398 Cara Wilde ~ Opening up to Connecting with Other Realms

Transcript

Holly: Hello adventurers! Welcome to the Into the Woods podcast, episode 398.

This is your host Holly Worton and I am back with another fabulous guest. I am super-excited to have Cara Wilde back on the show. This week is another ‘adventure in consciousness’, as opposed to outdoors adventures-type-episode.

So Cara has been a guest many, many, times in the past and I decided to have her back on the show because I have been receiving emails from people who have had had spontaneous experiences of tree communication, where a tree has reached out and spoken to them. But because they weren’t expecting to have this experience they were frightened and confused and sought out more information on the topic, which led them to my website.

Now, a lot of people feel like they are going crazy when they have these unexpected experiences: they didn’t seek them out; they weren’t expecting them; they didn’t set the intention and it just happened spontaneously. And we are taught that these things aren’t normal so we don’t know how to react.

In this episode I talk with Cara about our own experiences and how we can open up, if we choose to do so, to new adventures in the unseen realms.

So what are you going to learn in this week’s episode? We are going to talk about what to do when weird things happen that we are not expecting. We are going to discuss how to relax and go with the flow when these kinds of things happen. How we can open up to these experiences and invite them into our lives. How to set clear boundaries with the unseen realms and how to know which boundaries to set. Also, how to set clear intentions of what we want to experience. And how open should we be? Can we be totally open or should we hold back? And how can we stay safe when things start happening? Because again, this is stuff that a lot of us are new to and we might not want to open up to having ghost show up in our living room.

So before we get into the episode I wanted to talk to you about Cara Wilde in case you haven’t heard any of my previous episodes with her.

Cara is a mystic, shaman and healer whose business Wild Bliss focuses on creating a more sacred planet one person at a time. 

Cara supports professional women who want to remember who they truly are, why they are here and want to express that as a body of work in the world. 

Cara left her counselling and more mainstream work behind her when she couldn’t use her psychic abilities or work with guides and began to feel as though she was working blind. She set up her own business as an EFT practitioner, started to use her channeling and intuitive abilities and felt like she’d got the team on board and helped her clients in making more significant and longer lasting changes in their lives. 

As part of her work Cara channels a collective called The Ancients and offers practical guidance and support specific to the needs and concerns of those of us who are deeply sensitive and passionate about creating real change in the world. 

Cara passionately believes that those of us considered misfits are truly here to create a new way in the world and are part of the Divine’s blueprint for a Heaven on Earth. 

Cara lives in Cornwall, surrounded by the ocean and stone circles. When she isn’t working, you can find her running the trails or curled up under a heavy blanket with a good book.

Holly: Hello Cara.

Cara: Hello Holly.

Holly: I am so excited to talk with you about this topic today.

Cara: I am really looking forward to this topic, really looking forward to it!

Holly: So this episode is inspired by some emails that I have been getting recently from readers and people who have arrived at my website after having unexpected experiences with trees that they weren’t seeking out but yet a treat spoke to them and they thought: what is going on here, what is this? And they googled: can trees talk? And they ended up on my website and realised that yes this is a thing and no they are not going crazy. So the idea is what do we do when weird thing happen that we are not expecting (and I know you have a lot of comments on this question!)? I think a lot of people are starting to open up to these types of experiences without necessarily being aware of it, so things are happening that they weren’t expecting and they are outside their normal range of activity. So what do we do when these weird things happen?

Cara: Well I think first of all, a question, you know when readers have been connecting with you is that before they read your book? Or…?

Holly: Well recently I got an email from someone who had never heard of me, never heard of the book, never heard of the concept of trees talking and a tree spoke out to him or her and that person went on Google to figure out what had just happened to them and arrived at my website and saw that tree communication is indeed a thing.

Cara: Okay, so when the weird things happen the first thing to do is maybe reframe it, because it is not weird it is normal but we have been conditioned out of it. So hearing things from the non-physical, or the in-between-realm, or whatever language you want to put it, it is ancient in us: we are just reawakening our ancestry and what has been our more ancient way of being it is just that over the many, many, years it has been conditioned out of us and so that now it is so far out of our regular, everyday experience that is why it feels weird, but it is just new and normal. Does that make sense?

