Ancestral Grief Is Real And It’s Living in Your Body Right Now. Your Healing Isn’t Only For You.
Your healing heals backwards, present, and future.
There is a grief that feels too big to belong only to you.
You know the one. The sadness that arrives without a clean origin story in your own life. The mourning that feels older than your own memories, that surfaces in your body before it reaches your mind, that seems to know something about loss you haven’t personally experienced. The deep sadness you felt when you heard about the death of Nolan Wells, that just feels too familiar. The exhaustion that goes deeper than your current circumstances could fully account for. The heaviness that has been your companion for so long you’ve started to assume it simply belongs to your personality.
It doesn’t belong to your personality. It belongs to your lineage and there’s both clinical and spiritual evidence for what I’m about to say….. your ancestors’ unprocessed grief did not die with them. It traveled forward. It is, in some form, living in your body right now.
This is ancestral grief. It’s real, specific, and workable. There haven’t been many clinical frameworks adequate way to hold it, until now.
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What Ancestral Grief Actually Is
Ancestral grief is unprocessed loss that travels through generations, not as metaphor or vague inheritance but through specific and documented mechanisms that bridge the spiritual and the scientific.
The epigenetic research is now substantial enough to be named directly. Studies on Holocaust survivor descendants, the children and grandchildren of enslaved Africans, Indigenous communities navigating the ongoing impacts of genocide and cultural disruption, consistently show measurable physiological changes in the nervous systems and stress-response patterns of people who did not personally experience the original trauma but whose bodies carry its signature. The ACE studies extended this. The work of researchers like Rachel Yehuda on epigenetic inheritance of trauma opened a door that the clinical field has been slow to walk through, but the evidence is clear, trauma changes gene expression in ways that can be transmitted to the next generation.
Your grandmother’s unprocessed grief from losses she was never allowed to mourn, because the cultural expectation was survival and forward movement and the performance of strength, did not disappear when she died. The physiological signature of that grief moved forward in the biological material that produced you. It lives in your nervous system as a set of responses and sensitivities that feel entirely your own because they have always been inside you.
This isn’t a spiritual claim that bypasses science. This is a convergence point where ancestral traditions have always understood, that the dead remain present in the living in ways that matter and must be honored, is being confirmed by the mechanisms science can now observe.
Why the Pain Sometimes Feels Bigger Than Your Own Story
For BIPOC/BBIA women specifically, this convergence has a particular weight.
The losses that weren’t mourned in your lineage are not small ones. The grief of the Middle Passage, of families deliberately separated across generations of enslavement, of cultural and spiritual practices stripped away by force, of lands removed, languages forbidden, traditions criminalized, communities dismantled by policy and by violence, this grief was rarely given adequate space to be processed. The conditions of survival required its suppression. The people who carried it were often not permitted to grieve publicly, they weren’t supported in grieving privately, and they were praised for their composure rather than held in their pain.
Suppressed grief doesn’t resolve itself. It adapts. It changes form. It encodes into the body and into behavioral and relational patterns and into the specific quality of vigilance and exhaustion that many BIPOC/BBIA women carry in the texture of their lives. It moves forward into the next generation carrying the same signature it always had, but now without even the immediate context that produced it, which is why it can feel so disorienting, so sourceless, and so much larger than your own story.
The fact is that is that this is larger than your own story. Your story is one layer of a much older and heavier archive.
What This Looks Like in the Body and in Patterns
Clinicians trained in ancestral grief work learn to look for specific presentations that standard grief frameworks either miss or mislabel.
The hypervigilance that has no clear origin in the client’s own trauma history. The grief responses that seem disproportionate to the immediate loss, that carry a depth and a weight that doesn’t match what the client reports about their own experience. The physical locations where grief is stored, chest, throat, low belly, hips, that do not shift with standard somatic or talk-based interventions because the grief stored there predates the client’s own life and is not accessed through the client’s own narrative alone.
The relational patterns that repeat across generations in ways clients can observe but can’t change through will or insight alone. The specific fears and limitations that seem to belong to an earlier era, that were adaptive at some point in the lineage’s history and are now constraining in ways the client cannot fully understand. The sense of carrying something for someone else, of being the designated griever for losses that were never yours to carry alone.
These are not individual pathologies. They’re ancestral grief presentations and they require a framework that can hold the lineage as part of the clinical picture.
What Both Clinicians and Clients Need to Know
For clinicians: If you’ve ever sat with a client whose grief feels larger than her own story and not known what clinical framework to reach for, you have already been in the presence of ancestral grief without the tools to name or work with it. The presenting picture is often confusing precisely because standard grief models locate the work inside the client’s individual history, and ancestral grief is, by definition, outside it.
Naming it as ancestral grief changes the clinical work. It relocates the client’s experience from the context of individual pathology to the context of lineage and inheritance. It opens specific lines of inquiry and specific interventions that aren’t available inside an individualistic model. This framework offers clients something that standard frameworks rarely can: the experience of her pain making sense. Not as a sign that something is wrong with her but rather as a sign that she’s carrying something real that has a real history, and know that this is a pain that doesn’t need to be permenant.
For clients: If your grief has ever felt like it belonged to more than just your own life, you were likely right. The grief that feels ancestral often is and that isn’t a sign that your healing is more complicated or more hopeless than someone else’s. It’s a sign that you’re being called to do something that extends beyond your own life: to break a cycle, to process what could not be processed before you, to release what has been waiting in the lineage for someone with enough safety and enough support to finally let it move.
That isn’t a burden, even though it can feel like one. It’s an inheritance and an invitation.
How Healing Your Grief Breaks the Cycle
This is the part that most grief frameworks never reach, and it’s one of the most important things I know about this work.
When you grieve consciously, when you bring the ancestral weight into the light and allow it to be processed, named, witnessed, and released, you don’t only heal yourself. You shift what the next generation inherits.
The epigenetic mechanisms that transmitted the grief forward can, with adequate processing and support, transmit something different in the other direction. The children and grandchildren of women who do this work inherit a different nervous system baseline, a different stress response signature, a different relationship to grief and loss because the archive they are drawing from has been partially cleared. What you carry forward to them is not the suppressed grief of every generation before you. It is the processed grief, the grief that was finally allowed to move, that became something other than a weight.
Your healing isn’t only for you. It’s the most ancestrally generous act available to you. It sends liberation backward and forward in time simultaneously.
Where to Go Deeper
For clinicians: The Psychospiritual Grief Method Training on July 25th includes specific, detailed instruction in ancestral grief work, how to identify it in clinical presentations, how to work with it alongside standard grief frameworks, and how to hold the lineage as part of the clinical picture without overstepping into spiritual guidance. This is the framework for working at the intersection where your BIPOC/BBIA clients’ grief actually lives. Six CEs approved by the NBCC. Registration is open now. [Full details at healingwithamber.co/the-psychospiritual-grief-method-training]
For clients: If what you’ve read here has named something you have been carrying without language for it, a free grief counseling consultation is available for California residents. This is where we talk about what you’re holding, whether it includes ancestral grief, and what kind of support would actually serve you. [Book at www.healingwithamber.co →]
With care and intention,
Amber
I Had a Mediumship Reading That Was a Disaster. I’m the Reason Why.
I’m going to tell you something that practitioners in this space don’t often say out loud.
I had a reading recently that did not go the way anyone hoped. Not the client. Not me. It was the kind of reading that stays with you afterward, not because something dramatic or harmful happened, but because I could feel exactly where it went wrong and I could feel that the wrong turn was mine.
I fucked up.
I forgot the disclaimer and in forgetting it, I set us both up for something that felt like failure when it didn’t have to.
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What I Forgot to Say
Before a mediumship reading, there is something every client deserves to hear clearly, before the session begins and before expectation has a chance to take root and organize itself into a specific hope.
I can’t control who comes through and what comes through.
I can’t guarantee that the specific person you’re hoping to hear from will be the one who steps forward. I can’t promise that your mother will come, or your child, or your partner. I can’t promise that the message they bring, if they do come, will be the one you think you most need or most want to hear at that moment. Mediumship isn’t a telephone service with a direct dial to a specific number. It’s a channel and the channel is guided by Spirit, not by my preferences or yours.
I also cannot guarantee what the messages will be. Sometimes what comes through is comforting. Sometimes it is challenging and sometimes it’s mundane in a way that is actually its own form of evidence, the specific detail that only they would know, that has nothing to do with what the client expected and everything to do with what Spirit chose to offer.
I know this. I have known this since I began this work. I teach it. I believe it deeply and in this particular reading, I didn’t say it before we began.
Review from a recent mediumship reading
What Happened When I Led With Expectation
The client came in with a specific person in mind. A specific hope. A specific need for a specific message. I could feel the weight of that need before we even started, and instead of naming it, instead of gently redirecting toward openness before we opened the channel, I moved forward.
I led with expectation instead of with guidance through Spirit.
What followed was a reading that kept reaching toward something that wasn’t quite arriving. The connection felt thin in the places where the client most needed it to be clear. The messages that did come through were real, I believe that, but they weren’t the ones she came for, and without the disclaimer having been set, without the expectation having been gently released before we began, neither of us had the framework to receive what was actually being offered.
