Spiritual Protection: Do We Need It? Or Not?
Should we be buttoning ourselves up in sacred bubbles of spiritual light in order to feel protected from negative energy? Or should we be moving through the world like spiritual warriors emitting love and light wherever we go?
It seems that many people have strong opinions about 'protection', and in this episode, Karen shares her thoughts on the how and why of protection, acknowledging that different times require differing strategies. As always, a few things to think about and use or not - as you see fit.
Karen has studied many forms of spiritual and energetic healing, initially exploring the Radiance Technique and Reiki. For many years she worked under the guidance of a team of Healing Guides and has also explored Trance Healing.
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Episode Transcript
Hello, this is Karen from Soulful and Wild - or Karen, and what I wanted to talk to you about today is spiritual protection. Now, lets be real, some people get their knickers in a really big knot about this topic. Some folk get very definite that protection is a thing that we need to do when we are working with clients, or we need to protect our home, and other people think that that's just not a thing at all. So I thought I would address the issue.
Now when we're talking about protection, we're talking about energetic protection. We're not talking about security cameras and 12-foot fences around your house and things like that, but more your your energy, your space, shall we say. So when we're looking at protecting your home, we're talking about the energetic space that you don't want unsavoury or inappropriate people coming into. It's more the energy of it rather than the physicality of it, shall we say. So I'm going to share with you different things that I've thought, at different times. And I'll speak briefly about my thoughts on how things are now.
Like you, my opinions change dependent on where I'm at in my life, what's going on, as well as what’s happening out there in the world, and when I first got involved in spiritual healing (more than three decades ago), one of the things that I was taught was that I needed to ‘open up’ my energy centres. I'm speaking about chakras here.
If you're not familiar with chakras and the subtle bodies, you can have a look at either of my books, Tarot and Aromatherapy or perhaps best to look at Tarot Healing. Although they both address that topic if memory serves. There's quite a few things on the website in the reflections area - in the blog, basically. I like to call it ‘Reflections’ because it sounds nicer, and then I'm constantly referring to it as the blog, so I don't know what the wisdom of that was. But anyway, there's a few things that touch on the subtle anatomy there.
I've lost my train of thought here, but aagh yes… When I first started my training as a spiritual healer, we were taught, or I was taught, that I needed to open each of my energy centres. So the base chakra at the base of the spine and the the crux of the body - the juncture between your legs - it depends on your training as to which, and at what level you are sensing energy. So let's just talk about the base of the spine. We'll use that. The colour there is red, orange at the sacral centre - and we're talking about life force energy and reproductive organs here. Yes - there's certain organs that apply to each of these chakras. This is important when you’re doing healling work of course - where the condition originates… anyway, lets stay on track….
Each of these major energy centres, and we have squillions of them, like even at the tips of your fingers and in the palms of your hands, many, many, many energy centres - but 7 main ones.
Chakra of course, is the Sanskrit name for an energy centre. That's more New Age talk. Either terminology is fine thought; .the word chakra means wheel of fire. It's a vortex of energy, unseen mostly, to the normal eye, but many clairvoyants can see them, like some people can see the aura.
So I was taught basically that you need to open each of these energy centres from the base center, red, orange, yellow, green at the heart, throat, blue. and between the eyes there is the ajna centre. Some people call it the third eye, and its a very dark, dark purple, like an indigo colour, like the colour of a juniper berry actually. Then above the crown, quite a bit above the crown, there's the crown center where we take in energy from the universe or, you know, universal life force energy comes in from there. Now they're the main recognised, and long spoken about chakras, but, we have many energetic layers that go out from the physical and there are vortexes of energy in those as well. So it's not all static, ,
Yep, so I was taught that each of those energy centres had to be opened from the base chakra up to the crown and that then we would do invocations and clear the space - and all that sort of stuff; protect the energy within which we're working. Then after the healing work was done, i needed to close each of those energy centres and seal it with a a flaming cross, right? So it was sealed with love, basically, and that that would keep my energy intact. And yeah, so that's that's what I learned at the very beginning in spiritual healing.
When I did Reiki and things like that, there's a slightly different approach, but they use the Reiki energy to set up the healing space. Now I did that for a long time. i used to do an invocation to Spirit, ask for protection while I was doing the work, basically channelling energy, clearing entities, all that sort of thing. Then over time, it was almost as though there was an integration or some kind of shift that happened energetically, and I moved away from doing that. It wasnt about being lackadaisical, but it was more that I felt it was no longer required, that this integration of the the spiritual healing team, like the spirit that I was working with, had sort of integrated into my field and I kind of didn't need to do that anymore. I queried it though, and what I kind of got was, the answer that I got was this; “When you are standing under the waterfall (and if you imagine that you are under a waterfall and that water is falling down onto the crown of your head and running over your body and basically cleansing you with the water), if that water is pure unconditional love, and it’s running over you constantly, do you need to set up a protective field?” So that the answer that I was given at that time. So I stopped doing, as a general rule, this opening, and closing of the chakras and being so diligent (should I say anal?) about my own energy space.
