You do not need to overhaul your life to deepen your connection to Spirit. You need a practice.
In this episode I am walking through the daily spiritual and self-care practices that create space for my energy to actually move. Not a rigid routine. Not one more thing to add to your ascension list. Just the small, repeatable moments that keep me open, grounded, and able to receive.
What we get into:
Why I stopped asking "why did this happen to me" and started asking what the lesson is
The moment my joy guide shows up to remind an A-type Capricorn that fun is not optional
The morning ask I make for protection of light, and why keeping my energy mine matters
My red light shower ritual, and what it actually clears
Forgiveness as the practice that changed more for me than any other, and why the same lesson keeps repeating when it has not landed yet
What I actually eat and pay attention to, and why greens matter more than people think
Sleep, movement, meditation. It really is that simple
You do not need to start all of it at once. Pick one. Let it feel natural. Then add another. This is your life to live and no one else's.
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Ready to go deeper and build your own connection with Spirit? Awakening Your Path is a self paced program designed specifically to help you develop your own language with Spirit and start receiving clearly on your own.
Welcome back, my friends, to another episode of Seriously Dead. All right, I do want to just say we're getting into the fall months, and if you're local to Louisville, Kentucky, we've got some incredible events coming up and evenings with spirit in October, Sound Bath Reiki events, and I'm going to be hosting a workshop in November. More details on that coming soon. But before we dive into today's episode, I just want to thank each of you. Thank you for tuning in this week. Thank you for all the fan mail, the reviews. I read them all. I love them all. And I am so grateful for each of you. All right, this week we are going to dive into a topic that I get asked a lot about when it comes like, how did you become a medium? People ask me all the time, how do I do this work? How do I stay clear? How do I stay grounded? How do I keep my connection strong to spirit without burning out or losing myself in the process? I'm just going to say here, I have burnout and I have lost myself in the process. And I feel like every year I'm constantly refining the things that bring me joy because that's the frequency I always want to be in. Over the course of the many years I've been doing this work, I've started to create my own routine in a sense. It's not dramatic, it's not complicated, it's not some spiritual curriculum or a three-hour morning routine that you see people post on Facebook every day or on Instagram. It's something that over time I've just added these elements that become very natural. So today I'm going to share that practice with all of you. My morning prayer, my ritual at night, and all the things I do in between that allow me to keep my channel clear and ultimately feel good as a human because when I feel good as a human, guess what? Spirit connection, my intuition, everything is magical. This is a practice I built for my life, my energy, my specific needs as a medium and as a human. So I just want to caveat this entire episode by saying your practice may look different. It shouldn't look exactly like mine. And also fold in things that feel good to you. Don't do it all at once, but start with one thing, what feels natural, what feels easy, and then add another as it aligns with your life. Before I walk you through my practice, I want to talk about the guides who have helped me build it though. Because I didn't just sit down one day and design this whole spiritual practice from scratch. It evolved over time through showing up consistently and paying attention to what came through when it did. My guides show up in two ways. The first is when I ask, and the second is through signs and symbols that I've learned to recognize over time. The connection didn't happen overnight. It was built through a daily practice of showing up and reaching out. Sometimes it happened when I was in the gym, while I was lifting weights. Sometimes it was during a guided meditation, and sometimes it was just on an afternoon walk with no agenda other than being present and open. The purpose was not the setting. The purpose was the consistency, showing up every day, saying, I am here, I am listening, show me what I need. And over time that relationship deepened. The signs became clearer, the symbols became more specific, and the guides became more of a personality in my life rather than this vague spiritual concept. One of my guides, I actually call my joy guide. He specifically reminds me to have fun. I know it might sound like a lighthearted thing, but I want to tell you how seriously I take this guide because his presence in my life has changed something fundamental about how I operate. I'm a type A, a generator, a Capricorn. Hardworking is not something I have to convince myself to do. It is literally wired in me. And left to my own devices, I will work through every season without coming up for error until something stops me. And that's my joy guide. When I get too deep into a season of work without fun, I start to notice something. Simple tasks that should be easy to start feel hard. Things that flow when I am in balance start creating resistance. And within days of that frustration showing up, guess what? My joy guide appears with a reminder to enjoy life. And here's the one thing I have learned about this reminder. As