5 things you think are HIGH Vibration but are TOXIC AF
In this video Aaron Doughty recounts his 2012 awakening, describing how raising his vibration transformed his life from a low‑energy, substance‑dependent existence to a sober, purpose‑driven one. He then warns viewers about five common “high‑vibration” beliefs that actually keep people stuck. First, the literal belief in a future physical ascension and the habit of waiting for external salvation, which prevents present‑moment empowerment. Second, the starseed/twin‑flame narrative and the related limerence dynamic, which foster codependency and avoidance of inner‑child healing. Third, the demonisation of money as “evil,” which blocks practical value exchange and financial stability. Fourth, the empath’s over‑identification with others’ emotions, leading to boundary loss and burnout. Fifth, spiritual grandiosity and the misuse of conspiracy theories, often combined with skipping developmental stages in spiral dynamics (jumping from blue or orange directly to green or yellow), creating an us‑vs‑them mentality. Throughout, Doughty stresses grounding in the lower three chakras, integrating lessons rather than escaping, and offers practical tools—a free “vibrational detox” course, a 21‑day meditation, and a community called High Vibe Tribe—to help viewers detox low‑vibrational patterns and sustainably raise their vibration.
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When I raised my vibration back in 2012, my whole entire life changed. I went from feeling like a prisoner of my past, working a 9-to-5 job I did not like, feeling codependent on certain substances that I felt like I needed just to make me normal, like Adderall and other substances that I had to do to counteract the the side effects of that. And it was a feeling of being in this loop where I felt trapped, which interestingly enough was a very similar childhood dynamic that I had where I felt trapped, like I did not have freedom. But then in 2012, I had this huge epiphany shift in consciousness where I started to feel high a majority of the time being completely sober. And over the course of the next 6 months to a year, my whole entire life transformed. I went from feeling a 3 out of 10 on a scale of 1 to 10— 3, not feeling good a majority of the time— to feeling about a 7 or 8 out of 10, to completely getting rid of every substance, alcohol, partying, everything. I began meditating, healing the energy of my past. And my whole entire life transformed. I felt more free, I felt more authentic, I felt more empowered, and that's when I started to learn the power of elevating vibration. Now, there were a couple traps though that I fell into along the path of doing what I love full-time, of elevating my vibration to a level to where my whole entire life has transformed. I get to travel the world, do what I love, run live events, and embody the most authentic version of myself. However, there are certain traps that people will literally think these things are high vibe when it actually— they are keeping you locked in similar patterns, but you're not even aware of it. And once you become aware of this, you start to allow yourself to integrate to where you actually grow your roots into being grounded, and then you're able to go even higher. So to start this off, one of the things that happened back in 2012 that was a mistake that I experienced has to do with this understanding of what is called ascension, us ascending into a higher level of consciousness, which I believe is happening right now on the planet, but very different than the belief system that I had back in 2012 that actually kept me trapped, kept me locked, and kept me isolated and feeling alone. And that was that back in 2012, there was a belief that literally millions of people on the planet had that we were going to physically ascend into a higher level of consciousness. I know this sounds very out there, but nonetheless, there was this belief that many people had that were people that at the time, a lot of people thought were very like credible people that were spiritual teachers that were talking about this happening. So there was this a way of giving away authority to like these other people and then believing it. And what happened was there was this waiting of transformation for some future time. And there are people on the planet, by the way, that still believe that like, that the government's screwed and that there's money that's gonna be redistributed to people that actually deserve it and that money's not backed by gold, but they're waiting. They're waiting for ETs to land to give free technology so that we can raise and clean up the oceans. They're waiting. And one of the things that will keep you stuck where you are right now in lower states of consciousness is waiting for this ascension to happen. And in 2012, December 21st, 2012, when we were still here and we did not ascend into a higher level of consciousness, there was a recognition that this was more of a metaphor. This is more of a not so literal, but this is a, it's a thing we're doing in body. So one of the things and highest vibrational things you could do is not try to leave your body to escape to go somewhere else, but bring that higher vibrational information into your body. Stop waiting for the right time. And you may be doing this in a microcosm way where, you know, back in 2015, 2016, I knew I wanted to be on YouTube making videos, but I waited 2 or 3 years because I was waiting for someone to tell me to go for it. I was waiting to learn how to edit. I was waiting for the encouragement. And the skills, waiting, waiting, waiting. But you see, we're not gonna be saved. Humanity as a collective in the collective unconsciousness has this pattern where we're waiting for a savior, waiting for daddy to come save us all. And there's a childhood energy there, I believe, where it's like we wish we were saved when we were kids, so we're just waiting, but we have to be the ones to empower ourselves. Now, one of the second things we'll talk about is starseed. Now, with