A session is rarely without dialogue from one or more spirits surrounding a client.
These beings can be ancestral, transient, or attached to a miasm for a number of reasons. I find myself listening with one ear to a client and the other to the spirit world.
One story is told via the living, and sometimes another through the dead. Holding space while thoughts, emotions and memories cross parallel realms and boundaries, sometimes with a power struggle ensuing between those voices I am fiercely listening to. The lines become blurred for the storytellers, and trauma has a life all its own. Even if the stories are different, the traumatic thread is shared between this realm and the other, and negotiating various techniques to support a healthy understanding surrounding the miasm is key to every relationship that we are bonded to in the spirit world. I have found that even when my clients have little memory of their traumatic experience, it is being relayed to me by a spirit who also endured the trauma along with the client. The influence a spirit attachment has on in this world and on our stories can be intense, sometimes confusing our own thoughts and feelings. I have spent many hours holding space while assisting clients in disengaging with the “outside noise”, or those beyond the veil. Trauma is overwhelming. Our relationship to it can also be overwhelming to the point we disassociate. It is in that space we allow ourselves to become portals for the unseen to join us in our wounding, to relive the story in our earthly bodies as we try to reconcile and create a story that will carry us through. As individual trauma becomes collective, many feel the heaviness and the burden of bearing the weight of their own stories while having a nagging feeling that they are not alone in their pain.
What I love is that people are really seeing this on their own. In the last few years, many are truly recognizing that some of their experiences and the ways in which they are holding space for them are not without influence from trauma from their past, their parents past, their grandparents past, and so on.
The one question I always ask clients when working through trauma is “What do you have to gain by keeping company with the trauma?”
Then I ask them the same question about their parents and so on. It is not about judgement. It is about them being honest and real with what keeps them safe in this world while they tell their story.
When a client begins to allow their relationship with their story to become more honest, they begin to take accountability for their vulnerabilities, their strengths and their weaknesses. It actually creates a gentle boundary with the spirit world and lessens the power struggle involved in ancestral memory and lineage. This opening grants permission to those in the spirit world to create their own relationship to the same or similar trauma, thus empowering all involved to perhaps, one day, have a new story to tell, a healed one.