Spoiler: I think this is the first post where my passionate side comes through, strongly.
If you have been reading along, quite a lot of information has been thrown at you by this point. Going beyond this blog, that has been the case your entire life. You have been receiving information from the world around you since your first moments. Some of that has been helpful and some harmful. We don’t want the harmful and we show fear at the prospect that people will harm us. Whether intentionally or unintentionally.
Because of this, when people first get into spirituality and their spiritual paths they immediately want to jump to, “How do I protect myself?” First and foremost, there is an enormous amount of literature circulating with various methods and practices to do so. But I want to caution you before you jump into any of that. As I have said before, I designed this series to build from one topic to the next. It took me 12 other topics before I even started to talk about protection. Why is that? Simply put, everything I have talked about before will naturally create protection for you.
Protection, in a spiritual lifestyle, is a multi-edged sword. When we want protection we need to utilize understanding to get behind the why of that desire. What in our life has triggered us to want to throw a safety net over ourselves? What are we worried will happen? What are we attracting to our lives consciously or subconsciously? What are we doing that makes us feel like we need to be protected?
Let me give a quick story. I was speaking with someone who had to inspect apartments. They told me they once went into an apartment after someone had moved out and the last occupant left crystals in the place. At first, I thought, “OK no big deal…people lose crystals or misplace them from time to time.” This was not the case. They went on to explain that the crystals were meticulously arranged around the baseboards of the apartment. Hundreds of them lined every wall in the place creating a full perimeter. My thoughts changed to, “What were they doing there and trying to keep out?!”
It was a quick thought and I dismissed it because:
I don’t know the person or their circumstances.
I was going off someone else’s description of the scene.
My thought was not necessarily unjustified though. When we spend money on and work with crystals we don’t just discard them when we move. That’s one edge of the sword when going overboard with protections though. It makes you a target of suspicion. Going back to the questions above, when people get overly protective it sows seeds of doubt in their motives. What are you sending out that you don’t want coming back? If you are scared of what you’re putting out coming back to you then you don’t need protection, you need to reevaluate your values and intentions.
Another sword edge is your triggers. We grow into this world with emotional and mental traumas that need to be healed. We internalize all of this though and point blame at parts of ourselves. A good example of this is the buzzwords of Ego and Shadow. I will go into Ego in the next post and Shadow after wrapping up the Mind. They need to be mentioned here though because the way they are spoken about is that they are external and separate from us. They aren’t though. Ego and our Shadow are parts of us. And to “protect” ourselves from them means to deny parts of who we are. This is a damaging mindset to live in rather than supportive or protective.
Your triggers don’t need to be protected against. They need to be experienced so you can come to understand why you are getting triggered and how to heal those parts of yourself. I recently saw where someone said something along the lines of, “Triggers bring on negative emotions while Glimmers bring on positive emotions.” Personally, I love the change in terminology there. It is very fitting. What we need to understand is that if we are putting up walls and protections to avoid triggers those same walls and avoidance tactics will also prevent us from experiencing Glimmers.
We love to avoid things that seem too hard to deal with. Anger for example is something we don’t want to analyze we just want to get it out. We have Rage Rooms now. We pay money to go and break stuff to get out our anger and frustration. This isn’t the same as dealing with our anger though, it is giving in to the anger. It is an avoidance tactic. “If I just get it out then I don’t have to deal with it anymore.” True…until the next time you face the triggers that brought on the anger. Are you just going to keep paying money to project and embody anger over and over? What happens when you don’t have the funds to go to the rage room? Are you just going to break your stuff? Will you find that easier and continue to do that instead of paying for the rage room? How long until you’re out of things to break and what comes next?
Dealing with and understanding both your triggers and glimmers helps you to grow and make life more navigable. We make wiser choices and carry ourselves more firmly and confidently. Protecting against triggers makes us more fearful of the world around us. We grow paranoid and on edge as we peek around every corner to make sure nothing is going to jump out and trigger us. That’s not living. Living means facing the world and challenges so we can experience as much as possible and become stronger. As we grow in wisdom and pass down that wisdom the future generations become stronger and stronger. If we look at how society is today…we are pretty stagnant with not a lot of growth happening. Things, “seem to be getting worse,” as people say. Well yeah, because we aren’t actively doing anything to make it better. We are all secluding in on ourselves and “protecting” ourselves from genuine connections and experiences.
