Dear Soul Arcanum:
On Christmas Eve in 2003, my daughter (who was 25 years old) and my grandchildren (who were three and six years old) were murdered. I have been to Spiritualist churches and had my girls talk to me, so I know they have continued on in the afterlife. What I want to know is how I can do this myself. I talk to them all day and most of the night. I say my prayers and ask God to help me, but I never feel my girls around me. Please, do you think you could tell me what to do? Love to you!
– Elaine
Dear Elaine:
My heart goes out to you; I can’t imagine how it felt to lose your loved ones in this way. I do understand your disappointment with your attempts at spirit communication, however. Like you, my desire for spirit contact was born when someone I loved dearly passed. In my case, it was my first love who died at a young age, and I wanted nothing more than to connect with him again. It was thus very upsetting to me when I started to interact with other spirits, but not with him.
While I believe that with the right approach, spirit communication is possible for everyone, please keep in mind that even established mediums can’t always connect with particular spirits.
So why would the spirits we most desire to connect with elude us? There are a couple of reasons this often happens. First, in order to link with spirits, we must have a very high vibration, which means we must be in a state of great joy and peace. If someone we love more than life itself crosses over, it may be very hard to achieve that vibration when thinking of them. Grief is about as low in vibration as one can get, so to link with the people we love the most, we may have to spend a lot of time healing after their deaths before we’re able to think of them with love and joy. This is why a medium may be able to bring them through when we cannot.
Another thing that often happens with those we’ve loved dearly is that they are so close we don’t distinguish their energy as separate from our own. If they were a big “part of us” when they were alive, then this becomes even more true after they cross over. If a spouse is trying to communicate with us from beyond, it may seem like nothing more than our own thoughts coming through. If a stranger or an acquaintance reaches out from the other side, however, it may feel more like “someone else” is there.
This is similar to our ability to sense people’s presence when they’re living. Imagine you’re in the kitchen and your daughter is in the living room. In the back of your mind you know she is there even if you haven’t seen her there with your physical eyes. You may not be consciously thinking about where she is, but at an unconscious level, you can sense her presence. Now picture that a stranger is in your house, and you suddenly sense a change in the atmosphere. Even when a stranger is benevolent, our instincts will alert us when someone we don’t know is nearby.
By way of another example, unless you printed this out, your computer is on right now, and it’s making its normal electrical hum. Until I drew your attention to it, however, you were not conscious of this noise. It is there so often that you have learned to tune it out. If your computer started making a clinking noise – something you’re not used to – it would get your attention immediately.
This is the difference between the presence of the spirit of a loved one we were close to and other spirits. The loved ones may be there all the time, but because they are so familiar to us, we don’t take conscious note of it. We have to learn to listen with “new ears” to hear subtle sounds running in the background.
To complicate matters further, the non-physical is not accessed “out there somewhere,” but rather from within. When we look for spirits in our outer physical world or expect to hear or perceive them with our physical senses, we may be disappointed. It’s important for people who have never had conscious communication with spirits before to understand that this is a very subtle, internal experience. Have you ever been doing something and felt someone looking at you, then glanced up to find out your were right? This is how subtle this feeling is.
You described how you talk to your daughter and grandchildren all day. It sounds like you are very verbal/auditory, so you are probably trying to get answers clairaudiently. To me this is the hardest form of spirit communication because language is already a step removed from the heart of a message. It’s not universal the way that images and feelings are.
It’s my understanding that this is also the hardest way for spirits to communicate with us. The non-physical is a place of energy and mental telepathy, not spoken or written language. When we receive messages from spirits, we are the ones who usually translate the thought energy of the message into words; not the spirits. To get names and verbal answers is thus relatively very difficult.
It’s easiest for spirits to communicate in the language of emotion, which is pure energy. This is why we may feel a wash of love when a spirit is reaching out to us – there are no words for that sort of feeling. So if you’re just getting started with spirit communication, you might want to begin with basic instincts like those gut feelings that someone is there. Often people who are grieving do have these feelings tip them off to the presence of a loved one in Spirit, but they dismiss them as wishful thinking. The more you work with and trust those feelings, the more this form of awareness will grow.
If you’re having trouble even sensing a presence like this, try doing something that puts you in a very high vibration (a feeling of peace and joy) first, and then open up and “feel” for your loved ones. This may be something you simply love, or if you can, you might journal about the best times with your daughter and grandchildren, and get yourself into a state of profound happiness and appreciation for the wonderful memories you have. Then when your heart is swelling with love and joy, stop and close your eyes and ask to feel their presence.
If it is too hard for you to think about them and remain joyful, you might have to begin by asking for them to meet you in your dreams. Many people only have contact with loved ones in their dreams because that is the only time their vibration is high enough and their minds are open enough for this sort of thing to happen. If you begin to work with your dreams (and there are lots of books and articles on this subject) and you set a conscious intention every night of meeting up with them in your dreams, it will begin to happen.
Above all, you must both believe that you can do this and that the successes you achieve are REAL. Trust in your own experiences and be open to them taking whatever shape they want to take. You may be listening for a verbal answer, for example, when signs, feelings, mental images, or so-called “coincidences” are happening all around you. Don’t expect a marching band to ring your doorbell with a singing telegram; instead, listen carefully for whispers in your mind or subtle feelings throughout all of your being and trust them. If you FEEL it’s real, then it’s real.
Lucky for us all, spirit communication seems to be getting easier and easier as the human race evolves and the vibration of the planet rises. So what may have been hard for you yesterday could happen easily tomorrow. I wish you deeply healing, comforting, and undeniably real interactions with your loved ones, Elaine.
– Soul Arcanum
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