long as I have something fun planned, something on the calendar that has nothing to do with work, life starts to flow again. The resistance lives. The simple tasks become simple again. I actually schedule fun. I know that sounds like something some A-type Capricorn would say. And I am 100% owning that shit. I schedule fun. But the scheduling is not the point. It's the intention behind it, the commitment to joy as a non-negotiable part of my spiritual practice. Your guides are already with you. The relationship just needs to be built. And it gets built the same way every relationship gets built by showing up consistently and paying attention to what comes through when it does. So, number one in my daily spiritual practice is my morning protection prayer. This happens before my feet even hit the floor, before I check my phone, before I think about what's on the schedule, before the day has a chance to come rushing in and take over the quiet that exists in those moments of waking. It is a simple ask. It's not a complicated ritual. It's not something that requires props or a specific setting or a certain amount of time. I ask my team, all those that came before me and those yet to come, to surround me with a light of protection, to keep my energy mine and everyone else's theirs. That last part right there, keeping my energy mine and everyone else's energy theirs. As a medium, I spend my days in other people's energy, and the grief and the hope and the love and sometimes in the heaviness that clients bring into a session. And without an intentional practice of energetic protection, that energy doesn't always stay where it belongs. The morning prayer sets the container for the day. It draws a clear line between what is mine and what belongs to someone else. And it does that before the day even begins. So I'm not trying to create that protection when I realize all of a sudden my energy is leaking. You don't have to be a medium for this to work either. Every human is affected by the energy of people and environments around them. The coworker who always leaves you feeling drained, the family member whose anxiety becomes your anxiety the moment you walk into the room, the new cycle that sits in your nervous system for hours after every app has been closed. Energy is contagious. And starting the day with an intention to ask and keep your energy yours is one of the most simplest yet most powerful things you can do before anything else. All right, number two, the spiritual view. One of the foundational shifts in my practice has nothing to do with prayer or meditation or ritual. It's a perspective. At some point, I stopped asking, why did this happen to me? And I started asking, what's the lesson behind it? And that shift changed everything about how I move through difficulty. The why did this happen to me question is a closed question. It keeps you in a loop. It assigns victimhood to an experience that might actually be trying to teach you something. And it keeps the energy of existence alive in your body long after the experience itself is over. The what is the lesson behind this question is open. It's active. It puts you in a seat of a student rather than a victim. And it creates movement where the other question creates stagnation. It is not about pretending hard things are not hard and that pain is not pain. Hard things are hard and pain is pain. And those experiences deserve to be honored exactly for what they are. But underneath every hard experience, there is usually something trying to get your attention. A pattern that keeps repeating because the lesson has not been learned yet. A relationship that keeps showing up the same dramatic way because it hasn't been resolved yet. A situation that keeps arriving in different costumes because your soul is still working on what it came here to work on. When you start looking for the lesson instead of asking why, you start to see the pattern. And when you see the pattern, you finally have the power to change it. Number three, forgiveness. This is a practice that changed everything for me. And I want to be clear about that because I talk about forgiveness a lot on this show. And I want you to understand why. It is not because it is a nice spiritual concept, it is because I had no idea how much energy being mad or upset with someone actually holds until I finally learned the tools to release it. I carried things for a long time. Situations, people, moments where I felt wronged or overlooked or hurt in ways I was not ready to let go of. And I thought holding on to those things was somehow protecting me, keeping me from being hurt the same way again. What it was actually doing was taking up space, energetic space, space that was not available for anything new or better or more aligned with the life I was trying to build. Forgiveness cleared that space. And here's what I have learned about forgiveness that I did not understand before I practiced it. If something keeps happening, if the same pattern keeps showing up in different relationships or different situations, you have not learned the lesson yet. Forgiveness is part of learning the lesson. Not forgiving the other person for their sake, forgiving for yours, releasing the grip of it so the energy can move forward instead of staying anchored to something that already happened. Forgiveness does not mean what happened was okay. I want to say that again. Forgiveness does not mean what happened was okay. It does not mean that you let someone back into your life. It does not mean you pretend the wound was not real. It means you stop letting someone who has already taken enough from you take up any