Empower Your Soul

Signs or Ego? Decoding Spiritual Messages

• Medium Nicole • Season 1 • Episode 69

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Are you struggling to find clarity in your decisions? Join us as we explore the delicate balance between ego and spiritual guidance, unraveling the challenges and insights that can help you navigate life’s complexities. In this engaging episode, we dive deep into the ways our ego influences our choices, often driven by fear or the need for security. We share personal stories, anecdotes, and vital lessons learned through our experiences, highlighting how important it is to understand when our ego is steering the wheel and when it's time to listen to spiritual guidance.

This exploration provides listeners with essential tools to discern the often-misleading signals from the ego and the subtler nudges from the spirit realm. We endeavor to highlight that spiritual guidance isn’t a shortcut to an obstacle-free life; instead, it encourages our growth and evolution through life's challenges. As we reflect on how to harmonize the influences of both ego and spirit, learn how to approach decision-making more mindfully, creating a more authentic and fulfilling life path.

Whether you are contemplating significant life changes or just trying to navigate everyday choices, this episode will offer valuable insights to empower your decisions. Let's embark on this journey of self-discovery together, merging the wisdom of the spirit with the groundedness of the ego. Subscribe, share, and leave a review to continue engaging with our vibrant community!

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Speaker 1:

Hello and welcome to Empower your Soul. This is an interesting episode for me because this episode came as a download while I was trying to multitask and get some things done and I wrote these really quick notes and Spirit had some really good guidance and it felt really really good in the moment. But as I'm recording this, I've noticed I've recorded this a couple times and I keep stumbling over my words. I actually had a full podcast episode of this that I posted, but over my words, I actually had a full podcast episode of this that I posted, but I don't think it was the right intention and I'm still kind of muddling through this a little bit. So bear with me as I move and flow through this episode a little bit. But I really wanted to talk about how to make decisions with balancing your ego and balancing your spiritual guidance, because this is something I have personally struggled with and, to be honest, I don't feel super I'm going to say it, I don't feel super comfortable with this episode and recording this episode, because I don't think it's black and white. I think this can be a very gray space. I have certainly learned my lessons with making decisions from my ego as well as from my spirit team and I know that I'm not perfect at this, and I think that's where I really needed to start with this is because I'm going to give you what I know. You probably have your own way to help discern your ego, discern your spiritual guidance, but I really this is more like a red flag, a warning flag for folks that are in this making big decisions, mindset right now, and I think it's just really important for some listeners to hear today, which is why Spirit keeps making me do this over and over again and making sure I'm saying the right things or delivering the right message that they want to deliver. I don't think this is for me. I think this is for somebody listening out here, and that's probably true with most of the podcasts, but there's something about this one that's really important. So I want to give some examples as I go through here and I'm going to ask Spirit to bring it in as I'm going through.

Speaker 1:

But I just really want to talk about it because obviously this is a very personal topic of mine, because when we talk about ego, this really is what I like to say to my children our caveman brain, this is our like bottom of the hierarchy of needs, the bottom row, and it really is our survival mechanism. And you know, to some extent a lot of people talk about the ego is like your identity construct, like, but I think a lot of that comes down to your survival mechanism. So it's your protection mechanism, it's making sure that you're safe, you have food, water, shelter. It's, it's your protection mechanism, it's making sure that you're safe, you have food, water, shelter. It's all about stability, it's all about survival instincts and a lot of these decisions tend to be more rational, more analytical and, to be honest with you, more fear-based, because the fear comes from needing to survive and not dying like the cavemen. If they didn't go and travel for food, for saber tooth, tigers or whatever the heck they ate right then they would be, have no food and they would die. So the ego tends to be a very pressure driven ego, driven like urgency, pressure, fear based decisions that come with that, you know, and it's there's purpose to that.

Speaker 1:

I don't think the ego is an entirely a bad thing, and I know a lot of people do talk about the ego as a bad thing, because the ego makes sure that we survive and we as humans cannot get rid of our ego. It is painful. I really kind of wish I could. I wish I could just have my head in like the spirit world 24 seven and not have to worry about you know what's for dinner, driving my kids to all their sports practices right, that would be amazing. But that's not the reality that we live in and here, as a human, we opt to have a human experience. So the ego is naturally going to come with it.

