I’ve noticed something changing collectively in recent years. There seems to be a growing discomfort with uncertainty and, along with it, an increasing desire for absolute answers. We want to know when something will happen, who someone will be, whether a relationship will last, what the future holds, and exactly what we are supposed to do next. Sometimes there isn’t even a decision to be made. We simply want to know what is going to happen and when.
This isn’t limited to spirituality. It seems woven into the larger culture. We have more information available to us than at any other point in history, yet somehow we seem less comfortable not knowing. We can search Google, consult astrology, watch a Tarot reading, ask a psychic, scroll through hundreds of opinions, analyze someone’s behavior on social media, and now ask AI to interpret nearly every aspect of our lives. Underneath all of this searching can be a very human plea: Please tell me what is going to happen so I can stop feeling uncertain.
The impulse is understandable. Uncertainty can be terribly uncomfortable, especially during periods of heartbreak, loneliness, financial stress, rapid change, or fear about the future. Certainty sounds like relief. However, there comes a point when seeking information, reassurance, or spiritual guidance can quietly become something else: giving our power away.
When Everything Has Something to Blame
Along with our increasing desire for certainty, there seems to be a cultural tendency to search for something outside ourselves to explain why life isn’t going the way we want. Mercury is retrograde. There’s a family curse. Someone sent bad energy. An evil entity is interfering. The universe is blocking us. Our astrology chart says we can’t. Our childhood made us this way. The algorithm is against us. Now we can add AI to the list, confidently telling us that someone is a narcissist, a relationship is destined or doomed, a dream means something specific, or exactly what we should do next.
This doesn’t mean that outside influences aren’t real or worth considering. Astrology can illuminate patterns and cycles. Family dynamics and generational patterns absolutely affect us. I believe energy is real and that sensitive people can certainly be affected by the people and environments around them. Tarot can reveal things we have not yet consciously recognized, and AI can be an incredibly useful tool for gathering information, exploring possibilities, and helping us think through a problem. The issue is not whether these influences exist. The issue is how much authority we give them.
There is an enormous difference between recognizing an influence and surrendering our power to it. Mercury can be retrograde, and we can still communicate clearly. Our families can carry generations of unhealthy patterns, and we can decide that those patterns end with us. We can walk into a room filled with difficult energy without accepting that energy as our own. We can believe in spiritual energies without interpreting every setback as evidence that an evil entity has attached itself to us. We can receive a Tarot reading without handing the reader control of our future, and we can ask AI for perspective without allowing it to become the final authority on our lives.
The moment we decide that something outside of us is controlling our reality, we give that thing tremendous power over us.
Psychic Guidance Is About Energy, Not a Fixed Future
After many years of working with Tarot and psychic energy, I have enormous respect for what can come through during a reading. I have seen information arrive with remarkable accuracy. The cards can expose underlying dynamics, validate something we already sense, and illuminate possibilities that are difficult to see when we are standing too close to a situation. I absolutely believe we can sense what is developing around us.
However, my understanding of psychic work has never been about looking at a fixed future that has already been written. My gift is sensing current energy. I can often see where a situation appears to be heading based on what is happening now, what patterns are operating, where energy is flowing freely, where it is getting stuck, and how that energy may be contributing to a developing outcome. From there, the really useful work begins: identifying where the energy can be redirected to create something better.
This distinction matters because energy moves. People change. Circumstances change. Decisions change. We change. A particular outcome may be developing based on the current energy surrounding a situation, and that can be extremely valuable information. But understanding how we are participating in that energy, and recognizing where we have the ability to shift it, is far more empowering than believing we are simply waiting for a predetermined fate to arrive.
You Are Manifesting Your Reality All Day Long
This is where manifestation becomes much more practical than it is often made out to be. Manifestation is frequently presented as something we do occasionally when we want something. We light a candle, make a vision board, write an intention, say affirmations, or perform a ritual. Those practices can be wonderful, but manifestation doesn’t begin when we light the candle and stop when we blow it out.
We are manifesting our reality 24 hours a day, seven days a week through what we focus on, what we expect, what we tolerate, what we repeatedly tell ourselves, what we believe is possible, how we respond to other people, and the choices we make or continually avoid making. Our attention is energy, perhaps our greatest energetic currency, and where we repeatedly place that attention matters.
