You open your Akashic Records. You're feeling clear and grounded, questions are prepared and you're SO ready for the experience.

A message, insight, or download comes through. Maybe you see a visual playing out in your mind's eye or a memory drops in that you had long forgotten about.

And then at some point, especially if you're in a tender season or navigating the in-between, your mind shows up.

Is that actually guidance, or am I just making that up? Did I receive that, or did I create it? Am I hallucinating right now? What if I’m getting it wrong? What if I’m telling myself what I want to hear?

If you’ve ever sat with the Records (or with any form of intuitive guidance) and felt that doubt come in, let me reassure you that it is completely normal. It doesn't mean your channel isn't clear or that you’re doing it wrong. 

It just means you’re human and you’re doing something that asks you to trust a form of knowing that our culture has spent centuries teaching you to dismiss.

Here’s what I also know after years of working with the Records, doubt and discernment are not the same thing. Fear of getting it wrong is not the same as actually getting it wrong. Learning to tell the difference is not just possible, it’s one of the most important skills you can develop in this work.

In this post, I want to walk you through what I’ve learned about trusting what you receive. The kind of grounded, embodied discernment that lets you move forward with confidence, even when the guidance is not what you expected.

First: Why This Fear Exists

Before we talk about how to build trust, let’s acknowledge why the doubt is there in the first place.

We live in a culture that fundamentally does not trust the invisible. We’re trained from childhood to value what can be proven, measured, and explained. Intuition doesn’t fit into that framework. So most of us internalized, somewhere along the way, that our inner knowing wasn’t reliable. That we needed external authority to tell us what was real.

Add to that the very real fear of accountability. If you trust your guidance and act on it, you’re responsible for that choice. It’s easier, in some ways, to stay in doubt, because doubt feels safe. It keeps you from having to commit, from having to be wrong, from having to fully own your inner knowing.

And then there’s the specific vulnerability of this work, the Records communicate through you. You are the channel. Which means your mind, your emotions, your patterns, and your conditioning are all present in the room. Of course you’re going to wonder sometimes whether what’s coming through is guidance or just… you.

All of this makes sense. None of it means you’re incapable of receiving clearly.

The Difference Between Doubt And Discernment

This is the distinction I want to spend some time with, because I think it’s the one that changes everything.

Doubt is fear dressed up as wisdom. It says: I can’t trust this. What if I’m wrong? What if I’m making it up? Doubt lives in the head. It loops. It second-guesses. It rarely offers anything constructive, it just contracts.

Discernment is something different. Discernment is neutral, curious, grounded. It asks: Does this resonate? Does this feel aligned? Let me check this against what I know to be true. Discernment doesn’t dismiss what came through, it examines it. And it tends to expand rather than contract.

Here’s the simplest way I’ve found to tell them apart: doubt keeps you spinning. Discernment moves you forward, even if only to say “I’m not sure yet, and that’s okay.”

When you notice yourself looping on the same question, “but what if I made that up?”, that’s usually doubt. When you’re thoughtfully weighing what came through against your lived experience and your body’s response, that’s discernment.

Both are forms of checking in. Only one of them actually helps you receive more clearly over time.

What Aligned Guidance Usually Feels Like

I want to be careful here, because guidance doesn’t feel the same for everyone. Your intuitive language is unique to you, and part of the work of developing discernment is learning your specific signals.

That said, there are some qualities I’ve noticed in aligned guidance, both in my own practice and in the hundreds of readings I’ve facilitated.

It lands rather than arrives

Fear-based thinking tends to arrive loudly and urgently. Aligned guidance often has a quality of simply landing, like it was already there, waiting to be noticed. It doesn’t push. It doesn’t insist. It offers, and then it waits.

You might experience this as a message that drops in subtly. A knowing that settles rather than spikes. A sense of “oh” rather than “WAIT.”

