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Writer's pictureErica Detlefs

How to Tell the Difference Between Your Ego and Intuition

If you’ve ever meditated, worked with spirits, or even just tried reading your own tarot cards, you may have asked yourself this question before: was that my ego or imagination, or actually another being, message, or truly spiritual expierence?
Sometimes, it’s hard to tell.

The other day – the Leo full moon in fact – I was drawn to take one of my usual refresh/cleansing showers and then meditate. And let me tell you, my mind took me for a wild ride. I knew based on the feeling in my body that I was in a meditative state, but some of the things I heard and felt…I was unsure if it was my ego (or me, my mind, my imagination, fantasy, or similar) or actually messages from the divine.

Here's my best advice to figure it all out:


1. Ask for more signs

You can do this with your higher self, spirit guides, deities, angels, spirits, the fae, literally anything. Simply say aloud or in your mind, “I am unsure if it is really you. Could you please send more signs over the next three days?” You can ask for specific signs, or allow the spirit to show signs that are usually associated with them.

The trick then is to almost forget you asked for signs, so you don’t go purposefully looking where they aren’t.

I did this, and had a dream that same night, the next day I saw a post on a social media site I hadn’t logged into for a week, and knew that one part of the messages I’d received that day were in fact, something higher than me. With another part, I never felt that spirit’s presence for the next three days. It was most likely a fantasy.


2. Give yourself a day or two to think about it

Distract yourself for an hour or two. Try not to go back to meditating for a day or two. Distance yourself, essentially, to allow yourself to come down from your spiritual high (I strongly believe this is a thing) and reground yourself. Our brains are interesting things, and they commonly like to confirm what we already believe. So if we’re deep in a meditation, visualizing, thinking things…it’s gonna keep feeding us that information so we stay in that state of elation. Allow yourself some time, ground yourself, and then reflect on what you saw, felt, or heard. Usually you’ll know right away if it was true or not.


3. Ask yourself what media you’ve been consuming

The books, shows, videos, images, social-media posts…everything can affect what we see and feel when we meditate. Sleep is when we process and organize everything we’ve experienced through ought the day. I find it bleeds over into meditations and ritual work as well.

I had been deep, deep into a fantasy series the couple days before the full moon. Its characters and energy definitely seeped into my meditation as a way of processing it. In the moment, I sort of realized, because I did question if it was really a true message or not. But sometimes we don’t, and we need that distance, and the check-in with what we’ve been surrounding ourselves with, to double check.


4. Get third-party advice, if possible

An oldie but a goodie: ask someone else. Talk it out with a friend, get a tarot reading by a professional, or otherwise get some third-party advice. It a message is really trying to reach you, it’ll come through other people. Or, the reader will straight up be able to tell you otherwise.


Have you ever experienced this before? What did you do to figure it out? Let us know in the comments!

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