My First Ancestral Session for a Client
Come with me as I take you through connecting with a client's ancestor
I have this most amazing client, we’ll call her Beth.
Beth is someone who hungers after spirituality, but direct-from-source. I’m like this too, which is why I think we work so well together.
I deconstructed Christianity over the last five years; Beth has never been Christian and didn’t have too much religion while growing up. In the end, though, none of these things really matter. Once I had my spiritual and midlife psychic awakening as well, and through an invitation-by-dream from my spirit guides to go ahead and start sharing my gifts of calling forth and connecting with ancestors, healed and well deceased persons as well as channeling psychic information, I (hid under a hole for nine months, and then) did!
Beth was one of the first people to draw near when I opened my gifts to the world [I started first within a safe Facebook group of women I trust], and it’s been KISMET ever since. She is a client (and a person) whose presence and sense of spiritual-bullshit-filter pushes me ALL THE WAY to the edges of trusting, sensing and listening to my intuition.
So, I was immediately a ‘yes’ when Beth asked me if, in our next session, we could connect specifically to her paternal grandmother, who was half-Abnaki Native American.
How I Prepared
I prepped for our session by getting my water and coffee as always, getting dressed in an outfit I loved (I specifically love wearing black when I am working between worlds, so I wore a cute, collared black jumpsuit).
Next, I grabbed a woven, flat basket (I’ve used it as a personal spiritual altar now for a year or so) that I found in my mother’s summer home. It’s something that, while I am not sure its origin, looks as though it could have been passed down through the generations, with intricate woven detail of different straw colors and pattens… Whenever I have this next to me, I feel presence and power — it may be partially the basket, but I also know it is the feeling I get when I’m near it, and all the energy I’ve put into it as it has held crystals, flowers, stones, sticks, leaves, incense, herbs, oracle cards and ancestral photos this last year.
The final thing I did to prepare to call forth a healed and well ancestor (my client had a close relationship with this relative during her life), included my client: together we visited each of her chakras, or personal energy centers, one by one. Starting with the Root Chakra, which is all about safety, sense of self and connection to lineage, we closed our eyes and put our focus on this area of her body (client was on Zoom, a virtual meeting room), and discerned its energy. To keep things brief, I’ll just list what the focus of each chakra visit was:
Root (base of your trunk) - sense of safety in your body
Sacral (womb space) - creative life force, reproductive and creative endeavors, desires
Solar Plexus (couple inches below ribs) - connection to others, energy output, intention
Heart - your spiritual real self, truest longings, deepest values, spiritual self
Throat- your voice, your message/medicine for the world, communication
Third eye (between your brows, up a bit) - psychic and future, telepathic communication, vision
Crown ( just above your head) - spiritual reception point, spiritual highest self
Basically my intention with chakra work before calling forth her grandmother was to prepare my client’s (and my) spiritual body and nervous system so she (we) could create an energetic environment that would more easily receive and sense her grandmother’s presence and communications.
First, we called her forth by name.
I don’t believe it is wrong or bad to call ancestors forward so we can talk to them. In my experience, if they don’t want to come or it isn’t in both parties’ highest interest, they won’t. And we’ll feel that. This has only happened one time for a client, and in that case, the deceased party had taken their own life and things had ended really abruptly without closure. Spirit directed that this spirit wasn’t in a state at all to commune or connect.
So, we said my client’s grandmother’s full name. She had a list of three ancestors as I had asked her to bring, just in case the one she was looking to connect with wasn’t available, but instinctually I could feel this connection was going through first-try, so we didn’t use the other names today.
As a way to add more meaning and personalization to our summoning, we used Abnaki language to say, “Hello, dear grandmother”. It was really beautiful to hear those words, and was so simple to look up using ChatGPT, but added a beautiful sense of tenderness to the moment.
Next, we connected emotionally.
