supernatural experiences...

[Elzain]

Hi! I'm only new to witchcraft but since i was small i've been experiencing supernatural things...

One of the the things that i want to the answer is when i still a child...
Their was a time when my mom left me alone in my room, then the door was locked. She forgot to bring the key with her and she had a spare key but their was another lock that can only be opened from the inside. I was sleeping at that time. Then while they were finding a way to wake me up i saw woman with long black hair wearing a black dress beside me she was caressing my cheeks and was singing a song. I don't know if she was a ghost or not. Then 2 days after that we saw a big foot print in the door that looks like was made by a dog but was so big from the normal dog.

I asked a psychic who was the woman at that time. He did a reading and told me that it was the Goddess Hekate.

Well...
I want to ask you Elisa if their was a connection with Goddess Hekate and the big Foot Print that was left from our door?...

I also have an experience when i was sleeping in the car. I felt that someone touched my cheeks then i fell asleep. I dreamt of a beautiful woman with long curly hair. Beside her was flames floating. She looked so Divine. She looked at me then smiled at me. She told me that she has been waiting for me for a long time and that she had missed me. She also asked me if i still remember her. I told her no. She smiled then said that i will remember everything in time. I asked her what she meant by that but she didn't answered. Then i woked up.

Do you think that it was someone from my past that had come to meet me?...

Their was also a time when i was sleeping. I was with a girl with red long curly hair. and orangish eyes. she was telling about something. Then at the end she showed me 10 spheres. She told me to pick one. The one that will stay with me for now. I picked the red one then told me that i picked that right one. She also told me to take care of him. When i was going to ask something she suddenly disappeared. When i woke up i felt as if someone was beside me.

What do you think was that?...

The last one that i want to ask was something that i can't forget. I dreamt that i was a guy wearing a traditional japanese clothes of onmyouji. I was in the forest with a guy that i hadn't met before. I was sitting at a large rock. The he showed me his power after that he told me that he heard that i didn't want to be partnered with him and that i want another spirit to be my partner. I didn't said anything then he said that he will do his best so that everyone will acknowledge the 2 of us. Then He smiled and said that he will be by my side until my next life and that it was his promise. When i woke up i was told by my friend to meditate to find out what his name was and to talk to him.

Do you think that the one i dreamt of was from my past life?...

Sorry if i asked so many questions.
Thank you in advance...^^...

[Kassandra]

Hi. It’s not too many questions; just be ready for my really long answer in response to them all, hahaha.

Consulting psychics and friends are fine. But work to get to a point where you could decipher this stuff for yourself (save consultations for the really big stuff). I believe you could arrive at the true meanings of all of these questions with a little work. It should be you arriving at these interpretations, as they are very personal. It shouldn't be someone else telling you what they mean. A detail like meeting the man in "the forest" may not mean to someone else what it means to you. So their interpretation will be useless to you in the end. For this reason "dream dictionaries" are interesting to read, but are pretty useless. The entries are based on what the author thinks they mean, or has "researched" what they may mean to many other people (people who aren't you). Each of our minds is a living, breathing lexicon of symbols and images unique to our own souls and life experiences. So you just need practice with interpreting the language of your own soul. Therefore, I'll suggest tools to you with the goal of helping you take more of a leadership role with your abilities, so you could interpret what you experience.

I noticed a common thread that runs through all four of your questions is your being in a sleep state when receiving these messages. Seems that’s the primary way that Spirit has been communicating with you until now. When our noisy, distracted and fearful conscious minds are quieted in sleep, the spirit realm can finally get through and speak to our souls. And there’s a lot of power in dream imagery; it is direct, archetypal, powerful, and can at times be quite life-changing.

