Learning to Fear
When I began being mentored by a professional psychic many years ago, the first lesson, she told me, was going to be absolutely critical. So when she called for our first session I was buzzing with excitement. Were we going to practice clairvoyance or remote viewing? Would we focus on energy or mediumship? Nope. She told me the most important thing in my development was to first learn how to “protect” myself. She spent the entire first session teaching me how to “put myself in the white light” with a ritual of protection involving meditation, a candle flame, and a form of prayer.
“Protection from what?” I wondered the whole time. I had never encountered anything particularly frightening in my own psychic development. Maybe an uneasy feeling entering a room here, or a strange vision in a meditation there. My psychic awareness had made me more sensitive, but none of it felt at all threatening.
Photo by Cristian Newman on Unsplash
Ritual Belief
She didn’t really specify that first night but spent most of that first session doing her best to instill the fear of God fear in me. She told me she didn’t even want to think about what could happen if I failed to protect myself! There was darkness out there! There was evil in the world physical world and thus there was evil in the spirit world! We lock our doors to protect ourselves in the physical world, she told me, so we must do the same in the metaphysical world to protect ourselves!
I consider myself an open-minded skeptic — yes even now — so I had no problem trying her methods. It would be a few years before I was able to discover for myself there was really no such thing as evil spirits. So even though I wasn’t afraid, she had been doing this a long time so I wanted to respect her process as a teacher. If she wasn’t going to feel comfortable working with me unless I did this protection ritual, then who was I to argue with her experience? I diligently followed her instructions and played along even though it seemed a little silly.
So week after week, month after month, we started each of our sessions with this protection ritual. But I grew increasingly bored and frustrated with starting our call that way every week. I was always so excited and eager to get to our lessons and practice — yet increasingly I thought of those first several minutes as a big waste of time.
Unprotected
So I began to experiment outside of our calls with proving there wasn’t really a need for protection in my own readings and practices. First, I began to pare down the ritual of the protection routine she’d taught me. I changed the long meditation into a very brief one. I found I still gave good practice readings and — more importantly — nothing bad was happening to me!
So I continued to experiment with paring down the protection ritual until I eliminated the meditation altogether and replaced it with a quick, simple setting of good intention. Eventually the candle went bye-bye, too, although I kept that around for a long time just because I enjoyed the scent. It did not surprise me that my psychic abilities continued to unfold just as before and that nothing scary or bad was happening to me.
Still, I did not tell my mentor I was all but ignoring her advice! I didn’t want to offend her or have her needlessly worry about my well-being. And discernment comes naturally to me so I’ve never minded setting aside parts of someone’s teaching that don’t fit for me without discounting everything else.
But one day on our call, I was surprised that my mentor seemed to forget all about the mandatory protection ritual! I said nothing. I was excited that we got to dive right into the topic of the week. More time for practice, I thought. But halfway through the call, she realized what happened and was upset. She began to explain again why protection was so absolutely essential every time we worked and why she’d wished I had reminded her when she forgot. For the first time, she got more specific.
Protection From What?
It was for my own good, she told me! It was to protect myself from what she called — in very hushed tones, almost whispering on the phone — “low-evolved entities” that would be attracted to my light when I worked. Eventually, she confided in me that those “low-evolved entities” she was so concerned about was her term for a word she tried to never use — demons! She talked about how they might possess me and wreak all sorts of havoc in my life if I didn’t continue to protect myself!
Something clicked for me as she finally fully explained her reasoning behind why she saw such a need for “protection”. It suddenly made sense because I knew she had been raised in a very religious household. I realized her insistence on protection was something that was a way to get past her own fears that had a basis in her religious belief system. Demons were very real to her — and very not real to me. So why would I continue protecting myself against something someone else feared?
No Fear
I was glad she couldn’t see me smiling and rolling my eyes over the phone as she continued on with genuine concern. I listened to her expound on her fears — of hell, of psychic entities that could attach to you, of lost souls, etc. I didn’t have the heart to tell her I’d left behind the protection ritual months ago and everything was just fine. And that I didn’t believe in any of those things.
My own experiences had already proven to me there was nothing to fear. So I felt even better now about letting go of the “protection”. And I found, thankfully, this has absolutely zero impact on me or my readings. As the months ticked along and my mentorship ended, I almost forgot about the protection ritual that was once so ingrained in my practice.
Letting Go
But after a year or so of doing psychic readings, I began to frequently sense the presence of loved ones in the spirit world who were around my clients. These spirit people seemed to want to communicate and make their presence known even though clients had not sought me out for that purpose.
I had been comfortably working psychically and I didn’t quite know how to unfold my mediumistic ability so once again I sought out teachers. And once again I found that so many teachers insisted upon some type of protection ritual!
