Podcasts about shift your spirits

  Slade Roberson, professional intuitive, author, and host of the Shift Your Spirits Podcast, returns to the parlor. In Part 1 he shares tales of living in a haunted house growing up. In Part 2 he offers intuitive counseling to a listener, a clinical counselor,  with questions about intuition and trauma. Visit BigSeance.com/148 for more.   Other Listening Options Direct Download Link   In this episode: Episode Teaser :00 Intro :49 Pouring the tea! Today I’m drinking Wind Dancer tea by the sponsor of today’s episode, Nuwati Herbals. 2:25 Slade Roberson is a professional intuitive, author, and host of the podcast Shift Your Spirits, where he talks about spirituality with fewer hearts and flowers than most New Age blather. He also mentors emerging intuitives, psychics and healers in a program called Automatic Intuition. For Slade's previous episodes on the Big Seance Podcast, check out episodes 125 and 132. 3:42 The teaser for Slade’s first appearance on the Big Seance Podcast. 5:21 Tales of a Fourth Grade Haunting: A prequel to Shift Your Spirits. 6:38 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! 22:23 Everyday Intuition — Christine, a listener and professional clinical counselor, stepped in for some intuitive counseling and had questions about intuition and taking on other people’s trauma. 24:16 Christine gets advice on hearing and interpreting information from spirit guides and how to improve this ability. 43:55 Final thoughts from Slade. 54:09 A special THANK YOU to Patreon supporters at the Super Paranerd and Parlor Guest level! 57:32 Outro 59:26   For more on Slade Roberson: AutomaticIntuition.com ShiftYourSpirits.com Facebook: Shift Your Spirits Twitter: @SladeRoberson   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!      

I know the title may be throwing you. It’ll make sense once you hear this story. This is actually an episode about stranger angels and manifesting, health scares and synchronicity ... MENTIONED ON THE SHOW Future Thinkers : Dr. Kirby Surprise – The Science Behind Synchronicity HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSONSlade's Books & Courses Get an intuitive reading with Slade Automatic Intuition FACEBOOK GROUPShift Your Spirits Community BECOME A PATRONpatreon.com/shiftyourspirits Edit your pledge on Patreon TRANSCRIPT I know the title may have thrown you. It’ll make sense once you hear my story. This is really an episode about stranger angels and manifesting and dealing with challenges to our mortality and synchronicity... a lot about synchronicity. Synchronicity really never ceases to amaze me. About a year ago, a year and a half ago, I listened to a really cool podcast about synchronicity on the Future Thinker’s podcast I believe it's called. I’m going to find the link for the show notes so you can go check that out. Because I’ve actually never heard a better, more practical, scientific explanation for the phenomenon of synchronicity, like what's actually happening in our brains, why we experience it the way that we do. But even though I was comforted by the explanation of the scientist who had researched this and who had written a book and was being interviewed on the show, I still receive and process synchronicity through my Magical world view. It's really hard for me to not interpret synchronicity as some kind of message or sign, some way in which the Universe communicates with me or the Divine sort of leaves me these scavenger hunt clues. I remember one time having a conversation with one of my really super non-New Age super Muggle friends, and we were talking about synchronicity and she commented on the fact that synchronicity is actually the one thing, the one kind of paranormal phenomenon that absolutely everyone experiences regardless of their believe system. Ever since she said that, I've often wondered what agnostics and atheists have to say about synchronicity. I want to stop people on the street and interview them, but if you know someone, I'd love to have a conversation with them about it. Maybe we can get them on the show. Alright so I'm going somewhere with the synchronicity thing, I promise. I have recently had an injured foot, just to put it really simply. For six weeks, I was having pain in my foot. It started out, if you follow me online, if you are friends with me on Facebook, you will notice that about a month ago, I changed my Facebook profile. It's this pretty outdoor sunny leaves and light kind of background. It was shot in a park. That actual day was the first day this season that I wore my chacos, which are the really heavy strappy sandals that a lot of people wear. It was the first kind of warmish day where I thought, you know what? I'm going to be walking around outside. My feet aren't going to be in the pictures. I'm just going to wear my chacos. The strap cut into the tendon along the top of my foot, that runs to your big toe. I sort of stripped it out, felt like I bruised the tendon walking around taking pictures, and the pain just never went away. So then I'm like, in my high intensity interval training class, pulling the medical people that I know in the class, we have a couple doctors, a few nurse practitioners, some nurses, and I keep asking them questions about it, showing them my foot. I was like, is it possible to just bruise this tendon where it just hurts for a long time? They were kind of like, really dude? We're going to do this middle of class? Anyway, so it went on and on though, to the point where, about a month in, I was in the middle of class and we were doing some warm ups. We were skipping rope and you're really jumping up and down on your toes when you're skipping rope. I thought, you know what? I can't do this today. I've got to leave. It's really hurting that bad. So it turns out that my trainer, the person who leads all these classes, my fitness instructor, had a stress fracture in her left foot about two years ago. Same thing. She had to wear this boot for 10 weeks and it just so happens that I am friends with her partner. We went to high school together so sometimes I'll do things with them socially outside the context of the fitness classes. We went to see Rocket Man, the Elton John movie together. We were having cocktails afterwards. She was like, where have you been? I told her what was happening with my foot and she said, you know, I was really in denial about the fact that I actually had a stress fracture and I did not want it to be that. But you need to go and get it checked out because something's obviously wrong. Six weeks is way too long for something to just not get better. At all. So she referred me to the person she'd seen and she talked me into going to see an orthopedist foot and ankle person. I was like, okay. I can't wander around possibly hurting myself worse. I need to go and just bite the bullet, deal with this. I'm getting ready to go on this trip to Dallas but maybe I can, like, wear the boot when I get back from my trip. It's been six weeks. What's seven? So I go in there really expecting to have this stress fracture diagnosed, have to wear this boot on my foot for 10 weeks. I mean, that's just my mindset. I was prepared for that. So they did x-rays. Of course, a stress fracture's so small it actually isn't visible in an x-ray, so to diagnose the stress fracture, they use a tuning fork, which is really kind of amazing. They hit the tuning fork on the desk, and then they hold the end of it up to all the different bones in your feet. You feel a vibration. It's not uncomfortable or anything like that, but if the bone is broken, basically you will scream and then that will be the diagnosis that yes, that one is broken. So she did the tuning fork. She tested every spot on my foot you can imagine and nothing really set it off. So she talked to me a little bit more, had me describe what I was experiencing, where I was experiencing it when I do different types of motion and all this kind of stuff. She was like, okay, I know what's going on. So then she whips out the x-rays and she shows me the spaces in between the joints on all my toes - all of my smaller toes versus the space in the joints of my big toe. She said, I was expecting you to complain about both your feet hurting. And I said, that's weird because I said to my mom, the weirdest thing is happening. I'm starting to experience a phantom pain in my right foot that perfectly mirrors the one in my left. And my mom said, maybe you're compensating for the pain in your left foot and you're putting more stress in your right foot. So not you're getting a weird thing in the right foot. Turns out, I have the same condition in both of my big toes. I have arthritis. And if I hurt myself these days, like I did with the tendon, arthritis will set in to that spot and then it becomes inflamed and then it's like three months of pain, or even ongoing pain. So it's like those spots never really fully heal. They become something else. This has been happening on other parts of my body. So, I will stew on things. I will over analyse. I will look for meaning where there may only be randomness. Because I’ve lived through some major health scares like having a stroke 16 years ago and anal cancer 10 years ago, I honestly can be a bit of a hypochondriac. And after having my foot diagnosis saying, you know what? You really just have arthritis... I almost felt embarrassed by how much I thought something horrible was going on. Not that that's not bad and it might not be better over time, but it wasn't what I thought it was. I blew it up into this whole other thing in my head and I took the synchronicity of my trainer having the same spot in the same foot, having the same issue as just like a sign. Oh, well I have the same problem automatically. It's synchronicity. Dr Julia, who’s an administrator in our Facebook community and she's a friend of mine. She's a cancer survivor herself which she speaks about openly — Julia, do we like that term "cancer survivor"? Have we talked about this? I’m using it because it’s common shorthand and people know what you mean when you say that, but I’m not sure that I like that term. Anyway, if you've had cancer, you've come out the other side of it and you're still here, I guess you're a cancer survivor. Anyway, we were talking about how once you have the big c, every little thing that happens, even if you're the most laid back zen person in the whole world, every little thing has this tiny whisper in the back of your mind, “Oh my god it’s back." Every freckle a skin cancer. Every stomach ache is some kind of horrible tumour in your gut. And so I kind of now, because I KNOW that that phenomenon is taking place, and that I am a little bit of a hypocondriac because of it, I then try to over correct for that tendency by trying to be overly calm and rational and let's not go there. So if I know something's wrong with me and I have a diagnosis for sure, like if you tell me, oh yeah, you need surgery, I'm like, let's do it tomorrow. I don't want to wait because I know that the only way out is through. So let's just get on with it. But I do have this tendency to some wait. Maybe two weeks in, I have the thought, I probably need to get my foot x-rayed. But I thought, no, you're a hypochondriac. You're turning this into something it's not. It'll probably be fine. Let's wait and see. So I do that a lot. And it's not about a fear. It's not a fear of having something wrong. It's a fear of looking like a dumbass because I've gone to the doctor yet again thinking that I need to have my foot amputated and really, it's like, yeah dude, you have a little bit of arthritis but it's not the end of the world. So I'm actually kind of fearful of looking stupid because of my anxiety around health issues. Okay. That's another episode. I just have to say this though: I do not believe we manifest every illness we have with our thoughts. That we create the illnesses that we have some agreement with heaven to experience illnesses at certain points of our lives. I just don't believe that. I know a lot of people do. It's fine if you want to do it, but I'm just letting you know where my train of thought and my perspective, how I process stuff. And I do want to say, something that I want to get off my chest is... Don't say that to someone in the middle of chemo even if you believe it with all your heart that they've manifested their cancer. Please. For the love of God, do not say that to someone who has just been hit with a serious health diagnosis. I’ve had plenty of people in the new age community do that. To me. Recently. And I've seen it done to others in front of me. And it really... Whether you believe that's true, whether or not it is true, you need to check why it is that you would communicate that to someone at that moment in that vulnerable space. Like, what is it about you that needs to express that and be heard saying it? I guarantee you it's not helpful to the person who is in the midst of chemotherapy and radiation. That's not helpful for them to hear that. So just don't say it. And check yourself about why you might want to say that. Say it to yourself. Shit happens to people. Some things are genetic. Some things are shitty luck, and I just don’t go through life believing that you’re punished for having negative thoughts. That’s some Old Testament shit in my opinion. That’s New Age echoes of religious fundamentalism. No thank you. No! Not doing that. But I digress with that soapbox. Being intuitive isn’t as helpful as we’d like it to be when it's you. I even have some instances of some really cool medical intuition. I've had instances of medical intuition consistently around drug interactions and dosages. That seems to be the way in which my medical intuition will come through in a reading or just in interacting with someone. Sometimes I get information about medications that people are on. It's not something I offer as a service, because it's not something that shows up 100% of the time when I do readings for people. But I'm just saying, like, I can have medical insights for other people, for clients. But when it's MY stuff, it's just... no... It's not helpful. It doesn't work like that. We wish it would. Everybody spins out over their own personal life threatening shit. Other intuitives can help you. By all means, if you want to get a reading with someone who might have some insight or thought for you, that can be very constructive. But you need messages from outside the vacuum of your own mind. Especially when it comes to something that you might have a tendency to overanalyze or stew over or be anxious over or be a hypochondriac over. That stuff needs to be tested and mirrored outside yourself. And that experience happens with other people. So you need some partners. You need some participants, whether it's your mama, your best girl friend, your favourite tarot reader... Whatever. One of the most powerful ways, the most real ways, that I believe with all my heart that your guides do come through for you, that your prayers do get answered is by putting real people in your paths in the real world who have the training, the knowledge, the wisdom, the tools and the medicine to make a difference. Signs and patterns are tricky things. My trainer had a stress fracture same foot. She encouraged me. Because of that, to assume that that was what was going on with me. I overly identified with her illness. And then when I got the referral, and it was to the same PA she saw which, by the way, she recommended I go to someone but when I actually, you know the way it works, your doctor often says, okay we're going to get you a referral, and then that office will call you and someone who works the front desk will make an appointment for sometimes a whole group of doctors and physician assistants. It just turned out that I randomly got assigned was the person that my trainer went to as well. And so, again, that was another synchronicity that sort of sent me into space of expecting a certain outcome. I went in there thinking, okay, I'm going to get a boot. I have a stress fracture. I'm gonna have to wear this thing for 10 weeks. So I went on Monday and got that whole thing diagnosed, which I already told you about. So it was nowhere near the trauma I'd prepared myself for. And that was the real lesson here. It was a pain in my foot. That's all I knew. I should have stopped there with the self diagnosis. That was on Monday. On Tuesday I drive to Knoxville which is about 100 miles away, a neighbouring city, to get my car serviced. I drive a mini cooper. They only have mini cooper dealers so many hundred miles. They don't have a dealership in my city, so I drive out of town once a year and get work done on my car to get oil changes and all that kind of stuff. I've become pretty friendly with the woman who is the service concierge. Her name's Anne. She's super cool. I love having a woman as kind of the face of the service department. I think it's really cool. She's got a really outgoing personality. Since I end up waiting there a lot, I've struck up conversations with her. We just click, you know? We've become friends. She'll give me a loaner car and send me off to have lunch or do whatever. I remember asking her very early on when I first met her, I said, Is there anywhere to go that's not like, Panera or McDonald's? I hate Panera. I think it's like the most beige food in the whole world. She was like, what kind of food do you like? I said I love Thai food. That was the first thing I blurted out. And she's from Thailand. So she was very excited about being able to recommend her favourite Thai food restaurant called Little Bangkok. It's in Farragut, west Knoxville. If you go through there, check it out. It's some good Thai food. So anyway, I'm pulling up to the dealership. I'm expecting to see Anne and talk about Little Bangkok, get my loaner car, go have lunch. I walk in, and I kid you not. This is a day later, right? A day after I've been to the orthopedist. I walk in. Anne is wearing a boot on her left foot I said, “Do not tell me you have a stress fracture in your left foot?” She said yes. She got the boot yesterday. The day before. Same day that I went to the doctor, this woman I know, who lives 100 miles away, was going to the same doctor and she got the diagnosis that I was expecting. She got the boot for 10 weeks. I was like, What are the odds of that?! What does that even mean?! Does that not blow your mind when stuff like that happens? I have a mini explosion in my head. I just turn into a firework inside, when I get that kind of synchronicity matching up. What are the chances?! So we were talking about the whole thing. I was telling her that mine wasn't what hers was. And I was explaining to her why I was freaking out over her having the boot. And she said, "What do you think it means then, when something like that happens?" I said, “Well you know, at the end of the day, I think at a basic level I always interpret it as meaning that I'm exactly where I need to be, for whatever reason I’m in exactly the right moment. It's almost like a little flashing sign that says 'Intersection up ahead'.” So I get my loaner car, go to lunch, and here was another synchronicity. This place, Little Bangkok, at lunchtime is packed to the rafters. The last time I was there was 10 months ago. I took Seth camping with me for the first time, where I go every year. We stopped to have lunch on the way, and I said, "Let's go to this place, Little Bangkok." Tuesday, they sat me at the same exact table where they sat me and Seth 10 months ago. This is a fairly large restaurant. There were a million people in there and the only empty chair was the last one I sat in. What are the chances? Again, synchronicity. I'm like, what is up?? Something's coming up for me. When I get back, there’s this really beautiful young woman who's waiting on her car. She's sitting in the lounge area and she's talking to Anne. I can tell that they're friends the way I'm friends with Anne. Maybe Anne's that way with everyone who has the capacity. They are talking about her foot. I just immediately sat down next to this woman and just sort of butted in the conversation, not in an obnoxious way. Anne sort of brought me in to it. So I started telling her about the synchronicity with my foot. As I'm talking to her, I notice that she has some facial paralysis. Nothing too, too bad, but I know the signs because I've had that and I'm sensitive to it and will notice it in other people and I always wonder if they've maybe had a similar experience to me. A lot of times they've had bell's palsy. It was really weird how we just immediately started talking like friends. It was almost like I was meeting her there. And I walked in and was like, "Oh, there you are," and I sat down and we just started talking. Anne walks by and she goes, “OMG - of course you guys are talking. You guys are my like my special buddies. I have this connection with both of you that I don't have with everyone." So apparently she doesn't talk to everyone like she talks to me. And she said, "It totally makes sense that you guys are hanging out." Which was cool because we were sitting there in a waiting room so it was fun to talk. I ask her what her name was and she says Felicia. She says “I was just telling Anne about my own medical horror story since the last time I saw her. I had a stroke 3 months ago.” I let her tell me her story before jumping in because I hate it when people do that. I just listened and I held space for her story. All the time, I'm realizing, okay, here it is. Here's the intersection. Here's where these synchronicities are leading me. I'm in one of those stranger angels situations where I am the angel. Remember that the word 'angel' means messenger. I'm here. I'm supposed to tell her something. She starts telling me about her job. She works with students at a university. Again, same scenario as when I had my stroke. And she tells me the stress triggers are what brought the stroke on for her. That they were very much related to a horrible situation with her boss. Very similar to what I experienced. When she sort of comes to a natural pause in her story, I finally said something. I said, “Do you mind my asking how old you are?” She said, "I'm 33." So then I had to tell her I had a stroke at 33. Her mouth dropped. She was like, no way! So I told her my story. She's of course freaking out because she's hearing and seeing parallels. And I just flat out told her. I said, "You know what? I have been having all these synchronicities all day and I think that maybe I'm here to have this conversation with you. So I'm just curious. I'm going to be really nosy but I'm going to put this out there to you." I didn't tell her that I'm an intuitive or anything like that. I don't really like to necessarily do that with people because I think it shuts them down or sends them off on a tangent in an other direction. She was already open to me, so I just said, "Is there anything that's really weighing on you right now? What's the question in your mind? What are you holding in your mind right now that's just on a loop, that you really want a message around?" So she starts to tell me that she is considering moving back home because of all the stuff that's happening with her health. It feels like defeat to her. She feels she's kind of run out everything she loved about her job. It's now become this source of stress that's literally impacting her health. She kind of just wants to curl up and just go home. Which I think for her was Memphis, on the other end of the state. So I talked to her about the fact that I really get what that feels like. I didn't immediately, as necessarily as quickly as her, decide to move home. But within a few years of having my stroke, I decided to just fold it up and go home and be in my mom's house for awhile. I told her what an amazing turning point that was for me, without tell her that I started Shift Your Spirits or anything like that. I just in more general terms talked about how I was able to start a business of my own, that I'd been wanting to do and really get it off the ground. I asked her what she would like to do, if she could remove herself from all the stress, go back home to a safe place, and even accepting that that's somehow a defeat, returning home to your parents house at 33, if it allowed you to do any project. Like if you just had the breathing room to heal for awhile and work on something. What would it be? Omg y’all, she starts telling me about a podcast she wants to start with two girlfriends of hers!!! She’s pitching me this show and telling me about the concept. The next thing I know, of course, I'm rolling into podcasting advice and cheerleading and enabling her. At one point, we're interrupted and her dad texts. And she actually isn't moving back in with her mom. She would be moving back home with her dad. And she said, it's kind of unusual for him to text her in the middle of the day like that, so it was a weird little sign that he texted at that moment. That we were talking about her going back to live with him. She said something about his name and it turns out he has the same name as my dad and we talk about that and all this is happening really quickly. It was like the fastest conversation. Finally she goes, “You know what? Damn. I really do think you were put here for me to have this conversation with me today. I feel really different about how the next few months could play out. I was feeling like, oh this is terrible, and now you've presented it to me in a way of like, okay well hold on a minute. Maybe you can use this more constructively and it actually might lead to this new phase in your life. After kind of getting that feedback from her, she finally asked me what I did. What I do for a living. I was like, "Okay, you know what, I'm just going to show you." I knew she had an iPhone. It was sitting right there in the palm of her hand and I said, "Go to your podcast app." She went to her podcast app and she's grinning at me like, okay, she's expecting something. I told her to search, 'Shift Your Spirits', and of course, my cover image pops up, which is a picture of me. She was like, dying. No way. I can't believe I've been sitting here this whole time talking to you about this and... We were both kind of freaking out over the synchronicity and basking in the glow of having had this meaningful random intersection. Right at that moment, both of our cars were ready. Anne said, "Hey, you guys, you're both parked out front." We're both checking out. I had another person check me out while Anne was checking her out. We walked out together, walk over to where our cars are and our cars are identical. They're parked side by side, they're the same British racing green colour and they were so similar like we had to use our key fobs to lock and unlock the car to see which one was talking to which car. I got in my car and I waved at her. Without any irony at all, I called out “Bye, Felicia!” I kind of cracked up. She cracked up. I'm sure she's heard that joke a million times. I thought, in that moment, that expression will never work for me again in the same way. Because now, it felt like I was sending her on her way to something. It felt more like a Bon Voyage than a you-can't-sit-at-our-table, done with you kind of thing. I hope Felicia hears this. That's why I gave it the title that I did. I'm hoping that she be curious about my show and it'll be there in her podcast app and maybe she's telling her friends, "Oh, I met this guy who has a podcast and then she sees this title and it makes her curious to check it out and see if it was about her. But the story for this week is actually not over. I found a lump on my left testicle that night. I had suspected it'd been there before. It kind of crossed my consciousness in the last couple of months. But I for real found it, and holy shit, did I go down the Google rabbit hole Tuesday night. The whole time I’m like REALLY? Do I really need another milestone health crisis, Universe, guides and all Divine things? I mean, do I really need to do this again? Oh God... and I have somewhat of a jaded attitude about it, just to tell you the truth. I'm not so quick to think, Ohmygod I'm gonna die, as I was the first time. But I am weary of having to be put through the test again because I'm like, don't I already get it? Don't I already know? Do we really need to repeat this? I got up that morning, Wednesday morning, and I texted 3 people - Seth, Jeff and Dr Julia. I needed messages through them and I needed them to come without telling them that they were meant to be messages. So I literally just was like, "Good morning. I have a lump on my left testicle." I got back 3 messages that were pretty much almost the exact same thing, and I always think about the idea that when you hear a message 3 times, or when 3 different people recommend the same thing to you 3 times, there's something about that magic number 3 that we recognize as Divine. Like, okay, somebody's trying to tell me something. So I was sort of purposefully running that experiment with them. And Jeff answered back first and right away mentioned the fact that, you know what, testicular cancer usually happens to much younger guys, like in their 20s. So hold off on thinking that that's what this has to be. Julia messaged me maybe 30 minutes later, said the same thing. "By the way, let me put your mind at ease a little bit before you freak out. Statistically, testicular cancer is something that happens to much younger men so it may be something else. I'll talk to you later." She was about to go into a session. And then Seth said something to the effect of, "You know what? Right now, it's a lump. That's all it is. It's not cancer, it's a lump. You found a lump in your testicle. That's all it is right now." Which is so much the message that I got on Monday and Tuesday about the thing with my foot and my hypochondriacal acceptance of the scenario that didn't even turn out to be true. So what was really even cooler - Dr. Julia has worked in oncology for much of her career and she is married to an oncologist. He's a really wonderful man. I have a rapport with him as a friend personally. So I already love his personality. But she told me, she said, "He's right here. He's wanting to ask questions. Do you want to just talk to him?" I was like, "Of course I want to talk to him." I mean, I couldn't even get my own doctor on the phone. All I could get was an appointment. So to be able to talk to a man who has retired from a lifetime in oncology was like, okay, this is really what a wonderful scenario to have here at my fingertips. So yeah, put him on the phone! And, you know, he has such a great bedside manner. I think Julia knew that he could do a lot to sort of alleviate me from going down some bad thought track. He told me right away there are a lot of other things it could be. Google didn't tell me that there were other things it could be. Google just told me the worst news imaginable. One thing that Google did tell me is that even when it is cancer, it's literally one of the most treatable kinds of cancers that we have. He also offered me some perspective on statistically why it was kind of unlikely that it was cancer. That there was a chance it could be a cyst. That there were actually two different areas of tissue that it could be attached to. That there was a very good chance that it would just be something benign. A lot of different kinds of things that were benign that might only require monitoring. Yes, of course, I needed to go get an ultrasound because I need the diagnosis to be sure. And I remember the lesson about my foot, and not deciding what something is before I have actual diagnosis and information from a medical professional who knows what it is. Diagnosing yourself with your own intuition - it's not a thing, y'all. Diagnosing yourself with Google is a really bad idea. I think that we get hints and we get alerts, and some of those are intuitive. Some of those are body-mind connection. And we need to follow through with them in real life. You can't follow through in the ether. It's not a thought experiment. You can't follow through to an actual diagnosis in your mind. You can get the clues in your mind. You can get the clues in your intuition. But you can't be deciding to rewrite your will at 3am because you're on Google spinning out. You know, the whole 'fewer hearts and flowers' tagline is really not a dig at emotion or sensitivity or wearing your heart on your sleeve. Because, as you know, I do all of those things, and that quip, 'fewer hearts and flowers', it's really about reality versus the ethereal. It's about the type of information that we work with, that we can take in to a really delusional place or we can take into a really practical place. For me, what's the point of all this spiritual guidance and instruction and practice and information if it's not impacting my experience in the real world for the better. So I'm going next Monday to my GP to get the referral to go to a urologist to get an ultrasound. And guys, this is all happening the week that I finally go to Dallas to spend the weekend with Mr. Shoot the Moon. And as all things hateful will turn out, because yes of course it was a full moon on Mondayish, when all this stuff was happening, he kind of had his own life trauma happen the same freaking day that I discovered my lump. His situation is not necessarily something life threatening or anything like that, but it's not something I can really share because it's not my story to tell and I'm not going to put his private business out there, for god's sake. I've protected his identity because I do want to be able to speak about him as he is a character, an important person, in my world and in my stories. What he's dealing with though was definitely something bad enough that I was kind of afraid that he might need to cancel our weekend. This has been two years coming, we have been doing a daily countdown for two months. You know, because you've heard me talk about it for that long. So I was kind of like, Really, universe? I get this close and then you have to give me a fucking cloud to take on my sunny honeymoon? I was joking with Seth earlier. I was sending him pictures of goths in summer and I was saying, "You know what? My joy guides are confused. They're like Joy Division guides." My joy guides are like goth kid angels who got distracted and ended up at like a fetish bar in the underworld because there was a really cool show and then they showed up. So I was sending him these pictures of, saying like, "Oh! I asked for a honeymoon and I got this!" It's like a picture of a goth chick talking on her phone, "Let me make a few calls." It's like my wedding planner is in head to toe black and looks really really pouty. So yeah, I mean I was joking about it because I do feel a little bit of like, Really?? Come on... I was going for joy here. This is going to be a big moment of joy and then BAM BAM. I just got sucker punched right as I'm going in. And it's not that I think it's gonna have some lasting impact. It's more the idea of I wanted to have this experience with a certain mindset and I didn't need anything handicapping that, even a little bit. It can just kind of throw some sand in the motor. I'm telling you a story about testicular lumps because I cannot NOT tell this story this week. I have all kinds of ideas for things I want to do episodes about but something like this comes along and it's too big. I can't get on here and act like, "Oh, I'm telling you stories from my personal life and how I use my spiritual perspective to deal with the bullshit. Because if this isn't a story, I don't know what is. And I can’t fake my way through a planned episode about Finding Your Center or You Can Do it, reach for the stars! Hopefully you get some of those kind of messages from me but... That’s all fine and dandy until we need our spirit to cope with some real shit and this is where the REAL SHIFT is required. This is the kind of stuff that we are shifting. I’m pissed. I'm a little pissed. I'm worried. I hate having to wait for actual information I hate that it may affect my time with Mr Moon I hate what a protracted cancer treatment period could do to my life and my body and my bank account at this moment. I don’t want to do all that again. I don't. And I may not have a choice. Here’s just some things, before you freak out for me too bad, that you do need to know about testicular cancer because I need to keep it in my mind as well. If it's found early and it's not metastasized or in your lymph nodes or anything like that, it is an almost 100% treatable condition and usually it's just a surgery. They just take one out. You have two, so you can do without one and I'm pretty sure that they give you a little fake silicone one just so everything looks the same and feels normal. And again, it is something that does happen to younger men than me. I'm almost 50 years old. That's kind of a weird age to be getting it. The rational part of my mind is okay with this because I always say, as long as I get something treatable, I'm good. Because there are a lot of things that people are dealing with that have no answers. That have no therapy. That have no cures. This has all those things. Even the worst case scenario, if it's cancer, it's one of the most treatable cancers. So, you know, I'm rolling with it here. I'm shifting. I knew this year was in flux. This is a big year of changes for me. I feel like going on with everyone else. I'm talking to all of you guys about how it's happening in your own world. And I'm doing my best to create the kind of changes that I want in this moment of change. I just didn't plan for the changes that I DON'T want. The one thing we can count on is change. I have a friend named Scott who has been going through a lot and he is kind of traumatized by everything. I don't mean that in a mean way. I listen to him a lot. I provide a lot of space. I provide a Scorpio black hole for him to throw a lot of crap into and I'm not negatively impacted by it at all. But he is someone that needs to express a lot of trauma verbally and analytically. And recently he messaged me and said he was just exhausted from feeling panicked. And he said, "I'm afraid that I'm disconnecting because I'm just so tired from feeling anxious that I can't feel anything anymore." And I said, "You know, I actually think that's healthy." I call it robot mode: Go through the motions. Seek information. Get data. Do all that before you take action. Do all that before you decide things. Do all that before you have any kind of feeling about it. Anxiety comes from a lack of information. And the quickest way out is always through. So let's go get the data. Let's go get the information. But still - really universe? Robot mode the same week I go to Dallas to have my heart truly open for the first time in twenty years? Sigh. I read somewhere once in Rolling Stone or something, that because of the movie the Breakfast Club, the John Hughes movie, the David Bowie’s Changes was sort of considered the collective anthem for Gen X. And I thought, I’m good with that being our bumper sticker and our message to the world. Turn and face the strange changes

Jeremy Elliott is a Reiki Practitioner and spiritual healer who works in the Chattanooga area; his practice is called Positive Resonance. He’s also a self-described “spiritual nerd” who writes about a wide range of psycho-spiritual topics that explore how to live the life you have always dreamed of. I invited Jeremy on the show to share some of his knowledge about the topic of Ascension. GUEST LINKS - JEREMY ELLIOTT Positive Resonance HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSONSlade's Books & Courses Get an intuitive reading with Slade Automatic Intuition FACEBOOK GROUPShift Your Spirits Community BECOME A PATRONpatreon.com/shiftyourspirits Edit your pledge on Patreon TRANSCRIPT Jeremy: Okay, so ascension, there's essentially two things. There's the process and the event. Ascension is basically the process of reconnecting with God. A reason that it's called "ascension" is because here in the physical world, we're at low vibration, low frequency. So during the process of self-purification, which is another term for healing, we are raising our vibrations and eventually we will make it up to the point where we do reconnect with God or with everything. With Oneness. Slade: How did you become interested in this topic in particular? Jeremy: Actually, this topic kind of found me as a part of my path. For a lot of my life, it was not on really a spiritual path. I was working on websites in a corporate office. And then at some point I realized that I could definitely produce more meaning for the world. I had a more beneficial purpose for the world in general. And in that time, going through this process of self-discovery, the ascension topic really hit me in a big way. There's a lot of background, but I'd really like to get into more about the ascension in particular. Slade: Yeah, go ahead! And talk about what that process is for you. When you discovered it, it sounds like there was a process there that you latched onto and were interested in going through as part of a personal journey. Tell me about what that was. Jeremy: So just to give a little of the background, in my 20s, it was a point in my life where I didn't care about spirituality. I wasn't interested. It didn't matter, didn't make a difference to me. Then a close relative in the family died at a relatively young age, in their early 20s, and somehow that just set off, I don't know, it was a trigger. Something clicked and all of a sudden, I just started getting into everything. I didn't even know about meditation. I found this word in a book. I looked it up. I was looking up 'spiritism' which is a fascinating aspect of emerging Christianity and psychic abilities, life between lives, all this kind of thing. And for meditation, I got into Buddhism and that's where things started becoming a little bit problematic in life was how to deal with spirituality in life. At first there were questions like, how do I... because life was becoming in many ways, it was starting to become meaningless and kind of painful on one hand. I was starting to notice that things weren't clicking. I wasn't happy. I'd read about enlightenment and... Oh. That's what I want. That's going to solve everything. That was really the start of the whole process. Now, years later, I can say that's not the way you go about it. Actually, it's a lot different process because the journey... and it really helped me understand that what I was doing as I was looking at my life thinking, okay, I've got problems, and I want a solution to them. I want to get out of this pain. I want to be happy. And so I said, if I choose enlightenment, this is what's going to work for me. And so I go sit down on my meditation cushion for weeks and months and years. Nothing happened. At the end of it, it's almost like, you know what? This isn't working and I've done this for so long. What's going on? There was some resentment because when you realize this, it's almost like I made some kind of bargain with God. It was like, if I be a good spiritual person for so long, then everything's going to work out. I'm going to get my goody bag at the end. And that's not the way it works at all. So at this point, there's almost this idea of, maybe I don't really want it after all. Screw that. What that was, was actually just a classic case of what's called spiritual bypass. What happens is, what people will think, okay, I've got these problems. But now that I'm working on enlightenment, all the life issues, that's for little people. That's not for me because I'm too spiritual for those kind of concerns. It's a common trap to fall into. What actually happens is, the pain in our life, what we get in life is exactly what we need for ascension and for self-purification. That pain that we're trying to avoid by seeking ascension or seeking enlightenment, those are the signs that are signaling exactly what we can find inside of ourselves that we need to work on. So it's really kind of the opposite. We always tend to do things the opposite way than what we really need to do. So for instance, any time that you in life find something that you're not happy with, that is a signal that there is something inside of you that needs to be healed. So in healing that, whatever that is inside of you, that's the process of self-improvement. That's the spiritual path. That's what leads you to ascension. Slade: Mmm... let me stop you there and say that, when you said that, the first thing that I thought is, most people respond to that with thinking they need to change their circumstances or the situation that's causing them problems, right? Jeremy: Right. That's very common that people aren't happy. They think, I just need this. I just need that. Just to make it a short response. Anything that's temporary is not going to get happiness. Nothing external, in other words, can give you happiness. It has to be something internal. That internal is finding your true self and your true worth. This process of self-purification is actually uncovering... what has happened in life is we've all been wounded. We have these emotional reactions. People hurt us and that pain, instead of allowing ourselves to feel it, we repress it. We stuff it down inside. When that happens, those emotions actually prevent us from feeling our true self and our true worth. So the process of self-purification, the ascension process, is a journey of actually healing, is bringing those up, allowing ourselves to feel the pain in order to release it. One of the things that I like to point out to people is that... negative emotions are very tricky to deal with. Nobody likes to feel them or to work with them. But it's important to understand in the idealistic world that we're living in, the extent that we allow ourselves to feel negative emotions, that is the same capacity to which we will be able to feel positive emotions. If we don't allow ourselves to feel negative emotions, we cannot feel happiness. We cannot feel joy. So it's not avoiding the negative emotions or avoiding the negative situations, or trying to find things, bringing things into our lives that'll make us happy. It's actually working through the things that are difficult for us and are causing us pain. By working through those, we will get to happiness or the joy that we're seeking. Slade: So how do you work through that? When you and I were initially discussing this topic, writing back and forth, you talked about there being sort of stages, right? There are official stages to ascension, with some of the early stages being about this purification process. Explain what... because people hear that and they think, okay, I'm supposed to be going through a purification process. What does that mean? Jeremy: Okay so there's two aspects to it. Personal process and then there's the general process. In general, what we have if we're on this planet here, we have the first 7 initiations. And just to put this into perspective, in order to reach perfection, or oneness with God, there's 354 overall. So some people kind of think that once you reach enlightenment, or you ascend off this planet, that, okay, you're home free. It's not that way. You can think of the Ascended Masters, the ones who have ascended from this planet, as being just older brothers that are also not very far along the path but are there. And interestingly enough, those Ascended Masters, they want to help us because we're going to eventually take their place as they move up in what's basically called a spiritual hierarchy. So the stages, what we're dealing with here on Earth, we have, kind of before the initiation process, when you start the ascension process, you're now called an Initiate. Before that happens, you're basically on your own. You're doing whatever. You're experimenting. You're experiencing life. Once you start thinking about good versus bad or having some conceptual ideas of right and wrong, and also start to begin to manifest qualities of love and compassion, you're starting to get on the path of ascension. Now the first three stages of ascension deal with being able to have some sort of control over your physical body, your emotional body, and your mental body. There's a very good reason for this. So once you start to ascend higher and higher, because your thoughts and your emotions they're actually, can't say physical things but they're objects on the spiritual level. So even though we can't see them, if you look at the higher level, when you get to the astral level and higher, the spiritual beings that are helping us, spiritual helpers, they can see those as actual objects and those have consequences. So if you were to take somebody from the Earth plane and put them on a higher level, those thoughts would instantly manifest. So if you don't have control of your thoughts that well, well guess what? You've just actually done that. So this thing about ascension. It's not something like God's here being like... we're not playing favourites. This is just a necessary part of the process in order to be able to get to another level without doing harm on a higher level. Moving up in the initiation process, the 4th initiation is something that probably a lot of people on a spiritual path, at least that I've seen, are experiencing now is sometimes known as the "Job initiation", where everything in the world just kind of becomes meaningless. Everything that used to give you pleasure doesn't give you pleasure anymore. Or maybe just kind of your world collapses and everything falls apart. One of those two aspects. At first, it's extremely painful and mentally, because you feel like there's nothing for you, life doesn't make sense. It's all over. What that is is kind of like, for people who understand or know about tarot, it's kind of like the tarot card where it's a destructive process but it's actually a freeing one because it's allowing you to understand what's really important. That the physical, material things of life are not important. It's the spiritual aspects that's important. So it allows you to build a firm, spiritual foundation. As you build higher, the 5th initiation, you're actually starting to merge with your spirit, which is the divine aspect of yourself. And then when you get to initiation 6, you're actually at the beginning of the ascended master stage and at the end of initiation 7, you have completed your, you are basically, you are no longer in a cycle of reincarnation. You have released yourself. When you're at that level, if you think about what that level means, that means always having kindness in your heart, always having pure thoughts. When I say that, of course, I'm already laughing about the fact that people are gonna be like, okay, all I have to do is control my thoughts, control my feelings. No. That is not what you do. Because you can't. You can't control your thoughts and you can't control your emotions. The process of self-purification is one where you're finding, what is inside at a higher level that is affecting your thoughts and emotions? Whatever's influencing your thoughts and emotions, that's what needs to be healed. And that you can work on and help purify. Slade: I was gonna say, what about observing, because observing is not necessarily trying to control. You can acknowledge that you're having a certain thought or emotion without becoming overly attached to it or acting on it. So that's kind of a mid-range stage or goal in that process, right? Jeremy: Correct. Yes. You do want to have an awareness, or it's not that you... It would be very helpful if you had an awareness of your thoughts and your emotions at all times. Because people get lost in them. So part of the process is to, when you have an awareness, first of all, don't judge anything. The minute you judge it, you've basically repressed it. You've said, oh, I don't want this. And then when you start doing that, then it goes away and once those thoughts go away... When you're not aware of something, you can't fix it. Slade: Where would you fit re-framing into that process? This is something that I do a lot so of course I'm gonna quiz you from my limited perspective. But one of the things that I try to do is not only to acknowledge and observe those thoughts, but to replace them. Like you said, there's an equally positive level of thought and emotion for those negative thoughts and emotions. So how does that play a part in your perspective on this? Am I on the right track with that? Jeremy: Can you give a specific example? Because I'd like to use it. Or maybe I'll give an example: Let's say somebody's a jerk, right? You have this thought, somebody's a jerk. So you would reframe it and say, well, I really like this person. Is that kind of what you're doing? Slade: Well probably what I would do in that instance, like if I were to experience somebody who was acting a certain kind of way to me or whatever, causing me to have a negative thought or emotion about them, depending on what my relationship to that person was, if it was a random stranger, I might look for some kind of thought about the fact that it doesn't really have anything to do with me. That might be sort of a low level way of re-framing that. If it's someone that I am, say, close to, who's triggering me in some way, pissing me off, one of the first things that I'll do is remind myself what their intentions are. Most people, especially those you're in relationships with, their intention is not to annoy you. And I'm easily annoyed. Jeremy: So the way that I would take this, instead of worrying about what their intentions are, I would be like, Oh, this is great. Somebody is annoying me. Because every time that happens, this is a gift that, it's like telling you, there's something inside that is bothering you that can be healed. So these are basically triggers. And when you find repeating patterns, it's very helpful because then you're like, okay, this has happened over and over. This person's triggered me over and over. It's like the Universe is saying, "Look, you need to look into this. There's something in there." At which point you can meditate on. You can go inside and... what's going on? Slade: Right. Jeremy: Actually you don't need to feel... So you can feel pissed off in the moment, but in the same moment, having an awareness of being pissed off and being like, oh, this is great. I'm being pissed off. So what's happening here? In other words, be curious about being pissed off. Because most people are like, they take it and they immediately go into defense mode, like, oh he pissed me off, and want to clamp down. The moment that you have that emotional reaction, for instance, when you stop breathing, when you clench your mouth, you tighten your muscles, that represses that emotion. It keeps it from being able to express itself. It doesn't mean you want to act on the emotion, but you definitely don't want to hold it inside. By looking at it with curiosity (what's happening here?), you're also allowing it to have it's space. You're holding space for that emotion so it can fully express itself. At the same time, of course you don't want to keep doing that over and over again because that just doesn't make sense. But it just gives you that, it's showing you what you need. You can look and say, okay, when has this happened before? Look into childhood. Where in childhood did somebody piss me off? There might be something there that's... Oh! That's what happened. It was a memory that you'd long forgotten about and that needs to be healed. Because at the moment as a child, for instance, you saw it in a way, from a child's perspective, you took it in a lot differently and it caused a lot more pain than it needed to cause. Slade: I think that's a really useful simple tool - to be curious about everything. To investigate it and to treat your emotional responses as kind of diagnostic tools. Jeremy: Right. That's exactly right. That's actually kind of the purpose of all our relationships. We think that relationships are there to make us happy. That's not it. If you cannot be happy by yourself alone, then what you're doing is, you're expecting somebody else to make you happy. That's not the job of the other person. Slade: Oh gosh. That's a whole other show right there. Jeremy: Haha... Off of that tangent. But the point of every relationship that we have with a person is because that person reflects us. So if somebody is doing something... because there's people that do stuff that are "wrong", but we're not annoyed by them. Because we don't have that aspect inside of us. It's those things that they do that piss us off, that's because we have that same aspect in us that we're ashamed about. If we did not have that, we wouldn't care. So the problem with spirituality is where you have to be brutally honest. You have to throw out self-judgement. You have to throw out shame. You cannot feel guilty about this. You have to take everything on the level of, no matter what I've done in life, God is there and he always loves me. He doesn't care what I've done. He's seen it all. Once you've realized that, then you can look at yourself and be like, the only thing I have to heal is, I have to heal being able to love myself. When you're in those situations where you're looking for this stuff, immediately of course you want to go into denial. You want to make it look like, oh it's that person pissing me off. No. That person's showing you an aspect of yourself that you're ashamed of. That's what's pissing you off and you're projecting it on the other person. Slade: Sigh. I'm trying not to have any kind of emotional response to that. I'm taking it in. I'm gonna put that in my toolbox. I probably derailed you a little bit from talking about your process. Let me bring you to something that I always think about when I see the word "ascension", and what we've been talking about is kind of like the personal individual's soul's process, so to speak. But whenever I hear that word, I always think of the kind of collective, the human race as a whole ascending. Talk to me a little bit about that. Jeremy: Let's talk about that. Yeah. Because ascension is connected very much to new age. This is promoted as a new age show. New age, of course, we're entering the Age of Aquarius. So we're no longer in this, you know, people who are spiritual go meditate on a mountain or go off somewhere. We, the new spiritual warriors or healers, we're people in the community, we have families. This is one part of the new age. The other part of the new age is a fact that the, it's not just people who ascend. The planet is also ascending. So the planet has reached its 4th initiation apparently in 1987 with the Harmonic Convergence. And now, since at least 2012, we're having 5th dimensional frequencies come in. What does that mean? It means a couple of things. Higher frequencies make spirituality and spiritual healing a lot more accessible. For instance, when I practice reiki and I'm doing long-distance healing, I'm not only sometimes accessing the dimension of, well I'm accessing the dimension of space because I'm doing it long distance, but sometimes I'm accessing the dimension of time as well because I might have the healing done at a later time than I would, or do it in a sequence. So that's really exciting. What's more exciting is that it allows people in general to speed up the process of ascension. So what used to take, let's say, a lifetime to do an initiation, we can now do in a matter of years. As a matter of fact, for people who are here now listening to the show, there's a possibility, and I'm not saying a "should", but there is a possibility, it's out there, that any of us could reach the 7th initiation. In other words, escape the reincarnation cycle by the end of this lifetime. It's kind of this idea of, okay, if it feel right for you to do that then go ahead. There's no "should" here, but that's an open possibility. And it's something that's very exciting. Slade: So you mentioned 2012, since then there were 5th dimension, other frequencies coming in. Does that explain... like I felt when I first started Shift Your Spirits, if you go way way back in the archives to 2006, you find me kind of meditating a lot on this idea of the ascension of the Earth, of mankind in particular. And I felt this profound sense of excitement and hope and energy rising, whereas in the last few years, I almost feel like the energy has been overshot in some way, or I worry that, did we miss the train or what? Jeremy: So to explain a little bit what's going on, because the Earth has ascended, that has affected us as humans ourselves. There was a possibility at one point, there was a lot of people whose vibration wasn't high enough and they weren't going to be able to survive. So this idea of this, maybe in Biblical... this "Armageddon", a mass killing off of people, that was kind of a possibility because of the ascension of the Earth. There could have been people that didn't make it, for lack of a better term. What ended up happening instead was, there was a lot of, we would say "lightworkers", to use the term who were able to increase their vibration, basically their "light quotient" at a very rapid pace. And because of these people bringing up their frequency, their vibration, they were able to raise up the vibration of the whole, and that happened very quickly in that period between, let's say, 1990 to 2010, in that area. So that's what you would have been feeling. Now it was great for everybody. We're all here. We all made it. However, it did cause a slight issue because ascension is more than just the vibration. You also have the aspects. The mental aspect, the physical aspect, and the emotional aspect I talked about earlier. Those aren't necessarily raised at the same time. That also is necessary in order to continue higher. So when you get, at a planetary level, part of ascensioning and go towards what's the Cosmic, the next level is the Cosmic level, you're not going to be allowed to get to that level unless you go back and integrate those other aspects inside you. So just because a person has a high rate of vibration or is a high stage of initiation in the ascension process, it doesn't necessarily mean that they're very well integrated on other levels. So you can have somebody that could even be an Ascended Master who still is having issues with thought purification, with emotional purification or emotional maturity, as you could call it. Slade: As you think about these concepts, you think about things that are happening physically in the world, species die off, the incredible amount of pollution that we seem to have absolutely no collective perspective on, what's the story that you personally tell yourself about how that is reflected in this ascension process? What is going on with all of that... I guess what I'm asking is, does that mean that we're failing at it miserably? Is there some other explanation for why all that stuff is happening and it's part of the process and maybe I can chill out about it. Jeremy: There's a couple of ways of looking at it that are both necessary. So the first aspect is, what happens outside is a reflection of what's inside. It's very literal. So what you see outside is really what is inside you. If you see pollution outside, what that means is there's more to work on inside of you. So people like to, they have this concept of, I've got to change the world, I have to help the world. On a spiritual level, there's no significance of importance. If you stop a conflict with your spouse, you have done something just as important as on a world level of stopping a war. It's easy to get discouraged when you see these big problems, but you have to understand on a spiritual level, all problems are the same and you CAN make a difference. Every time that you are able to successfully deal with purifying your thoughts or your emotions, you are helping prevent disasters on a large scale in the world. You're literally doing that. The other part of this is the fact that, even though things do look bleak, everything is happening for a reason. And part of that reason is to help us realize that we do need to work on ourselves. But also, we need to realize that we do have unlimited power. We do have the capability of turning things around, but it's never a direct... You can't directly fix anything. I think we've pretty much explained on the show already. It's not, okay we have pollution in the world. We need to solve pollution now. If we have pollution in the world, there's still some pollution in ourselves that we can fix. And by doing that, it will help solve... the world will solve on its own. Slade: Hmm... So are you hopeful that enough people will become enlightened in that way that it will change things in physical reality somehow? Jeremy: I have hope that no matter what happens, it's what's needed to happen. It's not even, okay, this is good or this is bad. There's no judgement, okay maybe the world will explode. But it's just, in the end, that's a material object. We as spiritual beings will live on. We will mature no matter what environment we're in. We obviously don't want... I'm attached to this planet which is one of the reasons why I'm still here, right? Slade: Yeah. Jeremy: But again, we don't have to concern ourselves about external things because that external thing, that's just the movie that we're watching. That we can't control. But we have so much power to fix what's inside of us. And as long as we have hope of doing that, everything's gonna work. Slade: Oh I like that. That gives me a lot of hope and I'm sure that that's very useful to other people listening to this as well. Talk to me about practical stuff. Are there "techniques" helping to enable this process? Jeremy: Actually, there are quite a few things that you can do, just kind of spiritual practices. Now we've already discussed a little bit about looking inside for things that need healing. So the process of healing... Let's back up a second. The Spiritual Path in general, that is the process of self-improvement. So instead of trying to jump directly into "I want to ascend", just realize that everything you're doing to heal yourself or to improve yourself, you are on the path, okay? So you don't have to worry about it. And also, everything that comes in life, it's almost like, just look at what's happening in your life. That is the main thing that's going to help you find what you need. Because it's reflecting back what you need in your life. But as far as practical things that you can do, there are things like, you can repeat a mantra. You can repeat God's name. For instance, a technique you can do meditations where you will basically ask to speak to your guides, to speak to the spiritual masters. You don't need psychic abilities for this stuff. It's almost like you're using your imagination. But anything that gives you this feeling of connectedness. Even things like go to a yoga class, right? Go to your tai chi. All this stuff is helpful. If you're really interested in just a hundred different actual ascension techniques, there's a guy, part of what was the Ascension Movement in, I want to say, the '90s and a little later. Joshua David Stone. He wrote several books mentioning hundreds of these different little things that you can do. For instance, he talked about the whole encounter which is out of A Course in Miracles is to look at every person as if you were meeting God. Look at everything as if you're meeting God. So think of this plant in front of you as God, or the tree as God. He has so many different ideas you can use, if that's an interest. Slade: It sounds to me like a lot of the information or literature that you were inspired by or drawing on is more of a Buddhist teaching. What about somebody who has maybe a more traditional faith system? What do you say to that person? Jeremy: So, the first thing to realize is, keep your belief system in place. When you're in the ascension process, you do not need to change the beliefs in any way whatsoever. It's only important that you recognize the necessity of self-improvement. I like to say to people, there are as many ways to reach God as people, right? You don't need an exact path. You just need to use your own intuition. Every person has their own path. What works for one person is not gonna work for another person. Slade: Well you and I both live in the same area in southeast Tennessee, so we encounter a lot of fundamentalist churchgoers etc. and ask you probably experience in your daily life, a lot of the people that I really love and have friendships with are very different in their faith systems from me. It's something that I always struggle with and have spent kind of a lifetime learning how to process that. It's interesting because I'm thinking about, if we look at this thing of, this idea of it being kind of a diagnostic of what needs to be healed within ourselves, I can see this lifelong story arc of me growing up in the midst of this fundamentalist environment thinking, how the hell did I end up here? Really pissed off. I was much angrier when I was younger about it than I am now. Whereas now I have, I feel a much more elevated way of talking to people from different faith systems. And to tell you the truth, I have found that I'm actually much more in alignment with someone who is very devout in a different faith system from me than someone who has no faith at all. So for instance, even people who are devout Christians, are a little bit more open to the concepts of miracles and of some of the thoughts as objects kind of context that you and I are talking about. What I'm hearing you say is, within any faith system, there is this kernel of truth about this self-improvement path. All churches have that within then. Jeremy: So every religion has the truth in there. It's just a matter of recognizing what the truth is. The other thing to realize is that our life situation, whether religious or not religious, is exactly what we need right now on our path. So if a person's religious, I actually grew up Mormon, that's exactly where you're supposed to be. There is a purpose for that. It's definitely not something where you have to worry, oh I have to change my belief system. I need to do this or that. No. You are there. You've got to... And if you think about your own personal experience, the doing what you had to go through was what you needed to heal the aspects that you came into this life with. Slade: Sure. Jeremy: As long as you have the faith that your life, what you're living, your path that you're on, that's what you need. That's been provided for you. This is not by chance. Slade: There's one thing about this ascension conversation that you and I had that I wanted to make sure and get your thoughts on. What's the relationship between ego and ascension? Talk to me about that a little bit. Jeremy: Okay, so once again, what the ego wants to do when it hears about ascension is, oh, I want this. The ego is something where... it's just life in general where we think a car is going to make us happy. We think that this relationship is going to make us happy. Well, we think ascension is going to make us happy. So the ego will use ascension for its own purposes. And again, when you go, when you have a desire for anything, that prevents you from actually any kind of... self improvement. Because what you're doing is, now you're grasping onto something. You're thinking, okay, if I only had this, then I would be happy. Instead, you need to stop and be like, what's going on now? Slade: I wanted to hear you speak a little bit about this idea of handling the desire for ascension, the desire for enlightenment. I thought that was a really important thing to speak about. Jeremy: Right, okay. So this is a good question because it comes up a lot as... the ego is something that is going to want... it thinks it needs things for happiness. It thinks it's gonna want this or that. Ascension or enlightenment is going to come up. A good way of dealing with any type of desire is to realize, in the physical world, we don't get what we want when we want it. That's not going to happen but any time the ego comes up and rears its ugly head like, I want this now, that's what produces the pain. But we have to recognize that we do have needs and we do have wants. And if there's something that we do have a need for, we do have a need for love, we do have a need for this and that. So we sit with that pain and we say, okay, I recognize this. I am in pain because I do not have this but I still realize that I would like this. I'm not going to give up the desire just because I do not have it. Because a lot of the time, what the ego's going to do is, oh I can't have this now. I didn't really want it anyway. I never get what I want, that type of thing. So the healthy, emotional response to anything including ascension is to recognize, okay I do have this pain. I do have this desire. I want this even though I can't have it now. It's okay. I still respect the fact that I would like this. Slade: Tell us a little bit about the work that you do and where we can connect with you online. Jeremy: I'm a reiki practitioner in a holistic medicine locally in the Chattanooga area. My business is called Positive Resonance. My website address is https://pozrez.com/ Slade: Very cool. Jeremy, thank you for coming on and having this conversation with me. Jeremy: Slade, thank you so much for inviting me. It's been a pleasure.

This week I’m talking about a practical approach to discovering your purpose and taking action on ideas in ways that are easiest to pursue and that will also have the most impact in the world. MENTIONED ON THE SHOWAre You a Scanner? Refuse to Choose Energy Reboot HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSONSlade's Books & Courses Get an intuitive reading with Slade Automatic Intuition FACEBOOK GROUPShift Your Spirits Community BECOME A PATRONpatreon.com/shiftyourspirits Edit your pledge on Patreon TRANSCRIPT For 15 years, the number one type of question I get asked in readings is about discovering your purpose. Purpose is not necessarily the same thing as a job. You’ve probably heard this expressed by myself and others if you consume personal development content. The SENSE of purpose is something worth discovering in and of itself, independent of the concept of choosing a major or a career. But I do mentor intuitives, psychics, mediums, energy healers, teachers, coaches, counselors… and for many of us purpose IS about a profession. I get it. I need a project at the very least to express my purpose. There’s a lot of value in having a purpose driven project, even if it's not your primary source of income. If you have a boring day job, a purpose driven project can be the most important thing in the world to balance all that energy. I’ve seen clients start a project and it becomes like this release valve for other areas of life. The day job isn’t as awful. You’re not snapping at your spouse over everything. You’re not as annoyed with your kids for stealing your life force. You don’t hate your boss or the sound of coworkers breathing quite so much. You have a reason to get you up in the morning beyond all those mundane things. You have this new source of energy and also an outlet for energy. Because there's energy coming in, and then there's energy you're shedding. You need really healthy vessels and venues and streams for all of those things, to move in and out and through you. The biggest problem with the "Your Job is Your Life" model is that you can’t get everything that you need from that one source. You don’t get all your social interactions from one relationship… or expect one person to fulfill what it takes many relationships to have. And you've seen what happens in those marriages where people really have no friendships or relationships or support systems outside the marriage itself, it's just you and this person in a bubble with nothing else going on... That in itself is a kind of cancerous situation to be in. And I know lots of people with relationships like that. They think they want that. Oh, I want this person to be my best friend and we're going to do everything together. We're just together 24/7. We work together and vacation together. You know what though? I don't see a lot of those filled with joy, it doesn't seem like. So anyway, I think the average person, we need a lot of different kinds of friendships. We need people to take care of and people to make us laugh and we need family and we need people we can talk about woo woo stuff with. And we need people for sex. We need people that we've known our whole lives that we don't have to explain ourselves to. All kinds of different friendships. People who are teachers and mentors. Parents that you talk to. You know, all those different things. Not everybody has that, but ideally, you kind of want a spread, and you want your spouse to have a spread, and you want your kids to have all those things as well. If you’re unhappy and experiencing low level type of "depression" that’s not really clinical depression, but more a lack of motivation, still with an inkling that you should get off your ass and do something. There’s a chance to turn it around, and you feel that, and that's sort of part of the ennui that you're experiencing. The first thing that I would recommend is that you do the Energy Reboot. We've talked about it on a couple of different episodes, and of course can link to those, but the idea is to get back in touch with your intuition, spark your creativity, ground the body, rest better, feel better in your own skin. You can’t create from a place of lack and anxiety. And you can’t save the world if you’re empty and exhausted. Once you experience some of the results from doing the Reboot, because really, start there. Don't skip that. The results are ideas, energy, motivation. Just new fresh signals coming in. Once you start to experience that and feel like that's clicking again, like things are turned on again, things are connected again, sign up for something — a class, a workshop, some kind of group activity. Host something for people with your shared interest. Return to an old hobby or pull out some dream that you put on the shelf long ago. Teach your kids how to do something that you used to love to do when you were younger. Teach other people, period — you could sign up for something and host something at the same time by teaching people, because a lot of times your sense of purpose is about sharing what you’ve learned and experienced with other people. Sometimes your purpose will be chosen for you. Maybe it already has and you don’t have the clarity to realize it. Maybe there's something that you do in the world you're not even giving yourself credit for. Maybe there's something that you do you think of as a duty and a chore, that with a little tweaking and change in perspective, could really become something different. Once you put some intention behind it, you can transform all kinds of things that you're doing. But Discovering Your Purpose is as much about CHOOSING one as having angels descend with an engraved stone tablet or an owl drop a creamy parchment scroll down your chimney. People get lost because there are too many things they love. You feel your interests are all over the place. That they don’t go together. There's no rhyme or reason to them. Or you’re pulled between two different loves and you can’t choose between the two. You may just need to suck it up and do both or do everything you love a little bit. That’s what I do. I might be more successful if I only did one thing and put all my energy into it, but I honestly wouldn’t enjoy that, and the lack of joy would kill it, and I’d be back to square one with nothing. So I do a little bit of everything I love. I now have four different websites officially, 3 different pen names, 3 different businesses, soon to be 2 podcasts, dozens of individual income streams, and that’s not even counting things like my love of animals and the animals that I rescue and care for, and my friends' pets that I help with, and the people I support and care for in my daily personal life on all different levels. From advising younger people to helping some of the people that I work out with, motivating them. Now I don’t advise that you do it like this — if you can avoid it, definitely keep it simple by all means, it sounds heavenly to me, if you have a brain that does that. But some of us don't. And some of us can't choose. So you know what? Refuse to choose. I remember the first time I saw the title of that book, "Refuse to Choose - a Program for Doing Everything that You Love" by Barbara Sher, you've heard me talk about this before. It's like my favourite self-help book in the whole world. It's all based on this principle of scanners. That there's a certain personality type, it's a creative personality type, that requires you to be engaged in a lot of different things. To not just choose one lane and stay there 'til you die. There may be a lot of people who get a sense of safety and security from staying in one track and plodding along and doing the milestones that are laid out for them. And getting the certifications they need and working their way up and just doing what they do and staying there. But that's not scanners. And that's not me. That's probably not a lot of you that are listening. So if you’re a scanner, the cool thing is, we now have this language that allows us to embrace that, and to talk about it as an asset, which is life changing, if you've always been told you're doing it wrong. You're not following through on anything and you can't pick one thing and stick with it. If you've been told all those things, yet you're also extremely intelligent and can potentially do anything, then, you know what? Embrace the fact that you're a scanner. Choose vocations that resonate with that energy. There are lots of activities and environments, social structures, where this is a big positive. So don't put yourself over there in the grey box that has one lane because you're going to be miserable. There are a bunch of other places that you can go and plug in where who you are and the way that you operate and what you love in the world, no matter how eccentric it is, is of value. One of the easiest things that you can do is to tell yourself, you know what? I'm just gonna have a seasonal project. I'm not going to commit to doing something for four years, or five years, or one thing for all of my retirement. I'm going to do a single project each season. Or I'm gonna have a different side hustle project every year. Every new year I'm gonna try out some new crafty thing that I do and see if I can make some money of it. Just tell yourself that. Just knowing right up front that you get to switch it out can really re-orient everything within you. You know, chances are, if you do start out picking one little thing and doing it for a little while, you'll stumble onto one that other people really love. And then that takes over and it becomes about them more than just being about you. Shift Your Spirits was ONE writing project for me. It was one of half a dozen journals that I was writing at the time. This, all of this, that you know me for, it's just ONE area of interest and passion for me. So think of your interests and your roles in the world as different pieces of material in a mosaic. And within that mosaic, you are the glue. The common denominator really is you, so it’s not true that these things have no connection or that they're all over the place. They intersect in you. Knowing that, if you feel pulled equally between 2 different paths, you are a connection point between those 2 things. So, conceptually, philosophically, they do have a bridge, they do have an intersection. When you think about it, what is that connection point for YOU? Because that common denominator that exists for you very likely exists for other people too. Sometimes you need somebody else to point it out. It’s hard to see. You may need to have this conversation over a bottle of rose with someone, or coffee, and hash it out. Sort of mirror it out for one another. It's hard to see your own worth and value. I have a client who is an emerging intuitive, she does energy work, but she also has this cool natural skin care business. She felt like these were two vastly different interests. She's racking her mind trying to find a link between the two things. Because she’d rather be creating one content marketing platform as opposed to creating two separate businesses with different marketing plans and completely different platforms. She’s looking to write articles and post on social media and speak and teach — all the usual formats that work very effectively in all industries. She feels instinctively that there should be a connection… She’s RIGHT. From outside the forest, I can see all kinds of trees! So I asked her: What are the connections for you between skin care and energy? What are the connections, on a deep level, between how you look and how you feel? Why do you choose to craft products from natural ingredients in the first place? What are the spiritual values motivating that? How do the elements we put in and on our physical bodies affect our energy bodies? She can answer all these questions. She did, right there on the session with me. She had fascinating perspectives off the top of her head that lots of people would love to hear about! And you know what’s even cooler? I don’t know a lot of people talking about that particular intersection of topics. I advised her to do something of a mind mapping exercise. I like to do this with lists. Write down some lists. Both fields of work, both interests, in two parallel columns. And then … Draw lines connecting items in one column to the other, wherever you see a connection. As you find items that connect, you think of other things that are even easier and more obvious to connect and you start adding those to the list just so you can generate more of those connections. it will probably look like a jacked up set of boot laces, but the connections are there between these two things that you think are so different. That’s the point. Now, can you create a question that represents each one of those laces? And keep going with that. I suggested she brainstorm at least a list of 10. Once you’ve got a whole list of questions, you start answering them. You write articles for Medium.com, for other people's websites, to post on your own blog, Instagram stories, Facebook live videos where you talk about it, classes, tele-seminars. Your usual product demonstration for say, the skincare, becomes something more like a workshop. Something deeper and more contemplative. A beauty day at the spa becomes more of a retreat-mindset. Your clients aren’t just learning how to apply a product, they’re thinking about WHY they’re using the ingredients in your products and how those motivations make them feel. This is good stuff! I’m trying to think of some examples that are completely different. I love yoga. I did yoga teacher training classes, not to become a yoga teacher, but just to challenge myself and have a goal around it. I also missed the spiritual aspects of yoga being removed for western gym environments. I like the mystical parts obviously. But I also love kettle bells — that’s my favorite workout format. Kettle bell complexes, which are strings of poses that flow into one another, remind me very much of yoga flows, which I also love to do. There are some kettle bell poses that totally remind me of yoga poses with weights on the end. I do CrossFit. And I coach people on intuition and creativity and depression and often recommend fitness as a component of all that. I like to think of fitness as a spiritual practice. Now, I currently do all those things kind of separately, even though I am aware that I am the glue holding that mosaic together. So I do see how they're connected. But I practice them in my world in different boxes. But is there the possibility that other people might like all those ingredients mixed together too? Are there work out classes or fitness group training scenarios that could incorporate all those elements? Sure, I could see that. Since I started recommending the Reboot, I’ve been asked to come assist people, who are more spiritually inclined, to work out and learn to exercise with those concepts in mind. Which in some ways, might be easier than taking someone who is already comfortable in a fitness routine and changing their philosophy about it. I don't know. I guess you could do either thing. I could choose a project — get licensed to be a personal trainer — that could be my project. That could be the thing I'm gonna do this year. That could be my seasonal thing to focus on. I can get some people together, host a class — I could start creating those kind of workouts, those kind of training environments. What if you want to do volunteer work with kids or something? What if you love hip hop music? What if you wish you could’ve been a dancer back in the day? So I have a friend that loved all those things and I helped her apply for a parks and rec grant in our community to teach a hip hop dance class to kids after school. What if you did something like that? Maybe you love embroidery or watercolours and you don’t pursue it because you don’t think you’re the next Michelangelo, so why bother? You can’t make a living as an artist… So you kind of lost your steam for it. I bet the first person who came up with that art studio where you go drink wine with your girlfriends and paint, or go an interesting daytime date where you make pottery together, or the person who teaches art classes in nursing homes, those artists probably didn’t give up a career selling their work in galleries all over the world to create those types of businesses. They cobbled them together from their own interests and transformed it into something else for other people. Maybe you love tarot cards and you collect different kinds of decks and you think it would be fun to create your own. Maybe you're not even artistically inclined but you could find someone to partner with you and do the illustrations and you could write the card meanings. Maybe you want to start some kind of non profit fund, because your family experienced something really awful and there weren’t a lot of resources for it and you saw the opportunity to make the worst in thing in your life the best thing you’ve ever done. People do this stuff. All the time. The people who do this stuff are the people who do this stuff. And here’s the best piece of advice of all that I can give you — if you ARE turning this into a business, or if your project involves other people — and honestly, if it’s truly a sense of purpose, it involves other people, with the exception of other living things, like animals and plants maybe, but you probably still need human allies. Your conservation work where you get to only talk to trees is still impacting other people some how some way, down the line. Assuming it’s a given that your project is about other people, at this point, you simply follow where they ask you to go. If you have those 10 questions and you answered them for others, they will start generating their own follow up questions. And then you answer those. They will request special custom products. “Hey. Can you make this with this another fragrance that I'm really into?” They'll ask you to tweak it in a way for them. And you just fulfill that. You keep going. There's probably an infinite number of fragrances that you can change up. Remember my definition of marketing, borrowed from my friend Tim Grahl: find a group of people and be relentlessly helpful to them. That works just as well for purpose. Here’s what most people do wrong - they fret about picking the perfect concept. They analyze it a million different ways. They go off into their tower, into their laboratory, and they try to invent The Perfect Big Thing, A+ mind blowing… and then they come down and try to find people who want it. And sometimes people don’t. Or only a few do. You find out, after the fact, if you’d changed it somewhere along the way, you could have made it for more people. Maybe you could have chosen a different scent, or use a different name, or use different language that more people are actually searching for online that would've made it easier for them to find you. But I still think the best way for it is to jump in early. Pick something you love, find a group of people who love it too, and make something for them. Or host something for them. Create an environment and let them come together and do whatever it is that they want to do there. Create something with the goal of not creating an A+, but just putting a solid B out there. This is not an A+ podcast, not in terms of production level. I don't even have any music. Make your version of the thing a bunch of other people have already made. Romance novels, baked goods, and diet plans. These have infinite minor tweaks and variations, and the innovations don’t have to be huge because the people who love those things always want more of them. But do put yourself in a position to ask them what they want. Here’s a moisturizer with natural lavender scent, which I love. What essential oils do you guys love? Here’s my killer chocolate cake recipe, I can make all kinds of cake. What kind do you want? Who’s going vegan? Here’s what I wish I had known when I made that transition. What are your tips? Talk amongst yourselves. Start a little conversation pit. Toss some prompts out there. Host something for people who share your interests. A Facebook group can be started in a matter of seconds. Start conversations about your interests with these people who share your interests. And while you're at it, join in on everybody else’s group too to make those connections. And here’s the other really HUGE thing that most people get wrong: you do not have to be an expert. Just be a seeker. Nobody likes a know it all who’s perfect and doesn’t struggle. We’d much rather listen to a friendly, accessible person we identify with tell us about what she got wrong and how she eventually figured it out. We like her. And if she invites us to come along on the journey — awesome! We're in for that. Be a seeker and invite other seekers to participate. They will tell you what they need, what they want, what they're curious about. You just see if you can fulfill those requests. Be relentlessly helpful. If you have kids, think about this — You slave away creating an elaborate meal, maybe even trying out some new recipes you’ve never made before, and your family hates it. They would have rather had a simple grilled cheese or a ordered pizza. What if you asked them first? Hey, what do you guys want for dinner? The same approach applies to business and it applies to purpose. At some level, it’s all service. Purpose is serving other people: making things for them, telling them stories, solving their problems, supporting them when nobody can solve their problems, holding space. Here’s your assignment: Go make some of those mind maps. Write down lists of your loves and interests in columns. Look for connections. Draw lines between them. Make some crazy laces. Then find a group of people who might also be interested in those connections and host something for them. Be relentlessly helpful. A creative outlet, a side hustle, a new career, a business… a sense of purpose. This is one way you can find yours. And this is how you CHOOSE yours.

I wanted to do something special to commemorate the 100th episode of the Shift Your Spirits podcast, so for this interview, a listener has volunteered to turn the tables on me. The guest is asking the questions! Hilary Parker is a writer, editor and mom of two. In her business, Storied Creative Services, she used the power of storytelling to provide content marketing and publicity for her clients. Hilary and I talk about storytelling as well as how to tune into intuition in our everyday lives. GUEST LINKS - HILARY PARKER StoriedCreativeServices.com HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses Get an intuitive reading with Slade Automatic Intuition FACEBOOK GROUP Shift Your Spirits Community BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits Edit your pledge on Patreon

Åsa Poeche is a metaphysicist, witch, and shamanic practitioner. She’s an intuitive who loves mentoring people to help them achieve their goals or to help them get through struggles in life. She believes that a solid spiritual practice can very much be integrated with your personal and professional life. She uses her client’s own belief system to form the basis of the work while using her own tools, ritual and experiences to supplement. She agreed to let me record and share our first investigatory session together regarding the Love Curse I talked about in an earlier episode. Listen to Love Curse: Part 1 GUEST LINKS - ÅSA POECHE asapoeche.com HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses Get an intuitive reading with Slade Automatic Intuition FACEBOOK GROUP Shift Your Spirits Community BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits Edit your pledge on Patreon TRANSCRIPT Asa: Okay, so I'm just going to go through at a high level with you what's happened, so for everyone to know what's going on. I received a recording from you about a week ago, almost exactly a week ago, and I listened to that the same day. So I took some notes and it's given me a basic idea of what's going on. In a normal session, I would probably have a really small outline of what the client's problem is and we agree to have a session. And we sit and we talk through the whole thing in one conversation. And as we talk through the whole thing in that conversation, I start getting an idea of what needs to happen in the session. And then maybe what we need to do going forward for both myself and the client. In this session though, like I said, I've listened to all of your story and it's so much detail in there. When I sat and listened to it, I took a lot of notes, and a lot of the notes that I take are about phrases that you're using, the way you're talking about things, probably a little bit about the emotion that's in there too but mostly the phrases because, I know you understand this quite well, if I want to talk to you about something, I don't want to introduce a different way of talking about it because then we have to do the translation thing. So if I can use words that you're using already, that's much easier for me to get you to understand what we're talking about, if I want to help you work through something, right? So a lot of notes on that and a lot on how you structured this and how this panned out in the last 28 years. So a bit of a timeline. And then when I did that, we agreed afterwards to do this session and have this discussion today. So you're coming in a little bit more blind than I am to be honest, I think. Because I have the backstory. Have you got any questions so far? Slade: No. No, I'm loving it. Let me just tell you this. I want to put this out there for you. I stress feedback so much when I am working with intuitives, and I encourage people who are learning to get a lot of that kind of feedback and everything. But I just have to say, I'm really terrible at giving emotional responses in the moment and so, I don't know that I won't, but I can see me just processing and taking a lot of stuff in. So my being quiet sometimes is process. You may get another episode out of me where I'm like, "Okay, now I've simmered on all this." And I also really want to hear what you have to say about it. And I want to preface this, I think I did a pretty good job when I recorded... No I didn't... Did I? I talked about the fact that you had answered this question in the community and I wanted, I didn't want to lock us into necessarily doing the session and releasing all that, so I left it a little light. But the reality is, when I saw your response, it hit me like it was a revelation. I thought, oh shit, you know, in a good way and in a bad way simultaneously. But I knew, well wait a minute, what would she have to say about my story? Asa: And this is really interesting for me. When you said that, I went, ohh! Because I remember answering that question and it was a shamanism question. It was in a shaminism thread I think or something, and I put that witch thing in. I hit the button and I'm going, okay, stay on topic, because now you've involved the witch thing too and that was shamanism. I was actually mad at myself because, I thought, oh I'm just leaving it because it's stupid. Right? And then all of a sudden you come and say something to me and I'm like, ohmygod, that's why I went witch curse thing because it was almost like that was for you. Slade: Yes! Asa: And I thought, okay. And it's interesting how that happens because like I said, I'm in the shaminism space most the time in Shift Your Spirits but I am probably more of a witch than a shaman to be honest with you. But I try to kind of stay in that kind of field mostly in there because there are so many other witches in there and we don't want to have too many differing opinions arguing with each other either. But yeah, that was very interesting from my own view. What you were saying just then about how you won't have any emotional responses. Normally when I start and I agree to do a session with someone, I'll start getting pictures and I've got power animals coming in and it's like I'm doing okay. So this week I've had nothing, and I'm like, uh.. okay. There's no messages, there's no kind of imagery, nothing. So it's very, very quiet. There's no noise and I'm going, okay so what I'm dealing with is someone then who will process it probably after. And then also, you probably have a lot of background work done already. So really I don't have to get a picture to help you too much with this one. That's already sitting in there and it's kind of ready to go I think. This morning, actually, I was just waking up. That's the only time when I started getting some imagery coming in and I was ready to go now. And that would've been a couple of hours before. That was about 7:00 in the morning or so. So it was very interesting for me in that sense and I was very, very focused, and that makes sense with you. There's not a lot of going off on a tangent. This is what we're here for today and this is what we're dealing with. With a lot of clients, I have problems kind of saying, "We're focusing on this now. Don't worry about the chicken in the corner there. Look at this one here." It's been an interesting week in that sense. It's been very, very quiet and it's fine. And that's a good thing for me as well. One of the other things that we've really got working for us in this session too is we share a common language in witchcraft. So I try to speak to a language the client understands like I said. So if I'm treating someone whose got a Christian worldview, I will probably use that terminology because it just helps, you know? What I'm going to do - I'm going to describe this story like I got it, very briefly, and you used the witchcraft stuff. We talk about cursing and stuff and spells. You also had some psychology in there, so Maslow's hierarchy. I love it actually because it's quite interesting. But I'm also going to include some shaminism stuff because if we do go to air with this one, a lot of people are interested in this as well, so I'm just gonna give that perspective as well. You're okay with all of that? Slade: Yeah. I mean, the one thing that we have in common, that all the people that are attracted to our tribe, is the eclecticism. It's like we all just have all this stuff and I think that the diversity is what we have in common, which, it's a weird contradiction. I'm actually the one person who loves it if you mix metaphors and bring in a bunch of different symbols and, you know, I'll keep up. Asa: Yeah. So we know the sorcerer who cast this curse on you because it's you, right? It's really good. You don't have to sort of try to understand how these happened, because we know the whole mechination/machination (7:59) of this... And we also know that you're willing to dissolve this. You really want to do the work now. You're not afraid to go in there and do it. So that's also really fantastic. I'm just going to ruffle my papers a bit. So when you were 22, you cast a spell to protect yourself, to protect something that was very, very valuable to you. And you didn't want that to be threatened again. So you said, "This will NEVER happen to me again." And the feeling emotion was, as you said, an anger that was so strong that it made you cry, basically. And you were mad and hurt and wounded that you had been made to make a choice. And then you reinforced that with a mantra that you kept on using. I think that's correct, right? Slade: Umhmm. Asa: Yeah. And you said, basically, please let me have that gift. And I'll give away everything else, but I want THAT. And that's a bargain that you're striking, right? So you made the bargain, you cast the spell, and you said that you lost your creativity a little bit through your 20s. So it wasn't until you were 29 when you met Seth that that kind of, the writing came back again. Yeah? Slade: Yes. That is correct. Asa: And this is interesting for me because you mention Maslow's hierarchy, and I don't like to prove Maslow right, but you said, and I've had these thoughts myself as well, when you think you've skipped a step, right? So the belongingness and the love needs, you're going, I feel like I've skipped that step. Seth is probably one of those people, he's provided that fraternal love, you know? And you actually cast a spell to say, I want to keep that. I want to keep that belongingness and that love from him because I know that's going to sustain me. So you've had that piece, in a way. And you've even sort of gone, I NEED to keep that. I need to have it in my life to be able to do this. And that kind of makes it interesting too because you've actually gone and kind of counteracted your own curse a little bit, about 10 years later after this and said, "This is what I want to happen." And you said you came to being 39 and that's when it really took off, the writing, and now 10 years later you've gone and "I want the whole package. I want everything now." It's probably because you've showed up, your gift is pretty strong now. You have an audience. You have an outlet. And this is very much a part of you. We feel like you can let that in. Apart from the stars being aligned, of course, in the right way as well. We're ready to do the work now. So, knowing that, I would like to know how you feel about knowing that you've kind of already started rolling it back a little bit? Slade: You know what? That actually feels like a huge relief, and when you said, "Seth represents the fraternal layer of Maslow's pyramid", I thought, ohmygosh, he did! Like, I sort of, I didn't entirely skip that step after all. So that was an epiphany for me right here, like 30 seconds ago, I'm thinking, oh, you're right! I didn't skip it because I got a new kind of love with him that was really more important than some of the brittleness that goes along with romantic love. You know what I mean? There's some heavier love that exists on that platform in that pyramid altogether, as a group. And it didn't occur to me, like, oh! You got one of the really big ones. So that's interesting. Asa: And it's a really important one because I think, that's probably one of those loves that are more stable, that you can trust that they will generally be there for life maybe even, because you have a very strong bond in that, it's more of a brotherly love I guess. And you two seem to be very close anyway and neither of you want to let go of each other so at least that bond there is strong and safe. I think when I look at where you want to end up, and hopefully he's listening out there now, we should be really nice, this will be a person that totally says, that gift that you have, that you protect, that might be one of the things that attracts him to you. That might be one of the things that he would like to protect too. So if you think about it like that, it's probably not as threatening anymore. The person that you're going to attract now is not going to be jealous of your gift. They're going to be older. They're going to be more mature. And they're going to be probably saying, I really like this about Slade. His creativity and his writing and all this stuff he's doing. Because it's so much part of who you are now. Whereas when you were 22, you were still forming that personality. You know you wanted that in your life but you probably didn't know exactly what it was going to look like. You're probably able to structure your life better now. To say, "Okay, this is my writing time and this is my personal time and this is my... you know. So you don't have to spend as much time protecting that territory because it will probably be part of the life you'll have with this person. Slade: Mmm... Asa: Yeah? Slade: Nice. Asa: Does that make sense? Slade: Yeah. Asa: So the mantra that you used, you remember that, right? You remember what that was. Slade: Oh god, yeah. Asa: Okay. I'm not going to ask you to say what it is. But have a think of what the counteract to that is. Because we probably want to have a mantra now too that we go and say, this is what we're dissolving this with. We're dissolving this. We're making space for this person. I want to let this peace in. Because as we do that, we have obviously, you disassociated, basically if you made that happen that day in the shower, you sent a piece of yourself away. And it's an interesting thing from a shamanic perspective. If we have soul loss, normally it happens through trauma. We're unaware of it most of the time. It might be like 30 years later we come across a shaman and go, you've got soul loss, and we don't know how it happened. We know we've had an accident but we don't know exactly how that sped away or how much of it. But you know exactly what piece you sent away. It's a conscious process and you've gone through and said, "No. That's not.. I'm not gonna let that lead me astray. Because my gifts, my writing, is so important to me that that part I'll give up. I'll give up love for this." It makes it easier to countersay, you know, we know exactly what we're looking for. We know exactly when it was sent away. We know exactly how much time we've spent keeping it away. And we also know we let part of it back in again. So there's a little part in this romantic love thing that we're looking for now. And there is a piece, right? I don't think, from my perspective, what I saw this morning, I don't think I'll have to go and get it for you. I think we need to do some work around getting you to sort of lure it back, letting it back into your life again, because if I look at what you're saying, I don't think you've done the prep work for it yet because you haven't been ready. So now we're going to do the work of saying, okay, you know what? I'm going to get used to the thought of my gifts being safe and secure, and me being able to let another person into my space. And it's not going to be a threat. Because I know I can protect it. Right? Does that make sense? Slade: Yes. Asa: So the question for you then is, what do you feel needs to happen for you to get the love space? Slade: Oh.... God that's a good question. Well, I mean, part of it's a choice, right? Part of it is just a decision. I mean, I'm kind of that person that really has no problem believing that I'm pushing all the buttons because I prefer to have it that way. But, you know, it's a dance between me choosing it and also seeing something that I can trust reflected back, you know what I mean? I think that there's a part of me... I'm very, very willing to choose to let that back in. But I think until I see that... Maybe it is the person. Maybe it is a person. Until I see that person in the flesh and I experience it, and I know, I think then I'll exhale. Does that make sense? It's like there's a part of me that's going to be holding my breath. I want to say that some of the things that I mentioned about Deena reading my chart for me, some of the things that came up working with her, which has been in a way a little bit of a preparation, was that I was getting messages through people over the last 9 months or so, I've been attracting people who have these little bits and pieces of evidence. They're not the person, but it's like they're like showing me things that I probably didn't really think existed in people. Asa: Yeah. Slade: So that has softened me up and made me go, Oh, well wait a minute! It's enough that it feels like a message to me. Asa: Yeah. And I think that, from my point of view, it's almost like, and I'm going to use, for lack of a better term, the Universe is serving you up examples, right? And you get this very, I like that, not so much that one, but that one there... Oh! Never knew people could be like that. So it opens the possibility of kind of assembling this picture of what you want and how they make you feel. You go, I like how that person made me feel. But how they treated me and what they said to me and what they liked about me and how they responded to me. And that kind of opens the possibility a little bit more. You're going, okay, now I can see that I can actually want these things because they do exist. Right? Slade: Yes. Asa: And it's kind of like you, but you have to be open enough to see that, because, you know, you can drive past 15 restaurants and say, "There's no Vietnamese restaurants in this neighbourhood," and you've just passed 3 because you're not looking. You're looking at something else and you're being angry about something or you're being worried about something, right? So you close down. You've already started kind of going shopping a little bit. Window shopping. And going, okay, what's actually out there? So you're looking more out now than you're looking in. And saying, okay, now i'm going to have a look outside. And it feels like people are coming at you kind of like all of a sudden you’re being presented with these things but you're actually looking. You're actually paying attention. You're starting to notice these things and the more it happens the more it starts. You're going, Ooo, ahh, okay... I see! And, I think, yeah, with you having a presence out there where your work is getting recognition as well, on start, the person you're going to meet is going to have some sort of idea. And even if they don't, that's so much part of your personality now that it's going to come up very quickly, right? You're not going to tolerate anybody who's got a problem with it. Your main focus is, you know what? I am stable in my life and I'm adding this. It's like gravy on my potatoes. I've got my potatoes. I'm going to put gravy on them now. That's going to be good gravy. I want good gravy, right? That makes it easier because you can kind of turn around and work with yourself and say, you know what? I trust myself now. I trust myself to be able to say, You know what? I can put the brakes on if it doesn't feel right. I know when to stop. I know I have my boundaries. I know that this is my thing that I do that I'm not going to give up. This person has to be willing to be part of it. And I almost get a feeling, I hate doing this to be honest, but I'm going to say it. I almost get a feeling that the person coming will be very supportive of this. This will be something they treasure too, right? And this is what you want. You want someone that says, "I really like this about Slade. I'm fascinated by it. I might not be involved in it but this is something I treasure too. Because he treasures it. That's important to me because it's important to Slade." And that's kind of what you want too. Slade: Yeah, I don't need a fan. I don't need anybody to be so involved with it that they feel that they have to consume all of it. I think that's an interesting thing that comes up a lot is, sometimes you attract people who are attracted to the work persona, so I almost trust it more if it's someone who is like, "Oh, that's really cool that you do that. It's not really like my thing, but I think it's awesome that you do it." And end of story. Which, interestingly, is how my family is. There's a kind of weird, like, super amount of support and they're not necessarily paying a lot of attention to it. Asa: Yeah. If you look at it from the point of view of saying, I’m been in engineering most of my working life, in my family, we go, yeah that's alright, but they don't want to talk about it all day, right? Yeah, you do this and we do this. It's really good that you're successful with it and you're doing well and you're enjoying it. But that's what it is. It's a job. Slade: One of the biggest turnoffs to me is when somebody that I'm kind of interested in going for a coffee with, or a date, or whatever, comes at me with the offer to have a really deep philosophical conversation. Asa: No, no, no, no, stop! Slade: Please don't make me do that! Not on my off time! Asa: It's not work! Yeah, I know, and you want that kind of thing where the both of you have a life and then you grow and then you grow this thing that you have together with the relationship. That's a nice kind of.... And I think both of you and I are at that age now that we can understand that you have to have yourself. And then you make this relationship together with someone else. That's the kind of sweet spot that you want. Where are you at now with thinking about how easy it's going to be for you to kind of stop thinking that you're not cursed? Slade: Well, you know I said I probably would process a lot of things not in the moment. And that's not true. I'm actually kind of jotting down notes of things that are almost kind of epiphanies as you say them. It was funny because there was a realization I had at some point in this conversation, I made the note that when I was with Richard who was my first person in the story, I actually had a situation happen with him where I had developed a kind of physical violence as a way of defending myself as a child and as a teenager, and I got through high school by being very wiling to fight anybody that tried to victimize me in any way. And I remember being in a horrible fight with Richard and him saying to me, "You don't have to go there anymore." I was still in this mode, this teen warrior mode, there was a part of me that was always on a school bus ready to take on a bully. I carry that all the way up until my early 20s and I was doing that in my relationship with him. And I remember him saying, "You don't have to do that anymore. It's just not necessary." And as you were talking, kind of even about the Seth thing, realizing like, oh, the Maslow thing that I thought I was missing, I really wasn't missing. I actually had a piece of that. And I realized when you said being able to release the curse, and believe that you don't have to live like that anymore. I flashed back to that relationship with Richard when he told me that. What a huge revelation it was in that moment to realize like oh, I'm in this super aggressive mode that's just not required anymore and I let it go. So in answering the question, where am I in feeling like I can kind of let this go and everything, I think one of the things that I most was interested in talking to you about, because we always need someone outside our own head to look at the situation, and that's really what you're doing. There's always this fear that there's something that I'm missing. Now you've already told me a couple of things that I felt like, Oh, I was missing that. So I think one of my biggest questions is, what am I not seeing? What am I beating myself up about that I need to stop? What am I being stubborn about? What am I being really melodramatic about? I feel like the whole thing is really melodramatic. I am trusting you to tell me that kind of truth, you know? Like what do you see me doing, because you've known me for years, you know my work, you know we're friends, we message each other a lot, so you are in a good position to recognize this as a thread within my personality. Maybe you see evidence in other ways that I handle myself. So I'm here in a very raw and vulnerable way, saying, What am I missing here? Asa: I think, and I'm the kind of person who, I like to get everything out on the table and I'll pick the pieces that I can do something with, and you're an interesting person because you have pieces that you've put out in front of me and then there's pieces where I'm going, Oh, there's more, there's more. And I'm going, he's not quite ready to either see them himself or let me know about them yet. This is what I’m saying, I’m thinking — We're having a conversation now and then you're probably going to go away to process and then you go, okay I'm going to get rid of these pieces now. And that's really cool. That's okay because we don't go through this in a session basically. We just, it wouldn't be feasible I mean, we've probably spoken for half an hour or so now and we've gotten quite far, right? We've had a few points where you went, Ah, okay, I see this now. Which means that you as a storyteller, you'll start re-telling your stories slightly differently. So we're going back, if you want to be kind of melodramatic about it, we're going back to the past and we're going, okay, I'm seeing now things that I've done to kind of start undoing this. Seeing how things weren't quite the way I thought they were, and I'm wasn't quite as doomed with this curse as I may have thought, because there's things that have happened that I've shown myself that I'm actually capable of starting to unravel this as well. There's something still that's kept you in that space. You're going, I'm not quite ready to trust this yet. And that's the piece that we probably, it's probably going to take a little bit more, to say, okay, what is it down there that still makes you go, "I'm not quite sure yet. I'm seeing all these opportunities but I'm not quite ready to step over to the other side and go, I'm free! I'm ready to do this." Almost 30 years ago, 3 decades. It's a long, long time. It's a really, really long time. And the work that I'd like to see happen now is, we sure have to decide where the stuff that's in your consciousness, that you can literally go, okay, I got it, I understand that I have partially let love back in. I did that at 29, so ease the pressure there, took the foot off the brakes a little bit. And then whatever else is happening and you really, you realize your dream. You have realized your dream of using your gift and it becoming very much a part of who you are. So you can go, Ooo! Don't need to protect that as much. It can protect itself now. It's grown up. It's a grown up now. Slade: Yeah. Asa: It's not a baby that I have to defend. It's not a kitten that I found somewhere I have to defend. It's a really good thing that's happening. It's kind of getting your head around them, saying, that's not part of my truth. My truth is this. And then kind of extending that, if that makes sense. So, yeah. Slade: So is the shoot-the-moon thing my new mantra? Asa: If you want it to be! Now this has got to work for you, right? But it's also the picture you get with shoot-the-moon, I mean, what does that mean? Does it mean I can have it all, I can live, you know what? I'm gonna swear now. I earned that shit. I have earned that shit, right? I can have it, and I don't have to pay any dues to have all that. Literally. I worked my ass off to get to where I am today. And now I want. I want the extra bit. I want that and it's gonna be good because I'm not taking half-baked, right? I want that good part. And I deserve that. I can have that. There are so many cliches saying you deserve that, but you know, literally, you DO, right? You deserve to have that in your life. You can have it, you know? There's nothing, and I hate to say this, but nothing's stopping you but literally there isn't anything except for ourselves. Our minds put limitations on things all the time. And we can look at people, I'm going to mention Trump, who's got no limitations, he just goes, "I'm just going to have it all," and you sit there and be like, how can you even be like that? But he's kind of the opposite end of the scale, where he thinks he deserves everything, you know? I am the best. I'm going, give me some of what he's got, because I need that in my life because I could literally stretch myself a bit and understand that I don't need to limit myself out of fear so much again. And you have very little to fear in my mind, right? Except for the story that you tell yourself. Slade: Yeah. And you mentioned something at the beginning of the conversation that I do when I'm doing assessments for people working with their intuition or intuitive development. I do an assessment and the assessment is very much a, it's not even about the symbolism. It's about the words that they use when they're describing the symbolism that reveal subtext. So I was wondering if there's anything, you said you know when you were listening to the story that you noticed certain phrases and things that I said. Was there anything that stuck out to you that was telling about the way that I spoke about it? Asa: Yeah. It's very heavy on the defense, right? I'm under threat. Survival words are used and there's incredibly strong emotion in the beginning. There's anger that makes you cry. It's not even rage. It's that, I am really hurt. I am so hurt and I can't believe that this person made.. I'm so hurt that he attacked the one thing that I treasure the most. You know what it is? It's a rejection of you, right? He's taken the thing that was most precious to you and rejected it. I don't want that. I don't like it. I hate it. You need to stop it. So this is an attack on YOU. Like, literally. Go stab you in the heart, right, because it's Slade's baby that he's trying to kill. And it's very much a survival threat to me. If you lost that part at that age, if you had to give it away, your life would have been incredibly different. If you'd said, Okay, no, I'm gonna give that away for Richard, you would have given up your whole life. You would've a hunk of it. Slade: Ugh. Gross. Asa: Right? I couldn't count on him in the way I could count on myself. Slade: Yeah. Asa: And you are a person who relies very, very much on yourself. Slade: Umhmm. Asa: And I see sometimes, please don't take this the wrong way, I see sometimes you have almost literally hard time reaching out saying to people, "You know what? Take care of that for me." Slade: Yeah. Asa: As much as, you've got us girls in the Shift Your Spirits community to help you out there, the High Priestesses, as you like to call us. But at the same time, I can sometimes tell it's like you find it a little bit hard to let go of the reins. When I look, I'm going, this is perfect because that's like a training ground for you to say, I can actually step back, and go, It's probably going to be okay. Slade: Yes! Asa: Yeah. This kind of understanding that you are literally sitting in a space now where you've got it really good. You've taken such good care of Slade, right? And you've set him up in a space where he really likes to be. He gets to write. He gets to do his business. He gets to run his own days. He can plan his own life. He can do a little bit of extra things like travel and stuff, so you've taken really good care of yourself. But it's letting someone else in to that space now, because you're going, I don't want you to mess with that space. This is my space. I've made it really good. And I have a similar problem for myself, to be honest with you. I do the same thing, right? I'm going, I made my space. I don't want someone to come in with dirty, muddy shoes to walk through it, right? But we probably have to expect people to, to some extent, mess up our space a little bit. And learning to be okay with that. And learning to be okay with the fact that they don't fully understand our space, and you know, if we're lucky, we'll come together and we'll learn about each other's space and we'll create a better space out of that. Because we'll learn from them and learn from us. But it's really tricky to get past that hurdle, going, I'm really comfortable in my bubble. I feel really secure, and understanding that I'm not threatened. Does that make sense? Slade: Umhmm. Well and you identified something that's been a real theme for me within the past year or so, which was really in the last 2 years, was going from this sort of one-man band, this solo episode where I control everything, you know, not episode, sort of machinery, where I don't have to rely on anybody else. But I can also be a complete slave driver to myself if I choose, you know? In a way that I could never be to anyone else. I can only do that to me. Asa: Yeah. Slade: There's a lot of hesitation, not even in letting other people help me, but in fear of like, what a tyrant I can be if I went in the other direction. Like Trump, you know? There has been this theme of collaboration and community, and the platform going from being about me to being about all the other people who come on this show. It's sharing the stage, and also sharing the space with the people who are listening and participating. And hosting without having a party of 1. It's like, it's not me watching Netflix with the cats. It's me allowing there to be a keg party in the backyard. So that is definitely, like you said, having you guys that are my social media moderators and administrators, has put me back in a situation where I'm practicing being a manager of other people but, you know, in the context of letting other people's gifts work for me. I mean, the reason why I chose you guys, is because you can do all these things without me having to tell you how to do it. Because I trust you guys and you're all smart and capable in your own way. Sometimes I'm just constantly having to remind myself that, like, it's okay to let everyone else do what they do. So that's been something that is opening up for me. I wanted to say just for your own personal feedback, I've got a double Scorpio wrapped around this Leo, so when you start to, when you feel like there's something he's not telling me, of course there is, you know? I've got like a secret bat girl wall with a button with that cat suit hiding somewhere. And I definitely see that as kind of being part of my persona and all the astrology in the world tells me about the secrets that I keep, and my relationship with my shadow, and all that kind of stuff. So some of that may be kind of private or whatever, but I wanted to kind of end the conversation today, and you and I will continue with this conversation, because like you said, I'm going to go sleep on it, process, and, oh man! And I'll share that with you and with everyone that I can, but for the people who are listening, I wanted you to know that I put out such a personal episode, to the point that I thought, is this really so indulgent that nobody else is going to be able to relate to it? I got such overwhelming feedback from people writing and telling me what their version of this felt like, and realizing, ohmygod, I've done this to myself too, in different aspects of their lives, so it was really cool. So in speaking to them, and a lot of them I kind of wrote behind the scenes and I said, "Stay tuned! I have something coming." And I think you would find, if you work with some of these people and you may, because they may contact you and be like, "Ooo I want to have this conversation", that they all come with a self awareness and a capability and a bag of tricks and all this stuff too. And so, as you were talking, I was kind of making some notes about what this process is about, because I think that I believe at the root of it all, that if we put a curse on ourselves, we can certainly reverse it ourselves. So I think some of the things that I noticed, to kind of put out there for others who are thinking, how can I process this for myself, there was the idea of where it came from, obviously, what is the language around this curse? Who did it? Who is the source? And it's probably themselves. The idea of having a sort of reverse mantra, some other kind of language just to start to reinforce, this is a framing exercise, right? Asa: Yeah. Slade: The idea of the soul loss, when that happened, what the events were surrounding that, and then this idea of prep work around what you're missing, when did this happen, what kind of language are you using around it? Maybe even take the time to do what I did, which is to write your story out as if you're going to send it, and look for those words. You know, what emotions are in your story? What story are you really telling here? So I think it could be really helpful for people to look at some of those components for themselves, and they may have some revelations of their own. But it also would be very helpful, if they're going to do a session with you or someone who does this kind of work, to have some of those answers ready. Asa: Yeah. I'll shortcut the process a little bit too, but I have to say, most people are not as easy as you are. You're very self-aware and I think you understand, with language for instance, when I looked at, I've probably got about 6 pages of language that you were using and phrases, and I'm going, this is all survival mode, right? It's all about, I am so threatened, you know? I'm just gonna defend myself and I'm out there. And it makes sense now what you said about like in your teens you were ready to fight all the time. And that kind of kicked back in a little bit. And it might have been physical but all of a sudden, you are in a very high state of alert and it had to be protected at all costs. There was like no other way here. I have to protect this at ALL costs. I have to chop bits of myself off. Those bits can't be trusted so they need to go away. If I look at it this way, going forward probably what I would say is, I might turn around and say to you, I would like to do a soul retrieval for you eventually. If it doesn't spontaneously come back — it’s a pretty big part — but I think we can do the groundwork first. It always helps before you do that kind of thing, right? And also doing their reversal mantra will fortify the base that we're having here. So that when that comes back, it'll be... And also another thing is, that's the 22 year old part of you. That kind of needs to mature as well. That's a part of you that hasn't had a lot of attention. So it's working through that as well. Sometimes it happens quickly and sometimes people have enormous problems. We're kind of getting that part of it back in again because it's not functioning at the same level as you are. That's another thing as well. You're saying people can do the work. I was recommended to talk to someone because it is, like you say, people see things that you don't see. They hear you say things that you might not hear because you're so used to going over it in your head. And finding those patterns for you and saying, "Okay, this is where I see the work happening." It's funny what you were saying, the double Scorpio, I have very few clients where I'm going... It's not a wall but I'm going, there are secrets here. And I can push around and go, okay, I want to know what's behind that, but that's a bit rude. And I'm going, we had that discussion before because I said to you, "Do you want to know everything? And do I have permission to do this?" So literally you've given me permission to do it but it's not useful for me to come back at you and go, this, this and this. Because you'll be going, "Uh oh. Now I feel threatened again." So I don't want you to retreat back there. And it might not be things so useful for me to know anyway because those are your secrets, right? They're there for a reason. You want to be mystical and stuff, that's okay! The stuff that's come out today, it's the beginning. It's a journey. We'll talk again about this for sure and see what's new. And you are the kind of person who'll go away and you'll mull this over. And then probably I'll get a message, "What about this?" And that's perfect for me because I'm going, okay, now I can see what's happening between, we chat for a bit and what's the next step after that as well. So yeah. Slade: Awesome. I thank you because I definitely have at least two pieces that I, like I'm writing notes by longhand on a piece of paper and I've got these little stars by these kind of 'aha' moments and I'm like, OH! Part of my brain is already running off, trying to unpack those and unravel them and go, wait a minute! But for anybody out there listening who might be interested having heard this, for this reason or for any other, you know, who really resonates with you, tell us where we can find who you are, where we can find you online, and how to get in touch with you. Asa: So I've got a website. I'm on Facebook obviously, Asa Kristina Poeche. I've also got a Page on Facebook that's Asa Poeche. A webpage that's AsaPoeche.com. My services that are offered there currently are a session called, I call them mentoring sessions, a one-on-one session, because I don't like to call them healing sessions. I tend to sit in the space where I coach people more and get them to kind of come to realization through a discussion that we have. And I hope that kind of came through in what we did here now. It's more effective if I get you to solve your problem rather than me trying to fix you. I think sometimes you have these, I call them Tony Robbins moments, where you go, "Ohmygod! That's fantastic!" And then two days later you're like, "I'm not feeling the momentum anymore. And that's an important thing too, I find. I think when we have a session like this, you go away more pumped and sometimes you just lose momentum. Anyway, going back to my stuff, I'll do a lot of shamanic work but I think at heart I would probably call myself a hedge witch, which means I sit in this space where I'm very much working in the other world, tapping into a lot of beings around people and getting messages. I've got decades of studying metaphysical stuff, about two decades in shaminism. Yeah. That was a really, really messed up explanation of what I do, but ... Slade: It was very authentic. Well, one of the things that I... I, just for the record, and you know this but for the rest of the audience, I've been wanting to have you on my show since I had a show. Obviously those of you who are in the Automatic Intuition community, who are strong in the Shift Your Spirits community, meaning you produce a lot of content and you do a lot of teaching in the group, you're an active participant, you're a moderator, a lot of people will recognize your material from there and the interesting thing is, I don't just want the show to be like, oh, here's another intuitive and they do sessions and they're going to tell us about their sessions and here they are. It's like there's an added bit of extra expectation for you guys. I want you guys especially to have a really special introduction to everyone, because if it's someone that I've never met before, I can ask them a lot of curious questions about who they are and what they do. It comes from a really genuine place. But in order for you and I to have a genuine conversation, if we need to do something like this, it needs to be extra juicy. I was so excited when I saw your post in the community where you answered that question and you use a little bit of that witchy language and you caught my eye. I thought, oh wait a minute! So the idea to do this whole two-episode so far conversation came to me in that moment and I was so excited that you were willing to do this with me. Because it's a real tightrope act for both of us. You know what I mean? Asa: It is. And this is my first podcast too I've recorded for. So it's a big thing, right? Slade: Ohmygosh, is it? Asa: Yeah. I usually don't like listening to myself at all. It's one of those things … Sometimes you'll have the conversation with someone and you bounce off each other really easily. And sometimes when you have a client, it's like, are they there? Slade: Yes. Asa: Are you alive? Slade: Yeaaah. Asa: You always kind of end up worrying a little bit about that as well. I suppose, also, I have to say is, I always say I don't like teaching but that's probably not true because I also mentor people. You probably have to nudge me to have a few conversations with me before I take you on as a student. But it's probably one of the things I find most rewarding actually, and it's mostly helping people grow. And I do these also in business and professional space where I coach and mentor people to integrate spirituality into their professional and business lives. Becaue I think we can do with a lot more of that in the work place as well, and there are a lot of people that really struggle in that corporate environment. How can I be more spiritual in that kind of environment? And it's possible, right? So that's another thing that I do as well. Slade: Well I'm going to close with a shoutout to Amy Oscar, who gave me the term 'illuminated conversations', and I think that both you and I love to work in that capacity, right? We want a participating client, we want a collaborator, and we want someone to have these really beautiful deep conversations. So thank you for having one of those with me around this. I will keep you posted about my epiphanies and we'll probably hear some follow up for everyone else who's listening. So, again, thanks for doing it. Asa: Thank you for having me on.

