“If the experiences on the inner planes are not brought fully into the body, they have little merit.”
~ Anna, channeled by Claire Heartsong in Anna, the Voice of the Magdalenes: A Sequel to Anna, Grandmother of Jesus
I am a trained psychic medium, who grew up experiencing the spirit world as a normal part of life. However, I had been using this gift for a long time as a practice of disassociation.
I felt more safe in the spirit realms than I did in the physical world. I had experienced some challenging things in life, and dissociation was one of the primary ways I knew how to feel comfort in a world that offered very little to me.
It was great for when I needed it, and it gave me a very strong ability to enter into trance states that allow me to access different dimensions and spaces, however, it did not allow me to ground my experiences into the physical world.
I began to feel I was living in two very different worlds. That feeling persisted and became even stronger after training with several teachers who helped me hone working with different spirits and energies. Instead of helping me come into my body – where we experience life in all its emotions and feelings – they helped me become stronger in leaving it at will, and encouraged being out of body more than inside the body.
Over time I came to realize I had an issue with disassociation. Along with it being a useful tool, it also manifested in panic attacks, high pain tolerance, and the lack of ability to recognize when I was truly safe or not. I realized I was emotionally numb and unable to experience happiness. My spirit guides said continuously:
“You are in a body to experience the world around you. You are in a body to experience living as a human. You are in a body to feel the body.”
And:
“You are not here to escape the body.”
And:
“Ascension is inside of the body. The deeper you go in, the more you arise.”
I tried to go into the body deeper through meditation – imagining light in my cells. I tried to feel my body more and more, and came up against panic attacks and endless anxiety. I found myself in depression cycles, with nightmares that came with sleep paralysis and hypnagogic hallucinations. I would disassociate and lose time. Sometimes I would freeze for weeks, only moving to do what I needed to do.
There were cycles I thought I had healed that kept coming back, and left me with the realization these cycles and patterns are in my body. I wondered, where did they live, and how do you release them from the body in truly effective ways?
My guides told me:
“The key is within your body. The patterns are wired into your body, they live within your system.”
I began to focus more and more on the physical world around me. What made me feel safe? What made me feel good? What made me feel calm? What made my body feel good and happy and grounded? What made me feel more connected to my body?
The decisions I made began to follow this stream and I slowly lost the thread of spirituality I had identified with because it no longer served me to feel safe and bypass the emotions I had been disassociating from. I stopped meditating. I stopped having daily spiritual practice.
Eventually, I started to study the body, and my symptoms. The symptoms led me to the nervous system. The nervous system studies completely rocked my world as I recognized I was experiencing the aftermath of complex trauma. The more I read the more I knew this was the missing link to living my life in the way I truly want to.
When I started to learn somatic based coaching with Blaire Lindsay, I became terrified. If I became more embodied, would I lose my ability to connect with the spirits? Would I be less able to go into the trance states? Would I still be able to exercise my spiritual gifts?
I also learned I was absolutely terrified to be inside of my body. It felt incredibly foreign for me to occupy it.
Over the course of my studies, I learned what a gift it was to find safety in my body. It made my life easier, and more joyful. As I learned to sit with what is, I learned to have the capacity to feel a greater range of emotion. I could experience more of the human experience itself.
My boundaries became strong and natural – instead of me defining them in my mind, they began to arise inside of my body. As I gave deep respect to my body by learning how to listen to it, using the cues it gave me, I learned how to trust my body, and how to trust my intuition in a whole new way.
I learned the power of being inside of my body, and the gift we give others when we are embodied: it is the gift of presence, of groundedness, of being. The way we hold space deepens beyond imagining, and the doorways to deeper connection opens up.
Where did my spirit work enter all of this? 
While in the process of learning all this information I kept spending time with the Spirits. I began to invite them into the practice sessions I was doing as I was learning to be a somatic based coach. With all of this new information, I drew the Spirits into the session, and had one caveat: the client’s body would lead the session, and we would support.
The path to ascension is not to leave the body. It is to keep going deeper and deeper into the body, descending until there is nothing left. In our descent we bring light to all the corners, nooks, and crannies we hide from the world. We find our space to become more vulnerable, more true, more human, and more deeply divine.
When we do embodied spirit work we ask the client where they want to go, and let the body lead. That is met with the support of the spirits on an energetic/spiritual level. We help the body release what it needs to so it can be present in the moment and we ground the energies we receive.
We learn what it means to embody the higher energies that are around us all the time, and learn what it means to embody the highest version of ourselves that we can. To do this we need to feel safe in our bodies, in our experience of the world, and with the guidance that comes through our bodies and our intuition. We need to feel safe stepping into our power and our Divinity in the physical world.
This is the power of embodied spirit work – it’s a pathway to do that, in a very real grounded way.