Re-Learning Fear
Despite my own experience proving it wasn’t necessary, I started questioning that perhaps I should go back to putting myself in that white light after all. “What’s the harm?” of a little protection I thought. Maybe it was better safe than sorry. Psychic ability was one thing and perhaps communicating with spirit guides — but with mediumship I was now being asked to blend with the spirits of people, to let them overshadow me, etc. These were new concepts to me so I decided to take the “better safe than sorry approach” and go back to a quick white light ritual before every practice or reading.
And for the next few weeks something shocking unfolded— I became afraid of my metaphysical abilities for the first time. What if possession was real and someone — or some thing — might come in and harm me when I communicated with the spirit world? Did I really know enough to say protection isn’t really necessary for mediumship even though I didn’t need it when working psychically? Maybe I had been playing with fire all along by not protecting myself after all these past few years. Maybe I’d just been lucky!
So I brought back the full white light protection ritual in earnest. But it did not seem to help. For the next couple weeks, the fear was in the back of my mind much of the time I was working. In fact, the more I thought about it and the more diligently I focused on carefully protecting myself, the more bad things kept happening.
Never Enough
First it was a light bulb that had never burned out suddenly “popping” during my meditation. I was startled so badly I thought my heart would never stop racing. Then it was finding a spider in my room every time I did a reading even though I’d never encountered them in there for years before. Then there was a mysterious banging sound in the house that I could never place that seemed to disrupt my meditations and readings. Then my psychic readings, which had been going so well and brought me joy, suddenly seemed to become more difficult. I began to fear I was being blocked by someone — or some thing — in the spirit world.
I continued to focus on protection for a couple more weeks because I couldn’t understand why suddenly things kept taking such a turn for the worse. I researched protection rituals. Was I not protecting enough? Was this punishment for the months I’d skipped protection altogether? Had I somehow done something to become unworthy of the white light? Had I inadvertently let something into my own energy and now couldn’t get rid of it? Why was something that used to be so fun and exciting becoming so difficult and scary?
I feared it would continue to get worse and worse if I didn’t do something soon. And then it hit me… I was manifesting my own fears. I didn’t need protection from the spirit world. I needed protection from myself.
The Only Thing We Have To Fear…
I had already proven once before that I didn’t need protection from someone else’s fear. So why was I allowing that to happen all over again? I didn’t fear the spirit world at all until someone — this time teachers of mediumship — told me I should fear the spirit world.
So I did an experiment and once again dropped all forms of protection. I knew right away it would work because I’d already proven it to myself before that it would. And sure enough, immediately all the “bad” stuff stopped happening. My readings became fun and natural again. The spiders stopped showing up in that room. The light bulb didn’t pop anymore. And my mediumistic abilities began to dramatically improve.
Letting the Spirits In
Freed from the fear brought on by the belief that protection might be necessary, I was able to connect with more “difficult” spirit communicators. It was no longer just sweet old grannies I was sensing. Now I was getting whoever the client needed to hear from — alcoholic fathers who were neglectful or abusive, friends who died from a drug overdose, children who died by suicide, etc.
Every single one of them provided some form of healing, clarify, comfort or closure that my clients needed. No, the spirit communicators didn’t try to possess me. No, they scare me. No they didn’t hurt me or impact me negatively in any way.
None of the silly scary stuff that happens in horror movies ever happened to me. Not because I was protecting myself. Or because I had some super power immunity. Not because I am special. It was because those “scary” experiences and the fear people had about them were not mine. And I refused to take it on.
Belief Is True Protection
Can I prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that there is no such thing as “low-evolved entities”? Or demons or stuck spirits or possession or any other million scary things people want to associate with the spirit world or psychic ability? I don’t personally believe in any of those things and I have a lot of experience to back up those beliefs. But I cannot prove with absolutely certainty that they don’t exist to someone whose own experience suggests otherwise. What I can prove beyond a shadow of a doubt is that you don’t need any sort of protection to safely develop and work with psychic ability and mediumship.
In fact, my own experience shows the more I focused on protecting myself the more my own experience brought in something — spiders, popped light bulbs, scary sounds, etc. — that feels like I need protection from. Those who know the Law of Attraction will recognize it at work here. Like the parent telling a crying child “if you want something to cry about, I’ll give you something to cry about”, the Universe can help you manifest your own fears if that is what you choose to make your area of focus.
So What Are You Afraid Of?
As long as you believe you need protection — you will continue to need protection. But I’m living proof that you don’t really need a protection ritual unless you believe you need a protection ritual. It is my belief I am perfectly safe and that alone is all I need. It has been almost seven years since I’ve done any form of protection. Since then, I’ve connected to the spirit world and given psychic readings hundreds and hundreds of time without protection and without incident.
So what are you really protecting yourself from with a protection ritual? Could it be, like me, the only thing you need protection from is your need for protection?
Interested in learning more? I run a private Facebook group dedicated to teaching practical intuition and evidential mediumship. You can also check out my available services here for readings, classes, events, and workshops.
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