Susan Grace and Aubrey Mast host the Be The Evidence Podcast. They develop continual, ongoing astrological and wellness content at www.BeTheEvidence.live. They are dedicated to supporting the Collective during a time of massive, wide-sweeping change. In this Bonus Episode Susan and Aubrey Interview Slade Roberson of Shift Your Spirits Slade Roberson is a professional intuitive, author, and host of the podcast Shift Your Spirits, where he tries to talk about spirituality with fewer hearts and flowers than most New Age blather. He also mentors emerging intuitives, psychics and healers in a program called Automatic Intuition. Themes Reconnecting to your Intuition Becoming Inspired and sparking Creativity Bringing your Gifts into the World Receiving and Allowing Money Tools to Inspire Surfing Big Emotions Links Susan Grace www.SusanGrace.org Aubrey Mast www.aubreycmast.com Slade Roberson https://sladeroberson.com/ Offers Slade's Gift's Contacting Your Spirit Guides 101 - ebook + guided meditation to meet your guides sladeroberson.com/free Automatic Intuition Professional - Attunement guided meditation you can start the course for free by downloading the Attunement at automaticintuition.com Member Site www.BeTheEvidence.live You are invited to join Susan and Aubrey's growing member community at www.BeTheEvidence.live where you can get real time astrology updates by text, weekly live calls, presence practices, private group support, podcasts extended to all 12 signs and more.

A kind of real magic any one of us can perform, a kind of magic I do believe has the power to change our experience of reality, if not reality itself. "I promise if you keep searching for everything beautiful in this world, you will eventually become it." — Tyler Kent White MENTIONED ON THE SHOW One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are by Ann Voskamp The Book of Faded Green The Money Shift HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses Get an intuitive reading with Slade Automatic Intuition FACEBOOK GROUP Shift Your Spirits Community BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits Edit your pledge on Patreon TRANSCRIPT *this the Author's Draft ; not technically a full transcript I promise if you keep searching for everything beautiful in this world, you will eventually become it. — Tyler Kent White My hair stylist is, as many of them are, a down low psychotherapist. We were talking about someone miserable in my life She mentioned gratitude Our standing appointments every other week are mini summits between the New Age and New Christianity (hipster Christians we call them around here, not disparagingly) The Camp House Anyway she told me about a Christian author, Ann Voskamp who wrote this contemplative book called 1000 Gifts I haven’t read it and probably won’t but I still like the idea I am totally guilty of pessimism and negativity Double Scorpio grew up with a father who is a total Eeyore My Saturn Return had a lot to do with becoming aware of my negative perspective and how the voices I’d taken on were polluting my experience, my life, my capacity for joy Seth taught me how to do this. I credit him with teaching me the power of reframing. Miraculously, at 22 years old, he was one of the wisest people I’d ever encountered and one of my most effective therapists … to this date. You hear me speak of him often. He’s the Gayle to my Oprah Oprah helped really popularize and mainstream the concept of gratitude journaling It’s connected to the practice of Julia Cameron's Morning Pages which were popularized around the same time period. The Book of Faded Green was my first instinctive experiment — life changing Years later, I used re-framing to change my relationship with Abundance and escape poverty Even several years after that, it became The Money Shift The concept of the exercise in The Money Shift can be adapted to any number of things you need to shift. The name of this blog, this podcast SHIFT YOUR SPIRITS has always been at its core, a message about the power of reframing It’s a kind of Neurolinguistic programming Re-programming The past year was really hard for me because of my relationship with one family member. Someone who married into my family. This is the person I was discussing with my stylist I’ve never had “feuds” with anyone or falling out with any family members, not really I don’t fight with my brother I’m a Leo — we are triggered by a desire to protect those we believe are in our charge… Carrying around anger and outrage is debilitating And it’s not like doing The Money Shift for one month means those negative voices never creep back in. Reframing negative voices is chiropractic … shifting shifting shifting in the right direction, then back sliding with each little life encounter pulling in the other direction I usually practice what people would call Gratitude Journaling in the car. Driving allows me to look around and observe, and when I’m feeling desperately dark, I just start naming anything I like and can remark on positively The clouds are cool today. That tree’s beautiful. I love seeing the mountains from this stretch of highway… Anything I can grab onto to start that shift when I’ve forgotten myself. I was just thinking about how I needed to do another round of more focused, intense, committed Gratitude Shifting when a meme popped up on Facebook It says: Did you know you can rewire your brain to be happy by simply recalling 3 things you’re grateful for every day for 21 days? I thought, why yes. yes I do know some version of that concept if not this exact statistic. (Unverified by the way, but who cares, the spirit of it works for me.) Susan Hyatt suggested it as a challenge to her Facebook friends and asked if others wanted to participate with her. And like I needed anything else on my To Do list with a daily check in … But the synchronicity was there and sometimes my spontaneous decisions are the best, so I just did it. You may have seen me posting on my personal page or in the SYS group. I missed a day - who cares - I just picked up where I left off. I’m trying though to pick 3 DIFFERENT things every day and not just repeat versions of the same thing. Because my stylist told me one of the things she loved most about reading this woman’s book who did the 1000 Gifts, was how much, after you run through the obvious list of things, you really have to contemplate and observe and reach into the most mundane moments of your life to find new sources of beauty. For instance, she talked about being moved by a particularly meditative passage on washing dishes and observing the miraculous surface of soap bubbles. And I thought YES, the magic in the mundane. that’s where real magic is found. I don’t want magic to be woo woo, nearly as much as I need it to be REAL This is something Toni Morrison talks about and has been in my consciousness since I was a teenager. So, I thought, yes, won’t it be interesting to see where you might go after 21 days. 3 items for 21 days is ONLY 63 items. What will it take to discover 1000. If you keep doing 3 a day, it will take you 333 days And that math makes me think of the power of the 3 x 3 strategy And so I feel like this is a new magic spell we could do. It has threads running through so many Shift Your Spirits themes and memes. You could even do this as part of your Reboot — the free writing, journaling part of the process. Finding a list of 1000 things at 3 per day would essentially be 3 Reboots. And here’s the secret about the Reboot — you don’t stop after 3 months anyway, you do it indefinitely. That’s what happens when you fall into that practice and it becomes such a source of peace and energy. No pressure if you want to take on this challenge. Break it down in chunks. Work it in stages. This first part is 3 things per day for 21 days. Let’s do that part first and see where it gets us. And I think it might be cool if people post their daily gratitude in the Shift Your Spirits community. Hell, post that every day. Don’t be shy. Stick a cool picture. Nobody will be “annoyed.” If anything, for lurkers and scrollers, it still impacts us because we see that, in the moment, and we see others commenting and chiming in, and maybe we do post ours or maybe we don’t. But we think it. What are mine? What 3 things am I grateful for today? Everyone’s shifting together. And what if it becomes a habit? What if it becomes like stopping to take deep breaths for a minute? Or stopping to correct your posture? Or to stand and move your body when you’ve been sitting for too long? Listen, we are diving toward extinction of our species and the death of our planet. And when I started this blog, this platform, I believed we were on the verge of Ascensions In the last 2 years or so … Hmm. I really worry that we are riding out the last days and we have shifted away from elevating the human race. We need to pull out of this nose dive fast. People shifting, in their own bubbles, shifting against one another … Shifting into each other, connecting, networking ... Shifting en masse. Like the foaming clouds of soap bubbles in your kitchen sink... That’s magic. And I do believe that could change the world.

If you’re hitting that point in the new year where your excitement and drive around your intentions are starting to wane a little bit, this message is for you. A do-over, a re-do, a take two ... a reboot whenever you need it. MENTIONED ON THE SHOW Reboot Your Life original post 3x3 Project with Diana Frajman HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses Get an intuitive reading with Slade Automatic Intuition FACEBOOK GROUP Shift Your Spirits Community BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits Edit your pledge on Patreon TRANSCRIPT It is January 16, 2019 as I record this segment. If you’re listening in real time, when this episode first goes live in your podcast, it’s probably around January 29, 2019, so right at the end of January beginning of February. You’re probably hitting that point in the new year where your excitement and drive around your intentions are starting to wane a little bit. Fun fact about my practice as an intuitive - over the years, I've noticed that even though a lot of people want to get readings, have sessions, and start course work that's in my tutorials, or do Automatic Intuition. Those all seem like things you want to start in the new year. But I've noticed that it’s not so much about January. There's this wave of people who actually start things in February. And I have a theory about why that is, and I think it's because you pretty much start out the new year under your own guns, with a lot of energy and gonna do it on your own. And then you find out that you're not making as much progress as you want. And so you do reach for help or structure or somebody else's perspective. OR, maybe you just didn't get around to it. Like, the gun went off and you weren't ready to start yet. And so you are kind of getting it together during January. January is a horrible time of year in the northern hemisphere to get things together and start things and all of that, just for the record. So if you're one of those seasonal people who gets a little S.A.D., don't worry about it. It's cool. We're going to de-bunk a lot of that. And I purposefully did NOT record this at the end of December or for the New Year’s Day episode. Because it's not about New Years. It’s not about one specific day on a calendar. So don’t turn this off because you think it’s a new years thing that you missed … This is an Evergreen diatribe. And whenever you hear it, is when you were supposed to hear it. I want to drill down into all of that some… Maybe you never quite got out of first gear this year. I kind of feel that way. And I think it's because this New Year started off weird… We had a New Moon come in January 7th, I believe, so a week into it is when you get that nature cycle of newness. So the new moon, I do believe that we're very much in sync with the moon cycles, even if you don't believe in any other part of astrology, we can all kind of agree that the moon cycles have a definite impact on living things on this planet. So having that come a week in kind of made it like a weird slow start. It was at the end of a lunar cycle, while you're psychologically, intellectually telling yourself you're supposed to be experiencing something new. And then when we finally get to that new moon, it was eclipsed, so that's kind of weird. And then we're in between eclipses for most of January, with another one happening on the full moon. As I record this, I'm sitting here right in between those two things and so... I don't know. We might need an astrologer to explain all that a little bit more in-depth, but it just feels kind of like an "off" time for a lot of people. Not only am I processing my personal feelings for you, I'm kind of collating what other people that I've spoken to are expressing that they're feeling. And this is the pattern that I've identified. Over the years I’ve tried really hard to create alternatives to the new years resolution thing. I mean, for over a decade, I've blogged at this time of year starting out way back in, say 2007 or something like that, I got really nerded out into the linguistics of the word 'resolution', which is kind of associated with endings and started talking about reframing our language and getting into intentions. And over the last 10 years, intentions has become more of a popular buzzword and so as that became more spread throughout everybody's consciousness, I was trying to work with alternatives to intentions and make that not such a big scary word and I think for awhile there I was making interesting lists of things and I would try to come up with these recipes each year that seemed really simple, like, Do three things. It just kept getting more and more simple, and I kept minimizing it and I think the last time I ever did something like this, it was like the ONE thing that you need to do. And it was just this ONE sort of mindset shift or something that you were meant to practice. Now... and maybe I've contributed to this. It seems like we've almost developed this trend for not doing resolutions or setting intentions. You see a lot of people posting all their resolutions and intentions and key words. And then you see this good third of the people on social media posting about how they're not doing them and kind of embracing the lack of doing it. And for those of us who are a little bit too cool, we've gotten a little over the new age tools of the past because we've been around for awhile and been using them, and we've become a little bit too cool for school, you know what I mean? Like, vision boards, yawn. The law of attraction, ugh, the Secret wore everybody out. There was so much missing from it too. They didn't even get it right. And then you know, the whole word of the year thing, eyeroll right? I actually do have a word of the year though. It's really hard for me to see someone post, What's your word of the year? And me not think of it. So even though I didn't make a big announcement about my word of the year, or make an infographic or a meme or something. I do have one. And it was already there as a theme of something that I was preparing myself for. And my word is SCALE. So you can contemplate that. More the verb form than anything. The verb form of scale. It's about working with what I already have and making more out of it without increasing time necessarily, because one of my big issues is, I don't have any more time. I don't have any time to add anything else in, so I need to work smarter, not harder, as they say. But I also need for things to be scaleable. For instance, this podcast is a perfect example of one of the most scaleable things in my whole business. Because it is the exact same amount of work whether two of you listen to it or 2,000 or 200,000, right? It's the same amount of work. Those are the kinds of things that make sense to put more energy into. I can go all in with the podcast and with growing the audience for the podcast because it's not more work. But it will deliver more impact. It will deliver more income. All those kinds of things. So that's my kind of theme for the year. But I think you can think of scale in multiple directions. Like, what can you scale back? What can you make smaller that's too big and too complicated? I'm always looking to minimize things. Not only concepts like new years resolutions, but minimizing things in my visual space. The crap sitting around in my office. The number of images on the wall. I want minimalism. It brings me peace. So that's another type of scale and there's a lot of places as I look around my life where I can scale up or down. And it's not about bringing in anything new. It's not really about getting rid of things completely. It's just about finding the right size. It's like a Goldilocks fable or something. It's just hard not to think about that stuff when you see people posting it. So, in a way, whether we publicly share it or not, we do have goals, we have themes, we have dreams, we have hopes and we have wishes for changes that we want to make. And I think a lot of us have taken "the fewer hearts and flowers angle" to this cynical, jaded place. Especially in the way we put ourselves out there publicly. And maybe we’re jaded for a good reason — we’ve tried everything. But there are people for whom these tools and concepts that we've been practicing forever are really impactful. They're new to them. Maybe they're just discovering them. Or maybe they're re-discovering them with a newfound ability to make them work for them finally. They may be at that place in their life where it suddenly occurs to them that a vision board is an amazing tool for them. So my iteration of the whole new year's concept now, after I've minimized it down and made it as simple as I possibly can, and I can't do that anymore, my new angle or take on this whole concept is just about the evergreen. About, what is it when we strip it all away? What's the core of this that we take into our lives on a daily basis? I am obsessed with where does all the woo woo meet the ground? It doesn't matter to me if you have all these elaborate spiritual modalities and techniques and all this stuff that you're really well-versed in, if it doesn't have a practical, useful tool in your every day life, if it doesn't work for you in some way, then I don't really see the point. So it doesn't matter whether you set intentions, or when you choose to change your life. It doesn't matter not whether you do it, but it doesn't matter... Actually it doesn't matter whether you do it or not. It really doesn't. You can be at peace. There's a whole thing that I just realized I didn't put into this speech today, which is, you know what? It's okay just to BE. It's okay just to live your life and to not be aspirational. I did that whole episode about, can you be happy without doing something amazing? Can you be? Can you just do your thing? So it doesn't matter whether you set your intentions or not. Or whether you choose to change anything. But it really doesn't matter when you choose to do it. That's the main point of my speech today. And it doesn’t matter if you “blow it” because you can always do it again. Or try another way. These "holidays", these milestones, they're arbitrary dates ... I don't really celebrate New Year, because every day I have goals. I have a chance to fuck it up, and a chance to start again. Some days I rock, some days I suck, and the calendar doesn't really have much to do with that, you know? Let's be honest. Maybe the seasons? And the natural cycles. And the moon phases. Maybe that does impact us a little bit. I do believe that. But the CALENDAR, you know? Oh, your birthday was on a Wednesday and it was blah. But maybe that Friday is a great time to celebrate and do something. Or maybe it's the weekend before. We'll practice at making these adjustments. So I think we need to give ourselves permission to just do stuff when we want to do it. And not when we're TOLD we have to do it, or, Well, you missed your new years launch, so you're screwed! I guess you'll just have to wait 12 months. It's ridiculous. I don't care whether you acknowledge New Year's or not. I don't care whether you make resolutions or set intentions or do vision boards or have theme words. But I also don’t want you to think I think I’m better than you because I don’t do those things. Our lives are random and timing is a bitch and shit happens to good people, and everybody gets a little lucky here and there. And if you’re listening to this, then you’re trying, and I think that’s all that matters. Beyond that, whatever gets you through. Do whatever works for you. But keep this in mind — one of my biggest life lessons last year, this past year, was realizing how much easier and more powerful it is if you focus on manifesting PEOPLE rather than places or things. The people know the places and they have the things. So, reach out to new people in your world, even the ones who come and go in a matter of minutes. They can make all the difference. But while I have you here, if you want to do a Thing, for new years, for next week, for your birthday, for tomorrow.. A year ago, I talked about how to reboot your energy — I’ll link to that, because I probably went way more in depth on that episode than I’m about to here. It started out as just something that I noticed as a theme in the advice I was giving out to people who were coming in for readings. And I was getting complaints of sort of low level depression. You know when we say we're depressed but it's not like a clinical depression. It's more like, "eh". We've kind of lost our mojo, and we're not feeling motivated. We've lost our energy. We're intellectually aware that we're trying these things but then the visceral magic is just not popping off. And you're just feeling kind of not comfortable in your own body. So you're not necessarily in need of medication. And all the mindset shifts are not working. You're taking them in and they're kind of going in one ear and out the other. And then you're beating yourself up about it. So all of that kind of ennui, that existential angst. I was giving out this advice that had a pattern to it or theme. I started to sort of refer to it as the Energy Reboot. Because it was about, you know, just rebooting. Rebooting your life. Rebooting your spirit and your body and your soul and your emotions. Just reboot everything. It’s based on the principal that if you're feeling all the things that I just described, what you’re most likely missing is a 2-pronged connection to your creative, intuitive channel combined with a need to really be fully grounded in your body. This combination is particularly powerful. If you want to hear your guides, connect with your intuition, get your creativity flowing. But more than anything, if none of that feels like it's working, it's because it's not grounded. So the reason why you need to reboot is... Think about, you know how the WiFi router in your house, it says it's putting out a signal but it's been working too many times or too many devices connected to it. It's filled up and it's putting out a signal but it's really slow or it's just, your computer isn't able to connect to it. So you know, you go, unplug it, count to ten, plug it back in. My routers usually have these little lights that always remind me of the chakras of the spine or something. And they light up from the bottom back to the top. Unplugging, count to ten, plugging things back in is kind of like one of the most universal ways to fix machines that we have. You know, it's the first troubleshooting step. The cool thing is it works for us as well as for devices. We are a very complex machine but the same principle kind of applies. What's going on with those of you who are trying so hard, those of us who are trying and reaching and studying and practicing and wanting and hoping and willing and setting intentions. We are so up in the upper chakras. We're up in the third eye. We're up in the divine crown. We're constantly trying to project out of our heads. If you could see me now, I'm sort of waving my arms because it's like a plate-spinning thing. We're shaped like a tree and we're very top-heavy. We've got all this stuff going on and we're just always looking up, reaching up. You know how tiring it is, right? To roll your eyes up and reach your arms up. Everything gets heavy and it's almost like a coat rack that's got too many things on top of it. It's very precarious. Because we're so focused on everything from the heart chakra to the throat chakra to the third eye to the crown, it's like we're living in the upper half of our energy body and ignoring everything that takes place down below the root chakra, the sacral chakra, the centre of our guts and our sexual selves and our animal selves and the base of our foundation of strength. And so it seems to be a chronic thing that people who come in who are spinning out in the upper chakras, the reason why all that's not working, that signal is not connecting, is because you're not grounded. You need to unplug, go all the way back down to the bottom and work your way back up again. I prescribe that you do this reboot for 90 days, not just a month. Don't do things for a week or a month. Too many things can change from one day to the next. It's like watching the stock market too closely. Don't check your stocks too much because then you're just riding a roller coaster. Look at longer periods of time. I like quarters because I like to plan my business around quarters, and it also applies to your personal life and some of the personal development things that you want to do. And I think quarters, 3-month periods, are perfect goal chunk time periods. Because, you know, the first month you're like, Ooo ooo! You're really pumped. You've got a lot of energy going in. And you think, ah, you can do anything for a month. And you're supposed to do things for 30 days and then it becomes a habit or something. And then the 2nd month hits you and you suck. You fall off the wagon. You're not as motivated. You start missing. Beat yourself up about it. But if you're really committed, you've got another month to kind of bring it back home. And it all kind of comes in under the wire or comes out in the wash as they say. So rather than really focusing on the up and down wave, just zoom out a little bit and give yourself a 90 day period to go through those phases, knowing that there's gonna be a dip, but you can still come back up from the dip. The Energy Reboot itself is essentially a 90 day period of walking meditation combined with free associative writing. If you've heard of Morning Pages, as in The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron, or you've heard of gratitude journalling. The technical, intellectual term is proprioceptive writing. It's just writing. It's just, like, free associative writing, whatever you want to say. It's just babbling on the page. You can do it by hand in a journal. You can type if you type really fast and feel more comfortable doing that. That's the channel, that's the creativity part, that's the Higher Self. That's the voice of your guides. That's your cool flashes of inspiration and ideas coming through. It's you brainstorming with yourself. The walking meditation, yes I know there are some of you that can't walk, and that walking is truly a limitation that's beyond you. And if that's the case, write to me and I will give you some alternatives based on what your situation is. Something that you can use to re-ground the body that doesn't involve that kind of exercise. But for those of you who don't think about it when you get up and just walk across the room to go to the bathroom, or get up and grab your purse and go to your car and go somewhere, then you are fully capable of doing this. And it's walking every day. And the reason why I want you to walk is because jogging is hard and running is something that you have to work up to. And if you're not into the whole running thing, it sucks. But if you will think of a walking meditation as an opportunity to be outside, be in nature, clear your head, still get some of those endorphins going, the runner's high. The cool thing is, at least according to my FitBit and Apple watch, I burn almost the same amount of calories jogging because I run really slow as I do walking at a good pace. And if you jog for 30 minutes versus walk for 45 minutes, it's really close in terms of the calories that you burn. So the benefits fitness-wise are there for walking. And you don't need to go buy a new outfit, you don't need to drop a bunch at Lululemon, you don't need new shoes. Just go walk. Don't even think about it. And it's not going to change your life the very first second that you do it. The first few days you'll think, well I feel like a dork, waiting for the change to happen. Just do it. Just go on auto-pilot. I think if you can just walk and maybe kind of listen to some music, you can allow yourself to be with your thoughts. That's amazing. See some trees. See some other people. I know it's winter so go to a mall and do it. Or go to an indoor track, or wherever you can make it happen. But if you can walk, then do it. Do it every night after supper. Go for a 30 minute, 45 minute walk. I won't go into it again. I'm going to link to the other episode where it talks about the mechanics of how these two things work together. How these two activities, the walking meditation and the free associative writing. But if you do them for 90 days, it will reboot your energy. It will recharge your body and your spirit. It will reconnect you to your creativity, to your intuition, your motivation will change, your mood will change. Ideas will start to download. I promise you. It's just that simple. And all that other complex stuff, you can still do it if you have time for it. Or you can put it away and say, you know what, I'm just gonna do this one little simple thing for 90 days. Modify it wherever you wish. If you like to mind map and draw in a sketch book and do that kind of mind-to-hand-to-paper sort of thinking on paper, as opposed to maybe the free associative writing, do that! Just set a time limit for it. Set a timer for 15 or 20 minutes and do that some. Make a space for that. Part of the reason why I call it walking meditation is because yes, meditation is amazing and there are a lot of benefits associated with it. But that does not mean that you have to formally sit in a lotus position and clear your mind and chant and listen to a water fountain in the corner of your room. You don't have to do that. If anything, that sounds really boring to me and I don't think I could keep that up for half an hour. But I can go walk somewhere scenic and cool and see people and things, and dogs and nature. Ooo a feather on the ground! All kinds of cool things happen when you're walking. Walking IS a meditation if you do it with that intention. As far as other modifications, if daily is too much for you, I will say this: You could get really Shift Your Spirits meta and modify this with a 3x3 strategy, which also works on a 90 day time period. Also a quarter concept that I use. So again, I'll link to episodes where we've talked about the 3x3 project with Diana Frajman. What the 3x3 strategy is and how I use it. But basically it's 3 actions, 3 times a week, for 3 months. Do 3 things a week for 3 months. 3x3. So if you can't make a daily walking meditation/journalling happen, then do it 3 times a week for 90 days. And we'll say that that's the modified minimal version of this exercise. Anyway, I talked about all this stuff last year. I was just sharing it as a pattern of advice that I was giving out. And some of you decided to actually take it on as a challenge without my asking. And to do it and to try it and write me about it and say, Hey, I'm doing that. And you kind of made it a Thing. So now I'm putting it back out there as a Thing. Make the Energy Reboot your Thing that you're gonna do. And let me know that you're doing it. Post about it in the SYS community. Hashtag #REBOOT. Or put keywords at the beginning of your posts. Energy Reboot. Invite people to do it with you. Share your progress or your observations along the way. You can also contact me personally if you want to have some accountability. Email me halfway through and let me know what's different. At the end of the 90 days, write me again and tell me how things have changed.

“Is it possible… that Kundalini awakening could look like psychosis?” After ditching university, Kara-Leah Grant spent her twenties traveling the world in search of adventure, creativity and a tribe of like-minded souls. Sex, drugs, yoga and music festivals were simply part of the fun, until they weren’t. Diagnosed as bipolar after leaping topless onto a moving logging truck in the wilderness of British Columbia, Kara-Leah returns to New Zealand to heal her soul, face her past, and uncover the deep truths of her innermost being. GUEST LINKS - KARA-LEAH GRANT karaleah.com Sex, Drugs & (mostly) Yoga: Field Notes from a Kundalini Awakening by Kara-Leah Grant HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses Get an intuitive reading with Slade Automatic Intuition FACEBOOK GROUP Shift Your Spirits Community BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits Edit your pledge on Patreon TRANSCRIPT I asked her how bad it got when it really wasn’t fun anymore... Kara-Leah: That moment was waking up in a psych ward for the second time, so this is September 2004, and 4 weeks earlier I ended up in the psych ward as well. The second time I woke up, I remember so clearly I was in this single bed right beside the door and there were 4 beds to a room so it was me with other people. I woke up knowing that my fiancé had broken up with me 5 or 6 days before. Knowing that because he'd broken up with me, I now didn't have anywhere to live. Knowing that I was essentially in debt and I didn't have a job. Knowing that I'd been diagnosed bipolar. That I was back in a psych ward. That I was potentially seen as crazy. That my whole life had imploded. And knowing that, for the second time... The first time, it had been triggered by taking LSD and mushrooms and ecstasy and weed and all those things. But this time I hadn't taken any drugs. So it's a sense of waking up going, I'm crazy again and I can't blame the drugs and I've been dumped by the person that was supposed to be here for me. And feeling like hell was gracing my heart but I was so afraid of being vulnerable that I couldn't express it even. There was nowhere to go because I was surrounded by people in the ward and the room and the sense of total implosion of life and nowhere to hide anymore. Just nowhere to hide. It was a pretty painful moment in my life. Slade: So what switch sort of flipped in you to make you think, you know what? I'm gonna share this story with everyone. Kara-Leah: Well, I'd always been a writer and I had journalled my whole life. I had been working as a journalist in British Columbia where I was living. I was working as a waitress and as a journalist and as a go go dancer. And then I had quit waitressing because through writing full-time I'd written a screenplay that had won a national award. But I was really struggling. I was struggling massively. I wasn't able to pitch myself. I had a lot of stuff going on emotionally so even though I was theoretically freelancing as a writer, I wasn't making any money coming in. So when I woke up in the psych ward, I had a journal with me fortunately that someone had brought in and gave to me. She was like this angel. She literally showed up and she was like, I know that you write. And I thought that you would appreciate having something to write in. I didn't even know her that well, like an acquaintance of mine. So I had this journal that she dropped off for me maybe the first or second day I was in the psych ward. And I just remember writing in my journal and writing out everything that's happened. And at the very end of writing that diary entry, there was like this surge of knowingness, like this energy. I actually talk about this in the book, this knowingness or this energy came through several times in my life since, and I just found myself writing down, The sun was shining in in my life. So real. And it was just this, almost rebellious, You know what? Fuck you. You can't keep me down. All this shit that's happened to me, I will find my way back to the light. Just you wait and see. So that was me right at that moment. And I think that energy was what called me forth to find my way through. And I knew, even back then, that I would one day, that part of the journey was to share this story of mine with the public. Like it was really important to write about it because I was able to... I mean, it was such a gift to experience psychosis from the inside. To really witness what the mind was like, and that experience. And then to be able to recall it. And then to be able to articulate it in a way that other people could understand. So even then I had a sense of how important it was that I journal and write about my experiences of psychosis/awakening. It was though. Slade: So is it possible that what we would call psychosis or mental illness could also be a kundalini awakening? Tell me about that connection. Other people may be experiencing one or the other and wondering. Kara-Leah: Absolutely. Since then, my understanding from conversations I've had with different people and research that I've done, what can begin to happen for us is, especially if we're dabbling in a combination, as I was, of yoga practices and meditation practices and ecstatic dance practices combined with LSD or mushrooms or even weed, etc. All these plants' medicines, they're so powerful they really do impact our psyche and consciousness. And if you combine them with things like yoga and meditation and you haven't done the grounding work and the building of the witness of the container, and you haven't cleared out the psychological patterns from childhood, basically it blows your circuits, is one way to put it. It just blows your circuits. You're not really able to handle the amount of pure light and the amount of energy, of kundalini, that can start to move through the system. It's kind of like hooking up a regular old light bulb to 10,000 volts and expecting it to handle it. It just won't. You know, you've got to change your light bulb first. You've got to put in a 10,000 volt light bulb before you start channelling that much energy. But I didn't know any better. I know that there are so many people that are experiencing that convergence of awakening practices with plant medicines of various kinds without necessarily having done the psychological work necessary to stabilize the system and build strong enough channels to hold the flow. Slade: Mmm... That's a really great way of explaining it actually. I love that. And I mean, gee, what are the chances that we will play with magic if we run across it and don't know what we're doing? Kara-Leah: Ohmygod. It's happening so often. All over the place! People are doing ayahuasca... Slade: Yeah. Kara-Leah: Multiple times. And I don't necessarily have a follow up care yet... I don't necessarily have the constructs or the context to understand how one being works with what is revealed and what comes up in the unconscious. And so people are just left hanging so often, and they can dissolve. They can disintegrate. They can fall apart and not know how to navigate that territory. Slade: So how did you figure out how to recover from that? Or to retro-engineer the proper container, as you call it. How did you fix the container? Kara-Leah: So I was fortunate in that because I already did have the yoga and meditation practice, some part of me intuitively knew that what I'd experienced wasn't just psychosis and that I wasn't necessarily bipolar. That that was a western labelling. It was just this knowingness. So I knew that yoga would help me to pop myself back together mentally, emotionally, and right from the get-go, I was in the psych ward and I would go out on the lawn and practice yoga. That was my rock. That was the way that I built the container. Which is like the ability to witness oneself in action so that I was able to, rather than be identified with my thoughts and identified with my feelings, and identified with my body, and the sensations in my body, I was able to orientate to the witness that I am and still experience the thoughts and the feelings in the body but from a HELD place. So that I wasn't overwhelmed by the thoughts, or overwhelmed by the feelings. I was able to hold myself while I felt what I needed to feel. And while I learned how to observe my thoughts and then trace back to what was giving rise to the thoughts, so that I can uninstall or unprogram myself from the constructs of a lifetime and beyond, really. Like all the programming from childhood, from family, from school, from society. All the stuff that is NOT who I truly am. I just knew yoga was the way for me and I practice every single day. I was relentless in my practice of yoga. Slade: So you were in British Columbia though when you were in the psych ward? Kara-Leah: Yeah. I didn't know this at the time, but the experiences all happened during Lion's Gate, the astrological period of Lion's Gate that happens in August. And I was taken down to Lion's Gate hospital to keep at the psych ward at Lion's Gate hospital. It's interesting coincidences... Slade: Interesting! Kara-Leah: And what was even more intriguing was that it all got triggered when I was at Shambhala Music Festival and it was a Sunday morning. And I took acid that morning. Not a LOT, Maybe a quarter of a tab. I never took a lot. But I took acid and I went to the yoga class on acid and we went into lion's pose, which I've never done in my life before. I remember quite distinctly doing 3 rounds of lion's pose with lion's breath, and THAT was the moment that something in me went into the awakening process. It was like an excavation and I literally stood up in the class. I kind of looked at the teacher and I do recall her looking at me strangely but I was just like, I'm done. I've got what I needed from this. And I left the yoga class. From that moment on, I started to go through the awakening that eventually devolved into the psychosis of the next 5 or 6 days. So it was like, from lion's pose to Lion's Gate to Lion's Gate. Slade: Ooo... How long were you in that ward? Kara-Leah: So the first time I was there for just 3 days. They basically sedated me and... Because I'd gone into the ward that time speaking some kind of ancient language and doing prostrations. My body was going into spontaneous prostrations to the Sun god Ra. I mean, I'd never been taught this but it's just coming through my system. Like I knew how to do these things spontaneously. So the first doctor I saw, the psychiatrist, he was kind of onto it. Because he called it spiritual burglary. He's like, You've opened some doors you shouldn't have opened. He gave me some medication. Don't do that again. Don't take any more drugs. And oh, by the way, you're bipolar. Take this medication and see you later. So I was only there for 3 days. The second time which was exactly a month later on the new moon, both times, the second time, partly because it was my second time and there was no drugs that had precipitated it, I was there for 9 days. It took me longer to convince them I was sane enough to live out again in the community. Slade: Mmm... So at that point, you travelled back home to New Zealand, right? Kara-Leah: Yeah. I had no choice. I mean, I didn't have any money. I had nowhere to live. My fiancé had broken up with me. I needed to just come home. I didn't want to. I SO did not want to. I was leaving... I had lived in British Columbia for 7 years. I love that place. I love the mountains. I love the land. And I have amazing friends. I felt connected and I felt good there. I felt like I could be me there. Coming back to New Zealand, it was like slipping back into all the old constructs and all the old expectations and assumptions of who I was meant to be and how I was meant to act. Yeah, I didn't want to come home. Slade: Oh, I came home too. It took me a couple years from the time that I had my stroke to move back here. But I really did come home to just sort of survive, you know? To heal and to build back from square one. But that's of course when I started Shift Your Spirits. So we were experiencing that in parallel as well. I'm only just now realizing that. Because I didn't know you when all that was going on. I only know you as you started to build this online presence that you have and how we met. But yeah, my 2004, 2005 was probably very similar to yours in many ways. But it was like, oh, I'm back here?? Back to square one? Did you feel like that a little bit? Kara-Leah: Ohmygod. It was awful. I felt like I left the excitement and the adventure and the awesomeness and the aliveness of life, and I was back in this dead place where nothing was happening. And I was nobody and there was nothing. And it was like... My mom had moved so we lived in Dunedin when I was a teenager, which is like a university town of about 100,000 in the South Island. She's moved to this small mountain town of 400 people in the interim. So when I came back home, I was coming back to a place where I had no... It was completely different. It was a different house. It was a different town. In that respect it was actually amazing because the mountains and the lake, the nature was so beautiful, so powerful. And it was that landscape that really helped me to heal. Being in the mountains again of Queenstown, New Zealand is extraordinary, but yeah, I didn't want to be there. Did not want to be there. Slade: I credit the mountains with bringing me back as well. I came back to the Appalachians where I grew up and very, very powerful... One of the oldest geological features in the world, I have since learned. So they're very ancient mountains that have been worn down for just millennia, so there's layers and layers of magic here. The smokey mountains is how they're commonly known. So I had something similar going on where I almost had to choose to reconnect to the landscape and let go of whatever attachments that I used to have to it, and sort of re-define it in a new way and kind of romance this whole place I didn't want to be in but here I am, so how can I love it? Did you do something similar? Did you re-invent yourself in that way? Kara-Leah: Yeah. I just remember I was sleeping every day 'til like 2:00 in the afternoon. I was just trying to numb myself out as much as I could. And the only thing I had to numb out with was sleep really, because I wasn't taking any drugs or anything like that anymore. And I wasn't distracting myself with internet or movies. But I just remember having this sense of, I need to move. And so I started forcing myself... There's a trail around a lagoon. So I was like, right, I just have to get out. I've got to run for a hundred metres. And every day, there were these orange markers at 50m every interval around the lagoon. So I would run one more marker each day. And that was my way of forcing myself to be present and to kind of exist in the track of life again. And I remember really, really clearly that the day that I finally ran the whole way around. It was probably only 2km, maybe 3. It wasn't very far. But I was so ecstatic about the fact that I'd done it that I turned around and ran back around the whole way and did a double loop on that same day. That commitment to being in the landscape and running and walking the landscape was part of what helped me begin to heal. That and the yoga. But there's something about the physical movement, getting the endorphins and the serotonin going in the brain again, that really helped me begin that journey of healing. Slade: Oh yes! Thank you for saying that. I am very late to the game in discovering my athleticism. I didn't start working out until I was 41 and that was when I stopped smoking. I chose yoga as a replacement therapy for smoking. And so my connection and discovery of yoga is, I was trying to think, with a habit especially an addiction, what are you gonna put in that hole if you take it out? There's gotta be something else to go there. Some kind of replacement behaviour and I tried to think of what was the thing that was symbolically connected to smoking but that can somehow be healthy? So I came to the conclusion that it was the breath. And I just had this intuition. I'd done yoga before, as a smoker. It never stuck. But I instinctively knew, Oh yes! That's the thing. That's the thing that'll heal me and ground me in my body in a new way, and I was just passionately into it for maybe 4 years or so, doing it 5 days a week. I really do credit that with changing my relationship with my breath. It's crazy to think that I was still writing all the things that I write, and doing spiritual work and so I don't want people to think, like, Oh, you have to be perfect to be doing this kind of work. You don't. You just have to be on a journey of improving yourself. If you've got one plan to get to one orange marker around the lake, then you're ok. You're on the path. Kara-Leah: That was it. Having that sense of change every day, of aiming for something, achieving something, it gave me an anchor. Something to get out of bed for in a way. Slade: Well the whole idea that you said about the container and the metaphor of the lightbulb being plugged into too much energy is really cool because I actually have this thing called an energy reboot because so many of my clients will come to me really frazzled. They're spending so much time in their upper chakras. They're like always in the third eye, always trying to get that divine crown open. They're just way up here. If you could see me, I'm waving my hands above my head. It's a very top-heavy kind of energy. And they come in sort of burnt out and all over the place and I always say, you need to unplug and plug back in. And start at the bottom. And light yourself up from the root back up. To me, the way that I do that is through athleticism. Through really, really basic stuff like walking meditation. Even if you can't run around the lake, you can sure as hell walk around the lake. You know what I mean? Kara-Leah: Yeah it was a big part of my journey as well, realizing that I had just blown wide open through my heart and third eye and through the crown. All of that. And I was so blocked through first, second, third chakras and so that was a big part of why I went from awakening, feeling the oneness, the bliss, understanding life in such a deep way, into psychosis and right back into conditioned mind. And now it literally felt like going from being in heaven to going to hell. It was doing the hard work of recognizing, in order for me to experience that degree of openness and connection and bliss again, I had to clear out the lower chakras. I had to face my humanness and do the work of learning how to be with and meet reality as it was moment to moment. Slade: So let's fast forward a little bit and come into the present, fast forward this journey where you've taken all this to. Now you are primarily a retreat leader, correct? Kara-Leah: Yeah. I write books and I run retreats and I work with people online with mentoring programs and awakening programs. My primary thing is working with people in some way, supporting them on that journey, that emergence from, I kind of call it coming out of the matrix in some way. It's when people begin to wake up and things really begin to shift and change for them and they don't know. They need context. They need framework. They need tools in order to navigate that journey of emerging into a new way of being with reality. Slade: What are the patterns that you see people who are coming to you for this kind of assistance, support, what kind of patterns are you noticing in your clients? What are they bringing in? Kara-Leah: Hmm... Often what will happen is that people will begin to experience life in a new way. So they'll begin to become more aware of things but those things are still occurring. Like they'll begin to notice or become aware that, for example, that they're a people pleaser. Or that they let people treat them like a doormat. So there's a greater awareness of themselves in action. But they're not able to shift it or change it. And with that greater awareness, so often that comes usually judgement and shame and guilt and fear. So they come to me because they're starting to wake up and it feels awful because the judgement the guilt and the shame, and all those things get triggered. So a big part of what I'm doing with people is I talk a lot about anchoring into love and truth. Where I hold a space or a field of unconditional love in such a way that, however they show up, whatever they're experiencing, is completely okay. So that when they can feel that coming from me, they're able to start to feel that for themselves and they start to recognize that so much of their suffering is not because what's happening in their lives. Or not because what's happening inside of them, but it's because of how they are perceiving and how they are judging themselves. So once they feel me being an unconditional loving space for them, they can, it's almost like feel the imprint of that? So they can begin to feel their own unconditional sense of love for themselves as they are, with whatever is going on inside of them. Slade: Mmm... So for somebody listening right now, who's not in New Zealand, are you able to do this kind of work with people over the phone or over Skype or wherever they might be? Kara-Leah: Yeah, I work on Zoom, so I do a lot of work in session. I meet with people in the States, Canada. And I also do a retreat every year in Mexico, which of course is for mainly Canadian and American friends so that they can come. Slade: I didn't realize that you did them so close! Kara-Leah: I do! I do one in Mexico. And it's amazing because when people come on retreat with me, what I'm doing is I am very clear about setting up a super strong container on the energy and emotional and mental realm because what I've realized is that the stronger the container, the more held and supported and safe that people feel, it's like it activates them and it supports them to be able to let go, surrender and dissolve that which no longer suits them. It's almost as if, I mean I don't even do anything. Sometimes it feels like I don't DO anything on a retreat but of course what I'm doing is holding that strong container. And I set up a framework of basically explaining reality from a different perspective than most people perceive it. And they get it. They're like, Ohmygod. That makes so much sense. So then on the retreat, they begin to explore interacting with reality from that new framework. And they begin to see the benefits and feel the benefits of being in that new way. So it gives them an opportunity to step into and to be with themselves and be with reality in a different way so that, my intention is when they go back to their ordinary life, that they're able to bring that new way of being into their ordinary life. So it's not the kind of retreat where you just go away and you just chill out and then you go home again. It's actually about creating a new way of being from the inside out that you can take with you. Slade: What do you hope that you can contribute to the greater conversation about spirituality and personal development? Kara-Leah: My intention is to really help people learn how to be with the darkness and the shadow and the fears. Because what I was saying a lot especially in spiritual and new age circles is there can be this escape into the upper chakras. And this fear or unwillingness to be with the heavier, darker so-called negative things. And yet, the only way through into a very grounded heart-connected clear way of being is to get super comfortable with feeling the guilt, the shame, the fear, the anxiety, the depression, all those things, being able to BE with it so that you can move through it. So that's my intention, is to give people the framework and the tools so they know how to be with the challenging stuff for themselves. Which then means they can actually be with other people who are going through challenging stuff, and simply hold space for other people, so other people can then be with the challenging stuff. And so there's like a chain reaction of human beings being able to be with the hard stuff and be okay. Slade: The book is called Sex, Drugs & (Mostly) Yoga, Field Notes from a Kundalini Awakening by Kara-Leah Grant. Tell everybody where they can find you online and find out about your work and your retreats and all your stuff. Kara-Leah: So the best place to find me is on my website, which is KaraLeah.com. There's no hyphen. Even though my name has a hyphen, the website doesn't. So KaraLeah.com. And if you google me, you'll find me on Amazon. I've got a couple of other books and I'm on YouTube and I'm on Facebook. I'm on Instagram. And I'm blessed with a unique name. I've never found anyone with my name so it's pretty easy to find me online if you google my name. Slade: That was great, Kara-Leah. Thank you for coming on the show. Kara-Leah: My pleasure, Slade. Thank you so much for the opportunity to talk about all this stuff.

A special astrology workshop with recurring guest and evolutionary astrologer Dena DeCastro. We're taking a deep dive into Venus placement in your natal chart. Venus affects not only your love life but also other partnerships — including your relationship with money. Learn about the strengths and challenges associated with your Venus sign. *Each and every sign is explained. MENTIONED ON THE SHOW Ep 40 - Love & Money Personified with Morgana Rae Ep - 74 - Astrology & Past-Lives: Karmic Patterns in the Birth Chart with Dena DeCastro GUEST LINKS - DENA DECASTRO denadecastro.com DeCastro Astrology on Facebook HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses Get an intuitive reading with Slade Automatic Intuition FACEBOOK GROUP Shift Your Spirits Community BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits Edit your pledge on Patreon TRANSCRIPT Let’s set you up for this astrology workshop as well as any others we do in the future ... If you know a lot about your natal chart, you may know some of these planets and signs without having to look them up. Feel free to go ahead and listen along right now. For those of you who are beginners or who want to reference your chart and take notes — we are going to explore additional areas of your chart on future episodes, so you may want to start a document or a notebook — the site I most use and recommend is: astro.com There’s quite a bit you can do with a free account. There are a lot of places where you can cast your natal chart online—and I don’t get any kind of kickback for referring astro.com —the reason I prefer Astro is you can store up to 100 profiles with a free account. That’s helpful if you have clients you’re casting charts for, BUT even more importantly, you may want to store the charts of people you’re in relationships with. There’s a partner report in astro you may want to explore for spouses, people you’re dating, family members, coworkers, people you’re in business with … that person you’re about to marry! After you sign up for a user name and password, you’ll be asked to enter your exact birth information. Under the Free horoscopes tab, you’ll find a daily personal horoscope that’s pretty good for computer generated, but for the purposes of our workshops here, you’ll want to look under the Free Horoscopes tab, in the Short Horoscopes list is Personal Portrait. The personal portrait is what astro calls the Natal chart or the birth chart. Now, on that Personal Portrait page, they will offer some highlights from your chart, but that is nowhere close to everything. They may or may not interpret your Venus placement, I’m not sure how their algorithm works. But if you scroll down to the bottom, you will find a list called planetary positions of every planet in your chart and what sign it is in. For this episode, you’ll want to know what sign your Venus is in. You may also want to find the Venus placement of your significant others Of course, if you have an astrology site you like, or a natal chart that was professionally prepared for you, by all means use those. Find your Venus, we’ll jump right in to this conversation and let Dena tell you what it means and what you can do with this information in terms of Love and Money. Dena: So evolutionary astrology is a branch of astrology that focuses on past life and karmic patterns as part of the reading of the natal chart. We look at that through something in the chart called the nodes, the south node representing that past life or karmic pattern situation and then the north node representing what it is in this life that we're here to learn, that we have not experienced in past lives, that we've not mastered. And so we're here learning about that thing which is foreign to us. So it's much more... it's less predictive than some other branches of astrology. In fact, it's not predictive at all. It is more of a personal development kind of astrology, where in the reading, I'm offering people a way to look at themselves differently, not only from this life's perspective but from a soul level perspective. With that knowledge, I'm giving them suggestions about how to best live in alignment with their soul's plan coming into this life. And how ultimately, to live a more fulfilling, content and happy life. So that's the aim of it. So it's not meant for prediction. It is more meant for personal development and for growth. Slade: I actually really like that, because it's a little bit more woo woo and yet, also the personal development aspect of it really brings it down to earth. So, of course I'll link to the show that we did earlier so everyone can listen to that and find out about their node astrology, but what you told me on that show about my own south node in Virgo, has been really impactful going forward from that moment. It explained a lot of things about the way that I operate. It also explained a lot of my relationships with Virgos. Dena: Oh totally. I'm with you on that one. Slade: So anyway, I really love that piece of information. And one of the things that I noticed, talking to you the very first time that we ever spoke, which is that conversation by the way, and the reason why I wanted you back on the show is, well, first I'd love any excuse to talk to you, but... One of the things I found myself recommending to my friends and my clients about your readings is, astrology I've often noticed can have this really, really old, like old testament doom and gloom kind of quality to it sometimes... Dena: Yeah. Slade: Especially if you're looking at things that are computer-generated sometimes, I often tell people, Okay, you need to dial back the negative a little bit. Dena: Dial that back! Slade: And you have a way of speaking about astrology that feels kind of more hopeful and more positive and enthusiastic to me. And I was wondering if you are aware of what I'm talking about and if you get a sense of that as well. Dena: Yeah, you know, I think that in the astrological community, one of the viewpoints is that evolutionary astrologers are too much Pollyanna perhaps, or positive, compared to some others, which will tell you more of the doom and gloom aspects, like if you have an afflicted Venus, that your love life is going to be challenged for your whole life. Some branches of astrology are more deterministic, I will say that. And I am not coming from an, evolutionary astrology is not coming from a deterministic perspective. We embrace the idea of free will as being the prime mover and that once we have self-knowledge, we can make better choices. That's the whole point. We can, the reading itself changes what you can do with your future. It's not telling you that this is the future that's laid out for you. That this is what's going to happen because Saturn squared your Venus and it's gonna suck. Slade: Right. Dena: That it's a... it's saying, here are some choices. I will say though, that it is not all love and light. Anybody whose gotten a reading from me will tell you that we go into the shadow stuff. We go into what is, what are the lower possibilities for you? What are the things that can trip you up or the places where you can get tangled up in old patterns and get stuck. But in knowing that, then you can more likely avoid those places, right? Slade: Yeah, like, to explain what I meant by how that information for me impacted me going forward, what it did was, it just identified a certain thought process or where something's coming from in the way that I think and react to things. And knowing to look for that and to be aware when it popped it's head, I'd be like, Ooo... that's totally my south node in Virgo! And then having a polar companion opposite of like, Okay well so in order to balance out that energy that idea is to move towards this more Piscean way of looking at things. So when I say it's impactful to me, you're right. It's not like, Oh, it's just going to be this way and I'm just screwed to be that way. Dena: Right. Slade: What it does is it allows me to say, Oh, there's my tendency to do THAT, now I'm going to make a willful conscious decision to lean this other way in order to kind of balance that out, or to move away from it. So yeah, I'd like that. I definitely don't want to... I don't want information that I can't change or manipulate in some way. Dena: Right. And I said this on another podcast recently, that I'm always thinking, as I do a reading, how can I empower the client, not how can I disempower the client. Or to be careful not to say things that are going to disempower the client. That's super important to me. It really guides everything that I say as I go through a reading. Slade: Mmm... Well you're doing a good job of it. Dena: Thank you. Slade: So there is some great astrology content obviously online, on social media... Dena: Yeah! Slade: A lot of astrologers do time sensitive current posts about what's going on in the skies and you do a little of that as well. But when you and I were brainstorming astrological topics that we could explore on the show, I talked about how much I try to create evergreen content, meaning, whenever someone comes along and they find this show, even if it's two years from now, I want the information to still be relevant to them. Aspects of the natal chart, or birth chart, are those items that aren't as time sensitive, so I'd love for you to explain to us the difference between transits and our natal or birth chart elements. Dena: Yeah, so the natal chart is the birth chart that you're born with. It is the permanent chart. It's not going to change. However, how you respond to that chart can change. YOU can grow and change. But that chart doesn't change. So when I do a reading that's focused mainly on the natal chart, we're really looking at those lifelong themes and patterns, not the things that are happening now. The transits and progressions and solar arcs, those are three things, three tools that astrologers use. And there are more tools, but those are the three common ones. They tell us what is happening right now in this person's chart. What are the things moving through, that transits from the outside, the cosmic weather. For example, let's say Neptune is currently in Pisces and it may be connecting with something in your chart. It may be trining your moon or, I think it is trining your moon, I'm not sure... Maybe soon.. That is its own set of meaning about what's happening now or in this coming year, or maybe for the next two years. A Neptune transit is two years long, for example. So that's time and that's forecasting. That's not prediction. That's like saying, "Here is the cosmic weather that is around you. How can you best navigate it?" Progressions and solar arcs are a little bit different. They're something that unfolds from the chart itself and I won't get into a technical discussion of those, but they're just other tools that we use to look at this moment in time, but also what's coming down the road, maybe the next year, two years for somebody. To say, what are the lessons that are on your plate right now, what are the themes that are up in your life? And it can be really helpful, particularly if you're going through a challenging time, to understand that there are forces at play that may be affecting you, that are causing this to be a challenging time and there is something you can do about it. There are things that you can do to better work with those energies than if you didn't know about it. Slade: I like your weather metaphor because it's kind of like, if you know a hurricane's coming, then you can close the shutters and go underground. You can respond to those conditions in a different way. Another thing that I do think that astrological transits are good for, and I was just talking to a friend of mine who is going through a really rough life transition, and I said, "One of the things I like about astrology is, it's not a psychic reading. It's actually external, you know? It's like, here's a spreadsheet about stuff in your life." It has a little bit of a disconnect from being so much in our own heads a little bit. It's something that also can give you a sense of... Like if you are really going through something, and you're thinking, gawd, when is this ever gonna end?? I find it really helpful for someone to say, "Well, you know, April something is totally gonna shift." And just having a sense of, oh, okay. I may feel like I'm smack in the middle of it, and then I get a reading with you and you talk about some transits, and you're like, "Oh actually, it's been going on for a long time but you're almost done." That can be the difference between being in a really dark hole in the ground and having a little sense of, okay, I can go for two more months or whatever. Dena: Right. Slade: I love the emphasis on it not being so much about prediction as about conditions, like weather conditions and sort of windows of time as opposed to specific moments. Dena: Yeah. Slade: Well just to get back to the birth chart stuff. So we decided we wanted to do some shows where we focus on some of the bigger elements in birth charts. I feel like for people who are new to astrology, it makes sense for them to study their birth chart or their natal chart first, as a way of learning about this vocabulary and these concepts and how it relates to what they're working with in this lifetime. Dena: Yeah. Slade: So one of those big elements in our birth chart is our Venus. So teach us about Venus. Dena: Haha... So Venus is a planet that most people correlate to love because it's the goddess of love. It is a planet that has to do with connection and relationship. It is also, though, a planet that has to do with money and finances. And so a lightbulb went on for me recently when I was listening to your episode with Morgana Rae about love and money, and I was like, Oh! [unintelligible] Venus. That's the Venus energy coming through in those two things together. She's a very Venutian kind of person. And it just clicked in for me that so many people don't make THAT connection. The connection to money and resources, as well as love and romance associated with Venus. So I'll talk about both aspects, or both faces of Venus. So to begin with, Venus is the ruler of Libra, the sign of Libra, and Taurus. So it's the ruler of two signs. And Libra is a relationship sign. It's about connection and want to connect and wanting to come into balance with a significant other or a significant friend or a significant client. It's about the relationship of the one to the one. And about balance and harmony between those two things. On another level, Venus too is about our aesthetic sensibilities, our creativity, as Libra holds the archetype of the Artist, that which makes beauty. And as we think of Venus also of the goddess of beauty, and Aphrodite. So it's the part of us that wants to make beauty in the world, to bring beauty into our surroundings. The part of us that wants to experience beauty. That can come through creating, through artistry, and it can also come through being in love and through romance and connecting that way. That's all an experience of beauty. And it all brings us that sense of sigh, that sigh of the romantic quality of life. So that's Venus as it's the ruler of Libra. But Venus is also the ruler of Taurus. And Taurus is a sign that is connected to stability, resources, and a feeling of security, and that comes often through having enough resources, you know, that sense of stability and security. So hence Venus' connection to money. And so the Venus in our chart can tell us many things more than just what kind of people are we attracted to and what kind of people we tend to attract. I mean, that's all true and that's something I'll talk more about. But also it tells us, what is our relationship to resources, how do we create more resources for ourselves, how do we find our sense of security, how do we find a sense of stability and a foothold in the world. So really, there's those two dimensions of Venus, particularly love and money, that I want to focus on. Slade: Let me say something really quick about Morgana Rae. Of course I'll link to Morgana's interview when she was on the show as well. Some people know her. I reference her in The Money Shift. She was very influential in my relationship with abundance as an archetype. I just have to say, it's really interesting because if you hear Morgana talk about her story, she started working with abundance and money and financial programming and all those relationships that we have with resources. She discovered this while being a relationship coach. What she found was that people have the same issues with money that they have in their romantic partnerships and that was the connection she made. So anyway, I hope she gets to hear this and discover that there's an astrological basis for her observing that connection. Dena: Yeah. I would love that and I really enjoyed what she had to say in that episode. And I found so much personal value and had some really individual revelations about my own relationship to love and money through that episode. So it connected for me directly back to astrology and what I know there. So I think what I'll do is, I'll walk through some of the sign placements and maybe we will get through all 12. Slade: Okay! Dena: I'll do a little bit on each one if I can. Slade: Let's try, yeah. Dena: Yeah we'll try. So if you know your Venus placement, you can listen to each one and you might be able to find the Venus placements of your friends and family members and partner and be able to also get some pieces out of this. So Venus in Aries. Venus, again, as being correlated to who we are attracted to, what kinds of people we're attracted to and who we attract in. But also the relationship style. So Aries is a spontaneous fiery energy, right? And that's how Venus in Aries people tend to like it in a relationship. They tend to like things spicy and need them a little spicy and spontaneous and passionate, right? And so there needs to be that excitement. This is where we get into differences and preferences. As you know, some people like things more calm and easygoing in relationship, while you see others that's like, oh, they've always got so much relationship drama going on. But that's how some people actually like it. If you need it, right? So Venus in Aries is that energy. And as it relates to money and resources, Venus in Aries is really connected to needing to take on challenges in terms of one's work and financial goals, and being able to do things that feel fresh and new all the time. So there can be a... The shadow aspect of that the tendency to get bored quickly, like have a passionate attachment to an idea or project and then it can kind of fizzle. So that's the challenge for Venus in Aries. In both relationship and money, things can start off real hot and heavy, then go tzzzzz (fizzling down). So that's something to think about with all these Venus placements. It's always the positive and the shadow expression of each, things to be careful of. Venus in Taurus. Venus in the sign that it rules really craves stability, sensual or physical, tactile connection in relationship. A feeling of security and has an intensely loyal component and requires loyalty from the other. So that kind of slow and easy and comfortable style to a relationship is more what suits the Venus in Taurus type. Venus in Taurus regarding money. Again, you know, security and having a sense of stability is primary. So this type of person would more benefit from a job where they feel like, okay I know where my paycheck is coming from, it's pretty predictable. They're not as likely to be your freelancer unless there's a steady stream of abundance that they can count on coming from that. Venus in Taurus types really need that sense of I know I have all my ducks in a row financially all the time. The shadow side of that placement is getting too stuck in routines. Like getting too stuck in things always needing to be nice and comfortable, both in love and money. That we can get in routines as partners or we get kind of bored with each other. Try to keep things too nice, too easy, can be its own downfall. And the same with the approach to money. It's like you can keep yourself a little too small because you're afraid to take the risk of stepping out and doing something bigger. So that's Venus in Taurus. Venus in Gemini, which I think we both have. Slade: Yeeeees. This is me. I'm taking notes. Dena: Okay. Get your pen out. Venus in Gemini. Gemini's an air sign and it's about curiosity and wanting to learn new things all the time. Slade: Uh oh. Dena: There needs to be a huge amount of intellectual engagement with one's partner and/or friends. They have to be someone that you can talk to and have that mental connection with. Mental connection is primary. It's like you have to be on that level with the person where it's like, we can talk easily and I think, my husband, he's a Gemini rising, and so am I. So we're just non-stop chatterboxes with each other. Slade: Oh that's cool. Dena: Which is cool. And we like that. For some people it might drive them a little nuts. But as a Venus in Gemini person, I really like to be able to just chatter chatter with him. I need my quiet time too. But I think that Venus in Gemini also needs to be constantly, have something to be curious about. So that goes for love and for money. And the money aspect, we can easily make money through the word, through teaching, through writing, through speaking and also through learning new things and then repackaging what we learn and giving it back out through teaching. That's part of the Gemini archetype. Teaching and talking. Slade: That's us! Dena: That's you and me! I guess we're doing our Venus. Slade: Right. Dena: So the shadow stuff of Venus in Gemini is going from thing to thing without settling on one thing. With having trouble committing to one thing. That can come up in love or money, and I have to say, I had more trouble with the love part of that when I was much younger and not anymore, but I see that in myself for Venus in Gemini, of the next shiny object that comes by. I'm gonna follow that. And that can happen with money as well. That oh, maybe I should make money doing this! No, wait. I could be that! I'm gonna be a writer this week and then teacher next week and a, this or that. So there could be a difficulty in settling. I do think that abates with age. With Venus in Gemini as we grow up and kind of get our big boy, big girl pants on. And yet some people might not grow out of it as quickly. Slade: Well, and I have to say for myself, the way that that came down is, once I found the right context in which to work, I have a job that allows me to be a lot of different things, from, one day I'm an accountant, another day I'm doing web design, another day I'm interviewing people on a podcast. That variety I think is the reason why the entrepreneurial stuff works for me so well, is because I have it built in to this one thing I do is like a cluster of a whole lot of things. Dena: So true and same with me as well. I never get bored because every reading you do is a different deal. There are no two readings that are alike. So that keeps me constantly engaged. That's super important for those Venus in Gemini people out there to think about is, what will keep you constantly engaged with your mind? What will keep you constantly curious? Because you can get bored really easily with anything that's just even a little bit repetitive or redundant. So alright. With that, we're going on to Venus in Cancer. Venus in Cancer has some similarities to Venus in Taurus. There is a need for commitment and a feeling of emotional safety in relationship and as relates to money. So Venus in Cancer types really need to feel safe in order to connect emotionally with their significant other, with friends. So they're attracted to people who can provide that sense of comfort and safety and a feeling of they're not going anywhere. That significant other is there for the long haul. And so they're drawn to relationships that can provide that. As far as Venus in Cancer money-wise, there's a need for emotional safety in terms of how they make and bring in money. And that again, similarly to Taurus, requires a structure and a certain comfort level with their job or what they're doing to bring in money. I don't mean to make that sound at all boring. It's just that those two signs, Taurus and Cancer in particular, as we go on we'll get to Capricorn as well I see in this way, that they really do need a little more regularity of routine and comfort level in their relationship and work/money-wise. And that is okay. Part of what I like to always get across is we're all wired differently and part of what I like to bring to people is that accepting and validating that wiring is really important. And you can push a little bit against the edges of that, knowing that that is your want, you know? Sometimes you can get a little too comfortable. So here we have Venus in Cancer, the shadow element of it can be going too much into caregiving and nurturing of the other, too much into worrying about, I've got to show up for my work at the expense of myself, you know, sometimes forgetting to take care of oneself because the job or the money coming in means more than taking care of oneself. It's that over-focus on caregiving to the other that can go awry. So that's something for Venus in Cancer to watch. Then we have Venus in Leo. Colourful fire sign. The second fire sign we've come across. Leo is a creative, spontaneous energy. It craves adoration. It craves being appreciated. So own it, if you've got some Leo in your chart, which I know you do. That there is that need for being appreciated, particularly in partnership if you have Venus in Leo, to have the other person do the kind of traditional hearts and flowers aspects of romance with you, and to treat you a little bit like a god or goddess sometimes, you know? It's not something to be shy about. There is that need. And that you can do that for the other person as well. You may have a very romantic quality in the way that you approach relationship and with money. I will say that there's often a creative streak that wants to come through in how you make money. You could easily be an artist or creator of some type that brings in money through your creative drive. So that's something to look at. If you're not doing that and you're a Venus in Leo and you're thinking, Where is my creative career?? You can be doing that as a side line or a hobby. But there is some creative outlet is extremely important for you to have to get that Venus need met. You know, to have that sense of pleasure in life that we get from our Venus placement. And then the shadow side is that, what I mentioned in the beginning and be turned up to a little too high and Venus in Leo people can get too demanding of other people's attention, like, Look at me! It's that I need to be the centre of your universe attitude. And so we have to watch that with Venus in Leo. And know that, okay, it needs to be balanced. That there's two people in a relationship and that there's two people that need equal amounts of attention. So it's just that awareness can be helpful. Venus in Virgo. Another earth sign. It's similar to Taurus but Virgo is about having very high standards and being able to look at a relationship and at how we bring in money as practice, as constant work. Again, that doesn't sound glamourous, but we need Venus in Virgo people. We need people who understand that a relationship IS work. A relationship IS something that takes constant tending. And it's also sometimes about compromise and helping another person as much as it is helping ourselves. So Venus in Virgo people do have high standards for relationships in that they want the other person to work on it as hard as they are working on it. That's important for Venus in Virgo to consider when they're pairing up with someone is, is the partner someone who is able to do this work with me? And to look at it as a constant practice, the conscious practice of relationship because Venus in Virgo is interested in doing that work. As far as it relates to money, is service-oriented profession when you feel you're making a tangible difference in people's lives, where you can see the results. See, touch, feel the results of your work and how it's affecting people. That's going to be extremely important for Venus in Virgo. The shadow of Venus in Virgo is that perfectionism, you know, as we've talked about with south node in Virgo, can be applied to relationship and to one's work, so that it can be paralyzing. In relationship, it could be having too high of standards with the other person, to the point where nothing they do is right. Or I can't find the right person because I'm just too damn picky. That Venus in Virgo as it relates to money is about the, sometimes the Virgo Paralysis, I call it, needing to have things SO neat and tidy and perfect that no risks are taken. You'll notice that theme popping up from the earth signs, that the Taurus and Virgo and as we get to Capricorn, there's a tendency to, in the shadow, be risk-averse to the point where life becomes very confined. So that's a danger to watch for there. Venus in Libra, in the second sign that it rules, is definitely interested in having harmony and calm and peace in relationship. This is the opposite sign of Aries, the sign that we started with, and it's, I talked about the theme of Aries needing things kind of hot and drama, a little bit of drama is okay. Not Venus in Libra. Venus in Libra is opposite of that. There's a need for just a sweetness, a romantic peaceful tone in the relationships. As it relates to money, again, a creative career, an artistic career can be fulfilling for Venus in Libra, but also careers in which you are required to really work closely one on one with people. So with Venus in Libra, there can be some natural counselling abilities, the ability to mentor or work closely with a person on a daily basis, one on one, to have clients, for example. And that that could bring in resources. There's an ability that Venus in Libra people have to pick up on the needs of others and to connect with them very immediately and closely. To be sensitive to the needs of others. And that can be a gift. It can also be the shadow, in that Venus in Libra can get over-concerned with other's needs at the expense of oneself so it's that theme of getting lost in the relationship at the expense of one's own needs, and that can be the classic codependent kind of expression of that. And that can happen when Venus is triggered there. That's the Venus shadow to watch out for. Venus in Scorpio. Another water sign like Cancer. Scorpios are a very different sign from Cancer interestingly, being a water sign too. Venus in Scorpio really craves intensity, passion, Scorpio's ruled by Mars, just as Aries is ruled by Mars, and so there is this need for close, deep connection with the other. It could be 'I wanna be in every aspect of your life and I want you in every aspect of mine'. There can be almost that possessive quality to the relationship and that can make it sound a little unhealthy, and it could certainly go there in its shadow. But Venus in Scorpio really does need someone who can show up as an authentic person and handle going into the deep and difficult areas of relationship. They thrive on that. They thrive on having the hard discussions, the going for the raw truth in the relationship, and talking about what's going on underneath the surface. And so that's something to consider for Venus in Scorpio as they think about partnerships, like, can the other person match me there? Are they gonna be able to go deep? Are they going to be able to go really deep and to handle the intensity of what I want to do in relationship. And then Venus in Scorpio money-wise, again there needs to be that passionate engagement with one's career and often the career can involve confronting or looking at things other people don't want to look at. For example, I have a friend with Venus in Scorpio who is a hospice worker. She deals with people passing regularly. And so that actually something some people might go, Ooo gawd, I don't know if I could handle that, a Venus in Scorpio person can handle that, as far as this is what we're doing to bring in an income, and this is also what they feel drawn to do because they can. They can handle it. So that Scorpio element is really strong there and the shadow of it, again, is that possessiveness that can creep in, the jealousy, the lack of objectivity, being way too subjective and getting even a little paranoid in relationship. That can happen and so it behooves Venus in Scorpio to be aware of that tendency and to watch your thoughts and how they might be going that direction. And to say, okay, maybe I need to take a step back here and get some objectivity or talk to a friend about this or get another viewpoint before I go down that road in my head. Venus in Sagittarius. It's another fire sign. It's the last of our fire signs. The word spontaneity creeps in to every fire sign that I talk about. I think that having spontaneity in relationship is probably the most important for Venus in Sagittarius. There needs to be a huge amount of freedom and space for Venus in Sag people. This doesn't necessarily mean they can't be in a committed relationship. Not at all. Of course many Venus in Sag people are married, right? And you'll hear similar things about Venus in Gemini, like, oh, we can't commit, but I think of course they can and it depends on the whole chart. But within that relationship for Venus in Sag, they need to have a sense that they have a great amount of independence and space within the partnership. And to have room to breathe. Fire signs need room to breathe. Mark that down in your notes, people. Fire needs room to breathe just like the element. So it doesn't mean no commitment. It just means being able to have that dance with somebody where it's like, Oh, you're gonna go out tonight? Okay well I'm going to stay home and do my thing. And KNOW that it doesn't have to mean the relationship's going south. You know, that Venus in Sag person might need to go out more than a person who's got Venus in Taurus, right? Doesn't mean they can't have a relationship. It means they have to understand each other's needs. Venus in Sag also needs to feel like things are always an adventure, like they're on a quest. This is an adventure and there's that sense of looking toward the future with Venus. And so having plans for travel and adventures together as a partnership, that's gonna help them in any of their close relationships. Venus in Sag as relates to money really does need, again, that sense of, almost like Gemini, enlists challenge, excitement, curiosity, being fulfilled. So variety is hugely important for Venus in Sag people. They need to have variety in their work. They could be a freelancer, but they could also have a job that provides that kind of constant challenge and constant variety served up. And then the shadow, of course, is being noncommittal to the point of, they run away from every commitment. That could be the shadow Venus in Sag type is, I'm so averse to getting cornered that then I forget to have a relationship. That can definitely happen with Venus in Sag. Venus in Sag may be perfectly content out there in the wilderness on their own for awhile. They could also end up feeling very lonely later on if they realize, wow, I just really haven't made those close connections because I've been so protective of my freedom. So that's the shadow road for Venus in Sag. Venus in Capricorn is a sign that, again, the last earth sign. It has to do with creating things that last a long time and doing the hard work of creating them. And so in relationship, a Venus in Capricorn appreciates commitment, appreciates structure and stability, just like Taurus. Also takes pride in the accomplishments of having a long term relationship. And this applies to close friendships as well. You know, having those long term close relationships. That's an extremely important priority for Venus in Capricorn. There can also be the high standards element that we talked about with Virgo. There's that willingness to work on relationship and to be committed, that Venus in Capricorn has that is there too with the other earth signs. And then in work and money, Venus in Capricorn is the willingness to do the long haul with things, to be committed, to be enduring in one's work, in one's approach to work. And the desire to create something lasting. The desire to create something that took a long time to make and take pride in that creation. So the shadow road for Venus in Capricorn is too much work and no play. It's over-work. It's workaholism. It's the abdication of pleasure at the expense of relationships sometimes and at the expense of money. It's like I'm just gonna work til I drop kind of attitude, or I'm just gonna treat this relationship like it's a job and business-like. And it can get too business-like, and so that's one of the shadows of all three of the earth sign Venus is a tendancy to make relationship into kind of a business, or too business-like. To the point where it gets boring and all the life gets sucked out of it. And that's something, if you're aware of, can avoid by injecting some of the positive qualities into it, and also tap into other areas of your chart to bring in more spontaneity and breath of air. So then Venus in Aquarius really delights in relationship. In having, again, space, freedom, those are two key words that are common with Aquarius and with Sag. And then also having a sense of, perhaps more distance in their romantic relationships and they often can have quite a lot of friends and have, again, not necessarily just the close besties, but have a broad spectrum of friends of all different walks of life. In relationship, romantic relationship, they need things to be changed up quite a lot. They can also get bored very easily. So the partner would need to be someone who challenges the mind and the intellect. That's the air sign quality. And then also provides a lot of variety and ability for room to breathe. And then Venus in Aquarius as it relates to money is needing to making money through something that they feel is affecting the world for the better in some way. That can sound a little grandiose, but it's that humanitarian urge that Aquarius has to make things better for the next generation, or the next group of people coming up. And so when they turn their attention toward humanitarian things, they're more able to bring in the resources that they need. The shadow road for Venus in Aquarius is aloofness or disconnection. Getting too much in the head, forgetting to connect to the heart. So that's what they have to watch in relationships and in work. It's like they don't feel, they can get disconnected from what they're doing. That can be to the detriment, to both money and to love. And then finally, Pisces. Venus in Pisces, the last water sign. Pisces is an empathic sensitive and very compassionate sign. In relationship, they thrive with someone who is also sensitive because they could pick up on the other person's feelings quite easily, and always be aware of the other person's feelings. So it's important that they be with someone who does not take advantage of that. Who doesn't tap too much into their empathy and sensitivity and use it for the worst. That can be the shadow road. Venus in Pisces is, as a partner, someone who thrives on emotional connection and being able to have a deep spiritual connection with a partner. There needs to be that soul connection, that spark there that feels like we've known each other for lifetimes. That kind of connection. And then with work, Pisces is another sign, because of it's compassion and sensitivity, that works well with being able to do something that helps others. Working on behalf of the underdog, working on behalf of those who need help, that draws Venus in Pisces tyoes and that can be a way to bring in finances. And then the shadow side of Venus in Pisces again is that over-developed sensitivity that can then be taken advantage of. You know, if they're in a relationship with someone who is toxic or not healthy, that they can get too influenced by that and be taken down a dark road themselves. And how they can pull themselves out of that, though, is to, again, remember my needs to have to come first, actually. You know, that I can't lose myself in this. And that comes into play in their work as well. So that is Venus through all the signs. Of course, that was a really brief description of each but I encourage people, if you know your Venus sign, don't just go by the Venus sign. Also think about, if you know a little about astrology, other things in your chart as they might relate to that Venus. Because we don't just have a Venus. We have all the other planets as well and they can help to balance out certain things with the Venus that we might need to. Slade: Yeah! I was gonna point out that, like say for instance you have a Venus in a particular sign. I'll use mine as an example, Gemini. What I might look for in a potential partner, they could have a significant Gemini placement anywhere in their chart and be a little more likely to provide some of those elements, say someone with a sun or a moon or rising sign in Gemini, would still be able to sort of provide some of that energy, right? Like they don't have to have a perfectly matched Venus to Venus kind of situation. Dena: Right, right. So that's another thing that I'll point to here with compatibility and, you know, I often get the question, can you do a compatibility chart for me and my partner? And I don't think of it that way. I don't think that it is a situation where you're either compatible or you're not. You know? Via astrology, for one thing, and that there are so many things involved in each person's chart that you can't do it based on sun sign, or just Venus signs, any of that. It's the whole picture versus the whole picture. So a couple's reading is very complex in that we do consider all of the elements of each person's chart plus the composite chart, which is where you bring two charts together, so it's not just about Venus, for sure. Venus, like any of the planets that you take in isolation, can point you in a certain direction or help you understand a huge amount about yourself but it's not the whole picture. I want people to definitely be aware of that. Slade: Yes, and also knowing that, in keeping with your theory that understanding what you have in your chart then allows you to respond or balance those elements or bring them in, or understand why someone else might need certain things that are different from yours. You could have "Venuses that are not in the same realm as one another" and just by understanding that, well, I have this certain situation in my chart, and my partner has a different requirement, what that can do is then allow you to maybe make more conscious decisions to provide that in the relationship. Or to remember, it's not that this person doesn't want to spend time with me, but they like to go out and do things with their friends and have an independent kind of social life. And just knowing that and being aware of, that that's one of the ingredients you're working with, can allow you to, like you said, use your free will to modify how that's impacting you. Dena: Absolutely. And it is about self-understanding and it's about understanding the other and that's where a couple's reading can be helpful is understanding each other's Venus style can be hugely helpful but then understanding the whole chart as well, and saying, Okay, we just have these certain differences. We have these things that are more in harmony, and how can we maximize the things that work well together and how can we work on the things that are really quite different. And in almost any couple's reading I've ever done, nobody's perfectly lined up and the same. I mean that's just not the way it works. We're attracted to people who tend to make us work on ourselves. Slade: Mmm... Interesting point. Dena: That's why I think we're attracted to them, is like, Ooo, there's a challenge here and something I need to learn and that's why we're drawn to each other at a particular moment. Slade: Or they may have something that you're trying to bring in into your own life, so it's an opportunity for you to study or model that dynamic. Dena: Yes. Slade: And how can I be more like this? Dena: Right. Slade: I have to ask you, I hope it's not too much off topic, but it comes up so much in relationship-oriented readings, like with clients that I do and it probably comes up for you when you do relationship astrological readings. Soulmates. Twin flames. Talk to me about... Is there an astrological basis for these concepts? How do you describe and define those concepts? Dena: And I am probably gonna tick some people off with my answer to this. Slade: Do it! Dena: I'm gonna do it! Because it's what I think. I don't believe that we have one soulmate. And I don't... I just don't have enough knowledge about the concept of twin flames to understand it, really. It's not something that resonates with me particularly. There isn't an astrological basis for those terms as far as I know. But we do... Meaning it isn't, astrology doesn't prove that we have soulmates or twin flames. One way or the other. It doesn't disprove either. We do use the term "soulmate" in astrology at times, particularly as relating to the 8th House, in evolutionary astrology, that is a term associated with the 8th House, that it's the house of soulmates where we do the deep soul work. I emphasize soulmates plural. It's not The One. It's not the one in the sky that's gonna come down and like, we're gonna be happy together forever and walk off into the sunset. It's the one who I am going to do deep soul work with. And there may be, and will likely be, many in a lifetime, including friends that are like soulmate friends. I don't confine it to romantic quality. So my perception of soulmates, and as I have seen it play out in people's lives and in their charts, is that soulmates are people we're here to do deep work with. That the sign and planets in the 8th House can tell us more about what kinds of people that we can do that deep soul work with. That is another topic. It might be fun for another time to go deeper into THAT. But knowing your 8th House and 8th House planets can help understand like, this is the kind of person with whom I can do that deep soul work. So I'm not saying there's no soulmates. I'm saying my perspective on them is that it's not the happy ever after one. It is, okay we have people that come and go in our lives that we have unfinished business with perhaps, from past lives, and so there's that charge when we meet them. Like, okay, this is someone I need to do some work with and we have stuff from before. Maybe it needs to be finished up. But the thing that's challenging I think for a lot of people in considering soulmates and twin flames in the way that I do is, you know, nothing lasts forever. And even if you stay together 'til death, it's not gonna last forever. Relationships do come and go and particularly as we're evolving as a species, it seems like relationships have sometimes a faster burn rate than they used to. Slade: Really?! Dena: In terms of friendships and partnerships that, well, the whole phenomenon of serial monogamy, you know, is a good example of this. Just like we are growing and developing very quickly, and sometimes we outgrow people. And then we go on to the next person. And that used to be considered a failure. Oh, you can't settle down. You just can't be with one... I just see it as, in different phases of our lives we may be with different people and have different needs for growth and that's just what may happen. Now at the same time, I'm married and I intend to be married for the rest of my life. So there's that. It's hard for people to understand how those two things can coexist. How can one believe in marriage at all and still hold the beliefs that we have different soulmates and different needs at different points of our lives. I think it is a choice. We can choose to be with someone as long as we're doing good growth together. And as long as we're both consciously working on the relationship and becoming new to each other. Because we're always changing. As soon as we try to put ourselves in a box and say, Okay, you're my soulmate. This is going to last forever, you're the One, then its doomed pretty much. Slade: Well it's like the concept of a company or an entity that exists over long periods of time. Maybe there is the need for renovation or rebranding or you know, like, it seems like couples who have been together for long, long periods of time have phases within their relationship that they can point to. So, I mean, and I'm saying this to you as someone who is not married, so my opinion about how to be married is very limited, but I would hope that what that means is an ability to recognize that there are phases and changes and different acts in life. Or like movie franchises, there's gonna be a sequel, and then there'll be a part 3. My whole feeling or hope is that, well if I go into it with that expectation, maybe that will allow me the fluidity and the creativity to remake it or to change it as necessary. Dena: Yeah. Slade: Because the commitment is to the person. It's not necessarily to the time period that you met in, or whatever. Dena: Right. Yeah, I like that. And, just recalling, I was listening to an interview with Michelle Obama on Oprah's podcast recently and she was talking about their marriage and how there were some really hard times, which you don't think about when you see Barack and Michelle Obama. You just see, Oh, they're just total soulmates and they just belong together and they have this perfect relationship. She's like, No. There were some very hard years and she's like, If you've been married for 50 years and you have 20 years that are bad, you're doing pretty good, is what she said. And people are like, What?? Yeah! There's gonna be some hard times and some years that really suck and where you're going through either individual things that are tough or as a couple, and any long term relationship that lasts is going to have those different phases. And I think, who knows what the success of a marriage depends on. I don't have the answer but I suspect that a lot of it has to do with what you're saying is that flexibility and fluidity to go through these different phases together and the acceptance of that's going to happen. Slade: it's interesting that you mention the fact that our culture seems to be moving to a place where we're more accepting of the idea that there are different relationships for different time periods in your life because we also see that happening in career, the concept that people have multiple careers in their lifetime has become much more of an acceptable, intentional way of thinking about it. Gone are the days when you picked your major at 19 and you picked a job and you work there from 25 to 65, end of story. There are some professions that do allow for that but the expectation that you're failing if you don't do that is pretty gone from popular belief now. I mean, it still haunts us. But there is at least in the culture a recognition that, you know what, it's an admirable thing to decide, I'm going back to school at 40 and I'm changing my career! We applaud people who do that and so I think that may exist in parallel with... I don't know what it is. Maybe it's a fundamentalist thing. It's a fear-based thing that we're gonna lock everything down and it's just going to be this way forever. Dena: Right. Slade: We're moving as a species into a place where we recognize that things are evolving and changing. We are learning how to be more that way, right? Dena: Yeah. I would agree. I would say those two things are very connected. Slade: Oh, Dena, I could talk to you all day long. There are so many aspects of astrology that we can explore like this. Thank you so much for doing this deep dive and going through, at least speaking to everyone out there a little bit, giving them a taste of what they're working with. I will absolutely invite you back for other chats and we will do some other focused topic areas in this way. Tell everyone where they can go to find you online if they want to follow you or get a reading with you. Dena: Yeah! So you can find me at DenaDeCastro.com and there you can sign up for my list there. I do have a really cool free gift of the nodes in your chart, if you didn't hear about it from the last episode. It's still there for you if you do sign up for my list. I also will more regularly be posting things on Facebook as we go forward, and I have a Facebook, it's DeCastroAstrology. I say that because I just started back on Facebook after nine years away, so it's like getting back up to snuff on that has been interesting. But yeah I'm enjoying getting back into that community and also being part of the Shift Your Spirits community as well. And you can find me there too. I pop in if you have questions about this episode and what have you. Slade: Absolutely. We'll have a comment discussion in the group available for anyone who wants to ask you some good follow up questions. That was great, Dena. Thank you for coming back on the show again. Dena: Thank you. It's always my pleasure.

