What to Avoid and How to Solve it
The Spirit World is a fantastical place for the most part. Yes, there are dark entities present there too, but overall it is a rich place to draw inspiration, guidance, and protection from. Growing up in Catholic Ireland, beings from the Spirit realm were embedded into my skull through school, the church, and the community. I didn’t conceive it that way, nor is this how I was taught. But where do these saints, martyrs, and angels dwell? In the Spirit realm, of course!
Heaven is also known as the upper world, the spiritual realm that looks like the physical world is known as the middle world, and the lower world has been unfairly painted as hell. But that’s another story for a different day. The upper world is home to angels, saints, ascended masters, deities, and some ancestors. The middle world is home to nature spirits like faeries and plant spirits. And the lower world holds animal spirits and ancestral guides. You can work with spirits on any level of non-ordinary reality. Start with what you are drawn to.
I initially received little guidance outside of books, so learning to work with Spirits for me was a lot of trial and error. As with anything, what works for someone else, may not work for you. So gradually, I pieced together what worked, felt suitable for me, and what the spirits led me to. But best believe I made some mistakes along the way. Whatever way you choose to honor or work with them, here are four mistakes I made that you can learn from:
Lack of Clarity
Clarity really makes everything so much simpler. But getting to clarity isn’t always easy because it takes concerted effort, so it’s an often avoided principle in spirituality and business alike. Clarity means being clear about what you’re asking for or doing beforehand. Without it, it’s easier to have mixed or unwanted results because there was no initial direction.
Lack of clarity usually means getting mixed or more subtle results. If you don’t know what you’re looking for, then how will you know when you’ve found it? As a result, it’s far easier to doubt your experience, feel invalidated, or think that nothing happened and just give up trying to make a connection. Knowing what you’re looking for beforehand can alleviate or eliminate this from happening.
So, for example, if you’re meditating and requesting contact from the Spirit World, have that in mind or speak it out loud before sitting down for your practice. It’s like setting the tone or generating the energy in advance of what you would like to happen. The final results are your feedback, so to speak. Whether you deem them to be satisfactory or not is still valuable information to start with, and clarity makes it easier to document progress over time.
If you don’t know what you want but are curious, setting an intention is another way to go about it. I see intention as an invitation to the Spirits. So when you feel like you have no clue how to ask a question or perform a ritual or even just establish a connection, set the intention instead: ‘I intend to speak with my angels’, for example.
As I’ve mentioned in a previous article, ‘The 5 Best Ways to Contact your Spirit Guides,’ you may not get what you want the first time you try. Sometimes there is a lesson in the waiting or testing of faith that needs to occur. However, if you are persistent and committed, they will show up for you, which leads me to my next mistake…
2.) Impatience
Impatience and its cousin perfectionism can ruin a lot of things before they even get started. And I am guilty of both. We live in an on-demand society, and whatever we want, we can have it within minutes, if not immediately. That is especially true with social media, which has us addicted to mindless and excessive dopamine-inducing scrolling. Pleasure is now sought and attained in an instant.
This type of immediacy is not always reflected in the spiritual realms. And the main reason for that is that it takes time to establish a relationship with that world. Yes, some people manifest things seemingly instantly, and when the messages are strong, I have even done so myself. But, it does take work to get to this level. And we must learn to humble ourselves and be patient with what the Spirit World wants to teach us.
When we march in expecting specific results or outcomes, we often do not get what we want, and this is because these traits are closely associated with the ego and believing that we are in charge and that we know best. Surrender and trust are key pillars of manifestation. Control is an illusion that quickly fades when doing this work, and for years I had to learn this the hard way. In retrospect, I believe they were so hard on me because of the work I’ve been called to do, but initially, I really thought they had it out for me.
My best advice is to let them lead the way. Go in with an open mind and heart and find acceptance in the fact that you know nothing about what they have to offer you. Resolve to be a lifelong student of the spirit realms, and they will teach you many things that would otherwise take years or lifetimes to learn. And as they teach you, do your best to put in the effort to what they say and guide you. Be patient in the process.
3.) Over Reliance
My third mistake was spending too much time relying on the Spirits, which allowed me to avoid personal responsibility. ‘God helps those who help themselves’ always springs to mind. Once you start receiving from the Spirit World, it’s easy to treat it as an ordering service. I’ve seen all kinds of violations, but I do believe most are made ignorantly, not deliberately.
My misuse was asking the Spirits to help me with finances but then never doing anything different to change my circumstances. While they can indeed work miracles, it’s not their job to work as magic genies. A better approach would be to ask them for assistance in removing my money blocks or beliefs that prevent me from making more money. This pairs us together as a team seeking solutions in collaboration rather than a ‘do it for me’ approach.
The Spirits want us to be happy and generally work, guide, and protect us towards our highest good. However, this also means that they take us through some tough lessons if that is what serves the highest good. Both blessings and challenges pave the path to spiritual awakening and enlightenment.
4.) Doubt
Fear, doubt, and worry are rife in the human psyche. And while they serve a purpose in keeping us safe, they also prevent us from aligning with our highest potential. In a world that is increasingly reliant on logic and equations and research, we forget that feelings are valid, that intuition is life-saving, and that stories carry weight too. That isn’t to say that there’s anything wrong with the former methods, but instead that there is more to the world than meets the eye, and the two would work better in tandem than opposed to each other.
I doubted myself a lot when I first began engaging with the Spirits, and I habitually repressed the messages, the signs, and the symbols as the crazy ramblings of my mind. Of course, it’s always good to analyze and question where things are coming from; I’m not saying to frolic with the fancy of your mind unchecked. Rather, we are conditioned to negate things that cannot be explained rationally, things that cannot be seen, or things that cannot be proved scientifically. Colonialism, white supremacy, and systemic racism have also negatively affected alternative forms of healing. Science only recently validated Traditional Chinese Medicine, a system that has existed for thousands of years.
Imani means faith in Swahili. It is the foundation upon which I have learned to build. This, initially at least, is terrifying. Faith is not necessarily tangible, and it doesn’t feel solid at the beginning. However, over time, as you build seemingly blindly brick by brick, it is the base from which all great things are made.
Please see my services page if you are interested in working with me to develop or strengthen your connection with the Spirit World.
Blessings on your journey,
Imani Heals
xoxo
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