In the early stages of spiritual development, we all battle with balancing curiosity with vulnerability. We want to know about anything and everything having to do with spirituality and we seek answers from people who seemingly, by our young and underdeveloped sense of discernment, seem to know what they are talking about.

After all, they are a psychic – they have the ability to connect to things that we don’t, right? They have a much better connection to all things spiritual than we do, so we should probably listen to what they have to say.

The truth is, you are just as connected to spirit as they are and you are just as connected to your intuition, it’s only a matter of whether or not you listen to it. And in some instance, your intuition is practically SCREAMING at you to not put your complete faith and trust in this person.

I know I have, and in those instances it’s been of the utmost importance that I listened to what my gut was telling me.

I met a guy once who fancied himself a spiritual teacher, of sorts. I was in the earlier stages of my spiritual development where I had been having experiences and epiphanies that were rapidly eroding away my former notion of reality. As such, my mind was quite open to learning new things.

This stage of your growth is a vulnerable one. While you’re openness is a gift, because it allows you to integrate new information, without a healthy amount of discernment, it leaves you extremely vulnerable to being fed a lot of bullshit. And depending on how you react to that bullshit, it can do a lot of damage.

Don’t believe me? It’s really not much different than how you are fed religion at an early age – when you don’t know much about the world – and you believe it, and then those beliefs shape who you become. And when you’re a part of a religion that is fear-based and heavily reliant on control, it can much more harm to your psyche than it does good.

Even though in this case you’re an adult, physically, you’re back in a child-like mental state where everything is shiny and new. And while you’ve shed old beliefs, you’re in the process of creating new ones that will potentially inform your view of spirituality from here on out.

So I met this so-called spiritual teacher. Some of the things he was saying seemed… out there… but so much of what I was learning already seemed “out there” and who was I to judge? I thought I’d at least listen to what he had to say.

Boy, did he have a lot to say. And the more he talked, the more the icky feeling grew in the pit of my stomach.

To say that this guy gave me the heebs would be an understatement. It was more like the robot from Lost in Space running around with flailing arms yelling, “DANGER WILL ROBINSON!”

He had his own Facebook page and website, with fans and followers. He had fancy charts and graphs that he created to demonstrate the things he was teaching, and he was very interested in sharing those things with me. Many of his ideas were similar to other spiritual stuff I had read, but some of it was still very much like the religious upbringing I’d had.

It almost felt like he’d taken spiritual teachings from here and there, and put his own spin on them, and it felt very twisted. The things he said made sense, logically, but just didn’t feel quite right.

I asked three separate friends of the intuitive persuasion to give me their psychic impressions of him, and they each confirmed my creeped out feeling.

It wasn’t that he was a bad person. It’s just that he had not done a good job of working through is own issues and taming his own ego, so although he may have actually been receiving real guidance, it was being filtered through a really bent belief system.

Fortunately, this guy was not nearly charismatic enough to build a cult, but if he were, it would have been a dangerous combination. One of the last times he talked to me before I blocked him, he told me that he’d been psychically informed there was going to be a pole shift in three months and where he lived was going to be underwater, so he was preparing to move inland. Surprise, surprise… it never happened. Though maybe he moved. I don’t know.

The moral of this story is – always listen to your gut.

I had a reading a year ago or so with another guy who claimed that he was not a psychic, he merely channeled his higher self and it provided all of the information. I’d randomly found him on YouTube, and he had quite the following. I thought, “Oh ok. Why not? I’ll give him a shot.”

My first clue that this guy was full of shit – or at least full of ego – should have been when he told me that his “higher self” didn’t like to be wrong.

Red flag.

Thanks for being here,

Ash

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