Creating your spiritual safe space

Posted by Jessica Jewett 1 Comment »

Part of my safe space.

One of the most valuable lessons I learned in San Francisco was from Michelle Belanger. I knew about visualization exercises to calm frayed nerves or to create a shield from bad energy, but I had never been taught to build my own spiritual safety space in such an easy-to-follow manner. Maybe it’s because Michelle and I naturally get along, but I do think she’s a natural teacher and has the ability to help a lot of people. I want to pass along some of the things she taught me but then take it a step further and add some exercises that I’ve taught myself and also learned from my mentor, Nellie Kampmann.

Let’s first begin by talking about what is a safe spiritual space. In simple terms, it’s a place of your own design where you may access it through visualization and relaxation techniques and nobody may enter the space without your permission. Nobody living and nobody in spirit. It’s your space to control as you please. It’s your space to be quiet and think out your problems, seek spiritual answers, calm the affects of physical pain, or anything else you might need from a space of your own design. This, I’ve found, is the cornerstone of any successful meditation experience as well as preparing for and decompressing after a paranormal experience. So if you’re an investigator, it may be important for you to learn these techniques to protect yourself spiritually from energies or entities that you may not realize are there. This can also help build your defenses against psychic vampires – people who seem to suck the life out of you at an abnormal rate whether they are trying to do do or not.

So what you want to do is first find comfortable position. It doesn’t matter where or what position, just as long as your body is able to relax to a degree. First you want to begin by closing your eyes and taking slow, deep breaths. I’m an anxious person by nature, so this step takes me longer than others. There is no time limit. Focus on your breathing. Let yourself experience the rhythm of breath in your body, how it fills your limbs with life, and feel your lungs filling and deflating with each breath. As you feel your body beginning to relax, take further deep breaths. Each breath pulls you further under a warm blanket of comfort and further into your spiritual self. The noise of the tangible world fades away with each breath.

Your awareness will sink into a void if you haven’t built your safe space yet. For some people, the void is white shapeless space. For others, it may be black shapeless space. Begin laying out a small space around your spiritual self that makes you feel comfortable. You can design it to your heart’s content but don’t get too specific at first. Are you indoors? Keep the space manageable and small, like a room. Place each wall with your mind. Some people will reach out with a hand in the vision to place walls or objects. That’s okay too. Anything that gets the job done is okay. What’s on the walls? Paint? Wallpaper? This is your space – it’s all your choice, but be increasingly deliberate in putting it together in your meditative state. Are you outdoors? Decide whether you’re more comfortable in daylight or at night. Shape your land, place the grass, dirt, trees, and even water if you choose. As you get more comfortable with your space, indoors or outdoors, you can begin being more specific with the details and placing objects that make you feel at home. Spend as much time as you need building your space and make it your own. Remember that you can add, detract or change your space at any time, so you don’t have to get too absorbed in details right now. Just declare it as your own at put enough into it that makes you comfortable.

You will need a doorway in your space. This is a doorway completely under your control and nobody can get in unless you allow it. This doorway can have any appearance you choose as well. Supposing your space is outdoors, perhaps you could establish a wrought iron gate on the edge of your property, or a pool of water where souls may come and go, or trees that make a doorway shape, or anything else to your heart’s content. Supposing your space is indoors, simply install a door in one of the walls. You may add a few windows as well but don’t worry too much about what’s beyond your space. It should just be a void out there.

Now comes taking security measures. Use your spirit body to move around the perimeter of your space. Some people feel their spirit bodies are just like physical bodies while others tend to float along without a body – just a consciousness. Whatever is most comfortable for you is fine. Move around the perimeter touching things and announcing that nothing is allowed to invade your space without your consent. Create your energy boundaries by visualizing golden light or any means necessary to establish your space. If you have windows and a door, go through the process of unlocking and re-locking them while announcing your intent that this space belongs to you. Feel the locks in your hands. Or feel the warmth of the protective light as you lay it out around your spiritual home. Bottom line is you’re marking your territory and making your intentions known to the spirit world. Once you’ve completed the loop around your space and locked everything that can be locked, then your space is your own. Occasionally, if you feel insecure, you may go around and repeat this process of reestablishing your spiritual boundaries.