Speaker 1:

I don't think that it ever goes away, but I do want to talk about how you know your I'm going to say appropriately taking information from your ego to make decisions, instead of letting your ego make the decisions, because ego should be. I'm a data person. So your ego and your thoughts that come from your ego to me are data and information that something might be askew and you might need to pay attention to something. Ego to me are data and information that something might be askew and might need to pay attention to something. But I never let the ego drive the bus. I always let the ego be an input to my decision making, but it doesn't make the decisions, if that makes sense. So some examples I'm going to, I'm going to ask them. Oh, not, no, yet no examples. Yet they're telling me keep going. So that's kind of the ego based decisions. So is there anything I can say?

Speaker 1:

So, for example, when my son started I'm ignoring spirit, sorry spirit when my son started seeing spirits with his eyes when he was probably younger than eight. But when we were actually having the conversation about it, when he was like eight, he would freak out because he would see these black shadows right. So his ego was driving him because he had no basis for spiritual guidance at that point. We'll talk about that in a minute. So he sees black shadows. No one else can see the black shadow people. Um, they come to visit him at night so he freaks out. So his ego wants to protect him. He wants to keep him safe. So he sleeps with all the lights on, because he can't see them as well. When all the lights are on, he won't go upstairs and downstairs alone. In our house Again, ego driven wants to be safe, wants to protect his own safety, sleeps with covers over his head so he can't see. So this is what I'm talking about, about ego based decision. He sees something, jumps to fear based and then does things to protect him from that fear based perspective.

Speaker 1:

So if you're thinking about all the hecklers out there on the internet and YouTube, they're my worst heckler. I it's like high highs and low lows over there on YouTube because the best people are like not the best. I love all of you, but I have so many great people on YouTube over there that are wonderful, but at the same time I have the wicked hecklers on YouTube at the same time. And so when you think about the people that come at you for the spiritual work, they're obviously not coming from a spiritual guidance perspective. They are coming from a scared scarcity. You're challenging their perspective in life. You're challenging what they believe to be is true. So they are going to protect themselves by telling you that you're wrong and heckling you Like so. So again, they are coming at it from their perspective, their beliefs, and you're challenging their perspectives and their beliefs. So they're going to do their part to make sure that you know that you're wrong.

Speaker 1:

And then I'm right, because the ego makes me feel really good when I know I'm right and you're wrong. So whenever I get those hecklers, that's why I'm like thanks, have a great day, thanks for adding to my algorithm, because that's their truth and that's what they know, and when they come at me, they're just protecting their own identity so that they feel safe. They feel like they're going to survive. I mean, it's not really like I'm not going to threaten their life or anything right, but like that's the reality of the ego. It gets scared of anything that's different and it's going to react to. It. Makes sense, right, like it makes it makes sense. So when we're talking about spiritual guidance, then oh, hang on, before I go there, my eyes are just going to a couple things in my notes here, right here.

Speaker 1:

So when you're making ego based decisions, it gives you this is so bad, this short-term relief, followed by long-term misalignment, and I'm going to talk about why that is in a minute. But it also, like, creates this cycle of reactivity, because the more you feed your ego, the more you make decisions based on your ego. Your ego is going to get stronger and stronger and stronger and once it starts driving the bus, it's going to throw out anything that doesn't align to it. So, again, like it creates this cycle of reactivity that feeds itself and that's why we get a lot of um. I don't know if I have an example for this, but that's it's like. It's that self-fulfilling prophecy, right? Like if I think I'm going to be bad at this and my brain keeps telling me I'm going to be bad at this, then I'm not going to be good at this and it's just going to get worse and worse and worse. And that's not necessarily an example, but that's kind of what I want to toss out there. So, if we move to spiritual guidance, this is I'm going to.

Speaker 1:

I'm going to say spiritual guide or guidance today, in just the general sense of our connection to something larger. So this can look like your intuition. This can be signs or synchronicities that you're receiving to make decisions. It could be dreams, it could be messages that you receive through mediums. It could be, if you can connect to the other side yourself, your messages from your spirit team, akashic Records team, loved ones, etc. So I'm just going to keep it wide open here in terms of what I mean by when I say spiritual guidance.

Speaker 1:

In this episode and as we all know, with all of these spiritual guidance activities, I can't forget tarot. Tarot is in my head, yelling at me right now. It's very subtle, right. It's nonlinear, it's really not focused, it's not direct, and so, as a result, what's really interesting is that a lot of the stuff that we get from this I'm going to say it our ego wants to supplement it because we want the spiritual guidance to come in and we want these spiritual guides to come in and make our lives easier.

