The Higher Self: A Divine Connection
“Only when your hearts are empty of the things of the mind, is there love. Then you will know what it is to love without separation, without distance, without time, without fear.”
There is a very powerful reality which we are all invited to step into, which immeasurably increases our own sense of connection to self, the earth, others and to Divine.
The amazing thing about this reality is that it exists outside of all religious or spiritual constructs. Its one of those things which is just true, no matter which way you look at it, no matter which spiritual paradigm you operate from. I think its time for me to articulate this clearly here, because I’m noticing a pattern in the people who I work with one on one, and in other contexts as well, that people are hungry for this experience.
A number of years ago, I noticed a recurring curious experience. I would be sitting with one of my beautiful friends, and I would immediately see who they are on another plane. In my minds eye, this ‘other’ version of them was usually really big and tall, like over ten meters high, was usually glowing with a deep radiance, and was always holding power in their body, in their facial expression, in their eyes. Sometimes they were wearing strange clothes; or headdresses or really interesting jewelry, things I’ve never seen anywhere else. One looked like an Egyptian queen. One looks like a dragon rider. Another looks like a judge, another, a general of a large army. At first I just thought I was going a bit crazy. Seeing these visions of my friends. But I remember one time in particular, I was sitting with someone really dear to me, who was reeling under the weight of a crushing insecurity and fear. She was weeping on the couch next to me, head buried in her hands. All of a sudden, this other version of her appeared in my mind’s eye. Strong, fearless, utterly balanced, a warrior. In my own breaking heart, bearing witness to her suffering, I took a risk.
“Sometimes I think I can see who I think you will be when your body dies and your spirit lives on without it.” I said.
She looked up in shocked surprise.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, I know right now this thing that you are dealing with is all you can see. But I can see another version of you. Your spiritual self. She is strong and wise and completely fearless. She always knows what to do. She never wavers. She is you, your essential self, who God made you to be. She goes to war, riding in to battle certain of victory. She never leaves the presence of God, she is always in permanent union with the Godself and so she never doubts herself, not for a second.”
The more I started to say, the more started to come. Pretty soon I was painting her a fairly accurate picture of what I would now call her ‘higher self’. Just naming this reality had an immediately stabilizing effect on her, I remember. I was not offering her any kind of trite consolation, or lending her any of my hope. I was simply telling her the way I believe God sees her. The version of her that was always visible to me. It was a powerful moment, I think, of locating a fragile new sense of her own selfhood rooted deep into the power of Divine, deep into transcendence and belonging. Once people have that, they no longer need things like hope as much, because they have something infinitely better: union. Union is what we are always hoping for anyway, it is the root of the human heart’s frequency, the longing for union. With self, with a beloved who resonates at our own exact frequency, with Divine.
This conversation happened at least five years ago. For a long time, I could see some of my friends higher selves. I did not realize I also had one, or if I did, I wondered if maybe this kind of thing is only visible to others, maybe we don’t get to see it for ourselves. What I have since come to understand about our higher selves, and the way they work, I have learned in the last eighteen months of exploration, research and experimentation.
I have come to see the various versions of ourselves much like a set of Russian stacking dolls. We each have an inner child, the smallest doll, a 3D body - one that lives in the third dimension, what we can experience with our five senses, the middle sized doll, and then we have a higher self. Our higher self is like the largest doll in the stack, the one that contains all the others. When I eventually connected with my own higher self, I wrote about it in this piece, and have since gone on to learn a lot more.
My theology about the higher self is that it is the essential, soulful, spiritual essence of our being which pre-dates our human bodies by a long shot. In the pattern of the Imago Dei the human journey mirrors the Christological one. The Christ Consciousness is preeminent, (before all and in all and the mechanism by which all of creation comes into being) and then shifts into incarnation for a brief moment in human history. The man Jesus, born into the body of a first century Palestinian man, was the Christ Consciousness before he arrived, and when he left his human form behind, he returned into being the Christ Consciousness. So it is with us. Our higher self, in my opinion, is who we will be when our bodies go into the ground and we return to Source, Unity Consciousness, heaven or whatever you would like to call that dimension. For myself, because I resonate with the Christian tradition, I believe my higher self is in permanent union with the Christ Consciousness. So for me, to be in powerful connection with my own higher self, is how I stay in permanent connection with the Holy Spirit, it is how I put on ‘the mind of Christ.’ It is the reason I do not ‘go to prayer’ anymore. I ‘am in prayer’ in every breath, these days. I have learned that it is possible to live like this.
