Podcasts about ash riley

Gather 'round as we delve into the world of life coaching. Apparently in these modern times, for the average person, craving a new life implies seeking the assistance of a so-called life coach. These self-proclaimed saviors promise to guide you towards a life of success, wealth, and popularity. But let's not be fooled for beneath their veneer of expertise there may be nothing more than a shameless grift. In the tumultuous landscape of late-stage capitalism, where the weight of societal pressures and economic inequalities bears down on individuals, the quest for a new and improved life has taken on a peculiar form. Enter life coaching, the beacon of hope for those yearning to optimize themselves and strive towards the elusive next level. Join us on this episode as we navigate through the treacherous terrain of personal transformation in an unforgiving system. We dissect the woven web at the intersection of life coaching, new age spirituality, and the so-called wellness industry. As people grapple with the challenges imposed by late-stage capitalism, life coaching has emerged as a glimmer of possibility—a path to reinvention and advancement. How does this ethereal landscape intersect with the quest for personal transformation? And what happens when individuals willingly part with their hard-earned money, entrusting their hopes and aspirations to unlicensed professionals promising to guide them towards higher levels of optimization? As we delve deeper, we confront the pressing question of legitimacy. Does it truly matter that these life coaches lack professional licenses? Are they equipped with the necessary skills and expertise to navigate the intricate complexities of personal growth and transformation? Or are they merely capitalizing on the vulnerability of individuals, all while society at large remains blissfully unaware? During this episode, Thomas and Azi are joined by new friends of the pod, Ash Riley, a journalist and business consultant well-versed in ethical and trauma-informed approaches, and Marguerite Dautan, a visionary social change innovator and digital creator, we delve deep into the motivations and repercussions of this transformative pursuit. As we navigate the intricacies of personal growth and societal pressures, we'll explore the intricate dance between ambition and exploitation, as individuals invest their hopes, dreams, and hard-earned dollars into the promise of a better tomorrow.  Prepare to challenge the prevailing narratives as we shine a light on the profound impact of new age inpsired life coaching. What repercussions does it have on our collective well-being? Does it empower individuals to break free from the chains of socioeconomic capitalism, or does it inadvertently perpetuate the very system it claims to transcend? So, fellow skeptics and seekers of progress, prepare to have your illusions shattered and your wallets guarded as we unravel the tangled web of life coaching within the context of late-stage capitalism. Together, we'll confront the challenges, celebrate the triumphs, seek a deeper understanding, analyze, and question whether this pursuit of optimization truly offers liberation or merely perpetuates the status quo. Find us on on all social media platforms including Threads @griftypod and at griftypod.org Find this weeks friends of the pod by visiting their social media Margarit Davtian: @Seekwithser Ash Riley: @ashrising  

Have you ever worked in a high-control environment? Do you know how to spot the signs of a healthy v.s. culty workplace?Firstly, I'm so excited to announce the rebranding of my podcast, with a new mission and focus! In this episode, I have the pleasure of talking with Ash Riley, a trained journalist and business consultant with a focus on trauma-informed and ethical business practices.In this interview, we dive into a paradoxical situation that many people find themselves in—being stuck in toxic and harmful companies. We want to help you recognize the red flags to watch out for when considering a workplace. These include a lack of transparency in salary and benefits, an unstable work environment, and the presence of toxic or abusive behavior.We also take a closer look at how some companies use core values as a cover-up for their toxic practices. It's important to be aware of this facade and not be fooled by superficial displays of values that mask underlying issues.Join us as we uncover the truth behind toxic workplaces and equip you with the knowledge to make better choices for your career and well-being.Enjoy!LinksLiz Holmes wants you to forget about ElizabethElizabeth Holmes has changed her voice againIs your corporate culture cultish?19 cult-like jobs people couldn't wait to quit5 signs that Apple is a cult Ethical Entrepreneurship 101 Course:https://ethicsforcoaching.thinkific.com/courses/ethicalentrepreneurshipYou can connect with Ash here:Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ashrising/Website: www.inmysacredspace.com This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit seekwithser.substack.com

In this episode, I share my final thoughts on where I'm at with the whole ethics of online coaching and marketing. It's been an intense few weeks, and as much as I know this conversation is far from over, I'm ready to get back to regular programming over here.  References in this podcast:  Ash Riley https://www.instagram.com/ashrisingSupport the showThank you all so much for listening! I love sharing my journey and what I'm learning with you in this podcast!Let's connect on Insta! @iamshanarecker Join the free Build Your Business with Shana Community + Networking Events:https://www.shanarecker.com/offers/apxSph4q/checkoutLearn more about how to get access to the BYB INSIDERS and get the support you want as a new online coach without the high-ticket pricing:https://www.shanarecker.com/insiders

In this episode, I share an update on what I'm learning about the online coaching industry and ethical marketing. It's undoubtedly an eye-opener for sure. I also share some personal life lessons that have come up over the past few weeks as I do this work.As I learn more, I'm re-evaluating my own business programs and marketing practices, so I can make the necessary changes to be better for this industry.This isn't easy to do as someone guilty of using unethical marketing practices in the past. However, my business is helping new online entrepreneurs start their businesses. Hence, I feel it's important to know and understand ethical business practices to teach them to my clients. It's a LOT to unpack. This is how it's really going right now with me and all of this.___________________Links in this podcast: Ash Riley: https://www.instagram.com/ashrising/Ethical Business Post by Ash: https://www.instagram.com/p/CmMxGm1u9y0/Jillian Murphy, Sales Coach: https://www.instagram.com/thejillianmurphy/My Kajabi 30-Day Trial Affiliate Link: https://app.kajabi.com/r/hUEQxkCzSupport the showThank you all so much for listening! I love sharing my journey and the things I'm learning with you in this podcast! Please if you're a coach or online service provider and you want to join a high-vibe community of growing entrepreneurs consider hopping into the Clarity, Visibility and Client Facebook Group -->> CLICK HERE TO JOIN

Ash Riley is a writer, astrologer, and marketer advocating for a science-based, socially responsible, trauma-informed approach to spirituality, wellness, psychic development, and conscious business. She holds a B.A. in journalism with a concentration in strategic communications and a minor in sociology and her professional career in business and marketing spans nearly two decades. She recently launched an initiative to inform spiritual practitioners about toxic marketing practices in the wellness industry and establish a new paradigm for conscious business. Web: www.inmysacredspace.com Insta: @ashrising FB: Facebook.com/inmysacredspace

And plot synopsis? We don't know s**t. That's the conclusion we've come to, after two seasons of Screwed Up Podcast and nearly a decade in New Age. We don't know why weird or inexplicable things happen, we don't know what happens after we die, and we are fine with that. So for our last episode, we decided to just have fun and go for a final round of things we wanted to bitch about! Here's the episode rundown: Will our podcast be archived? Actually, this one, we DO know! Using spirit guides as an excuse to be an A-hole: A New Age memoir. Why don't people ever talk about their mundane past life where nothing interesting ever happened?   Memory and DNA: maybe it's just science.* That documentary that will never see the light of day because everyone keeps getting murdered! Bob Saget! Gatekeeping and control. We say our thanks and goodbyes!   Some more topics that we would have loved to pick apart and discuss: Is everyone actually born “psychic” or with intuition? After years of teaching intuition development and realizing that making assumptions about everyone being “born with the same abilities” is both wrong and stigmatizing, Mimi thinks that no, not everyone can be empathic, intuitive or psychic. Are empaths just neurodiverse: part three. There is a facet of synesthesia that is called Mirror Touch, which is the ability to feel physical sensations in the same area of your body where someone else is experiencing it. This doctor [links to a video] wrote a book about how this helps him with his patients, and it is FA-SCI-NA-TING. Perhaps another time!   Thank you to our wonderful past guests: Jules Evans, Rev. Lindsey Turner, Mx. Randi Lee, and Ash Riley. Thank you to Kaz Windness for our logo! Thank you to everyone who supported us, talked about us to their friends, tagged us on Instagram to suggest us to their friends, and to everyone who followed us on social media, including our now-defunct FB page. We appreciate you all!   Credits:  Produced and edited by Mimi Bonhomme All songs copyright free. References:  *Turns out that yes, it is: https://www.bbvaopenmind.com/en/science/bioscience/can-memory-be-inherited/

We sat down to chat with business expert Ash Riley on spirituality and toxic marketing, ethics, trauma-informed messaging and so much more. Who hasn't seen a wellness influencer market themselves as being a "six-figure coach" or a new ager selling a pricey service they claim you could afford if you just asked "the universe to manifest the money" for it. These tactics are often employed by spiritual practitioners who use the Law of Attraction (LoA) as a way to manipulate vulnerable people into buying their services, and/or by spiritual practitioners who are new to spirituality. The latter often have no business training, but will be encouraged by "pop" spiritual coaches to start selling their services out of a sense of having to fulfill a God-given purpose. Some spiritual practitioners also often engage in aggressive marketing out of a need to survive. The entire spiritual business model is rotten, according to our guest, and based on deceptive, capitalistic models.  We invited Ash Riley to discuss with us the ways in which spiritual entrepreneurs can create conscious and trauma-informed, compassionate businesses that are no longer based on deceptive marketing tactics. Ash Riley walks us through what led her to create an online community to support professional spiritual entrepreneurs who want to align their spiritual business with their core values.  About our guest Ash Riley holds a B.A. in Journalism with a concentration in Strategic Communications and a minor in sociology. She is a business and marketing expert whose professional career spans nearly two decades, including four years as a business consultant for early stage tech startups. She's also a modern-day mystic, intuition development mentor and blogger who writes extensively about marketing and spiritual ethics on her blog, In My Sacred Space. Her writing advocates for a science-based, socially responsible, trauma informed spirituality. She recently launched an initiative to inform spiritual practitioners about toxic marketing practices in the wellness industry and establish a new paradigm for conscious business.  Here is the episode rundown: Channeling Erik and the beginning of Ash's spiritual journey Why does spirituality have such a big toxic marketing problem? What made Ash Riley leave spirituality, then come back How marketing's history is rooted in trauma Why spirituality shouldn't be your only source of income at first, or come from a place of need Dr. Lana re-tells us the story of how a charlatan once used the LoA to manipulate her into buying her services What is trauma-informed marketing, and how can spiritual practitioners apply it? How to stay authentic and true to your values in your spiritual marketing strategies Why spiritual practitioners should be at the forefront of the world's rising social awareness and no longer make excuses Dr. Lana explains how there needs to be more access to resources and knowledge from the mental health field to engage in preventative work Ash's Encyclopedia of Spiritual Terminology and Meanings For links and references mentioned in this episode, please visit our website at screweduppodcast.com

  How and why has QAnon, the domestic terrorist cult, infected the spiritual and wellness communities? Ash Riley and Brian Smith return for a panel discussion on the topic, as well as hitting on things like prosperity gospel, law of attraction, mental illness, racism, narcissism, grieving, empathy, and apophenia. Plus holding influencers accountable, pulling people back, and lots of resources! Visit BigSeance.com/184 for more info.   Other Listening Options Direct Download Link   In this episode: Episode Teaser :00 Intro 1:01 Context and Background (USA Today) 1:42 Why QAnon Infected the Spiritual and Wellness Communities (InMySacredSpace.com) 3:52 A new “Triangle Table” discussion with Ash Riley of InMySacredSpace.com and Brian Smith, author of Grief 2 Growth and host and producer of the Grief 2 Growth Podcast at Grief2Growth.com. Ash and Brian appeared together recently in episode 172, where the topic was Spiritual Bypassing. 7:53 “How can you go out and say that you’re this love and light person and then be involved with this group of people who are clamoring for public executions?” Ash gives an introduction to the discussion. 9:35 Vulnerability and the Authority Figure 13:20 “It’s a very interesting look at psychology, sociology, and something that we all need to understand as we start to open ourselves up to certain things, to learn to still be discerning, and to know where to draw the lines and how to think for ourselves.” Brian Smith reflects on Ash’s article. 15:14 Individualism, Prosperity Gospel, The Secret, Law of Attraction, The Power of Positive Thinking, Narcissism and how they’re linked to spirituality. 16:35 Authority, vulnerability, and being new to spirituality. 23:47 Spiritual abuse and holding people accountable. 26:20 How to reach the people sucked in by QAnon. 29:34 Denial, delusion, and unhealed trauma. 32:02 Racism, Proud Boys, and Nazis in the QAnon community. 34:55 “Evangelicals will deny the racism aspect of it. They’ll say, ‘Of course I’m not racist. I have nothing to do with that. This can’t have anything to do with race.’ And the racists like it because, it’s a way of taking back our country. It’s the whole blood and soil thing.” - Brian Smith 36:53 Racism rooted in narcissism. 38:04 Self awareness and the Narcissistic Personality Scale. 39:10 Believing their own lies. 41:55 Mental illness in the spiritual community. 42:50 “We are so quick to give up our power to someone else, whether it be a medium in the spiritual community or a pastor in a church, and we think that they have a special connection that we don’t have. And we need to learn to be more discerning that that person is just a human being, and they’ve got the same filters and biases and problems and things that we do.” - Brian Smith 46:42 Helping those who are grieving to open up spiritually, while also using discernment. 47:40 The 12 Step Program and why it works so well. 50:10 The need for critical thinking skills and the conspiracies that don’t make any sense. 53:45 Conspiracy theories as a subcategory of the paranormal community. 57:11 Magical thinking, Schizotypy, and Apophenia. 58:20 How to stop the bleeding. Holding influencers accountable. 1:02:39 How do we pull people back? You can’t fight them with facts. Build trust, create a personal connection, and share empathy. 1:06:35 Former QAnon support groups 1:12:55 What’s coming up for Ash Riley and where to find her. 1:15:22 More on Brian Smith and where to find him. 1:17:34 Paranerd Sarah Moon recommends we check out the Conspirituality Podcast. 1:18:41 A special THANK YOU to Patreon supporters at the Super Paranerd and Parlor Guest level! 1:19:50 Outro 1:21:41   Articles/Resources The Conspirituality Podcast. Have You Been the Victim of Spiritual Abuse? Spirituality’s Relationship With Mental Illness “So many great, educated, functional people were brainwashed”: Can Trump's Cult of Followers be Deprogrammed? Nazi Hippies: When the New Age and Far Right Overlap The Science of Spiritual Narcissism @NarcissismRecoveryCenter (Instagram) RSA ANIMATE: The Divided Brain A Game Designer’s Analysis Of QAnon Recognizing And Understanding Synchronicity Materialistic Spirituality How Separation Consciousness Masks Itself In Spiritual Unity @TheWellnessTherapist (Instagram) Facts don't convince people in political arguments. Here's what does.   For more on Ash Riley Recent appearances on the Big Seance: Episode 132, Episode 172 InMySacredSpace.com Facebook: In My Sacred Space Twitter: @InMySacredSpace Instagram: @ashrising   For more on Brian Smith Previous appearances on the Big Seance: Episode 169, Episode 172 Grief2Growth.com Grief 2 Growth on Amazon Grief 2 Growth Podcast Grief 2 Growth on Facebook Twitter: @Grief2Growth1 Instagram @Grief2Growth     The Big Seance Podcast can be found right here, on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Pandora, Spotify, TuneIn Radio, Stitcher, Amazon Music, and iHeart Radio. Please subscribe and share with a fellow paranerd! Do you have any comments or feedback? Please contact me at Patrick@BigSeance.com. Consider recording your voice feedback directly from your device on my SpeakPipe page! You can also call the show and leave feedback at (775) 583-5563 (or 7755-TELL-ME). I would love to include your voice feedback in a future show. The candles are already lit, so come on in and join the séance!

This week I talk to Ash Riley of inmysacredspace.com about getting real within the spiritual community. Ash is a an advocate for science-based, socially responsible, trauma-informed spirituality without diluting the magick of mysticism. She writes a nuanced perspective on astrology, psychic development, and other spiritual topics to help you separate the bullshit from the cool shit. You can find her on Instagram @ashrising. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/selfconsciousnesspodcast/message

This week I talk to Ash Riley of inmysacredspace.com about getting real within the spiritual community. Ash is a an advocate for science-based, socially responsible, trauma-informed spirituality without diluting the magick of mysticism. She writes a nuanced perspective on astrology, psychic development, and other spiritual topics to help you separate the bullshit from the cool shit. You can find her on Instagram @ashrising. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/selfconsciousnesspodcast/message

  A month after the senseless killing of George Floyd, and after a medium claimed to channel him with a questionable and insensitive message, Patrick sat down in the parlor to discuss the topic of Spiritual Bypassing with special guests Amber Choisella, Ash Riley, and Brian Smith. What is Spiritual Bypassing? Other topics include speaking out against racism, shadow work, the mother wound, toxic masculinity, and mental health. Visit BigSeance.com/172 for more info!   Other Listening Options Direct Download Link   In this episode Episode Teaser :00 Intro 1:10 Patrick has recovered from a crazy first week of teaching music to middle school students in the year of 2020. 1:52 About this recording of the LIVE panel discussion on Spiritual Bypassing that Patrick hosted on Facebook back on June 28, 2020. This was about a month after the killing of George Floyd here in the US. 3:10 Patrick is joined in the parlor by Amber Choisella, Ash Riley, and Brian Smith, all former guests of the Big Seance. 5:10 The social media promotion of a video that inspired this conversation. The video was of a medium who claimed to have channelled George Floyd. 5:37 What is Spiritual Bypassing? 7:45 Shadow Work and what intuitive mediums need to understand. 9:00 Ego 10:38 The duality of light and dark, plus jumping on what’s trending. 11:10 The harmful message from the medium in video that inspired the conversation. 14:00 Too soon? 15:54 End the silence. Call out Spiritual Bypassing when you see it. Call out Racism when you see it. 18:20 “In order for an unhealthy or toxic relationship to be healed, the partner in the most power, the one leading the direction of the relationship, or the one who should be leading, has to recognize that there has been injury and take the initiative to reconcile the harm that has been done. This is not because they are better, smarter or more capable. It is simply because they find themselves with the moral responsibility of creating healing. So as a White man, I have to be the one to take that lead.” — John Wineland 20:00 Unresolved wounds and shadow work in mental health and therapy 21:48 Patrick’s learning experiences and being a part of organizing a Black Voices Matter march and rally this year. 25:18 “But I’m not a racist.” 26:35 Other examples of Spiritual Bypassing 28:00 Grief and Spiritual Bypassing 29:35 The delicate balance between being informed and unplugging. 31:13 “Because that’s not what a good Christian does.” 35:07 A lack of empathy. “If we were able to start looking at the world through a more trauma-informed view, we would be able to recognize toxicity much easier.” — Ash Riley 37:35 Mental health and stigma 42:15 Fear and Danger. There’s no bad emotion. 43:40 Ibram X. Kendi and the Antiracist 44:35 Feminism and the “Mother Wound” 46:43 How do we fix it? 49:26 The “Syzygy.” What?! Plus toxic masculinity. 50:18 Can Gen Z fix all of our mistakes? 52:55 Listen and then get engaged! 56:22 The positive changes that have been happening worldwide since the killing of George Floyd. 58:57 Find out more about Ash, Amber, and Brian 1:01:55 A special THANK YOU to Patreon supporters at the Super Paranerd and Parlor Guest level! 1:05:25 Outro 1:07:30   For more on Amber Choisella Previous appearance on the Big Seance: Episode 133 BlossomIntoYourPower.com Facebook: Blossom and Rise Instagram: Blossom and Rise   For more on Ash Riley Previous appearance on the Big Seance: Episode 132 InMySacredSpace.com Facebook: In My Sacred Space Twitter: @InMySacredSpace Instagram: @ashrising   For more on Brian Smith Previous appearance on the Big Seance: Episode 169 Grief2Growth.com Grief 2 Growth on Amazon Grief 2 Growth Podcast Grief 2 Growth on Facebook     The Big Seance Podcast can be found right here, on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Pandora, Spotify, TuneIn Radio, Stitcher, and iHeart Radio. Please subscribe, submit a rating, or share with a fellow paranerd! Do you have any comments or feedback? Please contact me at Patrick@BigSeance.com. Consider recording your voice feedback directly from your device on my SpeakPipe page! You can also call the show and leave feedback at (775) 583-5563 (or 7755-TELL-ME). I would love to include your voice feedback in a future show. The candles are already lit, so come on in and join the séance! 