She left disappointed. I sat with the session afterward feeling the specific weight of a lesson I should not have needed to learn this way. I ended up feeling like a failure and I refunded her for the time.
The Honest Truth About Mediumship That the Industry Doesn’t Always Say
There’s a version of mediumship that promises outcomes. That sells the reading on the certainty of contact, on the guarantee of closure, on the specific assurance that your person will come through and say exactly what you need to hear.
I have never made those promises but I didn’t make the counter-promise clearly enough in this instance, the honest caveat that protects both the client and the integrity of the work. I didn’t explictly state that I don’t control what happens, what’s said, and who shows up, Spirit does. In my 16 years of experience Spirit always offers what is needed rather than always what is wanted, and those two things aren’t always the same.
The disclaimer isn’t a confinement and it’s not a way of lowering expectations so that anything that happens feels like a success. It’s the truth of how this works, and clients deserve to have that truth before they sit down and open themselves to something this intimate.
When I forget to offer it, I’m not protecting my client and I’m setting them up to receive a real experience through a framework of expectation that will distort it.
What Leads With Expectation Does to the Channel
Here is the practical, experiential truth of what happened in this reading from my side of it.
When a client’s expectation is strong and unaddressed, it creates a kind of energetic pressure in the space. It’s not malevolent and it’s not innately the client’s fault. It just creates a weight of a specific hope that hasn’t been released and when I as the Medium haven’t named that pressure and helped to gently set it aside before we begin, I can feel myself reaching toward it, trying to find the connection that will satisfy it, rather than staying fully open to whatever is actually present.
Reaching is the problem. Mediumship requires receptivity, a particular quality of openness that is incompatible with grasping. The moment I am working toward a specific outcome rather than simply being available to whatever Spirit brings, the quality of what comes through shifts. It becomes thinner. Less precise. More effortful in a way that doesn’t serve anyone.
The disclaimer is not just for the client. It’s for me too. It releases both of us from the expectation that distorts the channel before the session even begins.
The Lesson, Simply
I won’t skip the disclaimer again.
Not because I am trying to protect myself from accountability if a reading doesn’t meet a client’s hopes. But because the disclaimer is an act of care. It’s the thing that creates the conditions for the reading to be what it actually is, rather than what anyone in the room is hoping it will be.
Every client who sits with me deserves to know before we begin that I’m not the one in charge of what comes through. I’m a channel and I will offer what I receive with as much clarity and integrity as I can. What arrives is guided by Spirit, and Spirit, in my experience, always has a reason for what it offers. That reason may not be immediately clear. The message may not be the one you came for and that isn’t a failure of the reading. It’s the nature of the work.
I owe every client that truth before we begin. I owe it to the integrity of this practice. And I owe it to myself as a practitioner who is still, after all of this, learning.
If You’re Considering a Reading
If you have ever sat with a Medium and left feeling like something didn’t quite arrive the way you hoped, I want you to know that your disappointment is valid. I also want to offer this; the absence of a specific message isn’t the same as the absence of contact. Sometimes what comes through is not what we came for, and sometimes, with a little distance, it turns out to have been exactly what was needed.
If you’re considering a mediumship reading with me, I will say the disclaimer now, here, as clearly as I can.
I can’t promise who will come through. I can’t guarantee the specific message you are hoping for. I will bring everything I have to the session, my full presence, my full training, my full commitment to offering what I receive with integrity and care. What arrives will be guided by Spirit, not by either of our expectations and I will trust that what Spirit offers is always, in some way, what is actually needed, even when it’s not what was asked for.
That is the truth of this work and it’s the foundation every reading deserves to be built on.
Book a Reading
📞 Mediumship Reading with Amber. Evidential, grounded, held with full ethical accountability and the disclaimer I will not forget again. Available worldwide. [Book at www.healingwithamber.co/mediumship-readings]
🌿 The Grief Sanctuary. For women who want ongoing community and support around the spiritual dimensions of grief, including what it means when a reading doesn’t give you what you hoped for and how to continue the relationship with your person beyond any single session.
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PS: I’m still learning and developing even after 16 years. That’s not a disclaimer. That’s the practice.
With care and intention,
Amber Choisella
BIPOC/BBIA Mental Health Awareness Month: What Mainstream Still Gets Wrong About Our Healing
Mental health awareness isn’t mental health access,
and for BIPOC/BBIA women, the gap between those two things is where we are still dying.
Every July, BIPOC Mental Health Awareness Month arrives with its graphics, hashtags, and lists of resources. Visibility matters. Representation in the conversation matters, but visibility without access is performance, and access without cultural competence is harm dressed up as help. Most of what gets offered to Black and brown women in mental health spaces, when they can access those spaces at all, is still organized around frameworks that were built without them in mind and have never been adequately revised to hold the full complexity of their lives.
I want to talk about what that looks like in practice, why it keeps happening, and what actually helps.
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What Mainstream Mental Health Spaces Keep Getting Wrong
They mistake cultural competence for cultural humility and settle for neither.
A clinician who has completed a diversity training knows, in principle, that your culture matters and that they should ask about it. What they often don’t know is what to do when your culture includes ongoing relationships with your deceased grandmother, experience grief that is communal and ancestral rather than personal and bounded, a spiritual life that is not separable from your psychological one, or a lineage of loss that predates your own birth by generations.
The training taught them to be curious. It didn’t teach them what to do with the answer when you tell them the truth.
They pathologize what they don’t have framework for.
A Black woman who reports seeing her deceased mother walks into a clinical setting and is assessed for psychosis. The same experience reported by a white woman in a different context is held as a grief response worthy of exploration. This is not a hypothetical. It is a pattern documented in clinical literature and replicated in the lives of nearly every BIPOC/BBIA woman I have sat with who has tried to bring her full spiritual experience into a clinical room.
Ancestral grief, spiritual gifts, continued relationship with the deceased, cultural mourning practices that look nothing like the stage model of grief, aren’t symptoms. They’re dimensions of a full and legitimate human experience. When the clinical framework has no container for them, it does not expand. It pathologizes. And the woman across the desk learns, again, that this part of her is not welcome.
They treat the individual as if the collective doesn’t exist.
Most Western clinical frameworks are built on an individualistic model of the self. The client is located inside her own psychology, history, and her own narrative. The grief is hers just as much as the healing is hers. The work is done between two people in a room.
For BIPOC/BBIA women, this model misses something fundamental, that grief is rarely only hers. It’s her grandmother’s and her grandmother’s mother’s and the unnamed women before them. The anxiety in her nervous system isn’t only the product of her individual experiences. It’s also the accumulated survival response of a lineage that lived under conditions requiring hypervigilance across generations. The healing isn’t only individual. It requires community, ritual, ancestral acknowledgment, and a framework large enough to hold all of it.
An individualistic clinical model will keep bumping into a ceiling with this client. Not because she is too complex, but because the model is too small.
Psychospiritual Healing Versus Western Therapy: What the Difference Looks Like
I want to be clear about something before I go further, I’m not saying Western therapy has no place in the healing of BIPOC/BBUA women because I am a licensed clinician and believe in evidence-based practice. I believe therapy, done well alongside cultural competence and spiritual literacy, can be genuinely transformative.
What I’m saying is that therapy alone, especially therapy delivered without cultural grounding or spiritual framework, isn’t sufficient for many BIPOC/BBIA women and the gap between what therapy typically offers and what BIPOC women actually need isn’t a small one.
Psychospiritual healing holds what clinical frameworks weren’t designed to hold. The ancestral grief that is somatic and inherited rather than narrative and personal. The spiritual experiences that are real and that require someone who can meet them as real rather than as symptoms to be assessed. The community and ritual dimensions of healing that exist alongside individual therapeutic work rather than being replaced by it.
In practice, this looks like a session that can include both a trauma-informed clinical lens and an ancestral grief framework. A practitioner who can sit with a client’s report of a visitation dream without needing to redirect it into something more clinically legible. A framework that treats the lineage as part of the clinical picture, not as background information to be noted and set aside.
It looks like the Psychospiritual Grief Method.
What We Actually Need
Healing that actually works for BIPOC/BBIA women isn’t a lesser version of what works for everyone else with some cultural sensitivity sprinkled on top, no, it’s a fundamentally different understanding of what healing is, what grief is, what the self is, and what it means to move through loss and emerge on the other side of it.
We need practitioners who are spiritually literate, not just culturally curious. Who understand that the spiritual dimension of a BIPOC/BBIA woman’s grief is not a complication of the clinical work but a central dimension of it. Who have done their own work on the intersection of lineage, identity, and spiritual experience rather than arriving in the room with a framework that flattens all of it.
We need community as a therapeutic modality, not just a nice supplement to individual work. The kind of witnessing that only happens when you are in a room with people who do not need you to translate yourself. Where the collective grief can be held collectively rather than isolated into individual sessions that never quite touch the full weight of what is shared.
We need ritual as medicine. The marked passages. The ceremonial acknowledgment of what has been lost. The practices that move grief through the body rather than simply naming it from the outside. This is not a spiritual add-on to real healing. For many BIPOC/BBIA women, it’s the mechanism through which real healing actually happens.
