You demand it. You talk to them. You describe it out loud and you talk to yourself in the car, in the mirror, you visualize it as you’re lying down at night and again when you wake up. You visualize yourself as a sun, the sphere of your energy growing, expanding...
My Hush, my invisibility spells, my glamours, my security perimeter ... it’s powerful. It’s huge. It’s a supernova.
I use invisibility to hide the security itself, so this strange pillow doesn’t smother others who are around me. To make me seem more normal to people in cafes.
I have been told I am simultaneously unapproachable and that I have a calming effect on people.
Anyway, when I went to this workshop last month, it had been a long time since I’d raised the portcullis and dropped the drawbridge over the moat.
Pulled back the invisibility glamour and thinned my veils.
But I was in this workshop with beginners. They were several people who just learning to feel energy, to cut cords ... I was concerned about blocking them. Making them think they were doing something wrong.
I told my guardians to: Please, let them in. Let them work on me.
It didn’t instantaneously happen … their protocols are meant to protect me from my own bad decisions. I spent a lot of time in preparation for that trip and during that trip negotiating taking down the security and bringing it back up.
There was a danger that other stuff might get through. You kind of can’t have it both ways. Although if you do this kind of work, you can use a pink shielding technique. A lot of security acts as a blind fold, when what you really require is something more along the lines of sunglasses.
Finding that correct modulation takes a while, and there are always exceptions you run across that you haven’t accounted for in advance.
My Airbnb in Chicago was in a building from the 19-teens. I have some particular connection to that time period and to apartments from that era.
I wrote a whole novel about an apartment in in Athens, Georgia built in 1927 - check date.
That book is called CLOUDBUSTING by Eric Slade, if you’re interested. My fiction is written under a pen name.
The apartment in the novel and many of the paranormal occurrences there are semi-autobiographical.
So this Airbnb was THAT kind of apartment.
The Chicago Oak Park version.
The same era of wood work and stain glass in the only house I ever bought too.
I managed to get my security down …
and ghosts came out of the woodwork.
I forgot how scary that is.
I think a lot of people are scared by their own guardians.
If you’ve awakened and felt an imposing presence in the room … did you ever think that’s YOUR entity, and it’s protecting you. It’s being scary to all the things that AREN’T able to get near you.
I feel bad because people ask me to tell them how to reverse this and clear a house.
But I don’t clear houses.
I don’t even try to take the sun out of the sky, I just use blackout drapes and sunglasses.
I really don’t clear space, I clear my senses.
And maybe that does have an affect on my environment. Maybe I’m sending out instructions that are augmented by some type of entity able to alter physical reality.
Guardian angels.
Protectors.
They’re not just whispering and floating around, they MOVE shit.
Out of the way.
They control flow and the interaction of physical bodies on this plane.
Maybe my spells and visualizations are amplified by them.
Or maybe I’m like a symphony conductor.
I honestly don’t know.
I don’t know how it works.
I don’t know for sure.
I don’t know what I BELIEVE — I have theories — but I am just swimming in it.
Moving through.
Experimenting.
Wondering...
I had a friend from Chicago come by the Airbnb.
He picked up on the spirits without knowing any of what I just told you. He kept whispering, and then apologizing for this impulse to keep his voice down.
He kept wanting to check the kitchen.
He swore someone was in the apartment.
I know. I kept telling him. I know. There’s nobody here. We’re safe.
He still wanted to check. I encourages him to.
He kept saying "I swear I hear someone. I can feel them there."
"I know. I know."
We eventually had to leave and go to his apartment in the north of Chicago for the rest of the evening.
And when I did return, alone.
Holy shit.
The place was crawling with shadows.
Surfaces were crawling with light.
They were swarming that space.
They were crashing my space.
I got really sleep-deprived —which just shreds the veil for me. There is nothing that pieces the veil and thins the skin and lowers the protection more than being sleep-deprived.
and I was stressed by everything that happened regarding the workshop (which I did another podcast about, last week) and I was having a hard time getting it all back together.
I was just reacting.
It’s hard to get control when you just in the thick of it.
Every time I moved from one room to the other, entities would step back into the shadows, would lurch around a corner to evade me, duck back into a closet, flee down a hall.
It went on and on.
They startled me.
I was jumpy.
I knew it was happening, but it still kept taking my breath away, managing to surprise me by the sheer force of the feelings.
Or the visions.
“Look at that,” I kept saying. “Look at you."
They made my skin crawl, but I wasn’t existentially frightened or afraid for my safety.
They weren't evil.
They were just spirits.
All the echoes were coming off the wood work in waves. Through the stained glass, off the snow which covered 90% of the view outside.
You think you see shadows in the dark … the snow!
Oh, my God, the visions I see against the snow.
White on white translucence and phosphorescence.
I was tripping.
Hard.
I felt like I was watching a screensaver on the walls, in the air. It was fantastic.
I couldn’t take my eyes away.
I stayed up most of the night watching it, packing, pausing to regard a particular noise or creepy crawly passing through, and mostly I was just wanting to leave.
I wanted everything to go back to normal.
I pictured the airport would start to button me back up.
I’d be alone in my head a lot while traveling, but also bombarded by people, in a tense environment.
I felt like it would trigger me to automatically close some stuff back up.
I was still too open.
A part of me was enjoying it too much.
It was a long ride to the airport through the snow and the young dad who drove me was so kind and open and I stayed open to engage with him.
And I got through security, and I thought well, there was the tense part … The tension can leave me now.
I can meditate. I can concentrate. I can pull myself together.
Every hoop I jumped through in the airport was a step closer to normal. I hoped.
I was finally in my seat and we were ready to go.
Slowly taxiing. No, maybe starting to taxi.
The snow was coming down.
We were racing an incoming blizzard to get up and out of the sky, away from Chicago and on towards Charlotte, North Carolina.
And then, the captain said we’d been stopped. We were next but.
They needed to wait for the temperature to warm up ONE degree in order for the de-icing machines to work.
The weather had dipped.
We waited an hour on the runway for the temperature to rise.
We waited as they de-iced the wings, and then finally, we raised to get off the ground before everything froze again.
I’ve never heard a plane make that much noise. Or that kind of noise.
I thought of the sound of entire forests groaning under the weight of frozen boughs and branches.
It was that sound, mutated into something mechanical.
I’ve never been afraid to fly.
My mother’s brothers were Navy pilots in the Korean war. They built little kit airplanes, like Volkswagen bugs with wings, like old Jeeps, really, with doors little more than metal frames wrapped in a plasticized cloth …
I was taken up into those planes, just big enough for 4, from the time I was old enough to remember.
My dad was in the Air Force, and I had flight log books in my name from when I was a toddler.
I was never afraid to fly.
I thought of that plane in Hawaii I was on one time that was like 75% Angel Therapy people and we joked about its being the safest plane in the world.
I thought Shit, I’m the only person on this plane talking to their guides other than the pilots. I could just feel it. And I felt weak.
And scared again. A new kind of scared.
Realizing how helpless my guardians might be to protect me in this circumstance.
It was the roughest flight I’ve ever been on.
the turbulence was insane.
I don’t know how someone who hates flying wasn’t screaming at the top of their lungs.
I got vertigo as the plane was coming down in Charlotte.
Now, I’ve never experienced motion sickness in my life.
I apologize to everyone who ever complained about getting car sick because I thought you guys were being weenies…
I didn’t know.
I didn’t know how horrible it felt.
I thought I was going to die from the vertigo. It wasn’t the G force as much as an inability to sense up or down. Gravity was both offline and completely knocking the shit out of me at the same time.
I was being tossed around by giants and I couldn’t process where the sky was or where the ground was supposed to be.
I was hyperventilating. I was sweating.
And because of the delay I was going to miss my connecting flight.
I started sobbing. I was so sick. And I just wanted to be HOME.
Charlotte is like a 35 minute flight from Chattanooga.
That’s all.
But if I had to stay in the Charlotte airport for a layover … I was going to die from vertigo.
I was texting my mom, who was telling me ask to get off the plane first.
They had done this on a previous flight into Chicago for people who were missing a connection. The flight attendants came on and asked if everyone would step aside and let people off now. They needed to run for their plane.
So when I asked if they could do that.
No.
Sorry. We can’t do something like that.
Bitch.
The speed with which she gave up helping me, dismissed helping me, made me want to scream at her.
I probably looked like a crazy person.
Another passenger said, when you get off, tell the gate agent to call ahead and have your flight wait for you.
It was already boarding…
Nope.
the gate agents had no idea what I was talking about. They didn’t make calls like that.
It wasn’t up to them.
And I was talking to my guides and my distinct thought was
“Can YOU call ahead? Can you let someone know? Can you make them know I’m coming. I’m close.”
And then I had to run.
With Vertigo.
Wearing a coat.
With a suitcase and a carry on.
Without the Vertigo it would have sounded like on our workouts of the day in Crossfit.
I thought — It’s running with a burden. It’s maybe a quarter of a mile to a half a mile.
I do stuff like that.
I can do it.
It was 3 concourses. I think I ran 36 gates …
It was hell.
It was not a cool scene in a movie.
I don’t know how I did it.
I got there a good 35 minutes after boarding should have started.
And It was 7 minutes after the flight should have taken off.
I ran to a gate agent, covered in sweat and I blurted out Chattanooga, the flight number …
They apologized and motioned toward this crowd of people.
All the people who should have boarded the flight had clustered around the gate, but they weren’t being allowed through.
One of the other passengers said
“They can’t get in touch with the plane.”
I was like “What?"
“They’re not letting us on and we don’t know why.”
They made an announcement.
They were unable to contact the pilot by radio.
The plane wasn’t answering their calls.
A few minutes later, the plane's first officer (? I think that’s what they called him. I remember thinking that can’t be right. That sounds very Star Trek ) he came running down a gangway, totally out of breath.
We could hear everything he said to the gate agents.
They’d been trying to radio the gate for over half an hour. They kept telling them we could board.
The signal never got through.
They were completely unable to communicate and nobody knew why. They could talk to the tower, they just couldn’t get in touch with the gate.
The plane was out on the tarmac too. It wasn’t close to the airport. It wasn’t attached to a gangway or whatever you call those things.
The pilot finally sent this guy from the plane to physically come and get us and tell us we could get on the plane.
We had to walk even farther. It was a damn hike.
I thought I was going to die.
I was still dizzy. covered in sweat.
Dressed for Chicago temperatures.
Carrying luggage.
The flight attendants and the other passengers talked about the communications glitch the entire time we were boarding. They talked about it after we were seated.
The flight attendants kept getting into conversations with each other and the passengers.
“Nothing like that ever happens. No one could hear us. It went on for over 30 minutes … No, it’s fine now. The moment you guys got on the plane, we can call the gate just fine.”
Ha ha, laugh laugh. Weirdest thing.
They held it for me. Through my haze of sickness and misery I kept whispering “Thank you.”
The girl sitting beside me was like “This dude is crazy.” She was giving me serious side eye.
And I still had Vertigo.
The takeoff was hell. The landing was hell.
But I made it home.
And my mother, who suffers from vertigo, was waiting for me at the airport with Meclizine.
If you’re hitting that point in the new year where your excitement and drive around your intentions are starting to wane a little bit, this message is for you.
A do-over, a re-do, a take two ... a reboot whenever you need it.
MENTIONED ON THE SHOW Reboot Your Life original post
3x3 Project with Diana Frajman
HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses
Get an intuitive reading with Slade
Automatic Intuition
FACEBOOK GROUP Shift Your Spirits Community BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits Edit your pledge on Patreon
TRANSCRIPT It is January 16, 2019 as I record this segment. If you’re listening in real time, when this episode first goes live in your podcast, it’s probably around January 29, 2019, so right at the end of January beginning of February. You’re probably hitting that point in the new year where your excitement and drive around your intentions are starting to wane a little bit.
Fun fact about my practice as an intuitive - over the years, I've noticed that even though a lot of people want to get readings, have sessions, and start course work that's in my tutorials, or do Automatic Intuition. Those all seem like things you want to start in the new year. But I've noticed that it’s not so much about January. There's this wave of people who actually start things in February.
And I have a theory about why that is, and I think it's because you pretty much start out the new year under your own guns, with a lot of energy and gonna do it on your own. And then you find out that you're not making as much progress as you want. And so you do reach for help or structure or somebody else's perspective. OR, maybe you just didn't get around to it. Like, the gun went off and you weren't ready to start yet. And so you are kind of getting it together during January.
January is a horrible time of year in the northern hemisphere to get things together and start things and all of that, just for the record. So if you're one of those seasonal people who gets a little S.A.D., don't worry about it. It's cool. We're going to de-bunk a lot of that. And I purposefully did NOT record this at the end of December or for the New Year’s Day episode.
Because it's not about New Years. It’s not about one specific day on a calendar.
So don’t turn this off because you think it’s a new years thing that you missed … This is an Evergreen diatribe. And whenever you hear it, is when you were supposed to hear it.
I want to drill down into all of that some… Maybe you never quite got out of first gear this year. I kind of feel that way. And I think it's because this New Year started off weird…
We had a New Moon come in January 7th, I believe, so a week into it is when you get that nature cycle of newness. So the new moon, I do believe that we're very much in sync with the moon cycles, even if you don't believe in any other part of astrology, we can all kind of agree that the moon cycles have a definite impact on living things on this planet.
So having that come a week in kind of made it like a weird slow start. It was at the end of a lunar cycle, while you're psychologically, intellectually telling yourself you're supposed to be experiencing something new. And then when we finally get to that new moon, it was eclipsed, so that's kind of weird.
And then we're in between eclipses for most of January, with another one happening on the full moon. As I record this, I'm sitting here right in between those two things and so... I don't know. We might need an astrologer to explain all that a little bit more in-depth, but it just feels kind of like an "off" time for a lot of people.
Not only am I processing my personal feelings for you, I'm kind of collating what other people that I've spoken to are expressing that they're feeling. And this is the pattern that I've identified.
Over the years I’ve tried really hard to create alternatives to the new years resolution thing. I mean, for over a decade, I've blogged at this time of year starting out way back in, say 2007 or something like that, I got really nerded out into the linguistics of the word 'resolution', which is kind of associated with endings and started talking about reframing our language and getting into intentions.
And over the last 10 years, intentions has become more of a popular buzzword and so as that became more spread throughout everybody's consciousness, I was trying to work with alternatives to intentions and make that not such a big scary word and I think for awhile there I was making interesting lists of things and I would try to come up with these recipes each year that seemed really simple, like, Do three things.
It just kept getting more and more simple, and I kept minimizing it and I think the last time I ever did something like this, it was like the ONE thing that you need to do. And it was just this ONE sort of mindset shift or something that you were meant to practice.
Now... and maybe I've contributed to this. It seems like we've almost developed this trend for not doing resolutions or setting intentions. You see a lot of people posting all their resolutions and intentions and key words. And then you see this good third of the people on social media posting about how they're not doing them and kind of embracing the lack of doing it.
And for those of us who are a little bit too cool, we've gotten a little over the new age tools of the past because we've been around for awhile and been using them, and we've become a little bit too cool for school, you know what I mean?
Like, vision boards, yawn. The law of attraction, ugh, the Secret wore everybody out. There was so much missing from it too. They didn't even get it right. And then you know, the whole word of the year thing, eyeroll right?
I actually do have a word of the year though. It's really hard for me to see someone post, What's your word of the year? And me not think of it. So even though I didn't make a big announcement about my word of the year, or make an infographic or a meme or something.
I do have one.
And it was already there as a theme of something that I was preparing myself for. And my word is SCALE. So you can contemplate that. More the verb form than anything. The verb form of scale.
It's about working with what I already have and making more out of it without increasing time necessarily, because one of my big issues is, I don't have any more time. I don't have any time to add anything else in, so I need to work smarter, not harder, as they say. But I also need for things to be scaleable.
For instance, this podcast is a perfect example of one of the most scaleable things in my whole business. Because it is the exact same amount of work whether two of you listen to it or 2,000 or 200,000, right? It's the same amount of work.
Those are the kinds of things that make sense to put more energy into. I can go all in with the podcast and with growing the audience for the podcast because it's not more work. But it will deliver more impact. It will deliver more income. All those kinds of things. So that's my kind of theme for the year.
But I think you can think of scale in multiple directions. Like, what can you scale back? What can you make smaller that's too big and too complicated? I'm always looking to minimize things. Not only concepts like new years resolutions, but minimizing things in my visual space. The crap sitting around in my office. The number of images on the wall.
I want minimalism. It brings me peace.
So that's another type of scale and there's a lot of places as I look around my life where I can scale up or down. And it's not about bringing in anything new. It's not really about getting rid of things completely. It's just about finding the right size.
It's like a Goldilocks fable or something. It's just hard not to think about that stuff when you see people posting it.
So, in a way, whether we publicly share it or not, we do have goals, we have themes, we have dreams, we have hopes and we have wishes for changes that we want to make. And I think a lot of us have taken "the fewer hearts and flowers angle" to this cynical, jaded place. Especially in the way we put ourselves out there publicly.
And maybe we’re jaded for a good reason — we’ve tried everything.
But there are people for whom these tools and concepts that we've been practicing forever are really impactful. They're new to them. Maybe they're just discovering them. Or maybe they're re-discovering them with a newfound ability to make them work for them finally. They may be at that place in their life where it suddenly occurs to them that a vision board is an amazing tool for them.
So my iteration of the whole new year's concept now, after I've minimized it down and made it as simple as I possibly can, and I can't do that anymore, my new angle or take on this whole concept is just about the evergreen. About, what is it when we strip it all away? What's the core of this that we take into our lives on a daily basis?
I am obsessed with where does all the woo woo meet the ground?
It doesn't matter to me if you have all these elaborate spiritual modalities and techniques and all this stuff that you're really well-versed in, if it doesn't have a practical, useful tool in your every day life, if it doesn't work for you in some way, then I don't really see the point.
So it doesn't matter whether you set intentions, or when you choose to change your life. It doesn't matter not whether you do it, but it doesn't matter... Actually it doesn't matter whether you do it or not. It really doesn't.
You can be at peace.
There's a whole thing that I just realized I didn't put into this speech today, which is, you know what? It's okay just to BE. It's okay just to live your life and to not be aspirational. I did that whole episode about, can you be happy without doing something amazing? Can you be? Can you just do your thing?
So it doesn't matter whether you set your intentions or not. Or whether you choose to change anything. But it really doesn't matter when you choose to do it. That's the main point of my speech today.
And it doesn’t matter if you “blow it” because you can always do it again. Or try another way.
These "holidays", these milestones, they're arbitrary dates ... I don't really celebrate New Year, because every day I have goals. I have a chance to fuck it up, and a chance to start again. Some days I rock, some days I suck, and the calendar doesn't really have much to do with that, you know? Let's be honest.
Maybe the seasons? And the natural cycles. And the moon phases. Maybe that does impact us a little bit. I do believe that.
But the CALENDAR, you know? Oh, your birthday was on a Wednesday and it was blah. But maybe that Friday is a great time to celebrate and do something. Or maybe it's the weekend before. We'll practice at making these adjustments.
So I think we need to give ourselves permission to just do stuff when we want to do it. And not when we're TOLD we have to do it, or, Well, you missed your new years launch, so you're screwed! I guess you'll just have to wait 12 months. It's ridiculous.
I don't care whether you acknowledge New Year's or not.
I don't care whether you make resolutions or set intentions or do vision boards or have theme words.
But I also don’t want you to think I think I’m better than you because I don’t do those things.
Our lives are random and timing is a bitch and shit happens to good people, and everybody gets a little lucky here and there.
And if you’re listening to this, then you’re trying, and I think that’s all that matters.
Beyond that, whatever gets you through. Do whatever works for you.
But keep this in mind — one of my biggest life lessons last year, this past year, was realizing how much easier and more powerful it is if you focus on manifesting PEOPLE rather than places or things.
The people know the places and they have the things.
So, reach out to new people in your world, even the ones who come and go in a matter of minutes. They can make all the difference.
But while I have you here, if you want to do a Thing, for new years, for next week, for your birthday, for tomorrow..
A year ago, I talked about how to reboot your energy — I’ll link to that, because I probably went way more in depth on that episode than I’m about to here. It started out as just something that I noticed as a theme in the advice I was giving out to people who were coming in for readings. And I was getting complaints of sort of low level depression. You know when we say we're depressed but it's not like a clinical depression. It's more like, "eh". We've kind of lost our mojo, and we're not feeling motivated. We've lost our energy.
We're intellectually aware that we're trying these things but then the visceral magic is just not popping off. And you're just feeling kind of not comfortable in your own body. So you're not necessarily in need of medication. And all the mindset shifts are not working. You're taking them in and they're kind of going in one ear and out the other. And then you're beating yourself up about it.
So all of that kind of ennui, that existential angst.
I was giving out this advice that had a pattern to it or theme. I started to sort of refer to it as the Energy Reboot. Because it was about, you know, just rebooting. Rebooting your life. Rebooting your spirit and your body and your soul and your emotions. Just reboot everything.
It’s based on the principal that if you're feeling all the things that I just described, what you’re most likely missing is a 2-pronged connection to your creative, intuitive channel combined with a need to really be fully grounded in your body.
This combination is particularly powerful. If you want to hear your guides, connect with your intuition, get your creativity flowing.
But more than anything, if none of that feels like it's working, it's because it's not grounded.
So the reason why you need to reboot is... Think about, you know how the WiFi router in your house, it says it's putting out a signal but it's been working too many times or too many devices connected to it. It's filled up and it's putting out a signal but it's really slow or it's just, your computer isn't able to connect to it. So you know, you go, unplug it, count to ten, plug it back in.
My routers usually have these little lights that always remind me of the chakras of the spine or something. And they light up from the bottom back to the top. Unplugging, count to ten, plugging things back in is kind of like one of the most universal ways to fix machines that we have. You know, it's the first troubleshooting step.
The cool thing is it works for us as well as for devices. We are a very complex machine but the same principle kind of applies.
What's going on with those of you who are trying so hard, those of us who are trying and reaching and studying and practicing and wanting and hoping and willing and setting intentions. We are so up in the upper chakras. We're up in the third eye. We're up in the divine crown. We're constantly trying to project out of our heads.
If you could see me now, I'm sort of waving my arms because it's like a plate-spinning thing. We're shaped like a tree and we're very top-heavy. We've got all this stuff going on and we're just always looking up, reaching up. You know how tiring it is, right? To roll your eyes up and reach your arms up. Everything gets heavy and it's almost like a coat rack that's got too many things on top of it. It's very precarious.
Because we're so focused on everything from the heart chakra to the throat chakra to the third eye to the crown, it's like we're living in the upper half of our energy body and ignoring everything that takes place down below the root chakra, the sacral chakra, the centre of our guts and our sexual selves and our animal selves and the base of our foundation of strength.
And so it seems to be a chronic thing that people who come in who are spinning out in the upper chakras, the reason why all that's not working, that signal is not connecting, is because you're not grounded.
You need to unplug, go all the way back down to the bottom and work your way back up again.
I prescribe that you do this reboot for 90 days, not just a month. Don't do things for a week or a month. Too many things can change from one day to the next. It's like watching the stock market too closely. Don't check your stocks too much because then you're just riding a roller coaster.
Look at longer periods of time. I like quarters because I like to plan my business around quarters, and it also applies to your personal life and some of the personal development things that you want to do.
And I think quarters, 3-month periods, are perfect goal chunk time periods. Because, you know, the first month you're like, Ooo ooo! You're really pumped. You've got a lot of energy going in. And you think, ah, you can do anything for a month. And you're supposed to do things for 30 days and then it becomes a habit or something.
And then the 2nd month hits you and you suck. You fall off the wagon. You're not as motivated. You start missing. Beat yourself up about it. But if you're really committed, you've got another month to kind of bring it back home. And it all kind of comes in under the wire or comes out in the wash as they say.
So rather than really focusing on the up and down wave, just zoom out a little bit and give yourself a 90 day period to go through those phases, knowing that there's gonna be a dip, but you can still come back up from the dip.
The Energy Reboot itself is essentially a 90 day period of walking meditation combined with free associative writing. If you've heard of Morning Pages, as in The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron, or you've heard of gratitude journalling. The technical, intellectual term is proprioceptive writing. It's just writing. It's just, like, free associative writing, whatever you want to say. It's just babbling on the page.
You can do it by hand in a journal. You can type if you type really fast and feel more comfortable doing that. That's the channel, that's the creativity part, that's the Higher Self. That's the voice of your guides. That's your cool flashes of inspiration and ideas coming through. It's you brainstorming with yourself.
The walking meditation, yes I know there are some of you that can't walk, and that walking is truly a limitation that's beyond you. And if that's the case, write to me and I will give you some alternatives based on what your situation is. Something that you can use to re-ground the body that doesn't involve that kind of exercise.
But for those of you who don't think about it when you get up and just walk across the room to go to the bathroom, or get up and grab your purse and go to your car and go somewhere, then you are fully capable of doing this. And it's walking every day.
And the reason why I want you to walk is because jogging is hard and running is something that you have to work up to. And if you're not into the whole running thing, it sucks. But if you will think of a walking meditation as an opportunity to be outside, be in nature, clear your head, still get some of those endorphins going, the runner's high.
The cool thing is, at least according to my FitBit and Apple watch, I burn almost the same amount of calories jogging because I run really slow as I do walking at a good pace. And if you jog for 30 minutes versus walk for 45 minutes, it's really close in terms of the calories that you burn. So the benefits fitness-wise are there for walking.
And you don't need to go buy a new outfit, you don't need to drop a bunch at Lululemon, you don't need new shoes.
Just go walk. Don't even think about it.
And it's not going to change your life the very first second that you do it. The first few days you'll think, well I feel like a dork, waiting for the change to happen.
Just do it. Just go on auto-pilot.
I think if you can just walk and maybe kind of listen to some music, you can allow yourself to be with your thoughts. That's amazing. See some trees. See some other people. I know it's winter so go to a mall and do it. Or go to an indoor track, or wherever you can make it happen.
But if you can walk, then do it. Do it every night after supper. Go for a 30 minute, 45 minute walk.
I won't go into it again. I'm going to link to the other episode where it talks about the mechanics of how these two things work together. How these two activities, the walking meditation and the free associative writing. But if you do them for 90 days, it will reboot your energy.
It will recharge your body and your spirit. It will reconnect you to your creativity, to your intuition, your motivation will change, your mood will change. Ideas will start to download.
I promise you. It's just that simple.
And all that other complex stuff, you can still do it if you have time for it. Or you can put it away and say, you know what, I'm just gonna do this one little simple thing for 90 days.
Modify it wherever you wish. If you like to mind map and draw in a sketch book and do that kind of mind-to-hand-to-paper sort of thinking on paper, as opposed to maybe the free associative writing, do that! Just set a time limit for it. Set a timer for 15 or 20 minutes and do that some. Make a space for that.
Part of the reason why I call it walking meditation is because yes, meditation is amazing and there are a lot of benefits associated with it. But that does not mean that you have to formally sit in a lotus position and clear your mind and chant and listen to a water fountain in the corner of your room. You don't have to do that. If anything, that sounds really boring to me and I don't think I could keep that up for half an hour.
But I can go walk somewhere scenic and cool and see people and things, and dogs and nature. Ooo a feather on the ground! All kinds of cool things happen when you're walking. Walking IS a meditation if you do it with that intention.
As far as other modifications, if daily is too much for you, I will say this: You could get really Shift Your Spirits meta and modify this with a 3x3 strategy, which also works on a 90 day time period. Also a quarter concept that I use.
So again, I'll link to episodes where we've talked about the 3x3 project with Diana Frajman. What the 3x3 strategy is and how I use it.
But basically it's 3 actions, 3 times a week, for 3 months. Do 3 things a week for 3 months. 3x3.
So if you can't make a daily walking meditation/journalling happen, then do it 3 times a week for 90 days. And we'll say that that's the modified minimal version of this exercise.
Anyway, I talked about all this stuff last year. I was just sharing it as a pattern of advice that I was giving out. And some of you decided to actually take it on as a challenge without my asking. And to do it and to try it and write me about it and say, Hey, I'm doing that.
And you kind of made it a Thing.
So now I'm putting it back out there as a Thing. Make the Energy Reboot your Thing that you're gonna do. And let me know that you're doing it. Post about it in the SYS community. Hashtag #REBOOT. Or put keywords at the beginning of your posts. Energy Reboot. Invite people to do it with you. Share your progress or your observations along the way.
You can also contact me personally if you want to have some accountability. Email me halfway through and let me know what's different.
At the end of the 90 days, write me again and tell me how things have changed.
Do you have disturbing thoughts about your own death? Or horrific daydreams where you play out different scenarios involving your own death, or that of your loved ones?
I think of it as the "elephant in the room" when we’re talking about spirituality and our souls. We’re probably all having these thoughts a lot more than we’re talking about them …
You Might Die Tomorrow is Kate Manser's life’s work dedicated to helping you live urgently, love openly, and enjoy your life — by thinking about your death.
It’s about an inspiration to live today.
GUEST LINKS - KATE MANSER www.youmightdietomorrow.com
Deathbed Meditation
You Might Die Tomorrow Facebook Group
MENTIONED ON THE SHOW Heather Alice Shea
HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses
Get an intuitive reading with Slade
Automatic Intuition
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TRANSCRIPT Kate:
Yeah, I was just like everybody else. I didn't really think about death very much, other than thinking that I was totally invincible all throughout high school, doing a lot of dangerous things.
But at the time, what precipitated my shift, from going from not thinking about death to embracing death, which is where I am today, was a period of intense death anxiety. I don't know if you've ever been there, Slade, but I was just consumed by death anxiety.
At the time, I was in a marriage that was very unhappy and I was just in decision paralysis agony, didn't know what to do, and then I had three people die around my same age in unrelated tragedies in a span of six months.
So that just sent me into a tailspin oh, Ohmygod, I could die at any moment. I need to be scared all the time.
Slade:
Mmm... So tell me, what are some of the components of death anxiety? What are the thoughts and the voices that you're hearing? What are they saying?
Kate:
It was like there was a movie in my head all the time of a really gory, not fun movie happening where like, if I was driving into an intersection, for example, which you do, we do all the time. I would just have this quick snap vision of a Mack truck coming and taking me out as I went through the intersection. And then it would just continue. That movie would continue and I would think, oh, what would happen?
The paramedics would come, then my family would have to be notified. All down just this dark tunnel of mortality.
And then the same thing would apply for other people in my life. I would imagine getting the call that my mom had died unexpectedly. And I think the phone was kind of a trigger for me because I had gotten a couple of these unexpected calls when three of my friends died. I had that negative association.
And so I was just afraid of death all the time. It was just this mysterious unknown thing that I couldn't control but put all my energy into trying to.
Slade:
Okay, so it was much more visceral violence, suspensful gory movie kind of stuff for you. It wasn't even more the existential stuff. It was actual... Well I've heard before that that's kind of a PTSD thing? To, in the moment, be struck with flashes of anxious violence. I mean, anything can cause you to have PTSD. You could have it around the trauma of those phone calls. You know what I'm saying? The ones that had happened in the past and that was some kind of lingering energy that was getting triggered.
Kate:
Oh yeah.
And it was the gory moment of death, for sure, but it was also.. My mind was very preoccupied with all the things that would happen after the death occurred. Because that's what's unknown. We don't know if we're going to be like the stoic, you know, if we lose someone in our life that we really care about, are we going to be the stoic survivor or are we going to be like crumbled under the circumstances?
So I would have trouble sleeping at night because I would imagine the whole scenario. What would happen if my husband had died unexpectedly, and calling his family and going to Brazil to have a funeral there and all of the things that would happen.
It got to the point that, I had always been someone who was like, pretty much a lover of life, but during this period, which lasted about a year and half, I was putting all my energy into death anxiety and it had completely clouded the beauty of life.
Slade:
Okay, so I have to tell you. There was this synchronicity involved with our meeting. The day before I was introduced to your site, a woman had posted in our Facebook Shift Your Spirits community asking if anyone else had obsessive thoughts about death.
Kate:
Wow...
Slade:
And she was really quick to say that, it wasn't really negative, it wasn't violent. She wasn't contemplating suicide or anything like that. She was just kind of putting it out there that she thought really often about death. But more from an existential place.
That's why I was surprised that you were talking about these kind of violent scenarios, the actual death itself. She was kind of talking more from a place of like, being really profoundly aware, like this clock ticking and having this limited amount of time on earth and she just put it out there and said, you know, that she was thinking about it in a contemplative way.
She found it odd that more people didn't talk about it, right? It's like this elephant in the room, especially in a community like ours where we're talking about spirits and communication from those who've passed. That kind of stuff. She was asking if anyone wanted to chime in and say how they felt about it.
And it was weird because it was one of those posts where a lot of people were liking it or responding to it without commenting. So I said, "Yeah, I really do think those thoughts actually, and I wasn't sure what to say though in support of that other than... I feel you.
Kate:
Yeah.
Slade:
And then the very day, there you were with your message and I thought, okay, this is obviously a conversation that I need to have for everyone who was probably seeing that post and thinking, I don't even know what to do with this.
So help me reframe this in a positive light. How did you get to a place where you could embrace your death?
Kate:
So believe it or not, it was another tragic and unexpected death of someone around me, same age, so it was like the fourth. A year and a half had passed since that six months where I had three in a row. I believe it was, yeah, about a year and a half went by and then a friend and coworker of mine at Google, Dan Freedenburg, was climbing Mount Everest and he died in the Nepal earthquake, in an avalanche, when he was up at base camp.
Man, I was so angry initially when I heard that he died, because he was a really vibrant, adventurous, goofy, very intelligent person, and very well liked among Google and his friends. He dated a celebrity and what my first reaction was, was just anger. That he had taken part in an elective sport, really, and took his life in his own hands and ultimately it was his choice to climb Mount Everest. That ultimately took him out of this world, away from all of us.
I was so mad at him at first.
But then as I thought more about it, I realized that climbing Mount Everest is something that you don't just like do on a random Saturday. It's something that requires a ton of mindful energy. It's very expensive. You have to train really hard for it and it's a choice that you make over a long period of time.
I realized that he was a very smart and vibrant person and he had put a lot of thought into climbing Mount Everest. He accepted the risk that came with that because, as I looked back on his decision, I came upon this realization that he HAD to climb Mount Everest in order to truly live. That if he had stayed on the ground, he also would have died in a way as well, because he would have been living out of his system of values and not living his authentic life.
That was when I suddenly saw death in a new perspective, which was that I have no control over when I die. Dan had no control over when he died and he decided to live vibrantly and take calculated risk.
I could die climbing Mount Everest if I ever did that, which I probably wouldn't.
I could die in that intersection that I was so afraid of going through all the time.
Or, I'm a very clumsy person! I could probably die climbing the stairs, and I'm putting so much of my precious energy into worrying about death when I could be putting that energy into living while I'm still alive.
That was really the main turning point for me, was just like, hey, I could die tomorrow and whereas when I was with the death anxiety, that was the most terrifying thought. Suddenly, a light had been shown on it and I was like, oh! I could die tomorrow! And that's the most freeing concept I've ever experienced.
Slade:
So that's interesting. The fact that we could make that a freeing concept.
So how do you recommend, as we're listening, we're all probably now really feeling the anxiety about it. So how do we manage that?
Kate:
Yeah. I'm actually doing some research right now for this for the last chapter that I'm working on for my book. Like, psychologically we manage our fear of death. I believe that fear of death is... And many, many scientists and psychologists believe that fear of death is like the one universal fear that all humans share. We're not all afraid of snakes but we're all afraid of death.
The research shows that the best way to manage our fear of death is two things:
Number one. To live life in accordance with our values, which then bolsters our self-esteem. And number two, to invite mortality awareness into your consciousness, as opposed to keeping it on the fringes, because I'd be very curious to talk to the woman who posted in your Facebook group what her contemplation has been and the arc of that.
Because, I know I can say for myself that the more I invite death into my life, the more I think about it and meditate on it, the better I feel and the more vibrant I live while I'm still alive.
Slade:
So how do you think we can use this sense of our mortality to empower us? To help us make decisions about what we're doing in our lives?
Kate:
Man, in death, everything seems to just fall away and become clear. Death is this... There's something about it. There's something about the finality of it that we have so much going on in our lives that when we look at it from the perspective of death or the end of our life, we realize how little of it really matters to us.
That's what I've found is the best way to help me make decisions in life is, I actually do this thing that I call the Deathbed Gut Check, which is that when i'm faced with a decision that I'm having trouble making, I don't know what to do. I get decision paralysis with the best of them and I'm frozen and trying to figure out what the heck I want to do with my life.
I do the Death Bed Gut Check, which is, I will close my eyes and imagine myself on my deathbed. I'm on my deathbed and I'm looking at the present moment or the tough decision that I'm trying to make, I'm looking BACK at it from the perspective of being about to die.
I am given a sense of clarity and I imagine myself thinking, like, ok, I'm on my deathbed, how do I feel having done Option A. I observe the visceral reaction in my body. Do I feel a lightness of being, or do I feel a pit at the bottom of my stomach?
I do the same thing for Option B.
Because it's so loud in our lives, with all this stuff that swirls around, and it's difficult to focus on... get that perspective of what matters. I use that sense of mortality to get perspective and help me make decisions in life. And that five second Deathbed Gut Check has helped me make some really, really important decisions and also really simple ones.
And it's something that, death is accessible to all of us and it's a tool that is radically underused.
Slade:
I have to share with you that several months ago, I was working with a healer around some creativity blocks and I was really struggling with the book that I was working on. Part of my struggle was that I had another book that I really wanted to be writing instead, and I had this HUGE sense of guilt about abandoning one to work on the other, and abandoning all that work and etcetera etcetera.
I was just angst thinking about it, as authors do. You know, just ridiculously blown up into this existential crisis.
The woman I was sharing all this with came back to me with just a really simple question: If you had only enough time to live and produce one of these books, which one is it?
Kate:
Wow.
Slade:
And it was INSTANTLY...
Kate:
gasp It was!
Slade:
You know what I mean? The answer was like, Oh.
Kate:
Lightning bolt.
Slade:
Yeah! It was like, so just flashed through your body. Like, all the thinking and worrying and pros and cons list just fell away.
Kate:
Yes!
Slade:
Yeah, so I will now call it the Deathbed Gut Check.
Kate:
Yeaaaah.
Slade:
It's a great way to think about it.
Well, so you also have something called the Deathbed Meditation. Tell us about that.
Kate:
The Deathbed Meditation actually came from the Deathbed Gut Check, because I had observed these positive effects of imagining myself on my deathbed and helping me make decisions in life that... I became curious about the deeper effects of meditating on mortality.
So I started googling around and I learned a lot about how pervasive death-awareness is, particularly in the Buddhist religion. But I couldn't find an actual meditation similar to what that Deathbed Gut Check is, from the perspective of our deathbed, looking back over our lives, and so I wrote one.
I've been facilitating it now for I think two and a half years and it's of course morphed over that time but it's essentially a guided meditation that's anywhere between 20 and 30 minutes. That's appropriate for novice and experienced meditators alike, in which I safely guide you to imagine yourself on your deathbed, wherever that is for you.
It's different for everybody. It could be your grandparents' house. It could be a shack on the beach. It could be, one guy actually, for him, his safe place, where his deathbed was, where he imagined it in this meditation, was a place that he had been on in a psychedelic trip and he said, "I never thought I'd be able to get back there and the meditation took me there."
So from the perspective of your deathbed, wherever that is, we go through and we look over your life. You growing up. We look at the decisions that you made in the time that you had. What you did do, what you didn't do. And we observe, again, those visceral feelings that come out.
But again, it's without judgement because at the end of your life, there's nothing you can do. But then at the end of the meditation, we close with a call to act, because unlike on your deathbed, at the end of this meditation, you DO have more time.
And with that, we have seen some really beautiful personal transformations occur.
Slade:
What kind of feedback do you get from the people who are doing this meditation? What are their takeaways?
Kate:
Oh, so many amazing things and I have to tell you, when I first started doing, even when I first started, with the whole concept of, you might die tomorrow, and the Deathbed Meditation, it had radically shifted my life for the better.
I'm telling you, I made changes in my life. I quit my job. I went travelling for a couple of years. Like, those things are awesome, but it was really the daily impact that mortality awareness had in my life, that just made me want to share it with the world.
But there were incidences where I was like, oh, this is talking about death. There are some people or some instances in which people may not accept it with open arms, and it will be hard. And the two incidences that I thought were, one, people who were actually dying. People with terminal illness or the elderly or people who deal with death every day in their lives, like doctors for example.
I was like, oh, I don't want to talk about you might die tomorrow with them because it's so real for them and I think it's inappropriate.
It turns out, over time, that those people, and particularly those with terminal illness, are the OG fans of you-might-die-tomorrow. And what I realize is like, unlike the rest of us, they can't push death under the rug. So from there, I gained a new sense of confidence in my message for everyone.
And then regarding the Deathbed meditation, just recently I, when I was doing workshops and things, I wasn't always including it. But when I got the call from Facebook a couple of months ago and they wanted me to perform, or facilitate, the Deathbed meditation at their corporate office here in Austen, that was when I knew that this is a message that I should not be afraid of. This is a message that people want to hear.
And some of the transformations I've seen are people who, like, one woman is a scientist and she was working testing soils for the government. She left her job and is now pursuing her dream to become a nutritionist. There are a lot of people who packed up their things and are now travelling in various parts of the world as a result of the meditation.
But really, what I hope is that, these big changes are fantastic in living life in accordance with what's meaningful to you. It is fantastic. But it's the little ways that death can positively impact your life, which is what I hope people take away from the Deathbed Meditation. Just loving more vibrantly, living more urgently, and making it a priority to enjoy our time while we're still here.
Slade:
So, this may be a little bit obvious question. It may just be a continuation of what you're just saying. But what do you hope that you can contribute to our collective understanding into the greater conversation about spirituality and our experience being human.
What do you hope your legacy is?
Kate:
Mmm... my legacy. I hope that people can embrace their death. That is my message. But really, at the end of the day, I found that you might die tomorrow and thinking about my death is a means to an end. Thinking about my death has positively impacted my life.
But what I want people to take away at the end of the day is to live in accordance with your values and I have no idea why we're really here. We're like, what is that saying? We're meat sacks gravitationally stuck to a rock spinning in a galaxy greater than our comprehension. We don't know why we're here. And so, to prioritize enjoyment in life, I think that's what I really would want people to take away, is just have fun. And you have no idea, just enjoying your life, how far that ripple effect will go to that which you don't even understand.
Slade:
It occurs to me that I should probably ask you, what are your feelings about the concepts of life after death, of the spirit surviving this lifetime? There's no right or wrong answer. I'm just curious what your personal feeling is about all that.
Kate:
I'm actually weirdly a fan of conspiracy theories. And I definitely don't think the afterlife and spirituality is a conspiracy theory but I say that because one of the things that I'm grateful for in my life is that I believe anything is possible until it's proven otherwise. And I really like the idea of, in our consciousness, living on in spirituality. So I believe in the possibility of the afterlife.
I absolutely believe in spirituality and if you look into the experiences of people who have actually had near death experiences, one of the key things, the key aspects that many of these experiences share is an understanding of the Oneness of humanity and shared consciousness, and the idea that our lives do go on.
And again, I think that death is the greatest teacher, and if that's what they see and it brings me comfort, then I'd absolutely believe in it.
What was your experience of mortality awareness?
Slade:
You know, I think mine is more of the existential stuff, and part of what I contemplate a lot, because I am surrounded by a community of people. Here's the weird thing - my brand is all about bringing spirituality down to earth. Like fewer hearts and flowers is my tagline...
Kate:
Yeah.
Slade:
Yeah, yeah.
So what that really means is it doesn't do anything for me if I can't apply it to my actual life. If spirituality and personal development go hand in hand, for me, and all this great new age vocabulary and tools and concepts only really, where's rubber hit the road kind of thing. So I'm always looking for that for myself, and that's sort of what I share and put out into the world.
Like, okay, well it's great that you can talk to your spirit guides. What can we do with that, you know?
Kate:
Yeah.
Slade:
But it's interesting because I still attract an audience that is much more woo woo than I am. Sometimes I look at the conversations going on in my own Facebook community and I'm like, man these people are out there! And I love it! I love it because I don't... I'm not there to debunk anything. And like you said, you know, if there's something that I don't really, if I can't disprove it...
My favourite quote is actually from Marilyn Monroe. She was being interviewed by someone for a newspaper article and she made an offhand remark about somebody's astrological sign and the reporter said, "Do you believe in that?"
And she, with this totally like, Duh, look on her face, was like, "I believe in everything a little bit."
So I kind of have that feeling. Like, I believe in everything a little bit.
So one of the things that I notice in my own deathbed meditative contemplations is, I have a lot of friends who are mediums who spend... their entire jobs and career and purpose revolves around the concept of speaking to people who have passed away. And I'm not a medium. All mediums are psychic but not all psychics are mediums.
Kate:
Yeah.
Slade:
And I don't specifically have that experience. So I have a big "Huh... okay, that's interesting."
So what I find my contemplations being is, I'm led down all of these super phenomenal paranormal conversations with people all the time. I'm inundated with the concept that, you know, our souls are infinite and all that kind of stuff. And I can visit people here, talk to them after I'm gone. And then I'll have these moments where I am like, wait a minute, that's what everybody else thinks.
And I'll reel it all the way back in and think, what do I really think about that?
And I have this concept that I've only spoken about with a few people. I actually did... Remember when I said sometimes my conversations with new people are more interesting than any other? I spoke with this woman named Heather Alice Shea once on the show and we were set up through a mutual friend. "You guys should do an episode!"
She and I talked for 50 minutes before we started the interview and it was all around an offhand comment that I had made about the fact that sometimes I think about being an atheist. And I test out my beliefs in terms of like, can I still be a psychic and be an atheist? Can I still explain some of this phenomenon without having to believe in a higher power or like a bearded man in the sky kind of thing.
So I have this whole concept of spiritual atheism that I play with.
She and I just went down this rabbit hole about that, right? Again, it's not about debunking anything or disproving anything, but is there this place that you can be comfortable in where you don't know?
Kate:
Mmm... the ambiguity.
Slade:
Yeah!
Are you okay with the thought that, you know, this could happen or something else could happen? I could be totally surprised. It could all be over and I wouldn't even know, you know?
So those are the kinds of things that I think about. I don't know if that answers your question, but...
Kate:
Yeah, that's beautiful. I mean, that really hits on what helped me is getting comfortable with that ambiguity and mindfully channelling my energy elsewhere. It's like, oh, I don't have control over when or how I die. But I have 100% control over how I live until that time comes.
Slade:
Yes.
Kate:
And I love that spiritual atheism. I met a guy who now has a retreat in Thailand and man, he's very passionate about his concept of spiritual atheism.
Slade:
Really!
Kate:
Oh yeah, yeah. I should connect you guys.
Slade:
Yeah! Who is it?
Kate:
His name is Pierre. He is American but he studied Zen Buddhism for many years in Japan and how has a retreat in Thailand. He's just very outspoken about this idea that you CAN separate them. You can separate the woo woo from the spirituality. And that you can make it whatever you want. And very specifically about the spiritual atheism.
Slade:
I have this fantasy. Like, you know you have your play out the - ooo what if this happened, kind of thing. And this is the comment that I made that Heather picked up on. I did an episode once about how I fantasize about just one day becoming a born again atheist.
Kate:
Wow.
Slade:
And announcing to everyone, I've worked my way through the list and I've found a way that I can philosophically justify all of this. For myself. Who would be okay with that? Who would stick around?
Because I don't... I actually think that we can have all of this stuff. I think there's a lot of biological explanations that will exist in the future understanding. I believe that a lot of the things that we experience as psychic phenomenon is literally just a part of our biology and the miracle of our brain. And it doesn't mean that it's not happening. It just means that we're just equipped to do it in mortal form. You know what I mean?
Kate:
Wow.
Slade:
I think that there's a lot of science that could explain some of the phenomenon that we experience. That's not a psychic prediction necessarily. It's just this thing that I contemplate a lot, which is, can we have all of this? And is it okay if you choose to populate your spirituality with supernatural concepts?
Because I kind of think, at the end of the day, people who have faith, even if it's a different faith system, I have found, are more open in general. They're more compassionate, they're more likely to believe other people's beliefs. They're more likely to leave other people alone to be whatever they want to be. They are less likely to need to convert everyone to their way of thinking.
You see it in elderly people in particular, who really talk in purely fundamentalist Christian vocabulary. But their philosophy and their vibe and their true wisdom is super open minded and extremely liberal.
I kind of feel like there is a place. There is a happy spot. I think that maybe it's what your message is about. That there's a place where we can exist in uncertainty. And because of the uncertainty, be motivated to make it all amazing now. Because what good is it, again, if it's not useful to us right now, what good is it if I'm gonna be able to contact my loved ones after I'm dead?
That's great, but what kind of impact can that have on people's experiences here and now in the moment? Can we do something practical? Can we be okay with the concept that what some people talk about is spiritual entities to a more clinical, intellectual mindset? We can talk about the archetypes as kind of psychological programming that all our brains kind of carry, like apps on our phone or whatever.
Kate:
Yeah.
Slade:
So I like to contemplate the place where all those things end up in a big chaotic mash and I think at the end of the day, it's a little bit of a choice. And as long as the choice is life and happiness and I'm gonna get off my ass and DO something, then I'm cool with whatever you want to bring.
Kate:
Yeah. Wow, you had a very insightful observation there about people who have a sense of spirituality being more open and accepting. There's actually scientific, or psychological basis for this. It's the research that I'm doing now is basically like, it really all comes down to security. And if you have a sense of security, which religion very often provides, you have the space to be more open. Because you don't feel threatened.
Whether it is Christian fundamentalism or whatever the belief in, that everything's going to be okay, that you're part of a group and things are stable. That bolsters self-esteem. But one of the things that I argue in my book is that spirituality is amazing. And I absolutely believe that people should do whatever makes them feel good.
I think you can also create your own personal religion of what is meaningful to you. Whether whatever you're practising religion is, you can kind of personal religion of, okay, these are the things that are important to me. And I'm going to actually live in accordance with those, and then that, therefore, provides that security that allows people to be open and...
Man, that was a beautiful observation.
Slade:
Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me about this today.
Tell everyone where they can go to find you online to explore this more.
Kate:
Yeah! Come hang out with me. My website is www.YouMightDieTomorrow.com. Pretty easy to remember. And I am finishing up my book now. It's going to hopefully be coming out this summer. And if you're interested in joining our community on Facebook, or inquiring about the experience of the Deathbed Meditation, I do those in person and online and groups and corporate workshops.
I just love to hear about what your experiences are and what thinking about your death has done and impacted your life.
Slade:
That's wonderful, Kate. That's for coming on the show.
Kate:
Thank you, Slade.
A little personal diatribe about comparing yourself to others, impostor syndrome and shoulding all over yourself.
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TRANSCRIPT Slade:
Have you been shoulding all over yourself?
Are the voices playing in your head these days starting sentences with You should this ... or You should that… Or I should …
You know, “I should …” feels a little better, a little more like you’re driving, you’re in control, it’s intentional … but beware the “I should probably …”
Hmm. That “probably” … That’s external. That is not originating within you.
And along with all the things you’re telling yourself you should be doing, if you do them, then it feels like you’re faking it. It feels like a mask. It feels like a white lie, at best. And if you’re supposed to be shining your light, then putting a mask over that dims it.
It’s a shade.
Impostor syndrome — who the F do you think you are, acting like you’re some kind of star. Nobody’s buying it. Look at so and so over there, look at HER instagram. She knows how to do it. She’s barely even trying.
And now we’re into Comparisonitis.
See, this malaise is actually sort of a cluster of mind virus cancer cells — it's comparisonitis and impostor syndrome (referred to in pharmaceutical commercials as IS) — and shoulding all over yourself.
That's the big symptom.
The past month or so, in my world, was difficult.
In addition to all the typical holiday stuff and just having all your routines interrupted, my dad was also in the hospital. And although I should have had a lot of excuses and reasons to cut myself some slack, instead I just kept thinking of all the things that a "Real FB group host" would post.
I kept being presented with the idea of things I was “supposed” to do or things I “ought” to do.
It actually became a little ridiculous. Because I was aware of it, as a voice, as a program, playing in the background. Like a tv left on across the room.
Somebody turn that shit OFF already!
I thought I ought to be posting Solstice message, because I would prefer to acknowledge THAT among all the holidays that we're acknowledging during the holidays and I felt like I needed to let everyone know I'm down with solstice.
And then of course, do I do a Christmas message? That's always kid of awkward for a non-Christian because we celebrate quasi-pagan American Christmas. I don't know. That's a conflict in and of itself.
And then a New Years message. That's a huge one for personal development bloggers and self-help people like me. I saw all these happy new year messages in the Facebook community and I felt like as the administrator, the originator of our group, I “should” somehow beam in. I "should" somehow appear in a FB live video or something.
I’m going to have to come back and do another post addressing goal setting and milestones and intentions and all that stuff, because it’s a topic unto itself, and it's a little bit too much of a tangent at this moment.
These were the kinds of things that were crossing my mind when I say I was "shoulding" all over myself. Those were the detailed examples in the moment of how that was all manifesting.
But the reality is, what I wanted to do during the Holidays, once the actual holidays hit and everyone was off doing all their stuff, I just wanted to RETREAT.
Self care was definitely what was called for and I don't think anyone who looked in and took a peek at what was going on in my world and the lives of those close to me and my family and all that, I don't think anyone would have argued with me that, you know, you need to just be focused on some self care.
But I felt like, in order to claim that, I had to REBEL.
I sure as shit couldn't "phone it in" or go through the motions (because that’s IS for sure. Impostor syndrome. We're calling it IS now).
By rebel I mean not “call in sick”, not apologize. I didn’t want to have to explain it or announce it or do a Facebook post about how I'm not going to be on Facebook. That annoys me.
I just wanted to ghost.
Aka the Irish goodbye, the French exit, and any number of other ethnophobic terms—which means leaving a social gathering without saying goodbye. One minute you’re there at the bar, the party ... And then the next minute you’re just gone.
Where did he go?
I’ve been practicing that for as long as I can remember. I know since childhood I can remember at least an elementary school age Halloween costume party of some type at some time when I ghosted. It required my mother's assistance because of course she was driving. But somehow I pulled off a ghosting.
Leaving without anyone noticing is one of the components of invisibility magic, which is something that I can say that I'm good at, or that I enjoy practicing. I don't know that I ENJOY it. I think I had to learn how to do it for any number of reasons. I enjoy the fact that I'm good at it and it's kind of fun to watch the effects of good invisibility magic. I think, wow, it's cool that I can do that.
I’ll talk about that another time too.
But this idea of ghosting, the Irish goodbye, the French exit, my friends in college kind of probably hated that about me. I was known to do it. I let it be a THING I was known for, because then it was just a blank cheque. I could do it all the time.
After college, friends always wanted to ride with me when we went out because I didn’t drink. I did designated driver on New Years Eve for, I can't even remember how many years.
But I always used to say, “Alright. You can ride with me to the club, but I WILL disappear on you, so just be prepared… I'll get you there but you gotta figure out how you're getting home. Because I will disappear."
Interestingly, when I think back to that, I realize what I REALLY wanted to be doing when I wanted to disappear from the club was the same thing that I wanted to be doing now when I disappeared from everything.
I just wanted to be home, reading a book. And that's exactly what I did for New Years.
Not New Years Eve. New Years Day.
I actually prefer New Years Day so much that I just go to bed in preparation on New Years Eve of having a luscious New Years Day.
My New Years Day's intentions were to really truly just take the day off, do nothing, but drink caffeine, coffee, tea, watch Netflix and read. And stay in my pajamas all day.
It's HARD for me not to work at least a little bit every day. And I did end up working for about 10 minutes. Because it was a Tuesday, and I forgot to schedule everything, so I had to jump on Facebook and share a few links to my latest podcast episode — for the sake of my guest, really, more than for me. If it had been one of these solo episodes, I would've just been like, eh, I'll do it tomorrow.
But I didn't want her to not get the full, you know, backing and sharing and promotion that her show deserves.
By the way, just for the record, lying all around day in pajamas not doing anything … was depressing. It was physically depressing. It programmed my body in a way that was really uncomfortable to me and I don’t think that I'm ever going to even try that again.
It honestly felt like being sick, but I wasn’t. And it kind of made me almost have symptoms of being tired, like feeling fatigue. And who wants that?
Through all this, on New Years Day even, when I was really just intentionally ghosting everything. I kept thinking:
- Are the people in the SYS community wondering where I am?
- Do they realize I’m missing?
- Are they disappointed that I’m not putting some helpful something on their feed today?
And I don't mean are they wondering where I am, do they miss me... like I wanted to be missed. It was more like, "Oh crap, I hope I can get away with this and that they really don't care." Because I really need this.
And I feel like if I could've asked you all to vote, you probably would've said it's okay. And there were so many wonderful Happy New Year messages on there anyway. I would kind of look at them and scan once in awhile, oh those are nice! You know, whoever's in there looking for that is getting a lot of it. They don't need mine. It's just a drop in the bucket at this point.
To tell you honestly, it sometimes feels like I’ve thrown a party on social media and then chosen to stay upstairs. Like I'm having a party in my house but I'm just hanging out in my bedroom with my cats because social media for me has always been a necessity of my business more than a real kind of personal impulse.
My personal impulse is always to ghost.
I don't know. Did you guys criticize my absence? Did you think, “Wow. What a lousy leader he is…”
Or did you even notice? Or did you think maybe I was recovering from a stressful holiday period with a parent in the hospital, because you saw me post about that. So you kind of knew, maybe, what was going on for me.
You know what? Who cares what you think about me? WHO CARES WHAT ANYONE THINKS? About you. Or me. Or anyone.
That’s kind of the point of all those thoughts — all the Shoulding all over yourself.
What do you really want to do? What do you need? Why isn’t that acceptable? Why isn't that enough?
How are you shoulding all over yourself? What areas of your life? What’s it about?
It’s gotta be about something to do with the public. With other people. With those around you outside your own head. With some perceived external judgment from the world.
But is that even real? Or are you projecting it?
And what happens if you just don’t? If you’re honest with your true inclinations and desires and needs and you just say:
- I’m not going.
- I’m not showing up.
- I’m not calling.
- I’m not explaining.
- I’m not apologizing.
Even as I say that, I’m thinking “Isn’t that a little rude though? You gotta make some excuses and apologies just to keep from hurting other people’s feelings…”
One of my favorite memes is a picture of a T-shirt that I really need to track down and order:
It's just a black t-shirt and it has big white block letters on it and it says “SORRY I’M LATE. I DIDN’T WANT TO COME.”
That kinda sums up my social life.
I'm one of those people that gets excited if you cancel plans with me. I go, "Oh yes!" I feel a sense of relief. It still assumes an apology. "Sorry I'm late. I didn't want to come."
It draws sarcastic attention to the issue and makes you more of an asshole.
But one of my favorite Oprah quotes, or Oprah-isms is “NO" IS A COMPLETE ANSWER.
It’s okay to say No.
Without an excuse
or an explanation
or a white lie
or a justification
What if you just say No? What can you really get away with just saying No to?
If you’re a spiritual person and you're trying to better yourself and be best, you probably want to come from a place of Yes.
So, that’s sticky, right? I want to come from a place of Yes but I need to say no and not apologize for it when I need to.
It sounds good, but that's all kind of hard to follow through on, I think. So maybe do this. Maybe get clear about what are you saying Yes to for the right or wrong reasons. What are you saying No to for the right or wrong reasons?
Just get clear about that.
Do you say No because of a fear of success? Then you should probably come from a place of Yes then right?
It’s so easy to convince ourselves that every invitation is an opportunity. Have you ever thought something like, "Yeah, but what if I don't go to the Christmas party and my soul mate was there and we didn't meet."
Some bad romantic comedy situation.
But let’s be honest—you know there are some things you just want to say No to.
Obligations.
What happens if you say No? Really, what happens?
What about instead of explaining or apologizing, you just don’t say the word 'sorry' anymore.
There was a meme going around last year that I loved so much. And it was about replacing Sorry with Thank you.
Instead of “Sorry I’m late” you say “Thank you for waiting on me.”
Instead of “Sorry I’m talking your ear off” you say “Thank you for taking the time to listen."
I know Oprah said No is a complete answer, but I think we can still make it pretty.
You could say: “Thank you for the invitation. I’m really grateful you included me. I won’t be able to attend. Have a fantastic time! Let’s catch up soon and you can tell me all about it.”
They're excited. They're don't want to hear about the drama going on in your world that you're using as an excuse not to come. So just wish them well. Wish them happiness and say, "Have a great time. Tell me about it later."
Are you mad at me, for choosing to be alone in my tower over the holidays? And just ignore all that Solstice, Christmas, New Year stuff and just not be there for it.
Are you disappointed? Do you resent me?
You’re not. You don't.
I’ve talked to some of you about this and I know what your response is...
And, you know, your friends and family and clients, they're probably okay with your choices too.
Whatever it is you’re trying to be:
perfect parent
perfect professional
perfect creative
perfect partner
perfect spouse
perfect planner
You notice the theme there…
Shoulding all over yourself is about perfectionism.
You’re not going to be perfect.
It’s not going to be perfect.
Maybe as we remove the words sorry and should from our vocabulary, and we can also remove the word perfect.
My friend Seth has a mantra for this:
“It always turns out wonderful anyway."
“Is it possible… that Kundalini awakening could look like psychosis?”
After ditching university, Kara-Leah Grant spent her twenties traveling the world in search of adventure, creativity and a tribe of like-minded souls. Sex, drugs, yoga and music festivals were simply part of the fun, until they weren’t. Diagnosed as bipolar after leaping topless onto a moving logging truck in the wilderness of British Columbia, Kara-Leah returns to New Zealand to heal her soul, face her past, and uncover the deep truths of her innermost being.
GUEST LINKS - KARA-LEAH GRANT karaleah.com
Sex, Drugs & (mostly) Yoga: Field Notes from a Kundalini Awakening by Kara-Leah Grant
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TRANSCRIPT I asked her how bad it got when it really wasn’t fun anymore...
Kara-Leah:
That moment was waking up in a psych ward for the second time, so this is September 2004, and 4 weeks earlier I ended up in the psych ward as well. The second time I woke up, I remember so clearly I was in this single bed right beside the door and there were 4 beds to a room so it was me with other people.
I woke up knowing that my fiancé had broken up with me 5 or 6 days before. Knowing that because he'd broken up with me, I now didn't have anywhere to live. Knowing that I was essentially in debt and I didn't have a job. Knowing that I'd been diagnosed bipolar. That I was back in a psych ward. That I was potentially seen as crazy. That my whole life had imploded.
And knowing that, for the second time... The first time, it had been triggered by taking LSD and mushrooms and ecstasy and weed and all those things. But this time I hadn't taken any drugs.
So it's a sense of waking up going, I'm crazy again and I can't blame the drugs and I've been dumped by the person that was supposed to be here for me. And feeling like hell was gracing my heart but I was so afraid of being vulnerable that I couldn't express it even. There was nowhere to go because I was surrounded by people in the ward and the room and the sense of total implosion of life and nowhere to hide anymore. Just nowhere to hide.
It was a pretty painful moment in my life.
Slade:
So what switch sort of flipped in you to make you think, you know what? I'm gonna share this story with everyone.
Kara-Leah:
Well, I'd always been a writer and I had journalled my whole life. I had been working as a journalist in British Columbia where I was living. I was working as a waitress and as a journalist and as a go go dancer. And then I had quit waitressing because through writing full-time I'd written a screenplay that had won a national award.
But I was really struggling. I was struggling massively.
I wasn't able to pitch myself. I had a lot of stuff going on emotionally so even though I was theoretically freelancing as a writer, I wasn't making any money coming in.
So when I woke up in the psych ward, I had a journal with me fortunately that someone had brought in and gave to me. She was like this angel. She literally showed up and she was like, I know that you write. And I thought that you would appreciate having something to write in. I didn't even know her that well, like an acquaintance of mine.
So I had this journal that she dropped off for me maybe the first or second day I was in the psych ward. And I just remember writing in my journal and writing out everything that's happened.
And at the very end of writing that diary entry, there was like this surge of knowingness, like this energy. I actually talk about this in the book, this knowingness or this energy came through several times in my life since, and I just found myself writing down, The sun was shining in in my life. So real. And it was just this, almost rebellious, You know what? Fuck you. You can't keep me down. All this shit that's happened to me, I will find my way back to the light. Just you wait and see.
So that was me right at that moment. And I think that energy was what called me forth to find my way through. And I knew, even back then, that I would one day, that part of the journey was to share this story of mine with the public. Like it was really important to write about it because I was able to...
I mean, it was such a gift to experience psychosis from the inside. To really witness what the mind was like, and that experience. And then to be able to recall it. And then to be able to articulate it in a way that other people could understand.
So even then I had a sense of how important it was that I journal and write about my experiences of psychosis/awakening. It was though.
Slade:
So is it possible that what we would call psychosis or mental illness could also be a kundalini awakening? Tell me about that connection. Other people may be experiencing one or the other and wondering.
Kara-Leah:
Absolutely.
Since then, my understanding from conversations I've had with different people and research that I've done, what can begin to happen for us is, especially if we're dabbling in a combination, as I was, of yoga practices and meditation practices and ecstatic dance practices combined with LSD or mushrooms or even weed, etc. All these plants' medicines, they're so powerful they really do impact our psyche and consciousness.
And if you combine them with things like yoga and meditation and you haven't done the grounding work and the building of the witness of the container, and you haven't cleared out the psychological patterns from childhood, basically it blows your circuits, is one way to put it. It just blows your circuits. You're not really able to handle the amount of pure light and the amount of energy, of kundalini, that can start to move through the system.
It's kind of like hooking up a regular old light bulb to 10,000 volts and expecting it to handle it. It just won't. You know, you've got to change your light bulb first. You've got to put in a 10,000 volt light bulb before you start channelling that much energy.
But I didn't know any better.
I know that there are so many people that are experiencing that convergence of awakening practices with plant medicines of various kinds without necessarily having done the psychological work necessary to stabilize the system and build strong enough channels to hold the flow.
Slade:
Mmm... That's a really great way of explaining it actually. I love that. And I mean, gee, what are the chances that we will play with magic if we run across it and don't know what we're doing?
Kara-Leah:
Ohmygod. It's happening so often. All over the place!
People are doing ayahuasca...
Slade:
Yeah.
Kara-Leah:
Multiple times. And I don't necessarily have a follow up care yet... I don't necessarily have the constructs or the context to understand how one being works with what is revealed and what comes up in the unconscious. And so people are just left hanging so often, and they can dissolve. They can disintegrate. They can fall apart and not know how to navigate that territory.
Slade:
So how did you figure out how to recover from that? Or to retro-engineer the proper container, as you call it. How did you fix the container?
Kara-Leah:
So I was fortunate in that because I already did have the yoga and meditation practice, some part of me intuitively knew that what I'd experienced wasn't just psychosis and that I wasn't necessarily bipolar. That that was a western labelling.
It was just this knowingness. So I knew that yoga would help me to pop myself back together mentally, emotionally, and right from the get-go, I was in the psych ward and I would go out on the lawn and practice yoga. That was my rock.
That was the way that I built the container. Which is like the ability to witness oneself in action so that I was able to, rather than be identified with my thoughts and identified with my feelings, and identified with my body, and the sensations in my body, I was able to orientate to the witness that I am and still experience the thoughts and the feelings in the body but from a HELD place.
So that I wasn't overwhelmed by the thoughts, or overwhelmed by the feelings. I was able to hold myself while I felt what I needed to feel. And while I learned how to observe my thoughts and then trace back to what was giving rise to the thoughts, so that I can uninstall or unprogram myself from the constructs of a lifetime and beyond, really. Like all the programming from childhood, from family, from school, from society. All the stuff that is NOT who I truly am.
I just knew yoga was the way for me and I practice every single day. I was relentless in my practice of yoga.
Slade:
So you were in British Columbia though when you were in the psych ward?
Kara-Leah:
Yeah. I didn't know this at the time, but the experiences all happened during Lion's Gate, the astrological period of Lion's Gate that happens in August. And I was taken down to Lion's Gate hospital to keep at the psych ward at Lion's Gate hospital. It's interesting coincidences...
Slade:
Interesting!
Kara-Leah:
And what was even more intriguing was that it all got triggered when I was at Shambhala Music Festival and it was a Sunday morning. And I took acid that morning. Not a LOT, Maybe a quarter of a tab. I never took a lot. But I took acid and I went to the yoga class on acid and we went into lion's pose, which I've never done in my life before.
I remember quite distinctly doing 3 rounds of lion's pose with lion's breath, and THAT was the moment that something in me went into the awakening process. It was like an excavation and I literally stood up in the class. I kind of looked at the teacher and I do recall her looking at me strangely but I was just like, I'm done. I've got what I needed from this.
And I left the yoga class.
From that moment on, I started to go through the awakening that eventually devolved into the psychosis of the next 5 or 6 days. So it was like, from lion's pose to Lion's Gate to Lion's Gate.
Slade:
Ooo... How long were you in that ward?
Kara-Leah:
So the first time I was there for just 3 days. They basically sedated me and... Because I'd gone into the ward that time speaking some kind of ancient language and doing prostrations. My body was going into spontaneous prostrations to the Sun god Ra. I mean, I'd never been taught this but it's just coming through my system. Like I knew how to do these things spontaneously.
So the first doctor I saw, the psychiatrist, he was kind of onto it. Because he called it spiritual burglary. He's like, You've opened some doors you shouldn't have opened.
He gave me some medication. Don't do that again. Don't take any more drugs. And oh, by the way, you're bipolar. Take this medication and see you later. So I was only there for 3 days.
The second time which was exactly a month later on the new moon, both times, the second time, partly because it was my second time and there was no drugs that had precipitated it, I was there for 9 days. It took me longer to convince them I was sane enough to live out again in the community.
Slade:
Mmm... So at that point, you travelled back home to New Zealand, right?
Kara-Leah:
Yeah. I had no choice. I mean, I didn't have any money. I had nowhere to live. My fiancé had broken up with me. I needed to just come home. I didn't want to. I SO did not want to.
I was leaving... I had lived in British Columbia for 7 years. I love that place. I love the mountains. I love the land. And I have amazing friends. I felt connected and I felt good there. I felt like I could be me there.
Coming back to New Zealand, it was like slipping back into all the old constructs and all the old expectations and assumptions of who I was meant to be and how I was meant to act.
Yeah, I didn't want to come home.
Slade:
Oh, I came home too. It took me a couple years from the time that I had my stroke to move back here. But I really did come home to just sort of survive, you know? To heal and to build back from square one.
But that's of course when I started Shift Your Spirits.
So we were experiencing that in parallel as well. I'm only just now realizing that. Because I didn't know you when all that was going on. I only know you as you started to build this online presence that you have and how we met.
But yeah, my 2004, 2005 was probably very similar to yours in many ways.
But it was like, oh, I'm back here?? Back to square one?
Did you feel like that a little bit?
Kara-Leah:
Ohmygod. It was awful. I felt like I left the excitement and the adventure and the awesomeness and the aliveness of life, and I was back in this dead place where nothing was happening. And I was nobody and there was nothing. And it was like... My mom had moved so we lived in Dunedin when I was a teenager, which is like a university town of about 100,000 in the South Island.
She's moved to this small mountain town of 400 people in the interim. So when I came back home, I was coming back to a place where I had no... It was completely different. It was a different house. It was a different town.
In that respect it was actually amazing because the mountains and the lake, the nature was so beautiful, so powerful. And it was that landscape that really helped me to heal. Being in the mountains again of Queenstown, New Zealand is extraordinary, but yeah, I didn't want to be there.
Did not want to be there.
Slade:
I credit the mountains with bringing me back as well. I came back to the Appalachians where I grew up and very, very powerful... One of the oldest geological features in the world, I have since learned. So they're very ancient mountains that have been worn down for just millennia, so there's layers and layers of magic here. The smokey mountains is how they're commonly known.
So I had something similar going on where I almost had to choose to reconnect to the landscape and let go of whatever attachments that I used to have to it, and sort of re-define it in a new way and kind of romance this whole place I didn't want to be in but here I am, so how can I love it?
Did you do something similar? Did you re-invent yourself in that way?
Kara-Leah:
Yeah. I just remember I was sleeping every day 'til like 2:00 in the afternoon. I was just trying to numb myself out as much as I could. And the only thing I had to numb out with was sleep really, because I wasn't taking any drugs or anything like that anymore. And I wasn't distracting myself with internet or movies.
But I just remember having this sense of, I need to move. And so I started forcing myself... There's a trail around a lagoon. So I was like, right, I just have to get out. I've got to run for a hundred metres. And every day, there were these orange markers at 50m every interval around the lagoon. So I would run one more marker each day.
And that was my way of forcing myself to be present and to kind of exist in the track of life again. And I remember really, really clearly that the day that I finally ran the whole way around. It was probably only 2km, maybe 3. It wasn't very far.
But I was so ecstatic about the fact that I'd done it that I turned around and ran back around the whole way and did a double loop on that same day. That commitment to being in the landscape and running and walking the landscape was part of what helped me begin to heal. That and the yoga. But there's something about the physical movement, getting the endorphins and the serotonin going in the brain again, that really helped me begin that journey of healing.
Slade:
Oh yes! Thank you for saying that. I am very late to the game in discovering my athleticism. I didn't start working out until I was 41 and that was when I stopped smoking. I chose yoga as a replacement therapy for smoking.
And so my connection and discovery of yoga is, I was trying to think, with a habit especially an addiction, what are you gonna put in that hole if you take it out? There's gotta be something else to go there. Some kind of replacement behaviour and I tried to think of what was the thing that was symbolically connected to smoking but that can somehow be healthy?
So I came to the conclusion that it was the breath. And I just had this intuition. I'd done yoga before, as a smoker. It never stuck. But I instinctively knew, Oh yes! That's the thing. That's the thing that'll heal me and ground me in my body in a new way, and I was just passionately into it for maybe 4 years or so, doing it 5 days a week.
I really do credit that with changing my relationship with my breath. It's crazy to think that I was still writing all the things that I write, and doing spiritual work and so I don't want people to think, like, Oh, you have to be perfect to be doing this kind of work. You don't. You just have to be on a journey of improving yourself.
If you've got one plan to get to one orange marker around the lake, then you're ok. You're on the path.
Kara-Leah:
That was it. Having that sense of change every day, of aiming for something, achieving something, it gave me an anchor. Something to get out of bed for in a way.
Slade:
Well the whole idea that you said about the container and the metaphor of the lightbulb being plugged into too much energy is really cool because I actually have this thing called an energy reboot because so many of my clients will come to me really frazzled. They're spending so much time in their upper chakras. They're like always in the third eye, always trying to get that divine crown open.
They're just way up here. If you could see me, I'm waving my hands above my head. It's a very top-heavy kind of energy. And they come in sort of burnt out and all over the place and I always say, you need to unplug and plug back in. And start at the bottom. And light yourself up from the root back up.
To me, the way that I do that is through athleticism. Through really, really basic stuff like walking meditation. Even if you can't run around the lake, you can sure as hell walk around the lake. You know what I mean?
Kara-Leah:
Yeah it was a big part of my journey as well, realizing that I had just blown wide open through my heart and third eye and through the crown. All of that. And I was so blocked through first, second, third chakras and so that was a big part of why I went from awakening, feeling the oneness, the bliss, understanding life in such a deep way, into psychosis and right back into conditioned mind.
And now it literally felt like going from being in heaven to going to hell.
It was doing the hard work of recognizing, in order for me to experience that degree of openness and connection and bliss again, I had to clear out the lower chakras. I had to face my humanness and do the work of learning how to be with and meet reality as it was moment to moment.
Slade:
So let's fast forward a little bit and come into the present, fast forward this journey where you've taken all this to. Now you are primarily a retreat leader, correct?
Kara-Leah:
Yeah. I write books and I run retreats and I work with people online with mentoring programs and awakening programs.
My primary thing is working with people in some way, supporting them on that journey, that emergence from, I kind of call it coming out of the matrix in some way. It's when people begin to wake up and things really begin to shift and change for them and they don't know.
They need context. They need framework. They need tools in order to navigate that journey of emerging into a new way of being with reality.
Slade:
What are the patterns that you see people who are coming to you for this kind of assistance, support, what kind of patterns are you noticing in your clients? What are they bringing in?
Kara-Leah:
Hmm... Often what will happen is that people will begin to experience life in a new way. So they'll begin to become more aware of things but those things are still occurring. Like they'll begin to notice or become aware that, for example, that they're a people pleaser. Or that they let people treat them like a doormat.
So there's a greater awareness of themselves in action. But they're not able to shift it or change it.
And with that greater awareness, so often that comes usually judgement and shame and guilt and fear. So they come to me because they're starting to wake up and it feels awful because the judgement the guilt and the shame, and all those things get triggered.
So a big part of what I'm doing with people is I talk a lot about anchoring into love and truth. Where I hold a space or a field of unconditional love in such a way that, however they show up, whatever they're experiencing, is completely okay. So that when they can feel that coming from me, they're able to start to feel that for themselves and they start to recognize that so much of their suffering is not because what's happening in their lives. Or not because what's happening inside of them, but it's because of how they are perceiving and how they are judging themselves.
So once they feel me being an unconditional loving space for them, they can, it's almost like feel the imprint of that? So they can begin to feel their own unconditional sense of love for themselves as they are, with whatever is going on inside of them.
Slade:
Mmm... So for somebody listening right now, who's not in New Zealand, are you able to do this kind of work with people over the phone or over Skype or wherever they might be?
Kara-Leah:
Yeah, I work on Zoom, so I do a lot of work in session. I meet with people in the States, Canada. And I also do a retreat every year in Mexico, which of course is for mainly Canadian and American friends so that they can come.
Slade:
I didn't realize that you did them so close!
Kara-Leah:
I do! I do one in Mexico.
And it's amazing because when people come on retreat with me, what I'm doing is I am very clear about setting up a super strong container on the energy and emotional and mental realm because what I've realized is that the stronger the container, the more held and supported and safe that people feel, it's like it activates them and it supports them to be able to let go, surrender and dissolve that which no longer suits them.
It's almost as if, I mean I don't even do anything. Sometimes it feels like I don't DO anything on a retreat but of course what I'm doing is holding that strong container. And I set up a framework of basically explaining reality from a different perspective than most people perceive it.
And they get it. They're like, Ohmygod. That makes so much sense.
So then on the retreat, they begin to explore interacting with reality from that new framework. And they begin to see the benefits and feel the benefits of being in that new way. So it gives them an opportunity to step into and to be with themselves and be with reality in a different way so that, my intention is when they go back to their ordinary life, that they're able to bring that new way of being into their ordinary life.
So it's not the kind of retreat where you just go away and you just chill out and then you go home again. It's actually about creating a new way of being from the inside out that you can take with you.
Slade:
What do you hope that you can contribute to the greater conversation about spirituality and personal development?
Kara-Leah:
My intention is to really help people learn how to be with the darkness and the shadow and the fears. Because what I was saying a lot especially in spiritual and new age circles is there can be this escape into the upper chakras. And this fear or unwillingness to be with the heavier, darker so-called negative things.
And yet, the only way through into a very grounded heart-connected clear way of being is to get super comfortable with feeling the guilt, the shame, the fear, the anxiety, the depression, all those things, being able to BE with it so that you can move through it.
So that's my intention, is to give people the framework and the tools so they know how to be with the challenging stuff for themselves. Which then means they can actually be with other people who are going through challenging stuff, and simply hold space for other people, so other people can then be with the challenging stuff.
And so there's like a chain reaction of human beings being able to be with the hard stuff and be okay.
Slade:
The book is called Sex, Drugs & (Mostly) Yoga, Field Notes from a Kundalini Awakening by Kara-Leah Grant. Tell everybody where they can find you online and find out about your work and your retreats and all your stuff.
Kara-Leah:
So the best place to find me is on my website, which is KaraLeah.com. There's no hyphen. Even though my name has a hyphen, the website doesn't. So KaraLeah.com.
And if you google me, you'll find me on Amazon. I've got a couple of other books and I'm on YouTube and I'm on Facebook. I'm on Instagram. And I'm blessed with a unique name. I've never found anyone with my name so it's pretty easy to find me online if you google my name.
Slade:
That was great, Kara-Leah. Thank you for coming on the show.
Kara-Leah:
My pleasure, Slade. Thank you so much for the opportunity to talk about all this stuff.
A special astrology workshop with recurring guest and evolutionary astrologer Dena DeCastro.
We're taking a deep dive into Venus placement in your natal chart. Venus affects not only your love life but also other partnerships — including your relationship with money. Learn about the strengths and challenges associated with your Venus sign.
*Each and every sign is explained.
MENTIONED ON THE SHOW Ep 40 - Love & Money Personified with Morgana Rae
Ep - 74 - Astrology & Past-Lives: Karmic Patterns in the Birth Chart with Dena DeCastro
GUEST LINKS - DENA DECASTRO denadecastro.com
DeCastro Astrology on Facebook
HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses
Get an intuitive reading with Slade
Automatic Intuition
FACEBOOK GROUP Shift Your Spirits Community BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits Edit your pledge on Patreon
TRANSCRIPT Let’s set you up for this astrology workshop as well as any others we do in the future ... If you know a lot about your natal chart, you may know some of these planets and signs without having to look them up.
Feel free to go ahead and listen along right now.
For those of you who are beginners or who want to reference your chart and take notes — we are going to explore additional areas of your chart on future episodes, so you may want to start a document or a notebook — the site I most use and recommend is:
astro.com
There’s quite a bit you can do with a free account. There are a lot of places where you can cast your natal chart online—and I don’t get any kind of kickback for referring astro.com —the reason I prefer Astro is you can store up to 100 profiles with a free account.
That’s helpful if you have clients you’re casting charts for, BUT even more importantly, you may want to store the charts of people you’re in relationships with. There’s a partner report in astro you may want to explore for spouses, people you’re dating, family members, coworkers, people you’re in business with … that person you’re about to marry!
After you sign up for a user name and password, you’ll be asked to enter your exact birth information.
Under the Free horoscopes tab, you’ll find a daily personal horoscope that’s pretty good for computer generated, but for the purposes of our workshops here, you’ll want to look under the Free Horoscopes tab, in the Short Horoscopes list is Personal Portrait.
The personal portrait is what astro calls the Natal chart or the birth chart.
Now, on that Personal Portrait page, they will offer some highlights from your chart, but that is nowhere close to everything. They may or may not interpret your Venus placement, I’m not sure how their algorithm works.
But if you scroll down to the bottom, you will find a list called planetary positions of every planet in your chart and what sign it is in.
For this episode, you’ll want to know what sign your Venus is in.
You may also want to find the Venus placement of your significant others
Of course, if you have an astrology site you like, or a natal chart that was professionally prepared for you, by all means use those.
Find your Venus, we’ll jump right in to this conversation and let Dena tell you what it means and what you can do with this information in terms of Love and Money.
Dena:
So evolutionary astrology is a branch of astrology that focuses on past life and karmic patterns as part of the reading of the natal chart. We look at that through something in the chart called the nodes, the south node representing that past life or karmic pattern situation and then the north node representing what it is in this life that we're here to learn, that we have not experienced in past lives, that we've not mastered.
And so we're here learning about that thing which is foreign to us.
So it's much more... it's less predictive than some other branches of astrology. In fact, it's not predictive at all. It is more of a personal development kind of astrology, where in the reading, I'm offering people a way to look at themselves differently, not only from this life's perspective but from a soul level perspective.
With that knowledge, I'm giving them suggestions about how to best live in alignment with their soul's plan coming into this life. And how ultimately, to live a more fulfilling, content and happy life.
So that's the aim of it.
So it's not meant for prediction. It is more meant for personal development and for growth.
Slade:
I actually really like that, because it's a little bit more woo woo and yet, also the personal development aspect of it really brings it down to earth. So, of course I'll link to the show that we did earlier so everyone can listen to that and find out about their node astrology, but what you told me on that show about my own south node in Virgo, has been really impactful going forward from that moment.
It explained a lot of things about the way that I operate. It also explained a lot of my relationships with Virgos.
Dena:
Oh totally. I'm with you on that one.
Slade:
So anyway, I really love that piece of information.
And one of the things that I noticed, talking to you the very first time that we ever spoke, which is that conversation by the way, and the reason why I wanted you back on the show is, well, first I'd love any excuse to talk to you, but...
One of the things I found myself recommending to my friends and my clients about your readings is, astrology I've often noticed can have this really, really old, like old testament doom and gloom kind of quality to it sometimes...
Dena:
Yeah.
Slade:
Especially if you're looking at things that are computer-generated sometimes, I often tell people, Okay, you need to dial back the negative a little bit.
Dena:
Dial that back!
Slade:
And you have a way of speaking about astrology that feels kind of more hopeful and more positive and enthusiastic to me. And I was wondering if you are aware of what I'm talking about and if you get a sense of that as well.
Dena:
Yeah, you know, I think that in the astrological community, one of the viewpoints is that evolutionary astrologers are too much Pollyanna perhaps, or positive, compared to some others, which will tell you more of the doom and gloom aspects, like if you have an afflicted Venus, that your love life is going to be challenged for your whole life.
Some branches of astrology are more deterministic, I will say that. And I am not coming from an, evolutionary astrology is not coming from a deterministic perspective. We embrace the idea of free will as being the prime mover and that once we have self-knowledge, we can make better choices.
That's the whole point.
We can, the reading itself changes what you can do with your future. It's not telling you that this is the future that's laid out for you. That this is what's going to happen because Saturn squared your Venus and it's gonna suck.
Slade:
Right.
Dena:
That it's a... it's saying, here are some choices. I will say though, that it is not all love and light. Anybody whose gotten a reading from me will tell you that we go into the shadow stuff. We go into what is, what are the lower possibilities for you? What are the things that can trip you up or the places where you can get tangled up in old patterns and get stuck.
But in knowing that, then you can more likely avoid those places, right?
Slade:
Yeah, like, to explain what I meant by how that information for me impacted me going forward, what it did was, it just identified a certain thought process or where something's coming from in the way that I think and react to things.
And knowing to look for that and to be aware when it popped it's head, I'd be like, Ooo... that's totally my south node in Virgo! And then having a polar companion opposite of like, Okay well so in order to balance out that energy that idea is to move towards this more Piscean way of looking at things.
So when I say it's impactful to me, you're right. It's not like, Oh, it's just going to be this way and I'm just screwed to be that way.
Dena:
Right.
Slade:
What it does is it allows me to say, Oh, there's my tendency to do THAT, now I'm going to make a willful conscious decision to lean this other way in order to kind of balance that out, or to move away from it.
So yeah, I'd like that. I definitely don't want to... I don't want information that I can't change or manipulate in some way.
Dena:
Right. And I said this on another podcast recently, that I'm always thinking, as I do a reading, how can I empower the client, not how can I disempower the client. Or to be careful not to say things that are going to disempower the client.
That's super important to me. It really guides everything that I say as I go through a reading.
Slade:
Mmm... Well you're doing a good job of it.
Dena:
Thank you.
Slade:
So there is some great astrology content obviously online, on social media...
Dena:
Yeah!
Slade:
A lot of astrologers do time sensitive current posts about what's going on in the skies and you do a little of that as well. But when you and I were brainstorming astrological topics that we could explore on the show, I talked about how much I try to create evergreen content, meaning, whenever someone comes along and they find this show, even if it's two years from now, I want the information to still be relevant to them.
Aspects of the natal chart, or birth chart, are those items that aren't as time sensitive, so I'd love for you to explain to us the difference between transits and our natal or birth chart elements.
Dena:
Yeah, so the natal chart is the birth chart that you're born with. It is the permanent chart. It's not going to change. However, how you respond to that chart can change. YOU can grow and change. But that chart doesn't change.
So when I do a reading that's focused mainly on the natal chart, we're really looking at those lifelong themes and patterns, not the things that are happening now.
The transits and progressions and solar arcs, those are three things, three tools that astrologers use. And there are more tools, but those are the three common ones. They tell us what is happening right now in this person's chart. What are the things moving through, that transits from the outside, the cosmic weather.
For example, let's say Neptune is currently in Pisces and it may be connecting with something in your chart. It may be trining your moon or, I think it is trining your moon, I'm not sure... Maybe soon..
That is its own set of meaning about what's happening now or in this coming year, or maybe for the next two years. A Neptune transit is two years long, for example. So that's time and that's forecasting. That's not prediction. That's like saying, "Here is the cosmic weather that is around you. How can you best navigate it?"
Progressions and solar arcs are a little bit different. They're something that unfolds from the chart itself and I won't get into a technical discussion of those, but they're just other tools that we use to look at this moment in time, but also what's coming down the road, maybe the next year, two years for somebody.
To say, what are the lessons that are on your plate right now, what are the themes that are up in your life?
And it can be really helpful, particularly if you're going through a challenging time, to understand that there are forces at play that may be affecting you, that are causing this to be a challenging time and there is something you can do about it. There are things that you can do to better work with those energies than if you didn't know about it.
Slade:
I like your weather metaphor because it's kind of like, if you know a hurricane's coming, then you can close the shutters and go underground. You can respond to those conditions in a different way.
Another thing that I do think that astrological transits are good for, and I was just talking to a friend of mine who is going through a really rough life transition, and I said, "One of the things I like about astrology is, it's not a psychic reading. It's actually external, you know? It's like, here's a spreadsheet about stuff in your life."
It has a little bit of a disconnect from being so much in our own heads a little bit. It's something that also can give you a sense of... Like if you are really going through something, and you're thinking, gawd, when is this ever gonna end?? I find it really helpful for someone to say, "Well, you know, April something is totally gonna shift."
And just having a sense of, oh, okay. I may feel like I'm smack in the middle of it, and then I get a reading with you and you talk about some transits, and you're like, "Oh actually, it's been going on for a long time but you're almost done."
That can be the difference between being in a really dark hole in the ground and having a little sense of, okay, I can go for two more months or whatever.
Dena:
Right.
Slade:
I love the emphasis on it not being so much about prediction as about conditions, like weather conditions and sort of windows of time as opposed to specific moments.
Dena:
Yeah.
Slade:
Well just to get back to the birth chart stuff. So we decided we wanted to do some shows where we focus on some of the bigger elements in birth charts. I feel like for people who are new to astrology, it makes sense for them to study their birth chart or their natal chart first, as a way of learning about this vocabulary and these concepts and how it relates to what they're working with in this lifetime.
Dena:
Yeah.
Slade:
So one of those big elements in our birth chart is our Venus. So teach us about Venus.
Dena:
Haha...
So Venus is a planet that most people correlate to love because it's the goddess of love. It is a planet that has to do with connection and relationship. It is also, though, a planet that has to do with money and finances.
And so a lightbulb went on for me recently when I was listening to your episode with Morgana Rae about love and money, and I was like, Oh! [unintelligible] Venus. That's the Venus energy coming through in those two things together. She's a very Venutian kind of person. And it just clicked in for me that so many people don't make THAT connection. The connection to money and resources, as well as love and romance associated with Venus.
So I'll talk about both aspects, or both faces of Venus.
So to begin with, Venus is the ruler of Libra, the sign of Libra, and Taurus. So it's the ruler of two signs. And Libra is a relationship sign. It's about connection and want to connect and wanting to come into balance with a significant other or a significant friend or a significant client. It's about the relationship of the one to the one. And about balance and harmony between those two things.
On another level, Venus too is about our aesthetic sensibilities, our creativity, as Libra holds the archetype of the Artist, that which makes beauty. And as we think of Venus also of the goddess of beauty, and Aphrodite.
So it's the part of us that wants to make beauty in the world, to bring beauty into our surroundings. The part of us that wants to experience beauty. That can come through creating, through artistry, and it can also come through being in love and through romance and connecting that way.
That's all an experience of beauty. And it all brings us that sense of sigh, that sigh of the romantic quality of life.
So that's Venus as it's the ruler of Libra.
But Venus is also the ruler of Taurus. And Taurus is a sign that is connected to stability, resources, and a feeling of security, and that comes often through having enough resources, you know, that sense of stability and security. So hence Venus' connection to money.
And so the Venus in our chart can tell us many things more than just what kind of people are we attracted to and what kind of people we tend to attract. I mean, that's all true and that's something I'll talk more about. But also it tells us, what is our relationship to resources, how do we create more resources for ourselves, how do we find our sense of security, how do we find a sense of stability and a foothold in the world.
So really, there's those two dimensions of Venus, particularly love and money, that I want to focus on.
Slade:
Let me say something really quick about Morgana Rae. Of course I'll link to Morgana's interview when she was on the show as well. Some people know her. I reference her in The Money Shift. She was very influential in my relationship with abundance as an archetype.
I just have to say, it's really interesting because if you hear Morgana talk about her story, she started working with abundance and money and financial programming and all those relationships that we have with resources. She discovered this while being a relationship coach. What she found was that people have the same issues with money that they have in their romantic partnerships and that was the connection she made.
So anyway, I hope she gets to hear this and discover that there's an astrological basis for her observing that connection.
Dena:
Yeah. I would love that and I really enjoyed what she had to say in that episode. And I found so much personal value and had some really individual revelations about my own relationship to love and money through that episode.
So it connected for me directly back to astrology and what I know there.
So I think what I'll do is, I'll walk through some of the sign placements and maybe we will get through all 12.
Slade:
Okay!
Dena:
I'll do a little bit on each one if I can.
Slade:
Let's try, yeah.
Dena:
Yeah we'll try.
So if you know your Venus placement, you can listen to each one and you might be able to find the Venus placements of your friends and family members and partner and be able to also get some pieces out of this.
So Venus in Aries. Venus, again, as being correlated to who we are attracted to, what kinds of people we're attracted to and who we attract in. But also the relationship style. So Aries is a spontaneous fiery energy, right? And that's how Venus in Aries people tend to like it in a relationship. They tend to like things spicy and need them a little spicy and spontaneous and passionate, right?
And so there needs to be that excitement.
This is where we get into differences and preferences. As you know, some people like things more calm and easygoing in relationship, while you see others that's like, oh, they've always got so much relationship drama going on.
But that's how some people actually like it. If you need it, right?
So Venus in Aries is that energy. And as it relates to money and resources, Venus in Aries is really connected to needing to take on challenges in terms of one's work and financial goals, and being able to do things that feel fresh and new all the time. So there can be a... The shadow aspect of that the tendency to get bored quickly, like have a passionate attachment to an idea or project and then it can kind of fizzle.
So that's the challenge for Venus in Aries.
In both relationship and money, things can start off real hot and heavy, then go tzzzzz (fizzling down).
So that's something to think about with all these Venus placements. It's always the positive and the shadow expression of each, things to be careful of.
Venus in Taurus. Venus in the sign that it rules really craves stability, sensual or physical, tactile connection in relationship. A feeling of security and has an intensely loyal component and requires loyalty from the other. So that kind of slow and easy and comfortable style to a relationship is more what suits the Venus in Taurus type.
Venus in Taurus regarding money. Again, you know, security and having a sense of stability is primary. So this type of person would more benefit from a job where they feel like, okay I know where my paycheck is coming from, it's pretty predictable. They're not as likely to be your freelancer unless there's a steady stream of abundance that they can count on coming from that.
Venus in Taurus types really need that sense of I know I have all my ducks in a row financially all the time.
The shadow side of that placement is getting too stuck in routines. Like getting too stuck in things always needing to be nice and comfortable, both in love and money. That we can get in routines as partners or we get kind of bored with each other. Try to keep things too nice, too easy, can be its own downfall. And the same with the approach to money. It's like you can keep yourself a little too small because you're afraid to take the risk of stepping out and doing something bigger.
So that's Venus in Taurus.
Venus in Gemini, which I think we both have.
Slade:
Yeeeees. This is me. I'm taking notes.
Dena:
Okay. Get your pen out.
Venus in Gemini. Gemini's an air sign and it's about curiosity and wanting to learn new things all the time.
Slade:
Uh oh.
Dena:
There needs to be a huge amount of intellectual engagement with one's partner and/or friends. They have to be someone that you can talk to and have that mental connection with. Mental connection is primary. It's like you have to be on that level with the person where it's like, we can talk easily and I think, my husband, he's a Gemini rising, and so am I. So we're just non-stop chatterboxes with each other.
Slade:
Oh that's cool.
Dena:
Which is cool. And we like that. For some people it might drive them a little nuts.
But as a Venus in Gemini person, I really like to be able to just chatter chatter with him. I need my quiet time too.
But I think that Venus in Gemini also needs to be constantly, have something to be curious about. So that goes for love and for money. And the money aspect, we can easily make money through the word, through teaching, through writing, through speaking and also through learning new things and then repackaging what we learn and giving it back out through teaching.
That's part of the Gemini archetype. Teaching and talking.
Slade:
That's us!
Dena:
That's you and me! I guess we're doing our Venus.
Slade:
Right.
Dena:
So the shadow stuff of Venus in Gemini is going from thing to thing without settling on one thing. With having trouble committing to one thing. That can come up in love or money, and I have to say, I had more trouble with the love part of that when I was much younger and not anymore, but I see that in myself for Venus in Gemini, of the next shiny object that comes by. I'm gonna follow that.
And that can happen with money as well. That oh, maybe I should make money doing this! No, wait. I could be that! I'm gonna be a writer this week and then teacher next week and a, this or that. So there could be a difficulty in settling.
I do think that abates with age. With Venus in Gemini as we grow up and kind of get our big boy, big girl pants on. And yet some people might not grow out of it as quickly.
Slade:
Well, and I have to say for myself, the way that that came down is, once I found the right context in which to work, I have a job that allows me to be a lot of different things, from, one day I'm an accountant, another day I'm doing web design, another day I'm interviewing people on a podcast. That variety I think is the reason why the entrepreneurial stuff works for me so well, is because I have it built in to this one thing I do is like a cluster of a whole lot of things.
Dena:
So true and same with me as well. I never get bored because every reading you do is a different deal. There are no two readings that are alike. So that keeps me constantly engaged. That's super important for those Venus in Gemini people out there to think about is, what will keep you constantly engaged with your mind? What will keep you constantly curious?
Because you can get bored really easily with anything that's just even a little bit repetitive or redundant.
So alright. With that, we're going on to Venus in Cancer.
Venus in Cancer has some similarities to Venus in Taurus. There is a need for commitment and a feeling of emotional safety in relationship and as relates to money. So Venus in Cancer types really need to feel safe in order to connect emotionally with their significant other, with friends.
So they're attracted to people who can provide that sense of comfort and safety and a feeling of they're not going anywhere. That significant other is there for the long haul. And so they're drawn to relationships that can provide that.
As far as Venus in Cancer money-wise, there's a need for emotional safety in terms of how they make and bring in money. And that again, similarly to Taurus, requires a structure and a certain comfort level with their job or what they're doing to bring in money. I don't mean to make that sound at all boring.
It's just that those two signs, Taurus and Cancer in particular, as we go on we'll get to Capricorn as well I see in this way, that they really do need a little more regularity of routine and comfort level in their relationship and work/money-wise. And that is okay.
Part of what I like to always get across is we're all wired differently and part of what I like to bring to people is that accepting and validating that wiring is really important. And you can push a little bit against the edges of that, knowing that that is your want, you know? Sometimes you can get a little too comfortable.
So here we have Venus in Cancer, the shadow element of it can be going too much into caregiving and nurturing of the other, too much into worrying about, I've got to show up for my work at the expense of myself, you know, sometimes forgetting to take care of oneself because the job or the money coming in means more than taking care of oneself. It's that over-focus on caregiving to the other that can go awry.
So that's something for Venus in Cancer to watch.
Then we have Venus in Leo. Colourful fire sign. The second fire sign we've come across.
Leo is a creative, spontaneous energy. It craves adoration. It craves being appreciated. So own it, if you've got some Leo in your chart, which I know you do. That there is that need for being appreciated, particularly in partnership if you have Venus in Leo, to have the other person do the kind of traditional hearts and flowers aspects of romance with you, and to treat you a little bit like a god or goddess sometimes, you know?
It's not something to be shy about. There is that need. And that you can do that for the other person as well. You may have a very romantic quality in the way that you approach relationship and with money.
I will say that there's often a creative streak that wants to come through in how you make money. You could easily be an artist or creator of some type that brings in money through your creative drive. So that's something to look at.
If you're not doing that and you're a Venus in Leo and you're thinking, Where is my creative career?? You can be doing that as a side line or a hobby. But there is some creative outlet is extremely important for you to have to get that Venus need met. You know, to have that sense of pleasure in life that we get from our Venus placement.
And then the shadow side is that, what I mentioned in the beginning and be turned up to a little too high and Venus in Leo people can get too demanding of other people's attention, like, Look at me! It's that I need to be the centre of your universe attitude.
And so we have to watch that with Venus in Leo. And know that, okay, it needs to be balanced. That there's two people in a relationship and that there's two people that need equal amounts of attention. So it's just that awareness can be helpful.
Venus in Virgo. Another earth sign. It's similar to Taurus but Virgo is about having very high standards and being able to look at a relationship and at how we bring in money as practice, as constant work.
Again, that doesn't sound glamourous, but we need Venus in Virgo people. We need people who understand that a relationship IS work. A relationship IS something that takes constant tending. And it's also sometimes about compromise and helping another person as much as it is helping ourselves.
So Venus in Virgo people do have high standards for relationships in that they want the other person to work on it as hard as they are working on it. That's important for Venus in Virgo to consider when they're pairing up with someone is, is the partner someone who is able to do this work with me? And to look at it as a constant practice, the conscious practice of relationship because Venus in Virgo is interested in doing that work.
As far as it relates to money, is service-oriented profession when you feel you're making a tangible difference in people's lives, where you can see the results. See, touch, feel the results of your work and how it's affecting people. That's going to be extremely important for Venus in Virgo.
The shadow of Venus in Virgo is that perfectionism, you know, as we've talked about with south node in Virgo, can be applied to relationship and to one's work, so that it can be paralyzing. In relationship, it could be having too high of standards with the other person, to the point where nothing they do is right. Or I can't find the right person because I'm just too damn picky.
That Venus in Virgo as it relates to money is about the, sometimes the Virgo Paralysis, I call it, needing to have things SO neat and tidy and perfect that no risks are taken. You'll notice that theme popping up from the earth signs, that the Taurus and Virgo and as we get to Capricorn, there's a tendency to, in the shadow, be risk-averse to the point where life becomes very confined. So that's a danger to watch for there.
Venus in Libra, in the second sign that it rules, is definitely interested in having harmony and calm and peace in relationship. This is the opposite sign of Aries, the sign that we started with, and it's, I talked about the theme of Aries needing things kind of hot and drama, a little bit of drama is okay. Not Venus in Libra. Venus in Libra is opposite of that. There's a need for just a sweetness, a romantic peaceful tone in the relationships.
As it relates to money, again, a creative career, an artistic career can be fulfilling for Venus in Libra, but also careers in which you are required to really work closely one on one with people. So with Venus in Libra, there can be some natural counselling abilities, the ability to mentor or work closely with a person on a daily basis, one on one, to have clients, for example. And that that could bring in resources.
There's an ability that Venus in Libra people have to pick up on the needs of others and to connect with them very immediately and closely. To be sensitive to the needs of others. And that can be a gift.
It can also be the shadow, in that Venus in Libra can get over-concerned with other's needs at the expense of oneself so it's that theme of getting lost in the relationship at the expense of one's own needs, and that can be the classic codependent kind of expression of that. And that can happen when Venus is triggered there. That's the Venus shadow to watch out for.
Venus in Scorpio. Another water sign like Cancer. Scorpios are a very different sign from Cancer interestingly, being a water sign too. Venus in Scorpio really craves intensity, passion, Scorpio's ruled by Mars, just as Aries is ruled by Mars, and so there is this need for close, deep connection with the other. It could be 'I wanna be in every aspect of your life and I want you in every aspect of mine'. There can be almost that possessive quality to the relationship and that can make it sound a little unhealthy, and it could certainly go there in its shadow.
But Venus in Scorpio really does need someone who can show up as an authentic person and handle going into the deep and difficult areas of relationship. They thrive on that. They thrive on having the hard discussions, the going for the raw truth in the relationship, and talking about what's going on underneath the surface.
And so that's something to consider for Venus in Scorpio as they think about partnerships, like, can the other person match me there? Are they gonna be able to go deep? Are they going to be able to go really deep and to handle the intensity of what I want to do in relationship.
And then Venus in Scorpio money-wise, again there needs to be that passionate engagement with one's career and often the career can involve confronting or looking at things other people don't want to look at.
For example, I have a friend with Venus in Scorpio who is a hospice worker. She deals with people passing regularly. And so that actually something some people might go, Ooo gawd, I don't know if I could handle that, a Venus in Scorpio person can handle that, as far as this is what we're doing to bring in an income, and this is also what they feel drawn to do because they can. They can handle it.
So that Scorpio element is really strong there and the shadow of it, again, is that possessiveness that can creep in, the jealousy, the lack of objectivity, being way too subjective and getting even a little paranoid in relationship.
That can happen and so it behooves Venus in Scorpio to be aware of that tendency and to watch your thoughts and how they might be going that direction. And to say, okay, maybe I need to take a step back here and get some objectivity or talk to a friend about this or get another viewpoint before I go down that road in my head.
Venus in Sagittarius. It's another fire sign. It's the last of our fire signs. The word spontaneity creeps in to every fire sign that I talk about. I think that having spontaneity in relationship is probably the most important for Venus in Sagittarius. There needs to be a huge amount of freedom and space for Venus in Sag people.
This doesn't necessarily mean they can't be in a committed relationship. Not at all. Of course many Venus in Sag people are married, right? And you'll hear similar things about Venus in Gemini, like, oh, we can't commit, but I think of course they can and it depends on the whole chart.
But within that relationship for Venus in Sag, they need to have a sense that they have a great amount of independence and space within the partnership. And to have room to breathe. Fire signs need room to breathe. Mark that down in your notes, people. Fire needs room to breathe just like the element.
So it doesn't mean no commitment. It just means being able to have that dance with somebody where it's like, Oh, you're gonna go out tonight? Okay well I'm going to stay home and do my thing. And KNOW that it doesn't have to mean the relationship's going south. You know, that Venus in Sag person might need to go out more than a person who's got Venus in Taurus, right? Doesn't mean they can't have a relationship. It means they have to understand each other's needs.
Venus in Sag also needs to feel like things are always an adventure, like they're on a quest. This is an adventure and there's that sense of looking toward the future with Venus. And so having plans for travel and adventures together as a partnership, that's gonna help them in any of their close relationships.
Venus in Sag as relates to money really does need, again, that sense of, almost like Gemini, enlists challenge, excitement, curiosity, being fulfilled. So variety is hugely important for Venus in Sag people. They need to have variety in their work. They could be a freelancer, but they could also have a job that provides that kind of constant challenge and constant variety served up.
And then the shadow, of course, is being noncommittal to the point of, they run away from every commitment. That could be the shadow Venus in Sag type is, I'm so averse to getting cornered that then I forget to have a relationship. That can definitely happen with Venus in Sag.
Venus in Sag may be perfectly content out there in the wilderness on their own for awhile. They could also end up feeling very lonely later on if they realize, wow, I just really haven't made those close connections because I've been so protective of my freedom.
So that's the shadow road for Venus in Sag.
Venus in Capricorn is a sign that, again, the last earth sign. It has to do with creating things that last a long time and doing the hard work of creating them. And so in relationship, a Venus in Capricorn appreciates commitment, appreciates structure and stability, just like Taurus. Also takes pride in the accomplishments of having a long term relationship.
And this applies to close friendships as well. You know, having those long term close relationships. That's an extremely important priority for Venus in Capricorn.
There can also be the high standards element that we talked about with Virgo. There's that willingness to work on relationship and to be committed, that Venus in Capricorn has that is there too with the other earth signs.
And then in work and money, Venus in Capricorn is the willingness to do the long haul with things, to be committed, to be enduring in one's work, in one's approach to work. And the desire to create something lasting. The desire to create something that took a long time to make and take pride in that creation.
So the shadow road for Venus in Capricorn is too much work and no play. It's over-work. It's workaholism. It's the abdication of pleasure at the expense of relationships sometimes and at the expense of money. It's like I'm just gonna work til I drop kind of attitude, or I'm just gonna treat this relationship like it's a job and business-like.
And it can get too business-like, and so that's one of the shadows of all three of the earth sign Venus is a tendancy to make relationship into kind of a business, or too business-like. To the point where it gets boring and all the life gets sucked out of it. And that's something, if you're aware of, can avoid by injecting some of the positive qualities into it, and also tap into other areas of your chart to bring in more spontaneity and breath of air.
So then Venus in Aquarius really delights in relationship. In having, again, space, freedom, those are two key words that are common with Aquarius and with Sag. And then also having a sense of, perhaps more distance in their romantic relationships and they often can have quite a lot of friends and have, again, not necessarily just the close besties, but have a broad spectrum of friends of all different walks of life.
In relationship, romantic relationship, they need things to be changed up quite a lot. They can also get bored very easily. So the partner would need to be someone who challenges the mind and the intellect. That's the air sign quality. And then also provides a lot of variety and ability for room to breathe.
And then Venus in Aquarius as it relates to money is needing to making money through something that they feel is affecting the world for the better in some way. That can sound a little grandiose, but it's that humanitarian urge that Aquarius has to make things better for the next generation, or the next group of people coming up. And so when they turn their attention toward humanitarian things, they're more able to bring in the resources that they need.
The shadow road for Venus in Aquarius is aloofness or disconnection. Getting too much in the head, forgetting to connect to the heart. So that's what they have to watch in relationships and in work. It's like they don't feel, they can get disconnected from what they're doing. That can be to the detriment, to both money and to love.
And then finally, Pisces. Venus in Pisces, the last water sign.
Pisces is an empathic sensitive and very compassionate sign. In relationship, they thrive with someone who is also sensitive because they could pick up on the other person's feelings quite easily, and always be aware of the other person's feelings. So it's important that they be with someone who does not take advantage of that. Who doesn't tap too much into their empathy and sensitivity and use it for the worst. That can be the shadow road.
Venus in Pisces is, as a partner, someone who thrives on emotional connection and being able to have a deep spiritual connection with a partner. There needs to be that soul connection, that spark there that feels like we've known each other for lifetimes. That kind of connection.
And then with work, Pisces is another sign, because of it's compassion and sensitivity, that works well with being able to do something that helps others. Working on behalf of the underdog, working on behalf of those who need help, that draws Venus in Pisces tyoes and that can be a way to bring in finances.
And then the shadow side of Venus in Pisces again is that over-developed sensitivity that can then be taken advantage of. You know, if they're in a relationship with someone who is toxic or not healthy, that they can get too influenced by that and be taken down a dark road themselves.
And how they can pull themselves out of that, though, is to, again, remember my needs to have to come first, actually. You know, that I can't lose myself in this. And that comes into play in their work as well.
So that is Venus through all the signs. Of course, that was a really brief description of each but I encourage people, if you know your Venus sign, don't just go by the Venus sign. Also think about, if you know a little about astrology, other things in your chart as they might relate to that Venus.
Because we don't just have a Venus. We have all the other planets as well and they can help to balance out certain things with the Venus that we might need to.
Slade:
Yeah! I was gonna point out that, like say for instance you have a Venus in a particular sign. I'll use mine as an example, Gemini. What I might look for in a potential partner, they could have a significant Gemini placement anywhere in their chart and be a little more likely to provide some of those elements, say someone with a sun or a moon or rising sign in Gemini, would still be able to sort of provide some of that energy, right? Like they don't have to have a perfectly matched Venus to Venus kind of situation.
Dena:
Right, right.
So that's another thing that I'll point to here with compatibility and, you know, I often get the question, can you do a compatibility chart for me and my partner? And I don't think of it that way. I don't think that it is a situation where you're either compatible or you're not. You know? Via astrology, for one thing, and that there are so many things involved in each person's chart that you can't do it based on sun sign, or just Venus signs, any of that. It's the whole picture versus the whole picture.
So a couple's reading is very complex in that we do consider all of the elements of each person's chart plus the composite chart, which is where you bring two charts together, so it's not just about Venus, for sure. Venus, like any of the planets that you take in isolation, can point you in a certain direction or help you understand a huge amount about yourself but it's not the whole picture.
I want people to definitely be aware of that.
Slade:
Yes, and also knowing that, in keeping with your theory that understanding what you have in your chart then allows you to respond or balance those elements or bring them in, or understand why someone else might need certain things that are different from yours.
You could have "Venuses that are not in the same realm as one another" and just by understanding that, well, I have this certain situation in my chart, and my partner has a different requirement, what that can do is then allow you to maybe make more conscious decisions to provide that in the relationship.
Or to remember, it's not that this person doesn't want to spend time with me, but they like to go out and do things with their friends and have an independent kind of social life. And just knowing that and being aware of, that that's one of the ingredients you're working with, can allow you to, like you said, use your free will to modify how that's impacting you.
Dena:
Absolutely.
And it is about self-understanding and it's about understanding the other and that's where a couple's reading can be helpful is understanding each other's Venus style can be hugely helpful but then understanding the whole chart as well, and saying, Okay, we just have these certain differences. We have these things that are more in harmony, and how can we maximize the things that work well together and how can we work on the things that are really quite different.
And in almost any couple's reading I've ever done, nobody's perfectly lined up and the same. I mean that's just not the way it works. We're attracted to people who tend to make us work on ourselves.
Slade:
Mmm... Interesting point.
Dena:
That's why I think we're attracted to them, is like, Ooo, there's a challenge here and something I need to learn and that's why we're drawn to each other at a particular moment.
Slade:
Or they may have something that you're trying to bring in into your own life, so it's an opportunity for you to study or model that dynamic.
Dena:
Yes.
Slade:
And how can I be more like this?
Dena:
Right.
Slade:
I have to ask you, I hope it's not too much off topic, but it comes up so much in relationship-oriented readings, like with clients that I do and it probably comes up for you when you do relationship astrological readings.
Soulmates. Twin flames. Talk to me about... Is there an astrological basis for these concepts? How do you describe and define those concepts?
Dena:
And I am probably gonna tick some people off with my answer to this.
Slade:
Do it!
Dena:
I'm gonna do it! Because it's what I think.
I don't believe that we have one soulmate. And I don't... I just don't have enough knowledge about the concept of twin flames to understand it, really. It's not something that resonates with me particularly. There isn't an astrological basis for those terms as far as I know. But we do... Meaning it isn't, astrology doesn't prove that we have soulmates or twin flames. One way or the other. It doesn't disprove either.
We do use the term "soulmate" in astrology at times, particularly as relating to the 8th House, in evolutionary astrology, that is a term associated with the 8th House, that it's the house of soulmates where we do the deep soul work. I emphasize soulmates plural. It's not The One. It's not the one in the sky that's gonna come down and like, we're gonna be happy together forever and walk off into the sunset.
It's the one who I am going to do deep soul work with. And there may be, and will likely be, many in a lifetime, including friends that are like soulmate friends. I don't confine it to romantic quality.
So my perception of soulmates, and as I have seen it play out in people's lives and in their charts, is that soulmates are people we're here to do deep work with. That the sign and planets in the 8th House can tell us more about what kinds of people that we can do that deep soul work with.
That is another topic. It might be fun for another time to go deeper into THAT. But knowing your 8th House and 8th House planets can help understand like, this is the kind of person with whom I can do that deep soul work.
So I'm not saying there's no soulmates. I'm saying my perspective on them is that it's not the happy ever after one. It is, okay we have people that come and go in our lives that we have unfinished business with perhaps, from past lives, and so there's that charge when we meet them. Like, okay, this is someone I need to do some work with and we have stuff from before. Maybe it needs to be finished up.
But the thing that's challenging I think for a lot of people in considering soulmates and twin flames in the way that I do is, you know, nothing lasts forever. And even if you stay together 'til death, it's not gonna last forever. Relationships do come and go and particularly as we're evolving as a species, it seems like relationships have sometimes a faster burn rate than they used to.
Slade:
Really?!
Dena:
In terms of friendships and partnerships that, well, the whole phenomenon of serial monogamy, you know, is a good example of this. Just like we are growing and developing very quickly, and sometimes we outgrow people. And then we go on to the next person. And that used to be considered a failure. Oh, you can't settle down. You just can't be with one...
I just see it as, in different phases of our lives we may be with different people and have different needs for growth and that's just what may happen.
Now at the same time, I'm married and I intend to be married for the rest of my life. So there's that. It's hard for people to understand how those two things can coexist. How can one believe in marriage at all and still hold the beliefs that we have different soulmates and different needs at different points of our lives.
I think it is a choice. We can choose to be with someone as long as we're doing good growth together. And as long as we're both consciously working on the relationship and becoming new to each other. Because we're always changing. As soon as we try to put ourselves in a box and say, Okay, you're my soulmate. This is going to last forever, you're the One, then its doomed pretty much.
Slade:
Well it's like the concept of a company or an entity that exists over long periods of time. Maybe there is the need for renovation or rebranding or you know, like, it seems like couples who have been together for long, long periods of time have phases within their relationship that they can point to.
So, I mean, and I'm saying this to you as someone who is not married, so my opinion about how to be married is very limited, but I would hope that what that means is an ability to recognize that there are phases and changes and different acts in life. Or like movie franchises, there's gonna be a sequel, and then there'll be a part 3.
My whole feeling or hope is that, well if I go into it with that expectation, maybe that will allow me the fluidity and the creativity to remake it or to change it as necessary.
Dena:
Yeah.
Slade:
Because the commitment is to the person. It's not necessarily to the time period that you met in, or whatever.
Dena:
Right. Yeah, I like that.
And, just recalling, I was listening to an interview with Michelle Obama on Oprah's podcast recently and she was talking about their marriage and how there were some really hard times, which you don't think about when you see Barack and Michelle Obama. You just see, Oh, they're just total soulmates and they just belong together and they have this perfect relationship.
She's like, No. There were some very hard years and she's like, If you've been married for 50 years and you have 20 years that are bad, you're doing pretty good, is what she said.
And people are like, What??
Yeah! There's gonna be some hard times and some years that really suck and where you're going through either individual things that are tough or as a couple, and any long term relationship that lasts is going to have those different phases.
And I think, who knows what the success of a marriage depends on. I don't have the answer but I suspect that a lot of it has to do with what you're saying is that flexibility and fluidity to go through these different phases together and the acceptance of that's going to happen.
Slade:
it's interesting that you mention the fact that our culture seems to be moving to a place where we're more accepting of the idea that there are different relationships for different time periods in your life because we also see that happening in career, the concept that people have multiple careers in their lifetime has become much more of an acceptable, intentional way of thinking about it.
Gone are the days when you picked your major at 19 and you picked a job and you work there from 25 to 65, end of story. There are some professions that do allow for that but the expectation that you're failing if you don't do that is pretty gone from popular belief now. I mean, it still haunts us. But there is at least in the culture a recognition that, you know what, it's an admirable thing to decide, I'm going back to school at 40 and I'm changing my career!
We applaud people who do that and so I think that may exist in parallel with... I don't know what it is. Maybe it's a fundamentalist thing. It's a fear-based thing that we're gonna lock everything down and it's just going to be this way forever.
Dena:
Right.
Slade:
We're moving as a species into a place where we recognize that things are evolving and changing. We are learning how to be more that way, right?
Dena:
Yeah. I would agree. I would say those two things are very connected.
Slade:
Oh, Dena, I could talk to you all day long. There are so many aspects of astrology that we can explore like this. Thank you so much for doing this deep dive and going through, at least speaking to everyone out there a little bit, giving them a taste of what they're working with. I will absolutely invite you back for other chats and we will do some other focused topic areas in this way.
Tell everyone where they can go to find you online if they want to follow you or get a reading with you.
Dena:
Yeah! So you can find me at DenaDeCastro.com and there you can sign up for my list there. I do have a really cool free gift of the nodes in your chart, if you didn't hear about it from the last episode. It's still there for you if you do sign up for my list.
I also will more regularly be posting things on Facebook as we go forward, and I have a Facebook, it's DeCastroAstrology. I say that because I just started back on Facebook after nine years away, so it's like getting back up to snuff on that has been interesting.
But yeah I'm enjoying getting back into that community and also being part of the Shift Your Spirits community as well. And you can find me there too. I pop in if you have questions about this episode and what have you.
Slade:
Absolutely. We'll have a comment discussion in the group available for anyone who wants to ask you some good follow up questions.
That was great, Dena. Thank you for coming back on the show again.
Dena:
Thank you. It's always my pleasure.
This show originally aired on the Big Seance Podcast - Ep 132 "Straight Dudes! Get Thyself to a Spirit Triangle!" and was produced by Patrick Keller.
Where are all the straight men in the metaphysical and spiritual communities? Patrick Keller of the Big Seance podcast hosted a "triangle table" chat with Ash Riley of In My Sacred Space and Slade Roberson of Shift Your Spirits.
We talk about ... the divine feminine, LGBTQ spirituality, coming out of the (spiritual) closet, and how to make spirituality more accessible to the elusive straight male.
A fun, lively, original discussion of some rarely approached topics!
GUEST LINKS - ASH RILEY InMySacredSpace.com
In My Sacred Space Discussion Group on Facebook
In My Sacred Space on Instagram
GUEST LINKS - PATRICK KELLER BigSeance.com
Big Seance Podcast
HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses
Get an intuitive reading with Slade
Automatic Intuition
FACEBOOK GROUP Shift Your Spirits Community BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits Edit your pledge on Patreon
TRANSCRIPT Ash:
I've decided that I am a connector.
Slade:
Yes.
Patrick:
Yes.
Ash:
That's what I do. I reach out to people, and I meet people and I connect them with other people, because, I don't know. I just feel like, oh! You guys should know each other because I like you and I like you.
You should like each other.
Slade:
I feel very much the same way. I consider myself a matchmaker, and I used to do it even when I was in corporate. I would hire people and put them in certain places to work with other people.
I have six marriages that resulted from that and...
Ash:
Holy -----!
Slade:
And there are at least three children that I can claim.
Ash:
You can start a business on that!
Patrick:
I remember you saying that, yeah.
Slade:
I don't know that I could do it if I did it intentionally with a romantic intention involved. But if I do it in the context of maybe work or, yeah, like you said, just recognizing, you guys should know each other.
Like, my Automatic Intuition program has become this party that I host. And whenever I add someone to it, it becomes increasingly more difficult to screen people to become a part of that. You know what I'm saying? It gets to be more and more kind of delicate and intricate.
And that's what I think about when somebody's like, I want to take your program!
I'm thinking, okay, what's the seating chart here, at the dinner table? You know what I mean?
Ash:
I feel like when I meet people that I want to introduce to other people, it's because I feel like they're gonna vibe and it's like a certain energy that I get from them. I feel they're similar.
Slade:
Yeah, I mean I would love it if people would do that to me. I mean, it does happen. People do introduce me to people, but I have become, especially with all this podcasting stuff, really kind of aware of the fact that, it's interesting that you say that, because I feel like my power is in introducing people to other people, also on a scale of like, discovering someone, or finding this person and being like, why aren't thousands of people listening to this woman?
Ash:
Yeah, yeah!
Slade:
You know? And interviewing them and I'm not interested in interviewing people who are already famous, or have more followers than I do, or whatever. Even though Patrick does.
Patrick:
Do you know how many people I've had the opportunity to, and I just go, and I either drop the ball and don't do it, or it just doesn't feel right. And the ones that I have interviewed that have been, you know, bigger names, just like landed in my lap.
Ash:
I've always wanted to... I mean, I have a decent following for what I do and the amount of effort that I put into it. It's not spectacular, but I recognize that I have a much bigger platform than a lot of other people.
When I do meet those people who I think, Gawd, people should know who this person is! That's why I always want to give them an opportunity to be exposed to my audience at least, because I'm like, if I meet somebody and I believe in them and what they're talking about, I think that that's really valuable for other people.
Slade:
Well you're also displaying your talent for recognizing that in other people. And people come to associate you with someone who has cool people on their platform. You know what I mean? I don't want people to feel like I have a bunch of canned interviews, or..
Ash:
Right!
Slade:
I want them to think, Wow! He always finds these people that I would've never known about otherwise but I'm so glad that I do. That's the feeling that I want them to have.
And I also want the people who are on the show to feel like it's a big deal for them. To feel like, either they love the show already so it's really cool for them to get to be on it, or they feel like, Wow, I went on the show and now I have so many more people listening to me. Or I've got so many new clients from that or whatever, and to be really excited about it.
Because we do this stuff so much more frequently now than the average person that we might put on.
There's just an energy about having someone be excited about being a part of what you're doing. And being excited about being a collaborator and it comes through. You can feel it. You know what I mean? When you listen to a show with somebody who's really excited and happy to be there, even if they're kind of nervous or something.
Ash:
Absolutely.
Patrick:
So, I'm just considering this thing started.
Slade:
Well why don't you tell everybody how we met, because I'd love to know what your perspective is on how we all three know each other.
Patrick:
I think I talked a little about it when I had each of you on the show, but I think I talked about it the most when Ash was on the show, and in my... it's not really a previous blogging life, because a podcast is just kind of an extension of what I started doing with the blog.
I met Ash through her blog, and I think when I realized she was from my area, that's when we started talking. I think I had, you might remember this, Ash, I don't know exactly how... If like, I messaged you or you messaged me. Or maybe you commented on my blog or something, but we started communicating pretty regularly.
I had lots of questions for her about my website. She had already been in the blogging world and I was still learning about it. I think we were talking about how I was experiencing the intense early part of my spiritual shift.
We've all talked about this, where I couldn't get enough books about it. And I couldn't stop reading about it and...
Ash:
The information-gathering phase.
Patrick:
Yes! Yes. And I was overwhelmed and I think Ash was like, You know, there's this dude that I need to connect you with because he's real.
That's how I got connected with your blog. I don't think I actually communicated with you until quite a bit later, Slade, but I was following you and learning from you at that time.
Slade:
Cool.
Patrick:
Then I think you reached out to me, Slade, before you started your fabulous podcast and Ash always pops up in topics, like, Ash said this, or Ash is so...
Ash:
SURPRISE! Here I am!
Slade:
From the closet.
Ash:
Like a jack-in-the-box.
Patrick:
By the way everybody, I made Ash sit in her closet because that's the greatest place for someone with a mobile laptop to record for acoustics, and it turns out her closet is basically a spiritual oasis and is beautiful.
Slade:
There's fashion in there too.
Patrick:
Yes!
Ash:
When I come out of the broom closet, it's like literally the spiritual broom closet here.
Slade:
It really is what I would expect your closet to be in the best kind of way. My closets are very suburban and not exciting at all. They are arranged by ROYGBIV and they all have the same exact hanger on every item of clothing, I will say that. Those are my two.
Ash:
You're not OCD either.
Slade:
No, not at all.
I have a south node in Virgo, I've discovered, which is where I get all my perfectionism in this lifetime from.
Ash:
I have a south node in Sagittarius, which is where I get all of my bluntness.
Slade:
Oh good! I like Sagittarius energy. We can trust it. That we're getting the exact, undistilled, unvarnished...
Ash:
The unvarnished truth.
Slade:
Yes. I like that. I like that quality.
Patrick:
I just wanted to tell people that we were, when we decided to do this, I don't know whose idea it was first, but it just...
Ash:
It was me! I said we should do this. It would be like the Avengers except with a better ending than Age of Ultron.
Patrick:
It just makes sense that it happened, because...
Slade:
We end up talking about each other anyway. If any two of us are together, the other person's name gets invoked, so...
Patrick:
Yes.
Ash:
We're like the Holy Trinity.
Patrick:
Yes!
And by way of joking, it's funny. We discussed what we were going to talk about and I don't know if you guys ended up being serious, but I was just joking and coming up with all these funny, ha ha things just to entertain people.
And it ended up that we came up with the curious thing that there are more women and gay men in our spiritual, psychic, metaphysical world, and not a lot of straight men. Like, what's up with straight men? Where are the straight men?
And I think Ash said something like, I think I copied and pasted it here, she said something like... Hang on...
Slade:
He's got receipts, Ash.
Patrick:
I apparently didn't copy. But you said something funny about, "Where are the straight men at, yo?" Or...Oh! I know! "When are straight men gonna get their sh*t together??" is what you said. Something like that.
Ash:
Yeah!
Slade:
Mmm... I have some theories about why it is a women-gay-men alliance predominantly. That's pretty easy to speak to. And it's so weird because when we were joking about this topic, we're kind of joking about it but then I was like, That's actually kind of a real thing that I observe all the time.
It came up in conversation with so many people over the next few days.
Ash:
Oh, really?
Slade:
There were other people who commented on it as well. It came up in a really super woo-woo way when someone told me, at the teahouse I go to, the next day, she brought up the fact that a lot of women were murdered for witchcraft during the Inquisition are reincarnating at this time. And that there were a lot of gay men that were crucified along with them. That is a very common lore, or whatever.
It's where the term 'faggot' literally comes from.
Patrick:
Ooo explain that more. How does that...?
Slade:
Well, they burned them along with the witches but in the context of like, Okay, we're going to have this big grand inquisition inquiry public burning to kill 1 or 2 or 3 women at a time, but then they just take a handful of queers and throw them in just as kindling, just to dispose of them. It wasn't even like, they didn't even waste a lot of energy on having a specific murder event for us, you know?
So the term 'faggot' refers to kindling, sticks that you throw in the fire to help it start burning. And that's kind of one of the origins of that disparaging term, or whatever.
So I was talking to this woman the day after you and I, the three of us, were kind of tossing that concept around. Where are all the straight dudes?? She just came out of nowhere with this idea that those souls are reincarnating right now.
And I'm not a huge past-life, reincarnation, that's not a rabbit hole that I go down really often. But I will always engage anyone in a conversation about it that wants to talk about it.
Yeah, she was like, "There's all these witches, the souls of all these women, who have chosen to reincarnate at this time."
It's, you know, I'm just passing it on.
Ash:
You just recently did an interview with Susan Grace, which is a long-time friend of mine as well. One of the things that she talks about pretty regularly is how... I would need to go back and... I think she's mentioned it in every single reading she's done for me in the last year.
Astrologically, we're coming back around through a cycle, and I can't remember which planet it is, but...
Patrick:
I can read your comment. Or actually it's Slade's comment. Slade said that she said something about the planetoid Regulus causing a 2,000 reign of men. That is over in 2020.
Ash:
So I think that might be what she's talking about, is the last time this happened was, it put us into the Dark Ages, which was the time when women were being burned at the stake for being witches. It was a suppression of the feminine.
That cycle is ending in the next five years. And it's kind of coming on right now. So you're seeing a lot of that collective pain and energy from that time coming up from beneath the surface for healing.
Patrick:
Mmm...
Slade:
I like the thought of it being kind of a cultural zeitgeist, or like an ancestral DNA kind of thing where it's just in our collective psyche to deal with that again. So I don't even think it has to be as literal a story as 'those souls are reincarnating', like they're all hanging out, going, "Okay, now's the time. Let's go y'all!"
Like it's a suffragette march.
I like to back out of those things, you know what I mean? I like to zoom out a couple of notches when talking about those things and imagine it in more of a, I don't know, mystical, collective consciousness kind of archetypal thing.
Ash:
Mmhmm.
Slade:
Like for some reason, I'm more happy and more comfortable getting onboard with that. In the way that you described it, as being like, that, whatever it was that's been repressed, we're not standing on its throat anymore. Of course it's gonna get up and wake back up again. Or, if nothing else, it's gonna have to be processed and dealt with differently than it has been.
Another way that this has come up, which isn't as specific as, 'Where are straight men?' and 'Why are women and gay men the allies in new age spiritual movements?' But in my Shift Your Spirits community, someone was posting about how Wicca and pagan-identified religion was really on the rise in the United States. And I told her in a comment, I said, I've actually been hearing that since the 1980s.
It started in the 1970s actually, that identification as a witch is one of the fastest growing religious identities in the United States and has been our entire lifetimes. Like it's not just happening. It's something that's BEEN happening for awhile, so I'm down with that.
Patrick:
Well if I may come down to Earth for a second and let's just talk about, like Ash said, I can't even think of more than a handful of straight psychics, for example.
Ash:
Straight, male psychics.
Patrick:
Straight male psychics, thank you.
What is it about... Is there something about the feminine, or, you know, there probably are a lot of gay men who want to smack me when I refer to them as feminine, but is there something about the brain of the feminine side or what makes... Is it more capable of getting into the spiritual and all of that...?
Ash is raising her hand.
Ash:
So, just to back up, everybody has masculine and feminine energy in them. I think that we have genderized that concept and that's not necessarily the case. It's just a way to refer to an archetype.
Think of it more in terms of yin and yang, where yin is the feminine aspect. It's the receptive. It's what's connected to the "Divine". So I think that the reason why we see more gay male psychics than we do straight male psychics is because they are more in tune with that energy. And that is the gateway through which we pull in psychic information, archetypally speaking.
I'm a tarot nerd and I love going through tarot archetypes but the archetype of the card, of the Lovers in the Major Arcana, it shows that. The traditional depiction of it is a man looking at a woman and the woman is looking up at a god-like angelic figure. The message within that card is that it's through the feminine that we reach that sort of enlightenment. Divine energy.
Slade:
I also want to throw in the fact that I think that whenever you exclude people from a social order where they're not in power, by virtue of survival or being able to make things happen for themselves, they have to become more resourceful and they have to learn how to do things in ways that people who, let's say you're heteronormative, white male in this culture.
Sometimes there's a lot of things that happen for you that you don't have to think about, in the same way that someone who is excluded from that, whether they're a woman, or they're a minority, ethnically, or they're a gay man, we have to go around and find windows, unlock doors and sometimes tunnel our way in if we can't go through the front door.
So I have a theory that that's also one of the reasons why gay people are considered more creative.
Patrick:
That's interesting.
Slade:
Or that women have an eye for the way that energies are interacting in a space in a different kind of way.
I don't think it's about the fact that we are... I do agree with everything you said about being more in touch with receptive energy. And also being released socially to experience that, you know? Women actually have it shoved down their throat. Gay men come to it by exclusion, well I might as well!
But I think that there's something that happened with the programming of straight men that is a little bit more on autopilot sometimes. And one thing that I will say for the straight dudes, because we've got a couple out there, and I can name them, but I won't embarrass them, but something that I've noticed about the straight men who ARE our allies, who we do find at our party, is that they're the real deal. They're the coolest of the guys. They're the ones that we all want to marry and they're the ones that probably need to be procreating more than the rest.
Ash:
And unfortunately, there's like two of them and all the rest of us are flinging ourselves at them.
Slade:
Oh, they're already married.
And we meet their wives and of course she's adorable too and we hate her.
Ash:
That bitch.
Slade:
Yeah, exactly.
You know, I do know these men in my life. And I think, gosh, what special kind of guys they are that they're able to shake out of that matrix, right? They are able to see through the matrix a little bit and see past that. So they are more awake.
So when you do find them, they are truly empowered and powerful guys. And they do exist.
But we can't ignore the fact that there's not a lot of them. And they don't tend to be working in this field the same way that we do, right?
Ash:
Yeah. One guy comes to mind that I discovered very recently and I completely, totally, just bought into everything. His name is John Wineland, and he's technically a relationship coach but he basically teaches yogic sexuality, and he just radiates this sacred masculine energy and it's so palpable. And you don't, I don't come across a lot of people that have that kind of presence, and who are able to talk about spirituality in a way that comes from that very masculine perspective.
I think he's fantastic. If you've never read any of his work or anything, I definitely recommend checking it out.
Slade:
Patrick, do you have any theories?
Patrick:
Like in college I can think of... and I'm not a psychic or a medium, or anything like that, so I'm not going to comment on it from that angle, but for example, after coming out, or being completely honest with some of the male friends that were straight that I had in college, I think were all these people that we're talking about. Because those are the ones I connected with.
They were very accepting and cool. They're not, I'm sure, psychics or mystics or anything like that. But I guess that's what I was thinking of.
I also think of the future of our world, my students, when I made the decision last year to officially kind of come out to my school community, meaning parents and students and no longer worried about that. Previously, I had only been out to my staff.
When I came out to my school community, I had some of the, and I'll use boys as examples, high school boys who I'd had as students in middle school, either came up and gave me a hug or told me how proud of me they were. One of them came up to me crying. And I thought, those are the cool peeps.
Slade:
Mmhmm.
Patrick:
Those are the cool kids.
And, you know, I have some students now, currently, they'll say, "Hey, Mr. Keller, how's your husband?"
And I'm like, that's cool. They're not afraid to be seen as 'I'm accepting this' or whatever.
So I think in that way, the future is very promising.
Slade:
I think that that's an amazing form of activism that gets overlooked, and it a cumulative thing and it's one of the reasons why being out is important.
Because it's so hard to de-humanize people when you know an actual face and name of an individual person. It makes it a little harder for people to put messages out there that are bigoted in some way because if you're someone who says, "Wait a minute, you know, they're talking about my teacher and that's not true." Therefore their whole theory is bunk.
I do believe that being the person who maybe you're the first out gay person that this straight guy has been friends with before, has an impact on how he raises his son down the road. That guy that you knew in college who's like, I never knew a gay dude before, but you're cool.
You just inoculated an entire potential family from future homophobia and probably misogyny as well. Because the issue with all those things are about people who are fearful and abusing people that they believe are beneath them.
And one of my friends who I work out with a lot that's a straight guy who's an ally said to me, he was like, "I'm not insecure about my masculinity."
The only way that you could be a misogynist or a homophobe is if you are.
Ash:
You know, I think that's an interesting conversation too.
I always share this article in my Facebook group. It's called 'Healing the Mother Wound', and the name of the woman who's worked this is... I'm trying to find it... Bethany Webster. She also has a really great article on how that sort of mother wound plays into toxic masculinity. I think I shared a link to it in one of my more recent blog posts.
Women talk a lot about men needing to take responsibility for how women have been treated for centuries and centuries and centuries. But also, there's a very important aspect here of, women also have to take responsibility for how we've raised our boys to be a part of that culture as well, and how toxic femininity has fed into toxic masculinity.
So I think, you know, in the midst of the #MeToo movement and how feminism is kind of gaining this momentum right now. We also have to, at some point, stop and also accept our role as women in what we've also helped to perpetuate in some ways by being unconscious. Just as unconscious as the unconscious masculine.
Slade:
You're right.
This polarity that's introduced by genderifying it, genderizing it, I can't remember what term you use, but by making it about masculine and feminine instead of making it about receptive versus projective energy, or dominant versus receiving, or all those different kind of terms, there's a lot of ways to talk about that stuff where it's not gender.
And this gender thing is kind of like the first basic form of social division, you know? We keep talking about how our culture's still so divided. That's like a basic division that has been going on for who knows how long, right?
The idea there, for a little while, that, before the #MeToo movement, there was kind of a meme within feminism about how feminism was humanism. Like, to be a feminist was essentially to be a humanist. And I know Justin Trudeau even brought that up recently when asked in an interview if he considered himself a feminist. And he said yes and that's why.
So I think that there are a lot of reasons why women would perpetuate a system that is misogynistic, because there are some women who would perceive themselves to be still elevated enough within that system that they wouldn't rock the boat. They'd rather indoctrinate their daughters in order to inhabit those positions of influence, however small they may be, as opposed to the real work of what Susan talked about.
Susan Grace said everything is going to be re-built. And part of what's happening is, everything's gonna fall apart first, you know?
In order to renovate stuff, you have to blow it up. And I think that, you know, my feeling politically, culturally and humanistically is that we are watching a lot of stuff unravel. And one of the things about her message that was so meaningful to me is: You want it to break apart.
Because we can't put it back together in a different way until it comes apart. So... that may have been a tangent...
Patrick:
I would love to bring something up, and that is, I mean, it goes along with everything we've talked about. But I've had a few guests on my show discuss how this women's suffrage movement happened... I mean, it's hand-in-hand with the spiritualist movement. And that was maybe kind of the first #MeToo era.
And so I would just be curious to know what we think, now that we are having this #MeToo movement and many people have referred to it as Another Year of the Woman, or The Year of the Woman.
What's that mean for spiritual peeps? Like us? What's it going to do to, if it was connected with the spiritual movement before, what's that do now?
Ash:
I think you see them kind of rising in parallel. And I think that's because, again, it goes back to that connection with the Divine Feminine and spirituality and that's how we're rising right now.
Slade:
I think women also are more receptive and use the principles that we teach and speak and talk about. Women have already mainstreamed a lot of new age culture to be tools in their tool box. The average woman is much more likely, in the United States, and I don't know, I can't speak to other cultures but here it feels like even people that, 10 or 20 years ago, we would feel like would never be seen chanting or burning incense or in a yoga class or something like that.
A lot of that stuff has just become a regular part of women's toolbox of self-care, right? Women don't hesitate to seek things like readings, as one of their sources of information. And they're much more likely to pass along a lot of their information to their spouses.
Like, I know a lot of guys whose partners and wives are getting readings from me. But I've even had situations where the husband is on the phone, or the information is clearly intended to be for the couple, but it's kind of like, it seems to be women who are just really comfortable with dialing that in.
So I feel like if women are in a position of power and are in a position to make more decisions, they're going to include those kind of tools and making it more available. And it will just be like, not as big of a deal to say, have something like that taught in a classroom, right?
Do you understand what I'm trying to get at?
Ash:
I have a question for you guys, and this is something that I've kind of pondered from time to time. And this could go off on a tangent as well.
I talk about coming out of the spiritual closet, and I think that there's a lot of similarities in being a spiritual person and sort of being discriminated against in certain ways for your personal beliefs. In that regard, I think a lot of that parallels being gay and having to hide who you are from the world too.
So I'm curious, especially with you guys, you're real spiritual and homosexual, so how does that... I don't know, let's talk about that.
Slade:
Hmm... Well, I will say this. It's easier to be out of your closet as part of your sexual identity than it was for me as a spiritual identity. I withheld THAT for much, much longer. Even though they both were happening in parallel in my awareness, I was actually more sensitive to the idea that I could be victimized for talking about hearing voices, being intuitive, being sensitive to spirits, knowing things about people. I was MUCH more afraid somebody was going to throw my ass in a sanitarium over that stuff than I was that I might be victimized for my sexual orientation.
That has been my experience is that, it actually might be harder to come out of the spiritual closet.
Ash:
I mean, I know for a fact, over the last 5, 6, 7 years that I've been doing this and have been administrating Facebook groups that many, many, many people are still afraid to be out about their spirituality. Because they are terrified of what friends and family are going to think, about how people are going to react, they're afraid of losing their jobs, their credibility, and I kind of agree with what you're saying.
I've never experienced having to come out about my sexuality, but I know that in terms of spirituality, that's been a really... It wasn't something that I just, you know, threw the door open and said, "Here I am!", dressed like Miss Cleo. It was sort of slow bits and pieces. I kind of just pushed it out there and I think maybe people just kind of saw it as an evolution.
Slade:
Like first you're bisexual for men, women...
Ash:
Right.
Slade:
You're really gay and everybody knows you're on your way to gay, but maybe you test the waters with the bi.
Ash:
Psy-curious.
Slade:
Psy-curious.
There's your title for this show, Patrick.
Patrick:
Well I joked around about how it's a triangle-table discussion instead of a round-table discussion and that works too. Triangle, gay, bi-curious.
Slade:
Gosh, right?? So many layers...
Patrick:
Well I can tell you that I don't know that I relate it to coming out or being gay as much because I have considered myself very lucky. I had a very smooth coming out process and I haven't really had a lot of, at least that my eyes are open to, a lot of discrimination thrown against me since coming out in my senior year of high school.
But I can tell you that I think part of my fear, like Slade is saying, of coming out of the spiritual closet, which I do, like Slade, that's more of a fear for me. It's harder when you have a podcast about it because everybody's like, "Yeah, he's a weirdo."
Ash:
What about blog?? I didn't even want to put my face on my own blog for three years.
Patrick:
Yeah?
Ash:
You know?
Slade:
Okay, you're a weirdo.
Patrick:
But what I was going to say is that I really have been also running away from organized religion my whole life and growing up Southern Baptist. And so, also, part of even though I'm so done with that and have left it behind, and I'm still running far away from it, worried about what people think, I guess, if you start talking about certain subjects. And I do have people give me weird looks because I don't have a lot of people in my community that are just kind of open to, "Hey, so let's talk SPIRITUALISM!"
That type of thing.
I do remember being more concerned about it when I was early on in the spiritual shift, that time period we were talking about earlier, when I was obsessed with EVP for example, and talking about spirit voices and people are like, "Uh........... I'm gonna go now........."
Ash:
I remember having a conversation with... I had several of these conversations actually, in a short period of time. I talked to my mom about it. I talked to some friends about it. And I had people, my best friend, ask me if she needed to call me an ambulance. I had people basically tell me I was delusional. My mom just kind of laughed it off and was like, "Oh, that's great. That's funny." And changed the subject. Really quickly.
I had a lot of people change the subject very quickly.
Slade:
What was the ambulance gonna be for?
Ash:
Because I'm crazy, apparently.
Slade:
To bring the straitjacket. They need an ambulance to deliver the straitjacket.
Ash:
Do you have a head injury?
But what IS funny is that since those conversations, a lot of those people have actually shifted on over with me.
Slade:
Oh, cool!
Can I say something about my observations with this? Because this is something that I get asked a lot, and I work with a lot of people who are smackdab right there on the cliff. A lot of people are emerging and putting themselves out, not only as a spiritual person, but identifying themselves as a psychic, right? Or an intuitive, or whatever the case may be.
And so, I hear these questions a lot. And I will say this, who you're imagining.... First of all, if you're in that space where you're like thinking, Ohmygosh, all these people are gonna think I'm nuts.
I want you to sit down and see if you can make an actual list of who those people are. Are there actual people who think that? And is there more than three?
Because sometimes you feel like, Oh there's all these people, and it's like, Okay, who are they?
Well, my mom and this person over there, I don't really know, but I bet they would.
It kind of falls apart a little bit and you start to realize how much you're pumping a lot of that up to be maybe more than it really is. And I'm not discounting the people who do say beep to you like you're delusional. But they are a minority.
So what happens when you do just say, "You know what? I'm not going to convince anyone of anything. But I'm going to put what I think out there."
It's like you're running a flag up a flag pole and all the people who agree with you, there's actually more of them in the closet than you ever realize, and they start approaching you and whispering, "Hey, by the way, I love your podcast."
Ash:
Exactly!
Slade:
That happens to me at the gym! Like it's a secret. Like I'm a drug dealer or something. You know what I mean?
Ash:
I had the same experience though. Like I would also meet people who, you know, I would tell them about some kind of weird paranormal experience that I've had and they'd be like, "You know what? This also happened to me one time."
And it seems like everybody HAS had at least one of those stories that they've always been reticent to share with someone because they don't know how that person's gonna react, and they don't know if that's a safe space.
Slade:
Right.
Ash:
Just by you being yourself and being open, you give them permission to also do that.
Patrick:
It's like a very therapeutic moment for them too. In those situations. I've had a few of those. They've been like, at the xerox machine. Those have been a lot of where these conversations have happened for me. Where they're like, "Oh, you know, I know you're into this stuff so I have this, the other night I had this blahblahblah..."
Just them getting it out of their system is, you know, I feel like I was their therapist or something.
Slade:
Feeling somebody that could witness them.
And just to tie up what I was trying to get at with, can you list the people who are supposedly going to think you're nuts?
You might. You might get a handful. But now when you start to list all the people who've emailed you and said, "Ohmygod, I love your podcast", or who have emailed you with their stories, and I know both of you get emails from people who tell you their life story and it's so vulnerable and so personal, and they've chosen YOU to be the person to tell, right?
And if we start to make a list of those people, the point that I'm trying to make for everyone out there who's feeling fearful of what the people who are gonna judge you negatively are going to think, when you start to really pool and list and add up all the people who are going to be connected to you because of it, or are gonna identify you as a safe person to talk to, or gonna agree with you or be interested in what you have to say, that population is so overwhelmingly larger, don't you think?
Patrick:
Yeah. It's just fear that keeps us assuming that we wouldn't be accepted.
Slade:
Yeah. We're afraid of what those 10 people are gonna think, that we don't even really like anyway. Meanwhile, there's a football stadium full of people who are like, "Bring it on!"
And what you realize when you walk through that portal, that vortex, and go through to the other side, you go, "Ohmygod, there's tons of people here." That's the first thing that really happens, is people flock to you because you have run a flag up and said, "I'm someone you can talk to about this."
That is a courageous act. Those of you who do put yourselves out there and do that are creating an opening for all those other people who can't. And creating a moment for them at this xerox machine, that they wouldn't have had otherwise.
So I think that that's the way it happens. And I understand why it's scary, and also understand that once you're on the other side of it, you'll think, What the hell was I waiting on??
Ash:
Yeah.
Patrick:
Kinda like when I came out this last year. I was like, why couldn't this have happened years ago? Because honestly when I started teaching 17 years ago, I always assumed that there would never be that moment. That I would be, I would have to wait until I was retired, to live that 100% out of the closet experience again.
Why couldn't it have happened at least five years ago? I don't know about 17 years ago, but...
Slade:
Well, I mean, the reason why it doesn't happen is because there is a very real danger that something really bad could happen to you. You could be targetted in some way. I mean, I don't want to say that, just by being brave and doing it, that that will make all of that stuff go away.
Ash:
Your dad could try to give you an exorcism in a public parking lot.
Patrick:
Or your parents could throw you out of the house as a teenager.
Slade:
Yeah.
Patrick:
And those things happen. There are very real dangers of, well, I'm sure coming out of the spiritualist closet for some, there might be a very real danger of someone, depending on where you live, or what your family situation is...
Slade:
I live in the Bible belt. I know what it's like to be surrounded by fundamentalists all the time. To the point where sometimes I feel like, maybe I actually have some kind of programming that I'm numb to it now. Because when I travel to other parts of the country that are different in some way, I think, Wow! Even the average redneck on the street is liberal!
It feels like I'm in Oz or something and it makes me aware of the fact that I do live in a place that is so conservative.
But I will say this. The bigotry is on both sides a little bit because I have such an expectation of these people around me, who maybe identifies as Christian or whatever, being unable to process what I do or connect with it in some way.
I'm often finding that I'm the one who's being narrow-minded.
They do come up to me and approach me and sometimes people who are mystical people in a religious way are actually much more able to talk about mysticism period. I've found that little old ladies who identify really strongly with Jesus are MUCH more open to the idea that your grandfather visits you at night.
They don't bat an eye about spirit visitation at all. Or the existence of angels, some of these things that are part of the new age...
Ash:
In some cases, I feel like they've just lived long enough to have those experiences.
Slade:
Right. And it's a matter of vocabulary. At some point you have to ask yourself, she's using the term she's using because of the time period that she grew up in, and the education and spiritual system she was indoctrinated into. That's her vocabulary and that's her words for it.
I often find myself putting it on myself to do the translating. The angry, younger version of myself was like, "Nah! This is BULLsh*t!" Like, in your face about it. Now I'm much more compassionate and empathetic to the fact that, you know what, I'll do the translating. I'm not gonna force them to accept my goddess vocabulary because sometimes that shuts people down just because they can't process what it is that...
You're using a word that they've never heard before and their mind shuts off at, "What? Did he just refer to God as a woman..?" or whatever. And then they don't hear everything you say afterwards.
And so I have learned to do the translating myself. And even though it wears me out sometimes, and I wish everybody was a little bit more fluid with their vocabulary, sometimes I have to look through the words that they're using and look at the energy of what they're trying to communicate. And say, "Okay, I get what she's saying. She's talking about empathy. She's talking about psychic receptivity. And she's just couching it in, a more conservative way of talking about it."
So it does go both ways a little bit. I'm just owning that for myself.
Patrick:
Word.
If I try to bring us back to the initial question, keeping in mind that we know that there are straight men, for example, who are our buds and who are completely down with all of this. And they're probably the ones throwing their phone across the room right now as they're listening. Because they're like, "Why can't you see me and hear me?" And just as there might be women who are completely lost on what we're talking about, and aren't down with it.
Keeping that in mind, how do we bring straight men in, or is it possible to bring straight men in? Do they have to do it themselves?
Ash:
Ooo good question.
Patrick:
Well I am a genius!
Ash:
There is no off position on the genius switch.
Slade:
For myself, I will say this. The same thing I was kind of talking about stepping out there and running a flag up the flag pole and letting people identify with you. So I think you live your example and you gather the other people along with you and you create those spaces. And you make sure that guys feel welcome when they do show up.
As far as recruiting them, that seems like a different kind of situation. I don't know that we can do that. I think that we need to make sure that we're not excluding the men that want to participate. The straight guys that wander into our meditation circle or whatever it might be.
And I do think that one of the things that could be different for Ash, for example, with the community she runs from mine, I do get a lot of male clients. And I get a lot of younger guys that come to me for readings, and I think that they do feel more comfortable just because there is a man present in the room, gives them a kind of permission to participate.
Even though I'm very out about my sexual identity, I do feel like sometimes the guys who show up to participate with us, it helps to see a couple of dudes in the room.
Ash:
I totally concur with that.
I was having a conversation with a friend just a couple of weeks ago about how there's not a lot of masculine voices when it comes to spirituality, particularly not straight male masculine voices. And I feel like there's a really big... Everybody wants to be able to see someone in a space that looks like them. And we always talk about how it's always a white male everywhere you go, EXCEPT where we are, you know?
Straight, white male.
So I think that's also a big barrier for those guys, is that they don't see a lot of people like themselves in our communities. So I think it's hard for them to be able to identify in some ways.
Slade:
I send a lot of men who are looking for relationships into those environments, particularly when straight guys who are in their late 20s and they come and have readings about their love life and where they can go to meet people. I do send them into those environments because I know...
Patrick:
You have match-making services also?
Slade:
Right! Just to bring that back in.
The fact of the matter is, if you are one of those men and you're really a special, unique, you know, maybe minority. But listen, if you want to be like the coolest person that ever walked through the room at yoga class, go to a yoga class as a straight man, as a place of putting yourself out there and saying, I'm a different kind of man. I can't imagine that you wouldn't have lots more opportunities to meet the kind of women that you want to meet.
Ash:
Exactly.
Slade:
You know, like those environments for the right kind of mindset, like if you're the kind of guy that thinks, You know what, I'm comfortable enough with myself. I don't mind being the only guy in the room.
You get a kind of attention for being the only man in the room with a bunch of women. Even when I was in college, I would take these women's studies classes (I have a Women's Studies certificate), and back then, they would give you a certificate if you took certain classes that were within other disciplines and fields and but they didn't have a major for it yet.
So if you took history classes that were designated as a women's studies history class, eventually if you had enough of those credits, they would give you a certificate.
So I would often take, say, for instance, a literature class or history class or politics class that was a women's studies class, because it was more interesting. The topic was more specific and granular and meaty in some way.
And I would find myself in these classrooms where I was the only man. And even though I was a gay man, I still was the only MAN. And there is an attention that you get from women when you're the only dude in the room.
And so I would think, that for a straight dude, that sounds like a great spot to be in.
Ash:
Just walk into the room, turn to the women and go, "Oh heeeeey!"
Slade:
So we are recommending that for your spiritual growth and edification, as well as your dating life, straight dudes, get thyself to a...
Ash:
Spiritual circle!
Slade:
Spiritual circle.
Patrick:
Right away.
So Ashley, what do I call this episode?
Ash:
Mmm... I don't know... Good Times in the Spiritual Closet?
Patrick:
Actually, I kind of like, Get Thee to a Spiritual Circle.
Ash:
Or triangle?
Patrick:
Or triangle!
Slade:
Ohmygosh.
Patrick:
Ash. Tell us what's going on in your sacred space, besides the closet that you're sitting in now? That could look like anyone's living room or bedroom, and it's your closet.
So tell us what's going on in your world.
Ash:
Oh... my world is quickly shifting and changing and I'm honestly not 100% certain where it's going right now. I just kind of started a re-brand over the summer, and I'm actually getting away from doing readings and being so focused on metaphysics and I'm kind of branching more into personal development and I'm on this big authenticity kick right now.
A lot of my writing has shifted quite a bit over the last year. It's kind of taken more of a creative, emotional direction.
I'm not selling anything, I'm not pedaling any wares, I have nothing to tell you other than if you just like to read my daily thoughts, you can follow me on Instagram and also subscribe to my blog.
Patrick:
I don't think there's anything wrong with that. That's awesome. Just BE.
Ash:
Yeah. I kind of decided that I'm doing this for pure enjoyment at this point, and I think that that's the best way to approach it. Especially if you want to grow something, do it because you're passionate about it, not because you need to make it happen.
It's my passion project.
Patrick:
So you've made this cool move that a lot of people would be very jealous of. This chance to just kind of jump out there and be brave and start something and move somewhere. How many years now have you, you're in Brooklyn, right?
Ash:
I'm actually Jersey City.
Patrick:
Oh, okay. So how long have you now been an East coast nerd?
Ash:
It was a year in July, so almost a year and a half December.
Patrick:
Wow. I had thought that it'd have been longer by now.
Ash:
Still pretty fresh over here!
Patrick:
Tell everyone... It's InMySacredSpace.com, right?
Ash:
Yes.
Patrick:
And you said your Instagram is where it's at?
Ash:
Yup. And InMySacredSpace.com. I'm also on Facebook too, but I seem to be gravitating more towards Instagram these days.
Patrick:
Slade! Just recently, I see that you kind of revisited some stranger angel stuff going on at sladeroberson.com.
Slade:
I did! It was my most recent episode. Just talking about the phenomenon of stranger angels, which is something that I read about and podcasted about in the past, but I had a whole different take on it while travelling, really around the concept of how you can be one of these people.
Like my past experiences have been all about receiving those experiences as opposed to, this time I was travelling with someone who is very actively likes to be a stranger angel. So it activated a different awareness about what it means to move through the world and interact with people that way.
Patrick:
What else is going on?
Slade:
You know, like Ash said, it's really not, for me, about pedaling anything in particular. I also believe in authenticity and I believe that putting yourself out there and talking about things that you're interested in and hosting a space where other people can do the same is a really powerful form of marketing, and you don't have to jump up and down and sell things in order to connect with people.
I really do believe in the concept of marketing yourself as being... Find a group of people that you share something in common with and go be relentlessly helpful to them.
Ash:
I love that. I love that! Be relentlessly helpful.
Slade:
I have to give credit to Tim Grahl. He's something of a business mentor to me and he comes from the independent publishing community. That's his definition and it's one I've taken and borrowed. My interpretation of that has been to create space with my platform for other people to come and...
It's not only about me making this content and putting it out there. That's one part of it. The authenticity. But also using my social media platform as a big keg party basically. I don't have control over it. It's not a... The Shift Your Spirits community on Facebook has been a surprising revelation in how... you know when you are in these groups where there are tens and thousands of people and no one is talking or commenting on anything, and the moderators and admin people are trying to get a discussion going and it's just fallen flat...
Ash:
I feel like that's how my group has become, but only because I've neglected it.
Slade:
Well, you know, it was one of my biggest fears, honestly, and starting a community like that was like, Ohmygod, how do I pump these people up? I thought I needed to be some kind of cheerleader or something and that's not my personality.
And what I have found...
Ash:
No!
Slade:
What I've found is that by inviting all these people and just creating a space for them to talk about all the things that they want to talk about, they all have their own paranormal experiences. They all have their own spiritual modalities that they study and so I have been very hands off with the community.
I'm hosting this community and that's my role. The people who participate, the members are the ones generating the discussion. I often don't even comment on the discussions because there are so many of them, and I love just kind of drifting through, quasi-invisibly, and seeing all the things that are going on.
And I have to tell you, I'm really proud to have my name on something that I didn't make but that nevertheless I feel like I invited to happen. And it's really about other people. It's not about me.
And when you're an author, you're an online personality or podcast host like we are, it's very easy to come from this ego space of being a performer and being like, the one who's the centre of attention. I have found that I'm moving into that. Weirdly I've become more collaborative, less about it being about me, and more about it being about everyone else.
