Far too often the concepts of shielding and protection are filled with misunderstandings and a lot of drama. Rather than create a sense of security and comfort within Self, despite the appearance of safety, it tends to reinforce a belief that one is powerless. This in turn reinforces the fear that shapes our experience of the non-physical world.
Everything from surrounding yourself with white light, prayers (beseeching), smoke, crystals, symbols, and talismans, are all forms of protection that are commonly spoken of. All of these practices hold one thing in common: The faith, and more often hope, that we’ll be safe in our spiritual experience.
Unfortunately, you cannot have hope of something without having doubt of it. While it is the very nature of hope to inspire against doubt, hope cannot dispel that which it is drawn from. It is the doubt of our power that acts against us in our wakening to our true Self. As you think, so shall you be, and experience.
Shielding and protection is a block or barrier to something we don’t want to experience. This is merely an extension of how we tend to block the unpleasantness of life and deny what we feel or experience in the physical world. It is yet another cue for self-exploration.
If we take a close look at our daily lives we can see just how much we’re practicing the art of ‘protection’ all the time. We may seek to control external events or people in order to feel in control and safe. We may vigorously strive to maintain our youthful physical appearance in order to feel safe from being looked upon as ‘old’ and to protect ourselves from those who might judge us as being undesirable. Like the puffer fish, we try to make ourselves appear larger than we are to intimidate potential predators.
There are many uncomfortable experiences we have in our lifetimes and rather than trying to always anticipate and protect ourselves from those experiences consider that everything that happens, happens for us. Consider that for a moment: Nothing happens to you and everything happens for you. While this may sound defeating, it only points to our power in perception and our ability to change our attitude rather than external forces.
With regard to psychic or supernatural experiences, we feel especially threatened because we feel especially powerless to stand up to it. In our everyday lives, it’s bad enough feeling scared and powerless against what we can see. The feeling is multiplied when we are afraid of what we can’t see. Your soul chose to come here, and it anticipated that you’d be right here, right were you are now, at this moment. Everything that has happened to you thus far is meaningful and has purpose, but if you are not seeing it as purposeful you will continue to feel victimized.
Our need for shielding and protection when dealing with spiritual matters is merely an extension of the need to shield and protect ourselves from all life’s unpleasantness. The bottom line however, is that we cannot shield ourselves against the experiences our soul has set up for us to work though. It has though, given us the tools in which to navigate our lives with joy.
What we tend to do is put all of our attention and focus on the experience, instead of how the experience makes us feel, We think in order to not feel that way, we have to change the experience, or make sure we don’t experience it by controlling people or things around us. In doing this, we totally ignore the idea that how we feel might not be based in truth. We’ve all experienced this in one way or another. Have you ever been so sure of something? You know without a doubt that it is the way it is, only to find out later that it wasn’t anything like you imagined? Here’s a quick example: You’re walking somewhere and a pretty girl, or good looking guy, walks by and smiles at you. Your mind immediately begins creating a story about how they must like you and want to go out with you. You have also imagined, without any current experience of it, that this person or that person is conspiring against you. Your body responds and tenses up, you can feel the outrage and anger and judgment rising within you, but the reality is that this person or that person hasn’t given any thought to you at all.
A need for protection is a conclusion we’ve made based on how an experience, or potential experience, makes us feel. Many of our fears arise not from personal experience, but from expectations we’ve developed from a lack of understanding of who we really are.
It’s easy to develop and notice the expectations we have of others. Our expectations are based upon their past and current behavior. We can notice the same with expectations we have of ourselves. We develop these expectations from what we have come to understand about our experiences, or, what we’ve concluded about our experiences, or how we felt about our experiences. Are the beliefs that lead to expectation necessarily true? By examining our feelings and where they are coming from we can discover if our conclusion is accurate. As with anything you encounter in life, your feelings in response to something are your own, they come from you, not from something outside of you. What this means is, deal with the fear you feel instead of the ‘monster’ you perceived to have made you feel it.
With regards to psychic awareness, we want to be safe in our experience. This in itself is not unreasonable or difficult to understand. A phrase you’ll hear a lot in the spiritual community is ‘Opening up’, where a person is opening up to spirit, opening up to intuition or psychic ability, or opening awareness. People who are seeking their true nature will inevitably ask, ‘what exactly am I opening myself to?’ It’s easy to see how people equate ‘opening’ with ‘vulnerable’.
The only way we can make this connection between ‘opening’ and ‘vulnerable’ in our minds is in the presence of fear. On some level inside us, the idea of opening is scary. We are afraid of what we are opening to and feel powerless in ourselves, so we seek out ways to make ourselves more powerful. The more powerful we seek to be, the more fearful we become and so, like a funnel, we bottle ourselves up, narrowing our view and awareness and understanding of our experiences. The most obvious problem with opening and shielding is that shielding seems to be positively selective when, in fact, keeping things out also keeps you in. This doesn’t sound much like opening to me.
I believe when we open, we are opening to ourselves, our true nature, our soul, spirit, higher Self. There is never anything to fear because we are only opening to ourselves, and we are essence eternal. It is through the awareness and understanding of ourselves as spiritual beings that we gain awareness and understanding of all we’re connected to.
Fear is a lack of understanding. Instead of seeking to understand the object of your fear, seek to understand the fear itself in your own mind. Deal directly with the idea of your fear and protection, and shielding will be unnecessary for you. The purpose of opening up is to become more aware of your true Self and to use that awareness to live more consciously in life.
