Ep 4 Developing a Spiritual Practice

Welcome to the Soul to Earth podcast, where we delve into the heart of spiritual growth and connection. In this episode, I explore the essentials of starting and nurturing a spiritual practice. This journey is a deeply personal one, and whether you’re just beginning or looking to enrich your existing practice, understanding these foundational steps can make a profound difference. Join me as I guide you through practical aspects and spiritual principles that can help you develop a meaningful and fulfilling spiritual practice. From grounding techniques to connecting with spirit guides, I share insights and tips to help you create a practice that resonates with your unique path.

Key Topics Covered:

• Grounding and Centering: Discover how these practices help you stay balanced and present in your spiritual journey.
• Exploring Traditions: Understand the importance of finding spiritual practices that resonate with your personal beliefs.
• Meditation and Journaling: Learn how these tools can enhance self-awareness and track your spiritual growth.
• Learning About Spiritual Tools: Expand your practice with new methods and techniques.
• Attending Workshops and Joining Communities: Gain support and knowledge from experienced practitioners.
• Using Divination Tools: Refine your psychic skills through structured practice and feedback.
• Building Relationships with Spirit Guides: Receive guidance and support from the spiritual realm.
• Honoring Cycles and Events: Connect with natural rhythms and enhance your spiritual alignment.
• Seeking Mentors: Get valuable wisdom to navigate and deepen your spiritual practice effectively.
• Engaging in Acts of Service and Gratitude: Cultivate a positive spiritual environment through compassion.
• Participating in Group Rituals: Experience communal support and shared energy to amplify your spiritual practice.
• Trusting Your Intuition: Align with your true self and enhance your spiritual journey by following your inner guidance.
• Practicing Mindfulness: Stay present and aware, deepening your connection to your inner self.
• Setting Intentions: Focus your spiritual efforts and manifest positive changes in your life.
• Engaging in Rituals and Ceremonies: Mark important occasions and personal milestones in your spiritual journey.
• Cultivating a Daily Practice: Establish routine and consistency to reinforce your spiritual commitment.
• Seeking Solitude and Reflection: Allow for introspection and deeper understanding of your spiritual path.

Resources and Links:

• Website: CareyKaas.com – Discover more about my services, offerings, and spiritual resources.
• Instagram: @psychicmedium_careykaas – Follow me for daily inspiration and updates.
• TikTok: @carey_thepsychic – Connect with me for engaging content and spiritual insights.
• Sacred Seer School: Join the Sacred Seer School on Mighty Networks – Become part of a supportive community dedicated to spiritual growth and learning.

Schedule a Session:

Ready to deepen your spiritual practice? Book a private session with me for personalized guidance and support. Visit this link to schedule your session today.

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Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:07

