How To Tell If A Spiritual Teacher Is The Real Deal

I’m sure we’ve all heard stories about a spiritual teacher or energy healer being more toxic than they are helpful.

I want to do what I can to ensure that everyone in this space is as safe as possible. Therefore, I’ve compiled a list of Red Flags when it comes to spiritual teachers/yoga instructors/energy healers.

These are the Red Flags to look out for when searching for/following a guru:

• The person claims that they are the powerful one, not the energy they channel.

• Read the subtle messages the person says. eg.

  • Do they imply they are all-knowing?

  • Do they think that they are the authority, not everyone’s inner self?

  • Do they deny your own intuitions in favour of their own?

  • Do they dismiss stories of your own psychic/intuitive gifts?

• If it’s an energy healing system that you’re learning, how many people have achieved the highest level of this system? Is there only one person at the top (or only a very few people?)

• Does your intuition tell you something is off about this person?

• When in groups with the person, are contradictions or challenges to their ideas accepted or punished (even subtlely)?

• Does the person seem to want followers or “yes-people”?

And, finally, remember the ultimate rule of spirituality: Whatever someone says, if it doesn’t resonate with you, disregard it. This prevents dogma and cult-like practices from infiltrating spiritual teachings.

There are plenty of genuine spiritual teachers/yoga instructors/energy healers out there who can help you. But sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between a good one and a harmful one. I hope this helps you differentiate between the two.

Fractals and Holograms and Fields, oh my!

In my meditations and metaphysical studies recently, I’ve discovered how expansive and ubiquitous fractals are.

For example, our astrological birth (natal) chart is a fractal of our lives. What’s happening in the sky and the energies between the transiting planets are a fractal of what’s happening here on earth. What’s going on in tarot and oracle cards are a fractal of the messages of our spiritual guides. The hermetic phrase, “As above, so below, as without, so within.”

I’m seeing fractals everywhere and I’m only just beginning my exploration of them.

There’s this deck of cards that I recently acquired called Path of the Soul, that has fractals on each card. The more I work with them, the more I discover about fractals and how they relate in my everyday life. And the more I work with fractals the more I see the connections between us all.

According to the Holographic Universe therory, we’re all a full representation of the whole. Like all holograms, one individual part is a representative of the whole. In that way, it’s a fractal.

Now, I never really understood fractals until I started working with them. Well, i understood them on an intellectual level, but not on a practical level. The practical lelve, where you see and interact with fractals, personally learning on a deep level what they mean to you.

For me, I see fractals as me outside of me and all around me. I know it doesn’t really make all that much sense, so I’ll try and explain it a little more.

Whenever I think of gratitiude, I imagine a green beam of light coming out of my heart. This beam lights up my surroundings and settles on whoever I think about and am grateful for.

However, when I apply the fractal theroy to this beam of gratitude, I see the beam coming out of my heart, but also directed back at me from all angles. In this way, I’m sending out energy and receiving it back magnified. Like the saying, “What you sew, so shall you reap.” Or the Wiccan Three-Fold law, “what you send out, you’ll get back times three.” And on and on.

Now I truly understand this spiritual principle on a deep, practical level. I feel it when I send out the green beam of gratitude, how that very beam gets sent back to me.

This doesn’t just apply to gratitude, but to everything energetic. Send out love and you receive it. Send out hate and you receive it too. Send out good vibes and you receive them back. And so on and so forth.

This is the basic principle of life, yet it’s taken me so long to truly understand this. And only once I started synthesising my knowledge from different spiritual traditions (Reiki, Tarot, Astrology, Meditations), was I truly able to understand this principle.

I’m not entirely sure what I wanted to say in this post, merely that sometimes it feels like you’re spinning your wheels when it comes to spirituality. You always feel like you’re learning and learning, but never actually doing anything. Like there’s always something more that you need to know or do before you can … be truly spiritual.

But the truth is, everything you do in regrads to spirituality takes you in the right direction. Takes you closer to the mysteries of the universe. Takes you closer to a more spiritual path. And sometimes it takes a while before you can truly see the progress you’ve made. But rest assured, you’ve progressed.

How to be compassionate—without burning out

My lama once told me, when he handed over the Tibetan singing bowl I’d just bought, that compassion is healing. And I never understood that. I just smiled and thanked him and took my bowl to play at home.

But during an intensive meditation retreat, my Reiki guides got me to really think about compassion as healing. And, as I'm a counsellor, I thought about it from the mental health aspect. Counsellors, psychologists etc, use compassion (or empathy as it's called in the industry) to help others. They use it every day, knowing that sometimes people just need a friendly ear to listen and really hear their worries.

And empathy or compassion works. It helps many people on the mental level. However, what if it's more than just mental, but on an emotional, spiritual, physical level? They talk about doctors with no bedside manner and how many people dislike this sort of doctor. And I get it.

Usui Mikao said that to be a Reiki Master, you need to know how to counsel others. I believe that's because compassion heals.

But you need to be able to differentiate between compassion and over-empathising with another. Compassion is a love energy that flows freely, but you will get Burnout if you over empathise with someone, and that's because you're putting too much of yourself into this compassion. There is a fine line that I struggled to differentiate. Compassion is a sort of love energy that is ever present in your heart. The way I ended up being able to access it was going into my heart and finding a white light that shone out of it. This was compassion. I put my hands into the light and said the person's name and that was enough to send this healing energy towards that person.

Compassion is ever present in your heart. It flows freely.

The other thing I learned during this week was about trust. Trust allows the energy to flow and as it flows, it removes blocks. Trust in the universe, trust in yourself, trust in Reiki. All of it allows the energy to flow. And when you're in the flow, synchronicities happen too.

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