My Advice for Anyone New to Spirituality
I’ve had probably around 6 asks in the last week about what to study if you’re new to spirituality, so here’s my in depth post about it!
Meditation, chakra work, and energy healing are the most important things to focus on learning and mastering first. Discernment and ego work are just as important, and are usually fostered alongside the practice of meditation and energy healing. Shielding, then finally you can talk with spirits, astral project, learn about your past lives, and do the countless things a spiritual practice can offer to you.
Please read this post if you are within your first 2 years of spiritual study! It’s important to foster these techniques early on, and if you feel like you’ve jumped to fast into talking with spirits and getting involved in all the drama knowing your past lives can bring, then I’d highly suggest backtracking and building on the foundational skills first. Granted, this is only an opinion, but I’ve seen a lot of negative stuff happen to people who don’t foster meditation, energy work, shielding, and discernment before moving into deeper stuff.
Getting energy readings, spirit readings/drawings, past life readings, Tarot card readings, etc. can be great starting points, but you have to be willing to learn on your own and take the information for self-discovery. Don’t get a reading if you just want information fed to you, trust your gut instinct if it’s the right time or not. Spirituality is all about following your own path and guidance, so, although its important that others guide you at the right time, try to be aware of falling into a state of dependency and relying on others for all the answers. Ask questions, though, questions are good!
Note, though: Some spiritual awakenings begin with energy awareness or past life memories, and if this is how yours starts, don’t neglect that. Above everything, trust your own intuition and guidance–just check to make sure you have a good intention that you aren’t acting out of a want to be known, famous, desired, etc. Work for your personal healing and growth, and to help others. I talk about discernment below, it can help with sifting through past life memories!
Don’t dive into helping others right away, help yourself and understand yourself first. With self-actualization and self-love, unconditional love towards others and the universe can spring freely forwards. This, I personally believe, is the biggest reason for creating a spiritual practice. Unconditional love and acceptance towards yourself, and then spreading joy and love outward.
Building a Meditation Practice:
This will be totally different for each person, depending on their free time, ability to focus (ADHD, anxiety, and other conditions like this can affect focus, but they won’t stop your ability to meditate at all, so it’s still important to foster a meditative awareness!), and dedication. Whether you can meditate for 5 minutes or 3 hours, a practice of meditation is still extremely important. It is, I believe, the most important foundation to any and all spiritual practices.
Some beginning meditation and mindfulness techniques:
Journaling: Spend 5-20 minutes at the end of each day writing down your insights, impressions, what happened, things you’re grateful for, things you learned, thoughts about yourself (try to foster positive thoughts with this practice). Here are 10 Journaling Tips.
Breathing and Still Mind Meditations: You can start with just 3-5 minutes a day, slowly building up to a longer practice over time. Don’t worry about your mind being totally silent, recognize that thoughts are present and allowed, and just continue to focus on what it feels like to breathe and be in the moment during your practice.
Here are 5 simple meditations you can try right now. Mantra, breathing, mindfulness, and more. :)
Yoga: A simple beginning yoga practice is good for mindfulness and your body! Look around for free or inexpensive classes, or do it in your own home by watching yoga instructional videos on YouTube. Here is a post on the Benefits of Yoga.
Simple Chakra Meditation: Sit comfortably for a 2-4 minute meditation. Cross your legs in a simple seated pose, if possible. Hold your hands open, palms up, and take five breaths in and out. While breathing in, imagine white, healing, light coming through your left palm. While the breath is in your chest, imagine the light going to your heart center. While exhaling, imagine it going out through your right hand. After these five breaths, place your right hand over your root chakra (on your tailbone) and continue this five breath pattern, imagining the white light entering the chakra and cleansing it of toxicity and negativity. Repeat this all the way up to the crown chakra.
Affirmations: Statements said to help your personal evolution, but you have to be careful with these. Try not to use affirmatives, use potential or what is currently happening. Like, if you are chronically ill, say something like “I am working towards healing and creating a healthy lifestyle, and I am content with the pace my body is healing at” instead of “I am healed.” Here are 100 affirmations.
Spend time alone to reflect: Any way that works for you. Recharge, relax, reflect.
Remove toxic relationships and people in your life that are dragging you down, and fill your life with like-minded people. Fostering love doesn’t just come from within, it also means bringing love in from the outside. Toxic habits should try to be moved past as well.
Records your dreams: Sometimes past life memories that aren’t forced will come through, you may meet spirit guides, astral project, lucid dream, etc. These are important experiences, but things you don’t want to force at this time. If they come naturally, it’s best to write them down!
Use guided meditations: There are tons of great ones to get you started on YouTube!
