I’ve Never Practiced Psychic Protection. I Never Needed To.

I’ve never practiced psychic protection.

When I’m washing my hair I’m thinking about all the dirt and sweat and negative thoughts from the day. I see it being scrubbed away and washed down the drain. The water transmutes it and I’m left clean, open, and refocused.

Same with my hands. I wash away the things I’ve touched and connected to that day that I’ve no need to hold on to. My feet, for possibly walking a path unintentionally that wasn’t properly aligned with who I am. My chest, for all the pain or emotion I carry with a heavy heart, so that I can accept truth in any form and love unconditionally. Even the most intimate parts of me, to wash away shame, guilt, or unworthiness I may still carry, so I can love and accept myself in all aspects and wholly embrace who I am.

I do this the way someone would wash their clothes and wipe down their shoes after a long hard day of work. Through the course of the day, they just get soiled.

I bathe, I eat, I drink water, I sleep. That’s the whole of it.

I have never practiced psychic protection because I’ve always known I have full autonomy. The only way I lose it is if I give it away.

I don’t believe anything is coming for me that has to be kept out. Observing something isn’t the same as opening a door to it.

This is all I’ve ever done

Not once. Not when I was starting out, not before a hard session, not even after one.

That was never a decision I made. It was never a question I had. I knew I didn’t need to protect myself the way I know what color my eyes are, and for a long stretch of my life I assumed that was everybody. I thought this was simply the way it was. You notice things, and then you go home and wash the day off you like anyone else.

I’m not telling you there’s nothing out there, and I have no way to show you that. What I’m telling you is that I’ve never carried fear about this work. Those are two completely different things. One of them is about the world. The other is about me, and it’s the one I actually know something about.

Yes, I’ve been scared

More than once. Looking back, the fear was always real. It was rooted in an experience I’d already had, one that somehow wired me to interpret what was in front of me wrong.

Walk into my office and sit down. You’ve never sat in that chair before, but your mind already knows what the table will feel like and what the chair will do when you lean back, because you’ve sat in something close enough to it. It’s wired for rapid interpretation. That’s very valuable to us.

Fear runs on the same wiring. If you’re afraid of the dark, and you’re also afraid of the woods, and then you have to walk in the woods at night, you arrive already hypersensitive to the environment and everything in it. You were going to be scared before anything happened. And the sound of a rabbit moving through the leaves comes through as a bear.

Mine is Cat’s Eye. I was young when I watched it and it has a troll that comes out at night, climbs the bedding, and steals a child’s breath while they sleep. For years I’d jump from the bed to the light switch rather than walk to it. I still live with that. It’s completely irrational, I know that it is yet knowing has never made a bit of difference.

So when something in a session has felt wrong to me, I start with what I carried into the room already loaded, before I look at anything else.

Then I found out what psychic protection was

Salt. White light. A shield you picture around yourself before you begin. A script to say when you open and a different one to say when you close. Cord cutting afterward. There are whole courses built on psychic protection and entire shelves of books, and for a lot of people it’s the first thing they’re ever taught, before they learn anything about what they’re actually perceiving.

There’s a second group that says none of that’s necessary, because you’re connecting with love and guarding yourself only closes you off.

They sound like opposites but they’re not. Both of them are answering the same question, which is how you ought to be handling the door.

Nobody checks whether there’s a door

Nobody stops to ask whether noticing is the same as opening.

You see a car behind you in the rearview mirror. Noticing it is the whole of what happened. You haven’t invited the driver into your back seat, and no version of looking in that mirror puts him there. Perception runs one direction.

Somewhere along the way this work got described as opening up. Once you accept that phrase, every conversation you have afterward is about how to shut the door again. The phrase built the problem, and then the whole field went to work into trying to solve it.

So where does the fear come from

It comes from the ritual, and it runs in that order.

Researchers put people in stress tests. They had to present on a subject they didn’t know, to a panel of judges who had been told to be cold about it, while their hand and arm movements were tracked the whole time. The anxious group produced noticeably more repetitive, rigid, ritualized movement than the calm group did. Anxiety came first. The ritual came out of it.

A psychic protection practice built on top of that is doing its work on you, not on the room. It’s making you predictable to yourself, and steadiness is most of what lets anyone do this at all, so I won’t call it decoration. It’s real and useful.

Explaining the ritual isn’t explaining the reading. Those are two different questions, and I’ve written separately about what’s actually happening when an impression arrives.

Calling the ritual a defense is where it goes sideways. Skip it and it stops feeling like a missed step in a routine. It starts feeling like leaving the house unlocked.

The part about spirits getting even

The deceased are still the people they were. I’ve said it before and I’ll stand by it. Dying doesn’t hand anyone a new personality, and it doesn’t hand them a grudge they never had.

So when someone asks me whether a spirit can come after them for reaching out, I want to know who they picture coming. Somebody who was decent to them alive doesn’t turn on them dead. Somebody who was difficult alive is still difficult in the same ordinary ways they’ve always been. That’s irritating but it isn’t dangerous.

Underneath retaliation is a simpler worry, which is that asking gets you punished. Most people carrying that can name exactly who taught it to them if they sit with it for a minute. A movie. A church. Some relative who said don’t mess with that. Or a teacher in this field who needs you frightened enough to keep buying the thing that makes you feel safe.

Fear is the easiest product in this industry to sell, because the person who buys it can never confirm it didn’t work.

If you’ve been wanting a session and something keeps stopping you, this is the thing I’m describing. You sit down at a table and we have a conversation. None of it asks you to open anything, and there’s no door to pull shut afterward.

What working scared costs you

A scared person is already looking for the exit.

Bracing for impact doesn’t stop it from landing. It just means you grab the first impression that comes and you leave. You don’t ask the second question. The uncomfortable pause where the person across from you would’ve corrected you never happens. You don’t stay with the confusing part long enough for it to resolve into anything specific.

I’ve written about how a nervous system trained on danger will hand you an accurate observation with a threat story stapled to it. This is the other half of that. Fear bends what you conclude, and it also shortens how long you’re willing to sit in the not knowing, and the good material almost always shows up past the point where a frightened person would’ve stopped.

The people I work with in Intuitive Mentoring are rarely short on ability. Most lack the patience to observe rather than force. There isn’t a one size fits all approach. Making yourself receive details a specific way only stunts the growth. We were never meant to be a carbon copy of each other.

Keep your ritual if you want it

I’m not asking anybody to throw out a practice that’s working. If your psychic protection routine is how you tell your brain the session has started, that’s a good habit and I’d keep it. Athletes do the same thing before they compete, and nobody calls it superstition to their face.

Skip it once and pay attention to what you feel. If you feel unfinished, the way you do when you leave the house without brushing your teeth, that’s hygiene and it’s fine. If you feel exposed, like something can reach out to harm you, that’s fear, and the practice is not what put it there.

Fear doesn’t get smaller when you feed it a ritual. It learns which ritual it can hold hostage.

I try to live with intentionality. That’s a maintenance schedule more than it’s a mindset. I wash, I eat, I sleep, and I put down what I picked up that day so I’m not carrying it into the next one.

If this is the kind of thing you want more of, I put one of these out every week. Follow along wherever you found this, and those on my email list get a little extra.