At this point, you will need to come out of the meditative state if it’s your first time in your new space. You don’t want to do too much too fast. Get to know your space when you have quiet time and you will start to find yourself feeling calmer and more centered progressively each day (if you meditate daily). Coming out of it is the opposite of going into it. Focus on your breathing again and with each exhale, feel yourself rising up to the physical world. Start to hear the sounds around you, become aware of where you’re sitting, etc. Sometimes it can take a little longer to reconnect with the physical world, sort of like waking up from a long nap, so let your body re-acclimate slowly. Move around where you’re sitting, stretch your arms and legs, and so forth. You’ll feel more relaxed after you’re finished.

In the next blog, I’ll teach you how to use your safe spiritual space to strengthen your inner self so that those who mean you harm or diminish your self-worth. You can use your internal spiritual space to find your own power. I’ll teach you the exercises this week.

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I want you to be prepared for rejection

Posted by Jessica Jewett 5 Comments »

I made it a rule when I “came out” about my reincarnation case several years ago that I wasn’t going to read anything about myself after the fact, especially when I published my book. When you start allowing outside noise into your head, it makes it almost impossible if not completely impossible to hear your own thoughts. And we all know that when outside noise makes you look down on yourself with a critical eye, it’s very difficult to pull yourself out of that negative cycle. Happiness is a choice. People who gossip and surround themselves with negative energy are only asking to be unhappy. So it’s better for certain types of people like myself who have sensitive, creative energy to avoid looking at themselves too closely or looking back on things they should have done differently or whatever the situation may entail.

The downside to avoiding reading things about myself is that it backfired in such a way that I developed a fear of rejection. I fully realized how far the fear of rejection went when I was in Gettysburg on the PRS field trip last November. One would think me being around “my own kind” as I call them would create a bubble of safety that would allow me to be open about not only being the reincarnation of Fanny Chamberlain but growing up a child medium as well. Not so. My fear of rejection was so intense that I didn’t tell anybody about what/who I am until the last day. Even then I didn’t name myself in the past. I only gave vague details about my former husband fighting there in Gettysburg and how I grew up having nightmares about army hospitals. I taught myself a long time ago to be okay with rejection from people who simply don’t understand the paranormal, but the possibility of being rejected by people educated in the field was at almost phobic proportions. Phobic because I am absolutely, wholeheartedly, unconditionally telling the truth about my past life case and there’s no concrete way to prove it. People have to take the evidence on faith. If they don’t, there’s a thinly veiled implication that I’m a liar and that’s the pill I can’t swallow. The fear of rejection about what/who I am was not something I spelled out directly there having lunch with Ryan Buell in Gettysburg but he figured it out.

“I want you to be prepared for rejection,” he said kindly but firmly, with a gesture of his fork.

I got it. I decided I would work on it, since I didn’t realize how bad the fear of rejection really was in me.

I know who I was, who I am, and what I’m doing with this life, but the possibility of other people rejecting me makes me doubt myself and I hesitate. There is hesitation cropping up when I do my readings at times as well. Things I should say but delete out of fear end up coming back to me with the clients’ feedback and I want to kick myself. Talking about Fanny is not something I do very much anymore either, except with a very tight circle of people who have proven their trust. When I “came out”, it was like a levy breaking free and I wrote about everything as if I was driven by some higher force. Then I learned how cruel strangers can be and I slowly tapered off on what I’m willing to discuss in public and what I’m not. Being called a devil worshiper or being told I need to ask Jesus for forgiveness don’t really faze me anymore though because it happens so often and the people doing the mudslinging are not intellectual in their arguments at all. Of course that doesn’t mean I like to see it.

Even in my own home, I find myself unconsciously suppressing my true nature. Most of you know that I come from a family of sensitives, mediums, intuitives, psychics, etc., going back many, many, many generations into France before we ever set foot in the New World. The problem is my family has an equally long history of suppressing those skills. If we acknowledge them at all, it’s only within the context of privacy among other family members. My grandmother is a psychic medium and also reads auras but she taught her children to suppress and ignore their own abilities to the point of making them phobic of them. My generation is starting to break that ugly cycle with me leading the pack in my work but my grandmother has been fighting me every step of the way since I was about sixteen. It’s difficult not to listen to her negativity. She knows I do readings and she knows I do PRS field trips but she doesn’t approve of either activity, saying that Ryan is a bad influence for encouraging me (I made the mistake of telling her about Gettysburg). When I went to an event with Dustin Pari formerly of Ghost Hunters and Ghost Hunters International last year, her response was to frown and warn me not to accept drinks from him because she watches Dateline date rape drug stories too much.

Sigh.

You see what I’m dealing with here.

