Blooming Wand
Welcome to Blooming Wand! Your sanctuary for grounded spiritual growth and authentic connection. I'm Emily O'Neal, an evidential psychic medium, intuitive healer, and coach helping you rediscover your inherent spiritual wisdom.
Each of us is born with a powerful intuitive connection to the unseen realms of energy and spirit. Yet life's challenges and societal expectations can dim this inner light. Through evidential mediumship, tarot insights, intuitive guidance, and transformative coaching, I offer a practical, evidence-based approach to spirituality that helps you reconnect with your intuitive self and ancestral wisdom.
I currently reside on Cowlitz lands in what is also known as Vancouver, Washington. My practice honors both place and lineage as I support others in their spiritual journeys.
Join me for conversations about developing intuition, communicating with Spirit, ancestral healing, and accessible spiritual tools for everyday life.
Blooming Wand
Your Body Knows Before Your Mind Does: The Truth About Limiting Beliefs
Ready to break free from the invisible prison of your own thoughts? This powerful exploration of limiting beliefs reveals why you feel stuck—and how to finally move forward.
Have you ever noticed that tight feeling in your chest when faced with an opportunity? The shallow breathing when considering a big change? That's not random—your body is speaking to you, signaling the presence of limiting beliefs long before your conscious mind catches up. As someone who guides others through transformation, I recently found myself caught in my own web of self-doubt and overthinking. Tarot cards from the suit of swords kept appearing in my daily practice, revealing figures with covered eyes trapped in their own thoughts—a perfect mirror for what was happening within me.
This episode dives deep into understanding limiting beliefs as something far more complex than negative thoughts. They're entire ecosystems of protection we built when younger, survival mechanisms that have outlived their usefulness. The breakthrough realization? You can't think your way out of a thought problem. Transformation happens when we engage our whole being—body, heart, and mind together. Learn to recognize the physical signatures of your limiting beliefs, from sudden tension to inexplicable fatigue, and discover why traditional "positive thinking" approaches often fail.
The freedom you're seeking doesn't come from eliminating limiting beliefs entirely (they have a stubborn way of shapeshifting), but from fundamentally changing your relationship with them. Download the companion worksheet from bloomingwand.com to begin this practice of coming home to your truest self. Remember, these beliefs aren't character flaws—they're outdated protection systems that once served you. Approach this work with curiosity rather than force, compassion rather than criticism, and watch as the invisible walls around your potential begin to dissolve, revealing the expansive truth of who you really are.
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Welcome to Blooming Wand, your home for grounded spiritual content. I'm Emily O'Neill, evidential Psychic Medium, intuitive Healer and Coach, and the first thing I want to say is full moon blessings. Friends. We have reached the second installment of our three-part monthly series exploring the top themes that surface most consistently in my readings. The top themes that surface most consistently in my readings mentoring sessions and five years of full and new moon, tarot curated insights. So the top three themes are understanding what's essential. We explored that back in August. If you didn't watch or listen to that episode, please do so, because today's episode really builds on that. You don't necessarily have to have listened to it, but I do think that they all kind of go.
Speaker 1:All three of these installments are going to go really well together and really help you with your self-care and spiritual practices. So don't forget to check them out. They are coming out on full moons because I just like to work with that illuminating energy. So with the August full moon, like I said, we explored understanding what's essential through the lens of human needs. On this full moon, in September we're going to be talking about breaking free of limiting beliefs and, just to catch you all up here, I really looked at all the content I've created over the last five years. This series is in celebration of five years of Blooming Wand, and I had been writing newsletters twice a month for five years, typically inspired by tarot cards that I pulled or oracle cards that I pulled that could give us a self-care or spiritual insight to work with during each moon cycle. And I went through all of that and I'll admit that sometimes I felt like a broken record, because I think a lot of things point in the direction of these three themes that we're talking about, so I felt like they deserve a deep dive. What you're going to get with these installments is a newsletter if you're not signed up, you can do so at bloomingwandcom a blog, a worksheet, a podcast and a YouTube video, so things that you can refer to. You don't have to do this all at once, but keep them in mind, flag them or save them for times when you feel like they might be helpful to you. Oftentimes I create these episodes and people will say to me that they'll listen to it, they'll digest it and then they're going to come. They come back to it later on down the road, and I think that that's cool because it means that it's giving good information that's worthy of sitting with and with processing and figuring out how it applies to you and your life and in your self-care and spiritual practices.
