AFTERLIFE TV 2024: When Sharing Isn’t Caring! Bob Olson discusses the risks and benefits of sharing your spiritual (sacred) experiences with others.
If you’ve ever had a spiritual experience (perhaps related to the afterlife) that you shared with others and you regretted sharing it, this video is for you.
In this episode, Bob talks about near-death experiences, past-life regressions, dream visitations, deathbed visions, after-death communications, and readings with mediums.
If you’d like to watch this video, When Sharing Isn’t Caring – Spiritual Self-Care, visit www.afterlifetv.com/?p=3841
Afterlife TV is presented by Afterlife Investigator & Psychic Medium Researcher Bob Olson, who is the author of Answers about the Afterlife: A Private Investigator's 15-Year Research Unlocks the Mysteries of Life after Death.
Check out Bob Olson's other sites: BestPsychicDirectory.com (a directory of hundreds of psychics & mediums by location with reviews & Instant Readings) & BestPsychicMediums.com (his personal recommended list of tested psychics and mediums) or visit Bob's Facebook Page. Bob also has a popular workshop for psychics and mediums at PsychicMediumWorkshop.com.
JOIN BOB'S NEWSLETTER: Join Bob Olson's "Afterlife Academy" newsletter (free): AfterlifeAcademy.com -- Follow Bob as he investigates the afterlife.
Hey, everybody, Bob Olson here with the afterlife TV. Today we’re gonna be talking about when sharing isn’t caring. We’re really talking about spiritual self-care here. I’d like to talk about why it’s important that you be cautious when sharing your spiritual experiences with others. I like to call them sacred experiences. But we’re talking about spiritual experiences.
I’ll give you a few examples as to what I’m talking about whenever you get a reading with a medium. This is the first way that I learned about the subject and why it was so important was right after I got my first reading, I started sharing it with other people. I’ll tell you about that in a moment. Another example that I’ve seen millions of people have had a dream visitation and this is when a loved one who is deceased comes to you in a dream, let you know that they’re OK, let you know that they’re still around. They’re watching over you certainly wants you to know that they’re no longer suffering if they say they were suffering before they passed. But they also want, you know, to let you know that, that they love you.
These dream visitations are things that people remember with great clarity. 30 years later, you know, as if it had happened the night before so many people have had them and then they go and they share them with other people who may have some skepticism around the subject and they make the people who are telling them about the dream feel judged, uh, maybe even question whether it was real. Now, They might feel a little shameful that they believed it was real even though they knew it felt real. And so they, after a while not might just stop telling people all about it. Third example is near death experiences. People who have had near death experiences.
These are people who have died for a few seconds or even a few minutes and then come back to life. A lot of times this will happen during surgery after they come back to life, you know, they wake up, they might tell the doctor or nurse about their near death experience about what they just, what just occurred to them. Oh my goodness. You know, I was, I saw a spirit, I saw my body. I was listening to you guys up by the ceiling. I went through this tunnel of light towards, towards light.
You know, I was told to co I had to come back and I was bummed out about it that near death experience. They start telling the doctors or doctor or nurse about it. And quite often they will get a response that makes them regret that they shared that experience with those people. Those people were hoping, maybe they had heard that many times before and they could just confirm it for them. It doesn’t always happen very rarely. It, it might.
And I’d love to hear about those stories. If you had a doctor or nurse, confirm that this is something that happens all the time because it is that would be risky professionally um for a health care professional to do that. But I know some people have such compassion and knowing within themselves and self confidence that they can be there for those people who are sharing, sharing those things and let them know. Yes, this is something that’s real and happens all the time. Fourth example would be you have a past life regression. You go to a a past life regression, hypnotherapist for about an hour and a half.
You go into a past life, you experience what life was like as that other person. It is such a profound and life changing experience. You come out of it, you can’t help but to be excited about sharing that with other people. And yet that’s a really hard thing for many people to accept. And so once again, their skepticism or just their inability to believe because it’s such a hard concept for them to even fathom. It’s not something that they grew up with.
It’s not something that they learned about while growing up. And so they just don’t know what to make of it. They might make you feel judged, they might make you feel that you’re ashamed for even believing that this was real. And you might even start to think that you got scammed by the regression. There’s lots of other experiences like these, perhaps, you know, someone who had a deathbed vision, we like to call those prede visions. This is when someone is dying and they usually, they’re often in bed, often in the hospital and they see deceased loved ones coming to greet them to welcome them home to make them feel more comfortable about that transition.
And that person might have shared with you that experience and in your effort to, to know if it was real or not, you might have talked to other people about it and in doing that, you might even felt a little bad for, for believing in it. Well, these are real experiences that happen all the time. I’ve been doing this for 27 years. I can’t tell you how many stories I’ve heard about all of these things. And that’s what I’m talking about today. I’m talking about protecting what I like to call your sacred experiences, the spiritual experience that you have.
