You’re listening to the transform your life from the inside out podcast. This is a continuation of the series shaman’s tips for an amazing 2026 episode 10. In this episode, I share three points of wisdom that are both from Don Juan and Don Javier. Predominantly a lot of this is from Don Juan and he shared all this with me back in the nineties. And in this episode, once I give you the points of wisdom, I want to talk about things like
distractions in your life, the things that we distract ourselves with. also want to talk about our application to our spiritual work. And I’ll share a point that Don Juan gave me many years ago. And I will also talk about something that I don’t talk about a lot on the podcast. And you might be thinking, boy, he’s going to talk about aliens or something. Well, I could, but not in this episode. But this topic is very appropriate for where we are in the world. And I want to talk about the economics in the world.
and where it’s potentially going. So if you’d like to learn more about these, keep listening. Hi, I’m Jim Fortin and you’re about to start transforming your life from the inside out with this podcast. I’m widely considered the leader in subconscious transformation and I’ve coached super achievers all around the world for over 25 years. Here you’re going to find no rah rah motivation and no hype because this podcast is a combination of brain science, transformational psychology,
and ancient wisdom all rolled into one to take your life to levels you’ve never thought possible. If you’re wanting a lot more in life, to feel better, to heal, to have peace of mind, to feel powerful and alive, and to bring more abundance and prosperity into your life, then this podcast is for you because you’re going to start learning how to master your mind and evolve your consciousness. And when you do that, anything you want then becomes possible for you.
I’m glad you’re here. Okay. So as I said in the introduction, I want to talk about points of wisdom tips to help you live an amazing 2026. And I want to share three points from both Don Juan and Don Javier. Let’s start with Don Juan. Now Don Juan was Don Javier’s mentor. Don Juan is a sorcerer, a shaman on the wall, and he was a healer in Mexico for many, many years.
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I worked with Don Juan back in the nineties and into the early two thousands. And here’s something he said when he would speak to me like Don Javier, I always took notes and I have a voluminous amount of notes that I’ve taken over the years. I go back through them every so often because I want to see how much I’ve grown, how much I’ve absorbed where I haven’t grown enough in my opinion, or where I could focus on and what I could do to grow and evolve myself spiritually.
So this goes back to about 2021. And here’s what he said. You miss a lot of things because you give your attention to distractions. Now think about that. You give your attention to distractions. And if I asked you, if you gave your attention to distractions at first thought face value, you’d probably say, no, Jim, I don’t. But I want to look at that and I want to explore that with you.
Life really is about when we are being spiritually focused. Life is about being fully present. So life is about presence. And most of us are never present in the current moment. We think that we are. We might not think that we are. don’t know what you think about what you do, but for the most part, and I used to be this way many years ago, we’re not living in the present. We’re not living in the now.
We’re living either in the future or in the past. In 1996, I just share the dates. So you have a bit of my journey and you understand that to some degree. I was talking to Don Javier and I mentioned this in the podcast before, and he’d asked me if X, Y, Z had happened to my life. And I said, no, not yet, but I’m hoping for that. And he said, stop hoping. Opportunity is all around you.
absorb it. Now, the reason that I mentioned that here in this episode, we can’t absorb life if we’re not in the present moment, paying attention to the present moment. So we’re not even aware that things are going on around us. Because when you’re in the present moment, you are generally keenly and acutely aware of your life around you. Why? By virtue of being present in the here and now. And this is also
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present moment awareness. But most of us, we don’t have that. And you know, I want to give you an example that I shared many years ago on a podcast episode. And the reason I bring some of this back is because Don Hubbier and I’ve talked about this with people that have worked with him for a short amount of time, meaning a year, two years, whatever. And I’m going on 30 years and I look at the people that are new with him. And then I look at myself 30 years ago.