Speaker 1:I try very hard to create grounded, down-to-earth content that can be integrated into day-to-day life. Hence the worksheets, which, I have to say, I'm doing them myself and I'm really loving it. It's almost like I didn't even create it. I can actually separate myself as the creator of them and just use them as a tool for myself, and it's been really helpful, and I hope that they're helpful to you. So let's just get started. Let's dive in.
Speaker 1:In August last month we focused on cultivating the essential to better understand ourselves through our fundamental needs and values, and this month we're diving into limiting beliefs, those subtle yet powerful stories that we tell ourselves, that shape our reality and often hold us back from our truest potential. And this starts with a personal story. So I've definitely had my own wake up calls, and I've had some recently. So a few months ago, I found myself trapped in the exact patterns that I help my clients to navigate. I am human, after all, and I was just like caught in this endless mental loop, overthinking every decision and feeling paralyzed by self-doubt.
Speaker 1:This is a common thing for me, but I'm working on it and during my daily tarot practice, I kept pulling cards from the suit of swords. And listen, if you have a daily tarot practice and you're pulling a lot of swords, it really does typically mean not all of the swords, but a lot of them are kind of harsh, they're kind of intense. They're usually asking us to step back and think about what's going on with ourselves mentally, what's going on with our internal and external communications. And so I was pulling so many swords, including, on repeat, eight of swords, nine of swords and two of swords. I was like what is going on? And, card after card, these images just stared back at me, revealing figures with their eyes closed or covered, trapped in their own thoughts. And at first I was really frustrated. Why wasn't I getting clearer guidance? I was like what is this all about? And then it hit me the message wasn't about external circumstances at all.
Speaker 1:These cards were showing me that I had become a prisoner of my own mind. My thoughts, specifically my limiting beliefs, had created invisible walls around me and I was closing or choosing closing my eyes, closing my mind, and choosing to keep my eyes closed, like turning away from the truth of my own power. There's all these like phrases in repeat or ways of thinking and like mechanisms of belief that I think are intended to keep me safe, or that's what I feel is the underlying motivation there, but that were really kind of making me feel really stuck. And so this realization changed everything, and I realized that I needed to move from my head into my heart, from analysis, which I'm super good at, to intuition, and from thinking my way out of the situation to feeling my way forward, which is really what the eight to me, the eight of swords is all about is learning to feel your way forward. And so the irony wasn't lost on me that here I was a coach who helps others identify and transform their living beliefs, and I was completely caught in my own web of like beliefs.
Speaker 1:And I was completely caught in my own web of like. I'm not experienced enough. Who am I to think I can help people? I need to have it all figured out before I can guide others. And those are just some of the beliefs. There are a lot more a lot around a sense of worth, a lot around, you know, needing to be really hyperproductive as well, and a lot around needing to be liked and needing to be popular. Yeah, I feel kind of vulnerable saying that, but it's true. Those are some of the things that were running through my mind and I share because I want you to know that I'm doing this work alongside of you. I think that that's important. I don't have all the answers, but I can you to know that I'm doing this work alongside of you. I think that that's important. I don't have all the answers, but I can speak to some from my experience and the hope that we can kind of have a dialogue and share with each other around this stuff. So, all that to say, this experience became the catalyst for diving deeper into understanding limiting beliefs, not just intellectually but experientially, like experiencing what it means to almost on a physiological level, what limiting beliefs were doing to me, because they do come with a set of feelings that arise within our bodies. And that journey led me to create the worksheet that I'm going to share with you. You can download it from my website at bloomingwandcom. Go to explore, go to my freebies page and the worksheet will be there. And this is just another gentle invitation to subscribe to the newsletter. It's my primary way of engaging with the community and you'll always get the links to all the things if you get the newsletter. So that's a little promo there.
