What does your higher self sound like?

Maybe we should start by defining what on earth a “higher self” is. 

Your higher self is who I talk to when I’m pulling cards and doing a reading for you. Your higher self is you, at the soul level – the version of you that knows all the plans that you had for this lifetime, as well as the best way to get them done and dusted. 

I sometimes liken your higher self to Google Maps. It knows all your destinations – although you might think your pit stops in life are “marriage”, “promotion”, “make a lot of money and get famous”, whereas your higher self knows they are actually “forgiveness”, “self-love”, “healing the mother wound” etc. 

And although it knows the best way to get to each lesson and life experience, it also knows that you will take the route that you wish, and so it’s just constantly rerouting you back to where you’re going, without judgment. Just as Google Maps doesn’t bat an eyelash as it adds six minutes to your journey when you’ve gotten off the highway too early, your higher self simply nods and allows you to make endless turns off the suggested route – in fact, it’ll even add points of interest for you to see on your off-road adventures.

Just like us, our higher selves have personalities, too. They each have a distinct tone of voice. They have a way of thinking and describing things that is personal to you. If you are a person who is quite connected to his or her inner voice, then your higher self probably sounds a lot like you. So if I’m meeting you for the first time while doing a reading, I can sometimes get a little bit of a sense of what you’re like based on what your higher self sounds like in my head.

For example, one guy I met a couple of weeks ago, his higher self explained everything to him in terms of methodical organizational frameworks, with KPIs. As I channeled messages for him, I saw flow charts. It was unsurprising when at the end of the session, his higher self suggested that instead of meditation, a form of de-stressing could be to organize and categorize things at home.

I’ve met a higher self that phrased an entire reading as a series of homework assignments. I’ve met a higher self that spoke so cryptically that I didn’t even understand what I was saying as I was saying it. I’ve even met a higher self that dropped F-bombs like a rapper. No joke, the message came through: “Guan Yin has forgiven you. Now when are you going to fucking forgive yourself?”

As a rule, higher selves are generally loving and forgiving, kind and compassionate. But how they express themselves is also true to how you would best receive the messages. I’ve channeled a higher self that to me seemed a little too tough love. Every suggestion sounded like an ultimatum. There were rhetorical questions and succinct mic-drop statements that were not followed by explanations or qualifications. 

In this kind of case, I do my best not to add or sugar-coat things too much out of my own niceness, because the message is always communicated exactly in the way the recipient needs to hear it. If I were to add anything to it out of my own discomfort, that might take away from the gravity of what needed to be heard, and how it needed to be processed.

I once told a client, “Your higher self says you’re basically a puppy.” It didn’t sound like something I would offer as a compliment, but she grinned and seemed to feel seen.

I talk to my own higher self all the time, and I’ve also had readings done for me. The people who’ve done readings for me often tell me how funny my higher self is, and I hope they enjoy the creative imagery used so that I can understand things visually. In one session, the channeler began to tell me, “it’s a marathon, not a sprint” – until my higher self told her to rephrase it, by describing me sitting on a floatie sipping mocktails, watching life go by. It was also super accurate to use “mocktails” rather than “cocktails” because I don’t drink. 

During my last Akashic Records reading, the practitioner was channeling with her eyes closed. She paused in confusion before telling me: “I don’t know anything about manga but I think I see… Gundam?” My higher self wished to show me that I could upgrade my software just like a Gundam robot. 

She was surprised by the reference – I was not. I don’t know how many comic-book fans also get Akashic readings? But it wasn’t the first time my higher self had spoken to me using animated allegories. It had once explained to me how the universe works by using Super Mario World as an example. It said that we all lived in one consistent universe – the Super Mario World, so to speak – but we all play on our own consoles. In other words, it’s all one world, but we are free to create our own individual realities. In your game, Mario has defeated Bowser and saved Princess Peach. In mine, I’m still figuring out why that damn Yoshi keeps running away from me. It made sense to me immediately, although it might not make sense to you now, and if that’s the case it’s because the message wasn’t tailored for you.

I love hearing what your higher selves sound like, because that tone of voice tells me so much about you – the way you think, how you see things, what you respond to. Things that you cannot know about people unless you know them deeply, and yet it is my privilege to access this for the people for whom I read, through the messages of their souls.

What your higher self says to you stays in your session only, although if something is extra profound then I may share the essence of the message anonymously. For example, this message is one I share whenever I can with parents: “As a parent, it is not your job to tell your children how good they should be. It is only your job to be the best person that you can be, so that they will want to follow in your footsteps and be like you.” And it’s true. If you live your life well, with kindness and joy, your children will learn this without your trying.

I was once told that you shouldn’t give out your birth details, because Chinese astrologers believed that people could look up your chart and use the information against you. I hope the world is not so dark. I certainly could never use someone’s personal epiphanies and vulnerabilities against them. I once saw Steven Bartlett interview a psychic on his podcast, Diary of a CEO. In it, she said something along the lines of, “Once you do a reading for someone, you cannot see them with anything except unconditional love.”

It’s so true. Once you converse with someone on a soul level, there is a level of intimacy reached that is beautiful and simple, and you see them for who they truly are. Which is what we all are, at our core: good peoples. 

To be honest, I don’t always remember everything I say in a reading, particularly if I didn’t know you beforehand. The messages come through fast, and I don’t always have real information to anchor the reading in, so I might forget the actual words or messages unless they resonate with me personally. But you don’t forget the feeling. The feeling of seeing someone deeply, the feeling of a higher self coming through to say the words that that person needed to hear in order to feel that connection to themselves. You don’t forget it because our higher selves love us unconditionally, and to be a witness to that feeling, to partake in that feeling, is why I do what I do. I see your higher self, accepting you and understanding you, and I make a choice to do the same, because it is so easy to do so. I see exactly why your higher self loves you unconditionally, and I love you too, in that moment and for a lifetime. 

I know this to be true in particular because I’ve done readings for people that I find annoying. And when all is said and done, the annoyance is replaced by this simple feeling of oneness. That within you, I see myself. A part of myself that is also worth loving – unconditionally.