I was talking to Dustin about suppression of medium abilities to please my grandmother recently. Under normal circumstances I’d never repeat private conversations but in the interest of helping other people, I don’t think he’d mind. Like Ryan, he cut to the heart of it with just a few words.

“All you can be is who you are. And you are… Unapologetically yourself,” he said, quoting my Twitter bio.

It occurred to me that a lot of people, including myself, may say that they don’t apologize for who they are or they are prepared for rejection but saying it and doing it are two very different things. There has to be a balance between awareness of people’s perception of you as well as the ability to stop those perceptions from hurting your views of yourself. Completely shutting out the noise puts you in a bubble and you never learn coping skills, nor do you develop tougher skin.

So, on a whim, I turned on the noise a little bit today to see what happens when I search myself online. I expected a lot of negativity because reincarnation is tough to accept just like doing intuitive readings is tough to accept as well. Surprisingly, the majority of what I found was my book on sale in many different retailers besides Amazon and Barnes & Noble. I also found myself on several paranormal websites that were rather objective in a way like, “Here are her claims if you want to look at them,” with no real subjective opinion. There was, however, one obscure message board deep in the search had a thread about my book when it was released, I think. The person who posted it called it rubbish and about ten other people chimed in but it was clear that nobody in the thread had bothered to read the book. If they quoted me, they twisted my words into something I didn’t mean. It was hatred based on… nothing, really. Hatred without bothering to really understand what they were hating. At first I was upset and stopped looking at it, but then I realized that it was the only negativity I found about myself out there. I’m pretty lucky, all things considered.

Then Ryan’s words came back to me. “I want you to be prepared for rejection.”

Then Dustin’s words came back to me. “All you can be is who you are. And you are… Unapologetically yourself.”

My three goals have been the same from the beginning. – 1) To connect with other people who have been through these experiences. 2) To tell my story in a truthful, humble and practical manner. 3) To help other people who think they might be alone. – I have accomplished all three of those goals, so I have to reach a place of peace in myself where any negativity thrown my way won’t really matter. If I have the right to say I was Fanny Chamberlain in a past life and I grew up as a child medium, then freedom of speech means other people have the right to question it or even hate it. I can’t control that. I can control the ability to follow the advice of two men who are very influential in my life. I control the information I release out there and I control presenting myself in the most purely authentic form. If people don’t use the information responsibly or they don’t bother to learn the whole story before they become armchair critics from the safety and anonymity of their computers, then that’s not my problem. The good I can do with my life far outweighs the bad thrown at me in years of hate mail and random message board discussions.

Does that mean I’m prepared for rejection and I’m just being myself? Well, only time and daily effort will reveal that. I figured out how to create a buffer around myself though. Whenever something bad comes my way, all I have to do is ask myself if my intentions were pure and if I was truthful in the purest, most practical way. The answer to both those questions being yes means I’ve done all I can and people misusing my information is their own problem. It won’t mean it won’t sting or I won’t want to argue, but there is no point.

Say what you mean correctly the first time and how people use it to bring positivity or negativity to their own lives is on their own shoulders, not yours.

One of the ways I’m going to push myself to “be prepared for rejection” is to give Ryan my book when I see him later this month in San Francisco. That sounds pretty minor but that is actually quite terrifying for me because I respect him so much that if he hated it, I think it would hurt a lot. But I ask myself those two questions again – are my intentions pure and was I truthful in the purest, most practical way? Yes and yes. So whatever happens, I did my best and that’s the thing that matters the most.

How can you apply these lessons to your own lives?

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Ghosts 101

Posted by Jessica Jewett No Comments »

Paranormal activity is not just limited to a ghost going bump in the night. The truth is there are many different types of hauntings that the average person does not understand. I decided to put this basic blog together as an introduction to paranormal phenomena in hopes of clearing up the misconceptions out there for everyone. Knowledge is power and the more you understand about the unseen world, the less likely you are to fear it.

The words people use to describe a haunting have become varied and numerous over the years, including ghosts, spirits, entities, spooks, souls, apparitions, and manifestations. These terms are not as interchangeable as people tend to think, however. What leaves the body when we die is the soul, sometimes called the consciousness as well. The soul is who we are. It’s our personality, our essence, everything we are within the body, and the body is simply the vehicle used to move through this particular lifetime. You are your soul and your soul is you. The body is just a shell. When your body dies and your soul leaves it, the living may still sense your presence. At that point, the word to describe you becomes either ghost, entity, spook or spirit. Those words are interchangeable, although I personally prefer spirit or entity because they don’t quite have the cartoonish connotation that comes with ghost or spook. Spirit is the most universal word to describe the consciousness that exists outside of the body in a haunting situation, while entity is a word that covers any type of paranormal consciousness, especially if you’re not sure about the cause.

