Type the words “spiritual protection” into a browser window and a veritable smörgåsbord appears in a drop down list. Spiritual protection rituals, spells, prayers, chants, mantras, incantations, symbols, herbs, candles, dream catchers, gem stones, crystals, jewelry, tattoos, clothing. Even protective spiritual sprays.
Pepper spray designed to ward off the Devil? Who knew?
Strange happenings
I don’t mean to make light of what is, fundamentally, a very dark subject. At different points in time during the past 45 years I’ve used several of these approaches to keep negative energies and interdimensional demons at bay. Sometimes successfully, sometimes not.
The most ubiquitous approach I used, aside from protective prayer, is probably surrounding myself in a bubble of white light. Again, with who knows what results.
Frankly, the most effective demon repellant I’ve ever found is an active, healthy lifestyle focused on creativity, nature, exercise, good friends, cats and dogs and other beloved pets, meditation, and no alcohol or drugs. Case in point was 2008—the year I spent renting the third-floor suite of rooms in a house built on top of the Hill of Witches in Escazu, on the outskirts of San Jose, Costa Rica.
I didn’t know the hill was named that. I didn’t know the coven that had conducted ceremony for a hundred years on the site the house stood on had cursed the land when they were pushed out. Nor did my landlady inform me that she hadn’t been able to rent those rooms for years because serious “haunting” experiences had driven the last four renters out—each in a matter of days.
Blithely unaware of any of that, I spent my days living there working on my first book, hiking, exploring the countryside, swimming in the house pool, generally feeling happier and healthier than I had in a decade. It wasn’t until about eight months into renting my aerie residence (the valley view from the top floor balcony was awesome) that I experienced anything strange.
I’d visited friends on the west coast and had driven back home over the Talamanca Mountains late at night—a harrowing drive even during daylight. I was exhausted and fell into bed after midnight, only to be roused from sleep by an attack that indeed took the form of black wraiths shrieking around me, trying to drag my astral body out of my physical form.
It took a concentrated effort to pull light energy up from my root chakras and love into my heart—all the while resisting the cold magnetism of fear—thinking no reaction no reaction no reaction I am a being of light and love I am a being of light and love I am …
And POOF! They were gone.
My body shook loose from the typical (scary) hypnogogic paralysis that accompanies most nighttime astral attacks. I breathed deep in relief, blinking into the quiet dark, wondering Where the hell did that come from? Then dropped back into uneasy slumber.
When I mentioned the experience to my landlady the next day, she blanched and nervously fessed up about the witches. Apparently, over the years, she and several others had tried to exorcise the rooms doing meditations, ceremonies, lighting sage and pau d’arco, taping protective mandalas on the walls‚ filling the rooms with white light, you name it. All to no avail.
I lived there another four months or so, and never had any further trouble. What happened after I left that house, I have no idea.
First encounter
I was raised in a haunted house.
The original Virginia plantation home was burned to the ground during the Civil War, and the Pickett family moved into the emptied stone slave quarters, building onto that structure over the next 100 years. My parents moved into the rambling columned farmhouse in 1959 when I was eight. And it didn’t take much time before we all recognized something odd was going on.
Furniture was moved at night. Books were pulled off shelves. Locked doors opened. Footsteps echoed. Occasionally you could hear the swish and rustle of long skirts against the hallway walls and smell lavender, even in the dead of winter. Eventually, I got used to the occasional presence I could feel entering my bedroom at night. Once, I felt somebody sit on the end of my bed—my feet sliding into the depression made in the mattress. Of course, when I switched on the bedside lamp, nobody was there.
It made for great campfire stories and scaring friends. But aside from that, our ghosts—which we determined were most likely the spirit remains of a young boy and an adult woman—were surprisingly un-impactful. And nobody commented on the fact that the frequent nightly episodes ceased once I was past menarche.
It wasn’t until 20 years later that I became cognizant of the fact that most “hauntings” and poltergeist activity take place around children, mostly girls, moving into and through puberty—that tumultuous, hormone-spattering time of life when a soul’s psychic doors bang frantically in the winds of biological and spiritual change.
No. Like my parents and most people in the 1960s, I was blissfully ignorant of “esoteric” knowledge until the publications of three books in 1968 changed things: Erich von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods, Carlos Castenada’s The Teachings of Don Juan, and Sybil Leek’s Diary of a Witch.
Suddenly, ancient aliens, nature spirits, supernatural phenomena, and psychic abilities were catching peoples’ attention. At least those with the eyes to see and the ears to hear.
Second encounter
Tasks we didn’t even think to question.
Even getting my Master’s degree in psychology didn’t open the doors of my mind.