Speaker 1:

So the purpose, the honest to goodness purpose of spiritual guidance and I think a lot of people, including myself, have this misconception about connecting with spirit guides, connecting with the other side, our loved ones right, if we can, it's like this, this level of attainable. If I can talk to my spirit guides, they're going to give me all the answers and my life is going to be easy and I don't have to worry about things, and they're going to take away all my problems, because that's what spirit guides do. Right, they're going to. I've it's like I've hit the bonus level, I've hit the secret level in Mario cart, mario brothers, and now I'm untouchable. And that's not the reality of of what spiritual guidance is.

Speaker 1:

Spiritual guidance is for the evolution of our soul. It is not for material comfort, is not for ego based needs, desires, money, food, shelter right, it is for, like, how do we, how do we make the most out of our time here so that we don't have to hopefully come back right or come back less. How do we learn our lessons? So it's just so. It's so interesting because I think what happens a lot of the time is that when we are receiving signs from spirit or receiving that spiritual guidance, it's so interesting because when we receive those signs and they don't make a lot of sense, what we do is we jump into our ego to try to piece those puzzle pieces together. So we're going to, for example and I'll give an example from somebody else and then me.

Speaker 1:

So I recently no, sorry, at some point in my career, my mediumship practices I was with somebody who received lots of signs from spirit and it must have been in multiple areas, and I don't remember how she got those signs. But she received signs from spirit that she should quit her job, do the spiritual work full time. And so she was just like, heck, yeah, blind faith, said I'm going to quit my job, I'm going to open my spiritual business, which I believe included Reiki as well as mediumship. So she just like quit her job, open mediumship. And she was like okay, spirit, bring me my clients, bring everything to me, I am ready. So again, this blind faith decision that happens from just following spiritual guidance is very real, and I think a lot of people who start this work think that it works this way. And I'm going to say I'm going to raise my hand and admit I thought it worked that way too and I knew, even with my business background, I had to do work to do some of this stuff. But I'll tell you what.

Speaker 1:

When I started receiving the spirit guide numbers excuse me, let me say that again I started receiving angel numbers over and over, and over and over again, um, and all of them, and I use this wicked cool website. I still recommend it to people, but now I take angel numbers with a grain of salt. But every time I looked up any sort of spirit guide number that came up on this website, pretty much all of them ended up synthesizing to you're amazing at this. This is your soul's purpose. Financial abundance is coming, that the angels are helping you.

Speaker 1:

And like, who doesn't want to receive those signs over and over and over? And it was so consistent, right? But here's the thing about signs and synchronicities. You're going to see what you look for. So I wasn't looking for the signs that said, yeah, this is going to take a little while. It's not your time, let things fall into place, right? Most of us want to jump to the conclusion of okay, let's do it, let's do it Now, I'm ready, let's go take care of me. Right? And again that's part of the ego coming in and being like, oh, thank God, now I don't have to do anything, as someone else can take care of everything for me.

Speaker 1:

And it's a very disempowering perspective, to be completely honest with you, and that's why you can't just use spiritual guidance as a tool, because spiritual guidance I like to think about it this way Spiritual guidance is like it to me and I. It goes back and forth. So again, this isn't totally black and white for me. But spiritual guidance for me is like the CEO almost setting the strategy when do we want to go, what do we want to do? Kind of like how do we want to get there? But also it doesn't give the details of how you're going to get there, right.

Speaker 1:

So that's why you can't completely rely on the spiritual guidance that comes in, because it's almost like in my instance, in this other woman's instance, it's it's this like fallacy of take the leap and the net will appear, and that you don't have to work for it and and spirit's going to handle all the details. And then what happens when you make decisions, trusting blindly in the spiritual guidance is whole man, that rug pulls out from under you so fucking fast. Reality hits right, the ego hits, the bills happen. You have clients that don't book you. You have like waves of clients that will book you at once, or maybe not, and then nothing right. And so so it's really in marketing Don't even get me started on social media and marketing. That's super painful.

