Anna Sayce

Tag: fear

  • How to Overcome a Fear of the Spirit World

    How to Overcome a Fear of the Spirit World

    Several years ago I really wanted to open up to the spirit realm and learn to connect with my spirit guides, but for months on end, fear stood in my way. I was scared of seeing/hearing ghosts, disembodied voices, evil entities and even my own spirit guides. I felt that hardly anyone could help me overcome this issue and most of those who did just said I had to ‘face the fear’, which I felt wasn’t much help because I was paralyzed by it!  Later on I had some help and reassurance from other psychics and had many breakthroughs of my own in my understanding of the spirit world, which helped me to deconstruct my fear and see it for what it was. I will share some of these breakthroughs in this post.

    Before I do, I just want to highlight that a certain level of comfort with exploring the spirit realm is definitely something worth attaining. We are meant to keep a connection to our own spirit. We are meant to receive guidance from our spirit guides. Connecting with spirit makes life easier and saves us hassle and energy when we’re going down the wrong road.

    Here are some of my insights on fear of the spirit realm and how to overcome it:

    Where Fear Comes From

    Fear can be constructive in that it alerts us to danger. If we’re about to be pushed off a cliff, we will naturally feel some fear because we’re in danger of dying. And of course this kind of fear serves us.

    But sometimes it’s difficult to distinguish between when you’re perceiving a really dangerous situation and when you’re pre-empting the possibility of danger in the future. For many people, fear has become an automatic response to protect them when they’re encountering new situations. So often when we’re in unknown territory, fear comes along and rears its head. ‘Watch out! You don’t know this territory! Anything could happen!’

    How helpful is this? Not very, in my view. Being in a state of fear is stressful, for the body, mind and spirit. Instead of allowing our fear to alert us to a real possibility of danger, we can be enslaved to our fear and constantly on edge, just in case something bad happens.

    As fear is often unjustified, it can be helpful to challenge our fears when we’re doing something new. Fear is seldom alerting us to a genuine danger and this applies to psychic development too. What are you actually afraid of? You need to get clear on this so that you can deconstruct your fear. And deconstruct it you should, because a fear of the spirit world is usually based on lack of a consciousness.

    But the Spirit World Is Frightening, Isn’t It?

    When I was doing psychic development, the preempting gremlins who used to pop up and alert me to danger ahead were the people around me. Some people felt I was in putting myself in a vulnerable position by exploring the spirit world and they told me so.

    In our collective consciousness there definitely exists a belief that it’s better not to mess with the spirit realm. I heard that a lot when I was starting out – some people around me felt that I was playing with fire. Luckily I understood the spirit world enough to know that wasn’t true and I continued in my intuitive development. But those sorts of attitudes are enough to put many beginners off.

    This collective attitude of fear stems from a lack of understanding of the spirit realm and how it helps us. Cultures who have a tradition of understanding and working with the spirit realm have no fear of it. For the Native Americans, for example, there is nothing scary about connecting with Spirit or with deceased ancestors. The very fact that we call connecting with spirit ‘supernatural’ is telling. We make it into something that is unnatural, when spirit is who we are. We are meant to embrace the physical and spiritual worlds equally, not fear them.

    Our Culture Has Made an Industry Out of the ‘Supernatural’

    It’s no wonder many of us are terrified of meeting ghosts in the night when we have the film industry which makes money from arousing a fear of the spirit realm. People will pay to be scared and thrilled, so it’s more profitable to exploit people’s fears than it is to portray reality. However, while people are paying to be scared, they’re unconsciously learning that the spirit realm is weird, terrifying and dangerous. If you see these movies and know little about the spiritual realm, you may end up believing that if you develop psychic abilities, you risk having objects moving around your living room, voices coming from your walls and faces appearing on your kitchen tiles. I can assure you that the reality of it is much less eventful. I see spirits (in my mind’s eye) and I hear a voice, (my inner voice – it sounds just like my own voice, so it’s not in the least bit scary).

