How to Become a Ghost

Shift Your Spirits

Most hauntings, or what we call ghosts, are probably psychic echoes. Residual energy. They’re like moving gifs or image loops.I had a haunting experience unlike most psychic echoes — a type of temporal phenomenon I hadn't considered before as the possible origin point for a ghost.

MENTIONED IN THE SHOW

You May Be Someone's Future Ghost

CLOUDBUSTING novel by Eric Slade

HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON

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TRANSCRIPT

Hey, thanks for listening to the Shift Your Spirits podcast.

I’m your host Slade Roberson.
For eleven years, I’ve been a professional intuitive and the author of the blog Shift Your Spirits, where I try to write about spirituality with fewer hearts and flowers than most New Age blather.

I also mentor emerging intuitives, psychics, and healers in a program called Automatic Intuition.

Today, I am back from a week’s hiatus for the first episode of our fall season. It seems to be working out pretty well to do a run of 12 episodes and then take a week off. It greatly impacts my quality of life to be able to do this. It also allows both Linda and I to catch our breaths and catch up on our To Do lists.

I, for one, am thrilled to see the back side of summer. I didn’t think about the podcast actually capturing my energy during a time I would normally retreat a bit. July and August - not my favorite time of year. You know how a lot of people have Seasonal Affective Disorder and they experience low energy in the winter? Well, I have the opposite of that. Hot humid summer drains me. It’s like a weight. It’s the psychic equivalent of that heavy lead blanket they lay on top of you when you have X-rays at the dentist. You know what I’m talking about?

I love fall. Or autumn. I’m gearing up for my most productive time of year. I spend October and November furiously writing. I can’t wait to be in hardcore, creative mode, with a sense of truly moving forward after so much stagnation and confusion.

I’ve mentioned the eclipse energy so many times, so I suppose I should share at least personally how that all shook out for me. You know the whole “Who am I? What’s my light? Where and how and why am I shining it into the world?"

I didn’t experience a shedding of my skin in terms of a transformation to something different, for me it’s been more of a recommitment to my original intentions. A return to my authentic creativity.

What I feel a need to shed is everybody else’s noise. Everyone else’s opinions and advice and judgments — even though they may be coming from a good place — it’s all started to be too much. (Without even getting into the cacophony of political conversation.) I just want the world to shut up so I can hear myself think.

Do you ever have those moments when you turn the car radio off and just drive with your thoughts? I need to get back to Me. To my truth. My creative impulses.

I know that sounds general. How it has come in specifically for me at this time is how it affects my writing. I’ve been writing non-fiction professionally for twelve years now. I’ve been publishing fiction for barely three years, but I’ve been writing it for over four decades… I’m not bragging, I’m just saying, I know how to do this. It’s the Thing my life has been oriented around.

And I lost the thread this summer. I couldn’t hear my own channel. There was so much freaking static, and it really scared me, to lose that part of myself. I was in a state of total anxiety for at least three months.

I am really plugged in to author communities online — indie publishing, industry news, classes, conventions, collaboration, marketing collectives, cross promotion… It is an absolute din of chatter. And I just reached a breaking point where I had to yell Silence!

My Automatic Intuition community does require me to be on social media, it is a priority, so unplugging as much as I might like to is not realistic at this time. If social media is part of your business, then you’ll understand. So, what I have done is turn off all the notifications for groups that I belong to.

I didn’t quit everything in a moment of madness; I just muted everybody. I can go back and start turning things back on when I’m in the mood for it. I’m in writing mode right now, not marketing mode, so a lot of posting and commenting about marketing and business-y writing stuff is just not helpful. When I shift gears, my desire for conversation and collaboration may change.

The issue is that other people’s opinions drown out your own wisdom.

I needed to hear my own channel, without any well meaning interference. So for me, that’s what the eclipse has been about. Returning to my creative origins, remember who I was when I was a creative writing major and pursuing my degree was only about pursuing my art. I had no real clue about what it would look like when that became an actual business. And in some ways, creatively, that’s a treasure that got buried and I needed to unearth it.