more space. Start small, find one thing, one person, one situation where you have been holding something that's costing you more energy than it's actually worth. And practice releasing it. Not all at once, not perfectly, just practice. The shift that comes from the practice is one of the most profound things you'll ever feel. Number five, nutrition and physical care. Now let me just start by saying I'm not a nutritionist, I'm not a doctor, and I'm not going to tell you exactly what to eat. But what I am going to tell you is to pay attention how food makes you feel. Because the connection between what you put in your body and your ability to access your intuition is real, and most people have no idea there's a correlation. Do you feel alive after you've eaten or are you tired and ready for a nap? That question sounds simple, but most people have never actually sat with it. They eat what's convenient or familiar or comforting without checking in with how your body actually responds. Your body is the vehicle for your spiritual practice. And a vehicle that is running on the wrong fuel doesn't perform the same way as it does when it's running on the right fuel. Get your greens in. I don't care what kind of green it is, but it needs to be alive and it needs to be green. Move your body. Movement is the key to moving energy. Get more sleep and meditate in whatever way works for you. I know that sounds like advice you've probably heard, but I want you to hear in this context. Taking care of your physical body is not separate from your spiritual practice. It is the foundation. The clearer, the more nurtured your physical vessel is, the more clearly you'll be able to hear what spirit and your own intuition are trying to tell you. You can't pour from an empty cup and you cannot receive clearly through a body that's running on empty. And finally, my last is my nightly cleansing ritual. Every night before I get into bed, I do something that has become one of my favorite parts of the day. I either take a bath or I take a shower. And it's not just any bath or shower. We recently renovated our bathroom, and when my husband installed the fan and the light in the shower, I had one very specific request. I wanted the light to change colors because I had already been thinking about this ritual and how I can continue to evolve it for my lifestyle, and I knew exactly what I needed. I turned the light red and I ask all the energy that didn't serve me throughout the day to be released. I ask my energy to anchor back into who I am. I ask my energetic feel to be cleared of anything that accumulated that was not mine to carry. The red light is intentional in this process. The red connects to our root chakra, to the grounding energy, to the part of us that's anchored to the earth and to ourselves. And the water is intentional. Water cleanses, not just physically, but energetically. The intention I bring into that shower is real as the water itself. And by the time I step out of that, I'm not carrying the day anymore. The client sessions, the energy I moved through, the small things that accumulated in my field without me noticing, all of it goes down the drain. And I go to bed as myself, grounded, cleared, and ready to start again tomorrow. Even though I've set my day up in my morning protection, the reality is things can still slip into our energetic field. Now, your ritual does not have to look like mine. You don't need a color-changing light or a renovated bathroom. You need an intention, a moment at the end of the day where you consciously release what is not yours and you come back home to yourself. That's the practice, and that is available for everyone. If you walk away from this episode with one thing, let it be this. You don't need to implement all of this tomorrow. You don't need to overhaul your life or build some three-hour morning ritual or do everything perfectly before any of this counts. Start with one thing: the morning prayer, the practice around forgiveness, the shift in perspective from why did this happen to me to what's the lesson? Pick one that resonates and do it consistently until it feels easy and natural. And then add another. Or maybe even find something that is not in my own practice that feels in alignment for you. This is your practice, built for your life, your energy, and your specific needs as a human being on this spiritual journey. And remember, no matter where you go, your guides are always with you. The relationship just needs to be built. Showing up consistently, paying attention to what comes through, the trust that spirit already meeting you more than halfway. All right, my friends, you know the game here. Let's not keep this in the spirit vault. Share it with someone who's been maybe wanting to deepen their own spiritual practice, but not sure where to start. I'd love to see and hear about your practices. Make sure to tag me on Instagram or leave a review wherever you listen to podcasts. You know I love them and I'm honored that you take time to share them. And if you're wanting to support developing your intuition a little deeper, grab my free five ways to develop your intuition guide at gennyshanks.com slash five. That's F-I-P-E. Or if you're ready to take your spiritual practice and your connection to spirit a little deeper, awakening your path, my self-paced three-part course, might be just what you need. You can find that at jenishanks.com slash AYP for awakening your path. I'll be back next week with another episode of Seriously Dead. But until then, stay open, stay curious, and remember the dead are not quiet. You just have to learn to listen to the video.
