Old Soul Leaders

I’M AN OLD SOUL. Maybe you are too. I’ll explain that more soon. But first, I’ve decided this will be a place for me to flow with my stream of consciousness. Uncensored. Written by various parts of myself that I usually hide from others. It’s an itch I need to scratch, a drug-like craving for freedom from the performative nature of all social media.

More and more, as I scroll the copycat, AI-inspired, everything’s a commodity wasteland that social media has become, I have no idea what to say, or if I even want to add to the conversation. Who will hear me, anyway, as I scream into the algorithmic-desert? And why is everybody selling shit to everybody else ALL the time?

I must admit that, occasionally, I try to sell my book—which I genuinely believe can help people—but then I go back to sharing random posts about my garden or daily reflections. I don’t have a huge following, anyway. I’m only famous with my clients, and very few of them spend time on social media. They’re too busy building things in the real world. For the past 12 years, most of my clients have come to me through referral.

I’m more of a behind-the-scenes leader, but I’d like to get better at being seen, so I can help more people. This blog probably isn’t going to achieve that, but I need to write it for myself, anyway. I feel a deep desire to just be real and share something without a practical goal or sales objective in a world that has become increasingly transactional.

In just the past two months I’ve had experiences with three different leaders I looked up to, who pretended to value me and my work, but really just wanted to sell me something. Don’t get me wrong. I have things I’d like to sell too, but I would rather be broke than use people to meet my bottom line.

Money is very useful, though, and of course I want to have enough to do what I came here to do. But what I care about most is building a better, more caring and conscious world alongside other leaders, who also care about that. Because if we don’t truly remember who we are and what actually matters very soon, we won’t have a world left to build our dreams in. Money will be irrelevant at that point. And you don’t need to be psychic to know that’s what’s coming if we don’t correct our course.

The Healer Identity

I am a healer of sorts, an alchemist, a mirror who reminds old soul leaders who they are and what they came here to do, and how the game of Life works. I call myself a “high-performance clairvoyant life and leadership coach,” because it incorporates all the things I get excited about. But every time tell I tell someone I’m a clairvoyant coach, they look at me blankly, then ask what a clairvoyant is.

All my clients just call me their “spiritual coach,” so I should probably change my title to that. But one of the weird things about me is I don’t think of what I do as “spiritual” because in my experience everything and everyone is spiritual, and too many people turn spiritual titles into an ego trip.

The part of me that does the clairvoyant work is my higher self, which we all have but don’t remember how to access. As an old soul (which just means someone who has lived a lot of past lives), I was born with sixth-sense abilities and spiritual interests. Those abilities have been heightened by decades of inner work and 20+ years of daily meditation.

I believe there are many old soul leaders here on Earth right now who came here to try to take us in a better direction before it’s too late. If you’re here reading this, you’re probably one of them, too, even if you don’t think of yourself that way. Almost all my clients are old soul leaders disguised as successful founders, entrepreneurs, artists and other innovators, who feel a calling in their soul to contribute to a better shared reality.

I think of us as a secret club, which I sometimes call the Conscious Leaders Club. But since that name is already taken, perhaps from now on I’ll call us The Old Soul Leaders Club. You’re an automatic member as long as you care more about genuinely listening to and living in alignment with your own inner guidance and uplifting others in a real way, than you do about being rich, recognized and validated (though it’s totally fine if you are rich and recognized, as long as that’s not your focus).

Also like you (and everyone else here), I have a human self who struggles with all the usual human things. I’d like this blog to be a place where both the higher and human aspects of myself can equally exist and be expressed.

The Weirdo/Loner Identity

My human’s life-long wound has been belonging, because I’ve been a weirdo all my life, passing in and out of multiple communities, not fitting in anywhere. Not even with the other weirdos. I finally have some very good friends, fellow weirdos, who are my gold in this world, but there are still many moments I feel alone.

It has been a lonely trip, even when I’m surrounded by loving people, because I feel like I know too much. I have channelled glimpses of the future we’re co-creating, and it isn’t good. I don’t have the luxury of believing in ridiculous stories about how we’re going to be saved by aliens, angels or the world splitting into different dimensions—because I already know we are, collectively, the force of creation, and so it’s up to us, and we don’t have a great track record.

