Reflecting on Vessel Work & Looking at Mediumship
Have you found your ideas about the world and the way it works changing recently? It feels like it’s more than just an Aquarius season thing. It could even be more than the transition from a Hanged Man year (2019 > 2 + 0 + 1 + 9 = 12) to a Death / Emperor year (13 follows 12, but 2 + 0 + 2 + 0 = 4), but that seems weighty enough for me. I know it is for me—Hello, North Node return in Cancer. It’s why I leaned so heavily into the season of the Crab and focused on “Vessel Work” for my astrological divination challenge for Cancer, the Wave Skimmer divination challenge.
In the Vessel Work exercises, I explored mediumship as a diviner who delivers a message. Divination is about being a medium in the sense of someone who delivers a message. The idea was to make sure that we were taking care of the vessel through which our divined messages are delivered (our intuitive workspace and mind–body–soul unit). That’s because it’s very easy for that vessel to be clogged with gunk or, conversely, stripped bare. And those who are either new to divining or are connecting to new energies often don’t know or realize that they need to take care of themselves. A nap and hot tea isn’t enough after a while. You have to get in there for cleaning and repairs!
At the time that I made the challenge, I wasn’t all that comfortable with the term medium with its other, more Hollywood-movie implications. Who can say with certainty that they can communicate with spirits? For me, I couldn’t even say that with uncertainty because I couldn’t tell you that I even believed spirits exist. (I didn’t deny it, but I didn’t know whether I believed it.) But now I can. I can tell you that I believe that spirits (as manifestations of divine energy) exist, that is. And I also believe that we can communicate with them, although I personally can’t guarantee to someone else that I’m communicating with a spirit, even less so with a specific personality. I’d love to help you do that, but I can’t guarantee when it’s happening. It’s a matter of faith and belief, although there are certainly “tests” you can do in an attempt to verify.
I’ve recently written about some of my experience with the Spirit Keeper’s Tarot, and I promised that there was more to the spiritual development on that front. So in the interest of completing the Wave Skimmer challenge, I want to share with you some of my experience with Vessel Work and my growing understanding of mediumship, the kind of mediumship that many of us assume “medium” implies, not the tepid definition I said was appropriate to any diviner.
And in case you’re curious, the card that I drew in Exercise 10 for communicating my Vessel Work experience to you all was the Queen of Wands, also known as the Head Witch in Charge.
It’s taken me many months to write about the Vessel Work that I did, almost half a year. My thoughts on mediumship were just emerging then after a series of readings pointing me in that direction, which is why I created exercises for Vessel Work. That my North Node is in Cancer, the sign of my Descendant, didn’t hurt as I decided that I had to force myself to do the work. What follows is a bit meandering, even more so than my normal posts, because my own beliefs meander. I think that when you come at certain beliefs from straight-on, you lose something, especially if it doesn’t hold up to rational accounts of everyday experience.
Six months after that Vessel Work and many more signs leading in that direction have led me to new revelations about myself and my connection to spirits, magic, and divine energies around me. What tipped things over the edge for me to share more about my beliefs was not the magical experience I had with the Spirit Keeper’s Tarot, but a tarot reading I had from its creator, Benebell Wen. In that reading, I asked about mediumship, and she drew several relevant cards encouraging my ownership of the ability and the title, including the Necromancer (the Moon) and the Eminence (9 of Pentacles). But more importantly, Benebell said something along the lines of “Your spirit guide is frustrated because you’re being sent all these signs, and you see them and understand them, but then you just don’t believe that they’re possible.” I’m supposed to believe it and own it. It felt so right and so true. I don’t know why I don’t believe the ”good” messages. Well, I do, but I’ve talked about some of that in my previous posts. The point is that I want to be able to help others through working with spiritual energy, although I don’t think that’s a requirement of a transformative tarot reading. If you think spirits are nonsense, then that’s fine with me. I’ve been there and still had great tarot readings.