There’s lots of them after death. Communications, we call them the signs and signals that spirits send you a lot of people are constantly getting these kinds of experience. They’re getting these signs and signals from their loved ones and loved ones in spirit. And then when they go to share them with other people, even people who put themselves out there as believing in this stuff, they might make you feel bad that you even believed in it. That, oh, my God. How can you be so naive?
So, what I’m really here to talk to you about is that number one, the skepticism that you may have met. that’s not unusual. We all all of us who are interested in these subjects, do any in, in sense of investigation of it on our own have met with this with when we, when we start to tell other people about it, I had my first reading with a medium. It was 1999 and it was my first long reading with a medium and it ended up being a three hour reading partly because the, the it was going so well, the medium who was kind of new at it at the time didn’t even want it to stop. That’s how well it was going. And that makes sense.
If you think about what I’ve been doing for 27 years, I’ve been writing about it talking about it since my father’s death in 1997. And I’ve been writing about all the experiences that I’ve been having. And then I started interviewing people on afterlife TV. In 2011. So knowing that this was going to become my life’s calling, it’s not surprising that I would go and have a my first experience with a medium that was so profound that it lasted three hours. And I got so much evidence in that three hour experience that I was forever changed because I knew that there was no way that this stranger that I was communicating with could possibly know all these things about my deceased loved ones, who were coming through that day details about my life that that most of my friends didn’t even know at the time.
And then when I got done with that experience the very next morning, oh, I was just so excited. So I called a very close friend of mine, David, who is now in spirit. And I told him all about my reading and he listened to every detail of it. He was at work at the time and I don’t know how long it took me to tell him, but it was a long story and he was riveted. But when we finished, he said I want to believe you. but my brain just is having a hard time with it.
I guess I’m going to have the experience, have to have the experience for myself. And he was right on that. This is one of those experiences that you just have to have yourself. And in order to really believe in it, especially if you have any skepticism. This is true for a lot of these spiritual experiences that the experience that you have personally is gonna be so much more profound and so much more believable than anything that somebody else tells you about their own experience. I, you know, I call that a vicarious experience.
Yes, we live vicariously through others, but we are forever changed by our own personal experiences. So I told David that was his response. Oh, you know, I’m gonna have to have my own reading because just my mind can’t wrap around this idea that, that you were able to communicate with your father and your grandmother who had died. And then I talked to my mother and, and I told my mother this is my mother and, and her husband had died, right? So, I was excited to tell her about it. And in the end, her response was, I believe that you believe it.
And we call that a mom burn back in the seventies. At least we used to call that a mom burn. That was my first experience with telling people about the sacred experience that I had had and other people crapping on it so that it diminished my experience. And for a lot of people, it will make them question whether the experience was even real. I knew after three hours of evidence that this stranger could not have possibly known, if not for communicating with my loved ones in spirit. I knew that it was real, but I understood how it could affect some people who maybe didn’t have a three hour experience and didn’t have the confidence that I had in what I had seen because I knew that I wasn’t giving the medium any clues.
And one of the things that I did was after I had this reading, I ended up interviewing a bunch of the clients from that medium that I had met. And there was this one client that I was talking with. And one of the things I was trying to do is understand what kind of people go to mediums. And here I am, I got best psychic director. We got 800 psychics and mediums on there. Things have changed right over the past 27 years.
But at the time, I wasn’t sure that I understood the kind of people who went to see mediums. And in talking to her, we got talking about the idea of sacred experiences and sharing them with other people. And she said, at one point, she learned to be cautious about sharing these experiences with other people. And she said it was just too sacred. I do not know how to put my experiences into words. I might mention it.
And if it touches someone’s heart and they ask for more, I’ll talk to them about it. But I don’t wanna betray my experience by not portraying it accurately. And that’s really what it’s all about. Right. We betray our own experience because we can’t articulate exactly what it was like because it was very personal to us. And when we’re telling other people about it, it’s only vicarious.
It’s in a, they’re trying to live vicariously through us. It’s not personal to them. Happy. Back in 2001, Melissa and I had, had promoted this event that had five mediums who gave readings from stage over the course of five hours. Uh, these were people that I had had readings with and, and I knew they were gifted and, and they were doing an amazing job. And so we put them all together, over 400 people had shown up for this event.
And I remember one of the mediums being on stage and I remember her, there was a person in the front row who she was giving a reading to and it was a woman who, whose face just remained stoic throughout. Uh, her arms were crossed. You know, she seemed skeptical, uh, wasn’t nodding, wasn’t smiling. She was just taking in the information and, and even though the medium told her, you know, she described her father, what he looked like when he was alive, his personality, how he died. She explained a lot of things about him that she couldn’t possibly know. She didn’t even know this woman’s name.