So, for the next 10 to 12 weeks, my writing surge will focus on the creative in creative writing. I’m tuning out the market, and what everyone else is doing.

I’m just getting clear about my identity, without judgment. This decision if you want to call it that has brought me tremendous peace. And the discomfort was part of the warning system helping me identify what is not working for me.

I hope you have had some similar epiphanies, at least an inkling of what you need to do to get back on track.

I have had some emails in the past few days from listeners who are still suffering from low energy and wondering when it’s going to pass and what they can do to get some relief.

For me personally and for most of the people I talked to, it was really terrible before the eclipse and has started to shift. It’s not immediate, but it’s definitely happening.

We are only barely out of Mercury Retrograde, still in the "shadow" period of that.

Depending on your sign, these energies could be moving through at a different point.

It's not just you, but I wouldn't be surprised if you're already feeling some relief.

(You could be sensitive to these huge storms. At the time of this recording Friday Sep 8, 2017, we are dealing with the aftermath of Harvey and bracing for Irma. If you’re listening from one of the areas affected, be safe. Even for those in other parts of the world, the vibrations from the winds alone are said to be setting off seismic earthquake sensors in some pretty far flung locations. I can imagine if you are sensitive to psychic energies and storms, the anxiety pouring into the collective from those who are displaced and in danger… It’s pretty hard core.)

If you’re listening from the future, the following suggestions will work regardless of when or under what circumstances you’re experiencing overwhelm. I am of course talking about emotional or mental overwhelm, not physical danger and natural disaster. But, this advice is for everybody.

When the psychic or ethereal or mental or emotional energies are overwhelming you...

Focus on grounding the physical.

Just start with your body.

If you already work out, be consistent and stick to your exercise plan. Go into robot mode, just show up and go through the motions. It doesn’t matter if you don’t feel like it, do it anyway.

If the only thing physical you can do is go for walks, go for a daily walk. At least 30 minutes, preferably in nature or a park or somewhere away from traffic. Gorgeous fall weather already happening for a lot of people. (Spring for Ozzies and Kiwis...) I would personally choose late afternoon or evening to release the stress of the day, but for some people first thing in the morning sets you up to handle more during the day.

Get up 30 minutes early if you need to. You'll make it up in deeper sleep.

The tiniest bit of discipline or success generates crazy amounts of momentum.

And if all you can do is breathe, just breathe. Focus on your breath.

These energies are a storm. Storms pass. Be safe.

One of the ways I chose to cope with the eclipse and mercury retrograde was by painting and rearranging my office. A can of paint and a color change is a relatively inexpensive way to transform a physical environment. And just as with the body, shifting the physical energy provides a foundation for bringing back the other layers of consciousness and productivity.

Because here’s the thing - you can’t hang a challenging transformation on a brittle foundation. It just collapses. You know how it is when you’re sick… You’re not creating anything when just lying there with a fever trying to breathe is your only realistic goal.

This has been a longer than normal personal intro. I still don’t feel like I fully recapped everything, but I think we’re all still processing. If you like hearing this personal stuff, do shoot me an email and let me know it’s helpful. I’ll be happy to share more as it comes up in our conversations.

Ok. I want to get into today’s story segment but, before I forget, I want to take a moment to say thank you to my newest supporters on Patreon:

Dr. Keith Holden, Jen Bookout Ramowski, and Russ, who requests some privacy and anonymity.

I appreciate all of you who have pledged your support and I’m really excited to see the new names each week. It demonstrates that you’re enjoying the show and want it to continue. That’s very encouraging to me, so thank you.

You can support my time in producing this show by pledging on Patreon.

For as little as $1 a month, listeners who support on Patreon can also access bonus Q&A episodes, where you send in questions, I record answers to them, and they go out to patrons of the show exclusively. There is also a level of support that includes a free download of the guided meditation “Messages from your Spirit Guides."

So, if you want to find out how you can become a patron, and access some of this extra audio content, please go to patreon.com/shiftyourspirits

And now, finally, here’s today’s story about how one becomes a ghost.