At different times, I went backwards and forwards with this. But I've always done things like clearing space. So, for example, if I'm doing counselling work with somebody or doing readings, there's a lot of emotion at times. People have come in with a lot of stuff, heavy emotion, fear, anxiety, those sorts of things. In the course of a session things start being resolved and as the person is relaxing, they're getting clarity about things, they're dropping those post-it notes, for want of a better term, off. and that stuff, kind of collects down there on the ground, you know, speaking metaphorically. So once they've gone... I don't want to leave t that pile of ‘post-it notes’ there, or heavy energy there, because the next person that's going to come in is going to come and sit on that chair and they're going to sit in that. No no no. It's very important from my perspective that I take responsibility for clearing that space so that when the next person comes in, they're coming into a clear energetic space -physically and energetically clear - and so it's just them, their energy and in this case me, and then the fresh work begins.
So genuinely, I do feel that it's important for all of us, whether you are working one-to-one with clients or just in your own space, that we hold clear energy. Another example; just say you're having a coffee with a friend at the kitchen table and they're blah blah blahing about their partner - or something like that - and they drop all that ‘stuff.’ You you want to clean that up too. You don't want that sitting around, floating around in your kitchen…
So things like using sage - now that’s a great thing to do. You light the sage, usually put a little plate under it. I've got a conch shell. um Nonot a conch shell, one of those New Zealand ones. You know, it's got the beautiful Mother of Pearl stuff in it. I forget what it's called now, but they're lovely. And i light it with a lighter, and I just hold the shell underneath. And what you do, if you, just say you're clearing your house, is you come in your front door, and then you you move from left to right. So the first room on the left, so just say you come into the living room, you will walk around that living room to your left, and do that whole room, and then go into the next room towards the left, so that you end up doing a circle, do everything, including your Your bedroom, your bathroom, your toilet. Bathrooms and laundries and toilets will hold stale energy a lot more. There's less flow usually in those kinds of rooms.
We're using history here. We're using plant medicine. Sage is the wisdom keeper, and Hermit energy - big time. So that’s wise energy. Smoke is very clearing. It makes the space sacred. It's lovely, and there's, you know, for millennia, like Aboriginal people use eucalypt and they use the smoke in a similar kind of way to what I'm describing with the sage. The sage is more a Native American tradition. But... many cultures use smoke. So you can just adjust accordingly, but the intention, it's your intention backed by action. Equally of course, you can use a spray bottle, something like this. This is a lovely bottle with sage essential oil in it and pure water shaken up together. Alternatively you can get the herb water that comes out of the distillation process when people are extracting essential oils from plant matter in the steam distillation process. This is often what a sage sprayactually is. You can get rose water and things like that too. But sage is a good cleanser, and you can, you know, spray it over the top of yourself as well if you feel like you've picked up something. So cleansing your space is a really good thing to do.
Even in your office, if you're an accountant, for example, dealing with the pressure of phone calls and stuff like that, all of that energy builds up, even the other people that come in and out of your workspace. You might like to clear that energetically and it just lightens the mood, the frequency in the space in case people are coming in grumpy and dropping their grumpiness there.
So space clearing is important. Clearing our own field is important and we can do that many ways. One of the ways that I often share with people is something that I call ‘Golden Bodies’. I learned that in India and it's a specific meditation practice where you're actually using your will. It's a bit of a different practice and I think I've spoken about that on a different podcast actually, so i won't bore you with that here, so we'll talk about white lighting because there's some sort of similarity, although it's different.
If you want to clean your own space, you can do this, but you can also clean a room or a house or something even bigger! If you want to really have fun with this, you can. One of the things that I used to do when I lived in Melbourne and had to travel from Broadmeadows area in Melbourne and travel right across to the South Yarra area on the train every day for work - and that's back at a time when I was really learning about white lighting and working with energy and Reiki and things like that - What I would do is white light myself, then I would white light the carriage I was sitting in. Now that had an impact on all the other people there. I would sit in meditation as I was traveling to work and white light, basically energetically clear, every carriage on the train - from where I sat all the way to the front, and usually I sat at the back, but if there were any behind me I'd do those as well.
This was done as a bit of an experiment initially, and it was very funny to me because what I discovered is that it would change the way people physically looked - even their body posture changed in some instances. I would encourage you to do something like that if you travel on public transport, if you ever go on the train or anything, or a bus, you know.
In just the same way, you can white light the office before you get there. So what do I mean when I say white light? Basically what we're doing is we are bringing the light of spirit, which is in essence pure unconditional love - we're bringing it in to our body. We're filling our body.
Darkness cannot exist where light is. Think about the light at midday. Under the burning sun in the summer, there's no shadow, right? So everything is absolutely crystal clear. You can see everything. In the light, there is no shadow. There is no darkness. So that's what we're working with.
We are... with intention, bringing the light in, and you can do it with your breath. …Imagine that you're breathing in that pure unconditional love, or golden light or white light, whatever makes sense to you, (I like my light to have a little golden flecks in it, you know, little sparkles. It can be really fun).
