My Mediumship Journey
My own journey into exploring death and what lies beyond began 12 years ago when my mother was diagnosed with triple negative breast cancer and given a 5% survival rate. My father relapsed when we received this news and spiraled into his own life and death battle with alcoholism. I am an only child and was living across the country in California at the time. Watching my family and support system disappear before my eyes quickly made me realize I needed to find another form of emotional support if I hoped to survive this myself. I had to find support that didn’t die and didn’t depend on someone or something outside myself. I had to find spiritual support.
Having grown up in the church, I knew about God and angels and Heaven, but at that time in my life, all of that felt too intangible to hang onto. I needed something more secure and solid to grasp, something beyond just blind faith… I needed to learn from those who had walked through the greatest fear that was facing me now – the fear of death, the fear of losing our loved ones. I wanted to know more about this teacher we walk side by side with from the day we’re born. I wanted to prove I could and would survive it. And I wanted to believe that what I had grown up being told in the church was true, that heaven was real and that we’ll someday meet again.
To get acquainted with death, I turned to books as my guide. People really, because people write the books. But it was books that buoyed me up during this time, and began to open my mind. Books by those who had an up-close knowledge of and intimacy with the subject. Books by hospice workers and nurses, books by spiritual teachers, books by scientists, books by those who had experienced NDE’s (Near Death Experiences), books by mediums.
The books written by doctors and nurses and hospice workers astounded me with their similarities. Their stories showed me what people experienced when dying was statistically impossible to chalk up to mere coincidence. How so many spoke about seeing a white light, about deceased loved ones appearing to the person in the days before their death, about how the energy shifted and changed in the room when the spirit left the body.
The spiritual texts I read, written by various yogis and ascended masters throughout the ages, spoke to me through the lens of the long story from a higher source. It was big picture thinking that made sense to me and finally answered some of the questions I had never found satisfactory answers to relating to karma, reincarnation and the “why me” question we all ask ourselves at some point.
My favorite text from this time (still my favorite today) was Autobiography of a Yogi. Written by Paramahansa Yogananda in the 1940’s, it is a direct account of his life and path towards becoming a yogi and bringing that wisdom to the West. Autobiography of a Yogi was a book that George Harrison kept in stacks by his door and handed out to anyone who came over. The only book on Steve Jobs iPad when he died.
The scientific spiritual books fed my young adult left brain which needed more than just a feeling or faith to go off of. Reading about quantum physics – how energy can not only never be destroyed but can also never be truly separated once linked – appeased the skeptic in me and helped me see how some of this “woo woo” might actually be real.
But the thing that had the biggest impact on me was reading about regular everyday people who had glimpsed the other side and come back to tell about it through their NDE’s. This to me felt like the most trustworthy form of “evidence” – straight from the source. There was no way to explain away what these people had experienced, both how they had defied the odds physically and survived “the impossible” and how thousands of people could come back with such similar stories about what they experienced on the other side.
Somewhere in one of these books someone mentioned mediumship, and as I dove into this topic and began to read more, another door in my mind opened, another safety net appeared to appease my fears. Reading about mediumship affirmed to me that not only do our souls go on, and not only will we be reunited after death, but also that the communication line between the physical world and the spirit world can stay open while we are here. This gave me great comfort to know that even if my worst nightmare happened – if I lost both of my parents – they would not only still be around me, but I could learn to communicate with them.
Uplifted by this information, I navigated the life and death situation playing out before me with a lot more grace and peace from that point forward. I feel so incredibly grateful and lucky to share that my mom defied the odds and made a full recovery. My father continued to struggle over the next decade, in and out of rehab, on and off the wagon. In early 2020 the situation was not looking good, and as the pandemic began and the panic mounted, I found myself brought back to mediumship. Up until that point, I had kept it in my back pocket as a knowing. Knowing IF I needed to study mediumship it was there, but with so much else going on in my life it didn’t feel like a priority to fit in. The pandemic brought it back in as priority.
Finding myself isolated across the country watching life and death struggles play out all around me, I worried that I might never see my family again. That Covid might take their lives. That my father might finally succumb to his self-destruction. I kept reading my books to buoy me and give me hope, but after one particularly harrowing relapse experience with my Dad I decided it was time to jump in. There might not be much time left. I had to learn how to communicate with the other side in case my Dad wasn’t going to make it through this year.
In perfect divine timing, a local psychic medium announced that she was leading an online course for beginners that fall. I signed up right away and felt immediate support from Mary’s style of teaching and the community she created. Her way of explaining the intangible broke down the “woo” of mediumship for me in a way that I could grasp and understand. Authentic and encouraging, Mary spoke of her own experience developing her abilities and assured us that we could all do the same. Her course gave me the courage to dive in deeper and was the perfect container for my beginner practice.
Strengthened by what I experienced in Mary’s course, which I would describe as glimmers of connection with the other side, I let fate take the wheel when another mediumship course dropped into my lap a few months later. What drew me to this course was that it emphasized something called “evidential mediumship,” which focused on bringing through information from the other side that could be verified by the sitter.