all of these things, I think it's possible they're done in a higher vibrational way, but very often what I see is people that go into, and this is gonna be related to the third one as well, when we talk about belief systems that keep people trapped. And you wanna talk about another one? Let me also throw in here twin flames. Twin flames, twin, 'cause so many people get so caught up with trying to find their twin flame. The twin flame is this even deeper than a soulmate. It is the other half to your soul. And that's the belief system people have. So therefore they're looking for the other half to their soul, which implies that they're not whole and complete already. They look for it in someone else and then they project onto this other person all their unmet childhood needs. And then if that person doesn't come around, then they think, oh my gosh, their twin flame is running. They watch videos on twin flame. There's this idea called limerence. Limerence. I'll talk more about this on a YouTube video. If you want, comment below and let me know. This idea of limerence is this, it's called a limerent object. When people feel like their needs weren't met as kids, they may become overly obsessive with getting the approval and validation of certain people in their life. They may put people on a pedestal, but what they do is they have a limerent object who they project all these fantasies on. And they want this person to come around because then it feels so high to be around this person. They give this person so much meaning that's not based in reality, but that person then becomes a limerent object from which is a fantasy in the head. And it becomes a way of not connecting with other people because there's this limerent object, this fantasy of someone's approval that probably isn't giving it to you, and that's why you're actually attracted to them. But what happens is you end up then having this dynamic where you are preoccupied and obsessive about this. And when it comes to twin flames, that's what I think honestly is happening for a lot of these people. They think it's a high vibrational idea. I'm so high vibrational, I came here to wake up. "and here's my twin flame." When really it's a codependent connection to an unmet childhood wound. And the real energy is being avoided of going into the inner child energy of looking at the shame, of feeling it and healing it, of knowing there's nothing wrong with you. Now, when we talk about starseed though, and we're gonna talk about the third one here in a minute too, which correlates to this, these are belief systems, remember, that keep people out of the present moment. And when you think about your body, think of like the bottom 3 chakras of the root chakra, the sacral chakra, the solar plexus, which is like willpower, your connection to relationship and families, and then your root chakra feeling safe. To move into a higher vibration, you must balance these 3 out to move into the heart. Now, what a lot of people do is in childhood, if you did not feel safe in the bottom 3 chakras, you may have moved up to your third eye as a survival mechanism to tune to everyone else, to understand how everyone else is thinking, feeling, and acting to say, who do I need to be to feel safe? So it's become a survival mechanism. But what happens is a lot of people that are starseeds that have this connection to the Pleiades and Arcturus and all these connections, like I said, it can be done in a high vibrational way. But what many people do is they overemphasize and they want to escape to go back home and they don't feel they don't feel connected to other humans. But it becomes this thing that rationalizes the feeling of being alone that also, for many people, keeps them from being present, keeps them trying to blast off and say, "I'm not from Earth." Well, no one— everyone is an eternal spiritual being living a temporary human experience. We all have multidimensional connections to many different facets of reality, None of us have only incarnated on Earth for hundreds, thousands of years. We're eternal. We have connections at higher levels of consciousness. Now, the reason I'm sharing that is because what happens a lot of times with this whole starseed idea is it becomes this pissing contest of who is higher vibrational. Oh, your higher self is only in the 6th dimension of the Pleiades. I am from Arcturus. I am from the 9th dimension. It becomes this, and then it becomes this thing where the energy and the roots are not here being grounded. But remember, there's a survival mechanism. A kid is not feeling safe in the body, so there's this move to the intuitive center. Now, in some ways, there are some people that they're very empathic. They can feel other people's energies. They become great at helping people heal. They become great at understanding and empathizing with other people. They become great at this intuitive connection to different realms, which can be great, but for many people keeps them trapped if they over-identify. And what you'll notice about these is that a lot of these, there can be higher vibrational expressions, but there can also be toxic connections of identification with it. So understand that one thing that I like that Bashar said once is somebody was asking about wanting to like go higher into the higher dimensions. And one thing that he said is that being grounded and focusing on feeling into the bottom 3 chakras, my interpretation of it, but it says like being grounded allows you to grow roots so that then you can go even higher. So be here now more and you will go higher, but realize you may have come here to have a physical experience. So people that get trapped in the belief systems of a starseed sometimes are people that aren't being here now. So one thing that I recommend is being honest with yourself. And I went through this stage, by the way. I went through this stage in 2012 when I was going through my awakening where I became fascinated with the Pleiadians, felt so connected to them, and then wanted to ascend December 21st, 2012. And like all of