How to Overcome a Fear of the Spirit World

A few years ago I really wanted to open up to the spirit realm and learn to connect with my spirit guides, but for months on end, fear stood in my way. I was scared of seeing/hearing ghosts, disembodied voices, evil entities and even my own spirit guides. I felt that hardly anyone could help me overcome this issue and most of those who did just said I had to ‘face the fear’, which I felt wasn’t much help because I was paralyzed by it!  Later on I had some help and reassurance from other psychics and had many breakthroughs of my own in my understanding of the spirit world, which helped me to deconstruct my fear and see it for what it was. I will share some of these breakthroughs in this post.

Before I do, I just want to highlight that a certain level of comfort with exploring the spirit realm is definitely something worth attaining. We are meant to keep a connection to our own spirit. We are meant to receive guidance from our spirit guides. Connecting with spirit makes life easier and saves us hassle and energy when we’re going down the wrong road.

Here are some of my insights on fear of the spirit realm and how to overcome it:

Where fear comes from

Fear can be constructive in that it alerts us to danger. If we’re about to be pushed off a cliff, we will naturally feel some fear because we’re in danger of dying. And of course this kind of fear serves us.

But sometimes it’s difficult to distinguish between when you’re perceiving a really dangerous situation and when you’re preempting the possibility of danger in the future. For many people, fear has become an automatic response to protect them when they’re encountering new situations. So often when we’re in unknown territory, fear comes along and rears its head. ‘Watch out! You don’t know this territory! Anything could happen! Listen to me, I’m just trying to protect you!’

How helpful is this? Not very, in my view. Being in a state of fear is stressful, for the body, mind and spirit. Instead of allowing our fear to alert us to a real possibility of danger, we can be enslaved to our fear and constantly on edge, just in case something bad happens.

As fear is often unjustified, it can be helpful to challenge our fears when we’re doing something new. Fear is seldom alerting us to a genuine danger and this applies to psychic development too. What are you actually afraid of? You need to get clear on this so that you can deconstruct your fear. And deconstruct it you can, because a fear of the spirit world is always based on lack of a consciousness.

But the spirit world is frightening, isn’t it?

When I was doing psychic development, the pre-empting gremlins who used to pop up and alert me to danger ahead were the people around me. Some people felt I was in putting myself in a vulnerable position by exploring the spirit world and they told me so.

In our collective consciousness there definitely exists a belief that it’s better not to mess with the spirit realm. I heard that a lot when I was starting out – some people around me felt that I was playing with fire. Luckily I understood the spirit world enough to know that wasn’t true and I continued in my intuitive development. But those sorts of attitudes are enough to put many beginners off.

This collective attitude of fear stems from a lack of understanding of the spirit realm and how it helps us. Cultures who have a tradition of understanding and working with the spirit realm have no fear of it. For the Native American Indians, there is nothing scary about connecting with Spirit or with deceased ancestors. The very fact that we call connecting with spirit ‘supernatural’ is telling. We make it into something that is unnatural, when spirit is who we are. We are meant to embrace the physical and spiritual worlds equally, not fear them.

Our culture has made an industry out of the ‘supernatural’

It’s no wonder many of us are terrified of meeting ghosts in the night when we have the film industry which makes money from arousing a fear of the spirit realm. People love paying to be scared and thrilled, so it’s more profitable to exploit people’s fears than it is to portray reality. However, while people are paying to be scared, they’re unconsciously learning that the spirit realm is weird, terrifying and dangerous. If you see these movies and know little about the spiritual realm, you may end up believing that if you develop psychic abilities, you risk having objects moving around your living room, voices coming from your walls and faces appearing on your kitchen tiles. I can assure you that the reality of it is much less eventful. I see spirits (in my mind’s eye) and I hear a voice, (my inner voice – it sounds just like my own voice, so it’s not in the least bit scary).

Thankfully, scary happenings have just not been a part of my psychic development experience. I have not seen a spirit in front of me looking like a real person since I was seven years old. I have heard voices (like whisperings) upon occasion, but there is really nothing scary or intimidating about it. It was interesting more than scary. And this is the opinion of someone who two years ago was so paralyzed by fear of ghosts that I would not get up in the night to use the bathroom!