We need honesty about access. Culturally competent psychospiritual care is still not equally or easily accessible. The financial barriers are real. The shortage of BIPOC/BBIA practitioners is real. The shortage of practitioners with spiritual literacy is even more acute. Acknowledging what we need isn’t the same as pretending it’s easy to find but naming it clearly is the beginning of demanding that it does exist.
What Has Actually Helped You?
I want to hear from you. Not what you think you should say, not the resources that were assigned to you in a space that didn’t quite fit, but what has actually moved something in your healing. What has reached the places that the standard frameworks couldn’t reach.
Respond to this email. This community learns from each other as much as from any practitioner or framework, and your specific experience of what has helped is exactly the kind of knowledge that belongs here.
Resources That Actually Serve
For clinicians ready to close the gap: The Psychospiritual Grief Method Training launches July 25th. Six CEs approved by NBCC, built specifically for practitioners who want a framework rigorous enough to hold the full complexity of BIPOC/BBIA women’s grief and spiritual experience. This isn’t a diversity training. This is a clinical and spiritual methodology built for the intersection where your clients actually live. [Full details and enrollment at healingwithamber.co/the-psychospiritual-grief-method]
For BIPOC/BBIA women seeking grief counseling that holds all of it: A free grief counseling consultation is available for California residents. This is where we talk about what you’re carrying, what has and hasn’t worked, and whether this practice is the right clinical fit for your care. [Book at healingwithamber.co]
Awareness without access is performance. You deserve more than performance. You deserve care that was actually built to hold you.
With care and intention,
Amber
You Have a Spiritual Gift. Untrained, It’ll Cost You. Do You Want That Debt?
You have something. You’ve always known it.
The knowing that arrives before anyone tells you. The way you walk into a room and immediately feel what everyone in it is carrying. The dreams that turn out to be accurate in ways you can’t explain. The ability to sit with someone in their worst moment and somehow offer exactly what they needed without knowing how you knew to offer it.
You have a gift and if you’re honest, you also have a complicated relationship with it.
Maybe you’ve been afraid of it. Maybe you’ve been using it without any structure or container, giving and receiving without knowing how to protect yourself, how to discern what’s yours and what isn’t, how to close the channel when you need to. Perhaps you’ve been performing it, sharing it publicly without having done the interior work to ground it, because the external response felt validating in ways the interior work never does, or maybe you’ve been sitting on it, aware that something is there but unwilling to develop it because development would make it real and making it real feels like responsibility.
All of these are understandable responses to having something you were never taught to hold.
None of them are the same as actually developing it though.
The Difference Between Having a Gift and Developing One
Raw spiritual ability is like any other form of raw capacity. It’s innate, untrained, unmapped, and undisciplined in the specific sense that it has no consistent relationship with your own discernment, your own ethics, your own understanding of what the gift is actually for.
A person with natural musical ability who never studies, practices, or develops that ability can produce something moving in the right moment. They can also produce something chaotic, harmful to themselves, and/or something that serves the audience but depletes the musician entirely because they have no framework for managing the exchange.
Spiritual gifts work the same way.
You can receive without understanding what you’re receiving.
You can transmit without understanding what you’re transmitting or what it costs you.
You can be genuinely gifted and genuinely untethered from any consistent practice of discernment, protection, grounding, or ethical accountability for what you do with what you have.
Development isn’t what makes the gift real. The gift is already real. Development is what makes it sustainable, directional, and actually useful to you and to the people you touch with it.
What Spiritual Development Actually Is
Development isn’t a certification or a credential. It’s not a certain number of practice hours or a series of courses completed or a specific tradition mastered. It is also not achieved by reading widely or following the right accounts or building an audience for your spiritual content.
Development is the ongoing, interior work of learning to be in relationship with your gift. Learning what it needs from you in order to function with integrity. There’s an importance of learning how to recognize the difference between what is coming from your clearest, most grounded channel and what’s coming from your own unprocessed wounds, needs or fears dressed up as spiritual information. There’s also a necessary in learning how to hold boundaries that protect both you and the people who receive your gifts and also learning how to create boundaries with Spirit, yes, that’s also necessary, because it’s not best to be opened all the time. Through development you know who you’re working with and build trust with yourself and Spirit to discern what is coming through.
For BIPOC/BBIA women especially, development carries an additional dimension: the work of recovering gifts that were suppressed, interrupted, or driven underground by colonization, by religious institutions that labeled ancestral gifts as dangerous, by generations of survival conditions that required the gifts to go quiet for safety. Development for us is not always starting from scratch. Sometimes it’s uncovering, reclaiming, learning the names for what was always there.
That recovery work requires support. It requires someone who can meet the gift at its actual level rather than offering a framework designed for someone else’s lineage and calling it universal.
Why People Skip It
Development is slower than activation. It’s less visible than performance. It doesn’t generate the same immediate response as sharing a reading publicly or posting about an experience that signals to others that you are gifted, and it requires you to look honestly at what’s not yet developed alongside what is.
Discernment is important and unconscious grief or wounds of your own could be coloring what you receive. This is an ethical blind spot that exist in any practice held without mentorship or accountability. Spirit will use our own experiences to communicate messages and if we haven’t done our work, we could definitely cause others harm.
Most people skip development because development requires humility, and humility is harder than activation.
The cost of skipping development is real. Practitioners without development cause harm, sometimes without ever knowing they did. They give wrong information because they aren’t able to go deeper due to unaddressed wounding or they haven’t learned discernment.
Development isn’t a detour from the work. It is the work.
What Happens When You Do the Work
I’ve been in ongoing development for 16 years. Development and devoting myself to healing has made me more precise and it has given my gifts direction, which is something raw ability, however real, can’t have on its own. It gave me a way of knowing the difference between what I was genuinely receiving and what was coming from somewhere inside my own unprocessed material, and most importantly it gave the folks I work with a practitioner who’s accountable for what she brings into the room.
That is what development makes possible. Not a more impressive version of the gift. A more trustworthy one.
The Invitation
If you have been sitting with a gift you have not yet developed, whether it’s mediumship, intuition, ancestral communication, empathic sensitivity, or any other form of spiritual ability that arrived before you had a framework to hold it, I want to invite you into something.
I provide support for becoming a more fully developed version of yourself. Mentorship that meets your specific gift, your specific lineage, your specific combination of clinical or professional background and spiritual experience, without requiring you to flatten any of it to fit someone else’s framework.
I am releasing something soon which I’m exciting about it!
Remember that development isn’t the end of the journey. It’s the beginning of committing to the journey with integrity.
Take the Next Step
🔮 Spiritual Development Mentoring with Amber is 1 on 1 mentoring for women ready to develop their spiritual gifts with structure, discernment, and real accountability. This is individualized support for the woman who knows she has something and is ready to learn to hold it with integrity. Available worldwide. Update with this service coming soon.[Book a consultation at www.healingwithamber.co]
📞 Schedule a Spiritual Counseling Consultation if you are navigating spiritual experiences that feel larger than your current framework, a consultation is where we assess what is happening, what kind of support would actually serve you, and what development could look like for you specifically. [Book at www.healingwithamber.co]
🌿 The Grief Sanctuary is for women doing this work in community. Monthly practices, ancestral connection, and a space where your spiritual life and your grief life are held as one continuous reality rather than separate concerns. [Join at $27/month upgrade subscription]
With care and intention,
Amber Choisella
When Their Freedom Wasn’t Ours: Grieving What July 4th Never Gave Us
Honoring the Grief of Liberation Withheld from Our Ancestors
Independence Day was written for some bodies, just not ours, not really.
When the document was signed, when the bells rang, and when the language of liberty and unalienable rights was first put to paper, the people who wrote it were not imagining your ancestors as included in its promise. Enslaved Africans were property under the very government declaring its independence. Indigenous nations were already being systematically displaced from the land that document claimed as newly free. The freedom celebrated on this day was real, and it was also, from its origin, a freedom with an asterisk, granted to some bodies and explicitly withheld from others.
That isn’t ancient history with no bearing on you because this is the architecture this country was built on, and the architecture doesn’t disappear simply because more time has passed. It shows up still, in different forms, in every generation since. It shows up in you, even now, even today, as you’re asked once again to celebrate a freedom that has never been fully and equally extended.
I just recently watched the documentary on Netflix about Thomas Jefferson of our the country’s founding fathers, and it was disappointing for him to share the vision that all men are created equal but believed my ancestors were less than and that Native Americans could be equivalent to Whites if they adapted the American culture…
This is grief and it deserves to be named as grief, not minimized as cynicism or political commentary.
The Erasure Worth Naming
There is a particular psychological and spiritual cost to being asked year after year to celebrate a holiday that wasn’t written with you in mind. To watch fireworks, cookouts, and flag displays that center a story of liberation your ancestors were actively excluded from at the moment it was declared. If you think about like this.
This isn’t a small discomfort. It’s a form of collective grief that BIPOC/BBIA communities have carried for generations, often without language for what it actually is. The grief of being asked to perform gratitude for a freedom that was never universal and watching a national narrative celebrate itself without ever fully computing with who that narrative left out, and who it’s still leaving out.
Naming this isn’t unpatriotic. It’s honesty and honesty is the only foundation that real healing has ever been built on.