Holly: Yeah it does. I think that probably over the centuries we have been trained to believe that these things are not normal and, possibly, I am wondering if this has to do with the Church because I imagine that in pagan times this would be quite normal to communicate with the nature spirits and things but I wonder if it was around times when the church came in and started changing things around that they started removing those beliefs from the population or squashing them.

Cara: Yeah there was part of that. My understanding of what happened over in the UK with the experience of my more Celtic ancestry was this ability to communicate with nature spirits was our source of power/was their source of power and so when we were invaded and the Romans came over here they squashed that down because it was a very dominating culture and they didn’t want our ancestors to be connected with their power and so then it because a crime and then it became a mental illness. So all these kind of criminalising or making it like a mental illness are ways of having power over and dominating and what’s the word?

Holly: Devaluing!

Cara: That’s it! Yes thank you I couldn’t think of the word and yes kind of devaluing it, so I think that is part of it. Then also there was the separation, ‘I think therefore I am’, there was this, when rationalisation came along and there was this agreement made between the Church and science that the spirituality was going to be governed by the church and then science was going to be in charge of everything else. So in order to coexist they split and this agreement, so spirituality became in the hands of religion and in the hands of the Church and anything that was science-based was said to be rational and logical and in the West we sort of embraced rationality and logic as being more important and more significant and more reliable than something like spirituality which was just about faith. [It was cast as] just something to get you through the bad times.

Holly: And it is also very intangible.

Cara: Yes, yes.

Holly: So I think a lot of people find the comfort in science because it deals with natural life forces that we can see and touch and feel (kind of).

Cara: Yes it does and I think it gives us a faulty sense of control as well.

Holly: I think it is interesting what you said about mental illness because that exists to this day, because whenever I get hate mail or criticism from people online it is always people accusing me of being crazy. So I think people are still kind of using that as a way to devalue people or to try to make sense of things that they don’t understand, like they don’t believe that you can talk to trees or nature spirits and so therefore this person must be crazy.

Cara: Yes and I think we have got really scared of differences too. And so, the kind of labels that we give mental health, whether that is schizophrenia or bipolar disorder or whatever it is that we do to those more significant mental health issues, it just scares people. It is like it is unpredictable and scary and different. If you think of being in connection with the non-physical and that in between realm, the bridge to that is imagination and being able to think outside the box and think differently but you have also got to remain grounded in physical reality. So it is like this manic thing, you go into these other realms you get the information and then you come back. You are always supposed to come back to the village! So when we do experience the edge of that in terms of mental health but we don’t feel comfortable being in the village or the village doesn’t accept or welcome us, the village doesn’t support our diversity or our needs we then start thinking and judging ourselves as different and being separate and wrong. And then that can lead to not wanting to come back to the village and not wanting to connect and so we end up ungrounded and spacey. So with that combination of isolation, maybe some trauma and not being very grounded can then lead to mental health issues where people do start experiencing stuff that needs taking care of, that is very different to what you are doing, does that make sense? So there is some truth, or some nuances, so it is not all black and white, there are some nuances, but yeah, it can be a way of wanting to dismiss it and that is fine, if some people need to do that, some people really need to feel that idea of being in charge and science is God and unless you can prove it, it doesn’t exist, and that kind of thing.

Holly: So something I have noticed over the years as I have kind of read people’s stories online about seeing kind of unexpected or unexplained things is that children seem to be more open to these experiences and there was a very timely question on AskReddit, which was: what was the creepiest and most unexplained thing that has happened to you which you still think about to this day? I read through the whole thread, because I love reading these stories, but a lot of them happen to be things that happened to people when they were children or pre-teens. So why do you think that children seem to be more open to these experiences?

