Ep 61 - Thoughts vs. Guidance: How to Tell What You're Actually Receiving

The number one question every channeler asks, regardless of experience level, is whether what they're receiving is actually guidance or just their own thoughts. The doubt doesn't go away the longer you practice. But it does become useful.

In this episode, Kim reframes the thinking mind from an obstacle into a tool, explains how she redirected her own mental chatter into a monitoring function that actually improved her channeling, and Monty shares the energetic difference between a thought and received guidance, specifically why thoughts are constructed and guidance arrives complete.

If you've ever second-guessed what you were receiving, this episode will give you something concrete to work with.

Topics covered:

• Why doubting your guidance is actually a sign you'll be good at channeling
• How to reassign your thinking mind so it stops interfering
• The energetic difference between a thought and received guidance
• A practical way to assess what you received after the fact

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Transcript

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Hello and welcome back to the Vessel and Boys Podcast. I'm your host, Kim Charlson. In today's episode, we're going to be covering the number one question that everyone asks: How do I tell that it's my thinking mind versus I'm receiving guidance? So let's get into it. Every single time I teach chinoing, regardless of how much experience the person has, there is always doubt that comes in. Every single time. I don't know if this is my thinking mind or guidance that I'm receiving. How do I tell what's the difference? And I say this with absolute love for all of us because I do it too. It does not matter how long you have been channeling for, that doubt is always going to be there. It is a useful thing for you. I want you to reframe your thinking a little bit first before we actually talk about the logistics, about how we can tell the difference and a tool that you can start using. It is important for you to understand that your questioning of whether or not something is a thought or is guidance is the reason why you will actually be very good at channeling. Discernment is one of the key aspects that we have to develop when we're going through the process of learning how to channel. There is the process that I've talked about so far in this series about preparing the vessel, getting our energy in the right place, getting to that underneath layer of our soul energy. But then there's the other part of knowing what we're actually tuning into is a good source for us to tune into, knowing whether the guidance was actually useful for us and whether or not we should actually act on it. Your thinking mind is something that plays a role in that. It is that discernment that we need to be able to do that. So instead of viewing it as the thinking mind is an obstacle towards us receiving accurate guidance, we have to give it a new role. We have to say, okay, instead of the thinking mind as something bad to be avoided, instead we redirect it and reassign it and give it a different job. Because the thinking mind is one of the most powerful tools you have as a human. It is so good at discernment. So when we redirect that discernment and give it its proper space, we can then channel even better than if we were trying to avoid the thinking mind energy entirely, which is a very nuanced and very different way of talking about channeling than you've probably heard before. So when I first started channeling, I often would have this is it just me? Is it my thinking mind? Is it guidance? I don't really know how to tell. And instead of constantly questioning that, I turned my thinking mind into a tool by first learning how to gather my thinking mind energy and setting it to the side so that way it wasn't involved in the channeling process itself, but then giving it a specific job of monitoring my connection and my state of my vessel and my energy, because the thinking mind is so great at that. When I learned how to do that, it unlocked so much because instead of my thinking mind being active of producing thoughts that then I had to differentiate. Okay, is this a thought or is this guidance? I don't know. My thinking mind instead was more concerned with, okay, are you connected? Okay, are you out of the way? What's your energy like? You need to fix this, you need to do that. Okay, we can tune into that source. It feels good. That discernment instead became a tool rather than something in the way. And it was all because I reassigned its role. So now that we kind of had this understanding of how our thinking mind can actually be used as a tool, let's hear from Monty about their interpretation of the energetic difference between thoughts and guidance and how we can begin to really understand that energetic difference. Let's hear from them and we'll bring it all together at the end of the episode. We are delighted to help explain the energetic perspective of your thinking mind versus the message. The energetic differentiation between the thinking mind and a message that you receive from an external source is the difference between something that is external and arriving into your vessel, and something being created by your vessel itself. When it comes to the act of channeling, whether it is that you are allowing yourself to be the vessel to receive guidance, for that guidance to come to you, or you are using your psychic and intuitive skills to allow your energy to go external to find information for you, it is always the act of receiving one way or another. Now, what is important to understand is when it comes to channeling specifically, it is the vessel that is the key. It is tending to and preparing the vessel that makes it possible for you to receive guidance most easily. Now, it does not require that you are consistently in a channeling state, that you have done the preparatory work, as what we instruct in our classes with our channel, to be able to create that vessel. It can happen more spontaneously if you have created the energetic environment and space within your energy for guidance to be received. But when it comes to channeling, the act of channeling itself is the act of receiving. It is that your vessel is the container and you are receiving information to it. Guidance as it is received is always complete. Although right now we are channeling through Kimberly and it is coming out in words, it is energy that we are directing through her, and that is being explained, formatted in words. Your own vessel has formats in which it works best. That may be such as hearing, seeing, knowing, feeling, or any of the other ways that you interpret information. The interpreting information comes after the receiving has arrived. The energy is already become present within your vessel. Then your psychic abilities and skills do the job of interpretation. It is important for you to discern the difference between the reception and the interpretation. To acknowledge this difference means that you understand that you have already received that information, that guidance, and now your psychic abilities are making sense of it. That information has arrived in its totality into the vessel, into the space that you have created to hold this information, to receive this energy. As such, the difference between the mind is that the mind is created from the vessel itself. The vessel is the creation point of that information. It is taking information and interpreting it by creating that interpretation at the same moment, not after. This is a subtle difference, but one that over time, as you experience it, it becomes clearer. So in a thinking mind way, you are piecing