Pay attention to what you eat: What you feed yourself is incredibly important, we feed ourselves subtle energy with every bite! Do your best, within the means of time and income, to focus on a balanced and holistic diet.
When Doing Chakra/Energy Work:
Read a lot about the chakras, both the 7 body chakras and the 12 chakra system. Just working with the main 12 and having a basic understanding of your energy and what a healthy energy system feels like for you should be enough chakra work to give you a stable foundation.
When learning about the chakras or working through blocks, work from the root chakra to the crown chakra (not the reverse order). The root chakra is your base, and all upper chakras rely on healthy chakras below them.
Don’t jump right into Kundalini work, save that for years into a practice, when you really understand energy and have a strong energy system. It can be dangerous and overwhelming, and if not done properly it can cause traumatic experiences with energy. It’s best to find a spiritual mentor to help you with this, too.
I have some books below that can help with chakra and energy work, and I highly recommend them as starting points.
Practice the idea of surrender–the Source/Universe is a great healer when you give yourself over to its energy and allow your internal healer to subconsciously work. Your subconscious and higher self/intuition hold all the information you need, you just have to practice letting it flow.
Discernment and How the Ego Can Be Harmful:
Learning about past lives and spiritual relationships prematurely can lead to an identity not built on the humility that a meditative spiritual practice can help you avoid. Being very self aware and actualized will make it much easier for you to discern your intentions behind an action, realizing whether its self gain or universal guidance.
Techniques for discernment:
Several different divination methods, on several different days (always when you’re in your personal best frame of mind) can be helpful, but not all of us know how to divine. A lot of self evaluation and question asking can help you discern without divination techniques, and here’s a (bit of a rough in tone) post about discernment. It’s a great post with awesome questions, but there are a couple things I disagree with or want to add on to though:
I think trusting your intuition is extremely important and valid, as long as you understand what intuition is. Fostering intuition is done mainly through meditation and energy work, where you can practice on yourself and basically practice minor discernment like “which chakra is unbalanced?” and then check yourself by doing research on the chakras. I’d advise against blatantly saying “this is my intuition” because you want something to be a certain way. Be aware of your wants, feel what it’s like to want that want, then be aware that that feeling and what your gut is actually saying could be different. Sometimes they’re the same, but not always. Practice on things like chakras and energy, things you can double check with research, before delving into things you can’t double check, like spiritual relationships and past lives! I also disagree that intuition and ego are the same–they’re very different, and you can feel that after you’ve discerned that they’re different and understand how they feel different overtime. It just takes practice (hence why I recommend years of practicing with energy work and meditation first!).
I totally agree about the part with not contradicting scientific theories. Spirituality and science aren’t opposites, they coexist extremely well, and if you’re really studying spirituality well, you’ll have a greater grasp on science too!
About signs, I’d say to ask for signs. Like say you think a certain spirit is your guardian, then ask for a specific sign, like a number that you often see (numerology), them to leave a feather, etc. Signs can be important signifiers of truth and often come in the form of physical manifestations!
If you feel proud to have received a certain answer, like let’s say it’s something you feel does indeed make you special and different without struggle, then do some more discernment. It could be your wishful and false egoic mind talking.
Ego isn’t always bad, so don’t shun it. Discernment isn’t about ignoring the ego, it’s about feeling it, recognizing what it feels like, being aware of that feeling and how it differs from genuine truth/intuition, and fostering that ability to differentiate and not be overcome with the ego.
Some Tips About More Advanced Spirituality:
Spiritual projection is safer than astral projection in most cases. I have a post here on this.
Shield before talking to any spirit, astrally or spiritually traveling, and I’d also highly say to shield before moving into a new place and send more energy into the shield every day or so. Here are three posts on shielding-one, two, three.
Do chakra cleansing before a past life regression, since it will aid in both focus, less of “wanting” a memory that can push you away from truth, and it will allow you better access (the Akashic Records like cleansed energy) and help you to make sure your intentions are in your best and highest interest.
Be aware that things can and do get dramatic and dangerous when you get involved with other spirits. It can be stressful and taxing, so being in the best mental place you can be when doing energy work is extremely important. You can confide in spirits when you’re having a rough time, but knowing meditation and self-healing techniques are a good basis to fall back on in case the spiritual work itself gets taxing.
Spirits can be great friends–enjoy and honor the relationships!
Talk with other people about their spiritual experiences with beings, read lore and mythology, and do a lot of research before getting involved. Getting into a deeper spiritual practice can be incredible and rewarding, but just make sure you’re safe and well educated first.