Speaker 1:But through my own process and from working with clients, I discovered that limiting beliefs are not just thoughts that we think. They're entire ecosystems of protection that we built, probably when we were younger and had fewer resources to navigate the world, and that limiting beliefs are survival mechanisms that have outlived their usefulness. Mine certainly have, and the belief that I need to be perfect before I can help others might have protected me from criticism early on, might have kept my voice from me using my voice and for some reason that made me feel safe, but it started to prevent me from stepping into my purpose and serving the people who needed what I had to offer. And the breakthrough came for me anyway when I stopped trying to think my way out of these patterns and started listening to what my body and heart were telling me.
Speaker 1:I try to think myself through almost everything. It's sort of like my default mode and I know now that when I start to overthink or analyze, it's like my little brain starts going, going, going. I've learned like step back, take some deep breaths, relax into the body. There's some meditations that I like to do for myself and to feel into my intuitive self, because the thinking isn't going to help. Every time a limiting belief has arisen for me, my chest gets tight, I start to do really shallow breathing and my shoulders kind of go up to my ears. There are subtle signals in my, our body that kind of hit our awareness first, before the thoughts come, but we just bypass them. I'm a huge, I'm really good at it and I've learned like what my body will cue me and then other thoughts will start going. And if I can go to that physical cue and rest with that sensation, I can find some really good wisdom, some good medicine there. Now here's what I wish someone had told me. Maybe they didn't, I just didn't listen. But you can't think your way out of a thought problem.
Speaker 1:Limiting beliefs live in the realm of the mind, but transformation happens when we engage our whole being. And when I finally stopped analyzing my limiting beliefs, thinking about them, and started feeling them in my body, everything shifted. Instead of asking myself like is this belief logical, I began asking how does this belief feel in my body? Instead of gathering evidence for or against a thought, raise your hand if you do that like man. That's like my go to. Instead of gathering evidence for or against a thought, I started noticing what created expansion versus contraction within my chest, because a lot of times I get like tension in my heart area when I'm not listening to it. And this wasn't about dismissing the mind, not at all. It's about remembering that the mind is just one tool in our toolkit and that sometimes it's not the right tool for the job.
Speaker 1:I always tell people, especially when we're slipping into a meditative state don't boss your mind around. It doesn't work. The more pressure you put against the thoughts, the more you focus on it, the busier it gets. We just sort of have to create some space with the mind, let it do whatever it wants to do and almost observe that, and that's a practice of learning how to do that. But we don't have to ride the thought train all the time, and I had to learn what that meant like because I was always on the thought train. I didn't know what it felt like to not be riding the rails with my mind all the time, so to speak, to lean into the train analogy. I think a lot of people that are listening can relate to that, that thinking that wants to come up when we're stressed or we're in a transitional point in our life or we're working hard, but maybe feeling the voices that were not good enough emerge so we can't think our way out of a thought problem. That's something that I feel is really helpful.
Speaker 1:Now, leaning into this theme that the body knows before the mind does, one of the most powerful discoveries in my journey was learning to recognize the physical signatures, the physical signatures of my limiting beliefs. Your body responds to those beliefs before you are even consciously aware of the belief itself. So common physical signs that I notice yours might be different, but sudden tensions, tension in shoulders, jaw or chest, shallow breathing oh my gosh, when my breathing gets shallow I'm like I know something's up Sinking, feeling in my stomach, fatigue that seems to come out of nowhere. Getting tired is a big sign. I just had a client and I was like you're probably going to start to feel really tired because you're bumping up against some mechanisms of behavior and belief and you're kind of you know, really wrapped up in that and it literally consumes our energy when we do that. And sure enough, they came to the next session like yeah, I am really tired and I didn't understand why I was tired all of the time, and I think that there might be something to this just being so wrapped up in the overanalyzing of everything that I'm draining my own vitality. It's like, yeah, we do that to ourselves sometimes, totally normal, right, but there are other paths that we can take, right. There's other things that we can do rather than doing the things that we were just used to doing. Now, feeling physically smaller or contracted, that is a big one for me. If I feel like I am hiding or making myself feel smaller, I know there's something at play there that I probably need to explore Now.