Cara: Nobody has told them that it shouldn’t be happening, nobody has told them that it shouldn’t be true. I think we are all born connected to spirit, we are all born connected and being able to see the non-physical and I just think it is how we are naturally and then it could be the parents then or the grownups then start to teach the how reality really is. And so they become stories, or imaginary friends or something like that so it is just as simple as we get conditioned out of it, in the same way we are all born athletic, we are all born wanting to run and move around and whether it is climbing trees or rolling down hills, we are all born athletic and to move because that is how we are naturally wired and then someone will come along and say: you are not very athletic, or you are not supposed to be like, or this is not for you and then we start internalising those messages or we look around and we don’t see, in terms of the children, they don’t see anybody else who is affirming that this stuff is real. And so it is just, the unseen becomes a place that imagination just forgot.

Holly: And I think there are so many ghost stories that are scary. How many ghost stories do we hear that are like nice and supportive and friendly ghosts? It is always scary stuff that is told around the camp fire, or things like that, so I think people also get that input of ghosts are scary and so avoid them.

Cara: Right, so you think we close down when we hear that it is scary, it is just something that we are not supposed to attend to, yeah.

Holly: So what was your first experience like?

Cara: My first experience, do you know it is hard to say, but the one that I remember the most and didn’t really think that much of it at the time but then when I got to know about paganism it really made sense but I used to stare out of my bedroom window at night and see faces in the grass and then decades later, when I was introduced to paganism, and I came across the green man, that was the face that I was seeing in the grass. When you ask me that question that was where my mind goes back to, I just wasn’t very aware of it. The first time I saw a ghost, I remember that!

Holly: Oh tell us.

Cara: Because I was training in our spiritualist church. So I had always grown up with feeling other people’s pains, and feeling other people’s emotions, and then came across a spiritualist church and it made sense of what was happening to me. So I was getting training on how to tune in more effectively and I was a Union rep at the time, on a smoke break with one of my colleagues and we were just having a fag, and she was talking about her wedding that had happened ten years ago and in between me and her, with my eyes physically I could see this white wispy form taking shape. And I wasn’t really looking for that kind of thing, I wasn’t really open to it and I could see a form starting to appear and I was used to it happening in my minds eye, like with my third eye, but I could have reached out and touched this and it took the shape of somebody. When I told her what I was seeing it was her grandmother and she came with this particular bouquet of flowers and when I told her about the bouquet of flowers it was her flowers from the wedding that we were talking about and I could see the beginning of this woman. I was like: oh my god I am on a fag break {laughing} this is so surreal. So that was the first time that I saw something physical and tangible like that.

Holly: And how old were you when that happened?

Cara: This was in my early 20s.

Holly: You see I don’t remember having any experiences like this when I was really little. I mean it is possible I don’t remember them, but I really don’t have any memories of strange things.

Cara: I remember being in my cot, and this is a proper memory because I asked my mum what kind of cot I had and she confirmed this is the cot that I had. I remember being in my cot and seeing a bubble in the corner of my room filled with people and magical beings and things and they were just my friends but I remember seeing them in the cot but I don’t think of that like an unusual experience which is why my mind didn’t go to that when you asked that question. That is interesting.

Holly: Well yes because it was normal to you at the time whereas the ghost was unusual.

Cara: Yes, but I remember having a bubble full of friends!

Holly: That’s nice! And the only couple of times that I had experiences about this we have already talked about this on another podcast episode when I launched my tree book, with tree of limbs, which was a tree that I found in the forest and received one of the stories for my book and after I received this tree’s story I felt this really weird energy that freaked me out and I remember you and I talking about that. I think it was just something that showed up that I wasn’t expecting and that shift of energy just completely creeped me out and I just high tailed it out of there!

Cara: What sense do you make of that now then?

Holly: Well interestingly last year I went back to the tree and the tree told me, you were right something did show up and you weren’t used to that energy and you weren’t expecting it, you were expecting to be with the tree and this thing showed up. It was fine, it wasn’t dangerous, it was different and again unexpected and so that was a good confirmation. And this one time I was meditating in West Kennet Long Barrow before dawn and I was all alone, had been alone for a while and then all of a sudden behind my shoulder I smelled this fresh tobacco, not like a cigarette, but fresh unburnt tobacco and it was really strong and came out of nowhere and I remember thinking someone is here, a guide or someone, but it freaked me out and I left. I couldn’t just sit with it and experience it or talk to the thing and ask what it was, it freaked me out because I was alone in the dark in this tomb and I left. And now in retrospect, thinking about these two experiences, I am kind of sad that I couldn’t sit with it because I want to have these experiences but they scare me.