  Do you have a Daily Practice for Communicating with Spirit? Listeners and some of our favorite past guests contribute tips and advice for starting your very own practice! Some of the shared wisdom includes fitness, meditation, incorporating photographs of loved ones, strengthening the physical senses, aromatherapy, remembering your dreams, and prayer. Plus wisdom on getting through the current challenge the world is currently facing. Visit BigSeance.com/162 for more info.   Other Listening Options Direct Download Link   In this episode This episode of The Big Seance Podcast is sponsored by Nuwati Herbals – “Herbal Remedies from Mother Earth.” Visit NuwatiHerbals.com and use the code BIGSEANCE to receive 15% off your Nuwati Herbals order as a THANK YOU! :00 Intro :41 Thank you for your contributions to this episode! 1:24 Pouring the tea! Today Patrick is drinking “Eye of the Hawk” tea by the sponsor of today’s episode, Nuwati Herbals. 1:44 First up is psychic medium, author, paranormal investigator, and television personality, Michelle Belanger (from Travel Channel's Portals to Hell and episode 152 of the Big Seance Podcast) and her recommendation for meditation in the shower. 3:08 Next up is previous guest, Joni Mayhan, who last joined us with DeAnna Simpson in episode 159 on the Hanover Haunting. She has advice on connecting with spirit guides by staying grounded and being mindful, raising vibration, and being present. 8:01 Amber Choisella is a metaphysical and spiritual counselor and was on the show in episode 133. Her advice is for meditation and “sitting in the power” techniques. 13:46 Next up is a listener named Christine. She’s been on the show with great feedback a few times before! Today’s advice is to stay mindful. 15:49 Author and spiritual medium, Claire Broad, is a good friend of the show, and joined us most recently in episode 149. Using a photograph of your loved one in spirit to gain a closer connection. 16:54 Next up is Angel Medium, Michael Terzi, who is probably a familiar voice, because he was just with us in last week’s episode! He recommends meditation, strengthening our physical senses, and discusses intuition and the phenomenon of ringing in the ears. 18:38 Now to a listener named Gretchen, who uses a combination of recorded music, crystals, and aromatherapy oils in her spirit communication. 28:37 A beautiful message and reminder from a listener named Keli. “Just talk to spirit. Just talk. That’s all it takes.” 31:52 Here’s another voice that will be familiar to you. International bestselling author, Theresa Cheung, is another good friend of the show, and most recently she was on episode 127 with Dr. Julia Mossbridge. Theresa’s tip? Remember your dreams. 33:11 Professional intuitive, author, and host of the Shift Your Spirits Podcast, Slade Roberson is another friend of the podcast and was most recently in episode 148. Fitness, rebooting your energy, and avoiding being top-heavy and frazzled! 34:56 Astrologer Dena DeCastro has been on the show several times and is a great friend to the show. Her last appearance was in episode 134. Movement, an altar space, prayer, and tarot helps insure a great day for Dena! 40:32 The contribution that I wanted to end the show with today is from friend Ash Riley, who is an Intuitive Personal Development Mentor. Most recently, she joined Slade Roberson in episode 132. Ash’s wisdom for us today is beautiful and I think is very much needed with what the world is currently going through. “You ARE spirit.” 42:05 National Domestic Violence Hotline National Sexual Assault Hotline A special THANK YOU to Patreon supporters at the Super Paranerd and Parlor Guest level! 49:17 Outro 51:10   The Big Seance Podcast can be found right here, on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Pandora, Spotify, TuneIn Radio, Stitcher, and iHeart Radio. Please subscribe, submit a rating, or share with a fellow paranerd! Do you have any comments or feedback? Please contact me at Patrick@BigSeance.com. Consider recording your voice feedback directly from your device on my SpeakPipe page! You can also call the show and leave feedback at (775) 583-5563 (or 7755-TELL-ME). I would love to include your voice feedback in a future show. The candles are already lit, so come on in and join the séance! 

In this special listener feedback episode, Patrick digs into listener emails, Apple Podcast reviews, PLUS discussion on past lives and reincarnation with Simon Bown and Claire Broad, and your 2019 astrological forecast with Dena DeCastro! Visit BigSeance.com/134 for more info. Other Android OptionsListen in Spotify Listen in Stitcher Listen in iHeart Radio Direct Download Link   In this episode: Intro :00 A voicemail and a question from Meredith. “If death is an illusion, how do you explain reincarnation?” :45 Hypnotherapist and host of the Past Lives Podcast, Simon Bown shares his take on Meredith’s question. 1:55 Psychic medium and former guest Claire Broad responds to the same question as well. 3:15 An interesting email from “Girl from Minnesota”, a great storyteller. She has a question about reincarnation/past lives and spirit guides. 9:47 A message from Veronica 18:48 Sharon asks about the Patreon for Big Seance Podcast! Check out Patreon.com/BigSeance. 20:29 Lorna from Australia on astral travel 21:21 Peggy Hagan writes in. (PonderingWithPeg.blogspot.com) 23:14 Don responds to the episode with Joshua Black on grief dreams. 24:40 Connecting a listener named Patric with the Big Seance Parlor community. 30:11 A funny and spooky story about scout camp from Pat. 31:28 Christopher Kohler with feedback on the Triangle Table episode with Slade Roberson and Ash Riley. This episode is still sparking some great discussion. 33:37 Dolly has a question about the voiceover lady in early episodes of the Big Seance Podcast. 35:43 More paranerds that I’ve heard from recently, including Sam Haynes with his new album! 37:30 Apple Podcast and iTunes Reviews! 39:54 One last email from Patty, who from the future let us know how Dena DeCastro’s Astrological Forecast for 2018 turned out! 41:29 Our 2019 Astrological Forecast with Dena DeCastro! 44:19 A special THANK YOU to Patreon supporters at the Super Paranerd and Parlor Guest level! 1:08:05 Outro 1:10:11   Fore more on Dena DeCastro DenaDeCastro.com Twitter: @siriusastrology Sirius Astrology Podcast Previous Big Seance Podcast episodes with Dena: 53, 61, 65, and 112.   The Big Seance Podcast can be found right here, on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, TuneIn Radio, Stitcher, and iHeart Radio. Please subscribe, submit a rating, or share with a fellow paranerd! Do you have any comments or feedback? Please contact me at Patrick@BigSeance.com. Consider recording your voice feedback directly from your device on my SpeakPipe page! You can also call the show and leave feedback at (775) 583-5563 (or 7755-TELL-ME). I would love to include your voice feedback in a future show. The candles are already lit, so come on in and join the séance!