We are, quite frankly, too identified with the human aspects of ourselves, and it’s causing us to destroy ourselves, each other, and our planet. Our identity creates division by its very nature. It is a division itself, imagining itself to be separate and alone, desiring to feel special and important, fearing death, scarcity and irrelevance, capable of great kindness, but also great selfishness and cruelty.

That’s why I’m obsessed with teaching leaders how to step outside of their human identity with my method (The Third Person Method). and practice giving empathy to their own human (and other humans, by extension). This naturally raises our collective consciousness. It aligns us with what we actually are… love itself in physical form.

Fortunately, the truth of existence is love. That is true, even when it seems impossible that it could be true. My human self often finds it impossible to reconcile that truth with all the ugly things happening in the world. But those ugly things are only happening because we have forgotten who we are.

While we may well destroy our planet and each other—the truth is, we can never be lost, and since we are all alone together, we are never really alone. As a psychic medium I can tell you that life doesn’t ever end, so you don’t have to take it all too seriously. We just transition from one adventure to the next, and there’s no such thing as blame or punishment beyond the confines of our human identity.

The Medium Identity

I don’t see dead people. But I have been able to feel them and receive messages from them since I was a child, which was absolutely terrifying every time it happened. Even in my teens, I remember when my friend’s boyfriend drowned and then visited me in my basement room, suddenly playing a wind-up musical toy on my shelf.

In my 20s, I shut that ability down, because it didn’t feel safe, welcome or useful. It came back with a vengeance after a 10-day meditation retreat in my early 30s, that led to a full blown kundalini awakening that turned my life upside down for two years. I would wake up with spirits whispering my name in my ears, knocking things off my shelves, playing a song on my piano at 2am (my ex-husband was there and can attest to the truth of this experience) and once exploding a cup I held in my hands while I was talking to my girlfriends about spirits. They definitely believed me after that…and avoided talking about it with me ever again.

I also had some terrifying experiences while staying in Spain and Portugal in buildings that were over a thousand years old. I now avoid ancient buildings. My ex-boyfriend was there with me, and he wasn’t someone who believed in spirits until he spent five years with me. After that, he didn’t just believe in spirits, he became capable of seeing energy as complex geometric structures in his mind. He was a full-stack developer building mathematically complex websites and software programs in his daily life, so it made sense he would see energy that way.

Thankfully, I eventually figured out how to block most spiritual encounters and thought that part of my life was done.

That is, until I started working with leaders and entrepreneurs as a channel for their own higher self guidance. Suddenly spirits would just show up—their dead parent, uncle, friend, etc.—with a message that person needed to heal, so they could step into higher alignment and do what they came here to do. Once I realized it was perfectly safe to share these messages, I chilled out and embraced it. Also, after my brother died two years ago of cancer, just two months after diagnosis, he came to our mom and placed his hand on her shoulder one night, while she was watching TV, almost giving her a heart attack. I was able to channel his personal message to her, which brought her great peace in the middle of one of the worst experiences any mother can imagine.

The result of all these otherworldly experiences? I know for sure that life continues after death. I know there is much more to life than meets the eye. So even though I don’t love the direction Earth is going at this point in time, my understanding that death is just a transition to a different way of being has helped me feel a lot less afraid. That said, I’m not in a hurry to give up the things I love here, like the smell of pine trees after the rain, that first sip of coffee, the transcendent feeling of dancing in perfect unison with another person, or when me and a friend can’t stop laughing about something ridiculous.

The Clairvoyant Identity

Another thing about me is that I can tune into people’s higher selves like tuning into a radio station. I call this “clairvoyant.” Technically this means I receive images and metaphors that show me what’s happening for someone, and I do have that ability, but I’m really more claircognizant, which means I will just “know” things, all at once, like a computer download from someone’s higher self.