This Lives in the Body, Not Just the History Books
I want to be specific about something, because it matters clinically and spiritually….the grief of liberation denied across generations is not abstract. It is somatic, it lives in the body, and it is passed down through the body, the same way every other form of ancestral and generational trauma is passed down.
Epigenetic research continues to confirm what ancestral traditions have always understood that the body remembers what the mind was never given language for. The tightness that shows up around certain holidays. The exhaustion that has no clear cause on a day that is supposed to be celebratory, and the low hum of something unresolved, present even when you cannot point to a single specific reason for it.
This is your lineage’s grief living within you. The people who built this country’s wealth without ever being granted its promised freedom. The Indigenous nations whose sovereignty was never honored, whose displacement is ongoing rather than historical. Their unprocessed grief didn’t disappear when they died. It moved forward, generation by generation, until it arrived in your body, on this day, asking finally to be acknowledged.
The Specific Weight of This Day
There is a particular kind of psychospiritual weight to being asked to celebrate freedom in a country that still, in the present tense, denies full liberty and bodily autonomy to Black, Indigenous, and brown communities.
Mass incarceration disproportionately removes liberty from Black and Brown bodies at rates that mirror, rather than break from, the patterns this country was founded on. Indigenous communities continue to navigate the ongoing, present-tense reality of land theft, broken treaties, and conditions that many historians and human rights organizations have named as continuing genocide, not a closed chapter. Reproductive autonomy, particularly for Black women, remains constrained by a healthcare system with well-documented, well-researched patterns of medical racism that cost lives.
Asking BIPOC/BBIA women to set this reality aside for a day of unqualified celebration is asking for a performance, not an authentic experience, and performing gratitude you don’t feel, year after year, takes a toll that accumulates.
What BIPOC and BBIA Women Carry on This Day
For BIPOC and BBIA women specifically, this day often asks for an additional layer of labor and perhaps the management of other people’s discomfort with your honesty about what the day actually represents.
You may have learned to perform enthusiasm you don’t feel, to attend the cookout and smile through the fireworks while something quieter and heavier sits underneath. You may have absorbed across your lifetime the subtle message that naming the gap between the promise of this day and the reality of your community’s experience makes you difficult, ungrateful, too political for a holiday.
This labor is exhausting because it requires you to manage your own grief in service of everyone else’s comfort. That’s not a small ask. In fact, it’s one more iteration of a demand that has been placed on BIPOC/BBIA women across generations. The necessity to hold your pain quietly so that others do not have to feel uncomfortable in its presence.
You are allowed to stop.
Reclaiming This Day on Your Own Terms
I want to offer something different than forced patriotism or performed celebration. I want to offer reclamation.
This July 4th, you’re invited to treat the day as one of ancestral acknowledgment rather than unqualified celebration. Light a candle for your ancestors who were denied the freedom this day claims to represent. Speak their names if you know them, or simply acknowledge their existence if you don’t. Let the day include grief alongside whatever else it includes for you, time with family, rest, food you enjoy. Both can be true in the same day.
You are allowed to skip the fireworks if they don’t serve you. You are allowed to spend the day in quiet remembrance instead of forced festivity. You are allowed to tell the people in your life, simply and without elaborate justification, that this day carries complicated weight for you and that you are choosing to honor that complexity rather than override it.
Intentional rest is itself a form of resistance and reclamation. Your ancestors who were denied rest, denied autonomy over their own bodies and time, would not begrudge you choosing rest on a day that claims to celebrate the very freedoms they were denied. Use the day to give yourself what they couldn’t access and understand that this isn’t a betrayal of the holiday. It may be the truest way to honor what was actually taken.
You Don’t Have to Hold This Alone
If this grief is landing somewhere real for you today, you do not have to carry it in isolation.
🌿 The Grief Sanctuary is an addition for women holding exactly this kind of collective, ancestral, and present-tense grief. Members receive monthly ritual practices, ongoing community support, and a space where naming this complexity is never treated as too much. [Join at $27/month and upgrade subscription]
✨ The Inner Circle is for women who are ready for deeper, more personalized ongoing support. Inner Circle members receive expanded access to Amber, priority scheduling for readings and consultations, and a more intimate level of guided practice for the women ready to go further in. [Upgrade membership]
📞 Grief/Spiritual Consultation: Schedule a free consultation for one-on-one support for processing the specific weight of ancestral and collective grief, available worldwide. [Book at www.healingwithamber.co]
🔮 For Clinicians: If you work with BIPOC/BBIA clients who carry this exact kind of historical and present-tense grief and you want a framework rigorous enough to hold it, the Psychospiritual Grief Method Training is open for enrollment. Six CEUs, small cohort. [Full details at www.healingwithamber.co/the-psychospiritual-grief-method-training]
With care and intention,
Amber
What My Grandmother Knew Without Knowing She Knew It
A Juneteenth Reflection on Roots, Truth, and the Spiritual Inheritance I Almost Walked Past.
My grandparents never graduated elementary school. My grandfather worked as a garbage man, every day, for years, so that his family could eat and his children could have what he didn’t.
My grandmother worked as a maid, in other people’s houses, cleaning up after other people’s lives, so that she could come home and pour everything that was left into raising my twin sister and me.
Neither of them had formal education. Both of them had something else, something that doesn’t show up on a transcript or a resume. They had Louisiana. They had the old ways, carried north and west with them like everything else they owned, folded carefully and kept close. They had a knowing that ran underneath the daily labor of survival, a knowing I didn’t have language for until decades later.
This Juneteenth, I want to talk about that knowing. About where it came from, what it cost to carry it, and what it has meant to finally allow myself to fully receive it.
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My Grandmother’s Hands
My grandmother spoke in a particular way. Phrases, small practices, specific instructions about what to do and not do, and spoke with an authority that didn’t invite questions. I grew up inside those phrases the way you grow without realizing it was anything other than simply how things were.
It wasn’t until years later, when I began studying Hoodoo formally, deliberately, as an adult building my own spiritual practice, that I sat upright in recognition. The phrases, practices, specific instructions. They had names. They had a tradition. They had a lineage that stretched back through Louisiana, through West and Central African spiritual systems that survived the Middle Passage by adapting, hiding inside Christianity, hiding inside folk wisdom, hiding inside what got passed to a granddaughter as simply “the way things are done.”
My grandmother was practicing Hoodoo. She never called it that. She probably didn’t think of it as a spiritual tradition with a name and a history. She thought of it as what her mother did, and her mother’s mother, the practical, ordinary knowledge of how to protect a household, how to read a sign, how to know something before you were told it.
I spent years not knowing what I had been given and then I spent more years deciding what to do with the knowing once I had it.
The Cost of Choosing a Lane
For a long time, I kept my spiritual gifts separate from the rest of who I was. The clinician in me wanted credibility, the kind the world recognizes immediately, the kind that doesn’t require explanation. The medium in me, the granddaughter of a woman who read signs without calling it reading signs, wanted to be fully here, fully herself, without translation, but she even hid that part of herself, but fully supported me discovering my abilities. I deeply suspected my grandmother had abilities due to her willingness to immediately believe me when I told her things I saw and experienced as a child.
I kept these two parts of me in separate rooms for longer than I want to admit. I told myself this was professionalism, but now looking back, it was actually a quieter form of the same pressure my grandparents lived under their whole lives: the pressure to make yourself smaller, more palatable, more legible to systems that were never built with you in mind.
My grandparents didn’t have the luxury of choosing a lane. They worked the jobs available to them, in a country that offered Black people in their generation very few choices and even fewer protections and underneath that labor, they carried something the world around them didn’t value, didn’t see, and in many cases would’ve been actively punished if it had been named clearly. They carried it anyway. Quietly. Faithfully and then they passed it to me without either of us fully understanding what was being transferred.
When I finally stopped splitting myself, when I let the clinician and the medium exist in the same room, the same practice, the same body, and something in me settled that I didn’t know was unsettled. It felt less like learning something new and more like finally putting down a weight I had been carrying for no reason. The growth in my abilities since that integration has been undeniable. I’ve been receiving even clearer messages and have developed a deeper trust in what I receive. A steadiness in the work that wasn’t available to me when I was still negotiating which parts of myself were allowed to show up.
Integration was never about adding spirituality to my clinical practice. It was about stopping the abandonment of what my grandmother gave me.
What Juneteenth Means in This Context
Juneteenth marks a specific kind of delay, the gap between when freedom was declared and when it actually reached the people it was meant for. Enslaved people in Texas didn’t learn they were free until more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation. Freedom existed on paper before it existed in their lives.
I think about that gap often in relation to my own spiritual inheritance. The freedom to fully claim what my grandmother gave me existed, in some sense, the whole time. It was always mine. It’s always been real, but it took me years to actually receive it, to stop hiding it, to stop treating it as something separate from my legitimate, credentialed, professional self.
There is a version of freedom that is declared and a version that is actually lived. I spent a long time in the gap between those two things, the same gap my ancestors waited inside for two and a half years before becoming legally free of enslavement. My freedom to be fully myself, clinician and medium, granddaughter and practitioner, was always true, but living inside that truth took longer for me to accept.