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

Like you, I have all these things on the horizon I haven’t reached yet: I tell myself I can’t I tell myself I’m not there yet One day Some day When I’m some Thing, some other version of myself than what I am now. What happens when I get there? Will I still be straining for the future and disconnected from what is all around me? Or will I have a moment like today, where I stop, and look around and realize I have so much of what I’m looking for? MENTIONED ON THE SHOW dooce.com by Heather Armstrong Out on a Limb by Shirley Maclaine HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses Get an intuitive reading with Slade Automatic Intuition FACEBOOK GROUP Shift Your Spirits Community BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits Edit your pledge on Patreon TRANSCRIPT I had a moment the other day, on a rainy day, drinking Earl Grey tea and writing at the Wildflower Apothecary and Tea shop where I go in the afternoons. It came over me, this wave of emotion, of realization and just awareness, in the moment. I am who I want to be when I grow up. I'm purposefully making that statement present tense, because I've still got a long ways to go. But I want to acknowledge that it's also happening now. If I can't be happy now, I mean, my family are all living and relatively healthy, nobody's fighting a serious illness. My pets are happy and healthy. I am so thankful and acutely aware of that joy every single day. My favourite moments are being on the couch watching Netflix or reading a novel on Kindle with my cat Sam on my chest and my cat Scotty between my knees. My heart is so full in those moments. And I know that they won't last forever. I've never been more comfortable in my own body - I feel very grounded, I work out a LOT, I sleep well, I have no chronic physical complaints, no pain. I don't take high blood pressure medicine. I'm in pretty good shape for somebody going on 50. I look in the mirror and I like myself. More so than I ever have. I have a safe and comfortable home. It’s not some dream loft I might have envisioned, but it’s more abundance than 99.9% of the people on the planet can claim. I have friends all over the country who trust and adore me and even though they are far away, I can text them within moments. I actually love those texting, long distance relationships. It's like this amazing, creative, humourous Improv that's always going on out there in the cloud. The physical landscape I move through every day is pretty freaking beautiful. Nature in Chattanooga, Tennessee is a fairyland, it really is. It's the reason why I wrote about a fairyland that exists here. I would have never imagined myself moving back home, but there is an energy in this city at this time, and it’s a good time to be here. And after all the personal friends and family and gratitude for good health and wellness, there is my work. My work is my life. THIS, right here, is my work. And I'm kind of like, Are you kidding me? That's awesome. I make money for talking, and commenting, and giving my opinion and sharing my stories, and doing all the things I would do with you over a cup at a cafe. And although I do work everyday, it’s because I love my work. It's part of my life and an extension of my personality. My schedule is my own, even though I'm kind of a slave driver about it. And you know, by the way, I was just telling my mother I know this sounds like a highly superficial thing, but I drive my dream car. It’s not a luxury car by any means. It’s a hard top Mini Cooper, British racing green. And I remember a time when that seemed so out of my reach and I thought “Wow. That is THE car that I would get if I could get any car.” Sometimes I walk up to it parked on the street and I think “I love my car!" I do! I got it. I could go on with this list. I don’t do this enough. By the way, especially when you’re feeling bad, playing this game when you’re alone, driving around, naming things that are pretty or that make you happy on those days when you can feel happy. If you do it on the days you don't feel happy, it’s really powerful. Just do it all the time, actually. But if you're in a place where you're trying to get that happy back, I mean, happy is such a dumb word. But you know what I mean. Whatever that means for you. I think it's something so much more quiet and less exciting than what we envision. But it's a powerful exercise. The gratitude listing, the gratitude journalling thing, it really will change your mind. You can reframe anything, and if you get really, really diligent about it and really police it, it will change your life. So do that, if you need it. Or if you haven't done it in awhile, this is your reminder, whenever you're done listening to me talk, turn this device off. Look around and start naming things. The point of all this — and I hate it when people do the “I love my clients so much” posts on Facebook, because it feels a little like humble bragging / marketing your services without doing it, kind of winky wink. I try not to do things that I think will make people roll their eyes. People make me roll my eyes a lot… That's something you don't know about me. You think I'm so much of a nicer person than I really am. I digress … The point of all this is, not to humble brag, and not to imply that I love my work so much therefore you should buy all of it. The point of all this is, If I can’t be happy now, when would I be? One of the things I notice we tend to do — and there’s a lot of evidence of this in the conversations in the Shift Your Spirits Community on Facebook. So I lurk and I skim and I read and comment here and there as I can, but I don't have the time or ability to get involved in ALL the conversations, but I do love to observe the patterns of things that emerge for me there, within an hour collective zeitgeist. We make a lot of things aspirational. And we think we're just identifying aspirations, but I think we make things aspirational and make them too hard. If it’s important, it has to be waaaaaaay out in the future. It needs to be difficult to get to. It needs to be freaking unattainable for us to dream about attaining it. I mean, just as a common example, people often post or ask about meditating like it’s learning to execute a particularly difficult spell from Dark Arts class at Hogwarts. Lotus positions and mind emptying and special rooms in your house and special corners in the room and alters and singing bowls and incense burning and stretchy flowy clothes that cost way too much money to be synthetic… In my mind, I'm seeing those and I'm seeing other people engaging and helping and offering advice, and their advice is often offered in difficult ways. They buy in to the difficult and, "Here's a really complicated answer to your complicated question", and I do that too with my own stuff. Especially when it comes to my writing and all my perfectionism issues around that stuff. But I notice that, just with the whole meditation thing, people come up to me on a daily basis at the cafe and engage me in conversations. It's a really common refrain: "I really need to start meditating." "I want to start meditating." "I try to meditate. Do you have any advice for meditating?" I just want to say, "You know what? Go for a walk. Clean things. Sweep your driveway." Literally, that's what I do when I want to meditate. Because I don't do all that other stuff. I'm bad at it too! I don't like things that are aspirational and difficult. If I really want to do it, I want it to be doable. Everything about my reason for starting Shift Your Spirits was to make the magical and the paranormal accessible to us NOW. In our daily lives, right? Where else would we want to have it? It's the magic in the mundane. I believe Toni Morrison is the one who gave me that phrase, possibly in some of her writing about writing or maybe an interview that she gave. I've always been really into stream of consciousness fiction. There's a strong element of magical realism and stream of consciousness in her work. That was my literary concentration in college — 20th century British novel. James Joyce. Virginia Woolf. Virginia's one of the really most famous executors of stream of consciousness. She's the reason we probably had to study it. This concept of illuminating a single moment in time and consciousness, and elevating it with layers of thought and synchronicity and observation and philosophy, all existing within this fluidity of time. Toni Morrison also talked about how we don’t have to find answers. People think, especially with writers or with leaders or preachers, or whoever it is that's standing up in front of the others, and trying to show the way, that it's about delivering answers. She talked about how she thinks the true job is to ask and contemplate powerful questions. So stop looking for the answers so much and just find a defining question for you. It may not have an answer. But leaning towards those possible answers, and searching for them, can be the meaningful process that you're looking for. It could give you the work of a lifetime, by the way. Trying to answer an unanswerable question. Not only is it the magic in the mundane, but it's also the mystery. Being who you want to be when you grow up is about being able to recognize that, and living in the present moment and being that. And choosing to contemplate the gratitude for it, right? Procrastination protects our dreams. It keeps them in the future where we can’t fuck them up as long as it remains in a glass bubble floating out of reach, we have hope around it. We can build all these stories and these fantasies about "some day", and "When we get there", and "Oh, if only that were mine". But if you take it down, and you break the glass and you use it, it changes it. And it's never as beautiful and mystical and magical as we thought it was. It exists in perfection in that abstract, out of reach, state. But it's not usable. It's not alive. It's not happening to us now. We aren't really using it. So why have it in our consciousness if we can't get to it? It's insane! Just as an idea for a piece of writing or creative project is never what you actually execute. It's like, the best book is always the one you’re going to write next. It's never the one you're working on. It is never the one that you're 75% of the way through. Trust me. Even though you're doing it! You're being the author that you wanted to be when you grow up. You're 75% of the way through editing a book, Draft 2. Oh, god help you. That looks nothing like the fantasy, right? I thought when I was a kid, I was going to grow up to be a cross between, get this, C.S. Lewis, a diarist, and a writer on the team of The Young & the Restless — don’t laugh. I loved soap operas from a really early age. I would rush home from the bus stop from kindergarden, or maybe my mother picked me up, but I still would want her to drive really fast and not stop and get the mail. I would want to get in there and watch that show. I still adore that format, I don’t watch old school daytime soaps or telenovelas or anything like that, but I do love really good serialized premium cable story telling, you know what I mean? And the diarist thing. I fell in love with this word at a really early age and I identified a lot with Anne Frank. A lot of us did when we read that book. And it’s this word that my spirit guides whispered to me as a child, diarist, again as a teenage, even again in my late 20s. And I can remember, in fifth or sixth grade, researching who are the authors were who were famous or known for their diaries and at that time, there was this humorist named Erma Bombeck, who wrote these kind of funny, almost like stand-up comedy routines about her life as a housewife in Middle America, or whatever. It was in book format though. I think she wrote columns in newspapers and syndicated stuff. I thought of that as kind of being a diarist. And when I was a teenager, there were those Shirley MacLaine spiritual non-fiction memoirs. Out on a limb. I somehow discovered Virginia Woolf, too, waaaay before anyone had to study stream of consciousness literature or became an English major or anything. It was like a ridiculously young age, reading letters that Virginia Woolf wrote. LIke a collection of her letters, for which she was famous, and that kind of felt like diaries. But I never understood HOW anyone would ever become successful or famous for writing a diary. Remember, my guides are whispering "diarist" all the time. Because Shirley MacLaine was already famous for being an actress before she shared her memoir. Even then, if the story was or wasn't interesting, we all knew that was part of the reason why it was published, and her face was on the cover, was because she was already someone that we knew, so we were interested in hearing more about her. But I started keeping journals, because of all this, when I was about 11 or 12. I wasn't even a teenager yet. I was really diligently trying to follow this practice of being a diarist, which I felt like would lead me to something. But I had no idea what it would be. I didn’t know as a little kid that C.S. Lewis was writing about religion and spirituality in another part of his career. I only knew Narnia. As I grew up and discovered that he was trying to indoctrinate me with Christian allegory, I was really resentful of that. I was a little pissed. I found his other work really tedious, like the other science fiction stuff, and then the more religious stuff, ohmygod, it was just so polemic and... No! I don't even go to church. Why in the hell would I want to read this? I quickly moved away from identifying wanting to be C.S. Lewis when I grew up. Although I did memorialize the death of the opinion of both him and Tolkien by writing a research paper in college about how Lewis converted Tolkien to Christianity. Like, worked him over for a really long time. Gag. I obviously didn’t become a soap writer either. So I was way off on that whole initial trajectory. BUT, here’s what’s interesting to me. I don't know what's interesting to you. I did grow up to be an author who writes spiritualist non-fiction AND fantasy novels. So it's kind of like C.S. Lewis. And I never understood how the “diarist” thing was ever going to come true — I could never see that path, yet my guides were really insistent. It's one of the things throughout my life the clairaudient word or message that I've heard most consistently, more than any other thing, that being a Diarist would be my key to becoming a writer. I thought my guides were confused about the words. I thought maybe I would become famous for some other kind of writing, and then people would want to read my diaries after I died or something. So I made sure to keep them and make them interesting, or try. Or I thought since I kept journals, like I thought of it as journals at that point. I wasn't even calling it diaries anymore. I didn't even buy the diaries with the little key on them, though I was fascinated with that whole concept when I was really young. But when I really got into doing a whole lot as a teenager, I quickly moved to writing in blank sketchbooks. I called them journals, and that's how I referred to them. Maybe my guides were trying to tell me to be a Journalist and the word was off. But that specific path, being an actual journalist, did not appeal to me at all. So there was a real confusion around all that. But then in 2003, I started seeing these web sites called blogs. Do you remember Dooce? Dooce.com? Did anyone follow Heather Armstrong? I'm going to put a link in the Show Notes so that we can go check in with Heather and see what's going on with her all these years later. But she was one of the first people who was writing this weblog about her life and was fascinating and interesting and entertaining. I read it every week or every couple of days, whenever she posted. So I was at that point where I was trying to figure out how to use the internet to further my career, to learn how to publish online. So I got some good advice from one of the founders of Movable Type, that I should learn how to install and build blogs. And then I should focus on learning to code CSS, which is webstandards. And so I did! I learned how to install Movable Type, which was a big deal back then. You couldn't just click a button and have your web post put it on there. You had to do all this stuff. And then later I learned how to install WordPress. But more than anything, I learned how to market these things, right? They were diaries, they were shared online diaries. And I started one of my own, a few years after learning how to build them, called Shift Your Spirits that I thought nobody would ever even it. And holy shit, I became famous for being a diarist. A blogger. That was the new word. But it's a diarist. Would you believe, in Apple podcasts, my podcast, this podcast, was submitted into the Spirituality category. Where else would you put it? But Apple always puts it in “personal journals.” No matter what I do, I can't get it out of that category and into something like spirituality or wellness. Anything else, no matter what. They won’t change my category. I have no idea why. They consider it a personal journal. I never called it that. Maybe their robots know more about me than I can see in myself. My blogs and my podcast episodes are serialized, dramatized, episodic content. I can kinda a connection to soap operas there. Every week, I write this unfolding story and I have no idea where it's going or where it ends. I’m just creating it as I go. And I think that's part of what I love about that whole soap writing. I’m sure I thought when I grew up I would live in a modern high rise in some glamorous city, there would be video phones like the Jetsons. I would wear fashiony dressy clothes all the time and I would putter about, busy busy, having meetings with people about my work, and possibly having meetings about my work by Jetson video phone. The reality is, I live in the city where I grew up, but it's changed and it's become a more glamorous version of itself, kind of. I actually hated living in a big city. I tried it. I don’t even really like visiting them very much either. I hate wearing dress clothes — I dress like a high school baseball coach who likes to hike on the weekends. I wear hoodies and crossfit trainers and sometimes I switch that up with a birkenstock clog. I write in cafes. My time is my own. And I do have meeting by video phone — it’s called Skype and Zoom and FaceTime. I get paid to tell people stories — about themselves, about myself, about these worlds I make up. I am not CS Lewis-level famous, but I am internet famous, which is probably better in some ways. Bottom line, I make a living sharing ideas from my head. It’s kind of better than glamorous — it’s casual! It's so casual and informal. It probably does sound like I’m bragging. But I really am just trying to acknowledge this moment in time in my life. I’m freezing the present. I'm looking around. I’m taking a moment to be grateful. And to just kind of shout it from the rooftops. Because, like you, I have all these things on the horizon I haven’t reached yet: I tell myself I can’t. I tell myself I’m not there yet. One day, some day, when I’m some Thing, some other version of myself than I am now What happens when I get there? Fastforward … to When I Get THERE. Will I still be straining for the future? and disconnected from what's actually going on? Or will I have a moment like I did the other day, today, where I stop, and I look around and I realize: I have so much of what I’m looking for. You have two choices to be who you want to be when you grow up: If you don’t already have it, if you're not even close, you need to change some shit. And that is hard. But if you want it, you have to be willing to give up some stuff maybe. I won't even go into all the things I gave up, or that I do give up, because I'm focusing on what I HAVE. If you do feel like you might have all the elements in place, or you just want to accept that maybe this IS it, then the question is not about what you can change, but how can you feel differently about what is. Be with what is. I am already everything I’ve ever wanted to become. I am fulfilling my purpose by being here. And I can’t be happy then, in some glamourized future I may never get to, If I can’t be happy now, If I can’t be grateful right now. If I don't know how to do that now, then how will I know how to do that whenever I get to wherever it is that I'm supposed to get to. So I’m pausing to mark this moment in time. And I recommend you do the same thing. If you can. You’re not missing anything. There’s nothing for you to bring in or add or change before you can acknowledge it. Before you can claim your reason for being here and to find love for yourself and the life that you're already living. You are already everything you’ve ever wanted to become. You fulfill your life purpose with every breath you take.

Jocelyne Leach calls herself a mystical midlife rebel. She's a personal and spiritual empowerment coach, mentor, and intuitive for women who want a joyful, vibrant second half of life. We’re talking about second acts and the opportunities present for us at middle age to finally do something meaningful with our lives. GUEST LINKS - JOCELYNE LEACH jocelynekelseyleach.com HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses Get an intuitive reading with Slade Automatic Intuition FACEBOOK GROUP Shift Your Spirits Community BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits Edit your pledge on Patreon TRANSCRIPT Jocelyne: Okay, well it was about 10 years ago. Probably everyone can remember 10 years ago when the shit hit the fan in the financial markets and it just felt like the whole world collapsing. The news was just terrible. Every day was very depressing. At the time, my husband and I were... We had two businesses that were quite vulnerable to fluctuating markets, and one was a pub and restaurant. One was a property development business. And so, when the markets take a dive, people stop eating out and property takes a dive. The whole thing just imploded. So my husband was extremely stressed. He got taken to hospital seriously ill with three perforated ulcers. At the time, I was uncharacteristically stressed and unhappy and suffering as well. Usually I'm quite a grounded person. So for me to feel all these kind of... the emotional wrangling of all this going on. It made me think, I've gotta get to the doctor and get some medication to help me through this. And I thought, No, that's not the route I want to go. I need to sort this out myself. So I started two things. One thing you might not know about me is I'm also a yoga teacher. So I really dug back into my yoga practice that had got a little bit kind of wishy washy. I dug back into that and took up a more powerful type of yoga. That helped a great deal. It really gave me something to focus on that took the thoughts out of my head because it was the thoughts that were just driving me crazy. And then, at that time, about 10 years ago, the internet was really starting to take off. And so, the wonderful thing of search engines were I could just keep finding different people on the internet who would give me words of wisdom that started me moving forward and kind of climbing out of my big black hole. It's things like finding Byron Katie and reading her books and beginning to kind of control my mindshit, basically. And that was how I started to kind of turn my ship around, basically. And I think at the same time, I was also having a bit of a mid-life crisis. I was kind of late-40s and just wondering what my life had all been about, because I had always been involved with the family business in one form or another. And I've never really pushed out on my own and done anything that I felt was my particular career, so to speak. So it just started that journey. And yoga, really, was the catalyst that got me into more and more kind of spiritual and metaphysical stuff. When I first started yoga, it was just a physical practice. I wasn't into any mumbo jumbo at all. It was kind of a physical practice so I wasn't interested in anything like chanting or meditation or anything like that. But when the need arose, I needed to get into that place of being calmer and finding tools for my mind. So that's really how it all evolved. Slade: That's interesting. I did not know that you were a yoga teacher. I have a pretty special place in my heart as well for yoga. I sort of feel like it was the thing that allowed me to... It's funny, I... Like what you just said. It started as a physical practice for you and then the mumbo jumbo came later. I started out with the mumbo jumbo, and when I went looking for something to physically heal me, I had had a surgery which cut into my core muscles and I was a smoker for 20 years. So at that time, I was recovering from surgery and smoking, and I thought, Ugh, this is disgusting, to be doing these two things at the same time. So I started to think, What is the representation of the breath in healing form? What is a replacement behaviour for smoking? And I really quickly landed on yoga, as being the kind of intersection of all that stuff. And I thought, Yay! I went to yoga as this mystic already! And it was funny because I really quickly was drawn into more of power yoga and as I built up that core strength and became more and more physically strong, and of course I did quit smoking and did yoga instead of smoking, I became extremely physically empowered and alive in my own body in a way that I'd never experienced. Jocelyne: Yeah. Yeah. Slade: Never experienced. We're talking, like, I was 41 when that happened, so... It ultimately led me to all the fitness that I do now, because I was like, Ah, I do the mumbo jumbo stuff in my day job. I want to lift weights and be a crossfit cult member, so I went that route. One of the things that I have noticed is, a lot of people who are yoga instructors may go into it as a physical practice, as a job, and somewhere along the way, they start to discover that they can read energy, that they are intuitive, then they start to pick up a lot of stuff especially if they're touching clients sometimes. Did any of that happen to you? Jocelyne: Yeah. Exactly how it happened. Like I said, I was more into the physical side of it, but I began to notice that, and I think I've always had this attribute, of being able to read people's energy. And I think it goes right back to childhood. I don't know why, but that was just always how I felt that I could understand people. I could look at them and I could kind of guess what was going on. And I began to notice that when people are in my class, I could figure out what was going on for them. And I began to notice that people were quite interested, in fact, they really demanded that I would make the classes in a way that they could tap into their own energy. It was the beginning of class where I used to, when it was quite a physical practice for me, I didn't really have a run in into class. We'd do maybe a couple of breaths just to show willing. And then I'd go straight into the physical practice. And then I began to see that people more and more wanted me to take them into more of a breathing sequence and to decompress them from their day. So the start of my class where we just do a couple minutes of breathing began to be 10 or 15 minutes of breathing. At first I thought, Oh, I don't know if I should be doing this. I don't think people will like it. But more and more, I found that was part of the reason they were coming. And so it went from there. And then I began to really see the difference that it was making to people and I began to put my foot into the other aspects. The more ethereal aspects of yoga. And it was quite a journey. Learning the history of yoga and realizing there are things that, what you might call the new age community had adopted, like working with chakras and visualizations and stuff like that. They were all things that had been part of yoga practice for thousands of years. And that's what led me into studying other things like astrology and hand reading and the akashic records. Because all of those also belong to vedic studies. So it's quite fascinating how that all unfolded for me. Slade: Do you still, I'm just curious if you still work with astrology at all. Jocelyne: Yeah, I do. Some of the most powerful readings I've ever had in astrology have been vedic astrology readings. I haven't been studying vedic astrology. But I have been studying western astrology and when I work with people now, I just always take their birth dates so I at least know what sign they are. Because that gives me a lot of information. Because a lot of my work is about energy, whether it's physical, mental, emotional, what have you. And things like astrology help you cut through a lot of chit chat. It gets you to the heart of the matter more quickly. Slade: Yeah. The reason I ask about that is because astrology is emerging as a theme in all my interviews right now. There are at least three people on this season who are specifically astrologers. But then when you mentioned that, I felt like I needed to ask, because this is a theme and I have been sort of reinvigorated around using that in my practice. I actually used to use, like, someone's natal chart was almost like a meditation or a gateway image for me to do readings, so I come from having done astrological charts for extra money when I was a teenager, when I was in college, for my parents' friends and some people in my family. Stuff like that. And so, I've always asked for that information for a client because if I know their sun, moon and rising sign, I can talk for an hour about what that tells me about them, you know? Jocelyne: Yeah. Slade: At that point, all the intuitive stuff comes in as well. I used to think, maybe I'm just kind of using this as a crutch. Maybe I'm just sort of using that as my way to log in, as we say. But then with all of you that I'm having these conversations with, I had sort of just backed away from including that on my intake forms. Now I'm rethinking, Oh wait a minute, I feel like my Guides and the Universe is all telling me, No, no. There's more to do with that. Keep that in place. It's a very useful vocabulary. Jocelyne: I think so. It goes along with another thing I do, which is to do with yoga. Which is ayurvedic medicine, which is kind of the Indian version of traditional chinese medicine. I do a, not with every client, but with some of my clients, I'll give them a kind of questionnaire thing that they complete, which also gives me their dosha, which is a physical representation of energy, so it goes into elemental energy like in astrology. For example, if I use me as an example, I'm a Gemini so I've got a lot of mental air energy. But physically, I've got a lot of earth energy. So it gives me a great understanding of someone if I know what their physical energy type is along with their mental energy type. So if I'm helping someone in more of a wellness way, which was my previous iteration in coaching. I was a lot more focused on wellness and health because that kind of went with the yoga. And then I started building the more mystical and intuitive skills now, so I'm veering more in that direction. It gave me a really good picture of that person quite quickly and I'm all for something that kind of cuts through stuff and you can get to the heart of the matter much more quickly. The same goes with the hand analysis. I learned how to do hand analysis and the energy shows up in the lines and the fingerprints in the hands as well. So all those things kind of tie in. Slade: Wow, so if you have a client there in person with you, do you usually read their hand as well? Jocelyne: I do do in person hand reading things. They're usually mini sessions. I'm lucky enough to teach my yoga classes, the majority of them, at a local spa that opened a few years ago. I offer a kind of 45-minute mini session. So I do that in person. But if I'm seeing someone long distance, then I like to send them a kit so they can print their hand prints for me. They send them back and I look at the printed version of their handprints. And in honesty, I prefer doing that. Because number one, it gives me a bit more time to just kind of mull over what I'm seeing. And secondly, with ink print, you get more fine detail. And quite often, I'm a bit distracted if I've got a person physically in that space, all expectant-like. I get stage fright a bit. I quite like to be kind of tucked up in my office, and just kind of mulling and ruminating over the information I've got so that I can present it in a more cogent way. Slade: I didn't know that you could do that! That you could do prints with ink and send them to someone and that they can... I've never thought of that before! Jocelyne: Yeah. Slade: That's fascinating. Jocelyne: Yes, it is. It's much, much more fun. Slade: Well, it also allows you the time to create a more meaningful volume of information. Because I think there's a tendency, you know, like, it's weird to just let a stranger hold your hand for most people for a long amount of time. I can see where there would be some kind of, a little bit of almost like a social space pressure to not sit there and manhandle them for 15 or 20 minutes. So to be able to have that kind of intellectual distance and to study the information kind of outside of that whole issue of touching or being in someone's personal space. I find it easier to read for people that I cannot see, that I'm not physically in the same room with. I often describe it as being like, when you are listening to music and you want to concentrate, you close your eyes. It's like getting rid of a lot of the senses that you don't need in that moment, so that you can sort of put all your focus on that intuitive channel, essentially. Jocelyne: Yeah, I think that's exactly it. I don't appreciate the distraction because I'm easily distracted anyway, so if I see an expression or something that... It can put me into my headspace, and I don't really want to be there. I want to be more into my intuitive space. The other thing I find especially with hand analysis, if I'm there with the person, and it's kind of, Cross my palm with silver, dearie, that kind of vibe, where if I'm at more a distance, it seems more, whatever the word is... Slade: Elevated? Jocelyne: Yeah. The opposite of being at the end of the pier, or in a fairground. Slade: Right. It's more elevated. Jocelyne: Doing tricks. Slade: More highbrow. Jocelyne: Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. You know, I come from a family where this is the kind of stuff that is not believed in. All my family think I'm a proper weirdo. And they're the kind of people where if you can see it, then you believe it. And I'm more, you see, actually, what you believe, and more in that intuitive space. They all look at me kind of a bit cock-eyed, as if a bit, Uh oh, What's she up to now? Slade: Well, every family needs one. Jocelyne: Well that's what I think. I'm letting my weird flag fly now and I don't mind. Slade: So talk to me a little bit about how your practices evolved. I imagine some of your yoga students become people who want personal sessions from you. Or that you kind of evolve the practice into doing more of the intuitive work and the coaching. Looking at your website, there's a focus around living a vibrant second half of life. Jocelyne: Yeah. Slade: You talked about the fact that your story, at one point sort of going through a midlife crisis. So talk to me about what this second half of life is about. Jocelyne: I think for women particularly, it's a kind of a point in life where women at a certain age, I don't want them to throw in the towel. I don't want them to think, Well I've got to a certain age, and I've got to start smalling things down now and contracting, kind of metaphorically speaking. What tends to happen is life kinda gets you when you're at mid-life. The thing that started me on my journey might not be typical for everyone, but it does and it can involve a certain amount of loss. It can be loss of your partner through divorce or through death, or loss of your health or jobs, or your kids moving out of your home, all sorts of things like that. I see it with my friends and my clients. There are great pressures on women at this age. There's barely a woman I've come across that doesn't have something of this kind of challenge going on for them. For most women, it's kind of unexpected, or it's more challenging than they thought it would be at this time of life. It's an accumulation of everything that's kind of topped off by the cherry on the top, which is having the menopause. So it challenges them from every part of their being - physical, mental, emotional, spiritual. You name it. It feels like you're powerless and you're a bit stuck. And it's all downhill from here on. I don't think that should be necessary. Not in this day and age and also, 50 isn't how 50 was when my grandmother was 50. And I think if people, well women especially, if they feel empowered again, that's how their second half becomes magical and meaningful. And they can live joyfully and have a vibrant second half of life. So that's what my job I feel is. To guide them and coach them at this time. To see the other side of this kind of void. And have a clear and inspired plan for a much more empowered, brighter future. Slade: What kinds of things do you see these women going on to do, like what kind of breakthroughs do they arrive at? Do they start businesses? Create new projects? What kind of result, really, happens when they become more empowered? Jocelyne: Yeah, I have had clients and friends who have the catalyst for them having to do something in their life, is maybe the loss of their marriage. So they've had to really think, Well, you know, I've been a homemaker for 25 years. I've got to do something now. And they'll start a business. I have several friends that have started businesses at a time in life where you think, Wow, that's a bit plucky. But they haven't had the choice because they've been thrown into that situation. Or, you know, if a partner had become seriously ill, or they've become debilitated in some way, women have to step up maybe and start being more of a breadwinner. So that's definitely something that I've noticed in women of this age and sometimes it's just they're ready for a kind of an awakening themselves. They're ready to find more about the spiritual side of life, or about aspects of life they haven't had time to pursue before if they were busy doing other things. You know, the kids leave home, you might have downsized, you might have downsized work-wise. Something else is calling and it's kind of like a clarion call to remember that you probably got more years behind you than you have ahead of you, so what are you going to do with those valuable years that you've got left? Slade: And they're open in a new way, right? Jocelyne: Yeah. Slade: The good news is... Because I attract this type of client as well. Women who are finally at a point where their energy is not being required by everyone else at quite the same amount. So what they're finding is they're sort of welling up with all this self-awareness and this creativity, and these sort of blank slates, and this sort of open space. Now, some people probably panic and dig in and freak out about all that, and wanting it to stay the same, so to speak. But the clients that I attract in my practice are like, Okay, well wait a minute, I've got all this time and all this energy and I'm not done yet, so what am I going to do now? It's really exciting to me because I feel like it's almost a second act, on the kind of energy that you see with college students, you know? Jocelyne: Yeah. Slade: I was a student adviser at a university before I started doing this work, and I see a real connection between the mindset of someone who is 19 years old and trying to choose a major for their study and then women who are in midlife who are coming to me wanting to discuss reconnecting to their creativity, starting a passion project of their own, doing something that they've always wanted to do. Do you see that kind of energy that I'm talking about? Joceyne: Absolutely. I think it's that kind of Saturn return effect and the need, I see, for people not to stop being creative, you know? Keep being creative. No matter how modest your dreams are, you need a new dream. You need to redesign your garden or redecorate the house or whatever it is. But you've got to keep having something to get up for in the morning. Otherwise you just kind of wither and die. So for some people, it would be modest dreams. For some people, it's like, yeah! I'm gonna open an animal sanctuary. I've got the time, I've got the space. I can do that now. They might want to travel. They might want to really do charity work or something that is meaningful for them, that they haven't had a chance to do before. Or just reinvent themselves in some other way that is meaningful to them. So that they really do get a chance to do what they might not have done when they were younger. Slade: Women in midlife too, have decades of practice doing multiple things at once. They're multi-taskers just by requirement. Almost everyone who's a mom. I joke with the moderators of my Shift Your Spirits community, which you are one of our moderators, I jokingly said to you guys, I pick ladybosses and moms. Because you guys are used to kind of doing a whole lot of everything, and dealing with everyone's stuff, you know, to put it nicely. And you have a lot of practice at getting on with shit. You know what I mean? Jocelyne: Yes I do. Slade: I really like this type of client because they're not coming in with a lot of hand wringing. They come in with a lot of energy and are looking for some place to spend it. They want to be encouraged and enabled to pour themselves into something and to be encouraged. Bring it on! I love to brainstorm. And I love it when people bring me their animal sanctuary passion projects and they need some support and encouragement to make that happen. What do you hope personally to contribute to this greater world of coaching and empowerment. What's your message you'd like to leave out there? Jocelyne: I think my main message is, what happened for me 10 years ago is that I really found out about myself. I dug down deep enough so that I could understand myself better. And I think that's the key, is to really know and understand yourself fully. Because then you can tackle the things that are your life lessons, that are your repeating patterns, the things that have kind of kept tripping you up. That thing about, you always go out with the same guy, or you always keep doing the same things and you have the same triggers. If people could just experience what it is to know themselves better, then it's a very empowering feeling to suddenly think, Okay, actually If I scroll back a bit, when I first had my hand analysis reading done for myself before I trained to do it, I had several coaching sessions where the lady did the technique that I described to you earlier, and everything she said to me wasn't a huge surprise. It was all stuff that I kind of knew about myself already. But it gave me kind of confirmation about who I really was. So then when I knew who I really was, it was like, Well, there's no good in me worrying about the fact that I'm no good at maths. Why don't I just keep pursuing the things that are my gifts and turn my gifts into spectacular gifts. You know, something I can really do something with. Rather than just be sad there wondering, lacking confidence and being triggered by all the things that triggered me in the past. I think a lot of us are the kind of stuck when we were triggered as a 10 year old or 14 year old. And I think, as a society, if a 10 year old or 14 year old died, it's a tragedy. The whole wider community feels that loss. But how many people go to their grave still being triggered as they were when they were a 10 year old or a 14 year old? I think that's a tragedy. I think how awful, that you're really dying as a 10 year old. Slade: Mmm... I had a client just recently that I did a reading with who expressed that she had wanted to be a writer when she was much younger, and that when she was 14 years old, her mother just really shut her down around that whole connection to herself. And, you know, it died, like you said, a spiritual death. So here she was, at this stage in life that we're talking about, looking to reconnect to that. I hope she hears this episode and what you just said. Because I really feel that it spoke to the reading that we did. I think she's a fan of the show, so she's probably nodding along right now. And it affirms the message that I brought through for her as well. I want to mention and not forget, because I love this title so much, if everyone goes to your website, they can get a free download. The title is "7 ways to instantly get calm in the middle of a shitstorm!" Jocelyne: Yes. Slade: Tell us about that. Jocelyne: Yeah, I'm a little irreverent. I think if you join up to my list, you might need to know that. That's a 7 day email series. Each day someone is sent a tip about a different way to kind of get a grip on whatever is triggering you, basically. One particular day, there might be a visualization and a breathing technique to calm. There might be some physical things to do, like jumping jacks or something like that, to get out of your head and into your body. It might be a recipe with essential oils, something like that. It could be dietary tips or something a bit more practical. So it's just 7 days of different things that could help you feel as if you've got a grip. Slade: It sounds like a lot of people would be interested in checking that out. Jocelyne, thank you for taking the time to speak with me today. Tell us where we can go to find you online. Jocelyne: My website, it's a little long-winded, but it's http://www.jocelynekelseyleach.com/ I think you'll put that in the notes or... Slade: Yes, yes. Awesome. Wonderful. That was great, Jocelyne. Thank you for coming on the show! Jocelyne: That's my pleasure. Cheery bye for now!

Aubrey Mast is an Intuitive, Health Coach, Herbalist, and Wellness Chef dedicated to helping people root into their bodies and into their sovereign self. She has helped thousands come back into their bodies with nutrition, self-care, and intuitive practices. Aubrey Mast and Susan Grace co-host the rapidly growing, internationally followed Be the Evidence podcast available now at http://betheevidencepodcast.com/ and all platforms where podcasts are streaming. We’re talking about bringing astrology into your daily life, bringing it back down to earth, and, as is Aubrey’s expertise, bringing it into the body. GUEST LINKS - AUBREY MAST betheevidencepodcast.com podcast betheevidence.live platform | community aubreycara.co Root Rising 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 Slade: People will have heard you and I speak before on your podcast, Root Rising. But you have a new podcast with Susan Grace. Tell us about that podcast. Aubrey: Yeah, so we have a brand new podcast that's called Be the Evidence. We just pushed out our 20th episode this morning and it is a blend of my strengths with working with clairvoyance and clairsentience, clairaudience. I'm able to hear and see images come to me and they typically are in relationship to the body and a lot of times colours. And then I meet that with Susan Grace, who's an amazing astrologer. The way that we look at it is, this is a beautiful way we blend the conversation about the mind and coming into the body. So it's very stars to root feeling. The podcast is all centred around this theme of being that evidence. I think for us, that means walking the talk. Like, if we are all in this movement towards collective consciousness, and doing our work, and showing up more embodied and more as infinite as liberated individuals, not only for ourselves but for society. There's some level of evidence that we have to walk on our day to day being. And so, this is a podcast where we explore those conversations in a very real talk way, like you just stumbled into our living room and Susan and I are having this really raw conversation of like, Oh, yeah, things have been really hard and this is how I'm moving through them. So you'll get pieces of astrology that's real time, and you'll definitely get pieces of wellness information within it. Slade: Tell me a little bit about your background. You're working on a Ph.D. I kind of want everyone to know where you're coming from and how seriously you take this mind-body connection. Aubrey: Yeah, so my Ph.D is in mind-body medicine. So far, it looks as if I'm going to be focused on the gut microbiome and how it relates to psycho-neuroimmunology, which is really a beautiful way of saying how the bacteria that is found all over our bodies, and in our environment, impacts the energies that we're exposed to. And that plays a role in our consciousness but also in our thoughts that we have and our overall wellbeing. But beyond that, my master's was in Public Health. I focused on nutrition. My undergrad was in health and wellness promotion. I'm an herbalist. I am also a chef. I'm a holistic health coach. The last 15 years of my career has really been focused on healing the body. And it seems like within the last 2 or 3 years, especially since I was doing my work with you, that it's become more of this intuitive-based practice, where it's not just about physically healing the body. It's also about consciously healing the thoughts that we think, because they dictate how our cells react and respond in our bodies. They dictate how our genes respond. So I'm really viewing it from a holistic level of healing from cells-forward, if that makes sense. Slade: How did you hook up with Susan? Aubrey: In the age of social media, this is like, the complete thing. You and I have had this conversation before too, I think. Of like, all of a sudden, somebody recommends somebody, or somebody shares somebody's post. So, 3 years ago, somebody shared one of her posts and I had viewed it and I was like, Ohmygosh. This is really pertinent. Because she posts with a finger on the collective consciousness for the day. She does daily astrology readings that are specific to the collective consciousness. So I had followed her through Facebook, because every time I checked in to her posts, day by day, they were right on the mark with what was going on in my world. And then I ended up scheduling a reading with her and sat with her for an intensive. And every time I saw with her, I would have this conversation of like, I think you and I are supposed to work together. I'm not quite sure how it pieces out but we're gonna work together. And there was that little awkward laugh of like, Haha... yeah, we'll see......... And then this is how it panned out. Slade: I just want to say, like a quick shoutout to Susan by the way, because her ears are totally burning right now. We're talking about her, and, Susan, I've had recommendations to interview you, so now I feel like I need to immediately, as soon as this conversation is over, get in touch with Susan and have her come on and talk about astrology. Because astrology is definitely showing up as a theme this season for my interview guests. So tell me how you guys blend this astrology information with the wellness and lifestyle choices and healing information that you're working with. Aubrey: Yeah, I think that's really such an important question, honestly, in a sense that, for anybody that's new to astrology, it is its own language. I know you've experienced this in how you teach in Automatic Intuition. There's that section where you speak about astrology and how to make it more simplified. But it's its own language. And I remember coming out of my first reading with Susan and just being completely blown out of the water. Not only was she poignant in what she was talking about, but I was automatically exposed to this language I had no idea what the hell any of it meant. Grand trines and retrogrades and things like that... I had heard these terms thrown around but I did not understand how that applied to my day to day world. I knew that it was part of a subset of language that I was trying to grasp at. So Susan and I had had this conversation of, the information and where astrology is just so pertinent, because it's a visual element. It's a visual map of what is going on, moment by moment. The beautiful thing I think I found about it was that she was like, I don't know how to make it land. Sorry Slade, I'm being interrupted by my son. Slade: That's ok! Aubrey: Thank goodness you can edit this out. Slade: Oh sure! We could also just talk to him. He can be part of the interview if necessary. Aubrey: Honey, you want to say hello? You can say, Hi Mr. Slade! Son: Hi Mr. Slade! Slade: Hey! Aubrey: Sorry about that. Slade: No problem! I often say, I didn't do a lot of the pre-show stuff because I've talked to you before. But one of the things I was gonna say is, if anything happens, we can always cut the show or if we get disconnected, or whatever, and it's fine! I've had instances where my cat's beat the door down and I had to get up and be like, Excuse me for just one moment while I let the cat in. At this point, I'm almost thinking that we should just leave that stuff in. I may not or I may. If something ever really funny and interesting happens, I will absolutely just leave it in. Aubrey: I love it. Slade: Yeah. Because, I mean, the point of this show is really to kind of eavesdrop on the cool conversations that I have with people, and I was listening to Be the Evidence podcast that you do with Susan and it felt like that. It felt like I was sitting at a table at the cafe, next to an astrologist and her girlfriend who is super knowledgeable about wellness stuff, and you guys were breaking it down. Sort of what you were observing in your, what was happening in your life and she was talking about it thematically using astrology as a language. And I just want to say, this came up also in my recent interview with Dena DeCastro. We were really stressing that this is an archetypal vocabulary and it's very useful from that perspective. Even if you take out all the predictive stuff, and the forces in the sky and all that, I was even thinking about the fact that we can use the language of astrology just as any magazine does. You know? Magazines always have this sort of seasonal lifestyle kind of focus, right? Like we shift gears during certain times of year because of the seasons and we tend to focus on different types of activities or different things in our body, depending on what's going on in the environment around us. And so I'm completely okay with saying, You know what? You can debunk everything there is about astrology, which, then I'd want you to go get a reading and then realize it's kind of hard to do that. We could just take it out and say, This is an excuse or an intention for us to focus on this particular theme at this moment. And it would still be incredibly valuable just from that perspective. So give me an example, like I was listening to your show a couple of weeks ago about Virgo energy and how that impacts your daily life, like you said. So give me some examples of how you guys use the themes of what's going on astrologically and then apply that to the 3rd dimensional world. Aubrey: Yeah... I think that's a whole piece of, How do we make it land? I think from being in this field where it's intuitive, right? And I like to be in my Ph.D where it's mind body medicine and a lot of the stuff is not tangible. We can't see it in a lot of ways. How do you make it land and make it become tangible, is always the question of, how can you create a storyline so that people can see it resonating within their lives? So that I can see it resonating in my own life. We just recorded last night and it was a... we're in a lot of Scorpio energy right now, which, thankfully, or not thankfully, I don't know what way you want to look at it, Susan and I are both very, very much in our Scorpio energy, so we can come off as very intense. But for people that are not comfortable in that, it can come off as so intense that it's overwhelming. There's that deer in headlights look, like, I don't know what to do with this, this is a lot. It can look kind of chaotic. Right now the hurricane's hitting and it's sort of that feeling, right? The way that we explore this is to talk about, well, these are the ways that it's coming up in our world. And how do you make it land? So if we're dealing with lots of intensity and lots of chaos. And there's lots of transformation and liberation, that can feel like anxiety a lot of times, and stress a lot of times. So the way that I like to always take it back to the body is, how do we bring these bigger themes into our day to day lives? If we're experiencing lots of anxiety and lots of stress because we're also experiencing lots of intensity in our day to day lives, then it's important to recalibrate our bodies. It's important to calm our systems down. The other day I did a float tank and I got this download about how important it is to drink adaptogens right now, which help us manage stress. They help our body adapt to stressors. That's one of the ways that we explore... like, okay, if you're dealing with intensity and anxiety, this is one of the ways that we can calm our systems. We can also go out into the woods. We can sit and drink a cup of tea. We can have a beautiful conversation like you and I are having. That's very intentional. And to focus on those tactics while we're aware of these bigger themes as a way to land the information into our systems, but without coming from a place of reactivity. I think that's the bigger point for me with astrology. Astrology is almost shining a flashlight on what's happening, and then we get to choose, how do we respond to it? Slade: Mmm... yes. I love that. I have tons of Scorpio in my chart, by the way. Aubrey: That makes sense, why we get along. Slade: Yeah. I'm a Leo with a moon in Scorpio and a rising sun in Scorpio. So I do attract Scorpio energy and I always say, Scary people don't scare me as much as they do other people. I can handle the darkness. Bring your darkness! And you know what? It's crazy though, because I notice when things are really intense and kind of negative, I am much more likely to have good conversations with my Scorpio friends. They seem to have an ability to absorb that negativity, or to filter it in such a way that they don't hear it as like, Oh you're bitchin' and complainin'. You're bringing me down. You know what I mean? Like they almost settle in and resonate with it. I find myself feeling more liberated in venting to someone with that kind of energy. So I don't know if... it's like, it's an instinctive thing and one of the things that I think is kind of interesting about astrology is I often find myself reacting to some kind of vibe that's going on, trying to adjust, like you said, and make these changes that are intentional and healthy and all that kind of stuff. And then I'll find out, while it's going on, or even after the fact sometimes, that there was this astrological phenomenon that I go, Oh, okay! Well that makes sense. That's what that was about. One of the things I think is really fascinating is how little you have to pay attention to it to still kind of be in it, a little bit. Aubrey: I agree. The other day I had that and a little bit of a tiff, was feeling really worked up and stunned. My words being very reactive. And then I had reacted, completely. I was a human and I was just reactive, right? And then later on, was like, What?? What WAS that? Why was I so reactive and sharp with my words? And then I had gotten on Facebook and I had seen that Susan had posted a Happening Now, and it was, Don't fly off the handle. You're going to get real agitated right now. And had listed the placements in the astrological chart for that moment. And I was like, Oh! This is what was happening at that time! But it was playing out in my real world and I was not aware that it was like actually, it had correlations with the planets. Slade: Oh, I hate it when that happens. When you literally read the astrological post 12 hours after you should have seen it, and you're like, Oh no! I just did the very thing that they told me not to do. Aubrey: Exactly. Slade: I do that a lot. I also, though, I think one of the things that's interesting about the predictive stuff is, sometimes I'm more interested in what is happening now in astrology. Like if you say, You know what, we're in a new moon right now. Or we're in a certain kind of moon phase, or Mars just shifted, something like that. Rather than projecting too far down the road, because I think sometimes knowing that, Oh you're going to have challenges in your social life and your relationships in December, it's kind of like, Ugh, I don't want to manifest that or contribute to that in some way and make it true. Therefore I have this tendency to kind of blind myself from some of the predictive stuff sometimes, and I know that sounds weird, but it's like, I don't even want to know. Because I don't want to curse myself in any kind of way. Because I know that, it's not like by knowing that there's gonna be a certain phase happening astrologically, that you can somehow magically avoid that. It still happens and you still kind of have to deal with it in the moment. So I kind of keep my focus a little bit more narrow. But I am interested and aware and I do sometimes, like you guys saw me in the group, when we were launching the Shift Your Spirits community, and everything was in retrograde. And I was like, Okay, well this is not the time to launch. When does it all start to open up again? And I went and sort of looked at when everything kind of had a forward motion to it and picked a date accordingly. Now, for me, I often try to pick dates around moon phases, like start something with a new moon, so that I can be in those rhythms. But I also feel like, philosophically, it gives me a structure to something that might ordinarily be a little bit chaos. If you're running around, kind of wondering, when do I do this? When do I start this? I'm managing multiple platforms online and it can all feel a little bit like plate spinning. And you're just sort of running around like putting out fires. So, for me, sometimes I use the astrological calendar and events as a way of just kind of putting some bookends around things. It makes me feel like it's more organized. Like I have a sense of when something starts and when it comes to fruition. The cool thing, for me, about moon phases is, they constantly restart. It's like, every month is a new opportunity to kind of, Okay, try again. New thing. New project. Aubrey: Yeah. I think that's so important. Since I'm in the bodywork, right? That's also how our cells work too. Our skin cells slough off and then we have new skin cells replaced. We're constantly going through this ebbing and flowing, whether it be from the moon or whether it be from our bodies regenerating ourselves. So we constantly have this ability to come back and give ourselves a framework on which to move around within. And I think we all just choose varying tools to use. I agree astrology helps to give some framework, but I also tend to veer away from any of the predictive qualities. But I also think that's because of my background of where I'm like, Well if we're gonna all walk through it, I would rather walk through it completely unbiased, and see whatever exposes itself, whether it be good or bad. And try to show up with as much grace as I possibly can. It's really interesting for me, working with Susan in a sense that, I've been with her now, in some capacity, for years and it's almost like my brain doesn't quite want to wrap around the language of astrology. I can get the thematics of it but I have a hard time keeping up with the actual vocabulary. I feel like if I was ever given a vocabulary test on astrology, I would probably get a D. Like, I can't. Even though I sit with an astrologer every week, multiple times a week. Slade: Oh, I might get a C+ at best. Aubrey: It's just really intense. But then it's so fascinating to me that I can be intuitively aware of the energies that are going on. I just might not be able to vocalize, Oh, this is because this just clipped in to this degree. Or this is because there is a trine there. Like, I don't have those words, but I can sensationally and visually see and feel what is happening. And I find that really fascinating. Slade: Well that's what I got from listening to you guys. It's kind of like eavesdropping on a conversation where you are sort of observing and she is translating and offering suggestions. And then you are kind of taking that and then... I feel like you're kind of the one who's grounding it in the body a little bit, and she's the one who's giving us the kind of overview, the magical perspective. It's a really cool concept because if you listen to all that astrology vocabulary coming at you, and especially if you don't know what the heck they're saying and what they're talking about, it's like, What do I do with this? Aubrey: Yeah! Slade: I like the idea of having some place that we can go and listen to the astrological information. But you're there as the kind of the person who's representing, for those of us that are like, Okay, what the heck do I do with that? What kind of choices do I make? So you guys are kind of, you're not necessarily speaking specifically about your own personal astrology. It is a little bit more general, right? For the whole audience that's listening. Things that are affecting ALL of us. Aubrey: Yeah. Susan pulls up the chart for the collective. We don't ever pull up a chart for us personally. It's for the collective and that's how she always reads, until she's in private readings. And I think, I just think that piece is so important. Especially when I... I've had several people reach out to me that are like, I don't know how to begin on my intuitive journey. And I know this is part of the reason YOU do the work that you do. Because you've got these requests as well. Figuring out how people... The language that we respond to, for me, in my world is, the language of our body. Oh I feel tight. I feel inflamed. My stomach's upset. I'm craving pizza all day long. Or I'm so tired I can't get out of bed. That's the language that I respond to. And then behind that, I have lots of visuals that tell me things about what's going on. And so, to me, that's how I'm able to communicate to people. Like, this is how you cultivate intuition and to your point about, if you just listen to somebody do a whole astrology, you can easily get blown out of the water and not know how to make it pertinent. But I also think that's so much inundated in the spiritual community, as we get further out into the conversations about 5D realities, or 11D realities. People can get very easily lost. And if we're coming at it with a goal of, Let's just elevate consciousness collectively, let's just all figure out how to be living our optimal lives and elevate one another, then I think we have to figure out how to speak that language at a very intuitive, but basic, understanding. Slade: Almost every single person who does come into my practice asking questions about connecting better, feeling disconnected from their intuition, and how to hear their inner wisdom, all that kind of stuff. Also the people who are in a phase of their life right now where they're absorbing everything that we're putting out. They're in a real intake kind of moment. They're just gorging themselves on all this stuff and it's all coming in. And they're trying to make sense of it and figure out where to put it. It's interesting that you said, for you it always comes back to listening to your body because the advice that I find myself giving so much is about grounding. Every time someone comes to me with an upper level chakra freakout, and what I mean about that is, if you are in your intellect, if you are spiritually questing, if you're constantly practicing psychic techniques or trying to increase your intuition, all that kind of stuff, it's all happening heart chakra and above. So there's this real top-heavy energy that's going on. People come in and they look frazzled. Their energy, to me, looks like a tornado. It's literally very narrow at the bottom and wide up top. It's like spinning around. And that's what they feel like! They feel like they're literally inside a tornado. The thing that fixes that is always to ground. To go all the way to the bottom and then come back up again. It stumps a lot of people how, Okay, if I'm trying to turn on my third eye, I'm trying to turn on my clairaudience, I'm trying to hear my Higher Self, how does walking barefoot actually do that better than meditating or listening to a guided session or something like that. I just find that for me, the stuff that feeds and electrifies and powers the magical stuff is always these really, really simple, physical, real world things. And I am not going to be happy if I'm running around, having visions and hearing voices and all that all day long. Just like with the breath and the waves and the ocean, you have to have these moments of exhalation, you know what I mean? And there has to be pause in between. And so, for me, the one thing that I see everyone doing, as they're trying, trying, trying to be better, is, they are over-complicating it. It's okay to swing into that complexity and into that intellectual rabbit hole, like go there and listen to some crazy stuff, and wow man, get philosophical about it. But then come back to the body. There's gotta be rest. There's got to be a centre. You can't do all that work dehydrated with no sleep and lots of stress in your life. You just can't. Aubrey: No. You'll burn out and then you'll feel very untethered to the reality, which I think that that's probably for me, one of the biggest requests that we have when we're embodied in this life particularly, is how do we become intuitive, realize our intuition, realize our consciousness, evolve and elevate ourselves while equally grounding into this physical vessel that we are also carrying. Slade: What do you hope to contribute to the conversation about wellness and intuition and astrology? You obviously represent someone who is bridging a lot of magical concepts with physical concepts. What do you hope to teach everyone? Aubrey: I think sort of similar to what you just mentioned about people making intuition harder than it needs to be. That I truly hope to teach people that living optimally, whether that be mentally or physically or emotionally or spiritually or socially or financially, and you have these tenets of wellness, does not have to be unattainable. It is all within our reach. Does it require some pivoting and lifestyle changes? Absolutely. Does it require us to dig underneath our stuff and see where we have limitations and barriers? For sure. We have to look at a lot of places where we've held ourselves back, but that doesn't mean that we all don't have the ability or the right to feel optimally well in all areas of our lives, whether it just be from the food that we're eating, or the company that we're keeping, or the way that we're creating, or the work that we're doing in the world. My hope is to be the voice of, We all have this opportunity to be completely liberated in all aspects, and we don't have to succumb to not feeling well in our finances and our physical body, mentally, emotionally. There can be upsets, but we all have the capabilities of writing that in a different story line. Slade: Aubrey, this is so cool to talk to you about all this stuff. Thank you for taking the time to speak with me today. Tell everybody where they can go to find you online and to find this podcast that you're doing. Aubrey: Yeah, thank you, Slade. I love being with you. It always... It fills my cup up. It really, really fills my cup up. Always. Susan and I's podcast is on Be the Evidence, and we are on iTunes and we are on Spotify and Stitcher. So you can find us anywhere, but we also have BetheEvidencepodcast.com That has all of the podcast available on it, and we are in the process of launching a brand new platform for all of the things that I've spoken to you about today. That, hopefully, will be live in the next month. So that would be the best place to find us. And we're also on social media, so on Facebook and Instagram and all of those platforms for the time being. Slade: Awesome. Well tell Susan that I want her to come on and talk to us about astrology, since this astrology theme is going strong. Once again, thanks for being on the show. Aubrey: Absolutely. Thanks for having me, Slade.

Janelle Hardy is a dancer, artist, and writer who teaches the Art of Personal Mythmaking, a transformational memoir-writing program. She loves weaving embodiment prompts together with creativity and ancient tales (like fairytales/ myths/ folklore/ etc) as a way of supporting growth and healing. This interview features a 7-minute guided visualization to unblock creativity by tapping into the body. GUEST LINKS - JANELLE HARDY janellehardy.com The Art of Personal Mythmaking Outline Your Memoir free workshop HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses Get an intuitive reading with Slade Automatic Intuition FACEBOOK GROUP Shift Your Spirits Community BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits Edit your pledge on Patreon TRANSCRIPT Janelle: So this is a really round-about sort of story because I didn't really know when I started teaching the work that I do, that it was actually about memoir-writing. I'll leave you with that statement and then circle back to it again. Slade: Okay. Janelle: I'm from the far north of Canada. The far north-west, which is the Yukon Territory, and for context for people that aren't Canadian (even some Canadians don't know where I'm from). It's beside Alaska and above British Columbia. It's beautiful. It's so wild. I'm not living there now, but I talk about it because I feel so connected to that place. I'm also from a family... I think I have a common experience to a lot of people in North America and in colonized countries where my ancestry, you know, I'd be considered white, but my ancestry is varied and mostly unknown. There were some family secrets that were whispered as I was growing up. That experience of growing up really attached to a landscape. And then learning that my roots in that landscape are only as deep as my grandparents having moved up there and met each other and settled down there, and wondering, Who am I? Where did I come from? And then struggling with some health challenges that didn't feel like they belonged to me really kind of pitched me on this path of curiosity and inquiry and kind of roaming all over the place in terms of what I studied and where I lived. So... See, this is the trouble with collecting my thoughts around all of my offshoots of interest, which, for a long time, really mystified me. I was really into painting. I was also really into writing. I was also really into dance. I wanted to be a dancer. I also wanted to live in other cultures, so I was an exchange student to Japan and to Russia and to another part of Canada, Ontario, which doesn't really sound like being an exchange student, but the Yukon is really different than southern Canada, in terms of lifestyle and how people think about themselves and their relation to the country that they're in. For example, in the Yukon, we refer to 'going outside' as leaving the Yukon to the rest of Canada, or outsiders coming to the Yukon, right? So there's a real strong identity wrapped up in being a Yukoner. And then, the other part of my realization was, I feel this intense claim to being a Yukoner to being part of this world, and it actually doesn't belong to me. There's a history of First Nations people there that is thousands of years old and is being erased and denied. So how can I reconcile my love and longing for this place with the understanding that my roots don't originate there and I don't get to claim it as only my own. All of these curiosities and wonderings pushed me out to study and travel and do all sorts of things, including becoming a single mother at 23 and having chronic fatigue. Throughout all that time, the one thing that kept me steady was a creative practice. And it didn't matter what the creative practice was. I'm a really big believer in creative energy and the life force, that kind of erotic creative life force that's in all of us. When it's in flow, we get to choose the medium that suits what we're trying to express best. And for some people, they just latch on to the one medium and they're a writer and that's all they are. Entirely. For other people, it's kind of peripatetic and maybe a bit dilettantish. Sometimes I've labelled myself as not being able to commit to something, but I've let go of that label and realized that I have the ability and desire to use different mediums to explore different facets of my creative energy, depending on what it is that's wanting to come through. So I might go through a phase of dance and choreography, which happened a lot in my mid-20s. That's a time when I earned a masters degree in dance. And then I really got into painting. And then I got a horrible creative block for years, where I had all the ideas and I actually couldn't write. I couldn't paint. I couldn't... It was so painful. It was so painful, this state. But it also taught me a lot. So I felt the bubbling force of my creative desiring, creative energy, and I had all the ideas and I encountered my own resistance and procrastination, no matter where I went. During that time, some of the jobs I was doing involved writing for a local coming events magazine and a couple of national magazines. What I noticed was, while I really enjoyed it, and for some reason was able to write about things when I was being paid, although the pay was terrible, but I was able to do the task when I set the intention outside of myself. And then I also became really angry that I couldn't prioritize my own desire for creative expression enough that I could work on my own projects during that time. I was only able to do it if it had a functional function in society, which was making some money and being of service to an employer. So all of that to say, most of my writing has always been creative non-fiction. It's almost never fiction or fantasy or imagined stories in that way. It's always been about finding a way to share an experience I've had in the world, either my own personal experience in order to understand myself, or, in the case of when I was writing these profiles on artists that were coming to perform in the Yukon, interviewing them and being able to describe their personality, physicality, art and the venue in a way that would invite people in. Slade: It's kind of freaking me out how much you're really speaking to me in this moment. I've been working a lot with issues around the struggle that I have, writing fiction, versus all of the prolific amount of stuff that I put out into the world around my paranormal memoirs, and Shift Your Spirits, and these interviews. And I can write articles. I can write blog posts. I can write for this audience because, like you said, it's sort of my job and there's something very liberating, weirdly, about, it's an official thing and I have to do it every week. I didn't even really think of it in terms of the blocks that I have around my novels as being particularly about something attached to, Oh it's just this thing that I'm making for myself that doesn't have this official, sanctioned place to be in the world. It's not being asked for by other people. It's something that I'm bringing through for myself. And it was really interesting. I don't remember the exact words of how you said that, but I thought, Oh! I get that. I understand that. That's a piece of the puzzle for me. So the wild synchronicity is that you and I are here, speaking for the very first time ever, and we're having this conversation. And I had just told you before we started recording that I have had an energy healing session, a clearing, around creative blocks. And I've also been to a chiropractor and a massage therapist yesterday, because there's a physical manifestation in my neck, like nerve impingement and my spine and neck. You... Something I want to say really quick and then I want to bring you back to this idea of blocks and how they're related to the body, but I wanted to say, when you were talking about your journey and how hard it was for you to sort of justify the idea of committing to one form of creative expression, one of the things that was a real turning point for me in my life was when I accepted the fact that I couldn't choose and I didn't have to. And that I would be all of those things together, and that's just what my path was. That, you know, I am an intuitive, and a novelist, and a interviewer voice talent. You know? Whatever! I am all of those things and I think most creative people are really eclectic. And sometimes the things that... And this is something I've been talking about a lot with clearing creative blocks. There is a purpose that you choose for yourself and then there's sometimes a purpose that's chosen for you by the world. And I feel like, as creative people, sometimes it's that hit song, it's that one performance that you did. It's that one job that you landed that just was the right place at the right time. And maybe you become known for that one thing. And people ask that and expect that of you. It becomes this identifying thing that YOU didn't necessarily choose as much as IT chose YOU. So it makes perfect sense to me why you're all those things. And knowing that you work with creativity and writing and mythmaking, and that you talk to me about how you work through creative blocks through the body, makes complete sense to me. That you're a dancer. It really is the intersection of all those things, right? It's you being a little bit of everything that you are. At least to me, in this moment, it's what you represent. To get back to this idea of the creative block and how it's connected to the body, talk to me about, first of all, when you were really blocked, what you discovered set you free. And then how you've learned to guide other people through that. Janelle: Okay. That's a really good question. My answer won't apply to everyone, but I think there's a lot of useful tools people listening can get out of my misery. Slade: Yeah! Absolutely. Janelle: Being creatively blocked as a creative person, number one, I think it actually makes us sick. Because it takes a lot of effort to shut the flow down. Being in the flow and having energetic as well as physical movement as a constant experience is actually our natural state. But we live in cultures, and by saying 'we', I'm kind of speaking to the experience I grew up in, being in North America, in an English-speaking culture colonized originally by England, and Canada, still being governed by England, tenuously. So we have a cultural inheritance that is really damaging. And the cultural inheritance is the idea of productivity being important in service of capitalism, of making money, of being an employee to someone else, having skills that someone else wants to pay to make money off of you for. We also have an inheritance of domination and we carry with us... And this is most intensely felt for people of European white ancestry, but anyone of colour growing up in a culture like this also receives these unspoken rules and values as well. We grow up learning that self-control involves contraction, tightening and dominating. Ownership of our body and our emotions and our inner state. We grow up understanding that what is considered attractive and valuable and wonderful in our culture is really limited. And if we don't fit, we need to feel shame and try to improve ourselves. Can you kind of get a sense that all of these non-verbal values that we grow up with involves tightening and shrinking and contracting and shutting down, in order to be okay, or be acceptable? Slade: Umhmm. Janelle: So with this kind of cultural inheritance, as well as a lack of deep grounding and roots, most of the cultures living in the Americas of all backgrounds no longer speak their indigenous languages. My ancestry's not English. It's quite a mix, but Scottish people never spoke English. Welsh people never spoke English. Arcadians never spoke English. There's a small bit of First Nations in my ancestry from Quebec and Canada. They were not English-speaking cultures. When language is lost, we also lose a great deal. We lose music, we lose language. We lose a connection to our roots. And then all we have to grasp onto, and we lose our stories. All we have to grasp onto is this very one-dimensional colonizer culture that really profits a lot off of teaching shame and shrinking us. The way that that relates to creative blocks, I think, is that it's really hard to be in flow if you feel like you're not good enough in any way. What some people do is, they figure out compensations around the tightening and the contracting and the shrinking. But then what happens is the creative flow comes and goes in 'bursts of inspiration' and flashes of insight and really intense, forceful rush of creativity that people get, afraid of not jumping in and staying up all night, buzzing away with it, because if it goes away, when will it come back? It might be three more years, right? We have all these ideas about our inherent creative flow that are warped by a constant experience of being taught to shut down and contract and deny that flow. In our bodies, we really feel it through tightening, through physical tension, even though most people in North America live very sedentary lives, there's actually no reason, if someone is doing a lot of sitting or desk work, to feel as tense as they do. As a bodyworker, I've spent 12 years working on peoples' bodies hands-on, it's astonishing how much tension there is in people that actually don't use their bodies. Part of it is related to this idea that we need to make an effort. We have to be appearing to be working hard. We have to be tightening up just in case... It becomes internalized. 'If anyone looks at me, I'm clearly a hard worker because I appear that way because my brows are furrowed while I tense my shoulders and type.' Or whatever it is. Slade: Right. Look busy. Janelle: Yeah. Looking busy. Busy making... That's a whole other tangent of how much energy gets devoted to making ourselves appear to be busy rather than just using our precious energy to create and do the work with ease, right? Back to getting creatively blocked, these are all things I've figured out as I've done a lot of healing work, offered it as well as received it. And had the excruciating experience of being blocked. Being blocked, the flow was locked up but it's like it's boiling away inside. The other things that really stopped me from just creating were perfectionism, this idea that it has to be brilliant and wonderful or it's shameful. Which, again, goes back to the cultural ideas of, it's not okay to just play. It's not okay to experiment. We have to have an idea and execute it as if it's the greatest thing ever. And how is that even possible when we're stumbling along learning a process, right? I got trapped in perfectionism for quite awhile. I also got trapped in being too serious. So being serious. I'm an empath and a highly sensitive person and introvert, so seriousness comes quite easily to me. Actually, one of the best antidotes came from a mutual friend, Anna Holden, who said, 'Cultivate a sense of amusement.' Being serious is not a good thing when you already tend to be on that side. But there I was stuck, well before I met Anna, being too serious. So I would have these light-hearted happy ideas and then I'd crush them because they weren't serious enough, they weren't... It's not really art if it's not serious! So I crushed those impulses and I just got caught in this spinning circle of contraction and perfectionism and seriousness. The thing that really helped, receiving bodywork really helps. Loosening up the physical restrictions helps with the energetic flow as well. I can't remember how many years ago, I had a summer up in the Yukon. I was still living up there. It's so beautiful up there. It never gets dark. It's just incredible. I didn't have any money. I didn't have a lot of work going on. I was also solo-mothering my daughter but I had time and I had art supplies! I didn't have money for extra art supplies but I had these watercolours. I had a whole bunch of watercolour paper, because my other problem was, I would collect things for the ideas. So I was always collecting stuff to collage with but then not collaging. I was always buying bits and pieces of art supplies but never allowing myself to have the pleasure of making art. I hit this point of deep frustration and fury and irritation with myself and I was like, 'UGH. I'm just gonna sit outside in the sun this afternoon with my paper and my pen and my paint brushes and my watercolours and a jar of water and I don't fucking care what comes out. I'm just gonna sit out there with my stuff and see.' And then, this is the liberating experience was, I started drawing feathers, and colourful circles and balls. I just let it flow. The nasty, critical perfectionist mind, of course, was still hanging out in there. That little eyeball's watching when I'm creating, saying things like, 'What the hell, Janelle? Feathers? Circles? Happy colours?? This isn't you. This is so... This is stupid! Stop it right now!' The part of me that was so tired of that mean, vicious voice shutting me down, it's like, 'I don't care. I don't care. I'm just letting things come out and I'm as surprised as you are that I'm drawing pretty, colourful feathers. But I don't care. I'm just gonna let it go.' I had to let go of my egotistical ideas about my fancy, serious artist creative projects that were gonna wow everyone, and just be okay with making pretty pictures for awhile, you know? Slade: I can so relate. I mean, I've had a lot of conversations this week with me as the patient, you know? Me as the client, talking about this issue with perfectionism and the paralysis that comes along with that. The desperate need that you... It's not like you're not aware that you're doing that to yourself. You KNOW that you are and that's what's so frustrating is that, like, 'Oh! How to make this shut up??' I think it's interesting that you said, really early on in our conversation, we literally make ourselves sick. Because when I was at the chiropractor yesterday with my neck locked up, which is still, it's still sore to turn my head and all that. And that's a common thing that happens to me. That's a place in my body where anxiety tends to go. Some people have stomach stuff. Some people are like neck and shoulders people, or back or head. There's different places in the body that tends to manifest, but mine is always that spot. My first instinct to explain what had happened was to be like, 'Oh, I hurt myself working out.' Because I do work out a lot and I can overdo it or do something with bad form and get a little bit of an issue or something. And that was the first place that I wanted to blame it. It wasn't until I talked to the energy worker, and again when I was talking to the body worker last night who was adjusting me, they were both challenging me that the blocks contracted muscle. The issue was that, like you said, everything was clenched. I was being challenged to accept the fact that this may not be a sports-repetitive-motion injury at all. This is stress induced. This is psychic. And when I say psychic, I mean that in a big term. I mean that in the fact that we can tie ourselves up in knots, whether you believe in psychic abilities at all, you're still capable of mentally, like you said, shrinking yourself. The issue of making yourself small so that you are more acceptable in some way... Janelle: Mmhmm. Slade: It's like all those themes are playing out for me. So I'm sitting here listening to you talk about that and I'm thinking, What a beautiful synchronicity for me to be having this conversation with you right now. I'm really curious. You talked to me about a kind of guided visualization that you do when you first start working with a group of people or some clients before doing a workshop or something like that. Is that something you'd be interested in kind of walking us through right now? Janelle: Yes! Slade: Let's do it! Janelle: I love doing this. I'll give just a little bit of context first... Slade: Okay. Janelle: ...about why I think it's so important to include the body in everything. Slade: Yes. Janelle: Number one is, our body is our ONLY home in this world and we seem to forget that a lot. Number two, back to the cultural stew that we're growing up in, we also inherited these ideas that rational intellectualizing and the thinking functions of ourselves is more important and more valuable than the body-based knowledge and experiences that we also have. So I feel like, bringing the body in is simply reminding people that I work with, and myself, because I can fall off of remembering this easily as well, but the body is JUST as important. If we include our body, the body's psyche, rather than being floating heads and thinking brains, forgetting about the body, we just feel so much better and also intuitively, gut-feelings wise, clairsentience, these are ways of knowing that come through the body first. And if we don't learn how to tune in to the body, we miss out. So for this visualization, first off, are you sitting? Slade: I am. Janelle: Okay so we'll do it from a seated position, because I'm sitting as well. You mentioned that your neck and your upper back often gets uncomfortable. Can you describe just a little more about what's going on? Slade: There's a tension between the shoulder blades and up into the neck. You probably have experienced where you wake up one morning and you can't turn your head all the way to one side or the other without experiencing it being like locked, you know? Having a crick in your neck is how we say it around here. Janelle: Yeah. Slade: Yeah. I asked the body worker last night, I said, 'What's the technical term for that?' She said, 'I think it's nerve impingement.' Yeah, does that help? Janelle: Yeah, it does. So one of the premises of the kind of bodywork that I'm trained in, which is Hellerwork Structural Integration, also known as 'rolfing', is that everything is connected to everything else. So it's never just where the issue is that needs attention. This may or may not help with the crick in your neck, but I know it'll help loosen things up and for everyone that's listening, if you're seated, that's the place to be for playing along with us. Because I'm going to describe this visualization from a seated position. Slade, I'll get you to notice where your sit bones are in relation to the chair. It's easier to tune in if you're sitting on a hard chair, but it's okay if your chair is soft. What you want to do is really have your whole body stacked over your sit bones, so that you're at the highest point. If you're not sure where that is, all you do is let yourself roll back on your pelvis so that you're sinking onto the fleshy part of your bum. You'll notice that your whole body starts to sink and your back rounds forward as you do that. So just take in a nice breath. Actually, if you let your head hang forward, you get to experience a lovely little stretch down your neck and all the way down your spine and through your shoulders. It's kind of a luscious thing to do. What we're doing is a pelvic rock. And then you're going to start rolling forward, tipping your belly forward, and you'll notice, slowly is better, you'll notice as you roll forward you start to get taller. This is how you know where your sit bones are and whether you're on top of them or not. Because when you're on top of them, you're at your high point, the tallest point. Just for contrast, you keep rolling your pelvis forward. You're kind of tightening your lower back and pressing your belly towards your thighs. You'll notice they start to sink a little. Your belly feels like it's spilling out onto your thighs. I'll get you to just tilt that pelvis back until you reach that high point again. And then you're just gonna do another pelvic tilt, rolling back, this time keeping your attention really in your spine. So noticing all the incredible possibilities for movement. Often our spine gets viewed as a one-unit rigid sort of thing but the reason we have so many vertebrae is because we want to have so many options for movement, so many joints to be able to turn and twist and arch and contract. So just notice the incredible ability for your spine to move, and also, really noticing those frozen stuck spots too. And then bringing yourself back on top of your sit bones again. I'll get you to draw your attention down into the soles of your feet. You're just going to press one foot into the ground. Let it go. Press the other foot into the ground. What I want you to notice is how pushing into your foot starts to move your pelvis which starts to move your spine, if you let it. So remember this: a lot of embodiment work and connecting to the body is learning how to let go of all of the layers of tightening and contractions. It's never actually about adding more effort. It's always about noticing sensation and movement, and where you can let go of armouring and tightening and efforting to hold yourself together. Get yourself together. That's a really common thing people say. And that involves a lot of tightness in the body. So as you're just pulsing from foot to foot and noticing the very subtle ways in which your spine is moved by what you're doing in your feet. What I'm going to get you to do now is bring your inner eye right into your tailbone. You're going to notice the tailbone hovering under the sacrum as the bottom of your spine. Draw that inner eye up into the sacrum, which is part of your spine that is fused to your pelvis, right? This is why when you're rocking your pelvis back and forth your spine goes along with it, because it has no choice. If we don't have movement in our pelvis, we don't have a lot of movement in our spine. So hips that are a little more wiggly than our current culture finds acceptable is actually ideal. Draw your attention from your sacrum up through your lumbar vertebrae, which is your lower back. These are big bulky ones. Just, in your mind's eye, picture, even if you don't really know what they look like, just picture these great big bones with these amazing cushions in between them. The joints have a sponge that is designed so that it absorbs pressure and a downward movement compression. And then it has the ability and leads the release of an upward lift. You can move your back as well as you're doing this pressing down, and picturing every single little disc between your vertebrae all the way up your spine, squishing down on them. Lift, an upward movement and so much spaciousness, right? Now I'll get you to bring your attention up your spine to where your ribs join your spine. The really beautiful thing to imagine is that your rib cage is not a big block. It's more like a bellows, an accordion. If you slowly twist from side to side through your shoulders, what you'll notice is, your rib cage basically goes along for the ride. And as you're twisting, allow your head to keep reaching back so you get a little bit of a stretch. You might also notice where you're a little limited in motion. As you're just doing a gentle rotation, a twist from side to side through your rib cage, keep your attention in your spine. Imagine that the twist is only happening from your spine. And then the ribs, as they're attaching to your spine, they kind of fan out. They have a capacity for way more movement than we allow. They fan out as we twist away to the side and then they come back in. There's also muscles between every rib that has the capacity to expand and contract. So if you take a really big breath in, and really breathe and notice what's happening in your ribs, but also send that breath into your spine where your ribs attach. And just notice. It's all about noticing, and then exhaling. Just do your breathing at your own pace. And then just doing a little rotation in your spine between your ribs. Noticing the movement in your ribs from your spine. Drawing your attention up to your neck and to your head, floating on top of your neck. We often separate the neck from the rest of the spine by naming it the neck, and having the idea of a stopping point at the top of the shoulders and a stopping point at the base of the skull. For this exercise, I'll just get you to imagine there are no stopping points. So when the neck is moving, it is in response to the movement in your mid-back and your mid-spine. See if you can draw in this elegant idea of capacity for movement as well as compression and release in the cushions between the vertebrae. Invite a little more freedom in. So most of this is slow, steady and gentle. And it's all about bringing your attention inside your body. Do one little last scan of your spine. Just noticing, and then opening your eyes if they're closed. If they're open, just kind of sharpening the focus. Letting your eyes land on some sort of tangible object in the room, and just noticing three details about it. And then letting your eyes land somewhere else, noticing another three details, specific details. And then bringing that attention that you're sending out through your eyes back to your ears, into this conversation and the more mundane regular world way of connecting. Slade: Lovely! That was wonderful. Thank you! relaxing sigh Now I have to remember I'm in the middle of an interview, right?? That's so cool. Too bad it's not on video. It would be quite an interesting thing for people to have witnessed. That is very cool. I'll put something in the introduction to prompt people who might be driving that that's coming up and that way, if they want to wait and do it. OR if you're driving and you just listen to that, and you're like, Oh that was really cool, go back later when you're home and do that as a guided visualization. There is a guided visualization in the middle of this episode! That's so cool! So how does that help with the creativity? Janelle: It just does. That's my fastest answer. More specifically, if you think of creativity as being a state of flow, unblocking flow in the body unblocks flow creatively. The other really cool thing is that, especially if your creative energy and output has been generated more through thinking and through head-based processes, it's like we just opened a few doors and windows to give you a better view, give you better access to your creative energy so you're getting more of it. Slade: Ooo I just saw this cool image in my mind's eye of like, when you have a door window open at one end of a space, and you go and open a door window in the other, you create this draft. You create literal flow. Like, it will slam the doors closed. Janelle: Yes! That's perfect. Slade: Very cool. You talked about somewhere in some of the material I was reading of yours, you have this phrase, 'letting the body lead you towards your stories'. What does that mean? How do we do that? Janelle: Okay. You can actually, what I just walked you through, that visualization, this is fun. You do something physical. You have a pen and paper and a timer. Right after that, you're in a bit of a different state, right? You do some flow writing. And if you keep your brainy brain part of things out of it, the part that wants to figure it out and is dreaming of writing awards already, if you keep that out, you do some sort of physical exercise and then you go straight into flow writing. It's like unwrapping a present, because something will show up. And if you stay open to not-knowing, it's really thrilling what will bubble up and come out. Actually, you mentioned you work out a lot. You can actually play with doing that after a workout. Or if, I don't know how you work out, but if, say, one day it's a legs day or something, you can very explicitly have the intention that you're gonna really tax your legs, you're gonna focus on that part of your body, and then you're gonna let your body write through you. You're gonna let those legs tell you something about them, or let them release a memory or story. It's pretty fun. The delight is just in the utter magic of what happens when we let ourselves be led and guided by our body, instead of trying to force it. Slade: Those of you listening who do my energy reboot are probably noticing the similarities. One of the things that I recommend to people to do to reconnect to their creativity, it's not so much about being blocked. Because obviously I can't be giving advice about that just yet. But as far as reconnecting to the creativity, or reconnecting to your sense of your Higher Self speaking to you, I recommend a combination of walking meditation with timed proprioceptive writing. Janelle: Yeah! Slade: Those two things in tandem, and I say, don't overthink it, just do it. It may not happen the first time, but what will emerge is through that grounding exercise, being in the body, you actually reconnect your antenna, so to speak. And then the writing allows you to start to translate that, to give a voice to record it and let it through. One thing attaches the hose and the other thing sort of turns the knob and lets it flow out. Does that make sense? Janelle: Oh yeah, total sense. I'll add a clarification to writing and staying in the body, rather than kind of tapping into a more unseen sort of energy or force that's more outside of the body. I totally agree with you. The body grounds us and you can be a more clear channel for that kind of guidance. And if you want to really specifically stay with the body, in your writing, and really tune into the body's psyche's stories, guidance, etc., it helps to just focus your attention in sensation and then be really specific with details when you're writing sensory details. So whatever's coming up, always asking the question, so allowing the flow to come out, but having a, in the back of your mind, just this reminder of, Oh, it was a beautiful day, so what are the specifics? What tells me it's a beautiful day? And what will tell the people reading this, if they ever do, it's a beautiful day? Or, Oh, my leg was sore. Okay. Let's get waaaay more specific. What part of the leg? What does sore mean? What's the sensation? Finding words to describe the physical experience. That will help to contain that kind of flow writing within the body. Slade: Well it's interesting too because for story telling, I mean, if you were editing a piece of fiction, one of the things you would look to make sure that you're doing is giving your reader multiple sensory information, so you know, to ground them in the story, to make sure that you're introducing smells and touch. And that everything isn't just always somebody looking at someone else, or thinking. You have to be really conscious to put that in. And I know everybody thinks that this magically happens, but sometimes you do have to consciously remind yourself to insert that. We have a tendency to focus on one clair sometimes, more than the other. We're either very visual or very feeling, sensory. And sometimes you have to balance those out with whichever one you don't see showing up. Does that make sense? Janelle: Yeah. It just makes it richer. Slade: Yeah. It's gonna be better for both you, as the person creating it, and if it finds its way to an audience, then they're going to be able to inhabit your experience that much more easily as well. Oh gosh, I love talking nerdtalk about writing. Janelle: It's fun. Slade: You're hitting all the buttons because you've got the psychic and the bodywork and the intuition, all the stuff, so we're loving this. Tell me about this transformational memoir writing process that you do, called The Art of Personal Mythmaking. I know you have a workshop that's kind of specific to a time of year and everything, so tell us about that and when you're doing it. Janelle: Okay. This is kind of a fun story too. So for a long time, doing all these different things, I thought, What the heck? This doesn't make sense. When are the threads gonna cross? And then about three or four years ago, this process showed up to me. I can't really claim credit for the personal mythmaking process. It just showed up to me as it's own entity. I offered it in person as a workshop for eight weeks. It was not about memoir writing at that time. I didn't think it was anyways. There was a really great response and I thought, I could teach this online! So then I kind of revamped it. I offered it again. I still didn't know it was about memoir writing. Everything was about writing your life story, healing through examining life's story, tapping into the body and using creative writing and I have a bachelor's degree in anthropology, so I love being an anthropology nerd and bringing in culture and all of that stuff. I was still confused. And then, I think just over a year ago, I realized that if someone really committed themselves to the full process, they have the rough draft of their memoir written based on how I was taking them through the process and the creative writing prompts. So I went, AHA! This is amazing! People asked me what I was doing, I said, I'm teaching this process and you actually get the rough draft of your memoir written by the end. And everyone's eyes would start to shine. And they go, Oooo! And I thought, Oh wow, that's what this is about! It's healing but it's also actually a very practical outcome as well of getting to the point of getting it out of yourself, onto paper, to rough draft stage. So all the process work, which, you know, it is amazing how many people have been dreaming about working with their life story and writing their memoirs for decades. Slade: Yes. Janelle: And either haven't started or they just have a bunch of overwhelming snippets of writing here, there and everywhere that they've tucked away in a metaphorical drawer or file on their computer and it's just eating at them. So I thought, this is not good. This is creative blocks where you start to get sick. If there's a story dying to be born, and we close the doors and shut it down out of overwhelm and fear, two common reasons people don't dive in, even though they have the desire, that's not good! We're making ourselves sick if we have stories to tell and we're not telling them. So The Art of Personal Mythmaking is a transformational memoir writing e-course and writing circle. I teach it online. Each week has its theme. I use fairytales, well more specifically, ancient tales. So any kind of tale that has lasted more than a generation basically, as a guide and a structure for outlining memoir, but also... I don't know. I feel like fairytales are like having a pretty wise grandma or grandpa, helping us out, to understand being human. And they can actually really help us with working through our life story. So I combine working with ancient tales with working with the body and creative writing and creativity. A lot of people, you know, they're just stuck in creative block or a fear of not being good enough. A desire to write but being so afraid of being a bad writer that they don't try. So getting past those things is really crucial to actually getting the writing out. And then coming together in a discussion and circle every week is so rich and so beautiful for people to be working through these themes in a supportive environment and be witness to the incredible richness of every single person's different way of understanding and writing about the same prompt is so beautiful. I don't know if I've described it very well. I get so excited about my students. Slade: You do it twice a year? Janelle: Yeah. Slade: And when's the next one? Janelle: August and February. So right now, we're looking at February coming up. Slade: Okay. So February 2019. We're recording this in September 2018 if anybody is listening from the future. They can go find out if you're still doing this workshop. And you may be doing it still in August and February. Or it may have evolved into something else! I suppose if we're on your mailing list, you'll remind us that this is coming up and one of the gifts that you have for people who subscribe is a two hour Outline Your Memoir workshop that you offer. Janelle: Yes. Slade: Okay. Tell us a little about that. Janelle: Actually it's a little different... It is free. It's a little different than a gift that just shows in your inbox. It's actually a live two-hour workshop. The way I work with people is really connected and relational and productive. Don't know if that's the wrong word but ... So I actually walk people through the process. So although it's a free workshop, it's not a workshop that I record. I have a couple free writing courses that do just show up in your inbox, but Outline Your Memoir is actually, you show up with your pen and paper and I offer it every two months or so. I walk you through the process of getting some structure to what you want to look at and work on and finish the two hours feeling really resourced to keep going. Slade: That is really cool! First of all, let me just say, Janelle, thank you for taking time today to speak with us and walk us through that process. Make sure everyone knows where they can go to find you online. Janelle: Right. I'm JanelleHardy.com You can probably also google 'Personal Mythmaking'. I don't think anyone else is really describing their work that way, so Janelle and Personal Mythmaking will get you there too. Slade: Wonderful. That was great. Janelle, thank you for coming on the show. Janelle: Thank you! Such a pleasure.