So for me right now, the growth in Shift Your Spirits is all about the people who listen to the show and interact on Facebook and create this cool space where they talk about cooler stuff than I might even think to bring up.
If you'd like to check that out, by all means, we'd love to have you.
Patrick:
And I'll put all of the links that we mentioned two groups and Instagram and websites. And we'll put all of those in the show notes.
Great idea, Ash!
Ash:
Thank you!
Slade:
That was fun!
Patrick:
You are a genius.
Ash:
I know. I'm also humble.
Patrick:
And I'm, right now, just so you know, I'm gonna take a screenshot selfie of all three of us on the screen.
Are you ready for the countdown?
Here's my classic smile. You ready?
One..
Two..
Three..... Wait, did I do it right?
OH NO I didn't do it right! I did it wrong! It's Command-Shift-3.
One.
Two.
Three.
YAAAAAAAY! Thank you.
Slade:
Fun.
Just because you’ve dealt with something in your life and survived it, doesn’t mean it doesn’t ever happen again.
The monsters you slay come back - faster, stronger, and more cunning than ever.
But recurring patterns are not necessarily your failures.
HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses
Get an intuitive reading with Slade
Automatic Intuition
FACEBOOK GROUP Shift Your Spirits Community BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits Edit your pledge on Patreon
Dallas Woodburn is a writing coach and "book doula" who helps people give birth to the books that are burning inside them. She is also the author of three books, both traditionally published and indie-published, and is a freelance writer for dozens of magazines, newspapers, and websites.
Dallas and I talk about the tiny shifts in perception that will help you stop procrastinating, stop making excuses, and finally write your book—or pursue another creative project you have.
Have a book burning inside you? This episode is for you.
GUEST LINKS - DALLAS WOODBURN www.yourbookbreakthrough.com/
www.dallaswoodburnauthor.com/
HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses
Get an intuitive reading with Slade
Automatic Intuition
FACEBOOK GROUP Shift Your Spirits Community BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits Edit your pledge on Patreon
Like you, I have all these things on the horizon I haven’t reached yet:
I tell myself I can’t
I tell myself I’m not there yet
One day
Some day
When I’m some Thing, some other version of myself than what I am now.
What happens when I get there?
Will I still be straining for the future and disconnected from what is all around me?
Or will I have a moment like today, where I stop, and look around and realize I have so much of what I’m looking for?
MENTIONED ON THE SHOW dooce.com by Heather Armstrong
Out on a Limb by Shirley Maclaine
HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses
Get an intuitive reading with Slade
Automatic Intuition
FACEBOOK GROUP Shift Your Spirits Community BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits Edit your pledge on Patreon
TRANSCRIPT I had a moment the other day, on a rainy day, drinking Earl Grey tea and writing at the Wildflower Apothecary and Tea shop where I go in the afternoons. It came over me, this wave of emotion, of realization and just awareness, in the moment.
I am who I want to be when I grow up.
I'm purposefully making that statement present tense, because I've still got a long ways to go. But I want to acknowledge that it's also happening now. If I can't be happy now, I mean, my family are all living and relatively healthy, nobody's fighting a serious illness.
My pets are happy and healthy. I am so thankful and acutely aware of that joy every single day. My favourite moments are being on the couch watching Netflix or reading a novel on Kindle with my cat Sam on my chest and my cat Scotty between my knees. My heart is so full in those moments.
And I know that they won't last forever.
I've never been more comfortable in my own body - I feel very grounded, I work out a LOT, I sleep well, I have no chronic physical complaints, no pain. I don't take high blood pressure medicine. I'm in pretty good shape for somebody going on 50.
I look in the mirror and I like myself. More so than I ever have.
I have a safe and comfortable home. It’s not some dream loft I might have envisioned, but it’s more abundance than 99.9% of the people on the planet can claim.
I have friends all over the country who trust and adore me and even though they are far away, I can text them within moments. I actually love those texting, long distance relationships. It's like this amazing, creative, humourous Improv that's always going on out there in the cloud.
The physical landscape I move through every day is pretty freaking beautiful. Nature in Chattanooga, Tennessee is a fairyland, it really is. It's the reason why I wrote about a fairyland that exists here. I would have never imagined myself moving back home, but there is an energy in this city at this time, and it’s a good time to be here.
And after all the personal friends and family and gratitude for good health and wellness, there is my work. My work is my life. THIS, right here, is my work. And I'm kind of like, Are you kidding me? That's awesome.
I make money for talking, and commenting, and giving my opinion and sharing my stories, and doing all the things I would do with you over a cup at a cafe.
And although I do work everyday, it’s because I love my work. It's part of my life and an extension of my personality. My schedule is my own, even though I'm kind of a slave driver about it.
And you know, by the way, I was just telling my mother I know this sounds like a highly superficial thing, but I drive my dream car. It’s not a luxury car by any means. It’s a hard top Mini Cooper, British racing green. And I remember a time when that seemed so out of my reach and I thought “Wow. That is THE car that I would get if I could get any car.” Sometimes I walk up to it parked on the street and I think “I love my car!"
I do! I got it.
I could go on with this list. I don’t do this enough. By the way, especially when you’re feeling bad, playing this game when you’re alone, driving around, naming things that are pretty or that make you happy on those days when you can feel happy. If you do it on the days you don't feel happy, it’s really powerful.
Just do it all the time, actually. But if you're in a place where you're trying to get that happy back, I mean, happy is such a dumb word. But you know what I mean. Whatever that means for you. I think it's something so much more quiet and less exciting than what we envision.
But it's a powerful exercise. The gratitude listing, the gratitude journalling thing, it really will change your mind. You can reframe anything, and if you get really, really diligent about it and really police it, it will change your life.
So do that, if you need it. Or if you haven't done it in awhile, this is your reminder, whenever you're done listening to me talk, turn this device off. Look around and start naming things.
The point of all this — and I hate it when people do the “I love my clients so much” posts on Facebook, because it feels a little like humble bragging / marketing your services without doing it, kind of winky wink. I try not to do things that I think will make people roll their eyes.
People make me roll my eyes a lot… That's something you don't know about me. You think I'm so much of a nicer person than I really am.
I digress … The point of all this is, not to humble brag, and not to imply that I love my work so much therefore you should buy all of it. The point of all this is,
If I can’t be happy now, when would I be?
One of the things I notice we tend to do — and there’s a lot of evidence of this in the conversations in the Shift Your Spirits Community on Facebook. So I lurk and I skim and I read and comment here and there as I can, but I don't have the time or ability to get involved in ALL the conversations, but I do love to observe the patterns of things that emerge for me there, within an hour collective zeitgeist.
We make a lot of things aspirational.
And we think we're just identifying aspirations, but I think we make things aspirational and make them too hard.
If it’s important, it has to be waaaaaaay out in the future. It needs to be difficult to get to. It needs to be freaking unattainable for us to dream about attaining it.
I mean, just as a common example, people often post or ask about meditating like it’s learning to execute a particularly difficult spell from Dark Arts class at Hogwarts. Lotus positions and mind emptying and special rooms in your house and special corners in the room and alters and singing bowls and incense burning and stretchy flowy clothes that cost way too much money to be synthetic…
In my mind, I'm seeing those and I'm seeing other people engaging and helping and offering advice, and their advice is often offered in difficult ways. They buy in to the difficult and, "Here's a really complicated answer to your complicated question", and I do that too with my own stuff. Especially when it comes to my writing and all my perfectionism issues around that stuff.
But I notice that, just with the whole meditation thing, people come up to me on a daily basis at the cafe and engage me in conversations. It's a really common refrain: "I really need to start meditating." "I want to start meditating." "I try to meditate. Do you have any advice for meditating?"
I just want to say, "You know what? Go for a walk. Clean things. Sweep your driveway."
Literally, that's what I do when I want to meditate. Because I don't do all that other stuff. I'm bad at it too! I don't like things that are aspirational and difficult. If I really want to do it, I want it to be doable.
Everything about my reason for starting Shift Your Spirits was to make the magical and the paranormal accessible to us NOW. In our daily lives, right? Where else would we want to have it?
It's the magic in the mundane.
I believe Toni Morrison is the one who gave me that phrase, possibly in some of her writing about writing or maybe an interview that she gave. I've always been really into stream of consciousness fiction. There's a strong element of magical realism and stream of consciousness in her work. That was my literary concentration in college — 20th century British novel. James Joyce. Virginia Woolf. Virginia's one of the really most famous executors of stream of consciousness. She's the reason we probably had to study it.
This concept of illuminating a single moment in time and consciousness, and elevating it with layers of thought and synchronicity and observation and philosophy, all existing within this fluidity of time.
Toni Morrison also talked about how we don’t have to find answers.
People think, especially with writers or with leaders or preachers, or whoever it is that's standing up in front of the others, and trying to show the way, that it's about delivering answers. She talked about how she thinks the true job is to ask and contemplate powerful questions.
So stop looking for the answers so much and just find a defining question for you.
It may not have an answer. But leaning towards those possible answers, and searching for them, can be the meaningful process that you're looking for.
It could give you the work of a lifetime, by the way. Trying to answer an unanswerable question.
Not only is it the magic in the mundane, but it's also the mystery. Being who you want to be when you grow up is about being able to recognize that, and living in the present moment and being that. And choosing to contemplate the gratitude for it, right?
Procrastination protects our dreams.
It keeps them in the future where we can’t fuck them up as long as it remains in a glass bubble floating out of reach, we have hope around it. We can build all these stories and these fantasies about "some day", and "When we get there", and "Oh, if only that were mine".
But if you take it down, and you break the glass and you use it, it changes it. And it's never as beautiful and mystical and magical as we thought it was.
It exists in perfection in that abstract, out of reach, state. But it's not usable. It's not alive. It's not happening to us now. We aren't really using it. So why have it in our consciousness if we can't get to it?
It's insane!
Just as an idea for a piece of writing or creative project is never what you actually execute. It's like, the best book is always the one you’re going to write next. It's never the one you're working on. It is never the one that you're 75% of the way through. Trust me. Even though you're doing it!
You're being the author that you wanted to be when you grow up. You're 75% of the way through editing a book, Draft 2. Oh, god help you. That looks nothing like the fantasy, right?
I thought when I was a kid, I was going to grow up to be a cross between, get this, C.S. Lewis, a diarist, and a writer on the team of The Young & the Restless — don’t laugh.
I loved soap operas from a really early age. I would rush home from the bus stop from kindergarden, or maybe my mother picked me up, but I still would want her to drive really fast and not stop and get the mail. I would want to get in there and watch that show.
I still adore that format, I don’t watch old school daytime soaps or telenovelas or anything like that, but I do love really good serialized premium cable story telling, you know what I mean?
And the diarist thing. I fell in love with this word at a really early age and I identified a lot with Anne Frank. A lot of us did when we read that book. And it’s this word that my spirit guides whispered to me as a child, diarist, again as a teenage, even again in my late 20s.
And I can remember, in fifth or sixth grade, researching who are the authors were who were famous or known for their diaries and at that time, there was this humorist named Erma Bombeck, who wrote these kind of funny, almost like stand-up comedy routines about her life as a housewife in Middle America, or whatever. It was in book format though. I think she wrote columns in newspapers and syndicated stuff.
I thought of that as kind of being a diarist.
And when I was a teenager, there were those Shirley MacLaine spiritual non-fiction memoirs. Out on a limb. I somehow discovered Virginia Woolf, too, waaaay before anyone had to study stream of consciousness literature or became an English major or anything. It was like a ridiculously young age, reading letters that Virginia Woolf wrote. LIke a collection of her letters, for which she was famous, and that kind of felt like diaries.
But I never understood HOW anyone would ever become successful or famous for writing a diary. Remember, my guides are whispering "diarist" all the time. Because Shirley MacLaine was already famous for being an actress before she shared her memoir. Even then, if the story was or wasn't interesting, we all knew that was part of the reason why it was published, and her face was on the cover, was because she was already someone that we knew, so we were interested in hearing more about her.
But I started keeping journals, because of all this, when I was about 11 or 12. I wasn't even a teenager yet. I was really diligently trying to follow this practice of being a diarist, which I felt like would lead me to something. But I had no idea what it would be.
I didn’t know as a little kid that C.S. Lewis was writing about religion and spirituality in another part of his career. I only knew Narnia.
As I grew up and discovered that he was trying to indoctrinate me with Christian allegory, I was really resentful of that. I was a little pissed. I found his other work really tedious, like the other science fiction stuff, and then the more religious stuff, ohmygod, it was just so polemic and... No! I don't even go to church. Why in the hell would I want to read this?
I quickly moved away from identifying wanting to be C.S. Lewis when I grew up.
Although I did memorialize the death of the opinion of both him and Tolkien by writing a research paper in college about how Lewis converted Tolkien to Christianity. Like, worked him over for a really long time.
Gag.
I obviously didn’t become a soap writer either. So I was way off on that whole initial trajectory.
BUT, here’s what’s interesting to me. I don't know what's interesting to you. I did grow up to be an author who writes spiritualist non-fiction AND fantasy novels. So it's kind of like C.S. Lewis.
And I never understood how the “diarist” thing was ever going to come true — I could never see that path, yet my guides were really insistent. It's one of the things throughout my life the clairaudient word or message that I've heard most consistently, more than any other thing, that being a Diarist would be my key to becoming a writer.
I thought my guides were confused about the words. I thought maybe I would become famous for some other kind of writing, and then people would want to read my diaries after I died or something. So I made sure to keep them and make them interesting, or try.
Or I thought since I kept journals, like I thought of it as journals at that point. I wasn't even calling it diaries anymore. I didn't even buy the diaries with the little key on them, though I was fascinated with that whole concept when I was really young. But when I really got into doing a whole lot as a teenager, I quickly moved to writing in blank sketchbooks. I called them journals, and that's how I referred to them.
Maybe my guides were trying to tell me to be a Journalist and the word was off. But that specific path, being an actual journalist, did not appeal to me at all. So there was a real confusion around all that.
But then in 2003, I started seeing these web sites called blogs. Do you remember Dooce? Dooce.com? Did anyone follow Heather Armstrong? I'm going to put a link in the Show Notes so that we can go check in with Heather and see what's going on with her all these years later.
But she was one of the first people who was writing this weblog about her life and was fascinating and interesting and entertaining. I read it every week or every couple of days, whenever she posted. So I was at that point where I was trying to figure out how to use the internet to further my career, to learn how to publish online.
So I got some good advice from one of the founders of Movable Type, that I should learn how to install and build blogs. And then I should focus on learning to code CSS, which is webstandards. And so I did!
I learned how to install Movable Type, which was a big deal back then. You couldn't just click a button and have your web post put it on there. You had to do all this stuff. And then later I learned how to install WordPress.
But more than anything, I learned how to market these things, right?
They were diaries, they were shared online diaries. And I started one of my own, a few years after learning how to build them, called Shift Your Spirits that I thought nobody would ever even it.
And holy shit, I became famous for being a diarist. A blogger. That was the new word. But it's a diarist.
Would you believe, in Apple podcasts, my podcast, this podcast, was submitted into the Spirituality category. Where else would you put it? But Apple always puts it in “personal journals.” No matter what I do, I can't get it out of that category and into something like spirituality or wellness. Anything else, no matter what.
They won’t change my category. I have no idea why. They consider it a personal journal. I never called it that. Maybe their robots know more about me than I can see in myself.
My blogs and my podcast episodes are serialized, dramatized, episodic content.
I can kinda a connection to soap operas there.
Every week, I write this unfolding story and I have no idea where it's going or where it ends.
I’m just creating it as I go. And I think that's part of what I love about that whole soap writing.
I’m sure I thought when I grew up I would live in a modern high rise in some glamorous city, there would be video phones like the Jetsons. I would wear fashiony dressy clothes all the time and I would putter about, busy busy, having meetings with people about my work, and possibly having meetings about my work by Jetson video phone.
The reality is, I live in the city where I grew up, but it's changed and it's become a more glamorous version of itself, kind of. I actually hated living in a big city. I tried it. I don’t even really like visiting them very much either.
I hate wearing dress clothes — I dress like a high school baseball coach who likes to hike on the weekends. I wear hoodies and crossfit trainers and sometimes I switch that up with a birkenstock clog. I write in cafes. My time is my own.
And I do have meeting by video phone — it’s called Skype and Zoom and FaceTime.
I get paid to tell people stories — about themselves, about myself, about these worlds I make up. I am not CS Lewis-level famous, but I am internet famous, which is probably better in some ways.
Bottom line, I make a living sharing ideas from my head.
It’s kind of better than glamorous — it’s casual! It's so casual and informal.
It probably does sound like I’m bragging.
But I really am just trying to acknowledge this moment in time in my life. I’m freezing the present. I'm looking around. I’m taking a moment to be grateful. And to just kind of shout it from the rooftops.
Because, like you, I have all these things on the horizon I haven’t reached yet:
I tell myself I can’t.
I tell myself I’m not there yet.
One day,
some day,
when I’m some Thing, some other version of myself than I am now
What happens when I get there?
Fastforward … to When I Get THERE.
Will I still be straining for the future?
and disconnected from what's actually going on?
Or will I have a moment like I did the other day, today, where I stop, and I look around and I realize: I have so much of what I’m looking for.
You have two choices to be who you want to be when you grow up:
If you don’t already have it, if you're not even close, you need to change some shit. And that is hard.
But if you want it, you have to be willing to give up some stuff maybe. I won't even go into all the things I gave up, or that I do give up, because I'm focusing on what I HAVE.
If you do feel like you might have all the elements in place, or you just want to accept that maybe this IS it, then the question is not about what you can change, but how can you feel differently about what is.
Be with what is.
I am already everything I’ve ever wanted to become.
I am fulfilling my purpose by being here.
And I can’t be happy then, in some glamourized future I may never get to, If I can’t be happy now, If I can’t be grateful right now.
If I don't know how to do that now, then how will I know how to do that whenever I get to wherever it is that I'm supposed to get to.
So I’m pausing to mark this moment in time.
And I recommend you do the same thing.
If you can.
You’re not missing anything.
There’s nothing for you to bring in or add or change before you can acknowledge it.
Before you can claim your reason for being here and to find love for yourself and the life that you're already living.
You are already everything you’ve ever wanted to become.
You fulfill your life purpose with every breath you take.
I’m sharing observations from my trip to Boston. Notes on shadow work, manifesting, parking angels, and an expanded awareness of the stranger angels phenomenon.
MENTIONED ON THE SHOW E:79 - The Passenger
E:61 - Parking Angels
HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses
Get an intuitive reading with Slade
Automatic Intuition
FACEBOOK GROUP Shift Your Spirits Community BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits Edit your pledge on Patreon
TRANSCRIPT I travelled to Boston, Massachusetts, last week with my friend Rob, who you may remember is also one of the people I travelled to New Orleans with last month. We were joking, while in Boston, that we were living The Passenger Part 2, the sequel to Episode #79, the podcast where I shared some of my adventures and spiritual observations while travelling in New Orleans.
We were laughing about the fact that sequels are often really disappointing attempts to resurrect some memes or themes that were successful in the original. We were laughing about it because the point of comparison between these two trips is really unfair. There's no way that this, as a sequel, would be satisfying to that other trip.
This trip was different from the New Orleans trip for a lot of reasons. There was a large group of people coming from all over to go to New Orleans to celebrate a birthday party for a friend that we all had in common. Of course, it was New Orleans so there was the expectation of a certain level of party and debauchery, etc.
This trip was just the two of us. It was just Rob and I. The tone was extremely different. The quest was entirely focused and we were dealing with some darker emotions on this trip.
Just to give you a little bit of backstory without going into his privacy too much. Rob's sister passed away a couple of years ago in New Hampshire. After the funeral, there was a storage facility with some of her personal effects and belongings that had been left behind, that still needed to be gone through and processed and distributed to people within the family.
He'd been dreading, obviously, going back up there, taking a trip just to go through those boxes, clear out the storage facility and ship some things back to his home in Atlanta. He told me, when he first presented the trip to me, that I just kept coming up as someone to accompany him on this journey.
He hated to ask his partner to go back up there, after having already gone and done all the funeral stuff once before. He felt like it was a tall order to ask him to go back and be a companion one more time in this last leg of the process.
I seemed uniquely qualified as someone who's been friends with him for over 25 years. We are like family and I am someone who deals with stuff, you know, issues of life and death, a lot of vulnerable client conversations in my daily world. So yeah, it made sense to me why I came up as a possible person to accompany him on this.
We also wanted to, after accomplishing what we needed to, to have a moment where we could shake some of that energy off and turn to something more hopeful and happy, and just have a good time a couple days in Boston enjoying the city.
We've known each other for years. We've travelled together a lot and we travel well together. So I was really looking forward to it. I did feel like I was uniquely equipped to be the passenger again on this trip. I couldn't really imagine anyone else. On paper, maybe it doesn't sound like so much fun but it was a really intensely great experience for both of us.
We were travelling on the new moon in Scorpio. That was the day we were going up there. I was very aware of the significance of that. If you haven't heard me talk about my chart before, I'm a Leo with a Scorpio moon and Scorpio ascendant. I have a lot of Scorpio in my chart. I always personally like to unload some of my darker stuff with Scorpio friends.
If you have friends who have Scorpio significantly in their chart, there's something about Scorpio energy people. They're able to process a lot of really heavy stuff, whether it's death or sexuality. And they have a capacity to do so without being negatively impacted by it, and also without there being shame involved.
If you have any kind of issue that you feel shame around, even if it's the shame of sharing something dark and affecting other people, find yourself a Scorpio, or someone with a Scorpio moon, or it could be any significant placement in their chart. We do have the capacity to do that kind of work. It's shadow work!
This trip, whether Rob would ever use that terminology or not, was a shadow work voyage. Sexuality, mortality, very much a part of the link to Scorpio energies, Scorpio new moon. I've heard it expressed that someone who has this kind of energy, or this kind of placements in their chart, is referred to as someone who can see in the dark, and I like that term.
I'm someone who can see in the dark. So I was all down to accompany him to the dark and back into the light again.
Just a little bit of a note on my update on travel anxiety and sleep issues. It's definitely an anxiety thing. Travelling relinquishes a lot of control in order to work. To be successful you do need to be carried a bit and not trying to control everything. Routines go out the window when you travel. That all makes it difficult for me.
I really thrive on having a very routine life, so it can be exhausting for me to be outside of that and to be ungrounded, especially if you don't know how to recognize and allow those magic moments to happen.
Now fortunately, I am very hyperaware of my own shortcomings in those areas and also aware of how to make those experiences what they need to be. How to allow them to be what they're meant to be for you, and to step back outside yourself a little bit and observe how it's an opportunity for you to practice differently. To be in the world differently. Literally to wear a different cloak and to move through the world in a new way.
The biggest takeaway from this trip for both Rob and I was about the recurring theme that manifesting is not about attracting the right place or the right circumstances, the right details or the right things, but it's about connecting to the right people. Manifesting even a circumstance is often about attracting the right kind of people to assist in that to make it happen.
If you manifest and attract the right people to you, and present whatever it is that you're trying to accomplish, often a lot of stuff gets taken care of by itself. Or the people that you attract will take care of multiple steps along your to-do list. That was something that I noticed a lot.
We would have a set of things we needed to accomplish. We need to go here and get this. And we need to go to this other place and pick up the key. And after that, we need to figure out where to take this stuff, and can we haul this here. There'd be like a set of five things and sometimes the answer to that was one person that we met along the way, who we would share, We're trying to do this, this and this. And they would often have a simplified route, or a way of condensing a lot of the steps.
So I noticed that in manifesting, we weren't manifesting each individual thing. It was all sort of rolled together, and it was all defined by people.
Manifesting the right person and presenting your needs to them, they often had solutions that were simply better than anything that you could come up with. Sometimes because they were local to the place and the space that we were working in, they had information and understanding and knowledge about where we were that made it very easy for them to connect dots for us that we would have really struggled to make on our own.
Rob is very much a friendly and outgoing person, like I am. We both have the capacity to speak to strangers and to project our personalities a little bit. And we got into a lot of situations where there were people who were unacknowledged in the roles that they were in.
Especially like, people working in the airport. You could see that they were very close to being an automaton. They were saying the same thing over and over again. Hundreds of people were just streaming by and Rob talked about the fact that, breaking that for them and simply acknowledging them, and asking them, Hey, how's it going, or whatever.
Just seeing them in the moment produced powerful magic. It was like, we weren't just looking to get assistance. We were also giving it. We were in this very conscious dance of interacting with people and giving our energy and creating opportunities for them to give us theirs. It was like everyone was sleepwalking and we were suddenly coming through and waking everyone up for just a moment.
And you could see the impact that it has.
I think most people who are sad and troubled and struggling in their lives feel a certain amount of invisibility. I do think that just acknowledging someone, making eye contact with them, speaking to them in just a pleasant way, you never know what kind of impact that you might have just had on the trajectory that that person is on.
It's so easy for us to not experience that. It's very easy to get on a bus and immediately look at your phone. Or get in an Uber and get on your phone, without talking to the driver. That kind of thing.
Of course, I talked a lot about Uber drivers in the first passenger episode, episode #79, so I'm not going to go into a whole lot of Uber stories this time around, but we still had those moments, you know? We still had the guy that was an Uber driver who was looking to develop his real estate business and doing rentals and Rob was able to give him some advice about some tools and platforms he could use to automate certain parts of his business.
Just these little things where we were sharing bits of information.
And, you know, I was really aware, even to myself, I wasn't so much talking to Rob about stranger angels phenomenon. But I saw how Rob, in the way that he interacted with people, he very much was a stranger angel to a lot of the people he encountered.
I could see how the impact that he was making and the energy that he was sharing, some day they could be like, You know what? This guy just got in my car and told me about this cool thing and I started using it and it was awesome. It was just the answer I was looking for. I never saw him again, kind of thing.
So I was very aware of this phenomenon, not only of attracting stranger angels to help us on our journey through the small towns of New Hampshire, and trying to navigate where we needed to go.
But also the fact that you could be a stranger angel if you were in the mindset. It was kind of like the same switch got thrown. And whether or not you were that for the other person or they were that for you, was kind of secondary. Like it could sort of happen for both of us.
It sounds so simple. The kindness of strangers, just to interact with people more. Don't be lost in your cell phone.
Like, yeah, yeah, we hear that kind of stuff all the time and I don't think there's anything wrong with information technology and being connected in that way. But I do think it's very powerful. To be present and to look other people in the eyes and make sure that they feel they're seen. Even just for a moment.
So, you know, some of the kinds of things that happened was, what started out as a question about where we could drop off donated items. We had some things after we went through the storage facility, we had boxes of things. Bins, nice plastic tubs full of stuff that we wanted to donate. And so we were looking online for Goodwillls and places where we could go and drop off stuff. Places that would be open.
Some of them were 25 miles away, they were in neighbouring towns. We didn't really know like, do they have one of those big drop centres, where they have a trailer in the parking lot where you can leave stuff inside it. We didn't have any way of knowing these things.
And so there was a small antique junk store kind of place. You know one of those places, it's like kind of antiques, but then it just kind of like this crazy random stuff. It was right across the street from the storage facility. I said, You know what? Let me stop in there and ask them, because they probably know where some dumpsters are that we can throw some stuff away. And they probably are also aware of where we could take things and donate it, and it might save us a trip somewhere out of town.
Once I got inside and started talking to the owner of the junk store, I realized really quickly that he actually wanted the stuff. He was willing to go through it himself. So what started out as a frustrating googling situation, just by manifesting this one person, suddenly he took it all off our hands on the spot.
We didn't have to go anywhere. We didn't have to go find any of those places. He actually helped us unload the truck right then and there. I realized that we were sort of possibly a windfall to him, to his store. He had all these items, hopefully, among that stuff that he could sell in his store. To him, it was a plus. One man's trash is another man's treasure kind of thing.
And there were just a lot of circumstances where things like that happened and it made me really aware every time we started to say, We need to find a certain kind of hotel, or we need to find a certain kind of restaurant, that I started to think of everything in terms of, we need to find people to ask. We need to find the right people to present what we're trying to do. And then they always have great recommendations to make.
It's the same as when you go somewhere and you ask someone, Where's somewhere good to eat? People who live somewhere locally will know about places to go that tourists don't necessarily see. And so, you always get a different experience if you can plug into someone who is from that world. It's very different than googling 'restaurants close to me'.
So, yeah, the power of acknowledging people. That was really a big part of this trip. The idea of being a stranger angel, and also attracting them to you. That this is a phenomenon of interaction.
Of course, I've written about and spoken about stranger angels in more of a paranormal context, but in the moment, we really have no way of knowing who these people are before and after they leave us. It's just a moment in time where they're almost like, a walk-in part in our lives, and we're a walk-in part in theirs.
Simply stopping to acknowledge Rob's impulse to connect with other people, we were able to kind of feed off each other's intentional friendliness. We both have this thing in our personality where we use our friendliness and our personality to draw people out.
It was really fun to be with someone else who I could perfectly modulate that behaviour and really match in a certain way. There was no resistance there. We were both very much on the same page without having to think about it.
Someone that I encountered, I can't remember what the details were, but I complimented someone on her coat or something like that. She shared, in the moment, how insecure she was actually about buying that colour, and how she almost didn't do it, and how, again, even that morning before putting it on, she felt this sense of, Ugh, I shouldn't wear this colour. It's really obnoxious.
The fact that I notice it and said to her, That's a really beautiful colour for you to wear, was like a trip to her. Because she apparently had spent so much time thinking the exact same opposite.
And so, just there in that moment, sharing that observation, I didn't realize. Maybe it was an intuitive thing. But I didn't consciously pick up on the fact that, Wow, this person's really struggling with her appearance today. That by obeying the impulse to say something really turned her around.
She acknowledged that in the moment. She was like, Ohmygod, I can't believe that you knew to do that.
There was a guy in the airport who we talked to about his glasses, in what started out as a, Oh, I like your glasses, conversation, ended up being a more in-depth Rob passing on his love of Zenni optical and exposing another person to the ability to afford multiple pairs of glasses styles. So that was another one of those exchanges that started out very innocently.
Yeah, I mean, there were so many of these things and I'm sitting here trying to recall them. Unless I'd written them down in the moment with the purpose of tracking them all, it's kind of hard to remember. I just remember having the feeling that I was choosing to be that way in the world. And it's a choice that a lot of people don't make. It's actually easy to not be that way in the world.
But there was something so profoundly powerful about knowing that you could do it and seeing the result, over and over again. It was almost like we were playing with this magic that we found. Like we found a magic spell and we're like, Ooo, let's do it again and see what happens, throughout the trip and we're never disappointed.
It was really pretty amazing.
There was some mastery level parking angels experience that I have to acknowledge. No one was there to witness it but Rob. He was impressed. The parking angels are for real. They are in full effect. Go and listen to that episode, too, about parking angels. I feel like stranger angels and parking angels were the theme.
The thing is, is that those concepts became so expansive for me in the world on this trip. It also made me aware of the fact that I AM one, by choosing to be one of these forces in the world. And that you can be the most muggle person in the whole world and if you understand the intention of being a magical person, and interacting with others in that way, it's extremely infectious and it really gets you results.
Like, you see the results of doing it and it turns me on to be that way more.
Maybe it's because in our normal routine lives we're just sort of seeing the same people all the time, so it's harder to create those experiences. But I'm going to be looking for ways to practice that more in my daily life. And see what stones I'm leaving uncovered.
So there was a lot of shadow work on this trip and when we came back out of it, towards the end, there was a lot of light and a lot of beautiful fall colours and walking around Boston. And we were able to flip the energy a little bit and we returned on 11-11, which was auspicious.
There's a lot of 11 numerology this month. November 2018. But whenever you're listening to this, because I know some of you are listening from the future and it may not be November 2018 anymore, but whenever you're hearing this, just know you're kind of meant to hear this message right now. It's important for you to know why this month is so vibrationally powerful in terms of numerology.
11 is an awakening number. It's an energetic portal signifying heightened consciousness, awareness. It opens a path to spiritual growth and ascension. There's a lot of energetic shifts happening this month. November 1st. November 10th. November 11th. November 19th. November 28th and November 29th.
November 29th is another big one. It's 11:11:11. It's how it reduces numerologically, it's a hard word to say. Some of the themes that I want you to take away from my shadow work this week is about resetting and re-programming, levelling up, increasing your intuition, your perception is changing. There's clarity, there's insight. Very vivid, realistic dreams for those of you who are dreamers may hold important messages.
There are some life altering opportunities and events. Exciting possibilities. Increasing déjà vu and signs and serendipities and synchronicities. It's all about that alignment and that flow. Past, present, future all integrating together. There's effortless manifesting and there's an abundance of blessings.
And, of course, in the United States, this is thanksgiving time.
So I think all of that is connected somehow to gratitude. Doing shadow work, being aware of mortality, death, sexuality, all of that stuff is ultimately kind of comes back around to gratitude. Of being grateful for being in this world, being in a body, and having the experience that we're having, and allowing ourselves to see it as something magical, even when it seems mundane.
So, play at being a stranger angel in your world. This month. There's very little difference between playing that role and being that phenomenon. I mean, if you intend to do it for someone else, it's very likely to be effective to the person receiving it.
Also, ask people for what you need. Ask people for what you need. People have a natural urge to be heroes. We like to help people. We love to rescue somebody and point them on their way. We love to be the person who delivers a tool or a message or a piece of information that really impacts someone. And when you are carrying that kind of stuff around, there's nothing better than having the opportunity to share it.
So give each other that opportunity. Go ask someone to help you. Present to them what you want to accomplish and see how much of it they actually can assist you with.
Jocelyne Leach calls herself a mystical midlife rebel. She's a personal and spiritual empowerment coach, mentor, and intuitive for women who want a joyful, vibrant second half of life.
We’re talking about second acts and the opportunities present for us at middle age to finally do something meaningful with our lives.
GUEST LINKS - JOCELYNE LEACH jocelynekelseyleach.com
HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses
Get an intuitive reading with Slade
Automatic Intuition
FACEBOOK GROUP Shift Your Spirits Community BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits Edit your pledge on Patreon
TRANSCRIPT Jocelyne:
Okay, well it was about 10 years ago. Probably everyone can remember 10 years ago when the shit hit the fan in the financial markets and it just felt like the whole world collapsing. The news was just terrible. Every day was very depressing.
At the time, my husband and I were... We had two businesses that were quite vulnerable to fluctuating markets, and one was a pub and restaurant. One was a property development business.
And so, when the markets take a dive, people stop eating out and property takes a dive. The whole thing just imploded.
So my husband was extremely stressed. He got taken to hospital seriously ill with three perforated ulcers. At the time, I was uncharacteristically stressed and unhappy and suffering as well. Usually I'm quite a grounded person. So for me to feel all these kind of... the emotional wrangling of all this going on. It made me think, I've gotta get to the doctor and get some medication to help me through this.
And I thought, No, that's not the route I want to go. I need to sort this out myself.
So I started two things. One thing you might not know about me is I'm also a yoga teacher. So I really dug back into my yoga practice that had got a little bit kind of wishy washy. I dug back into that and took up a more powerful type of yoga.
That helped a great deal. It really gave me something to focus on that took the thoughts out of my head because it was the thoughts that were just driving me crazy.
And then, at that time, about 10 years ago, the internet was really starting to take off. And so, the wonderful thing of search engines were I could just keep finding different people on the internet who would give me words of wisdom that started me moving forward and kind of climbing out of my big black hole.
It's things like finding Byron Katie and reading her books and beginning to kind of control my mindshit, basically. And that was how I started to kind of turn my ship around, basically.
And I think at the same time, I was also having a bit of a mid-life crisis. I was kind of late-40s and just wondering what my life had all been about, because I had always been involved with the family business in one form or another. And I've never really pushed out on my own and done anything that I felt was my particular career, so to speak.
So it just started that journey. And yoga, really, was the catalyst that got me into more and more kind of spiritual and metaphysical stuff.
When I first started yoga, it was just a physical practice. I wasn't into any mumbo jumbo at all. It was kind of a physical practice so I wasn't interested in anything like chanting or meditation or anything like that. But when the need arose, I needed to get into that place of being calmer and finding tools for my mind.
So that's really how it all evolved.
Slade:
That's interesting. I did not know that you were a yoga teacher.
I have a pretty special place in my heart as well for yoga. I sort of feel like it was the thing that allowed me to... It's funny, I... Like what you just said. It started as a physical practice for you and then the mumbo jumbo came later.
I started out with the mumbo jumbo, and when I went looking for something to physically heal me, I had had a surgery which cut into my core muscles and I was a smoker for 20 years. So at that time, I was recovering from surgery and smoking, and I thought, Ugh, this is disgusting, to be doing these two things at the same time.
So I started to think, What is the representation of the breath in healing form? What is a replacement behaviour for smoking? And I really quickly landed on yoga, as being the kind of intersection of all that stuff. And I thought, Yay! I went to yoga as this mystic already!
And it was funny because I really quickly was drawn into more of power yoga and as I built up that core strength and became more and more physically strong, and of course I did quit smoking and did yoga instead of smoking, I became extremely physically empowered and alive in my own body in a way that I'd never experienced.
Jocelyne:
Yeah. Yeah.
Slade:
Never experienced.
We're talking, like, I was 41 when that happened, so... It ultimately led me to all the fitness that I do now, because I was like, Ah, I do the mumbo jumbo stuff in my day job. I want to lift weights and be a crossfit cult member, so I went that route.
One of the things that I have noticed is, a lot of people who are yoga instructors may go into it as a physical practice, as a job, and somewhere along the way, they start to discover that they can read energy, that they are intuitive, then they start to pick up a lot of stuff especially if they're touching clients sometimes.
Did any of that happen to you?
Jocelyne:
Yeah. Exactly how it happened.
Like I said, I was more into the physical side of it, but I began to notice that, and I think I've always had this attribute, of being able to read people's energy. And I think it goes right back to childhood. I don't know why, but that was just always how I felt that I could understand people. I could look at them and I could kind of guess what was going on.
And I began to notice that when people are in my class, I could figure out what was going on for them. And I began to notice that people were quite interested, in fact, they really demanded that I would make the classes in a way that they could tap into their own energy.
It was the beginning of class where I used to, when it was quite a physical practice for me, I didn't really have a run in into class. We'd do maybe a couple of breaths just to show willing. And then I'd go straight into the physical practice.
And then I began to see that people more and more wanted me to take them into more of a breathing sequence and to decompress them from their day. So the start of my class where we just do a couple minutes of breathing began to be 10 or 15 minutes of breathing. At first I thought, Oh, I don't know if I should be doing this. I don't think people will like it.
But more and more, I found that was part of the reason they were coming. And so it went from there. And then I began to really see the difference that it was making to people and I began to put my foot into the other aspects. The more ethereal aspects of yoga.
And it was quite a journey. Learning the history of yoga and realizing there are things that, what you might call the new age community had adopted, like working with chakras and visualizations and stuff like that. They were all things that had been part of yoga practice for thousands of years.
And that's what led me into studying other things like astrology and hand reading and the akashic records. Because all of those also belong to vedic studies. So it's quite fascinating how that all unfolded for me.
Slade:
Do you still, I'm just curious if you still work with astrology at all.
Jocelyne:
Yeah, I do.
Some of the most powerful readings I've ever had in astrology have been vedic astrology readings. I haven't been studying vedic astrology. But I have been studying western astrology and when I work with people now, I just always take their birth dates so I at least know what sign they are. Because that gives me a lot of information.
Because a lot of my work is about energy, whether it's physical, mental, emotional, what have you. And things like astrology help you cut through a lot of chit chat. It gets you to the heart of the matter more quickly.
Slade:
Yeah. The reason I ask about that is because astrology is emerging as a theme in all my interviews right now. There are at least three people on this season who are specifically astrologers. But then when you mentioned that, I felt like I needed to ask, because this is a theme and I have been sort of reinvigorated around using that in my practice.
I actually used to use, like, someone's natal chart was almost like a meditation or a gateway image for me to do readings, so I come from having done astrological charts for extra money when I was a teenager, when I was in college, for my parents' friends and some people in my family. Stuff like that.
And so, I've always asked for that information for a client because if I know their sun, moon and rising sign, I can talk for an hour about what that tells me about them, you know?
Jocelyne:
Yeah.
Slade:
At that point, all the intuitive stuff comes in as well.
I used to think, maybe I'm just kind of using this as a crutch. Maybe I'm just sort of using that as my way to log in, as we say. But then with all of you that I'm having these conversations with, I had sort of just backed away from including that on my intake forms. Now I'm rethinking, Oh wait a minute, I feel like my Guides and the Universe is all telling me, No, no. There's more to do with that. Keep that in place. It's a very useful vocabulary.
Jocelyne:
I think so.
It goes along with another thing I do, which is to do with yoga. Which is ayurvedic medicine, which is kind of the Indian version of traditional chinese medicine.
I do a, not with every client, but with some of my clients, I'll give them a kind of questionnaire thing that they complete, which also gives me their dosha, which is a physical representation of energy, so it goes into elemental energy like in astrology.
For example, if I use me as an example, I'm a Gemini so I've got a lot of mental air energy. But physically, I've got a lot of earth energy. So it gives me a great understanding of someone if I know what their physical energy type is along with their mental energy type.
So if I'm helping someone in more of a wellness way, which was my previous iteration in coaching. I was a lot more focused on wellness and health because that kind of went with the yoga.
And then I started building the more mystical and intuitive skills now, so I'm veering more in that direction. It gave me a really good picture of that person quite quickly and I'm all for something that kind of cuts through stuff and you can get to the heart of the matter much more quickly.
The same goes with the hand analysis. I learned how to do hand analysis and the energy shows up in the lines and the fingerprints in the hands as well.
So all those things kind of tie in.
Slade:
Wow, so if you have a client there in person with you, do you usually read their hand as well?
Jocelyne:
I do do in person hand reading things. They're usually mini sessions. I'm lucky enough to teach my yoga classes, the majority of them, at a local spa that opened a few years ago. I offer a kind of 45-minute mini session. So I do that in person.
But if I'm seeing someone long distance, then I like to send them a kit so they can print their hand prints for me. They send them back and I look at the printed version of their handprints.
And in honesty, I prefer doing that.
Because number one, it gives me a bit more time to just kind of mull over what I'm seeing. And secondly, with ink print, you get more fine detail. And quite often, I'm a bit distracted if I've got a person physically in that space, all expectant-like.
I get stage fright a bit. I quite like to be kind of tucked up in my office, and just kind of mulling and ruminating over the information I've got so that I can present it in a more cogent way.
Slade:
I didn't know that you could do that! That you could do prints with ink and send them to someone and that they can... I've never thought of that before!
Jocelyne:
Yeah.
Slade:
That's fascinating.
Jocelyne:
Yes, it is. It's much, much more fun.
Slade:
Well, it also allows you the time to create a more meaningful volume of information. Because I think there's a tendency, you know, like, it's weird to just let a stranger hold your hand for most people for a long amount of time. I can see where there would be some kind of, a little bit of almost like a social space pressure to not sit there and manhandle them for 15 or 20 minutes.
So to be able to have that kind of intellectual distance and to study the information kind of outside of that whole issue of touching or being in someone's personal space.
I find it easier to read for people that I cannot see, that I'm not physically in the same room with. I often describe it as being like, when you are listening to music and you want to concentrate, you close your eyes. It's like getting rid of a lot of the senses that you don't need in that moment, so that you can sort of put all your focus on that intuitive channel, essentially.
Jocelyne:
Yeah, I think that's exactly it. I don't appreciate the distraction because I'm easily distracted anyway, so if I see an expression or something that... It can put me into my headspace, and I don't really want to be there. I want to be more into my intuitive space.
The other thing I find especially with hand analysis, if I'm there with the person, and it's kind of, Cross my palm with silver, dearie, that kind of vibe, where if I'm at more a distance, it seems more, whatever the word is...
Slade:
Elevated?
Jocelyne:
Yeah. The opposite of being at the end of the pier, or in a fairground.
Slade:
Right. It's more elevated.
Jocelyne:
Doing tricks.
Slade:
More highbrow.
Jocelyne:
Yeah. Exactly. Exactly.
You know, I come from a family where this is the kind of stuff that is not believed in. All my family think I'm a proper weirdo. And they're the kind of people where if you can see it, then you believe it. And I'm more, you see, actually, what you believe, and more in that intuitive space.
They all look at me kind of a bit cock-eyed, as if a bit, Uh oh, What's she up to now?
Slade:
Well, every family needs one.
Jocelyne:
Well that's what I think. I'm letting my weird flag fly now and I don't mind.
Slade:
So talk to me a little bit about how your practices evolved. I imagine some of your yoga students become people who want personal sessions from you. Or that you kind of evolve the practice into doing more of the intuitive work and the coaching.
Looking at your website, there's a focus around living a vibrant second half of life.
Jocelyne:
Yeah.
Slade:
You talked about the fact that your story, at one point sort of going through a midlife crisis. So talk to me about what this second half of life is about.
Jocelyne:
I think for women particularly, it's a kind of a point in life where women at a certain age, I don't want them to throw in the towel. I don't want them to think, Well I've got to a certain age, and I've got to start smalling things down now and contracting, kind of metaphorically speaking.
What tends to happen is life kinda gets you when you're at mid-life. The thing that started me on my journey might not be typical for everyone, but it does and it can involve a certain amount of loss. It can be loss of your partner through divorce or through death, or loss of your health or jobs, or your kids moving out of your home, all sorts of things like that.
I see it with my friends and my clients. There are great pressures on women at this age. There's barely a woman I've come across that doesn't have something of this kind of challenge going on for them. For most women, it's kind of unexpected, or it's more challenging than they thought it would be at this time of life.
It's an accumulation of everything that's kind of topped off by the cherry on the top, which is having the menopause. So it challenges them from every part of their being - physical, mental, emotional, spiritual. You name it. It feels like you're powerless and you're a bit stuck. And it's all downhill from here on.
I don't think that should be necessary. Not in this day and age and also, 50 isn't how 50 was when my grandmother was 50. And I think if people, well women especially, if they feel empowered again, that's how their second half becomes magical and meaningful. And they can live joyfully and have a vibrant second half of life.
So that's what my job I feel is. To guide them and coach them at this time. To see the other side of this kind of void. And have a clear and inspired plan for a much more empowered, brighter future.
Slade:
What kinds of things do you see these women going on to do, like what kind of breakthroughs do they arrive at? Do they start businesses? Create new projects? What kind of result, really, happens when they become more empowered?
Jocelyne:
Yeah, I have had clients and friends who have the catalyst for them having to do something in their life, is maybe the loss of their marriage. So they've had to really think, Well, you know, I've been a homemaker for 25 years. I've got to do something now. And they'll start a business.
I have several friends that have started businesses at a time in life where you think, Wow, that's a bit plucky.
But they haven't had the choice because they've been thrown into that situation.
Or, you know, if a partner had become seriously ill, or they've become debilitated in some way, women have to step up maybe and start being more of a breadwinner.
So that's definitely something that I've noticed in women of this age and sometimes it's just they're ready for a kind of an awakening themselves. They're ready to find more about the spiritual side of life, or about aspects of life they haven't had time to pursue before if they were busy doing other things. You know, the kids leave home, you might have downsized, you might have downsized work-wise.
Something else is calling and it's kind of like a clarion call to remember that you probably got more years behind you than you have ahead of you, so what are you going to do with those valuable years that you've got left?
Slade:
And they're open in a new way, right?
Jocelyne:
Yeah.
Slade:
The good news is... Because I attract this type of client as well. Women who are finally at a point where their energy is not being required by everyone else at quite the same amount. So what they're finding is they're sort of welling up with all this self-awareness and this creativity, and these sort of blank slates, and this sort of open space.
Now, some people probably panic and dig in and freak out about all that, and wanting it to stay the same, so to speak. But the clients that I attract in my practice are like, Okay, well wait a minute, I've got all this time and all this energy and I'm not done yet, so what am I going to do now?
It's really exciting to me because I feel like it's almost a second act, on the kind of energy that you see with college students, you know?
Jocelyne:
Yeah.
Slade:
I was a student adviser at a university before I started doing this work, and I see a real connection between the mindset of someone who is 19 years old and trying to choose a major for their study and then women who are in midlife who are coming to me wanting to discuss reconnecting to their creativity, starting a passion project of their own, doing something that they've always wanted to do.
Do you see that kind of energy that I'm talking about?
Joceyne:
Absolutely. I think it's that kind of Saturn return effect and the need, I see, for people not to stop being creative, you know? Keep being creative.
No matter how modest your dreams are, you need a new dream. You need to redesign your garden or redecorate the house or whatever it is. But you've got to keep having something to get up for in the morning. Otherwise you just kind of wither and die.
So for some people, it would be modest dreams. For some people, it's like, yeah! I'm gonna open an animal sanctuary. I've got the time, I've got the space. I can do that now.
They might want to travel. They might want to really do charity work or something that is meaningful for them, that they haven't had a chance to do before. Or just reinvent themselves in some other way that is meaningful to them. So that they really do get a chance to do what they might not have done when they were younger.
Slade:
Women in midlife too, have decades of practice doing multiple things at once. They're multi-taskers just by requirement. Almost everyone who's a mom.
I joke with the moderators of my Shift Your Spirits community, which you are one of our moderators, I jokingly said to you guys, I pick ladybosses and moms. Because you guys are used to kind of doing a whole lot of everything, and dealing with everyone's stuff, you know, to put it nicely. And you have a lot of practice at getting on with shit. You know what I mean?
Jocelyne:
Yes I do.
Slade:
I really like this type of client because they're not coming in with a lot of hand wringing. They come in with a lot of energy and are looking for some place to spend it. They want to be encouraged and enabled to pour themselves into something and to be encouraged.
Bring it on!
I love to brainstorm. And I love it when people bring me their animal sanctuary passion projects and they need some support and encouragement to make that happen.
What do you hope personally to contribute to this greater world of coaching and empowerment. What's your message you'd like to leave out there?
Jocelyne:
I think my main message is, what happened for me 10 years ago is that I really found out about myself. I dug down deep enough so that I could understand myself better. And I think that's the key, is to really know and understand yourself fully. Because then you can tackle the things that are your life lessons, that are your repeating patterns, the things that have kind of kept tripping you up.
That thing about, you always go out with the same guy, or you always keep doing the same things and you have the same triggers.
If people could just experience what it is to know themselves better, then it's a very empowering feeling to suddenly think, Okay, actually If I scroll back a bit, when I first had my hand analysis reading done for myself before I trained to do it, I had several coaching sessions where the lady did the technique that I described to you earlier, and everything she said to me wasn't a huge surprise.
It was all stuff that I kind of knew about myself already. But it gave me kind of confirmation about who I really was.
So then when I knew who I really was, it was like, Well, there's no good in me worrying about the fact that I'm no good at maths. Why don't I just keep pursuing the things that are my gifts and turn my gifts into spectacular gifts. You know, something I can really do something with. Rather than just be sad there wondering, lacking confidence and being triggered by all the things that triggered me in the past.
I think a lot of us are the kind of stuck when we were triggered as a 10 year old or 14 year old. And I think, as a society, if a 10 year old or 14 year old died, it's a tragedy. The whole wider community feels that loss.
But how many people go to their grave still being triggered as they were when they were a 10 year old or a 14 year old? I think that's a tragedy. I think how awful, that you're really dying as a 10 year old.
Slade:
Mmm... I had a client just recently that I did a reading with who expressed that she had wanted to be a writer when she was much younger, and that when she was 14 years old, her mother just really shut her down around that whole connection to herself. And, you know, it died, like you said, a spiritual death.
So here she was, at this stage in life that we're talking about, looking to reconnect to that. I hope she hears this episode and what you just said. Because I really feel that it spoke to the reading that we did. I think she's a fan of the show, so she's probably nodding along right now. And it affirms the message that I brought through for her as well.
I want to mention and not forget, because I love this title so much, if everyone goes to your website, they can get a free download. The title is "7 ways to instantly get calm in the middle of a shitstorm!"
Jocelyne:
Yes.
Slade:
Tell us about that.
Jocelyne:
Yeah, I'm a little irreverent. I think if you join up to my list, you might need to know that.
That's a 7 day email series. Each day someone is sent a tip about a different way to kind of get a grip on whatever is triggering you, basically. One particular day, there might be a visualization and a breathing technique to calm. There might be some physical things to do, like jumping jacks or something like that, to get out of your head and into your body.
It might be a recipe with essential oils, something like that. It could be dietary tips or something a bit more practical. So it's just 7 days of different things that could help you feel as if you've got a grip.
Slade:
It sounds like a lot of people would be interested in checking that out.
Jocelyne, thank you for taking the time to speak with me today. Tell us where we can go to find you online.
Jocelyne:
My website, it's a little long-winded, but it's http://www.jocelynekelseyleach.com/ I think you'll put that in the notes or...
Slade:
Yes, yes.
Awesome. Wonderful. That was great, Jocelyne. Thank you for coming on the show!
Jocelyne:
That's my pleasure. Cheery bye for now!
Susan Grace is a writer, intuitive, and empathic astrologer dedicated to the Collective’s call to usher in the End of Suffering. She has read thousands of charts for people of all walks of life from all over the world. She says she does this work to ensure no one feels alone in the massive shift happening in the world.
And she has some important messages we need to hear right now.
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TRANSCRIPT Slade:
You write on your site, I climbed my way out of a deep dark well I had fallen into by feeling my way through astrology and listening to the whispering guidance from souls beyond the veil.
Tell me the story behind that.
Susan:
Well I looked up and found that everything was falling apart. And I fought it for a long time. I tried to hold everything up with duct tape. I could feel that energies bigger than me were saying, You don't understand. You're done here.
So I finally gave in and I just felt like something bigger than me was guiding, and I thought, Alright! Whatever you feel like you need to take down, because it's in my best interest, go ahead. But if we're going to do this, we're gonna do it all right now. Because I'm not doing this for ten years.
And I swear, it was like the planets went, You heard the lady. And just... WHAM! It took everything down! All the rest of it!
And I had to trust it. I had to trust that it was in my favour, that it knew what it was doing, and I had to ride it out.
I ended up on the other side, exactly where I needed to be, course-corrected. And that made me start to dig into astrology and say, I need to understand what's happening here. Because I can't figure this all out by myself. I've got my limited perception as a human, can't figure all this out by myself. I need help.
And so I just started digging and digging and digging and digging into the astrology to learn what was happening. And that's how I got started.
Slade:
How far back does your interest in astrology go? Was this something that you dabbled in when you were younger? Do you have a lifelong history with astrology?
Susan:
Well, I have a lifelong history with horoscopes, just sun signs, right?
When I was coming up, there was no internet. We had things like newspapers and magazines. And I would follow horoscopes for the same reason. I needed help. I'd take all the help I can get.
But then, once the internet came out, and once I saw my chart, I saw my chart in 2012, and that changed me forever. Then I was like, Oh, this is what I need! This is the key I've been looking for.
Slade:
Wow... So how did you get from that epiphany to actually doing readings for other people professionally?
Susan:
Social media.
When I first started really reading, I felt like these astrologers I was listening to were talking a lot about all the mechanics within a chart, but they weren't putting it all together. I kept ending up saying to myself, I hear what you're saying, but what do you mean? What are you talking about? What does this ultimately mean?
And I got to the point where I could sit in a chart for the day, and I'd figure out everything that was happening, and I would be like, Alright, this looks like anxiety. And then I would go and take art images and match that with the astrology, within social media.
Nobody knew what the hell I was doing.
All I was doing was feeling it out, mostly for myself, but then it caught on. And people started to share it a lot. And then, eventually it got to the point where people are going, Can you look at my chart? I was like, I'm not an astrologer. And then they kept saying it.
I had a friend of mine who said, Susan, I'm going to PayPal you, and you are going to open my chart and read it. And I said, Okay!
And then that's when it started.
I had a friend of mine who had me on one of her shows. The two other panelists, off mic, were saying, Are you an astrologer? And I said no. And they're like, I believe you are! They had an intervention with me.
And then it really got to where people wanted to hear what I had to say, not just my interpretation through art. The art fell away and now it's just me and my voice.
Slade:
Mmm... What do you think makes your astrological readings different from other astrologers?
Susan:
In my personal chart, I have a lot of water, water signs, which, in astrology, that means that I feel everything all the time. When I'm in a chart with someone, I walk them all the way through it. I've had readings with other astrologers and they give you basic, broad interpretations of your chart.
When I read a chart for someone, I read EVERYTHING in their chart to them. Every placement. Every aspect. Every transit. Where the planets are now. And the phases of life they're going to go through. I tell them everything. They should know as much as I do about their own chart.
And then I'm able to feel it too. I'm able to say, This looks like, for instance, something really rough happened when you were a kid and you've been trying to make up for it since then.
And they're like, YES.
And I'm like, Alright, well let's talk about it. And I get them all the way through feeling out who they are too. Not just book knowledge.
Slade:
So you use your intuition quite a bit then.
Susan:
Oh, yeah! And I did not even plan on this.
When I first started reading... I'm gonna go ahead and tell you the truth about this...
Slade:
Mmhmm!
Susan:
When I first started reading, the very first professional one I did, someone's deceased father came through from the other side and I had never experienced that before. I decided on the fly to be brave and be like, Listen, this is going to sound crazy, but this is the energy I feel right behind me. As if this person is here.
I described that they were in blue jeans wearing a t-shirt and they had a hammer in their hands. And they were like, tapping the hammer into their other hand, as if they're frustrated.
And she said, Ohmygod. That's my dad. He used to build fences. And I said, Well I don't think he likes your boyfriend. And she said, I don't think he does either!
So yeah, weird things like that have opened up, since I've become a professional reader. So it's a lot of intuition, it's a lot of messages from guides, it's a lot of outside energy saying things like, Tell them again! Tell them again! Tell them again! Tell them again!
Sometimes I have to say, Alright! Back up! I just said it. I will say it again. But back up a little bit.
It's that kind of stuff.
Slade:
Mmm... I have to tell you that, looking at someone's chart is my portal into reading for them and that was how I started doing intuitive readings was, if I know someone's sun, moon and rising sign, I can do an intuitive reading based on those three pieces of information. But for some reason, it's like...
I've heard of other psychics who use even playing card decks or they have a coin that they twirl in their hand or they have these weird ticks that they have that are kind of their little gateway ritual, or whatever. And mine has fallen away to be just intuitive. But for a long time, that was how I would tune in to someone. I would just go and I would cast their chart and I would look into their chart.
And I used to say, I wasn't even really reading their chart. It was more like the graphic became sort of the window. It was like a symbolic window. But if I looked through that window, it became representative of connection to that person.
So that's very interesting that you have this combined, intertwined experience with that as well. It makes total sense to me.
Because, same kind of thing. I was sort of drafted. Hey, can you read for me? Can you connect with my guides? ... I can try! That's sort of how it happens.
I always think about what happened to you, with your friends being an example of one of those... The Purpose that the Universe picks for you, as opposed to maybe the one that you would've picked for yourself. You know what I mean?
It's like, Nope. Here's your Purpose! You're drafted.
Susan:
Yeah. In my chart, I have placements around the galactic centre and when that happens, often the Purpose of your life, they come and get you. I could go hide under the bed. They were still gonna come get me somehow.
You know, if you go back to my 10 year old self, my 20 year old self, and said, What do you want to be when you grow up? I never would've said an astrologer online. Because there was no astrologers and there was no online! It didn't exist!
So that feeling of something coming to find you, I don't know, I'm noticing it happening more and more to people, no matter what placements they have in their chart. Because we're all kind of being called up right now. We're all needed in the world.
Slade:
Mmm... 2012. That was such a milestone year, expectantly. Like something was supposed to happen in 2012 and it did for you. For sure.
Susan:
So it happened for the world too. We just haven't seen it all play out just yet. You'll see. 2020 is the next marker and you're going to see it play out even more. Something DID happen in 2012.
Slade:
Mmm... Can you tell us?
Susan:
Sure!
Slade:
Well you're here! Go for it.
Susan:
If you've been following things like this, December 21, 2012 was the end of the Mayan calendar. People were saying it was the end of the world, and that's not true. It was the end of the world as we knew it.
And what happened in 2012 was our solar system, which orbits around our sister star Sirius, was coming out of the darkest part of its orbit from Sirius. When we're closest to Sirius, we're the most conscious. When we're the furthest from Sirius, we're the least. It takes 2000 years for our solar system to go through the darkest part of its orbit from Sirius. We came out of that in 2012.
Also in 2012, the same year, there's a planet called Regulus, very big planet that marks the leadership of the world. It takes 2000 years for Regulus to go through a sign. The exact same 2000 years, Regulus was in Leo.
When we were in darkness, or unconsciousness, we were king and kingdom led. 2012 the same year that we're coming back into consciousness, Regulus clicked in to Virgo. Now the leadership of the world for the next 2000 years is the healing goddess energy. And the healing goddess energy is coming for everyone.
Everyone is going to be healed one way or another.
Slade:
Mmm... So what happens in 2020?
Susan:
In 2020, Pluto is in Capricorn. Last time just Pluto was in Capricorn was when U.S. signed the Declaration of Independence. Saturn will cross Pluto in 2020. The last time Saturn and Pluto together were in Capricorn was the Renaissance. When Saturn crosses Pluto in 2020, Jupiter will be here too.
The last time those three were in Capricorn was the year 1284, in the middle of our darkness. So the control of the world is going to flip. That control mechanism, fear mechanism, suppression, oppression, all of those are going to collapse and we are going to replace it with what we truly find valuable.
It's Uranus going through Taurus. So it's going to be going back and healing the planet. It's going to be healing our own traumas from being suppressed and pushed down. It's going to be building new systems for education and for finding water for people, for healthcare systems, everything.
Everything is going to be rebuilt.
Slade:
This is good news.
Susan:
Yeah!
Slade:
Hallelujah.
Ohmygosh. That's really good to hear, Susan, because it's been a rough couple of years.
Susan:
it's been rough for all of us and people are exhausted. Exhausted! And if you don't understand... This is one of the reasons I will never ever put astrology down. If you don't understand where we are, what's been happening and where we're going, you could give up! And this is NOT the time to give up. I keep saying over and over and over. And I'm gonna keep saying it. We are going UP not down.
So if you're starting to witness collapse, what you need to pay attention to and what you need to participate in is what's replacing it. Because the collapse is going to happen with our without your participation. And you want it to happen.
But what comes next? Go there.
Slade:
I love it.
So, I have to ask you, just really quickly before we move on from your readings, do you record your sessions? Is that an option for people?
Susan:
Yes, I record sessions and then I send it. I do it face to face on Zoom so that I can share my screen with them and I can show them everything I'm talking about in their chart. And I record it and I send it to them through Dropbox.
Slade:
Okay, excellent. Because I was just thinking, I have the wonderful benefit of having recorded you saying all of that. And I also have a transcriptionist. So I have access to that information and I wanted to make sure, because something shifts when you start reading like that. Like you kind of become a channel, a little bit.
Susan:
Oh yeah. And I can tell whenever I'm channeling. My voice gets more forceful and I start talking faster. I become very emphatic. It's almost like my feminine water steps aside and the masculine comes forward and starts being like, Pay attention. I'm telling you something important.
Slade:
Right.
Susan:
And then it kind of fades off. And then the water in me comes back more.
Slade:
I love it though. It's so cool because I've been listening to a lot of your podcast with Aubrey. Most people will have listened to my interview with Aubrey Cara. She's your co-host on the show Be the Evidence.
Aubrey and I ended up talking about you so much in that interview that I literally Facebook-messaged you the minute we were finished recording. I was like, Your ears have to be burning. You need to come do an interview with me immediately, otherwise people are gonna be like, Where's the other chick, you know?
So you've been on my list of potential guests from the beginning of my show for over a year. A lot of my listeners actually recommended you to me, but at that time, this newer podcast actually wasn't even out yet. So I feel like the timing has worked out.
It's a very cool show concept. I have been listening to it as preparation for speaking with both of you guys. I love it because it is very much about what's going on in the moment.
I'm going to turn it over to you and let you tell me about this show, Be the Evidence, from your perspective. Tell me about the name and the concept and what it's all about.
Susan:
Sure.
It was, I guess two years ago. I was working with someone when I was still in my executive position at a corporate job and the president of the company had cancer. And I was in Houston with him helping him go through treatment. I was in the hotel room and I really felt like I was around that air of, I don't know if you've ever cared for someone who has something like that. There's like a heaviness around it. There's a heavy energy around it.
I found myself going, How do I know that I'm right, that we come out of things like this? How do I know I'm right when I say, We heal out of suffering. We are healing out of suffering. We're going up not down. How do I know I'm right about that?
Instantly, it came: You have to be the evidence of it.
So I wrote down, Be the Evidence. And that became a tag on my website, and then (sorry there's a siren outside my window).
Slade:
Of course there is.
There was a large truck moving some limbs around earlier on my end. It's part of the humanizing charm of our show.
Susan:
So when Aubrey and I started talking about doing a podcast, and she said, What do you think about the concept?
Well it comes from my website, and I don't know how you feel about that but I'm kind of stuck on this Be the Evidence thing.
And she's like, I don't care if it came from your website. I like it. Let's do it! That's where we come from, is that you have to be the evidence in the world. It's not going to do for us to all sit back and pontificate about where we think we should be going, with humanity.
We've got to get out there and do it, in all of our questioning, in all of our confusion, in all of our vulnerability, in all of our going, I don't know what's going on, do you? Nope!
And we have to keep doing it. You have to keep showing up. Show up! And be the evidence of what we can become, because nobody else is coming to do it.
Slade:
Mmm... The thing I love about your show is, it feels like a conversation that I have with some of my closest girlfriends, who will text me and be like, What the hell is going on?? Is something in retrograde or you know?
And I mean, I'm not even an astrologer, but I usually am well versed enough in some of what's going on, or I will have picked it up, or heard it from this person or that person. So I will engage them with whatever little piece of new age perspective I have on it.
A lot of those conversations actually end up being my content for my show, my blog post. One of my PR people. She and I became really close friends and for awhile, she would text me once a week and ask me some kind of heady question.
I was like, That's a really cool question. Keep asking me those! Because they were generating stuff.
So it reminds me, when I listen to you and Aubrey, it reminds me of those conversations. It feels like we're eavesdropping on Aubrey calling you up and saying, What's going on in the sky?
And then your... whatever it is that happens, you start channeling, right? You're a channel. It'll go through this conversational phase, and then you have these moments where it's like, Susan is up on the soapbox telling it to us.
I love it because it's really in the moment. You did a show on the full moon in Aries, which was a day or two ago. And I can listen to that in that moment when I'm feeling that energy.
So you guys do 3 shows a week. It is very much in the moment. I'd like to hear a little bit about the process. How does that all work?
Susan:
The process is what it sounds like.
Aubrey and I will, just for a few minutes, before we start recording, off mic, that's exactly what happens.
I go, How are you feeling? She's like, Not so good! And then I'm like, Okay, let me show you what's happening in our charts. And she's like, That explains it. And I'm like, So these points I think are the strongest points of what's going on. And she goes, I agree. Let's go.
And then we just hit record.
We don't talk about how far we're going to go. We don't set up any kind of outline. We just start talking.
So we have noticed, I think we're on number 24 now. We've noticed that we've started developing a pattern without even talking about it. We get on when we're both very human, very vulnerable, going, Man, I feel lost too. Wow.
And then we get on a roll. And then there's a chan... Like you say, like you describe it, sounds like there's a channeling step going on. Something bigger comes through. By the time we finish, we both go, Right, that was complete.
That's it.
We laugh sometimes because it really is like you guys are listening in on us processing what the hell is happening. That's exactly what we do.
Slade:
I love that. I mean, it's such a cool concept. I try to keep everything really evergreen with what I do. But I do introductions that are very much in the moment. And I talk about my personal life and those often take on a life of their own. Sometimes I'm like, Wow, that was better than the planned segment.
So I love the philosophy behind your show. I love the way that you approach it. It's very much the same kind of idea that we have here for this conversation. This is you and I meeting for the first time, talking about things that we have in common and the conversation has a life of its own.
But you guys are impressively cranking out these episodes. Like, you make a lot of them.
Susan:
That was by choice. We started out, I think the first one was a week apart. We did it just weekly. And then we're like, that's too long. So we went to two a week. So we podcast on Tuesdays and Thursdays. We felt like Friday to Monday was too long. And so now we're up to three.
And we've talked about going daily, and we might! Because we really feel like the energy is saying, No you don't understand. All hands on deck right now.
And we are meeting that call. We're ready. We're ready to show up for the collective and anything that's going to happen, we are totally going to walk straight through this with people. We want to make ourselves available as much as we possibly can.
Slade:
I love it. I think it's a really cool show concept. I've been enjoying it.
I don't know how other people will work it into their daily... Maybe they'll listen to it on their commute, or when they're on the train or the bus, or driving. I listen to it when I'm shaving. Like when I take my shower and I'm shaving. Because they're 20 minutes. It's a good amount of time to kind of check in every day, or maybe on those days where you really do feel like, Something's going on this week! I'm gonna see if what I'm feeling is right.
And one of the things I've noticed about you even off mic, before we really started recording is, you have a very eloquent way of succinctly kind of stating things that it would take me a whole paragraph to say.
And then you'll say something that's a phrase. I call those Shining Sentences. That is a channeled thing. Like the name for your show and how that came through. That was a shining sentence. You speak in shining sentences!
You have a very poetic quality to your content, especially when it's written - your Facebook posts, your website. I notice that you even style them.. They're blocked on the page more the way that poetry is. Which, anyway, I just think is cool. I'm just analyzing you for the fun of it.
Sometimes we're not aware of what we're doing artistically. Other times it's super intentional. Am I right in assuming that all those things are kind of part of what you're trying to create and I'm just picking it up?
Susan:
First of all, it's intentional but it's not my intent. When people finally started saying, We need to hear your words, it just started coming out in verse. I don't know why. And it still comes out in verse.
Sometimes I go back to my own posts, going, What the hell is happening? And then I read my own and I go, Oh, okay. Yeah, right. Got it.
But also, I've had more than one person tell me, when they finally talk to me, beyond just reading my words, they're like, Oh, you talk like you write!
And I don't realize I'm doing it.
Slade:
That's very cool. It's a unique style and I like it. It's one of the things that draws me in. The use of the astrological vocabulary, I'm a little bit fluent in that so... But even sometimes when you talk about things that are really nuanced, I get the energy of what you're saying because of the way that you say it. There's a layer. It's definitely got a poetic quality to it. I can't find a better way to describe it.
When we were writing back and forth, corresponding about the show, you wrote to me saying that you believe we are web-building right now. What did you mean by that?
Susan:
Well it's a very old paradigm, very patriarchal, to feel like there's one person going to do all the heavy lifting and then we're all going to follow that one person. No. That's not what we're doing anymore. Now we all rise together. We share resources, we share ideas, we support each other. We cross-promote.
We are here to build a tighter and tighter and tighter and tighter and tighter and tighter and tighter web. A web of us all coming up together. Because there a power in our numbers. And because we all house our own special kind of tapped-in to the energy, all kinds of resources, our own specialties, our own bodies of knowledge.
We all have something different and it's all needed. And so we build these things together.
If you're out there competing right now, you've already lost. You have to find what you're really good at and then hook up with everybody else and what they're really good at.
And conversely, if you're going out and you think you're gonna do what everybody else is doing, wrong answer. If it's already been done, it's already dead. So find what you do really well, your own specific way, and then we build webs.
We don't fight each other. We join together.
Slade:
One of my marketing mentors, he has a very progressed view of what it means to put yourself out there, as a business person. He always says, You find a group of people and then you become relentlessly helpful.
Susan:
Yes!
Slade:
That, to him, is the definition of marketing.
Find a group of people that speak your language, that are like-minded, and then go be relentlessly helpful.
I love that. I don't know that I'm always pulling it off, but it's definitely in my mind to lean towards that, right?
I feel my own practice expanding when I chose to do the podcast. It became a platform for other people to talk, not just me. And that was a huge shift! I was surprised, as someone who likes to control everything, you know, a perfectionist, south node in Virgo I think is the way you would say that...
Susan:
Yeah!
Slade:
Moving into that more Piscean kind of north node mindset or whatever, for me, has been about recognizing how good it feels to collaborate with people.
Susan:
Yeah. Listen Slade, south node in Virgo, right?
Slade:
Mmhmm.
Susan:
South node in Virgo people, it's not just that you're perfectionists. It's also that you've got this thing where you feel like everything is up to you. Nobody else is gonna do it so I gotta do it. And people with south node in Virgo, it's like you've got bleeding calluses on your hands, because you're the one doing all the work. Everybody else has already gone home and you're still doing it.
And north node in Pisces is trying to say, Listen, there's a greater force of life at play here too. And you can allow that to contribute. It doesn't have to all be on you.
Slade:
Yes. Yes!
Hence these wonderful interviews that I do. Do you realize how much easier it is for me to record an interview with you than it is to prepare an episode where it's just me? Just the actual workload of what is involved is so completely different. The energy is so different collaborating with people. And it feels so cool to be, to feel, I said to someone, I said, I feel like I'm kind of hosting a party for a bunch of people. I'm not teaching anyone anything. I'm inviting a lot of really interesting people to come together and hang out and interact.
That's where it feels like it's growing, and I love that because it's actually easier, Susan. It's actually easier to let other people do some of the work, especially the parts that they're better at.
Susan:
And don't you know that's teaching people a lot? We're teaching people a lot in doing that. We're showing that you're a way-shower.
Slade:
Mmm... I've heard that before.
Susan:
The thing about a way-shower is that you go out in front and you figure things out. And then people are going, I don't know what to do. You go, Hang on, five more minutes. I've almost got it figured out. And you figure it out!
And then you go, Okay, now I got it. And you show people the way.
And what I've been trying to say to way-showers is, really think about that in the opposite direction too. Think about the miracle of you, figuring out a way, and showing people you haven't even met yet, people out there who feel lost, have someone up ahead thinking about them, and they don't even know their name.
That's a miracle.
Slade:
Mmm... Thank you for that. That was really lovely.
What do you hope to contribute to this greater collective, you know, when we think about personal development, and maybe that term isn't even a really good one anymore, from what you and I have been discussing and describing. But what do you hope to kind of contribute to the conversation about astrology, about spirituality, about human evolution.
Susan:
Oh, for sure, I know this sounds kind of grandiose but I really believe it, in my bones, that this wave of humanity, if you're alive on the planet today, you are part of a wave that is going to bring humanity out of suffering. We are the bridge between suffering and liberation.
Sometimes that can feel like you're being pulled apart, like you don't know which side is going to win. But I'm telling you, that we are going to pull humanity all the way out of suffering and we are going to heal ourselves. Now is the time.
That's the task that this generation, this wave of humanity, has.
So whenever you feel overwhelmed with suffering, when you feel overwhelmed with pain, you feel overwhelmed in darkness, it's important to remember that this is the last of it. We're meant to get in and heal it all the way out. Don't stop. You have to keep going. Because that's what we're being called for to do.
Slade:
Susan, thank you for taking the time to come and speak with me today.
Susan:
My pleasure.
Slade:
So tell everybody where they can go to find you online, if they want to get a reading with you or if they want to find your podcast.
Susan:
I am at SusanGrace.org so you can read more about me there. Or under the Services page, where my readings are listed. And I also have a set of, what I call 'The Papers'. These are just short little write-ups I've done for trends that I see in people's charts. Those are available there too.
Be the Evidence is under Be the Evidence, whatever podcast you're streaming, including iTunes. And then on SimpleCast we're under Be the Evidence as well. And on Facebook, I'm under Susan Grace, and on Instagram as well, Susan Grace.
Slade:
Wonderful. We'll put all those inks in the Show Notes to make it really easy.
That was great, Susan. Thank you for coming on.
Susan:
Thank you for having me.
Aubrey Mast is an Intuitive, Health Coach, Herbalist, and Wellness Chef dedicated to helping people root into their bodies and into their sovereign self. She has helped thousands come back into their bodies with nutrition, self-care, and intuitive practices. Aubrey Mast and Susan Grace co-host the rapidly growing, internationally followed Be the Evidence podcast available now at http://betheevidencepodcast.com/ and all platforms where podcasts are streaming.
We’re talking about bringing astrology into your daily life, bringing it back down to earth, and, as is Aubrey’s expertise, bringing it into the body.
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TRANSCRIPT Slade:
People will have heard you and I speak before on your podcast, Root Rising. But you have a new podcast with Susan Grace. Tell us about that podcast.
Aubrey:
Yeah, so we have a brand new podcast that's called Be the Evidence. We just pushed out our 20th episode this morning and it is a blend of my strengths with working with clairvoyance and clairsentience, clairaudience. I'm able to hear and see images come to me and they typically are in relationship to the body and a lot of times colours. And then I meet that with Susan Grace, who's an amazing astrologer.
The way that we look at it is, this is a beautiful way we blend the conversation about the mind and coming into the body. So it's very stars to root feeling.
The podcast is all centred around this theme of being that evidence. I think for us, that means walking the talk. Like, if we are all in this movement towards collective consciousness, and doing our work, and showing up more embodied and more as infinite as liberated individuals, not only for ourselves but for society. There's some level of evidence that we have to walk on our day to day being.
And so, this is a podcast where we explore those conversations in a very real talk way, like you just stumbled into our living room and Susan and I are having this really raw conversation of like, Oh, yeah, things have been really hard and this is how I'm moving through them.
So you'll get pieces of astrology that's real time, and you'll definitely get pieces of wellness information within it.
Slade:
Tell me a little bit about your background. You're working on a Ph.D. I kind of want everyone to know where you're coming from and how seriously you take this mind-body connection.
Aubrey:
Yeah, so my Ph.D is in mind-body medicine. So far, it looks as if I'm going to be focused on the gut microbiome and how it relates to psycho-neuroimmunology, which is really a beautiful way of saying how the bacteria that is found all over our bodies, and in our environment, impacts the energies that we're exposed to. And that plays a role in our consciousness but also in our thoughts that we have and our overall wellbeing.
But beyond that, my master's was in Public Health. I focused on nutrition. My undergrad was in health and wellness promotion. I'm an herbalist. I am also a chef. I'm a holistic health coach. The last 15 years of my career has really been focused on healing the body.
And it seems like within the last 2 or 3 years, especially since I was doing my work with you, that it's become more of this intuitive-based practice, where it's not just about physically healing the body. It's also about consciously healing the thoughts that we think, because they dictate how our cells react and respond in our bodies. They dictate how our genes respond.
So I'm really viewing it from a holistic level of healing from cells-forward, if that makes sense.
Slade:
How did you hook up with Susan?
Aubrey:
In the age of social media, this is like, the complete thing. You and I have had this conversation before too, I think. Of like, all of a sudden, somebody recommends somebody, or somebody shares somebody's post.
So, 3 years ago, somebody shared one of her posts and I had viewed it and I was like, Ohmygosh. This is really pertinent. Because she posts with a finger on the collective consciousness for the day. She does daily astrology readings that are specific to the collective consciousness. So I had followed her through Facebook, because every time I checked in to her posts, day by day, they were right on the mark with what was going on in my world.
And then I ended up scheduling a reading with her and sat with her for an intensive. And every time I saw with her, I would have this conversation of like, I think you and I are supposed to work together. I'm not quite sure how it pieces out but we're gonna work together. And there was that little awkward laugh of like, Haha... yeah, we'll see.........
And then this is how it panned out.
Slade:
I just want to say, like a quick shoutout to Susan by the way, because her ears are totally burning right now. We're talking about her, and, Susan, I've had recommendations to interview you, so now I feel like I need to immediately, as soon as this conversation is over, get in touch with Susan and have her come on and talk about astrology. Because astrology is definitely showing up as a theme this season for my interview guests.
So tell me how you guys blend this astrology information with the wellness and lifestyle choices and healing information that you're working with.
Aubrey:
Yeah, I think that's really such an important question, honestly, in a sense that, for anybody that's new to astrology, it is its own language.
I know you've experienced this in how you teach in Automatic Intuition. There's that section where you speak about astrology and how to make it more simplified. But it's its own language. And I remember coming out of my first reading with Susan and just being completely blown out of the water.
Not only was she poignant in what she was talking about, but I was automatically exposed to this language I had no idea what the hell any of it meant. Grand trines and retrogrades and things like that... I had heard these terms thrown around but I did not understand how that applied to my day to day world. I knew that it was part of a subset of language that I was trying to grasp at.
So Susan and I had had this conversation of, the information and where astrology is just so pertinent, because it's a visual element. It's a visual map of what is going on, moment by moment. The beautiful thing I think I found about it was that she was like, I don't know how to make it land.
Sorry Slade, I'm being interrupted by my son.
Slade:
That's ok!
Aubrey:
Thank goodness you can edit this out.
Slade:
Oh sure!
We could also just talk to him. He can be part of the interview if necessary.
Aubrey:
Honey, you want to say hello? You can say, Hi Mr. Slade!
Son:
Hi Mr. Slade!
Slade:
Hey!
Aubrey:
Sorry about that.
Slade:
No problem!
I often say, I didn't do a lot of the pre-show stuff because I've talked to you before. But one of the things I was gonna say is, if anything happens, we can always cut the show or if we get disconnected, or whatever, and it's fine!
I've had instances where my cat's beat the door down and I had to get up and be like, Excuse me for just one moment while I let the cat in.
At this point, I'm almost thinking that we should just leave that stuff in. I may not or I may. If something ever really funny and interesting happens, I will absolutely just leave it in.
Aubrey:
I love it.
Slade:
Yeah. Because, I mean, the point of this show is really to kind of eavesdrop on the cool conversations that I have with people, and I was listening to Be the Evidence podcast that you do with Susan and it felt like that. It felt like I was sitting at a table at the cafe, next to an astrologist and her girlfriend who is super knowledgeable about wellness stuff, and you guys were breaking it down. Sort of what you were observing in your, what was happening in your life and she was talking about it thematically using astrology as a language.
And I just want to say, this came up also in my recent interview with Dena DeCastro. We were really stressing that this is an archetypal vocabulary and it's very useful from that perspective. Even if you take out all the predictive stuff, and the forces in the sky and all that, I was even thinking about the fact that we can use the language of astrology just as any magazine does. You know?
Magazines always have this sort of seasonal lifestyle kind of focus, right? Like we shift gears during certain times of year because of the seasons and we tend to focus on different types of activities or different things in our body, depending on what's going on in the environment around us. And so I'm completely okay with saying, You know what? You can debunk everything there is about astrology, which, then I'd want you to go get a reading and then realize it's kind of hard to do that.
We could just take it out and say, This is an excuse or an intention for us to focus on this particular theme at this moment. And it would still be incredibly valuable just from that perspective.
So give me an example, like I was listening to your show a couple of weeks ago about Virgo energy and how that impacts your daily life, like you said. So give me some examples of how you guys use the themes of what's going on astrologically and then apply that to the 3rd dimensional world.
Aubrey:
Yeah... I think that's a whole piece of, How do we make it land? I think from being in this field where it's intuitive, right? And I like to be in my Ph.D where it's mind body medicine and a lot of the stuff is not tangible. We can't see it in a lot of ways.
How do you make it land and make it become tangible, is always the question of, how can you create a storyline so that people can see it resonating within their lives? So that I can see it resonating in my own life.
We just recorded last night and it was a... we're in a lot of Scorpio energy right now, which, thankfully, or not thankfully, I don't know what way you want to look at it, Susan and I are both very, very much in our Scorpio energy, so we can come off as very intense.
But for people that are not comfortable in that, it can come off as so intense that it's overwhelming. There's that deer in headlights look, like, I don't know what to do with this, this is a lot. It can look kind of chaotic. Right now the hurricane's hitting and it's sort of that feeling, right? The way that we explore this is to talk about, well, these are the ways that it's coming up in our world.
And how do you make it land?
So if we're dealing with lots of intensity and lots of chaos. And there's lots of transformation and liberation, that can feel like anxiety a lot of times, and stress a lot of times. So the way that I like to always take it back to the body is, how do we bring these bigger themes into our day to day lives?
If we're experiencing lots of anxiety and lots of stress because we're also experiencing lots of intensity in our day to day lives, then it's important to recalibrate our bodies. It's important to calm our systems down.
The other day I did a float tank and I got this download about how important it is to drink adaptogens right now, which help us manage stress. They help our body adapt to stressors. That's one of the ways that we explore... like, okay, if you're dealing with intensity and anxiety, this is one of the ways that we can calm our systems.
We can also go out into the woods. We can sit and drink a cup of tea. We can have a beautiful conversation like you and I are having. That's very intentional. And to focus on those tactics while we're aware of these bigger themes as a way to land the information into our systems, but without coming from a place of reactivity.
I think that's the bigger point for me with astrology. Astrology is almost shining a flashlight on what's happening, and then we get to choose, how do we respond to it?
Slade:
Mmm... yes. I love that.
I have tons of Scorpio in my chart, by the way.
Aubrey:
That makes sense, why we get along.
Slade:
Yeah. I'm a Leo with a moon in Scorpio and a rising sun in Scorpio. So I do attract Scorpio energy and I always say, Scary people don't scare me as much as they do other people. I can handle the darkness. Bring your darkness!
And you know what? It's crazy though, because I notice when things are really intense and kind of negative, I am much more likely to have good conversations with my Scorpio friends. They seem to have an ability to absorb that negativity, or to filter it in such a way that they don't hear it as like, Oh you're bitchin' and complainin'. You're bringing me down. You know what I mean? Like they almost settle in and resonate with it.
I find myself feeling more liberated in venting to someone with that kind of energy.
So I don't know if... it's like, it's an instinctive thing and one of the things that I think is kind of interesting about astrology is I often find myself reacting to some kind of vibe that's going on, trying to adjust, like you said, and make these changes that are intentional and healthy and all that kind of stuff.
And then I'll find out, while it's going on, or even after the fact sometimes, that there was this astrological phenomenon that I go, Oh, okay! Well that makes sense. That's what that was about.
One of the things I think is really fascinating is how little you have to pay attention to it to still kind of be in it, a little bit.
Aubrey:
I agree.
The other day I had that and a little bit of a tiff, was feeling really worked up and stunned. My words being very reactive. And then I had reacted, completely. I was a human and I was just reactive, right? And then later on, was like, What?? What WAS that? Why was I so reactive and sharp with my words?
And then I had gotten on Facebook and I had seen that Susan had posted a Happening Now, and it was, Don't fly off the handle. You're going to get real agitated right now. And had listed the placements in the astrological chart for that moment.
And I was like, Oh! This is what was happening at that time!
But it was playing out in my real world and I was not aware that it was like actually, it had correlations with the planets.
Slade:
Oh, I hate it when that happens. When you literally read the astrological post 12 hours after you should have seen it, and you're like, Oh no! I just did the very thing that they told me not to do.
Aubrey:
Exactly.
Slade:
I do that a lot.
I also, though, I think one of the things that's interesting about the predictive stuff is, sometimes I'm more interested in what is happening now in astrology. Like if you say, You know what, we're in a new moon right now. Or we're in a certain kind of moon phase, or Mars just shifted, something like that.
Rather than projecting too far down the road, because I think sometimes knowing that, Oh you're going to have challenges in your social life and your relationships in December, it's kind of like, Ugh, I don't want to manifest that or contribute to that in some way and make it true.
Therefore I have this tendency to kind of blind myself from some of the predictive stuff sometimes, and I know that sounds weird, but it's like, I don't even want to know. Because I don't want to curse myself in any kind of way. Because I know that, it's not like by knowing that there's gonna be a certain phase happening astrologically, that you can somehow magically avoid that.
It still happens and you still kind of have to deal with it in the moment. So I kind of keep my focus a little bit more narrow.
But I am interested and aware and I do sometimes, like you guys saw me in the group, when we were launching the Shift Your Spirits community, and everything was in retrograde. And I was like, Okay, well this is not the time to launch.
When does it all start to open up again? And I went and sort of looked at when everything kind of had a forward motion to it and picked a date accordingly.
Now, for me, I often try to pick dates around moon phases, like start something with a new moon, so that I can be in those rhythms. But I also feel like, philosophically, it gives me a structure to something that might ordinarily be a little bit chaos.
If you're running around, kind of wondering, when do I do this? When do I start this? I'm managing multiple platforms online and it can all feel a little bit like plate spinning. And you're just sort of running around like putting out fires.
So, for me, sometimes I use the astrological calendar and events as a way of just kind of putting some bookends around things. It makes me feel like it's more organized. Like I have a sense of when something starts and when it comes to fruition.
The cool thing, for me, about moon phases is, they constantly restart. It's like, every month is a new opportunity to kind of, Okay, try again. New thing. New project.
Aubrey:
Yeah. I think that's so important.
Since I'm in the bodywork, right? That's also how our cells work too. Our skin cells slough off and then we have new skin cells replaced. We're constantly going through this ebbing and flowing, whether it be from the moon or whether it be from our bodies regenerating ourselves.
So we constantly have this ability to come back and give ourselves a framework on which to move around within. And I think we all just choose varying tools to use. I agree astrology helps to give some framework, but I also tend to veer away from any of the predictive qualities.
But I also think that's because of my background of where I'm like, Well if we're gonna all walk through it, I would rather walk through it completely unbiased, and see whatever exposes itself, whether it be good or bad. And try to show up with as much grace as I possibly can.
It's really interesting for me, working with Susan in a sense that, I've been with her now, in some capacity, for years and it's almost like my brain doesn't quite want to wrap around the language of astrology. I can get the thematics of it but I have a hard time keeping up with the actual vocabulary. I feel like if I was ever given a vocabulary test on astrology, I would probably get a D. Like, I can't. Even though I sit with an astrologer every week, multiple times a week.
Slade:
Oh, I might get a C+ at best.
Aubrey:
It's just really intense.
But then it's so fascinating to me that I can be intuitively aware of the energies that are going on. I just might not be able to vocalize, Oh, this is because this just clipped in to this degree. Or this is because there is a trine there. Like, I don't have those words, but I can sensationally and visually see and feel what is happening. And I find that really fascinating.
Slade:
Well that's what I got from listening to you guys. It's kind of like eavesdropping on a conversation where you are sort of observing and she is translating and offering suggestions. And then you are kind of taking that and then...
I feel like you're kind of the one who's grounding it in the body a little bit, and she's the one who's giving us the kind of overview, the magical perspective.
It's a really cool concept because if you listen to all that astrology vocabulary coming at you, and especially if you don't know what the heck they're saying and what they're talking about, it's like, What do I do with this?
Aubrey:
Yeah!
Slade:
I like the idea of having some place that we can go and listen to the astrological information. But you're there as the kind of the person who's representing, for those of us that are like, Okay, what the heck do I do with that? What kind of choices do I make?
So you guys are kind of, you're not necessarily speaking specifically about your own personal astrology. It is a little bit more general, right? For the whole audience that's listening. Things that are affecting ALL of us.
Aubrey:
Yeah.
Susan pulls up the chart for the collective. We don't ever pull up a chart for us personally. It's for the collective and that's how she always reads, until she's in private readings.
And I think, I just think that piece is so important. Especially when I... I've had several people reach out to me that are like, I don't know how to begin on my intuitive journey. And I know this is part of the reason YOU do the work that you do. Because you've got these requests as well.
Figuring out how people... The language that we respond to, for me, in my world is, the language of our body. Oh I feel tight. I feel inflamed. My stomach's upset. I'm craving pizza all day long. Or I'm so tired I can't get out of bed. That's the language that I respond to.
And then behind that, I have lots of visuals that tell me things about what's going on.
And so, to me, that's how I'm able to communicate to people. Like, this is how you cultivate intuition and to your point about, if you just listen to somebody do a whole astrology, you can easily get blown out of the water and not know how to make it pertinent.
But I also think that's so much inundated in the spiritual community, as we get further out into the conversations about 5D realities, or 11D realities. People can get very easily lost. And if we're coming at it with a goal of, Let's just elevate consciousness collectively, let's just all figure out how to be living our optimal lives and elevate one another, then I think we have to figure out how to speak that language at a very intuitive, but basic, understanding.
Slade:
Almost every single person who does come into my practice asking questions about connecting better, feeling disconnected from their intuition, and how to hear their inner wisdom, all that kind of stuff. Also the people who are in a phase of their life right now where they're absorbing everything that we're putting out. They're in a real intake kind of moment. They're just gorging themselves on all this stuff and it's all coming in. And they're trying to make sense of it and figure out where to put it.
It's interesting that you said, for you it always comes back to listening to your body because the advice that I find myself giving so much is about grounding. Every time someone comes to me with an upper level chakra freakout, and what I mean about that is, if you are in your intellect, if you are spiritually questing, if you're constantly practicing psychic techniques or trying to increase your intuition, all that kind of stuff, it's all happening heart chakra and above. So there's this real top-heavy energy that's going on.
People come in and they look frazzled. Their energy, to me, looks like a tornado. It's literally very narrow at the bottom and wide up top. It's like spinning around. And that's what they feel like! They feel like they're literally inside a tornado.
The thing that fixes that is always to ground. To go all the way to the bottom and then come back up again.
It stumps a lot of people how, Okay, if I'm trying to turn on my third eye, I'm trying to turn on my clairaudience, I'm trying to hear my Higher Self, how does walking barefoot actually do that better than meditating or listening to a guided session or something like that.
I just find that for me, the stuff that feeds and electrifies and powers the magical stuff is always these really, really simple, physical, real world things. And I am not going to be happy if I'm running around, having visions and hearing voices and all that all day long. Just like with the breath and the waves and the ocean, you have to have these moments of exhalation, you know what I mean? And there has to be pause in between.
And so, for me, the one thing that I see everyone doing, as they're trying, trying, trying to be better, is, they are over-complicating it. It's okay to swing into that complexity and into that intellectual rabbit hole, like go there and listen to some crazy stuff, and wow man, get philosophical about it.
But then come back to the body.
There's gotta be rest. There's got to be a centre. You can't do all that work dehydrated with no sleep and lots of stress in your life. You just can't.
Aubrey:
No. You'll burn out and then you'll feel very untethered to the reality, which I think that that's probably for me, one of the biggest requests that we have when we're embodied in this life particularly, is how do we become intuitive, realize our intuition, realize our consciousness, evolve and elevate ourselves while equally grounding into this physical vessel that we are also carrying.
Slade:
What do you hope to contribute to the conversation about wellness and intuition and astrology? You obviously represent someone who is bridging a lot of magical concepts with physical concepts. What do you hope to teach everyone?
Aubrey:
I think sort of similar to what you just mentioned about people making intuition harder than it needs to be. That I truly hope to teach people that living optimally, whether that be mentally or physically or emotionally or spiritually or socially or financially, and you have these tenets of wellness, does not have to be unattainable. It is all within our reach.
Does it require some pivoting and lifestyle changes? Absolutely.
Does it require us to dig underneath our stuff and see where we have limitations and barriers? For sure. We have to look at a lot of places where we've held ourselves back, but that doesn't mean that we all don't have the ability or the right to feel optimally well in all areas of our lives, whether it just be from the food that we're eating, or the company that we're keeping, or the way that we're creating, or the work that we're doing in the world.
My hope is to be the voice of, We all have this opportunity to be completely liberated in all aspects, and we don't have to succumb to not feeling well in our finances and our physical body, mentally, emotionally. There can be upsets, but we all have the capabilities of writing that in a different story line.
Slade:
Aubrey, this is so cool to talk to you about all this stuff. Thank you for taking the time to speak with me today.
Tell everybody where they can go to find you online and to find this podcast that you're doing.
Aubrey:
Yeah, thank you, Slade. I love being with you. It always... It fills my cup up. It really, really fills my cup up. Always.
Susan and I's podcast is on Be the Evidence, and we are on iTunes and we are on Spotify and Stitcher. So you can find us anywhere, but we also have BetheEvidencepodcast.com That has all of the podcast available on it, and we are in the process of launching a brand new platform for all of the things that I've spoken to you about today. That, hopefully, will be live in the next month. So that would be the best place to find us.
And we're also on social media, so on Facebook and Instagram and all of those platforms for the time being.
Slade:
Awesome. Well tell Susan that I want her to come on and talk to us about astrology, since this astrology theme is going strong.
Once again, thanks for being on the show.
Aubrey:
Absolutely. Thanks for having me, Slade.
I’m sharing some adventures from my trip to New Orleans. I had experiences I feel you can appreciate, with themes around — manifesting, synchronicity, serendipity, and practicing the art of surrender.
MENTIONED ON THE SHOW The Passenger Siouxsie & The Banshees
HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses
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Automatic Intuition
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*no transcript for this episode
Janelle Hardy is a dancer, artist, and writer who teaches the Art of Personal Mythmaking, a transformational memoir-writing program.
She loves weaving embodiment prompts together with creativity and ancient tales (like fairytales/ myths/ folklore/ etc) as a way of supporting growth and healing.
This interview features a 7-minute guided visualization to unblock creativity by tapping into the body.
GUEST LINKS - JANELLE HARDY janellehardy.com
The Art of Personal Mythmaking
Outline Your Memoir free workshop
HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses
Get an intuitive reading with Slade
Automatic Intuition
FACEBOOK GROUP Shift Your Spirits Community BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits Edit your pledge on Patreon
TRANSCRIPT Janelle:
So this is a really round-about sort of story because I didn't really know when I started teaching the work that I do, that it was actually about memoir-writing.
I'll leave you with that statement and then circle back to it again.
Slade:
Okay.
Janelle:
I'm from the far north of Canada. The far north-west, which is the Yukon Territory, and for context for people that aren't Canadian (even some Canadians don't know where I'm from). It's beside Alaska and above British Columbia. It's beautiful. It's so wild. I'm not living there now, but I talk about it because I feel so connected to that place.
I'm also from a family... I think I have a common experience to a lot of people in North America and in colonized countries where my ancestry, you know, I'd be considered white, but my ancestry is varied and mostly unknown. There were some family secrets that were whispered as I was growing up.
That experience of growing up really attached to a landscape. And then learning that my roots in that landscape are only as deep as my grandparents having moved up there and met each other and settled down there, and wondering, Who am I? Where did I come from?
And then struggling with some health challenges that didn't feel like they belonged to me really kind of pitched me on this path of curiosity and inquiry and kind of roaming all over the place in terms of what I studied and where I lived.
So...
See, this is the trouble with collecting my thoughts around all of my offshoots of interest, which, for a long time, really mystified me.
I was really into painting. I was also really into writing. I was also really into dance. I wanted to be a dancer. I also wanted to live in other cultures, so I was an exchange student to Japan and to Russia and to another part of Canada, Ontario, which doesn't really sound like being an exchange student, but the Yukon is really different than southern Canada, in terms of lifestyle and how people think about themselves and their relation to the country that they're in.
For example, in the Yukon, we refer to 'going outside' as leaving the Yukon to the rest of Canada, or outsiders coming to the Yukon, right? So there's a real strong identity wrapped up in being a Yukoner. And then, the other part of my realization was, I feel this intense claim to being a Yukoner to being part of this world, and it actually doesn't belong to me. There's a history of First Nations people there that is thousands of years old and is being erased and denied.
So how can I reconcile my love and longing for this place with the understanding that my roots don't originate there and I don't get to claim it as only my own.
All of these curiosities and wonderings pushed me out to study and travel and do all sorts of things, including becoming a single mother at 23 and having chronic fatigue. Throughout all that time, the one thing that kept me steady was a creative practice. And it didn't matter what the creative practice was.
I'm a really big believer in creative energy and the life force, that kind of erotic creative life force that's in all of us. When it's in flow, we get to choose the medium that suits what we're trying to express best.
And for some people, they just latch on to the one medium and they're a writer and that's all they are. Entirely. For other people, it's kind of peripatetic and maybe a bit dilettantish. Sometimes I've labelled myself as not being able to commit to something, but I've let go of that label and realized that I have the ability and desire to use different mediums to explore different facets of my creative energy, depending on what it is that's wanting to come through.
So I might go through a phase of dance and choreography, which happened a lot in my mid-20s. That's a time when I earned a masters degree in dance. And then I really got into painting. And then I got a horrible creative block for years, where I had all the ideas and I actually couldn't write. I couldn't paint. I couldn't...
It was so painful. It was so painful, this state. But it also taught me a lot. So I felt the bubbling force of my creative desiring, creative energy, and I had all the ideas and I encountered my own resistance and procrastination, no matter where I went.
During that time, some of the jobs I was doing involved writing for a local coming events magazine and a couple of national magazines. What I noticed was, while I really enjoyed it, and for some reason was able to write about things when I was being paid, although the pay was terrible, but I was able to do the task when I set the intention outside of myself.
And then I also became really angry that I couldn't prioritize my own desire for creative expression enough that I could work on my own projects during that time. I was only able to do it if it had a functional function in society, which was making some money and being of service to an employer.
So all of that to say, most of my writing has always been creative non-fiction. It's almost never fiction or fantasy or imagined stories in that way. It's always been about finding a way to share an experience I've had in the world, either my own personal experience in order to understand myself, or, in the case of when I was writing these profiles on artists that were coming to perform in the Yukon, interviewing them and being able to describe their personality, physicality, art and the venue in a way that would invite people in.
Slade:
It's kind of freaking me out how much you're really speaking to me in this moment.
I've been working a lot with issues around the struggle that I have, writing fiction, versus all of the prolific amount of stuff that I put out into the world around my paranormal memoirs, and Shift Your Spirits, and these interviews. And I can write articles. I can write blog posts. I can write for this audience because, like you said, it's sort of my job and there's something very liberating, weirdly, about, it's an official thing and I have to do it every week.
I didn't even really think of it in terms of the blocks that I have around my novels as being particularly about something attached to, Oh it's just this thing that I'm making for myself that doesn't have this official, sanctioned place to be in the world. It's not being asked for by other people. It's something that I'm bringing through for myself.
And it was really interesting. I don't remember the exact words of how you said that, but I thought, Oh! I get that. I understand that. That's a piece of the puzzle for me.
So the wild synchronicity is that you and I are here, speaking for the very first time ever, and we're having this conversation. And I had just told you before we started recording that I have had an energy healing session, a clearing, around creative blocks. And I've also been to a chiropractor and a massage therapist yesterday, because there's a physical manifestation in my neck, like nerve impingement and my spine and neck.
You... Something I want to say really quick and then I want to bring you back to this idea of blocks and how they're related to the body, but I wanted to say, when you were talking about your journey and how hard it was for you to sort of justify the idea of committing to one form of creative expression, one of the things that was a real turning point for me in my life was when I accepted the fact that I couldn't choose and I didn't have to.
And that I would be all of those things together, and that's just what my path was. That, you know, I am an intuitive, and a novelist, and a interviewer voice talent. You know? Whatever! I am all of those things and I think most creative people are really eclectic. And sometimes the things that...
And this is something I've been talking about a lot with clearing creative blocks. There is a purpose that you choose for yourself and then there's sometimes a purpose that's chosen for you by the world. And I feel like, as creative people, sometimes it's that hit song, it's that one performance that you did. It's that one job that you landed that just was the right place at the right time. And maybe you become known for that one thing. And people ask that and expect that of you.
It becomes this identifying thing that YOU didn't necessarily choose as much as IT chose YOU.
So it makes perfect sense to me why you're all those things. And knowing that you work with creativity and writing and mythmaking, and that you talk to me about how you work through creative blocks through the body, makes complete sense to me. That you're a dancer.
It really is the intersection of all those things, right? It's you being a little bit of everything that you are. At least to me, in this moment, it's what you represent.
To get back to this idea of the creative block and how it's connected to the body, talk to me about, first of all, when you were really blocked, what you discovered set you free. And then how you've learned to guide other people through that.
Janelle:
Okay. That's a really good question.
My answer won't apply to everyone, but I think there's a lot of useful tools people listening can get out of my misery.
Slade:
Yeah! Absolutely.
Janelle:
Being creatively blocked as a creative person, number one, I think it actually makes us sick. Because it takes a lot of effort to shut the flow down. Being in the flow and having energetic as well as physical movement as a constant experience is actually our natural state.
But we live in cultures, and by saying 'we', I'm kind of speaking to the experience I grew up in, being in North America, in an English-speaking culture colonized originally by England, and Canada, still being governed by England, tenuously. So we have a cultural inheritance that is really damaging.
And the cultural inheritance is the idea of productivity being important in service of capitalism, of making money, of being an employee to someone else, having skills that someone else wants to pay to make money off of you for. We also have an inheritance of domination and we carry with us... And this is most intensely felt for people of European white ancestry, but anyone of colour growing up in a culture like this also receives these unspoken rules and values as well.
We grow up learning that self-control involves contraction, tightening and dominating. Ownership of our body and our emotions and our inner state. We grow up understanding that what is considered attractive and valuable and wonderful in our culture is really limited. And if we don't fit, we need to feel shame and try to improve ourselves.
Can you kind of get a sense that all of these non-verbal values that we grow up with involves tightening and shrinking and contracting and shutting down, in order to be okay, or be acceptable?
Slade:
Umhmm.
Janelle:
So with this kind of cultural inheritance, as well as a lack of deep grounding and roots, most of the cultures living in the Americas of all backgrounds no longer speak their indigenous languages. My ancestry's not English. It's quite a mix, but Scottish people never spoke English. Welsh people never spoke English. Arcadians never spoke English. There's a small bit of First Nations in my ancestry from Quebec and Canada. They were not English-speaking cultures.
When language is lost, we also lose a great deal. We lose music, we lose language. We lose a connection to our roots.
And then all we have to grasp onto, and we lose our stories. All we have to grasp onto is this very one-dimensional colonizer culture that really profits a lot off of teaching shame and shrinking us.
The way that that relates to creative blocks, I think, is that it's really hard to be in flow if you feel like you're not good enough in any way. What some people do is, they figure out compensations around the tightening and the contracting and the shrinking. But then what happens is the creative flow comes and goes in 'bursts of inspiration' and flashes of insight and really intense, forceful rush of creativity that people get, afraid of not jumping in and staying up all night, buzzing away with it, because if it goes away, when will it come back? It might be three more years, right?
We have all these ideas about our inherent creative flow that are warped by a constant experience of being taught to shut down and contract and deny that flow. In our bodies, we really feel it through tightening, through physical tension, even though most people in North America live very sedentary lives, there's actually no reason, if someone is doing a lot of sitting or desk work, to feel as tense as they do.
As a bodyworker, I've spent 12 years working on peoples' bodies hands-on, it's astonishing how much tension there is in people that actually don't use their bodies. Part of it is related to this idea that we need to make an effort. We have to be appearing to be working hard. We have to be tightening up just in case... It becomes internalized.
'If anyone looks at me, I'm clearly a hard worker because I appear that way because my brows are furrowed while I tense my shoulders and type.' Or whatever it is.
Slade:
Right. Look busy.
Janelle:
Yeah. Looking busy. Busy making... That's a whole other tangent of how much energy gets devoted to making ourselves appear to be busy rather than just using our precious energy to create and do the work with ease, right?
Back to getting creatively blocked, these are all things I've figured out as I've done a lot of healing work, offered it as well as received it. And had the excruciating experience of being blocked. Being blocked, the flow was locked up but it's like it's boiling away inside.
The other things that really stopped me from just creating were perfectionism, this idea that it has to be brilliant and wonderful or it's shameful. Which, again, goes back to the cultural ideas of, it's not okay to just play. It's not okay to experiment. We have to have an idea and execute it as if it's the greatest thing ever. And how is that even possible when we're stumbling along learning a process, right?
I got trapped in perfectionism for quite awhile.
I also got trapped in being too serious. So being serious. I'm an empath and a highly sensitive person and introvert, so seriousness comes quite easily to me. Actually, one of the best antidotes came from a mutual friend, Anna Holden, who said, 'Cultivate a sense of amusement.'
Being serious is not a good thing when you already tend to be on that side. But there I was stuck, well before I met Anna, being too serious. So I would have these light-hearted happy ideas and then I'd crush them because they weren't serious enough, they weren't... It's not really art if it's not serious! So I crushed those impulses and I just got caught in this spinning circle of contraction and perfectionism and seriousness.
The thing that really helped, receiving bodywork really helps. Loosening up the physical restrictions helps with the energetic flow as well.
I can't remember how many years ago, I had a summer up in the Yukon. I was still living up there. It's so beautiful up there. It never gets dark. It's just incredible. I didn't have any money. I didn't have a lot of work going on. I was also solo-mothering my daughter but I had time and I had art supplies!
I didn't have money for extra art supplies but I had these watercolours. I had a whole bunch of watercolour paper, because my other problem was, I would collect things for the ideas. So I was always collecting stuff to collage with but then not collaging. I was always buying bits and pieces of art supplies but never allowing myself to have the pleasure of making art.
I hit this point of deep frustration and fury and irritation with myself and I was like, 'UGH. I'm just gonna sit outside in the sun this afternoon with my paper and my pen and my paint brushes and my watercolours and a jar of water and I don't fucking care what comes out. I'm just gonna sit out there with my stuff and see.'
And then, this is the liberating experience was, I started drawing feathers, and colourful circles and balls. I just let it flow. The nasty, critical perfectionist mind, of course, was still hanging out in there.
That little eyeball's watching when I'm creating, saying things like, 'What the hell, Janelle? Feathers? Circles? Happy colours?? This isn't you. This is so... This is stupid! Stop it right now!'
The part of me that was so tired of that mean, vicious voice shutting me down, it's like, 'I don't care. I don't care. I'm just letting things come out and I'm as surprised as you are that I'm drawing pretty, colourful feathers. But I don't care. I'm just gonna let it go.'
I had to let go of my egotistical ideas about my fancy, serious artist creative projects that were gonna wow everyone, and just be okay with making pretty pictures for awhile, you know?
Slade:
I can so relate. I mean, I've had a lot of conversations this week with me as the patient, you know? Me as the client, talking about this issue with perfectionism and the paralysis that comes along with that. The desperate need that you... It's not like you're not aware that you're doing that to yourself. You KNOW that you are and that's what's so frustrating is that, like, 'Oh! How to make this shut up??'
I think it's interesting that you said, really early on in our conversation, we literally make ourselves sick. Because when I was at the chiropractor yesterday with my neck locked up, which is still, it's still sore to turn my head and all that. And that's a common thing that happens to me. That's a place in my body where anxiety tends to go.
Some people have stomach stuff. Some people are like neck and shoulders people, or back or head. There's different places in the body that tends to manifest, but mine is always that spot.
My first instinct to explain what had happened was to be like, 'Oh, I hurt myself working out.' Because I do work out a lot and I can overdo it or do something with bad form and get a little bit of an issue or something. And that was the first place that I wanted to blame it.
It wasn't until I talked to the energy worker, and again when I was talking to the body worker last night who was adjusting me, they were both challenging me that the blocks contracted muscle. The issue was that, like you said, everything was clenched.
I was being challenged to accept the fact that this may not be a sports-repetitive-motion injury at all. This is stress induced. This is psychic. And when I say psychic, I mean that in a big term. I mean that in the fact that we can tie ourselves up in knots, whether you believe in psychic abilities at all, you're still capable of mentally, like you said, shrinking yourself.
The issue of making yourself small so that you are more acceptable in some way...
Janelle:
Mmhmm.
Slade:
It's like all those themes are playing out for me.
So I'm sitting here listening to you talk about that and I'm thinking, What a beautiful synchronicity for me to be having this conversation with you right now.
I'm really curious. You talked to me about a kind of guided visualization that you do when you first start working with a group of people or some clients before doing a workshop or something like that. Is that something you'd be interested in kind of walking us through right now?
Janelle:
Yes!
Slade:
Let's do it!
Janelle:
I love doing this.
I'll give just a little bit of context first...
Slade:
Okay.
Janelle:
...about why I think it's so important to include the body in everything.
Slade:
Yes.
Janelle:
Number one is, our body is our ONLY home in this world and we seem to forget that a lot.
Number two, back to the cultural stew that we're growing up in, we also inherited these ideas that rational intellectualizing and the thinking functions of ourselves is more important and more valuable than the body-based knowledge and experiences that we also have.
So I feel like, bringing the body in is simply reminding people that I work with, and myself, because I can fall off of remembering this easily as well, but the body is JUST as important.
If we include our body, the body's psyche, rather than being floating heads and thinking brains, forgetting about the body, we just feel so much better and also intuitively, gut-feelings wise, clairsentience, these are ways of knowing that come through the body first. And if we don't learn how to tune in to the body, we miss out.
So for this visualization, first off, are you sitting?
Slade:
I am.
Janelle:
Okay so we'll do it from a seated position, because I'm sitting as well.
You mentioned that your neck and your upper back often gets uncomfortable. Can you describe just a little more about what's going on?
Slade:
There's a tension between the shoulder blades and up into the neck. You probably have experienced where you wake up one morning and you can't turn your head all the way to one side or the other without experiencing it being like locked, you know? Having a crick in your neck is how we say it around here.
Janelle:
Yeah.
Slade:
Yeah.
I asked the body worker last night, I said, 'What's the technical term for that?'
She said, 'I think it's nerve impingement.'
Yeah, does that help?
Janelle:
Yeah, it does.
So one of the premises of the kind of bodywork that I'm trained in, which is Hellerwork Structural Integration, also known as 'rolfing', is that everything is connected to everything else. So it's never just where the issue is that needs attention.
This may or may not help with the crick in your neck, but I know it'll help loosen things up and for everyone that's listening, if you're seated, that's the place to be for playing along with us. Because I'm going to describe this visualization from a seated position.
Slade, I'll get you to notice where your sit bones are in relation to the chair. It's easier to tune in if you're sitting on a hard chair, but it's okay if your chair is soft. What you want to do is really have your whole body stacked over your sit bones, so that you're at the highest point.
If you're not sure where that is, all you do is let yourself roll back on your pelvis so that you're sinking onto the fleshy part of your bum. You'll notice that your whole body starts to sink and your back rounds forward as you do that. So just take in a nice breath.
Actually, if you let your head hang forward, you get to experience a lovely little stretch down your neck and all the way down your spine and through your shoulders. It's kind of a luscious thing to do. What we're doing is a pelvic rock.
And then you're going to start rolling forward, tipping your belly forward, and you'll notice, slowly is better, you'll notice as you roll forward you start to get taller. This is how you know where your sit bones are and whether you're on top of them or not. Because when you're on top of them, you're at your high point, the tallest point.
Just for contrast, you keep rolling your pelvis forward. You're kind of tightening your lower back and pressing your belly towards your thighs. You'll notice they start to sink a little. Your belly feels like it's spilling out onto your thighs. I'll get you to just tilt that pelvis back until you reach that high point again.
And then you're just gonna do another pelvic tilt, rolling back, this time keeping your attention really in your spine. So noticing all the incredible possibilities for movement. Often our spine gets viewed as a one-unit rigid sort of thing but the reason we have so many vertebrae is because we want to have so many options for movement, so many joints to be able to turn and twist and arch and contract.
So just notice the incredible ability for your spine to move, and also, really noticing those frozen stuck spots too.
And then bringing yourself back on top of your sit bones again. I'll get you to draw your attention down into the soles of your feet. You're just going to press one foot into the ground. Let it go. Press the other foot into the ground.
What I want you to notice is how pushing into your foot starts to move your pelvis which starts to move your spine, if you let it. So remember this: a lot of embodiment work and connecting to the body is learning how to let go of all of the layers of tightening and contractions.
It's never actually about adding more effort. It's always about noticing sensation and movement, and where you can let go of armouring and tightening and efforting to hold yourself together. Get yourself together. That's a really common thing people say. And that involves a lot of tightness in the body.
So as you're just pulsing from foot to foot and noticing the very subtle ways in which your spine is moved by what you're doing in your feet.
What I'm going to get you to do now is bring your inner eye right into your tailbone. You're going to notice the tailbone hovering under the sacrum as the bottom of your spine. Draw that inner eye up into the sacrum, which is part of your spine that is fused to your pelvis, right?
This is why when you're rocking your pelvis back and forth your spine goes along with it, because it has no choice. If we don't have movement in our pelvis, we don't have a lot of movement in our spine. So hips that are a little more wiggly than our current culture finds acceptable is actually ideal.
Draw your attention from your sacrum up through your lumbar vertebrae, which is your lower back. These are big bulky ones. Just, in your mind's eye, picture, even if you don't really know what they look like, just picture these great big bones with these amazing cushions in between them. The joints have a sponge that is designed so that it absorbs pressure and a downward movement compression. And then it has the ability and leads the release of an upward lift.
You can move your back as well as you're doing this pressing down, and picturing every single little disc between your vertebrae all the way up your spine, squishing down on them. Lift, an upward movement and so much spaciousness, right?
Now I'll get you to bring your attention up your spine to where your ribs join your spine. The really beautiful thing to imagine is that your rib cage is not a big block. It's more like a bellows, an accordion. If you slowly twist from side to side through your shoulders, what you'll notice is, your rib cage basically goes along for the ride. And as you're twisting, allow your head to keep reaching back so you get a little bit of a stretch. You might also notice where you're a little limited in motion.
As you're just doing a gentle rotation, a twist from side to side through your rib cage, keep your attention in your spine. Imagine that the twist is only happening from your spine. And then the ribs, as they're attaching to your spine, they kind of fan out. They have a capacity for way more movement than we allow. They fan out as we twist away to the side and then they come back in.
There's also muscles between every rib that has the capacity to expand and contract. So if you take a really big breath in, and really breathe and notice what's happening in your ribs, but also send that breath into your spine where your ribs attach. And just notice. It's all about noticing, and then exhaling.
Just do your breathing at your own pace.
And then just doing a little rotation in your spine between your ribs. Noticing the movement in your ribs from your spine. Drawing your attention up to your neck and to your head, floating on top of your neck. We often separate the neck from the rest of the spine by naming it the neck, and having the idea of a stopping point at the top of the shoulders and a stopping point at the base of the skull.
For this exercise, I'll just get you to imagine there are no stopping points. So when the neck is moving, it is in response to the movement in your mid-back and your mid-spine. See if you can draw in this elegant idea of capacity for movement as well as compression and release in the cushions between the vertebrae.
Invite a little more freedom in.
So most of this is slow, steady and gentle. And it's all about bringing your attention inside your body.
Do one little last scan of your spine. Just noticing, and then opening your eyes if they're closed. If they're open, just kind of sharpening the focus. Letting your eyes land on some sort of tangible object in the room, and just noticing three details about it. And then letting your eyes land somewhere else, noticing another three details, specific details.
And then bringing that attention that you're sending out through your eyes back to your ears, into this conversation and the more mundane regular world way of connecting.
Slade:
Lovely!
That was wonderful. Thank you! relaxing sigh
Now I have to remember I'm in the middle of an interview, right??
That's so cool. Too bad it's not on video. It would be quite an interesting thing for people to have witnessed.
That is very cool. I'll put something in the introduction to prompt people who might be driving that that's coming up and that way, if they want to wait and do it. OR if you're driving and you just listen to that, and you're like, Oh that was really cool, go back later when you're home and do that as a guided visualization. There is a guided visualization in the middle of this episode!
That's so cool!
So how does that help with the creativity?
Janelle:
It just does. That's my fastest answer.
More specifically, if you think of creativity as being a state of flow, unblocking flow in the body unblocks flow creatively. The other really cool thing is that, especially if your creative energy and output has been generated more through thinking and through head-based processes, it's like we just opened a few doors and windows to give you a better view, give you better access to your creative energy so you're getting more of it.
Slade:
Ooo I just saw this cool image in my mind's eye of like, when you have a door window open at one end of a space, and you go and open a door window in the other, you create this draft. You create literal flow. Like, it will slam the doors closed.
Janelle:
Yes! That's perfect.
Slade:
Very cool.
You talked about somewhere in some of the material I was reading of yours, you have this phrase, 'letting the body lead you towards your stories'. What does that mean? How do we do that?
Janelle:
Okay.
You can actually, what I just walked you through, that visualization, this is fun. You do something physical. You have a pen and paper and a timer. Right after that, you're in a bit of a different state, right? You do some flow writing.
And if you keep your brainy brain part of things out of it, the part that wants to figure it out and is dreaming of writing awards already, if you keep that out, you do some sort of physical exercise and then you go straight into flow writing. It's like unwrapping a present, because something will show up. And if you stay open to not-knowing, it's really thrilling what will bubble up and come out.
Actually, you mentioned you work out a lot. You can actually play with doing that after a workout.
Or if, I don't know how you work out, but if, say, one day it's a legs day or something, you can very explicitly have the intention that you're gonna really tax your legs, you're gonna focus on that part of your body, and then you're gonna let your body write through you. You're gonna let those legs tell you something about them, or let them release a memory or story.
It's pretty fun. The delight is just in the utter magic of what happens when we let ourselves be led and guided by our body, instead of trying to force it.
Slade:
Those of you listening who do my energy reboot are probably noticing the similarities.
One of the things that I recommend to people to do to reconnect to their creativity, it's not so much about being blocked. Because obviously I can't be giving advice about that just yet. But as far as reconnecting to the creativity, or reconnecting to your sense of your Higher Self speaking to you, I recommend a combination of walking meditation with timed proprioceptive writing.
Janelle:
Yeah!
Slade:
Those two things in tandem, and I say, don't overthink it, just do it. It may not happen the first time, but what will emerge is through that grounding exercise, being in the body, you actually reconnect your antenna, so to speak.
And then the writing allows you to start to translate that, to give a voice to record it and let it through. One thing attaches the hose and the other thing sort of turns the knob and lets it flow out. Does that make sense?
Janelle:
Oh yeah, total sense.
I'll add a clarification to writing and staying in the body, rather than kind of tapping into a more unseen sort of energy or force that's more outside of the body. I totally agree with you. The body grounds us and you can be a more clear channel for that kind of guidance.
And if you want to really specifically stay with the body, in your writing, and really tune into the body's psyche's stories, guidance, etc., it helps to just focus your attention in sensation and then be really specific with details when you're writing sensory details.
So whatever's coming up, always asking the question, so allowing the flow to come out, but having a, in the back of your mind, just this reminder of, Oh, it was a beautiful day, so what are the specifics? What tells me it's a beautiful day? And what will tell the people reading this, if they ever do, it's a beautiful day?
Or, Oh, my leg was sore. Okay. Let's get waaaay more specific. What part of the leg? What does sore mean? What's the sensation? Finding words to describe the physical experience. That will help to contain that kind of flow writing within the body.
Slade:
Well it's interesting too because for story telling, I mean, if you were editing a piece of fiction, one of the things you would look to make sure that you're doing is giving your reader multiple sensory information, so you know, to ground them in the story, to make sure that you're introducing smells and touch. And that everything isn't just always somebody looking at someone else, or thinking.
You have to be really conscious to put that in. And I know everybody thinks that this magically happens, but sometimes you do have to consciously remind yourself to insert that.
We have a tendency to focus on one clair sometimes, more than the other. We're either very visual or very feeling, sensory. And sometimes you have to balance those out with whichever one you don't see showing up. Does that make sense?
Janelle:
Yeah. It just makes it richer.
Slade:
Yeah. It's gonna be better for both you, as the person creating it, and if it finds its way to an audience, then they're going to be able to inhabit your experience that much more easily as well.
Oh gosh, I love talking nerdtalk about writing.
Janelle:
It's fun.
Slade:
You're hitting all the buttons because you've got the psychic and the bodywork and the intuition, all the stuff, so we're loving this.
Tell me about this transformational memoir writing process that you do, called The Art of Personal Mythmaking. I know you have a workshop that's kind of specific to a time of year and everything, so tell us about that and when you're doing it.
Janelle:
Okay. This is kind of a fun story too.
So for a long time, doing all these different things, I thought, What the heck? This doesn't make sense. When are the threads gonna cross? And then about three or four years ago, this process showed up to me. I can't really claim credit for the personal mythmaking process. It just showed up to me as it's own entity.
I offered it in person as a workshop for eight weeks. It was not about memoir writing at that time. I didn't think it was anyways. There was a really great response and I thought, I could teach this online!
So then I kind of revamped it. I offered it again. I still didn't know it was about memoir writing. Everything was about writing your life story, healing through examining life's story, tapping into the body and using creative writing and I have a bachelor's degree in anthropology, so I love being an anthropology nerd and bringing in culture and all of that stuff.
I was still confused.
And then, I think just over a year ago, I realized that if someone really committed themselves to the full process, they have the rough draft of their memoir written based on how I was taking them through the process and the creative writing prompts.
So I went, AHA! This is amazing! People asked me what I was doing, I said, I'm teaching this process and you actually get the rough draft of your memoir written by the end.
And everyone's eyes would start to shine. And they go, Oooo!
And I thought, Oh wow, that's what this is about! It's healing but it's also actually a very practical outcome as well of getting to the point of getting it out of yourself, onto paper, to rough draft stage. So all the process work, which, you know, it is amazing how many people have been dreaming about working with their life story and writing their memoirs for decades.
Slade:
Yes.
Janelle:
And either haven't started or they just have a bunch of overwhelming snippets of writing here, there and everywhere that they've tucked away in a metaphorical drawer or file on their computer and it's just eating at them.
So I thought, this is not good. This is creative blocks where you start to get sick. If there's a story dying to be born, and we close the doors and shut it down out of overwhelm and fear, two common reasons people don't dive in, even though they have the desire, that's not good!
We're making ourselves sick if we have stories to tell and we're not telling them.
So The Art of Personal Mythmaking is a transformational memoir writing e-course and writing circle. I teach it online. Each week has its theme. I use fairytales, well more specifically, ancient tales. So any kind of tale that has lasted more than a generation basically, as a guide and a structure for outlining memoir, but also... I don't know. I feel like fairytales are like having a pretty wise grandma or grandpa, helping us out, to understand being human. And they can actually really help us with working through our life story.
So I combine working with ancient tales with working with the body and creative writing and creativity. A lot of people, you know, they're just stuck in creative block or a fear of not being good enough. A desire to write but being so afraid of being a bad writer that they don't try. So getting past those things is really crucial to actually getting the writing out.
And then coming together in a discussion and circle every week is so rich and so beautiful for people to be working through these themes in a supportive environment and be witness to the incredible richness of every single person's different way of understanding and writing about the same prompt is so beautiful.
I don't know if I've described it very well. I get so excited about my students.
Slade:
You do it twice a year?
Janelle:
Yeah.
Slade:
And when's the next one?
Janelle:
August and February. So right now, we're looking at February coming up.
Slade:
Okay. So February 2019.
We're recording this in September 2018 if anybody is listening from the future. They can go find out if you're still doing this workshop. And you may be doing it still in August and February. Or it may have evolved into something else!
I suppose if we're on your mailing list, you'll remind us that this is coming up and one of the gifts that you have for people who subscribe is a two hour Outline Your Memoir workshop that you offer.
Janelle:
Yes.
Slade:
Okay. Tell us a little about that.
Janelle:
Actually it's a little different... It is free. It's a little different than a gift that just shows in your inbox. It's actually a live two-hour workshop.
The way I work with people is really connected and relational and productive. Don't know if that's the wrong word but ...
So I actually walk people through the process. So although it's a free workshop, it's not a workshop that I record.
I have a couple free writing courses that do just show up in your inbox, but Outline Your Memoir is actually, you show up with your pen and paper and I offer it every two months or so. I walk you through the process of getting some structure to what you want to look at and work on and finish the two hours feeling really resourced to keep going.
Slade:
That is really cool!
First of all, let me just say, Janelle, thank you for taking time today to speak with us and walk us through that process.
Make sure everyone knows where they can go to find you online.
Janelle:
Right. I'm JanelleHardy.com
You can probably also google 'Personal Mythmaking'. I don't think anyone else is really describing their work that way, so Janelle and Personal Mythmaking will get you there too.
Slade:
Wonderful. That was great.
Janelle, thank you for coming on the show.
Janelle:
Thank you! Such a pleasure.
A lot of listeners of this show are going through a spiritual awakening, or have recently experienced their intuition coming on line. I'm speaking very personally about what that experience was like for me, and sharing some advice about what to do if this is happening to you.
MENTIONED ON THE SHOW Reboot Your Life
HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses
Get an intuitive reading with Slade
Automatic Intuition
FACEBOOK GROUP Shift Your Spirits Community BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits Edit your pledge on Patreon
*no transcript for this episode
Lisa Campion is a Psychic Counselor, Energy Healer and Spiritual Teacher who specializes in training emerging psychics, healers and empaths to fully step into their gifts and live their life purpose - because, as she says, the world needs all the healers it can get!
She’s been a professional psychic for decades and she also teaches Reiki. She talks about her brand new book which integrates psychic development and Reiki together.
MENTIONED ON THE SHOW The Art of Psychic Reiki: Developing Your Intuitive and Empathic Abilities for Energy Healing by Lisa Campion
Red Shoes with Psychic Lisa Campion - previous episode
GUEST LINKS - LISA CAMPION lisacampion.com
Psychic Reiki Facebook Group
HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses
Get an intuitive reading with Slade
Automatic Intuition
FACEBOOK GROUP Shift Your Spirits Community BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits Edit your pledge on Patreon
TRANSCRIPT Lisa:
Well, it comes from a class that I've been teaching. I've been teaching reiki for about 20 years. And just in case you don't know what reiki is, reiki is a very gentle, hands-on energy healing technique from Japan.
It's pretty exciting these days because, out here on the east coast where I live, all of the big hospitals have reiki in their complementary and alternative medicine units. So you can go to a big Boston hospital and ask for a reiki person to come and do this energy healing on you while you're in the hospital while you're getting chemo, pre and post surgery. It's really used for pain management a lot these days. Works great for anxiety and depression.
It's getting to be more and more popular, more and more mainstream.
So I train a lot of people to do reiki. I've been teaching for 20 years. What I noticed about it and why psychic reiki is that studying particularly reiki, energy medicine in general, but particularly reiki, often opens people who are sensitive.
So if you're an empath, you might become more sensitive. If you have psychic tendencies or potential and you learn reiki, that can really open that channel for you. A lot of people didn't know what to do about that. It would be scary for them. It would be, I had one old lady tell me, 'I really love reiki but I stepped away from it because I felt like it opened me. I didn't know what to do and I got scared.'
That makes me sad because I feel like the world needs all the healers it can get. That's how I decided to teach both of them together and why I wrote a book about it.
Slade:
I'm just wondering, that question comes up for a lot of people that I interact with, this idea of being opened up and being afraid of that happening. And kind of like, resisting it and sort of backing up from that.
What do you say to somebody who's experiencing that, or on the verge of sort of feeling like they're opening up a little bit. What do you recommend that they do to sort of protect themselves but also move forward?
Lisa:
Yeah, it can be super overwhelming to people, so people who are sensitive and empathic, they feel, they're worried, they're afraid they're going to get flooded or overwhelmed or swamped by other people's feelings and emotions. That's hard for them.
The people that are psychically-inclined may have a lot of fear about what that means. Are they gonna see bad things? Are they gonna go crazy? Are people gonna think they're crazy? What are they gonna tell their friends and family they're seeing people, they're having these psychic experiences, and there's still a lot of stigma about this.
I know I'm preaching to the choir with you on this topic, Slade, but, you know, not too long ago, they would put people like us in the mental hospital for talking to angels.
Slade:
True.
Lisa:
Talking to angels and talking to their Uncle Fred would land you in the looney bin.
So people have to sort of unwind the fear around that.
And then, I think the best thing to do about it, I think everyone has to make a decision about whether they're going to accept or allow that part of themselves. Can we own it and what, if you do, then we have to sort of train.
So, the empaths need to train, learn how to manage their energy, which nobody ever knows. Because very few people get taught that. And psychic people need to learn basic... I think it's like being street-smart. Like, how do we, when we have enough information, it's less scary than if we just don't throw open the door and don't have any context for it.
Slade:
You know, you're right to talk about the preaching to the choir thing. Even I forget how many people who are going through this, it's new for them. It's sometimes hard to remember when you've been doing this for 20 years that there's somebody who's experiencing this for two weeks or whatever.
I keep being reminded, especially on social media and the Facebook groups, so many people posting about being in that part of the process. So I do want to be really sensitive to the fact that not everybody feels as bold and brave as we might.
So who is this book for, ideally?
Lisa:
It's for people that are new to the idea of reiki and wanting to learn. So it gives my version of reiki, which is pretty practical, pretty grounded, pretty technical in a way. And I think it would also quite benefit people who are already reiki practitioners.
You know, there's over a million reiki practitioners just in the United States alone and many more worldwide. Those people who have studied reiki, who want to learn more about it but also want to really incorporate the psychic, intuitive energy management piece because hardly anyone teaches that.
There are a lot of fabulous reiki teachers, but they don't teach energy management basics. They don't teach how to really open our intuition, how to really strongly connect with our guides, our reiki guides. There doesn't seem to be very much where that's all in the same package.
Slade:
There are photographs in your book. There are infographics. You've got hand positions for working on yourself, for working on other people. Can we learn to actually practice reiki from this book?
Lisa:
You could. Yeah. It was designed to be a manual, so you can use it like a manual with a lot of the psychic and energy management techniques. And even those techniques are very technical-oriented, so teaching you specifically how to ground, how to clear yourself after a session, how to connect with your guides, what to do when x, y and z happens.
Of course, when we're doing reiki, you do need to receive an attunment. The attunement can only be done by a reiki master.
So a lot of people say, 'Well I feel like I touch people and I move energy. Am I doing reiki?'
And the answer really is no unless you had a reiki attunement. So you could get everything you needed for reiki level one and two from the book except the attunement. You still need to find somebody near you who would do that for you.
Slade:
Well if there's that many people out there who are reiki practitioners, I guess that's a pretty realistic thing to be able to track down.
What do you suggest someone does who maybe doesn't live in a major city, if they want to do the attunement? How would they find someone?
Lisa:
Lots of people do long distance attunements, and I do too. So I'm happy to do long distance attunements for people that I teach. Actually for the first time ever this summer, I taught a virtual reiki class via livestream.
So I had a bunch of people in the room with me, and then I had a whole bunch of people on livestream. That was very cool. I loved it.
For those people that were taking the class virtually, I would attune them long distance. So you can get long distance attunements. You can get long distance reiki treatment sessions and long distance works just as well. Some people say even better than when you're in the room.
Slade:
Really? Why do you think that is?
Lisa:
They've done a lot of studies, and I read this really interesting study recently about this. Long distance healing sessions seem to be more effective because... I don't know if there's less interference, there's less personalization. We don't take things personally as much. There's not, maybe as much mingling of our personal stuff into a session when it's long distance.
Slade:
Like sensory distractions or something?
Lisa:
Yeah, or like our personal agenda. Like you really like that person and you really want to help them.
Slade:
Right.
Lisa:
Sort of where we get hooked as a person, not as a healer, with our clients. And doing long distance work takes that out.
Slade:
Interesting.
Well I prefer to not see people when I'm doing readings for them. I like to be kind of blind and only listening to them. And I prefer to do it from a distance. If somebody local asks me to do a reading, I'm like, 'You have to call me. I won't do it in the room with you.'
Lisa:
I know. I know that about you! I think that's so cool. But you're an auditory psychic, really, so...
Slade:
Yeah...
Lisa:
I know you got all the channels loaded up, but that's how you make your connection.
Slade:
It's kind of like when you listen to a piece of music and you really want to go in deep, you close your eyes and really focus in on it.
But I am a people watcher, so I'm reading the subtle clues of like, the jewellry choices that someone made or what they're wearing or why does she have that hairstyle? It's very distracting.
Lisa:
Right!
And I think the long distance takes that away. We get sort of a more neutral, more objective connection with long distance.
Slade:
You know what? I just have to say, I think technology's so amazing. And because I really think that technology is a friend to our... You know, we talk about the inner connectivity of human beings and collective consciousness and the zeitgeist and our ascendance as a species. I really believe that our technology, in particular our communications technology, amplifies our ability to do that. It really does have this opportunity to be hyper-connected.
And to hear that there is a study that shows, not only does it works, but it actually might even work better - that's exciting.
Lisa:
That was exciting.
And it was so exciting for me to do the livestream this summer. That was an incredible experience for me as a teacher, because I had a room full of 20 people, but I also had 10... One from... They were all over the world!
And that livestream technology put them in the room with me. So cool.
Slade:
Are you gonna keep doing those, do you think? Periodically?
Lisa:
Yeah!
Slade:
Okay!
Lisa:
I will.
Slade:
Cool, cool.
I've always wanted to ask a reiki practitioner this, and for some reason I haven't. Maybe because I don't want to show actually how little I know about it. But I'm just curious. What kind of things can we expect to experience if we are receiving reiki from someone? Should we feel something? What happens?
Lisa:
Yeah it's a great question.
Reiki is a very nurturing and filling kind of energy. We say it comes in at the frequency of unconditional love. Which, I think if you're going to be stuck on planet earth, stuck on a desert island with only one frequency, that's a really good one to have, you know?
Most people are really, sort of like turning on a faucet and standing under a waterfall where what you're receiving is this unconditional love.
People tell me that it's very relaxing. It's very warm. So the reiki practitioner's hands get warm. That's sort of a signature of reiki - it's a hot hand healing technique. And people will feel sort of this, sometimes if you're sensitive to the flow of energy, you might feel pulsing, tingling, heat, kind of the feelings of energy moving.
Other people don't feel that but they feel the results of the energy moving. So they'll feel relaxed, warm, peaceful, nurtured, energized.
It's good. It's a good feeling.
Slade:
I am really impressed.
I'm only becoming just aware, not only through you, but through another reiki practitioner that I work with, and I do mentoring with a lot of people around the intuitive stuff and the building of their practice who do have reiki and incorporate that into their practice.
I come from the other side of where you're coming from, which is, I came in through the intuitive. And so much of what I do is just, almost a talk therapy or talk coaching format, and I have seen that there is this real beauty in having a healing component to your practice.
Not only being able to tell someone, 'Oh, well your energy looks like crap. Here's why.' But to have the ability to actually do something about it, right then and there...
Lisa:
Absolutely.
For me, that's the coolest thing.
I do, about half of my sessions are in person in my office, and half are long-distance, phone or skype. The in-person sessions, because I'm a visual psychic and I'm looking at everyone's energy field, it's really painful for me to sit in a chair and see what's going on inside your energy field and not want to do something about it.
So you can see me look at my client, I'll be like, 'Let's get you up on the table.' Because I want to get my hands on you. I want to sort of smooth things out or get rid of some blocks or kind of patch you back up a little bit. It's so satisfying to me to be able to do that.
Slade:
Well that's interesting you talk about the fact that you are more of a visual psychic. I noticed, just for me personally, looking through the book, one of the sections that I was most attracted to was the level of detail that you go into about reading the aura of the client.
Talk to me a little bit about that. Is this stuff that you've observed through your practice? Did you learn it from someone else? There's a really cool level of detail specifically about reading the aura that I was surprised to find in here. I thought it was cool.
Lisa:
Yeah, thank you!
I think I can teach people to do it pretty quickly. It's finding your open channel, so look, I teach my students to have somebody stand in front of a white wall and begin to observe. Like, what do we see? What do we see with our eyes open? What do we see if we look out of our peripheral vision or if you squint your eye? What do you then see if you close your eyes, because you're going to see better. Your psychic eye will kind of kick in.
I like to also change the word 'see' to 'perceive'. So what do we perceive? Because everyone has different channels. Somebody might feel it, hear it.
You might ask, 'Well what does that person's aura look like?' And you get the answer as a word in your head or a feeling in your body. A smell, a taste, a colour. There's all kinds of ways that that comes in and I think a lot of it is, that information is very available to us. Because we're constantly unconsciously reading other people's energy 24/7. We're all masters at it.
Slade:
Mmm...
Lisa:
We're ready. We're just doing it mostly unconsciously.
So bringing that sort of consciousness, and then being aware of what channels we're receiving that information on is where we get really, oh, no, I get it.
Slade:
I notice that there's also an emphasis on empaths, which is really cool because, as we were talking about earlier, this experience of being sensitive and opening up to things. Tell me why particularly you chose to emphasize so much training around that energy hygiene, or that energy protection component.
Lisa:
Thanks for that question. It's a great question.
What I notice about empaths, and I really work a lot with empathic people, is that I believe, the qualities of being an empath (so being able to feel what people are feeling with your own emotions, being able to put your hands on people, touch them and feel what's going on in their body in YOUR body), I believe that those two things are like the perfect diagnostic x-ray, MRI, for healers.
So, really, that's what empath is for. That level of empathy is for people that are drawn to helping, healing, being a caregiver. We can all find our own unique way of doing that. But SO many empaths are called to be healers. So many. So many are called...
And reiki is such a great entry point for people that are wanting to study. In fact, I will often tell my empaths to learn reiki, because learning reiki gives them an outlet for their desire to heal people. It teaches you how to not use your own energy, but to use universal life force. We can't run out of this universal supply of energy so you're not giving up your personal energy in reiki.
And then it teaches you how to really ground, how to clear yourself, especially the way that I teach it. We learn these energetic basics of, how do we manage our energy field? So I think it's very good on every level, for people that are empaths.
Slade:
You know what I love about that too is so many people who talk about being highly sensitive, or experiencing empathic phenomenon, feel victimized by it. They feel afraid or anxious or beleaguered in some way. There's a lot of negativity and sort of victim-mindset around that sometimes. I really love, especially some of the people, like yourself that I've had on the show, who speak about the idea of being an empath from this really empowered perspective.
That sensitivity is a gift and it's an ability that you can develop to do something really active in the world to help other people, right?
Lisa:
Yes. I absolutely...
And I feel like what needs to happen is the empaths need to learn how to manage their energy, to manage their sensitivity. And that's the part that's missing for them.
So it does absolutely feel like a curse. Like, take it away from me, make it go away, until we learn, first of all, what it's for. And then, second of all, how do we actually, in the moment, manage our energy. How do we ground? How do we clear energy we picked up that we don't want anymore? How do we pick up a habit of having a stronger energy field, or less porous energy field?
And it's not hard to learn. There are many, many easy ways to do it.
Once you begin to do that in a habitual way, so you change your habits, your energy management habits, then all of a sudden, the world is easier to be in. People don't drain you. The supermarket doesn't freak you out.
And you can really then step into your gifts.
And I feel this, it makes me really sad, because I feel like there's this terrible catch-22. Empaths want to help. They want to serve. They know that's what they're for and they can't figure out how to do it without this missing piece.
Slade:
Mmm...
Something that I had an epiphany around there was you talking about was learning to use universal life force energy instead of using your own energy. And I thought, you know what? Maybe when I experience the anxiety of being drained, or from interacting with too many people, maybe it's because I'm shifting into a mode where I'm using my own energy and I'm not consciously aware of that.
I'm gonna go sit with that concept. That was actually really revelatory for me. I'm having a moment over here, thinking, Ohmygod, is that what I'm doing?
Lisa:
Oh good!
Slade:
Like I'm gonna go work on that piece.
Lisa:
We ALL do! It's what we all do until we learn otherwise. Until we learn there's another way.
Slade:
Yeah.
Lisa:
We give up our energy, and when we don't have anymore, we steal energy from other people. We steal energy from coffee, sugar. We kind of have to... We become desperately drained and we then have to figure out how to fill ourselves up through addictions or through sort of energy vampirism. All of these horrible things that we don't want to do.
So people are always talking about energy vampires. I'm considering this as the topic of my next book, by the way. What is the truth about energy vampires?
Some energy vampires are people that are so empathic and they've been so badly drained that they're now desperate to get energy from anything. We go into system breakdown when that happens.
Slade:
That's kind of a more compassionate way to think about them too, to tell you the truth. Because when I hear 'energy vampire', I'm thinking, somebody with a personality disorder, who's like, 'Oh god, (eye roll) here they come.' You know what I mean?
So to think about that from a more compassionate place of like, why are they doing that? What happened to them that they got to that point? That's a good thing to keep in mind.
This is a little bit of a tangent, but while we're on the subject, what are your feelings around psychic attack? Like when somebody comes to you and says, 'I'm being psychically attacked', or 'someone is cursing me', or doing some kind of evil magic on me...
What are your feelings about that? What's going on?
Lisa:
I think that it's real. I definitely have, in all the years that I've been doing work, you know, doing sessions for people, I think most of the time, probably a good 80% of the time, whoever's doing it is totally unconscious that they're doing it. You know? You're going through a rough break up and your ex is walking around, muttering, cursing you the way we think, that kind of thing, and if we're sensitive and we're so psychically connected to somebody, we're gonna feel it.
Slade:
Okay.
Lisa:
You know? We're gonna feel that. And I think that's most of the time.
It's not that the person, somebody, woke up and said, 'I'm gonna do some black magic today!' 'What can I do to take a bite out of Slade this morning?'
That is pretty rare.
It does happen. There are definitely cultures or people who are very curse-prone. And I lived in a town with... For awhile, my office was in a town with a population of people who really loved to curse. And you'd go, you could go pay this lady $500 to put a curse on your friend who stole your boyfriend.
Then if you're the person that got cursed, you go to the same lady to pay her $500 to get that thing off.
That's happened. I just think it's not as common. It's mostly unconscious. People not knowing how to...
And then people having maybe not very good boundaries. So if you're very leaky and you don't have a strong boundary, and the outer edge of your energy field is breached through trauma or whatever. There's many reasons why that happens. Then you can be really sensitive to that.
Slade:
My feeling is that you kind of have to participate in it at some level. Like, you've gotta be in some kind of relationship with this person in order for that phenomenon to occur.
That may or may not necessarily be in your book. I just wanted to ask you about it while you were talking about it. And you were thinking about perhaps writing something about the topic.
It is something that people bring to me in my practice, and I'm always a little bit suspicious of it being what they perceive it as. You know, that there could be something else going on.
One thing I want to ask you about the book though is, we talked a lot about the reiki and the energy management part of it. Can we also learn to do psychic readings through this book?
Lisa:
Yeah. Yeah, you can.
So I talk a lot about that. How to develop our psychic abilities. How to develop our intuition, which I see slightly different from psychic, and how to apply that in a reading. Because what happens a lot is that people, you know, when you're doing reiki or you're working with your hands, on or just above a person, and if you have those channels open, you might begin to see colours around those people. You might begin to feel the presence of spirits around you.
It happens ALL the time.
And I think it's great. It's an incredible opportunity for the healing to be deeper, more powerful, for your client to get more out of it if you know how to do it.
So we have to learn, what does it mean when you see colours around people? What do you do when a spirit comes in? 'I think your mother's here...' How do we handle that? How do we get more of it? How do we have good boundaries and ethics around it?
I talk actually a lot about ethics in my book. Because I feel like people... It's really important because not everyone gets good training, not every psychic gets good training, not every healer gets good training around, what are the boundaries? How do we keep ourselves and our client safe, especially with psychic stuff.
Slade:
I'm curious. Do you have any kind of plans to do maybe a Facebook group or some other kind of support around the book and the people who are working with it in the process?
Lisa:
Yeah!
I have a Facebook group. It's called Psychic Reiki.
Slade:
Okay.
Lisa:
I would love to have you in it. Come on in, everybody!
Slade:
Okay!
Lisa:
It's a real nice community and it is a... You do have to ask permission to join the group, but I'd love to have you there. And that's exactly... I pop in there every week and do some Facebook live, I do some teaching, I answer questions. It's a great community.
Slade:
Is there anything that we haven't touched on about the book that you really want to emphasize or get out there?
Lisa:
I just wanted to say, I don't know, how, kind of amazed I am that I did it. It was really quite a process and it's been a very growthful personal process for me, to commit to doing it. It was a lot of work.
I started writing it in 2015 and here it is in 2018, hitting the shelves. It was a pretty intense journey for me to go fully down that path and... Yeah, I guess that's...
Slade:
Well we definitely do have some writers in the audience and I wanted to ask you... Like, I always feel a little bit guilty if I start to nerd out on the author stuff when I'm talking to someone else. But you and I were talking a lot about the process and this journey, and books are big project undertakings. They're, like you said, you spent three years working on this.
So what did you discover about this creative process? Will you do it again?
Lisa:
Absolutely will.
The books are like queuing up in my head, so I already have the next three books, I think, in my head. I think of them like airplanes waiting for an open runway to land. And they do build up and I do feel compelled to write.
Actually, I quite like the process of writing. I really enjoy it and somehow I was under this crazy idea that that was sort of it. That you hand in the manuscript and then you're done. Suddenly a book magically happens.
So I wasn't prepared for the amount of work that it took to write the proposal, which I thought was more difficult than writing the book. And I had a coach. I never would've done it... I've had some really good coaching. And that's what helped me really get over these parts that I didn't know.
And I would talk to my book coach and literally have to go breathe into a paper bag for a few minutes afterwards... 'You want me to do what?'
Slade:
We're so neurotic about this, aren't we?
Lisa:
Ohmygod, it was terrible! It had me at my edge, like the edge of my comfort zone.
Once the writing was over, I was sort of fine during that period. Then I got an agent, that happened actually easily for me and a week later I had a publishing deal from a very good publisher, New Harbinger Press. They specialize in self-help and spirituality books.
Then there was a year of editing the manuscript, which I was like, 'Ah! Piece of cake. I can do this.'
And it was absolutely grueling.
Slade:
Ooo...
Lisa:
And it took forever.
And the editor that I had was very good but not a big hand-holder. So after, little shreds of my ego were left after that book, I mean, there was nothing. It was like burned down to a bare-bones of myself.
But I learned a TON. I learned a ton about how to write a good book and I'm a teacher, so that's where I came from. And she's like, 'There's a different skill set between teaching and writing a book that people will actually read.'
So what happened to the manuscript, you wouldn't even recognize the manuscript I turned in compared to what it is. But I learned a ton.
And then when I was, I was like, 'I'm finally done!'
They sent the manuscript back to me and they said, 'Great. Now cut out 10,000 words.'
Slade:
Ooo, yeah.
Lisa:
And I learned micro-editing, like you take out the little words that don't mean anything. And I'm super glad I did because it's so much more polished. So much more readable. The whole process of that.
Slade:
My editor is a grammar nazi. I mean, she has a masters degree in grammar. I'm an English major. I have an English degree. I write all the time. I don't think that I'm that bad at it. But I learned that I had so many horrible... My face turns red thinking about the things that I would fill a manuscript with unconsciously.
And so, the things that she's taught me about grammar, like, 'Oh, you have a tendency to do this thing, which is really annoying, and then you're gonna have to go through and change it'.
What happens is, you take that on and it becomes a part of your programming. And then the next time you write, you don't do those things.
So it is the most humiliating thing in the world to work really hard on something and feel like such a smartypants and then have somebody hand it back to you marked to pieces. I mean, it just shreds your soul.
Lisa:
Totally.
It was so painful, but I'm such a better writer now.
Slade:
Yeah!
And every time you do it, it's like you're learning something, even about the structure of a book. Like when you go in and write that next outline, having been through that process, it changes the way that you start. It reduces the amount of work on the back end, sometimes, just by knowing, okay, I know what's going to happen here so let's build this in from the beginning.
I just want to say that for... Yeah, go ahead.
Lisa:
I was just gonna say, who knew that a chapter really needs an introductory paragraph and a concluding paragraph. They teach you that in high school and I never did it. And now I have it.
Slade:
Did you not do... Did you not identify as a writer when you were younger like that?
Lisa:
I did! I totally did. I was like you. I was a literature major. I studied comparative literature. I was a freelance writer for Ziff Davis for ten years. I wrote magazine articles for national magazines.
I always thought I was a good writer. And I think I was a good writer, but I think I'm a much better writer now.
Slade:
Mmm... I think you're the real deal.
Because most people would crumble in the face of that and just run away. The fact that you've been through that process and your first thought is, Ooo what am I going to do next, is the sure sign of an author.
I'm really excited for you to be experiencing this first big launch. I was gonna say, for everybody who's out there working on a book, there is a great power in completing projects and taking them all the way through the process.
Because, like I said, you learn something from the tail end of it, which is so much bigger than you thought. That then informs what you do from the beginning and the next one. And I feel like that probably happens on some level every single time.
So don't just write A book. Write lots of books. Write all of them, if you have time.
Lisa:
Yeah.
Slade:
Lisa, I'm so happy that our work gives us the opportunity to get together and talk like we do.
Again, the book is called The Art of Psychic Reiki: developing your intuitive and empathic abilities for energy healing, by Lisa Campion.
Tell us where we can go to find out more about you and this book.
Lisa:
Well the book you can get on Amazon, Barnes and Nobles, Goodreads. It's available on all those places. And if you want to find out more about me, just come visit me on my website: LisaCampion.com
I'd love to see you on that Facebook group. Find me on Facebook or like me on Facebook and find my Facebook page, Psychic Reiki. I'd love to see you there.
Slade:
That was great, Lisa. Thank you for coming on the show.
Lisa:
Thank you, Slade. It was so much fun.
Some psychics don’t believe spirit guides even have names. But in hundreds of readings, I've received names, and given them out to clients. Sometimes the names themselves are messages.
Because of the feedback, signs, and synchronicities that occur, I choose to continue sharing this information.
In this episode, I share ways in which you can experience these phenomena for yourself.
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TRANSCRIPT I name everything.
Names are the way that I interact mentally, intellectually, psychically, emotionally, with things that even might not ordinarily have names. For instance, computers, my cars, certain trees that I see on a regular basis that I have an affinity for.
With something like computers, for example, someone posted about this in the group the other day, asking a question about why their relationship with technology was so terrible. There was a lot of cursing and a lot of hatred towards the computer. And it made me really aware of my own relationships with computers.
I adore my computers. I think of them as artificial intelligence versions of guides. Computers are the way that I live my life. It enables me to have the career that I do, to interact with people, to maintain my friendships.
A lot of my life is lived abstractly in a digital realm, as I'm sure yours is too.
To me, especially with it being such a huge part of my work, my computers are like trusty steeds must have been to people 200 years ago. Your horse was everything. Maybe that's more getting into the realm of what your car is.
But for me, my computers, they're not living things. They're not pets. They're not pet rocks. I don't think of them as being spirit entities or alive in any way. I do think that they're the first glimmer of an emerging artificial intelligence that we will probably interact with in our lifetimes. So I've already got a lot of practice interacting with them.
But I give different computers names, partly so that I can keep track of them in my file system. Especially on my back-up drives. I can tell where certain documents would have been in time, based on which computer I was using for those few years.
So there'll be almost a theme within my life and the computers' names sometimes represents that, from that time period.
I give my computers powerful names. The current computer that I'm working on right here as we speak has a very powerful guardian angel protector's name. And for some reason, I feel like I shouldn't say what that is. It's really personal and private and for psychic security reasons and physical security reasons, I'm not gonna tell you what my computers' names are.
But they do have names. You know, they're comparable to people's names or superhero names or angelic entities' names. I always imbue them with this powerful, wonderful personality, as if they're genies in bottles, or guardian angels. That type of vibe. That's how I see them.
So maybe that's one of the reasons why I have a good relationship with technology or maybe it's the other way around. My relationship with technology comes first, and then that allows me to have the warm fuzzies about technology. I can't really tell you.
So the idea of your spirit guides having individual names, it's something that's been around in my consciousness for about 15 years, as far as it being something out there that was talked about.
I remember years ago, as many of you may, watching Sylvia Browne on Montel Williams and answering questions from the audience. People would often stand up and ask her, 'What's my guide's name?' And she would just throw these names out there.
Also, when I first started blogging, it was one of the things that I blogged about most. Was this experience that I had of retrieving these names for these entities that were around me and how I kind of named them and interacted with them, the same way that I'm talking about my computers.
And I can remember at the time that there was a lot of argument in the blog comments of my blog and my peers. There's some people that are respected peers and colleagues of mine who do not believe in spirit guides having names.
Part of the philosophy is that they may exist in a realm in which the concept of human language is just completely not even there. Therefore their name might be some unintelligible, ungraspable concept that we don't even have the sensory ability to process.
And I think that's true. So I do think that the idea of spirit guide names down here in this realm is very much an imposed concept. The same way that we impose the concept of time on something that is really kind of impossible to understand fully, but we have a system of dividing up and naming time, and the passing of time, and our brains can wrap around that.
So there is something similar that's happening with spirit guide names I believe. So let me just take that for the record. It's something that we use down here in the physical world as people, specific to our language and culture and personality.
Out there, in the wider, multiple dimensions of the Universe, the concept may fall apart or become more complex or multi-faceted, in some way. It doesn't really impact our use of it here and now.
So that's the reason why I'm good with it.
I also always simply got names. If anybody asks me, 'Hey, you pick up a name from my spirit guide?' I pretty much always have something. Something comes through. I've just always gotten names. And I've always been hyperfocused on names and name origins and name meanings.
I think it has something to do with the fact that I have an unusual name. A not-common name. My name is more common in the UK as a last name. Growing up, the little license plates that you get for your bicycle, they never had Slade on them. Even baby name dictionaries.
When I was a kid, I would go and look to see if they had my name and wanting to know what it meant. And my name was never in those dictionaries.
I was 20 years old before I ever found a baby name dictionary with my name in it. And I was in the UK at the time that I ran across it. I bought it and I still have it. It is one of the only print books that I still use almost on a daily basis.
And if you've ever been on camera with me on Skype or Zoom or something like that, you have probably seen me twist around and reach for it and pull it out when we start talking about names. Names are always a component of the assessment that we do in the Automatic Intuition program.
So I started out doing readings really by doing spirit name readings. I was talking about my guides and who was who, and how I kind of interacted with them and writing about that. People started writing to me and asking me if I could pick up on a name for their spirit guide.
And this was an uncanny amount of emails that I got that were ALL the same question.
So I remembered Sylvia Browne passing out her spirit guide names and I thought, Well, if it's good enough for Sylvia, it's good enough for me. And so I started doing the spirit guide name readings.
That was really the first kind of psychic reading that I ever did for other people, if you don't count interpreting someone's chart, which, even though it was astrology, sometimes I think my intuition would play a part in how I would explain someone's chart to them.
Back to the spirit guide name readings.
They were email readings. They were really simple. And I remember thinking, Well, Sylvia, how do we really know that you're not just randomly pulling names out of a hat? Not that I necessarily thought that about her, but I can see how other people might think that.
And I thought, I've gotta put something else in these readings so that people understand that I'm really tuned in to them individually. So that it helps them to accept like, yeah, this is a name that I got for YOU. I didn't just flip a book open and cover my eyes and pick a name at random and email it to you.
I actually really tuned in and listened. In finding out what your spirit guide's name was, I would also pick up on impressions about you in your personality, and what you were like. I started to include this little personal identification section in all those readings to let people know, kind of like, 'Hey, this is you.'
And if you resonate with this as being true, then that helps you to accept the other pieces of information going along with this.
So that's really how my psychic readings grew. Because as I started to get feedback from the readings, the feedback started to be more and more about the other things that I was picking up about people and those details tended to grow.
Over time, some of the spirit guide name information took a backseat to much more pressing questions. If people are gonna spend the time and the money to talk to me, there are often things that they care about here in the real world that they want to talk about a lot more than something that's kind of ethereal and unable to be proven. And maybe neither here nor there.
So I saw that drop off a little bit over time.
It still surprises me though, that it's always kind of there for the asking if anybody wants to know. I don't make a big point of forcing that on anyone unless they express an interest in it.
Long story short, I get names. And I give them. And I continue to give them out because of the feedback that goes along with them. There's a LOT of different ways that specific names and words pop up for me.
As a clairaudient, as a claircognizant, intuitive, it often comes tumbling out in normal conversation. I'll try to give you some examples of different ways that this manifests for me. But more than anything, I would give people names and they would have some kind of association with them.
And weirdly, my names never produced associations with people who've passed away. I very rarely have experiences doing mediumship. But I have had some very interesting experiences with doing mediumship. So I'm trying not to say I don't do that. Because there is some indication that I can. It's just not something I'm presented with as often.
Here's a story I've never told anyone before.
So my nephew who is 18 months old at the time of this recording, his name is Hayden. And that name is a name that exists in my journals as far back as being a teenager. And you know how you have that kind of list of names, Oh, if I ever have a kid, I want to name him this, or I really like this name for a girl. You probably had that thought at some point. Some of you may have pretty elaborate lists around that.
I wonder how many of those names that you want to name your kid when you're 10 actually end up being the names that you name your kid. Or if you veer off in a completely different direction when there's another person involved in getting to choose a name.
