W is for: Western Spirituality Treats God Like A Gumball Machine
This post is part of a series: “The ABC’s of What I’ve Learned as a Medium and Intuitive Healer.”
I say Spirit to mean God, the Universe, the Cosmos - I use these phrases interchangeably for all enlightened beings who help us. I use “Spirit” to mean everything out there, taking care of and managing in here: Them as a group and concept. You may choose to substitute the word “Spirit” with Jesus, Archangel Michael, Allah, Lakshmi, Kuan Yin, The Universe, The Cosmos, or about a billion other names, and it doesn’t matter. Spirit is all this and so much more than we can ever understand.
Western Spirituality Treats God Like A Gumball Machine
Since I began working as a spiritualist, I have said over and over that I could never imagine doing anything else for work, ever again. I said that out loud as recently as September, at a friend's wedding. For most of my adult life, I was in a corporate career, and after the magic of having found this world in which I really felt like I could help people and make a difference, I especially couldn't consider going back to anything else. I’ve always said I can't imagine working for anyone else again, and I can't imagine anything which could be even half as fulfilling as this. So a couple weeks ago, it was completely shocking when, for the first time, I said out loud, “I don’t know if I can keep doing this.”
Please forgive me as I jump back and forth to tell this story, and let me take a few steps back.
Entering the Castle
“It is very risky to speak on behalf of God, especially with a tone of absolute authority. I have often imagined that people who carry on about how God ‘thinks’ human beings should behave must appear to be complete fools to the divine. But it is possible to speak with integrity of our own experiences with the God who has come to us individually. It is from this place that I share my experiences with you. You can draw whatever guidance or insight from these experiences that you want.” Caroline Myss, Entering the Castle
Just before this, I read the book Entering the Castle by Caroline Myss. She is an impeccable intuitive whose work I have admired for years and whose teaching style I have tried to emulate in many ways. Though I have owned this book for years, I couldn't bring myself to read it until recently. The book is a modern interpretation of a vision which the Spanish nun Teresa of Avila had hundreds of years ago. This vision was of the soul as a castle which one could travel through, and at the center of the castle, after much hard work and self-examination, one meets God.
Early in the book, there is this quote: "Medieval mystics saw their suffering as a sign from God that they were loved. Suffering was their way of being mindful of God every second of their lives." When I read this, I rolled my eyes pretty hard, and said aloud that maybe the whole thing was ridiculous, because we don't view suffering as a gift in this day and age, Teresa, no thank you.
Still, I really wanted to take the book seriously and make every attempt I could to go through it strenuously, skipping no rooms and asking my guides and higher self to help me with each room. I asked them to show me my blind spots, and tell me what they saw if I didn't see it.
In the first area of the castle, one deals with their relationship with humility. One addresses times they've been humiliated and how their life could have been different if that hadn't happened to them. That's the first room. You're not even eased in! In the very first hallway, one addresses how they've been humiliated, how they've humiliated others, what would humiliate them now, how they view humility, and so much more incredibly painful work, that by the end of this hallway, one already feels like a different person. (At least, I did.) But, it's really just beginning. The entire first section is room after room addressing one's relationship with being humble.
This quote from the book is long, but important in regard to all this: “You cannot master humbleness just once or all at once. It is a daily life practice because, without a doubt, the fear of being humiliated is the most controlling voice in our psyches. Teresa and other spiritual directors from other traditions understood this basic truth of human nature. Many people who are looking for their purpose, their highest potential, are frustrated and exhausted by their quest because they think they can’t see the next step they’re meant to take. But even when that next step is right in front of them -- which it always is -- most would find a reason not to move forward. Some would say, 'Well the time is just not right,' and others, 'I’m just not sure.' The excuses are always the same, but in the end, all excuses boil down to the fear of humiliation. These individuals are waiting for something that will never come: they want guidance in a package, like a severance package or portfolio. And they want their guidance package to contain: (1) specifics of what they should do, and with whom, usually with a guarantee that other people involved will do all the ‘high risk’ work; (2) a guarantee that they will not have to invest one cent of their own money, but will make a great deal in return doing the minimum; (3) a guarantee that they will not have to move, re-organize their lives, or become uncomfortable in any way, shape, or form; and, most important of all, (4) a guarantee that they will not, they must not, fail. Oh, and being admired by others in this 'highest potential project' would also be nice. In short, they want a guarantee that they will win the race before they even run it.”
