Shift Your Spirits

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

Chiron Sign Tables Cafe Astrology

The National Chart of the United States interpretation

Actual Natal Chart of the USA

Chiron in Aries and You

Chiron in Aries: Fight for the Right to Be You

denadecastro.com

DeCastro Astrology on Facebook

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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 exci

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.

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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

asapoeche.com

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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

5 Self-Help Books I Don't Hate

The War of Art by Steven Pressfield

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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,

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.

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

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

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?"

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

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!

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

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?

What is the outcome?

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.

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.

Hashtag it #WarofArt

If this issue is high on your list --

I cast a spell of protection around my heart when I was 22 years old.

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.

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.

mikibrittenham.com

Grounding through Sacred Geometry free ebook by Miki Brittenham

15 Characteristics of Near Death Experience

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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 mome

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.

One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are by Ann Voskamp

The Book of Faded Green

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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.

The Camp House

Anyway she told me about a Christian author, Ann Voskamp who wrote this contemplative book called 1000 Gifts

I am totally guilty of pessimism and negativity

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.

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.

I’ve never had “feuds” with anyone or falling out with any family members, not really

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

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.

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.

What will it take to discover 1000.

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.

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.

Everyone’s shifting together.

Listen, we are diving toward extinction of our species and the death of our planet.

In the last 2 years or so … Hmm.

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 ...

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.

juliaspinolo.com

Resources (Research)

Medical Girl Mystical World Dr. Julia Spinolo's Show

Don't Fear Placebos Akimbo: a podcast from Seth Godin

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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 babie

A travelogue / paranormal memoir about my Airbnb, which was haunted, and about a major Parking Angels miracle that occurred on an airport tarmac.

The 3x3 Project

Pink Light Shielding for Empaths

Manage and Protect Your Psychic Energy

Waking Spirits

Parking Angels

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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.”

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.

I think this has a lot to do with The Hush.

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.

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.

I managed to get my security down …

I forgot how scary that is.

I think a lot of people are scared by their own guardians.

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 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.

Maybe my spells and visualizations are amplified by them.

I honestly don’t know.

I had a friend from Chicago come by the Airbnb.

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.

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.

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.

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.

White on white translucence and phosphorescence.

I was tripping.

I felt like I was watching a screensaver on the walls, in the air. It was fantastic.

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 felt like it would trigger me to automatically close some stuff back up.

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.

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.

The weather had dipped.

I’ve never heard a plane make that much noise. Or that kind of noise.

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.

It was the roughest flight I’ve ever been on.

I got vertigo as the plane was coming down in Charlotte.

Now, I’ve never experienced motion sickness in my life.

I didn’t know.

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.

Bitch.

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.

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.

Reboot Your Life original post

3x3 Project with Diana Frajman

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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