And I watched the things they’re doing and I listened to the things they’re saying. And I’m like, yeah, that was me 20, 25, 30 years ago. I completely get it. But I’m seeing it from a different place today because of my time on the path with Don Javier and my experience. many years ago in reference to me, he said, you are all over the place. And by the way, I lived my life back then.
like many people live their life now. And so when he said you’re all over the place, what he meant was he gave me a visual. He said, if you take a wagon wheel and you’ve got the hub, you got the center, and then you have the spokes around the center. And then you have the wheel on the outside of the spokes. And referencing himself and talking to me, he said to me, what I did was
He drew me an example. They showed me an example of I could be in the hub in the center and that I will metaphorically go out on a spoke, meaning going a direction with my attention or my thoughts or whatever I’m doing, my preoccupation. And he said, instead of coming back to your center, what you do is now you jump to another spoke and then you jump to another spoke and you jump to another spoke. But you know what? You’re never in balance. You’re never in your center.
You’re never present in the moment because you’re never in the center of the whole wheel. You’re always out on the spoke somewhere. And I look at the way that I lived for many years and I look at the way that many people interact with today. That’s how they live. By the way, please excuse my voice or my nasal sound today. The weather’s changing today. It was really cold yesterday. It’s warm today, cold today. So it’s been raining for like seven days in Sedona, which is very rare.
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My allergies are flaring up a little bit, but where I want to go here is where are you giving your attention? Now I’ve talked about this a little bit, I believe on the last couple of episodes, but what distractions are we getting into? And these distractions that we’re getting into for most of us are products of this day and age and technology. But I know people who do this kind of stuff.
There was a young man that I was working with last year. He’s an entrepreneur. And he told me that he would spend three hours per day on TikTok watching particular influencers. Now on one hand, he’s saying, I want to grow my business. But on the other hand, he’s literally investing his life into this mindless and meaningless distraction of these influencers. Now,
If he were watching videos on YouTube, let’s say about how to build something. Let’s say he wanted to build a work shed at his house or fix his car or plumbing in the house or whatever. I know many people that will say, Hey, I learned to do that by simply going to YouTube. I definitely get that. But so many people, and I’ve done it before. I don’t do it now, but so many people doom scroll on Instagram. And by the way, there’s a whole psychology behind the doom scrolling.
And this was created back, I believe in around 2002 or three. And once a person at Instagram figured out the formula, what they did instead of you having to go from post to post, now you could just scroll your post. That’s what’s created doom scrolling where people now spend hours at a time on social media and Instagram. But the whole point, this episode that I’m talking about is these are distractions for most people.
They are distractions and most people invest their life into distractions. And then they wonder why, why am I not getting what I want in life? When you take a step back and you look at it, we’re into distractions with Facebook and different things. So many of us invest our lives into the meaningless distractions of Netflix, YouTube, Instagram.
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A big deep hole, a dark hole is Twitter or X, whatever you call it. Facebook, Snap, all these different apps, they own our attention. And the marketing world, because they’re a big distraction for us, but in the marketing world, the saying is basically the person that controls the attention controls the marketplace. And that’s what Facebook and Instagram are very good at is controlling attention.
I remember one day I was chatting with this lady who is in the Jim Fortin community, the free group that I have. You can go to jimfortin.com slash app and join that free community. And she said that she wasn’t creating what she wanted to create in business. And I said, please break your day down for me. And she goes, well, I spend XYZ amount of time, like 90 minutes per day playing games on Facebook. Now, and she wonders why she’s not building her business.
That is a distraction. And the problem with all this is that we are not experiencing and absorbing life candidly. In my opinion, we’re not even living. What we’re doing is we are existing. I’m going to use this word intentionally as robots, machines. That’s part of a system that makes other people rich. Zuckerberg.
and the owners of social media. All the while, those people caught in the system and the distractions are being sucked dry energetically and of their attention. But for what? For the entertainment value of those apps. I remember when it really dawned on me back in the 20, I don’t know, 17, 20, 17, 20, 18, thereabouts, 20, 16, maybe I was doom scrolling.