together the different pieces and creating the interpretation. Each different piece is brought together, formulated into a whole. Your thoughts are constructed in this way. The interpretation is the act of the construction, the act of putting these different pieces together of what you know. Channeling and the receiving of guidance is different in that the guidance is already there, and then you are coming into the awareness of its completeness. As you are working to become more in tune with your psychic skills, it may feel as though it is an unfolding, a getting to know the different facets of it. But it is different than it being constructed and interpreted in the same moment. It already exists in its whole completeness, and you are rather allowing yourself to interpret it from different directions, from different psychic senses. However, it is that completeness that is the difference. It is that the interpretation is coming after the guidance has been received. When you are using psychic skills to go outward to seek information, it may feel a bit more like it is being constructed. It is a more similar energy to the thought processes. You are receiving information and making sense of it. You are interpreting it at the same time. So that is why, for many people, when they begin channeling, they feel that their thinking mind and that the information that they are receiving are the same. Because they have gone through the process first of developing their psychic skills of going externally and interpreting information in the moment, piecing it together into a whole. This is the difference of the practice of channeling, is that that information is received fully in its completeness. So we offer this one solution energetically for you to be able to understand when it is your thinking mind versus receiving guidance. We will not speak about the act of going out to get psychic information, as that is not our specialty. When you receive information of guidance, allow yourself a moment to just notice how your psychic skills and senses are noticing its completeness. It may be that you first hear a word, receive the vision of a color or an image, feel something in your body, or have a knowing that arrive in a sequence. It is different than constructing with your thinking mind. It is that you are allowing yourself to look at the guidance from different perspectives within your own senses. The guidance is complete and you are merely receiving it through your psychic senses. Allow yourself to sit with that guidance before you begin to interpret. Do not interpret during the act of receiving. Allow yourself to refrain from trying to make sense of it for a moment. And you will notice that a thinking thought that comes in that is not guidance will want to be interpreted immediately as part of that receiving. You cannot turn it off. But if you are able to refrain from trying to make sense of it, that you are not trying to interpret, but merely the act of receiving, that can help you to define the difference between a thinking thought and guidance as you receive it. Thinking thoughts require interpretation to be formulated. That is how they are created. So if you are able to abstain from that interpretation of assigning meaning when you receive it, that is one way that you can allow yourself to know that what you are receiving is truly guidance. There are other energetic techniques, of course, to help your vessel be in a prepared state to receive guidance, to allow the energy of your thinking mind to be separated, to create that space, that distance, that vessel container for the guidance to arrive. This is something Kimberly is more of an expert in as it is part of the human vessel. We send you great love in learning how to use your own discernment between thinking and guidance. We send you great love. That is all. Hearing from Monty and their energetic understanding of a thought is something that is actively constructed through putting pieces together and interpreting them, versus guidance is something that arrives in its whole. It's a little hard to really put into practice at the beginning because you're like, well, I can't feel that. I don't know what that feels like, or uh Monty, that's not super helpful. I get it. Because when Monty shared that information with me the first time when I was kind of earlier on and was still very, very questioning on a consistent basis, is this me? Is it Monty? I don't know. It wasn't as helpful as what I would have loved it to be at the time. I'm gonna be the first to admit that. But this awareness now gives you a way for you to look at what you're receiving and to say, okay, was this something that felt complete and I was just kind of seeing different angles of it and understanding it more deeply and being able to see it for what it was of kind of like, here's this statue, and I'm gonna turn it and see all the different angles of it. Or was it something of I constructed it, I put these different pieces together to make a whole? When we start to assess it from that perspective after we're done receiving, we can start to understand a little bit better. Okay, yeah, that was my thoughts. We can also do an assessment of the qualities that that piece of guidance or thought has. Most of the time, thoughts are really future focused. They have a tendency to have a lot of anxiety, a lot of shoulds, a lot of, uh, I just have to do this this way or else to them. Guidance doesn't really have that to it. It's more of here's a presentation of some information, do with it what you will. It is up to you. So that's also one way that we can tell the difference between thoughts and guidance. But it really comes down to putting it into practice, of creating the space for you to get the mechanics of channeling down and then give yourself the space to assess, okay, that yeah, that was a thought. I'm starting to understand that. Yeah, that was guidance. Okay, I'm giving my mind a job to do, it's starting to do that better. I'm training it how to focus that way. It's really staying out of the way, and I can really sense that what I'm receiving is guidance more and relying on that self-discernment throughout that process. As we learn how to differentiate between thoughts and guidance, we learn to trust ourselves more of the guidance that we do receive because we feel more confident in it. So it is a process that evolves over time. It's not something that we get down straight away. And from time to time, it just comes up again, especially when the guidance that we receive is kind of like very familiar with our thinking mind. Like we're already having those thoughts and the guidance is just reinforcing it. Sometimes that can bring up again, oh, yep, just my thinking mind. Or no, this guidance really is confirming what I'm thinking. Sometimes that also comes up, even for me, even though I can channel obviously very clearly a lot of the time. It's normal to have that process. So I want to just reassure you of that. If you want to learn how to develop your channeling skills, to tell the difference between your thinking mind and guidance in practice, you have one week left to enroll for the Conscious Vessel program. And if you're someone who is not really ready yet to step fully into channeling and you want to work on just your thinking mind, maybe your nervous system, and being able to just sense your spirit guides, you can also find a link below for the Clear Channel workshop, which is a self-guided on-demand workshop that you can go through that teaches you the basics of telling the difference between thoughts and guidance, as well as how to work with your nervous system and thinking mind so you can connect more clearly. Thank you so much for joining us. We will see you in the next episode.