Big Toes and Higher Selves
Do you mean, I’m not all there is?
(This post was originally published on my Substack, pameladellpalmer.substack.com on April 10, 2026)
I was thinking, this morning, about souls and higher selves and spirit guides, and about what their roles are, and how it’s all a bit confusing.
A rather weird analogy popped into my head, as happens pretty often. And then I asked my guides for some clarification.
I thought I’d share this little adventure with you, in case you’ve experienced some of this same confusion.
Growing up, I was taught that I’m a body with a soul. I think most of us were, if we were taught about souls, at all.
And yet this is incorrect.
First of all, I’m not my body. I’m the consciousness inhabiting the body. But it’s also not quite correct to say that I’m the soul. Because my soul is so much more vast than the little part that’s currently focused into this body. As is yours.
It’s kind of like if you dip your left big toe into a pool of water and the minute it goes into the water, it can no longer see what it’s attached to, and it promptly forgets it was ever part of the body.
Your left big toe feels abandoned. Scared. Alone.
But not really alone, because there are a lot of other toes down there talking to each other, toe wrestling, or grabbing coffee at the local crab cafe.
It’s important to note that you didn’t place your toe into this particular pool of water on a whim, or by accident. Not at all. There are experiences that you want to have, through that toe, that you can’t have any other way.
You have a plan for your toe, but once it goes into the water, it has free will. That was the deal you made with it beforehand.
Now, your hope, today, is that it will make its way into that sunny spot in the water, but you can’t just move it there. It has to decide to move there on its own.
So, you enlist the help of a couple of your friends whose toes are not in the water at this time. “Coax it towards that sunny part of the pool, please?”
“Sure!” they say as they grab their goggles, snorkels, and invisibility cloaks.
Your friends, who will act as guides, can’t directly interfere, but they can attempt to gently influence your toe. They sink under the water, see the patch of sunlight that they know is your goal, and notice a group of toes playing golf in that direction.
One of them pokes his head out of the water, pulls the snorkel from his mouth and says to you, “Send your toe a desire to play golf.” Popping the snorkel back in, he sinks once more under the water as you direct the thought to your left big toe that it really wants to play golf.
Your toe won’t know where the idea came from, but when it sees the group of golfer toes, it heads toward them, suddenly desiring to play.
Your friend’s hand shoots up out of the water in a thumbs up.
Step by step, you and your friends work together to coax your toe, in this manner, into that patch of sunlight. Why? Because it’s fun!
And because when your toe finally wanders into the sunshine, it laughs with joy – a joy that lights you up all the way to your fingertips and scalp, and has your friends leaping out of the pool with whoops of satisfaction, sharing a watery high-five.
With your mission now complete, you pull your foot out of the water.
Your left big toe looks around with surprise, blinking as if it’s just awakened from a dream. As it stares at the other toes, and up at the rest of the body, it begins to smile with recognition and remembrance.
You dry off your left big toe with great care as your other toes squeeze in tight and give it a big welcome home hug. Perhaps you massage it gently with your most expensive moisturizer as you thank it for its bravery, then you paint a beautiful star on its toenail that makes it sigh with happiness.
As you stand and smile at your grinning friends, wet towels draped around their shoulders, one of them hands you her goggles and snorkel. “My turn,” she says. “I want to see if my right littlest toe can get over her shyness and make some new friends.”
The above analogy brought up more questions for me, so I turned to my guides, asked my questions, and channel-typed their answers.
Are the soul and the higher self two different things?
Yes and no, depending upon how you look at it, and how you define those terms. For the purposes of this discussion, we will use the terms interchangeably.
All right. Why do we need guides? Is it true that the higher self can’t help us all that much?
It is that the higher self is learning and processing right along with you. It does not feel your emotions, at least not the lower ones. It truly cannot go into those lower depths, and it does not experience your physical pain, not in the way you do.
However, it is acutely aware that you’re having the experiences. It’s watching. It’s learning, as you learn. It’s cheering you on. But it is essentially too connected to you to be a good guide. It is, in fact, you.
Therefore, it needs the help of others. Which would be us.
Okay, so tell me this. I’ve heard it said that as we rise in vibration, we’re becoming, more and more, our higher selves.
This is true.
What does that mean?
Well, go back to what we just said – that the higher self cannot go down into those lower depths of emotions and experiences, except through you, the human. But as you rise up out of those depths and into higher and lighter frequencies, it is able to merge with you more fully. Or, more accurately, you are more fully able to merge with it.
We become one?
To some extent. It is not that the human loses free will, not at all. Or that the human ceases to be who they are at the personality level. You will continue to be you. But you will also know yourself, more and more, as part of the whole of your higher self.
Do you mean I’ll know everything that my higher self knows?
No. That would utterly overwhelm you.
So, what does it mean?
The best way we can explain it is like this. Imagine you are heading off on an adventurous vacation in the jungles of Peru, where you will not have access to WIFI. You’ll need some guidebooks and reference manuals, so before you leave, you download the six books that have the information that might be useful onto the Kindle app on your phone.
You could download far more books — books on knitting or on cooking vacations in France — but they’d just clutter up your Kindle app. You know it’s best if you only download the books you might actually need, so that you can find them easily.
As you, the human, rise higher and higher in vibration, you are able to access more and more of the knowledge, gifts, wisdom, and abilities that your higher self has accumulated throughout eons and incarnations, both on physical worlds and in the higher dimensions.
But…and this is key…you are only able to access that knowledge, and those gifts and abilities, that serve your plan for this lifetime. And only as you are ready. By which we mean vibrationally in alignment with, similar to reaching new levels in a video game.
You, for example, greatly desire clairvoyance, and you’ve been told that you possess that gift. Yet you’ve been unable to access it in any significant measure.
Is that because I haven’t reached the level of my life-slash-video game where I can unlock it?
That is correct.
In the past, it was rare for humans to awaken at all, let alone come to realize that they have access to a vast library of knowledge and wisdom, and a wonderful array of gifts and abilities, through their higher selves. (And yes, even though what is potentially available to you is only a small fraction of all creation, it is still quite vast.)
However, you are living in a different time. More and more of you are awakening to this truth every day, whether through your own experiences, and writings such as these, or simply through a feeling in your heart that you are connected to something far greater than your human self, something that loves you fiercely and unconditionally. It matters not what name you give it.
All it takes to rise in vibration is to allow that unconditional love in, and to reflect it back to the world, in each moment, as fully as you are able. As you do so, you align more and more with your higher self, with your divinity, and more and more becomes available to you in increasingly extraordinary ways.