Why the Spirits Are the Ultimate Authority, and How to Learn Their Language
Here is one of the most important things I teach, and it may surprise you coming from a teacher: always follow the guidance given to you by benevolent spirits in the upper and lower worlds, even when it differs from what I have taught you. Direct guidance from a power animal, a spirit teacher, a benevolent ancestor, or another helping spirit is more powerful than any technique followed by the book or learned from a human teacher.
The Spirits Are the Ultimate Authority
If you receive guidance in a journey to do something differently than the way I teach it, then by all means follow that guidance, as long as you are certain you are in the upper or lower world. This is not about building a hierarchy with me at the top. It is the opposite. It is about helping you access your own direct connection to the spirit world, safely and effectively, and then trusting it. One important caution: this does not apply to spirits encountered in the middle world. Interacting safely with middle world spirits takes significant experience and discernment. But in the upper and lower worlds, every spirit being you meet must tell the truth, so you can safely ask for guidance and help there.
Because of that, you can ask direct questions and trust the answers. Are you my power animal? What am I meant to learn from this image? You can even ask about situations in your life, such as the intention of another person in a difficult dynamic, and receive an honest and accurate read on what is happening.
Building Your Personal Language of Spirit
The real skill to refine is not reaching the spirits. It is understanding what they are communicating, so that we do not misinterpret the message. Most of us were not raised in families or cultures that handed down an established language for talking with the spirit world. Our parents most likely lived entirely in physical reality, where all of this was dismissed as weird. So we have to develop that language of communication for ourselves. Learning to build your own personal language of spirit, alongside learning to journey to the upper and lower worlds, is one of the core objectives of Level 1. It is what allows you to truly have faith in what you perceive.
Four Ways Intuition Shows Up
It helps enormously to know how your own intuition tends to work. Some people are highly visual and see in the spirit world. Others are kinesthetic or clairsentient, they feel, or they simply know. Others are strongly auditory and hear. Most of us use some combination of these, and some use all four. Before journeying, it is worth a moment of honest self-reflection: am I visual, kinesthetic, auditory, a knower? Because your journeys will most likely mirror the way your intuition already works.
This matters because people torture themselves needlessly. In nearly every class, someone says, I didn't see anything. I ask, what did you feel? They say, I just felt fur, but I wasn't sure what it was. I send them back to ask the question directly, what am I feeling, and they return knowing exactly what it was. Meanwhile, someone else in the same room is describing visuals worthy of a Hollywood film. Neither is better. They are simply different ways of perceiving. In the beginning, visuals are a little easier to trust, we are a visually dominant species, likely because our ancestors needed sharp sight to avoid predators. But visuals are not always more useful in the end, because we can see a great deal and still not know what it means, and misinterpret it. So do not force a vision if you are not a visual person. Go with what you feel, what you hear, what you know. Trust the way you naturally receive.
Learning to journey and to build your own personal language of spirit is one of the central things we work on together in Level 1 - The Fundamentals of Shamanism.