None of that really touched the woman getting the reading until the medium said, one of the things that your father is asking me to say to you. And I feel a little silly saying it is that he used to call you jelly bean. He’s telling me to say jelly bean. And when the medium said that the woman just felt her tears and that was this silly little detail that finally broke through her wall of skepticism. The reason I tell you the story is one, this is sort of how it works. You know, a lot of times th this is what happened.
We, we have these profound experiences and what makes it deeply meaningful is often just the fact that they told you some silly little detail like jelly bean. And because that is the thing that breaks through our skepticism. When we go to share that with other people, it just sounds silly. So imagine this woman, she talks about her reading with this stranger who was on stage this medium and she’s telling her friend or family member about it. Well, I can assure you that one of the things she’s going to avoid is is talking about jelly bean. She’ll, she’ll mention it, but she’s also gonna mention all the other things like, you know, she described what her father looked like, what he did for work, you know what his personality was like, how he died.
Those are gonna be the things that we tend to share with other people because now, we recognize as we’re sharing them that we’re, we’re, we’re hitting a wall of skepticism and she’s not gonna emphasize the jelly bean thing that much because that was important to her. But that’s very subjective. And for whatever reason it was that detail that worked for her isn’t necessarily gonna work for her friends and family members. This is just true for all of these experiences that I was talking about. Um, and more and so people’s skepticism affects you. That’s really the point of this video.
But it’s also in an effort to have you be cautious about who you share it with because I don’t want people to ruin the spiritual experiences that you have with other people. Some people see people in spirit, they actually see the apparition of their deceased parent or grandmother or child or spouse. They see them, they wake up in the morning, they see them like a lot of times for some reason, I don’t know why they’re at the end of the bed. You know, they’re standing there. It’s usually a momentary thing and you start telling enough people about it and you will then not believe that you actually saw it anymore. People will convince you that it was wishful thinking or that it was a dream before you woke up and it wasn’t real.
Uh This is what I’m talking about here in 2010, I gave a workshop to 100 and 22 psychics in mediums. And I was trying to explain this to them. I’ll, I’ll tell you why I was trying to explain it to them. But one of the things that I said was spirituality is a sacred experience. It’s private, it’s individual. Let’s use mediumship as an example because spirituality is subjective.
It’s often the silliest evidence coming through that is the most profound for the person getting the reading. It might be a nickname. It might be a memory that, that you shared with the deceased. It might be something that nobody else knows. Like you put something in the casket. Interestingly, when we try to share our sacred experiences with others, the sacredness is somehow reduced.
It gets torn down. People’s skepticism affects you more accurately. It infects you before you know it, the sacredness of your life, changing spiritual experience is diminished to uncertainty, possibly even shame, depending upon who you shared it with. In the worst cases, you ask yourself, how could I have been so foolish and naive to believe what I believed later? Just so that I could explain it to the psychs and mediums. And the reason I was teaching it to them was because they’ve all experienced a client having a reading, half hour, one hour reading the clients in tears.
The client is nodding, the client is smiling, the client is acknowledging that the information, the details of the person coming through their, how they died, what they look like, what they did for work, what their personality was like, memories that you shared with them quite often, the person in spirit will through the medium even talk about things that have happened in your life since they’ve been dead. They’ll share that with them. These are things that this medium could never possibly know. They share all those things, the medium shares all these things with the person and they’re, you know, like I said, many times you’re in tears and they’re so excited about the reading and then they hang up the phone or they leave the office. And maybe two weeks later, they’re calling up the medium and they’re saying, I didn’t get anything. I’m unhappy with my reading.
Their family and friends got to them, their family and friends tore down this amazing reading that they had to the point where they don’t even believe it anymore to the point where they might feel like they gave it all away. If the medium didn’t actually get this information, I must have told it to them or somehow gave it away and all the details just get thrown out the window. And that’s the diminishment of a sacred experience. It’s not just about readings. Of course, as I said, you know, you might, let’s just say there’s a certain song that every time you hear it, you think of your loved one in spirit. But let’s just say, every time you talk about your mother and spirit, the song that you, that you, that makes you think of her comes on the radio.
Maybe you’re talking to a friend about your mother. And then all of a sudden that song comes on the radio. Maybe you’re, you’re driving along and you’re having a conversation with your mother, mom. I just wanted to tell you about my day. And then the song comes on the radio. I call these divine coincidences.
Some might say serendipity. It happens so often and this happens with me. There’s a certain song that reminds me of my father. And every time I’ve, when I’ve been writing about him, I’ll, I’ve gotten up from my desk and I, I walk into the living room and on the radio his song is playing and it’s a song that from I think the sixties. So it’s a very old song. It’s not like they’re playing it on the radio all the time.
