I thought I’d talk a bit about my experience when I do a session. Usually, if I’m talking to a new client, I’ll give them my “new client spiel” which explains how I work, and how this might look to them.

“My job during a session is to get my own thoughts out of my head as much as possible, to create space for your loved one, whether it’s a pet or a person or a spirit guide, they need space to be heard. When I create that space and set my own logical brain aside; a side effect of that process is I may not remember something you just told me, so I might ask you to repeat a name or something you just told me.

The other side effect is I don’t really vet what comes out of my mouth, and sometimes I hear myself saying a bunch of words, and I have no idea what I just said. So sometimes I’ll ask you, “Does that make sense?” because I want to make sure that whatever was said made sense to you, because that’s what matters. If I do say something that you find confusing, you go ahead and ask whatever questions are on your mind.

Every medium has different techniques for connecting with the other side – I connect through you (the client.) I’m going to ask you to describe what the person / pet looks like, and you’re going to visualize them as you’re describing them to me. It doesn’t have to be a recent memory, just a strong one. What you’re doing when you bring up that memory is you’re creating your OWN psychic connection with them. I piggy back off of that connection you’ve just made, like you’re the telephone operator and I’m just on one end of the phone.”

At that point, a new person might ask a few more questions about how things work, but most of the time we’re ready to dive right in.

Something happened a couple of months ago that has been on my mind lately: my mother showed up during a session *for my client*. My Mom, it turns out, had some really similar life experiences to my client, and they’d known each other in life (although I didn’t know this person well at all.) My Mom was a guest star, not the main event, but it was still a surprise for both of us.

Whenever my Mom would show up for me, as I was driving or puttering around the house, the grief was still too strong for me to really have much of a conversation with her. That connection, my direct connection between me and my mother on the other side was still cloudy with grief. It’s very difficult for me to communicate through the static interference of that energy.

However, the connection between my client and my Mom was crystal clear – because I was in medium mode, I didn’t experience any of the usual pain or grief when I was focusing on what she was saying to my client. It was easy; none of the messages were for me.

It’s getting easier for me to talk to my Mom directly. Right now, she’s more of an audience to the humdrum things in my life. She really enjoys the kittens and wonders if she would’ve been allergic to Ragdolls. She talks about her calico, “Tiger” a lot, and thinks Tiger would’ve been a great name for Mikey. She totes around her cat and is always with Heidi, our family schnauzer.

When it comes to talking to my *own* spirit family, as a medium, it really depends on what’s going on in my own mind and body. I’m curious about where the static-y, disruptive energy of grief really comes from. When Mocha died in 2012, I grieved for her intensely and even asked her to go away when she came to visit during those first few weeks. But after I experienced a wonderful healing by Linda Keen, I felt happy and energetic again, overnight. I could have Mocha’s spirit around me and I wouldn’t feel sad anymore, I felt joyful that I *could* heal from this loss so quickly.

The next year when my Leo cat died, the big tabby boy I’d adopted from the Humane Society when I was 19, I felt like I’d lost a limb. I didn’t *want* to heal rapidly from that grieving. Leo would come to visit me when I was sitting in the bath. I’d feel his heavy purring body thump onto my chest and I’d just weep away in the tub, holding him.

If you’re ever worried about your relationship with your loved ones on the other side, whether you talk to them or share a cup of coffee with them in the morning, don’t feel weird. I sometimes think about how crazy I would’ve looked to someone else, holding a cat spirit in the bath tub and crying. Grief isn’t very dignified! I never really got over Leo’s death until I got Mikey. (Mikey is Leo’s second reincarnation with me in this life.) Mikey has just filled in this loss as only he can, and I have been wishing / thinking about how nice it would be if people could experience the reincarnation of their lost loved ones, say in a grandchild. But these aren’t things we really talk about, unless we’re referring to the Dali Lama. Besides, reincarnating pets is really just a fortunate side effect of their too-short life expectancy!

The year after that, my Mom’s diagnosis came down the pipe, and a year and a half later, she died too. The death of a loved one can put us in such a state of primal need, it difficult to see past your own needs and reality into the needs and reality of others. Sometimes people have conflicting needs when someone they love is dying. I had a hard time understanding and communicating my own needs at the time. That’s probably another blog post, down the road.

A few months after my mother’s death, talking *for* her to someone else was such a surreal experience. Here was my Mom, chatting away, and here I was, fully connected to her and experiencing her, without any of my own grief or pain to muddy the connection. That’s the miracle of medium mode.

Of course, after that session ended I felt all of the grief and pain you’d expect me to feel. I think I went straight out and bought some house plants. My grief had been triggered during the session, but it was happening off in a corner of my mind, in this soundproof booth part of my brain that where all of my thoughts hang out while I’m in medium mode.

That experience gave me a completely new perspective on grief. The pain of grief is just something in the monkey-mind, in that part of my personality that walks and talks through my days. That grief isn’t actually a part of my spiritual connection to the universe, and if I chose, I could just bypass it entirely.

So it makes me curious about how our minds and spirits connect to each other, and to everything else.

I *use* the client’s mind to make that spiritual connection in the first place. If the client is grieving heavily, sometimes that can muddy the connection. Usually we can get past it, by bouncing through a third party, like my own guide, one of the client’s guides or even a different family member on the other side – so grief is only relative to the person creating that feeling. THAT particular grief exists only in that individual’s personal reality. You can bypass it by moving outside your personal sphere of consciousness.

Which makes you think about how real is your real, anyway? Is medium mode more real than my every-day real? Or is it less real, since it’s detached?

Is a Buddhist’s meditative reality during his spiritual practice more real than the grocery shopping trip he did earlier that day?

Is a dream visitation from a loved one more real than their death?

What do you think, folks?