Tag: anxiety attack

The Necessary Illusion

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Don’t worry, Soul Unfold readers–I have not left your side.  I even reach out to you while running out to grab lunch. Yesterday’s card was The Devil–it was one of those days that is like quicksand, where you feel like you can’t get a foothold, and more questions and to-dos just keep pouring in.  I was also grumpy, which is Devil-like!

Guess what, though?  After all of that whining I did about canceling my vids, someone special gave me a webcam and setup, so I will be coming to you in all-new high definition very soon (hopefully tonight, but my God, I really have to do laundry).

Today’s card is the Ace of Wands–this is a card of career and creative opportunities, and wands are the suit of flame, so consider this card to be like the flame re-igniting in my soul (every now and then the pilot light gets blown out, no shame in that game). It is also my “YES” card for some situations–the Aces of every suit can function that way from time to time, but take care with that, because sometimes they mean “YES EVERYTHING WILL WORK OUT OK” and not “YES THIS IS THE ANSWER TO YOUR QUESTION.” It is a positive card with a lot of germination energy–as in “we’ve only just begun” (sorry about the Carpenters earworm, but at least you’re in good company, I gave it to myself, too):

Stay tuned to find out if I have more to say about the Ace of Wands later on.  I am also considering blogging about the Akashic records soon–anyone interested?  I recently received a request to write about astral travel as well.  I am somewhat uncomfortable with OBEs (Out of Body Experiences), although I have seen my soul cord upon waking (thick silver cord extending out of my lower chest/solar plexus area) and have experienced lucid dreams where I am visiting with angels and other spirit guides.  I am still growing in this area, so watch for more cool things to happen.  I have experienced clairaudience before (I am writing about this in my book, and one of my posts on this blog describes this encounter with Spirit Guide Althea).

In considering writing about the Akashic records, I want to encourage you strongly to remember that there is a reason we are born with innocence of the endless futures and pasts that surround us. We do not have knowledge of our past and future lives because we are here to fulfill the current life plan we have written for our souls. The current iteration of you, the wave spiraling out from the Source that is you right now, was divinely concocted to encounter this world with all of your faults and glories and to make the impact you are making, whether you view that impact as positive or negative. Knowledge of the future and past can change people, can orient them away from their purpose, so encounter it carefully and continue to ground yourself in the present, or you risk falling down the rabbit hole of needing to know everything-and that is a dark path, I promise.

I received a message from my future self yesterday about this subject.  You can communicate with your future self, too-just ask your divination tools what message your future self would send you if you could sit in front of him or her, and even imagine him or her walking in and sitting across from you.  It will be one of the clearest, most helpful answers for your present situation that you could imagine, and you will feel the imprint of your own spirit in the response (because it IS you answering, but I promise, it will feel like the best, brightest, smartest version of you ever).  My future self told me along with a card flip (my question was:  if my future self could give me any advice right now to help us make it to where we need to be, what would she tell me?):

“It’s OK not to know.  All information will come to you at the right time. For now, it’s up to you to make the decisions, to be brave, to try.  That is what it means to be human.”

She kicked me in the pants and reminded me to be a person of faith, the person who takes it one step at a time.  And no, before you ask, she does not respond this way every time–at other times, she has reminded me that we get stronger every day, she has warned me of dead-end ideas and situations, and, recently, that wisdom comes with experience. Basically, when I communicate with the angels, they comfort me and give me love and support (and occasionally real talk), but when I communicate with myself, she kicks me in the rear and reminds me to grow up.  She’s a jerk, but she’s who I want to be when I grow up.  Too bad she doesn’t have a British accent to go along with that bad attitude.