This show originally aired on the Big Seance Podcast - Ep 132 "Straight Dudes! Get Thyself to a Spirit Triangle!" and was produced by Patrick Keller. Where are all the straight men in the metaphysical and spiritual communities? Patrick Keller of the Big Seance podcast hosted a "triangle table" chat with Ash Riley of In My Sacred Space and Slade Roberson of Shift Your Spirits. We talk about ... the divine feminine, LGBTQ spirituality, coming out of the (spiritual) closet, and how to make spirituality more accessible to the elusive straight male. A fun, lively, original discussion of some rarely approached topics! GUEST LINKS - ASH RILEY InMySacredSpace.com In My Sacred Space Discussion Group on Facebook In My Sacred Space on Instagram GUEST LINKS - PATRICK KELLER BigSeance.com Big Seance Podcast HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses Get an intuitive reading with Slade Automatic Intuition FACEBOOK GROUP Shift Your Spirits Community BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits Edit your pledge on Patreon TRANSCRIPT Ash: I've decided that I am a connector. Slade: Yes. Patrick: Yes. Ash: That's what I do. I reach out to people, and I meet people and I connect them with other people, because, I don't know. I just feel like, oh! You guys should know each other because I like you and I like you. You should like each other. Slade: I feel very much the same way. I consider myself a matchmaker, and I used to do it even when I was in corporate. I would hire people and put them in certain places to work with other people. I have six marriages that resulted from that and... Ash: Holy -----! Slade: And there are at least three children that I can claim. Ash: You can start a business on that! Patrick: I remember you saying that, yeah. Slade: I don't know that I could do it if I did it intentionally with a romantic intention involved. But if I do it in the context of maybe work or, yeah, like you said, just recognizing, you guys should know each other. Like, my Automatic Intuition program has become this party that I host. And whenever I add someone to it, it becomes increasingly more difficult to screen people to become a part of that. You know what I'm saying? It gets to be more and more kind of delicate and intricate. And that's what I think about when somebody's like, I want to take your program! I'm thinking, okay, what's the seating chart here, at the dinner table? You know what I mean? Ash: I feel like when I meet people that I want to introduce to other people, it's because I feel like they're gonna vibe and it's like a certain energy that I get from them. I feel they're similar. Slade: Yeah, I mean I would love it if people would do that to me. I mean, it does happen. People do introduce me to people, but I have become, especially with all this podcasting stuff, really kind of aware of the fact that, it's interesting that you say that, because I feel like my power is in introducing people to other people, also on a scale of like, discovering someone, or finding this person and being like, why aren't thousands of people listening to this woman? Ash: Yeah, yeah! Slade: You know? And interviewing them and I'm not interested in interviewing people who are already famous, or have more followers than I do, or whatever. Even though Patrick does. Patrick: Do you know how many people I've had the opportunity to, and I just go, and I either drop the ball and don't do it, or it just doesn't feel right. And the ones that I have interviewed that have been, you know, bigger names, just like landed in my lap. Ash: I've always wanted to... I mean, I have a decent following for what I do and the amount of effort that I put into it. It's not spectacular, but I recognize that I have a much bigger platform than a lot of other people. When I do meet those people who I think, Gawd, people should know who this person is! That's why I always want to give them an opportunity to be exposed to my audience at least, because I'm like, if I meet somebody and I believe in them and what they're talking about, I think that that's really valuable for other people. Slade: Well you're also displaying your talent for recognizing that in other people. And people come to associate you with someone who has cool people on their platform. You know what I mean? I don't want people to feel like I have a bunch of canned interviews, or.. Ash: Right! Slade: I want them to think, Wow! He always finds these people that I would've never known about otherwise but I'm so glad that I do. That's the feeling that I want them to have. And I also want the people who are on the show to feel like it's a big deal for them. To feel like, either they love the show already so it's really cool for them to get to be on it, or they feel like, Wow, I went on the show and now I have so many more people listening to me. Or I've got so many new clients from that or whatever, and to be really excited about it. Because we do this stuff so much more frequently now than the average person that we might put on. There's just an energy about having someone be excited about being a part of what you're doing. And being excited about being a collaborator and it comes through. You can feel it. You know what I mean? When you listen to a show with somebody who's really excited and happy to be there, even if they're kind of nervous or something. Ash: Absolutely. Patrick: So, I'm just considering this thing started. Slade: Well why don't you tell everybody how we met, because I'd love to know what your perspective is on how we all three know each other. Patrick: I think I talked a little about it when I had each of you on the show, but I think I talked about it the most when Ash was on the show, and in my... it's not really a previous blogging life, because a podcast is just kind of an extension of what I started doing with the blog. I met Ash through her blog, and I think when I realized she was from my area, that's when we started talking. I think I had, you might remember this, Ash, I don't know exactly how... If like, I messaged you or you messaged me. Or maybe you commented on my blog or something, but we started communicating pretty regularly. I had lots of questions for her about my website. She had already been in the blogging world and I was still learning about it. I think we were talking about how I was experiencing the intense early part of my spiritual shift. We've all talked about this, where I couldn't get enough books about it. And I couldn't stop reading about it and... Ash: The information-gathering phase. Patrick: Yes! Yes. And I was overwhelmed and I think Ash was like, You know, there's this dude that I need to connect you with because he's real. That's how I got connected with your blog. I don't think I actually communicated with you until quite a bit later, Slade, but I was following you and learning from you at that time. Slade: Cool. Patrick: Then I think you reached out to me, Slade, before you started your fabulous podcast and Ash always pops up in topics, like, Ash said this, or Ash is so... Ash: SURPRISE! Here I am! Slade: From the closet. Ash: Like a jack-in-the-box. Patrick: By the way everybody, I made Ash sit in her closet because that's the greatest place for someone with a mobile laptop to record for acoustics, and it turns out her closet is basically a spiritual oasis and is beautiful. Slade: There's fashion in there too. Patrick: Yes! Ash: When I come out of the broom closet, it's like literally the spiritual broom closet here. Slade: It really is what I would expect your closet to be in the best kind of way. My closets are very suburban and not exciting at all. They are arranged by ROYGBIV and they all have the same exact hanger on every item of clothing, I will say that. Those are my two. Ash: You're not OCD either. Slade: No, not at all. I have a south node in Virgo, I've discovered, which is where I get all my perfectionism in this lifetime from. Ash: I have a south node in Sagittarius, which is where I get all of my bluntness. Slade: Oh good! I like Sagittarius energy. We can trust it. That we're getting the exact, undistilled, unvarnished... Ash: The unvarnished truth. Slade: Yes. I like that. I like that quality. Patrick: I just wanted to tell people that we were, when we decided to do this, I don't know whose idea it was first, but it just... Ash: It was me! I said we should do this. It would be like the Avengers except with a better ending than Age of Ultron. Patrick: It just makes sense that it happened, because... Slade: We end up talking about each other anyway. If any two of us are together, the other person's name gets invoked, so... Patrick: Yes. Ash: We're like the Holy Trinity. Patrick: Yes! And by way of joking, it's funny. We discussed what we were going to talk about and I don't know if you guys ended up being serious, but I was just joking and coming up with all these funny, ha ha things just to entertain people. And it ended up that we came up with the curious thing that there are more women and gay men in our spiritual, psychic, metaphysical world, and not a lot of straight men. Like, what's up with straight men? Where are the straight men? And I think Ash said something like, I think I copied and pasted it here, she said something like... Hang on... Slade: He's got receipts, Ash. Patrick: I apparently didn't copy. But you said something funny about, "Where are the straight men at, yo?" Or...Oh! I know! "When are straight men gonna get their sh*t together??" is what you said. Something like that. Ash: Yeah! Slade: Mmm... I have some theories about why it is a women-gay-men alliance predominantly. That's pretty easy to speak to. And it's so weird because when we were joking about this topic, we're kind of joking about it but then I was like, That's actually kind of a real thing that I observe all the time. It came up in conversation with so many people over the next few days. Ash: Oh, really? Slade: There were other people who commented on it as well. It came up in a really super woo-woo way when someone told me, at the teahouse I go to, the next day, she brought up the fact that a lot of women were murdered for witchcraft during the Inquisition are reincarnating at this time. And that there were a lot of gay men that were crucified along with them. That is a very common lore, or whatever. It's where the term 'faggot' literally comes from. Patrick: Ooo explain that more. How does that...? Slade: Well, they burned them along with the witches but in the context of like, Okay, we're going to have this big grand inquisition inquiry public burning to kill 1 or 2 or 3 women at a time, but then they just take a handful of queers and throw them in just as kindling, just to dispose of them. It wasn't even like, they didn't even waste a lot of energy on having a specific murder event for us, you know? So the term 'faggot' refers to kindling, sticks that you throw in the fire to help it start burning. And that's kind of one of the origins of that disparaging term, or whatever. So I was talking to this woman the day after you and I, the three of us, were kind of tossing that concept around. Where are all the straight dudes?? She just came out of nowhere with this idea that those souls are reincarnating right now. And I'm not a huge past-life, reincarnation, that's not a rabbit hole that I go down really often. But I will always engage anyone in a conversation about it that wants to talk about it. Yeah, she was like, "There's all these witches, the souls of all these women, who have chosen to reincarnate at this time." It's, you know, I'm just passing it on. Ash: You just recently did an interview with Susan Grace, which is a long-time friend of mine as well. One of the things that she talks about pretty regularly is how... I would need to go back and... I think she's mentioned it in every single reading she's done for me in the last year. Astrologically, we're coming back around through a cycle, and I can't remember which planet it is, but... Patrick: I can read your comment. Or actually it's Slade's comment. Slade said that she said something about the planetoid Regulus causing a 2,000 reign of men. That is over in 2020. Ash: So I think that might be what she's talking about, is the last time this happened was, it put us into the Dark Ages, which was the time when women were being burned at the stake for being witches. It was a suppression of the feminine. That cycle is ending in the next five years. And it's kind of coming on right now. So you're seeing a lot of that collective pain and energy from that time coming up from beneath the surface for healing. Patrick: Mmm... Slade: I like the thought of it being kind of a cultural zeitgeist, or like an ancestral DNA kind of thing where it's just in our collective psyche to deal with that again. So I don't even think it has to be as literal a story as 'those souls are reincarnating', like they're all hanging out, going, "Okay, now's the time. Let's go y'all!" Like it's a suffragette march. I like to back out of those things, you know what I mean? I like to zoom out a couple of notches when talking about those things and imagine it in more of a, I don't know, mystical, collective consciousness kind of archetypal thing. Ash: Mmhmm. Slade: Like for some reason, I'm more happy and more comfortable getting onboard with that. In the way that you described it, as being like, that, whatever it was that's been repressed, we're not standing on its throat anymore. Of course it's gonna get up and wake back up again. Or, if nothing else, it's gonna have to be processed and dealt with differently than it has been. Another way that this has come up, which isn't as specific as, 'Where are straight men?' and 'Why are women and gay men the allies in new age spiritual movements?' But in my Shift Your Spirits community, someone was posting about how Wicca and pagan-identified religion was really on the rise in the United States. And I told her in a comment, I said, I've actually been hearing that since the 1980s. It started in the 1970s actually, that identification as a witch is one of the fastest growing religious identities in the United States and has been our entire lifetimes. Like it's not just happening. It's something that's BEEN happening for awhile, so I'm down with that. Patrick: Well if I may come down to Earth for a second and let's just talk about, like Ash said, I can't even think of more than a handful of straight psychics, for example. Ash: Straight, male psychics. Patrick: Straight male psychics, thank you. What is it about... Is there something about the feminine, or, you know, there probably are a lot of gay men who want to smack me when I refer to them as feminine, but is there something about the brain of the feminine side or what makes... Is it more capable of getting into the spiritual and all of that...? Ash is raising her hand. Ash: So, just to back up, everybody has masculine and feminine energy in them. I think that we have genderized that concept and that's not necessarily the case. It's just a way to refer to an archetype. Think of it more in terms of yin and yang, where yin is the feminine aspect. It's the receptive. It's what's connected to the "Divine". So I think that the reason why we see more gay male psychics than we do straight male psychics is because they are more in tune with that energy. And that is the gateway through which we pull in psychic information, archetypally speaking. I'm a tarot nerd and I love going through tarot archetypes but the archetype of the card, of the Lovers in the Major Arcana, it shows that. The traditional depiction of it is a man looking at a woman and the woman is looking up at a god-like angelic figure. The message within that card is that it's through the feminine that we reach that sort of enlightenment. Divine energy. Slade: I also want to throw in the fact that I think that whenever you exclude people from a social order where they're not in power, by virtue of survival or being able to make things happen for themselves, they have to become more resourceful and they have to learn how to do things in ways that people who, let's say you're heteronormative, white male in this culture. Sometimes there's a lot of things that happen for you that you don't have to think about, in the same way that someone who is excluded from that, whether they're a woman, or they're a minority, ethnically, or they're a gay man, we have to go around and find windows, unlock doors and sometimes tunnel our way in if we can't go through the front door. So I have a theory that that's also one of the reasons why gay people are considered more creative. Patrick: That's interesting. Slade: Or that women have an eye for the way that energies are interacting in a space in a different kind of way. I don't think it's about the fact that we are... I do agree with everything you said about being more in touch with receptive energy. And also being released socially to experience that, you know? Women actually have it shoved down their throat. Gay men come to it by exclusion, well I might as well! But I think that there's something that happened with the programming of straight men that is a little bit more on autopilot sometimes. And one thing that I will say for the straight dudes, because we've got a couple out there, and I can name them, but I won't embarrass them, but something that I've noticed about the straight men who ARE our allies, who we do find at our party, is that they're the real deal. They're the coolest of the guys. They're the ones that we all want to marry and they're the ones that probably need to be procreating more than the rest. Ash: And unfortunately, there's like two of them and all the rest of us are flinging ourselves at them. Slade: Oh, they're already married. And we meet their wives and of course she's adorable too and we hate her. Ash: That bitch. Slade: Yeah, exactly. You know, I do know these men in my life. And I think, gosh, what special kind of guys they are that they're able to shake out of that matrix, right? They are able to see through the matrix a little bit and see past that. So they are more awake. So when you do find them, they are truly empowered and powerful guys. And they do exist. But we can't ignore the fact that there's not a lot of them. And they don't tend to be working in this field the same way that we do, right? Ash: Yeah. One guy comes to mind that I discovered very recently and I completely, totally, just bought into everything. His name is John Wineland, and he's technically a relationship coach but he basically teaches yogic sexuality, and he just radiates this sacred masculine energy and it's so palpable. And you don't, I don't come across a lot of people that have that kind of presence, and who are able to talk about spirituality in a way that comes from that very masculine perspective. I think he's fantastic. If you've never read any of his work or anything, I definitely recommend checking it out. Slade: Patrick, do you have any theories? Patrick: Like in college I can think of... and I'm not a psychic or a medium, or anything like that, so I'm not going to comment on it from that angle, but for example, after coming out, or being completely honest with some of the male friends that were straight that I had in college, I think were all these people that we're talking about. Because those are the ones I connected with. They were very accepting and cool. They're not, I'm sure, psychics or mystics or anything like that. But I guess that's what I was thinking of. I also think of the future of our world, my students, when I made the decision last year to officially kind of come out to my school community, meaning parents and students and no longer worried about that. Previously, I had only been out to my staff. When I came out to my school community, I had some of the, and I'll use boys as examples, high school boys who I'd had as students in middle school, either came up and gave me a hug or told me how proud of me they were. One of them came up to me crying. And I thought, those are the cool peeps. Slade: Mmhmm. Patrick: Those are the cool kids. And, you know, I have some students now, currently, they'll say, "Hey, Mr. Keller, how's your husband?" And I'm like, that's cool. They're not afraid to be seen as 'I'm accepting this' or whatever. So I think in that way, the future is very promising. Slade: I think that that's an amazing form of activism that gets overlooked, and it a cumulative thing and it's one of the reasons why being out is important. Because it's so hard to de-humanize people when you know an actual face and name of an individual person. It makes it a little harder for people to put messages out there that are bigoted in some way because if you're someone who says, "Wait a minute, you know, they're talking about my teacher and that's not true." Therefore their whole theory is bunk. I do believe that being the person who maybe you're the first out gay person that this straight guy has been friends with before, has an impact on how he raises his son down the road. That guy that you knew in college who's like, I never knew a gay dude before, but you're cool. You just inoculated an entire potential family from future homophobia and probably misogyny as well. Because the issue with all those things are about people who are fearful and abusing people that they believe are beneath them. And one of my friends who I work out with a lot that's a straight guy who's an ally said to me, he was like, "I'm not insecure about my masculinity." The only way that you could be a misogynist or a homophobe is if you are. Ash: You know, I think that's an interesting conversation too. I always share this article in my Facebook group. It's called 'Healing the Mother Wound', and the name of the woman who's worked this is... I'm trying to find it... Bethany Webster. She also has a really great article on how that sort of mother wound plays into toxic masculinity. I think I shared a link to it in one of my more recent blog posts. Women talk a lot about men needing to take responsibility for how women have been treated for centuries and centuries and centuries. But also, there's a very important aspect here of, women also have to take responsibility for how we've raised our boys to be a part of that culture as well, and how toxic femininity has fed into toxic masculinity. So I think, you know, in the midst of the #MeToo movement and how feminism is kind of gaining this momentum right now. We also have to, at some point, stop and also accept our role as women in what we've also helped to perpetuate in some ways by being unconscious. Just as unconscious as the unconscious masculine. Slade: You're right. This polarity that's introduced by genderifying it, genderizing it, I can't remember what term you use, but by making it about masculine and feminine instead of making it about receptive versus projective energy, or dominant versus receiving, or all those different kind of terms, there's a lot of ways to talk about that stuff where it's not gender. And this gender thing is kind of like the first basic form of social division, you know? We keep talking about how our culture's still so divided. That's like a basic division that has been going on for who knows how long, right? The idea there, for a little while, that, before the #MeToo movement, there was kind of a meme within feminism about how feminism was humanism. Like, to be a feminist was essentially to be a humanist. And I know Justin Trudeau even brought that up recently when asked in an interview if he considered himself a feminist. And he said yes and that's why. So I think that there are a lot of reasons why women would perpetuate a system that is misogynistic, because there are some women who would perceive themselves to be still elevated enough within that system that they wouldn't rock the boat. They'd rather indoctrinate their daughters in order to inhabit those positions of influence, however small they may be, as opposed to the real work of what Susan talked about. Susan Grace said everything is going to be re-built. And part of what's happening is, everything's gonna fall apart first, you know? In order to renovate stuff, you have to blow it up. And I think that, you know, my feeling politically, culturally and humanistically is that we are watching a lot of stuff unravel. And one of the things about her message that was so meaningful to me is: You want it to break apart. Because we can't put it back together in a different way until it comes apart. So... that may have been a tangent... Patrick: I would love to bring something up, and that is, I mean, it goes along with everything we've talked about. But I've had a few guests on my show discuss how this women's suffrage movement happened... I mean, it's hand-in-hand with the spiritualist movement. And that was maybe kind of the first #MeToo era. And so I would just be curious to know what we think, now that we are having this #MeToo movement and many people have referred to it as Another Year of the Woman, or The Year of the Woman. What's that mean for spiritual peeps? Like us? What's it going to do to, if it was connected with the spiritual movement before, what's that do now? Ash: I think you see them kind of rising in parallel. And I think that's because, again, it goes back to that connection with the Divine Feminine and spirituality and that's how we're rising right now. Slade: I think women also are more receptive and use the principles that we teach and speak and talk about. Women have already mainstreamed a lot of new age culture to be tools in their tool box. The average woman is much more likely, in the United States, and I don't know, I can't speak to other cultures but here it feels like even people that, 10 or 20 years ago, we would feel like would never be seen chanting or burning incense or in a yoga class or something like that. A lot of that stuff has just become a regular part of women's toolbox of self-care, right? Women don't hesitate to seek