You might be drawn to a particular color. So go with that. Trust yourself on that. Trust your own intuition. Just keep that breathing going until you have the sense that the whole of your body is full of light. Then keep bringing that in and filling the space around your body, (like your personal space or your aura) and then you can extend it out into the room.
Now if that doesn't speak to you, what you can do, especially if you've got a connection with guides or a real strong connection with Spirit yourself, you can actually ask or claim it, and bring that pure light energy down into the centre of the room and fill the room like that.
So you don't have to do it through yourself first. But it's always good to be clean and clear yourself as well as your space. Now, this is just like basic spiritual hygiene, right?
This brings us to the question of what do I need to protect myself from? Now, it's a tricky one. I don't want to sound too kooky, although I'm sure that I do sound kooky - LOL. ,
It’s basic though. There's love and there's fear, isn't there? They're two totally different frequencies - and you could say that love is light and that fear is dark. So in truth, if we talk about the light and the dark, it's really understandable and it's not too woo-woo to go say that these are two forces of energy that we are dealing with on this plane within which we live and move and breathe, right? And i think that's what we're working with.
There are times when the world and the majority of people in it are very light. Things are flowing well. There are also times where things are darker. There are many shifts happening in our world at this time, and big shifts can bring in fear.
To me, the light and the dark are really working out who's going to rock the roll. So if you are a bright, sparkly, shiny light in the world and dark is trying to put that light out, it's a good idea to put some protection in place. That's all.
Now you might just clear yourself and clear your space on a regular basis. You might also do things like, see this beautiful piece of selenite? It's a gift from a friend, actually - and I usually put this on my Tarot deck after I've used it. But I have some very small slivers that I bought from the local crystal shop. I actually got them from the Goddess Emporium in Albury.
I have a piece, just a really tiny one, sitting on top of the architrave of the door, both front and back. So basically, because what selenite does, is it balances and and clears, clears and balances. It's one of the crystals that you don't have to ‘clean’. You know how they say you've got to put your crystals out in the moon to clear them of negative energy. Selenite, you never have to do that with. It's sort of a self-cleaning one, shall we say. It's like a self-cleaning oven.
So I'm talking about selenite and putting that up on the lintel (is that the right word?) of your entrance door. And the intention is that you're setting up a cleansing, balancing field, so anyone who comes in, they'll be balanced and cleared - and that includes us. You know, we go out into the world and we might have a difficult day. Somebody might cut you off in the car. You can get a bit crabby. You don't want to bring that into your home.
It makes sense doesn’t it?
Now, I do think that clearing and cleansing and protecting is more important now than it has been before, but I'd really invite you to check in with yourself to see if that's right for you. Remember that when I talk about this, it's not from a place of fear or weakness or victimhood or anything like that. It's about taking care of business.
Think about your mouth. Obviously from a health perspective, you want to have good dental health, so obviously you brush your teeth and that keeps your teeth in your head much longer, and it costs less when you go to the dentist.
Think about spiritual protection and clearing and cleansing like that - it's kind of the same.
This is the approach that i tend to take with it now. What else?
Well, there's things like crystals - I have some around about my garden, in different places, some up near my gate, some in the driveway. I've got a crystal grid on a shelf on the front veranda. There's a blog post on crystal grids, creating a crystal grid on the website, which you're welcome to have a look at, that might be something that you want to do. You can use your crystals to set up an intention and hold an intention. I use mine for mostly for the bees, the crystal grids that is, to boost their immunity.
But yeah, I think that self-clearing and energetic protection, I think it's basic, logical, sensible stuff. In just the same way, if you're going to go away for the weekend, you don't leave your house unlocked. It's basic common sense. You lock the door, you take care of business, deal with the obvious things.
There are some other little things that people do, like putting witch's bells on their back door - they’re like a protection amulet. Different cultures have different things…
Even things that you grow in your garden can be protective. They say that there are certain herbs that set up protection. and Fennel is something that is often grown in a “witch's garden” as a protection and also Artemisia, Mugwort, that is also protection. Similiarly, there are certain trees in the Celtic tradition, the Rowan tree, they are, planted with intention in special places. You see them in the UK growing around cemeteries because they make a space sacred.
Another thing that you can do for yourself, and and I've done this quite a lot, is to put get a drop of Sandalwood, real sandalwood essential oil, and let one drop fall onto your finger, then you put it onto C7 at the back of your neck - and just pop it there, because what that does, is it stops your energy being pulled. It's kind of like sealing a soft spot. Sandalwood the essential oil is all about creating a sacred space.
So sacred spaces are safe, are they not?
So there's some thoughts for you to consider on spiritual protection.
Very happy to hear your thoughts on this. You're very welcome to contact me if you've got any questions around this. It's an interesting space to explore this spiritual protection space, so play with it, and work out what is right for you.
There may be times when it's really important for you to do lots of protection, setting up protection for yourself - and other times, not so much.
All right. All the best. Have a wonderful day. Stay safe.