Daily Medium Life – A Reluctant Medium Follow Up

Nine months ago I made my first blog post ever all about my mediumship abilities and everything I was going through.

It’s hard to believe it’s been nine months of being public.  I still get questions and weird looks daily about what it’s like so I thought it might be a good time to check in.

The short story is that although I don’t talk about it super often and my mediumship readings make up a very small part of my practice, talking to spirit is still a very present part of my everyday life.

I think that most people think that being a medium is just me walking around seeing physical manifestations of spirits all day every day.  That is not the case. In fact, it’s pretty rare that I physically see spirits. It happens on occasion but for the most part, I get a sense that they are there and then I see them in my mind.

This week was a big one for astrological movement and I felt it very strongly.  The veil between words has a tendency to thin during the full moon, so I will be more aware of spirits. They will feel more present, a little stronger, a little bit more disruptive in my daily life.  They will break through during times when I am usually able to block them out.

So for example, when I work with Reiki clients or tarot clients, I typically turn off my mediumship ability so that I’m focused just on my client and I don’t get distracted, bu this week with everything that was going on, I  was interrupted in a reiki session and also in the middle of a reading at a tarot party by very persistent spirits that needed to talk to my clients.

That is really not the norm.  I have become very good at setting my boundaries with spirits, much the way I do with people in the physical world.  When I am off the clock, I really try to be fully off the clock. (Like when I was on vacation last month and I put up my spirit “out of office”)

I hold weekly spirit “office hours” where I will be open to communication with spirit and I also open up while I’m in session with mediumship clients, but the rest of the time, I turn on my spiritual “out of office” to give myself a break energetically.

So contrary to popular belief, I’m not walking around all day every day reading the relatives of everyone I meet.  I would be totally exhausted if I tried to do that.

With so many medium shows on TV now I think people get the impression that I’m going to walk up to them at the grocery store and start giving a reading, but personally I find that to be very invasive.  Reality TV is well-edited and those TV mediums are usually filming for weeks to get enough content for a full show. They aren’t just walking around reading constantly.

Even in other energy work sessions I give, I try not to read people unless that is specifically what they are there for because it feels ethically a little weird to me, and I respect the privacy of my clients.  If a spirit is being really persistent, I will tune in and see what all the fuss is about, but I really try to respect boundaries the rest of the time.

This week was an exception though.  When I was at a tarot party, a client’s daughter in spirit interrupted our session to come through really strong to both me and her mom.  She was very persistent and even her mom could feel the energy that she was bringing. It turned out to be very healing and a really important message, but afterwards I was super tired.

On my way home, another spirit that I am personally familiar with popped into the car with me while I was driving home. I think he was trying to help me out because I was so tired and I had a long drive, but everytime he comes around he makes my car smell like cigars (which I hate).  We had a nice little spirit chat before he popped out again and let me have some peace.

What I’ve found very interesting is that mediumship brings out my perfectionist side.  I don’t like to do anything that I’m not good at and mediumship is incredibly hard, and subjective.  There are so many different ways spirits communicate and sometimes I have to switch how I am communicating with a spirit on a dime because they don’t like to talk the way I usually do.  Spirits communicate in so many different ways and because of the way they communicate, with basically no context at all, doing a reading for someone is incredibly vulnerable.

I’ve also found that as an industry, people tend to lump all psychics and mediums in with the ones who are frauds.  This is not totally fair, Every industry has their share of frauds but for whatever reason, when it comes to metaphysics, people are especially ready to call every practitioner a fraud.  

This can be so frustrating to me since there are plenty of bad lawyers, doctors, financial advisors but you don’t find people having the same hesitation about hiring them.  I know the healing power of this work.

I’ve been so discouraged at times, and as a bit of a perfectionist myself I’ve considered giving it up several times, just to let myself off the hook.  What’s funny is that every time I do something weird will happen to convince me otherwise.

The first time, I had five client sin a row come in for reiki sessions who had a spirit with them who was desperate for me to deliver a message.  Then, I tried again and had clients come in for tarot only to have very strong spirits trying to communicate with them as well. Then this week, I said maybe I will just take a mediumship break for a bit to give myself a little more space in my schedule for some of the new work I’m doing, I had three different people reach out for readings and then that spirit show up at my tarot party to talk to her mother.

So I have to say, “OKAY, SPIRIT, I WON’T!”

I just wanted to give you all an update since I haven’t talked about it on the blog here for a while. I welcome any questions about this or anything else I do.  I’ll talk to you all next week.

In other news, this week is the absolute last call for 2020 Year Ahead Tarot Readings and New Years Release and Initiation Reiki and Tarot Combos. These are potent offerings that are perfect for you if you are trying to plan your year for maximum efficiency. They will be coming off my offerings list next week to make room for some new things that I am very excited about, so keep your eyes out for some new stuff coming next month.

The Reluctant Medium

I’ve been keeping a secret.

Two years ago, I realized I was a medium. I could communicate with the spirits of people who’ve passed.

Out of nowhere, I could feel my deceased friend’s presence and hear him talking to me in my head. It was as if he was sharing his thinking and I was hearing it instead of mine.

He showed me the circumstances surrounding his death and then gave me messages for his family. He answered some of my questions. Then, just like that, he was gone.

Nothing about this experience was scary. It was surprising — and enlightening.

All my life, I’ve had instant and strong feelings about people, sometimes even before they ever said anything to me.  My mom would say that I was always a good judge of character.