things like readings, as one of their sources of information. And they're much more likely to pass along a lot of their information to their spouses. Like, I know a lot of guys whose partners and wives are getting readings from me. But I've even had situations where the husband is on the phone, or the information is clearly intended to be for the couple, but it's kind of like, it seems to be women who are just really comfortable with dialing that in. So I feel like if women are in a position of power and are in a position to make more decisions, they're going to include those kind of tools and making it more available. And it will just be like, not as big of a deal to say, have something like that taught in a classroom, right? Do you understand what I'm trying to get at? Ash: I have a question for you guys, and this is something that I've kind of pondered from time to time. And this could go off on a tangent as well. I talk about coming out of the spiritual closet, and I think that there's a lot of similarities in being a spiritual person and sort of being discriminated against in certain ways for your personal beliefs. In that regard, I think a lot of that parallels being gay and having to hide who you are from the world too. So I'm curious, especially with you guys, you're real spiritual and homosexual, so how does that... I don't know, let's talk about that. Slade: Hmm... Well, I will say this. It's easier to be out of your closet as part of your sexual identity than it was for me as a spiritual identity. I withheld THAT for much, much longer. Even though they both were happening in parallel in my awareness, I was actually more sensitive to the idea that I could be victimized for talking about hearing voices, being intuitive, being sensitive to spirits, knowing things about people. I was MUCH more afraid somebody was going to throw my ass in a sanitarium over that stuff than I was that I might be victimized for my sexual orientation. That has been my experience is that, it actually might be harder to come out of the spiritual closet. Ash: I mean, I know for a fact, over the last 5, 6, 7 years that I've been doing this and have been administrating Facebook groups that many, many, many people are still afraid to be out about their spirituality. Because they are terrified of what friends and family are going to think, about how people are going to react, they're afraid of losing their jobs, their credibility, and I kind of agree with what you're saying. I've never experienced having to come out about my sexuality, but I know that in terms of spirituality, that's been a really... It wasn't something that I just, you know, threw the door open and said, "Here I am!", dressed like Miss Cleo. It was sort of slow bits and pieces. I kind of just pushed it out there and I think maybe people just kind of saw it as an evolution. Slade: Like first you're bisexual for men, women... Ash: Right. Slade: You're really gay and everybody knows you're on your way to gay, but maybe you test the waters with the bi. Ash: Psy-curious. Slade: Psy-curious. There's your title for this show, Patrick. Patrick: Well I joked around about how it's a triangle-table discussion instead of a round-table discussion and that works too. Triangle, gay, bi-curious. Slade: Gosh, right?? So many layers... Patrick: Well I can tell you that I don't know that I relate it to coming out or being gay as much because I have considered myself very lucky. I had a very smooth coming out process and I haven't really had a lot of, at least that my eyes are open to, a lot of discrimination thrown against me since coming out in my senior year of high school. But I can tell you that I think part of my fear, like Slade is saying, of coming out of the spiritual closet, which I do, like Slade, that's more of a fear for me. It's harder when you have a podcast about it because everybody's like, "Yeah, he's a weirdo." Ash: What about blog?? I didn't even want to put my face on my own blog for three years. Patrick: Yeah? Ash: You know? Slade: Okay, you're a weirdo. Patrick: But what I was going to say is that I really have been also running away from organized religion my whole life and growing up Southern Baptist. And so, also, part of even though I'm so done with that and have left it behind, and I'm still running far away from it, worried about what people think, I guess, if you start talking about certain subjects. And I do have people give me weird looks because I don't have a lot of people in my community that are just kind of open to, "Hey, so let's talk SPIRITUALISM!" That type of thing. I do remember being more concerned about it when I was early on in the spiritual shift, that time period we were talking about earlier, when I was obsessed with EVP for example, and talking about spirit voices and people are like, "Uh........... I'm gonna go now........." Ash: I remember having a conversation with... I had several of these conversations actually, in a short period of time. I talked to my mom about it. I talked to some friends about it. And I had people, my best friend, ask me if she needed to call me an ambulance. I had people basically tell me I was delusional. My mom just kind of laughed it off and was like, "Oh, that's great. That's funny." And changed the subject. Really quickly. I had a lot of people change the subject very quickly. Slade: What was the ambulance gonna be for? Ash: Because I'm crazy, apparently. Slade: To bring the straitjacket. They need an ambulance to deliver the straitjacket. Ash: Do you have a head injury? But what IS funny is that since those conversations, a lot of those people have actually shifted on over with me. Slade: Oh, cool! Can I say something about my observations with this? Because this is something that I get asked a lot, and I work with a lot of people who are smackdab right there on the cliff. A lot of people are emerging and putting themselves out, not only as a spiritual person, but identifying themselves as a psychic, right? Or an intuitive, or whatever the case may be. And so, I hear these questions a lot. And I will say this, who you're imagining.... First of all, if you're in that space where you're like thinking, Ohmygosh, all these people are gonna think I'm nuts. I want you to sit down and see if you can make an actual list of who those people are. Are there actual people who think that? And is there more than three? Because sometimes you feel like, Oh there's all these people, and it's like, Okay, who are they? Well, my mom and this person over there, I don't really know, but I bet they would. It kind of falls apart a little bit and you start to realize how much you're pumping a lot of that up to be maybe more than it really is. And I'm not discounting the people who do say beep to you like you're delusional. But they are a minority. So what happens when you do just say, "You know what? I'm not going to convince anyone of anything. But I'm going to put what I think out there." It's like you're running a flag up a flag pole and all the people who agree with you, there's actually more of them in the closet than you ever realize, and they start approaching you and whispering, "Hey, by the way, I love your podcast." Ash: Exactly! Slade: That happens to me at the gym! Like it's a secret. Like I'm a drug dealer or something. You know what I mean? Ash: I had the same experience though. Like I would also meet people who, you know, I would tell them about some kind of weird paranormal experience that I've had and they'd be like, "You know what? This also happened to me one time." And it seems like everybody HAS had at least one of those stories that they've always been reticent to share with someone because they don't know how that person's gonna react, and they don't know if that's a safe space. Slade: Right. Ash: Just by you being yourself and being open, you give them permission to also do that. Patrick: It's like a very therapeutic moment for them too. In those situations. I've had a few of those. They've been like, at the xerox machine. Those have been a lot of where these conversations have happened for me. Where they're like, "Oh, you know, I know you're into this stuff so I have this, the other night I had this blahblahblah..." Just them getting it out of their system is, you know, I feel like I was their therapist or something. Slade: Feeling somebody that could witness them. And just to tie up what I was trying to get at with, can you list the people who are supposedly going to think you're nuts? You might. You might get a handful. But now when you start to list all the people who've emailed you and said, "Ohmygod, I love your podcast", or who have emailed you with their stories, and I know both of you get emails from people who tell you their life story and it's so vulnerable and so personal, and they've chosen YOU to be the person to tell, right? And if we start to make a list of those people, the point that I'm trying to make for everyone out there who's feeling fearful of what the people who are gonna judge you negatively are going to think, when you start to really pool and list and add up all the people who are going to be connected to you because of it, or are gonna identify you as a safe person to talk to, or gonna agree with you or be interested in what you have to say, that population is so overwhelmingly larger, don't you think? Patrick: Yeah. It's just fear that keeps us assuming that we wouldn't be accepted. Slade: Yeah. We're afraid of what those 10 people are gonna think, that we don't even really like anyway. Meanwhile, there's a football stadium full of people who are like, "Bring it on!" And what you realize when you walk through that portal, that vortex, and go through to the other side, you go, "Ohmygod, there's tons of people here." That's the first thing that really happens, is people flock to you because you have run a flag up and said, "I'm someone you can talk to about this." That is a courageous act. Those of you who do put yourselves out there and do that are creating an opening for all those other people who can't. And creating a moment for them at this xerox machine, that they wouldn't have had otherwise. So I think that that's the way it happens. And I understand why it's scary, and also understand that once you're on the other side of it, you'll think, What the hell was I waiting on?? Ash: Yeah. Patrick: Kinda like when I came out this last year. I was like, why couldn't this have happened years ago? Because honestly when I started teaching 17 years ago, I always assumed that there would never be that moment. That I would be, I would have to wait until I was retired, to live that 100% out of the closet experience again. Why couldn't it have happened at least five years ago? I don't know about 17 years ago, but... Slade: Well, I mean, the reason why it doesn't happen is because there is a very real danger that something really bad could happen to you. You could be targetted in some way. I mean, I don't want to say that, just by being brave and doing it, that that will make all of that stuff go away. Ash: Your dad could try to give you an exorcism in a public parking lot. Patrick: Or your parents could throw you out of the house as a teenager. Slade: Yeah. Patrick: And those things happen. There are very real dangers of, well, I'm sure coming out of the spiritualist closet for some, there might be a very real danger of someone, depending on where you live, or what your family situation is... Slade: I live in the Bible belt. I know what it's like to be surrounded by fundamentalists all the time. To the point where sometimes I feel like, maybe I actually have some kind of programming that I'm numb to it now. Because when I travel to other parts of the country that are different in some way, I think, Wow! Even the average redneck on the street is liberal! It feels like I'm in Oz or something and it makes me aware of the fact that I do live in a place that is so conservative. But I will say this. The bigotry is on both sides a little bit because I have such an expectation of these people around me, who maybe identifies as Christian or whatever, being unable to process what I do or connect with it in some way. I'm often finding that I'm the one who's being narrow-minded. They do come up to me and approach me and sometimes people who are mystical people in a religious way are actually much more able to talk about mysticism period. I've found that little old ladies who identify really strongly with Jesus are MUCH more open to the idea that your grandfather visits you at night. They don't bat an eye about spirit visitation at all. Or the existence of angels, some of these things that are part of the new age... Ash: In some cases, I feel like they've just lived long enough to have those experiences. Slade: Right. And it's a matter of vocabulary. At some point you have to ask yourself, she's using the term she's using because of the time period that she grew up in, and the education and spiritual system she was indoctrinated into. That's her vocabulary and that's her words for it. I often find myself putting it on myself to do the translating. The angry, younger version of myself was like, "Nah! This is BULLsh*t!" Like, in your face about it. Now I'm much more compassionate and empathetic to the fact that, you know what, I'll do the translating. I'm not gonna force them to accept my goddess vocabulary because sometimes that shuts people down just because they can't process what it is that... You're using a word that they've never heard before and their mind shuts off at, "What? Did he just refer to God as a woman..?" or whatever. And then they don't hear everything you say afterwards. And so I have learned to do the translating myself. And even though it wears me out sometimes, and I wish everybody was a little bit more fluid with their vocabulary, sometimes I have to look through the words that they're using and look at the energy of what they're trying to communicate. And say, "Okay, I get what she's saying. She's talking about empathy. She's talking about psychic receptivity. And she's just couching it in, a more conservative way of talking about it." So it does go both ways a little bit. I'm just owning that for myself. Patrick: Word. If I try to bring us back to the initial question, keeping in mind that we know that there are straight men, for example, who are our buds and who are completely down with all of this. And they're probably the ones throwing their phone across the room right now as they're listening. Because they're like, "Why can't you see me and hear me?" And just as there might be women who are completely lost on what we're talking about, and aren't down with it. Keeping that in mind, how do we bring straight men in, or is it possible to bring straight men in? Do they have to do it themselves? Ash: Ooo good question. Patrick: Well I am a genius! Ash: There is no off position on the genius switch. Slade: For myself, I will say this. The same thing I was kind of talking about stepping out there and running a flag up the flag pole and letting people identify with you. So I think you live your example and you gather the other people along with you and you create those spaces. And you make sure that guys feel welcome when they do show up. As far as recruiting them, that seems like a different kind of situation. I don't know that we can do that. I think that we need to make sure that we're not excluding the men that want to participate. The straight guys that wander into our meditation circle or whatever it might be. And I do think that one of the things that could be different for Ash, for example, with the community she runs from mine, I do get a lot of male clients. And I get a lot of younger guys that come to me for readings, and I think that they do feel more comfortable just because there is a man present in the room, gives them a kind of permission to participate. Even though I'm very out about my sexual identity, I do feel like sometimes the guys who show up to participate with us, it helps to see a couple of dudes in the room. Ash: I totally concur with that. I was having a conversation with a friend just a couple of weeks ago about how there's not a lot of masculine voices when it comes to spirituality, particularly not straight male masculine voices. And I feel like there's a really big... Everybody wants to be able to see someone in a space that looks like them. And we always talk about how it's always a white male everywhere you go, EXCEPT where we are, you know? Straight, white male. So I think that's also a big barrier for those guys, is that they don't see a lot of people like themselves in our communities. So I think it's hard for them to be able to identify in some ways. Slade: I send a lot of men who are looking for relationships into those environments, particularly when straight guys who are in their late 20s and they come and have readings about their love life and where they can go to meet people. I do send them into those environments because I know... Patrick: You have match-making services also? Slade: Right! Just to bring that back in. The fact of the matter is, if you are one of those men and you're really a special, unique, you know, maybe minority. But listen, if you want to be like the coolest person that ever walked through the room at yoga class, go to a yoga class as a straight man, as a place of putting yourself out there and saying, I'm a different kind of man. I can't imagine that you wouldn't have lots more opportunities to meet the kind of women that you want to meet. Ash: Exactly. Slade: You know, like those environments for the right kind of mindset, like if you're the kind of guy that thinks, You know what, I'm comfortable enough with myself. I don't mind being the only guy in the room. You get a kind of attention for being the only man in the room with a bunch of women. Even when I was in college, I would take these women's studies classes (I have a Women's Studies certificate), and back then, they would give you a certificate if you took certain classes that were within other disciplines and fields and but they didn't have a major for it yet. So if you took history classes that were designated as a women's studies history class, eventually if you had enough of those credits, they would give you a certificate. So I would often take, say, for instance, a literature class or history class or politics class that was a women's studies class, because it was more interesting. The topic was more specific and granular and meaty in some way. And I would find myself in these classrooms where I was the only man. And even though I was a gay man, I still was the only MAN. And there is an attention that you get from women when you're the only dude in the room. And so I would think, that for a straight dude, that sounds like a great spot to be in. Ash: Just walk into the room, turn to the women and go, "Oh heeeeey!" Slade: So we are recommending that for your spiritual growth and edification, as well as your dating life, straight dudes, get thyself to a... Ash: Spiritual circle! Slade: Spiritual circle. Patrick: Right away. So Ashley, what do I call this episode? Ash: Mmm... I don't know... Good Times in the Spiritual Closet? Patrick: Actually, I kind of like, Get Thee to a Spiritual Circle. Ash: Or triangle? Patrick: Or triangle! Slade: Ohmygosh. Patrick: Ash. Tell us what's going on in your sacred space, besides the closet that you're sitting in now? That could look like anyone's living room or bedroom, and it's your closet. So tell us what's going on in your world. Ash: Oh... my world is quickly shifting and changing and I'm honestly not 100% certain where it's going right now. I just kind of started a re-brand over the summer, and I'm actually getting away from doing readings and being so focused on metaphysics and I'm kind of branching more into personal development and I'm on this big authenticity kick right now. A lot of my writing has shifted quite a bit over the last year. It's kind of taken more of a creative, emotional direction. I'm not selling anything, I'm not pedaling any wares, I have nothing to tell you other than if you just like to read my daily thoughts, you can follow me on Instagram and also subscribe to my blog. Patrick: I don't think there's anything wrong with that. That's awesome. Just BE. Ash: Yeah. I kind of decided that I'm doing this for pure enjoyment at this point, and I think that that's the best way to approach it. Especially if you want to grow something, do it because you're passionate about it, not because you need to make it happen. It's my passion project. Patrick: So you've made this cool move that a lot of people would be very jealous of. This chance to just kind of jump out there and be brave and start something and move somewhere. How many years now have you, you're in Brooklyn, right? Ash: I'm actually Jersey City. Patrick: Oh, okay. So how long have you now been an East coast nerd? Ash: It was a year in July, so almost a year and a half December. Patrick: Wow. I had thought that it'd have been longer by now. Ash: Still pretty fresh over here! Patrick: Tell everyone... It's InMySacredSpace.com, right? Ash: Yes. Patrick: And you said your Instagram is where it's at? Ash: Yup. And InMySacredSpace.com. I'm also on Facebook too, but I seem to be gravitating more towards Instagram these days. Patrick: Slade! Just recently, I see that you kind of revisited some stranger angel stuff going on at sladeroberson.com. Slade: I did! It was my most recent episode. Just talking about the phenomenon of stranger angels, which is something that I read about and podcasted about in the past, but I had a whole different take on it while travelling, really around the concept of how you can be one of these people. Like my past experiences have been all about receiving those experiences as opposed to, this time I was travelling with someone who is very actively likes to be a stranger angel. So it activated a different awareness about what it means to move through the world and interact with people that way. Patrick: What else is going on? Slade: You know, like Ash said, it's really not, for me, about pedaling anything in particular. I also believe in authenticity and I believe that putting yourself out there and talking about things that you're interested in and hosting a space where other people can do the same is a really powerful form of marketing, and you don't have to jump up and down and sell things in order to connect with people. I really do believe in the concept of marketing yourself as being... Find a group of people that you share something in common with and go be relentlessly helpful to them. Ash: I love that. I love that! Be relentlessly helpful. Slade: I have to give credit to Tim Grahl. He's something of a business mentor to me and he comes from the independent publishing community. That's his definition and it's one I've taken and borrowed. My interpretation of that has been to create space with my platform for other people to come and... It's not only about me making this content and putting it out there. That's one part of it. The authenticity. But also using my social media platform as a big keg party basically. I don't have control over it. It's not a... The Shift Your Spirits community on Facebook has been a surprising revelation in how... you know when you are in these groups where there are tens and thousands of people and no one is talking or commenting on anything, and the moderators and admin people are trying to get a discussion going and it's just fallen flat... Ash: I feel like that's how my group has become, but only because I've neglected it. Slade: Well, you know, it was one of my biggest fears, honestly, and starting a community like that was like, Ohmygod, how do I pump these people up? I thought I needed to be some kind of cheerleader or something and that's not my personality. And what I have found... Ash: No! Slade: What I've found is that by inviting all these people and just creating a space for them to talk about all the things that they want to talk about, they all have their own paranormal experiences. They all have their own spiritual modalities that they study and so I have been very hands off with the community. I'm hosting this community and that's my role. The people who participate, the members are the ones generating the discussion. I often don't even comment on the discussions because there are so many of them, and I love just kind of drifting through, quasi-invisibly, and seeing all the things that are going on. And I have to tell you, I'm really proud to have my name on something that I didn't make but that nevertheless I feel like I invited to happen. And it's really about other people. It's not about me. And when you're an author, you're an online personality or podcast host like we are, it's very easy to come from this ego space of being a performer and being like, the one who's the centre of attention. I have found that I'm moving into that. Weirdly I've become more collaborative, less about it being about me, and more about it being about everyone else. So for me right now, the growth in Shift Your Spirits is all about the people who listen to the show and interact on Facebook and create this cool space where they talk about cooler stuff than I might even think to bring up. If you'd like to check that out, by all means, we'd love to have you. Patrick: And I'll put all of the links that we mentioned two groups and Instagram and websites. And we'll put all of those in the show notes. Great idea, Ash! Ash: Thank you! Slade: That was fun! Patrick: You are a genius. Ash: I know. I'm also humble. Patrick: And I'm, right now, just so you know, I'm gonna take a screenshot selfie of all three of us on the screen. Are you ready for the countdown? Here's my classic smile. You ready? One.. Two.. Three..... Wait, did I do it right? OH NO I didn't do it right! I did it wrong! It's Command-Shift-3. One. Two. Three. YAAAAAAAY! Thank you. Slade: Fun.