This gives you an idea of what you’re dealing with in the castle. It is not easy, and it is not meant to be easy, as while/if we are looking for ease, we are still not ready to meet God - not in the castle and not in our lives. Caroline (modern writer) and Teresa (of Avila) don’t recommend one try to get through the castle in one day, and Teresa said many of the nuns who learned from her never made it past the fourth area (of seven).
After this, one addresses their relationship to chaos. Room after room about how we create our own chaos. Addressing temptations, our private agendas we've decided were based on God's advice, where we're blaming God for not being there when X happened to us, and so much more. One must challenge their contradictions, work through what they think about God and what they think God thinks about them - it's a whole thing.
I can say that by the end of the book I was in shambles, and I had actual sobbing breakdowns many times while working through humility, chaos, and my relationship to Spirit even as I teach others about their relationship to Spirit. I was left with two, absolutely overwhelming and heart-wrenching feelings:
One, every bit of suffering in our lives is a gift and a sign from God that we are loved, guided, and taken care of. That I had found this completely ridiculous at the beginning of the book only drove it home more sincerely by the end.
Two, I don't know if the career I have fought for is one I really enjoy, and I maybe haven't for some time.
This was a huge and ego-stomping moment for me. Even saying out loud that there was a possibility that this career may not be the right path was so painful for so many reasons, it’s still hard to think or talk about. But I think that makes it more important to talk about, so I’m going to try to continue to be almost painfully honest in this post about what I have been going through during an unprecedented personal crisis of faith. Not a crisis of faith in Spirit, but in my spiritual community and in myself. In my ability to continue to work within this community, make changes, and try to continue to spread a Spirit-lead, compassion-forward message.
This is because it is abundantly clear that this is not the message about Spirit which almost anyone wants to hear.
Spirituality As A Violent or Sexy Niche Market
If one tries to find a spiritualist online right now, they are incredibly likely to find someone who is claiming to curse others, to predict the future, to tell what someone else is thinking, or to cast any number of spells which will do anything from make someone fall in love with you to make you a millionaire overnight. I will make a bold claim but it's one I mean: these are not spiritual people, and they are not working with Spirit.
(Sadly, one is about 1000 times more likely to find a negative entity to work with through these behaviors than they are to find a genuine spirit guide. This is why this community is also under constant attack from negative entities - these rituals and violent activities, especially when done in the name of Spirit or angels as so many are, invite in forces which feed on people through negativity. Years ago, I didn't think this was true or possible, and now I have seen too many examples of it.)
It’s much easier to find incorrect information than correct, where the online spiritual community is concerned. Consent is a law of the universe, every spirit guide would tell you that. So why are so many online spiritualists claiming to read others' minds for you? To tell you what your ex is doing or thinking or talking about now? Would you want someone else to be able to spy on you? No. So why would you do this to anyone else, even if you actually could? Spirit always tells us to put out what we want to get back, because they understand energy and karma. Not one legitimate spirit guide would tell anyone to try to breach anyone else’s consent, and definitely not to try to hurt anyone else using “spiritual” means. It’s interesting so many who claim to work with Spirit are willing to sell these kinds of services.
This misinformation is a theme. It's impossible to access The Akashic Record without one's eighth chakra open, so why do most who post about The Record not mention or know about the out-of-body chakras? Why do they not explain where it is located or how to access it? Western spiritualists love to talk about Kundalini awakenings through a new lens, but most do not know about or explain the nadis, the energetic channels through which these awakenings happen, nor the granthis or many other aspects which are simply missing from these teachings. There is often only the vaguest understanding of the chakras, which govern every aspect of our experience through our belief systems. When we combine this lack of information with how many claim to "read minds" and "curse people," it's nearly impossible to find a spiritualist who even feels genuine. The online community was so overrun by spiritualists who are not spiritual people that Etsy spiritualists were almost completely replaced by AI, and no one even noticed.