When channeling the deceased, make sure you have years of experience under your belt and have a completely positive, healing intention. This can be traumatic for the passed relatives or beloved, so only channeling with explicit consent of both the physical person and the spirit, with the intention to heal and release binds holding the spirit or person back, and knowing how to clearly discern pure channeling from false interpretation are extremely important. I’ve seen so much emotional agony over people who channeled with deceased without following these suggestions.
As far as twin flames goes…this is a complicated subject. Try not to seek your twin flame, but recognize and accept longing for them. If they come into your life, that’s wonderful, but don’t expect or dwell on it too much. Live your life for you, not for meeting “the one.”
“Vibrational Healing” by Jaya Jaya Myra (My book review is here)
“Energy Medicine” by Donna Eden
“The Power of Now” by Eckhart Tolle
“Stillness Speaks” by Echkart Tolle
“365 Ways to Raise Your Frequency” by Melissa Alvarez
“A Handbook of Chakra Healing” by Kalashantra Govinda
“Emotional Intimacy” by Robert Augustus Masters
“Nutritional Healing” by Phyllis A. Balch
“Chakra Foods for Optimum Health” by Deanna M. Minich
Personal advice and opinions (but use your own judgement best):
I personally think that the focus of your spiritual practice should be on yourself and on overcoming challenges, emotional pain that’s clung onto you from this life and past lives, and learning to love life despite the challenges this world will give you. It’s not about knowing a hundred spirits or being famous in a past life, it’s about you and your unique individuality in all the glory the Source created you to be. If you have the latter intention, most likely your practice will foster nothing but healing, light, and love.
I wouldn’t advise making a tumblr account just for a spiritual blog until a year or two into your practice, unless you use tumblr as a journal. There’s a lot of drama and ego here that’s easy to get swept up into. Sometimes it can only bring negative energy to you, and sometimes it puts you at risk for being manipulated by others with ill intentions. Form your own spiritual practice and basis first.
I’d definitely suggest not doing energy readings, past life readings, twin flames readings, spirit drawings etc etc until you are very very very well versed in spiritual work! These are things that can deeply affect someones life (especially past life and twin flame readings) and can cause a lot of harm if not done with the purest of intentions and with the sole goal of healing. If you want to practice, then please make a clear disclaimer about it and how these are only practice and not meant to be taken as truth. Trust yourself, definitely, but please know how to foster positivity, light, and healing before trying any of these. (Honestly, I’d say minimum 3-4 years of intense spiritual work for non-practice readings).
I’m not a huge fan of pendulum work, but it’s different for everyone! Just keep in mind that pendulums are known not to be entirely accurate. I’d say it’s between 40-70% accurate, depending on the person. Don’t just ask a question once and then take that as fact–discern more!
Know that “getting rid of the ego” isn’t a great suggestion or idea to follow. It’s very “New Age” in that it denies the idea that we all have an ego as a natural part of us, and it labels the ego is bad. The ego isn’t bad, it just is. It is a natural part of us that has a lot of influence. Be aware of your ego and how it acts, understand that you are not your ego, but don’t fight it. Just be aware and work towards using it’s influence for productive self-awareness and healing.
“New Age” spirituality can be incredibly manipulative, ableist, and a hell of a lot of other things. It isn’t always, and not everyone who practices spirituality currently is “New Age.” Ideas like Indigo Children, Earth Angels, and concepts about healers having specific body types, etc are often ways to make people with mental health issues, Autism, heavier body types, etc, feel like they are more than human rather than recognizing an actual issue (in some cases, not all of these are “issues”). New Age practitioners don’t always have bad intentions, but it’s just important to always take things with a grain of salt. Including anyone today who does spiritual work. I’d be happy if you disagree about things I say or really look into this post and find what you do and don’t agree with! (And please message me, since I want to learn as well).
“New Age” spirituality also labels things as good or bad, instead of recognizing that all just is. You have every right to have a personal feeling of “good” and “bad,” but there’s no universally true/defined “good” or “bad.”
Also, sometimes people use spirituality to manipulate others. Be wary of things like “I spoke with your spirit/higher self!” when you don’t know the person who says that all that well, things like claiming ownership or close relationships to many spirits (it’s possible, of course, but just be careful since it can be a sign of the harmful ego!), and people who don’t try to keep an open mind with spirituality or are harsh with answers. We all have bad days and strong opinions, but this should come off differently than a general all-around negativity.
Disclaimer: This post may not fit exactly with your spiritual practice, and that’s okay! It’s only my advice to beginners, what I define as beginners, and what steps I feel should be taken in what approximate order. Practice your own path, of course, but do keep in mind your intention and the big question of “why am I doing this and how will it affect me and others around me?”
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