Where are the straight men in the metaphysical and spiritual communities? Previous guests, Ash Riley of InMySacredSpace.com and Slade Roberson of the Shift Your Spirits Podcast, join Patrick in a roundtable (ahem - triangle table) discussion of a rarely approached topic! Visit BigSeance.com/132 for more info! Other Android OptionsListen in Spotify Listen in Stitcher Listen in iHeart Radio Direct Download Link   In this episode: Episode Teaser :00 Intro 1:00 Some improvements, thanks to Patreon Support! 1:33 Some background on how this episode and conversation came about. 2:16 How are Patrick and both of our return guests connected? Ash is a connector. Slade is a matchmaker. 3:43 Patrick met Ash online during the “information gathering phase” of his “spiritual shift.” Ash then introduced Patrick to Slade and his work. 8:31 Ash brought the team together for this “triangle table.” The topic started out as a joke in a planning discussion, but ended up being something everyone decided to roll with. What’s up with the lack of straight men in the spiritual/metaphysical community? 11:51 Slade’s take on the initial question. Reincarnation, witch trials, and where the term “faggot” came from. 13:25 The suppression of the feminine: Susan Grace and the 2,000-year reign of men that ends in 2020. 15:58 The feminine archetype 19:23 Those who are excluded from a social order have to become more resourceful. 21:28 Straight men who are allies of the feminine and the spiritual are the real deal! Unfortunately, they’re all married. Ha! 23:15 Patrick’s take. Being “out” is important! 25:29 Healing the Mother Wound and toxic masculinity/femininity 28:52 Unraveling and falling apart 30:26 The Spiritualist Movement, Women’s Suffrage, and the Me Too Movement 32:44 Being “psy-curious”: The similarities of coming out of the spiritual closet and coming out as gay 35:40 When the response to you coming out is not good 40:35 Fear of acceptance, conversations at the Xerox machine (or the water cooler), and making others comfortable enough to share their stories 43:23 The dangers of coming out 47:03 Bigotry sometimes goes both ways 48:34 Making straight men feel welcome 51:20 “Everybody wants to be able to see someone in a space that looks like them.” 53:39 Are you a straight, psy-curious man who is looking for love? “Get thyself to a spirit circle!” 54:28 Catching up with Ash and what’s going on in her world 57:27 A whole different take on Stranger Angels over at SladeRoberson.com. Plus, “Be relentlessly helpful.” 59:54 A special THANK YOU to Patreon supporters at the Super Paranerd and Parlor Guest level! 1:05:50 Outro 1:07:23 #Paranerd Hashtag 1:09:00   For more on Ash Riley and Slade Roberson: Ash Riley's previous appearance on The Big Seance Podcast (Episode 94) Slade Roberson's previous appearance on The Big Seance Podcast (Episode 125) InMySacredSpace.com SladeRoberson.com and ShiftYourSpirits.com In My Sacred Space on Facebook @InMySacredSpace on Twitter @InMySacredSpace on Instagram Shift Your Spirits on Facebook @SladeRoberson on Twitter   The Big Seance Podcast can be found right here, on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, TuneIn Radio, Stitcher, and iHeart Radio. Please subscribe, submit a rating, or share with a fellow paranerd! Do you have any comments or feedback? Please contact me at Patrick@BigSeance.com. Consider recording your voice feedback directly from your device on my SpeakPipe page! You can also call the show and leave feedback at (775) 583-5563 (or 7755-TELL-ME). I would love to include your voice feedback in a future show. The candles are already lit, so come on in and join the séance!

Have you ever wondered what it’s like to get a medical intuitive reading? If so, this episode is for you! Patrick shares the audio of his mother's reading by previous guest and medical intuitive, Terry Andersen. Visit BigSeance.com/131 for more info. Other Android OptionsListen in Spotify Listen in Stitcher Listen in iHeart Radio Direct Download Link   In this episode:  Intro :00 Terry Andersen is a psychic medium and medical intuitive who I sat down with in episode 129. After that interview, Terry offered to give my mom Linda a reading, and both her and my mom were open to recording the reading for your listening pleasure! For my full interview with Terry, visit BigSeance.com/129 :42 Pouring the tea 2:10 The reading 2:24 A special THANK YOU to Patreon supporters at the Super Paranerd and Parlor Guest level! 30:55 Stay tuned for an upcoming episode with friends and previous guests, Ash Riley and Slade Roberson! 32:38 Outro 33:05   For more on Terry Andersen: TerryAndersen.com  Terry Andersen’s Facebook Group   The Big Seance Podcast can be found right here, on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, TuneIn Radio, Stitcher, and iHeart Radio. Please subscribe, submit a rating, or share with a fellow paranerd! Do you have any comments or feedback? Please contact me at Patrick@BigSeance.com. Consider recording your voice feedback directly from your device on my SpeakPipe page! You can also call the show and leave feedback at (775) 583-5563 (or 7755-TELL-ME). I would love to include your voice feedback in a future show. The candles are already lit, so come on in and join the séance!

Slade Roberson is a professional intuitive counselor, author, and producer & host of the Shift Your Spirits Podcast. He joins Patrick in the parlor to discuss his origin story, reconnecting with spirituality, the fantastic titles from his archives, his thoughts on spirit guides, and the 2-part Stranger Angels podcast episodes that you MUST check out! Visit BigSeance.com for more info.    Other Android OptionsListen in Spotify Listen in Stitcher Listen in iHeart Radio Direct Download Link   In this episode:  Episode Teaser :00 Intro :55 Please welcome Slade Roberson to the parlor! 1:29 Pouring the green tea. 3:39 An explanation of Slade’s tagline, “83% fewer hearts and flowers than most New Age blather.” 4:15 Curating the imagery for Shift Your Spirits. 10:07 Reconnecting with his spirituality, and Slade’s origin story, which he calls “the switch.” 12:22 Were some of the details in Slade’s “switch” written in the stars for him? 19:15 Looking back at the 12 years of archives from Shift Your Spirits. Hummingbird Screen was one of the first posts that Patrick remembers reading and loving. 22:48 Some of the fantastic (and HILARIOUS) titles of Slade’s blog posts and podcast episodes! Where do they come from? 30:02 Being that kid who kind of got a nose ring. Shootout to #paranerd and previous guest, Ash Riley! 37:05 Discussion of two amazing episodes of Shift Your Spirits that listeners MUST check out! Stranger Angels Part 1 and Part 2. 39:48 Is it better to find out who your spirit guides are on your own, or is it equally valid to ask someone about who your spirit guides are? 44:45 A listener Question: "I’ve used a pendulum which confirmed who two of my guides were. I've had several reasons recently to suspect who they were. But in trying multiple guided meditations multiple times to connect with them I get nothing. Got any suggestions? What might I be doing wrong or why might this happen?” 54:10 Where to find Slade and information about available courses! 58:55 A special THANK YOU to Patreon supporters at the Super Paranerd and Parlor Guest level! 59:50 Apple Podcast/iTunes Reviews! 1:00:45 Outro 1:02:50 #Paranerd Hashtag 1:04:27 Outtake 1:04:48   For more on Slade Roberson and Shift Your Spirits: ShiftYourSpirits.com Facebook: Shift Your Spirits Twitter: @SladeRoberson   Record your voice feedback directly from your device on my SpeakPipe page! Call the show at (775) 583-5563 (or 7755-TELL-ME). I would love to include your voice feedback in a future show. Visit BigSéance.com for more information. Please help The Big Séance Podcast by subscribing to the show on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, TuneIn Radio, Stitcher, Google Play Music, and iHeart Radio.  

I'm very excited to welcome my friend, Ash Riley, an intuitive personal development mentor who works with many spiritual topics, to chat about dreams and sacred spaces.