Spirituality has become a sexy niche market. More want to show off their spiritual or "witchy" tattoos, wrap themselves in crystals and pendants and charms which are inherently spiritual and/or religious, and make endless videos about their latest reiki attunement, but no one “has time” to pray or have any relationship with God whatsoever if they can’t post about it. It has become more important to look spiritual than to be spiritual. It has become more important to talk about God than to talk to God. We are advertising and monetizing our relationship with God first, and sadly, we have shifted culturally to thinking that this is what Spirit would want. That God would be impressed with our devotion which we put on display. God would love our appropriated Ganesha tattoos and our mandalas and our videos on YouTube telling everyone about what should be a sacred and private session. (But do we ever ask?)
We didn't get here overnight, and we have to be honest that it happened because it has been a very long time since most spiritualists or intuitives were doing anything valuable or which actually helped anyone. We were not becoming better people ourselves, so could not teach others how to become better people. More to the point - we weren’t getting closer to God (just trying to look it), so how could we teach anyone else to talk to God? This is what I had to look at, that I am part of this community in which we say we are helping others but devaluing God in actuality and in concept. I have to acknowledge that the reason this niche market of sexy spirituality is popular is that it is what the overwhelming majority of our clients want.
God’s Advice Isn’t About Social Media
Most of our clients have no intention of hearing from God unless God says exactly what the client wants them to say, which is, "Get rune tattoos and take a sexy pilgrimage so you can photograph it and put it online, because pics or your spiritual journey didn't happen."
Most of my clients do not want to talk about their own chakras, to talk about their own auric field, to talk about how they personally can be of service or do better or be better. Even those who would call themselves the most spiritual do not really want to talk about Spirit at all. Most people who make their way to spiritualists do so because they want to understand why God has not yet told them to take a highly-photographable and widely-consumable spiritual journey, preferably one on which they will meet their hopefully highly-photographable soulmate who can travel with them.
We say, "I put in my daily prayers, so where’s my million dollars?" (Refusing to acknowledge our longstanding beliefs about and abuse of money.) "I told God I wanted a perfect partner, I did the manifesting activity I saw online, but I’m still lonely, why?" (Refusing to acknowledge our longstanding beliefs about and abuse of relationships.) "I'm putting video after video of my witchcraft on TikTok, so where are my million followers?"
And from here, people blame God because they don’t have what they want. People cry to God (and to me and other working spiritualists) about how their higher self is not listening to them and doesn’t want to make their life better. People scream about how their spirit guides are clearly not listening to their prayers because none of their prayers are ever answered.
God Will Never Take A Lesson From You
It is a new and incredibly Western thought that our relationship with God is meant to be about our putting out our hand and their giving us whatever it is we've asked for, whether we are ready for it or would even understand it once we had it. Spirit is not obligated to hand any of us anything. If our relationship with Spirit is about putting a quarter in a machine to receive our gumball, we can watch manifesting videos 1000 times per day and our life will never change. Not because manifesting isn't real or because God isn't real - because we are fundamentally misunderstanding all roles in the situation. Because God just handing us something we asked for but are not vibrationally aligned with would not, in any way, make our life better.
Manifesting in actuality is a slow, painstaking process of acknowledging and adjusting limiting and/or damaging beliefs until you understand why you are not aligned vibrationally with what you want. By the time someone has done so, their beliefs have changed so much as to make the person they used to be unrecognizable, and they usually don’t care about the thing they were initially trying to manifest anymore, anyway. Western spiritualists tell you otherwise because you pay us to.
Our soul chose this lifetime with immense care based on what we personally needed to do and learn. No soul incarnated here is perfect or we wouldn’t be here - we're all still here learning lessons. If we asked for something which we didn't understand (so our vibrations were nowhere near it), and it was just handed to us? We'd have missed out on a very important learning opportunity. God's true function with us is those learning opportunities. Spirit helps us see where our life could be better and tries to help us put in the work to get there. No part of their function is about doing anything for us which we could learn to do or handing us anything which we could learn to go get. They would see this as doing us an immense disservice because teaching someone is loving them and believing in them and their soul.
If your child asks you to do something for them, at a certain point, don't you stop doing it for them and teach them how to do it? Within reason, within the bounds of what they are capable of and what is available to them with who they are and what they know - don't you teach them to get what they want? Don’t you prepare their food while they can’t, but eventually show them how to do so themselves? Don't you drive your child until they get their license? Provide their home until they get their own? This is our relationship with Spirit and our guides. They don't give us anything - they repeatedly (really endlessly) try to put us on a collision course with life which would ensure we can learn to become a person who knows how to get the thing we want. This is always appropriate to who we are, what we know, and what we are capable of. There is not a prayer in the world one could say that would make God just hand them anything, because there is nothing they would learn from that. We're here in these human bodies to learn.