    Thankfully, scary happenings have just not been a part of my psychic development experience. I have not seen a spirit in front of me looking like a real person since I was a small child. I have heard voices (like whisperings) upon occasion, but there is really nothing scary or intimidating about it. It was interesting more than scary. And this is the opinion of someone who two years ago was so paralyzed by fear of ghosts that I would not get up in the night to use the bathroom!

    Negative Forces

    And then there is the fear of evil. If we open ourselves up to Spirit, don’t we encounter good spirits and bad spirits? I was scared more than once upon hearing that negative forces exist and that they eat girls like me for breakfast.

    Yes, low-vibrational spirits do exist. Low-vibrational spirits tend to be earthbound spirits who are a bit lost and stuck. These spirits may appear to be malevolent or even demonic entities, but they’re not. Before you go thinking that you are being pursued by a negative entity, have a read of this article, to see how it’s common to mistake earthbound spirits for negative entities: Encounters with Ghosts

    If you really feel that you’ve come across a low-vibrational spirit, which I doubt unless you’ve been messing with ouija boards, the most important thing to know is that low-vibrational spirits may look scary if you don’t know much about them, but once you understand how they function, you realize that they are nowhere near as scary as they appear. Let me explain…

    We, as beings of Light get our vital life force from Source/God/the Creator (choose your favourite word). This is the energy which animates us, which feeds us.

    Low-vibrational energies on the other hand are energies who feel separated from Source or God thus they feel they have no energy source of their own. Because they think they have no energy source of their own, they draw their power from other beings (like vampires). They do this by feeding off negativity in beings of light. This is why earthbound spirits attach to us – to draw energy from us.

    But we need to remember that there is no ‘source’ of darkness to contend with. There is no Devil. Source or God is the only energy that is. Negative energy exists wherever there is an absence of Source, or light energy.

    When you feel fear in the presence of a low-vibrational entity, that can in some cases nourish the entity and it grows and expands. It can even get scarier and scarier in proportion to your fear. You’re the one who’s feeding it. Quite simply, they are only as powerful as you allow them to be.

    The first time I stood up to what I thought was a low-vibrational spirit it was so unscary it was laughable (in hindsight, it was probably an earthbound spirit that I mistook for a negative entity.) Either way, it was a bit like a kid in a Scream mask on Halloween. Take his mask off and underneath is someone who’s just getting off on scaring people. If you don’t realize that his mask is just a mask, you may run away, screaming. You can be sure that the entity will run after you, to get more fear energy out of you. But if you turn back and face the entity and run after it and de-mask it, the entity will then go and find someone else to scare. Simple as that.

    So, Some Principles to Remember When Exploring the Spirit Realm:

    • Fear is based on a lack of consciousness about what you’re up against
    • Just because other people think the spirit realm might be scary doesn’t mean it is
    • Interaction with the spirit world is natural and beneficial and many native cultures think nothing of calling on their ancestors or guides
    • Focus on your fear and it will grow.
  • The Top Three Myths About Psychic Ability

    The Top Three Myths About Psychic Ability

    Myth # 1: Only ‘Gifted’ People Can Develop Psychic Awareness

    Clients often ask me ‘do you really think I could develop my psychic abilities?’

    My answer is always yes and the reason for that is, we all have the potential to be gifted psychics. Your intuition is your birth right, but for many of us our psychic senses diminish in childhood as they are not nurtured in the same way that our five physical senses are. Those who are psychic have either:

    I retained a little bit of psychic ability from childhood but I also fall somewhat into the second category of people (those who have worked to consciously develop their psychic ability) – this is partly because I shut off my natural psychic awareness around the age of six or seven. I remember seeing spirits around that age. My mother told me that my experiences were just imaginings and since I was not the kind of child who liked to go against the grain, I took this to heart. As a result, I just stopped engaging with the energies around me.

    My psychic re-awakening began with a bump in 2007, when I trained as a professional intuitive.

    One night I was rudely awakened by a spirit who presented as a dark-haired man, in his thirties. And the following happened in a flash:

    The spirit of this man showed me an image (like a movie image) of him in a caravan with a woman who appeared to be his wife. The man got out of the caravan. My boss at that time got into the caravan with the woman and replaced the man. The man gave me this message:

    “I was not able to take my wife on holiday, but I am so glad your boss did”.