This is the Soul to Earth Podcast. I'm your host, Carrie Coss, psychic evidential medium, mentor, and witch, here to help you explore your connection with the spirit world and discover your own grounded spiritual practice. Hello, everybody, and welcome to the podcast. I am so excited to be back here with all of you. I took last week off as my daughter is finishing up her summer here in Portland and she's about to head back down to California to enter into her junior year of college. So every chance I get with her has been just really special to me. And seeing as though we're finishing things up, I wanted to make sure to spend as much time with her as possible. So, but I'm very excited to get into this week's episode. So as I was putting together my entire list for the season, some of the fundamental things I really wanted to cover were things to do with helping all of you, my listeners, really develop your own spiritual foundations. And part of your spiritual foundations is learning to develop your own spiritual practice. Now, what is a spiritual practice truly? So, first of all, remember we're not talking about religion, which means we're not talking about anyone's specific set of rules, practices. And so everything that you create in this practice will really reflect your own preferences, beliefs, and things that you enjoy. So it should be something joyful as you begin to explore different options. Now, spiritual practice really reflects activities and rituals which are designed to deepen your connection with your inner self, with spirit, the spirit realm, and the natural world. And it really, I believe, involves a consciousness and an intention of doing different practices and rituals and habits, if it, as it were, that really help connect you in with what is important to you in the realm of spirit and then integrating it into your life. And what does it do for you? Well, first of all, it really fosters a deep connection with spirit. It helps you work on healing, and it also helps improve the things that you want to focus on. So let's say, for example, you really want to develop your intuition. Well, developing a spiritual practice that centers around that aspect of what you want to experience is going to be important for you. And there's different ways to go about doing this. So that's why they call it a practice because you do it regularly, so much so that it just becomes integrated into your life. Now we're going to go back many years to when I first started my spiritual path. And when I started working at the school or being involved in the school where I was in my 20s, one of the things that I really appreciated about the school was that it required us to meditate a lot. And although at first it took a lot for me to get in the discipline of meditating a lot, it really helped impact my mental health, my communication with my guides, my intuitive development, my psychic abilities and my own healing path. So we meditated at least three times a week. And often in those situations, we meditate for longer periods of time. Now, today, I don't believe everybody has an hour and a half to meditate per se. I mean, some days maybe you do, but to really make something a regular part of what you do, you need to be realistic. And that's part of what we're going to be looking at is really doing some reflection on how this will be something that you will be sustainable for you going forward. So that's really about being honest with yourself about what you can and cannot do. And especially as you're beginning, a lot of people are very eager and keen to get started. And so they sort of shoot for the fences. And they say, I'm going to meditate five times a week and I'm going to meditate for 45 minutes at a time. And it just doesn't match their life when they start. So it's much better to approach these things in a very down-to-earth, realistic manner and get success doing that rather than try to put a lot of pressure on yourself. So some of the things you want to think about that could be interesting for you or some fundamentals. And I would say these are the ones I would encourage you to look into and do. The first one I would say would be a mindfulness practice. And that would be something like meditating. Now, there's different types of meditations. Obviously, there are guided meditations, there are sitting in the power meditations, which are often done by mediums to really build their power and their energy, and then therefore have a stronger link to the spirit world. There are transcendental meditation. There are meditations that work with binaural music, which balances the brain. So there's many different types. And so you really have to explore and look into what's best for you. But some of the benefits of meditation, which you can imagine, are that it quiets the mind, it enhances spiritual awareness and self-awareness, and it really also improves your intuitive abilities. The next thing is you want to think about doing things that really ground you and center you. Now, if you think about grounding, grounding is meaning that your energy, which includes your aura, your chakras, and also your physical body, mental health, it really connects you to your life, to the earth. And ways that you can do that are basically movement. This could be something like yoga, walking, dancing, and also just being out in nature. These are things that really connect you into your energy field, your body, and the earth. So looking into doing grounding techniques or practices also that helps and center your energy as well. Some of the important things I think that also can be helpful, at least at some point, are to work on journaling. You know, journaling, it is such a beautiful practice because, first of all, you can write down and just share your heart on those pages without being judged, without anyone knowing what you're saying, and without being criticized for your handwriting. So it's really meant to be a release. But journaling can also be used in combination with what's known as journal prompts, which really can incite and invoke self-reflection, shadow work, healing, and also putting together pieces of information that come to you, sometimes from the spirit world, sometimes from your loved ones in spirit, your spirit guides, your higher self, channel information, things of that nature. Next, you want to possibly look at using spiritual tools. Well, I have my favorites. Do you have yours? So, of course, you can think about things like oracle cards, crystals, runes. You can have scrying tools, which help you get messages from guides. You can also do charm casting. There's just a variety of things that you can use with things in your physical environment to make things become more concrete and much more ritualistic, which I think are very helpful when it comes to validating and edifying what you're receiving and experiencing on a spiritual level. The next thing is in a spiritual practice, you really want to think about what you're interested in. So uh, and sometimes that comes from talking to people you know that you feel comfortable with, that you respect their opinion. And if you know they're on a spiritual path, find out what they're doing. You can also look up things just in general with your own research. You can go to the library and get books on different things to do with spiritual practices, the occult, mysticism, witchcraft, all types of things, getting information in that regard. And then in general, see what you feel drawn to. Are you drawn to more of a shamanic practitionership? Are you drawn to astrology? Are you drawn to tarot cards? Are you drawn to energy healing? Reiki? Are you drawn to developing your psychic abilities, your mediumship abilities, the Akashic Records? Just start exploring and asking these questions and then take it from there. Next, you can also, of course, build your relationship with your spirit guides. Now, there's a lot of different ways to build your relationship with your spirit guides. And of course, I teach these classes and really believe in them. But some of the ways people do this are by essentially asking their guides to come near them so that they can feel them, learning to understand the signs that their guides send them, learning to communicate with them. You can also do things like inspired writing or automatic writing with them, visualizations to be able to communicate with them, scenes of that nature. And so all of these things are just things that start to make you understand what you're interested in, and therefore then bring them into your spiritual practice. Now, we live in a very busy culture, extremely busy. We also have a lot of distractions that can easily pull us into our monkey minds. One of the important