In the Old Testament, after people have built the tower of Babel and tried to reach the heavens to defeat God, God does not strike them down. Why not? Because they would not be any wiser for it. God is forgiveness and compassion, yes, but God is also this - our teacher. God knows no human is unforgivable, and there is no value in striking anyone down, but in teaching them. Giving them a learning opportunity.
Even when humans say we have conquered God, even when humans say God is dead, even when humans are concerned with cursing and bombing and hurting each other in God's name, the truth of it is that God will never hurt us back. Why? Because we wouldn’t be made any wiser for it. Because each of us has a spark of Source, of the Creator inside us, trying desperately to become wiser and experience more. Our relationship with God is about getting closer to that spark of divinity within us. The way each of our minds connects to God's big mind.
Life Is Not Supposed to Be Easy
It's become incredibly popular among Western spiritualists to say this life is meant to be easy and a blast and an absolute joy - that what God wants for you is a perfect life of ease and comfort and exactly zero hardship. I'm sorry (no I'm not) to say - this is the exact opposite of what God wants for any of us because none of us is made any better or smarter by it. If we look back on the times during which our lives truly changed because we changed irrevocably and permanently for the better - did that happen during good times? Almost never. We grow out of hardship and learning to endure. When we learn to endure without blaming others for our chaos or creating more chaos, we live as our highest self. When we learn to live as our highest self without asking for anything in return - now we're on the path to God. This is a path I can now admit I feel I'm starting over again from scratch, after my trip into the Castle.
"That is what a person living in spiritual congruence is expected to do: to shine light where there is none, but not to expect light to be shone in return. Light is always returned, of course, but one type of suffering ends when we no longer expect light to be returned by all those we help along the way." Caroline Myss, Entering the Castle
For those of us who believe (myself included), when we get onto the vibration of hurt and blame, we eventually place these feelings on Spirit in whatever form we view them. "Where was God when this happened to me? Why hasn't God gotten me out of this terrible situation? Why hasn't God already brought down all those rotten people whose beliefs don't match mine? God obviously wants me to have this thing I want, so why don’t I have it?" Only when we are hurt and when we are in a place of blame do we blame God for the things happening in our lives, and not only do we blame God for our suffering, we blame God for not getting us out of our suffering. This is simply not God‘s function.
Being incarnated is about suffering and learning to endure, which leads to learning to overcome. The path to God begins with removing self-imposed barriers (like lack of humility and creation of chaos) and learning to endure and then overcome the trials and suffering which come with being human. Each of us is here to learn this.
I refuse to continue to be one of the new age intuitives telling you that incarnation is supposed to be a free-for-all circus in which you become a millionaire overnight via an effortless path of unmatched creative ideas and meet your soulmate at the age of 17 and buy the perfect mansion and live out your life exactly as you think your one and only path to happiness can unfold. This is a fantasy. When we think this, it’s doing ourselves and God a disservice. (Don’t you think God is more creative than that?) No matter who you are, the truth is that God does not want this for you and will not help you get it. There is no one in the world for whom that life is going to make them better or smarter. Incarnation is about getting better. It is about seeing what we put out into the world and recognizing that is the only thing that comes back to us. Recognizing that there is absolutely nothing in our lives which we did not accept or create, and that the things we don’t have, it’s up to us to go get them if we want them. It's about cause and effect and learning to make order out of chaos. Spirit cannot hand us something for which our beliefs are not aligned, nor would they, because doing so doesn’t teach us anything. They care about teaching us where our beliefs are limiting or damaging because that’s what’s right to do for a soul, just like a good parent would do. Being incarnated is about learning who you are and how to become just a little better this lifetime than you were the one before. We grow when we have reason and motivation.