Cara: I think that is completely understandable and you need to trust that instinct even if you change your mind afterwards. And I think we are not used to sitting down in circles and doing this, we are not used to being in community and doing it together. I used to be so not into physical spirit, sprites and the nature spirits and things like that, I was not interested, I was an angel girl and that was where I was happy and that was where I was going to be because I didn’t trust any of this pagan malarkey! I just didn’t! And as always with my spiritual journeys I have plenty of humbling moments and so when I first moved to Cornwall, I think I have told you before, I said to source: please help me find my local soul family. And one synchronicity led to another and I ended up connecting with a spiritual group and we just, and oh my god we were like renegade spiritual people, we had a hedge witch, a sea witch, a Druid, a traditional pagan and then me who had no clue and didn’t know what I was. So they introduced me to what sabbats where and what that meant and all these kind of rituals and I was like: I am not opening up to any of that! {laughing} I am not trusting any of that. And then one of them led a tree workshop and we needed to go and connect with a tree and so my first experience of that, I was kind of: oh well, we will see what happens, but I am very happy in the angelic realm. And as soon as I felt into the tree it felt like I was going to fall into it and reality just shifted and morphed for me and the tree just lost its physical state and everything just went, trying to find the words, everything went fluid, it lost its sense of solidity and I felt like I was going to merge and fall in with the tree and I thought: there might be something to this! So I learnt how to trust the spirits by just working with them and getting feedback from them and mostly I was scared of that because I didn’t feel safe in physical reality anyway and had not had a community that taught me how to work with those energies and what they meant when they did show up.

Holly: Yes.

Cara: I remember seeing a Druid friend of mine, we were on the stone circle on the Cornish moors and he was going around with his wand which was this massive branch from a log and casting a protective space around the stone circle and I remember thinking: that is a nice thing to do, just a nice a thing to do and didn’t give it the respect really and then, as I am watching him, I saw this blue electric blue light shoot out the top of his wand and when I spoke to a friend of mine afterwards she said, you saw witch (what’s it called?) I can’t remember the term now but it was a witch’s power, that’s what I saw. So most of my beliefs have been challenged by my own direct experiences.

Holly: And how did you feel when you first started opening up and having these direct experiences?

Cara: That was just really exciting. If I have a direct experience and hear something straight from source or I have an experience like that I am really quite comfortable (there is one occasion when I haven’t been). It is the human made stuff that gets in the way, it is the belief systems that I am suspicious of. For example the sea witch that I was working with was teaching me to cast spells when working with the tides and we were collecting sea glass and I had not had sea glass before, I had never been able to find one and when I was working with him, I found my first piece of sea glass and he said to me, if I were you I would throw that back to the ocean as an offering to the spirit and I just thought, oh yeah, because you are not supposed to have anything, these earth gods just want sacrifice all the time. I was really cynical and not happy about that and remember saying to the sea god: well if you want a sacrifice here you can have it, I don’t want your damn… and I threw it into the ocean and just I did a wave came in and another piece of sea glass rose to my feet.

Holly: Wow!

Cara: And that to me was like, that’s your human made stuff, to think that we need anything from you, we are just here to be with you and co-exist with you and give to you and celebrate with you. So I have had to unlearn a lot of my assumptions that just came from human belief systems. Does that make sense?

Holly: Yeah, absolutely. I think I see that offering as kind of a sign of respect rather then they need stuff from us.

Cara: Yeah and I think that was my own inner stuff that I needed to work through but I think the way that it was presented at the time was that we are less than spirit.

Holly: Ah, yes.

Cara: And that human beings have got something to make up for. And even some of the spirituality and new age concepts of, we are hear as a classroom and it is full of lessons and our soul needs to have these lessons to grow; that’s just not what I hear from source and the non-physical, that’s our stuff.

