Shift Your Spirits

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.

The words our subconscious minds hear us saying to ourselves — verbally or internally — are a feedback loop of programming and expectations.

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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.

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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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:

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

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.

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Reconnect Your Soul's Voice the workbook (50% off code:SYS)

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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.

"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.

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Spoiler alert: I'm healthy, but a little heartbroken.

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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.

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