How can we ensure spiritual protection?
This blog is long overdue. A few years ago, I saw an ad for a one-day workshop on spiritual protection and how to protect ourselves from spiritual attacks – or something along those lines.
While protection is not something to take lightly, and any practitioner worth their salt will have their system well-honed, when I see these kinds of workshops, I frown. I know they can trigger people’s fear, and unlocking new fears or worsening those that a person may already suffer from is the antithesis of healing.
And the thing is: I dont think they’re worth it. In fact, I’m pretty sure they’re not, but there are ways you can protect yourself that are tried, tested and -most importantly- true.
Allow me to give you the low-down, as per my own teachings, on the ever-popular topic of spiritual protection. In fact, I’ll do better than that, Here’s a three step, no bullshit, spiritual protection plan:
1. Get healthy
2. Create healthy spiritual relationships
3. Trust
Simple, right?
Well, perhaps simpler than lighting 800 candles, projecting white light around you at all times or smudging every nook and cranny of your home until the air is so thick you can barely breath and the fire department shows up.
The thing is, real protection goes much deeper and requires us to really show up for ourselves emotionally.
First let’s get into some shamanistic fundamentals.
Why spiritual intrusions and attachments happen, and the nature of energy
First off, energy that doesn’t belong to us, when lodged in our bodies, may cause all sorts of problems. I’m referring to energy we inadvertently take in or is sent our way, energy we steal from people we envy or admire, and energy in the form of entities that attach to us.
Keep in mind that it’s not really the energy that’s bad, energy is neutral. It’s only a problem when it’s in the wrong place.
We are conceived with strong spiritual bodies, but as we go through life, things happen that can cause parts of our soul to flee our bodies. This creates a vulnerability in our energy field. Like a weak or missing link in the overall chain.
These vulnerabilities cause a chain reaction:
First, they make it easier for us to take in energy that is sent our way – think: A jealous neighbour, a resentful ex-lover, or energy that we willingly take in without realizing it, like when we help a friend through grief or visit a sick relative in the hospital. We call this misplaced energy ‘intrusions’.
If we are healthy, that energy does not get an opportunity to lodge in our bodies, it either bounces off, or in the case of the grief-stricken friends whose grief we willingly take in, dissipates out of our bodies quickly. Energetic healers are trained to consciously release this energy to keep themselves healthy.
But when we are in a vulnerable state and suffer soul loss, and as a result, many intrusions, we become even more vulnerable to taking in misplaced energy.
Soul loss feels numb. Taking in misplaced energy feels terrible. This combination often leads to depression and even physical illness. It becomes tough to make healthy choices when we are already suffering.
Not making healthy choices often invites yet more drama, hurt and chaos into our lives. Earth bound spirits and certain entities may feed off the energy that is created from chaos. They attach and begin to feed off both our chaos and our healthy energy, fueling the former, and further depleting the latter.
It is a downward spiral that, take heart, is entirely reversible.
How do we spiritually protect ourselves?
If you suffered soul loss due to something terrible that happened to you, which caused intrusions and attachments that ultimately lead to bad decisions, depression and suffering, I’m thinking you might need something a bt more sustantial than a candle.
The best protection – the only protection that works in the long run – is having the courage to roll up our sleeves and deal with our challenges.
What was it that initially caused our soul fragments to depart? What can we do to restore our own power and how can we strengthen that power over time? These are the questions that form the basis of real protection.
For example, taking brave steps to deal with addiction or to release resentment, pain and trauma. It’s not easy to have the courage to love ourselves enough that we are willing to take an active role in our healing, but it’s essential.
Shamanic healing sessions can help by restoring soul fragments to us, but in the end, it’s really up to us. We must want to be healthy, and then we must take action to get healthy and to stay healthy.
Health = protection
Every action is a choice. With every action, we must ask ourselves, does this action help me on my path or throw me off my path? Does it help me be more powerful or does it take my power away?