Curious about whether my present self gives my past self advice?  I believe our souls are nonlinear, and that time and space are necessary constructs made by humankind to move forward in a physical world. I often meditate with my past self and offer her solace and advice, and it is a healing, wonderful exercise in which I discover how far I have come in this leg of my journey and truly feel like I am sending energy to the “past” where it is needed. If you ever doubt that time is an illusion, consider those days when we “spring ahead” (this weekend) and “fall back” an hour, or consider time zones and how events occur at different times according to where you live, but they occur at the same “moment” for everyone. Yes, that is the measurement of time we are talking about, but it gives you pause when you consider the possibilities outside of our physical world. From the top-down, spiritual perspective, time is an illusion, a construct, but it is a necessary one for us to get the essential work done while we’re in this arena called Earth.  Time is one of the greatest tools we have to truly learn and change, and ultimately, transformation and change are the secrets to why we are still breathing.

 

 

 

 

 

The Accidental Medium

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I practice my mediumship often on friends and friends of friends–I typically take on 2 to 3 readings in a week. One of the most frequent questions I hear is “how did you first know you were a medium?” My answer is always fretfully complicated but is easy to sum up in fewer words than I typically use.

It was an accident.

I knew as a teen that I had odd dreams. This is typical of young people, before the world horns in to change their minds. Specifically, when I was 19, I dreamed of a terrible violent act that happened several miles from my residence, but unfortunately I dreamed of it 6 months too early and did not recognize the faces of the people in the dream. This did not convince me that I was psychic, although I had terribly disturbed sleep, particularly when sleeping in a room across from a cemetery (cemeteries actually do hold energy because they are sacred places that the living, as well as the dead, often visit).

I still was not a psychic medium at this time. I connected to Spirit and could feel that connection strongly, but I would not solidly be a psychic medium yet for more than a decade. For most of my 20s and a couple of years into my 30s, I suffered from clinical depression and severe anxiety. My condition limited me in ways that I describe in the book I am composing in detail. I am 34 and not suffering any signs of this condition that plagued me, arguably, from the age of 17 until 32–15 years of pain that I could not shake. I also share in an appendix to the book the wide variety of holistic remedies that I used while overcoming both anxiety and depression.

In the depths of this painful time, I attended a psychic fair as a way to get out of the house by myself and learn more about the occult, which had always interested me. The psychic reading I received did not do much for me, but the meditation that I learned in one of the lectures blew my mind wide open. I connected with Spirit and experienced peace that I had never known before. My soul was recharged and motivated before, but this time it was like someone flipped a switch and there was no going back.

I began meditating every day and taking epsom salt baths to detoxify both my body and my spirit. The baths still work to this day and help bring me back to center when my energy is too frantic. The baths and the meditations were my bridge to overcoming anxiety and depression. My meditations, however, lead me to a powerful tipping point where I would meet spiritual energy so strongly that I would begin to suffer again from anxiety attacks at the fear of the unknown forces at work. At this time, I sought help in a meditation group, and I continued my meditation work on my own as well.

Several events, all involving spiritual work during meditation, occurred in a row and lead, I believe, to my recovery. I pushed the boundaries of my spirituality to the hilt with a group of psychics and healers who lead regular meditations and psychic circles in my local area. As I worked with these people, the sense of community assisted me in releasing the fear and gave me a greater sense of purpose. I first attended a meditation group with these healers because I feared that I needed help from experts while I explored this side of myself–I had a lot of terrifying, preconceived notions that were causing me a great deal of paranoia as I tried to open myself up to God and the powers of meditation. Ultimately, attending psychic message circles and meditation groups lead me to the healing art of Reiki.

Not until I was attuned to Reiki did I discover what it is like to have full psychic medium abilities. In sharing Reiki with other healers, I discovered that their loved ones would leave messages with me–first only in symbols and pictures, then later in full action. I became a psychic medium purely by accident, as a result of seeking peace after over a decade of fear and sadness. It was in pushing my spiritual boundaries that I discovered this ability and, simultaneously, dropped the painful conditions I had carried within me in secret for so long.