It feels neutral, even when it’s hard

This is one of the most useful signals I know. Guidance that comes from the Records, even when it’s pointing to something difficult, like a pattern you need to release or a decision that scares you, tends to have a quality of neutrality or even tenderness. It’s not urgent or alarmed. It doesn’t catastrophize.

Fear, on the other hand, tends to carry charge. It’s louder, more insistent, more dramatic. It often comes with a sense of warning or urgency that has an edge to it.

Aligned guidance can absolutely point you toward hard things. But it does so with a quality of this is what is, not this is what you should be panicking about.

It doesn’t tell you what you want to hear or what you’re afraid to hear

This is a subtle one, but worth paying attention to. Guidance that’s filtered through your desires tends to confirm what you were hoping for. Guidance filtered through your fears tends to confirm what you were dreading.

Aligned guidance, in my experience, opens you up to new possibilities. It might offer a perspective you hadn’t considered. It might reframe the question entirely. It might be simpler than you expected, or more complex. It has a quality of coming from somewhere else, outside your normal frame of reference.

If what you receive is exactly with what you already believed before you opened the Records, that’s worth noting and sitting with.

Your body responds before your mind does

This is where somatic awareness becomes so important in this work.

Before your analytical mind has a chance to assess what came through, your body has already responded. And that response is information.

When guidance is true, many people notice a softening. A sense of relief, even if the message itself is hard. Warmth in the chest, or a gentle opening in the belly. A subtle exhale. A feeling of yes, that’s it, even before you fully understand what “that” is.

When something is coming from fear or distortion, the body tends to contract. There’s a tightening, a bracing, or sometimes a kind of mental urgency that lives in the head rather than the body.

Neither response is absolute, you’re learning your own signals, not following a formula. But beginning to track these responses over time is one of the most powerful ways to build discernment.

Somatic Signals: Learning Your Body’s Language

Whether or not you’re not used to thinking about your body as a source of guidance, your nervous system has been tracking truth your whole life. You just might not have been taught to listen to it.

Here’s a simple practice for building somatic discernment in your work with the Records:

Before you open the Records, take a moment to notice your baseline. Where does your body feel open? Where does it feel tight? What’s your breathing like? You’re not trying to change anything, just notice.

After you receive a piece of guidance, pause before you analyze it. Instead of immediately asking “is that true?”, ask: how does my body respond to this?

Some questions to explore:

• Does anything soften when I sit with this?
• Does anything contract?
• Where do I feel this in my body?
• Is there a quality of relief, even if the message is uncomfortable?
• Is there urgency or alarm?
• If so, is it coming from the guidance itself, or from my reaction to it?

Over time, you’ll start to recognize your specific signals. The particular warmth in your sternum that means yes, trust this. The tightening in your throat that means slow down, something’s off. The quality of settling in your belly that means this is landing in me as true.

This is not a quick practice. It’s something that develops with attention over time. But it’s one of the most reliable forms of discernment I know.

The Role Your Nervous System Plays

Something I don’t see talked about enough in Akashic Records education is how the state of your nervous system directly affects the clarity of what you receive.

When your nervous system is dysregulated, when you’re stressed, anxious, dissociated, or in survival mode, your capacity to receive clear guidance is genuinely compromised. Not because the Records aren’t available, but because you’re not in a state where you can perceive them clearly.

Think of it this way –– imagine trying to hear a quiet, peaceful voice in the middle of a fire alarm. The voice is still there, but the alarm is making it nearly impossible to hear.

Your nervous system is the same. When it’s in alarm mode, everything gets filtered through that alarm. What comes through tends to carry more fear, more urgency, more distortion.

This is why regulation before accessing the Records isn’t optional, it’s foundational. Even a few minutes of grounding, breathing, or simply placing your hands on your heart and slowing down can meaningfully shift the quality of what you receive.

It doesn’t mean you can only access the Records when you’re perfectly calm. But it does mean that if you’re finding your guidance feels unreliable or distorted, your nervous system is a good place to look first.