Speaker 1:

So there's a lot of like disillusionment that can happen by following this spiritual fantasy is what I want to say and it's going to burn you and it burns a lot of people. So again, you need to remember that spirit isn't here to remove your obstacles, they are not here to make your life easier. And as you receive that spiritual guidance, again your ego wants to pop in and say everything's going to be taken care of, because that's what your ego is going to want to believe. But it doesn't take away all the problems and steps you got to take to get to that end goal. If it's meant to be, it doesn't mean it's going to be easy. I have to say that to my clients all the time. It's not going to be easy. So again, you need to kind of take both spiritual guidance and the ego kind of in tandem to balance your decisions. And again I kind of tend to think of spirit as the CEO, but it's not really. And like ego is my worker bees, right, Ego is my frontline staff doing the shit work that no one wants to do. But what happens is that it does balance each other. So I'm going to take the instance of getting using spiritual guidance for direction setting, right. So let me give an example.

Speaker 1:

I knew that I needed to do this work full time, right. I knew that I needed to leave my job. I was hearing, I was I'm going to say I was seeing it in the angel time, right, I knew that I needed to leave my job. I was hearing, I was I'm going to say I was seeing it in the angel numbers, right, I was hearing it in readings. I could feel it in my bones, I could see it in my dreams, so. So spirit was showing me in very various ways that this is going to happen. And it's not. It's a matter of like. I did an Akashic Records reading once and I saw like a blue whale and it's like it's huge, it's coming, you can't stop it, it's just a matter of time before it arrives. So that's kind of how spirit would show it to me.

Speaker 1:

But I knew that if I quit my job and I did not have my mindset right, I would, my ego would freak the fuck out and I would ruin my energy and I would attract the wrong clients. Right, and because this is the reality of what happens, because your ego takes over, you're worried about money, you're worried about putting food on the table, you're worried about am I going to pay my mortgage? Right, and that lowers your vibration lower on the earthly plane and it makes it harder for you to connect to spirit and it makes it harder for you to like, keep your vibration high to attract the kinds of clients that are best aligned with your energy. So I knew this, so I made sure I had about six months of time before I quit my job to build my social media, to get my name known out locally, to do local demonstrations, to find clients, to squeeze clients into every point of my day, because a lot of this work is word of my word by word of mouth, right, If I could use my mouth to get the right word out. That would be great. So this is what I mean is like I knew what the direction was, but my ego, I knew I needed to make sure I could pay the bills, so I did everything I could to set my business up for success while at the same time saving money for a rainy day, just in case I don't get those clients. So, again, I'm using both the spirit guidance and my ego to help me figure out what's the best path there, and I really liken my ego to like the easiest way I like to say it is your spiritual guidance tends to be your what, and then your ego is more like your how. So it's like the project management to implement the project, I mean realistically. So you can do, you can flip it too, right? So I think you can still flip it too, so you can still use, you know, your ego to make a decision, right, is there one? So, for example, I'm going to be totally honest with you. I am, because this is who I am, and I'm going to loathe saying this, but I'm going to say this anyway. So, soul Journey Sundays. If you haven't, if you're not aware of this, I should probably bring Julie on to talk about this.

Speaker 1:

Soul Journey Sundays is a once every other month on a Sunday night. There's this lovely woman Julie's Speech Gens I butcher her name every time, I'm sorry, julie, if you're listening who essentially gets a whole bunch of metaphysical professionals together to give essentially free readings or very discounted readings. I really I donate the money that I receive from her towards charities because this is my charity initiative, but essentially you can pay $50 and get two readings, two 15-minute readings from amazing professionals Like. I went to Soul Journey Sundays a few times before I signed on as a reader and I'm going to talk about that in a second and I was blown away by the readings that I got. Like blown away. These are amazing, amazing readers and it's all different modalities. You kind of walk in, you don't know you get what you get. You don't really get upset, you just walk in and whatever you're supposed to get you get that night. So it's a great deal if you're looking for a little bit of like $50 for two readings by awesome professionals. It's groups of two, so it's you and somebody else kind of partnered up in the same room together with the reader. But I first heard about Julie on another podcast, I was like that's amazing.

Speaker 1:

I went to her Soul Journey Sundays a few times and I was like I don't know, by then I've been in mediumship for quite a while and my ego was there. I was like I could do this, I could do this, I want to be able to get on this. And it was I'm going to be honest a little bit of an ego trip for me. Like I was like I'm going to be so good that I'm going to be here and I'm going to be a reader on here. And I set that intention from a very ego-based perspective, that I'm as good as these people. I want to, I want to read to. And then what does spirit do? Spirit signs.