So that name, I didn't really know that it was necessarily like, Ooo, if I have a son, I'm gonna name him this. Because I didn't really ever have a conception that I would have children. I just really like that name and for me.
I had names for characters in fiction. That was something that I was always kind of brainstorming, is cool ideas for names for characters. Sometimes the names would come first and I'd be like, That's a really cool name for a female ninja or whatever. Then I would elaborate and grow the character from the name.
So this name Hayden was really significant to me throughout my teen years. And when I was 19, I actually wrote a story about a real experience that I had with a spirit in my freshman dorm room. And for the purposes of the story, I needed to disguise what the real name was. So I wanted to give him another name.
So in that piece of fiction, I used the name Hayden for that spirit. And I worked on that story for many years. It grew and over time, it was something that I came back to maybe five or six years ago. I pulled it out and started looking at it again and thought, You know, there's something there. There's some bones of a good story.
One of the things though that I decided after working on it, and this was about five years ago. It's in the Cloud Busting universe, if you've read the novel Cloud Busting, it actually would be sort of a prequel to that story. It's a story leading up to that summer for that character.
The spirit, Hayden, was very much a spirit that was waiting to be born into flesh again. And was actively probably pursuing and trying to manipulate people in some way in order to inhabit flesh again and to come in.
So there was a little bit of darkness around it.
And I shelved that project even after working on it again, decades later. I was like, Okay, I like the story but that name is not creepy enough for me. It's not dark enough. I need to come up with another name for that spirit character.
In the meantime, set it aside and thought, you know, I'll come back to it if it wants to be come back to.
Then a couple of years ago, my brother and sister-in-law got pregnant. And they started talking about the names that they were going to choose for their child. And the first thing that they said, 'If it's a boy, his name's going to be Hayden.'
And I was like, Oh crap! That's a weird synchronicity.
I actually told her and my brother a little bit about it without getting too deep into what that character represented in my story. Because my brother's pretty sensitive and I think he's more psychic than I am. But he does not like to talk about these things and is a little bit more creeped out by it, whereas I'm like super into it. It makes him uncomfortable and I was worried that if I told him, like, 'Yeah, that was the name of an evil spirit in a story that I wrote,' that it would creep them out and make them not want to use the name. Because I really loved the name and I thought, Yeah that's a really cool name for him!
So I did tell her, my sister-in-law, 'You know what? It's really crazy. I have journal entries going back to my teen years where I talk about my love for that name.'
And she said, 'That's really cool. Okay. That's enough of a confirmation for me.'
And they did end up naming him that.
So that's just an example of one of these really charged scenarios that I've had with names that stretches out over years and years and years.
I also get really difficult bizarre names that I don't even really think I've ever heard before. And you would think, it's one thing to tell someone that they have a spirit guide named John, right? And tell them, 'Oh, yes, you're gonna see signs everywhere that that's your spirit guide's name.'
That's a pretty easy one.
Actually, I don't think I've had a lot of Johns. I actually have had a lot of Marys though, as spirit guide names, and connection to Mother Marys. That's another issue. Usually there are extra signs that go along with Mary that let us know it's her.
But just to give you an example of one of these really bizarre ones that happened recently.
Seth and I were texting and I sent him this silly picture. It's a meme of a cat that tried to turn into a peacock and it's sort of half cat, half peacock. It said something about a shapeshifting fail or something like, when you're shapeshifting fails but you still look fabulous. And it's this picture of this cat/peacock.
I sent it to him because we have an ongoing magical practice of creating this menagerie of fairy animals. It's something that we play with and talk about. So I sent him this picture and he said something about, 'Oh, I think that's my spirit animal!' And was asking me, 'What do you think the guide's name is?'
I said, 'Clytemnestra.'
Which he then began to explain to me that he was (and Seth if I get this wrong, sorry) something to the effect of, he was standing outside in a parking lot trying to photograph a rainbow or storm or something, and was having a conversation with someone about Greek goddesses.
Clytemnestra is either the daughter of a goddess or god or something. But anyway, that name is part of classical literature. I think she may be in the Midea, or one of those old plays or something.
So it's definitely a name that I've heard before. It's buried in my psyche somewhere.
But there was this really weird synchronicity where I pulled this Greek goddess' name out of thin air at the moment that he's kind of having this interaction with another person about that.
So that's just an example of an every day occurrence that will happen with these names that come to me.
One of the best confirmations that I ever got for a client reading... When I give a client a spirit guide name in the context of a reading, whether that's the focus of the reading or just an incidental piece of information, I always ask for them to have clarification. And together we call in or invoke synchronicities and signs of affirmation from that spirit that we do have their name right.
That can take very mundane forms. Just, okay, for the next few days you have this surge of seeing that name everywhere. Or you interact with somebody at Starbucks and the name's on their name tag. Or you look up at the television and there's a name on the screen and someone's talking and that's their name.
You see these little winks and synchronicities in your daily life where that name is being highlighted. And that's the kind of expectation that I have without giving them too much detail about what to look for. But just letting them know, you know what? You'll get some confirmations around the name.
So this particular client was an ex-pat living in Italy at the time of her reading. We pulled through this name. I don't even remember if it was an Italian name. It could have been a polish name. It was a surname. It was very complex and unusual. I can't even remember what it is right now but it was... I imagine some kind of Czech or Polish or Italian name that's not Smith. Something really unique. A name that I never specifically heard before. I kind of tried to spell it for her.
I remember joking with her and saying, telling her the thing about getting the feedback on the name and I was like, 'This is probably not gonna happen for you. I CAN'T imagine how it could.'
This is a tall order, but we'll see what happens.
She was laughing about it too. Like, 'Yeah, that's never gonna happen.'
I got an email from her half an hour later. After getting off the phone from the reading with me, she went downstairs and went to a cafe. She grabbed a couple of newspapers and got her coffee. She sat down at a little table outside and she flipped the newspaper over.
On the front page was a story about this Italian porn film director who had just been busted for money laundering or child porn or whatever. It was like this big scandal that was in the newspaper. And that was his name.
And she was like, Okay it's kinda weird that it's a porn director.
But the synchronicity of that is too amazing.
So that was one of the ones that I was just like, Okay, I am forever going to give out whatever name that I get, because obviously there's something to it.
And actually that's kind of my attitude at this point. I don't KNOW how it works. I just know that it DOES work, so I'm just going to continue doing it until I decide otherwise.
You kind of have to go with the name that you're given. At least until you investigate. Because I remember telling her, 'Oh, you might want to shorten that or turn it into a nickname or something if it makes it easier for you to work with that name.'
To willfully change it is definitely something that can be an option, but wait and see what comes up for the name that you DO get. People are often disappointed by the names of their guides. It's not always me giving them out.
For instance, in the attunement meditation that we do in the beginning of the Automatic Intuition program, you retrieve your own guide's name during the meditation. So even still, people come to me with like, 'Okay, this is kind of a dorky name but this is what I got.'
I kind of call it George the Asian immigrant phenomenon. It's like, you know how you can be in one culture, say in America where we speak English and someone will immigrate to our country from a very different language system, like Chinese or Japanese or something that is not even as close as a European name. Something really from a different part of the world.
They will often adopt English names for a variety of reasons: to make it easier for people to say their name, or to represent symbolically their new American identity. Whatever it might be that that is a common practice that they will take on a name that they feel is Americanized in some way.
And the names that they choose are always kind of funny, right? They don't go with them. We sort of giggle when we see this man from East Asia whose name is George or Eugene or something kind of off and it doesn't seem to go with what he looks like or whatever.
So I think sometimes the guides are doing something similar. I don't think they 100% have the ability to grasp the nuances of our language and experience in the dimension we're in. So they choose these things kind of like they're trying to assimilate a little bit. So they end up choosing things that sound a little funny to us.
So that could be one component of it.
Something that I found, especially during readings is that the names can often be a message in themselves. Like the names can be conveying something conceptual or thematic to the client. And so I always like to look up names in the moment. Like I said, I turn around and I reach for my little dictionary. I pull it out and I say, 'You know what? Let's look that name up.'
You can also google 'Name meaning: (whatever the name is)' and you'll get information about the name origin and what it means, whether or not it's a boy's name, all that kind of stuff.
With reading clients, sometimes they already have a significant association with the name. Like, maybe the name I pull through for the spirit guide IS that name that they're like, 'Ohmygod, I always wrote in my diary that I was gonna have a son named that.' Or whatever.
It's kind of fun to play with, okay, what is the message that is buried in the etymology, in the complexity of this name's history? You don't always know that at first blush. So there is an intellectual, academic component to doing a little bit of research around the names to get some additional meaning. And there's often significance and synchronicity within that.
So to give you an example, sometimes my clients really hate the names that I pull through for them.
I had a hair stylist one time who got a reading with me. She was so pissed that her spirit guide's name was Oliver that she berated me about it, like, went off on this tirade about the name and how ridiculous it was.
I remember being a little offended in the moment because weirdly enough, my hair stylist had a baby infant son named Oliver. So I felt this weird kind of offense on behalf of her, that this other woman was making fun of the name. I tried to just be like, 'Well, it's what I got. You don't have to like it. You can certainly give him another one if you want to. But I have to stick by and trust that there's a reason why I am picking up on that name. Because if often proves true.'
I told her a little bit about the history of what I'm telling you about doing these readings.
So she got off the call in a huff, and I really even thought for a moment, I almost want to give her a refund. Just to disconnect from her energy and I just like, if you're THAT unhappy with the reading, then forget it! Let's just call the whole thing off.
I can't remember if I did give her a refund or not. But it was like a really bad interaction. Like it went down really bad. Have only ever had two or three of that kind of episode ever happen with anyone.
So I have to tell you, I get an email from her months and months and months later, apologizing to me. And she told me that, again, she's a hair stylist, and she has, up on her station, a little collection of framed images around hair styling stuff or whatever. One of the images is her framed license that she has to display. And then she had some other cool old barbershop pictures or something like that.
And so she told me, she said, 'One of the pictures is signed, has someone's autograph at the bottom of it or it has a name in ink indicating that that's the person in the picture.' And it was like, Little Happy Barber from 1910, or whatever. And she wrote to tell me that his name was Oliver. And that that name was written in ink, on a photograph that had hung at her station for years, before I ever even did the reading for her and since.
So I was like, Wow. Okay. Glad I stuck to it and didn't back down from it.
One of my favourite stories about guide names actually happened with one of my mentoring clients named Kristina. Kristina has had a long history of doing energy work. She's a healer. She's very successful at it and has had a practice for a long time.
But when she came to start working with me, one of the things that she really wanted to develop was her ability to do readings, meaning, read the client, communicate to them the phenomenon that she was observing. Because as she explained it to me, she could move the energy and she could heal energy and release it and clear it and do all kinds of things.
But she could not explain it to someone, have a conversation around it, put into words. It just.. It confounded her. So that was one of the things she wanted to work on.
So as we are doing her assessment, her attunement session, which is the first session that we do in Automatic Intuition, I have everyone tell me their experience with the attunement. They walk me through it like it's a dream that they had. I take notes and there are neurolinguistic clues in the word choice that they use in addition to the symbolism that they bring through that tells me things about their abilities and how their abilities are wanting to manifest, where their blocks are and all that kind of stuff.
So during that session, she told me that the name that she retrieved for her Akashic Record guide was Rhonda. And she kind of giggled about it and I giggled about it too because Rhonda is the name of my dental hygienist since I'm 14 years old. I've had the same hygienist and her name's Rhonda.
So when you say the name Rhonda to me, I picture this sweet little blonde lady in scrubs. Krstina was joking about the fact that Rhonda doesn't really sound like a guide's name. It's not something exotic or profound or biblical or anything like that.
And so we were kind of giggling about it and we went on with the session. We were continuing to discuss other things and then I remembered, Ooo, Rhonda. Let's look her up in the name dictionary! I'm just curious what that might mean.
Oh! The one other thing I forgot to tell you about this whole issue that she was having with being able to vocalize the stuff that she sees, throughout the entire process of her telling me her attunement experience, she was clearing her throat and coughing.
And I said, 'You definitely are blocked in the throat chakra.' Your ability to speak and to access your voice is an issue for you. Like you're actually struggling to have a conversation with ME about it.'
So we got out the baby name dictionary and I said, 'Let's just see what Rhonda means.'
And Rhonda means Voice.
We both just died, screaming on the phone, like chills up and down our body, like, NO WAY, right?
So that kind of thing does happen a lot around these names. So I think of names as being significant. Partly for the message and the symbolism and the theme that they might bring through that represents something about your lessons and your Purpose.
Does it help you to focus or invoke spirit by calling on these helpers? If having that name helps you interact in a ritualistic way or, like I said, sort of wrap your mind around something that's harder to wrap the mind around, then by all means, I think the name can be sort of a shorthand. It's like a magic spell or mantra.
A lot of people will go down this rabbit hole of wanting to do, kind of like a full spirit guide and guardian panel, and bios on every single entity and what they do and what their name is, where they come from and all that kind of stuff.
And I think this is something that we all go through as we start to uncover this and explore it. It may be kind of like a phase that you go through, where you're like, Okay, I want to know who EVERYONE is, and you can definitely work on that. You can find that out. You can investigate. You can get the guides to talk to you more to communicate about the others through meditations and automatic writing sessions. All kinds of things.
I would've thought, because I went through that phase early on in doing these readings and everything, that THAT would have become more complex and complicated over time. Like, the further I go in this process, the more I'm going to delve in and learn about all these different people. And I'm just going to be populating this dimension full of entities and who they are and what they do.
The weird thing is, just the opposite has happened for me.
Over time, it's all kind of collapsed together and become more vague and more rolled all up into a little bubble, and I just think about the bubble. I don't break the bubble apart and go into all the little molecules that are inside there. I just go, Yup, there's my bubble.
I think of my guides as kind of a single group entity, not unlike the way that I'm speaking to you right now. I can sense there are thousands of you listening and it's like a crowd that morphs between being an individual person and then being this multi-soul thing at the same time.
So there's a similar feeling to me with the concept of audience with the guides. I kind of have this guardian angel spirit that I've been aware of longest in my lifetime. She goes all the way back to childhood for me and I guess she's technically what we would call an Asher or the personal guardian angel spirit that we tell little kids that they have.
I just like her. I just like talking to her and I have been addressing her as an individual among my guides for so long that whenever I want to talk to my guides, I kind of have a tendency just to talk to her with the understanding that the others are listening, that she has the ability to pass on and delegate, and that they can figure it out amongst themselves.
So I either talk to her or I talk to them as a group. That's usually the way that I interact with them, at this point.
So you may be wondering how to get your guides names and I think the easiest thing to do is just ask. Especially if you feel a presence, or you're meditating or trying to communicate with your guides and calling them in.
Ask for a name. See what pops in your head. And also ask for, like I did with my clients, a confirmation in the real world about that name. And then you'll start to see those synchronicities letting you know, Hey, that's the name.
Automatic writing is another way that you might retrieve that kind of detail. You can also just speak. Do dialoguing, if you set a voice recorder on your phone and just start channeling and speaking to your guides and asking them questions.
Another exercise I like to do with people is, write a scene in which you are creating a "fictional" version of yourself who is a master psychic. Write a character for yourself as if it's in a novel or film and this psychic has a spirit guide that she communicates with and the guide's name is what?
Pick a really cool name for that guide.
It's another way to use the imagination to get at the intuition. Sometimes the things that you think you're imagining ARE intuitive impulses and again, there are feedback and signs from other people and external sources that will let you know when that's something intuitive.
You can also get a reading! From anybody who does readings that might pick up a name for you and work with that. Again, ask for signs in the real world of affirmation.
One thing that a lot of people ask me about this topic is why psychics might get a different name from you.
For instance, you may have this name you retrieved on your own and then you go get a reading with someone. They come back to you and say, 'I talked to a guide and it was a different name.'
I think one of the best ways to explain what could be happening there, because I don't want to tear down anybody's abilities. Somebody may have just talked to a different guide. You have lots of guides around you and the guide that I just said that I have a preference for communicating with is not a guide that's going to speak with someone who is a stranger. Who is external to me.
Like, those guardian angel guides, those are LOCKED UP. They really present an imposing fortress of energy to anybody outside of you that's approaching them. Whereas you have this relationship with them. They're like a secret service agent that's following you around and you know them and you're comfortable with them. So they don't have the same impact.
Psychics can't necessarily get at certain parts of your guide team, or your chart, or information about you. There could be reasons why you are keeping that close, or it's a security issue or a safety issue.
So one of the ways to describe how this goes down is to think of the metaphor of a party.
Let's say that there is a big surprise party for you. It's a birthday party and there are people there from your family. There are friends of yours from school. There are people there that you work with. They're all from these different kind of environments.
Maybe I'm invited to this party and I go to this party. The person who's your best friend in the whole world may not be the person that I click with, or that I end up encountering. Or I might run into somebody really neat and end up in the corner having a great conversation with them and come away and be like, yeah, telling you about who I met at your party.
The person that I interacted with the most and really clicked with and liked was somebody that you work with that you're not even really that close to. So it's a personality thing. That can be part of it.
Another thing too is, if you send me into that party with a specific investigation around your job and career, then I'm going to move through the party and be like, Okay, who here works with my client?
And I'm gonna get a small amount of people raising their hands. So I'm going to focus on communicating just with those people.
Again, I may be talking to somebody that you work with, who knows things about you in that environment. Meanwhile, your best friend in the whole world that you've known since you were five, is on the other side of the room doing the macarena and wearing a lampshade on their head. Who knows.
So just keep in mind that you do have multiple guides and different guides can connect to different psychics, depending on the time frame, what's going on with you. You could have something going on in your life that's making one of your guides more active. Like they're more at the forefront, driving a major issue that's going on.
And so that might be the guide that presents forward when you get a reading.
You know, at the end of the day, I want you to always defer to your own information. So if you retrieve information on your own and it's comfortable for you, and you have an emotional attachment to a particular guide, a particular name, then you go with that, you know?
Somebody comes along and says you've got a guide that's got a different name, that's fine. Throw that person into the mix as a secondary guide and move on. Continue to practice and work with the name and the entity that you feel most connected with.
If it doesn't empower you or make you feel more magical to talk to guides at all, then don't force it. I know there are a lot of people here who are smart people who think of these concepts in more symbolic, archetypal terms. More of a psychological, analytical, dream symbolism place.
You can be both intellectual and a little bit woo-woo at the same time. That might allow you to access some of this information that you might otherwise dismiss as being ridiculous or far-fetched or something like that.
So if it feels silly to you to have these imaginary friends, then what I suggest to you is that you begin to think of the concept of guides as archetypal programs. We all have tons of human archetypes that we work with and that we embody in different contexts, in different times in our life and in different sort of relationship scenarios.
So think of these archetypal programs as being like apps you can download. Some apps you use more than others. You have apps that are downloaded on your phone that you've never opened up. Just because you don't care to check the stock market, or whatever it might be. But it is available to you should something change and you want to access that.
So think about spirit guides, if it helps you, as these kind of archetypal programs that you can access and run. And that the guides are representing some facet of your experience as a human being. Maybe you, as the mother archetype. Maybe you, as the wounded child, the magician, the artist. All these different facets and components of human experience that we have to choose from.
You can think of those as spirit guides that exist within the psyche.
You technically have free will to do whatever you want with this concept, including change the names of your guides. Or give them names, if they aren't forthcoming. Maybe they just look at you with a blank stare like, I don't have a human name.
Give them a nickname if you want. Go back through that list of what you wanted to name your kids when you grew up and pick a name for them.
You know what's interesting? People rarely ask me their spirit guide names anymore. Even when I have them on the phone for an hour. So I kind of feel like now, having talked about this, I'm going to get that question a little bit more. And that's fine.
It's something that we can always throw in and I always think, why doesn't anybody ever ask that? I could tell them, if they wanted to know.
So if you want to know, go to sladeroberson.com. Book a reading with me and we'll talk about it.
Dena DeCastro is a professional astrologer, writer, and teacher. She offers individual astrology readings and mentors those who wish to take their astrological knowledge to the next level.
Dena teaches us what our north and south nodes can tell us about our karmic lessons and our life purpose.
MENTIONED ON THE SHOW Linda Goodman's Sun Signs
Jeane Dixon
NORWAC
The Mountain Astrologer
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TRANSCRIPT Dena:
So, when I was young in the '70s, my parents were both kind of hippie, you know, Bohemian, interested in all of that stuff. My dad actually read tarot cards, not for a living, but just as a hobby. My mom had a close friend who was an astrologer and they would sit at the dining room table and look at charts and dish on men and I was just fascinated, always.
I would browse the books in the bookshelf. I was kind of an early reader, so I would just kind of nerd out on all the astrology books that my parents had. And so I just immediately, you know, I came from somewhere. I have a feeling I came from a past-life, probably. But this innate interest in astrology and the planets and even space and stars, was something that was just there when I was very little. I would say, starting at about 5.
So I went on, throughout my teenage years, read a lot of the usual books. You know, Linda Goodman's 'Sun Signs' was one of them. That was like my bible when I was in junior high and I grew to be able to read charts, more about late high school age, college age, and I would practice on my friends and family.
It just grew and it was always with me.
Interesting side note, during that time when I was about 8 or 9, my mom became a born-again Christian, so she eschewed all of that. You know, tarot, astrology, all of that was out. And it was looked at as, you know, she said it's the dark arts. I don't think she used that word. That's more of a Harry Potter term actually. The Dark Arts.
It was forbidden in our house and so I had to do it surreptitiously for awhile. But then she eventually switched back and became more open to, I would say, early New Age ideas or occult ideas. So there was a few years in there where it was like, on the sly, I had to do my astrology stuff.
And then when I got into my late 20s, I had a friend of mine that suggested, 'You COULD do this for a living!'
Could I? Could I really?
So I put out my shingle and started charging for readings when I was right at my Saturn return, which is 28, 29 years old. And have been doing that ever since!
Slade:
Wow.
So I have to ask you, you started way before we had computer software to do this stuff.
Dena:
Yeah.
Slade:
So at what point in your career did the technology come in and play a part? Or does it, at all?
Dena:
It did. Like, in the '90s, there were ways that you could order charts on, via the internet or mail order. That was kind of the way you did it. It's kind of funny.
I learned to cast charts by hand in the late '90s finally. I had always had charts given to me so that was how I did it in the early days, like in my teenage years. Like, somebody already had a chart and I'd look at it.
Slade:
Oh, okay!
Alright. So you're much more about the interpretation than the castings, even at that early age.
Dena:
Yes, right.
Slade:
Okay! I can relate to that. That would be true for me as well. I NEVER learned to cast a chart by hand, just for the record.
Dena:
It takes so long. It really is an onerous process. I know how to do it. If you had me do it today, gosh it's been maybe 18 years since I've actually cast a chart by hand. So it would be a tricky but it's good I think for astrologers to at least learn how to do. At least once. To get a sense of viscerally what's going on.
Because the thing with technology now is that it detaches us from what the actual mechanics are of the solar system and the planets in relation to the earth. And for some reason, when you learn to cast a chart, you get more of a sense of, okay, the ascendant, for example, the rising sign, is the rising sign. Because that's what's actually rising on the Eastern horizon. So there's an example of that. That it's rooted to the physical world.
With software, we can forget that sometimes and it just becomes a piece of paper in front of us. It's like, that's the glyph of Venus, but oh, there's a Venus in the sky as well. So that's a difference.
But I think for time and for efficiency, you can't beat technology, for sure.
Slade:
No, definitely not.
And I'm mostly just interested in, like if somebody can give me a list of what their planets are in and what houses everything's in, that's enough for me to work on.
Dena:
Yeah!
Slade:
I will say though, that I love the natal chart graphic - the cool geometric thing, and I think everybody's a little bit in love with that, right? There's a mystique about it.
Dena:
Yeah, certainly! The glyphs, the symbols, they're very beautiful. They're just aesthetically pleasing and it looks like something from the Renaissance, or it just has that kind of ancient feel and evokes that. So I do think there's the appeal of it.
And I can, like you, if I just know somebody's birthday and they don't even have a time, I can look in ephemeris and say, 'Here's where all your planets were.' Maybe excepting the moon because it moves very fast but everything else I can pretty much know, that's where it was. Even with that I can get so much information.
But having the visual of the chart works better for me. Just being able to see it laid out.
Slade:
That is so cool.
I was very fascinated by that as a child. I had an aunt in the '70s who was friends with Jean Dickson.
Dena:
Oh wow!
Slade:
Do you remember her?
Dena:
Yeah, I do!
Slade:
She had - It's so funny when you were talking about your childhood experience of kind of going through the books in your parents' library. I used to go through HER books when I would visit. She lived in Florida. And when we would go down to visit, she had this library of '70s new age, feminist everything. And some of her books were astrology books that were autographed by Jean Dickson. And I always thought that was the most glamourous thing in the whole world, right?
Dena:
Very glamourous, for sure.
She's probably one of THE most famous astrologers, at least from that era. She's a name that everybody knows.
Slade:
Right.
And Linda Goodman's books. I remember those as well.
So one of the things I'm really excited to talk to you about is kind of your niche of astrology, which is the connection between astrology and past lives. And also how the nodes play into that, and karmic patterns in the chart.
I just would love to open up the floor and hear you talk about these relationships.
Dena:
You know, I'll start by saying, when I started practicing astrology, which was the late 1998, 1999, I really was doing the typical descriptive astrology. For example, your sun is in Aries. You are fiery, spontaneous, brash and bold. You know, something like that.
That started to feel a little limiting to me.
So I was searching... A few years into doing it, around 2002, 2001, 2002, I started to search for what more can I learn? I just felt this impulse that I needed to find a different approach, or another layer to my system. And so I went to an astrology conference here in the Northwest called NORWAC. It's the Northwest Astrology Conference.
Steven Forrest was speaking there and he and Jeffrey Wolf Green are two astrologers that really founded this school of thought within astrology called Evolutionary Astrology. It's called 'evolutionary' because it is based on the premise that our souls do reincarnate and they move from lifetime to lifetime, learning lessons and evolving. The intention is evolution.
And with that, the nodes, the south node represents the past life or karmic patterns, and north node represents what we are here to learn to become or to embrace. And the whole point of it is evolution. The whole point of it is growth and change. And it made so much more sense to me than the idea that we're just static. That we're born with this chart and that's just who we are for the rest of our lives.
And the other main component, or the foundational belief in this type of astrology is the idea of free will. And that we make choices in our lifetimes that impact where we're going, the lessons we have to learn, and how we respond to those lessons with our free will really determines how we move along our path. How we move toward our Soul Purpose.
So this all resonated with me.
I had always believed in reincarnation. It's one of those beliefs that you can't really explain. It was a knowing. I just felt a knowing about it.
I will say that, it's not that there isn't proof for reincarnation. There's a lot of good case studies out there and proof for reincarnation. But it is one of those things that people take on faith, and some people have a strong reaction one way or the other to that idea.
But reincarnation is very much inherent in this niche of astrology that I practice. It's a foundational piece of it.
That all being said, I went to study with Steven Forrest at his apprenticeship program. I did that for a few years and embraced this path within astrology, because it really resonated with what I already had felt and believed for most of my life.
What it is that I think this kind of astrology offers that's a little different to some branches is the south node karmic patterns can point out: Here are the things in a past life that you experienced, and also that vexed you, or that upset you, or that's left unresolved at the time you left that life. And then when you came into this life as a soul, you carry some of that baggage with you. We call that 'karma', and that's a memory. An emotional memory of what went on. But we don't consciously remember that.
So in this life, our work is to learn to release those old patterns and not to get stuck in repeating those karmic situations. But we're inclined to want to do so because we tend, as humans, to want to repeat what we've done before and what's comfortable. Even if it's painful. It can feel comfortable because it's familiar.
So the north node points to, well what's the medicine for that? What can we do?
That's where free will comes in. What can we do in THIS life to pull ourselves out of those old stuck patterns of the past? And the north node offers the medicine, the way, for us to move away from staying stuck and stagnant.
So remember that the key point is growth. The key point is evolution. All of us, if we're born, we have karma. If we're born, we're also a living thing that needs to grow and evolve. If we stop doing that, if we stagnate on a soul level, we feel unfulfilled and bored and unhappy.
So when clients come to me, what they're often looking for is, I'm kind of stuck. Or I'm in a place in my life where I'm trying to make a transition and I feel like I'm scared and I can't. What's blocking me? Or they're just, they have that general malaise. I just don't have the joy for life. I'm feeling like I'm not on my path but I can't really figure out what to do to get on it, or to get back to it.
And so the nodes are very powerful to look at that and say, Okay, well here's what's in your way. Here's the karmic patterns of the past. Here is where you can get stuck very easily, repeating these patterns. And then here, the north node is what you're here to learn and to embrace. And the more you move TO that, even if it's scary, even if it feels challenging, which it will, the more you move toward that, the more you make choices in that direction, the more fulfillment and peace and joy for life you can gain back.
So that's the overview with how I see it.
Slade:
So if I tell you what my north node is, can you tell me... Since I'm the one that's here talking to you, we'll use my chart as an example.
Dena:
Absolutely!
Slade:
I have a north node in Pisces. What can you tell me about that?
Dena:
Yes!
Well I can speak to that because so do I!
Slade:
Oh, interesting!
Dena:
So let me just say about that too. The nodes go to a new sign about every year and a half. So you can know that if you're born within a close time frame to someone, that you very likely have the same nodes. They're are like these mini generations. 1.5 years of the same. And that pattern repeats every 18, 19 years. They will come back around to the same nodes.
So yeah. So we have the same ones. I think we're both born in '69, right?
Slade:
Yes! July 23rd.
Dena:
Oh, gosh! Same month! Ohmygoodness.
Slade:
Wow.
Dena:
I'm July 8th.
Slade:
Okay.
Dena:
So I can speak to this pretty well.
But just because we have the same nodes doesn't mean like I know everything about this, because I'm working with the same struggles, right?
Slade:
Okay.
Dena:
So if you have the north node in Pisces, that means you have the south node in Virgo. The nodes are always opposite signs to each other, always at 180 degrees. So once you know one, you can figure out the other.
Let's start with the past-life karmic pattern for you.
South node in Virgo is really attached in past lives to doing things perfectly because you may have had a job or a position which required you to have a certain level of perfection in what you did. For example, being a doctor. If you make a mistake being a doctor, something really disastrous could happen, right? Or even being an artist or a crafts person where you have to get all the details just right or else it's just a big mess. People aren't going to like it, right?
There's this high level perfectionism that was instilled in you in a past life.
The tendency with south node in Virgo is to beat yourself up for every mistake. That's the karmic baggage that comes in to this life with you is self-flagellation, tending to beat yourself up for every mistake, having higher standards for yourself than anyone else in your life.
Resonating much?
Slade:
Yes.
Dena:
And Mercury is the planetary ruler here. So Mercury rules Virgo and Mercury is a planet of mind. So your intellectual abilities in this past life were over the top. Like you probably had great powers of analysis and the ability to understand what's wrong in every situation and know how to fix it, right?
And so you bring that into this life.
In a way there are some gifts there too. It's not that the south node is entirely negative. We bring in past life gifts. Like, okay, you come in with those intellectual skills. You come in with that ability to do things almost perfectly. You come in with that ability to analyze and fix situations.
But if you stay there, if you stay there in this life, if you keep doing that and really go into that south node territory, you will feel anxiety and you will feel unfulfilled and you will feel like I'm never getting into where I want to be, because I can't be perfect, right?
Slade:
Mmm...
Dena:
None of us can be.
So the fear with south node in Virgo and north node in Pisces is letting go of control. This is where we're starting to move toward Pisces because Pisces, north node in Pisces says, Well the medicine is to move toward the Pisces territory. So letting go of control. Allowing yourself to make mistakes and have compassion for those mistakes. And trusting in something beyond yourself. Having faith that
there are powers greater than we that are taking care of things. And that we don't have to take care of it all. We don't have to micromanage every aspect of our lives.
So speaking as a co-person with this set-up, I can say, this has guided me immensely in my life knowing this. Because, and for you, you can speak to this as well. I'd love to hear what you have to say about it. But just knowing that I'm here to develop compassion for myself and that I'm here learning to let more things go.
I've been listening to your podcast, right? I've heard you speak about allowing yourself to make B+s, instead of...
Slade:
Yes!
Dena:
Like, Perfect! You're right on track!
That's what I'm talking about.
Slade:
Yeaaaaah.
Dena:
It's a need for self-acceptance in a radical way. Like, not just 'Oh, I accept myself.' We can all say that from a head place. But the PRACTICE, the spiritual practice of self-compassion, self-acceptance and actually being able to spot when you are holding yourself up to that too-high standard, and then saying, Ok, I've gotta let that go. I've just gotta let that go.
Slade:
I have to give you some feedback around this because of course, my mentoring clients know how much I stress how important it is to get feedback from outside your own head about your readings. And so I just want everyone also listening to know how incredibly accurate that is for me, just from that one little thing I told you - my north node in Pisces. You were able to really nail a lot of the issues that I have.
Perfectionism in particular with writing is a constant... like you said, it's both a gift and a curse. I have much higher standards for myself than I do for other people. The thing that was so liberating about blogging 13 years ago or whenever it was when I first started doing it was, it relaxed the expectation for writing.
Dena:
Yes.
Slade:
So much. It made it so accessible and it made the feedback immediate. And it allowed me to really grow as a writer, because instead of going off and, like you said, beating myself up and questioning myself and being alone in my own head bubble, you know, tearing myself to pieces and having this wizardly war with my own ego. And, you know, it's a hard creative process to live inside that.
And so, one of the things that's so interesting about why I feel like Shift Your Spirits is so successful, out of all the other kinds of projects that I've written, is because it had such a low expectation going in. And that's not to say that I don't put myself into it. I just have a real relaxed attitude about it, that I don't about some other kinds of writing. I was like, 'Oh, it's a blog.'
Dena:
Yeah.
Slade:
And it's so funny because that blogging allowed me to build an audience, to write for people, to have a lot of iterations. So, eh, this week's kinda sucked. Next week's might be amazing. And you start to notice these patterns as a perfectionist. The things that people respond to the most are not necessarily the things that you put the most effort into or the ones that are your favourites.
Sometimes, for example, the Money Shift is the best-selling piece of writing that I've ever put out into the world and I did it in three days. And it was just merely a 'oh, I just need to put this message out'. I'm repeating myself here in my readings. Let's just put it in a little tutorial.
Dena:
Right.
Slade:
And there's something about that lack of having high expectations that is extremely freeing and, you know, I stress this for other writers as well: Put out a lot of work. Blogs and social media allow us to really develop our voice and to test what people are responding to.
At some point, when you have an audience, the biggest liberation of all is having you guys to talk to. And to write for.
Dena:
Right..
Slade:
I'm just feeding you guys your toast and scrambled eggs every day.
Dena:
Yeah!
Slade:
There's something that feels liberating also as a perfectionist to be able to step back and to serve people.
Dena:
Yes.
Slade:
Which I think maybe getting to some of that Pisces energy that you're talking about. Not only turning it over to a higher power, but also realizing I am participating not just from my ego but I'm participating on behalf of these thousands of people who want me to do it.
And so, it's a sense of duty and a sense of something bigger than me that I am both pulling from and also displaying to.
Dena:
Yeah.
Slade:
It's really cool.
Interestingly, my mom has the same north node and I do run across people here and there that share that and, interesting synchronicity there, it would be you of all people!
Dena:
I know!
Slade:
That is an example of the kind of thing that people would get if they contact you for a session, right?
Dena:
That's true.
And yes, you can get such an amazing amount of information just from knowing the nodes. Just like you said at the beginning, we were talking about knowing sun moon rising sign, we were talking earlier about that. That is a foundational piece - sun moon and rising sign. You can get so much information just from those three pieces.
And then same with the nodes. If I know just THAT, I tell that to people and they're like, 'Ohmygod, you just spelled out my whole life.'
Slade:
Yes!
Dena:
So it's such a powerful tool.
It's not a substitute for getting a full reading. And I want to say that because, looking at the chart wholistically will always give you the most depth of analysis and the most understanding. But having this piece as guidance is huge.
So something I ... yeah, go ahead.
Slade:
I was just gonna say, I know that probably a lot of people listening DO know a lot about their chart. They have had their chart done and stuff. So one of the reasons why I really like what you you just did for me for example is, you went in and focused on and embellished a very specific area.
So it actually refreshes my excitement in my chart and knowing that, 'Ohhh! There's all these little things that I can still deep dive into, that maybe I feel a little blasé about my chart. Now I'm like, 'Ooo wow!' It does kind of rekindle an interest to have something that is connected to Purpose.
Because, like yourself, that is a question that a lot of my clients come with as well.
Dena:
Yes! And I think you feel excited because it's empowering. This kind of information is empowering.
That's one thing I aim to do with the kind of readings that I do is to empower people with the tools to make good decisions for themselves and to take the reigns of their own life and to make their free will choices.
That's what this information provides you with.
It's like, 'Okay, I know I can move toward Pisces. I know sometimes it's going to be hard. Sometimes I'm going to resist it and want to stay stuck in the Virgo territory. The shadow Virgo. But I can choose differently.
Slade:
How does that manifest for you personally? Like, where does this Pisces/Virgo duality kind of play out in your world, and how do you combat that, or, you know, heal that?
Dena:
Well the first thing that comes to mind is writing, for sure. I'm a writer. I've done a blog for a lot of years. Astrology, I wrote some astrology articles for the Mountain Astrologer. I also began writing fiction. I've taken a few stabs at it and "failed" attempts of novels over the last dozen, 15 years.
Recently, I finally finished a first draft of a novel. And what I had to do during the process of that, and to get through it and to actually get it done and put it into, actually get it to the place where I could pitch it at a writers' conference recently, which I did, was to constantly be talking to that Virgo part of myself by embodying the Pisces. And say, 'I hear you, inner critic. I hear that this isn't perfect. I hear that it sucks. All those voices.'
I had to label that south node Virgo voice. Similar to how people use the inner critic, right? That 'Okay, you're the inner critic. I hear you. Go sit in the corner because I'm going to keep writing this book.' Every day.
It was... I have to tell you, it was a bit of a fight. A lot of parts of it were very intense and very challenging. But I brought in the Pisces consciously and said, 'Okay, it's all good. You're doing great. No matter what you do, at least you're doing it. And what matters is that you like it.'
And what matters is that YOU have fun with it. And that's a very Piscean kind of like, 'Hey, no big deal. Go with the flow.' It's THAT attitude.
Slade:
Mmm... I call this... It's so funny because I call that angel and devil the Flow Drafting Voice and the Editor.
Dena:
Yeah!
Slade:
And the Flow Drafting Voice is the same channel that my intuition rides alongside and so, when you are in a first-draft mode, you don't need to be, you don't need the Editor. It's like, You come back later. On a re-write. You come back when we start to take it apart and do re-writes and edits and polishing and all that. You've got plenty of work to do so sit down and shut up. Right now we're just flowing.
We're just being a hippie chick here.
Dena:
Exactly.
Slade:
That's kind of how I see that Pisces flow voice as being this kind of bare-foot, flowers in her hair, creative type of energy, you know?
Dena:
Yeah!
Slade:
Gosh, we have a lot in common!
Wow.
Dena:
Yeah. Well it's probably because we're born in the same month.
Slade:
That is so interesting! You know what? I don't meet a lot of people born... like, I rarely meet July Leos at all. Because there's just not a lot of us. There's just that one little week. And then I don't meet a lot of people born the same year. I've heard that we are one of the smallest populations that's alive right now. Yeah. The Gen-X population is REALLY small compared to the Boomers and then the ones that came after.
We are greatly outnumbered.
Dena:
Yes. Yes. I would agree. I feel that.
And I know something about that little mini-tribe of 1969 people that... There was quite a lot going on with the planets that summer. They were all lining up. You know where that little traffic jam of planets is in your chart, I'm sure. And it's right on the south node.
So I'll speak to that real briefly here and say that in your chart, in an individual's chart, I'm just speaking generally, those nodes can be interacting with any combination of planets. It could be that the south node is conjunct, meaning it's right on other planets in your chart, Jupiter, Pluto, what have you. And so that will also add layers to the interpretation that I would do in an individual reading, to look at what is aspecting the nodes, what planets are conjunct, or square, mostly in hard aspects to the nodes is what I tend to look at.
So that gives information to the story here.
And I do draw a past life story. You know, I tell a story. Now it's not a literal past life reading and that's something that I want to make clear. I don't actually see if you were Benjamin Franklin in a past life.
Slade:
Right.
Dena:
That's not what this is. It is more about general themes.
But I do weave it into a story because story telling is what I like to do. And it's a mode that works for people to try to understand something. So I'll say, I'll give that caveat to somebody and, okay, I'm going to tell you a story and it's not a literal story but it encapsulates an emotional truth or an emotional dynamic of what happened to you in a past life.
That's how I approach reading that and then bringing in the other planets, that is to say, to inform the south node.
Slade:
Okay. So for someone maybe like myself, who does work with astrology a little bit, you have a mentorship program where you work with people taking astrology to the next level. Is that something that you do with more professional-type mindset?
Tell me about the mentorship program.
Dena:
Yes!
My mentorship program is to work one-on-one with those who want to learn more about astrolgoy. It could be even a beginner that really just wants to use it for their own edification, for their own purposes.
Most of the clients that I work with are either astrologers or somebody about, on the verge to become a professional astrologer, and they're just a little hesitant about taking that leap, you know? They don't feel quite like they have all the... There are some missing pieces in what they know, or there's some insecurity there.
And then there are also counsellors, therapists, psychologists. People who want to use this as part of their profession. And I've had a couple of those clients. And that's been really rewarding for me to work with those people.
So I teach the basics but that's not what I really teach in the mentorship program. I'm more focused on, 'Let's go in to what do you feel are your missing pieces?' 'Where do you feel there are gaps in your knowledge?' And let's go into those.
And then I also speak to things like, how to become a professional astrologer. What's the business end of it? What do I know from my experience about how to do this in a way that's going to be successful and in a way that is ethical. So we talk about the things that will help them to make it a business, if that's what they wish to do with it.
Slade:
I'm really excited about this because in my professional intuitive mentoring, I touch on astrology just in a very brief way. And like I said, I do tend to work with what I call, sort of, elemental astrology, which is the sacred elements, earth, air, fire, water, and I kind of speak symbolically to those dynamics.
The people are often asking me about going deeper into the astrology component itself, and I always say to them, 'You know what? It needs it's own course.'
I can't just kind of shoehorn that into a chapter or something. It's not gonna happen.
Dena:
Right.
Slade:
So I'm really excited to hear about what you do in that mentorship program, because it sounds like a lot of people listening right now are gonna be excited about it. I know you make ME want to be an astrologer now. I'm like, I could do this!
Dena:
You could do it!
You probably have a lot more experience than you give yourself credit for. If you've been doing it since you were a kid, I'm sure it's probably really in your bones.
Slade:
Well I have a hard not using it. I have a hard time not speaking... I mean, in my family, if you're dating someone, you just say things like, 'Well he has a moon in cancer.' And you go, 'Ahh!'
It's like, five pages of information just went running through their head.
Dena:
Totally, yeah.
Slade:
So we do have a tendency to use it, almost like a Jungian kind of psychoanalytical vocabulary, if you wanna be kind of high brow about it, which I do think that one of the attractions to me with astrology is it allows me to use that archetypal language that you also find in the tarot and that kind of thing.
Dena:
Yes.
Slade:
So I do play with that language a lot.
I was considering no longer asking for birth data when I do my intuitive readings, because sometimes so many people don't know it, and they get stressed that somehow it's going to impact their reading. And I kind of backed away from that.
But this kind of makes me want to leave it in a little bit.
Dena:
Oh yeah!
Slade:
Yeah. Because it's... you're making me really aware of how much I do love astrology and have always been interested in the nodes, because I have to tell you just really quickly, my mom... Sometimes I get a chart done for my birthday.
And I think when I was about 15 years old, my mom had discovered this woman named Barbara Alexander, if she's still out there. And she was really excited to take me to Barbara, because Barbara was also a clinical psychotherapist. She had degrees and had a practice as a psychotherapist. When you would go to her office, it was very academic and official. It looked like what you would imagine a psychologist office would look like. She recorded the session, which was something I hadn't had happen before.
She talked to me about the north node in Pisces and was the first person to put that in mind, that the north node was about, kind of, Purpose. And she also told me that my writing career would take off in my mid-to-late 30s, which was absolutely true.
Dena:
That's on! Yeah.
Slade:
I don't know if that's the same for you as well, if it worked out to be that same time period.
Anyway, I'm curious to know, what do you hope to contribute to the greater conversation about astrology? What would you kind of like your legacy to be around this subject?
Dena:
I guess one of the big things I like to bust out there about misconceptions of astrology is that it's not fortune-telling. It's not future prediction, and some people do use it that way.
What I want to contribute is the idea that astrology is a powerful tool for self-development, for self-understanding, and then also to give you the ability to choose what you do in your life, because you become more conscious of yourself and your patterns through this kind of awareness of the charts. Through evolutionary astrology.
I'm not saying that evolutionary is the only path. There are so many different kinds of astrology and so many different branches. You'll know if you just go on the internet.
What I really want to impart is a more empowered free will focused way of using astrology and that's what I hope to contribute.
Slade:
You have a free e-book people can download called Your Karmic Past and Your Life Purpose. Tell us about that.
Dena:
Yes. So if you go to my website, up in the upper right hand corner you'll see a little box that says exactly that. If you subscribe, you get a free gift: Your Karmic Past and Your Life Purpose. Within that, there is a table where you can look up your birth date and you'll be able to find your nodes sign. Just by looking up your birthday. So it really breaks it down very easily.
I give some introductory information about the nodes, what they mean, what is karma... I go more deeply into that topic. And then for each sign of the north node south node combination, I lay out what is the karmic pattern, what are the big fears that block you, what is your growing edge, meaning what are you here to learn.
And then I also give some affirmations. So for example, for Pisces north node, the affirmations are, I accept myself exactly as I am. That one sounds a little Stuart Smalley. But that's okay. And I trust that I am taken care of within the greater order of things. Another one is, I go with the flow of life.
So that's an example of affirmations that can help that particular node combination. North node Pisces, south node Virgo.
And then I, at the end of that document, you'll find frequently asked questions about the nodes. What about past lives? Does it mean... Can you see if I'm Benjamin Franklin in a past life? That kind of information.
And then finally, in that document, there are resources for further reading, if you want to read about really good books about reincarnation and evolutionary astrology listed there.
So yeah! You can find that at my website.
Slade:
Oh gosh. That's a great resources.
Tell us where we can go to find you online.
Dena:
So I'm at www.denadecastro.com/ and I'm also on Facebook now. I just started back there after nine years away. And actually, Slade, you are part of the reason that I came back to Facebook.
Slade:
Yay!
Dena:
I really wanted to be part of your group. There are a couple of other groups too that I've just really wanted to participate in and I want to start a couple of groups there. So my Facebook is Dena DeCastro Astrology and you can find me that way too.
Slade:
Excellent. We'll put all those links in the show notes for everyone.
And for those who joined the Shift Your Spirits community, they will be able to go online and ask you questions, and we'll have a post featuring this interview so you can interact and everyone can tag you and talk to you more about this subject.
Dena, I am so excited to meet you. This was such a great conversation. Thank you so much for coming on the show.
Dena:
Thank you, Slade, for having me. It was great.
How do you know which things in life happen because they were predetermined versus things you’re experiencing because of decisions you made that are not in alignment with your soul path and purpose?
And why do things happen to you? Is it karma?
MENTIONED ON THE SHOW Cloudbusting by Eric Slade
HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses
Get an intuitive reading with Slade
Automatic Intuition
FACEBOOK GROUP Shift Your Spirits Community BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits Edit your pledge on Patreon
TRANSCRIPT A little disclaimer
Automatic Intuition is not a cult where everyone subscribes to my belief system, or assimilates to a shared philosophy.
The exact opposite.
The intention is to support YOU in discovering YOUR practice and bringing through YOUR wisdom.
Because if you say to me “I’m bringing through info about Soul Contracts” I can say “Cool! That’s not my wheelhouse, but it could be yours. Let me support you in accessing that wisdom."
Because I know there is audience for whatever you believe, even if it’s not what I believe.
All to say …
I might piss some people off with this segment. And disappoint a bunch of others.
You don’t have to believe what I believe.
I celebrate the Mystery. Not Knowing is normal.
I think anytime anybody tells you they KNOW something is true on the other side, in another dimension, about the Universe that cannot be tested or corroborated ... My alarms go off.
That’s fundamentalism.
If it’s a theory, if it’s a cool myth, if it’s an archetypal fable, or if it’s channeled wisdom … Then it’s all those things.
But it’s not necessarily fact.
It’s the kind of belief that requires faith.
And you’re entitled to your faith.
I’m entitled to my alternatives.
But most of you are here listening because you want to talk about personal development and spirituality without all the blind faith or the “It’s channeled. Therefore it’s fact.” That’s a leap. Even coming me, you should take it with a grain of salt.
I have a magical world view — in some areas, I’m a total space cadet and you might be inclined to think “I’m not buying that.” Where in others, even in more established subjects, I’m like “Nope. That’s a fairy tale. That doesn’t work for me in the real world.”
I know I’m putting out mixed messages. I know I’m full of contradictions. The jury is out on a lot of my beliefs, but … we are deliberating and accepting whatever redacted documents you want to share …
I’m making these disclaimers about myself, Automatic Intuition, and our beliefs because I want you to know that my own students disagree with me and my opinions do not necessarily represent the others.
I admittedly have a little bit of a bully pulpit here.
BUT I am encouraging all my mentoring clients to create their own.
We celebrate diversity of thought, and people having their own clients, their own audience, that resonates with their particular perspective. Just like you resonate with most of mine.
DISCUSSION QUESTION
How do you know which things in life happen because they were predetermined/contracted lessons, versus, things you’re experiencing because of decisions you made that are not in alignment with your soul path/purpose?
A lot of people chimed in with thoughts about Soul Contracts.
I actually know a lot of people both inside my mentoring community and in other groups who do work with soul contracts. I know a lot about the resources for that work and I know people I can put you in touch with.
If you want to deep dive on soul contracts, you can.
I talk about Spirit guides. And they can’t be proven. But I can implement the advice I perceive from them and see the results of that information in my actual world.
Here’s the part where I’m gonna piss some people off...
I don’t believe in Fate.
I don’t believe in soul contracts and predestination.
I don’t believe in a supreme being that micromanages our actions.
I don’t believe we choose our hardships from a menu of bad shit while sitting on a cloud in the bardo between lifetimes.
I get the question WHY in readings a lot.
For years I’ve gotten these questions.
I’ve had a lot of time to bring through those messages and practice how best to deal with feelings of “Why did this happen to me?"
I don’t believe asking WHY something happened ever gets you the answers you need.
Better questions to ask are:
- What can I learn from this?
- What am I going to do with this?
- What can I make from it?
Shit happens.
Random shit happens to good people.
Now, when you make bad choices and you stray from the path and purpose you know in your heart you should be in, then you increase the chances of bad shit happening.
I don’t think it’s karma sometimes as much as it’s self-sabotage.
But none of this is to say I don’t believe we’re here for a reason
or that we don’t have a purpose
or that this isn’t a profound spiritual experience
Maybe we come in with general themes, not specific jobs to accomplish
Maybe we come in with a weakness in some aspects of our being and attract life lessons that allow us to master those issues
Maybe the issues get assigned through the process of living, being here.
There are a myriad of components:
family members, society, culture, time period
Incidental random circumstances
All combining and crashing and merging with WHO YOU ARE at soul level
Why does it have to be pre-scripted?
Does it make you feel better to think you came here with a list of challenges to deal with—
- at 42 I’m going to have a bad mammogram
- at 32 I’m going to test positive for HIV
Please don’t say something like to someone living with cancer or HIV.
But do imagine what it sounds like if you do.
I think it’s offensive.
But I’m entirely okay with saying we chose to come participate in this big virtual reality free for all called the earth plane. And I’m okay with thinking or believing or telling stories about spiritual entities coming here to have a human experience.
I think we could just say Yes, knowing it’s going to be dangerous and treacherous and painful, as well as joyful and exciting.
I do believe, just to bottom line it, that we are here to learn how to transcend existential pain and choose love.
And if we didn’t set that up beforehand, it’s still the best way forward.
Because even the most old school Old Testament fundamentalist story telling tells us the thing that separates human kind from all the other entities swirling around our galactic center is our free will.
Having something be contracted before your lifetime — feels like a cop out to me.
It feels like the opposite of will.
It feels like something that is comfortable to the victim.
Listen, we are all victims at some points in our lives, and will continue to be, until we choose to transcend it.
That’s the only thing that separates a victim from a victor.
At some point you’ve got to put down that bag of rocks and learn how to throw them with precision.
Turn your burdens into gifts.
Your pain into tools.
The ingredients of a meaningful life are the same as a pointless one — it all gets shifted with perspective, gratitude, and an exercise of your free will.
I’m much more comfortable accepting some shit is random; and some of the shit we bring on ourselves through the choices we make; or a combination of the above.
In fiction storytelling, drama and empathy are created in the audience by giving our characters a set of Best Bad Choices to make.
At our very, very best, we’re just doing our best, maybe writing that contract on the fly.
Making it up as we go.
Even the best of us.
Now we have good intentions and we have free will.
And we have the choice to make something meaningful out of what is happening to us.
WHY it happened … that’s a shit show.
What you need to survive this world is not knowledge of a soul contract, but sheer courage.
A personal solo episode about losing the joy for my writing and a breakthrough I recently experienced healing issues around creativity, self-esteem, and perfectionism.
MENTIONED ON THE SHOW Akimbo Seth Godin's Podcast
Leaders' Call to Adventure Lori Ference podcast
Silent All These Years Tori Amos
HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses
Get an intuitive reading with Slade
Automatic Intuition
BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits Edit your pledge on Patreon
TRANSCRIPT There are a lot of you listening to this who I personally really wanted to tell this story to.
Like, not as an episode but just in my life. It's actually easier just to make it a podcast episode and tell the story at once. I've texted a few people. I've called a few people over the last week. I've called Seth and made him listen to me talk about it for an hour and a half. And then I went to text my friend Jeff last night to catch him up on what had been going on with me and I thought, 'Oh god, this is just all too much for texting.'
For some reason, it feels more self-indulgent to keep calling people individually and gushing about my creative breakthroughs and my angst and all that kind of stuff. It just seems to be more appropriate to actually do a personal podcast episode which you can fast forward or choose not to listen to.
For those of you who are choosing to listen to this, you're my friends too and you have expressed interest in my personal episodes and me sharing things from my personal life. Actual issues that I'm dealing with. It humanizes the whole thing, right? And it reminds you that I am not a guru sitting up here with a bunch of wisdom about this stuff. I am someone who is playing with all these tools and all this language, and observing, and trying to share a part of my process as a way of motivating you and bringing you along with me.
So this all goes back to all that solar eclipse madness we had in 2017.
At the time that I'm recording this, it is towards the end of August 2018, if you're listening from the future and you need some time context there. But back to the big eclipse in 2017, at the end of the summer. It was about a year ago, and the bookends for all the eclipse stuff that was going on last year was about the sign of Leo, and the opposite sign of Leo, which is Aquarius.
There was this thematic dynamic and there were sort of two questions that the eclipses were bringing up for you. And the fact that I am a Leo and Jeff, incidentally, who I wanted to tell this story to, is Leo as well. And so, one of the reasons why I felt so exhausted in trying to catch him up on this in text messages, we've been having this conversation for well over a year about both of us, and how we've been going through this. Not to mention all the clients and people I do readings for, where we've had conversations about this.
So this is just my personal experience with all this stuff.
But for all of us, there was a theme. There IS a theme with the solar eclipses that we've been through and all this retrograde stuff with an eclipse is kind of like, 'Oh, by the way, here's a bonus lesson for you. Just to make sure you got that all worked out.
The Leo is really asking us: How are you a star? What's your light? What do you have to give the world?
The Aquarius is about: Who's receiving that light? Who's observing it? Who can see it? Who is impacted by it?
I didn't make this up, by the way.
I heard something Seth Godin talking about it on his podcast Akimbo. I'll try to find the exact episode and link to it. But if you want to check out Akimbo, I think it was one of the first three episodes that he did for that whole podcast. But he had an episode about Making Things for the Weirdos. So this is the thing I didn't make up. For the edge, not the middle.
The idea of what makes something super popular, what makes something mainstream. Things were not created for the mainstream. They aren't created for the middle. If you create something that's gonna appeal to everyone, you're going to re-invent the colour beige. You're going to reconstitute oatmeal.
The way in which things become popular and mainstream is that they are picked up by the weirdos. By the fringes. By the tastemakers and the hipsters and the people who are on the edge. The Lantern-bearers who are out in the woods guiding the lost back to the light. Back to civilization. It's found on the edge in the margins.
And so, people who are early adopter of things that end up being very popular and cool are very proud of themselves for discovering something, and appreciate something that is new and difficult and hard to categorize and that not everyone gets. If you've ever had those friends who always want to be the one who finds the new band before anyone else and who always wants to listen to something that everyone else finds off-putting or reads something that's really difficult.
It's part of their ego-pride that they are able to go places the rest of us can't go. Or go there FIRST. They discover things and then they pass it to us.
The way that that life cycle works for things that become popular, that are loved by a lot of people, they start with the weirdos. So if you're trying to make something cool, according to Seth Godin's concept or theory, you start out by making things for the weirdos. Go for the fringe! Be weird, because that's where it gets picked up and that's where you're going to create something original.
With that in mind, it's been on my mind and it's a theme that plays into this episode and this personal story.
So I have two author friends, Kim and Brandon.
Brandon and I talk about a lot more than on the show because he's a science-fiction author. He does a lot of research on the topics that we're interested in. You know, the ascension of humanity, psychic information from the collective, ancient civilizations. He works a lot of this stuff into his books, and so he ends up coming up on the show sometimes because our conversations overlap.
Kim is someone who also listens to this show. Incidentally, it's really kind of cool because I went to this writer's conference. It was called the Best-Seller Summit, I think, two years ago, in Nashville. I first gravitated, the very first night, to Brandon and before I left there, I had met Kim and discovered that she was another one of these people that I'd gone on to college with, but didn't know while I was AT college. Susan Hyatt's one of those people as well.
I feel like they're special because we were just destined to find each other at some point.
It's interesting that those are the two people that I brought away from that experience. Usually when I go to any conference, I pick up one major soul family member at least. And that's one of the things that I look forward to whenever I travel. Especially if it's work-related or has a project at its centre.
Kim and Brandon, incidentally, I was telling people about my idea for this podcast as a content marketing strategy at that conference. And I was talking about this basic concept for it. And it's interesting that the two people that I connected with and became friends with there, are also very much listeners of this show. Like, they genuinely listen to this show the way all of you do, who are fans of this content, this topic.
So that's how we met.
And I have an ongoing relationship with both of them. Brandon is very much a sort-of coach to me and someone that I look up to and admire for his productivity and his work ethic. Kim is my, I call her my Author Therapist. She's the person who talks me off the ledge and who I call when I really need to be vulnerable about being a fiction author.
Listen, guys. Fiction authors - we are a neurotic bunch of cats, okay? We are tortured. And I know that sounds really ridiculous to say, but you just have to assume that I'm telling you about some part of my life that you don't see as much as this part. There's this other place where I'm this angsty artist and I'm not the only one. We're all that way for some reason. Anyway.
We do require a lot of emotional support and it's a little bit crazy because we get really, really worked up and really sometimes depressed and neurotic and all kinds of negative energy that we have to work through. And dealing with things that are entirely imaginary. So if you were to be a fly on the wall listening to us talk, and you weren't an author, I always think, 'Gawd, people would think we are NUTS!'
But anyway. There you have it.
It's a little bit of a curse and a calling. We do not feel that it's necessarily something that we chose. We feel that it's something that we have to do. It was ordained by the creative life force and intelligence in the Universe. So it's a struggle.
Something that really happened for me this year that came to a head was, you may have seen me before posting word counts on my projects as I'm working on them. I do NaNoWriMo sometimes in November every year - National Novel Writing Month. That's something that we do is we post our word counts daily to motivate each other or to hold ourselves accountable. It's something that author friends, especially on social media, do in a lot of groups and communities.
My friend Brandon was posting about how he was raising his word counts. Brandon has been on a trajectory for a couple of years of producing a lot of work really quickly. He's writing serialized science fiction and releasing a lot of books per year. There's an entire community of authors who work this way, and he's trying to learn some of those skills and apply them to increase his own productivity.
So he's posting about how he's getting higher and higher in his daily word counts. I remember a point at which he posted something about being up to 5,000 words a day. And I was comparing myself to that on a day when I literally had a word count on my novel of like, 400 words. It took me like an hour and a half to produce those 400 words. And just to give you an idea, I usually write for a two hour session, and I like to get somewhere between 1,500 and 2,000 words.
So my fiction goal per day really is a lowball 1,000 words a day.
So here's Brandon, writing about 5,000 words a day, which of course he's comparing himself to people who are writing 10, and 12,000. But I compared myself to that and I just really got down in the dumps about it. And felt like I was just crawling towards my goals and got really in my head about it.
First red flag here is comparing yourself to others, right?
I love the quote, 'Comparison is the thief of joy.' I think that is mostly attributed to Theodore Roosevelt. It's one of my mantras. At this time, unfortunately, wasn't enough to get me out of this ditch that I got into with my writing over the course of the last year or so.
So I was telling my other author friend, Kim, about this. I was talking about, 'Ohmygod, Brandon's doing so great. I'm so happy for him. But I am comparing myself to him and feeling like, just such a loser.' I was telling her, 'I'm just slowing down more and more. I'm barely getting 500 words of fiction written per day...'
Kim's listening to me and she's such a wonderful, sweet soul. She holds space so well for these hair-pulling sessions of mine. And she just asked me a really simple question. She said, 'Well, what about your non-fiction?'
I was stumped for a moment. And I thought, 'Ohmygod, I don't even COUNT non-fiction anymore.'
I've been writing non-fiction professionally every day for over a decade. For like, 13 years or something like that, if we get really technical. I do email-readings, notes for phone readings, channelling, automatic writing sessions for the readings that I do, I do posts in my Automatic Intuition community. I answer email questions. I answer questions on Quora and Facebook. I write scripts for guided meditations.
I write scripts for these podcasts. I write show notes before the shows as an outline, and then I write show notes after the shows to create the blog posts and the metadata for this podcast. I write the introductions segments pretty much word for word, the way that I perform them. The outros and the channelled messages, the Oracle segment.
I write blog posts. I've written thousands of blog posts at this point. I don't even really know exactly how big my archive is. I write email newsletters. I've been doing that for, you know, 15 years. I write transcripts sometimes. Tutorials.
I write classes on the various topics that I speak about. Intuition, connecting with your guides, the Money Shift, all that kinds of stuff. I wrote a workbook for my mentoring clients, for the Automatic Intuition professional community and that's basically like a textbook.
Every day I write morning pages. And then sometimes I write afternoon morning pages. But they're not morning pages anymore. They're associative writing exercises. They're brainstorming.
So as I'm going, all of that stuff flashed through my head when she asked, 'What about your non-fiction? What's your word count for that?'
And I thought, 'Ohmygod, I can't even put a number on that.' But as we were conversing, I just sort of grabbing handfuls of those things in my mind and I was thinking, 'Wow. Yeah. I write 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10,000 words a day sometimes. There's probably very few days of the week where I don't at least write 1,000 or 2. Whether I'm working on my novels or not.
So it was so crazy. I was like, 'Hold on a minute! THAT’S ALL THE WRITING I’M NOT COUNTING. I'm not counting it! I'm not giving myself credit for it. I don't write it down. I don't log it. I don't track it. I don't beat myself up about it. I also don't lift myself up with it. Or give myself any credit for it whatsoever.
That's really messed up, y'all!
That's crazy that I'm doing that. I'm sitting here almost in tears because I wrote a piddly 400 words on my novel, and completely discounting the other 5, 6, 7,000 words that I wrote that day. And I'm walking around telling myself, 'I'm not prolific. I'm not productive. I'm such a loser. I'm crawling. I produce hardly any work. I'm only working 2 hours a day.'
NONE of that is accurate.
It's such a loud ego-programmed radio station and I've got it on full blast. And I've become so accustomed to it that I'm not even aware that it's playing. And it was like, when Kim asked me that question, 'Well, what's the word count for all your non-fiction?'
It was like somebody just pulled the plug on the radio and it was completely quiet. I realized, 'Holy shit. How is it that I'm doing that to myself?'
Maybe we all need to write down everything we do in a day and post it so that other people can give us feedback about it. Because here's the truth you guys - we are terrible judges of our own worth! We're terrible at valuing ourselves and what we accomplish and what we do and what we contribute to other people. What we put out there and what we're good at. Awful. Take us off the panel. We are not allowed to judge ourselves. We're just completely incapable of doing it.
We really do need feedback. Constructive compassionate feedback from other people, to even get anywhere close to accurate. And all Kim did was ask me a really good question. You know? Just a really compassionate, logical, obvious question from where she was standing. That's all it took.
So I'm kind of thinking, 'If this is ringing any bells for you, maybe you need to do an exercise where you literally just make a huge list of everything that you do in a day. Everything you do.
Oprah also got in my head during this whole scenario. It was back when A Wrinkle in Time came out. She was on Van Jones with the creator and director of that movie, and they were being interviewed. She said something about how she believes that there is the purpose that you choose for yourself in life, and then there is the purpose that life chooses for you.
I started thinking about that and contemplating that.
And I thought, Okay, well maybe my Life Purpose that life has chosen FOR me is what I do for you guys. What you're listening to right now. All the stuff that I do on my 'non-fiction' side. That's kind of the purpose that was given to me. I feel DRAFTED into being a professional intuitive and talking about all this stuff. It was just supposed to be a writing project and it's turned into being a teacher and a speaker, and a counsellor and all the stuff that you know me for, right?
And so I thought, Well maybe the purpose that I choose for myself is being a fiction author, being a novelist. That's something that I've wanted to do since I was a really little kid, right? I mean, I never ever ever have strayed from that compass point, from that North Star.
And then I flashed back on an interview that I did with Lori Ference last year. And I believe it was on Lori Ference's show, not on my show. I was being interviewed for a Leaders' Call to Adventure and she referred to me as 'Prolific'. She used that word.
And I was like, 'What??' I was really embarrassed. I was like, you know, in my mind making cutting motions to her. Like, 'No! Don't say that. I'm not prolific. Don't say that to me.'
So when all that stuff came tumbling out with Kim's question, 'What's your word count for your non-fiction?' I thought, 'Oh! Okay. That's what Lori was talking about! That's what she was looking at. That's what made her thinking of the word 'Prolific'. And I was like, 'No. You can't... Please don't put that word on me. I don't deserve that word. Stephen King is prolific.'
I thought of the word 'prolific' as being what you produce on the finish end of things that everyone can see and buy on Amazon and that you're super famous for. And that's the only thing I would count as prolific. Again, the only thing that I'd give you credit for if you use that word.
Another thing that comes up for me, especially last year, right after the eclipse was What Would Tori Do? So Tori Amos exists for me as a kind of creative archetype. Like she's like a patron saint to me of creativity and how she got there is, one of the things those of us who are obsessed with Tori and love her, one of the things we love about her is that she invites us into this private interior creative landscape with an entire cosmology and a language of her own archetypes and symbols, to the point where it's super, amazingly immersed in her kind of crazy in a way.
And we love it.
It has absolutely no relationship whatsoever to anything that's going on in popular music, necessarily. Sometimes some of her songs stray over and become... You know, there have been a few, but that's not her audience. Her audience is the super passionate group of people who feel really personally connected to her and invited into her diaries.
This is someone who also knew what she wanted to be and who she wanted to be from childhood. She was a prodigy pianist at the age of two or something insane like that. Went to a music conservatory and was playing professionally and recording by the time she was 11 years old. Everyone knew that Tori would always be a musician in a major big way. She spent a lot of her early life, her teen years and her early 20s trying to figure out what that looked like for her.
Her story, her trajectory as an artist is the reason why she operates as an archetype in my kind of worldview and why I compare myself to her as a source of inspiration is because, you know, she got kicked out of classical musical school pretty much and rejected from that classical world because she was too much of a freak and an artist.
And then when she tried to kind of do the LA music scene, get a record deal, get a big label behind you, and make you a star, kind of thing, she got really chewed up by that part of the industry. They put her in this ridiculous sort of styling and tried to sort of give her a sound that was heavy metalish, because that was like what was going on in the late 80s and she ended up looking like a ridiculous extra in a white snake video. And she did this album under the name, 'Y Kant Tori Read' and it was a joke. It was an absolute flop and it was just a huge disaster.
She experienced a personal trauma in her life. She was raped around that time and she just dropped everything and just fled and went away.
As the story goes, she rented a piano, and just quietly on your own, in her own headspace, wrote the song 'Silent All These Years'. That was a moment of just claiming like... And if you listen to the song, it IS that message of just sort of letting everything go and tuning everything out and realizing that you have been suppressing your own voice. And just allowing your own voice to come through, right? It's just a basic throat chakra anthem of self-expression and claiming your voice. For women in particular and women in music, it represented a game changer.
Because like Seth Godin said, when Tori just went and created her weird little music that was straight from her heart, we all devoured it and loved it and attached to it. There wasn't a place for her in the music industry, so she created a new one. We, the fans, created a new space for these sort of 90s era women singer/songwriters. And there's so many artists that came after her that had that kind of intimacy, especially in their lyrics and their personal themes and all that, and would owe a debt of gratitude for her and would own it in a second that she was an influence.
That's how I got into thinking last year when the solar eclipse thing was going on.
Long story short, I was writing a book last year that was a sequel to a book that I've already written. And I'd gotten so in my head with everyone telling me:
'You have to write a sequel.'
'You have to write in serials.'
'You can't mark it, writing a whole bunch of individual books.'
'You've got to write one thing and then write book two and three and four and five before you move on to something else or you're never gonna make any money. You'll never build and audience.'
'People won't be interested in standalone books if you keep writing them.'
'People won't be interested in books that have children as main characters.'
Of course, along came Stranger Things and reminded us that that's bullshit.
Some of the other things that I was putting on myself was this idea that I had to write in a certain voice that was a little bit more palatable, that I tried to make myself fit into a genre more neatly so it would be easier to market. And I really just backed myself into a corner, yet I felt like I didn't have anywhere else to go.
And so I was working on this book ALL last year, asking myself the question, 'Okay, this is my light. Who am I shining it for?'
And thinking, 'Well, I'm shining it for these people who bought that other book so I've got to be beholden to them somehow and write a sequel.'
And I got to the point where I worked for 11 months on this book and I was nowhere near finished with it. And it wasn't even a long book. I mean, I was like, 150 pages into this book that I felt was going to take me another two years to write. And I was slowing down in my word counts. They were dropping from 1,000 words a day down to 500 and 400 and 300. And then I was losing my seven days a week momentum and dropping down to five days a week. And then finding reasons for it to only maybe three.
And then at the time I called Kim in a panic, I was writing twice a week and that two hour session was getting eaten up and turned into an hour. And I was writing 300 words and OH SHIT, I'm never going to finish this book and I hate it.
And the reason why I can't write it is because it's not connected to my heart.
So I just, you know... Prolific? That's not prolific.
So all of that really made me start to wonder - Where else am I not giving myself credit?
In my Automatic Intuition mentoring program, and in that community, one pattern that I notice in all of us, is that we focus on the one technique we can’t do, at the expense of owning the techniques that produce tons of information for us.
We all do this!
I can't see auras! I can't see auras! Meanwhile, you can do mediumship and bring through someone's relative that's crossed over. Who cares if you can't read auras! You're a medium. That's amazing.
But we all do this!
To make this episode about YOU as well as me, I want you to ask, where in your life are you doing this? Where are you discounting your own success? Your own productivity? Your own creativity? Where are you suppressing it and just sweeping it under the rug and acting like you suck when you don't!
I do a fitness class that's very similar to cross-fit. It's called circuit breaker. We do it on Saturday mornings and recently, we were doing this workout in honour of what we call the Fallen Five in Chattanooga. A few years ago, we had a domestic terrorism event in Chattanooga where a young guy went and shot up a naval recruiting centre and killed five people here in Chattanooga Tennessee where I live.
Which is really surreal if you've lived in one of the cities that's been the focus on the news of one of these terrorism events. One of these school shootings. All that kind of madness. It's almost like it's taking place somewhere else because you're watching it on tv and it doesn't even feel like it could be here.
That's a whole other story for another time.
But anyway, we do a workout to honour those guys every year on the anniversary of when they were killed. If you know anything about cross-fit and the cross-fit community, a lot of the workouts of the day for cross-fit are made and named after and in honour of people who have been killed in the line of duty, like active service people in the military, fire fighters, police officers. They often have these workouts created for them.
So my trainer, Lisa Blevins, wanted to make this workout for the Fallen Five the official circuit... Not, well, it is the official circuit breaker, but she wanted to get it accepted or adopted as the workout of the day for the cross-fit community at large to honour these people.
So we're outside. We're doing this workout. It's really rough. It's grueling, and of course, one of the reasons why you associate these things with those who aren't there anymore is because we CAN do these workouts. We're here and alive and physically able to do them. So that's... what you're thinking as you're suffering through the process and thinking, Ohmygod. What have I gotten myself into?
But you do it because you can. And because you're alive and you have a body that works.
So there's a group of us that, we're outside. We're trying to huddle up under a little bit of shade that's out there where we work out. And we're complaining. Huffing and puffing through the whole thing. I think there were 5 rounds in the workout and I got halfway through the 4th going into the 5th. Somewhere. I don't know. It was like, 4 out of 5. But I didn't finish. I knew I wasn't remotely going to finish.
There were a bunch of us that didn't. We literally couldn't complete it. We were kind of complaining and bitching and moaning. To my credit, I always tell people, is part of the way that I process my pain when I'm working out, and it depends on who I'm hanging out with.
So me and a couple of my friends who do tend to complain a little bit more. We happen to all be in our 40s by the way. We're out there. We're doing this workout talking about how much we suck because we didn't finish. It was like an hour and a half of tire-flipping in the sun and running 500 metres every time the whistle blows and all this kind of stuff.
And it hit me as we were talking, I said, 'You know, look around. What's crazy is there are literally only 24 people here today. Out of all the thousands of people within driving distance of this class, in our city, in our surrounding community … We are the ones here doing it. Us. Just us. No one else.'
So you know what? Even 80% of a kick ass work out like that is pretty amazing. We’re in a ridiculously small percentile. I don't even know how many 0.0s you have to go to to get to us. But there we were, in that moment, talking about how much we sucked, when we were just a tiny handful of people who had accomplished something that no one else had.
So it's a Shift in Perspective, right?
Shift your spirits.
The skew, the thing we get wrong, it's always about Self-worth. You look at all the little things and the things you take for granted. You may do something that feels mundane to you, that looks like a super power from the outside to someone who can't do it, or doesn't know how, or doesn't have the aptitude for it.
I always think about people who cook. I think people who can cook are creative geniuses. And they're like, 'Dude, calm down. It's a bowl of pasta.'
So I want you to go over your day. Maybe it was yesterday. Pull back to 30,000 feet, and then start to zoom back in slowly, and really jot everything down. And track everything down from the moment you got up until you went to bed. Really notice - What are you really accomplishing every day? What are you not giving yourself credit for?
The thief of joy - Comparison. Comparisonitis, you might hear this called.
When I started jotting down notes, actually a few months ago, for this episode, because I had a series of interviews I wanted to do and I knew at some point I wanted to do this solo episode about all this stuff. We're doing all this astrological madness this summer and thought, 'Oh yeah, this'll be a good time to talk about all the eclipses, and how they were all hitting me and what I was suffering through and angsting about.'
So a couple of months ago, I'm writing notes for the show, pretty much everything that I've just talked to you about. I still didn't feel particularly prolific. I had the title of the show, Prolific AF, because that was the word Lori awarded me, and it represented something that I felt I didn't deserve. And honestly, as I was preparing to do this episode, I still didn't remotely feel like I earned that word, or could own it.
Last week I had an energy clearing. It was a really good session. There were a lot of breakthroughs for me about the self-worth issue that I was experiencing around my writing. And it was like the block in my writing was this glue that was holding me to something that wasn't working. And it was making it really impossible for me to put it down. Maybe I just needed to give myself some kind of permission through someone else.
But like with Kim asking me, 'How many words are you not counting that you deserve credit for?'
Amanda asked me, 'If you had three months to live, is this the book that you would keep writing for those three months?'
I immediately thought, 'Oh HELL NO. Absolutely not.'
She said, 'Well, do you know what the book that you would write is?'
And I immediately knew what it was. I immediately knew. It's something that I've had on my radar, in my creative pot simmering away in the background, in the moment she asked me that. And I thought, Okay, I've got three months to leave behind something that really matters. Something that I really want to write. And I knew exactly what it was.
It was weird. It's a weird story. And there are so many reasons why I kept it on the back-burner. Because everything in marketing and publishing said: Don't write this book.
But I gotta tell you about the numbers on the project.
So the book I was struggling to write all last year, I worked on for 11 months and I got about 50,000 words done on that book. 11 months to do 50,000.
Last week, in five days, I wrote 25,000 words. So if you break that down, the project that wasn't working probably took me six months to do 25,000 words. And I just did that in five days. FIVE DAYS. That's like 90, 100 pages if it's easier for you to conceptualize.
More significantly, you know what it is? It's that 5,000 word goal that Brandon was posting about that I compared myself to and felt like I was so completely incapable of accomplishing.
I was recently reunited with my best friend from the last 30 years. Alex. Alex is one of my greatest creative mentors, truly. I collaborated with him so much and I learned so much about the way he works that I've applied to the way that I work. And the way I identify myself as a creative person come from a lot of the strengths that I borrowed from him and gleaned over the course of our friendship.
And I was texting him about this whole phenomenon last week, after I'd written all these words. After they were just spilling out of me. Like I can't write them fast enough. I said, 'I think I’m having my Silent All These Years Moment.'
I think that book that I was writing this past year was my awful 'Y Kant Tori Read'. It was me in a bad bustier with heavy metal hair, trying to be something that I'm not.
So to re-answer those questions:
- What’s my light?
- For whom am I shining it?
I don't know. You guys are going to have to tell me if I'm shining it for you. Because I'm just going to shine it. And it's going to be a little weird. And it's unlike anything else that I've ever written, and I'm SO freaking excited about it.
And I can see how the feelings and the application of what's different for me now could allow me to produce a whole lot of weird little books. And maybe we'll just say, 'Eff it. Let's make a new genre just for me.' Maybe it'll never fit and I'll stop trying to make them fit. And it'll just be another book by Slade. In the same way that people love Tori Amos. You know, download her album the minute it drops. We don't even have to hear it. It's more Tori - we want another dose.
Making things for the weirdos. So I'm writing a book for the weirdos! Because I AM a weirdo. And I feel very passionately connected to this project and I just finally gave myself permission to work on it. And it's crazy how much easier it is to do the thing you've been telling yourself you're not supposed to do.
What am I doing differently?
You know what? I’m not counting words for fiction anymore — I don’t count them for non-fiction. There's too many of them. It's too much work. It’s too hard to do. It’s too time-consuming. It takes too long to check that spreadsheet and evaluate that. I'm just not doing that anymore.
Why would I do it for this one writing project when I don't do it for any of my other writing projects, which are all very relaxed and very successful and you guys experience them every week. You experience at least one little bit of my writing ability and maybe you get it in three or four different formats. If you follow me online, you get some more.
So I'm spouting it out over here. So I'm just folding the fiction in along with that and not treating it as something different. Why would I make it different? It only makes it not work. All I was doing was breaking it. The whole point of the word count thing is to be motivating. And it was DE-motivating me. So why would I do that to myself?
I’m just writing the project. I'm just getting it done. Same as I do with ALL the others.
Yesterday, I wrote for 5 hours straight and I was actually bummed that I had to stop.
Today, it’s killing me that I had to really stop to record this episode. I had to make myself. I had to set a timer - not to make myself write. To make myself STOP writing.
So today, you know what? But today, I really do FEEL prolific as fuck.
John Shaughnessy has solved the mystery of the ancient pyramids built all over the world. Amazing lost scientific knowledge on how the moon is a grandmother clock that regulates large cycles on Earth, like ice-ages and interglacial periods.
If you're interested in the civilizations of the ancient past, Shaughnessy proposes a revelatory, mind-blowing new theory...
MENTIONED ON THE SHOW Why the Pyramids Were "Really" Created by Brandon Ellis
GUEST LINKS - JOHN SHAUGHNESSY Pyramid Gravity Force 1 Video lecture
Pyramid Gravity Force: How the Earth's Pyramids Work by John Shaughnessy
There is Something About the Moon... by Wendy Salter and John Shaughnessy
HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses
Get an intuitive reading with Slade
Automatic Intuition
BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits Edit your pledge on Patreon
TRANSCRIPT John:
Well, I'm John Shaughnessy. I come from Massachusetts. I grew up in Massachusetts a few miles outside of Boston, downtown Boston in a small suburb.
I first got introduced into space, generally the... whatever you want to call it, the Cosmo. I got a part time job working on the weekends at the Museum of Science. And in the Museum of Science, they have a place called the Planetarium. I was taking tickets. I sold tickets to the Planetarium show and I just fell in love with it. I was doing special effects. I was involved with running around during the show and changing slides in the old Don Howard projectors.
I had to place myself Saturday, Sunday mornings, I'd get in there early. I had to place myself, this big giant sized projector, I could... After I knew what I was doing, I was click shutting the lights down and having my own light show and...
That lasted about two years but it sowed a seed in me.
Later on, like, I've always had, say, psychic anomalies that would just come in and I would know stuff before it happened or... to the point where I freaked out my friends I was hanging out with. You know, I just shrugged it off, made a joke out of it, because I didn't know what was actually happening.
Back in the day, you didn't have a class in middle school on how to deal with your psychic personality, you know what I mean?
Slade:
I still don't think they have that on the curriculum.
John:
Yeah! You know, there's reasons for it, you know? It scares the hell out of people. Well, the ones that are in control, anyhow.
That all being said, I joined the navy. It was my first geographical cure and you know, jumped into the service. I was on a small ship, the USS Miller and we did a couple of major cruises. I was at three 6-month deployments. One of them, it was like a small shakedown cruise just going up and down the eastern seaboard, say, from Halifax to Puerto Rico and maybe down to the Bermuda Triangle.
One particular day in the Bermuda Triangle, I had an event and that kind of shook me to the core.
You know, we're a mighty ship and it was a clear blue day. Not a cloud in the sky and the ocean was the same colour as the sky, really. You couldn't tell where the horizon began and end. We just lost power - this mighty ship with backup generators, batteries. Everything just went completely dark, still, quiet. There was no waves. Just amazing, and it was about 10 minutes of just sitting there.
The eerie thing is it wasn't a lot of talking. It was like we were just looking into each others' eyes, because we had little battery lights that lit up so you could catch people's faces. It was like a show made up of mimes, you know? We were just looking at each other. It was, What's going on? What's happening here? So it was pretty profound.
After we got the power back, generators finally kicked on. We got going and really, there was no real investigation that actually came down to the crew. I wasn't an Officer. I was just an enlisted man, so it kind of triggered something in me and I started chasing the paranormal, you know?
One of my favorite books back then, I forget the author, it was 'The Probability of the Impossible'. It was like, maybe hundreds of incidences where things just defied logic and science. So I just got hooked into that and the Bermuda Triangle. There was a lot of books back then of the Bermuda Triangle and von Däniken. It was Erich von Däniken's work I grabbed a lot. Chariots of the Gods. Started reading a lot.
I was always interested in the unknown, the mysteries. If somebody couldn't figure something out, I'd show up. But if everybody had it all figured out, it didn't interest me. So any puzzle or conundrum wasn't working right or something like that, I kind of enjoyed solving those problems. It's just how my brain worked and a lot of times, I would get intuitive...
I'm the type of guy who would get from A to C without going to B. A lot of areas in my mind.. I have the mind where I can put things together inside my brain. I don't have to draw things. I can just, you know, build up systems and troubleshoot without having to do the hard work on the bench, so to speak. I can walk it through and all that while working and kind of works like that.
So I got into the power industry. I'm retired right now. I got into generating electricity at the utility level. Gas turbines and boilers, steam turbines, so pretty large machines. 100,000 horsepower. I got into hydroelectric dam operations. I used to supervise, I was a supervisor in the big utilities, Con Edison Northeast Utilities, and retired now.
So that's good. So I can put more of my work into my real passion and that's these leftover enigmas that seem to be sprinkled all over the planet.
One particular time I got into... I was watching, getting into the pyramids. I touch topics and I just dig deep into them. I read all I could. I just get obsessed with it and I just hit a wall. I just hit a block. I was fascinated with gravity early on. I thought that was an awesome field to get into and try and unlock and basically get some kind of anti-gravity machines going.
I did a lot of experiments. I was able to manipulate the weight of an object in an apothecary scale with rotating mass.
As I got deeper and deeper into this, I would be reading Einstein's theory of special relativity, a lot of Tesla's work. Self-taught, really. Whatever I kind of got obsessed with, I just dug into it until I got to the bottom or got bored with it and couldn't get any further.
One particular day I came into the living room. The TV was on and Michio Kaku's a pretty famous physicist out of New York. He was cutting right to a commercial and he kind of just, the last words he said as I was doing the dead drop into the lazyboy was, 'We still don't know what these pyramids are doing!' Then it just went off to a commercial. I muted it like I usually do.
I just had an epiphany in my brain, just a thought going, I wonder what's on the other side of Giza? You know, the Giza Plateau pyramids. I've always had globes around me. If you came into my house, there's globes, atlases, maps and things of that nature. So I was pretty up on geography and, like I said, I got a little bit of training when I was 16 at the Museum of Science because I was obsessed with how the universe worked.
So I got up, I walked across the living room, looked at the globe. There's a floor-mount globe about a three feet high and I found Giza and I spun it 180 degrees. Same latitude. Not antipodal, latitude. My finger landed right on a Hawaiian island chain, right? So that's strange. Just my background in gravity and the tidal lock with the moon and things like that automatically clicked in subconsciously, like this, the only real connection here is gravity. It's such a large distance.
Therein lies the basis, the foundation of a theory that I've put out into the world with books, videos, talks, conferences and so on and so forth. So as time went on, next couple of weeks, my brain was just set on fire. I was driving down the road writing down notes. It's like you got this proverbial download of 30,000 words in about 5 minutes. And you're like back-engineering what you just took in kind of, type of thing.
Because it was pretty profound. You know, the hair on the back stands up, on your neck stands up. You get the shivers. You know you're on to something.
Long story short, I started saying, If Giza lines up with Hawaiian hot spots, what are the other pyramids doing? You know. So you gotta back out of my early theory that there's a connection between the two and say, Well if there's a connection between those two there's gotta be a connection to the other ones.
Lo and behold, every time I went to a large cluster of pyramids, a large pyramid, 180 degrees and on the same latitude, there would be a volcano that aligned with it. So the pyramid at sundown in Mexico aligned with Mount Sigiriya in Sri Lanka, which is an ancient volcano. It has a, if you can believe it, an alien-shaped, elongated, not alien, elogated shape skull for a magma plug, and it's got huge claws at the base of it and nobody knows where it came from, who built it or anything. They rival the size of the Spinx, so that's interesting.
Then I went over to the Chen pyramids, a large cluster of pyramids and that aligned with the... ironically, the Bermuda Island, which, unbeknownst to me at the time, it was made up of two ancient dormant super calderas that actually make up that island.
And then there's El Tigre. It lines up with the Andaman Islands. Down in Guatemala, those pyramids are twice as high as Giza. As I said, El Tigre, the other name escapes me but... La Dante. It was like, 'Okay, these pyramids are lining up with these volcanos, or this strip of volcanic islands, or another island with a volcano.'
So after I get up to 20, and then 30, and then 40, I said, 'Okay, alright. There's definitely a connection here.' And I'm like, at the time I didn't have it all figured out. I don't know if I have it all figured out now but I'm pretty deep into the theory.
I was like, 'Okay, what's driving this...'
My mind at the time, I just felt like gravity was static on the earth, that my concept of gravity was static gravity like, we have the gravitational field and it's x amount of meters per second, the force of it, and...
After writing the book, I wrote my book and then a lot of times you get as much information as you have, and you have to get it out of you. You have to put it in writing and so I put my first book out, Pyramid Gravity Force. During that process of putting that all together, if you look at the cover of my book, it's the earth, the moon, and a large pyramid. A large super-imposed pyramid on the planet earth and I got a little one-line diagram that goes from the pyramid down to the core and back out to the moon.
So that's where the gravitational energy was coming from that was actually connecting these spots together. Now, at this particular geographical time, geological time, sorry, geological time frame that we're in right now, the Nile Valley pyramids are aligned with the Hawaiian hot spot. That particular alignment is active right now. That in and of itself is, I call the Hawaiian hot spot the Magma Relief Valve of the planet in that particular location. It's the only constant erupting volcano because it's artificially controlled from the large pyramids on the other side of the planet.
So basically we spin through the gravitational field of the moon, and that is the perpetual motion. This is a perpetual motion energy machine and you get the feedback from that energy when you go down to the ocean and see the tides roll in and roll out. I mean, this is a massive energy connection between this heavenly body we call the moon.
So I said, 'Okay, it is the engine, the mechanics behind the system that basically lowers the gravitational field. When the pyramids of the Giza plateau spin through the moon's gravitational field, it lowers the gravitational field under the Hawaiian hotspot and allows that magma to dribble out.
Now, granted, different alignments out there in the solar system like we just went through, not to get off topic. I gotta watch out or we won't be coming back.
I mean, this is a real weird alignment anyway. I'll just touch this. Hopefully I can get back to where I was going.
Slade:
I'll bring you back in a minute. I'll bring you back.
John:
Well, I mean, this is where I've sold a minimum in conjunction with that, at the same time, we have all the planets on one side of the sun. You have this huge draw of gravitational pull collectively by all the planets, and that's why... Consequently, we have this very hot summer that we just went through. On top of when the sun is at a solar minimum, it actually puts out more radiation. It's actually hotter. Most people can probably identify.. when they walk outside, it feels like someone's jumping on your head.
Slade:
Yup.
John:
Pushing down on you. It's like someone's deflecting your field. It's like you're carrying a 50lb backpack around everywhere you go.
Slade:
It's making us feel a little crazy, right?
John:
Oh yeah, definitely. It's a lot of energy coming in and most people probably intuitively will just duck in from one shaded place to the next. From one air conditioning place to the next just to stay out of it.
Anyway, so that all being said, getting back to the moon and the pyramid here.
When we spin through the, the alignment of the pyramids and the Giza Plateau, they're set up in the Orion configuration, or dogleg. The smallest pyramid cuts into the moon's gravitational field. Because we spin in to the moon's gravitational field.
So what this does, this way they have it set up, so if you can visualize, the earth spins in to the moon's gravitational field, it sets up the Fibonacci vortex, okay? And then the other larger two pyramids, GP2 and GP1, follow suit and flow through it. Now that creates a huge gravitational vortex in that zone and it goes through the planet and lowers the gravitational field on the Hawaiian hot spot and allows the magma to freeflow .
That all being said, that's kind of the mechanics of what's going on with Hawaiian hot spot and the Giza Plateau pyramids.
Slade:
So it's controlling the volcanic forces at work in the earth, right? It's stabilizing something, right? Like what's the purpose here?
John:
When you step back, the god built the planets. If you go back and all the, you go into the ancient texts, it was built by higher minded beings, God, whatever you choose. And you put a planet together like Earth, you're gonna ask, What are my biggest challenges here?
One of the biggest challenges on earth is magma control, like controlling tectonic plate slips. Most of our volcanism, volcanic activity on the planet are, build up pressure, explode, kill everything for a hundred miles around and seal it back up again.
So that all being said, I mean you've got the Ring of Fire, which we have, you know, consistent volcanic activity. And right in the middle of the Ring of Fire is the relief valve of the Hawaiian hot spot. So it's actually, when we do go into these alignments I just alluded to this past summer, well since April. We went in, all the planets are on one side of the solar system. When that happens, going back just 120 years, you can go back thousands of years now, but just the last 120 years that actually happened SIX times. Every time that happened, we had a 3000% increase in volcanic activity on the planet.
So, stepping back, your inner solar system, your planets in the solar system and it's affected by outside gravitational influences by the planets. So you're the host planet for intelligent life. So you want to keep it calm. So what you do is, you build some pyramids and you create this relief valve using the gravitational force of the moon, which is the biggest player of gravity on the planet.
The other planets do increase and decrease that force, but nevertheless the moon is the biggest gravitational force. When these energies come into play on the planet, and create magma pressure, and especially in intergalacial pressure like right now we're in the warm up period, so you're in expansion, the poles are rising, the plates are getting squished together on the equatorial region because of heavier ocean.
So you get a lot of... we're going from pumpkin-shaped to spherical-shaped. So you're in a constant changing environment.
So this tool, this mechanism, this engineering, that's been on the planet for eons, I think it comes and goes. These things have been, probably have been rebuilt before. These pyramid systems, they've been rebuilt as the little ones underneath have been... As a technology comes back into the human consciousness and mainstream grabs it and says, 'Hey, these things are important. We'd better do something about this.'
They're actually playing a critical role in our survival. And that re-emphasizes the rebuild and the physics and everything else that comes along with this.
To sum that up, that's what this is. It's terraforming, and it's also, I hate to use the word geo-engineering, because it's got a bad rap lately, but it's geo-stabilizing. In essence, when you get control over... You saw that amount of magma come out of the Hawaiian hot spot just recently because the alignment of the planets and solar minimum piggyback. And that alignment we had a lot of magma...
If you didn't have the Hawaiian hot spot, the lower gravitational field with the pyramids and the Nile valley manipulating that and allow that magma just to flow out freely, and after that the Hawaiian hot spot just sealed up for a year or so. It'd have been a catastrophic explosion beyond biblical proportions. We could have been going into the Stone Age a lot sooner, so...
And what that particular location does, it lowers the lower mantle and upper mantle pressures and allows it to bleed out. And it prevents super calderas like Yellowstone Super Caldera from erupting. There's another giant super caldera in South America. So there's a reason behind the madness. All the magma. No pun intended.
But there's a reason behind magma control so that's what it's all about. That's kind of where I've pulled this all into some serious scientific theory. And what backs up my gravitational theory is the moon and the high tide. A lot of people aren't aware that on the moon side, you get the high tide. On the moonless side, 180 degrees opposed to it, you get a high tide also. I call that the moonless high tide. So you get the moonless high tide and a moon high tide.
Therein lies the evidence. Physical, repeatable, observable evidence that this is how gravity works on the planet.
Recently, just recently, like the last couple of weeks, Russian scientists released a study and got published, I think, by Itmo University, I forget the name of the university in Russia. They built the Giza GP1 to scale using the same material. And what they did was they submerged it in bath of, not a bath, they submerged it with electromagnetic energy. And what they were able to find was, the three chambers inside the pyramids, the king's chamber, the queen's chamber and the subterranean chamber actually were focal points, okay?
They were concentrating the energy inside these focal points.
And then they did the same thing with the non-ionizing radiation, we know it as radio waves, some form of radio wave. They got the same result. They published the result.
I put a, it's in my book, you know, the different language but the pyramids of subatomic particle lenses and they published the videos on YouTube in my name on pyramids being lenses. And I've also put down, in the chambers were the focal points. I've gone out and spoke about this.
I had a Russian interview on, it was like their version of the History channel. I got about 15 minutes. They were really great. They do a lot of great graphics, bring in my theories and about four years ago, three years ago I think it was, three or four years ago, so I got on Russian TV and I got to expel on that. Somebody must've been listening, 'Maybe this guy's got something going', they were actually pretty advanced in their search for understanding what the pyramids do and what it's all about.
So that all being said, that came back recently to me as, okay, proof positive, your theory's right in a lot of aspects. They're actually coming back with physical repeatable evidence that are being done in controlled labs.
So the next step is getting the industry to, the mainstream paranormal New agers to look at these alignments that are... There's a connection between the pyramids and volcanoes. These things are... You're not putting 6 million tons of stone together to run a couple of light bulbs, you know? It's just... It's not...
And I'm not putting down anybody that comes up with theories of what have you, because it's those theories that we all build our theories on. You know. Get higher and try to figure out what's going on.
Slade:
So what is this... What's coming up? What does this mean?
You talked about the fact that this is controlling the ice ages, right? There's going to be a pole swap at some point, correct?
John:
Well I'm probably the only one out there that's not in the pole-swap camp.
Slade:
Okay.
John:
But I'll tell you why.
Getting into my science there, and looking at the planet and knowing how the subatomic particles flow, just like the astrophysics did, theoretical physics community and all the what do you call it, neuron, electrons, galvatron, croutons, whatever. They all come in from the poles and they go out the equatorial region and they rotate back in, just like magnetic flux line, they call it. That's so famous. That image of the magnetic field on the planet that creates the Van Allen belts and so on and so forth.
But what these, I call them 'planet builders', what they've done is they've created a huge... The Antarctica continent is shaped like a hexagon, just like Jupiter and Saturn. In effect, it kind if ties in with the tetrahedron. So it's a tetrahedron. In my book, the tetrahedron, the shape of this particular continent, sets up to be a subatomic land. It's like a giant pyramid. It concentrates the inflow of subatomic particles in the southern hemisphere of the South pole.
Now if you look at the North pole, there's nothing really up there. It's water. Ice. There's no giant land, so...
What you have to visualize is that you're going to have a higher flow coming in to the North pole and a slower flow coming in to the South pole, because the continent is right there. Antarctica. So what that does is slows down the subatomic flow. And it also slows down, or blocks the flow, to singularity.
So you have a larger, say like a 70% of subatomic flow in the North and 30% in the South. But the flows are actually going at different velocities. So this is what locks in the magnetic field.
Slade:
So this is maintaining the magnetic field and it's also ultimately making the planet more habitable?
John:
Right.
Slade:
Without it, it'd be too chaotic and volcanic for us to even be here.
John:
Yeah, exactly. So it's all part of a huge system. Anywhere you go, any continent you go to.
That's why I'm a naysayer on the magnetic pole swap because the people that built this planet, that did the last rebuild terraforming, they're geniuses. They're not gonna... They don't want to come back and rebuild pyramids every year. They do it and they make it last. And they see the human consciousness when it needs to be and when we get to that level so we can understand the technology and re-utilize it and build it and re-build it. And things of that nature.
Slade:
Let's talk about that for a second.
So first of all, let me ask you: When you talk about the planet builders, are we talking Atlantis, Lemuria, Ancient Aliens kind of concept? Where do you come in in that whole thing? Do you think somebody came here and set this all up for us?
John:
Yes.
Slade:
Well tell me a little bit about that. Because you're obviously a very science-minded guy, but then you also, you do mention Edgar Cayce. And you talked about how you were intuitive, that you get these downloads, which was crazy because this is the first time you and I ever talked, but the people who listen to this show, that's something we talk about a lot.
So when you say it's coming into the consciousness, talk to me about, are you one of the people who's bringing this through currently? Do you see yourself as, okay, I'm meant to bring this information in and put it back into human consciousness?
John:
Yes. Yes, I feel with the trying to stay humble and keeping your ego in check is like... And yeah, I feel that my information is radical. It's new. It's not mine. This stuff was already here, you know? I'm just saying, 'Hey, I think this is the way these things work.' And this is the proof that I have. This is the physical evidence.
So yes. I think there's a, it's part of the human consciousness. We get seated at different ages in the human history. This last go from the ice age into the intergalacial period was, I feel that was when humanity peaks at the peak of the intergalacial period. And then we go into the ice age and we drop off and we forget everything. Only to come back and do it again the next intergalacial period.
Hopefully we won't be on the oil economy. We got sidetracked into this oil economy by some corrupt individuals. But anyways...
Slade:
So this is waves of rise and fall of human civilization, right?
John:
Right.
Slade:
Okay.
John:
Yeah. Like it's, I'll just make a point.
Michael Cremo, I don't know if you know. He's done a lot of work and he's got a lot of evidence that modern man has been down here for a minimum of half a million years. There's evidence all over the place that supports this. Obviously it's buried because it goes up against the narrative, whatever the narrative is, at any particular day, so...
It's just a rise and fall of humanity.
Now to come into this environment, you have to take the physical form of a human being. Whether it's just walk-ins or people just coming in to you who are what have you, or you're just a real mature soul and you've ascended to a real high level of consciousness. You've got the Buddha, Gandhi... You have a lot of very mature souls. Jesus Christ and going on and on and on. I'm just talking.
There's a lot of them. I'm not getting everybody obviously. I don't want to offend anybody. Just saying, there's... We get seated with these master, these masters, really, of human consciousness. And in the middle of that, we get people like Tesla, Einstein, Newton, Galileo, a lot of the Greek philosophers, you know. They come in and they pass a message along. They bring in ideas, technology, concepts, sciences, and things of that nature.
So it's just a re-circulation of the human consciousness on the planet. And it's like the old proverbial saying that your soul is here to have a human experience, not the other way around, you know? So...
And I think it's a tool for growth. For the spirit, if you believe in reincarnation. You know, you keep coming back and hopefully every time you come back, you utilize that space and time to ascend to a higher state of consciousness. Then maybe eventually you don't have to come back. You can just sit up on the moon and watch the big show.
Slade:
So in your theory, the information that you're accessing, is kind of held in the collective consciousness. Some people call it the Akashic Records. There's some other dimension where this knowledge exists and different ones of us tap into it and... I actually think a lot more people tap into it than we even give credit for.
You know, there are those Ascended Masters that are kind of like the rock stars. Then there's a bunch of us that do it a little bit here and there, right? Just humbly, you know, thinking of it that way.
John:
Yeah. It's a collective group. Yeah, I wouldn't be where I was at... Maybe I'm supporting somebody I don't know, and they're going to come up with something that's going to add to it and... You know, the Russian scientist's doing this research and then... The time spans are amazing. I mean, you're only down here for a short amount of time and all of a sudden, you're starting to get this wave of science, you know? And it's all coming together collectively from different parts of the world. And from places you'd never expect.
It's like, we're a very small pocket of humanity. People in this new age, 'truth seekers', they call them, I call us. We're not satisfied with the story. We're lifting up the curtain in the Wizard of Oz, going behind the curtain to see who's running the machine, you know?
So we're a small pocket. We do add to the human family. We do add a consciousness that helps, will help in the future, I think, to navigate us through changes that are coming. And that's what I think it's all about.
Slade:
Do you think there's something we're supposed to do in particular, like, do the pyramids need to be refurbished in some way? Do they need to be maintained or something like that?
John:
Right, I mean, my mind's always going on about that. Where are we at? What do we need to do? Are we at a critical stage right now?
Four years ago, they came up with there's three times the amount of water trapped in the transition zone between the upper and the middle mantle. And I'm thinking, so that ties in to the volcanism. That ties in to the magma control.
A lot of times, I just get overwhelmed. I have to jump on the couch and take a nap.
Slade:
Do you think we're in danger of breaking something?
John:
Yeah, I think we're going up fast.
The only thing I can say to sum up where I'm at, the science and everything. And I go back to the icicle sample. Thank god for the icicle samples. Because we can get some grounded, we can ground our thoughts on this particular source of time. It goes back a million some odd years, but...
They've done a great job showing intergalacial periods and ice ages. For the most part, it's like clockwork. It's like 104,000 ice age. 13,500 on average for the intergalacial period.
That all being said, all the ice is not going to melt in intergalacial period. If that ice is 1,000,000 years old, we just came out of the ice age 13,500 years ago, something big is... A lot of people are going to wait for the ice to melt. But my theory in my other book, 'There Is Something About the Moon' gets into the physics of what controls the ice age. And that is, as the ocean rises, the gravitation - this is common knowledge - the moon's gravitational field is shifting from the glaciers and the polar caps... The actual claw...
There's actually five images on the moon and that tells a whole story also but anyway... So transfer to the hard surface of the ice to the girth of the ocean. What that does is it, it in effect is causing the earth to tilt from 23.5 or 23.4 to, it's gonna go to 19.4. And Tiwanaku, the Gate of the Sun, the name escapes me now, but that's 4 degrees off. The Gate of the Sun, the sun is supposed to rise in the middle of it, and it will once we get back to the ice age tilt.
The ice age tilt goes from 23.5 to 19.4 degrees, and then the sun will rise up in that Gate in Tiwanaku. I think it's in Tiwanaku. But anyway, long story short, there's a highway in Mexico and they've been marking the summer solstice sun at high noon and it's been travelling 100 miles, feet, north.. south.. Let me back up a bit I'm stepping on my words here.
They're actually marking it and they're marking the tilt. They're acknowledging the tilt is changing. So we are going to a lower tilt. Now I mean, you gotta go like a thousand miles to get one degree. It's a pretty significant move. We don't think it is. You know, 23 to 19, you wouldn't think it'd be that big, but it's actually a significant drop, a significant movement. And the sun actually coming up over the Tropic of Cancer in the summer, what do you call it, solstice. The summer solstice in the southern hemisphere.
So what's going on is that the solstices are squeezing the Tropics, the Tropic of Cancer and Capricorn will move to 19. And what that does is lowers the light on the upper latitudes, both in the north and southern hemisphere. And essentially, we're going into ice-building mode, okay?
So this is the control mechanism that the moon also ties into. It's a multi-faceted engineering system that protects the planet. So if we're melting faster because of human activity, which we probably are because of the higher greenhouse gases that they surmise based on the previous ice core samples, we are way off the charts. We're going to accelerate the melting of the ice and it's going to hit what I call is the high water mark. And I think maybe [unintelligible] island out in the Pacific might be the high water mark island. It's only 5 feet high. I mean, 5 feet's a lot of water but it is...
As the water increases in volume on the earth, you're gonna get more of a larger degree tilt in a period of time. So instead of 100 feet a year, you could be getting a quarter mile. At some point, it's gonna really pick up pretty quick. And that'll launch us into the Ice Age.
But this is a good thing!
Because we're in an environment where you can't flat-line. Because there's so much energy, you know, the sun, the Milky Way galaxy, the planets... You're either going up or down. And that's just the nature of the beast that we're here. Hopefully we attain higher level of technology that operates on the natural energy that the planet makes besides burning stuff. We're in the burn-scorch technology.
Slade:
Yeah. It does seem like there's probably some better stuff we could be using.
My mind is spinning out as you're talking. I'm thinking about, you know, maybe I'm getting downloads too. But I'm seeing all these potential explanations for what we call astrology, I'm seeing how a lot of this ancient architecture that we have, the Henges and all this stuff that the Aztecs left behind. They really are some kind of calendars or... Like you were talking about, they're marking the stuff on a highway but that's like the really scratching on the chalkboard version of something that has been left behind for us, right?
John:
Mmhmm.
There's a book by Derek Cunningham. He surmised that the Sacsayhuamán, you know the saw-toothed walls up there, and I did the same thing. We're different theories but he's kind of, said there was a language being... Those shapes of blocks are actually a language.
Slade:
Ooo! Interesting!
John:
Again, it's like a lot of these little tiny pockets of information. These people come in, they do the download, and they're gone. You know? So it's up to the next generation to come in and pick up and keep putting this together. But I think it's all experimentation. That whole plateau up there is literally instrumentation of where we are in the ice age, or intergalacial period, and you can actually measure the degree of tilt on a lot of these obelisks.
The three big power centres: You've got the Vatican, Washington, and some other place that escapes my mind. It has these obelisks and they actually measure the tilt. That's what those giant obelisks do. You can keep an eye on and measure what's going on. There's a huge one in St. Peter's Square where I've been before.
That all being said, there's instrumentation all over the place. You got Stonehenge. You got the pyramids. You got the temples. The temples are, haven't completely been transcribed as a lot of... There's information on the moon. You know, the images on the moon also tell a story of where we are in the intergalacial period.
There's a famous stele with Akhenaten and Nefertiti. They're with their three children. They have a disc and they have the lines coming down. At the end of every one of those lines, is a saying, iconography of the moon, the claw, right? So you have this claw coming down. And you go through, this is actually a very short period in the span of time between the ages. This is actually just a very rare point in time on earth. The intergalacial periods are very short span of time.
A normal weather pattern is an ice age on the planet. 100,000 years building ice and you know, it's habitable, humanity survives it, and life does flourish, but obviously not, you know, a mile under a glacier, but...
That all being said, as far as I'm concerned, a lot of the hieroglyphs and steles and images in Egypt, because Egypt seems to have a huge amount of information on the moon and Mars and a few things. Past life on the planets. So essentially, that stele, that round circle in the middle is the moon, okay? And we rock back and forth. And you can read the moon as it comes up out of the ocean or out of the horizon with the naked eye. Any higher than that you have to get binoculars because you have a lensing effect when it comes up out of the ocean.
But that tells us where you are in a time on the... There's two clocks. You got the moon clock, which I bring in through with my research with co-author, researcher, Wendy Salter, we kind of put this whole thing together on what the moon is. So there's a way of reading where you are in the intergalacial period and the ice ages. Just to sum that up.
Now the other big clock is the wobble of the earth, where you know it's a 26,000 year old clock (approximately, it's a little less than that). That actually is the only time we really have besides the moon. Like, if we didn't have wobble, we wouldn't really have any real time clock. Because we're just in a Milky Way band just floating around the centre of the Milky Way galaxy and all the stars remained the same. If you didn't have that wobble, you wouldn't have the change, the zodiac houses where the sun rises up in the zodiac house. We're in Pisces right now, going into Aquarius.
So those are two giant clocks. So it's like the wobble was made on purpose, to give us time.
For me, every time I get into, you know, why is it like that? And it comes back with an answer. That's the answer I got for the wobble. It's not like a defect. It's not... Everything is perfect on this planet. The solar system is absolute perfection. The highest level of knowledge. Universal knowledge.
Slade:
Wow. Okay. Just to sum up for everyone because, again, we're just scratching the subject here, and possibly starting like, 10 different conversations that I could go on.
John:
You gotta take it easy on the listeners, you know?
Slade:
I'm going to link to all these things in the show notes for everyone. But just to break it down so everyone knows where to go to get more information. You've got a free YouTube video of a lecture that you gave. It's a pretty good length.
The main book that we're talking about here called 'Pyramid, Gravity, Force - How the Earth's Pyramids Work'. And then you co-authored with Wendy Salter, a book called 'There is Something About the Moon'.
What are you working on next?
John:
Just the last couple of weeks, I brought in some discoveries on what controls the solar minimum. The irony here is, the orbit of Jupiter is 11 years. The solar minimum is 11 years. It's like, Hello! Is anybody paying attention? Even though the earth rotates past Jupiter 11 times, it only comes in direct alignment between Jupiter and the sun, the last 11 years, right before the solar minimum, so it comes into direct alignment between the sun and Jupiter.
And so basically I put a paper out. I put a video out and I do try to get my stuff published. I put stuff out and I send it to the journals and hopefully someday they'll get it through. But the bottom line is that what a lot of people don't understand is Jupiter is not in orbit around the sun. It's like a binary orbit between these two bodies, like they actually wobble on each other's axises, or elliptic orbits, rather and they kind of bounce out and around each other.
So Jupiter's movement actually creates a corkscrew orbit of the sun and that also has an 11 year cycle on it also. But long story short, what happens when the earth gets in between Jupiter and go full circle, going back to the point I wanted to make, once the earth gets directly in line with Jupiter and the sun, it actually blocks the gravitational field and kind of filters it, it lowers it. That is the source of all the turbulence on the sun, the sun storms, the black spots, the giant magnetic storms. Once the earth comes in front of it, the sun just goes into this pure fusion environment. This fusion or fission. I always get the two mixed up. But anyway, it just goes into a ball and there's no spots at all for three or four months. Sometimes six months, it depends.
So it actually shuts down all that turbulence. Once the earth passes out, it's like two or three months later, the torque begins between these two giant heavenly bodies and you get the massive storms.
So that was a recent discovery that I've just brought in and... It's tough. I'm not in academia, so I'm outside. But I think that's where you do the most work. I don't have any constraints. Nobody's saying I can't say this and... I can say whatever I want. I don't have to..
Slade:
Right.
John:
So this is like what's good for me and I think it seeds the, whatever you call it, the mainstream world of academia. It resonates out and they'll grab it and, you know, put something together with it. I mean, we need to know these things. We really need to get on top of what effect these planets are having on our environment. Because we're in a critical stage where we're pretty critical with the heat. There's a lot of environments that are changing yearly, rapidly, very fast and...
Prior to that, I put a system together to forecast volcanic activity a little tighter with the alignments with planets and the moon and the moon's Metonic cycle. It's a huge influence on, say, volcanic eruption. So like right now, the prediction system we have right now, the USGS (United States Geological Survey), every country that has a volcano has some kind of prediction. Basically it's like, Okay if it's rumbling, they put a warning out to the local people, societies that are living at the foothills of these volcanoes.
Guatemala, we lost a lot of people just this past summer. They put the warnings out to them and the people there are saying, 'Well it's been rumbling the last 10 years. Nothing happened.'
I'm trying to get someone to help me build a software because all this information is available. What you can do is, you can go back the last time a volcano erupted and you can time stamp it and go back and say, Okay, get the time stamp on the last time it erupted. Go back to a solar simulator and find out where the positions of the planets were. And then also go back to the moon's Metonic cycle.
And what it is is, and this is what I've done is, I've gone back and looked at where that eruption was and I went back and saw they were in the same alignment that it was 400 years ago. I don't know the date off the top, just to make a point. And so, what this does is you can go to these people and say, 'Hey look. We know it's been rumbling the last 20 years. 100 years. Nothing's every happened, but the last time it did erupt, the planetary alignments were in this position and the moon was in this particular part of the Metonic cycle.'
So you have more concern. So you're coming in with a little bit more heavier warning than 'You should get out of here.'
Slade:
Yeah.
John:
It's tough for people to just pick up and take off. Their whole lives' are around these volcanoes. So that's kind of what I'm working on. I'm working on that type of thing.
I'm working in on tying in this new ocean system into my volcanic theory that said three times the ocean are locked up in this material called ringwoodite. It's a blue crystal-type looking thing but it actually has a high percentage of water in it. It's equivalent.. the numbers are wild. One of the numbers was three times the equivalent of the surface ocean volume is trapped in this lime.
Trying to figure out, is this something we need to be concerned with? It's a huge amount of water and my thing is, seeing that all the ice doesn't melt, we know that because, you know, going back a million years, we've had 10 ice ages with this ice that doesn't melt.
And then you have the Biblical flood stories from every ancient text. And I'm thinking, Does this water that's trapped in that section of the planet, is this something that somehow ruptures and bleeds out to the surface for 40 days and 40 nights and goes back down, you know?
Slade:
Yeah! Ohmygod.
John, this is all so truly truly fascinating. We're just scratching the surface here.
I want everyone to go and check you out so that they can see the amount of research and detail there is behind all these stories and theories. Tell us where we can go to find you online.
John:
I'm on Facebook under my name John Shaughnessy. My websites are http://www.pyramidgravityforce.com/ and http://www.tisatmoon.com which is abbreviation for There Is Something About the Moon. You can go there too and that'll link you up. Both my books you can get on Amazon, Kindle or Lulu books. Yeah you can get my emails also. I'm available. Contact links are on those two sites. I have 62 videos on YouTube and yeah, I'm pretty much out there.
Google 'John Shaughnessy'. Put 'Pyramid' or 'moon' behind it because there's a lot of John Shaughnessys. I guess we have a reputation of breeding like rabbits. There's thousands of them. So you want to get the right guy. Put pyramid and moon in and you'll get me.
Slade:
I'll be sure to put all those links that you just mentioned. Make them really easy for people just to click on.
John Shaughnessy. Thank you so much for taking some time this morning to talk to me.
John:
Alright. Really appreciate you having me on too, Slade. Thanks again. Maybe we'll do it again soon.
Tracey Dawn is an Intuitive Counselor and writer. She is passionate about guiding others in building a relationship with their inner self. She provides intuitive readings, online courses, meditations and blog posts to inspire you to live your best life. Through inner work, Tracey believes everyone has the capacity to develop their intuition, harness their personal power and discover their innate sense of happiness.
Tracey and I talk about tapping into the power of being calm, and creating communities around the concept of happiness.
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TRANSCRIPT Tracey:
I started studying psychology in high school and then followed it into university, got my degree there. Thought that's what I wanted to do was become a psychologist. But as I studied psychology in university, I just felt it wasn't for me. I wanted to do something more proactive and more pro-mental health, pro-wellness, rather than reactive.
Yeah, so I always knew that I was some sort of psychic or intuitive when I was a kid, and then growing up into being a teenager in my 20s, I was also a really strong empath, and that started to negatively affect me, because I didn't realize that I was an empath and didn't realize kind of what was happening to me as I was absorbing others emotions and problems and I started to wear it on my skin and it started to show as physical ailments on my skin and in my life.
So that was the big learning experience that I didn't really know what was happening at the time.
And then in my 20s, went to my local spiritual centre and took a set of meditation classes. That was really life changing for me because I learned how to meditate and learned how to set grounding, and how to create healthy, energetic boundaries. To really own my own energy and then have that healthy safe boundary from others and other harmful energies.
That was a really big turning point for me. I knew how to move forward and own my space. And then from that point on, I saw it as such a gift to be an empath.
And then I wanted to use my psychology from there and combine it with being an intuitive. And just learn to help people in that type of way.
Slade:
How did you recognize that you had gifts as an intuitive? What were some of the things that alerted you to having psychic abilities?
Tracey:
Yeah, it started when I was a kid. I used to hear things people were gonna say before they said it. The phone would ring and I would know who's calling before I picked up the phone. Of course, that was before Caller ID, which takes the fun out of it now. And then, I...
A big turning point for me, actually, was in my 20s. My dad passed away from a terminally ill... He was terminally ill and had a neurodegenerative disease and that was a very heart-wrenching process to go through that with him. But when he passed away, he stayed with me in spirit. And he came back to visit me and be with me for quite a long time.
I didn't really know what was happening. I could hear him laughing. I could hear him speaking to me the day after he passed away and I thought, Oh no, I'm losing my marbles here.
You know, this isn't good! As a psychology graduate, I thought, Oh no, I'm hearing voices. I'm gonna have to go to the psych ward and get assessed for that because when you hear voices and you're a psychology graduate, you know that's not a good thing.
So I was too afraid to tell anyone. I don't feel that anyone in my family is inclined towards that intuitive psychic lifestyle. So I just felt very alone and afraid to tell anyone. Afraid that I had really gone over the deep end in my grief.
As time progressed, yeah, it was hard. Time progressed and I still would hear him talking to me and it became so real. I knew it was real.
And so, on my own, I started to research, you know, what's happening. I went to the library and started reading all these books and then went online and was like, looking online trying to just find some support with other people that had had this type of experience.
I began communicating with my dad on a regular basis. As I did that, and became more and more aware of his presence around me, I also became more and more aware that there was a load of spirits around me. It wasn't just my dad. It was a whole crowd.
And I can remember that exact moment, opening my awareness to that and just being like, Ohmygosh so there's my dad but who are all these other beings around me? And I could feel how ecstatic and happy those beings were around me, that I was finally aware of their presence.
Slade:
Yeah!
Tracey:
So that was a pivotal moment for me. It was really exciting.
So again, I started, still not telling anyone, reading books and going online and I came across the term 'Spirit Guide', which I never heard before. Of course I've heard of angels, you know, in the past, but I thought angels were this kind of cherub-looking, very religious figure and I didn't think I believed in them, but all of a sudden, I'm surrounded by spirit guides and angels, so...
Anyways, I get on the computer. I'm trying to find, you know, look into spirit guides and what does that mean... came across your website, actually!
Slade:
Yay! It worked.
Tracey:
Yeah, that was about four years ago now and yeah... I was really really happy to find your site. It gave me so many answers of what the heck was happening to me. This is real and this is a good thing. It's actually a gift. It's nothing to hide or be ashamed or embarrassed about.
It's a gift and how to use that gift.
Slade:
That's such a cool... you know, that's such a cool moment for me to actually kind of shine a light on for a second. Because as you were telling that story about that moment that you became aware that, Oh wait a minute - there's a lot of something around me. You know, it's not just this one connection with my dad but there's actually some other kinds of spirits around me and they're ecstatic that I've noticed them.
When you were saying that, I flashed back to that moment for me, just for an instant, I was back in time and I remember that moment, that idea that, they were like, Oh yay! He can finally see that we're here, kind of thing. And how expectant they were for that to happen. So that took me back for a second and then I remember, everything that you've said about psychology and studying sort of the more clinical, academic route.
I had all of that conflict in myself as well. How can I be both these things? How can I be somebody who studies this and even takes it seriously, but also, I'm talking to people that aren't here. My whole impulse to put that out into the world was really... I think that at the time that I did it, I did it for myself, never thinking that anyone else would really run across it.
So to be here all this time later and to hear that you came along and found that, and that, there was so much comfort to be found in someone else saying, Yeah, this is happening to me too but I've decided it's okay. You know what I mean?
So I kind of want to say to everyone out there, who has whatever that is that they're hiding from everyone else that they think they're going to be judged over, I think sometimes you really do have to just be the person who's willing to raise your hand first so that other people can coalesce around you or whatever.
And that, if that's where you are in this moment, whatever it's about, just know that there's someone like what you're saying, who's gonna come along and see that and immediately be mired in it and connect with you.
It's the fastest way to not be alone in whatever it is that you're experiencing. Does that make sense?
Tracey:
Yeah, definitely. It's a big reason why I'm doing this - to help other people who are in that state, and let them know they're not alone. And help them to see that it's a gift.
Slade:
Yeah you talked about the empath thing. About how being an empath, and absorbing toxic energy, started to manifest as illness for you. I hear a lot of people talking about being an empath in a way that's almost like a victimhood kind of thing. I get it.
I'm not saying that if you feel victimized by that, or overwhelmed by that, if you're in a state in your life where you're like, Ohmygod, I just feel like I'm being bombarded, I get it. I think that's a natural progression of awareness in that area.
But what was it, really, that allowed you to stop feeling victimized by that and to feel more empowered by it?
Tracey:
It's definitely being aware of my own energy and what my energy feels like. So that I can then be aware when someone else's energy is in my space. And then having a daily routine of grounding myself, setting up my boundaries, doing what I need to take care of me, for the day, so that I go out into my life...
Because we tend to avoid people if you're an empath. I think a lot of empaths like to stay at home and are introverts. It's just easier that way. But you can't stay home all the time. YOu know, you gotta go to the grocery store, sometimes you have to go to the airport where it's really busy. Being on an airplane can be tough.
So you need to have those tools to go out into the world so that you can handle it appropriately. And in that way too, you can build on those gifts because it IS a gift. Once you can harness it, you can start to move forward and grow with it and use it and be grateful that you have it.
Slade:
Well, you and I were speaking right before we started recording about the climate in the world at large right now. We're speaking in July 2018, for those who are listening from the future. It's just really a disgruntled energy is the way that I described it to you, that I was absorbing. And I thought it was so timely because we set up this scheduled meeting so far in advance, not really knowing the week that I would've had, going into this conversation with you.
I love how things work out in a meaningful way time-wise, because you are someone that, your energy is very calm. It's something that I've always noticed about you. It's a way that you're very different from me. You have a stillness about you in your voice and it's very attractive and safe.
It's one of the reasons why I wanted to have you come on and have you talk about the work that you do. Because you do, sort of, represent something that I instinctively felt like we needed to hear and to think about.
So I was really drawn to this blog post that you wrote called 'Why Being Calm is a Superpower'. I struggle not to react to things in passion and anger. I'm always trying to dial myself down.
So tell me about this concept of being a calm superhero. Give me some advice.
Tracey:
Well I think everyone struggles with not reacting. Because I think that's the quickest and most natural way to react. It's a lot of what's happening around us, especially right now as you mentioned. It's just a really turbulent, chaotic time in our world unfortunately. It's really hard to watch the news and be aware of what's going on in the world.
So to be a calm superpower, it came to me. Superhero movies are everywhere right now. I don't know how many they made but they're just everywhere. And they're all so powerful and fast and strong and this and that, but what about being calm? I do believe that is a superpower. I think it's actually more difficult in such stressful times than to react.
So it does lean on a lot of meditation principles. But it's basically having that peaceful centre. So not immediately reacting to what's happening around you. It's choosing your reaction. So creating space between something that's happened and your reaction. Creating space in there, deliberately choosing how you want to react rather than instantly flying off the handle and reacting.
Because those reactions, they can also be physical reactions that you feel in your own body, right? So not only might you be putting out harmful energy into the world - you might also be harming your own body if you have high blood pressure, you've got a knot in your stomach, you clench your fists, you're sweating. The typical road rage. You picture someone on the crazy freeways that I visited a couple months ago in California. You've got that crazy road rage. That could also be harming your own body.
Slade:
Yeah. You know, it's interesting that you mention right there, I think that that's actually... I've gotten much better, you know, than I was, say, in my 20s. I'm almost a completely different person in my ability to not react immediately and to take my time and really process my thoughts.
For anyone who struggles with firing off a text or whatever it is, one of the things that I do is, I write it in a separate application first. I rehearse and edit. Anything that I send that I feel like might be provocative or... I'm just very, very careful. Go through and look for warning signs of, don't use 'always', don't use 'never', talk about your feelings as opposed to accusing the person of their actions and all this kind of basic 'don't blow people up' kind of tools that we...
They're pretty popular! Most of us have heard these lectures before.
Even still, one of the things that I noticed when I have one of those interactions where I'm like, Okay, I've got to respond to this but I need to do it in a way that's not gonna escalate and all that good stuff.
I had one of those happen recently with a family member and the thing that I noticed and immediately was so regretful of is how it made me feel, physically, for the rest of the day. You know what I mean? I was like, That really sucked. It was not worth it. To have that interaction at all.
I used to be able to go in and out of that energy and sort of blow it off and fling it away. You brought such a good point up about the fact that when you do that, you're actually sort of releasing it into the world, right? You're sort of polluting the world with your own negativity. You're just heaping on, right?
Tracey:
Yeah. And you're adding to it. They're setting the bar at a certain level and you're just meeting them there.
Slade:
I have to say that, I have this general rule about a radical lack of attention, which is, you know, the more someone is acting out, the less you respond to it. There's something very powerful about saying nothing.
What's interesting is, when you say nothing, and you choose to kind of come from a place of complete stillness, like I'm just going to be a statue here.
One of the things that I've noticed is, it doesn't disrupt your physical energy to just NOT react. You know what I mean? And, actually, it's a little shady because not reacting to people can actually make them more angry. So just be aware that you can be...
Don't do it from a place of passive-aggression. Do it from a place of, You know what? I don't want to feel that way.
The lesson for me in having that interaction was, you know what, it takes a toll on me. And there were so many things that I gave up for the rest of the day: my ability to concentrate, my ability to work productively.
I actually had to delay recording because things come through in your voice. You can hear it right now that I'm smiling when I'm speaking. You can hear that. I thought, I can't record, 'Hey! Welcome to my Show!' while I'm in this toxic cloud of... ugh!
I really do value the idea of being peaceful and being non-confrontational and trying to find the barrier. You talked about boundaries and I think that one of the things we're all struggling with right now is, when do you choose to act? Or, when do you choose say something or react to something, versus maybe being passive.
Do you have any thoughts about that?
Tracey:
Well I think it's important to take your time. I know I'm a big thinker, so if I'm in an altercation with someone, I like to step away and reassess my thoughts. It could also be the introvert in me.
So I also wanted to mention, because you said earlier there's a lot going on in our world right now and the energy is really intense and it's turbulent. So there's some spiritual leaders that say that you should only focus on what makes you feel good and only focus on what makes you feel joy. If something doesn't make you feel good, then to redirect your attention elsewhere.
I just want to say that that's something that I personally don't agree with. Because there's a lot going on in our world that needs positive change and I think it's really important that if something doesn't make us feel good, of course don't absorb it.
We know as empaths and highly sensitives - don't take it into your energy field. But be aware of it so that you can make it better. So that you can make it more beautiful. You can affect positive change. I watch the news personally. I like to know what's going on in the world even though some days it's really difficult. Some days I'll read it instead of watching it, because I find that a little easier on my system to read it.
I do think it's important to know what's going on because there's a lot going on right now. We need to help be the positive change.
Slade:
I agree. I really do.
I think that that's a hard thing to manage is the thought of, avoiding the shadow versus bringing light to the shadow. As professional intuitives, often advise other people who are getting into this work to be aware of the fact that people aren't bringing you their celebratory issues. They're bringing you their darkness. They're bringing you stuff that they are troubled by.
So you really do have to have an ability to go into the shadow. To be the archetype, in the Tarot it's the Hermit, I call it the Lantern-Bearer. Where you are the person who helps guide people back to the light. The light doesn't need your light as much as the shadow does.
I was having a discussion with someone about the concept of avoiding the news versus me, like yourself, I want to be aware of it. And I feel empowered by knowing what's going on. I would feel more in danger by being disconnected from it.
I said to her that the metaphor to me of the shadow that we're up against is that we all kind of have our little individual candle. And if you bring your candle in, you light it. If you vote, if you speak your mind, all those candles lit collectively DO drive away the darkness.
I know it's a really hard thing for people to decide on. Because sometimes, like you said, the most sensitive people in the world are often the ones that have the most walls up. At some point, they just decided, you know what, it's just simpler for me to just close it all down and just shut it all off.
And so I understand that. I'm very compassionate towards people who feel that way, but I do want to encourage people, like you said, find a way to refocus the energy, or to filter the energy, for instance, reading versus watching, I know for myself, I have certain news sources that I find more calm, less likely to have ads everywhere, less likely to be clickbait.
For me personally, NPR's website because it's strictly just the story, you know, not a lot of chaos going on visually. Once you identify you have those certain sites, what I'll do is, even if I see a ticker running across the screen of some sensational thing that's just happened, I'll go to NPR and search for it and see what their version of it is. Because I know it's going to be a little bit more the tone that I want.
I think that's one of the ways that you can mitigate that energy someway. Or you can have some intention around it, like, I want this story that I want on my own terms.
Tracey:
And my own time.
Slade:
And my own time.
Like, I don't want to deal with that right now because you have a baby and you might be doing something with your child and you're like, Ugh, I can't process both of those things simultaneously. You might want to come back later when you're able to sort of sit down and focus on it.
The other piece of advice that I've heard from people before is to picture things as if you're looking at them through a window. That's a little bit of a clairvoyant kind of exercise. But to meditate on something as if you're standing on a door, outside a door looking in to where it's happening. And if you picture there being a window between you and the thing, then it creates an energetic barrier, or filter, in some way.
It just kind of takes it away from you a little bit. It reminds your more primitive brain - this is not mine. I don't have to have a fight or flight response to this.
Tracey:
Yeah, and I would add that, we should really be looking at our whole life that way, as it's through a window, as like a movie playing out in front of us. We are in the background as the observer just to not get too attached to so many things in our life that's going on.
I think that's a great exercise.
Slade:
Your website is called CreateYourHappiness.com and the concept of happiness is kind of ephemeral. It's a hard thing to pin down maybe. I think it's one of those things that we all feel like, we know it when we see it. Or it's this thing that we're aiming towards but we've never really spent time defining it.
So I was wondering, how do YOU define happiness as a concept?
Tracey:
Happiness is such a trendy word right now. I feel like everyone's on the search, on the pursuit of happiness and there are multiple definitions of happiness and it means different things to different people. It is kind of hard to pin down.
How I look at it is, there are essentially two types of happiness. There's the short-lived happiness that you get when you accomplish something. Maybe you meet a new partner, you fall in love, you buy something, you get a new house. Those are things that are new and exciting. And then it kind of, there's a drop off at some point after.
The other type of happiness I believe is building a relationship with your inner self. Which is essentially your soul, your spirit, your Higher self. There's lots of different words for it, but that's the true part of you that existed before you were born, that will continue to exist after you die, and it's your real true self.
So everything I do, the meditations I've created on my website, the blog posts I create, everything is essentially about building a relationship with your inner self. I believe when you do that, you develop your intuition. You come in to your sense of personal power, which is so important. You start to learn how to control and harness your emotions. Everything really falls into place when you can tune in to that innate sense of happiness.
And have it with you at all times.
I provide some meditation exercises that help you drop right back into it so you can tune in to that long lasting happiness that is a constant. Part of living this lifetime, we know is guaranteed that there will be heartbreak, there will be heartache, there will be pain. That's just something that's gonna happen.
So I don't want to say that it is all roses and rainbows and everything's going to be happy all the time. Because that's not true. We need to learn through these difficult, challenging experiences. But then as a result of going through those, it's looking at the situation and, how can I create my life now that this has happened to me?
So going back on my example of my dad passing away, it was very life-changing for me because after that happened, I felt like a different person. Like a more refined version of who I am.
It's like I hit a fork in the road. Who I was before wasn't going to be continuing forward in the same way because I was a different person. I had a choice - what do I want to create? What do I want my life to look like now that I've had to go through these couple of very difficult years?
So it was like, one side of the fork was creating anger and bitterness and resentment. I'm sure some people create addiction. Those types of things can go down that side of the road.
And then on the other side of the road was choosing to make my life better because of what happened to me. I wanted to create something beautiful and to help other people go through what I went through. And create just a better life as a result of what I had to endure and as a result, happiness follows all of that, of course.
So it's creating that long-lasting happiness, creating the life that you want is really a big part of doing what I'm doing, why my website's called Create Your Happiness.
Slade:
You know, of course there's someone listening right there who feels the absolute opposite. There's someone who the back-in-time version of yourself and she is at the fork. And she feels terribly unhappy. She feels miserable. She's had the rug pulled out from under her. She's overwhelmed by all the energy coming at her.
What do you do first? What do you say to her? What advice can you give her... What do you do first to just kind of start to turn that around? Because it's gonna be a journey to get there, but if that's happening right in this moment, what's one thing, or a couple of things that she can do to change it?
Tracey:
Yeah, well first, you're not alone.
Everyone needs to go through something like this in their life. Unfortunately it's part of living and it doesn't make it feel any better in the moment. It still hurts so much. But you're not alone.
Second, to take care of YOU.
I'm such an advocate for self-care. I think it's so very important. Self-care looks different for different people. Maybe that's having a nice warm bath with candles. Or maybe it's reading a good book, having a glass of tea. It can be really anything but whatever makes you feel good in your own skin. Takes care of you.
I think that's really the first couple of steps to take and start there.
Slade:
So tell me about the happiness tribe.
Tracey:
Yes! I'm really excited about the happiness tribe growing. It's really great to see.
I've just been wanting to collect a group of people who are like-minded in this topic and who want to learn more about who they really are. They want to learn how to develop their intuition and control their emotions and harness their personal power and create this collective of people.
There's a sign-up on my website and I send out a weekly newsletter about all these topics we've been discussing. And then also this week, I've just created the private Facebook group which I'm really excited about.
So we've got a Happiness Tribe group on Facebook and our mantra is 'A rising tide lifts all boats.' Meaning, together, by sharing information and collaborating with each other, we elevate the collective, as well as ourselves.
So the Facebook group is really about collaboration. Sharing information about books that you've read, insights you've had, experiences you've had, asking questions of the group, and just sharing amongst each other and finding that sense of community. I'm really looking to build a community around this topic.
So, you mentioned, the girl who's going through the very difficult time right now, I would love if those types of people could join us in the Happiness Tribe and feel safe and feel like they're not alone. And that they can ask any questions.
Maybe someone's going through what I mentioned earlier, where all of a sudden, you're hearing all these spirits talking to you and you're feeling like you're crazy and you can't tell anyone. I'd hope those people, too, would join our group and feel safe in sharing and learning about what's happening and how to use it and see the gift within it.
Slade:
I think it's one of the true silver linings of social media. There's so many things in the news right now about how toxic social media is. But you're reminding us of something which, at its most basic, unhappiness is a sense of isolation. It's feeling alone in whatever it is you're experiencing.
I know, speaking to a lot of you who are emerging as intuitives, that, feeling like there aren't other people that you can talk about that with. Feeling like there's no one in your immediate world that you can confide in is one of the most negative parts of that experience. It's one of the most daunting things.
The cool thing about our technology is it does allow us to be with potentially thousands of other people who really do get us. And who really do want to answer your post about, What do I do? I feel like everything is sort of imploding on me, and I just need somebody to give me some advice.
People love to give advice. Believe it or not, even though we do this professionally, I've noticed it's an impulse in everyone to want to feel a sense of being able to save someone else from those emotions.
Like, by giving advice, by offering some words of encouragement, or whatever, and people are so timid about posting their pain, as opposed to the highlight-reel of how groovy their life is, you know?
If you've ever done it before, if you've ever put that post up that says, 'Hey, I'm really struggling with something. What do you guys think?' It's amazing how the impulse of people to flock to that and to weigh in on it.
So you've created something that is a very private, safe, environment where people are vetted to sort of come in and have those kind of conversations. Of course we will link to that in the show notes so everyone can find it.
Tracey:
Even though the world is such a crazy place right now. It's chaotic and everything else. Running parallel to that is amazing things we can do online and with social media. And that we can now gather and create a collective community online and find each other around the world and feel like we're not alone.
So I think it's interesting that those two things are running parallel at this time.
Slade:
So what do you hope to contribute to the greater conversation about personal development and spirituality and happiness. What do you hope is your legacy?
Tracey:
Okay. Well definitely that you can create your life. That's really where I got my title, Create Your Happiness, from. So I'm a big advocate of goal-setting. That's something else that I talk a lot about on my website is, 10-year goals.
So picture your life 10 years from now. And if you haven't done that, it's so important to picture exactly the life that you want to have and dream big! Picture what your family life will be like. Your house. Where you live. Your job. Go over every aspect and imagine the life that you want to have.
And then from there, trickle it back to where you are today.
I provide a bunch of tools on my website about how to work toward those goals. So, we can't control what happens to us. We can't control the circumstances in our life. But we can control how we react. And then choosing to create your life, create your circumstances that you can control. And move yourself towards the life of your dreams.
Because you have the power to do that.
We didn't just come here to allow everything to happen to us. You know? We came here to learn and to love and to explore and I just want to help people be more playful in their life. And to enjoy themselves more, and to see that we came here to have fun. We came here to enjoy ourselves.
It doesn't need to be so serious and stressful, even though there are serious and stressful things going on around us.
Slade:
So you have a free meditation on your website that I imagine is one of these tools. Tell us about the free meditation.
Tracey:
Yes so I created a 10-minute guided visualization meditation. For those who aren't familiar with the term 'guided visualization', basically it just means it's an audio clip of my voice. I'm walking you through exactly what to do, exactly what to think about. And it's using your imagination to do certain tools and exercises, like create a grounding and set an intention.
Versus, I feel like there's a stereotype of meditation that, you know, you sit in a comfortable cross-legged position and you try to not have any thoughts. I think to a lot of people, that's quite intimidating because it is so very difficult to get our mind to stop thinking thoughts. It's near impossible to do that.
This is a very friendly beginner type meditation and I walk you through everything. And then at the end, I walk you through how to set an intention for your day. So ideally it would be great if you use this meditation on a daily basis.
I ask that people bookmark the page and keep it on their phone or computer so that they can access it all the time, and create an affirmation and intention. So just thinking about, for each day, what do you want to create? Do you want to create that you are grateful today for everything that you have? Or do you want to create that 'I am successful' or 'I have loving friends and family'.
The possibilities are endless. And you can really check in with your goals to create those intentions. Or I can just fly off the handle for the day of what you want to experience that day. But that begins to start the process of creating your life and creating your happiness. Moving with intention. Moving into a place of creating your day as you would like to experience it.
Slade:
That sounds awesome. And 10 minutes sounds like a small investment, especially for somebody that is struggling, you know?
Tracey, I always love your energy when I speak with you. It's been a true pleasure to capture our conversation, now that we can share with everyone else. So one more time, just tell everyone where they can go to find you online.
Tracey:
Yeah. It's www.createyourhappines.com is my website. I hope to see everyone there!
Slade:
That was great, Tracey. Thank you for coming on the show.
Tracey:
Thanks so much for having me.
Melissa Bird, PhD, MSW is a passionate feminist whose education in social work has led to a career advocating for children, women, and their families. She is a fierce believer in social justice advocacy and preparing women for leadership roles in politics. As a writer, professor and fiery public speaker, Dr. Bird creates the genesis for a new brand of leadership. Her words awaken revolutionaries, trailblazers and powerful innovators in the quest for justice. When she’s not building her public speaking Empire, she can be found reading trashy novels, drinking fine whiskey, playing mom to three delicious humans, and loving her punk rock scientist James Thomas Kelly.
She’s a fierce believer in social justice advocacy and preparing women for leadership roles in politics. For women who want to be heard. Women who want their families to be respected. Women who believe they can make a difference in their communities and create lasting change, Dr. Bird is creating the genesis for a new brand of leadership she calls The Graceful Revolution.
MENTIONED ON THE SHOW Eagle Forum
Emerge America
Netroots Nation
GUEST LINKS - Dr. Melissa Bird birdgirlindustries.com
5 Can’t Miss Steps to Finding Your Voice free
SAGE Guide to Social Work Careers by Melissa Bird, PhD, MSW
HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses
Get an intuitive reading with Slade
Automatic Intuition
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TRANSCRIPT Melissa:
Well, I used to say that I was like a political badass. I'm more of a hellraiser than a trailblazer, and I help people tap into their passion to engage in advocacy in their communities. And so, for years, I was teaching at a college level and I worked as a lobbyist for Planned Parenthood in Utah and I was really involved in politics in Utah.
I've kind of taken all of those years of working on the ground and in the Capitol, both at the state level and at the national level, and I decided that it's time to build the Bird girl Army, and really bring people to the place where they are super tapped-in to their passion and their jam and what lights them on fire so that they can go out and do the thing that lights them up.
That's become so apparently critical to me right now in 2018 because we are getting inundated constantly with SHIT, and it's coming down on us all the time. And so, every morning you wake up and you have 500 things on your phone talking about how the nation is exploding and people are freaking out. And they don't know what to do.
So what I do is, I give them the tools to go out and do the thing so they can get past the paralysis and into intentional action. Because it's going to take intentional action at a COMMUNITY level, not at a national level, at a community level, to build this back up. So that we can feel like we're not stuck not making a difference in our communities.
And so I've taken all these years of being a lobbyist, like, on the front lines and making changes in policy and politics and taking it to this really passionate, lit up, on fire... I had someone say that I was an igniter and I just light everyone on fire, which could be really dangerous.
That's a huge responsibility and really taking it to the next level so that people can have the tools to engage in action in their communities and engage in dialogue with people who are holding elected office at a local level, so at city county and state level.
Because, I tell this to my students all the time when I'm teaching in a classroom, but basically, the federal government is a wash at this point. You're not going to make a huge gigantic difference at a federal level, and I don't know if that's good or bad, but that's where we're at.
But now we have this huge opportunity to directly impact our local leaders, no matter what their party affiliation is.
We have stories to tell and we have... There are ways that these policies directly impact our lives and it is OUR time to be telling those stories to people. There's no bigger time to be doing that, so I teach people how to have the tools to scream their passionate dreams from the mountaintop and go out and do that thing.
Slade:
Wow.
You know what? Let's get into a big topic here.
I'm going to ask you a big old loaded controversial question. I believe in synchronicity and timing, and there is definitely a big beautiful Divine timing for me personally with you being here in this moment talking to me today. It's very significant because we've been talking about spirituality and politics in the Automatic Intuition community, the group of people that I mentor privately.
We've been talking about it this week for the first time, very civilly, I must say, so I'm very proud, but I think one of the reasons why we haven't touched it in so long is because it's such a hot potato kind of situation. But somebody went there in a really good way, in a kind of adjacent issue, and so... there is a big dissension among spiritual practitioners, right?
Some of us believe that it's really important to disconnect from the news in order to preserve your psychic hygiene and to protect your energy and your vibration, and that you just need to tune it all out.
And then some of us believe that part of being conscious for us is being plugged in and observant of all that stuff, and aware of the bad and the good.
So what are your thoughts about being spiritually conscious and politically conscious?
Dr. Bird:
So the first thing I want to say is, I have been wanting to email you for like, months and months about coming on the show to talk about this, and it was only in the last couple of weeks that I was like, You HAVE to do this right now.
So I was like, What?
And I was nervous! I was like, What am I going to say to Slade?? What if he thinks I'm this whackadoodle noodle, like, We're gonna talk about how to use your intuition to engage in politics!
And I was like, That's exactly what you're gonna say. You're gonna type it out. It's gonna be fine. He's not going to reject you and everything's going to be magic.
And so...
Slade:
Which it was.
Dr. Bird:
Which it was.
So the fact that you just barely had this conversation while I was like, I really need to talk to Slade, was really... You know, Divine intervention and all the magic.
So, I have to say that because I'm really excited to be having this conversation about using your intuition to engage in social justice work and politics. I call it 'social justice work' because no matter where you fall on the political spectrum, it doesn't matter where you're at because everything that is happening has to do with how our society is going to thrive or just survive, moving forward, because of all of the policies that are being enacted at a federal level that are going to trickle down to the local level.
I can honestly say that, I feel that need to be completely disconnected from the toxicity of the media. And I also feel the need to be completely inundated with what's happening currently in our nation and in our world.
The way that I have sort of pulled that apart and teased that apart is that, I choose, and I'm really active on social media, I LOVE Twitter, I LOVE Facebook, I love Instagram. I love being online and connecting with other people in that way.
But I have figured out how to use my intuition to lead me into places where I am going to be connecting with people who aren't just like me, but who appreciate my differences of opinion.
And this is, I think, where people are getting stuck and later on today, for example, I do Facebook live on Mondays and Fridays, I have Monday Mayhem and Fuck Shit Up Friday. And at noon my time, Pacific time, and I have been having conversations with my darling friend Amy Wolf, who I consider a dear friend who's completely the polar opposite of me politically. She's a conservative, Christian Methodist in a really small conservative town in Oregon.
But she and I have connected on this level that is just unbelievable. And we have people from my friends and her friends and people in the community who keep sending us messages thanking us for having honest conversations about politics, about fundamentalism, about abortion, about really tough conversations about justice and social justice and what that means to each of us.
And we do it in a way that is so respectful that you can't not get something out of that.
You know, and I come from a conservative place - I was born and raised in Utah. And what I learned when I was walking the hills of that Capitol is, elected officials just put their pants on one leg at a time. We're all people. We all get up in the morning and think, How am I going to make a difference in my world today? What do I want to do to really make a difference in my world today?
And it may be the difference is, My god, I'm going to vacuum my house, and that's an accomplishment. It may be that you're going to write a bill and pass it into law like I did. Oh god, it's been 15 years since I wrote that bill. I'll talk about that in a second.
This idea that we have to be divisive about politics is a new idea. That is something that was created out of, I would say, 1980s during the Reagan administration. That was when the divisiveness of politics came along. Were there separation of parties? Totally. Were there Democrats and Republicans fighting against each other for power? Absolutely. For years and years and years.
But there was a discourse and a nuance to politics that has been lost as, I would say, really starting in the 80s and it got worse during the Clinton administration and now it's just all gone to shit.
And I believe that we have so much power to make a difference.
And I know it because I've done it. And I'm not saying - I don't do any of my work because I'm like, up on some high horse pedestal. I'm probably on a soapbox, let's be fucking real here. I love my soapbox. My husband, he even bought me a soapbox that says 'Fairy Soap' on it from the 1920s.
Slade:
I love that.
Dr. Bird:
So that I can have an... I love my fairy soapbox. And it says 'Fairy' so clearly. That makes me even happier. And so...
I can get on my soapbox all day but when I was getting my Masters degree in social work in 2003, I did the very first research in Utah about homeless LGBTQ youth so NOBODY had been, this was, you know, 2002, 2003.
Nobody was talking about homeless kids. Nobody was talking about homeless queer kids, and here I am, in Utah, trying to figure out how many of our youth identifies LGBTQ and I did this research for my Masters research class and Utah was no different so at the time, 35% of youth identified as LGBTQ, and I was like, We have to do something.
Our shelter law was so bad it said that you couldn't shelter a youth for longer than eight hours without parental consent or emancipation. And I knew that our kids, we didn't have an emancipation bill because I worked in child welfare, and I knew we didn't have an emancipation bill and I was like, Ohmygod, I've got to write one!
I sat at my dining room table listening to Ani DiFranco and Metallica and I took the 26 lines from 26 other states and wrote them out line by line and hashed out a lot... I picked the lines that I thought would work in Utah because Utah is a more conservative state and I knew that the parents' rights' folks were going to lose their minds about it.
And so, I wrote this law, and I threw everything in it and I called the woman who was an elected official and I said, Hey Roz, I think I just wrote a bill and I'm wondering if you'd sponsor it.
And she said, What's it about?
I said, Homeless youth.
And she was like, Great!
And I emailed it to her and she called me back like five minutes later. She goes, Missy Bird, you just wrote a law! People don't do that!
And I was like, Oh, they don't?
She's like, No, they come to you with an idea. We take it to leg. research, and then they figure it all out.
Oh! I wrote a law!
It's the only thing, Slade, I've given birth to for real. That bill is my baby.
I learned how to lobby. I taught myself how to lobby. I taught myself how to advocate, and I got it passed into law two years later, and that bill has helped hundreds of homeless youth get emancipated.
I learned how to stay away from talking about LGBTQ kids with certain people but I knew that that was part of the story for other people who were in power. I learned how to talk about polygamist kids that were being kicked out of their homes, as a way to sort of leverage this conversation up to a different space.
And I just listened to my gut the whole entire time.
So every single thing I do when I'm talking, whether it's a person in the community or an elected official is, I use my gut instinct to have conversations about what's happening in our communities. I have followed my intuition throughout my entire career as an advocate.
And so, I think as you're having this broader political conversation in your group, it's not just about politics the way we see it on Fox news and MSNBC. It's about, How do the things that are happening in our neighbourhoods and in our cities and in our counties and in our states directly impact what's happening, our ability to access safe and clean water, our ability to access safe and clean food, our ability to stay in the homes that we're building for ourselves and for the people around us and our families and our friends.
That's what policy is. That's what politics is.
Politics isn't this bullshit Mitch McConnell flipping Paul Ryan ridiculousness, Dianne Feinstein and all this national distraction. The national distraction keeps us from looking in our own backyards and seeing what we can do to help the little old lady who lives next door who might be having a hard time getting her newspaper every damn day.
That's politics!
Slade:
Yeah, what do you say to that person, because you must meet these people, right? Who say, I'm really spiritual and I just don't want to engage in politics, it's just all too negative.
What do you say to that person because, we have to believe, first of all, let's be compassionate. We understand why they're wanting to tune out and protect themselves. I mean, it's a given. I get it.
But there has to be something deep within them that responds to what you just said, that has some feeling of, like, Ohmygod I've got to do something.
But then they also feel overwhelmed and helpless.
So when you are confronted with that, I can't do politics because I'm too spiritual, what do you say to light that person up?
Dr. Bird:
I ask them what matters to them.
I say, You know what? I get it. You don't want to... I don't like politics as usual either. I get it. I know that your conviction says that you just want to stay the hell out of this because it's just too much. But what is one thing you can do, that you feel like you can do from your spiritual centre, to make an impact potentially?
Are you willing to tell your story to one of your local elected officials?
Are you willing to help support a candidate at a local level who resonates with you either by donating money or your time?
Is there something you can do to raise the vibration of the people we actually have serving in office that you would be comfortable with?
I understand you think your vote doesn't matter. But I'm going to tell you right now, at a local level, your vote matters SO... I mean, I get that federal politics has completely shut down a lot of people from wanting to be able to engage in this process of voting. But we are the only democratic nation in the world where a majority of the people who live here don't vote.
Slade:
Yeah, that's insane.
Dr. Bird:
I mean, in every other democracy in the world, the majority of people who are of voting age VOTE! And we don't. And it's...
And I actually was in a conversation about this in a Twitter group that I'm in. They have some research that says the millennials are like, I'm not voting.
So people are trying to figure out how to get the millennials to vote. And my response was, their parents don't take them to the polls because their parents don't vote. My kids have been going to the polls since they were little wee bits, right?
They go with us every November. It doesn't matter if it's a city election or a state election or a federal election. Every November, we vote. And our kids go with us, so our kids just know that that Tuesday in November, that's what you do. They've never NOT voted with us.
And I think that part of the problem is that millennials are like, Well I'm not going to vote because my parents don't vote. Why the hell would I vote?
And I feel like, from a spiritual space, if voting is your thing that you're like, 'Screw it, I don't care', find some other way to tap into your centre and your intuition and what you want in the world, and make THAT the thing.
If you don't want to vote, fine. I'm not gonna force you to vote. Although I am gonna, I might have a little judgy voice inside of me that's like, For reals?
Do SOMETHING.
I don't care what it is. But do something to elevate the vibration of making a change in our communities, because this is why we are where we are at in 2018.
Slade:
Mmm... It's so funny because, I'm going to throw a bumper sticker at you, but you are going to remember it: Think global, act local.
Remember that??
Dr. Bird:
I know!!!
Slade:
Yeah, I mean, that's really what you're saying. That's the answer.
And you know something I've noticed too is, I was thinking about that the other day, I was thinking about the fact that, my daddy took me to vote for every Republican he could. And I ended up with such a completely different political opinion than him, but I do remember being taken to vote and thinking it was really cool to go behind the curtain.
And it used to be all very like the Wizard of Oz...
Dr. Bird:
Yes!
Slade:
You know, it was that big machine... And so I thought it was amazing and I thought it was cool. And I can remember in elementary school - ELEMENTARY SCHOOL - we had mock elections.
Dr. Bird:
YES!!!
Slade:
I remember when it was like, you know, the Jimmy Carter Gerald Ford election in 2nd grade or whatever.
Dr. Bird:
Nice!
Slade:
We were taught to do that, and we were taught that it was this sort of holy thing that you did, you know?
Dr. Bird:
And you just said it, Slade. It is a HOLY thing.
Slade:
Yeah.
Dr. Bird:
The power of that vote is given to us as a GIFT. It is a gift just like our spiritual intuition. It is a gift just like our ability to breathe air and drink water.
It is a GODDAMN GIFT to be able to vote in this country. It is an HONOUR and a PRIVILEGE to be able to vote for the people who represent you in office.
It is NOT some bullshit strong-arm tactic that we have been led to believe it is by very conservative and very liberal groups of humans.
And I will say this flat out until the day I die - this extremist bullshit that we have going on on the right and the left, there are so many of us that are in the middle, floundering, going, What the HELL do I do next?
THAT'S why I do the work that I do. Because especially for women, but I think also for the LGBTQ community, and for minorities, and people of colour, there are... AND I will say, I will put Republican women in this camp as well. There are a shit-ton of us sitting right in the middle, going, What the hell do I do?
Nothing. I got nothing.
I don't know... The parties are completely out of control. The party platforms on both sides of the aisle are becoming ridiculous. Extremists. A line-in-the-sand views. It's not real! And we know this as spiritual practitioners, right? Like, we know that this extremist, hard-line, no nuance, black or white, there is nothing else, that's bullshit! That's not how it works!
There is not a hard and fast way to do politics. And there is not a hard and fast rule to doing this.
Trusting your gut to engage in social action is the way that we can be the leaders and shift this dynamic. That's the way. There's a whole ton of us in the middle.
I will say, I don't... I cross party vote all the time. Especially at a local election level because I like fiscal conservancy. I've seen what happens when you've got a bunch of fiscally liberal people running child welfare. It doesn't work very well. You've got to find moderation in the middle.
Slade:
Well you know what's interesting too at the local level, my mom was asking me. She said, When you go and vote in local elections, you can't even really tell from the ballots, at least the way it's presented to us, locally, who is a Republican or Democrat. It's not necessary...
Dr. Bird:
That's because they're all non-partisan. They're all non-partisan.
Slade:
Right. It's not spelled out, and you know what? When I vote locally, a lot of the times I'm voting for people that I personally know. I'm voting for a doctor that I know that's running for office. I'm voting for someone that I've met in a cafe that I always talk to. You know what I mean?
Dr. Bird:
Yeah!
Slade:
They're actual real people.
And I even notice when I went to vote this week, there was this man out there canvassing for someone who, honestly, I would never vote for in a million years. But he engaged me in conversation about something completely random, and we were kind of just standing there having a conversation on the sidewalk and it wasn't really about politics at all.
But the whole time, I was thinking, Oh, I'm so glad he's standing here because my computer's in my car.
And I knew that because I parked next to him, even though politically he was my enemy, I knew that he'd protect my shit when I went inside. Nobody's gonna mess with my car with this dude standing here. Like, he's just looking to bust somebody, you know?
That whole experience and the conversation about the way that the parties are kind of not identified with at these really, really local elections, I was very much in the space of, a lot of that shit just falls away when you're dealing with people who actually live down the street from you. When you're dealing with people that you actually look in the face and have conversations with.
It does matter less. And everyone hates "a group of people" except for their cousin that is one. Except for their hairdresser that is one.
Dr. Bird:
Umhmm.
Slade:
Those people they love, and that's why it's so important to kind of really authentically represent who you are in the world and just... go out and be friends with everyone. And be a nice person. And be yourself.
Because, to me, that IS a form of political activism, you know what I mean?
Dr. Bird:
Yes, exactly!
And it's not just about voting. Voting is a piece of this democracy, but it's not the entire democracy.
It's also about us being really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really invested in getting out of the echo-chamber of our politics.
So part of what happens is we tend to surround ourselves with like-minded individuals who think exactly like we do. That's the echo-chamber. We do it on Facebook, we do it on Twitter. We do it... We get entrenched in these spaces where we are just listening to ourselves talk over and over again because it's reflected in the people that we're surrounded with.
The beauty of what you're talking about, about the dialogue that you're having in that group, is that you're not in an echo-chamber. Because there's people from all over that have differences of opinion. This is why I will always maintain this relationship with Amy in a respectful, intentional, delicious, glorious, graceful manner.
Because I love connecting with people who aren't just like me. I love that!
And I think, to keep ourselves safe, especially now, because of all of the threats that are coming at us, we have become even more entrenched in the echo-chamber and we're afraid to expand that conversation outside the people that think and behave just like us.
And I think it is to our detriment.
Because if I, I as this queer, you know, at the time I was married to woman at the Capitol and I was lobbying for Planned Parenthood, so here I am, this lesbian-identified, platinum blonde punk rock girl with hair like Pink, at the Utah State Capitol wearing high heels and fishnet and miniskirts, you know, like my inner Erin Brockovich, going in to the Capitol, talking about Planned Parenthood and sex...
And I got 6 laws passed!
Now if I can do that at the Utah State Capitol, don't tell me y'all can't make a difference somewhere else. Because that's where the rubber meets the road right there. You can go in...
And by the way, those state houses, those are our houses. City Halls, the County Council, the State Capitol, we pay for that with our tax dollars. You wouldn't not walk into the front door of your own home. Don't be afraid to walk in to the front door of a house where policy is being made. Because you paid for that.
That's ours! It's just like paying rent. Those are our houses. We own them. And we have to remind elected officials that those are our places too. They're public. They're not walled off from the public.
It's different at the federal level. It's not - this is where I think the beauty of being involved and looking around our neighbourhoods and the spaces that we're in every single day, where we go to the grocery store, where our kids go to school, where the neighbours kids go to school, where we connect and interact at a very local level is where we should be getting involved politically.
Slade:
Well, and we, just to touch on a little bit, like your relationship with your friend who's conservative, we need ALLYS. When you were talking about safety, you know, if some jumped-up group is coming after your ass, you need somebody on their side of the fence to calm their ass down.
Dr. Bird:
Mmhmm!
Slade:
You need to be able to call into and talk within their bubble. You need a connection in there.
Dr. Bird:
Yes!