Holly: Yes, that absolutely makes sense. So how do we open up to having these experiences?

Cara: I was really thinking about that question because I was thinking, how do you not? I would say if you are wanting to open up to these experiences, it could be like that person who emailed you about this weird thing happening. Because I think if you are open to it spirit is going to find a way to connect with you and to get messages through and then connect you with a human being that can be a bit of a channel or portal for it as well. I don’t know how it is for you but for me it is intrinsically linked to being open emotionally. The emotional link that’s how I embody my connection with spirituality and stop it from being just an experience that I have in a mental realm. So I think really being present in your body, learning how to send subtle energies but I think the main thing is to just be curious. If you want to have that kind of experience be curious about what might be open and what might be there, is the first step of being open to it.

Holly: That makes sense, absolutely. So how do we relax and go with the flow when things start happening?

Cara: Well I think it is really important to be around people who maybe know what it is that is happening to you, we are designed to learn from each other as human beings and so when I was looking back on how I relaxed with it, it was because my elders, or my mentors, and people who knew this stuff just affirmed and validated what I was experiencing and helped me make sense of it. So I think that is really important, we need to be in connection and communication with other people that get it, that have done that already. And then I think trusting your instincts like you were doing, you know, get yourself out of there if you don’t like it is really important as well. And then it is that, the word that is coming to me is adventure, think of it as just like an adventure.

Holly: An adventure in consciousness.

Cara: Yes.

Holly: So how do we know that we are not crazy?

Cara: We don’t! {laughing} I remember when I was working as an addictions specialist and so we had overlaps with the mental health wing of the hospital, so the ward where people used to be hospitalised because they were having certain episodes and seeing things (god the words are escaping me today! I cant remember the actual word for it now when people have visions of things). We were talking about how they were a reiki practitioner giving reiki to their colleagues and talking about spirits that showed up and then going back into work in the mental hospital and trying to calm patients down who were saying very similar things in a different way.

Holly: Wow, yes.

Cara: And the difference is that you are not crazy if you can function in the world.

Holly: Yes, I think that is a huge, huge, guideline. If you are otherwise functioning and if these experiences are not completely throwing you off track.

Cara: Yes and so I had an ex boyfriend who died unfortunately and when we first connected he was really interested and I gave him tarot readings and he went on to develop and be diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia in the end. And so, I got to see the difference firsthand then the difference between me doing tarot reading and knowing the spirits that I was seeing and staying grounded and the difference with him was that he was starting to believe that he was Buddha in a past life and… it was quite grandiose and there wasn’t anything tangible to hold onto, it was all lost in this mental realm. Like, spirit is eternally practical, it is supposed to help us be more physical and I have had my fair share of, I hate the term spiritual bypassing to be honest (I think it is used really derogatorily these days) but I have used it as a way of avoiding physical sometimes because I have had unhealed trauma, because I didn’t want to be connected to the physical world and so I would be like, just leave me with the angels!  

Holly: Well, it is a coping mechanism and it helped you get through something difficult.

Cara: It really was, it was a gentle way to land in the physical world. But even when I was doing that kind of more dissociative behaviour there was always a real sense of the difference between here and there, they didn’t merge into one. And I think those kind of boundaries are really important, especially with empaths. I have had a client before who was really, really, connected at an empath level with a horse and every time her horse got an injury there would be a wound that showed up on her body.

Holly: Oh wow.

Cara: I didn’t believe her at first and then she showed me and I said, you are too emotionally connected to this horse, you are not supposed to have kind of relationship and I think boundaries are so important when you are doing this work.

Holly: That leads on to another question of mine. How do we set boundaries, how do we know which boundaries need to be set? If we are new to this stuff how do we know what boundaries we need?

Cara: Don’t do what I did, have I ever told you what happened to me in a spiritualist church that time?

Holly: No. Can you also explain what a spiritualist church is for people who might not know?