Giving us happiness in exchange for nothing is not part of our relationship with God. Our souls came into these human bodies with a purpose, and our spirit guides' function is to help us meet that purpose. Their function is absolutely not to help us curse other people, to help us spy on other people, or to look cool or do fun party tricks. Our spirit guides are trying to help us be better people because this is what makes it most likely that we will move toward our purpose. It makes us more likely to maximize good and minimize harm with whatever we have at the time. I am sick of being one of the Western spiritualists who tells you that intuition and building gifts and your relationship with Spirit is supposed to be easy. It’s supposed to be hard. It is supposed to be incredibly hard. It should be the most difficult thing you ever do. But until we do it, we will look for God everywhere without wanting to see him. We will look around at everyone else and blame them for every bad thing that ever happened in our lives, which never actually allows us to make it better. We will continue to create chaos and wonder where the chaos is coming from, and many of us will blame God.
The more focused we are on the material world around us, the less able we are to actually connect to the pure feeling of being touched by God. There is a reason so many spiritualists over thousands of years have given up possessions and human relationships. It is possible that as people who care about money and care about our relationships, we are already building barriers between us and God at all times. Now I believe we are meant to live in the modern society we do live in, our relationship with money and our relationships with others are very important. But if we have the chance to talk to God and the first thing we want to ask about is money or relationships, we still do not know the things Spirit wants to talk about. And as spiritualists, when our services are centered around helping you achieve more physically or materially or helping you focus on other people rather than helping you focus on yourself, we have fallen into the trap of Western spirituality. I have fallen into this trap too. I have said for years that I have been teaching people to get closer to divinity and to that feeling of being touched by God, and I believed it, but while watching the majority of my clients fail to get any closer to God because of this world view and because of these incorrect ideas about why we should want to talk to God in the first place.
A good spiritualist should always acknowledge first and foremost that they have no personal power - every good thing we do comes from God. I do not heal anyone, God heals through me. I cannot tell anyone what they need to hear because I have no idea what anyone needs to hear - I allow myself to be a channel for Spirit to say what someone needs. A good spiritualist should also allow for Spirit to tell you how a problem started and how to become more accountable - how to be aware of and work on more aspects of yourself. We will never be able to control anyone else, we’ll never be able to control anyone else’s behavior or thoughts or the way they see us or anything else about what they think or do. Even if we could, we shouldn't want to, as we wouldn't want to be controlled. We are the only thing we can control. This is what Spirit wants to talk to us about. They want to tell us how to get better. I have found that these are the sessions clients find most disappointing. People do not want Spirit to ask them for accountability, or to become wiser, better, smarter, or work harder. This is a good chunk of the reason people avoid God in the first place. People want significant praise for very little work. People want to be told they are a "starseed of immense natural ability" and then they expect that gifts will just come pouring out with no work or effort or even basic training (you’re probably not and they definitely won't). Western spirituality has turned us into those who go to spiritualists to hear that we are already perfect and don’t need to change a thing, or that our life is going to become perfect without our work or input.
Once we work through these traps, then we can really be touched by Spirit. Then we can see that every bad thing that happened to us was not chaos, but divinity, helping us add more order to our lives through awareness. When we come up against a bad life situation, we can say that the next time, we will not accept or create the same. Learning what we do not like helps us move closer to things we do like.
So, like the medieval mystics, we can learn to see suffering as a sign that we are loved by God. God never causes our suffering, only repeatedly shows us where we cause our own suffering and the suffering of others, and God loves us anyway. Though we continue to treat Spirit as if their entire function is to spit out a gumball when we put in a quarter, they love us anyway and continue to show us the ways we cause our own suffering and the suffering of others.
The Future Isn’t Set And It’s Our Responsibility To Create
There is an absolute obsession with asking psychics to predict the future because we are lazy. (I stopped doing these readings years ago and consider talking about the future to be like 3% of my job.) When we ask to predict the future, what we are really doing is begging God to just hand us the future so we do not have to work for it. When we ask God what’s going to happen in three months, it’s because we are hoping to hear that our entire world is going to be majestic in three months, and preferably with zero work or input from us. We are hoping to hear that in three months, even though right now we are lonely and poor, we will somehow be in an amazing partnership and rich and the most intuitive person in the world. People ask, "When will my guides be giving me new psychic gifts?" Not, "How do I work to develop new psychic gifts?"
Dropping the question "when?" from every conversation with our spirit guides immediately brings us miles closer to Spirit. But people hate hearing this maybe more than any other advice I can give them. Over the years, the number of clients I have had who were willing to truly work hard and put in effort to get what they wanted from their spiritual practice has been maybe 5% of my entire client base. The other 95% have asked me to tell them that at some point, their life is going to fall into place without their putting in any effort, and more so, they want me to tell them this is what God is and what God wants. This is what Western spirituality is teaching. We are teaching that our relationship with God is about complete and utter laziness. That God would want us to be lazier and ask for more while doing and learning less, as if that makes any sense for any God any of us claims to know.