This spoke to me as someone who did not take this work lightly and wanted to assure those who were skeptical that this is real. If I was going to be practicing mediumship, I wanted to make sure that what I was bringing through was not only healing and helpful, but valid and verifiable. I also found it refreshing that the teacher, Suzanne Giesemann, came from a background that was the complete opposite of the “woo world.”
Her previous career was as a U.S. Navy commander and aide to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. She didn’t believe in any of this stuff until her stepdaughter was struck by lightning and killed in a freak accident, and the session she had with a medium following her death made her a believer. So much so that she began studying mediumship full time and over a decade later, became one of the most well-known mediums in the world. She was not a born medium, she was a learned medium. Like what I was trying to do.
Suzanne’s course emphasized that we all have the ability to communicate with the spirit world, that it’s like building a new muscle. You wouldn’t work out for two weeks and say “I don’t have a six pack yet so I guess it’s not working,” right? Through mediumship I learned that intention is everything and the first rule of mediumship (not to be confused with fight club!) is you don’t question what you see. Meaning, you don’t try to give the image you are seeing meaning … You don’t analyze it, you don’t judge it, and you certainly don’t dismiss it. In a practice session, you always say what you see, no matter how trivial or silly it may seem. You can’t be afraid of getting it wrong.
As a former people-pleaser and approval seeker, this “dare to fail” mentality was (and still is!) particularly difficult for me to embrace. In the beginning, I had a hard time even opening up to let anything in. It was almost like I was blocking out messages from fear of getting it wrong, from fear that it was just my imagination. But what I’ve learned through continued practice over the years is that it always feels like your imagination at first. It was only when I began to open up to the possibility that what I was imagining could be a message from spirit that I began to receive information that could be verified by my sitter.
Also, spirit doesn’t discriminate form. My first holy-shit-aha communication moment was with a woman’s cat! I love that this was my first verified experience, as growing up I had a wild Maine Coon cat named Melissa (my favorite name at age five!) and cats have always had a special place in my heart. After Suzanne’s course had ended, I joined an online mediumship development circle with some of the students from the course. Every Monday night we would meet virtually to pair off and practice reading for each other and then discuss as a group what we had experienced.
Up until that night I had experienced what I previously described as “glimmers” … somewhat getting the essence or look or personality of my sitter’s loved one but nothing that was truly verifiable. As a student of evidential mediumship I was not satisfied with the vague messages I was receiving and prayed for a wow moment to let me know, this is real! Enter Mitzy …
As I set the intention to tune into Allison’s cat during our practice session (the sitter doesn’t always specify who they would like you to contact but in this case my sitter was clear she wanted to hear from her cat), I entered into “mediumship mode” and tried to let go of my thinking mind. I instead set my vibration in tune to the world or spirit, welcoming in any visions or images of favorite toys or kitty treats that wanted to appear. To my disappointment, nothing of the typical cat content arose, and for most of the session, nothing at all arose … it wasn’t until the very last minute before the timer went off that an image of hands presenting a bouquet of lilacs appeared clear as day in my mind’s eye.
Thrown off by the randomness of this image, which didn’t conjure up any cat associations for me, my old perfectionist tendencies briefly considered dismissing it altogether and not sharing at all. But then I remembered my oath as a student of mediumship – to share authentically whatever I receive, no matter how trivial or silly it might seem. So as I delivered my message to Allison with unsure inflection and braced for failure, you can imagine my shock when she burst into tears and exclaimed, “Ohmygosh, Mitzy!”
I couldn’t fathom how lilacs could elicit this response until she shared that she had had a reading with a professional pet medium last week, who had told her, “Your cat is telling me that her sign for you is lilacs, so anytime you see lilacs that is her saying hello.” JACKPOT!! I almost fell off my chair and cried with her because I was so shocked and happy. I finally had my evidential mediumship moment that verified for me beyond a doubt that this work is real, and that I can do it too!
The experience brought me so much joy. I laughed out loud that my first verifiable spirit connection was with a cat, and that the love from this animal in spirit came through so strongly that it brought tears of joy to my sitter. I helped do that!! And it was so clear that if I had been too afraid of getting it wrong and didn’t share that information, that moment never would’ve happened. That was a huge turning point and huge lesson for me in my practice.
My dad ended up making a full recovery and thankfully I didn’t need to use my newfound skills for my original purpose. But I know that someday both of my parents will die, and that other people I love will die … and that it is all an evitable part of life. But now, instead of being afraid of it or feeling out of control around death, I feel a whole lot more comfort and grace around it with mediumship a part of my life and practice.
And let me be clear, I am still practicing. I don’t always get clear and consistent information, but when I do, it blows my mind every time. I don’t advertise myself as a medium because I am still a student, still learning, but I also don’t dismiss the real messages I have received from the spirit world, messages that have been verified by loved ones here on earth in my practice sessions. And what I feel most passionate about right now, more than being a medium myself, is helping people know that they have this ability too. That mediumship is a gift available to all of us.
I hope that by sharing some of my experience with you here, it invites you to open up your own mind and investigate what lies beyond. Don’t take my word for it, practice yourself and see what happens. I will be doing more events on this topic to come, stay tuned!