Now, at 34 years old, I still have minor flare-ups of the depression that once plagued me, but they are few. The anxiety attacks are gone. As a hobby, I read Tarot regularly, as well as palms, and I offer messages to my friends from their departed loved ones. Most importantly, I meditate and I communicate with my own guides often to decide my best next step. As a survivor of clinical depression and anxiety, I fully believe in the healing powers of meditation and promise to share more about this with you both here and in my book.

In love and light—Erica.

Freedom in Darkness: Letting Go of the Need to Know

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It’s OK not to know.

I mean it. In fact, not knowing is the basis of the human condition. It is part of the contract we agree to before we take physical form—we pledge to embark on this journey in which we will not experience Divine love in the same way as we do in Spirit, where it infuses our beings and is ever present. When we take our human bodies, Spirit is still present, and God’s love is still everywhere, but there is a separation, often referred to as “the veil,” to prevent us from fleeing back home.

That veil is the basis of our constant need to control our environments and know the future. Human survival is about evolution and response, and nothing can prepare you for a situation like knowing exactly how it will play out. As a medium, I have experienced the constant need to know what comes next and temptation to pin that information down. I struggle with this temptation every day, but thankfully, the tools that I use are designed to gently remind me when my questions are overstepping boundaries that are in place for a reason. My divination tools offer me insight about the future without telling me too much. They tell me just enough to make better decisions.

When we sit up at night and we worry about the future, we waste time. Everyone knows that worrying is sometimes useful and sometimes a waste. Worry is a barometer—it is your intuitive self indicating that something is wrong. Your subconscious runs numbers and schemes all day, and that is where your worries surface from—your intuitive self can know more than your “aware” self. You do need to pay attention to those nagging concerns, but only if they are problems you can work on. Identify what you are worrying about, write it down, follow it with a multi-step plan to correct the imbalance, and thank your subconscious for the alert. Then: release. Release the worry. Surrender your fate to the Divine. The most relaxing feeling in the world is knowing you have done all that you can and the rest is in the hands of the Divine. You have incarnated on this Earth into a form that is not all-powerful like you are in Heaven. This is Heaven’s greatest gift to us. We have the opportunity to grow but almost none of the responsibility, because we have a limited range of power in our physical forms.

If you are worrying about something that is out of your hands, then you are toxic, septic, even, with energy that drains your batteries and does not give back, and you can cleanse yourself of that physically and spiritually. My Moonshine Meditation with Archangel Haniel from this blog is ideal for cleansing yourself of needless worry and feeling Divine comfort.

Worries are akin to messages from your computer that indicate something is off. One message from your antivirus that there is a Trojan horse in your system is great, because you can navigate to your antivirus program’s dashboard and tell the program to fix the problem. Done deal, no more alerts. However, sometimes worries become messages that in themselves are like viruses. A message from your PC that continually indicates something is wrong, but there is no source of the problem, is in itself often caused by a virus. This is what happens with worry in our spiritual systems. Worries tell us what is important to us and what we need to fix, but when they become viral and fear-based, they become our very human attempts to tell the future and dispel the terror of the unknown. It is easy to tell whether your worry is a helpful message or a virus. If you can do something about it and the worry disappears after you set in motion the fix for it, then it is a helpful message.

If your worry is something you can do nothing about and it plagues you mercilessly, then you are dealing with a virus and a spiritual and physical cleanse can help you.
Purging viral worry from your system is best achieved by meditation or what some people call “finding your center.” At my spiritual center is a place where I am eternally sitting in lotus position, enfolded in gentle green light and peace. Wherever I may be in the physical world, this aspect of my spirit is always present and available for me to take a time out. I developed this secret “room” at the center of my spirit by meditating for a few minutes every day. During my meditations, I was eventually able to achieve a place of such peace that I am now able to replicate it in visualization at a moment’s notice.
Finding your center is about learning to listen to Spirit, accessing Heavenly love, and then remembering what that feeling is like whenever and wherever you need it. The secrets to finding your center are as follows:

1. Regular meditation
2. Patience
3. Faith in yourself and in a power higher than yourself

In Corinthians, the Bible speaks of the nature and importance of love, famously stating in 1:13 “So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.” Not to be forgotten are the underpinnings of love—faith and hope. Faith is nothing more than patience—patience with others, patience with self, patience with the human condition. Hope is love extended into the future. Hope is allowing space for love in your heart and putting a down payment on your dreams.