these ungrounded ideas that I later realized were metaphors. And then eventually I was like, no, I don't need to get a job. I'm adding value to the collective just by being me. And then eventually I integrated back into society. One other thing we could add in here too has to do with money. Money is an exchange of energy. A lot of times people think that avoiding money and shaming money and seeing it as bad is a high vibrational virtue. Money is a neutral concept. Everything in reality is a neutral concept. It is an exchange of energy. When you realize that when you give value, they'll hold back their spiritual gifts too, 'cause they're like, well, this is a spiritual gift. I should not be helping other people in exchange for like being able to have a living because I placed this thing on a pedestal and it needs to be this pure thing. Understand we are in a reality, we have incarnated into a reality that uses an exchange of value known as money. And I'm not saying there can't be realities or societies that don't thrive on that and don't have some bartering system. I'm not saying that it doesn't exist, but I'm saying when you see money as bad and as evil and as dirty, which I, these are all things by the way that I'm sharing that I have done at a certain point. So I'm not speaking down at you. I'm kind of like speaking to my past self of what I needed to hear. Because in 2012, 2013, I was like, money is bad. It's not backed by gold. And then guess what? Do you think I attracted any money? Do you think I was able to add value into society in exchange for some type of energy? I saw it as evil. So this is a trap that many people fall in if they become overly identified with it. Now, one of the other sides of this is the empath. The empath, the person that can feel other people's energies at a very strong level. Sometimes it can be like, well, I'm so sensitive, I can't go out in public. But we're all one. And like, that's another idea in the high vibe communities. Like, we're all one consciousness, which is true. But also the challenge and the lesson a lot of high vibe people need is to actually individuate. Is to feel the separation between you and other people, to feel safe inside of your own body, to know that other people's problems are not your thing to fix. And if you do try to fix it, you might be enabling them instead of letting them learn their lessons and grow up. So empaths can be powerful 'cause you are aware of what other people are thinking and feeling. You got this healing modality, probably really good at servicing and helping other people because you can tune into them so well. But this can be done in a toxic way if you over-identify, you try to fix and you can't set boundaries. So what is the solution? It's feeling the separation. It's feeling more inside of your bottom 3 chakras. I have the frame technique on this if you wanna check that out. The frame technique is one of the most powerful, simple techniques I've ever learned from my, I learned it from my shadow work integration coach, has to do with subject-object and understanding the separation that you can feel to feel safe inside of your own body. And you see, when you think of an empath, an empath can feel other people's fear, anger, courage, guilt, shame, 'cause they're empathic. But the key is processing your own emotion. And then you can even set boundaries so that you don't have to constantly put yourself in those situations. A lot of times also, I will, I will mention this. When there's, man, how deep do I want to get into this? There's this whole idea also of something called spiral dynamics, which I'm not going to go completely into. If you want a video on this too, let me know in the comments below. But spiral dynamics are different levels of consciousness. And when you're at those levels of consciousness, there's a spiral that moves up. Now, what happens is based on the values you have, you may be in certain levels of consciousness. And when you go through an awakening, you'll normally pop to a different level. Now, blue is the level of consciousness of religion, tradition, conformity, democracy. A lot of America is in blue. And when you have the gravity in blue, meaning your energy in blue, you value safety, you value doing what everyone else does, you value tradition. Now, when you move into orange, which is the next stage, that's capitalism, that's money, that's progress, that's science. And that's a level of consciousness that people can move into. And then green is above that. Green is more like, philanthropy, Burning Man, being vegan, helping the environment, helping other people, '70s, '80s music like Beatles. These are all very green ideas. Now these levels, when they're in the, now you move up the levels. Now what happens sometimes is people skip orange 'cause they're in blue. Like my dad was in blue. He's more orange curious now. Now what happens though is people, they may skip, when they go through awakening, they may skip all the way to green, but they skip orange and they don't learn, they think money is bad. So they don't learn, they don't ground themselves. You can't skip levels. You have to eventually go back down to learn it. That's what happened to me. Now, the reason I'm sharing this is because in every level you think you're right. You think this is the way to do things. And then when you look at the other levels, you're like, once you get, also once you move up, you can look back and remember what it was like to be orange, remember what it's like to be blue. But what happens is you end up judging the other levels. Now in yellow, which is above all this, is a level of consciousness where you realize beliefs create reality. You realize that all these other levels, whatever they believe to be true is true. But that there's not any right or wrong. It's more so about creating systems for everyone to like keep moving up the spiral. So what happens though is when we're talking about elevating vibration, a lot of people will skip a level and then say money is bad and then they're in the green. Part of green though