That means manifestation is also happening when we spend hours obsessing over why someone hasn’t texted back, repeatedly tell ourselves that nothing ever works out, or remain in a situation we know isn’t right while waiting for the universe to remove us from it. It is happening when we continually search for evidence that we are cursed, blocked, unlucky, unwanted, or powerless. Every time we reinforce that story, we give it more energy.
Fortunately, the opposite is also true. Manifestation happens when we look at something in our lives and decide, I don’t like where this is going, so I’m going to pivot. We can withdraw our attention from what we no longer want to feed and direct it toward something else. If a pattern keeps repeating, we can stop asking only why it keeps happening and begin asking what we can do differently when it appears again.
This is what I mean by personal responsibility. It isn’t about blaming ourselves for everything that happens. It is about recognizing where our power actually exists.
Nothing Is Happening “To” Us
Of course, things happen that we did not consciously choose. People behave badly. Relationships end. Jobs disappear. Plans fall apart. Other people make decisions that affect us, and life sometimes hands us circumstances we would never have requested. Taking personal responsibility does not mean pretending that we control every event or blaming ourselves for painful experiences. It means refusing to surrender our power over what happens next.
There is a significant difference between acknowledging that something painful or unexpected happened and developing a worldview in which life is perpetually happening to us. The first recognizes reality. The second can gradually become an identity built around powerlessness. When that happens, we begin searching outside ourselves not only for explanations, but also for rescue.
If Mercury caused the problem, we have to wait for Mercury. If a curse caused it, someone has to remove the curse. If another person is responsible for our happiness, they have to change before we can feel better. If the Tarot predicts something, we wait for the prediction. If AI gives us an answer, we may keep feeding it questions until we finally feel reassured. In every case, the source of our power has been moved somewhere outside ourselves.
A much more useful question is, What is mine to do now? We may not be able to control what happened, what another person chooses, or every circumstance surrounding us, but we can decide what we are willing to continue feeding with our energy. We can decide what we tolerate, where we place our attention, what boundaries we establish, and what direction we choose from here.
Guidance Is Not the Same as Authority
None of this means that we should stop seeking spiritual guidance. Quite the opposite. I believe deeply in calling on our higher selves and spirit guides for help. We can pray, meditate, pull a Tarot card, journal, sit quietly, walk in nature, ask for signs, and pay attention to synchronicities. We can ask for guidance as often as we need it, but then we need to become quiet enough to actually listen.
The challenge is learning to distinguish genuine guidance from desperation. Guidance often becomes clearer as we become calmer and quieter, while desperation tends to send us scrambling for more answers. We can go from reader to reader, card to card, video to video, Google search to Google search, and now AI prompt to AI prompt, hoping somebody or something will finally give us the answer we want to hear.
Sometimes, if we’re willing to be completely honest with ourselves, we already know the truth. We just don’t like it. We know the relationship isn’t working. We know someone’s actions aren’t matching their words. We know the job has run its course; a boundary needs to be set, or a situation isn’t going to become what we hoped it would be. Instead of accepting what we already sense, we keep searching for another interpretation, another sign, another reading, or another opinion that will tell us something different.
At that point, we aren’t really seeking guidance. We’re trying to force a square peg into a round hole. We keep reaching for the answer that allows us to hold onto the outcome we want rather than accepting the reality that is already presenting itself. The more emotionally invested we become in a particular answer, the easier it is to confuse reassurance with intuition and wishful thinking with spiritual guidance.
The answer we keep searching for may already be the quiet truth underneath all that noise. Our higher self doesn’t always tell us what we want to hear. Sometimes the deepest guidance is the thing we have been trying hardest not to know. Learning to trust ourselves means becoming willing to hear that truth too, even when it asks us to let go, change direction, set a boundary, or accept that something simply isn’t aligned for us anymore.
When we accumulate too many opinions, predictions, signs, interpretations, and possibilities, eventually we can no longer hear our own inner voice. Spiritual guidance should deepen our relationship with our inner knowing, not replace it. A psychic can offer perspective, Tarot can illuminate the energy, astrology can provide context, a spiritual teacher can help identify a pattern, and AI can help us examine possibilities. They are all tools. None of them should become the ultimate authority over our lives.
