Shift Your Spirits

In this week’s segment, how I work with my guides to remain in the flow of divine timing.

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In this week’s segment, I’m sharing a paranormal memoir originally published as Jack Daniels Makes You Telepathic.

Rob Brezsny's Free Will Astrology

Cosmos & Psyche by Richard Tarnas

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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.

The Best Way to Use Tarot Cards to Develop Your Psychic Abilities

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In this week’s segment, I’m sharing my thoughts on claircognizance and the perfect tool, in my opinion, to develop it.

Can an Atheist be Psychic?

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Sylvia Browne

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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

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.

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.

Anatomy of the Spirit by Caroline Myss

Heidi Frank Palmer https://subtlebodysolutions.com/

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

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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, Purit

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...

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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...

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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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?"

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The Silva Method

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.

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The Magicians on SyFy

Manifest Anything

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