However, I am in agreement with your friend, who recommended you meditate to get to the bottom of the last dream. I would take that a step further and recommend you develop a regular, consistent meditation practice. Incorporate it into your path as a witch. You can learn to alter your consciousness at will, and go in and out of any state you wish, anytime you wish. So instead of Spirit (the Higher Self, guardian angels, ancestors, teachers, whomever) having to sneak through the back door of your consciousness (i.e. through your dreams), it could just walk through the front door of your waking consciousness on a regular basis. Spirit speaks to us constantly, sometimes loudly, most of the time very subtley. To hear it we must exercise mindfulness throughout the day, or we'll miss their cues. It's like practicing a musical instrument, or practicing to play a sport; without regular, consistent practice, you lose your edge. So you've got to clock the hours, put in the work. Through regular meditation you'll develop mindfulness, and be able to do such things as arrive at the meanings of your dreams on your own.

In this thread, I mention several meditation methods (as well as some general info about the nature and purpose of spirit guides, as I have experienced their presence in my life): Overview of meditation techniques. Try several of them until you find what works well for you, personally. Whatever method you choose, learn to quiet your mind regularly and you will get answers to these and many other questions in your life. Don’t let your effort be hit-or-miss, or else your results will likewise be hit-or-miss: be sure to set aside regular time for this and keep these appointments with your spirit. Anyone experiencing as much spirit contact as you seem to be, can’t afford not to meditate.

You might try doing readings to increase your confidence in what you are sensing. Buy and use a tarot or oracle deck. Spend time getting to know each card, not just through the "instruction booklet," but through your own interpretation of the imagery on it. The archetypal imagery is no different than dream imagery really, same thing. Again, this would help you work on this stuff in the waking state, training you to use the same skills you use while you’re asleep. Start by doing readings for yourself for a while. Then offer to read for family or close friends. Then read for strangers. We have a forum here in which members could practice their reading skills: Tarot and Intuitive Readings by Members . Jump in there! Develop confidence in what you are picking up; confidence dispels fear.

As far as the dreams you mentioned, Hecate would be a great deity to work with as the feminine energy principle represented on your altar (if you don’t already have that set up). Use your instincts for whom you’d like to represent the masculine principle –you’ll probably receive that in a dream too, I bet! Hecate encapsulates the very rhythm of the nature cycle, the Great Mother, virgin/mother/crone all rolled into one. Whether that was her or not in your dream, work with her and see what happens. And about the dog foot print you mention, I found this interesting comment in Wiki:

“Dogs were closely associated with Hecate in the Classical world. ‘In art and in literature Hecate is constantly represented as dog-shaped or as accompanied by a dog. Her approach was heralded by the howling of a dog. The dog was Hecate's regular sacrificial animal, and was often eaten in solemn sacrament.’ The sacrifice of dogs to Hecate is attested for in Thrace, Samothrace, Colophon, and Athens.”



Revisit the dream of the 10 spheres during a meditation session (that sounds like the name of a movie, Dream of the Ten Spheres) specifically set aside for that purpose, nothing else. Keep a journal to write down the messages you get, and I suggest using crystals to assist you in understanding the meanings of each sphere. For example, you could use 10 clear quartz crystals, as they’re easy to work with. Or since you mention the color red for the sphere you chose in the dream (that kind of reminded me of The Matrix, haha), you could use crystals of differing colors to represent each sphere, like red jasper for the red sphere, etc. When you’re selecting the crystals, try to avoid asking a salesperson to help you. Again, use the opportunity to exercise your own skills. Intuitively connect with the crystals, sense which crystals represent which spheres.

Keep all 10 of them arranged as you see fit on your altar. Hold and meditate on one crystal (sphere) per meditation session to learn its Medicine for you; I wouldn’t try to do them all in one session. Let it take several days to unfold, don’t rush. During the session, quiet your mind. Then tell your guides you are open to them sharing with you whatever information that sphere/crystal has for you. Look at (clairvoyance), and listen to (clairaudience) the first things that come to your mind. Trust this. Create a dialogue, ask questions, wait for the answers. After your meditation session, write down in your Book of Shadows what insight you received. Again, with the amount of dream work you do, and since this info first came to you in a dream, I recommend you have a section specifically dedicated just to dreams, if not a separate dream journal altogether.