And I caught myself one night that I had scrolled for maybe two hours. And I stopped and I recognized in that moment that that time and all the time in the past that I put in the Instagram was of zero value. It was an entertainment value in that moment. Cars, which I like cars, cats, and I’m just kidding, but I’m a dog lover. I have a cat, too, but it was just
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mindless, a mindless, bad investment of my time, complete distraction when I could have actually been learning or reading or doing something to evolve and grow myself. And you know, we have to look at where we place our attention, which I’ve talked about in the last couple of episodes, but also look at the distractions that get in the way. And I remember when we were in Jackson Hole for family vacation,
Today I have family that lives there and I’ve looked at buying a home there. Probably won’t happen anytime soon though. But I remember we were leaving the Jackson Hole Airport and there was some kind of form you could fill out as competition. And the form was, hey, fill out this form and you could win a free trip back to Jackson Hole. What I did is I filled out the form and there were probably about 20 of us on that trip. My immediate family with Don Javier, my sister,
my other sister, my mom, et cetera. And as we’re standing in line at the airport, I probably spent a good, I don’t know, 15 minutes, 10, whatever, filling out this form. And Don Hubbier looked at me and he said to me, and I’ve never repeated this since then, but now it makes sense in this episode, he goes, if you would spend, to me, he said, if you would spend time being present in your life, you would not need to win anything.
you would manifest it. But look where I was putting my attention into the distraction of, let me give this form my life energy. And maybe just maybe that’s where my attention is. That’s what the distraction is. Maybe just maybe I could win something. And what he was implying is what if you put your attention onto being present and knowing yourself deeper and realizing that you can manifest anything that you want.
In fairness to you and Don Javier has never really done this to me. He never tells anyone how to be or what to do. He simply suggests it is not my place to tell you how to invest your life, how to air quote, spend your life. did an episode on that about three years ago. Are you investing your life or spending your life? So it’s not my place to tell you how to live your life, but I do want to bring it back to spirituality. And if you want to grow and evolve spiritually,
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distractions ain’t going to cut it because growing your life spiritually, evolving yourself requires commitment and dedication. It’s no different than working out or releasing weight or building a business or whatever. But many people tend to think, okay, I have spirituality in one compartment. I have my 3d life, another compartment, two very separate things.
And I’m going to get really busy with my 3D life with the distractions of my 3D life. And I’ll get to my spirituality when I get to it. Well, the reality is we could flip that and give our attention to our spiritual evolution and then remove the distractions that prevent us from further evolving as beings. Years ago, I asked myself,
How much of the true essence in my life that’s in my life right now, the beauty of my life, do I miss because I am preoccupied with some news entertainment, some social media, something I’m reading about going on in the world? How much of my present am I literally missing out on because I’m so absorbed into the distractions of my mind?
And that takes me to the quote that John Lennon said many years ago is life. happens when you’re making other plans? So the whole point of this first part of the podcast is I’m just telling you, and you can do what you want. Obviously when I say, I’m just telling you, I want to change that to, I’m just sharing with you, know, Don Juan quote, you miss a lot of things because you give yourself to your distractions. Listen very carefully. You miss.
a lot of things because you give yourself to your distractions. What pertains to me, Jim, and this context also pertains to you listening. So the question is, what distractions do you invest your life into and what are they really giving you? So now on the next point, this is also
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And it could tie a little bit into the last point, but it was a standalone point that Don Juan said at a different time. So the next point is he said most people don’t ever give not even 50 % to their spiritual work. Some give a hundred percent and they have that correspondence in life. Now, what he’s really saying is that many, this was the people working with him and Don over here.
What he was really saying is you’re sitting here in front of me and you say you want to do the work and you might do it in my presence right now doing things I’m instructing you to do or being present or absorbing what I’m giving you. But then you walk out of this room and then you’re right back to your 3d life again. And what he was saying overall is that you don’t even get it wasn’t directed at me actually. This comment was directed at someone else.
But anytime Don Juan or Don of yours talking to me, he’s also talking to everyone else. And when he’s talking to someone else, even though he’s not addressing himself to me, I’m of the mind as all of us have talked over the years, we’re all of this opinion. Even if he’s talking to you and I’m in the room listening and I’m part of that conversation, he’s also talking to me because of what applies to you applies to me.
And he was saying this because Don Juan can be very, very hammered to the nail, as I said, very direct, very firm. But what he was saying is that most don’t even give 50 % of their attention and their energy to their spiritual work. We give it to the 3D world, but we don’t give it to the most important world, the world of our spirit and our soul and the ethereal.