Most hauntings, or what we call ghosts, are probably psychic echoes. Residual energy. They’re like moving gifs or image loops.I had a haunting experience unlike most psychic echoes — a type of temporal phenomenon I hadn't considered before as the possible origin point for a ghost. MENTIONED IN THE SHOW You May Be Someone's Future Ghost CLOUDBUSTING novel by Eric Slade HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses Get an intuitive reading with Slade Automatic Intuition BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits TRANSCRIPT Hey, thanks for listening to the Shift Your Spirits podcast. I’m your host Slade Roberson. For eleven years, I’ve been a professional intuitive and the author of the blog Shift Your Spirits, where I try to write about spirituality with fewer hearts and flowers than most New Age blather. I also mentor emerging intuitives, psychics, and healers in a program called Automatic Intuition. Today, I am back from a week’s hiatus for the first episode of our fall season. It seems to be working out pretty well to do a run of 12 episodes and then take a week off. It greatly impacts my quality of life to be able to do this. It also allows both Linda and I to catch our breaths and catch up on our To Do lists. I, for one, am thrilled to see the back side of summer. I didn’t think about the podcast actually capturing my energy during a time I would normally retreat a bit. July and August - not my favorite time of year. You know how a lot of people have Seasonal Affective Disorder and they experience low energy in the winter? Well, I have the opposite of that. Hot humid summer drains me. It’s like a weight. It’s the psychic equivalent of that heavy lead blanket they lay on top of you when you have X-rays at the dentist. You know what I’m talking about? I love fall. Or autumn. I’m gearing up for my most productive time of year. I spend October and November furiously writing. I can’t wait to be in hardcore, creative mode, with a sense of truly moving forward after so much stagnation and confusion. I’ve mentioned the eclipse energy so many times, so I suppose I should share at least personally how that all shook out for me. You know the whole “Who am I? What’s my light? Where and how and why am I shining it into the world?" I didn’t experience a shedding of my skin in terms of a transformation to something different, for me it’s been more of a recommitment to my original intentions. A return to my authentic creativity. What I feel a need to shed is everybody else’s noise. Everyone else’s opinions and advice and judgments — even though they may be coming from a good place — it’s all started to be too much. (Without even getting into the cacophony of political conversation.) I just want the world to shut up so I can hear myself think. Do you ever have those moments when you turn the car radio off and just drive with your thoughts? I need to get back to Me. To my truth. My creative impulses. I know that sounds general. How it has come in specifically for me at this time is how it affects my writing. I’ve been writing non-fiction professionally for twelve years now. I’ve been publishing fiction for barely three years, but I’ve been writing it for over four decades… I’m not bragging, I’m just saying, I know how to do this. It’s the Thing my life has been oriented around. And I lost the thread this summer. I couldn’t hear my own channel. There was so much freaking static, and it really scared me, to lose that part of myself. I was in a state of total anxiety for at least three months. I am really plugged in to author communities online — indie publishing, industry news, classes, conventions, collaboration, marketing collectives, cross promotion… It is an absolute din of chatter. And I just reached a breaking point where I had to yell Silence! My Automatic Intuition community does require me to be on social media, it is a priority, so unplugging as much as I might like to is not realistic at this time. If social media is part of your business, then you’ll understand. So, what I have done is turn off all the notifications for groups that I belong to. I didn’t quit everything in a moment of madness; I just muted everybody. I can go back and start turning things back on when I’m in the mood for it. I’m in writing mode right now, not marketing mode, so a lot of posting and commenting about marketing and business-y writing stuff is just not helpful. When I shift gears, my desire for conversation and collaboration may change. The issue is that other people’s opinions drown out your own wisdom. I needed to hear my own channel, without any well meaning interference. So for me, that’s what the eclipse has been about. Returning to my creative origins, remember who I was when I was a creative writing major and pursuing my degree was only about pursuing my art. I had no real clue about what it would look like when that became an actual business. And in some ways, creatively, that’s a treasure that got buried and I needed to unearth it. So, for the next 10 to 12 weeks, my writing surge will focus on the creative in creative writing. I’m tuning out the market, and what everyone else is doing. I’m just getting clear about my identity, without judgment. This decision if you want to call it that has brought me tremendous peace. And the discomfort was part of the warning system helping me identify what is not working for me. I hope you have had some similar epiphanies, at least an inkling of what you need to do to get back on track. I have had some emails in the past few days from listeners who are still suffering from low energy and wondering when it’s going to pass and what they can do to get some relief. For me personally and for most of the people I talked to, it was really terrible before the eclipse and has started to shift. It’s not immediate, but it’s definitely happening. We are only barely out of Mercury Retrograde, still in the "shadow" period of that. Depending on your sign, these energies could be moving through at a different point. It's not just you, but I wouldn't be surprised if you're already feeling some relief. (You could be sensitive to these huge storms. At the time of this recording Friday Sep 8, 2017, we are dealing with the aftermath of Harvey and bracing for Irma. If you’re listening from one of the areas affected, be safe. Even for those in other parts of the world, the vibrations from the winds alone are said to be setting off seismic earthquake sensors in some pretty far flung locations. I can imagine if you are sensitive to psychic energies and storms, the anxiety pouring into the collective from those who are displaced and in danger… It’s pretty hard core.) If you’re listening from the future, the following suggestions will work regardless of when or under what circumstances you’re experiencing overwhelm. I am of course talking about emotional or mental overwhelm, not physical danger and natural disaster. But, this advice is for everybody. When the psychic or ethereal or mental or emotional energies are overwhelming you... Focus on grounding the physical. Just start with your body. If you already work out, be consistent and stick to your exercise plan. Go into robot mode, just show up and go through the motions. It doesn’t matter if you don’t feel like it, do it anyway. If the only thing physical you can do is go for walks, go for a daily walk. At least 30 minutes, preferably in nature or a park or somewhere away from traffic. Gorgeous fall weather already happening for a lot of people. (Spring for Ozzies and Kiwis...) I would personally choose late afternoon or evening to release the stress of the day, but for some people first thing in the morning sets you up to handle more during the day. Get up 30 minutes early if you need to. You'll make it up in deeper sleep. The tiniest bit of discipline or success generates crazy amounts of momentum. And if all you can do is breathe, just breathe. Focus on your breath. These energies are a storm. Storms pass. Be safe. One of the ways I chose to cope with the eclipse and mercury retrograde was by painting and rearranging my office. A can of paint and a color change is a relatively inexpensive way to transform a physical environment. And just as with the body, shifting the physical energy provides a foundation for bringing back the other layers of consciousness and productivity. Because here’s the thing - you can’t hang a challenging transformation on a brittle foundation. It just collapses. You know how it is when you’re sick… You’re not creating anything when just lying there with a fever trying to breathe is your only realistic goal. This has been a longer than normal personal intro. I still don’t feel like I fully recapped everything, but I think we’re all still processing. If you like hearing this personal stuff, do shoot me an email and let me know it’s helpful. I’ll be happy to share more as it comes up in our conversations. Ok. I want to get into today’s story segment but, before I forget, I want to take a moment to say thank you to my newest supporters on Patreon: Dr. Keith Holden, Jen Bookout Ramowski, and Russ, who requests some privacy and anonymity. I appreciate all of you who have pledged your support and I’m really excited to see the new names each week. It demonstrates that you’re enjoying the show and want it to continue. That’s very encouraging to me, so thank you. You can support my time in producing this show by pledging on Patreon. For as little as $1 a month, listeners who support on Patreon can also access bonus Q&A episodes, where you send in questions, I record answers to them, and they go out to patrons of the show exclusively. There is also a level of support that includes a free download of the guided meditation “Messages from your Spirit Guides." So, if you want to find out how you can become a patron, and access some of this extra audio content, please go to patreon.com/shiftyourspirits And now, finally, here’s today’s story about how one becomes a ghost. SEGMENT I feel most hauntings, or what we call ghosts, are probably psychic echoes. Residual energy. They’re like moving gifs or image loops. I’m not a medium, so I don’t experience human spirits in visitation, such as a relative or recently departed friend coming in. What most people would call demonic hauntings…Negative entity attachments, that type of thing…Yeah, I do not experience that at all. I have very specific psychic security in place. Layers and layers of programming and refined rules with my guardians to keep that kind of energy away from me. It is dealt with far outside the perimeter of my personal space. The only other explanations for what I’ve experienced as ghosts would be the results of some kind of irregular time phenomena. I actually wrote about this type of ghost in my novel Cloudbusting. And then there is the idea that time is an entirely abstract human construct and doesn’t really exist in the way we perceive it. Ash Riley brought this up in her interview on dream interpretation and past lives. The idea that past lives are multiple lives and might be happening simultaneously, in some kind of parallel dimensions. So, today’s ghost story is about a time phase shift I experienced. And when it happened it was the first time I was aware of the idea that we could witness the origin point of what might become a future haunting. You May Be Someone's Future Ghost About 3 years ago I had a haunting experience that was truly unlike any other — a type of phenomenon I haven't heard anyone else speak about; a kind of ghost I've never even really contemplated. I had a conscious awareness of myself as a future ghost to someone who will occupy my house years after me. It was the day I realized my mother and I were going to have a beloved family pet euthanized. I woke up that morning to find a text message that it was time. Buddy was eighteen years old, he had an amazing long life, but he was in decline. We anticipated he probably wouldn't be with us for another year. Still, he took a quick turn for the worst and I can’t allow that situation to drag on one more moment longer than it needs to. I spoke to my mama by phone and assured her I would go with her to the vet. The appointment wasn't until 3:00 in the afternoon, so I told her I'd come over early, observe him, confirm his condition, and spend a little time with him, say goodbye. One of the worst things at that point is waiting. When the decision has been made and it's the right one, I don't have the patience to wait. Waiting at all seems cruel to me. When you're terminally ill, in agony in your own skin, eight hours is an eternity. I hated for him to go through that. (Incidentally, I believe strongly in euthanasia for people, too.) After getting off the phone with my mother, it was torture trying to putter around my house, and kill time until I was due to go over and see Buddy. I'd only lived in my new house for two months. It was an old place, built in the 1930s, but I can absolutely assure you — don't be too disappointed — it was not haunted. I performed every spell of invitation I know; I stood in the dark and listened to the quiet until my ears were ringing… nothing. My new house was eighty-one years old, but it had only been home to just three families in all that time. Lots of kids had been raised there, their handprints are pressed into the patio concrete, their names and birthdays are carved into the workbench in the garage. From what I know of the history of the house from the previous owner and the elderly neighbors next door, my house had known mostly love. No deaths, no tragedies, no violence. The energy of the space was truly peaceful, and of course, I was grateful for that. But there's a part of me that doesn't mind a little lingering spirit here and there. A little psychic echo. I’ve lived in haunted rental houses all my life; I finally bought one, and it was spirit-free. My friend Tina’s houses are always centers of paranormal activity. I'm pretty convinced at this point it has little to do with her houses; I think they move around with her. She’ll become periodically excited by the escalation of activity — thumps and bumps and footsteps and such — and beg me to come over and experience it. It never fails, though. She complains that, several hours before I’m due to arrive, her own ghosts all go quiet. Nothing happens while I'm there; she just as fun catching me up on the evidence. And later I hear that the house remained peaceful for days afterward. I have a heavy angelic security detail. I've worked for years to put it in place, customize it, and maintain it. They clear the spaces I intend to visit. By my request, I have a larger than average buffer zone. Other than the guides I may intentionally connect with at my clients' requests, almost nothing "randomly spooky" gets through. This could also have something to do with the stillness of the new house I had bought. But honestly, I don't think so. I tried to pick up on some ghosts. I strained to hear just a faint echo of some soul who had resided there in the past. I did have one small flash of a psychic memory, imprinted out in the yard near the edge of the property. There is an original thriving boxwood hedge around three sides of the property. It was one of the features I really loved about the house, this living green fence. But boxwood is meant to be maintained in a box like shape, which requires a lot of hedge trimming. I’ve mowed my share of grass, and I’ve weedeated and edged many a driveway and sidewalk, but maintaining the perfect planes of this boxwood was another level of yard work. It’s not just the top you see. Once you finish the top, you have to go back around the property and do the outside wall. And then you have to go back around the property and do the interior wall of the hedge. Oh. My. God. This was some physical labor. Even though I hadn’t heard a peep out of any ghosts inside the house, one day while I was out there sweating away, I heard a grumbling voice. A man, bitching and moaning to himself about this hedge. I was thinking it too, but I distinctly heard him. And I saw or felt that he was doing this with giant manual scissor like trimmers. This was decades ago, long before electric hedge trimmers. It was just a minute or so, and it soon faded away. I blessed him from the future and at least felt a little more grateful for the obnoxious clatter of my power tool chewing through the job. But back to the present. To the morning of Buddy's last day. I'm alone in my kitchen, and I allow myself to have one really big loud ugly cry for Buddy. And in that moment, I felt someone with me. It was a teenaged girl. She couldn’t see me, but she could hear me crying and was trying to communicate with me. I knew — and I can't tell you exactly how I knew, I was just certain in that instantaneous claircognizant download kind of way — that she wasn't a ghost. I was the ghost. She was in the future, and she heard the psychic echo of my grief. I had just left it there, imprinted it on the space, and a girl who will one day live in that house after me, picked up on it. I was in shock — I'd never thought about our ability to do this, or at least to be aware of it in the present while it is happening. Have you ever thought about this? Maybe it's just me. I don’t know about you, but now I feel incredibly on display… You know what I mean? What am I imprinting? What’s getting recorded? It's like those time capsules I used to bury in hopes that someone would dig them up one day. I've also written messages inside the closets of my dorm rooms before … I’ve left objects or notes in apartments when I moved out of them… It made me think of all that. Who’s watching me, picking up on me from other times, other dimensions? I felt bad. I wanted to assure her that I wasn't haunting her — I wasn't trapped there or anything — I was just crying for someone I loved. It never occurred to me that anybody would hear it. Out of time. I did my best to project to her a feeling that everything was okay. I spoke clearly and explained my situation, in case some future ghost hunter did want to record like an EVP… I don't think she could really make out my words at all. It was like when somebody is on the other end of a bad phone connection — you can hear her asking "Hello?" in that same one-sided kind of way. Anyway, this signal — this vortex, this brief wormhole in time, or whatever it w as — faded away. It probably only lasted two or three minutes, but it left me wondering about the temporal aspect of haunting. Are you, right now, someones's ghost in the future? OUTRO Thanks again for listening to the Shift Your Spirits podcast. For show notes, links, transcripts and all the past episodes please visit shiftyourspirits.com You can subscribe in iTunes or Stitcher or whatever app you use to access podcasts. If you’d like to get an intuitive reading with me, or download a free ebook and meditation to help you connect with your guides please go to sladeroberson.com and if you’re interested in my professional intuitive training program, you can start the course for free by downloading the Attunement at automaticintuition.com BEFORE I GO I promised to leave you a message in answer to a question or a concern you may have. So take a moment to think about that — hold it in your mind or speak it out loud. I’ll pause for just a few seconds….right…now. 1…2…3…4 MESSAGE Endings are openings for new beginnings. If you’re still waiting for some fresh new direction to present itself, hang in there. It’s inevitable. It’s seasonal. There’s no flailing or striving required, really. Conserve your energy and allow it to come to you…It’s on its way. It’s picking up right now, like a breeze. You’ll feel it when it arrives. You can’t miss it. And I’ll talk to you later.

Clairvoyant medium, Travis Sanders, sits down with Patrick for a conversation about psychic kids, Spiritualism, and support for today's young people. Plus his book, I Am Psychic, So Are You!: A Clairvoyant Handbook. Visit BigSeance.com for more info.   In this episode: Episode Teaser :00 Intro 1:18 Welcome to the parlor, Travis Sanders! 3:09 Travis was featured on Psychic Kids with Chip Coffey when he was 19, but he was working as a medium even before that. 5:08 Growing up psychic and getting an early start working at psychic fairs 7:31 Travis has a passion for helping psychic kids. 12:35 Is there a spiritual purpose for people who are born on the autism spectrum? 14:25 Are all children born with a greater ability to communicate with the Other Side? And is there truth to the theory that children lose that ability as they grow up? 16:09 Travis does a lot of Facebook LIVE videos. He speaks often about Spiritualism, spirit communication tools, and Lily Dale. 17:47 Just like the famous Scole group, Travis has a glass dome for development circles, and they meet regularly. (Patrick has since obtained his own glass dome.) 21:22 Travis is very honest about what he feels is likely to be fraudulent in Spiritualism or mediumship. Plus, why do we not have much evidence of physical phenomena like ectoplasm in mediumship in our lifetime? 23:38 The Gordon Higginson lineage 28:13 The Fox Sisters 29:20 What is life like on the Other Side? Is it all that different? 30:58 Can you design and build your own home on the Other Side? 32:35 Twin Flames, angels, and reincarnation. Are these things real? 34:39 Wisdom for Millennials and what older generations need to understand. 36:30 The BEST part of being psychic medium Travis Sanders 41:24 The WORST part of being psychic medium Travis Sanders 43:30 Travis’s book, I Am Psychic, So Are You!: A Clairvoyant Handbook 44:48 Upcoming events and where to find Travis 47:03 International Podcast Day is September 30th! 49:04 Highlights from my recent LIVE video with previous guest Ash Riley in the Big Seance Parlor on Facebook. 49:29 Outro 58:40   For More on Travis Sanders PsychicTravisSanders.com Travis Sanders on Facebook Travis's book, I Am Psychic, So Are You!: A Clairvoyant Handbook   Record your voice feedback directly from your device on my SpeakPipe page! Call the show at (775) 583-5563 (or 7755-TELL-ME). I would love to include your voice feedback in a future show. Visit BigSéance.com for more information. Please help The Big Séance Podcast by subscribing to the show on Apple Podcasts, TuneIn Radio, Stitcher, Google Play Music, and iHeart Radio.

