Episode 5: Spiritual Myths & Unpopular Opinions Part 2 | What you need to know about manifestation, energy protection, universal lessons, and more!

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Hello magical souls and welcome back to another episode of The Soul’s Human Experience Podcast. This is a continuation of last week’s episode, the second part of spiritual myths and unpopular opinions. Last week we covered manifestation and happiness. This week we’ll continue on with staying high vibe, energy protection, universal lessons, and humility. That’s a lot to cover but before we jump in I want to share a quick story with you about finding humor. If you’ve ever had the Trader Joe’s mini ice cream cones then you’ll know what I’m talking about, but Trader Joe’s has these delicious mini ice cream cones and the ice cream on the top is covered with a chocolate shell. And I was eating one on my couch and somehow a piece of the chocolate shell flew and landed on the ottoman in front of the couch, except I didn’t notice it until the next day when my husband pointed it out, so now there was this chocolate stain on the light grey ottoman. I thought ok let me go get the stain remover to clean it which is this small bottle and it was sitting under the sink behind another bottle. So I reach over that bottle to grab the stain remover and it falls out of my hand. I try to grab it again and it falls out of my hand again. And again. And again. And I am not kidding, after five tries I started laughing because it was so funny to me that I couldn’t seem to hold onto this bottle. And I paused for a moment and said thank you to the universe for that moment of humor. Finally then on the sixth try I was able to grab it. But I could have just as easily gotten annoyed. That could have just as easily been a moment of annoyance in my day. But instead, I chose to see it as a moment of humor. One thing I learned from Sonia Choquette is to ask for joy spirit guides in your day to make you laugh. So I can’t help but wonder if there are joy guides setting up this stuff to try and get us to laugh. Isn’t that a fun idea? Maybe I just couldn’t hold on to it but either way I wanted to share that. 

Alright, let’s get into today’s topic. So we had manifestation and its subconscious messaging of acquiring more being not a good or helpful thing, the truth about happiness, and the next one has to do with both of the first two actually, all three of them overlap. Specifically, this next one is about staying high-vibe. The popular opinion that you often hear is that you need to be high vibe in order to get what you want. Or in other words, become a match to the vibration of the thing you want and you’ll attract it to you. And that if you can’t match its vibration, then you won’t receive it. Because all physical things exist as energy before they exist in the 3D. And they vibrate at a high frequency—presumably one that’s higher than you are. 

First of all, it’s completely unrealistic to expect yourself to be in a high vibration all the time. The expectation alone brings in the energy of negative pressure because it’s a condition of “do this..or else”. So you can’t possibly fail, or you won’t get what you want to get. Now you aren’t failing at all, because it’s near impossible to achieve, so you can’t fail at that. Unless you’re an enlightened guru, and if you are you’re probably not manifesting anyway, you’re going to have periods of lows. We assume that low equates to bad and undesirable. And sure, it’s probably safe to assume that most people would prefer to feel feelings of high vibration versus low vibration. But what if we could see times of low vibration differently. Isn’t there a sort of unique creativity that can come from those times? Isn’t it a great time for deep introspection? Isn’t it often a time of contraction that leads to expansion? Some great ideas, stories, and growth have come from my own low times. I think of the tortured artist whose pain is the fountain of their beautiful art. And it doesn’t always have to be this way. We experience times of high vibration. That unfortunately leads to fearing the opposite. You don’t have to. You don’t have to try and push it away and not just because of the reasons I just listed but it also isn’t going to affect your manifestations the way you think it will. I can speak from personal experience that I have manifested things while I was overall not feeling very positive. I think what’s more important than trying to maintain a state that’s not maintainable, is practicing the allowing of what is. So you’re feeling happy and high-vibe? Great. You’re experiencing a period of upset? Also great. See how that changes the narrative? If it’s meant for you it’s going to get to you. You don’t need to put yourself into a state of fear or worry or repelling of what’s natural and going to happen. Will feeling good fast-track you? Yeah, maybe. But who cares? When you live in the certainty that it’s destined for you and the surrender of the journey to it, you’re going to enjoy the ride a lot more than trying to stay in the fast lane and being miserable the whole time just trying to stay there. Not to mention that that forcing is kind of low vibrational in itself. I just want to stress that there doesn’t need to be any pressure attached to the way you feel at any given moment. I know I’ve found myself beating myself up for feeling sad for what I determined a “too-long” period of time. No need. Let it ride. The less you attach yourself to it the quicker it will move on. 