Speaker 1:The emotional landscape that can indicate limiting beliefs or anxiety without a clear external cause. I have that. I have this a lot Feeling overwhelmed by simple decisions. I see this a lot in my sessions. I see this a lot. Feeling overwhelmed by simple decisions. I see this a lot in my sessions. I see this a lot, a lot A sense of being stuck or paralyzed. This is another one that I see quite a bit in client sessions. Feeling stuck or paralyzed is definitely a sign of a couple of things that could be going on, and it's good to not be too hard on ourselves when we feel stuck or paralyzed.
Speaker 1:Gentleness and tenderness is usually the anecdote to that Self-doubt that feels disproportionate to the situation. Wow, I mean, that's another really big one, probably connected to some of the examples I gave about myself earlier. That self-doubt thing man, I don't know about you, but that's been probably one of the number one things I've had to work on in my personal self-care and spiritual practices is this voice that's always like telling me that I can't, or doubting my ability to do the things that I want to do, and kind of keeping me in the same place all of the time, probably because it's protecting me and thinks it's keeping me safe, right, keeping me in the known realm rather than entering into the unknown. And fair enough, like I don't think I'm the only one that does that the urge to hide or make myself invisible. I always joke about this because I'm a bit of a homebody. I call myself a hobbit, if you remember. In the Hobbit, when Gandalf just kind of shows up at Bilbo's door, bilbo's like I don't want to go on an adventure, while I am a fun and playful person person and I do like adventures more often than not like I enjoy my solitude and being at home and reading and doing things like that. But there's a difference between being a homebody and then actually avoiding things so that you're not seen, so keeping yourself sort of isolated so that people won't really see you. If they can't see you, they can't judge you, they can't criticize you, things like that. So that's actually one I have to pay attention to, because sometimes I'm like am I just being my normal homebody self or am I hiding? And that's something I have to explore. Learning to catch these signals early has been a game changer for me, and now, when I feel that kind of familiar tightness in my chest, I know that a limiting belief has been activated and I can address it before it takes over my entire day. Now, sometimes addressing it means simply just acknowledging like, oh, there's that thought again or there's that thing again, and then that's really all that I do. But there are other times where I really like feel into that and be present for the voice that's speaking or the belief that's speaking in my mind and give it space through journaling or just where it's living in my body and shining my love light on it and letting it know that I see it and I hear it and that tends to help.
Speaker 1:I used to think that changing limiting beliefs was about replacing negative thoughts with positive ones. I don't think I'm the only one that probably thought that, but that approach never stuck for me and I felt like it was like forced and inauthentic and like lying, telling myself a lie. The example is like the limiting belief that I'm not experienced enough didn't disappear when I tried to replace it with I'm incredibly experienced. That felt like a lie. But when I shifted to I have valuable experience and perspective to share and I'm incredibly experienced, that felt like a lie. But when I shifted to I have valuable experience and perspective to share and I'm committed to growing, that felt like something I was connected to and that belief felt true and expansive, because one I feel like is sort of a limited mindset, like I'm so experienced, it has like a firm boundary or something to it, whereas I have experience and I like to share it and I'm also committing to learning and growing gave me a sense of freedom Like I don't know at all. I'm always learning and growing and I like to share that process with the Blooming One community because I think it's healthy. So that's what I mean by like just shifting it from a negative thought to a positive thought, didn't really work for me. Finding a phrase that felt more holistic did so.