Dena DeCastro is a professional astrologer, writer, and teacher. She offers individual astrology readings and mentors those who wish to take their astrological knowledge to the next level. Dena teaches us what our north and south nodes can tell us about our karmic lessons and our life purpose. MENTIONED ON THE SHOW Linda Goodman's Sun Signs Jeane Dixon NORWAC The Mountain Astrologer GUEST LINKS - DENA DECASTRO denadecastro.com DeCastro Astrology on Facebook HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses Get an intuitive reading with Slade Automatic Intuition FACEBOOK GROUP Shift Your Spirits Community BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits Edit your pledge on Patreon TRANSCRIPT Dena: So, when I was young in the '70s, my parents were both kind of hippie, you know, Bohemian, interested in all of that stuff. My dad actually read tarot cards, not for a living, but just as a hobby. My mom had a close friend who was an astrologer and they would sit at the dining room table and look at charts and dish on men and I was just fascinated, always. I would browse the books in the bookshelf. I was kind of an early reader, so I would just kind of nerd out on all the astrology books that my parents had. And so I just immediately, you know, I came from somewhere. I have a feeling I came from a past-life, probably. But this innate interest in astrology and the planets and even space and stars, was something that was just there when I was very little. I would say, starting at about 5. So I went on, throughout my teenage years, read a lot of the usual books. You know, Linda Goodman's 'Sun Signs' was one of them. That was like my bible when I was in junior high and I grew to be able to read charts, more about late high school age, college age, and I would practice on my friends and family. It just grew and it was always with me. Interesting side note, during that time when I was about 8 or 9, my mom became a born-again Christian, so she eschewed all of that. You know, tarot, astrology, all of that was out. And it was looked at as, you know, she said it's the dark arts. I don't think she used that word. That's more of a Harry Potter term actually. The Dark Arts. It was forbidden in our house and so I had to do it surreptitiously for awhile. But then she eventually switched back and became more open to, I would say, early New Age ideas or occult ideas. So there was a few years in there where it was like, on the sly, I had to do my astrology stuff. And then when I got into my late 20s, I had a friend of mine that suggested, 'You COULD do this for a living!' Could I? Could I really? So I put out my shingle and started charging for readings when I was right at my Saturn return, which is 28, 29 years old. And have been doing that ever since! Slade: Wow. So I have to ask you, you started way before we had computer software to do this stuff. Dena: Yeah. Slade: So at what point in your career did the technology come in and play a part? Or does it, at all? Dena: It did. Like, in the '90s, there were ways that you could order charts on, via the internet or mail order. That was kind of the way you did it. It's kind of funny. I learned to cast charts by hand in the late '90s finally. I had always had charts given to me so that was how I did it in the early days, like in my teenage years. Like, somebody already had a chart and I'd look at it. Slade: Oh, okay! Alright. So you're much more about the interpretation than the castings, even at that early age. Dena: Yes, right. Slade: Okay! I can relate to that. That would be true for me as well. I NEVER learned to cast a chart by hand, just for the record. Dena: It takes so long. It really is an onerous process. I know how to do it. If you had me do it today, gosh it's been maybe 18 years since I've actually cast a chart by hand. So it would be a tricky but it's good I think for astrologers to at least learn how to do. At least once. To get a sense of viscerally what's going on. Because the thing with technology now is that it detaches us from what the actual mechanics are of the solar system and the planets in relation to the earth. And for some reason, when you learn to cast a chart, you get more of a sense of, okay, the ascendant, for example, the rising sign, is the rising sign. Because that's what's actually rising on the Eastern horizon. So there's an example of that. That it's rooted to the physical world. With software, we can forget that sometimes and it just becomes a piece of paper in front of us. It's like, that's the glyph of Venus, but oh, there's a Venus in the sky as well. So that's a difference. But I think for time and for efficiency, you can't beat technology, for sure. Slade: No, definitely not. And I'm mostly just interested in, like if somebody can give me a list of what their planets are in and what houses everything's in, that's enough for me to work on. Dena: Yeah! Slade: I will say though, that I love the natal chart graphic - the cool geometric thing, and I think everybody's a little bit in love with that, right? There's a mystique about it. Dena: Yeah, certainly! The glyphs, the symbols, they're very beautiful. They're just aesthetically pleasing and it looks like something from the Renaissance, or it just has that kind of ancient feel and evokes that. So I do think there's the appeal of it. And I can, like you, if I just know somebody's birthday and they don't even have a time, I can look in ephemeris and say, 'Here's where all your planets were.' Maybe excepting the moon because it moves very fast but everything else I can pretty much know, that's where it was. Even with that I can get so much information. But having the visual of the chart works better for me. Just being able to see it laid out. Slade: That is so cool. I was very fascinated by that as a child. I had an aunt in the '70s who was friends with Jean Dickson. Dena: Oh wow! Slade: Do you remember her? Dena: Yeah, I do! Slade: She had - It's so funny when you were talking about your childhood experience of kind of going through the books in your parents' library. I used to go through HER books when I would visit. She lived in Florida. And when we would go down to visit, she had this library of '70s new age, feminist everything. And some of her books were astrology books that were autographed by Jean Dickson. And I always thought that was the most glamourous thing in the whole world, right? Dena: Very glamourous, for sure. She's probably one of THE most famous astrologers, at least from that era. She's a name that everybody knows. Slade: Right. And Linda Goodman's books. I remember those as well. So one of the things I'm really excited to talk to you about is kind of your niche of astrology, which is the connection between astrology and past lives. And also how the nodes play into that, and karmic patterns in the chart. I just would love to open up the floor and hear you talk about these relationships. Dena: You know, I'll start by saying, when I started practicing astrology, which was the late 1998, 1999, I really was doing the typical descriptive astrology. For example, your sun is in Aries. You are fiery, spontaneous, brash and bold. You know, something like that. That started to feel a little limiting to me. So I was searching... A few years into doing it, around 2002, 2001, 2002, I started to search for what more can I learn? I just felt this impulse that I needed to find a different approach, or another layer to my system. And so I went to an astrology conference here in the Northwest called NORWAC. It's the Northwest Astrology Conference. Steven Forrest was speaking there and he and Jeffrey Wolf Green are two astrologers that really founded this school of thought within astrology called Evolutionary Astrology. It's called 'evolutionary' because it is based on the premise that our souls do reincarnate and they move from lifetime to lifetime, learning lessons and evolving. The intention is evolution. And with that, the nodes, the south node represents the past life or karmic patterns, and north node represents what we are here to learn to become or to embrace. And the whole point of it is evolution. The whole point of it is growth and change. And it made so much more sense to me than the idea that we're just static. That we're born with this chart and that's just who we are for the rest of our lives. And the other main component, or the foundational belief in this type of astrology is the idea of free will. And that we make choices in our lifetimes that impact where we're going, the lessons we have to learn, and how we respond to those lessons with our free will really determines how we move along our path. How we move toward our Soul Purpose. So this all resonated with me. I had always believed in reincarnation. It's one of those beliefs that you can't really explain. It was a knowing. I just felt a knowing about it. I will say that, it's not that there isn't proof for reincarnation. There's a lot of good case studies out there and proof for reincarnation. But it is one of those things that people take on faith, and some people have a strong reaction one way or the other to that idea. But reincarnation is very much inherent in this niche of astrology that I practice. It's a foundational piece of it. That all being said, I went to study with Steven Forrest at his apprenticeship program. I did that for a few years and embraced this path within astrology, because it really resonated with what I already had felt and believed for most of my life. What it is that I think this kind of astrology offers that's a little different to some branches is the south node karmic patterns can point out: Here are the things in a past life that you experienced, and also that vexed you, or that upset you, or that's left unresolved at the time you left that life. And then when you came into this life as a soul, you carry some of that baggage with you. We call that 'karma', and that's a memory. An emotional memory of what went on. But we don't consciously remember that. So in this life, our work is to learn to release those old patterns and not to get stuck in repeating those karmic situations. But we're inclined to want to do so because we tend, as humans, to want to repeat what we've done before and what's comfortable. Even if it's painful. It can feel comfortable because it's familiar. So the north node points to, well what's the medicine for that? What can we do? That's where free will comes in. What can we do in THIS life to pull ourselves out of those old stuck patterns of the past? And the north node offers the medicine, the way, for us to move away from staying stuck and stagnant. So remember that the key point is growth. The key point is evolution. All of us, if we're born, we have karma. If we're born, we're also a living thing that needs to grow and evolve. If we stop doing that, if we stagnate on a soul level, we feel unfulfilled and bored and unhappy. So when clients come to me, what they're often looking for is, I'm kind of stuck. Or I'm in a place in my life where I'm trying to make a transition and I feel like I'm scared and I can't. What's blocking me? Or they're just, they have that general malaise. I just don't have the joy for life. I'm feeling like I'm not on my path but I can't really figure out what to do to get on it, or to get back to it. And so the nodes are very powerful to look at that and say, Okay, well here's what's in your way. Here's the karmic patterns of the past. Here is where you can get stuck very easily, repeating these patterns. And then here, the north node is what you're here to learn and to embrace. And the more you move TO that, even if it's scary, even if it feels challenging, which it will, the more you move toward that, the more you make choices in that direction, the more fulfillment and peace and joy for life you can gain back. So that's the overview with how I see it. Slade: So if I tell you what my north node is, can you tell me... Since I'm the one that's here talking to you, we'll use my chart as an example. Dena: Absolutely! Slade: I have a north node in Pisces. What can you tell me about that? Dena: Yes! Well I can speak to that because so do I! Slade: Oh, interesting! Dena: So let me just say about that too. The nodes go to a new sign about every year and a half. So you can know that if you're born within a close time frame to someone, that you very likely have the same nodes. They're are like these mini generations. 1.5 years of the same. And that pattern repeats every 18, 19 years. They will come back around to the same nodes. So yeah. So we have the same ones. I think we're both born in '69, right? Slade: Yes! July 23rd. Dena: Oh, gosh! Same month! Ohmygoodness. Slade: Wow. Dena: I'm July 8th. Slade: Okay. Dena: So I can speak to this pretty well. But just because we have the same nodes doesn't mean like I know everything about this, because I'm working with the same struggles, right? Slade: Okay. Dena: So if you have the north node in Pisces, that means you have the south node in Virgo. The nodes are always opposite signs to each other, always at 180 degrees. So once you know one, you can figure out the other. Let's start with the past-life karmic pattern for you. South node in Virgo is really attached in past lives to doing things perfectly because you may have had a job or a position which required you to have a certain level of perfection in what you did. For example, being a doctor. If you make a mistake being a doctor, something really disastrous could happen, right? Or even being an artist or a crafts person where you have to get all the details just right or else it's just a big mess. People aren't going to like it, right? There's this high level perfectionism that was instilled in you in a past life. The tendency with south node in Virgo is to beat yourself up for every mistake. That's the karmic baggage that comes in to this life with you is self-flagellation, tending to beat yourself up for every mistake, having higher standards for yourself than anyone else in your life. Resonating much? Slade: Yes. Dena: And Mercury is the planetary ruler here. So Mercury rules Virgo and Mercury is a planet of mind. So your intellectual abilities in this past life were over the top. Like you probably had great powers of analysis and the ability to understand what's wrong in every situation and know how to fix it, right? And so you bring that into this life. In a way there are some gifts there too. It's not that the south node is entirely negative. We bring in past life gifts. Like, okay, you come in with those intellectual skills. You come in with that ability to do things almost perfectly. You come in with that ability to analyze and fix situations. But if you stay there, if you stay there in this life, if you keep doing that and really go into that south node territory, you will feel anxiety and you will feel unfulfilled and you will feel like I'm never getting into where I want to be, because I can't be perfect, right? Slade: Mmm... Dena: None of us can be. So the fear with south node in Virgo and north node in Pisces is letting go of control. This is where we're starting to move toward Pisces because Pisces, north node in Pisces says, Well the medicine is to move toward the Pisces territory. So letting go of control. Allowing yourself to make mistakes and have compassion for those mistakes. And trusting in something beyond yourself. Having faith that there are powers greater than we that are taking care of things. And that we don't have to take care of it all. We don't have to micromanage every aspect of our lives. So speaking as a co-person with this set-up, I can say, this has guided me immensely in my life knowing this. Because, and for you, you can speak to this as well. I'd love to hear what you have to say about it. But just knowing that I'm here to develop compassion for myself and that I'm here learning to let more things go. I've been listening to your podcast, right? I've heard you speak about allowing yourself to make B+s, instead of... Slade: Yes! Dena: Like, Perfect! You're right on track! That's what I'm talking about. Slade: Yeaaaaah. Dena: It's a need for self-acceptance in a radical way. Like, not just 'Oh, I accept myself.' We can all say that from a head place. But the PRACTICE, the spiritual practice of self-compassion, self-acceptance and actually being able to spot when you are holding yourself up to that too-high standard, and then saying, Ok, I've gotta let that go. I've just gotta let that go. Slade: I have to give you some feedback around this because of course, my mentoring clients know how much I stress how important it is to get feedback from outside your own head about your readings. And so I just want everyone also listening to know how incredibly accurate that is for me, just from that one little thing I told you - my north node in Pisces. You were able to really nail a lot of the issues that I have. Perfectionism in particular with writing is a constant... like you said, it's both a gift and a curse. I have much higher standards for myself than I do for other people. The thing that was so liberating about blogging 13 years ago or whenever it was when I first started doing it was, it relaxed the expectation for writing. Dena: Yes. Slade: So much. It made it so accessible and it made the feedback immediate. And it allowed me to really grow as a writer, because instead of going off and, like you said, beating myself up and questioning myself and being alone in my own head bubble, you know, tearing myself to pieces and having this wizardly war with my own ego. And, you know, it's a hard creative process to live inside that. And so, one of the things that's so interesting about why I feel like Shift Your Spirits is so successful, out of all the other kinds of projects that I've written, is because it had such a low expectation going in. And that's not to say that I don't put myself into it. I just have a real relaxed attitude about it, that I don't about some other kinds of writing. I was like, 'Oh, it's a blog.' Dena: Yeah. Slade: And it's so funny because that blogging allowed me to build an audience, to write for people, to have a lot of iterations. So, eh, this week's kinda sucked. Next week's might be amazing. And you start to notice these patterns as a perfectionist. The things that people respond to the most are not necessarily the things that you put the most effort into or the ones that are your favourites. Sometimes, for example, the Money Shift is the best-selling piece of writing that I've ever put out into the world and I did it in three days. And it was just merely a 'oh, I just need to put this message out'. I'm repeating myself here in my readings. Let's just put it in a little tutorial. Dena: Right. Slade: And there's something about that lack of having high expectations that is extremely freeing and, you know, I stress this for other writers as well: Put out a lot of work. Blogs and social media allow us to really develop our voice and to test what people are responding to. At some point, when you have an audience, the biggest liberation of all is having you guys to talk to. And to write for. Dena: Right.. Slade: I'm just feeding you guys your toast and scrambled eggs every day. Dena: Yeah! Slade: There's something that feels liberating also as a perfectionist to be able to step back and to serve people. Dena: Yes. Slade: Which I think maybe getting to some of that Pisces energy that you're talking about. Not only turning it over to a higher power, but also realizing I am participating not just from my ego but I'm participating on behalf of these thousands of people who want me to do it. And so, it's a sense of duty and a sense of something bigger than me that I am both pulling from and also displaying to. Dena: Yeah. Slade: It's really cool. Interestingly, my mom has the same north node and I do run across people here and there that share that and, interesting synchronicity there, it would be you of all people! Dena: I know! Slade: That is an example of the kind of thing that people would get if they contact you for a session, right? Dena: That's true. And yes, you can get such an amazing amount of information just from knowing the nodes. Just like you said at the beginning, we were talking about knowing sun moon rising sign, we were talking earlier about that. That is a foundational piece - sun moon and rising sign. You can get so much information just from those three pieces. And then same with the nodes. If I know just THAT, I tell that to people and they're like, 'Ohmygod, you just spelled out my whole life.' Slade: Yes! Dena: So it's such a powerful tool. It's not a substitute for getting a full reading. And I want to say that because, looking at the chart wholistically will always give you the most depth of analysis and the most understanding. But having this piece as guidance is huge. So something I ... yeah, go ahead. Slade: I was just gonna say, I know that probably a lot of people listening DO know a lot about their chart. They have had their chart done and stuff. So one of the reasons why I really like what you you just did for me for example is, you went in and focused on and embellished a very specific area. So it actually refreshes my excitement in my chart and knowing that, 'Ohhh! There's all these little things that I can still deep dive into, that maybe I feel a little blasé about my chart. Now I'm like, 'Ooo wow!' It does kind of rekindle an interest to have something that is connected to Purpose. Because, like yourself, that is a question that a lot of my clients come with as well. Dena: Yes! And I think you feel excited because it's empowering. This kind of information is empowering. That's one thing I aim to do with the kind of readings that I do is to empower people with the tools to make good decisions for themselves and to take the reigns of their own life and to make their free will choices. That's what this information provides you with. It's like, 'Okay, I know I can move toward Pisces. I know sometimes it's going to be hard. Sometimes I'm going to resist it and want to stay stuck in the Virgo territory. The shadow Virgo. But I can choose differently. Slade: How does that manifest for you personally? Like, where does this Pisces/Virgo duality kind of play out in your world, and how do you combat that, or, you know, heal that? Dena: Well the first thing that comes to mind is writing, for sure. I'm a writer. I've done a blog for a lot of years. Astrology, I wrote some astrology articles for the Mountain Astrologer. I also began writing fiction. I've taken a few stabs at it and "failed" attempts of novels over the last dozen, 15 years. Recently, I finally finished a first draft of a novel. And what I had to do during the process of that, and to get through it and to actually get it done and put it into, actually get it to the place where I could pitch it at a writers' conference recently, which I did, was to constantly be talking to that Virgo part of myself by embodying the Pisces. And say, 'I hear you, inner critic. I hear that this isn't perfect. I hear that it sucks. All those voices.' I had to label that south node Virgo voice. Similar to how people use the inner critic, right? That 'Okay, you're the inner critic. I hear you. Go sit in the corner because I'm going to keep writing this book.' Every day. It was... I have to tell you, it was a bit of a fight. A lot of parts of it were very intense and very challenging. But I brought in the Pisces consciously and said, 'Okay, it's all good. You're doing great. No matter what you do, at least you're doing it. And what matters is that you like it.' And what matters is that YOU have fun with it. And that's a very Piscean kind of like, 'Hey, no big deal. Go with the flow.' It's THAT attitude. Slade: Mmm... I call this... It's so funny because I call that angel and devil the Flow Drafting Voice and the Editor. Dena: Yeah! Slade: And the Flow Drafting Voice is the same channel that my intuition rides alongside and so, when you are in a first-draft mode, you don't need to be, you don't need the Editor. It's like, You come back later. On a re-write. You come back when we start to take it apart and do re-writes and edits and polishing and all that. You've got plenty of work to do so sit down and shut up. Right now we're just flowing. We're just being a hippie chick here. Dena: Exactly. Slade: That's kind of how I see that Pisces flow voice as being this kind of bare-foot, flowers in her hair, creative type of energy, you know? Dena: Yeah! Slade: Gosh, we have a lot in common! Wow. Dena: Yeah. Well it's probably because we're born in the same month. Slade: That is so interesting! You know what? I don't meet a lot of people born... like, I rarely meet July Leos at all. Because there's just not a lot of us. There's just that one little week. And then I don't meet a lot of people born the same year. I've heard that we are one of the smallest populations that's alive right now. Yeah. The Gen-X population is REALLY small compared to the Boomers and then the ones that came after. We are greatly outnumbered. Dena: Yes. Yes. I would agree. I feel that. And I know something about that little mini-tribe of 1969 people that... There was quite a lot going on with the planets that summer. They were all lining up. You know where that little traffic jam of planets is in your chart, I'm sure. And it's right on the south node. So I'll speak to that real briefly here and say that in your chart, in an individual's chart, I'm just speaking generally, those nodes can be interacting with any combination of planets. It could be that the south node is conjunct, meaning it's right on other planets in your chart, Jupiter, Pluto, what have you. And so that will also add layers to the interpretation that I would do in an individual reading, to look at what is aspecting the nodes, what planets are conjunct, or square, mostly in hard aspects to the nodes is what I tend to look at. So that gives information to the story here. And I do draw a past life story. You know, I tell a story. Now it's not a literal past life reading and that's something that I want to make clear. I don't actually see if you were Benjamin Franklin in a past life. Slade: Right. Dena: That's not what this is. It is more about general themes. But I do weave it into a story because story telling is what I like to do. And it's a mode that works for people to try to understand something. So I'll say, I'll give that caveat to somebody and, okay, I'm going to tell you a story and it's not a literal story but it encapsulates an emotional truth or an emotional dynamic of what happened to you in a past life. That's how I approach reading that and then bringing in the other planets, that is to say, to inform the south node. Slade: Okay. So for someone maybe like myself, who does work with astrology a little bit, you have a mentorship program where you work with people taking astrology to the next level. Is that something that you do with more professional-type mindset? Tell me about the mentorship program. Dena: Yes! My mentorship program is to work one-on-one with those who want to learn more about astrolgoy. It could be even a beginner that really just wants to use it for their own edification, for their own purposes. Most of the clients that I work with are either astrologers or somebody about, on the verge to become a professional astrologer, and they're just a little hesitant about taking that leap, you know? They don't feel quite like they have all the... There are some missing pieces in what they know, or there's some insecurity there. And then there are also counsellors, therapists, psychologists. People who want to use this as part of their profession. And I've had a couple of those clients. And that's been really rewarding for me to work with those people. So I teach the basics but that's not what I really teach in the mentorship program. I'm more focused on, 'Let's go in to what do you feel are your missing pieces?' 'Where do you feel there are gaps in your knowledge?' And let's go into those. And then I also speak to things like, how to become a professional astrologer. What's the business end of it? What do I know from my experience about how to do this in a way that's going to be successful and in a way that is ethical. So we talk about the things that will help them to make it a business, if that's what they wish to do with it. Slade: I'm really excited about this because in my professional intuitive mentoring, I touch on astrology just in a very brief way. And like I said, I do tend to work with what I call, sort of, elemental astrology, which is the sacred elements, earth, air, fire, water, and I kind of speak symbolically to those dynamics. The people are often asking me about going deeper into the astrology component itself, and I always say to them, 'You know what? It needs it's own course.' I can't just kind of shoehorn that into a chapter or something. It's not gonna happen. Dena: Right. Slade: So I'm really excited to hear about what you do in that mentorship program, because it sounds like a lot of people listening right now are gonna be excited about it. I know you make ME want to be an astrologer now. I'm like, I could do this! Dena: You could do it! You probably have a lot more experience than you give yourself credit for. If you've been doing it since you were a kid, I'm sure it's probably really in your bones. Slade: Well I have a hard not using it. I have a hard time not speaking... I mean, in my family, if you're dating someone, you just say things like, 'Well he has a moon in cancer.' And you go, 'Ahh!' It's like, five pages of information just went running through their head. Dena: Totally, yeah. Slade: So we do have a tendency to use it, almost like a Jungian kind of psychoanalytical vocabulary, if you wanna be kind of high brow about it, which I do think that one of the attractions to me with astrology is it allows me to use that archetypal language that you also find in the tarot and that kind of thing. Dena: Yes. Slade: So I do play with that language a lot. I was considering no longer asking for birth data when I do my intuitive readings, because sometimes so many people don't know it, and they get stressed that somehow it's going to impact their reading. And I kind of backed away from that. But this kind of makes me want to leave it in a little bit. Dena: Oh yeah! Slade: Yeah. Because it's... you're making me really aware of how much I do love astrology and have always been interested in the nodes, because I have to tell you just really quickly, my mom... Sometimes I get a chart done for my birthday. And I think when I was about 15 years old, my mom had discovered this woman named Barbara Alexander, if she's still out there. And she was really excited to take me to Barbara, because Barbara was also a clinical psychotherapist. She had degrees and had a practice as a psychotherapist. When you would go to her office, it was very academic and official. It looked like what you would imagine a psychologist office would look like. She recorded the session, which was something I hadn't had happen before. She talked to me about the north node in Pisces and was the first person to put that in mind, that the north node was about, kind of, Purpose. And she also told me that my writing career would take off in my mid-to-late 30s, which was absolutely true. Dena: That's on! Yeah. Slade: I don't know if that's the same for you as well, if it worked out to be that same time period. Anyway, I'm curious to know, what do you hope to contribute to the greater conversation about astrology? What would you kind of like your legacy to be around this subject? Dena: I guess one of the big things I like to bust out there about misconceptions of astrology is that it's not fortune-telling. It's not future prediction, and some people do use it that way. What I want to contribute is the idea that astrology is a powerful tool for self-development, for self-understanding, and then also to give you the ability to choose what you do in your life, because you become more conscious of yourself and your patterns through this kind of awareness of the charts. Through evolutionary astrology. I'm not saying that evolutionary is the only path. There are so many different kinds of astrology and so many different branches. You'll know if you just go on the internet. What I really want to impart is a more empowered free will focused way of using astrology and that's what I hope to contribute. Slade: You have a free e-book people can download called Your Karmic Past and Your Life Purpose. Tell us about that. Dena: Yes. So if you go to my website, up in the upper right hand corner you'll see a little box that says exactly that. If you subscribe, you get a free gift: Your Karmic Past and Your Life Purpose. Within that, there is a table where you can look up your birth date and you'll be able to find your nodes sign. Just by looking up your birthday. So it really breaks it down very easily. I give some introductory information about the nodes, what they mean, what is karma... I go more deeply into that topic. And then for each sign of the north node south node combination, I lay out what is the karmic pattern, what are the big fears that block you, what is your growing edge, meaning what are you here to learn. And then I also give some affirmations. So for example, for Pisces north node, the affirmations are, I accept myself exactly as I am. That one sounds a little Stuart Smalley. But that's okay. And I trust that I am taken care of within the greater order of things. Another one is, I go with the flow of life. So that's an example of affirmations that can help that particular node combination. North node Pisces, south node Virgo. And then I, at the end of that document, you'll find frequently asked questions about the nodes. What about past lives? Does it mean... Can you see if I'm Benjamin Franklin in a past life? That kind of information. And then finally, in that document, there are resources for further reading, if you want to read about really good books about reincarnation and evolutionary astrology listed there. So yeah! You can find that at my website. Slade: Oh gosh. That's a great resources. Tell us where we can go to find you online. Dena: So I'm at www.denadecastro.com/ and I'm also on Facebook now. I just started back there after nine years away. And actually, Slade, you are part of the reason that I came back to Facebook. Slade: Yay! Dena: I really wanted to be part of your group. There are a couple of other groups too that I've just really wanted to participate in and I want to start a couple of groups there. So my Facebook is Dena DeCastro Astrology and you can find me that way too. Slade: Excellent. We'll put all those links in the show notes for everyone. And for those who joined the Shift Your Spirits community, they will be able to go online and ask you questions, and we'll have a post featuring this interview so you can interact and everyone can tag you and talk to you more about this subject. Dena, I am so excited to meet you. This was such a great conversation. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Dena: Thank you, Slade, for having me. It was great.

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.  

Slade Roberson is a professional intuitive, author, and host of the podcast Shift Your Spirits, where he does a great job speaking about spirituality with fewer hearts and flowers than most New Age blather. We sat down to talk about how he works as a clairaudient and claircognizant intuitive and mentor. Slade and I talk about how difficult it can be to narrow down your craft - and how critical it is to do so. "Do one thing really well," Slade says. "Like, if you could only make a grilled cheese sandwich, then make it really good!" We talk more deeply about how to figure out what work is yours to do and what is simply not your grilled cheese to make. Slade tells us about his professional mentorship program for emerging intuitives, called Automatic Intuition. He offers a free way to start the program for free, which you can find with the links below. Slade and I talk about how our different health crisis lead to finding our true calling in the world, and how mundane things like good nutrition, Crossfit and sleep keep this intuitive healthy. Learn more about Slade at: http://sladeroberson.com Start his Automatic Intuition program at: https://automaticintuition.com/ Listen to his podcast Shift Your Spirits: http://sladeroberson.com/blog Contact your Spirit Guides 101: https://sladeroberson.com/free/ Support this podcast on Patreon: www.patreon.com/sensitivityuncensored Book a reading with me: www.sensitivityuncensored.com/work-together Join The Refuge for Sacred Rebellion: www.sensitivityuncensored.com/refuge-sacred-rebellion FREE Sacred Pampering Event 9/1: www.sensitivityuncensored.com/sacred-pampering-event

In this week’s segment, a manifesto about clairaudience and communicating with spirit — communicating with the higher self, with divine wisdom, with inner guidance, with guides — through the concept of Voices. MENTIONED ON THE SHOW Star Trek Star Trek: Discovery The Expanse Series by James S.A. Corey The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle Who are You Talking to When You Talk to Yourself Dissociative Identity Disorder HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses Get an intuitive reading with Slade Automatic Intuition BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits Edit your pledge on Patreon TRANSCRIPT You know how I talk about starting the blog Shift Your Spirits back in 2006 with a dozen or so essays … This was one of those original pieces. Originally published in September 2006, about a month after I started blogging, under the title “Who are you talking to when you talk to yourself?” It’s buried in the archives, about as deep as it can be, but it still enjoys pretty decent traffic. And oddly, or interestingly, in the past week, three different fans of this show mentioned it by name and called it as one of their favorite posts. It was a foundational post. A kind of manifesto of how I approached the concept of communicating with spirit. Before I ever did a reading or started blogging with your questions and emails requests as prompts, I thought this was the topic I would focus on. The concept of Voices was something Seth and I had explored at length only a few years before I started all this work, and it was so life-changing for me, I really thought a deep dive into Voices was going to be the whole point. It’s disparaged in our society — hearing voices, listening to the voices in your head, doing what the voices tell you to do … talking to yourself. It’s the punchline to a lot of lazy jokes. And yet it’s something we all experience. It’s a psychic channel we all have access to. The one thing that has evolved for me the most since I first wrote about this is that Voices are less about external voices, or proof of entities outside yourself, and more an awareness of archetypal programs and partitions in the mind. The idea of programming has come full circle — Seth and I were philosophizing about this in 1999, I took the principles deeper into new age space, and then more recently I’ve found myself using smart phone metaphors when I’m attempting to explain how I wrap my head around it all—that the archetypes, the higher self, the still small voice within, the collective unconscious, the hive mind are like apps on a handheld mobile device—they can be downloaded from the cloud, they can be accessed, opened up and run… I’m going to leave my original vocabulary as it is, but just know, even if communicating with angels or talking to ascended masters or channeling spirits makes you uncomfortable because it’s a little too woo woo, it also works from a purely psychological angle. There are mansions of the mind that can be explored in this way… Once you begin paying closer attention to the Messages of Guidance you receive every day, what the Voices of these Messengers sound like, where they’re coming from, when they pop in, and what their original Source may be, you can begin to Identify them, carry on intentional conversations with them, start building a better relationship with them... You may also want to tell some of them to sit down and shut the hell up. You carry on conversations with yourself all the time. Some of the things you say you literally speak out loud. And you talk about talking to yourself. You acknowledge this to other people and nobody assumes you're crazy. Think about the last time you muttered something under your breath when there was someone else in the room and you apologized: "I'm just talking to myself." Or "Don't pay any attention to me, I'm just thinking out loud…" Think about the times you've said to another person: "I try to tell myself everything will work out for the best…" "Part of me wants to believe…" "Something tells me…" "I just can't trust myself on this…" "My heart says one thing, but my head says another…" Ring any bells? You clearly talk to yourself. You acknowledge that there are interior dialogues taking place and most people regard this as perfectly normal. Of course, I am not speaking to you as a psychiatrist, and my musings on this subject are just that — musings, thoughts, opinions — listening to me on a podcast is not a substitute for a real mental health diagnosis.  But talking to yourself is not mental illness. It’s not schizophrenia or multiple-personality disorder. Here's a simple way to tell the difference: Multiple personality disorders are defined by a lack of conscious awareness, there is no dialogue taking place, the different personalities coming through are all taking turns in the driver's seat of consciousness and they are usually unaware of one another. They may be aware that there are others, but they don't know necessarily connect anymore or even know how to contact each other. They don't have relationships -- they don't communicate with one another. Multiplicity or dissociative identity disorder is even considered by some psychologists to be more a survival mechanism than a disorder or disease. The ability of the different parts of oneself to scatter, split up, when the self comes under attack. Like covering the eyes of a child you’re with so that they can't see the gruesome details of the car crash on the side of the road. Or mouthing or spelling out certain words so that young children in the room won't know what you're talking about. Multiple Personality Disorder is a kind of protection -- a hardcore survival mechanism. Multiplicity is an advanced form of the impulse to scatter the flock so that the Whole can't be taken out with one shot. This splintering of the Self is a superhuman ability like the burst of adrenaline or physical strength or courage we experience under extreme conditions. This is called a disorder because once the multiple parts of the Self get lost they may not be so easy to regroup. They separate for the sake of survival, and they run so far, in such extreme emotional terror, they can't find the Others again in order to integrate. The different selves divide the traumatic information and carry only pieces of the puzzle, because to put all the pieces back together and see the Whole Story -- and identify with it, to become the trauma, at a deeply personal level -- is just too much for any one mind to bear and go on... By becoming consciously aware of who's talking -- what part of your Self is coming through -- you clearly don't fit this general description of mental illness or multiple- personality disorder. Eckart Tolle in The Power of Now talks about "watching the thinker." There's a part of your mind that can stand back, as a director, and watch all the Voices performing on your inner stage. You know how you have that "professional phone voice" you use at work? You may have accidentally answered your personal cell phone like that before - once or twice - but you don't slip up and allow the "wrong" voice to grab the microphone very often... You don't have to think about all this -- much of it is on autopilot. What I'm leading you toward is the practice of monitoring and micro-managing the Voices you've been taking for granted and not paying so much attention to... On some level, there's a Director Self, a Managing Consciousness, that is always running - it's the Boss - it's the Big Self you refer to when you say Me. It manages, directs, and prompts the various sub-Voices you use in everyday situations. The Thinker decides which of your Voices should pop in and do their thing, given the context. Actors and Singers and Writers will quickly identify with this phenomenon -- they have consciously developed their acute sense of Who- says- what- when- and- how. This is how someone can direct and star in a film simultaneously. You are the director and star and producer of your life. This is your greatest project. It's being written by you, for you, you're playing the lead, casting the other players... Most of it is improvisational. You have a Voice that tells jokes... Some of us have a more talented inner-comedian than others. Sometimes he's performing live at a party or a table of friends and he's on fire, cracking everybody up. That’s just one example of the internal species of Voices. Are you always aware of choosing them, or do many of them just "know" when it's their line? When you start identifying them, you find them all over the place. I used to call them my Chorus... (back during a time when my life felt a little too much like a Greek Tragedy : ) Or maybe an Orchestral metaphor would work here: when you're listening to a piece of music you're familiar with, you start to pick out "that killer bass-line" or wonder "who's that on the back-up vocal?" Would you call your ability to do this Psychic with a capital P? Probably not. But you see where I'm going with all this… You can think of a ton more examples I haven't named. Start listening for the different instruments in what you call your Head — there are different sounds coming in, taking over for solos, at different times, in different contexts... All together, they are kind of a Piece of Music, right? Now you're getting warmer. You are in the general vicinity of the Place you will go to when you want to listen for Voices of Spirit, or your Higher Self, or Divine Guidance... You've got to identify who everybody is in that head of yours, what solo they play, what keeps refraining… And by everybody, I mean Voices. Which voices are the "loops" that play over and over? The hateful, self-critical voices are the ones that creep into the background, like a grinding, low sample that's been repeating behind everything else. It undermines your more conscious, intentional solo efforts... You're belting "I will survive" but there's a loop on this remix version of your affirmation, and it's back there, softly chanting "I suck... I always... I'll never..." That’s what’s killing your ability to manifest your intentions by the way. You hear it now — how could you have missed it? Of course! Now you're on your way to cleaning up that Master Mix and getting rid of the noise that you didn't consciously ask to be there. You also channel external voices. In a very real, third-dimensional, everyday experience, you can hear and express the voices of individuals, living or dead, with whom you've had a relationship. You can also channel the Voices of people you've never met before — authors or singers from other times and places whose personas, wisdoms, and messages, have been preserved in media. This could even be considered the most obvious form of immortality. What are Ghosts, if they are not the memories that continue in the minds of the living? When you and a buddy are planning some delicious, wicked mischief like sneaking out after curfew, or skipping school, or borrowing your dad's car without telling him… Or maybe you're considering a course of action that you know your parents or your boss or your boyfriend will disapprove of... You say things like: "I know exactly what he's going to say…" "She is going to be livid!" "I can hear my mother now, saying…" "My grandpa is rolling over in his grave right now…" Impersonations are a form of channeling. You might even imitate the Voice of your Dad: "How many times have I told you kids…”  And your sister shrieks with laughter because she recognizes that Voice. She’s amused and delighted by your ability to "bring that Voice through" with so much truth and accuracy, she might even cover her ears in mock-horror and squeal: "Stop it! You're freaking me out!" Consider the phrase: What would Jesus do? This was a large-scale social meme several years ago. Kind of like the equivalent of the "Got milk?" campaign for Christian marketing… This Question is meant to [re]activate the voice of Jesus that you carry within. Christians believe that if you experienced some form of being saved and/or baptized that Jesus has come into your heart and resides there, eternally, whether you pay attention to his presence or not. The idea is that once you've become aware of the Christ Consciousness within and invited Him to be with you, work through you, speak through you, guide you, you can then say "God is my co-pilot." You have free will — you're doing the driving, but when you're lost, you have a presence there you can call on to be your soul compass, your navigator — a voice you can trust to check the map and tell you which way to turn to get yourself back on track. When someone is Born Again or rededicates his life, he has become consciously aware of the fact that he has access to a Higher Power, but he may have failed to make use of it as he could... Or maybe he's heard it and willfully ignored it. At some point he strayed from his path or began shutting that voice down or muting it; he sees the error in this and chooses to change the behavior and begin listening again. Let’s talk about: Talking about Yourself in the Third Person  You've overheard parents programming these voices in their children, speaking about the Voice as if it is clearly meant to be something the children have already received and should "know better" — which is to understand how to access these Parental Guidance Voices on their own. The Parents quiz their children, inviting them to call up, or call in, or channel that Voice: The Mom says to the four year old "What does Mommy say about leaving your legos all over the living room floor?" Is Mommy having a schizophrenic moment, or is she acknowledging her child's capacity to download her wisdom, make it part of his conscious, decision-making process, and "run the program" at will, on his own, without her prompting? A good mother knows that her child needs a piece of her that will always be with him, even when she can't be. He needs to be capable of simulating her wisdom in a variety of situations, and applying that Voice in both circumstances she has anticipated and the ones that she never dreamed he would encounter. The Mom acknowledges her child's ability to do this. She guides him in developing and using this particular type of channeling. She openly discusses it with other moms and dads — maybe from a very different perspective than this — vague, unnamed... Parenting discussions may not involve a psychic vocabularly, but the principles are definitely talked about. The How To is considered traditional and important. Child development is so fundamental that we don't think to call it supernatural — that's because it's not. It's the perfect example of a human communication phenomenon that is common, practical, and incredibly psychic, all at the same time. Consider these other snatches of common dialogue: When you say you've had a change of heart, what changed? What shift occurs when we consider another person's point of view? What are we doing when we step into another person's shoes? Why are we told to be careful what we wish for? Why is it notable when two people suddenly say the same thing at the same time? "Jinx! Buy me a Coke." Why do we knock on wood when we speak of an intended, hopeful outcome that we fear influencing by saying it out loud? Why do we say "I'm afraid to even say it…"? Why do we say "famous last words" when we put something out to the Universe? What Source are we referring to when we say "I should've listened to my gut…" Some people don't believe in the presence of invisible entities, guardian angels, ghosts, spirit guides, and the like would prefer to use a different vocabulary to describe these internal dialogues: Imaginary friends The subconscious mind Your ego Your intuition If you require logic — or feel more comfortable taking "baby steps" as you approach the idea of communicating with spirit entities, that's cool. I personally find that neurologists and clinical psychotherapists have empirical data that supports the common ways that the human mind functions; I discover plenty of corresponding vocabulary and supportive explanations in various fields of study. It seems unrealistic and unlikely that you will have profound, otherworldly, out-of-body experiences on a daily basis — spirit entities may very well knock you over the head once in a while with something Big you just can't explain away... To get your attention, to start a conversation, to inspire you to start asking Questions... But, for the most part, receiving Higher Guidance on a daily basis requires that you integrate new perspectives and new habits into your common experiences. The Shift is introduced, practiced, and maintained over an accumulation of millions of moments — all of them opportunities to ask all the little questions that will add up to a relationship — a lifestyle — that features the Big Mysteries. Whatever your vocabulary or what camp you approach the Questions from — the religious, the medical/scientific, the spiritualist — we clearly can agree that we all talk to ourselves, we have different facets of our personalities that we can access consciously and subconsciously. We all experience complex relationships with others and the Self. We all talk to ourselves, and it's perfectly normal. This behavior is more commonplace than it is aberrant. I'll tell you what is crazy: Asking questions of a roomful of people you trust Immediately hearing their responses — advice, warnings, instructions... and totally ignoring them, suppressing them, or proceeding as if you have no voices of wisdom to work with. The Voice that speaks to you, the Name you give it, and the way you choose to define it is crucial — but the identity of a Voice remains secondary to its Messages for you and what you do choose to do with that information. When you: Ask a question Pray Meditate The Voice that answers you may be: your intuition your higher self your God your Spirit Guide your grandmother who has already passed your imaginary friends the psychic who reads for you your best friend, over coffee your Aunt Sharon, who's the greatest listener on earth, the one you call whenever you're having trouble making an important decision... What matters most about these dialogues is: What is the Answer you receive? Does the answer resonate with you? Do you agree with it? Are multiple sources giving you the same advice? Are you listening for the truth or looking for something to tell you what you want to hear? Does the answer support you, your best interests, and empower you to make good decisions? Who is being served by your acting on the advice you're being given? The Inner Critic, Fear, and Shadow Guides  Just as your consciousness downloads programming of Voices of Advice that you may call on — or your psychic sense can listen to — the benevolent entities who support you — however you choose to perceive your relationships to all these Voices you're experiencing — there are good ones and bad ones. You are your own worst critic because you decide who to listen to and who to dismiss. You have free will, and you are responsible for your behavior. Do you let the bossy, nagging, belittling voices hog your inner microphone? Do you allow hurtful remarks that undermine your confidence to play over and over again? Do you recognize the Source for the Voices that have something to gain by scaring you, paralyzing you, playing on your insecurities? Learn how to identify the Voices you already have access to, create working relationships with the guides who attend you on your Mission, and use the information you receive to create the life you know you were meant to live.

I've only ever worn one piece of jewelry in my entire life — a silver owl ring. I mentioned a little bit about how I used it in Ep 52 : Spirit Guides, Sigils and Sign Language. This is the story of (partly) how it became so magical. It was blessed by the spirit of Pope John Paul II. Posthumously. HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses Get an intuitive reading with Slade Automatic Intuition BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits Edit your pledge on Patreon TRANSCRIPT There is a picture of the ring on my blog. https://sladeroberson.com/blog/owlring In the episode on Spirit Guides and Sign Language, where I talked about projective and receptive energy, I promised to come back and tell this story. I’ve only ever worn one piece of jewelry in my entire life for more than like a day. I have this silver owl ring. It's like something worn by one of those guys who wears denim shirts and pants together, possibly a little Native American ancestry, probably also wearing some turquoise somewhere. Maybe a belt buckle. Have you ever seen a man wearing one of those Indian chief’s head rings? Do you know what I’m talking about? Well, my owl would be right beside it in the same jewelry tray. Now, obviously, owls are my totem, so that was a big reason why I have it in the first place. I had gone on a buying trip for this New Age store I worked at called the New Moon Gallery. Shout out to my friend Alisa who is hopefully listening right now and just started to squeal. She and I were together looking at mostly women’s jewelry for the store when I ran across this owl ring and had to buy it for myself. Not even for the store. And I wasn’t even sure I would ever wear it. It was kind of an ironic purchase in the moment. I took a quick pic with my phone just so you can see exactly what I’m talking about. It’s a carved, or casted maybe, silver ring that takes up the entire digit of one of my fingers. When I found it, it was too big for my ring finger and I took to wearing it on my index fingers. Which is why it became a part of the whole projective / receptive hand magic that I talked about on that other episode. As you’ll see in this awful pic, it has tarnished in my drawer because I stopped wearing it about seven years ago when I started lifting weights a lot. Since then, my hands are literally beefier — I didn’t know that had happened — and the tarnish makes it a little easier to see the carving detail, so I just took the pic as is. You can see it on the corresponding blog post for this episode. If you have been a Shift Your Spirits blog reader for a long time, you may remember my black and white author photo, where you can actually see it on my finger. I have my hand on my chin and that was my author pic for like ten years. So, a few years after buying that ring and hardly even knowing why considering I didn’t wear jewelry, when I started communicating with spirit guides, and trying to get back my power and a sense of direction, I started to wear that ring. I was also coding a lot and the weight of my index finger because of the ring helped me type. A QUICK DISCLAIMER ABOUT THE STORY I’M ABOUT TO TELL YOU: I am not even remotely Catholic, so I will likely butcher some details related to that. I don’t care. Of course you could say this is communication from a saint, and there have to be miracles associated with someone to become beatified. But I consider this about a connection to an individual soul, and also a member of a soul family. To be honest, his conservative statements against recognizing same sex unions are to be expected given his job, but they obviously piss me off and I completely disagree. But then I believe he was the head of one of the largest terrorist organizations on the planet. So, I don’t know what to do with the politics and the religion of the situation… Let’s just say that’s politics. I’m just going to leave it out as not really part of this story. I believe in a vague way, admittedly that I don’t fully understand, that I am connected to Mother Mary as an ascended master, that I attract others who are connected to her, regardless of religion, and that Pope John Paul II is a figure within this network of entities. I went through an intense period of researching Marian visitations. If you read books about people to whom the Virgin Mary makes appearances, of course you’ll find lots of young women, but there is a theme of her appearing or speaking to spiritual men of different faiths. It’s like a “control group” that transcends religion. If I can say this humbly, I feel a resonance with that. During all my Mary Visitation Research, I had heard this rumor somewhere that PJP II was a Marian cultist, and that a lot of the other cardinals did not want him to be pope because of this. He supposedly had some nuns secretly embroider this vest for him that said, in Latin, “I am hers” and he wore it during his inauguration. Like his predecessor, John Paul II dispensed with the traditional Papal coronation and instead received ecclesiastical investiture with a simplified Papal inauguration on 22 October 1978. During his inauguration, when the cardinals were to kneel before him to take their vows and kiss his ring, he stood up as this one Polish prelate Stefan Cardinal Wyszyński knelt down, stopped him from kissing the ring, and simply hugged him He also broke with tradition by addressing the crowd at all, in Italian, and he did declare that he accepted the responsibility of becoming pope "in a spirit of obedience to the Lord and total faithfulness to Mary, our most Holy Mother." When he died, I was sitting in a Border’s bookstore cafe — the one where I would go to visit Refuse to Choose. April 2, 2005, almost a year before I decided to move back to Chattanooga and about a year and half from launching Shift Your Spirits. I was still just blindly following these weird messages and signs and synchronicities I was receiving. I overheard this guy at a nearby table, excitedly talking about how he had impulsively decided was to jump on a plane and go to view the pope laid out in state. He was giddy with this bizarre impulse, telling his friend about the spontaneity and how he felt spiritually moved or guided to do this. Almost a week later, I think, it’s been a long time, I was in the Border’s cafe working again, writing, tinkering with code, building websites for clients, only this time I was there very late in the evening. It felt like a dream because my dreams always take place at dusk. There’s a quality to the light. And that guy was back, talking to two friends this time, same table just beside me. I listened to his breathless story about flying to Rome, getting straight into a cab, immediately standing in line, but for almost a whole day, being one of the last people they allowed through, to view the pope laid out in state, and the surreal experience of being back in a cab and back on a plane and flying home before realizing, really processing, what he felt. It all took like a day and a half. I learned later, by the way, that over a million people stood in line to see the pope laid out in state this way. This guy—I’ll never know his name—said felt strangely electrified and numb, but like he had to be there, and that all the people he would subsequently meet in life would receive some of the grace of PJP II directly. He said, he knew that sounded crazy and almost arrogant. He apologized for not being able to articulate what he meant about carrying that energy and giving it to others. At that point, I interrupted him. It wasn’t too weird, I’d caught his eye several times. Energetically and physically, I was part of both conversations, he knew that. His friends left when he started talking to me so he joined me at my table and continued to gush about his experience and the emotions and energy coursing through him. And I told him about Mary and my experiences with her and how bizarre it even was and how I wanted to tell someone about it. I asked this guy about receiving PJP’s energy. I said I thought I could actually feel it. They were getting ready to close the Borders at that point and we started walking outside together and he asked me: “Do you have a ring?” And I took off my owl ring, which I had started to wear and handed it to him. He stared at it and played with it and mumbled something over it, like a prayer or a spell. And then he handed it back to me. His eyes were shining with tears. He embarrassedly wiped them away. We walked a little further into the parking lot. The parting was strange. He said “I’m not quite sure what to do with myself, now.” I said “Me either." “We have to do something with this.” he said. “I’m going to. Promise me you will.” I said, “I will. I promise” And I did. At least, I think I did. I think this is it. All of this last thirteen years since I met him. Soon after that meeting, I received a more specific message from Mother Mary — the concept for Shift Your Spirits. Really, just the title. And that it was a blog and I was supposed to share my stories on it. The summer I started Shift Your Spirits, I dreamt a few times about PJP II. Back when I was having dreams I was at this Congress of Souls. It was this open air space that resembled the sanctuary where I have gone to Beltane Gatherings for decades, but of course, it was shifted in that dream dimension kind of way. Pope John Paul II was there giving a speech, but it was in Italian, and I couldn’t hear him. In the dream, I struggled as if it were a sound volume issue, not language … I was straining to hear him. I keep straining to hear those message and to translate what I think they’re about.

How I personally choose to navigate and manage dark energy on social media. I hope that by sharing the headspace I am coming from, you will be inspired to create an intentional approach that allows you to find some more peace. And while you're at it — be better at it than I am. MENTIONED ON THE SHOW Publishers hated ‘A Wrinkle in Time.’ Madeleine L’Engle never forgot the rejections. HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses Get an intuitive reading with Slade Automatic Intuition BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits Edit your pledge on Patreon TRANSCRIPT *Not all my episodes are fully scripted, word for word. Sometimes I work with partial notes and fragments. This is not going to be easy to talk about. I’m only going to even get close, if I get close. I’m going to fail miserably and leave a lot out. But I had some part of this conversation in a session with a client named Marissa from the Automatic Intuition community. She said she found my thoughts and strategies helpful in dealing with some online PTA communication. It’s something people ask me about a lot in my personal life—those who are both my friends on social media and in real life. So I felt compelled to just share some of it with you guys. Nobody needs to know you don’t like them. one of those “rules to live by” learned the hard way, as they say Unpack that. Notice all the things that means. It can only serve one purpose, to hurt the other person by having them know about your hate. It’s putting your hate in their consciousness. Absolutely NO situation is improved by this. Even if you want to engage in a war, you willfully choose to … there’s no advantage to alerting your enemy, to warning them before you strike. It only makes people defensive It escalates disharmony It makes you a target It draws attention to you Do you need attention so badly that you’ll take any kind of attention, negative attention? A lot of people will. That’s all they can get — or they think that’s all their worth — and they spitefully demand it. In this age of media Flame wars and online truth bubbles Nothing is more effective at shutting down the attention-seekers than silence. Total lack of engagement. A part of you might be tempted to participate. People constantly talk about not wanting drama, but they want drama. It makes them feel important, engaged, alive. Unfollowing isn’t just some passive insult to others, unfollowing is the best way to ensure you don’t even know or care. Which for anyone who might want to perceive you as an enemy is a total bitch slap, but it’s also a truly healthy disengagement. If you really don’t want it, you don’t care to know about it at all. These comment wars are misplaced sense of purpose. For some people, it’s tapping into outrage and a connection to a cause. They don’t have any mountains to climb so they pick hills to die on, almost at random You have a higher outlet. I’ve told the story about experimenting with putting out some writing as a blog in 2006. That’s how Shift Your Spirits came to be. There were 2 contenders—I seriously considered doing either a political blog or a blog about spirituality and personal development. I could easily have gone either way. I have plenty to say about politics. It was a hard decision. I received a name and a concept—a shining sentence—a clairaudient download — for the political blog, just like I did with Shift Your Spirits: 83% fewer hearts and flowers than most new age blather. It came down to: which energy could I bear carrying everyday. I knew Shift Your Spirits would encourage me to be a better version of myself. Now, don’t get me wrong, the religiosity of fundamentalism is a constant source of anger. Political blogging would have meant running a toxic channel 24-7. Even if I was careful to put something better into the stream, I would have been at least beholden to listening and observing and analyzing all the other toxic political comment. Resist. Fuck yes. Be involved. Vote. Donate. Gather. Preach. Sit in. Stand up. All of it. But online posts on social media aren’t really any of that. They are a pale shade of true action. Act. In meaningful ways. Getting in arguments on FB. Kinda no skin in the game. It’s the catfishing of giving a godamn. If it’s all you got, so be it. If your political analysis is valuable, put it out there. AS AN AUTHOR. There is a tradition in publishing. Authors do not talk back to reviews. You’ve spent 100s of 1000s of words already - carefully making your statement. Anything beyond that is trivial, small by comparison. If you must comment or post, I have a few rules that might help you keep it constructive. *By the way, sidebar, I think these work in relationships as well. Don’t use always or never. Those words are immediately inaccurate and will inspire pushback. Don’t tag anyone. Don’t address any individual personally. Compose what you want to say on a separate screen. Don’t talk about what you don’t like or get in your own punch on re-stating the problem, state the issue as you observe it in the CONTEXT of what can be done to help the situation Mic drop and walk away. DO NOT respond to any comments on what you posted. Ever. Leave it for the lesser minds to squabble over. The true reason I do not post political stuff is ... I can’t do it a little bit. What is 2%? How it is different than 10%? 10 becomes 75 in a hot flash of being baited. You lose all day to anger and rehearsing — a mental spinning that is obsessive and useless and draining. You give away your time and energy and you feel stressed and tired afterward. Was that really worth it? For me, a cold hard white hot silent NONE is the only way to manage it. 1% is 100%. That’s like being a 1% smoker. What the hell is that? ZERO. It the only way for me to manage it. A little bit is not an option. I was listening recently to Oprah on an interview with Van Jones talk about giving energy to the darkness, to the other side. Thinking about it, engaging with it, hating it is giving energy to it. You cannot fight it head on. You have to transcend it. That’s what the ZERO hard line is for me. It’s managing part of my attempt to transcend it. I have to be on Facebook a little bit. I have a community on there, and the technology is great for managing a private group. So here’s what I do. I set tabs to open on my browser to window to all the sites I’m monitoring — email, mailing lists, scheduler, web sites, podcast … I set a Facebook tab to open to the Group itself. That way, I can come in as an admin and keep an eye on my group without swimming out into the larger FB ecosystem. That which you give your attention to expands. For a million different reasons. In so many ways and contexts that statement is true. So don’t it give your attention. Everything you respond to — even just to give a “like” expands. This is not even just metaphysical. Online, the algorithms will promote posts that have been liked more, commented on more, and shared more. In a world where we all want to be acknowledged and valued—whether in darkness or in light—nothing holds more power than a radical lack of attention. What do I mean by “radical”? I am NOT advocating being clueless or uninformed. I find it infuriating when someone equates being willfully ignorant with an attempt to be more spiritual. Pick a single news source you trust. You will notice if you follow me on social media I often repost items from NPR. That started because they do not use a lot of embedded advertising. I will not reshare even a legitimate news item that clicks through to a site where you have to jump over hurdles of embedded Google ads. No. If I want to share the actual core story, I will go and search for NPRs version of that news item. That’s my preference. You may have your own. Just give it some thought and install some protocols for yourself and stick to them. What I mean by radical lack of attention... I’m getting at the idea of removing your attention from a LOT more than what you just obviously find abhorrent. Don’t just block the haters Curate what you want to see, actively. I unfollow everyone unless they prove they have something to offer my feed that I want to see One boring item or just something irrelevant. I go to their profile and look at their last 5 or 10 posts. There is someone who posts in a language I can’t read. 100% of the time. I don’t follow that. Now that person is likely bilingual and can read English and follows my posts, and that’s awesome. But I can’t return the attention because of my own language. But... I make room for what I can consume and what I want to consume. Sometimes I want a challenging different opinion that is intelligent. There are people with different political opinions who are extremely intelligent and I respect what they thoughtfully put out and I am CURIOUS about where they are coming from. They are the best representation of people who are different than me. Or I choose to follow a different racial perspective that is eye-opening for me. I have an author friend who is very passionate about whitewashing and issues of race, and she’s brilliant. I want to hear what she has to say. I don’t “enjoy” the posts that challenge me... But I value them. And I choose them. I’m not passive about what invades my mental space. I try not to BE irrelevant to others. I try to be authentic and personal but less fluff. Less detritus. Less stuff you see everywhere else. (I don’t always pull that off. It’s just an aspiration running in the background of my mind.) Everything I want to say, politically, is being said. I see my opinions represented. I don’t need to tell you a news item of the day—20 of your friends just did. I don’t need to tell you what kind of human being the President is—he shows you and he tells you every day. I don’t have to say a thing. I don’t have to say anything negative. I don’t have to give my attention my focus or my voice to darkness. I don’t have to magnify anything with my attention without choosing to do so. Do as I say, not as I do. And at the end of the day, we are one race, stuck together on one planet, and I pray we survive long enough to evolve beyond the petty divisions. One of the things I think will be most impactful about contact with an intelligent extraterrestrial civilization is it will change our perspective on what is Other. It will shift the otherness away from our human family. Hopefully, we will use this as more leverage to Ascend. For the record, I haven’t given up hope that we will Ascend as a species.

Many of the people who listen to the Attunement Guided Meditation I created for the Automatic Intuition Course report meeting spirit guides, in the Akashic Records in particular, who appear as blue-skinned extraterrestrial beings. I have never been personally drawn to "Starseed" information, but the topic shows up frequently in the private community of intuitives I mentor. I asked them to weigh in on the research I found on the subject. And I'm sharing my own thoughts on the beings who are said to be assisting in the ascension of humanity. MENTIONED ON THE SHOW Coast to Coast https://www.coasttocoastam.com/ Automatic Intuition Professional https://automaticintuition.com/ Mark Watson | AngelEarth Music https://www.facebook.com/AngelEarthMusic/ Shiva | Hindu Deity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shiva Andromeda, Antares, Arcturus | Federation of Planets http://www.exopaedia.org/Blue-skinned+aliens The Prism of Lyra by Lyssa Royal & Keith Priest http://amzn.to/2GFY2jk The Lantern Bearer https://simplecast.com/s/d506756b About Channeling with Frank Butterfield https://simplecast.com/s/6267e210 HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses Get an intuitive reading with Slade Automatic Intuition BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits Edit your pledge on Patreon TRANSCRIPT Take 11. I want to talk about Blue-skinned Aliens. That's right. Extraterrestrials. Possibly Angels. Possibly both. I actually think it's a technicality. The reason why I said "Take 11" and I'm leaving that in is because I want to say upfront that this is an unscripted episode and it's probably going to be really rambly, and I'm just going to do it off the top of my head because in order to prepare a really thoughtful, wholly inclusive report on Blue-skinned Aliens would be beyond my ability to do in any normal amount of time and I would have to bring in a huge chunk of the internet, and I don't even have time to read all that the internet has to say about Blue-skinned Aliens. So, I know that for some of you, this is going to start what I call a 'Magic Carpet Ride'. It also could actually be happening to you in the middle of a magic carpet ride about this subject. So what I mean by 'Magic Carpet Ride' is, and I don't do these so much anymore. I actually don't have the free time or the sleep schedule to allow for me to do magic carpet rides anymore. Because when I was in a period where I was doing a lot of these, it was back during the time period that you hear me talk about in my origin story, between 2003 and 2006. I was partially paralyzed. I was housebound, a recluse, I was communicating with my guides a lot intentionally for the first time, I was spending a lot of time learning to code online. So I was just living in front of a computer and had no sense of time. And to me, a magic carpet ride kind of describes this prayerful meditative experience that is part investigation, part channelled inquiry, part synchronicity, where something comes into your consciousness and you start with a query and Google and it leads from one thing to the next and you keep exploring and seeing new things to click on and time goes by and I would start out doing this at 10 or 11:00 at night and suddenly I would realize that the sky was turning grey outside and it was morning and I'd spent an entire evening travelling around the globe and travelling this interior landscape and this quasi-dimensional place that we've created in the internet, and I would come out of it, having been to all these places that I never realized that initial query was going to take me. So Blue-skinned Aliens. If you start that, if you click on the links that I'm going to give you in the show notes, just be warned. You could end up on a magic carpet ride. I actually was very, very careful to not allow myself to do that. I kept a protective bubble around me and I looked at it through a window and I got what I needed to get to have this conversation with you, and then I shut myself down. Because I didn't want to go full rabbit hole here. So yeah, in 2008, I went to Hawaii, the first and only time that I've been to Hawaii, for a conference of people who communicate with angels. I went there admittedly a bit as a corporate spy. I was in the process of developing what would become the Automatic Intuition program, and I had some ideas about how I wanted to support and teach people to do readings and to connect with their emerging intuition. But I wasn't really sure, I didn't have a sense of, Can I teach this to other people? Will it work? How do other people teach it? So I was in a mode back in 2008. I remember the day I arrived in Hawaii was the day that Barack Obama was elected. So that was a really interesting milestone that solidifies the date forever in my mind, for many reasons. But I was in the process of going to a lot of different kinds of psychic development workshops, really just kind of seeing how other people were teaching it. One of the things that really annoyed me was how much of it was really only teaching clairvoyance, but that's another conversation and that might be something that we get into if you ever work with me in the context of Automatic Intuition. You'll hear my speel about how I decided to adapt what I was doing to account for the lack of support in the other types of sensitivities and clairs, as we call them, beyond just clairvoyance. Because I wasn't particularly clairvoyant. Not at the time that I went to Hawaii. But anyway, so I was in Hawaii to be a corporate spy, to go to a really high-up the food chain kind of new age event to see how it was done by the pros! And also just to experience being in Hawaii with over 300 other people who all have the ability to connect with and communicate with Angels, as I already identified with. So yeah, it was magical and amazing on a lot of levels and I met a lot of people who are still in my life all these years later. But anyway, fast forward a little bit. I was really interested in and intrigued by, there was a man, Mark Watson, who is a composer, a musician who does a lot of background music for new age meditations and, he gave a little speel or a little talk about music theory, the scales, the chords that are associated with different archangelic vibrations, and how to use a certain musical key to invoke a specific type of angelic entity. To tell you the truth, it was all over my head, music-wise. Like I knew enough to be able to just kind of furiously scribble down what he was saying, and I knew that coming up as part of the training program that I was developing, I was going to be creating a guided meditation that would act as an Attunement, and so I felt like, Oh this is amazing. This is exactly what I need to know in order to create the Attunement. I wanted to do some very specific things and call in some certain types of energy so I took notes. And, in a very simplistic way, attempted to apply what I learned from him in creating that Attunement. So fast forward basically a year later was when I launched the Automatic Intuition Professional Program in November of 2009, I believe. And so, the way it works, and actually if you want to experience this, if you haven't already, you can go to AutomaticIntuition.com and download the Attunement for free and experience what I'm talking about. So what the Attunement is and how it works. It's a guided meditation. The intentions at the level of the musical stuff that I'm talking about was to align the chakras, to ground, centre, work your way up through the chakras, and more than anything, to open the crown chakra to ensure that all of the information that's coming in for you is the highest possible vibration and there is a few specific triggers within the Attunement that allow you to connect with your asher, which is a sort of a personal guardian angel. You know when we talk to little kids about, Oh you have a guardian angel that's watching out for you! I call that the asher. I can't even remember where I learned that term, but that's the type of angel who is sort of like your personal bodyguard. Anyway, so new experience and meeting with that entity and you also experience, as this sort of finale of the Attunement, if you will, a meeting with your guides in the Akashic Records. And this could be one entity, it could be a group. But it's meant to call in any entity that you have, that's hanging out, waiting for you to use your spiritual gifts or your intuitive abilities, your healing abilities, in the context of doing it for other people. Now this is not just about, Oh, what should I do with my job, and when am I going to meet the love of my life, and the kinds of things you might ask a phone psychic. This is specifically to introduce you to someone who can help retrieve information for you on behalf of other people. So you are volunteering to be a channel and a conduit and this entity is meant to assist in that. It's a very high level intention. It's a high level vibration and it calls in a very high level, for lack of a better word, I keep calling it high. I actually think of, when we talk about high and low frequencies in vibrations, I think of those as notes on a piano, so you can think of this frequency as being something in the dog whistle range, or whatever. Something outside the normal ability to hear and process sounds. That's kind of what the Attunement does. One of the most difficult things about creating the Attunement is actually to script an experience where I am prompting you on what to see, hear and feel without telling you what to see, hear, and feel. Or in some cases, to prompt you to have an experience that might be visual without telling you to see something, or that could be visual for one person, could be auditory for another, could be sensory in the body for another person. So it's a very weird thing to try to write if you ever do a guided meditation. It's like telling a story without telling too much detail because, of course, you want the person to fill in all of that on their own. That's what the Attunement is and that's how it works. The reason why we start the course with the Attunement is obviously, it represents an intention, a goal that you've set for yourself and also a kind of promise that you're making. You're putting it out to the Universe, to all of humanity: Hey, I intend to use my abilities and to develop my abilities in order to serve other people and make everything wonderful for everyone else. That's your goal. It's a selfless act of service and the Attunement is really kind of something for us to wrap our brains around down here in the earthly dimension and just give us a way to see, hear, feel, name, experience, talk about that thing that is happening at a higher level. Because there's a part of it that's happening in a dimension that we're not even aware of and I don't even try to script that. I just, in my intentions in creating this, I am calling in those energies and asking that they be there for anyone who listens to it. So, thanks to Mark Watson for giving me that little bit of music theory help enact that. So I've been using this Attunement with my clients and my students for, what is it, almost 9 years now? And I always get really wonderful feedback. I get a lot of requests to create separate music tracks for meditation without the guided part. Without the vocal script. Even my dad asked me if he could just have the background music and make it extra long and then he can just use that to either rest or meditate or do that kind of relaxation stuff with it, which I have never really gotten around to. I don't even know if I can find the master files for that... We'll see... But anyway, so everybody who comes into my program does this Attunement and one of the things that's really cool for me is, every single one of the first sessions that I do with everyone, they tell me about their experience with the Attunement as if it's a dream that they had and I am writing down notes of what they're saying, and there is information encoded in your experience of the Attunement. Not only the things that you hear that are symbolic, and the things that you see that are archtypal, but the actual word choice and the way that you speak about this phenomenon tells me things about your intuitive abilities, how they already manifest, and more importantly, it lets me know if there is something waiting in the wings for you that you are not even aware of and you've never thought to try. If there's some kind of ability you have the potential for, that's right there, and you just don't know to reach for it. It will let me know whether or not to coach you forward, and which tools would allow you to access those abilities. So based on that, we have an entire session pretty much where we unpack everything in the Attunement. What you saw, felt, heard, thought, your impressions, what you learned during the Attunement. Anything that I see that I can unpack for you in terms of symbolism and the guide that you met and the names that you're getting for these guides and what they all mean. Based on that conversation, what we really do is, we use that to determine which tools and techniques and psychic modalities are most likely to produce results for you. So for instance, I can tell from the Attunement if clairvoyance is not your thing, if you're going to go a bunch of classes where they're like, Close your eyes and visualize, you're probably going to be disappointed. But I can also tell that automatic writing would produce some really satisfying experiences, both for you and for anyone that you read for, and here's why that tool would be better suited to you. So it's kind of like a diagnostic and it helps me customize the course and how you learn to develop your intuition. So it's a really cool thing. I'm very proud of it. At the time that I was creating it, I was just creating it and those were my intentions. My understanding of how it works has evolved over time. So one of the coolest things for me is, I have the perspective of everybody else's experience with the Attunement, so the patterns that I see emerging may not be apparent to the people who are having these experiences, but from where I'm sitting, I can see things, like, Oh wow, isn't that interesting. Everybody always has this type of experience here. Or when someone has an experience that is uniquely outside of the pattern that I see with other people. That's always really interesting too. I feel like, personally, my way of visualizing metaphysical stuff and talking about all this spiritual stuff has a kind of science-fiction vibe to it. And I'm very aware of the script within the Attunment being a little science-fictiony, and a little CGI. So it's always fascinating to me. There is an entire vein of students in Automatic Intuition who come through and have these really Native American, shamanic, spirit animal, outside under the stars bonfire... They have this whole aboriginal kind of experience that isn't remotely science-fictiony, and I'm always fascinated by how many people still take what I think of as having this certain kind of flavour to it, and they come out with a completely different set of details and aesthetics. So anyway, that kind of stuff is very fascinating to me. Sometimes I share it with the people in the context of the conversation because I want them to realize that they're plugging into something bigger than themselves and they're not the only person who has that kind of entity as an Akashic Records guide. So, we see a lot of Merlin archetypes. I talked about that on a previous episode about the lantern bearer, right? And I talked about the wise old man Gandalf hermit-tarot guy who shows up for a lot of people in this Attunement. That is a common symbol that we see, so to speak. There's another one though, that's particularly common. It's always been there a little bit. Here and there. But lately it's become almost everyone coming through the course. And so I'm always interested when there are these waves of things moving through the people that I work with, whether it's readings that I'm doing for clients or the students who are being attracted into the program. Last year it was healing energy. A lot of healers. I'm still seeing a lot of people who do energy healing come in to the course for whatever reason. So that seems to be a theme that was really apparent in 2017 for me, is energy healing. So lately, it's been a lot of blue-skinned aliens. A lot of Akashic Records guides have been presenting as ginormous blue-skinned angelic creatures. Now the reason I said at the top of this episode or this segment that I think that they could be angels, I think they could be extraterrestrials. I think some of us see those as being the same thing. And if you really want to split hairs about it, angels aren't of this world, so they kind of are extraterrestrial. It could just be that they are a type of galactic entity or spiritual energy that we perceive in a way that we associate with, Ooo that looks like an alien to me. So these entities are usually very tall, they're beautiful, they have luminous pale blue skin or sometimes it's dark, it's cobalt. It's always about indigo and blue. And the prevalence of this lately has been almost identical from one person to the next, and it's always been in the back of my mind. I thought, Is that have something to do with Hindu gods? Has this got something to do with some other kind of phenomenon going on? I'm usually focused on the work itself, so I just kind of tuck it away. But I've decided to kind of go down a little bit of a rabbit hole and research some of this. I don't know, for whatever reason, I just decided, Now I'm going to look it up. I'm just going to peek at the magic carpet ride. I'm not going to go too far down the slide, but I just want to get a sense of what's going on. So I generally am not drawn to this kind of Starseed information. I find it curious and interesting and when it crosses my radar, I'm like, Oh wow, that's kind of cool. I'll read about it or get sucked into watching something about it, but it's really not that frequently. Here in the last few years, really the only time that it ever even crosses my mind is in the context of the people that I work with, the entities they communicate with, and the entities they channel and who shows up in these meditations. That kind of stuff. And that's the only time that it even is a blip. And I'm not, I want to be really, really clear about this. When I say it doesn't show up for me, I'm not passing judgment on it and I'm not saying it's not true. I'm just letting you know why, Why haven't I talked about this before? Why don't I talk about it all the time? Why isn't everything in Shift Your Spirits connected in some way to exploring this huge subject, you know? The implications are enormous. So I just want to let you know that when I say I'm not drawn to it, I'm just... I'm not drawn to it. I don't go looking for it. But if it shows up in my life, I'm like, Oh! That's cool! And I like to try and process this stuff without passing judgment on it because quite frankly, there are tons of people who could listen to anything that I have to say and talk about and judge that as a bunch of bullshit. So I am very aware that everyone has their own perspective and I'd like to think that we're all getting a piece of a bigger picture. Some of those pieces overlap and some of them don't. But I try not to invalidate anyone else's experience. So if someone comes in, I meet someone at a conference or something who's a channel and they talk to galactic beings and that's their platform, that's cool. I find it kind of fascinating, to tell you the truth. It makes what I do seem very ho hum, to tell you the truth. Still, okay, so I decided to dip my toe in this just a little bit in Google and just see, Okay, what's the deal? What's everybody else saying about the blue-skinned aliens? And by the way, I did also investigate a little bit around, Is this connected in some way with Hindu gods, because we see a lot of depiction of Shiva and other Hindu gods who have blue skin, and I thought, Maybe there's something there? What's interesting, and Google this, Google the Hindu god thing, and the only thing that I could find was a lot of linguistics conversations. A lot of talk about how that color blue doesn't translate. There's not a word for it in that language that actually, if you look at original texts, they're talking about dark-skinned or black-skinned people, and anyway, there seems to be some argument about whether or not they're really talking about blue-skinned people or dark-skinned people. And from my understanding, the darkness has to do with earthliness, as if they have come from the earth. Which, to me in my personal pantheon and cosmology, that sounds more like fairy entities, or elementals. But I think the devas, in that part of the world, in that cosmology and worldview, are elemental energies. So anyway. If you want to, you can research that also and see, but I found that really quickly that those are not the same thing, and that there doesn't seem to be a connection between the Hindu gods and the blue-skinned aliens. By the way, I will share links in the show notes, if you want to go down that rabbit hole, and I chose to share a specific site. There are literally thousands. Like, one of my clients, Shawn, said, There are tons of people just on Wordpress.com who write about the galactic federation and all this stuff that has to do with aliens, and so I tried to pick a site that I thought seemed to be well-executed, you know. They had their shit together. They've compiled a lot of information, it's well organized, it's put together in a way that I feel okay with recommending, right? So I'm just sort of passing judgment on one droplet of water in the entire ocean of the internet, but so... I want to share with you some of what I found on this one site, regarding blue-skinned aliens. And I'm kind of going to be reading to you here from this, so if you want the attribution link, it will be in the show notes. This is not my channeled information or even my opinion. This is just what the internet says about blue-skinned aliens. Several stories mention humanoid alien races with a blue skin. These usually refer to Andromedans. The Andromedas were the "blue race" that landed in Florida in 1954, trying to pursuade the US Government not to work with the greys, but instead to join forces with something called "The Orbin." Their advice apparently was sadly ignored by the US Government. The Hopi Indians also talk about a race of blue skinned Star Warriors. There are several indications that lead us to believe these Star Warriors are the same Andromedans. "The nature of the Andromeda realm is abstract and fluid. A dimensional doorway exists in our nearby galactic neighborhood as a bridge to the Andromeda Energy. This bridge/doorway is the star Antares." That's from a book called The Prism of Lyra, Lyssa Royal & Keith Priest. Many sources mention Andromeda as the home of several higher dimensional species. Some of these species chose to come and assist Earth in its current day Ascension progress. To adapt to a life in a 3-dimensional body, these Starseeds usually go through Antares. Okay, so I also, in researching Antares and Andromeda, wanted to read you a little bit about the Federation of Planets. "The Association of Worlds, or (United) Federation of Planets, "is a group of physical and non-physical beings from many realms who come together for a number of purposes. Some have called them a galactic confederation or federation. There is no hierarchical structure or authority inherent in the Association. The primary purposes for their interactions with Earth are: (1) to gently nudge humanity toward a greater awareness of itself and its place within the Association, and (2) to prevent a critical number of nuclear explosions on Earth, which can cause a rip in the fabric of space/time, affecting the galactic neighborhood. They have absolutely no intention now of evacuating anyone from Earth under any conditions. They understand the absolute necessity for the human race to become responsible for itself.” Note that a lot of the information on the Federation is channeled, though corroborated by many contactees, and by some witnesses working on covert government projects. Remote viewers, also, confirm the existence of such an organization." Okay. End the part where I'm reading from the interwebs. So if this information is mostly channeled, like what they just noted, it occured to me that I have a network of channels and psychics right here at my disposal. The very people that these visions came through in the first place. So the people who are seeing blue-skinned aliens as Akashic Records guides within my Attunement as part of the Automatic Intuition community program, I have a private Facebook group with all these guys, so what I did is, I decided to sort of post some of this information to them. I thought, Okay well fine, if all this stuff is channeled, let's channel it. Let's remote view it. Let's check in. Let's talk to some guides and see what they have to say. I consider the Automatic Intuition community a tribe of peers. I'm not a guru. I'm more of like a host. I'm like a camp counsellor. I'm a little bit further down the road than other people, or a little bit "older" in this process and I'm there to help and advise and organize. So it was really interesting. What I did was I posted what I just read to you guys and I asked everyone else, Hey, what do you think about this? Check in with whoever it is that you communicate with and see what you think. Or what you feel or anything that you have to comment on this conversation. And a few people contacted their guides and asked about this directly. For instance, they contacted their guides and said, Hey, is this true or not? A lot of the people who chose to comment corroborated what I was posting. They just basically checked in with it and said, some form of, Yeah, this kind of checks out for me. They did a gut check on it and also let me know if it felt real to them. And in particular, Kara, and Lisa and Aubrey all talked about just kind of a gut feeling of like, Yeah, when I was checking in with this, it resonates with me as true and one of their number... I can't remember which one, said that when they heard the word Andromeda, that it was sort of beating like a drum, and then I know Aubrey came along and said, Ohmygod, yeah, beating like a drum exactly explains the experience that I'm having when I hear that word too. So anyway, that was very cool. Jane and Kara both talked about a connection to ancient Egypt that came up for them. Melany had a random experience in the past where she recalled these 3 entities who showed up during a healing session that she was doing with a client, and after the session was over, the client mentioned seeing 3 blue entities, which Melany took as a confirmation of what she was seeing. And she said, This isn't something that happens in all her sessions. It wasn't something that she was willfully trying to contact. It just sort of appeared. And then the same thing was kind of happening for the client. And you have to understand when you're doing these sessions, that may sound like all well and good. Oh, I've kind of got this feeling and then the client says, Oh, yeah, I got that feeling too. And it's not necessarily like that. Sometimes there are things that happen in the feedback where the clients and you are able to communicate different sets of detail that seem to corroborate themselves, and sometimes in the moment this synchronicity is very powerful. I told you a story recently about how, you know, me and one of the people in this group were like pulling cards for each other simultaneously, and we didn't even decide to do it. It was just an impulse and how we pulled the same card and when things like that happen and you're living that in the moment, it's very powerful confirmation, for sure. Chris in particular said that she didn't have a lot to offer up, but she actually kind of did have a lot of cool things to say, but she said that she had an experience many years ago, like 25-30 years ago, of waking from a dream and hearing the word “Antares”. Maybe she was in some dream state classroom or her guides were slipping a little information into her consciousness, but she always felt like there was somewhere-out-there this piece of info for her. She's tried researching it from time to time, and never found a whole lot. Maybe she was doing what I was doing. Which was kind of dipping her toe in, saying, Hmm has anybody written about this? But she said that she did know that Antares was some kind of gateway or home star or something. And that she had actually bought this book, The Prism of Lyra, which had some of the quote that I was reading to you, and she felt it was sort of put in her path, and so she picked it up. So anyway, there was a lot of exciting conversation and we were going back and forth, as you do on Facebook threads. It's hard to relate that conversation anecdotally here, but I wrote Chris back and I said, It's very interesting because when I read her comment about Antares, I went back to that same site, because I saw that as a highlighted hyperlink in some of the information, and so I went to that page and found that Antares and Arcturus are the same thing. Now, the reason why this is interesting is because I have been told before, maybe more than once, that my soul origin is Arcturian. There are some practitioners, in particular I know soul re-alignment practitioners, retrieve information about the soul origin, which is this concept that your soul originate some time somewhere out in the galaxy other than here, and then travels here. Anyway, Antares, like we talked about, is the home of these higher dimensional entities, in both physical and non-physical, and people talk about the Doorway to Antares, or the gateway, between the galaxies and to other universes and it's some kind of "interdimensional bridge to Andromeda from our galaxy. Some souls, upon physical incarnation, choose to pass through the Antares gateway to reactivate soul memory" (Lyssa Royal & Keith Priest, The Prism of Lyra) or to give them layers of ability and consciousness that they need to exist within our dimension. So, again, that's not something I channeled. That's something I read. But, here on earth, a lot of the people that are referred to as Starseeds, actually come from Arcturus, or Antares. They are highly sensitive, highly intellectual, usually very empathic, they tend to be a little more withdrawn and reserved. So, one other Automatic Intuition person, Penelope, said - she chimed in a little later because she's in a different time zone - she's in Hawaii! She said that she works with an Arcturian consciousness in her healing work. Lots of cobalt blue, she says, very powerful, intelligent, compassionate energy. And she wrote to me and said, it makes sense to me if your soul group of origin is Arcturus that Arcturian energy would be present in your attunements. So meaning, well if your soul origin is Arcturian, then you would produce this energetic guided meditation that would have some of that type of energy to it. Okay, so yeah, that makes sense. And she also said that Arcturus is the guiding star for Polynesian wayfarers. So, like I said, Penny is in Hawaii. I met Mark Watson in Hawaii. There’s a connection emerging around Hawaii. Meanwhile, I kid you not, I had to go to Walmart. While all this conversation was going on, and I am in Walmart and I get a text from my friend Jeff. Jeff is someone that I met in Hawaii, at that conference. I believe actually prior to even getting there, I knew that he was there and I feel that one of the reasons why I went to Hawaii at that time was to connect with him. He's one of those people that is a soul brother to me and Jeff very much functions in my life as kind of my private psychic. Like, if i'm spinning out of control, that's who I'm contacting. And so he's also a friend and he has access to the Automatic Intuition community as a kind of anchor point for me because he was there having the conversation with me about the program as I was developing it. And so he's always been sort of someone that I tag team in a lot of my work, and Jeff also listens to this podcast, so I'm sure he's like, jumping up and down right now really excited that I'm talking about him. Hey Jeff! So yeah, I didn't even know at the time that Jeff and I were texting, I didn't even think about the Hawaii thing. That has all come up since Penny contacted me. She has actually offered to do a session with me some time this week so I can experience this energy that she's working with, which is very cool, and very generous of her. And I'm excited to see what comes of this. So there could be more parts to this story. Anyway, Jeff is texting me. I'm at Walmart. He's like, Ohmygod I'm loving this conversation that's going on in your AI group. And then he says to me, I'm Arcturian too! And I said, Okay, so how did you come to know that? And he said, kind of the same thing I did. That a psychic told him that, or maybe it was a channel. But he did mention one thing. He said, whoever told him that was also dead on about a lot of other details. There was a lot of confirmation affirmation about her other information, which made him kind of more likely to take that on board. And it was really funny because, as we're talking about it, I didn't want to give him the sense that I was tearing anything down, so I typed, “I don’t NOT believe in it." And it was one of those instances where your texts cross and you are typing each other at the same time and he typed the same thing to me. "I don't NOT believe in it." And so, that's a really important part of the puzzle here, for me personally is, I don't really experience this. I'm not drawn to it. It doesn't come through for me in readings. I don't dream about it. I don't find it showing up in automatic writing sessions that I do. I'm not channeling it. Nothing like that. And that doesn't mean that it's not real. It doesn't mean it's not interesting to me. It definitely doesn't mean that you shouldn't pursue it if it's something coming through for you, because I absolutely would support you in doing that. I really do try not to judge it. It could ALL be 100% true. We could all cross to the other side and find out, Wow! All that crap that Slade was talking about in episode 50 was dead on! So the thing about this type of information, as I was reading this website and I was kind of trying to evaluate which websites I felt were a little bit more reputable than the others, and as Shawn was saying, there are so many people online who are channeling this information. Being told that I have a soul origin in Arcturus is kind of a type of information that really cannot be confirmed. Now, it is interesting that more than one person has told me that. So I haven't had a lot of conversations with people that have said, Oh, your soul origin is this, and your soul origin is this. It's only happened a couple times and I was told the same thing. So that kind of is a quasi-confirmation thing, right? So if there's something to it, there's definitely a pattern there. I think three people have told me that. And here's the thing - no one has ever told me my soul origin was something else. The only people who have ever even brought that subject up to me have told me the exact same thing. So I do think that's a little interesting. But, in my readings, if you get a reading with me, I will give you spirit guide information if it's something that you specifically ask for. And information about who your guides are, how they're presenting to me, if they have names that they're giving me, all that kind of stuff. But even then, I try to introduce some way of confirming that information and what I usually do is I request that you receive signs and synchronicities. Like, really just a ton of them to corroborate that information. And I get back some really cool stories post-reading from people who write me back that same day and often have these synchronicities with the names. I've had it happen with some really, really unusual names too. We're not just talking about Johns and Marys here. I've had it happen in some really - like, that needs its own episode. So I'll make note to do an episode about spirit guide names, right? And why I think that there's something to them and what I think it's all about and how it works and all that kind of stuff. Because I know some psychics have an attitude that spirit guide names are BS and that you shouldn't give them at all. I feel differently about it and maybe I need to come back and explain all that in a separate episode, since you like the woo woo stuff so much. So anyway, I try to do something, even when I am bringing through information that just literally can't be corroborated. I mean, I could be telling you anything. Even with good intentions, but how can we get some kind of feedback from outside our own heads? In the real world. To kind of show up and corroborate that a little bit. And so, we do have an exercise that I do in that context. I don’t know how I feel about just calling everything “channeled” as if that is a blank check. I'm a little bit prickly about that whole concept. I admit. When somebody says, Oh, this is channeled information, I kind of think, Okay... I'm immediately... there's a skeptical filter there. I admit it. It's a response that I have. But, if the wisdom that's coming through in this channeled information is applicable and useful and insightful, I'm less likely to question the source. I don't really care about the source. For me, if someone is bringing through information that's really fascinating and useful and shifts your mind, then that's what counts, right? And so, I definitely think if you look at some of the channeled information that's most popular, you think about Esther Hicks or even our own friend, Frank Butterfield. If you listen to Frank and Paul and some of the stuff that he brings through, it's really, like I take that information on. I have a use for it. It's not like he's just babbling about some planet off in some other part of the Universe and just painting a pretty picture of what it looks like there. He's usually instructing and teaching wisdom about the human condition and how we think about things and how we can think about them differntly. So that is one of the ways I tend to judge the channeled information. So I don't judge whether or not it is channeled, or where the source might be. I just sort of judge the information itself. Is that useful to us? That's where I'm at. Fewer hearts and flowers. Fewer abstracts. Just random things that can't be confirmed. If the information has no bearing on us or our experience, quite honestly it could be science fiction. It’s okay. I like science fiction. I think it is a platform for the story of humanity as a whole, as a species, at a much higher level. It makes philosophy and anthropology and science and biology all really accessible to popular thought. It gives us a way of thinking about ourselves as one thing. And that is something that you will see in science fiction more than any other kind of story telling. And that's one of the things that people who are fans of science fiction, especially the high brow stuff. That's what we are there to get from it. So... People don’t ask me super esoteric questions during readings. They usually want to know about their lives and how to impact the situations that they're living through in some kind of practical way. BOTTOM LINE: I believe it’s irrelevant whether I intend any of this. Whether I intentionally am Arcturian and I'm creating Attunements with Arcturian energy and that's my thing and I'm really in to it, or whether or not I'm just, happen to be doing it within this soup of stuff. So that it is a part of it. It’s interesting though, to me, that I could create something that brings that through without necessarily willfully intending to so. And so that's the reason why my whole fascination with this subject has kind of come to a head. Like, how is it that I've created something that I don't get blue-aliens from. But everyone, not everyone, a lot of people, there's a pattern of clients and students who, in accessing my work, access these blue-skinned aliens. The thing is, if it is true that there is a galactic federation — I kind of hope so. I would love to think this is true and actually happening. Sidebar: I kind of think that we’re probably the North Korea of the galactic neighborhood. You know what I'm saying? I think I come away with a thought, as I'm processing all this stuff about the blue-skinned aliens. I can still serve that greater good by introducing intuitives to it who may channel it. Or who may connect with it. Who may use it willfully, or may use it indirectly. I don't at all have a sense that, Ooo, demons are trying to talk to us or anything like that. Don't go there with this. Nothing about this feels like that to me. I know there's some people with some religious programming who are going to go down that well and I'm just here to say, don't. No. And don't bring that to me, by the way. Because I don't need to hear about that. I don't believe it. So, I do believe that even as I'm bopping around doing what I do, that I could be inadvertently serving a galactic federation that wants to see humanity ascend. And if that's what's happening, I'm cool with that.

This week is a long personal introduction with reflections on the show's first year, the most popular episodes, what that has shown me about you guys, and where we're going in the future. There is also a shorter segment with a message about creativity and purpose and your duty to dedicate yourself to the tasks you’ve been given. TOP 10 EPISODES Erin Pavlina on Past Lives, Astral Projection & the Other Side Blocked from Hearing Your Spirit Guides How to F* up Your Ability to Manifest Repeating Numbers with Laurra Warnke A Channeled Message about Life Purpose Stranger Angels: Part 1 Love & Money Personified with Morgana Rae A Sign or a Coincidence? Recognizing Your Higher Self with Heather Alice Shea About Channeling with Frank Butterfield ALSO MENTIONED ON THE SHOW: Frank Butterfield & Lori Ference on Leaders' Call to Adventure: Ep 10, Ep 11, Ep16 Seth Godin (on true fans) The Grand Opening Shift Your Spirits Article ARCHIVE 1000 True Fans by Kevin Kelly The War of Art by Steven Pressfield Shift Your Spirits on SPOTIFY HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses Get an intuitive reading with Slade Automatic Intuition BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits Edit your pledge on Patreon TRANSCRIPT You must honor the ideas you’ve already been given if you want to receive more. A few months ago, Shawn, one of my mentoring clients in the Automatic Intuition program presented me with a really exciting prospect — a project that's part channeling, part writing. I was truly excited for him. I thought Wow. That’s a beautiful concept. It’s succinct, the title itself is one of those shining sentence type clairaudient downloads. It honestly reminded me a bit of when I received the idea for Shift Your Spirits. I was thinking, I can see an entire platform that can be built around this. There’s the potential for a practice and a business. And it will really appeal to people. But I didn’t want to overwhelm him with where it could all go. It was an idea that had yet to be executed and brought through. So, the Holidays came, and we know how those months go by, and Shawn contacted me for a session. He said he was lost. He wasn’t sure what to do next. What direction to take. He was kind of waiting for everything to come together. And when we were talking this week he told me that he had successfully learned to do readings, and the feedback from his reading clients is positive. And when I asked him about the channeling project, he said he had no trouble connecting and retrieving those channeled messages. All that was really missing, the sense of direction, in my observation, was he just needed to dedicate himself to this project. To dedicate time in his schedule either every day or on a 3x3 Strategy. He said that word DEDICATE was the marching orders he was hoping for. I experience this all the time in my fiction. I have lists of ideas for novels and stories. I have two books on my desk laid open in a sloppy state of word surgery, sequels to my novel Havenwood. And I feel uninspired by them. Last autumn I kept wanting some really BIG idea to strike me. To land in my lap and light me up so that all I could think about was writing it. I kept trying to make that idea come. I tried to prime that pump and drag it out of the sky. To draw down the moon, to raise a cone of power, and the silence from my guides, from my muse, was actually painful. I obsessed over the absence of the next big idea. I finally gave up. I dedicated myself to the projects on my desk. The ones my readers are waiting for and expecting. I’m not in love with them. I’m not on fire. I was when I first started to plot them, maybe, but that beautiful brainstormy part of the process had already come and left me with a big pile of work. In absence of anything better to do during my writing time, I went back to working on my current books. I am about a month away from the end of a four month writing stretch. The drafting of this current book will soon shift into the editing process. And then last week I had a story come. A bolt from the blue. A lightning. I sat up in bed, just before drifting off, and reached for my tablet to furiously type some notes. That’s what I was waiting for. That’s the kind of idea, burst of inspiration, I wanted 6 months ago. But I believe with all my heart, it was given because I followed through on the ones I’d been given before. Why would they give me more, if I’m only going to lay them aside and demand another one? Doesn’t it make sense if the muses and the guides are giving out assignments, they give the best ones to those with a track record of following through? You have to honor the ideas you're given. Regardless of how they might be critically received, whether or not they will sell, whether they become a replacement career or remain a hobby, if the Divine is delivering plans and ideas to you, it is your duty to execute them, to bring them through. You've been chosen. You've been interrogating your divinity (your creativity) about your purpose: What should you do? What should you make? Who should you make it for? And if these questions have only left you spinning in hesitation -- paralysis, blocks -- then ask your work what it needs. How can you best honor the Inspiration itself? What is the Idea asking you to do? What action does your Art require your inner Artist to take? If you're going to be true to your creative gifts, you must honor the ideas you’ve been given.

