Spiritual Growth spurts

In order for an instrument to play properly, it needs to be in tune. All of the strings or keys need to be adjusted to harmonize together. If one string is off, the instrument will not sing when played; rather it will sound grating, jarring and unsettling. This is how we also work as vibrational physical and spiritual beings. We have two aspects of ourselves that need to be in harmony. If one aspect of your life is in one key or vibration, and another is in a completely different key or vibration, you are in a state of disharmony. This can happen when you suddenly experience a change in your ability to open and connect with Spirit. Why is this what do you do about it?

Growth often happens in spurts. Remember when you were a kid and all of a sudden you grew about an inch in 2 weeks? Well, this can happen too in spiritual growth. Have you recently gone through a period where you made a huge leap in your ability to connect with Spirit? Have you suddenly grasped concepts that previously made no sense to you? Have you made a big step forward in your spiritual based business and are suddenly reaching more people than before, offering new services or just raised your prices? Are you spending more time with people who are also on a Spiritual path? Every time you reach a new level in your growth, everything else in your life has to adjust too. Your spiritual life has just raised its vibration, now everything else needs to rearrange to accommodate that.

Think about it. When you suddenly grew as a kid, nothing fit you. You may have even felt awkward and clumsy as you adjusted to the different dimensions in your body. You may have tripped more easily, or knocked things over. You may have needed more food and more sleep. When you make leaps forward in your spiritual life, your physical life needs time to catch up. In the realm of Spirit, things move at light speed and the Divine Light makes transformation and healing happen at incredibly fast rates-faster than the dense vibration of the Earth plane. This is why we work with Spirit and one of the incredible benefits of opening to Spirit. However, not every aspect of your life can absorb the same rate of change.

It's really easy to get used to the highflying vibration that Spirit brings into your life. As your interest increases, so do your abilities, your sensitivity and your vibration. As you open to Spirit you begin to spend more time hanging out in those higher vibrations-Spirit is amazing, uplifting, enlightening, powerful, and transformative. But wait a minute. You are still a human being in a human body. If you were supposed to be in the Spirit realm all the time, you wouldn't be here! Right? Right. You are here, in a body, for your own soul growth and path. There are things you came here to learn and work through too.  As both human beings and spirits, and we need to bring both dimensions of our existence into alignment with the other. Both aspects have to work together, or you exist in a state of disharmony and your engine breaks down.

You know if you're experiencing this disharmony if:

• You are suddenly having difficulty being patient with people in your life
• The things that you did for relaxation are not really relaxing you
• You feel aggravated, irritable and over sensitive
• Your wardrobe, diet, TV shows, music, or regular routines suddenly feel different or uncomfortable
• You are experiencing emotional swings up and down
• You generally feel "off" or unmotivated with no good reason

These are all signs that you may be experiencing spiritual growth spurts that aren't being supported by your physical life circumstances. Take a deep breath, take a moment and observe your physical life and evaluate if there are areas ready for a change to a new, higher vibration. You can fix this! Here's how:

Here are some areas to look at:

Your personal relationships with friends, family and clients. Do your boundaries need to be redrawn? Are there some friends you may need to distance from for a bit? Is there someone you are beginning to dread spending time with? Be honest.

Your leisure time. Maybe you're getting tired going to bars or clubs. Maybe your tastes are shifting in your media choices, maybe your recreational time is not feeling as relaxing as it used to. Where are you noticing the "off" feeling? Be patient as you take time to observe how you spend your time and be honest with what you see.

Your personal self-care: Maybe you are ready to shift your diet, drink more water or get more sleep. Perhaps you may want to take on fewer clients as you adjust to your new levels of sensitivity and awareness. Maybe you need some more time by yourself than usual. Maybe you need to find a new activity you enjoy that isn't about Spirit, but just about you enjoying yourself.

Remember, we have physical and spiritual selves. Both of these aspects of our existences need to be operating in the same, or harmonizing, vibrations or they are not in a state of mutual support and the system will break down. Use your new Spiritual skills of awareness and sensitivity and apply them to your own life. Find some areas where you can make some little changes-it doesn't take a major overhaul. In fact, that is even more unsettling. Just pick a couple of things to try and see how you feel. You can gently bring the other areas of your life into harmony with your beautiful, new, high-flying vibe! As always, trust yourself and your process. Need help with this? We can always look into this for personalized and unique solutions, just for you, in a reading!

With love,

Ashley

Part of being on a Spiritual path is letting go...

All of us want to be kind and compassionate. All of us want to do all we can to help others in our lives, the ones that we love, to succeed, to be happy, to be healthy, to be safe. As we progress on our paths it becomes clear that we are all responsible for ourselves and there is really only so much you can do for someone else. This is one of the life lessons that can be hardest to accept, especially when you love someone who is ill, who is an addict or who simply won't take care of themselves.

How do you really help someone else?

In my most difficult and challenging relationships, I have asked Spirit what my best course of action is. This is what they said: You service their soul and not their personality.

In other words, Spirit is saying that it is important to detach enough to be able to look at what is in the Highest Good for someone. Is it in their Highest Good for you to rescue them, yet again? Probably not. Rescuing others is not allowing them to learn the lessons they are learning through whatever pattern or difficulty they are going through. This is not so easy, as the personality of the one you love will fight you all the way. They will be angry with you for not doing what you have always done. They will hate you for not saving them. They will say mean and hurtful things to you out of their own pain.

The desire to help someone you love can be so strong, so overpowering that it can be easy to believe you have the power to actually change someone's life. The truth is, you don't. With people who are caught in destructive patterns, whether it is abuse, addiction, mental or physical illness; no matter what someone else on the outside tries to do to guide, help or assist, until the person themselves sees the pattern there is really nothing you can do.

The internal need for someone you love to be OK can be so intense that it blinds you. You act out of panic and denial, rather than from peace and compassion. You can get caught in a destructive pattern where you constantly drop your own life to take care of someone else's inability, or you send money to your addict sister for the 100th time when she swears that this time it's just to buy some new clothes. You rush to take over someone's life, to bail them out. The guidance I receive from my Guides and Angels cautions against this, because in reality, sometimes the kindest thing you can do is let them experience the consequences of their actions. For me, this means not dropping everything to run and take care of my ill relative who will not take care of herself. For you, maybe it's not covering up for someone's drinking problem or emotional abuse anymore. Let the chips fall where they may. Then there is actually an opportunity for the ill person to see what they are doing to themselves. This is servicing the soul.

The next thing Spirit has said about these challenging relationships is to point out the enormous gifts I have received from navigating through these relationship struggles. My Guides and Angels have told me to open my heart to forgiveness and to choose to see these challenges as soul growth lessons. So, although I am not always successful at remembering this, I try. We can choose to recognize that part of our life paths is to learn this lesson of detaching while still being kind and compassionate. We can learn how to love and let go. In doing this I have discovered that without the challenges I have faced, I would not have developed my strengths. If I had not experienced profound loss, would I have found my Guides and Angels? Would I ever know the miracle of healing relationships after death?

It is not in the challenge that we find our strength-it is in how we rise to meet it. When we pray for courage and strength, God does not just give us courage and strength; the Divine gives us the opportunity to find those qualities within ourselves. This is what experiencing physical life is all about: every single person and circumstance is in our lives to teach us something that helps our souls to grow.

What circumstances have you lived through and what strengths did you develop as a result? Who are your toughest teachers and what are you learning from them? Write it down then thank them for it, even if you just say it in a prayer.

With love,

Ashley   

Your body responds to a reading

Sometimes after a reading clients will experience some physical symptoms. While these vary from person to person, experiencing physical after-effects is not uncommon, especially if you have never had a reading or an energetic healing before. Why is this and what are some of the symptoms you may experience?

Why physical symptoms happen

A reading is a direct experience with Spirit. Spirit exists in the Divine Light. This is Source, or God, energy. This is powerful, pure and transformative. It is a higher energetic vibration, or frequency, than we live in here in physical life on Earth. When you come into contact with the Divine Light, whether through a mediumship reading, an energy healing of some kind, or even in meditation, you are introducing a high, pure and different vibration into your physical, mental and energetic systems. This is real and this affects you. How does this happen in a reading and what are some effects?

The reason to have a reading is to connect the client with their Spiritual team of supporters; their Guides, Angels and Loved Ones who love and watch over them. This means getting everyone in the same space and time together.  The medium is the facilitator, or host, of this connection. Picture this: the medium decides to throw a small gathering at her place and starts getting things ready. She cleans, sets up some snacks and puts on her hostess dress. Then she invites those people in Spirit who are close to the client to come to the party. These people show up. These are the client’s Spirit Guides, Angels, Deceased Loved Ones - whomever is in the best interest for the client at this particular point in time shows up at the party. Everyone's excited, as it is at this specific party that the special celebrity guest will arrive. This special guest is the person they have been wanting to connect with; the one they have been calling but who hasn't necessarily been home to take their calls. So, Spirit is excited to be in the same room with this person with an opportunity to connect and communicate. After everyone in Spirit has had their opportunity to come in and get comfortable, the medium then invites the special guest, the client, to the party.

The moment the client gets on the phone with the medium is when everyone is at the party at the same place and time. From then on, the medium acts as translator for the people at the party: translating information from Spirit to the client. This is the whole point of a reading; to get everyone together in the same room and have a conversation. To have a conversation, Spirit uses energy– this is their language. They don't have voice boxes. They can't talk the way we do using our physical bodies. So they send energy in different forms. The medium receives the information through their own energetic, or chakra, system and translates it through their physical body and gives it out to the client with their voice, or throat chakra. Imagine you are sitting at a table with a translator and a person speaking a foreign language. You may understand and be focused primarily on the translator, but you are still hearing and receiving from information from the speaker. You are still part of the conversation. So in a reading, the client is also receiving information in the form of energy from Spirit because they are present and part of the conversation, or energetic link, occurring. This direct contact with Spirit, with the Divine Light, can cause the client's own energetic system to respond and the energy begins to flow. It is like a jumpstart to your car battery; blockages start moving and chakras start opening and when these things happen, very real physical symptoms can result.

What are the symptoms?

Some of these common symptoms that can occur after readings are also common to those that occur after energy healing of all kinds: tenderness in the crown and third eye chakras, headaches, generally feeling “off”, excessively tired or the opposite – feeling jumpy or like you can’t sleep. You might even feel flu-ish or like a cold is coming on. Or, you may feel a burst of energy. You might get really thirsty or hungry, or you may not have an appetite. Everyone is different and their body responds differently to the high vibration energy from Spirit. All of these symptoms are indications that your energetic system has experienced an influx of the Spiritual energy that was flowing during the reading/healing.

So how long does this last and what do you do?

First, if you haven't already, educate yourself on the chakra system. Check out this great article on how the physical and energetic systems are interrelated by Shamana Sarah Petruno here. Then try some grounding and clearing meditations to move your energy. Then, set up a reading with a medium or a healing with an energy practitioner to help move your energy or to find out directly from Spirit what your best next steps are.

Experiencing physical effects from readings is a great sign that your Spirit is ready to make some changes. If you are experiencing symptoms, it means your system is responding to the high vibration from Spirit and indicates that you are ready to begin working on a Spiritual path. Another way to look at it is that your aches and pains are your Spirit speaking to you through your physical body: it's ready for you to start paying closer attention to your true self within.

Wondering what your best next steps are? Let's connect with your Spirits to find out!

with love,

Ashley

When you don't like what you hear from Spirit

Sometimes in readings the tone is fun, light, exciting, touching and playful. Other times not so much. Sometimes Spirit comes through to talk about tougher stuff; they bring illumination to areas in your life that aren’t in their highest state. Sometimes Spirit sheds light on the darker places. At times, in readings Spirit will discuss how my clients are avoiding things in their lives, how perhaps they are not being truly honest with themselves or with others. Spirit may encourage my client to stretch outside of their comfort zone and change things in order to really move forward into their path and purpose.

When these kinds of messages come through, it can be tempting to “cherry pick” guidance; to take what you like and discard the rest. It is easy to think, “well, that part was from Spirit – that other part maybe was wrong.” Here’s the thing – it doesn’t work that way. You can’t believe some of it and then not the part that isn’t as appealing to you. Spiritual Guidance is about growth, love and support and sometimes that love can feel like tough love. When someone loves you, really loves you, they don’t tell you what you want to hear, they tell you what they really think and what you actually need to hear. They tell you the truth.

It can also be enticing to keep asking Spirit the same question when you don’t like the answer you are getting. You keep asking in the hopes the response will be different next time. This doesn’t work. Think about it this way - how do you feel when someone asks your opinion repeatedly on the same issue over and over again and you put thought, energy and love into responding and they never heed your advice? What about that friend of yours who is in an abusive relationship and you have talked her through it, around it, offered help, given her support groups to go to, offered to house her when she first leaves him and it always ends up the same way – she goes back to him and doesn’t take any of your suggestions? At a certain point, you stop answering. You stop offering solutions and you give up. If you repeatedly ask the same question of Spirit but then refuse to follow through on the guidance they give because you don’t like it, they will eventually be quiet about it. Spirit will give you direction, ideas, encouragement and will offer you love and support as you work to make changes. But, if you keep asking the same question, taking the answer and then not using it because you don’t like what you hear, sooner or later that same question is going to stop being answered. This doesn’t mean they stop loving, supporting and encouraging you, but they will refrain from giving you guidance that you refuse to take.

The same rules for any relationship apply to yours with your Angles, Guides and Loved Ones - If you ask for an opinion, be prepared to hear it. This goes for people both in physical bodies and not currently in physical bodies, like your Spirit Guides, Angels and Deceased Loved Ones. By Although the answer may not be what you think you want to hear, by trusting Spirit and taking all of what they say, not just the “good” part, you open yourself to the opportunity for growth and transformation and your relationship with Spirit can grow and flower.

Remember, the true value of guidance lies not in its appeal to your ego, but rather to your Spirit within. 

with love,

Ashley