Cara: Yes, it is a very traditional British way of experiencing spiritualism, very similar to the way that they work over at John of God you know, which really surprised me. But it is not working with nature spirits it is working with spirits that want to come through and quite often associated with mediumship which is more proof of life and stuff and giving messages. So I used to go and stand on podiums or in circles and give messages to people as they came through. So it is more of that kind of mediumship angle. So I had gone to watch somebody do a presentation where they would get up and they would give messages that come through, a bit like you see on the TV. And it was in church. And I went with a really good friend of mine and I was in my early 20s, thought I knew it all about spirituality (really arrogant), and we were having this conversation about whether evil exists or not. And I was saying come and have a go if you think you are hard enough, kind of thing really; so this attitude of, I am beyond all that, this kind of thing. And then we were in church and I went to pick something up and I felt a hand on the back of my head and it pushed me onto the chair in front and I banged my head and there was nobody there. A non-physical hand… and my friend at the side of me just went, what was that?. And then I closed my eyes and I got a picture of the devil and it terrified me and so I went home that night and I phoned up my mentor at the time and she said, get sea salt out and put it all around the boundaries of your house, and I am thinking: I think there is going to be more than sea salt needed here! And both me and my friend had nightmares the whole night. And so that was a big… and then after that I just said, I am not interested, I am not fighting, I am not attracting, I am not interested. And I have never had a negative experience since. So that was a real lesson to me, personally, I don’t believe in evil and I don’t believe in negative energies that are wanting to come and get us but I just think there are a lot of thought forms out there that have been given lots and lots of attention over the years and years and years and years and I just let myself line up with them on that day.

Holly: So how would you define a thought form?

Cara: Maybe if I give you an example. So I was in one of my family [member]’s homes and everyone was saying that they were seeing a ghost and so asked me to come over and see if I could cleanse the space and I could see this one particular energy block was just stood at the top of the stairs all the time and I knew that it wasn’t a spirit, I could tell, it was just suppressed emotions and thoughts that weren’t getting discussed in the house that had gone on for so long it had started to take on an energetic form.

Holly: Wow, okay.

Cara: And that’s what thought forms are and that is what we are likely to bump up against.

Holly: So how do you clear those things? I mean do you smudge the house? Do you address those emotions?

Cara: I didn’t do that one because it was family and I thought, I am not going there! But if I can feel a build up of things in my home or where there has been an illness and I can feel a build up of thought forms I do do smudging. So I use different herbs to burn, but it is more that I do an intention and I call in the quarters, so I call in the energies of the north, south, east and west just to clear the energy of the room.

Holly: Okay, good. So if people want to get started opening up to these things, should we set clear intentions of what we want to experience or should we just be open to whatever is in our greatest good?

Cara: Depends how much fear you carry about it I think. So if you feel really scared about doing it and you are really quite nervous and quite fearful of being out of control and it not being a pleasant experience then I would set very clear intentions that you only want to connect with the most loving beings, for your own safety, for your own internal sense of safety, because that is the most important thing. I would say if you were going to open up, just open up to love, open up to the heart field, open up to loving beings and start there. How would you encourage somebody to start opening up?

Holly: Well I am still at a place where I want to start opening up?

Cara: What?

Holly: Yes! I can channel spirit guides and talk to trees but I want to experience so much more, I want to be able to see things. I feel these energies, I felt the tobacco man in West Kennet Long Barrow but I couldn’t see anything and I am a very visual person and I would love to be able to open up my vision to be able to see these energies.

Cara: So for that then, I would say that spirit would probably be respecting the fact that that freaked you out before?

Holly: I have had conversations with the faerie realm about that as well and asking them, please show yourselves to me I want to see you and they have said, not yet, because we know that would freak you out.

Cara: Yes, so if I start to smell something or feel somebody around I just get really curious and, do you ever feel into a tree to make a connection with it, emotionally feel into it?

Holly: yes.

Cara: That’s what I would do with whatever turned up. That is the access to that realm for me is using my sense’s ability and then for me the visual opens up after that. But I have to make that emotional, energetic, connection first. It is always through curiosity and wondering what is going on. When things have just turned up in my living room, who’s this? Who has come? And I would feel my heart open and a sense of curiosity. It is very different template on the ‘how tos’ than a mental mind map of following steps 1, 2, 3 and 4, it is just feeling your way into it.

