What Psychospiritual Counseling Actually Is (Why I Had to Create It Myself)
How My Own Grief, Cultural Displacement, and Spiritual Awakening Became a Framework And Why BIPOC/BBIA Women Needed It to Exist
It’s not a term I made up, but it is a term that I have created a part of my clinical identity. Psychospiritual counseling holds the psychological and the spiritual in one clinical container simultaneously, treating them as inseparable dimensions of the same human experience rather than as separate domains requiring separate practitioners at separate times in separate spaces. Heavy on the separate spaces.
That definition sounds simple, but simplicity is deceptive, because the actual practice of doing this work with integrity requires a kind of double fluency that clinical training and spiritual development alone doesn’t produce. Most practitioners end up choosing one language over the other because holding both fluently is genuinely demanding, and the clinical field historically has never held such space before.
I didn’t arrive at this work by theoretical interest. I arrived at it the way most BIPOC/BBIA women arrive at anything that actually fits them, which is naturally exhausting every available option that was supposed to fit and finally being forced to build something that did (insert deep sigh here).
What the Field Was Missing When I Showed Up to It
Clinical psychology, as it was handed to me in my training, operated on assumptions about what grief is, where it lives, and how it moves. The problem with this is that it hasn’t been tested against the experience of Black/Brown/ Indigenous/Asian women or ancestral grief/ the kind of loss that doesn’t have a clean narrative origin, and the limitations of those assumptions don’t always announce themselves in theory, but they show up consistently in sessions. I noticed a gap in treatment.
The spiritual dimension of grief was the gap I kept encountering, or the lack of spirituality in treatment. I’ve had women who had experienced the presence of their deceased loved one, not as a complication of their bereavement but as a continuing relationship that was helping them grieve. Although current grief frameworks ask Clinicians to place spiritual experiences/encounters aside so that the psychological aspect of grief could be worked with as if spiritual experiences were bypassing grief completely.
This wasn’t clinically adequate, and I knew it. I also knew that naming that inadequacy openly inside professional clinical culture required a kind of foundation that I had to build. Liberation Psychology is similar to what I created, which you can read more here on this about this specific framework. I created a framework that was missing in the grief clinical space, a space I’ve found myself in throughout many chapters in my life. Which I’ll speak more to in a bit.
The Disenfranchised Grief of Cultural and Spiritual Practices
There’s a specific kind of grief that doesn’t have formal recognition in most clinical contexts and the field names it disenfranchised grief, meaning grief that the culture or the institution around the grieving person doesn’t recognize as legitimate, regardless how significant the loss was which then goes largely unsupported because the systems designed to support grief were designed with a different kind of loss in mind.
For BIPOC/BBIA women, disenfranchisement runs through both the cultural and spiritual dimensions of their experience in ways that impact each other, because the spiritual practices that their lineages carried were frequently dismissed, criminalized, or simply treated as non-existent by the same Western institutions that then offered clinical support for grief without any framework or understanding for their cultural and spiritual practices.
A Black woman entering in therapy who had a grandmother who communicated with ancestors and or practiced Hoodoo or even Voodoo and she grew up watching that communication and/or ritual practice as a real and living relationship with the dead, do you think she would feel guilty in bringing this aspect of her life experience into the clinical space? Especially for grief work… probably not based upon current frameworks outside of a psychospiritual framework. Or what about the Latina/Latinx woman who practices Santeria or the Indigenous woman who is a shaman or medicine woman who hides that significant aspect of themselves in the clinical space?
These are reasons I wanted the Psychospiritual Grief Method to address directly, because the disenfranchisement of ancestral spiritual practices isn’t a minor cultural sensitivity issue but a structural absence in the field that has been producing real harm to the populations who are in most need of adequate grief support.
My Own Journey Was the Research
This is where the Psychospiritual Grief Method originates...
I am a Soulann woman from a Louisiana lineage. My grandmother practiced Hoodoo without calling it that, passing down a particular quality of knowing. She was my first supporter in connecting to Spirit before I understood what being psychic or a medium meant. She ventured through different religions and took what resonated with her and gave me permission to search for truth within myself. She read the bible daily and never said my experiences were demonic. She was my safe space to communicate my experiences with before I found it in the clinical field. I spend years managing and compartmentalizing who I am while I building my clinical identity because it felt safer and more legible to the institutions I was moving through.