Slade:
Because that's how... that's where their consciousness, like if you want them to be conscious of who you are, they have to know you. And somebody within there needs to identify with you and connect with you as an individual person. Because when you think about people as human beings, you treat them differently.
Dr. Bird:
That is exactly right. That is exactly right.
And you know, when I left Utah to go get my Ph.D in California. When I left Utah, they roasted me at an Irish pub in Salt Lake City and Gayle Ruzicka, who was the head of the Eagle Forum, which, Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum, right? Super conservative group. Gayle Ruzicka came to my roast and roasted me and pinned me with an Eagle Forum pin, because she was like, You know what? I don't agree with you on almost every single thing, but I honour you and I respect you and I am going to miss debating you on that hill.
Slade:
Awesome.
Dr. Bird:
And for awhile, she would call me and say to me, Missy, I really miss you. I miss having that debate with you because it was always intentional and respectful.
And this goes back to me using my intuition to talk to people who have absolutely not one damn thing in common with me. And it was scary.
This is the other thing. I think people are just so fucking afraid to say the wrong thing, especially now. Because, you know, if we identify as Liberal Progressives, if we don't say the exact politically correct thing, we get ANNIHILATED by the Liberals. And if we identify with the Conservative Republican ideas, we get lambasted because we're not conservative ENOUGH. We're not hateful enough against the gays or whatever that is.
And I think that that is what really... Like, stepping through my fear and being like, Okay, well I've got to get this bill passed because I want to help the homeless kids.
And that's the other thing about tapping into your passion and tapping into your jam, and figuring out what lights you on fire. Because if you can tap in to that one thing, I don't care if it's the environment, or housing, or homelessness, or food or being pro-choice or anti-choice.
Whatever your thing, I don't care what your thing is. I want you so tapped in to it that you know what lights you on fire so that you can advocate for that thing, because I actually think it's going to bring us more towards the middle and it will take people out of these extreme spaces and bring them into this space where they are acting from intention and love.
Because you can't NOT when you're in your sweet spot.
When you're in that place where you know without a shadow of a doubt that that THING that lights you on fire is the thing you're going to talk about all the time. And that's what I do. That's what I help people do, is figure out what that thing is so that they can go out and do that thing.
Because when you do it, that's when people come around you from both sides of the aisle. It doesn't matter because you're so lit up and tapped in and turned on and just moving and flowing that you're like, Hell yeah!
That's the person I want to be around.
That person who's so excited and not being divisive. I'm not talking that excited divisive way. I'm talking the person who's willing to be imperfect in their activism, who's willing to be vulnerable in their activism, who's willing to say, This is who I am and this is what I believe in at the very core of my soul and my heart. Because this is what I want to do in the world.
And that's a very different space than 'all the gays should be banished'. That's not the space I'm talking about. That's not passion. That's not speaking from a space of love and intention and grace. THAT is mean.
Slade:
Yeah. Be FOR something. That's always my rule is, when I start to stray into harping on what I'm against, as opposed to trying to come from a place of what I'm for.
Dr. Bird:
Yes!!! There's a bumper sticker.
Slade:
Just be FOR something. Because it's hard to be FOR things that are terrible. You know, it's harder, in a way.
I think if you can come from a place of what you're for, you're also less likely to make people defensive. Because, like you said, you're vibrating in a high energy and a positive energy. And I've met people before who were, like at authors conferences and stuff, who write about really conservative Christian concepts, I mean, I live in the Bible belt, so if I go meet other authors, there's a really good chance that there's a minister in there somewhere who's written a book.
One of the coolest women that I've met at one of those spaces is completely different mindset from me spiritually, but she desperately wanted to have lunch with me because she liked my energy.
I was like, 'Of course you do.' Because she was so lit up about what she loved and what she cared about, and it was like we recognized each other's light, you know what I mean?
Dr. Bird:
Yeeeees!
Slade:
It wasn't about the filter that we had on it or what the container was or anything like that. It was just the light itself that drew us and made us say like, 'We need to have lunch because we're having too much fun talking.'
And when I have those experiences, I'm like, why can't this be what, you know, it always feels like.
Dr. Bird:
But it CAN be because, I feel like, you know, we forget that people are equally as passionate as we are about certain things. So the reason Gayle and I work so well together is not because we had one damn thing in common. It's that exact thing: The passion in me recognized the passion in her.
And I was like, Listen, you and I aren't going to get along on a policy level but as human beings, we can get along just fine. Thank you.
And that's what we're forgetting in this whole thing. I don't have to agree with your policy or your politics, but I am deeply driven to respect people's difference because I don't want everyone to be just like me. I don't want to be trapped in my own echo-chamber. It gets a little bit loony in there sometimes!
Slade:
You don't want everybody rocking your look!
Dr. Bird:
No, listen! I am an individual, damnit.
You know what I'm saying though? This diversity of thought is what makes this so fucking awesome.
Slade:
Yeah. All diverse systems are more healthy.
Dr. Bird:
Yes!
Slade:
Yeah.
Alright. So I want you to tell me about something. So you have this program called Candidates Secret Weapon program. That sounds pretty badass, but just tell me what exactly is that all about?
Dr. Bird:
I'm so excited you asked me about this.
So the Candidates Secret Weapon, my friend Melanie Childers, she and I met randomly though some groups online somewhere. And Melanie lives in Georgia and she and I connected and we were like, What are women missing...
So we have all these women running for office in record numbers across the country. They're all being trained by these great organizations like Emerge, and all these fantastic organizations. But what Melanie and I have known from the years and years that we've been working together, or working in politics, is that in coming together, what Melanie and I really recognize is, we're training all these women to run, but then, and they've got this campaign staff and they're super awesome but then the criticism comes in.
The personal attacks come in. The things we see when women run for office, where they get criticized for who they are, and they just get annihilated in the press. They get annihilated by the voter. They get this sort of... the patriarchy comes out and the sexism comes out. And the crap comes out.
And the you've got women who worry about getting up to speak to their voters. They worry about making a mistake doing an interview with the press. They start to worry. And so their mindset and their energy gets off because women are running in a system that was created for white straight men to win.
So now you have all these women and women of colour who are running, who are like, running in this system that's meant to keep the power in its place.
And so the Candidates Secret Weapon is all about shifting the mindset and the energy and the intuition so that women are running as women.
And so they are coming from this space of badass connection to their passion and their jam, so that their platform and their story fully resonates with people, so that they can manage their fears around fundraising and asking for money, because it's really hard for women to do that, for some weird reason. (I haven't figured that out because I love asking for money. It's like my favorite thing on Earth.)
And managing their inner critic and dealing with all of the voices that come up, just in general. As women, we deal with this SHIT coming into us and we have to manage these critics that say you're not capable of doing this. You're not going to win. You're not going to be able to make this happen.
We create, sort of, this confidence framework for women to be able to - THAT'S the secret weapon. The secret weapon is...
There's a woman who's running for office somewhere in middle America. I can't remember off the top of my head right now, but she was being told by her campaign staff not to bring her kids with her on the campaign trail. She's like, I'm out of dissonance with this because I'm a mom! And I'm proud of my family.
And I was like, Girl, take your kids out!
Slade:
Yeah...
Dr. Bird:
What are you talking about!
Be in integrity with who you are! That's what this secret weapon is all about. It teaches women who are running for office how to hold, stay in their power, and communicate with confidence and do all these things that are intentional and vibrational to help them stay in that space of power, of their own spiritual power and their own intentional power and their own confidence so that they can win.
Slade:
So what's the response been like?
So do you... Was it you that said you were like, paying your teenagers to track down their contact information to make a list for you?
Dr. Bird:
That was me!
I was like, Listen, girls, I got a job for you.
There's a lot of women running for office, right? And so, I'm like, I don't have time to do that! But I have teenagers who are doing nothing right now so I'll pay them.
Slade:
Ooo... very cool.
Dr. Bird:
Yeah. Because they're in-between work right now. It's my daughter and her best friend.
So we have about 10 women right now who are going through the program. We're waiting for their feedback right now. I'm really excited to hear about it. I'm just sitting back here waiting. I kind of feel like I'm having this pregnant pause where I'm like, Ohmygod, When's it coming when's it coming?
I'm just waiting.
Slade:
So this is a new...
Dr. Bird:
Brand new! Like, this is the first time I've ever actually talked about it.
Slade:
In the media.
Dr. Bird:
In the media! And so, it's kind of exciting!
We set it up... When we first envisioned it, it was this sort of, 1-on-1 coaching program, because Melanie and I are both life coaches, and so it was this sort of 1-on-1 coaching thing and I was like, That's not big enough! It's gotta be bigger.
And so, it is out online so all of... Melanie and I did videos and then we have workbooks. So it's me and Melanie whipping up all this stuff. And so we've got six videos that are an hour long, a little less than an hour long, apiece, and then workbooks that go with them.
And I don't know what the response is, because we just barely launched it this week.
Slade:
I just had this flash of what it could grow into and I was picturing you with your army and that your army was actually women who would go and take that training and that message and go and be on these campaign teams.
Like, you could just send all these people from the mothership to go to Georgia, to go to Iowa, to go to all these places and be that voice of what you're talking about, in that person's environment, right?
That would be really cool.
Dr. Bird:
That would be really cool.
We are, Melanie and I are gonna be, we've connected with, we're going to be at Netroots Nation, probably we will be doing that right when this airs or right after this airs. So I'm excited about that. We'll be talking to all these activists about the secret weapon, the activitst secret weapon, using the same kind of concept.
So you are absolutely right in that vision, Slade. I can see it now!
Slade:
So someone who, this is really kind of cool actually because when we think about that person, who is this spiritually minded woman, I don't want to plug in to the toxicity of the network news broadcasts but I want to do something.
Maybe their something is being part of your organization. You know, going out and representing.
Dr. Bird:
Yeah. I think that's absolutely, absolutely true. Is that connecting with the work that I'm doing so that you are tapped in to your passion and your jam and the thing that's lighting you up, that's exactly what I want to create in the world. Is people who are so tied in to how they want to BE.
And it is the spiritual women who are like, I just don't want to sit down and be quiet anymore. I'm done being quiet. I can't sit here while this is happening but I don't know what to do.
That is what I give to women and that is what I do.
Slade:
Well I was going to ask you about your legacy and you already told me so... That was gonna be the next question. That sounds like a good enough answer to my question that you psychically heard.
So, when you go to your website, you have a free download that's called 'Five Can't-Miss Steps to Finding your Voice'. How does that feed in to your message and what you're talking about here? Is that an extension of this, or a tool people can access RIGHT NOW that will give them a piece of what you do.
Dr. Bird:
It is indeed a tool.
I was so driven to figure out how to help people immediately figure out their passion. And so, when I came up with the 'Five Can't-Miss Steps', this is sort of based on all of my work that I learned, you know, 15 years ago, doing my work at the Utah State Capitol, so it's all about tapping in to your WHY and really being clear on why you want to do the things you're doing.
Again, it goes all back to your passion and your jam. Tools to actually find your jam, which is not just the thing that makes you excited, but also your favorite song and how your favorite song makes you feel.
There's that music that we hear that makes us... and I can't dance, let's just talk about white girl can't dance. I have NO rhythm at all. But man, when I hear, One Girl Revolution, that's one of my favorite songs, or even Pink or Ani, or even Carmina Burana's my most favorite symphony. When I hear that, I MOVE.
My body cannot sit still. And that's your jam.
And so one of the things that I'm trying to help people do is figure that out so that they can just put that song on all the time and be in their jam, so that they vibrate at a difference space, so that they can go out and do their thing.
Slade:
Oh! So it helps you figure out your theme song?
Dr. Bird:
Mmhmm.
Slade:
That's awesome.
Dr. Bird:
It helps you figure out your theme song AND so... it reminds you when you're listening to that song, I'm going to take action. Like, go do something. Send an email to an elected official. Send a thank you note.
One of the things I talk about in my freebie is saying thank you and being grateful and putting your gratefuls out into the world. And saying thank you to someone who's actually making a big huge difference.
So I am a big fan of the handwritten thank you note, because it's how I was raised, and I will write random thank you notes to Brené Brown, and Hilary Clinton and the people that I love. The people that inspire me. And I will write handwritten thank you notes to people like my county council people or my city council people.
Or the guy running... we have a huge homeless problem here in Corvallis, and the guy who was running HOAC (Housing Opportunities Action Council). That guy needs a thank you note. He's getting lambasted right now. Like, people who I see in the community who are taking the shit but doing the good work, I'll send them thank you notes and say, thank you so much for doing what you're doing!
I mean, yeah, like connecting to our community - that's what I teach.
And I give people, in that 'Five Can't-Miss Steps to Finding your Voice', I also give people permission to be imperfect. Because I think that's the other neat thing we're really really wanting right now, is, how can I be imperfect when I'm terrified of being imperfect, because I've been told my whole life I have to do it perfect. I have to do it right.
And I'm like, No. Fuck that. Be imperfect. I'm not perfect. But I am not going to shut up for nothing. And you can't make me.
Slade:
Missy, ohmygod, I want to talk to you about a million things and we probably will after we stop recording. (Sorry people, who are listening and want to hear all that.)
So we make sure and let everyone know where they can go find you online, tell us where we can find you.
Dr. Bird:
Well, in Bird Girl fashion, I am my own industry and so you can find me at birdgirlindustries.com on the interwebs. I am also on Patreon, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, @birdgirl1001, because I'm a Libra so I have to talk about my birthday in all my things... Maybe I'll get birthday cards on 10-01!
And so I'm on all of those things and I absolutely love engaging with people. It just makes me so happy. I had a woman the other night who was just... asking for how to just stop the chaos and move forward and I was like, Just breathe.
And she's like, she sent me a message two days later and was like, That's revelatory! That's like revolutionary, so even if you aren't involved in one of my programs, even though I hope everyone gets involved in one of my programs...
Oh! I also have a 'Marginalized No More' training online that's super easy to do that's got a couple of things that launches off of that freebie. So there's another thing online that's super fun that you can tap into.
Slade:
Yeah!
Dr. Bird:
But I just, you know, I love connecting with people and giving them little nuggets of joy to just go off into the world and take with them.
So... I'm all about creating that army.
Slade:
Well, and I want to say to anyone who wants to follow you on Facebook. You are a really fun person to have on your Facebook friends because you ARE super enthusiastic, you like the hell out of stuff, your comments are always, you're a cheerleader for all your friends and I can see that...
I like to call myself a professional Enabler. I am re-claiming the concept of 'enabling' because it's become such a dirty word but I find that so much of what I do is about hearing someone's dream and then thinking, Ohmygod YES that's an amazing idea. Let me convince you that you can do it. You know what I mean?
Dr. Bird:
Ooo I love that!
Slade:
And you're a kindred spirit in that way. And your presence is, that really comes through in your online presence. So I want to tell everyone, Don't be shy to be friends with you online. Because you're super fun and excited friend to have.
Dr. Bird:
Thank you!
And I swear all the time so that's a bonus.
Slade:
Yeah, yeah. If you like the swearing then that's always available.
Dr. Bird:
(Inaudible)
Slade:
Of course you are! Why would you be on my show if you weren't.
Dr. Bird:
Listen, that is the goddamn truth.
Slade:
Missy, thank you so much for letting me capture this conversation with you. It's super timely and I'm sure that we will find many many more things to talk about in the future. But for now, I just want to say thank you.
Dr. Bird:
Slade, thank you so much for having me on. I'm so stupid happy about it I don't even know what to do with myself.
Scott Vaughn is an intuitive healer, who specializes in helping others see through old belief systems that no longer serve them and empowering them to take charge of their own lives through recognition of their spiritual gifts.
Scott shares a supernatural event from his family history — the story of his great, great grandfather Parks, a preacher who floated to the ceiling of his church and stayed there.
MENTIONED ON THE SHOW DUNE by Frank Herbert
Bene Gesserit
LITANY AGAINST FEAR
I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.
Bene Gesserit "Litany Against Fear" from Frank Herbert's Dune Book Series © 1965 and 1984 Frank Herbert Published by Putnam Pub Group ISBN: 0399128964
GUEST LINKS - SCOTT VAUGHN www.scottdouglasvaughn.com
www.scottvaughnphotography.com
The Grandpa Story Scott's original post about the levitating preacher
HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses
Get an intuitive reading with Slade
Automatic Intuition
BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits Edit your pledge on Patreon
TRANSCRIPT Scott:
I'm Scott Vaughn. You got that part right, I know that.
I'm a professional intuitive in Johnson City, Tennessee. I do a lot of work, a lot of readings.
When I first began my work, I was doing a lot of healing work. I'm sort of a, was a reiki practitioner who sort of woke up one day, and, not that all reiki practitioners need to wake up, that isn't what I'm trying to imply. I was going along about my married life and, this stuff has always been in the background for me. I was always, probably a little bit more claircognizant I would say, if I was putting a term on it, than I could have recognized at the time.
I always seemed to know some things that I was not supposed to know and it seemed to make people more uncomfortable, now that I think about it, than I was able to access at the time.
But somewhere around 2012, I think it's in the summer that I actually met you on the street side in Chattanooga, I ended up having a health issue and turns out I had had some elevated liver enzymes. I went to the doctor about it. That this is a theme. I've had elevated liver enzymes for a long time.
So I went to the doctor and she said, We're gonna send you and get you an ultrasound of this liver. So they did an ultrasound of my liver. She said, We didn't find anything. I'm going to send you to a gastroenterologist. And of course, I was a really great hypochondriac in those days so that just absolutely fed those wonderful impulses and urges that I had going on at the time.
So she sent me to a gastroenterologist and he said, We're going to do a CAT Scan of your liver. This was around, I think, maybe Memorial Day of 2012. That's 6 years ago now. Hard to believe.
But they call me back, the nurse, she says, Hello, we have found something on your liver and we're definitely going to need to take a look at it. We're going to have to schedule you in for an MRI.
And as you know, medical tests always... you don't get them the next day. It was like, 5 weeks out. So of course I was scared shitless.
What I had to do at that point, I was working a fairly rigorous spiritual program, and I had to really put myself back into that, because I had, not really thrown that out. I just wasn't as rigorous in my practice as I had wanted to be.
And as I began to do that, I don't know what happened. I began to wake up, and went to the local metaphysical shop, which was not really a place that I hung out, to be honest with you, at that point, and had a chakra alignment.
I don't exactly know what happened there but I began to... He put some sto... This is how I would have described it then. He put these rocks on me and he left the room. And then I started seeing all these dead people. So that's how I talked about it then, so that's how I'll talk about it now.
I started hearing, I mostly hear things, rather than see things, although I do see things in my mind's eye as well, but my mind's ear is, I think, more developed. I began to hear these conversations with people who had passed and favorite aunts were coming by, my grandfather was coming by, my father was, had not passed yet but he came by later. We can talk about that later.
And after that, just began to start having what I call.. just sort of mind-blowing awarenesses.
Began realizing that I needed to follow a slightly different path for my life, and I'd been working, and did until fairly recently, in higher education, in academic advising and higher education administration. I was at the point in my life where I was really ready to go very heavy into that conference-going world and writing articles and all that stuff that people do in the academic world.
It sort of just really called all that into question for me and... This is not what I'm supposed to do. I'm supposed to do something else.
So... took a few classes here and there. I enrolled in a ministerial program that was being offered out of our local metaphysical shop that's named Atlantis here in Johnson City, and the teacher, my teacher, who was offering it, just... I happened to be in there one day, probably buying a stone because I was getting an interest in crystals and things like that.
And she said, Hey, I'm teaching this class. I don't know if you might be interested in it.
And for some reason, which was very seemingly out of character for me, I said, Yeah, I'm interested in doing this!
It was the Alliance of Divine Love, it's a metaphysical, ordinational ('ordinational' is not a word), but it's a metaphysical sect, it's not really a sect either, but it's a metaphysical type of ordination, with 3-years long course, and that was a really good experience for me.
And the only reason that I really want to mention that is if you had, if she had come to me a year before, maybe 2 years before:
- I never would have encountered her. That's one thing.
- I would've just been like, No! Hell no! Like, You're crazy. I don't want anything to do with... No!
It wasn't that I had anything against it from a religious standpoint. It's just that I thought, I thought people who are like who I've turned out to be were absolutely crazy.
Funny the way things shift over time for you, and...
So, went through that, and it became very apparent that I needed to... It was just time for me to start working with people and I kept hearing this strong message: You need to work with others.
And I'm like, Wow, I don't know, I'm like, Why?
I'd taken a reiki class several years before and that was a lot of fun. I did it, and work on, you know, put my hands on some people, did it for myself. Thought it was a real neat experience.
That summer I also felt the need to take that second level of reiki and... so I opened up the following year. Just started seeing folks in my house, in my living room, as a matter of fact. I put up a massage table in my living room and started working with folks.
One of my very first clients was a guy named Dennis (if you're listening Dennis, Hey!) turned out to be a very dear friend over time. I performed at his wedding last summer to his partner. I was working with Dennis and I was doing all the stuff.
And in those days, it was a very formal preparing the space and making sure everything was very quiet and very sacred and taking it with just the utmost seriousness. I had these agate wind chimes that were really pretty, but when the air conditioning would blow, it would sound, clink clink clink.
It was annoying.
I resist the word cacophonous because that's really pretentious, but they're... I had to call it out and say it was pretentious, but it was cacophonous. It was annoying.
And I remember saying, just looking up, Can't you do something about these horrible wind chimes? I can't focus on Dennis.
And I got a very, very clear message back, and I still laugh about it.
You don't need to worry about the wind chimes because you're not doing any of this anyway.
Slade:
Ooo...
Scott:
And I was like, Shit.
But that was a very strong message for me, very early in beginning to do my work.
And then, and just logically followed, I knew that I was also supposed to do readings as well but didn't know how that would work. But I knew that was coming for me. I remember one of the, the very first psychic fair I participated in, I didn't know what to call myself. I was more in the room with the healer folks, but towards the end, I was like, I'm really here to do readings.
I ended up doing a couple of readings for folks and it seemed to... I don't remember them very well, which I usually consider that a pretty good sign that something decent happened, if I'm staying out of the equation and not screwing it up with my conscious mind, and everything sort of logically followed after that.
I felt like I just needed to probably stop seeing people outside of my office or outside of my house, because I live in a condo and it was just... went and had to keep it clean all the time and I didn't like to do that, so decided it was probably a good idea to open up an office that was right over the hill from where I was living at the time, and began to do readings, mostly I used to be doing healing type work and it wasn't exactly reiki that I ultimately began to do that I am doing now.
I don't exactly know what I would call the methodology that I have but it's not a lot of hands on. It's a lot of chanting, it's a lot of frequency, and just sending energy back and forth for folks. It's a lot of Spirit Guides. It's a lot of calling in the Medicine People from other cultures, and allowing them to hold the space and allowing that work to continue. But began doing readings.
Primarily my work now consists mostly of doing readings instead of doing healing work. That's sort of not the focus as much now. It's just turned out more that I'm doing readings.
And, I was told very early on that, the people that I would end up working with were probably going to be people who were not necessarily always sold on the new age path, the whole metaphysical thing. That the person I was going to be working with, you know, anyone who seeks me out, I feel like I work with whomever I'm supposed to work with, but the majority of the people who come my way are folks who are disappointed in organized religion and in the church and things like that. But they haven't been able to find a way to replace that with anything that's meaningful.
These are folks who are sad sometimes and disillusioned about the way they've seen spiritual matters handled. And folks who really want to... They know there's something more but they may have been taught all their lives it was not okay to seek those things. Because that was not allowed. There's a strong threat of that, especially here in this culture in east Tennessee.
So that tends to be a lot of the people who come my way.
One of the things that I feel very strongly that I'm supposed to do is sort of, the Hermit card in the tarot is one that I sort of embody. Just sort of holding the light up for folks.
Slade:
Mmm...
Scott:
You know? Standing there, along the path. The nice thing about that card is, you don't know what's in front, you don't know what's behind. But there he is, holding the light. And that's sort of what I've been feeling lately, that I'm supposed to embody. Is holding the light up for people and interpreting the things that are given to me to offer to them as insights for them along their path.
Slade:
You're a Lantern Bearer, Scott!
Scott:
A Lantern Bearer - that's cute. I love that.
Slade:
I actually have an episode about the Hermit tarot and how I re-named it the Lantern Bearer, because... yeah..
Scott:
You know what? I may have stolen that. That may be where I've heard that. I may be stealing from you and I don't -
Slade:
I stole it from someone else.
Scott:
Okay.
Slade:
There was a, I don't know if there's one of those decks floating around out there where the Hermit card is actually called the Lantern Bearer, or someone somewhere has used that term, and I was like, Ooo, I like that!
Scott:
I'm sure Hay House has put it out somewhere, you know?
Slade:
Right. Yes. Copyright whoever said it!
But I do have an episode about it and the episode's mine.
I want to talk to the audience for just a second and let them know that, for those of you listening to this conversation, Scott is a friend of mine and he's an honorary member of the Automatic Intuition community because he was sort of teaching himself while being friends with me, but yet I still needed him to be a part of that group.
I've wanted to interview him since day one of this podcast but here's the thing with interviewing your friends. We could talk for hours about anything, and it may or may not necessarily be fun or interesting to anyone listening. So far I think you're doing pretty good, but...
So the challenge was to find the right focus topic, and with so many of the guests on the show being intuitives and healers and peers, Scott and I were kind of brainstorm texting about this for months, like, What should we do an episode about??
And then I see this post on Scott's Facebook wall titled, "Concerning The Time My Great-Great Grandfather Floated to the Ceiling of the Church—And Lingered.” I read the story and I lost my mind over it.
I told Scott “THIS” this is what I want to talk to you about. Nobody else has this story.
This was months ago.
Scott:
Great!
Slade:
Go ahead and say something while I clear my throat.
Scott:
One of the things about the story is that, a lot of times I'll re-run myself on Facebook. You know. Nobody really notices that much about that as the person doing it. People think, Oh this is great, you just put it together now.
No, this is a re-run from last year. You liked it then too.
But I think the first time I put that out there, maybe 2009, I was in a much different head, I was in a much different heart space than I am now, okay? So there was a lot of, the original version of that, if it's still out there and I don't think I went back and edited it, really conveys a lot of the skepticism I had at the time with it.
And then the latest version comes from what I would say is a more heart-centred, really knowing, just from a much more knowing place and much more loving place and a much more... I'm very open to the possibilities of everything that could have happened when he floated to the ceiling of the church and lingered.
Slade:
Okay, so... let's just... You've got to tell us this story.
Your great-great-grandfather floated to the ceiling of the church. I'm just going to let you tell us... Like I've never heard it before. Tell it to me.
Scott:
Okay. Like you've never heard it before.
Because a lot of times when I'm talking about this story, I'm talking about the story itself, which is different than telling the story. It's the story about the story.
It goes that my great-great-grandfather had started out, I think, in the hills of Tennessee and then south eastern Kentucky of a town Jellico, Tennessee. That's about two hours above, maybe an hour and a half, an hour above Knoxville, if you take Interstate 70. A very remote mountain area.
If you were writing a book about Appalachia and you really wanted to find something that seemed almost cliche it was so realistic, you could find that.
And so, in the back woods, probably a Baptist minister, okay, and my understanding at the time is that he was a very straight up and down Baptist minister, very read-the-scripture, the talk-a-lot kind of guy and was making a pretty good living as preacher back in the woods.
Around the early 20th century, this wave of Pentacostalism started sweeping through the country, hitting about, in the mountains (my electricity just went out as we're talking about this - Hello, great grandpa, great great grandpa Parks).
So (electricity's back) so this wave of Pentacostalism starts sweeping through the country, probably hits the area in the early 20th century in Jellico, and... So he began to preach... I don't know how familiar you are with some parts of the Bible. Over in the book of Corinthians, it talks about the spiritual gifts of healing, of prophecy of times, of people being able to interpret speaking in other tongues and people being able to put their hands on other people and they be healed from things.
He began to preach those things and a lot of people followed him as he started a new congregation. He took his congretation with him and they moved and started something else. The people who went with him were all into it, but a lot of people in the community, it was heresy to them.
So, the story goes that three men, allegedly from the Baptist church, came in to break up the service. They had guns and they appeared in the very back. My great-great-grandfather, I'm going to start calling him Grandpa Parks, or grandpa. Grandpa Parks was up there preaching and he saw the men and he said, If you come one step closer, I pray the devil smite you.
And they walked closer.
And of course, people in the church were starting to really panic and get nervous. My great-great-grandmother, Grandma Parks is sitting there thinking, she starts to pray, and at that moment, the Spirit of God picks him up from the pulpit and he rises to the ceiling of the church, and of course, Grandma Parks is there and she's like, Oh God, he's about to be 'transa-lated', was the word I heard.
He's about to be transa-lated, just like Enoch. He's about to be transa-lated just like Enoch.
She thought he's gonna... People are like, He's gonna go through the ceiling! He's gonna go through the ceiling!
And, of course, you know, he's just as surprised as anyone, right? So the look on his face... really, you know, he's described as looking like he was scared, because, not because of the men at the back at this point, because he really just didn't know what was happening.
And moved him through the congregation, through the middle of the congregation. You know, there's the rows on either side, right through the middle of the church and put him down right in front of the three men with the guns.
Thus, after that, he was left alone.
Now the story also goes that the three men, one of them, shortly after went blind. One of them dropped his gun, took his place in the church service and shut up.
Okay? He joined up.
And the other one, at some time later, you know, who knows, history tends to conflate times, he killed himself.
Yeah, so, sort of like the three men on the cross maybe, or the Holy Trinity there, I don't know. But there were three of them.
Outside of that, this entire denomination in the mountains, they call themselves The Church of God of the Mountain Assembly in Jellico. They're still there! There are still... You can look them up on Google. The Church of God of the Mountain Assembly headquarter in Jellico.
That's one of the things that they talk about in some of their literature, was the time when Brother Parks was lifted to the ceiling of the Church, and that was a sign that they were doing the right thing. They were on the right track and that their message had weight and that began to grow and spread.
There are quite a few, interestingly enough, Jellico's in the coal mining area and as the mines dried up, people went north. So a lot of my family, as well, went to Michigan. I have quite a bit of family in Michigan, or had been in Michigan at the time. So there's quite a bit of that church now in Michigan as well, which is interesting.
And so, the amazing part of that story for me in that whole thing is it's sort of like a litmus test to my own spiritual development for me, when I look back. I was told the story as a kid. I was always fascinated by family stories. I know this is not the focus of what we're talking about, but I have equally interesting stories from... Nobody levitated, but people getting, sticking knives up their nose and dying from that, the other side of my family. I'll talk about that later.
It's my uncle, Hugh Ballard, on my dad's side, who stuck the knife up his nose and died. But, I was always fascinated somehow, I sort of became like R2D2 for my family. They implanted stories within me as a small child and it tended to speak to me in the wrong way and I just start projecting holographs of stories that make people uncomfortable, I suppose. I don't know.
Slade:
I'm kind of that person in my family as well.
Scott:
You're a storyteller, so...
Slade:
Well, I think that... It's weird because I had aunts that would do genealogical research and stuff like that. And they would always give the stuff to me. Like, they didn't give it to their own kids.
For some reason, people identified that I was the one to give it to.
They felt like it would get told somehow, or it would be preserved, or just cared about, in a way, by me, that other people wouldn't. And it's true! I do care about all that stuff more.
But I do wonder, what would possess you to think this, like, 7 year old boy wants to know about all this stuff?
Scott:
I've often wondered that, but it came to me from my mom's side of the family and my dad's side of the family. I've ended up with all of the family pictures. I've ended up with all of those things.
But my ancestors, 'ancestors' is using that term broadly, my family members who have passed, my ancestors, some of them were alive when I was alive, they figure very prominently in the work that I do too. So that's another matter entirely that we can talk about in a minute.
Slade:
Here's something I want to ask you about, because...
Scott:
Please do!
Slade:
And I have to say, all the months that we tried to think of a reason for you to come on the show, and then all the months since we decided what the reason was, interestingly, two days ago in real time, I interviewed Ian Allen, who is a friend of yours, who also lives in Johnson City, and part of our conversation was about how supernatural, mystical, what we consider new age topics were viewed through the filter of Christianity.
So you have some crazy, I mean, full-blown witchcraft going on, but it was all in the name of Jesus, you know what I mean?
So I was wondering what your perspective is on that sort of weird mishmash of Christianity and the supernatural stuff which is not traditionally thought of as everyday Christian.
Scott:
Right, you know, I've been thinking that you were going to ask that question. I've not had an answer for it all week. Because I've had that in mind as well and I think that I was raised in a very traditional Christian family environment, and those kinds of things, though it's very conservative religion, a very evangelical religion, generally speaking, the belief was, a lot of those things that happened in, you know, the early church, we didn't have access to them in the current church.
So the idea that, Can people be healed? Yes they can but God uses doctors. That's why God created doctors. Whatever, right?
But... I've had to look further back into my family to be able to find some of those things, and that's in my Pentecostal relatives, right? Some of my mom's family, they still follow that path, and a lot of my family doesn't.
But they're always the ones at the family gatherings I'm gravitating towards, because they're talking about prayer and things that have happened as a result of prayer. They're talking about warts falling off people. They're talking about somebody who had cancer who doesn't have cancer now. Somebody who was a drug addict one day and suddenly had an experience and they've not used drugs in 25 years.
Those kinds of things. All kinds of ways of having miracles.
And I don't really have an answer to your question. I have just a lot of experiences, a lot of things I believe have happened but I don't really know why that is.
So thank you for asking - it's a great question!
Slade:
Do you believe in miracles?
Scott:
Yeah, of course!
Now, I used to - For many years, I considered myself an atheist, okay? And so I didn't believe in anything. And it took a lot of work for me to not believe in anything, which tells me I wasn't a very good atheist.
The kind of work that I'm doing now certainly was off the table because it was deeply buried. And, I think, you've heard that there are no atheists on the front lines of battle. I don't know. No atheist in the foxhole?
I don't know about that, but I do know that some things that happened to me in my life forced me to really reconsider there was something out there that was bigger than me, and that wasn't me. Otherwise I would really be dead or worse... So if you can think of yourself being dead or worse, the worse part means that you're probably not an atheist. Because you tend to believe there is something going on out there that doesn't line up with your belief system, being an atheist, or at least as I understood it.
For many years, I've used, I was an alcoholic. I'm a recovering alcoholic now, drug addict, those things. It's been many years since... I've been clean and sober for many years.
Slade:
Was that the result of anything spiritual? Or was it more of... from that atheist time period?
Scott:
It was probably from all that. I was a very bitter guy, a lot of bitterness against, and rebellion against religion, and those kinds of things, and with the family history, I suppose, that's always a part of it.
Just poured alcohol onto it and pills and just went through a period of my life where I really wasn't there for it.
As I got sober, that's sort of the beginning of my re-awakening.
I believe we're all born awakened, right? Then I think, our families, our society, etc., I think we just get closed up and closed up. And in the end, we buy into that belief that we're closed up so much and we just continue to add to it, and alcohol was my way of adding to it, and not being here for my life.
As I began to show up more for my life, I began to see, at least for me, there's a lot more than what I'm willing to admit is out there and in here, right? There a lot more and I don't have to be shut off from it.
As I began to realize that I'm not shut off from it, I started awakening.
I won't say that I'm awakenED. I will say that I'm awakenING, if that makes any sense.
I've been sort of thinking that some of these things might come up over the course of us talking today, and in some ways, I think I am baffled that I'm doing this and I'm grateful that I am doing this, but...
If you had met me 10 years ago, and you had told me... If I had come to you for a session 10 years ago, of course I wouldn't have come to you for a session 10 years ago because I wouldn't have dared to 10 years ago, based on where I was, and you had told me that I was going to be doing this kind of work and all of that, I would have laughed.
I would have thought, Boy, he has confirmed that he is just as crazy. I went in here and paid him money, you know, that kind of thing.
So yeah.
Slade:
I probably would have told you.
Scott:
Yeah, I know. And I would have been like, You're crazy!
Slade:
I would be that person people always tell me about. I hear this all the time, 'A psychic told me once' and I'm always in the chain of... I'm never the first one to tell them, which is probably cool.
Scott:
Correct.
Slade:
I'd rather be at the end of that line of...
Just to go back to this miracle for a second, with your great-great-grandfather...
Scott:
Absolutely.
Slade:
You know what, if it's okay with you, I'll post a transcript of your Facebook post so everybody can kind of read some of that detail, because it's different every time you tell it, right? There's a different perspective.
Scott:
It is!
Which tells me it was different every time it was told to me so who knows exactly. There have also been members of my family who've worked really hard at debunking the story too. We'll talk about that in a minute if you like, but yeah...
Slade:
Well tell me, did you ever speak to anyone who actually witnessed this?
Scott:
Okay. The first family reunion, and it's interesting that all this is coming up, because in two weeks, I will be at the site of all this again. Okay? In two weeks, my family is having a reunion in Jellico.
Because I'm the person who knows the stories, and knows where all the people are buried. I'm probably the last person alive, at least in this branch of my family who could take you to the graves of everyone who has come before us.
Anyway, I don't know where I was going with that, but the first thing at every reunion, I take my tape player and I, because when I was a kid, my parents for my 5th birthday, my parents bought me a tape recorder, okay?
So I was always just recording things and I knew that some of my older family members were going to be there, and I knew I wanted to get some things on tape. I also knew that my grandmother was toward the younger end of the family. So my grandmother, and even her mother who passed away, who died really young, she probably wasn't there for what happened either. But I was there.
My grandmother's best friend, Helen Seal, who she grew up with, came down from Michigan to be part of the reunion because:
- She and my grandmother were like sisters and,
- The coal-mining camp where everybody was originated there in Tennessee and Kentucky. Everybody was very much like family so Helen came down.
Helen was still part of, she's passed now, but she was part of the Church of God of the Mountain Assembly in Michigan. So she still attended the church but in Michigan. You know I said a lot of people went to Michigan to work in the automobile factories when the coal mines dried up.
Slade:
Right.
Scott:
So Helen was also just a great storyteller. She had long grey hair that she wrapped up in a bun. She was just a spitfire of a woman so I knew I wanted to talk to her about it.
And I wish I could find the tape. It's going to be that mythical tape that's lost, that I can't find now. Sort of like Nixon's tape that's missing from Watergate.
Yeah, but she's telling me, and it starts out, she says, 'I know you want to talk about the time Brother Parks was lifted to the ceiling church, and many years ago, I asked Sister Parks what she thought about it.'
So she goes into this story, okay, and she wasn't there, but she was getting it, she was telling me her version of Sister, of my great-great-grandmother telling her the story. Okay?
Slade:
Okay.
Scott:
Then Helen's husband, Oble, he, I don't know how he knew this, because he didn't live there, but he said that there was an old lady living in the community, Granny Mobely was her name, Granny Mobely (sounds like a Lee Smith novel)...
Slade:
It does.
Scott:
It does!
Granny Mobely, who was there at the time, right, and I said, Where does she live?
And he said, Well I don't know.
It's , I don't know, or I didn't know to just go down to the grocery store and ask people where Granny Mobely lived, but I never investigated that any further. I was into college and changing schools and all of that. So I never got any first hand account.
I do know that the church has some official records and there have been two books that they have put out, two little books, where they tell the story.
Also, he kept a journal as well that one of his other descendants has. I was thinking, How many descendants must he have? My great-great-grandparents had like, 8 children. And so, if you think about probably... There are probably thousands of people now who are descended from them, living today.
But one of my cousins' distant relatives, probably what I would call a 5th cousin, in Michigan, who's the pastor of one of the churches there, oddly enough, has his journal, where he wrote some things down.
I've never been able to get ahold of that. I've wanted it. I've sent requests. I've asked for copies of it. I've tried to communicate with people about it and that's never been... No one's ever been able... No one's ever been willing to communicate with me about that, which just adds to the mystery and tells me that one day I will see it. You know how that goes.
He used to prophesize well too, about great birds with people in them flying through the air. That one day, people would be, one day, this is Oble Seal told me this, that one day he was out preaching, he said, One day, there'll be people on the moon.
And this was in the 30s, right? And I don't know what we were talking about in the 30s. I don't know about... I mean, I'm sure there were, certainly there were aircrafts in the 30s. I don't know how many he would have had access to, but there certainly had not been astronauts in the 30s yet.
Slade:
We had Jules Verne and we had, I don't remember if that... What was it that Hans Fritz movie, Metropolis, or... There's some really, really old creepy black-and-white movie I think that might portray people travelling on rockets to the moon, right?
Scott:
Yeah, so maybe that's... I don't... Who knows if he had access to seeing those...
Slade:
Umhmm... Oh yeah!
Scott:
You know, probably not.
So I don't know. And I wish that I could find that tape. I know it was in the attic where I used to live, and then I've moved since then. I don't know where that box of tapes went. You know how that kind of thing goes.
Slade:
It's a great set up for a novel.
Scott:
Yeah, I know. It is!
Slade:
Someone finds the box of tapes in the attic and then, you know.
Of course, in the story, you're both your 40-year old self and your 95-year old self so we can switch back and forth between time periods. I can see the whole thing right now.
Scott:
Absolutely.
Yeah, that's very good. Thank you very much! That's good inspiration for that.
Slade:
Yes!
Scott:
Reverend Parks also is part of my work that I do here today too. He's one of what I call my 'assistants' and my 'guides'.
Slade:
So he's like an ancestor guide?
Scott:
He's an ancestor guide and when I'm working with someone specifically in a healing type session, he very strongly appears.
Slade:
Interesting!
Scott:
A lot of really tuned-in people say, Who is the bearded man here who is not you?
Slade:
Ooo!
Scott:
That's Grandpa. Pay him no mind.
He's very much who I call in to help when, you know, need a space cleaned out, he's very helpful with those kinds of things. He's very good at removing what I call, reptilian type energies from folks as well.
Slade:
You know, I have to say, it just occurred to me as I was asking you that question about the whole connection with Christianity versus this kind of supernatural stuff, one of the things that became really apparent to me, because I always thought of myself as very much sort of against fundamentalism, still do...
Scott:
Same here.
Slade:
Very anti-Christian, all that kind of stuff.
But one of the things that I have observed, kind of begrudgingly in the beginning, was that the people who are more open to talking about mysticism are by nature people of faith.
And so, if you go to an older generation of people and you want to talk about supernatural stuff, there's a lot more little old church ladies that want to talk about spirits and healing and communication from the dead and all that kind of stuff, and are a lot more open to it than, certainly than an atheist is going to be, or an intellectual from our generation is going to shut that down much more quickly too.
And so I learned very quickly to kind of have this universal translator running in my mind and to realize that that was the language they were given to speak with, you know, was the language of the Bible in the culture that they grew up in and so, that's what they had to work with.
But some of the things that they will tell you and some of the things that they will describe are just straight up like, Well this is total paranormal investigation!
Scott:
This is straight up like off Sylvia Browne.
Slade:
Totally, totally!
Scott:
Yeah.
Slade:
So it's made me a little bit more open-minded in myself. I have had to be more open-minded about the fact that when you strip away the vocabulary and you strip away whatever theology's comfortable and whatever symbolism is used, in both camps, or in any camp and all the camps, you'll find that there are people who are extremely plugged in and sensitive and aware and awakening and all that kind of stuff.
And then you will find people who are going through the motions and claiming to get it when they don't and then you have people who are just completely tuned out.
But that idea of who that someone is who is plugged in transcends everything else. And so when I recognize another person who's 'plugged-in', I don't care. All that other stuff is transparent. You see through it.
And so I had these experiences where I have talked to these little old ladies who use the Jesus vocabulary through the whole thing, but meanwhile, they're the most likely to get what it is that I do and to be accepting of it.
Scott:
I had an aunt who was, she always used to like to renounce the spirit of fear. That was one of her big things that she liked to do.
Slade:
Ooo I like that.
Scott:
Renounce the spirit of fear, you know.
Here, 25 years later, I start into A Course in Miracles and talking about love and fear and all of those things, and I'm like, Good grief Rita, you were onto it all along.
Slade:
It reminds me of the Bene Gesserit Litany against fear from doom. Do you know it?
Scott:
No, I don't.
Slade:
Okay. I'll put it in the show notes. Fear is the mind killer.
Anyway. It's a little litany that the nun-like witch organization in that world.. It's a chant that they do when facing fear. It's a way of, kind of like...
Scott:
Fair enough.
Slade:
...allowing the fear to pass over and through you.
I can't recite it off the top of my head right now but I'll put it in the show notes for your sake if no one else's.
Scott:
For my ADD's sake, I'm trying to sit here not get on my phone and look it up while we're talking.
Slade:
I know! Don't do that in the middle of an interview!
Scott:
Yeah, I'm not. I'm definitely not doing that.
I'm thinking, he'd never know. This is audio, but you'd know, because you're you!
Slade:
The litany against fear.
It's really good. It's up there with the Serendipity prayer, and, you know, it's one of those tools for me. It's a mantra for sure.
So I gotta ask you this.
Scott:
Please.
Slade:
Given your perspective and where you are in everything, I see you as someone who is kind of an archivist in a way, of all this old knowledge and old wisdom. You've got pieces of it, more so than others might.
And so, as you think about how you are breaking that all down, sort of processing it and then putting it back together and give it new life and new form, what do you most hope to contribute to the conversation about spirituality?
Scott:
You know, it's to really... There's so many trappings that folks put on it. And just let go. That's one thing that I'm always telling folks.
Just let go and stop trying to control absolutely everything. Just allow. Seek the truth for yourself and allow it to come.
You can study whatever you want to study, but be open to the sources that the truth might come to you.
Be open to what speak to you. Be open to what doesn't speak to you. Sometimes what doesn't speak to you speaks to you more than... because it doesn't speak to you, if that makes sense.
In the 12-steps circles, people talk about 'let go and let God', you know, let go and let Spirit do Spirit's work, and realizing that a lot of that happens in a very subtle way in that it often times doesn't happen very instantly.
It's a process and also that just because we're spiritual, just because we studied the Law of Attraction, which is great, you know, it's fine. It's not the only law there is though.
Just because we've read this and watched the latest YouTube video, just because we've done this or this or this, it doesn't absolve us from doing the work on ourselves. And from taking, you know, sometimes I tell the folks that I'm working with, if nothing else, I'm gonna be able to, hopefully, with some assistance here, provide you at least some kind of mirror so that you can see yourself honestly, and see your path in a way that you've not seen it before.
At least as honest as I can convey it to you, as honest as you're able to see it, but to look very closely inside for the answers and not externally. Because the answers for me are not the answers for you, and there's certainly some universal truths, but the path for everybody is slightly different. And each person has his or her own expression.
And I just feel like I'm babbling, Slade. I love that question.
Slade:
It's meant to be a stumper but it's also meant to be a prompt to...
Well, I used to ask people what really bugs the shit out of them in all this crap. And then I realized, Heather O'Shea I think was the person who was like, 'I'm going to reframe that, make it more positive'.
And I was like, 'Okay, that's a good idea'.
And so, going forward, I try to re-frame that as a more positive thing.
Scott:
One thing I would say is, this is not a cake mix. Okay? This is not... You realize there are certain... We don't have as much control over things in our world as we do over baking a cake.
It's a good analogy, but again, it's not the best analogy. Okay?
I do believe that the new thought community talks about planting seeds and watering seeds and all that, but the idea is that you've got to plant the appropriate seeds for the thing that you want. Right?
And...
Slade:
And you have to do it. You have to tend it.
Scott:
YOU have to tend your garden.
Remember, from Candide, and he goes through all that and Candide at the end: All of this is well and good. All of this is well and good. I've encountered the woman who had her ass eaten because of steak or something, but I still had to cultivate my own garden.
You know? I still had to cultivate my own garden.
And Pangloss is saying, 'All is well and good in this best of all possible worlds.'
And Candide's saying, 'Yes, thank you, but I still have to cultivate my own garden', and that is me planting the appropriate seeds and doing the literal work of putting the thing together. Keep seeing things. If you can think it, you can be it. If you can dream it, you can be it.
On one level, that's certainly true. You know? I know that there's a lot of hope for people in that as well. But if it were that simple, we wouldn't have any problems. If it were that simple...
I hear a lot of talk about... Everything's all the Law of Attraction this, and the Law of Attraction that, and that is certainly all well and good and there's so much truth there, right? But it's not simply just thinking happy thoughts all the time and everything will be okay.
It's about embodying a new way to be, and truly, not just sprouting affirmations (hehe, 'sprouting'), not just spouting affirmations at yourself. Sprouting - I'm using that seed metaphor.
Slade:
Right. Taking it all the way through
Scott:
Yeah, taking it all the way through. Thank you!
It's... You can't just say, 'I am at peace with myself' and 'today's going to be better' and everything just work out. You have to go a little bit deeper than that.
You have to do what affirmations really do. You have to... The nice thing that I love, because I deal with a lot of affirmations with folks that I work with is to say, 'Use this as an affirmation.' And 'You'll know it's working if, after you've done this for a couple of days, you feel worse.'
Because that means it's lodged itself in those deep recesses of the things that you don't want to have to deal with and it's bringing it all to the surface. It's going in there and it's sort of destroying the energy of the thing you no longer want, and it's just all bubbling up like stomach acid, right?
In that way, you know you're on the right track.
Slade:
Interesting...
Scott:
There's always that thing is, I want to feel better and I want to feel better NOW.
And I'm always like, we can all feel better, but we still have to do something. You know? We still have to take a look at our ourselves.
Slade:
Well, you know, and you don't just do it once either. I think the... If I was answering your question with the way that you're answering it, I would say that, the thing that really kicks you in the gut when you realize that you have to get up and re-do it every day.
You have to start over and over and over again and every day.
I mean, some things might carry you through longer arcs of time, but really, it's not A decision. It's thousands of decisions. It's thousands of times making the same decision over and over again.
Scott:
It's a whole spiritual practice. It's not just a set of isolated things. It's a whole spiritual practice, you know? Like yoga is a spiritual practice. It's a whole thing. It's not just going to a class now and then. Although I love going to yoga classes, but it's a whole spiritual practice that I have to embody.
And I have to figure out a new way to BE, not just a new way to think, not just a new way to act, but a whole new way to BE if I want some results in that way.
But certainly I know inside of me, given, left to my own devices, I'll always usually pick the easy way out.
Slade:
Scott, it's so good to capture one or maybe a handful of your stories. I know that we still have so many others that we could do, but I'm glad that we finally got one in the can.
I really want to appreciate you for coming on and telling your story.
Tell everyone where they can go find you online.
Scott:
Yeah! It's sort of the entrepreneur phase of my life right now but ScottDouglasVaughn.com is the website for my spiritual work.
Also I'm a photographer! I take pictures of abandoned buildings and things like that. And all of this grew out of that same summer, summer of 2012 that I was talking about a little bit earlier. That's ScottVaughnphotography.com
My website, ScottDouglasVaughn.com is pretty good insight into what I'm doing right now.
Ian Allan is a psychic and intuitive Witch living in Johnson City, TN. He owns and operates Appalachian Witchery, where he teaches classes on Appalachian Folk Lore and Magic, he offers tarot and psychic readings, as well as magical consultations and spell creation.
WE TALK ABOUT: * unique Appalachian spiritual culture * divination, water witching, dowsing, folk magic, ancestor veneration, books of shadows * the definition of real magic * the difference between magic and manifesting
MENTIONED ON THE SHOW Rumours - Fleetwood Mac
Drawing Down the Moon by Margot Adler
The Spiral Dance by Starhawk
Talking Appalachian by Amy Clark
Power of the Witch by Laurie Cabot with Tom Cowan
LaurieCabot.com
Wicca: A Guide for the Solitary Practitioner by Scott Cunningham
The Witches' Voice
GUEST LINK - IAN ALLAN Appalachian Witchery
HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses
Get an intuitive reading with Slade
Automatic Intuition
BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits Edit your pledge on Patreon
TRANSCRIPT Ian:
My name is Ian Allan. I live in Johnson City, Tennessee, was originally raised in a small coal-mining town in southwest Virginia. Not West Virginia, but Virginia, the southwest corner called Wise. Grew up in a kind of traditional Appalachian family. Became more knowledgeable, I guess would be the world I would use about dreams that I was having and feelings I would be getting about people I would meet at churches or in public atmospheres that would start becoming true.
And so I became pretty obsessed with occult sort of ideas from a very young age and it just kind of started developing from there, around the age of 13, is probably when I really started working on developing certain gifts or abilities, if you want to use that word. And it just kind of went on from there.
I became a public tarot reader in which I, about 11 years ago, I have been doing all of that for over 20 years at this point now, but really stepped in to the public sphere about 11 years ago and started reading for the public and offering classes on different topics relating to witchcraft as well as, specifically, Appalachian folk magic.
Slade:
Okay, so I'm just curious when you meet someone for the first time in real life and they ask you what you do, what do you say?
Ian:
Um, well, previous to March, I would pretty much say I teach Appalachian folk lore and magic. I also read tarot cards. It's not something I've ever really been shy about telling people.
Slade:
Okay.
Ian:
I... Just last October, had an interview with the local newspaper and my picture's in it and it's titled Appalacian Witchery. So if people have read the paper, they saw my face, they read an article about me. It's not something I've ever really hidden.
It does, obviously, get a lot of weird looks or eye rolls sometimes, but that just kind of comes with that whole idea of being a witch. People don't want to think that we exist sometimes or that we're just crazy people.
So it's something I've gotten used to. I've gotten a thicker skin over the years.
Slade:
One of the reasons I ask that question, and I've started asking it of a lot of the people that I interview is because so many of the people who listen to this show and the people that I work with in particular, are in some kind of process of sort of coming out of the broom closet, or coming out of the psychic closet. Coming out of some kind of closet, right?
It's helpful to hear other people's stories and also hear sometimes that we don't all just walk around, you know, like carrying a sign, you know?
Ian:
Oh yeah!
Slade:
You know, there's a very, varied nuances to how we answer that question and how we go about in the public.
And you've been confronted with the very real reality of having the local newspaper feature you, whereas I'm kind of anonymous locally but yet more globally visible, you know what I mean?
So it must be a little bit different being like, but you're the town witch, you know! Everyone's gotta have one, right?
Ian:
Exactly. Exactly.
Historically, yeah. Every village had a witch or shaman who could do herbalism, who would also do magic on the side. So yeah, every village, every town, usually had someone that they would go to, and I'm okay with being that.
And I'm not the only one here in Johnson City. Believe me. There are plenty of witches here. I guess I am probably one of the more outspoken ones who hasn't hid himself away, or herself away.
So with that does a certain lack of anonymity within the public locally. And I'm okay with that. I like taking care of my community. People who you wouldn't suspect would come to me for readings, for discussion of spell creation and that sort of thing.
People who are, you know, ministers' wives, ministers themselves, but, that's days... kind of like, I always view it as a... almost like a psychologist sort of thing where, if you come to me, you come to me and it doesn't leave this room. No one's going to know your name, no one's going to know what we talked about.
Slade:
Right.
Ian:
It's definitely helped word of mouth, I guess, for my business, if you want to look at it that way, but it's more of a, I like taking care of my local community. Not that I don't care about my global community, I do care about them but, growing up in the 90s, there was that whole 'think locally'.. 'think globally, act locally', adage, so I've always kind of tried to live by that adage.
If I can affect my small town in some way, then they'll start affecting the world at a larger rate than I could by myself.
Slade:
Yeah, well listen, there are people who listen to this show from all over the world. I mean, Australia, Singapore (I have a lot of fans in Singapore for some reason - hey guys!), Europe... You know, places where, even maybe there's people in Canada who don't really know about the Appalachian region and culture that we're talking about.
You are from a city called Johnson City, which is in northeast Tennessee, kind of in the corner with North Carolina and Virginia.
So if you would, just kind of explain for everybody a little bit about what Appalachian magic and folk lore is, as, you know, how you would sum it up.
Ian:
Okay, well, the first thing that I always do in my classes is discuss the word that you're pronouncing. You're saying, Appa-LAY-chia, I pronounce it Appa-LATCH-a.
Slade:
Mmhmm.
Ian:
And there's a reason for that.
There's kind of an imaginary line, like the Mason/Dixon line, about the pronunciation of the word of the mountains that we live in. And below this imaginary line, so probably somewhere below Washington DC, northern Virginia, sort of area, you're going to hear it pronounced Appalachia. Above that they're going to say Appalachia.
And part of that is, you know, it's just dialect. But it was a way for people back in the 1800s into the early 1900s to know who was an outsider and who could be trusted.
Because the carpet baggers who would come down to the south, into the Appalachian mountains, or the coal miners or the coal companies who would send in people from the north, they would say Appalachia and we learned they weren't fully to be trusted because were exploiting us. They were stealing our land, they were stealing our property. Stealing our coal, taking our trees and then leaving us in poverty.
And so, words, first off, have a lot of power. They have a lot of meaning, so... and it's not wrong to say Appalachia, because the people in the Appalachian mountains into Pennslyvania, Vermont and Maine, they DO pronounce it Appalachia. So their pronunciation is right for them, but when you're talking southern Appalachia, it's more proper to use that pronunciation of Appalachia.
Slade:
So I sound like a carpet bagger! What the hell. I'm from Tennessee!
Actually, you know what would be funny is if I wasn't looking at that word written down and I was surrounded by my family (because my dialect changes depending on who I'm speaking with) I wonder which way I would say it if I wasn't thinking about it.
I'm going to be listening for it now and like, how my family says it.
Anyway. I didn't mean to interrupt. But go ahead.
Ian:
Oh no, that's perfectly fine because what you just talked about is like, if you were hanging out with your family, how would you say it? That's what we call code switching. We all have different ways of talking and different words that we use, depending on who we're talking to and what event's going on.
There's a great book by a great professor of mine who I, from the University of Virginia's college at Wise. Her name's Amy Clark. She wrote, or she edited a book called Talking Appalachia, and it's a book of collected essays about, or people from around the Appalachian region who wrote about code switching, basically, how they talk and why they talked the way they did.
It's a fascinating thing if you're into linguistics.
Slade:
I was a linguistics major originally in college, yeah! Yes I am interested in that!
Ian:
Yeah, so, that's a good thing and I've totally rambled off of your first question.
So, your question was more about Appalachian magic and folk lore, correct?
Slade:
Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, a lot of people... So we've identified a little bit of the area physically, geographically, that we're talking about.
Why don't you tell us where the magic part comes from, or maybe what's unique about Appalachian magic? Where did this fusion of stuff come from?
Ian:
Okay.
So Appalachian folk magic is really kind of a conglomeration of Scot beliefs, Irish beliefs, English beliefs, German, and a little bit of Turkey, practices, as within this area because it was pretty isolated and even to this day, they consider the Appalachians isolated, from the rest of the larger United States.
But, these groups of people started settling here in these mountains and they would share some of their beliefs with one another and they kind of just created a mixing pot, a nice mix in a cauldron, if you want to keep good doing the witch stuff, beliefs and culture and created something that was more unique.
I think it's probably the most American of practices. Because I mean, you do have folk magic in New England, but it was very much colonial English practices that they continued because that was who settled there.
In the mountains, you had more, more people who came from sort of the lower echelons of society, so to speak, come in to the mountains because they said, 'Oh! No one settled here. There's plenty of land. Let's move here and create our own wealth, not realizing how rocky and sandy the mountains were, not really fit for a lot of farming.
So then their life, the hard scrabble life, created different myths, different practices, different folk lores... Things like the wampus cat are definitely Appalachian in origin.
That's sort of how all this came about was. Different people from different, but similar backgrounds, coming together to live and then just having to share with one another because of how isolated the area actually was at the time.
Slade:
Hmm... Okay, okay.
So you mentioned the wampus cat. What are some of the topics that you teach classes about when you teach Appalachian folk lore? Just kind of tell us, what are some of the topics?
Ian:
The first one that I always like to teach, and I usually teach it maybe twice a year, once in the spring and once in the fall, as just kind of an introduction to Appalachian folk lore and magic, and that just covers a broad series of topics, such as who settled the area, where do we get it, some folk remedies.
I discuss some of the legends like the wampus cat or, as he's now become named, the Wood Booger, which is not the most flattering of a name for a creature in Appalachia, but, you know, whatever. Call it whatever you want. It's a big hairy man, kind of like a big foot running around in our woods.
And then we talk about divination techniques and in some of the other classes I do a class just on divination techniques that are unique here to this area, which, of course, are also similar to other things that people do in the broader world, like dowsing is a big thing within the mountains, especially what they call water witching, and that's where a person has a special ability to find water would take a specific type of wood, and the wood varied, depending on the family.
My grandfather used peach tree wood to dowse for water to dig a well. Whereas other families I've known, they use ash or even elder to dowse with. But then of course, water witching is, has been done all over the world and also pendulum, using things like a wedding band on the woman's... taking a piece of hair from the woman's head and dangling her wedding band over her pregnant belly would indicate male or female.
I teach a class on just specifically Appalachian techniques.
I also teach classes on how to read playing cards as a divination tool and tarot cards. I teach some modern witchcraft classes.
Slade:
Well, let me take you back into the past a little bit and come back up to where your knowledge is now, but...
So for a long time I've really been wanting to talk to someone on the show about witchcraft and magic because I come to all of this new age stuff from an identification as a witch at a really young age and so my family is very much Appalachian and I've got some Appalachian witchery, you know, a few steps back, like grandparents, but I very much grew up in suburbia.
So for the most part, I grew up in Knoxville, Tennessee, so, you know, a decent sized city suburbia, so my identification as a witch (I have to tell you this story because i haven't told it to other people), but I was probably about 8 or 9 years old because I actually looked it up to see when the Fleetwood Mac album Rumours came, because that was 1977. I loved that album.
I remember, it must have been soon after that because my family was going on a car trip somewhere, like maybe to Florida or something long like that and I think my mom had told me that I could buy a magazine at the grocery store. So I got her to buy me a Rolling Stone magazine which she was kind of like, Why do you want a Rolling Stone magazine, you know, you're 8!
But it was because there was a feature on Stevie Nicks, and in that magazine, I got it because it was just HER and it was cool pictures of her and I was like, Oh, Stevie!
Ian:
Oh yeah!
Slade:
So I'm in the back of the car driving through Georgia in 1970-something and I'm reading Stevie Nicks talking about white witchcraft and how, you know, she's a white witch and all this stuff. And I had this total epiphany of like, Ohmygod, I'm a white witch, that's what I am!
From that point on, I was always interested in wicca as a teenager and in college, I kind of discovered... I did a Women's Studies certificate in college, just because it was like you could take these more interesting cool kind of classes that were feminists but they were within different things, like some kind of feminist history or something like that and...
After you took so many of them, they actually will give you a certificate in Women's Studies and sometimes I was the only guy in these classes but I just liked the topics. I would the syllabus, or the class listed in the roster and be like, Oh that sounds amazing!
So anyway, I got turned on through this Irish women's studies teacher of mine to all this really modern feminist paganism, right? So I was reading, one of my favorite books is, there was an NPR reported named Margot Adler who wrote a book called Drawing Down the Moon. It's kind of a collection of all the various different types of modern witchcraft in America, or modern neopaganism.
And then probably the big one for me, a big game changer was The Spiral Dance by Starhawk. That was when I kind of connected the whole feminine principle of the goddess, you know, like the lifeforce in the Universe as being a feminine thing, which was instinctively true for me and she kind of made that intellectual connection for me, in a way.
So anyway, I'm wondering, what is your version of that? What were your... How did you come to this? Were there other people in your family or did you just.. you know, were you encouraged? Discouraged?
What was your story of how you discovered this part of yourself?
Ian:
Oh yeah!
I guess the easiest way to explain it, I have to go back to the 80s, when I was first... Because I was only born in '83, so... It was a weird time, being born in '83 or the late 80s in the area of the Appalachians that I grew up in. Because I grew up, like I said, in Wise, Virginia, and that is on the very tail end of Virginia. It's about 20 minute drive to Kentucky.
Coal had started to fail. It was no longer king in the area, and so people were starting to lose jobs. Mines were closing down. The world there was trying to figure out what to do next. Sadly, they still haven't figured it out. But that's a whole other podcast...
Slade:
Yeah, right.
Ian:
...to talk about the devastation of coal companies on the people within Appalachia.
That area was very stuck, trying to figure out, how do we move in to a sort of modern mindset when we don't want to? We still want to be very old-fashioned, very traditional, in our community, and I kind of got swept up in that as I was coming of age, thinking, there's nothing here for me. Watching MTV and thinking, Oh, I'm going to be on Real World or Road Rules and that's how I'm going to see the world.
Trying to get away from it but very deeply still wanting to connect with where I was being born.
And the word 'witch' was never used in my family as far as describing my aunts, or my great aunts, or my great uncles, or any of that. Because they were very Christian, and that's also something I try to stress in my classes is, I use the word 'witch' because I think it's the most apt word, and witchcraft is the most apt word for describing the practices people did here.
But they were very staunchly Christian.
And so, everything they did came through the power of prayer to Jesus or to God. They weren't real hip on the Catholics either.
Slade:
Right.
Ian:
There are many a sermon I sat through connecting Catholicism basically to Satanism. So growing up, they weren't real hip on Catholics, even though my dad is from, well, he's an army brat but his family ended up settling in the Fairfax area and they ARE Catholic, so half of my family is Catholic and the other half is very traditional southern and Free Will Baptists in the mountains.
But everyone in my family still did things. They would interpret dreams, they would talk about ghost stories. The professor I mentioned earlier, Amy Clark, in her English composition class, I think it was Composition 102, she made us do an oral history report and I went and interviewed my great aunt Fern, and collected all sorts of folk lore and stories about the road I grew up on. Because growing up, it was mostly all my family that lived on this road.
She shared a story about how my grandmother and her cousin Ione used to go stay with this lady out on this back road called Red Wine. And everyone thought she was a witch. Things would move in her house without her touching them, and my aunt Fern didn't really know a whole lot because she was never invited to go sleepover there, so she just got second-handed stories..
There were definitely stories growing up that I would hear and then there were also the herbal remedies that my grandmother would make, or other people in the family would make for people being sick.
I started having dreams from a very young age, where I was like, Oh, this is actually real. This is happening. And they were more literal dreams. They weren't the ones I would have to go interpret like, Oh, there were three cows in my dream. What does that mean?
It was like, Oh, I'm walking into a church and here's someone that hasn't been in church sitting there and they're getting ready to give a testimony about how they've been sick and then that Sunday we'd go to church and that would happen.
And I was like, Oh, this is interesting.
And I also just really loved stories about witches, about vampires, about the monsters... That was where my interest as a very young child was at. Like, I remember specifically in second grade, my best friend Ashley had wore her mother's winter cloak to school and we went to library. I took her cloak and put it on like a cape and was running around like I was a vampire. I very specifically remember that because I got in trouble for that. Because it was a library and I was not supposed to be running around having all this fun.
While everyone else was there checking out the Hardy Boys books, I was in the weird section checking out the children's versions of Frankenstein or Dracula, those sorts of books.
So I would try to watch anything on TV that my mother would allow me to watch about witchcraft or whatever and I became... obsessed is probably the best word for it. Kind of became obsessed with it, especially the Salem Witch Trials.
Halloween is still my favorite holiday to this day so I always looked forward to the fall and specifically, October, because then, you know, when Discovery channel and the History channel were actually about science and history, they would show specials about the history of witchcraft, or the history of vampirism. Even if they repeated the same thing ten times that month, I would watch it every time it came on.
Slade:
Yeah.
Ian:
And then when I was 13, we took a trip to... It was a whole big family trip. We drove with the entire family, some uncles, some aunts, up to Gettysburg to see the re-enactment, probably on 4th of July, around the 4th of July because I think that's when they do all their re-enactments.
So we went there and then we were following my mom's brother on up to Connecticut where him and his wife had moved to, and I realized that Connecticut was very close to Massachusetts. I convinced my family to take a day trip to Salem.
So one day we all piled in the car, drove I think 5 - 6 hours to Salem. And I was... I guess awestruck is probably the best word for it. Because I was like, Wow they're talking about witchcraft like it's something that anyone can do. That it's actually real and tangible and I remember seeing this woman walking down the street in long black robes with her staff and black hair flowing.
And then I discovered who that was, and it's a woman named Laurie Cabot, the official witch of Salem. I was like, Wow, witches are real!
I bought my first deck of tarot cards when I was there and then we came home and I just started reading tarot cards with the little white book that came with it, for friends and family.
That slowly started to develop more and more, and then I purchased a couple of books on wicca and witchcraft, one being Laurie Cabot's book, The Power of the Witch. And then a book by Scott Cunningham, I think it was Wicca: A Guide for the Solitary Practitioner. And then I discovered, Oh! There's a shop in Kingsport called Dilly's Curiosity Shop. And they had books and herbs and candles. It wasn't JUST a witch shop.
They had tons of stuff on the New Age movement, on Hinduism. It was just kind of a hippie, new age sort of store, and once I became old enough to drive, you could usually find me there every weekend or every other weekend, spending my hard-saved allowance on books and candles and things that I needed.
So it really started from there, was when I really discovered, Oh wow... So about 13. Wow, witchcraft is real and, you know, this is what my family's been doing and what I've been doing naturally for years.
Starting to study it from there just kind of helped develop it more into something that wasn't just an occasional, Oh I'm having a dream, or I'm getting a sensation from meeting this person, or I feel like I need to leave some food outside for whatever gunk might be creeping around outside to protect the house. That sort of thing.
It wasn't just something that I did spontaneously anymore. It became more of a honed practice.
Slade:
Yeah... Yeah I was going to ask you, actually, let's see, I'm going to come back to that and ask you a little bit about your personal practice but...
I'm interested in, first of all, all those books were taking me back. I used to work in one of those stores, like your're talking about. It was called The New Moon. I basically was the person who chose the books for the magic section.
All the people who worked there, we all kind of had our different area of expertise. There was somebody who did all the crystals and stones. There was a guy who was a Druid and he did all of that. There was a guy who was into Buddhism, so all that section of the store, he would advise the owner what to buy.
My thing was goddess spirituality, wicca, this whole thing. So the books that you're naming off, I'm like, Yeah, yeah we had that book, we had that book.
I'm interested, you know, when I was talking about Starhawk. Starhawk always defined magic, which she took from someone named Dion Fortune, as the art of changing consciousness at will. So I kind of wonder, what's your definition of magic? What is that, to you? How does it work?
Ian:
Yeah. It's a question that, you know, most people want to know a definition too. And as I said, I've studied and practiced for 20-something years, so I've read all the definitions, Dion Fortune, Starhawk, Aleister Crowley, and I think, yes, they're all pretty accurate.
The art of changing consciousness at will - I like to take it a little step further and it's more than just changing your consciousness. It's also... Because changing your consciousness is one thing. But being able to change physical reality is a whole other, and I know they...
As you get deeper into the magic conversations and topics, we talk about micro and macrocosms and how if you change your consciousness and you are changing physical reality but being able to literally change your physical reality is part of my definition of magic.
So it would be more like the art of changing physical reality and your consciousness at will, in alignment with natural forces. Because I don't believe that there is anything really supernatural about anything that witches do. We are using natural energies and natural forces. We're just using it in a way that most people aren't aware of the ability of how to manipulate those energies to effect the change we want to see.
Slade:
She goes on in her definition, she talks about the art part as using sensory imagery and symbols that evoke emotions and then the will is kind of directed energy and intention, and together, those things sort of mix and shift, because we're kind of swimming around in this emotional-thought-energy soup, or whatever.
You know what's interesting to me, see, is that sounds like people talking about Law of Attraction and talking about manifesting. I started blogging 12 or 13 years ago and the vocabulary that was popularized by The Secret sort of eclipsed some of what we call magic. It was like, no longer fashionable to use the word 'magic', now it's 'manifesting'.
Do you have any observations about the relationship between those things? Is that something that you notice as well?
Ian:
Okay. So yeah.
I definitely believe that there is validity in the Law of Attraction in its relation to magic. I am definitely not going to be your love and light person when it comes to this conversation because I think most of what we get with Law of Attraction is bullshit for the most part.
When it comes down to - you have cancer because you wanted cancer - you wanted to be sick, I think it's especially (and I don't want to name names because I don't want to start any internet wars with anyone), but there are people who purport this Law of Attraction and about being in alignment with it, or stepping out of it, and you have to step out of it to know when you're in alignment with your Law of Attraction.
It's very victim-blaming to me.
Slade:
Yeah.
Ian:
The way that they discuss it sometimes. And it's not helpful. And it's not been official, for the people who were in crisis mode, because then they think, Oh well I did this to myself.
And yes, there is a part of it that I believe we do to ourselves. We make choices, whether they're conscious or subconscious choices, we make them, that create our realities. I mean, that's true. If I choose not to do something, I'm going to have the consequences of that action.
But the manifestation of magic is definitely, you do certain things to attract what you're trying to get in your life.
If I'm trying to get a job, I'm going to put my energy into my resume of attracting the job I want. And as a witch, I will take it a step further and anoint the edge of my resume with an oil blend I've made to attract a good job for me. Or the best job for my highest good.
I'm going to do that and send the resume in and I guess now, most things are electronic. I know some witches who, electronically, they have a very faint... what's the word that I'm looking for... it's on the back of paper that you put on... a watermark! A very faint watermark of a sigil that they created.
And, a sigil, you know, is just an image that you create and you imbue with a certain energy. So they would create a job sigil and put that onto the back of their resume before they emailed it out.
And so, for me, that's more how the Law of Attraction works. It kind of goes back to the ideas that I grew up with. Being raised in a Christian home, but a magical Christian home. You know. God helps those who help themselves.
So if you're acting in alignment with something that you want, then the Universe is going to provide that. But you have to do it in the accurate way.
And so, for me, I don't like using the term Law of Attraction just because of all of that baggage that I feel comes with it. And how simplified things like The Secret made it. It's not just, Ooo I'm going to sit in my house and make a pretty dream board and hang it up and it's going to manifest. At least in my experience, it's been, You can do that, but if you don't put in the work to try to manifest it, the Universe isn't going to give it to you.
I think the Law of Attraction has been simplified and that it has... Because the new age movement has a lot of money behind it, especially when you're being published by people like Harper Collins or the bigger publishing companies. They can definitely get you more exposure than Llewellyn could get you. I don't think you'll see many Llewellyn books on the best seller's list the way that you will, you know, Penguin or Harper Collins. Those sorts of publishing companies.
So definitely if it's going to feed the capitalist society, then they're going to pounce on it. And so, yeah, I guess that's my answer for your question on Law of Attraction!
Slade:
That's cool!
I'm very happy to hear your take on all that because it does... I think it always sort of... I feel the contrast in it and I'm always aware, kind of, of the intersection of that terminology, so... I'm one of those people who I use other people's vocabulary in order to reach them. Like you were saying, for instance, there are a lot of really Christian people who use Christian vocabulary to talk about magic, so if I'm going to talk about magic to them, I'm going to use their vocabulary because otherwise you shut them down if you start coming at them with, you know, like calling it the 'goddess'.
If you're talking to a 90-year old woman about folk lore and she's talking about Jesus, just call it Jesus. You know what I mean?
Ian:
Exactly.
Slade:
Just keep on going.
So, to me, it's always a language thing. It's interesting. Your whole thing about the word 'Appalachia', I did not know that specifically, so that was a huge epiphany for me to hear that about the idea of how it identified someone from being somewhere else.
I was a linguistics major and I'm always interested in language and, to me, as a writer, magic and spell-crafting is very much, sort of rooted in a lot of language and when I do assessments of my mentoring students, I actually listen for the way in which they speak about these things.
And that doesn't mean the obvious stuff like the symbolism and the archetypes and the buzzwords. I actually am listening for the actual words that they use, like, are they using passive language, are they using a lot of visual language, do they speak emotionally, those kind of things sometimes tell you a lot.
It's subtext.
Ian:
Yes.
Slade:
To shorten the story.
So I'm interested... you touched on a couple of things. The whole thing about the resume was interesting.
What other kind of... not the things you necessarily do for your clients that you teach, but just in your own personal life, what kind of rituals do you observe? Or what kinds of magic do you do every day, kind of household magic?
Ian:
Okay, yeah.
So household magic. That's always been kind of a big part of most folk magic. I always like calling it 'folk' magic instead of calling it 'low' magic because it makes it seem like it's something less worthy, because by definition, 'high magic' is like super occulty sort of things where you have to have a special robe and special pentograms painted on the floor.
And then, I don't know who popularized the terms 'high' and 'low' magic but low magic was what the common folk did, and you know what? I'm a common folk. I like being a common folk. I don't want all the responsibility of being John Dee and deciphering things for Queen Elizabeth.
That's not my interest area. I don't want to go and sit in the White House, especially this White House, and manifest messages for any political figure, especially what we have now.
So my daily practice, there is, and this is something that people from almost all backgrounds, culturally, they have, if they dig deep enough, is ancestor veneration. Ancestors play a big part in my practice, and in the practice of the Appalachian people, as well as other cultures as well. I'm not forgetting them.
It's big in hoodoo and voodoo as well, in African American and African traditions. But it's also big in European traditions.
And so I definitely try to make sure I light a candle for my ancestor's altar every day and just kind of say hello to them. Let them know that I'm still thinking of them and, thanks for being who you were because then I can't be who I am if it wasn't for you.
And that's not to say that all my ancestors were great people because they weren't. We all have those rotten branches and the rotten fruit on our family trees, and so, in classes, I do teach ways to kind of, you know, you don't want to invite all of your entire ancestry into your home because you might have a child molester or murderer or serial rapist in your family and that's definitely not what you want to invite into your home. So I teach ways to kind of try to helpfully, try to hopefully help them along on the other side to get to where they need to be.
In my practice, I try to light a candle for them every day, just saying thank you, because sometimes, my magic is just me going to the alter and saying, I really need your help. This is the situation.
And I'll bring them food. I'll cook them a special meal of whatever it is that they specifically like. Usually it's cornbread or something very southern. Cornbread, soup beans, pork chops, really salty country ham that I can't try to eat because it's too salty, but I will set it at their alter and light the candles and kind of say a prayer to them.
It's sort of like the idea of Catholics asking saints for help. That's how a lot of witches use ancestors, and sometimes that's all you need to do to get help. You might get answers in your dreams from one of your ancestors. And it might be even someone that you don't know is your ancestor. A random person will pop up in your dream and give you the answer.
Or things just start magically happening in your life, like I was really needing help to get this job and then suddenly you get 4 job offers. That sort of thing.
I try to bless my food before I eat it. I do a lot of garden work. So I definitely try to take care of the plant spirits. In my belief structure, every ... I'm what you would consider an animist, so I definitely believe that every plant has its own very specific spirit, the dirt has it's own spirit, so I try to get to know that spirit, talk to it, learn about it.
I am the crazy person in my condos that's seen outside mumbling to themselves and I think that's where the idea of witches, you know, muttering to themselves came from, is that we talk to everything. Things that no one else would see, we would be talking to the trees, to the plants, to the birds that were up in the trees, and also muttering spells under our breath for, usually for the good.
Not all witches do things for the good of all, but I mean, that's usually my general practice. I don't a daily spell. I'm not... mostly because my life doesn't dictate that I need it. My life isn't that hectic that, I have to put it back together, always!
Slade:
Right.
Ian:
I do magically craft things. I make what's now commonly referred to as Books of Shadows, you know, spell books. I tea-stain pages with special herbs for special meanings, like keeping secrets and keeping power in the book and I'll bind them and add in special pictures and I try to sell them. Sometimes I just give them as gifts.
I do magical crafts pretty much on the regular, making witches' cords, which is kind of a braided cord with special items like oak leaves or tarot cards, feathers, generally I have a very specific purpose in mind for each of them. I will make one for protection of the house, one to get a job, one to be enchanting, to have enchantments over people to make you feel... kind of like a glamour.. make yourself look more appealing and you just kind of really hang these in your home or your office for whatever purpose it is that you..
I would create it for you and, just looking at it, kind of helps imbue you with that energy because all the energy is there and kind of just drips down, like a rain cord..
And so, that's pretty much basically my daily practice. Like I said, I don't do spells every day just because my life doesn't dictate it, that I need to do a spell every day.
But I do sit in communication with the spirit world almost every day. Whether that's plant spirits or my ancestor spirits or both.
Slade:
You are like me, you're like a like-minded soul in that you want this to be normal and part of your every day life. Like, it doesn't have to be some high ritual, like there's something almost off-putting about that, to me. Whereas something that I can incorporate into my daily existence, I'm a big sweeper. I sweep a lot.
Ian:
Oh yeah.
Slade:
You were talking about, that's where the images of witches outside, you know, crazy people muttering spells to themselves, I'm outside sweeping all the time. I'm that weird little old person who's like, I'm practicing for when I'm a little old man out there sweeping the sidewalk.
So you've talked a little bit about these magical crafts. Now how does that play into, you do professional magical consultations and you create spells for people. So is there something similar in what you do for your clients?
Ian:
Yeah. Definitely.
Just to get back to the brooms, I'm obsessed with brooms. I have... I don't know how many brooms I have hanging in the house, but I love brooms. I love the magic of sweeping. I have a specific broom for sweeping my front lawn, and then I have a specific broom that I use if I go to a client's house to clean out energy or angry ghosts or that sort of thing, that I only use for that specific purpose.
Magical consultations might involve my broom, depends on what they come to me for. A client will, you know, usually contact me on my Facebook page or my number is on my Facebook page too, or they'll call me. And they will set up an appointment time.
Sometimes I know beforehand because they want to share a little bit over phone about, this is why I need to come meet you. I'm having a hard time in my marriage, or I'm having a hard time finding a job.
In the meeting, I take a lot of notes. I know that's off-putting for some clients. Like, why are you writing this down? And I'll write it down because, while I will remember most of things, I don't remember everything when I go back home, and start creating a spell or ritual for the person.
And so, they'll bring me their issue, or their troubles, or what they're trying to magically create in their life. And, the consultation usually involves a reading of some sort. I'll get my cards out and see if there's some, if there is a block to what you're trying to do. Because sometimes we do create blocks for ourselves. Or there are people in our life that are blocks.
Like if you're trying to save your marriage but your partner is not wanting to save your marriage and they're completely over that marriage, you don't want to try to force a marriage with someone who's really trying to escape it.
And so, it's important for me to do these readings that I'm doing, consultations, because I don't want to trap someone into a marriage that will eventually make both people completely miserable.
Or, the job that they're trying to get, we will look at that specific job and kind of look at the future and be like, Oh, you will be happy here so I'll craft something to help you be more enchanting in your interviews, or just draw the energy to you specifically for this job.
Or if it's the other way, this job is going to be a terrible fit for you. You will like it for a bit but then it's going to be super draining. I would do something more like a road opener, so to speak, to make them more open to more offers of jobs, to a bigger spectrum of jobs, where they might need to take that job initially, but continuing to be open and going out and try to attract the job that's going to be most beneficial for them.
So I will sit down and talk with the person, do a reading, and then I usually try to bring so many different herbs and things with me, so I can create little baths the person can take if they need a cleansing bath, or a bath to make them have more self-esteem, that sort of thing.
I can create that on the spot and give it to them. But if it's something that requires more work, like if I have to go purchase certain items that I don't have on hand, then we set up another time to meet.
If it's something that I need them to do, because for me, magic is most potent if the person that needs the magic is involved in it in some physical way. Whereas if I'm just at my house, doing a spell for you, I'm not going to have as much emotion in it as you are going to be able to manifest for yourself. Because it's affecting you more than it is me. I can pull up as much emotion as I possibly can, and I do, and I send it out.
Not every spell is going to work. It's kind of a 70, 80% chance that it's going to manifest the way you want it to. Because... I'm a big advocate when I talk about magic is, magic is going to take the path of least resistance.
So you need to be specific and general at the same time in what you're trying to manifest. I know that sounds like a contradiction, to be general and specific, but if you're just, Oh, I need money, and we do a money spell, you might get an inheritance but your mother might die. And that's not what you're trying to manifest.
So you want money, but what do you want that money for? So you want that money because you want to go on vacation. So let's do a spell for that vacation instead of just money.
Slade:
Interesting, yes.
Ian:
And that's where the consultation come in handy instead of someone just sending me a message saying, hey I need a spell for this, and me sitting down, okay cool. I'll just write you the spell and do all the stuff in the instructions and you do it. Because it might manifest in a way they aren't expecting or wanting.
And so, getting... And that's why I take so many notes. Getting down to the nitty gritty, exactly what the person is trying to create with their lives, dictates exactly what type of spell or magical ritual, if I feel it needs to get to that point would dictate.
Slade:
Is this something that you always have to do in person or can you do it over the phone and send people things?
Ian:
I can do it over the phone and then mail all the stuff out. Sometimes there are things that I will do on my end. And then I'll just send pictures of my work as I'm going along so they know I'm actually doing it.
Slade:
Okay.
Ian:
Instead of, you know, there are crooks out there who, I would do a spell for you, send me $400!
Slade:
Right.
Ian:
And then they sit at home and eat popcorn and watch Netflix. And then send you a message, I've done it!
You should see it happening.
I try to keep things on the up and up as much as possible. So I will send people pictures as much as I can. I do think sometimes taking pictures and documenting it can sometimes zap a bit of the energy out of it because... that's my own personal belief. I'm kind of going back to the idea of electronics pulling energy, but...
Slade:
Huh...
Well, I think that, well one thing that electronics does do is it allows us to reach people that aren't here. It takes away the distance somewhat, so that you can, you know, speak to somebody that's on the other side of the country.
But I would think that, the fact that there is this sort of physical object that you often create, you know, like the cords or a little grimoire or something like that, there's something, you know, the reason I can never be a Buddhist is because I like attaching energy and emotion to things.
I find objects that have been imbued with power and emotion and association and intention to be extremely delicious and I want them sitting around on my shelves and stuff, you know?
I think that's one of the ways in which magic really differs, but I would think that there would be something to that sort of crafted item that is uniquely special, to the way that you do readings and healings.
In working with people who do different kinds of readings or healings, I usually talk to them about the idea that there's a diagnostic part of their session and there's a healing active part of the session.
For me, it's all language. It's all words. It's basically, I'm an enabler and I can give you a big pep talk and that is the way that I heal.
For other people, it might be something like, doing reiki, or like you said, it might be going clearing spirits or it might be crafting this item, spell, and then you use the intuitive part as a kind of diagnosis. Like, what's really going on here before I go messing with it? What's underneath the layers?
I think that your practice is really kind of cool and unique and the reason why I asked about if you could do it at a distance because I know that there are a lot of people listening who are going to want you to now, and you know, gonna contact you and say, Wait a minute! Can you do this over the phone because I really want one.
Let me... Before we talk about how people can get in touch with you, I just want to ask you a couple of questions.
One is... Are we doing okay on time for you?
Ian:
Oh yeah.
Slade:
Okay cool. I'm loving this conversation. I could talk to you all day. You can come back once a month.
So what do you most hope to contribute to the sort of greater conversation about spirituality and new age stuff? You touched on the idea that, of course, being published by a major publisher can sometimes falsely put those ideas forward. I'm very much a proud indie author, podcaster, and...
If you can put your work out there into the world, what is something that you kind of hope to maybe change about everybody's perception about magic.
Ian:
Well, I guess it's two-fold.
My main goal, when I started Appalachian Witchery, was to try to preserve Appalachian culture, at least an aspect of Appalachian culture that has kind of been pushed into the dark corners.
Even people who do Appalachian studies, they don't really, or at least in my experience, because I haven't read every Appalachian studies paper or book known to man, but they don't really discuss a lot of the witch folklore, or the magic that they would do.
So I was very worried that it was a part that was kind of being lost in the conversation when we were talking about Appalachia. And so, I kind of wanted to bring that to the forefront because I'm very proud of where I'm from.
I'm not ashamed to say I was born in a very small town. I think we had 2000 people in it, and I think the county may have had 6000 people altogether.
And then when it comes to witchcraft and magic, just that, I want to de-myst... not really demystify it, because there is power in it being kind of a sacred, hidden spooky sort of thing, but that it is something that... I can sit down and craft you this spell but you are going to be the one that... I need you to actually do part of it for me.
So that everyone can kind of understand that everybody has the ability. Everyone has the ability to tap in to these natural forces and kind of take charge of their own life in the process.
Because, I mean, we live in the quick-fix prescription society where, I have a problem. Give me a pill. Let's fix it. And I think that kind of correlates into the occult world, the new age world at large. People come to healers and workers and think that we can fix them in one session. And they don't have to go home and do any work on their own.
And that's sadly not the case.
If you go and get reiki, yeah you're going to feel better. But when you go home, you need to take some of the things that you've learned in your session and start applying them to your life. If you're not applying them, then you're not actually doing the work and you'll start making those decisions again and ending up in the same place.
So it kind of goes back to that whole, idea of power of attraction. If you're not willing to make the changes, then you just keep attracting the same thing that you've been doing.
And so, for me, when I do the consultations or I do the readings, I really try to embed that idea that, it's good that you're coming to me for getting an outsider's perspective. Because you're getting some advice, some knowledge that you wouldn't have had otherwise, but ultimately the work lies with you in order to make those changes.
I can assist you and I can help you at that, but it is mostly personal responsibility. And I guess that's really what I try to stress most. Is preservation of a culture and personal responsibility for your life.
Slade:
If someone's listening to this and realizing for the first time that they might be a witch because of our conversation, which will happen. What would you advise them to do first? Like, if they feel this real flush of like, Ohmygod, this is amazing, this is the thing for me.
Where would a new person go to kind of begin learning about this? Do you have any particular resources or books or things that you would recommend?
Ian:
The first thing I would say is, if you're kind of acknowledging, Oh wow, I might be a witch, is not to go running through the streets announcing that to everyone. Because that...
And we do that sometimes when we discover something new that we're very passionate about. We're like, Oh this is what I am, this is who I am.
Slade:
Yeah...
Ian:
And it's off-putting, especially when you're, if we're talking, I might be a witch, is, you will encounter a lot of those people that are going to try to extinguish that light. Tell you you're crazy, it doesn't work, it's just nonsense, so that's my first advice is, don't run out telling everyone what you think unless they're someone you can really trust.
And so, finding those people is the next step. And there are resources like The Witch's Voice online, I think it's www.WitchVox.com
Slade:
Okay.
Ian:
And they have a dropdown menu on one of the, either the right or left hand side, I haven't been to the website in awhile, and you can select your state or your country of where you're living, and then narrow it down. People post group meetups there, they post kind of personals. Years ago I had one on there myself. Trying just to meet like-minded people to talk and discuss...
Facebook is a great resource. I'm a member of a lot of groups, like Pagans of the Northeast, which is all situated north-east Tennessee. There's Friends of TC, which is Friends of the Tri-City, which is what we call the area I live in. Johnson City, Bristol, Kingsport, is a Tri-City area. And then anyone who is any sort of pagan or witch, can post their events, can post meetups there.
So finding those people, and you can just go into like, Facebook and type in "San Diego witchcraft" and you're going probably going to find a ton of options, groups, that sort of thing there.
Books-wise, I always like to start people out with the basics. One being, I am a Cabot Witch. I've trained with Laurie Cabot and I'm actually going for my second degree in two weeks.
Slade:
I forgot to ask you about that - yes take a second and explain what that is. The Cabot Tradition.
Ian:
Okay. Yeah!
So the Cabot Tradition is created by Laurie Cabot. It's known as the Cabot Kent Tradition and Laurie Cabot is just a fascinating woman. She was one of the first to be a public witch in America in the early '70s. And she had been initiated and trained by some witches in Boston, I believe, back when she was, I think, 15. They came from Kent, England.
When she started teaching publicly, she titled her tradition the Cabot Kent Tradition because she had added some of her own flavour into things, which is always so important to me, when people are trying to teach witchcraft, I'm like, you need to have done it long enough, for one, to teach it, and two, to have your own, sort of ideas and structure and traditions that you've created to teach.
Because witchcraft is a very personal thing, and that's something that Laurie brought to it, was that she had spent all these years crafting herself as a witch and had all these years of knowledge.
So she started teaching in Salem in the mid-70s and I think by the late 70s, Dukakis, Governer Dukakis I think he was at the time, gave her the official title of Official Witch of Salem.
Since then, she has been on Oprah, a bunch of other talk shows, teaching about witchcraft and her tradition.
And she, to this day, she's 85 now, and she's still teaching the classes and being present at the rituals, the 8 Sabbats that they follow. The 8 high holidays for her tradition, and for kind of witchcraft at large. We have 8 holidays that we usually follow. Some traditions are a little different than others and they don't do all 8, but...
About 2 years ago, I had the availability, the time and the money to go and study in her Witchcraft 1 class and got my first degree in the Cabot Kent tradition, which, when I was 13, that is who I saw walking down the streets of Salem. I was like, Oh!
Slade:
Ohmygosh.
Ian:
And so, as I studied more from the time I was 13 on, I realized who that had been who I had seen. I was like, I have to study with this woman. And then 20 years later, it manifested!
Slade:
Wow...
Ian:
I had put it out into the Universe all those years ago.
And sometimes that's how magic works. I would love magic to be like Bewitched, and we could wiggle our nose and it manifests on the spot, but sometimes magic takes a long time to actually manifest into your life.
So I studied with her back in 2016, and then coming up, July 15th I'm going back up to Salem for my second degree in her tradition.
So yup, that's a fascinating little very rough history of her that I gave you.
Slade:
No, that's cool. I intended to ask you about it earlier. It was something that, because the whole tradition thing is an avenue that a lot of people explore. There are different lines of witchcraft, different types of traditions... I'm really speaking from kind of a lone practitioner, eclectic sort of person, which you also do, kind of in your every day life.
But I think one of the takeaways for me for someone if they're new is to... like you said, well good on Facebook. There are some things that Facebook does really, really well, and that could be one of them. Is to connect with people locally.
There is a lot about, when I go back to my interests in these subjects and where they came from, a lot of what I learned was physically in a certain location, or, you know, was a certain kind of shop, like you talked about. Most cities have that cool little store where there are people working there who are a resource, there are people putting flyers up for events.
It is kind of, there is something about the power of where it takes place, you know what I mean? Like, different parts of the world, different parts of the country, have different energy, have different... Because this is so connected to nature.
Even though you can use the internet as a tool to kind of find some resources, if you can ground that in people where you are, I think that would be my advice based on your advice, you know?
Ian:
Oh yeah, yeah.
That's perfect advice because, like you said, the way that someone's going to connect to their place is going to be different depending on where they're at. Someone in Singapore is definitely going to have a different sort of, probably even different definition of witchcraft, and practice of witchcraft in Singapore, as compared to me, sitting here in Johnson City, Tennessee.
We're probably going to go about it 2 different ways.
So yes, if you can find a local spot, then definitely capitalize on that. Read the flyers. Talk to the store owners. Talk to the people that are working there. Because I did, as well, work at a sort of a metaphysical shop for about 8 years when I moved out here to Johnson City. And people definitely talk to the shop workers about what they're doing, what they're looking for, any sort of meet-up or ritual, gathering, that's going on. So they are a plethora of information.
But you have to talk to them. You have to ask them.
Slade:
They're like metaphysical librarians.
Ian:
Yeah.
Slade:
But you're right. A lot of people who work in those stores are not just retail employees. They're there because they have knowledge about herbalism or knowledge about crystals or they're specifically involved in the community in something like a local circle or coven, something like that. That's where you'll find them, if you want to meet them.
And, you know, they're often identified by their jewellry.
Ian:
Yeah, yeah. We witches love our very large pieces of jewellry.
Slade:
Statement necklaces.
Listen, I know it always kind of puts you on the spot a little bit when somebody asks you to recommend books or something in the middle of a conversation, so I'm thinking, after we have this conversation, you're probably going to think of things like, Oh! I should have mentioned this book or this website, or whatever.
So you can send those to me if they come to you and you think of something you want me to put in the show notes. Because I'll put all the stuff that we've talked about in the show notes and links to different books and sites and stuff so if you want to add to that, we'll have some time here from the time we're recording 'til it goes out.
Ian:
Okay.
Slade:
I'll be working on that and you can...
It's also interesting that you'll be going on your trip to study with Laurie again probably around the same time that everyone is listening to this.
Ian:
Oh, wow! Okay!
Slade:
Yeah, that same week!
So yeah, there's going to be a lot of energy behind you. A lot of people are going to be thinking about you and what you're doing up there. And then when you get back, they're probably going to want to contact you.
It's been really fantastic capturing this conversation with you. I feel like I'm kind of running long on time. We'll have to have you come back at some point and go down some specific rabbit holes. Because this is a...
You're the FIRST witch to be on this show and given the fact that I identify with that word as well, it's kind of like, Dang, why haven't I talked about this? So you're representing for a big canopy of topics here and I appreciate what a good job that you did in making it kind of specific, and unique to you and your practice.
But also introducing the topic at large to a lot of different people. This is a big, big topic. There used to be statistics out there about neopaganism and sort of the growth of that spiritual tradition statistically, in this country. And there's a lot of people interested in this and wanting to learn more about it.
Tell everyone the best place they can go to find you online. What's your Facebook page?
Ian:
The best place is going to be my Facebook page. It is just titled Appalachian Witchery and there is a picture of the Blue Ridge mountains, so the mountains are going to look kind of blue and it's going to say 'Appalachian Witchery' in red font.
I used to have a website but that is a whole other story about that, that I'm not going to get into, because it was cancelled by the people that owned Square.
Slade:
Ooo interesting!
Ian:
Yeah. There's a whole thing about occult business and how they don't support them. And they cancelled my website...
Slade:
Oh, wow!
Ian:
That's basically the story. I made them quite a bit of money.
Slade:
Wow...
Ian:
And then they decided to delete me and a bunch of other people, based on the content of their website, which was really just me selling my crafts and my classes.
You could buy a seat to my class on that website, which made it so much easier for me, because I could say, I can seat 30 people and put 30 tickets up on the website and then they would sell and I wouldn't have to worry about trying to send out emails letting people know that I'd gotten their money and the seat had been saved, which is what I've had to go back to, at this point.
Slade:
So everybody can definitely see what you're doing on your Facebook page, because I saw where you'd posted some stuff talking about the upcoming class that you're going to do with Laurie and so, I mean, it can do a lot of things for you, and it's good enough for people to go and check out what you're doing.
Like you said, you have your number there, so they can email you and call you and set up a consultation. And of course, I'll link to it. It'll be easy to find.
This was really great, Ian. I've wanted to talk to you for awhile. I've enjoyed following you on Facebook for so many reasons.
I really want to thank you for coming on the show.
Ian:
Thank you for inviting me. I've enjoyed being able to talk about my practice and things.
So definitely, I'm very much interested in coming back and talking more about things. Because I'm not JUST a solitary practitioner. I actually have a group here in the mountains and we've kind of crafted our own tradition here that I would love to talk about.
Slade:
Okay, cool!
Ian:
About what we do and how we've kind of crafted this tradition.
Slade:
Yeah! Maybe we can time it with one of the holidays or something, and put some intention around some of those traditional witch points in the year, you know what I mean, like...
Ian:
Oh yeah!
Slade:
That would be really cool to do some content around some of those. Or maybe we'll have you come back for Halloween, since that's your favorite. We'll do some stuff around that.
Ian:
The witches' busiest month. October.
Slade:
Yeah.
Ian:
Yeah! Definitely.
Slade:
That would be great!
Ian:
I very much look forward to it.
In this week’s segment, a manifesto about clairaudience and communicating with spirit — communicating with the higher self, with divine wisdom, with inner guidance, with guides — through the concept of Voices.
MENTIONED ON THE SHOW Star Trek
Star Trek: Discovery
The Expanse Series by James S.A. Corey
The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle
Who are You Talking to When You Talk to Yourself
Dissociative Identity Disorder
HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses
Get an intuitive reading with Slade
Automatic Intuition
BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits Edit your pledge on Patreon
TRANSCRIPT You know how I talk about starting the blog Shift Your Spirits back in 2006 with a dozen or so essays … This was one of those original pieces. Originally published in September 2006, about a month after I started blogging, under the title “Who are you talking to when you talk to yourself?”
It’s buried in the archives, about as deep as it can be, but it still enjoys pretty decent traffic. And oddly, or interestingly, in the past week, three different fans of this show mentioned it by name and called it as one of their favorite posts.
It was a foundational post. A kind of manifesto of how I approached the concept of communicating with spirit. Before I ever did a reading or started blogging with your questions and emails requests as prompts, I thought this was the topic I would focus on. The concept of Voices was something Seth and I had explored at length only a few years before I started all this work, and it was so life-changing for me, I really thought a deep dive into Voices was going to be the whole point.
It’s disparaged in our society — hearing voices, listening to the voices in your head, doing what the voices tell you to do … talking to yourself. It’s the punchline to a lot of lazy jokes.
And yet it’s something we all experience. It’s a psychic channel we all have access to.
The one thing that has evolved for me the most since I first wrote about this is that Voices are less about external voices, or proof of entities outside yourself, and more an awareness of archetypal programs and partitions in the mind.
The idea of programming has come full circle — Seth and I were philosophizing about this in 1999, I took the principles deeper into new age space, and then more recently I’ve found myself using smart phone metaphors when I’m attempting to explain how I wrap my head around it all—that the archetypes, the higher self, the still small voice within, the collective unconscious, the hive mind are like apps on a handheld mobile device—they can be downloaded from the cloud, they can be accessed, opened up and run…
I’m going to leave my original vocabulary as it is, but just know, even if communicating with angels or talking to ascended masters or channeling spirits makes you uncomfortable because it’s a little too woo woo, it also works from a purely psychological angle. There are mansions of the mind that can be explored in this way…
Once you begin paying closer attention to the Messages of Guidance you receive every day, what the Voices of these Messengers sound like, where they’re coming from, when they pop in, and what their original Source may be, you can begin to Identify them, carry on intentional conversations with them, start building a better relationship with them... You may also want to tell some of them to sit down and shut the hell up.
You carry on conversations with yourself all the time. Some of the things you say you literally speak out loud.
And you talk about talking to yourself. You acknowledge this to other people and nobody assumes you're crazy.
Think about the last time you muttered something under your breath when there was someone else in the room and you apologized:
"I'm just talking to myself."
Or
"Don't pay any attention to me, I'm just thinking out loud…"
Think about the times you've said to another person:
"I try to tell myself everything will work out for the best…"
"Part of me wants to believe…"
"Something tells me…"
"I just can't trust myself on this…"
"My heart says one thing, but my head says another…"
Ring any bells? You clearly talk to yourself. You acknowledge that there are interior dialogues taking place and most people regard this as perfectly normal.
Of course, I am not speaking to you as a psychiatrist, and my musings on this subject are just that — musings, thoughts, opinions — listening to me on a podcast is not a substitute for a real mental health diagnosis.
But talking to yourself is not mental illness. It’s not schizophrenia or multiple-personality disorder.
Here's a simple way to tell the difference:
Multiple personality disorders are defined by a lack of conscious awareness, there is no dialogue taking place, the different personalities coming through are all taking turns in the driver's seat of consciousness and they are usually unaware of one another.
They may be aware that there are others, but they don't know necessarily connect anymore or even know how to contact each other. They don't have relationships -- they don't communicate with one another.
Multiplicity or dissociative identity disorder is even considered by some psychologists to be more a survival mechanism than a disorder or disease. The ability of the different parts of oneself to scatter, split up, when the self comes under attack. Like covering the eyes of a child you’re with so that they can't see the gruesome details of the car crash on the side of the road.
Or mouthing or spelling out certain words so that young children in the room won't know what you're talking about.
Multiple Personality Disorder is a kind of protection -- a hardcore survival mechanism.
Multiplicity is an advanced form of the impulse to scatter the flock so that the Whole can't be taken out with one shot. This splintering of the Self is a superhuman ability like the burst of adrenaline or physical strength or courage we experience under extreme conditions.
This is called a disorder because once the multiple parts of the Self get lost they may not be so easy to regroup. They separate for the sake of survival, and they run so far, in such extreme emotional terror, they can't find the Others again in order to integrate. The different selves divide the traumatic information and carry only pieces of the puzzle, because to put all the pieces back together and see the Whole Story -- and identify with it, to become the trauma, at a deeply personal level -- is just too much for any one mind to bear and go on...
By becoming consciously aware of who's talking -- what part of your Self is coming through -- you clearly don't fit this general description of mental illness or multiple- personality disorder. Eckart Tolle in The Power of Now talks about "watching the thinker." There's a part of your mind that can stand back, as a director, and watch all the Voices performing on your inner stage.
You know how you have that "professional phone voice" you use at work? You may have accidentally answered your personal cell phone like that before - once or twice - but you don't slip up and allow the "wrong" voice to grab the microphone very often...
You don't have to think about all this -- much of it is on autopilot.
What I'm leading you toward is the practice of monitoring and micro-managing the Voices you've been taking for granted and not paying so much attention to...
On some level, there's a Director Self, a Managing Consciousness, that is always running - it's the Boss - it's the Big Self you refer to when you say Me. It manages, directs, and prompts the various sub-Voices you use in everyday situations.
The Thinker decides which of your Voices should pop in and do their thing, given the context.
Actors and Singers and Writers will quickly identify with this phenomenon -- they have consciously developed their acute sense of Who- says- what- when- and- how.
This is how someone can direct and star in a film simultaneously.
You are the director and star and producer of your life. This is your greatest project. It's being written by you, for you, you're playing the lead, casting the other players... Most of it is improvisational.
You have a Voice that tells jokes... Some of us have a more talented inner-comedian than others. Sometimes he's performing live at a party or a table of friends and he's on fire, cracking everybody up.
That’s just one example of the internal species of Voices. Are you always aware of choosing them, or do many of them just "know" when it's their line?
When you start identifying them, you find them all over the place. I used to call them my Chorus... (back during a time when my life felt a little too much like a Greek Tragedy : )
Or maybe an Orchestral metaphor would work here: when you're listening to a piece of music you're familiar with, you start to pick out "that killer bass-line" or wonder "who's that on the back-up vocal?"
Would you call your ability to do this Psychic with a capital P? Probably not.
But you see where I'm going with all this… You can think of a ton more examples I haven't named.
Start listening for the different instruments in what you call your Head — there are different sounds coming in, taking over for solos, at different times, in different contexts... All together, they are kind of a Piece of Music, right?
Now you're getting warmer. You are in the general vicinity of the Place you will go to when you want to listen for Voices of Spirit, or your Higher Self, or Divine Guidance...
You've got to identify who everybody is in that head of yours, what solo they play, what keeps refraining… And by everybody, I mean Voices.
Which voices are the "loops" that play over and over?
The hateful, self-critical voices are the ones that creep into the background, like a grinding, low sample that's been repeating behind everything else.
It undermines your more conscious, intentional solo efforts...
You're belting "I will survive" but there's a loop on this remix version of your affirmation, and it's back there, softly chanting "I suck... I always... I'll never..."
That’s what’s killing your ability to manifest your intentions by the way.
You hear it now — how could you have missed it? Of course!
Now you're on your way to cleaning up that Master Mix and getting rid of the noise that you didn't consciously ask to be there.
You also channel external voices. In a very real, third-dimensional, everyday experience, you can hear and express the voices of individuals, living or dead, with whom you've had a relationship.
You can also channel the Voices of people you've never met before — authors or singers from other times and places whose personas, wisdoms, and messages, have been preserved in media. This could even be considered the most obvious form of immortality.
What are Ghosts, if they are not the memories that continue in the minds of the living?
When you and a buddy are planning some delicious, wicked mischief like sneaking out after curfew, or skipping school, or borrowing your dad's car without telling him… Or maybe you're considering a course of action that you know your parents or your boss or your boyfriend will disapprove of...
You say things like:
"I know exactly what he's going to say…"
"She is going to be livid!"
"I can hear my mother now, saying…"
"My grandpa is rolling over in his grave right now…"
Impersonations are a form of channeling. You might even imitate the Voice of your Dad: "How many times have I told you kids…”
And your sister shrieks with laughter because she recognizes that Voice. She’s amused and delighted by your ability to "bring that Voice through" with so much truth and accuracy, she might even cover her ears in mock-horror and squeal:
"Stop it! You're freaking me out!"
Consider the phrase: What would Jesus do? This was a large-scale social meme several years ago. Kind of like the equivalent of the "Got milk?" campaign for Christian marketing…
This Question is meant to [re]activate the voice of Jesus that you carry within. Christians believe that if you experienced some form of being saved and/or baptized that Jesus has come into your heart and resides there, eternally, whether you pay attention to his presence or not.
The idea is that once you've become aware of the Christ Consciousness within and invited Him to be with you, work through you, speak through you, guide you, you can then say "God is my co-pilot."
You have free will — you're doing the driving, but when you're lost, you have a presence there you can call on to be your soul compass, your navigator — a voice you can trust to check the map and tell you which way to turn to get yourself back on track.
When someone is Born Again or rededicates his life, he has become consciously aware of the fact that he has access to a Higher Power, but he may have failed to make use of it as he could... Or maybe he's heard it and willfully ignored it.
At some point he strayed from his path or began shutting that voice down or muting it; he sees the error in this and chooses to change the behavior and begin listening again.
Let’s talk about: Talking about Yourself in the Third Person
You've overheard parents programming these voices in their children, speaking about the Voice as if it is clearly meant to be something the children have already received and should "know better" — which is to understand how to access these Parental Guidance Voices on their own.
The Parents quiz their children, inviting them to call up, or call in, or channel that Voice: The Mom says to the four year old "What does Mommy say about leaving your legos all over the living room floor?"
Is Mommy having a schizophrenic moment, or is she acknowledging her child's capacity to download her wisdom, make it part of his conscious, decision-making process, and "run the program" at will, on his own, without her prompting?
A good mother knows that her child needs a piece of her that will always be with him, even when she can't be. He needs to be capable of simulating her wisdom in a variety of situations, and applying that Voice in both circumstances she has anticipated and the ones that she never dreamed he would encounter.
The Mom acknowledges her child's ability to do this. She guides him in developing and using this particular type of channeling. She openly discusses it with other moms and dads — maybe from a very different perspective than this — vague, unnamed... Parenting discussions may not involve a psychic vocabularly, but the principles are definitely talked about. The How To is considered traditional and important.
Child development is so fundamental that we don't think to call it supernatural — that's because it's not. It's the perfect example of a human communication phenomenon that is common, practical, and incredibly psychic, all at the same time.
Consider these other snatches of common dialogue:
When you say you've had a change of heart, what changed?
What shift occurs when we consider another person's point of view?
What are we doing when we step into another person's shoes?
Why are we told to be careful what we wish for?
Why is it notable when two people suddenly say the same thing at the same time? "Jinx! Buy me a Coke."
Why do we knock on wood when we speak of an intended, hopeful outcome that we fear influencing by saying it out loud?
Why do we say "I'm afraid to even say it…"?
Why do we say "famous last words" when we put something out to the Universe?
What Source are we referring to when we say "I should've listened to my gut…"
Some people don't believe in the presence of invisible entities, guardian angels, ghosts, spirit guides, and the like would prefer to use a different vocabulary to describe these internal dialogues:
Imaginary friends
The subconscious mind
Your ego
Your intuition
If you require logic — or feel more comfortable taking "baby steps" as you approach the idea of communicating with spirit entities, that's cool. I personally find that neurologists and clinical psychotherapists have empirical data that supports the common ways that the human mind functions; I discover plenty of corresponding vocabulary and supportive explanations in various fields of study.
It seems unrealistic and unlikely that you will have profound, otherworldly, out-of-body experiences on a daily basis — spirit entities may very well knock you over the head once in a while with something Big you just can't explain away... To get your attention, to start a conversation, to inspire you to start asking Questions...
But, for the most part, receiving Higher Guidance on a daily basis requires that you integrate new perspectives and new habits into your common experiences.
The Shift is introduced, practiced, and maintained over an accumulation of millions of moments — all of them opportunities to ask all the little questions that will add up to a relationship — a lifestyle — that features the Big Mysteries.
Whatever your vocabulary or what camp you approach the Questions from — the religious, the medical/scientific, the spiritualist — we clearly can agree that we all talk to ourselves, we have different facets of our personalities that we can access consciously and subconsciously. We all experience complex relationships with others and the Self.
We all talk to ourselves, and it's perfectly normal. This behavior is more commonplace than it is aberrant.
I'll tell you what is crazy:
Asking questions of a roomful of people you trust
Immediately hearing their responses — advice, warnings, instructions...
and totally ignoring them, suppressing them, or proceeding as if you have no voices of wisdom to work with.
The Voice that speaks to you, the Name you give it, and the way you choose to define it is crucial — but the identity of a Voice remains secondary to its Messages for you and what you do choose to do with that information.
When you:
Ask a question
Pray
Meditate
The Voice that answers you may be:
your intuition
your higher self
your God
your Spirit Guide
your grandmother who has already passed
your imaginary friends
the psychic who reads for you
your best friend, over coffee
your Aunt Sharon, who's the greatest listener on earth, the one you call whenever you're having trouble making an important decision...
What matters most about these dialogues is:
What is the Answer you receive?
Does the answer resonate with you?
Do you agree with it?
Are multiple sources giving you the same advice?
Are you listening for the truth or looking for something to tell you what you want to hear?
Does the answer support you, your best interests, and empower you to make good decisions?
Who is being served by your acting on the advice you're being given?
The Inner Critic, Fear, and Shadow Guides
Just as your consciousness downloads programming of Voices of Advice that you may call on — or your psychic sense can listen to — the benevolent entities who support you — however you choose to perceive your relationships to all these Voices you're experiencing — there are good ones and bad ones.
You are your own worst critic because you decide who to listen to and who to dismiss. You have free will, and you are responsible for your behavior.
Do you let the bossy, nagging, belittling voices hog your inner microphone?
Do you allow hurtful remarks that undermine your confidence to play over and over again?
Do you recognize the Source for the Voices that have something to gain by scaring you, paralyzing you, playing on your insecurities?
Learn how to identify the Voices you already have access to, create working relationships with the guides who attend you on your Mission, and use the information you receive to create the life you know you were meant to live.
In this week’s segment, the conclusion of the paranormal memoir Waking Spirits.
HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses
Get an intuitive reading with Slade
Automatic Intuition
BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits Edit your pledge on Patreon
TRANSCRIPT POLTERGEIST
The story of my time at Daniel was significant to my becoming an intuitive by profession not only because of the actual phenomena or experiences that took place there, but because of the relationships, the associations, the pieces of awareness that began to come together (and fall apart) for me while living in that house. You’ve heard me talk about my stroke and my being housebound, teaching myself to write code — this is the house where that all happened.
There are almost circular story arcs over the course of my lifetime, an inward spiraling that becomes tighter and close enough to qualify as simply overlapping.
The happenings began with my brother when we were kids. They came back when we lived together again as grown men. He was the one who remembered the most.
At first, I suspected that the activity I witnessed at the Daniel house was the work of a poltergeist, and many contemporary parapsychologists theorize that poltergeists are projected by adolescents -- that they are darker spiritual energies manifested by, and external to, a specific individual.
My brother was a bit too old to qualify as a "youth" but he did still maintain youthful qualities in his lifestyle -- nothing too raucous by any means, just a little bit rock n roll -- the hours and some of the company he kept, the buzzes they enjoyed, his sleeping patterns, the way he disappeared into the cave of his bedroom, uncommunicative, to surf the Web and play video games....
I really believed either something was attached to him and he had brought it with him, or else there was something already present in the house that had taken an interest in him.
I thought of it and referred to it as his poltergeist.
Until he left to go on tour, and the energy I expected to leave with him stayed behind.
The first night after he left, the noises started up again, just like they always did.
I remember the exact moment when it dawned on me -- (and, by the way, who was I to judge his lifestyle? Wasn't I just riding out the clock of my twenties that began in college, the one that was losing steam as I lost my way?)
It wasn't about him -- it was about ME.
And, as if in response, as affirmation, I saw shadows behind me shift and move.
I discovered that the powered-off desktop monitor acted as a darkened mirror.
I watched the reflection of movement in the dim, shut-down computer screen in front of me.
I began to sit at my desk for great lengths of time before logging on, just observing the gray columns of air that waved like seaweed or drapery pleats along the hallway behind me, waiting for those few fleeting moments when facial features emerged, leaning in as if to read over my shoulder.
(Yes, of course I felt a chill of their breath on the back of my neck, just as you may have in sympathy hearing about it. You too may have experienced this; countless times.)
Only a few weeks after we moved into Daniel, my brother's girlfriend stayed over and woke up talking about what she'd been hearing in the night. I overheard her conversation and immediately engaged her, so she'd feel affirmed. So I would too.
My brother swore he hadn't seen or heard anything (which is what first made me suspicious that it might be connected with him in some way) but he shocked me by telling her stories of the haunted Green House. We had not talked about it in years. I wasn't sure until that moment just how much he witnessed and remembered. He drew me in to participate in the narration, but he supplied most of the details.
Together we told her the stories I related in the Vortex memoirs.
In order to tell you about how I came to separate out the messages from spirit guides from the petty noise-making of ghosts, to discern angels from apparitions, and to be aware that there are those who walk among us guiding us who are not human, I had to tell you about Jesse, who basically announced to me that they were about to re-enter my life in a whole new way.
So, hopefully you can begin to see how these rambling tales are not "random spooky moments" from my life, but all the back story I wanted to share with you that leads up to the Ultimatum from my guides.
How Shift Your Spirits came to be. How everything you know of me (which is only a little bit) who I have so recently become in this world -- a professional intuitive, an anti guru, an author slash teacher of woo woo, a spiritual entrepreneur -- was not some tidy straight shot of towing the line and being a really well-behaved person.
Who I have become emerged from the great wreckage of my earlier life -- you have met me having crawled out of a ditch I first fell into while living at Daniel.
It's a pretty cliche spiritual transformation biography, really -- I'm not just "special" in some way that other people aren't. I'm one of billions, all with a story to tell and a lesson to be had from it. I'm not metaphysical royalty -- I fucked it All Up royally. It all went to Hell, and I'm sure I was either navigating or driving at least some of the time.
The worst life you could possibly live and the one you would most like to create for yourself -- they have remarkably similar ingredients.
LIFE UNRAVELED
I came to resemble That Person that's always in each episode of the re-enactment show A Haunting, the one who seems to be losing his mind, as either a precursor to -- or the direct result of -- losing everything else.
I stopped eating. I stopped sleeping. I even stopped reading books.
I either unconsciously withdrew from my friends or else they abandoned me. I've never been sure if it was my fault, theirs, or all of the above... but the results were the same -- devastating. Isolating.
The job that seemed to be so perfect for me, that I had moved from another state to pursue, was a disaster -- my immediate supervisor who had "clicked" with me so well during the interview process was a monster behind closed doors. When no witnesses were around, I was cruelly bullied. With a degree of viciousness that no one in that office would believe.
About six months in, I woke up one morning partially paralyzed.
The left side of my face, my left shoulder and extending into my left arm and hand. The doctors said maybe Bell's Palsy, although there was no infection present; maybe a minor stroke, brought on by stress (which has always been the diagnosis that felt most likely to me). A few spiritual healer types have suggested "shamanic sickness" -- yeah, that sounds a bit more glamorous than the truth of my beaten-down mind-body-spirit connection....
I was forced to resign from that perfect job (after they insisted I come by the office before going to the emergency room to "prove" that I was really paralyzed). I was laid off from two more positions in quick succession.
I was working with an agent who secured me a book publishing deal which soon imploded. It's a long story for another time and place. I barely escaped with my content and copyrights intact.
GUIDES ARE NOT GHOSTS
I have never admitted it to anyone, but I feared at the time that I might be experiencing a possession. I've never said so because I don't want anyone to confuse communicating with spirit guides with possession -- they are NOT the same thing.
Later, looking back, there's no confusion about that -- there were two distinctly different kinds of phenomena happening. I straddled two worlds.
The house was filled with basically two groups of spirit entities:
---One kind threw pennies at me from the shadows in the attic, rattled cabinet doors, made the lights dim and the computer screen flip, and manifested as a coil of dark smoke in a corner of my bedroom. They contacted me just to get my attention, to distract me, or to be noticed just for the sake of being noticed. They weren't children so much as they were child-like. They punked me like teenagers in search of adrenalin ringing doorbells and then running.
They were active in the night.
---The other group wanted desperately to tell me things. They were persistent, but gentle. They offered advice, commenting on practical circumstances. Their insights were inspiring and proved to be not only true but truly useful.
Those voices came in the morning.
You know that transitional dream state, where you are just beginning to wink back into waking awareness, but still clinging to the threads of your interior astral reality?
I would come to in the midst of Conversations with People. For the next few years I would immediately lurch to the computer to record the topics of these dialogues.
There was an emotional urgency that accompanied the messages. The voices. They were actual words -- clues -- most often fragmented and minimal in the word count department, but very specific.
I experimented with the most low-impact, low-risk instructions -- things that involved no one else, that, if they led to nothing, nobody need ever know about but me.
Strange, eccentric little tidbits of information that seemed so random when they first came through, but proved to be powerful road signs.
One example that stands out to this day, that still makes me whisper How else could that be possible?:
I ran across some letters in a box from a friend I had not spoken to in over ten years. I felt so much guilt and grief, realizing how I had dissolved the connection.
For years I had allowed him to believe he had wronged me. Actually, it was worse, I gave him no reason, only sudden silence. I left him to wonder, as my more recently estranged friends were now torturing me.
I felt all the pain of that action return to me, with the accumulated interest of its years. It was the first time I directly asked the spirits to do something for me.
"Find a way for me to get in touch with him. Just so I can apologize and let him know he did not do anything wrong."
I imagined I might run across a current address online, send an email.... At best, that is. I didn't believe (yet) they could assist me by "granting wishes."
The next day (the very freaking next day), I was pulled out of the house for an insignificant errand -- to buy toothpaste. This was the first time I was distinctly aware that the voices came along in the car with me, like a hushed and hard-to-hear GPS. They urged me past the closest grocery store, past a Walgreens, a CVS, and several others of their kind.... All the way across town, to a pharmacy at an interstate overpass.
He was there, in the dental aisle.
He didn't even live in Atlanta -- he was driving to Savannah, and had stopped at this random exit in the suburbs to buy a new toothbrush.
I couldn't even begin to make him know how I knew that serendipity had been arranged.
It was magic enough had it been unconscious and incidental.
We are friends again, and still in touch, to this day.
And every time I retrieve a message for someone during a reading, I recall how seemingly insignificant the packaging might appear to be. At first.
Clues, not necessarily "answers."
In regards to my book deal disaster, I was told over and over again to "View Source." I would hear a very distinct male voice lean in and murmur in my left ear when I was on the computer.
...View the source, the source code, the page source...
I knew nothing about computer programming. I thought "code" referred to some kind of math, and that computer science... well, it distinctly has the word "science" in it.
It's a language, his voice would insist.
Oh, I knew what I must have appeared like to external eyes -- an out-of-work insomniac whose phone rarely rang and whose friends no longer even replied to emails (his cat had even stopped sleeping with him); paralyzed in front of a screen, muttering to himself, perpetually nosing through the scrolls of HTML and Javascript and CSS that runs like an underground river of information just beneath the pages on the Web.
But it is a language.
And it began to make sense to me. And I looked for resources to teach me more. And it was this skill set that rescued me from financial destitution and gave me the ability to publish myself.
You wouldn't know jack about me -- you wouldn't be listening to any of this -- without that moment when I clicked the words "Page Source" because I kept hearing a voice say it over and over again.
God! And I never would have predicted -- or believed -- that I would be here a few years later admitting that I began to do "what the voices in my head" suggested.
P WORDS
...penny, pitch, poltergeist, presence, paralysis, page source, programming...
I have now learned that this kind of alliteration accompanies names or key words that are trying to come through.
You know how it feels when a word is right on the tip of your tongue? Your mind frantically feels around in the dark -- it finds the knob, but keeps fumbling for the key hole.
Clairaudience feels like a sustained version of that state -- instead of seconds that soon slip into place, it goes on for minutes. Entire mornings. Like waking up with the same song stuck in your head day after day.
Once the right word hits, it "lights" up, the ticker tape freezes and full sentences emerge.
Back then it was words that begin with p.
P-words, everywhere.
My brother's name begins with a P....
PAUL
Then there was my friend Paul, back in Chattanooga. He'd taken it really hard when I told him I was moving back to Atlanta.
Paul had been a really successful computer programmer, but then he started drinking a lot. Drinking in secret and alone.
His house was always lively with friends. He had a great deck and a garden and people congregated around his abundance. But even when neighbors stopped by in the morning for coffee, he'd be sneaking off into the kitchen pantry or the bathroom to have a little nip something. To pop or snort something else.
The one habit he had managed to quit cold turkey was answering my phone calls.
I assumed he needed a little time and space to pout.
I sat straight up in bed one morning, gasping like someone whose shoulders had been held down under water.
Paul.
The p-words stopped scrolling on Paul.
They were talking about Paul.
Maybe that was why the insistence on the programming and the page source code and... I knew then that he was really in trouble. I also knew that he no longer spoke to me.
You know how, so often -- more than by any other method -- you learn to trust your intuition after failing miserably to listen to what it's trying to tell you?
Hearing it distinctly and clearly, but not having faith in it. Not following through.
Then something happens, and you promise yourself -- you vow -- "Next time, I will listen and I will act."
I waited five days knowing something was wrong.
I knew Paul wouldn't pick up if I called anyway.
He never did.
When Paul's roommate finally answered, he told me that Paul had gone up into the attic (several days prior) and hanged himself.
In this week’s segment, I'm sharing a paranormal memoir about a Penny Charm, a ritual of blessing you can do with the spirits in a new house.
MENTIONED ON THE SHOW Numerology Repeating Number Sequences
I, Tonya film
HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses
Get an intuitive reading with Slade
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TRANSCRIPT I like houses with ghosts. I prefer them. Where else does the largest chunk of all that "charm" and "character" come from if not from spirit energies?
But it seems a lot of people react to the presence of any spirit as a "negative" spirit, and, in my opinion, that's just not necessarily the case.
When I moved into the house I shared with my brother in 2003 (the house on Daniel) I had not yet begun to make the distinctions that you find me writing about now, like the differences between ghosts and spirit guides and angels....
I only observed that, among the population of the invisible, were those that came and went, those that came with the locations they inhabited, and those that came along with us, attached to us personally like parents or pets.
My awareness of these subjects had only just shifted to conscious -- the Daniel House is where I moved right after my encounters with Jesse, whom I told you about in the episodes called Stranger Angels. Daniel is where I took those first steps that led ultimately to my communicating and working with spirit guides. (And that’s the arc of my personal history I’m recounting in these paranormal memoirs.)
The Daniel House represents a bridge in memory and experience from the haunted Green House of my childhood. Living with my brother again as an adult seems to have either drawn new phenomena to me, or plugged me back in and turned up the volume.
Gray little black-shuttered Daniel came with great potential for ghosts and residual energy. It was built in the 1930s in a middle class inner-city neighborhood with the timid room dimensions of that pessimistic time. It wasn't the oldest house I've ever lived in, but it was the oldest house I spent a lot of nights in alone, listening... expecting.
Part of the promise of ghosts at Daniel came with the finished walk-up attic, an upper half-story with dormer windows and a permanent steep staircase behind a door at the back of the house. The ceiling height of the attic would have been irresistible to children -- and sure enough, the first time the leasing agent walked me through the house, he semi-apologized for the scribbles on the attic walls.
...Names printed in little kid scrawl; a few broken wax crayons, paper labels peeled off, stomped into the cracks between the floorboards; the murky window light like that of an abandoned terrarium....
How many spooky movies and horror novels begin with delicious little moments of foreshadowing just like this?
Since it was the last room he showed me, the realtor had no way of knowing how much more the possibility of a kid-haunted attic appealed to me than the refinished wood floors and the upgraded appliances, the new energy efficient water heater and the central heat and air.
And there was no telling what all that renovation might have awakened....
The plan was that, by sharing the house, my brother and I could both take advantage of the best of multiple worlds -- for my brother, who spent more time on the road touring with bands than at home, the arrangement would allow him to get rid of an expensive storage facility, and still have some place to come home to, without having to maintain an apartment on his own. For me, well into my thirties, beyond any lingering tolerance for collegiate roommate situations, yet not financially stable enough to live alone in a city as expensive as Atlanta, co-habitating with my mostly absent brother would mean quasi-living-alone. I could enjoy reduced expenses, the place mostly to myself, and yet have an actual family member I could count on not to screw me over in one of those many ways that roommates can.
I know he didn't love the arrangement or benefit from it quite as much I did, but the timing was right for both of us -- he needed to go off on tour again in a hurry; I was moving back to town and starting a new job within a matter of days. With windows of opportunity as small as our overlapping circumstances, Daniel was serendipitous.
The first time I showed the place to my brother, he wanted to investigate the shed out behind the house and compare it to the attic. The lawn had just been mowed by the realty company in anticipation of our move-in date. We noticed the large rectangular depression in the yard beyond the back patio slab.
"My theory is they used to have a carport or something back here," I said.
My brother squinted. His cheeks pulled back in a wince. "Looks like a bomb shelter to me." Standing over the concave depression, he looked like he felt queasy. "They've obviously buried the entrance though."
Now, I've already told you I believe he is one of the most psychically sensitive people people I know -- but also the most uncomfortable with it. He never talks about the paranormal in the present tense at all, although he will refer, matter-of-factly and with great detail, to our shared past experiences when we were kids.
He was a statue of second thoughts, staring down between his feet with a frown at the faint footprint of that forgotten underground room. I half-expected him to deliver an early-in-the-spooky-movie line like "I have a bad feeling about this..." or "Wait! Did you hear that?"
He muttered something fairly close: "No telling what's under this yard...."
My brother's reactions in reality will probably always be a disappointment compared to my magical world view -- still, I decided to downplay his first exploration of the attic. I lingered back on the stairs, not unlike how the realtor had positioned himself when he'd shown it to me, offering dismissive responses and body language that said "Whatever. Nothing to see here. Let's go back down."
I don't know if my brother spotted the children's drawings on the walls in the corner. He only pronounced the attic's security as a favorable place to store his expensive surplus sound equipment.
He left to go rent a Uhaul.
Before moving anything into the house, I performed a ritual walk-through to introduce myself to the ghosts, to map any active vortex or portal in etheric dimensions coinciding with the physical space. (I prefer to wait and call the archangels into their protective posts at the four corners of the property later -- after I'm all moved in. Like a lid or a seal or a deadbolt; a moat around me and mine.)
Once the keys are yours it's hard to resist bringing something in with you on that first visit to a new place. You think Why waste a trip over without throwing a few things in the trunk? Doesn't make any sense when you can easily predict just how sick you'll be in the next day or so of all that carrying boxes back and forth....
But an empty house is like that pause between breaths in yoga, the moment that is neither inhaling or exhaling, the midpoint of the swing free from gravity, neither kicking up toward the sky or dropping back to earth.
Some of the greatest sources of power can only be found in Between Things, and most people feel a need to hurry through that unnerving discomfort, as minor as a dash through the rain without an umbrella between the car and the front porch roof overhang. The stillness of the in between can be peaceful or its silence can be deafening, depending on your personal comfort with sustaining a sense of timelessness, of nowhere, of nothing, of namelessness.
This moment is rife with magic -- you only get one such moment per move. Once you bring in your pets, your thoughts and emotions, your friends and family, your personal belongings steeped in your energy... the spirits have already started shifting, ink dropped in water, smoke torn and curled by your breezing in.
When I first move into a house I don’t smudge right away (or sage, as in its verb form, to burn sage) because .... Well, because I have this theory ....
So let me interrupt here with an apologetic parenthetical aside/ slash/ disclaimer before I tell you my theory about smudging --
This is just a belief (or a behavior, really) based on personal observation. I know it's not The Norm and Most People may not agree with this and I would not doubt it for a second if you told me there's a traditional Native American shaman in a famous 1970s commercial somewhere with a big fat tear sliding down his cheek as he casts his gaze out over the way I have gutted and bent shamanic tools and techniques to my own eclectic 21st Century mixed Anglo-Cherokee Neo-Pagan Post-Modern Creato-Matic Magical Practice.
My theory is that smudging sedates spirits much like smoking subdues a hive of bees.
To clarify further: smudging clears energies; it does not necessarily clear entities.
It doesn't get rid of Anyone, it just might make them stoned, pliable, sleepy, unmotivated... (maybe they get the munchies; and so if you know it's not mice -- or really big cockroaches -- or a roommate/partner with an Ambien-induced sleep-eating problem -- then That's probably why you're hearing the rustle and ruckus in the kitchen cabinets late at night).
Who's to say the Things That Go Bump don't dig a fatty smudge bundle just as much as your deceased Aunt Clara, your childhood fairy companion Sarafina, or your Guardian Angel Fanciel?
You know, I'm pretty sure sage smudge is a Southwestern thing anyway (my life stories take place in either Tennessee or Georgia); we certainly don't use Southeastern tobacco in anything close to a traditionally reverent way....
My point is: it's all bastardization, cultural appropriation and customization.
Many of my theories and practices exist under a canopy of Personalization -- that your beliefs and your intentions literally create the power -- the force, the degree, the volume, and the outcome -- of any ritual.
Take it; tweak it; make it work for you.
A CONTRACT WITH THE SPIRITS
A medium friend of mine -- one of those guys you typically see accompanying paranormal investigators on those ghost hunting shows -- taught me this basic ritual for establishing a working co-habitation contract with any self-aware spirit entities who are bound to a specific location. Spirits may be attached to your house without being technically "earthbound" -- earthbound is an undesirable state of purgatory where the spirit is trapped and unable to cross over due to trauma, confusion, obsession; much more common are benevolent spirits dropping by a beloved past home in visitation.
Someone may have loved this house before you did (obviously, this is especially true with an older house). The original owner may have also been its creator -- he may have designed and built it to very personal specifications. It may have represented the single largest financial investment in his entire life. His wife may have given birth to children in this house; at the very least it is the place where they were raised. Some members of the home's original family may have died in the house -- not tragically, but as they most wished.
There can be enormous positive emotional attachments between spirits, memories, and places.
When you first walk through the space as part of your introductory ritual, listen for that history -- sense those personal stories. Recognize those who have gone before you. Honor their lives and respect their experiences -- this should be the foundation on which your own life story will be overlaid.
You are a new layer — it's a palimpsest. In the eye-blink of the present, your breath, your thoughts, your emotions, your energy are scribbled on the walls of the past of all those who have walked here before you.
A GAME WITH THE GHOSTS
We called this contract — this ritual, this spell, this game, really — a penny charm (in that obvious, childlike manner with which such things tend to be named).
The basic gist of a penny charm is that, before you move any of your belongings into the home, you greet the spirits who dwell there, you introduce yourself, explain who you are, how you intend to share the space, how you wish to interact with them, ask for their blessing, and invite them to provide security for you and yours.
If the spirits accept you as a new member of the family and agree to let you reside in their house unmolested, they will leave a coin (or coins) on the floor. The coin -- usually a penny -- will appear close to a door or window (sometimes, it may appear on the actual window sill).
You should express your thanks to the spirits and place the penny on the top of the closest door- or window-frame. (The trim around a standard door or window will comfortably hold a small coin, disguising it from view.)
The protection’s not literal; it's not only active on a particular door as a physical lock or deadbolt might be; all physical and non-physical pathways into and through the space should be theoretically "covered.” I've observed that the penny's placement might have something to do with energetic or spiritual portals, more than physical openings. If you do find multiple coins as a result of the spell, just place them individually, according to the best/closest corresponding door or window.
Or spread them around the house. It's your ritual -- follow your instincts.
The penny acts as a symbolic charm of protection -- the coin itself has no power; it represents the signed contract that the spirits have agreed to provide protection, to the best of their abilities, in the dimensions which they can affect.
Fully expect the penny to (eventually) vanish.
(Shortly after placing it above a door or window, you may remember the charm and check to see if it's still there. At some point, you will forget about it... this is when it ultimately disappears. Then again, months or even years later, the coin may still be there. Who knows? Both situations have happened to me.)
What if you've already been living in your home for some length of time -- can you still do this spell? I've moved around a lot, as a renter, so I've had plenty of opportunities to do this from Day One. I don't see any reason why you can't or shouldn't perform this spell right now if you want.
A couple of things I would advise -- if it ain't broke, don't worry about fixing it. I also can't help but wonder how many of you, if you go feeling around the tops of your doors and windows, might discover these kinds of coins or talismans already in place. If you find something there, and you're not experiencing "negative haunting issues," I'd assume the charm is still active -- leave it alone or put it back.
If it makes you feel better, before returning a found coin that you suspect is already an active charm, you could always ask the spirits to amend the contract to include you.
If you really want to ensure that the pennies you find are indeed charms or messages left by ghosts -- sweep first.
Sweeping ups the challenge level; but also it takes the doubt out. Unless your home is new construction, you'll nearly always find those Last Dustpan Piles left behind by the vacating human occupants. Those coins don't count (you know they don't) so start your ritual with a clean floor.
Sweeping is, in my opinion, one of the most multi-purpose practical, functional, and productive spiritual activities you can engage in -- excepting, of course, exercise. (Yes, vacuuming is the obvious alternative if you have carpeted rooms.)
I sweep daily. Not only the obvious places like the kitchen, but also the sidewalk, the driveway, the curb at the street. I'm sure the neighbors driving by think I'm obsessive-compulsive; when I'm in my senior years, stooped and ancient, I'll hopefully pass for eccentric and a bit anachronistic -- one of Those Little Old People.
For everyday sweeping spells I use a trusty full-size industrially manufactured (but still natural fiber) straw broom; but for rituals, such as the Penny Charm Contract, I go full-on hand-made besom. I've had my besom since the mid 1970s -- it looks like it came straight out of the props collection for a Loreena McKennitt album cover photo shoot.
I swept through the rooms of Daniel, prattling on out loud to whatever spirits might be present. I talked to them just as I would one of my new living neighbors. I have always experienced satisfying results from informal, improvisational rituals; formal prayers scripted by other people or choreography out of books feels a little fake to me. That kind of self-consciousness is a red flag indicating a lack of authenticity; therefore, the true power may be diminished.
I left the house and returned the next day with my first car load of stuff.
On the long drive back into the city, I kept picturing where I was most likely to find a coin waiting for me. I hurried through the front entry and past the living room, a quick raking glance in either direction assured me those boards were still bare.
As I anticipated, I discovered the coin in the dining room at the back of the house, about twelve inches in front of the door with the stairs leading up to the attic.
I was still convincing myself it was indeed there -- a dull rusted penny -- even a heartbeat or two after spotting it. I picked it up to see what year it was... 1973. Aw, wouldn't it have been perfect if it could have been 1969, the year of my birth? Already the stuff of stories, the symmetry of that detail was probably too much to ask for... But it did occur to me that my brother was born in '73.
Maybe they were drawn to him, more than me. He's more naturally sensitive... Ghosts, pets, babies have always found him instantly approachable. Maybe he'd even been by the Daniel house last night, since I performed the spell, and spoke to them, unknowingly or not.
I placed the coin on top of the sill on that most obvious of doorways and thanked the spirits for accepting us into their home.
Well, there it is, I thought. I can officially move in now.
I went out to my car and brought the first box into the back bedroom.
There was another penny, by the closet door. (Minted in the late 1990's; nothing exceptional about that.) This closet was actually the underside of the staircase to the attic -- the same space, reached from a door on the other side.
And the most logical places for our two desktop computers were in the spots where the coins had been found. This proved to be a very significant part of the story.
In this week’s segment, how I work with my guides to remain in the flow of divine timing.
MENTIONED ON THE SHOW Project Atlantis by Brandon Ellis
Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler
Waking Ghosts 2 Penny Charming
Frank Butterfield interview with Lori Ference
HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses
Get an intuitive reading with Slade
Automatic Intuition
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In this week’s segment, I’m sharing a paranormal memoir originally published as Jack Daniels Makes You Telepathic.
MENTIONED ON THE SHOW Rob Brezsny's Free Will Astrology
Cosmos & Psyche by Richard Tarnas
HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses
Get an intuitive reading with Slade
Automatic Intuition
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TRANSCRIPT The spirits were especially loud that weekend.
You know, normally, I'd say your expectations about clairaudience (your psychic hearing abilities) should be mostly interior and subtle. Just as you have a Mind's Eye, you have a Mind's Ear too -- two of them, actually, you can feel them with your fingertips: find your temples; now move your fingertips back about half an inch until they are directly above your ears but still touching the soft sensitive hollows of the temples' edges.
Clairaudience most often takes the forms of whisper and murmur, just at the boundary of imagination: maybe it's a perfect title or phrase that wells up as a creative gift; someone calling your name over the sound of the shower; a conversation like a television heard through a wall; a loop of song stuck in your head, drilling a snatch of lyric like a riddled message for you to solve...
Every once in awhile, though, clairaudient sounds are experienced as both profoundly physical and truly external.
GHOSTS & GRAVEL
Memorial Day weekend, I went camping with a group of my buddies up at a resort in the mountains of northeast Tennessee. Timberfell Lodge is a pretty little holler stuffed with, in addition to the main building that is its namesake, an RV park, a swimming pool, a tavern, cabins and bathhouses, with wooded trails and landscaped gardens tying it all together.
I was a late addition to the party and I'm also used to a rougher, more fully off-the-grid version of "roughing it." So, while my friends unpacked (stocked the refrigerators) in their rustic yet air-conditioned shacks, I went off on my own in search of a spot to pitch my tent.
In keeping with the tradition of most Gothic tales, someone must wander off on his own and become sufficiently isolated...
I exaggerate, of course, a bit ridiculously.
The only space large enough and level enough to build my homestead for the weekend was centrally located and right on a major foot-traffic thoroughfare. It was one of those spots you find in a busy campground that's so good you wonder what must be wrong with it that it's still available.
I didn't question it too much. I have specialized spirit guides devoted to the task of finding me camp sites, parking spaces, theater seats, short cuts through gridlock, and items of clothing in my size... Technically, they're angels -- little cherubim who race around me like puppies (blue heelers crossed with Tasmanian devils) in wide elliptical comet-arcs.
They are the working shepherd dogs of my desires. And I must say, they're often extremely good at what they do.
Later, I learned from the neighbors that someone was indeed camped there and mysteriously deserted the spot in the night. Makes me wonder if my l'il cherubs might not be pit-bullies who run ahead and muscle people out of my way.
My site was only fifty feet from a faux-Pompeiian bath and the swimming pool where my friends were already beginning to congregate, drinks in hand, while I stomped stakes in the ground and popped up my tent in record time.
I stripped out of my traveling clothes, mixed an Olympian Jack-and-Coke, threw on some flip flops and headed toward the pool, by way of the gravel path I kept hearing everyone crunching along.
I immediately saw that I had camped just beside a rock garden in the center of the entire property. It was appointed in accordance with its premier position in the landscape -- there was a star-shaped convergence of foot paths from every direction covered in white pebbles; artfully planted flowers and ornamental shrubs; the murky gold and copper of slow-moving koi flashed in a tiny reedy pond fed by a steep series of man-made pools and rock shelves in a creek that rivaled Nature's own design of a mountain stream; a white classical statue of Poseidon holding a real metal trident lorded over the water feature at the end of a Japanese foot bridge beside a Narnian lamppost.
Lovely.
In my haste to catch up to the party, I didn't stop to examine the memorial plaques that were spaced among the shrubs and stones. As I raced by, faces winked at me from photographs on the ground, glass frames refracting the sun in flashing messages like Morse code mirrors. They might have registered somewhere within my subconscious.
Fast-forward through the next few days and nights. Much intoxication, socializing, and general Memorial Day weekend merriment was had by all. We could insert a montage here of jokes and smiles, sunscreen and bug spray, beer and bratwurst barbeques, camp fires and conversations -- usually started with "So, where are you here from?"
I must cut in with a director's commentary for just a moment to mention how I never cease to be amazed by my ability to attract, no matter where I find myself or within what degree of diverse company, all manner of shamen, priests, neo-pagans, Radical Faeries, Reiki masters, energy healers, psychics...
Lightworkers are moths to each other's shine.
At one point someone simply came right up to me and said "Has anyone ever told you they can see your aura?"
"Well, yes, indeed, many times. But it usually has more to do with the observer than it does with me. Do you typically see auras?" I asked.
"No, not really. At least I've never thought so. But I swear I can see what must be... your aura. I would say I'm just a little drunk, but I don't see it around everyone."
"But surely not just around me. Look again. Who else has one?"
He slowly and purposefully squinted around at the sunbathers and identified the very people I would have predicted. I was clearly witnessing someone's epiphany about his clairvoyant abilities. He didn't even quite have the vocabulary to articulate what he was realizing, yet some part of him believed that I was a person who might coach it out of him.
Amazing how that happens.
I had these little mini-sessions and fifteen-minute client consultations pop up all weekend. I really was not "trying" -- I would have been just fine with an anonymous, bourbon-enhanced vacation from mindfulness.
JACK & COKE MAKES ME TELEPATHIC (NOT REALLY)
Throughout the weekend, I noticed that several people's thoughts seemed particularly loud. Now, I don't consider myself a "mind-reader" by any stretch; for me, telepathy has always seemed to depend most on the power of the Projector.
For example, one of our group was a friend of a friend of a new friend I had just met that day, a guy from Atlanta named Michael. Only a few minutes after he joined us at the pool, I was watching him watch people and I could clearly hear his interior commentary. He has a wicked sense of humor, clever word choice, and a comedian's timing... I kept laughing out loud.
Everyone gave me that screwed up what are you laughing about face, and when Michael caught my eye, I could see that he knew that I knew what he was thinking. I gave him the snake-eyes finger motion "Right here" -- the hand-sign that says "we're connected, mind-to-mind."
"I can totally hear everything you're thinking."
"You cannot!" He protested.
But it kept happening. I started responding out loud to him as if it was a conversation. It became a bit of a running gag with us. At one point, he "tested" me in front of our friends.
"What am I thinking now?" He narrowed his eyes at me in showy concentration and I heard (clairaudiently) a string of expletives.
"I'm not repeating that!"
"Okay, what about now?" Michael's face took on a softer innocent expression and our onlookers waited for me to translate.
Instead of saying anything, I simply acted on his sub-vocal request -- I went over to a nearby grocery sack, rooted around, pulled out a bag of Ruffles, put them back, and dug deeper for the bag of Funyuns.
Michael's mouth was hanging open as I walked over and dropped the bag of chips on his lap. "No way! He's good," he said as an aside to our witnesses.
"I'm telling you -- you just happen to think really loud," I teased him.
This experience really drove home for me the fact that clairaudience (any psychic sense, for that matter) is not unidirectional -- the degree or power or volume of the transmission of information has a lot to do with the unique combination of the two people interacting.
So, before you judge and label "how psychic" you believe you are -- your ability as a Receiver -- keep in mind that you may have yet to encounter the right Projector.
My mother can read my mind, but I can't read hers; I can only Project. My brother and I can swap moods like we're breathing the same air in a room, but you wouldn't call it information. My friend Seth and I regularly send simple messages to each other on the wind, in both directions, with a fairly decent, even track record on each side.
WHAT ARE GHOSTS IF NOT MEMORIES + LOVE?
People generally believe I am a social extrovert -- I'm hyperactive in the presence of my friends, and a manic talker, even with strangers.
But what others can never witness is the extreme amount of downtime and alone-time I require to maintain any kind of psychological balance.
I am constantly practicing invisibility. I spend hours every day wearing earplugs and reading. I wear iPod earbuds in public just so people won't speak to me. I can't stand the sight of a computer screen after 4 pm. I rarely answer the phone without a prior appointment.
I require the exact same number of hours of uninterrupted sleep, at the exact same time -- cocooned in white noise -- or I come completely undone.
When I'm camping with a group, my favorite time of day is dawn. I like to wake up hours before everyone else and wander about by myself. No matter where I vacation, or how many people are present, there is always a point in the morning when I'm the only one up.
On Monday morning, as everyone slept into their hangovers, I had the bathhouse all to myself. I showered and shaved long before first light, and as I made my way back to the tent, I lingered in the Memorial Garden.
Most times of day, the white gravel paths were like a highway interchange -- there were so many people rushing to the bathroom or on their way to the pool or dashing back to their cabins... you'd get run over trying to stand and watch the koi.
The only sound that morning other than my breath and the birds was the patter of the falling water in the artificial creek. It was nice. It lulled me into a contemplative state of mind.
I finally had a chance to study the plaques and photographs, which were now decorated with fresh flowers.
I've noticed these types of spaces in many of the places that I go on retreat -- whether it's at a spiritual sanctuary or a campground like this. You know right away that, even though their remains are interred somewhere by their biological families, these are the places of the heart, where they most loved to spend time with their spiritual families.
I wondered how someone had come early enough to place the flowers without my seeing them...
I compulsively calculated the age of the deceased, based on the dates on the plaques, finding every one of their lives way too brief.
And then the obviousness of the holiday and the present moment collided in my awareness.
Memorial Day.
Here I was remembering people I had never known.
Spirits don't haunt the graveyards of their lifeless remains -- they visit the places where they lived, where their happiest memories were made.
I felt compelled to reach out to them, just to say Hey.
I asked who among them, if any, had died in military service.
At that moment, someone came running toward me along the gravel. The sound is unmistakable.
Whoever it was was coming at me fast, probably barreling toward the bathroom, and not expecting someone to be silently standing in the middle of the path in the shadows of predawn.
The noise, so loud and sudden, startled me.
I had half a second to react, pure reflex.
I stepped up and away toward the edging of border stones, even as the wind of the runner was on top of me.
But whoever it was stopped behind me, playfully skidded to a halt in a noisy spray of white gravel, and embraced me from behind.
The force of the impact sent me tipping forward into the hedges, but I was pulled back the other way into a great big bear hug.
It knocked the breath out of me.
I turned to see who was on top of me, expecting to see someone there that I knew, horsing around and grinning at the shocked look on my face --
There was no one there.
In this week’s segment, I’m sharing some advice about using oracle cards. There is a way to use them where they can become a crutch, or with a few simple tweaks, they can help you develop your intuitive abilities.
RELATED LINK The Best Way to Use Tarot Cards to Develop Your Psychic Abilities
HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses
Get an intuitive reading with Slade
Automatic Intuition
BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits Edit your pledge on Patreon
In this week’s segment, I’m sharing my thoughts on claircognizance and the perfect tool, in my opinion, to develop it.
MENTIONED ON THE SHOW Can an Atheist be Psychic?
Automatic Writing Lessons
Sylvia Browne
HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses
Get an intuitive reading with Slade
Automatic Intuition
BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits Edit your pledge on Patreon
TRANSCRIPT Several months ago I received an email from a listener of the podcast, I presume, and I think she was responding to one of those requests that I would have made where I said, you know, send me your questions if you have any that you'd like me to answer on the podcast. And it wasn't an interaction like I have with you guys who become supporters on Patreon. I often message you guys through that platform when you come on board and we have a little back and forth around your favorite shows, which topics you'd like to see more of. If you do have any specific Q & A, I pull those out and I keep a record and an ongoing list to work from. So, this woman just sent this to me, an email and it was a very large collection of questions. And I remember thinking like, this is great.
This is like a syllabus. I can just work through this over time and do a whole bunch of different episodes. There were cases where even one of her questions could have produced two or three different episodes depending on what part of the question you decided to focus on. Case in point, she sent me one question that kind of blew my mind a little bit because she was under the assumption that you have to communicate with spirits in order to be psychic. And she even said, "How can you be psychic if you can't communicate with spirits directly?" And I think I may have touched on this in an episode where I talked about spiritual atheism a little bit. I don't know if you recall hearing that. I'll have to go look it up and see if I can find it. I know I did a bonus episode on Patreon with Heather Alice Shae and we talked about that a little bit, but I do know that I talked about atheism and ESP and the kind of idea that spirit communication wasn't necessarily the same thing as like biologically tested science, you know, laboratory experiments around extra sensory perception.
And so those are very different topics and they don't always have to go hand in hand. So I was blown away by her having this assumption that she couldn't be psychic unless she started to essentially be a medium, I think was even where she was going with that. And so I had this question in my list of possible topics of something to talk about. But what I really realized when I started trying to answer this question is that it is a question about claircognizance. When I read that, how can you be psychic if you don't communicate with spirits? I thought claircognizance. Hello, that's just, you know, straight download, that's psychic Wifi and you don't really have to go through anyone to get that. You're not being relayed anything. It's just there. I've done an episode also where I talked about my reading process in great detail and it's evolved over time.
When I first started this website, people were sending me questions about their spirit guides, because at the time I was telling stories about my experiences with angels and spirit guides. And so my first readings were about identifying spirit guides and telling people what names I got for their spirits. And you know, I remember at the time the Montel Williams show had Sylvia Browne on like once a week. Do you remember this? And that was one of the things people would stand up in the audience when he would go around in the mic and let them ask really quick psychic questions of Sylvia and she would just do these cold reads from the stage, really quick, just rapid fire. And that was one that a lot of people would stand up and ask, "Can you tell me who my spirit guide is? Can you tell me the name of my guide?"
So I don't know if that had something to do with it, but it was a big part of the conversation when I started doing readings back in 2006. And now I very rarely have anyone ask me about their guides, even when we're on the phone and we're talking about a whole lot of different stuff. And that's cool. It may or may not matter. Most people are focused on something that's going on in their real life and how to affect something in a practical way down here in the real world. To tell you the truth, that's what I'd be spending my time on as well. I want solutions. I want strategies. I think that it's an interesting conversation to have, especially with other people who are involved in spiritual development or working on their psychic abilities. It's fun to go and have a coffee chat together amongst ourselves about all that stuff. That's the kind of thing that I'd like to talk with students in the Automatic Intuition community about.
I think it's interesting, but when we go face forward with the clients that's not necessarily gonna have that much of an impact on someone's life. So my readings are very much evolved over time to the point where I just think of them now as claircognizant. I really don't pay that much attention to guides, personally. And what I mean by that is I don't individually try to identify who I'm speaking with. If I do call in my guides for myself, I do that kind of as a general group. I just sort of think of them as a collection of guardians and energy and spirits and stuff. I have a nickname for them, which I'm not going to share because it's kind of like, it's a little silly, but it's also private. It's kind of like a magic word. So I'm not gonna tell you what that is, but I have a little word that I say, whenever I want to call them to me. But even that is a very abstract sort of thing.
Claircognizance to me is the most important intuitive sense. It produces like 99 percent of the content in my readings. It produces a lot of the oracle messages. It produces a lot of the articles that I write. All kinds of stuff. I think of it as just being this sort of pure download. But speaking about the clairs and why claircognizance may be a little bit harder to identify or develop, is because first of all so much psychic development out there -- and you've heard me talk about this before, Anna holden mentioned it on a recent episode as well -- that most psychic development courses are focused on clairvoyance. It's easy to understand because our entire language feels to me like it evolved out of a need to describe visual information to one another. And we also, in this modern era have a lot of metaphors around film and television and video and close circuit security cameras.
When you think about a word, a term like slow motion ... I used that incorrectly in a book, in a novel that I had set in 1917, and I caught it and edited it before it went out the door. But I remember thinking, oh, what, wait a minute. That's a video editing term that's something that's like VCR era. I don't think that they would have had any conception of what slow motion meant because you didn't see things in slow motion until TV started showing you this slow motion effect. So anyway, we have all this language to describe clairvoyance, we can talk about obviously the imagery that we see itself, the colors, who's there, where they are, what's happening. We can speak that to another person.
We can also use terms like fast forward, freeze frame, rewind, go back, watch it in slow motion, watch it in replay. Ce can do that in our minds conceptually with clairvoyance. So it makes it very easy to talk about clairvoyance. We also commonly have dreams and we share those with one another and again, it's a kind of language sharing, a visual experience. So I would say clairaudience is also easy to share in the same kind of way and talk about, because it is language. It comes in as language or it comes in as music and more than anything there's a sense of time associated with clairaudience. Like I was sitting in my room typing at 3:15 and I heard the sound coming from the hallway. There's also the sense sometimes of something being whispered near you or it could be an interior voice, but the idea of being able to place a clairaudient signal in time or space is easy to talk about. It's also easy to simply relay what you heard.
So if I'm talking on the phone to someone and you're in the room with me, I can listen to what that person says and then I can repeat it to you, even word for word. Again, clairaudience is something that's very easy for us to have a dialogue around.
Now. Claircognizance is interesting because even though I feel like it's the pure source, the channel with the most content, the easiest way to actually retrieve psychic information without thinking about it ... It's a little bit hard to talk about. And if you're new to it or you're trying to develop that particular skill, it's a little hard to say when it happens or how it happens. It's kind of like an I Dream of Jeannie special effect. You know what I mean? It's like -- blink, it's there. Blink it's not there.
If you go to that security cam footage metaphor, in terms of clairvoyance, you can watch something appear on screen. You can stop it and you can rewind it and you can zoom in on it, all that kind of stuff. But with claircognizance, it's like you go to the security cam footage and it's missing. It's like that scene in the movie where someone edited the security cam footage and ... blink, it's just gone.
Clairsentience is ... Well, you know, it's difficult to talk about feelings, right? It's hard to describe emotions in writing. It's hard to convey emotions to other people. When we think about empathy, which is a kind of clairsentienc, it's an ability to sort of feel what someone else is feeling or compassion, which is slightly more removed, but it's the ability to willfully and intentionally project yourself into the emotions of someone else and take them on and try to connect with them.
It's hard for us to project our emotions at someone. Even when we think about telepathy, we think about telepathy being more in terms of clairvoyance. "I'm going to look at this card with the triangle on it and I'm going to beam that at your brain and then you're gonna see the triangle."
I do think that with clairsentience, it's the reason why fiction is so powerful and storytelling. Why storytelling and filmmaking and television and acting is such a huge part of our world. Here we are, we're so developed, we have this amazing information technology. We have philosophical concepts and we think of ourselves as being highly evolved over thousands of years even though we have very far to go. But have you ever stopped to think, why is Hollywood such an important place in our universe and why our actors paid so much money?
Why are professional athletes valued at the level that they are? I think it's a clairsentience thing. I think it's because they have an ability that allows us to live and experience things vicariously through them. When you read a book, you're essentially reading another life. You are plugging into another reality. There is a connection between acting and writing and even sports performance. You think about the Olympics or you think about the game day shows where they have these biographies and these emotional backstories and they really get you invested in what's happening. So you are living through these other people emotionally.
Clairsentience is something we talk a lot about protecting ourselves from. Also being able to ground the energy. Clairentience is often something that we're trying to manage. that's changing for me a little bit, especially after talking to Anna Holden from Sensitivity Uncensored.
If you haven't listened to that episode and you are an empath or highly sensitive person, check that out because when it comes to someone coming to me and saying, "How do I develop who I am as a clairsentient person?" I think Anna is onto something that's really powerful and empowering and willful and kind of punk rock ... Like everything I wouldn't have thought to associate with empathy. So check her out. I am processing a lot of what I'm learning from her and rethinking about how I approach it.
But on this particular segment, I really wanted to talk about claircognizance and developing that tool in particular. I think you can find a lot of information out there on developing clairvoyance and almost any workshop that you go to at a new age center is probably going to have some type of visual component or vision work in it.
I want to just to take a few minutes and say claircognizance is my jam. It's something that I find a lot of people in the Automatic Intuition program coming in with some aptitude for. If I do see that in the assessment of the attunement that we do, I will usually suggest to them that they develop their claircognizance because there is a bit of an overlap with clairaudience.
Clairaudience is about language and it's about receiving instructions, information, shining sentences, cool titles, names for things. You know, sometimes it's a haiku, sometimes it sounds like a greeting card. Sometimes it sounds like a directive or a warning. It can be any number of experiences. It can be lyrics in a song that speak to you. I always say, when you have a song stuck in your head, notice what those lyrics are and stop singing it for a minute and imagine, okay, what if that's a message?
What if that's the back of an oracle card and you're doing a divination experience?Imagine what is it that you're thinking about right now? What is your subconscious trying to communicate to you through the song lyrics? Sound and music are coming from a slightly different part of the brain than language too. So there's a lot that we can talk about regarding clairaudience. I do consider myself primarily a clairaudient intuitive. That's what I identified with for a long time. This idea of me saying, you know what, it's all claircognizance for me at this point is a bit of a newer development. I even need to change my About page, to tell you the truth, to more accurately reflect that. It's easy for me to mentor someone who has some kind of aptitude for claircognizance or clairaudience because I think that there is enough of an overlap that we can work with them simultaneously because.
