Tag: spirits

  • Encounters with Ghosts

    Encounters with Ghosts

    Were you fascinated by ghosts as child? I know I was. I would spend my lunch times in the school library, looking at books about ghosts and scaring myself silly with ghost pictures, like this one:

    (This is a famous photograph taken in Newby Church, Yorkshire, and although it looks kind of fake to me now, it didn’t when I was a child!)

    I was both fascinated and terrified by ghosts growing up. My first brush with a ghost was when I was about five or six years old, in our family home. The more I developed my intuitive abilities in my early twenties, the more I perceived ghosts. In my own home I rarely came into contact with a ghost, but I regularly came into contact with ghosts in hotels and in friends’ houses.

    I spent the last three and a half weeks on holiday in England. During my holiday, I visited Blickling Hall in Norfolk, which is the supposed birthplace of Anne Boleyn (the second wife of King Henry VIII, who was beheaded by him in 1536 for adultery). Legend has it her birthplace Blickling Hall is haunted by her headless ghost, among the many ghosts that reside there.

    I was looking forward to having a look inside and seeing what I might ‘pick up’ about the place but unfortunately only the grounds were open – the actual building was shut for the winter.

    The afternoon spent at Blickling Hall reminded me that I’ve never written about the topic of ghosts, even though I get lots of questions about ghosts from readers.

    What Are Ghosts?

    Ghosts are the mental and emotional bodies of the deceased. (Another term for them is ‘earthbound spirits’.)

    They exist in the astrals, but have not fully crossed over to the astral realm and so a part of them is still on Earth. They are often found in hospitals, police stations, funeral parlours, cemeteries, bars, clubs, and hotels.

    Ghosts can stay behind on the earth plane for a variety of reasons. For example, if a recently deceased soul believes they have done something wrong that they will be judged for, they may refuse to cross over. Or if a soul had an addiction when they were incarnated that they are not ready to release, they may also be reluctant to cross over. And when someone dies suddenly and unexpectedly and the person is too shocked and distressed to cross over and leave their life behind, they may choose to stay on the earth plane. Unfinished business can also cause a soul to keep a part of themselves on the earth plane, long after their life has ended.

    (Important note: don’t confuse ghosts with the popular term ‘negative entities’. Ghosts are not scary or even inherently negative – they were once incarnated people.)

    How Ghosts Affect us

    Ghosts can occupy homes and can attach to peoples’ auras too. When they do this, they drain energy, which is one reason why it’s not a good idea to keep ghosts hanging around, no matter how much we like them!

    One ghost will drain a very small amount of energy. But the more ghosts you have hanging around you, the more draining it becomes. The second reason why ghosts are to be avoided is because by nature they are emotionally unstable and very susceptible to negative emotions. When they attach to someone, they amplify and echo any pain and negative emotion in a person’s energy field. So if you feel angry and have one hundred earthbound spirits in your energy field, that anger will be amplified. The same goes for any fear, pain or guilt. Those negative emotions can be reduced by removing any earthbound spirits that are present (although note that removing the spirits might do nothing to remove the actual root cause of the negative emotion – these spirits simply echo negative emotion that is already there – they do not create it.)

    What’s It Like When a Ghost Comes a-knocking?

    Perhaps you have also had the experience of feeling a presence in your home or somewhere else. Here’s what it feels like for me:

    It often happens as I’m falling asleep. The sides of my head get hot and start tingling.  Next, faces I don’t recognize start flashing through my mind’s eye furiously and usually, one or two will stick in my mind’s eye.  If I attempt to sleep, I get woken up, sometimes as often as every ten minutes or so and it feels like someone has hit me on the side of the head to wake me.  (This happens mostly in hotels and friends’ houses – it has only happened once in my own home.) If it goes on for long enough, I can clearly see in my mind’s eye the entity that is bothering me. The last time this happened in a friend’s house, I was told by the family living there that the description I gave of the entity I saw in my mind’s eye matched exactly the previous owner of the house who was known to be haunting the property.

    Who Attracts Ghosts?

    Sensitive, empathic and intuitive people often notice ghosts.  And ghosts notice sensitive people and are attracted to their auras because they are so open.

    Your aura may be even more open if you practise automatic writing, channelling or mediumship, and you are willing to channel whoever ‘comes through’.  Ideally, you would want to be channelling your Guides in spirit or your Higher self – not just any old spirit. For this reason, I recommend starting an automatic writing session by addressing your Higher self or Spirit Guides. Because if you are willing to open up to whoever comes through, you may actually be channelling the emotional body of a ghost who is still around on earth because they couldn’t let go of their physical addiction (as an example). That’s the earthly equivalent of asking someone who is on drugs or addicted to drugs, for advice on your latest life issue.  It’s possible that you might not get very helpful advice because it is could be coming from a place of stuckness and fear (remember that many ghosts won’t cross over because of fear, pain or sometimes a desire for revenge.)