Susan Hyatt is a master certified life coach, weight loss expert, and the author of BARE. She’s the creator of the trademarked BARE Process, the BARE Deck, a podcast called BARE, and an online community called BARE DAILY. We talk about: Helping women stop dieting How you know the inner voices are not your higher self How to silence the voice of the Inner Mean Girl Flipping the dialogue away from self-violent thoughts "There's no upside to violent self-thoughts. They don't help in any way," Susan says. "The more you allow yourself to be seen and take up space, the more you can conquer those voices that say you shouldn't." MENTIONED ON THE SHOW If I'm So Smart, Why Can't I Lose Weight? by Brooke Castillo GUEST LINKS - SUSAN HYATT shyatt.com BARE daily BARE Podcast BARE by Susan Hyatt (the book) HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses Get an intuitive reading with Slade Automatic Intuition BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits Edit your pledge on Patreon TRANSCRIPT Susan: I help people get what they want. Slade: What does that mean? Susan: That means, so when you say to people, I'm a life coach, still most of the population has no idea what that means. Theres an elderly woman on a plane that thought that meant I was a hospice worker. And so I look at it more as a conversation starter. So I'm not, if I just say, I'm a life coach, people's eyes kind of glaze over and then they are like, Oh, okay. If I say, I help opoeple get what they want, then they're like, WHAAAT? Say more! And then it's a conversation I'm having about, I'm a life coach and an author and I specialize in helping women stop dieting. Sometimes I just say, I help women stop dieting and you can see, I've written a couple funny stories because especially women are like, What?? You help them stop?? What would you do that? Because we're so immersed in diet culture. People think that dieting is being healthy and it's actually the opposite of that. Slade: Hnm.. How did that land in your lap, by the way? How did that become your thing? Susan: Well, it became my thing because I was 35 - 40 pounds over my natural weight when my first year as a life coach. And I knew that there were underlying issues about that. And I felt like, Hahaha it was my final frontier to conquer. It wasn't, but it certainly was one issue that I needed to deal with. And I hired a weight loss coach named Brook Castillo who's amazing, and she has this great book, If I'm So Smart, Why Can't I Lose Weight? And what we really did was dive in to the emotional side of eating, which really rocked my world. And I lost that weight within about six months. And I was somebody who I joke, that I was, I really had a PhD in being a couch potato. I mean, I refused to exercise, I didn't want anyone telling me what I could or couldn't eat, and it really rocked my world. And I thought, If I can lose this extra weight, then I want to help other women do it. And so I became, I added weight loss coaching to my repertoire. And what I started to notice after coaching hundreds of women was, I was really spending the bulk of my time, because I could help anybody lose weight. It's really the inner deep work that makes weight loss sustainable, and it has nothing, I promise, to do with calories in, calories out, no pain no gain, all that stuff we're taught. It's really about, Is this woman cherishing herself, loving herself, giving herself enough daily pleasure so that she's not getting her entertainment from food, so that she's not getting her comfort from food, so that she's not numbing out. And I really started to notice that my clients, I could help them lose 50, 100 pounds, and then they would start complaining about other parts of their bodies. So yes, they had lost the weight, but now they were fixated on stretch marks, or, I still have a muffin top, or, Maybe I should get cosmetic surgery. And I started focusing on learning how to love your body as it is, right now. And THEN we'll do this other stuff. And BINGO! Everything changed. And so I developed this process called BARE, and it's really a process of bringing a woman back to herself. And figuring out that diet just keeps you on this deprivation cycle that you can't win. And the diet industry's actually counting on that. It's like, I think the latest statistic, it's a over 100 billion dollar industry and it's designed to keep you dissatisfied with how you look so that you keep spending money trying to become something else . Slade: Wow. Do you remember what the breaking point was for you? The shift that happened in your own mindset. I mean, now, working with the other clients, you were able to see it from outside and observe it in controlled environment. But when that happened to you, can you go back and remember what that mindset shift was? Susan: Yeah, I can remember. There was this moment, it was, I think maybe I had lost about 16 pounds of the 35 to 40, and we were going on spring break vacation and my daughter at the time was maybe 7. And I bought a new bikini and I was so excited in the store about having this bathing suit. And I remember my coach wanted me, she made a joke about a client of hers that she had asked to take a picture of herself in a swimsuit and send it to her. And when the photo arrived, it was a photo of her client flipping her off. And I started laughing and I said, "Don't ever assign that to me." And she was like, "Oh, really?? That's your homework then!" And so I have my daughter, I put my swimsuit on, I was actually feeling great. My little 8-year old Emily takes a photo of me and I felt fine the entire process. Until I looked at the photo on my big desktop screen. And all of a sudden, all of these really negative thoughts started flooding in. That were still there about, Oh, you don't look as good as you thought, and just really self-violent thoughts that almost all women have about their bodies. And I thought, You've got some real work to do. And I often think about, I was doing a webinar yesterday and I was talking about this. When you look at little kids. Say a film crew shows up at an elementary school, little kids are fighting, shoving each other out of the way to be seen on camera. This is an exciting thing, like, Look at me, I'm on TV! And at some point, we receive messages from either family of origin or culture at large that the way that you look is not acceptable. And by the time we reach our age, we're so full of these messages that we should look a certain way and we're not good enough. And in that moment when I looked at myself on screen, I was like, You have got to figure out how to be like that again. Be like, There I am! Look at me! And show up. And stop this hiding because you have some cellulite or whatever it might be. And that was really a moment, an AHA moment, a breaking point moment, a moment where I shifted and decided to devote myself to figuring that out. And I did! And I can tell you that people are always asking me, I don't understand how you get all that stuff done. And I can tell you, the reason I get so much stuff done, is because I'm no longer obsessing about food and body and how I look. Slade: Mmm... Tell me about, well, first I have to tell you. You probably know this about me but I like to personify the archetypes, I like to communicate with voices, a lot of the work I do with people is around policing the negative self talk. You know, it's really about learning how to, not only identify that, but one of the things that you pointed out was, these voices come from your family and society. They don't come from your higher self. They don't come from little kid you. You've got them from somewhere. You took them on, you download them, and you call them your own thoughts and they're really not. I noticed when I was looking at your website, before the interview, that you have an archetype called the Inner Mean Girl. Tell me about her. Is that who it is that's saying all these mean things? Susan: Yes! And you're absolutely right. These thoughts that we absorb and take on as our own, we were not born into this world with those kind of beliefs. We picked them up along the way and yeah, your inner mean girl is the one saying really horrible things to you about yourself that are untrue and the way that you know they're not true is because they make you feel horrible. And I think most women think that that is because they talk with their girlfriends, they talk with their mom, they talk with other people and everybody goes, "Oh yeah! Me too!" And so they think, Well that's normal and that's just the way it is. But it is prevalent in our culture but it's not what we were meant to experience, and so we have to clap back at that and tell the mean girl to have a seat and educate her on how you want to be treated. And you can flip the dialogue on that and practice talking back to her and saying kind things, because, listen, even if you want to argue with me and say, No, but she's right. I DO need to lose weight. I don't exercise. I am lazy. You've to to ask yourself different questions and tell yourself different things so that you change your behaviour, but there's no upside to self-violent thoughts, if you haven't noticed. There's no upside to it. Slade: Right. Susan: It doesn't help in any way. Slade: So you recently landed a big book deal. And I know this because we're friends on Facebook and you've been talking about the process and everything. Is this book deal, The BARE Message, is that what this is about? Tell me about the book. Susan: The book is called BARE, and we're still working on the subtitle. But thank you very much. Yes, I'm so excited to have a book deal for it. It's basically - Slade: Yay! Congrats! Susan: Thank you!!! I'm so stoked! Actually, just had a meeting with my publishing team yesterday, and they are on it. It's gonna be fire. I cannot wait for it to hit. Actually, pre-sale, the book is not going to be out until January of 2019, so there's a big process to getting these books out into the world, and I'm slightly impatient... Slade: Yeah... Susan: I would like it to be in your hands tomorrow, but pre-orders, actually, will start fairly soon, but the books will not ship until January. And yes, it's a book full of personal stories and client stories and it walks you through the BARE process. And the thing that I like about the BARE process is - so when you get the book, it's a story, and then there's a challenge. So it gets you taking action immediately. Side note, I have a podcast, the BARE podcast, which is going to drop on iTunes maybe by next week, so people, while they're waliting on the book, can check out the podcast. I'm dropping an entire season at once, so it can walk people through... there's 8 episodes in season 1. It walks people through the BARE process. You can do it on your own or you can decide to hire a coach to help you. Slade: Oh! Okay. You also have, for people who don't want to wait, who want to dive in and work with it, this platform, this work, this material exists in various forms. You have a community, an online community around it already, right? Susan: Yeah, yeah! It's called BARE Daily. The way that it's set up is, if someone joins the community, they get access, a username and password to an online classroom that has the BARE process in videos, so you can watch a video, there's homework assignments, there's tons of stuff in there. And then, in the private forum, I'm in there every day and so are my BARE coaches. So let's say you sign up and you start doing the BARE process, and you hit a wall or you have an issue, which you will. Coaches are there 24/7 to coach you through what's happening in the forum. So it's really a sweet set up. Slade: I have to ask you this question. I love to ask everyone this, and I'm trying to learn to ask it in a more postitive way, but, as someone who's spent some time now in the personal development world, what do you most hope to change about the conversation? Susan: So many things, Slade. So many things. Primarily, I want to disrupt diet culture. So the segment of the self-help industry that focuses on food, body and weight, I want to change the conversation from fear and deprivation to pleasure, love, positivity. So that's number one. People who are promoting unhealthy, unsustainable lifestyle changes, things that you wrap your body in, or starve yourself. All these kinds of things. I definitely want to, not flip the switch, flip the table on those folks. And then, also, the part of the self-help industry that is selling a bill of goods around, how do I say this? So I'm a big believer in spiritual grease plus elbow grease. Meaning, Yes, the Universe has your back. Yes, the Universe is conspiring in your favour. And whatever higher power you believe in, yes, your higher power, your higher self wants you to have everything that you crave. But you have to couple that faith in belief with action. And so, I get pretty worn out with people who are selling the idea that if you just believe it hard enough, it will happen. Slade: Mmm... yeah. Like the law of attraction method, I mean, not like specifically, but some of that stuff. Like thinking it will be true, feel your way into the reality, that kind of stuff? Susan: Yeah, because it's only part of the story. I have dear friends who are big law of attraction teachers, and I think people misunderstand it and they think, Well if I pay this money and I make a vision board, and I just believe that I'm going to own a Mercedes, and it's going to appear in my driveway... And tomorrow, I'm going to be dancing with Cardi B and Bruno Mars. It's gonna happen. Yes, if you do some things to put yourself in the path of Cardi B, if you do some work and go to the Mercedes dealership, you know? Slade: Right. Susan: It's just, I believe in magic, I believe in miracles, but I grew up Catholic. I'm a recovered Catholic. But my mother used to always say, God helps those who help themselves! And I guess that's really stuck with me, because I believe that to be true that, yes these miraculous things can happen, but you have to get out of your own way and do some work. Slade: I actually believe that too and I wasn't even indoctrinated to believe it. But that line, you know, God helps those who help themselves, really does work for me. You know, if somebody says it to me and I'm like, Amen! You know what I mean? Susan: Hallelujah! Slade: And I do write and teach law of attraction stuff in hopefully my corrected methods but, one of the things I like to introduce into the conversation is that, what you describe that the vision board thing is like working with one element as opposed to all the sacred elements. It's like legs on a stool kind of thing. You've got some other legs you've got to attach to this thing before it'll stand up. Susan: Yeah! And I totally, I mean I do vision board workshops online. It's not... I love all those things. They just have to be combined, like you said, with other practices. Slade: Well that's one of the reasons I wanted you to be on here. Because this is fewer hearts and flowers, we still love all the spiritual stuff, right? And the thing I love about you is you embody that very down to earth use of these things as tools. It's not an airy fairy thing for you. You love to show yourself doing it. You're on camera a lot. People can Facebook live right into your office on a daily basis. Susan: Yeah, it's true. Slade: And I love that about you too because you're never full hair and make up and wearing a glitter gown, except in a photo shoot, which you do. You get that out of your system. Susan: You gotta bring the big guns in sometimes, but yeah, on a daily basis I'm typically in my work out clothes with no make up. Slade: Well, you know what? That was very inspiring to me as I was developing this podcast and putting it out, because one of the pieces of advice that I got was, just don't worry about the intro music and the this and the that at the other thing. It's about you speaking, it's about the content, and it's about letting people hear you and the guests that you connect with. Just think of it as a big voice mail. Just take it down a notch. And that was very freeing for me. And you and I had a little interaction on Facebook probably about a year ago about that whole thing and you encouraged me. You were like, Yeah, people need to see you. Susan: Hmm? Slade: That probably will be my next step. Is to get to let my face be out there more. But that's one of those things... Susan: Dude! Why would you not let your face be seen??? You're a hottie! Slade: Because! Susan: McHotterson! You are depriving your audience of... You will be blessing the interwebs with your face. Slade: Alright. Susan: I need to come over there and smack you around. Slade: Well you'll be proud to know that I'm going to do my first Facebook live next week. For my - Susan: Next week?! How about this afternoon?? Slade: Well because it's a training for my Automatic Intuition peeps, so they get to be exposed to me first. But I was thinking about it and I was like, Yeah, you know what? I'm just going to sit on camera and... And I totally thought I 'm going to do this Susan Hyatt style. That you were my inspiration for that. Susan: That's awesome. And I have to say, that's part of the BARE process. Is to make you seen and be seen. So you have to, the more you allow yourself to be seen and take up space, the more you can conquer those voices that say that you shouldn't, that you don't look alright, like, whatever. Put yourselves out there, people. Slade: Well that was kind of my last big question for you, was about the whole make a scene concept. We're all rooting for you, living through you vicariously, as you're making your scenes and posting about that. And people just have to follow you online to get the full experience of what I'm talking about, because it unfolds, as you encounter things in your daily life and you share it. So, I used to, my friends in college actually used to call me Julie Sugarbaker, and I was notorious for telling some people off. You know what I mean? And I was really good at it. But I reached a point where I kind of had to dial back a lot of my anger. I had to go all the way back, strip back down and work my way back up again, and as we all know, this last year or so has been very trying when it comes to posting things online about your, the things that you're pissed about. I always look at you and I'm like, How is she coming out smelling like a rose every time? Because you are so good at doing something. Like, if I do what you do, I end up in a flame war. I mean... Susan: Oh! You mean with your following. People get mad. Slade: Yes! Like, you are so good at treading the line on making the scene and sharing the fact that you're pissed and putting it out there and calling stuff out without, somehow, ending up in tears at the end of the day and you wasted your whole day arguing with people online. So I'm wondering, What am I missing? Where do we draw the line there? How do you police that energy? Susan: So I have an unfair advantage, and my unfair advantage is that I have, for 19 years, parented a man named Ryan Hyatt. And Ryan Hyatt is some of the biggest most challenging energy that you could encounter. So I feel like I have been in boot camp with how to have boundaries, express feelings, call it like it is, in a way that doesn't set fire to everything. Sometimes I do want to set fire to everything, so there's number one. So sorry Slade, I'm going to have to ship Ryan off to you so that you can get some practice with that before, but... Secondly, I think I'm always, one of the things that I teach in writing, or when I'm training coaches on how to come up with content, how to come up with content for Facebook, how to come up with content for your blog, for your podcast, for whatever reason, a fellow Sugarbaker over here, I have always been able to come up with topics more readily, more easily, if I think about what has irritated me or pissed me off lately. And then what I do is say, Okay, I'm really irritated about whatever, these people who are selling diets. Then I try to come up, before I open my mouth, I try to come up with the life coachy solution to it, so that it's not just a rant. That I'm offering my displeasure, and I'm all, Let me tell you something, but I couch it in, Well here's what you could do for yourself if you're experiencing this too. And so I think that's what keeps it from just being something that would ruin someone's day. My day, your day, whatever. Slade: I like it. Susan: Yeah. So there's a little bit... Then also, you know it, I do get hate mail, I do get people who disagree and who will post things, but I shut it down pretty quickly. I don't let them have a platform on my platform. I'm open minded, so if they're talking about something respectfully and they just disagree, that's fine. But if they're trying to set fire to my Facebook thread, then they're immediately blocked. That's it. You don't get to come over on my page and do that. Sorry. Slade: You know what? I actually realized as you were saying this that, I teach this in terms of, journalling. I used to keep diaries a lot and that's a big tool for me and at some point I realized, it was nothing but whining. And when I did Morning Pages for the first time, the Julia Cameron style, I remember being like, You know what? I'm not just going to bitch every morning for 15 minutes. How's that a way to start the day? So I made a rule with myself that the only way that I can mention something that was wrong in my diary is if I put a potential solution there. Or, I am broke, here's what I'm going to do about it, kind of thing. And I teach that to people a lot. You can't, it's one thing to, like you said, it's one thing to rant, and it's one thing to vent, but I think even venting in your private space, without having constructive context, is damaging. You're just letting the inner mean girl have a dance party in your head. Susan: Right. Slade: So, what's next for you? You've got this big book coming out but it's going to take awhile. So what are you going to do in the meantime? Susan: So what I'm doing in the meantime is, I'm trying to build my BARE membership community up and I am spending a lot of time inside there. We have cooking classes and exercise classes... Just all kinds of great content that happens privately in there. I'll be spending most of my time in there. I'm also doing some international retreats this year. One to Italy that's already sold out and one to England and maybe one to Paris. That's one of my favorite cities. And then I'm training a bunch of BARE coaches, so coaches in the BARE methodology, so that they can spread this far and wide, and just on my regular! Slade: It must be fun to be you. Susan: It IS fun to be me! And I tell you, I remind myself of that every morning when my inner mean girl wants to whine about how much she has to do. I slap her around and tell her she is so lucky, that she's to stay in the miracle and be grateful for this practice and this business and this life. Slade: Mmm... Susan, I truly do love your energy. I could talk to you all day long, and one of the reasons why I had to get you on my show is because you'll probably be too famous next year to be on my show. Susan: Stop it! Never too famous for you. Slade: Anyway, it was fantastic to get to capture a chat with you and introduce you to some of my peeps who may not have heard of you before. So tell everyone where where they can go to find you online. Susan: Thank you so much, by the way. This was a delight. My website URL, is SHyatt.com. And then you can follow me on Instragram @SusanHyatt, or on also Facebook, same handle. Thank you for coming on the show Susan. Susan: Thank you! Thanks again for listening to the Shift Your Spirits podcast. For show notes, links, and all the past episodes please visit www.shiftyourspirits.com You can subscribe in iTunes or Stitcher or whatever app you use to access podcasts. If you’d like to get an intuitive reading with me or download a free ebook and meditation to help you connect with your guides please go to https://sladeroberson.com/ and if you’re interested in my professional intuitive training program, you can start the course for free by downloading the Attunement at https://automaticintuition.com/

Morgana Rae is the international #1 best selling author of Financial Alchemy: 12 Months of Magic & Manifestation, winner of WE Magazine's "Top Women In Ecommerce” Award, and widely regarded to be the world’s leading Relationship with Money coach. "The Universe doesn't require perfection." - Morgana Rae One of my favorite quotes in this interview is: "To my Law of Attraction friends, don't cheat yourself out of the depths of your despair. It's very, very useful; because it gives you something to push off of. Let yourself sink to the bottom of the pool." Morgana says if you've been feeling like a loser because you're doing everything "right" and you're still getting crappy results, you're either protecting yourself or birthing something new. If you're protecting yourself, you need to identify the monster you're protecting yourself from and get rid of it. "If your Money was a person, who would Money be?" GUEST LINKS - Morgana Rae MorganaRae.com Free 4-Part Video Series Financial Alchemy: Twelve Months of Magic & Manifestation by Morgana Rae Abundance & Prosperity Blog HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses Get an intuitive reading with Slade Automatic Intuition BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits Edit your pledge on Patreon TRANSCRIPT Morgana: Hi! My name is Morgana Rae. I have been a life and business success coach since 1996. I started out working with people in Hollywood and movie stars and producers and directors. And then, something took a turn. Around 2003, when I became really well known for my unique and weird approach to coaching relationship with money, and I gotta say, your wealth is in your weirdness. Because the way I approach relationship with money, there is nothing else like that out there. And there was so much desire for what I was saying that I kind of pivoted and made that what I call my pain door. Like the entry way for transformation. So I'm sure I'll be talking about how I approach transforming your relationship with money from this monster of scarcity into this honey of love and abundance, and, FYI, when I talk about relationship with money, and believe me, oh my god, my clients have made so many millions of dollars over the years and tens of millions of dollars and it's really interesting watching the arc of my career and how the numbers have been getting progressively bigger and bigger over the years. So yeah, my stuff is really good. For cash and, full disclosure, my work actually has nothing to do with money. When I'm teaching and talking about relationship with money, I'm really talking about your relationship with life. I've just found that money and our money pains and our money issues are a really useful metaphor for the deepest, darkest, most tender vulnerabilities in our relationship with life. Namely our relationship with money is a reflection of our own feelings about our own lovability, our own worth and our safety in the world. So that's what I do. Slade: Oh, wonderful. The people who have been following me for the last 12 years have heard me speak about you many times, I'm sure. Listen I have to tell you how I discovered you. I heard you on a radio show with Dr. Meg Blackburn-Losey back in 2006. Do you remember her? Morgana: Yes! My god, that was so long ago! Slade: I know! So I had just launched Shift Your Spirits as a blog, and I was pretty broke at the time. And I was re-inventing my entire life. I didn't even know how much I can look back at 2006 and see it as this major milestone, just fork in the road. And of course I am no stranger to communicating with spirit entities. But what a lot of people don't even realize about that is, for me, communicating with the Archetypes in particular is something that I’ve done almost my entire life, I mean, I'm one of those people who, I personify everything - my cars have names, my computers have names. Morgana: I get it. Slade: Yeah! So when I heard you ask that question If Money Were a Person, Who Would Money Be… That, I was like, I know exactly what she's doing. And I just immediately went into that sort of automatic writing practice that I had, and my sort of spiritual dialoging, and I went there. I mean I got it almost 100% and I can honestly tell you that I can trace a lot of the success of this brand and platform that I've created to that part of the process. I mean, you were definitely an impact, and I know that you've told the story a lot of times about how that kind of, I call something like that a Shining Sentence. Like, one of those things that just lands in your lap. It's a divinely communicated concept or name or title and I was wondering if you would speak a little about when that first appeared to you. That concept. How did that come about? Morgana: Okay. Well first of all, it was not elegant. And I was not wearing white robes and meditating and feeling peaceful. It's more a great cosmic joke, and, by the way, to anybody listening, who has been struggling and feeling like a failure or a loser or hopeless, congratulations. Especially if you're somebody who's been doing everybody's programs and doing what you're told you're supposed to do, like going to school, getting good grades, hiring a coach, doing what you're told, and you're still getting crap results, I am a member of that club. And I have come to a couple of conclusions, being on this planet for awhile. If you are doing everything you're supposed to be doing, you know, and you're putting in your best effort, and by the way, the Universe does not require perfection. It does not require perfection. Let's say you're just giving it your best effort and it just doesn't make sense why you're still not seeing results, whether it's money, or career, or love, or health. And you're feeling hated and discouraged and all that kind of stuff. I believe, from my experience of coaching many, many, many thousands of people over the last couple of decades, that when that's going on, you are protecting yourself from this result. You are unconsciously protecting yourself from what you are consciously pursing, and by the way, there are always really, really good reasons. You are not a loser. You're actually quite successful at protecting yourself from a perceived threat. And we need to uncover that so we can do something about it. And then there's also the possibility that you are birthing something new. So that was what was going on with me. I had my vision board, and I had my affirmations and I am a good student. You know, National merit scholar, honors in college and you know, taking that good girl student to getting all these certification in coaching and also being really, really good at marketing. And still managing, despite every possible advantage, to make only $100 a month living in Los Angeles, one of the most expensive cities in the world. And this is even after helping new actors and new writers and new directors become celebrities. So I had a reputation People wanted to hire me. And it was like I had superhuman powers to, like a martial artist, to evade getting paid. Really, really impressive and devastating. To the point that, I just kept taking more classes, thinking that, Oh, the next class! And then I'll be able to get paid. Because also I've got this big integrity thing. So I don't want to charge unless I know I can deliver. So I kept getting more coaching certifications and better and better results for clients. And then I would take marketing classes and I remember back in probably 2002, taking a class in Overcoming Sales Objections. And for those who don't know what that is, there are classes that will teach you what to say when somebody says, I can't afford it, or I don't have time, or I have to think about it. There are scripts for that! And being a really good student, I would parry these concerns that clients had, and they would say yes they would hire me. And here's the rub. 7 times in a row. Really think about that. 7. 7 times in a row people said they would hire me and then they didn't show up and they hadn't paid. And after the 7th time, I just ran out of hope. That, it was like the rug of my psychological wellbeing was just ripped out from under me and I plunged into despair. And I remember being in my little one-bedroom apartment and, you know, pulling close those blackout drapes. And just getting on my bed and screaming. I was in so much pain. I was so hurt and frightened and angry and outraged. Because I had done everything. And I still wasn't moving forward and it felt so unfair. And I - it felt like this sadistic cosmic joke that I finally, after all these years, had figured out what I'm here to do. Which is to help people. And I was actually really good at it. In fact, better than a lot of the coaches I knew who were making a lot of money. So I discovered in that moment that I have the capacity to feel superior and inferior at the same time. And I really just wanted to die. And I'm really honest about that. I'm actually - you can't see it, but I'm actually crying right now because money is a really personal thing. It represents our right to survive and the worth that we and society puts on us and then if you dig even deeper, it feels like our lovability. Because our parents were our first experience of money. They fed us, they clothed us, they told us what we were worth. These are the roads that money takes later on. So, by the way, sidebar, any parent issues you have are going to show up in your relationship with money. So here I am, back to my tale of woe. And I'm just lying on the bed, crying and screaming and I'm hating the Universe and I'm feeling deeply hated by the Universe back. And when I cried myself out, to my law of attraction friend, don't cheat yourself out of the depth of your despair. It's very, very useful because it gives you something to push off of. Let yourself just sink to the bottom of the pool. When I cried myself out, I had two thoughts. One was that, for me, Morgana, from southern California, that money had to be my next area of spiritual growth. Mostly because I'm named Morgana and I'm from southern California so spirituality kind of comes easy to me. I don't have the same conflicted feelings around spirituality that I have, say about money. Being this person who wants to be a good person and all that. And I also got curious about what the heck was going on inside of me that couldn't be with money. I just had that idea. What's going on inside of me that can't be with money because Ivy League education, great results for clients, a golden tongue for marketing. It really just didn't make sense. So there's something going on on the inside. And very soon after, within a day or two, I had a session with my coach. Now get this. I'm making $100 a month so I can't even pay rent. But I always made sure that I had a coach, thank god. And my coach, out of the blue, and by the way, I still think he's one of the greatest coaches ever, and this poor guy, just month after month telling me to do stuff and I was doing things and nothing was happening. And then he had this out of the blue moment of brilliance that changed my life forever. So I come to the call and I'm in this dark place and he asked me, and this is where you may want to lean in or pull out your pen. He asked me: If your money was a person, who would your money be? And because I was so fortunate as to be so close to my pain and so raw, that I spontaneously saw my money personified as this big scary dirty violent biker dude who terrified me. And before I made money a person, I had no idea that I had those feelings about money. I didn't know that it was dirty or scary or caused fights. Well, actually once I took a look at that, yeah. Family members, stolen inheritances, people not talking to each other for decades, and things that happened as a child that I, in a very reasonable healthy way, compartmentalized. Because I've always been a person who, if it's a choice between money and relationship, I choose love and relationship, which is a very healthy decision until it starts to not be. But anyway, so I see this biker and I experience how I feel about him. And by the way, this is crucial. It wasn't an intellectual exercise. It's - I could - it was a full body experience where I realized, I could see in my mind's eye, that if I were at a live event with this guy, like I saw myself at this outdoor event, I would have my eye on him constantly to create maximum distance between us. And I had one of those big lightbulb moments in that instance. Oh My God. That's what I was doing with money. So while I was tirelessly taking classes, marketing my heart out, having enrollment conversations, doing everything I was supposed to be doing and with the vision boards and the millionaire mindset and the taglines and the affimrations and all that. I was creating maximum distance between myself and money because it was dangerous. And ultimately could kill me. And that's really dark stuff. And it was really clear to me that I could not have money in my life if that guy was my money. Because when it's a person, it becomes real, in a way that's, like, I know a lot of my peers talk about relationship with money. It's become actually a very popular topic in the, you know, over the last 15, 16 years that I've been doing this, and... But when they talk about money, they talk about ideas. I think Harv Eker has a list of rich people beliefs, poor people beliefs, and all of that is very interesting, but that's very surface level. I don't personally believe in say, a millionaire mindset, but I believe in a millionaire heartset, and the mind will follow the heart. So because this biker felt so scary to me, I knew I couldn't possibly have money in my life if this was my relationship with money, so the biker and I had to break up. I had to get rid of him. And my coach pointed out that he wasn't too happy either. So we ended that. By the way, I don't teach it that way anymore. I just lucked out. My process has become a lot more bloodthirsty and I just follow what works for clients and what produces the most dramatic, powerful restuls. But we can get to that later. Slade: Okay. Morgana: So I got rid of the monster. That's the important part. And that created a new problem. Because I lived in Los Angeles. And I just got rid of my relationship with money and that wasn't going to last very long. And I didn't want the monster to come back. I didn't call it a monster then, I called him the biker, but he was monstrous. So I was aware of this emptiness, this vacuum, that I needed to fill really quickly before the biker came back to fill it. So I thought to myself, who could I want in my life so much that I would be willing to have a relationship with this person, even if it's money. And this is a really important frame, because if you've ever been in a horrible relationship, you know that you're not in a hurry to jump into that again. So I was feeling very burnt and gun-shy. And probably would have preferred to stay single and money-free if that had been an option. So it had to be a person first. The relationship first, not the cash. The relationship can never be based on, do this for me, or, what have you done for me lately, because that becomes the money monster again. That takes away your power and makes you dependent and that's a money monster dynamic. So that's my story. I asked myself, well who could I want in my life so much that I would be willing, willing to maybe have this person in my life even though it's money. Because I was feeling very careful. And hallelujah, because I came to the process so in touch with my pain the monster was so real, and the monster was so gone, it was possible to have this immediate experience of the very real feeling new person. Like, Presto! So the new person who popped in, the archetype that I call the Money Honey, happened to be this tall, dark, handsome, clean cut, young, safe, romantic young man in a tuxedo holding a bouquet of red flowers and in love with me. And by the way, that just popped into my consciousness and I was as surprised as anybody. The flowers, the romance, and the idea of money being in love with me was weird! I had never thought that way before, but he felt so real. And this is really important: I also felt how vulnerable he was. Like he really loved me and I had been breaking his heart for years. I have found coaching so many people that the most effective archetypal relationship with the new Money Honey is romantic. Now I have coached a lot of people who have suffered some form of sexual trauma. I think it's - I don't know if it's the people who hire me or if this is representative of the population at large, but it does seem that the majority of people have suffered sexual trauma. So, this is not a predatory hypersexual partner who is going to trample your boundaries. This is going to be very safe, loving relationship that actually is very helpful in reprogramming your romantic and relationship blueprint in the future. That's just another sidebar. So here's this beautiful guy who loved me, who wanted to be with me, and I had a very strong sense of, I had the power, I was the gatekeeper in the relationship. He had always wanted to be with me and I'd been pushing him away. So I asked him what he needed from me so that he could stay with me the way he wanted to. This was all intuitive. And he responded immediately, which is another useful characteristic of having money be a person, is you can have a conversation and get really useful information. So he said to me that he needed me to love him. And to stop treating him like a monster. Now I know that the idea of the love of money brings up a whole biblical kettle of fish. and I have a few things to say on that. First of all, love is not greed. It's not exploitation. It doesn't harm or hurt people. It is not scarcity-based. It is expansive. It is noble. It brings out the best in you as a human being. That is love. Love is love. Greed and all that other stuff is not love. So that's the first part. And then, a friend of mine took a class in ancient Aramaic two years ago and specifically focused on that passage, and that's not what it ever said in the Bible anyway. What it really said was that the obsession and or the worship of money can cause trouble. And I would be the first one to agree with that. And in fact, not just that the worship of money can cause trouble, but it was written in context of slaves. So if you worship money so much that you don't feed your slaves, you're gonna have trouble having healthy slaves. I don't think any of us would dispute that and I don't think we really, despite what certain Republicans in the United States might say currently, I don't think slavery is an acceptable option. So there actually, you know, just, it never ever said the love of money is the root of all evil. And love is not evil. (inaudible: 24:17) The final piece was so, I made this agreement not, and this is the interesting thing, not to finagle or manipulate or get more cash in my life, but because he was such a sweet, vulnerable lovable person, and I didn't want to be a jerk. And I - he deserved love, and I didn't want to hurt him. So I agreed. Because he was worthy of love. And it had nothing to do with cash. So the final step is, we made an agreement. And next time he brought me a client, I would say thank you. Because this is how he would give me gifts. This is how he wooed me. He would give me clients. And what I was doing, when I had this unconscious relationship with the monster was, imagine somebody gave you a sweater and your response was, Ew, that colour! Ugh! And that's kind of what I was doing. He would send me a client and when I would freeze, and hem and haw and get all weird about stating my fee, it was ike I was going, Ew, gross, scary, embarrassing, it's a monster. Like I was asharmed of him. Which is a really awful, unloving way to be. So I got it and I said I would say thank you. And then the funniest thing happened, is the next day, four people called me out of the blue to hire me. And they hired me. At double what I had ever charged before. And, honestly, it was so uncomfortable for me because I had built these years of neurological patterns where my mouth wanted to talk him out of the sale. And I'm sitting there observing myself, right? Sitting on my hands, biting my tongue while everything in me is wanting to shove a sample session down their throat or, you know, nonsense. And I got to practicing, This is my fee, and then the most difficult skill in the world, which is, and then shut up and let them decide for themselves. And I got, you know, the first one was really hard. The second one was less hard and I just kept getting practice and then very quickly I had a full coaching practice and I was raising my rates, and I was starting groups and getting waiting lists, and I travelled the world, getting married, a hundred times in a hundred countries, I lead my exotic Honey Goddess retreats in Bali and I hop on a plane every few weeks to go across the country to visit my dad who has Alzheimer's. Slade: Okay, well wait a minute. You need to tell us, explain this about you getting married multiple times. What's the story about that? Morgana: Well, I am kind of a relationship-obsessed fool. And my best friend the astrologer will confirm that. From an astrological perspective. And, in fact, I had to make money a cute guy just so I could be nice to him. And, I finally met my guy when I was already 45 years old so, you know, men and women listening, dating actually gets better when you get older because people are grown ups. And, including you and me. So I had this idea that I really, I wanted to travel the world with the love of my life and way back in 2012, I made a decision that I just, I had to change my business to make room for that. Have far fewer private clients, digitilize everything, so that I could leave and travel the world with the love of my life. I called that my make out with a cute guy around the world business plan. And I honestly met my husband, whose name online was Travel Guy, eight months later. Slade: So you made this idea to do this before he showed up! Morgana: Yeah. And, by the way, I also spelled it out in my profile. I wrote, This is my top secret fantasy for the two of us, SHH, in my dating profile that everybody can see, right? Because I've been doing e-commerce so long so even my dating profile has e-commerce schtick in it. Slade: Ohmygosh. Morgana: So I wrote, This is my top secret fantasy for the two of us. SHH. Don't tell anybody. I wake up in your arms in India, Italy or Prague and we make love. And then we check our email. And then we go to a museum or a marketplace or we just get lost and we live like that for months. And I gotta tell you, I attracted the most interesting, educated, worldly, awesome guys with that profile. And married one of them. 20 times so far! Slade: Ohmygosh. Mprgana: And so when I was - in 2014, I was already 47 by then. I had just finished leading my goddess retreat in Bali. And my then-boyfriend was in South Africa on a photo safari, shooting animals with a camera, not a gun. And he would skype me at insane hours, like at 3 or 4am, so that he could get me in Indonesia. In fact, he almost got eaten by a lion just crossing from his house in the bush to the building that had the internet. And men are so funny, because I had already figured out that he was the One. He was the first guy I dated in 10 years who didn't have an expiration sign above his head and... But it had to, he had to almost get eaten by a lion for him to think, What kind of a guy does this just to talk to a girl? You know, for five minutes on a bad internet. She must be the One. That's how he figured it out. So he proposed to me and I was like, well first I freaked out because I knew we were getting married. I wasn't worried about that. I just thought it would take him a couple more years to figure it out. So when it came earlier than I expected, all of my commitment issues came screaming to the surface. But I'd already decided, so... I got home on a Thursday, picked him up on a Friday and we eloped within 24 hours. And I thought, Okay, that's that. And then, a couple weeks later, he had an assignment in Puerto Vallarta, and arranged for me to come too so we called that our honeymoon. And we were down in Puerto Vallarta and we were passing by their iconic cathedral, Our Lady of Guadalupe, and he said, Hey, you want to get married again, as a goof. And I was like, Yeah, sure. My kind of, you know, the game in our relationship is, he suggests things and I say yes. Because it's always a great adventure. And, a woman on our tour said, Well, you know, I'm ordained in the U.S. And he said, Great! You're gonna marry us. So we walk to the front of the cathedral, took off our rings. Tammy Lee, our friend, you know, said some stuff about love. Devon, my husband, made up some new vows. We always just make up our vows on the spot and he said some new stuff that really landed in a deep, beautiful place with me. So I start crying because my husband's quite... He does wedding vows really well. And so I'm crying, we share our vows, we put on rings, people in the pews are giving us the thumbs up, we kiss and it was amazing. It was like, it was deeper the second time than the first time. And we came out, we were euphoric, like, Ohmygod! We have to do this everywhere! We have to get married in temples and mosques and a yurt and standing stones and mud huts. We just need to - we need to experience this everywhere! And within a day, he proposed that we get married 100 times in 100 countries. And we just had, we just had this amazing Mayan Mexican magical wedding in Manzanillo (how many Ms can I get in there). And honestly like, I'm such a bad bride. I've never spent more than $20 on a white lacy dress. Sometimes I forget to pack shoes or brushes. You know, I've combed my hair out with my wedding veil. So I'm a horrible bride. But, in my experience, is that it's really, it's not the venue, it's not the dress. Really, it's just the relationship and the vows. And by accidents. I've had a bunch of big fairytale weddings that I didn't plan and I didn't expect because my husband's a travel writer. Some tourism boards in different countries have just spontaneously offered us these magical beautiful weddings. So sometimes it's in a castle and costumes and foreign languages and customs, and sometimes it's just my husband and me in a hotel lobby or park bench, saying, Here, can you read the script? And it's just a beautiful relationship practice that I think everybody should do. It's cheaper honestly than one big expensive party wedding, at least in L.A. and I think that those big expensive weddings, and by the way, if that's what you want, go for it. That's what I wanted when I was in my 20s, not when I was in my 40s. It's a lot of pressure for a baby marriage. Slade: Yeah. Morgana: So, you know, just for who we are, it's really nice to keep getting married and saying, This is important to us, and for me being an insecure attachment theory kind of person, well I'm across the board. Sometimes I'm insecure, sometimes I'm secure and sometimes I'm avoidant, but it's really nice to keep being reminded that I'm loved. Slade: You've taken this thing that has so much pressure and is such a fleeting thing, and there's really a lot of anxiety around it, right? Like, a lot of people feel so much pressure to get it right and then it happens and then it's gone. And you guys have taken away all the anxiety around it and dialed the romance up and then the best part is, you get to do it over and over again. So it's never in the rear view mirror. You know? Morgana: Yeah... Slade: It's always, it's pulling you through the relationship instead of being this gun that goes off at the beginning of the race. It's this... Morgana: Yeah. I don't think any wedding can live up to the pressure of, you only have one and you have to have it perfect. And I don't think weddings were supposed to be like that. It's really supposed to be about the marriage not the party. When we were in Serbia, because my husband had a childhood friend from L.A. whose mom was Serbian and he moved to Serbia, and then fell in love with Eastern Europe's biggest pop star, it's kind of like their Madonna, Bebi Dol. And we got married there and they wanted, his friend wanted a dual wedding. So, okay, I have 100. I can share one. And, we, you know, the guests were all the friends of Devon's friend. And I don't know why, maybe they were just really drunk, but when my husband started saying his wedding vows, which, by the way, were beautiful, a bunch of wedding guests started booing. Slade: Really! Morgana: I kid you not. I've never heard of such a thing. They started booing. I wanted to walk down the steps on my little kitten heels and punch somebody out. It was astonishing and in that moment, I realized that I wasn't going home with any of those people I was going home with the prize, who was standing right in front of me. And I really got, in that moment, that the wedding is not about the venue or the food, or the guests, or the dress or anything. It's - nobody has the power to ruin your wedding. Unless you give it to them. Because really, all that matters is, you are going home with this person that you choose. You get the prize. Oh! And, by the way, I was talking about personifying money and I'm just like you. My business, she's a person. The book I'm about to write, she's another person. They all have their personhood. I don't even create it. They just let me know. And so, because this singlehood, and this loneliness, has been the greatest pain in my life. I've been looking for my guy since I chased Brian Patterson under the piano on his 5th birthday and he was the older man. So, about two months before I met Devon, I did my money process but I did it with a Love monster. Because it was really annoying. Because I could hear myself on interviews, like every week saying, Well, you know, if you're doing everything right and you aren't getting the results, you're protecting yourself. And so you want to uncover what you're protecting yourself from and turn it into a monster and then get rid of the monster. And I would hear myself saying that and I'd be actually thinking to myself, That's what's going on with love. And... but I just - It took me a really long to finally break down and do the process with Love, because that was a really big monster. Even bigger than the money monster. And I honestly believe all money issues are love issues. So I was going to a deeper level and it was so big and so terrifying that it was just so big. I didn't know how I could destroy it or get rid of it. But I did. I gave it my best effort and I met my husband a couple months later. Slade: I wondered if you had reverse engineered this process for the love, for the love itself, and because there does seem to be a trajectory with your relationship that does kind of parallel what happened with your financial life, your financial relationship, and also followed it, in a really... I mean, we could write a book about this. Maybe you are writing a book about this. You said that you're writing a book. What's your next book about? Morgana: My next book is called, Money Goddess. It's a spiritual manifesto for women's personal and economic empowerment. I've been leading my Money Goddess retreats for, I guess, eight years now. And then I did live events in L.A. and a virtual class before that, and I've just been developing this material for years because I have coached, I've always coached men. But I have more personal experience being a woman. And so, my Money Goddess program, my Money Goddess experiences was really addressing the, Okay you change the relationship with money and then what comes up for women? Our relationship with our sexuality, our bodies, our beauty, our lovability, is the first thing that comes up for women. And then our making peace with our victim experience and finding our Life Purpose. Our rage, that we're not allowed to have in society. We're not, you know, we get, We're not supposed to be angry or vengeful or shrill harpies, right? So we - there's a lot of behaviour that, where we distrust we're not vicious, like evil Lady Macbeth. So there's a lot of human experience that women are supposed to not have, that we get a lot of shit for. Pardon my language. Honestly, I really like to swear like a sailor and I've been behaving very well. Slade: You can. Morgana: Oh! Thank fucking God. Slade: I should've told you at the beginning. Morgana: Haha.. But yeah, you know, it's like all my life I've been told what's wrong with me and I've come to the conclusion that it's not wrong, it's female! And there's a difference. Slade: Mmm... Morgana: So I have a really, especially after the last year, a very... just a fire in my belly about really giving human beings permission to access all of ourselves, and there's a power and a gift! There's a superpower in all of it, in our appetites, and our rage, and our competition and ambition and our victim experience is sacred. All of it has these amazing gifts and also wounds. So this book is really about what it is to... I want to change the conversation about what it is to be a woman. And, by the way, it applies to men and all genders too, but this one is specifically speaking to people who identify as women. Using goddess archetypes, which creates, I think, a nice nobility for our experiences that we've been shamed for. Oh yeah? You're calling me a slut? Well there's a goddess for that. Slade: Right! Morgana: And I embrace that. Slade: Yeah. Morgana: This is a powerful... Lust is a life-affirming feeling. So that's what I'm working on next, is honestly, I want to create a global Money Goddess movement of women who love themselves and respect themselves and are the drivers in their life. Because I think that will be good for the planet. Slade: I wanted to ask you about something called the Results Accelerator Program. Can you tell me about that? Morgana: Oh yeah. That's my newest thing! So here's a problem and I'm really telling on myself here, which is, so for all these years, I coach people or they coach themselves and they get this beautiful, luscious, alive Money Honey experience relationship. And then it kind of fades away. Because even - why do you think I get married all the time? Maintaining a relationship, even with a human being, takes a lot of attention and maintenance. And it's hard enough with a human. It's much harder with an imaginary person who doesn't have a body. So I've been really thinking about, Well how do I solve this problem of reconnecting people to their Money Honey on a regular basis? And that's how this developed. And surprisingly, a lot of people who haven't done my Money Honey work have signed up for it. Because it's not really required but then when they get in they want it and I have tools inside the program to help them slay their money monster and connect with their Money Honey. But it's a daily practice where people log in every day and they set their daily priorities with their Money Honey. And then when negative self talk comes up, they share that and then they share what their Money Honey says to them. And it's like, the negative stuff is a trigger to wake up the Money Honey so he or she can shut up and respond. And that's where the most people come up with the most brilliant insights because they're channelling their highest wisdom, but without any of their own baggage, which is one of the reasons making the Money Honey another person separate, instead of, you know, your future self or higher self or something, but making it, you know, experiencing it as outside of yourself kind of clears it of all your nonsense and gives you a much more loving and accurate assessment, and encouraging us or you, because your Money Honey will always recognize that you are more powerful, creative, and resourceful and wonderful than you see yourself. And if it doesn't, it's not a Money Honey. So this Results Accelerator, I wanted to have a really, just, accessible, super super high touch, high engagement accountability support online love club. That's not about dumping more information because we're just, all the information that we're trying to get through can become oppressive. But to just support you really personally every day. That's what I created a few months ago, and the results have been beyond my wildest dreams. Really, just, people feel loved and supported and they're having results and breakthroughs and stuff that they've been struggling with for years. It's very gentle. I talk about progress not perfection and stripping things down to baby steps and when people are rewarded, then it becomes addictive. So these, you know, positive actions suddenly become the things you've been putting off. Suddenly, you want to do them because you want to get the recognition. And the love. And the support. And then you also start getting great results in your life. It's so much a snowball. So that's my Results Accelerator. That's my new thing. Slade: Very cool. I was actually going to ask you at one point about addressing that whole idea of what happens when the honeymoon is over, or so to speak. That definitely answered that question. I do have a question for you though. This is - some form of this I like to ask everyone, and obviously you're no stranger to all the personal development programs and conversations and new age tools and all that stuff. You've been in it and with it and swimming in that ocean for awhile. Is there anything that you find yourself thinking is really, either bugs you about the whole kind of personal development landscape, or something that you always want to grab the microphone and shout, to correct the conversation. What's something like that that comes up for you? Morgana: I've had a number of, what I would call, dark nights of the soul, where I just have wanted to pull out of the industry. Because I see some people who talk a really good talk and do a lot of harm. And I don't want to be that. And I don't want to be confused with that or associated with that. And I was going through, because like apparently, I'm just freaking empathic, but there was that, I think his name was James Arthur Ray or something. The weekend that he was doing his demigod murderous... you know... tent, smoked tent or whatever it was, thing, where all those people died, I went into just - and I didn't know it was going on, but I went into a dark, dark, dark place and I honestly had to create a whole new monster about the industry and the stuff that I couldn't be with and slay that and kind of create a new relationship with being in the business with a new Money Honey. It was like, Well, the thing about the Money Honey is, that, by definition, my Money Honey shares my values. So, yeah. I don't even know how to articulate it today. I'm kind of jet lagged. I just got back from a two-day conference last week with 100 really high profile multi-six, multi-seven figure coaches and, everybody thinks they're a good guy, right? Slade: Mmm hmm. Morgana: But what happens is, even people at that level, and often people at that level, are scared. Like, they had a few years of really big results, and then the market changes and they become more and more transactional. And it's, you know, people think that more dollars is gonna solve problems. No. The stakes just get higher. So now they have all these employees to pay and the money isn't coming in. So the challenge is, you know, people, when people are coming from scarcity, they can become more transactional than relational. Do your due diligence before you hire people. Run their name and maybe ad scan when you Google it, to see what people are saying. Trust your gut. That's a big one because some of, you know, sociopaths are very good sales people. Because they can promise anything because they don't really care about delivering it. So something can sound really, really promising, intellectually. Trust your gut. I think our guts really know. There are some really, really great coaches out there. And some not so great coaches. Things that used to work really well, like product launch formula, and tele-summits, and you know, things like that, are not working as well as they used to. JB launches not working as well as they used to, and I don't know that that language is being represented by the people selling those formulas yet. So I'm gaining - this is very rambling because I haven't really, you know, but I'm gaining just a real deep, deep appreciation for the original old school pure form of coaching, which is not telling anybody what to do, or telling anybody how to do things, but is really just, through conversation, drawing forth your own answers. Because you know what you do and what you believe and what you value and what you want better than anybody else does. And you want to be able to communicate with integrity. To be successful in business. Now what I'm saying is that the purest, most relationship oriented people with the best integrity are weathering the market changes a lot better than the people who are being transactional and treating clients like objects and dollars. Slade: Thank you for that. I always love asking that question because it does produce an interesting improvisational unearthing of wisdom, and I actually personally took a lot from that. So I got a lot from what you just said, if no one else has. Morgana: I'm glad. Slade: So thank you. Listen, Morgana Rae, I'm such a huge fan of yours. I really am. It's a thrill to capture our conversation with you. I want to make sure that you tell everyone where they can go online to find you and where they can start working with your material. Morgana: Absolutely. Lots and lots of high quality free stuff at MorganaRae.com Start with my four-part free video series. Also my blog has hundreds of articles and videos and when you opt in for the video series, you would be on my VIP list where I can curate and send you my newest articles or things that I think would be helpful for you to read or see. Whenever I have any freebies, you'll be the first to know about it. When my Results Accelerator sessions open up every, you can't get in except once every four weeks, you'll hear about that. When I go back to do another Money Goddess retreat, you'll hear about that. But mostly it's content. And you can opt out at any time.

This discussion with Master Channel, Frank W. Butterfield is one of the most profound I've had. In the second part of our conversation, we take a deep dive into creating with intention. The information coming through Frank and the Communion of Light makes the Abraham/Hicks material seem like an entry level introduction to manifesting. You will hear things you've never heard before and perhaps gain a new understanding on how creation actually works. ​ EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS When does creating with intention become trying to manipulate the universe? ​Why perseverance, consistency and persistence are cultural constructs How overwhelm can catalyze a new understanding Getting rid of your TO DO list The oxymoron of financial freedom and willingness to be broke The difference between an intentional and chaotic universe ABOUT FRANK W. BUTTERFIELD ​Frank W. Butterfield is a Master Channel who has been working with individuals and groups since 2009 to help his clients remember who they are, in truth. First learning to channel in 1990, Frank has worked both in and out of the corporate world. He has discovered that the best way to live his own life is to allow the Universe to sort things out for him but always remembers that your mileage may vary. Having traveled extensively most of his life, he currently resides in Daytona Beach and has no interest in racing cars or riding motorcycles, but does love the beach. GUEST LINKS https://communionoflight.com http://frankwbutterfield.com Facebook BACKGROUND LISTENING EP10: Frank W. Butterfield, Part 1 - There's No Such Thing as Getting Ready EP9: Slade Roberson, Part 2 - Cracking the Code of Willpower At 38:40 into this conversation, Slade and I talk about what we thought Frank meant when he said, "Stop trying to ^**(&&%@ manipulate the universe." Shift Your Spirits: Ep35- About Channeling with Frank Butterfield ​This is Shift Your Spirits podcast episode that introduced me to Frank and his work. If you are unfamiliar with channeling, it's a great introduction. It covers what channeling is, and how to do it. What it means to be a channel, and what to do if you think you might be one. Books The Fifth Sacred Thing by Starhawk Cloudbusting by Slade Roberson(Eric Slade)-Frank referred to this book as "Storm Chasing" MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE Werner Erhard and est LEADERS' CALL TO ADVENTURE RATE OR REVIEW THIS PODCAST EPISODE PAGE ON LEADERS' CALL TO ADVENTURE

This 2-part conversation with Master Channel, Frank W. Butterfield is one of the most profound I've had. In the first part of our conversation, I ask questions that came up when listening to Frank tell Slade Roberson of Shift Your Spirits how he became a channel. Frank and I start off discussing the 1987 Shirley MacLaine miniseries which had a significant impact on Frank's awareness. As Frank discusses experiences he later recognized as channeling in his corporate life, it may even leave you wondering if you have channeled yourself. By the end of this episode, we begin to take a deep dive into some mind-blowing content that challenges the basic things we are taught in school about how to succeed. EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS ​The 1987 Shirley MacLaine miniseries that caught Frank's attention Could you be channeling without knowing it? How burning your bridges and spending all your money can be the best thing ever Why there's no such thing as getting ready ABOUT FRANK W. BUTTERFIELD ​Frank W. Butterfield is a Master Channel who has been working with individuals and groups since 2009 to help his clients remember who they are, in truth. First learning to channel in 1990, Frank has worked both in and out of the corporate world. He has discovered that the best way to live his own life is to allow the Universe to sort things out for him but always remembers that your mileage may vary. Having traveled extensively most of his life, he currently resides in Daytona Beach and has no interest in racing cars or riding motorcycles, but does love the beach. GUEST LINKS https://communionoflight.com http://frankwbutterfield.com Facebook BACKGROUND LISTENING Shift Your Spirits: Ep35- About Channeling with Frank Butterfield ​This is Shift Your Spirits podcast episode that introduced me to Frank and his work. If you are unfamiliar with channeling, it's a great introduction. It covers what channeling is, and how to do it. What it means to be a channel, and what to do if you think you might be one. BOOKS/MEDIA Out on a Limb (book) Out on a Limb (miniseries) The Law of Attraction Opening to Channel The Nature of Personal Reality OTHER RESOURCES Kevin Ryerson Edgar Cayce's A.R.E. Institute The Seth material Orin and DaBen material ​ LEADERS' CALL TO ADVENTURE RATE OR REVIEW THIS PODCAST EPISODE ON LEADERS' CALL TO ADVENTURE

There’s a common malaise among reading clients. A low-level depression, disconnection, lack of inspiration. People keep asking me "What do I need to do to be happy?" I’m sharing a technique I’ve started to call Rebooting Your Life. Honestly, the strategy is so simple, if you’re not willing to do it or try it, I have to wonder if you really want to change. This is doable. This will shift everything. Don’t dismiss it for some more difficult solution. When was happiness ever complicated? MENTIONED ON THE SHOW: The War of Art by Steven Pressfield The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses Get an intuitive reading with Slade Automatic Intuition BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits Edit your pledge on Patreon TRANSCRIPT Where is happiness? In what energy center or chakra of the body does happiness reside? Somewhere in the heart, a little bit in the head, the divine crown, maybe… Those are the upper frequencies, the upper energetic levels of the body. You are experiencing a sense of longing, desire, and yet confusion related to the higher pursuits, the top half of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs — love, self-esteem, self-actualization, and transcendence; while experiencing symptoms and disturbances related to the lower energetic centers of the body — sleep, substance abuse, mood issues, depression (which is all actually rooted in the physical and causes or contributes to those higher functions breaking down…) If you feel “unhappy” you may actually be feeling ungrounded. The upper frequencies are on the fritz, and you are seeking to correct them, to elevate them, to take them higher into a vague perception of peace and happiness. No matter what strategies or substance or energy we introduce at the higher level, without the grounding in the physical self — safety, faith, basic wellness — it would only topple this whole house of cards. The love you feel for romantic partners also represents a much higher, more sophisticated energetic function than you’re in a solid position to pursue. Your guides have brought you here in this moment to save yourself. Nothing less than that. This is more than an existential crisis, it is also a physical, mortal one. If you’re calling yourself depressed, unfulfilled, unhappy, then you’re crying out for a life-line and the messages are coming in through me. Not a grand design for your future life plan — a simple strategy with acts of grace you can and need to execute NOW. Do not think beyond the next three months. For the next three months — starting immediately, starting tomorrow — you have one task. (Well, two tasks when we get into it...) But the main task is to save yourself by rebooting your energy. To re-ground and rebuild from the root up. There are no short-cuts. You cannot cheat or procrastinate or delay this. These are saving acts of faith and grace you can execute successfully. The instructions I’m giving you will sound simple but you do not require — and you may not even be able to handle — complexity. Grand designs and Big plans would only make things worse. Don’t worry about making this a New Year’s Resolution or starting at the top of the month. You must begin tomorrow. Today would not be too soon. You know how the solution for so much technology that hangs up or behaves oddly or freezes is to turn the power off and back on again? Rebooting. It works for nearly everything. It is always the first thing to try and most often the only thing you require. If you are spinning in the upper chakras — higher thought, intellect, overthinking, analyzing, worrying, wresting with relationships, seeking purpose, trying to hear your guides, connecting with your higher self, receiving creative flashes — you need to reboot and ground yourself in the physical body, first. To do this, you need to take immediate and daily action in the lowest energy centers of the body. (Don’t read this as meditation or yoga — that is “intermediate” level actions. If you can execute my instructions successfully for three months, then you may begin considering introducing more esoteric solutions.) Here is how you: save your life come out of depression sleep better hear the voices of your guides and your higher self free yourself of addiction and self-destructive choices (including unhealthy relationships) DISCLAIMER: Of course, I am not a medical professional; I am not dispensing mental health advice, I am speaking to you as a friend who observes patterns in our energies, in our decisions, and in our behaviors. By all means, your clinical diagnoses take priority; and if you don’t have a clinical diagnosis but think you might need to get one, this is your guides taking an opportunity, through me, to encourage you to finally go make that happen. Other than your children and your spouse (who can help themselves, so don’t over do it), your only priority is yourself. Your physical health, safety, and grounding. And by the way, this is probably one of those situations not unlike airplane emergencies, where you need to put that oxygen mask over your own face before you start trying to save other people. Stop using alcohol or marijuana or pills immediately. You may not feel you are technically an alcoholic or addict. If this is true, you will have no problem ceasing all consumption immediately. If you cannot, then you are addicted, psychologically or physically or emotionally…it doesn’t matter. You really should go to meetings, whether you believe you qualify or not. You require the perspective and you need to the social support. There are stranger angels (incarnate entities who are meant to guide and protect you) inhabiting human bodies — even posing as helpful strangers and friends. You will find them in groups like as AA or Narcotics Anonymous, or other communities built around that template. If there are psychotropics or pharmacological prescriptions you are still taking, please do not cease those suddenly, but they are most likely not working because you are not clinically depressed in the ways those medications can influence. Something I have observed during hundreds and hundreds of readings over the past decade: When a creative person — especially someone who consciously identifies as a creative, like a writer, musician, artist, actor — or they have in the past at some point in their lives… When a creative person tells me they’re depressed, technically, they don’t have a project. So, there are usually two things going on with people who may not be clinically depressed, but who are self-identifying with that terminology. You’re depressed because you are a creative person with no outlet for self-expression, and you’re depressed because you are in pain within your own body and you require a physical energetic reboot. I’m assuming in this motivational rant that most of you have no major physical limitations with moving around throughout your day. Obviously, some of you may have limitations here, so I don’t want to be insensitive to that. I know a few of you have to live life in a chair or are bedridden. You have my permission to email me and I will give you an alternative for rebooting your physical chakras, ok? For the rest of you — maybe some of you are telling yourself you have more limitations than you really do, so let’s be honest with ourselves about that. Assuming you get up many times a day and move around your world without giving it a thought... Here is how you save yourself, correct this imbalance, and begin a new chapter in your life: 90 days of walking meditation. (That means going for a walk outside, preferably somewhere with something to look at like trees or a river. It can also be a park full of people. But it must be in nature, regardless of the weather.) 30 minutes of walking per day. (If you do it for 45 minutes or an hour, I’ll never know.) Just walking. Not jogging. Not joining a gym. Do not buy new outfits or shoes you don’t need. Start today, or tomorrow at the latest. Do not make this a New Year’s resolution or say I’ll start at the first of the month or I’ll wait for a new moon. Start now. You’ll feel excellent that you made a start. It will seem like a small victory, but there will be an inkling deep inside you. A small voice turning over and beginning to stir. We are awakening that voice. Take your phone and listen to music or podcasts if you really like — or don’t. Silence and the sound of your breath and your own thoughts is a chance to clear the static in the upper energy centers. Walk for 30 minutes, each day, for 90 days. At some point, you cannot predict when or how, but your higher self and your guides will begin to whisper in your ear. You will begin to receive directions and ideas. You will begin to make observations about what to change and what steps to take next. The first steps along your journey to a new life and to whatever you will recognize as happiness are literal steps. In addition to this physical grounding in the body, we need to bring your creative and intuitive channels back online. You do this by writing Morning Pages. Every morning, set a timer for 15 minutes and write. Write whatever you want. It’s not meant for anyone but you. You are retuning your soul, slowly but surely, 15 minutes per day. Morning pages. Journaling (by computer or on paper) for 15 minutes every day for 90 days. The concept of this comes from The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. At the end of 90 days, you may wish to join an Artist’s Way group on Facebook and do this process with a community of like-minded souls. This first 90 days is your practice round. Do not judge the process of walking meditation and morning pages until the end of three months. Just do this. Sober. Judge the results at the 90 day mark. I want you to write me at that 90 day mark and tell me what you have experienced. If you will listen to us — me + my guides + your guides — you will begin to sleep better, you will begin to feel better, the fog will lift, solutions will present themselves, your relationships will change, and you will be in a position to take on the next steps. Bigger, more challenging, more sophisticated strategies and systems. And here’s a bonus tip that will absolutely shrink your mind and set you up for true results. During the first week of your walking meditation + morning pages ritual, read: The War of Art by Steven Pressfield. It is very short. I just re-read it one day at lunch, and then finished it up the next day at lunch. It’s a $4 download for the ebook version. It is about Resistance his word for concepts like The Devil. Procrastination. Self-sabotage. There is a life-changing message for you in this little book. So 4 things for you to do if you’re feeling depressed, disconnected and just need to reboot: Immediate sobriety The War of Art Walking 30 minutes a day Writing morning pages for 15 minutes a day Go make it so. And write me. I am looking for some emails in 90 days. Thanks again for listening to the Shift Your Spirits podcast and for all your support this year. It’s been tremendous. For show notes, links, transcripts and all the past episodes, please visit www.shiftyourspirits.com You can subscribe in iTunes or Stitcher or whatever app you use to access podcasts. If you’d like to get an intuitive reading with me — try out my email reading — or download a free ebook and meditation to help you connect with your guides, please go to https://sladeroberson.com/ and if you’re interested in my professional intuitive training program, you can start the course for free by downloading the Attunement at https://automaticintuition.com/

In Part 2 of of my conversation with Slade Roberson of Shift Your Spirits, we go deeper into the impact having a stroke had on Slade. As he struggled to regain his speech and rehabilitate his body, his livelihood, his way of interacting with the world and the person he knew himself to be changed dramatically. Ultimately, it's up to us to alchemize the darkness that accompanies life-altering challenges and use them for our own positive transformation. During the conversation, Slade comes to realize that with the stroke experience, he cracked a part of himself that ultimately allowed him to become the prolific creator he is today. That and, of course, the discipline he honed learning to code during his recovery. From talking about the power of will, self-control and focus, the conversation leads to an a ha moment we both had when listening to Frank Butterfield (the entity Paul) during Slade's Shift Your Spirits episode: About Channeling with Frank Butterfield ​ EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS Scheduling, creativity and cat people Cracking willpower - is it really like binary code? How life changing events and confronting mortality can simplify choices to a very basic level University degrees may not be as valuable as we think We grasp less and less as we get older Pondering the a ha moment in "About Channeling with Frank Butterfield" STOP trying to control everything "The totality of your influence isn't just one piece. It's an accumulation over a great deal of time​." - Slade Roberson ABOUT SLADE ROBERSON Slade Roberson is a professional intuitive counselor, author and podcaster of Shift Your Spirits, where he tries to write and speak about spirituality with fewer hearts and flowers than most New Age blather. He also mentors emerging intuitives, psychics, and healers in a program called Automatic Intuition. RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE Listen to Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: “My Stroke of Insight” from Oprah’s SuperSoul Conversations in Podcasts My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey by Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor Shift Your Spirits Episode 11: Spirituality, Leadership and Adventure with Lori Ference ( My answer when Slade asks me about the one thing that is misunderstood in spiritual circles.) LEADERS' CALL TO ADVENTURE RATE OR REVIEW THIS PODCAST EPISODE ON LEADERS' CALL TO ADVENTURE

In 2002, Slade Roberson had a stroke. Four years later, he started the wildly successful blog Shift Your Spirits. We talk about the hole in Slade's resumé and how he came to Frankenstein a job out of doing what he loves. Slade Roberson is a professional intuitive counselor, author and podcaster of Shift Your Spirits, where he tries to write and speak about spirituality with fewer hearts and flowers than most New Age blather. He also mentors emerging intuitives, psychics, and healers in a program called Automatic Intuition. I came across Slade's Shift Your Spirits blog about 7 years ago, drawn in by his paranormal memoirs which were released weekly, like much-awaited episodes in the golden age of radio. I sank into them like one would reading a good book on an overstuffed chair by the fire. Slade has a no nonsense approach to storytelling, yet there's a richness in his language, like weaving together the strands of a beautiful tapestry. You really feel like you are in the room with him and experiencing whatever he is real-time. He has a rare ability to capture the mystery and power of the invisible world and making it unfold into a practical and grounded reality. So, you can imagine my delight when I discovered he was starting the Shift Your Spirits podcast and would be telling those stories I loved and more in a new format. He describes the podcast as sharing his brand of spiritual edification, paranormal experiences, personal development, and interviews with others who write and teach about these subjects. I was honored to be one of those "others" who were first interviewed. Slade's interview with me: Spirituality, Leadership and Adventure with Lori Ference ​Slade is incredibly prolific. Even though he only started the podcast in March this year, he has already completed three seasons. I especially enjoy tuning into those which feature his personal stories and reflections, much like how I connected with his work in the first place. A couple weeks ago, I was headed out the door for a run and looked on my podcast playlist to choose something to listen to for the duration I was out. I chose Slade's 5 Self-help Books I don't Hate. As I listened, I had an a ha moment and reached out to Slade to request an interview. The backstory to the a ha moment and reaching out to Slade: Questioning Burnout, Part 2 We talk about a lot of things in the show that those who've followed Slade for awhile might be wondering. And, if you are new to Slade's work, this show provides an excellent introduction. How exactly does one come to be a professional intuitive counselor, author and podcaster??! As Slade notes, I am pretty good at getting people to talk about things they may not have talked about in other interviews. EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS The hole in Slade's resumé Origins of Shift Your Spirits - through darkness into a whole new universe Figuring out your personal cosmology - how journaling helps Self-Help books Slade doesn't hate (plus one more) and his Circle of Mentors The Frankenstein approach to career creation How the most successful product Slade ever created came out of the financial collapse of 2008 SHIFT YOUR SPIRITS EPISODES MENTIONED IN THE SHOW 08 - Stranger Angels: Part 1 ​09 - Stranger Angels: Part 2 - Jesse 36 - A Channeled Message about Life Purpose 35 - About Channeling with Frank Butterfield 31 - The 5 Self-Help Books I Don't Hate SELF-HELP BOOKS SLADE DOESN'T HATE Refuse to Choose by Barbara Sher The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron Allen Carr's Easy Way to Stop Smoking The War of Art by Steven Pressfield The Money Shift by Slade Roberson LEADERS' CALL TO ADVENTURE RATE OR REVIEW THIS PODCAST EPISODE ON LEADERS' CALL TO ADVENTURE

Frank W. Butterfield is a Master Channel who has been working with individuals and groups since 2009 to help his clients remember who they are, in truth. First learning to channel in 1990, Frank has worked both in and out of the corporate world. He has discovered that the best way to live his own life is to allow the Universe to sort things out for him but always remembers that your mileage may vary. Having traveled extensively most of his life, he currently resides in Daytona Beach and has no interest in racing cars or riding motorcycles, but does love the beach. WE TALK ABOUT: …channeling, Communion of Light, Paul, chakras, the difference between mediumship and channeling, Edgar Cayce, Jane Roberts, Seth, Ester Hicks, Abraham, the distinction between channeling and deep trance channeling, intuitive development, psychic readings, the difference between willingness and ability... BOOKS MENTIONED: Opening to Channel by Sanaya Roman and Duane Packer Out on a Limb by Shirley MacLaine Seth Books by Jane Roberts Oversoul Series by Jane Roberts A Course in Miracles by Dr. Helen Schucman Ask and It Is Given by Esther and Jerry Hicks This Morning, Over Here: A Memoir That Never Happened by Frank Butterfield GUEST LINKS - Frank Butterfield FrankWButterfield.com Communion of Light HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses Get an intuitive reading with Slade Automatic Intuition BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits Edit your pledge on Patreon TRANSCRIPT INTRO Thanks for listening to the Shift Your Spirits podcast. I’m your host Slade Roberson. For eleven years, I’ve been a professional intuitive and the author of the blog Shift Your Spirits, where I try to write about spirituality with fewer hearts and flowers than most New Age blather. I also mentor emerging intuitives, psychics, and healers in a program called Automatic Intuition. Today I have an interview with Frank Butterfield about channeling. What channeling is, how to do it. What it means to be a channel, and what to do if you think you might be one. I love all my interview guests and all their segments are special for different reasons. But I must say, I did personally really dig the middle of this interview with Frank. I guess I should say he brought through a message that really resonated for me in that moment. I felt like he was channeling for me. I asked the question I sometimes ask guests, about what message he thinks is missing from the New Age conversation, and he went off about giving up what you're trying to get. I can’t even paraphrase it or repeat it... It’s a real twist on the concept of “surrender”— it's bad ass and down to earth and yet conceptually elevated. Be sure and listen for it. And, of course, as always, there’s an oracle segment at the end of the show. So be thinking about a question or a concern you have. Hold it in your mind, and I’ll come back on, after the final links and credits, and leave you with that extra message. BEFORE I FORGET I'd like to say a quick thank you to Angela Brophy and Tina Whisnant, my newest supporters on Patreon. I appreciate all of you who have pledged your support and I’m really excited to see the new names each week. It demonstrates that you’re enjoying the show and want it to continue. That’s very encouraging to me, so thank you. Listeners who support the show on Patreon can access bonus Q&A episodes, where you guys send in questions, I record answers to them, and they go out to patrons of the show exclusively. There’s also a level of support with a free guided meditation "Messages from Your Spirit Guides." To find out how you can become a patron, support my time in producing this show, and access the extra bonus content, please go to patreon.com/shiftyourspirits This week’s interview with Master Channel Frank Butterfield is a nice length, so I am going to cut my personal intro here. Let’s listen to Frank: INTERVIEW SEGMENT Frank: Well, my name is Frank Butterfield and I am a Channel, first and foremost. I've been doing that since 1990, although I've done a lot of other things. And I also am an author. I've published 19 novels and 3 non-fiction books that are based on my channeling work. I live in Daytona Beach Florida, right at the end of the road and go to the beach as often as I can. And have a pretty wonderful life. It's pretty quiet and I'm really enjoying where I'm at. And I'm also really glad to be here. Slade: Thank you for being here. So what is channeling, for somebody who's never heard of that before. What is it and how do you do it? Frank: Well, the way I do it, and it's a good question because there's a lot of different ways that people define channeling. But the way that I do it is I basically sit. I allow an energy, what I call a broader, non-physical perspective, to come through and sit in me. And then it speaks through me. And so communion of light is sort of the name that's used to describe what's going on and then the energy, the voice that talks through me, has a name called Paul. That theoretically is supposedly connected to Saint Paul, formerly Saul of Tarsus, but I don't really put a lot of stock into that. But in any event, it is very distinct. It speaks in a very different voice than I do, although our voices are now more similar than ever before. But now that I'm much more used to it and have been doing it for a long time, but the way in which they talk and I do speak of them as plural, with other people, it's very different than the way I do. They get away with a lot of shit that I wouldn't dare let myself do. But essentially, channeling is, for me, is just literally sitting inside of myself, not reaching up or out, but sitting inside myself and opening up something that then comes down into me and then moves through me. If you want to talk about chakras, what I'm doing is sitting in my heart chakra and then letting my throat chakra be open. And that's all that it is. It's really simple. It's very simple now. Of course it wasn't simple at the beginning. But that's what it is. What it isn't is mediumship. I can do mediumship. I don't like it, but basically what mediumship is for me is there's an energy that sits on my right and sort of whispers in my ear and then I relay what they're saying to whoever the mediumship experience is for. I haven't done it in a long time and I don't really have any desire to do it. There's lots of really great mediums out there. But mediumship and channeling are not the same thing. Mediumship I like to consider to be sort of on the 6th chakra level. So it's more of a psychic experience that involves personality to personality interaction. Channeling the way that I do it is more of a 7th chakra perspective, where it's about a broader perspective, narrowing itself down through me. Whereas mediumship is very peer-to-peer, and channeling the way that I do it is a little bit different than that. Slade: Okay, so how did you discover that you had the ability to do this? Frank: Well, I don't know that... that's a really good question. The way I found out how to do it was that I was working at a metaphysical bookstore that is sadly closed, called Fields Books, on, that was on Polk Street in San Francisco. And they had a book there that they were selling called Opening the Channel by Sanaya Roman and Duane Packer which is still available and I highly recommend it. And I bought it, took it home and basically over the course of one afternoon, I don't recommend this, I sat down and kind of went through all the processes as fast as I could. And by that evening, something was talking through me. It was really difficult but it happened and it's... you know what's interesting is, it's not so much an ability as it is an interest. and I believe that's true about anything at all. No one really has innate abilities but people cultivate ideas because they're interested in them. And then they just get better and better at them through practice or through repetition or whatever it may be. Slade: Okay. So when you were saying that you were aware that something was speaking through you, so were you in a trance when this happened or were you consciously aware of it? Explain the distinction there in your awareness. Frank: Well my exposure to channeling prior to that was through reading the words of Jane Roberts and seeing the made-for-TV movie Out on a Limb that was a Shirley MacLaine project based on the novel or the non-fiction book she wrote, and they filmed two different channels and those two different channels actually sort of represent the distinction that I was talking about a little earlier. One of the channels was more of a medium, and one of the channels was more of a sort-of broader perspective sort of person. But in any event, one of them obviously went into a very deep trance and the other one sort of went into a lighter trance. Jane Roberts went into a very deep trance apparently from the way it was described in the writings. As did Edgar Cayce. Who's another Channel who predates Jane Roberts. But I, when I first was doing this, I was in - it was like I was in a hypnotic state. I was aware of what was going on, but I had nothing to do. And my job was to be open, which at the beginning was difficult but became easier and easier. Now I can move back and forth very easily between the two states. I've never really been a deep trance Channel and I don't have the personality for it. I just kind of refuse to do anything where I'm absent from the process. But I can also say that when I am channeling, there are plenty of times when I have no idea, I know that specific words like 'the', 'brown', 'dog', I know that 'the' and 'brown' and 'dog' were said, but I don't understand why they were said, I don't know what that meant, and I've learned not to care. That took awhile. But it's not a deep trance. There's some people who can do that and they're very good at it and they just kind of get knocked out. Sanaya Roman talks about that in her experience that she, her first experience channeling was she turned on a tape recorder, she fell asleep and then she woke up 30 minutes later and it was 30 minutes of words that she didn't remember. She just thought she was asleep the entire time. I've never had that experience, but I do sort of fade away and then come back. And time moves in a very different way than when I'm doing something like this, where I'm very aware of the passage of time. A long period of time will go by and I'll think it's only been 10 or 15 minutes. Slade: How long was it from the time that you first tried this in San Francisco, sort of as an experiment How long was it from the time that that happened until you met Paul, or the Communion of the Light sort of revealed itself? Frank: So there's kind of three stages. So from 1990 to the winter of 1991, into '92, I was channeling this voice that called itself Raji. Which is an Indian first name. And it said very clearly, I'm here to help you get started and then when we're done I'll be gone and I'll move on. And the winter of '91, '92 I lived in Provincetown, on the end of Cape Cod, and I was with a group that was reading A Course in Miracles, and one night, we were playing a round with the Ouija board, and the Ouija board said, Tell Frank to channel. So I opened up and this very different thing happened. A very different voice and Raji was gone and has never been back. So from that, I guess it was actually like January of '92 until June of 2007, I was channeling this sort of indeterminate, just very broad, non-personality driven energy. Which I now recognize was the Communion of Light. That's who they were. But that was where I was in my ability, in my interest in allowing them. I was kind of going around saying, I'm kind of a Channel, I should be a Channel, I should be doing this but I'm not really doing it. And then in that interim time, in those 15 years, I went from being a person who kind of bopped around the country, to getting a real job and becoming really successful really quickly. And then all of a sudden remembering that I didn't have to do that anymore. And so I had a real job for about 10 years, and then I just quit. And I walked around for about a year, year and a half, saying, There's something I know how to do that I probably should be doing, but I don't know what it is. And it was channeling. And I remember having lunch with a friend of mine, saying, I know there's something that I do that I'm supposed to be doing. And I'm going to come back to you at some point and say, You know what that thing was? And that was right. It was a, like a Thursday night, and a friend of mine, my roommate and I had gone to see a movie, we came back to the apartment, we sat down and I just said, I think I'm supposed to channel for you. It just all of a sudden occurred to me. And so when I opened my mouth, this more focused version of what I had been doing over the previous 15 years appeared. And kind of gave itself a definition in a way that it didn't have before. And I had a more, not really a personality, but a more clear notion of what it was. And it began to speak and then in that first night, it, or they, introduced themselves. They were like, Frank should do this and this and this, none of which I did. And then they, when it was kind of over with, when they helped my friend with a question about his career, and which apparently was very useful, because he actually did what they suggested and then they said, Okay well now we're going to show you how to be a medium. And I was like, Okay, whatever. And they brought his mother in, who I'd never met, and then gave, you know, very, like all good mediums, they gave three points of identifying information that I had no idea about but that gave my friend the clue that there was something going on. And we even had what the Spiritualists would call a demonstration. There was an aroma of roses went through this room that was completely sealed off and just had air conditioning on. And it was pretty amazing. And I did that, like I said, I did that for a little while and then I was like, That's not really me. And I now realize what they were doing was saying, Okay here's a little bag of tricks that you think you're supposed to have. Why don't you go play with them and see if you like them. I didn't like any of them. So I just became a Channel. And that was, I'm sure this is on your list of things to ask me, but that was about two months before I talked to you. Slade: Oh! Okay, yeah. I mean one of the things that I'm enjoying about this conversation, for the record for those who are listening, I have known you and observed from outside the experience, but I was curious about, I've heard these stories too, so I'm sitting here putting it all together as a timeline. So you're saying this is where I came in to knowing you. Frank: Yeah. That's exactly right. Slade: Okay, so keep going. This is fascinating. Frank: So I did that for a couple months. I was just kind of trying to figure out what to do with my life and then I kind of came to a crisis where I was trying to understand what it meant to be a Channel. Did it mean I was going to have to give up myself, which is what I had always believed. I think that's why I always dabbled with it. That I was going to have to give up my personality, my sense of self. And I had had a project at the time where I was interviewing people and I can't even remember what the topic was, but you were one of the people that I interviewed. For some, like it was a podcast or, I don't know what I was doing. But somehow that's how I got in touch with you. And then about a week after we talked, I called, I texted, I don't know how I got in touch with you, but I just was like, I need help, I'm having a nervous breakdown. And you kind of walked me through, No, there's - I don't remember what you said, but what i got out of it was, there's you as the Channel, and then there's you as Frank. And you're, it's just like a job. You're going to put on this hat, and when you're done with the hat, with the job, you take off the hat. And I was like, Oh, yeah, of course! And so, what's interesting is, what has actually happened is that through the channeling and through what I've been doing since then, I have become more of myself, not less. And I have become more at peace with different idiosyncratic aspects of myself and different parts of my personality and everything is sort of folded in together, instead of being these wildly disparate parts that I was really scared of. And now everything is more integrated. So it's exactly the opposite of what I was afraid of. So that's how we met. And then the next significant thing that happened was that I, about a month after we talked, at this point I was living in Dallas, which is itself a weird story because I had lived in Austin and nobody goes from Austin to Dallas. Everybody goes from Dallas to Austin. Because they're like, I'm tired of living this big city life. I'm going to go some place where everybody's cool. So I did the opposite. But in doing so, I met a group of people in Fort Worth, of all places, who were Abraham devotees. And Abraham, I'd always been like, I'd seen the books, I'd never picked one up, and I thought, Oh Abraham, Sarah, Esther... I get it. Bible, bible, bible. This is just more of that old new-thought crap where everything has to be biblically based. Of course I didn't read anything. I didn't know what they were talking about. But it just - I was like, Eh, whatever. So I go to this group in Fort Worth and then there's going to be an Abraham workshop down in San Antonio. So there I'll just, as Abraham people do, completely, completely over the moon about this opportunity. And they're like, You have to go with us! And so I did. Even though I really didn't have the money. Somebody actually paid for me to go, which was really sweet. So we get there and of course, being this group, we got there as soon as the doors opened. And so we then sat in chairs for an hour and a half waiting for the thing to start. Because everybody wanted to be right up front. And we get in there and I'm just like, Okay, then suddenly, the room's filling up and it's time to start. And I suddenly became aware of the presence of Abraham as an energy. And it was just really obvious. And then as soon as, the way I imagine is the way I saw it, was that up at the top of the room, there was like people waiting, like people waiting for the warehouse to open or the factory to open to start their shift. And they were all standing around smoking cigarettes and shooting the breeze. And then all of a sudden, the shift started and it all coalesced as a single energy right at the centre of the room. I wasn't imagining this. It was literally what I saw. That's how i interpreted it. And then as soon as that coalescing happened, Esther and Jerry, Esther Hicks and her husband Jerry, walked in the door. And Esther's the woman who channels Abraham. They walked in the door and we started. The first part of the workshop was amazing. There were one after another after another of people asking questions and it was really, really amazing to sit there and watch Esther do her thing. Because I could see what she was doing. As a Channel, I knew enough about what I was doing already to see how she was handling the energy. What was fascinating was a guy comes up. The last question of the first segment. So before the first break. And he's missing an arm, missing his right arm and missing his right leg. And he walks up and he sits down in the chair and he says, I want my arm and my leg back. Just like that. That's literally his opening question. And I saw Esther kind of pop out and look around at the room, be like, How the hell am I going to do this? Which I very much recognized. And then she popped back in. And then Abraham began to do something that I'm now very familiar with, and was kind of like, helping him begin to open up to possibilities instead of seeing a big leap from a missing limbs to i want to have the limbs back, began to walk him through the ideas of what could possibly happen. And a lot of it was about being willing to be like the coolest guinea pig who tests out new prosthetics, which I thought was amazing. But it was just this really great conversation. When that was over with, because I didn't know myself like I know myself now, I didn't do this, but I immediately wanted to get up and drive back to Dallas. I did not want to stay for the rest of the workshop. But because I was there with this group of people and this person had paid for me to be there, I stayed. What a friend of mine who was in that group said to me later was that, she said I thought you just looked so angry after that first break. And I said, Well, I wasn't angry. I just was very uncomfortable. And what I ended up doing was I ended up getting all the way to the back of the room. I wanted to be there because I felt like I was doing homework. Or studying something. And I wanted to be in the room but I didn't want to be in the room. And I went all the way, way, way, way into the back. And that's the only Abraham workshop I've ever been to and I would never go to one again. I might change my mind and it's not because the work isn't amazing. It's just because it's not me. And it's not for me. But the next thing that happened after that was about six months later after I was still kind of dabbling a little bit and hadn't really said, Okay I'm a Channel and this is what I do. I end up back in Austin and the way Communion of Light describes this is, the way Paul describes this is, that they sent me to Abraham school, which, that's really the best way to put it. I just suddenly had an idea one day and I realized there was this law of attraction group in Austin that was kind of sitting there with nobody running it. And I had been part of that before I moved to Dallas. And I was coming back to Austin so I thought, Oh great, I'll just take over this group. It was one of those meet-up groups. We'll just study Ask and It Is Given, which is the big Abraham book. And so I did, I don't know why it came to me, but I just set up this little agenda, something I would never even normally do. And like we're going to do chapters 1, 2, 3, first week and then 4, 5, 6, and then 7, 8, 9. And I stood up at the front. I explained, we went through that book. And then we went through another book. And then we did the first book again. And then I set up the second group. And then both of the groups ended at the same time the study of whatever books we were looking at, after about six months. And then I was done. And by then, I knew it felt better to just leave. And that's when I started kind of my practice that I do now and the work that I do now. And that's when clients began to come to me and began to show up. And I started being able to make a living doing what I do now. And that was - what was also fascinating about that is that at the beginning, the first year or two I got lots of people who were saying - well there were two groups. One group would say, I've gotten everything from Abraham I can get. And so now I've found you and now I feel like all of my questions are being answered. Because that is the difference between Paul and Abraham's. Paul directly answers the questions that people ask whereas Abraham will take the questions and use them as examples for teaching. And Paul will say very clearly we don't teach. We remind. And that's a big part of what they talk about. And they're always kind of reminding people that that's what they're doing. So that was one group. But then there was another group much smaller. Who would kind of show up, they would sort of pop their head up somewhere and say, You're just copying Esther. I'm like, you need to come and see that this is very different. But it took me awhile to be able to realize that I was right when I said that. Because I would, every time someone would show up to say that, I would sort of think, well maybe they're right. Maybe I'm just mimicking. And then I would ask people who'd been to every single Abraham workshop since 1993 and say, Is this the same? And they would say, No, it's absolutely different. The words are enough the same to where I don't get lost. And that's when I begin to realize, Oh, that's why I went to Abraham school. Was so that I would learn that language. So that happened for the next couple of years and then by about 2010, I was in my element and I was rocking and rolling and that's what's been going on ever since. Getting better and better, but you know, pretty much... Slade: Yeah, so currently, because I've been to live events like what you describe. The trance channeling event that I went to was a much smaller, like a circle, kind of thing. 20 people. It wasn't a full-on conference hall kind of experience. But channeling is obviously different than what most people expect from a psychic reading and so... Frank: Yes. Slade: Just kind of describe for people how do you do your work? How do your followers or clients experience these messages? How do you put them out there? Frank: Well, the way people - I don't know how people find me. Because I don't advertise. They just show up. And that's perfect. That's exactly right. But in terms of how I interact with people or how they interact with Paul, I do have, well, I guess I have three different types of experiences that people can get into. First there's a thing that's been going on since 2010 called the Village, which is just a series of weekly calls that happen twice a week now, used to be three times but now twice, and you just, it's open. You bring whatever question you have and there are people from all over the world who come into those calls. The other thing that I do, and I don't do it every week but almost every week is, I have a Saturday through Friday series of conversations that happen at the same time every day. 10am Eastern Time. And people come in with - there's a little, it's on a specific topic and there'll be a 10 - 15 minute initial sort of conversation about it and then time for people to ask questions about it after that. And so that's - they can, that's one way of sort of coming in a little bit closer because those conversations are much more intimate and they're very specific. So people come in with specific questions on a specific topic, like it might be, their self-image, body, creativity, their work, money. Any... It can be, or just general metaphysics, sometimes. So there's that. And I also do private sessions where people can talk one on one. One of the strategies, for lack of a better way of putting it, that I've developed is, I kind of keep the private sessions over to the side. Because there was a period of time when I had what I like to call “looky-loos", who came in and would do one private session and they would not read any of the things I had written about what a session is like, and they would come in and be like, Tell me about my Aunt Esther. And I'm like, ... did you... and Paul would basically read them the Riot Act and say, This is not fortune telling. This is not that. This is not mediumship. There are other people. Go to them. But if you want to find out about you in relationship to your Aunt Esther, whether she's alive or dead, we can talk about that. But we can't tell you about her because we're not talking to her we're talking to you. And that, I began to realize... So now, in terms of pricing, if somebody comes to the website, you can book a private session, but it's going to cost a whole lot of money. And I do that specifically because I don't want people just coming in off the street doing that. I'd rather them go in through, either the Village or through actually the morning series calls. Because there it's a really good way to get exposed to the material. I also have tons of samples. I don't even know how many hours now. But lots and lots of them. So there's lots of opportunities to sort of hear what it's like and then decide if it's right. Because it isn't right for everybody. And I would not suggest that anyone who generally considers themselves to be a psychic or to be interested in intuitive development, a lot of the people you work with, that that's not going to be enough. You're going to want to have something a little bit more because I don't like to say that this is advanced material, because it isn't, but we talk a lot about things that, as far as I know, are not being discussed anywhere else. But then again, I don't really know because I don't pay attention to what anyone else is doing. But I do know that Paul is very direct with people and is very clear and that's not for everybody. Because some people, and I do hold you responsible for this by the way, Slade. Slade: Why? Frank: Because you're - that thing that you say. Where 83% less flowers or something. Slade: Oh, okay! Frank: It comes from that. It literally comes from that. Because there was something that, there was like the first time I ever saw your website and I saw that, it was like a bell went off. And I thought, Of course! That's actually what makes what I'm doing very different. Because there's no soft pedaling. It's not hard information. It's not scary information. It's just very direct. It's like, You are doing this and you can do something different. Which is very different than saying, Well, you know, some people do it in this way and then you could maybe think about doing it in that way. It's very direct. Gets right to the heart of the matter of whatever the person is bringing to the table. Which I very much love. Because, to me, that's the most useful thing you can do. But it's not what everybody wants. And I wouldn't pretend to think that that would be right for any particular specific person. Only the other person is going to know. I would never know. So that's why I like to kind of give people the ability to sort of float in and float out and see what they like and what they don't. And then if they want to go deeper, there's lots of other opportunities to do that. Slade: You'd be the perfect person to ask the question about what kind of message do you feel like perhaps it's something that comes through when you're doing these sessions with Paul and the Communion of Light. A message that you feel like is missing from a lot of other new age channels and I don't mean channel in the literal sense. I just mean any kind of platform that produces these types of conversations. This type of subject matter. Is there something that you sort of want to put out there that you don't feel gets said enough? Frank: Well, if you want to hear, yes. There is one very specific thing. But it's kind of an assholey thing for me to say. Slade: That's alright. Frank: Okay. So it's that, it's basically - how much can I curse? Slade: You can curse all you want to. I'll put a little red E on the episode. Frank: Okay. Stop. Fucking. Manipulating. The. Universe. Stop trying to manipulate the Universe to give you what you want. It doesn't work. And I know you agree with me on this. Well, actually I don't know that. I suspect you do. What I hear a lot of new age people saying is, Here's how you're going to convince the Universe to be on your side. And that's not the way it works. The Universe is absolutely positively on your side. In a way that you can't even begin to comprehend because there's no person who is on your side the way the Universe is. Because every person has an ax to grind. And that makes them distinct from you. That's part of the set up of physical reality is that there's a distinction between you and someone else. And the distinction is not the body but rather the intention that causes the body to happen. So the thing that really - it doesn't bother me. It's just like, there's a lot of, How can I massage the Universe, how can I convince the Universe to do what I want it to do? You can't. You can't control it. But you can direct it. But directing and controlling are two very very different things. You can direct and say, this is the intention that I have. And then you have to stand back and let it happen. And you can't control it. And there's sort of an idea in the new age new thought arena where if I can figure out how to control my mind, control my body, control my events, control my circumstances, control my situations, control my relationships, then I'll get all the things that I want. But that's impossible. You literally can't control any of those things. Slade: Yeah... Frank: Because control is the illusion that we generate because we believe, and this is getting right to the heart of stuff Paul talks about, because we believe we live in a chaotic universe and we are supposed to be controlling things. It's not just something that people do who have a pathology. It's what you're supposed to do because otherwise you are going to get in a shitload of trouble. Slade: So what can we do instead? How should we orient ourselves away from that in another direction? Frank: Well my favorite thing that Paul says is, Give up now. Give up early. Give up often. Give up immediately. Give up constantly. Always give up. Always give up. And that's another one of those new age things where people will come around and be like, Never give up! Hold on to your dreams. No. Actually, give up your dreams. Not because you're now giving them away and you're never going to have them again. But because the Universe actually... it's not like the Universe ever forgot that you had a dream. And it's not your job to work on it. So the practical, most practical thing, in my opinion, is, and it's to be willing to let go of whatever it is that you're trying to get. Slade: Mmm... Frank: But the key there is willing. It's amazing how many people will be like, will say, I don't want to give up what I'm working on. Well, you don't have to give up on it. Just be willing to give up on it. And the way Paul puts that is, still, somebody will say, Well, I'm intending to create this experience. And they'll say, Okay... First and foremost, are you willing to not have it? And of course, you know, even people who've been asked that question many times will say, No, I'm not. I really, really... I need it. I want it. I've got to have it. I've got to get it. And then I say, Well, you're going to have a very hard time getting to it because as long as you NEED it, you're always going to be in a state of needing it. And means that it will be over there, not over here. You don't accomplish NEEDING something by getting to it or making it happen. Even the people you think are doing that, even when you think you've done that in the past, that's not how it happened. It happened because you let go of it long enough for it to come to you. Because that's the way this is designed. Everything comes to you. Nothing is supposed - you're not supposed to be reaching out for anything. You can, and it's okay if you do, but let it come to you because everything is designed to come to you but not in the sort of Shirley Temple Good Ship Lollipop sort of way that most people think that means. Like, well then everything will be exactly perfect. No! Shit is still going to happen. But you need shit to happen. Because that's part of the physical experience. That's how you define the difference between one thing and another. Is by noticing, This is something I don't want. And so that gives you the opportunity to decide, well this is something I do want. But not want as in need, but want as in have a preference for or have an affinity for. Slade: Mmm... Frank: And as I've begun to kind of, for myself, really take a lot of this in and try to walk as much of the talk that comes out of my mouth as I can, what I've noticed is, my desire for stuff has diminished. Greatly. Slade: Mmm... Frank: Whereas I thought, I was always afraid for a long time that all of this talk how manifestation works in creating your own reality, I would end up being very greedy. But actually the exact opposite has happened And I find myself more delighted to be in the midst of what I'm beginning to realize other people are probably judging me for, which I don't really give a shit about, and I don't give a shit about it. They're like, You should be - and I say this very jokingly - you're as good as Esther. Why don't you have three houses and 15 gazillion clients and selling 19,000 best-selling books because you're not working, you're not doing what you're supposed to do? No, I'm doing exactly what I want to do. And I don't want any of that. I thought I wanted it. Because it seemed like this very Good Ship Lollipop kind of thing that would be really great to have and then I would be in the middle of all of this whatever it is that she has and, I don't want what she has. I mean, I love that she has it. I think that it's fabulous. But I don't want it. This sounds much loftier and much more exalted than I mean it. It's just, being willing to give up what it is that I thought I wanted has allowed me to discover what it is that I truly, truly, truly love. Which I feel like I've just barely scraped the surface of. Slade: That was awesome. I love all of that. I'm just taking it in. I'm glad I asked you that question. It was a last minute add. Alright, let's switch gears just a little bit. There's somebody out there listening right, who feels like they might be emerging as a Channel. They're going through that experience that you were going through 10 years ago. So what do you recommend that they do first? Frank: Well... Oh that's a really good question. It would depend. And so I'll give a couple of scenarios. The part... So the story that I've told about my own process is stretched out because I'm really stubborn. But I also had to kind of learn who I was. And that didn't happen 'til I turned 40. Really, truly. And that was 10 years ago. So all that summer of 2007 stuff was right after I turned 40. And that's kind of when I became a real person, in my opinion. Because everything else I'd been doing was, I was trying to satisfy other people's desires, and that's - if you're willing to become a Channel, you're going to discover all of the shit that you've been trying to pull on yourself your entire life. You can't get away from it. And that's not for everybody. But the simple most practical thing I would do is I would either get a coach, a mentor, someone else who's done it, or really go to the basics, which is that book. There's never been a better book written on this topic than Opening the Channel. It is - and if you do what they say in the way that they say it, and you do it in the order and in the amount of time it takes, not one day, but over a series of weeks into months, it will work. You'll also discover what it is that you're really wanting. When, back in that summer of 2007, there was a guy that I knew in Dallas who I went and had lunch with one day. And I was telling him about, it was after I'd been to San Antonio, and I was telling him about what I'd seen and what had happened and all that. And he, because his way of teaching is to be an asshole, so what he did was, he said, This is all about your ego. And I was like, Well, yes but except for the part where I'd done this long enough to know that it isn't about my ego. I would be willing to walk away from it. I'm not trying to do this to become famous or become like, although I probably didn't say that at the time, but I was pretty aware of it at the time. But what he was pointing out was, you're going to get to sit in all of your stuff and that's, it's not for the faint of heart. And I'm not saying it's hard. It's actually, this is actually a very simple thing to do. It's just that it requires you to move into a place psychologically, mentally, energetically, where you're willing to let go of what you think is supposed to happen. And for me, that's what channeling - for me it's a daily practice. That's what channeling is. Is it allows me to sit and let something much bigger than me happen. Through me. And to be willing to not have to figure out what I'm going to say next or how I'm going to do it or how I'm going to show up. Just to be able to recognize the right people, right place, right time, right way, is what's going on. Always. So the willingness to fall back into that and to be open to it is first and foremost. And when I say willingness, I don't mean ability to do that. It's WILLINGNESS. Because everybody has the ability to do that already. Organically. As a part of their nature. The willingness is where the rub is. If you're willing to let it happen, it will happen. But you don't - and it's not 100% willingness, it's just a little bit, in my experience. So again, the practical thing is: a. Get help. Don't do it by yourself. Even if that means just a book. Or.. because they also did a set of recordings, Sanaya and Duane did, on this, for that book. But get someone else to help you. And be aware of the fact that not mediumship, which is a very different thing, but channeling as in, just letting this energy come through you, is about being willing to let something bigger than how you perceive yourself happen. And it sounds really exalted and, Ohmygod, that's of course exactly what everyone and all people should be doing. But it's scary as shit. Because when the rubber meets the road, you've still got your identity of yourself and how you are holding yourself together and what you're supposed to be doing to make things happen. And channeling will challenge that. It's not difficult and it's not really as scary as I'm making it sound. It's just that it's like a very fast course of psychotherapy. Slade: Well it sounds like if you are listening to this and you feel like that is your path, the easiest thing for you to do as a human being, period, is to simply move in to it. And move through it. Right? Frank: Yeah. And it's not going to feel simple. But it is the simplest thing. Slade: I don't want to run out of time, and I could talk to you all day and we could just go and go and actually people could just go to you and listen to more of you. But I want to give you an opportunity to talk about - you have a new book that just came out today called, This Morning, Over Here: A Memoir That Never Happened. Tell us about that. Frank: Well, briefly. It's a little novella that I wrote about a month ago as just something that came to me and it's a story about me moving over into what Paul likes to call a Parallel Reality. And I just wake up one morning and I have everything that I've ever wanted. But I don't have everything that I know. And it's sort of like, 24-hour period of walking through this reality trying to figure out who I am now, and it's - I wrote it, it's kind of in the tradition of Jane Roberts The Over Soul Seven series of books and taking some of these ideas and putting them into practice. But hilariously, yesterday, because I knew I was going to release this today, I asked Paul, Okay, could this actually happen? Because I knew they were involved in this. In fact, they're quoted in the book to a certain extent. And they were like, No, you can't. You literally can't do that. And they explained why, in a lot of detail, much longer than we have here. But they said thinking about it is really helpful thing because being aware of the fact that every idea manifests, every idea manifests. It just may not manifest with you. Is a very powerful thought. And there's a lot you can do with that. So I really enjoyed the process of writing the book. I really love the story for a variety of reasons. And it was one of those experiences where I, exactly what they said yesterday is exactly what I discovered. Which was, as I wrote the book, I could see the ME that moved over into this other reality started kicking ass a little bit more than I normally do. And I was kind of like, Oh, I like that! I like what's going on over here. And it wasn't the stuff. It was what happened in my personality, how I adapted to it. So it was fun to write. And it's a really quick read. It's only 24,000 words so it's maybe a couple of hours at the most. And I just had a lot of fun with it. And it's up on Amazon, so... Slade: Links in the show notes. I'll put a link in there for sure. So, Frank, it's been really wonderful just to kind of hear your story laid out in chronological fashion like that. Tell everyone where they can go online to find you. Frank: So it's really easy. Just go to CommunionofLight.com and there's a bunch of things there. You can contact me through there. You can listen to hundreds or samples of things that I've done over the last 10 years, or last 7 years, really. Or you can jump in and enjoy some of the things we're doing. And get in touch! let me know you heard this conversation. I'd love to talk to anyone about the topic of channeling or whatever it is that comes up for you. And so, thats where you can find me. That's where I'm at. Slade: Well I feel really honoured to get to capture some of your time and wisdom today. It was really terrific. Thank you for coming on. Frank: Well thank you! It was a real pleasure and what a lot of fun as always talking with you. OUTRO Thanks again for listening to the Shift Your Spirits podcast. For show notes, links, transcripts and all the past episodes please visit shiftyourspirits.com You can subscribe in iTunes or Stitcher or whatever app you use to access podcasts. If you’d like to get an intuitive reading with me, or download a free ebook and meditation to help you connect with your guides please go to sladeroberson.com and if you’re interested in my professional intuitive training program, you can start the course for free by downloading the Attunement at automaticintuition.com BEFORE I GO I promised to leave you a message in answer to a question or a concern you may have. So take a moment to think about that — hold it in your mind or speak it out loud. I’ll pause for just a few seconds….right…now. 1…2…3…4 MESSAGE Do it or don’t do it. When it comes to purpose, at some point it’s about action and it’s a choice; it’s a decision you make. But just keep in mind, if you’ve been given something really wonderful to share with the world, it’s not selfish for you to do so. It’s the exact opposite. It’s terrible for you to withhold your gift. Let us have it. And I’ll talk to you later.