I Am a Soulann Woman
My maternal lineage comes from Louisiana. From a lineage that survived the Middle Passage by hiding its spiritual truth inside whatever container would keep it alive, Christianity, folk wisdom, the ordinary instructions of a grandmother to her granddaughters. My people carried Hoodoo without always naming it Hoodoo. They carried ancestral knowing without a vocabulary that named it as such. They survived by adapting, by disguising, by passing the real thing down quietly enough that it would not be destroyed.
I call myself a Soulann woman because that lineage, that specific Louisiana root, that specific blend of survival and spirit and quiet, fierce knowing, lives in me. It is not abstract ancestry. It is my grandmother’s hands. It is my grandfather’s labor. It is the elementary education they never received and the spiritual education they gave me without either of us calling it that.
My ancestors live through me. Not as a metaphor but as a literal reality that shapes how I move through grief, through ritual, and through the work I do with every woman who sits across from me carrying her own inherited knowing that she hasn’t yet had permission to claim.
What I Want You to Know This Juneteenth
If you are carrying something similar such as your grandmother’s phrases you didn’t understand were spiritual practice, a knowing that runs underneath your formal credentials, a sense that part of yourself has been waiting in a separate room for permission to come fully forward, I want you to know that the permission was never actually required from anyone outside yourself.
Your ancestors who survived what they survived, worked the jobs they worked, and carried what they carried without the language or the safety to name it fully, didn’t do that so you would keep splitting yourself the way I did for so long. They did it so you could be whole. Freedom was always real and the work now is simply to live inside it.
Come Claim What’s Yours
🌿 The Grief Sanctuary: For women ready to integrate the full truth of their ancestral inheritance, spiritual and clinical, named and unnamed, into one whole practice of healing.
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🔮 Spiritual Development Mentoring: If you are sitting with your own version of what I sat with for years, a gift you’ve inherited but haven’t fully claimed, this one-on-one work is built to help you stop splitting yourself. [Book a consultation at www.healingwithamber.co]
With care and intention,
Amber
What "Spiritual Culturally-Responsive" Actually Looks Like in a Grief Session
You’ve done the trainings.
The continuing education credits on cultural humility. The webinar on culturally-responsive practice, and the workshop on implicit bias. You’ve done the work of examining your assumptions, checking your privilege, learning to sit with discomfort. You have the hours and you’ve got the frameworks.
Then you go back into your sessions hoping you’re doing it right.
If you’re honest and I’m asking you to be honest here, you still might not know what to do when a Black client tells you her grief is not just about this loss. It’s about every loss including her mother, but also Trayvon and her ancestors whose names she doesn’t know. We should also understand when she talks about the church community that told her she wasn’t grieving “right” because she was asking too many questions about a God who would take someone so young.
That’s not a cultural humility problem. That’s a framework problem.
Cultural humility is necessary, but it’s not sufficient. Knowing that you carry biases, knowing how to examine them, and knowing how to approach a client’s cultural background with curiosity rather than assumptions, this is the floor. The floor isn’t the ceiling, though.
The ceiling is actually knowing what to do when your client’s grief carries dimensions that your clinical training never prepared you for.
Here is what that requires:
Understanding collective and ancestral grief.
Many BIPOC/BBIA clients carry grief that is communal and multigenerational. Grief that doesn’t only belong to them. Grief that was handed down through lineages of loss, that lives in the body as inherited trauma which connects an individual’s personal loss to a much larger arc of suffering and survival.
An individualistic clinical lens will keep bumping into a ceiling with this client. Her grief is not just hers. It’s her grandmother’s, and her grandmother’s mother’s, and the unnamed women before them who survived things that were never acknowledged and never grieved. When you work with her grief, you are working with all of that. Understanding how to locate a client within her lineage, rather than just her personal history, changes what becomes possible. When you focus on an individual commits to healing themselves, in turn, they provide healing to their lineage as well.
Understanding spiritual grief specifically the grief of religious displacement.
For many BIPOC/BBIA clients, the church, the mosque, the tradition was the container for grief. It was where death was processed, where community gathered, and where the language of loss lived. When that tradition fails them, judges their grief, denies their experience, or requires a performance of faith they can no longer sustain, the loss then becomes not just spiritual but also communal, relational, and deep.
Spiritual grief compounds with other grief. A client who is simultaneously mourning a death and mourning the tradition that was supposed to hold her through death is carrying two losses at once. Most clinical frameworks have no place for the second one.
Understanding grief inside ongoing racial trauma.
Your BIPOC/BBIA client is not grieving in a neutral world. She’s grieving in a world that is actively harming people who look like her, where her safety isn’t guaranteed, and where the news carries ongoing evidence that her life and the lives of her community are treated as expendable. Her acute personal grief is happening inside chronic collective stress.
A grief framework that doesn’t account for this context will keep missing what is most alive in the room. Not because the clinician isn’t trying it’s because the framework wasn’t built for it.
Why Spiritual Integration Cannot Be Separate From Cultural Responsiveness
Here’s the piece that most cultural competency trainings miss entirely, and it is the piece the Psychospiritual Grief Method treats as central rather than supplemental, you cannot be genuinely culturally responsive to grief without being spiritually literate, because for most cultures outside the dominant Western secular framework, grief and spirituality were never separate categories to begin with.
In many African and African diasporic traditions, grief is inseparable from ancestral practice. Mourning includes ritual communication with the dead, libation, naming ceremonies, and an understanding that the deceased remain active participants in the life of the family. A clinician who treats a client’s reported communication with a deceased parent as a symptom to be assessed, rather than a culturally embedded practice to be understood, is not being culturally responsive. They’re pathologizing a tradition because it doesn’t fit a secular clinical model.
In many Indigenous communities across Turtle Island, grief is communal and land-based, tied to ceremony, to specific protocols for honoring the dead, and to an understanding of death as a continuation within a larger relational web that includes ancestors, land, and future generations. A framework that isolates grief to the individual psyche, separate from land, ceremony, and community, will miss what is actually happening for that client.
In many Latinx traditions, the dead remain present participants in family life through practices like ofrendas, novenas, and the active maintenance of relationship across Día de los Muertos and beyond. Grief here isn’t something to be resolved and left behind. It’s something to be tended, seasonally and ritually, for as long as the relationship matters, which is often indefinitely.
In many South Asian and Hindu traditions, specific rituals, including the timing of cremation, the structure of mourning periods, and ceremonies tied to the soul’s journey after death, are not cultural decoration around grief. They’re the mechanism through which grief is processed.
A clinician unfamiliar with these structures may miss why a client’s distress intensifies or eases at specific points that have nothing to do with Western stage models of grief and everything to do with where the family is in a ritual calendar.
A clinician can take every cultural humility training available and still miss all of this, because the trainings teach the clinician to be curious and non-judgmental about cultural difference in general. They don’t teach clinicians what is actually happening, spiritually and ritually, inside a given client’s grief, or how to integrate that understanding into the clinical work itself rather than treating it as background information to be respectfully noted and then set aside.
This is the distinction the Psychospiritual Grief Method insists on: spiritual integration is not an add-on to cultural responsiveness. It is cultural responsiveness, applied to the domain where most cultures actually locate their understanding of death, loss, and continuity. A clinician who is curious about culture but spiritually illiterate will keep missing the actual terrain of the client’s grief, no matter how many trainings they complete.
What Clients Already Know
Most BIPOC women who have spent time in therapy can tell you within a few sessions whether their whole grief is welcome in that particular room. They can read it in the small moments, what the clinician lingers on, what gets redirected, what produces a subtle shift in posture. They have years of practice editing themselves for clinical spaces.
If you are that client, I want you to know that the editing you’ve been doing is not a personal failing or evidence that your grief is too complicated to be held. It is evidence that the room you were in did not have the framework yet. That framework exists, and practitioners trained in it are out there.
If you are a clinician, you do not have to be the room your clients edit themselves for. That is a choice available to you, with the right training.
What This Training Provides
Becoming a clinician who can hold the full picture requires more than good intentions and cultural sensitivity trainings. It requires a framework specific enough to actually use. That’s what the Psychospiritual Grief Method provides, not a posture, not a set of principles, but a real clinical framework for working at the intersection where most BIPOC/BBIA clients’ grief actually lives.
Enrollment is open now for the first training on Saturday July 25th. 9am-4:30pm PST.
Next Steps
For clinicians: If you recognize the gap this post named and want a framework rigorous enough to close it, enrollment for the Psychospiritual Grief Method Training is open. Six CEUs, small cohort, built for practitioners ready to hold the full complexity of their clients’ grief. [Full details at www.healingwithamber.co/the-psychospiritual-grief-method-training]
For clients seeking counseling: If you are navigating grief that includes ancestral weight, spiritual displacement, or the compounding reality of racial trauma, a free grief consultation is available for California residents. This is where we talk about what you’re carrying and whether this practice is the right fit for your care. [Book at www.healingwithamber.co]
With care + intention,
Amber
The Backlash I Get for Calling Religion Indoctrination (Why I’m Not Stopping)
Every time I post something about religion being a form of indoctrination, I know what’s coming.