And it’s not my place to judge you, but looking back at me in my early years, I thought, okay. This is really cool that I get to sit with Don Juan. I get to work with Don Javier and Don Juan. And my thought back then was, okay. They’re giving me knowledge. But I was wrong years later and they never ever said anything differently. But years later, it dawned on me is that
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But they’re not giving me knowledge. They’re giving me understanding. Because when you have knowledge, you know something. Everything else is just simply information. And information without depth and application is really of no value.
So this applies and I’ve said it before, and you may hear it in a different context now where Don Javier always says, know yourself, know yourself. Knowing information doesn’t mean you know yourself. It means that you know external information, but do you really know yourself? And let me give you an example of that. Oftentimes I have therapists that will enroll in TCP.
And this has happened a lot. PhDs, psychologists, et cetera, and TCP. And they’re very stuck in their life, but yet on the flip side, they’re a psychologist and they literally are a therapist helping people shift their lives. I’m not judging on this, okay, at all. And basically I understand that many times it’s easier to help other people than it is to help ourselves.
But what I look at and I recognized long ago, oftentimes therapists will go to school and they will learn a lot of external knowledge. And by the way, I’m not knocking therapy. I’ve seen a therapist before. Most have not been helpful to me, but one in particular has been extraordinarily helpful to me. And if you feel like you need therapy, then I think that’s a great decision for you. You need to do what’s good for you. But what I recognize back to the story I was opening up there,
Many people will go to school to become a therapist and they learn all of the analytical tenants of the profession, but yet they can’t see how they can apply those educational tenants and concepts to their own life. And therefore they are stuck in their own life. So we want to know ourself, but the reason why, let me make it a benefit for you. Okay. You listen to the podcast because you won’t benefit.
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Knowing yourself means knowing yourself from what I’ve heard called a higher octave, a higher state of being, a higher state of consciousness from higher awareness of life and higher awareness of mind. Saint Germain said that if humans knew how the universe work, they would cease to believe in miracles. Now think about what I just said. If you knew yourself,
you would know how the universe works. And if you knew how the universe worked, you’d be able to create anything you wanted in life. And you wouldn’t think of it as a miracle. But what I want to share with you, me, all of us, we all have life lessons. Some things we can directly attribute to, okay, I co-created that. And then other things we create, which we either want or do not want. And
In that moment, we can’t see the correlation between how we co-created. But this is what I know about that is even when I am not consciously co-creating something that I do not want, what that is bringing to me is not what I want, but it’s bringing me a lesson that I need so I can continue on my spiritual path. And I reference this to my life because 2024
was a shit sandwich for me. I mean, it was a shit sandwich. And not only that, it was a double decker shit sandwich. And I look back, even while I was in it, I look back and I’m like, okay, I consciously created none of that, but I have compliance with it in some way because it happened in my life. But what came from that shit sandwich was amazing because it gave me so
much growth. 2024 was a year of a lot of pain. But, you know, even Don Javier says this, we humans don’t grow and evolve without the pain. It would be nice to think otherwise, but the truth is, you don’t change anything about yourself until you’re in enough pain. And if you’re just kind of in a little bit of pain or a little dull pain, you won’t change. But think of it this way. You know, you hit your thumb with a hammer, which you don’t hit it hard.
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Okay, well that hurts, but I don’t need to go to the ER. Now you smash your thumb with a hammer and the thumbnail’s coming off and you’re bleeding and all these kinds of things. You may want to go to the ER, but the pain is what drove you to the ER. 2024 was a year of a lot of pain for me, but I also know that the pain brought tremendous, a tremendous amount of growth. And for that, I’m extremely, extremely, extremely grateful.
Because for me, that helps me fulfill my spiritual mission, which means that I can be of deeper and more profound service to you guys. And that’s my intention in 2026 is being of deeper service to you guys. But, you know, we have to manage ourselves. And I remember a friend sitting down talking to me last year because this friend was aware of all the things that were going on in my living environment.
my personal life, my professional life, business, everything. And my friend said to me, not knowing what I was sharing with you now and the way that I’m sharing it, said, Jim, do you even care? You look like you don’t care about all these things that are happening. I don’t hear any quotes. Somebody said, I don’t hear you bitching about it. I don’t hear you groaning about it. I don’t hear you being upset about any of it. You’re managing it all as if nothing is happening.