Then you have self-proclaimed gurus advising by repeating the same tired information from hundreds or thousands of years ago. And they disguise it as something new or cutting-edge. What came from the past should be stepping stones to continue growing, not dead stops. Spirituality and spiritual practices/lives should evolve to keep up with the evolution of time. We don’t grow in complacency; we grow from challenge. Sometimes that means challenging what came before us to say, “Hmmm ok but if we try this I bet we can make it better.” Being overly protective denies us the opportunity to face these challenges.
That’s the next edge of the sword. At this point, we are almost describing more of a sai than a sword because sai traditionally are octagonal so let’s go with that if you’re trying to visualize multi-edged swords. Back to the point, we not only fear events triggering us. We fear people “doing things to us.” Again this fear leads to walls and barriers being constructed. We end up boxing ourselves in. When you have so many protections and wards in place nothing gets in and nothing gets out. The more layers and layers you put up the harder it becomes for the universe to reach out to you and give you the things you are asking for. That person who cut you a dirty look after they accidentally bumped into you. Yeah, they just threw a psychic dart at you. Did you deserve it? Absolutely not. Are you going to go run and hide under the covers because that happened? No, you’re gonna continue with your day. Here’s the thing, by the time you reach 5 years old you have already experienced at least 1826 attacks. That is one type of painful or uncomfortable experience per day, leap year included. The day you were born was both beautiful and traumatizing. There was blood and slime and screaming and crying and warmth was traded for cool air, but there was life and joy and relief and love.
If you are so sequestered because “What if someone tries to do something to me,” then you will miss out on everything worth having in life. People are going to try to shape you and condition you to how they want you to be. They are going to impose their limiting beliefs on you. They are going to criticize you. They are going to try to put you in “your place.” That will never end so long as you draw breath. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news. Here’s the thing though, the more you try to “protect” yourself from that the easier it is for these people to influence you. The more protections you put up don’t help you expand, they make you smaller and more compact. Which in turn makes you more susceptible to being picked up and put on a shelf that someone else designed.
You will meet people who will do this unintentionally and your protections may hold against them. Only because they are unaware of what they are doing and that you have guarded against it. But when you have all those protections up and someone comes along who knows what they are doing it's a different story. Those who intentionally manipulate and groom others to their wills will see you and see your protections and say, “Ooo a perfectly wrapped piece of candy.” Your protections literally created a perfect prison and all these people have to do is push the right buttons to turn you into a puppet.
Now let’s flip to a different edge of the sai. How do you create healthy protections that allow you to be safe and secure but not boxed in or suspicious? Foundations 1-12. It is that simple.
The more in tune you are with your body and your mind the more secure and safe you become with yourself. You, every part of who you are is the strongest and most dependable protection you can ever have. You can radiate your being which banishes ill intent. People may send psychic darts but your very essence will pull a move from The Matrix stopping the darts in midair and sending them to the ground. By building yourself up bit by bit you find less need to cover yourself in protections because they become natural.
That doesn’t mean other protection techniques are invalid. It just means, from a Foundational level, you don’t need them from the start. If your mind is set with clear intentions, emotional control, purposeful values, and regular usage of the forces of the mind then you really come to a point where there’s not that much to worry about. People advanced with years of practice in spiritual paths can of course go astray and abuse their power. We will discuss that in Foundations of Spirit. These are the people all those other protection techniques are written about. Quite frankly…most of the people writing up those techniques are the same ones using the adverse of them as well. Notice here that I am not afraid to call it out and call it what it is. Am I implying I’m untouchable? Not in the slightest! I have been practicing spirituality for over 20 years now, I have learned how to deal with it when it comes. Ultimately I have learned that no person in existence can hurt me more than I have hurt myself in the past.
There are aspects of protection to learn and techniques that can be beneficial for other reasons besides the people you interact with. Those are not what I would consider “foundational” skills though. Those are things you learn along your path once you discover exactly what your path is. For example, protection from angry spirits (souls of the dead). Specific practices and paths will learn how to guard and protect against those kinds of energy. But it's not as frequently occurring as the media likes to portray so it’s not something I will go into detail about in this series.
The key takeaway of protection is that when you walk your path with integrity it is a naturally occurring part of you. When you overly complicate protections and feel the need to bolster or shore up something is out of alignment. We need to do some inventory of ourselves and our environment. Are we still aligned in our integrity or are the people around us trying to bring us down? Or is it as simple as we don’t trust ourselves enough to feel confident and secure?
Working through the foundations I have written up to this point will create your sense of self and natural confidence and protection. Without having to go the extra mile. Incorporating the things I have written in this series also leads to the creation of the most powerful guardian you can ever ask for. Your Ego! More on that in the next post.
Until then, you are safe, you are cherished, and you are the beautiful you. See you next time!
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