I hadn’t received anything yet from Grandmother to let me know she was there, but I felt thick spiritual presence around me, and it felt good and light (as in not dark), so we moved on: I asked Beth (client) what her feelings are currently toward her grandmother? I don’t know why I asked this, probably because it needed to be asked. Beth did happen to have some mixed feelings due the final months of her grandmother’s life before passing, so I held some space while my client felt those release through tears.
Next, I began to receive images and feelings from the Grandmother.
She (in life a nickname of hers was ‘Andy’, so I’ll call her Grandmother Andy)—Grandmother Andy showed me a white flag… Beth had had a hard time, ever since she was little and Grandmother Andy had passed on, understanding why Andy didn’t fight harder to stay alive. In Beth perspective, once Andy’s husband died, she became less committed to life and living, and this felt so painful to my client, as they’d been very close.
But at this moment, Grandmother Andy showed us a ‘white flag’, and the feeling that accompanied it was, “surrender”. She helped communicate closure to my client right off the bat, by letting her heart know that it was not personal or for a lack of love for Beth that Andy needed to let go of living and move on in spirit. Her time was done, and she needed to surrender, even as a woman who had been such a ‘fighter’ and spunky one. The first thing Grandmother Andy did was give Beth closure and healing around the timing of her death. This was so settling for Beth, we were able to move on.
The Grandmother-in-Spirit took in from there
Honestly, once we have our Ancestor present, there isn’t a lot of need for me to ‘lead’ the session. I just hold our connection to her, and field the conversation between client and Deceased Loved One. This is such a beautiful part, it feels like…. like being in between two worlds — it feels like when I look forward to my client’s face, I’m looking at a desert, and when I feel into the Ancestor’s energy, it’s a rain storm, and I’m at a threshold point where I can feel some rain and feel some heat. Or like I’m standing between State Lines, one foot in each state. Those are the closest explanations I can get to.
“…it feels like when I look forward to my client’s face, I’m looking at a desert, and when I feel into the Ancestor’s energy, it’s a rain storm, and I’m at a threshold point where I can feel some rain and feel some heat.”
Grandmother Andy showed me a vision, almost like I was watching a home video, of her and little-girl-Beth, when my client was a girl, chopping vegetables together and cooking gleefully together in the kitchen. As I received this, I communicated it to Beth, and it was very meaningful to her: she told me how cooking together in the kitchen was one of their most favorite, memorable past times together.
From there, amongst a lot of other tidbits that were personal and special to Beth, Grandmother Andy told me that Beth would one day be writing a book on cooking, but not a cookbook… It would be a guide more about returning joy to food and cooking, and how this is one of Beth’s gifts in their lineage. This also really resonated with Beth and made her emotional, as she had felt herself pull away from the joy of cooking after her grandmother’s passing due to the way it made her miss her.
We wrapped up by releasing Grandmother Andy & processing
“Stay if you can, leave if you must” is the incantation I learned from one of my mentors, Amanda Yates Garcia. So with that, as our session was about 15 mins out from closing (this was a 90-min session - time flew by and so much happened!), we closed our time with Grandmother Andy, and took the rest of the time to process all we had received.
It felt a lot like a family of farmers might feel, having spent all day preparing for and then picking their crop harvest… It felt like we were around a fire that was still glowing. The feeling of kinship that settles into our hearts, minds and auras when an ancestor comes close is so real. It’s as real as fire glowing, it’s as real as the chair I’m sitting in. It’s wonderful, soul-filling, warming and helps us go back to the life we know with more love in our hearts and confidence in our life’s path.
Gratitude, as always.
I always end by thanking my client, my Guides, and Spirit for my gifts, for my client’s intention and belief, for the beautiful connections made and presence given all-around.
What a wonderful session it was, and the first of many to come!
Resources for you!
If you’d like to learn more about how to call forth your ancestors (I know it can sound ‘creepy’, but that feeling is just fear, and you can work to clear that fear. What’s left is truly extraordinary. The only veil that exists, is the fear we are addicted to, obsessed with and attached to), this book by Daniel Foor, Ph.D. is really, really wonderful!
And if you want to start not with ancestors, but even just connecting to your Spirit Guides, I really loved and recommend this one.