I’m also clairsentient, which means I can feel someone else’s emotions. If I spend enough time with someone (and sometimes it takes me a while), I can see the things they hide, even from themselves. And that gets weird sometimes with people who think they have it all figured out, and don’t want to hear otherwise. I have to pretend I don’t see what I see, because if they don’t wanna know, it’s not my business to tell them. So it’s both a gift and a curse, sometimes, having x-ray eyes that can look through another’s psyche and soul. It can feel exhausting with people who are hiding things from themselves. They will often avoid me, and not even know why. Their “false self” doesn’t want to get called out. But that never feels good for me. Even though I’d love to keep trying to connect with them in a real way, I find those interactions almost unbearably awkward.

I love channelling because it’s easy to create real impact. I can change someone’s life by simply connecting them with their own higher self and sharing the messages it wants them to hear, and guiding them through whatever processes that higher aspect chooses to heal them. But that only works if they are willing to act on those messages and do that healing work with me. Which is why I only work with leaders and other action takers willing to do that inner work.

The hardest part of my work is that I will often solve a major problem for a leader/entrepreneur, which allows them to do something they never could before, have things they never had before, experience things they never experienced before. But then it feels so natural for them to stand in that new higher identity, and have all the things that go with that, that they completely forget it was my work with them that got them there in the first place. That’s not something they are doing to me. It’s just the nature of their experience. Once they uplevel, they feel like they’ve always been there. They can’t remember what it was like before.

Of course that’s my human who feels that sting, not my higher self, which needs no recognition. I’m very aware that it’s not “me” solving their problems, but I still had to hold that space of pure channelling that made those shifts possible. It also requires a lot of coaching to convince them to keep using my method daily. Credit is not necessary but it sure is wonderful when it happens. And I guess I’m just saying that the human part of me wishes it would happen more often. I feel like we all deserve acknowledgement and appreciation for the things we contribute to this world.

The Writer Identity

Anyway, I’m here writing on Substack because I miss writing, and because my friend, Robb, suggested I try it. I started writing poetry as a child:

”Tall, small, wide but inside is what’s most important of all.” – age 8.

As a teen, I wrote much darker (and occasionally profound) poems—maybe I’ll share one sometime, or is that TMI? I also graduated to short stories and novels, which I sometimes wrote under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs. My teens were a Wild West of experimentation and near annihilation of my self.

I planned to be a novelist, until a bitter college teacher spent an hour convincing our entire class that it was near impossible to make a living as a novelist, so I became a journalist and magazine editor, then business copywriter, then college teacher, then charity cofounder, then corporate facilitator, then clairvoyant coach for leaders and entrepreneurs.

I’m still a writer in my heart, but I feel rusty in this blogosphere. That said, I did just publish my second book (The Third Person Method: A Daily Practice to Lead + Create From Your Higher-Self Intelligence).

My first book, a travel memoir, is still available but, kind of like the crazy cousin, we just don’t talk about it much…. it was written by an old version of me, who was still somewhat disassociated. It has some good moments, but it’s all over the place, not unlike this blog post.

It needed more than a good editor. It needed me to be at a higher level of consciousness than I had attained at that time.

(I also wrote a a full length novel, and two more partially written novels, that I never published.)

We can only create at the level of consciousness we have developed. That’s why I believe it’s integral for any leader and/or creator to relentlessly evolve their consciousness. Life is a game, and we are the players and creators of that game—billions of us all playing and creating together at the same time. Our level of consciousness determines what we can and will create in the game.

I used to write thousands of words for magazines and blogs, and it felt natural. I identified as a “writer.” For the past 12 years I’ve identified as a clairvoyant coach and channel, so writing a blog post doesn’t feel natural anymore. It feels like a past life. Whatever we get used to forms our current identity.

Past Identities (Old Souls)

To be an old soul means to have lived many past lives. These will often show up in this life as multiple talents, passions and curiosities.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve also lived multiple lives in this lifetime, to the point where it gets confusing sometimes. …Like holy shit, did this all happen in this ONE life? I can flash back to moments in 30+ countries, multiple careers, a few completely different major relationships, like that time I married a Lao man and we ran a children’s charity together building schools in Laos, for example. Or that time I lived and worked in a township in South Africa for three months. Or that time I tried to be a permaculture hobby farmer on two acres of land in Northern Ontario. The list goes on and on.