Holly: Yeah, that makes sense, that makes absolute sense. I am just so, I want it.

Cara: That will push it away.

Holly: I know, I know. And I also get that sense of frustration, I have been wanting to be able to see for so long and I haven’t and so I kind of get that frustration that I can’t see so I think feeling into it and setting the intention.

Cara: Because I think when… I just think about what happens when you are feeling into it because it is a subtle energy field, it is a subtle realm, you can’t feel it from a place of frustration that’s not subtle enough, is what I am thinking and the more that you are in a place of just being open and receptive yourself the more likely it is going to happen.

Holly: And I think that experience that I had with that tree King of Limbs and that energy that showed up that was around Samhain and so I am wondering if also spending more time outdoors with these intentions in those times of year when supposedly the veil is thin between realms, that might help.

Cara: Yes that does help and being around people that are already doing it. You are then joining a collective energy field where it is normalised and you are likely to have a direct experience yourself without kind of realising. So for me when I was first learning about paganism and there was a sabbat going and it was just, come to our house and we are going to celebrate this and I didn’t even know what that but I knew instinctively to make bread and to bring it with me and they said, ah that’s what we do we break bread. And I was thinking that, wow I am in touch with something I didn’t know existed within me but, actually, I think I was in touch with the morphogenic field that they had created which allowed me to connect in with my ancestry but it was their field that they had already generated that I was reading. That’s why people do circle work together, that’s why, unless you are a hedge witch, you can do witchcraft together it is just more powerful because you create a stronger energy field between you.

Holly: That makes sense. So when we are starting to open to these things, how open should we be?

Cara: Well I think that is personal taste, also how busy you are and how much time you want to put to one side for it? Like how much of it do you want to take over your life? – on a real, practical, level.

Holly: Because sometimes these things show up when we are not expecting, so it is not like we go out and say, right, today from 4.00pm to 5.00pm it will happen, exactly.

Cara: So I think once the process starts you can then say, speed up, slow down, no I don’t like it, I do like it. I don’t think we are in control of it to begin with but I am open to being wrong if anybody else thinks any differently but think your intention is more to what you want to connect with.

Holly: That makes sense. So how do we stay safe when these things start happening? So you talked about that thought form energy that banged your head on the table, how do we keep ourselves safe?

Cara: I would really be, first of all, honest about your own belief system and respect the fact that if you have been brought up with a religion that teaches you that tarot is evil and wicked or whatever, and that you are opening yourself to the devil, respect those belief systems. And what I mean by that is that they are [the beliefs] in you and living and breathing in you so you might need to do it slightly differently and slightly more cautiously until you build up your trust, which only comes from your own relationship with source, or the non-physical, or with spirits. So that is like, just start where you are and don’t force yourself to be where you are not to begin with. Then, I always teach it, it is the same thing as if you go to a party and you come across a strange and some of them you are going to think, you are not for me straight away, and you just know and some of them you just feel really comfortable with, really safe with, and it feels just lovely to be you and you kind of hit it off – and it is exactly the same with spirit for me.  

Holly: So what are the potential dangers because I think that someone who is new to getting into this might not even think that they need to protect themselves from something.

Cara: Well I don’t think there are, that’s the thing I don’t think we do need to protect ourselves from anything other than my arrogance of inviting something in is perhaps not the best way to do it. But I don’t think there are dangers other than your intention to connect with something heart-centred. Otherwise you might come across thought forms or more playful spirits or a bit mischievous maybe.

Holly: What about if someone wants to open up to fairy realms and things like that but they don’t want to see ghosts showing up to their home? How do they set those boundaries and manage this, is it just a matter of setting intentions and saying, I would like some of this please, but I do not want that, how do you deal with that?

Cara: When I first heard you say that I was thinking, they are two very different things.

Holly: But they are both examples of the unknown or invisible realms.