Do the same with the two people who seem to be from your past lives. Use something to represent them: like, you could draw pictures of each of them, or cut out pictures from a magazine, and set each picture in front of you as you meditate on it (again, one person per session). Even draw a picture of yourself in the onmyouji clothing, or use an existing image. Ask the picture --really you are talking to your own subconscious mind; the picture is just a tool-- to give you insight as to why you are dressed that way. Listen for the answers and write what you get. Over time, look for patterns that connect all these people together, as past life information usually has an obvious pattern of some sort. But you only notice what is when you study it with mindfulness. It may take several weeks, but it's worth the time --this is your life, after all. Deciphering some of my past life stuff took several years in some instances, and I'm still putting other pieces together, so don't feel bad. lol!

Take your time, be consistent, and above all enjoy the wonderful journey! I wish you the best.

[Elzain]

Hi
Thank you so much for the advice Elisa.
Now i'm planning when i'm going to meditate because i have school and clinicals.
I also met the guy from my dreams.
It seems that his always been by my side. In the past onmyouji calls them Shikigami.
He told me that he was my Shikigami in the past and that he had fulfilled his promise to me.
Now we are friends again.
I'm still finding out about my past life as an Onmyouji and my other past life.^^.
But i had some problems cause i feel like i had so much negative energy on me right now that it blocks my senses in the supernatural.
Do you know how i can cleanse my aura?...
Thank you so much.^^.

[Kassandra]

Great. Glad you're getting insight about your spirit people, and about your own past lives. Everything's there for a reason, and it's fulfilling when those reasons start making sense, when the soul’s sometimes mysterious puzzle pieces start falling into place, one by one. Boy, do I know how that could get perplexing and frustrating at times. But, I also find, the answers always surface in their own good time, one way or another.



Regarding clearing your aura of negativity, there are many approaches to take when dealing with negative energy. When choosing an approach, first determine where exactly the negative energy really comes from.

Briefly assess:
“Is the negative energy actually projected from someone else?” or
“Do my physical surroundings contribute to the negative energy I’m experiencing?” or
“Could I myself somehow be generating it, while perhaps not even realizing I am?”

In all three instances, dealing with it becomes largely a matter of understanding one’s perceptions of things. In this post I’m going to address the last of the above three assessment questions first, looking at how we physically and mentally generate and experience negative energy. I’ll address the other two questions in another post.



Assessing the Physical

We are “electro-magnetic” beings, that is, we absorb the quality of energies projected around us, while simultaneously projecting the qualities of energies we’re generating. So, needless to say, the energy we generate greatly colors our perceptions of people and situations we encounter. Therefore, a good place to look at first is one’s overall physical habits, one’s baseline health, how one treats the “equipment” (the body) one is utilizing while experiencing this incarnation. It’s important to sleep enough, eat healthy foods/drink plenty of water, exercise vigorously, and not put unnecessary chemicals into one’s body. Really boring stuff I know, but profoundly important never the less. That’s the physics of the Earth plane, the laws we must abide by because we’re not spirits yet (or again). We’re physical beings who must play by the rules of being a physical being. Few of us can get all those areas in balance at once. I found, in talking to many people and in my own experience, a lot of what we perceive as negativity coming from outside ourselves, is often “negativity” our poor bodies are suffering from due to imbalance we’ve imposed upon it (and is simultaneously generating and projecting outwardly as well).

But surprisingly, just trying to maintain physical balance as much as is possible at any given moment, is often enough to fend off the majority of what might be perceived as outside negative energy. For instance, if you’re chronically sleep deprived, your mental “pistons” (the neurons, neurotransmitters, and other thinking equipment of the body) just can’t fire correctly. As a result you’ll generate and experience lame, low-level, discombobulated energy. There’s a good reason why sleep deprivation is an effective torture method used against prisoners! If you suffer from self-imposed sleep deprivation, at best you’ll be tired, cranky, impatient and unable to fully grasp things. At worse, you may be noticeably delusional, perhaps even suicidal. Additionally, your pituitary gland won’t excrete the right chemicals at the right time, your circadian rhythm will be totally thrown off, and a host of other problems will add up to one big mess ...sleep is that important. Since you are in school, you may be “burning the candle at both ends,” as they say. Assess to see if the negativity you’re experiencing has to do with depriving your body of sufficient sleep. If so, getting adequate rest may resolve the negativity you’re experiencing.