Laurra Warnke is a professional intuitive and author of the blog Intuitive Journal. She also works with the Akashic records to help you get clear on your soul level gifts and heal past life issues. She offers private individual readings and spiritual business mentoring. Our conversation focuses on stepping out of the psychic closet, choosing a spiritual path, and what those repeating number sequences mean. WE TALK ABOUT: ...Akashic Records readings, dark night of the soul, stepping out of the psychic closet, intuition, meditation, seeing repeating numbers, spiritual entrepreneurship, technology is spiritual, confidence, self worth, numerology, Chaldean numerology, repeating numbers, spiritual awakening... GUEST LINKS - Laurra Warnke IntuitiveJournal.com HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses Get an intuitive reading with Slade Automatic Intuition BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits Edit your pledge on Patreon TRANSCRIPT INTRO Hey, thanks for listening to the Shift Your Spirits podcast. I’m your host Slade Roberson. For eleven years, I’ve been a professional intuitive and the author of the blog Shift Your Spirits, where I try to write about spirituality with fewer hearts and flowers than most New Age blather. I also mentor emerging intuitives, psychics, and healers in a program called Automatic Intuition. Today I have an interview with Laurra Warnke about spiritual awakening, stepping out of the psychic closet, and the meaning of repeating number sequences. And, of course, as always, there’s an oracle segment at the end of the show. So be thinking about a question or a concern you have. Hold it in your mind, and I’ll come back on, after the final links and credits, and leave you with that extra message. I’m going to keep the intro short this week because I have a tiny cut on the very tip of my tongue which is making every word I say a little millisecond of torture. I’m also heading to Atlanta to see Tori Amos in concert. So, let’s just dive in and listen to my conversation with Laurra. Laurra: I’m a professional intuitive and I wasn't always that. I've worked into that over the course of the years here and really through a lot of my own self healing and my own spiritual awakening. And right now I do akashic record readings and those have changed over the years where they're not quite as, let's just follow this one process. It's a little bit more of using pure intution, using numerology, astrology, along with akashic records. And so they've kind of changed as I've grown, and I guess a little bit of the journey, getting started, back in about 2008, I went through what I would consider kind of a dark night of the soul. And it was kind of a rough year. It was a very rough year. And there was some points along the way where I just felt very, very empty inside and like, I had really lost my connection to spirit, connection to source, and well, where do you go now? How do you get through this? And so it kind of began a process of self-healing, and working on a lot of issues of confidence self worth. Part of that was kind of having an inutitive awakening, a spiritual awakening, and I was starting to see repeating numbers at that point in time, and you know, what are those and where do they fit into the process? And at one point, really just coming to the realization, Wow, what I was doing for work in the past isn't anywhere where I need to be and at the time, I was working as an office manager for a financial advisor, and you know, that's a lot of numbers, a lot of paperwork, and a lot of desk work, and there was just this feeling of such emptiness and I know a lot of people, you know, you go through periods where it's, you're just, you feel you're not in the right job so you start going down that process. Well I need a different job and well, you know, as it came to be seen, for me, that job didn't exist in the traditional corporate world and that was kind of beginning of building, starting to build my own business and I started my intuitive journal website in the end of 2009 and by 2010, I was going through your course and a few others and started doing readings professionally and just wanting to help people overcome that feeling of emptiness and... there is more and you can connect with more. So I guess that's a little bit about part of my journey. Slade: Do you remember what it was like when you were on the other side of that decision and of course we hear the terminology, "stepping out of the psychic closet", right? Do you remember what it was like to still be in the closet? And sort of on the other side of making that leap? Laurra: It was utter and sheer terror when I actually had the realization like, Ohmygosh, is this really what I'm supposed to be doing right now? And when I tried to go back into that, it was unawareness. Just like... And that's I think that's part of that dark night of the soul that you go through is the breaking through of unawareness to awareness of, Okay I'm supposed to be over here not where I am, and there was a lot of sadness with it as well. And just a feeling of what I'm doing right now to fill myself up isn't what I need anymore. And so it was a very scary time but yet when you keep waking up every morning thinking about it and, you know, it becomes very compelling. It's like you need to follow that thread. You need to pick up that thread and keep following it. And I think one of the biggest maybe turning points was before I'd even started my blog, I set down on the recliner, I had a digital recorder because that's what you recorded with back then, and I just started talking. And I recorded myself talking for maybe 45 minutes and all of what I had in my head I finally got out. And it was so, just refreshing and relieving to actually put it into words. And I think a lot of people kind of sit in that, you know, where it's a very mental state and a lot going on but to actually start saying it out loud, and I mean I was saying it to myself. There was nobody else in the room when I did that. And after that, when I did that, it's like, Okay, I need to keep going with this. I need to go forward and that's when I started my blog and when I started Intuitive Journal, it was really just like, more along the thought lines of, If I'm experiencing this, others are too. And for me, I felt very alone. Like there was nobody to talk to. I didn't have any friends in the spiritual community at that point in time and anybody that I knew in real life was definitely not on that same page at all and, you know, it makes you feel very, very alone at first. Slade: Let me ask you this when you're talking about the recording that you did. Was that more of a kind of venting the pain so to speak, or was it more like a declaration of your intentions of how you wanted to move forward? Do you recall the content of that? Laurra: It was maybe a little bit of both, but it was getting out where I really stood on things. And so part of it was that venting, where well, No, I don't believe this anymore. I no longer buy into this and, you know, at that point I didn't have it all put together. Slade: So it was like a manifesto, in a way. Laurra: Yeah! Slade: Like you were just channeling this manifesto live in the room by yourself. Laurra: Yeah! Slade: Okay, that's cool. Well how did that end up - did that kind of conversation that you were having with yourself, did it then become sort of what you were blogging about in the intuitive journal? Laurra: Yeah, it actually, when I started to break it down, when I went and listened to it, it really became a lot of the different categories that I started writing about. And anything from intuition or using meditation or the repeating numbers and it was like, my brain dump, I guess, for starting a website. And, yeah, it was kind of interesting just - it started flowing! Slade: So there's somebody listening to us right now in the moment and from the future who is probably in that same state of mind. And we all have this version of our story, right? This sad dark night of the soul turning point story... Laurra: Right. Slade: We really do. We really do. And it's the very first episode of this podcast if anybody wants to hear mine. But, there's somebody listening right now who is nodding along, they're connecting with you, you're really mirroring who they are and where they are right now. What advice would you give her? Laurra: It is a choice to step further down this path, down the spiritual path, doing intuitive work in any form and just to know that there are so many people out there cheering for you and supporting you and that, yes, keep going. Just doing what you can every day. More people need to hear it. More and more and more, I mean, not that you necessarily want to talk about all the events of the world of the day but more people need that message. More people need the connection because I think so many people have forgotten their connection to spirit and we see some of these results when you hear it on the news, and it's needed. Your voice is needed, in whatever form. Whether that's a blog or video or just speaking to, you know, friends and family. One of the things I would say to somebody getting started: the whole stepping out of the psychic closet thing. You don't have to step out 100% out of that closet tomorrow. It can be a very gradual process. And for me, that was my process where there were points along the way where, Ohmygosh I can't step that far. I can't go that far. And so, it was maybe a little bit of a battle with what's in your comfort zone versus what isn't. But just know that each time you publish a blog post or you say something or you do something, each one of those is one of those little steps. And you know, you don't necessarily have to have, it doesn't have to be this big BOOM drop the bomb, you know, to all of your friends and family because usually when you're starting out, your confidence level isn't there to be able to support it. And so telling one person that you really can confide in. Maybe you tell two people. And maybe a year later, you tell more people. So I think part of it is just keeping taking those steps forward where you are comfortable but always pushing yourself just a little bit to come out a little more and a little more and a little more. So I don't know, I hope that helps somebody out there. Slade: Well, and if I can add to that, I would like to say that your friends and family are not necessarily your clients or your audience. Laurra: Exactly. Yup. Slade: And I kind of had the realization that I was keeping myself from doing it or putting myself out there because I had these 3 or 4 imaginary people that I thought would disapprove of it or something. And they weren't even really my family. My family's pretty supportive, but I know that we all have this cluster of people that we think are going to judge us or you know, like give us the side-eye or whatever. And that really hangs in our minds eye or whatever. But once I started doing it, I realized real quickly the crowd of people who wanted to hear what I had to say and were excited about it so completely outnumbered whatever that imaginary group of people is that I thought I was worried about, that it obliterated it. It was like, I'm not working for those people. Are you going to open your mouth and speak your truth because of these three people over here that have got their arms crossed, or for this crowd of 8000 people that's like, cheering you on, you know? It's really kind of, like you said, it is a choice and it becomes an easy decision in hindsight. So I don't want to belittle it for anybody who is trying to make that choice, but I want you to know that there's more people on the other side of it than this list of people that you think will disapprove. By tenfold, you know? Laurra: Tenfold. Slade: And another thing too about the isolation. I've kind of come to believe that maybe we're dispersed through the population for a reason. Like if we all lived in the same town, it would be the coolest place ever, but the rest of the world would just be a nightmare. And I do kind of feel like maybe we're strung throughout the globe like nodes on a network and, in order for that network to be activated and to sort of wrap and enfold everyone, you are actually contributing your part. It's like you're lighting your little candle in the crowd. And that's really the choice that you're making. Like you said, it's not - I wish that we could be like overnight hugely famous and everybody in the world would know what we're doing, but it's much quieter than that, isn't it? Laurra: Yes, definitely much quieter. Slade: What are some of the things you support - one of the things you do in your business is you support spiritual entrepreneurs, people who are trying to build their business and fulfill their calling and do this professionally. So what are some of the things that you notice people bringing you, that they seem to be the most hung up on? Laurra: Um... anything from publishing the first blog post to doing a video... I mean everybody has their points of, you know, we're almost panic attack: Ohmygosh I just can't go there, I can't do that. And yet maybe they're getting their word out in a different way. Some of the more current clients that I've worked with, it has been about adding an additional piece. Like they're doing the work, or they're starting to do the work and, for some people it is, it's about, Let's get your first clients, let's get your practice clients. There could be some hang-up right there and others are a little further along and maybe they're connecting in person and they want to bring in and do a website presence. So that's a lot of the mentoring that I do. Is kind of like adding pieces in and for others, maybe they have the website but they have not built a newsletter and the thought of writing, you know, writing newsletters, publishing that... So it varies from person to person. It's just like, it's all one more step. One more step forward. Slade: So you sort of just support people wherever they are in whatever they're missing from the mosaic, you help them kind of identify that and just do one thing at a time, add one more element. Laurra: That seems to be right now how it is working very well. And so, otherwise I think it can be very overwhelming starting out, and I do think that when you get... Building a website, to me, is kind of like a birthing process. You're birthing your baby and it's like, here's this creation of yours and sometimes getting involved a little too early in that process, sometimes you need to have thought through what am I going to be writing about, what am I going to do, and you've gotten a few pieces in place and okay, and then well, let's bring one more piece in. Let's bring one more piece in. Slade: I think a lot of people get distracted and I think some of the tools of business and communication and technology - all this stuff is amazing, right? Laurra: Oh yeah. Slade: It allows us to be everywhere in the English-speaking world at this moment and it's really pretty cool. And I believe that it's very spiritual. I think technology has a very spiritual element to it for that reason. It's a democratizing force over the long period of time that it will be with humanity. We're going through some birthing pains with that for sure, but one of the things I think people come to me and they have a little bit of everything, or they've studied a lot of different modalities and techniques and tools and maybe done different certifications. One of my ways of approaching mentoring people is just to kind of treat it like, We all have this cool bag of stuff that we bring with us: life experience and wisdom, the practical things that we've learned how to do and the books we've read and, so to me it's about everyone's focused on all those little pieces, right? Like, I gotta have a YouTube and I gotta have a blog. Laurra: Right. Slade: And they're kind of overly focused on the little bits and pieces, whereas to me, the thing that makes your practice YOUR practice or your Purpose is it's kind of like the glue that holds all those things together. You're sort of the grout in the mosaic. You know what I mean? So my goal is to always show someone how to connect all those things, and even in some cases, to disclude some of the things that they're doing. Like you don't need to do that. Somebody told you to do that but it's really not serving a purpose. So one of my best pieces of advce for someone who is trying to do this is to actually follow where the clients take you. Like, you don't really go off in a vacuum and create all this stuff and then come back and be like, TADA! Here's what I got to hit you over the head with. It's much more practical to put yourself out there, see who you attract in your practice and then look at the issues that are being brought to you. Look at the ways that you're mirroring the clients. Is there a pattern to who's showing up for you? It's almost like the clues to your Purpose are within the people that you attract in a way. They're sort of showing you who you are and what you're meant to do for them. And so if you approach it as a, Here's this person, this is what they're presenting me with. What do I have to address that for them? What do I have to support them in their intention or to fix their problem, whatever it might be. And if you just keep doing that, it actually defines a lot of what you do, right? I mean, you write blog posts that answer the questions that people bring you. You create videos and podcasts for the same reason. I mean a lot of what we're doing is we're answering questions that our collective audience brings us over and over again and that's how we decide what we talk about. So I'm interested because I've known you since you started out doing this and that's a really cool perspective to get to see. What has evolved about your practice since the beginning? What's different about who you are now as an intuitive? Laurra: Um, you know, I would say, just confidence. And just seeing a lot of the patterns through many different clients. The same, a lot of the same issues coming through, just finding the thread and the patterns and as far as the modalities and toolkit, the big bag of tools, just keeping expanding on them. Mainly it's because I love it. I love learning a new tool. Is integrating all of those tools and rather than just hanging onto only one tool but to, you know, that does kind of start to become, Okay this is your practice. This is how you are doing healing work. This is how you're identifying problem situations. So it has definitely matured, I guess would be the word I'd use. Matured over the years, where when you learn one thing at first, its like, Oh I have to hang on to that for.. and keep doing that. And okay, now take a breath, you can bring in this one and you can use this tool. And just even a deeper understanding of the tools. Sometimes when you learn a modality, it's very cut and dry. Do it this way, x, y, z. This is step 1, 2, 3. But yet you don't necessarily maybe all the time get where did that come from? How did that develop? And that's where I kind of am at now, going just deeper into some of the history of some of these pieces, like how does it all connect? And I guess I sit at home and contemplate how does this connect with this? How does astrology and numerology and akashic records and all of these other pieces and your intuition and these other different divine energy streams... how do they all connect? How do they all overlap? And you know, it's kind of... I don't know there's a lot of different pieces to it but I just feel that there's this very large common thread. Slade: There's this one piece that you mention that I really wanted to be sure and talk to you about and that was the divine numbers, the repeating number sequences and this is one of my favorite personal topics and I actually always had intentions of blogging about it or writing about it a lot more because I have this one post that I did about the meaning of 222 and the meaning of 11:11 and both of those posts to this day get so much search traffic in Google that you would think my site was entirely devoted to that or something. And I do have a numerology page that I'll link to in the show notes, but you've made this more of a focus topic in your practice than I have. So how did you become interested in repeating number sequences? Laurra: Well for me it was just seeing them myself and becoming very curious about them because like many, many others that are tuning in, you see them much more frequently than would be normal. When you're seeing one number or different combinations of numbers and you're seeing them 6, 7, 10, 15 times a day and yeah, it's there to get you to notice. That you're seeing them. So it's like, Alright, now what? So it's, I guess the way I would look at it is, it's taking you down a path. And just walking your spiritual path. So it's a very easy way for angels to connect with you. Just on your every day choices that you make. And aligning you with a higher vibration. So for me, thinking of each of the numbers as an energetic vibration, I think is helpful. Where the vibrational energy of 222 is slightly different than 777 or something else that you might see. And really it's learning - where most people I think get stuck is, you see them, and it's really cool, Oh that's neat, and then you stop. And you go back to your regular life. No! Hang on - they're there for a reason. Yeah, you are supposed to be doing something. It IS a message from Spirit, from the Divine, and so, one of the things that I can say that helps, because it's different for everybody and that's, there's just not 100% one cut and dry answer for every one, is to really start thinking about, Okay, if you can go back in the last three to five minutes, or even the last hour, maybe even the last day, what were you thinking about that would've been something that would've been raising your vibration? And a lot of times, when I've noticed this happening, is when you're sitting there and you're just kind of daydreaming, like, Oh gosh, it'd be so great if I had a job that was closer to home, that I didn't have to commute, that would be just so awesome. Or maybe you want to take a, maybe it's vacation. So, you know, those are some of the more real life things that... I see it kind of as two different levels. I mean it's spiritual communication but it's also help for you to take some next steps in your day to day life, and for me, one of the biggest times that I saw repeating numbers, it was when I was getting ready to leave my job. And so I was working full time before, and in June of 2011, I left my job in order to be doing this work full-time. In the two week period, maybe even probably a month, before I got up enough courage to give my notice, like the day before the day of, I saw any and all repeating number patterns like, about 40 times in a row. And it was like, Okay, thank you, thank you, thank you for the validation. I can do this! I can go turn in my resignation, and I did. Slade: Mmm... Laurra: So that's just one piece of it. But it is really a, it's there for you to hear it and, Okay, if you're thinking thoughts of starting your own business, of leaving one job for another job, the connection with the energetic vibration, it's like, Okay, maybe there's a better vibration at this new job, maybe you don't have to deal with as much stuff. And it's like, Okay so there's something that's a higher level of connection for you. And just taking that time to really think through it. Slade: Yeah, I think there's kind - and this is my approach, you don't have to necessarily agree with it. I'm interested in seeing where your purpose, where your perspective, sort of adds to my understanding of this. But one of the first things that I tell people, because it seems to me that the first question that I get is, What does it mean? Again, like overly focused on the detail of that individual number, whereas I feel like seeing the numbers at all is kind of a, it's like a flag, right? It's like somebody is - Laurra: Yup. Slade: either flashing a light or setting off an alarm or ringing some bells or showing you these numbers, and it's meant to get your attention, first and foremost. And then I also do the same thing that you said, which is I think, Okay wait a minute, what was I just thinking about? Because you're right. You're usually in a semi-conscious state when you see these things. It pulls you out of a moment of daydreaming while you drive or something like that. And you see it on the dashboard or you see it on the, you know, car in front of you or whatever it might be. And it sort of takes you out of it. So the first thing I try to do is capture what was just being flagged for me? It's like the Universe is observing the security footage of my thoughts and they have time-stamped that moment for some reason, right? Laurra: Yes. Slade: Right there. And so the first thing I ask is, Okay, what am I thinking about when these, this phenomenon keeps occurring, because that's being flagged for me. That's telling me your own thoughts or your own wisdom right there. Pay attention to that dude. It's already there. It's coming through. And then - but there is this other fun element right? Of interpreting them as this kind of Morse code from the beyond or whatever it might be. So what - you have a free report with repeating number sequences and you define triple numbers from 0s to 999, and all the things in between. So - well tell us about that report, first of all. What's all in that? Laurra: Well it is a little bit of a just kind of history of kind of like we've talked of here, of how kind of it came to be for me, but just a little bit more expansion on each of the numbers and it's the, What do they mean for me? What am I supposed to do next? And so, it is validation. Yeah, you are supposed to do something next. And maybe it's going to that workshop that you - What happens is, we shut down so many good things and I think of the repeating numbers are there to, Hey wait a minute! Stop. That was important! Slade: Yeah. Laurra: Like you said, it kind of gets bookmarked. Like, let's go back to that. For example, you saw an advertisement for some type of a workshop. Oh, that would be really cool to attend. That'd be great. And then all of a sudden, reality, the I can't afford that, I can't get away from home, I couldn't take off of work, and you shut it down right away. And I think sometimes it's like, Wait a minute! Stop! That was the path right here. Go to the workshop. Follow that path. So that's part of it. But just to kind of also, validation that they're pointing you in a direction. They're pointing you in a better direction. A good direction. And just, it's like, Okay, time to wake up here. Slade: Do you have meanings for individual numbers in there? Like if somebody is seeing 444 and they want to know what that means, do you have sort of like a dictionary of meanings for those numbers? Laurra: Yes, I do. I have a short summary on each of the main numbers. I don't go into too much very specific number patterns, but for 111, 222, 333, all the way through 000, I have all of those and 11:11. So each has a nice little summary paragraph so that you can just kind of get acquainted with the energetic vibration of each number and like, Okay what area is this really connecting with? Alright, this is guidance and reassurance. Or this is just a big YES energy. So that you can kind of use that and apply it to what you were thinking about shortly before you saw them. Slade: How did you go about discovering the meanings for those numbers? Is it something that you researched and compiled, is it channeled information? Where did you get the meanings? Laurra: A lot of it was just either my own intuition or my own channeling that I did. To just get some of the basics down and if I were to go and do them over, which I think I probably need to, I think just having this many years of understanding, I think would just kind of add a little deeper perspective to what I've already come up with. Slade: Interesting. Well that's cool because then that means your resource is an additional set of wisdom. It's not just, you know, some - regurgitating something somebody else has already said about it. I mean, I know some of the big ones will probably have very similar meanings for whatever, but I like the fact that you're offering an additional YOUR version, your take on these, so that it's something if you're interested in this phenomenon, you can add that resource to all the stuff that you're collecting and bookmarking. Because I know I have a page of notes linking to different things that talk about this and discuss it. And I think one of the things that's kept me from building more resources around it is because I really would have to go in and reveal those meanings for myself. There's two different ways you can approach that project. You could research and compile something, just like someone might do around color psychology. Or there is this other approach where you can actually add something to the canon, so to speak. And that sounds a little daunting to me. And I'm kind of a procrastinator about things that are daunting. But anyway, I'm very fascinated with this subject and I definitely wanted to hear what you had to share about it. I'm interested in something else and I know people are going to notice this about you when they see your name in the title of the blog post, and on the podcast episode. You spell Laurra with two Rs, and that was a conscious decision. You actually changed the spelling of your name for an energetic numerological kind of reason, correct? Laurra: Yes, that is correct. Slade: Tell me about that. Laurra: When I was studying numerology and astrology, you're talking about some numbers are fortunate, some numbers are not fortunate. I had a name reading done, and it really wasn't coming up to a fortunate number and so this was one of the recommended numbers or vibrations here adding this extra letter in. There's different ways you can do it, but this was like, Okay. So it was really trying it out. Because for anybody who's kind of thought, either they don't like their name or they just want it to resonate to a higher vibration or more fortunate vibration, like, Oh... and I'm sure if you've been anywhere around any, you know, there's a lot of people that have done this, and I guess I will say, even after this long, I'm, it's still difficult to step in to it. When you are looking at changing the spelling of your name, there's different levels of it. One would be changing it on your Facebook page, changing it on your website. And then there's another level which would be changing it on your bills, your chequing accounts, the way you sign things. And then another level of it would be actually going so far as to change birth certificate information. And to be fully stepping into that number and for me, I've only gotten to a certain point of being able to do that and it's interesting. So am I going to say it's like, Oh this is perfect! Everybody should go do this! No. I think it's something to be really thought through as to whether or not you want to go that path. I think it's perfect for some people. And some people can embrace it immediately and then there's others probably more like me that's like, Hmm, got a few reservations. Not so sure. What am I missing? Am I not seeing this the way I should... Maybe I should be seeing this on a bigger picture? So I don't know if that helps anybody down the way. Take your time with it. If you're thinking about doing it, take your time with it. And one piece I will add in: if you're looking at traditional Western numerology, there's Chaldean numerology as well. When I was doing this, it was using Chaldean numerology and I'll let you look that up. There are differences in how things are calculated. So I think if you're considering doing it, that you are very sure of which avenue you are going down and why. And that's one of the things that can just help you step in to it if you do decide to change the spelling of your name. Slade: I think you could also think of this as your sort of pen name. Right? Like, there are a lot of people who use a different author name. There are people who use a different name for their spiritual practice than maybe what they do in their everyday lives. And there's lots of different reasons around that. Laurra: Yup. Slade: And something people ask me about a lot is, Well is that inauthentic in some way? Is that, kill the energy, for you to "use" a different name. And I actually think what you're talking about doing could be combined with the idea of choosing a name for yourself that represents this new path, or that represents this side of you, you know? Because I have a lot of other sides. I don't walk around all day long living and breathing intuition. It's partly my career and I'd like to think it's part of my Purpose to be doing this. But there are lots of other parts of my personality where I'm not necessarily that person all the time. Laurra: Yup. Slade: And I was even thinking as you were talking about how you were using it for yourself personally, I was thinking, Well it sort of represents you in this mode, right? Laurra: Right. Slade: Like it could still be something - it's like a special costume that you wear, or a piece of jewelry that brings you power, or I think that maybe that would be an in-between way of approaching it. Maybe you don't change your legal name but maybe it becomes part of the decision around who am I going to be in this new aspect of my life, and what do I want to present? I know people who've entirely changed their name as a part of a sort of willful change of their persona and who they are and how they see themselves. Laurra: Yup. Slade: So I think that could be an empowering part of it. And you could also get a name reading done if you're in that process and see where is it fallen out and maybe that will help you make a decision about a name that you're considering using. Laurra: Yeah. I have seen quite a few that maybe they've even dropped their last name and used a different last name as, like you said, a pen name in essence. But yeah, it becomes the persona. This is part of me in the business, and this is what I'm portraying. I remember listening to a video of somebody who used a pair of glasses, special pair of glasses, and when they put the glasses on, that was their persona. And you know, they took on that role that they had developed of, Okay, when I put these glasses on, it represents me in this business mode. It was very interesting. Slade: Oh, I love that. I have a friend who wears a tiara while she does her make up. Laurra: Oh I love that! Slade: It's kind of a similar concept. But yeah, like putting on this special aspect of yourself. Yeah, I like those kind of spells. I think that's very powerful personal magic to dabble in. So what's next for you? Do you have any special projects that you'd like to do? Laurra: Well, I guess if I say it out loud, it must mean it's real! I am looking into - I'm getting just the very basics of getting started doing a podcast and so I'm just, like I said, in the beginning stages of that. But you know, now that I've publicly announced that, I guess I've made it real. And I guess I will be continuing on ahead with that. Slade: Well that explains why I was compelled to invite you then! Laurra: Exactly. Slade: You were drafted by the Universe. I guess my email must've been, had a lot more weight to it than I realized. When I sent you that you were probably thinking, Oh no, they know about the podcast! Laurra: It really was. Slade: They're gonna make me do it now! Listen, Laurra, it's been such a pleasure catching up with you and I would love to talk to you again and do more podcasting with you in the future. But tell everyone where they can go to find you online. Laurra: Okay so my website is intuitivejournal.com and yeah, if you head on over there, I have a free report on Repeating Numbers. And just kind of get you going, get you on the path and you can read a little bit more about me and the journey and everything. That would be the best place to start. Slade: That's terrific, Laurra. Thank you for coming on the show. Laurra: You are welcome. Thank you so much for having me. It's been awesome connecting with you again, Slade. OUTRO Thanks again for listening to the Shift Your Spirits podcast. For show notes, links, transcripts and all the past episodes please visit shiftyourspirits.com You can subscribe in iTunes or Stitcher or whatever app you use to access podcasts. If you’d like to get an intuitive reading with me, or download a free ebook and meditation to help you connect with your guides please go to sladeroberson.com and if you’re interested in my professional intuitive training program, you can start the course for free by downloading the Attunement at automaticintuition.com BEFORE I GO I promised to leave you a message in answer to a question or a concern you may have. So take a moment to think about that — hold it in your mind or speak it out loud. I’ll pause for just a few seconds….right…now. 1…2…3…4 MESSAGE Give up. Anger jealousy what people think. Just stop trying to control the universe. It’s like trying to grab a fish under water. Surrender detach. It’s nice - calm powerful serene - not to care in that desperate grasping way. It doesn’t mean you can’t do all the things you want to do - but let them come to you. You cannot miss what is yours, what is truly meant for you will find you. And I’ll talk to you later.

Erin Pavlina is a professional intuitive, blogger and author who has written more than 800 articles on the topic of spiritual, psychic and personal development. We talk about intuitive counseling, past life readings, astral projection, and what happens on the Other Side. MENTIONED IN THE SHOW: ...past lives, past life readings, astral projection, the Other Side, the veil, paranormal investigation, spirit guides... GUEST LINKS - ERIN PAVLINA erinpavlina.com The Astral Projection Guidebook by Erin Pavlina HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses Get an intuitive reading with Slade Automatic Intuition BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits Edit your pledge on Patreon TRANSCRIPT INTRO Hey, thanks for listening to the Shift Your Spirits podcast. I’m your host Slade Roberson. For eleven years, I’ve been a professional intuitive and the author of the blog Shift Your Spirits, where I try to write about spirituality with fewer hearts and flowers than most New Age blather. I also mentor emerging intuitives, psychics, and healers in a program called Automatic Intuition. Today I have an interview with Erin Pavlina about past life readings, astral projection, and the Other Side. And, of course, as always, there’s an oracle segment at the end of the show. So be thinking about a question or a concern you have. Hold it in your mind, and I’ll come back on, after the final links and credits, and leave you with that extra message. BEFORE I FORGET I'd like to say a quick thank you to Heather Becker, my newest supporter on Patreon. I appreciate all of you who have pledged your support and I’m really excited to see the new names each week. It demonstrates that you’re enjoying the show and want it to continue. That’s very encouraging to me, so thank you. Listeners who support the show on Patreon can access bonus Q&A episodes, where you guys send in questions, I record answers to them, and they go out to patrons of the show exclusively. To find out how you can become a patron, support my time in producing this show, and access the extra bonus content, please go to patreon.com/shiftyourspirits Today’s guest, Erin Pavlina is a professional intuitive, blogger and author who has written more than 800 articles on the topics of spiritual, psychic and personal development. Just before the recording started, I took a moment to tell Erin about the impact she’s had on my own career as an intuitive and author. Way back in 2006, I had no intentions of becoming a professional intuitive, but my guides were really pushing me to write and publish about my experiences with the paranormal. And at the time I was writing the first articles for Shift Your Spirits, I discovered Erin's blog which she had just launched. It was a huge synchronicity for me. Erin set a real, tangible example for me to emulate — just as a blogger, not to mention as an intuitive. I had no idea what it would lead to… Back in the day, I wrote her emails asking for advice, and she was always encouraging, inspiring, and she treated me like a peer. I am forever grateful for that. She gave me a print interview on Shift Your Spirits 10 years ago. So, for me, sharing this conversation is a full circle moment. Whether she knew it or not before today, I consider Erin one of my mentors. INTERVIEW SEGMENT Erin: That's really cool. Yeah, I've heard that from some other people. And that, I think is the part that's most gratifying, is creating and inspiring people who also create the drops in the ocean and send the ripples out. Slade: Yeah. Erin: Because the more people we have doing this, the better. Slade: Right. It's kind of like nodes in a network and you raise a tower and a bunch of other people can connect to those as well. Erin: Exactly. Slade: Well for those listeners who may be discovering you for the first time, tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do. Erin: Okay. So I'm an intuitive counsellor. So what I do is I connect to my clients' spirit guides and get information that will help them on their path, whether that's career, relationships, finance, health, spirituality, whatever they want to ask about, their guides will answer. So I consider myself a conduit. Just a relay. And I've honed my abilities to the point where I am able to clearly receive information from people's spirit guides and then I just pass it on and they kind of go from there. Slade: Awesome. So you've written about a turning point in your life and I was referring back to 2006 and you've called it a kind of Emergence. So how did you become an intuitive? Where was the story, the origin, for you? Erin: So I was intuitive my whole life. You know, when I was four years old, I started to notice things. I would have premonitions. I would have dreams about deceased people coming to me and giving me information that turned out to be correct, and I kind of went through my life just having intuition for myself, and I never considered that I could do this for other people. And one day I was watching a reality show, Beauty and the Geek, and my second cousin who I hadn't seen since he was a little kid, was on the show and I noticed that every time he came on the screen, I would hear a voice telling me things. Like, tell Josh I'm sorry, tell Josh it's not his fault. I'm like, Who is talking to me? And I really didn't understand what was happening because I certainly wasn't expecting it. But I started writing down everything I was hearing. And then when the show was over a couple of months later, I got in contact with him and I said, I don't know if you're into this stuff, but I gotta tell you what this voice is telling me. And I told him everything that this female voice was giving me. And there was silence on the other end of the line. I'm like, Josh, are you still there? And he said, I'm shaking right now. I said, Why? He said, Because I know exactly what you're talking about. I know exactly who you're talking to. My finacee had a suicide six months ago and everything you're telling me is stuff that I found in her suicide note, which I didn't share with any other person in the world. And so we were both kind of sitting there going, Well... well... well... what is this?? And it occurred to me that I had been speaking to a deceased person. Then I thought to myself, If I did that once, maybe I can do it again. So I started trying consciously to tune in to other people's deceased relatives. And I also discovered at the same time other guides that would come to me and that I could tell were not deceased people. They were spirit guides. And I just very boldly and courageously and with no other intent other than to help people, started passing along messages to people from their guides. And that's really how it started. Then I decided to start writing about some spiritual topics. Again, with no intention of it really turning into anything. And as I was talking about this thing with my audience, my growing audience, people started asking me to give them a reading. I'm like, Well I don't know how to give a reading, per say. I don't know how that functions. But again, I thought, I might as well try. So I tuned in to my guides and I asked them for help doing this work and they taught me how to do it and I started doing this professionally in 2006. And here we are. Slade: Wow. It's so similar to kind of how it happened for me too. I thought, Oh, I'm just going to write about these experiences that I have and then all the people reading kind of drafted me and said - Erin: Exactly! Slade: ... Can you connect for me? Yeah, so I was like, months behind you, but also observing you to some degree, you know, having it happen as well. And I think that's one of the reasons I attach to your experience so strongly. So I'm wondering though, since it has been, what, it's like almost 12 years for you? Erin: Yeah. Slade: That you've been doing readings... How have your readings evolved over time, like, are they different now then back when we first discovered you? Erin: I would say that the mechanism of how I receive information is exactly the same. But I've gotten faster and better and more clear at getting the information. So I used to do like, a 30-minute phone reading or 1-hour phone reading, but I'm very to the point. You know? I'm not all out there and I don't meander around. I get right to the point and I discovered that I could answer a lot of questions for people in just 15 - 20 minutes. And so, gradually, I have honed my reading skills to the point where I can do a 15-minute reading for somebody and still cover all the areas of their life that they want to cover. And then I also was able to start doing readings by email, which I remember trying that long time ago, but people have follow-up questions, and then it turned into this back-and-forth email exchange. But later, probably around in year seven or eight, I decided to give it a try again because after speaking with my guides about it, they told me how to do it so that a person would get a full reading by email. So I had people send me their questions by email and I sit in my meditation, connect with their guides, and I can answer their questions just as well over email as I could over the phone and I have found that very, very, very few people need any kind of follow-up because the reading is still very thorough. So I would say that I've gotten better and faster, and even more clarity than we had before. Slade: Okay well I'm very impressed with all that. Not only for myself, but I know that there are a lot of other intuitives who are listening right now who, one of the questions I get a lot of times about doing email readings is how do you handle the back-and-forth, so I'm very curious that that just isn't an issue. Erin: Actually one of the things I think happens is, when they send me a question, I don't just answer the question. I use that as a launching point to talk to their guides about their entire situation. So if somebody says, you know, should I move to L.A. and take the job, or keep the one I have in New York, it's not just a yes or no question for me. I talk to the guides about their career path and they show me all the different trajectories that the person could be on and which ones will likely lead to the best outcomes for them. And I also talk to their guides about what the person most wants to experience in their lives. So when I send back the reading, I don't just say, Yeah, move to L.A. Slade: Right. Erin: You know? I'll talk to them about what they truly wanted when they incarnated, what their current trajectory is taking them, and also what they want to experience. And so I look through all of their possibilities, pick the one or two that the guides are very much in favour of, and when I send back the reading, I not only tell her why she should go to L.A., but also why she should go and what she's going to experience there, what challenges she might face and how to overcome them. So it's very complete. Slade: That's very cool. I'm curious, Is there a particular type of reading that you tend to attract in your practice? Have you noticed any patterns? Erin: Yeah, I mean, the types of questions people ask, after doing thousands and thousands of readings, there are a few questions that are sort of at the top. The top one is definitely how can I transition to a career I'll enjoy? Which I find interesting and I guess a lot of people go through that, you know? You get out of college or high school, you pick a career path and somewhere down the line, five or ten years later, you are not happy. You've had a shift and your career has not shifted with you. So a lot of people want to know what they can do to be happier in their careers. So that's a big one. Slade: Yeah. I notice that you also do past-life readings, correct? Erin: Yes. I've just started doing that. Slade: How did you - Well, that's cool because I was wondering how you discovered that you were receiving past life information. Was it prompted by a question someone had about it or how did that emerge? Erin: For the most part, during the last 11 - 12 years, most people did not ask me about past-life stuff. So past-life information would only emerge in the reading when the guides felt it was necessary for the person to know what had occurred in previous lives. Usually there were some kind of trauma that was carried over. So I never really gave it a whole lot of thought because my personal opinion was that getting a past-life reading doesn't help them a whole lot this life unless there is some kind of carry-over. But one day when I was in meditation with my guides, they gave me the idea to just do it. And I don't really question them after this many years. They said, Do some past-life readings. You're going to see some really interesting patterns. You're going to see some really interesting things, and it is going to be very helpful to people. So I thought, Alright. So really, on a whim, but with great delight and joy and curiosity, I offered the past-life readings. And I ended up getting like, 300 people signed up in the first week and it was a little overwhelming, because it takes a long time to do those, but as I got going with them, I realized how valuable they are, how important they are, and what would happen is when I would tune in to their past life, the guides would show me their entire life, like a video, and I could fast-forward or rewind or pause at various points and what I did, because obviously a life is very long, I would grab the key salient significant experiences of their life and express those to them. Otherwise, obviously it would take many, many, many pages to go over a past life. And so what we discovered together, me and my clients, is that knowing how you were in a previous life often informs what you're doing in this life, whether it's a reacting to something bad that happened and you say, I'm never doing that again, or it's an opportunity to replay and redo things that happen in your previous life where you didn't like the outcome. It's like re-doing a dream in a way. You get to change the outcome. It was really cool. Slade: Well, one of the main reasons that I wanted to talk to you at this time was because one of my listeners requested a show topic covering the Veil of Forgetfulness or The Veil, as some people call it. And when I heard that, I immediately thought of you because I remember the tagline that you had years ago about remembering where you came from. And I thought you would be the perfect person to ask about this topic. So what is the Veil? How would you explain it? Erin: To me, I guess the Veil is like a blanket covering your memories so that you cannot remember who you really are and where you really came from. And I think a lot of intuitives have pondered, Why bother with a veil? Why can't we remember that we come from love? Why can't we remember who we are, who we were and everything like that? And I don't know that I have the definitive answer, but the way that I view incarnations is kind of like playing a video game where you create a character, you give him or her certain attributes, certain strengths, certain weaknesses, and then you hit Play. And so, if your character knew everything, if your character knew everything that he was going to have to do and everything he was going to have to be, he would probably, you know, fall on his sword and say, Forget this, I'm not doing it. So part of it is to have, part of the Veil is to have the experience, to have it be clean, to have it not be informed by who we've been and who we are and not remember where we come from. But I think it's very important and very helpful if you can remember where you came from, and you know, where you're going to return to, because I have to imagine that if we were all living in a world where we remembered that we're connected, that we're all One, that we come from love, we would treat each other differently, and we'd treat the planet differently, and very, very different things would happen. Slade: So do you think, and I mean I'm just asking you to kind of philosophically ponder a little bit, do you think it's something that we're meant to overcome, that it's sort of maybe a soul chosen... like you said, if it's a video game, is it a survivalist game that you are agreeing to go into with the limitations because of those limitations, or do you think it's the intention of a higher power that we come in forgetting... Erin: I think it's both. Slade: Yeah... Erin: I think that the system is set up so that we don't remember. But I want to clarify that by saying, Some people do remember. There's a lot of people that remember but they're told by society and by how they're raised and everything that it's probably not real or not true. Kids have a very strong grasp of cooperation and love and being very unconditionally loving. And then our societal structure often changes their nature to be, I don't want to say selfish, but looking after oneself. Not sharing. But I think it's all, I don't want to say it's all part of the game, because that sounds, I don't know, I don't like that, but it's part of the system and I'm not 100% sure why it is but I do know that it's beneficial in some way or we wouldn't keep doing it and I also know that some people do remember and that's... When people have their awakening, they remember and then it's very... it feels very important to share that memory with other people, which is why I kind of started my blog. Slade: Yeah... Erin: Is to wake people up. And to help them remember that they're a spiritual being having a human experience and that we can design and structure this playground any way that we want. Slade: You've written a lot about The Other Side. You have an e-book actually available on your website called The Other Side, which is a collection of some of the information that you've brought through, specifically about the other side and what happens when we die, what happens before we incarnate, the in-between. I'm just wondering, Is there anything that you've discovered about the other side that was particularly surprising to you, that you hadn't heard before from another source? Something that might have been unexpected or peculiar? Erin: Yeah, I think usually when I would do a reading and I would connect with a deceased individual, they would send love and they would send hope and all kinds of ideas to make a person's life better. But there was one situation where I was speaking with a gentleman on the other side and his client was, his daughter was my client and he was very intelligent and he was coming through very clearly. And when I got off the phone with my client, I continued talking to this guy because that's how strong a connection we had and how interested I was in speaking to him. And he was very interested in speaking to me. So he was at a real high vibration and I kind of asked him, What do you do over there? What's going on? And one of the things he said is, It's sort of like a creation experience. There's a lot of different things you can create over there. Different experiences, but one of the things that he was doing is engaging in sort of philosophical discussion, sharing of wisdom with other beings on the other side. So that sounded really cool to me. It was a little unexpected. Some people on the other side want to create sort of a fantasy-realm for themselves where they re-live a little bit one of their most recent life and they set things up to see what would have happened if they had taken a different road. So it's almost like you seem to get an opportunity to say, What would have happened if I had taken that job? Or what would've happened if I married that guy? And all the curiosity you ever had in your life, you're allowed to kind of see what would've happened if you had taken a different road. So there are apparently people spending time doing that a little bit. The other thing I saw which was, I was not expecting is some times, and this is very, very, very rare, so I don't want people to worry about this. Sometimes, if a person crossed over and they had either suicided or there was some mental anguish going on with them, they, I saw, had a tendency to re-live a lot of the anguishing experiences, hanging on to something that they really did not need to hang on to but which they could not seem to let go. And in those cases, what I saw over time because I would read for the same client and we'd kind of check in to see what people were doing, there were angelic energies around them that were helping them to heal and helping them to close those wounds so they could properly and fully cross over and release their life. The life that they had just had. Because there's something about they don't want them to cross over until they're able to drop that persona and be back at One, in peace and kind of become their higher self again. Does that make sense? Slade: Yeah, interesting. So I wonder if, do you think that corresponds with what we call earth-bound spirits and spirits that are trapped or do you think it's something else? Erin: Yes, I do think that some spirits have a difficult time crossing over but I really, really, really, really want to stress that that's a teeny tiny percentage of people. Because most people easily slough off the connection and are able to cross over completely and fully, but I have seen some energies that are either too afraid to cross over because they fear judgment or are a little bit confused and they need a little extra help working on releasing and cutting the cord with this life. So yeah, that happens sometimes. Rarely. Slade: Cool. Well, you know, the thing is, you do so many fascinating things including, you have a whole paranormal investigation team which we'd have to do a separate episode about. Erin: Yeah. Slade: So I won't take you down too many rabbit holes. But I was curious about the connection between the things that we're talking about. The readings, the mediumship, connecting with the other side, communicating with spirits, and then astral projection, which is another really big topic for you that you've written about. You have a book about astral projection. So, what do you use the astral projection for? What's the application? Erin: Yeah, okay that's a great question. When I was young, when I was 15 to maybe 18 or 20 years old, I used to astral project because I was getting attacked by lower vibrational entities on the astral plane. And it wasn't something I was trying to do and it certainly wasn't something I was trying to attract, but it kept happening. I finally got to the point where I said, You know, if you're going to keep attacking me, I'm going to go on the offense because I don't like this. So I started projecting three or four nights a week, and I would go on patrol and I would remove and clear lower vibrational entities that I saw either around my house, not inside but outisde, and then I started doing that for other people. And then that kind of died down a lot. I got real focused on college and dating and marriage, children, business etc. And so my astral projection experiences now are focused very differently. So now when I go out, I'm either helping a spirit who is having difficulty crossing over. I do some astral projection work on my paranormal investigations to identify and look at the ghost or entity that is plaguing our clients and I communicate with it to see what its deal is. And also sometimes I'll visit friends because that's fun. Also I will visit either another dimension or go up to the, oh let's call it the Ether, where I'll communicate and commune with my own deceased relatives, friends and loved ones from this life and previous lives. Slade: Awesome. Okay well that makes me want to get the book now. So I assume that the astral projection guide book is about mastering some of those techniques for those purposes, correct? Erin: Exactly. Yeah. The book really covers a lot of detail about how to prepare yourself to astral project because you really want to be mentally prepared and then some techniques to achieve it faster and also troubleshooting some common problems people experience when they first start projecting. Slade: Very cool. I'll put a link in the show notes and on my blog as well so people can go check that out. I'm curious what's next for you. Do you have anything special, project-wise, coming up on the horizon? Erin: Yeah, I'm working on an intuition development program. It'll be an audio program. This is something I've been wanting to do for at least five years, but I have not had the time to devote to doing it. And now I finally do, I have completed the script so all I need to do is record it and get it produced. And in this program, people will learn how to use their clair-abilities: clairvoyance, clairaudience, sentience and cognizance. And we'll also go over the practical ways that you can use it in your daily life because a lot of people don't realize they can use it for everything. And it will also go over how to prepare yourself to be able to hear your guides and receive intuition whenever you desire, where you don't have to just wait for it to strike you. Slade: Very cool. You'll have to come back on when you get all that up and running and share it if you'd like. Erin, it's been a real pleasure catching up with you and finding out what you're up to. Tell everyone where they can go find you online. Erin: The website is erinpavlina.com and I'm sure Slade will post it up somewhere. There's hundreds of articles on there that you can read for free, which I love. I love to hear people's feedback on the articles, and often we go over to my Facebook wall and talk about each article, so that's available for people as well. Slade: That's wonderful. Thank you, Erin, for coming on the podcast. I really appreciate it. Erin: Thank you. It was great catching up. OUTRO Thanks again for listening to the Shift Your Spirits podcast. For show notes, links, transcripts and all the past episodes please visit shiftyourspirits.com You can subscribe in iTunes or Stitcher or whatever app you use to access podcasts. If you’d like to get an intuitive reading with me, or download a free ebook and meditation to help you connect with your guides please go to sladeroberson.com and if you’re interested in my professional intuitive training program, you can start the course for free by downloading the Attunement at automaticintuition.com BEFORE I GO I promised to leave you a message in answer to a question or a concern you may have. So take a moment to think about that — hold it in your mind or speak it out loud. I’ll pause for just a few seconds….right…now. 1…2…3…4 MESSAGE Do you have issues with faith? Are you guilty of trying to plan out every little detail of your life? This is a little reminder for you to trust in something greater than yourself — it can be the natural world, the universe, a higher consciousness, God, or even just the Mystery. Having this kind of faith is about trusting that the outcome will be exactly what it should be, no matter what it is, and it will happen in its own perfect time. Give your divine timing over to the divine — it’s better at it than we are. You can take a break from the impossible job of coaxing the universe. Take a break, take a breath. And I’ll talk to you later.

Empathy — experiencing external emotional energies as your own moods and sensitivities and feelings — is the foundation of being psychic. If you identify as a lightworker, or someone who is actively seeking a spiritual path, absorbing other people's energy comes with the territory of everyday life. For some professions, it can be an occupational hazard. MENTIONED IN THE SHOW: ...empath, psychic protection, psychic shielding, astral projection, grounding, meditation, kundalini, white light, auras, spirit guides... Psychic Shielding for Empaths The Astral Projection Guidebook by Erin Pavlina HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses Get an intuitive reading with Slade Automatic Intuition BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits Edit your pledge on Patreon TRANSCRIPT INTRO Hey, thanks for listening to the Shift Your Spirits podcast. I’m your host Slade Roberson. For eleven years, I’ve been a professional intuitive and the author of the blog Shift Your Spirits, where I try to write about spirituality with fewer hearts and flowers than most New Age blather. I also mentor emerging intuitives, psychics, and healers in a program called Automatic Intuition. Today I want to share some techniques for psychic shielding and managing your energy. And, of course, as always, there’s an oracle segment at the end of the show. So be thinking about a question or a concern you have. Hold it in your mind, and I’ll come back on, after the final links and credits, and leave you with that extra message. BEFORE I FORGET I'd like to say a quick thank you to my newest supporters on Patreon: Julia David Linda I appreciate all of you who have pledged your support and I’m really excited to see the new names each week. It demonstrates that you’re enjoying the show and want it to continue. That’s very encouraging to me, so thank you. Listeners who support the show on Patreon can access bonus Q&A episodes, where you guys send in questions, I record answers to them, and they go out to patrons of the show exclusively. I'm thinking of offering a new level of support for the show where you get to access the downloadable courses and books from the shop on my site. The way I’m thinking this would probably work is that each month one course will be featured and accessible and then I would rotate through most of the products I have available. I’d love to hear your thoughts about this. Write and tell me. I’ll let you know for sure when I decide to do this. You can always edit your pledge amount if you made one months ago and want to raise it to access the bonus content. I’m including a new link now in the show notes on how to do that. To find out how you can become a patron, support my time in producing this show, and access the extra bonus content, please go to patreon.com/shiftyourspirits I’d also like to give a quick shout out to Titti and Heather, Patreon supporters who requested today’s show topic about managing and protecting your psychic energy. PSYCHIC SHIELDING FOR EMPATHS I’ve yet to encounter anyone who has a high level of natural intuitive abilities — such as clairvoyance, clairaudience, or claircognizance — who is not also primarily clairsentient. Empathy — experiencing external emotional energies as your own moods and sensitivities and feelings — is the foundation of being psychic. If you identify as a lightworker, or someone who is actively seeking a spiritual path, it comes with the territory of everyday life. And for those who take this identity into the professional realm — obvious careers such as psychotherapists, counselors, coaches, social workers, medical professionals, massage therapists, energy healers, psychics, ministers, teachers, and child care; but also human resource professionals, customer service workers, hair stylists — anyone who deals with numerous individual people, called to assist (at least listen to) others who are processing a lot of negative conditions and circumstances — residual energy is literally an occupational hazard. PSYCHIC PROTECTION FROM HUMAN ENERGY Here are some excerpts from reading requests I’ve received asking for psychic protection techniques for specifically human-to-human energy exchange. Listen to the following and see if you identify with any of these: I need to be empathetic enough to effectively communicate, be able to explain my point of view without having to be defensive or worried about being attacked, still show compassion and a willingness to listen, YET remain detached enough that I can be true to myself, authentic, stick to my guns. I find myself constantly being drawn in to other people’s drama. I’m a good listener, and I care about other people, but sometimes it feels like I’m a dumping ground for other people’s stress and bad energy. My friends and family love to talk to me about their problems. I’m the one everyone comes to for advice. I feel that it’s truly my life purpose to play the part of the counselor. On the one hand, I do feel that I’m helping and being of service to others… but more often times than not, I end up feeling drained. I proudly identify myself as a light-worker, a way-shower. I am very open, very intuitive, very sensitive. I want to continue growing and opening myself further, but there’s a part of me that resists. Just as I start to pick up on someone’s vibes, there’s a part of me that wants to rise up, slam the door… to protect myself. How can I do both? I guess I’m what you call an empath. I am a psychic sponge — I absorb everyone else’s energy and I don’t know how to turn it off. Is there a way I can turn it down or protect myself without turning off? I worry a lot. I worry about everyone. I worry for them. It’s like I have a sign on my forehead that says “Leave your problems with me.” I know it may sound crazy to someone who doesn’t experience it, but it can literally make me feel ill — my stomach is either in knots or my neck muscles are stiff all the time. I worry more than anything that I’m going to give myself cancer from carrying all this stress. I try to be positive, but it feels like the whole world wants to tear down my attitude. The relationship is over. It has run its course. We both know it, we both agree, and we both want to move on… But there’s still a lot that has to be negotiated in order for us to go our separate ways. Every time we even talk on the phone, it’s like the wound gets torn open all over again, and we both end up in tears. How can I move forward and heal without backsliding into that painful place that feels like square one? Help! I feel like I’m under psychic attack. I’m afraid that if I open up my intuition too much, I’m going to make myself more vulnerable. I most often share the following psychic “soft” shielding technique with empaths who work in para-professional or healing arts fields where heart-centered connection is a requirement. It has become a staple training in the Automatic Intuition program. EMPATHIC SHIELDING I’m sure you are familiar with the concept of Purple Light and White Light Shielding — Purple Light being the highest angelic vibe you can invoke for spiritual protection, nurturing, and support; White Light being the universal holy shield. WHITE LIGHT MAY BE TOO HARD CORE The thing to keep in mind about White Light is that it’s entirely impermeable and allows for too little heart chakra to heart chakra reflection/ interaction. White Light protection in everyday relationships is a bit overkill. TRY PINK LIGHT VISUALIZATION As an alternative to using White Light shielding, use Pink — the ethereal, aura color representation of your Higher Self. The color of rose quartz, which can also literally be assigned, associated, activated, and amplified by the crystals themselves. When talking to (anyone with whom you may require this softer, tender-hearted protection) picture yourself sheathed in a column of pearly bubble-gum pink light, from just above your head extending all the way through the floor beyond your feet. Imagine it being poured on top of your head, starting at your crown chakra. I personally picture this substance as having the appearance and viscosity of liquid soap or shampoo. You might also envision that you’re Glinda the Good Witch in her big pink bubble — that’s about the the right size in relationship to your body/aura. (and, it’s just plain fun to call forth your Inner Glinda once in awhile. Even the biggest bad ass among us has an Inner Glinda.) PINK LIGHT AS BOTH MIRROR AND FILTER What happens is...When the subject you’re communicating with projects onto you, the most positive authentic heart-centered energy is reflected back to him/her. The Pink also allows for your loving energy — compassion, concern, good will — to pass through, yet the White Light (which is still present within the Pink) blocks negative energy. So, it’s a semi-permeable shield — which expands the Highest Self-loving Energy that either of you project; and it’s a kind of filter — magnifying what you most hope to receive/ project, while still blocking negative psychic energy completely and absolutely. USING ACTUAL CRYSTALS If you have rose quartz crystals physically present, they can act as a switch or consciousness trigger for turning on this shield. I recommend that therapists and mediators actually have some piece of rose quartz in the line of sight of both parties; on the table or desk between you is ideal. You can wear rose quartz as jewelry or carry a piece in your pocket. Just seeing this color acts as a subconscious activation switch, even for those who don’t intellectually know the symbolic spiritual significance. The Woo Woo Stuff — the visualizations, the meditations, the rituals, the spells — is really just a representation and a reminder of your commitment to a particular conscious intention. Just going into a conversation aware of what you want to block, what you want to project and receive, impacts your attitude and word choice and allows you to set the energy. When you set a strong energetic intention like this — when you’re willfully driving the vibration — others must conform or deal with the discomfort. They have no choice but to match that energy or they have to leave. In which case, the integrity of the kind of conversation you want to have is ultimately maintained. Remember, if in doubt, you simply express how YOU feel; that’s the most honest thing you can do. Your feelings are non-negotiable, no matter how controlling another person might want to be, or think they can be — when presented with someone’s feelings, there’s nothing they can do but accept them. Anyone not down with the good vibes — who refuses, who chooses over and over again to be difficult — is undoubtedly someone not worthy of your time and energy. I’d say two chances would be my line in the sand — after which, as much distance and lack of contact you can make happen is entirely warranted. You can’t have a war if both sides don’t show up. We have legal channels and barriers if necessary — security, attorneys, mediators. (If you keep answering that cell phone when he calls and engaging in another verbal battle, you are participating.) Don’t forget the most basic intention manifestation/ law of attraction factors — if you establish beforehand how you WANT the script to go, then you’re creating it — not reacting on the fly and finding yourself unequipped to provide the details of the Best Case Scenario. If you prepare for the conversation going badly, if you prepare a dialogue of argument, the Universe will be sure to shoot that scene for you. You may be pleasantly surprised, even blown away, by how positively others will respond and behave if YOU are prepared for them to. MAINTENANCE Cord cutting Clearing meditation Astral projection (Erin Pavlina’s technique) for those of you who practice any kind of psychic readings it’s really important to disconnect or log off readings - we are overly focused on tuning in - not logging off properly is like leaving a door or window open… What I do is establish protocol with my guides, programming a particular object, or even better, an associated ACTION with energy management. charging a piece of jewelry remember, when I talked therapists having a large piece of rose quartz on the desk or table between themselves and their clients Guide Assignment - let your guides manage all this My Secret Service protocol All of this is a more advanced level of energy and protection, so I really want to stress the basics of being grounded. Especially if you are spinning in the ether, overanalyzing, overthinking, if you describe your circumstances as a cloud hovering over you, if you feel pulled in too many directions — if you feel like there’s not enough time in the day… Ground your energy. If you feel overwhelmed, Focus on the basics, focus on the physical. For me, that is exercise. If my workouts are maintained, it helps manage my appetite and most importantly it impacts my sleep. If you’re not sleeping, you’re not in a state of mind to manage these more complex energies. Get the physical sorted first. If you’re not a fitness buff, go for a walk every day. Just 30 minutes or 45. It will change everything. If you have physical limitations and that’s not an option for you, then work on visualizing your energy being grounded. Kundalini meditation would be good for you. OR start with perfecting a basic visualization of your spine growing down into the ground and becoming roots, like a tree. THAT is great place to start managing the foundation of your psychic energy. OUTRO Thanks again for listening to the Shift Your Spirits podcast. For show notes, links, transcripts and all the past episodes please visit shiftyourspirits.com You can subscribe in iTunes or Stitcher or whatever app you use to access podcasts. If you’d like to get an intuitive reading with me, or download a free ebook and meditation to help you connect with your guides please go to sladeroberson.com and if you’re interested in my professional intuitive training program, you can start the course for free by downloading the Attunement at automaticintuition.com BEFORE I GO I promised to leave you a message in answer to a question or a concern you may have. So take a moment to think about that — hold it in your mind or speak it out loud. I’ll pause for just a few seconds….right…now. 1…2…3…4 MESSAGE You just received a gift. A magical energetic gift. The ability to complete any creative idea you have. And if you jump on this now, with enthusiasm and optimism and perseverance, I’m predicting the positive outcome will be tremendous. Don’t hesitate. Stop thinking about it, go for it. And I’ll talk to you later.

Michelle Vandepas is a best-selling author, TEDx and Keynote speaker and workshop and retreat leader attracting clients who know they want to dig deeper into or do more with their lives and businesses. She works with those who need a bigger audience, have a message to share, and know that now is the time. For Michelle, it’s not about who you are, but what you’re here to do. Her online courses, live mastermind programs, and VIP retreats have attracted thousands of people who now understand how to “BE” in their DO-ing, clear about their PURPOSE and filled with the SPARK of life. MENTIONED IN THE SHOW: The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron GUEST LINKS - MICHELLE VANDEPAS TheSpark.love The SPARK Facebook GroupPurpose: The Alignment Guide Free Gifts from Michelle HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses Get an intuitive reading with Slade Automatic Intuition BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits Edit your pledge on Patreon TRANSCRIPT INTRO Hey, thanks for listening to the Shift Your Spirits podcast. I’m your host Slade Roberson. For eleven years, I’ve been a professional intuitive and the author of the blog Shift Your Spirits, where I try to write about spirituality with fewer hearts and flowers than most New Age blather. I also mentor emerging intuitives, psychics, and healers in a program called Automatic Intuition. Today, I’m sharing a conversation with Michelle Vandepas about aligning with your purpose. And, of course, as always, there’s an oracle segment at the end of the show. So be thinking about a question or a concern you have. Hold it in your mind, and I’ll come back on, after the final links and credits, and leave you with that extra message. And to tell you the truth, I am personally really looking forward to what that message is going to be! You may not realize this, but I use them for myself. It’s Friday, October 13, 2017 as I record this, and it feels a bit like the sky is falling. We’ve got wild fires in Northern California, people starting to die in Puerto Rico from drinking water out of creeks and ditches, going weeks without power or cell service… and millions of us in the US are about to lose our healthcare coverage. I really don’t know how much to address current events on the podcast, because the majority of you are listening from the future. Thousands of you. I want the content to be evergreen—meaning it can speak to you at whatever point in time you are listening. There is great power in the synchronicity of when you receive these messages. And even if I try to be super current with events in the present, they’re going to be a week behind, at best. So much changes, day to day... So, if I seem like I’m saying too little, not saying enough, or seeming to ignore something that happened this morning or went down in a big way yesterday, it’s just because recording is a snapshot in time, but the messages transcend time, to come and find you in your now. I am attempting to make content that has that ability. I am admittedly dancing around this. Awkwardly. If you have any input about how you’d like me to handle timely events, I would love to hear your suggestions. Shoot me an email. If you’re fine with my making these episodes entirely timeless, email me and let me know that too. Before I forget, I want to say a quick thank you to Merrie Kisch, my newest supporter on Patreon. And also thank you to Ann Luke-Montez who raised her pledge amount. I appreciate all of you who have pledged your support and I’m really excited to see the new names each week. It demonstrates that you’re enjoying the show and want it to continue. That’s very encouraging to me, thank you. Listen, I’ve lost a lot of people who are angry that I am communicating in audio. I have gone to great trouble to make most if not all the episodes available as a written transcript — today’s episode with Michelle about aligning with your purpose does indeed have a full transcript. For the record, there are eleven years worth of posts — hundreds if not thousands of articles — available on my site. Go to sladeroberson.com/archives There’s a search feature and tons to read. But I’m still getting emails from long-term followers who are disappointed. They don’t like the change. They want me to go back to short blog posts once a week. And you know, this platform has to grow and evolve. I needed to make this new and exciting and to breathe new life into Shift Your Spirits with this audio. Working with me is essentially talking to me, and I know from the feedback from those of you who love the show that it is authentically aligned with my voice. I’m telling you this because I want you to know that pledging your support on Patreon is one of the ways that you tell me to make this show for you and to ignore those who are sending me, well, hate mail for making this show. Some people do not like change. Change is the only thing in the world you can rely on. You gotta be a change surfer. You gotta learn to adapt and be flexible in all areas of life… But to wrap up this rant — it’s not just a “pledge drive” when I tell you about Patreon. It really literally is you saying “Slade, I love this podcast. I’m out here listening. I find the shows meaningful and helpful. Please keep sending me episodes." …I will. I plan to. Listeners who support the show on Patreon can access bonus Q&A episodes, where you guys send in questions, I record answers to them, and they go out to patrons of the show exclusively. I just released a bonus episode “How to Manifest a Relationship” as a tie-in to the show on soul mates. You guys who are supporters will find that download in the posts section on Patreon. You can edit your pledge amount at any time, like Ann did, if you decide you want to access the bonus audio. I’ll put a link in the show notes on how to do that. https://patreon.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/115002804683-How-do-I-edit-my-Pledge- To find out how you can become a patron, support my time in producing this show, and access the extra audio content, please go to patreon.com/shiftyourspirits Okay. Let’s get to this week’s interview. Purpose. It’s one of our favorite subjects to talk about. And I’ve found someone perfect for us to talk to. Michelle Vandepas. TRANSCRIPT of INTERVIEW Slade: So, by way of introduction, for those of you out there who may not have heard of Michelle Vandepas, Michelle, why don't you tell us who you are and what you do. Michelle: So... Wow. I am a - so that's a great question, right? I suddenly realize I don't know how to put myself in a box of who I am and what I do. So I'm an author. I write. I'm a coach. I'm a business coach. I'm a book publisher. I'm a TEDx speaker. Those are all my accomplishments. But really who I am is someone who is highly concerned about the energy in the world and how I believe when we all are connected to our authentic self, when we're on purpose, when we feel alive and we feel aligned with who we are, that we can help change the planet to be a better place. Slade: Well, you know, in the time that I've known you, and we were just chatting before we started recording, about how we've known each other for probably ten years. And in that time, I've seen you do all the things that you're talking about. The TED talks, courses, workshops, masterminds, in a lot of areas that obviously are connected and make sense. But I'm wondering how did helping people align with their purpose become your purpose? How did you identify - how did you land here? Michelle: Yeah, good question. So what's really interesting is I've always been doing this in my business coaching, and back 20 years ago when I owned a business, a manufacturing business, it was a lot of coaching the employees and the staff members about how they could contribute the best in the work place. So I feel like I've always been coaching other people to be on Purpose. How I kind of came full circle and decided to devote the next few years of my life to helping people with it is I think when we're not feeling aligned with our own Purpose, everything else is just slightly off kilter or out of whack. So it's very difficult to run a business if you don't feel like you're doing what you're here to do. It's difficult to raise a family if you're always in stress about it and you don't feel aligned. So no matter where you are in your life, it comes back to understanding who you are at the core and then I know you relate to this. You write about Purpose all the time, Slade, so I think there's something fundamental that when we can accept who we are, know that we are here for a reason, that we can feel on Purpose with our lives, it helps everything else unfold. It helps all other areas of our life. So I think that's where I feel I can make the biggest difference. Slade: Okay. So Life Purpose. You hear those two words together a lot. It's a tricky thing to identify. I can tell you right now that this show will get tons of downloads just from that keyword or phrase in the title. I've seen it before. As you said, I do write about Purpose and speak to people about it and it's probably in 99% of the conversations I have with people when I do readings. So the thing is, back to the idea that it's a little tricky to identify. For a lot of people, it gets mixed up with creative passions, hobbies, jobs, career tracks, maybe it's a little of all of those things. Just tell me how do you define Purpose? Michelle: Yeah, I love this conversation. So the way I view Purpose is you're already living it. Everybody is already living it. Even if they don't know what it is. It is just something that is inside of us. And Purpose is how we express out into the world. In the very biggest picture, like the hugest picture, is how we express our love into the world. But that's difficult because love comes with so many romantic notions that it's hard to always wrap our brain around that. So let me give you an example. I like to work with archetypes when I'm talking about Purpose because I think it helps us relate a little bit easier. Most of us can relate to feeling like we're a teacher, we are a leader, we're a caregiver, we might have mom or dad energy, we might feel like we're a nurturer. These are energies. These are expressions of a way to give back or to live our life. But they don't have really anything to do with a vocation or a hobby or a job or a passion. So if you identify with, let's say, the caregiver archetype, you enjoy helping people, you like to nurture other people. You may or may not become a nurse or a hospice provider. You might be able to live that archetype through being a teacher or through being a barista or through blogging. That archetype can come through many many ways. And that's usually something that we're born with. That's an essence of our soul about how we express out into the world. If you don't feel identified with that archetype, if you don't feel like you're a caregiver, it's not going to be the first thing that is expressed out while you're out in your world. So to bring this back around, if you have a job in - let's just say you're a blogger, you will naturally tie into your gifts that you were born with, such as teacher or leader or inspirer or caregiver, through your writing, when you feel more connected with the archetype of your individual purpose. Does that make sense? Slade: Hmm.. oh yeah! Actually I really love this. I love the archetypes, and that's a good filter to view this from. Because it's sort of like an ingredient, like you said it's an essence, and you can put that essence in a lot of different places. Right? Like it sort of comes out of you no matter where we put you. If you're a nurturer, or a natural cheerleader, it doesn't really matter if you're literally on a sports team or you're just working in a bank. Michelle: That's right. Slade: It's gonna kind of express itself to the people around you, right? Michelle: Right. And where I see people get a little disrupt or feel disengaged with Purpose is when they're trying to chase it around their work. So if you know that you're a caregiver then you're suddenly like rolling your eyes and thinking, 'Ah, I gotta go be a nurse.' Well what you said is totally on point. That no, start with what you're already doing in your life and notice how caregiving shows up. Or notice how cheerleading shows up. When you start noticing what you're already doing in all areas of your life, you'll feel more connected. And as you start feeling more connected, then you're willing to express it more. You're willing - because then you have proof that yes, this is who I am, right? The world becomes our mirror and we go, 'Yes, I am a cheerleader.' This is awesome. People respond to this. And then we do more of it naturally. Slade: Hmm... So what else do you think people tend to kind of get wrong when they go looking for their Purpose? Like you said, when they go chasing it and they get off track, what's some other... 101 bungles... Michelle: Yeah. I'm the perfect poster child for this, right? We always teach what we learn, or we teach what we need to learn, whatever that saying is. So a great example is, I had a period of my life when I became very engaged with my artistic side of myself. And I loved painting, and doing all kinds of creative endeavors and I spent hours and hours... I had some luxury of time back then, and spent a lot of time developing my creative self and my artistic self and I went to workshops and I had some shows and I suddenly had this light bulb - wow this must be my Purpose. And so I decided, I set up shop, I set up my own art exhibits, I suddenly was investing in getting things framed and having to sell things and then I was asked to do a couple of commissions and I'm like, oh man, I hate this so much. It's like, my passion and my creative expression suddenly turned into a job. Because I had mistakenly thought my Purpose was related to my passion. And I can have a passion for art that isn't necessarily my Purpose. My Purpose is more about inspiration, teaching, leading, and I can do those things through my art, but the art itself was not my purpose. Slade: I'm actually kind of comforted to hear you say this because I live an entirely second life as a fiction author. So I have this, these two worlds, or two roles, and sometimes it just makes me uncomfortable trying to have to make them both be about the same thing. And I really just learn to kind of let them be two things and in my mind, my Purpose feels like it's related around Shift Your Spirits, it's what you know me for, it's very much what you do as well, inspiring, enabling, coaching, supporting people, teaching, telling stories. And then, you know, the other thing is an art. It is a passion and it's a hobby. It's also business but it doesn't have to be - everything doesn't have to be in one box, right? Michelle: Um hmm... let me ask you a question. In your fiction writing, do you feel as though you're bringing any of your inner Purpose like inspiring, and leading, and those things through any of your dialogue or your characters? I'm just curious. Could be yes or no. Slade: Yeah, I actually ask myself this question a lot because I feel like it's not so on the nose that I feel like my stories have to be inspirational reader's digest type fiction or something. Or like some - I don't write stories about people who are on a spiritual mission or anything like that. So I have asked myself this question and I think it's more about a deeper emotional kind of journey. The ability to give someone another life in another world to experience, which is so much of what I get out of reading fiction, and I think that there's a case to be made for story-telling being such a huge part of so many areas of what we do in the world whether it's ministry or teaching or just entertainment. Stories are big business and they're big soulful enterprises in and of themselves. So I think where I come down with it is I feel like my magic comes in the form of words. And I have always had a gift for storytelling and sometimes that includes hosting someone like you and creating a platform for you to tell a story. You know what I'm saying? Michelle: Yes, that's beautiful. Slade: Yeah and I can make a case that we're all storytellers and, I do tell some of my intuitive training students a lot that I think intuitives - storytellers make great intuitives. People who speak symbolic language have an ability to take that vocabulary into a lot of different vocations. So, again, not to get too much in the weeds about myself personally, but we're coming back to this idea that it's an essence that you already have and it's something that you can take into anywhere we drop you. Right? Like, ultimately if you're wiling to. Michelle: That's right. And I just want to circle back around with you because you also blog and you write and you've been doing this a long time and obviously these podcasts. So you have a gift with words and that writing and podcasting is just one way you're choosing to express that gift. You could choose to express that gift maybe in song writing, or maybe something that I haven't even thought of. Writing copy. You're just choosing to express your gift of a way with words in these platforms right now. Doesn't mean blogging suddenly is your Purpose. Slade: Right, yes. Exactly. And I have had periods where I was a song writer and I was a - I've done different kinds of artistic pursuits just like you were talking about. The difference between kind of your creativity and your passion and your art and then you can, you can or you can not choose to express that in combination with a Purpose or in combination with a job. I tell people all the time sometimes the greatest way to ruin your passion is to turn it into a business. Michelle: Yeah! Like my art! Exactly. Slade: So when I was thinking about the fact that I was going to be talking to you today and I thought, you know, this is an area of expertise for you, that you've gone even deeper in than I have, but I was trying to think of my listeners and kind of where they fall on this question. Because like I said, it's nearly always a component of any reading that I do. And I was trying to think of, how can I ask questions that the people listening would ask if they were sitting here in front of the microphone and I kind of identified - there's a few different people that are at different stages of asking themselves this question. So I wondered if you would indulge me and let me ask you kind of a question, there's kind of three different angles. And I wanted to ask for advice for each one of those people. Are you game for that? Michelle: I'm game! Slade: Okay! Michelle: Let's see where it goes! Slade: So, the first one is the person who has no clue what their Purpose is. They really feel like just the canvas is blank, and that's a very terrifying feeling. You know, the blank page and you don't, something's supposed to be written on there and you don't know what it is. So what do you say to that person who has no clue what their Purpose might be? Michelle: Yeah, great. So and this comes up a lot with the people I work with, who maybe their kids are now gone, or their job is over or they're retiring and they feel like, now what? But it can happen with people of all ages for a variety of reasons. And the first thing that I want to tell the listeners is really to reassure them that it really doesn't matter if you know your Purpose. It's like it doesn't matter if you can see the ocean. It's still there. Your Purpose is there. Now you may feel a little frustrated that you don't know what it is. You may feel disconnected to it. But it's there. It's inside of you. So I would encourage listeners who are in this space to just breathe in to the fact that they are alive on the planet, they have a Purpose even if they don't know what it is. And allow it. Allow the expression of their Purpose to be shown to them over some time. In my book it's a 28-day process of journalling and asking questions. But the first stage of that is to live with the affirmation that I am already living my Purpose. Slade: Okay. That's awesome. What do you say to the person who kind of already has a clue what it is, right? They know deep down in their heart what their Purpose is. They feel that calling but maybe they're in a state of fear or procrastination, you know, they're sitting in the cubicle at work and they're dissatisfied with what they're doing and they know what their heart wants to do or what they're being called to do in some way. What does she do next? How does she get started? Michelle: So first I would encourage not the DOING of it. And I would really encourage the BEING of it. Because I think what happens is we skip steps. We're like, 'Okay I know that I'm supposed to be out there speaking to the world.' Well speaking again is a doing. It's not a Purpose. So is the Purpose really that you would like to inspire people with the message? Is your Purpose that you feel like you're a leader, that you have a calling to change other people's lives through leading or through inspiration or - it's tricky because it's like you have a gift for speaking and that's the gift and that could be how your Purpose is done and expressed in the world but we gotta go first underneath that - what the BEING is. And so, I would encourage people who know deep inside that they're supposed to go speak, that comes up a lot with my clients. "I know I'm supposed to go speak." Be out there on stage. Be more visible. I'd encourage you first to tap into what is it that your call - what is it that calls that part of yourself? Are you feeling like you're here to lead? And then keep going into that energy and express it more and more in what you do right now. So if you are called to lead, do that in the job you have right now. Do that with your family. Do that as you move about the world. And as you're deepening that confidence in yourself, it's amazing how opportunities start opening up to allow you to do more of how you want to express that feeling in the world. Slade: Okay. These are good. I'm having some epiphanies around this stuff. So I've got one more. It's a little challenging. And I can actually think of a couple people that I know that are peers that are out there who might be listening, who - okay, what do you say to the person who knows what his Purpose is, maybe he's been doing it for awhile, who's been working at it, and then suddenly he's not seeing the "success" with it that he had expectations for? What's going on with that person, when they feel like they're, they know what they're supposed to do, but for some reason it's not taking off the way that they think, "Oh! It's my Purpose. I'm doing it, therefore the wings should just spread open and I should fly." What do you say to the person when that's not happening? Michelle: So, Purpose is being, and Purpose is not success-driven. So Purpose is back to how do you express your love in the world? How do you express yourself out into the world? If you were then taking that and let's just pretend that you're here to inspire other people and your chosen way to do that is to become a public speaker, then you have to learn the business of speaking, you have to learn the nuances, you have to understand how to book gigs, how to write contracts, you have to then go learn the pieces of running that business if that's choosing, if that's how you're going to choose to express your Purpose of inspiration out into the world. But again, and then I do business coaching as well, so I can speak to this. Your Purpose is how you're expressing in the world in all areas of your life and so if you're putting, 'OMG, my Purpose is all wrapped up in this business,' you're going to have heartache and downfall because business has natural ups and down cycles. And so you've got to come back and be grounded in who you are. I want to come back for a minute because I think there's a piece here that we've tiptoed around a little bit, Slade. And that is, people feel scared of their Purpose. Like if Slade, you know, think back ten or twelve years ago and if you suddenly knew that you were here to inspire people about Purpose and how they can become intuitive, you may not know, have known how to do that. All those years ago. And there might have been some fear for you. Slade: Oh yes. Michelle: And so... Right? It's all of us. And so if we can go into what is it that we are expressing and continue to do that every day we strengthen the muscle of accepting who we are. If someone were to tell me that I'd be on the telesummits with thousands of people and coaching some fairly well-known names out there, ten years ago, I would've been terrified. And go, 'No, I don't have those skills. That's not me. I don't have that confidence. I don't have that knowingness,' right? And so we start by giving ourselves either small steps or big steps, whatever it is, but confirmation that we're on the right track. Because that builds that muscle that gives us our own acceptance. I think when we don't accept the gifts that we were born with, it's really difficult to go be - feel successful, but feeling successful is a life, not just a business. It's how do we feel in our life? Do we feel fulfilled? So I think I want to come back around to - it's the feeling of being fulfilled that I think we chase, and money seems to represent that and business success represents that. But let's come back to how are we expressing, how are we ful - being fulfilled, how are we helping, how are we serving, and then maybe it's business coaching that this person really needs. Slade: Great advice. Thank you so much. So tell us about Spark. What is this? Michelle: So I think you know I've played a lot with this idea of Purpose, passion, fulfillment creativity, and the word that sums all of that up for me is Spark. And so I've created a system for helping us all keep that spark alive inside. I don't know how you feel, but you know we're just on the other side of another mass shooting here in the United States, we've had hurricanes, there's fires, there's wars all over the world. It feels like it's pretty difficult sometimes to stay grounded that we can even make a difference with all these world problems. And so, getting in touch with our own spark is the beginning of feeling alive and then feeling like we can help in whatever way that looks like to us. Big or small, helping the local food community, helping a stray cat, helping stop genocide and wars, wherever it is that you personally feel like you're called to help. It starts with connecting with that spark inside of us. Because when that flame starts dying out, it's really difficult to even just get off the couch, right? We become glued to the news, we get into overwhelm. So the system I've created are always different areas where we learn to connect in with our own spark so that we can express more fully our authentic selves. And, like I say in this book, Purpose book, which is the first step of the system, how can we not be authentic, right? We are authentic. We just don't always recognize what that is. And then we try to cover it up, or we have our baggage or we eat too much or we do all kinds of self sabotaging things because we don't really know who we are. And so this system takes us through some self-reflection. I'm not here to tell anybody who they are. It's all inside. We just have to uncover it. We have to recognize it. We have to love who we are, you know? It's that thing that we gotta love ourselves first. And it's true, but we have to learn who we are so that we can love ourselves. Slade: So the book part component of this that you're talking about, it's a new book you have out called Purpose: The Alignment Guide : 28 Days of Inspiration, Reflection, Intention and Creative Expression. Now this sounds more like a program than just a book. So explain to us how this book works. Michelle: Yeah, it is. It's 28 days. Each day, wel, each week there's an affirmation. The very first one is 'I am already living my Purpose.' And there's coloring exercises ,activities, writing prompts, and the book takes you through my thoughts about why I believe we're all already living our Purpose. Just a short chapter on that. And then it encourages you to reflect on how you are living your Purpose day to day. There are daily affirmations, daily questions, the book takes you through how does the earth energy affect you? I'm finding it very interesting right now with things like fires and hurricanes and so forth to not be affected by that, and I think a lot of us are affected by intense weather or even just a big snowstorm. And so, how does that affect your day to day living, and does that make you go more internal or does that cause you to be angry in the world? And just having a place to write down and explore these feelings helps you understand and learn more of who you really are. Who we are at the core. So the book is a 28-day exploration with writing prompts for every day. Journaling and loads of cool coloring pages and there's also a coloring book that you can download at no cost or purchase to go along with this with all the really cool images. And the images are a little edgy. They're not like flowers and butterflies. They're what I call kind of galactic images with weird eyes and the sun going sideways because I think that's how I feel right now. Like everything just a little big sideways. And so I want to acknowledge that and express that. And the Purpose is just the first workbook in a 9-month system. So there's 8 more books coming out, each one exactly the same format. So it's a 9-month program that I have on helping you connect back in with who you are. Slade: So why is it 28 days specificially? Michelle: Yeah, so there's a couple of answers to that. It is a nice system of every week you look at a new affirmation and in this case, a new area of Purpose. And then we all need a day or two or three to just rest. So it's not like a month-long system. You can start this in the middle of the month, you can start it in the middle of the week, you just work through the days and then you, at the end of the 28 days, it's a moon cycle, it's a natural cycle. You just rest, let it all integrate, allow your subconscious to process everything you've been thorough. It's like savassana in yoga. You just incorpirate everything that you have learned and thought about and doodled and processed over the last four weeks. And then after a few more days, you can start again on the next book. Day 1 and go through another 28-day process. Slade: Very cool. It actually would be fun to do that with the moon cycle if you wanted. I'm a bit of a witch so I like to do everything like ritualized around the moon calendar. It just, it gives it a certain kind of structure that feels, I don't know, it feels empowering, so I like to play with that. That's very cool. Michelle: Yes! Yeah! Slade: So, not to compare this to anything in any way other than a compliment, but I really, as I was looking at the material, it appealed to me in much the same way that the artist way appealed to me. I think that there's a certain type of person who may have done that years ago back in the day who would really be turned on by your book. Thank you! Thank you. I actually mention Julia Cameron in my dedication. She's a huge mentor of mine. I have interviewed her a couple of times. I've been to a live workshop of hers. I bow down to her as one of the creative goddesses of the world, so thank you, I take that as a huge compliment. Slade: Oh, that's very cool. We share her as a hero for sure. Yeah, so I definitely think that you can make a connection with the type of work that you're doing and so if there's anybody who - because I know once you've done something before, maybe you don't really want to go back through that process again, but this would be something new, and it's a little bit shifted of course, around this idea of aligning with Purpose, but the experiential part of it feels similar. In an exciting kind of way. Have you had any ideas about doing like a group around it? Like a Facebook group or something? Michelle: Yes! So - thank you for asking. Yes, and I have one going right now. So theSpark.love group on Facebook. You can come and join for free. No charge. There are people uploading their pictures and their doodling and I answer questions in there, and so thespark.love is also my website. That's the name of the group on Facebook. So just come join and then obviously I offer paid classes and I have a live retreat coming up in May, so obviously I'm doing this also as part of my own coaching business, but everybody come and join at least for free so we can get to know each other and I can help you through the process. And then if there's a next step, happy to talk to you about that. Slade: Oh that's very cool. I am a big believer in the social power of doing things in groups. If I have the opportunity to take something in a class environment I always go for that because I can accomplish so much more when I have interaction with other people around it. I'm a big believer in that so basically you're saying somebody can go and sign up for thespark.love Facebook group and the only thing that they would really require would be the book, which is not a huge investment, if they wanted to really participate in this and plug in with this whole concept, right? Michelle: That's right. $16.95 on Amazon, and nothing else. Just connect in the group because there's other people that are having conversations about Purpose and that's always a cool thing. Slade: Well I'll definitely pull all your links so anybody who is listeining can either go to my blog or they can go direclty to the podcast feed and just click on those. And go and sign up. You also have a free course that people can download on your webiste, correct? Michelle: I do. There's a Purpose course on my website, there's the coloring book, there's a couple of meditations. The website is again, thespark.love because it's how we express our spark as love out into the world. That's the biggest expression of who we are. And so, yes, I have all kinds of free gifts. I have a downloadable course. Come get your gifts, thank you! Thank you for this promotion, yeah. I'm so good at promoting other people but we're all like that, right? Thank you. Slade: Yeah, well there's some very specific places to jump and plug in to what you're doing and it doesn't cost anything other than your interest, you know? So it's a very powerful and easy thing to promote. I do want to ask you before we wrap up the conversation. One of the things that I really like to ask those of you who've been around working in this space, for several years now. Is there anything that you feel is a message that's kind of missing from the conversation on personal development or something that needs to be brought forward a little bit? Michelle: Yeah, good question. So I am so over self-improvement. Like, there was a time in my life when I'm like, I wanted to get my hands on everything around self-improvement and personal development. These days I think it's - the conversation at least that I like to have is, we don't have to improve anything. We can choose to explore our gifts and develop them if we want to. We can always learn more things. But it's really about what, uncovering what's already there. It's really about going inside rather than looking outside and the more I go deeper in this, the more I know that to be true for at least myself and many of the people I work with is, how can we really uncover who we are rather than looking outside for answers? And so, in this book, even though I'm here having this conversation with you, it all comes back to what is true for the individual, not what I'm saying, not what you're saying, not what my book says. These are all tools to help you explore more deeply what's true for you. Slade: I love that approach. Thank you for sharing that. And Michelle, thank you so much for coming on and taking the time and having a conversation with me around this topic. I know everybody's going to enjoy listening to it. Michelle: Slade, I love you. It's been an honor to connect with you over all these years and I'm looking forward to the next one. Thank you for having me. OUTRO Thanks again for listening to the Shift Your Spirits podcast. For show notes, links, transcripts and all the past episodes please visit shiftyourspirits.com You can subscribe in iTunes or Stitcher or whatever app you use to access podcasts. If you’d like to get an intuitive reading with me, or download a free ebook and meditation to help you connect with your guides please go to sladeroberson.com and if you’re interested in my professional intuitive training program, you can start the course for free by downloading the Attunement at automaticintuition.com BEFORE I GO I promised to leave you a message in answer to a question or a concern you may have. So take a moment to think about that — hold it in your mind or speak it out loud. I’ll pause for just a few seconds….right…now. 1…2…3…4 MESSAGE Have you seen or heard any owls lately? Any owl totems or symbols crossing your path. Owl energy is about the ability to see everything around you, to find the real truth in the shadows. This symbol can mean that someone around you is trying to throw you off or disguise his or her real intentions. Make sure you’re not lying to yourself right now. If you’re being delusional, wake up. Not facing the truth in one area of your life will block you from moving forward in any other area. Look into your darkness a little bit. That’s where you’ll find the way out. And I’ll talk to you later.