I would meet people and instantly know things about them that I couldn’t possibly know. I could “hear” if what they were saying and what they were feeling were the same, and I would say extremely specific things about the person that I hadn’t personally experienced, but that I knew were true.

Of course, I thought all of this was normal and that everyone else could do that too.

I grew up in a conservative, Catholic family. From a young age, I was told that contacting spirits was wrong.

That stuck with me into adulthood. Even as I got into yoga and reiki, I didn’t believe in mediums. I didn’t understand why anyone would want to talk to the dead.

Then I heard from my friend.

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Two years ago, I took my first reiki training.

As a long-time yogi, I’d been aware of reiki as a form of energy healing, but I considered it a bit too “woo-woo” for me.

I was surprised by how much I enjoyed the class and stunned when I realized I actually felt something.

My partner for the class was already a reiki master but was taking the introductory class because she wanted to learn more by adopting a beginners’ mindset.

After working together for the first time, she sat back and said: “You’ve been a healer in many, many lifetimes.  When it’s the right time, you will hear, and you will see.”

I stared at her thinking, “OK, lady. This is the exact reason why I avoided this woo-woo nonsense.”

After taking the level two a month later, I got really sick for about three weeks — maybe the flu, or something.

I was congested and coughing. My ears were blocked. My stomach was upset. My skin broke out like I was back in middle school.

My acupuncturist had a different idea.

This wasn’t the flu, he said, but a full-body detox. I’d gone through a reiki attunement and this was a top side effect.

When I came out on the other side, everything started getting strange. I got ringing in my ears I thought was tinnitus. I had strange pains — in my right shoulder, the outside of my shoulder joint, my bicep connection or deep inside my collarbone. 

I couldn’t replicate the pain by lifting weights or doing yoga. It would come at random times and then pass just as quickly. I went to the chiropractor and acupuncturist, but neither could find a physical reason for the pain and neither could resolve it.

After about a month, I had a breakthrough.

I had a dream about a friend who had passed a year and half earlier. In the dream, he was trying to talk to me. I could see his mouth moving but I couldn’t hear what he was saying. In the dream, I was having the shoulder pain. When I woke up, I had the sharpest pain to date. I was so confused.

I explained what happened to my acupuncturist. He thought the pain was because fear was making me block a message. I was ready to try anything at that point to make the pain go away, so I obliged him. He put a couple of needles in me. I laid there and waited for something to happen. To my genuine surprise, after about five minutes, it did.

That’s when I felt my friend’s presence.

My acupuncturist came back and took the needles out and I basically ran home without telling anyone what had happened.


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Over the next few weeks, I debated if what I had experienced was real. Was I losing my mind? Did I imagine it?  Would anyone even believe me if I told them what happened?

The pain in my shoulder persisted. Finally, I went to see my reiki teacher. On the drive to the appointment, I was talking out loud to my friend’s spirit. I was in the bargaining stage. I said that if my teacher confirmed what my friend had told me, I would talk to his family like he had asked.

I told my teacher about the shoulder pain and asked him to see what he could pick up on. He gave me a more general but still accurate description of what was going on: a male spirit that was connected to me — more as a friend than a romantic interest — was trying to get a message across, and he was being so persistent because he was concerned about someone in the living world.

This was exactly what I needed to hear, and exactly what I didn’t want to hear. I knew I had to talk to my friend’s parents.

I was so nervous walking in. My palms were sweaty. I didn’t know where to start. I told them what had happened and what my friend has said. They were floored. We were all in disbelief.

Yet, it was what I needed to see.

That experience showed me how much closure these experiences can bring, and it opened my eyes to how healing this work can be.

After that, the floodgates opened. I was getting contacted by spirits left and right. I could feel them trying to talk to me while I was driving and teaching and at work meetings.

I didn’t know how to control it. I was overwhelmed, anxious and exhausted. What had started as a gift turned into a bit of an overwhelming mess.

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I needed help.

I learned a lot: how to control my abilities, how to tune in and tune out, and how to set strong boundaries. 

That was critical. It calmed me down and helped me feel more like I was running the show, rather than spirits inundating me.

Over time, and with a lot of practice, I learned how to better communicate and how to sit and read someone.

I’ve also taken reiki level three, Kundalini reiki certification, and reiki four. My gifts, suppressed for far too long, have only grown with practice and additional trainings.

With reiki, I’ve been able to zero in on specific issues I see in people’s energy. I’m not just seeing that a person has grief in her abdomen, but that she has a complicated relationship with food stemming from comments her mother made when she was a kid.

My mediumship has also come into play. I often feel spirits come in with my clients. Inevitably, I find that whatever a client is struggling with is tied to his or her relationship or perceived responsibility to the spirit that came in with them.

Doing mediumship readings is the scariest thing I’ve done.

I feel open and vulnerable. I get a ton of information and have no context or knowledge to know if what I’m saying makes any sense. It takes a lot of trust and ability to let go of the need to be right.

I would always feel a moment of pure panic before I started and then as soon as I settled in, I would see, or more likely hear, that it was connecting for the person. 

The past two years have been a wild ride, and I’ve been navigating all of it while working a full-time corporate job, part-time yoga-teaching jobs, and living with a boyfriend for the first time ever. So much change in such a short period of time.

So why am finally going public now?

Because I’m finally making the leap. After two years of doing energy healing and intuitive coaching on the side, I’ve decided to make it my full-time gig.

In future posts, I’ll answer some common questions people have about reiki, mediumship and tarot.  I’ll be using this blog as a way to catalogue my experience and make some of these complex, abstract ideas more understandable.