I am not going to describe my own higher self here, because that is the kind of knowledge that one should only have of you once they have been initiated into contact with that part of your soulful self. It is that kind of powerful truth that mythologies speak about, where to have the ‘name’ (or perhaps more accurately, energetic imprint) of another is to have command over them, to have access to them in a way which makes them vulnerable. Plenty of my nearest and dearest have ongoing contact with my higher self, I do make this part of myself available, most notably to my children, my best friends, my patients and my clients. When I work with other parents, the way I describe their children’s contact with their higher self, is that for children, the parent’s higher self is like a galaxy to belong and explore and play in. It is the anchoring of their own soul’s safety and security, the mechanism and transportation system by which our children get to develop their own cosmological container: about who they are, how loved and safe they are, where they belong and what really matters. When parents lack a strong connection to their higher selves, and they are parenting very sensitive, bright and spiritually attuned kiddos, I believe this can show up as expressions of disconnection, fear, anxiety, nightmares, phobias and other psychological or emotional phenomena. Sometimes these are things which genuinely need proper mental health care to remedy. However, sometimes they can be remedied through deep and remediating connection with a loving, safe and expansive ‘other’. I highly recommend both.
When I greet my kids, particularly after not seeing them for a few days, I always take the minute before they burst in and fall into my arms and send my consciousness deep within my own higher self, deep into the heartbeat of the universe and deep into the Christ Consciousness. I imagine it like a galaxy held inside my arms swelling and beating and breathing, expanding and growing and echoing with ancient song, mystery and presence. I’ve been doing this a long time now, so it only takes me seconds to enact this practice. Its not a long sit-down-and-meditate type deal. As they come running up to me I fling my arms out wide and deliberately enfold them into this cosmic expanse, housed within the flesh-and-blood of my own skin, my scent, my body. I do this as a wordless welcome home ritual, which I’m convinced settles and grounds them within seconds into my energy, into their own selves, into their home.
There are so many incredible things to say about the miraculous and amazing things that happen when we get connected to our higher selves, and if this is something you would like to explore, I currently have only 2 final spots open for new clients for the next six months, so you are welcome to get in touch if you would like to learn this in an accompanied way. But for here, with limited time and space, I will offer you this:
When we have a divine soul covenant with another human, no matter how far away they are from us, we can work with their higher self and do all sorts of cool and interesting things together if their higher self also consents to it. This is where we start to move into and play with things like telepathy, shared dreaming, body-work and healing. One beloved soul who I am privileged enough to connect with in this way has a higher self who is perhaps far more vibrant, intuitive and powerful than they realize. This person has High Priest energy, with the authority to work in several spheres and manifest almost anything they want. Their higher self is deeply connected to Divine, is absolutely on mission and under higher orders about that but it appears at times that their 3D self has perhaps not caught up with this yet, so there is a lingering appearance of them being slightly disconnected from their own center of truth and belonging and healing. I work with them quite consistently around healing, which is all their higher self has consented to. There are other things I know instinctively that I am not welcome to support them in, so I’m very clear about their energetic boundaries and where I can go and where I must allow lots of privacy and space. I’ve made a regular practice of sitting with this person’s higher self and connecting, and then just following the Spirit’s prompting as to what is needed, where the pain is, where the injury lies, where the doubt, fear and insecurity lingers inside their 3D mind. In union with my higher self and the Holy Spirit, I am slowly supporting this person to come into union with their own higher self, and I am starting to see evidence that this is now taking place. This is breathtakingly beautiful for me to bear witness to, and is a powerful confirmation that Divine is deeply invested in our own and others’ healing, restoration, belonging and union.