Within minutes, the comments start. Some are thoughtful disagreements, the kind I genuinely welcome but most follow a familiar pattern that consist of accusations that I’m attacking faith, attacking culture, and ultimately attacking the very thing that held our families together through generations of survival. Comments telling me I’ve lost my way, that I’m being used by dark forces and I’m leading women astray. Sometimes the responses are angry. Sometimes they’re worried, in a way that’s almost more uncomfortable than anger, the tone of someone trying to save me from myself, which is really sad if you think about it…
I’ve sat with this reaction enough times now to understand something important about it and I wanna talk about it openly today, because I think the pattern itself, the constant backlash is part of the conversation needed.
What I Actually Mean When I Say Indoctrination
Let me be precise, because precision matters here.
When I talk about religion as indoctrination, I am not saying that faith is meaningless, that religious tradition has no value, or that the people who practice within religious structures are wrong or deceived. Many of the women in this community have deep, living relationships with religious traditions, and I’m not interested in dismantling that.
What I am naming is something more specific in the way that religious structures, like many structures of authority, can be used to install beliefs before a person has the capacity to examine them. The way certain teachings function less as invitations to seek truth and more as instructions to stop seeking. The way questioning itself gets coded as betrayal, as sin, as evidence of spiritual failure rather than spiritual maturity.
This is not unique to religion. Educational systems, family systems, cultural systems, all of them can function this way but religion carries a particular weight because it operates with the authority of the sacred, which makes its instructions feel less like instructions and more like truth itself.
Naming that dynamic is not the same as attacking faith, but I understand why for many folks the two feel impossible to separate.
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We Are All at Our Current Level of Understanding
Here is something I have to remind myself of, repeatedly, especially in the moments right after a wave of pushback arrives.
Everyone is at their current level of understanding. Including the people responding with anger and the folks who genuinely feel threatened by what I’m naming. I
This is not a condescending statement. It’s simply true, and it’s true for all of us, all the time, about everything. There was a version of me, not that long ago who would have had the exact same reaction to some of what I now teach. Who would have read a post like this one and felt something tighten, something defensive, something that said this is dangerous that this person has lost something important.
What changed wasn’t that I became smarter or more enlightened than the person I used to be. What changed was that my understanding expanded to include more than it did before and that expansion happened on its own timeline, shaped by my own experiences, my own grief, my own questions that finally got loud enough to need answers.
I cannot give someone else that expansion before they are ready for it. No one can and trying to force it, through argument, through being right louder, through winning an exchange in the comments, has never once worked, not for me and not for anyone I’ve watched try it.
My Content Isn’t for Everyone
This is the part that took me the longest to actually believe, not just say.
My content isn’t for everyone and that’s not a failure. That’s not me being too much, too controversial, or too out there. That’s just the nature of speaking from where I actually am, rather than from some flattened, inoffensive middle ground designed to avoid ever unsettling anyone.
If I tried to write in a way that never challenged anyone’s current framework, I would have nothing left to say. The work I do exists specifically at the edge of frameworks, the place where grief meets Spirit, where clinical meets ancestral, and where the structures people were given start to show their limits. That edge is, by definition, going to be uncomfortable for folks who are not yet near it. Just like the newly released movie, Disclosure Day. I haven’t spoken too much on the existence of non-human life but how could there NOT be within an infinite Universe. If you’ve seen the movie, what did you think about it? I felt like a documentary overall for me and it also felt validating to my experiences and decades of experiences that have been reported. There’s some folks that posted on social media that they walked out of the theater because it wasn’t good… well, they’re not at a level to understand, just like this post, but I digress….
The women who find real resonance in what I teach are often the ones who were already feeling that discomfort before they found this space. They were already questioning and already sensing the gap between what they were taught and what they were experiencing. My content didn’t create that gap. It gave language to a gap that was already there.
For someone who isn’t at that edge yet, my content will land as foreign, threatening, or simply not for them. That’s accurate. It not an insult to them and it isn’t a failure on my part. It’s just where they currently are, and where I currently am, and the distance between those two places.
Most recent YouTube interaction on recent YouTube short
The Consciousness Shift Happening Right Now
I believe we’re living through a genuine shift in collective consciousness, and I don’t say that lightly or as a marketing phrase.
Across generations, across cultures, more and more folks are waking up to questions that previous generations either didn’t ask or weren’t safe to ask out loud. Questions about the systems they were raised inside and about what was inherited versus what was actually theirs, and questions about the relationship between spirituality and institution, between faith and fear, between what was taught as truth and what was actually a mechanism of control.
This shift isn’t comfortable because growth is never comfortable. Shifts in consciousness rarely are, for the individual or for the collective. When something this foundational starts to move, the systems built on top of it respond. I mean, look at America right now… right conversation, perhaps wrong time…. Sometimes that response looks like backlash or sometimes it looks like people you love feeling destabilized by your questions, even when your questions were never about them.
The backlash I receive isn’t really about me. It’s a small, local instance of a much larger friction. The friction of a worldview meeting something that doesn’t fit inside of it anymore. That doesn’t make the friction feel great to be on the receiving end of but it does change how I hold it.
Discernment as Spiritual Practice
Here is where I want to land here because I think this is the most useful thing I can offer on this topic.
Discernment, the capacity to sit with conflicting information, conflicting reactions, conflicting truths, and learn how to choose what is actually yours without needing everyone else to agree because it’s not a side skill. It’s one of the most important spiritual practices there is.
Discernment is what allows you to hear criticism and ask, honestly, is there something here for me, without collapsing into either total rejection or total absorption. It’s what allows you to know the difference between someone disagreeing with you and someone being a genuine messenger of something you need to hear, even when both arrive sounding similar.
Discernment is also what allows you to release content, relationships, or frameworks that aren’t for you without needing to convince anyone else that your choice is correct. You don’t owe an explanation for the edge you’re standing on. You don’t have to win the argument to know what’s true for you.
This is a spiritual intervention in its most practical form. Not a dramatic vision or a thunderclap of certainty, but the quiet, ongoing practice of checking in with your own knowing and trusting it, even when, especially when, the folks around you are telling you that you shouldn’t.
If You’re Ready to Go Deeper
If reading this landed somewhere real for you, if you’ve been feeling the friction of your own expanding understanding, of relationships and frameworks that no longer fit the way they used to, you don’t have to navigate that alone.
🌿 The Grief Sanctuary: Consider joining the reading space for women in exactly this kind of expansion. Monthly practices, ritual support, and a space where questioning is not a problem to be managed. Upgrade Subscription
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🛞 The Inner Circle: An exclusive tier for women who are ready for deeper, more personalized ongoing support as your understanding continues to shift. Upgrade Membership
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🔮 Spiritual Development Mentoring: A new offering for women who are ready to be guided through this expansion intentionally, with someone who has walked this edge and can hold both the clinical and the spiritual reality of what you’re moving through. This is one-on-one work for the woman who knows something is shifting and wants real support through it.
[Book a consultation at www.healingwithamber.co]
Remember that your understanding is allowed to expand and not everyone has to come with you at the same pace.
With care and intention,
Amber Choisella
The Clinician This Training Was Built For (And the One It Wasn’t)
Let me be specific about who this training is built for, because not every clinician needs it, and I would rather speak directly to the ones who do than cast a wide net and lose the people this is actually designed to serve. This training was built for a specific kind of practitioner. One I recognize because I was her.
Two People Reading This
This post is for both the clinician wondering whether this training is for them, and the grieving client who wants to understand what it would mean to work with a practitioner who has it.
Because the question of fit matters from both sides of the room.
Who the Training Was Built For
You are a licensed clinician, LPCC (LPC), LCSW, LMFT, psychologist, social worker, who works with grief in any form. Not only bereavement but also ambiguous loss, disenfranchised grief, identity loss, ancestral grief, and spiritual crisis related to grief. You understand that grief is not only about death and your practice already reflects that understanding.
You work with BIPOC/ BBIA (Black, Brown, Indigenous, and Asian) clients, or you want to. You’re either BIPOC/ BBIA yourself and navigate on how to bring your cultural and spiritual knowledge into your clinical work, or you are deeply committed to building a practice that doesn’t flatten your clients’ cultural and spiritual realities into a Western secular framework. You’ve felt the limitation of that flattening in the room and have watched clients edit themselves for it.
You’ve sat with a client’s spiritual experience, a visitation dream, a belief in ancestral communication, a ritual practice, a faith crisis, and felt genuinely unclear about your clinical role. Not uncomfortable in a way that would pathologize but felt genuinely uncertain of what to do next. You’ve wondered: do I engage this? How? What does culturally responsiveness actually look like in this specific moment, not just as a principle on a diversity training slide?
You’re spiritually curious or spiritually awakened yourself and may be navigating your own integration of clinical identity and spiritual identity, feeling like the two parts of you have been living in different rooms, and wondering if there is a way to let them meet in the work. You may have a practice, or beliefs, or a set of experiences you don’t bring into your clinical role because you’re trained not to and you’re starting to wonder what gets lost in that separation. What your clients lose when you perform a version of yourself that is less whole than the practitioner you actually are.
You want a framework. Not a vague set of principles or a checklist of culturally responsive behaviors, an actual framework, specific and grounded in both clinical and spiritual knowledge that you can actually use with your real clients in your actual practice.
If you read that and felt recognized, keep reading.