is like also like being vegan is a very common one. And I was vegan back in 2012 and I saw that this is the right way, this is the only way, I want to ascend. And what happened is I ended up creating this belief system where I would judge people that weren't vegan. I would also judge people that weren't going through their awakening, they weren't woke. So they're all sheeple, they're all sheep, they're asleep in the matrix. What kind of spiritual grandiosity do you think that creates? What kind of us versus them mentality does it create? When it's like, this is the right way to do it. And there was a, there was, so for years, that was the perspective when then eventually I realized that they're just, they're different belief systems and it's okay for people to believe it. It's okay for people not to believe in it. We live in a reality where we're all connected, where our beliefs create our reality. One of the epiphanies for me was that plants are also, yeah, I know it gets, I'm not trying to get into the whole vegan debate right now, by the way, but if everything is energy, I realized that also plants are energy as well. So it's all just, it's all consuming more of ourselves anyways. We're all one consciousness. Now, the reason I say this though is because a toxic perspective is when we're in reality and we are judging and demanding that other people believe what we believe, which is being stuck in those different levels. So that belief may actually be keeping you stuck in green versus realizing beliefs create reality, seeing the value in it, but not trying to control it. Where it is completely valid to believe it, it is completely valid to not believe it. Well, for a long time, I was in this us versus them mentality. Which also leaks into one of the other ones, which is conspiracy theory. A lot of times people may look at conspiracy theory and say, everything's not all as it seems, bro. And while I think, I remember back in 2021 when things were going on in the world, there was a part of me that could see that I could start making a lot more content on stuff like this 'cause it would get views, people were into it. And I thought that some of it was valid. However, I see it as this thing that keeps people trapped a lot of times. It keeps people trapped in reality's messed up. There's all these things going on behind the scenes. Maybe some of them are true, but does it benefit you to be studying it nonstop? Like once you get the message, you can hang up the phone and then focus on your own vibration, focus on your own passion. For a long time, I was, oh my gosh, all this stuff's happening. I was doing a lot of research and my dreams started to be weird. I remember it just became this very negative thing to focus on with all these things going on that were wrong and all this conspiracy. Now, like I said, there is probably a higher vibrational way you could go about this, but many people get stuck in the identity with this whole thing. They become like, they always wanna figure out the next thing and everything becomes like, once you start seeing through the lens of the conspiracy stuff, everything you see is like messed up. You start having weird dreams. You start only talking about things of, start probably annoying friends and family 'cause like, what are you talking about? And I'm not saying that some of that stuff, I'm saying there could be validity in some of it. However, becoming overly identified with it maybe isn't your purpose. I made that conscious choice not to keep going down that rabbit hole because I noticed it would, de-escalate my vibration the more I'd focus on it. One thing Bashar would say when people would ask questions about it is like, which reality? Because there are an infinite number of parallel realities that exist, which one do you choose? Are you choosing ones where everything's wrong and there's all this control and all this dynamic? Now, I'm still aware that there is maybe a certain level of control with the media and all of these things, but I'm not giving my power away to it. I'm choosing to be the change I wish to see in the world by freely expressing. You see the difference? So understand that everything we're mentioning here is about integrating these aspects into ourselves. Spiritual grandiosity, spiritual ego is also the thing that keeps people back the most. This is why one of the highest vibrational things you can realize is the less thoughts you think, the more present you are, the more the divine can flow through you. The more you become identified with form, I am high vibrational, I am this, I am that, it's like an ego comes in the back door that then keeps you stuck, keeps you separated from the divine, separated from other people. And one of the best things you could do is integrate it and to let, like, I believe everyone has the ability to channel higher vibrational energy into their body by being connected to the divine because we are the divine. And that's why I think I'm able to make videos many times a week without really prepping that much. Like, yes, I just wrote this on the board 10 minutes before I started this video, but it just kind of comes through every single day that I make these videos because there's an intention of adding value. So becoming aware of these can really Shift your life. Now, part of the thing we do, we do something called a vibrational detox, a low vibrational detox inside that of High Vibe 101, which is my free course, $1,000 course for free inside High Vibe Tribe, which is also free community. For a while longer, you can experience the course, go through it, and tell me, give me your feedback so that I can make it better. It's going to be in the top of the description box below. Join High Vibe Tribe, check it out. And then also, if you want a meditation for elevating your vibration to the next level, I have a meditation. Read the comments to see what's possible, but listen to this meditation for 21 days and watch what happens. This meditation will change your dominant vibration.
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