If if someone asks you a question and you just kind of know the answer to what they're asking you, you just have this great piece of advice. It just spills out of you and you may even be aware in the moment as you're speaking it. I'm like, wow, who was talking? This is really great. I've never even thought about this before, but now this is great. Information is coming out of my mouth and that's a bit more of a dialoging or channeling experience. But the reason why I say that's related to clairaudience is because our minds have to almost immediately -- not almost -- our minds literally translate everything into language and words, just so we can think about it. And it's a micron of ... I don't even know how to quantify how quickly that happens, but the moment you think something, even if it's an I Dream of Jeannie blink and it's there, your mind immediately attaches a word to it or starts to tell a story about it or forms language around it. Because that's the only way you can handle it. Even in your own head. That's the only way that you can really think about it.
So when you go to communicate claircognizant information to someone else, even in the moment, improvisation, conversation -- as fast as it's happening -- it is getting translated into language. So to me, the lines blur a little bit sometimes between claircognizance, clairaudience and what we would call vocal channeling or being a transe channel.
My general rule of thumb in mentoring intuitive development is that the tools that work with clairaudience are also likely to produce the most and the best information around claircognizance. To me the most reliable and the simplest and the most obvious tool is automatic writing, which produces the most volume of detailed content. And that's very easy to share with the client.
So if you're thinking in terms of producing a reading for someone else, if someone brings you a question and you use some clairvoyance, you might get a symbol or an image. You describe that to them and it may be a string of those things. But it's kind of fragmented.
One of the things that I've noticed with automatic writing is it tends to be very language heavy, very conversational, and it has a lot of descriptors built into it. Just in terms of the number of words it produces, produces more detail. Sometimes in those little bits of random detail that you just think of as word choice, when you look at it, there's actually a pattern of something that will speak to the client. Like say for instance, you start using a whole lot of metaphors around something like music, without knowing their musical background, it may be really meaningful to them that you are using language that we associate with sound and music. So even though you might be talking about something metaphorically or symbolically, you might start telling a story.
The cool thing about automatic writing is it just produces a lot and it gives a lot for the client to have feedback around. And it's also already in a format that's very easy to share. It's almost instantaneous. You asked me a question, I retrieved the answer. I dream of Jeannie Blink and here it is. I'm typing it to you as fast as I possibly can. Send. Send an email off to that person. It's one of the purest forms for me of doing a reading and it's one of the reasons why I looked again at doing email readings. For a long time, I decided that email readings were somehow lesser than talking to me on the phone. I will say that there is something that happens when you speak to me live. It's a whole other ballgame, and there's more that can take place. But when it's just an answer to a question, and it's really specific and sort of limited in scope, I think automatic writing is amazing.
I do have a tutorial by the way, just to plug it. It's called Automatic Writing Lessons and that's been on my Shop page for years and years. It's a very basic, personal take on how to do proprioceptive writing, freestyle writing, automatic writing. You can use it in a lot of different contexts. It's a technique that uses a timing device as a way of invoking speed, and speed in my conception is related to the intuitive channel.
The intuitive channel is really fast. The thinking mind is a little bit more ponderous and slow. So when you're trying to develop your intuition or you're trying to isolate the intuitive channel, speed is your friend and you want it to happen as fast as possible. You don't want to think about it. You don't want to edit it. You don't want to take it apart or fix it in any way.
The detail that you can bring through in automatic writing is really incredible. Here's the thing though: you'd never know it without the feedback from outside your own head, from outside your own experience. You really need someone else to judge it because to you, it could just look like something that you made up. The best way to test this and probably one of the only ways that you'll ever know how your intuition is landing or how accurate it is. You may be surprised. A lot of people would do this automatic writing exercise and think, oh, that seems like a ho hum run of the mill kind of monologue that I wrote down, not even realizing how many psychic hits and how much detail there is hidden within it. The only way that you ever find that out is by getting feedback from the person that it was intended for.
I really learned to trust my intuition because of the feedback. From doing it over and over again, I've just learned to trust that the process produces something and not to overthink it or question it. Not to be hesitant about it. The feedback from client after client saying, "Oh my God, how'd you know this? I can't believe you used this word. I can't believe you said such an such." That kind of feedback is where you start to realize, oh, I'm tapping into something here. It does have a meaningful impact for the other person.
You really can't judge it. That's the key. You need someone else to judge it. Do automatic writing sessions using questions that are provided to you by someone else. Now you might be tempted to do this with someone you're close with, like one of your kids or your mom or your best friend who is also into this kind of stuff, and maybe you do card readings for each other or something like that... That's okay, but it's actually undermining you a little bit whenever you do readings for people that you know. On some level you question whether or not your subconscious has retained information about them that you don't consciously remember. You worry that you are extrapolating and making up educated guesses based on things that you already know about this person. Even though you don't really, you may tell yourself, oh, I'm doing automatic writing for this person. Somewhere in the back of your mind, if you know them, you are doubting a little bit that some of those other things might be factors.
If you want to really develop your claircognizant ability and you want to test it and really get a sense of where your hits are landing and how, use questions from a stranger. That may sound really hard to do, but actually the online world and social media makes it very easy for us to be connected with people who are virtual strangers.
We might know their face and we know their name and maybe know little bits about them. I would bet there are probably a lot of you listening who belong to spiritual groups or interest groups around new age topics or psychic development, stuff. Groups where there's a bunch of people that you don't really know. They're members for the same reason you are, which is around a topic. You may only be focused on a few of the people that you've interacted with, but you actually do have, on social media, access to thousands of people who you don't know, who you really don't know anything about. If you were to present to them, hey, I want to test myself, I'm going to try to do some automatic writing. Is there anybody who wants to participate with me? You can get some volunteers really quickly and you can do some practice readings, using the timed automatic writing technique.
Get these people that you don't know to present you with questions. The cool thing is if you want to do one for a friend of yours and then do one or two or three for total strangers, what you will notice is it's actually really liberating to do a reading for a total stranger. To do an automatic writing exercise, with a question as a prompt from someone you don't know ... if you produce any words at all, it pretty much has to be your intuition. Because that's all you have to rely on an answering their question. You really don't have things stored in your subconscious that you remember about them from earlier interactions. You don't have their backstory to extrapolate from. Because they're strangers.
This is a really basic, great strong way to develop claircognizant ability and the feedback is where you will learn. You have to kind of retro-engineer the feedback. What I mean by that is that sometimes the things that I feel the weirdest about writing down, like say for instance, I'm doing a reading for someone and it's all in text, it's an email and I'm doing automatic writing and I'm clickety clacking away, 100 words per minute and there's this whole story unfolding and it makes sense. And then something will come through that kind of doesn't belong or seems odd or seems to break the flow of the story in some way. Now, as a writer, as a storyteller, if I was editing that story, I would edit those things out. This doesn't make sense. Why is this detail about a blue stuffed animal in the middle of this paragraph? I would take things out that didn't go along with the other kind of symbolism and conceptual stuff going on in the text.
But with automatic writing, with claircognizance, with testing your psychic ability, don't edit anything. Don't remove anything. You can clean it up for spelling and add some punctuation. Add paragraph breaks. I always appreciate people who format their writing is such a way that it's easy to read. But don't remove content. Don't remove thoughts or concepts or details or phrases or word choice. Don't change any of that stuff. The stuff that I most want to remove is usually the stuff that the clients respond to the most strongly. It's the thing that they have the most association around, the biggest stories around.
Had I only done five or 10 readings and looked at them and thought, now that sounds ridiculous. I would have never known that. Those things that feel ridiculous to me are really good stuff. Those are some psychic kits. And because I've heard that over and over again, I'm like, there it is again, the thing that I thought was weird and dorky, they have this entire story around it. What happens then is the 11th and the twelfth and the 13th time I do it. I just allow myself to feel that and write it down. At this point when I start to get one of those sort of uncomfortable, weird details, I'm like, yes, nailed that. Give me those, because I know that there is power in those and I've learned to trust that what I experience as discomfort in that moment is actually getting at something psychic.
It might not be that for you, it might be something completely different. You may feel like a real magical sense of flow during those parts that are truly landing with the other person. You won't know until you let them evaluate them. The thing that's really hard to wrap your mind around is that you are not a good judge of your abilities. You need someone else to judge it for you in order to get any kind of distance and objective perspective on it.
So don't edit. Resist the urge to remove anything. Write, really quickly clean it up a little bit just for punctuation and formatting. Send it back to that stranger who provided you with the question. And ask them for feedback. Let them know up front that's what you're looking for, that you're doing this in exchange for some constructive, compassionate feedback.
That is my absolute number one best tip for developing your claircognizance. The rest of it, I think you'll find in the experience of using it.
Are you an HSP? An empath? Just feeling overwhelmed and like you're "doing life bad"?
You're going to love this interview with Anna Holden.
Anna Holden is a professional intuitive, energy healer and spiritual teacher. She mentors burgeoning psychics and healers in her professional training program, The School for Sacred Rebellion. She also runs The Refuge for Sacred Rebellion, a spiritual enlivenment platform for highly sensitive people, and she hosts The Soul of Sensitivity podcast, a show that explores the intersection of sensitivity and spirituality.
WE TALK ABOUT: * clairsentience and empathy * highly sensitive people as an indicator species * reclaiming the sacred self
This is not your run of the mill conversation about being a psychic sponge and carrying the weight of the world around with you and being burdened with everyone’s ugly shit.
Anna refers to herself as a "sensitive revolutionary" ... and she has a whole different empowering angle on this topic.
MENTIONED ON THE SHOW Anatomy of the Spirit by Caroline Myss
Heidi Frank Palmer https://subtlebodysolutions.com/
GUEST LINKS - Anna Holden sensitivityuncensored.com
Soul of Sensitivity podcast
Anna's Free Guide You Are a Goddamn Magical Unicorn
The Refuge for Sacred Rebellion
The School for Sacred Rebellion
HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses
Get an intuitive reading with Slade
Automatic Intuition
BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits Edit your pledge on Patreon
TRANSCRIPT Anna: I'm Anna and I work with people who are highly sensitive, empathic, intuitive, and usually these people find me because they're overwhelmed. So I work specifically with people who are highly sensitive to help them develop their intuitive channels and strengthen their sense of sensitivity so it's not overwhelming them, and that they're able to work with it. I see that, I mean, I really see sensitivity and being an empath as a really huge gift that we're not given any tools around, any sort of know-how around, so I kind of create a structure and a language to be able to work with those things.
And I do that one-on-one, I do that in my membership group, and I do that in different courses and an intuitive school that I'm working on.
Slade:
Very cool.
I want to come back a little bit and talk sort of about your manifesto, and the whole thing about sensitivity in particular how you kind of relate that to everything. That's something I want to dive in a little bit deeper on.
One of the things I'm interested in - I've been asking a lot of people this, so I'm going to ask you - when you meet someone for the first time in real life and they ask you what you do, what do you say?
Anna:
Oh Jesus.
You know, it really - it's funny, because I listened to the episode that you're referencing and I'm like, 'I'm taking notes', because this is something that I still struggle with, you know? It really depends.
Sometimes I tell people I'm an intuitive. If I feel pretty comfortable with people I'll tell them I'm an intuitive.
If it's somebody who is just totally out of this realm, I'll call it, sometimes I'll say that I have a healing arts practice. Sometimes I will say that I work with people who are highly sensitive to help them manage overwhelm.
Those are usually the three places I will go, but I find it, I really find it a struggle.
And for me, it's the sense of, how much do I - or it's kind of this battle between how much can I own about what I do and how much is actually going to get in and how much is safe in this situation?
Slade:
Yeah, well, and you know what?
Also, some people ask that question very politely with the expectation that they're probably going to get a boring answer.
Anna:
Mmhmm!
Slade:
You know, like, 'I work as a clerk in a shipping department', or whatever. And sometimes people, just to be polite, might ask a bit of follow-up questions, but most people, myself included, when I ask somebody what they do, they may tell me and I'm like, 'Oh, okay, cool!' And I just kind of gloss over it and move on with the conversation.
So I think that we feel especially under-the-gun about our identity in some way that we're projecting onto the situation a little bit.
But I do, you know, I live in the Bible belt, so I don't walk around calling myself a psychic to every stranger that I meet. But I will say that I have learned, over time, more and more, how many people DO get me, and DO like what I do, and sometimes I'm pre-judging them and thinking, 'Oh, they're probably super conservative and traditional, and this would wig them out.'
And then I find out later that they're not at all. And then I feel like as ass for, you know... being weird about it.
Anna:
Oh, I so resonate with that!
Because sometimes, I've said this before, particularly in the early parts of my practice, where I was like, I feel like the witch on the edge of town that everybody goes to but nobody talks about.
Slade:
Yes!
Anna:
Where it's like, sometimes yeah, I'll tell people I'm a psychic and they'll come up to me later on and be like, 'I really want to know more. I just feel really drawn to knowing more.'
And it's always kind of funny when that happens, that there is an opening. Oftentimes people are really searching for this, and particularly people who are more conservative often are really, you know, looking for some of this and when - we can create an opening for curiosity, I suppose.
Slade:
Well and another weird full-circle thing that I've discovered is that sometimes people of religious faith, even though I think, 'Oh, they're really traditional in their faith', people of faith generally are more open to conversations about faith. They're more open to the subject matter of supernatural phenomenon. They believe in angels and guides and archetypes and deities and all this kind of stuff actually.
So sometimes they're weirdly open minded about the metaphysical part of it, almost a part that the intellectual crowd would dismiss us for. Sometimes the little old ladies who go to church every day, they're the mystical one. They're totally like down-low witches, you know what I mean?
Anna:
Totally!
Yeah, you know, the way that I relate that is, so I grew up in Utah in Mormon country and my - I was not raised Mormon, but my mom's family is very Mormon. I think she's the only of her eight other siblings that left the Mormon church.
So when we go to family reunions, there's always been this like, you know, we kind of get very reserved and we stop cussing. There's just not a lot, besides traffic and weather, that we talk about.
But I was really surprised in that - and I feel kind of bad that I was surprised, like not putting as much, kind of faith in these cousins, particularly a couple of women that I grew up with, where we had this fantastic conversation about sensitivity and energy and different energy tools to help her sensitive kids and she was so open to all that, and a very, very devout, religious person.
And I realized, wow, that is MY prejudice. That was ME getting in the way of what turned out to be this really beautiful exchange.
Slade:
Yeah, that's very cool.
So obviously you didn't always identify as a professional intutiive or as a psychic new age person, so how did you become one?
Anna:
Oh gosh, yeah.
What's kind of interesting is that I was a scientist first. I have a Bachelors degree and a Masters degree, Slade, in science. In conservation science and environmental science and really, I kind of chalk that up to I'm-really-interested-in-nature.
I'm really... I find so many answers in nature and I realized recently - not recently but I've realized over the years that I really have an intuitive, you know, I have intuitive telepathic conversations when I'm in nature. That was kind of the place that I lived - in this very analytical, very scientific place.
But on the other side of that, I was always seeking, and, you know, growing up in Utah as a non-Mormon, where everybody (I did a whole podcast on this) everybody that I was around. The town that I was in was a huge percentage Mormon, I think, in the '80s, 80% Mormon. So pretty much all the people that I went to school with had this really strong sense of relationship with God that included a lot of rules and books and, just things I didn't have, but I was really interested in having a relationship with something higher because I saw spirits and animal spirits and all kinds of things.
And so, in my early twenties, I started exploring that kind of on the side. I started - well, after I went to college, I started studying. I studied some reiki, I studied qigong, I read the Tao Te Ching, I dabbled in Buddhism, just trying to find a sense of connection and along the way, when I was Colorado (I had taken a year off of school to follow a guy, ahem) I met this great community of intuitives like, the first psychics that I've ever met, and had really ground-breaking, earth-shaking experiences of validation, of really feeling seen for the first time in my life.
And it gave in me a sense of direction that I had never really had before.
So, over the years, I continued dabbling in meditation and different energy healing arts and it was funny because I think at that time in my early twenties, I read my first Caroline Myss book, the Anatomy of the Spirit, and I was like, 'Ohmygosh. This is so cool. I totally want to do this.'
But thinking that it was really out of reach, you know, believing that it's something you're born with or you're not and...
Eventually, in my mid-twenties, I asked the main intuitive that I worked with, 'Hey, do you think I could do this?'
And she just, she kind of laughed, you know? She was like, 'Ohmygosh, Anna. Of course you can do this!'
And so I just started taking some basic energy management meditation classes and then eventually decided to join a full clairvoyant training program. And clairvoyant, I mean, clairvoyance, you've said this on your podcast, where it's like clairvoyance is the only thing people are teaching which I totally agree with that.
And for me, it was really helpful because I am very clairsentient, in a way that's actually kind of damaging and hard on my body. So learning to be clairvoyant was really helpful, and I actually then didn't right go out into the world and get readings, or to give readings rather. I had to, I kind of was very type-A, I had to get all the certifications first and studied yoga and ayurveda and stuff.
That's the general story.
I then eventually, when I moved to Seattle about six years ago, I was going to set up as an ayurvedic practitioner and the laws in Washington are a lot stricter than where they were when I was living in California. I was like, Crap! I can't set up as an ayurvedic practitioner. Well, I guess i'll just give readings then.
So I feel like I kind of fell into being a professional psychic but that was definitely the place where I was supposed to be.
Slade:
Mmm...
By the way, your website is called SensitivityUncensored.com, if anybody's listening and they want to kind of look at you and check out your site while we're talking, because there's so much about the personality. The imagery on your site, the language on your site, that really drew me in.
And seeing some of that, I immediately connected with you and couldn't help but feel that you must've been motivated to create something in a response to all that goody-goody that's out there that I sort of feel like I try to respond to as well.
So I was wondering, what motivated, just kind of the vibe of your site and the concept?
Anna:
Yeah, oh that's great. That's part of the reason why I was drawn to you, Slade, it was the less hearts and flowers. So I was like, 'Oh, thank God.' Someone else, you know?
Slade:
Yeah!
Anna:
Well there's a couple things.
First actually, was that I recognized that the clients, the highly sensitive clients I was attracting, one of the real challenges they had was this real sense of seriousness, that everything was so serious.
And, like you know what happens when we get serious all the time. Our energy shuts off. It stops flowing, you know?
So part - so they learned, working with me, that we're not going to be super serious. We're going to go through important, difficult stuff and we're not going to do that in a life or death, with a life or death energy, you know? We're going to go through a little bit more lighthearted so that we can stay just above and work with what's there.
So that was the first thing.
The second reason is that I had, before that, kind of pigeon-holed myself with my previous website as like, the perfect healer. I think you know what I'm talking about. It was really annoying, Slade, my website. And I think about it now, I cringe. It's like when you are in the year 2000 with a 1981 haircut. You're like, 'Oh, that should have been updated.'
So I had felt like I had created this pressure for myself to show up perfectly, which is like, I'm nowhere near perfect, and it just wasn't the vibe that I actually worked from. So the website was a bit of a 'coming out' in a way for me, being like, 'Hey, yeah i'm a healer and I do things really, really differently.'
And then kind of the third thing is, I have avoided for years calling myself psychic because I don't tend to like a lot a lot of the psychic community, kind of that new-age vibe because it's like the Law of Attraction and that's all that exists. Which, like, I just want to vomit a little with that, and I see a lot of clients getting really hung up on some of these new age principles that have been spun really poorly, taught really poorly, kind of from a, I like to call it, Puritanical way, where it's like, 'I did everything right. Why isn't the Universe giving me what I want?'
And i'm like, okay well we just kind of - that's not how it works!
Slade:
There's a kind of fundamentalism that has crept in to it all.
Anna:
Exactly! Yeah!
Slade:
Yeah. I totally know - well, I have to say, in keeping with kind of lightness and the vibe of your site when people first land on it, they'll know what I'm talking about. You have to go check this out because I honestly kind of felt like, and I don't mean this to sound in any way like you're smaller than me or less mature, something like that, but I felt like you were like my little sister who I thought of as being like an elementary school kid who suddenly got really cool and turned punk rock over the summer, and I was like, 'Wait a minute!'
And I looked at you and I was like, 'Oh wait, she's cooler than me!"
And it felt like something I did respond to, you're right. The less hearts and flowers thing. But you had it dialed up in a way that was particularly feminine, I think, but in a badass kind of way, you know, like a babydoll punk kind of vibe. There's something kind of retro '90s grunge about it. I don't know how to put words on it but it was really refreshing and exciting to me to see that, and I do think that you're in a safe space, talking to this group of people who follow me or listen to this podcast. They will totally get you and they will appreciate it and they will laugh in all the right places and be excited.
Anna:
Right, right.
Slade:
But you have this manifesto and again, the language that you use, everything is very, kind of, cool and grounded and kind of in your face in a good way that kind of wakes you up. But it's not trying too hard. It feels very natural. It feels, like you said, you came out of some pristine kind of shell that you were trying to be in, and sort of let it all out and, you know what it is?
It's like a cool, it's like a cool hair cut. You know, like when you cut all your hair off and you dye it blonde, which I know that you recently did.
Anna:
Yes! Hahaha...
Slade:
It's like your site kind of feels like the spiritual 'coming out' version of that. Like, I'm going to go into the bathroom and I'm gonna shave my head and then I'm gonna come out and be like, raccoon eyeliner watch out.
Anna:
Yeah.
Slade:
But having said all that, that definitely is like a, WHAT?
You know, like it made me stop in my tracks and want to come in. But then when I started to read your actual manifesto, kind of your About page, about where you're coming from and everything, there's some real depth and philosophical originality going on here.
So, I want you to kind of talk to me about this concept of Sacred Rebellion, and it's clear from your domain name, Sensitivity Uncensored, that there's this relationship between highly sensitive people and then this concept of rebellion.
Explain all that to us. What is that manifesto?
Anna:
Yeah, absolutely.
So I, you know that when I wrote the manifesto, I mean, that comes straight from inside. I feel every word of that manifesto. It wasn't something, when I created my website, that I was like, and then I will have a manifesto! It was like, one day I was like, I have a manifesto! And it must be written! And...
I think this is actually where my science background comes in, because something that I observe about the people I work with, people who are sensitive, who are empathic, who are intuitive, we have so many answers for the problems that are plaguing the world.
I mean, we are like, I liken this in science to the indicator species, you know? A way you could say that more commonly is, the canary in the coal mine. We can, we feel what's happening. We have a knowingness about what's happening when we're clear. Sometimes we see, we hear, and we receive tremendous amounts of guidance.
I really believe that there's a critical place for sensitive, empathic, intuitive people on the planet, and that we currently have a culture that is not set up to recognize our gifts.
Nobody is going to step aside for that to happen right? That has to come from us claiming our space, finding our power and our place, wherever we want that to be. I'm not saying we all need to get on the front lines and be social justice warriors or something, you know?
But coming into our power and having enough personal sovereignty to do our thing in the world. No matter if that's, you know, being a professional psychic or being a really good interior designer, or an artist that just moves people.
I just feel like it's so important.
And so, the Sacred Rebellion is that claiming. The Sacred Rebellion has two parts.
First, it's about personal practices and personal tools that help us come to a place of spiritual and personal sovereignty, where we are much more able to clearly able to discern between what is our STUFF to deal with and what is the stuff of someone else or the world.
Basically being able to discern between energies, right? So that we can do US. That's the first part of Sacred Rebellion. It's a re-claiming, a claiming, remembering.
The second part, and I think this is so critical, is the 'so that'.
We do that work - SO THAT - we can be in this greater world, earth, doing our part, for humanity, the earth, consciousness, whatever.
So, and you pointed this out, so much of my work is really grounded because I believe it has to be. If we really want to change the situation of the planet and really help, you know, human consciousness raise up or, however you want to, however you want to talk about that goal.
So, again, the Sacred Rebellion is about doing those two things and doing them in community with other highly sensitive, empathic, intuitive people. I mean, I think I've heard you said, Slade, sorry, you had said, Slade, that, you know, we're spread out, as intuitives. You have that theory we're not all bunched together, and how isolating that is.
Slade:
Mmhmm.
Anna:
And I'm like, 'Okay! Let's group up!' Like, we need community, so that's where my Refuge for Sacred Rebellion is that place where we come together and do this.
Slade:
Yeah, talk about, a little bit about this. It's kind of a program, right? Or it's, I mean, it's a community. You explain what it is, the Refuge for Sacred Rebellion.
Anna:
Yeah.
The Refuge for Sacred Rebellion - it's a membership group. It's a place for highly sensitive, or sensitive souls, empaths, intuitives, others, people who have felt 'othered', to come into community with other highly sensitive empathic psychic others.
And I co-lead this with a woman named Heidi Frank Palmer, and she was a long-term client/student of mine who's right up with me, and we are co-leading the space. What we, our goals for this space is, are to create a real sense of community. To provide ample opportunity for us to get to know each other, to share what's happening for us daily and where we're at in our stories.
We do this through a Facebook group. We also have monthly discussion calls about different subjects that are either guided by us or guided by other members.
Basically the things that creative people struggle with. Like, we break it down.
We have what we call 'office hours', kind of stealing something from my college professors, where we kind of hang out online, and if you want to, you can come and ask us questions and get advice as part of the group.
And then, twice a year, I teach the Fundamental Tools for my School for Sacred Rebellion and intuitive development Program, and this was, these are a set of tools that I created and originally was calling, 'Sensitive Self-Defense'. It's like spiritual hygiene for sensitives. It's a bunch of meditation tools that really help us take those first steps to getting spiritually sovereign.
I used to sell this course for so much money and whatever, and now it's just like, you're in the Refuge, you'll get these tools. Twice a year, we go through it together. You can join us. You can not join us. They're available within the membership area of the website so you can refresh, or work through, at your own pace.
Basically we are trying to create a place where you can come, you know, come together and go through this experience of being a sensitive, creative, intuitive soul on this planet at this time.
Slade:
Hmm, okay.
I was hoping that you would have some advice for sensitive people. You kind of touched on that idea of the first thing that you need to do, that kind of sensitive self-defense, and I encounter people who refer to themselves as HSP, Highly Sensitive People, empaths. One of the first things that I teach everyone who comes into my intuitive training is a different kind of shielding technique that's not just a, you know, wall of white light and bleach.
It's like, it's too much, you know.
I always tell people there's a difference between a blindfold and sunglasses.
Anna:
Yes, yes!
Slade:
So what are some tips you have for someone - because the thing about people who are empathic and highly sensitive is, they're the most likely to be shut down. They're the most likely to have walls. They're the most likely to be like, so withdrawn within themselves that they're not seeking, they're not reaching for this stuff like some of us are.
So when you encounter one of those people, and you're kind of triaging that highly sensitive empath, and you need to give them a pair of sunglasses instead of a blindfold, what do you advise?
What's the first thing to do?
Anna:
Such a great question.
So, the thing that I notice about these people, I mean, this is everyone I work with, is that, I mean, rightly so, they're inside themselves, right? Because the world is fucking harsh. So I just see no judgment in that.
They've been doing what they learned to do to protect themselves, you know? Good job. Now it's not working so let's do something else, right?
So, what I notice is that HSP, what they do is they eject. Like, their aura usually, not always, but usually the first thing I see clairvoyantly when a HSP comes at me is, they're not in their body.
Slade:
Mmm...
Anna:
Because their body is painful. It's too painful to be in their body. It's scary. It's over-whelming. There's so much sensation, you know? So they're just like, I'm ejecting into the spiritual, the theoretical space that is so much easier for me to be in.
So before I actually offer sunglasses, and I used to do this, Slade, I used to just offer protection first, and it didn't work for HSP.
Slade:
Okay.
Anna:
Because for them, what I find, is they've got to get grounded first.
Slade:
Okay.
Anna:
They HAVE to be in their body.
So that stuff actually, the first thing that I give them is, I teach them how to create a really dynamically solid grounding cord I'll call it. So it's not like you're stuck to your chair, you know, but it's a way to plug in and to really fill up the space of your body.
And then after that, I offer actually a little bit of like, I call it 'turning on the tap', how do you then get nourished with air and water, now that you're in your body, and then I give protection.
Because I think about it like, I think about protection kind of like the alarm system of a house. Right? And say this alarm system works like, will only protect if you and all your shit is in your house. You know what I mean?
If they're not in their bodies, then what's the alarm system doing, you know?
Slade:
Mmm...
Anna:
That's kind of what I, that's how I explain it at least.
And this is just came from me working with THIS population for so long, that I was like, Why isn't a protection working?
Oh. Because they're not there.
Slade:
I had an image come to me while you were speaking. I'm just going to share it, that for me, I had this kind of fitness image come in, which was the idea that without core strength, you're not really in a position to work a bunch of kung fu and martial arts, you know what I mean?
Anna:
Haha.. Totally!
Slade:
You can't throw a punch if you don't have a strong core. You can't spin around and kick someone in the face if you don't have balance, you know what I mean? You can't put all these muscles on top of something that doesn't have a centre.
Which I think, in general, is a lot of what, when people call themselves spiritual seekers or they're working on all these tools and all this stuff, I often find that they're orbiting the body...
Anna:
Yes!
Slade:
...playing with all this stuff that's kind of like in the upper chakras and you've heard me talk about this and the whole idea of re-booting, re-grounding energy and working back up again if you feel like you're frazzled or fried or whatever.
But that's coming to me as a part of this picture of what you're describing, like, it doesn't make sense for you... like, you gotta be in your body first before you can manage the kind of shell of energy.
Anna:
Well, absolutely.
I mean, for most HSP, this is our natural tendency, to take up space in the upper chakras at kind of the expense of the lower. And this, then, just generally makes us feel like we do life bad.
Slade:
Yes!
Anna:
You know? Most people who are not sensitive and empathic, you know, no judgment on that, but they naturally tend to just hang out in their lower chakras, so it's like, easy to get a job, and kind of easy to make money and they're not too worried about what their Spirit's doing, you know? It's just like, it's basic.
And then, HSP we're all up in our upper chakras going like, why can't I get a job that I like? Like, why...
Slade:
Yes...
Anna:
Why is this... And it's like, Yeah! There's a gift about occupying those upper chakras. And, you do have a body. And, you don't have to occupy those lower chakras in the same way that everyone else does.
So let's find a way to occupy them that, you know, really resonates and validates who you are as a Spirit.
Slade:
Yeah, it's like your Wifi isn't going to work if the little box isn't plugged in to the wall.
Anna:
Yes! I love that - that's totally it. Yes.
Slade:
Yeah, and the thing is, is like, when I talk about people doing that, and I do talk about it because I see it in clients and I see it in myself. There's been this ongoing theme this year where I keep returning to real basic stuff about the body and wellness, and nutrition, and simple fitness.
And the thing is, is I don't think that any of that stuff has to be complicated.
I think, actually, everyone's impulse is to over-complicate it by a bunch of outfits and special shoes and like, go for a marathon and, I mean it's good to have goals and stuff but I think that if you are sort of working in all those upper chakras and they're not working right for some reason, like you said, I feel like I'm doing this wrong, then look at really simple grounding.
Do you walk around outside?
Anna:
Yes!
Slade:
Do you feel sunlight on your eyelids? That creates a vitamin in your body, you know?
And getting back to your, sort of, I want to say it's kind of neo-pagan, in a way, like the way that you connect from your science background in conservation and ecology back to the sort of you know, earth as life force as a living entity, all that kind of stuff.
So there's that connection to it as well, and that's really simple, basic, animal, like you said, lower chakra kind of stuff to work on.
And we're all guilty of it.
Anna:
Oh, yeah.
Slade:
I mean, I spend most of my time trying to climb up in my third eye and balance on my divine crown all day long and, you know, all this kind of stuff and, you know, everything from the heart chakra up is like getting all this attention and it was a real life-changer for me when I was forced to rebuild my body, first with yoga, and then on some other kinds of fitness.
But it came out of a really, like, ohmygod, I had surgery, and my core muscles had been cut into and I had to rebuild my basic strength and I did that after doing all the psychic stuff.
So I don't want anybody to think that you can't be perfectly great psychic if you've got, you know, if you're chubby and you're working on it, it's okay. You can still do all this stuff.
Anna:
Oh, god, yeah!
Slade:
I used to do all this stuff. But do look at, if it's not working, maybe this is, what we're talking about is the reason why.
Anna:
Yeah, totally.
I just want to add, you can be chubby and not working on it.
Slade:
You can.
Anna:
There's nothing wrong with that.
Slade:
Absolutely.
Because, like you said, some people who are really sensitive are not spending time in the body, it's on autopilot in some way, and that could include being sedentary and sort of eating on autopilot and all kinds of things that go along with that. And you are spending all your time in your head.
And years and years ago when I tried to quit smoking, I was trying to treat it as an addiction and I went to a doctor who asked me a gazillion questions about my lifestyle. It felt more like a psychiatric assessment, if you've ever been to someone, you know, to be kind of assessed for depression or something like that. There are these elaborate quizzes that you take and it was that kind of process.
He told me at the end of it, he said, you're not addicted to the cigarettes, you're addicted to the endorphin that the body releases when you starve yourself and you're using caffeine to stimulate and to stay in your mind and you spend a lot of time doing activities that are super super mental. And it's like your happy place is to feel like a robot, like you're riding around inside this machine and your body is not really you.
You're just your brain.
And that, I don't know how that changed my perspective but that was the clue to me realizing what was really happening, and it was that I was disassociating.
Anna:
Totally.
And, even like addiction energy is kind of an upper chakra energy anyway though, so it's probably just, you know, easier to focus on and it's funny, as you talked about that, the image I got is like, oh! That kind of helped you drop into your body and kind of let go of that concept of addiction.
Slade:
Yes.
Anna:
Super cool.
Slade:
Total tangent there but I feel like it's all related. It's all related.
Anna:
Yeah!
Slade:
I keep having this image, like a... There's gonna be some links that I'm gonna share but there's some images of you on your website, on your psychic school, on your intuitive school program page, that are out in nature and they're very, um, they're very much the, that kind of intersection of spirituality and nature and...
That's what this has all been about for me, is kind of bridging those worlds, so to speak. I think that that's really what you're doing, from my perspective.
But I'm interested in what you hope to contribute to this kind of new age world, spirituality, personal development... What do you kind of hope to offer?
Anna:
I think we're... Yeah, that's such a great question. I think you're the first one to really ask it to me.
So, you know, I think what I'm really trying to contribute is, there's been a really large focus in this realm of the upper chakras, of transcending the human experience. And I think we've got to stop doing that.
To be honest, if we want things to change on the ground, if we actually want to improve this world that we are in, in these human bodies, then I don't think that we can have spirituality divorced from the body, and divorced from what happens in the body.
So what I'm hoping to leave behind is, is that. It's how to have all of this juicy, creative, inspirational, psychic stuff, you know, as an in-the-body experience. And actually have it connect us more to our humanity and to, then, how we interact with other humans in the community.
I see so much spiritual bypassing these days. I see so much pain and trauma inflicted on other people, saying from some kind of spiritual elitism viewpoint that I think is so harmful, and I see it because we're using our spirituality kind of divorced from our humanity, from our soul, from those deep soulful chakras.
So I think that's what I'm trying to do, and really help HSP and empaths step into their power, because there's a power and there's a place for all of us here, particularly us sensitive empaths, and it's so easy for the culture that we're in to feel like there's NOT a place and I just...
There is.
I think I'm going to say that until I die. There's a place for us and it's really important.
Slade:
Mmm...
We have to talk about your, the free book that you offer on your website and I'm really excited about this. I don't think that, if I'm projecting into the future, I don't think I'd title the podcast this, but I wanted to just steal it and make it the title of the podcast.
The title of your e-book is, 'You Are a Goddamn Magical Unicorn', which, I have decided, wins the award for the best title on a subscriber incentive that I have personally seen, and I've looked at a lot of them because I coach people around this, and I was like, Yes! That is awesome.
So, 'You're a Goddamn Magical Unicorn'. It's free to everyone who goes to your website. What's it about?
Anna:
Yeah.
So this is actually a guidebook for HSP.
It's kind of like, oh! So you found out you're highly sensitive. Here's your instruction manual. Not instruction manual, but your guidebook. And I wrote it from that place of, we are being too goddamn serious, you know. We, there's so much tiptoeing around our sensitivity and just... I just wanted it to be out there.
You are special and goddamnit we need you.
So this is, I'm not gonna lie, I may have had some whisky while I wrote this, but this is a guidebook written in, take the title, it's written in that sort of tone. It also, though, offers really practical suggestions for getting in your body for grounding. It offers guided meditations.
You also, if you sign up for my newsletter, you get a book and you get the guided meditation that's in the book as an audio file. So you get both.
Slade:
Okay, cool.
Anna:
Yeah.
And I think I even, ohmygosh, I think I even created a unicorn mandala for you to colour in there.
But basically it's like, Here's what high-sensitivity means, like, this is what it means biologically. Here's how herd animals, because all mammals have highly sensitive individuals. So here's how mammals handle high sensitivity, which I think is super cool. Like, the highly sensitive deer or like zebras of any herd are so revered, because they're the first ones to know that there's danger.
Slade:
Mmm!
Anna:
So everyone is like, What are the sensitives doing? We will follow the sensitives.
And it's just in humans where we get all backwards. And so, I talk about the herd mentality in a very fun way and then I talk about, yeah, taking up space as your own highly sensitive being, and here are three ways you can get started.
Slade:
Okay. That's awesome.
That's exactly kind of what I was kind of hoping that you would have somewhere to send someone. When someone approaches me and they say, 'Help, I'm just kind of like, curled up in a ball here.'
I always want to say, 'Do this.'
And you're right. I teach them how to protect themselves first, and I like what you talked about on the show about the need to be in the body first and all that.
So I think that's an incredibly cool resource even if it didn't have such a kickass title, it sounds like a really awesome piece of information, so definitely we will link to that. Go to your website. It's right there on the homepage and you can't miss that cute little image.
So what's next for you? Do you have any big projects on the horizon here?
Anna:
Yes, yes.
I have been building what I'm calling the School for Sacred Rebellion for awhile now. And this is kind of the next step from the Refuge. So the Refuge for Sacred Rebellion is that place where we all get started together. Within that, you learn those sensitive self-defense tools that are kind of like Spiritual Hygiene 101.
The School for Sacred Rebellion is my intuitive development program where we go through all of the clairs. We learn how to do, um, you can jump in kind of.
Part One is doing basic aura healings. So actually working in, I call it 'Activating the healer' because I believe we're all healers so let's just find yours. Let's find your healer and bring them to the forefront.
And you can kind of stop there, and that provides you with a tremendous amount of resources just for working with your own energy and doing healings on yourself and with others.
And if you want to dive deeper into those intuitive arts, it goes into Part Two, which is developing clairvoyance, claircognizance, clairsentience, clairaudience, all of that and at the end, we finish with this really cool integration mentorship, because I don't want to create little Anna-bots, you know, like you're having to go out in the world and do what I do.
The people that are, that this program is really for are, you know, people who are already doing some form of healing work. I mean, it doesn't have to be for this, but people who are like, 'Yeah, I'm a massage therapist', 'I'm a yoga teacher', 'I'm a doctor', and I would just love to have more to offer my people.
So you go through this program, you learn which of the clairs are your strengths, how you want to put them together and then in the mentorship, we, you basically get a bunch of one-on-one and group support in how are you going to go do you now, in this world?
Slade:
One of the things that I notice about it that I thought was really appealing was the fact that it's broken up into stages, almost more like, if you go to college, and you take, like, 101, and then you come back the next semester and do 201, you know, 102, however they number it, I can't remember, it's been too long.
But I like the fact that you can kind of come in and get a stage of the work and then get off and work at that level, or you could keep going, or you could come back and go continue on with the next thing.
Anna:
Yup.
Slade:
But rather than it being ONE big huge long program that you commit to from the beginning, you can kind of go through it, you can break it up a little bit more, which I think is gonna really appeal to people, both for financial reasons and also just because absorbing and processing some of this stuff, you need to sit with a tool, like what you just described, you know...
Anna:
Totally.
Slade:
...discovering the self-healer within you, that's something you could sit in that might carry you for months, as you're processing that and integrating that into your life, before you feel like you need to come back to the next thing. Rather than kind of stuffing your face with too much stuff and then trying to figure out later, why did I buy all this, you know.
Anna:
Yeah.
Slade:
I want to mention, too, that the course is really not officially launching until the summer of 2018 but Anna has decided to share the page with us. Like I said, check it out just for the cool photography, if nothing else.
There's some really great imagery there, great information, and if someone does go to that page and they're interested, they can go ahead and start working with some of these programs?
Anna:
They can, well, yes and no.
So my - if you get to the school and you are just super stoked about it, and you really want to be in it, then get into the Refuge, because the Refuge is where you get those, kind of the starter tools...
Slade:
Okay.
Anna:
Like, the prerequisite tools that really guide everything else.
The next round of teaching those tools is going to be early Fall of this year. And then there'll be another class of the School.
Eventually, I hope to have enough co-teachers and enough bandwidth. I have a one year old right now so I don't have a huge amount of bandwidth, that I can have, you know, multiple sections of the courses going at once, so it is like, 'Oh yeah, that section is offered then and then.'
Slade:
Okay.
Anna:
But right now it's a little bit more linear, just because of all of that.
Slade:
Yeah.
Okay. So we're getting a sneak peak at what's coming from you.
Anna:
Yeah!
Slade:
And that's very, very cool, and still, the entry point would be to get into the Refuge and start working with the tools and the community there, either way.
But we'll link to it just so you can check it out and see what's on offer and see your cool new haircut. And um...
Anna:
Oh, it's funny, Slade.
So I just want to share something with you, with the audience, which is that, so I cut all my hair off and dyed it platinum blonde, which I loved. And now I've been doing a bunch of mountain biking in Seattle, around Seattle, and I nailed these upgrades to my bike and my husband was kind of frowning, like, Okay, I won't bleach my hair anymore, in order to pay for the upgrades. You know, to kind of make it even.
So right now, I'm kind of rocking '90s boy band colours.
Slade:
Okay!
Anna:
You know, like, it's like a little '90s boy band. I'm not that stoked on it but it's kind of funny.
Slade:
Hey, listen, one of my best girl friends is platinum and it's, you gotta be like, dedicated to platinum. It's a lot of upkeep and a lot of chemistry involved. Yeah. It's not just something you do once.
Anna:
Nope.
Slade:
Anna, it's been really fantastic capturing this conversation with you and hearing about your take on everything. I definitely learned a few things and I'm processing some things differently, having spoken with you about HSP and how to, how to work with that.
I think I will go away and ponder and probably do some things differently. Definitely gonna be sending some people to the Goddamn Magical Unicorn book and...
But just before you leave us, tell everyone where they can go to find you online.
Anna:
Yeah, you can find me at www.sensitivityuncensored.com.
And then I'm also, I'm kind of on Facebook but really I'm more on Instagram @sensitivity_uncensored.
Slade:
Cool.
We'll put all the links in the Show Notes to the various parts of your site that we highlighted.
That was great, Anna. Thank you for coming on.
Anna:
Yeah, thank you so much. I really enjoyed it.
This week I’m sharing another episode segment that is entirely an Oracle Message.
The longer oracle segments seem to be topical in nature. This time, I'm giving you the topic up front. It's about soul mates and romantic love. (These longer oracle episodes are an experiment, so let me know what you think.)
That’s not to say you shouldn’t listen to it — there is a more universal message within it that I feel would speak to a lot of people, regardless of circumstances in the love/ dating/ marriage departments.
So, think about a question you have about romantic love. Hold it in your mind. Or better yet, hold it in your heart.
And that long form oracle message is coming up right after the personal introduction...
HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses
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This week I’m sharing an episode segment that is entirely an Oracle Message.
The longer oracle segments seem to be topical in nature. So, think about a larger area of your life you’d like to hear addressed.
Hold it in your mind. Or better yet, hold it in your heart.
And that long form oracle message is coming up right after the personal introduction...
MENTIONED ON THE SHOW The Positive Side of Mercury Retrograde
SYS Astrology Archive
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I've only ever worn one piece of jewelry in my entire life — a silver owl ring.
I mentioned a little bit about how I used it in Ep 52 : Spirit Guides, Sigils and Sign Language.
This is the story of (partly) how it became so magical. It was blessed by the spirit of Pope John Paul II.
Posthumously.
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TRANSCRIPT There is a picture of the ring on my blog. https://sladeroberson.com/blog/owlring
In the episode on Spirit Guides and Sign Language, where I talked about projective and receptive energy, I promised to come back and tell this story.
I’ve only ever worn one piece of jewelry in my entire life for more than like a day.
I have this silver owl ring. It's like something worn by one of those guys who wears denim shirts and pants together, possibly a little Native American ancestry, probably also wearing some turquoise somewhere. Maybe a belt buckle.
Have you ever seen a man wearing one of those Indian chief’s head rings? Do you know what I’m talking about? Well, my owl would be right beside it in the same jewelry tray.
Now, obviously, owls are my totem, so that was a big reason why I have it in the first place.
I had gone on a buying trip for this New Age store I worked at called the New Moon Gallery. Shout out to my friend Alisa who is hopefully listening right now and just started to squeal. She and I were together looking at mostly women’s jewelry for the store when I ran across this owl ring and had to buy it for myself.
Not even for the store. And I wasn’t even sure I would ever wear it. It was kind of an ironic purchase in the moment.
I took a quick pic with my phone just so you can see exactly what I’m talking about. It’s a carved, or casted maybe, silver ring that takes up the entire digit of one of my fingers. When I found it, it was too big for my ring finger and I took to wearing it on my index fingers. Which is why it became a part of the whole projective / receptive hand magic that I talked about on that other episode.
As you’ll see in this awful pic, it has tarnished in my drawer because I stopped wearing it about seven years ago when I started lifting weights a lot. Since then, my hands are literally beefier — I didn’t know that had happened — and the tarnish makes it a little easier to see the carving detail, so I just took the pic as is. You can see it on the corresponding blog post for this episode.
If you have been a Shift Your Spirits blog reader for a long time, you may remember my black and white author photo, where you can actually see it on my finger. I have my hand on my chin and that was my author pic for like ten years.
So, a few years after buying that ring and hardly even knowing why considering I didn’t wear jewelry, when I started communicating with spirit guides, and trying to get back my power and a sense of direction, I started to wear that ring. I was also coding a lot and the weight of my index finger because of the ring helped me type.
A QUICK DISCLAIMER ABOUT THE STORY I’M ABOUT TO TELL YOU:
I am not even remotely Catholic, so I will likely butcher some details related to that. I don’t care. Of course you could say this is communication from a saint, and there have to be miracles associated with someone to become beatified. But I consider this about a connection to an individual soul, and also a member of a soul family.
To be honest, his conservative statements against recognizing same sex unions are to be expected given his job, but they obviously piss me off and I completely disagree. But then I believe he was the head of one of the largest terrorist organizations on the planet. So, I don’t know what to do with the politics and the religion of the situation…
Let’s just say that’s politics.
I’m just going to leave it out as not really part of this story.
I believe in a vague way, admittedly that I don’t fully understand, that I am connected to Mother Mary as an ascended master, that I attract others who are connected to her, regardless of religion, and that Pope John Paul II is a figure within this network of entities.
I went through an intense period of researching Marian visitations.
If you read books about people to whom the Virgin Mary makes appearances, of course you’ll find lots of young women, but there is a theme of her appearing or speaking to spiritual men of different faiths. It’s like a “control group” that transcends religion. If I can say this humbly, I feel a resonance with that.
During all my Mary Visitation Research, I had heard this rumor somewhere that PJP II was a Marian cultist, and that a lot of the other cardinals did not want him to be pope because of this.
He supposedly had some nuns secretly embroider this vest for him that said, in Latin, “I am hers” and he wore it during his inauguration.
Like his predecessor, John Paul II dispensed with the traditional Papal coronation and instead received ecclesiastical investiture with a simplified Papal inauguration on 22 October 1978.
During his inauguration, when the cardinals were to kneel before him to take their vows and kiss his ring, he stood up as this one Polish prelate Stefan Cardinal Wyszyński knelt down, stopped him from kissing the ring, and simply hugged him
He also broke with tradition by addressing the crowd at all, in Italian, and he did declare that he accepted the responsibility of becoming pope "in a spirit of obedience to the Lord and total faithfulness to Mary, our most Holy Mother."
When he died, I was sitting in a Border’s bookstore cafe — the one where I would go to visit Refuse to Choose.
April 2, 2005, almost a year before I decided to move back to Chattanooga and about a year and half from launching Shift Your Spirits.
I was still just blindly following these weird messages and signs and synchronicities I was receiving.
I overheard this guy at a nearby table, excitedly talking about how he had impulsively decided was to jump on a plane and go to view the pope laid out in state. He was giddy with this bizarre impulse, telling his friend about the spontaneity and how he felt spiritually moved or guided to do this.
Almost a week later, I think, it’s been a long time, I was in the Border’s cafe working again, writing, tinkering with code, building websites for clients, only this time I was there very late in the evening.
It felt like a dream because my dreams always take place at dusk. There’s a quality to the light.
And that guy was back, talking to two friends this time, same table just beside me.
I listened to his breathless story about flying to Rome, getting straight into a cab, immediately standing in line, but for almost a whole day, being one of the last people they allowed through, to view the pope laid out in state, and the surreal experience of being back in a cab and back on a plane and flying home before realizing, really processing, what he felt. It all took like a day and a half.
I learned later, by the way, that over a million people stood in line to see the pope laid out in state this way.
This guy—I’ll never know his name—said felt strangely electrified and numb, but like he had to be there, and that all the people he would subsequently meet in life would receive some of the grace of PJP II directly.
He said, he knew that sounded crazy and almost arrogant. He apologized for not being able to articulate what he meant about carrying that energy and giving it to others.
At that point, I interrupted him. It wasn’t too weird, I’d caught his eye several times. Energetically and physically, I was part of both conversations, he knew that.
His friends left when he started talking to me so he joined me at my table and continued to gush about his experience and the emotions and energy coursing through him.
And I told him about Mary and my experiences with her and how bizarre it even was and how I wanted to tell someone about it.
I asked this guy about receiving PJP’s energy. I said I thought I could actually feel it.
They were getting ready to close the Borders at that point and we started walking outside together and he asked me: “Do you have a ring?”
And I took off my owl ring, which I had started to wear and handed it to him.
He stared at it and played with it and mumbled something over it, like a prayer or a spell. And then he handed it back to me. His eyes were shining with tears.
He embarrassedly wiped them away. We walked a little further into the parking lot.
The parting was strange. He said “I’m not quite sure what to do with myself, now.”
I said “Me either."
“We have to do something with this.” he said. “I’m going to. Promise me you will.”
I said, “I will. I promise”
And I did. At least, I think I did.
I think this is it. All of this last thirteen years since I met him.
Soon after that meeting, I received a more specific message from Mother Mary — the concept for Shift Your Spirits. Really, just the title. And that it was a blog and I was supposed to share my stories on it.
The summer I started Shift Your Spirits, I dreamt a few times about PJP II. Back when I was having dreams I was at this Congress of Souls. It was this open air space that resembled the sanctuary where I have gone to Beltane Gatherings for decades, but of course, it was shifted in that dream dimension kind of way.
Pope John Paul II was there giving a speech, but it was in Italian, and I couldn’t hear him. In the dream, I struggled as if it were a sound volume issue, not language … I was straining to hear him.
I keep straining to hear those message and to translate what I think they’re about.
“When are we enough?” asks psychic counselor Lisa Campion.
"It's exhausting, this ruthless pilgrimage to be better, better, best.
"We are constantly inundated on every level with messages that we’re not enough. We are people with tattered self-esteem upholding these ideals of what we think we’re supposed to be, constantly unsatisfied with the reality of being human.
"What would happen if we began and ended that journey with fully loving and accepting ourselves as we are right now?
"What would happen if we stopped clutching and grasping at our ego ideals and simply allow that Grand Plan to unroll at our feet like the Yellow Brick Road?"
MENTIONED ON THE SHOW Slade's guest interview on Lisa's show Rebooting Your Energy with Slade Roberson
The Creative Penn | Joanna Penn
Tim Ferriss
Transcendental Meditation®
The Silva Method
GUEST LINKS - Lisa Campion lisacampion.com
The Miracle of Healing Lisa's show on Empower Radio
Lisa's Free Guided Meditation
The Art of Psychic Reiki by Lisa Campion (forthcoming book)
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I use a combination of sigil magic and sign language to communicate with my spirit guides and guardians. It's a unique (eccentric) practice that has evolved over time. It's anonymous; it's a kind of shorthand; it's fast.
I thought by sharing how and the reasons why I do this, it might give you some ideas about how to create inventive ways to communicate with your own guides.
On this episode, I talk about sigils, sign language, energy projection and energy reception, dominant and non-dominant hands in moving energy, manifesting and magical protection.
MENTIONED ON THE SHOW Paganism in Cornwall, England Schools — The Daily Mail
Slade’s interview on Mavericks Unlimited with Krish Surroy
http://bit.ly/2J0fVtK
Morning Pages — Reboot Your Life
https://slade.simplecast.fm/reboot
Scrivener Writing Software
https://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener/overview
Evernote Software
https://evernote.com/
The OA on Netflix
https://www.netflix.com/title/80044950
The Magicians on SyFy
http://www.syfy.com/themagicians
Manifest Anything
https://sladeroberson.com/classes/manifest-anything
Practical Sigil Magic
https://amzn.to/2ImCPub
Sigils of Power and Transformation
https://amzn.to/2Jbn371
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How I personally choose to navigate and manage dark energy on social media. I hope that by sharing the headspace I am coming from, you will be inspired to create an intentional approach that allows you to find some more peace.
And while you're at it — be better at it than I am.
MENTIONED ON THE SHOW Publishers hated ‘A Wrinkle in Time.’ Madeleine L’Engle never forgot the rejections.
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TRANSCRIPT *Not all my episodes are fully scripted, word for word. Sometimes I work with partial notes and fragments. This is not going to be easy to talk about. I’m only going to even get close, if I get close. I’m going to fail miserably and leave a lot out.
But I had some part of this conversation in a session with a client named Marissa from the Automatic Intuition community. She said she found my thoughts and strategies helpful in dealing with some online PTA communication.
It’s something people ask me about a lot in my personal life—those who are both my friends on social media and in real life. So I felt compelled to just share some of it with you guys.
Nobody needs to know you don’t like them.
one of those “rules to live by”
learned the hard way, as they say
Unpack that. Notice all the things that means.
It can only serve one purpose, to hurt the other person by having them know about your hate.
It’s putting your hate in their consciousness.
Absolutely NO situation is improved by this.
Even if you want to engage in a war, you willfully choose to … there’s no advantage to alerting your enemy, to warning them before you strike.
It only makes people defensive
It escalates disharmony
It makes you a target
It draws attention to you
Do you need attention so badly that you’ll take any kind of attention, negative attention?
A lot of people will. That’s all they can get — or they think that’s all their worth — and they spitefully demand it.
In this age of media
Flame wars and online truth bubbles
Nothing is more effective at shutting down the attention-seekers than silence.
Total lack of engagement.
A part of you might be tempted to participate.
People constantly talk about not wanting drama, but they want drama. It makes them feel important, engaged, alive.
Unfollowing isn’t just some passive insult to others, unfollowing is the best way to ensure you don’t even know or care. Which for anyone who might want to perceive you as an enemy is a total bitch slap, but it’s also a truly healthy disengagement.
If you really don’t want it, you don’t care to know about it at all.
These comment wars are misplaced sense of purpose.
For some people, it’s tapping into outrage and a connection to a cause.
They don’t have any mountains to climb so they pick hills to die on, almost at random
You have a higher outlet.
I’ve told the story about experimenting with putting out some writing as a blog in 2006. That’s how Shift Your Spirits came to be.
There were 2 contenders—I seriously considered doing either a political blog or a blog about spirituality and personal development.
I could easily have gone either way. I have plenty to say about politics.
It was a hard decision. I received a name and a concept—a shining sentence—a clairaudient download — for the political blog, just like I did with Shift Your Spirits: 83% fewer hearts and flowers than most new age blather.
It came down to: which energy could I bear carrying everyday.
I knew Shift Your Spirits would encourage me to be a better version of myself. Now, don’t get me wrong, the religiosity of fundamentalism is a constant source of anger.
Political blogging would have meant running a toxic channel 24-7. Even if I was careful to put something better into the stream, I would have been at least beholden to listening and observing and analyzing all the other toxic political comment.
Resist. Fuck yes. Be involved. Vote. Donate. Gather. Preach. Sit in. Stand up. All of it.
But online posts on social media aren’t really any of that. They are a pale shade of true action.
Act. In meaningful ways.
Getting in arguments on FB. Kinda no skin in the game. It’s the catfishing of giving a godamn.
If it’s all you got, so be it.
If your political analysis is valuable, put it out there. AS AN AUTHOR. There is a tradition in publishing. Authors do not talk back to reviews. You’ve spent 100s of 1000s of words already - carefully making your statement. Anything beyond that is trivial, small by comparison.
If you must comment or post, I have a few rules that might help you keep it constructive.
*By the way, sidebar, I think these work in relationships as well.
Don’t use always or never. Those words are immediately inaccurate and will inspire pushback.
Don’t tag anyone.
Don’t address any individual personally.
Compose what you want to say on a separate screen. Don’t talk about what you don’t like or get in your own punch on re-stating the problem, state the issue as you observe it in the CONTEXT of what can be done to help the situation
Mic drop and walk away.
DO NOT respond to any comments on what you posted. Ever.
Leave it for the lesser minds to squabble over.
The true reason I do not post political stuff is ... I can’t do it a little bit. What is 2%? How it is different than 10%? 10 becomes 75 in a hot flash of being baited. You lose all day to anger and rehearsing — a mental spinning that is obsessive and useless and draining.
You give away your time and energy and you feel stressed and tired afterward.
Was that really worth it?
For me, a cold hard white hot silent NONE is the only way to manage it. 1% is 100%. That’s like being a 1% smoker. What the hell is that?
ZERO. It the only way for me to manage it. A little bit is not an option.
I was listening recently to Oprah on an interview with Van Jones talk about giving energy to the darkness, to the other side.
Thinking about it, engaging with it, hating it is giving energy to it.
You cannot fight it head on.
You have to transcend it.
That’s what the ZERO hard line is for me. It’s managing part of my attempt to transcend it.
I have to be on Facebook a little bit. I have a community on there, and the technology is great for managing a private group. So here’s what I do. I set tabs to open on my browser to window to all the sites I’m monitoring — email, mailing lists, scheduler, web sites, podcast …
I set a Facebook tab to open to the Group itself.
That way, I can come in as an admin and keep an eye on my group without swimming out into the larger FB ecosystem.
That which you give your attention to expands. For a million different reasons.
In so many ways and contexts that statement is true.
So don’t it give your attention.
Everything you respond to — even just to give a “like” expands. This is not even just metaphysical. Online, the algorithms will promote posts that have been liked more, commented on more, and shared more.
In a world where we all want to be acknowledged and valued—whether in darkness or in light—nothing holds more power than a radical lack of attention.
What do I mean by “radical”?
I am NOT advocating being clueless or uninformed. I find it infuriating when someone equates being willfully ignorant with an attempt to be more spiritual.
Pick a single news source you trust. You will notice if you follow me on social media I often repost items from NPR. That started because they do not use a lot of embedded advertising. I will not reshare even a legitimate news item that clicks through to a site where you have to jump over hurdles of embedded Google ads. No. If I want to share the actual core story, I will go and search for NPRs version of that news item. That’s my preference. You may have your own. Just give it some thought and install some protocols for yourself and stick to them.
What I mean by radical lack of attention...
I’m getting at the idea of removing your attention from a LOT more than what you just obviously find abhorrent.
Don’t just block the haters
Curate what you want to see, actively.
I unfollow everyone unless they prove they have something to offer my feed that I want to see
One boring item or just something irrelevant. I go to their profile and look at their last 5 or 10 posts.
There is someone who posts in a language I can’t read. 100% of the time. I don’t follow that. Now that person is likely bilingual and can read English and follows my posts, and that’s awesome. But I can’t return the attention because of my own language.
But... I make room for what I can consume and what I want to consume.
Sometimes I want a challenging different opinion that is intelligent. There are people with different political opinions who are extremely intelligent and I respect what they thoughtfully put out and I am CURIOUS about where they are coming from. They are the best representation of people who are different than me.
Or I choose to follow a different racial perspective that is eye-opening for me. I have an author friend who is very passionate about whitewashing and issues of race, and she’s brilliant. I want to hear what she has to say.
I don’t “enjoy” the posts that challenge me...
But I value them. And I choose them. I’m not passive about what invades my mental space.
I try not to BE irrelevant to others. I try to be authentic and personal but less fluff. Less detritus. Less stuff you see everywhere else.
(I don’t always pull that off. It’s just an aspiration running in the background of my mind.)
Everything I want to say, politically, is being said. I see my opinions represented. I don’t need to tell you a news item of the day—20 of your friends just did.
I don’t need to tell you what kind of human being the President is—he shows you and he tells you every day.
I don’t have to say a thing.
I don’t have to say anything negative. I don’t have to give my attention my focus or my voice to darkness.
I don’t have to magnify anything with my attention without choosing to do so.
Do as I say, not as I do.
And at the end of the day, we are one race, stuck together on one planet, and I pray we survive long enough to evolve beyond the petty divisions. One of the things I think will be most impactful about contact with an intelligent extraterrestrial civilization is it will change our perspective on what is Other. It will shift the otherness away from our human family.
Hopefully, we will use this as more leverage to Ascend.
For the record, I haven’t given up hope that we will Ascend as a species.
Many of the people who listen to the Attunement Guided Meditation I created for the Automatic Intuition Course report meeting spirit guides, in the Akashic Records in particular, who appear as blue-skinned extraterrestrial beings.
I have never been personally drawn to "Starseed" information, but the topic shows up frequently in the private community of intuitives I mentor. I asked them to weigh in on the research I found on the subject.
And I'm sharing my own thoughts on the beings who are said to be assisting in the ascension of humanity.
MENTIONED ON THE SHOW Coast to Coast https://www.coasttocoastam.com/
Automatic Intuition Professional
https://automaticintuition.com/
Mark Watson | AngelEarth Music
https://www.facebook.com/AngelEarthMusic/
Shiva | Hindu Deity
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shiva
Andromeda, Antares, Arcturus | Federation of Planets
http://www.exopaedia.org/Blue-skinned+aliens
The Prism of Lyra by Lyssa Royal & Keith Priest
http://amzn.to/2GFY2jk
The Lantern Bearer
https://simplecast.com/s/d506756b
About Channeling with Frank Butterfield
https://simplecast.com/s/6267e210
HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses
Get an intuitive reading with Slade
Automatic Intuition
BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits Edit your pledge on Patreon
TRANSCRIPT Take 11.
I want to talk about Blue-skinned Aliens. That's right. Extraterrestrials. Possibly Angels. Possibly both.
I actually think it's a technicality.
The reason why I said "Take 11" and I'm leaving that in is because I want to say upfront that this is an unscripted episode and it's probably going to be really rambly, and I'm just going to do it off the top of my head because in order to prepare a really thoughtful, wholly inclusive report on Blue-skinned Aliens would be beyond my ability to do in any normal amount of time and I would have to bring in a huge chunk of the internet, and I don't even have time to read all that the internet has to say about Blue-skinned Aliens.
So, I know that for some of you, this is going to start what I call a 'Magic Carpet Ride'.
It also could actually be happening to you in the middle of a magic carpet ride about this subject. So what I mean by 'Magic Carpet Ride' is, and I don't do these so much anymore. I actually don't have the free time or the sleep schedule to allow for me to do magic carpet rides anymore.
Because when I was in a period where I was doing a lot of these, it was back during the time period that you hear me talk about in my origin story, between 2003 and 2006. I was partially paralyzed. I was housebound, a recluse, I was communicating with my guides a lot intentionally for the first time, I was spending a lot of time learning to code online.
So I was just living in front of a computer and had no sense of time. And to me, a magic carpet ride kind of describes this prayerful meditative experience that is part investigation, part channelled inquiry, part synchronicity, where something comes into your consciousness and you start with a query and Google and it leads from one thing to the next and you keep exploring and seeing new things to click on and time goes by and I would start out doing this at 10 or 11:00 at night and suddenly I would realize that the sky was turning grey outside and it was morning and I'd spent an entire evening travelling around the globe and travelling this interior landscape and this quasi-dimensional place that we've created in the internet, and I would come out of it, having been to all these places that I never realized that initial query was going to take me.
So Blue-skinned Aliens. If you start that, if you click on the links that I'm going to give you in the show notes, just be warned. You could end up on a magic carpet ride.
I actually was very, very careful to not allow myself to do that. I kept a protective bubble around me and I looked at it through a window and I got what I needed to get to have this conversation with you, and then I shut myself down.
Because I didn't want to go full rabbit hole here.
So yeah, in 2008, I went to Hawaii, the first and only time that I've been to Hawaii, for a conference of people who communicate with angels. I went there admittedly a bit as a corporate spy. I was in the process of developing what would become the Automatic Intuition program, and I had some ideas about how I wanted to support and teach people to do readings and to connect with their emerging intuition. But I wasn't really sure, I didn't have a sense of, Can I teach this to other people? Will it work? How do other people teach it?
So I was in a mode back in 2008. I remember the day I arrived in Hawaii was the day that Barack Obama was elected. So that was a really interesting milestone that solidifies the date forever in my mind, for many reasons. But I was in the process of going to a lot of different kinds of psychic development workshops, really just kind of seeing how other people were teaching it.
One of the things that really annoyed me was how much of it was really only teaching clairvoyance, but that's another conversation and that might be something that we get into if you ever work with me in the context of Automatic Intuition. You'll hear my speel about how I decided to adapt what I was doing to account for the lack of support in the other types of sensitivities and clairs, as we call them, beyond just clairvoyance.
Because I wasn't particularly clairvoyant. Not at the time that I went to Hawaii. But anyway, so I was in Hawaii to be a corporate spy, to go to a really high-up the food chain kind of new age event to see how it was done by the pros!
And also just to experience being in Hawaii with over 300 other people who all have the ability to connect with and communicate with Angels, as I already identified with.
So yeah, it was magical and amazing on a lot of levels and I met a lot of people who are still in my life all these years later.
But anyway, fast forward a little bit.
I was really interested in and intrigued by, there was a man, Mark Watson, who is a composer, a musician who does a lot of background music for new age meditations and, he gave a little speel or a little talk about music theory, the scales, the chords that are associated with different archangelic vibrations, and how to use a certain musical key to invoke a specific type of angelic entity.
To tell you the truth, it was all over my head, music-wise. Like I knew enough to be able to just kind of furiously scribble down what he was saying, and I knew that coming up as part of the training program that I was developing, I was going to be creating a guided meditation that would act as an Attunement, and so I felt like, Oh this is amazing. This is exactly what I need to know in order to create the Attunement. I wanted to do some very specific things and call in some certain types of energy so I took notes.
And, in a very simplistic way, attempted to apply what I learned from him in creating that Attunement.
So fast forward basically a year later was when I launched the Automatic Intuition Professional Program in November of 2009, I believe. And so, the way it works, and actually if you want to experience this, if you haven't already, you can go to AutomaticIntuition.com and download the Attunement for free and experience what I'm talking about.
So what the Attunement is and how it works. It's a guided meditation. The intentions at the level of the musical stuff that I'm talking about was to align the chakras, to ground, centre, work your way up through the chakras, and more than anything, to open the crown chakra to ensure that all of the information that's coming in for you is the highest possible vibration and there is a few specific triggers within the Attunement that allow you to connect with your asher, which is a sort of a personal guardian angel. You know when we talk to little kids about, Oh you have a guardian angel that's watching out for you!
I call that the asher. I can't even remember where I learned that term, but that's the type of angel who is sort of like your personal bodyguard.
Anyway, so new experience and meeting with that entity and you also experience, as this sort of finale of the Attunement, if you will, a meeting with your guides in the Akashic Records. And this could be one entity, it could be a group. But it's meant to call in any entity that you have, that's hanging out, waiting for you to use your spiritual gifts or your intuitive abilities, your healing abilities, in the context of doing it for other people.
Now this is not just about, Oh, what should I do with my job, and when am I going to meet the love of my life, and the kinds of things you might ask a phone psychic. This is specifically to introduce you to someone who can help retrieve information for you on behalf of other people.
So you are volunteering to be a channel and a conduit and this entity is meant to assist in that.
It's a very high level intention. It's a high level vibration and it calls in a very high level, for lack of a better word, I keep calling it high. I actually think of, when we talk about high and low frequencies in vibrations, I think of those as notes on a piano, so you can think of this frequency as being something in the dog whistle range, or whatever. Something outside the normal ability to hear and process sounds.
That's kind of what the Attunement does.
One of the most difficult things about creating the Attunement is actually to script an experience where I am prompting you on what to see, hear and feel without telling you what to see, hear, and feel. Or in some cases, to prompt you to have an experience that might be visual without telling you to see something, or that could be visual for one person, could be auditory for another, could be sensory in the body for another person.
So it's a very weird thing to try to write if you ever do a guided meditation. It's like telling a story without telling too much detail because, of course, you want the person to fill in all of that on their own.
That's what the Attunement is and that's how it works.
The reason why we start the course with the Attunement is obviously, it represents an intention, a goal that you've set for yourself and also a kind of promise that you're making. You're putting it out to the Universe, to all of humanity: Hey, I intend to use my abilities and to develop my abilities in order to serve other people and make everything wonderful for everyone else. That's your goal.
It's a selfless act of service and the Attunement is really kind of something for us to wrap our brains around down here in the earthly dimension and just give us a way to see, hear, feel, name, experience, talk about that thing that is happening at a higher level. Because there's a part of it that's happening in a dimension that we're not even aware of and I don't even try to script that. I just, in my intentions in creating this, I am calling in those energies and asking that they be there for anyone who listens to it.
So, thanks to Mark Watson for giving me that little bit of music theory help enact that.
So I've been using this Attunement with my clients and my students for, what is it, almost 9 years now? And I always get really wonderful feedback. I get a lot of requests to create separate music tracks for meditation without the guided part. Without the vocal script. Even my dad asked me if he could just have the background music and make it extra long and then he can just use that to either rest or meditate or do that kind of relaxation stuff with it, which I have never really gotten around to.
I don't even know if I can find the master files for that... We'll see...
But anyway, so everybody who comes into my program does this Attunement and one of the things that's really cool for me is, every single one of the first sessions that I do with everyone, they tell me about their experience with the Attunement as if it's a dream that they had and I am writing down notes of what they're saying, and there is information encoded in your experience of the Attunement. Not only the things that you hear that are symbolic, and the things that you see that are archtypal, but the actual word choice and the way that you speak about this phenomenon tells me things about your intuitive abilities, how they already manifest, and more importantly, it lets me know if there is something waiting in the wings for you that you are not even aware of and you've never thought to try. If there's some kind of ability you have the potential for, that's right there, and you just don't know to reach for it.
It will let me know whether or not to coach you forward, and which tools would allow you to access those abilities.
So based on that, we have an entire session pretty much where we unpack everything in the Attunement. What you saw, felt, heard, thought, your impressions, what you learned during the Attunement. Anything that I see that I can unpack for you in terms of symbolism and the guide that you met and the names that you're getting for these guides and what they all mean.
Based on that conversation, what we really do is, we use that to determine which tools and techniques and psychic modalities are most likely to produce results for you.
So for instance, I can tell from the Attunement if clairvoyance is not your thing, if you're going to go a bunch of classes where they're like, Close your eyes and visualize, you're probably going to be disappointed. But I can also tell that automatic writing would produce some really satisfying experiences, both for you and for anyone that you read for, and here's why that tool would be better suited to you.
So it's kind of like a diagnostic and it helps me customize the course and how you learn to develop your intuition.
So it's a really cool thing. I'm very proud of it.
At the time that I was creating it, I was just creating it and those were my intentions. My understanding of how it works has evolved over time.
So one of the coolest things for me is, I have the perspective of everybody else's experience with the Attunement, so the patterns that I see emerging may not be apparent to the people who are having these experiences, but from where I'm sitting, I can see things, like, Oh wow, isn't that interesting. Everybody always has this type of experience here.
Or when someone has an experience that is uniquely outside of the pattern that I see with other people. That's always really interesting too.
I feel like, personally, my way of visualizing metaphysical stuff and talking about all this spiritual stuff has a kind of science-fiction vibe to it. And I'm very aware of the script within the Attunment being a little science-fictiony, and a little CGI. So it's always fascinating to me. There is an entire vein of students in Automatic Intuition who come through and have these really Native American, shamanic, spirit animal, outside under the stars bonfire... They have this whole aboriginal kind of experience that isn't remotely science-fictiony, and I'm always fascinated by how many people still take what I think of as having this certain kind of flavour to it, and they come out with a completely different set of details and aesthetics.
So anyway, that kind of stuff is very fascinating to me.
Sometimes I share it with the people in the context of the conversation because I want them to realize that they're plugging into something bigger than themselves and they're not the only person who has that kind of entity as an Akashic Records guide.
So, we see a lot of Merlin archetypes. I talked about that on a previous episode about the lantern bearer, right? And I talked about the wise old man Gandalf hermit-tarot guy who shows up for a lot of people in this Attunement. That is a common symbol that we see, so to speak.
There's another one though, that's particularly common. It's always been there a little bit. Here and there. But lately it's become almost everyone coming through the course. And so I'm always interested when there are these waves of things moving through the people that I work with, whether it's readings that I'm doing for clients or the students who are being attracted into the program.
Last year it was healing energy. A lot of healers. I'm still seeing a lot of people who do energy healing come in to the course for whatever reason. So that seems to be a theme that was really apparent in 2017 for me, is energy healing.
So lately, it's been a lot of blue-skinned aliens. A lot of Akashic Records guides have been presenting as ginormous blue-skinned angelic creatures. Now the reason I said at the top of this episode or this segment that I think that they could be angels, I think they could be extraterrestrials. I think some of us see those as being the same thing. And if you really want to split hairs about it, angels aren't of this world, so they kind of are extraterrestrial.
It could just be that they are a type of galactic entity or spiritual energy that we perceive in a way that we associate with, Ooo that looks like an alien to me.
So these entities are usually very tall, they're beautiful, they have luminous pale blue skin or sometimes it's dark, it's cobalt. It's always about indigo and blue. And the prevalence of this lately has been almost identical from one person to the next, and it's always been in the back of my mind. I thought, Is that have something to do with Hindu gods? Has this got something to do with some other kind of phenomenon going on?
I'm usually focused on the work itself, so I just kind of tuck it away.
But I've decided to kind of go down a little bit of a rabbit hole and research some of this. I don't know, for whatever reason, I just decided, Now I'm going to look it up. I'm just going to peek at the magic carpet ride. I'm not going to go too far down the slide, but I just want to get a sense of what's going on.
So I generally am not drawn to this kind of Starseed information. I find it curious and interesting and when it crosses my radar, I'm like, Oh wow, that's kind of cool. I'll read about it or get sucked into watching something about it, but it's really not that frequently. Here in the last few years, really the only time that it ever even crosses my mind is in the context of the people that I work with, the entities they communicate with, and the entities they channel and who shows up in these meditations. That kind of stuff.
And that's the only time that it even is a blip.
And I'm not, I want to be really, really clear about this. When I say it doesn't show up for me, I'm not passing judgment on it and I'm not saying it's not true. I'm just letting you know why, Why haven't I talked about this before? Why don't I talk about it all the time? Why isn't everything in Shift Your Spirits connected in some way to exploring this huge subject, you know?
The implications are enormous.
So I just want to let you know that when I say I'm not drawn to it, I'm just... I'm not drawn to it. I don't go looking for it. But if it shows up in my life, I'm like, Oh! That's cool! And I like to try and process this stuff without passing judgment on it because quite frankly, there are tons of people who could listen to anything that I have to say and talk about and judge that as a bunch of bullshit.
So I am very aware that everyone has their own perspective and I'd like to think that we're all getting a piece of a bigger picture. Some of those pieces overlap and some of them don't. But I try not to invalidate anyone else's experience. So if someone comes in, I meet someone at a conference or something who's a channel and they talk to galactic beings and that's their platform, that's cool. I find it kind of fascinating, to tell you the truth. It makes what I do seem very ho hum, to tell you the truth.
Still, okay, so I decided to dip my toe in this just a little bit in Google and just see, Okay, what's the deal? What's everybody else saying about the blue-skinned aliens? And by the way, I did also investigate a little bit around, Is this connected in some way with Hindu gods, because we see a lot of depiction of Shiva and other Hindu gods who have blue skin, and I thought, Maybe there's something there?
What's interesting, and Google this, Google the Hindu god thing, and the only thing that I could find was a lot of linguistics conversations. A lot of talk about how that color blue doesn't translate. There's not a word for it in that language that actually, if you look at original texts, they're talking about dark-skinned or black-skinned people, and anyway, there seems to be some argument about whether or not they're really talking about blue-skinned people or dark-skinned people.
And from my understanding, the darkness has to do with earthliness, as if they have come from the earth. Which, to me in my personal pantheon and cosmology, that sounds more like fairy entities, or elementals. But I think the devas, in that part of the world, in that cosmology and worldview, are elemental energies. So anyway.
If you want to, you can research that also and see, but I found that really quickly that those are not the same thing, and that there doesn't seem to be a connection between the Hindu gods and the blue-skinned aliens.
By the way, I will share links in the show notes, if you want to go down that rabbit hole, and I chose to share a specific site. There are literally thousands. Like, one of my clients, Shawn, said, There are tons of people just on Wordpress.com who write about the galactic federation and all this stuff that has to do with aliens, and so I tried to pick a site that I thought seemed to be well-executed, you know. They had their shit together. They've compiled a lot of information, it's well organized, it's put together in a way that I feel okay with recommending, right?
So I'm just sort of passing judgment on one droplet of water in the entire ocean of the internet, but so...
I want to share with you some of what I found on this one site, regarding blue-skinned aliens. And I'm kind of going to be reading to you here from this, so if you want the attribution link, it will be in the show notes.
This is not my channeled information or even my opinion. This is just what the internet says about blue-skinned aliens.
Several stories mention humanoid alien races with a blue skin. These usually refer to Andromedans. The Andromedas were the "blue race" that landed in Florida in 1954, trying to pursuade the US Government not to work with the greys, but instead to join forces with something called "The Orbin." Their advice apparently was sadly ignored by the US Government.
The Hopi Indians also talk about a race of blue skinned Star Warriors. There are several indications that lead us to believe these Star Warriors are the same Andromedans.
"The nature of the Andromeda realm is abstract and fluid. A dimensional doorway exists in our nearby galactic neighborhood as a bridge to the Andromeda Energy. This bridge/doorway is the star Antares." That's from a book called The Prism of Lyra, Lyssa Royal & Keith Priest.
Many sources mention Andromeda as the home of several higher dimensional species. Some of these species chose to come and assist Earth in its current day Ascension progress. To adapt to a life in a 3-dimensional body, these Starseeds usually go through Antares.
Okay, so I also, in researching Antares and Andromeda, wanted to read you a little bit about the Federation of Planets.
"The Association of Worlds, or (United) Federation of Planets, "is a group of physical and non-physical beings from many realms who come together for a number of purposes. Some have called them a galactic confederation or federation. There is no hierarchical structure or authority inherent in the Association. The primary purposes for their interactions with Earth are: (1) to gently nudge humanity toward a greater awareness of itself and its place within the Association, and (2) to prevent a critical number of nuclear explosions on Earth, which can cause a rip in the fabric of space/time, affecting the galactic neighborhood. They have absolutely no intention now of evacuating anyone from Earth under any conditions. They understand the absolute necessity for the human race to become responsible for itself.”
Note that a lot of the information on the Federation is channeled, though corroborated by many contactees, and by some witnesses working on covert government projects. Remote viewers, also, confirm the existence of such an organization."
Okay. End the part where I'm reading from the interwebs.
So if this information is mostly channeled, like what they just noted, it occured to me that I have a network of channels and psychics right here at my disposal. The very people that these visions came through in the first place.
So the people who are seeing blue-skinned aliens as Akashic Records guides within my Attunement as part of the Automatic Intuition community program, I have a private Facebook group with all these guys, so what I did is, I decided to sort of post some of this information to them. I thought, Okay well fine, if all this stuff is channeled, let's channel it. Let's remote view it. Let's check in. Let's talk to some guides and see what they have to say.
I consider the Automatic Intuition community a tribe of peers. I'm not a guru. I'm more of like a host. I'm like a camp counsellor. I'm a little bit further down the road than other people, or a little bit "older" in this process and I'm there to help and advise and organize.
So it was really interesting.
What I did was I posted what I just read to you guys and I asked everyone else, Hey, what do you think about this? Check in with whoever it is that you communicate with and see what you think. Or what you feel or anything that you have to comment on this conversation.
And a few people contacted their guides and asked about this directly. For instance, they contacted their guides and said, Hey, is this true or not?
A lot of the people who chose to comment corroborated what I was posting. They just basically checked in with it and said, some form of, Yeah, this kind of checks out for me. They did a gut check on it and also let me know if it felt real to them.
And in particular, Kara, and Lisa and Aubrey all talked about just kind of a gut feeling of like, Yeah, when I was checking in with this, it resonates with me as true and one of their number... I can't remember which one, said that when they heard the word Andromeda, that it was sort of beating like a drum, and then I know Aubrey came along and said, Ohmygod, yeah, beating like a drum exactly explains the experience that I'm having when I hear that word too.
So anyway, that was very cool.
Jane and Kara both talked about a connection to ancient Egypt that came up for them.
Melany had a random experience in the past where she recalled these 3 entities who showed up during a healing session that she was doing with a client, and after the session was over, the client mentioned seeing 3 blue entities, which Melany took as a confirmation of what she was seeing. And she said, This isn't something that happens in all her sessions. It wasn't something that she was willfully trying to contact. It just sort of appeared. And then the same thing was kind of happening for the client.
And you have to understand when you're doing these sessions, that may sound like all well and good. Oh, I've kind of got this feeling and then the client says, Oh, yeah, I got that feeling too.
And it's not necessarily like that. Sometimes there are things that happen in the feedback where the clients and you are able to communicate different sets of detail that seem to corroborate themselves, and sometimes in the moment this synchronicity is very powerful. I told you a story recently about how, you know, me and one of the people in this group were like pulling cards for each other simultaneously, and we didn't even decide to do it. It was just an impulse and how we pulled the same card and when things like that happen and you're living that in the moment, it's very powerful confirmation, for sure.
Chris in particular said that she didn't have a lot to offer up, but she actually kind of did have a lot of cool things to say, but she said that she had an experience many years ago, like 25-30 years ago, of waking from a dream and hearing the word “Antares”. Maybe she was in some dream state classroom or her guides were slipping a little information into her consciousness, but she always felt like there was somewhere-out-there this piece of info for her. She's tried researching it from time to time, and never found a whole lot. Maybe she was doing what I was doing. Which was kind of dipping her toe in, saying, Hmm has anybody written about this?
But she said that she did know that Antares was some kind of gateway or home star or something. And that she had actually bought this book, The Prism of Lyra, which had some of the quote that I was reading to you, and she felt it was sort of put in her path, and so she picked it up.
So anyway, there was a lot of exciting conversation and we were going back and forth, as you do on Facebook threads. It's hard to relate that conversation anecdotally here, but I wrote Chris back and I said, It's very interesting because when I read her comment about Antares, I went back to that same site, because I saw that as a highlighted hyperlink in some of the information, and so I went to that page and found that Antares and Arcturus are the same thing.
Now, the reason why this is interesting is because I have been told before, maybe more than once, that my soul origin is Arcturian. There are some practitioners, in particular I know soul re-alignment practitioners, retrieve information about the soul origin, which is this concept that your soul originate some time somewhere out in the galaxy other than here, and then travels here.
Anyway, Antares, like we talked about, is the home of these higher dimensional entities, in both physical and non-physical, and people talk about the Doorway to Antares, or the gateway, between the galaxies and to other universes and it's some kind of "interdimensional bridge to Andromeda from our galaxy. Some souls, upon physical incarnation, choose to pass through the Antares gateway to reactivate soul memory" (Lyssa Royal & Keith Priest, The Prism of Lyra) or to give them layers of ability and consciousness that they need to exist within our dimension.
So, again, that's not something I channeled. That's something I read.
But, here on earth, a lot of the people that are referred to as Starseeds, actually come from Arcturus, or Antares. They are highly sensitive, highly intellectual, usually very empathic, they tend to be a little more withdrawn and reserved.
So, one other Automatic Intuition person, Penelope, said - she chimed in a little later because she's in a different time zone - she's in Hawaii! She said that she works with an Arcturian consciousness in her healing work. Lots of cobalt blue, she says, very powerful, intelligent, compassionate energy. And she wrote to me and said, it makes sense to me if your soul group of origin is Arcturus that Arcturian energy would be present in your attunements.
So meaning, well if your soul origin is Arcturian, then you would produce this energetic guided meditation that would have some of that type of energy to it.
Okay, so yeah, that makes sense. And she also said that Arcturus is the guiding star for Polynesian wayfarers.
So, like I said, Penny is in Hawaii. I met Mark Watson in Hawaii.
There’s a connection emerging around Hawaii.
Meanwhile, I kid you not, I had to go to Walmart. While all this conversation was going on, and I am in Walmart and I get a text from my friend Jeff. Jeff is someone that I met in Hawaii, at that conference. I believe actually prior to even getting there, I knew that he was there and I feel that one of the reasons why I went to Hawaii at that time was to connect with him. He's one of those people that is a soul brother to me and Jeff very much functions in my life as kind of my private psychic. Like, if i'm spinning out of control, that's who I'm contacting.
And so he's also a friend and he has access to the Automatic Intuition community as a kind of anchor point for me because he was there having the conversation with me about the program as I was developing it. And so he's always been sort of someone that I tag team in a lot of my work, and Jeff also listens to this podcast, so I'm sure he's like, jumping up and down right now really excited that I'm talking about him.
Hey Jeff!
So yeah, I didn't even know at the time that Jeff and I were texting, I didn't even think about the Hawaii thing. That has all come up since Penny contacted me. She has actually offered to do a session with me some time this week so I can experience this energy that she's working with, which is very cool, and very generous of her. And I'm excited to see what comes of this.
So there could be more parts to this story.
Anyway, Jeff is texting me. I'm at Walmart. He's like, Ohmygod I'm loving this conversation that's going on in your AI group.
And then he says to me, I'm Arcturian too!
And I said, Okay, so how did you come to know that?
And he said, kind of the same thing I did. That a psychic told him that, or maybe it was a channel.
But he did mention one thing. He said, whoever told him that was also dead on about a lot of other details. There was a lot of confirmation affirmation about her other information, which made him kind of more likely to take that on board.
And it was really funny because, as we're talking about it, I didn't want to give him the sense that I was tearing anything down, so I typed, “I don’t NOT believe in it."
And it was one of those instances where your texts cross and you are typing each other at the same time and he typed the same thing to me. "I don't NOT believe in it."
And so, that's a really important part of the puzzle here, for me personally is, I don't really experience this. I'm not drawn to it. It doesn't come through for me in readings. I don't dream about it. I don't find it showing up in automatic writing sessions that I do. I'm not channeling it. Nothing like that.
And that doesn't mean that it's not real. It doesn't mean it's not interesting to me. It definitely doesn't mean that you shouldn't pursue it if it's something coming through for you, because I absolutely would support you in doing that.
I really do try not to judge it.
It could ALL be 100% true.
We could all cross to the other side and find out, Wow! All that crap that Slade was talking about in episode 50 was dead on!
So the thing about this type of information, as I was reading this website and I was kind of trying to evaluate which websites I felt were a little bit more reputable than the others, and as Shawn was saying, there are so many people online who are channeling this information.
Being told that I have a soul origin in Arcturus is kind of a type of information that really cannot be confirmed.
Now, it is interesting that more than one person has told me that. So I haven't had a lot of conversations with people that have said, Oh, your soul origin is this, and your soul origin is this. It's only happened a couple times and I was told the same thing.
So that kind of is a quasi-confirmation thing, right? So if there's something to it, there's definitely a pattern there. I think three people have told me that.
And here's the thing - no one has ever told me my soul origin was something else. The only people who have ever even brought that subject up to me have told me the exact same thing. So I do think that's a little interesting.
But, in my readings, if you get a reading with me, I will give you spirit guide information if it's something that you specifically ask for. And information about who your guides are, how they're presenting to me, if they have names that they're giving me, all that kind of stuff.
But even then, I try to introduce some way of confirming that information and what I usually do is I request that you receive signs and synchronicities. Like, really just a ton of them to corroborate that information. And I get back some really cool stories post-reading from people who write me back that same day and often have these synchronicities with the names.
I've had it happen with some really, really unusual names too. We're not just talking about Johns and Marys here. I've had it happen in some really - like, that needs its own episode. So I'll make note to do an episode about spirit guide names, right? And why I think that there's something to them and what I think it's all about and how it works and all that kind of stuff.
Because I know some psychics have an attitude that spirit guide names are BS and that you shouldn't give them at all. I feel differently about it and maybe I need to come back and explain all that in a separate episode, since you like the woo woo stuff so much.
So anyway, I try to do something, even when I am bringing through information that just literally can't be corroborated. I mean, I could be telling you anything. Even with good intentions, but how can we get some kind of feedback from outside our own heads? In the real world. To kind of show up and corroborate that a little bit. And so, we do have an exercise that I do in that context.
I don’t know how I feel about just calling everything “channeled” as if that is a blank check. I'm a little bit prickly about that whole concept. I admit. When somebody says, Oh, this is channeled information, I kind of think, Okay...
I'm immediately... there's a skeptical filter there. I admit it. It's a response that I have.
But, if the wisdom that's coming through in this channeled information is applicable and useful and insightful, I'm less likely to question the source. I don't really care about the source. For me, if someone is bringing through information that's really fascinating and useful and shifts your mind, then that's what counts, right?
And so, I definitely think if you look at some of the channeled information that's most popular, you think about Esther Hicks or even our own friend, Frank Butterfield. If you listen to Frank and Paul and some of the stuff that he brings through, it's really, like I take that information on. I have a use for it. It's not like he's just babbling about some planet off in some other part of the Universe and just painting a pretty picture of what it looks like there. He's usually instructing and teaching wisdom about the human condition and how we think about things and how we can think about them differntly.
So that is one of the ways I tend to judge the channeled information.
So I don't judge whether or not it is channeled, or where the source might be. I just sort of judge the information itself. Is that useful to us? That's where I'm at.
Fewer hearts and flowers. Fewer abstracts. Just random things that can't be confirmed.
If the information has no bearing on us or our experience, quite honestly it could be science fiction.
It’s okay. I like science fiction. I think it is a platform for the story of humanity as a whole, as a species, at a much higher level. It makes philosophy and anthropology and science and biology all really accessible to popular thought.
It gives us a way of thinking about ourselves as one thing. And that is something that you will see in science fiction more than any other kind of story telling. And that's one of the things that people who are fans of science fiction, especially the high brow stuff. That's what we are there to get from it.
So... People don’t ask me super esoteric questions during readings. They usually want to know about their lives and how to impact the situations that they're living through in some kind of practical way.
BOTTOM LINE:
I believe it’s irrelevant whether I intend any of this.
Whether I intentionally am Arcturian and I'm creating Attunements with Arcturian energy and that's my thing and I'm really in to it, or whether or not I'm just, happen to be doing it within this soup of stuff. So that it is a part of it.
It’s interesting though, to me, that I could create something that brings that through without necessarily willfully intending to so.
And so that's the reason why my whole fascination with this subject has kind of come to a head. Like, how is it that I've created something that I don't get blue-aliens from. But everyone, not everyone, a lot of people, there's a pattern of clients and students who, in accessing my work, access these blue-skinned aliens.
The thing is, if it is true that there is a galactic federation — I kind of hope so. I would love to think this is true and actually happening.
Sidebar: I kind of think that we’re probably the North Korea of the galactic neighborhood. You know what I'm saying?
I think I come away with a thought, as I'm processing all this stuff about the blue-skinned aliens. I can still serve that greater good by introducing intuitives to it who may channel it. Or who may connect with it. Who may use it willfully, or may use it indirectly.
I don't at all have a sense that, Ooo, demons are trying to talk to us or anything like that. Don't go there with this. Nothing about this feels like that to me. I know there's some people with some religious programming who are going to go down that well and I'm just here to say, don't.
No.
And don't bring that to me, by the way. Because I don't need to hear about that. I don't believe it.
So, I do believe that even as I'm bopping around doing what I do, that I could be inadvertently serving a galactic federation that wants to see humanity ascend.
And if that's what's happening, I'm cool with that.
We are always striving to be better. We’re always wanting to change ourselves.
All this judgment - all this trying to change - is exhausting and detrimental to the creative process. It constantly introduces self-doubt and expectation of failure.
If you’re spinning your wheels, or not seeing the results your efforts should be producing, or if you feel like there’s never enough time in the day to pursue all that purposeful stuff you really want to get to in this life…
I might have some ideas about how we can bust out of these prisons of our own making. I’m ready to try something different.
MENTIONED ON THE SHOW Arrival film
3x3 Strategy
The Magicians TV show
Krish Surroy - Mavericks Unlimited
HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses
Get an intuitive reading with Slade
Automatic Intuition
BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits Edit your pledge on Patreon
TRANSCRIPT I don’t know about you, but I am exhausted with trying. With working, with doing, with straining, with pushing and reaching… With clenching and holding my breath and … JUDGING myself.
On the one hand there’s discipline and all that—and I’m very disciplined, slow and steady, committed to assigning blocks of time to all the things I want to get done and fiercely protecting them from Resistance.
But … ugh. If I’m so good at being disciplined and productive, why am I talking to myself like I’m not?
There has to be some middle ground.
I think what I’m experiencing here is a pendulum swing in the other direction.
Introducing podcasting into my work and my schedule was a big requirement of discipline and establishing systems and discovering which rules I had to follow before I could start throwing them out and …
I’m ready to ditch some shit, guys.
No more To Do Lists
I’m lumping iPhone reminders in with this. That’s my To Do of choice.
if it is important but kind of small, it will get done immediately or, it's too big to forget, and it will hang in the sky like a spaceship in the movie Arrival until I engage with it.
I’m not going to forget an enormous flattened black shard ominously looming over my landscape. I don’t need to write that down.
“Remember to make contact with large alien space craft.” Ridiculous.
That doesn’t need to be on a list.
I have friends—and I’m not singling anyone out if you’re listening, so don’t think I’m talking about you, I can name a dozen of you and at least ten are worse than you about this—I have friends who claim to be addicted to having a physical day planner. They all say the same thing: they need to see it there in writing, physically, or they feel like they can’t manage it. It gives them a feeling of control over all the stuff they have to keep up with.
By the way, this is the same impulse hoarders have. They feel less anxious if they see all the stuff lined up on top of physical surfaces. Things put away, tucked in cabinets and organized in bins, might get lost.
Having all the stuff at your fingertips, carrying it around with you even, in a tote bag or a ginormous purse, helps you feel less anxious and more in control.
But … Does it really? Or does it really only create artifacts? Tiny physical manifestations of your anxiety.
What happens if you go planner free?
Anybody wiling to try it?
I’m not talking about client appointments, doctor’s appointments. Things that involve other people’s businesses. Your shared family and kids calendar on the kitchen wall.
But consider how much you are duplicating. That’s where we might find the real issue. Anxiety-fueled duplication. CC’ing the crap out of every facet of your life. Making a backup and then a copy of the backup.
If you have an appointment card under a magnet on the fridge, is it also on a to do list, on your phone calendar (you have more than one digital calendar too don’t you) and then on your phone reminders and then physically written in your day planner and put on one of those list pages in the back of the planner or in the margins. Maybe you throw it on a sticky note too and leave it on your desk right in your eye line, just in case.
No seriously, are you doing this?
THIS is what I’m talking about with all the trying. It’s layers and layers of self-doubt and expectation of failure.
No more big email lists
I’m exhausted with carrying big lists. This is the dick size/ bust size of internet business posturing. It is super important. It is more important than money. Your contact list is the most important thing ever. It’s true. I will continue to beat that drum.
But the size, beyond the 1000 true fans, is meaningless. Worse than meaningless. It’s actually the inverse of meaningful.
It literally costs more money to maintain large lists. You’re buying tickets for every friend you have, even the ones who never show up and are never going to.
I am pruning my lists.
(I hear gasps from all the people with internet based businesses.)
I’m cutting dead weight. Deleting those who don’t read and click and interact with me. There’s 30k, 40K zombies I’m carrying around. 2000, maybe 3000 of you are actually truly participating. That’s more than enough to support my work.
If you’re hearing the sound of my voice at this moment, you are one of the chosen. You chose yourself, you chose me. Thank you for being here.
The rest are kept around because of fear of missing out, I guess. Fear of someone asking me how big my list is and not having a huge number to impress them with. Sometimes, it’s a barrier to participate. I am no longer asking my collaborators about their list size. I’m going to start by removing my energy from the hive mind on this issue.
It’s not a requirement to be a guest on my show. Your personality and your message and your energy and the cool thing I like about you is what matters. And I am getting rid of statistics in my business dealings that don’t reflect that.
It may hurt. When someone says “You need 5000 people on your email list in order to participate in this author cross promotion” I may regret pruning 25,000 people. Gulp. Whoops. They weren’t going to bring anything to the game.
And if I’m not being invited because of who I am and what I do in the world, then I don’t want to play with you anyway. I don’t want to be member on your panel or whatever.
"What if I don’t do the thing everybody told me to do and I end up regretting it?"
(Sidebar: That’s an ever present thought, it’s a mind virus—you probably have your own strain of career mind virus specific to your work and field. But if I stop and analyze that. It’s really never true. I can’t find one instance where I intuitively broke from the herd and regretted it at a deep soul level for months and years later. Anything that might kind of look like that, in the moment, ends up being a detour I was meant to take and so it’s okay further along in my story.)
No more paid advertising
I’m so sick of worrying about whether or not you are my “target.”
In marketing we are constantly told to define our “target market” and I’m here to say, after 15 years of hearing that, your audience, your followers, are not targets; you’re the target.
You’re their target.
Be one thing. You. Do the hell out of it. Let everyone decide whether or not they dig you. End of story. They’re shooting queries into Google, into the universe, and they hit something you made. Bulls eye. Awesome. They will know it; you don’t even have to.
Which is easier? To be a big deep bright red authentic cool relatable target hanging out there for everyone to find, or to shoot a million differently tweaked arrows at a gazillion abstractions of human beings?
No. Not doing that. Not even trying anymore. Taking back that energy.
No more writing to market
This goes along with target. Trying to play this fortune-telling educated guess about what creative projects to pursue based on their potential to sell.
I gotta tell you. Nothing makes me feel like I’m trying too hard more than that. Many authors and speakers and artists and business people do this with practical success.
But, when it’s just you, and it’s your passion, and you’re intending to inject something with pieces of your soul and hang it out in the world.
It is exhausting and detrimental to the creative process to constantly introduce self-doubt and expectation of failure.
Put simply—I’m going to pivot from this trying mindset and create things that are deeper, more specific, more narrow … for fewer of you. Beautiful novels that only a special (possibly smaller) group can appreciate.
You’re either mass marketing some shit, or you’re making custom, luxury items.
Get really clear about which one you want to do. This is true of your purpose of your work. I think it could be true of your relationships as well. How many of you maintain fewer but deeper friendships?
It just occurred to me as I’m talking about all this. That the word TRYING also means getting on your nerves. Exhausting you.
Here’s what I've been thinking about a lot in the last few months and how I’m going to go about changing it.
Whatever I’ve done in the past, whatever I’ve been doing. Especially systems that I have in place, I’m going to look at and ask myself “does it have to be that way?”
Ex. I’ve worked weekends for 15 years. Why? I know why I did in the beginning. Why have I continued to do it?
Example - my podcast show notes
I sort of tried to do what other people do—always a good way to start. But after doing them for awhile, I find they are awkward to execute in their current format. So I might change those to more accurately reflect the process I naturally use to put them together.
If you want to participate in this mental exercise with me, ask yourself these questions
- Where am I entrenched?
- Where am I grasping?
- Where am I continuing to push and not seeing much in the way of results?
- Where am I afraid to stop trying so hard?
I’m kind of thinking:
What’s the opposite of a 3x3 strategy?
I know, I spent all last year teaching you one of my productivity techniques, and now I’m telling you I’m gonna throw it out.
If it’s important enough, it’s not like I will forget its existence.
I tend think about projects and work that needs to be done until … the day I pounce on it.
I just do it. This moment suddenly feels like the moment, and I just execute. Or start.
I have these rhythms that feel good—my dedicated blocks of time I’ve told you about. There are writing blocks, and client blocks, and reading blocks, and recording blocks, and blocks for exercise and downtime… I don’t decide what I’m going to do in those blocks sometimes until I get there. And then I spontaneously work within the block. It’s a loose set of rules that feels powerful and flexible to me.
And then there are some rhythms that do not feel good to me. (working on weekends)
That started because of Sunday’s at the cafe. My posts used to get picked up by my email service provider for afternoon Sunday delivery, and so if I wrote the post by a certain time on Sunday morning, that was my deadline.
I don’t remotely do that anymore. I schedule it all in advance.
Why am I still working on Sundays if it’s not my routine and it feels bad?
That’s insane.
I’m gonna stop scripting my solo episodes.
I’m going to stop using a template for interviews.
I’m going to stop weighting myself on a scale and stop obsessing over portions and look at quality of what I eat and how I feel in my body and in my clothes
Doesn’t mean I’m not exercising.
You don’t have to do any of what I’m going to do.
This may represent advanced material and advanced approach for you. You can certainly use all my old tools and all my old advice it will get you there. It will work the way I said it did, especially if you’re at the right point.
But if it feels good to you what I’m saying right now about letting it go, about not trying so hard, maybe that’s what you need to do to. Maybe relaxing is going to allow you to move forward.
I have a proven track record of producing and shipping and getting it out there and making money from it and getting people to hear me. So you can’t fool yourself here. You can’t use this as a way to procrastinate and avoid. You can only use this if it allows you to run.
If it allows you to expand.
If it sets you free.
I may find out this is a terrible idea. A year ago I was telling you to do something completely different. If this is a disaster I’ll come back and tell you that too. And I’ll also tell you what I discover if it works.
I am tired of trying so hard. of clenching, straining, controlling.
I need a name for this approach. Naming things is a part of my magic I want to keep.
Maybe I will call it something like … Freestyle.
I’m going to try Freestyling in as many areas of my life as it seems applicable.
Look around in your life
Are you the only one doing what you’re doing?
You’re probably doing something right.
You might be on a better path. Please consider this along with what everybody says you should do.
We are always striving to be better. We’re always talking about changing ourselves.
I heard a great quote a few weeks ago on The Magicians (the TV show on SyFy)
"Instead of trying to change, maybe the brave thing is to be you and accept the consequences."
I love that. It’s wicked, subversive, rebellious. I need a hit of that. That’s what was missing from my New Year.
So:
- What is all my stuff reminding you of in your own life?
- What is it bringing up for you?
- Where are you clenching and grasping and trying too hard … and what might happen if you stop?
This week is a long personal introduction with reflections on the show's first year, the most popular episodes, what that has shown me about you guys, and where we're going in the future.
There is also a shorter segment with a message about creativity and purpose and your duty to dedicate yourself to the tasks you’ve been given.
TOP 10 EPISODES 1. Erin Pavlina on Past Lives, Astral Projection & the Other Side 2. Blocked from Hearing Your Spirit Guides 3. How to F* up Your Ability to Manifest 4. Repeating Numbers with Laurra Warnke 5. A Channeled Message about Life Purpose 6. Stranger Angels: Part 1 7. Love & Money Personified with Morgana Rae 8. A Sign or a Coincidence? 9. Recognizing Your Higher Self with Heather Alice Shea 10. About Channeling with Frank Butterfield
ALSO MENTIONED ON THE SHOW: Frank Butterfield & Lori Ference on Leaders' Call to Adventure: Ep 10, Ep 11, Ep16
Seth Godin (on true fans) The Grand Opening
Shift Your Spirits Article ARCHIVE
1000 True Fans by Kevin Kelly
The War of Art by Steven Pressfield
Shift Your Spirits on SPOTIFY
HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses
Get an intuitive reading with Slade
Automatic Intuition
BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits Edit your pledge on Patreon
TRANSCRIPT You must honor the ideas you’ve already been given if you want to receive more.
A few months ago, Shawn, one of my mentoring clients in the Automatic Intuition program presented me with a really exciting prospect — a project that's part channeling, part writing.
I was truly excited for him. I thought Wow. That’s a beautiful concept. It’s succinct, the title itself is one of those shining sentence type clairaudient downloads. It honestly reminded me a bit of when I received the idea for Shift Your Spirits.
I was thinking, I can see an entire platform that can be built around this. There’s the potential for a practice and a business. And it will really appeal to people. But I didn’t want to overwhelm him with where it could all go. It was an idea that had yet to be executed and brought through.
So, the Holidays came, and we know how those months go by, and Shawn contacted me for a session. He said he was lost. He wasn’t sure what to do next. What direction to take. He was kind of waiting for everything to come together.
And when we were talking this week he told me that he had successfully learned to do readings, and the feedback from his reading clients is positive. And when I asked him about the channeling project, he said he had no trouble connecting and retrieving those channeled messages.
All that was really missing, the sense of direction, in my observation, was he just needed to dedicate himself to this project. To dedicate time in his schedule either every day or on a 3x3 Strategy.
He said that word DEDICATE was the marching orders he was hoping for.
I experience this all the time in my fiction. I have lists of ideas for novels and stories. I have two books on my desk laid open in a sloppy state of word surgery, sequels to my novel Havenwood.
And I feel uninspired by them. Last autumn I kept wanting some really BIG idea to strike me. To land in my lap and light me up so that all I could think about was writing it.
I kept trying to make that idea come.
I tried to prime that pump and drag it out of the sky. To draw down the moon, to raise a cone of power, and the silence from my guides, from my muse, was actually painful. I obsessed over the absence of the next big idea.
I finally gave up. I dedicated myself to the projects on my desk. The ones my readers are waiting for and expecting. I’m not in love with them. I’m not on fire. I was when I first started to plot them, maybe, but that beautiful brainstormy part of the process had already come and left me with a big pile of work.
In absence of anything better to do during my writing time, I went back to working on my current books.
I am about a month away from the end of a four month writing stretch. The drafting of this current book will soon shift into the editing process.
And then last week I had a story come. A bolt from the blue. A lightning. I sat up in bed, just before drifting off, and reached for my tablet to furiously type some notes.
That’s what I was waiting for. That’s the kind of idea, burst of inspiration, I wanted 6 months ago.
But I believe with all my heart, it was given because I followed through on the ones I’d been given before.
Why would they give me more, if I’m only going to lay them aside and demand another one? Doesn’t it make sense if the muses and the guides are giving out assignments, they give the best ones to those with a track record of following through?
You have to honor the ideas you're given.
Regardless of how they might be critically received, whether or not they will sell, whether they become a replacement career or remain a hobby, if the Divine is delivering plans and ideas to you, it is your duty to execute them, to bring them through.
You've been chosen.
You've been interrogating your divinity (your creativity) about your purpose:
- What should you do?
- What should you make?
- Who should you make it for?
And if these questions have only left you spinning in hesitation -- paralysis, blocks -- then ask your work what it needs.
- How can you best honor the Inspiration itself?
- What is the Idea asking you to do?
- What action does your Art require your inner Artist to take?
If you're going to be true to your creative gifts, you must honor the ideas you’ve been given.
When we talk about doing something Amazing with our lives, meaning something large scale, a legacy that will outlive us… Do you really need that to be happy?
When you look into your heart, when you get really honest with yourself, you may find that you don’t.
I honestly believe you might be happier if you can let all that Amazing go.
MENTIONED ON THE SHOW Oscillococcinum (homeopathic flu remedy - WholeFoods markets a storebrand version as "Flu Ease" - same stuff)
Elderberry syrup
Project Atlantis (Ascendant Chronicles 1) by Brandon Ellis
HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses
Get an intuitive reading with Slade
Automatic Intuition
BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits Edit your pledge on Patreon
TRANSCRIPT The title of this episode “You don’t have to do something amazing to be happy” is a line from the movie Passengers, with Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt.
I’ve been hanging onto this quote for awhile, for about 6 months.
(No spoilers, here.) It's the controlling idea for the decision the Jennifer Lawrence's character Aurora Lane has to make.
Aurora’s a journalist, with big plans to create this amazing piece of reporting, that spans centuries of time, that she will essentially spend her life’s work on, it’s a project that will define her posthumously.
It’s very much about the future. Even the future that exists beyond her life.
She is forced to make an extreme choice about the present situation she finds herself in.
She’s watching these videos her friends and family back on earth made for her as a going away present. These are people she will never see again in this lifetime because she’s chosen to undertake this journey as part of her big writing project slash legacy.
One friend of Aurora’s had left her a message which stops her in her tracks.
She says
"You don’t have to do something amazing to be happy."
With all that solar eclipse existential crisis stuff going on in the summer and fall of 2017 — who am I? What is my light? Who can see it shining? — all that stuff…
I spent a lot of time privately considering whether or not I could be happy without being aspirational in my work. Having to create something Amazing. Is that something I could possibly let go of? I won’t spoil the movie by telling you the choices the characters make and how they arrived at their decisions.
But the contemplation put me in mind of something that is talked about very much in the indie publishing world, the internet marketing world...the Long Tail
There are no gate keepers anymore.
The gate keepers used to define it so that only those who did something amazing even got to show their work.
It used to be, only the big fish, the Stephen Kings, the Danielle Steeles, the JK Rowlings could make a living as an author. They weren’t even fish, they were whales. And they made a LOT of money. They were incredibly financially successful.
And then you had maybe some little tiny poets and academics swimming around. Minnows. Teaching in schools to make their income. Their published works were more merit-based accomplishments.
Those whales are still there. But, what used to be the mid-list and the small-list, the little bits along the tail, is expanding.
What the longer tail means for creatives is that more and more people can make money — as a side hustle, as a living — doing something they love.
And almost ANYONE can make and share something they love to do just for the pure joy of it, and reach potentially millions of other humans on the planet.
In the past, if you were an amazing cake decorator, only the members of your family or your local community experienced your work on special occasions. And you probably didn’t have too many peers.
Now, your Instagram and Pinterest encircle the globe and you have thousands of online peers. Even just hundreds.
Maybe you’re one of those musicians who isn’t going to blow up on YouTube like Justin Bieber or Taylor Swift… But you’re still able to sit down at the piano and do a Facebook live and blow some people away. Change their day. Communicate a message to them at just the right time that changes how they feel.
"You don’t have to do something amazing to be happy.”
But, here are some questions:
How do you define amazing?
Are we talking everyday amazing?
1000 true fans amazing and you can make some money from it on the side?
Are you internet famous or mainstream media famous?
Do you have to be any of things?
Can you go back to making a pretty cake for your sister’s wedding?
Can you just decorate cookies and build gingerbread houses with your kids at the holidays?
How about you sing to your beloved when there’s no one else around to hear it?
What if you write an amazing toast for a friend’s retirement party?
What if, what you can jot down in a blank card rivals anything a greeting card company author can compose?
What if a birthday card from you makes a person choke up and weep?
It’s still kind of amazing.
So I think the decision is a matter of SCALE.
What kind of scale do you require to be happy?
Because you do have to express your creativity, share your gifts, practice your talent. You must. For your own health and well being and for the joy of others. It’s a kind of duty really.
And it’s a part of a whole lifestyle — like eating well and exercising and getting good sleep.
You must.
"You don’t have to do something amazing to be happy.”
But what scale do you really require?
Most people I know would love it to be the scale of their job and income.
But be careful with that. Turning a passion into a job can change the passion.
My friend Tricia went to school to be a pastry chef. Her desserts are amazing. But she went and got an admin job at a university because working in restaurants was horrible for her and sucked all the joy out of why she baked in the first place.
She’s happier having it be her passion, not her job.
Being married.
Raising kids.
Having friends and family.
Being a part of a community, even if it’s a tiny band of misfit rebels.
Having a furry companion animal waiting for you to come home because you are the center of their universe.
Traveling.
Watching a great show on TV with your significant other.
Binging Netflix alone on an iPad.
Gloriously alone, with a book and a cup of tea.
And you may borrow any of the above or supply your own happy thing.
Are these things amazing?
I think they meet the definition of amazing.
But when we talk about doing something Amazing with our lives, meaning something Large Scale, a legacy that will outlive us…
Do you really need THAT?
When you look into your heart, when you get really honest with yourself, you may find that you don’t.
I don’t know what will make you happy. You may not yet either. You might stumble upon it. Just make sure you take a moment to acknowledge when you finally realize you’re sitting smack in the middle of it. Don’t miss it — the happiness — because you’re focused on the Amazing.
I am speaking to you now as someone who does have to do something a little bit amazing. If you think creating and producing this show is amazing. If writing and publishing books is amazing. I think both those things are.
I considered all this and found that I am a happy mid-lister. I don’t need to be Oprah or James Lipton. I like this smaller scale. But a little bit amazing is way, way more happy than NOT doing it could ever be, for me.
That’s me. You may scale up or down.
I was struck by the line in that movie, and I spent a lot of this year considering what I could redefine and possibly let go of.
I honestly believe you might actually be happier if you CAN let all that Amazing go.
I think a great exercise to do here would be to write a letter to yourself, write a journal entry, a morning page and consider the questions:
Do I have to do something amazing to be happy?
What would happy be for me, what would it look like, without that pressure?
Amanda Heisman is a Nutrition Intuitive & Energy Coach. She teaches Intuitive Eating & Eating for Energy, while exploring the spiritual & emotional sides of Nourishment and channeling the needs of the Nourishment Body. The marrying of her formal training and intuitive gifts provides deep transformation.
"Thriving health isn't just about the absence of disease." - Amanda
Heisman
We talk about:
- How dieting is the opposite of nourishment
- The spiritual and emotional components of nutrition
- Why intuition and nutrition are a match made in Heaven
MENTIONED ON THE SHOW VIDEO: "Why Intuition and Nutrition are a Match Made in Heaven" or The Marriage of a Nutrition Coach and Intuitive
GUEST LINKS - AMANDA HEISMAN heismanhealth.com
Facebook Heisman Health
Facebook Group - Intuitive Eating for Energy
Free Resources : “Amanda's Top Swaps” or 20 Minute Free Mini-Reading
HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses
Get an intuitive reading with Slade
Automatic Intuition
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TRANSCRIPT Amanda:
So I'm Amanda Heisman. I'm an intuitive nutrition and energy coach. So what that means is, I kind of married my formal training as a Certified Holistic Health coach and my abilities as a nutrition intuitive.
So I help people transform their energy. I help people eat for energy and eat more intuitively. So they can use that sort of energy and intuition they build to just create a life that they love. Pretty much.
So I explore the spiritual and emotional sides of nourishment as well as the physical. And as a nutrition intuitive I can channel the needs of the nourishment body and kind of explore where you can be better nourished.
Slade:
Okay. I know everyone listening is really curious about the intuitive part of this, right?
Amanda:
Yeah!
Slade:
That's the part I'm really interested in hearing about.
So, how do you use intuition in the process of counseling someone around nutrition? Just describe that for me.
Amanda:
Sure.
So I can use these words like, the nourishment body, or explore the energy of your health potential, but what does that really mean?
What I do is, I'm more claircognizant or clairsentient, so I feel things very specifically as far as I can feel where an organ might be holding stuck emotion or where it might be storing emotion or it might be storing some toxicity. It might not be - I see it as a spinning, almost. Like it might not be corr - but like the energy of the organ might not be corresponding with the energy centre of the body or the chakras, you know, if you're listeners are familiar with the chakra system, right?
So it might not be, kind of matching up to what it needs to be for a full energy or for full nourishment.
So we know that health isn't just - great thriving health isn't just the absence of disease, right? A great relationship isn't just the absence of abuse. Things... we really look at what is the full potential here of how much you can be thriving. How much energy you can have. How beautiful a life you can have.
And so, how I use my intuition is first seeing where that toxicity might be stored in the physical... It's kind of a, you know we have our energetic body, we have our physical body, we have our emotional body. It's kind of like I feel whether it's on the emotional body side or the physical body side, where there's kind of stuck energy. And then I can address it from there.
So it might feel like an organ, it might feel like a colour... It just might present as emotions, as stored emotions that we need to address.
Does that make sense?
Slade:
Yeah, absolutely. That's really interesting. I was just talking to someone last night about the fact that the chakras spin. That many people talk about the spinning as the motion of the energy.
So that's cool that you affirmed that for me. Because I wasn't sure if I had that entirely right.
I'm curious to know, was there a life event that sort of led you to this work? How did you come to it? What's your story?
Amanda:
Yeah! Excuse me.
So, I have kind of two big life events that first led me back on the nutrition path and then second led me back on the more intuitive side. That second part was more gradual but the initial one was, I was living in south Florida and I was climbing the corporate ladder, so to speak. I had a great life and I had a great job and I was doing really well for myself down there.
And I, one day, I was very work-hard play-hard Type A borderline, I call myself sometimes a recovering perfectionist or recovering Type A sort of achiever.
And one day, I got in a car accident on 95, a freeway down there. And I suffered from herniated discs in both my C5 and my L5, so my structure, my spine, my structural health and that kind of turned my life upside down at the time because I was so centered around... I was very active. I was very athletic. Always very athletic growing up and through my 20s and young adult life, and then I just couldn't do anything anymore.
I'd run marathons and triathlons, soccer games, all these things, and then it was kind of like, BLOP. Like, I had to be really, I had to rest during my recovery and I didn't like that so much. I really resisted it at the time. I was always trying to figure out how to go back to my old ways. And that was just kind of a coming out of the really young energy, right? The really masculine energy I had going in my career and in my sports and everything. And kind of swinging into learning, connecting to my yin side and being really, connecting with gentle exercises so...
That's what opened me up after going through with the neurologist. Going through kind of the gamut of the western medicine diagnoses and treatments. CT scans and MRIs and everything else and it ended with the neurologist telling me to fuse my discs together. And have that surgery.
And I think I was 30 at the time and I just... It was a full body no. No, there has to be something else. You know? I don't want to do that.
So I, that started me on this path of just exploring all sorts of holistic modalities. So osteopathy really helped me. Qigong and yoga really helped me. And then I started looking at nutrition. I finally, after nearly a year of this, got it through a little bit that, hmmm maybe if I can't go run, or do something really active anymore, I should take a look at what I'm putting in my body in the first place.
And that opened up this whole world of nutrition and I couldn't believe the initial - two small changes that I made for my body, for my individual body, having just an exponential effect on my energy. So I thought, Maybe there's something to this. And I kind of worked my way through my recovery the following year.
And then, fast forward basically ended up leaving corporate America and didn't know what I was going to do at the time. That was kind of, surprised that wasn't a surprise, sort of thing.
And then ended up just resting for a few months and then going back to, deciding to go back to nutrition school that summer. And now I'm on this path to help others.
So that was kind of, the first big life event was the car accident and all the ramifications in recovery and lessons I learned from that.
And then the second would be, kind of the perfect storm that was happening when I knew I had to end a relationship but I wasn't doing it. So it was the end of a very significant partnership of a romantic partner. He and I separated and during my emotional recovery from that, I was just so aware of, and I had spiritual mentors at the time as well, I had a modern day shaman, and other folks who channeled the Archangels and different mentors around me. I was very well supported and I have a great support system in my family and friends as well.
But I was very aware of how many kind of, very spiritual mystical experiences I was having. Things that couldn't be explained. Just over and over again. That were directly related to each stage of the grief cycle, each emotion I was going through. And so, during the last maybe year of our relationship and then the year of recovery, my abilities started to become really apparent.
Such that I couldn't hide them anymore. The whole quote about, to remain tight in a bud was more painful than to blossom, so that started, that really started to come forth and I'm, I'm still coming into my own as far as that goes.
I help people in the capacity I do now, but I can feel that it's going to maybe be different in a year. We're always growing, right?
Slade:
What were some of those experiences that you were having? I mean, I mentor emerging intuitive all the time and I'm always curious to see the patterns of how these opportunities keep presenting themselves. You know, if it was like a movie, and we had special effects, it would be like some spirit would beam in and talk to us or something...
What were the real world examples of how that was presenting itself for you? Was it synchronicities or... What were the signs?
Amanda:
Yeah!
There were, I mean, sure there were a ton of synchronicities, there were a ton of repeating numbers, there were a ton of repeating animals that would show up in my life. Animal symbolism. So those were just kind of par for the course.
But then there were these experiences like, we'd both decided to separate but we had about two months left on our lease so we kind of decided to stay, to live together. So that was really difficult. And sometimes one or the other of us would go to friends, but sometimes we were just both there together. And one time we're both there. We just happened to be in bed together and this... I felt this incredible warmth in, because this is just such a painful time, for both of us. For both of us.
Such a painful time.
And I just felt an incredible warmth in the room and like a, it wasn't a flash with my physical eyes, but it was a flash. You know? It was like a flash in between us and then over by the door of the bedroom.
And I just, I woke my partner up because I was like, somebody's here! Somebody's here and I heard Michael and so it was Archangel Michael and he was just providing comfort for me. I didn't get a clear message, or words or anything.
But he was just there, letting me know that I was going to get through this time.
There was another time in the summer, it was summertime in south Florida. It's hot and sticky. And I had dreams. So I'd have dreams at that time I was really connecting to the earth I was on, and so I was in my dreams, talking to a lot of Native American tribes.
So I was part of their tribe and I was doing a lot of talking about, I was, there was a very clear message from them for me about our earth and about how we can do better with the earth. So there was that.
There was, there were a lot of sort of what, I don't know, people call it astral traveling or whatever, different experiences I would have in higher realms, where I was clearly meeting with higher selves, we were working through contracts or forgiving each other, things we couldn't say in the physical to each other, saying it up there.
And then just helping, having experiences where I was flying around the globe - I say "flying", I don't know what else to call it. Flying around the globe just kind of helping humanity through a difficult time it's been the last couple of years on earth.
That's just a few things!
Slade:
I've actually really fascinated by - I love to hear those kind of stories. Those experiences and you actually made me remember something that I haven't talked about for maybe 11 or 12 years. And I remember very early on when I started blogging, writing about how I would have these experiences. I guess they were dreams where I was at some kind of, it felt like an outdoor gathering. Like a music festival or something. Except the Pope would be speaking.
And for some reason, it was the Pope a lot. It was right after Pope John Paul had died and that's a whole other story.
But it's just funny. I just wanted to mention that because then somebody will ask me about it and I can talk about it again.
Yeah, I kind of had that same experience where you feel like you're, I called it like a congress. It was like I had been chosen to go somewhere and convene with all these other people for the purposes of hearing these speeches or something.
And it felt like some kind of movement or whatever. And I guess here in the 3rd dimensional plane I was doing whatever I was supposed to do because I stopped having those dreams. And then I just started doing this instead. So maybe that had something to do with my process as well.
To get back to your story, one of the things I'm curious about is, were you already doing sort of more formal straight up mainstream nutritional counseling and then you kind of decided to add in this intuitive or spiritual component, or was it all kind of happening at the same time?
Describe how that kind of emerged for you, or came together in the way that you do your practice.
Amanda:
Sure!
So... Yes.
Both and. It was kind of like, yes, I started out, I wouldn't say it was ever mainstream, because it wasn't, it's wasn't like a dietitian, the difference between a holistic health coach and a dietitian is that we do look at all sides of health, right?
Slade:
Okay.
Amanda:
So we're very holistic in the sense that we're considering the whole person and all human faculties, emotional, physical spiritual, mental. So it's already very holistic and I already knew about my intuition and trusted my intuition in a very nominal sense. But I hadn't had these really super mystical experiences yet. I'd just, I just knew that when I trusted my intuition, good things happened. And when I went against it, not so great things happened in my life, or what I would call, not so great things.
So there was always that.
And looking back, I can kind of see, well yes, I was pretty much channeling there, there, and there, I just didn't know it yet. Or wasn't really recognizing it yet.
And then it really became more and more apparent when so many things, so many things were happening so quickly and then I had to bring it together and have kind of this spiritual coming out of the closet as they say, right? And really say, these, you know, I think I have a video out there called, Why intuition and nutrition are a match made in heaven.
Because it's really a recognition. Our bodies are these vehicles that we have chosen in this lifetime and I think that's beautiful. I think it's, the body is what's on the journey. Your soul chose this vehicle this time around to house it. And let's begin it. Let's honour it. Let's...
As much as we are up in the higher realms as light workers and as spirit workers, and light workers, we also need to come back down and ground all of that spiritual and emotional work into the physical body. So that's, I mean, that's just something I love to do but it's kind of how it came together. It just feels so natural for me because the energy, like the energy of nourishment and eating is like open and free and expansive. It follows the universal laws of expansion.
I can't talk about this without raising my arms. I'm raising my arms in a V right now. You can't see me but...
It's just, it's expansive like that. It makes me put my hands up and so often the messaging we get around eating and, is a message of diet. It's a message of restriction, which is the exact opposite of the energy of nourishment being expansive.
So it was just, once that kind of clicked, and we can turn away from things, we can kind of turn towards that reframing, reframing eating and nourishment as sacred, as joyful, as ease, not restrictive, not a struggle, not an adversarial relationship with food and our bodies, not shoulds and should-nots.
Stop Should-ing on me.
No, everyone's individual. Let's explore what's good for your nourishment body.
But really, it's this divine... eating and nourishment is this divine recognition. It's a recognition of the divine in us, right? It's a really... It can be a really sacred experience, so I, you know, there's an energy inside of you. There's an energy inside of me that always knows what we need to put in our mouth and so I love tapping into that energy. Just makes sense for me, it just kind of flows.
Think I went on a tangent. Did that answer your question?
Slade:
Yeah! Sure it's fine. The questions are just prompts to get you to tell us stories anyway.
So I do have a couple... Okay I want to go a little bit more specifically into some of the nutritional stuff, right?
Amanda:
Sure.
Slade:
So I notice that you mentioned that there were two changes that you made in your nutrition that made a really big exponential impact and on your website, there's a sort of pulled quote that says, "Small diet tweaks produce huge results." And that sounds super encouraging to me.
So tell us what were those two changes that you initially made that made such a huge difference?
Amanda:
Sure!
So back then, I had no - I didn't eat awfully, but I was just kind of eating par for the course. Had never really thought about what went in my body. I maybe had maybe some oatmeal, maybe an egg, maybe a bagel for breakfast, or maybe nothing for breakfast. Again, I didn't put much thought into it. Maybe I had an apple with lunch and a sandwich and a salad with dinner. And some more meat and veggies or something. I didn't really... It wasn't a conscious decision.
I just ate.
And then I started thinking more consciously about what I was putting in. What I did for myself was, I tried the green smoothie in the mornings, first thing coming out of, breaking the fast, coming out of not eating all night, out of our body's rest. And being able to get kind of the life force energy, the chlorophyll, just vitamins, nutrient packed smoothie green drinks in the morning really set, what it did was it took away the kind of mid-afternoon wall. The mid-afternoon slump that I always used to hit. And it just provided... Basically I was getting two servings of vegetables and a serving of fruit in a 16-20 oz smoothie every morning, just right off the bat.
And so I was feeling so much more energy because I was at a point where I was feeling really lethargic, really a lot of brain fog, headaches were kind of normal, back and neck pain were normal, so those kind of low level symptoms don't have to be our daily experience, right?
So that's the first thing I did.
And then I started to play around with dairy and really noticed that I was kind of dairy sensitive and had never really known it. And so I just made simple switches from... to nut milk and reduced... I will say reduced, because I didn't cut it all out right away. Cheese was hard. But I reduced cheese and dairy, and I felt just so much better just from those two small things.
It had just, like I said, an exponential effect on my energy initially.
So it made me go, Hmm, and made me want to dig deeper.
Slade:
Are there patterns or, what do you see in the clients that you attract. What are the top issues that people seem to be presenting?
Amanda:
I see people present with all sorts of different symptoms. I see people present with, even all sorts of different conditions or diseases or sensitivities. But these are just their own physical manifestations of the energy usually of not having the self-love that we're meant to. As these beautiful beings here on earth, right? Of just really being unhappy with themselves and I think that's something we're all... We can all, we're all working on... And really it's a journey back to self-love and to really appreciating ourselves and giving ourselves...
We always say in my programs, Replace judgment with curiosity.
We can throw around the word self-love, but what does that mean? How do I get there? Why don't I love myself in the first place? Or I think I do love myself but my actions would show differently. I'm running myself into the ground, or whatever.
So the simple act of kind of noticing where we have judgments around things, and then replacing it with kind of a child-like curiosity has been really transformative in a lot of my life and in a lot of my clients' lives.
So HMMM? For example. We have this tendency to, I'm doing so great, I'm doing so great, I'm doing so great with my eating or with whatever it is. My workout schedule, whatever. And then inevitably we have some sort of, Oh, I binged on pizza, ate a box of donuts and skipped my workout, or something. Something like that.
So instead of this, I'm SUCH a bad person, What the heck Amanda?? I was a BAD girl. We even use those sort of phrases, right? Talking to ourselves like, I was a BAD girl. It's more of a conversation like, Oh, that was an interesting decision. Why did... I wonder why I did that. I wonder where that came from? I wonder why I felt I needed that comfort or, what sort of sweetness is missing in my life? Maybe I just need a hug. Maybe...
And it just opens up this whole conversation with ourselves of where those feelings might be coming from. What's missing in our lives that we would like, how we actually, what's the dialogue underneath all of that?
Slade:
Mmm.. that's an interesting question.
Yeah, because I'm aware of the fact that, like you say, when you're making those choices, there's a part of my brain that will observe me doing something that I really intellectually don't want to do, and I'm like, Oh, and you're just going to eat that anyway.
Amanda:
Yeah!
Slade:
And there really is a part of you that can observe you doing something in action, in the moment that you're like, that is not what we talked about doing.
What's going on when that happens?
Amanda:
Yeah! What is going on?
I mean, there's - it really depends on the individual and there's a lot of things going on but I want to touch on the... That intuitive eating can sound like a little out there, or a little airy fairy, but really what we're doing is getting in touch with our own body intuition and it's not like magically one day you're going to be all AHHHHH with your body, and it's just... It's a practice and it's a process, so what I do is teach that step by step process to get closer to that.
Now, there I have a... One of the modules in one of my courses is about the eight causes of cravings. So there's a lot of different things that could be happening, but one of them that I see a lot is like this: the comfort foods/wanting to return to childhood, this inner child sort of, the inner child wants attention. So it comes out in these kind of cravings of sweets or macaroni and cheese or these things that we had as children.
So I see, that's like just one that I see a lot, but what we say in our classes is, I build these frames as we're moving towards intuitive eating to help people operate. So rather than a specific dietary theory, we talk about bio-individuality and learning what works in their unique body.
But there are some universal truths about the human body, right?
We don't do well with processed food and high fructose corn syrup and sugar and alcohol and these things. And we do really well with lots of water and vegetables and sleep and movement and love in our lives. Like, we do, that's pretty universal.
There's all these other things in between that we can kind of play with. And some people are sensitive to dairy. Some people don't like to eat a lot of meat. Some people don't like greens and all these things. There's a lot to play with, but the frames that I set up are kind of thinking about things in maybe 90/10 or 80/20. Maybe 80% of the time you do what you told yourself you're going to do and whatever clean eating means to you. And then maybe 20% of the time you have the donut or you have the glass of wine or you have whatever it is.
Because that might be, you might be with your friends and that's going to be a nourishing experience for you.
Slade:
Oh, okay!
Amanda:
So if, you know what I mean? If the joy factor outweighs the guilt factor, it's kind of a GO every time. If that makes sense.
Slade:
Oh yeah! I like that approach. Because that's modification. It's like, when you injure yourself and you're rehabbing your hurt knee or whatever it is, one of the things I'm always afraid that I'm going to do is injure it worse by using it. And the thing that I've heard over and over again from people who do rehab, in a really physical context, is that it's always good to think of things in percentages, rather than on and off, or do it and don't do it.
So what you do in those situations is you do 20% of a squat instead of not doing one at all.
So it kind of speaks to me. Same kind of thing in yoga. Yoga's very permissive in modifying things to suit your body and your ability, so if you can't go that deep, you just go a little ways. And that sounds kind of similar.
Amanda:
Absolutely.
Slade:
I've already heard some things that you mention where I hear myself in there and I'm like, Huh, okay. I'm looking at the programs now going, Which one do I want to do?
So I know that everybody else is thinking the same thing.
Talk us through, Okay, let's say we're interested in working with you and you have these different kinds of programs. Is it like getting an intuitive reading at the start and then we pick one of the programs with your advice to go into? Walk us through it and talk about the different programs that you offer, because I'm curious about how this works from a client perspective.
Amanda:
Absolutely.
It is like that. It's best - I do free mini readings, 20 minute readings, in a mini-session form. So they can certainly schedule with me and we can go from there. I can give my recommendation on which program would work best for them. But I work with private clients, do the private coaching and mentorship programs one-to-one in either 90, 60 or 30 day options.
So those are some of my favorites because we know it's very personalized and we get a lot done in those times and really set habit change and set reframes that are really transformative for a lot of people. Really transform their energy.
So that's what I do on the private coaching side.
I also have, I do live group programs and those are fun because you kind of have a support group. Right now I have detox, a holistic detox going on, so mind, body, and spirit detox. That's currently running and that's a lot of fun.
So I'll have, basically what I do is I kind of read the energy in the collective and then feel into what would support everyone right now, and this was a good time for a detox.
And there's no other group programs upcoming right now, but who knows what I'll create and re-run in the future.
And then I have, of course you can always schedule a session with me. A full session. Which are 50 minute sessions and we get a lot done. Or I do like a written reading which I can do at a different investment level, a little more affordable for some people. I do a written reading.
So there's those.
And then I have digital self-led programs, I have three intro programs that I love because they're good way to get introduced to my work and they're all under $100. So I have all sorts of different investment levels but that's a good way to really get some foundational habits in.
There's Meal Prep Magic, which is all about demystifying meal prep and kind of a kitchen tool kit, if you will, for beginners.
So there's that one.
Then there's the Sugar Release experiment, which is really...
Slade:
Yes!
Amanda:
Yeaaaah.
Slade:
Tell us about the Sugar Release!
Amanda:
That's the big one. That's one of my most popular ones. And that's probably because I got myself heavily addicted to sugar during the recovery from that car accident I spoke about. I never had to deal with caffeine or alcohol. Those aren't my things. But sugar was like...!
So that's a 30-day program that is again, we're taking our focus away from what we "can't have" or what we're cutting out, to what we're replacing it with. What are we adding in that is going to nourish our bodies so much? Because your average run of the mill sugar craving comes from usually, if it's not emotional, it's coming from nutrient deficiency. So we're literally, just like in our cleanse, we're literally flooding the body with nutrients because we're kind of overfed and undernourished in our society, right? Lots of food but not a lot of actual vitamins and nutrients in it.
So when we flip that and really feed, just flood our body with nourishment and nutrients, vitamins, phytochemicals and everything. We become well nourished again and the things that were kind of, I call it the crowding out, it just kind of falls away. The sugar, and the things that, it's like a nice Jedi mind trick.
So that's 30 days that is really simple. It's not this, it's a really different approach and really simplistic approach in which we focus on adding in one thing. We're focusing on one thing that becomes habit every other day. So it's delivered in a video lesson, short, easy to work into your day between 5 and 10 minute video. Every other day so you have all of that day and the next day to focus on that one thing. That one simple thing. Either it's getting more water or getting one more serving of vegetables, or seeing how many hugs you can give that day.
One thing.
And you'll be surprised how big of an effect that has.
Because sugar is one of those things that I see, it's kind of an accepted addiction in our society and it's one of those things I see most often also in the light workers and the spirit-preneurs out there who, they use it as a quick way to ground. And there are so many better ways to ground.
Slade:
Interesting!
Amanda:
Yeah, so it's everywhere.
It's kind of, the sugar addiction is kind of pervasive, so that's a big one.
So Meal Prep Magic, Sugar Release experiment and then the Intro to Intuitive Eating experience, which is a 21-day course, self-led, set up in a similar fashion where it has workbooks and video lessons. And that's delivered right to their email.
Slade:
Okay that's cool! That's a lot of different options there. I'm sure everyone heard themselves in one of those things.
That was a really cool insight about the sugar addiction being related to grounding. Sugar is obviously probably would be mine. My mom is a baker and it's her creative expression, you know? It's what she makes. It's part of something that... We all need something that we make that other people can admire and enjoy and that's her thing!
She can make a dessert out of cobwebs and a pack of equal. And just some glitter.
So I always, always, always have access to desserts. Because she eats like a tiny spoonful of whatever it is and then it's like, Here's a whole pie you can have!
Like, I'm not going to eat a whole pie.
But I never thought about, because as you were talking, I was like, Well what's my big deal with that? Why do I consume as much sugar as I do? And that idea that it's grounding in some way struck me. That kind of makes sense to me because I've heard the theory before that weight in general is a kind of manifestation of an intent to ground, or that fats or different things like that that actually physically cause the body to grow in some way can be kind of manifestations of that.
Do you have any theories about those kinds of connections between spiritual issues manifesting in the body? Is that something that you are interested in or that you talk about?
Amanda:
Oh yeah! I mean, it's all connected and I've definitely seen what you're talking about where weight and sugar, things like that, fats, used to ground, using weight as protection, there's absolutely a physical manifestations like that. Absolutely.
The - Nope, I lost it.
Slade:
Oh that's okay!
I just thought of something I wanted to be sure and ask you about when you were talking about the programs. You have something for free when people sign up for your mailing list, and it's a Top Swaps list.
Tell me about that, because I'm curious to what's on that.
Amanda:
The Top Swaps is just a fun one for beginners if things we think of as staples or normal in our fridge, in our kitchen, that we can easily switch to, just upgrade to something that's more nourishing for us. So like you can easily switch Gatorade to coconut water, or white or wheat bread to a sprouted grain bread. Or just very simple things that aren't too much more expensive, don't taste too different, they're just easy swaps to make to sort of upgrade your health.
Slade:
Do you have a swap for potato chips?
Amanda:
Haha.. potato chips. I think there's one on there.
Slade:
Okay.
Amanda:
There are a lot of brands out there, like Late July, that are better than just your average run of the mill potato chip, kind of these organic, whole grain, chips, or sweet potato chips. And then even that can be like a step down and then even nuts, seeds, things like that. Because sometimes it's just about the crunch and that, sometimes it's just about the crunch, the chewing, the little bit of salt.
Slade:
Absolutely.
From 7pm 'til midnight for me. I just want to crunch things. Yeah, I do.
Amanda:
Yeah!
Slade:
Well I'll definitely send a link for everyone to go and check that out and get that.
I'm interested - one of the things I really love to ask everyone that comes on the show is, is there anything that you hear people saying about nutrition that kind of drives you nuts, or makes you want to scream at the TV?
Amanda:
Haha... Only all the time!
Slade:
What are some of the things that you - What do you most hope to contribute to the conversation about spirituality and nutrition and personal development What do you, if you could get some messages out there, what would they be?
Amanda:
Ohmygoodness. I think I've said quite a bit of them already, but the reason I created this whole cleanse that I'm running right now is because of how many ill-conceived cleanses I thought, maybe well-intentioned, but ill-conceived cleanses I thought I saw out there, and so just this idea of, like stepping away from the restrictive, the struggle, the adversarial relationship, really turning our gaze towards an idea that maybe, even if we're not open to it yet, but maybe just the possibility that eating could be divine. That eating could be joyful. It could be...
Nourishment can happen with ease. It can be a sacred experience.
I think we're really serious all the time. Sometimes both about eating and our diets and things like that and about spirit, I see this in spiritual work and doing inner work and digging into our painful past and things like that. It doesn't have to be so serious all the time.
We're meant to have fun. We're here to have fun. Joy is our natural state.
We're these light beings on a grand adventure and we happen to be in these physical bodies, so let's have fun, let's do things that bring us pleasure. I don't want to divorce from my physical body. I know I'm an all-expansive being, but I'm here on this earth at this time for a reason and I'm going to live in my physical body. I'm going to ground in to it. That means I'm exploring all sides of myself but like I said, it's my chosen vehicle to house my soul at this time.
It's what's on the journey. Let's be in it. Let's honour it.
I would say, just the movement towards getting back in touch with our inner child, having more fun, joy is our natural state. I don't think that's - Because one of my other pet peeves is the spiritual bypassing too. And so I don't say that to make light of anything or any trauma or anything that anyone is dealing with. But I just think it doesn't have to be so serious all the time.
Spiritual bypassing is just basically using spiritual, a term popularized, I don't know if you've heard of her but, it's a term popularized by Robert Augustus Masters and Lissa Rankin, whom I both respect. It's kind of like avoidance in holy drag. It's this, the drug is draped in spiritual terms, so rather than the sugar being the addiction or the alcohol being the addiction, it's this avoidance of the feelings.
So I'm not talking about that. I'm not talking about pushing feelings down. I'm talking about feeling the feelings. Being in the body. Feeling everything that we're here to feel, you know? Whatever we think. I don't think that anger, sadness is wrong. It's just part of the fullness of our experience, so we're going to have those, but we're also going to have joy, we're going to have love.
We're going to have all of these things in our lives and I just, I would love to see it more incorporated in personal development, in spiritual mentoring, in things that happen in nutrition, in things that happen on a daily basis in our lives. like these things, our lives are made up of these moments.
The little things really are the big things. So let's have fun.
Slade:
I love that. It sounds like you've done a lot of work to put a lot of content together. There's a lot that you offer, Amanda. It's really awesome to hear your expertise in this subject matter.
So tell everyone where they can go to find you online.
Amanda:
Yeah! I'm very active on Facebook. Heisman Health is my business name. So facebook.com/HeismanHealth. And I run a free support group called Intuitive Eating for Energy and you can find me in there. We do a lot of great, just communing in that group. And of course, my website is HeismanHealth.com That's where you can sign up for free mini readings. 20-minute mini readings or the Top Swaps sheet we talked about!
Slade:
Awesome.
That was great, Amanda. Thank you for coming on the show!
Amanda:
You're so welcome. Thanks for having me, Slade. I really appreciate you.
Are you a Lantern Bearer? Are you one of those people even strangers seem to want to tell their problems to? Does it seem like you have a sign above your head, some signal broadcasting out into the world?
You’ve heard the term lightworker, but this archetype is something much more specific...
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TRANSCRIPT Are you a Lantern Bearer?
Are you one of those people total strangers seem to want to tell their problems to?
Does it seem like you have a sign above your head? Some signal broadcasting out into the world?
You’ve heard the term light worker, but there is a specific archetype and terminology I've observed in the Automatic Intuition community.
There’s an archetype that shows up a lot in guided meditations with emerging intuitives, psychics and healers — they call him by different names, but the description is very consistent — what most Tarot decks call The Hermit.
Sometimes people say he's Gandalf-like or they directly identify him as Merlin. Or they just describe someone who is clearly that entity.
In Tarot the spiritual journey of a lifetime is the archetypal progress of acquiring wisdom.
It begins with the Fool > evolves to the Magician > and matures in the Hermit.
This culmination of a spiritual life path of magic is the life of Merlin.
The Hermit, as a word, as a term, conjures a lot of negatives in our modern mindset. We also tend to disconnect from it. It’s not an easy thing for contemporary light workers to identify with this word, this image, The Hermit.
We disparage ourselves with it, use it to describe an impulse to withdraw from the world, to cocoon ourselves in our safe space and not engage. I can’t tell you how many people have used the term this week in describing their winter hibernation practices. “I’ve been such a hermit lately. I just want to stay home with the pets and watch Netflix.”
That sounds like the greatest peace in the world to me, an ideal scenario, and yet when we say this to each other, it’s always with a note of apology, isn’t it?
There is an alternate term for the Hermit archetype (and for the term light worker) that I find so much more appealing.
The Lantern Bearer.
Years ago I ran across a Tarot deck somewhere or a book on the work of Dr. Carl Jung where the term Lantern Bearer was used in place of the Hermit.
The Hermit just makes us think of someone alone, an introvert, an older person no longer connected to society, living as an outcast, either by choice or circumstance.
The Lantern Bearer better describes what it is this person, this archetype, is doing.
I often tell the people I mentor who want to develop their intuition and to use it in service to others… Be prepared to be in the trenches. The people who come to you for readings for assistance or advice (as it often manifests in normal everyday Muggle life) come with darkness.
They’re bringing anxiety, fear, pain, uncertainty, worry.
By the time they’re speaking to you about their worries, decisions, issues — they’ve spent hundreds — maybe thousands — of hours overthinking it. They’ve turned themselves around until they are dizzy. They’re stumbling around in the darkness looking for a light to lead them back.
The light doesn’t need your light. Those who are truly in the light are all together in a big bright super nova humming together in harmony.
The darkness is where your light is needed.
The Hermit — the Lantern Bearer — lives at the edge of civilization not only because he is some outcast, he is there to do his work. To carry his lantern into the night so that those lost in the dark woods can find their way back.
If you are a Lantern Bearer, you’re a human lighthouse. And you’re likely placed a bit away from the center of culture and society. You’re on the edge because that is where you are needed. You are isolated because we have been dispersed throughout the population so that we may serve and reach more people.
Sure, it would be great if you could gather up all the like-minded spiritual souls and put them in one place. That would be an amazing place to live. But the rest of the world would go to hell and a lot of souls would remain lost there.
If you are a Lantern Bearer, you already know it.
It’s like you have a neon sigh floating over your head — a light — that invites people to ask you for help. To tell you their problems. To seek your perspective.
People at work bring you their problems. Your family members call you. Total strangers confide surprising amounts of personal information. You’re everybody’s untrained psychotherapist and counselor, even when your actual job has nothing to do with it. You will always be found inhabiting that role.
This is what we talk about when we say a life purpose is not necessarily a job. It could be in alignment with your job, but it is the thing you will end up doing no matter where we put you.
I remember about 18 years ago, still a good five or six years before I would create a career that more closely embodied my purpose — this thing for which you know me. I was in a convenience store with a friend of mine, Seth. (Seth listens to the show, so Hey Seth! I don’t know if you remember this incident the way I do. I think it was at the BP on Dayton Boulevard.)
Anyway. We were waiting in a long line. The cashier was one of those bitter creatures who can ring you up without ever once acknowledging your existence. Something I despised when I was in a supervisory position over cashiers, by the way. I would eat you alive for doing this when I Manage on Duty. I did my part to ensure there is at least a small population of cashiers trained and released on the public who make eye contact and speak to the customers they interact with.
So. We watched this woman ring up person after person, without so much as a hello or thank you, and when we got to the counter, in the course of ringing up a couple of drinks — we’re talking seconds, here — she managed to tell me all about the divorce she was currently going through. And in that moment, of course I tried to think of something quick and brief but hopefully helpful to say. To leave her with some fortune cookie wisdom that might make a positive impact.
Walking out to Seth’s truck, I remember he was sort of smiling and shaking his head at me. And I asked him, pointblank “What? Does that not happen to everyone?”
I will never forget, he said “It happens to you.”
Well, it happens to a lot of us. Because it’s about who we are. And when we know it, we can use it with intention.
If you are a Lantern Bearer, you have the ability to change lives. Maybe to save a life. With as little as a smile or a nod. To let someone know that in your light, they are seen. They are visible. They matter. They count.
Everybody you pity, everyone you love, those with whom you empathize or despise… They all need to be acknowledged. Noticed. Heard.
We all need a witness.
To recognize the spark in the eyes of another is our most eminently worthy gesture of humanity. To withhold such a small instance of focus from any living person seems lazy, at best; at worst, it’s cruel.
We focus so much on gaining acknowledgement for ourselves, we miss the easiest act of grace and power — to look into the eyes of another and simply allow ourselves to see a flash of mirrors there.
Susan Hyatt is a master certified life coach, weight loss expert, and the author of BARE. She’s the creator of the trademarked BARE Process, the BARE Deck, a podcast called BARE, and an online community called BARE DAILY.
We talk about:
- Helping women stop dieting
- How you know the inner voices are not your higher self
- How to silence the voice of the Inner Mean Girl
- Flipping the dialogue away from self-violent thoughts
"There's no upside to violent self-thoughts. They don't help in any way," Susan says. "The more you allow yourself to be seen and take up space, the more you can conquer those voices that say you shouldn't."
MENTIONED ON THE SHOW If I'm So Smart, Why Can't I Lose Weight? by Brooke Castillo
GUEST LINKS - SUSAN HYATT shyatt.com
BARE daily
BARE Podcast
BARE by Susan Hyatt (the book)
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TRANSCRIPT Susan:
I help people get what they want.
Slade:
What does that mean?
Susan:
That means, so when you say to people, I'm a life coach, still most of the population has no idea what that means. Theres an elderly woman on a plane that thought that meant I was a hospice worker.
And so I look at it more as a conversation starter. So I'm not, if I just say, I'm a life coach, people's eyes kind of glaze over and then they are like, Oh, okay.
If I say, I help opoeple get what they want, then they're like, WHAAAT? Say more!
And then it's a conversation I'm having about, I'm a life coach and an author and I specialize in helping women stop dieting. Sometimes I just say, I help women stop dieting and you can see, I've written a couple funny stories because especially women are like, What?? You help them stop?? What would you do that? Because we're so immersed in diet culture. People think that dieting is being healthy and it's actually the opposite of that.
Slade:
Hnm.. How did that land in your lap, by the way? How did that become your thing?
Susan:
Well, it became my thing because I was 35 - 40 pounds over my natural weight when my first year as a life coach. And I knew that there were underlying issues about that. And I felt like, Hahaha it was my final frontier to conquer.
It wasn't, but it certainly was one issue that I needed to deal with.
And I hired a weight loss coach named Brook Castillo who's amazing, and she has this great book, If I'm So Smart, Why Can't I Lose Weight? And what we really did was dive in to the emotional side of eating, which really rocked my world. And I lost that weight within about six months.
And I was somebody who I joke, that I was, I really had a PhD in being a couch potato. I mean, I refused to exercise, I didn't want anyone telling me what I could or couldn't eat, and it really rocked my world.
And I thought, If I can lose this extra weight, then I want to help other women do it. And so I became, I added weight loss coaching to my repertoire.
And what I started to notice after coaching hundreds of women was, I was really spending the bulk of my time, because I could help anybody lose weight. It's really the inner deep work that makes weight loss sustainable, and it has nothing, I promise, to do with calories in, calories out, no pain no gain, all that stuff we're taught.
It's really about, Is this woman cherishing herself, loving herself, giving herself enough daily pleasure so that she's not getting her entertainment from food, so that she's not getting her comfort from food, so that she's not numbing out.
And I really started to notice that my clients, I could help them lose 50, 100 pounds, and then they would start complaining about other parts of their bodies. So yes, they had lost the weight, but now they were fixated on stretch marks, or, I still have a muffin top, or, Maybe I should get cosmetic surgery.
And I started focusing on learning how to love your body as it is, right now. And THEN we'll do this other stuff.
And BINGO! Everything changed.
And so I developed this process called BARE, and it's really a process of bringing a woman back to herself. And figuring out that diet just keeps you on this deprivation cycle that you can't win. And the diet industry's actually counting on that. It's like, I think the latest statistic, it's a over 100 billion dollar industry and it's designed to keep you dissatisfied with how you look so that you keep spending money trying to become something else .
Slade:
Wow.
Do you remember what the breaking point was for you? The shift that happened in your own mindset. I mean, now, working with the other clients, you were able to see it from outside and observe it in controlled environment.
But when that happened to you, can you go back and remember what that mindset shift was?
Susan:
Yeah, I can remember.
There was this moment, it was, I think maybe I had lost about 16 pounds of the 35 to 40, and we were going on spring break vacation and my daughter at the time was maybe 7. And I bought a new bikini and I was so excited in the store about having this bathing suit.
And I remember my coach wanted me, she made a joke about a client of hers that she had asked to take a picture of herself in a swimsuit and send it to her. And when the photo arrived, it was a photo of her client flipping her off. And I started laughing and I said, "Don't ever assign that to me."
And she was like, "Oh, really?? That's your homework then!"
And so I have my daughter, I put my swimsuit on, I was actually feeling great. My little 8-year old Emily takes a photo of me and I felt fine the entire process.
Until I looked at the photo on my big desktop screen.
And all of a sudden, all of these really negative thoughts started flooding in. That were still there about, Oh, you don't look as good as you thought, and just really self-violent thoughts that almost all women have about their bodies.
And I thought, You've got some real work to do. And I often think about, I was doing a webinar yesterday and I was talking about this. When you look at little kids. Say a film crew shows up at an elementary school, little kids are fighting, shoving each other out of the way to be seen on camera. This is an exciting thing, like, Look at me, I'm on TV!
And at some point, we receive messages from either family of origin or culture at large that the way that you look is not acceptable. And by the time we reach our age, we're so full of these messages that we should look a certain way and we're not good enough.
And in that moment when I looked at myself on screen, I was like, You have got to figure out how to be like that again.
Be like, There I am! Look at me! And show up. And stop this hiding because you have some cellulite or whatever it might be.
And that was really a moment, an AHA moment, a breaking point moment, a moment where I shifted and decided to devote myself to figuring that out.
And I did!
And I can tell you that people are always asking me, I don't understand how you get all that stuff done. And I can tell you, the reason I get so much stuff done, is because I'm no longer obsessing about food and body and how I look.
Slade:
Mmm...
Tell me about, well, first I have to tell you. You probably know this about me but I like to personify the archetypes, I like to communicate with voices, a lot of the work I do with people is around policing the negative self talk. You know, it's really about learning how to, not only identify that, but one of the things that you pointed out was, these voices come from your family and society. They don't come from your higher self. They don't come from little kid you. You've got them from somewhere. You took them on, you download them, and you call them your own thoughts and they're really not.
I noticed when I was looking at your website, before the interview, that you have an archetype called the Inner Mean Girl. Tell me about her. Is that who it is that's saying all these mean things?
Susan:
Yes! And you're absolutely right. These thoughts that we absorb and take on as our own, we were not born into this world with those kind of beliefs. We picked them up along the way and yeah, your inner mean girl is the one saying really horrible things to you about yourself that are untrue and the way that you know they're not true is because they make you feel horrible.
And I think most women think that that is because they talk with their girlfriends, they talk with their mom, they talk with other people and everybody goes, "Oh yeah! Me too!"
And so they think, Well that's normal and that's just the way it is.
But it is prevalent in our culture but it's not what we were meant to experience, and so we have to clap back at that and tell the mean girl to have a seat and educate her on how you want to be treated. And you can flip the dialogue on that and practice talking back to her and saying kind things, because, listen, even if you want to argue with me and say, No, but she's right. I DO need to lose weight. I don't exercise. I am lazy.
You've to to ask yourself different questions and tell yourself different things so that you change your behaviour, but there's no upside to self-violent thoughts, if you haven't noticed. There's no upside to it.
Slade:
Right.
Susan:
It doesn't help in any way.
Slade:
So you recently landed a big book deal. And I know this because we're friends on Facebook and you've been talking about the process and everything. Is this book deal, The BARE Message, is that what this is about?
Tell me about the book.
Susan:
The book is called BARE, and we're still working on the subtitle. But thank you very much. Yes, I'm so excited to have a book deal for it. It's basically -
Slade:
Yay! Congrats!
Susan:
Thank you!!! I'm so stoked!
Actually, just had a meeting with my publishing team yesterday, and they are on it. It's gonna be fire. I cannot wait for it to hit. Actually, pre-sale, the book is not going to be out until January of 2019, so there's a big process to getting these books out into the world, and I'm slightly impatient...
Slade:
Yeah...
Susan:
I would like it to be in your hands tomorrow, but pre-orders, actually, will start fairly soon, but the books will not ship until January.
And yes, it's a book full of personal stories and client stories and it walks you through the BARE process. And the thing that I like about the BARE process is - so when you get the book, it's a story, and then there's a challenge.
So it gets you taking action immediately.
Side note, I have a podcast, the BARE podcast, which is going to drop on iTunes maybe by next week, so people, while they're waliting on the book, can check out the podcast. I'm dropping an entire season at once, so it can walk people through... there's 8 episodes in season 1. It walks people through the BARE process. You can do it on your own or you can decide to hire a coach to help you.
Slade:
Oh! Okay.
You also have, for people who don't want to wait, who want to dive in and work with it, this platform, this work, this material exists in various forms. You have a community, an online community around it already, right?
Susan:
Yeah, yeah!
It's called BARE Daily. The way that it's set up is, if someone joins the community, they get access, a username and password to an online classroom that has the BARE process in videos, so you can watch a video, there's homework assignments, there's tons of stuff in there.
And then, in the private forum, I'm in there every day and so are my BARE coaches. So let's say you sign up and you start doing the BARE process, and you hit a wall or you have an issue, which you will. Coaches are there 24/7 to coach you through what's happening in the forum.
So it's really a sweet set up.
Slade:
I have to ask you this question. I love to ask everyone this, and I'm trying to learn to ask it in a more postitive way, but, as someone who's spent some time now in the personal development world, what do you most hope to change about the conversation?
Susan:
So many things, Slade. So many things.
Primarily, I want to disrupt diet culture. So the segment of the self-help industry that focuses on food, body and weight, I want to change the conversation from fear and deprivation to pleasure, love, positivity. So that's number one.
People who are promoting unhealthy, unsustainable lifestyle changes, things that you wrap your body in, or starve yourself. All these kinds of things. I definitely want to, not flip the switch, flip the table on those folks.
And then, also, the part of the self-help industry that is selling a bill of goods around, how do I say this? So I'm a big believer in spiritual grease plus elbow grease. Meaning, Yes, the Universe has your back. Yes, the Universe is conspiring in your favour. And whatever higher power you believe in, yes, your higher power, your higher self wants you to have everything that you crave. But you have to couple that faith in belief with action.
And so, I get pretty worn out with people who are selling the idea that if you just believe it hard enough, it will happen.
Slade:
Mmm... yeah. Like the law of attraction method, I mean, not like specifically, but some of that stuff. Like thinking it will be true, feel your way into the reality, that kind of stuff?
Susan:
Yeah, because it's only part of the story.
I have dear friends who are big law of attraction teachers, and I think people misunderstand it and they think, Well if I pay this money and I make a vision board, and I just believe that I'm going to own a Mercedes, and it's going to appear in my driveway... And tomorrow, I'm going to be dancing with Cardi B and Bruno Mars. It's gonna happen.
Yes, if you do some things to put yourself in the path of Cardi B, if you do some work and go to the Mercedes dealership, you know?
Slade:
Right.
Susan:
It's just, I believe in magic, I believe in miracles, but I grew up Catholic. I'm a recovered Catholic. But my mother used to always say, God helps those who help themselves!
And I guess that's really stuck with me, because I believe that to be true that, yes these miraculous things can happen, but you have to get out of your own way and do some work.
Slade:
I actually believe that too and I wasn't even indoctrinated to believe it. But that line, you know, God helps those who help themselves, really does work for me.
You know, if somebody says it to me and I'm like, Amen! You know what I mean?
Susan:
Hallelujah!
Slade:
And I do write and teach law of attraction stuff in hopefully my corrected methods but, one of the things I like to introduce into the conversation is that, what you describe that the vision board thing is like working with one element as opposed to all the sacred elements. It's like legs on a stool kind of thing.
You've got some other legs you've got to attach to this thing before it'll stand up.
Susan:
Yeah! And I totally, I mean I do vision board workshops online. It's not... I love all those things. They just have to be combined, like you said, with other practices.