Speaker 1:Today I still pull sword cards in my tarot practice, but they no longer feel like warnings. Instead they feel like a gentle reminder to come back to my center, to trust my inner, knowing over my mental chatter. And the limiting beliefs haven't completely disappeared. I mean, surprise, surprise, right, where one maybe I work with one another one pops up. But such is life, right, that's okay. There's really no destination, right. But what I want to say is my relationship with my limiting beliefs has fundamentally changed and, instead of being trapped by them, I can recognize them, thank them for trying to protect me and choose a different response, and that freedom is available to you.
Speaker 1:Your limiting beliefs are not the truth of who you are. They're old stories that you can choose to rewrite who you are. They're old stories that you can choose to rewrite. And the same inner wisdom that brought you to this episode, that made you curious about your own patterns, is the same wisdom that will guide you toward your most authentic, expansive self. Trust the process, trust your heart, trust that you have everything within you to break free from the mental prisons you've unknowingly created. And if you're ready to begin your journey, don't forget. You can download the Limiting Beliefs Worksheet and start the practice of coming home to your truest self anytime that you want. I encourage you to approach this work with curiosity rather than force, and compassion rather than criticism. So remember this is what helped me, because I'm doing the worksheet too these beliefs develop for good reason, when you had fewer resources. They're not character flaws, they're outdated protection systems.
Speaker 1:Transformation is a process, not a one-time event. Right, your body and your heart are wise allies in this journey. So your body will never lie to you, and I really do feel it's the portal to our intuitive wisdom. Your breath is a great way to connect with your heart and your body, and a consistent practice of doing so is definitely going to be very helpful. Things to pay attention to are how beliefs in your feel, in your body, not just in your mind and what creates expansion versus like contraction, and the stories behind the beliefs. When did they first develop? Your authentic or essential self knows certain things are true about you and it's good to develop some awareness around that. Right, and I feel like looping back to the previous episode about essentials when we understand more about what our essential needs are, oftentimes sort of a component of that process is bumping up to limiting beliefs. So we'll come to knowing some things that are true about what's essential to us, and then a belief might come forward and say you can't have that, you're not good enough, that's never going to be possible, and just sort of stop us in our tracks. So I really do hope it is my prayer that this three-part series becomes a practical guide to understanding some of this.
Speaker 1:If you get tarot readings, if you work with tarot or oracle cards, if you go to a psychic, if you even do go to a medium because a lot of times when mediums work this has happened when I work with clients a spirit communicator, a deceased loved one, will come through with a message that will often connect to one of these three themes and then people leave the session. It's like well, that's great advice from spirit, but now what? And so it's my intention to fill in that space from the. Maybe you're doing tarot or Oracle or meditations or in communion with spirit or your intuitive self, and you're kind of in that space of like I have this information, but like now, what Like? How do I practically apply some of this wisdom into my life? That's where I come in. I'm here to help with that and I hope that this three-part series does just that.
Speaker 1:Now I want to say that next month, on the full moon in October, we're going to be talking about boundaries, which is a great way to wrap up this three-part series. I cannot wait. Boundaries I didn't know anything about boundaries, how to set them, how to honor them, why I needed them, why they actually make the world a better place. So I'm excited to tap into that and I feel like these are three topics. What's essential?
Speaker 1:Limiting beliefs and boundaries that we hear a lot. It's in almost every self-care book, they're talked about, on lots of podcasts, all the things, and I think it's because there's some value to the topics, and this is just sort of my perspective on them, based off of interacting with all of you, sort of my perspective on them based off of interacting with all of you, the Blooming One community. So thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much for your support. Don't forget to subscribe to the newsletter at bloomingonecom. Also, be sure to like, follow, subscribe to the podcast on your favorite streaming services or on YouTube. And I bet you know what I'm going to say next. What I always say Take good care of yourselves, get those journals out and I'll see you soon.