Do you even have feelings? And my thought was as well. Yeah, I do have feelings, but I’ve learned over the years to discipline and manage my attention and manage it, not only external world, but manage it on the essence of me. And that’s what Don Juan is talking about in this part of the podcast is
not giving ourselves to the distractions of the world, but giving myself 100 % to the evolution and involvement of me and the growth of me. And when I started working really from that place, no matter what was happening, I’m fine with it. You know, last year, the main thing about my house was that the contractor lied and that he materially breached the contract.
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Even my attorney said you could sue the crap out of the contractor and own the guy. He would owe you money. The contractor was for one year and it took him over three and a half years to finish my house. And for a year and a half, I lived in an unfinished house that was hell in the way that it was done. But the way that I look at it is what that forced me to do is give even more attention to my spiritual evolution and my spiritual growth.
So these lessons that happened, I didn’t consciously create the lessons saying, Oh, I’m going to create a shit sandwich in my life. I created them, which brought on the adversity and the pain, which then I put my attention on evolution of self and devoting myself greatly to my spiritual growth even more. So all the things that were created simply started falling away. So to recap this part of the podcast,
is most people don’t ever give even 50 % to their spiritual work. Some give 100 % and then they have the correspondence in life. What he meant by that is what you put in is what you get out. The house and Don Hovey and I talked about it recently. He even said recently we were chatting one day and he goes, I was looking for all kinds of ways to help you energetically. I don’t know how you got through what you got through. It would have killed me.
He meant the energetic disruptions because I lived in a construction zone for a year and I live in Sedona. There’s nowhere else to go when there’s no, you know, I couldn’t find a rental that would accommodate me and what I needed and space and an office and my dogs and a yard and everything else. We always have choices, but this was staying in this house was the best possible choice. But what it required me to do is it broke me in half.
And then I had to come back and it broke my energy. I had to come back and refocus and double down on my spiritual evolution and my investment in the energy of my spirituality. The question for you or what I want to share with you is how you invest your time and your attention is what you give your life to and where I choose to invest my time and my attention.
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is on my spiritual evolution. All right, point number three. Now I’m going to say a little bit about this in this episode, and then I’ll pick up more in the next episode. We’ll go deeper. In July of 2002, here’s the exact quote. I wrote it down verbatim. Don once said in 2002, economic collapses are going to come. And it’s important that you have independence so that you are not
affected. Now, over the decades, both Don Juan and Don Javier, they both literally have talked about the shifts and the changes happening on the planet. Humanity is currently in a phase of evolution. Metaphorically, and I’ve talked about it before, my friend, Gary Zukov talks about it. Don Javier has talked about it for decades, as has Don Juan. We are metaphorically as a species going from
the winter into the spring and a rebirth thing of everything. But right now at this time in humanity, we are in a storm, a 3D storm of political structures, power structures, control structures, and social and economic changes. And particular in the US is significant economic stresses and changes.
Now, when I say stresses, don’t mean to be personally, I could make it stressful as it affects business and everything, but I choose not to at this point in my life. But if you look at the stability of the U S economy, I’ve never liked this word, the F word, the fat word. I mean, I’ve always been trim and fit for the most part, but I’ve never ever said, look at that person. They’re a fat person. To me, I find it a bit disparaging.
and disrespectful, but only for me do it works for you. But I read this quote one time that the U S economy is a fat lady dancing on a card table. And when you look at the reality of that as a truism, as I said, what I want to do is I want to talk about what that means economic collapse. But I also want to talk about how it pertains to your spirituality. You know, how does the world providing it does collapse economically or may collapse economically?
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How does that affect you? And that’s really what Don Juan was getting at, which I’ll continue here. But what I want to share in the next episode, most people are completely not aware of what is happening in the US economy and the global economy. And I know this because I interact with students all day long. And I will often ask, well, how many of you know what this is? How many of you know what that is?
How many of you know why gold is $4,134 as of today? And I hear crickets. People don’t fully understand the economics. Now what I mean when I use the word fully, I took a lot of economics in college, but economics and investing in business is always, I mean, I’ve been in business 30 years now. And higher level investing in particular because I have another brother-in-law who’s a mutual fund manager.
