Looking For A Spirit Person

Generally when I conduct Message Circles I say a short prayer, close my eyes, put out my "Open For Business" sign to the spirit people, and then wait. In a moment or two the spirit people will begin to take shape in a way that is specific enough for me start identifying their details and assigning them to whoever is sitting around me.

If I'm doing this at my home, I can tell when we're nearing the end because the feeling of energy from my porch (where I ask the spirit people to wait) begins to diminish. If I'm doing the Circle at another facility or someone's home, I just go through each spirit person until I find, when my eyes are closed and I'm listening, that no new information or details are coming to me.

At my July Message Circle at Opal Moon in Croton, NY, I had gone through this process, related all the spirit people who were there for me, and was getting ready to close the Circle. A family of three women asked if I would bring someone through for them who hadn't come in, and whom they really wanted to hear from. I don't often follow through with such a request because they usually come at the end of the Circle, and that sort of request lends itself more to a private reading. After all, no one else in the Circle got to ask for a specific message.

I hadn't really been satisfied with the spirit people I had brought through for this family though. There hadn't been any real hits, or zingers, that had the family members laughing or crying or absolutely identifying their spirit person. My feeling is if I don't give the client this level of detail, then I'm just like any other run-of-the-mill medium who could (for all I know) be making the whole thing up. Yes, I'm one of the most skeptical people out there!

So I asked for the spirit's first name, and went looking. What that means is I close my eyes (I'm pretty visual, and this helps me concentrate) and instead of waiting for something to appear on the inside of my eyelids, I kind of push out into the darkness that is there. I stretch my vision as if I'm peering towards a very far off horizon to see if I can detect any movement there or any change. I may do that looking left, center and right. I try to be patient, all while my conscious mind is taunting me: "You suck. These poor people can see right through you. They can see you don't know what you're doing. They can see you're a fraud."

Yeah, that stuff goes through my mind. I don't usually believe it, but when I have to look, summon, or fight for an impression I begin to doubt myself. Because the clock is ticking, everyone's waiting, I'm already ready to close up shop and go home.

I also tune in to my feelings. I concentrate super hard on locating or identifying any twinge or emotion that begins to even faintly crop up. My feeling is if a spirit person didn't show up at a Circle, either they have a very good reason for staying away or I am not picking up on their frequency. So in this exercise I just heighten my awareness as much as I can. It's difficult to describe, and kind of difficult to do: I can't sustain it for more than a few seconds. It's like diving into a pool to retrieve something from the bottom of the deep end; I can only dive down for a few seconds before coming back up for air. And every time I have to come back up I'm aware that people are waiting for me to deliver. It's pretty stressful, which is the perfect way NOT to feel when trying to find a spirit person.

Finally, after about three whole minutes of this kind of work (try it, it's MUCH longer than you think!) I thought I felt something. I leapt on it like a terrier and began to drag it back from the far horizon closer to my experience.

The feeling I got was a very slight feeling of being "off" or out of balance. I brought it up to the family, with my usual connection of recreational or pharmaceutical drug use. They could confirm some of the medicinal drug use. I felt I saw either a hand weight or a baby rattle, neither of which they could identify. And it went this way back and forth, a "sort-of" identifying detail, then one we couldn't place. We got a little closer to identifying him clearly when I saw him stick out his tongue at me, and it was evident he was making fun of me. The family would concur that he would do such a thing. Still, it wasn't enough for me or for them. He showed that he smoked, they agreed -- but so what, lots of people smoked. Still not enough for me.

He showed me a heartbreak connected with him, which the family validated. But then the next detail wasn't a hit. I wasn't getting enough detail, a few physical things, but finally an overall feeling from the spirit that he was losing patience with me. First he was making fun of me because I wasn't interpreting his symbols clearly enough (which the family validated, as he had a taunting kind of streak when alive), and threw up increasingly ridiculous symbols for me to try to interpret. Then he stopped, kind of with a feeling of "Enough! I'm very busy! Wrap it up!"

His mother asked, "what does he say?" and immediately the response came to me, "they don't have their hooks in me any more." Which caused quite a lot of laughter from the family, and had a two-fold meaning: he had been an alcoholic, and died from complications of that addiction after time in the hospital hooked up to things. He talked about a richness or texture in his perception now that he wasn't able to enjoy before, which seemed to describe emerging from the fog of alcoholism.

So these were pretty good hits, but I still wanted to give this family more. So I begged this impatient spirit for one more detail, one really specific message that would comfort his people. He talked about Edgar Allen Poe, and his poem about the Raven, specifically the line about knocking at the chamber door. He said this knocking, this door, would be how they would know him when he came to visit. One family member gave a happy shout: another medium had delivered the same message that inexplicable knocking would actually be this spirit announcing his presence. His mother said just days ago she'd thought she'd seen him at her door. He wanted them to know they weren't making it up, it was really him when they either heard knocking or had the visual impression of him it would be by or in a door.

Finally! The spirit person seemed to pack up his energy really quickly as though he had to rush off. I wanted to ask him where he was going and what he was doing that he had to get back to. I wanted to know why he hadn't voluntarily shown up during the Circle. But even before I got those thoughts formulated he told me, "Not now," and left.

In my practice now I plan to ask some of these questions:

"What occupies you in the spirit world?"
"Are you traveling around this globe, other worlds, dimensions?"
"What does it look like there?"
"Are you aware of past lives, or of a plan to return?"

I hadn't ever bothered with these issues before, because I wanted to get their identity out to their people more than anything. I think I felt there was always time to get to this "unimportant" stuff. And frankly, I'd read some books by other mediums who described the afterlife in ways that just didn't seem plausible, or seemed too New Age-y. Castles in the sky, great libraries filled with scrolls (who needs to read when you're a spirit?), heavenly meadows and angelic beings. It just seemed like crap. That's human stuff, isn't it?