Ok completely switching gears now. The next topic I want to talk about is energy protection. I am pretty sure this a very unpopular opinion because I’ve only ever heard one other person agree with me on this and they were one of my Reiki Masters. And that is, you don’t actually need energy protection at all. The idea that you need to do any kind of rituals, practices, visualizations, or whatever it may be, in order to protect your energy, is fundamentally completely unnecessary. Why? Because there is only one person who has control over your energy and that is you. Absolutely no one can enter, or disrupt your energy field without your consent. That belief is your energy protection. If you are 100% firm in that belief, you’re good, your energy is solid. A long time ago I did practice energy protection because I would consider myself an empath and if you’re not careful or you don’t hold that belief that your energy is your own, then yes, your energy can be vulnerable. Do I think that energy protection exercises work? Yes. Why do they work? Because that’s the meaning you’ve given it. In that case, you are of the belief that you’ve done the practice and it’s going to protect you. And that’s why it works. So I’ll say that you need to do what feels right to you, there’s nothing wrong or harmful about energy protection if you do practice it, but I’m offering the idea that it’s not necessary and I would encourage you to instead try out the belief that your energy is yours and only yours and therefore impenetrable. The only caveat I will give, is if you are a reflector in human design, you naturally have a very open energy and so it may be helpful for you to visualize something like a golden shield around you. Because putting an image behind the belief may help solidify that belief of owning your energy when inherently you may have a more difficult time with that than most people. Otherwise, I think energy protection is more about where you are spending your energy, because it’s your currency. And not worrying so much about it being vulnerable.

That one was pretty quick so let’s move on to another really quick one which is humility. We have this cultural idea that being humble is the way you should act. Like if someone says to you wow you look so great, I love your outfit, what is your first reaction? For many people it’s probably oh, it’s old, it’s nothing, or some form of downplaying. We are so quick to shift credit away from ourselves. Because again a shared cultural idea that liking yourself or being proud of yourself is somehow an unattractive quality to have. There’s a famous clip of Snoop Dog accepting an award and in his thank you’s he says, “and I’d like to thank me”. Yes. One hundred percent yes. Why shouldn’t he? Did he not have responsibility for his work? Why should he not be proud of himself? I think by being humble it dims our light. And conversely we shine when we celebrate ourselves. Wouldn’t it be nice if it were as acceptable to say about yourself, “I’m awesome,” as it is to tell someone else that they’re awesome? It’s okay to be proud of yourself. Even if you prefer to practice it privately. I would honestly love to hear your thoughts on this. On all of these topics of course. But I think this one is probably the least accepted or rather, most accepted one. What do you think about humility and the role it plays?

Ok we’ve made it to the sixth and final unpopular opinion slash myth. This is another juicy one  and it’s lessons and tests from the universe. I’m just going to come out and say it and then I’ll talk about it in more detail. I do not think this is earth school. I do not believe that the universe distributes tests and lessons for you to pass in earth school. Now I know this is unpopular because even the great Ram Das said earth is a school. So if everyone else says it is, and the metaphor works very well, why would I disagree? Well, to understand that you have to understand what the universe is. The universe is one thing: love. It is the conscious energy of love. Someone or something that loves you would never test you, purposely put you through trials of hardship, or ask you to prove yourself. It just wouldn’t. That is not how love acts. Love is compassionate, kind, and forgiving. So it’s a fair question to ask then, why do we experience hardship? I believe that many, if not most or all of our challenges were set up by us. Either as souls pre-planning for our earthly experience, or as humans in our free will choices. In both cases, you present yourself with opportunities for expansion. To some extent, I agree with most spiritual teachers who say we are here to learn. While I don’t believe we are here for learning as our sole purpose, I think learning comes with the territory of the human experience and cannot be removed from it. It’s an important part because without it there is no evolution. And why would we want to expand and evolve? Well, my personal belief is that there is some level of growth that humanity must experience and so as souls, we volunteer to come here and help push that evolution along. There’s also another idea of soul evolution, which is the idea most people seem to subscribe to along with earth school. I didn’t use to believe in soul evolution, because if the soul is a perfect piece of the universe then it can’t evolve into anything more or greater than it already is. And if there is no hierarchy in the spirit world, then that further supports the lack of the need for soul evolution. I do still believe those things but I have heard some channeled messages that say otherwise and talk about soul evolution and I am always open to changing my opinions so I have to admit I revisit the question of soul evolution from time to time. I don’t think we will ever know for sure on that one so as always, listen to what you feel is true for you. My truth doesn’t have to match your truth. There are people who swear this is earth school and I just don’t subscribe to that. It probably doesn’t help that I really did not like school. So the idea of school continuing on forever is such a bad energy for me. I prefer to think of my time here as a time to enjoy to the fullest extent possible. And when challenges arise I don’t think of them as tests or lessons but as opportunities to expand and uplevel and become a better human, and therefore also betting the world as a whole. I am going to talk more about this in another episode because I want to expand more on why we’re really here, so I think I’m going to end it here for now. 

I really hope you’ve enjoyed listening to all of these myths and unpopular opinions. I’d love to hear your thoughts on them and if you have any questions or stories to share, you can email them to hello@annaschlinghoff.com. I’ll see you in the next episode.