When you think about finding your soul mate, always ask yourself this question: "Who do you want to be when you meet the love of your life?" This approach to passion takes care of many of your needs, beyond just the sexual and romantic. This is the compass of self love that will set you on a course for a great life, no matter who you are and whether you ever choose to partner permanently. HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses Get an intuitive reading with Slade Automatic Intuition BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits TRANSCRIPT INTRO Hey, thanks for listening to the Shift Your Spirits podcast. I’m your host Slade Roberson. For eleven years, I’ve been a professional intuitive and the author of the blog Shift Your Spirits, where I try to write about spirituality with fewer hearts and flowers than most New Age blather. I also mentor emerging intuitives, psychics, and healers in a program called Automatic Intuition. One of my Patreon supporters requested an episode with my views about soul mates and twin flames. I asked her "Are you sure you want to hear what I really believe about these topics? Because I may not say the things most people want to hear… I have a pretty no-bullshit opinion when it comes to this subject.” She said that’s what she was hoping for and to bring it on. Listeners who support the show on Patreon can access bonus Q&A episodes, where you guys send in questions, I record answers to them, and they go out to patrons of the show exclusively. But since I feel like this topic is a popular one, I’m going to put it out to the whole podcast audience, instead of doing it as an exclusive this time. There is also a level of support that includes a free download of the guided meditation “Messages from your Spirit Guides." So, if you want to find out how you can become a patron, and access the extra audio content, please go to patreon.com/shiftyourspirits Bear with me. This could be a random, non-linear conversation. I pulled up a lot of the material I’ve written about soul mates over the past twelve years. I’ve skimmed over it. It’s safe to say, my observations have not changed much. My opinions have deepened. But I’m asking you to bear with me as I talk about it, because it could move in circles. Spirals, even. My intention is that if I free-flow through this subject, as if I’m collecting little bits of wisdom and pointing them out to you, one or more of them will resonate with you and whatever questions you may have about your own life in terms of partnerships, karmic connections, soul mates. There are a lot of messages for a lot of different people waiting to come through me. So, I’m just going to dive in and swim around, and see what I can bring to the surface, okay? If you’re still seeking, I will say this: The more you grow into the person you’re truly meant to be, and you know yourself and have greater access to your wisdom… Unfortunately, it seems cruel, but your pool of potential mates gets smaller, not larger. When you were in your teens, every potential person you caught in your net was a Young Adult trilogy just waiting to be written. When you’re older and wiser, you start throwing back all the little fish without wasting much time and energy. You throw back some big fish, too. And you’re okay with it. Because you know yourself and what you truly require out of a partner. Some of the big red flags I’ve noted for those who are seeking: If you’re trying to find a partner, that’s problematic. If you think you’ve found them, but you're working to make them love you. That’s a huge red flag. If you’re calling more than one friend and/or psychic to help you decide if this one is the One, chances are … it isn’t. No bellows required, here. You should not find yourself over there fanning the flames, trying to keep the spark going… That’s not how this should work. Listen, the beginning should be fairly easy, and fun, and lot of mutual chemistry and excitement… If you’re working just to get in the relationship in the early stages. You’re in danger, girl. That’s some of the What Not to Do. Here’s a couple of things you definitely should do: Say yes to things. People, events, invitations. Things that don’t, on the face of it, have anything to do with dating. Meeting potential partners through other friends is healthy. It makes sense for a lot of reasons. And always ask yourself this — number one question: Who do you want to be when you meet the love of your life? In other words, orient your life around other kinds of passions. This approach takes care of many of your needs, not just the sexual or romantic. This is the compass and self love and true passion that will set you on a course for a great life, no matter who you are and whether you ever choose to partner permanently for life. I’ll dip back into all of this more during this episode. SEGMENT You might not know it, just from reading the articles on Shift Your Spirits, but Relationships are the #2 Most Requested type of Reading I perform. Although I can only directly tune in to the person who gives me access and permission, I am a big believer in the unique wisdom offered through astrological composite charts. This is where the natal information of two people is cast together as a chart of the synergistic relationship, as if the relationship itself is literally a living entity with its own personality and spiritual qualities. (I offer interpretations of these composite charts as a "bonus" to consultations for those with relationship questions, assuming you can supply the necessary birth information for both parties.) Here are some of my “truths” about soul mates and relationships. These are some general chunks of wisdom I’ve observed during relationship readings and couples sessions, and truths I’ve learned the hard way — through my own personal experiences. Relationships are the mirrors by which we experience ourselves. You are always having a relationship with some part of yourself, reflected and externalized by your partner. There are differences between soul mates and twin flames. In the Western Hollywood vocabulary, soul mate is often intended to refer to a specific type of soul-contracted relationship that is synonymous with a twin flame — the idea that each person has one and only one perfect potential romantic partner. While I wouldn't say that there's no such thing as a twin flame, I would venture that it is a rare phenomena and not one which everyone is destined to experience in this lifetime. I also believe that we have many potential soul mates with whom we can create a variety of successful partnerships, including marriage. Here’s what most people think they’re describing: Of all the souls in all the galaxies there's just one and he happened to be born in the same era of time, same part of the globe, same culture, same language ... he even went to the same school and works out at the same gym. Those are some incredible odds. That's a tiny pool of possibilities. And a ton of pressure. Nobody's finding love under those circumstances. And you know something I’ve noticed: The only people who use the term "twin flame” and mean it — like, it’s not just a cool idea they daydream about, but they’re ready to set themselves on fire over it — they are usually in a crazy-ass triggered state. That’s just my opinion. I’m sure I’m crushing somebody with that statement. You don’t have to agree with me. But I feel a lot of people resonating with that, and if you’re one of them, Yes. Keep the twin flame terminology in the Amazon page description of your paranormal romance series. Read all the delicious fiction you want to read about twin flames. But probably don’t base any important life decision on the concept. We all have many potential soul mates with whom our partnerships defy categorization, type, or role — members of our spirit family, those with whom we walk together. Not all soul mates are required to exist within romantic, sexual, and/or marriage templates in order to be spiritually fulfilling. It's quite challenging to create a relationship with someone when the connection is greater than any known social construct, especially in the beginning. The power of the initial spark may be hard to compartmentalize without assuming it is meant to be romantic. Spiritually important relationships are learning experiences even when they don't end up in bliss. Soul-contracted (in which you have chosen prior to this lifetime to know one another for the purpose of delivering [shared] lessons) or karmic relationships (in which we work out unfinished business or repay energetic debts) - these may often be painful or difficult, even while still being very spiritually significant. Sometimes it's not about you — it may feel like you're playing the Lead, but sometimes you are a Supporting Actor, playing the role of messenger or teacher for your partner. Projection and Transference are tricky forms of love. If you're a light worker, with a life purpose and/or a professional career that involves heart-centered healing, be aware that there is a big difference between clients/patients and friends/lovers. Anyone who appears to be both will probably belong to the client/patient category. While “saving someone" may be motivated by a truly loving intention, it can be a disastrous foundation for a marriage. The pattern in your relationships is carried by you, not by your partners. Mary has a disastrous relationship with John. Mary has another disastrous relationship with Bob. Mary has a so-so relationship with Michael. Mary says that all these men have the same issues. While that may be true, who’s the obvious common denominator in all these pairings? That’s right, Mary, we’re looking at you, girl. If you’ve got a pattern, you’re the pattern. Human beings are not ideas. Be careful that you're not having (desiring to have) a relationship with an idea. If you prioritize a Role over an individual person, you will be disappointed by anyone's inability to become that Idea. Being alone is always better than being with the wrong person. If you're not complete, no one else can complete you. The ideal relationship is not 50-50 — in the highest numerical quantification, you bring 100% and your partner brings 100%. 50-50, 60-40, 70-30... These recipes are expressions of (and probably formulas for) co-dependence. Sharing your life with someone who also has a life of his/her own can be the icing on the cake. But icing with no cake is a plate full of frosting, which is probably way less appealing (and ultimately less nourishing) than it sounds. Having a relationship is never a good substitute for having a life. A relationship is a unique entity co-created by the participants. It is not ultimately comparable to any other partnership. You always attract the relationship with the lesson you are meant to learn at this time. You can't really fail at a relationship if you maintain the philosophical position that allows you to perceive it as a learning experience. Lowering your vibration, playing small, or dumbing down to your partner's level in order to make the relationship "work" is unsustainable. Don't bank on conditional future beneficial changes in your partner. "She'll be perfect for me once she..." "He'd be perfect for me if he'd just learn to..." This is like playing the Change Lottery. Evaluate the relationship based on what you know to be currently true. What if he never changes in the way you hope? The balance of energetic currency in a relationship does not have to take the same form to be reciprocated. An excellent massage may be reciprocated by a gourmet meal. An expensive gift may be reciprocated by priceless emotional support. There IS such a thing as a successful, temporary, transient relationship. Important or significant do not necessarily equal forever. If you doubt that he's your soul mate, you're probably right — he's not. Listen carefully when someone tells you she's not good enough for you — this is truth straight from the source. When people tell you they "don't want to hurt you" or "don't want someone to get hurt," it usually means they're preparing for that likelihood. This is a big clue to their expectations, if not their intentions. If you want to be in relationship with a woman or a man who's into yoga (fitness, hiking, books, pets, spirituality... insert your interests here) don't look for him/her in a bar. You may get lucky, but the odds are stacked against you. Statistically — logically — most people in bars are into one thing for sure — drinking. Go to a more obvious, relevant source environment. 511 — Too Much Information. Confession, Authenticity, and Honesty are not necessarily the same things. Don't talk about your exes or introduce your history of relationship nightmares as a topic of conversation during your first few dates. Why do people continually make this mistake? If you want to open up, open up about a bright future, not your neurotic past. (Not yet, anyway... Save your Dark Secrets for someone who can receive them in the proper time and context.) Be clear about your intentions and careful what you wish for — your ability to manifest is very powerful, for good or bad. If you choose to manifest a relationship where money/financial security is prioritized over other qualities like mutual love/respect, please don't be shocked when you find yourself in a loveless marriage with a rich dude who treats you like a trophy. Your ability to receive (deserve) Abundance affects not only your relationships with people but also your relationship with other forms of wealth such as money. The Good News is that the person you want to become, the life you ultimately want to create for yourself, and the partner you want to attract, with whom you can share your highest self and your best life, can be achieved as one goal. This power, this happiness, this flow — it's a package deal. You are most likely to fall in love with someone else when you fall in love with you — with your world. You are most likely to meet a partner who shares your values in an environment where like-minded people congregate over mutual ideals. Let’s talk about surrender. I recommend you surrender the whole love hunt. Let it go. Surrender this whole ... grasping thing. You're spending way too much energy on what's missing. But — let's make sure you spin the word surrender right: It's not "give up" because "that ship has sailed." This is about tapping into the phenomenon where the things you're looking for usually show up the minute you stop striving so hard to find them. Now, you can’t cheat this magic. You can't "pretend" not to look, yet really be looking... Surrendering this constant “love hunt” is about redirecting your energy to the person you’ve always wanted to become. That version of yourself is the same person as who you want to be when you meet the love of your life. So trust that you can let it go. You’re not going to “miss” anything that’s meant for you. It'll happen when it happens, and you can either waste energy on it or effortlessly allow it to find you. Let it find you busy making other amazing things happen in the world. Your ex is getting married. You saw the engagement pics on Facebook. You’re internally beating yourself up for having such a petty emotional response. "Even that asshole has someone … really?" "There must be something profoundly wrong with me that I’m still alone, while…" It’s entirely human to have this internal conversation; but while you’re at it, ask yourself: "Who do I want to be when I meet the love of my life?" Prioritize becoming that person. The better you know yourself, the more likely you and your potential mate can recognize one another. It’s not about finding them; it’s about finding you. Focus on a passion that has nothing to do with anyone else. Alone or partnered (or something else) it’s a win in all potential scenarios. Becoming who you've always wanted to become — focusing on a passion that has nothing to do with anyone else — this is the key ingredient to attracting the right partner. It's not about finding them; it's about finding you. Have you ever considered your ideal romantic partnership from this perspective: Who do I want to be when I meet the love of my life? What backstory will I have lived — one of victimhood or one of transcendence? What do I want to be able to share? Why will he or she be proud of me? What will I have to offer? When you lean toward becoming the person you've always intended to be, your vibration changes. There's an evolution in the signals you're sending out. These are the vibes that attract the person you're meant to be with. Can you really manifest a partner? Most popular philosophies about the law of attraction want to conflate manifesting with creating. We're told over and over again that we create 100% of everything that happens to us. I've come pretty close to screaming my problems with that. I believe there's a difference between creating and manifesting. Creating involves projecting, forcing, a strength of will. Manifesting requires receiving, allowing, a passive grace. There's an important component to meeting the love of your life that is out of your control. I believe we all need to accept that. It is luck. It may be destiny, it may be fate… You can manifest anything. You can create and attract all kinds of things in this world. You can influence many aspects of your experience. You can design much of the life you want… but you cannot design other people. You can be ready. You can be willing, open, brave. You can definitely be in the process of discovering who you are in the world. The better you know yourself, the better you and your potential mate can recognize one another. After eleven years of giving professional readings, I've observed that there are exactly three kinds of clients who ask questions regarding soul mates or romantic partnerships: Those who are single and dissatisfied and want to know how and when to acquire a romantic partnership. Those who are already partnered/ married, deeply dissatisfied or distressed. Those who are partnered to one person and pining away for another (an actual person or an ideal). Then there are the clients who book readings to ask about other concerns: Those who are partnered, happy, and working on another area of their lives. Those who are single, happy, and working on another area of their lives. So, I have a Theory: If unhappy single people need guidance meeting someone, and if unhappy coupled people need guidance breaking up, then I must deduce the following: The "happiness factor" in our lives is entirely based on internal perspective. The "happiness factor" in our lives is independent of romantic status. Did you get that? A boyfriend will not "complete" you; and "getting a girlfriend" is the worst kind of substitute for "getting a life." The Other Kind of Passion The elusive missing component to your sense of fulfillment, sense of joy, and sense of purpose in life is found in an entirely different area. It has little (potentially nothing) to do with whether or not anyone wants to date you. The simple joys are found in numerous, humble external circumstances (easily accessible by most people, excluding obvious extreme hardship and tragedy) or the sense of peace is found in the internal modes of attitude and choice. A Common Thread The good news is that the "fix" for dissatisfaction is usually a single, universal pursuit that affects all facets of the life you're creating. The fix is unique from one person to the next, but there's a common thread within the life of every individual. If you do indeed have a soul mate that you are destined to meet, that individual most likely waits for you within the vicinity of your sense of purpose, or within the realm of another humbler, simpler pursuit of happiness. A shared hobby. A common interest. There's one passion you can focus on that transforms all areas of your life simultaneously. Deep down, you already know what that passion is. As you're reading this, you have flashes of this knowledge -- that goal you know you must achieve… that thing for which you feel you were put on this earth... Go back to doing that -- love will find you there. If you do not know what that passion is for you, talk to me. Instead of the way I usually do the oracle at the end of an episode, I want to just share some thoughts with you. You know what I find consistently amazing about the Universe? (Well, just one aspect, among so many...) Over and over again I am awestruck by the rarity and perfection of the connections between souls in the briefest parcels of time. It's so easy to take for granted, to go worrying the Magic That's Missing like a toothache or a raw spot on your gum, your tongue returning helplessly to a mysterious emptiness or source of pain... Where's the Soul Mate? Where’s that perfect Co-Star? But stop this week (at least today) to consider the precision and force with which unimaginable abundance still manages to find you. What are the Chances? What are the Odds? I mean, when you consider how vast is this one dimension we most exist in — is the third dimension one dimension? or do we exist in three? oh, hell, it doesn't matter, we don't consciously occupy much among many — when you contemplate how many billions of souls are incarnate at this moment, from among the trillions who have come and gone... When you consider the eye-blink in time in which we dwell, how can it be that we have come to know one another? What fragile spark of miracle has made possible your best friend? ...the sweet pets that have found you, who seem grown from pieces of your heart. ...the books that have defied so much chance to fall off shelves right in front of you and speak to you across miles and centuries. ...that even one human being loves you (let alone the many). ...that the clouds have piled up in a big sky just so, just for you, just in that moment. ...that there can be such a perfect song that knows how to find you riding radio waves across across air and space, that can always manage to make you cry. ...that you could accidentally wander in front of a landscape so picturesque you forget to breathe (just for a second). ...that a stranger meets your eye in passing, smiles, and is gone. The improbable choreography, the great Spiral Dance, dwarfs all petty bothers and complaints and leaves me speechless, looking about in wonder. How can it be? Really, how can this be that I am here in this moment — that we are here — that you have chanced to listen this and share in contemplation of my questions... For just a moment notice what is greater than your sadness or even your joy, what you're missing or what you find in plenty... Fucking Amazing. OUTRO Thanks again for listening to the Shift Your Spirits podcast. For show notes, links, transcripts and all the past episodes please visit shiftyourspirits.com You can subscribe in iTunes or Stitcher or whatever app you use to access podcasts. If you’d like to get an intuitive reading with me, or download a free ebook and meditation to help you connect with your guides please go to sladeroberson.com and if you’re interested in my professional intuitive training program, you can start the course for free by downloading the Attunement at automaticintuition.com and I’ll talk to you later.

I was not raised in religion. My interest in spirituality is entirely self-motivated. When I was seven years old, I asked to attend a Vacation Bible School, so I could ask questions like "Is Mother Nature God's wife?" MENTIONED IN THE SHOW The Magicians Drawing Down the Moon - Margot Adler The Jungle Book (1967) God’s Eye Trust in Me - Siouxsie and the Banshees HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses Get an intuitive reading with Slade Automatic Intuition BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits TRANSCRIPT INTRO Hey, thanks for listening to the Shift Your Spirits podcast. I’m your host Slade Roberson. For eleven years, I’ve been a professional intuitive and the author of the blog Shift Your Spirits, where I try to write about spirituality with fewer hearts and flowers than most New Age blather. I also mentor emerging intuitives, psychics, and healers in a program called Automatic Intuition. Today’s introduction is probably not going to be as lengthy as the last one — I’m recording these episodes close together, so I’m not sure how much more original insightful life experience has occurred in my world in such a short span of time. We’re on the backside of Hurricane Irma, as I record this, in a lovely cold drizzling rain. We lost power here only briefly from about 10 pm at night to 7 o’clock this morning. I mean, if you’re going to lose power, that was an ideal window. I can’t really complain about it at all, but I am stunned to experience the winds we had last night, this deep inland, in the mountains of Tennessee. I really truly hate it for all of you who are still without power across the Southeast. Or suffering from lack of the basics. I cannot even imagine. I am truly grateful for my luck and privilege. If there is anyone in our community in need with like a GoFund Me page or another organization they’d prefer we support, please contact me if you can and I will lend whatever I can in terms of sharing your needs with my platform and audience, helping to expand the reach of your requests and messages. I hope everyone and their pets came through this okay. I have absolutely no wacky supernatural meanings or godly messages to attach to these storms. Because I’m not Kirk Cameron. But I do have an oracle message for you at the end of the show. So stay tuned after the final links and credits. I do have one new tool I started using in the last few days. My friend Matt posted this on Facebook: "My serenity is inversely proportional to my expectations. The higher my expectations of other people are, the lower is my serenity. I can watch my serenity level rise when I discard my expectations.” He has a personal note: try also replacing "expectations" with “attachment.” I looked it up to find the source, and it is actually from the Alcoholics Anonymous handbook. Page 452. That’s cool. I’m not in AA but I love a good re-framing technique. Remember my not-complaining for a month back in the spring? I continue to fail at this, pretty miserably. I have to admit it. It’s really hard not to complain. People are frustrating and disappointing. They are. So, I like this idea that lowering my expectations, increases my sense of peace. When I notice my internal chatter critiquing something (especially someone) I just say “Lowering my expectations. No expectations. Just doing my thing. Just moving through here.” And it’s pretty powerful in the short term. It’s an almost immediate interruption of negative internal dialogue. You can refer back to the show notes and try it out. I always like to tweak these mantras and make them personal, my own words, in my own voice. Since I am recording again back to back, I don’t have a lot of new patrons to call out. But I see Wendy Bassett did just slip in with a pledge. Thanks Wendy! If you started supporting the show this week, between the last few episodes, I have not forgotten you. I will thank you personally next time. It’s a time delay issue between recording and publishing. I appreciate all of you who have pledged your support and I’m really excited to see the new names each week. It demonstrates that you’re enjoying the show and want it to continue. That’s very encouraging to me, so thank you. You can support my time in producing this show by pledging on Patreon. For as little as $1 a month, listeners who support on Patreon can also access bonus Q&A episodes, where you send in questions, I record answers to them, and they go out to patrons of the show exclusively. There is also a level of support that includes a free download of the guided meditation “Messages from your Spirit Guides." So, if you want to find out how you can become a patron, and access some of this extra audio content, please go to patreon.com/shiftyourspirits Today, I want to tell you a story about when I went to Vacation Bible School where I infamously posed the question: “Is Mother Nature God’s Wife?”. I am proud to say I became a full blown heretic before I even got to third grade. SEGMENT As I’ve talked about before, I was not raised in religion. My interest in spirituality is entirely self-motivated. I’m sure my parents must have kind of wondered where this little mystic kid came from. Because nobody had to shove it down my throat, I was into it! I can make a case that I was into it in a completely authentic way that never would have happened if I had been indoctrinated by adults. When I was seven years old, I asked my parents to let me attend a Christian institution known as Vacation Bible School. We have to take a minute to talk about this diploma or "certificate of recognition," as it’s technically called. I snapped a pic of it with my phone from my mother’s archives and I’ve posted it on my blog so you can check it out. The Jesus in this illustration is giving me Kris Kristofferson. With maybe a little Kenny Loggins/ Dan Fogelberg… You know, singer-songwriter vibe. He’s a white guy, of course, bearded, pretty ruddy complexion actually. He could almost be related to the Brawny paper towel guy. He looks like a young guy from a 1950s Boy Scouts of America pamphlet grew up to become a hippie. He’s wearing a creamy hemp poncho with a hood and he’s got this far away expression on his face, faintly smiling at whatever he’s seeing in the distance. And he’s making this complicated hand gesture. He’s working magic, I guess. I mean, the hand positioning reminds me of something you’d see Quentin do on The Magicians. But then there’s this small guy in the foreground in a leather skirt and sandals with a do rag who looks a little Native American at first glance - and honestly, as a kid, I thought he was and wasn’t really sure what the connection was supposed to be. Now I see this guy is tossing handfuls of seed from a fanny pack contraption onto this barren looking ground with gnarled and twisted plants. So I guess Jesus is working some crop magic for this guy. Maybe for someone who’s more educated in children’s bible stories, this will ring a bell, or when you see it, you see all my misperceptions and know what it’s truly intended to be … but I still for the life of me can’t imagine what this scene has to do with Vacation Bible School. But. It is pretty. And there’s something delicious and utopian about these campy mid century church illustrations that I admit appealed to me. As a kid I was as an easy recruit (initially) for Church-sponsored functions. Beyond the promised hype of craft projects and pizza socials, I was hungry for hard-core religious experience. My serious dedication is evidenced by this certificate that I was just describing, which has a little gold foil seal on it that says "Perfect Attendance." CHURCH-SANCTIONED SPIRIT POSSESSION Someone had explained to me the Southern Baptist phenomenon of Being Saved, in which any average child on Earth can experience a life-long form of holy possession by the Son of God Himself — simply by asking for it to happen. This was incredible news! I already knew I was protected by an enormously tall lady who looked like Catwoman in a nightgown and no child ever believed in, stalked, and engaged with fairies more than me. Not only did I applaud my belief in fairies to save Tinkerbell when Peter Pan came on TV, I dressed up in full green Peter Pan attire — green tights and felt elf shoes — one of a handful of "Halloween" costumes that I found reason to wear on several other occasions throughout the year. Considering I never set foot in a Catholic Church until I was 19, my intense longing from the age of 5 to "go as" a Catholic Priest or a Franciscan Monk for Halloween does make me open to the traditional notion of past-life memories. In her incredible work on modern Neo-Paganism Drawing Down the Moon, Margot Adler finds a common thread among the witches she interviewed — an instinct for engaging in spontaneous ritual theater at a very early age, despite socialization toward any particular religious tradition. I certainly built enough henges in the woods behind our house, charged enough mystical paraphernalia — wands, crystals, arrowheads, amulets, potion bottles — and entertained an audience of invisible spirit guides and guardian angels with an artistic commitment and devotion only rivaled by my current will to podcast… And while all these mystical experiences would be quickly dismissed or, at best, patronized by adults — and I knew not to discuss such things with unsympathetic audiences — here was a similar magical experience that was not only socially-acceptable, it was praised, encouraged, an absolute sin if you missed out on it. You didn’t need to tell me twice — sign me up! As if that wasn't promising enough, the Baptist Church attended by most families in our neighborhood was called Mars Hill — which I took as an affirmation of my desire to one day be part of the future mission to colonize the Red Planet. At the time, I really thought Being Saved could propel me in my aspirations to become a Priest and an Astronaut — simultaneously! It would be a few years before I came to understand that in polite white Christian America, there is a thin line between piety and stigma. You're supposed to be a good Christian — but you're not supposed to be too good at it. The same behavior that defines the believer also damns the mystic. Believe in God, pray every day — just don't tell anyone if He answers you Stand up in church and sing — but without emotion or fervor — do not speak in tongues or writhe in ecstasy — if by chance you really feel something, for God's sake, keep it to yourself Do not rest until you've forced your belief on everyone you encounter — but don't make the mistake of behaving like you mean it. Ask What Would Jesus Do? and if all else fails, set an example of what not to do by reminding everyone what judgment feels like I took the school in Vacation Bible School pretty literally. I came with some challenging philosophical questions. I genuinely thought this teacher — Miss Alice something, it’s noted on the certificate — might have some answers for me. She required you to stand up in the class to ask your questions. I opened with “Is Mother Nature God’s wife?” She tittered and kinda laughed it off, and talked about the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. And I was like “Yes, exactly. Where’s the mom? Everybody has a mom…” She waved me back down into my chair and tried to change the subject. Looking back, I’m sure she didn’t know what to say or how to handle it, she probably was philosophically challenged—she was probably, what, in her twenties? That seems old to a child, but to most of us, now, she was a child herself, parroting some Bible School teachings to a room full of six- and seven-year-olds. I remember feeling put out and angry that she wouldn’t call on me anymore, but I was able to channel my emotions into creating a really intensely colorful God’s Eye out of yarn and popsicle sticks. An object I was not surprised to discover years later is actually a ritual tool, magical object, and cultural symbol evoking the weaving motif and its spiritual associations of for the indigenous people of western Mexico. I waited a day or two and she finally called on me again to stand up and ask another question: "If God didn't want Adam and Eve to eat that Tree, why didn't He plant it somewhere else?” She exhaled in loud exasperation, pursed her lips and, again, waving for me to sit down, shot me a glare as she continued on with her Rated-G version of naked people, forbidden fruit, and Original Sin. That day’s arts and crafts project was drawing scenes from the Garden of Eden story. I was a huge fan of Disney’s original animated film of The Jungle Book, which came out a few years before I was born. People used to tell me I looked like Mowgli, probably because I was skinny and tan and had long brown hair. One of the most compelling scenes for me was when Kaa, the serpent, hypnotizes Mowgli while singing “Trust in Me.” (Sidebar: Siouxsie and the Banshees recorded a great cover version of that song.) I envisioned the serpent tempting Eve with its evil magic had to look something like this, so I drew a big close up of a colorful snake with psychedelic eyes. Miss Alice whoever she was actually confiscated this illustration before I even finished coloring it in. I’m actually pissed that it’s not in my mother’s child art archives. It was a really pop art concept piece. She whispered to me the snake was not an appropriate subject and suggested I draw something “prettier” because, you know, it’s the Garden of Eden; it’s full of animals and plants and... (Honestly, it’s hard for most people of any age, let alone kids, to get past the nudity in the Garden of Eden myth. Am I right?) So, I drew a picture of Adam and Eve, buck ass naked, picking fruit and surrounded by cute animals beneath a lush jungle canopy. Now, as I saw it depicted in a television miniseries, the crotch region was artfully blocked by bushes and waist high plants. I went with that coverage for both figures, but the Eve in my picture is reaching for an apple overhead (of course) and I rendered her knockers in full detail. What? She’s picking fruit. She’s naked. It would look stupid to put her entire body behind a bush. But, that is exactly what Miss Alice demanded I do in a furious whisper. You can tell by looking at the finished drawing that the full body bush in front of Eve was an after the fact censorship bar. It ruined the picture, if you asked me. I made it to the end of the week, but I wasn’t leaving without putting forward one of my biggest beefs with Christianity. Fortunately, we were discussing Heaven. Unfortunately, Miss Alice would not call on me. I finally just stood up and blurted out “How can it be Heaven if our pets aren’t there?” She told me to sit down, that I had not been called on. “If you can have anything you want in Heaven that makes you happy, then why can’t you have your pets there?” She actually bared her teeth at me at this point. “Sit. Down. And shut up." As I slowly lowered myself into my chair I said "I don’t want to go to Heaven if my pets aren’t going to be there.” I remember looking around the room at all these kids staring at me, their faces masks of shock and anxiety. And when Miss Alice asked for another question, every hand in the room shot up. Guess what everybody wanted clarified? But you won’t believe what happened next. I was sent to a church psychologist. Immediately. Right then. Removed from class and sent to someone in the building who ran “tests to see how smart I was.” Looking back, these activities resembled those assessments for kids with behavioral issues — or possibly “gifted” designation. Pictures where you describe the emotional dynamic taking place, etc. At one point, the lady gave me one of those eight-pack jumbo crayons sets, like the ones for really little kids, and asked me to draw a picture of God. Well, I thought about the old bearded man in a robe sitting on a throne of clouds… I could visualize it, but honestly, rendering that much white, in crayon, is problematic. It was too ambitious for the circumstances. So I went with my Starry Night technique. I had discovered if you drew with two or three crayons of similar or complementary hues as if they are one crayon, you can achieve a kind of Vincent Van Gogh effect. I took the yellow, the red, and the orange, and drew a big, thick stroke sun in the center of the page. Not the son like Jesus, s-u-n like the big fiery globe of molten life-giving light and heat at the center of our natural existence. Sun worship. The ultimate pagan religious expression. I pretty sure they called my parents in and just asked them not to bring me back. I remember feeling like they were insulted after meeting with that church psychologist. But believe it or not, I still chose to be saved and baptized there and went through with it. I’m pretty sure it happened that Sunday after the close of Vacation Bible School. And that’s a whole other tale of disappointment and disillusionment I’ll have to share another time. Ultimately, with the odd exception of a Halloween party where I technically didn’t make it past the parking lot, we never really went back to that church. But as I sit here right now thinking back on that time, without malice or disgust, I am 100% positive if Jesus had been teaching that class, I would have been his favorite person in the room. OUTRO Thanks again for listening to the Shift Your Spirits podcast. For show notes, links, transcripts and all the past episodes please visit shiftyourspirits.com You can subscribe in iTunes or Stitcher or whatever app you use to access podcasts. If you’d like to get an intuitive reading with me, or download a free ebook and meditation to help you connect with your guides please go to sladeroberson.com and if you’re interested in my professional intuitive training program, you can start the course for free by downloading the Attunement at automaticintuition.com BEFORE I GO I promised to leave you a message in answer to a question or a concern you may have. So take a moment to think about that — hold it in your mind or speak it out loud. I’ll pause for just a few seconds….right…now. 1…2…3…4 MESSAGE Go back in time. What were your original thoughts and intentions? Return to your earliest authentic impulses. Recommit to those. Shed everybody else’s noise. Everyone else’s opinions and advice and judgments — even though they may be coming from a good place — it’s all too much. You need to tell the world to shut up so you can hear yourself think. Turn off the radio and drive with just your thoughts. Get back to you. To your truth. And I’ll talk to you later.

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

What if all this spiritual stuff were bullshit? What if it all is magical thinking? To be honest, I'm still not comfortable with how closely what I put out into the world resembles religion. I think religion is literally mankind’s worst invention ever. And sometimes I fantasize about being an atheist. I daydream about it. MENTIONED IN THE SHOW DUNE by Frank Herbert Bene Gesserit LITANY AGAINST FEAR I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain. Bene Gesserit "Litany Against Fear" from Frank Herbert's Dune Book Series © 1965 and 1984 Frank Herbert Published by Putnam Pub Group ISBN: 0399128964 “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” —Edmund Burke Dr. Keith Holden Ep 12 - Power of the Mind in Health and Healing Dream-walking & remote viewing Ep 21 - I Dream I’m Other People Atheism & ESP HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses Get an intuitive reading with Slade Automatic Intuition BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits TRANSCRIPT INTRO Hey, thanks for listening to the Shift Your Spirits podcast. I’m your host Slade Roberson. For eleven years, I’ve been a professional intuitive and the author of the blog Shift Your Spirits, where I try to write about spirituality with fewer hearts and flowers than most New Age blather. I also mentor emerging intuitives, psychics, and healers in a program called Automatic Intuition. Today, I want to share some of my thoughts about atheism and psychic ability. It’s not an especially long episode, but events this week have put me in a sensitive place regarding religion. And by sensitive, I mean Over it. It’s Friday, August 18 as I record this and I’ve just admittedly broken my own code of not making politically divisive posts on social media. If you’re listening from the future, this was the week of the events in Charlottesville, Va where Heather Heyer was killed at a neo-Nazi rally. I won’t go into all of that here. If you’re interested in hearing my thoughts on the subject, I’ve posted an original piece on Facebook and on Medium.com. So feel free to friend me or check that out. I received a lot of support, and a little bit of really ugly backlash. I probably won’t be doing this again any time soon, but I wanted to go on record at least once, about where my line is. I do believe that Silence can be seen as support or approval. And I’ve been thinking a lot about the Edmund Burke quote, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” So, I felt triggered to do some not-nothing. ... As always I have an oracle segment at the end of this show. Be thinking about a question or a concern you have. Hold it in your mind, and I’ll come back on at the end, after the final links and credits, and leave you with an extra message… BUT BEFORE I FORGET This is the last time I’ll be recording before the Solar Eclipse. It’s weird to try and imagine what I may be thinking or feeling about all of that by the time you hear this. It might take a week or two for my real life introduction segments to catch up with all the processing we’re probably doing. It’s been a volatile time. One of my closest friends Lacy lost her mother to cancer last week. And a lot of my energy is with her right now. This is episode 24. My intention is to do episodes in runs of 12, with a week off. My first mini season came out at like 13 or something slightly off because well, I was just starting this podcast and trying to find a rhythm for it. And I failed to communicate when I took that first break. So, I want to be sure and let you know if you’re listening in real time, we will skip next week. This allows me to plan breaks through out the year so that Linda and I can catch up on production and transcription and have a little bit of a buffer on putting out these shows. I want to take a moment to say thank you to my newest supporters on Patreon: Jason Chinn and Chris Lynn I appreciate all of you who have pledged your support and I’m really excited to see the new names each week. It demonstrates that you’re enjoying the show and want it to continue. That’s very encouraging to me, so thank you. You too can support my time in producing this show — and you can support Linda, who transcribes all my words each week — by pledging on Patreon. For as little as $1 a month, listeners who support on Patreon can also access bonus Q&A episodes, where you send in questions, I record answers to them, and they go out to patrons of the show exclusively. So If you want to find out how you can become a patron, especially if you would like the transcription to continue, please go to patreon.com/shiftyourspirits And now, here’s today’s episode. SEGMENT What if all this spiritual stuff were bullshit? What if it all is magical thinking? I fantasize about being an atheist. I day dream about it. It would just be easier. The intellectual side of me wouldn’t feel discomfort. My ego wouldn’t worry about being judged. To be honest, I am still not comfortable with how closely what I do and put out into the world resembles religion. I think religion is literally mankind’s worst invention. I can make an argument that just about any social ill or self-inflicted problem of the human race can be traced back to religion somehow, some way. The magical part of me is resentful. I feel like religion stole the magic tools and misappropriated them. I admit to playing with those same tools, speaking much of the same language. And part of me really does not like that. The vast majority of us try to express this conundrum as being “spiritual but not religious.” There’s a part of me that badly wants to rail against the whole thing. I don’t want to be associated with anything which a whiff of religiosity I want to be able to freely and clearly without complication say “this is all bullshit.” So much of it is. Or else it’s been so badly muddied. Yet, here I am, trying to explain what I and others experience, to harness it, to make it useful to us in some way. I go through this internal checklist, testing what I can dismiss. It’s definitely easy for me to imagine you can be psychic without believing in spirits or religion. Psychic ability could simply be a bio-technology. Like any other function in our bodies and minds. There is a lot of amazing complicated involuntary stuff happening within our biological vessels. There could other explanations for what we perceive as the presence of spirits. I always think one day there will be scientifically supported biological explanations for psychic ability, spiritual phenomenon. We’re always reading those cool science pieces others share on Facebook about interconnection, the mind’s impact on the body…evidence or proof of some mystical wisdom. It’s one of the reasons I loved having Dr. Keith Holden on the show... Maybe spirits are cellular memory. It’s ancestral intelligence passed through DNA. The Native Americans believed in this. If you read Dune by Frank Herbert… The Bene Gesserit - an order of witches who can access the intelligence of all the women who preceded them matrilineally as biological ancestors. It’s like have the voice of every mother and grandmother before you as an enormous hive mind of counselors within your own head. After the episode about dream-walking, One of my listeners — Sterling — wrote to me and proposed the theory that we remote view others in our dreams and help them during crises … and the person receiving that assistance may experience it as a spiritual presence. What if our guides are living people connecting to us psychically, on another plane? What if all this stuff is symbolic thinking? It’s true in some way, but representative of something else, like icons on a touchscreen. What if what we perceive to be spiritual phenomena is a kind of User Interface with parts of our intellectual technology and consciousness we don’t fully understand how to access and use. Yet. I hate to think about how a few hundred years from now I will be viewed as a misguided superstitious idiot with good intentions and bad information. But here’s the one stumper... What do we do with synchronicity? My friend Lacy pointed out it’s the one phenomena every one experiences, regardless of belief. Atheists still experience synchronicity, right? How do they explain it to themselves? I’d love to know, but I doubt there are any atheists listening to this show. If you know of one, or some books or links, I’d love you to share them with me. Weirdly, I randomly stumbled upon a blog post I had written almost ten years ago called Atheism and ESP. I want to share that story with you right now “Can an atheist be psychic?" Mark, an evangelical youth minister, asked me this question last weekend at the coffee house. The wi-fi cafe where I go to write in the afternoons and on weekends is the favorite mobile office for a lot of ministers in the community where I live. You might assume I would prefer to be surrounded by a flock of bright-eyed New Agers, but not only is an environment like that unlikely to exist in Chattanooga, TN it wouldn't necessarily appeal to me. I am comforted by diversity. There are a few Buddhist monks here and there, plenty of college students and professors and even a few technopagans (usually in the evenings), but the overwhelming number of "regulars" whose work weeks most resemble my own are Christian preachers. We each have "our" (preferred) table or couch -- our spots where we play modern scribes on laptops, week after week... I can't say that they see the resemblance between our roles as much as I do -- but they behave as if it's true, and actions are what counts. If the cafe were filled with mystics who wanted to chat, I'd never get anything accomplished. And, besides, I see the distances and the differences as a promising vision of an interfaith future; where we respect each other as people first, regardless of our vocabularies. Even though Mark is Pentecostal, he experiences a high-level of clairaudience that is more similar to my own than anyone I've ever met. He's even "confessed" his ability to me, to ensure more understanding between us. Just like anyone I meet on my path, my goal as a minister is always to communicate permission for you to believe what you will, and encouragement for you to create the world you want to live in. I politely refuse to argue theology, politics, or define Source with anyone -- last time I allowed myself to engage in that conversation, I almost lost Mark -- he asked me by whose Authority my abilities are endowed, and I succinctly responded "Mine." "Now don't fret," I quickly appended the statement when I saw the light in his eyes go dim, and I picked up the silent keyword heresy, "You already know the Source resembles your own in a way that words and definitions only confuse. Repeat your Question, ask my Source directly this time, and not me..." I mentally stood back, stood down from the protection I normally project, and received his quick, shy, telepathic probe. It was interesting to note that he went straight for my guides and they answered him directly. Mark looked flushed and slightly embarrassed, but the pinched eyebrows relaxed, and his face softened with a kind of child-like smile. He suddenly looked hopeful and happy, like he'd just heard something wonderful and clever. Guess he found the Authority he needed in there, the one my personal labels could not have affirmed for him. Now, reassured, Mark respects me and trusts me enough to still ask me brilliant, challenging questions once in awhile -- but not to challenge me; more to share with me the ways in which he feels challenged. So, back to last Saturday, when Mark turned around in his chair, peeked over my laptop and asked me "Can an atheist be psychic?" "Absolutely!" I said. "I feel that psychic abilities -- extra-sensory perceptive abilities -- are independent of any agenda we might attach to them. Look at this way: you can draw a picture on a napkin without being an artist; you can sing in the shower without being a musician; you can talk without being a speaker; you know when something tastes delicious, whether or not you can deconstruct the recipe and whip it up yourself in the kitchen. The mechanics of the senses have no predetermined goal." See, only a day prior to this question, I began participating in a university study which profiles psychic abilities, or extra-sensory perception, from a purely clinical, scientific perspective. I have grown so used to attaching my own faith and personal understanding of the supernatural, that I'd actually forgotten that academic ESP literature rarely addresses religion or spirituality at all. You don't have just five biological senses, you actually have nine -- your psychic faculties exist and are constantly available to you, regardless of any belief system. Your body -- certain regions of your body -- act as antennae. You receive and process information using your four extra senses much as you do the five you're most familiar with -- you don't have to believe in anything to be able to see, hear, taste, smell, or feel. You can interact with, respond to, receive information from, and communicate with your environment -- especially with other people or other living things in your environment -- regardless of what you believe or don't believe. How you process, define, identify who, what, or where the information comes from is another conversation entirely. You don't have to see radio waves to use them in your everyday life. You don't have to believe in electricity to flip switches. You don't have to understand the way light behaves as both waves and particles to be able to see. I feel that anyone can strengthen their psychic senses. You are psychic; you use these senses all the time. You don't have to sit down and pray once a week to be able to smell. You don't have to remember to hear when you wake up in the morning. Now, who it is you may be hearing... That's another story. I have this other daydream where one day, I just come out and reveal to you guys, that I am a Psychic Atheist. And I pivot everything I do… Because, here’s the thing. I can still do readings. The information that I get is still accurate and useful. The source of this information is what I’m questioning here. I think even the Akashic Records in theory could be retained in a philosophy of psychic atheism. Does this conversation make you feel uncomfortable? Or does it spark your imagination in some way? I don’t know — I just wanted to talk about this. To put it out there and see what comes back. Does anything about this resonate with you? I really want to know. Talk to me. OUTRO Thanks again for listening to the Shift Your Spirits podcast. For show notes, links, transcripts and all the past episodes please visit shiftyourspirits.com You can subscribe in iTunes or Stitcher or whatever app you use to access podcasts. You don’t have to use the purple button on your iPhone — some people don’t like that app. My personal favorite podcast app is Overcast. So, check that one out. If you’d like to get an intuitive reading with me, or download a free ebook and meditation to help you connect with your guides please go to sladeroberson.com and if you’re interested in my professional intuitive training program, you can start the course for free by downloading the Attunement at automaticintuition.com BEFORE I GO I promised to leave you a message in answer to a question or a concern you may have. So take a moment to think about that—hold it in your mind or speak it out loud. I’ll pause for just a few seconds….right…now. 1…2…3…4 MESSAGE If you’re feeling hurt or angry about another person’s behavior toward you, now is the time to release the negative energy around those circumstances. If you hang onto it, it’s going to attract more of the same. Anger and resentment are tough bonds—they’re super glue—they keep you attached to the events that create initial suffering, they keep them alive within you, and it drains you. Forgiveness is not forgetting, it’s not falling to resist, it’s a clearing of energy that serves as the first step in creating room for peace and joy. So, help to contribute your part in that. And if nothing else, forgive yourself for having unrealistic expectations of a situation that can’t provide perfection. Perfectionism is one of the ways we sabotage ourselves. And I’ll talk to you later.

Melany Oliver has over 10 years experience healing deep emotional wounds. She helps women wounded by childhood trauma and negative relationships learn to love and accept themselves. She also helps those who are heartbroken or unable to attract their life partner release energetic blocks to manifesting true love. She’s the creator of Healing the Broken Heart, Complete Heart Attunement, and the Heart Paths, which support those on a spiritual journey learn how to process their emotions and life lessons. MENTIONED IN THE SHOW: ...Reiki, Thai yoga massage, holistic and complimentary therapies, NLP (neuro-linguistic programming), hypnotherapy, theta healing ... cording, energy cord, etheric cord, energetic divorce, energy exchange, cord cutting... GUEST LINKS - MELANY OLIVER melany-oliver.com Healing the Broken Heart Complete Heart Attunement HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses Get an intuitive reading with Slade Automatic Intuition BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits TRANSCRIPT Hey, thanks for listening to the Shift Your Spirits podcast. I’m your host Slade Roberson. For eleven years, I’ve been a professional intuitive and the author of the blog Shift Your Spirits, where I try to write about spirituality with fewer hearts and flowers than most New Age blather. I also mentor emerging intuitives, psychics, and healers in a program called Automatic Intuition. Today, I’m sharing a conversation with Melany Oliver about healing from heartbreak. And, of course, as always, there’s an oracle segment at the end of the show. So be thinking about a question or a concern you have. Hold it in your mind, and I’ll come back on, after the final links and credits, and leave you with that extra message. BUT BEFORE I FORGET It’s August 14, 2017 as I record this. If you’re listening right when this episode comes out, we have just experienced the eclipse. And hopefully you’re moving toward your best intentions for the future and a break with past patterns that no longer serve you. It will likely take a while for this energy to move through and there’s still work to be done around this Leo / Aquarius duality. My simplification of the theme you should be considering, or the questions to ask yourself, revolve around the idea of your true identity. Leo energy (for everyone) is about being a star, shining your special light, and the Aquarius side of things is about the greater humanitarian definition of who you are. Who, on a larger scale, will receive your light. Who is your true self? What are your gifts? And how do you intend to impact the world. It feels like a test right now — you will either become reaffirmed in who you want to be or you may realize you’ve strayed from the path you set for yourself, or you may discover a new image of who you truly are and feel the nudge to adopt that new self. The challenges and changes right now are about embracing what will allow you to shine, and releasing what is not working. I’d like to take a moment to say thank you to my new supporters on Patreon: Ann Luke-Montez Janet Thomasson Miki Lea I appreciate all of you who have pledged your support and I’m really excited to see the new names each week. It demonstrates that you’re enjoying the show and want it to continue. That’s very encouraging to me, so thank you. You too can support my time in producing this show — and you can support Linda, who transcribes all my words each week — by pledging on Patreon. For as little as $1 a month, listeners who support on Patreon can also access bonus Q&A episodes, where you send in questions, I record answers to them, and they go out to patrons of the show exclusively. I just posted the latest bonus episode on how I do a psychic reading, step by step, in great detail, so you guys who are supporters can go listen to that if you haven’t already. If you’d like to listen to that episode, you can find out how to pledge your support for the show at patreon.com/shiftyourspirits Okay. Let’s get into today’s interview. Melany Oliver has over 10 years experience healing deep emotional wounds. She helps women wounded by childhood trauma and negative relationships learn to love and accept themselves. She also helps those who are heartbroken or unable to attract their life partner release energetic blocks to manifesting true love. She’s the creator of Healing the Broken Heart, Complete Heart Attunement, and the Heart Paths, which support those on a spiritual journey learn how to process their emotions and life lessons. I’ll let her introduce herself... Melany: I'm Melany and I work with emotional wellbeing and I help people process their deep emotional pain. And empower them and not allow their emotions to sabotage their life, to rule their life, and that's the basics of what I do. That's the main, that's the core of what I do is really all about emotions and emotional empowerment. Slade: I know a lot of people who are listening are going to be wondering where your accent comes from. Tell us where you come from. Melany: Haha.. I was born in Brazil. My mother's half Brazilian, half Italian. My father's English, Welsh-English. I grew up in Dubai so... I don't know where my accent's from. I think it's mixed up. Slade: It's very interesting, yeah! It's funny because whenever I listen to you try to speak, there is a part of my brain - I was originally a linguistics major in college and this is not something that I talk about a lot but it's funny because I'm very good at identifying English-speakers and you know, and where they come from. Like a lot of people in America can't tell the difference between a New Zealand or South African, stuff like that... Melany: Yeah... Slade: And I notice when I'm listening to you, that there are parts of my brain... Melany: Haha... you're confused! Slade: Yeah, I'm trying to at - I'm like, i heard something there that sounded British and then I'll hear something else that sounds a little different. And so, yeah, um I just - I felt like in the moment as I was listening from the perspective of the audience, like, Everyone's going to wonder where is she from with the lovely accent! Anyway... Melany: I get that a lot. I get - people don't know where I'm from. I've gotten from everywhere, literally. Slade: It's fascinating though. You have a very different worldview, I'm sure, from the intersection of all those cultures. I am curious in hearing, how did you become a professional intuitive? Melany: Basically I had no idea what I was going to do. And I remember applying to university and I applied to so many different courses and I honest - when I got the results and I just did not know what to do. And so what I did was I took a gap year and I went traveling and studied a lot of different modalities. So I started reiki, I did Thai yoga massage, and that's when I started to realize that actually I really like the whole alternative medicine field. And so I studied holistic and complementary therapies at university and then from then on I just started to study all sorts, you know, NLP, hypnotherapy, and in the background, I've always been, you know, an intuitive, but never really... I never really took that on board as a profession, but over the years of treating clients through massage - so I did five years of massage - I started to realize that people used to have a lot of releases emotionally and I was able to pick up their emotions just by giving them a massage, reflexology or aromatherapy massage, and that's what also got me interested in the intuition and aura reading and all of that and so it was actually a gradual process. I did start doing tarot readings from when I was around 18. I was very young but I only started to really take this professionally 10 years on when I was around 27 because I just didn't feel confident enough at the time and it was just a lot of encouragement from friends who had had readings, and messages from me and it was basically they encouraged me and that's how it kind of started. Slade: You were definitely not the first person, massage therapist, that I've spoken to who has discovered their intuition in that practice or in that sort of hands-on healing. I would say that, gosh, there's probably like a third of the people that I speak to who are emerging as intuitives or who just discovered that they're empaths... Yeah, do some type of bodywork where they're actually touching the clients and, yes so that's really fascinating. Of course, that's not how I come to it at all. I'm a terrible masseuse. I end up just petting people like they're cats. Which can be kind of nice, depending... Well, you know, you have a unique focus though for your practice and you're the creator of Healing the Broken Heart and Complete Heart Attunement and your website talks about how you specifically help women who are heartbroken and unable to attract their life partner release all kinds of blocks to healing their heart and attracting love. So how did that become the focus of your practice? Melany: Again, it wasn't something that I chose. It was something that - it kind of just happened naturallyI started doing more. After the massage phase, I went into more healing. And healing in general I was doing Reiki healing, theta healing and all sorts of other - NLP, hypnotherapy, and over the years again, I noticed that my main clientele were women who were heartbroken. And after seeing a lot of women, I also - based on all the tools that I know - I also started to see a pattern emerge in terms of a process. So, for example, I wouldn't just go straight into forgiveness work. I need to first release the overwhelm and then release the resistance, and then perhaps if they're ready, then to go into forgiveness. So it was years of treating women who were heartbroken and that's how I created my processes and it just kind of landed on my lap. It just happened. It wasn't something I specifically chose. Slade: Well, I think that there's a theme actually in discovering our purpose. It's often about following where people ask us to go more than it is about deciding where we're going to take them. You know, that's a piece of advice that I give a lot, so... I feel like I was a little drafted into doing this as well. One of the things I noticed though, in all the times that I've spoken with you, you use the term "heartbreak" in kind of more expansive way than most people do, you know what I mean? Melany: Yeah. Slade: You use the concept of heartbreak beyond just the romantic love, so... Melany: Oh, totally. Slade: How do you define heartbreak in the context of spiritual healing? Melany: Yeah, and I've also - sometimes I use the wound, heart wound or emotional wound, and it's really anything that breaks your heart, and it could be your mother passing, I've treated clients that they couldn't get over their loved ones passing. That in itself is a heart wound. It could also be for your pets or anything like that, but any form of trauma, any form of emotional hurt that really hurts you and you're not able to get over, that is a heart wound, and a heart break, and yeah, that's - you're absolutely right, it's not just about partners or exes and things like that. It goes deeper than that. Even childhood wounds. You could have had your heart broken as a child by parents, family, teachers. It's really about the emotion, the emotional wound, I define it as a heartbreak. Slade: That - You have something called the Heart Path series that's about processing emotions and emotional discipline. Tell us about the Heart Path series. Melany: So the Heart Path 1 is more about the self healing. So it is about emotional discipline where I go into how to process emotions, and not just emotions but also how it affects your mind and how to shift your mindset after processing your emotions. So Heart Path 1 is really about healing yourself. It's a complete self-healing journey and these are tools in which you can use over and over again and you'll probably go through the journey, as I have, many times. So that's the main focus of the Heart Path 1. Heart Path 2 is more about your intuition and developing your intuition and really connecting with your heart, with your heart's wisdom and the reason why I did it in that way - it's also - the whole Heart Path actually is based on my own journey and it's based on everything that I've learned and my favorite tools and how to develop yourself spiritually, mentally, emotionally, and the reason why I've put the intuition part second is because if you haven't dealt with your wounds, if you haven't really healed your childhood traumas or any form of trauma, your intuition will be heavily influenced by your wounds and you'll not be a clear channel. Perhaps you'll hear your intuition but you won't trust yourself to follow it. You will react based on your emotions. So it is a process. And the last part - the Heart Path 3 is more about aligning with your heart's purpose, with your heart's desires and it's more about manifesting but more in alignment with your soul, with your heart. So that's the Heart Path. Slade: Okay, so I'm not a woman, as you may realize, but I have, of course, experienced heartbreak, and there are thousands of women in my audience who I'm representing right now. So just speak to me as if, you know, if I came to you and I was considering working with you one-on-one, walk me through the process. Like, what can I expect if I approach you and I say, "I just can't get over this woundedness." Walk me through what working with you one-on-one would be like. Melany: Sure. So normally I would always start with releasing the overwhelm because when people come to me, they're not in a good place. They're normally in a dark hole, or they're stressed out and completely overwhelmedSo the first part is really about bringing yourself back into balance, grounding, and preparing you to go deeper. Because when you're overwhelmed there's no way you're going deeper into your wounds and you're not able to process anything. The second part I always check if there's any resistance, and I work with releasing resistance through reframing and using different techniques. Again, exactly what it says, to release resistance so that we go deeper. And after that it's more about processing the deep hurtful emotions that everybody avoids. That's why they're stuck. So I sit most of the time it's really sitting with clients through that painful emotion and I do guide them through visualizations, guided imagery, and to bring out, to pull out their pain, their hurt, and sit them through a process so that they can process and really release that deep core emotion that they've probably suppressed over a very very long time. And then once the emotion is really released, and I have - I don't know how to say it - I can sense when somebody has reached the core, when someone has really accepted that emotion and truly released it, then we can start on rebuilding, whether it's their self-esteem and working on self-love or whatever. The core whatever they need, then it's all about reprogramming and rebuilding. So this is, I guess, you can say, a brief framework that I use through my processes, through the way that I work with clients. Slade: I would love to get your advice about obsessive thoughts. So - and I'm asking for a friend, and for my past and future self, when I'm in this state - but you know the kind of thing I'm talking about, which is maybe the relationship is broken and it's starting to unravel and you kind of know it deep down and he's not responding to your texts, and you feel in your gut that something's wrong and your imagination starts filling in all these scenarios, or this is something that I see everyone go through like my friends. You've just broken up with somebody. You've really willfully chosen and made that decision to move on and you know it's the right thing to do, but you can't stop thinking about the person. It feels like an actual sickness, you know what I mean? Like, you're just obsessed. Melany: Yeah. Totally get that. Slade: So do you have any advice or rules or guidelines for how to deal with that? Melany: Absolutely. And this is a classic case of "cording". So when you're obsessed with someone and you're continuously thinking about them and you have - it's like - when you - firstly, before I speak about that, when you have a relationship with someone, immediately you create an energy cord so there's like an energy, etheric cord between you and that person. So one of the tools that I teach my clients, and I guide them through, is to do an energy exchange and a cord cutting. And really that makes a big difference. But this is - you have to do this consciously, some people may not want to do it. Also, depending on where the cord is - so most of the time these energetic cords the way - when I see it in my mind, it's through the lower chakras, if you know about the chakras, and especially the sacral chakra, which is all emotional. So definitely there's cording going on, so the first thing is to really do a cord cutting, an energy exchange. And then second I have some very specific NLP techniques that I use to cut you from the past, from those thoughts, and it works really well. So, and clients are almost always surprised at how well it works actually. Slade: Is cord cutting something that someone could do on their own or are they just too stuck in their own energy to really trust doing it by themselves? Melany: Yeah, it's definitely something you can do on your own. You can just use your intention and really imagine that cord and you take your energy back. You give back their stuff and you consciously make the decision to cut the cords. You can certainly do it on your own, but obviously there's some clients that maybe they're not able to, they're scared, or they don't know how. But it's really that easy. You use your mind, you use your intention and you really do it consciously. You make the decision to almost do like an energetic divorce with that person and so that you can move on energetically and you do feel a difference in your field. Slade: I am particularly good at doing this for myself. And I have a Venus in Gemini, which is like, it's like this sign of the serial monogamist, but because it's in an air sign, it's about being able to plug in and plug back, you know unplug again, and I always try to share this with other people and I am not judging them but they seem to be really bad at it, so... This is usually with friends or family members, or someone close to me more than specifically clients, but I see people who are trying to hang on to friendships or to create a civil relationship with the ex, way too soon after the breakup - Melany: Absolutely. Slade: Like there's really no break. It just is kind of like this extension, this drawn out connection and I believe that you can have healthy relationship with your exes. I have some kind of civil friendly connection with everyone that I've ever been in love with. I'm happy and proud to say. But I do believe that there has to be a very hardcore period of distance. Melany: I absolutely agree. Slade: Yeah, so what's your role for that? Melany: I actually had to tell clients to stop - well, unless they have children, then that's a whole different story. Slade: Right, yes. Melany: Because obviously you need to be connected if they're the father or mother of your child, but if it's just an ex and that's... especially clients that I have treated who have been in abusive relationships, I had to actually tell them to have no contact because it was not healthy and what they were doing actually unconsciously is wanting, seeking approval and seeking some sort of validation and sort of having them in the background as a way to - maybe some day, who knows. And that is not healthy, you know? That's not where you want to be. And I agree. You have to fully cut cords, have no communication until you are in a healthy space, then maybe in the future, okay. Maybe you can but yes, so... especially for clients who I see are really struggling then I do recommend that, to have no contact. Slade: I have a ritual that I do. There's actually a meaning of the word "casket". It's kind of a rural sort of Appalachian term for a little chest, where you keep keepsakes, like love letters and mementos and things like that. But I love the fact that the word also is something that we bury the dead in, right? It's a casket. And so I sort of created a ritual around that concept where I believe that every sign of the person, like if you do have photographs, if you do have letters and little things, if it's not something you're returning to them, it's something you want to keep, it needs to go in this casket and it needs to be bound up, tied up, and it needs to go in the closet for at least a year. Melany: Totally. Slade: Yeah. It needs to be a death. You really need to mourn it. Melany: I have - Slade: Yeah, go ahead. Melany: I was just going to share a really interesting story. So I had a client who was in an abusive relationship and she had an - it was over, but she was still suffering the aftermath which I was working with her through, she had diamond earrings that she was wearing every day, and it had been I think 5 years or I can't remember how long it was - and she was still wearing them every day. And I made her either sell it or, you know, sell it and buy something else but she was so stuck in that story that I asked her, I think this would be a good idea for you to do to really break free. You don't need that. You can buy yourself another pair of earrings. Anyway, so she finally, she did it. And two weeks later, she went back home and her mother gave her a gift which was a diamond earrings that was way bigger and more beautiful than the one she had from her aunt. It's just so funny. She emailed me and I was like, That is just hilarious. So when you hang on to things, you know, it's just things. It's material things. It's not, doesn't mean anything but psychologically it was keeping her stuck in the past and she manifested diamond earrings but bigger and more beautiful and didn't have the same memories, let's say, that she was carrying with her every day. I thought that was funny. Slade: My mom actually - and I remember watching her do this and really being aware of the symbolism of it, but I didn't want to, you don't want to stop someone in the midst of them doing something and make them self-conscious about it. But she very instinctively when she was divorced, she had divorce jewelry that she felt like she couldn't wear anymore or whatever. And her instinct was, I'm going to go have this melted down and have them make something new out of it. And so she went and had this piece of jewelry, I think it was a ring, designed, using the stones and the precious metals from these other pieces and she made this whole new thing for herself. She designed it and it was hers. So she transformed all that into something and I remember at the time - Melany: Beautiful. Slade: being very aware of the symbolism of that and I thought, Well she's doing it already, I'm not going to call attention to it. She's instinctively doing something that, yes, you would advise someone else to do and the thing I think a lot of people forget is, your subconscious mind is aware that that thing is on your body. Melany: Absolutely. Slade: It's aware of the weight of it and the - you catch sight of it in the mirror even though you've looked at those earrings a hundred times... Melany: Yes. Slade: Some part of you knows you're wearing them and it's broadcasting those memories. Melany: Totally. And it's like subliminal messages, you know? Slade: Yes. Melany: Unconscious messages that you're not consciously aware of, but like you said, you catch a glimpse of it, you're putting it on every day, and it's constantly reminding you of that, so, yeah... I get rid of everything. When I'm done, I'm done. Slade: I do too. And like I said, I'm very good at it. Melany: Maybe I'm extreme. Slade: It's - you know the thing is, I'm one of those people who I anticipate pain. I know how long it takes to move through that energy and in to heal, regardless of how good you are at it, or how much you make the choice to do it. There's still going to be some period that just sucks. And my way of dealing with that is like, Let's hurry and do it as quickly as possible. Like, the fastest way is through it, so if I'm going to have to suffer for the next 6 months, then we better get a move on. Melany: Yeah. Slade: And so, that kind of propels me through it or into it and it's almost kind of like, I feel a rush, a sense of needing to hurry, so I can be over soon. Melany: I have the same approach for myself. Slade: Yeah, I think it comes from having been through it multiple times and really getting good at it and thinking, You know what, I know what this is about. I know what I have to do to get to the other side of it. I am not someone, just for the record when I said I have connections to everyone I've ever been in a relationship with, none of those people have I ever for one second considered getting back together with. I don't understand that whole phenomenon. I kind of feel like if somebody's worthy of your love, there's probably something about them that always will be. With the exception of someone who's abusive or is a sociopath or a narcissist or has some issue that makes it toxic for you to be connected to them. But I do believe that the average person who's making average mistakes in relationships is still worthy of being out there somewhere as a Facebook friend or whatever. And that's okay. Melany: Yeah. Slade: You use a term in your Heart Path series, "emotional discipline". Is that what we're talking about? Melany: Yes, it is. Totally. And because, if you have a lot of emotions that you haven't processed, you will just act in ways that are - that will probably sabotage your relationships, it will take over basically your decisions, your actions, and... Well first in terms of, and when it comes to exes, going back to what you mentioned, you truly need to have healed that before you either leave, before you can have a mutual friendship, let's say, a respectable, respectful friendship. Because otherwise, as I mentioned before, there'll still be a little part of you that is looking for approval for - that is seeking some sort of acknowledgment or something. Does that make sense? Slade: Yeah, no. That actually hit me really hard when you said that the first time, and I thought, Oh, I'm a little guilty of that. I'm a little guilty of the person who doesn't want to be with me anymore still thinking I'm a good person. Like, that is something that I'm, at least subconsciously wanting to have and yeah, I'm absolutely guilty of that, for sure. The other thing too, you know, correct me if I'm wrong, but on a really basic level, you can't attract something better, you can't attract the person who's meant to be with you if that space is occupied, you know? Melany: Yeah. Slade: It's like the seat next to you, if someone else is sitting in that seat, no one else can come along and sit there. Melany: Absolutely. And maybe the person will and you'll miss it. Because you're so stuck on the past, like you said, your field is - your heart is filled with someone else so you still have those strings, those cords attached to the past that you're carrying along with you. Trying to move forwards and trying to manifest but with all this stuff in your field, so it will block you, yeah. Slade: So that's the manifesting part of the cycle. The process, right? Melany: Yes, oh yes. Slade: And you really can't do, you can't manifest when all this foundational stuff, when you're wounded, when you've got cords of attachment draining your energy, occupying your thoughts and filling your heart, you can't manifest anything. Melany: Well, you can, but it won't be the right person. Slade: Not what you want. Yeah, manifest a bunch of crap. Melany: Yeah, exactly. So that you can, again, you're going to manifest things to trigger you to waken you, so that you realize, okay I need to deal with myself. I still have emotions, trapped emotions down there that need to come out, so... To manifest true - someone that is in alignment with what your heart truly desires, then yes, you need to let go. Otherwise you can manifest but not the right person. Slade: What do you say to the person who is manifesting the same relationship over and over again? What's that about? Melany: That is definitely about trauma, because what you're doing is you're repeating a pattern and what I have found normally, it's childhood trauma. It's not just about an ex or even a few exes. It's always childhood-rooted core... these are like core deep-rooted trauma where you're seeking to be loved firstly, but in the wrong way. And it's only when you can truly go back and do inner child work, which is what I do mainly, with these type of issues. After we've released all the exes, then you can start to really, well, then you can start to manifest after you've healed your childhood wounds. Yeah. Slade: What message do you think is kind of missing from the spiritual, psychological world where, you know, the personal development world where we talk about these things and discuss it and want to be better. What do you think is the message that is missing or sort of needs to be brought forward? Melany: One of the biggest things that I have seen is that a lot of people think that the spiritual world and being spiritual and all of that and self-development, maybe not so much self-development, is all about being positive and thinking positive and all of that. Which yes, that is the goal, and essentially that's where you want to be. But however, it's about facing the dark stuff, facing your fears, facing these wounds that nobody talks about. Something that people are ashamed of and this is actually something that I post about on my social media, which maybe has shocked a few people. But I was ready to wake people up. It's not about being positive. If you're struggling, if you're stuck, then no matter how much, how many affirmations you do, or how much you try to think positive, things will not shift until you deal with those hurtful, painful emotions and your shadow and these traumas. Slade: Hmm... Yes. Melany: I don't know if it's emphasized enough. Slade: Yeah, it's shadow work. I mean, I think that actually came up on the last interview that I did, so there is a connection here and you and I were talking before we started recording about this particular time period. The whole eclipse phenomenon and everything being about a break with the past, a break with old patterns and re-aligning somehow, and the thing is, you can't break with patterns if you're not kind of acknowledging them. Melany: Yes, absolutely. And that's actually another good point. This is another thing that may be missing is, I see a lot of people use spiritual concepts and even things like meditation, to bypass dealing with their stuff. And then they wonder why they're stuck months later. Oh, but maybe I need to meditate longer. And no, you actually need to be consciousYou need to actually face your stuff, and not try to transcend them. Slade: I also have a theory that a lot of our purpose is found in that painful stuff. It's about a transmutation of our life lessons because nobody wants to hear somebody who's just really happy and has an easy time of it telling us how to live. All your credibility and all your wisdom comes from these traumatic things that you contend with and learn how to deal with and your best hope at impacting someone else is to offer them a shorter path through that. Melany: Yeah, absolutely. And the only reason I say that when I started my spiritual journey or my spiritual path, nobody told me this. I was just told I need to be positive and I need to be grateful and I need to think positive thoughts. Which yes, but I didn't actually realize that I actually had to deal with my dark stuff. So that's why I emphasized on this point as well. But yeah, you're right and it's only when you've gone through certain experiences that you're able to help another take the shorter path, you know. Slade: Yeah, yes. So you have five free audio tools that are available for my listeners if they go to your website. Tell us about these tools and where we can go to find them. Melany: Sure. These are really the basic tools to release overwhelm, start to release fear, and really bring yourself back to balance because when you're in a state of stress and overwhelm, there's no way you're processing anything. So you can go to my website. It's Melany-Oliver.com. Or if it's easier, you can also go to MelanyOliverHealing.com. And you can subscribe to my website and you'll receive these five tools and they're, like i said, this is the foundation. This is the basics so that you can start to get centered, get grounded, start to process some of your emotions and really bring you to a place of balance. So that you can be conscious and then you can start to do more deeper work. Slade: Are these guided meditations? Melany: No, these are audio tools. I just speak about each tool so you can hear me speak. There are i think two meditations on them. Links that I've put up there as well. But they're tools so you can start practicing as of today. Slade: Okay, that's awesome. Well I will put your links in the show notes and on the blog post so everybody can just click on that and go sign up and get those and start using them. Thank you, Melany, for talking about this subject. I know it's probably one of the number one reasons why people do seek advice in the first place, so I know that there's somebody out there listening who has really learned a lot from your talk. Melany: Awesome. Thank you so much for having me. It was really nice to speak to you. Slade: Thanks again for listening to the Shift Your Spirits podcast. For show notes, links, transcripts and all the past episodes please visit shiftyourspirits.com You can subscribe in iTunes or Stitcher or whatever app you use to access podcasts. You don’t have to use the purple button on your iPhone — some people don’t like that app. My personal favorite podcast app is Overcast. So, check that one out. If you’d like to get an intuitive reading with me, or download a free ebook and meditation to help you connect with your guides please go to sladeroberson.com and if you’re interested in my professional intuitive training program, you can start the course for free by downloading the Attunement at automaticintuition.com BEFORE I GO I promised to leave you a message in answer to a question or a concern you may have. So take a moment to think about that—hold it in your mind or speak it out loud. I’ll pause for just a few seconds….right…now. 1…2…3…4 MESSAGE It’s important at this time that you remember your self worth. That you hold your head high and hold yourself in high esteem. You can set firm but gentle boundaries with others without being isolated from them. You can also delegate from a place of authority. Remember you have allies who can assist you in the external world even as you focus on your internal self-care. And I’ll talk to you later.

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

I'm publicly sharing one of the exclusive Q&A episodes recorded for my Patreon supporters, so you can hear a sample of the bonus content. This episode answers a question from the listeners about "Discovering Your Life Purpose." The Q&A content for patrons of the show is shaping up to be somewhere between personal mini-readings and universal questions people have about spirituality and personal development. This episode has a full text transcript below. MENTIONED IN THE SHOW "How Badly Do You Want It?" Chani Nicholas Free Will Astrology Colette Baron-Reid Wisdom of Avalon Oracle HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses Get an intuitive reading with Slade Automatic Intuition BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits TRANSCRIPT Hey, thanks for listening to the ‘Shift Your Spirits’ podcast. I’m your host, Slade Roberson. For eleven years now, I’ve been a professional intuitive and the author of the blog ‘Shift Your Spirits’, where I try to write about spirituality with fewer hearts and flowers than most new age blather. I also mentor emerging intuitives, psychics and healers in a program called Automatic Intuition. Today I am talking about life purpose. Of course, as always, I have an oracle segment at the end of the show. So be thinking about a question or concern you have, hold it in your mind and I’ll come back on at the end after the final links and credits and leave you with an extra message. But before I forget, I wanted to mention a few milestones that are happening right now. It is Wednesday, July 26th, 2017 as I record this. My birthday was Sunday, July 23rd and I am the first day of Leo. Hey to all the other Leos out there. I should’ve told you last week so you could’ve, you know, sent me a birthday message in time, but I, you know, sometimes the way I record these episodes and when they actually go live is not so timely. I also like to make, you know, this content as evergreen as possible, but I have heard from some of you that you do enjoy it when I tell you a little bit about what’s going on in my life, currently, and those of you who keep up and listen to each episode as they come out will probably appreciate this a little bit more, but, who knows. It might be interesting to look back someday if I ever listen to an archive episode and remember, you know, where I was at the time and place that I created the episode. Anyway, so the reason why this is significant other than this being my birthday, it was also a new moon in Leo. And it’s one of two new moons that are occurring in Leo, which is very unusual, from what I hear. And it’s also the start of an eclipse season. We’re going to have an eclipse coming up here in August. I’m sure you’ve heard about it. If you want to know the exact dates of all this stuff, like the new moon in leo, and when the eclipse happens and what sign it’s in, all that stuff, be sure and Google it for exact information. I don’t go really deep with a lot of astrology because that would be entirely its own podcast, and there are people, greater minds than me, speaking about astrology. Incidentally, I really like Chani Nicholas, as far as an astrologer that I follow and read, and Rob Brezsny’s Free Will Astrology always makes me happy. I’ll try to remember to go back and put those in the show notes for you so you can check them out. But, you know, just to, kind of, bullet down for you as you’re thinking about, what does this all mean for me right now, you know. If you’re listening to the archives in the future, I want you to think about the fact that it doesn’t mean that it’s not relevant. Because there’s always something significant about when a message comes to you. And that can happen out of time, so just, you know, think about what I’m saying here about what this means and apply that to wherever you are at this time when you’re listening to this. This phenomenon, or this energy that’s moving through right now, from the best that I can tell, is really about identity and issues of, you know, shedding your skin and transforming in some way, and so, everything that I’m reading, it kind of feels disruptive and major and it’s revolving around big questions, like, who am I in the world, and, you know, what am I doing, and what is my role? And I know it felt a little bit more intense to me leading up to the new moon, whereas the new moon feels like it kind of gave new energy to this question. So it went, for me, from feeling like a crisis of “oh my god what am I doing with my life” to more of a sense of “okay, you know what, this is who I am, this is what I really need to kind of man up here and let go of, and here are some things that, you know, aren’t working for me as much anymore. And, my theory is that when you hear something like this, you know, whether you believe in the astrology or maybe you believe in the synchronicity of what I’m talking about and how it applies to what you’re going through right now. Whenever you get these messages, I think it’s important – there’s a part of you that - flash - instantly knows, what it’s talking about, right? There’s a part of you that’s like, ohmygod, that’s talking about my job, or, you know, whatever it might be. Or “ohmygod, they’re talking about that project that I really secretly want to do.” And when you have that sense of knowing, like, “Ooooo I know what this is talking to me about”, I think you need to willfully take that, drag it out into the light, and deal with it as purposefully as possible. Because when you don’t, what tends to happen is, it kind of – you get dragged into it and it kind of tends to happen TO you, and you have less control over it. The circumstances are usually not as empowering as well. So, when you know you’re like, facing some kind of change and you have a glimpse into, sigh this is what I need to do. Do it. Just make it happen. Don’t wait for it to happen to you. That’s my philosophy. And, as always, you know, it is a choice. So I don’t know. I like to be the one who gets to make the choice, if at all possible. There’s a lot of responsibility in controlling something, but I do believe that, you know, stuff happens and you’re going to have to go through stuff, and it’s just so much easier to do it like a leader, you know. Just to go in and make something happen, even when it’s difficult. So, that’s kind of my thought process. That may be very personal to me, but hopefully that mirrors you in some way. And is adaptable to some of what you’re contemplating this week. Anyway, other milestones about the podcast. This is the 20th episode of the podcast! And, from all the statistics that I’ve read, there’s this figure that always floats around out there. If you are in the podcasting community, or you listen to people who teach and talk about the medium, you’ll hear a lot that most podcasts do not make it past 15 episodes. So I’m a little bit happy that I’ve flown past that mile marker there. And thank you for your support in making that happen! I mean, if you weren’t listening to it, there’d be no reason for me to keep making it. I’ve heard this other metric about podcasts – that there’s a kind of significant milestone when you reach 20,000 listens. That somehow really legitimizes what you’re putting out there and makes you kind of visible as someone who is, you know, doing this for real. It tends to be that people who advertise are looking at that metric as a kind of proof of staying power. So, 20,000 listens sounds like a lot, but, at the time that I’m recording this, we are at 9719 listens for the show, like 300 more episode downloads and we’ll be at 10,000. I’m actually pretty confident that by the time you’re listening to this, we’ve actually already crossed the 10,000 mark. So, you know, in a few short months, we are halfway to that milestone of 20,000 listens! You know, halfway there. So, that’s really cool, and exciting. And, the other thing that I wanted to say about the podcast this week is, just kind of how blown away I am by how many of you have responded to my request to support the show on Patreon. I cannot tell you how much it excites me – the whole Patreon phenomenon, which, you know, you can – I’ll give you a link in a little bit and you can go check it out and see what it’s all about – but, I can’t tell you what this would have done for me 11 years ago when I first started blogging ‘Shift Your Spirits’. At that time, the only way to really support your show financially was through, you know, annoying Google ad-blocks, and I really hate that automated third-party advertising. It just – it feels really inauthentic to me. And, you know, sometimes you get this weird, like, you know, political ad or something, you know, that you would totally not support and it’s like flashing right there in the middle of your post that you spent all this time and energy on, and it’s – in some cases, maybe even, you know, opposite of the message that you’re trying to put out into the world. There are a million reasons why I just don’t like it, but 11 years ago, you know, I chose to put it out as a passion project, and to work week-after-week putting out content. And, you know, I supported myself through doing readings for other people, and that really, you know, kind of paid for the show, so to speak, and allowed me to keep doing it. But it would have been really amazing 11 years ago to have had the opportunity for people who loved the blog and were reading each week to just have a way to donate to the show and support it. And I can’t imagine what kind of support that could have grown into over this length of time. So, anyway, you know, that didn’t happen. That didn’t line up for me. But it’s lining up for me now as I’m shedding my skin and kind of evolving my storytelling and writing into being this conversational audio medium, which is very exciting and I really love to do it. So there’s this whole, kind of, re-birthing going on for me, and a shedding of the skin, which, you know, there’s a lot of people who are dropping away at the same time who, maybe the audio doesn’t appeal to. So, you know, there’s some growing pains involved in this, but there’s a real passion behind the people who really like the show, and that means so much to me, and it’s really evidenced by the support on Patreon. So, one of the things that we are doing to address the fact that there are still a lot of people who love this show, or love this content, who have been following the blog for many years, who just want to read it, or maybe they have a limitation that makes the audio difficult for them, and that is to offer full transcripts of the shows, which is amazing for a lot of different reasons. So, you know, just as synchronicity would have it, someone within my community, one of you out there listening, Alan – thank you very much - introduced me to a young woman who is transcribing the show! Long story short, she was here and she found me and the story of how she found me was really too cool to ignore, and so I decided to go ahead and pay myself out of pocket, up front, even though the podcast is not really at the point that it can support her, I’ve gone ahead and hired her. She’s too good and too perfect for what we’re trying to accomplish here. So yes, thanks to Linda – Linda, I’m sure you’re listening and typing away – anyway, just a little shout out to you. Also a shout out to the latest supporters on Patreon: Leanne Steiner Titti Backstrom Helen Auburn Laura Speltz Nick Lovelady Nick, I gotta tell you, you’re the first and currently only male supporter of the podcast. Now, I know there are other guys listening, because I hear from you and I know who you are and I talk to you about the show. Thank you for listening. So I am challenging the other guys though, to show up and make their support known on Patreon as well. I truly appreciate all of you who have pledged your support. It demonstrates that you’re enjoying the show and you want for it to continue, and that’s very encouraging to me. In addition to covering the young woman who is diligently transcribing these episodes, you can also support my time in producing the show by pledging your support on Patreon for as little as $1/month. And listeners who support on Patreon can also access bonus Q&A episodes where you send in questions, I record answers to them, and they go out to patrons of the show exclusively. So, if you want to find out how you can become a patron, especially if you would like to see transcripts of all these shows continue, please go to https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits. And speaking of the bonus episodes, today I’m sharing one of the exclusive Q&A episodes I recorded for my patrons about life purpose. So you can get a glimpse into what these extra episodes are all about. I am actively collecting questions from my patrons. One of the things I’m noticing about these episodes that’s different is these kind of, they’re kind of like these mini-readings. Or somewhere between a personal, individual reading and a public talk on the subject. And it’s a really good venue for speaking directly to your question when it represents something that a lot of other people are interested in hearing answered as well. You know, the Universal stuff. And it’s proof of how our most individual questions are also universal questions, right? So it’s interesting that pattern is emerging. Anyway, without further chitchat, here is a taste of the exclusive bonus episodes for my Patreon supporters: Discovering your life purpose. Hey, welcome to the first Q&A of the ‘Shift Your Spirits’ podcast. This episode was created exclusively for people who support the show on Patreon. So, of course, thanks again for your support. It truly means the world to me and I am happy to record some special bonus content just for you guys. If you have a question you’d like me to answer, you can send me a message through the Patreon page itself, or you can just email me: contact@sladeroberson.com So our first question comes from Emilia and it’s a doozy. It’s a big Life Purpose question but, you know, I think it’s probably truly representative of one of the biggest questions that everyone has. Emilia writes, “How do you figure out how to serve spiritually? How do you find your "why" or what it is you are put on this earth to do. It's my biggest frustration, because I know the answer is probably sitting right in front of me.” Okay, yeah, so, I mean, part of that you answered yourself in that, you know, it probably is sitting right in front of you. It’s probably so much a part of what you already do that there is a little bit of a ‘forest for the trees’ scenario going on here. And, you know, I always have the image of the person who is looking for their sunglasses and they’re on the top of their head, you know that thing that we do. Those kinds of things come to mind. But I get it, because there’s a part of it that’s inherent and it is what it is, and it’s sort of foisted on you, or it’s sort of a part of your DNA, and then there’s another aspect of it that’s very much chosen. It’s a wilful choice. And I just want to say, kind of as a disclaimer, that this is a question that is a lot easier to get at working with someone one-on-one, obviously, right? So, if you were to book a reading with me or book a session around this, this is, literally, like, 90-something percent of the readings that I get touch on this idea of life purpose or career or creative entrepreneurship. The place where sort of all those things swirl together. What’s my major? That kind of thing. It’s weird that I really struggle to come up with some sort of Top 10 list of ways to discover your purpose or something like that. So forgive me. I’m going to go with a little bit more of a rambly thought process. I’ve been jotting down notes since I received Emilia’s question and, you know, she didn’t really use the term “life purpose”, but that’s sort of what she’s getting at. And, so, I’m going to do my best to give some general thoughts that maybe anyone can sort of apply to this question, or this search, and, you know, it’s a hard thing to say to someone, but relax the search a little bit. Sometimes the people who are trying so hard and so desperately and working and really sort of exhausting themselves trying to figure this out are not getting any closer by doing that. So, just keep that in mind. Let’s chill out on this a little bit and relax and think about letting it emerge for us. Because the thing is, whenever anyone mentions life purpose, or what you came here to do, or what your dream is for your life, there are things that flash on the screen of your mind, and I would bet that a lot of what you do when that flash occurs is suppress it. Ignore it. Sweep it under the rug. Tell yourself, like, no I can’t be that. I can’t ask for that. There’s something there, oftentimes, that people simply don’t acknowledge. You kind of know what your purpose is, but you’re afraid of it. So I have a couple of questions for you that I really want you to think about and meditate on. If you want to pause this, grab a pen or grab your phone, notes, app, or whatever it is so that you can write these down. I want you to really sort of contemplate a couple of things. So question number 1: What’s the thing you’re afraid to tell people your purpose is? Okay. The other question that I want you to think about is, what did your purpose used to be before you talked yourself out of it? So, a few things should be coming to mind there. And maybe you need to go off when you’re not listening to me ramble on about this. You know, go and really meditate on those two questions. But, some things should start to emerge for you. Do some journaling around that. Put those questions at the top of a page as header and set a timer and just do some automatic writing, and write everything that you can think of in answer to that question and see what comes up for you. There are some things in there that want to emerge. I promise you. So, lets - again, it’s kind of hard to speak about this in a general way because it sounds really abstract. So, let’s think, you know, that thing that kind of flashes in your mind, the thing that you’re sort of afraid to tell people that your purpose is, you know, the dream that’s too big to share, the dream that scares you or embarrasses you a little bit. Whatever that might be, let’s put it front and centre in our consciousness, right? And the first thing that I would advise you to do is just sort of move towards it vaguely, with a lurch, with a guess. Just sort of an educated, like, I want to go over that way. My purpose somehow is to be a writer so the first thing that I’m going to move towards is simply writing something. Or towards creating a list of ideas of things that I’d like to write. So just a general movement towards that thought process. Okay? And so, the next step, or maybe, you know, it’s something more altruistic. It’s some kind of volunteer work or philanthropy. And so, you think, you know what, in my heart, I want to be someone who raises tons of money and really changes people’s lives. I want to go into a town and, you know, establish clean water for an entire village in a part of the world that doesn’t have it. And, by the way, I know a woman who did that. She never bragged about it. I only found out about it at her memorial service after she’d passed. But anyway. So - maybe she’s here with us reminding us of different examples of what purpose is. It’s not always something creative. Emilia’s question was specifically about how do you serve spiritually. So let’s say you have just this sort of vague sense of – I want to do something to make a difference. I want to help people in some way. I want to change their lives. So that’s a vague kind of bulls-eye, but it’s still a target and it’s something that you can move towards. So the first thing you want to do is simply try something in the vicinity of whatever that thing is. Make something or do something. Here’s the key - for others. Make something, do something, for others, that’s in the vicinity of that feeling, right? Because you’re kind of testing, you’re pinging the idea, you’re throwing something at it. You know, the image of throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing if it sticks, okay? That’s what you’re doing. That’s sort of the first step in trying to find your way. So it’s a call-and-repeat, a Marco Polo kind of game that you’re playing with yourself and the rest of the world and the Universe. And it involves other people. So, the answer to your purpose is in the feedback from other people. So, sometimes you have to start that volley, start that conversation, that back and forth, the experience. So you have to lop the first shot. You have to say, I’m gonna volunteer for this soup kitchen at Thanksgiving. I’m going to go and serve some meals, or whatever. From that experience, you know, things happen. You make other connections. You meet someone there. You’re able to share again. Put it out there. Share it with someone. Let someone in that environment know about your dream. Share it. Someone will then have a next step for you. So the feedback will come from other people in the vicinity of what it is that you’re doing. If your purpose is something more creative, like the example of being a writer, then you need to write something. And put it out there. And allow people to give you some feedback about it. You need to get direction from outside your own head. And you also need affirmation. You know, that you’re kind of on the right path. The thing is, once you take that first step and get that feedback, that clue, it’s like the Amazing Race. Every step there’s like a ticket waiting for you with an instruction for the next round of activity or action. So, all you got to do is move towards the vicinity of what you think your purpose could be, what you’re afraid it might be, what you’re shy about it, acknowledging it, or maybe you’re truly passionate and really direct about it and you’ve just been procrastinating. You know, there’s those people who – they really know what their purpose is. You know, maybe they’re a singer or musician and they haven’t performed in years. They sing in the shower but they haven’t written a song, they haven’t picked up the guitar that’s sitting in the corner of the room. You’ve got to do something and you can’t do it in your ivory tower where there’s no feedback. You need feedback from other people. You need to hear – "Yes, you’re really talented" or "Yes, that resonated with me." "There’s something there", "You’re on to something." And then you follow those clues towards the next step. Another thing that’s really effective in getting a ball rolling and serving spiritually is simply to host something. Hosting something is a really powerful position to be in. And, you know, this doesn’t have to be necessarily a big event that involves a lot of expense or, you know, logistics. It could be something as simple as hosting a Facebook group where you can discuss a particular topic. Invite all your friends and, you know, get other people involved. The idea in hosting something is, it’s a selfless thing to hold space for other people to participate around that topic or that purpose that you have. So it’s not just about you saying, “I’m a leader, here follow me”. It’s more about you saying, “Here, I’ll cover the admin. I’ll make this space and create a cool graphic for it, and I’ll, you know, monitor the comings and goings of people who want to join the group. You know, I’ll market it a little bit, put the word out there, I’ll be in charge. You guys just come and participate. Come and participate with each other.” And, the cool thing is, in providing a forum or space for an event that you’re hosting for other people, thinking about them and the connections they make, everyone knows who the host is. Everyone goes through the host. Everyone greets you. Everyone sends you the Facebook request to ask to be in the group. And so you kind of get to touch everyone in the room, and everyone associates it with you in a way that may come up for them later. But by hosting something, you’re establishing yourself in a very passive way, and in a way that serves other people as being someone connected to this idea, and so you are kind of planting yourself in other people’s minds as being someone connected with this idea. And so, that will create opportunities for you because when they are looking for people to participate in their events or their charities or their projects, they can invite you. You’re going to be top of the mind for everyone in that group. So hosting something is a really good idea. It’s a powerful marketing tool, by the way, and it’s a very authentic and unsleazy way to put yourself out into the world. So host something. The thing to remember though is, once you put whatever it is outside yourself, it’s kind of not yours anymore. And you don’t really want it to be, right? Because you’re wanting to serve other people. So it belongs to the world, once you create that thing and you put it out there. It belongs to the people who receive it. And those people who care about it can begin to manage some aspect of it for you. And often you will find allies. You know, I recently had the experience, if you listen to the podcast, which I know you do, of having somebody take a post that I did and turn it into a coaching modality. Diana Frajman with the 3x3 project, and a lot of people have written to me and, you know, it resonated with them about how they’re applying that to themselves. So my purpose was really so, kind of, secondary in that whole experience. I mean, it’s part of what I do. I share ideas around spirituality and productivity and, you know, just how I manage my own life. And I put it out there in a way that it’s meant to serve other people. Someone else came along and took it up and adopted it and made it into something else. And so, you know, I’m attached to it in a way, but, you know, it’s almost as an observer and as a participant myself. So that’s a really cool feeling. And the fact of the matter is, I didn’t do that on my very first post. You know, this is after years and years of writing, and there are little things here and there that I’ve put out that people have taken and done other things with, and so it really is about other people. You know, putting yourself out there in a really authentic way and kind of not having any expectation about it. And waiting and seeing where other people place the emphasis. And then you can respond to that further. So, you know, at that point you’re really just kind of following where people are asking you to go. And this is a really good clue about developing a practice, developing a business. Being – this is something that I tell my students in my intuitive mentoring program – your clients have the direction and the instructions for you about where you’re supposed to go. It’s not so much about you, again, going into the ivory tower and deciding what your purpose is and then coming down off the mountain with your stone tablets and announcing to the world what it is. It’s a little bit of a back and forth. You’ve got to get it going outside your head. You gotta ping the Universe. You gotta throw something out to the crowd. See what they do with it, and adapt accordingly. And follow where they want to go. If you simply look around in your life and you step back and you take note, start, maybe, even taking a record. What do people ask of you? You know, what do people come to you for. There are certain kinds of things that you’re the go-to person for, right? Maybe it’s things that people complain to you about. It may not seem so altruistic and lovely, but start to take note of what it is that people are asking you to do, because you could go through life in service by simply answering the questions that people have for you. Or by simply doing the things that people request whenever you see someone in need of something and you think, “Okay, well how can I provide that for them? You could go through your entire life just, sort of, doing that, and I would say that that would definitely be a life of purpose. You have to really listen and observe. These directives can kind of go right over your head because you’re so busy looking for something – Tada! You know, like, big and important and The Thing. So I imagine in my mind that there’s like a Venn diagram, right? There’s an overlap – imagine 3 circles – what you’re good at, what you enjoy, what other people care about, and there’s a point in the centre where your talents and what you love and what other people care about overlap. But also think about, you know, the thing that you have had to strive the hardest to conquer in life – how that overlaps with something that a lot of other people suffer as well. What’s something that you have struggled with and survived, that you see a lot of other people struggling with in the world? Think about that Venn diagram. Where does that overlap occur? That can also be a clue. You know, there are clues to your purpose hiding in your dreams. There are clues in your childhood play. The things that you pretended and the things that you love to act out. It’s interesting to me – I always think it’s fun to think about the fact that kids like to pretend to work. You know, they play office and play all these like, you know, sit at a desk and perform menial paperwork. We used to like to pretend that we worked in a library and we would, like, stamp all our books. It’s such a, like, a thing that if you did have to do it as a job, you would not think of it as a joy. But obviously children recognise a joy in service, and in work and in performing those kind of activities and being efficient and creating organization out of chaos. So think about the things that you like to play as a little kid. What kind of stories are you drawn to? What do you love to read about? What stops you in your tracks on Facebook? What gets you to post an angry face? What gets you riled up and feeling outraged? There are clues there. There are also clues, you know, in the thing you like to escape into. Maybe it’s as simple as the thing that you’re drawn to escape into, maybe you need to create that kind of escape for other people. Maybe you just, you know, voraciously read happy ending sweet romance novels. And, you know, it’s just your secret candy that you live for that keeps you going and bolsters you emotionally in the background and nobody even knows about it. So maybe you need to put some of those out there into the world. You could do it under a pen name. No one even has to know. There are also clues to your purpose and how you can serve other people in your astrological chart. And again, this is something that I would look at with an individual person that I was doing a reading for. You know, I look at the True Node, or the North Node. There are a couple signs that show up there that tell me specific things. Obviously, I work with people who tend to have more similarities of purpose, and so there are certain things I look for there. There are clues in the Ascendant in your astrological chart, your rising sign, which is, you know, who you are in the world to other people, how other people perceive you and how you interact socially. There could be some real clues there. There are areas of your chart that, you know, affect your career, finances, creativity, sometimes there are clues in that part of your chart as well. But it’s really a synergy of all those things, you know, is there a pattern there? I might look at several different things and see something reoccurring and that might give me a clue. But even when I’m doing a reading for someone, there’s a conversation. There’s a part of it that you have to provide. I can get you going in a general vibe, but when it really starts to come together is when you have those details and you have those specific things that light you up. And I can sense when we hit it, because I’ll get up and start pacing the room. It changes my energy when I’m talking to somebody about that stuff. One other thing that I really want to stress again, you know, I did mention, you know, maybe your purpose in how you serve other people is connected to something that you’ve had to fight against, or something that wasn’t so great. Maybe it’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to you, or it’s the one thing you would change about your life. If you could get rid of anything about who you are and what you’ve experienced. You know what? I hate to tell you but that stuff’s gold, you know? One of the reasons that I interviewed Ryan McRae, the ADHD nerd, on the podcast was because he’s someone that I’ve encountered who chose this thing that’s been a huge challenge for him. It’s probably something that he never would’ve wanted to have. But he’s worked so hard to overcome it, and it occurred to him that like, “This sucks and this is hard for me and I’ve had to create all these systems just to allow me to kind of be on an even keel with other people”. And so, what he does is he represents that sucky thing for other people who are experiencing it as well. There’s something extremely powerful and authentic in being coached or led or encouraged by someone who has crawled through the same shit as you. Obviously, the ditch that you’ve been through gives you some credibility that somebody who is just Pollyanna-perfect is like, no. You don’t want to hear what they have to say. You want to hear what the person who’s been through it has to say. And only someone who has been through what you’ve been through can really, really understand. And so, think about what is it in your life that might represent that? How could you put that out into the world? How could you turn that around and make it service? And you know what’s funny is, as I’m saying that, I realize that that may be one of the most challenging ways to serve because it brings up a lot of issues of shame. Even if it’s something you can’t control. Something that is, you know, a disability, or something that was imposed upon you that’s not the result of something that you did or chose, but just a crappy hand that you were dealt or whatever. There’s still a lot of shame in standing up and saying, “Hey, I’m messed up in this way”, “I have this physical disability”, “I have this mental illness”, “I have this disease”. But if you can make that shift, if you can get past - what are my family and friends going to think - there’s millions of people out there for whom you could be a hero. So yeah, it’s not always something you’re good at, or you’re talented, you know, at doing. It’s not always, like, “Oh I’ve always wanted to dance and I took ballet when I was a child”. Sometimes your purpose is sharing how you survived the horrible, most worst thing in the world, and how you overcome a struggle for which you had no inherent gifts or talents or abilities and you had to scrap it together, you know. There’s a great opportunity there. There’s a wealth that’s a treasure chest. What’s the Joseph Campbell quote… where you… something about where you stumble is where your treasure lies. “It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure.” ― Joseph Campbell You know, your sense of purpose should be less about living a purpose and more about living with purpose. So don’t overlook the purpose you express in your every day life already. It’s in your relationships, it’s in how you conduct yourself with empathy and compassion. It’s a filter through which you judge everything. What you prioritize, the decisions you make. The bottom line may simply be, how do you contribute to others? How do you make the world a better place? How do you make someone’s day a little bit easier? And, you know, back when I first started doing this thing that I do that you know me for when I first decided, “Okay fine, I’ll do this purposeful thing. I’ll put myself out there and talk about my spirituality or whatever”. The message I kept getting from my guides – it was pretty creepy - I’ll have to tell you the story sometime of how I went to this trance-channelling event and the trance channel even said this message, but - the message that sort of launched ‘Shift Your Spirits’ that remains the driving affirmation, I suppose, is that: You’re already everything that you’ve ever wanted to become. You fulfill your life purpose with every breath you take. I want to leave you with one little thing. I was looking at, you know, the different things that I’ve written about purpose on my website, you know, seeing if I have any articles to pull from – which I really didn’t. I just kind of winged it, because it’s not something, like I said, that I’ve ever created a comprehensive BuzzFeed checklist post for. But I ran across this thing in my life purpose category. It’s a post called “How Badly Do You Want it”. And I wanted to read this and do a reading of it and kind of share this with you. Reading blog post There seems to be this perception that identifying your passion is the hard part. Once you really nail that down and put your energy into something you truly love – can’t live without doing – that everything just “flows." The flow, free of obstacles, is somehow the ultimate judgment on your choice and your efforts. And then, here comes this video of Oprah talking about “failure" as simply helpful information trying to move you in another direction. (I happily shared that video on Facebook; in the moment I ran across it, I thought it was a great message for anyone feeling overwhelmed and burnt out…) But, wait – if it's not going well, I must be doing it wrong, right? That’s kind of the message. The idea that failure is trying to move you in another direction and be helpful. Some higher power must be trying to move you in another direction. So, where do we put all the success stories about perseverance, about all the people who didn't get it right on the first or second or third tries? All this sounds good in new age theory, but I have to admit something to you: it is not my personal reality. My websites have been hacked multiple times over the last few years — I didn’t take that as a “sign” that I should simply abandon eleven years' worth of published writing and twenty thousand readers and, “Oh well, you know, I’m getting hacked a lot. That’s the Universe’s way of telling me this is not my purpose. I’m just going to go do something else.” My last book launch suffered from some technical difficulties and every planet you can name was in retrograde at the time that it happened. You know what? I have a whole other catalogue of books to release. So, that passion hasn’t changed. Just because everything in the world got thrown at me, and it was a hurdle, it's still the direction that I’m meant to go. You know, I didn’t decide that that’s somehow telling me “No, it’s not flowing so obviously you’re not supposed to be doing this anymore.” My latest book — HAVENWOOD — which was really the Big One. I’ve put out non-fiction, obviously, and some shorter fiction, but I’d never written and released an epic historical fantasy novel. This was “I want to be a writer when I grow up” Big. It was a life-long dream of mine. It is a passion of mine. After nineteen months of work, I imported the final edits for the formatting stage of that book, and… The text was jacked up with errors and random code. It’s my “passion.” And it ain’t “flowing." So here’s what I wanted to share with you from this: Sometimes I think the Universe is sparring with me. It’s egging me on. It’s literally testing me. It’s not just trying to point out – oh things aren’t flowing very well for you, therefore you should change direction and that’s what failure’s trying to teach you. No. Here’s what I think is happening. I think the Universe is saying, “How badly do you want this?" And I say, “More than all your potholes and razor wire, Universe. More than all your barriers and blocks.” It’s not the first time that I’ve crawled out of a ditch and crossed the finish line bruised and bloodied. It won’t be the last. Fuck your flow, Universe. Fuck your flow. It’s not always about it being easy and it’s not always about it being flowing. This post is ultimately a message about Perseverance. So, yeah. Serving. Serving with Purpose. Finding your Purpose, choosing a Purpose. You know, you can make one. And you’ve got several. Do them all. Do a little bit of everything, but the main thing is, put it out there and get feedback. And the feedback will guide you. Maybe the feedback will tell you this is a brick wall, go in another direction. And it could happen. But don’t be discouraged. Because if it’s really something that’s meant to be, and it’s something that you’re really super drawn to, and you don’t have to think very hard to discover what it is and to go after it, then sometimes all those hurdles and the fact that it’s hard is, you know, the Universe’s way of testing you. So, the thing about Purpose. You know, the conclusion about purpose is it’s both this big wilful act, and at the same time, it’s this passive, just breathing and being who you are at the same time. And so it’s a volley back and forth between those two things. And I think what those things are is a spectrum of your energy as you project who you are to the world. Sometimes it’s just a little moment: you being you, smiling at a stranger on the sidewalk, answering a text from your friend, taking your kid somewhere they need to go. And then other times it’s you off in your office working really hard, blood sweat and tears for 19 months to produce a piece of art. So, it’s all that and everything else in between, but I hope that some of what I’ve said here has given you something to contemplate and to allow you to either affirm what it is that you’re doing or maybe gives you a new sense of direction. Anyway, I’m going to stop rambling for now. Thank you for being a patron, and participating in this Q&A episode scenario. Really, seriously, send me your questions. This is a great prompt, and, you know, you can make them relatively personal. This is still a small group of people, so try to keep in mind, you know, that your question obviously I’m going to answer it in a way that it will speak to more than one of us, but there’s a small group of you in the room right now with me energetically out there representing, so send us your questions and I’ll keep creating these for you guys. Thank you for your support. Thanks again for listening to the ‘Shift Your Spirits’ podcast. For show notes, links, transcripts and all the past episodes, please visit ShiftYourSpirits.com. You can subscribe in iTunes or Stitcher or whatever app you use to access podcasts. You don’t have to use that purple button on your iPhone. Some people don’t like that app. My personal favorite podcast app is Overcast, so go check that one out. If you’d like to get an intuitive reading with me, or download a free e-book and guided meditation to help you connect with your guides, please go to https://sladeroberson.com/. And if you’re interested in my professional intuitive training program, you can start the course for free by downloading the attunement at https://automaticintuition.com/. Before I go, I promised to leave you a message in answer to a question or concern you may have. I pulled a card for a friend the other night after a long, late-night heart-to-heart conversation. From Colette Baron-Reid Wisdom of Avalon Oracle, which I have as an app on my phone. This deck and Oracle app were inspired by The Mists of Avalon, a novel by Marion Zimmer Bradley, which is one of my all time favorite works of fiction ever. It is probably why my own fiction is in the historical fantasy genre. Anyway, in just a moment, I’m going to read the card to you as today’s Oracle. The message of the card spoke not only to his situation and mine, but I feel like it speaks to this eclipse season as well, and the transformation that we’re going through. So take a moment to think about your own issue. Hold it in your mind or speak it out loud. I’ll pause for just a few seconds right now. 1…2…3…4 Absolute truth, courage, self-respect and responsibility. The Lady of the Lake represents the highest order of respect for yourself and the manner in which you operate within the world around you. She is the harsher element of truth, where denial is swept away by a tidal wave of events. In the ancient legend of Avalon, the Lady of the Lake presented Merlin with the sword of truth. The magic that welded this metal was fired by the will of the Goddess. When the Lady of the Lake appears, she demands nothing short of total truth and integrity; and she asks you to be mindful of all the signs, signals, and omens that present themselves to you. This is not the time to second-guess. If a signal appears, be assured that a challenge has been presented. Moving forward without acknowledgment of the challenge will result in unnecessary difficulties. If the signal is to move, she pushes you to act. Do so, for a victory is imminent. Regardless of your question, the message is to take care when the Lady of the Lake appears, as serious business is at stake. The Lady reminds you of your personal responsibility in shaping your reality and its consequences. Seek the sword of truth within yourself and great success will be yours. Have courage, for when the Lady appears, the strength of Avalon is behind you in support of your quest for wholeness and abundance. and I’ll talk to you later.