If there was time, and space, I could describe to you the higher selves of others. People all over the world. People who I don’t even speak the same language as. I’ve stopped doubting in this practice and reality now, and embraced it as part of my own soul’s work, to support people to come home to themselves, to arrive inside their own sacred container with Divine, to begin to show up in their lives as deeply supported and truthful and at home in their own power. This work, I tell ya, it brings me to my knees in gratitude. It is just so damn beautiful. One of my clients is a gifted and talented professional woman with several degrees doing very important work. Her higher self is such a badass, an Empress with governance over an astonishingly broad spectrum of reality. She only lets me come in so close when we work together, and although this client of mine is not fully connected to her own higher self, when I give her information about what I can and cannot do to support her, because of where I am and am not allowed to work and go and move with the conversation, she will laugh with delight. Sometimes she will ask me something, a question or a request for advice or validation with her actual physical mouth, and her higher self will say sternly and with quiet authority, “Do not approach.” Like the mighty sphinx. Like a general commanding an army. And I always submit to that! I tell her, “I’m sorry, I’m not allowed to go there with you. This is something you are going to have to do yourself. Your higher self is forbidding me from treading on this territory with you, I think you are probably supposed to be tapping deeply back into your own power in that particular arena and not divest it to anyone, including me, even for a second.” Very skilled therapists have other ways of saying this exact same thing, of supporting human sovereignty and not treading on another’s intuition. I have not got time to go and study and learn how to be a very skilled therapist though, my training days are over. I’ve done as many degrees as I’m going to now, I’m in full swing now, finding my own groove, so this apprenticeship to the Holy Spirit where I learn on the fly, this is how I make it work now.
There are many reasons I love this approach to my work and why it resonates so deeply with me.
Firstly, I am absolutely convinced by the universal law of free will, that no one can ever make us do anything that insults our soul. That we are all completely sovereign beings. When I connect with someone’s higher self, I am deeply connected to the root of their own sovereignty. There, the muddy waters which can sometimes swirl between a client and a practitioner, things like power dynamics, transference, countertransference and projection have very little impact. No one for a hot second is allowed to put me on a pedestal, or to substitute my own framework for their own, or divest their authority to me. Not even a tiny bit. Their higher self won’t have it. Neither will mine. So when I relate to them like this, it is inherently empowering for them, and it constantly reminds them of their own grace, dignity, belonging and agency. The Social Worker in me nerds out about this. About how simple its becoming for me to point a person toward their own empowerment. I feel like I just got handed the therapeutic shortcut of a lifetime.
Secondly, I am so wary of the personality cults that can sometimes arise around people who operate inside spiritual frames of any kind. Pastors, evangelists, preachers, healers, prophets. None of these offices are exempt from the ego-trip that can go on when people start seeking you out for their own validation, healing, support or advice. Being in touch with another person’s higher self, as well as your own, is a brilliant way to avoid falling into the trap of working with another for your own validation, for your own egoic reassurance, to earn any kind of “I’m good because I help those who ‘need’ me” badge. The mystics speak about the annihilation of the soul, or the ego-death, or the death to self. I believe it is only when we really go through this, that we are able to connect with our higher self. In my own life, this was certainly true. All my contact with and connection to my deepest belonging, power and union with Divine was not able to show up for me until I had gone through a brutal dark night of the soul. Out of total disconnection, out of exile and separation and fear and facing my own mortality, my own tenuous grasp on the will to keep breathing, out of deep desperation and absolute decimation, out of the conviction that I was finished, ended, deluded and irredeemably broken, better off dead. Out of that place, my power was finally able to slowly arrive to support me in the safe container which is the annihilated soul no longer encumbered by an ego. If you are divesting your authority in any way to a spiritual leader who has not yet met their own ego-death moment in their own journey, I would advise you to be very, very wary.
Finally, I believe that we are all powerful co-creators of reality. When I am working with people one on one, I always remain curious about what Divine is calling our higher-selves to co-create together. It is never anything that I am doing for them, or to them. It is always an I-Thou relationship, a sense that I am being invited into incredibly holy and sacred territory. I am absolutely convinced that our power to co-create our realities is limited only by the degree to which we stay disconnected from our higher selves. True connection, union and plugging into the Source energy which the universe runs on, is the simplest, quickest and most powerful way to align with what Christians will call “God’s will for my life.” Because I’m plugged into this most of the time now, I no longer doubt what “God’s will for my life” is. I am settled and sure, confident and patient. Grounded and established, and absolutely free inside of it all to fully unfold, emerge, become and allow everything to arrive in the fullness of its own time. When we are plugged in like this, our will aligns with the will of Divine and we stop frantically searching for answers, reassurance, and some firm ground to stand on.
We become the firm ground for others to learn how to stand on.
The answers show up exactly when we need them and not a second before.
We become the reassurance for the world that Love has arrived, is arriving and will continue to arrive. We are released to participate deeply in the 'already-here-not-yet-culminated’ Shalom energy which Jesus ushered in when he arrived in his own skin container, in total alignment with his own higher self, his own divinity, his own power and human fragility, his longing and suffering and love.
What a time to be alive, love.