What This Training Is Not
You’re not the right fit if you are looking for a framework to use outside your clinical scope. This training assumes active licensure and is designed for practitioners working within a professional clinical context.
You’re not the right fit if you want a spiritual development experience for yourself. This is a clinical practitioner training, not personal growth work. You will likely gain personal insight, because that’s the nature of this material, but the primary focus is your clinical practice and what becomes possible in your room.
You’re not the right fit if you are looking for a passive CEU experience. This is an in-depth methodology training that requires genuine engagement with a live session that includes real application. It will ask something of you.
What the Right Clinician Usually Discovers
Something worth saying about what the right practitioner typically finds inside this training is…you already know more than you think you do.
You’ve been improvising your way through the gaps in your training for years. Reaching toward something more rigorous, sensing what your clients needed and not quite having the clinical language to hold it, doing the work with instinct and care, while being conscious of that constant low-grade awareness that your framework was not fully adequate to the complexity of what was in the room.
What the Psychospiritual Grief Method gives you is not entirely new knowledge. It’s a framework for the knowing you already have. Language for the things you’ve been sensing but didn’t have clinical permission to hold and structure for the work you’ve already been reaching toward.
That is what a good framework does. It doesn’t replace your instincts, no, instead it gives your instincts a home.
The practitioners most transformed by this training are not the ones who came in knowing the least. They’ll be the ones who came in carrying the fullest picture of their clients’ complexity, improvising through the gaps, and wanting something more rigorous to work from. They were already most of the way there. The framework named what they already knew and gave them a way to use it with intention.
What It Means If You’re the Client
If you are a grieving woman reading this, not a clinician, what this training exists to address is the gap you have felt in spaces that couldn’t hold your grief fully. The part of you that had to stay outside. The spiritual experiences you stopped mentioning because the room didn’t know how to hold them.
Practitioners trained in the Psychospiritual Grief Method have a framework for meeting the full complexity of your grief, ancestral, spiritual, somatic, and cultural without requiring you to translate yourself into a language that flattens it. This is what culturally responsive care looks like in practice, not as a principle but as a specific set of skills in the room with you.
You deserve a practitioner who has that framework and we do exist.
What the Training Includes
The Psychospiritual Grief Method training includes full instruction in the five-phase ARISE Arc as a usable clinical framework with specific tools for each phase. Clinical and spiritual frameworks for holding the intersection of grief, spirituality, and cultural identity, including continuing bonds, ancestral grief, spiritual crisis, and multigenerational loss. Case conceptualization tools and practitioner reflection practices. Live sessions for teaching, Q&A, and supervised application. A community container for practitioners working at this intersection, because the professional isolation of this work is real and worth addressing.
This methodology requires real learning, not passive content consumption.
Ready to Learn More?
For clinicians: Enrollment for the Psychospiritual Grief Method Training is open now. Six CEUs. Small cohort. Built for practitioners who are ready to bring their whole self into the room. [Full details at www.healingwithamber.co/the-psychospiritual-grief-method]
For clients: If you are navigating grief that has a spiritual or ancestral dimension and you want one-on-one support from a practitioner who holds both, a free consultation is available. [Book at www.healingwithamber.co]
This framework doesn’t replace your instincts. It gives your instincts a home.
Amber
Your Spiritual Gifts Are Terrifying You and That’s Exactly How They’re Supposed to Arrive
What Your Ancestors Want You to Know About the Power You’re Afraid to Claim
You felt something you weren’t supposed to be able to feel. You knew something before it was possible to know it. You saw something in a dream that then happened. You sensed a presence so clearly that the rational explanation stopped being convincing, and the one that replaced it scared you more.
Your first instinct wasn’t wonder. It was fear.
That response is not a sign that something is wrong with you. It is, in fact, one of the most reliable indicators that something real is happening.
Why Emerging Gifts Feel Terrifying
Spiritual gifts, when they’re emerging, don’t usually arrive with a soft welcome or a clear instruction manual. They arrive in the gap between what you thought was real and what you’re suddenly experiencing. They land in the nervous system before the mind has a framework to receive them, which means the nervous system often responds the way it responds to any unknown, with alarm.
The gift doesn’t feel like a gift when it first arrives. It feels like something happening to you without your permission kinda like a curse… It can and does feel like that at time because you start seeing things you didn’t ask to see and knowing things you didn’t ask to know. You’re being affected by other people’s emotional states so acutely that you can barely distinguish/discern their pain from your own. You could also be receiving information in dreams or in waking moments that turns out to be accurate in ways you can’t explain.
These experiences are disorienting. The disorientation is not evidence that you are broken. It is evidence that your capacity is larger than the container you’ve been living inside, and that the container is in the process of expanding.
Fear Versus Reverence
There is an important distinction worth making here, between the fear that signals danger and the fear that signals the sacred.
Not all fear is a warning to retreat. Some fear is the body’s way of recognizing that something significant is happening, something that asks for a different quality of attention than ordinary experience requires. Many spiritual traditions same the belief that the shaking in the presence of something holy is not the same as the shaking in the presence of something threatening, even when both feel like fear in the body.
The fear that says “I am in danger” is usually accompanied by a desire to flee, to close, to protect. The reverence that looks like fear is often accompanied by something underneath it that wants to move closer, even when the surface of you is frightened. The awe that is on the other side of the alarm.
Learning to tell the difference is part of the work of living in relationship with gifts that are larger than you initially knew how to hold. You don’t have to be fearless. You just have to be willing to get curious about what the fear is actually pointing toward.
What Was Taken, What Is Being Reclaimed
For BIPOC people, the terror around spiritual gifts carries a layer that is worth naming directly.
Your ancestors had these gifts. The woman in your lineage who was called a healer, a dreamer, a medicine woman, a seer and the traditions your people practiced before colonization, before forced conversion, before the calculated destruction of Indigenous spiritual systems and the criminalization of African and Afro-Caribbean religious practice. The gifts that existed in your bloodline for generations before they became dangerous to express.
Suppression isn’t ancient history. The Yoruba religion was actively persecuted across multiple continents well into the twentieth century. Curanderismo and Indigenous ceremonial practice were interrupted through residential schools and forced assimilation within living memory. The “Strong Black Woman” framework that forbids vulnerability also, conveniently, forbids the kind of softness and receptivity that gifts require.
What you’re experiencing as terrifying might be, in part, a cellular memory of the cost of these gifts. Your nervous system holds the history of what happened when the women before you were seen with these abilities. The fear is not only yours, but some of it is also inherited and inheriting it does not mean you are required to stay inside it.
These gifts weren’t destroyed by suppression because they went underground. They moved through the bloodline in forms that were harder to name and easier to survive with. They are surfacing now in you, in part because you are living in conditions where it is finally safe enough to surface.
Common Experiences That Terrify People
If you are wondering whether what you’re experiencing counts, here is what I hear most often from the women who find their way to this work:
Knowing something about a person the first time you meet them, information you had no logical way of accessing.
Feeling other people’s emotions in your own body with such acuity that crowds become overwhelming and some people leave you depleted in ways that have nothing to do with what was said.
Dreams that contain specific, accurate information about things that then happen.
A sense of presence in rooms that feels distinct from imagination.
Hearing a name, a word, or a phrase clearly in the space between sleeping and waking.
A sudden and inexplicable knowing about a situation or a person that turns out to be true.
These are'’t symptoms. They’re capacities and that distinction matters.
Why the Gifts Are Emerging Now
Grief is one of the primary activating conditions for spiritual gifts. This is not coincidence or poetic metaphor. The experience of profound loss disrupts the ordinary psychological and nervous system structures that keep certain kinds of perception filtered out. When the container of the normal life cracks open, what was being filtered sometimes comes through.
Tower moments do the same thing. Identity crisis, spiritual awakening, the loss of the structures you organized your life around, these are all conditions that open the veil in both directions. You become more permeable and the information that was always there but was previously blocked by the business of ordinary life begins to come through.
Your ancestors may also have made a choice. There are traditions across multiple cultures that understand spiritual gifts as something transmitted with intention from the lineage, often to a specific person, often at a specific moment in their life. If you are the one in your family who is doing the conscious work, who is naming what was unnamed, who is in the passage of transformation, you may be the one the lineage chose to transmit through. That is an enormous thing to receive. It is also, from the ancestral perspective, a form of trust.
What to Do When the Gifts Terrify You
The first and most important instruction is this: don’t shut it down.
Suppression does not make gifts disappear. It makes them louder and less organized. What does not flow finds other channels, and those channels are usually less comfortable than the one you were trying to avoid. Fear is understandable but I’m gonna tell you right now that suppression is NOT the answer to it.
Learn to ground before and after any experience of heightened perception. Intentionally place your feet on the floor and allow your body to make physical contact with something solid. Take slow and deliberate breaths. Grounding creates the container that makes the gifts navigable rather than overwhelming.
Find language for what you’re experiencing, if not with everyone in your life, then in a journal, in a community that understands, with a practitioner who can hold the full picture. The gifts become more workable when you stop having to pretend they aren’t happening.
Study what you’re experiencing within a tradition or framework that has held this before. You don’t have to invent the language from scratch. The traditions your lineage came from have language for this. Finding your way back to that language can be its own form of homecoming.