When You’re Genuinely Unsure: What To Do

Even with all of this awareness, there will be times when you’re genuinely unsure whether what you received was guidance, wishful thinking, fear, or some combination of all three. That’s not failure, it's part of the practice.

Here’s what I’ve found helpful when I’m in that in-between space:

Let it breathe

Don’t try to force certainty. Sometimes guidance that felt unclear in the moment becomes obvious three days later when something in your life suddenly illuminates it. Give what you received some time before you dismiss it.

Notice what happens over time

Aligned guidance tends to stay consistent. If you receive the same message across multiple sessions, across multiple forms, in the Records, in a dream, in a conversation with a friend, that’s worth paying attention to. Fear tends to shift and change as circumstances change. Guidance tends to remain.

Track your INTUITIVE PINGS

Start keeping a record of what you receive and what unfolds. Over time, you’ll be able to look back and see the patterns, the moments when what came through turned out to be accurate, the moments when you were filtering, the moments when you were in doubt but the guidance was right anyway. This kind of evidence builds genuine trust, the kind that isn’t dependent on reassurance.

Ask the Records directly

If you’re unsure whether what you received is clear, you can ask: Is this coming from my highest guidance? Is there anything distorting what I’m receiving? The Records are responsive. They can help you discern within the session itself.

Be willing to be wrong sometimes

This is the hardest one, maybe. Part of building trust is accepting that you will sometimes filter. You will sometimes receive a mix of true guidance and your own projections. You will sometimes get it wrong. That’s not a reason to stop trusting, it’s a reason to keep practicing.

No one develops discernment by never making mistakes. You develop it by making mistakes, noticing them, learning from them, and returning to the practice.

TALK WITH AN EXPERIENCED PRACTITIONER

Sometimes you just need to process what came through with someone who's been in the Records A LOT. Someone who's seen the full range of how the Records communicate, who can normalize what you're experiencing, help you decipher messages, and reflect back what they're noticing that you might not see clearly yourself.

This Is Exactly Why I Built The Akashic Portal

Trusting what you receive is not something you figure out once and then have forever. It’s a practice. A relationship. Something that deepens over time through experience, attention, and a genuine commitment to keeping showing up even when you’re not sure.

It requires a willingness to be in relationship with your own inner knowing, to take it seriously, to examine it, to act on it sometimes even before you’re certain. Not because you’re reckless, but because trust is built through intentional action, not just contemplation.

And it requires support. Not because you can’t do this alone, but because there is something uniquely powerful about developing this skill inside a community of people who are doing the same thing. Who can reflect back what they’re noticing in you when your doubt gets loud. Who can hold your knowing when you’ve momentarily lost it. Who can say yes, I trust what you received when you’re still not sure.

The healers and practitioners I’ve watched develop the most solid, grounded discernment have almost never done it in isolation. They’ve done it in relationship, with the Records, with a teacher, with a community.

Inside TAP

Discernment isn’t a module. It’s not something I can teach you in a single session or a single post.

It’s something that develops through practice — real practice, over time and with support.

Inside The Akashic Portal, this is one of the foundational things we build together. Through monthly co-creation sessions where we open the Records as a community. Through guided journeys that help you recognize your intuitive signals. Through a community of intuitive practitioners who reflect your gifts back when your doubt gets loud. Through my ongoing support as you learn to trust what you’re receiving and integrate it into your life and work.

The nervous system practices woven throughout TAP aren’t extras. They’re the foundation, because I’ve seen, again and again, that regulation is what makes clarity possible.

If you’ve been trying to develop discernment on your own and finding it slow, uncertain, or frustrating, I want you to consider that it might not be a you problem. It might be a support problem.

The Akashic Portal opens for enrollment soon. Waitlist members receive early access and exclusive pricing before doors open to the public.

→ Learn More About The Akashic Portal

And if you’re newer to the Records and want to begin building your foundation first, start here.