Similar considerations could be made about nutritional deprivation: eat crappy food, generate low-level, crappy energy. I know a guy who is literally “another person” whenever he’s hungry and needs to eat food. It’s creepy (perhaps he’s got a bad blood sugar problem or something). I didn’t think food could affect someone like that. Then I remembered when I was younger and I used to think I suffered from depression, until I discovered how nutrition (or the lack of it I unwittingly suffered from, at the time) aversely affected my own mood, comprehension, and perception. I hadn’t been depressed after all; I was just hella’ hungry! Exercise is important too. I was totally grossed out when I read that people who don’t exercise and sweat regularly could potentially have the same stinky toxins just beneath the surface of their skin for years, and never release it from their bodies. Ew. Plus exercise releases dopamine, serotonin and other feel-good drugs naturally created by the body …why not exercise, if for no other reason than that? Free drugs! That’ll clear any “negativity” right there.

Which leads to the obvious, and which goes without saying …if you fill your body with unnecessary chemicals it has no need for (i.e., in excessive drugs and/or alcohol use), the chemicals just turn to poison, and you’ll both experience unusable toxic energy, as well as outwardly project it to the world somehow. Al-Anon and similar organizations have meetings attended by people who know this all too well.

All in all, whenever physical health is compromised, perception will somehow be affected, unless one makes a conscious effort at correcting the imbalance. So sometimes what we perceive to be “negative energy,” is just the result of poor self-care.



Assessing the Mental

A second, good place to look at whenever one desires to "clear negative energy" is within one’s own head. It’s insightful to look at one’s overall mental habits, especially the verbal soundtracks one finds playing there loudly and clearly. I find that Fear (rational, or irrational) and Resentment (holding grudges, etc.), are probably the two biggest brick walls blocking us from generating and/or receiving any kind of clear, positive energy. It seems that energy feeds on itself, and fear thoughts generate more fear. They just generally grow, and start affecting more and more areas of life. Resentments too, I’ve noticed, tend to grow. They could start with one particular person or incident in the beginning. And if we don’t learn the lesson ingrained in our interaction with that person or incident, then let the person or incident “ go” mental/emotionally, that initial resentment feeds on itself and grows. When we later experience similar people and incidents (because we tend to inevitably experience “resonances,” parallels, echoes of one thing that look “energetically” just like another), the resentment starting with “him or her” grows to encompasses our perception of “all those people out there just like him/ her.” Still growing unchecked, it then expands into “the whole world is essentially just like him/her.”

I call these “calcified thoughts.” Sometimes we are not compassionate with ourselves, and need protection from our own destructive negative thoughts and emotions. It’s interesting that we’ll seek to acquire crystals, spells, psychic shielding techniques, talismans, cleansing techniques, sage smudging, or other “protections” against what we fear is “outside” negative energy ….while completely oblivious to the negative energy generated by our souls. Calcified thoughts are brittle, never-changing, frozen like the dinosaur bones one would excavate from an archeological dig in the desert. Positive energy cannot enter these blocked perceptions; in fact, nothing good can penetrate them. They only increase in negativity with time, unless we release them. In readings I can psychically see people “pollute” their own auras with their own toxicity, the negative energy issuing from their souls (usually from a particular chakra, specifically) like a thick, smelly, grey smokestack billowing from a factory, into an otherwise clear sky. That’s what it looks like. When we embark on a reading of our own minds in meditation, and start really digging, we sometimes find many frightening calcified thoughts there. But self-love and self-compassion (not self-pity, a different thing altogether) motivate us to work at letting these poisons go.