You don’t have to have lived a bunch of different lives in this one to be an old soul, though. You just need to care more about helping others than about amassing wealth and status. That’s the true mark of an old soul. It just makes sense. If you’ve already had multiple lifetimes where you had everything a person could ever want, then, at some point you realized it was mostly meaningless. Then the only real game becomes creating a better shared game and reminding others of who they really are.

So, if you feel a deep desire to make this world better even though it often looks impossible, and you have a bunch of different skills, talents and interests that may not always seem to fit together, then you are indeed an old soul leader who came here to help. And you CAN help because it’s your soul’s purpose to do so.

Sure, the world is a shit-show and we can’t fix everything, but we can create bubbles of win-win worlds. Those bubbles are really fucking important, so…

Welcome. There are many of us here on Earth. We need to have each other’s back. As I mentioned, being an old soul leader can feel really lonely.

Sometimes I feel like the main character in Timothy Findley’s novel, Pilgrim.

Sometimes I feel like the traveller in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

And sometimes I feel like I’m just floating around, trying to figure out where I am, and what to do next, and if it’s even worth participating at this point on Earth, because it’s such a fucking mess.

(I do care very much about making things better in the ways I can, by the way. But sometimes I just feel really tired.)

Fortunately, I’ve had a lot of spiritual experiences—the kind that completely change your life and make it very clear that this is a temporary game we are playing. And we’re all safe even when it feels like we’re not. And we’re making up most of the rules, though obviously other people are too, and often we get stuck following their rules because we don’t know how to create or enforce our own. Learned helplessness and all that shit. It’s a thing, even on a spiritual level.

That’s the secret reason why I wrote my book: to remind old soul leaders who they are, how they work and how the game of Life works, so they can finally do what they came here to do at their highest potential. That’s not written anywhere on or in the book, but it is the real reason. I believe that’s what I came here to do.

Random tip: if you’re truly an old soul, you probably find small talk impossible.

One of my long-time clients who has become a good friend told me once that I should get a T-shirt that says: Go Deep or Go Home. That pretty much sums me up.

Another friend I once loved in the romantic sense—a lawyer and stock trader turned fire juggler and bachata teacher—once said to me: “Shawn you’re too deep for me. You’re the ocean. I will drown in you.”

It hurt then. But I know he was just telling me about his own preference. And eventually I also realized he wasn’t a genuine friend, all things considered. He always wanted me to help him, and I always did. But when my brother died and I needed him most, he stopped replying to my voicemails.

Underneath it all, we are all deep as the ocean. We are all drops of water in an endless ocean. We are all the one thing pretending to be someone or something else. Something individual. Something alone.

Whereas “alone” is not possible. It’s not even real. It’s an illusion, albeit a very believable and painful one.

We are extremely powerful but we get limited by our identity’s beliefs. Our beliefs create our reality. That is the hard truth. But changing our beliefs is like bending a spoon—possible but really fucking hard to believe in enough to make it work.

Enter my method. While it didn’t fix everything (being human is part of the game of Life), it drastically transformed my life for the better. More importantly, it saved my life more than once, which is not a small thing. It also brought me much better friends.

Like Pilgrim, in Timothy Findley’s book, I wanted to die in the earlier years of my life journey more times than I can even count. But now I know I never actually wanted to die. I just wanted the pain the die—the befuddlement, chaos and confusion that seemed to be endemic to being ME.

Fortunately my higher self never let me do that. It always showed up with fairly miraculous help and support and guidance to keep me moving forward, and to remind me all the pain was not ME. It was my human, and she just needed my help to feel less alone.

I’m so glad I stuck around as I’ve since had so many magical experiences. There’s so much more to this game, this dream of Life, that we are playing together. Every experience is possible from the most horrific to the most beautiful you can imagine.

Even though I have lived many lives in this one, completely different versions of “me”, what connects all of the different versions of me together is my essence, spirit, soul. It is the same for you. We are THAT.