SEGMENT

I feel most hauntings, or what we call ghosts, are probably psychic echoes. Residual energy. They’re like moving gifs or image loops.

I’m not a medium, so I don’t experience human spirits in visitation, such as a relative or recently departed friend coming in.

What most people would call demonic hauntings…Negative entity attachments, that type of thing…Yeah, I do not experience that at all. I have very specific psychic security in place. Layers and layers of programming and refined rules with my guardians to keep that kind of energy away from me. It is dealt with far outside the perimeter of my personal space.

The only other explanations for what I’ve experienced as ghosts would be the results of some kind of irregular time phenomena. I actually wrote about this type of ghost in my novel Cloudbusting.

And then there is the idea that time is an entirely abstract human construct and doesn’t really exist in the way we perceive it. Ash Riley brought this up in her interview on dream interpretation and past lives. The idea that past lives are multiple lives and might be happening simultaneously, in some kind of parallel dimensions.

So, today’s ghost story is about a time phase shift I experienced. And when it happened it was the first time I was aware of the idea that we could witness the origin point of what might become a future haunting.

You May Be Someone's Future Ghost

About 3 years ago I had a haunting experience that was truly unlike any other — a type of phenomenon I haven't heard anyone else speak about; a kind of ghost I've never even really contemplated.

I had a conscious awareness of myself as a future ghost to someone who will occupy my house years after me.

It was the day I realized my mother and I were going to have a beloved family pet euthanized. I woke up that morning to find a text message that it was time.

Buddy was eighteen years old, he had an amazing long life, but he was in decline. We anticipated he probably wouldn't be with us for another year. Still, he took a quick turn for the worst and I can’t allow that situation to drag on one more moment longer than it needs to.

I spoke to my mama by phone and assured her I would go with her to the vet. The appointment wasn't until 3:00 in the afternoon, so I told her I'd come over early, observe him, confirm his condition, and spend a little time with him, say goodbye.

One of the worst things at that point is waiting. When the decision has been made and it's the right one, I don't have the patience to wait. Waiting at all seems cruel to me. When you're terminally ill, in agony in your own skin, eight hours is an eternity. I hated for him to go through that. (Incidentally, I believe strongly in euthanasia for people, too.)

After getting off the phone with my mother, it was torture trying to putter around my house, and kill time until I was due to go over and see Buddy.

I'd only lived in my new house for two months. It was an old place, built in the 1930s, but I can absolutely assure you — don't be too disappointed — it was not haunted.

I performed every spell of invitation I know; I stood in the dark and listened to the quiet until my ears were ringing… nothing.

My new house was eighty-one years old, but it had only been home to just three families in all that time. Lots of kids had been raised there, their handprints are pressed into the patio concrete, their names and birthdays are carved into the workbench in the garage.

From what I know of the history of the house from the previous owner and the elderly neighbors next door, my house had known mostly love. No deaths, no tragedies, no violence.

The energy of the space was truly peaceful, and of course, I was grateful for that.

But there's a part of me that doesn't mind a little lingering spirit here and there. A little psychic echo. I’ve lived in haunted rental houses all my life; I finally bought one, and it was spirit-free.

My friend Tina’s houses are always centers of paranormal activity. I'm pretty convinced at this point it has little to do with her houses; I think they move around with her.

She’ll become periodically excited by the escalation of activity — thumps and bumps and footsteps and such — and beg me to come over and experience it.

It never fails, though. She complains that, several hours before I’m due to arrive, her own ghosts all go quiet. Nothing happens while I'm there; she just as fun catching me up on the evidence. And later I hear that the house remained peaceful for days afterward.

I have a heavy angelic security detail.

I've worked for years to put it in place, customize it, and maintain it. They clear the spaces I intend to visit. By my request, I have a larger than average buffer zone. Other than the guides I may intentionally connect with at my clients' requests, almost nothing "randomly spooky" gets through.

This could also have something to do with the stillness of the new house I had bought. But honestly, I don't think so. I tried to pick up on some ghosts. I strained to hear just a faint echo of some soul who had resided there in the past.