Speaker 1:

Spirit told me to sign up for a spiritual assessment class. I already knew how to do spiritual assessments. I think my kid was sick that day to take them to the doctors but I went anyway and I went to my breakout group at this spiritual assessment class Like the stars aligned and I'm like you've got to be shitting me. So Spirit literally gave me the opening to say, okay, if that's what you want, go to this class, got it set up. So I'm'm in her breaker group and it's just the two of us and I have, and I get to read for her and I give her this reading and she's got some cool events coming up and like I don't really know any about this stuff, but I'm talking about all these things and so the reading I gave her was spot on. And she's like oh, my God, nicole, you're like, like you're so good, you know what's with her words, to be fair, her words and I was like, hey, I have to be honest with you, julie. I've I've been to your soul journey Sundays. Would you be interested in having me as a reader? Slam dunk, right, slam dunk. So spirit. So my ego set the path and spirit was like game on and they led me down the path to allow me to have that opportunity.

Speaker 1:

So I'm going to say it goes both ways. It goes both spirit setting direction and your kind of ego helping you get there, as well as your ego setting direction and spirit getting you. But I think either way, like there's no right way to this work. But the best way to do this is to kind of use both to drive your direction and make your decisions. Don't rely on one or rely on the other, bring them both together. So I just again, it's an art, not a science, but I would say, if you're making decisions based on urgency, based on need, if it has a lot of emotion to it, that's when that's a red flag, that that's your ego trying to make that decision.

Speaker 1:

If you are making decision because you hope things are going to work out, because it's like a hope and a wish, but you don't really have a plan to get it done, that's your spirit guidance coming through to say this is where I want to go. So you really, and it's like it's okay that you have both of them, but you need to bring them together to really make a decision. And if you have the hat, if you have the direction so like, for example, right now, I know I'm supposed to be doing something else. I don't really know what it is yet. I know it's like that feeling, that anticipation of something is brewing, but I don't have all the ingredients for my soup yet.

Speaker 1:

As the dead person said on Thursday, I don't have all the ingredients for my soup yet, so I don't know what I'm making. I don't know what my soup is, I don't know what my ingredients are. So I know there's something out there and my spiritual guidance has told me there's something out there, but my ego says I don't even know what the fuck we're talking about yet. So this is where I'm like okay, so I see that you give me more signs or you help lead the way to figure out where am I going with this. You let me know a little more detail and then my ego will come in and take over to figure out what's the path to get there. So, yeah, that's kind of how I approach all of this. Is I, if I feel like it's a partial picture, which I think most of us do in this work I wait for spirit to give me the information to help me make that complete picture, or how do I bring it together, and I trust that spirit's going to lead me down the right path for these decisions.

Speaker 1:

But I'd never make big decisions based on either spiritual guidance or ego, or at least I try as heck not to, because it never ends up well. So I mean that's that's the reality of this work. So, again, I would say, like areas to be cautious in, or like certain decisions that you need to really think about before you make them. So definitely when you're starting a spiritual business again, don't don't look before you or like, look before you, leap, don't just leap. So that's a great time to check Is it my ego, is it my spiritual guidance, coming through any sort of life change or anytime you're kind of navigating difficult or challenging times, like realistically, anything where there's high emotions at stake or or sink or swim at stake, that automatically is going to bring your ego in so much faster than kind of listening to your spiritual guidance.

Speaker 1:

So that's when you're going to want to pause and really think about it. But yeah, I mean that's really I'm going to ask spirit if there's anything else and again, it's all your typical things. If you're trying to look for clearer spiritual reception, you know, meditate, journal, all that, all that jazz, and if you feel like your ego is overactive, this is a really good time to like also journal, go, meditate, go for a walk, talk about it and like there's some. I know EFT is a really cool technique that you can use to really calm kind of your ego or your or reactivity there. But yeah, I mean other other than that, it's just trust that the whole of you can make good decisions. It's not just spirit, it's not just your ego, it's kind of the combination of all of these things, and when in doubt, I would honestly say wait it out, because the longer you wait, to a certain extent right, the more information spirits, the more time spirits going to have to put things in place for you. Right, the more information spirits, the more time spirits going to have to put things in place for you, for you to be successful, to enable you to be successful. So, yeah, I think that's my advice here.

Speaker 1:

I just want to thank all of you. I hope this was helpful. If you feel like this session was for you, drop me a line. I want to hear about it. I definitely want, I want to know. So, thank you all for being here and then coming up about it. I definitely want, I want to know. So, um, thank you all for being here and then coming up on Friday, which I'm going to record after. This is going to be all about passwords, so I'm really excited about that one. I also don't know where that one's going to go. It's going to be fun. All right, love you all, take care.

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