It’s like Obi Wan Kenobi conducted a global Jedi mind trick on all of humanity: “There’s nothing to see here. Move along.”
It wasn’t until I made the choice to completely drop out of the rat race in 1986 that things changed. At that point, I left my husband and my lucrative-but-exhausting career in network sports television and went to go live alone in the woods in a one-room stone cabin perched beside a river on 100 acres in the mountains of north Georgia.
Rent? Twenty-five dollars a month.
With no indoor plumbing, no electricity, and no distractions, I started meditating in earnest, rising with the sun in the morning, heading to bed after dark. I meditated for hours and hours every day, asking one solitary question: “Who am I?”
And almost immediately I was besieged by dark forces.
Dark wraiths attacked in the night. Awakening in hypnogogic terror, I could feel astral hands on my spirit body, tugging and pulling until “I” was wrenched from my physical form and hurled into terrifying hell realms … graveyards, pits filled with red-eyed ravening beasts, claws dripping blood … every horror scene imaginable.
Night after night this happened. Lights zoomed around the room in the dark. Insane shrieking laughter echoed in my ears.
Frightened and clueless as to what was happening to me, I contacted my old academic advisor from school and he gave me the names of two top-notch psychiatrists in Atlanta. I picked one and made an appointment.
Old school
“Well doc,” I chirped brightly, “Whaddaya think?”
Gold Waterford pen tapping rhythmically against his notepad, he said, “I’d like to start seeing you three times a week for the next six months. Then we can decide from there.”
Three times a week? Christ! He thinks I’m a schizophrenic …
Telling him I’d think about it, numb and depressed, I left his office.
Which is precisely what happens to innumerable people around the world on a daily basis. I’m not saying there’s no such thing as mental illness and schizophrenia. They’re very real. But whether psychiatrists, doctors, and scientists believe it or not, so are non-physical beings and dark interdimensional forces that exacerbate and even cause these conditions whose agenda is simple:
Keep human beings terrified of the non-physical realms and ignorant of their own non-physical nature. Keep them focused on purely physical things while continuously triggering them emotionally, keeping them in crisis and fight or flight response in order to control them and feed on their life force and emotional energy.
Aka loosh. Aka food.
Of course, I didn’t know about any of that back then. Fortunately, as a self-reflective human being deeply focused on developing self-awareness, I rejected the shrink’s diagnosis and got a second opinion from a psychologist involved in New Age spirituality.
“I wouldn’t worry about it,” she said upon hearing the exact same story. “You’ve obviously cracked your kundalini and are in the midst of a spiritual awakening. I’m much more concerned about that abusive relationship with your step-father …”
Kundalini? … Spiritual awakening? Hmmmmm … mental wheels turned, cranking out whole new vistas of “reality” to explore.
I saw her once a week for six months, and then she sent me on my way. With greater understanding of what was happening to me, my fear lessened. Within a year the astral attacks faded away to nothing.
Ultimate protection
But no.
The spell we’ve been manipulated to cast upon ourselves remains fixed. Society’s material matrix remains solid: “There’s nothing to see here. It’s all superstitious nonsense. Get real. Move along.”
Which leaves those of us who recognize the reality of these beings faced with the ongoing question of protection against the darkness.
What to do?
Having dealt with spirits and interdimensional demons pretty much my whole life, I have finally realized—finally!—that it’s not so much a matter of doing than it is of being.
Being what?
- Being aware of the reality of the situation.
- Being aware of the nature of my own self as a spirit being of pure love.
- Being aware of the nature of these interdimensional demons and their complete inability to harm or affect me unless I give them the power to do so.
The very act of seeking protection sets up the reality that I need protection. The very act of seeking protection sets up the reality that these forces have power over me. Sets up the reality that I am subject to these beings.
Hello?
I’m not saying that prayer and using crystals and sage and that sort of thing are bad. Heaven knows I’ve sat in ayahuasca ceremonies in the Amazonian jungle with shamans blowing tobacco smoke and chanting over me, invoking protections while some very deep healing work was going on. They have their time and place.
But there comes a time in our growth when we must stop playing the game altogether.
We are Creators.
We create reality through our thoughts, beliefs, emotions, choices, and actions. When do we start believing in ourselves? When do we stop feeling afraid of the dark?
When do we stop giving it so much power?
When do we choose to proudly stand in our Light? When do we feel such love for ourselves, for each other, for life itself, that the radiant power of that love dispels all illusion? All darkness?
When?
The reawakening of our love nature has been seriously ramping up for some time.
Hold onto your hats! The time is now.
Much love and aloha ~