I did have one small flash of a psychic memory, imprinted out in the yard near the edge of the property.

There is an original thriving boxwood hedge around three sides of the property. It was one of the features I really loved about the house, this living green fence. But boxwood is meant to be maintained in a box like shape, which requires a lot of hedge trimming. I’ve mowed my share of grass, and I’ve weedeated and edged many a driveway and sidewalk, but maintaining the perfect planes of this boxwood was another level of yard work. It’s not just the top you see. Once you finish the top, you have to go back around the property and do the outside wall. And then you have to go back around the property and do the interior wall of the hedge. Oh. My. God. This was some physical labor.

Even though I hadn’t heard a peep out of any ghosts inside the house, one day while I was out there sweating away, I heard a grumbling voice. A man, bitching and moaning to himself about this hedge. I was thinking it too, but I distinctly heard him. And I saw or felt that he was doing this with giant manual scissor like trimmers. This was decades ago, long before electric hedge trimmers. It was just a minute or so, and it soon faded away. I blessed him from the future and at least felt a little more grateful for the obnoxious clatter of my power tool chewing through the job.

But back to the present. To the morning of Buddy's last day.

I'm alone in my kitchen, and I allow myself to have one really big loud ugly cry for Buddy.

And in that moment, I felt someone with me.

It was a teenaged girl. She couldn’t see me, but she could hear me crying and was trying to communicate with me.

I knew — and I can't tell you exactly how I knew, I was just certain in that instantaneous claircognizant download kind of way — that she wasn't a ghost.

I was the ghost.

She was in the future, and she heard the psychic echo of my grief.

I had just left it there, imprinted it on the space, and a girl who will one day live in that house after me, picked up on it.

I was in shock — I'd never thought about our ability to do this, or at least to be aware of it in the present while it is happening.

Have you ever thought about this? Maybe it's just me. I don’t know about you, but now I feel incredibly on display… You know what I mean? What am I imprinting? What’s getting recorded?

It's like those time capsules I used to bury in hopes that someone would dig them up one day. I've also written messages inside the closets of my dorm rooms before … I’ve left objects or notes in apartments when I moved out of them…

It made me think of all that.

Who’s watching me, picking up on me from other times, other dimensions?

I felt bad. I wanted to assure her that I wasn't haunting her — I wasn't trapped there or anything — I was just crying for someone I loved.

It never occurred to me that anybody would hear it. Out of time.

I did my best to project to her a feeling that everything was okay. I spoke clearly and explained my situation, in case some future ghost hunter did want to record like an EVP…

I don't think she could really make out my words at all. It was like when somebody is on the other end of a bad phone connection — you can hear her asking "Hello?" in that same one-sided kind of way.

Anyway, this signal — this vortex, this brief wormhole in time, or whatever it w as — faded away.

It probably only lasted two or three minutes, but it left me wondering about the temporal aspect of haunting.

Are you, right now, someones's ghost in the future?

OUTRO

Thanks again for listening to the Shift Your Spirits podcast.

For show notes, links, transcripts and all the past episodes
please visit shiftyourspirits.com

You can subscribe in iTunes or Stitcher or whatever app you use to access podcasts.

If you’d like to get an intuitive reading with me, or download a free ebook and meditation to help you connect with your guides please go to sladeroberson.com

and if you’re interested in my professional intuitive training program, you can start the course for free by downloading the Attunement at automaticintuition.com

BEFORE I GO

I promised to leave you a message in answer to a question or a concern you may have.

So take a moment to think about that — hold it in your mind or speak it out loud. I’ll pause for just a few seconds….right…now.

1…2…3…4

MESSAGE
Endings are openings for new beginnings. If you’re still waiting for some fresh new direction to present itself, hang in there. It’s inevitable. It’s seasonal.

There’s no flailing or striving required, really. Conserve your energy and allow it to come to you…It’s on its way. It’s picking up right now, like a breeze. You’ll feel it when it arrives. You can’t miss it.

And I’ll talk to you later.