But you go and tell somebody about that and I’ll tell you what they’re gonna get you to stop believing that that’s actually your father trying to signal to you that he is acknowledging you talking to him. He is acknowledging you talking about him or your mother or whoever it is that you’re talking about any of the experiences that I’ve ever talked about on afterlife TV, here or written about in my book, answers about the afterlife. All the things that we talk about here are a sacred spiritual experience that somebody has had even an out of body experience, any kind of profound experience that you might have had during meditation. The risk that you take in sharing it with others is that they’re gonna ruin it for you. And yet there is a reason that we continue to do it. There is a reason.
Now, some people shut down. I actually wrote down four stages of preserving the sacred stage. One is we start sharing with people our early experiences only to be met with skepticism. At first we think, oh my God, this is gonna change your life. When you hear, when you hear this story, that’s the way I felt about my first reading. Oh my God, wait till you hear this.
It’s gonna change your life. And then I realized, oh no, I can’t share my experiences with other people because they have to have the experience for themselves. And that’s why we meet with skepticism. It was meaningful to you. It’s not gonna have the same meaning to them. That’s stage one.
Stage two is we have now become a little bit more cautious, but we’re still sharing, but we’re being a little bit more careful about it. We’re dropping some bread crumbs to see if they nibble at it. Are they interested in talking about this subject? And if they are, maybe we can have a meaningful, you know, wonderful conversation about these things. If not quite often, people will just sort of shut down right away because the person didn’t respond positively. The, the third stage is we’ve met with skepticism so often and not just skepticism judgment quite often that now we’re being really careful.
And stage three is you don’t share your spiritual experiences with anybody who doesn’t first share a spiritual experience with you. They bring it up first and then you go, ok. Now I feel safe talking to that person about some of my experiences. They had a past life progression. They just shared it with me. I’m gonna tell them about my dream visitation.
Um That is stage three and stage four is people just shut down and they don’t feel safe telling anybody about their experiences anymore. For fear of ridicule, judgment, skepticism, feeling shameful. I ran into a woman who told me about a unique situation. She lost a child, she had 22 Children, two boys, she lost a child and every so often she would meet someone new. And in the course of that conversation, someone would ask what I like to call an innocent question. But that innocent question, they have no idea, the emotional charge behind the answer, but they ask it anyways because they’re kind of things we ask all the time.
What do you do for work? Right. Well, for, for this woman, it’s how many Children do you have? Well, how does, how is she supposed to answer that? Especially if she has had her sacred experiences? Diminished along the way.
So she has been through all those stages that I just talked about and depending on who it is, she’s talking to sometimes or where she’s at in terms of her bravery and courage. That particular day, she may say I have 22 Children and one of them is in heaven. If that person doesn’t immediately shut down just from bringing up death as we see in our society all too often try to talk about the, the loss that you’re experiencing with someone. Quite often, people are trying to count the ways that they can escape from that conversation and get out of there because we in this society have not learned how to talk about death and dying and certainly grief. So we try to find ways out of that conversation. Most of the people watching afterlife TV have experienced this in one way or another.
And so what this woman does is if the person didn’t shut down just by saying one of my Children is in heaven, then she might say something like and I get a lot of messages from him. Quite often he sends me after death. Communications that can either then cause the person to shut down or cause them to become interested or wanna share their own experiences. And that could become something very meaningful and and can even add to the relationship because now they have something in common that they can talk about that as we all know, we can’t really talk about with just anybody. This woman had written to me and I wrote back to her. I said every so often someone asks you an innocent question which somehow leads to an incredibly meaningful conversation.
And the result lifts you and the other person in ways that can’t be fully articulated, but it’s always appreciated and both parties walk away a little differently than before. These are the small male moments that make a life precious and full. And I wish all of you, I wish that you have more of those moments in your life. Appreciate you spending time with me. And I hope that you have many more spiritual experiences and sacred experiences and that the people that you share them with are open and loving and accepting of them so that it just adds to your overall experience. Thank you so much.
All right, bye bye.
Afterlife TV is presented by Afterlife Investigator & Psychic Medium Researcher Bob Olson, who is the author of Answers about the Afterlife: A Private Investigator's 15-Year Research Unlocks the Mysteries of Life after Death.
Check out Bob Olson's other sites: BestPsychicDirectory.com (a directory of hundreds of psychics & mediums by location with reviews & Instant Readings) & BestPsychicMediums.com (his personal recommended list of tested psychics and mediums) or visit Bob's Facebook Page. Bob also has a popular workshop for psychics and mediums at PsychicMediumWorkshop.com.
JOIN BOB'S NEWSLETTER: Join Bob Olson's "Afterlife Academy" newsletter (free): AfterlifeAcademy.com -- Follow Bob as he investigates the afterlife.