Listen to what your own "thought recordings" say to you as they play and replay throughout the day. Sometimes the content can be shocking. One might hear, for instance, one’s mother’s thoughts and fears about wartime deprivation or lack, or one might hear one’s 5th grade teacher fear of cars or water, or one’s uncle or aunt’s thoughts about their dislike of people of a particular race, religion or sexual orientation. We don’t even realize we’ve absorbed them! It’s amazing what thoughts are rattling around in our heads, that firstly didn’t originate with us, and secondly have anything to do with our own life experiences.

Especially if one is an “empath,” which many people are, it’s even more crucial to master the art of separating original thoughts and emotions from those unwittingly absorbed from others. Frequent meditation (preferably daily) is a must for an empath, not an option (…unless one has chosen that feeling miserable is an acceptable way to live, and I’m not being facetious when I say that, as people do choose to live “outside” themselves/their life purposes, entangled in the drama of others).

We might also hear toxic, self-defeated thoughts rattling around in our brains incessantly:

“I’ll never do it right.”
“This always happens to me.”
“People hate me.”
“They said I would fail, and they’re right; I’m going to fail.”
“I’m not good at this, and never will be.”
“She’s smarter/prettier/better-liked/nicer than I am.”

Before worrying about clearing any outside negative energies, if any of this stuff is on the inside, work on clearing it first.



Investing Wisely

Thankfully however, positive thoughts, like acceptance and peace, also feed upon themselves and grow. So it helps to think of your energy –mental, emotional and physical– as though it were all money, your soul’s “currency” as it were. So how will you spend it? Will you squander it mindlessly, or invest it wisely? What’s that investment portfolio going to look like (i.e., your life purpose as you live it)? How will you structure the contributions to those funds? Wise “energy investments” tend to have a rich yield of fulfillment and peace; unwise investments tend to result in spiritual bankruptcy. Therefore, the more one accepts and grows past what's not really worth straining one’s mind and emotions over, the more resources are available to invest in what is worthy of one’s time (i.e., what supports one’s true life purpose). The result is greater inner peace, as well the enjoyment of perceptions of a peaceful outside world. As peacefulness feeds on itself and grows, like other forms of energy do, one success will follow another, confidence grows into more confidence, one achievement leads to another …and in these ways the soul gradually unfolds.



In every spiritual path I’ve studied, I was always trained to begin by looking at personal responsibility when examining the root of a problem: at the Berkeley Psychic Institute they taught the importance of grounding, centering, shielding and otherwise bringing one’s own energy under control, before concerning oneself with someone else’s energy. Christianity taught me that a public “show” of faith was in no way equivalent to personally worshipping God “in spirit and in truth.” Buddhism taught me that the source of suffering is attachment to what’s not essential to my spirit, attachment to what the ego believes it needs for survival. Vedanta taught me that we are all the Atman, the same universal energy, expressed in a vast myriad of forms, and that believing otherwise is to buy into the delusion of maya, of separateness, and other tricks of the physical world. And one of the principles of the Spiritualist church I attend state that "we make our own happiness or unhappiness as we obey or disobey Nature's physical and spiritual laws." They're all saying the same thing, as far as I'm concerned.

So I always seem to stress that self-healing, whether it's clearing the aura of negative energy, or anything else, first starts with self-assessment. Assess your management of your personal physical/mental/emotional energies currently, and for the next couple of weeks bring whatever you feel needs to be brought into balance, into balance. I’m sure that doing so will “clear” a lot of what you now perceive as being negative energy in your aura. For instance, if you're not eating right, throw some fruit, Power Bars, a turkey sandwhich and bottled water into your bookbag, rather than eat grease burgers for lunch (or skipping meals, which is worse than eating grease burgers). If you're walking around like a bloodshot zombie, get more sleep. For free drugs to perk you up, exercise vigorously 3 or 4 times a week. And if mom's nagging negativity is rattling around in your brain, write some positive affirmations on some 3x5 cards, read them out loud during the day, and drown her out. Do whatever you gotta' do.

All of what you do --how you treat your body, what things you think, say and do to yourself and to others, equally affect your aura, so examine these things first. I’ll talk about dealing with negative energy from your physical surroundings, or from people, in my next post.


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