That authority belongs to us.
Stand in Your Energetic Sovereignty
Being spiritually or energetically sensitive does not mean being energetically defenseless. We have dominion over our own energetic space. Other people’s moods can affect us, environments can feel heavy, and highly sensitive people may notice energetic shifts that others overlook. However, sensing an energy does not mean we have to absorb it, identify with it, fear it, or allow it to control our lives.
This is one reason I believe strengthening the solar plexus chakra can be so valuable. The solar plexus is associated with personal power, confidence, will, boundaries, self-direction, and our ability to act rather than simply react. We strengthen that energy not only through meditation or chakra work, but by exercising it in ordinary life. We make decisions, say no when we mean no, follow through on commitments to ourselves, and notice where we habitually defer to other people. We practice trusting our own judgment without immediately looking outside ourselves for confirmation that we made the right choice.
Ritual can also help reinforce that sense of spiritual sovereignty. We can light a candle with intention, clear our space, visualize strong energetic boundaries, work with crystals that represent confidence and personal power, pray, call on our higher self and spirit guides, or consciously call our energy back to ourselves. These practices can be deeply meaningful ways to focus intention, shift energy, and reconnect with our spiritual center. But it is important to remember where the power actually resides.
You are the power. These are the tools.
The candle is a tool. The crystal is a tool. Tarot is a tool. Astrology is a tool. Ritual is a tool. Even the psychic, teacher, healer, or spiritual guide we turn to is there to help us access something within ourselves, not to become the source of our power. When we forget that distinction, spiritual practices that were meant to empower us can become yet another place where we surrender our authority.
The purpose of these tools is to help us focus our intention, strengthen our awareness, understand the energy at play, and reconnect with the power we already possess. A ritual can help us claim a boundary, a crystal can serve as a physical reminder of an intention, and Tarot can reveal a pattern we haven’t been able to see clearly. They can support us in directing our energy, but they do not possess the power to live, choose, or create on our behalf.
The Cultural Obsession With “When”
There is nothing inherently wrong with wanting to know when something might happen. Timing has always fascinated us, whether we seek it through astrology, Tarot, psychic readings, forecasts, predictions, or increasingly sophisticated technology. The problem arises when we place our emotional well-being on the answer. We want to know when love will arrive, when money will improve, when an opportunity will appear, or when life will finally get easier because we imagine that knowing when will make uncertainty easier to tolerate.
After many years of doing this work, I’ve come to believe that the most truthful answer to “When?” is often: when you are aligned with it. That doesn’t mean we control every circumstance or can magically force another person, opportunity, or outcome to appear. It means that what we are asking for also requires us to become energetically, mentally, emotionally, and sometimes practically available for it. We can say we want a healthy relationship while remaining energetically attached to an unhealthy one. We can say we want abundance while continually reinforcing fear and scarcity. We can ask for a new opportunity while resisting the changes, risks, or actions that would allow us to meet it. Sometimes the question isn’t whether what we want is coming. The question is whether we are actually aligned with receiving and sustaining it.
This is where I believe I can help far more than by simply giving a predicted date. My gift is sensing the current energy around a situation and helping someone understand their alignment with what they are trying to create. From there, we can explore the Universal Laws at play, identify the energetic patterns supporting or interfering with the desired outcome, and understand how to consciously work with those laws rather than treating them as mysterious forces operating outside our control. Instead of simply asking, When will this happen?, we can begin exploring, What is happening energetically right now, and how can I work with it?
That shift changes the entire nature of a psychic reading. Rather than sitting back and waiting for a predicted future to arrive, we become active participants in creating what comes next. We can identify where our thoughts, beliefs, attention, expectations, choices, and actions are aligned with what we want and where they are contradicting it. Sometimes the necessary shift is energetic. Sometimes it is emotional or practical. Often, it is a combination of all three.