    In the first chapter of my Intuitive Awakening Course, we get clear on who it is OK to channel, for exactly this reason – there is no point asking for advice from disembodied entities who have no more (or even a lot less) perspective than you do on your own life. If you do end up channelling a ghost, the channelled information may not be very coherent or helpful.

    How to Avoid Channelling Ghosts

    To prevent ghosts entering your aura, don’t open yourself up to channel just any old spirit.  Instead, channel your Higher self or the beings who were assigned to you to help you on your path (i.e. Spirit Guides and Guardian Angels.)  When you do channeling, request to channel your Spirit Guides, Guardian Angels or Higher self only – those beings who are with you at the choice of your soul.

    Those who smoke marijuana can also attract ghosts in even larger numbers because this substance opens up your aura to these spirits.

    What about you – ever had an encounter with a ghost? What happens for you when you perceive one? Do you have any further questions about ghosts? (I may write another article on this subject.) Feel free to share your experiences in the comments.

  • 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.
  • How To Develop Clairaudience

    How To Develop Clairaudience

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    Clairaudience means ‘clear-hearing’. It is the ability to ‘hear’ Spirit.

    Clairaudience is that little voice inside you that issues warnings or gives guidance. It tends to speak to you when you are in danger or when you have an important decision to make that will impact on your life. If you don’t have clairaudience as one of your psychic gifts, it can be developed. In this article, I give you a couple of exercises for developing it.

    If clairaudience is one of your natural intuitive gifts, your higher self and Spirit Guides will use mostly clairaudient means to communicate with you, including sounds, words and songs you’re familiar with. These can be internal or they can be outside of you. You may also hear voices in your dreams or upon waking.

    Who is Clairaudient?

    Clairaudients tend to hear more than most people. People who are bothered by noise pollution are naturally predisposed towards clairaudience because of their heightened sensitivity.

    Clairaudients often hear ringing in their ears — some clairaudients interpret this as a sign to pay attention and consciously tune in to their intuition.

    Musicians are often clairaudient. There are many accounts of composers who have heard or dreamt of a melody playing internally inside their minds, before they put it down on paper. (Famously, Paul McCartney is someone who has written a lot of his songs based on a melody or lyrics that he heard upon waking.) 

    The first step to developing your clairaudience is to really fine-tune your sense of hearing. Here’s an exercise to help you do this:

    Unpicking the Orchestra

    Listen carefully to all the sounds you hear around you while you’re lying in bed at night — the sounds of cars passing, the sounds of birds or animals, of planes, of people talking or the sounds of music. We normally tune out these noises so that we can concentrate or sleep. But when you tune out noise, you dull your perception and you become less sensitive to your inner voice.

    When you begin to listen consciously to the noise that you normally tune out, you will hear an ‘orchestra’ of sounds. Your objective with this exercise is to notice each and every one of these sounds that make up this ‘orchestra’. Take it apart. Count how many sounds you can hear and make a note of what they are. Some may be really subtle and barely noticeable. The goal here is really to heighten your auditory perception.

    Do this every night for a week before you go to sleep and you will be amazed at how much you were not hearing before. This will begin to activate your clairaudience.

    Clairaudient Listening

    You can also actively listen for clairaudient guidance.

    Visualize turning on a radio and tuning into the ‘channel’ of your intuition or your Spirit Guides. Imagine them sitting around a table, ready to communicate with you. Then, start asking questions.

    See if you can ‘hear’ or perceive any words — it could be a clear voice that is easy to discern or you may have to really focus and go inside yourself to hear it clearly. If you don’t hear anything at all, don’t give up on your first attempt. For most people it takes practice and persistence to get into the habit of listening to your intuition.

    Further Tips

    • Set the intention to utilize your clairaudience. Write it down somewhere as this reinforces it.
    • Don’t block your clairaudience through fear of hearing something negative/frightening. If you’re afraid of hearing spirit for fear of being spooked, intend only to hear your Spirit Guides and higher self, who have your best intentions at heart and who would never knowingly scare you.
    • Listen to binaural beats to develop your clairaudience further.
    • Meditate. Intuitive guidance often comes through the gaps between our thoughts. Meditation quietens the mind and creates more gaps in our thoughts so our intuitive guidance can more easily be heard during meditation. (If you want to read more about why quietening the mind is so essential to psychic development, you might like to read this article: ‘The Alpha State – Why Is It Essential to Psychic Development?’)
    • Use affirmations to develop clairaudience, such as “It is safe to hear my inner voice” or “I am powerfully clairaudient”.

    Further Reading:

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