So we’re always, I’m going to see him tomorrow for the Thanksgiving holiday. We’re going to his house and spending four days there. But we often talk about at very high level because he used to be a high level person at Fidelity, so much so that he would interact with the chairman of the board. And we talk high level economics and I learned a lot from him. And I asked him, I share with him my thoughts about the economy and he’ll share with me his thoughts from his, you know, 35 years of
financial advising history and trading and everything. But what we want to look at is, which again, the next episode, the tangible finances and what’s happening in the world. But what I want to look at in this episode is frequency and vibration. You’ve heard me say before, we go from thoughts to feelings, to vibration, frequency. And when the world becomes an economic shit storm, even like right now,
This is November of 2025. The administration is saying, oh, the economy is better. It’s hotter than it’s ever been. Bullshit. That is not true when you look below the surface. When you look at the true numbers, when you look at what’s called true inflation, inflation is higher than what the government’s telling you it is. So there’s a whole lot of mythology coming out of Washington. And when you look at boots on the ground, so to speak,
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You look at regular Americans, they’re having a harder time. There’s not a lot of liquidity in the economy. They’re having a harder time buying eggs, paying their health insurance. A decade ago, the average home buyer in the U.S. was in their 20s. Now the average home buyer in the U.S. is in their late 30s. What does that tell you? But right now I don’t want to get into economics. What I want to get into and just chat about or broach the subject
How does that affect your thoughts, which then affects your feelings, which then affects your vibration, which then affects your frequency? Because we go from how you know what I’m thinking, then do how I’m feeling and then the how I’m vibrating and then the what my frequency is. And if we don’t have a high frequency, then everything comes collapsing down energetically and even economically. And so this is why Don Juan said quote the word independence from collapses.
Now we had a collapse in 2008. A little secret, if it happens again, it’s going to be worse in 2008. Why? Because in 2008, the government did not have 38T with a trillion dollars in debt. The United States did not have the over supplied money that it has now as a result of the Fed printing money. So the economy is one hell of a lot worse off now than it was in 2008.
but where we go in this episode.
Take a breath and dependence and dependence so that we can maintain our spiritual balance and maintain our peace. Because most of us, I know I’ve talked about it in the podcast before and you may or may not remember. Most of us, we live as a slave to money and economy and circumstances. You don’t believe me? Nothing’s changed. Look back at the Great Depression.
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People, mean the masses, millions lived as a slave to the economics of the Great Depression. What we don’t recognize is that we are independent of the external economy. So what Don once said, and this is how I live my life today, and I learned this fortunately 20 years ago, a lot of people are going to have a challenge with what I’m going to say, meaning not a mental challenge, but a financial challenge. But when you really, really deep dive into this,
And you look at the history of all this, it’ll all make sense to you. I was incredulous a couple of days ago when Donald Trump is suggesting a 50, 50 year mortgage and a 15 year car payment note. Are you kidding me? So right now at, you know, interest rates, if you buy a home, let’s say the home is 1 million over the course of 30 years, you’re going to end up paying
2 million for that home. But if we go to a 50 year mortgage and you stretch out the mortgage payments and the interest, you’re not going to pay 2 million for that home. You’re going to pay, are you ready? 3 million for that home. Who gets rich? Well, the bankers and the system. Where it’s going is ideally where we want to be is no debt. Just think about that. And I know it’s not possible for the largest majority of people listening, but just think about
because you can do that. What it’s like to have no debt and then how would that affect your thoughts and your feelings and your vibration and your frequency. As I said earlier in the episode, if most humans knew how the universe worked, they would cease to believe in miracles. That was Saint Germain. So I’d like to suggest that it’s time that we start dedicating
a larger percentage of our time and energy and attention into our spiritual evolution. Now, Don Juan, what he did talk about when he said making yourself immune, he also talked about very explicitly raising your frequency. But a lot of people don’t know what that means. They think it’s a practice to raise your frequency. No, it is not a practice. It is an awareness of being. And when you know yourself as soul,
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When you know yourself as first and only a spiritual being before you’re a physical being and you work and you maintain yourself in that place, you have automatically raised your frequency. Thanks for listening and I’ll catch you over on the next episode. Bye bye.