things that I will share with you that I think is really valuable is to create routines around disengaging with your phone or your computer or your device or any screen time. And spend the first part of your day, at least 20 minutes, a half an hour, not on your phone. And just tuning in, even just tuning into your breath and being open to your guides and seeing what they have for you, being open to your loved ones and spirit, just keeping yourself in an open space, allowing yourself to be in the moment. I think that we really forget, myself included, how important it is to just focus on your breath and being in this moment. We really run away, even if we're on a spiritual path, with this pull towards many different things that keep us away from listening to our center and just taking in the breath coming in and out of our lungs. A lot of people also work with the idea of giving gratitude. And the idea of gratitude and saying what you are grateful for is really more than just being a good person. What it does when you give gratitude towards what you are experiencing that's positive in your life, you actually set up a framework within your consciousness of presentness, of being in the moment and seeing and feeling and experiencing what is possible and what is positive and what you can create. Putting yourself in the plus sign instead of in the negative sign, right? That's a way you can really start your day. The other thing is, I love starting my day with pulling cards. So I often pull an Oracle card. If you are not someone who uh does any tarot, don't worry about that. You can get a beautiful Oracle deck that you feel drawn to that you really feel represents your guides or your ancestors or the spirit world. And you can spend time, first of all, cleansing that deck and then possibly putting it somewhere sacred for a few days before you start working with it and really turn that deck over as a tool of divination so you can connect with whoever it is that you want to connect with. So I get messages from my guides with certain decks, I get messages from my loved ones from certain decks, I get messages from the deities I work with with certain decks. So you can do that. You don't have to go to the lengths I've gone, but you can definitely start doing that. And that way you're gonna start feeling the connection you have with spirit. And then as you do that, that practice is definitely woven in through your life. So even if you go off to work and you're busy doing whatever it is you do with your time during the day with work, you have that link to start you with to keep you centered. So you're building that tradition. The other thing is that I think is very important. Well, of course, this is me as a pagan and as a witch, is to really start paying attention to what are the different cycles going on during the year. So, what are the moon cycles? What phases of the moon are you in? And you can add in those phases and with the moon into your spiritual practice. You can light candles, give thanks, you can call upon different guides and deities that are connected with those energies. And this would align you in with intention setting, manifestation, and also being more in the flow of energy and working with the current of spiritual energy as a planetary energy and zodiacal energy as opposed to working against it. So you're honoring cycles. Another thing to think about is do you want to build your psychic abilities? Do you want to build your mediumship abilities? And how can you integrate those skills into your life? Of course, I'm gonna promote, you know, and share with you, you know, the amazing opportunity you have when you go into working with other mediums that are developing. And certainly I have a course that does that. But if you don't do it, you know, with a mentor, make sure you do it with a trusted group that you know is gonna give you honest feedback. But you do not have to work necessarily in that situation with a mentor. You can just go with a group of people that maybe you trust and you feel comfortable with. And you can start even developing your intuition by doing different intuitive exercises. There are many great authors who have exercises that you can use. You can certainly look online as well. And uh these are different tools that really help enrich and invoke and uh embed and integrate your intuitive knowing into your life, which definitely re-leads to enrichment, to a sense of connection, to a sense of awareness, and also just in tune with the world and spirit world around you. The other thing is you can definitely work with mentors, as I mentioned, who have information or teachings or practices that align with your beliefs, things that you're interested in, and also maybe teachings that you want to explore. I still do this regularly. I take classes all the time in different topics that I'm really passionate about and that I'm embracing and integrating. And it really does enrich my life tremendously. Doing group activities and rituals, you know, more and more, what is so exciting to me is that in different meetup groups all over the world, people are doing things like moon rituals and planetary uh, you know, activations, and they're also doing more the pagan holidays and they're celebrating things and they're coming together with much more intention as we convert from being solely seeped in either atheism, non-animism, or at least a singular uh religion when it comes to a singular god. So more people are waking up to this a belief that wow, the world is alive, consciousness is alive, the plants, the planets, the nature, everything around us is alive and we are interacting with it. And so let's get together and celebrate it and animate it together. So doing these types of rituals or ceremonies is just one more reason to be able to come together and connect with others so you can feel that sense of connection in your spiritual practice. I also want to say one thing I think is very important is community because when you're on this path, it can be very isolating if you don't have people around you who are supportive, who are open-minded, who are encouraging, who disbelieve you. You can be a very deep spiritual practitioner and have people around you who don't agree with you whatsoever. Now, I'm not suggesting that we end our connections with any of these wonderful people in your life who probably care about you, love you, but maybe just don't understand. But I am suggesting that you find people that at least you can express this with, even if it's online or somewhere locally where you live, or you can connect and be able to engage in something that you find so meaningful. I feel like this is so important. And the good thing is more and more people are beginning to be open to these things and creating these things and these circles. And one way you can do that is through the app called Meetup, because in a lot of cities they have different groups that do meetups for things like practicing tarot or mediumship circles or healing or even moon circles, things like that. So there's many things that are there for you. So I just want to recognize that the journey of starting your spiritual path or maybe rededicating yourself, integrating in a regular spiritual practice, I believe is a very important part of our journey. And finding a schedule that works for you, practices that really inspire you, and also having that learner's mindset, I think are incredibly important. But one of the main things I think is that's important is that your heart and your intentions are validated. So having people that you can share that with and grow and be validated by is what is going to help you in the long run really stand on your own two feet as far as bringing this into your life. So our meeting today together is incredibly meaningful to me. I hope you found this helpful and insightful. I want to again encourage you to please sign up for my Sacred Seer School. It's absolutely free to join. We do have an incredible community. We do a lot of enriching activities. Some of them are free. I have upcoming classes coming up in the fall of 2024. So please be sure to check those out. Also, make sure you're following me on all my social media platforms. And then also remember, if you are following this podcast and you sign up as a preferred member, meaning that I know that you are a follower and a subscriber and you're sharing it. I am going to pick amongst you, one of you or a few of you to be able to come on the podcast and get a free reading. So make sure you're checking that out. And again, I'm so excited to chat with you. I can't wait for our upcoming episodes. So we have some amazing ones. So please stay tuned. As always, be well, and we'll see you on the next one.