Once again I'll go to parenting - if your child asks you to let them live off ice cream and Cheetos, one would hope you would still introduce some other items from the food pyramid, because while your child knows how to ask for things they like, they do not know what is best or what would actually make them feel good. If your child wants to play ball in an intersection, hopefully you, with more information, don’t let them. Spirit knows that most of the things we ask for are things which would simply make us feel terribly should we receive them, because we tend to ask for things we don't understand.
"We fear intimacy with the divine unless it is on our terms. When we need help, we want that help to come exactly as we need it, exactly when we need it, causing as little discomfort as possible. We want constant proof that God hears our prayers and monitors are physical survival, but we do not really want to make eye contact with the divine because of the consequences: after encountering God, we would have to live a relentlessly, conscious, compassionate life, and we would have to overlook the behavior of people in our world to continue to live as we once did… and treat them with understanding and compassion." - Caroline Myss, Entering the Castle
Would God Like Hearing Your Prayers?
Even among those of us who believe in prayer, very few of us are praying for things like love, compassion, scientific breakthroughs, medicinal breakthroughs, societal breakthroughs, kindness, forgiveness. In short, few of us are praying for the things we say we want to see in the world. Spirit is about 1000 times more likely to hear prayers like, "Please poison my enemies. Please burn down my place of work. Please send a bomb to that country I hate. Please throw those people who don't look like me out of my country." (As if any of these things would actually make anyone better or smarter, either.)
As I've said, as most Western spiritualists, I've fallen into these traps. Not of praying for destruction, but of praying for myself and my loved ones and my clients and no one else. This is something I have shifted only in recent months.
"You can tell yourself that you do indeed trust in this God, but do you really believe that your basic needs will be met in life? Do you require order in your physical world to feel safe? What do you pray for? How many prayers do you offer for safety? For protection? How many prayers do you make that stem from your desire to survive? How many prayers do you offer in surrender? How much do you fear that if you surrender, God will reduce you to poverty? Do you still need a reason for even one experience or trauma that happened to you? Do you still question why chaos swept through your life and re-ordered the plans you had?" - Caroline Myss, Entering the Castle
Something I had to do on my trip through the castle was ask myself: would God like hearing my prayers? And I've begun to ask this of my clients: Are your prayers messages of hate? Are your prayers asking God to hand you something you have not worked for and have no intention of earning? Do you think God is inspired to answer messages of hate? Do you think God is inspired to hand you something you have not earned or worked for and that would not make you any smarter or better in the having of it?
My first experience with God after which I could not ever deny again was years ago, but I had become so disenchanted over years of this that before I reached God in the castle, I asked first, "Have I ever even met you?" This is not easy to admit, as someone who teaches others to talk to Spirit.
This encounter with God in the castle was a re-awakening of a feeling I needed desperately. The feeling that being known and seen by the Universe, the Cosmos, Spirit, God, whatever name you choose to give it - that's what's important. No other person can make us feel seen in this way, no Instagram or Tiktok post or spiritual tattoo or manifesting activity is going to do it. What we are looking for is our pure and honest encounter with God. Until we are ready for that, we will look for God everywhere while trying desperately not to see, because we know once we do, the next step will be accountability and an inability to move backward and pretend we don't know what we now know. Once we allow God to speak to us, it would be impossible to pretend we don’t hear. So most of us will spend our lives desperately avoiding the conversation.
"Even as we crave spiritual intimacy with the divine... we also have deep fears about God and the ways that an encounter with the divine will change our lives. We long for guidance, but are also terrified of revelation. We pray to know God, but fear God‘s answers." - Caroline Myss, Entering the Castle
The prayers which are answered are prayers like, "Please show me how I am creating my own chaos or chaos for my family? Please help me be the best parent and partner I can be. How can I be more humble? How can I forgive those who have hurt me as I pray those whom I have hurt have forgiven me? How can I put out more of what I want to see in the world? How can I be of service today?"
