We are all mediums
In my last blog post, I talked about my definition of spirit. In this one, I want to talk about spirits, and how spirits relate to mediumship.
The idea of the existence of spirits is probably more challenging to the Western rationalist than the idea of “spirit”. Spirits have come to mean anything from fairies to demons, gods, ancestors, plant spirits and much more. In the Western mediumship field, there are any number of “mediums” who claim to speak with dead ancestors and provide comfort to the living from beyond the grave.
To the rationalist, this is all nonsense. To them, mediums are charlatans that prey on people’s unresolved issues with dead relatives, absolving them of guilt or relieving them of grief for a fee.
I’d like to leave this common understanding of mediums to the side for now and talk about another type of mediumship with roots deeper in our archaic past. This type of mediumship involves embodying an energy (or spirit) that we do not identify with in the “limited I” sense. Most people view themselves in this “limited I” sense. Our entire culture is predicated on constructing and maintaining this identity. Some people call this the ego. In this sense of self, there are strict boundaries around what “I” am and what “I” am not. For most people in our culture, this self-sense is a fact of life. But this “fact'' is a relatively recent phenomenon. In many cultures, the “I” is more inter-relational. People experience their identity within an interrelated structure of family, tribe or nation. The ego is still there, with just a looser definition.
In tantric Spiritual practices, gnostic forms of Christianity and shamanic practices one goal of the practice is to merge one’s sense of self or even replace one’s “limited I” self with another “higher” spirit. I believe the reason many people have difficult experiences with plant medicines is because these medicines take the “limited I” sense of self and begin to smash it apart. Our culturally-reinforced “I” self tries to resist this process and this resistance causes an immense amount of suffering.
In some wisdom traditions, the goal is the ultimate realization that none of this is actually “real” (including any sense of “self'') but that truth is so terrifying to our ego-mind that it has to be approached in steps. Those “steps” involve gradually replacing our individual consciousness with other spirits– this is the mediumship that interests me. Before I get into a discussion of my own relationship with some of these spirits (coming soon!) I want to talk about how we are all mediums.
The mediumship most people practice every day is a mediumship of all the stories we learned about ourselves and the world as children. In addition, we are also mediums for all of the stories and unhealed pains of our ancestors. These stories are imprinted into us through family and cultural relationships and we then play them out in our everyday life. Sometimes in a moment of clarity, people have the thought– “how did I get here?”-- into this relationship, into this job, into this way of being or thinking that just seemed to happen on its own. It is because that independent self we desperately hold onto is nothing more than a vessel for stories. These stories are the spirits of our ancestors, old relationships and childhood imprinting that we continue playing out in the world. I like to talk about them as spirits because that makes them alive, and it creates a setting where we are able to play with them as entities that we can engage with and ultimately change.
The process of tracking that we use in Kundalini Mediumship is to reveal who these spirits are and what they are doing inside of us. You can begin this process by being curious about what spirits are alive inside of you. Who are they? What are they saying? Where did they come from? What emotionally impactful experiences in your life (or your ancestors’ lives) imprinted them into your body/mind/spirit?