All that exists is vibrational energy. The more connected and in tune you are to your true Self, the more conscious you are of your vibrational level. The more conscious you are, the more in control of your experience. What you think affects how you feel. What you feel affects your vibration. Your vibration shapes your experience.
You can increase awareness and consciousness by increasing your vibration. Most people are familiar with this idea and know how our vibration is connected to emotions, feelings. What we tend to see as positive feelings will raise our vibration and what we see as negative feelings will lower vibration.
Whatever level your vibration is at, you will only be affected or notice vibrations that are like in nature. This is where you can apply the concept of mirrors, in that we are all mirrors for each other, as well as the experiences we encounter.
Getting our vibration up to where we’d like it to be is never the problem. The problem is in maintaining it throughout the various distractions that pull it back down again. Have you ever had a day where nothing could get you down? It didn’t matter what anyone said or did, you didn’t let it affect your mood. That’s what this is all about. Choose to maintain your calm, peaceful center. Choose where and what your attention will be given to.
I can’t help thinking of protection as going out into the middle of a highway, building a large barricade to hide behind, hoping that you won’t get hurt. Your barricade may not be strong enough initially and you may have a close call here and there so you decide that you just need a better, bigger, stronger barricade. And while you seem safe behind your shield of protection, there is still the ever present fear that something big enough will come along to go right through your barricade. My advice to anyone would be to consider getting off the highway.
One of my favorite lines comes from the Karate Kid, “the best way to avoid a punch, is to not be there”. Do not allow anything in your experience to intrude upon your calm center. You must be clear in your intention. People speak of having difficulty retaining that calm peaceful quality of their spirit in the midst of some upsetting experience. This is why it is important to consider this when you are not in the midst of an emotional experience. It takes a lot of reminders. When you do find yourself in it, it is easier to remind yourself of how you wish to ‘be’ when you already have a clear intention in mind.
One thing I’ve always wanted to know, where was the supernatural ‘evil’ before we opened our spiritual eyes? Why are billions of people not suffering from psychic attacks, dark attachments and evil, energy draining entities? There are billions of people walking around literally unprotected. Are they crazy? Are they just asking for it? Some believe that it’s only when we endeavor to help others that we are targeted by beings of lower energies. There are good people everywhere doing incredibly good things for others all the time, spiritual or not. And yet, they remain clear and attack free.
‘Safety, is the complete relinquishment of attack’ – A Course in Miracles
What this means is that the idea of safety isn’t about manipulation of anything outside of ourselves. It isn’t about being stronger or more powerful. In order to be safe we must let go of our expectations of being attacked, injured, or manipulated. This doesn’t mean turning a blind eye to potential situations in which one may be hurt or injured. We can be safe in the world more effectively with an understanding of it, than we can with a fear of it.
We create our own ‘evils’. There is a lack of understanding of Self, which leads us to believe that what we fear is more powerful than ourselves. And whatever is more powerful than ourselves, we don’t understand. What we don’t understand, we fear. What we fear, we judge as evil.
Guy Finley talks about something similar in his audio series, The Illusion of Limitation. He says that we will have an experience, and that experience may be unpleasant. From this experience we will draw conclusions about ourselves and the world to the point of creating a monster that wants to destroy us. I want to clarify that all of our experiences do not take place outside of ourselves, some of our experiences are internal. Our tendency is to want to prevent that experience from happening again, or at all, so we tell ourselves we need to be more prepared.
Up until this point your experience may develop you in two ways. The first and more common, is to develop an expectation and fear that it WILL happen again and so you begin to seek out ways to protect yourself against it. You try your best to understand it. Why? So you can either avoid it, or defeat it. In our minds, we create this ‘monster’ then set about ways in which to destroy it. All the while having no conscious thought of having created it in the first place.
The second way it could go is that you recognize what the experience is making you think, say, do, and feel. I’ve always maintained that our growth is never about the experience itself, it is about how we respond to the experience and learn from it. Do not confront the object of your fear, it is an illusion created by your interpretation of events, other people, and yourself. Confront the conclusions you have made about your fear. Confront your current understanding of who you really are as well as who others really are.
In my process of self-discovery I’ve come to understand a few things that make shielding and protection unnecessary in my work. There is nothing in creation that I can experience or imagine that isn’t ‘God’. God is All There Is and nothing can exist separate from God. I am a divine, eternal being that cannot be diminished, injured, or harmed in any way. We are all made of the same stuff. Whatever I encounter is ‘me’.
When it comes down to living your life, do what you feel is necessary for you to establish or maintain a feeling of wellbeing at any time. I will never say that shielding and protection aren’t useful tools, I will however, always maintain that with a greater understanding of yourself as spirit, it will be unnecessary.
Christopher Cormier has been working as a professional psychic medium and spiritual counselor for 12 years seeing clients in-person, by phone or internet and began exploring spirituality 15 years ago with a simple question: Is there more?
As a psychic medium, Chris has worked with clients throughout Canada, the USA, and overseas offering inspiration, guidance and evidence that we are much more than we appear, and that death is just a gateway to all that we are.
As a spiritual counselor Chris has been assisting people in recognizing their true nature as spirit and helping to empower them to understand and implement the aspects of their own spirit into their everyday lives.
“We are all divine spirit, each and every one of us. We’re here to remember that, and by establishing that inner connection we all have to that part of ourselves, our lives will transform allowing joy, happiness and abundance to thrive in it. In doing so we find that the world around us naturally transforms to reflect that.” – Christopher
www.cormierchris.com
christopher@cormierchris.com