Jesse was the first person to suggest to me that some of the benevolent strangers we encounter are not even human, but incarnated guardians. Corporeal angels. This is a continuation of Stranger Angels: Part 1. If you haven’t heard the story about my weird European stalker who looked like a mannequin, then hit pause and go listen to Episode 08. It will make this sequel a lot more satisfying... I met Jesse in 2002, exactly ten years after that trip to Europe. I was thirty-two years old. I had lived through a really shitty Saturn Return that nuked all the structure in my world and left me in a ditch that I would spend most of my thirties crawling out of. At the time, I was recovering from a serious illness and working on rebuilding the basics of third-dimensional existence — you know: job, place to live — I had no way of knowing that I was about a year away from a major Trip Down the Rabbit Hole that would deliver me to some different level of identity and I suppose a reorientation to my spiritual path — events that climaxed with an intervention by my guides, an ultimatum regarding my sense of purpose, and ultimately the creation of Shift Your Spirits and the work for which you know me. MENTIONED IN THE EPISODE Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey by Sallie Nichols Conscious Evolution: Awakening the Power of Our Social Potential by Barbara Marx Hubbard The Ones Who Glow by Slade Roberson Angels 101 by Doreen Virtue A Book of Angels by Sophy Burnham An Angel for Every Day by Angela McGerr Sylvia Browne's Book of Angels Angel of the Revelation by William Blake phylum/ phyla — the different types or levels of angels: Thrones and Principalities, Dominions, Virtues, Carrions, Powers, Seraphim, Cherubim, Archangels, Angels asher — your personal guardian angel (body guard) silver cord technician — the angel who manages your silver cord connection to spirit The Books of Enoch Mother Mary Speaks to Us by Brad Steiger and Sherry Hansen Steiger Quantum Spirituality — this is not the book I remember. I may have the title wrong... Quantum Theology by Diarmuid O'Murchu *I think this may actually be the book and I have remembered the title incorrectly. ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED AS Jesse : Stranger Angels - Part 3 Jesse : Stranger Angels - Part 4 The Paranormal Memoirs Are you new to podcasts? How to subscribe to my podcast free HOST LINKS sladeroberson.com Get an intuitive reading with Slade Download a free ebook and meditation Automatic Intuition Patreon.com Support this Show TRANSCRIPT Okay, so this episode is a part 2 - it’s a continuation of last week's episode called - you guessed it - Stranger Angels part one. If you haven’t heard the story about my weird European stalker who looked like a mannequin, then go ahead and hit pause right now I promise it will make this sequel a lot more satisfying if you go listen to that episode first. Part one is Episode 8. Jesse was the first person to suggest to me that some of these benevolent strangers we encounter are not even human, but incarnated guardians. Although I had experiences as a kid that involved angel sightings, spirit guides, spirit animals, ghosts, elementals ... I would never have included that man John, who had followed me around on my trip to Europe, in a similar kind of paranormal category. Over the years, I even found myself relating the story of the almost-mugging — and, for some reason, excluding the part about John entirely. Until my conversations with Jesse, I would have lumped these strangers into quirky, environmental synchronicities. Let me explain what I mean by environmental synchronicity — I’m talking about these patterns I observe that seem to emerge from random chaos, and feel somehow “less personal” — just glitches or glimpses of cosmic machinery at work that don’t feel “targeted” toward me in a significant, meaningful way. I’ll give you a couple of recent examples: A few months ago, just before Christmas, I was standing in the checkout line at the supermarket behind some random stranger. Nothing noteworthy about that, except that, the very next day, in a completely different part of the city, I was waiting to place an order at the cafe, and the same person got in line behind me. Never saw him before; never saw him again after… Another example of this kind of environmental synchronicity... Last month, I was out running errands. I stopped to get gas and a car pulled up at the pump next to mine. I noticed it because it was the exact same make, model, year, and color as my own car. (You always notice when you see “your” car on the road, right?) So, I went all over town that day — the bank, the post office, the bookstore, the cafe, and eventually, a few hours later, criss-crossed my way to an enormous shopping mall in an area of the burbs I generally avoid and only visit about once a year if I absolutely have to — I needed to exchange a gift. I found a group of empty parking spaces and pulled into one. As I was getting my bag out of the trunk, a car pulled into the space next to mine — same make, model, year, and color - AND - it was that same exact car and driver from earlier in the day. In that asphalt sea of parking options, not to mention in a medium-size city — we’re talking about a quarter of a million people -- what are the chances? So, these are not Big Deal experiences, right? — just things that make you go “Hmm… What was that all about it?” Never saw them before; never saw them after. I suppose it’s some fairly irrelevant mathematical remainder in the clockwork of divine timing. Anyway, that’s the kind of compartment in my mind where I might have placed the story about John the European mannequin stalker, just tagged with a greater-than-average significance and a Big Mystery stamp… At least, that’s how I thought of it before I met Jesse. …My name is Slade Roberson For over ten years, I’ve been a professional intuitive and the author of the blog Shift Your Spirits, where I try to write about spirituality with fewer hearts and flowers than most New Age blather. I also mentor emerging intuitives, psychics, and healers in a program called Automatic Intuition. Before we go any further, just a quick FYI — I’ve added a new feature to the show. For years now, before I send out a blog post, I try to tune in and listen for something that will speak directly to you, that will serve as a message. Like an oracle. And I get email replies, every week, with tons of you saying that the post was a direct answer to a question you had. It’s really cool, and I want to bring that phenomenon to the podcast… At the very end of this episode, after my final links and credits, I have a channeled message for you. Be thinking about a question or concern you have. It might be answered by the show itself. But hold it in your mind and I’ll come back on at the end and leave you with something extra… Back to the story... I met Jesse in 2002, exactly ten years after that trip to Europe. I was thirty-two years old. I had lived through a really shitty (shittier-than-most) Saturn Return that nuked all the structure in my world and left me in a ditch that I would spend most of my thirties crawling out of. At the time, I was recovering from a serious illness and working on rebuilding the basics of third-dimensional existence — you know: job, place to live — I had no way of knowing that I was about a year away from a major Trip Down the Rabbit Hole that would deliver me to some different level of identity and I suppose a reorientation to my spiritual path — events that climaxed with an intervention by my guides, an ultimatum regarding my sense of purpose, and ultimately the creation of Shift Your Spirits and the work for which you know me. Back in 2002, I was not operating from even so much as the intention of a “higher vibration” — I was just surviving. (Barely.) I was working in Chattanooga (where I grew up) at a temporary, low-paying job while searching for a full-time position with benefits, preferably in a counseling environment, where I could also work toward my Master’s degree. I decided I wanted to move back out of state, to Atlanta, a larger city where I had lived before and where there were more opportunities. Fortunately, my temporary job gave me Mondays off, so I could arrange to do interviews on at least that one weekday, and travel down on the Sundays before. All the back-and-forth was expensive; gas eating up most of my funds. The weeks of job hunting were turning into months. Many of my friends and contacts in Atlanta had moved away; even more of them were estranged. I had one friend from college who was generous with her hospitality, who I felt I could impose on to some degree, but I was going to rely on her heavily for a place to stay at a longer duration of time once I’d actually secured a position and could then start that second stage of relocating to a place of my own. I’d already worn out my welcome with more than one person. I told everyone, including my parents, that I was spending those Sunday nights in motels; more often than not, armed with pre-ironed interview clothes, a lint-roller, resumes, and my cell phone, I slept in my car so I’d have enough gas money to return home. (I could sometimes simply get up before dawn in Chattanooga and drive down but the morning rush hours and unpredictable gridlock of getting into Atlanta on Monday mornings was way more stressful and difficult to effectively schedule.) I passed most of those earlier Sunday evening hours killing time hanging out in cafes. I tend to haunt cafes — I’ve discovered more than one magical vortex in a favorite cafe. If I decided to plot them on a map I wouldn’t be surprised to discover evidence of ley lines or some personal power nexus. I met Jesse at the Starbucks in Ansley. He politely asked if I minded if he sat in a leather armchair next to mine that shared the small table between them. He was dressed in scrubs; maybe a surgeon, probably a nurse. He was handsome in a bland, super clean-cut way — he obviously had some seriously Nordic DNA that results in superior height, blond hair, blue eyes, and an airbrushed complexion. I remember thinking he looked less like a nurse than a model for a medical uniforms catalogue, or maybe an extra in a hospital scene on a TV show. I don’t remember how we initially began chatting, but the conversation started over the books we were reading. I was reading Jung and Tarot; he was reading Conscious Evolution by Barbara Marx Hubbard. (Which I just realized saying that, I told Amy Oscar, who I interviewed in episode 4 of this podcast, that listening to her reminded me of listening to Barbara Marx Hubbard. Anyway Jesse talked at great length about the concepts of Hubbard’s work — he was a bit dull and emotionless in his delivery, professorial, but the information itself was interesting and he seemed intent on instructing me about it. He eventually asked me what “my story” was, and I told him about my process of finding work and relocating. Pointing to my book he said : “You’re inhabiting the Wanderer archetype.” I was like “Ah, yes, or you could just call me a Fool, as the Tarot would.” He shrugged and kindly said “It's the beginning of all Journeys." When the baristas began to make the obvious motions of closing the cafe, Jesse asked me where I was staying. I told him truthfully that I wasn’t sure yet, but I lied and said I was going to go find a cheap motel — and I mentioned a notoriously shady possibility nearby. He looked troubled by this and was like. “No, no no. I live alone, really close to here, just blocks from the University where you’re going for your interview. I have a guest room, I’m not working tomorrow, and I insist you come stay with me.” I was not looking forward to finding a safe place to sleep in my car, and after going through the motions of being assured that the invitation was sincere, not just a friendly but empty offer, I accepted with grateful relief. JESSE’S HOUSE So, I was supposed to follow his car to his place, but he also gave me back-up directions in case we were separated, not an address but like simplified landmark-syle — The house was on Woodland Hills, the first driveway on the left after the last speed bump as you approach the traffic light at the end of the street. Jesse drove some vaguely forgettable car — something white, fairly late model, like a Ford Taurus — it looked like a rental. I’d probably driven past his house thousands of times over the years. When he stooped to go in through the back door into his kitchen, I realized for the first time just freaking how tall he was. The strangest thing about Jesse’s house was that it was almost entirely empty — there were no appliances except a coffee maker, nothing but water and milk and a bag of coffee in the refrigerator, paper plates and plastic cups in the cabinets; there was nothing but a lonely chandelier in the dining room; two leather armchairs, a large television and a lamp, both sitting on the floor in the living room; there was no art work on the walls; blinds were the only window treatments; in one bedroom there was a mattress and an alarm clock on the floor, an open closet with a row of scrubs and a few pairs of jeans and t-shirts; the bathroom had a toothbrush, toothpaste, a razor, and shaving cream in the medicine cabinet, a bar of soap and a bottle of shampoo in the shower… It looked like a house that had been immaculately upgraded and remodeled — for sale, but was like badly in need of some staging. I asked him “Did you just move in?” And all he said was “Uh…yeah.” (The same cryptic and succinct answer he’d given me when I asked if he was a nurse.) The whole house smelled like saffron incense. When he showed me to the second bedroom, apologizing that it was his “meditation room slash library,” I discovered where Jesse kept all his possessions (or at least a good ninety-five percent of them). Books. Books — everywhere. (It was a bit… eccentric; possibly insane.) The books weren’t shelved, but in stacks on the floor; a few feet high, and two or three stacks deep around the entire perimeter of the room. The twin mattress on the floor, well-made with crunchy new pillows, made the whole room look like some kind of gigantic crib with book-stacks instead of bars. Had the stacks been any closer to the bed or any taller I would’ve feared that they might topple over on me and bury me alive while I slept between them. I had once worked in a small metaphysical book store, so I immediately recognized the spiritual subject matter of his collection; he seemed to have at least every title we’d carried in stock, and then some. The books were also in several languages — English, French, Italian, German, Dutch, Afrikaans… Yes, I recognize Afrikaans because I have an ex who grew up in South Africa and I was fascinated by his Afrikaans (Afrikaner?) versions of The Chronicles of Narnia. In addition to the most popular best-sellers on a range of subjects, as I explored the spines more carefully I realized that the one over-arching theme, the one topic that was represented more than any other was: Angels. And, I mean, this guy was clearly obsessed with angels. ANGELS? Really?! Our earlier conversation had established Jesse (in my mind, at least) as intellectual, sober, and serious. He just didn’t seem to fit the profile of the customers I remembered coming into the new age book store and purchasing material about angels. I must admit, at most periods in my life, I negatively judged people with an interest in angelology as being vapid. With the exception of those who approached the subject of angels from an academic, scholarly, or comparative religion angle, I assumed the audience for contemporary angelology to be simplistically fundamentalist or spiritually immature. Weren’t angels a bit — I don’t know — fluffy, naive, benign yet decidedly un-powerful? Although I would have had a hard time describing sightings of beings like the one I wrote about in "The Ones Who Glow" as anything but some type of guardian angel, at the time I met Jesse I still held onto some arrogance that my experience (or at least my perspective) was uniquely profound. The truth is, at this present moment, I accept that the word “angel” describes a type of entity I do believe in — a vocabulary that transcends the boundaries of human culture and faith — yet some part of me wishes there was a footnote every time I use the word that says “The angels I see do not look a damned thing like Barbie dolls in nightgowns with wings. Their energy is comforting not because they are ‘huggable’ but because they are powerful.” In response to Jesse’s semi-apology about my having to sleep in a makeshift library, I told him I always need to read before falling asleep anyway. It was already incredibly late in the evening and I had to get up early; so he left me to the books and retired to his own room. A person’s books provide an irresistible insight into his private self, so I stayed up for awhile exploring them. I was intrigued to discover how many of the books had been autographed — all the Doreen Virtue titles were inscribed to Jesse by name; Sophy Burnham, Angela McGerr, Sylvia Browne… they were all signed. In addition to the modern, popular titles you would find in any well-stocked New Age section, there were also very old books I’d never seen before and still have not run across again — volumes filled with Kaballah; encyclopedias of angel names; invocations, prayers, and spells for calling in the Archangels and banishing demons… Of all the uniformly blank white walls in Jesse’s house, there was one exception — opposite the bed I was going to sleep in — above and between the stacks of books -- was a print of William Blake’s Angel of Revelation -- which I used as the illustration to the original written version of this story on my blog. I’ll link to that post so you can come take a look at the painting. When I opened the closet to hang up the suit bag containing my interview clothes I found the floor covered with more poster prints, rolled up like scrolls with rubber bands around them. From peeking at them, I found they were more reproductions of angel paintings and facsimiles of illuminated manuscripts. I fell asleep that night staring at the Angel of Revelation, with that little coif of golden curls that clashes absurdly with the intensity of his expression and purpose, frozen in his bold-postured pronouncement... Jesse served me coffee the next morning when I came out of the bathroom, dressed and ready to leave for my interview. He very formally inquired how I had slept. “Angels, angels, everywhere,” I said, hoping it came across as only a slightly teasing prompt. “Indeed they are,” he said. I’ve always had a tendency to want to adopt another person’s language in an attempt to connect with them. So I tried to talk about it, to at least communicate to him that I was more open to the topic than I probably really felt. I told him: “I’ve liked William Blake since I was a little kid. When I was in elementary school, a librarian found me looking at a book of Blake’s paintings and poems and she told me that Blake saw angels in trees when he was a boy. I remember resisting the urge to confess Me too!.” “Maybe that’s exactly what she was inviting you to do,” Jesse said. “I’ll give you another opportunity to now. I’d like to hear about that.” I’d actually never told anyone that before I told him. I’m not sure I even fully remembered it until that moment. So I told Jesse about The Ones Who Glow, the same story I wrote about my first encounter with a guardian angel when I was about five or six years old. “That was your asher,” he told me. It was the first time I’d ever heard that term. He explained to me that the asher is the proper word for the “classic guardian angel,” and is merely one of many different types (or phyla) of the spirit entities we call angels. “Will you come back next week?” he asked me. "I want to tell you more, and I have a feeling you have some other stories too. You’re welcome to stay here again, when you go on your second interview.” “Provided I get called back for another interview,” I said. “Are you making a prediction?” “Oh yes, I absolutely believe you will,” Jesse said. “You’ve just called your asher to you, after a very long time.” “I have?” “By talking about her, right now. You will notice the effects of having done so.” As I gathered my things to leave, and thanked him for his hospitality, he wrote a pager number down on a piece of paper and gave it to me. It said “pager - colon.” Which was a little odd. I didn’t know anyone still used those. “Let me know when you’re back in town,” he said. "I insist. Promise me you'll come back and we’ll continue this conversation.” I said that I would, although I’m not sure how much I meant it. My first interview was a success, and I did get called back for another one the following week… and the truth was, this time it was scheduled late in the afternoon on Monday — I really had no good reason to drive down on Sunday and stay the night. It was totally unnecessary, other than to visit Jesse again. And I decided to do that. I found myself wondering if I should actually page him. I was worried that I might be imposing on a stranger who was only being polite. But then, he had given me an oddly specific way to contact him…A pager. Which felt like something that in 2002 had to be used for urgent situations. Then, it occurred to me that the number might even be a fake. I decided that I would page him, and if he called back I would thank him again for letting me stay and let him know that his prediction about the second interview came true. And that would give him the opportunity to invite me to meet again if he really wanted to. The page went through okay, but quite a bit of time passed and my cell phone never rang. I drove down anyway. And I eventually went back to the same cafe where I had met him. Hours passed, closing time came. Still no call. I was pretty disappointed, and feeling foolish that I would now have to spend money on a hotel or find a safe place to sleep in my car and kill another entire day until it was time for my interview. But as I was getting in my car to leave, Jesse pulled up next to me in the parking lot and rolled down his window. He was clearly in a rush — flushed in the face, and almost out of breath. He said “Oh, good, I caught you! Follow me back to my house.” I spent a total of four Sunday evenings and Mondays in a row at Jesse’s house unearthing memories of possible angel sightings, paranormal experiences, and encounters with supernatural beings. I wasn’t called in beyond a second interview — I didn’t even get that job, although a good friend helped me find another position at that same University not long after… The truth is, I kept going back to stay at Jesse’s with an entirely different motivation. The second time I encountered Jesse, he came to the cafe where we had originally met, just as I was leaving. The third time, I paged him, while at Lenox Mall, miles away in another part of town, and fifteen minutes later he walked right up to me in a Pottery Barn. The fourth and final time, I dropped by his house without paging him at all. His car wasn’t there, but I peeked through the window in his back kitchen door; and then, just as I was putting my car in reverse, he pulled up behind me in the driveway. I didn’t even consciously realize how much I had locked away and forgotten about until I started sharing these stories with him — the more of them I recalled, the more they began to surface. There were so many experiences I had never talked about or even remotely considered telling anyone. You gotta understand -- at the point I met Jesse, in 2002, I was still deeply guarded (and relatively ignorant) about the existence of spirit guides or angels. For the first thirty-five years of my life I carried on under a profound anxiety that I might be mentally ill, or, more importantly, that other people would diagnose me as mentally ill — and that if I talked about this, I could be institutionalized, locked away, lose my freedom, or maybe even my life over it. I could never recall or transcribe my conversations with Jesse word-for-word, and, if this were a movie, I would simply show you a montage of those hours spent in the armchairs that were the only substantial furniture in the house talking over take-out food and cups of coffee. Much of these talks felt like some kind of intensive therapy sessions — like, as if, in the symbolic logic of dreams, Jesse’s uniform blue medical scrubs represented healing. He never talked about himself, his work, his family, his life. At first I would ask questions, according to social protocol, but they were always vaguely deflected. He interviewed me, with very precisely chosen questions that I was sometimes surprised to realize how much I could answer, at great length. He wanted to dig into the details of strange memories that I hadn't thought about for years. I’ve never felt “listened to” so completely. After pulling the stories from me, he would take a turn theoretically “diagnosing” or identifying the themes from a spiritualist perspective, as if he were writing a thesis paper on my childhood. Sometimes, the dialogue felt like a psychic reading, as he seemed to know more about me than I did. And — always — he related the context and the parameters of what we discussed to the existence of angels. I eventually moved from feeling “embarrassed” by the direct way he lectured about this topic to warming to the possibilities. The more I shared, and the more he explained to me, the more I felt something click into place that made more sense than I might have initially wanted to admit. I began to feel lighter, intrigued, even relieved that there were things that had never made sense to me before that suddenly had this magical, retroactive filter through which I could reconsider them. Viewed through the prism of Jesse’s beliefs, the very things that I had uncomfortably ignored and repressed because they were disturbing or confusing began to have a purpose, a cohesion that would at least make sense in the realm of Stories. Skeletons in my closet, of which I was mostly ashamed, were recast as powerful, meaningful, benevolent characters. The ingredients of my -- air-quotes — “mental illness” became the components of a mystical narrative where I was a hero, not a victim. (It’s very much the current model for my client readings — to reinterpret a person’s Story such that the seemingly random threads emerge as a pattern in a tapestry; the painful pieces become gifts of the spirit; the tragedies become tests of the will; the failures become the acquisition of wisdom… Any life story can be willfully romanced through an intentional shift in perspective.) Much of what Jesse shared about angelic entities was biblically arcane to the point of being obtuse: stuff like The Book of Enoch who was essentially abducted by ancient aliens (angels) and later returned to record the names we historically know them by; and archaic categorizations of the angelic hierarchies — the Four Choirs, and the subset phyla (species) of angelics like Supernals, Celestials, Illuminations, Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones, Dominations, Virtues, Powers… and those of the Orders of the Fourth Choir who are the most likely to closely interact with humanity — Principalities, Archangels, (plain old) Angels. Among the “lowest” order were the personal guardian angels who work with each of us, usually in pairs: our Ashers and Silver Cord Technicians. (Technicians is my word. I don’t remember what he called it. I obviously had to go back and research all those terms, after the fact…I don’t have that kind of recall.) Recently, one of the students I’m mentoring through the Automatic Intuition Program told me that she believed one of her spirit guides had shown up, unannounced, on her doorstep one day. An unusually small woman who claimed to have a “message” and was invited in. After a conversation in which she made predictions for this student concerning her future life purpose, she left and was never seen or heard from again. I didn’t say so at the time, but I wondered that this might not technically be an entity of a much higher vibration than a guide. I doubt the ability of a spirit guide (which I classify as a formerly human soul) to manifest a corporeal body — to assume living form. But of course it depends on whether or not anyone else witnessed this little woman — was my student the only person to see, hear, and interact with her? If so, then I suppose it may well have been a spirit guide in full-body apparition, not unlike a ghost; or else she was able to be perceived by interior psychic senses. Jesse suggested that many of the beings we might perceive as brief, full-body apparitions with very limited interaction — and assume to be ghosts or shadows or angels — might actually be astral travelers: real, living, flesh-and-blood human beings, asleep in some other part of the world whose souls leave their bodies and wander around. This might explain why so many of the women we see depicted in artwork about this often seem to be wearing nightgowns, are unaware of their surroundings, and are unresponsive, like sleepwalkers. While many spirit entities of all types are most commonly perceived by intuitively sensitive people, who experience them regularly or intermittently through the subtler psychic senses, Jesse told me that there are beings who literally manifest physical bodies that all of us — absolutely anyone — can see and interact with. It takes enormous power and ability to assume a corporeal form, even temporarily, and it’s unlikely that ghosts, earthbound spirits, or dis-incarnate human souls acting in the roles of guides, could pull this off. Beyond just being around us everywhere in some “ethereal” way or in some “other dimension,” corporeal angels walk around among us. Even though we see them and speak to them, we mostly dismiss them as random strangers; it may never occur to us that they're not human. ROLES OF CORPOREAL ANGELS Jesse said that angels who take the physical form of human strangers commonly appear to be doctors, nurses, EMT’s, police officers, firefighters. You may have brief and meaningful interactions with people in these roles who you never see again, and others of their kind can’t account for them and will likely not know who you’re talking about if you ask about them. Many corporeal angels will assume the guise of homeless people. Jesse pointed out that many panhandlers are quite aware of this lore, regardless of their personal beliefs, and may strategically exploit the perception for their own ends. He advised that the best means of discernment is simply your gut — that you know or at least suspect on an intuitive level; their vibration is usually quite high, the feeling that you get in their presence should never be threatening, though it could be uncomfortable or intense. Here are Some of the Qualities that Might “Give Away” the Incarnated Angel: they seem “rooted” to a particular spot — able to interact with you, although they may remain standing or seated in one place or they move around normally, but they're limited to a specific physical location or time their clothing may be “anachronistic” — the style of the clothing is oddly out of fashion, or appears “too new,” without normal wear and tear their clothing may appear unusually put together or hastily chosen there’s an anonymous quality to their overall appearance — they blend easily into crowds they may be unusually tall or the opposite, extremely diminutive in size they may appear to be of an indeterminate age — whether they are young or old, it seems almost impossible to guess they are “plainly beautiful” in an unremarkable way that has more to do with “newness” than the handsomeness of their features — “beautiful” in the way that all infant creatures are beautiful; even though their features are not interesting or necessarily sexually attractive, their skin is often colorless or without variation or blemish their smell may be unusually strong or noticeable; pleasant but pervasive they speak without recognizable accent or dialect they are emotionally even-keel or undemonstrative in their expression — perhaps even “robot like” even though other people may be able to see them as well as you can, they have no known connection or relationship to anyone else you feel their presence before you notice them; they are always aware of you first; by the time you make eye contact you realize that they have already been staring at you And there can be some Significance to Their Names They are not quick to introduce themselves or to volunteer their names; if you ask, they will provide you with a single first name. The names they claim will often be of recognizable significance to you — a name that you particularly like; that you have known many people to share; that appears often in your family; one that corresponds with a figure of importance to you. Even when their names don’t seem to be coincidental or meaningful, they nevertheless correspond to some pattern. (Have you noticed the commonality among the names of the characters I have shared in these memoirs, not to mention the names of some of my guides that I’ve talked about before? They all have J-name. Names that start with the letter J: Joanna, Julie, James … John…..Jesse. Although it is a very simple pattern, it’s an unyielding constant. More important than the “type” of entity or the details of their physical appearance are the roles they play or the circumstances in which they may interact with the living in a corporeal form. Circumstances Where Angels Tend to Intervene Miracles Transition periods like birth and death Physical Danger Direction Regarding Life Path and Purpose assistance while Traveling I specifically recall that “while traveling” was the last thing that Jesse mentioned; combined with the list of odd physical attributes, it was The Trigger that finally made me say “Okay — wait a minute…” This is how and why this series of memories I’ve been sharing with you connects. Before that day, I had never related to another person the mystery of the stranger who had followed me from London to Paris to Amsterdam. I believe it had confounded me and defied logical explanation for so long — and to such a degree that I feared speaking about it would only make me sound paranoid. I had uncomfortably and successfully semi-forgotten it. Tucked it away with no expectation of ever understanding how it could be… “Why now?” I asked Jesse, after he pronounced his judgment that my experience in Europe was a perfect example of what he alluded to as evidence of Their existence. “Why am I just becoming aware of this, here and now, at this point?” He said “At whatever point in time, your awareness can change in all directions — backwards into the past, forward into the future. You’ve definitely — admittedly — been wandering around in the woods in the dark, purposefully hiding. Maybe now you’ve stumbled upon a path that leads Somewhere you should go.” (Jesse’s speeches tended to be spiked with these Yoda-like kind of answers.) “So, what do I do with that?” I asked. He said “Reconsider… Everything…” And then he said something to me that I would hear repeated, from a variety of sources, in remarkably similar wording and form, over the next few years — I refer to it as The Ultimatum from My Guides: He asked me “Why would you keep what you believe to yourself?” I wish I could say that meeting Jesse set me on a clearly defined, purposeful, peaceful path out of those proverbial woods I was wandering in. “Reconsidering Everything” was not a pretty process — it was not all “hugs and angel wings” — the Universe had already stripped me of so many basic structures in my life, and then it sent a Wrecking Ball through my world, and deconstructed my belief system and my understanding of reality. Although my personal paranormal experiences certainly increased a hundred-fold, the next few years was more like a tornado tearing through those woods, and if I’d ever feared that I might lose my mind… Well, I finally did. I lost it. Remember my Origin Story, episode one? It took me about three or four years to crawl up and out to a place of lucidity and control that has allowed me to produce the writing on my site and to begin counseling others and providing readings. That last day with Jesse, after he challenged me regarding my reasons to continue in secrecy, he did something that was completely out of character with the relaxed, timeless nature of the routine we’d established, or the synchronicity of my comings and goings — he suddenly announced that he had to go. (Which I translated as a polite way of saying it was time for me to go.) He was urgent, fixed, and final in showing me out the door; it felt like he had heard a silent alarm go off and knew my car was about to turn back into a pumpkin. From the small back porch near his driveway, Jesse watched me throw my bag into the trunk. Before I sat down in the driver’s seat, I took my last chance to speak to him over the hood of the car: I said “You know, don’t think that I’m not unaware that, if everything you claim is true, you are highly suspect. You meet more of the criteria than Stalker John did. If anyone I’ve ever met is One of Them, you must be.” He gave me a grin and a little shrug — not a confirmation, but certainly not a denial. I never saw him again. About a month later, when I had finally landed a job and relocated, I wanted to at least talk to him and let him know how everything had worked out. But when I called his pager, I received a wrong number message. Although I never ran into him again, there were three occasions when I discovered books mysteriously left for me — one for each of the places where I lived between 2003 and 2006: Messages from Mother Mary a book called Quantum Spirituality which I cannot seem to find on Amazon and Conscious Evolution (the book by Barbara Marx Hubbard that Jesse had been reading when I first met him). Not only did Jesse disappear on me — even his home vanished. The few times that I drove by the small white house right after moving to Atlanta, I saw a realtor’s For Sale sign by the mailbox and it looked emptier than ever. Whenever I found myself on that street, I would slow down as I passed the house, looking for signs of occupancy. On one occasion, about a year later, during a particularly rough patch of difficult psychological transition, I actually went there with every intention and hope of stopping and visiting him again. I carefully tracked the landmark speed bumps — just past the last bump before you get to the traffic light — and I pulled into the driveway. Before me was a green house, and, more disorienting, the driveway and the sidewalk were on the wrong side of the house. I got out and looked to the neighbors on either side — it had to be one of those; I only could’ve missed it by one, in either direction… The house simply was not there. As if it existed according to a magical law of physics like Platform 9 and 3/4 where you catch the Hogwarts Express, or the safe house in The Order of the Phoenix that can slide into and out of a crack in space-time… Over the next couple of years, I scoured that street, expecting to locate it at last and realize my previous error, even if Jesse wouldn’t be found there. When I eventually moved back to Tennessee in 2006, the last thing I did on my way out of town, my car packed to the roof with my belongings, was take one final slow (fruitless) creep down Woodland Hills at that last speed bump. And telling you this story is the closest I’ve come to finding it again — or making it “real." Thanks for listening to this episode of Shift Your Spirits. For show notes, links, and all the past episodes please visit shiftyourspirits.com You can subscribe to this podcast in iTunes or Stitcher if you have an Android device, or Overdrive or … whatever app you like to use to access podcasts. Once you subscribe, then all the episodes will be there for you, automatically. And you can take them with you to the gym or listen in your car … that’s what I love about podcasts. If you’re new to podcasts, chances are it’s that purple button on your iPhone. Click it, search Shift Your Spirits and hit Subscribe. Also, if you want to support the show, it would really help me out if you’d leave a rating and a review in iTunes, and share it with some friends you think would be into it. 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 download the Attunement from the course for free at automaticintuition.com BEFORE I LET YOU GO I promised to leave you a message in answer to a concern or question you may have. So take a moment to think about that—hold it in your mind or speak it out loud—I’ll pause for just a few seconds….right…NOW 1…2…3 MESSAGE It looks like someone may be trying to hide their real intentions from you. Maybe even lying to you. But consider also you could be lying to yourself. In some kind of denial. Notice the presence of Owls. Those are signs from your guardians that deception is taking place, but that you are protected from it when you ask to see the truth. The owl is a totem of wisdom and the ability to see through bullshit. I'LL TALK TO YOU LATER

Have you ever found yourself in a stressful or dangerous situation and had a complete stranger offer assistance? As if they’d been placed there, by fate, or impossible coincidence, miraculously timed to step in and help … And then, just as mysteriously, disappeared? Maybe looking back it seems like the Universe was using this ordinary person as a divine messenger for you — an ordinary vessel, but with a supernatural role and unbelievable timing. But have you ever experienced this phenomenon in such a way it left you wondering if these helpful strangers were even human beings at all? ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED AS: Stranger Angels - Part 1 Stranger Angels - Part 2 The Paranormal Memoirs Are you new to podcasts? How to subscribe to my podcast free HOST LINKS sladeroberson.com Get an intuitive reading with Slade Download a free ebook and meditation Automatic Intuition Patreon.com Support this Show TRANSCRIPT Have you ever found yourself in a stressful or dangerous situation and had a complete stranger offer assistance?  As if they’d been placed there, by fate, or impossible coincidence, miraculously timed to step in and help…And then, just as mysteriously, disappear? Maybe looking back it seems like the Universe was using this ordinary person as a divine messenger for you. An ordinary vessel, but with a supernatural role and unbelievable timing. But have you ever experienced this phenomenon in such a way it left you wondering if these helpful strangers were even human beings at all? My name is Slade Roberson.  For over ten years, I’ve been a professional intuitive counselor and the author of the blog Shift Your Spirits, where I try to write about spirituality with fewer hearts and flowers than most New Age blather.  I also mentor emerging intuitives, psychics, and healers in a program called Automatic Intuition. Now a quick FYI before we go further — I’ve added a new feature to the show. For years now, before I send out a blog post, I try to tune in and listen for something that will speak directly to you, that will serve as a message. Like an oracle. And I get email replies, every week, with tons of you saying the post was a direct answer to a question you had. This is a really popular phenomenon -  for both of us - and I want to bring that to the podcast… So At the very end of this episode, after my final links and credits, I have a channeled message for you.  Be thinking about a question or concern you have. It may be answered by the show itself. But hold it in your mind and I’ll come back on at the end and leave you with something extra… OK So,  Back to the show.  Today, I want to share one of my own experiences with what I call stranger angels… (although I would never have used that terminology at the time…) In January 1992, when I was twenty-two years old, I traveled to Europe.  I flew to London with a small group of friends and stayed for a few days before splitting off from them to go meet up with another friend Allison who was waiting for me in Paris. We had arranged to connect at a specific hotel between the Latin Quarter of the 5th Arrondissement and the 13th Arrondissement on a Saturday morning — but the only trains I could take required that I arrive either half a day early or half a day late. So, I opted to travel in the wee hours of Friday night/ really early Saturday morning which would put me in Paris at 1 am. We were going to share a room, but I figured I could splurge and check into my own room for one night at the same hotel and sleep for awhile until Allison woke up. I only had a little bit of British cash when I left London, but I wasn’t concerned — all the train stations I’d ever been to in large cities like New York and London were always bustling with activity at all hours, even in the middle of the night. So I figured I could go to a money exchange when I arrived in Paris and turn in some American traveler’s checks for francs.  After the Channel boat crossing, which was actually pretty crowded, there were only four other people in the car on the train with me — two girls from New Jersey, Joanna and Julie, an Australian guy who eventually introduced himself as James, and a nondescript man in a khaki-colored trench coat who remained several rows away, never joined in our conversation, but nevertheless seemed to always be staring and closely watching us whenever I glanced over at him. The Jersey girls made entertaining companions, they were chatty and easy to be with; James from Australia was shy and although he moved closer to sit near us, he mostly just listened to the conversation. I was unprepared when I arrived at the Gare du Nord train station in Paris to find it an absolute ghost town — every kiosk, cafe, ticket booth, and bank was dark, locked up with those roll-down gates like you see on the front of mall stores when they’re closed. This was a Friday night in Paris; I thought there would be people everywhere. The Jersey girls yelled a cheery goodbye and snatched one of the only waiting taxis, and James melted away into the streets with the small crowd who exited our train from other cars. I wandered around in an awkward circle, looking for signs of activity, and quickly realizing I was not going to find any. This was a really ill-planned arrival. I had been so comfortable in London — I was traveling with friends from the US; staying in the apartment of British nationals; there was no language barrier; not to mention a kind of “past-life” familiarity that was at least partially supported by recognizable landmarks from years of studying English literature. Now I was alone in an abandoned metropolis with just enough high school French to read signs and grunt nouns and adjectives and to possibly butcher a verb conjugation or two, in a pinch. I was an obvious tourist carrying everything I had in an enormous pack; an easy target for a mugging. I was actually thankful there was a freezing fog everywhere to ensure the streets were emptier than they might otherwise have been. There was only one other person anywhere nearby that I could appeal to for directions. And he was watching me. The man in the khaki-colored trench coat, who had been staring at me on the train, was lingering, lurking at a casual distance. At least he was a familiar face, and if he had just arrived from England then chances were good he spoke my language. Feeling like a child who’d lost his mom in the mall, I walked up to him and began babbling about my circumstances — where I was trying to get to in the city, where I might find a money exchange… Why was Paris of all places shut down like this on a Friday night? I felt no sense of danger from him. Honestly, I suspected he might be cruising me, and I was more than willing to play along with that a little bit in exchange for crucial information. I was confident I could politely fend off any sexual advances, if that was his motive. As I talked to him, I realized there was something vaguely off about him. In the back of my mind I was cataloguing the details of his manner and appearance. He introduced himself simply as “Uh… John” and something about the way he said it sounded like a lie made up on the spot. When he spoke, his voice was soft and polite, yet he made no facial expressions. He was absolutely emotionless. He spoke English, yet I could detect no traceable accent — it wasn’t British, or American, or Australian. I can picture his face clearly and I would immediately recognize him if he walked into the room right now— but I can’t really describe much about him that would be identifiable or unique. His eyes were an unusual icy blue, but other than that… He could have been thirty… or he could have been forty or even fifty. His hair might have been a dirty blond… or maybe a light brown, or even silvery-gray. He was dressed from head to toe in monochrome — his pants and shirt were the same colorless beige. Only his shoes were a different color (and I noticed that, despite the cold, he wasn't wearing any socks). His clothes had creases in them, as if they had been taken directly out of packages. I felt like if I could have checked inside his collar I’d find price tags still attached. It reminded me of when I’d worked in retail stores, the way the body forms we dressed for the window displays appeared before the clothes had been steamed. That was it — he looked like a living mannequin. He looked too new, too perfect — yet totally unremarkable. He had absolutely no body hair — zero -  no stubble, no shadow, no hair on his wrists — not even the faint down that a woman or a child might have. He gave off an anonymous perfume that smelled exactly like… unscented dryer sheets. Even his breath was like a warm load of clean towels. John was… supernaturally ordinary. He offered to informally exchange the small handful of British pocket money I had on me — I handed him what amounted to less than five bucks, and turning away from me for a moment (probably to keep me from seeing into his wallet, I suppose) he produced a bill that, although still a modest amount, was at least quadruple the value of what I’d given him. “But it’s not enough for a taxi all the way from here,” he said. “You’ll need to walk quite a way first, as far as you can.” Using a rail map posted on a wall for reference, he showed me where I was and where I was headed. “Once you are in view of Notre Dame, or come to the Seine, you should be close enough to hail a driver to take you the rest of the way to your exact destination”  He hesitated for a second and then offered to walk with me. I told him that wouldn’t be necessary — I appreciated his kindness but I anticipated it might be more difficult to get rid of him later if I needed to. Before we parted ways outside the station he also warned me about the dangers of walking through this part of Paris in the middle of the night. He ominously advised me to “Be invisible,”  As far as ensuring that my path was relatively deserted, the weather was probably a blessing; but the grace of the cover it provided me came at a price — it was miserably freezing cold. The moisture in the air was just light enough to remain a dense fog, but it soaked me as well as any steady drizzle might have… It was a long, harrowing (shitty) night. I would need another thousand words here to itemize the petty trials of that night’s walk. My feet were blistered and swollen for days… I could not get warm the entire week that I spent in Paris… But to simplify the story, I can’t recall many times that I have felt that physically vulnerable. Had I been a crow, I could’ve kept moving directly south, but the streets were a crooked, uncooperative labyrinth that required constant course correction. I expended a lot of energy “being invisible” as I had been instructed. I encountered very few people — a handful of prostitutes propositioned me from the caves of doorways and shopfront awnings; I constantly crossed and recrossed streets to avoid anyone on the sidewalk; I ducked into phone booths from time to time to collect myself and maintain my bubble of cloaked energy. It didn't take me long to realize that John was following me. He remained a block or two behind me, and stopped when I stopped. Who has nowhere to be and nothing better to do than to follow me through the streets of Paris at 3 am in the middle of January? A serial killer? But I have to admit maybe I was a little comforted by his strange yet at least somewhat familiar presence over the alternative of being completely alone. Hours later — after walking and walking for hours — I spotted the recognizable architecture of Notre Dame. Soon after that, I was across the Seine and in the Latin Quarter. Thinking surely I was close enough to afford a cab the rest of the way, I stopped a driver and spluttered my destination.  He laughed at me and pointed — to the street I was seeking, which was about a few hundred feet away. I walked up and down that street for another hour — not only was the hotel not there, the very street number itself did not exist. After pacing back and forth and carefully tracking the building numbers to convince myself I wasn’t hallucinating, I was literally in tears. In frustration, I sat on a bench and surrendered to having arrived at being finally and totally lost. That’s when I saw John again, across a square formed by a jumbled intersection of streets. I was just pissed off enough and desperate enough at this point to walk right up to him and demand to know why in the Hell he was stalking me. He disappeared down a side street that looked like an alley and I followed him. But it wasn’t an alley at all — It was an improbable, completely eccentric continuation of the street I had been pacing up and down. The numbers picked up and continued. No sign of John, but there was the hotel. That Monday, a few days later, I was with my traveling companion Allison and her friend Natalie. We were walking from the Champs-Elysees headed to the Eiffel Tower when someone waved at me from the window of a restaurant. It was Jersey Joanna and Julie, smiling and waving excitedly at me. it was such an unexpected joy, the unlikely synchronicity of seeing these familiar faces.There were two men sitting with the girls who turned around to see who they were waving at. One of them was James the Australian guy — and I thought Wow! They ran into him again too? That’s kind of cool. What are the chances? And then I made eye contact with the Other guy. It was John. Why would he be with them? They never even spoke on the train… Allison was like “Do you know those people?” She was looking at me like — How is it even possible that you would just run into someone Here? I was kind of too overwhelmed in the moment just trying to process the coincidence to explain how huge it actually was, so I just said. “Yeah. They came over with me on the train from London.” But that wasn’t the last time I saw John while I was in Europe. I saw him again, a few weeks later, on the day I was mugged at gun point in Amsterdam. My time in Paris was… difficult. I felt stressed, distracted, uneasy, but also mute and invisible. I’m someone who talks a lot, but because my roommate Allison was fluent in French, she did all my talking for me. Her friend Natalie was a French national, and although I’m sure they didn’t purposefully exclude me, they chattered away with me along as a silent third wheel, just listening, catching only about fifty percent of what they said. They dragged me through two full days of the Louvre… Madonna-and-Child, Madonna-and-Child, Madonna-and-Child — “Oh, look, the Mona Lisa; neato” — Madonna-and-Child, Madonna-and-Child… Endless palatial corridors of Madonna-and-Child.  I felt like I was stuck in some virtual reality walk-through of a really tedious Art History textbook. I told Allison “If I don’t see something painted after 1890, I’m going to lose my mind.” So I ducked out and went for some amazing (much needed) inspiration from the modern art collection at the Pompidou Centre — without the girls. When Allison and I were finally alone in our room that night and she switched back to English, my voice came out thick from lack of use. And when we spoke, we bickered. She kept asking me. “What are you looking at?” I was standing by the window — again — peering out through a gap in the curtains, not really conscious of what I was doing or that it was even noticeable until she pointed it out. She accused me of acting paranoid, day after day — constantly looking back behind us when we were walking, checking and re-checking the lock on the door, and lurking near the window watching the street. She said “You’re making me nervous. It’s like we’re being followed.” I couldn’t explain myself so I let her believe I was just being a pill; that I was miserable being in Paris with her. (Which I kinda was.) I told her I was going to cut my stay short and go to Amsterdam alone. She didn’t protest; I’m sure she was relieved to spend her remaining days with Natalie without having to be my translator.  Maybe France simply did not agree with me.  Arriving in Amsterdam I immediately regained the better mood and sense of comfort I’d had when I began my trip in the UK. I met a couple my age from San Francisco, Marty and David, who were staying in my hotel. They had been in Amsterdam for most of the previous week, their last three days coincided with my first three; they were able to show me around to all the “best” places nearby they’d discovered to hang out and eat, reasonably inexpensive ones that weren’t such tourist traps. We went out to some great clubs every night and, best of all, I could participate fully in conversation again. I had exactly the kind of traveling experience I had hoped to have. I became attached to Marty and David pretty quickly, and when they departed, their absence was palpable. I had little expectation of achieving that same sense of joy or meeting other strangers I could click with so effortlessly.  Truly, my intuition said “Might as well go ahead and leave” — but there were a few sites I wanted to see while I had the chance and they seemed appropriate for that lonely, invisible state I had fallen back into. The first day on my own, I went to the Anne Frank House (a profound adventure that deserves its own story sometime) and then I came back to my hotel room and watched the flocks of thousands of birds that would wheel out into the sky each evening at dusk above the Centraal Station just across the canal from my window, moving together like an enormous tornado or a computer-animated coming swarm in a killer bee movie. They would hover in a shifting cloud for close to half an hour, as if they knew they were performing for an audience. The next day I chose to walk across town to the Van Gogh Museum. It was a fortunate serendipity on some levels — there was a special temporary traveling exhibit on Mackintosh Art Nouveau, which is absolutely my favorite art history design period ever. The entire upstairs of the museum was converted into complete rooms that replicated Art Nouveau interiors, and there was a small movie theater playing a documentary on the period. Although there were a half-dozen other people in the theater with me, I felt like the installation existed at that time and place just for me — like I had successfully manifested it… and I had more of these intense past-life memories that had made my time in England feel so electric. When the credits scrolled across the screen and the lights came on, I pulled myself up with a satisfied sigh and headed reluctantly toward the exit. I’m sure if you’d been there watching me, you would have seen the smile on my face MELT when I saw ….  JOHN sitting in the back row. Part of me was like Are you kidding me? But my physical response was fear — I didn’t even look at him, I just kind of weirdly acted like I hadn’t seen him — like you do when you see someone you don’t want to run into— and I just fled the museum. The wind that channeled between the buildings was the only thing that kept me from running all the way back to my hotel — I would round a corner and find the signs and traffic lights swinging wildly, and I’d have to lean into the force of the wind as if I was hiking uphill. It created that horrible sensation you have when you’re being hunted in dreams, your body stuck in slow motion, your limbs lagging behind the directions of your mind. It’s easy for me now to look back and wonder about the questions that must have been going through my mind — Who is this guy? Why would he be following me like this? Is he a stalker, a serial killer — maybe he’s some kind of cop who mistakenly thinks I’m a serial killer? Why would anyone want to tail me? And you know How is it even possible that he can keep up with me from one city to the next? At the time — honestly — I did not care. I wasn’t thinking anything except "I want to go home.” I hurried from the museum as if the United States was just a few miles away, and if I could move fast enough and push myself, I might reach it before I ran out of breath. I’d been abroad for about a month at that point — maybe I just wasn’t as “worldly” as I would’ve fancied myself to be; maybe all these enormous gray winter cities were smoothing away the edges of my personality… maybe I was just incredibly homesick and this was what that felt like. But more than anything, I felt threatened. I felt unsafe. I felt like I was in danger… and the stranger behind me, who I couldn’t seem to shake, corresponded with this atmosphere of fear. Fear often turns into anger (especially for me) and the anger gets directed at the person you blame for making you feel afraid. (Regardless if that’s appropriate or not) But at some I wasn’t just running away anymore, I was also fuming, and I knew it was building up ( and like, God help him if he actually caught up to me) – which, I kinda wanted to happen. I may have looked like I was moving away from him, but I was really marching toward the break where I would turn around and just RAGE. I heard a voice in my head (a man’s voice, not my own) say: You are powerful. And I answered back: I AM powerful. You are protected, the voice said.  And that slowed me down a little bit. You are fine, the voice assured me. Now, I was out of breath. There was a stitch in my side. I’d dropped into a slower pace of determined, sustainable endurance, and the words I was hearing rearranged themselves in a sing-song affirmation in time to my foot falls: I am powerful, I’m protected, I am fine / I am powerful, I’m protected, I am fine / It became a mantra, a chant that helped me maintain my speed, it pulled me along, but also calmed me, put me into an altered state. I came face to face with this man with dreadlocks who was standing right in my path. I ducked to the side to go around him and he matched the movement in what seemed like one of those awkward “Excuse me, after you” kind of dances But Dreadlocks wasn’t trying to pass me, he was shadowing me, mirroring me, “guarding” me like a basketball player. When I just stopped, he walked right into me as if he were going to embrace me with one arm and shake my hand with the other. He grabbed me and held me close him, and shoved a gun against my belly. At least, a pocket full of something meant to feel like the nose of a handgun. “Money,” he said to me in English. “Come on.” Two things flip my switch: being assaulted or bullied being in the presence of someone I care about who is being assaulted or bullied When I was in my twenties, I had virtually no ability to manage defensive anger and my temper turned on and up in one direction – full-on, unbridled, absolutely ape shit. No warning, no ratcheting up by degrees… And it came with a loud, hateful, free-style narration. My Daddy used to say that I had The Kind of Lip That Will Get You Killed in The Wrong Circumstances. My friends in college were amused by my tongue-lashings and called this aspect of my personality “Julia Sugarbaker.” I doubt Dreadlocks would have ever predicted the manner in which I responded. He had no way of knowing just how pumped up on anger and fear I already was. I probably looked like someone running away, which his instincts identified as prey – but what he ran right into was Royally Pissed. When my words came out, I screamed them, berating the pedestrians who passively walking by as much as my mugger, and on some level, I was screaming at John. “You have got to be fucking kidding me. You’re going to mug me, in broad daylight, two o’clock in the afternoon, in the middle of the damn street? And you expect me to believe you’ve got a gun and you’re going to shoot me with it in front of all these people for spare change? You know, it’s no shock to me that every fucking piece of shit would-be thug in America actually does carry a gun because our whole society prides itself on the fact, but in the Netherlands, man, really? That’s a pretty big deal for you to be carrying here, isn’t it? I mean, you’re either a serious hard core criminal or you’re faking it. You’re obviously small time, because why else would you be holding me up for a handful of cash that won’t even buy you a cup of coffee? What is that in your pocket anyway, a plastic cigarette lighter?” Dreadlocks glanced around nervously at the crowd I was drawing and said under his breath “Man, cool down. Just give me some money, that’s all I want.” I shoved my hand into my pocket and pulled out some Dutch coins and the crumpled, sweaty French bill that John had given me that night at the Gare du Nord. I’d never spent it. I had continued to carry it around like a talisman. I was even a little bit pissed to be giving up something I’d come to think of as a souvenir. Dreadlocks-man held out his hand between us and I slammed the money onto his palm, slapping it hard enough that the coins leapt and pinged off a grate in the sidewalk. He held onto the French bill, looked at it quickly, and shook his head like he was disappointed with me. “Man, come on,” he said, as if he were trying to say “I can’t do anything with this…” “No? Cause you said all you wanted was money; that’s all I got; that’s all you’re getting. Would you rather have some traveler’s checks you can’t possibly exchange without an ID and a really good forgery? If so, you’ll need to walk me back to my hotel and let me get them out of my room safe for ya, you wanna do that?” He looked at the French bill again like he was trying to decide whether or not to just give it back to me. “Come on,“ he pleaded one more time. I saw him look over my shoulder and his eyes re-focused. I knew exactly who he was looking at. In a much lower, confidential, whisper I said to him. “You see that man behind me, the one in the trench coat? …Yeah, I can see that you do… You’ll notice I also don’t even need to look because I know he’s back there. He’s been following me for two weeks. He’s some kind of cop, or some kind of detective, I don’t know who or what he is, but he’s watching me, and now he’s watching you too. You just got that guy for a witness.” It really wasn’t a bluff; and maybe the authenticity of my confession gave it power. At any rate, the doubt and confusion played out quickly. The Dreadlocks guy backed away slowly at first, clearly keeping his eyes on John, and then he turned and ran. I was so jacked up on the adrenalin of the situation, I swiveled around with the full intention of finally laying into this “stranger” John who was following me. I was mad enough to punch him.  Of course he was there, just as I knew he would be, keeping to his minimum fifty-foot distance. John just opened his hands and held out his palms, slightly shaking his head. He grinned with a kind of lop-sided, regretful smile. He looked, more than anything, sad and… apologetic. As if to say, “Sorry that it had to be like this.” And then he just walked away, back in the direction we’d come from. He was just swallowed by the crowd. I’ve attempted to relate this story without interpretation, because at the time it happened, and for many years after, it was just an odd mystery that became one of those “the time I was held up at gun point” stories. Knowing what I speak about and write about these days, of course, you’re gonna infer some paranormal or spiritual significance... Honestly, it may not even compare that well to the more profound angelic intervention stories you might have heard — it just happens to be one that happened to me. And I’m sharing it with you because it’s an event that came up again a decade later. This is just a Prologue. In 2002, ten years later, I met a man named Jesse — who somehow already knew these events had happened to me — and he’s the one told me What It All Meant. So... thanks for listening and stay tuned to the next episode of the Shift Your Spirits podcast… For show notes, links, and all the past episodes please visit shiftyourspirits.com You can subscribe to this podcast in iTunes or Stitcher or whatever app you use to access podcasts. If you’re new to podcasts, it’s that purple button on your iPhone. Click it, search Shift Your Spirits and hit Subscribe - then all the episodes will be there for you, automatically. And you can take them with you to the gym or listen in your car … that’s what I love about podcasts. Also, if you want to support the show, it would really help me out if you’d leave a rating and a review in iTunes, and share it with some friends you think would be into it. If you’d like to get an intuitive reading with me, or download a free ebook and meditation to help you connect with your guides please go to sladeroberson.com and If you’re interested in my professional intuitive training program, check out automaticintuition.com BEFORE I GO I promised to leave you a message in answer to a concern or question you may have. So take a moment to think about that—hold it in your mind or speak it out loud—I’ll pause for just a few seconds….right…NOW MESSAGE Your situation needs some forgiveness. You need to let go of any past anger you’re holding onto. It’s holding you back. You either need to forgive someone else…OR You need to forgive yourself... For placing unrealistic expectations on this situation.  I'LL TALK TO YOU LATER

On SYS episode 02, I share some grandmother magic -- one of the magical ritual prayer spells that I practice, how it came to be, and how you can develop one of your own. There are simple but powerful rules for this kind of prayer magic. The story involves a glass bowl that belonged to my maternal grandmother, and a painting of the Virgin Mary given to me by one of my readers, one of my first clients. SHOW NOTES Full notes and links HOST LINKS sladeroberson.com Get an intuitive reading with Slade Download a free ebook and meditation Automatic Intuition Patreon.com Support this Show TRANSCRIPT So this may be an odd piece to put so close to the beginning of a new podcast, but then that statement in itself says a lot about my complicated relationship with spirituality. Mother Mary is very much connected to how and why I started ‘Shift Your Spirits’ in 2006, and I’ve been promising, intending to tell my story about her this entire time, and I never seem to get around to it. I’m getting closer. Maybe it makes a kind of sense that I would start a podcast here. My relationship with Mary is significant and complex. I’m one of the most unlikely people I can think of to be visited by the Virgin Mary, but I was, and that is a story in itself, which I will have to come back and tell you on another episode. I’m not even sure how to think about her. I suppose she is an ascended master to me. No offence to anyone who believes she is the mother of their messiah. I certainly was not raised Catholic. I wasn’t raised to be a Christian. I was raised surrounded by Christianity, but I do not identify as a Christian. I do believe in magic and miracles and spirits. I consider myself something of a witch. I’m known to be a psychic. I’m an eclectic, spiritual but not religious, as I imagine you probably are as well. My name is Slade Roberson. For over ten years now, I’ve been a professional intuitive and the author of the blog ‘Shift Your Spirits’ where I write about spirituality with fewer hearts and flowers than the leading new age blather. I also mentor emerging intuitives, psychics and healers in a program called Automatic Intuition. Today, I want to tell you about some grandmother magic. One of the Magical Ritual Prayer Spells that I practice. It involves a glass bowl that belonged to my maternal grandmother and a painting of the Virgin Mary given to me by one of my readers, one of my first clients. Now, this glass bowl is actually an ashtray. It’s a beautiful, heavy, amber-colored glass ashtray with this pattern of rays in raised ridges on the bottom. It’s kind of a mid-century modern sunburst. It could be an antique from as far back as the 1930s to the 1960s. I was born in 1969 and this belonged to my grandmother who died in 1971. My maternal grandmother, Victoria, who was called by her middle name, as I am, her full name was actually Queen Victoria, she kept this ashtray as a prize knickknack on her coffee table for years, maybe decades. My aunt Vera assured me that no one was ever allowed to ash in it though. Now, a little bit about Vera. She’s the oldest of 11 kids. She’s my mother’s sister. The first book I ever published was actually my aunt Vera’s autobiography. My mother edited the book and I formatted and published it. It’s called “Stop Over in Wilder”. It starts with this beautiful opening passage about the first time Vera saw a plane flying over her hometown as a little girl in the 1920s. Wilder, Tennessee was one of those little towns that literally disappeared. It doesn’t exist anymore. It makes me think of a few other films and books like “A Trip to Bountiful”, which started out as a play. And then, of course, “Fried Green Tomatoes” at the Whistle Stop Café, Fannie Flagg novel, that was also turned into a movie. Both of those works are kind of about this phenomenon of towns that, from, you know, the early 19th century, that, by the end of the 19th century just aren’t there anymore. Before Vera passed, she gave this ashtray to me. And, for the record, I’ve never ashed in it either. Now the painting – it came to me from a woman named Debra Estep, who friends and family call “Debs”. Debra, several years ago my mom was undergoing a major surgery and I had posted about it online. Debs saw it and she sent my mom this little angel coin. This medallion for her to keep with her as a protection. So Debs is this really sweet soul. She’s a military mom, she – to be someone I’ve never met before, she has been very generous to me over the past decade. And to my mom, who she also doesn’t know, she’s just a really kind soul and a really cool person. And actually she told me that this painting is called a mezzotint, or metzotint. I’m not even sure how to pronounce it. She told me to Google it and, actually now that I’m here recording this I realize that I forgot to Google it. Some of you might want to look that up and see exactly what it means. I’m just looking at it, so that works for me. But back in 1985, Debra was working part-time as a receptionist for an attorney. And the attorney’s secretary asked her to proofread an advertisement he was going to run in the paper. He was looking for a part-time person to be a companion for his elderly mother. Debs thought about it that night and the next day, she went into the attorney’s office and she pitched him the idea of hiring her for the position. She told him, you know, he could find anybody to answer the phones, but he was going to have a hard time finding someone he could really trust to care for his mother. She said he had a dry personality and he just kinda nodded and said, “Okay. I’ll think about it and let you know.” Leaving the office, Debra thought, “Oh well, he seemed less than positive about that idea.” She was 27 years old at the time and she thought he probably wanted someone a little bit older. But the next day, he approached her when she arrived for work and he was very enthusiastic and friendly in a way that she’d never seen him be before. And he told her he wanted her to start working with his mom the very next week. So Mrs. Mays was 86 years old at the time. She was sharp as a tack as they say. A brilliant woman. She’d graduated from college in 1918 with a degree in Pharmacology. And over the five years that Debra was her caretaker, there was no subject that they didn’t discuss. Mrs. Mays kept up with current issues and world news. With all that had happened in the century she’d lived through, listening to her was like a lesson in history. And Debra would often bring her young children to visit. Mrs. Mays adored them and they came to call her “Grandma Mays”. After she passed in 1990, her family invited Debra to her apartment and generously offered her any of the woman’s possessions she wanted as mementos. So, the mezzotint of the Virgin Mary with Child was one of those three items Debra kept to remember her time with Mrs. Mays. 25 years later, Debra was reading my blog ‘Shift Your Spirits’ and I had written about this connection I have to Mother Mary, and she said she had the impulse to send the mezzotint to me. And as she was boxing it up, she sensed that Mrs. Mays was with her and wholeheartedly approved of giving it to me. So, needless to say, I was touched once again by Debra’s generosity towards me. It was a really sweet gesture. And it was also charged with so much history and sentiment, and, you know, that alone makes the image extremely powerful regardless of what the image is of. I had just purchased my first home and it was a first image I hung on the walls in the house. And I saw that as a blessing from Mary herself. So I sent Debs a picture of the picture in my still-empty new house. So the glass ashtray, the magic prayer bowl, it sits on a low chest in my bedroom now with the mezzotint of Mother Mary hanging just above it. And so this ritual, or the rules of this ritual that I do, I’m not sure if it’s religious. It could be sacrilegious. To me, in my mind, it feels like a little old catholic lady meets a granny woman witch kind of ritual. So the thing about the request that I put in the prayer bowl – some of the kind of rules I have around this is that it’s gotta be something big. It can’t be petty stuff, it can’t be selfish or materialistic. It’s gotta be about someone other than just me. And more than anything, it has to be something that I can’t affect or control any further on my own. Usually it’s something I’ve already tried to affect or impact and I feel like it’s finally come to the point where it’s outside of my power. And at that point I’ve gotta surrender it. I’ve gotta let it go and give it to Mary. I actually say that a lot, “I’m gonna give this to Mary.” And so the requests are written down on little pieces of paper and they’re also left open in the bowl while the request is, sort of, active. And if, in some way, the prayer gets answered, or the problem gets solved, or taken care of, or resolved in any way, when they’re done, so to speak, I fold them up and close them but I leave them inside the bowl. Everything that I give to Mary in this way is taken care of. It’s really kind of miraculous and I don’t take it lightly and I don’t throw a lot of things in there because I don’t want to mess with this perfection that I’ve got going. So there’s a lot of reverence about where I draw the lines and what goes in there. But the stuff that goes in there – it gets taken care of. Some of the, you know, kinds of things that I put in there: I have some friends, for the past few years who have been trying to adopt a child and, that went into the bowl. My own brother and sister-in-law were pregnant last year with the first and only grandbaby in our family. Their little son named Hayden, who was born on Christmas Eve. And obviously I did an ongoing kind of prayer bowl request. It started out with a little piece of paper just sort of announcing that they were pregnant and it just had their names and baby on it. And then when they had their gender reveal party and we found out that it was going to be a boy, there was this blue, tiny clothespin that you wore on your collar, on your shirt or whatever, at the party, to indicate the sex that you were predicting that the baby was going to be. So everyone had a little blue clothespin or a pink clothespin. I had a blue one because I correctly predicted that it was going to be a boy. So when I got back from the gender reveal party, I added the little blue clothespin to the piece of paper that said “Parrish & Heather’s baby”. And then, later on, when they chose a name for him, I wrote his name, Hayden, on there as well. So I imagine that Hayden’s prayer request and his little slip of paper with the blue clothespin on it is likely to reside in this bowl the rest of my life. That’s one that I don’t see ever being closed up or put away. There’ve been other things that I’ve put in there. You know, whenever someone comes to me with something really serious and heavy going on in their world, especially if they know about this prayer bowl thing, which now I’m probably going to get even more requests, but if someone makes a really specific request to me, or I see it as something that I can do on behalf of them, it often involves other people’s loved ones, I will put their name on a paper and put it in there. And, like I said, it always gets taken care of. There’s only one time that it didn’t work. And that was with one of my pets - a cat named Cinco, and I’ll tell you that in just a second. First, I wanted to go back and mention that – I don’t know how this happened or it emerged or evolved, but there seems to be some significance to the color of ink that I write these prayer requests down in. So, red ink - I use Sharpies, by the way in case you’re wondering - red ink is usually for something that’s kind of a short-term, emergency situation, like maybe a health crisis or someone’s, you know, going in for surgery. Something that is immediate and going to have a resolution fairly soon. I tend to write those in red. Things that are long-term or ongoing, such as my nephew, Hayden, his request is written in black and most of my general requests are written in black ink. So, there’s this one time that the prayer bowl did not work, and that was with this cat, Cinco, that I was talking about. He was a feral cat that I spent over a year, kind of feeding and luring, closer and closer, to trusting and to being able to come inside during the winter and stay in the garage where it was a little warmer. It took months and months of putting out food and inching him closer and closer, to get him to a point where he would come into the garage during the winter and huddle near a heater. At one point, he was badly hurt and he had something stuck in his eye. I was horrified. I knew he was going to die this really slow, agonizing death, or if be - he did survive, it would be after a lot of suffering and he was going to be impaired for the rest of his life. So I was able to trap him with a raccoon trap and took him to the vet and they were able to save him and save his eye. They fixed him, you know, neutered him, and I brought him home and returned him back out into the woods and he disappeared for several days. But he eventually started coming back again and, this was a really wild animal. He was the most timid animal that I’ve ever encountered and I don’t know that he ever would have been a pet. He was just to the point where he would let me, sort of, quickly brush my hand along his back, you know, when he walked around my feet, but that was as close as he got to being a pet. He was a really, really, gentle, pretty, sweet little animal. He was solid grey and he was very hard to see in the woods. He looked like a shadow. So, long story short – I didn’t know this was going to be a story about Cinco, but maybe I need to eulogize him a little bit – he was attacked and killed by a coyote in broad daylight. And we heard it and it was really horrifying. And we didn’t know for sure if what we heard was him. It was more of a, kind of, suspect noise in the woods, but he didn’t show up to eat his appointed time that evening. Spent weeks looking for him in the woods, looking for some sign of him. Hoping that maybe he had run away because of the coyotes that were back there and that, you know, maybe he might come back again. And there’s something, kind of, nothing worse than something disappearing, and not knowing what happened. And so… I was so caught up in all the practical ways of looking for him that I didn’t really think to give it to Mary. And by the time that I did, you know, it was probably a week had gone by from when we assumed he had been snatched by the coyote. And I wrote his name on a piece of paper. And I really didn’t do it in a sense of empowerment. I didn’t do it as something that I felt like, “I’m giving this to Mary to solve”. It felt like an afterthought, and I don’t know why, but at the time I couldn’t locate the green – I couldn’t locate the black sharpie or the red sharpie. I grabbed the green Sharpie and I thought, “Well, green is kind of like the color of life, so it’ll be fine.” So I wrote his name down in green piece of paper and I put it in the prayer bowl. I’ve never written anything in green ever again. The thing about the way I believe that these spells and these rituals work is they are a kind of programming for our own brains, you know, and, to me now, the color of that green ink is - it’s kind of poisoned, you know, and so I have this really strong association and sense of hope and manifesting positive things when it comes to the black and the red, so, you know, I’ve become very superstitious about the green and I won’t be writing anything in green ever again. Unless I evolve some new kind of programming where it makes better sense. But right now, those are kind of the rules of this ritual that I do. So whenever I tell this story to somebody about the Mary bowl, the Virgin Mary ashtray, I get requests from people. And they’re essentially prayer requests. So if you have something like that, and you follow me on social media, and you want to contact me and tell me about it. I – if it’s, you know, if it’s something you genuinely feel like fits the criteria, by all means, let me know. But the reason why I wanted to record this and tell you about it is because, explaining all this would be a little hard to write down. But more than anything, I’m telling you this because, you know, you can make your own magical prayer bowl, or prayer bottle or prayer jar or, anything like this. It takes something that you feel has some emotional significance, and maybe some spiritual symbolism, something that you identify with as being a conduit between you and the divine. Whatever that is, I encourage you to make one. You can borrow my rules to get started and you can adapt them however you think they best work for you. So thank you for listening to ‘Shift Your Spirits’ podcast. You can subscribe in iTunes or Stitcher or whatever app you use to access podcasts. If you’re new to podcasts, it’s probably that purple button on your iPhone. Click it, search ‘Shift Your Spirits’, and hit subscribe. Also, since this is a new podcast, it would really help me out if you would rate the show on iTunes and leave me a review. Share it on social media, tell your friends about it. It would make a huge difference in my efforts here and I would be extremely grateful. If you’d like to get an intuitive reading with me, or download a free guided meditation to help you connect with your guides, please go to https://sladeroberson.com/. And if you’re interested in my professional intuitive training program, you can start the course for free by downloading the attunement at https://automaticintuition.com/. For show notes and links, visit ShiftYourSpirits.com

On SYS episode 03, I talk about how your ego spins messages like a DJ spins songs. Carl Jung believed that a precise diagnosis could, in and of itself, spontaneously launch the healing process. So, learning how to identify these messages is the first step in consciously separating from the Voices that are not you — were never you — and no longer serve you. SHOW NOTES Full notes and links The Money Shift HOST LINKS sladeroberson.com Get an intuitive reading with Slade Download a free ebook and meditation Automatic Intuition Patreon.com Support this Show TRANSCRIPT Carl Jung believed that a precise diagnosis could, in and of itself, spontaneously launch the healing process. Your mind and your spirit, your psycho-spiritual wellness is very much dependent on the messages playing in your interior monologues, your imaginary dialogues, and the messages that get communicated through your relationships with other people. My name is Slade Roberson. For over ten years, I’ve been a professional intuitive and the author of the blog ‘Shift Your Spirits’, where I try to write about spirituality with fewer hearts and flowers than most new age blather. I also mentor emerging intuitives, psychics and healers in a program called Automatic Intuition. Today, I want to talk about how your ego spins messages like a DJ. The whole point of psychoanalysis and talk-therapy is to identify, to become conscious of what messages are playing within you: how they got there, who authored them, where they came from and when you either chose to adopt them or had them forced on you. You were not born with any of the messages that are currently playing in your mind. Absolutely everything you say to yourself, about yourself, was written by someone else. Your words are not original. They’re always repeated. Even if you have an original thought, it must be expressed or translated into language, and language can be broken down into basic parts which you did not invent. Even if your ordering of words, or unique literary device, has never been expressed in quite the same way before by anyone else on earth, the building blocks of the language itself, the vocabulary, the words, the letters, the full names, are inherited from an enormous collective culture that has travelled to you across thousands of generations of humanity. You downloaded these messages. You absorb them. You parrot them. You either consciously hear them and take them within you, or you unconsciously become infected with them as mind viruses. These messages and fragments of everyone else’s opinions and beliefs become a part of your own mental database. Your own interior library. Your own sound collection. These messages have the capacity to organize around archetypal energy patterns and become Voices with a capital “V”. Personae with whom you develop ongoing persistent relationships. Now if you’ve worked with my book ‘The Money Shift’, then you’re already familiar with how this phenomenon plays out regarding the voice of your abundance archetype. Similar relationships are taking place with any number of archetypes, beliefs, issues, your self-esteem, your inner child, your saboteur, your rebel, your artist. You can investigate absolutely any relationship you have with any template or archetypal energetic pattern within your psyche and begin to make conscious choices about the conversations you are allowing to play. Think of the music or mp3 library on your computer or your smartphone. Although you call these songs yours, and they’re very representative of who you are as a person, on some level, of course, you’re aware you did not write, sing, play, or record any of these songs. You have the capacity to identify these songs and their artists as separate from you, even as you employ them to assist you in expressing your thoughts and emotions. When you listen to your music collection, you have no problem behaving as an active director, even a tyrant, in choosing what you want to hear in that moment. You repeat your favorites obsessively. You will skip a song you don’t want to hear. You may even delete one you never want to hear again. You make choices according to present energetic requirements to chill out, to get yourself revved up and moving, to have a good cry, to dance around the room. You adjust the volume to appropriate circumstances. You can even shut the whole thing off. It’s relatively easy for you to identify the songs, messages, voices you love in the context of your literal music collection. You know who’s singing, you know the lyrics by heart, you know when the song was released, you can recall the time you heard it, where you were, what you were doing, who you were with. You can do the same thing with the songs that get on your nerves and drive you nuts. Yet you have no problem avoiding them or ignoring them when you want to. Now, approach this metaphor as it relates to your self-talk. The inner monologues and dialogues of voices, messages, and beliefs that you allow to play in your mind every day of your life. It’s interesting how you unconsciously assume you don’t have the same power of choice. Notice how the negative voices seem to get so much more airplay as opposed to being shut down or avoided. Why is that? You were not born hearing, and believing, and identifying with these words: asshole, bitch, fag, fat, lazy, slut, stupid, ugly. Every single one of those came from somewhere outside of you. So here’s what I want you to think about. What are some of the messages, the voices, you have downloaded that cause you pain or hold you back? Who are the original authors? Who introduced you to these messages? Where were you when you first heard them? Your internal mind chatter feels much more like some god-awful music channel you were forced to listen to and have no control over. The gentle, supportive, loving voices of your spirit are out-numbered. They’re drowned out. Are you just waiting and hoping one of those nice songs will come on sooner or later? Who says you can’t delete the ones that aren’t serving you? Or at least skip over them when you hear their opening strings and just jump to one that brings you power and joy? Your ego is an obnoxious DJ. It has taken over the playlist endlessly spinning a heavy rotation of fear-based tunes. Observe this station carefully. Consciously. Diagnose where these voices and their messages came from. Acknowledge that they were never started as yours. They came from somewhere externally. And you internalized them. This kind of identification is the first step in consciously separating from the Voices that are not you — were never you — and no longer serve you. Thanks for listening to this episode of Shift Your Spirits. You can subscribe in iTunes or Stitcher or whatever app you use to access podcasts. If you’re new to podcasts, it’s probably that purple button on your iPhone. Click it, search ‘Shift Your Spirits’, and hit subscribe. Also, since this is a new podcast, it would really help me out if you would rate the show on iTunes and leave me a review. Share it on social media, tell your friends about it. It would make a huge difference in my efforts here and I would be extremely grateful. If you’d like to get an intuitive reading with me, or download a free guided meditation to help you connect with your guides, please go to https://sladeroberson.com/. And if you’re interested in my professional intuitive training program, you can start the course for free by downloading the attunement at https://automaticintuition.com/. For show notes and links, visit ShiftYourSpirits.com

On SYS episode 01, I’m telling the story of how Shift Your Spirits came to be. Back in 2002, over the course of a few months, my seemingly "ideal" life was systematically ripped away from me. I crawled out of the wreckage by listening to the voices of spirits and angels who were communicating with me. The directions they gave me led me to rebuild my life into something more closely resembling what I'd always wanted it to be. SHOW NOTES Show notes and links HOST LINKS sladeroberson.com Get an intuitive reading with Slade Download a free ebook and meditation Automatic Intuition Patreon.com Support this Show TRANSCRIPT So, true story. In 2002, at the age of 33, I had a stroke. You know that joke about ‘don’t give yourself an aneurysm’? Well, I did. I was working at the time at what I thought was my dream job. I was a student adviser at a university and I had also found an agent for the first time in my life for my fiction. So, on paper, my life looked, if not perfect, then perfectly suited to me. And, in a matter of months, it turned into hell. It all got pulled out from under me. On a Sunday night, I was out with some friends. I think we were at a bar or a restaurant, and then a club and anyway, I do remember hearing kind of a pop in my jaw, like a TMJ thing, you know. Like your jaw just kind of popping weird. And soon after that, my contact lens in my left eye just really started to torture me, so you know, I told everybody I gotta go home and get these contact lenses out of my eye. It’s Sunday night anyway, I’m working tomorrow. So I went home. And I woke up the next morning partially paralyzed. The entire left side of my face was sort of melted or frozen, and the reason why my contact lens had been bothering me apparently the night before is because my eye could no longer blink. So the paralysis extended down my neck and into my shoulder and kind of partially affected the fingers on my left hand. So I had to wear a patch over my eye and I sounded drunk when I spoke and, you know, I was missing tons of work. When it first happened, that Monday morning, and I called in sick, and - this is part of the reason why this job turned out to be hell - my boss didn’t believe me. He thought that I was calling in hungover, and insisted that I come by and prove that my face was paralyzed. So I left the emergency room after being there for most the day and having doctors see me, and I went by my office, and very angrily pointed at my melted face and said, “See?” So, needless to say, I just wanted to go home and crawl under the covers, you know. And I started missing a lot of work because of this and I eventually did lose my job over it. And I became kind of a shut-in there, for awhile. So my name is Slade Roberson. For over ten years now, I’ve been a professional intuitive and the author of the blog ‘Shift Your Spirits’ where I try to write about spirituality with fewer hearts and flowers than the leading new age blather. I also mentor emerging intuitives, psychics and healers in a program called Automatic Intuition. Today, I want to introduce you to my new podcast. And tell you a little bit about the origin story for ‘Shift Your Spirits’, how all this got started and where I hope to take it in the near future. So, after ten years writing for you every week, I want to do something new. Most of my job revolves around talking to you guys, one-on-one. I do intuitive readings, I go on other people’s podcasts, I do interviews with other intuitives to see if we can work together on my mentoring program, and I coach people to do what I do. So, you know, everything I do is talking. So why not, you know, record some of it and let everyone hear all the good talking stuff. So, back to the story. It took me about nine months, maybe ten months, to recover most of my speech. Like, to get, I would say, maybe to about 90% recovered. And one of the things that the speech therapist advised me was to sing and to recite poetry because it does sort of use a different part of your brain and it also helps exercise those muscles and re-wire them as the nerves are coming back online to the cheeks, and the tongue, the lips, and everything. So, what ended up happening is I started to listen to a lot of rap and I would actually stand in the mirror for long periods of time and try to sing and annunciate the rap that I was listening to. And I credit Missy Elliot for being my speech therapist and a big reason why I recovered so much of the speech that I did. So, hey Missy, thanks girl! I also, you know, started to pray a lot. I was shut-in in my home by myself all the time, talking to the cat, talking to the walls, and you know, talking to my guides. I was really haunted in that house for those nine months. And, you know, there’s that joke about doing what the voices in your head tell you to do. Well, I really did start to hear my guides speaking back to me. And this conversation, this dialogue, started up and I really got to the point where I had nothing left to do but to trust them and I said, “You know what? I don’t know what to do with myself at this point. You tell me what to do and I’ll do it.” I did manage to get another job during this period. It was working for a guy who ran an online company and so there were really just one or two people working in this sort of warehouse space, and they were doing a lot of fullfillment for his online store. So it was pulling merchandise and packing it up, like a mini three-person-Amazon kind of scenario, and I also ended up losing that job. The guy was a little shady. I worked there for close to two months, during the end of the year, and I was promised to be paid for all that time that I’d been working on Christmas Eve. He wanted to get a lot of his Christmas sales and merchandise in to pay the few of us who were employees. So, Christmas Eve came and, of course, I wanted to go out of town and go home and visit my family and I went by to pick up my cheque or my money from him, and I found the warehouse locked. And it took several frustrating weeks to even get him to call me back and communicate with me. Long story short, he had no money to pay me. He never did pay me. And that whole experience actually was a big eye opener for me. I saw for the first time, how someone with a relatively small operation could run something online that looked like a big full-fledged business enterprise, and I do think that something clicked for me. And so I look back on that as a good thing that occurred, even though I’m still mad about the money that he owes me. What it did do was it made me mad as hell. And I came home from the holidays not having gotten paid for all that work that I did. And I thought, you know, I could do what he’s doing. Actually, I could do something better than what he’s doing because I wouldn’t deal with all this physical merchandise and stuff. I would just, you know, deal with writing content and possibly publishing, which is what I always wanted to do. So I took what was literally my last 35 bucks in my chequing account and I registered my own domain. And I decided I’m going to figure out how to do this online publishing thing. Remember this is 2003. So it took me a few years. I taught myself HTML, CSS, PHP. I literally just stayed in my house 24/7 learning to code. And at the time I was also still working with this agent on my fiction. And he had been talking to me about my platform as an author and we were trying to come up with some type of non-fiction part of what I did, to create an opportunity for me to teach and to possibly write a column, to do something that was in coordination with the fiction. So he had read all of my fictional stories and he was like, you know, there’s a theme. All writers have a story that they kind of keep telling over and over again and you definitely have one. And I was like, really! Okay, well what is it? And he said, all your characters are Joan of arc. They all have the ability to hear these voices, or they have some kind of psychic ability, and they’re socially outcast for it. Or they’re persecuted in some way. So what’s all that about, he asked me. And you know, so I told him. He was the first person that I told. What I never really mentioned to anyone else in my life up to that point. Because I was afraid people would think I was insane. I told him that I hear voices. That I hear spirits around me and I communicate with them. So, while he was trying to find me a column where I could write some of this non-fiction stuff, because he did see a bridge between the paranormal elements and my fiction that I was writing about and this real thing that was happening to me. But, of course, I had discovered this thing called blogging, which was a new kind of website, and I was experimenting with it. I was teaching other people how to blog. That was really sort of starting to become an income stream for me, or job, for me at the time, with all the skills that I had learned around self-publishing. So I decided, you know, I’m just gonna make a blog. I was doing it for all these other people, you know, these businesses that were hiring me to develop email marketing programs for them and blogs and I was teaching them how to use it. I was setting everything up, and they just really never seemed to do as much with it as I knew that they could, and it was frustrating to me that I was going to all this effort to build these beautiful little scenarios online for them to market themselves and put themselves out there, and they just didn’t do anything with it. So I started to become a little insecure that maybe I didn’t know what I was talking about. That maybe, you know, I was wrong about my strategies for developing online content and marketing it and getting people to pay attention to it. So as an experiment, I’ll take these articles that I’ve been writing for my agent about my paranormal experiences, my experiences as a child growing up, seeing and hearing things, and just all the stuff that I was writing about. The guides. I thought, I’ll just do an experiment and create a blog with that stuff because there’s nothing further from business-like than a blog about paranormal experiences and I just wanted to see if I went through the motions of pretending that I was my own client, and I built the blog and I did it as frequently as I was supposed to, and I did the email capture form, and I had a subscriber incentive. All this stuff that you’re supposed to do online to build an audience. What if I just do it, and just see if it works as well as I think it’s going to. And I actually didn’t think it would work. I, kind of - a part of me was still very much in the closet about all this and very shy about anyone knowing about it or hearing it. So I sort of tucked it away under a sub-domain on my web presence, and I thought, you know, I’m just going to stick this here, and maybe I’ll get enough of a trickle of interest that it’ll give me the data to sort of see if this works. And the name for the blog, Shift Your Spirits, really came to me fully formed. It was one of those things that my guides said, here’s the name of your blog. And I thought, okay, that’s cool, that works. So I slapped that name on it, and it wasn’t even like, ShiftYourSpirits.com. It was just my own, one of my business domains with this weird little folder tucked off to the side where no one would see it. So, this other weird thing happened around that same time. I started finding these books left in strange places, okay? So, I remember one time going out to my car in the middle of the night because I would go grocery shopping at like, 2:00 in the morning so that I wouldn’t have to see and encounter a lot of people. It was a vanity thing for me. I was wearing this eye patch, and my speech was slurred, and I just didn’t want anyone to see me. So I would go to Kroger in the middle of the night when there were, like, three people working there. And I came out to my car and found a book on my windshield. And it was called “Messages from Mother Mary”. And it was this little book about people who had seen and heard the Virgin Mary. And, okay, so there’s a whole Virgin Mary sighting experience that I have which I have to tell you on another episode that happened around this time. So we’ll come back to that, I promise you. It’s, like, one of the big stories that I want to tell. Anyway, so not long after that, I was living in a second story loft that had kind of a balcony outside of it. This place was almost like a prison. It was gated. It was very hard to even get into the parking lot, let alone get at any of the individual apartments. And so I had this balcony that you could only get to from, you know, going through my apartment. And I heard a thud one day and went outside and found a book on my balcony, like someone had tossed it up over the railing and/or dropped it from the ceiling, where the roof of the building, and it had just landed there. And it was called “Quantum Spirituality”. So anyway, more stories later about those books and their content. But anyways, so this strange stuff was happening, these synchronicities, and meanwhile I was writing this collection of articles. I had about twelve, which is what I usually advise people to do when they were starting out. You know, put out about a dozen, ten or so articles when you first start a blog, and launch it with a collection. And people started writing to me. Like, a lot of people started writing to me who had read these posts and were commenting on them, or emailing me and asking me if I could do a reading for them, if I could connect with their guides, or tell them what their guides’ names were. Things like that, and, at first I was, like, I have no idea if I can do a reading for someone else, but I’ll try! You know, and so I started writing these emails back to people where I would just sort of tune in and I would listen and I would get information from their guides or about their guides and sometimes the people would send me a question and I would tune in and get an answer for it and I would send it to them. And they were these really short little email readings that I started doing, you know, dozens of them every day. And this blog that I put out there, that I didn’t want anyone to see really, blew up. It became the single most productive, effective, successful blog that I’d ever created for anyone. All the mechanisms that I put in place were firing and I was building this subscriber list really quickly. I think, you know, after like a month, or six weeks, into doing this experiment, I had 800 people following my blog and getting their new post delivered to them in email. So, I decided at that time, well this is really cool. I’m going to offer these readings that I’m doing for people as a free incentive: If you subscribe to my blog, I’ll do this quick little email reading for you. So, oh my god, I literally put it online and took it back down the next day. I got so many people who signed up and sent me their information, sent me their questions, wanted a reading from me. It took six or seven months for me to complete all of those readings. Meanwhile, continuing to create the blog posts and.. I put something else out as a free subscriber incentive. Something that people could just download. Because it never occurred to me that so many people would say yes, and, anyway… Fast forward nine, ten months later, I’ve been doing this blog and doing all these readings and, at that point, I had done literally hundreds of readings, and I just realized one day, I can do readings for people. And so I started to accept donations, and then I eventually started to charge for it. And I stopped being a web developer and just, kind of became a full-time psychic. So, I’ve been doing this now for almost eleven years at the time of this recording. So many of the posts that I’ve written over the years, I’ve read out loud, as you do, you know, as you’re editing them, and I always thought that so many of my posts were better read out loud. Or they made really good spoken word pieces. And I also have so many stories that I just want to tell you guys that are very daunting to try to write. Like the experience with the Virgin Mary, and... just some of those kinds of things that are big whoppers that I always intent to write about and they’re just too long to be posts, and they’re too hard to put down in words. Yet, I tell these stories all the time to people that I’m friends with, and so I’ve always been thinking, “If I can just tell this story, and record it like I tell it to a friend of mine, that would be cool, and that would be the way to put it out.” And, you know, a lot of what I want to share with you, too, are other people’s voices. There are so many people that I talk to all the time, who are my peers, who do this kind of work, or do something similar but interesting, and I’d love to showcase what they do and I’d love for you to be a fly on the wall and listen to some of the conversations that we have about spirituality and paranormal experiences, etc. And, you know, I also have these friends and family members who have cool ghost stories and I always think, “Yeah, man, I just need to, like, record them telling me these cool ghost stories and share those with my audience as well.” So, I’d like to do some interviews on this podcast. My hope would be at least a couple times a month starting out. I’d like to have some guests on and let you guys get to know those people as well. So, if you are one of the people who’d like to be a guest on this show, by all means contact me. One of my best friends, Lacy, told me that she predicts that doing this podcast might actually go beyond my intentions of just simply flipping the writing into speaking, so I’m excited to see what might happen next. I certainly never intended for the last decade of my life to happen the way that it did. But it’s been the most rewarding job that I’ve ever had, and one that I would have never thought to do, had I not just put it out there. So I’m putting this next phase out there, which is Shift Your Spirits in audio format, and I hope you’ll tune in with me and come along, and see what happens. So, thanks for listening to this introductory episode. You can subscribe in iTunes or Stitcher or whatever app you use to access podcasts. If you’re new to podcasts, it’s probably that purple button on your iPhone. Click it, search ‘Shift Your Spirits’, and hit subscribe. Also, since this is a new podcast, it would really help me out if you would rate the show on iTunes and leave me a review. Share it on social media, tell your friends about it. It would make a huge difference in my efforts here and I would be extremely grateful. If you’d like to get an intuitive reading with me, or download a free guided meditation to help you connect with your guides, please go to https://sladeroberson.com/. And if you’re interested in my professional intuitive training program, you can start the course for free by downloading the attunement at https://automaticintuition.com/. For show notes and links, visit ShiftYourSpirits.com 0 Likes