Negative forces

And then there is the fear of evil. If we open ourselves up to Spirit, don’t we encounter good spirits and bad spirits? I was scared more than once upon hearing that negative forces exist and that they eat girls like me for breakfast.

Yes, negative entities do exist. I clear a lot of negative energies - including negative entities – in my readings and I understand how they operate.

The most important thing to know is that negative forces look scary if you don’t know much about them, but once you understand how they function, you realize that they are nowhere near as powerful and scary as they appear. Let me explain…

We, as beings of Light get our vital life force from Source/God/the Creator (choose your favourite word). This is the energy which animates us, which feeds us.

Negative energies on the other hand are energies who have taken a vow of separation from Source or God thus they have no energy source of their own. Because they have no energy source of their own, they draw their power from other beings (like vampires). They do this by creating negativity in beings of light, which they can then siphon off. So negative entities inspire emotions like fear, anger, hatred, jealousy, resentment. They love limiting beliefs that inspire these emotions and thoughts. Lots of yummy soul food for them.

But we need to remember that there is no ‘source’ of darkness to contend with. There is no Devil. Source or God is the only energy that is. Negative energies exist wherever there is an absence of Source, or light energy. That’s why they’re called dark energies.

When you feel fear in the presence of a negative entity, that nourishes the entity and it grows and expands. It gets scarier and scarier in proportion to your fear. You’re the one who’s feeding it. If you ignore or banish any class of negative entity, it shrinks and disappears. Quite simply, they are only as powerful as you allow them to be.

The first time I stood up to a negative spirit it was so unscary it was laughable. A negative entity is a bit like a kid in a Scream mask on Halloween. Take his mask off and underneath is someone who’s just getting off on scaring people. If you don’t realize that his mask is just a mask, you may run away, screaming. You can be sure that the negative entity will run after you, to get more fear energy out of you. But if you turn back and face the entity and run after it and de-mask it, the entity will then go and find someone else to scare. Simple as that. So the best way to face your fear of the prince of darkness is to de-mask him and tell him to go and scare someone else.

There may be cases where people believe they have been harmed by negative forces. This all depends on your belief system. If you buy into your fears to such an extent that you really believe you can be harmed by negative forces, you may just let them do that. But negative forces cannot harm you without your collaboration. Even dark forces respect free will.

Dark energy does not exist to torment us

It really helps to understand why negative energies exist. Many people are afraid of negative forces because they think that dark energy exists just to torment us.

I have my own ideas about why negative energy exists. I know for certain that they are not here to torment us. I resonate strongly with something I read in the Conversations with God series, which is that negativity exists because God wanted to experience relativity; that the big bang was effectively a shattering of God energy into small particles (souls), so that God could experience itself as many polar opposites, including positive and negative, hot and cold, male and female, light and dark.

In seeing opposites, we get to experience negativity as well as positivity. In this process, we understand what we stand for and we identify ourselves as beings of Love and light. We identify with the God energy that we came from and we evolve in the learning of ourselves as beings of Light.

I have found from my spiritual healing work that if a client is encountering a negative entity (whether it’s an actual entity or even just a fear of it), many times the entity is helping the client to see who they really are on a soul level. That might sound odd, but it’s true. Negative entities can be quite helpful in that they show us where we’re buying into darkness. You will only attract an entity who scares you if you buy into the idea that you can be harmed by it; that there is something to fear. You attract entities which exploit your limiting beliefs about yourself.

So if you should ever become aware of the presence of a nasty spirit, you might want to think what is this entity showing you about your life. If the entity wants to scare you, how can you eliminate fear from your life? If the entity tells you you’re worthless, where are you believing that in your own mind? A negative entity cannot exploit your fear if you have no fear receptor in the first place.

So, some principles to remember when exploring the spirit realm:

• Fear is based on a lack of consciousness about what you’re up against

• Just because other people think the spirit realm might be scary doesn’t mean it is

• Interaction with the spirit world is natural and beneficial and many native cultures think nothing of calling on their ancestors or guides

• Focus on your fear and it will grow

• You are in control of negative entities through the energy you feed them and you can’t be ‘attacked’ or victimized without your consent

Got any others? Please share your experiences or insights!