Now, before I started my first divination challenge a year ago (the Star Seeker challenge), I would’ve told you that tarot (for me at least) was almost entirely mundane, a sort of psychoanalysis with cards. Certainly I’d done magical work with the tarot at points in my life, but it wasn’t how I saw the cards working in any way outside of special scenarios, like Halloween or a solstice. I still think that tarot can be an excellent tool for mundane personal work. But I was also lying to myself. That was partly based in my own fears of judgment, by myself, my loved ones, and strangers. I thought some ideas that others had were fairly out there, and I saw my own initial beliefs in magical possibility as a potentially slippery slope to really questionable thought patterns and practices.
There are a lot of ethically dubious practices and people involved in intuitive and occult and divinatory work (in any line of work really, especially where people in need and/or people of faith are involved). It can be hard to determine whether someone is a fraud or just having an off day or accidentally connecting to the wrong energy or delivering a message out of sync with the present. And because of that, I’ve never wanted to lean too heavily on the spiritual connections that I sometimes feel. I never want to oversell myself or promise something that I can’t actually prove and, on still some days, don’t firmly believe. It’s just easier and less legally murky to talk about self-reflection and personal transformation.
But sometimes I’ve just felt things or seen events playing out in my head in the middle of a reading. Sometimes they’re metaphorical, and I always explain them as examples to help put an abstract interpretation into a real-life situation. I don’t always know which of those is a genuine psychic hit and which is simply a well-imagined example. But I do know of psychic hits that have been especially salient and helped people make breakthroughs in the struggles they’ve been working through, whether that’s healing from painful and confusing relationships or finding the spark again after personal defeats. So how do I explain those?
You can read about my statement on how I believe the tarot works on my About page, but for the sake of convenience, the short version is that I believe that tarot works by connecting energy between people. That’s not a new belief. But what allows for that energy connection and what that energy is was always murky for me. What happens after connecting? Pieces of the querent and reader interact, and the reader can then intuit what it is that the querent is working through and needs insight into? How? What are those pieces? What is that ”energy”? Well, shit. I guess it’s spiritual energy. And how does that connection even happen when, for the most part, the querent is not in the same physical space as I am? Hmm . . . I guess it travels over some intangible conduit, like a spiritual conduit. I suspect that a lot of tarot readers who don’t think of themselves as spiritual mediums probably find that an acceptable explanation of how tarot works without explicitly referring to spirits or any divine energy.
For purposes of terminology, let me reiterate that I think spirits are manifestations of divine energy, even if I don’t identify any specific being(s), or god(s), at the source of that divine energy. What I am calling spirits can be thought of in many forms; they aren’t necessarily person-shaped spectres floating through walls.
But I think it’s time to refer to spirits and divine energy.
I’ve mentioned in the past that my thoughts on spirit guides have evolved significantly over the past year. And my deck interview spread assumes a certain level of interaction with divine energy, or at least the possibility of it. But it was still nebulous, and I didn’t really get into the full woo of it. That’s just not part of my public life, and I don’t need a querent to believe in it in order to benefit from one of my readings. However, my private practice has shifted to be much more full-on woo, and it’s been thanks to a developing sense of my own role as a medium. Yeah, that kind of medium.
Now, do I think that I can talk to the Other Side? Not always. But I do genuinely believe that there’s something there. I’ve connected with energies, or what I’ve taken to be archetypal spirits, in very immediate ways (for good and bad), even if there’s always been some sort of intermediary to help the transmission along. (Read more in ”A Magical Experience with the Spirit Keeper’s Tarot.”) I’d like to think that my own Vessel Work exercises were transformative in and of themselves—and I encourage you to try them out—but they were symptoms of other work that I was doing, and they just kept the momentum going, kept me committed to that path. Clearing out the gunk just made room for questions that needed answering, and I found that doing the Vessel Work gave me space and time and energy to explore the answers to those questions.
I hope that you’ll join me on this journey as some of my practice shifts. Connect with one’s own spiritual energy is intimately personal, but I want to help where I can. If you’re looking to connect with spiritual energies during a tarot reading, I’d like to help. I think it’s most effective during live readings (by phone, by video call, or even in person) because we can explore that connection together in real time and thus have a better sense of what we’re working with. It’s always possible to connect to the wrong spirit or energy, and I wouldn’t want to waste anyone’s time with a reading based on a message from an irrelevant source. I’ve been told that a specialty of mine in this regard is the removal (or transference) of burdens off of the querent (onto me), so if you’re interested in exploring more with me, let’s talk. I want to help you.