When to Seek Support
If your experiences are interfering with your ability to function, care for yourself, maintain basic safety, or stay connected to reality in ways that feel frightening rather than expansive, please reach out for support from someone trained to hold both the clinical and the spiritual dimensions, like me. A genuine spiritual emergency may need both a skilled spiritual guide and a clinical practitioner, and there is no spiritual integrity in refusing support when support is what the moment requires.
If your experiences are disorienting but you are functional, you are safe, and something underneath the fear recognizes what is happening even while the surface is frightened, what you likely need is not clinical intervention but spiritual accompaniment. Someone who can help you learn to live inside the expanded capacity rather than fight it, like me.
What Your Ancestors Want You to Know
I have been doing this work long enough to tell you, with confidence, what comes through again and again when I sit with women in exactly this experience:
They gave you these gifts because they trust you. Not because it will be easy, or because you won’t be frightened, or because you have your life perfectly arranged to receive them. They trust you because they’ve been watching you, they know what you’re capable of, they know that gifts emerging isn’t separate from the grief and loss you’ve been moving through. The Tower happened because they needed you open. The grief did what grief does because they needed you permeable. Your gifts are arriving now because now is when you can finally hold them.
You’re not going crazy. You’re coming into something and you are not alone in it.
You Don’t Have to Figure This Out Alone
📞 Schedule a spiritual consultation with Amber. If you are in the middle of an emerging gift and you need someone who can hold both the clinical and the spiritual reality of what you’re experiencing, a one-on-one consultation is where that conversation happens. This is where we assess what is unfolding, what kind of support would actually serve you, and how to begin building a relationship with what is emerging rather than fighting it. Available worldwide for spiritual consultation. [Book at www.healingwithamber.co]
Your gifts are real. You were chosen for them for purpose. Come find the support that helps you receive them.
With love,
Amber Choisella
What Psychospiritual Grief Work Actually Looks Like (Why It's Not Just Therapy OR Spirituality)
It All Begins Here
When I tell people I do “psychospiritual grief work,” they usually look confused.
“So like... therapy?” they ask. “Or like... spiritual counseling?” they ask next. The answer is neither and both. And that confusion is exactly why so many people’s grief stays stuck.
Here’s the truth: grief is not just a psychological problem that therapy can solve and it’s not just a spiritual crisis that spirituality can heal. It’s both, simultaneously, integrated into one whole human experience. Until you address BOTH dimensions, you’re only getting half the healing.
What Psychospiritual Grief Work Means
Psychospiritual grief work is the integration of clinical psychology, spiritual wisdom, somatic practice, and cultural understanding into one coherent approach to loss.
It means:
You don’t have to choose between your therapist and your medium. You don’t have to hide your spiritual experiences from your therapist because they’ll pathologize them. You don’t have to pretend your grief is only about brain chemistry and neurotransmitters when you KNOW your person is trying to reach you. And you don’t have to bypass your trauma by throwing spiritual platitudes at legitimate psychological pain.
Psychospiritual work holds both realities at once:
Your grief is real AND your loved one is still connected to you
Your trauma needs processing AND your ancestors are supporting your healing
Your nervous system needs regulation AND your spiritual gifts are opening
You need clinical support AND you need ancestral wisdom
Your pain is legitimate AND it’s transforming you
What It Actually Looks Like in Practice
Session 1: The Foundation
We start where traditional therapy does. We focus on understanding your loss, your history, what broke when they died (or left, or changed). I’m asking clinical questions: What’s your support system? Are you sleeping? Have you had thoughts of harming yourself? What were your attachment patterns?
I’m also asking the questions therapy won’t: What spiritual experiences are you having that you’re afraid to mention? What signs have you noticed? Do you feel their presence? What does your intuition tell you about them? Are you seeing them in dreams? What cultural or ancestral practices around grief do you come from?
Clinical + Spiritual from minute one.
The Body Work
Traditional grief therapy might talk about “somatic responses to trauma” which is good…. but psychospiritual work says: your body is a sacred text. The tightness in your chest isn’t just stress. It’s where you’re holding unexpressed words to your person. The exhaustion isn’t just depression. It’s your nervous system working overtime to process both the physical loss AND the spiritual reality of their continued presence.
We work somatically: breathwork, body scans, gentle movement. We locate the grief in your body and ask what it needs. And we do this while honoring that grief lives in the body because humans are WHOLE beings not just minds, not just spirits, but integrated systems.
The Spiritual Processing
This is where psychospiritual work differs most from traditional therapy. We’re not bypassing your grief by telling you “they’re in a better place.” We’re not spiritually gaslighting you. Instead, we’re creating space for the spiritual reality of your loss.
If you’re having mediumship experiences such as receiving messages, signs, and/or dreams, we will be exploring that. Not as “coping mechanisms” (the psychology term that dismisses it) but as actual communication. We’re asking: what is your person trying to tell you? What do they want you to know? What unfinished business exists?
We’re also asking the clinical question: is this helping your grief or prolonging it? Are these experiences grounding you or keeping you in fantasy? Are they connecting you to your person in a healthy way, or are they keeping you stuck?
Integration, not separation.
The Cultural Layer
Psychospiritual grief work MUST include cultural understanding. Your grief isn’t generic. If you’re a Black woman, your grief carries the weight of systemic racism, medical racism, the loss of your people. If you’re Latinx, your grief includes the family dynamics and cultural expectations you grew up with. If you’re Indigenous, your grief might be collective, for your people, your land, your ancestors’ suffering.
Traditional therapy often ignores this. Spirituality sometimes appropriates it. Psychospiritual work centers it.
We’re asking: What does your culture teach about grief?What rituals belong to your people? What ancestral wisdom do you have access to? How does your identity as a BIPOC woman shape your grief? What systemic oppression is layered into this loss? What do your ancestors need from you in this grief?
The Integration Work
This is the deepest part. Once we’ve addressed the psychology, the somatic, the spiritual, and the cultural dimensions, we integrate them.
You’re not “getting over” your grief. You’re learning to carry it while also carrying joy. You’re not “moving on.” You’re weaving your person into the fabric of who you’re becoming. You’re not “healing” as if the wound closes and disappears. You’re integrating the loss into your identity in a way that honors both the person you were before and the person you’re becoming.
Psychospiritual integration means:
You can cry about their death AND feel their presence
You can be angry at God/Universe/Spirit AND believe in ancestral support
You can use clinical tools AND spiritual practices
You can process trauma AND receive messages
You can grieve who you were AND embrace who you’re becoming
You can honor your culture AND integrate modern psychological understanding
You can believe in both evidence-based therapy AND the reality of spirit
Why This Matters
Too many BIPOC women are sitting in therapy with white therapists who dismiss their spiritual experiences as symptoms of depression. Too many are working with spiritual teachers who tell them to “trust the universe” while ignoring legitimate trauma. Too many are trying to choose between their psychology and their spirituality when the answer is: you need both.
Grief work that only addresses the mind leaves the Spirit orphaned. Grief work that only addresses the spirit leaves the trauma unprocessed. Psychospiritual grief work says you’re a whole person deserving of whole care.
This is the work I do. This is the work I teach other clinicians to do and this is what changes everything.
How to Access Psychospiritual Grief Work
If you’re grieving and you’ve been stuck in either “just therapy” or “just spirituality,” you deserve this integrated approach.
Three ways to work with me:
🌙 Join The Grief Sanctuary My membership community where we do psychospiritual grief work together. Monthly ancestral rituals, weekly spiritual counseling, group mediumship sessions, and community of BIPOC women who understand the full complexity of grief. $27/month gets you everything—live calls, practices, recordings, resource library.
💙 Free Grief Therapy Consultation If you want to explore whether working together is right for you, book a free 15-minute consultation. We’ll talk about what brought you here, what you’ve tried, what you’re hoping for. No obligation. Just honest conversation.
[Schedule Your Free Consultation]
🔮 For Clinicians: The Psychospiritual Grief Method Training If you’re a therapist, counselor, or licensed clinician who wants to learn how to integrate spiritual wisdom with clinical psychology in grief work, I’m launching certification training on July 25th, 2026.
This is for clinicians who are tired of the limitations of Western psychology alone. Who understand that your BIPOC clients are having spiritual experiences you have no framework for. Who want to expand your practice to honor the whole person: mind, body, spirit, & culture.
The training covers:
The five transformation phases of psychospiritual grief (Acknowledge, Embody, Reconnect, Integrate, Transform)
How to create culturally-responsive containers for grief work
Integrating mediumship, tarot, ancestral practice, somatic work, and trauma processing
Working ethically at the intersection of therapy and spirituality
Building a sustainable practice that honors your own energy
[Learn More About The Psychospiritual Grief Method Training]
You Deserve the Whole Thing
Your grief doesn’t fit into a single box. Your healing doesn’t need to choose between psychology and spirituality. You’re a whole person deserving of whole care.
Psychospiritual grief work isn’t a trend or a luxury. It’s the integration you’ve been waiting for.
Whether you join Sanctuary, book a consultation, or train to offer this work yourself, there’s a space for you here.
Your grief matters. Your spirit matters. Your culture matters. All of it, together.
With care + intention,
Amber