An interview with Ash Riley about dream interpretation and past lives. We talk about everything from improving your dream recall, to theories about time and consciousness, to how our phobias can have origins in past lives. Ashley Riley is a spiritual entrepreneur, intuitive lifestyle blogger, and personal development mentor who enjoys empowering others to tap into their own inner-strength. She is the voice behind In My Sacred Space, an intuitive lifestyle blog which explores personal, spiritual, and intuitive development, and incorporating spirituality into daily life. This episode has a full text transcript below. MENTIONED IN THE SHOW: Kyle Cease Hannah Ehlers-Bond Many Lives Many Masters by Bryan Weiss Journey of Souls by Michael Newton Quantum Healing Hypnosis Technique Past Life Regression The OA on Netflix GUEST LINKS - Ash Riley In My Sacred Space Online Dream Interpretation Course Free ebook Connect with your past lives through your dreams HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses Get an intuitive reading with Slade Automatic Intuition BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits TRANSCRIPT Hey, thanks for listening to the Shift Your Spirits podcast. I’m your host Slade Roberson. For eleven years, I’ve been a professional intuitive and the author of the blog ‘Shift Your Spirits’, where I try to write about spirituality with fewer hearts and flowers than most New Age blather. I also mentor emerging intuitives, psychics, and healers in a program called Automatic Intuition. Today, I’m sharing a conversation with Ash Riley about dream interpretation and past lives. We talk about everything from improving your dream recall, to theories about time and consciousness, to how our phobias can have origins in our past lives. And, of course, there is an oracle segment at the end of the show. So be thinking about a question or a concern you have. Hold it in your mind, and I’ll come back on, after the final links and credits, and leave you with that extra message… BUT BEFORE I FORGET I wanted to share a bit of an update, or an observation, really, about the last episode—episode 21—in which I shared a dream I believed to be about a woman abducted in Arizona. After publishing the show and listening back, I noticed something I had never thought of before. There were no cell phones in that dream. And because of that, I don’t feel it could possibly have been from a present or even recent time period because the first thing she would have done when she ran out of gas is call or text someone. She didn’t even check her messages when she went on break. I feel like this detail alone blows my theory that I was dreaming about something urgent or something happening in the present. The fact that I couldn’t find anything remotely resembling the story could also support this incident having taken place in the past. Assuming it was real and it happened, of course. But, you know, after this conversation with Ash, I’m not sure remote viewing through dreaming is what this was about at all. There may be something underneath, deep within the dream content, thematic, more important than the details of the story it presents. You’ll get an idea of what I’m talking about when you hear this interview segment coming up. I also want to comment on this eclipse season again. I feel like we will definitely look back on this time period as a turning point in our lives. I’m not going super deep into the astrology of all of this, so be sure and consult better minds than mine. Actually, I am sharing and reposting a lot of articles on Facebook, which is where I tend to share time-sensitive content, so please send me a friend request on Facebook if you’d like to access some of what I’m reading about the subject. First of all, though, if you’re experiencing some turmoil, breakdown, identity crisis, life quakes, I want you to know that it’s not just you. That may be a small consolation, but I do find that comforting, myself. Because I talk to so many people all over the world every week, I am in a unique position to notice patterns that are going on out there. And if that corresponds with some of this eclipse astrology, cool. Regardless of spirituality or faith or total lack of those things, we still have a collective consciousness. And there are some powerful common themes presenting in a lot of people’s lives right now. I’m recording this Aug 8, 2017, so if you’re listening when it comes out or soon after it, it’s obviously timely. But if you’re listening to the archives in the future, this message may still hold significance for you. You may be experiencing something similar and some serendipity has allowed this message to reach you at whatever time and place you are. It’s okay to believe it speaks to you now — whenever you hear it, just like the oracle message at the end of the show. This pattern or phenomenon or transit we’re going through seems to be about shedding our skins, or having our identities challenged. If you are presented with a strong impulse to take an action right now, if it’s a clear action, even if it seems sudden or impulsive, move toward it. If it’s wrong, you will get immediate feedback, and you can back off, but the biggest problem everyone seems to be having right now is a kind of paralysis. Lack of decision. Feeling lost. Not sure what direction you’re going in. Not sure how to move forward... So, I have to ask you this…What is wrong with waiting? What about surrendering, allowing yourself to be carried where you’re meant to go? Check again — your situation may feel like an emergency or like something has to be tended to immediately. But does it really? Can it wait a few weeks? If you can wait, I would advise doing nothing. Make no decisions, take no actions, observe the thoughts and feelings and wait for the message to emerge from them. Or for the circumstances to resolve themselves. Chani Nicholas sent out a newsletter this week, and there was a section that really spoke to me. She wrote: "Try not to rush to replace what is leaving. Try not to jump to conclusions about what to do with the new room. Try not to assume too much just because being in the unknown is uncomfortable." I want to take a moment to say thank you to my new supporters on Patreon: Theo Walker Darla Antoine Alisa Martin and James Roberson It’s nice to see some life long supporters showing up in Patreon. Darla Antoine was one of the first people to take my professional intuitive training almost 8 years ago. Alisa is one of the people in the world who has been talking to me about spirituality the longest. Decades, she’s been listening to me. She’s also the friend I mentioned in the last episode whom I apparently visit in the dream space every once in a while for a chat. And James Roberson is my father. Actually both my parents support my show on Patreon — my mother was the first person to pledge, which was before I started thanking people on the show. But my dad is actually a fan and listens to all the episodes, and reads all the posts. I know a lot of you don’t feel like you can be your authentic self with your family. And I certainly celebrate the value of chosen family. But I want it to be known that my parents do support my work, and would do so even if it’s not their thing. I am very blessed in this way. I appreciate all of you who have pledged your support. I’m really excited to see the new names every week. It demonstrates that you’re enjoying the show and want it to continue. That’s very encouraging. It means more to me than you may realize. You too can support my time in producing this show — and you can support Linda, the young woman who is creating our transcripts every week — by pledging on Patreon for as little as $1 a month. Listeners who support on Patreon can also access bonus Q&A episodes, where you send in questions, I record answers to them, and they go out to patrons of the show exclusively. So If you want to find out how you can become a patron, especially if you would like Linda's transcription to continue, please go to patreon.com/shiftyourspirits Okay. Let’s get into today’s interview. Ashley Riley is a spiritual entrepreneur, intuitive lifestyle blogger, and personal development mentor who enjoys empowering others to tap into their own inner-strength. She is the voice behind In My Sacred Space, an intuitive lifestyle blog which explores personal, spiritual, and intuitive development, and incorporating spirituality into daily life. And Ash happens to love talking about a few things that I don’t talk about so much — dream interpretation and past lives. She even mixes the two together. Here’s my conversation with Ash: Ash: In My Sacred Space has been my little side passion for the last going on four years now, I think. It is, it started out as a lifestyle blog, and I talked to you about this the other day, where it was sort of this amalgamation of spiritual living and however that manifested itself in your life. And it was from home décor to cooking or gardening or general spirituality, whatever. And slowly and surely, over the last four years, it’s kind of gravitated toward serious focus on personal development and metaphysics. And so, last year, around July, I decided to start doing readings for my followers. I’ve been doing them for friends for a long time and I’d also been doing dream interpretations for friends for a long time, and obviously for myself. And I’ve been doing personal development coaching for my friends. So I decided to bring all that together into this online space that I had, and offer it to all the people who’d been following my blog for the last three to four years. And, I use a combination of numerology, tarot, personology, really any kind of psychic tool that is at my fingertips to dig into a person’s soul path and really figure out what the real lesson they’re trying to learn in these challenges that they’re coming into in their lives and how can we bring that subconscious block forward into their awareness and help them release and heal that? And so, with my mentorship sessions especially, I like to do a combination of numerology and personology and dream interpretation and we’ll use tarot to kind of direct us in each of our sessions. I ask them to set goals for each of their sessions and then we work through whatever comes up. It’s been really fascinating because I see – I have clients who come in and something will spark within me intuitively about what they’re going through and I’ll throw it out there and they’ll initially be resistant to it. They’ll say, “No no no, I’m over that, that’s not what’s happening.” Then I have them keep a dream journal in between sessions. And they come back to me with all these dreams. And I start going through their dreams and it is just like, screaming out in their dream symbolism that this is what’s going on. And it’s really great to have something tangible like that to point to. To kind of help them blast through the cognitive dissonance of what’s going on. Slade: This is one of the reasons why I wanted to - well I wanted to talk to you about a million things, and we could probably do so many different episode topics or whatever, but when you brought up this subject of dream work, I was like, “Yes! That’s what I need to talk to you about.” Because I have started to talk about my own dream experiences a little bit. And interestingly enough, how dense I am about – like if somebody else told me their dream and it had an obvious symbol in it, I would be very quick to see it. But when it’s my own, it’s not as apparent to me, you know. So, I am not a dream expert. I’m not even a very good dreamer. Like, my dream life is so disappointing and so many people will bring this up to me. You know, potential clients want to talk about their dreams or they, you know, want to know if I do any kind of interpretation around that symbolism or whatever. And I can, sort of, I can do that when it comes up in conversation, of course, but when you said that this was an area that you focused on, I was like, that’s really cool because I want you to supplement my understanding and my wisdom. And, you know, I don’t have to explain it to people because you can explain it better than I can. But yeah, so I have a bunch of questions about dream interpretation and dream work and specifically about some of the, like your free e-book on this subject, and some of the courses that you have. So, just first and foremost, I was interested in knowing how did you end up specifically making dream work a focus. Like, what drew you to the topic specifically? Ash: I’ve always been a pretty avid dreamer, even back when I was a kid and when I was younger. And I’ve always had pretty good dream recall. I didn’t actually get into the interpretation of dreaming until I sort of discovered spirituality a few years ago, and I just found it to be the easiest avenue for me to start accessing and developing my own intuition. Because, as I said on my website, you can literally do it in your sleep. It doesn’t get any easier than that. Slade: So talk to me about the – you have a dream interpretation course. Tell us about that. Ash: Yeah, so, like I said, I’ve been doing this for myself for a long time, and I started to do it for friends and in my Facebook group for people. And it’s something that a lot of people have a lot of curiosity about. But it seems like they – not a lot of people have a good knowledge of how to go about interpreting dreams. And, you know, for some people it’s just like, “Oh, what does this one dream mean?” And I really want people to understand that there is so much more to dreamwork than just figuring out what this dream means. Because you can use dreamwork to do so many things. And that’s why I have my two e-books on my website. One of them is how to contact your spirit guides through your dreams. One of them is how to access your past lives through your dreams. You can dream with intention and set specific intentions with your dreamwork and access parts of your multi-dimensional self in your subconscious mind that you don’t necessarily have access to on a regular basis. And that opens the door to so, so much. With how you develop on a personal level, and how you live your life. Slade: What are some general tips that you would tell somebody who’s kind of at the beginning of this process? Because you’re right. I don’t even think about it until I have one really good dream that seems meaningful and then I think, “Ooo! What was that trying to tell me?” But, you know, you just sort of altered my perspective in how this is really something that you want to monitor in an ongoing way, right? Because the patterns are so important and, I mean, I really stress this in my intuitive development mentoring as well, is to watch for the patterns of what’s being brought to you and following that as a way of discovering your practice. So, what would you tell somebody who’s like, “Ooo! Okay, yeah, I want to go into this.” What are a few basic good practices for starting a dream journal or dream interpretation log or, you know, what would you advise? Ash: Get into the habit. Dreaming is a routine, and waking up every morning and writing down what you remember from your dreams is a habit you want to get into. I’m to the point now where I am interpreting my dreams while I’m still in them. And that just comes from routine practice and having it on my mind that I’m going to remember this and figure out what it means. And then, I’m not even necessarily lucid in those dreams when that’s happening. It’s just something that I naturally do now. Now I hear a lot of people tell me, “Well, I don’t dream.” And that’s not necessarily the case. Everybody dreams. Every night. It’s just a matter of whether or not you remember it. And, a lot of times the reason you don’t remember it can be because you’re a really deep sleeper. People who have a lighter sleep pattern tend to be able to remember their dreams more often because they’re – you have the best dream recall the second that you wake up. Particularly if you’re waking up during R.E.M. You’ll be likely to remember your dreams more. So there’s little tips and tricks that can help with dream recall, like setting an intention before you go to bed telling yourself that you’re going to remember your dreams. You can set an alarm clock for like, around 2:30, 3:00 am to wake you up, and then you immediately just write down the things that you remember. Don’t move when you wake up in the morning. Just lay there and try to remember what was happening in your head before you woke up. Because the more that you – dreams are stored in your short-term memory initially, and when you wake up and you start to move around, it can make them fade away. So it’s really important that you kind of sit still and try to hold on to them and commit them to your longer-term memory. So like, repeating the symbols that you saw and the actions that happened in the dream can be - can help you commit those to your long-term memory and then get them down in your dream journal. Gosh, there’s just so much… Slade: Well, so there’s another topic that you’re really into that I’m also deficient in. There’s two things that are really attractive topics to a lot of people in our collective audience, and that’s past lives and dreamwork. And so, you actually combine those two things. I don’t really do a lot of past life readings, past life stories don’t come up for me very much in readings and you and I have talked about it. I mean, it’s not that, there’s just some people who focus on different things or they receive different types of information. Some people are natural mediums. Some people pick up on angelic energy or some people are more attuned to energy centres in the body. You know, there’s different things. So, one of your expertise that I don’t have is this synergy of the past life information with the dream stuff. So tell me about how you – how do you get at the past life stuff through your dreams? Ash: Just learning to – a bit part of dream interpretation is learning to identify what type or types of dream you’re having. And a lot of times you can get things mixed together in a single dream, different elements. There can be pieces of it that are past life, but it’s sort of layered underneath modern day symbolism, so learning to identify which parts of the dream are what and what is really coming through in that dream is kind of an art form that you kind of have to learn to develop. And they have a lot of checklists and things like that as supplementary material in the course that’ll help you figure those things out. Slade: So does the course have – tell us a little bit about what’s in the course content-wise. Is it video? Is it audio? Is it workbook style? A mix? Just to get some people interested in it, why don’t you describe it a little bit more in detail. Ash: It’s a mix of things. There’s a video lesson in every module, and there’s downloadable worksheets. There’s exercises. There’s homework assignments. I give access to tons and tons of resources that are free. I have a Facebook group for everyone in the course to come in and they get to work with me one-on-one in the Facebook group, and with each other. Because a huge part of learning this is practicing and you can practice on yourself for a really long time, but when you start to really practice with other people, it gets interesting because you start to learn that different people have very different dream styles and very different dream symbolism. Like, I have one friend who is also a prolific dreamer, but her dream style is so different from mine that it’s almost – it’s difficult for us to interpret one another’s dreams because they’re so different from what we’re both used to. So it’s really cool how you can learn your dream style and learn to identify different types of dreams. Learning to dream with intention and the course gives you all kinds of worksheets and downloadable things to help you learn those basic fundamentals and really give you a good foundation for learning how to figure yourself out, from a dream standpoint. Slade: Do you feel that one of the things that’s going to occur as you get into this and study this, like you said, as you’re analyzing and learning about your dream style – do you kind of develop your own symbology, or your own language, like where is the relationship between the kind of archetypal dream dictionary sort of scenario, versus your sort of personal symbolism. Is there a difference in the way that you teach it? Ash: There’s definitely a difference between archetypal symbolism and your own personal symbolism. A lot of people think that it has to be either or. I don’t teach it that way. I believe that you can find the layers of meaning in your dreams and that the archetypal symbolism and your personal symbolism can both be simultaneously true. Slade: So tell me like a cool example of a past life dream story that’s come up either for you or maybe somebody in your group. Ash: Oh goodness. My past life dreams tend to be really, really heavy. And the reason why is because they’re coming up because there are things that are karmic patterns that I’m trying to heal. And so, a lot of them tend to be really emotionally painful. But I do have one anecdotal story that’s not so heavy. That I will share with you. Just not to bring everyone down. And I actually talk about it in my e-book on past life dreams. One night, I was falling asleep and I just happen to idly wonder, have I ever had any past lives as a man, because all the ones that I’ve seen so far in my dreams and various other things have all been me as a woman. And I had a dream that night that I was a Roman or Greek soldier, and I was in an army and there was like this big celebration happening, like we’d just won this major war and there was like this feast going on and I was sort of like a lower guy on the totem pole, and there was a certain area of this place that was reserved just for the generals and the people who were really high up. But I also had this really stubborn F-U streak and I was drunk and decided to crash the general’s party. And that’s really all I remember of this dream, but I definitely figured that that has to be where my whatever I-do-what-I-want streak comes from – it’s that life. Slade: That’s cool. That’s interesting. You know, as you were talking about that, I was thinking, well I’m putting you on the spot asking you to recall this. And I actually – when I was in high school, I think I was doing some kind of fiction competition or something. I was writing a short story for some submission and I based the short story on a dream that I had had about being a World War I trench soldier in France. Probably, you know, British soldier in the trenches. You know, that famous – where, I mean, just gazillions of people died in that area in that time period, so… And like you said, it wasn’t really - definitely was low on the totem pole. I wasn’t anybody famous, and the dream itself was just sort of a snippet of being in that experience and having a lot of sensory detail about what it felt like and I was not interested in any kind of military anything. Military history, nothing. So I didn’t really read about that kind of stuff and I wasn’t attracted to movies or anything about it. But because of that dream, I have had a lifelong interest in a World War I and World War II history, particularly in Europe, and am constantly drawn to things about the trench warfare in particular. So, I don’t know. It’s really weird. It’s like I can take on the idea of past lives and the story and if somebody told me, “Yeah, you know that was a past life experience you were picking up on.” I’m like, okay cool. But at the same time, I don’t have any kind of hard and fast belief about it. You know what I’m saying? I don’t know. Like I feel I’m a little wary of like, being like, “Yes, you know, this is definitely true. And this is how it happened.” So, it’s just one of those things it’s like, if it comes in and finds me, I will definitely take it on board, and it certainly sounds like a good explanation, don’t you think? Ash: Yeah. I think for me, identifying a past life dream, like I said, it tends to come with some really heavy emotional energy. And I wake up in the morning with what I have termed to be the past-life-dream hangover. And it’s sort of like this dream that just sticks with you all morning and you’re really still processing a lot of the emotional energy that was attached to it. And I very much feel that emotional energy when I’m in that dream. With what’s happening and what’s going on. And, like I said, they almost always mirror something that is going on in my current life that is attached to that karmic pattern. Slade: Interesting. So it’s like, something that is happening in your life now will prompt an attachment to that memory or bring it to the surface in some way, you think? Ash: Yeah, and, I mean, I’m in the camp that believes that our lives are actually – time doesn’t exist and our lives are happening simultaneously, and so it’s not even necessarily a past thing that happened. It could be that I’m actually tapping into this other life that is me as it’s happening. And we’re experiencing these things at the same time. Slade: Interesting. Okay, now that’s really good. That’s juicy. I like that. How did you arrive at that theory? How did that come to you? Ash: I think that – first of all, I think it’s actually a scientific fact nowadays, but coming through my spiritual development, I have channelled stuff about it that has just sort of come out and like, “Wow, where did that come from. That’s really juicy.” And then I go look it up and it’s like, “Oh! This is related to Einstein’s theory of relativity – weird!” Slade: Yeah. Ash: And then I’ve also seen a lot of other people have come up with sort of the same information. And when I see a recurring pattern in things that other people are channelling and feeling and thinking, I pay attention to that. And I don’t necessarily – I think people get too bogged down in the details. And they miss the commonality and the theme with the little nuggets of truth that are at the base of it. You know what I mean? Slade: Yeah, you’re right. Most people are interested or concerned with the who and the detail – the kind of set dressing of the historical time period and, you know, all that kind of stuff because that’s fun. Let’s face it, you know. We all want to get dressed up and be a princess in another culture. But, yeah, you’re right. The underlying theme there is really what’s most important from it. I, you know, as we’re sitting here talking, and maybe it’s because I’m, you know, picking up on your energy and you’re drawing things to the surface, but I have an actual other good past life experience story. When I was in Hawaii at an Angel Therapy Practitioners’ Conference – I think this was in 2008 – I met a British woman there named Hannah Ehlers who I will link to Hannah in the show notes, and I’m probably going to have to send her a message now and say, “Hey, you need to listen to my podcast.” I haven’t talked to her in forever but I just remembered as you were speaking that she and I were hanging out in the pool as one does in Hawaii at our convention, and she was talking about how she does past life readings on people and that was, you know, kind of one of the things that she did. And I told her that I had had this lifelong aversion to anything that has to do with childbirth. Like, seeing - Ash: (inaudible) Slade: Yeah, yeah. And probably a lot of people do, because if the past life thing is real, then, you know, there’s a ton of us who have died in childbirth, right? And, so, I mean, I have – even if it’s a silly labour scene on a sitcom, like it is – I cannot be in the same room with it. I have to turn the channel and this was a lifelong thing. It just would make me cringe. And it was one of the only things that I could identify like that in my whole life. I have no snake phobias or fear of heights or anything like that, but the sound of someone being in childbirth, even in fictional circumstance, was like, NO, cannot do this. And I said something to her about that, because we were talking about it, and she just very quickly told me what the situation was. And she told me she said, “Actually, you did not die in childbirth. You were in the other room and you experienced your wife being in distress and dying in childbirth and so that’s why the sound of witnessing it is not really about experiencing it so much as just hearing it is very triggering. And I was like, “Wow…” First of all, I would’ve guessed that it was because it was something that happened to me personally, and I would never have thought, “Oh, I didn’t necessarily go through it but I witnessed it in some way.” That has made a different imprint. Because actually, there’s a sense of helplessness when you are the person who maybe is not the victim but the witness. Or, you know, somebody who cannot help someone that you care about, you know, when they’re sick or in distress or whatever. Speaking of heavy stuff, you know, but – so I took that in and, I was like, okay, she was very quick with the story and she told me a whole lot of other specific details and how it related to a phobia that my mother has that was very accurate as well, and she even told me, she said “Your mother was present at that time. She was your child and you two survived the situation. And that’s a past life karmic thing that you have as souls.” And, you know, it just went on and on and I was like, “Okay… okay cool!” And I have to tell you, and I’ve never told her this, I don’t think, but I’ve never once had that experience since that conversation. Like, I can watch Call the Midwife all day long now. Ash: Have you ever read, I think it’s Many Lives, Many Masters? Slade: Yes! Way back. I was probably in my teens or early twenties. Ash: That is like the exact thing that Brian Weiss talks about with his clients when doing their past life regressions. He brings them back to this moment where this phobia centers around, and the minute that that’s brought into your conscious awareness, it can finally be processed and released and it no longer exists anymore. Slade: You’re right. That’s so true. Ohmygod I love this. Now I want to have Hannah come on the show. Shoutout to Hannah! Very cool. And I’m glad you remember the Many Lives, Many Masters, because that’s kind of like one of the bibles of past life stuff, right? Ash: Right. I’m actually a huge fan of Michael Newton as well. Journey of Souls, Destiny of Souls, I thought was a really great thing. It’s kind of more like between-lives work, but it’s still really really good. Slade: So what’s the difference between between-life work and past-life work? Ash: So past life work is, they take you into the past life itself, and dig around there and bring things into your awareness. Life between lives is where they take you into I guess what you would maybe consider the bardo state, where you’re doing your pre-life planning, so to speak, about what you’re wanting to experience in this life and which past lives is attached to and why and it sort of gives you a view of the afterlife in a structural form and kind of what happens during the death process when you come back into that place and you review your life and you see what worked, what didn’t and what you want to create in the next one. Slade: Wow. Have you done any of that for yourself? Ash: I did! I did a Quantum Healing Hypnosis Therapy session which is a Dolores Cannon method, and it is technically a life-between-lives type work thing. Have you ever seen the OA on Netflix? Slade: Yes. I like it. Ash: Okay. There is a part in the OA when she’s sort of in her near-death state and she’s talking to the woman in the room with the galaxy walls and everything. Slade: Yes! Ash: I forget… Slade: Beautiful. Ash: That’s very similar to what I saw in this regression when I experienced my death and went into that place. I was standing there and I was able to look down at the floor into this sort of like pool and see myself on my deathbed and there were these three beings that were there. They were very tall and I kind of got the feeling that that was sort of like my counsel. And I was standing in front of them and we were reviewing that life. And the imagery just really stuck with me and when I saw that part of the OA, I was like, “Ohmygod! That’s it!” Slade: It’s interesting that you pulled that out because that is the most impactful memorable image to me, and there are a lot of them, in that show actually. There’s some amazing stuff. I mean, even the crash sequence on the bridge when the car goes into the water and all that stuff. I mean, there’s so many scenes that are shot in very unique ways but you’re right. That part where she crawls up into the room where the walls are made out of stars and… there’s something about that that – I welled up emotionally, like, you know, felt very teary watching that. Even from the first time you see it and you’re not really sure in the context of the story, you know, what may be happening or whatever, but just as an image, that tweaked my mind. That was an Inception-kind of feeling for me, watching that. It was very cool. Awesome. So, let me ask you this. Because it’s all fun and it’s very interesting and it’s kind of good story telling. How do you think we can use these stories to make a difference in our lives now? What kind of result do you see when you work with someone around this dream stuff? What can someone expect to improve I guess about their current situation? Ash: The sky’s the limit. It all really just depends on what your intention is and what you want out of it. You know. It’s a tool like anything else. It’s like using tarot cards. It’s like using a pendulum or going to get a psychic reading. It’s all - whatever information you uncover is going to help you in whatever it is that you’re attempting to move forward with. I think it’s particularly good when you’re working with blocked emotional energy from be it past lives, current lives, whatever. Your dreams are – they’re your window to your own subconscious mind. They’re constantly reflecting yourself back to you. The parts of yourself that you are unaware of or that are unknown to you. And in some ways, it’s very much shadow work. Slade: Yes. Ash: And the whole purpose of it is to help us integrate more and more of that shadow self until we become whole. Consciously whole, I should say. Slade: There are a couple takeaways for me from this conversation with you that really change my perspective on a few things. I never really thought about dreams as being a psychic tool. I don’t know what I – I had it in a different category entirely. Like, maybe psychic ability is like a channel and then dreams are a channel, or something like that. But you’re right. When I work with people around the concept of tools, I use that word very loosely to describe anything from a modality to a technique to a divination art to, you know, a subject that you might study or healing practice that you take on. So I’ve never really thought about, oh, dreams just need to be another one of those tools to pull from. And the other thing is this idea that you sort of - sums it up when you said, “It’s essentially a kind of shadow work.” But the idea that one of the reasons why these dreams are important is not so much the surface layer of the visuals and the detail and the costumes and all that kind of stuff. But this idea that whether it is actually a memory of a past life or it is your brain presenting your own stuff within that story, it’s still useful for the theme that’s at the bottom. You know what I mean? Ash: Right. Slade: Like whatever the theme is that’s trying to be communicated to you. So that’s really cool. Thank you, for that. I will go away pondering and thinking about this whole topic differently because of that. And, you know, I think that actually might give me a shift around my whole attitude about dreams, because I’m kind of – I’m a bad dreamer, so maybe I sleep deeper than I thought or whatever it might be. But I, you know, it’s weird when you have an attitude like, “Oh, I’m not good at that so I’m not going to do it,” and I have a little bit of that prejudice against this topic. Ash: Um hmm. Slade: So I’m interested to see how that’s going to impact me. Because you’re right, it will change my intention when I lay down to go to sleep, just having that shift and kind of opening up to the possibility of that. So it’s very cool. Thank you for doing that. Just to make sure that we get an invitation from you, where should people go if they want to start working with you or if they want to download some of your free resources. Tell us where to go. Ash Go to my website at https://inmysacredspace.com/ and basically you can navigate to just about anywhere on my site from the home page. I, like I said, I do readings, I do – and I wouldn’t necessarily call it a “reading”. I work much more in the realm of personal development. And so, you can come to me. I’m not going to predict your future for you. I’m not going to tell you if and when your ex is coming back to you. What I will tell you is what it is that is underneath the surface that is keeping you from having meaningful relationships. And I’ll help you pull that forward and then we can work through that. You know, I’m much more geared toward helping you overcome these things than just telling you what to do or what to think or what to see. Thanks again for listening to the Shift Your Spirits podcast. For show notes, links, transcripts and all the past episodes please visit shiftyourspirits.com You can subscribe in iTunes or Stitcher or whatever app you use to access podcasts. You don’t have to use the purple button on your iPhone — some people don’t like that app. My personal favorite podcast app is Overcast. So, check that one out. If you’d like to get an intuitive reading with me, or download a free ebook and meditation to help you connect with your guides please go to sladeroberson.com and If you’re interested in my professional intuitive training program, you can start the course for free by downloading the Attunement at automaticintuition.com BEFORE I GO I promised to leave you a message in answer to a question or a concern you may have. So take a moment to think about your issue—hold it in your mind or speak it out loud—I’ll pause for just a few seconds….right…NOW 1…2…3…4 MESSAGE Right now, your thoughts may not be as logical and factual and true as you’d like to think. Emotions are running the show. But remember, you are not necessarily your feelings; you are the one experiencing them. To get some perspective or relief, you can zoom out and observe them from a distance. Emotions are about the sacred element water. And water is about fluidity. So, lose your rigidity. Relax your self-imposed rules. See where the water wants to carry you and allow change to happen with as little resistance as possible. And I’ll talk to you later.