This is also why predictions rarely create the lasting peace we imagine they will. A date can easily become a countdown. We begin watching for evidence, analyzing interactions, waiting for the predicted opportunity, or wondering whether every new development is finally the thing we were told was coming. When the expected outcome doesn’t appear exactly as anticipated, we may simply seek another prediction. In the meantime, we can miss the much more useful information available to us in the present moment.
A more empowering approach shifts the focus away from When will this happen? and toward How am I aligned with what I say I want? What am I doing that supports it, and what am I doing that contradicts it? What am I continually feeding with my attention? What Universal Laws are operating whether I am consciously working with them or not? Most importantly, where can I pivot? Those questions give us something far more valuable than a date. They give us our power back.
AI Is the Newest Place to Give Away Our Power
AI has added a fascinating new dimension to this tendency because it is extraordinarily good at producing confident-sounding answers. The problem is that confidence is not the same thing as truth. AI can be tremendously useful for research, brainstorming, organizing our thoughts, considering another perspective, and putting language around something we are struggling to understand. I use it myself, and I think it can be an amazing tool.
However, AI can also become another oracle. We can describe a relationship and ask what the other person is thinking, whether someone is a narcissist, whether a relationship is destined, what a dream means, or what we should do next. If the answer doesn’t provide enough reassurance, we can ask again, add more details, change the wording, and continue until we receive an answer that temporarily makes us feel safe.
We have been doing the same thing with Tarot cards for years. We pull a card, dislike the answer, pull another, ask the question differently, and then pull three more for clarification. At some point, the tool stops providing guidance and begins feeding reassurance-seeking. AI may be the newest version of this pattern, but the human tendency behind it is ancient. No matter how sophisticated our tools become, discernment remains our responsibility.
Spirituality Should Make Us More Powerful, Not More Afraid
This may be the part of this conversation I feel most strongly about. A spiritual practice that continually leaves us frightened of planets, curses, entities, other people’s energy, predictions, signs, or invisible forces is not helping us step into our power. Spirituality should expand our consciousness, not shrink our world.
A healthy spiritual practice should help us become more aware of ourselves, more discerning, more compassionate, more responsible for our choices, and more confident in our ability to navigate life. It should allow us to recognize an energy without automatically becoming afraid of it, recognize a pattern without becoming imprisoned by it, and receive guidance without becoming dependent on the messenger. When something in life isn’t working, our spiritual tools should help us engage with the situation rather than provide another explanation for why we are powerless to change it.
This is ultimately how I understand psychic work as well. Psychic information can show us what appears to be developing. Tarot can illuminate the energy surrounding a situation. A reading can provide validation, clarity, and sometimes remarkably specific information. Yet the most important question remains: What are we going to do with what we now know? Where can we redirect our energy? What are we feeding that needs less of our attention, and what deserves more of it? What belief is keeping us stuck? What boundary needs strengthening? What choice have we been avoiding? What do we already know that we keep asking someone else to confirm? These are the questions that return the power to us.
Take Your Power Back
Maybe what we need collectively right now isn’t another answer. Perhaps we need a greater capacity to tolerate not knowing, to wait without panicking, to observe without immediately assigning a spiritual explanation, and to allow people and situations enough time to reveal themselves. Maybe we need to become more comfortable making a decision without receiving a cosmic guarantee that everything will work out exactly as planned.
There will always be mystery, and I think there should be. Tarot does not eliminate it. Psychic ability does not eliminate it. Astrology does not eliminate it. Spirit guides do not eliminate it, and AI certainly does not eliminate it. All of these things can illuminate the road, offer perspective, and help us recognize what we might not be seeing clearly on our own. They can provide guidance, but they were never meant to take the wheel.
So ask for guidance. Get the reading. Pull the cards. Check the astrology. Talk to your guides. Use AI. Perform the ritual. Then come back to yourself and decide what you are going to do with what you have received. Take responsibility for the energy you are bringing into your life, strengthen your boundaries and your solar plexus, and stop continually feeding what you say you don’t want. Begin giving more of your attention and energy to what you actually want to create.
We are manifesting all the time, not just when we are performing a spiritual practice. That means we have an opportunity, again and again, to notice where our energy is going and consciously redirect it. If you look at the direction your life is moving and realize you don’t like where it’s going, you don’t need to immediately search for something outside yourself to blame.
You can pivot.
