In my other blog posts I’ve mentioned the spiritual teacher, Bashar. Today I want to focus on one of his concepts I love, the permission slip. A permission slip is any ritual or behavior that helps you to accomplish something that you want to accomplish. That statement sounds very general because it is! It’s applicable to so many areas of life. You are already familiar with permission slips, so once you learn about them, you’ll begin to see them everywhere. Apart from using them every day in non-spiritual contexts, they are extremely powerful tools for manifestation. I’d like to emphasize a few points about them that I haven’t encountered elsewhere.

A permission slip is a ritual that becomes an excuse for your mind to believe in a desired belief. To simplify things slightly, Bashar claims that when you truly believe in something, you manifest it into reality, so long as it’s something meant for you to experience in this life. I’ve talked about manifestation in previous blog posts so I won’t go into detail about its power here, but I doubt there’s anyone alive who wouldn’t like to manifest a few things into their life. In this post, I’ll describe how I created one myself and then walk through a few everyday examples to help get you brainstorming how you can design your own to start using right away.

In spiritual circles, crystals and gems can be used for healing and to elicit certain emotional states, as well as other things. For instance, clear quartz is used for clarity, amplification, and energy alignment. Celestite is used to bring peace, connect with higher realms, and calm the nervous system. One apparent fact about crystals is they occasionally need to be recharged or cleansed for them to work optimally since they absorb energy from the environment. I actually wonder whether this is universally true or if it’s a belief that manifests reality, but that’s a topic for another day.  

It is believed that you can recharge crystals by various methods like placing them outside under a full moon, under direct sunlight, by cleaning them with fresh or salt water, by burning incense, by using sound such as tuning forks, etc. Since these methods are well established, they are not often thought of as what they are—permission slips. The underlying truth of what is happening when you recharge a crystal or gem in these ways is that you 1) perform an action that you believe will have a given outcome, and 2) that belief manifests the believed effect. Permission slip.

For many people, the above rituals are sufficient, but none of them really resonated with me. I like the idea of charging my crystals in the moonlight because there’s a magical quality to both nighttime and moonlight, but I don’t want to have to check the moon cycle or place my gems outside overnight. I created my own permission slip for recharging crystals:

1. I place a gem in my face-up palm and take a few deep breaths.
2. I visualize the surface of my palm becoming the surface of the moon. There is a beautiful view of both the Sun and the Earth.
3. I feel the weight of the gem causing it to sink slightly into the lunar dust.
4. I feel the dust on my hands. I smell this dust as it floats up to my nose.
5. I visualize the sunlight striking the crystal and heating it up (Space, in sunlight near the Earth, is quite hot. The surface temperature of the moon can reach 250°F).
6. I imagine a crackling sound as the internal structure of the gem is reenergized.
7. I think “By placing this gem here I realign it with its highest frequency. I appreciate and thank the sun, the earth, and the moon.”
8. Finally, I return the gem to my palm here on Earth.

For me, this exercise is a lot more interesting and visceral than placing the gems in the moonlight here on Earth, but that is just what resonates with me. You can use the following formula any time you find something that you want to accomplish where you don’t have a method or the methods available don’t resonate with you.

1. Decide which outcome you want.
2. Visualize in detail what should happen during the ritual.
3. Acknowledge that your ritual accomplishes what you intended.
4. Say thank you.

Adjust anything you’d like, even these steps. You don’t just have to visualize whatever you want happening. You could also perform actions such as burning incense, lighting a candle, doing jumping jacks—whatever you like. I don’t have proof, but it feels to me like making it your own makes it work better than just taking someone else’s ritual. Your ritual doesn’t have to stay the same for all time either. Change things as you feel inspired and you will keep it fresh.

Everyday Permission

As I mentioned before, the non-spiritual world is filled with permission slips or rituals designed to make you believe in something—hence manifest—but they are not often identified as such. Once you identify a permission slip you have the opportunity to change it and “find what feels good”, to quote yoga teacher, Adriene Mishler.

When I went back to school in my 20s, I became very interested in meta-learning, the study of learning how best to learn. I found that the book “How to Become a Straight-A Student” by Cal Newport had several permission slips designed to get you into a focused, studying mentality. Some examples included studying for an exam in the room you would take it in, having a dedicated light on your desk that you only turned on when you needed to focus, only studying at specific times of the day, carving out daily blocks of time you would be unreachable so you could accomplish focused studying, and having snacks and water available for consumption at specific times to keep yourself fueled and focused. These don’t require visualization like my lunar surface crystal recharge ritual, but they are permission slips, nonetheless. You give your mind permission to believe you are focused because your focus lamp is on, and you manifest focus. This is a good time to mention that you don’t technically need a permission slip to believe something you want to manifest, but it’s a simple way to make the human mind believe in something, and belief is the action that manifests things.

The world of sports is also filled with rituals that athletes use to signal that it’s time to perform. Some of these include putting gear on in a specific order, wearing specific things like jewelry or underwear, blessing oneself before taking an at-bat, bouncing a tennis ball a specific number of times before serving, etc. The full list is probably longer than the number of athletes on Earth.

The painter, Ian Roberts, talks about a design professor who taught at the Rhode Island School of Design and MIT whom I only know by the name of Daniel. Daniel does not refer to a studio as a place you can walk into, but rather a verb. He created a permission slip that says, any time his attention is drawn to something that sparks his artistic attention, he purposefully enters a mindset of awe, connection, and play that enables him to achieve his artistic goals. In my own words, his ritual would be something like:

1. Notice something that you are attracted to, artistically.
2. Remember this means it is now time to “enter studio”.
3. Embody the qualities you’ve purposefully developed in your artistic endeavors, such as playful curiosity, mindfulness—in the sense of checking in with yourself to understand what it is that you are feeling as you see this object or scene—perseverance, patience, focused attention, etc.

I find the permission slip to be extremely freeing. Before I encountered Bashar’s idea, I tended to strictly adhere to rituals for fear that they wouldn’t work if I deviated. Now I understand that the goal is to establish belief. For me it’s much easier to permit myself to believe if I’ve created the ritual to my own liking.

One final note on belief. I don’t literally believe that my gems were teleported to the moon. I believe that they are recharged because of my ritual. When I place them there in my mind’s eye—when I see the sunlight and feel the dust, hear the cracking—something unexplainable happens. I just know they’re recharged.