Cara: I don’t know if you open to fairy realms does the mean that you are automatically get ghosts showing up in your living room, I don’t think it does. Also, there are two areas, the first that you are in charge of your energy system so you get to say what gets in there and what doesn’t, you are sovereign and sometimes we know that more than others, we are sovereign beings in our own right. We are non-physical we need to remember that, we are non-physical, we are just actually inhabiting a body right now but all we are doing is tapping into the real realm, the physical realm is the illusion, we are just tapping into what is really there, does that make sense?

Holly: Yes it does.

Cara: And sometimes I think when we frame the question when we think about being in charge, we have to separate that from being in control and remember that the fey and gnomes and nature sprites, they are sovereign beings in their own right and so they might not want to show up for us. It is like both, we are all different races really and it is about having respect for that and dignity for that and they will do the same. And then ghosts, they are something very different and I think you can just close that down and not want to get engaged in it, if you don’t pay attention to it, I think it will be rare that they stick around unless it is part of your intention for this lifetime to bring messages in from ghosts, then they might be adamant.

Holly: Right.

Cara: I don’t think it is something that can just kind of happen without some part of you being involved in it at some level.

Holly: Yeah, that makes sense. Some part of you is interested in it or curious or your soul has signed up for that.

Cara: Yeah, I imagine that many people say something very different to that, have a different belief system, but I think if it shows up in your world or it shows up in your reality then there is a good reason for that.

Holly: Yes that makes sense. So do you have any other advice for people who want to open up to these experiences or aren’t really sure what to do?

Cara: It is just so much fun! It is just like play! And invite higher energies, it is not a language that I like to engage with very often, because I don’t think it actually works like that but finer vibrations, higher energies, at the highest level. Like, you want the best quality friends, so have the best quality spiritual friends too. Be willing to be surprised and delighted too by what happens. And you know sometimes people might just want things to spontaneously happen or some people might want to follow traditions.

Holly: Going back to what you said earlier, by open and curious, that is a great attitude to have.

Cara: I don’t think I have got anything else that I would add to what I have said to be honest.

Holly: No, that’s been fantastic, thank you. So would you like to share with us where we can find you online.

Cara: Yes I am at carawilde.com and I am one WildeCara over on Instagram as well.

Holly: And you have a special kind of free gift/download for listeners, don’t you?

Cara: I do, it is part of, I teach people how to channel their guides and connect with the non-physical but in a very specific, channeling, way and as part of that I have a channeled process to invoke protection if anybody needs it before they make connection with the non-physical and also a crystal meditation which is really, really, good practice for being able to hold your focus at will with that non-physical realm and being able to stay connected, because it is easy to get distracted. So I have put two of those together in a download. Did I explain that in a way that makes sense?

Holly: Absolutely, absolutely and I think that is a perfect combination because it helps you tune into the subtle energies while at the same time feeling safe.

Cara: One thing that is just occurring to me is that something like rocks and the mineral kingdom have their own consciousness, so if you first want to start opening up to the non-physical realm, it might be easier to start with that plane, it is a very slow vibration and so it is easier to access from physical realm and so you can start feeling into it and that crystal meditation should help that as well. You can do that with, well, that’s what stone circles are about, but you can do that with any kind of rocks and crystals in your own life, that might be a safer kind of space to start with because they have their own personalities don’t they?

Holly: Yes, and it is something that you can do from the privacy of your own home, so you don’t have to worry about people seeing you talking to your rocks.

Cara: And people do it all the time with flowers or your animals, you can start connecting with your animal as a safe way of connecting with the non-physical.

Holly: Yeah and I think that is something as well, you have already got a relationship with your pet so it might be easier for you to connect with the than to a tree or crystal or something.

Cara: Yeah and I think that connecting to a spirit is probably the most advanced connection to the unseen realm, you know?

Holly: That makes sense. Well thank you so much for joining us today!

Cara: Well thank you, it has been really good to chat.

Holly: Excellent! Such a good conversation, thanks.

 

Holly: Please drop me a line and let me know what you thought of this week’s episode, you can email at hollyworton.com or find me online and get in touch there. Thank you so much for listening and remember to visit hollyworton.com/398 for the show notes on this episode. Thank you.