My guides asked me recently - when was the last time you prayed for someone you dislike? I almost balked - why would I, even? But I shouldn't have had to ask, and I'm embarrassed now that I did. Because I shouldn't care enough or be on the vibration to dislike anyone in the first place. Because we're all sparks of the same Source. Because I would want others to show me compassion and forgiveness no matter who I was or what I was doing, so that's all I should show anyone else, or what right do I have to ever ask for it?
My Journey Since The Castle
Until recently, I was not ready to look at the fact that I have been part of this system. That I have been teaching people manifesting, teaching people to use psychic gifts, teaching people to get closer to Spirit, but knowing that the vast majority of the intuitive community is not really one which has any intention to be spiritual any longer. My relationship with most of my clients has not been one of empowering their relationship with God as much as begging them to see that relationship as one which is worthy of time for more reasons than just manifesting material goods. I can see how I have allowed my own morals to go by the wayside, because I was so convinced that this career was the only way to use my gifts. Which really, if I’m looking at it, is myself monetizing God in the same way as everyone else I have mentioned. Having had the opportunity in the castle to weed out my own private agendas which I was dressing as God’s advice, I could see that my team had been trying to show me for a long time that I am not excited about bringing this career to any further steps, and something has to change.
Thérèse of Lisieux, a french nun, reminded us that it’s more important to talk to God than to talk about God. We’ve lost this as an ideal and so many of us are talking about God while desperately avoiding being of service in our own lives or in the lives of others, though this is what God would ask each of us to do. I have to say this is what I have seen throughout more of my career than any other attitude, and I have to be honest that I fell into comfortably disliking a high number of my clients and sessions while planning to build my entire world out of this. While until just a month ago, everything in my life had been focused on how to bring my career to the next step (an in-person location), I suddenly felt that doing so was wrong, and that trying to force any more steps would really be an exercise in extreme ego - it would be forcing something I know all of my vibrations are against. That's why it wouldn't work and why an in-person location hasn't worked effortlessly for me thus far - not because Spirit is blocking me or because it's the wrong thing to do, but because it's the wrong thing to do for me when all my vibrations are against it. Attempting to convince people that God is worth it is not what I want to do anymore, at least not in this way.
I have ongoing clients and mentorship students whom I have known and loved dearly, some of whom for years. I do not in any way mean to say all clients are like this, that I hate everything about what I do, or that I am ungrateful to anyone whom I've worked with over the years. Watching those who have gotten closer to Spirit and who have made huge changes for themselves and others - being close to them has been and continues to be one of the greatest joys of my life. But for the first time, I think that down the road, I will not be doing this. I am no longer considering putting my resources into an in-person location. I am considering going back to school for science, as for years I have been telling myself that I could do so much as a medium who believed in science, and I’m now thinking about how much more I could do as a scientist who believes in mediumship.
I know writing a post like this is likely to lead to loss of some clients and anger from others, and many people will wonder why I did this, just as many wondered why I left Etsy when that was a huge blow, and as many have wondered why I have never taken my business to social media. But the answers to all of this are that my integrity has to come first, and once I know better, I have to do better. To act as if I am who I have always been or still want what I used to want would be so disingenuous I can't stand the thought. I have to be honest that it is becoming too difficult to find things in this community to believe in, respect, or value. And I have to be completely honest with myself and my remaining clients that I have no interest in trying to change it from the inside because this community views God as a gumball machine, and I am no longer interested in helping people put in their quarter and wonder why they are not getting out exactly what they asked for. Those with whom I continue to work as a spiritualist will get this attitude from me, and they know my practice is and has always been about hard work and dedication to the bigger picture and feeling better on purpose. Those who are trying to act as if God is something which could be bent to a person’s will aren’t clients I’m interested in having, as this is just not a paradigm I feel comfortable feeding into ever again.
To end this much-too-personal post, I'll bring you in on my prayers and hope that you'll pray with me to whichever larger system you believe in. “God, please help humanity. Please help those who are suffering. Please help those who are displaced, homeless, cold, or hungry. Please help those who are scared. Please help those who are lost, struggling, or running in circles. Please help addicts. Please help those who can’t see the source of their pain. Please help those who are furthest from you. Please help all places of science and learning be guided by knowledge and betterment for all. Please help all places of worship be guided by a vision of oneness. Please help those who can make changes for all humans make them for the good of as many as possible. Please help all humans, now and at the time of our deaths. Thank you, amen.”