I’ve also lived many lives before this one. You don’t have to believe that, but I’ve seen them. And I was only ever famous in one of them. That’s a pretty unbelievable story for another time. All the rest were just horrible, painful and sad. Lives where I was imprisoned, tortured, murdered, again and again. One where I lost my entire family to murder by marauders. And one very surprising life where I was a powerful emperor in Rome, overseeing an arena with slaves pulling chariots for entertainment. I was a very bad person. I was absolutely appalled, but it helped me understand a few things better about how life is a continuum of experiences, and we have all been perpetrators and victims many, many times.

So I try to alway remember what a gift it is to be here now, with this level of awareness.

Sometimes I cry just seeing the beauty of sunlight shining through a tree in a certain way. Or after my chihuahua bosses me around, demanding food and walks, then curls up so completely surrendered into love on my lap. Or when a butterfly takes flight.

I have a story about that.

You Can Still Fly

I was at a cacao ceremony in the jungle in Mexico with a group of Brazilian Zouk dancers, when I accidentally swatted a butterfly out of fear and broke it’s wing. Or that’s how it seemed. It lost it’s balance, kept falling over and seemed unable to fly. After it tried a few times, it lay still, against my leg. The guy sitting next to me, said to me gently: “I think it’s a little broken.”

I couldn’t accept that. I spent the next 30 minutes, calling on forces I’ve never called on before, to heal it, motivated by a feeling that I could not live with myself for destroying such an innocent creature.

Shockingly (to me), it worked. It suddenly flew straight up. The guy sitting next to me, who had watched the whole thing, was just as shocked as I was.

As it flew off, I heard very clearly in my mind: “You think your wings are broken but you can still fly.”

That’s when I realized, I wasn’t the one who healed the butterfly. He had come to heal me.

You see, for many years I believed I was irretrievably broken.

In my 20s, I had arguments with people in my head that were so real, I would find myself talking out loud as I walked in the park. It always shocked me, but I was very aware that I was riding a fine line with my sanity. I also had a few episodes where, when something hard happened, I would scream in the mirror at my human, telling her how stupid she is, how much I hate her. Once, I smashed everything in the room in a blind rage of self hatred.

As you might imagine, this created an energetic vibration that attracted many shitty experiences, and not particularly good people or relationships, with some exceptions. Because we attract what we feel and believe about ourselves. Life is a mirror.

This method I discovered, that actually came through me over a series of years, mostly via thousands of hours of meditation, freed me from all of that. It created a space in my head and heart that I didn’t even know was missing. It made it possible for me to not just stop hating myself but to actually give love to the parts of myself that felt unlovable. This created much more peace and calm inside me.

And that started attracting much better people and things into my life. Literally everything and everyone that was there before fell away. And all new things and people flowed in. And now I’m completely different than I once was.

I never argue with people in my mind at all anymore. I try to see that they’re doing the best the can with what they know, and I see myself that way too. I still talk to myself out loud sometimes, but it’s always consciously, with kindness. When I look at myself in the mirror, I see a human who is trying her best and I see myself as her Caretaker. (That’s why I call it The Third Person Method.)

I tell her that I’m sorry it’s so hard, but that she’s doing great, even when she feels she’s failing—which is most of the time. The secret is that I KNOW I’m not her. I’m not “Shawn” the human aspect of myself. I am actually the one who can float above and outside of her and surround her with a container of love. So I do that as often as I can.

That is the real work we have to do on Earth. If we don’t, we are finished.

We have to learn to stop identifying with our human and start putting a container of love and kindness around our human. Then our higher self will begin to drive our lives and our world will reflect that.

That’s why I wrote my book: The Third Person Method, to make it much easier for us to do that. I use my own method every day. Without it, I would not be able to stay in alignment.

Where am I going with all of this? I honestly don’t know. Tonight, I just felt the need to begin writing from a real place. I often write with a focus to help others. But here I’m hoping to connect with other old souls. I’d like to just share my own lived experiences; what I’m learning as an old soul myself.

Are you out there?

Let me know if any of it resonated and if I should continue writing more blog posts like this. I have what feels like a million more stories I could share with you, if you’re interested. I could probably write about one a week. And you can share your old soul stories in the comments.

xo