An apparition is defined as “an unusual or unexpected sight” and “a ghostly figure”, meaning it’s only appropriate to use that word when you physically see a spirit. Example: “I saw a full-bodied apparition.” That means you physically saw a fully formed figure of a spirit. It’s not correct to say, “I felt the apparition,” or, “I sensed the apparition,” because you would be saying you felt or sensed a visual experience. You either saw an apparition or you felt or sensed a spirit but not both. Along those lines, manifestation is derived from the verb to manifest, meaning “to make evident by showing or displaying”. This word can be used with any of the six (yes, six) senses when a spirit is present. Example: “I saw/felt/smelled/heard/tasted/sensed the manifestation of a spirit.”

As you can see, getting the basic vocabulary correct will be very helpful in describing spirit activity. It’s important to develop continuity in the field so that we are all on the same page and there are no misunderstandings or miscommunications.

In general, spirits can really be divided into two main groups: human and inhuman. A human spirit is a spirit of someone who has previously lived within a human body, while an inhuman spirit is a spirit of something that has never been human and never will be human. Inhuman spirits include demons, angels, sprites, faeries, elementals, etc.

Most people mistake demons for angry human spirits when there are distinct things to consider. Demons are much, much stronger than any human spirit could be, and they are capable of diabolical confusion, oppression and possession. Diabolical confusion is when a person is made confused, foggy and emotionally drained by a demon at a location. Demonic oppression is when a demon literally oppresses people in a location, making them feel depression, influence in doing bad things, etc., which is not unlike diabolical confusion but much worse. Demonic possession is when a demon will literally take over a human body and the human no longer has control over their actions, which will turn violent with knowledge they should not have and languages they have never spoken. It should be made perfectly clear that true demon activity is very, very rare. Angry human spirits can mimic some of the behavior but are not as dangerous and they are easier to cleanse. The demon idea should only be considered after every other possible explanation has been explored.

Most people often call human spirits angels as well, which is not correct. Angels, like demons, are their own species of spiritual entity and they have never been nor will ever be human. People often say, “So-and-so has gone on to be a guardian angel,” but that’s not entirely correct. Yes, spirits of our loved ones do watch over us from time to time but they are not guardian angels. They’re just spirits. There are many, many different types of angels in a hierarchy in the afterlife (or heaven if you prefer that word) and they all have different functions. So remember there is a distinct difference between a human spirit and an angel.

Human and inhuman spirits can then be divided into two categories each: residual or intelligent. To say that someone is experiencing a residual haunting means it’s an imprint of energy on the atmosphere replaying itself over and over again. There is no actual spirit present with residual hauntings – the phenomena is simply caused by repeating cycles of energy left there from a traumatic or important event in the location’s history. Think of a video loop playing over and over again. The people in the video aren’t actually there repeating their actions but the imprint of their images or sounds are still there. It’s an energy problem, not a spirit problem, and residual energy can be imprinted from both human events and inhuman events of good or bad nature. On the flip side, an intelligent haunting is what people typically think of when they think of the paranormal – a human or inhuman spirit that cannot or will not leave a location. Intelligent spirits will interact with other spirits or living people around them. Many of them will respond to provocation.

Being classified as earthbound or visitation will determine whether the intelligent spirit can come and go at will. Earthbound spirits are those who have not moved into the afterlife. They are stuck, for lack of a better word, here in the physical world by choice or because they don’t know they’re dead. When a spirit chooses to stay, it’s usually because they’re afraid of what they’ll find in the afterlife (if they’ve done wrong, for example), they don’t want to leave loved ones behind, or they feel they have unfinished business that needs to be completed before they can go. When a spirit does not choose to stay, it’s usually because they don’t know they’ve died. This most often occurs when death occurs suddenly (in war, for example), or when the body dies in an extreme state of confusion (drug overdoses, for example). There are a lot of reasons why spirits become earthbound and there are a lot of unique exceptions to rules that mean it should be examined on a case by case basis. A spirit making a visitation, however, is a spirit that has moved on to the afterlife but occasionally returns to look in on loved ones or visit places that held meaning in their lives. Visitations to loved ones most often happen in the dream state when our minds are most able to receive such information.

I hope all of this helps you get started in your understanding of the unseen world.

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