    I was shocked and excited that I had had an encounter with a spirit but I did not know who the spirit was or what his message meant. I knew I had to relay it to my boss.

    So, the next day, I put my apprehensions to one side and told my boss about what had happened in the night. He was amazed and proceeded to explain that the spirit was undoubtedly his wife’s first husband, who had died several years earlier.

    My boss’s wife and her first husband (the deceased spirit) had always planned to spend time travelling around the US in a camper van but their dream was never fulfilled as he became ill and later passed away. When she met her second husband – my boss – they made the camper van tour that she had been unable to make with her first husband. I couldn’t believe what had just happened to me! I didn’t consider myself psychic or gifted and all I had done was set an intention and do a little psychic development. This story shows that we can all reawaken our psychic awareness, sometimes with quite stunning results.

    Myth # 2: Psychic Development is Scary Because You Have To Communicate With Spirits

    I remember being really terrified at the thought of opening up my psychic awareness again. I didn’t want to talk to spirits or see them – I was afraid of being startled.

    Talking to disembodied spirits and seeing them is a big aspect of psychic awareness. But I later learned that there are other ways to tune into Spirit. Psychic awareness can also be gut feeling (clairsentience), an inner knowing (claircognizance) or listening to your inner voice (clairaudience).

    If you’re a beginner in psychic development, you can begin by tuning into your own Higher Self. You don’t have to talk to disembodied spirits to do that.

    Your Higher Self is already communicating with you constantly – whether you are perceiving it is another matter. If you’re stuck in a job you hate with no escape in sight, your Higher Self may whisper to you ‘you know this job isn’t for you…why don’t you pursue your long-term dream of becoming a writer?’

    This sense of knowing that you’re not fulfilling your purpose by working in a job you hate is just as much part of your extra-sensory perception as clairvoyance is.

    You can begin developing psychic awareness just by allowing your Higher Self to guide you. Take note of what feels ‘right’ to you, on a deep level and take action accordingly. It is one thing receiving intuitive guidance, but acting on that intuitive guidance is something else entirely and can take a great deal of courage at times.

    Let’s have a look at the third myth:

    Myth # 3: All psychics are clairvoyant by definition

    Before I trained in spiritual healing, I thought that all psychics had to be clairvoyant. This was mostly because many professional psychics are natural clairvoyants. I’m not among them. My clairvoyance has developed over time, but my strongest intuitive gifts are still clairsentience (gut feeling, empathy, the ability to ‘feel’ what aligns with my spirit, among other things) and claircognizance (the ability to ‘download’ information from Spirit).

    But I didn’t realize I had these gifts until I started my training. And I’m not alone in being primarily clairsentient and claircognizant. Several months ago, in my readings, I undertook to find out from clients’ Akashic soul records which psychic gifts they use to receive information from their Higher Self. I found that most clients do not primarily utilize the gift that we normally associate with being psychic – clairvoyance. Over the last several months around 35% of my clients have been primarily claircognizant (this means that their strongest natural psychic ability is claircognizance), 30% clairsentient, 30% clairaudient and only 5% of the people I read for were clairvoyant.

    Many people haven’t heard of clairsentience and claircognizance (and few have heard of clairaudience), which is interesting because according to what I’ve seen over the past several months, these psychic gifts are so much more common than clairvoyance.

    Does this mean that the people who aren’t naturally clairvoyant can’t be gifted psychics?

    No, what it means is that most people have a different psychic skill set from the one we’re used to hearing about most – clairvoyance. But clairvoyance is not the only skill to develop. Clairsentience, claircognizance and clairaudience are equally valid intuitive ‘vehicles’ too.

    So now when clients ask me “do you really think I could be psychic?” my answer is always yes, if you can do the following: identify your strongest psychic gift , honour and acknowledge the guidance you receive through that intuitive ‘vehicle’ and then make time to consciously develop it .

    The rest will follow. Once you honour and develop your primary gift, you will find that other skills that once weren’t so natural to you will develop as well.

    Further Reading: