Explorez tous les épisodes du podcast True Spirituality with Ange

In this episode I share about a self enquiry process that can help spiritual seekers examine through the lens of critical faculty beliefs that they hold or that they are being served by religious or spiritual leaders.

But first, we should start with us. This episode is a follow up on how the mind works which I believe is an incredibly important episode for us spiritual seekers. The mind is both wonderful and dangerous and we need to know how to use it safely. Peace starts with us, as we explore in the interview with Barbara With and that starts with examining our own thoughts.

The process is called "The Work" and was created (or received) by Byron Katie at a time in her life where she wasn't functioning any more and she realised that a big part of her suffering came from her own thoughts. It is obviously nothing new to practices such a buddhism. However, what is unique and powerful about her process is that it is incredible simple. People confuse simplicity with lack of power. Nothing could be further from the truth. Simple things can sometimes be a lot harder than complex ones. And believe me, her process packs a punch.

It rests in four simple questions:

1. Is it true?
2. Are you sure?
3. How do you feel when you believe this thought?
4. Who would you be without it? Or how would you feel without it?

Then she asks you to turn your thought around and instead of pointing the finger at others (something that the ego looooooves to do - yes I know about this because I have an ego too), and take it back to you. It's also a lesson in acceptance which ties in with the F**k It Experiment in conducted in June.

In the episode I go through the process about a belief that has been making me angry of late, and that is that my knees are ruining my life. I had a knee injury last year and just as I am finally able to run again, my other knee has decided to pack up. Grrrr.

But we also need to use this process to go through the b**sh*t that we are constantly served by spiritual and religious leaders. And I used the example of the Virgin birth and how that ties into the "divine feminine" (to hear my thoughts on that concept, listen to episode 50 here) and Jesus' celibacy which makes us all feel ashamed about our basic emotional and sexual needs.

So take it into your spiritual journey to be more discerning about what and who you believe. It's a spiritual jungle out there, remember. Keep yourself safe.

If you would like to explore beliefs in a safe space with a professional (me), why not book a discovery call with this link. You can start working with me from as little as £111 a month.

This episode explores the progress that science has made to measure or understand consciousness and is based on a book called Being You by Anil Seth. Frankly, I was a little disappointed by the content of the book, which I have yet to finish. However, I think what I discovered by reading this book is important for us spiritual speakers because it shows the limits of how much objectivity we hold.

This in turn is important to keep us grounded in our own perception of what is happening to us as we navigate the spirit world.

One of the most important ideas of the first part of the book is that consciousness is not measured or ranked by how awakened we are or whether we can speak and demonstrate that ability. It is very dangerous to assume that a human being has a superior consciousness to a turtle, for example. Because the reality of consciousness is an INNER experience that in a vast majority of cases cannot be captured by the existing methods of measurement.

However the author argues that temperature used to be a mystery and science has since demystified temperature to the point where now most people grasp the concept instantly. And that is because scientists have invented an instrument that can measure it. This has not yet been possible for consciousness, but we can be confident that one day they will.

The other interesting that surfaced from the book is that we should not confuse wakefulness with consciousness as the dream experiences that we have whilst we sleep are actually part of our consciousness.

Why do I think it's important to explore the point of view of scientists with regards to consciousness? Because we need to understand what is real and what is not as spiritual seekers. In the episode, I refer back to the episode about mental health and spirituality which you can listen to here.

In this episode I explored John C. Parkin and his wife's philosophy that rests mantras that start with the phrase "F**k it".

Their book came out in 2019 and made a lot of noise because for the first time, a swear word was associated with a spiritual practice. And although their method is not for everyone, it actually rests on sound principles.

Swear words and profanities are looked down upon and sometimes even banned by religion, especially the three Abrahamic ones (i.e. Judaism, Islam and Christianity). It is considered disrespectful, negative and a sign of lack of control. I have to admit to partaking to that point of view myself at the start of my spiritual journey. But then, I unpacked both my prejudice and my privilege and have now changed my views. Swearing is not something I do often, but I no longer consider it "unspiritual". I think this ties in with the episode I did about whether spiritual people get angry, which you can listen by clicking on this link.

To get an idea of what the F**k it philosophy is like, I did a fourteen day experiment on my social media, which I also share on the podcast. It was both fun and interesting.

Of the six basic mantras that are at the core of the F**k it revolution, I have retained one: "F**k it, I can relax now".

In conclusion, I have enjoyed this experiment and would recommend it to beginners on the spiritual path. I would love to know what you think though, so please feel free to comment below.

This month's guest, Cindy Stal, brings a whole new level of wisdom that comes from her first hand experience at healing incredible pain with pleasure. Her awakening happened as she was sitting in her corporate job, in a grey office, with a grey carpet, a grey ceiling and when she looked outside, she saw the grey sky and thought to herself, "I can't do this anymore". She started thinking about how she dreaded going to work on Sunday afternoons, and I am sure some of you will relate to this.

A second powerful moment in Cindy's life was when her first husband was in hospital for cancer and she wandered into the hospital chapel and prayed. It's not something she did often at the time, and she heard "Follow your passion". She looked around, only to find out she was alone in the church.

When she gave birth to her still born daughter and experienced pain like never before, the voice came back and said "You have to keep your heart open or you will lose everything". So she listened to the voice. Keeping her heart open was the simplest yet the hardest thing she had been asked to do. It is so much harder than to close it down to protect us. And thanks to keeping her heart open, her husband and her became closer instead of growing apart. They were able to be there for each other.

Cindy challenges the narrative of the grief industry that tends to reinforce the victim mentality. Instead, Cindy wants to invite us to embrace pleasure as the powerful healer that it is. Pleasure is about choosing life again. This lead her to create the Pussy Oracle, a beautiful deck laced with gold, pink and purple, that talks about so much more than pleasure and sex. To find out about Cindy, head over to her website. You can also find her on IG and FB.

Angel numbers are a very special way that they can get your attention, through digital clocks, car plates or house numbers. And this is great.

In this week's episode, I am going to explore the meaning of numbers 1 to 9 in traditional numerology, then dive into the meaning that Diana Cooper, the angel lady in the UK, assigns to them only to invite you to check how it lands with you.

It can be confusing to see that each spiritual teacher assigns a different meaning to angel numbers. Who is right? You are right, inasmuch as what matters is how you feel about one particular teacher or number. Number 3, for example, reminds me of my dad. But to a Christian, it will have the particular association with Christ consciousness or the trinity.

Angel numbers are one of the signs that angels use to communicate with you but what I have come to learn is that they use a sign that is significant to you rather than what it is supposed to mean universally. For this reason, I invite you to do an audit of the symbols that mean something special to you. One number can mean something different to you because it is the day you met a certain person, or got your first job, or whatever.

I also encourage you to listen to EP 23 about signs from the Universe to get a broader understanding of how signs work.

The BBC has released a powerful documentary called Backlash, the murder of George Loyd. This documentary is the foundation for today's episode. All spiritual people should care about black lives and equality. I felt called to do this episode also because in my interview with Barbara With last month, we talked about World Peace and the fact that peace starts within. I do not believe that anger at systemic oppression falls into that category. That anger is righteous anger. It obviously should be channeled positively but I will be the last one to judge people who have taken part in riots in response to systematic oppression. I will also not tolerate people who call out "wokism" when it is about human rights and basic decency.

We live in times where there is a rise in fascism and fascist ideas, which can be very seductive and keeping silent in those times leads to validating these ideas. It is right to be upset when human rights are violated. It is not enough not to be racist, we need to be anti-racist.

The spiritual community is mostly white. It is rare to see people of colour as attendees not to mention as speakers and that needs to change. In the UK, 18% of population is black and there should be a proportionate representation in all spaces, but there is not.

White spiritual communities still violate the culture of indigenous people by selling white sage and palo santo in "spiritual" shops. I still see dream catchers sold in Mind Body Spirit Fairs. And no one bat an eye lid at it. Even Lee Harris, who i respect and love, has a lit white sage wand in his videos. This needs to stop. Please listen to Episode 75 to educate yourself around what cultural appropriation is.

Listen to the episode for book recommendations to educate yourself on the topic of racism.

In part 1 of today's episode I talk about the dangers of ignoring our intuition. You know how important it is for me to keep you safe on your spiritual journey. I have actually already published an episode on how to do that and I invite you to listen to it, if you haven't already. I have also already done one episode on intuition. Click here to listen. And sometimes listening to one's intuition is a question of life and death, as Emma Turton, one of my guests shared in EP 29 on Health, Illness and Spirituality.

In part 2 of this week's episode, I share the three main reasons we don't trust our intuition.

In part 3, I share what we can do about it.

In Part 1, I share three stories. Two that happened to me and one that happened to the engineers of NASA. So it's not just little old me. These are cautionary tales. Intuition can do two things for us, it can steer you away from danger, or it can pull us towards wonderful things. As you might have guessed by the title, today we talk about the dangers of ignoring it.

In Part 2 I explain why it's actually perfectly reasonable not to trust our intuition. We have all been conditioned to ignore it and more often than not, it doesn't make sense.

But because intuition is here to save us from danger, like the sign on the road above this text, we need to take three action steps to change our relationship to intuition. Here are the three things I encourage you to do:

1. Go on a treasure hunt for stories of intuition
2. Analyse your stories of intuition to spot patterns
3. Pluck up the courage to take action

I share one story where I had the courage to take action, which in that particularly story meant to speak up for what I had been shown BEFORE I knew if it was right. This is a story that I shared in my memoir, Spiritual Lawyer. I invite you to do the same. Find the courage within to act on it. And for now, just pick one of the three points I listed above. You don't have to pick the most difficult. You can start easy.

Barbara With is a musician, a composer and a channeler. Barbara had a twenty year career as a musician, touring on the road with her original material. It is during that time that she discovered automatic writing. She was writing a letter to a friend and suddenly the whole mood shifted. The words that came out were full of love, compassion and were very uplifting.

You know it's channeling due to the nature of the words. Its fruits, so to speak.

Because she had been mentored for a long time, she knew what was happening.

Three years ago, Barbara was called to go on a Peace Pilgrimage. She rented out her house and travelled the world on a peace tour. She took a leap of faith and closed down all the activities that supported her financially. What happened was phenomenal. First, she toured in the US, then in January, she headed towards the UK. She travelled 23,000 miles. She was in the UK during the Julien Assange trial. She contacted the Aetherius Society. But mostly talked to everyone who asked her why she was in the UK by sharing her mission to bring world peace, through working on each one's individual peace. Peace starts with us. It starts within.

During year 2, she headed to Georgia and set up to lay the foundation of her work. She had been teaching about world peace since 1999. This time, she created a global conflict REVOLUTION TM challenge. You can download it for free on her website. It starts with us, and as we go through the process, the world around us starts to change.

She is now at the end of her second year and has been invited to speak at a conference in Barcelona about the Science of Consciousness. This coincides with the 70th anniversary of the Russell Einstein Manifesto.

Barbara's main guide is Einstein and she is really excited what he will have to say considering the anniversary of the manifesto is on the 9th of July and the conference is on the 8th. Barbara will be rubbing shoulders with Deepak Chopra, Nassim Haramein and more. She will be channeling Einstein on stage.

Fun fact, I don't think there is anyone who is more scared of seeing ghosts and spirits than I am.

As usual, we started the episode with a definition of ghost and a definition of spirit. The consensus in the Oxford dictionary seems to be that ghosts are apparitions of dead people that appear mostly as nebulous images whereas spirits seems to be seen as the non physical part of a person which is the seat of emotions and character, also known as the soul. My personal definition is that ghosts are stuck in limbo or earth bound, whereas spirit people are visiting. Usually spirit visits are positive and have a purpose. To learn more about the spirit world, listen to Episode 49.

The commonality between ghosts is that they have usually had a brutal or upsetting death which has generated such intense emotions that they are not able to move on. I am sure a lot of you can relate to that feeling as it can happen sometimes when something overwhelming happens to us.

In the episode, though, I explore a third and fourth option for what people perceive as ghosts. The third option is an energy imprint left by an action done so many times by someone that that would leave a trace even after they left. The fourth is more interesting: it happens when our soul splits and we leave a fragment of it in a place and time where we have experienced trauma. It happened to me and I have helped clients retrieve soul fragments. I have never heard of a psychic who had seen such soul fragments but I would love to hear from you if you have. This can happen for example, when you have a car accident or maybe you receive some shocking news. Your soul isolates that moment in time energetically to protect you, but it also drains you so when the time is right, it is important to be able to retrieve these soul fragments.

In a similar vein, I do wonder if people who are experiencing NDEs have ever been seen as "ghosts" by psychics before. Again, if you have, I would love to hear from you. Check out the episode I did about NDEs with this link.

The fifth possibility are entities, which I have touched upon briefly in episode 08, which I encourage you to listen to.

Science does offer one option too and I want you to explore that one first to make sure you are safe, and that is carbon monoxide poisoning. Have your boilers checked, friends. Keep healthy.

In this episode, I share my experience of a healing session in the Akashic Records with the support of Chantal Vanderhaeghen, a Mind Body Spirit Counsellor, with whom I have worked for several years. The healing session was for me and I wanted to explore the reason why I have not been able to release the weight that I want despite having brushed up my eating and having joined a gym about a month ago.

Healing sessions happen very often in the Akashic Records and I would like to invite you to listen to EP 57 if you haven't already, to understand better what the Akashic Records are.

As soon as I asked the question in the Akashic Records, I was shown myself wearing a full suit of armour, medieval style. I heard the words "Armour of Motherhood". It made a lot of senses. What I was shown is that the thirty years of battles I have experienced as a mother had created that heavy energy around me and that heaviness had created extra weight in the physical. I was aware that I tend to use weight to create a protective layer for myself, but this was new.

I was astounded as a few days before I had been listening to a Lee Harris interview about his book, the Future Human, where he says he sees the energy of war leaving the Earth in the ten years to come. I had also interviewed a woman for the podcast who is a Peace activist. It felt like the Universe was conspiring to help me let go of that warrior energy.

Today I want to talk about the Dark Night of the Soul, which is a very common concept in spiritual circles, especially mystic ones. It's a phase of our lives where we experience a lot of pain and loss, but that pain and loss ultimately transforms her and helps us find a greater meaning in life.

I have experienced many dark nights of the soul, but in this episode, I focused on three of them in the hope that they will inspire you or help you if this is something you are going through right now. Right now, I am in the happiest part of my life, and I believe that the levels of joy I am experiencing are probably more intense because of the pain that I have been through previously. However, despite this, I will never buy into the No pain no gain philosophy.

I believe that the reason we sometimes have to experience pain is that we sleep walk through life and maybe even live someone else's version of life instead of our own. And we are too afraid of change to live the life that we are meant to live. this wake up call can come in the form of a job loss, a divorce, the death of a loved one, a challenging illness or an accident.

They are of course traumatic and my purpose is not to serve you a dish of toxic positivity. There is however an opportunity for growth in them. And sometimes, these events happen because we don't listen to the more subtle signs we are sent by the Universe. Not always, but sometimes.

It is our job to find the meaning in it. Or to look for the bigger picture. The model of the Hero''s Journey can help us understand that we all go through these and that they have a universal power.

What we should not do is try to avoid the pain and the loss. It's important to stay with it, as buried feelings never die.

The three episodes I share are as follows:

1. Three brushes with death when I still lived in Paris that showed me the link between emotions and illnesses. Please refer to Episode 29 on Health, Illness and Spirituality with Emma Turton.
2.  
3. The loss of my career when I was pregnant with my third child, which helped me leave a career that was not fulfilling me and be a better mum for my children.
4.  
5. A car accident that showed my mother's true colours and helped me make a final break with her.

If you have experienced a dark night of the soul and would like to share it, feel free to use the contact me form to share.

I am sure you have had wind of the turmoil that is agitating the UK right now after the Supreme Court decision of the 16th of April that decided that the legal definition of a woman is linked to biological sex. If not, where have you been hiding. This has really shaken me to my core and prompted me to record my first advocacy episode where I debunk the idea that gender is an ideology and put the debate where it belongs: in the human rights camps.

I was going to do this as a speech at my next toastmasters' meeting but then decided it would do nicely as a podcast episode. Speeches at Toastmasters are limited to 5 to 7 minutes and it's not enough to explore the topic in depth.

In a nutshell:

Sex and gender are two entirely different concepts. Members of the medical community in the UK have described this ruling as absurd and scientifically incorrect.

Sometimes the law is wrong and outdated. The Supreme Court refused to consult members of the trans community before ruling and the Good law Project is already preparing a case to take the UK government to the European Court of Justice. You can help by donating to them so that the blow to human rights that just happened can be corrected.

This is not a case of standing by and allowing things to unfold. Trans rights are human rights.

In the meantime, if you are a woman, please post on social media that trans women are welcome in your space by following Katie Neeves' suggestion on LinkedIn.

A quick reminder that you have until next Wednesday to purchase my Trust Your Intuition Online course for half price. Click here to invest.

Our guest this month shares her journey of having grown up in a household with a mother who "found Jesus". It's taken a few years for Nismah to deconstruct her mother's faith and live her best life. She has a podcast where she interviews people who have gone through the same process called the Escape from Religion.

What is religious deconstruction? It's the process of pulling apart and re-examining one's religious beliefs. It originated in the US around evangelism. Wikipedia tells us that people who deconstruct have described destabilizing feelings of anxiety, guilt, anger, confusion, and fear, as well as curiosity, awe, and liberation. As an open-ended process, the outcome of deconstruction is uncertain.

I think it's a good idea for us to re-examine our beliefs, whether religious or other, so I was really excited to have Nismah on the podcast.

Nismah experienced religion as toxic due to the numerous rules and conditions that she had to follow, that she believes lead to self abandonment. She explains that she finds it hard sometimes to distinguish between religion and cult because where do you draw the line?

We also discussed how sadly religions tend to have an all or nothing approach to their teachings, which is difficult for some people, especially when some of it does not resonate. Nismah describes her deconstruction as a gradual process that culminated one day as she read a passage in the Bible that claimed that women had to be silent, and she had a profound reaction to it, recognising that it did not align with her values. It turns out the rampant homophobic environment she grew up in was the last nail on the coffin, as Nismah discovered she was gay.

A quick reminder that my Trust Your Intuition Online Course is available at a 50% discount for the whole month of April (2025)on my Thinkific platform. Click here to purchase.

But before we start on the how to stay high vibe no matter what, I wanted first to define what is high vibe. Sometimes when we want to define something, we have to say what it’s not. So there’s two things that for me, high vibing is not.

The first thing that it’s not is smiling when you feel like crying, shouting, kicking or screaming. That is not being high vibe. Smiling is easy. I can just smile now, but inside I can have incredible feelings bubbling in me that make me feel totally disconnected from this smile. So for me, high vibe comes from a much, much deeper place than just smiling and pretending things are okay. High vibe for me is an energy. Now I’m going to explore a little bit this idea because I think as children, we all knew when people were pretending they were happy and when they were not because all children can read energy. I remember numerous instances when my mom would say, don’t be silly, or this or that or the other because what I was looking at didn’t fit with how it made me feel. And I think all children are like that. So maybe actually the start of this episode would be for you to ask your children and have this conversation with them to help them understand that there’s nothing wrong with them.

The second thing that being high vibe is not is complaining, bitching, gossiping and feeling like the world is against you. This is really low vibe.

To me, the definition of being high vibe is a feeling of unconditional happiness that comes from knowing that the universe has your back. And I need to say this is work in progress because from where we come from, if you are from the same kind of background as me, where we were taught to feel that the world was full of dangers, that we had to be careful with strangers, that we shouldn’t trust other people and all sorts of things, this is kind of an alien concept. It will take some work on yourself, on your beliefs, on your mindset to get to the point where you have this unconditional happiness. And also talking about unconditional happiness, we are also taught to believe that something or someone is going to make us happy. And that comes from the fact that our parents want to make us happy. So if we’re not happy, they take it personally as a sign that they haven’t done their job. I remember as a child feeling sad, feeling angry feelings that were not welcome in our house. We had to be happy and if we weren’t, we were constantly reminded how other people were less happy than we were less fortunate, and we should just count our blessings, which is counterproductive when you’re dealing with emotions.

Note: I mention in the episode that my memoir My Father Who Art in Heaven is only available privately. This is not longer the case. It is now available on Amazon. Click here to purchase it.

Here’s a couple of tips that I’ve identified that can help you to be high vibe regardless of the circumstances.

1. Stop labelling things as good or bad.
2. Ask yourself how can I make the most of the this situation?
3. Don’t complain about what is happening to you
4. Ask yourself: how can I turn this challenge into an opportunity?
5. Face your fears and ask ask yourself if they are real. A great way to do this is to use Byron Katie’s process.
6. Listen to upbeat music, be mindful of the lyrics though
7. Do something creative
8. Watch something funny and have a good laugh

Be aware that because this is an episode from a previous podcasts, my facebook page has changed and some of the references to websites are no longer active.

In today's episode I touch on the subject of keeping yourself safe whilst exploring spiritual practices but also the line that exists between the two, which is sometimes hard to define. A spiritual experience badly managed can result in a mental illness or breakdown.

A reminder that my Trust Your Intuition Online Course is available at a 50% discount for the whole month of April (2025), as I believe that intuition is the tool that will keep you safe. I believe that in the context of this particular episode, it would help you find a safe spiritual teacher to mentor you through these experiences. Click here to find out more.

If you are reading this blog or listening to the episode after April 2025 and want to make sure you never miss a discount or promotion, sign up for my newsletter with this link.

Intense spiritual practices can lead to psychosis or other mental health challenges. They are to be taken seriously and not to be practiced on your own or at the hands of inexperienced people. They can literally lead to paranoia, obsessive rituals, unshakable beliefs in false information, grandiose beliefs, extreme guilt or fear of being punished, incoherent or jumbled thoughts and withdrawal.

Spiritual practices and beliefs can also be used to bypass negative emotions and trauma, and lead to people believing that they have no ego or are all "love and light". This is actually rather dangerous as these individuals usually end up projecting their unresolved feelings onto you. I have had people psychically attack me when in that state of mind. It's nasty.

The first four statements that can help you screen yourself for mental illness (though it is often hard to be objective when we are in the thick of it) are:

1. I feel that others control what I think or feel
2. I see or hear things that others do not hear or see
3. I feel it is difficult for me to express myself in words that others can understand
4. I find it difficult to make the difference between what's real and what's not

To understand how the mind works, I encourage you to listen to EP 63 on how the mind works.

My personal experience of both clairvoyance and psychosis had led me to understand that they feel very different even if you might see exactly the same thing. And that difference lies in the mental state you are in when they happen. If you are grounded and calm, they feel serene. If you are agitated, they can upset you. Not to mention you can believe that something that is not here, actually is. I didn't. I knew exactly what was happening. I share about these experiences in my memoir, Spiritual Lawyer, which is available on Amazon. Click here to purchase.

I remember when hearing about kundalini awakening for the first time, wanting to experience that. A kundalini experience is a process of activating a dormant energy that is believed to be at the base of our spine, which can lead to a spiritual awakening. Dr Greyson, whom I mentioned in EP 66 about Near Death Experiences, has written a paper about it where he mentions that the Western model of science is not able to explain them. He does, however, compare them to near death experiences.

In relevant spiritual traditions, people were kept safe and supervised by an experienced member of that community, a shaman, who usually had experienced something similar. This leads me to caution everyone about doing breath work and even meditation without the presence of a highly qualified person with a mental health background.

This being said, I also believe that some of these experiences can be caused by tears in our energy fields, possibly due to substance abuse or trauma and that repairing the energy field can go a long way to support mental health recovery. I would never, however, advise not to seek professional help.

This is of course a first exploration of the theme and we might circle back to this topic in further episodes if need be.

Today's episode was inspired by a conversation i had with one of my clients over the weekend. A conversation came up with some relatives where the fact that she had "manifested" her house was disclosed and it made her feel very uneasy. She wanted my opinion as a mentor. 

My advice is to keep things close to your chest when you start your spiritual journey. Not everyone will be supportive. Not everyone will understand. Not everyone will know. The world is full of people with strong opinions and not enough people who listen and honour other people's experiences. I am not blaming anyone. We live in a society that has not taught us how to do this. 

I was asked on the Caroline Martin Breakfast Show on BBC Radio on Saturday (at the 2h48min mark)  https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p0kxh99b what I would say to my detractors, and my answer was that I am not here to convince anyone. I really am not. In a way you could say that I am here to preach to the choir. 

Your new found spirituality is like a seedling that needs nurturing in the right environment. If exposed to the elements, it might not be strong enough. Our spiritual journeys require us to  be discerning and to ascertain who is "safe" and who is not. What I mean by safe is someone who will respect our experience. And if we are lucky, throw a light on it that will help us understand what the heck is going on. That requires experience. I want to be that person for you. 

I have been on this journey for forty odd years and I feel that although my spiritual "tree" is not a 100 solid oak, it's pretty strong and has healthy roots that keep me grounded whilst my branches reach further to the sky. The more upward you go, the deeper your roots must be, so my advice is also to learn to ground yourself. 

It's also important to keep ourselves safe and avoid cults. I want to refer you back to EP 02 on how to cult proof your journey. As we depart from traditional religions, we are at risk of behind roped in by people who don't have our best interests at heart. Click here to listen to the episode about cult proofing your journey. https://pod.fo/e/1f2f7a

Your best protection is to have a strong intuition and for the launch of my memoir Spiritual Lawyer on Kindle, I would like offer my trust your intuition course for half price until the end of April (2025). Click here to find out more. http://spirituallawyer.thinkific.com

Laura Richard is the author of Married to a Nice Guy and a speaker who specialises in narcissistic abuse. In this episode she shares how her religious education contributed to staying in a toxic marriage.

Laura is the host of the That's Where I'm at Podcast and in the recent episodes, her guests have talked a lot about religious abuse and she believes the two are connected. Her podcast initially talked about the things that are not talked about, and it gradually became more centered around narcissistic abuse. The more she interviews guests on the topic, the more Laura feels she deepens her understanding of the topic.

The most important first step when you leave a marriage to a narcissist is to have your experience validated. Often times, people who have not been through it do not understand. They might ask, for example, why did you not leave him? Why did you put up with all of it. One of the reasons is that it is a very gradual process at the start. You don't see it coming until it's too late. Either they know something about that you are ashamed of and threaten to tell everyone, or they create so much fear in the relationship that you are paralysed.

Laura was raised as a Catholic, left the church at 15 then joined some Christian churches when she married but she is now deconstructing religion. In her view, the worse thing about it is the manipulation which then leads to further manipulation by men in relationship because it's based on patriarchy and oppressive. And you are afraid that if you leave, God will be angry at you. Laura sees a similar pattern in abusive marriages. There is a lot of mental dishonesty, but you can't see it because you have been raised in it. That's something that struck Laura when she was a child, how people would say one thing in Church and do almost the exact opposite after they left mass.

Laura remembers that even though her mother was a devout Catholic, when the time came for her funeral, the Catholic Church refused to do a service because she had been cremated and wanted her ashes scattered. Not only that, they told her and her sister that their mother was going to the purgatory for not wanting to be buried like other people. It was very painful.

Laura was married for thirty-two years and she wonders if her faith did not keep her longer than she needed to be in her marriage. The bible group she attended encouraged her to pray for her marriage and for her to be a better wife. It seemed that saving the marriage was more important than Laura's wellbeing, and even safety. She was encouraged to be a better person as if that would solve the marriage's problems, when in reality it was her husband that was the problem. She remembers how she was told that God hates divorce, so the pressure was on her to make it work, to stick it out. The reality is that it keeps women in toxic marriages longer than needed. And often times, women are being gaslit at the pulpit.

In this episode we do something a bit different and explore the American TV series called the Good Place to extract from it seven spiritual lessons. At the start of the episode, I describe the premise of the show, without revealing the plot twist that comes at the end of the first season. If you have not watched it, I highly encourage you to do so. 

I refer back to EP 28 which answers the question of whether it is spiritual to help other people.

Here are what I consider the seven spiritual lessons of the Good Place are: 

1. Life is complex and it is actually fairly hard to decide if a decision is good or bad

2. Lying is not always morally wrong

3. If you do good with an ulterior motive, it defeats the point

4. You don't need to go to a monastery in Tibet in order to become enlightened

5. We all have free will

6. Every day it gets harder to be a good person

7. We all need a purpose in life.

Death and dying was a taboo when I grew up, which in a way encouraged me to want to talk about it even more. I purchased many books on the topic, especially Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’ books which I found very enlightening. She offered a model for the journey that people who are faced with death go on that comprises five phases.

* denial
* anger
* bargaining
* depression
* acceptance

This was never meant to be a rigid model but more of an observation of what the majority of people went through. It is incredibly useful to normalise but also to support people going through this journey. I think since her seminal work, others have taken her model and expanded on it, especially for those who stay behind, i.e. the loved ones of people who die. They are likely to go through a very similar cycle though in my limited experience, people tend to stay stuck in the denial phase almost until the end.

What is really important to understand and I have discussed this in previous episodes, is that the person who is dying must be at the centre of a circle where no one is allowed to offload onto them. Offloading is only allowed outwards. So if you imagine a circle where the dying person is in the centre, then you have their loved ones, then maybe their friends and relatives, then their colleagues, if they have any or their acquaintances and last professionals involved. It is unethical for anyone to offload how they feel inward in the circle. This is what has been called the Ring Theory. The idea was born out of the frustration of a woman who lived in cancer and who had one of her colleagues tell her how upset she was about it. I hope you can see this was adding a burden onto the woman living with cancer that she could have well done without.

The other idea I explore on the podcast is that our departed loved ones care probably a lot less about their funeral arrangements and you attending the funeral than you think they do. If, for any reason, you are unable to go to someone’s funeral or you don’t want to go, let go of the guilt and know you can create your own ritual.

The last thing I wanted to talk about is whether we need to let our loved ones in heaven “rest in peace”.

I also encourage you to listen to EP 23 about signs, as your loved ones often communicate with you through these and I would love for you to know how to interpret those signs.

This episode was inspired by Kyle Gray’s new book, The Angels Are With You now. After I listened to the audiobook of it, I had an impulse to go to a Leisure Centre to return some equipment last Sunday. Unknown to me, there was a Mind Body Spirit Fayre held at that Leisure centre at the precise time I turned up.

I saw a gorgeous piece of selenite with angel wings carved on it, which was a definite sign that angels were with me, especially since I had spotted two car plates on the way with 444 and 777 on them respectively. As I walked around the Fayre, I came across a tarot deck stand and there, on the table, was one of Kyke Gray’s decks. I decided to buy it becasue I had a chance to look at it. I had purchased one of Kyle’s decks six months ago and had to return it as I did not like it at all. I welcomed the opportunity to be able to see the cards for myself before I gifted myself that deck.

Looking back I think it was also the angels’ way of buying myself a gift as a reward to having finished the mamouth task of editing my second memoir, Spiritual Lawyer.

There are five ways that we separate ourselves from the help that angels can give us.

1. Believing that our problems are not as important to the angels as the problems of other people
2. Believing that if we ask for help from angels we are somehow depriving people who need the help more than we do
3. Focusing too much on seeing angels and believing there is something wrong with us if we can’t
4. Obsessing over finding out what the name of our guardian angel is
5. Believing that we are not good enough to speak to angels directly

Listen to the episode to hear about this in more details. 

Carl Honore is an award-winning writer, broadcaster and TED speaker, Ageism Disruptor and voice of the global Slow Movement. His latest book is called Bolder. And I am really pleased to have had him on the podcast.

If you have been on your spiritual path for any length of time, you would have heard invitations to slow down, so I thought it would be good to have Carl on the podcast as the expert on the topic.

Carl's journey started as a stressed father who was always rushing. Every day was a race against the clock and I think a lot of us can relate to this. One day as he was trying to rush through the bedtime story he was reading to his son, he took stock and realised that it had gone too far. This set him on a course to understand our relationship with time. As the journalist that he is, this took him around the world, as he explored the different ways cultures approach time.

The Western world has a capitalistic relationship with time. Everything revolves around the clock. We believe that time is money. So slowing down is costing us.

Carl talks about reconeccting to his inner tortoise, which I find very endearing but which also reminds me of Grand Master Oogway in Kun Fu Panda.

During our discussion, I think Carl and I were able to recognise that the moment he took stock of what he was doing, in terms of rushing fatherhood, was an awakening moment of some sort. He had another one that led to another book called Bolder, that I am reading at the moment and finding enlightening.

Even though Carl identifies as agnostic, he is open to the idea that life has a spiritual dimension and he is definitely on a quest to find answers. Carl can be found on his website and on LinkedIn. You can subscribe to his substack account with this link. To watch his TEDtalk on the power of slow, click here. To watch his TEDTalk on ageing, click here.

When I started on my spiritual paths, I admired people who had spiritual gifts such a clairvoyance, healing powers or who could do remote viewing. I assumed that people who had those gifts were more spiritually advanced than I was, but I have since realised that this is not true. The pursuit of spiritual gifts such as described in the Autobiography of a Yogi can actually be a distraction on our spiritual path. if they blossom, good, but if they don't, that doesn't mean anything about us.

In today's episode, we are going to talk about the ethical side of spiritual gifts and why that is incredibly important.

I have been reading the Ethical Psychic by Jennifer Lisa Vest, who has both an academic view point from her background as a professor of philosophy and the practical view point of a practitioner of various modalities such as shamanism, reiki, medical intuition, reading the akashic records and more. I do recommend reading her book whether you have psychic gifts or are seeking the guidance of someone who has.

Just because someone can do something doesn't mean that they should. And that is the starting point of this discussion. Discernment, boundaries and ethics are paramount because I believe that psychic gifts can actually be harmful be they not used appropriately. This is the reason I was actually quite reluctant to use mine. I was afraid of doing harm and leaving people worse off, especially with my tarot readings.

People who seek the guidance or help of people with psychic gifts are often vulnerable. Some also need mental health support that they might not be willing to seek out for whatever reason, so it is our responsibility to recognise that and encourage our clients to go to counselling or seek professional help when they need it.

I have a couple of rules that I stick to. I do not read for kids. I do not read people without their permission. I only work with clients who are perfectly aligned to what I offer. I set my intention that the information and guidance that I share is always, to the best of my ability, useful, uplifting and inspiring. And I never use my gifts for entertainment.

Of course a huge part of being ethical as a psychic is to refrain from cultural appropriation which is something I explored in last week's episode.

I am doing a proper episode on cultural appropriation because I have come across a couple of spiritual influencer in the UK that have recommended “sageing” as a practice to cleanse one’s aura and I am annoyed that this is still happening, more than twenty years after I embraced my spiritual journey. It seems that nothing has changed.

Maya Angelou says: “Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.” But I feel that in this context, we need to know better. The excuse of not knowing is no longer valid.

What is cultural appropriation? I refer to the definition from Wikipedia: “The adoption of an element or elements of one culture or identity by members of another culture in a manner perceived as inappropriate or unacknowledged.” It is particularly controversial when done by members of a dominant culture.

If you are part of the dominant race of a country that has colonialist roots: be incredibly careful of what you do. You are in the hot seat. But this also applies to minorities in your country so for people in the UK: the Roma people and people who practice Wicca.

It also ties into the commercial exploitation of that culture, be it religion, tradition, customs, dance steps, fashion, symbols, language, history or music.

Cultural appropriation is harmful. In doubt, don’t do it.

In the episode I talk in particular about the use of white safe to cleanse energy. But there are hundreds of other examples, not all linked to spirituality. Using the word “chakra”, turning yoga into a workout, medicine wheels, use of Chinese characters or Celtic symbols as tattoos, sweat lodges, vision quests, ayahuasca ceremonies, cacao ceremonies, kahuna magic, spells, feng shui, qi gong, tai chi, evil eye, hamsa, dreadlocks, and so much more.

Cultural appropriation is intimately linked to colonisation and oppression of marginalised groups. It fuels inequality, social injustice and racism.

Have you heard the expression Karma is a bitch? Karma has been used in the West as this concept of divine justice and in this episode, I wanted to highlight first how we are white washing the concept but also how there is a bit of cultural appropriation that is happening here that we have to be very careful of.

Karma is defined by the sum of a person's actions in this life and in previous states of existence viewed as deciding their fate in future existences. It has been interpreted as good or bad luck. There are three concepts attached to this which I explore in the episode: fate, punishment and revenge. I will get revenge out of the way: God is not revengeful and the loss of your child is not some punishment because you didn't attend mass regularly. I hope no one has ever told you that, and if they have, you must not believe them.

Fate is the idea that events outside of our control are predetermined by a supernatural power. The concept comes from the Greek and Roman mythology and is illustrated beautifully in the TV series Kaos, which I highly recommend you watch. In order to avoid cultural appropriation, let's focus on that concept rather than karma. Fatalism is the frame of mind where everything is predetermined and inevitable and it leads to passivity. I don't recommend it. I give an example of how having a psychic reading can actually lead to that and backfire.

I mentioned the akashic records in the episode because it enables us to see into the bigger picture and realise that possibly some events are predetermined by us before we are born, but once on Earth, free will reins and we can do what we damn well want. Checkout episode 57 to learn more about the Akashic records if you haven't listen to it already.

Punishment is a concept that is used in many religions to motivate human beings to act decently. In the Christian tradition, we have Judgement Day and the Second Coming of the Christ where we will be judged and either saved or damned. If you go back to the episode I did on Near Death Experiencers (EP 66), you can find a simliar process called the Life Review but what happens during the life review is that you are made to experience how your thoughts, words and deeds impacted other people during your life on Earth by experiencing it through the eyes of the people on the receiving end. It's not used for judgment or punishment purposes but for education and betterment. That's a radically different energy.

When a lot of bad things happen to people, it's not karma. It's more likely to be that these people are old souls who have chosen bigger challenges for themselves because they are more interesting and you can learn more from them. I encourage you to listen to episodes 68 and 73 with baby soul communicator Lauren Dionysius as we tuned into the souls of children who have chosen particularly challenging lives. I also invite you to listen to EP 58 on why bad things happen to good people.

Karma is also sometimes associated with the law of attraction and I would like to refer back to episode 32 called the Gentle Art of Manifesting.

The short answer to today's episode title is no. Karma is not punishing you. So relax.

In this third and last episode of the series on baby souls with Lauren Dionysius, we connect with the soul of a child who has chosen to incarnate in an abusive home.

This episode was both incredibly hard to record, but also perhaps the most deeply touching of the series. It reveals how the child who came to talk to us knew exactly what they were signing up for, their resistance to coming into that life scenario and the reasons why they chose that life experience. This episode can also be used to make some sense of why souls might choose to incarnate in a location torn with conflict, as in a war zone.

This episode has been recorded to help people who have experienced abuse or trauma in their childhood and professionals who work with such children, or adults who have had these childhood experiences. It is not meant to sugar coat the reality of these situations, but it might soften the edges for people who are in contact with this topic, by helping separate the human experience from the soul experience.

Lauren beautifully explains that it is not possible to make peace with the experience of child abuse on a human level. And one of the reasons is that if we did, we would become complicit with it. It is not even desirable. This does not in any way moves us away from the notion of right and wrong. There is no compromise here. Abuse is wrong. Child abuse is wrong.

But personally, having been able to see the soul purpose of my childhood experiences has really brought me a level of peace and deep healing that I was never able to access before that. And I am hoping that this episode is going to be able to support those who are ready to access that level of understanding of child abuse to see it from a bigger perspective.

We do not advise that you listen to this at the early stages of your healing journey as there might be a tendency to bypass the healing process by finding a meaning too early in the process.

For those souls who choose these incredibly hard experiences, there is often a bigger purpose. But there is also so much learning on a personal level. There is an opportunity to rise from the experience, but there is no blame for the individuals who are not able to. Sometimes there is a more collective goal of making these experiences known to the bigger public. It brings the darkness of humanity into the light.

The biggest takeaway he has for us is to believe children who share their experiences and validate it, whilst obviously, calling in support for them. It is also very important for us to understand that the upset we feel at what with witness must not be shared with the person going through the abuse or trauma. We need to find people who are not involved in it, to support us. There is a theory called the Ring Theory that goes more in depth about this. I encourage you to read this article to educate yourself on how to be responsible with your own emotions when you encounter people who have been abused. Click here for the article on Wikipedia.

I encourage you to make sure that you are ready to listen to this interview as it contains difficult information.

Apparently our brain is geared towards beauty. It's in our genes. Scientists tell us that beauty actually reflects health and strong genes. Our instincts are focused towards the survival of our species through reproduction, and so the cult of beauty was born. When you are beautiful outwards, you are given such and advantage in life. From a spiritual point of view it does not make sense. But here we are. We live in a society where beautiful people get better grades for doing the same thing as their less beautiful counterparts. They get better paid. We assume their honesty. Mothers naturally give more attention to attractive babies. And the list goes on. Even juries are less likely to find attractive people guilty.

The brain is a beauty detector. We get a hit of dopamine by looking at a beautiful person. Is that why?

Outer beauty is not fair, but inner beauty can be worked on. It's an accomplishment.

In this context, I thought it even the more important to talk about inner beauty. I am being a bit selfish here, because it serves me to do that. It helps with my self worth because I don't see myself beautiful, but I know that having pursued self development for the best part of thirty years, I would probably win a contest a inner beauty.

Despite all that, I have seen women enter a room and command it, despite not being the prettiest in the room.

How do we cultivate that inner beauty. Inner beauty is the sum of good things that can be found in a person.

It stems from confidence, love, honesty, kindness, compassion, integrity, wisdom and loyalty. I talked about each of this aspects in more depth in the podcast episode.

Having lived with clutter for almost twenty years, I know first hand what it's like to live in a house that overwhelms you. It affects your energy levels, your mental clarity, your mental health even and tends to isolate you because you refrain from letting people come to your home.

So let me start these show notes that I am approaching this episode with zero judgment. If I come across as judgmental nevertheless, then I want to apologise. Please let me know how I can do better. I know, for example how some people who struggle with organisational skills have it harder than others and executive function can also take its toll.

I am setting the intent that you will receive the energetic push that you need to get started and maybe the confidence that you can do it, from listening to my episode. I also highly recommend listening to the Declutter Hub Podcast, which has been instrumental in helping me get my house ready for sale in 2024. And also Karen Kingston's small and easy to read Clear your clutter with Feng Shui.

Clutter is any collection of things that is untidy... according to the Oxford dictionary. It can also be broken items, unwanted or disliked gifts, meaningless activities, friendships that have run their courses, containers with missing lids, lone socks... in no particular order.

Clutter can happen for a variety of reasons but most of them pertain to our mental or emotional state. Though the fact that where I live capitalism is rife does not help. Who had not been lured into buying unwanted things because they were a good bargain and sounded like a good idea. Or the famous Black Friday offers. Mostly, though, clutter happens due to a small number of reasons:

1. Fear of not having enough
2. The belief that the more things we have the happier we will be
3. The lack of respect for our home
4. Wanting to do only fun things in life
5. Over-consumption

I want to explore in particular the overconsumption that derives with the capitalistic model of consumption. It's big. It's in our faces constantly. It's been an underlying message ever since the industrial revolution that started between the 16th and the 18th century. So much so that it is sometimes hard to see it for what it is: a model that destroys our planet and creates more problems then it solves. Capitalism is based on the need for us to constantly want more. Sadly it has also created social harm, pollution, inequality, inhumane treatment of workers, and oppression through slavery, colonialism and imperialism.

I finish the episode by giving you a couple of tips on how to get started.

Last week I talked about new Earth, this week I am exploring new You from an energetic perspective. From very young, our parents show us how important it is to clean our bodies and clean our rooms. Most of us anyway, and there is no judgment from me either way. Whereas we are never educated as to the importance of keeping our bodies, our minds and our houses clean energetically.

So let's dive in.

In the first part of the episode, I talk about how our bodies, our minds and our homes get energetically dirty. Things like arguments, worry. illness, or just what I call the sponge effect: us absorbing the negative energy of others. I then give you some methods that you can use to clean your body, mind and house energetically, with things like salt, journalling, guided meditations, crystals or spending time in nature.

For your home, decluttering is incredibly important and for inspiration, I recommend the Declutter Hub Podcast.

I share with you a particular way of journalling that helps you allow the negative energy to exit your body through your arm, into the ink of your pen and onto paper.

But the one thing I do not recommend, is to use white sage or palo santo as it is cultural appropriation and it encourages over harvesting, which is damaging to indigenous people.

I have done a podcast episode about the five things you need to know about energy. Click here to listen. I have an energy intelligence for sensitive entrepreneurs course on my Thinkific platform that goes in much more depth into this, which also includes a reiki one attunement. To purchase that course, head over here.

If you would like to book an energy cleanse with me, use this link.

First of all best wishes for 2025. I am so happy we are all getting the opportunity of a fresh start, of setting intentions and feel we have a blank page to write a new story on. If you want help on how to do that, head over to episode 17 from last January where I explore the difference between New Year Resolutions, Intentions and Goals. We will be referring back to quite a few episodes in this blog post.

The reason I am referring back to that is that I heard on another podcast that we have a whole year (2025) to shift our ways on a global scale in order to create New Earth, where humanity treats the planet the way it deserves to be. I heard on that podcast that we don’t own the Earth, we rent it. And it made me feel that we were very poor tenants indeed.

Sometimes we think that we do can’t really make a difference because the problems are so big. I want you to leave this blog post feeling that you actually can. And in order for you to do that, I want you to understand the power of prayer and tiny steps. I did a whole episode on Prayer back in October 2023, so I invite you to go listen to that. If you don’t have the time, know that prayer works and that we don’t have to be religious or spiritual for it to work. This episode goes more in depth into how to do it and why every single prayer works.

I share a story in it that made a huge impression on me at the start of my spiritual journey. Caroline Myss was a great inspiration and in one of her books, she shares the story of one of her clients who had an NDE in a car accident. As Caroline’s body floated above her body, she saw the cars that were withheld on the road because of what happened to her and most of it was not pretty to see. Everyone was complaining about the traffic, but then she noticed a car that seemed to shine amongst the traffic jam. It seemed to broadcast some celestial music and the most beautiful fountain of multicoloured light. She approached that car and saw that the driver of that car was praying. She noted the car plate and remembered it after she came back into her body and decided to send flowers to that person to thank them for what they did for her.

What a story. Don’t you think? Since hearing it, I always send angels and prayers when I see emergency vehicles and although i have not witnesses car accidents other than my own in 2019, I never complain about traffic.

At the end of today’s episode, I make a list of things we could collectively pray for as I heard in one of the NDE videos I listened to to prepare the episode on NDEs that collective prayer is even more beautiful than individual ones. Let’s pray and value all the tiny steps that we take to make this planet a better place.

I also mentioned the Sacred Heart Prayer group that I manage on Facebook, so if you want to join, click here.

We are continuing to talk to babies in spirit in this episode, but whereas the last episode was more about Lauren's journey of becoming a baby soul communicator, in this episode a collective of baby souls came forward to talk about difficult topics such as:

1. Autistic children
2. Transgender kids
3. Kids that have a challenging or life threatening health condition
4. Kids who chose to die young

These kids have so much to teach us and I am still in awe of what these souls have chosen to share with us on the podcast. The information that came through Lauren is both surprising and powerful. It confirmed to me that children are here to teach us, not the other way round. Of course, we are here to teach them about being human, but they are here to teach about bigger things that relate to the journey of the soul. 

Some of the pearls of wisdom that these souls shared:

• "Stop trying to define me"
• "My parents need more support than I do"
• Some kids choose challenges as an act of service to their parents
• For kids who dies young, sometimes even babies who die soon after birth "I chose quality over quantity"
• "I just wanted to come and kiss the Earth"

Have your heart opened wide by listening to the whole episode. And share widely with parents of professionals involved with children who need to hear what these incredible kids have to say.

Although none of my loved ones died by suicide, I have supported suicidal people in my life almost as a constant since teenage. I am not a professional, but as a spiritual teacher I wanted to talk about this topic that from a religious and spiritual point of view is often labelled as a sin. If you have listened to my podcast before, you know I am here to debunk myths. I need to say right off the bat: it is not a sin and you won't go to hell. Or your loved one won't.

This is where I am angry at religion and spirituality: there is no need to add insult to injury. People who contemplate suicide are usually in situations that feel unbearable and they see death as the only way out, be it that they experience pain, challenging illnesses or sometimes domestic abuse. Not everyone who contemplates suicide suffers from mental ill health.

It is time we remove the stigma around suicide. One in five person will have contemplated it once in their life. It's common. There is nothing to be ashamed of.

The risk factors are the following (and the more ticks on this list, the higher the risk so watch out for your loved ones): harassment and bullying, a previous attempt, family history, difficult life events, trauma and abuse, stressful events such as job loss, divorce or debt, feelings of hopelessness, feelings of worthlessness, feelings of isolation, use of drugs or alcohol, chronic pain or disability, domestic violence, and certain mental health conditions. The risk of suicide is incredibly higher for transgender individuals and other LGBTQIA community members.

In this episode I share some tips from my own lived experience and the ten myths listed by the Samaritans, a UK based organisation that offers a hotline: 116 123.

If you know someone who is at risk, you can absolutely make a difference but always ensure that you don't do more than you can cope with. Professional help is always there to step in. I briefly want to mention Papyrus for Youth Suicide in the UK. Know that there is a trust that supports young people called Winston's Wish. And the NHS has a service called Help is at hand. If you are not in the UK, hopefully you can find resources on Google, but your doctor should have some information for you.

Last but not least, I want to refer you to a YouTube Video by a near death experiencing who met a family member who had died by suicide on the other side and who tells of how they were in a good place. If you like to read and are open to the idea, I also recommend a book called My son and the afterlife by Elisa Medhus, M.D.

I am a mental health first aider so feel free to message me on my FB profile here.

There was a time when I was so obsessed with Near Death Experiences (NDEs) that I wished I had one myself. That was, however, at the start of my spiritual journey. As I progressed in my spiritual journey, I had what people label as Spiritual Experiences (SEs) and now, I feel these are much more gentle. I have come to the personal conclusion that not all of us need NDEs to learn spiritual lessons, and that perhaps those who do needed something much more drastic to "wake up". There is no judgment in what I just wrote. It's just an observation.

I want to recommend three books if you want to learn about NDEs: the first book is called After by Dr Greyson, the second is Dying to be Me by Anita Moorjani and the third is Proof of Heaven by Eben Alexander.

Contrary to popular belief, not all NDEs are pleasant. Not everyone goes to "heaven". Some people go through to a very dark place that some even describe as Hell. My understanding of this is the reason you go to the place of light as opposed to the place of darkness has nothing to do with how good you have been but more to do with the proportion of light you have inside of you as opposed to the darkness. We all have both light and darkness in us. Anyone who tells you that they are pure light is lying to you. As humans, we are born into duality. And we all have done things when gripped with fear that we are not very proud of.

What are the main teachings that Near Death Experiencers bring back from their experience?

1. The body can heal from the most extreme illnesses and even death when one changes the way they look at life.
2. When it's not our time to go, we are strongly encouraged to come back, but it's always a choice.
3. We go through a life review after we leave our bodies. This review is not a judgment. It's mean to be educational.
4. Life is a play - Earth is a playground, albeit sometimes a very tragic one.
5. The only thing that matters in our experience on Earth is love.
6. Life on Earth is a playground, not a court room.
7. Dying can be easier than living.
8. We choose our parents
9. Doctors and nurses are assisted by angels regardless of whether they believe in them or not and regardless of whether they are aware of being assisted or not.
10. The spirit world wants to help us.
11. We "survive" death as we are more than our physical bodies and our brain, and this is experienced the most by atheists.
12. Love is all that matters and the source of all existence.
13. We are never alone.

I have just signed to join Toastmasters and when I asked myself what to talk about in the icebreaker, the very first speech one does in front of the club, the words that came were "Six degrees of separation".

The concept of six degrees of separation was originally conceived by a Hungarian author called Frigyes Karinthy, although he did not use these words precisely. And the idea is that people are six or fewer connections from each other. But the way I was supposed to use this expression was different. I was supposed to use it to talk about the fact that through life, we separate from our true selves and the idea was that I chose six events that brought me back to my true self.

In this episode, I share with you those six degrees. I have given them titles and they are little stories in themselves.

1. Degree 1 is called Rue de Rennes, and is about how I escaped a bombing in Paris in September 1986
2. Degree 2 is called Mike and Wendy Noah and is about how I communicated with these people in my dreams
3. Degree 3 is called San Francisco and is about how I found out mosaics was going to be the medium I would use in my art
4. Degree 4 is called Angel dust and is about a psychic reading where the medium told me I had angel dust coming out of my hands
5. Degree 5 is called Sugar in the Tank and is about the first time I had the courage to share angelic guidance with a friend
6. Degree 6 is about my first public speaking experience

These six steps or experiences allowed me to reclaim a part of me that I had lost and took me from being a lawyer (in 1986 I was still a student) to who I am today. I call myself a spiritual lawyer, but really I am a modern mystic.

These six steps are an excerpt my memoir called Spiritual Lawyer which is coming out in 2025. So if you would like to be informed when it is available for sale, sign up for my author newsletter with this link. 

Back in the early days of my career as a clinical hypnotherapist, I wanted to talk to babies in spirit. So you can imagine how excited I was when I came across Lauren Dionysius who does precisely that. Lauren is a former registered nurse who worked extensively in the NICU and helped lots of babies get better but also witnessed many baby deaths.

In this episode, which is the first in a series of three, Lauren talks about her personal journey of working with babies and how that led to burn out. She took a year sabbatical to reflect on where she was supposed to go next and ended up going back to the NICU.

She shares one of the most transformational experience there when a new born whose parents were unreliable communicated with her telepathically. I won't spoil the story for you as she tells it so eloquently on the podcast but be prepared to have your beliefs challenged, in the nicest possible way.

Lauren now works full time supporting families and communicating with not yet born babies, babies in the womb, babies who have died and so much more. Her work is phenomenal and I feel honoured she came to share about her work here on the podcast.

As the episode came to a close, I felt the presence of a collective of baby souls who wanted a voice and had a lot to say, so we literally recorded the second episode right after the first one. It will be released in a month's time and it tackles issues that I have personally been wondering about for the longest time. We also have a third episode in the works.

Not only that, but this collective has asked for the episodes to be released now, when I had initially scheduled Lauren's interview for March 2025. This has completely upset my podcast interview scheduIe but I am actually delighted to make space for these mind blowing but more importantly heart opening interviews.

To find out more about Lauren, click here.

Until we understand how our minds work, we believe we are our thoughts and we also believe we have no control over our thoughts. We even identify with our beliefs so deeply that we can become defensive when someone enters our world and challenges them. 

This is the reason I believe that in order for us to awaken, we need to understand how the mind works. And this episode is all about that. 

I was lucky enough that I trained in clinical hypnotherapy in 2007 and it rocked my world. Both in the literal sense, as in created tremendous change. One of these changes is that it helped me overcome a ten-year writer's block without even trying. And in a metaphorical sense because it opened the door to a way of living I had no idea even existed. 

I had had years of therapy before that, but the therapy, although useful to reflect on things and to connect the dots, never took me beyond my thoughts. I was limited to explore a room that contained past experiences and beliefs but with no real awareness of the vast world that existed outside that room. And not only outside that room, but in other realms. 

It is estimated that we have an average of 70,000 thoughts per day. If we don't realise that we are not our thoughts, we stay prisoner of these thoughts which most of the time go into many contradicting directions and distract us constantly from what is happening in the now. 

Once your realise you are not your thoughts, you can also become more aware of the beliefs that are thrown at you constantly by the media. And mostly, these are negative beliefs because it is what sells. But our minds becomes the repository of those beliefs and we might want to curate our space with more helpful beliefs. 

We have a choice. 

Although a belief is a thought that we think is true and usually we have ample evidence to support it, it might be worth us deciding if that belief is supporting us and then reverse engineer what we want to create in our lives and then choose the beliefs that support that version of reality we want to create. Once you do that, you will be amazed how you can find evidence to support this new belief, because the truth is, our beliefs act as filters. If you don't believe in aliens (and I am not suggesting you do or don't) then you will deny any evidence of them when you come across it. If you do, you might actually interpret facts around as evidence regardless of whether they are. It all starts with the belief. 

In this episode I also talk about the different parts of the brain that you need to know about so you understand how every thought that crosses your mind can take you down two paths: the negative path or the positive path. This, of course, is not to indulge in toxic positivity, but my experience has taught me that with anything that happens to us, our beliefs can increase or decrease the suffering we experience depending on what thought we think about the situation. 

I hope you enjoy this episode and if you do, please share it with someone who needs or needs to listen to it. 

We live in a society that values knowledge and intelligence above wisdom and kindness. Personally, wisdom and kindness rank above but it goes further than that, so I wanted to explore this topic in depth. I was encouraged to explore after listening to a very thought provoking podcast by Rory Stewart called the Long History of Ignorance on BBC Sounds.

Rory is a politician. He knows how to make a good argument and I could see how ignorance is not necessarily a bad thing in four situations.

1. When you are about to face a challenge or tragedy - this is important for us psychics. Knowledge of the future is not good enough. We need to have the wisdom to only impart to our clients what is going to be useful, uplifting and for the highest good of our clients.
2.  
3. When you need to learn something. Having knowledge about something can actually come in the way of our learning especially if we think we already know the topic.
4.  
5. When you are looking to solve a problem. You need to put aside what you think you know so that better solutions can be found. This is very important in science and Rory actually quoted a psychiatrist that claims that most scientific discoveries have not been made with the scientific method but by some intuitive leap.
6.  
7. When you are looking to connect to Universal intelligence (see my previous episode about channeling called Not My Words, Not My Thoughts.

If you would like to hear what I have to say in a bit of a stream of consciousness kind of episode, listen to this episode. I have also mentioned the podcast The rest is politics.

Have you ever comforted someone who came to you to share their problems and said words that you thought were wiser than you? You are not alone. It happened to me a lot, until I trained in mediumship and then I started to understand better what was happening.

I actually believe that some of my mosaics were channeled. In particular, one called maternity. I never learnt how to do mosaics. I just did. I admired a lot of the mosaic artists like Gaudi and wanted to give this medium a try. Funny that: the word "medium".

This needs not be spooky, although I would understand if you panicked a little. After all, we know so little about it. And religion would tell you that you were being possessed. The reality is very different but discernment is important.

How do you know these are not your thoughts? They feel novel. It's not the usual kind of thoughts that you have. They are usually inspiring, uplifting and positive without being cliched or invalidating. You might think to yourself, "I am not that clever", or "I am not that wise", or "I am not that talented". In fact this is precisely the thought I had when I created my mosaic called Maternity. I am not that talented.

Channeling is a lot more common than we think. It happens to regular people. All they need is an open mind, literally and metaphorically. What you need to understand though, is you can be channeling good spirit guides but also mischievous ones. If you don't know what you are doing it's like opening your front door for everyone to come in. Every possible stranger, and you can't trust that all of them are going to have the best intentions.

How does channeling work? We channel when our minds reach Theta waves and we are in a state of trance. That is a state that I have learnt to understand very well as a clinical hypnotherapist. In the podcast episode, I talk about the most common kinds of brain waves we experience. I also share where you should practice channeling and why.

There is a warning, though. As I wrote earlier in this blog, not every entity you will channel will be benevolent. There are such things as entities and I sometimes wonder if people who suffer with schizophrenia are not actually channeling dark entities, especially when the "voices" tell them to hurt themselves or others. I once met a shaman who worked in mental health hospitals to support people who were going through a spiritual crisis that disguised as a mental health crisis.

In the episode I shared what it feels like when I channel and my training in this modality, and the incredible benefits it can bring to public speaking. However, I do not recommend channeling on your own, without the guidance and supervision of a mentor experienced in that field. At the very least you should listen to my episodes about:

• clearing your space energetically
• the five things you need to know about energy and
• light and darkness

This is something I teach my VIPs, so if you are interested in channeling, why not book a discovery call with me with this link.

Answering this question can be particularly offensive to people who have had abusive childhoods or have been abandoned by their parents. If the question offends you, then move on. Ignore this blog post and the associated podcast episode. I am not writing it to offend or hurt you. And I respect that you find it offensive.

The reason I am asking it, though, is because as a teenager, in the middle of a heated argument with my sister, instead of telling her how awful she was (and she was, but so was I), I said to her "We chose each other, so why don't we try to get along." At the time I did not know where this came from. Now I have an idea and we will be discussing this in next week's episode.

If I chose my sister, then the next logical thing is that I chose my parents too. I do find it particularly interesting to try to suss out why we might have chosen them. And this episode is about this. Why would those of us who have had abusive childhood chosen our parents? Who in their right minds would choose abuse?

One of the explanations I have been shown is that there can be a difference between what our souls want and what we want after we incarnate. Our souls have access to the bigger picture and also, tend to be quite ambitious for us. Our souls want growth and resolution for us, so they sometimes plan ambitious blue prints for us, and abusive childhoods can be a stepping stone for greatness. Don't think for a minute that I command abuse. I don't. However, hardships and challenging life circumstances can, as long as we have the support of at least one caring adult, build our resilience.

This can also be the result of the soul thinking that the choices it is making for its next incarnation are a lot easier than they seem. In addition to this, souls have no ego, so they don't care about comfort, fame, riches, reputation, success or money. They care more about experience and growth. And at this state of evolution of humanity, we learn a lot better from hardships than we learn from ease and fun. This could change, but we are not there yet.

Generally speaking, it is more advanced souls (and by that I only mean souls with more experience, not superior souls) that are likely to choose childhood abuse or hardship. These souls know they can do and they also know that they will embrace these challenges and turn them into opportunities to be better persons but also help humanity. I am not saying however, that advanced souls do not suffer. I think they do, but they are not victims. They do not need your pity.

But I also don't want you to feel any pressure to be a hero if you have experienced childhood abuse. The priority should always be your own healing first. You don't have to help others or turn your pain into gain. What is most important, though, it to let go of the shame. We all know that children and victims tend to take the shame of their abusers on and think that there is something wrong with them. Let go of that right away.

To book a discovery call with me, click here.

Kayla Subica is an artist, singer, writer and director. She is just back from the Fringe Festival in Edinburgh with a show called Happy Medium where she brings all of herself on stage. She is all about presence and flow, yet for her to come out as a medium in her singing career took a little bit of work.

Happy Medium is a musical about a quirky psychic medium in 1970’s New York. She was meant to be a singer-when life derailed and handed her the gift of mediumship. Her dream isn’t dead, even if her chosen company is. This interactive dark comedy includes live audience tarot readings; both comedic, and sincere!

Kayla was very religious as a child. Although she wasn't necessarily psychic she knew things and voiced them. But it's not until she reached the age of seventeen and had a palm reading that she felt that she could do what the reader did for her and felt seen for the first time. As things turned out, when she did theatre school, she was asked to play a witch which led her to immerse herself in the culture of local witches where she learnt a lot. She shares much wisdom during the interview, including how important it is to take what resonates with you but not all that a mentor teaches, especially if does not feel right.

Kayla has managed to carve herself a unique space on stage where she brings her mediumship skills and her tarot reading skills into an interactive play with her audience, that is for entertainment but with that respect for the messages that come through.

At the end of the interview, she shared her magic with us by doing a mini reading for me, as she would do in her show, by pretending I was in a telephone booth and me asking a question. If you would like to find out more about Kayla, go to her Instagram account, her Facebook page, or her website. She also has a YouTube channel.

When I was younger and something bad happened to me, my default mode was to say "Why me?" It came from my religious conditioning, but deep down I probably thought I deserved it because my entire life I had been told I was a bad person, so naturally bad things should happen to me. And yet, I thought it was so unfair. I was a good person. I was generous, kind and generally compliant. So why me?

I was pretty young when I observed around me that bad things happened to good people. They happened all the time. When I embraced my spiritual journey, though, I started to realise that asking why was not helpful. It was actually a bad question. How was a much better kind of question.

So how do good people cope when bad things happen to them?

First by reminding themselves that it is not a punishment. I have been watching Kaos on Netflix this past week and it's all about vengeful Gods that punish humans, or sometimes not even punish but play with them to increase their power. There is nothing like that going on in real life, no matter what your religion tells you. So if we are not going to ask why and try to find answers, what are we going to do?

First, we are going to challenge the good and bad spectrum. Good is only something we desire or approve of. Bad is the opposite. It's entirely subjective. Sometimes if we take the label out of the situation, it can actually make it easier. Not always, but sometimes. It is what it is. In the episode, I also discuss that when we often get what we need not what we desire (the good) and it is actually for our highest good.

Second, sometimes, bad situations have hidden blessings. There is an art in harvesting these, but first we need to tend to our emotions around what is happening by honouring them and sugar coating things is actually counterproductive and can even be harmful. No matter what your emotions are, they are valid. They need to be experienced to the full before you can get to the other side. This being said, sometimes we have emotions that are triggered by unhelpful thoughts. I used to think I was cursed, and that served no purpose whatever other than make me feel miserable. I had to get rid of that limiting belief. I actually recommend the work of Byron Katie for that. It's powerful.

When facing a crisis, I have four tips for you:

Tip #1: Accept the situation

Tip #2: Trust that you have what it takes to face it

Tip #3: Reach out for help from the right kind of people

Tip #4: Realise that you are not alone

Joseph Campbell gave us a remarkable framework to help us cope with challenges, called the hero's journey. I have talked about it in Episode 56, so if you have not yet listened to it, I encourage you to do so.

Challenges transform us and can make us better persons. I know I am a better person for the challenges that I have been through in my life. And you are probably too. But they can make us better or they can make us bitter. It's always our choice.

Make sure you sign up for my webinar called Why bad things happen to good people so that I can show you the process more in depth and you get a chance to ask me questions about this. It's on the 28th of October, at 7 pm UK time in zoom. To receive the link, sign up for my author newsletter with this link.

The Akashic Records is an expression that was first used by C. W. Leadbeater in a book called Clairvoyance in 1899. However, the concept is not new, and has been called the Book of Life in nearly all religious traditions, albeit with a slightly different understanding.

It is defined by Theosophists as a compendium of all universal events, thoughts, words, emotions and intents ever to have occurred in the past, present and future in terms of all entities and life forms, not just humans.

C.W. Leadbeater claims that all clairvoyants can read them, but I disagree.

In this podcast episode, I share with you the difference between a psychic reading and an akashic records reading and help you understand what is best for you between the two. I also share information that will help you understand if you are ready to learn how to access your own akashic records. I refer back to an episode of the Intuitive Revolution in Business podcast that went into this topic, which is also available here on YouTube. If you are on Android, you will need to scroll down on your app to find the episode, so look for episode 12. If you have an iPhone, just click this link.

For thousands of years, these records were only known to initiates within traditional religions. The reason is that knowledge is power and one had to be trained and tested extensively before being given access to this information. It's not just that the information could be misused, it is also that if you are given it without being ready, it can actually be detrimental to you.

In the episode, I give you the things to look for that will prove that you are in the records.

If you want to learn more, I recommend Linda Howe's book, called the Akashic Records.

I share guidelines of the dos and donts in the records but I think more importantly I share tips that will help you find out as a client if someone is really reading your records.

If you would like an akashic records reading with me, head over to my shop here on this website. Either check the menu above or click this link. If you would like to discuss me teaching you how to read the records, for yourself or others, book a discovery call to discuss my VIP package with this link.

I mentioned on the podcast that I would be doing Black Friday deals for the first time in my business in years, but only to people signed up to my mailing lists. I have several but the three you want to check out are:

1. My general list
2. My author list
3. My publishing list

Joseph Campbell changed my life and I realised recently that I probably ought to dedicate my entire podcast to him because he gave me a non religious framework to explain my spiritual experiences.

Who was Joseph Campbell and why should his work matter to you? Joseph Campbell was an American professor of literature and is the author of multiple books; his most famous being the Hero with a Thousand Faces. He was made famous notably by his influence on George Lucas, the director of Star Wars.

Why should you care? Because we are all the heroes of our own lives and knowing the twelve steps of the hero's journey can give us a road map to guide us and give us comfort. One of the biggest negative beliefs when we face challenges is the belief that we are alone. In truth, it is very likely that someone has been through something similar to you and could be a great mentor to help you through the ordeal.

In the episode I illustrate the twelve steps of the hero's journey with my own experience of losing my job as a corporate lawyer, which I am going to list briefly here. If you would like to hear me talk about these steps and ask me any questions you may have about spirituality in person, sign up for my webinar by joining my author mailing list with this link. I will be running them regularly so if you have missed the date of the 28th of October (2024), or if you can't make the time, don't worry. I will be running plenty more.

The twelve steps of the hero's journey are the following:

1. The call to adventure
2. The refusal of the call
3. Meeting the mentor
4. Crossing the threshold
5. Tests, allies and enemies
6. The approach to the inmost cave
7. The ordeal
8. The reward
9. The road back
10. The resurrection
11. The return
12. The freedom to live

This framework is so famous now that even Grammarly has a blog post about it. There is a reason for this. Joseph Campbell has become the golden standard to write Hollywood film stories thanks to the popularisation of his framework by Christopher Volger in his best seller The Writer's Journey, Mythic Structure for Writers.

The biggest insight that Joseph Campbell gifts us is that the biggest dragon we have to slay on our spiritual journey is not the enemies of this world but our own ego. And in a way, this is incredibly empowering because it brings us back in control. It's not a popular path, as I mentioned already in Episode 48 of the podcast called Dancing in the Light and Playing with the Shadows. It is so much more glorious to slay dragons or enemies of the public. But this illustrates that the spiritual journey is rarely an outer adventure but an inner one.

We need to descend into our own darkness and free ourselves from our fear, guilt, shame and other negative emotions because for as long as we live our lives by them, they are our masters and they drive our behaviours in very powerful ways.

Don't forget to sign up for my author's newsletter so that you can be informed of when my memoir about my own hero's journey of going from corporate lawyer to spiritual lawyer will be available for sale. Here is the link to do so.

To listen to the episode, click here.

Shireen Khanum is a paediatrician, who grew up in Austria, England and Pakistan and who now lives in the United Arab Emirates. Raised by a mother who was a Roman Catholic and a father who was a Muslim, Shireen turned to Islam more because at the time it was the dominant religion where she lived, although most of her education was done with Irish nuns. Luckily, Shireen has never experienced islamophobia in her life.

I invited her on the show because I feel that in the West, and I am producing this podcast in the UK, there is an underrepresentation of islam but also a vilification. Stereotypes are rife and what better way to combat stereotypes than to meet and get to know real people.

Shireen is actually a dear friend of mine and I wanted her to have an opportunity to share about her religion and debunk some myths. Shireen shares the fact that both her grandfather and her father were very enlightened and did not put any pressure on Shireen's mum to convert.

But Shireen is also unusual inasmuch as she can see through her patients' bodies and is often able to diagnosed them before they have a chance to share what is troubling them, and for her to examine them. By night, Shireen writes novels. She has just published her fourth one about the Indus Valley, with a bit of a science fiction angle. To listen to the episode, click here. To find out more about Shireen and her books, head over to her Facebook profile where she uses her mother's maiden name, Magedin. She has a website and all her books are available on Amazon.

I believe that rather than God having created humans in "his" image as claims Genesis in the Bible (we will talk about God's gender in a minute), it is the opposite. Humans have created God in their image. And my best bet is that they have done so to soothe themselves from the disturbing thought that the world has no rhyme or reason. But before we go any further, I want to highlight how much wrong there is in the sentence "God created man in his image". For one, why the male gender for both? The answer comes from the fact that most religions have been invented by men for men. Words matter, my friends. So please try to change the pronouns you use when referring to God: they, them.

In today's podcast episode, I explore the difference between monotheism and polytheism.

On the one hand we have the three Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, that all worship a single God. On the other hand, you have Indian religions, Iranian religions and East Asian religions, that worship multiple Gods. If you look at all these religions from my premise that humans have invented God in their image, the fact that a religion worships one God or more, doesn't really matter. In my opinion, the only difference is that in one case the single God will reflect the complexity of the human personality whereas if we worship multiple Gods, each one is likely to reflect one aspect. No offence meant to religious people. But I guess the point I am making is that I don't see any valid reason for the monotheist to look down upon the polytheists as less evolved, because it's the same. What is rather disturbing is that the monotheists usually claim that if you don't follow their god, you will go to hell. I am not aware that polytheists threaten people in the same way.

In the episode, I talked about the main twelve Gods of the Greek Pantheon, and observed that the roles assigned to these gendered Gods and Goddesses reinforced the social roles of their time, be it in a divine feminine and masculine way, which resonates with the episode I did about why I do not use the terms divine feminine and masculine. To me it's nothing more than a patriarchal model, that has been handed down through the centuries and sadly espoused by the New Age movement, thereby continuing the bias.

Emile Durkeim seems to agree with my theory that humans have invented God as an extension of human life. Matt Rossano adds an interesting dimension to this debate. He believes that humans have invented God to enforce moral values. He claims that whilst humans lived in small groups of people, morality was easier to establish due to social pressures like gossip and reputation, but that the larger the groups, the more difficult that was to maintain. As a lawyer, I am hoping that law does this better than religion, although arguably, laws do not deal with morals as much as religion does.

To receive the first three chapters of my new memoir, Spiritual Lawyer, click here.

I chose quite a dramatic topic for this week's episode and wondered if I chose more than I can chew. But it's just a start. This episode is part of a series that is helping you decide if a religious or spiritual concept resonates with you, or aligns with your values and if it doesn't, I give you permission to get rid of it. Personally, Heaven and Hell do not form part of my spiritual blueprint.

If you would like to download the PDF I created to help you create that spiritual blueprint for yourself, sign up for my True Spirituality newsletter with this link. I have several newsletter so don't assumed that because you signed up for one of them, you are on my main one.

Before I start on the meat of this episode, I want to list all the episodes of the podcast that are relevant to your spiritual blueprint:

• EP 6 talks about Prayer
•  
• EP 10 talks about Twin Flames
•  
• EP 11 talks about Tantra and Pleasure
•  
• EP 18 talks about Angels and EP 47 shares how to work with them
•  
• EP 23 talks about Signs from the Universe
•  
• EP 27 talks about Meditation
•  
• EP 30 talks about Feng Shui
•  
• EP 32 talks about Manifesting
•  
• EP 34, 35 and 36 talk about the Tarot
•  
• EP 49 talks about the Spirit World
•  
• EP 50 talks about the Divine feminine
•  
• EP 52 talks about Reincarnation

The definition of Heaven by the Oxford Dictionary says "Heaven is a place regarded in various religions as the abode of God and the angels and the good after death". Right away this rings alarm bells for me: the "good". What does that even mean?

Asking about heaven leads to ask about God, which is going to be expanded on in our next episode but suffice to say there are two camps, to simplify matters: monotheists and polytheists. Sadly the monotheists look down upon the polytheists and have been, at least that's the case for Christianity, involved in many atrocities including colonialism.

A great person to learn about myths and gods, is Joseph Campbell and I particularly recommend his interview series with Bill Moyers called the Power of Myth. Sometimes I wish religious people were more transparent about what is myth and what is fact. There are a lot of myths presented as facts in religion, such as for example, the Virgin Mary. And I suppose that requiring that you buy into the myth blindly could be part of the enrolment strategy, so that you don't question other tenants of that religion.

Heaven is also used metaphorically to describe a place of bliss where people are happy and there is an absence of conflict. I want to mention here the Vortex, often talked about by Abraham-Hicks, as I believe that it refers to the same space as heaven. My personal experience is that the energy of the akashic records is similar.

As someone who has experienced both Heaven and Hell on Earth, I would say that Heaven is a place where we feel that everything is going to be ok, that there is nothing going wrong, where it feels that the Universe has our back and where we feel loved unconditionally. Overall, not very common experiences. I would add that I believe Heaven is a place where you are able to see the bigger picture.

Now, Hell. Jean-Paul Sartre defined Hell as Other People. War is definitely one flavour of Hell. As is pain, but also, in my opinion, mental illness. In the TV Series called Lucifer, Hell has one special room for each of us where we are confronted with a situation in a loop until we can free ourselves from our own mental hell. And Dan, one of the characters, is only able to escape his own prison cell in Hell, when he lets go of the belief that he was a bad father.

In a way I agree with Sartre, but I think that Hell can also be something we create for ourselves through guilt, regret, shame and fear. Sadly it can also be domestic abuse. So let's not blame a hypothetical God in heaven for our problems on Earth, or the Devil aka Lucifer Morningstar, and aim at creating more pockets of Heaven on Earth.

The ultimate question, though, is: Do you resonate with the concept and would like to include it in your spiritual blueprint or not? My personal vote is a no. Please share yours in the comments below or on my Facebook page.

I have a special announcement: I will be launching my second memoir this year and would like to invite you to join my launch crew. If that is something that interests you, Click on this link to join the pop up facebook community where all my supporters are gathered for this event.  There will be games and competitions. You can find out in the Facebook community or on my author newsletter by subscribing with this link. 

Reincarnation is an interesting topics that has a mixed bag of beliefs attached to it. Although traditionally pertaining to religions like Buddhism and Hinduism, it has now become a lot more mainstream. It wasn't part of my original religious background, but it is a concept that I have been interested in for several decades. 

In this episode, I explore the beliefs around it and debunk some concepts that do not resonate with me. 

I share about the work of psychiatrists that have explore and written about past life regression, which have enabled them to describe their clients' experiences not just around past lives but also in between lives. 

But this only remained theoretical until my own children shared about their own past lives at around the four-year old mark. 

Then a few years later, when I trained in reiki, I had my first spontaneous past life recall. What I saw threw a very interesting light on the relationship dynamics I had with my mother and my first husband, that helped me get closure. 

I have had the privilege of seeing clients' past lives in sessions and the information has always been useful and brought a new level of healing to their lives. So my conclusion about reincarnation is that it does not matter what the religious background says about it, it has a therapeutic value that I encourage people to explore in safe hands and at the right time. 

Kathryn Rickert lives in Canada and has been a primary school teacher for twenty years but there is another side of her that most of her pupils know nothing about: her psychic abilities. Kathryn could see and hear spirit from very young. They opened up when her grandmother died and she used to see her uncle all the time, even though she had never heard of him because he died when Kathryn's mum was sixteen. Luckily Kathryn's mum was not dismissive of her experience but sadly a lot of parents are. And that can create more harm than good.

There was a long period of time when Kathryn ignored and suppressed her gifts because her friends mocked her, but they all came back running when she became a mum and a primary school teacher. During a mediumship training course, she called upon her uncle and he explained to her that the little girl he often brought with him was her sister. Kathryn didn't know that her mum had a miscarriage. And from that moment on, she was hooked.

It started off with burnout, sadly, and the need for her to look after herself when the demands of her job, particularly as she was heavily involved with special needs kids, whom she loves, started to impact her health. This coincided with the birth of her second child. She describes that period as both a break down but also as a breakthrough as in her own words "it brought me back to me".

She did a lot of different trainings relating to psychic abilities that led her to build her business around the time of the pandemic but is now back in the classroom and what she learnt has been invaluable to her as a teacher.

Kathryn and I discussed how parents can best support their children when they mention unusual things such as imaginary friends or maybe have instant likes or dislikes of people around them. This was a fascinating conversation. And the first thing that came up was how important it was to ask children about their experience. They might be experiencing all sorts of psychic phenomenon or visits from spirit beings but they assume that everyone has these experiences so they are not likely to share with you automatically.

But also, as important if not more, is to believe them when they share with you even if you don't quite understand what is happening. We also talked about the fact that it's often around the age of four to five that kids share memories about past lives or talk about imaginary friends. Often times, as they progress through the schooling system, these experiences either fade away or the kids don't talk about them anymore because they are mocked for it. But it's important that this age group gets the right support so they don't get scared.

If you would like to know when Kathryn is launching her course for parents of kindergarden kids, sign up with this link.

When I started exploring spirituality outside of religion, everybody seemed to talk about the divine feminine and masculine. There were circles for women, and circles for men. It was made very clear that we both have the divine masculine and feminine within us, whether we are male or female, but everything was labelled as feminine or masculine. Intuition was feminine. Leadership was masculine. And I tagged along, because I didn't know any better.

It took me to go on a journey with people that are close to me who are non binary and transgender to realise that the binary model is everywhere and that it is quite toxic. Why should being sensitive be a feminine quality? I knew plenty of exquisitely sensitive men. And why should taking action be a masculine quality? I am an action taker myself. 

I started to read more content written by queer people and even though I was disconcerted at first - I was after all unlearning from years of binary thinking - I truly felt like I was seeing the world afresh. And it felt exciting. I am not queer but I know a lot of queer people now and if you have listened to any of my podcasts before, you know I am a passionate ally. Naturally, this led me to question this whole divine masculine and feminine mumble jumble. 

When I was a child, I had more male friends than female friends. But here is the thing: I did not see them as male or female. They were just my mates. It's only when growing up and particularly when reaching adolescence that the whole feminine and masculine debate started to kick in. Back then, I did not know that gender was a social construct designed to control people. And that it had been used by missionaries all over the world to oppress indigenous cultures. 

A man only acts like a man because he is conditioned to do so from a very young age. This was made very clear when I gave birth to a child that was assigned as male at birth. I remember my child, as a toddler, picking up some of my earrings and trying them on. I thought it was delightful. However, his dad rushed to his side and took the earrings off his ears at light speed and confiscated them. How interesting? This was one of the millions of micro actions that his father and all the adults around me took to reaffirm his gender. The same happens to girls. 

Schools continue to reinforce these models if only by pushing heteronormative literature and addressing pupils as boys and girls. That is not even necessary. And yet they pretend that talking about gender is an ideology. They are obviously blind to the fact that the binary gender model is an ideology in itself and that they are perpetuating it. 

Women should be aware that issues around gender fluidity affect them even if they feel strong in their own gender, because gender roles have been used to oppress women and non binary folks for centuries. By men. 

Science has actually established that there are more similarities between genders than difference, so this whole gender binary model is based on social construct exclusively. It also varies between cultures. Dresses are routinely worn by men in certain cultures. As well as jewellery. 

Even the World Health Organisation has stated in 2023 that gender is hierarchical and that it produces inequalities that intersect with other social and economical inequalities. 

To me, being spiritual means doing everything in my power not to harm others. And then learning more to do better. I feel that the gender debate should be brought to the spiritual world and for us to question it. After all, spirit beings - which I have covered in my last episode - do not have gender. Angels are not male or female. Even spirit guides are not, even though they might have preferred to incarnate as a certain gender over their various lifetimes. 

So on the back of this week's episode I invite you to question what you hear in spiritual circles and ask yourself if this is not rehashing toxic gender stereotypes. Listen to the words you use when referring to God. Do you use pronouns? Why? Do you really think God is male or female and can you take a moment to question if this really makes sense? Next time someone tells you that intuition is a feminine attribute, stop and pause. I am not even going to go down the path of entertaining statements like men are from Mars and women are from Venus. But also ask yourself, am I being inclusive in my spiritual practice? 

As a final note, I just wanted to add that the University of Birmingham published an article stating that there is no evidence that creating gender neutral spaces increases levels of sexual violence against women and children. So when someone uses that argument to justify having women circles only, think about what hidden agenda might behind this. 

PS: I am not denying that it is important for victims of sexual abuse to have safe spaces, which might involve it being female only spaces. That is an entirely different topic that I care about tremendously.

In this episode, I attempt to define the various spiritual beings that you might come across when you reach out to the spiritual world. I have listed eight of them, in no particular order. They are often confused even by some of the most famous spiritual teachers.

1. Spirit guides
2. Elementals
3. Ascended Masters
4. Celestial beings
5. Power animals
6. Entities
7. Ancestors
8. Our higher selves

I just realised that I forgot to talk about magical beings so I may talk about them in a separate episode or bring someone in who specialises in them. I think that is why I haven't covered them in this episode. But also this is just an introduction to the spiritual world.

What is important to realise is that all these beings, save perhaps Ascended Masters are not necessarily of the highest of intents, so you should always be discerning about who you team up with or work with. As you listen to the episode, I also want you to know that what I am talking about is my understanding of these beings, but that this might not feel right for you. So by all means, follow what feels right for you and understand that this could be because you are not ready for what I am teaching, but also that we may never fully agree and that's ok too.

How do you work with these beings? The same way you work with angels, so go back and listen to episode 47 if you have not listened to it already. There is a difference though: these beings have free will of their own.

One of the dangers of working with spiritual beings is the natural tendency to hand our power over to them because they are wiser. This is dangerous for two reasons. First, you have a wisdom of your own that you can access through your intuition and your higher self. Second, you are the one living your life on earth and you chose to live this life so you can make your own decisions. A CEO does not delegate all decisions to experts and consultants, he/she asks them for guidance then they make their own decisions.

I also want you to know that you don't need to be psychic to work with guides and spiritual beings. I explain how this can happen without you even knowing that it is happening and it's nothing to be scared about. They might show you signs or plant ideas in your mind directly. It's really fascinating. I personally don't think I have any truly genius ideas of my own. I know my guides plant a lot of them in my mind and I am so grateful for that.

I also want you to know that just because someone is dead does not mean they are wise, so be discerning when you work with guides or your own loved ones in heaven. They might have access to higher wisdom but they might still have limiting beliefs and unhelpful ways to look at the world. Always be discerning.

If you would like me to help you connect to your guides or know who they are, why not work with me. Find out on my website www.angedelumiere.biz what services I have available and feel free to book a discovery call with me to discuss the options.

Dancing in the light and playing with the shadows used to be my catch phrase for years at the start of my spiritual journey. I was well aware that we all want to think that we are these luminous and loving being, but sadly, as humans, we have a shadow. You cannot have light without shadow on Earth. It's a fact.

A fact that a lot of spiritual folks deny or hide, because having a shadow is "unspiritual". However, in my opinion embracing your spirituality requires you to embrace your shadow. So what exactly is the shadow and who coined the term?

Carl Jung defined it as "the part of us that contains what lies dormant beneath the light of our awareness and contains unacceptable traits and feelings, but also our hidden gifts and talents." The man did not invent the concept, he just made it popular in the white western world, and probably borrowed it from shamanic communities that he came in contact with. 

As Joanna Penn mentions in her book Writing from the Shadow, it is not unnecessarily evil, illegal or immoral, although it can certainly be. But the truth is that we all have one. Even Gandhi often mentioned how imperfect he was and resisted the tendency of portraying him as a saint. 

That part is also sometimes labelled as the ego in spiritual circles, which is a different definition to the one espoused in psychology circles. Some spiritual people even claim that the death of the ego is the goal. I personally believe this to be a dangerous goal, as it is virtually impossible and when you do that, there is a risk that you start hiding parts of you that don't conform with this unrealistic ideal. Two things can then happen: you project it onto other people or it erupts like a volcano after being repressed for too long and you go into a rage. 

Of course this comes from the misunderstanding of what the ego is. Most people think the ego is that propensity that some people display to boast about themselves in an exaggerated manner. But the ego can pretend to be humble. It can make you manipulative. And it will usually try to convince you that the thing that you are doing that clashes with your values is justified because... fill in the gap. The ego is incredibly clever and persuasive. And if you don't understand how it works, it will play you. 

Even Jung defined enlightenment in relation to making the darkness conscious rather than imagining figures of light. But to paraphrase him, making the darkness conscious is vastly unpopular as it requires looking at things we do not want to look at and doing hard work. 

Feel free to head over to the show notes on my website www.angedelumiere.biz/podcast if you want to comment with your thoughts and experience so we can start a conversation going.