It’s not love, faith and hope alone that move the mountains in your way in life. It is what you do while you foster faith, hope and love. Faith is accepting the laws of physics on this Earth. Faith is the presence of action filling the void of defeat. Faith is reminding yourself that small changes make big results. You throw a rock, you get a splash. For every action on this Earth, there is an equal, but opposite reaction. Holding onto that thought will bring you more faith than you will ever need. And hope? Hope is the 5-year plan you wrote down in the first place to guide those rocks you are throwing into the waves. Hope is doing something about it gladly and allowing for your future to be what you want it to be.

Release and surrender are the keys to walking a spiritually tuned path. You have to release your expectations, surrender your path to God, and pledge to just try. That’s it. Then put one foot in front of the other–sometimes literally. I follow a blog titled Zen Daily Habits (at http://zenhabits.net/) and written by a man named Leo Babauta. In one of his first entries, Leo writes about how he changed his life, what the early days of those changes were like. He writes about making small changes—basically, taking baby steps. He speaks of lacing up your shoes and going running for 5 minutes every day until that 5 minutes becomes easier, then slowly increasing the amount of time you run and, as a result, improving your health. Leo writes brilliantly about change and how to make it happen in a method he calls “taking the long view.” Taking the long view means making small changes bit by bit in preparation for a future you would like to help shape. Taking the long view is love, faith and hope in action. Taking the long view is getting back in the game and playing for win or for defeat, for love of the game. Taking the long view is how you break out of ruts and taking the long view is how you halt worry in its tracks.

When mystic Eckhart Tolle writes about the power of living in the now, he harnesses a great force—the force of accepting that we do not know what the future brings, and that is OK, because the future does not exist yet, and every moment in the future is a moment that will come to pass in the now, therefore the now is all there is, so there is no point to living in the future. There are, however, like myself, some very literal-minded people out there who cannot live in the now. Planning is essential to human survival, and planning is a form of hope and faith. Where literal-minded people can access the power of now is at the point where your plan ends—be willing to take action, to try to shape your future, but then to sit back and enjoy the present moment as it unfolds. Enjoy the 5-minute run and the mini victory it brings you every day. Enjoy the idea if you are on a weight loss journey that every day you diet and exercise is a day you will look and feel better than the day before. The power of now combines efficiently with the idea of the long view when you juxtapose them with release, surrender, hope, faith and, most of all, love.

Out of the 3 concepts of faith, hope and love, it is hope that is most marketable for mystics. Hope is what everyone is selling, from famous mediums to modern mystics to Zen masters. Hope. I can give you hope, too. It is free. One foot in front of the other—that is the starter kit to hope. Anything can and does happen every day. That is hope.
Test your hope muscle. Try asking your higher power to take the wheel in the ultimate act of spiritual surrender. Try giving the angels, if they are your jam, as they are mine, or a specific angel permission to help you with some aspect of your life. Or just tell the Universe you give her permission to help you with a certain situation. Then, stand back and watch the opportunities roll in. It could be that a friend gives you a pair of running shoes you needed because they don’t fit her. It could be as well a blog post that advertises how to run a 5K in 5 weeks. It could be a friend asking you to go to Zumba.

Whatever it is, it’s coming if you ask for it. Watch for it. Do it. Keep doing it. God waits for you to arrive. You are a singular crystallization of God’s love, and the Universe is singing to you through me, through your dreams, through your joy and most of all, through your hope.

All you have to do is try.

In love and light, playing my heart out for you—Erica.