Slade:
Well that's one of the reasons I wanted you to be on here. Because this is fewer hearts and flowers, we still love all the spiritual stuff, right? And the thing I love about you is you embody that very down to earth use of these things as tools.
It's not an airy fairy thing for you. You love to show yourself doing it. You're on camera a lot. People can Facebook live right into your office on a daily basis.
Susan:
Yeah, it's true.
Slade:
And I love that about you too because you're never full hair and make up and wearing a glitter gown, except in a photo shoot, which you do. You get that out of your system.
Susan:
You gotta bring the big guns in sometimes, but yeah, on a daily basis I'm typically in my work out clothes with no make up.
Slade:
Well, you know what? That was very inspiring to me as I was developing this podcast and putting it out, because one of the pieces of advice that I got was, just don't worry about the intro music and the this and the that at the other thing. It's about you speaking, it's about the content, and it's about letting people hear you and the guests that you connect with. Just think of it as a big voice mail. Just take it down a notch.
And that was very freeing for me.
And you and I had a little interaction on Facebook probably about a year ago about that whole thing and you encouraged me. You were like, Yeah, people need to see you.
Susan:
Hmm?
Slade:
That probably will be my next step. Is to get to let my face be out there more. But that's one of those things...
Susan:
Dude! Why would you not let your face be seen??? You're a hottie!
Slade:
Because!
Susan:
McHotterson! You are depriving your audience of... You will be blessing the interwebs with your face.
Slade:
Alright.
Susan:
I need to come over there and smack you around.
Slade:
Well you'll be proud to know that I'm going to do my first Facebook live next week. For my -
Susan:
Next week?! How about this afternoon??
Slade: Well because it's a training for my Automatic Intuition peeps, so they get to be exposed to me first.
But I was thinking about it and I was like, Yeah, you know what? I'm just going to sit on camera and... And I totally thought I 'm going to do this Susan Hyatt style. That you were my inspiration for that.
Susan:
That's awesome.
And I have to say, that's part of the BARE process. Is to make you seen and be seen. So you have to, the more you allow yourself to be seen and take up space, the more you can conquer those voices that say that you shouldn't, that you don't look alright, like, whatever.
Put yourselves out there, people.
Slade:
Well that was kind of my last big question for you, was about the whole make a scene concept.
We're all rooting for you, living through you vicariously, as you're making your scenes and posting about that. And people just have to follow you online to get the full experience of what I'm talking about, because it unfolds, as you encounter things in your daily life and you share it.
So, I used to, my friends in college actually used to call me Julie Sugarbaker, and I was notorious for telling some people off. You know what I mean? And I was really good at it.
But I reached a point where I kind of had to dial back a lot of my anger. I had to go all the way back, strip back down and work my way back up again, and as we all know, this last year or so has been very trying when it comes to posting things online about your, the things that you're pissed about.
I always look at you and I'm like, How is she coming out smelling like a rose every time? Because you are so good at doing something. Like, if I do what you do, I end up in a flame war. I mean...
Susan:
Oh! You mean with your following. People get mad.
Slade:
Yes! Like, you are so good at treading the line on making the scene and sharing the fact that you're pissed and putting it out there and calling stuff out without, somehow, ending up in tears at the end of the day and you wasted your whole day arguing with people online.
So I'm wondering, What am I missing? Where do we draw the line there? How do you police that energy?
Susan:
So I have an unfair advantage, and my unfair advantage is that I have, for 19 years, parented a man named Ryan Hyatt. And Ryan Hyatt is some of the biggest most challenging energy that you could encounter. So I feel like I have been in boot camp with how to have boundaries, express feelings, call it like it is, in a way that doesn't set fire to everything.
Sometimes I do want to set fire to everything, so there's number one. So sorry Slade, I'm going to have to ship Ryan off to you so that you can get some practice with that before, but...
Secondly, I think I'm always, one of the things that I teach in writing, or when I'm training coaches on how to come up with content, how to come up with content for Facebook, how to come up with content for your blog, for your podcast, for whatever reason, a fellow Sugarbaker over here, I have always been able to come up with topics more readily, more easily, if I think about what has irritated me or pissed me off lately.
And then what I do is say, Okay, I'm really irritated about whatever, these people who are selling diets. Then I try to come up, before I open my mouth, I try to come up with the life coachy solution to it, so that it's not just a rant. That I'm offering my displeasure, and I'm all, Let me tell you something, but I couch it in, Well here's what you could do for yourself if you're experiencing this too.
And so I think that's what keeps it from just being something that would ruin someone's day. My day, your day, whatever.
Slade:
I like it.
Susan:
Yeah. So there's a little bit... Then also, you know it, I do get hate mail, I do get people who disagree and who will post things, but I shut it down pretty quickly. I don't let them have a platform on my platform.
I'm open minded, so if they're talking about something respectfully and they just disagree, that's fine. But if they're trying to set fire to my Facebook thread, then they're immediately blocked. That's it.
You don't get to come over on my page and do that. Sorry.
Slade:
You know what? I actually realized as you were saying this that, I teach this in terms of, journalling. I used to keep diaries a lot and that's a big tool for me and at some point I realized, it was nothing but whining. And when I did Morning Pages for the first time, the Julia Cameron style, I remember being like, You know what? I'm not just going to bitch every morning for 15 minutes. How's that a way to start the day? So I made a rule with myself that the only way that I can mention something that was wrong in my diary is if I put a potential solution there.
Or, I am broke, here's what I'm going to do about it, kind of thing.
And I teach that to people a lot. You can't, it's one thing to, like you said, it's one thing to rant, and it's one thing to vent, but I think even venting in your private space, without having constructive context, is damaging. You're just letting the inner mean girl have a dance party in your head.
Susan:
Right.
Slade:
So, what's next for you? You've got this big book coming out but it's going to take awhile. So what are you going to do in the meantime?
Susan:
So what I'm doing in the meantime is, I'm trying to build my BARE membership community up and I am spending a lot of time inside there. We have cooking classes and exercise classes... Just all kinds of great content that happens privately in there. I'll be spending most of my time in there.
I'm also doing some international retreats this year. One to Italy that's already sold out and one to England and maybe one to Paris. That's one of my favorite cities.
And then I'm training a bunch of BARE coaches, so coaches in the BARE methodology, so that they can spread this far and wide, and just on my regular!
Slade:
It must be fun to be you.
Susan:
It IS fun to be me!
And I tell you, I remind myself of that every morning when my inner mean girl wants to whine about how much she has to do. I slap her around and tell her she is so lucky, that she's to stay in the miracle and be grateful for this practice and this business and this life.
Slade:
Mmm... Susan, I truly do love your energy. I could talk to you all day long, and one of the reasons why I had to get you on my show is because you'll probably be too famous next year to be on my show.
Susan:
Stop it! Never too famous for you.
Slade:
Anyway, it was fantastic to get to capture a chat with you and introduce you to some of my peeps who may not have heard of you before. So tell everyone where where they can go to find you online.
Susan:
Thank you so much, by the way. This was a delight. My website URL, is SHyatt.com. And then you can follow me on Instragram @SusanHyatt, or on also Facebook, same handle.
Thank you for coming on the show Susan.
Susan:
Thank you!
Thanks again for listening to the Shift Your Spirits podcast.
For show notes, links, and all the past episodes please visit
www.shiftyourspirits.com
You can subscribe in iTunes or Stitcher or whatever app you use to access podcasts.
If you’d like to get an intuitive reading with me or download a free ebook and meditation to help you connect with your guides please go to
https://sladeroberson.com/
and if you’re interested in my professional intuitive training program, you can start the course for free by downloading the Attunement at
https://automaticintuition.com/
I receive a lot of emails and requests for readings from people who feel blocked from hearing their guides.
The greatest hindrance to hearing the voices of Spirit is listening for what you think you're SUPPOSED to hear.
On this episode, I talk about: receiving psychic information through the different clairs; developing claircognizance in particular; the different "lanes" of consciousness; reframing expectations to bust through the blocks; and whether guides are external or within us.
I'm also sharing real examples, conversation, and correspondence with mentoring students from Automatic Intuition.
MENTIONED ON THE SHOW: About Channeling with Frank Butterfield
Black Irish Books & Steven Pressfield
HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses
Get an intuitive reading with Slade
Automatic Intuition
BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits Edit your pledge on Patreon
This week, I'm talking about getting rid of goals and replacing them with systems. It’s a mindset shift.
What’s the difference between Systems and Goals?
And how might getting rid of the whole concept of goals actually help you become the person you want to be?
MENTIONED ON THE SHOW: Tim Grahl
HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses
Get an intuitive reading with Slade
Automatic Intuition
BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits Edit your pledge on Patreon
How do you tell the difference between your higher self and your ego, especially as it relates to daily decision making?
Heather Alice Shea is an Intuitive Empath and Empowerment Coach who helps spiritual seekers and healers ditch their demons and take their power back through cultivating strong intuitive skills and a connection to their personal truth.
You may want to have a pen handy for this—Heather shares 8 ways to identify, at any given moment, whether or not you're listening to your higher self.
MENTIONED ON THE SHOW The Upanishads Edgar Cayce's A.R.E.
Tim Grahl (Systems vs. Goals)
"You can fail at what you don't want, so you might as well take a chance on doing what you love." - Jim Carrey
GUEST LINKS - Heather Alice Shea heatheraliceshea.com
Intuitive, Inspired, Authentic You! by Heather Alice Shae
HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses
Get an intuitive reading with Slade
Automatic Intuition
BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits Edit your pledge on Patreon
Morgana Rae is the international #1 best selling author of Financial Alchemy: 12 Months of Magic & Manifestation, winner of WE Magazine's "Top Women In Ecommerce” Award, and widely regarded to be the world’s leading Relationship with Money coach.
"The Universe doesn't require perfection." - Morgana Rae
One of my favorite quotes in this interview is:
"To my Law of Attraction friends, don't cheat yourself out of the depths of your despair. It's very, very useful; because it gives you something to push off of. Let yourself sink to the bottom of the pool."
Morgana says if you've been feeling like a loser because you're doing everything "right" and you're still getting crappy results, you're either protecting yourself or birthing something new.
If you're protecting yourself, you need to identify the monster you're protecting yourself from and get rid of it.
"If your Money was a person, who would Money be?"
GUEST LINKS - Morgana Rae MorganaRae.com
Free 4-Part Video Series
Financial Alchemy: Twelve Months of Magic & Manifestation by Morgana Rae
Abundance & Prosperity Blog
HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses
Get an intuitive reading with Slade
Automatic Intuition
BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits Edit your pledge on Patreon
TRANSCRIPT Morgana:
Hi! My name is Morgana Rae. I have been a life and business success coach since 1996. I started out working with people in Hollywood and movie stars and producers and directors.
And then, something took a turn.
Around 2003, when I became really well known for my unique and weird approach to coaching relationship with money, and I gotta say, your wealth is in your weirdness. Because the way I approach relationship with money, there is nothing else like that out there. And there was so much desire for what I was saying that I kind of pivoted and made that what I call my pain door. Like the entry way for transformation.
So I'm sure I'll be talking about how I approach transforming your relationship with money from this monster of scarcity into this honey of love and abundance, and, FYI, when I talk about relationship with money, and believe me, oh my god, my clients have made so many millions of dollars over the years and tens of millions of dollars and it's really interesting watching the arc of my career and how the numbers have been getting progressively bigger and bigger over the years.
So yeah, my stuff is really good. For cash and, full disclosure, my work actually has nothing to do with money. When I'm teaching and talking about relationship with money, I'm really talking about your relationship with life.
I've just found that money and our money pains and our money issues are a really useful metaphor for the deepest, darkest, most tender vulnerabilities in our relationship with life. Namely our relationship with money is a reflection of our own feelings about our own lovability, our own worth and our safety in the world.
So that's what I do.
Slade:
Oh, wonderful.
The people who have been following me for the last 12 years have heard me speak about you many times, I'm sure.
Listen I have to tell you how I discovered you. I heard you on a radio show with Dr. Meg Blackburn-Losey back in 2006. Do you remember her?
Morgana:
Yes! My god, that was so long ago!
Slade:
I know!
So I had just launched Shift Your Spirits as a blog, and I was pretty broke at the time. And I was re-inventing my entire life. I didn't even know how much I can look back at 2006 and see it as this major milestone, just fork in the road. And of course I am no stranger to communicating with spirit entities. But what a lot of people don't even realize about that is, for me, communicating with the Archetypes in particular is something that I’ve done almost my entire life, I mean, I'm one of those people who, I personify everything - my cars have names, my computers have names.
Morgana:
I get it.
Slade:
Yeah!
So when I heard you ask that question If Money Were a Person, Who Would Money Be… That, I was like, I know exactly what she's doing. And I just immediately went into that sort of automatic writing practice that I had, and my sort of spiritual dialoging, and I went there. I mean I got it almost 100% and I can honestly tell you that I can trace a lot of the success of this brand and platform that I've created to that part of the process.
I mean, you were definitely an impact, and I know that you've told the story a lot of times about how that kind of, I call something like that a Shining Sentence. Like, one of those things that just lands in your lap. It's a divinely communicated concept or name or title and I was wondering if you would speak a little about when that first appeared to you. That concept.
How did that come about?
Morgana:
Okay. Well first of all, it was not elegant. And I was not wearing white robes and meditating and feeling peaceful.
It's more a great cosmic joke, and, by the way, to anybody listening, who has been struggling and feeling like a failure or a loser or hopeless, congratulations. Especially if you're somebody who's been doing everybody's programs and doing what you're told you're supposed to do, like going to school, getting good grades, hiring a coach, doing what you're told, and you're still getting crap results, I am a member of that club.
And I have come to a couple of conclusions, being on this planet for awhile.
If you are doing everything you're supposed to be doing, you know, and you're putting in your best effort, and by the way, the Universe does not require perfection. It does not require perfection. Let's say you're just giving it your best effort and it just doesn't make sense why you're still not seeing results, whether it's money, or career, or love, or health. And you're feeling hated and discouraged and all that kind of stuff.
I believe, from my experience of coaching many, many, many thousands of people over the last couple of decades, that when that's going on, you are protecting yourself from this result. You are unconsciously protecting yourself from what you are consciously pursing, and by the way, there are always really, really good reasons. You are not a loser. You're actually quite successful at protecting yourself from a perceived threat. And we need to uncover that so we can do something about it.
And then there's also the possibility that you are birthing something new.
So that was what was going on with me. I had my vision board, and I had my affirmations and I am a good student. You know, National merit scholar, honors in college and you know, taking that good girl student to getting all these certification in coaching and also being really, really good at marketing. And still managing, despite every possible advantage, to make only $100 a month living in Los Angeles, one of the most expensive cities in the world.
And this is even after helping new actors and new writers and new directors become celebrities.
So I had a reputation People wanted to hire me. And it was like I had superhuman powers to, like a martial artist, to evade getting paid. Really, really impressive and devastating. To the point that, I just kept taking more classes, thinking that, Oh, the next class! And then I'll be able to get paid. Because also I've got this big integrity thing. So I don't want to charge unless I know I can deliver.
So I kept getting more coaching certifications and better and better results for clients. And then I would take marketing classes and I remember back in probably 2002, taking a class in Overcoming Sales Objections. And for those who don't know what that is, there are classes that will teach you what to say when somebody says, I can't afford it, or I don't have time, or I have to think about it. There are scripts for that!
And being a really good student, I would parry these concerns that clients had, and they would say yes they would hire me.
And here's the rub. 7 times in a row. Really think about that. 7. 7 times in a row people said they would hire me and then they didn't show up and they hadn't paid.
And after the 7th time, I just ran out of hope. That, it was like the rug of my psychological wellbeing was just ripped out from under me and I plunged into despair. And I remember being in my little one-bedroom apartment and, you know, pulling close those blackout drapes. And just getting on my bed and screaming. I was in so much pain. I was so hurt and frightened and angry and outraged.
Because I had done everything. And I still wasn't moving forward and it felt so unfair. And I - it felt like this sadistic cosmic joke that I finally, after all these years, had figured out what I'm here to do. Which is to help people. And I was actually really good at it. In fact, better than a lot of the coaches I knew who were making a lot of money.
So I discovered in that moment that I have the capacity to feel superior and inferior at the same time.
And I really just wanted to die.
And I'm really honest about that. I'm actually - you can't see it, but I'm actually crying right now because money is a really personal thing. It represents our right to survive and the worth that we and society puts on us and then if you dig even deeper, it feels like our lovability. Because our parents were our first experience of money. They fed us, they clothed us, they told us what we were worth. These are the roads that money takes later on.
So, by the way, sidebar, any parent issues you have are going to show up in your relationship with money.
So here I am, back to my tale of woe. And I'm just lying on the bed, crying and screaming and I'm hating the Universe and I'm feeling deeply hated by the Universe back. And when I cried myself out, to my law of attraction friend, don't cheat yourself out of the depth of your despair. It's very, very useful because it gives you something to push off of.
Let yourself just sink to the bottom of the pool.
When I cried myself out, I had two thoughts. One was that, for me, Morgana, from southern California, that money had to be my next area of spiritual growth. Mostly because I'm named Morgana and I'm from southern California so spirituality kind of comes easy to me. I don't have the same conflicted feelings around spirituality that I have, say about money. Being this person who wants to be a good person and all that.
And I also got curious about what the heck was going on inside of me that couldn't be with money. I just had that idea. What's going on inside of me that can't be with money because Ivy League education, great results for clients, a golden tongue for marketing. It really just didn't make sense. So there's something going on on the inside.
And very soon after, within a day or two, I had a session with my coach. Now get this. I'm making $100 a month so I can't even pay rent. But I always made sure that I had a coach, thank god.
And my coach, out of the blue, and by the way, I still think he's one of the greatest coaches ever, and this poor guy, just month after month telling me to do stuff and I was doing things and nothing was happening. And then he had this out of the blue moment of brilliance that changed my life forever.
So I come to the call and I'm in this dark place and he asked me, and this is where you may want to lean in or pull out your pen. He asked me:
If your money was a person, who would your money be?
And because I was so fortunate as to be so close to my pain and so raw, that I spontaneously saw my money personified as this big scary dirty violent biker dude who terrified me. And before I made money a person, I had no idea that I had those feelings about money. I didn't know that it was dirty or scary or caused fights. Well, actually once I took a look at that, yeah. Family members, stolen inheritances, people not talking to each other for decades, and things that happened as a child that I, in a very reasonable healthy way, compartmentalized.
Because I've always been a person who, if it's a choice between money and relationship, I choose love and relationship, which is a very healthy decision until it starts to not be.
But anyway, so I see this biker and I experience how I feel about him. And by the way, this is crucial. It wasn't an intellectual exercise. It's - I could - it was a full body experience where I realized, I could see in my mind's eye, that if I were at a live event with this guy, like I saw myself at this outdoor event, I would have my eye on him constantly to create maximum distance between us. And I had one of those big lightbulb moments in that instance.
Oh My God. That's what I was doing with money.
So while I was tirelessly taking classes, marketing my heart out, having enrollment conversations, doing everything I was supposed to be doing and with the vision boards and the millionaire mindset and the taglines and the affimrations and all that. I was creating maximum distance between myself and money because it was dangerous. And ultimately could kill me.
And that's really dark stuff.
And it was really clear to me that I could not have money in my life if that guy was my money. Because when it's a person, it becomes real, in a way that's, like, I know a lot of my peers talk about relationship with money. It's become actually a very popular topic in the, you know, over the last 15, 16 years that I've been doing this, and...
But when they talk about money, they talk about ideas. I think Harv Eker has a list of rich people beliefs, poor people beliefs, and all of that is very interesting, but that's very surface level. I don't personally believe in say, a millionaire mindset, but I believe in a millionaire heartset, and the mind will follow the heart.
So because this biker felt so scary to me, I knew I couldn't possibly have money in my life if this was my relationship with money, so the biker and I had to break up. I had to get rid of him. And my coach pointed out that he wasn't too happy either. So we ended that.
By the way, I don't teach it that way anymore. I just lucked out. My process has become a lot more bloodthirsty and I just follow what works for clients and what produces the most dramatic, powerful restuls. But we can get to that later.
Slade:
Okay.
Morgana:
So I got rid of the monster. That's the important part. And that created a new problem. Because I lived in Los Angeles. And I just got rid of my relationship with money and that wasn't going to last very long. And I didn't want the monster to come back. I didn't call it a monster then, I called him the biker, but he was monstrous.
So I was aware of this emptiness, this vacuum, that I needed to fill really quickly before the biker came back to fill it. So I thought to myself, who could I want in my life so much that I would be willing to have a relationship with this person, even if it's money. And this is a really important frame, because if you've ever been in a horrible relationship, you know that you're not in a hurry to jump into that again.
So I was feeling very burnt and gun-shy. And probably would have preferred to stay single and money-free if that had been an option. So it had to be a person first. The relationship first, not the cash. The relationship can never be based on, do this for me, or, what have you done for me lately, because that becomes the money monster again. That takes away your power and makes you dependent and that's a money monster dynamic.
So that's my story.
I asked myself, well who could I want in my life so much that I would be willing, willing to maybe have this person in my life even though it's money. Because I was feeling very careful. And hallelujah, because I came to the process so in touch with my pain the monster was so real, and the monster was so gone, it was possible to have this immediate experience of the very real feeling new person.
Like, Presto!
So the new person who popped in, the archetype that I call the Money Honey, happened to be this tall, dark, handsome, clean cut, young, safe, romantic young man in a tuxedo holding a bouquet of red flowers and in love with me. And by the way, that just popped into my consciousness and I was as surprised as anybody. The flowers, the romance, and the idea of money being in love with me was weird! I had never thought that way before, but he felt so real.
And this is really important: I also felt how vulnerable he was. Like he really loved me and I had been breaking his heart for years.
I have found coaching so many people that the most effective archetypal relationship with the new Money Honey is romantic. Now I have coached a lot of people who have suffered some form of sexual trauma. I think it's - I don't know if it's the people who hire me or if this is representative of the population at large, but it does seem that the majority of people have suffered sexual trauma. So, this is not a predatory hypersexual partner who is going to trample your boundaries. This is going to be very safe, loving relationship that actually is very helpful in reprogramming your romantic and relationship blueprint in the future. That's just another sidebar.
So here's this beautiful guy who loved me, who wanted to be with me, and I had a very strong sense of, I had the power, I was the gatekeeper in the relationship. He had always wanted to be with me and I'd been pushing him away. So I asked him what he needed from me so that he could stay with me the way he wanted to. This was all intuitive.
And he responded immediately, which is another useful characteristic of having money be a person, is you can have a conversation and get really useful information. So he said to me that he needed me to love him. And to stop treating him like a monster.
Now I know that the idea of the love of money brings up a whole biblical kettle of fish. and I have a few things to say on that.
First of all, love is not greed. It's not exploitation. It doesn't harm or hurt people. It is not scarcity-based. It is expansive. It is noble. It brings out the best in you as a human being. That is love.
Love is love. Greed and all that other stuff is not love.
So that's the first part.
And then, a friend of mine took a class in ancient Aramaic two years ago and specifically focused on that passage, and that's not what it ever said in the Bible anyway. What it really said was that the obsession and or the worship of money can cause trouble. And I would be the first one to agree with that. And in fact, not just that the worship of money can cause trouble, but it was written in context of slaves. So if you worship money so much that you don't feed your slaves, you're gonna have trouble having healthy slaves.
I don't think any of us would dispute that and I don't think we really, despite what certain Republicans in the United States might say currently, I don't think slavery is an acceptable option.
So there actually, you know, just, it never ever said the love of money is the root of all evil. And love is not evil.
(inaudible: 24:17)
The final piece was so, I made this agreement not, and this is the interesting thing, not to finagle or manipulate or get more cash in my life, but because he was such a sweet, vulnerable lovable person, and I didn't want to be a jerk. And I - he deserved love, and I didn't want to hurt him. So I agreed. Because he was worthy of love.
And it had nothing to do with cash.
So the final step is, we made an agreement. And next time he brought me a client, I would say thank you. Because this is how he would give me gifts. This is how he wooed me. He would give me clients. And what I was doing, when I had this unconscious relationship with the monster was, imagine somebody gave you a sweater and your response was, Ew, that colour! Ugh!
And that's kind of what I was doing. He would send me a client and when I would freeze, and hem and haw and get all weird about stating my fee, it was ike I was going, Ew, gross, scary, embarrassing, it's a monster. Like I was asharmed of him. Which is a really awful, unloving way to be.
So I got it and I said I would say thank you. And then the funniest thing happened, is the next day, four people called me out of the blue to hire me. And they hired me. At double what I had ever charged before. And, honestly, it was so uncomfortable for me because I had built these years of neurological patterns where my mouth wanted to talk him out of the sale.
And I'm sitting there observing myself, right? Sitting on my hands, biting my tongue while everything in me is wanting to shove a sample session down their throat or, you know, nonsense. And I got to practicing, This is my fee, and then the most difficult skill in the world, which is, and then shut up and let them decide for themselves.
And I got, you know, the first one was really hard. The second one was less hard and I just kept getting practice and then very quickly I had a full coaching practice and I was raising my rates, and I was starting groups and getting waiting lists, and I travelled the world, getting married, a hundred times in a hundred countries, I lead my exotic Honey Goddess retreats in Bali and I hop on a plane every few weeks to go across the country to visit my dad who has Alzheimer's.
Slade:
Okay, well wait a minute. You need to tell us, explain this about you getting married multiple times. What's the story about that?
Morgana:
Well, I am kind of a relationship-obsessed fool. And my best friend the astrologer will confirm that. From an astrological perspective. And, in fact, I had to make money a cute guy just so I could be nice to him.
And, I finally met my guy when I was already 45 years old so, you know, men and women listening, dating actually gets better when you get older because people are grown ups. And, including you and me.
So I had this idea that I really, I wanted to travel the world with the love of my life and way back in 2012, I made a decision that I just, I had to change my business to make room for that. Have far fewer private clients, digitilize everything, so that I could leave and travel the world with the love of my life. I called that my make out with a cute guy around the world business plan. And I honestly met my husband, whose name online was Travel Guy, eight months later.
Slade:
So you made this idea to do this before he showed up!
Morgana:
Yeah.
And, by the way, I also spelled it out in my profile. I wrote, This is my top secret fantasy for the two of us, SHH, in my dating profile that everybody can see, right? Because I've been doing e-commerce so long so even my dating profile has e-commerce schtick in it.
Slade:
Ohmygosh.
Morgana:
So I wrote, This is my top secret fantasy for the two of us. SHH. Don't tell anybody. I wake up in your arms in India, Italy or Prague and we make love. And then we check our email. And then we go to a museum or a marketplace or we just get lost and we live like that for months.
And I gotta tell you, I attracted the most interesting, educated, worldly, awesome guys with that profile. And married one of them. 20 times so far!
Slade:
Ohmygosh.
Mprgana:
And so when I was - in 2014, I was already 47 by then. I had just finished leading my goddess retreat in Bali. And my then-boyfriend was in South Africa on a photo safari, shooting animals with a camera, not a gun. And he would skype me at insane hours, like at 3 or 4am, so that he could get me in Indonesia. In fact, he almost got eaten by a lion just crossing from his house in the bush to the building that had the internet.
And men are so funny, because I had already figured out that he was the One. He was the first guy I dated in 10 years who didn't have an expiration sign above his head and... But it had to, he had to almost get eaten by a lion for him to think, What kind of a guy does this just to talk to a girl? You know, for five minutes on a bad internet. She must be the One. That's how he figured it out.
So he proposed to me and I was like, well first I freaked out because I knew we were getting married. I wasn't worried about that. I just thought it would take him a couple more years to figure it out. So when it came earlier than I expected, all of my commitment issues came screaming to the surface. But I'd already decided, so...
I got home on a Thursday, picked him up on a Friday and we eloped within 24 hours. And I thought, Okay, that's that.
And then, a couple weeks later, he had an assignment in Puerto Vallarta, and arranged for me to come too so we called that our honeymoon. And we were down in Puerto Vallarta and we were passing by their iconic cathedral, Our Lady of Guadalupe, and he said, Hey, you want to get married again, as a goof.
And I was like, Yeah, sure. My kind of, you know, the game in our relationship is, he suggests things and I say yes. Because it's always a great adventure.
And, a woman on our tour said, Well, you know, I'm ordained in the U.S.
And he said, Great! You're gonna marry us.
So we walk to the front of the cathedral, took off our rings. Tammy Lee, our friend, you know, said some stuff about love. Devon, my husband, made up some new vows. We always just make up our vows on the spot and he said some new stuff that really landed in a deep, beautiful place with me.
So I start crying because my husband's quite... He does wedding vows really well. And so I'm crying, we share our vows, we put on rings, people in the pews are giving us the thumbs up, we kiss and it was amazing. It was like, it was deeper the second time than the first time.
And we came out, we were euphoric, like, Ohmygod! We have to do this everywhere! We have to get married in temples and mosques and a yurt and standing stones and mud huts. We just need to - we need to experience this everywhere!
And within a day, he proposed that we get married 100 times in 100 countries.
And we just had, we just had this amazing Mayan Mexican magical wedding in Manzanillo (how many Ms can I get in there). And honestly like, I'm such a bad bride. I've never spent more than $20 on a white lacy dress. Sometimes I forget to pack shoes or brushes. You know, I've combed my hair out with my wedding veil. So I'm a horrible bride.
But, in my experience, is that it's really, it's not the venue, it's not the dress. Really, it's just the relationship and the vows.
And by accidents.
I've had a bunch of big fairytale weddings that I didn't plan and I didn't expect because my husband's a travel writer. Some tourism boards in different countries have just spontaneously offered us these magical beautiful weddings. So sometimes it's in a castle and costumes and foreign languages and customs, and sometimes it's just my husband and me in a hotel lobby or park bench, saying, Here, can you read the script?
And it's just a beautiful relationship practice that I think everybody should do. It's cheaper honestly than one big expensive party wedding, at least in L.A. and I think that those big expensive weddings, and by the way, if that's what you want, go for it. That's what I wanted when I was in my 20s, not when I was in my 40s. It's a lot of pressure for a baby marriage.
Slade:
Yeah.
Morgana:
So, you know, just for who we are, it's really nice to keep getting married and saying, This is important to us, and for me being an insecure attachment theory kind of person, well I'm across the board. Sometimes I'm insecure, sometimes I'm secure and sometimes I'm avoidant, but it's really nice to keep being reminded that I'm loved.
Slade:
You've taken this thing that has so much pressure and is such a fleeting thing, and there's really a lot of anxiety around it, right? Like, a lot of people feel so much pressure to get it right and then it happens and then it's gone. And you guys have taken away all the anxiety around it and dialed the romance up and then the best part is, you get to do it over and over again. So it's never in the rear view mirror. You know?
Morgana:
Yeah...
Slade:
It's always, it's pulling you through the relationship instead of being this gun that goes off at the beginning of the race. It's this...
Morgana:
Yeah. I don't think any wedding can live up to the pressure of, you only have one and you have to have it perfect. And I don't think weddings were supposed to be like that. It's really supposed to be about the marriage not the party.
When we were in Serbia, because my husband had a childhood friend from L.A. whose mom was Serbian and he moved to Serbia, and then fell in love with Eastern Europe's biggest pop star, it's kind of like their Madonna, Bebi Dol. And we got married there and they wanted, his friend wanted a dual wedding.
So, okay, I have 100. I can share one.
And, we, you know, the guests were all the friends of Devon's friend. And I don't know why, maybe they were just really drunk, but when my husband started saying his wedding vows, which, by the way, were beautiful, a bunch of wedding guests started booing.
Slade:
Really!
Morgana:
I kid you not. I've never heard of such a thing. They started booing. I wanted to walk down the steps on my little kitten heels and punch somebody out. It was astonishing and in that moment, I realized that I wasn't going home with any of those people I was going home with the prize, who was standing right in front of me.
And I really got, in that moment, that the wedding is not about the venue or the food, or the guests, or the dress or anything. It's - nobody has the power to ruin your wedding. Unless you give it to them. Because really, all that matters is, you are going home with this person that you choose.
You get the prize.
Oh! And, by the way, I was talking about personifying money and I'm just like you. My business, she's a person. The book I'm about to write, she's another person. They all have their personhood. I don't even create it. They just let me know.
And so, because this singlehood, and this loneliness, has been the greatest pain in my life. I've been looking for my guy since I chased Brian Patterson under the piano on his 5th birthday and he was the older man.
So, about two months before I met Devon, I did my money process but I did it with a Love monster. Because it was really annoying. Because I could hear myself on interviews, like every week saying, Well, you know, if you're doing everything right and you aren't getting the results, you're protecting yourself.
And so you want to uncover what you're protecting yourself from and turn it into a monster and then get rid of the monster.
And I would hear myself saying that and I'd be actually thinking to myself, That's what's going on with love. And... but I just - It took me a really long to finally break down and do the process with Love, because that was a really big monster. Even bigger than the money monster.
And I honestly believe all money issues are love issues.
So I was going to a deeper level and it was so big and so terrifying that it was just so big. I didn't know how I could destroy it or get rid of it. But I did. I gave it my best effort and I met my husband a couple months later.
Slade:
I wondered if you had reverse engineered this process for the love, for the love itself, and because there does seem to be a trajectory with your relationship that does kind of parallel what happened with your financial life, your financial relationship, and also followed it, in a really... I mean, we could write a book about this. Maybe you are writing a book about this.
You said that you're writing a book. What's your next book about?
Morgana:
My next book is called, Money Goddess. It's a spiritual manifesto for women's personal and economic empowerment. I've been leading my Money Goddess retreats for, I guess, eight years now. And then I did live events in L.A. and a virtual class before that, and I've just been developing this material for years because I have coached, I've always coached men. But I have more personal experience being a woman.
And so, my Money Goddess program, my Money Goddess experiences was really addressing the, Okay you change the relationship with money and then what comes up for women? Our relationship with our sexuality, our bodies, our beauty, our lovability, is the first thing that comes up for women.
And then our making peace with our victim experience and finding our Life Purpose. Our rage, that we're not allowed to have in society. We're not, you know, we get, We're not supposed to be angry or vengeful or shrill harpies, right? So we - there's a lot of behaviour that, where we distrust we're not vicious, like evil Lady Macbeth.
So there's a lot of human experience that women are supposed to not have, that we get a lot of shit for. Pardon my language. Honestly, I really like to swear like a sailor and I've been behaving very well.
Slade:
You can.
Morgana:
Oh! Thank fucking God.
Slade:
I should've told you at the beginning.
Morgana:
Haha.. But yeah, you know, it's like all my life I've been told what's wrong with me and I've come to the conclusion that it's not wrong, it's female! And there's a difference.
Slade:
Mmm...
Morgana:
So I have a really, especially after the last year, a very... just a fire in my belly about really giving human beings permission to access all of ourselves, and there's a power and a gift! There's a superpower in all of it, in our appetites, and our rage, and our competition and ambition and our victim experience is sacred. All of it has these amazing gifts and also wounds.
So this book is really about what it is to... I want to change the conversation about what it is to be a woman. And, by the way, it applies to men and all genders too, but this one is specifically speaking to people who identify as women. Using goddess archetypes, which creates, I think, a nice nobility for our experiences that we've been shamed for.
Oh yeah? You're calling me a slut? Well there's a goddess for that.
Slade:
Right!
Morgana:
And I embrace that.
Slade:
Yeah.
Morgana:
This is a powerful... Lust is a life-affirming feeling.
So that's what I'm working on next, is honestly, I want to create a global Money Goddess movement of women who love themselves and respect themselves and are the drivers in their life. Because I think that will be good for the planet.
Slade:
I wanted to ask you about something called the Results Accelerator Program. Can you tell me about that?
Morgana:
Oh yeah. That's my newest thing!
So here's a problem and I'm really telling on myself here, which is, so for all these years, I coach people or they coach themselves and they get this beautiful, luscious, alive Money Honey experience relationship. And then it kind of fades away. Because even - why do you think I get married all the time?
Maintaining a relationship, even with a human being, takes a lot of attention and maintenance.
And it's hard enough with a human. It's much harder with an imaginary person who doesn't have a body. So I've been really thinking about, Well how do I solve this problem of reconnecting people to their Money Honey on a regular basis? And that's how this developed. And surprisingly, a lot of people who haven't done my Money Honey work have signed up for it. Because it's not really required but then when they get in they want it and I have tools inside the program to help them slay their money monster and connect with their Money Honey.
But it's a daily practice where people log in every day and they set their daily priorities with their Money Honey. And then when negative self talk comes up, they share that and then they share what their Money Honey says to them. And it's like, the negative stuff is a trigger to wake up the Money Honey so he or she can shut up and respond. And that's where the most people come up with the most brilliant insights because they're channelling their highest wisdom, but without any of their own baggage, which is one of the reasons making the Money Honey another person separate, instead of, you know, your future self or higher self or something, but making it, you know, experiencing it as outside of yourself kind of clears it of all your nonsense and gives you a much more loving and accurate assessment, and encouraging us or you, because your Money Honey will always recognize that you are more powerful, creative, and resourceful and wonderful than you see yourself. And if it doesn't, it's not a Money Honey.
So this Results Accelerator, I wanted to have a really, just, accessible, super super high touch, high engagement accountability support online love club. That's not about dumping more information because we're just, all the information that we're trying to get through can become oppressive. But to just support you really personally every day.
That's what I created a few months ago, and the results have been beyond my wildest dreams. Really, just, people feel loved and supported and they're having results and breakthroughs and stuff that they've been struggling with for years.
It's very gentle. I talk about progress not perfection and stripping things down to baby steps and when people are rewarded, then it becomes addictive. So these, you know, positive actions suddenly become the things you've been putting off. Suddenly, you want to do them because you want to get the recognition. And the love. And the support.
And then you also start getting great results in your life. It's so much a snowball.
So that's my Results Accelerator. That's my new thing.
Slade:
Very cool. I was actually going to ask you at one point about addressing that whole idea of what happens when the honeymoon is over, or so to speak. That definitely answered that question.
I do have a question for you though. This is - some form of this I like to ask everyone, and obviously you're no stranger to all the personal development programs and conversations and new age tools and all that stuff. You've been in it and with it and swimming in that ocean for awhile.
Is there anything that you find yourself thinking is really, either bugs you about the whole kind of personal development landscape, or something that you always want to grab the microphone and shout, to correct the conversation.
What's something like that that comes up for you?
Morgana:
I've had a number of, what I would call, dark nights of the soul, where I just have wanted to pull out of the industry. Because I see some people who talk a really good talk and do a lot of harm. And I don't want to be that. And I don't want to be confused with that or associated with that.
And I was going through, because like apparently, I'm just freaking empathic, but there was that, I think his name was James Arthur Ray or something. The weekend that he was doing his demigod murderous... you know... tent, smoked tent or whatever it was, thing, where all those people died, I went into just - and I didn't know it was going on, but I went into a dark, dark, dark place and I honestly had to create a whole new monster about the industry and the stuff that I couldn't be with and slay that and kind of create a new relationship with being in the business with a new Money Honey.
It was like, Well, the thing about the Money Honey is, that, by definition, my Money Honey shares my values.
So, yeah. I don't even know how to articulate it today. I'm kind of jet lagged. I just got back from a two-day conference last week with 100 really high profile multi-six, multi-seven figure coaches and, everybody thinks they're a good guy, right?
Slade:
Mmm hmm.
Morgana:
But what happens is, even people at that level, and often people at that level, are scared. Like, they had a few years of really big results, and then the market changes and they become more and more transactional.
And it's, you know, people think that more dollars is gonna solve problems. No. The stakes just get higher. So now they have all these employees to pay and the money isn't coming in.
So the challenge is, you know, people, when people are coming from scarcity, they can become more transactional than relational. Do your due diligence before you hire people. Run their name and maybe ad scan when you Google it, to see what people are saying. Trust your gut. That's a big one because some of, you know, sociopaths are very good sales people. Because they can promise anything because they don't really care about delivering it.
So something can sound really, really promising, intellectually. Trust your gut. I think our guts really know.
There are some really, really great coaches out there. And some not so great coaches. Things that used to work really well, like product launch formula, and tele-summits, and you know, things like that, are not working as well as they used to. JB launches not working as well as they used to, and I don't know that that language is being represented by the people selling those formulas yet.
So I'm gaining - this is very rambling because I haven't really, you know, but I'm gaining just a real deep, deep appreciation for the original old school pure form of coaching, which is not telling anybody what to do, or telling anybody how to do things, but is really just, through conversation, drawing forth your own answers.
Because you know what you do and what you believe and what you value and what you want better than anybody else does. And you want to be able to communicate with integrity. To be successful in business. Now what I'm saying is that the purest, most relationship oriented people with the best integrity are weathering the market changes a lot better than the people who are being transactional and treating clients like objects and dollars.
Slade:
Thank you for that.
I always love asking that question because it does produce an interesting improvisational unearthing of wisdom, and I actually personally took a lot from that. So I got a lot from what you just said, if no one else has.
Morgana:
I'm glad.
Slade:
So thank you.
Listen, Morgana Rae, I'm such a huge fan of yours. I really am. It's a thrill to capture our conversation with you.
I want to make sure that you tell everyone where they can go online to find you and where they can start working with your material.
Morgana:
Absolutely. Lots and lots of high quality free stuff at MorganaRae.com Start with my four-part free video series. Also my blog has hundreds of articles and videos and when you opt in for the video series, you would be on my VIP list where I can curate and send you my newest articles or things that I think would be helpful for you to read or see. Whenever I have any freebies, you'll be the first to know about it. When my Results Accelerator sessions open up every, you can't get in except once every four weeks, you'll hear about that. When I go back to do another Money Goddess retreat, you'll hear about that. But mostly it's content. And you can opt out at any time.
There’s a common malaise among reading clients. A low-level depression, disconnection, lack of inspiration. People keep asking me "What do I need to do to be happy?"
I’m sharing a technique I’ve started to call Rebooting Your Life. Honestly, the strategy is so simple, if you’re not willing to do it or try it, I have to wonder if you really want to change. This is doable. This will shift everything. Don’t dismiss it for some more difficult solution.
When was happiness ever complicated?
MENTIONED ON THE SHOW: The War of Art by Steven Pressfield
The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron
HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses
Get an intuitive reading with Slade
Automatic Intuition
BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits Edit your pledge on Patreon
TRANSCRIPT Where is happiness?
In what energy center or chakra of the body does happiness reside?
Somewhere in the heart, a little bit in the head, the divine crown, maybe…
Those are the upper frequencies, the upper energetic levels of the body.
You are experiencing a sense of longing, desire, and yet confusion related to the higher pursuits, the top half of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs — love, self-esteem, self-actualization, and transcendence; while experiencing symptoms and disturbances related to the lower energetic centers of the body — sleep, substance abuse, mood issues, depression (which is all actually rooted in the physical and causes or contributes to those higher functions breaking down…)
If you feel “unhappy” you may actually be feeling ungrounded.
The upper frequencies are on the fritz, and you are seeking to correct them, to elevate them, to take them higher into a vague perception of peace and happiness.
No matter what strategies or substance or energy we introduce at the higher level, without the grounding in the physical self — safety, faith, basic wellness — it would only topple this whole house of cards.
The love you feel for romantic partners also represents a much higher, more sophisticated energetic function than you’re in a solid position to pursue.
Your guides have brought you here in this moment to save yourself.
Nothing less than that. This is more than an existential crisis, it is also a physical, mortal one.
If you’re calling yourself depressed, unfulfilled, unhappy, then you’re crying out for a life-line and the messages are coming in through me. Not a grand design for your future life plan — a simple strategy with acts of grace you can and need to execute NOW.
Do not think beyond the next three months. For the next three months — starting immediately, starting tomorrow — you have one task. (Well, two tasks when we get into it...)
But the main task is to save yourself by rebooting your energy. To re-ground and rebuild from the root up.
There are no short-cuts. You cannot cheat or procrastinate or delay this.
These are saving acts of faith and grace you can execute successfully.
The instructions I’m giving you will sound simple but you do not require — and you may not even be able to handle — complexity. Grand designs and Big plans would only make things worse.
Don’t worry about making this a New Year’s Resolution or starting at the top of the month.
You must begin tomorrow. Today would not be too soon.
You know how the solution for so much technology that hangs up or behaves oddly or freezes is to turn the power off and back on again?
Rebooting. It works for nearly everything. It is always the first thing to try and most often the only thing you require.
If you are spinning in the upper chakras — higher thought, intellect, overthinking, analyzing, worrying, wresting with relationships, seeking purpose, trying to hear your guides, connecting with your higher self, receiving creative flashes — you need to reboot and ground yourself in the physical body, first.
To do this, you need to take immediate and daily action in the lowest energy centers of the body. (Don’t read this as meditation or yoga — that is “intermediate” level actions. If you can execute my instructions successfully for three months, then you may begin considering introducing more esoteric solutions.)
Here is how you:
- save your life
- come out of depression
- sleep better
- hear the voices of your guides and your higher self
- free yourself of addiction and self-destructive choices (including unhealthy relationships)
DISCLAIMER:
Of course, I am not a medical professional; I am not dispensing mental health advice, I am speaking to you as a friend who observes patterns in our energies, in our decisions, and in our behaviors. By all means, your clinical diagnoses take priority; and if you don’t have a clinical diagnosis but think you might need to get one, this is your guides taking an opportunity, through me, to encourage you to finally go make that happen.
Other than your children and your spouse (who can help themselves, so don’t over do it), your only priority is yourself. Your physical health, safety, and grounding. And by the way, this is probably one of those situations not unlike airplane emergencies, where you need to put that oxygen mask over your own face before you start trying to save other people.
Stop using alcohol or marijuana or pills immediately.
You may not feel you are technically an alcoholic or addict. If this is true, you will have no problem ceasing all consumption immediately. If you cannot, then you are addicted, psychologically or physically or emotionally…it doesn’t matter.
You really should go to meetings, whether you believe you qualify or not. You require the perspective and you need to the social support. There are stranger angels (incarnate entities who are meant to guide and protect you) inhabiting human bodies — even posing as helpful strangers and friends.
You will find them in groups like as AA or Narcotics Anonymous, or other communities built around that template.
If there are psychotropics or pharmacological prescriptions you are still taking, please do not cease those suddenly, but they are most likely not working because you are not clinically depressed in the ways those medications can influence.
Something I have observed during hundreds and hundreds of readings over the past decade:
When a creative person — especially someone who consciously identifies as a creative, like a writer, musician, artist, actor — or they have in the past at some point in their lives… When a creative person tells me they’re depressed, technically, they don’t have a project.
So, there are usually two things going on with people who may not be clinically depressed, but who are self-identifying with that terminology.
You’re depressed because you are a creative person with no outlet for self-expression, and you’re depressed because you are in pain within your own body and you require a physical energetic reboot.
I’m assuming in this motivational rant that most of you have no major physical limitations with moving around throughout your day. Obviously, some of you may have limitations here, so I don’t want to be insensitive to that. I know a few of you have to live life in a chair or are bedridden. You have my permission to email me and I will give you an alternative for rebooting your physical chakras, ok?
For the rest of you — maybe some of you are telling yourself you have more limitations than you really do, so let’s be honest with ourselves about that.
Assuming you get up many times a day and move around your world without giving it a thought...
Here is how you save yourself, correct this imbalance, and begin a new chapter in your life:
90 days of walking meditation.
(That means going for a walk outside, preferably somewhere with something to look at like trees or a river. It can also be a park full of people. But it must be in nature, regardless of the weather.)
30 minutes of walking per day.
(If you do it for 45 minutes or an hour, I’ll never know.) Just walking. Not jogging. Not joining a gym. Do not buy new outfits or shoes you don’t need.
Start today, or tomorrow at the latest.
Do not make this a New Year’s resolution or say I’ll start at the first of the month or I’ll wait for a new moon.
Start now.
You’ll feel excellent that you made a start. It will seem like a small victory, but there will be an inkling deep inside you. A small voice turning over and beginning to stir. We are awakening that voice.
Take your phone and listen to music or podcasts if you really like — or don’t. Silence and the sound of your breath and your own thoughts is a chance to clear the static in the upper energy centers.
Walk for 30 minutes, each day, for 90 days.
At some point, you cannot predict when or how, but your higher self and your guides will begin to whisper in your ear. You will begin to receive directions and ideas. You will begin to make observations about what to change and what steps to take next.
The first steps along your journey to a new life and to whatever you will recognize as happiness are literal steps.
In addition to this physical grounding in the body, we need to bring your creative and intuitive channels back online.
You do this by writing Morning Pages. Every morning, set a timer for 15 minutes and write. Write whatever you want. It’s not meant for anyone but you. You are retuning your soul, slowly but surely, 15 minutes per day.
Morning pages. Journaling (by computer or on paper) for 15 minutes every day for 90 days.
The concept of this comes from The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. At the end of 90 days, you may wish to join an Artist’s Way group on Facebook and do this process with a community of like-minded souls. This first 90 days is your practice round.
Do not judge the process of walking meditation and morning pages until the end of three months. Just do this. Sober. Judge the results at the 90 day mark.
I want you to write me at that 90 day mark and tell me what you have experienced.
If you will listen to us — me + my guides + your guides — you will begin to sleep better, you will begin to feel better, the fog will lift, solutions will present themselves, your relationships will change, and you will be in a position to take on the next steps. Bigger, more challenging, more sophisticated strategies and systems.
And here’s a bonus tip that will absolutely shrink your mind and set you up for true results.
During the first week of your walking meditation + morning pages ritual, read:
The War of Art by Steven Pressfield.
It is very short. I just re-read it one day at lunch, and then finished it up the next day at lunch. It’s a $4 download for the ebook version.
It is about Resistance his word for concepts like The Devil. Procrastination. Self-sabotage.
There is a life-changing message for you in this little book.
So 4 things for you to do if you’re feeling depressed, disconnected and just need to reboot:
- Immediate sobriety
- The War of Art
- Walking 30 minutes a day
- Writing morning pages for 15 minutes a day
Go make it so.
And write me. I am looking for some emails in 90 days.
Thanks again for listening to the Shift Your Spirits podcast and for all your support this year. It’s been tremendous.
For show notes, links, transcripts and all the past episodes, please visit
www.shiftyourspirits.com
You can subscribe in iTunes or Stitcher or whatever app you use to access podcasts.
If you’d like to get an intuitive reading with me — try out my email reading — or download a free ebook and meditation to help you connect with your guides, please go to
https://sladeroberson.com/
and if you’re interested in my professional intuitive training program, you can start the course for free by downloading the Attunement at
https://automaticintuition.com/
Dr. Martha Jo Atkins researches and teaches about the language, movement, and visions most people experience at the end of life. She is the executive director of Abode Contemplative Care for the Dying in San Antonio, Texas.
We talk a lot on this podcast about what happens after you die, what’s going on on the other side of the veil. Martha Jo has dedicated her career to standing just on this side of the veil, making the transition better for others, observing the phenomena, and teaching us all how to better navigate the sign posts of dying for our loved ones.
WE TALK ABOUT: * the mystical sign posts along the process of dying * pre-death visions — do they happen for everyone * how the conversations we have in the room where someone is dying can help or hinder their transition
MENTIONED ON THE SHOW: Signposts of Dying by Marth Jo Atkins, PhD
The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully by Frank Ostaseski
When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi & Abraham Verghese
Paula by Isabel Allende
The Nine Elements of Near-Death Experience by Dr. Raymond Moody
GUEST LINKS - Martha Jo Atkins MarthaAtkins.com
Abode Contemplative Care for the Dying
HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses
Get an intuitive reading with Slade
Automatic Intuition
BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits Edit your pledge on Patreon
TRANSCRIPT Martha Jo:
My name is Martha Jo Atkins. I am a death and dying educator, counselor, and presently, I am the executive director of Abode Contemplative Care for the Dying in San Antonio. We take care of people who are in the last three months of life, and help them transition from here to there, and it's a really pretty magical place.
So I do private practice and that stuff and teach about preparing for end of life questions to ask yourself, things to talk to your family about, that kind of stuff.
Big fun.
Slade:
Well we'll get to how you manage the fun of all of that in a minute.
But I am curious to hear more about Abode Contemplative Care for the Dying. Would you talk a little bit more about that and maybe explain how is it different than other forms of hospice care?
Martha Jo:
Yeah, so Abode was started by a guy named Edwin Sasek, who studied at the Kubler-Ross Centre back in the 80s, which was in New Mexico, and Edwin learned about the monasteries in the 14th and 15th centuries, where dying people, travelling people who were dying, would go to the monasteries and the men in the monasteries would give them the best of what they had. So the best food, the best mat, the best whatever they had to help them travel on their next journey.
And Edwin had this dream of starting a place where there was a chair, and a mat, and a light bulb, and somebody could sit with somebody who was dying and help them go. He didn't have a model for that and some 20 years later, he met a classmate of his who had been at the Kubler-Ross Institute too, who was running a non-profit home in Michigan I believe, where he was caring for dying people.
And Edwin put together a group. He had a model, he has that kind of energy that has, invites people to follow, and a group of people put Abode together and it's built on contemplative practices. So mostly about presence.
So how do you bring your spiritual practices to bear in every day life, and he invites people to do that in context, in this place, in this community. Helping people with their dying process.
So we got three people who come at a time. They're in the last three months. We go and visit them and make sure that this is the right place for them. All the people who are coming to us recognize that they're dying. They don't necessarily like it, but they understand that that's what's happening. And then we accompany them. Walk alongside them as they're on their journey.
Right now, we're not charging a fee for that. I think that's going to be changing in the springtime, just because economics are the way they are and we need to be able to support ourselves. So we'll charge something, and also have financial aid for people. Edwin's dream was for this to be for people who couldn't pay and for us to be able to care for those people and we still will do that and we will care for other people who can pay and that will allow us to keep the cycle going of helping people who need it.
Slade:
Mmm... that sounds wonderful.
Martha Jo:
Yeah, it's a pretty magical place.
And the question you ask was how it's different. It is not a hospice. Hospices in our country, it's a benefit of insurance, it's a benefit of medicare and medicaid, and there's a number of days that you can be on hospice, you get a doctor and a nurse and a social worker, a chaplain and an aid that will come to your home for short amounts of time, 30 minutes to a couple of hours and care for you, and the rest of the time, your family or friends are the ones who care for you.
And so we take care of those people who are in the gap. We don't get money from hospices or from medicare or from insurance. That money all goes to the hospices. The hospices refer someone to us and we are simply a home. We serve as extended family.
Slade:
So you guys fill in the gaps for someoneo who maybe doesn't have those family members present.
Martha Jo:
Right. Somebody who's 90 and their spouse is 90 and they've been married for 70 years and he can't turn her. And he doesn't understand what's happening.
Or recently, we had a 26 year old who didn't want to die at home. Who had a 4-year old and an 8-month old, and was worried about her mother. So we had, at one point in the room, there were four generations in this room helping this woman say goodbye to this life, and we got to be a part of all that and facilitate some opportunities for the goodbye saying there.
Slade:
So I'm sure tons of people must ask you about, you know, the sadness or the depression that goes along with this environment.
Martha Jo:
Yeah!
Slade:
I'm sure you have to see that differently in order to manage all that.
So talk to me about the emotional part of doing this work.
Martha Jo:
So I, along with the people I work with, my colleagues and I feel called to this. And it is very much a soul calling and it very much is, it's a place we want to be and it's a place where we find the energy and yes, there are moments of sadness, and as we do the work, we learn how to carry the sadness differently, and carry the work differently.
So when I first started doing death and dying work, I was in my 20s and I took everything home and was sad about everything. And the way I saw death and dying in my 20s is very different than I see it now. It now it is a transition. Somebody is going to their next place.
There is a sweetness to it. There is a... Oh, there's an ineffability to it. There's... Words fail me sometimes to talk about how beautiful it is.
And it's, there's not a lot of bullshit. I think that's the other thing I really, really love. People who are dying don't have time to pretend, and so the conversations are real. And for those of us who love those kinds of conversations, this is just...
It's a beautiful, beautiful place to be and the sadness is, it's almost secondary. In fact, it is secondary. It's the opportunity to be with somebody in a very real presence and the veil is thin and we get to experience magic sometimes, and sometimes it's just life is hard, but we get to do it together, and it's good.
Slade:
How did this specific calling find you? Was there a turning point that led you down this path? Was there a loved one that passed, that brought you into this experience?
Martha Jo:
Yeah, yeah.
My brother Jim died when I was 23. He was 37 and it was one of those phone calls in the middle of the night and I heard my mother make a sound that I had not ever heard her make before and I knew something was terribly wrong. And we as a family began navigating and negotiating grief and what it looked like and what it felt like and what it sounded like and, it was hard. It was really hard.
He was the oldest and much loved and we had to find our way. And one of the things I did was go back to school. I wrote a paper about starting a children's... The task was to write a paper about starting a children's service in San Antonio that didn't exist. So I wrote about starting a children's bereavement centre, and my professor encouraged me to follow up on that.
So I did.
I started this non-profit and ran it for about seven years called the Children's Bereavement Centre of South Texas. And in that process, I brought my family in and we were able to continue to have conversations about Jim and about our own grief and what we needed. And then we got to hear stories from other people and how they were managing and it became this back and forth of healing and helping, which is the best way to live life, I think. We give and we get and it's not all altruism. And I think for people who think that that is it, I think they're missing the goodness there. Because we get to receive too.
So we as a family did that. And became closer as families can in those situations sometimes and ours did. And then my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer and she had death bed visions. She saw my brother, she saw her parents and her grandparents as she was dying, and I had talked to her about, that that could happen and we had some really meaningful conversations around that.
That parlayed into more conversations and as my dad got sick more and more, and I ended up doing my dissertation work for my PhD on deathbed phenomenon, and it's been pretty great.
Slade:
Well you know the reason why I wanted to have you on the show is because there is a magical component to all this. And that's how you and I know each other and that's the thing that we connected around.
And so, I mean, of course the most important thing I want to get to kind of some of the magical stories and the mysticisicm around all this.
So, I mean, what happens when we die?
Martha Jo:
There is a, from my vantage point, there is a trajectory of experiences, and the way I envision it now is like a cylinder, and we get on the outside of the cylinder and then we're pulled in and in and in until you get to the centre of it, and you go up and out.
Somebody saw my drawing and said, Oh, it's kind of like birth.
And I think it is. I think it's very much like birth.
As, when people come to us, they know they're dying. We know they're dying. And so, what I watch for, what I see are patterns and what I, the way I work is, when people come into our place, they're doing the work of dying. So sleep changes. One of the first thing we see, people's nights and days will get mixed up.
I heard a beautiful story this week about a little girl who, probably 6, 5 or 6 years old, got sent home, immediately didn't go to sleep. And they were talking about giving her more pain medicine and they were going to give her sleep medicine and finally somebody said, Why don't we just ask her why she's not sleeping?
And she said, she was afraid she was going to die when she went to sleep and she wasn't sure how she was going to get to heaven.
So some really smart person said, Get her some angel wings.
So they got her angel wings, put them on her, and said, If you happen to die in your sleep, you'll just fly to heaven. You'll know exactly what to do.
She slept from that night on.
Slade:
Oh, wow.
Martha Jo:
I know. Isn't that a great story?
Slade:
Oh gosh, that's wonderful.
Martha Jo:
Adults do that too. And we get so caught up in, you know, they're not sleeping, they need to be sleeping. It's very much a part of the process. And yes, sometimes you can give people medicine and get them resorted, sometimes not. That's just part of what they need to do.
We see people not want to be in their bed. They want to be in another place. They need to be on the couch or they need to sleep in the chair. And it's these little shifts that we watch for.
And then there is the visions that begin to happen. And you'll see people look outside, like out the window, out into the yard, and I'm often asked if it's medication related or disease related and I will tell you, the visions happen with all kinds of diseases, medicated or not, and they're different for people but they happen. And I let people make, encourage people to make whatever meaning they need to make out of those.
But as part of this trajectory of dying, the person will see people who I call "Friendlies" outside, so they're not people they know. They may see a baseball game. They may hear people on the porch. They may see somebody walking by. Sometimes they're people that are darker skinned than them, which I always find fascinating. White people see black people all the time, which I love.
And it's not a, there's not a fear there. It's just, Oh, there's somebody out there.
And then the dying person kind of comes back a little bit and they'll go, Okay, but reality is, there isn't really anybody out there, am I going crazy?
So part of what we do at Abode is normalize all of this. That these are things that happen and you may see people and you may dream about people and they're here to help you and this is part of the process.
The visions eventually come inside, and eventually the Friendlies become people they know. And eventually, the... If you're in a bed and looking at the end of it and you see somebody standing down there, that's one kind of vision people have.
And as they get farther into the process, and as they move into the cylinder, or closer into the cylinder, they'll begin to see people up midway around the room and then at the top of the room.
And you'll see people reaching. There's a back in time experience, where people are in, oh, the guy who did... Moody. Raymond Moody. Talks about your life review. And dying people have that. You'll see them go back, try to lasso a horse or, in my dad's case, he would put his stole on. He was a minister and he would open his Bible. And I knew exactly what he was doing. And other people would look at him and thought, What is Noble doing? He's back in Sunday school.
And further and further and further back people go. And then there's this reaching up as those are reaching towards something.
The other thing that happens is this use of metaphors. And the metaphors change as people are further into the trajectory of dying. And it's real subtle. You may be with someone for 12 hours and you may hear three of them. Or you may hear one of them. But they're indicators. And they're indicators that people are a little bit further along in their journey.
It's... I tell people they're not predictive. They are signposts. They just show you a little bit where people are and help you know that they're in process and doing what they need to do and I think that helps the people who are family members and friends to prepare their hearts maybe a little bit more too.
Slade:
Mmm...
You wrote a book, by the way, I want to mention, called Signposts of Dying, and I'm sure this is the type of thing that you describe and explain in that book, correct?
Martha Jo:
Yeah, these are those kinds of things. Sure.
Slade:
The pre-death visions, as you call them, we have these stories ingrained in our culture, and they're kind of part of our lore. Books and TV always portray them. The seeing of the loved one at the foot of the bed, talking to people that we can't see, the relatives that come to get you to take you on...
How many of those kind of pre-death visions are real patterns in the experience of the dying?
Martha Jo:
Oh, I think everybody has them. I think we just see probably 70% of them. 70% of the people we see, and the other people are so far in their process that they're doing their own thing behind closed eyes.
And I watch people, like they're dreaming but they're not dreaming. It's a very different away-ness that happens, as people are in the bed and they go away to another place and then they come back and then they go farther away and they come back for a little less time and it's not as deep here as it was before. You...
The quality of the experience with the people in the room changes. Because they need to be in that other place and it's... it is trackable and it does happen with just about everybody I see.
Slade:
Wow.
Martha Jo:
Yeah!
Slade:
So this may put you on the spot, I don't know you can tell me if it does, but based on your observations, do you personally see compelling evidence that the soul is moving on beyond the physical body to another location?
Martha Jo:
I do think that now. And I have hedged my bets on that for a long time, but I do.
We cared for a woman not long ago who was just, if you can imagine, heels dug in and hands out, she did not want to go. It was all she could do to keep from dying and she was going to do it, and.... wasn't eating... I bet she weighed 70 pounds when she finally died. And she was angry. And she spent most of her time angry. And then she was getting up from a commode in the bathroom, somebody was helping her get up, and her heart stopped. And one of the navigators, our people who do the bedside work, we call them In the black navigators, and one of the navigators caught her and thought, Ohmygosh, she's died.
And then she came back! Her name was Anna.
And she was a little softer, and a little sweeter, and then she went away again, 4, 5, times she died and came back. One time, we were just talking about this last night, we gathered everyone around the bed and we were breathing with her because we thought this was it. And her eyes kind of opened and she looked around the room at all of us and she said, It's so beautiful! Can you hear the flowers? Can you see the colors and just this... all of this landscape that she was seeing.
And she... It wasn't crazy talk. It wasn't... I don't know... It was a continued preparation for whatever it was she needed to do and she got to the end of all that and she looked around and said, Can we have coffee?
Like, Ohmygod yes, we can have coffee. So we made coffee and we all had coffee together.
And she ended up dying a couple of days later. She wanted selfies that night. Part of her process was shifting this anger into an opening for her. And not everybody does that. Lots of people do. There's a feeling to it, there's a texture to it. There's an energy and the energy in the room shifts and I do think there's something else. I do.
Slade:
You said that your attitude had shifted from the time you were, say, in your 20s doing this work to who you are now doing this work.
Martha Jo:
Yeah.
Slade:
And so, is that the direction that you've shifted in? Has it allowed you to maybe relax or feel more peaceful in some way?
Martha Jo:
Yeah. I think that's a beautiful way to say it. Yes.
I helped care for my first human who died was an infant, and being in a hospital setting in the medicalness of all of that, and the fast moving people and the medical language and there wasn't much pause for honoring the spirit of that child. The mentor I had in that moment, happily, called me over, had me put my hand on the baby. She put her hand on the baby. And she looked at me and she said, Sometimes they forget.
They had done a code on this kid, and when they finished, everybody just ran out of the room.
And so this woman paused for a minute, and wanted me to pause for a minute, and I've never forgotten that. And as I have continued to care for people from my 20s to now, that piece of the dying process has gotten stronger and more rooted in me.
And that's primarily how we work with people at Abode. It's not the medical. We don't have IVs, we don't take blood pressure. It's not about any of that. It's about accompanying people. And I like that much better. And it feels, as you say, it's more relaxed and more peaceful and just... it just works better for me.
Slade:
A little over a year ago, my mother found her companion of 20 years on the floor of his bathroom and he had collapsed, probably had had a heart attack, and after she called 911, as she was waiting for the ambulance, she sort of held his head in her lap and she talked to him as he died. And she says that she feels like he knew that she was there and could hear him.
And before speaking to you today, I was talking to her and you know sometimes I'll tell her about people that I'm interviewing or whatever, and I told her a little bit about you and why I was excited to have you on the show, and that I was preparing questions and everything, and she said, Ask her if they can hear us!
She really wants to know if they can hear us as they're going.
Martha Jo:
Yeah, I 1000% believe they can. And I 1000% believe the conversations we have in the room in front of them can help or hinder.
So if we, we had a guy with us a couple weeks ago who wanted to make sure his wife was cared for. They'd been married for 55 or 57 years, and so I purposely started a conversation with the children about how they were going to care for their mother, and then purposely started a conversation with the mother about how she was going to be cared for by the children, so he could hear all that. And he died later that night.
Did the same thing with another couple who had been married for a long, long time, and she was 87 and hadn't decided where she was going to live. And I started asking her questions in front of him and every once in awhile, I'd holler, Did you hear that? Did you hear that?
He hadn't been talking for a couple of days. And somebody probably would walk in and think I was nuts. That he couldn't hear all that. And we've surely had doctors come in and say, They're not in their bodies, they can't hear.
I don't believe that at all.
I believe that the people who are dying, by and large, make a decision when they're going to go. They pick the moment, if they can. They decide who's going to be in the room or not. And I have seen it again and again and again, waiting 'til that very last person pulls up in the parking lot and they walk in the door and they're gone a minute later. Or they wait until somebody goes to the bathroom or goes to the kitchen, which is 500 yards away, and they go and come back and the person's gone by the time they get back.
It's energy. It's energy. And what kind of energy they want or need in the room, and who they want or need in the room, and who they want to protect or not. Who can hold the space for them?
The 26 year old, died of colon cancer. The day her mother got a colonoscopy was the day the woman chose to die. And she, we called her mother that morning and her mother was all dopey and couldn't drive over and there was another woman at our place who had connected really, really well with Tai and very much a mother figure and Tai was restless and we, you medicate as much as you can medicate and sometimes there's still a restlessness. And as soon as that woman walked in and started stroking her brow, that child calmed. It was amazing. And very soon after that, she died.
She didn't want her mama there. Her mama was taking care of her babies, and her mama was taking care of herself. Very headstrong, neat, neat, neat woman.
But I'm, yes, tell your mother, Yes they can hear, and how kind of her to offer that reassurance to her person as he was leaving.
Slade:
Yeah.
Martha Jo:
It's a good thing.
Slade:
I think that's one of my biggest takeaways from this conversation is the idea of, we hear that so much. That they're hanging on, and that they don't want to let go because they're anxious about things that they're leaving unsettled. And to actually, to settle that in their presence so that they can overhear it, or that they can just feel on some level that some of those things that they're anxious about are being taken care of, I will remember that.
I will remember that and that will change how I handle that kind of situation, for sure.
One thing I really love to ask people on the show is, what do you think is missing from the conversation about dying?
Martha Jo:
What a great question.
We're at a really tenuous point in our American history, about how we are going to care for our dying in the coming years. There are 10,000 baby boomers a day turning 65, and in the next 15 years, we're going to have a plethora of people who are sick and need help and the way we operate now, we're mostly medical and a little bit holistic. And I think what's missing is how we were 50 years ago, but we need to innovate and re-engineer that, not 50 years, probably 75 years ago, when people died at home and we knew what to do. And we knew when somebody was dying, that it was okay to let them go. And we knew how to sit and be present and hold space.
That doesn't happen so much anymore because people get sick, they go to the hospital. We send them to rehab and then they get sent to hospice. There's a missing link of how to be present with somebody, and I think that's a vital conversation we need to start having again.
Slade:
What, if you could change something, what would you change about end of life care?
Martha Jo:
I would enhance palliative care in our country.
Palliative care and hospice care often get lumped together and they're different. Palliative care is about alleviating suffering. And if we can get more people who have chronic illnesses with palliative care people earlier, I believe that would help the way people die and help them die better. Because we would be talking sooner rather than later, and waiting 'til that crisis happens in the hospital, or you know, however it happens.
Somebody falls down and hits their head. Do we put them on a ventilator for the rest of their life, or do we let them go? And what have they said? And having those conversations with the family, or having them with your chosen family, having them with your friends, about what you really want, and bringing in the people who are wiling to stand toe-to-toe with the so-called experts, many of them are, I say so-called because they're not experts on you. You are an expert on you and you need to let the people around you know what you want so you can express those, or they can express those wishes when you need them expressed.
Slade:
Mmm...
In addition to your book, Signposts of Dying, is there any other resources that you would recommend for someone to go check out?
Martha Jo:
Yeah, there's a really beautiful book by Frank Ostaseski, who was Buddhist, who started Zen Hospice in San Francisco. His book is called The Five Invitations, and I think there's words after that, but you'll be able to find it with that. Really beautiful book about dying and dying well. Beautiful stories.
What else would I recommend?
There's a beautiful book called, When Breath Becomes Air, which is about a surgeon who finishes medical school and then finds out he's got cancer and how he grapples with that and how his family grapples with that. It's a really beautiful book as well.
I'll think about some others.
Slade:
Yeah! I was going to say, I kind of put you on the spot with that question, but absolutely you can send me some things after the fact. I'm sure as soon as we hang up you're going to be like, Oh, I should have said this!
Martha Jo:
Oh yeah, Here's five more things...
Slade:
So everyone can check the show notes and we'll have recommended resource links from you.
I wanted to throw in one. It just kind of came to me. But, the novelist, Isabel Allende who wrote House of the Spirits and a lot of fiction. She's, I think, Columbian. She wrote a memoir called Paula that is about the death of her daughter from cancer at a really young age. Like in her early 20s. And she talks about, I know it sounds, all this stuff sounds depressing, yet when you read it, it's such a beautiful reverent articulation of the experience and I remember, you know, her talking about what it means, the honor of being present when someone comes into the world and when they leave it.
Martha Jo:
Yeah.
Slade:
It gives me chills thinking about it. So if there's anybody, especially who has lost someone recently, and they're looking for something to kind of talk them through the beauty of that, I definitely recommend that book and I'm going to stick that in the show notes too.
Martha Jo:
Yeah, that's a good one.
Slade:
What's next for you? What's on your horizon?
Martha Jo:
The next thing for me, I'm going to start teaching people who want to engage more in death and dying work. I really, the way we're set up right now in this country to care for our dying is not going to be sustainable in 15 years. So part of what I want to do is to start to teach people. There's a number of folks who are doing doula training, which is from the birth doula movement. And they've transferred that to dying. And there are many, many similarities.
So I'm going to start doing that and doing some apprenticeship work at Abode. Bringing people to Abode so they can be with our people and see that they're people first and dying second, and think about their own life and ways to live meaningfully. Because I think, at the end of the day, we are all going to die. And how are we living now and how do we want to live? So helping people investigate that and move into more of that.
And I want to do the same.
Slade:
That's a big job and I'm glad you're doing it.
You know what? Somebody may hear this and that may speak to them and they may be called to do that because of your conversation .
Martha Jo, it's been really wonderful capturing your perspective on something, you know, we talk so much about the veil on this show, we're often on the other side of it. So to get to capture your impressions from the side where you're at, the sort of threshold, is really cool.
Tell everyone where they can go to find you, if they want to read more about you.
Martha Jo:
So my personal website is marthaatkins.com and then Abode's webiste is Abodehome.org and you can find out all kinds of stuff about those places.
Slade:
Wonderful. That was fantastic, Martha Jo. Thank you for coming on to the show.
Martha Jo:
Thank you.
You have got such a radio voice. It's awesome.
Slade:
Mine is??
Martha Jo:
It is! It's brilliant!
Slade:
Oh, that's sweet. Thank you. That'll be cute. That's a good way to end it.
If you feel like you’re being held back by fear of judgment, and ego, and what other people might think of you, I have a vision I want to share with you. It’s kind of a mini visualization exercise that will hopefully help free you, as it did me, to do your true work in the world.
HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses
Get an intuitive reading with Slade
Automatic Intuition
BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits Edit your pledge on Patreon
I share some personal memories about a trance channeling event I attended and how the remarkable message I received affirmed for me that I was supposed to follow this path, writing and speaking about spirituality, and ultimately becoming a professional intuitive.
MENTIONED IN THE SHOW SpiritLite.com Dr. Meg Blackburn-Losey
CONNECTED EPISODES Ep 35 - About Channeling with Frank Butterfield
Ep 01 - The Origin Story: Part 1
HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses
Get an intuitive reading with Slade
Automatic Intuition
BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits Edit your pledge on Patreon
Frank W. Butterfield is a Master Channel who has been working with individuals and groups since 2009 to help his clients remember who they are, in truth. First learning to channel in 1990, Frank has worked both in and out of the corporate world. He has discovered that the best way to live his own life is to allow the Universe to sort things out for him but always remembers that your mileage may vary. Having traveled extensively most of his life, he currently resides in Daytona Beach and has no interest in racing cars or riding motorcycles, but does love the beach.
WE TALK ABOUT: …channeling, Communion of Light, Paul, chakras, the difference between mediumship and channeling, Edgar Cayce, Jane Roberts, Seth, Ester Hicks, Abraham, the distinction between channeling and deep trance channeling, intuitive development, psychic readings, the difference between willingness and ability...
BOOKS MENTIONED: Opening to Channel by Sanaya Roman and Duane Packer
Out on a Limb by Shirley MacLaine
Seth Books by Jane Roberts
Oversoul Series by Jane Roberts
A Course in Miracles by Dr. Helen Schucman
Ask and It Is Given by Esther and Jerry Hicks
This Morning, Over Here: A Memoir That Never Happened by Frank Butterfield
GUEST LINKS - Frank Butterfield FrankWButterfield.com
Communion of Light
HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses
Get an intuitive reading with Slade
Automatic Intuition
BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits Edit your pledge on Patreon
TRANSCRIPT INTRO
Thanks for listening to the Shift Your Spirits podcast.
I’m your host Slade Roberson.
For eleven years, I’ve been a professional intuitive and the author of the blog Shift Your Spirits, where I try to write about spirituality with fewer hearts and flowers than most New Age blather.
I also mentor emerging intuitives, psychics, and healers in a program called Automatic Intuition.
Today I have an interview with Frank Butterfield about channeling. What channeling is, how to do it. What it means to be a channel, and what to do if you think you might be one.
I love all my interview guests and all their segments are special for different reasons. But I must say, I did personally really dig the middle of this interview with Frank. I guess I should say he brought through a message that really resonated for me in that moment. I felt like he was channeling for me. I asked the question I sometimes ask guests, about what message he thinks is missing from the New Age conversation, and he went off about giving up what you're trying to get.
I can’t even paraphrase it or repeat it...
It’s a real twist on the concept of “surrender”— it's bad ass and down to earth and yet conceptually elevated.
Be sure and listen for it.
And, of course, as always, there’s an oracle segment at the end of the show.
So be thinking about a question or a concern you have. Hold it in your mind, and I’ll come back on, after the final links and credits, and leave you with that extra message.
BEFORE I FORGET
I'd like to say a quick thank you to Angela Brophy and Tina Whisnant, my newest supporters on Patreon.
I appreciate all of you who have pledged your support and I’m really excited to see the new names each week. It demonstrates that you’re enjoying the show and want it to continue. That’s very encouraging to me, so thank you.
Listeners who support the show on Patreon can access bonus Q&A episodes, where you guys send in questions, I record answers to them, and they go out to patrons of the show exclusively. There’s also a level of support with a free guided meditation "Messages from Your Spirit Guides."
To find out how you can become a patron, support my time in producing this show, and access the extra bonus content, please go to patreon.com/shiftyourspirits
This week’s interview with Master Channel Frank Butterfield is a nice length, so I am going to cut my personal intro here. Let’s listen to Frank:
INTERVIEW SEGMENT
Frank:
Well, my name is Frank Butterfield and I am a Channel, first and foremost. I've been doing that since 1990, although I've done a lot of other things. And I also am an author. I've published 19 novels and 3 non-fiction books that are based on my channeling work. I live in Daytona Beach Florida, right at the end of the road and go to the beach as often as I can. And have a pretty wonderful life. It's pretty quiet and I'm really enjoying where I'm at.
And I'm also really glad to be here.
Slade:
Thank you for being here.
So what is channeling, for somebody who's never heard of that before. What is it and how do you do it?
Frank:
Well, the way I do it, and it's a good question because there's a lot of different ways that people define channeling. But the way that I do it is I basically sit. I allow an energy, what I call a broader, non-physical perspective, to come through and sit in me. And then it speaks through me. And so communion of light is sort of the name that's used to describe what's going on and then the energy, the voice that talks through me, has a name called Paul.
That theoretically is supposedly connected to Saint Paul, formerly Saul of Tarsus, but I don't really put a lot of stock into that. But in any event, it is very distinct. It speaks in a very different voice than I do, although our voices are now more similar than ever before. But now that I'm much more used to it and have been doing it for a long time, but the way in which they talk and I do speak of them as plural, with other people, it's very different than the way I do.
They get away with a lot of shit that I wouldn't dare let myself do.
But essentially, channeling is, for me, is just literally sitting inside of myself, not reaching up or out, but sitting inside myself and opening up something that then comes down into me and then moves through me. If you want to talk about chakras, what I'm doing is sitting in my heart chakra and then letting my throat chakra be open. And that's all that it is. It's really simple.
It's very simple now. Of course it wasn't simple at the beginning. But that's what it is.
What it isn't is mediumship. I can do mediumship. I don't like it, but basically what mediumship is for me is there's an energy that sits on my right and sort of whispers in my ear and then I relay what they're saying to whoever the mediumship experience is for. I haven't done it in a long time and I don't really have any desire to do it. There's lots of really great mediums out there.
But mediumship and channeling are not the same thing. Mediumship I like to consider to be sort of on the 6th chakra level. So it's more of a psychic experience that involves personality to personality interaction. Channeling the way that I do it is more of a 7th chakra perspective, where it's about a broader perspective, narrowing itself down through me. Whereas mediumship is very peer-to-peer, and channeling the way that I do it is a little bit different than that.
Slade:
Okay, so how did you discover that you had the ability to do this?
Frank:
Well, I don't know that... that's a really good question.
The way I found out how to do it was that I was working at a metaphysical bookstore that is sadly closed, called Fields Books, on, that was on Polk Street in San Francisco. And they had a book there that they were selling called Opening the Channel by Sanaya Roman and Duane Packer which is still available and I highly recommend it.
And I bought it, took it home and basically over the course of one afternoon, I don't recommend this, I sat down and kind of went through all the processes as fast as I could. And by that evening, something was talking through me. It was really difficult but it happened and it's... you know what's interesting is, it's not so much an ability as it is an interest. and I believe that's true about anything at all.
No one really has innate abilities but people cultivate ideas because they're interested in them. And then they just get better and better at them through practice or through repetition or whatever it may be.
Slade:
Okay. So when you were saying that you were aware that something was speaking through you, so were you in a trance when this happened or were you consciously aware of it?
Explain the distinction there in your awareness.
Frank:
Well my exposure to channeling prior to that was through reading the words of Jane Roberts and seeing the made-for-TV movie Out on a Limb that was a Shirley MacLaine project based on the novel or the non-fiction book she wrote, and they filmed two different channels and those two different channels actually sort of represent the distinction that I was talking about a little earlier.
One of the channels was more of a medium, and one of the channels was more of a sort-of broader perspective sort of person. But in any event, one of them obviously went into a very deep trance and the other one sort of went into a lighter trance. Jane Roberts went into a very deep trance apparently from the way it was described in the writings. As did Edgar Cayce. Who's another Channel who predates Jane Roberts.
But I, when I first was doing this, I was in - it was like I was in a hypnotic state. I was aware of what was going on, but I had nothing to do. And my job was to be open, which at the beginning was difficult but became easier and easier.
Now I can move back and forth very easily between the two states. I've never really been a deep trance Channel and I don't have the personality for it. I just kind of refuse to do anything where I'm absent from the process.
But I can also say that when I am channeling, there are plenty of times when I have no idea, I know that specific words like 'the', 'brown', 'dog', I know that 'the' and 'brown' and 'dog' were said, but I don't understand why they were said, I don't know what that meant, and I've learned not to care. That took awhile.
But it's not a deep trance. There's some people who can do that and they're very good at it and they just kind of get knocked out. Sanaya Roman talks about that in her experience that she, her first experience channeling was she turned on a tape recorder, she fell asleep and then she woke up 30 minutes later and it was 30 minutes of words that she didn't remember. She just thought she was asleep the entire time.
I've never had that experience, but I do sort of fade away and then come back. And time moves in a very different way than when I'm doing something like this, where I'm very aware of the passage of time. A long period of time will go by and I'll think it's only been 10 or 15 minutes.
Slade:
How long was it from the time that you first tried this in San Francisco, sort of as an experiment How long was it from the time that that happened until you met Paul, or the Communion of the Light sort of revealed itself?
Frank:
So there's kind of three stages.
So from 1990 to the winter of 1991, into '92, I was channeling this voice that called itself Raji. Which is an Indian first name. And it said very clearly, I'm here to help you get started and then when we're done I'll be gone and I'll move on.
And the winter of '91, '92 I lived in Provincetown, on the end of Cape Cod, and I was with a group that was reading A Course in Miracles, and one night, we were playing a round with the Ouija board, and the Ouija board said, Tell Frank to channel.
So I opened up and this very different thing happened. A very different voice and Raji was gone and has never been back.
So from that, I guess it was actually like January of '92 until June of 2007, I was channeling this sort of indeterminate, just very broad, non-personality driven energy. Which I now recognize was the Communion of Light. That's who they were.
But that was where I was in my ability, in my interest in allowing them. I was kind of going around saying, I'm kind of a Channel, I should be a Channel, I should be doing this but I'm not really doing it. And then in that interim time, in those 15 years, I went from being a person who kind of bopped around the country, to getting a real job and becoming really successful really quickly. And then all of a sudden remembering that I didn't have to do that anymore.
And so I had a real job for about 10 years, and then I just quit. And I walked around for about a year, year and a half, saying, There's something I know how to do that I probably should be doing, but I don't know what it is.
And it was channeling.
And I remember having lunch with a friend of mine, saying, I know there's something that I do that I'm supposed to be doing. And I'm going to come back to you at some point and say, You know what that thing was? And that was right. It was a, like a Thursday night, and a friend of mine, my roommate and I had gone to see a movie, we came back to the apartment, we sat down and I just said, I think I'm supposed to channel for you.
It just all of a sudden occurred to me.
And so when I opened my mouth, this more focused version of what I had been doing over the previous 15 years appeared. And kind of gave itself a definition in a way that it didn't have before. And I had a more, not really a personality, but a more clear notion of what it was. And it began to speak and then in that first night, it, or they, introduced themselves. They were like, Frank should do this and this and this, none of which I did.
And then they, when it was kind of over with, when they helped my friend with a question about his career, and which apparently was very useful, because he actually did what they suggested and then they said, Okay well now we're going to show you how to be a medium.
And I was like, Okay, whatever.
And they brought his mother in, who I'd never met, and then gave, you know, very, like all good mediums, they gave three points of identifying information that I had no idea about but that gave my friend the clue that there was something going on. And we even had what the Spiritualists would call a demonstration. There was an aroma of roses went through this room that was completely sealed off and just had air conditioning on. And it was pretty amazing.
And I did that, like I said, I did that for a little while and then I was like, That's not really me.
And I now realize what they were doing was saying, Okay here's a little bag of tricks that you think you're supposed to have. Why don't you go play with them and see if you like them. I didn't like any of them. So I just became a Channel.
And that was, I'm sure this is on your list of things to ask me, but that was about two months before I talked to you.
Slade:
Oh! Okay, yeah.
I mean one of the things that I'm enjoying about this conversation, for the record for those who are listening, I have known you and observed from outside the experience, but I was curious about, I've heard these stories too, so I'm sitting here putting it all together as a timeline.
So you're saying this is where I came in to knowing you.
Frank:
Yeah. That's exactly right.
Slade:
Okay, so keep going. This is fascinating.
Frank:
So I did that for a couple months. I was just kind of trying to figure out what to do with my life and then I kind of came to a crisis where I was trying to understand what it meant to be a Channel. Did it mean I was going to have to give up myself, which is what I had always believed. I think that's why I always dabbled with it. That I was going to have to give up my personality, my sense of self.
And I had had a project at the time where I was interviewing people and I can't even remember what the topic was, but you were one of the people that I interviewed. For some, like it was a podcast or, I don't know what I was doing. But somehow that's how I got in touch with you. And then about a week after we talked, I called, I texted, I don't know how I got in touch with you, but I just was like, I need help, I'm having a nervous breakdown.
And you kind of walked me through, No, there's - I don't remember what you said, but what i got out of it was, there's you as the Channel, and then there's you as Frank. And you're, it's just like a job. You're going to put on this hat, and when you're done with the hat, with the job, you take off the hat.
And I was like, Oh, yeah, of course!
And so, what's interesting is, what has actually happened is that through the channeling and through what I've been doing since then, I have become more of myself, not less. And I have become more at peace with different idiosyncratic aspects of myself and different parts of my personality and everything is sort of folded in together, instead of being these wildly disparate parts that I was really scared of. And now everything is more integrated.
So it's exactly the opposite of what I was afraid of. So that's how we met.
And then the next significant thing that happened was that I, about a month after we talked, at this point I was living in Dallas, which is itself a weird story because I had lived in Austin and nobody goes from Austin to Dallas. Everybody goes from Dallas to Austin. Because they're like, I'm tired of living this big city life. I'm going to go some place where everybody's cool.
So I did the opposite.
But in doing so, I met a group of people in Fort Worth, of all places, who were Abraham devotees. And Abraham, I'd always been like, I'd seen the books, I'd never picked one up, and I thought, Oh Abraham, Sarah, Esther... I get it. Bible, bible, bible. This is just more of that old new-thought crap where everything has to be biblically based. Of course I didn't read anything. I didn't know what they were talking about.
But it just - I was like, Eh, whatever.
So I go to this group in Fort Worth and then there's going to be an Abraham workshop down in San Antonio. So there I'll just, as Abraham people do, completely, completely over the moon about this opportunity. And they're like, You have to go with us! And so I did. Even though I really didn't have the money. Somebody actually paid for me to go, which was really sweet.
So we get there and of course, being this group, we got there as soon as the doors opened. And so we then sat in chairs for an hour and a half waiting for the thing to start. Because everybody wanted to be right up front.
And we get in there and I'm just like, Okay, then suddenly, the room's filling up and it's time to start. And I suddenly became aware of the presence of Abraham as an energy. And it was just really obvious.
And then as soon as, the way I imagine is the way I saw it, was that up at the top of the room, there was like people waiting, like people waiting for the warehouse to open or the factory to open to start their shift. And they were all standing around smoking cigarettes and shooting the breeze. And then all of a sudden, the shift started and it all coalesced as a single energy right at the centre of the room.
I wasn't imagining this. It was literally what I saw. That's how i interpreted it.
And then as soon as that coalescing happened, Esther and Jerry, Esther Hicks and her husband Jerry, walked in the door. And Esther's the woman who channels Abraham. They walked in the door and we started.
The first part of the workshop was amazing. There were one after another after another of people asking questions and it was really, really amazing to sit there and watch Esther do her thing. Because I could see what she was doing. As a Channel, I knew enough about what I was doing already to see how she was handling the energy.
What was fascinating was a guy comes up. The last question of the first segment. So before the first break. And he's missing an arm, missing his right arm and missing his right leg. And he walks up and he sits down in the chair and he says, I want my arm and my leg back. Just like that. That's literally his opening question.
And I saw Esther kind of pop out and look around at the room, be like, How the hell am I going to do this? Which I very much recognized. And then she popped back in.
And then Abraham began to do something that I'm now very familiar with, and was kind of like, helping him begin to open up to possibilities instead of seeing a big leap from a missing limbs to i want to have the limbs back, began to walk him through the ideas of what could possibly happen. And a lot of it was about being willing to be like the coolest guinea pig who tests out new prosthetics, which I thought was amazing.
But it was just this really great conversation. When that was over with, because I didn't know myself like I know myself now, I didn't do this, but I immediately wanted to get up and drive back to Dallas. I did not want to stay for the rest of the workshop. But because I was there with this group of people and this person had paid for me to be there, I stayed.
What a friend of mine who was in that group said to me later was that, she said I thought you just looked so angry after that first break.
And I said, Well, I wasn't angry. I just was very uncomfortable. And what I ended up doing was I ended up getting all the way to the back of the room. I wanted to be there because I felt like I was doing homework. Or studying something. And I wanted to be in the room but I didn't want to be in the room. And I went all the way, way, way, way into the back.
And that's the only Abraham workshop I've ever been to and I would never go to one again. I might change my mind and it's not because the work isn't amazing. It's just because it's not me. And it's not for me.
But the next thing that happened after that was about six months later after I was still kind of dabbling a little bit and hadn't really said, Okay I'm a Channel and this is what I do. I end up back in Austin and the way Communion of Light describes this is, the way Paul describes this is, that they sent me to Abraham school, which, that's really the best way to put it.
I just suddenly had an idea one day and I realized there was this law of attraction group in Austin that was kind of sitting there with nobody running it. And I had been part of that before I moved to Dallas. And I was coming back to Austin so I thought, Oh great, I'll just take over this group. It was one of those meet-up groups. We'll just study Ask and It Is Given, which is the big Abraham book.
And so I did, I don't know why it came to me, but I just set up this little agenda, something I would never even normally do. And like we're going to do chapters 1, 2, 3, first week and then 4, 5, 6, and then 7, 8, 9. And I stood up at the front. I explained, we went through that book. And then we went through another book. And then we did the first book again. And then I set up the second group. And then both of the groups ended at the same time the study of whatever books we were looking at, after about six months. And then I was done.
And by then, I knew it felt better to just leave. And that's when I started kind of my practice that I do now and the work that I do now.
And that's when clients began to come to me and began to show up. And I started being able to make a living doing what I do now. And that was - what was also fascinating about that is that at the beginning, the first year or two I got lots of people who were saying - well there were two groups. One group would say, I've gotten everything from Abraham I can get. And so now I've found you and now I feel like all of my questions are being answered. Because that is the difference between Paul and Abraham's. Paul directly answers the questions that people ask whereas Abraham will take the questions and use them as examples for teaching. And Paul will say very clearly we don't teach. We remind. And that's a big part of what they talk about. And they're always kind of reminding people that that's what they're doing.
So that was one group.
But then there was another group much smaller. Who would kind of show up, they would sort of pop their head up somewhere and say, You're just copying Esther.
I'm like, you need to come and see that this is very different.
But it took me awhile to be able to realize that I was right when I said that. Because I would, every time someone would show up to say that, I would sort of think, well maybe they're right. Maybe I'm just mimicking. And then I would ask people who'd been to every single Abraham workshop since 1993 and say, Is this the same?
And they would say, No, it's absolutely different. The words are enough the same to where I don't get lost. And that's when I begin to realize, Oh, that's why I went to Abraham school. Was so that I would learn that language.
So that happened for the next couple of years and then by about 2010, I was in my element and I was rocking and rolling and that's what's been going on ever since. Getting better and better, but you know, pretty much...
Slade:
Yeah, so currently, because I've been to live events like what you describe. The trance channeling event that I went to was a much smaller, like a circle, kind of thing. 20 people. It wasn't a full-on conference hall kind of experience. But channeling is obviously different than what most people expect from a psychic reading and so...
Frank:
Yes.
Slade:
Just kind of describe for people how do you do your work? How do your followers or clients experience these messages? How do you put them out there?
Frank:
Well, the way people - I don't know how people find me. Because I don't advertise. They just show up. And that's perfect. That's exactly right.
But in terms of how I interact with people or how they interact with Paul, I do have, well, I guess I have three different types of experiences that people can get into. First there's a thing that's been going on since 2010 called the Village, which is just a series of weekly calls that happen twice a week now, used to be three times but now twice, and you just, it's open. You bring whatever question you have and there are people from all over the world who come into those calls.
The other thing that I do, and I don't do it every week but almost every week is, I have a Saturday through Friday series of conversations that happen at the same time every day. 10am Eastern Time. And people come in with - there's a little, it's on a specific topic and there'll be a 10 - 15 minute initial sort of conversation about it and then time for people to ask questions about it after that.
And so that's - they can, that's one way of sort of coming in a little bit closer because those conversations are much more intimate and they're very specific. So people come in with specific questions on a specific topic, like it might be, their self-image, body, creativity, their work, money. Any... It can be, or just general metaphysics, sometimes.
So there's that.
And I also do private sessions where people can talk one on one.
One of the strategies, for lack of a better way of putting it, that I've developed is, I kind of keep the private sessions over to the side. Because there was a period of time when I had what I like to call “looky-loos", who came in and would do one private session and they would not read any of the things I had written about what a session is like, and they would come in and be like, Tell me about my Aunt Esther.
And I'm like, ... did you... and Paul would basically read them the Riot Act and say, This is not fortune telling. This is not that. This is not mediumship. There are other people. Go to them. But if you want to find out about you in relationship to your Aunt Esther, whether she's alive or dead, we can talk about that. But we can't tell you about her because we're not talking to her we're talking to you.
And that, I began to realize... So now, in terms of pricing, if somebody comes to the website, you can book a private session, but it's going to cost a whole lot of money. And I do that specifically because I don't want people just coming in off the street doing that. I'd rather them go in through, either the Village or through actually the morning series calls. Because there it's a really good way to get exposed to the material. I also have tons of samples. I don't even know how many hours now. But lots and lots of them. So there's lots of opportunities to sort of hear what it's like and then decide if it's right.
Because it isn't right for everybody. And I would not suggest that anyone who generally considers themselves to be a psychic or to be interested in intuitive development, a lot of the people you work with, that that's not going to be enough. You're going to want to have something a little bit more because I don't like to say that this is advanced material, because it isn't, but we talk a lot about things that, as far as I know, are not being discussed anywhere else. But then again, I don't really know because I don't pay attention to what anyone else is doing.
But I do know that Paul is very direct with people and is very clear and that's not for everybody. Because some people, and I do hold you responsible for this by the way, Slade.
Slade:
Why?
Frank:
Because you're - that thing that you say. Where 83% less flowers or something.
Slade:
Oh, okay!
Frank:
It comes from that. It literally comes from that. Because there was something that, there was like the first time I ever saw your website and I saw that, it was like a bell went off. And I thought, Of course! That's actually what makes what I'm doing very different. Because there's no soft pedaling. It's not hard information. It's not scary information. It's just very direct. It's like, You are doing this and you can do something different. Which is very different than saying, Well, you know, some people do it in this way and then you could maybe think about doing it in that way. It's very direct. Gets right to the heart of the matter of whatever the person is bringing to the table.
Which I very much love. Because, to me, that's the most useful thing you can do. But it's not what everybody wants. And I wouldn't pretend to think that that would be right for any particular specific person. Only the other person is going to know. I would never know.
So that's why I like to kind of give people the ability to sort of float in and float out and see what they like and what they don't. And then if they want to go deeper, there's lots of other opportunities to do that.
Slade:
You'd be the perfect person to ask the question about what kind of message do you feel like perhaps it's something that comes through when you're doing these sessions with Paul and the Communion of Light. A message that you feel like is missing from a lot of other new age channels and I don't mean channel in the literal sense. I just mean any kind of platform that produces these types of conversations. This type of subject matter.
Is there something that you sort of want to put out there that you don't feel gets said enough?
Frank:
Well, if you want to hear, yes. There is one very specific thing. But it's kind of an assholey thing for me to say.
Slade:
That's alright.
Frank:
Okay. So it's that, it's basically - how much can I curse?
Slade:
You can curse all you want to. I'll put a little red E on the episode.
Frank:
Okay.
Stop. Fucking. Manipulating. The. Universe.
Stop trying to manipulate the Universe to give you what you want. It doesn't work. And I know you agree with me on this. Well, actually I don't know that. I suspect you do.
What I hear a lot of new age people saying is, Here's how you're going to convince the Universe to be on your side. And that's not the way it works. The Universe is absolutely positively on your side. In a way that you can't even begin to comprehend because there's no person who is on your side the way the Universe is.
Because every person has an ax to grind. And that makes them distinct from you.
That's part of the set up of physical reality is that there's a distinction between you and someone else. And the distinction is not the body but rather the intention that causes the body to happen. So the thing that really - it doesn't bother me. It's just like, there's a lot of, How can I massage the Universe, how can I convince the Universe to do what I want it to do?
You can't. You can't control it. But you can direct it. But directing and controlling are two very very different things. You can direct and say, this is the intention that I have. And then you have to stand back and let it happen. And you can't control it. And there's sort of an idea in the new age new thought arena where if I can figure out how to control my mind, control my body, control my events, control my circumstances, control my situations, control my relationships, then I'll get all the things that I want.
But that's impossible.
You literally can't control any of those things.
Slade:
Yeah...
Frank:
Because control is the illusion that we generate because we believe, and this is getting right to the heart of stuff Paul talks about, because we believe we live in a chaotic universe and we are supposed to be controlling things. It's not just something that people do who have a pathology. It's what you're supposed to do because otherwise you are going to get in a shitload of trouble.
Slade:
So what can we do instead? How should we orient ourselves away from that in another direction?
Frank:
Well my favorite thing that Paul says is, Give up now. Give up early. Give up often. Give up immediately. Give up constantly. Always give up. Always give up.
And that's another one of those new age things where people will come around and be like, Never give up! Hold on to your dreams.
No. Actually, give up your dreams. Not because you're now giving them away and you're never going to have them again. But because the Universe actually... it's not like the Universe ever forgot that you had a dream. And it's not your job to work on it. So the practical, most practical thing, in my opinion, is, and it's to be willing to let go of whatever it is that you're trying to get.
Slade:
Mmm...
Frank:
But the key there is willing. It's amazing how many people will be like, will say, I don't want to give up what I'm working on.
Well, you don't have to give up on it. Just be willing to give up on it. And the way Paul puts that is, still, somebody will say, Well, I'm intending to create this experience. And they'll say, Okay... First and foremost, are you willing to not have it? And of course, you know, even people who've been asked that question many times will say, No, I'm not. I really, really... I need it. I want it. I've got to have it. I've got to get it.
And then I say, Well, you're going to have a very hard time getting to it because as long as you NEED it, you're always going to be in a state of needing it. And means that it will be over there, not over here.
You don't accomplish NEEDING something by getting to it or making it happen. Even the people you think are doing that, even when you think you've done that in the past, that's not how it happened. It happened because you let go of it long enough for it to come to you. Because that's the way this is designed. Everything comes to you. Nothing is supposed - you're not supposed to be reaching out for anything. You can, and it's okay if you do, but let it come to you because everything is designed to come to you but not in the sort of Shirley Temple Good Ship Lollipop sort of way that most people think that means.
Like, well then everything will be exactly perfect.
No! Shit is still going to happen. But you need shit to happen. Because that's part of the physical experience. That's how you define the difference between one thing and another. Is by noticing, This is something I don't want. And so that gives you the opportunity to decide, well this is something I do want. But not want as in need, but want as in have a preference for or have an affinity for.
Slade:
Mmm...
Frank:
And as I've begun to kind of, for myself, really take a lot of this in and try to walk as much of the talk that comes out of my mouth as I can, what I've noticed is, my desire for stuff has diminished. Greatly.
Slade:
Mmm...
Frank:
Whereas I thought, I was always afraid for a long time that all of this talk how manifestation works in creating your own reality, I would end up being very greedy. But actually the exact opposite has happened And I find myself more delighted to be in the midst of what I'm beginning to realize other people are probably judging me for, which I don't really give a shit about, and I don't give a shit about it. They're like, You should be - and I say this very jokingly - you're as good as Esther. Why don't you have three houses and 15 gazillion clients and selling 19,000 best-selling books because you're not working, you're not doing what you're supposed to do?
No, I'm doing exactly what I want to do. And I don't want any of that. I thought I wanted it. Because it seemed like this very Good Ship Lollipop kind of thing that would be really great to have and then I would be in the middle of all of this whatever it is that she has and, I don't want what she has. I mean, I love that she has it. I think that it's fabulous. But I don't want it.
This sounds much loftier and much more exalted than I mean it. It's just, being willing to give up what it is that I thought I wanted has allowed me to discover what it is that I truly, truly, truly love. Which I feel like I've just barely scraped the surface of.
Slade:
That was awesome. I love all of that. I'm just taking it in. I'm glad I asked you that question. It was a last minute add.
Alright, let's switch gears just a little bit. There's somebody out there listening right, who feels like they might be emerging as a Channel. They're going through that experience that you were going through 10 years ago. So what do you recommend that they do first?
Frank:
Well... Oh that's a really good question. It would depend. And so I'll give a couple of scenarios.
The part... So the story that I've told about my own process is stretched out because I'm really stubborn. But I also had to kind of learn who I was. And that didn't happen 'til I turned 40. Really, truly. And that was 10 years ago.
So all that summer of 2007 stuff was right after I turned 40. And that's kind of when I became a real person, in my opinion. Because everything else I'd been doing was, I was trying to satisfy other people's desires, and that's - if you're willing to become a Channel, you're going to discover all of the shit that you've been trying to pull on yourself your entire life. You can't get away from it. And that's not for everybody.
But the simple most practical thing I would do is I would either get a coach, a mentor, someone else who's done it, or really go to the basics, which is that book. There's never been a better book written on this topic than Opening the Channel. It is - and if you do what they say in the way that they say it, and you do it in the order and in the amount of time it takes, not one day, but over a series of weeks into months, it will work.
You'll also discover what it is that you're really wanting.
When, back in that summer of 2007, there was a guy that I knew in Dallas who I went and had lunch with one day. And I was telling him about, it was after I'd been to San Antonio, and I was telling him about what I'd seen and what had happened and all that. And he, because his way of teaching is to be an asshole, so what he did was, he said, This is all about your ego.
And I was like, Well, yes but except for the part where I'd done this long enough to know that it isn't about my ego. I would be willing to walk away from it. I'm not trying to do this to become famous or become like, although I probably didn't say that at the time, but I was pretty aware of it at the time.
But what he was pointing out was, you're going to get to sit in all of your stuff and that's, it's not for the faint of heart.
And I'm not saying it's hard. It's actually, this is actually a very simple thing to do. It's just that it requires you to move into a place psychologically, mentally, energetically, where you're willing to let go of what you think is supposed to happen. And for me, that's what channeling - for me it's a daily practice. That's what channeling is. Is it allows me to sit and let something much bigger than me happen. Through me. And to be willing to not have to figure out what I'm going to say next or how I'm going to do it or how I'm going to show up. Just to be able to recognize the right people, right place, right time, right way, is what's going on. Always.
So the willingness to fall back into that and to be open to it is first and foremost. And when I say willingness, I don't mean ability to do that. It's WILLINGNESS. Because everybody has the ability to do that already. Organically. As a part of their nature. The willingness is where the rub is. If you're willing to let it happen, it will happen. But you don't - and it's not 100% willingness, it's just a little bit, in my experience.
So again, the practical thing is:
a. Get help. Don't do it by yourself. Even if that means just a book. Or.. because they also did a set of recordings, Sanaya and Duane did, on this, for that book. But get someone else to help you. And be aware of the fact that not mediumship, which is a very different thing, but channeling as in, just letting this energy come through you, is about being willing to let something bigger than how you perceive yourself happen. And it sounds really exalted and, Ohmygod, that's of course exactly what everyone and all people should be doing.
But it's scary as shit. Because when the rubber meets the road, you've still got your identity of yourself and how you are holding yourself together and what you're supposed to be doing to make things happen. And channeling will challenge that.
It's not difficult and it's not really as scary as I'm making it sound. It's just that it's like a very fast course of psychotherapy.
Slade:
Well it sounds like if you are listening to this and you feel like that is your path, the easiest thing for you to do as a human being, period, is to simply move in to it. And move through it. Right?
Frank:
Yeah. And it's not going to feel simple. But it is the simplest thing.
Slade:
I don't want to run out of time, and I could talk to you all day and we could just go and go and actually people could just go to you and listen to more of you. But I want to give you an opportunity to talk about - you have a new book that just came out today called, This Morning, Over Here: A Memoir That Never Happened.
Tell us about that.
Frank:
Well, briefly. It's a little novella that I wrote about a month ago as just something that came to me and it's a story about me moving over into what Paul likes to call a Parallel Reality. And I just wake up one morning and I have everything that I've ever wanted. But I don't have everything that I know. And it's sort of like, 24-hour period of walking through this reality trying to figure out who I am now, and it's - I wrote it, it's kind of in the tradition of Jane Roberts The Over Soul Seven series of books and taking some of these ideas and putting them into practice.
But hilariously, yesterday, because I knew I was going to release this today, I asked Paul, Okay, could this actually happen? Because I knew they were involved in this. In fact, they're quoted in the book to a certain extent. And they were like, No, you can't. You literally can't do that. And they explained why, in a lot of detail, much longer than we have here. But they said thinking about it is really helpful thing because being aware of the fact that every idea manifests, every idea manifests. It just may not manifest with you. Is a very powerful thought. And there's a lot you can do with that.
So I really enjoyed the process of writing the book. I really love the story for a variety of reasons. And it was one of those experiences where I, exactly what they said yesterday is exactly what I discovered. Which was, as I wrote the book, I could see the ME that moved over into this other reality started kicking ass a little bit more than I normally do. And I was kind of like, Oh, I like that! I like what's going on over here.
And it wasn't the stuff. It was what happened in my personality, how I adapted to it.
So it was fun to write. And it's a really quick read. It's only 24,000 words so it's maybe a couple of hours at the most. And I just had a lot of fun with it. And it's up on Amazon, so...
Slade:
Links in the show notes. I'll put a link in there for sure.
So, Frank, it's been really wonderful just to kind of hear your story laid out in chronological fashion like that. Tell everyone where they can go online to find you.
Frank:
So it's really easy. Just go to CommunionofLight.com and there's a bunch of things there. You can contact me through there. You can listen to hundreds or samples of things that I've done over the last 10 years, or last 7 years, really. Or you can jump in and enjoy some of the things we're doing. And get in touch! let me know you heard this conversation. I'd love to talk to anyone about the topic of channeling or whatever it is that comes up for you. And so, thats where you can find me. That's where I'm at.
Slade:
Well I feel really honoured to get to capture some of your time and wisdom today. It was really terrific. Thank you for coming on.
Frank:
Well thank you! It was a real pleasure and what a lot of fun as always talking with you.
OUTRO
Thanks again for listening to the Shift Your Spirits podcast.
For show notes, links, transcripts and all the past episodes
please visit shiftyourspirits.com
You can subscribe in iTunes or Stitcher or whatever app you use to access podcasts.
If you’d like to get an intuitive reading with me, or download a free ebook and meditation to help you connect with your guides
please go to sladeroberson.com
and if you’re interested in my professional intuitive training program, you can start the course for free by downloading the Attunement at
automaticintuition.com
BEFORE I GO
I promised to leave you a message in answer to a question or a concern you may have.
So take a moment to think about that — hold it in your mind or speak it out loud. I’ll pause for just a few seconds….right…now.
1…2…3…4
MESSAGE
Do it or don’t do it.
When it comes to purpose, at some point it’s about action and it’s a choice; it’s a decision you make.
But just keep in mind, if you’ve been given something really wonderful to share with the world, it’s not selfish for you to do so. It’s the exact opposite.
It’s terrible for you to withhold your gift.
Let us have it.
And I’ll talk to you later.
Laurra Warnke is a professional intuitive and author of the blog Intuitive Journal. She also works with the Akashic records to help you get clear on your soul level gifts and heal past life issues. She offers private individual readings and spiritual business mentoring.
Our conversation focuses on stepping out of the psychic closet, choosing a spiritual path, and what those repeating number sequences mean.
WE TALK ABOUT: ...Akashic Records readings, dark night of the soul, stepping out of the psychic closet, intuition, meditation, seeing repeating numbers, spiritual entrepreneurship, technology is spiritual, confidence, self worth, numerology, Chaldean numerology, repeating numbers, spiritual awakening...
GUEST LINKS - Laurra Warnke IntuitiveJournal.com
HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses
Get an intuitive reading with Slade
Automatic Intuition
BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits Edit your pledge on Patreon
TRANSCRIPT INTRO
Hey, thanks for listening to the Shift Your Spirits podcast.
I’m your host Slade Roberson.
For eleven years, I’ve been a professional intuitive and the author of the blog Shift Your Spirits, where I try to write about spirituality with fewer hearts and flowers than most New Age blather.
I also mentor emerging intuitives, psychics, and healers in a program called Automatic Intuition.
Today I have an interview with Laurra Warnke about spiritual awakening, stepping out of the psychic closet, and the meaning of repeating number sequences.
And, of course, as always, there’s an oracle segment at the end of the show.
So be thinking about a question or a concern you have. Hold it in your mind, and I’ll come back on, after the final links and credits, and leave you with that extra message.
I’m going to keep the intro short this week because I have a tiny cut on the very tip of my tongue which is making every word I say a little millisecond of torture. I’m also heading to Atlanta to see Tori Amos in concert.
So, let’s just dive in and listen to my conversation with Laurra.
Laurra:
I’m a professional intuitive and I wasn't always that. I've worked into that over the course of the years here and really through a lot of my own self healing and my own spiritual awakening. And right now I do akashic record readings and those have changed over the years where they're not quite as, let's just follow this one process. It's a little bit more of using pure intution, using numerology, astrology, along with akashic records.
And so they've kind of changed as I've grown, and I guess a little bit of the journey, getting started, back in about 2008, I went through what I would consider kind of a dark night of the soul. And it was kind of a rough year. It was a very rough year. And there was some points along the way where I just felt very, very empty inside and like, I had really lost my connection to spirit, connection to source, and well, where do you go now? How do you get through this?
And so it kind of began a process of self-healing, and working on a lot of issues of confidence self worth. Part of that was kind of having an inutitive awakening, a spiritual awakening, and I was starting to see repeating numbers at that point in time, and you know, what are those and where do they fit into the process?
And at one point, really just coming to the realization, Wow, what I was doing for work in the past isn't anywhere where I need to be and at the time, I was working as an office manager for a financial advisor, and you know, that's a lot of numbers, a lot of paperwork, and a lot of desk work, and there was just this feeling of such emptiness and I know a lot of people, you know, you go through periods where it's, you're just, you feel you're not in the right job so you start going down that process. Well I need a different job and well, you know, as it came to be seen, for me, that job didn't exist in the traditional corporate world and that was kind of beginning of building, starting to build my own business and I started my intuitive journal website in the end of 2009 and by 2010, I was going through your course and a few others and started doing readings professionally and just wanting to help people overcome that feeling of emptiness and... there is more and you can connect with more.
So I guess that's a little bit about part of my journey.
Slade:
Do you remember what it was like when you were on the other side of that decision and of course we hear the terminology, "stepping out of the psychic closet", right? Do you remember what it was like to still be in the closet? And sort of on the other side of making that leap?
Laurra:
It was utter and sheer terror when I actually had the realization like, Ohmygosh, is this really what I'm supposed to be doing right now? And when I tried to go back into that, it was unawareness. Just like... And that's I think that's part of that dark night of the soul that you go through is the breaking through of unawareness to awareness of, Okay I'm supposed to be over here not where I am, and there was a lot of sadness with it as well. And just a feeling of what I'm doing right now to fill myself up isn't what I need anymore. And so it was a very scary time but yet when you keep waking up every morning thinking about it and, you know, it becomes very compelling. It's like you need to follow that thread. You need to pick up that thread and keep following it.
And I think one of the biggest maybe turning points was before I'd even started my blog, I set down on the recliner, I had a digital recorder because that's what you recorded with back then, and I just started talking. And I recorded myself talking for maybe 45 minutes and all of what I had in my head I finally got out. And it was so, just refreshing and relieving to actually put it into words.
And I think a lot of people kind of sit in that, you know, where it's a very mental state and a lot going on but to actually start saying it out loud, and I mean I was saying it to myself. There was nobody else in the room when I did that. And after that, when I did that, it's like, Okay, I need to keep going with this. I need to go forward and that's when I started my blog and when I started Intuitive Journal, it was really just like, more along the thought lines of, If I'm experiencing this, others are too.
And for me, I felt very alone. Like there was nobody to talk to. I didn't have any friends in the spiritual community at that point in time and anybody that I knew in real life was definitely not on that same page at all and, you know, it makes you feel very, very alone at first.
Slade:
Let me ask you this when you're talking about the recording that you did. Was that more of a kind of venting the pain so to speak, or was it more like a declaration of your intentions of how you wanted to move forward?
Do you recall the content of that?
Laurra:
It was maybe a little bit of both, but it was getting out where I really stood on things. And so part of it was that venting, where well, No, I don't believe this anymore. I no longer buy into this and, you know, at that point I didn't have it all put together.
Slade:
So it was like a manifesto, in a way.
Laurra:
Yeah!
Slade:
Like you were just channeling this manifesto live in the room by yourself.
Laurra:
Yeah!
Slade:
Okay, that's cool.
Well how did that end up - did that kind of conversation that you were having with yourself, did it then become sort of what you were blogging about in the intuitive journal?
Laurra:
Yeah, it actually, when I started to break it down, when I went and listened to it, it really became a lot of the different categories that I started writing about. And anything from intuition or using meditation or the repeating numbers and it was like, my brain dump, I guess, for starting a website.
And, yeah, it was kind of interesting just - it started flowing!
Slade:
So there's somebody listening to us right now in the moment and from the future who is probably in that same state of mind. And we all have this version of our story, right? This sad dark night of the soul turning point story...
Laurra:
Right.
Slade:
We really do. We really do. And it's the very first episode of this podcast if anybody wants to hear mine. But, there's somebody listening right now who is nodding along, they're connecting with you, you're really mirroring who they are and where they are right now.
What advice would you give her?
Laurra:
It is a choice to step further down this path, down the spiritual path, doing intuitive work in any form and just to know that there are so many people out there cheering for you and supporting you and that, yes, keep going. Just doing what you can every day.
More people need to hear it. More and more and more, I mean, not that you necessarily want to talk about all the events of the world of the day but more people need that message. More people need the connection because I think so many people have forgotten their connection to spirit and we see some of these results when you hear it on the news, and it's needed.
Your voice is needed, in whatever form. Whether that's a blog or video or just speaking to, you know, friends and family.
One of the things I would say to somebody getting started: the whole stepping out of the psychic closet thing. You don't have to step out 100% out of that closet tomorrow. It can be a very gradual process. And for me, that was my process where there were points along the way where, Ohmygosh I can't step that far. I can't go that far. And so, it was maybe a little bit of a battle with what's in your comfort zone versus what isn't. But just know that each time you publish a blog post or you say something or you do something, each one of those is one of those little steps. And you know, you don't necessarily have to have, it doesn't have to be this big BOOM drop the bomb, you know, to all of your friends and family because usually when you're starting out, your confidence level isn't there to be able to support it. And so telling one person that you really can confide in. Maybe you tell two people. And maybe a year later, you tell more people.
So I think part of it is just keeping taking those steps forward where you are comfortable but always pushing yourself just a little bit to come out a little more and a little more and a little more. So I don't know, I hope that helps somebody out there.
Slade:
Well, and if I can add to that, I would like to say that your friends and family are not necessarily your clients or your audience.
Laurra:
Exactly. Yup.
Slade:
And I kind of had the realization that I was keeping myself from doing it or putting myself out there because I had these 3 or 4 imaginary people that I thought would disapprove of it or something. And they weren't even really my family. My family's pretty supportive, but I know that we all have this cluster of people that we think are going to judge us or you know, like give us the side-eye or whatever. And that really hangs in our minds eye or whatever.
But once I started doing it, I realized real quickly the crowd of people who wanted to hear what I had to say and were excited about it so completely outnumbered whatever that imaginary group of people is that I thought I was worried about, that it obliterated it. It was like, I'm not working for those people. Are you going to open your mouth and speak your truth because of these three people over here that have got their arms crossed, or for this crowd of 8000 people that's like, cheering you on, you know? It's really kind of, like you said, it is a choice and it becomes an easy decision in hindsight.
So I don't want to belittle it for anybody who is trying to make that choice, but I want you to know that there's more people on the other side of it than this list of people that you think will disapprove. By tenfold, you know?
Laurra:
Tenfold.
Slade:
And another thing too about the isolation. I've kind of come to believe that maybe we're dispersed through the population for a reason. Like if we all lived in the same town, it would be the coolest place ever, but the rest of the world would just be a nightmare. And I do kind of feel like maybe we're strung throughout the globe like nodes on a network and, in order for that network to be activated and to sort of wrap and enfold everyone, you are actually contributing your part. It's like you're lighting your little candle in the crowd. And that's really the choice that you're making.
Like you said, it's not - I wish that we could be like overnight hugely famous and everybody in the world would know what we're doing, but it's much quieter than that, isn't it?
Laurra:
Yes, definitely much quieter.
Slade:
What are some of the things you support - one of the things you do in your business is you support spiritual entrepreneurs, people who are trying to build their business and fulfill their calling and do this professionally. So what are some of the things that you notice people bringing you, that they seem to be the most hung up on?
Laurra:
Um... anything from publishing the first blog post to doing a video... I mean everybody has their points of, you know, we're almost panic attack: Ohmygosh I just can't go there, I can't do that. And yet maybe they're getting their word out in a different way. Some of the more current clients that I've worked with, it has been about adding an additional piece. Like they're doing the work, or they're starting to do the work and, for some people it is, it's about, Let's get your first clients, let's get your practice clients. There could be some hang-up right there and others are a little further along and maybe they're connecting in person and they want to bring in and do a website presence.
So that's a lot of the mentoring that I do. Is kind of like adding pieces in and for others, maybe they have the website but they have not built a newsletter and the thought of writing, you know, writing newsletters, publishing that... So it varies from person to person.
It's just like, it's all one more step. One more step forward.
Slade:
So you sort of just support people wherever they are in whatever they're missing from the mosaic, you help them kind of identify that and just do one thing at a time, add one more element.
Laurra:
That seems to be right now how it is working very well. And so, otherwise I think it can be very overwhelming starting out, and I do think that when you get... Building a website, to me, is kind of like a birthing process. You're birthing your baby and it's like, here's this creation of yours and sometimes getting involved a little too early in that process, sometimes you need to have thought through what am I going to be writing about, what am I going to do, and you've gotten a few pieces in place and okay, and then well, let's bring one more piece in. Let's bring one more piece in.
Slade:
I think a lot of people get distracted and I think some of the tools of business and communication and technology - all this stuff is amazing, right?
Laurra:
Oh yeah.
Slade:
It allows us to be everywhere in the English-speaking world at this moment and it's really pretty cool. And I believe that it's very spiritual. I think technology has a very spiritual element to it for that reason. It's a democratizing force over the long period of time that it will be with humanity. We're going through some birthing pains with that for sure, but one of the things I think people come to me and they have a little bit of everything, or they've studied a lot of different modalities and techniques and tools and maybe done different certifications.
One of my ways of approaching mentoring people is just to kind of treat it like, We all have this cool bag of stuff that we bring with us: life experience and wisdom, the practical things that we've learned how to do and the books we've read and, so to me it's about everyone's focused on all those little pieces, right? Like, I gotta have a YouTube and I gotta have a blog.
Laurra:
Right.
Slade:
And they're kind of overly focused on the little bits and pieces, whereas to me, the thing that makes your practice YOUR practice or your Purpose is it's kind of like the glue that holds all those things together. You're sort of the grout in the mosaic. You know what I mean?
So my goal is to always show someone how to connect all those things, and even in some cases, to disclude some of the things that they're doing. Like you don't need to do that. Somebody told you to do that but it's really not serving a purpose.
So one of my best pieces of advce for someone who is trying to do this is to actually follow where the clients take you. Like, you don't really go off in a vacuum and create all this stuff and then come back and be like, TADA! Here's what I got to hit you over the head with.
It's much more practical to put yourself out there, see who you attract in your practice and then look at the issues that are being brought to you. Look at the ways that you're mirroring the clients. Is there a pattern to who's showing up for you? It's almost like the clues to your Purpose are within the people that you attract in a way. They're sort of showing you who you are and what you're meant to do for them.
And so if you approach it as a, Here's this person, this is what they're presenting me with. What do I have to address that for them? What do I have to support them in their intention or to fix their problem, whatever it might be.
And if you just keep doing that, it actually defines a lot of what you do, right? I mean, you write blog posts that answer the questions that people bring you. You create videos and podcasts for the same reason. I mean a lot of what we're doing is we're answering questions that our collective audience brings us over and over again and that's how we decide what we talk about.
So I'm interested because I've known you since you started out doing this and that's a really cool perspective to get to see. What has evolved about your practice since the beginning? What's different about who you are now as an intuitive?
Laurra:
Um, you know, I would say, just confidence. And just seeing a lot of the patterns through many different clients. The same, a lot of the same issues coming through, just finding the thread and the patterns and as far as the modalities and toolkit, the big bag of tools, just keeping expanding on them. Mainly it's because I love it. I love learning a new tool. Is integrating all of those tools and rather than just hanging onto only one tool but to, you know, that does kind of start to become, Okay this is your practice. This is how you are doing healing work. This is how you're identifying problem situations.
So it has definitely matured, I guess would be the word I'd use. Matured over the years, where when you learn one thing at first, its like, Oh I have to hang on to that for.. and keep doing that. And okay, now take a breath, you can bring in this one and you can use this tool. And just even a deeper understanding of the tools.
Sometimes when you learn a modality, it's very cut and dry. Do it this way, x, y, z. This is step 1, 2, 3. But yet you don't necessarily maybe all the time get where did that come from? How did that develop? And that's where I kind of am at now, going just deeper into some of the history of some of these pieces, like how does it all connect? And I guess I sit at home and contemplate how does this connect with this? How does astrology and numerology and akashic records and all of these other pieces and your intuition and these other different divine energy streams... how do they all connect? How do they all overlap? And you know, it's kind of... I don't know there's a lot of different pieces to it but I just feel that there's this very large common thread.
Slade:
There's this one piece that you mention that I really wanted to be sure and talk to you about and that was the divine numbers, the repeating number sequences and this is one of my favorite personal topics and I actually always had intentions of blogging about it or writing about it a lot more because I have this one post that I did about the meaning of 222 and the meaning of 11:11 and both of those posts to this day get so much search traffic in Google that you would think my site was entirely devoted to that or something.
And I do have a numerology page that I'll link to in the show notes, but you've made this more of a focus topic in your practice than I have. So how did you become interested in repeating number sequences?
Laurra:
Well for me it was just seeing them myself and becoming very curious about them because like many, many others that are tuning in, you see them much more frequently than would be normal. When you're seeing one number or different combinations of numbers and you're seeing them 6, 7, 10, 15 times a day and yeah, it's there to get you to notice. That you're seeing them.
So it's like, Alright, now what?
So it's, I guess the way I would look at it is, it's taking you down a path. And just walking your spiritual path. So it's a very easy way for angels to connect with you. Just on your every day choices that you make. And aligning you with a higher vibration.
So for me, thinking of each of the numbers as an energetic vibration, I think is helpful. Where the vibrational energy of 222 is slightly different than 777 or something else that you might see. And really it's learning - where most people I think get stuck is, you see them, and it's really cool, Oh that's neat, and then you stop. And you go back to your regular life.
No! Hang on - they're there for a reason.
Yeah, you are supposed to be doing something. It IS a message from Spirit, from the Divine, and so, one of the things that I can say that helps, because it's different for everybody and that's, there's just not 100% one cut and dry answer for every one, is to really start thinking about, Okay, if you can go back in the last three to five minutes, or even the last hour, maybe even the last day, what were you thinking about that would've been something that would've been raising your vibration? And a lot of times, when I've noticed this happening, is when you're sitting there and you're just kind of daydreaming, like, Oh gosh, it'd be so great if I had a job that was closer to home, that I didn't have to commute, that would be just so awesome. Or maybe you want to take a, maybe it's vacation. So, you know, those are some of the more real life things that...
I see it kind of as two different levels. I mean it's spiritual communication but it's also help for you to take some next steps in your day to day life, and for me, one of the biggest times that I saw repeating numbers, it was when I was getting ready to leave my job. And so I was working full time before, and in June of 2011, I left my job in order to be doing this work full-time. In the two week period, maybe even probably a month, before I got up enough courage to give my notice, like the day before the day of, I saw any and all repeating number patterns like, about 40 times in a row. And it was like, Okay, thank you, thank you, thank you for the validation. I can do this! I can go turn in my resignation, and I did.
Slade:
Mmm...
Laurra:
So that's just one piece of it. But it is really a, it's there for you to hear it and, Okay, if you're thinking thoughts of starting your own business, of leaving one job for another job, the connection with the energetic vibration, it's like, Okay, maybe there's a better vibration at this new job, maybe you don't have to deal with as much stuff. And it's like, Okay so there's something that's a higher level of connection for you.
And just taking that time to really think through it.
Slade:
Yeah, I think there's kind - and this is my approach, you don't have to necessarily agree with it. I'm interested in seeing where your purpose, where your perspective, sort of adds to my understanding of this.
But one of the first things that I tell people, because it seems to me that the first question that I get is, What does it mean? Again, like overly focused on the detail of that individual number, whereas I feel like seeing the numbers at all is kind of a, it's like a flag, right? It's like somebody is -
Laurra:
Yup.
Slade:
- either flashing a light or setting off an alarm or ringing some bells or showing you these numbers, and it's meant to get your attention, first and foremost.
And then I also do the same thing that you said, which is I think, Okay wait a minute, what was I just thinking about?
Because you're right. You're usually in a semi-conscious state when you see these things. It pulls you out of a moment of daydreaming while you drive or something like that. And you see it on the dashboard or you see it on the, you know, car in front of you or whatever it might be. And it sort of takes you out of it.
So the first thing I try to do is capture what was just being flagged for me? It's like the Universe is observing the security footage of my thoughts and they have time-stamped that moment for some reason, right?
Laurra:
Yes.
Slade:
Right there.
And so the first thing I ask is, Okay, what am I thinking about when these, this phenomenon keeps occurring, because that's being flagged for me. That's telling me your own thoughts or your own wisdom right there. Pay attention to that dude. It's already there. It's coming through.
And then - but there is this other fun element right? Of interpreting them as this kind of Morse code from the beyond or whatever it might be.
So what - you have a free report with repeating number sequences and you define triple numbers from 0s to 999, and all the things in between. So - well tell us about that report, first of all. What's all in that?
Laurra:
Well it is a little bit of a just kind of history of kind of like we've talked of here, of how kind of it came to be for me, but just a little bit more expansion on each of the numbers and it's the, What do they mean for me? What am I supposed to do next?
And so, it is validation. Yeah, you are supposed to do something next. And maybe it's going to that workshop that you - What happens is, we shut down so many good things and I think of the repeating numbers are there to, Hey wait a minute! Stop. That was important!
Slade:
Yeah.
Laurra:
Like you said, it kind of gets bookmarked. Like, let's go back to that.
For example, you saw an advertisement for some type of a workshop. Oh, that would be really cool to attend. That'd be great. And then all of a sudden, reality, the I can't afford that, I can't get away from home, I couldn't take off of work, and you shut it down right away.
And I think sometimes it's like, Wait a minute! Stop! That was the path right here. Go to the workshop. Follow that path. So that's part of it.
But just to kind of also, validation that they're pointing you in a direction. They're pointing you in a better direction. A good direction. And just, it's like, Okay, time to wake up here.
Slade:
Do you have meanings for individual numbers in there? Like if somebody is seeing 444 and they want to know what that means, do you have sort of like a dictionary of meanings for those numbers?
Laurra:
Yes, I do. I have a short summary on each of the main numbers. I don't go into too much very specific number patterns, but for 111, 222, 333, all the way through 000, I have all of those and 11:11. So each has a nice little summary paragraph so that you can just kind of get acquainted with the energetic vibration of each number and like, Okay what area is this really connecting with? Alright, this is guidance and reassurance. Or this is just a big YES energy.
So that you can kind of use that and apply it to what you were thinking about shortly before you saw them.
Slade:
How did you go about discovering the meanings for those numbers? Is it something that you researched and compiled, is it channeled information? Where did you get the meanings?
Laurra:
A lot of it was just either my own intuition or my own channeling that I did. To just get some of the basics down and if I were to go and do them over, which I think I probably need to, I think just having this many years of understanding, I think would just kind of add a little deeper perspective to what I've already come up with.
Slade:
Interesting.
Well that's cool because then that means your resource is an additional set of wisdom. It's not just, you know, some - regurgitating something somebody else has already said about it. I mean, I know some of the big ones will probably have very similar meanings for whatever, but I like the fact that you're offering an additional YOUR version, your take on these, so that it's something if you're interested in this phenomenon, you can add that resource to all the stuff that you're collecting and bookmarking. Because I know I have a page of notes linking to different things that talk about this and discuss it.
And I think one of the things that's kept me from building more resources around it is because I really would have to go in and reveal those meanings for myself. There's two different ways you can approach that project. You could research and compile something, just like someone might do around color psychology. Or there is this other approach where you can actually add something to the canon, so to speak. And that sounds a little daunting to me. And I'm kind of a procrastinator about things that are daunting. But anyway, I'm very fascinated with this subject and I definitely wanted to hear what you had to share about it.
I'm interested in something else and I know people are going to notice this about you when they see your name in the title of the blog post, and on the podcast episode. You spell Laurra with two Rs, and that was a conscious decision. You actually changed the spelling of your name for an energetic numerological kind of reason, correct?
Laurra:
Yes, that is correct.
Slade:
Tell me about that.
Laurra:
When I was studying numerology and astrology, you're talking about some numbers are fortunate, some numbers are not fortunate. I had a name reading done, and it really wasn't coming up to a fortunate number and so this was one of the recommended numbers or vibrations here adding this extra letter in. There's different ways you can do it, but this was like, Okay.
So it was really trying it out. Because for anybody who's kind of thought, either they don't like their name or they just want it to resonate to a higher vibration or more fortunate vibration, like, Oh... and I'm sure if you've been anywhere around any, you know, there's a lot of people that have done this, and I guess I will say, even after this long, I'm, it's still difficult to step in to it.
When you are looking at changing the spelling of your name, there's different levels of it. One would be changing it on your Facebook page, changing it on your website. And then there's another level which would be changing it on your bills, your chequing accounts, the way you sign things. And then another level of it would be actually going so far as to change birth certificate information. And to be fully stepping into that number and for me, I've only gotten to a certain point of being able to do that and it's interesting.
So am I going to say it's like, Oh this is perfect! Everybody should go do this!
No. I think it's something to be really thought through as to whether or not you want to go that path. I think it's perfect for some people. And some people can embrace it immediately and then there's others probably more like me that's like, Hmm, got a few reservations. Not so sure. What am I missing? Am I not seeing this the way I should... Maybe I should be seeing this on a bigger picture?
So I don't know if that helps anybody down the way. Take your time with it. If you're thinking about doing it, take your time with it.
And one piece I will add in: if you're looking at traditional Western numerology, there's Chaldean numerology as well. When I was doing this, it was using Chaldean numerology and I'll let you look that up. There are differences in how things are calculated. So I think if you're considering doing it, that you are very sure of which avenue you are going down and why. And that's one of the things that can just help you step in to it if you do decide to change the spelling of your name.
Slade:
I think you could also think of this as your sort of pen name. Right? Like, there are a lot of people who use a different author name. There are people who use a different name for their spiritual practice than maybe what they do in their everyday lives. And there's lots of different reasons around that.
Laurra:
Yup.
Slade:
And something people ask me about a lot is, Well is that inauthentic in some way? Is that, kill the energy, for you to "use" a different name. And I actually think what you're talking about doing could be combined with the idea of choosing a name for yourself that represents this new path, or that represents this side of you, you know? Because I have a lot of other sides. I don't walk around all day long living and breathing intuition. It's partly my career and I'd like to think it's part of my Purpose to be doing this.
But there are lots of other parts of my personality where I'm not necessarily that person all the time.
Laurra:
Yup.
Slade:
And I was even thinking as you were talking about how you were using it for yourself personally, I was thinking, Well it sort of represents you in this mode, right?
Laurra:
Right.
Slade:
Like it could still be something - it's like a special costume that you wear, or a piece of jewelry that brings you power, or I think that maybe that would be an in-between way of approaching it. Maybe you don't change your legal name but maybe it becomes part of the decision around who am I going to be in this new aspect of my life, and what do I want to present?
I know people who've entirely changed their name as a part of a sort of willful change of their persona and who they are and how they see themselves.
Laurra:
Yup.
Slade:
So I think that could be an empowering part of it. And you could also get a name reading done if you're in that process and see where is it fallen out and maybe that will help you make a decision about a name that you're considering using.
Laurra:
Yeah. I have seen quite a few that maybe they've even dropped their last name and used a different last name as, like you said, a pen name in essence. But yeah, it becomes the persona. This is part of me in the business, and this is what I'm portraying.
I remember listening to a video of somebody who used a pair of glasses, special pair of glasses, and when they put the glasses on, that was their persona. And you know, they took on that role that they had developed of, Okay, when I put these glasses on, it represents me in this business mode. It was very interesting.
Slade:
Oh, I love that.
I have a friend who wears a tiara while she does her make up.
Laurra:
Oh I love that!
Slade:
It's kind of a similar concept. But yeah, like putting on this special aspect of yourself. Yeah, I like those kind of spells. I think that's very powerful personal magic to dabble in.
So what's next for you? Do you have any special projects that you'd like to do?
Laurra:
Well, I guess if I say it out loud, it must mean it's real!
I am looking into - I'm getting just the very basics of getting started doing a podcast and so I'm just, like I said, in the beginning stages of that. But you know, now that I've publicly announced that, I guess I've made it real. And I guess I will be continuing on ahead with that.
Slade:
Well that explains why I was compelled to invite you then!
Laurra:
Exactly.
Slade:
You were drafted by the Universe. I guess my email must've been, had a lot more weight to it than I realized. When I sent you that you were probably thinking, Oh no, they know about the podcast!
Laurra:
It really was.
Slade:
They're gonna make me do it now!
Listen, Laurra, it's been such a pleasure catching up with you and I would love to talk to you again and do more podcasting with you in the future. But tell everyone where they can go to find you online.
Laurra:
Okay so my website is intuitivejournal.com and yeah, if you head on over there, I have a free report on Repeating Numbers. And just kind of get you going, get you on the path and you can read a little bit more about me and the journey and everything. That would be the best place to start.
Slade:
That's terrific, Laurra. Thank you for coming on the show.
Laurra:
You are welcome. Thank you so much for having me. It's been awesome connecting with you again, Slade.
OUTRO
Thanks again for listening to the Shift Your Spirits podcast.
For show notes, links, transcripts and all the past episodes
please visit shiftyourspirits.com
You can subscribe in iTunes or Stitcher or whatever app you use to access podcasts.
If you’d like to get an intuitive reading with me, or download a free ebook and meditation to help you connect with your guides
please go to sladeroberson.com
and if you’re interested in my professional intuitive training program, you can start the course for free by downloading the Attunement at
automaticintuition.com
BEFORE I GO
I promised to leave you a message in answer to a question or a concern you may have.
So take a moment to think about that — hold it in your mind or speak it out loud. I’ll pause for just a few seconds….right…now.
1…2…3…4
MESSAGE
Give up. Anger jealousy what people think. Just stop trying to control the universe.
It’s like trying to grab a fish under water.
Surrender detach.
It’s nice - calm powerful serene - not to care in that desperate grasping way.
It doesn’t mean you can’t do all the things you want to do - but let them come to you.
You cannot miss what is yours, what is truly meant for you will find you.
And I’ll talk to you later.
Erin Pavlina is a professional intuitive, blogger and author who has written more than 800 articles on the topic of spiritual, psychic and personal development. We talk about intuitive counseling, past life readings, astral projection, and what happens on the Other Side.
MENTIONED IN THE SHOW: ...past lives, past life readings, astral projection, the Other Side, the veil, paranormal investigation, spirit guides...
GUEST LINKS - ERIN PAVLINA erinpavlina.com
The Astral Projection Guidebook by Erin Pavlina
HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses
Get an intuitive reading with Slade
Automatic Intuition
BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits Edit your pledge on Patreon
TRANSCRIPT INTRO
Hey, thanks for listening to the Shift Your Spirits podcast.
I’m your host Slade Roberson.
For eleven years, I’ve been a professional intuitive and the author of the blog Shift Your Spirits, where I try to write about spirituality with fewer hearts and flowers than most New Age blather.
I also mentor emerging intuitives, psychics, and healers in a program called Automatic Intuition.
Today I have an interview with Erin Pavlina about past life readings, astral projection, and the Other Side.
And, of course, as always, there’s an oracle segment at the end of the show.
So be thinking about a question or a concern you have. Hold it in your mind, and I’ll come back on, after the final links and credits, and leave you with that extra message.
BEFORE I FORGET
I'd like to say a quick thank you to Heather Becker, my newest supporter on Patreon.
I appreciate all of you who have pledged your support and I’m really excited to see the new names each week. It demonstrates that you’re enjoying the show and want it to continue. That’s very encouraging to me, so thank you.
Listeners who support the show on Patreon can access bonus Q&A episodes, where you guys send in questions, I record answers to them, and they go out to patrons of the show exclusively.
To find out how you can become a patron, support my time in producing this show, and access the extra bonus content, please go to patreon.com/shiftyourspirits
Today’s guest, Erin Pavlina is a professional intuitive, blogger and author who has written more than 800 articles on the topics of spiritual, psychic and personal development.
Just before the recording started, I took a moment to tell Erin about the impact she’s had on my own career as an intuitive and author.
Way back in 2006, I had no intentions of becoming a professional intuitive, but my guides were really pushing me to write and publish about my experiences with the paranormal. And at the time I was writing the first articles for Shift Your Spirits, I discovered Erin's blog which she had just launched. It was a huge synchronicity for me.
Erin set a real, tangible example for me to emulate — just as a blogger, not to mention as an intuitive. I had no idea what it would lead to… Back in the day, I wrote her emails asking for advice, and she was always encouraging, inspiring, and she treated me like a peer. I am forever grateful for that. She gave me a print interview on Shift Your Spirits 10 years ago.
So, for me, sharing this conversation is a full circle moment. Whether she knew it or not before today, I consider Erin one of my mentors.
INTERVIEW SEGMENT
Erin:
That's really cool. Yeah, I've heard that from some other people. And that, I think is the part that's most gratifying, is creating and inspiring people who also create the drops in the ocean and send the ripples out.
Slade:
Yeah.
Erin:
Because the more people we have doing this, the better.
Slade:
Right. It's kind of like nodes in a network and you raise a tower and a bunch of other people can connect to those as well.
Erin:
Exactly.
Slade:
Well for those listeners who may be discovering you for the first time, tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do.
Erin:
Okay. So I'm an intuitive counsellor. So what I do is I connect to my clients' spirit guides and get information that will help them on their path, whether that's career, relationships, finance, health, spirituality, whatever they want to ask about, their guides will answer.
So I consider myself a conduit. Just a relay. And I've honed my abilities to the point where I am able to clearly receive information from people's spirit guides and then I just pass it on and they kind of go from there.
Slade:
Awesome.
So you've written about a turning point in your life and I was referring back to 2006 and you've called it a kind of Emergence. So how did you become an intuitive? Where was the story, the origin, for you?
Erin:
So I was intuitive my whole life. You know, when I was four years old, I started to notice things. I would have premonitions. I would have dreams about deceased people coming to me and giving me information that turned out to be correct, and I kind of went through my life just having intuition for myself, and I never considered that I could do this for other people.
And one day I was watching a reality show, Beauty and the Geek, and my second cousin who I hadn't seen since he was a little kid, was on the show and I noticed that every time he came on the screen, I would hear a voice telling me things. Like, tell Josh I'm sorry, tell Josh it's not his fault.
I'm like, Who is talking to me?
And I really didn't understand what was happening because I certainly wasn't expecting it. But I started writing down everything I was hearing. And then when the show was over a couple of months later, I got in contact with him and I said, I don't know if you're into this stuff, but I gotta tell you what this voice is telling me.
And I told him everything that this female voice was giving me. And there was silence on the other end of the line. I'm like, Josh, are you still there?
And he said, I'm shaking right now.
I said, Why?
He said, Because I know exactly what you're talking about. I know exactly who you're talking to. My finacee had a suicide six months ago and everything you're telling me is stuff that I found in her suicide note, which I didn't share with any other person in the world.
And so we were both kind of sitting there going, Well... well... well... what is this??
And it occurred to me that I had been speaking to a deceased person. Then I thought to myself, If I did that once, maybe I can do it again.
So I started trying consciously to tune in to other people's deceased relatives. And I also discovered at the same time other guides that would come to me and that I could tell were not deceased people. They were spirit guides. And I just very boldly and courageously and with no other intent other than to help people, started passing along messages to people from their guides.
And that's really how it started.
Then I decided to start writing about some spiritual topics. Again, with no intention of it really turning into anything. And as I was talking about this thing with my audience, my growing audience, people started asking me to give them a reading.
I'm like, Well I don't know how to give a reading, per say. I don't know how that functions. But again, I thought, I might as well try. So I tuned in to my guides and I asked them for help doing this work and they taught me how to do it and I started doing this professionally in 2006.
And here we are.
Slade:
Wow.
It's so similar to kind of how it happened for me too. I thought, Oh, I'm just going to write about these experiences that I have and then all the people reading kind of drafted me and said -
Erin:
Exactly!
Slade:
... Can you connect for me?
Yeah, so I was like, months behind you, but also observing you to some degree, you know, having it happen as well. And I think that's one of the reasons I attach to your experience so strongly.
So I'm wondering though, since it has been, what, it's like almost 12 years for you?
Erin:
Yeah.
Slade:
That you've been doing readings...
How have your readings evolved over time, like, are they different now then back when we first discovered you?
Erin:
I would say that the mechanism of how I receive information is exactly the same. But I've gotten faster and better and more clear at getting the information. So I used to do like, a 30-minute phone reading or 1-hour phone reading, but I'm very to the point. You know? I'm not all out there and I don't meander around. I get right to the point and I discovered that I could answer a lot of questions for people in just 15 - 20 minutes.
And so, gradually, I have honed my reading skills to the point where I can do a 15-minute reading for somebody and still cover all the areas of their life that they want to cover.
And then I also was able to start doing readings by email, which I remember trying that long time ago, but people have follow-up questions, and then it turned into this back-and-forth email exchange.
But later, probably around in year seven or eight, I decided to give it a try again because after speaking with my guides about it, they told me how to do it so that a person would get a full reading by email. So I had people send me their questions by email and I sit in my meditation, connect with their guides, and I can answer their questions just as well over email as I could over the phone and I have found that very, very, very few people need any kind of follow-up because the reading is still very thorough.
So I would say that I've gotten better and faster, and even more clarity than we had before.
Slade:
Okay well I'm very impressed with all that. Not only for myself, but I know that there are a lot of other intuitives who are listening right now who, one of the questions I get a lot of times about doing email readings is how do you handle the back-and-forth, so I'm very curious that that just isn't an issue.
Erin:
Actually one of the things I think happens is, when they send me a question, I don't just answer the question. I use that as a launching point to talk to their guides about their entire situation. So if somebody says, you know, should I move to L.A. and take the job, or keep the one I have in New York, it's not just a yes or no question for me. I talk to the guides about their career path and they show me all the different trajectories that the person could be on and which ones will likely lead to the best outcomes for them.
And I also talk to their guides about what the person most wants to experience in their lives.
So when I send back the reading, I don't just say, Yeah, move to L.A.
Slade:
Right.
Erin:
You know? I'll talk to them about what they truly wanted when they incarnated, what their current trajectory is taking them, and also what they want to experience. And so I look through all of their possibilities, pick the one or two that the guides are very much in favour of, and when I send back the reading, I not only tell her why she should go to L.A., but also why she should go and what she's going to experience there, what challenges she might face and how to overcome them.
So it's very complete.
Slade:
That's very cool.
I'm curious, Is there a particular type of reading that you tend to attract in your practice? Have you noticed any patterns?
Erin:
Yeah, I mean, the types of questions people ask, after doing thousands and thousands of readings, there are a few questions that are sort of at the top. The top one is definitely how can I transition to a career I'll enjoy? Which I find interesting and I guess a lot of people go through that, you know? You get out of college or high school, you pick a career path and somewhere down the line, five or ten years later, you are not happy. You've had a shift and your career has not shifted with you. So a lot of people want to know what they can do to be happier in their careers. So that's a big one.
Slade:
Yeah.
I notice that you also do past-life readings, correct?
Erin:
Yes. I've just started doing that.
Slade:
How did you - Well, that's cool because I was wondering how you discovered that you were receiving past life information. Was it prompted by a question someone had about it or how did that emerge?
Erin:
For the most part, during the last 11 - 12 years, most people did not ask me about past-life stuff. So past-life information would only emerge in the reading when the guides felt it was necessary for the person to know what had occurred in previous lives. Usually there were some kind of trauma that was carried over.
So I never really gave it a whole lot of thought because my personal opinion was that getting a past-life reading doesn't help them a whole lot this life unless there is some kind of carry-over. But one day when I was in meditation with my guides, they gave me the idea to just do it. And I don't really question them after this many years.
They said, Do some past-life readings. You're going to see some really interesting patterns. You're going to see some really interesting things, and it is going to be very helpful to people.
So I thought, Alright.
So really, on a whim, but with great delight and joy and curiosity, I offered the past-life readings. And I ended up getting like, 300 people signed up in the first week and it was a little overwhelming, because it takes a long time to do those, but as I got going with them, I realized how valuable they are, how important they are, and what would happen is when I would tune in to their past life, the guides would show me their entire life, like a video, and I could fast-forward or rewind or pause at various points and what I did, because obviously a life is very long, I would grab the key salient significant experiences of their life and express those to them. Otherwise, obviously it would take many, many, many pages to go over a past life. And so what we discovered together, me and my clients, is that knowing how you were in a previous life often informs what you're doing in this life, whether it's a reacting to something bad that happened and you say, I'm never doing that again, or it's an opportunity to replay and redo things that happen in your previous life where you didn't like the outcome.
It's like re-doing a dream in a way. You get to change the outcome. It was really cool.
Slade:
Well, one of the main reasons that I wanted to talk to you at this time was because one of my listeners requested a show topic covering the Veil of Forgetfulness or The Veil, as some people call it. And when I heard that, I immediately thought of you because I remember the tagline that you had years ago about remembering where you came from. And I thought you would be the perfect person to ask about this topic.
So what is the Veil? How would you explain it?
Erin:
To me, I guess the Veil is like a blanket covering your memories so that you cannot remember who you really are and where you really came from. And I think a lot of intuitives have pondered, Why bother with a veil? Why can't we remember that we come from love? Why can't we remember who we are, who we were and everything like that?
And I don't know that I have the definitive answer, but the way that I view incarnations is kind of like playing a video game where you create a character, you give him or her certain attributes, certain strengths, certain weaknesses, and then you hit Play.
And so, if your character knew everything, if your character knew everything that he was going to have to do and everything he was going to have to be, he would probably, you know, fall on his sword and say, Forget this, I'm not doing it.
So part of it is to have, part of the Veil is to have the experience, to have it be clean, to have it not be informed by who we've been and who we are and not remember where we come from. But I think it's very important and very helpful if you can remember where you came from, and you know, where you're going to return to, because I have to imagine that if we were all living in a world where we remembered that we're connected, that we're all One, that we come from love, we would treat each other differently, and we'd treat the planet differently, and very, very different things would happen.
Slade:
So do you think, and I mean I'm just asking you to kind of philosophically ponder a little bit, do you think it's something that we're meant to overcome, that it's sort of maybe a soul chosen... like you said, if it's a video game, is it a survivalist game that you are agreeing to go into with the limitations because of those limitations, or do you think it's the intention of a higher power that we come in forgetting...
Erin:
I think it's both.
Slade:
Yeah...
Erin:
I think that the system is set up so that we don't remember. But I want to clarify that by saying, Some people do remember. There's a lot of people that remember but they're told by society and by how they're raised and everything that it's probably not real or not true. Kids have a very strong grasp of cooperation and love and being very unconditionally loving. And then our societal structure often changes their nature to be, I don't want to say selfish, but looking after oneself. Not sharing.
But I think it's all, I don't want to say it's all part of the game, because that sounds, I don't know, I don't like that, but it's part of the system and I'm not 100% sure why it is but I do know that it's beneficial in some way or we wouldn't keep doing it and I also know that some people do remember and that's... When people have their awakening, they remember and then it's very... it feels very important to share that memory with other people, which is why I kind of started my blog.
Slade:
Yeah...
Erin:
Is to wake people up. And to help them remember that they're a spiritual being having a human experience and that we can design and structure this playground any way that we want.
Slade:
You've written a lot about The Other Side. You have an e-book actually available on your website called The Other Side, which is a collection of some of the information that you've brought through, specifically about the other side and what happens when we die, what happens before we incarnate, the in-between. I'm just wondering, Is there anything that you've discovered about the other side that was particularly surprising to you, that you hadn't heard before from another source? Something that might have been unexpected or peculiar?
Erin:
Yeah, I think usually when I would do a reading and I would connect with a deceased individual, they would send love and they would send hope and all kinds of ideas to make a person's life better. But there was one situation where I was speaking with a gentleman on the other side and his client was, his daughter was my client and he was very intelligent and he was coming through very clearly. And when I got off the phone with my client, I continued talking to this guy because that's how strong a connection we had and how interested I was in speaking to him. And he was very interested in speaking to me.
So he was at a real high vibration and I kind of asked him, What do you do over there? What's going on?
And one of the things he said is, It's sort of like a creation experience. There's a lot of different things you can create over there. Different experiences, but one of the things that he was doing is engaging in sort of philosophical discussion, sharing of wisdom with other beings on the other side. So that sounded really cool to me. It was a little unexpected. Some people on the other side want to create sort of a fantasy-realm for themselves where they re-live a little bit one of their most recent life and they set things up to see what would have happened if they had taken a different road.
So it's almost like you seem to get an opportunity to say, What would have happened if I had taken that job? Or what would've happened if I married that guy? And all the curiosity you ever had in your life, you're allowed to kind of see what would've happened if you had taken a different road. So there are apparently people spending time doing that a little bit.
The other thing I saw which was, I was not expecting is some times, and this is very, very, very rare, so I don't want people to worry about this. Sometimes, if a person crossed over and they had either suicided or there was some mental anguish going on with them, they, I saw, had a tendency to re-live a lot of the anguishing experiences, hanging on to something that they really did not need to hang on to but which they could not seem to let go. And in those cases, what I saw over time because I would read for the same client and we'd kind of check in to see what people were doing, there were angelic energies around them that were helping them to heal and helping them to close those wounds so they could properly and fully cross over and release their life. The life that they had just had. Because there's something about they don't want them to cross over until they're able to drop that persona and be back at One, in peace and kind of become their higher self again.
Does that make sense?
Slade:
Yeah, interesting.
So I wonder if, do you think that corresponds with what we call earth-bound spirits and spirits that are trapped or do you think it's something else?
Erin:
Yes, I do think that some spirits have a difficult time crossing over but I really, really, really, really want to stress that that's a teeny tiny percentage of people. Because most people easily slough off the connection and are able to cross over completely and fully, but I have seen some energies that are either too afraid to cross over because they fear judgment or are a little bit confused and they need a little extra help working on releasing and cutting the cord with this life.
So yeah, that happens sometimes. Rarely.
Slade:
Cool.
Well, you know, the thing is, you do so many fascinating things including, you have a whole paranormal investigation team which we'd have to do a separate episode about.
Erin:
Yeah.
Slade:
So I won't take you down too many rabbit holes.
But I was curious about the connection between the things that we're talking about. The readings, the mediumship, connecting with the other side, communicating with spirits, and then astral projection, which is another really big topic for you that you've written about. You have a book about astral projection.
So, what do you use the astral projection for? What's the application?
Erin:
Yeah, okay that's a great question.
When I was young, when I was 15 to maybe 18 or 20 years old, I used to astral project because I was getting attacked by lower vibrational entities on the astral plane. And it wasn't something I was trying to do and it certainly wasn't something I was trying to attract, but it kept happening.
I finally got to the point where I said, You know, if you're going to keep attacking me, I'm going to go on the offense because I don't like this. So I started projecting three or four nights a week, and I would go on patrol and I would remove and clear lower vibrational entities that I saw either around my house, not inside but outisde, and then I started doing that for other people.
And then that kind of died down a lot. I got real focused on college and dating and marriage, children, business etc. And so my astral projection experiences now are focused very differently.
So now when I go out, I'm either helping a spirit who is having difficulty crossing over. I do some astral projection work on my paranormal investigations to identify and look at the ghost or entity that is plaguing our clients and I communicate with it to see what its deal is. And also sometimes I'll visit friends because that's fun. Also I will visit either another dimension or go up to the, oh let's call it the Ether, where I'll communicate and commune with my own deceased relatives, friends and loved ones from this life and previous lives.
Slade:
Awesome. Okay well that makes me want to get the book now.
So I assume that the astral projection guide book is about mastering some of those techniques for those purposes, correct?
Erin:
Exactly. Yeah.
The book really covers a lot of detail about how to prepare yourself to astral project because you really want to be mentally prepared and then some techniques to achieve it faster and also troubleshooting some common problems people experience when they first start projecting.
Slade:
Very cool. I'll put a link in the show notes and on my blog as well so people can go check that out.
I'm curious what's next for you. Do you have anything special, project-wise, coming up on the horizon?
Erin:
Yeah, I'm working on an intuition development program. It'll be an audio program. This is something I've been wanting to do for at least five years, but I have not had the time to devote to doing it. And now I finally do, I have completed the script so all I need to do is record it and get it produced. And in this program, people will learn how to use their clair-abilities: clairvoyance, clairaudience, sentience and cognizance. And we'll also go over the practical ways that you can use it in your daily life because a lot of people don't realize they can use it for everything. And it will also go over how to prepare yourself to be able to hear your guides and receive intuition whenever you desire, where you don't have to just wait for it to strike you.
Slade:
Very cool. You'll have to come back on when you get all that up and running and share it if you'd like.
Erin, it's been a real pleasure catching up with you and finding out what you're up to. Tell everyone where they can go find you online.
Erin:
The website is erinpavlina.com and I'm sure Slade will post it up somewhere. There's hundreds of articles on there that you can read for free, which I love. I love to hear people's feedback on the articles, and often we go over to my Facebook wall and talk about each article, so that's available for people as well.
Slade:
That's wonderful. Thank you, Erin, for coming on the podcast. I really appreciate it.
Erin:
Thank you. It was great catching up.
OUTRO
Thanks again for listening to the Shift Your Spirits podcast.
For show notes, links, transcripts and all the past episodes
please visit shiftyourspirits.com
You can subscribe in iTunes or Stitcher or whatever app you use to access podcasts.
If you’d like to get an intuitive reading with me, or download a free ebook and meditation to help you connect with your guides
please go to sladeroberson.com
and if you’re interested in my professional intuitive training program, you can start the course for free by downloading the Attunement at
automaticintuition.com
BEFORE I GO
I promised to leave you a message in answer to a question or a concern you may have.
So take a moment to think about that — hold it in your mind or speak it out loud. I’ll pause for just a few seconds….right…now.
1…2…3…4
MESSAGE
Do you have issues with faith? Are you guilty of trying to plan out every little detail of your life?
This is a little reminder for you to trust in something greater than yourself — it can be the natural world, the universe, a higher consciousness, God, or even just the Mystery.
Having this kind of faith is about trusting that the outcome will be exactly what it should be, no matter what it is, and it will happen in its own perfect time.
Give your divine timing over to the divine — it’s better at it than we are.
You can take a break from the impossible job of coaxing the universe.
Take a break, take a breath.
And I’ll talk to you later.
Empathy — experiencing external emotional energies as your own moods and sensitivities and feelings — is the foundation of being psychic. If you identify as a lightworker, or someone who is actively seeking a spiritual path, absorbing other people's energy comes with the territory of everyday life. For some professions, it can be an occupational hazard.
MENTIONED IN THE SHOW: ...empath, psychic protection, psychic shielding, astral projection, grounding, meditation, kundalini, white light, auras, spirit guides...
Psychic Shielding for Empaths
The Astral Projection Guidebook by Erin Pavlina
HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses
Get an intuitive reading with Slade
Automatic Intuition
BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits Edit your pledge on Patreon
TRANSCRIPT INTRO
Hey, thanks for listening to the Shift Your Spirits podcast.
I’m your host Slade Roberson.
For eleven years, I’ve been a professional intuitive and the author of the blog Shift Your Spirits, where I try to write about spirituality with fewer hearts and flowers than most New Age blather.
I also mentor emerging intuitives, psychics, and healers in a program called Automatic Intuition.
Today I want to share some techniques for psychic shielding and managing your energy.
And, of course, as always, there’s an oracle segment at the end of the show.
So be thinking about a question or a concern you have. Hold it in your mind, and I’ll come back on, after the final links and credits, and leave you with that extra message.
BEFORE I FORGET
I'd like to say a quick thank you to my newest supporters on Patreon:
Julia
David
Linda
I appreciate all of you who have pledged your support and I’m really excited to see the new names each week. It demonstrates that you’re enjoying the show and want it to continue. That’s very encouraging to me, so thank you.
Listeners who support the show on Patreon can access bonus Q&A episodes, where you guys send in questions, I record answers to them, and they go out to patrons of the show exclusively.
I'm thinking of offering a new level of support for the show where you get to access the downloadable courses and books from the shop on my site.
The way I’m thinking this would probably work is that each month one course will be featured and accessible and then I would rotate through most of the products I have available.
I’d love to hear your thoughts about this. Write and tell me.
I’ll let you know for sure when I decide to do this. You can always edit your pledge amount if you made one months ago and want to raise it to access the bonus content.
I’m including a new link now in the show notes on how to do that.
To find out how you can become a patron, support my time in producing this show, and access the extra bonus content, please go to patreon.com/shiftyourspirits
I’d also like to give a quick shout out to Titti and Heather, Patreon supporters who requested today’s show topic about managing and protecting your psychic energy.
PSYCHIC SHIELDING FOR EMPATHS
I’ve yet to encounter anyone who has a high level of natural intuitive abilities — such as clairvoyance, clairaudience, or claircognizance — who is not also primarily clairsentient.
Empathy — experiencing external emotional energies as your own moods and sensitivities and feelings — is the foundation of being psychic.