I'm sharing a recent phenomena I've been experiencing — I dream that I'm other people. Like, I'm tuning in to other people's lives when I'm sleeping. This episode has a full text transcript below. MENTIONED IN THE SHOW "You Are God; Act LIke It" Ash Riley HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses Get an intuitive reading with Slade Automatic Intuition BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits TRANSCRIPT Hey, thanks for listening to the Shift Your Spirits podcast. I’m your host Slade Roberson. For eleven years, I’ve been a professional intuitive and the author of the blog ‘Shift Your Spirits’, where I try to write about spirituality with fewer hearts and flowers than most New Age blather. I also mentor emerging intuitives, psychics, and healers in a program called Automatic Intuition. Today, I want to share some creepy dream possession experiences I’ve been having. And, of course, as always, I have an oracle segment at the end. So be thinking about a question or a concern you have. Hold it in your mind, and I’ll come back on at the end of the show, after the final links and credits, and leave you with an extra channeled message… BUT BEFORE I FORGET It’s August 1, 2017 as I record this and over the weekend the ‘Shift Your Spirits’ podcast did indeed cross 10,000 downloads. It's cool to stop and think that what you are doing right now has happened over 10,000 times in just the last four months. That’s kind of mind boggling. This double new moon in Leo eclipse month Thing seems to be really messing with me. I am a Leo, so, I heard, you know, that it’s especially difficult for Leos. I am struggling with my writing at the moment. I’m a working writer. I have been for over a decade. I write specific hours every day. It’s a job. It has taken me by surprise to be struggling with my process, all of a sudden, out of nowhere. And I don’t want to be someone who complains and feels no joy in the thing that I do every day. That I identify as my purpose and who I am. So, you know, that’s just not happening. That’s not an option. So, I have decided to back off a little and take some time and energy to redecorate and reorganize my study. I spend way too much of my life working and creating and communicating from a room that’s disorganized and a little depressing and just crammed with random stuff. It’s one of those ugly spare rooms many of us have that became my workspace by default. It just hasn’t been shown the love and the intention, and I’m hoping that since I’m struggling with an internal process, the solution may be to shift the physical external environment to better represent how I want to feel on the inside. You’ve probably heard the How to F up Your Ability to Manifest episode — it’s the most downloaded episode of this show ever — so you’ll know that one of my rules is: if you want to state a complaint about how horrible your life is, you must attach a possible solution. So that’s how I’m going to handle this. I’ll keep you posted. Also, another big milestone. August 1st is also my blog’s birthday. Eleven years ago today, I sat right here in this very spot, in a completely different life, and I posted my first post: “You are God; Act Like It.” And with that one message released into the collective, my life began to change drastically. For the better. And I became this person that you know now. I want to take a moment to shout out to Scott Vaughn, who is my newest supporter on Patreon. Thank you, Scott. I appreciate all of you who have pledged your support. It demonstrates that you are enjoying the show and want it to continue. That’s very encouraging to me. You too can support my time in producing the show and the young woman who is creating our transcripts by pledging on Patreon for as little as $1 a month. Listeners who support on Patreon can also access bonus Q&A episodes, where you send in questions, I record answers to them, and they go out to patrons of the show exclusively. So if you want to find out how you can become a patron, especially if you would like the transcription to continue, please go to patreon.com/shiftyourspirits. I’m going to cut this introduction here. This episode is a little bit longer than the others. Maybe you will like that; or maybe you want me to keep them short. You can write and tell me how you feel about the show length. But for now, I want to share some personal experiences with you about my dreams. I don't dream very much, you know. Like, most of you probably have stress dreams about your everyday life or you have these dreams that are very whimsical and full of symbolic wacky stuff that doesn’t make much sense. And, you know, the kind of thing that you explain to somebody the next day and tell them this cool story about, “Ohmygod I had this dream last night and it was really weird and this thing happened and this other thing happened” and, you know, being on the outside of that looking in, I am always a little bit annoyed by people who tell you long drawn out blow-by-blow dream stories unless it’s like about you or there’s some really significant punch line and they’re pretty good at telling stories. But to people who kind of dump this sort of old school psychiatrist dream info dump analysis scenario on you, like on your lunch break or whatever, that always has annoyed me and I wonder if one of the reasons why I’m annoyed by it is because I’m a little jealous. I’m envious. It doesn’t really happen to me. Of course, there are exceptions and I’m speaking in really general terms, but I don’t really dream. And when I say that, put an asterisk there and a footnote, what I mean by “I don’t dream much” is – either I’m not aware that I’m dreaming when it’s happening, or I don’t remember it. I don’t have any kind of recall about it later or sense that it happened. I am a light sleeper, meaning, you know, I’ll wake up really easily if someone is making a noise or something like that. I’m very noise-averse. I do almost sensory deprivation when I sleep. I wear earplugs. I wear a visual mask, you know, a little velvet mask over my eyes to block light. And I like white noise, but even that has gotten to the point where that bothers me as well. So – but, I will say this – I am a very regular sleeper. I sleep the exact same number of hours. Every night I go to bed at the same time, get up at the same time, seven days a week. My internal clock is like, within ten minutes. I rarely use an alarm clock. I wake up at the same time just automatically and, once I’m awake, I’m awake. And I get up. Like, I don’t really like to be in bed, but, you know, just that’s to kind of give you some context about where I’m coming from. I’m not an insomniac or, you know, I don’t have any issues around sleep really at all other than I’m very protective of it. But I am sort of jealous of people who have daily symbolic sort of stream-of-consciousness films happening in their interior that they can get up the next day and think about. And obviously, you know, I have exceptions to this. I recently mentioned on one of the episodes of this show when I was talking about signs and synchronicities, when all that was happening, I did actually have this really super symbolic, very-aware-of-it-when-I-woke-up dream about the giant snail hovering in the sky. And I was able to look that up. But, you know, I don’t really have those kind of dreams where you can look it up when you wake up. And you know, I would like to have that sort of dream life because I feel like it’s one of these tools within the kind of intuitive realm where it’s a whole channel that I don’t have. I’m like somebody who doesn’t have cable or doesn’t have Netflix or something. I’m like, missing this whole psychological intuitive creative platform. I just don’t have access to it, so, I don’t know. There’s different theories about this. I had one person tell me that maybe because of the kind of work that I do, that I’ve become used to slipping in and out of certain kinds of consciousness states in my daily waking life that other people don’t access. And it’s one of the reasons why people want to meditate more or, you know, do sort of mindfulness activities and that I actually have incorporated that so much into my sort of work life that maybe there’s something that other people don’t get that they only get when they dream, and so, maybe that’s been sort of messed up in some way, or, not messed up, I don’t want to say there’s anything wrong with me. I just think it’s different. Or, it could be – I don’t know… I don’t know. If you have a theory, you can write and tell me. If you have some kind of feeling about it. But anyway, I’m not that stressed about it. I have kind of given up thinking about it. But I do feel a little bit apologetic about the fact that I don’t write about dreams and I don’t do a lot of dream analysis conversations and it doesn’t come up a lot in readings. If people approach me about that subject, or, you know, I get like requests to write certain article topics, or to do shows about certain topics. And that might be one of those areas that people are like, “Oh, do something about dream analysis or dream symbolism,” and people often write in asking for me to do sessions that are sort of launched or prompted by analysing dreams that they’ve had and wanting to know what they mean. And so I feel like it’s one of those areas that I just don’t have access to. I don’t think we all have to do everything. There’s a few things I don’t do. I don’t do mediumship, I don’t do dreamwork, and I don’t do a lot of past lives stuff. And so, I’m a little disappointing in those areas if you’re hoping to get a lot from me. But, the good news is – one of the reasons why I wanted to record this episode and tell you about some dream stuff that’s happening with me that is a little bit fantastical and interesting is because I’ve had it on my brain. I’m getting ready to interview someone for this show, Ash Riley, actually, and she and I have done a little bit of pre-conversation about where we want to take the conversation that would be interesting for you guys, and she mentioned dreamwork. And how that is something that she’s focusing on a lot right now, and I thought, “Cool! This is my opportunity to bring that to you guys through someone else’s expertise if not mine.” But, so I’m going to interview Ash and likely you’re listening to this either right before the episode with her or right after. I’ll put them somewhere close together because they came together in my mind in creating them. So, anyway, I wanted – and I got into the conversation actually a little bit with Ash in Messenger and we were texting back and forth and I was telling her about, you know, this - what I’m telling you right now – that I don’t dream, except, I have some really cool exceptions. But, I do want to say this. You know, as an adult, I rarely, rarely, almost never have nightmares. Or bad dreams. Like, ever. That’s just not a part of something that I experience and so I’m very thankful for that. But at the same time, I also don’t have very many cool like “Inception-like” surrealist fantasy dreams either. So, I don’t really have anything in either extreme too much. But – I used to dream – I used to have bad dreams a lot when I was a little kid. Mostly about my brother. I would have a lot of fearful dreams about him because he was very accident-prone. He was kind of a disaster kid and I was usually the one that was with him when the 911 would go down, you know, whether or not we were out playing somewhere or whatever. So, I had a lot of anxiety about him getting hurt and me having to rescue him. So, of course, you know, I had dreams about that a lot. The other thing that I remember from childhood about dreams was, when I was a little kid, I took books to bed. I don’t remember ever having an interest in stuffed animals, but books to me had a kind of a quality that maybe other people project onto their stuffed animals, and I think books kind of had like these little spirit animal souls to them or something. I also remember very distinctly throughout my entire life from the earliest memories that I have, feeling like, if I read just before falling asleep, which I do religiously, it’s part of how I do fall asleep, if I read while I’m falling asleep and I have a book in my presence in my bed with me, that there’s a really good chance that I can slip into the world of the book through my dreams. And you know, like I always want this to happen now about my own novels. I’m always working on fiction somewhere over in another corner of my life, and one of the things I’ve noticed is, it tends to be the very last thing that I think about when I’m falling asleep. Because I’ll be reading someone else’s fiction up to the point that I’ve become sleepy, and then as I kind of turn out the light and put my book away and take my glasses off and rearrange the pillows and then kind of go in for that last little bit of wakefulness before I sleep, I will think about my own books and, you know, the scenes that are coming up that I have to write, and something that I am worrying about or trying to figure out, trying to make sense of. And so, I did have this one really cool experience. Only one time have I ever dreamed my way into one of my own books, and I kind of think that deep down, this is what I’m hoping will happen when I’m thinking about – I’m thinking – okay well maybe I’ll fall asleep and I’ll fall into my dream world and I will figure something out about – like, the book will happen for me like a movie and then I can just get up tomorrow and be like, “Oh that was amazing I’m going to write that.” So it only happened to me one time. When I was working on the novel, HAVENWOOD, which is a historical fantasy. There is a sort-of plantation in this – in the main character’s world. She owns a farm and there is a long section in the book where she’s actually working in the fields with her workers, you know, as one of them. And I did have this really amazing dream that was a fly-over drone shot of the scene of her working in the fields and this line of – actually they’re elves who work for her, so that was really cool. And I remember it being very lucid and as I was kind of hovering over them, I was like, “Ohmygod they are my elves; they look amazing!” It was like, the first time that anyone had ever sort of CGI-movie-effect shown me my own imagination in a way that felt like I was an audience for it. And it’s kind of hard to describe when you tell someone like, “I know what these creatures look like, and I can describe them, but I also don’t see them the way that you see something on screen in a movie.” And so even if, you know, if someone ever were to make a movie or something that I’d written, I would have the same experience anyone else has with like, seeing it for the first time, adapted in some kind of visual way. So anyway, these are the kind of things I think about around dreaming. But - so obviously there are a few cool exceptions. So when I say “I don’t dream,” there’s a “…” but, you know, once in awhile, I have these kind of cool, you know, sort of scenarios happen. And the reason why I wanted to talk about this on this episode, and the point, which I do have and I am getting to, is lately I’ve started to dream just a little bit more frequently, and by that I want to say, quantify that as sort of here and there. Maybe a few times a month? And this has been, let’s say, in the last six months or so. My dreams are not sort of freaky versions of my life. They’re actually very normal dreams about other people’s lives. Like, this episode is about the fact that I have a theory I’m beginning to believe that I dream that I’m other people. And that these people are probably real, like they exist somewhere out there in the world and that I am picking up on them or walking into their life in some way. I’ve heard people say that, you know, astral travellers are, you know, or – no, I know what I’ve heard. The theory that ghosts might actually be people who are astral travelling and one of the reasons ghosts always appear to be in nightgowns and stuff is because they’re sleeping. They’re sleeping people who are astral projecting from, you know, another part of the world or whatever. I don’t even know where I heard that but it’s an interesting idea. It would make a cool movie. But, so, I’ve been having these dreams that really make me think: okay, wait a minute. I think something’s actually going on here. And I want to tell you one that I had a few months ago that really freaked me out. And it was so exceptional that I also told a friend of mine about it and it became like, a whole thing and it went down in my notebook and I’m just now getting around to talking about it to you guys. But, a few months ago I had a dream about a waitress, and – actually I should say, I had a dream that I was a waitress. And I knew lots of circumstances about my life. I knew that, you know, I was working in some kind of chain restaurant. It felt like an Applebys or like an Outback steakhouse or something like that. I was a little bit older, you know, maybe in my late 20s, like, at an age when people go back to school. And I had worked at, sort of cooler places before as a waitress and I was sort of not happy about working in this sort of chain environment because I didn’t feel like the tips were as good, and I was just generally kind of depressed about it. And I was in nursing school. I’d gone back to school and I had decided I was going to go into nursing, and I was probably having some kind of like, sad-on-return you know late 20s, early 30s kind of life crisis because I remember very distinctly feeling this sense of ‘ennui’ about this shift at Applebys or whatever. And, also, knowing that I was doing this because I was in nursing school and I wasn’t really excited about the nursing school thing either. I was kind of going through the motions and I was depressed. So, anyway, there’s this guy that I’m waiting on and, at one of my tables, and he’s a little creepy. He, he’s not creepy in a sleazy kind of way, like looks like a Wanted poster or anything like that. He was actually kind of nice and clean-cut looking but he was a little too, like, dead in the eyes, even though he was smiley and he was flirting, not in a gross, like super obnoxious way, but he was just overly friendly and leering and he just, you know, he just creeped me out. And I was really anxious to sort of get rid of him and give him his check and send him on his way. And it wasn’t really busy. It was like an early shift before, you know, a lot of dinner crowd. There was like, one little family and, you know, then this guy was by himself. Anyway, long story short. He was kind of rattling me to the point where I just didn’t really want to go back to his table and I finally had dropped his bill and so I went to this other waitress and I told her what was going on and I described the way he was making me feel and everything, and she said, “Well, I’ll watch the table and I’ll run his card or whatever. Why don’t you just, you know, like go take a break, go to the bathroom or something. Just don’t even bother interacting with him and maybe he’ll be gone by the time you get back.” And so, I was like, “Yeah, cool.” And I went to the bathroom. And here’s where the part where it really freaks me out. I always have a sense when I’m having these dreams that I’m other people – I’m in their body so I’m not seeing myself from outside the body but I do have moments where I look down and I notice, like, “Oh, I have a girl’s hands” or “I have - I’m a different skin color” or something like that. So I’ve seen my clothes, I see things sort of out of my peripheral vision. And, I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed this before, but I’ve never ever had a dream where I was looking in a mirror. I’ve just – I can’t think of any instance where that’s ever happened. So I go in this bathroom, and at that moment I realize that I’m lucid dreaming. I’m aware that I’m the dreamer even as I’m aware that I am this girl. And I know as she’s walking towards the mirror I’m thinking, “Ohmygod, I’m going to need to see what she looks like.” And I’m sort of waiting for that moment when her eyes will pan up and make contact in the mirror and I will get to see what she looks like. And there’s a sense of nervousness about it because I’m kind of thinking, wait a minute, I can’t see myself in a dream and see another face looking at me. This is going to be really weird. And as she gets close to the mirror and looks up, it actually feels painful to me, like a migraine kind of pain, or actually it felt a lot like when your eyes are super dilated from being to the eye doctor. I remember one time they just really dilated the crap out of my eyes, like to the point where it was almost painful. And it was like that kind of feeling. And like this feeling like, please don’t make me look at myself, like I can’t do this, and thinking, surely there’s going to be a cutaway. Something’s going to happen and break this moment. I’m not actually going to look at myself in the mirror and see someone else looking back, and I did. I distinctly saw – and I was like, squinting, it was like the light hurt and it hurt to see this face looking back at me, but I saw who I was very distinctly. I had blond hair, and you know, like I said, I was sort of in my late 20s, and relatively attractive young woman. Sort of depressed looking, you know, kind of tired-like. She hadn’t really gone to much trouble to sort of make herself – you know how you just sort of go through the motions of what’s acceptable for you to look like when you go to work and you’re not feeling it, you know? She looked, sort of, harassed and kind of tired and – but I saw her distinctly and the whole time I’m thinking, “Ohmygod, I am someone else. I’m dreaming I’m someone else’s life.” So at that point I sort of slip away from the lucid part and go back into her a little bit. And I think there was a little bit of a time jump in the dream, you know, as dreams do. It sort of cuts like a television show, and I’m finally off work and I’m leaving and I’m walking outside and I’m somewhere desert. This is a desert environment I would say most likely Arizona, and the reason why I thought it was Arizona because that’s the one kind of state in the southwest that I’ve been to that looks like what this looked like. But, you know, we’ve all seen a lot of tv and so we know what that part of the country looks like and it’s definitely that part of the country. But I am getting into my car and I’m, you know, going home or whatever. It’s kind of not super late in the evening, but you know it is night time. The sky has a kind of glow to it. It’s more lit up than I think it would be in Tennessee, which is where I live right now, probably because of the flatness of the geography or something. So I’m noting all these things as the dream is happening to me and I get in my car and I start driving, I want to say north. And there’s really nothing once I start driving away from this sort of little area off the highway where there’s like, you know, restaurants and convenient stores and you know hotels and all that kind of stuff that there is off any interstate in the United States. I’m sort of driving away from that, going towards an area that looks more sparsely populated and I get a few miles down the road and I run out of gas. My car is like sputtering and I pull over and I’m thinking, “This is impossible. I distinctly remember getting gas, you know, maybe two days ago max.” There – and I feel this really weird panic because my first thought is like, all the gas has drained out of my car, like, how is this possible? Like it’s gone somewhere. Somebody took my gas or else it’s been – some hose or something somewhere’s come undone and all the gas has spilled out of my car. And that was my sense. My sense was not like, what’s wrong with the car or, you know, oh crap I ran out of gas. You know like it was something I could accept. I knew she knew that something was like really really wrong with this scenario, and I get out of the car and I’m thinking, ohmygod, like, do I keep walking home or do I try to walk back to sort of civilization? I think I was sort of somewhere kind of halfway in between and it was going to be potentially a hike either way and I’m thinking, oh but I don’t want to leave my car on the side of the road and all this kind of stuff is going through my head. Someone pulls over to help me and it’s the guy – the creepy guy from the restaurant, and I’m thinking, oh crap, you’ve got to be kidding me, like, I definitely – it made all the hairs kind of stand up on my arms and on the back of my neck and I was getting like a creeped out feeling but more than anything it was a little bit annoyed feeling, like, ugh, here he is, and he’s like, smiling and you can tell he’s just so thrilled to be able to help me in this scenario. And he has this whole excuse to interact with me again and… So, the thing is though, he’s trying to convince me – he’s being very sweet and very nice and very low key. He’s like, “Listen, you know, obviously I can take you back. We can get some gas. I have a gas can or I can take you back and you can call someone.” He’s not being super obnoxious about it but he is trying to convince me, like, you know, like, just get in the car and let me take you with me. And I’m kind of, okay, you know, convinced, I’m thinking I’m being overly paranoid. If I hadn’t had seen this guy earlier in the evening and had this interaction with him, I probably wouldn’t feel afraid. But it’s something about the synchronicity of it being him was bothering me a little bit, but I gave in to it. And I got in the car, and he’s being really chatty and really friendly like he was in the restaurant, but he’s not driving back towards town. He’s driving out away in the direction that I was originally going but he’s going on and I’m like, okay wait a minute, trying to figure out a way to kind of say, wait a minute weren’t you going to go the other direction, without sounding panicked, trying to sound nonchalant about it. I look over – I kind of glance over at him. I’m trying not to look at him too much or whatever. I’m sort of trying to stare ahead and act like, oh crap what’s going on I gotta get myself out of this situation. And I glance over and he has his hand on his lap, kind of inside his thighs, and there’s a gun in his hand. And he has it laying there. In his lap. For me to see. At that moment, the fear drove me out of this woman’s body and out of this dream. I wake up and I’m like, ohmygod, that was – that’s a person. Something really happened to this person and I’m dreaming it. And I don’t know if it happened at the moment that I was dreaming it or if it’s something, you know, I mean not to toot my own horn or anything, but one of the things that I don’t do is like, you know, police detective psychic work where I find missing people or something like that. I’ve never had that kind of experience and the first thing that crossed my mind was, what if this is a straight up like medium, you know the tv show kind of scenario, where I’m picking up on some kind of criminal information that’s very valuable and real? And that was my first thought. So it’s Sunday morning when I wake up and I always go to breakfast with my friend Tina every Sunday morning. And Tina is a friend of mine I mention often because she’s very much into paranormal investigation and she has a lot of supernatural sort of experience happen in her house a lot. And so we ended up – we always end up talking about this stuff, especially if something happened during the week and she often has, you know, little creepy things happen to her that she loves to tell me about, and so, I, of course, was like telling her this whole story just as I’m telling it to you guys, and she immediately goes into – this is a real thing, this is really happening, you need to look this up, is there some way we can Google for this woman? Is there some kind of missing persons thing? So we’re sitting there in the restaurant where we have breakfast and on the smartphone looking for missing persons listings for Arizona. You know, that’s kind of the first thing we start with. And so I really quickly found out that there are actually Missing Persons groups on Facebook and they’re organized by state. And so, Tina’s like, let’s scroll through here and see if you see this person. Would you know her if you saw her? And I said, you know what? I would absolutely know her if I see her. I saw her in the mirror. If I see her face, I will recognise her. So I’m scrolling through there and I’m really expecting that I’m going to see a picture of this woman and be like, ohmygod it’s her, you know. And I’m scrolling through there and the thing that I was really struck by was how no one even came close to looking like this woman. None of the listings were for anybody that I’d even think, ooo could that be her? Maybe that’s her? Nothing was even close, you know. It was like a child or, you know, an elderly woman who was, you know, Latino just completely not anything that I was anticipating seeing, and I think my fear in this moment was, okay what if there’s a whole bunch of people that are kind of close to this woman’s description and I’m going to have a hard time deciding, could that be her could that not be her? But I have to tell you guys, I spent, you know, that whole day and then it started to really bother me and haunt me the more that I couldn’t find, you know, a record of her in some way, the more stressed I got about it and the more I started to look and go into other states’ groups and look in New Mexico and look in, you know, Utah and just anywhere that I thought might have that landscape, just thinking, you know, the synchronicity of this is too powerful for me to not follow through on it. It has to mean something. I couldn’t find her. I never found her and the thing is, I never even found anything close. It was a total bust. And I thought, alright, well, spirits, if this is your way of giving me some police detective psychic kind, you know, of bit of information, this is horrible because I can’t do anything with it. I don’t even – I can’t even be the crazy person that randomly calls a police station and reports something. And I’ve heard that, you know, psychics call in and tell - report things to detectives all the time. I didn’t even really – like, who would I call to do that? Even if I wanted to just make some kind of random, like, put-it-out-there sort of phone call. But anyway, I – this one has really stuck with me as being significant partly because of the fact that I saw her. And secondly because part of me believes that the reason why I could’ve been picking up on it is because it was happening at that moment and that that could’ve explained why it wasn’t a story yet, posted on a website. You know, it could’ve been some time later. I don’t know. Even as I’m telling you this, I’m feeling like maybe I need to go back and look again. Now it could be this missing persons cold case or something. But, so – my whole thing is: why would I dream this? Why would I dream something so specific and about another person to this degree? I mean, it doesn’t make sense to me. I know what it feels like to have a normal dream where I’m like working and it’s tedious and it’s weird and doesn’t make sense when I wake up but you know there it is. So since having this experience, I also have had a few other examples and they’re not anything that interesting or significant. They’re, like I said, I don’t have freaky dreams about my own life. I kind of have these normal dreams about other people’s lives and so, just to try to pull up a couple of examples because I usually don’t even remember them for very long after I have them. But I recently dreamt that I was in Amsterdam and I was some kind of architecture or interior design person and I was at some kind of conference in Amsterdam and I was out having drinks with other people in my field and we were all speaking German and I don’t know if, like, I felt like German was not my language necessarily, but for some reason, either a lot of the other people at the table were German. There was some reason why we were speaking German and I recognize that I was speaking German because it’s a language that I’ve taken a little bit of. And then, at one point, you know, in this bar I run into this guy from high school. Which, I don’t even think that’s the right term because I think we’re all Europeans in this dream and I don’t think they call it high school. But, I ran into this guy who knew me from my home, who was a teenager and – I’m a man in this dream but I’m like, a completely different age and I’m from somewhere I want to say, like, Hungary, maybe? And this guy recognizes me from school and I remember being sort of annoyed that I had to talk to him and do that whole like, ohmygod, you know, like how are you, it’s been ten years, and you know that whole thing. And he wasn’t somebody that I really liked very much or wanted to have that whole pissing contest with. He was kind of a douche bag and obviously trying to impress me. The one thing that I noticed as I’m dreaming it is that we switched languages. He was speaking to me in another language and I don’t really recognize this language. It definitely sounded Slavic to my ear. And I’ve studied German and Russian and there were a lot of eastern European languages that sound vaguely similar to Russian, so I knew it was a Slavic tongue from one of the smaller sort of eastern European countries. And that that was my native tongue. That was my first language and there was a sense of relief and flow about that language. In my mind, as the lucid dreamer, I know what’s being said. I sort of just claircognizantly understand what’s being said even as I can hear that this is a foreign language that I don’t speak. So that was just like a dream. You know, that I had one month. And then maybe the month after that, I had another dream that I was staying at this hotel with a friend of mine who was like, a girl that worked with me and I know this sounds really cheesy, but I think we were models and we were possibly like, British. We were European and I think we were speaking English but we were in Tokyo. We’re in Japan and we’re in this really nice fancy hotel that we’ve been put up in as part of a job. And we’ve been out partying and apparently maybe our job there is over and we’re supposed to check out of the hotel and we’re actually overstaying. You know, it’s like you have to check out by a certain time and we are literally too wasted and hungover and just rode hard to get it together and you know pack and all this stuff. And I remember laying there, just, ugh, feeling horrible and my friend is kind of like chattering away and I’m just waiting for there to be a knock at the door and for the hotel management to come and throw us out and I’m thinking, I’ve got to convince her we need to pull it together and get out of here because they’re going to throw us out. And… Yeah, so that dream doesn’t really lead anywhere either but those are just the two that I can think of in this moment as I’m recording that show you how I have these really specific dreams and I’m other people in really specific places and I know a lot of details about their lives and these are not dreams about me. And they’re not dreams from a past life or something like that. They’re just kind of like I’m tuning in to someone else. Like I’m just wandering around the globe in my sleep, slipping into someone’s dream life in some way. And here’s something really weird – I have a friend who’s a long-time friend of mine. We worked together in a metaphysical bookstore so we’ve had lots of conversations about metaphysical things. And she’s a dreamer. She’s a big-time dreamer. And she will regularly, maybe once a year, something like that, she’ll send me a message on Facebook and say, “You were in my dream last night and we hung out and had coffee and we talked about blahblahblah and it was really cool to see you.” And it’s kind of half in jest, but to her, like she says she really does feel like I visited her in some way. And I’m thinking, well that’s cool because I don’t really have that experience at all. But if you have it, that’s fine. So it’s kind of weird because it’s been this ongoing sort of joke, at least with her, that I travel around and visit her in my sleep and I’m thinking, what if I do that in some other kind of way? What if this is like an intuitive channel that maybe other people have this experience. Like, I know if you’re listening to this, and you’ve had this experience, I’m going to hear from you and I want to. I want you to email me and tell me. You don’t have to tell me like, your whole dream or whatever. Just tell me if this happens to you at all and what you think is going on here. Because my feeling from having been told by a psychotherapist that there may be something different with the way that I’m compartmentalizing different levels of consciousness and how I use them. That there may be some things that I do when I’m awake that I then don’t do when I’m asleep. And if so, maybe that allows me to isolate this thing that happens to all of us, like think about it. Maybe in the midst of your super-populous dream life, because you’re one of those people who has, you know, these colourful wacky dreams every night of your life, and you have a whole variety of stress dreams, and running from people dreams, and you know, sex dreams and whatever it might be. You also somewhere in that mix, you might be slipping into these dreams that you’re other people, and maybe you’re not even really aware of it. Maybe you think it’s just - you’re you. But think about it. And I’m going to ask Ash about it. See what she says. When she’s on the show, because I’ll definitely going to talk to her about dream stuff. So I feel like this will come up. And I’ll try not to re-tell the whole story because that’ll be really irritating. Maybe I’ll send her this before we speak or something like that. But anyway, yeah, just a theory. Just a thought. Just a weird little thing that I wanted to share with you guys because I think about sharing it all the time. And I’m like, where do you start with this subject. And so I want to say, just as a P. S. that I always feel like – I felt the same way about the episode that I did about signs because you have a lifetime of dreaming. You have a lifetime of signs and synchronicities, so where do you go in and start a conversation about that? So my feeling is, I just kind of have to hit record, and plop down and tell you whatever comes up. You know, what’s most on the surface of my mind, so, this doesn’t really represent the best examples ever, other than the weird story about seeing my own face and the dream and being someone else. That was the reason why I picked that story for sure. I don’t think that I’ll ever forget that dream. But, yeah. Write me. Tell me. If I’m on to something here, or if you’ve had this experience, I’d love to hear from you. Alright, I’ll shut up now. Talk to you later. Thanks again for listening to the Shift Your Spirits podcast. For show notes, links, transcripts and all the past episodes please visit shiftyourspirits.com You can subscribe in iTunes or Stitcher or whatever app you use to access podcasts. You don’t have to use the purple button on your iPhone — some people don’t like that app. My personal favorite podcast app is Overcast. So, check that one out. If you’d like to get an intuitive reading with me, or download a free ebook and meditation to help you connect with your guides please go to sladeroberson.com and if you’re interested in my professional intuitive training program, you can start the course for free by downloading the Attunement at automaticintuition.com BEFORE I GO I promised to leave you a message in answer to a question or a concern you may have. And this week, when I looked at the very first ‘Shift Your Spirits’ post from August 1, 2006, I realized it was an oracle message. It spoke to me that way, across the years. So I’m thinking it will speak to you as well. So take a moment to think about your own issue—hold it in your mind or speak it out loud—I’ll pause for just a few seconds….right…NOW 1…2…3…4 MESSAGE Your creativity and your divinity are one and the same. You most resemble God, the Creator — the ultimate, all-encompassing, whatever-you-want-to-call-it expression of All That Is — when you are co-creating your unique reality. Don’t get stuck on the word “creative” and think I’m only talking about “art.” Think bigger, more generally. If you think you don’t create, you’re wrong. You are creating your reality each and every moment. It’s inevitable and unavoidable. Creativity is inherent. It’s eminent. In Genesis, God literally assigned Adam [man, human beings] a role in Creation: to name everything. That’s our job — to continually explore and define all of reality. Reality is information. The ultimate goal of information is to saturate all creation. Thoughts are tools; words are their handles. What words are you wielding? Do they reflect how you want to feel? I’ll talk to you later.