This is hard work. It’s not easy to embark on a healing journey. It takes resilience, patience and tenacity. It takes compassion for one’s self and others. It’s soul-wrenching half the time, and gut-wrenching the other half of the time.
But it works.
When we make good decisions, entities have a harder time attaching to us. When we honour ourselves and others, questionable energy people send our way bounces off.
Spiritual protection when we walk in the spirit world
When we do spiritual work, we often come into contact with entities that can attach to us.
In addition to maintaining good mental, physical and emotional health, we must rely on our helpers to protect us. That is their job.
That means that we must TRUST our helping Spirits. If we can’t trust our helping Spirits, then either we don’t have strong enough belief (yet) or we are not yet in that healthy place that empowers us to trust ourselves and trust others.
And if that is the case, that’s okay, but it’s not the right time to be doing spiritual work. If our trust is wavering and we are beginning to fear, we must step back and examine what is really going on with us.
I remember when I was working with my late teacher, Tira Br
How I learned the meaning of protection
andon-Evens, she gave me some amazing advice about protection.
It was in the early days of my studies, and I had been journeying by myself i.e. without guides (please, never do this!) and she told me that journeying alone was a dangerous practice, so naturally my next step was to get panicked about protection, and ask her a hundred questions about it.
Her exact words escape me, but she told me a story about when she started journeying, and how she’d spend an hour setting up her house, lighting candles and doing all sorts of things in the name of safeguarding herself.
And one day her main guide came to her and said “Tira, why are you putting so much effort into protection? Don’t you know that’s my job?”
And Tira’s response was to justify her actions. Protection is, after all, very important, etc. etc.
Her guide then said (and I paraphrase) “If you want to spend an hour on pre-journey protection, that’s your prerogative, but know that you don’t NEED to. You only need to trust that I am already doing this for you, and that, as long as you have me at your side, you are fully protected. So now that you know this, don’t have you other things you could be doing?”
When fear becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy
Fear is a lack of trust.
When we don’t feel we can trust our environment, ourselves or our loved ones, we become fearful. We worry bad things will happen.
That fear tastes like ambrosia to entities that feed off the chaotic energy it produces. It attracts attachments, it keeps our energetic bodies vulnerable to intrusions and we become self-fulfilling prophesies.
I do think that fear can have a place in our lives; but that important warning fear feels different than paranoid fear. Just like it’s different than the startle-reflex fear (I always startle when I see spirits and ghosts, but I get past it because I know my Spirits protect me 100% of time.)
The way to combat fear is trust. If I am working on a client and come up against something truly frightening, I am able to screw my courage to the sticking place because I have faith that my Spirits are warriors that can protect me against anything. They have never let me down. I don’t expect they ever will.
I also remember that nothing happens without God’s permission, that the dark and the light are two sides of the same sacred coin, and all are children of God. As long as I walk with the light, I’m on the winning team.
Walk with the light everyday
If I am a touch vulnerable and happen to pick up an attachment along the way, I don’t panic because I can simply go to my Spirits and ask them to remove it. I can always ask them for help.
They will do exactly what’s needed to teach me whatever it is that I was meant to learn from this attachment.
Usually the lesson is about how to walk more strongly in the light. Things like working out, eating better, following through on promises, drinking less alcohol, getting more sleep, getting my ass to the doctor, understanding and enforcing my boundaries. In other words, being accountable to my emotional, mental and physical health.
These actions allow me to better handle challenges that come my way (called ‘life’) and deal with my issues better. They empower me to walk with the light everyday and not fall prey to attachments or intrusions.
Believe me, taking an eight-hour course would be so much easier, but when it comes to our health, there is no quick way to get there.
So sure, you can spend your whole Saturday in a dark room learning how to cast circles, light candles and project white light, but chances are, your Spirit guides and shaking their heads and saying, “Doesn’t she know I’ve got this handled?”
All you really need to do to protect yourself is be healthy enough to trust them.