If you identify as a lightworker, or someone who is actively seeking a spiritual path, it comes with the territory of everyday life. And for those who take this identity into the professional realm — obvious careers such as psychotherapists, counselors, coaches, social workers, medical professionals, massage therapists, energy healers, psychics, ministers, teachers, and child care; but also human resource professionals, customer service workers, hair stylists — anyone who deals with numerous individual people, called to assist (at least listen to) others who are processing a lot of negative conditions and circumstances — residual energy is literally an occupational hazard.
PSYCHIC PROTECTION FROM HUMAN ENERGY
Here are some excerpts from reading requests I’ve received asking for psychic protection techniques for specifically human-to-human energy exchange. Listen to the following and see if you identify with any of these:
- I need to be empathetic enough to effectively communicate, be able to explain my point of view without having to be defensive or worried about being attacked, still show compassion and a willingness to listen, YET remain detached enough that I can be true to myself, authentic, stick to my guns.
- I find myself constantly being drawn in to other people’s drama. I’m a good listener, and I care about other people, but sometimes it feels like I’m a dumping ground for other people’s stress and bad energy.
- My friends and family love to talk to me about their problems. I’m the one everyone comes to for advice. I feel that it’s truly my life purpose to play the part of the counselor. On the one hand, I do feel that I’m helping and being of service to others… but more often times than not, I end up feeling drained.
- I proudly identify myself as a light-worker, a way-shower. I am very open, very intuitive, very sensitive. I want to continue growing and opening myself further, but there’s a part of me that resists. Just as I start to pick up on someone’s vibes, there’s a part of me that wants to rise up, slam the door… to protect myself. How can I do both?
- I guess I’m what you call an empath. I am a psychic sponge — I absorb everyone else’s energy and I don’t know how to turn it off. Is there a way I can turn it down or protect myself without turning off?
- I worry a lot. I worry about everyone. I worry for them. It’s like I have a sign on my forehead that says “Leave your problems with me.” I know it may sound crazy to someone who doesn’t experience it, but it can literally make me feel ill — my stomach is either in knots or my neck muscles are stiff all the time. I worry more than anything that I’m going to give myself cancer from carrying all this stress.
- I try to be positive, but it feels like the whole world wants to tear down my attitude.
- The relationship is over. It has run its course. We both know it, we both agree, and we both want to move on… But there’s still a lot that has to be negotiated in order for us to go our separate ways. Every time we even talk on the phone, it’s like the wound gets torn open all over again, and we both end up in tears. How can I move forward and heal without backsliding into that painful place that feels like square one?
- Help! I feel like I’m under psychic attack. I’m afraid that if I open up my intuition too much, I’m going to make myself more vulnerable.
I most often share the following psychic “soft” shielding technique with empaths who work in para-professional or healing arts fields where heart-centered connection is a requirement. It has become a staple training in the Automatic Intuition program.
EMPATHIC SHIELDING
I’m sure you are familiar with the concept of Purple Light and White Light Shielding — Purple Light being the highest angelic vibe you can invoke for spiritual protection, nurturing, and support; White Light being the universal holy shield.
WHITE LIGHT MAY BE TOO HARD CORE
The thing to keep in mind about White Light is that it’s entirely impermeable and allows for too little heart chakra to heart chakra reflection/ interaction. White Light protection in everyday relationships is a bit overkill.
TRY PINK LIGHT VISUALIZATION
As an alternative to using White Light shielding, use Pink — the ethereal, aura color representation of your Higher Self. The color of rose quartz, which can also literally be assigned, associated, activated, and amplified by the crystals themselves.
When talking to (anyone with whom you may require this softer, tender-hearted protection) picture yourself sheathed in a column of pearly bubble-gum pink light, from just above your head extending all the way through the floor beyond your feet. Imagine it being poured on top of your head, starting at your crown chakra. I personally picture this substance as having the appearance and viscosity of liquid soap or shampoo. You might also envision that you’re Glinda the Good Witch in her big pink bubble — that’s about the the right size in relationship to your body/aura. (and, it’s just plain fun to call forth your Inner Glinda once in awhile. Even the biggest bad ass among us has an Inner Glinda.)
PINK LIGHT AS BOTH MIRROR AND FILTER
What happens is...When the subject you’re communicating with projects onto you, the most positive authentic heart-centered energy is reflected back to him/her. The Pink also allows for your loving energy — compassion, concern, good will — to pass through, yet the White Light (which is still present within the Pink) blocks negative energy.
So, it’s a semi-permeable shield — which expands the Highest Self-loving Energy that either of you project; and it’s a kind of filter — magnifying what you most hope to receive/ project, while still blocking negative psychic energy completely and absolutely.
USING ACTUAL CRYSTALS
If you have rose quartz crystals physically present, they can act as a switch or consciousness trigger for turning on this shield. I recommend that therapists and mediators actually have some piece of rose quartz in the line of sight of both parties; on the table or desk between you is ideal. You can wear rose quartz as jewelry or carry a piece in your pocket. Just seeing this color acts as a subconscious activation switch, even for those who don’t intellectually know the symbolic spiritual significance.
The Woo Woo Stuff — the visualizations, the meditations, the rituals, the spells — is really just a representation and a reminder of your commitment to a particular conscious intention. Just going into a conversation aware of what you want to block, what you want to project and receive, impacts your attitude and word choice and allows you to set the energy.
When you set a strong energetic intention like this — when you’re willfully driving the vibration — others must conform or deal with the discomfort. They have no choice but to match that energy or they have to leave. In which case, the integrity of the kind of conversation you want to have is ultimately maintained.
Remember, if in doubt, you simply express how YOU feel; that’s the most honest thing you can do. Your feelings are non-negotiable, no matter how controlling another person might want to be, or think they can be — when presented with someone’s feelings, there’s nothing they can do but accept them.
Anyone not down with the good vibes — who refuses, who chooses over and over again to be difficult — is undoubtedly someone not worthy of your time and energy. I’d say two chances would be my line in the sand — after which, as much distance and lack of contact you can make happen is entirely warranted.
You can’t have a war if both sides don’t show up.
We have legal channels and barriers if necessary — security, attorneys, mediators. (If you keep answering that cell phone when he calls and engaging in another verbal battle, you are participating.)
Don’t forget the most basic intention manifestation/ law of attraction factors — if you establish beforehand how you WANT the script to go, then you’re creating it — not reacting on the fly and finding yourself unequipped to provide the details of the Best Case Scenario.
If you prepare for the conversation going badly, if you prepare a dialogue of argument, the Universe will be sure to shoot that scene for you.
You may be pleasantly surprised, even blown away, by how positively others will respond and behave if YOU are prepared for them to.
MAINTENANCE
Cord cutting
Clearing meditation
Astral projection (Erin Pavlina’s technique)
for those of you who practice any kind of psychic readings
it’s really important to disconnect or log off readings -
we are overly focused on tuning in -
not logging off properly is like leaving a door or window open…
What I do is establish protocol with my guides, programming a particular object, or even better, an associated ACTION with energy management.
charging a piece of jewelry
remember, when I talked therapists having a large piece of rose quartz on the desk or table between themselves and their clients
Guide Assignment - let your guides manage all this
My Secret Service protocol
All of this is a more advanced level of energy and protection, so I really want to stress the basics of being grounded.
Especially if you are spinning in the ether, overanalyzing, overthinking, if you describe your circumstances as a cloud hovering over you, if you feel pulled in too many directions — if you feel like there’s not enough time in the day…
Ground your energy.
If you feel overwhelmed,
Focus on the basics, focus on the physical.
For me, that is exercise. If my workouts are maintained, it helps manage my appetite and most importantly it impacts my sleep.
If you’re not sleeping, you’re not in a state of mind to manage these more complex energies.
Get the physical sorted first.
If you’re not a fitness buff, go for a walk every day. Just 30 minutes or 45. It will change everything.
If you have physical limitations and that’s not an option for you, then work on visualizing your energy being grounded.
Kundalini meditation would be good for you.
OR start with perfecting a basic visualization of your spine growing down into the ground and becoming roots, like a tree.
THAT is great place to start managing the foundation of your psychic energy.
OUTRO
Thanks again for listening to the Shift Your Spirits podcast.
For show notes, links, transcripts and all the past episodes
please visit shiftyourspirits.com
You can subscribe in iTunes or Stitcher or whatever app you use to access podcasts.
If you’d like to get an intuitive reading with me, or download a free ebook and meditation to help you connect with your guides
please go to sladeroberson.com
and if you’re interested in my professional intuitive training program, you can start the course for free by downloading the Attunement at
automaticintuition.com
BEFORE I GO
I promised to leave you a message in answer to a question or a concern you may have.
So take a moment to think about that — hold it in your mind or speak it out loud. I’ll pause for just a few seconds….right…now.
1…2…3…4
MESSAGE
You just received a gift. A magical energetic gift. The ability to complete any creative idea you have. And if you jump on this now, with enthusiasm and optimism and perseverance, I’m predicting the positive outcome will be tremendous.
Don’t hesitate. Stop thinking about it, go for it.
And I’ll talk to you later.
I'm sharing of my favorite tools for discovering magic, reigniting your creative spark, managing your consciousness, choosing a path and purpose that will allow you to do everything you love, and shifting your negative thoughts about money and abundance.
...Creativity, consciousness, path, purpose, negative thinking, money and abundance...
MENTIONED IN THE SHOW: The Spiral Dance by Starhawk
The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron
The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle
Refuse to Choose by Barbara Sher
The Money Shift by Slade Roberson
Allen Carr's Easy Way to Stop Smoking
Other Best Books on Spirituality:
https://sladeroberson.com/blog/books/best-books-on-spirituality.html
HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses
Get an intuitive reading with Slade
Automatic Intuition
BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits Edit your pledge on Patreon
Michelle Vandepas is a best-selling author, TEDx and Keynote speaker and workshop and retreat leader attracting clients who know they want to dig deeper into or do more with their lives and businesses. She works with those who need a bigger audience, have a message to share, and know that now is the time. For Michelle, it’s not about who you are, but what you’re here to do. Her online courses, live mastermind programs, and VIP retreats have attracted thousands of people who now understand how to “BE” in their DO-ing, clear about their PURPOSE and filled with the SPARK of life.
MENTIONED IN THE SHOW: The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron
GUEST LINKS - MICHELLE VANDEPAS TheSpark.love
The SPARK Facebook GroupPurpose: The Alignment Guide
Free Gifts from Michelle
HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses
Get an intuitive reading with Slade
Automatic Intuition
BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits Edit your pledge on Patreon
TRANSCRIPT INTRO
Hey, thanks for listening to the Shift Your Spirits podcast.
I’m your host Slade Roberson. For eleven years, I’ve been a professional intuitive and the author of the blog Shift Your Spirits, where I try to write about spirituality with fewer hearts and flowers than most New Age blather.
I also mentor emerging intuitives, psychics, and healers in a program called Automatic Intuition.
Today, I’m sharing a conversation with Michelle Vandepas about aligning with your purpose.
And, of course, as always, there’s an oracle segment at the end of the show.
So be thinking about a question or a concern you have. Hold it in your mind, and I’ll come back on, after the final links and credits, and leave you with that extra message.
And to tell you the truth, I am personally really looking forward to what that message is going to be! You may not realize this, but I use them for myself.
It’s Friday, October 13, 2017 as I record this, and it feels a bit like the sky is falling. We’ve got wild fires in Northern California, people starting to die in Puerto Rico from drinking water out of creeks and ditches, going weeks without power or cell service… and millions of us in the US are about to lose our healthcare coverage.
I really don’t know how much to address current events on the podcast, because the majority of you are listening from the future. Thousands of you. I want the content to be evergreen—meaning it can speak to you at whatever point in time you are listening. There is great power in the synchronicity of when you receive these messages.
And even if I try to be super current with events in the present, they’re going to be a week behind, at best. So much changes, day to day...
So, if I seem like I’m saying too little, not saying enough, or seeming to ignore something that happened this morning or went down in a big way yesterday, it’s just because recording is a snapshot in time, but the messages transcend time, to come and find you in your now.
I am attempting to make content that has that ability.
I am admittedly dancing around this. Awkwardly. If you have any input about how you’d like me to handle timely events, I would love to hear your suggestions. Shoot me an email.
If you’re fine with my making these episodes entirely timeless, email me and let me know that too.
Before I forget, I want to say a quick thank you to Merrie Kisch, my newest supporter on Patreon. And also thank you to Ann Luke-Montez who raised her pledge amount.
I appreciate all of you who have pledged your support and I’m really excited to see the new names each week. It demonstrates that you’re enjoying the show and want it to continue. That’s very encouraging to me, thank you.
Listen, I’ve lost a lot of people who are angry that I am communicating in audio. I have gone to great trouble to make most if not all the episodes available as a written transcript — today’s episode with Michelle about aligning with your purpose does indeed have a full transcript. For the record, there are eleven years worth of posts — hundreds if not thousands of articles — available on my site. Go to sladeroberson.com/archives There’s a search feature and tons to read.
But I’m still getting emails from long-term followers who are disappointed. They don’t like the change. They want me to go back to short blog posts once a week. And you know, this platform has to grow and evolve. I needed to make this new and exciting and to breathe new life into Shift Your Spirits with this audio.
Working with me is essentially talking to me, and I know from the feedback from those of you who love the show that it is authentically aligned with my voice.
I’m telling you this because I want you to know that pledging your support on Patreon is one of the ways that you tell me to make this show for you and to ignore those who are sending me, well, hate mail for making this show. Some people do not like change.
Change is the only thing in the world you can rely on.
You gotta be a change surfer. You gotta learn to adapt and be flexible in all areas of life…
But to wrap up this rant — it’s not just a “pledge drive” when I tell you about Patreon. It really literally is you saying “Slade, I love this podcast. I’m out here listening. I find the shows meaningful and helpful. Please keep sending me episodes."
…I will. I plan to.
Listeners who support the show on Patreon can access bonus Q&A episodes, where you guys send in questions, I record answers to them, and they go out to patrons of the show exclusively.
I just released a bonus episode “How to Manifest a Relationship” as a tie-in to the show on soul mates. You guys who are supporters will find that download in the posts section on Patreon.
You can edit your pledge amount at any time, like Ann did, if you decide you want to access the bonus audio. I’ll put a link in the show notes on how to do that.
https://patreon.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/115002804683-How-do-I-edit-my-Pledge-
To find out how you can become a patron, support my time in producing this show, and access the extra audio content, please go to patreon.com/shiftyourspirits
Okay. Let’s get to this week’s interview.
Purpose. It’s one of our favorite subjects to talk about. And I’ve found someone perfect for us to talk to.
Michelle Vandepas.
TRANSCRIPT of INTERVIEW
Slade:
So, by way of introduction, for those of you out there who may not have heard of Michelle Vandepas, Michelle, why don't you tell us who you are and what you do.
Michelle:
So... Wow. I am a - so that's a great question, right? I suddenly realize I don't know how to put myself in a box of who I am and what I do. So I'm an author. I write. I'm a coach. I'm a business coach. I'm a book publisher. I'm a TEDx speaker. Those are all my accomplishments.
But really who I am is someone who is highly concerned about the energy in the world and how I believe when we all are connected to our authentic self, when we're on purpose, when we feel alive and we feel aligned with who we are, that we can help change the planet to be a better place.
Slade:
Well, you know, in the time that I've known you, and we were just chatting before we started recording, about how we've known each other for probably ten years. And in that time, I've seen you do all the things that you're talking about. The TED talks, courses, workshops, masterminds, in a lot of areas that obviously are connected and make sense. But I'm wondering how did helping people align with their purpose become your purpose?
How did you identify - how did you land here?
Michelle:
Yeah, good question.
So what's really interesting is I've always been doing this in my business coaching, and back 20 years ago when I owned a business, a manufacturing business, it was a lot of coaching the employees and the staff members about how they could contribute the best in the work place. So I feel like I've always been coaching other people to be on Purpose. How I kind of came full circle and decided to devote the next few years of my life to helping people with it is I think when we're not feeling aligned with our own Purpose, everything else is just slightly off kilter or out of whack.
So it's very difficult to run a business if you don't feel like you're doing what you're here to do. It's difficult to raise a family if you're always in stress about it and you don't feel aligned. So no matter where you are in your life, it comes back to understanding who you are at the core and then I know you relate to this. You write about Purpose all the time, Slade, so I think there's something fundamental that when we can accept who we are, know that we are here for a reason, that we can feel on Purpose with our lives, it helps everything else unfold. It helps all other areas of our life. So I think that's where I feel I can make the biggest difference.
Slade:
Okay. So Life Purpose. You hear those two words together a lot. It's a tricky thing to identify. I can tell you right now that this show will get tons of downloads just from that keyword or phrase in the title. I've seen it before. As you said, I do write about Purpose and speak to people about it and it's probably in 99% of the conversations I have with people when I do readings.
So the thing is, back to the idea that it's a little tricky to identify. For a lot of people, it gets mixed up with creative passions, hobbies, jobs, career tracks, maybe it's a little of all of those things. Just tell me how do you define Purpose?
Michelle:
Yeah, I love this conversation.
So the way I view Purpose is you're already living it. Everybody is already living it. Even if they don't know what it is. It is just something that is inside of us. And Purpose is how we express out into the world. In the very biggest picture, like the hugest picture, is how we express our love into the world. But that's difficult because love comes with so many romantic notions that it's hard to always wrap our brain around that.
So let me give you an example. I like to work with archetypes when I'm talking about Purpose because I think it helps us relate a little bit easier. Most of us can relate to feeling like we're a teacher, we are a leader, we're a caregiver, we might have mom or dad energy, we might feel like we're a nurturer. These are energies. These are expressions of a way to give back or to live our life. But they don't have really anything to do with a vocation or a hobby or a job or a passion.
So if you identify with, let's say, the caregiver archetype, you enjoy helping people, you like to nurture other people. You may or may not become a nurse or a hospice provider. You might be able to live that archetype through being a teacher or through being a barista or through blogging. That archetype can come through many many ways. And that's usually something that we're born with. That's an essence of our soul about how we express out into the world. If you don't feel identified with that archetype, if you don't feel like you're a caregiver, it's not going to be the first thing that is expressed out while you're out in your world.
So to bring this back around, if you have a job in - let's just say you're a blogger, you will naturally tie into your gifts that you were born with, such as teacher or leader or inspirer or caregiver, through your writing, when you feel more connected with the archetype of your individual purpose.
Does that make sense?
Slade:
Hmm.. oh yeah! Actually I really love this. I love the archetypes, and that's a good filter to view this from. Because it's sort of like an ingredient, like you said it's an essence, and you can put that essence in a lot of different places. Right? Like it sort of comes out of you no matter where we put you. If you're a nurturer, or a natural cheerleader, it doesn't really matter if you're literally on a sports team or you're just working in a bank.
Michelle:
That's right.
Slade:
It's gonna kind of express itself to the people around you, right?
Michelle:
Right. And where I see people get a little disrupt or feel disengaged with Purpose is when they're trying to chase it around their work. So if you know that you're a caregiver then you're suddenly like rolling your eyes and thinking, 'Ah, I gotta go be a nurse.' Well what you said is totally on point. That no, start with what you're already doing in your life and notice how caregiving shows up. Or notice how cheerleading shows up.
When you start noticing what you're already doing in all areas of your life, you'll feel more connected. And as you start feeling more connected, then you're willing to express it more. You're willing - because then you have proof that yes, this is who I am, right? The world becomes our mirror and we go, 'Yes, I am a cheerleader.' This is awesome. People respond to this. And then we do more of it naturally.
Slade:
Hmm... So what else do you think people tend to kind of get wrong when they go looking for their Purpose? Like you said, when they go chasing it and they get off track, what's some other... 101 bungles...
Michelle:
Yeah. I'm the perfect poster child for this, right? We always teach what we learn, or we teach what we need to learn, whatever that saying is. So a great example is, I had a period of my life when I became very engaged with my artistic side of myself. And I loved painting, and doing all kinds of creative endeavors and I spent hours and hours... I had some luxury of time back then, and spent a lot of time developing my creative self and my artistic self and I went to workshops and I had some shows and I suddenly had this light bulb - wow this must be my Purpose.
And so I decided, I set up shop, I set up my own art exhibits, I suddenly was investing in getting things framed and having to sell things and then I was asked to do a couple of commissions and I'm like, oh man, I hate this so much. It's like, my passion and my creative expression suddenly turned into a job. Because I had mistakenly thought my Purpose was related to my passion. And I can have a passion for art that isn't necessarily my Purpose. My Purpose is more about inspiration, teaching, leading, and I can do those things through my art, but the art itself was not my purpose.
Slade:
I'm actually kind of comforted to hear you say this because I live an entirely second life as a fiction author. So I have this, these two worlds, or two roles, and sometimes it just makes me uncomfortable trying to have to make them both be about the same thing. And I really just learn to kind of let them be two things and in my mind, my Purpose feels like it's related around Shift Your Spirits, it's what you know me for, it's very much what you do as well, inspiring, enabling, coaching, supporting people, teaching, telling stories.
And then, you know, the other thing is an art. It is a passion and it's a hobby. It's also business but it doesn't have to be - everything doesn't have to be in one box, right?
Michelle:
Um hmm... let me ask you a question.
In your fiction writing, do you feel as though you're bringing any of your inner Purpose like inspiring, and leading, and those things through any of your dialogue or your characters? I'm just curious. Could be yes or no.
Slade:
Yeah, I actually ask myself this question a lot because I feel like it's not so on the nose that I feel like my stories have to be inspirational reader's digest type fiction or something. Or like some - I don't write stories about people who are on a spiritual mission or anything like that. So I have asked myself this question and I think it's more about a deeper emotional kind of journey. The ability to give someone another life in another world to experience, which is so much of what I get out of reading fiction, and I think that there's a case to be made for story-telling being such a huge part of so many areas of what we do in the world whether it's ministry or teaching or just entertainment.
Stories are big business and they're big soulful enterprises in and of themselves. So I think where I come down with it is I feel like my magic comes in the form of words. And I have always had a gift for storytelling and sometimes that includes hosting someone like you and creating a platform for you to tell a story. You know what I'm saying?
Michelle:
Yes, that's beautiful.
Slade:
Yeah and I can make a case that we're all storytellers and, I do tell some of my intuitive training students a lot that I think intuitives - storytellers make great intuitives. People who speak symbolic language have an ability to take that vocabulary into a lot of different vocations.
So, again, not to get too much in the weeds about myself personally, but we're coming back to this idea that it's an essence that you already have and it's something that you can take into anywhere we drop you. Right? Like, ultimately if you're wiling to.
Michelle:
That's right. And I just want to circle back around with you because you also blog and you write and you've been doing this a long time and obviously these podcasts. So you have a gift with words and that writing and podcasting is just one way you're choosing to express that gift. You could choose to express that gift maybe in song writing, or maybe something that I haven't even thought of. Writing copy. You're just choosing to express your gift of a way with words in these platforms right now. Doesn't mean blogging suddenly is your Purpose.
Slade:
Right, yes. Exactly. And I have had periods where I was a song writer and I was a - I've done different kinds of artistic pursuits just like you were talking about. The difference between kind of your creativity and your passion and your art and then you can, you can or you can not choose to express that in combination with a Purpose or in combination with a job.
I tell people all the time sometimes the greatest way to ruin your passion is to turn it into a business.
Michelle:
Yeah! Like my art! Exactly.
Slade:
So when I was thinking about the fact that I was going to be talking to you today and I thought, you know, this is an area of expertise for you, that you've gone even deeper in than I have, but I was trying to think of my listeners and kind of where they fall on this question. Because like I said, it's nearly always a component of any reading that I do. And I was trying to think of, how can I ask questions that the people listening would ask if they were sitting here in front of the microphone and I kind of identified - there's a few different people that are at different stages of asking themselves this question.
So I wondered if you would indulge me and let me ask you kind of a question, there's kind of three different angles. And I wanted to ask for advice for each one of those people.
Are you game for that?
Michelle:
I'm game!
Slade:
Okay!
Michelle:
Let's see where it goes!
Slade:
So, the first one is the person who has no clue what their Purpose is. They really feel like just the canvas is blank, and that's a very terrifying feeling. You know, the blank page and you don't, something's supposed to be written on there and you don't know what it is. So what do you say to that person who has no clue what their Purpose might be?
Michelle:
Yeah, great. So and this comes up a lot with the people I work with, who maybe their kids are now gone, or their job is over or they're retiring and they feel like, now what? But it can happen with people of all ages for a variety of reasons. And the first thing that I want to tell the listeners is really to reassure them that it really doesn't matter if you know your Purpose. It's like it doesn't matter if you can see the ocean. It's still there. Your Purpose is there. Now you may feel a little frustrated that you don't know what it is. You may feel disconnected to it. But it's there. It's inside of you.
So I would encourage listeners who are in this space to just breathe in to the fact that they are alive on the planet, they have a Purpose even if they don't know what it is. And allow it. Allow the expression of their Purpose to be shown to them over some time. In my book it's a 28-day process of journalling and asking questions. But the first stage of that is to live with the affirmation that I am already living my Purpose.
Slade:
Okay. That's awesome.
What do you say to the person who kind of already has a clue what it is, right? They know deep down in their heart what their Purpose is. They feel that calling but maybe they're in a state of fear or procrastination, you know, they're sitting in the cubicle at work and they're dissatisfied with what they're doing and they know what their heart wants to do or what they're being called to do in some way. What does she do next? How does she get started?
Michelle:
So first I would encourage not the DOING of it. And I would really encourage the BEING of it. Because I think what happens is we skip steps. We're like, 'Okay I know that I'm supposed to be out there speaking to the world.' Well speaking again is a doing. It's not a Purpose. So is the Purpose really that you would like to inspire people with the message? Is your Purpose that you feel like you're a leader, that you have a calling to change other people's lives through leading or through inspiration or - it's tricky because it's like you have a gift for speaking and that's the gift and that could be how your Purpose is done and expressed in the world but we gotta go first underneath that - what the BEING is.
And so, I would encourage people who know deep inside that they're supposed to go speak, that comes up a lot with my clients. "I know I'm supposed to go speak." Be out there on stage. Be more visible. I'd encourage you first to tap into what is it that your call - what is it that calls that part of yourself? Are you feeling like you're here to lead? And then keep going into that energy and express it more and more in what you do right now.
So if you are called to lead, do that in the job you have right now. Do that with your family. Do that as you move about the world. And as you're deepening that confidence in yourself, it's amazing how opportunities start opening up to allow you to do more of how you want to express that feeling in the world.
Slade:
Okay. These are good. I'm having some epiphanies around this stuff.
So I've got one more. It's a little challenging. And I can actually think of a couple people that I know that are peers that are out there who might be listening, who - okay, what do you say to the person who knows what his Purpose is, maybe he's been doing it for awhile, who's been working at it, and then suddenly he's not seeing the "success" with it that he had expectations for? What's going on with that person, when they feel like they're, they know what they're supposed to do, but for some reason it's not taking off the way that they think, "Oh! It's my Purpose. I'm doing it, therefore the wings should just spread open and I should fly."
What do you say to the person when that's not happening?
Michelle:
So, Purpose is being, and Purpose is not success-driven. So Purpose is back to how do you express your love in the world? How do you express yourself out into the world? If you were then taking that and let's just pretend that you're here to inspire other people and your chosen way to do that is to become a public speaker, then you have to learn the business of speaking, you have to learn the nuances, you have to understand how to book gigs, how to write contracts, you have to then go learn the pieces of running that business if that's choosing, if that's how you're going to choose to express your Purpose of inspiration out into the world. But again, and then I do business coaching as well, so I can speak to this. Your Purpose is how you're expressing in the world in all areas of your life and so if you're putting, 'OMG, my Purpose is all wrapped up in this business,' you're going to have heartache and downfall because business has natural ups and down cycles. And so you've got to come back and be grounded in who you are.
I want to come back for a minute because I think there's a piece here that we've tiptoed around a little bit, Slade. And that is, people feel scared of their Purpose. Like if Slade, you know, think back ten or twelve years ago and if you suddenly knew that you were here to inspire people about Purpose and how they can become intuitive, you may not know, have known how to do that. All those years ago. And there might have been some fear for you.
Slade:
Oh yes.
Michelle:
And so... Right? It's all of us. And so if we can go into what is it that we are expressing and continue to do that every day we strengthen the muscle of accepting who we are. If someone were to tell me that I'd be on the telesummits with thousands of people and coaching some fairly well-known names out there, ten years ago, I would've been terrified. And go, 'No, I don't have those skills. That's not me. I don't have that confidence. I don't have that knowingness,' right? And so we start by giving ourselves either small steps or big steps, whatever it is, but confirmation that we're on the right track. Because that builds that muscle that gives us our own acceptance.
I think when we don't accept the gifts that we were born with, it's really difficult to go be - feel successful, but feeling successful is a life, not just a business. It's how do we feel in our life? Do we feel fulfilled? So I think I want to come back around to - it's the feeling of being fulfilled that I think we chase, and money seems to represent that and business success represents that.
But let's come back to how are we expressing, how are we ful - being fulfilled, how are we helping, how are we serving, and then maybe it's business coaching that this person really needs.
Slade:
Great advice. Thank you so much.
So tell us about Spark. What is this?
Michelle:
So I think you know I've played a lot with this idea of Purpose, passion, fulfillment creativity, and the word that sums all of that up for me is Spark. And so I've created a system for helping us all keep that spark alive inside. I don't know how you feel, but you know we're just on the other side of another mass shooting here in the United States, we've had hurricanes, there's fires, there's wars all over the world. It feels like it's pretty difficult sometimes to stay grounded that we can even make a difference with all these world problems.
And so, getting in touch with our own spark is the beginning of feeling alive and then feeling like we can help in whatever way that looks like to us. Big or small, helping the local food community, helping a stray cat, helping stop genocide and wars, wherever it is that you personally feel like you're called to help. It starts with connecting with that spark inside of us. Because when that flame starts dying out, it's really difficult to even just get off the couch, right? We become glued to the news, we get into overwhelm.
So the system I've created are always different areas where we learn to connect in with our own spark so that we can express more fully our authentic selves. And, like I say in this book, Purpose book, which is the first step of the system, how can we not be authentic, right? We are authentic. We just don't always recognize what that is. And then we try to cover it up, or we have our baggage or we eat too much or we do all kinds of self sabotaging things because we don't really know who we are.
And so this system takes us through some self-reflection. I'm not here to tell anybody who they are. It's all inside. We just have to uncover it. We have to recognize it. We have to love who we are, you know? It's that thing that we gotta love ourselves first. And it's true, but we have to learn who we are so that we can love ourselves.
Slade:
So the book part component of this that you're talking about, it's a new book you have out called Purpose: The Alignment Guide : 28 Days of Inspiration, Reflection, Intention and Creative Expression. Now this sounds more like a program than just a book. So explain to us how this book works.
Michelle:
Yeah, it is. It's 28 days. Each day, wel, each week there's an affirmation. The very first one is 'I am already living my Purpose.' And there's coloring exercises ,activities, writing prompts, and the book takes you through my thoughts about why I believe we're all already living our Purpose. Just a short chapter on that. And then it encourages you to reflect on how you are living your Purpose day to day.
There are daily affirmations, daily questions, the book takes you through how does the earth energy affect you? I'm finding it very interesting right now with things like fires and hurricanes and so forth to not be affected by that, and I think a lot of us are affected by intense weather or even just a big snowstorm. And so, how does that affect your day to day living, and does that make you go more internal or does that cause you to be angry in the world? And just having a place to write down and explore these feelings helps you understand and learn more of who you really are. Who we are at the core.
So the book is a 28-day exploration with writing prompts for every day. Journaling and loads of cool coloring pages and there's also a coloring book that you can download at no cost or purchase to go along with this with all the really cool images. And the images are a little edgy. They're not like flowers and butterflies. They're what I call kind of galactic images with weird eyes and the sun going sideways because I think that's how I feel right now. Like everything just a little big sideways. And so I want to acknowledge that and express that.
And the Purpose is just the first workbook in a 9-month system. So there's 8 more books coming out, each one exactly the same format. So it's a 9-month program that I have on helping you connect back in with who you are.
Slade:
So why is it 28 days specificially?
Michelle:
Yeah, so there's a couple of answers to that.
It is a nice system of every week you look at a new affirmation and in this case, a new area of Purpose. And then we all need a day or two or three to just rest. So it's not like a month-long system. You can start this in the middle of the month, you can start it in the middle of the week, you just work through the days and then you, at the end of the 28 days, it's a moon cycle, it's a natural cycle. You just rest, let it all integrate, allow your subconscious to process everything you've been thorough. It's like savassana in yoga. You just incorpirate everything that you have learned and thought about and doodled and processed over the last four weeks. And then after a few more days, you can start again on the next book. Day 1 and go through another 28-day process.
Slade:
Very cool. It actually would be fun to do that with the moon cycle if you wanted. I'm a bit of a witch so I like to do everything like ritualized around the moon calendar. It just, it gives it a certain kind of structure that feels, I don't know, it feels empowering, so I like to play with that. That's very cool.
Michelle:
Yes! Yeah!
Slade:
So, not to compare this to anything in any way other than a compliment, but I really, as I was looking at the material, it appealed to me in much the same way that the artist way appealed to me. I think that there's a certain type of person who may have done that years ago back in the day who would really be turned on by your book.
Thank you! Thank you. I actually mention Julia Cameron in my dedication. She's a huge mentor of mine. I have interviewed her a couple of times. I've been to a live workshop of hers. I bow down to her as one of the creative goddesses of the world, so thank you, I take that as a huge compliment.
Slade:
Oh, that's very cool. We share her as a hero for sure. Yeah, so I definitely think that you can make a connection with the type of work that you're doing and so if there's anybody who - because I know once you've done something before, maybe you don't really want to go back through that process again, but this would be something new, and it's a little bit shifted of course, around this idea of aligning with Purpose, but the experiential part of it feels similar. In an exciting kind of way.
Have you had any ideas about doing like a group around it? Like a Facebook group or something?
Michelle:
Yes! So - thank you for asking. Yes, and I have one going right now. So theSpark.love group on Facebook. You can come and join for free. No charge. There are people uploading their pictures and their doodling and I answer questions in there, and so thespark.love is also my website. That's the name of the group on Facebook. So just come join and then obviously I offer paid classes and I have a live retreat coming up in May, so obviously I'm doing this also as part of my own coaching business, but everybody come and join at least for free so we can get to know each other and I can help you through the process.
And then if there's a next step, happy to talk to you about that.
Slade:
Oh that's very cool. I am a big believer in the social power of doing things in groups. If I have the opportunity to take something in a class environment I always go for that because I can accomplish so much more when I have interaction with other people around it. I'm a big believer in that so basically you're saying somebody can go and sign up for thespark.love Facebook group and the only thing that they would really require would be the book, which is not a huge investment, if they wanted to really participate in this and plug in with this whole concept, right?
Michelle:
That's right. $16.95 on Amazon, and nothing else. Just connect in the group because there's other people that are having conversations about Purpose and that's always a cool thing.
Slade:
Well I'll definitely pull all your links so anybody who is listeining can either go to my blog or they can go direclty to the podcast feed and just click on those. And go and sign up.
You also have a free course that people can download on your webiste, correct?
Michelle:
I do. There's a Purpose course on my website, there's the coloring book, there's a couple of meditations. The website is again, thespark.love because it's how we express our spark as love out into the world. That's the biggest expression of who we are. And so, yes, I have all kinds of free gifts. I have a downloadable course. Come get your gifts, thank you!
Thank you for this promotion, yeah. I'm so good at promoting other people but we're all like that, right? Thank you.
Slade:
Yeah, well there's some very specific places to jump and plug in to what you're doing and it doesn't cost anything other than your interest, you know? So it's a very powerful and easy thing to promote.
I do want to ask you before we wrap up the conversation. One of the things that I really like to ask those of you who've been around working in this space, for several years now. Is there anything that you feel is a message that's kind of missing from the conversation on personal development or something that needs to be brought forward a little bit?
Michelle:
Yeah, good question.
So I am so over self-improvement. Like, there was a time in my life when I'm like, I wanted to get my hands on everything around self-improvement and personal development. These days I think it's - the conversation at least that I like to have is, we don't have to improve anything. We can choose to explore our gifts and develop them if we want to. We can always learn more things. But it's really about what, uncovering what's already there. It's really about going inside rather than looking outside and the more I go deeper in this, the more I know that to be true for at least myself and many of the people I work with is, how can we really uncover who we are rather than looking outside for answers?
And so, in this book, even though I'm here having this conversation with you, it all comes back to what is true for the individual, not what I'm saying, not what you're saying, not what my book says. These are all tools to help you explore more deeply what's true for you.
Slade:
I love that approach. Thank you for sharing that. And Michelle, thank you so much for coming on and taking the time and having a conversation with me around this topic. I know everybody's going to enjoy listening to it.
Michelle:
Slade, I love you. It's been an honor to connect with you over all these years and I'm looking forward to the next one. Thank you for having me.
OUTRO
Thanks again for listening to the Shift Your Spirits podcast.
For show notes, links, transcripts and all the past episodes please visit shiftyourspirits.com
You can subscribe in iTunes or Stitcher or whatever app you use to access podcasts.
If you’d like to get an intuitive reading with me, or download a free ebook and meditation to help you connect with your guides please go to sladeroberson.com
and if you’re interested in my professional intuitive training program, you can start the course for free by downloading the Attunement at automaticintuition.com
BEFORE I GO I promised to leave you a message in answer to a question or a concern you may have.
So take a moment to think about that — hold it in your mind or speak it out loud. I’ll pause for just a few seconds….right…now.
1…2…3…4
MESSAGE
Have you seen or heard any owls lately? Any owl totems or symbols crossing your path.
Owl energy is about the ability to see everything around you, to find the real truth in the shadows. This symbol can mean that someone around you is trying to throw you off or disguise his or her real intentions.
Make sure you’re not lying to yourself right now. If you’re being delusional, wake up. Not facing the truth in one area of your life will block you from moving forward in any other area.
Look into your darkness a little bit. That’s where you’ll find the way out.
And I’ll talk to you later.
How I perform a psychic reading, step by step.
MENTIONED ON THE SHOW Evernote
HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses
Get an intuitive reading with Slade
Automatic Intuition
BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits
Italia Oliver is a Spiritual Life Coach, Intuitive Reader, and Conscious Vocal Channel. She's the creator of The Stairway to Healing™, a program designed to reconnect people to the aliveness, wholeness, and empowerment that resides in all of us. As she endured cancer, she began receiving messages from Spirit.
MENTIONED IN THE SHOW: …channeling, Esther Hicks’ Abraham, Daryl Anka's Bashar, angels, spirit guides, extraterrestrials, Edgar Caye, fourth-dimensional being Jack, Elsheegon of the Light, light body activation, Andromedan Morenae, Archangel Haniel, Archangel Galadriel, breast cancer, October Breast Cancer Awareness Month, mesothelioma, chemotherapy…
Jamie Rota, Center for the New Age, Sedona, AZ
Chapel of the Holy Cross, Sedona, AZ
The Angel Store, Scottsdale, AZ
Mystic Connections, Huntington Beach, CA
GUEST LINKS - ITALIA OLIVER Beauty for Ashes
Attached by Amir Levine and Rachel Heller
BLT for the Soul
ItaliaOliver.com
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Automatic Intuition
BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits
When you think about finding your soul mate, always ask yourself this question: "Who do you want to be when you meet the love of your life?" This approach to passion takes care of many of your needs, beyond just the sexual and romantic. This is the compass of self love that will set you on a course for a great life, no matter who you are and whether you ever choose to partner permanently.
HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses
Get an intuitive reading with Slade
Automatic Intuition
BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits TRANSCRIPT INTRO
Hey, thanks for listening to the Shift Your Spirits podcast.
I’m your host Slade Roberson.
For eleven years, I’ve been a professional intuitive and the author of the blog Shift Your Spirits, where I try to write about spirituality with fewer hearts and flowers than most New Age blather.
I also mentor emerging intuitives, psychics, and healers in a program called Automatic Intuition.
One of my Patreon supporters requested an episode with my views about soul mates and twin flames.
I asked her "Are you sure you want to hear what I really believe about these topics? Because I may not say the things most people want to hear… I have a pretty no-bullshit opinion when it comes to this subject.”
She said that’s what she was hoping for and to bring it on.
Listeners who support the show on Patreon can access bonus Q&A episodes, where you guys send in questions, I record answers to them, and they go out to patrons of the show exclusively.
But since I feel like this topic is a popular one, I’m going to put it out to the whole podcast audience, instead of doing it as an exclusive this time.
There is also a level of support that includes a free download of the guided meditation “Messages from your Spirit Guides."
So, if you want to find out how you can become a patron, and access the extra audio content, please go to patreon.com/shiftyourspirits
Bear with me.
This could be a random, non-linear conversation. I pulled up a lot of the material I’ve written about soul mates over the past twelve years. I’ve skimmed over it. It’s safe to say, my observations have not changed much. My opinions have deepened.
But I’m asking you to bear with me as I talk about it, because it could move in circles. Spirals, even.
My intention is that if I free-flow through this subject, as if I’m collecting little bits of wisdom and pointing them out to you, one or more of them will resonate with you and whatever questions you may have about your own life in terms of partnerships, karmic connections, soul mates.
There are a lot of messages for a lot of different people waiting to come through me.
So, I’m just going to dive in and swim around, and see what I can bring to the surface, okay?
If you’re still seeking, I will say this:
The more you grow into the person you’re truly meant to be, and you know yourself and have greater access to your wisdom… Unfortunately, it seems cruel, but your pool of potential mates gets smaller, not larger.
When you were in your teens, every potential person you caught in your net was a Young Adult trilogy just waiting to be written.
When you’re older and wiser, you start throwing back all the little fish without wasting much time and energy. You throw back some big fish, too.
And you’re okay with it.
Because you know yourself and what you truly require out of a partner.
Some of the big red flags I’ve noted for those who are seeking:
If you’re trying to find a partner, that’s problematic.
If you think you’ve found them, but you're working to make them love you. That’s a huge red flag.
If you’re calling more than one friend and/or psychic to help you decide if this one is the One, chances are … it isn’t.
No bellows required, here. You should not find yourself over there fanning the flames, trying to keep the spark going… That’s not how this should work.
Listen, the beginning should be fairly easy, and fun, and lot of mutual chemistry and excitement… If you’re working just to get in the relationship in the early stages.
You’re in danger, girl.
That’s some of the What Not to Do. Here’s a couple of things you definitely should do:
Say yes to things. People, events, invitations. Things that don’t, on the face of it, have anything to do with dating. Meeting potential partners through other friends is healthy. It makes sense for a lot of reasons.
And always ask yourself this — number one question:
Who do you want to be when you meet the love of your life?
In other words, orient your life around other kinds of passions. This approach takes care of many of your needs, not just the sexual or romantic.
This is the compass and self love and true passion that will set you on a course for a great life, no matter who you are and whether you ever choose to partner permanently for life.
I’ll dip back into all of this more during this episode.
SEGMENT
You might not know it, just from reading the articles on Shift Your Spirits, but Relationships are the #2 Most Requested type of Reading I perform. Although I can only directly tune in to the person who gives me access and permission, I am a big believer in the unique wisdom offered through astrological composite charts. This is where the natal information of two people is cast together as a chart of the synergistic relationship, as if the relationship itself is literally a living entity with its own personality and spiritual qualities. (I offer interpretations of these composite charts as a "bonus" to consultations for those with relationship questions, assuming you can supply the necessary birth information for both parties.)
Here are some of my “truths” about soul mates and relationships. These are some general chunks of wisdom I’ve observed during relationship readings and couples sessions, and truths I’ve learned the hard way — through my own personal experiences.
Relationships are the mirrors by which we experience ourselves. You are always having a relationship with some part of yourself, reflected and externalized by your partner.
There are differences between soul mates and twin flames. In the Western Hollywood vocabulary, soul mate is often intended to refer to a specific type of soul-contracted relationship that is synonymous with a twin flame — the idea that each person has one and only one perfect potential romantic partner. While I wouldn't say that there's no such thing as a twin flame, I would venture that it is a rare phenomena and not one which everyone is destined to experience in this lifetime. I also believe that we have many potential soul mates with whom we can create a variety of successful partnerships, including marriage.
Here’s what most people think they’re describing:
Of all the souls in all the galaxies there's just one and he happened to be born in the same era of time, same part of the globe, same culture, same language ... he even went to the same school and works out at the same gym.
Those are some incredible odds. That's a tiny pool of possibilities. And a ton of pressure. Nobody's finding love under those circumstances.
And you know something I’ve noticed:
The only people who use the term "twin flame” and mean it — like, it’s not just a cool idea they daydream about, but they’re ready to set themselves on fire over it — they are usually in a crazy-ass triggered state.
That’s just my opinion. I’m sure I’m crushing somebody with that statement. You don’t have to agree with me. But I feel a lot of people resonating with that, and if you’re one of them, Yes. Keep the twin flame terminology in the Amazon page description of your paranormal romance series. Read all the delicious fiction you want to read about twin flames. But probably don’t base any important life decision on the concept.
We all have many potential soul mates with whom our partnerships defy categorization, type, or role — members of our spirit family, those with whom we walk together. Not all soul mates are required to exist within romantic, sexual, and/or marriage templates in order to be spiritually fulfilling. It's quite challenging to create a relationship with someone when the connection is greater than any known social construct, especially in the beginning. The power of the initial spark may be hard to compartmentalize without assuming it is meant to be romantic.
Spiritually important relationships are learning experiences even when they don't end up in bliss. Soul-contracted (in which you have chosen prior to this lifetime to know one another for the purpose of delivering [shared] lessons) or karmic relationships (in which we work out unfinished business or repay energetic debts) - these may often be painful or difficult, even while still being very spiritually significant.
Sometimes it's not about you — it may feel like you're playing the Lead, but sometimes you are a Supporting Actor, playing the role of messenger or teacher for your partner.
Projection and Transference are tricky forms of love. If you're a light worker, with a life purpose and/or a professional career that involves heart-centered healing, be aware that there is a big difference between clients/patients and friends/lovers. Anyone who appears to be both will probably belong to the client/patient category.
While “saving someone" may be motivated by a truly loving intention, it can be a disastrous foundation for a marriage.
The pattern in your relationships is carried by you, not by your partners. Mary has a disastrous relationship with John. Mary has another disastrous relationship with Bob. Mary has a so-so relationship with Michael. Mary says that all these men have the same issues. While that may be true, who’s the obvious common denominator in all these pairings?
That’s right, Mary, we’re looking at you, girl.
If you’ve got a pattern, you’re the pattern.
Human beings are not ideas. Be careful that you're not having (desiring to have) a relationship with an idea. If you prioritize a Role over an individual person, you will be disappointed by anyone's inability to become that Idea.
Being alone is always better than being with the wrong person.
If you're not complete, no one else can complete you.
The ideal relationship is not 50-50 — in the highest numerical quantification, you bring 100% and your partner brings 100%. 50-50, 60-40, 70-30... These recipes are expressions of (and probably formulas for) co-dependence.
Sharing your life with someone who also has a life of his/her own can be the icing on the cake. But icing with no cake is a plate full of frosting, which is probably way less appealing (and ultimately less nourishing) than it sounds.
Having a relationship is never a good substitute for having a life.
A relationship is a unique entity co-created by the participants. It is not ultimately comparable to any other partnership.
You always attract the relationship with the lesson you are meant to learn at this time. You can't really fail at a relationship if you maintain the philosophical position that allows you to perceive it as a learning experience.
Lowering your vibration, playing small, or dumbing down to your partner's level in order to make the relationship "work" is unsustainable.
Don't bank on conditional future beneficial changes in your partner. "She'll be perfect for me once she..." "He'd be perfect for me if he'd just learn to..." This is like playing the Change Lottery. Evaluate the relationship based on what you know to be currently true. What if he never changes in the way you hope?
The balance of energetic currency in a relationship does not have to take the same form to be reciprocated. An excellent massage may be reciprocated by a gourmet meal. An expensive gift may be reciprocated by priceless emotional support.
There IS such a thing as a successful, temporary, transient relationship. Important or significant do not necessarily equal forever.
If you doubt that he's your soul mate, you're probably right — he's not.
Listen carefully when someone tells you she's not good enough for you — this is truth straight from the source.
When people tell you they "don't want to hurt you" or "don't want someone to get hurt," it usually means they're preparing for that likelihood. This is a big clue to their expectations, if not their intentions.
If you want to be in relationship with a woman or a man who's into yoga (fitness, hiking, books, pets, spirituality... insert your interests here) don't look for him/her in a bar. You may get lucky, but the odds are stacked against you. Statistically — logically — most people in bars are into one thing for sure — drinking. Go to a more obvious, relevant source environment.
511 — Too Much Information. Confession, Authenticity, and Honesty are not necessarily the same things. Don't talk about your exes or introduce your history of relationship nightmares as a topic of conversation during your first few dates. Why do people continually make this mistake? If you want to open up, open up about a bright future, not your neurotic past. (Not yet, anyway... Save your Dark Secrets for someone who can receive them in the proper time and context.)
Be clear about your intentions and careful what you wish for — your ability to manifest is very powerful, for good or bad. If you choose to manifest a relationship where money/financial security is prioritized over other qualities like mutual love/respect, please don't be shocked when you find yourself in a loveless marriage with a rich dude who treats you like a trophy.
Your ability to receive (deserve) Abundance affects not only your relationships with people but also your relationship with other forms of wealth such as money.
The Good News is that the person you want to become, the life you ultimately want to create for yourself, and the partner you want to attract, with whom you can share your highest self and your best life, can be achieved as one goal. This power, this happiness, this flow — it's a package deal.
You are most likely to fall in love with someone else when you fall in love with you — with your world. You are most likely to meet a partner who shares your values in an environment where like-minded people congregate over mutual ideals.
Let’s talk about surrender.
I recommend you surrender the whole love hunt.
Let it go.
Surrender this whole ... grasping thing.
You're spending way too much energy on what's missing.
But — let's make sure you spin the word surrender right:
It's not "give up" because "that ship has sailed."
This is about tapping into the phenomenon where the things you're looking for usually show up the minute you stop striving so hard to find them.
Now, you can’t cheat this magic.
You can't "pretend" not to look, yet really be looking...
Surrendering this constant “love hunt” is about redirecting your energy to the person you’ve always wanted to become.
That version of yourself is the same person as who you want to be when you meet the love of your life.
So trust that you can let it go.
You’re not going to “miss” anything that’s meant for you.
It'll happen when it happens, and you can either waste energy on it or effortlessly allow it to find you.
Let it find you busy making other amazing things happen in the world.
Your ex is getting married. You saw the engagement pics on Facebook. You’re internally beating yourself up for having such a petty emotional response.
"Even that asshole has someone … really?" "There must be something profoundly wrong with me that I’m still alone, while…"
It’s entirely human to have this internal conversation; but while you’re at it, ask yourself:
"Who do I want to be when I meet the love of my life?"
Prioritize becoming that person.
The better you know yourself, the more likely you and your potential mate can recognize one another.
It’s not about finding them; it’s about finding you.
Focus on a passion that has nothing to do with anyone else.
Alone or partnered (or something else) it’s a win in all potential scenarios.
Becoming who you've always wanted to become — focusing on a passion that has nothing to do with anyone else — this is the key ingredient to attracting the right partner.
It's not about finding them; it's about finding you.
Have you ever considered your ideal romantic partnership from this perspective:
Who do I want to be when I meet the love of my life?
What backstory will I have lived — one of victimhood or one of transcendence?
What do I want to be able to share?
Why will he or she be proud of me?
What will I have to offer?
When you lean toward becoming the person you've always intended to be, your vibration changes. There's an evolution in the signals you're sending out. These are the vibes that attract the person you're meant to be with.
Can you really manifest a partner? Most popular philosophies about the law of attraction want to conflate manifesting with creating. We're told over and over again that we create 100% of everything that happens to us. I've come pretty close to screaming my problems with that.
I believe there's a difference between creating and manifesting. Creating involves projecting, forcing, a strength of will. Manifesting requires receiving, allowing, a passive grace.
There's an important component to meeting the love of your life that is out of your control. I believe we all need to accept that.
It is luck. It may be destiny, it may be fate…
You can manifest anything. You can create and attract all kinds of things in this world. You can influence many aspects of your experience.
You can design much of the life you want… but you cannot design other people.
You can be ready. You can be willing, open, brave. You can definitely be in the process of discovering who you are in the world.
The better you know yourself, the better you and your potential mate can recognize one another.
After eleven years of giving professional readings, I've observed that there are exactly three kinds of clients who ask questions regarding soul mates or romantic partnerships:
Those who are single and dissatisfied and want to know how and when to acquire a romantic partnership.
Those who are already partnered/ married, deeply dissatisfied or distressed.
Those who are partnered to one person and pining away for another (an actual person or an ideal).
Then there are the clients who book readings to ask about other concerns:
Those who are partnered, happy, and working on another area of their lives.
Those who are single, happy, and working on another area of their lives.
So, I have a Theory:
If unhappy single people need guidance meeting someone, and if unhappy coupled people need guidance breaking up, then I must deduce the following:
The "happiness factor" in our lives is entirely based on internal perspective.
The "happiness factor" in our lives is independent of romantic status.
Did you get that?
A boyfriend will not "complete" you; and "getting a girlfriend" is the worst kind of substitute for "getting a life."
The Other Kind of Passion
The elusive missing component to your sense of fulfillment, sense of joy, and sense of purpose in life is found in an entirely different area. It has little (potentially nothing) to do with whether or not anyone wants to date you.
The simple joys are found in numerous, humble external circumstances (easily accessible by most people, excluding obvious extreme hardship and tragedy) or the sense of peace is found in the internal modes of attitude and choice.
A Common Thread
The good news is that the "fix" for dissatisfaction is usually a single, universal pursuit that affects all facets of the life you're creating. The fix is unique from one person to the next, but there's a common thread within the life of every individual.
If you do indeed have a soul mate that you are destined to meet, that individual most likely waits for you within the vicinity of your sense of purpose, or within the realm of another humbler, simpler pursuit of happiness. A shared hobby. A common interest.
There's one passion you can focus on that transforms all areas of your life simultaneously.
Deep down, you already know what that passion is. As you're reading this, you have flashes of this knowledge -- that goal you know you must achieve… that thing for which you feel you were put on this earth...
Go back to doing that -- love will find you there.
If you do not know what that passion is for you, talk to me.
Instead of the way I usually do the oracle at the end of an episode, I want to just share some thoughts with you.
You know what I find consistently amazing about the Universe? (Well, just one aspect, among so many...)
Over and over again I am awestruck by the rarity and perfection of the connections between souls in the briefest parcels of time.
It's so easy to take for granted, to go worrying the Magic That's Missing like a toothache or a raw spot on your gum, your tongue returning helplessly to a mysterious emptiness or source of pain... Where's the Soul Mate? Where’s that perfect Co-Star?
But stop this week (at least today) to consider the precision and force with which unimaginable abundance still manages to find you.
What are the Chances? What are the Odds?
I mean, when you consider how vast is this one dimension we most exist in — is the third dimension one dimension? or do we exist in three? oh, hell, it doesn't matter, we don't consciously occupy much among many — when you contemplate how many billions of souls are incarnate at this moment, from among the trillions who have come and gone...
When you consider the eye-blink in time in which we dwell, how can it be that we have come to know one another?
What fragile spark of miracle has made possible your best friend?
...the sweet pets that have found you, who seem grown from pieces of your heart.
...the books that have defied so much chance to fall off shelves right in front of you and speak to you across miles and centuries.
...that even one human being loves you (let alone the many).
...that the clouds have piled up in a big sky just so, just for you, just in that moment.
...that there can be such a perfect song that knows how to find you riding radio waves across across air and space, that can always manage to make you cry.
...that you could accidentally wander in front of a landscape so picturesque you forget to breathe (just for a second).
...that a stranger meets your eye in passing, smiles, and is gone.
The improbable choreography, the great Spiral Dance, dwarfs all petty bothers and complaints and leaves me speechless, looking about in wonder.
How can it be?
Really, how can this be that I am here in this moment — that we are here — that you have chanced to listen this and share in contemplation of my questions...
For just a moment notice what is greater than your sadness or even your joy, what you're missing or what you find in plenty...
Fucking Amazing.
OUTRO
Thanks again for listening to the Shift Your Spirits podcast.
For show notes, links, transcripts and all the past episodes
please visit shiftyourspirits.com
You can subscribe in iTunes or Stitcher or whatever app you use to access podcasts.
If you’d like to get an intuitive reading with me, or download a free ebook and meditation to help you connect with your guides
please go to sladeroberson.com
and if you’re interested in my professional intuitive training program, you can start the course for free by downloading the Attunement at
automaticintuition.com
and I’ll talk to you later.
I was not raised in religion. My interest in spirituality is entirely self-motivated. When I was seven years old, I asked to attend a Vacation Bible School, so I could ask questions like "Is Mother Nature God's wife?"
MENTIONED IN THE SHOW The Magicians
Drawing Down the Moon - Margot Adler
The Jungle Book (1967)
God’s Eye
Trust in Me - Siouxsie and the Banshees
HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses
Get an intuitive reading with Slade
Automatic Intuition
BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits TRANSCRIPT INTRO
Hey, thanks for listening to the Shift Your Spirits podcast.
I’m your host Slade Roberson.
For eleven years, I’ve been a professional intuitive and the author of the blog Shift Your Spirits, where I try to write about spirituality with fewer hearts and flowers than most New Age blather.
I also mentor emerging intuitives, psychics, and healers in a program called Automatic Intuition.
Today’s introduction is probably not going to be as lengthy as the last one — I’m recording these episodes close together, so I’m not sure how much more original insightful life experience has occurred in my world in such a short span of time. We’re on the backside of Hurricane Irma, as I record this, in a lovely cold drizzling rain. We lost power here only briefly from about 10 pm at night to 7 o’clock this morning. I mean, if you’re going to lose power, that was an ideal window. I can’t really complain about it at all, but I am stunned to experience the winds we had last night, this deep inland, in the mountains of Tennessee.
I really truly hate it for all of you who are still without power across the Southeast. Or suffering from lack of the basics. I cannot even imagine. I am truly grateful for my luck and privilege. If there is anyone in our community in need with like a GoFund Me page or another organization they’d prefer we support, please contact me if you can and I will lend whatever I can in terms of sharing your needs with my platform and audience, helping to expand the reach of your requests and messages.
I hope everyone and their pets came through this okay. I have absolutely no wacky supernatural meanings or godly messages to attach to these storms. Because I’m not Kirk Cameron.
But I do have an oracle message for you at the end of the show. So stay tuned after the final links and credits.
I do have one new tool I started using in the last few days. My friend Matt posted this on Facebook:
"My serenity is inversely proportional to my expectations. The higher my expectations of other people are, the lower is my serenity. I can watch my serenity level rise when I discard my expectations.”
He has a personal note: try also replacing "expectations" with “attachment.”
I looked it up to find the source, and it is actually from the Alcoholics Anonymous handbook. Page 452. That’s cool. I’m not in AA but I love a good re-framing technique.
Remember my not-complaining for a month back in the spring? I continue to fail at this, pretty miserably. I have to admit it. It’s really hard not to complain. People are frustrating and disappointing. They are.
So, I like this idea that lowering my expectations, increases my sense of peace. When I notice my internal chatter critiquing something (especially someone) I just say “Lowering my expectations. No expectations. Just doing my thing. Just moving through here.”
And it’s pretty powerful in the short term. It’s an almost immediate interruption of negative internal dialogue.
You can refer back to the show notes and try it out. I always like to tweak these mantras and make them personal, my own words, in my own voice.
Since I am recording again back to back, I don’t have a lot of new patrons to call out.
But I see Wendy Bassett did just slip in with a pledge. Thanks Wendy!
If you started supporting the show this week, between the last few episodes, I have not forgotten you. I will thank you personally next time. It’s a time delay issue between recording and publishing.
I appreciate all of you who have pledged your support and I’m really excited to see the new names each week. It demonstrates that you’re enjoying the show and want it to continue. That’s very encouraging to me, so thank you.
You can support my time in producing this show by pledging on Patreon.
For as little as $1 a month, listeners who support on Patreon can also access bonus Q&A episodes, where you send in questions, I record answers to them, and they go out to patrons of the show exclusively. There is also a level of support that includes a free download of the guided meditation “Messages from your Spirit Guides."
So, if you want to find out how you can become a patron, and access some of this extra audio content, please go to patreon.com/shiftyourspirits
Today, I want to tell you a story about when I went to Vacation Bible School where I infamously posed the question: “Is Mother Nature God’s Wife?”. I am proud to say I became a full blown heretic before I even got to third grade.
SEGMENT
As I’ve talked about before, I was not raised in religion. My interest in spirituality is entirely self-motivated. I’m sure my parents must have kind of wondered where this little mystic kid came from. Because nobody had to shove it down my throat, I was into it! I can make a case that I was into it in a completely authentic way that never would have happened if I had been indoctrinated by adults.
When I was seven years old, I asked my parents to let me attend a Christian institution known as Vacation Bible School.
We have to take a minute to talk about this diploma or "certificate of recognition," as it’s technically called. I snapped a pic of it with my phone from my mother’s archives and I’ve posted it on my blog so you can check it out.
The Jesus in this illustration is giving me Kris Kristofferson. With maybe a little Kenny Loggins/ Dan Fogelberg… You know, singer-songwriter vibe.
He’s a white guy, of course, bearded, pretty ruddy complexion actually. He could almost be related to the Brawny paper towel guy. He looks like a young guy from a 1950s Boy Scouts of America pamphlet grew up to become a hippie. He’s wearing a creamy hemp poncho with a hood and he’s got this far away expression on his face, faintly smiling at whatever he’s seeing in the distance. And he’s making this complicated hand gesture. He’s working magic, I guess. I mean, the hand positioning reminds me of something you’d see Quentin do on The Magicians.
But then there’s this small guy in the foreground in a leather skirt and sandals with a do rag who looks a little Native American at first glance - and honestly, as a kid, I thought he was and wasn’t really sure what the connection was supposed to be. Now I see this guy is tossing handfuls of seed from a fanny pack contraption onto this barren looking ground with gnarled and twisted plants. So I guess Jesus is working some crop magic for this guy.
Maybe for someone who’s more educated in children’s bible stories, this will ring a bell, or when you see it, you see all my misperceptions and know what it’s truly intended to be … but I still for the life of me can’t imagine what this scene has to do with Vacation Bible School.
But. It is pretty. And there’s something delicious and utopian about these campy mid century church illustrations that I admit appealed to me.
As a kid I was as an easy recruit (initially) for Church-sponsored functions. Beyond the promised hype of craft projects and pizza socials, I was hungry for hard-core religious experience.
My serious dedication is evidenced by this certificate that I was just describing, which has a little gold foil seal on it that says "Perfect Attendance."
CHURCH-SANCTIONED SPIRIT POSSESSION
Someone had explained to me the Southern Baptist phenomenon of Being Saved, in which any average child on Earth can experience a life-long form of holy possession by the Son of God Himself — simply by asking for it to happen.
This was incredible news! I already knew I was protected by an enormously tall lady who looked like Catwoman in a nightgown and no child ever believed in, stalked, and engaged with fairies more than me.
Not only did I applaud my belief in fairies to save Tinkerbell when Peter Pan came on TV, I dressed up in full green Peter Pan attire — green tights and felt elf shoes — one of a handful of "Halloween" costumes that I found reason to wear on several other occasions throughout the year. Considering I never set foot in a Catholic Church until I was 19, my intense longing from the age of 5 to "go as" a Catholic Priest or a Franciscan Monk for Halloween does make me open to the traditional notion of past-life memories.
In her incredible work on modern Neo-Paganism Drawing Down the Moon, Margot Adler finds a common thread among the witches she interviewed — an instinct for engaging in spontaneous ritual theater at a very early age, despite socialization toward any particular religious tradition.
I certainly built enough henges in the woods behind our house, charged enough mystical paraphernalia — wands, crystals, arrowheads, amulets, potion bottles — and entertained an audience of invisible spirit guides and guardian angels with an artistic commitment and devotion only rivaled by my current will to podcast…
And while all these mystical experiences would be quickly dismissed or, at best, patronized by adults — and I knew not to discuss such things with unsympathetic audiences — here was a similar magical experience that was not only socially-acceptable, it was praised, encouraged, an absolute sin if you missed out on it.
You didn’t need to tell me twice — sign me up!
As if that wasn't promising enough, the Baptist Church attended by most families in our neighborhood was called Mars Hill — which I took as an affirmation of my desire to one day be part of the future mission to colonize the Red Planet. At the time, I really thought Being Saved could propel me in my aspirations to become a Priest and an Astronaut — simultaneously!
It would be a few years before I came to understand that in polite white Christian America, there is a thin line between piety and stigma. You're supposed to be a good Christian — but you're not supposed to be too good at it.
The same behavior that defines the believer also damns the mystic.
- Believe in God, pray every day — just don't tell anyone if He answers you
- Stand up in church and sing — but without emotion or fervor — do not speak in tongues or writhe in ecstasy — if by chance you really feel something, for God's sake, keep it to yourself
- Do not rest until you've forced your belief on everyone you encounter — but don't make the mistake of behaving like you mean it.
- Ask What Would Jesus Do? and if all else fails, set an example of what not to do by reminding everyone what judgment feels like
I took the school in Vacation Bible School pretty literally. I came with some challenging philosophical questions. I genuinely thought this teacher — Miss Alice something, it’s noted on the certificate — might have some answers for me.
She required you to stand up in the class to ask your questions.
I opened with “Is Mother Nature God’s wife?”
She tittered and kinda laughed it off, and talked about the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. And I was like “Yes, exactly. Where’s the mom? Everybody has a mom…”
She waved me back down into my chair and tried to change the subject. Looking back, I’m sure she didn’t know what to say or how to handle it, she probably was philosophically challenged—she was probably, what, in her twenties? That seems old to a child, but to most of us, now, she was a child herself, parroting some Bible School teachings to a room full of six- and seven-year-olds.
I remember feeling put out and angry that she wouldn’t call on me anymore, but I was able to channel my emotions into creating a really intensely colorful God’s Eye out of yarn and popsicle sticks. An object I was not surprised to discover years later is actually a ritual tool, magical object, and cultural symbol evoking the weaving motif and its spiritual associations of for the indigenous people of western Mexico.
I waited a day or two and she finally called on me again to stand up and ask another question:
"If God didn't want Adam and Eve to eat that Tree, why didn't He plant it somewhere else?”
She exhaled in loud exasperation, pursed her lips and, again, waving for me to sit down, shot me a glare as she continued on with her Rated-G version of naked people, forbidden fruit, and Original Sin.
That day’s arts and crafts project was drawing scenes from the Garden of Eden story.
I was a huge fan of Disney’s original animated film of The Jungle Book, which came out a few years before I was born. People used to tell me I looked like Mowgli, probably because I was skinny and tan and had long brown hair.
One of the most compelling scenes for me was when Kaa, the serpent, hypnotizes Mowgli while singing “Trust in Me.” (Sidebar: Siouxsie and the Banshees recorded a great cover version of that song.)
I envisioned the serpent tempting Eve with its evil magic had to look something like this, so I drew a big close up of a colorful snake with psychedelic eyes.
Miss Alice whoever she was actually confiscated this illustration before I even finished coloring it in. I’m actually pissed that it’s not in my mother’s child art archives. It was a really pop art concept piece.
She whispered to me the snake was not an appropriate subject and suggested I draw something “prettier” because, you know, it’s the Garden of Eden; it’s full of animals and plants and...
(Honestly, it’s hard for most people of any age, let alone kids, to get past the nudity in the Garden of Eden myth. Am I right?)
So, I drew a picture of Adam and Eve, buck ass naked, picking fruit and surrounded by cute animals beneath a lush jungle canopy.
Now, as I saw it depicted in a television miniseries, the crotch region was artfully blocked by bushes and waist high plants. I went with that coverage for both figures, but the Eve in my picture is reaching for an apple overhead (of course) and I rendered her knockers in full detail.
What? She’s picking fruit. She’s naked. It would look stupid to put her entire body behind a bush.
But, that is exactly what Miss Alice demanded I do in a furious whisper.
You can tell by looking at the finished drawing that the full body bush in front of Eve was an after the fact censorship bar.
It ruined the picture, if you asked me.
I made it to the end of the week, but I wasn’t leaving without putting forward one of my biggest beefs with Christianity. Fortunately, we were discussing Heaven. Unfortunately, Miss Alice would not call on me.
I finally just stood up and blurted out “How can it be Heaven if our pets aren’t there?”
She told me to sit down, that I had not been called on.
“If you can have anything you want in Heaven that makes you happy, then why can’t you have your pets there?”
She actually bared her teeth at me at this point. “Sit. Down. And shut up."
As I slowly lowered myself into my chair I said "I don’t want to go to Heaven if my pets aren’t going to be there.”
I remember looking around the room at all these kids staring at me, their faces masks of shock and anxiety. And when Miss Alice asked for another question, every hand in the room shot up.
Guess what everybody wanted clarified?
But you won’t believe what happened next.
I was sent to a church psychologist. Immediately. Right then. Removed from class and sent to someone in the building who ran “tests to see how smart I was.”
Looking back, these activities resembled those assessments for kids with behavioral issues — or possibly “gifted” designation. Pictures where you describe the emotional dynamic taking place, etc.
At one point, the lady gave me one of those eight-pack jumbo crayons sets, like the ones for really little kids, and asked me to draw a picture of God.
Well, I thought about the old bearded man in a robe sitting on a throne of clouds… I could visualize it, but honestly, rendering that much white, in crayon, is problematic. It was too ambitious for the circumstances.
So I went with my Starry Night technique. I had discovered if you drew with two or three crayons of similar or complementary hues as if they are one crayon, you can achieve a kind of Vincent Van Gogh effect.
I took the yellow, the red, and the orange, and drew a big, thick stroke sun in the center of the page. Not the son like Jesus, s-u-n like the big fiery globe of molten life-giving light and heat at the center of our natural existence.
Sun worship. The ultimate pagan religious expression.
I pretty sure they called my parents in and just asked them not to bring me back.
I remember feeling like they were insulted after meeting with that church psychologist.
But believe it or not, I still chose to be saved and baptized there and went through with it. I’m pretty sure it happened that Sunday after the close of Vacation Bible School. And that’s a whole other tale of disappointment and disillusionment I’ll have to share another time.
Ultimately, with the odd exception of a Halloween party where I technically didn’t make it past the parking lot, we never really went back to that church.
But as I sit here right now thinking back on that time, without malice or disgust, I am 100% positive if Jesus had been teaching that class, I would have been his favorite person in the room.
OUTRO
Thanks again for listening to the Shift Your Spirits podcast.
For show notes, links, transcripts and all the past episodes
please visit shiftyourspirits.com
You can subscribe in iTunes or Stitcher or whatever app you use to access podcasts.
If you’d like to get an intuitive reading with me, or download a free ebook and meditation to help you connect with your guides
please go to sladeroberson.com
and if you’re interested in my professional intuitive training program, you can start the course for free by downloading the Attunement at
automaticintuition.com
BEFORE I GO
I promised to leave you a message in answer to a question or a concern you may have.
So take a moment to think about that — hold it in your mind or speak it out loud. I’ll pause for just a few seconds….right…now.
1…2…3…4
MESSAGE
Go back in time. What were your original thoughts and intentions? Return to your earliest authentic impulses. Recommit to those.
Shed everybody else’s noise. Everyone else’s opinions and advice and judgments — even though they may be coming from a good place — it’s all too much. You need to tell the world to shut up so you can hear yourself think.
Turn off the radio and drive with just your thoughts. Get back to you. To your truth.
And I’ll talk to you later.
Most hauntings, or what we call ghosts, are probably psychic echoes. Residual energy. They’re like moving gifs or image loops.I had a haunting experience unlike most psychic echoes — a type of temporal phenomenon I hadn't considered before as the possible origin point for a ghost.
MENTIONED IN THE SHOW You May Be Someone's Future Ghost
CLOUDBUSTING novel by Eric Slade
HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses
Get an intuitive reading with Slade
Automatic Intuition
BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits TRANSCRIPT Hey, thanks for listening to the Shift Your Spirits podcast. I’m your host Slade Roberson.
For eleven years, I’ve been a professional intuitive and the author of the blog Shift Your Spirits, where I try to write about spirituality with fewer hearts and flowers than most New Age blather.
I also mentor emerging intuitives, psychics, and healers in a program called Automatic Intuition.
Today, I am back from a week’s hiatus for the first episode of our fall season. It seems to be working out pretty well to do a run of 12 episodes and then take a week off. It greatly impacts my quality of life to be able to do this. It also allows both Linda and I to catch our breaths and catch up on our To Do lists.
I, for one, am thrilled to see the back side of summer. I didn’t think about the podcast actually capturing my energy during a time I would normally retreat a bit. July and August - not my favorite time of year. You know how a lot of people have Seasonal Affective Disorder and they experience low energy in the winter? Well, I have the opposite of that. Hot humid summer drains me. It’s like a weight. It’s the psychic equivalent of that heavy lead blanket they lay on top of you when you have X-rays at the dentist. You know what I’m talking about?
I love fall. Or autumn. I’m gearing up for my most productive time of year. I spend October and November furiously writing. I can’t wait to be in hardcore, creative mode, with a sense of truly moving forward after so much stagnation and confusion.
I’ve mentioned the eclipse energy so many times, so I suppose I should share at least personally how that all shook out for me. You know the whole “Who am I? What’s my light? Where and how and why am I shining it into the world?"
I didn’t experience a shedding of my skin in terms of a transformation to something different, for me it’s been more of a recommitment to my original intentions. A return to my authentic creativity.
What I feel a need to shed is everybody else’s noise. Everyone else’s opinions and advice and judgments — even though they may be coming from a good place — it’s all started to be too much. (Without even getting into the cacophony of political conversation.) I just want the world to shut up so I can hear myself think.
Do you ever have those moments when you turn the car radio off and just drive with your thoughts? I need to get back to Me. To my truth. My creative impulses.
I know that sounds general. How it has come in specifically for me at this time is how it affects my writing. I’ve been writing non-fiction professionally for twelve years now. I’ve been publishing fiction for barely three years, but I’ve been writing it for over four decades… I’m not bragging, I’m just saying, I know how to do this. It’s the Thing my life has been oriented around.
And I lost the thread this summer. I couldn’t hear my own channel. There was so much freaking static, and it really scared me, to lose that part of myself. I was in a state of total anxiety for at least three months.
I am really plugged in to author communities online — indie publishing, industry news, classes, conventions, collaboration, marketing collectives, cross promotion… It is an absolute din of chatter. And I just reached a breaking point where I had to yell Silence!
My Automatic Intuition community does require me to be on social media, it is a priority, so unplugging as much as I might like to is not realistic at this time. If social media is part of your business, then you’ll understand. So, what I have done is turn off all the notifications for groups that I belong to.
I didn’t quit everything in a moment of madness; I just muted everybody. I can go back and start turning things back on when I’m in the mood for it. I’m in writing mode right now, not marketing mode, so a lot of posting and commenting about marketing and business-y writing stuff is just not helpful. When I shift gears, my desire for conversation and collaboration may change.
The issue is that other people’s opinions drown out your own wisdom.
I needed to hear my own channel, without any well meaning interference. So for me, that’s what the eclipse has been about. Returning to my creative origins, remember who I was when I was a creative writing major and pursuing my degree was only about pursuing my art. I had no real clue about what it would look like when that became an actual business. And in some ways, creatively, that’s a treasure that got buried and I needed to unearth it.
So, for the next 10 to 12 weeks, my writing surge will focus on the creative in creative writing. I’m tuning out the market, and what everyone else is doing.
I’m just getting clear about my identity, without judgment. This decision if you want to call it that has brought me tremendous peace. And the discomfort was part of the warning system helping me identify what is not working for me.
I hope you have had some similar epiphanies, at least an inkling of what you need to do to get back on track.
I have had some emails in the past few days from listeners who are still suffering from low energy and wondering when it’s going to pass and what they can do to get some relief.
For me personally and for most of the people I talked to, it was really terrible before the eclipse and has started to shift. It’s not immediate, but it’s definitely happening.
We are only barely out of Mercury Retrograde, still in the "shadow" period of that.
Depending on your sign, these energies could be moving through at a different point.
It's not just you, but I wouldn't be surprised if you're already feeling some relief.
(You could be sensitive to these huge storms. At the time of this recording Friday Sep 8, 2017, we are dealing with the aftermath of Harvey and bracing for Irma. If you’re listening from one of the areas affected, be safe. Even for those in other parts of the world, the vibrations from the winds alone are said to be setting off seismic earthquake sensors in some pretty far flung locations. I can imagine if you are sensitive to psychic energies and storms, the anxiety pouring into the collective from those who are displaced and in danger… It’s pretty hard core.)
If you’re listening from the future, the following suggestions will work regardless of when or under what circumstances you’re experiencing overwhelm. I am of course talking about emotional or mental overwhelm, not physical danger and natural disaster. But, this advice is for everybody.
When the psychic or ethereal or mental or emotional energies are overwhelming you...
Focus on grounding the physical.
Just start with your body.
If you already work out, be consistent and stick to your exercise plan. Go into robot mode, just show up and go through the motions. It doesn’t matter if you don’t feel like it, do it anyway.
If the only thing physical you can do is go for walks, go for a daily walk. At least 30 minutes, preferably in nature or a park or somewhere away from traffic. Gorgeous fall weather already happening for a lot of people. (Spring for Ozzies and Kiwis...) I would personally choose late afternoon or evening to release the stress of the day, but for some people first thing in the morning sets you up to handle more during the day.
Get up 30 minutes early if you need to. You'll make it up in deeper sleep.
The tiniest bit of discipline or success generates crazy amounts of momentum.
And if all you can do is breathe, just breathe. Focus on your breath.
These energies are a storm. Storms pass. Be safe.
One of the ways I chose to cope with the eclipse and mercury retrograde was by painting and rearranging my office. A can of paint and a color change is a relatively inexpensive way to transform a physical environment. And just as with the body, shifting the physical energy provides a foundation for bringing back the other layers of consciousness and productivity.
Because here’s the thing - you can’t hang a challenging transformation on a brittle foundation. It just collapses. You know how it is when you’re sick… You’re not creating anything when just lying there with a fever trying to breathe is your only realistic goal.
This has been a longer than normal personal intro. I still don’t feel like I fully recapped everything, but I think we’re all still processing. If you like hearing this personal stuff, do shoot me an email and let me know it’s helpful. I’ll be happy to share more as it comes up in our conversations.
Ok. I want to get into today’s story segment but, before I forget, I want to take a moment to say thank you to my newest supporters on Patreon:
Dr. Keith Holden, Jen Bookout Ramowski, and Russ, who requests some privacy and anonymity.
I appreciate all of you who have pledged your support and I’m really excited to see the new names each week. It demonstrates that you’re enjoying the show and want it to continue. That’s very encouraging to me, so thank you.
You can support my time in producing this show by pledging on Patreon.
For as little as $1 a month, listeners who support on Patreon can also access bonus Q&A episodes, where you send in questions, I record answers to them, and they go out to patrons of the show exclusively. There is also a level of support that includes a free download of the guided meditation “Messages from your Spirit Guides."
So, if you want to find out how you can become a patron, and access some of this extra audio content, please go to patreon.com/shiftyourspirits
And now, finally, here’s today’s story about how one becomes a ghost.
SEGMENT
I feel most hauntings, or what we call ghosts, are probably psychic echoes. Residual energy. They’re like moving gifs or image loops.
I’m not a medium, so I don’t experience human spirits in visitation, such as a relative or recently departed friend coming in.
What most people would call demonic hauntings…Negative entity attachments, that type of thing…Yeah, I do not experience that at all. I have very specific psychic security in place. Layers and layers of programming and refined rules with my guardians to keep that kind of energy away from me. It is dealt with far outside the perimeter of my personal space.
The only other explanations for what I’ve experienced as ghosts would be the results of some kind of irregular time phenomena. I actually wrote about this type of ghost in my novel Cloudbusting.
And then there is the idea that time is an entirely abstract human construct and doesn’t really exist in the way we perceive it. Ash Riley brought this up in her interview on dream interpretation and past lives. The idea that past lives are multiple lives and might be happening simultaneously, in some kind of parallel dimensions.
So, today’s ghost story is about a time phase shift I experienced. And when it happened it was the first time I was aware of the idea that we could witness the origin point of what might become a future haunting.
You May Be Someone's Future Ghost
About 3 years ago I had a haunting experience that was truly unlike any other — a type of phenomenon I haven't heard anyone else speak about; a kind of ghost I've never even really contemplated.
I had a conscious awareness of myself as a future ghost to someone who will occupy my house years after me.
It was the day I realized my mother and I were going to have a beloved family pet euthanized. I woke up that morning to find a text message that it was time.
Buddy was eighteen years old, he had an amazing long life, but he was in decline. We anticipated he probably wouldn't be with us for another year. Still, he took a quick turn for the worst and I can’t allow that situation to drag on one more moment longer than it needs to.
I spoke to my mama by phone and assured her I would go with her to the vet. The appointment wasn't until 3:00 in the afternoon, so I told her I'd come over early, observe him, confirm his condition, and spend a little time with him, say goodbye.
One of the worst things at that point is waiting. When the decision has been made and it's the right one, I don't have the patience to wait. Waiting at all seems cruel to me. When you're terminally ill, in agony in your own skin, eight hours is an eternity. I hated for him to go through that. (Incidentally, I believe strongly in euthanasia for people, too.)
After getting off the phone with my mother, it was torture trying to putter around my house, and kill time until I was due to go over and see Buddy.
I'd only lived in my new house for two months. It was an old place, built in the 1930s, but I can absolutely assure you — don't be too disappointed — it was not haunted.
I performed every spell of invitation I know; I stood in the dark and listened to the quiet until my ears were ringing… nothing.
My new house was eighty-one years old, but it had only been home to just three families in all that time. Lots of kids had been raised there, their handprints are pressed into the patio concrete, their names and birthdays are carved into the workbench in the garage.
From what I know of the history of the house from the previous owner and the elderly neighbors next door, my house had known mostly love. No deaths, no tragedies, no violence.
The energy of the space was truly peaceful, and of course, I was grateful for that.
But there's a part of me that doesn't mind a little lingering spirit here and there. A little psychic echo. I’ve lived in haunted rental houses all my life; I finally bought one, and it was spirit-free.
My friend Tina’s houses are always centers of paranormal activity. I'm pretty convinced at this point it has little to do with her houses; I think they move around with her.
She’ll become periodically excited by the escalation of activity — thumps and bumps and footsteps and such — and beg me to come over and experience it.
It never fails, though. She complains that, several hours before I’m due to arrive, her own ghosts all go quiet. Nothing happens while I'm there; she just as fun catching me up on the evidence. And later I hear that the house remained peaceful for days afterward.
I have a heavy angelic security detail.
I've worked for years to put it in place, customize it, and maintain it. They clear the spaces I intend to visit. By my request, I have a larger than average buffer zone. Other than the guides I may intentionally connect with at my clients' requests, almost nothing "randomly spooky" gets through.
This could also have something to do with the stillness of the new house I had bought. But honestly, I don't think so. I tried to pick up on some ghosts. I strained to hear just a faint echo of some soul who had resided there in the past.
I did have one small flash of a psychic memory, imprinted out in the yard near the edge of the property.
There is an original thriving boxwood hedge around three sides of the property. It was one of the features I really loved about the house, this living green fence. But boxwood is meant to be maintained in a box like shape, which requires a lot of hedge trimming. I’ve mowed my share of grass, and I’ve weedeated and edged many a driveway and sidewalk, but maintaining the perfect planes of this boxwood was another level of yard work. It’s not just the top you see. Once you finish the top, you have to go back around the property and do the outside wall. And then you have to go back around the property and do the interior wall of the hedge. Oh. My. God. This was some physical labor.
Even though I hadn’t heard a peep out of any ghosts inside the house, one day while I was out there sweating away, I heard a grumbling voice. A man, bitching and moaning to himself about this hedge. I was thinking it too, but I distinctly heard him. And I saw or felt that he was doing this with giant manual scissor like trimmers. This was decades ago, long before electric hedge trimmers. It was just a minute or so, and it soon faded away. I blessed him from the future and at least felt a little more grateful for the obnoxious clatter of my power tool chewing through the job.
But back to the present. To the morning of Buddy's last day.
I'm alone in my kitchen, and I allow myself to have one really big loud ugly cry for Buddy.
And in that moment, I felt someone with me.
It was a teenaged girl. She couldn’t see me, but she could hear me crying and was trying to communicate with me.
I knew — and I can't tell you exactly how I knew, I was just certain in that instantaneous claircognizant download kind of way — that she wasn't a ghost.
I was the ghost.
She was in the future, and she heard the psychic echo of my grief.
I had just left it there, imprinted it on the space, and a girl who will one day live in that house after me, picked up on it.
I was in shock — I'd never thought about our ability to do this, or at least to be aware of it in the present while it is happening.
Have you ever thought about this? Maybe it's just me. I don’t know about you, but now I feel incredibly on display… You know what I mean? What am I imprinting? What’s getting recorded?
It's like those time capsules I used to bury in hopes that someone would dig them up one day. I've also written messages inside the closets of my dorm rooms before … I’ve left objects or notes in apartments when I moved out of them…
It made me think of all that.
Who’s watching me, picking up on me from other times, other dimensions?
I felt bad. I wanted to assure her that I wasn't haunting her — I wasn't trapped there or anything — I was just crying for someone I loved.
It never occurred to me that anybody would hear it. Out of time.
I did my best to project to her a feeling that everything was okay. I spoke clearly and explained my situation, in case some future ghost hunter did want to record like an EVP…
I don't think she could really make out my words at all. It was like when somebody is on the other end of a bad phone connection — you can hear her asking "Hello?" in that same one-sided kind of way.
Anyway, this signal — this vortex, this brief wormhole in time, or whatever it w as — faded away.
It probably only lasted two or three minutes, but it left me wondering about the temporal aspect of haunting.
Are you, right now, someones's ghost in the future?
OUTRO
Thanks again for listening to the Shift Your Spirits podcast.
For show notes, links, transcripts and all the past episodes
please visit shiftyourspirits.com
You can subscribe in iTunes or Stitcher or whatever app you use to access podcasts.
If you’d like to get an intuitive reading with me, or download a free ebook and meditation to help you connect with your guides please go to sladeroberson.com
and if you’re interested in my professional intuitive training program, you can start the course for free by downloading the Attunement at automaticintuition.com
BEFORE I GO
I promised to leave you a message in answer to a question or a concern you may have.
So take a moment to think about that — hold it in your mind or speak it out loud. I’ll pause for just a few seconds….right…now.
1…2…3…4
MESSAGE
Endings are openings for new beginnings. If you’re still waiting for some fresh new direction to present itself, hang in there. It’s inevitable. It’s seasonal.
There’s no flailing or striving required, really. Conserve your energy and allow it to come to you…It’s on its way. It’s picking up right now, like a breeze. You’ll feel it when it arrives. You can’t miss it.
And I’ll talk to you later.
What if all this spiritual stuff were bullshit? What if it all is magical thinking?
To be honest, I'm still not comfortable with how closely what I put out into the world resembles religion. I think religion is literally mankind’s worst invention ever.
And sometimes I fantasize about being an atheist. I daydream about it.
MENTIONED IN THE SHOW DUNE by Frank Herbert
Bene Gesserit
LITANY AGAINST FEAR
*I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.*
Bene Gesserit "Litany Against Fear" from Frank Herbert's Dune Book Series © 1965 and 1984 Frank Herbert Published by Putnam Pub Group ISBN: 0399128964
“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” —Edmund Burke
Dr. Keith Holden Ep 12 - Power of the Mind in Health and Healing
Dream-walking & remote viewing Ep 21 - I Dream I’m Other People
Atheism & ESP
HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses
Get an intuitive reading with Slade
Automatic Intuition
BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits TRANSCRIPT INTRO Hey, thanks for listening to the Shift Your Spirits podcast.
I’m your host Slade Roberson.
For eleven years, I’ve been a professional intuitive and the author of the blog Shift Your Spirits, where I try to write about spirituality with fewer hearts and flowers than most New Age blather.
I also mentor emerging intuitives, psychics, and healers in a program called Automatic Intuition.
Today, I want to share some of my thoughts about atheism and psychic ability.
It’s not an especially long episode, but events this week have put me in a sensitive place regarding religion. And by sensitive, I mean Over it.
It’s Friday, August 18 as I record this and I’ve just admittedly broken my own code of not making politically divisive posts on social media. If you’re listening from the future, this was the week of the events in Charlottesville, Va where Heather Heyer was killed at a neo-Nazi rally.
I won’t go into all of that here. If you’re interested in hearing my thoughts on the subject, I’ve posted an original piece on Facebook and on Medium.com. So feel free to friend me or check that out. I received a lot of support, and a little bit of really ugly backlash. I probably won’t be doing this again any time soon, but I wanted to go on record at least once, about where my line is. I do believe that Silence can be seen as support or approval. And I’ve been thinking a lot about the Edmund Burke quote, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
So, I felt triggered to do some not-nothing.
...
As always I have an oracle segment at the end of this show.
Be thinking about a question or a concern you have. Hold it in your mind, and I’ll come back on at the end, after the final links and credits, and leave you with an extra message…
BUT BEFORE I FORGET
This is the last time I’ll be recording before the Solar Eclipse. It’s weird to try and imagine what I may be thinking or feeling about all of that by the time you hear this. It might take a week or two for my real life introduction segments to catch up with all the processing we’re probably doing.
It’s been a volatile time. One of my closest friends Lacy lost her mother to cancer last week. And a lot of my energy is with her right now.
This is episode 24. My intention is to do episodes in runs of 12, with a week off. My first mini season came out at like 13 or something slightly off because well, I was just starting this podcast and trying to find a rhythm for it. And I failed to communicate when I took that first break. So, I want to be sure and let you know if you’re listening in real time, we will skip next week. This allows me to plan breaks through out the year so that Linda and I can catch up on production and transcription and have a little bit of a buffer on putting out these shows.
I want to take a moment to say thank you to my newest supporters on Patreon:
Jason Chinn and Chris Lynn
I appreciate all of you who have pledged your support and I’m really excited to see the new names each week. It demonstrates that you’re enjoying the show and want it to continue. That’s very encouraging to me, so thank you.
You too can support my time in producing this show — and you can support Linda, who transcribes all my words each week — by pledging on Patreon.
For as little as $1 a month, listeners who support on Patreon can also access bonus Q&A episodes, where you send in questions, I record answers to them, and they go out to patrons of the show exclusively.
So If you want to find out how you can become a patron, especially if you would like the transcription to continue, please go to patreon.com/shiftyourspirits
And now, here’s today’s episode.
SEGMENT
What if all this spiritual stuff were bullshit?
What if it all is magical thinking?
I fantasize about being an atheist. I day dream about it.
It would just be easier.
The intellectual side of me wouldn’t feel discomfort.
My ego wouldn’t worry about being judged.
To be honest, I am still not comfortable with how closely what I do and put out into the world resembles religion.
I think religion is literally mankind’s worst invention.
I can make an argument that just about any social ill or self-inflicted problem of the human race can be traced back to religion somehow, some way.
The magical part of me is resentful.
I feel like religion stole the magic tools and misappropriated them.
I admit to playing with those same tools, speaking much of the same language.
And part of me really does not like that.
The vast majority of us try to express this conundrum as being “spiritual but not religious.”
There’s a part of me that badly wants to rail against the whole thing.
I don’t want to be associated with anything which a whiff of religiosity
I want to be able to freely and clearly without complication say “this is all bullshit.”
So much of it is.
Or else it’s been so badly muddied.
Yet, here I am, trying to explain what I and others experience, to harness it, to make it useful to us in some way.
I go through this internal checklist, testing what I can dismiss.
It’s definitely easy for me to imagine you can be psychic without believing in spirits or religion.
Psychic ability could simply be a bio-technology. Like any other function in our bodies and minds. There is a lot of amazing complicated involuntary stuff happening within our biological vessels.
There could other explanations for what we perceive as the presence of spirits.
I always think one day there will be scientifically supported biological explanations for psychic ability, spiritual phenomenon. We’re always reading those cool science pieces others share on Facebook about interconnection, the mind’s impact on the body…evidence or proof of some mystical wisdom.
It’s one of the reasons I loved having Dr. Keith Holden on the show...
Maybe spirits are cellular memory. It’s ancestral intelligence passed through DNA.
The Native Americans believed in this.
If you read Dune by Frank Herbert… The Bene Gesserit - an order of witches who can access the intelligence of all the women who preceded them matrilineally as biological ancestors. It’s like have the voice of every mother and grandmother before you as an enormous hive mind of counselors within your own head.
After the episode about dream-walking, One of my listeners — Sterling — wrote to me and proposed the theory that we remote view others in our dreams and help them during crises … and the person receiving that assistance may experience it as a spiritual presence.
What if our guides are living people connecting to us psychically, on another plane?
What if all this stuff is symbolic thinking? It’s true in some way, but representative of something else, like icons on a touchscreen.
What if what we perceive to be spiritual phenomena is a kind of User Interface with parts of our intellectual technology and consciousness we don’t fully understand how to access and use.
Yet.
I hate to think about how a few hundred years from now I will be viewed as a misguided superstitious idiot with good intentions and bad information.
But here’s the one stumper...
What do we do with synchronicity?
My friend Lacy pointed out it’s the one phenomena every one experiences, regardless of belief.
Atheists still experience synchronicity, right?
How do they explain it to themselves? I’d love to know, but I doubt there are any atheists listening to this show.
If you know of one, or some books or links, I’d love you to share them with me.
Weirdly, I randomly stumbled upon a blog post I had written almost ten years ago called Atheism and ESP.
I want to share that story with you right now
“Can an atheist be psychic?"
Mark, an evangelical youth minister, asked me this question last weekend at the coffee house.
The wi-fi cafe where I go to write in the afternoons and on weekends is the favorite mobile office for a lot of ministers in the community where I live. You might assume I would prefer to be surrounded by a flock of bright-eyed New Agers, but not only is an environment like that unlikely to exist in Chattanooga, TN it wouldn't necessarily appeal to me.
I am comforted by diversity. There are a few Buddhist monks here and there, plenty of college students and professors and even a few technopagans (usually in the evenings), but the overwhelming number of "regulars" whose work weeks most resemble my own are Christian preachers. We each have "our" (preferred) table or couch -- our spots where we play modern scribes on laptops, week after week... I can't say that they see the resemblance between our roles as much as I do -- but they behave as if it's true, and actions are what counts.
If the cafe were filled with mystics who wanted to chat, I'd never get anything accomplished. And, besides, I see the distances and the differences as a promising vision of an interfaith future; where we respect each other as people first, regardless of our vocabularies.
Even though Mark is Pentecostal, he experiences a high-level of clairaudience that is more similar to my own than anyone I've ever met. He's even "confessed" his ability to me, to ensure more understanding between us. Just like anyone I meet on my path, my goal as a minister is always to communicate permission for you to believe what you will, and encouragement for you to create the world you want to live in. I politely refuse to argue theology, politics, or define Source with anyone -- last time I allowed myself to engage in that conversation, I almost lost Mark -- he asked me by whose Authority my abilities are endowed, and I succinctly responded "Mine."
"Now don't fret," I quickly appended the statement when I saw the light in his eyes go dim, and I picked up the silent keyword heresy, "You already know the Source resembles your own in a way that words and definitions only confuse. Repeat your Question, ask my Source directly this time, and not me..."
I mentally stood back, stood down from the protection I normally project, and received his quick, shy, telepathic probe. It was interesting to note that he went straight for my guides and they answered him directly. Mark looked flushed and slightly embarrassed, but the pinched eyebrows relaxed, and his face softened with a kind of child-like smile. He suddenly looked hopeful and happy, like he'd just heard something wonderful and clever. Guess he found the Authority he needed in there, the one my personal labels could not have affirmed for him.
Now, reassured, Mark respects me and trusts me enough to still ask me brilliant, challenging questions once in awhile -- but not to challenge me; more to share with me the ways in which he feels challenged.
So, back to last Saturday, when Mark turned around in his chair, peeked over my laptop and asked me "Can an atheist be psychic?"
"Absolutely!" I said. "I feel that psychic abilities -- extra-sensory perceptive abilities -- are independent of any agenda we might attach to them. Look at this way: you can draw a picture on a napkin without being an artist; you can sing in the shower without being a musician; you can talk without being a speaker; you know when something tastes delicious, whether or not you can deconstruct the recipe and whip it up yourself in the kitchen. The mechanics of the senses have no predetermined goal."
See, only a day prior to this question, I began participating in a university study which profiles psychic abilities, or extra-sensory perception, from a purely clinical, scientific perspective. I have grown so used to attaching my own faith and personal understanding of the supernatural, that I'd actually forgotten that academic ESP literature rarely addresses religion or spirituality at all.
You don't have just five biological senses, you actually have nine -- your psychic faculties exist and are constantly available to you, regardless of any belief system. Your body -- certain regions of your body -- act as antennae. You receive and process information using your four extra senses much as you do the five you're most familiar with -- you don't have to believe in anything to be able to see, hear, taste, smell, or feel.
You can interact with, respond to, receive information from, and communicate with your environment -- especially with other people or other living things in your environment -- regardless of what you believe or don't believe.
How you process, define, identify who, what, or where the information comes from is another conversation entirely.
You don't have to see radio waves to use them in your everyday life. You don't have to believe in electricity to flip switches. You don't have to understand the way light behaves as both waves and particles to be able to see.
I feel that anyone can strengthen their psychic senses. You are psychic; you use these senses all the time. You don't have to sit down and pray once a week to be able to smell. You don't have to remember to hear when you wake up in the morning.
Now, who it is you may be hearing... That's another story.
I have this other daydream where one day, I just come out and reveal to you guys, that I am a Psychic Atheist. And I pivot everything I do…
Because, here’s the thing. I can still do readings.
The information that I get is still accurate and useful.
The source of this information is what I’m questioning here.
I think even the Akashic Records in theory could be retained in a philosophy of psychic atheism.
Does this conversation make you feel uncomfortable?
Or does it spark your imagination in some way?
I don’t know — I just wanted to talk about this. To put it out there and see what comes back.
Does anything about this resonate with you?
I really want to know.
Talk to me.
OUTRO
Thanks again for listening to the Shift Your Spirits podcast.
For show notes, links, transcripts and all the past episodes
please visit shiftyourspirits.com
You can subscribe in iTunes or Stitcher or whatever app you use to access podcasts. You don’t have to use the purple button on your iPhone — some people don’t like that app. My personal favorite podcast app is Overcast. So, check that one out.
If you’d like to get an intuitive reading with me, or download a free ebook and meditation to help you connect with your guides
please go to sladeroberson.com
and if you’re interested in my professional intuitive training program, you can start the course for free by downloading the Attunement at
automaticintuition.com
BEFORE I GO
I promised to leave you a message in answer to a question or a concern you may have.
So take a moment to think about that—hold it in your mind or speak it out loud. I’ll pause for just a few seconds….right…now.
1…2…3…4
MESSAGE
If you’re feeling hurt or angry about another person’s behavior toward you, now is the time to release the negative energy around those circumstances. If you hang onto it, it’s going to attract more of the same.
Anger and resentment are tough bonds—they’re super glue—they keep you attached to the events that create initial suffering, they keep them alive within you, and it drains you.
Forgiveness is not forgetting, it’s not falling to resist, it’s a clearing of energy that serves as the first step in creating room for peace and joy. So, help to contribute your part in that.
And if nothing else, forgive yourself for having unrealistic expectations of a situation that can’t provide perfection. Perfectionism is one of the ways we sabotage ourselves.
And I’ll talk to you later.
Melany Oliver has over 10 years experience healing deep emotional wounds. She helps women wounded by childhood trauma and negative relationships learn to love and accept themselves. She also helps those who are heartbroken or unable to attract their life partner release energetic blocks to manifesting true love.
She’s the creator of Healing the Broken Heart, Complete Heart Attunement, and the Heart Paths, which support those on a spiritual journey learn how to process their emotions and life lessons.
MENTIONED IN THE SHOW:
...Reiki, Thai yoga massage, holistic and complimentary therapies, NLP (neuro-linguistic programming), hypnotherapy, theta healing ... cording, energy cord, etheric cord, energetic divorce, energy exchange, cord cutting...
GUEST LINKS - MELANY OLIVER melany-oliver.com
Healing the Broken Heart
Complete Heart Attunement
HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses
Get an intuitive reading with Slade
Automatic Intuition
BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits TRANSCRIPT Hey, thanks for listening to the Shift Your Spirits podcast.
I’m your host Slade Roberson.
For eleven years, I’ve been a professional intuitive and the author of the blog Shift Your Spirits, where I try to write about spirituality with fewer hearts and flowers than most New Age blather.
I also mentor emerging intuitives, psychics, and healers in a program called Automatic Intuition.
Today, I’m sharing a conversation with Melany Oliver about healing from heartbreak.
And, of course, as always, there’s an oracle segment at the end of the show.
So be thinking about a question or a concern you have. Hold it in your mind, and I’ll come back on, after the final links and credits, and leave you with that extra message.
BUT BEFORE I FORGET
It’s August 14, 2017 as I record this. If you’re listening right when this episode comes out, we have just experienced the eclipse. And hopefully you’re moving toward your best intentions for the future and a break with past patterns that no longer serve you. It will likely take a while for this energy to move through and there’s still work to be done around this Leo / Aquarius duality.
My simplification of the theme you should be considering, or the questions to ask yourself, revolve around the idea of your true identity. Leo energy (for everyone) is about being a star, shining your special light, and the Aquarius side of things is about the greater humanitarian definition of who you are. Who, on a larger scale, will receive your light.
Who is your true self? What are your gifts? And how do you intend to impact the world.
It feels like a test right now — you will either become reaffirmed in who you want to be or you may realize you’ve strayed from the path you set for yourself, or you may discover a new image of who you truly are and feel the nudge to adopt that new self.
The challenges and changes right now are about embracing what will allow you to shine, and releasing what is not working.
I’d like to take a moment to say thank you to my new supporters on Patreon:
Ann Luke-Montez
Janet Thomasson
Miki Lea
I appreciate all of you who have pledged your support and I’m really excited to see the new names each week. It demonstrates that you’re enjoying the show and want it to continue. That’s very encouraging to me, so thank you.
You too can support my time in producing this show — and you can support Linda, who transcribes all my words each week — by pledging on Patreon.
For as little as $1 a month, listeners who support on Patreon can also access bonus Q&A episodes, where you send in questions, I record answers to them, and they go out to patrons of the show exclusively.
I just posted the latest bonus episode on how I do a psychic reading, step by step, in great detail, so you guys who are supporters can go listen to that if you haven’t already.
If you’d like to listen to that episode, you can find out how to pledge your support for the show at patreon.com/shiftyourspirits
Okay. Let’s get into today’s interview.
Melany Oliver has over 10 years experience healing deep emotional wounds. She helps women wounded by childhood trauma and negative relationships learn to love and accept themselves. She also helps those who are heartbroken or unable to attract their life partner release energetic blocks to manifesting true love.
She’s the creator of Healing the Broken Heart, Complete Heart Attunement, and the Heart Paths, which support those on a spiritual journey learn how to process their emotions and life lessons.
I’ll let her introduce herself...
Melany:
I'm Melany and I work with emotional wellbeing and I help people process their deep emotional pain. And empower them and not allow their emotions to sabotage their life, to rule their life, and that's the basics of what I do. That's the main, that's the core of what I do is really all about emotions and emotional empowerment.
Slade:
I know a lot of people who are listening are going to be wondering where your accent comes from. Tell us where you come from.
Melany:
Haha.. I was born in Brazil. My mother's half Brazilian, half Italian. My father's English, Welsh-English. I grew up in Dubai so... I don't know where my accent's from. I think it's mixed up.
Slade:
It's very interesting, yeah! It's funny because whenever I listen to you try to speak, there is a part of my brain - I was originally a linguistics major in college and this is not something that I talk about a lot but it's funny because I'm very good at identifying English-speakers and you know, and where they come from. Like a lot of people in America can't tell the difference between a New Zealand or South African, stuff like that...
Melany:
Yeah...
Slade:
And I notice when I'm listening to you, that there are parts of my brain...
Melany:
Haha... you're confused!
Slade:
Yeah, I'm trying to at - I'm like, i heard something there that sounded British and then I'll hear something else that sounds a little different. And so, yeah, um I just - I felt like in the moment as I was listening from the perspective of the audience, like, Everyone's going to wonder where is she from with the lovely accent!
Anyway...
Melany:
I get that a lot. I get - people don't know where I'm from. I've gotten from everywhere, literally.
Slade:
It's fascinating though. You have a very different worldview, I'm sure, from the intersection of all those cultures. I am curious in hearing, how did you become a professional intuitive?
Melany:
Basically I had no idea what I was going to do. And I remember applying to university and I applied to so many different courses and I honest - when I got the results and I just did not know what to do. And so what I did was I took a gap year and I went traveling and studied a lot of different modalities. So I started reiki, I did Thai yoga massage, and that's when I started to realize that actually I really like the whole alternative medicine field.
And so I studied holistic and complementary therapies at university and then from then on I just started to study all sorts, you know, NLP, hypnotherapy, and in the background, I've always been, you know, an intuitive, but never really... I never really took that on board as a profession, but over the years of treating clients through massage - so I did five years of massage - I started to realize that people used to have a lot of releases emotionally and I was able to pick up their emotions just by giving them a massage, reflexology or aromatherapy massage, and that's what also got me interested in the intuition and aura reading and all of that and so it was actually a gradual process.
I did start doing tarot readings from when I was around 18. I was very young but I only started to really take this professionally 10 years on when I was around 27 because I just didn't feel confident enough at the time and it was just a lot of encouragement from friends who had had readings, and messages from me and it was basically they encouraged me and that's how it kind of started.
Slade:
You were definitely not the first person, massage therapist, that I've spoken to who has discovered their intuition in that practice or in that sort of hands-on healing. I would say that, gosh, there's probably like a third of the people that I speak to who are emerging as intuitives or who just discovered that they're empaths... Yeah, do some type of bodywork where they're actually touching the clients and, yes so that's really fascinating. Of course, that's not how I come to it at all. I'm a terrible masseuse. I end up just petting people like they're cats. Which can be kind of nice, depending...
Well, you know, you have a unique focus though for your practice and you're the creator of Healing the Broken Heart and Complete Heart Attunement and your website talks about how you specifically help women who are heartbroken and unable to attract their life partner release all kinds of blocks to healing their heart and attracting love.
So how did that become the focus of your practice?
Melany:
Again, it wasn't something that I chose. It was something that - it kind of just happened naturallyI started doing more. After the massage phase, I went into more healing. And healing in general I was doing Reiki healing, theta healing and all sorts of other - NLP, hypnotherapy, and over the years again, I noticed that my main clientele were women who were heartbroken. And after seeing a lot of women, I also - based on all the tools that I know - I also started to see a pattern emerge in terms of a process. So, for example, I wouldn't just go straight into forgiveness work. I need to first release the overwhelm and then release the resistance, and then perhaps if they're ready, then to go into forgiveness. So it was years of treating women who were heartbroken and that's how I created my processes and it just kind of landed on my lap. It just happened. It wasn't something I specifically chose.
Slade:
Well, I think that there's a theme actually in discovering our purpose. It's often about following where people ask us to go more than it is about deciding where we're going to take them. You know, that's a piece of advice that I give a lot, so...
I feel like I was a little drafted into doing this as well.
One of the things I noticed though, in all the times that I've spoken with you, you use the term "heartbreak" in kind of more expansive way than most people do, you know what I mean?
Melany:
Yeah.
Slade:
You use the concept of heartbreak beyond just the romantic love, so...
Melany:
Oh, totally.
Slade:
How do you define heartbreak in the context of spiritual healing?
Melany:
Yeah, and I've also - sometimes I use the wound, heart wound or emotional wound, and it's really anything that breaks your heart, and it could be your mother passing, I've treated clients that they couldn't get over their loved ones passing. That in itself is a heart wound. It could also be for your pets or anything like that, but any form of trauma, any form of emotional hurt that really hurts you and you're not able to get over, that is a heart wound, and a heart break, and yeah, that's - you're absolutely right, it's not just about partners or exes and things like that. It goes deeper than that. Even childhood wounds. You could have had your heart broken as a child by parents, family, teachers. It's really about the emotion, the emotional wound, I define it as a heartbreak.
Slade:
That - You have something called the Heart Path series that's about processing emotions and emotional discipline. Tell us about the Heart Path series.
Melany:
So the Heart Path 1 is more about the self healing. So it is about emotional discipline where I go into how to process emotions, and not just emotions but also how it affects your mind and how to shift your mindset after processing your emotions. So Heart Path 1 is really about healing yourself. It's a complete self-healing journey and these are tools in which you can use over and over again and you'll probably go through the journey, as I have, many times.
So that's the main focus of the Heart Path 1.
Heart Path 2 is more about your intuition and developing your intuition and really connecting with your heart, with your heart's wisdom and the reason why I did it in that way - it's also - the whole Heart Path actually is based on my own journey and it's based on everything that I've learned and my favorite tools and how to develop yourself spiritually, mentally, emotionally, and the reason why I've put the intuition part second is because if you haven't dealt with your wounds, if you haven't really healed your childhood traumas or any form of trauma, your intuition will be heavily influenced by your wounds and you'll not be a clear channel. Perhaps you'll hear your intuition but you won't trust yourself to follow it. You will react based on your emotions. So it is a process. And the last part - the Heart Path 3 is more about aligning with your heart's purpose, with your heart's desires and it's more about manifesting but more in alignment with your soul, with your heart.
So that's the Heart Path.
Slade:
Okay, so I'm not a woman, as you may realize, but I have, of course, experienced heartbreak, and there are thousands of women in my audience who I'm representing right now. So just speak to me as if, you know, if I came to you and I was considering working with you one-on-one, walk me through the process. Like, what can I expect if I approach you and I say, "I just can't get over this woundedness." Walk me through what working with you one-on-one would be like.
Melany:
Sure. So normally I would always start with releasing the overwhelm because when people come to me, they're not in a good place. They're normally in a dark hole, or they're stressed out and completely overwhelmedSo the first part is really about bringing yourself back into balance, grounding, and preparing you to go deeper. Because when you're overwhelmed there's no way you're going deeper into your wounds and you're not able to process anything.
The second part I always check if there's any resistance, and I work with releasing resistance through reframing and using different techniques. Again, exactly what it says, to release resistance so that we go deeper. And after that it's more about processing the deep hurtful emotions that everybody avoids. That's why they're stuck. So I sit most of the time it's really sitting with clients through that painful emotion and I do guide them through visualizations, guided imagery, and to bring out, to pull out their pain, their hurt, and sit them through a process so that they can process and really release that deep core emotion that they've probably suppressed over a very very long time.
And then once the emotion is really released, and I have - I don't know how to say it - I can sense when somebody has reached the core, when someone has really accepted that emotion and truly released it, then we can start on rebuilding, whether it's their self-esteem and working on self-love or whatever. The core whatever they need, then it's all about reprogramming and rebuilding.
So this is, I guess, you can say, a brief framework that I use through my processes, through the way that I work with clients.
Slade:
I would love to get your advice about obsessive thoughts. So - and I'm asking for a friend, and for my past and future self, when I'm in this state - but you know the kind of thing I'm talking about, which is maybe the relationship is broken and it's starting to unravel and you kind of know it deep down and he's not responding to your texts, and you feel in your gut that something's wrong and your imagination starts filling in all these scenarios, or this is something that I see everyone go through like my friends. You've just broken up with somebody. You've really willfully chosen and made that decision to move on and you know it's the right thing to do, but you can't stop thinking about the person. It feels like an actual sickness, you know what I mean? Like, you're just obsessed.
Melany:
Yeah. Totally get that.
Slade:
So do you have any advice or rules or guidelines for how to deal with that?
Melany:
Absolutely. And this is a classic case of "cording".
So when you're obsessed with someone and you're continuously thinking about them and you have - it's like - when you - firstly, before I speak about that, when you have a relationship with someone, immediately you create an energy cord so there's like an energy, etheric cord between you and that person. So one of the tools that I teach my clients, and I guide them through, is to do an energy exchange and a cord cutting. And really that makes a big difference. But this is - you have to do this consciously, some people may not want to do it. Also, depending on where the cord is - so most of the time these energetic cords the way - when I see it in my mind, it's through the lower chakras, if you know about the chakras, and especially the sacral chakra, which is all emotional. So definitely there's cording going on, so the first thing is to really do a cord cutting, an energy exchange.
And then second I have some very specific NLP techniques that I use to cut you from the past, from those thoughts, and it works really well. So, and clients are almost always surprised at how well it works actually.
Slade:
Is cord cutting something that someone could do on their own or are they just too stuck in their own energy to really trust doing it by themselves?
Melany:
Yeah, it's definitely something you can do on your own. You can just use your intention and really imagine that cord and you take your energy back. You give back their stuff and you consciously make the decision to cut the cords. You can certainly do it on your own, but obviously there's some clients that maybe they're not able to, they're scared, or they don't know how. But it's really that easy. You use your mind, you use your intention and you really do it consciously. You make the decision to almost do like an energetic divorce with that person and so that you can move on energetically and you do feel a difference in your field.
Slade:
I am particularly good at doing this for myself. And I have a Venus in Gemini, which is like, it's like this sign of the serial monogamist, but because it's in an air sign, it's about being able to plug in and plug back, you know unplug again, and I always try to share this with other people and I am not judging them but they seem to be really bad at it, so...
This is usually with friends or family members, or someone close to me more than specifically clients, but I see people who are trying to hang on to friendships or to create a civil relationship with the ex, way too soon after the breakup -
Melany:
Absolutely.
Slade:
Like there's really no break. It just is kind of like this extension, this drawn out connection and I believe that you can have healthy relationship with your exes. I have some kind of civil friendly connection with everyone that I've ever been in love with. I'm happy and proud to say. But I do believe that there has to be a very hardcore period of distance.
Melany:
I absolutely agree.
Slade:
Yeah, so what's your role for that?
Melany:
I actually had to tell clients to stop - well, unless they have children, then that's a whole different story.
Slade:
Right, yes.
Melany:
Because obviously you need to be connected if they're the father or mother of your child, but if it's just an ex and that's... especially clients that I have treated who have been in abusive relationships, I had to actually tell them to have no contact because it was not healthy and what they were doing actually unconsciously is wanting, seeking approval and seeking some sort of validation and sort of having them in the background as a way to - maybe some day, who knows. And that is not healthy, you know? That's not where you want to be. And I agree. You have to fully cut cords, have no communication until you are in a healthy space, then maybe in the future, okay.
Maybe you can but yes, so... especially for clients who I see are really struggling then I do recommend that, to have no contact.
Slade:
I have a ritual that I do. There's actually a meaning of the word "casket". It's kind of a rural sort of Appalachian term for a little chest, where you keep keepsakes, like love letters and mementos and things like that. But I love the fact that the word also is something that we bury the dead in, right? It's a casket. And so I sort of created a ritual around that concept where I believe that every sign of the person, like if you do have photographs, if you do have letters and little things, if it's not something you're returning to them, it's something you want to keep, it needs to go in this casket and it needs to be bound up, tied up, and it needs to go in the closet for at least a year.
Melany:
Totally.
Slade:
Yeah. It needs to be a death. You really need to mourn it.
Melany:
I have -
Slade:
Yeah, go ahead.
Melany:
I was just going to share a really interesting story. So I had a client who was in an abusive relationship and she had an - it was over, but she was still suffering the aftermath which I was working with her through, she had diamond earrings that she was wearing every day, and it had been I think 5 years or I can't remember how long it was - and she was still wearing them every day. And I made her either sell it or, you know, sell it and buy something else but she was so stuck in that story that I asked her, I think this would be a good idea for you to do to really break free. You don't need that. You can buy yourself another pair of earrings.
Anyway, so she finally, she did it. And two weeks later, she went back home and her mother gave her a gift which was a diamond earrings that was way bigger and more beautiful than the one she had from her aunt.
It's just so funny. She emailed me and I was like, That is just hilarious. So when you hang on to things, you know, it's just things. It's material things. It's not, doesn't mean anything but psychologically it was keeping her stuck in the past and she manifested diamond earrings but bigger and more beautiful and didn't have the same memories, let's say, that she was carrying with her every day.
I thought that was funny.
Slade:
My mom actually - and I remember watching her do this and really being aware of the symbolism of it, but I didn't want to, you don't want to stop someone in the midst of them doing something and make them self-conscious about it. But she very instinctively when she was divorced, she had divorce jewelry that she felt like she couldn't wear anymore or whatever. And her instinct was, I'm going to go have this melted down and have them make something new out of it. And so she went and had this piece of jewelry, I think it was a ring, designed, using the stones and the precious metals from these other pieces and she made this whole new thing for herself. She designed it and it was hers. So she transformed all that into something and I remember at the time -
Melany:
Beautiful.
Slade:
- being very aware of the symbolism of that and I thought, Well she's doing it already, I'm not going to call attention to it. She's instinctively doing something that, yes, you would advise someone else to do and the thing I think a lot of people forget is, your subconscious mind is aware that that thing is on your body.
Melany:
Absolutely.
Slade:
It's aware of the weight of it and the - you catch sight of it in the mirror even though you've looked at those earrings a hundred times...
Melany:
Yes.
Slade:
Some part of you knows you're wearing them and it's broadcasting those memories.
Melany:
Totally. And it's like subliminal messages, you know?
Slade:
Yes.
Melany:
Unconscious messages that you're not consciously aware of, but like you said, you catch a glimpse of it, you're putting it on every day, and it's constantly reminding you of that, so, yeah...
I get rid of everything. When I'm done, I'm done.
Slade:
I do too. And like I said, I'm very good at it.
Melany:
Maybe I'm extreme.
Slade:
It's - you know the thing is, I'm one of those people who I anticipate pain. I know how long it takes to move through that energy and in to heal, regardless of how good you are at it, or how much you make the choice to do it. There's still going to be some period that just sucks. And my way of dealing with that is like, Let's hurry and do it as quickly as possible. Like, the fastest way is through it, so if I'm going to have to suffer for the next 6 months, then we better get a move on.
Melany:
Yeah.
Slade:
And so, that kind of propels me through it or into it and it's almost kind of like, I feel a rush, a sense of needing to hurry, so I can be over soon.
Melany:
I have the same approach for myself.
Slade:
Yeah, I think it comes from having been through it multiple times and really getting good at it and thinking, You know what, I know what this is about. I know what I have to do to get to the other side of it. I am not someone, just for the record when I said I have connections to everyone I've ever been in a relationship with, none of those people have I ever for one second considered getting back together with. I don't understand that whole phenomenon.
I kind of feel like if somebody's worthy of your love, there's probably something about them that always will be. With the exception of someone who's abusive or is a sociopath or a narcissist or has some issue that makes it toxic for you to be connected to them. But I do believe that the average person who's making average mistakes in relationships is still worthy of being out there somewhere as a Facebook friend or whatever. And that's okay.
Melany:
Yeah.
Slade:
You use a term in your Heart Path series, "emotional discipline". Is that what we're talking about?
Melany:
Yes, it is. Totally.
And because, if you have a lot of emotions that you haven't processed, you will just act in ways that are - that will probably sabotage your relationships, it will take over basically your decisions, your actions, and...
Well first in terms of, and when it comes to exes, going back to what you mentioned, you truly need to have healed that before you either leave, before you can have a mutual friendship, let's say, a respectable, respectful friendship. Because otherwise, as I mentioned before, there'll still be a little part of you that is looking for approval for - that is seeking some sort of acknowledgment or something. Does that make sense?
Slade:
Yeah, no. That actually hit me really hard when you said that the first time, and I thought, Oh, I'm a little guilty of that. I'm a little guilty of the person who doesn't want to be with me anymore still thinking I'm a good person. Like, that is something that I'm, at least subconsciously wanting to have and yeah, I'm absolutely guilty of that, for sure.
The other thing too, you know, correct me if I'm wrong, but on a really basic level, you can't attract something better, you can't attract the person who's meant to be with you if that space is occupied, you know?
Melany:
Yeah.
Slade:
It's like the seat next to you, if someone else is sitting in that seat, no one else can come along and sit there.
Melany:
Absolutely. And maybe the person will and you'll miss it. Because you're so stuck on the past, like you said, your field is - your heart is filled with someone else so you still have those strings, those cords attached to the past that you're carrying along with you. Trying to move forwards and trying to manifest but with all this stuff in your field, so it will block you, yeah.
Slade:
So that's the manifesting part of the cycle. The process, right?
Melany:
Yes, oh yes.
Slade:
And you really can't do, you can't manifest when all this foundational stuff, when you're wounded, when you've got cords of attachment draining your energy, occupying your thoughts and filling your heart, you can't manifest anything.
Melany:
Well, you can, but it won't be the right person.
Slade:
Not what you want. Yeah, manifest a bunch of crap.
Melany:
Yeah, exactly. So that you can, again, you're going to manifest things to trigger you to waken you, so that you realize, okay I need to deal with myself. I still have emotions, trapped emotions down there that need to come out, so... To manifest true - someone that is in alignment with what your heart truly desires, then yes, you need to let go. Otherwise you can manifest but not the right person.
Slade:
What do you say to the person who is manifesting the same relationship over and over again? What's that about?
Melany:
That is definitely about trauma, because what you're doing is you're repeating a pattern and what I have found normally, it's childhood trauma. It's not just about an ex or even a few exes. It's always childhood-rooted core... these are like core deep-rooted trauma where you're seeking to be loved firstly, but in the wrong way. And it's only when you can truly go back and do inner child work, which is what I do mainly, with these type of issues. After we've released all the exes, then you can start to really, well, then you can start to manifest after you've healed your childhood wounds. Yeah.
Slade:
What message do you think is kind of missing from the spiritual, psychological world where, you know, the personal development world where we talk about these things and discuss it and want to be better. What do you think is the message that is missing or sort of needs to be brought forward?
Melany:
One of the biggest things that I have seen is that a lot of people think that the spiritual world and being spiritual and all of that and self-development, maybe not so much self-development, is all about being positive and thinking positive and all of that. Which yes, that is the goal, and essentially that's where you want to be.
But however, it's about facing the dark stuff, facing your fears, facing these wounds that nobody talks about. Something that people are ashamed of and this is actually something that I post about on my social media, which maybe has shocked a few people. But I was ready to wake people up. It's not about being positive. If you're struggling, if you're stuck, then no matter how much, how many affirmations you do, or how much you try to think positive, things will not shift until you deal with those hurtful, painful emotions and your shadow and these traumas.
Slade:
Hmm... Yes.
Melany:
I don't know if it's emphasized enough.
Slade:
Yeah, it's shadow work. I mean, I think that actually came up on the last interview that I did, so there is a connection here and you and I were talking before we started recording about this particular time period. The whole eclipse phenomenon and everything being about a break with the past, a break with old patterns and re-aligning somehow, and the thing is, you can't break with patterns if you're not kind of acknowledging them.
Melany:
Yes, absolutely. And that's actually another good point. This is another thing that may be missing is, I see a lot of people use spiritual concepts and even things like meditation, to bypass dealing with their stuff. And then they wonder why they're stuck months later. Oh, but maybe I need to meditate longer. And no, you actually need to be consciousYou need to actually face your stuff, and not try to transcend them.
Slade:
I also have a theory that a lot of our purpose is found in that painful stuff. It's about a transmutation of our life lessons because nobody wants to hear somebody who's just really happy and has an easy time of it telling us how to live. All your credibility and all your wisdom comes from these traumatic things that you contend with and learn how to deal with and your best hope at impacting someone else is to offer them a shorter path through that.
Melany:
Yeah, absolutely. And the only reason I say that when I started my spiritual journey or my spiritual path, nobody told me this. I was just told I need to be positive and I need to be grateful and I need to think positive thoughts. Which yes, but I didn't actually realize that I actually had to deal with my dark stuff. So that's why I emphasized on this point as well.
But yeah, you're right and it's only when you've gone through certain experiences that you're able to help another take the shorter path, you know.
Slade:
Yeah, yes.
So you have five free audio tools that are available for my listeners if they go to your website. Tell us about these tools and where we can go to find them.
Melany:
Sure.
These are really the basic tools to release overwhelm, start to release fear, and really bring yourself back to balance because when you're in a state of stress and overwhelm, there's no way you're processing anything. So you can go to my website. It's Melany-Oliver.com. Or if it's easier, you can also go to MelanyOliverHealing.com. And you can subscribe to my website and you'll receive these five tools and they're, like i said, this is the foundation. This is the basics so that you can start to get centered, get grounded, start to process some of your emotions and really bring you to a place of balance. So that you can be conscious and then you can start to do more deeper work.
Slade:
Are these guided meditations?
Melany:
No, these are audio tools. I just speak about each tool so you can hear me speak. There are i think two meditations on them. Links that I've put up there as well. But they're tools so you can start practicing as of today.
Slade:
Okay, that's awesome. Well I will put your links in the show notes and on the blog post so everybody can just click on that and go sign up and get those and start using them.
Thank you, Melany, for talking about this subject. I know it's probably one of the number one reasons why people do seek advice in the first place, so I know that there's somebody out there listening who has really learned a lot from your talk.
Melany:
Awesome. Thank you so much for having me. It was really nice to speak to you.
Slade:
Thanks again for listening to the Shift Your Spirits podcast.
For show notes, links, transcripts and all the past episodes
please visit shiftyourspirits.com
You can subscribe in iTunes or Stitcher or whatever app you use to access podcasts. You don’t have to use the purple button on your iPhone — some people don’t like that app. My personal favorite podcast app is Overcast. So, check that one out.
If you’d like to get an intuitive reading with me, or download a free ebook and meditation to help you connect with your guides
please go to sladeroberson.com
and if you’re interested in my professional intuitive training program, you can start the course for free by downloading the Attunement at
automaticintuition.com
BEFORE I GO
I promised to leave you a message in answer to a question or a concern you may have.
So take a moment to think about that—hold it in your mind or speak it out loud. I’ll pause for just a few seconds….right…now.
1…2…3…4
MESSAGE
It’s important at this time that you remember your self worth. That you hold your head high and hold yourself in high esteem. You can set firm but gentle boundaries with others without being isolated from them. You can also delegate from a place of authority. Remember you have allies who can assist you in the external world even as you focus on your internal self-care.
And I’ll talk to you later.
An interview with Ash Riley about dream interpretation and past lives. We talk about everything from improving your dream recall, to theories about time and consciousness, to how our phobias can have origins in past lives.
Ashley Riley is a spiritual entrepreneur, intuitive lifestyle blogger, and personal development mentor who enjoys empowering others to tap into their own inner-strength. She is the voice behind In My Sacred Space, an intuitive lifestyle blog which explores personal, spiritual, and intuitive development, and incorporating spirituality into daily life.
This episode has a full text transcript below.
MENTIONED IN THE SHOW: Kyle Cease
Hannah Ehlers-Bond
Many Lives Many Masters by Bryan Weiss
Journey of Souls by Michael Newton
Quantum Healing Hypnosis Technique
Past Life Regression
The OA on Netflix
GUEST LINKS - Ash Riley In My Sacred Space
Online Dream Interpretation Course
Free ebook Connect with your past lives through your dreams
HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses
Get an intuitive reading with Slade
Automatic Intuition
BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits TRANSCRIPT Hey, thanks for listening to the Shift Your Spirits podcast. I’m your host Slade Roberson.
For eleven years, I’ve been a professional intuitive and the author of the blog ‘Shift Your Spirits’, where I try to write about spirituality with fewer hearts and flowers than most New Age blather.
I also mentor emerging intuitives, psychics, and healers in a program called Automatic Intuition.
Today, I’m sharing a conversation with Ash Riley about dream interpretation and past lives. We talk about everything from improving your dream recall, to theories about time and consciousness, to how our phobias can have origins in our past lives.
And, of course, there is an oracle segment at the end of the show.
So be thinking about a question or a concern you have. Hold it in your mind, and I’ll come back on, after the final links and credits, and leave you with that extra message…
BUT BEFORE I FORGET
I wanted to share a bit of an update, or an observation, really, about the last episode—episode 21—in which I shared a dream I believed to be about a woman abducted in Arizona. After publishing the show and listening back, I noticed something I had never thought of before. There were no cell phones in that dream.
And because of that, I don’t feel it could possibly have been from a present or even recent time period because the first thing she would have done when she ran out of gas is call or text someone. She didn’t even check her messages when she went on break.
I feel like this detail alone blows my theory that I was dreaming about something urgent or something happening in the present. The fact that I couldn’t find anything remotely resembling the story could also support this incident having taken place in the past. Assuming it was real and it happened, of course.
But, you know, after this conversation with Ash, I’m not sure remote viewing through dreaming is what this was about at all. There may be something underneath, deep within the dream content, thematic, more important than the details of the story it presents. You’ll get an idea of what I’m talking about when you hear this interview segment coming up.
I also want to comment on this eclipse season again.
I feel like we will definitely look back on this time period as a turning point in our lives.
I’m not going super deep into the astrology of all of this, so be sure and consult better minds than mine. Actually, I am sharing and reposting a lot of articles on Facebook, which is where I tend to share time-sensitive content, so please send me a friend request on Facebook if you’d like to access some of what I’m reading about the subject.
First of all, though, if you’re experiencing some turmoil, breakdown, identity crisis, life quakes, I want you to know that it’s not just you. That may be a small consolation, but I do find that comforting, myself.
Because I talk to so many people all over the world every week, I am in a unique position to notice patterns that are going on out there. And if that corresponds with some of this eclipse astrology, cool.
Regardless of spirituality or faith or total lack of those things, we still have a collective consciousness. And there are some powerful common themes presenting in a lot of people’s lives right now.
I’m recording this Aug 8, 2017, so if you’re listening when it comes out or soon after it, it’s obviously timely. But if you’re listening to the archives in the future, this message may still hold significance for you. You may be experiencing something similar and some serendipity has allowed this message to reach you at whatever time and place you are.
It’s okay to believe it speaks to you now — whenever you hear it, just like the oracle message at the end of the show.
This pattern or phenomenon or transit we’re going through seems to be about shedding our skins, or having our identities challenged.
If you are presented with a strong impulse to take an action right now, if it’s a clear action, even if it seems sudden or impulsive, move toward it. If it’s wrong, you will get immediate feedback, and you can back off, but the biggest problem everyone seems to be having right now is a kind of paralysis. Lack of decision. Feeling lost. Not sure what direction you’re going in. Not sure how to move forward...
So, I have to ask you this…What is wrong with waiting?
What about surrendering, allowing yourself to be carried where you’re meant to go?
Check again — your situation may feel like an emergency or like something has to be tended to immediately. But does it really? Can it wait a few weeks?
If you can wait, I would advise doing nothing. Make no decisions, take no actions, observe the thoughts and feelings and wait for the message to emerge from them. Or for the circumstances to resolve themselves.
Chani Nicholas sent out a newsletter this week, and there was a section that really spoke to me. She wrote: "Try not to rush to replace what is leaving. Try not to jump to conclusions about what to do with the new room. Try not to assume too much just because being in the unknown is uncomfortable."
I want to take a moment to say thank you to my new supporters on Patreon:
Theo Walker
Darla Antoine
Alisa Martin
and James Roberson
It’s nice to see some life long supporters showing up in Patreon.
Darla Antoine was one of the first people to take my professional intuitive training almost 8 years ago.
Alisa is one of the people in the world who has been talking to me about spirituality the longest. Decades, she’s been listening to me. She’s also the friend I mentioned in the last episode whom I apparently visit in the dream space every once in a while for a chat.
And James Roberson is my father. Actually both my parents support my show on Patreon — my mother was the first person to pledge, which was before I started thanking people on the show. But my dad is actually a fan and listens to all the episodes, and reads all the posts.
I know a lot of you don’t feel like you can be your authentic self with your family. And I certainly celebrate the value of chosen family. But I want it to be known that my parents do support my work, and would do so even if it’s not their thing. I am very blessed in this way.
I appreciate all of you who have pledged your support. I’m really excited to see the new names every week. It demonstrates that you’re enjoying the show and want it to continue. That’s very encouraging. It means more to me than you may realize.
You too can support my time in producing this show — and you can support Linda, the young woman who is creating our transcripts every week — by pledging on Patreon for as little as $1 a month.
Listeners who support on Patreon can also access bonus Q&A episodes, where you send in questions, I record answers to them, and they go out to patrons of the show exclusively.
So If you want to find out how you can become a patron, especially if you would like Linda's transcription to continue, please go to patreon.com/shiftyourspirits
Okay. Let’s get into today’s interview.
Ashley Riley is a spiritual entrepreneur, intuitive lifestyle blogger, and personal development mentor who enjoys empowering others to tap into their own inner-strength. She is the voice behind In My Sacred Space, an intuitive lifestyle blog which explores personal, spiritual, and intuitive development, and incorporating spirituality into daily life.
And Ash happens to love talking about a few things that I don’t talk about so much — dream interpretation and past lives. She even mixes the two together.
Here’s my conversation with Ash:
Ash:
In My Sacred Space has been my little side passion for the last going on four years now, I think. It is, it started out as a lifestyle blog, and I talked to you about this the other day, where it was sort of this amalgamation of spiritual living and however that manifested itself in your life.
And it was from home décor to cooking or gardening or general spirituality, whatever. And slowly and surely, over the last four years, it’s kind of gravitated toward serious focus on personal development and metaphysics.
And so, last year, around July, I decided to start doing readings for my followers. I’ve been doing them for friends for a long time and I’d also been doing dream interpretations for friends for a long time, and obviously for myself. And I’ve been doing personal development coaching for my friends.
So I decided to bring all that together into this online space that I had, and offer it to all the people who’d been following my blog for the last three to four years.
And, I use a combination of numerology, tarot, personology, really any kind of psychic tool that is at my fingertips to dig into a person’s soul path and really figure out what the real lesson they’re trying to learn in these challenges that they’re coming into in their lives and how can we bring that subconscious block forward into their awareness and help them release and heal that?
And so, with my mentorship sessions especially, I like to do a combination of numerology and personology and dream interpretation and we’ll use tarot to kind of direct us in each of our sessions. I ask them to set goals for each of their sessions and then we work through whatever comes up.
It’s been really fascinating because I see – I have clients who come in and something will spark within me intuitively about what they’re going through and I’ll throw it out there and they’ll initially be resistant to it. They’ll say, “No no no, I’m over that, that’s not what’s happening.”
Then I have them keep a dream journal in between sessions. And they come back to me with all these dreams. And I start going through their dreams and it is just like, screaming out in their dream symbolism that this is what’s going on.
And it’s really great to have something tangible like that to point to. To kind of help them blast through the cognitive dissonance of what’s going on.
Slade:
This is one of the reasons why I wanted to - well I wanted to talk to you about a million things, and we could probably do so many different episode topics or whatever, but when you brought up this subject of dream work, I was like, “Yes! That’s what I need to talk to you about.”
Because I have started to talk about my own dream experiences a little bit. And interestingly enough, how dense I am about – like if somebody else told me their dream and it had an obvious symbol in it, I would be very quick to see it. But when it’s my own, it’s not as apparent to me, you know.
So, I am not a dream expert. I’m not even a very good dreamer. Like, my dream life is so disappointing and so many people will bring this up to me. You know, potential clients want to talk about their dreams or they, you know, want to know if I do any kind of interpretation around that symbolism or whatever.
And I can, sort of, I can do that when it comes up in conversation, of course, but when you said that this was an area that you focused on, I was like, that’s really cool because I want you to supplement my understanding and my wisdom.
And, you know, I don’t have to explain it to people because you can explain it better than I can.
But yeah, so I have a bunch of questions about dream interpretation and dream work and specifically about some of the, like your free e-book on this subject, and some of the courses that you have.
So, just first and foremost, I was interested in knowing how did you end up specifically making dream work a focus. Like, what drew you to the topic specifically?
Ash:
I’ve always been a pretty avid dreamer, even back when I was a kid and when I was younger. And I’ve always had pretty good dream recall. I didn’t actually get into the interpretation of dreaming until I sort of discovered spirituality a few years ago, and I just found it to be the easiest avenue for me to start accessing and developing my own intuition.
Because, as I said on my website, you can literally do it in your sleep. It doesn’t get any easier than that.
Slade:
So talk to me about the – you have a dream interpretation course. Tell us about that.
Ash:
Yeah, so, like I said, I’ve been doing this for myself for a long time, and I started to do it for friends and in my Facebook group for people. And it’s something that a lot of people have a lot of curiosity about.
But it seems like they – not a lot of people have a good knowledge of how to go about interpreting dreams. And, you know, for some people it’s just like, “Oh, what does this one dream mean?”
And I really want people to understand that there is so much more to dreamwork than just figuring out what this dream means.
Because you can use dreamwork to do so many things. And that’s why I have my two e-books on my website.
One of them is how to contact your spirit guides through your dreams. One of them is how to access your past lives through your dreams.
You can dream with intention and set specific intentions with your dreamwork and access parts of your multi-dimensional self in your subconscious mind that you don’t necessarily have access to on a regular basis.
And that opens the door to so, so much. With how you develop on a personal level, and how you live your life.
Slade:
What are some general tips that you would tell somebody who’s kind of at the beginning of this process? Because you’re right. I don’t even think about it until I have one really good dream that seems meaningful and then I think, “Ooo! What was that trying to tell me?”
But, you know, you just sort of altered my perspective in how this is really something that you want to monitor in an ongoing way, right?
Because the patterns are so important and, I mean, I really stress this in my intuitive development mentoring as well, is to watch for the patterns of what’s being brought to you and following that as a way of discovering your practice.
So, what would you tell somebody who’s like, “Ooo! Okay, yeah, I want to go into this.” What are a few basic good practices for starting a dream journal or dream interpretation log or, you know, what would you advise?
Ash:
Get into the habit. Dreaming is a routine, and waking up every morning and writing down what you remember from your dreams is a habit you want to get into. I’m to the point now where I am interpreting my dreams while I’m still in them.
And that just comes from routine practice and having it on my mind that I’m going to remember this and figure out what it means.
And then, I’m not even necessarily lucid in those dreams when that’s happening. It’s just something that I naturally do now.
Now I hear a lot of people tell me, “Well, I don’t dream.” And that’s not necessarily the case.
Everybody dreams. Every night.
It’s just a matter of whether or not you remember it.
And, a lot of times the reason you don’t remember it can be because you’re a really deep sleeper. People who have a lighter sleep pattern tend to be able to remember their dreams more often because they’re – you have the best dream recall the second that you wake up. Particularly if you’re waking up during R.E.M. You’ll be likely to remember your dreams more.
So there’s little tips and tricks that can help with dream recall, like setting an intention before you go to bed telling yourself that you’re going to remember your dreams.
You can set an alarm clock for like, around 2:30, 3:00 am to wake you up, and then you immediately just write down the things that you remember.
Don’t move when you wake up in the morning. Just lay there and try to remember what was happening in your head before you woke up. Because the more that you – dreams are stored in your short-term memory initially, and when you wake up and you start to move around, it can make them fade away. So it’s really important that you kind of sit still and try to hold on to them and commit them to your longer-term memory.
So like, repeating the symbols that you saw and the actions that happened in the dream can be - can help you commit those to your long-term memory and then get them down in your dream journal.
Gosh, there’s just so much…
Slade:
Well, so there’s another topic that you’re really into that I’m also deficient in. There’s two things that are really attractive topics to a lot of people in our collective audience, and that’s past lives and dreamwork.
And so, you actually combine those two things.
I don’t really do a lot of past life readings, past life stories don’t come up for me very much in readings and you and I have talked about it. I mean, it’s not that, there’s just some people who focus on different things or they receive different types of information.
Some people are natural mediums. Some people pick up on angelic energy or some people are more attuned to energy centres in the body. You know, there’s different things. So, one of your expertise that I don’t have is this synergy of the past life information with the dream stuff.
So tell me about how you – how do you get at the past life stuff through your dreams?
Ash:
Just learning to – a bit part of dream interpretation is learning to identify what type or types of dream you’re having. And a lot of times you can get things mixed together in a single dream, different elements. There can be pieces of it that are past life, but it’s sort of layered underneath modern day symbolism, so learning to identify which parts of the dream are what and what is really coming through in that dream is kind of an art form that you kind of have to learn to develop.
And they have a lot of checklists and things like that as supplementary material in the course that’ll help you figure those things out.
Slade:
So does the course have – tell us a little bit about what’s in the course content-wise. Is it video? Is it audio? Is it workbook style? A mix? Just to get some people interested in it, why don’t you describe it a little bit more in detail.
Ash:
It’s a mix of things. There’s a video lesson in every module, and there’s downloadable worksheets. There’s exercises. There’s homework assignments. I give access to tons and tons of resources that are free. I have a Facebook group for everyone in the course to come in and they get to work with me one-on-one in the Facebook group, and with each other.
Because a huge part of learning this is practicing and you can practice on yourself for a really long time, but when you start to really practice with other people, it gets interesting because you start to learn that different people have very different dream styles and very different dream symbolism.
Like, I have one friend who is also a prolific dreamer, but her dream style is so different from mine that it’s almost – it’s difficult for us to interpret one another’s dreams because they’re so different from what we’re both used to.
So it’s really cool how you can learn your dream style and learn to identify different types of dreams. Learning to dream with intention and the course gives you all kinds of worksheets and downloadable things to help you learn those basic fundamentals and really give you a good foundation for learning how to figure yourself out, from a dream standpoint.
Slade:
Do you feel that one of the things that’s going to occur as you get into this and study this, like you said, as you’re analyzing and learning about your dream style – do you kind of develop your own symbology, or your own language, like where is the relationship between the kind of archetypal dream dictionary sort of scenario, versus your sort of personal symbolism. Is there a difference in the way that you teach it?
Ash:
There’s definitely a difference between archetypal symbolism and your own personal symbolism. A lot of people think that it has to be either or. I don’t teach it that way. I believe that you can find the layers of meaning in your dreams and that the archetypal symbolism and your personal symbolism can both be simultaneously true.
Slade:
So tell me like a cool example of a past life dream story that’s come up either for you or maybe somebody in your group.
Ash:
Oh goodness. My past life dreams tend to be really, really heavy. And the reason why is because they’re coming up because there are things that are karmic patterns that I’m trying to heal. And so, a lot of them tend to be really emotionally painful.
But I do have one anecdotal story that’s not so heavy. That I will share with you. Just not to bring everyone down.
And I actually talk about it in my e-book on past life dreams.
One night, I was falling asleep and I just happen to idly wonder, have I ever had any past lives as a man, because all the ones that I’ve seen so far in my dreams and various other things have all been me as a woman. And I had a dream that night that I was a Roman or Greek soldier, and I was in an army and there was like this big celebration happening, like we’d just won this major war and there was like this feast going on and I was sort of like a lower guy on the totem pole, and there was a certain area of this place that was reserved just for the generals and the people who were really high up.
But I also had this really stubborn F-U streak and I was drunk and decided to crash the general’s party. And that’s really all I remember of this dream, but I definitely figured that that has to be where my whatever I-do-what-I-want streak comes from – it’s that life.
Slade:
That’s cool. That’s interesting.
You know, as you were talking about that, I was thinking, well I’m putting you on the spot asking you to recall this. And I actually – when I was in high school, I think I was doing some kind of fiction competition or something. I was writing a short story for some submission and I based the short story on a dream that I had had about being a World War I trench soldier in France.
Probably, you know, British soldier in the trenches. You know, that famous – where, I mean, just gazillions of people died in that area in that time period, so…
And like you said, it wasn’t really - definitely was low on the totem pole. I wasn’t anybody famous, and the dream itself was just sort of a snippet of being in that experience and having a lot of sensory detail about what it felt like and I was not interested in any kind of military anything. Military history, nothing. So I didn’t really read about that kind of stuff and I wasn’t attracted to movies or anything about it.
But because of that dream, I have had a lifelong interest in a World War I and World War II history, particularly in Europe, and am constantly drawn to things about the trench warfare in particular.
So, I don’t know. It’s really weird. It’s like I can take on the idea of past lives and the story and if somebody told me, “Yeah, you know that was a past life experience you were picking up on.” I’m like, okay cool.
But at the same time, I don’t have any kind of hard and fast belief about it. You know what I’m saying?
I don’t know. Like I feel I’m a little wary of like, being like, “Yes, you know, this is definitely true. And this is how it happened.” So, it’s just one of those things it’s like, if it comes in and finds me, I will definitely take it on board, and it certainly sounds like a good explanation, don’t you think?
Ash:
Yeah. I think for me, identifying a past life dream, like I said, it tends to come with some really heavy emotional energy. And I wake up in the morning with what I have termed to be the past-life-dream hangover. And it’s sort of like this dream that just sticks with you all morning and you’re really still processing a lot of the emotional energy that was attached to it.
And I very much feel that emotional energy when I’m in that dream. With what’s happening and what’s going on. And, like I said, they almost always mirror something that is going on in my current life that is attached to that karmic pattern.
Slade:
Interesting.
So it’s like, something that is happening in your life now will prompt an attachment to that memory or bring it to the surface in some way, you think?
Ash:
Yeah, and, I mean, I’m in the camp that believes that our lives are actually – time doesn’t exist and our lives are happening simultaneously, and so it’s not even necessarily a past thing that happened. It could be that I’m actually tapping into this other life that is me as it’s happening. And we’re experiencing these things at the same time.
Slade:
Interesting. Okay, now that’s really good. That’s juicy. I like that. How did you arrive at that theory? How did that come to you?
Ash:
I think that – first of all, I think it’s actually a scientific fact nowadays, but coming through my spiritual development, I have channelled stuff about it that has just sort of come out and like, “Wow, where did that come from. That’s really juicy.”
And then I go look it up and it’s like, “Oh! This is related to Einstein’s theory of relativity – weird!”
Slade:
Yeah.
Ash:
And then I’ve also seen a lot of other people have come up with sort of the same information. And when I see a recurring pattern in things that other people are channelling and feeling and thinking, I pay attention to that. And I don’t necessarily – I think people get too bogged down in the details. And they miss the commonality and the theme with the little nuggets of truth that are at the base of it. You know what I mean?
Slade:
Yeah, you’re right. Most people are interested or concerned with the who and the detail – the kind of set dressing of the historical time period and, you know, all that kind of stuff because that’s fun. Let’s face it, you know. We all want to get dressed up and be a princess in another culture.
But, yeah, you’re right. The underlying theme there is really what’s most important from it.
I, you know, as we’re sitting here talking, and maybe it’s because I’m, you know, picking up on your energy and you’re drawing things to the surface, but I have an actual other good past life experience story.
When I was in Hawaii at an Angel Therapy Practitioners’ Conference – I think this was in 2008 – I met a British woman there named Hannah Ehlers who I will link to Hannah in the show notes, and I’m probably going to have to send her a message now and say, “Hey, you need to listen to my podcast.”
I haven’t talked to her in forever but I just remembered as you were speaking that she and I were hanging out in the pool as one does in Hawaii at our convention, and she was talking about how she does past life readings on people and that was, you know, kind of one of the things that she did.
And I told her that I had had this lifelong aversion to anything that has to do with childbirth. Like, seeing -
Ash:
(inaudible)
Slade:
Yeah, yeah. And probably a lot of people do, because if the past life thing is real, then, you know, there’s a ton of us who have died in childbirth, right?
And, so, I mean, I have – even if it’s a silly labour scene on a sitcom, like it is – I cannot be in the same room with it. I have to turn the channel and this was a lifelong thing. It just would make me cringe.
And it was one of the only things that I could identify like that in my whole life. I have no snake phobias or fear of heights or anything like that, but the sound of someone being in childbirth, even in fictional circumstance, was like, NO, cannot do this.
And I said something to her about that, because we were talking about it, and she just very quickly told me what the situation was. And she told me she said, “Actually, you did not die in childbirth. You were in the other room and you experienced your wife being in distress and dying in childbirth and so that’s why the sound of witnessing it is not really about experiencing it so much as just hearing it is very triggering.
And I was like, “Wow…”
First of all, I would’ve guessed that it was because it was something that happened to me personally, and I would never have thought, “Oh, I didn’t necessarily go through it but I witnessed it in some way.” That has made a different imprint.
Because actually, there’s a sense of helplessness when you are the person who maybe is not the victim but the witness. Or, you know, somebody who cannot help someone that you care about, you know, when they’re sick or in distress or whatever.
Speaking of heavy stuff, you know, but – so I took that in and, I was like, okay, she was very quick with the story and she told me a whole lot of other specific details and how it related to a phobia that my mother has that was very accurate as well, and she even told me, she said “Your mother was present at that time. She was your child and you two survived the situation. And that’s a past life karmic thing that you have as souls.” And, you know, it just went on and on and I was like, “Okay… okay cool!”
And I have to tell you, and I’ve never told her this, I don’t think, but I’ve never once had that experience since that conversation. Like, I can watch Call the Midwife all day long now.
Ash:
Have you ever read, I think it’s Many Lives, Many Masters?
Slade:
Yes! Way back. I was probably in my teens or early twenties.
Ash:
That is like the exact thing that Brian Weiss talks about with his clients when doing their past life regressions. He brings them back to this moment where this phobia centers around, and the minute that that’s brought into your conscious awareness, it can finally be processed and released and it no longer exists anymore.
Slade:
You’re right. That’s so true. Ohmygod I love this. Now I want to have Hannah come on the show.
Shoutout to Hannah!
Very cool. And I’m glad you remember the Many Lives, Many Masters, because that’s kind of like one of the bibles of past life stuff, right?
Ash:
Right. I’m actually a huge fan of Michael Newton as well. Journey of Souls, Destiny of Souls, I thought was a really great thing.
It’s kind of more like between-lives work, but it’s still really really good.
Slade:
So what’s the difference between between-life work and past-life work?
Ash:
So past life work is, they take you into the past life itself, and dig around there and bring things into your awareness. Life between lives is where they take you into I guess what you would maybe consider the bardo state, where you’re doing your pre-life planning, so to speak, about what you’re wanting to experience in this life and which past lives is attached to and why and it sort of gives you a view of the afterlife in a structural form and kind of what happens during the death process when you come back into that place and you review your life and you see what worked, what didn’t and what you want to create in the next one.
Slade:
Wow. Have you done any of that for yourself?
Ash:
I did! I did a Quantum Healing Hypnosis Therapy session which is a Dolores Cannon method, and it is technically a life-between-lives type work thing. Have you ever seen the OA on Netflix?
Slade:
Yes. I like it.
Ash:
Okay. There is a part in the OA when she’s sort of in her near-death state and she’s talking to the woman in the room with the galaxy walls and everything.
Slade:
Yes!
Ash:
I forget…
Slade:
Beautiful.
Ash:
That’s very similar to what I saw in this regression when I experienced my death and went into that place.
I was standing there and I was able to look down at the floor into this sort of like pool and see myself on my deathbed and there were these three beings that were there. They were very tall and I kind of got the feeling that that was sort of like my counsel. And I was standing in front of them and we were reviewing that life.
And the imagery just really stuck with me and when I saw that part of the OA, I was like, “Ohmygod! That’s it!”
Slade:
It’s interesting that you pulled that out because that is the most impactful memorable image to me, and there are a lot of them, in that show actually. There’s some amazing stuff. I mean, even the crash sequence on the bridge when the car goes into the water and all that stuff.
I mean, there’s so many scenes that are shot in very unique ways but you’re right. That part where she crawls up into the room where the walls are made out of stars and… there’s something about that that – I welled up emotionally, like, you know, felt very teary watching that. Even from the first time you see it and you’re not really sure in the context of the story, you know, what may be happening or whatever, but just as an image, that tweaked my mind. That was an Inception-kind of feeling for me, watching that. It was very cool.
Awesome.
So, let me ask you this. Because it’s all fun and it’s very interesting and it’s kind of good story telling. How do you think we can use these stories to make a difference in our lives now? What kind of result do you see when you work with someone around this dream stuff? What can someone expect to improve I guess about their current situation?
Ash:
The sky’s the limit. It all really just depends on what your intention is and what you want out of it. You know. It’s a tool like anything else. It’s like using tarot cards. It’s like using a pendulum or going to get a psychic reading. It’s all - whatever information you uncover is going to help you in whatever it is that you’re attempting to move forward with.
I think it’s particularly good when you’re working with blocked emotional energy from be it past lives, current lives, whatever. Your dreams are – they’re your window to your own subconscious mind. They’re constantly reflecting yourself back to you. The parts of yourself that you are unaware of or that are unknown to you.
And in some ways, it’s very much shadow work.
Slade:
Yes.
Ash:
And the whole purpose of it is to help us integrate more and more of that shadow self until we become whole. Consciously whole, I should say.
Slade:
There are a couple takeaways for me from this conversation with you that really change my perspective on a few things.
I never really thought about dreams as being a psychic tool. I don’t know what I – I had it in a different category entirely. Like, maybe psychic ability is like a channel and then dreams are a channel, or something like that. But you’re right. When I work with people around the concept of tools, I use that word very loosely to describe anything from a modality to a technique to a divination art to, you know, a subject that you might study or healing practice that you take on. So I’ve never really thought about, oh, dreams just need to be another one of those tools to pull from.
And the other thing is this idea that you sort of - sums it up when you said, “It’s essentially a kind of shadow work.” But the idea that one of the reasons why these dreams are important is not so much the surface layer of the visuals and the detail and the costumes and all that kind of stuff. But this idea that whether it is actually a memory of a past life or it is your brain presenting your own stuff within that story, it’s still useful for the theme that’s at the bottom. You know what I mean?
Ash:
Right.
Slade:
Like whatever the theme is that’s trying to be communicated to you.
So that’s really cool.
Thank you, for that. I will go away pondering and thinking about this whole topic differently because of that. And, you know, I think that actually might give me a shift around my whole attitude about dreams, because I’m kind of – I’m a bad dreamer, so maybe I sleep deeper than I thought or whatever it might be.
But I, you know, it’s weird when you have an attitude like, “Oh, I’m not good at that so I’m not going to do it,” and I have a little bit of that prejudice against this topic.
Ash:
Um hmm.
Slade:
So I’m interested to see how that’s going to impact me. Because you’re right, it will change my intention when I lay down to go to sleep, just having that shift and kind of opening up to the possibility of that.
So it’s very cool. Thank you for doing that.
Just to make sure that we get an invitation from you, where should people go if they want to start working with you or if they want to download some of your free resources. Tell us where to go.
Ash
Go to my website at https://inmysacredspace.com/ and basically you can navigate to just about anywhere on my site from the home page. I, like I said, I do readings, I do – and I wouldn’t necessarily call it a “reading”. I work much more in the realm of personal development. And so, you can come to me. I’m not going to predict your future for you. I’m not going to tell you if and when your ex is coming back to you.
What I will tell you is what it is that is underneath the surface that is keeping you from having meaningful relationships. And I’ll help you pull that forward and then we can work through that.
You know, I’m much more geared toward helping you overcome these things than just telling you what to do or what to think or what to see.
Thanks again for listening to the Shift Your Spirits podcast.
For show notes, links, transcripts and all the past episodes
please visit shiftyourspirits.com
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If you’d like to get an intuitive reading with me, or download a free ebook and meditation to help you connect with your guides
please go to sladeroberson.com
and If you’re interested in my professional intuitive training program, you can start the course for free by downloading the Attunement at
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BEFORE I GO
I promised to leave you a message in answer to a question or a concern you may have.
So take a moment to think about your issue—hold it in your mind or speak it out loud—I’ll pause for just a few seconds….right…NOW
1…2…3…4
MESSAGE
Right now, your thoughts may not be as logical and factual and true as you’d like to think.
Emotions are running the show. But remember, you are not necessarily your feelings; you are the one experiencing them. To get some perspective or relief, you can zoom out and observe them from a distance.
Emotions are about the sacred element water. And water is about fluidity. So, lose your rigidity. Relax your self-imposed rules. See where the water wants to carry you and allow change to happen with as little resistance as possible.
And I’ll talk to you later.
I'm sharing a recent phenomena I've been experiencing — I dream that I'm other people. Like, I'm tuning in to other people's lives when I'm sleeping.
This episode has a full text transcript below.
MENTIONED IN THE SHOW "You Are God; Act LIke It"
Ash Riley
HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses
Get an intuitive reading with Slade
Automatic Intuition
BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits TRANSCRIPT Hey, thanks for listening to the Shift Your Spirits podcast. I’m your host Slade Roberson.
For eleven years, I’ve been a professional intuitive and the author of the blog ‘Shift Your Spirits’, where I try to write about spirituality with fewer hearts and flowers than most New Age blather.
I also mentor emerging intuitives, psychics, and healers in a program called Automatic Intuition.
Today, I want to share some creepy dream possession experiences I’ve been having.
And, of course, as always, I have an oracle segment at the end.
So be thinking about a question or a concern you have. Hold it in your mind, and I’ll come back on at the end of the show, after the final links and credits, and leave you with an extra channeled message…
BUT BEFORE I FORGET
It’s August 1, 2017 as I record this and over the weekend the ‘Shift Your Spirits’ podcast did indeed cross 10,000 downloads. It's cool to stop and think that what you are doing right now has happened over 10,000 times in just the last four months.
That’s kind of mind boggling.
This double new moon in Leo eclipse month Thing seems to be really messing with me. I am a Leo, so, I heard, you know, that it’s especially difficult for Leos. I am struggling with my writing at the moment. I’m a working writer. I have been for over a decade. I write specific hours every day. It’s a job. It has taken me by surprise to be struggling with my process, all of a sudden, out of nowhere. And I don’t want to be someone who complains and feels no joy in the thing that I do every day. That I identify as my purpose and who I am. So, you know, that’s just not happening. That’s not an option.
So, I have decided to back off a little and take some time and energy to redecorate and reorganize my study. I spend way too much of my life working and creating and communicating from a room that’s disorganized and a little depressing and just crammed with random stuff. It’s one of those ugly spare rooms many of us have that became my workspace by default. It just hasn’t been shown the love and the intention, and I’m hoping that since I’m struggling with an internal process, the solution may be to shift the physical external environment to better represent how I want to feel on the inside.
You’ve probably heard the How to F up Your Ability to Manifest episode — it’s the most downloaded episode of this show ever — so you’ll know that one of my rules is: if you want to state a complaint about how horrible your life is, you must attach a possible solution.
So that’s how I’m going to handle this. I’ll keep you posted.
Also, another big milestone. August 1st is also my blog’s birthday. Eleven years ago today, I sat right here in this very spot, in a completely different life, and I posted my first post: “You are God; Act Like It.”
And with that one message released into the collective, my life began to change drastically. For the better. And I became this person that you know now.
I want to take a moment to shout out to Scott Vaughn, who is my newest supporter on Patreon.
Thank you, Scott.
I appreciate all of you who have pledged your support. It demonstrates that you are enjoying the show and want it to continue. That’s very encouraging to me.
You too can support my time in producing the show and the young woman who is creating our transcripts by pledging on Patreon for as little as $1 a month.
Listeners who support on Patreon can also access bonus Q&A episodes, where you send in questions, I record answers to them, and they go out to patrons of the show exclusively.
So if you want to find out how you can become a patron, especially if you would like the transcription to continue, please go to patreon.com/shiftyourspirits.
I’m going to cut this introduction here. This episode is a little bit longer than the others. Maybe you will like that; or maybe you want me to keep them short. You can write and tell me how you feel about the show length.
But for now, I want to share some personal experiences with you about my dreams.
I don't dream very much, you know. Like, most of you probably have stress dreams about your everyday life or you have these dreams that are very whimsical and full of symbolic wacky stuff that doesn’t make much sense. And, you know, the kind of thing that you explain to somebody the next day and tell them this cool story about, “Ohmygod I had this dream last night and it was really weird and this thing happened and this other thing happened” and, you know, being on the outside of that looking in, I am always a little bit annoyed by people who tell you long drawn out blow-by-blow dream stories unless it’s like about you or there’s some really significant punch line and they’re pretty good at telling stories. But to people who kind of dump this sort of old school psychiatrist dream info dump analysis scenario on you, like on your lunch break or whatever, that always has annoyed me and I wonder if one of the reasons why I’m annoyed by it is because I’m a little jealous. I’m envious. It doesn’t really happen to me.
Of course, there are exceptions and I’m speaking in really general terms, but I don’t really dream. And when I say that, put an asterisk there and a footnote, what I mean by “I don’t dream much” is – either I’m not aware that I’m dreaming when it’s happening, or I don’t remember it. I don’t have any kind of recall about it later or sense that it happened. I am a light sleeper, meaning, you know, I’ll wake up really easily if someone is making a noise or something like that. I’m very noise-averse. I do almost sensory deprivation when I sleep. I wear earplugs. I wear a visual mask, you know, a little velvet mask over my eyes to block light. And I like white noise, but even that has gotten to the point where that bothers me as well.
So – but, I will say this – I am a very regular sleeper. I sleep the exact same number of hours. Every night I go to bed at the same time, get up at the same time, seven days a week. My internal clock is like, within ten minutes. I rarely use an alarm clock. I wake up at the same time just automatically and, once I’m awake, I’m awake. And I get up. Like, I don’t really like to be in bed, but, you know, just that’s to kind of give you some context about where I’m coming from. I’m not an insomniac or, you know, I don’t have any issues around sleep really at all other than I’m very protective of it.
But I am sort of jealous of people who have daily symbolic sort of stream-of-consciousness films happening in their interior that they can get up the next day and think about. And obviously, you know, I have exceptions to this. I recently mentioned on one of the episodes of this show when I was talking about signs and synchronicities, when all that was happening, I did actually have this really super symbolic, very-aware-of-it-when-I-woke-up dream about the giant snail hovering in the sky. And I was able to look that up.
But, you know, I don’t really have those kind of dreams where you can look it up when you wake up. And you know, I would like to have that sort of dream life because I feel like it’s one of these tools within the kind of intuitive realm where it’s a whole channel that I don’t have. I’m like somebody who doesn’t have cable or doesn’t have Netflix or something. I’m like, missing this whole psychological intuitive creative platform. I just don’t have access to it, so, I don’t know.
There’s different theories about this. I had one person tell me that maybe because of the kind of work that I do, that I’ve become used to slipping in and out of certain kinds of consciousness states in my daily waking life that other people don’t access. And it’s one of the reasons why people want to meditate more or, you know, do sort of mindfulness activities and that I actually have incorporated that so much into my sort of work life that maybe there’s something that other people don’t get that they only get when they dream, and so, maybe that’s been sort of messed up in some way, or, not messed up, I don’t want to say there’s anything wrong with me. I just think it’s different. Or, it could be – I don’t know…
I don’t know. If you have a theory, you can write and tell me. If you have some kind of feeling about it.
But anyway, I’m not that stressed about it. I have kind of given up thinking about it. But I do feel a little bit apologetic about the fact that I don’t write about dreams and I don’t do a lot of dream analysis conversations and it doesn’t come up a lot in readings. If people approach me about that subject, or, you know, I get like requests to write certain article topics, or to do shows about certain topics. And that might be one of those areas that people are like, “Oh, do something about dream analysis or dream symbolism,” and people often write in asking for me to do sessions that are sort of launched or prompted by analysing dreams that they’ve had and wanting to know what they mean.
And so I feel like it’s one of those areas that I just don’t have access to. I don’t think we all have to do everything. There’s a few things I don’t do. I don’t do mediumship, I don’t do dreamwork, and I don’t do a lot of past lives stuff. And so, I’m a little disappointing in those areas if you’re hoping to get a lot from me.
But, the good news is – one of the reasons why I wanted to record this episode and tell you about some dream stuff that’s happening with me that is a little bit fantastical and interesting is because I’ve had it on my brain. I’m getting ready to interview someone for this show, Ash Riley, actually, and she and I have done a little bit of pre-conversation about where we want to take the conversation that would be interesting for you guys, and she mentioned dreamwork. And how that is something that she’s focusing on a lot right now, and I thought, “Cool! This is my opportunity to bring that to you guys through someone else’s expertise if not mine.”
But, so I’m going to interview Ash and likely you’re listening to this either right before the episode with her or right after. I’ll put them somewhere close together because they came together in my mind in creating them.
So, anyway, I wanted – and I got into the conversation actually a little bit with Ash in Messenger and we were texting back and forth and I was telling her about, you know, this - what I’m telling you right now – that I don’t dream, except, I have some really cool exceptions.
But, I do want to say this. You know, as an adult, I rarely, rarely, almost never have nightmares. Or bad dreams. Like, ever. That’s just not a part of something that I experience and so I’m very thankful for that. But at the same time, I also don’t have very many cool like “Inception-like” surrealist fantasy dreams either. So, I don’t really have anything in either extreme too much.
But – I used to dream – I used to have bad dreams a lot when I was a little kid. Mostly about my brother. I would have a lot of fearful dreams about him because he was very accident-prone. He was kind of a disaster kid and I was usually the one that was with him when the 911 would go down, you know, whether or not we were out playing somewhere or whatever. So, I had a lot of anxiety about him getting hurt and me having to rescue him. So, of course, you know, I had dreams about that a lot.
The other thing that I remember from childhood about dreams was, when I was a little kid, I took books to bed. I don’t remember ever having an interest in stuffed animals, but books to me had a kind of a quality that maybe other people project onto their stuffed animals, and I think books kind of had like these little spirit animal souls to them or something.
I also remember very distinctly throughout my entire life from the earliest memories that I have, feeling like, if I read just before falling asleep, which I do religiously, it’s part of how I do fall asleep, if I read while I’m falling asleep and I have a book in my presence in my bed with me, that there’s a really good chance that I can slip into the world of the book through my dreams.
And you know, like I always want this to happen now about my own novels. I’m always working on fiction somewhere over in another corner of my life, and one of the things I’ve noticed is, it tends to be the very last thing that I think about when I’m falling asleep. Because I’ll be reading someone else’s fiction up to the point that I’ve become sleepy, and then as I kind of turn out the light and put my book away and take my glasses off and rearrange the pillows and then kind of go in for that last little bit of wakefulness before I sleep, I will think about my own books and, you know, the scenes that are coming up that I have to write, and something that I am worrying about or trying to figure out, trying to make sense of.
And so, I did have this one really cool experience. Only one time have I ever dreamed my way into one of my own books, and I kind of think that deep down, this is what I’m hoping will happen when I’m thinking about – I’m thinking – okay well maybe I’ll fall asleep and I’ll fall into my dream world and I will figure something out about – like, the book will happen for me like a movie and then I can just get up tomorrow and be like, “Oh that was amazing I’m going to write that.”
So it only happened to me one time. When I was working on the novel, HAVENWOOD, which is a historical fantasy. There is a sort-of plantation in this – in the main character’s world. She owns a farm and there is a long section in the book where she’s actually working in the fields with her workers, you know, as one of them. And I did have this really amazing dream that was a fly-over drone shot of the scene of her working in the fields and this line of – actually they’re elves who work for her, so that was really cool. And I remember it being very lucid and as I was kind of hovering over them, I was like, “Ohmygod they are my elves; they look amazing!”
It was like, the first time that anyone had ever sort of CGI-movie-effect shown me my own imagination in a way that felt like I was an audience for it. And it’s kind of hard to describe when you tell someone like, “I know what these creatures look like, and I can describe them, but I also don’t see them the way that you see something on screen in a movie.”
And so even if, you know, if someone ever were to make a movie or something that I’d written, I would have the same experience anyone else has with like, seeing it for the first time, adapted in some kind of visual way.
So anyway, these are the kind of things I think about around dreaming. But - so obviously there are a few cool exceptions. So when I say “I don’t dream,” there’s a “…” but, you know, once in awhile, I have these kind of cool, you know, sort of scenarios happen.
And the reason why I wanted to talk about this on this episode, and the point, which I do have and I am getting to, is lately I’ve started to dream just a little bit more frequently, and by that I want to say, quantify that as sort of here and there. Maybe a few times a month? And this has been, let’s say, in the last six months or so.
My dreams are not sort of freaky versions of my life. They’re actually very normal dreams about other people’s lives. Like, this episode is about the fact that I have a theory I’m beginning to believe that I dream that I’m other people. And that these people are probably real, like they exist somewhere out there in the world and that I am picking up on them or walking into their life in some way. I’ve heard people say that, you know, astral travellers are, you know, or – no, I know what I’ve heard. The theory that ghosts might actually be people who are astral travelling and one of the reasons ghosts always appear to be in nightgowns and stuff is because they’re sleeping. They’re sleeping people who are astral projecting from, you know, another part of the world or whatever. I don’t even know where I heard that but it’s an interesting idea. It would make a cool movie.
But, so, I’ve been having these dreams that really make me think: okay, wait a minute. I think something’s actually going on here. And I want to tell you one that I had a few months ago that really freaked me out. And it was so exceptional that I also told a friend of mine about it and it became like, a whole thing and it went down in my notebook and I’m just now getting around to talking about it to you guys.
But, a few months ago I had a dream about a waitress, and – actually I should say, I had a dream that I was a waitress. And I knew lots of circumstances about my life. I knew that, you know, I was working in some kind of chain restaurant. It felt like an Applebys or like an Outback steakhouse or something like that. I was a little bit older, you know, maybe in my late 20s, like, at an age when people go back to school. And I had worked at, sort of cooler places before as a waitress and I was sort of not happy about working in this sort of chain environment because I didn’t feel like the tips were as good, and I was just generally kind of depressed about it. And I was in nursing school. I’d gone back to school and I had decided I was going to go into nursing, and I was probably having some kind of like, sad-on-return you know late 20s, early 30s kind of life crisis because I remember very distinctly feeling this sense of ‘ennui’ about this shift at Applebys or whatever. And, also, knowing that I was doing this because I was in nursing school and I wasn’t really excited about the nursing school thing either. I was kind of going through the motions and I was depressed.
So, anyway, there’s this guy that I’m waiting on and, at one of my tables, and he’s a little creepy. He, he’s not creepy in a sleazy kind of way, like looks like a Wanted poster or anything like that. He was actually kind of nice and clean-cut looking but he was a little too, like, dead in the eyes, even though he was smiley and he was flirting, not in a gross, like super obnoxious way, but he was just overly friendly and leering and he just, you know, he just creeped me out. And I was really anxious to sort of get rid of him and give him his check and send him on his way. And it wasn’t really busy. It was like an early shift before, you know, a lot of dinner crowd. There was like, one little family and, you know, then this guy was by himself.
Anyway, long story short. He was kind of rattling me to the point where I just didn’t really want to go back to his table and I finally had dropped his bill and so I went to this other waitress and I told her what was going on and I described the way he was making me feel and everything, and she said, “Well, I’ll watch the table and I’ll run his card or whatever. Why don’t you just, you know, like go take a break, go to the bathroom or something. Just don’t even bother interacting with him and maybe he’ll be gone by the time you get back.”
And so, I was like, “Yeah, cool.” And I went to the bathroom. And here’s where the part where it really freaks me out. I always have a sense when I’m having these dreams that I’m other people – I’m in their body so I’m not seeing myself from outside the body but I do have moments where I look down and I notice, like, “Oh, I have a girl’s hands” or “I have - I’m a different skin color” or something like that. So I’ve seen my clothes, I see things sort of out of my peripheral vision.
And, I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed this before, but I’ve never ever had a dream where I was looking in a mirror. I’ve just – I can’t think of any instance where that’s ever happened. So I go in this bathroom, and at that moment I realize that I’m lucid dreaming. I’m aware that I’m the dreamer even as I’m aware that I am this girl.
And I know as she’s walking towards the mirror I’m thinking, “Ohmygod, I’m going to need to see what she looks like.” And I’m sort of waiting for that moment when her eyes will pan up and make contact in the mirror and I will get to see what she looks like. And there’s a sense of nervousness about it because I’m kind of thinking, wait a minute, I can’t see myself in a dream and see another face looking at me. This is going to be really weird.
And as she gets close to the mirror and looks up, it actually feels painful to me, like a migraine kind of pain, or actually it felt a lot like when your eyes are super dilated from being to the eye doctor. I remember one time they just really dilated the crap out of my eyes, like to the point where it was almost painful. And it was like that kind of feeling. And like this feeling like, please don’t make me look at myself, like I can’t do this, and thinking, surely there’s going to be a cutaway. Something’s going to happen and break this moment. I’m not actually going to look at myself in the mirror and see someone else looking back, and I did.
I distinctly saw – and I was like, squinting, it was like the light hurt and it hurt to see this face looking back at me, but I saw who I was very distinctly. I had blond hair, and you know, like I said, I was sort of in my late 20s, and relatively attractive young woman. Sort of depressed looking, you know, kind of tired-like. She hadn’t really gone to much trouble to sort of make herself – you know how you just sort of go through the motions of what’s acceptable for you to look like when you go to work and you’re not feeling it, you know? She looked, sort of, harassed and kind of tired and – but I saw her distinctly and the whole time I’m thinking, “Ohmygod, I am someone else. I’m dreaming I’m someone else’s life.”
So at that point I sort of slip away from the lucid part and go back into her a little bit. And I think there was a little bit of a time jump in the dream, you know, as dreams do. It sort of cuts like a television show, and I’m finally off work and I’m leaving and I’m walking outside and I’m somewhere desert. This is a desert environment I would say most likely Arizona, and the reason why I thought it was Arizona because that’s the one kind of state in the southwest that I’ve been to that looks like what this looked like. But, you know, we’ve all seen a lot of tv and so we know what that part of the country looks like and it’s definitely that part of the country.
But I am getting into my car and I’m, you know, going home or whatever. It’s kind of not super late in the evening, but you know it is night time. The sky has a kind of glow to it. It’s more lit up than I think it would be in Tennessee, which is where I live right now, probably because of the flatness of the geography or something.
So I’m noting all these things as the dream is happening to me and I get in my car and I start driving, I want to say north. And there’s really nothing once I start driving away from this sort of little area off the highway where there’s like, you know, restaurants and convenient stores and you know hotels and all that kind of stuff that there is off any interstate in the United States. I’m sort of driving away from that, going towards an area that looks more sparsely populated and I get a few miles down the road and I run out of gas.
My car is like sputtering and I pull over and I’m thinking, “This is impossible. I distinctly remember getting gas, you know, maybe two days ago max.” There – and I feel this really weird panic because my first thought is like, all the gas has drained out of my car, like, how is this possible? Like it’s gone somewhere. Somebody took my gas or else it’s been – some hose or something somewhere’s come undone and all the gas has spilled out of my car. And that was my sense. My sense was not like, what’s wrong with the car or, you know, oh crap I ran out of gas. You know like it was something I could accept. I knew she knew that something was like really really wrong with this scenario, and I get out of the car and I’m thinking, ohmygod, like, do I keep walking home or do I try to walk back to sort of civilization? I think I was sort of somewhere kind of halfway in between and it was going to be potentially a hike either way and I’m thinking, oh but I don’t want to leave my car on the side of the road and all this kind of stuff is going through my head.
Someone pulls over to help me and it’s the guy – the creepy guy from the restaurant, and I’m thinking, oh crap, you’ve got to be kidding me, like, I definitely – it made all the hairs kind of stand up on my arms and on the back of my neck and I was getting like a creeped out feeling but more than anything it was a little bit annoyed feeling, like, ugh, here he is, and he’s like, smiling and you can tell he’s just so thrilled to be able to help me in this scenario. And he has this whole excuse to interact with me again and…
So, the thing is though, he’s trying to convince me – he’s being very sweet and very nice and very low key. He’s like, “Listen, you know, obviously I can take you back. We can get some gas. I have a gas can or I can take you back and you can call someone.”
He’s not being super obnoxious about it but he is trying to convince me, like, you know, like, just get in the car and let me take you with me.
And I’m kind of, okay, you know, convinced, I’m thinking I’m being overly paranoid. If I hadn’t had seen this guy earlier in the evening and had this interaction with him, I probably wouldn’t feel afraid. But it’s something about the synchronicity of it being him was bothering me a little bit, but I gave in to it. And I got in the car, and he’s being really chatty and really friendly like he was in the restaurant, but he’s not driving back towards town. He’s driving out away in the direction that I was originally going but he’s going on and I’m like, okay wait a minute, trying to figure out a way to kind of say, wait a minute weren’t you going to go the other direction, without sounding panicked, trying to sound nonchalant about it.
I look over – I kind of glance over at him. I’m trying not to look at him too much or whatever. I’m sort of trying to stare ahead and act like, oh crap what’s going on I gotta get myself out of this situation.
And I glance over and he has his hand on his lap, kind of inside his thighs, and there’s a gun in his hand. And he has it laying there. In his lap. For me to see.
At that moment, the fear drove me out of this woman’s body and out of this dream. I wake up and I’m like, ohmygod, that was – that’s a person. Something really happened to this person and I’m dreaming it. And I don’t know if it happened at the moment that I was dreaming it or if it’s something, you know, I mean not to toot my own horn or anything, but one of the things that I don’t do is like, you know, police detective psychic work where I find missing people or something like that. I’ve never had that kind of experience and the first thing that crossed my mind was, what if this is a straight up like medium, you know the tv show kind of scenario, where I’m picking up on some kind of criminal information that’s very valuable and real? And that was my first thought.
So it’s Sunday morning when I wake up and I always go to breakfast with my friend Tina every Sunday morning. And Tina is a friend of mine I mention often because she’s very much into paranormal investigation and she has a lot of supernatural sort of experience happen in her house a lot. And so we ended up – we always end up talking about this stuff, especially if something happened during the week and she often has, you know, little creepy things happen to her that she loves to tell me about, and so, I, of course, was like telling her this whole story just as I’m telling it to you guys, and she immediately goes into – this is a real thing, this is really happening, you need to look this up, is there some way we can Google for this woman? Is there some kind of missing persons thing?
So we’re sitting there in the restaurant where we have breakfast and on the smartphone looking for missing persons listings for Arizona. You know, that’s kind of the first thing we start with. And so I really quickly found out that there are actually Missing Persons groups on Facebook and they’re organized by state. And so, Tina’s like, let’s scroll through here and see if you see this person. Would you know her if you saw her? And I said, you know what? I would absolutely know her if I see her. I saw her in the mirror. If I see her face, I will recognise her.
So I’m scrolling through there and I’m really expecting that I’m going to see a picture of this woman and be like, ohmygod it’s her, you know. And I’m scrolling through there and the thing that I was really struck by was how no one even came close to looking like this woman. None of the listings were for anybody that I’d even think, ooo could that be her? Maybe that’s her?
Nothing was even close, you know. It was like a child or, you know, an elderly woman who was, you know, Latino just completely not anything that I was anticipating seeing, and I think my fear in this moment was, okay what if there’s a whole bunch of people that are kind of close to this woman’s description and I’m going to have a hard time deciding, could that be her could that not be her?
But I have to tell you guys, I spent, you know, that whole day and then it started to really bother me and haunt me the more that I couldn’t find, you know, a record of her in some way, the more stressed I got about it and the more I started to look and go into other states’ groups and look in New Mexico and look in, you know, Utah and just anywhere that I thought might have that landscape, just thinking, you know, the synchronicity of this is too powerful for me to not follow through on it. It has to mean something.
I couldn’t find her. I never found her and the thing is, I never even found anything close. It was a total bust. And I thought, alright, well, spirits, if this is your way of giving me some police detective psychic kind, you know, of bit of information, this is horrible because I can’t do anything with it. I don’t even – I can’t even be the crazy person that randomly calls a police station and reports something. And I’ve heard that, you know, psychics call in and tell - report things to detectives all the time. I didn’t even really – like, who would I call to do that? Even if I wanted to just make some kind of random, like, put-it-out-there sort of phone call.
But anyway, I – this one has really stuck with me as being significant partly because of the fact that I saw her. And secondly because part of me believes that the reason why I could’ve been picking up on it is because it was happening at that moment and that that could’ve explained why it wasn’t a story yet, posted on a website. You know, it could’ve been some time later. I don’t know.
Even as I’m telling you this, I’m feeling like maybe I need to go back and look again. Now it could be this missing persons cold case or something.
But, so – my whole thing is: why would I dream this? Why would I dream something so specific and about another person to this degree? I mean, it doesn’t make sense to me. I know what it feels like to have a normal dream where I’m like working and it’s tedious and it’s weird and doesn’t make sense when I wake up but you know there it is.
So since having this experience, I also have had a few other examples and they’re not anything that interesting or significant. They’re, like I said, I don’t have freaky dreams about my own life. I kind of have these normal dreams about other people’s lives and so, just to try to pull up a couple of examples because I usually don’t even remember them for very long after I have them.
But I recently dreamt that I was in Amsterdam and I was some kind of architecture or interior design person and I was at some kind of conference in Amsterdam and I was out having drinks with other people in my field and we were all speaking German and I don’t know if, like, I felt like German was not my language necessarily, but for some reason, either a lot of the other people at the table were German. There was some reason why we were speaking German and I recognize that I was speaking German because it’s a language that I’ve taken a little bit of.
And then, at one point, you know, in this bar I run into this guy from high school. Which, I don’t even think that’s the right term because I think we’re all Europeans in this dream and I don’t think they call it high school. But, I ran into this guy who knew me from my home, who was a teenager and – I’m a man in this dream but I’m like, a completely different age and I’m from somewhere I want to say, like, Hungary, maybe?
And this guy recognizes me from school and I remember being sort of annoyed that I had to talk to him and do that whole like, ohmygod, you know, like how are you, it’s been ten years, and you know that whole thing. And he wasn’t somebody that I really liked very much or wanted to have that whole pissing contest with. He was kind of a douche bag and obviously trying to impress me.
The one thing that I noticed as I’m dreaming it is that we switched languages. He was speaking to me in another language and I don’t really recognize this language. It definitely sounded Slavic to my ear. And I’ve studied German and Russian and there were a lot of eastern European languages that sound vaguely similar to Russian, so I knew it was a Slavic tongue from one of the smaller sort of eastern European countries. And that that was my native tongue. That was my first language and there was a sense of relief and flow about that language. In my mind, as the lucid dreamer, I know what’s being said. I sort of just claircognizantly understand what’s being said even as I can hear that this is a foreign language that I don’t speak.
So that was just like a dream. You know, that I had one month.
And then maybe the month after that, I had another dream that I was staying at this hotel with a friend of mine who was like, a girl that worked with me and I know this sounds really cheesy, but I think we were models and we were possibly like, British. We were European and I think we were speaking English but we were in Tokyo. We’re in Japan and we’re in this really nice fancy hotel that we’ve been put up in as part of a job. And we’ve been out partying and apparently maybe our job there is over and we’re supposed to check out of the hotel and we’re actually overstaying. You know, it’s like you have to check out by a certain time and we are literally too wasted and hungover and just rode hard to get it together and you know pack and all this stuff.
And I remember laying there, just, ugh, feeling horrible and my friend is kind of like chattering away and I’m just waiting for there to be a knock at the door and for the hotel management to come and throw us out and I’m thinking, I’ve got to convince her we need to pull it together and get out of here because they’re going to throw us out. And…
Yeah, so that dream doesn’t really lead anywhere either but those are just the two that I can think of in this moment as I’m recording that show you how I have these really specific dreams and I’m other people in really specific places and I know a lot of details about their lives and these are not dreams about me. And they’re not dreams from a past life or something like that. They’re just kind of like I’m tuning in to someone else. Like I’m just wandering around the globe in my sleep, slipping into someone’s dream life in some way.
And here’s something really weird – I have a friend who’s a long-time friend of mine. We worked together in a metaphysical bookstore so we’ve had lots of conversations about metaphysical things. And she’s a dreamer. She’s a big-time dreamer. And she will regularly, maybe once a year, something like that, she’ll send me a message on Facebook and say, “You were in my dream last night and we hung out and had coffee and we talked about blahblahblah and it was really cool to see you.”
And it’s kind of half in jest, but to her, like she says she really does feel like I visited her in some way. And I’m thinking, well that’s cool because I don’t really have that experience at all. But if you have it, that’s fine. So it’s kind of weird because it’s been this ongoing sort of joke, at least with her, that I travel around and visit her in my sleep and I’m thinking, what if I do that in some other kind of way?
What if this is like an intuitive channel that maybe other people have this experience. Like, I know if you’re listening to this, and you’ve had this experience, I’m going to hear from you and I want to. I want you to email me and tell me. You don’t have to tell me like, your whole dream or whatever. Just tell me if this happens to you at all and what you think is going on here. Because my feeling from having been told by a psychotherapist that there may be something different with the way that I’m compartmentalizing different levels of consciousness and how I use them. That there may be some things that I do when I’m awake that I then don’t do when I’m asleep.
And if so, maybe that allows me to isolate this thing that happens to all of us, like think about it. Maybe in the midst of your super-populous dream life, because you’re one of those people who has, you know, these colourful wacky dreams every night of your life, and you have a whole variety of stress dreams, and running from people dreams, and you know, sex dreams and whatever it might be. You also somewhere in that mix, you might be slipping into these dreams that you’re other people, and maybe you’re not even really aware of it. Maybe you think it’s just - you’re you.
But think about it. And I’m going to ask Ash about it. See what she says. When she’s on the show, because I’ll definitely going to talk to her about dream stuff. So I feel like this will come up.
And I’ll try not to re-tell the whole story because that’ll be really irritating. Maybe I’ll send her this before we speak or something like that.
But anyway, yeah, just a theory. Just a thought. Just a weird little thing that I wanted to share with you guys because I think about sharing it all the time. And I’m like, where do you start with this subject.
And so I want to say, just as a P. S. that I always feel like – I felt the same way about the episode that I did about signs because you have a lifetime of dreaming. You have a lifetime of signs and synchronicities, so where do you go in and start a conversation about that?
So my feeling is, I just kind of have to hit record, and plop down and tell you whatever comes up. You know, what’s most on the surface of my mind, so, this doesn’t really represent the best examples ever, other than the weird story about seeing my own face and the dream and being someone else. That was the reason why I picked that story for sure. I don’t think that I’ll ever forget that dream.
But, yeah. Write me. Tell me. If I’m on to something here, or if you’ve had this experience, I’d love to hear from you.
Alright, I’ll shut up now. Talk to you later.
Thanks again for listening to the Shift Your Spirits podcast.
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BEFORE I GO
I promised to leave you a message in answer to a question or a concern you may have. And this week, when I looked at the very first ‘Shift Your Spirits’ post from August 1, 2006, I realized it was an oracle message. It spoke to me that way, across the years. So I’m thinking it will speak to you as well.
So take a moment to think about your own issue—hold it in your mind or speak it out loud—I’ll pause for just a few seconds….right…NOW
1…2…3…4
MESSAGE
Your creativity and your divinity are one and the same.
You most resemble God, the Creator — the ultimate, all-encompassing, whatever-you-want-to-call-it expression of All That Is — when you are co-creating your unique reality.
Don’t get stuck on the word “creative” and think I’m only talking about “art.” Think bigger, more generally. If you think you don’t create, you’re wrong. You are creating your reality each and every moment. It’s inevitable and unavoidable. Creativity is inherent. It’s eminent.
In Genesis, God literally assigned Adam [man, human beings] a role in Creation: to name everything. That’s our job — to continually explore and define all of reality. Reality is information. The ultimate goal of information is to saturate all creation.
Thoughts are tools; words are their handles.
What words are you wielding? Do they reflect how you want to feel?
I’ll talk to you later.
I'm publicly sharing one of the exclusive Q&A episodes recorded for my Patreon supporters, so you can hear a sample of the bonus content. This episode answers a question from the listeners about "Discovering Your Life Purpose." The Q&A content for patrons of the show is shaping up to be somewhere between personal mini-readings and universal questions people have about spirituality and personal development.
This episode has a full text transcript below.
MENTIONED IN THE SHOW "How Badly Do You Want It?"
Chani Nicholas
Free Will Astrology
Colette Baron-Reid Wisdom of Avalon Oracle
HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses
Get an intuitive reading with Slade
Automatic Intuition
BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits TRANSCRIPT Hey, thanks for listening to the ‘Shift Your Spirits’ podcast. I’m your host, Slade Roberson. For eleven years now, I’ve been a professional intuitive and the author of the blog ‘Shift Your Spirits’, where I try to write about spirituality with fewer hearts and flowers than most new age blather. I also mentor emerging intuitives, psychics and healers in a program called Automatic Intuition. Today I am talking about life purpose. Of course, as always, I have an oracle segment at the end of the show. So be thinking about a question or concern you have, hold it in your mind and I’ll come back on at the end after the final links and credits and leave you with an extra message.
But before I forget, I wanted to mention a few milestones that are happening right now. It is Wednesday, July 26th, 2017 as I record this. My birthday was Sunday, July 23rd and I am the first day of Leo. Hey to all the other Leos out there.
I should’ve told you last week so you could’ve, you know, sent me a birthday message in time, but I, you know, sometimes the way I record these episodes and when they actually go live is not so timely. I also like to make, you know, this content as evergreen as possible, but I have heard from some of you that you do enjoy it when I tell you a little bit about what’s going on in my life, currently, and those of you who keep up and listen to each episode as they come out will probably appreciate this a little bit more, but, who knows. It might be interesting to look back someday if I ever listen to an archive episode and remember, you know, where I was at the time and place that I created the episode.
Anyway, so the reason why this is significant other than this being my birthday, it was also a new moon in Leo. And it’s one of two new moons that are occurring in Leo, which is very unusual, from what I hear. And it’s also the start of an eclipse season. We’re going to have an eclipse coming up here in August. I’m sure you’ve heard about it. If you want to know the exact dates of all this stuff, like the new moon in leo, and when the eclipse happens and what sign it’s in, all that stuff, be sure and Google it for exact information. I don’t go really deep with a lot of astrology because that would be entirely its own podcast, and there are people, greater minds than me, speaking about astrology. Incidentally, I really like Chani Nicholas, as far as an astrologer that I follow and read, and Rob Brezsny’s Free Will Astrology always makes me happy. I’ll try to remember to go back and put those in the show notes for you so you can check them out.
But, you know, just to, kind of, bullet down for you as you’re thinking about, what does this all mean for me right now, you know. If you’re listening to the archives in the future, I want you to think about the fact that it doesn’t mean that it’s not relevant. Because there’s always something significant about when a message comes to you. And that can happen out of time, so just, you know, think about what I’m saying here about what this means and apply that to wherever you are at this time when you’re listening to this.
This phenomenon, or this energy that’s moving through right now, from the best that I can tell, is really about identity and issues of, you know, shedding your skin and transforming in some way, and so, everything that I’m reading, it kind of feels disruptive and major and it’s revolving around big questions, like, who am I in the world, and, you know, what am I doing, and what is my role? And I know it felt a little bit more intense to me leading up to the new moon, whereas the new moon feels like it kind of gave new energy to this question. So it went, for me, from feeling like a crisis of “oh my god what am I doing with my life” to more of a sense of “okay, you know what, this is who I am, this is what I really need to kind of man up here and let go of, and here are some things that, you know, aren’t working for me as much anymore. And, my theory is that when you hear something like this, you know, whether you believe in the astrology or maybe you believe in the synchronicity of what I’m talking about and how it applies to what you’re going through right now. Whenever you get these messages, I think it’s important – there’s a part of you that - flash - instantly knows, what it’s talking about, right? There’s a part of you that’s like, ohmygod, that’s talking about my job, or, you know, whatever it might be. Or “ohmygod, they’re talking about that project that I really secretly want to do.” And when you have that sense of knowing, like, “Ooooo I know what this is talking to me about”, I think you need to willfully take that, drag it out into the light, and deal with it as purposefully as possible. Because when you don’t, what tends to happen is, it kind of – you get dragged into it and it kind of tends to happen TO you, and you have less control over it. The circumstances are usually not as empowering as well.
So, when you know you’re like, facing some kind of change and you have a glimpse into, sigh this is what I need to do. Do it. Just make it happen. Don’t wait for it to happen to you. That’s my philosophy. And, as always, you know, it is a choice. So I don’t know. I like to be the one who gets to make the choice, if at all possible. There’s a lot of responsibility in controlling something, but I do believe that, you know, stuff happens and you’re going to have to go through stuff, and it’s just so much easier to do it like a leader, you know. Just to go in and make something happen, even when it’s difficult. So, that’s kind of my thought process. That may be very personal to me, but hopefully that mirrors you in some way. And is adaptable to some of what you’re contemplating this week.
Anyway, other milestones about the podcast.
This is the 20th episode of the podcast! And, from all the statistics that I’ve read, there’s this figure that always floats around out there. If you are in the podcasting community, or you listen to people who teach and talk about the medium, you’ll hear a lot that most podcasts do not make it past 15 episodes. So I’m a little bit happy that I’ve flown past that mile marker there. And thank you for your support in making that happen! I mean, if you weren’t listening to it, there’d be no reason for me to keep making it.
I’ve heard this other metric about podcasts – that there’s a kind of significant milestone when you reach 20,000 listens. That somehow really legitimizes what you’re putting out there and makes you kind of visible as someone who is, you know, doing this for real. It tends to be that people who advertise are looking at that metric as a kind of proof of staying power. So, 20,000 listens sounds like a lot, but, at the time that I’m recording this, we are at 9719 listens for the show, like 300 more episode downloads and we’ll be at 10,000. I’m actually pretty confident that by the time you’re listening to this, we’ve actually already crossed the 10,000 mark. So, you know, in a few short months, we are halfway to that milestone of 20,000 listens! You know, halfway there. So, that’s really cool, and exciting.
And, the other thing that I wanted to say about the podcast this week is, just kind of how blown away I am by how many of you have responded to my request to support the show on Patreon. I cannot tell you how much it excites me – the whole Patreon phenomenon, which, you know, you can – I’ll give you a link in a little bit and you can go check it out and see what it’s all about – but, I can’t tell you what this would have done for me 11 years ago when I first started blogging ‘Shift Your Spirits’. At that time, the only way to really support your show financially was through, you know, annoying Google ad-blocks, and I really hate that automated third-party advertising. It just – it feels really inauthentic to me. And, you know, sometimes you get this weird, like, you know, political ad or something, you know, that you would totally not support and it’s like flashing right there in the middle of your post that you spent all this time and energy on, and it’s – in some cases, maybe even, you know, opposite of the message that you’re trying to put out into the world. There are a million reasons why I just don’t like it, but 11 years ago, you know, I chose to put it out as a passion project, and to work week-after-week putting out content. And, you know, I supported myself through doing readings for other people, and that really, you know, kind of paid for the show, so to speak, and allowed me to keep doing it. But it would have been really amazing 11 years ago to have had the opportunity for people who loved the blog and were reading each week to just have a way to donate to the show and support it. And I can’t imagine what kind of support that could have grown into over this length of time.
So, anyway, you know, that didn’t happen. That didn’t line up for me. But it’s lining up for me now as I’m shedding my skin and kind of evolving my storytelling and writing into being this conversational audio medium, which is very exciting and I really love to do it. So there’s this whole, kind of, re-birthing going on for me, and a shedding of the skin, which, you know, there’s a lot of people who are dropping away at the same time who, maybe the audio doesn’t appeal to. So, you know, there’s some growing pains involved in this, but there’s a real passion behind the people who really like the show, and that means so much to me, and it’s really evidenced by the support on Patreon.
So, one of the things that we are doing to address the fact that there are still a lot of people who love this show, or love this content, who have been following the blog for many years, who just want to read it, or maybe they have a limitation that makes the audio difficult for them, and that is to offer full transcripts of the shows, which is amazing for a lot of different reasons. So, you know, just as synchronicity would have it, someone within my community, one of you out there listening, Alan – thank you very much - introduced me to a young woman who is transcribing the show! Long story short, she was here and she found me and the story of how she found me was really too cool to ignore, and so I decided to go ahead and pay myself out of pocket, up front, even though the podcast is not really at the point that it can support her, I’ve gone ahead and hired her. She’s too good and too perfect for what we’re trying to accomplish here. So yes, thanks to Linda – Linda, I’m sure you’re listening and typing away – anyway, just a little shout out to you.
Also a shout out to the latest supporters on Patreon:
Leanne Steiner
Titti Backstrom
Helen Auburn
Laura Speltz
Nick Lovelady
Nick, I gotta tell you, you’re the first and currently only male supporter of the podcast. Now, I know there are other guys listening, because I hear from you and I know who you are and I talk to you about the show. Thank you for listening. So I am challenging the other guys though, to show up and make their support known on Patreon as well. I truly appreciate all of you who have pledged your support. It demonstrates that you’re enjoying the show and you want for it to continue, and that’s very encouraging to me. In addition to covering the young woman who is diligently transcribing these episodes, you can also support my time in producing the show by pledging your support on Patreon for as little as $1/month. And listeners who support on Patreon can also access bonus Q&A episodes where you send in questions, I record answers to them, and they go out to patrons of the show exclusively.
So, if you want to find out how you can become a patron, especially if you would like to see transcripts of all these shows continue, please go to https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits.
And speaking of the bonus episodes, today I’m sharing one of the exclusive Q&A episodes I recorded for my patrons about life purpose. So you can get a glimpse into what these extra episodes are all about. I am actively collecting questions from my patrons. One of the things I’m noticing about these episodes that’s different is these kind of, they’re kind of like these mini-readings. Or somewhere between a personal, individual reading and a public talk on the subject. And it’s a really good venue for speaking directly to your question when it represents something that a lot of other people are interested in hearing answered as well. You know, the Universal stuff. And it’s proof of how our most individual questions are also universal questions, right? So it’s interesting that pattern is emerging.
Anyway, without further chitchat, here is a taste of the exclusive bonus episodes for my Patreon supporters: Discovering your life purpose.
Hey, welcome to the first Q&A of the ‘Shift Your Spirits’ podcast. This episode was created exclusively for people who support the show on Patreon. So, of course, thanks again for your support. It truly means the world to me and I am happy to record some special bonus content just for you guys. If you have a question you’d like me to answer, you can send me a message through the Patreon page itself, or you can just email me: contact@sladeroberson.com
So our first question comes from Emilia and it’s a doozy. It’s a big Life Purpose question but, you know, I think it’s probably truly representative of one of the biggest questions that everyone has. Emilia writes, “How do you figure out how to serve spiritually? How do you find your "why" or what it is you are put on this earth to do. It's my biggest frustration, because I know the answer is probably sitting right in front of me.”
Okay, yeah, so, I mean, part of that you answered yourself in that, you know, it probably is sitting right in front of you. It’s probably so much a part of what you already do that there is a little bit of a ‘forest for the trees’ scenario going on here. And, you know, I always have the image of the person who is looking for their sunglasses and they’re on the top of their head, you know that thing that we do. Those kinds of things come to mind. But I get it, because there’s a part of it that’s inherent and it is what it is, and it’s sort of foisted on you, or it’s sort of a part of your DNA, and then there’s another aspect of it that’s very much chosen. It’s a wilful choice. And I just want to say, kind of as a disclaimer, that this is a question that is a lot easier to get at working with someone one-on-one, obviously, right? So, if you were to book a reading with me or book a session around this, this is, literally, like, 90-something percent of the readings that I get touch on this idea of life purpose or career or creative entrepreneurship. The place where sort of all those things swirl together. What’s my major? That kind of thing.
It’s weird that I really struggle to come up with some sort of Top 10 list of ways to discover your purpose or something like that. So forgive me. I’m going to go with a little bit more of a rambly thought process. I’ve been jotting down notes since I received Emilia’s question and, you know, she didn’t really use the term “life purpose”, but that’s sort of what she’s getting at. And, so, I’m going to do my best to give some general thoughts that maybe anyone can sort of apply to this question, or this search, and, you know, it’s a hard thing to say to someone, but relax the search a little bit. Sometimes the people who are trying so hard and so desperately and working and really sort of exhausting themselves trying to figure this out are not getting any closer by doing that. So, just keep that in mind. Let’s chill out on this a little bit and relax and think about letting it emerge for us. Because the thing is, whenever anyone mentions life purpose, or what you came here to do, or what your dream is for your life, there are things that flash on the screen of your mind, and I would bet that a lot of what you do when that flash occurs is suppress it. Ignore it. Sweep it under the rug. Tell yourself, like, no I can’t be that. I can’t ask for that. There’s something there, oftentimes, that people simply don’t acknowledge. You kind of know what your purpose is, but you’re afraid of it.
So I have a couple of questions for you that I really want you to think about and meditate on. If you want to pause this, grab a pen or grab your phone, notes, app, or whatever it is so that you can write these down. I want you to really sort of contemplate a couple of things.
So question number 1: What’s the thing you’re afraid to tell people your purpose is? Okay. The other question that I want you to think about is, what did your purpose used to be before you talked yourself out of it?
So, a few things should be coming to mind there. And maybe you need to go off when you’re not listening to me ramble on about this. You know, go and really meditate on those two questions. But, some things should start to emerge for you. Do some journaling around that. Put those questions at the top of a page as header and set a timer and just do some automatic writing, and write everything that you can think of in answer to that question and see what comes up for you. There are some things in there that want to emerge. I promise you.
So, lets - again, it’s kind of hard to speak about this in a general way because it sounds really abstract. So, let’s think, you know, that thing that kind of flashes in your mind, the thing that you’re sort of afraid to tell people that your purpose is, you know, the dream that’s too big to share, the dream that scares you or embarrasses you a little bit. Whatever that might be, let’s put it front and centre in our consciousness, right? And the first thing that I would advise you to do is just sort of move towards it vaguely, with a lurch, with a guess. Just sort of an educated, like, I want to go over that way. My purpose somehow is to be a writer so the first thing that I’m going to move towards is simply writing something. Or towards creating a list of ideas of things that I’d like to write. So just a general movement towards that thought process. Okay?
And so, the next step, or maybe, you know, it’s something more altruistic. It’s some kind of volunteer work or philanthropy. And so, you think, you know what, in my heart, I want to be someone who raises tons of money and really changes people’s lives. I want to go into a town and, you know, establish clean water for an entire village in a part of the world that doesn’t have it. And, by the way, I know a woman who did that. She never bragged about it. I only found out about it at her memorial service after she’d passed. But anyway. So - maybe she’s here with us reminding us of different examples of what purpose is. It’s not always something creative. Emilia’s question was specifically about how do you serve spiritually.
So let’s say you have just this sort of vague sense of – I want to do something to make a difference. I want to help people in some way. I want to change their lives. So that’s a vague kind of bulls-eye, but it’s still a target and it’s something that you can move towards. So the first thing you want to do is simply try something in the vicinity of whatever that thing is. Make something or do something. Here’s the key - for others. Make something, do something, for others, that’s in the vicinity of that feeling, right? Because you’re kind of testing, you’re pinging the idea, you’re throwing something at it. You know, the image of throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing if it sticks, okay? That’s what you’re doing. That’s sort of the first step in trying to find your way. So it’s a call-and-repeat, a Marco Polo kind of game that you’re playing with yourself and the rest of the world and the Universe. And it involves other people.
So, the answer to your purpose is in the feedback from other people. So, sometimes you have to start that volley, start that conversation, that back and forth, the experience. So you have to lop the first shot. You have to say, I’m gonna volunteer for this soup kitchen at Thanksgiving. I’m going to go and serve some meals, or whatever. From that experience, you know, things happen. You make other connections. You meet someone there. You’re able to share again. Put it out there. Share it with someone. Let someone in that environment know about your dream. Share it. Someone will then have a next step for you. So the feedback will come from other people in the vicinity of what it is that you’re doing.
If your purpose is something more creative, like the example of being a writer, then you need to write something. And put it out there. And allow people to give you some feedback about it. You need to get direction from outside your own head. And you also need affirmation. You know, that you’re kind of on the right path. The thing is, once you take that first step and get that feedback, that clue, it’s like the Amazing Race. Every step there’s like a ticket waiting for you with an instruction for the next round of activity or action. So, all you got to do is move towards the vicinity of what you think your purpose could be, what you’re afraid it might be, what you’re shy about it, acknowledging it, or maybe you’re truly passionate and really direct about it and you’ve just been procrastinating. You know, there’s those people who – they really know what their purpose is. You know, maybe they’re a singer or musician and they haven’t performed in years. They sing in the shower but they haven’t written a song, they haven’t picked up the guitar that’s sitting in the corner of the room. You’ve got to do something and you can’t do it in your ivory tower where there’s no feedback. You need feedback from other people. You need to hear – "Yes, you’re really talented" or "Yes, that resonated with me." "There’s something there", "You’re on to something." And then you follow those clues towards the next step.
Another thing that’s really effective in getting a ball rolling and serving spiritually is simply to host something. Hosting something is a really powerful position to be in. And, you know, this doesn’t have to be necessarily a big event that involves a lot of expense or, you know, logistics. It could be something as simple as hosting a Facebook group where you can discuss a particular topic. Invite all your friends and, you know, get other people involved. The idea in hosting something is, it’s a selfless thing to hold space for other people to participate around that topic or that purpose that you have. So it’s not just about you saying, “I’m a leader, here follow me”. It’s more about you saying, “Here, I’ll cover the admin. I’ll make this space and create a cool graphic for it, and I’ll, you know, monitor the comings and goings of people who want to join the group. You know, I’ll market it a little bit, put the word out there, I’ll be in charge. You guys just come and participate. Come and participate with each other.”
And, the cool thing is, in providing a forum or space for an event that you’re hosting for other people, thinking about them and the connections they make, everyone knows who the host is. Everyone goes through the host. Everyone greets you. Everyone sends you the Facebook request to ask to be in the group. And so you kind of get to touch everyone in the room, and everyone associates it with you in a way that may come up for them later. But by hosting something, you’re establishing yourself in a very passive way, and in a way that serves other people as being someone connected to this idea, and so you are kind of planting yourself in other people’s minds as being someone connected with this idea. And so, that will create opportunities for you because when they are looking for people to participate in their events or their charities or their projects, they can invite you. You’re going to be top of the mind for everyone in that group. So hosting something is a really good idea. It’s a powerful marketing tool, by the way, and it’s a very authentic and unsleazy way to put yourself out into the world. So host something.
The thing to remember though is, once you put whatever it is outside yourself, it’s kind of not yours anymore. And you don’t really want it to be, right? Because you’re wanting to serve other people. So it belongs to the world, once you create that thing and you put it out there. It belongs to the people who receive it. And those people who care about it can begin to manage some aspect of it for you. And often you will find allies. You know, I recently had the experience, if you listen to the podcast, which I know you do, of having somebody take a post that I did and turn it into a coaching modality. Diana Frajman with the 3x3 project, and a lot of people have written to me and, you know, it resonated with them about how they’re applying that to themselves. So my purpose was really so, kind of, secondary in that whole experience. I mean, it’s part of what I do. I share ideas around spirituality and productivity and, you know, just how I manage my own life. And I put it out there in a way that it’s meant to serve other people. Someone else came along and took it up and adopted it and made it into something else. And so, you know, I’m attached to it in a way, but, you know, it’s almost as an observer and as a participant myself. So that’s a really cool feeling.
And the fact of the matter is, I didn’t do that on my very first post. You know, this is after years and years of writing, and there are little things here and there that I’ve put out that people have taken and done other things with, and so it really is about other people. You know, putting yourself out there in a really authentic way and kind of not having any expectation about it. And waiting and seeing where other people place the emphasis. And then you can respond to that further.
So, you know, at that point you’re really just kind of following where people are asking you to go. And this is a really good clue about developing a practice, developing a business. Being – this is something that I tell my students in my intuitive mentoring program – your clients have the direction and the instructions for you about where you’re supposed to go. It’s not so much about you, again, going into the ivory tower and deciding what your purpose is and then coming down off the mountain with your stone tablets and announcing to the world what it is. It’s a little bit of a back and forth. You’ve got to get it going outside your head. You gotta ping the Universe. You gotta throw something out to the crowd. See what they do with it, and adapt accordingly. And follow where they want to go. If you simply look around in your life and you step back and you take note, start, maybe, even taking a record. What do people ask of you? You know, what do people come to you for. There are certain kinds of things that you’re the go-to person for, right? Maybe it’s things that people complain to you about. It may not seem so altruistic and lovely, but start to take note of what it is that people are asking you to do, because you could go through life in service by simply answering the questions that people have for you. Or by simply doing the things that people request whenever you see someone in need of something and you think, “Okay, well how can I provide that for them? You could go through your entire life just, sort of, doing that, and I would say that that would definitely be a life of purpose. You have to really listen and observe. These directives can kind of go right over your head because you’re so busy looking for something – Tada! You know, like, big and important and The Thing.
So I imagine in my mind that there’s like a Venn diagram, right? There’s an overlap – imagine 3 circles – what you’re good at, what you enjoy, what other people care about, and there’s a point in the centre where your talents and what you love and what other people care about overlap. But also think about, you know, the thing that you have had to strive the hardest to conquer in life – how that overlaps with something that a lot of other people suffer as well. What’s something that you have struggled with and survived, that you see a lot of other people struggling with in the world? Think about that Venn diagram. Where does that overlap occur? That can also be a clue.
You know, there are clues to your purpose hiding in your dreams. There are clues in your childhood play. The things that you pretended and the things that you love to act out. It’s interesting to me – I always think it’s fun to think about the fact that kids like to pretend to work. You know, they play office and play all these like, you know, sit at a desk and perform menial paperwork. We used to like to pretend that we worked in a library and we would, like, stamp all our books. It’s such a, like, a thing that if you did have to do it as a job, you would not think of it as a joy. But obviously children recognise a joy in service, and in work and in performing those kind of activities and being efficient and creating organization out of chaos. So think about the things that you like to play as a little kid. What kind of stories are you drawn to? What do you love to read about? What stops you in your tracks on Facebook? What gets you to post an angry face? What gets you riled up and feeling outraged? There are clues there.
There are also clues, you know, in the thing you like to escape into. Maybe it’s as simple as the thing that you’re drawn to escape into, maybe you need to create that kind of escape for other people. Maybe you just, you know, voraciously read happy ending sweet romance novels. And, you know, it’s just your secret candy that you live for that keeps you going and bolsters you emotionally in the background and nobody even knows about it. So maybe you need to put some of those out there into the world. You could do it under a pen name. No one even has to know.
There are also clues to your purpose and how you can serve other people in your astrological chart. And again, this is something that I would look at with an individual person that I was doing a reading for. You know, I look at the True Node, or the North Node. There are a couple signs that show up there that tell me specific things. Obviously, I work with people who tend to have more similarities of purpose, and so there are certain things I look for there. There are clues in the Ascendant in your astrological chart, your rising sign, which is, you know, who you are in the world to other people, how other people perceive you and how you interact socially. There could be some real clues there. There are areas of your chart that, you know, affect your career, finances, creativity, sometimes there are clues in that part of your chart as well. But it’s really a synergy of all those things, you know, is there a pattern there? I might look at several different things and see something reoccurring and that might give me a clue.
But even when I’m doing a reading for someone, there’s a conversation. There’s a part of it that you have to provide. I can get you going in a general vibe, but when it really starts to come together is when you have those details and you have those specific things that light you up. And I can sense when we hit it, because I’ll get up and start pacing the room. It changes my energy when I’m talking to somebody about that stuff.
One other thing that I really want to stress again, you know, I did mention, you know, maybe your purpose in how you serve other people is connected to something that you’ve had to fight against, or something that wasn’t so great. Maybe it’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to you, or it’s the one thing you would change about your life. If you could get rid of anything about who you are and what you’ve experienced. You know what? I hate to tell you but that stuff’s gold, you know? One of the reasons that I interviewed Ryan McRae, the ADHD nerd, on the podcast was because he’s someone that I’ve encountered who chose this thing that’s been a huge challenge for him. It’s probably something that he never would’ve wanted to have. But he’s worked so hard to overcome it, and it occurred to him that like, “This sucks and this is hard for me and I’ve had to create all these systems just to allow me to kind of be on an even keel with other people”.
And so, what he does is he represents that sucky thing for other people who are experiencing it as well. There’s something extremely powerful and authentic in being coached or led or encouraged by someone who has crawled through the same shit as you. Obviously, the ditch that you’ve been through gives you some credibility that somebody who is just Pollyanna-perfect is like, no. You don’t want to hear what they have to say. You want to hear what the person who’s been through it has to say. And only someone who has been through what you’ve been through can really, really understand.
And so, think about what is it in your life that might represent that? How could you put that out into the world? How could you turn that around and make it service? And you know what’s funny is, as I’m saying that, I realize that that may be one of the most challenging ways to serve because it brings up a lot of issues of shame. Even if it’s something you can’t control. Something that is, you know, a disability, or something that was imposed upon you that’s not the result of something that you did or chose, but just a crappy hand that you were dealt or whatever. There’s still a lot of shame in standing up and saying, “Hey, I’m messed up in this way”, “I have this physical disability”, “I have this mental illness”, “I have this disease”. But if you can make that shift, if you can get past - what are my family and friends going to think - there’s millions of people out there for whom you could be a hero. So yeah, it’s not always something you’re good at, or you’re talented, you know, at doing. It’s not always, like, “Oh I’ve always wanted to dance and I took ballet when I was a child”. Sometimes your purpose is sharing how you survived the horrible, most worst thing in the world, and how you overcome a struggle for which you had no inherent gifts or talents or abilities and you had to scrap it together, you know. There’s a great opportunity there. There’s a wealth that’s a treasure chest. What’s the Joseph Campbell quote… where you… something about where you stumble is where your treasure lies.
“It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure.” ― Joseph Campbell
You know, your sense of purpose should be less about living a purpose and more about living with purpose. So don’t overlook the purpose you express in your every day life already. It’s in your relationships, it’s in how you conduct yourself with empathy and compassion. It’s a filter through which you judge everything. What you prioritize, the decisions you make. The bottom line may simply be, how do you contribute to others? How do you make the world a better place? How do you make someone’s day a little bit easier? And, you know, back when I first started doing this thing that I do that you know me for when I first decided, “Okay fine, I’ll do this purposeful thing. I’ll put myself out there and talk about my spirituality or whatever”. The message I kept getting from my guides – it was pretty creepy - I’ll have to tell you the story sometime of how I went to this trance-channelling event and the trance channel even said this message, but - the message that sort of launched ‘Shift Your Spirits’ that remains the driving affirmation, I suppose, is that:
You’re already everything that you’ve ever wanted to become. You fulfill your life purpose with every breath you take.
I want to leave you with one little thing. I was looking at, you know, the different things that I’ve written about purpose on my website, you know, seeing if I have any articles to pull from – which I really didn’t. I just kind of winged it, because it’s not something, like I said, that I’ve ever created a comprehensive BuzzFeed checklist post for. But I ran across this thing in my life purpose category. It’s a post called “How Badly Do You Want it”. And I wanted to read this and do a reading of it and kind of share this with you.
Reading blog post
There seems to be this perception that identifying your passion is the hard part. Once you really nail that down and put your energy into something you truly love – can’t live without doing – that everything just “flows."
The flow, free of obstacles, is somehow the ultimate judgment on your choice and your efforts.
And then, here comes this video of Oprah talking about “failure" as simply helpful information trying to move you in another direction.
(I happily shared that video on Facebook; in the moment I ran across it, I thought it was a great message for anyone feeling overwhelmed and burnt out…)
But, wait – if it's not going well, I must be doing it wrong, right? That’s kind of the message. The idea that failure is trying to move you in another direction and be helpful. Some higher power must be trying to move you in another direction. So, where do we put all the success stories about perseverance, about all the people who didn't get it right on the first or second or third tries?
All this sounds good in new age theory, but I have to admit something to you: it is not my personal reality.
My websites have been hacked multiple times over the last few years — I didn’t take that as a “sign” that I should simply abandon eleven years' worth of published writing and twenty thousand readers and, “Oh well, you know, I’m getting hacked a lot. That’s the Universe’s way of telling me this is not my purpose. I’m just going to go do something else.”
My last book launch suffered from some technical difficulties and every planet you can name was in retrograde at the time that it happened. You know what? I have a whole other catalogue of books to release. So, that passion hasn’t changed. Just because everything in the world got thrown at me, and it was a hurdle, it's still the direction that I’m meant to go. You know, I didn’t decide that that’s somehow telling me “No, it’s not flowing so obviously you’re not supposed to be doing this anymore.”
My latest book — HAVENWOOD — which was really the Big One. I’ve put out non-fiction, obviously, and some shorter fiction, but I’d never written and released an epic historical fantasy novel. This was “I want to be a writer when I grow up” Big. It was a life-long dream of mine. It is a passion of mine.
After nineteen months of work, I imported the final edits for the formatting stage of that book, and… The text was jacked up with errors and random code.
It’s my “passion.” And it ain’t “flowing."
So here’s what I wanted to share with you from this:
Sometimes I think the Universe is sparring with me. It’s egging me on. It’s literally testing me. It’s not just trying to point out – oh things aren’t flowing very well for you, therefore you should change direction and that’s what failure’s trying to teach you. No. Here’s what I think is happening. I think the Universe is saying, “How badly do you want this?"
And I say, “More than all your potholes and razor wire, Universe. More than all your barriers and blocks.”
It’s not the first time that I’ve crawled out of a ditch and crossed the finish line bruised and bloodied.
It won’t be the last.
Fuck your flow, Universe. Fuck your flow. It’s not always about it being easy and it’s not always about it being flowing.
This post is ultimately a message about Perseverance.
So, yeah. Serving. Serving with Purpose. Finding your Purpose, choosing a Purpose. You know, you can make one. And you’ve got several. Do them all. Do a little bit of everything, but the main thing is, put it out there and get feedback. And the feedback will guide you. Maybe the feedback will tell you this is a brick wall, go in another direction. And it could happen. But don’t be discouraged. Because if it’s really something that’s meant to be, and it’s something that you’re really super drawn to, and you don’t have to think very hard to discover what it is and to go after it, then sometimes all those hurdles and the fact that it’s hard is, you know, the Universe’s way of testing you.
So, the thing about Purpose. You know, the conclusion about purpose is it’s both this big wilful act, and at the same time, it’s this passive, just breathing and being who you are at the same time. And so it’s a volley back and forth between those two things. And I think what those things are is a spectrum of your energy as you project who you are to the world. Sometimes it’s just a little moment: you being you, smiling at a stranger on the sidewalk, answering a text from your friend, taking your kid somewhere they need to go. And then other times it’s you off in your office working really hard, blood sweat and tears for 19 months to produce a piece of art. So, it’s all that and everything else in between, but I hope that some of what I’ve said here has given you something to contemplate and to allow you to either affirm what it is that you’re doing or maybe gives you a new sense of direction.
Anyway, I’m going to stop rambling for now. Thank you for being a patron, and participating in this Q&A episode scenario. Really, seriously, send me your questions. This is a great prompt, and, you know, you can make them relatively personal. This is still a small group of people, so try to keep in mind, you know, that your question obviously I’m going to answer it in a way that it will speak to more than one of us, but there’s a small group of you in the room right now with me energetically out there representing, so send us your questions and I’ll keep creating these for you guys.
Thank you for your support.
Thanks again for listening to the ‘Shift Your Spirits’ podcast. For show notes, links, transcripts and all the past episodes, please visit ShiftYourSpirits.com.
You can subscribe in iTunes or Stitcher or whatever app you use to access podcasts. You don’t have to use that purple button on your iPhone. Some people don’t like that app. My personal favorite podcast app is Overcast, so go check that one out.
If you’d like to get an intuitive reading with me, or download a free e-book and guided meditation to help you connect with your guides, please go to https://sladeroberson.com/. And if you’re interested in my professional intuitive training program, you can start the course for free by downloading the attunement at https://automaticintuition.com/.
Before I go, I promised to leave you a message in answer to a question or concern you may have. I pulled a card for a friend the other night after a long, late-night heart-to-heart conversation. From Colette Baron-Reid Wisdom of Avalon Oracle, which I have as an app on my phone. This deck and Oracle app were inspired by The Mists of Avalon, a novel by Marion Zimmer Bradley, which is one of my all time favorite works of fiction ever. It is probably why my own fiction is in the historical fantasy genre. Anyway, in just a moment, I’m going to read the card to you as today’s Oracle. The message of the card spoke not only to his situation and mine, but I feel like it speaks to this eclipse season as well, and the transformation that we’re going through.
So take a moment to think about your own issue. Hold it in your mind or speak it out loud. I’ll pause for just a few seconds right now.
1…2…3…4
Absolute truth, courage, self-respect and responsibility.
The Lady of the Lake represents the highest order of respect for yourself and the manner in which you operate within the world around you.
She is the harsher element of truth, where denial is swept away by a tidal wave of events.
In the ancient legend of Avalon, the Lady of the Lake presented Merlin with the sword of truth. The magic that welded this metal was fired by the will of the Goddess. When the Lady of the Lake appears, she demands nothing short of total truth and integrity; and she asks you to be mindful of all the signs, signals, and omens that present themselves to you.
This is not the time to second-guess. If a signal appears, be assured that a challenge has been presented. Moving forward without acknowledgment of the challenge will result in unnecessary difficulties. If the signal is to move, she pushes you to act. Do so, for a victory is imminent. Regardless of your question, the message is to take care when the Lady of the Lake appears, as serious business is at stake. The Lady reminds you of your personal responsibility in shaping your reality and its consequences.
Seek the sword of truth within yourself and great success will be yours. Have courage, for when the Lady appears, the strength of Avalon is behind you in support of your quest for wholeness and abundance.
and I’ll talk to you later.
In 1978, my family moved into a house that was haunted. Part 3 in a three-part series of readings from my paranormal memoirs "Tales of a Fourth Grade Haunting." (For Part 1 and 2, check out episode 17 & 18.)
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED AS "Memory, Metaphor & Active Imagination" HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses
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Automatic Intuition
The Cosmic Tribe Tarot Eric Ganther & Stevee Postman
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In 1978, my family moved into a house that was haunted. Part 2 in a three-part series of readings from my paranormal memoirs "Tales of a Fourth Grade Haunting." (For Part 1, check out episode 17.)
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED AS "The Plural Form of Vortex" HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses
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Automatic Intuition
The Cosmic Tribe Tarot Eric Ganther & Stevee Postman
BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits
In 1978, my family moved into a house that was haunted. Part 1 in a three-part series of readings from my paranormal memoirs "Tales of a Fourth Grade Haunting."
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED AS "To Sleepwalk in the Past Tense" HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses
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Automatic Intuition
BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits
Diana Frajman returns to share the results of The 3x3 Project.
If you have not listened to the first show with Diana, go back and check out episode 7.
3 actions, 3 times a week, for 3 months = change your life
MENTIONED IN THE SHOW: Change Your Life in 3 Months
The 3x3 Project
GUEST LINKS - Diana Frajman Crone Confidence
Get an intuitive reading with Diana
HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses
Get an intuitive reading with Slade
Automatic Intuition
BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits
If you’re feeling overwhelmed, or like you can’t focus, or like you’re never getting anything done, you’re going to dig this conversation with Ryan McRae.
Ryan’s a writer and a blogger who helps adults - especially those with ADHD - be more successful and productive. He’s an Evernote ninja, board game player and he admits to having an unhealthy relationship with hash browns.
Ryan shares his story of learning to thrive in chaos, as well as a few of his favorite exercises for finding focus.
MENTIONED IN THE SHOW: ADHD, overwhelm, anxiety, procrastination, finding focus, productivity, procrastination, time management, habit-building, purpose, The Tower Refuse to Choose Barbara Sher
The Cosmic Tribe Tarot Eric Ganther & Stevee Postman
Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World Cal Newport
GUEST LINKS - RYAN MCRAE For snarky, no-nonsense free email courses on managing your calendar, procrastination, and habit-building TheADHDNerd.com
HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses
Get an intuitive reading with Slade
Automatic Intuition
BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits
Signs - particularly animal signs, Native American spirit animals, animal medicine, omens - finding feathers, meaningful coincidence, synchronicity …
This is one of my favorite topics in the world. It’s a program that’s always running in the background of my psyche. It’s a language of messages I’m constantly engaging with, like morse code from the natural world.
Over the weekend, I had a few stories coming to me about signs and coincidences —from my dad, from a really close friend, and I experienced a pretty good one myself. So I’m thinking maybe I should just share those conversations with you guys.
MENTIONED IN THE SHOW: "Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished." -Lao Tzu
What do grey feathers mean?
HOST LINKS: Slade's Books & Courses
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Automatic Intuition
Become a Patron:
https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits
I started noticing I was slipping back into a terrible habit — complaining. And not only did I notice the negative quality of the energy I was putting out into the world ... I noticed the impact it was having on my ability to manifest joy and abundance.
I needed to get a handle on my negativity quickly. I'm sharing some of my strategies for reframing negative thoughts and shifting your language back into a place of power. There's even a 30-day challenge — want to join me?
MENTIONED IN THE SHOW:
The Terrible Destructive Power of Complaining
The Book of Faded Green
Morning Pages The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron
HOST LINKS:
Slade's Books & Courses
Get an intuitive reading with Slade
Automatic Intuition
Become a Patron:
https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits
We’re bridging science and spirituality in a discussion with Dr. Keith Holden about using the power of your mind to heal your body and maximize your intuition. Dr. Holden is board certified in Internal Medicine, trained in Functional Medicine, and has a special interest in the mind-body connection and spirituality in medicine. His course "Power of the Mind in Health and Healing" is a best-seller on Udemy.com with over 5200 students from 119 countries.
Mentioned during the show: On this episode, we talk about: energy as information, how mindfulness and meditation can affect how your genes express, electroceuticals, pulsed electromagnetic field therapy, transcranial magnetic stimulation, ONDAMED ® Bioenergetic therapy, BEMER therapy, pulse testing, muscle testing, brainwave entrainment, isochronic tones, binaural beats, guided meditation and more.
Institute for Functional Medicine
Dr. Herbert Benson - The Relaxation Response
The Flexner Report
Kathryn Kulhman
The Monroe Institute
HeartMath Institute
Guest links - Dr. Keith Holden dr-holden.com
Power of the Mind in Health and Healing - Udemy course
Power of the Mind in Health and Healing - Book
Host links - Slade Roberson Slade's Books & Courses
Get an intuitive reading with Slade
Automatic Intuition
Patreon.com - Support this show
On episode 11, I’m sharing a conversation with Lori Ference.
Lori is a professional intuitive who guides leaders and visionaries through transformational change. She supports those venturing into unknown territory in their lives and businesses as an advisor and strategic project director.
She’s also the producer and host of Leaders' Call to Adventure, which features the inspiring stories of those who have taken the road less traveled. As an athlete, she embraces this spirit of adventure through running — she’s currently training for a one-hundred mile ultra marathon.
MENTIONED IN THE SHOW:
On this show we talk about ESP, past lives, shamanism, think tanks, fractal theory, intrinsic time, predicting the future, the birth of the spiritual internet, visionaries, leadership, adventure, and, of course, intuition.
Books by Sanaya Roman:
Personal Power Through Awareness
Living with Joy
Opening to Channel
Spiritual Growth
The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield
Mosaic
GUEST LINKS - Lori Ference
www.loriference.com
www.leaderscalltoadventure.com
Leaders' Call to Adventure - Facebook
Leaders' Call to Adventure - Podcast
HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON
Slade's Books & Courses
Get an intuitive reading with Slade
Automatic Intuition
Patreon.com Support this Show
On SYS episode 10, I’m sharing a conversation with Licia Berry about The Black Madonna.
Licia’s an artist, mentor, speaker, and author of the International #1 bestseller I Am Her Daughter — which we’ll talk about on the show — along with the story of how Licia took a solo pilgrimage to southern France to photograph the elusive Black Madonnas, only to find that in France the Black Madonna is not so elusive after all, and contributed to several mystical experiences that changed her life.
MENTIONED IN THE SHOW:
On this show we also talk about vision quests, the Holy Grail, Lourdes, shamanism, ancestral memory, Dia de los Muertos, White Buffalo Calf Woman, the many faces of the Goddess — Sibyle, Isis, Amaterasu, Brigid, and Great Mother, the archetypal mothering intelligence in the universe.
The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd
Labyrinth by Kate Mosse
Camino de Santiago
the famous pilgrimage route through France and Spain
Lourdes
Please see the corresponding post on my blog sladeroberson.com for photographs and artwork Licia promised to share:
Our Lady in Stone - Lourdes Sighting, photograph © Licia Berry 2016
Mary White Buffalo Calf Woman, mixed media © Licia Berry 2016
Prints available at http://juicysacredliving.com/fine-art
GUEST LINKS - Licia Berry
liciaberry.com
I Am Her Daughter book
http://juicysacredliving.com/current-project/
HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON
Slade's Books & Courses
Get an intuitive reading with Slade
Automatic Intuition
Patreon.com Support this Show
Jesse was the first person to suggest to me that some of the benevolent strangers we encounter are not even human, but incarnated guardians. Corporeal angels.
This is a continuation of Stranger Angels: Part 1. If you haven’t heard the story about my weird European stalker who looked like a mannequin, then hit pause and go listen to Episode 08.
It will make this sequel a lot more satisfying...
I met Jesse in 2002, exactly ten years after that trip to Europe. I was thirty-two years old. I had lived through a really shitty Saturn Return that nuked all the structure in my world and left me in a ditch that I would spend most of my thirties crawling out of. At the time, I was recovering from a serious illness and working on rebuilding the basics of third-dimensional existence — you know: job, place to live — I had no way of knowing that I was about a year away from a major Trip Down the Rabbit Hole that would deliver me to some different level of identity and I suppose a reorientation to my spiritual path — events that climaxed with an intervention by my guides, an ultimatum regarding my sense of purpose, and ultimately the creation of Shift Your Spirits and the work for which you know me.
MENTIONED IN THE EPISODE Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey by Sallie Nichols Conscious Evolution: Awakening the Power of Our Social Potential by Barbara Marx Hubbard
The Ones Who Glow by Slade Roberson
Angels 101 by Doreen Virtue
A Book of Angels by Sophy Burnham
An Angel for Every Day by Angela McGerr
Sylvia Browne's Book of Angels
Angel of the Revelation by William Blake
phylum/ phyla — the different types or levels of angels: Thrones and Principalities, Dominions, Virtues, Carrions, Powers, Seraphim, Cherubim, Archangels, Angels
asher — your personal guardian angel (body guard)
silver cord technician — the angel who manages your silver cord connection to spirit
The Books of Enoch
Mother Mary Speaks to Us by Brad Steiger and Sherry Hansen Steiger
Quantum Spirituality — this is not the book I remember. I may have the title wrong...
Quantum Theology by Diarmuid O'Murchu
I think this* may actually be the book and I have remembered the title incorrectly.
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED AS Jesse : Stranger Angels - Part 3
Jesse : Stranger Angels - Part 4
The Paranormal Memoirs
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How to subscribe to my podcast free
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Download a free ebook and meditation
Automatic Intuition
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TRANSCRIPT Okay, so this episode is a part 2 - it’s a continuation of last week's episode called - you guessed it - Stranger Angels part one. If you haven’t heard the story about my weird European stalker who looked like a mannequin, then go ahead and hit pause right now
I promise it will make this sequel a lot more satisfying if you go listen to that episode first.
Part one is Episode 8.
Jesse was the first person to suggest to me that some of these benevolent strangers we encounter are not even human, but incarnated guardians.
Although I had experiences as a kid that involved angel sightings, spirit guides, spirit animals, ghosts, elementals ... I would never have included that man John, who had followed me around on my trip to Europe, in a similar kind of paranormal category. Over the years, I even found myself relating the story of the almost-mugging — and, for some reason, excluding the part about John entirely.
Until my conversations with Jesse, I would have lumped these strangers into quirky, environmental synchronicities.
Let me explain what I mean by environmental synchronicity — I’m talking about these patterns I observe that seem to emerge from random chaos, and feel somehow “less personal” — just glitches or glimpses of cosmic machinery at work that don’t feel “targeted” toward me in a significant, meaningful way.
I’ll give you a couple of recent examples:
A few months ago, just before Christmas, I was standing in the checkout line at the supermarket behind some random stranger. Nothing noteworthy about that, except that, the very next day, in a completely different part of the city, I was waiting to place an order at the cafe, and the same person got in line behind me. Never saw him before; never saw him again after…
Another example of this kind of environmental synchronicity...
Last month, I was out running errands. I stopped to get gas and a car pulled up at the pump next to mine. I noticed it because it was the exact same make, model, year, and color as my own car. (You always notice when you see “your” car on the road, right?) So, I went all over town that day — the bank, the post office, the bookstore, the cafe, and eventually, a few hours later, criss-crossed my way to an enormous shopping mall in an area of the burbs I generally avoid and only visit about once a year if I absolutely have to — I needed to exchange a gift. I found a group of empty parking spaces and pulled into one. As I was getting my bag out of the trunk, a car pulled into the space next to mine — same make, model, year, and color - AND - it was that same exact car and driver from earlier in the day.
In that asphalt sea of parking options, not to mention in a medium-size city — we’re talking about a quarter of a million people -- what are the chances?
So, these are not Big Deal experiences, right? — just things that make you go “Hmm… What was that all about it?” Never saw them before; never saw them after. I suppose it’s some fairly irrelevant mathematical remainder in the clockwork of divine timing.
Anyway, that’s the kind of compartment in my mind where I might have placed the story about John the European mannequin stalker, just tagged with a greater-than-average significance and a Big Mystery stamp…
At least, that’s how I thought of it before I met Jesse.
…My name is Slade Roberson
For over ten years, I’ve been a professional intuitive and the author of the blog Shift Your Spirits, where I try to write about spirituality with fewer hearts and flowers than most New Age blather.
I also mentor emerging intuitives, psychics, and healers in a program called Automatic Intuition.
Before we go any further, just a quick FYI — I’ve added a new feature to the show.
For years now, before I send out a blog post, I try to tune in and listen for something that will speak directly to you, that will serve as a message. Like an oracle.
And I get email replies, every week, with tons of you saying that the post was a direct answer to a question you had.
It’s really cool, and I want to bring that phenomenon to the podcast…
At the very end of this episode, after my final links and credits, I have a channeled message for you.
Be thinking about a question or concern you have. It might be answered by the show itself. But hold it in your mind and I’ll come back on at the end and leave you with something extra…
Back to the story...
I met Jesse in 2002, exactly ten years after that trip to Europe. I was thirty-two years old. I had lived through a really shitty (shittier-than-most) Saturn Return that nuked all the structure in my world and left me in a ditch that I would spend most of my thirties crawling out of. At the time, I was recovering from a serious illness and working on rebuilding the basics of third-dimensional existence — you know: job, place to live — I had no way of knowing that I was about a year away from a major Trip Down the Rabbit Hole that would deliver me to some different level of identity and I suppose a reorientation to my spiritual path — events that climaxed with an intervention by my guides, an ultimatum regarding my sense of purpose, and ultimately the creation of Shift Your Spirits and the work for which you know me.
Back in 2002, I was not operating from even so much as the intention of a “higher vibration” — I was just surviving. (Barely.)
I was working in Chattanooga (where I grew up) at a temporary, low-paying job while searching for a full-time position with benefits, preferably in a counseling environment, where I could also work toward my Master’s degree. I decided I wanted to move back out of state, to Atlanta, a larger city where I had lived before and where there were more opportunities. Fortunately, my temporary job gave me Mondays off, so I could arrange to do interviews on at least that one weekday, and travel down on the Sundays before.
All the back-and-forth was expensive; gas eating up most of my funds. The weeks of job hunting were turning into months. Many of my friends and contacts in Atlanta had moved away; even more of them were estranged. I had one friend from college who was generous with her hospitality, who I felt I could impose on to some degree, but I was going to rely on her heavily for a place to stay at a longer duration of time once I’d actually secured a position and could then start that second stage of relocating to a place of my own.
I’d already worn out my welcome with more than one person. I told everyone, including my parents, that I was spending those Sunday nights in motels; more often than not, armed with pre-ironed interview clothes, a lint-roller, resumes, and my cell phone, I slept in my car so I’d have enough gas money to return home. (I could sometimes simply get up before dawn in Chattanooga and drive down but the morning rush hours and unpredictable gridlock of getting into Atlanta on Monday mornings was way more stressful and difficult to effectively schedule.)
I passed most of those earlier Sunday evening hours killing time hanging out in cafes. I tend to haunt cafes — I’ve discovered more than one magical vortex in a favorite cafe. If I decided to plot them on a map I wouldn’t be surprised to discover evidence of ley lines or some personal power nexus.
I met Jesse at the Starbucks in Ansley. He politely asked if I minded if he sat in a leather armchair next to mine that shared the small table between them. He was dressed in scrubs; maybe a surgeon, probably a nurse. He was handsome in a bland, super clean-cut way — he obviously had some seriously Nordic DNA that results in superior height, blond hair, blue eyes, and an airbrushed complexion. I remember thinking he looked less like a nurse than a model for a medical uniforms catalogue, or maybe an extra in a hospital scene on a TV show.
I don’t remember how we initially began chatting, but the conversation started over the books we were reading. I was reading Jung and Tarot; he was reading Conscious Evolution by Barbara Marx Hubbard.
(Which I just realized saying that, I told Amy Oscar, who I interviewed in episode 4 of this podcast, that listening to her reminded me of listening to Barbara Marx Hubbard.
Anyway
Jesse talked at great length about the concepts of Hubbard’s work — he was a bit dull and emotionless in his delivery, professorial, but the information itself was interesting and he seemed intent on instructing me about it.
He eventually asked me what “my story” was, and I told him about my process of finding work and relocating.
Pointing to my book he said : “You’re inhabiting the Wanderer archetype.”
I was like “Ah, yes, or you could just call me a Fool, as the Tarot would.”
He shrugged and kindly said “It's the beginning of all Journeys."
When the baristas began to make the obvious motions of closing the cafe, Jesse asked me where I was staying. I told him truthfully that I wasn’t sure yet, but I lied and said I was going to go find a cheap motel — and I mentioned a notoriously shady possibility nearby.
He looked troubled by this and was like. “No, no no. I live alone, really close to here, just blocks from the University where you’re going for your interview. I have a guest room, I’m not working tomorrow, and I insist you come stay with me.”
I was not looking forward to finding a safe place to sleep in my car, and after going through the motions of being assured that the invitation was sincere, not just a friendly but empty offer, I accepted with grateful relief.
JESSE’S HOUSE
So, I was supposed to follow his car to his place, but he also gave me back-up directions in case we were separated, not an address but like simplified landmark-syle — The house was on Woodland Hills, the first driveway on the left after the last speed bump as you approach the traffic light at the end of the street.
Jesse drove some vaguely forgettable car — something white, fairly late model, like a Ford Taurus — it looked like a rental.
I’d probably driven past his house thousands of times over the years.
When he stooped to go in through the back door into his kitchen, I realized for the first time just freaking how tall he was.
The strangest thing about Jesse’s house was that it was almost entirely empty — there were no appliances except a coffee maker, nothing but water and milk and a bag of coffee in the refrigerator, paper plates and plastic cups in the cabinets; there was nothing but a lonely chandelier in the dining room; two leather armchairs, a large television and a lamp, both sitting on the floor in the living room; there was no art work on the walls; blinds were the only window treatments; in one bedroom there was a mattress and an alarm clock on the floor, an open closet with a row of scrubs and a few pairs of jeans and t-shirts; the bathroom had a toothbrush, toothpaste, a razor, and shaving cream in the medicine cabinet, a bar of soap and a bottle of shampoo in the shower…
It looked like a house that had been immaculately upgraded and remodeled — for sale, but was like badly in need of some staging.
I asked him “Did you just move in?”
And all he said was “Uh…yeah.”
(The same cryptic and succinct answer he’d given me when I asked if he was a nurse.)
The whole house smelled like saffron incense.
When he showed me to the second bedroom, apologizing that it was his “meditation room slash library,” I discovered where Jesse kept all his possessions (or at least a good ninety-five percent of them).
Books. Books — everywhere. (It was a bit… eccentric; possibly insane.)
The books weren’t shelved, but in stacks on the floor; a few feet high, and two or three stacks deep around the entire perimeter of the room. The twin mattress on the floor, well-made with crunchy new pillows, made the whole room look like some kind of gigantic crib with book-stacks instead of bars. Had the stacks been any closer to the bed or any taller I would’ve feared that they might topple over on me and bury me alive while I slept between them.
I had once worked in a small metaphysical book store, so I immediately recognized the spiritual subject matter of his collection; he seemed to have at least every title we’d carried in stock, and then some. The books were also in several languages — English, French, Italian, German, Dutch, Afrikaans… Yes, I recognize Afrikaans because I have an ex who grew up in South Africa and I was fascinated by his Afrikaans (Afrikaner?) versions of The Chronicles of Narnia.
In addition to the most popular best-sellers on a range of subjects, as I explored the spines more carefully I realized that the one over-arching theme, the one topic that was represented more than any other was: Angels. And, I mean, this guy was clearly obsessed with angels.
ANGELS?
Really?!
Our earlier conversation had established Jesse (in my mind, at least) as intellectual, sober, and serious. He just didn’t seem to fit the profile of the customers I remembered coming into the new age book store and purchasing material about angels. I must admit, at most periods in my life, I negatively judged people with an interest in angelology as being vapid. With the exception of those who approached the subject of angels from an academic, scholarly, or comparative religion angle, I assumed the audience for contemporary angelology to be simplistically fundamentalist or spiritually immature.
Weren’t angels a bit — I don’t know — fluffy, naive, benign yet decidedly un-powerful?
Although I would have had a hard time describing sightings of beings like the one I wrote about in "The Ones Who Glow" as anything but some type of guardian angel, at the time I met Jesse I still held onto some arrogance that my experience (or at least my perspective) was uniquely profound.
The truth is, at this present moment, I accept that the word “angel” describes a type of entity I do believe in — a vocabulary that transcends the boundaries of human culture and faith — yet some part of me wishes there was a footnote every time I use the word that says
“The angels I see do not look a damned thing like Barbie dolls in nightgowns with wings. Their energy is comforting not because they are ‘huggable’ but because they are powerful.”
In response to Jesse’s semi-apology about my having to sleep in a makeshift library, I told him I always need to read before falling asleep anyway. It was already incredibly late in the evening and I had to get up early; so he left me to the books and retired to his own room.
A person’s books provide an irresistible insight into his private self, so I stayed up for awhile exploring them. I was intrigued to discover how many of the books had been autographed — all the Doreen Virtue titles were inscribed to Jesse by name; Sophy Burnham, Angela McGerr, Sylvia Browne… they were all signed. In addition to the modern, popular titles you would find in any well-stocked New Age section, there were also very old books I’d never seen before and still have not run across again — volumes filled with Kaballah; encyclopedias of angel names; invocations, prayers, and spells for calling in the Archangels and banishing demons…
Of all the uniformly blank white walls in Jesse’s house, there was one exception — opposite the bed I was going to sleep in — above and between the stacks of books -- was a print of William Blake’s Angel of Revelation -- which I used as the illustration to the original written version of this story on my blog. I’ll link to that post so you can come take a look at the painting.
When I opened the closet to hang up the suit bag containing my interview clothes I found the floor covered with more poster prints, rolled up like scrolls with rubber bands around them. From peeking at them, I found they were more reproductions of angel paintings and facsimiles of illuminated manuscripts.
I fell asleep that night staring at the Angel of Revelation, with that little coif of golden curls that clashes absurdly with the intensity of his expression and purpose, frozen in his bold-postured pronouncement...
Jesse served me coffee the next morning when I came out of the bathroom, dressed and ready to leave for my interview. He very formally inquired how I had slept.
“Angels, angels, everywhere,” I said, hoping it came across as only a slightly teasing prompt.
“Indeed they are,” he said.
I’ve always had a tendency to want to adopt another person’s language in an attempt to connect with them. So I tried to talk about it, to at least communicate to him that I was more open to the topic than I probably really felt.
I told him:
“I’ve liked William Blake since I was a little kid. When I was in elementary school, a librarian found me looking at a book of Blake’s paintings and poems and she told me that Blake saw angels in trees when he was a boy. I remember resisting the urge to confess Me too!.”
“Maybe that’s exactly what she was inviting you to do,” Jesse said. “I’ll give you another opportunity to now. I’d like to hear about that.”
I’d actually never told anyone that before I told him. I’m not sure I even fully remembered it until that moment.
So I told Jesse about The Ones Who Glow, the same story I wrote about my first encounter with a guardian angel when I was about five or six years old.
“That was your asher,” he told me. It was the first time I’d ever heard that term. He explained to me that the asher is the proper word for the “classic guardian angel,” and is merely one of many different types (or phyla) of the spirit entities we call angels.
“Will you come back next week?” he asked me. "I want to tell you more, and I have a feeling you have some other stories too. You’re welcome to stay here again, when you go on your second interview.”
“Provided I get called back for another interview,” I said. “Are you making a prediction?”
“Oh yes, I absolutely believe you will,” Jesse said. “You’ve just called your asher to you, after a very long time.”
“I have?”
“By talking about her, right now. You will notice the effects of having done so.”
As I gathered my things to leave, and thanked him for his hospitality, he wrote a pager number down on a piece of paper and gave it to me. It said “pager - colon.” Which was a little odd. I didn’t know anyone still used those.
“Let me know when you’re back in town,” he said. "I insist. Promise me you'll come back and we’ll continue this conversation.”
I said that I would, although I’m not sure how much I meant it.
My first interview was a success, and I did get called back for another one the following week… and the truth was, this time it was scheduled late in the afternoon on Monday — I really had no good reason to drive down on Sunday and stay the night. It was totally unnecessary, other than to visit Jesse again.
And I decided to do that.
I found myself wondering if I should actually page him. I was worried that I might be imposing on a stranger who was only being polite. But then, he had given me an oddly specific way to contact him…A pager. Which felt like something that in 2002 had to be used for urgent situations. Then, it occurred to me that the number might even be a fake.
I decided that I would page him, and if he called back I would thank him again for letting me stay and let him know that his prediction about the second interview came true. And that would give him the opportunity to invite me to meet again if he really wanted to. The page went through okay, but quite a bit of time passed and my cell phone never rang.
I drove down anyway. And I eventually went back to the same cafe where I had met him. Hours passed, closing time came. Still no call. I was pretty disappointed, and feeling foolish that I would now have to spend money on a hotel or find a safe place to sleep in my car and kill another entire day until it was time for my interview.
But as I was getting in my car to leave, Jesse pulled up next to me in the parking lot and rolled down his window. He was clearly in a rush — flushed in the face, and almost out of breath.
He said “Oh, good, I caught you! Follow me back to my house.”
I spent a total of four Sunday evenings and Mondays in a row at Jesse’s house unearthing memories of possible angel sightings, paranormal experiences, and encounters with supernatural beings.
I wasn’t called in beyond a second interview — I didn’t even get that job, although a good friend helped me find another position at that same University not long after… The truth is, I kept going back to stay at Jesse’s with an entirely different motivation.
The second time I encountered Jesse, he came to the cafe where we had originally met, just as I was leaving. The third time, I paged him, while at Lenox Mall, miles away in another part of town, and fifteen minutes later he walked right up to me in a Pottery Barn. The fourth and final time, I dropped by his house without paging him at all. His car wasn’t there, but I peeked through the window in his back kitchen door; and then, just as I was putting my car in reverse, he pulled up behind me in the driveway.
I didn’t even consciously realize how much I had locked away and forgotten about until I started sharing these stories with him — the more of them I recalled, the more they began to surface. There were so many experiences I had never talked about or even remotely considered telling anyone.
You gotta understand -- at the point I met Jesse, in 2002, I was still deeply guarded (and relatively ignorant) about the existence of spirit guides or angels. For the first thirty-five years of my life I carried on under a profound anxiety that I might be mentally ill, or, more importantly, that other people would diagnose me as mentally ill — and that if I talked about this, I could be institutionalized, locked away, lose my freedom, or maybe even my life over it.
I could never recall or transcribe my conversations with Jesse word-for-word, and, if this were a movie, I would simply show you a montage of those hours spent in the armchairs that were the only substantial furniture in the house talking over take-out food and cups of coffee. Much of these talks felt like some kind of intensive therapy sessions — like, as if, in the symbolic logic of dreams, Jesse’s uniform blue medical scrubs represented healing.
He never talked about himself, his work, his family, his life. At first I would ask questions, according to social protocol, but they were always vaguely deflected. He interviewed me, with very precisely chosen questions that I was sometimes surprised to realize how much I could answer, at great length. He wanted to dig into the details of strange memories that I hadn't thought about for years.
I’ve never felt “listened to” so completely.
After pulling the stories from me, he would take a turn theoretically “diagnosing” or identifying the themes from a spiritualist perspective, as if he were writing a thesis paper on my childhood. Sometimes, the dialogue felt like a psychic reading, as he seemed to know more about me than I did.
And — always — he related the context and the parameters of what we discussed to the existence of angels.
I eventually moved from feeling “embarrassed” by the direct way he lectured about this topic to warming to the possibilities. The more I shared, and the more he explained to me, the more I felt something click into place that made more sense than I might have initially wanted to admit.
I began to feel lighter, intrigued, even relieved that there were things that had never made sense to me before that suddenly had this magical, retroactive filter through which I could reconsider them.
Viewed through the prism of Jesse’s beliefs, the very things that I had uncomfortably ignored and repressed because they were disturbing or confusing began to have a purpose, a cohesion that would at least make sense in the realm of Stories.
Skeletons in my closet, of which I was mostly ashamed, were recast as powerful, meaningful, benevolent characters. The ingredients of my -- air-quotes — “mental illness” became the components of a mystical narrative where I was a hero, not a victim.
(It’s very much the current model for my client readings — to reinterpret a person’s Story such that the seemingly random threads emerge as a pattern in a tapestry; the painful pieces become gifts of the spirit; the tragedies become tests of the will; the failures become the acquisition of wisdom… Any life story can be willfully romanced through an intentional shift in perspective.)
Much of what Jesse shared about angelic entities was biblically arcane to the point of being obtuse: stuff like The Book of Enoch who was essentially abducted by ancient aliens (angels) and later returned to record the names we historically know them by; and archaic categorizations of the angelic hierarchies — the Four Choirs, and the subset phyla (species) of angelics like Supernals, Celestials, Illuminations, Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones, Dominations, Virtues, Powers… and those of the Orders of the Fourth Choir who are the most likely to closely interact with humanity — Principalities, Archangels, (plain old) Angels.
Among the “lowest” order were the personal guardian angels who work with each of us, usually in pairs: our Ashers and Silver Cord Technicians.
(Technicians is my word. I don’t remember what he called it. I obviously had to go back and research all those terms, after the fact…I don’t have that kind of recall.)
Recently, one of the students I’m mentoring through the Automatic Intuition Program told me that she believed one of her spirit guides had shown up, unannounced, on her doorstep one day. An unusually small woman who claimed to have a “message” and was invited in. After a conversation in which she made predictions for this student concerning her future life purpose, she left and was never seen or heard from again.
I didn’t say so at the time, but I wondered that this might not technically be an entity of a much higher vibration than a guide. I doubt the ability of a spirit guide (which I classify as a formerly human soul) to manifest a corporeal body — to assume living form. But of course it depends on whether or not anyone else witnessed this little woman — was my student the only person to see, hear, and interact with her? If so, then I suppose it may well have been a spirit guide in full-body apparition, not unlike a ghost; or else she was able to be perceived by interior psychic senses.
Jesse suggested that many of the beings we might perceive as brief, full-body apparitions with very limited interaction — and assume to be ghosts or shadows or angels — might actually be astral travelers: real, living, flesh-and-blood human beings, asleep in some other part of the world whose souls leave their bodies and wander around. This might explain why so many of the women we see depicted in artwork about this often seem to be wearing nightgowns, are unaware of their surroundings, and are unresponsive, like sleepwalkers.
While many spirit entities of all types are most commonly perceived by intuitively sensitive people, who experience them regularly or intermittently through the subtler psychic senses, Jesse told me that there are beings who literally manifest physical bodies that all of us — absolutely anyone — can see and interact with.
It takes enormous power and ability to assume a corporeal form, even temporarily, and it’s unlikely that ghosts, earthbound spirits, or dis-incarnate human souls acting in the roles of guides, could pull this off.
Beyond just being around us everywhere in some “ethereal” way or in some “other dimension,” corporeal angels walk around among us. Even though we see them and speak to them, we mostly dismiss them as random strangers; it may never occur to us that they're not human.
ROLES OF CORPOREAL ANGELS
Jesse said that angels who take the physical form of human strangers commonly appear to be doctors, nurses, EMT’s, police officers, firefighters. You may have brief and meaningful interactions with people in these roles who you never see again, and others of their kind can’t account for them and will likely not know who you’re talking about if you ask about them.
Many corporeal angels will assume the guise of homeless people. Jesse pointed out that many panhandlers are quite aware of this lore, regardless of their personal beliefs, and may strategically exploit the perception for their own ends. He advised that the best means of discernment is simply your gut — that you know or at least suspect on an intuitive level; their vibration is usually quite high, the feeling that you get in their presence should never be threatening, though it could be uncomfortable or intense.
Here are Some of the Qualities that Might “Give Away” the Incarnated Angel:
they seem “rooted” to a particular spot — able to interact with you, although they may remain standing or seated in one place
or they move around normally, but they're limited to a specific physical location or time
their clothing may be “anachronistic” — the style of the clothing is oddly out of fashion, or appears “too new,” without normal wear and tear
their clothing may appear unusually put together or hastily chosen
there’s an anonymous quality to their overall appearance — they blend easily into crowds
they may be unusually tall or the opposite, extremely diminutive in size
they may appear to be of an indeterminate age — whether they are young or old, it seems almost impossible to guess
they are “plainly beautiful” in an unremarkable way that has more to do with “newness” than the handsomeness of their features — “beautiful” in the way that all infant creatures are beautiful; even though their features are not interesting or necessarily sexually attractive, their skin is often colorless or without variation or blemish
their smell may be unusually strong or noticeable; pleasant but pervasive
they speak without recognizable accent or dialect
they are emotionally even-keel or undemonstrative in their expression — perhaps even “robot like” even though other people may be able to see them as well as you can, they have no known connection or relationship to anyone else
you feel their presence before you notice them; they are always aware of you first; by the time you make eye contact you realize that they have already been staring at you
And there can be some Significance to Their Names
They are not quick to introduce themselves or to volunteer their names; if you ask, they will provide you with a single first name.
The names they claim will often be of recognizable significance to you — a name that you particularly like; that you have known many people to share; that appears often in your family; one that corresponds with a figure of importance to you.
Even when their names don’t seem to be coincidental or meaningful, they nevertheless correspond to some pattern. (Have you noticed the commonality among the names of the characters I have shared in these memoirs, not to mention the names of some of my guides that I’ve talked about before? They all have J-name. Names that start with the letter J: Joanna, Julie, James … John…..Jesse.
Although it is a very simple pattern, it’s an unyielding constant.
More important than the “type” of entity or the details of their physical appearance are the roles they play or the circumstances in which they may interact with the living in a corporeal form.
Circumstances Where Angels Tend to Intervene
Miracles
Transition periods like birth and death
Physical Danger
Direction Regarding Life Path and Purpose
assistance while Traveling
I specifically recall that “while traveling” was the last thing that Jesse mentioned; combined with the list of odd physical attributes, it was The Trigger that finally made me say “Okay — wait a minute…”
This is how and why this series of memories I’ve been sharing with you connects. Before that day, I had never related to another person the mystery of the stranger who had followed me from London to Paris to Amsterdam. I believe it had confounded me and defied logical explanation for so long — and to such a degree that I feared speaking about it would only make me sound paranoid.
I had uncomfortably and successfully semi-forgotten it. Tucked it away with no expectation of ever understanding how it could be…
“Why now?” I asked Jesse, after he pronounced his judgment that my experience in Europe was a perfect example of what he alluded to as evidence of Their existence. “Why am I just becoming aware of this, here and now, at this point?”
He said “At whatever point in time, your awareness can change in all directions — backwards into the past, forward into the future. You’ve definitely — admittedly — been wandering around in the woods in the dark, purposefully hiding. Maybe now you’ve stumbled upon a path that leads Somewhere you should go.”
(Jesse’s speeches tended to be spiked with these Yoda-like kind of answers.)
“So, what do I do with that?” I asked.
He said “Reconsider… Everything…”
And then he said something to me that I would hear repeated, from a variety of sources, in remarkably similar wording and form, over the next few years — I refer to it as The Ultimatum from My Guides:
He asked me “Why would you keep what you believe to yourself?”
I wish I could say that meeting Jesse set me on a clearly defined, purposeful, peaceful path out of those proverbial woods I was wandering in.
“Reconsidering Everything” was not a pretty process — it was not all “hugs and angel wings” — the Universe had already stripped me of so many basic structures in my life, and then it sent a Wrecking Ball through my world, and deconstructed my belief system and my understanding of reality.
Although my personal paranormal experiences certainly increased a hundred-fold, the next few years was more like a tornado tearing through those woods, and if I’d ever feared that I might lose my mind… Well, I finally did. I lost it. Remember my Origin Story, episode one?
It took me about three or four years to crawl up and out to a place of lucidity and control that has allowed me to produce the writing on my site and to begin counseling others and providing readings.
That last day with Jesse, after he challenged me regarding my reasons to continue in secrecy, he did something that was completely out of character with the relaxed, timeless nature of the routine we’d established, or the synchronicity of my comings and goings — he suddenly announced that he had to go.
(Which I translated as a polite way of saying it was time for me to go.)
He was urgent, fixed, and final in showing me out the door; it felt like he had heard a silent alarm go off and knew my car was about to turn back into a pumpkin.
From the small back porch near his driveway, Jesse watched me throw my bag into the trunk. Before I sat down in the driver’s seat, I took my last chance to speak to him over the hood of the car:
I said “You know, don’t think that I’m not unaware that, if everything you claim is true, you are highly suspect. You meet more of the criteria than Stalker John did. If anyone I’ve ever met is One of Them, you must be.”
He gave me a grin and a little shrug — not a confirmation, but certainly not a denial.
I never saw him again.
About a month later, when I had finally landed a job and relocated, I wanted to at least talk to him and let him know how everything had worked out. But when I called his pager, I received a wrong number message.
Although I never ran into him again, there were three occasions when I discovered books mysteriously left for me — one for each of the places where I lived between 2003 and 2006: Messages from Mother Mary a book called Quantum Spirituality which I cannot seem to find on Amazon and Conscious Evolution (the book by Barbara Marx Hubbard that Jesse had been reading when I first met him).
Not only did Jesse disappear on me — even his home vanished.
The few times that I drove by the small white house right after moving to Atlanta, I saw a realtor’s For Sale sign by the mailbox and it looked emptier than ever. Whenever I found myself on that street, I would slow down as I passed the house, looking for signs of occupancy. On one occasion, about a year later, during a particularly rough patch of difficult psychological transition, I actually went there with every intention and hope of stopping and visiting him again.
I carefully tracked the landmark speed bumps — just past the last bump before you get to the traffic light — and I pulled into the driveway.
Before me was a green house, and, more disorienting, the driveway and the sidewalk were on the wrong side of the house. I got out and looked to the neighbors on either side — it had to be one of those; I only could’ve missed it by one, in either direction…
The house simply was not there.
As if it existed according to a magical law of physics like Platform 9 and 3/4 where you catch the Hogwarts Express, or the safe house in The Order of the Phoenix that can slide into and out of a crack in space-time…
Over the next couple of years, I scoured that street, expecting to locate it at last and realize my previous error, even if Jesse wouldn’t be found there.
When I eventually moved back to Tennessee in 2006, the last thing I did on my way out of town, my car packed to the roof with my belongings, was take one final slow (fruitless) creep down Woodland Hills at that last speed bump.
And telling you this story is the closest I’ve come to finding it again — or making it “real."
Thanks for listening to this episode of Shift Your Spirits.
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BEFORE I LET YOU GO
I promised to leave you a message in answer to a concern or question you may have.
So take a moment to think about that—hold it in your mind or speak it out loud—I’ll pause for just a few seconds….right…NOW
1…2…3
MESSAGE
It looks like someone may be trying to hide their real intentions from you. Maybe even lying to you.
But consider also you could be lying to yourself. In some kind of denial.
Notice the presence of Owls. Those are signs from your guardians that deception is taking place, but that you are protected from it when you ask to see the truth.
The owl is a totem of wisdom and the ability to see through bullshit.
I'LL TALK TO YOU LATER
Have you ever found yourself in a stressful or dangerous situation and had a complete stranger offer assistance? As if they’d been placed there, by fate, or impossible coincidence, miraculously timed to step in and help … And then, just as mysteriously, disappeared?
Maybe looking back it seems like the Universe was using this ordinary person as a divine messenger for you — an ordinary vessel, but with a supernatural role and unbelievable timing.
But have you ever experienced this phenomenon in such a way it left you wondering if these helpful strangers were even human beings at all?
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED AS: Stranger Angels - Part 1
Stranger Angels - Part 2
The Paranormal Memoirs
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TRANSCRIPT Have you ever found yourself in a stressful or dangerous situation and had a complete stranger offer assistance?
As if they’d been placed there, by fate, or impossible coincidence, miraculously timed to step in and help…And then, just as mysteriously, disappear?
Maybe looking back it seems like the Universe was using this ordinary person as a divine messenger for you. An ordinary vessel, but with a supernatural role and unbelievable timing.
But have you ever experienced this phenomenon in such a way it left you wondering if these helpful strangers were even human beings at all?
My name is Slade Roberson.
For over ten years, I’ve been a professional intuitive counselor and the author of the blog Shift Your Spirits, where I try to write about spirituality with fewer hearts and flowers than most New Age blather.
I also mentor emerging intuitives, psychics, and healers in a program called Automatic Intuition.
Now a quick FYI before we go further — I’ve added a new feature to the show.
For years now, before I send out a blog post, I try to tune in and listen for something that will speak directly to you, that will serve as a message. Like an oracle.
And I get email replies, every week, with tons of you saying the post was a direct answer to a question you had.
This is a really popular phenomenon - for both of us - and I want to bring that to the podcast…
So
At the very end of this episode, after my final links and credits, I have a channeled message for you.
Be thinking about a question or concern you have. It may be answered by the show itself. But hold it in your mind and I’ll come back on at the end and leave you with something extra…
OK
So,
Back to the show.
Today, I want to share one of my own experiences with what I call stranger angels… (although I would never have used that terminology at the time…)
In January 1992, when I was twenty-two years old, I traveled to Europe.
I flew to London with a small group of friends and stayed for a few days before splitting off from them to go meet up with another friend Allison who was waiting for me in Paris. We had arranged to connect at a specific hotel between the Latin Quarter of the 5th Arrondissement and the 13th Arrondissement on a Saturday morning — but the only trains I could take required that I arrive either half a day early or half a day late. So, I opted to travel in the wee hours of Friday night/ really early Saturday morning which would put me in Paris at 1 am.
We were going to share a room, but I figured I could splurge and check into my own room for one night at the same hotel and sleep for awhile until Allison woke up.
I only had a little bit of British cash when I left London, but I wasn’t concerned — all the train stations I’d ever been to in large cities like New York and London were always bustling with activity at all hours, even in the middle of the night. So I figured I could go to a money exchange when I arrived in Paris and turn in some American traveler’s checks for francs.
After the Channel boat crossing, which was actually pretty crowded, there were only four other people in the car on the train with me — two girls from New Jersey, Joanna and Julie, an Australian guy who eventually introduced himself as James, and a nondescript man in a khaki-colored trench coat who remained several rows away, never joined in our conversation, but nevertheless seemed to always be staring and closely watching us whenever I glanced over at him.
The Jersey girls made entertaining companions, they were chatty and easy to be with; James from Australia was shy and although he moved closer to sit near us, he mostly just listened to the conversation.
I was unprepared when I arrived at the Gare du Nord train station in Paris to find it an absolute ghost town — every kiosk, cafe, ticket booth, and bank was dark, locked up with those roll-down gates like you see on the front of mall stores when they’re closed. This was a Friday night in Paris; I thought there would be people everywhere.
The Jersey girls yelled a cheery goodbye and snatched one of the only waiting taxis, and James melted away into the streets with the small crowd who exited our train from other cars.
I wandered around in an awkward circle, looking for signs of activity, and quickly realizing I was not going to find any. This was a really ill-planned arrival. I had been so comfortable in London — I was traveling with friends from the US; staying in the apartment of British nationals; there was no language barrier; not to mention a kind of “past-life” familiarity that was at least partially supported by recognizable landmarks from years of studying English literature.
Now I was alone in an abandoned metropolis with just enough high school French to read signs and grunt nouns and adjectives and to possibly butcher a verb conjugation or two, in a pinch. I was an obvious tourist carrying everything I had in an enormous pack; an easy target for a mugging.
I was actually thankful there was a freezing fog everywhere to ensure the streets were emptier than they might otherwise have been. There was only one other person anywhere nearby that I could appeal to for directions.
And he was watching me.
The man in the khaki-colored trench coat, who had been staring at me on the train, was lingering, lurking at a casual distance.
At least he was a familiar face, and if he had just arrived from England then chances were good he spoke my language.
Feeling like a child who’d lost his mom in the mall, I walked up to him and began babbling about my circumstances — where I was trying to get to in the city, where I might find a money exchange… Why was Paris of all places shut down like this on a Friday night?
I felt no sense of danger from him. Honestly, I suspected he might be cruising me, and I was more than willing to play along with that a little bit in exchange for crucial information. I was confident I could politely fend off any sexual advances, if that was his motive.
As I talked to him, I realized there was something vaguely off about him. In the back of my mind I was cataloguing the details of his manner and appearance.
He introduced himself simply as “Uh… John” and something about the way he said it sounded like a lie made up on the spot.
When he spoke, his voice was soft and polite, yet he made no facial expressions. He was absolutely emotionless. He spoke English, yet I could detect no traceable accent — it wasn’t British, or American, or Australian.
I can picture his face clearly and I would immediately recognize him if he walked into the room right now— but I can’t really describe much about him that would be identifiable or unique.
His eyes were an unusual icy blue, but other than that…
He could have been thirty… or he could have been forty or even fifty.
His hair might have been a dirty blond… or maybe a light brown, or even silvery-gray.
He was dressed from head to toe in monochrome — his pants and shirt were the same colorless beige. Only his shoes were a different color (and I noticed that, despite the cold, he wasn't wearing any socks).
His clothes had creases in them, as if they had been taken directly out of packages. I felt like if I could have checked inside his collar I’d find price tags still attached. It reminded me of when I’d worked in retail stores, the way the body forms we dressed for the window displays appeared before the clothes had been steamed.
That was it — he looked like a living mannequin.
He looked too new, too perfect — yet totally unremarkable.
He had absolutely no body hair — zero - no stubble, no shadow, no hair on his wrists — not even the faint down that a woman or a child might have.
He gave off an anonymous perfume that smelled exactly like… unscented dryer sheets. Even his breath was like a warm load of clean towels.
John was… supernaturally ordinary.
He offered to informally exchange the small handful of British pocket money I had on me — I handed him what amounted to less than five bucks, and turning away from me for a moment (probably to keep me from seeing into his wallet, I suppose) he produced a bill that, although still a modest amount, was at least quadruple the value of what I’d given him.
“But it’s not enough for a taxi all the way from here,” he said. “You’ll need to walk quite a way first, as far as you can.”
Using a rail map posted on a wall for reference, he showed me where I was and where I was headed. “Once you are in view of Notre Dame, or come to the Seine, you should be close enough to hail a driver to take you the rest of the way to your exact destination”
He hesitated for a second and then offered to walk with me.
I told him that wouldn’t be necessary — I appreciated his kindness but I anticipated it might be more difficult to get rid of him later if I needed to. Before we parted ways outside the station he also warned me about the dangers of walking through this part of Paris in the middle of the night.
He ominously advised me to “Be invisible,”
As far as ensuring that my path was relatively deserted, the weather was probably a blessing; but the grace of the cover it provided me came at a price — it was miserably freezing cold. The moisture in the air was just light enough to remain a dense fog, but it soaked me as well as any steady drizzle might have…
It was a long, harrowing (shitty) night.
I would need another thousand words here to itemize the petty trials of that night’s walk. My feet were blistered and swollen for days… I could not get warm the entire week that I spent in Paris… But to simplify the story, I can’t recall many times that I have felt that physically vulnerable.
Had I been a crow, I could’ve kept moving directly south, but the streets were a crooked, uncooperative labyrinth that required constant course correction.
I expended a lot of energy “being invisible” as I had been instructed. I encountered very few people — a handful of prostitutes propositioned me from the caves of doorways and shopfront awnings; I constantly crossed and recrossed streets to avoid anyone on the sidewalk; I ducked into phone booths from time to time to collect myself and maintain my bubble of cloaked energy.
It didn't take me long to realize that John was following me. He remained a block or two behind me, and stopped when I stopped.
Who has nowhere to be and nothing better to do than to follow me through the streets of Paris at 3 am in the middle of January? A serial killer? But I have to admit maybe I was a little comforted by his strange yet at least somewhat familiar presence over the alternative of being completely alone.
Hours later — after walking and walking for hours — I spotted the recognizable architecture of Notre Dame. Soon after that, I was across the Seine and in the Latin Quarter. Thinking surely I was close enough to afford a cab the rest of the way, I stopped a driver and spluttered my destination.
He laughed at me and pointed — to the street I was seeking, which was about a few hundred feet away.
I walked up and down that street for another hour — not only was the hotel not there, the very street number itself did not exist. After pacing back and forth and carefully tracking the building numbers to convince myself I wasn’t hallucinating, I was literally in tears. In frustration, I sat on a bench and surrendered to having arrived at being finally and totally lost.
That’s when I saw John again, across a square formed by a jumbled intersection of streets. I was just pissed off enough and desperate enough at this point to walk right up to him and demand to know why in the Hell he was stalking me.
He disappeared down a side street that looked like an alley and I followed him. But it wasn’t an alley at all — It was an improbable, completely eccentric continuation of the street I had been pacing up and down. The numbers picked up and continued.
No sign of John, but there was the hotel.
That Monday, a few days later, I was with my traveling companion Allison and her friend Natalie. We were walking from the Champs-Elysees headed to the Eiffel Tower when someone waved at me from the window of a restaurant.
It was Jersey Joanna and Julie, smiling and waving excitedly at me. it was such an unexpected joy, the unlikely synchronicity of seeing these familiar faces.There were two men sitting with the girls who turned around to see who they were waving at. One of them was James the Australian guy — and I thought Wow! They ran into him again too? That’s kind of cool. What are the chances? And then I made eye contact with the Other guy.
It was John.
Why would he be with them? They never even spoke on the train…
Allison was like “Do you know those people?” She was looking at me like — How is it even possible that you would just run into someone Here?
I was kind of too overwhelmed in the moment just trying to process the coincidence to explain how huge it actually was, so I just said. “Yeah. They came over with me on the train from London.”
But that wasn’t the last time I saw John while I was in Europe.
I saw him again, a few weeks later, on the day I was mugged at gun point in Amsterdam.
My time in Paris was… difficult. I felt stressed, distracted, uneasy, but also mute and invisible.
I’m someone who talks a lot, but because my roommate Allison was fluent in French, she did all my talking for me. Her friend Natalie was a French national, and although I’m sure they didn’t purposefully exclude me, they chattered away with me along as a silent third wheel, just listening, catching only about fifty percent of what they said.
They dragged me through two full days of the Louvre… Madonna-and-Child, Madonna-and-Child, Madonna-and-Child — “Oh, look, the Mona Lisa; neato” — Madonna-and-Child, Madonna-and-Child… Endless palatial corridors of Madonna-and-Child.
I felt like I was stuck in some virtual reality walk-through of a really tedious Art History textbook. I told Allison “If I don’t see something painted after 1890, I’m going to lose my mind.” So I ducked out and went for some amazing (much needed) inspiration from the modern art collection at the Pompidou Centre — without the girls.
When Allison and I were finally alone in our room that night and she switched back to English, my voice came out thick from lack of use.
And when we spoke, we bickered.
She kept asking me. “What are you looking at?”
I was standing by the window — again — peering out through a gap in the curtains, not really conscious of what I was doing or that it was even noticeable until she pointed it out.
She accused me of acting paranoid, day after day — constantly looking back behind us when we were walking, checking and re-checking the lock on the door, and lurking near the window watching the street.
She said “You’re making me nervous. It’s like we’re being followed.”
I couldn’t explain myself so I let her believe I was just being a pill; that I was miserable being in Paris with her. (Which I kinda was.)
I told her I was going to cut my stay short and go to Amsterdam alone. She didn’t protest; I’m sure she was relieved to spend her remaining days with Natalie without having to be my translator.
Maybe France simply did not agree with me.
Arriving in Amsterdam I immediately regained the better mood and sense of comfort I’d had when I began my trip in the UK. I met a couple my age from San Francisco, Marty and David, who were staying in my hotel. They had been in Amsterdam for most of the previous week, their last three days coincided with my first three; they were able to show me around to all the “best” places nearby they’d discovered to hang out and eat, reasonably inexpensive ones that weren’t such tourist traps. We went out to some great clubs every night and, best of all, I could participate fully in conversation again. I had exactly the kind of traveling experience I had hoped to have.
I became attached to Marty and David pretty quickly, and when they departed, their absence was palpable. I had little expectation of achieving that same sense of joy or meeting other strangers I could click with so effortlessly.
Truly, my intuition said “Might as well go ahead and leave” — but there were a few sites I wanted to see while I had the chance and they seemed appropriate for that lonely, invisible state I had fallen back into.
The first day on my own, I went to the Anne Frank House (a profound adventure that deserves its own story sometime) and then I came back to my hotel room and watched the flocks of thousands of birds that would wheel out into the sky each evening at dusk above the Centraal Station just across the canal from my window, moving together like an enormous tornado or a computer-animated coming swarm in a killer bee movie. They would hover in a shifting cloud for close to half an hour, as if they knew they were performing for an audience.
The next day I chose to walk across town to the Van Gogh Museum. It was a fortunate serendipity on some levels — there was a special temporary traveling exhibit on Mackintosh Art Nouveau, which is absolutely my favorite art history design period ever. The entire upstairs of the museum was converted into complete rooms that replicated Art Nouveau interiors, and there was a small movie theater playing a documentary on the period. Although there were a half-dozen other people in the theater with me, I felt like the installation existed at that time and place just for me — like I had successfully manifested it… and I had more of these intense past-life memories that had made my time in England feel so electric.
When the credits scrolled across the screen and the lights came on, I pulled myself up with a satisfied sigh and headed reluctantly toward the exit.
I’m sure if you’d been there watching me, you would have seen the smile on my face MELT when I saw …. JOHN sitting in the back row.
Part of me was like Are you kidding me?
But my physical response was fear — I didn’t even look at him, I just kind of weirdly acted like I hadn’t seen him — like you do when you see someone you don’t want to run into— and I just fled the museum.
The wind that channeled between the buildings was the only thing that kept me from running all the way back to my hotel — I would round a corner and find the signs and traffic lights swinging wildly, and I’d have to lean into the force of the wind as if I was hiking uphill. It created that horrible sensation you have when you’re being hunted in dreams, your body stuck in slow motion, your limbs lagging behind the directions of your mind.
It’s easy for me now to look back and wonder about the questions that must have been going through my mind — Who is this guy? Why would he be following me like this? Is he a stalker, a serial killer — maybe he’s some kind of cop who mistakenly thinks I’m a serial killer? Why would anyone want to tail me? And you know How is it even possible that he can keep up with me from one city to the next?
At the time — honestly — I did not care. I wasn’t thinking anything except "I want to go home.” I hurried from the museum as if the United States was just a few miles away, and if I could move fast enough and push myself, I might reach it before I ran out of breath.
I’d been abroad for about a month at that point — maybe I just wasn’t as “worldly” as I would’ve fancied myself to be; maybe all these enormous gray winter cities were smoothing away the edges of my personality… maybe I was just incredibly homesick and this was what that felt like.
But more than anything, I felt threatened. I felt unsafe. I felt like I was in danger… and the stranger behind me, who I couldn’t seem to shake, corresponded with this atmosphere of fear.
Fear often turns into anger (especially for me) and the anger gets directed at the person you blame for making you feel afraid. (Regardless if that’s appropriate or not)
But at some I wasn’t just running away anymore, I was also fuming, and I knew it was building up ( and like, God help him if he actually caught up to me) – which, I kinda wanted to happen. I may have looked like I was moving away from him, but I was really marching toward the break where I would turn around and just RAGE.
I heard a voice in my head (a man’s voice, not my own) say:
You are powerful.
And I answered back: I AM powerful.
You are protected, the voice said.
And that slowed me down a little bit.
You are fine, the voice assured me.
Now, I was out of breath. There was a stitch in my side. I’d dropped into a slower pace of determined, sustainable endurance, and the words I was hearing rearranged themselves in a sing-song affirmation in time to my foot falls:
I am powerful, I’m protected, I am fine /
I am powerful, I’m protected, I am fine /
It became a mantra, a chant that helped me maintain my speed, it pulled me along, but also calmed me, put me into an altered state.
I came face to face with this man with dreadlocks who was standing right in my path. I ducked to the side to go around him and he matched the movement in what seemed like one of those awkward “Excuse me, after you” kind of dances
But Dreadlocks wasn’t trying to pass me, he was shadowing me, mirroring me, “guarding” me like a basketball player. When I just stopped, he walked right into me as if he were going to embrace me with one arm and shake my hand with the other.
He grabbed me and held me close him, and shoved a gun against my belly. At least, a pocket full of something meant to feel like the nose of a handgun.
“Money,” he said to me in English. “Come on.”
Two things flip my switch:
being assaulted or bullied
being in the presence of someone I care about who is being assaulted or bullied
When I was in my twenties, I had virtually no ability to manage defensive anger and my temper turned on and up in one direction – full-on, unbridled, absolutely ape shit. No warning, no ratcheting up by degrees… And it came with a loud, hateful, free-style narration. My Daddy used to say that I had The Kind of Lip That Will Get You Killed in The Wrong Circumstances. My friends in college were amused by my tongue-lashings and called this aspect of my personality “Julia Sugarbaker.”
I doubt Dreadlocks would have ever predicted the manner in which I responded. He had no way of knowing just how pumped up on anger and fear I already was. I probably looked like someone running away, which his instincts identified as prey – but what he ran right into was Royally Pissed.
When my words came out, I screamed them, berating the pedestrians who passively walking by as much as my mugger, and on some level, I was screaming at John.
“You have got to be fucking kidding me. You’re going to mug me, in broad daylight, two o’clock in the afternoon, in the middle of the damn street? And you expect me to believe you’ve got a gun and you’re going to shoot me with it in front of all these people for spare change? You know, it’s no shock to me that every fucking piece of shit would-be thug in America actually does carry a gun because our whole society prides itself on the fact, but in the Netherlands, man, really? That’s a pretty big deal for you to be carrying here, isn’t it? I mean, you’re either a serious hard core criminal or you’re faking it. You’re obviously small time, because why else would you be holding me up for a handful of cash that won’t even buy you a cup of coffee? What is that in your pocket anyway, a plastic cigarette lighter?”
Dreadlocks glanced around nervously at the crowd I was drawing and said under his breath “Man, cool down. Just give me some money, that’s all I want.”
I shoved my hand into my pocket and pulled out some Dutch coins and the crumpled, sweaty French bill that John had given me that night at the Gare du Nord. I’d never spent it. I had continued to carry it around like a talisman. I was even a little bit pissed to be giving up something I’d come to think of as a souvenir.
Dreadlocks-man held out his hand between us and I slammed the money onto his palm, slapping it hard enough that the coins leapt and pinged off a grate in the sidewalk. He held onto the French bill, looked at it quickly, and shook his head like he was disappointed with me.
“Man, come on,” he said, as if he were trying to say “I can’t do anything with this…”
“No? Cause you said all you wanted was money; that’s all I got; that’s all you’re getting. Would you rather have some traveler’s checks you can’t possibly exchange without an ID and a really good forgery? If so, you’ll need to walk me back to my hotel and let me get them out of my room safe for ya, you wanna do that?”
He looked at the French bill again like he was trying to decide whether or not to just give it back to me. “Come on,“ he pleaded one more time.
I saw him look over my shoulder and his eyes re-focused. I knew exactly who he was looking at. In a much lower, confidential, whisper I said to him. “You see that man behind me, the one in the trench coat? …Yeah, I can see that you do… You’ll notice I also don’t even need to look because I know he’s back there. He’s been following me for two weeks. He’s some kind of cop, or some kind of detective, I don’t know who or what he is, but he’s watching me, and now he’s watching you too. You just got that guy for a witness.”
It really wasn’t a bluff; and maybe the authenticity of my confession gave it power. At any rate, the doubt and confusion played out quickly. The Dreadlocks guy backed away slowly at first, clearly keeping his eyes on John, and then he turned and ran.
I was so jacked up on the adrenalin of the situation, I swiveled around with the full intention of finally laying into this “stranger” John who was following me. I was mad enough to punch him.
Of course he was there, just as I knew he would be, keeping to his minimum fifty-foot distance.
John just opened his hands and held out his palms, slightly shaking his head. He grinned with a kind of lop-sided, regretful smile. He looked, more than anything, sad and… apologetic. As if to say, “Sorry that it had to be like this.”
And then he just walked away, back in the direction we’d come from. He was just swallowed by the crowd.
I’ve attempted to relate this story without interpretation, because at the time it happened, and for many years after, it was just an odd mystery that became one of those “the time I was held up at gun point” stories.
Knowing what I speak about and write about these days, of course, you’re gonna infer some paranormal or spiritual significance...
Honestly, it may not even compare that well to the more profound angelic intervention stories you might have heard — it just happens to be one that happened to me. And I’m sharing it with you because it’s an event that came up again a decade later.
This is just a Prologue.
In 2002, ten years later, I met a man named Jesse — who somehow already knew these events had happened to me — and he’s the one told me What It All Meant.
So... thanks for listening and stay tuned to the next episode of the Shift Your Spirits podcast…
For show notes, links, and all the past episodes
please visit shiftyourspirits.com
You can subscribe to this podcast in iTunes or Stitcher or whatever app you use to access podcasts.
If you’re new to podcasts, it’s that purple button on your iPhone. Click it, search Shift Your Spirits and hit Subscribe - then all the episodes will be there for you, automatically. And you can take them with you to the gym or listen in your car … that’s what I love about podcasts.
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If you’d like to get an intuitive reading with me, or download a free ebook and meditation to help you connect with your guides
please go to sladeroberson.com
and If you’re interested in my professional intuitive training program,
check out automaticintuition.com
BEFORE I GO
I promised to leave you a message in answer to a concern or question you may have.
So take a moment to think about that—hold it in your mind or speak it out loud—I’ll pause for just a few seconds….right…NOW
MESSAGE
Your situation needs some forgiveness. You need to let go of any past anger you’re holding onto. It’s holding you back. You either need to forgive someone else…OR
You need to forgive yourself...
For placing unrealistic expectations on this situation.
I'LL TALK TO YOU LATER
On SYS episode 07, I’m sharing a conversation with Diana Frajman.
Diana’s a wisdom blogger committed to inspiring older women to recognize and own that they're the most powerful brand females come in.
One of the most challenging questions many women face when they reach the time in life when they are no longer prioritizing partners and spouses and children in the same way is “What am I going to do next?”
Diana focuses on this unique stage of personal development and empowerment on her site Crone Confidence.
On this show we also talk about creativity, goal setting, productivity and making action plans truly achievable with Diana’s experiment The 3x3 Project.
MENTIONED IN THE SHOW:
Change Your Life in 3 Months
The 3x3 Project
Automatic Author - (organizing your book ideas)
GUEST LINKS - DIANA FRAJMAN
Crone Confidence
Get an intuitive reading with Diana
Crone Confidence Facebook Community
HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON
Slade's Books & Courses
Get an intuitive reading with Slade
Automatic Intuition
Patreon.com Support This Show
On SYS episode 06, I share the paranormal experiences surrounding the recording of episode 02.
After recording the Magic Mother Mary Prayer Bowl show, there was a spirit visitation and amazing synchronicity, all culminating in a message from the beyond.
frisson - a sudden, passing sensation of excitement, a shudder of emotion or a shiver caused by stimuli other than cold, such as an epic moment in a song, or the climax of a movie.
SHOW NOTES Full notes and links
Are you new to podcasts?
How to subscribe to my podcast free
HOST LINKS sladeroberson.com Get an intuitive reading with Slade
Download a free ebook and meditation
Automatic Intuition
Patreon.com Support this Show
On SYS episode 05, I’m sharing my conversation with a Soul Caller.
Author of Sea of Miracles, Amy Oscar is a highly sensitive intuitive healer and spiritual guide who has devoted the past 20 years to helping thousands of people come home to the gifts of self-love and their own true nature.
Like a spiritual systems analyst, Amy is able to read the energetic architecture of the heart to detect (and help us break through) the psycho-spiritual patterns which bind us.
She sees us as multi-dimensional beings on soul-led paths, and she offers tools and training – and the mirror of illuminated conversation – to help us live heart-centered lives in a time of turbulence.
GUEST LINKS - AMY OSCAR
amyoscar.com
One-on-One Illumination Sessions
Sanctuary for Soul Callers: a free Facebook group
One Circle: Weekly live calls and discussion
Sea of Miracles: An Invitation Into the Light by Amy Oscar
The Soul Caller Training
HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON
Slade's Books & Courses
Get an intuitive reading with Slade
Automatic Intuition
Patreon.com Support this Show
On SYS episode 04, I’m sharing my conversation with intuitive healer Jenny Mannion.
Jenny is an author, mind/body mentor, and energetic catalyst.
She helps people tap into their own greatness and self-love to facilitate fast and lasting change, as she did when she healed herself of seven years of chronic illness in three weeks.
GUEST LINKS - JENNY MANNION jennymannion.com jenny@jennymannion.com
607-437-7867
A Short Path to Change (book)
"Aligned and Inspired Mondays"
The Secret (movie)
The Artist's Way
HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON
sladeroberson.com Get an intuitive reading with Slade
Download a free ebook and meditation
Automatic Intuition
Patreon.com Support this Show
On SYS episode 03, I talk about how your ego spins messages like a DJ spins songs.
Carl Jung believed that a precise diagnosis could, in and of itself, spontaneously launch the healing process.
So, learning how to identify these messages is the first step in consciously separating from the Voices that are not you — were never you — and no longer serve you.
SHOW NOTES Full notes and links
The Money Shift
HOST LINKS sladeroberson.com Get an intuitive reading with Slade
Download a free ebook and meditation
Automatic Intuition
Patreon.com Support this Show
TRANSCRIPT Carl Jung believed that a precise diagnosis could, in and of itself, spontaneously launch the healing process. Your mind and your spirit, your psycho-spiritual wellness is very much dependent on the messages playing in your interior monologues, your imaginary dialogues, and the messages that get communicated through your relationships with other people.
My name is Slade Roberson. For over ten years, I’ve been a professional intuitive and the author of the blog ‘Shift Your Spirits’, where I try to write about spirituality with fewer hearts and flowers than most new age blather. I also mentor emerging intuitives, psychics and healers in a program called Automatic Intuition.
Today, I want to talk about how your ego spins messages like a DJ.
The whole point of psychoanalysis and talk-therapy is to identify, to become conscious of what messages are playing within you: how they got there, who authored them, where they came from and when you either chose to adopt them or had them forced on you. You were not born with any of the messages that are currently playing in your mind. Absolutely everything you say to yourself, about yourself, was written by someone else. Your words are not original. They’re always repeated. Even if you have an original thought, it must be expressed or translated into language, and language can be broken down into basic parts which you did not invent.
Even if your ordering of words, or unique literary device, has never been expressed in quite the same way before by anyone else on earth, the building blocks of the language itself, the vocabulary, the words, the letters, the full names, are inherited from an enormous collective culture that has travelled to you across thousands of generations of humanity. You downloaded these messages. You absorb them. You parrot them. You either consciously hear them and take them within you, or you unconsciously become infected with them as mind viruses.
These messages and fragments of everyone else’s opinions and beliefs become a part of your own mental database. Your own interior library. Your own sound collection. These messages have the capacity to organize around archetypal energy patterns and become Voices with a capital “V”. Personae with whom you develop ongoing persistent relationships. Now if you’ve worked with my book ‘The Money Shift’, then you’re already familiar with how this phenomenon plays out regarding the voice of your abundance archetype. Similar relationships are taking place with any number of archetypes, beliefs, issues, your self-esteem, your inner child, your saboteur, your rebel, your artist. You can investigate absolutely any relationship you have with any template or archetypal energetic pattern within your psyche and begin to make conscious choices about the conversations you are allowing to play.
Think of the music or mp3 library on your computer or your smartphone. Although you call these songs yours, and they’re very representative of who you are as a person, on some level, of course, you’re aware you did not write, sing, play, or record any of these songs. You have the capacity to identify these songs and their artists as separate from you, even as you employ them to assist you in expressing your thoughts and emotions. When you listen to your music collection, you have no problem behaving as an active director, even a tyrant, in choosing what you want to hear in that moment. You repeat your favorites obsessively. You will skip a song you don’t want to hear. You may even delete one you never want to hear again. You make choices according to present energetic requirements to chill out, to get yourself revved up and moving, to have a good cry, to dance around the room. You adjust the volume to appropriate circumstances. You can even shut the whole thing off. It’s relatively easy for you to identify the songs, messages, voices you love in the context of your literal music collection. You know who’s singing, you know the lyrics by heart, you know when the song was released, you can recall the time you heard it, where you were, what you were doing, who you were with. You can do the same thing with the songs that get on your nerves and drive you nuts. Yet you have no problem avoiding them or ignoring them when you want to.
Now, approach this metaphor as it relates to your self-talk. The inner monologues and dialogues of voices, messages, and beliefs that you allow to play in your mind every day of your life. It’s interesting how you unconsciously assume you don’t have the same power of choice. Notice how the negative voices seem to get so much more airplay as opposed to being shut down or avoided. Why is that? You were not born hearing, and believing, and identifying with these words: asshole, bitch, fag, fat, lazy, slut, stupid, ugly. Every single one of those came from somewhere outside of you.
So here’s what I want you to think about. What are some of the messages, the voices, you have downloaded that cause you pain or hold you back? Who are the original authors? Who introduced you to these messages? Where were you when you first heard them? Your internal mind chatter feels much more like some god-awful music channel you were forced to listen to and have no control over. The gentle, supportive, loving voices of your spirit are out-numbered. They’re drowned out. Are you just waiting and hoping one of those nice songs will come on sooner or later? Who says you can’t delete the ones that aren’t serving you? Or at least skip over them when you hear their opening strings and just jump to one that brings you power and joy?
Your ego is an obnoxious DJ.
It has taken over the playlist endlessly spinning a heavy rotation of fear-based tunes. Observe this station carefully. Consciously. Diagnose where these voices and their messages came from. Acknowledge that they were never started as yours. They came from somewhere externally. And you internalized them. This kind of identification is the first step in consciously separating from the Voices that are not you — were never you — and no longer serve you.
Thanks for listening to this episode of Shift Your Spirits. You can subscribe in iTunes or Stitcher or whatever app you use to access podcasts. If you’re new to podcasts, it’s probably that purple button on your iPhone. Click it, search ‘Shift Your Spirits’, and hit subscribe. Also, since this is a new podcast, it would really help me out if you would rate the show on iTunes and leave me a review. Share it on social media, tell your friends about it. It would make a huge difference in my efforts here and I would be extremely grateful.
If you’d like to get an intuitive reading with me, or download a free guided meditation to help you connect with your guides, please go to https://sladeroberson.com/. And if you’re interested in my professional intuitive training program, you can start the course for free by downloading the attunement at https://automaticintuition.com/.
For show notes and links, visit ShiftYourSpirits.com
On SYS episode 02, I share some grandmother magic -- one of the magical ritual prayer spells that I practice, how it came to be, and how you can develop one of your own.
There are simple but powerful rules for this kind of prayer magic.
The story involves a glass bowl that belonged to my maternal grandmother, and a painting of the Virgin Mary given to me by one of my readers, one of my first clients.
SHOW NOTES Full notes and links
HOST LINKS sladeroberson.com Get an intuitive reading with Slade
Download a free ebook and meditation
Automatic Intuition
Patreon.com Support this Show
TRANSCRIPT So this may be an odd piece to put so close to the beginning of a new podcast, but then that statement in itself says a lot about my complicated relationship with spirituality. Mother Mary is very much connected to how and why I started ‘Shift Your Spirits’ in 2006, and I’ve been promising, intending to tell my story about her this entire time, and I never seem to get around to it. I’m getting closer. Maybe it makes a kind of sense that I would start a podcast here.
My relationship with Mary is significant and complex. I’m one of the most unlikely people I can think of to be visited by the Virgin Mary, but I was, and that is a story in itself, which I will have to come back and tell you on another episode.
I’m not even sure how to think about her. I suppose she is an ascended master to me. No offence to anyone who believes she is the mother of their messiah. I certainly was not raised Catholic. I wasn’t raised to be a Christian. I was raised surrounded by Christianity, but I do not identify as a Christian.
I do believe in magic and miracles and spirits. I consider myself something of a witch. I’m known to be a psychic. I’m an eclectic, spiritual but not religious, as I imagine you probably are as well.
My name is Slade Roberson. For over ten years now, I’ve been a professional intuitive and the author of the blog ‘Shift Your Spirits’ where I write about spirituality with fewer hearts and flowers than the leading new age blather. I also mentor emerging intuitives, psychics and healers in a program called Automatic Intuition.
Today, I want to tell you about some grandmother magic. One of the Magical Ritual Prayer Spells that I practice. It involves a glass bowl that belonged to my maternal grandmother and a painting of the Virgin Mary given to me by one of my readers, one of my first clients. Now, this glass bowl is actually an ashtray. It’s a beautiful, heavy, amber-colored glass ashtray with this pattern of rays in raised ridges on the bottom. It’s kind of a mid-century modern sunburst. It could be an antique from as far back as the 1930s to the 1960s. I was born in 1969 and this belonged to my grandmother who died in 1971. My maternal grandmother, Victoria, who was called by her middle name, as I am, her full name was actually Queen Victoria, she kept this ashtray as a prize knickknack on her coffee table for years, maybe decades. My aunt Vera assured me that no one was ever allowed to ash in it though.
Now, a little bit about Vera. She’s the oldest of 11 kids. She’s my mother’s sister. The first book I ever published was actually my aunt Vera’s autobiography. My mother edited the book and I formatted and published it. It’s called “Stop Over in Wilder”. It starts with this beautiful opening passage about the first time Vera saw a plane flying over her hometown as a little girl in the 1920s. Wilder, Tennessee was one of those little towns that literally disappeared. It doesn’t exist anymore. It makes me think of a few other films and books like “A Trip to Bountiful”, which started out as a play. And then, of course, “Fried Green Tomatoes” at the Whistle Stop Café, Fannie Flagg novel, that was also turned into a movie. Both of those works are kind of about this phenomenon of towns that, from, you know, the early 19th century, that, by the end of the 19th century just aren’t there anymore.
Before Vera passed, she gave this ashtray to me. And, for the record, I’ve never ashed in it either. Now the painting – it came to me from a woman named Debra Estep, who friends and family call “Debs”. Debra, several years ago my mom was undergoing a major surgery and I had posted about it online. Debs saw it and she sent my mom this little angel coin. This medallion for her to keep with her as a protection. So Debs is this really sweet soul. She’s a military mom, she – to be someone I’ve never met before, she has been very generous to me over the past decade. And to my mom, who she also doesn’t know, she’s just a really kind soul and a really cool person. And actually she told me that this painting is called a mezzotint, or metzotint. I’m not even sure how to pronounce it. She told me to Google it and, actually now that I’m here recording this I realize that I forgot to Google it. Some of you might want to look that up and see exactly what it means. I’m just looking at it, so that works for me.
But back in 1985, Debra was working part-time as a receptionist for an attorney. And the attorney’s secretary asked her to proofread an advertisement he was going to run in the paper. He was looking for a part-time person to be a companion for his elderly mother. Debs thought about it that night and the next day, she went into the attorney’s office and she pitched him the idea of hiring her for the position. She told him, you know, he could find anybody to answer the phones, but he was going to have a hard time finding someone he could really trust to care for his mother. She said he had a dry personality and he just kinda nodded and said, “Okay. I’ll think about it and let you know.”
Leaving the office, Debra thought, “Oh well, he seemed less than positive about that idea.” She was 27 years old at the time and she thought he probably wanted someone a little bit older. But the next day, he approached her when she arrived for work and he was very enthusiastic and friendly in a way that she’d never seen him be before. And he told her he wanted her to start working with his mom the very next week.
So Mrs. Mays was 86 years old at the time. She was sharp as a tack as they say. A brilliant woman. She’d graduated from college in 1918 with a degree in Pharmacology. And over the five years that Debra was her caretaker, there was no subject that they didn’t discuss. Mrs. Mays kept up with current issues and world news. With all that had happened in the century she’d lived through, listening to her was like a lesson in history. And Debra would often bring her young children to visit. Mrs. Mays adored them and they came to call her “Grandma Mays”.
After she passed in 1990, her family invited Debra to her apartment and generously offered her any of the woman’s possessions she wanted as mementos. So, the mezzotint of the Virgin Mary with Child was one of those three items Debra kept to remember her time with Mrs. Mays. 25 years later, Debra was reading my blog ‘Shift Your Spirits’ and I had written about this connection I have to Mother Mary, and she said she had the impulse to send the mezzotint to me. And as she was boxing it up, she sensed that Mrs. Mays was with her and wholeheartedly approved of giving it to me. So, needless to say, I was touched once again by Debra’s generosity towards me. It was a really sweet gesture. And it was also charged with so much history and sentiment, and, you know, that alone makes the image extremely powerful regardless of what the image is of. I had just purchased my first home and it was a first image I hung on the walls in the house. And I saw that as a blessing from Mary herself.
So I sent Debs a picture of the picture in my still-empty new house. So the glass ashtray, the magic prayer bowl, it sits on a low chest in my bedroom now with the mezzotint of Mother Mary hanging just above it. And so this ritual, or the rules of this ritual that I do, I’m not sure if it’s religious. It could be sacrilegious. To me, in my mind, it feels like a little old catholic lady meets a granny woman witch kind of ritual. So the thing about the request that I put in the prayer bowl – some of the kind of rules I have around this is that it’s gotta be something big. It can’t be petty stuff, it can’t be selfish or materialistic. It’s gotta be about someone other than just me. And more than anything, it has to be something that I can’t affect or control any further on my own. Usually it’s something I’ve already tried to affect or impact and I feel like it’s finally come to the point where it’s outside of my power. And at that point I’ve gotta surrender it. I’ve gotta let it go and give it to Mary. I actually say that a lot, “I’m gonna give this to Mary.”
And so the requests are written down on little pieces of paper and they’re also left open in the bowl while the request is, sort of, active. And if, in some way, the prayer gets answered, or the problem gets solved, or taken care of, or resolved in any way, when they’re done, so to speak, I fold them up and close them but I leave them inside the bowl.
Everything that I give to Mary in this way is taken care of. It’s really kind of miraculous and I don’t take it lightly and I don’t throw a lot of things in there because I don’t want to mess with this perfection that I’ve got going. So there’s a lot of reverence about where I draw the lines and what goes in there. But the stuff that goes in there – it gets taken care of. Some of the, you know, kinds of things that I put in there: I have some friends, for the past few years who have been trying to adopt a child and, that went into the bowl.
My own brother and sister-in-law were pregnant last year with the first and only grandbaby in our family. Their little son named Hayden, who was born on Christmas Eve. And obviously I did an ongoing kind of prayer bowl request. It started out with a little piece of paper just sort of announcing that they were pregnant and it just had their names and baby on it. And then when they had their gender reveal party and we found out that it was going to be a boy, there was this blue, tiny clothespin that you wore on your collar, on your shirt or whatever, at the party, to indicate the sex that you were predicting that the baby was going to be. So everyone had a little blue clothespin or a pink clothespin. I had a blue one because I correctly predicted that it was going to be a boy.
So when I got back from the gender reveal party, I added the little blue clothespin to the piece of paper that said “Parrish & Heather’s baby”. And then, later on, when they chose a name for him, I wrote his name, Hayden, on there as well. So I imagine that Hayden’s prayer request and his little slip of paper with the blue clothespin on it is likely to reside in this bowl the rest of my life. That’s one that I don’t see ever being closed up or put away.
There’ve been other things that I’ve put in there. You know, whenever someone comes to me with something really serious and heavy going on in their world, especially if they know about this prayer bowl thing, which now I’m probably going to get even more requests, but if someone makes a really specific request to me, or I see it as something that I can do on behalf of them, it often involves other people’s loved ones, I will put their name on a paper and put it in there. And, like I said, it always gets taken care of.
There’s only one time that it didn’t work. And that was with one of my pets - a cat named Cinco, and I’ll tell you that in just a second. First, I wanted to go back and mention that – I don’t know how this happened or it emerged or evolved, but there seems to be some significance to the color of ink that I write these prayer requests down in. So, red ink - I use Sharpies, by the way in case you’re wondering - red ink is usually for something that’s kind of a short-term, emergency situation, like maybe a health crisis or someone’s, you know, going in for surgery.
Something that is immediate and going to have a resolution fairly soon. I tend to write those in red. Things that are long-term or ongoing, such as my nephew, Hayden, his request is written in black and most of my general requests are written in black ink.
So, there’s this one time that the prayer bowl did not work, and that was with this cat, Cinco, that I was talking about. He was a feral cat that I spent over a year, kind of feeding and luring, closer and closer, to trusting and to being able to come inside during the winter and stay in the garage where it was a little warmer. It took months and months of putting out food and inching him closer and closer, to get him to a point where he would come into the garage during the winter and huddle near a heater.
At one point, he was badly hurt and he had something stuck in his eye. I was horrified. I knew he was going to die this really slow, agonizing death, or if be - he did survive, it would be after a lot of suffering and he was going to be impaired for the rest of his life. So I was able to trap him with a raccoon trap and took him to the vet and they were able to save him and save his eye. They fixed him, you know, neutered him, and I brought him home and returned him back out into the woods and he disappeared for several days. But he eventually started coming back again and, this was a really wild animal. He was the most timid animal that I’ve ever encountered and I don’t know that he ever would have been a pet. He was just to the point where he would let me, sort of, quickly brush my hand along his back, you know, when he walked around my feet, but that was as close as he got to being a pet.
He was a really, really, gentle, pretty, sweet little animal. He was solid grey and he was very hard to see in the woods. He looked like a shadow. So, long story short – I didn’t know this was going to be a story about Cinco, but maybe I need to eulogize him a little bit – he was attacked and killed by a coyote in broad daylight. And we heard it and it was really horrifying. And we didn’t know for sure if what we heard was him. It was more of a, kind of, suspect noise in the woods, but he didn’t show up to eat his appointed time that evening.
Spent weeks looking for him in the woods, looking for some sign of him. Hoping that maybe he had run away because of the coyotes that were back there and that, you know, maybe he might come back again. And there’s something, kind of, nothing worse than something disappearing, and not knowing what happened. And so…
I was so caught up in all the practical ways of looking for him that I didn’t really think to give it to Mary. And by the time that I did, you know, it was probably a week had gone by from when we assumed he had been snatched by the coyote. And I wrote his name on a piece of paper. And I really didn’t do it in a sense of empowerment. I didn’t do it as something that I felt like, “I’m giving this to Mary to solve”. It felt like an afterthought, and I don’t know why, but at the time I couldn’t locate the green – I couldn’t locate the black sharpie or the red sharpie. I grabbed the green Sharpie and I thought, “Well, green is kind of like the color of life, so it’ll be fine.” So I wrote his name down in green piece of paper and I put it in the prayer bowl.
I’ve never written anything in green ever again.
The thing about the way I believe that these spells and these rituals work is they are a kind of programming for our own brains, you know, and, to me now, the color of that green ink is - it’s kind of poisoned, you know, and so I have this really strong association and sense of hope and manifesting positive things when it comes to the black and the red, so, you know, I’ve become very superstitious about the green and I won’t be writing anything in green ever again. Unless I evolve some new kind of programming where it makes better sense. But right now, those are kind of the rules of this ritual that I do.
So whenever I tell this story to somebody about the Mary bowl, the Virgin Mary ashtray, I get requests from people. And they’re essentially prayer requests. So if you have something like that, and you follow me on social media, and you want to contact me and tell me about it. I – if it’s, you know, if it’s something you genuinely feel like fits the criteria, by all means, let me know. But the reason why I wanted to record this and tell you about it is because, explaining all this would be a little hard to write down. But more than anything, I’m telling you this because, you know, you can make your own magical prayer bowl, or prayer bottle or prayer jar or, anything like this. It takes something that you feel has some emotional significance, and maybe some spiritual symbolism, something that you identify with as being a conduit between you and the divine. Whatever that is, I encourage you to make one. You can borrow my rules to get started and you can adapt them however you think they best work for you.
So thank you for listening to ‘Shift Your Spirits’ podcast. You can subscribe in iTunes or Stitcher or whatever app you use to access podcasts. If you’re new to podcasts, it’s probably that purple button on your iPhone. Click it, search ‘Shift Your Spirits’, and hit subscribe. Also, since this is a new podcast, it would really help me out if you would rate the show on iTunes and leave me a review. Share it on social media, tell your friends about it. It would make a huge difference in my efforts here and I would be extremely grateful.
If you’d like to get an intuitive reading with me, or download a free guided meditation to help you connect with your guides, please go to https://sladeroberson.com/. And if you’re interested in my professional intuitive training program, you can start the course for free by downloading the attunement at https://automaticintuition.com/.
For show notes and links, visit ShiftYourSpirits.com
On SYS episode 01, I’m telling the story of how Shift Your Spirits came to be.
Back in 2002, over the course of a few months, my seemingly "ideal" life was systematically ripped away from me. I crawled out of the wreckage by listening to the voices of spirits and angels who were communicating with me.
The directions they gave me led me to rebuild my life into something more closely resembling what I'd always wanted it to be.
SHOW NOTES Show notes and links
HOST LINKS sladeroberson.com Get an intuitive reading with Slade
Download a free ebook and meditation
Automatic Intuition
Patreon.com Support this Show
TRANSCRIPT So, true story. In 2002, at the age of 33, I had a stroke. You know that joke about ‘don’t give yourself an aneurysm’? Well, I did. I was working at the time at what I thought was my dream job. I was a student adviser at a university and I had also found an agent for the first time in my life for my fiction. So, on paper, my life looked, if not perfect, then perfectly suited to me. And, in a matter of months, it turned into hell. It all got pulled out from under me. On a Sunday night, I was out with some friends. I think we were at a bar or a restaurant, and then a club and anyway, I do remember hearing kind of a pop in my jaw, like a TMJ thing, you know. Like your jaw just kind of popping weird. And soon after that, my contact lens in my left eye just really started to torture me, so you know, I told everybody I gotta go home and get these contact lenses out of my eye. It’s Sunday night anyway, I’m working tomorrow.
So I went home. And I woke up the next morning partially paralyzed. The entire left side of my face was sort of melted or frozen, and the reason why my contact lens had been bothering me apparently the night before is because my eye could no longer blink. So the paralysis extended down my neck and into my shoulder and kind of partially affected the fingers on my left hand.
So I had to wear a patch over my eye and I sounded drunk when I spoke and, you know, I was missing tons of work. When it first happened, that Monday morning, and I called in sick, and - this is part of the reason why this job turned out to be hell - my boss didn’t believe me. He thought that I was calling in hungover, and insisted that I come by and prove that my face was paralyzed. So I left the emergency room after being there for most the day and having doctors see me, and I went by my office, and very angrily pointed at my melted face and said, “See?”
So, needless to say, I just wanted to go home and crawl under the covers, you know. And I started missing a lot of work because of this and I eventually did lose my job over it. And I became kind of a shut-in there, for awhile.
So my name is Slade Roberson. For over ten years now, I’ve been a professional intuitive and the author of the blog ‘Shift Your Spirits’ where I try to write about spirituality with fewer hearts and flowers than the leading new age blather. I also mentor emerging intuitives, psychics and healers in a program called Automatic Intuition.
Today, I want to introduce you to my new podcast. And tell you a little bit about the origin story for ‘Shift Your Spirits’, how all this got started and where I hope to take it in the near future.
So, after ten years writing for you every week, I want to do something new.
Most of my job revolves around talking to you guys, one-on-one. I do intuitive readings, I go on other people’s podcasts, I do interviews with other intuitives to see if we can work together on my mentoring program, and I coach people to do what I do. So, you know, everything I do is talking. So why not, you know, record some of it and let everyone hear all the good talking stuff.
So, back to the story.
It took me about nine months, maybe ten months, to recover most of my speech. Like, to get, I would say, maybe to about 90% recovered. And one of the things that the speech therapist advised me was to sing and to recite poetry because it does sort of use a different part of your brain and it also helps exercise those muscles and re-wire them as the nerves are coming back online to the cheeks, and the tongue, the lips, and everything.
So, what ended up happening is I started to listen to a lot of rap and I would actually stand in the mirror for long periods of time and try to sing and annunciate the rap that I was listening to. And I credit Missy Elliot for being my speech therapist and a big reason why I recovered so much of the speech that I did. So, hey Missy, thanks girl!
I also, you know, started to pray a lot. I was shut-in in my home by myself all the time, talking to the cat, talking to the walls, and you know, talking to my guides. I was really haunted in that house for those nine months. And, you know, there’s that joke about doing what the voices in your head tell you to do. Well, I really did start to hear my guides speaking back to me. And this conversation, this dialogue, started up and I really got to the point where I had nothing left to do but to trust them and I said, “You know what? I don’t know what to do with myself at this point. You tell me what to do and I’ll do it.”
I did manage to get another job during this period. It was working for a guy who ran an online company and so there were really just one or two people working in this sort of warehouse space, and they were doing a lot of fullfillment for his online store. So it was pulling merchandise and packing it up, like a mini three-person-Amazon kind of scenario, and I also ended up losing that job. The guy was a little shady. I worked there for close to two months, during the end of the year, and I was promised to be paid for all that time that I’d been working on Christmas Eve. He wanted to get a lot of his Christmas sales and merchandise in to pay the few of us who were employees. So, Christmas Eve came and, of course, I wanted to go out of town and go home and visit my family and I went by to pick up my cheque or my money from him, and I found the warehouse locked. And it took several frustrating weeks to even get him to call me back and communicate with me.
Long story short, he had no money to pay me. He never did pay me. And that whole experience actually was a big eye opener for me. I saw for the first time, how someone with a relatively small operation could run something online that looked like a big full-fledged business enterprise, and I do think that something clicked for me. And so I look back on that as a good thing that occurred, even though I’m still mad about the money that he owes me.
What it did do was it made me mad as hell. And I came home from the holidays not having gotten paid for all that work that I did. And I thought, you know, I could do what he’s doing. Actually, I could do something better than what he’s doing because I wouldn’t deal with all this physical merchandise and stuff. I would just, you know, deal with writing content and possibly publishing, which is what I always wanted to do.
So I took what was literally my last 35 bucks in my chequing account and I registered my own domain. And I decided I’m going to figure out how to do this online publishing thing. Remember this is 2003. So it took me a few years. I taught myself HTML, CSS, PHP. I literally just stayed in my house 24/7 learning to code. And at the time I was also still working with this agent on my fiction. And he had been talking to me about my platform as an author and we were trying to come up with some type of non-fiction part of what I did, to create an opportunity for me to teach and to possibly write a column, to do something that was in coordination with the fiction.
So he had read all of my fictional stories and he was like, you know, there’s a theme. All writers have a story that they kind of keep telling over and over again and you definitely have one. And I was like, really! Okay, well what is it? And he said, all your characters are Joan of arc. They all have the ability to hear these voices, or they have some kind of psychic ability, and they’re socially outcast for it. Or they’re persecuted in some way. So what’s all that about, he asked me. And you know, so I told him. He was the first person that I told. What I never really mentioned to anyone else in my life up to that point. Because I was afraid people would think I was insane. I told him that I hear voices. That I hear spirits around me and I communicate with them.
So, while he was trying to find me a column where I could write some of this non-fiction stuff, because he did see a bridge between the paranormal elements and my fiction that I was writing about and this real thing that was happening to me. But, of course, I had discovered this thing called blogging, which was a new kind of website, and I was experimenting with it. I was teaching other people how to blog. That was really sort of starting to become an income stream for me, or job, for me at the time, with all the skills that I had learned around self-publishing. So I decided, you know, I’m just gonna make a blog. I was doing it for all these other people, you know, these businesses that were hiring me to develop email marketing programs for them and blogs and I was teaching them how to use it. I was setting everything up, and they just really never seemed to do as much with it as I knew that they could, and it was frustrating to me that I was going to all this effort to build these beautiful little scenarios online for them to market themselves and put themselves out there, and they just didn’t do anything with it.
So I started to become a little insecure that maybe I didn’t know what I was talking about. That maybe, you know, I was wrong about my strategies for developing online content and marketing it and getting people to pay attention to it. So as an experiment, I’ll take these articles that I’ve been writing for my agent about my paranormal experiences, my experiences as a child growing up, seeing and hearing things, and just all the stuff that I was writing about. The guides. I thought, I’ll just do an experiment and create a blog with that stuff because there’s nothing further from business-like than a blog about paranormal experiences and I just wanted to see if I went through the motions of pretending that I was my own client, and I built the blog and I did it as frequently as I was supposed to, and I did the email capture form, and I had a subscriber incentive. All this stuff that you’re supposed to do online to build an audience. What if I just do it, and just see if it works as well as I think it’s going to. And I actually didn’t think it would work. I, kind of - a part of me was still very much in the closet about all this and very shy about anyone knowing about it or hearing it. So I sort of tucked it away under a sub-domain on my web presence, and I thought, you know, I’m just going to stick this here, and maybe I’ll get enough of a trickle of interest that it’ll give me the data to sort of see if this works.
And the name for the blog, Shift Your Spirits, really came to me fully formed. It was one of those things that my guides said, here’s the name of your blog. And I thought, okay, that’s cool, that works. So I slapped that name on it, and it wasn’t even like, ShiftYourSpirits.com. It was just my own, one of my business domains with this weird little folder tucked off to the side where no one would see it.
So, this other weird thing happened around that same time. I started finding these books left in strange places, okay? So, I remember one time going out to my car in the middle of the night because I would go grocery shopping at like, 2:00 in the morning so that I wouldn’t have to see and encounter a lot of people. It was a vanity thing for me. I was wearing this eye patch, and my speech was slurred, and I just didn’t want anyone to see me. So I would go to Kroger in the middle of the night when there were, like, three people working there. And I came out to my car and found a book on my windshield. And it was called “Messages from Mother Mary”. And it was this little book about people who had seen and heard the Virgin Mary. And, okay, so there’s a whole Virgin Mary sighting experience that I have which I have to tell you on another episode that happened around this time. So we’ll come back to that, I promise you. It’s, like, one of the big stories that I want to tell.
Anyway, so not long after that, I was living in a second story loft that had kind of a balcony outside of it. This place was almost like a prison. It was gated. It was very hard to even get into the parking lot, let alone get at any of the individual apartments. And so I had this balcony that you could only get to from, you know, going through my apartment. And I heard a thud one day and went outside and found a book on my balcony, like someone had tossed it up over the railing and/or dropped it from the ceiling, where the roof of the building, and it had just landed there. And it was called “Quantum Spirituality”. So anyway, more stories later about those books and their content.
But anyways, so this strange stuff was happening, these synchronicities, and meanwhile I was writing this collection of articles. I had about twelve, which is what I usually advise people to do when they were starting out. You know, put out about a dozen, ten or so articles when you first start a blog, and launch it with a collection. And people started writing to me. Like, a lot of people started writing to me who had read these posts and were commenting on them, or emailing me and asking me if I could do a reading for them, if I could connect with their guides, or tell them what their guides’ names were. Things like that, and, at first I was, like, I have no idea if I can do a reading for someone else, but I’ll try!
You know, and so I started writing these emails back to people where I would just sort of tune in and I would listen and I would get information from their guides or about their guides and sometimes the people would send me a question and I would tune in and get an answer for it and I would send it to them. And they were these really short little email readings that I started doing, you know, dozens of them every day. And this blog that I put out there, that I didn’t want anyone to see really, blew up. It became the single most productive, effective, successful blog that I’d ever created for anyone. All the mechanisms that I put in place were firing and I was building this subscriber list really quickly. I think, you know, after like a month, or six weeks, into doing this experiment, I had 800 people following my blog and getting their new post delivered to them in email.
So, I decided at that time, well this is really cool. I’m going to offer these readings that I’m doing for people as a free incentive: If you subscribe to my blog, I’ll do this quick little email reading for you. So, oh my god, I literally put it online and took it back down the next day. I got so many people who signed up and sent me their information, sent me their questions, wanted a reading from me. It took six or seven months for me to complete all of those readings. Meanwhile, continuing to create the blog posts and.. I put something else out as a free subscriber incentive. Something that people could just download. Because it never occurred to me that so many people would say yes, and, anyway…
Fast forward nine, ten months later, I’ve been doing this blog and doing all these readings and, at that point, I had done literally hundreds of readings, and I just realized one day, I can do readings for people. And so I started to accept donations, and then I eventually started to charge for it. And I stopped being a web developer and just, kind of became a full-time psychic.
So, I’ve been doing this now for almost eleven years at the time of this recording. So many of the posts that I’ve written over the years, I’ve read out loud, as you do, you know, as you’re editing them, and I always thought that so many of my posts were better read out loud. Or they made really good spoken word pieces. And I also have so many stories that I just want to tell you guys that are very daunting to try to write. Like the experience with the Virgin Mary, and... just some of those kinds of things that are big whoppers that I always intent to write about and they’re just too long to be posts, and they’re too hard to put down in words. Yet, I tell these stories all the time to people that I’m friends with, and so I’ve always been thinking, “If I can just tell this story, and record it like I tell it to a friend of mine, that would be cool, and that would be the way to put it out.”
And, you know, a lot of what I want to share with you, too, are other people’s voices. There are so many people that I talk to all the time, who are my peers, who do this kind of work, or do something similar but interesting, and I’d love to showcase what they do and I’d love for you to be a fly on the wall and listen to some of the conversations that we have about spirituality and paranormal experiences, etc. And, you know, I also have these friends and family members who have cool ghost stories and I always think, “Yeah, man, I just need to, like, record them telling me these cool ghost stories and share those with my audience as well.”
So, I’d like to do some interviews on this podcast. My hope would be at least a couple times a month starting out. I’d like to have some guests on and let you guys get to know those people as well. So, if you are one of the people who’d like to be a guest on this show, by all means contact me.
One of my best friends, Lacy, told me that she predicts that doing this podcast might actually go beyond my intentions of just simply flipping the writing into speaking, so I’m excited to see what might happen next. I certainly never intended for the last decade of my life to happen the way that it did. But it’s been the most rewarding job that I’ve ever had, and one that I would have never thought to do, had I not just put it out there. So I’m putting this next phase out there, which is Shift Your Spirits in audio format, and I hope you’ll tune in with me and come along, and see what happens.
So, thanks for listening to this introductory episode. You can subscribe in iTunes or Stitcher or whatever app you use to access podcasts. If you’re new to podcasts, it’s probably that purple button on your iPhone. Click it, search ‘Shift Your Spirits’, and hit subscribe. Also, since this is a new podcast, it would really help me out if you would rate the show on iTunes and leave me a review. Share it on social media, tell your friends about it. It would make a huge difference in my efforts here and I would be extremely grateful.
If you’d like to get an intuitive reading with me, or download a free guided meditation to help you connect with your guides, please go to https://sladeroberson.com/. And if you’re interested in my professional intuitive training program, you can start the course for free by downloading the attunement at https://automaticintuition.com/.
For show notes and links, visit ShiftYourSpirits.com
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