The grief of that compartmentalization was its own form of disenfranchised grief. I was unconsciously grieving a form of myself that I felt like I couldn’t fully be present with because I didn’t feel safe to bring it into the many sessions of multiple grief episodes throughout my life.
My spiritual awakening occurred the night before I experienced a car accident with my grandfather. We were on route to the hospital where my grandfather transitioned shortly after. The prophetic feeling left me with a deep curiosity to learn more about my abilities which included the developing mediumship and training with The Morris Pratt Institute, The University of Metaphysics where I’m on the PhD track, and the Arthur Findlay College. Yet, the shift in perspective occurred earlier this year when I decided that I was no longer willing to compartmentalize myself because I knew that they are women who were just like me who need to feel safe in the clinical space. Spiritual individuals are human and need mental health treatment too. They need a place to be safe enough to bring their entire selves into the therapeutic environment for holistic healing. Theres’s an increasingly undeniable reality that the clinical and the spiritual aren’t separate domains of my identity but one continuous knowing.
The Psychospiritual Grief Method didn’t emerge from a literature review, although literature definitely supports it. The framework emerged from lived integration, sitting with my own grief, my gifts, my own ancestral inheritance, and refusing to allow any of them be more legitimate than the others. This is what needs to be taught.
What Psychospiritual Counseling Actually Offers BIPOC/BBIA Women
When a BIPOC/BBIA woman enters a psychospiritual counseling relationship, she is entering a space that was built with her experience as the central design consideration rather than as a demographic variable to be accommodated and that difference is palpable from the first session, because the questions the practitioner knows to ask are the questions that locate her grief at its actual level rather than at the level the standard framework can reach.
Grief that is ancestral gets addressed as ancestral grief, with frameworks and practices suited to inherited loss rather than only personal loss. The spiritual experiences that are part of how she is processing the death of someone she loved gets addressed as real dimensions of the grieving process, with a practitioner who has the fluency to meet them rather than the training to redirect them. The cultural practices and beliefs that shape her relationship to death and to what continues after death get treated as clinically significant context rather than as interesting background information that falls outside the scope of the session.
This is what psychospiritual counseling makes possible, and it is also what the training on October 17th is designed to produce in the practitioners who attend it, because the women who need this kind of care need more practitioners who can offer it, and the training is how that supply increases.
For the Clinician Who Recognizes This Gap
If you have been improvising through the gap I described earlier, reaching toward something more adequate than what your training gave you without yet having the language or the framework to name what you were reaching toward, the Psychospiritual Grief Method Training on October 17th is where that improvisation becomes a methodology.
🎓 Psychospiritual Grief Method Training: October 17th, 2026, six CEUs, small cohort by design, built for clinicians who are ready to hold the full complexity of BIPOC women's grief with the clinical and spiritual rigor it actually requires.
🌿 The Grief Sanctuary is for women who want ongoing community and monthly psychospiritual practices that hold the cultural, spiritual, and ancestral dimensions of grief the clinical field has historically ignored.
✨ The Inner Circle is for women who are ready for deeper, more personalized ongoing support and direct access to Amber as the work continues to deepen.
With care and intention,
Amber Choisella
Your Ancestors Grieve Too: A Spiritual Look at Inherited Loss with A Look at Epigenetics and Ancestral Work
A beginning statement that you feel in your bones is true.
The Grief You're Carrying Might Not Have Started With You.
There’s a grief that arrives without an occasion.
It’s not triggered by a loss you can point to or even be connected to anything that happened in your own lifetime. Yet you feel its presence in your body with specificity and a weight that doesn’t feel imagined. Something that feels real that’s been here longer than you have, something you inherited rather than acquired.
This is what’s known as ancestral grief and it’s one of the most difficult grief presentations to name because it resists the framework that most grief support is built around. The framework of personal loss tends to relate to where something in your own life ending and the grief belongs to that ending whereas ancestral grief doesn’t fit that framework because that loss isn’t something that directly happen to you, and naming it requires a willingness to locate yourself inside of a larger story than the one that begins with your own birth.
I want to offer you a spiritual framework for understanding what ancestral grief is and how to begin recognizing it because the recognition is the beginning of the tending that begins to move what’s been stored in your lineage for longer than any living member of your family can remember.
What Ancestral Grief Looks Like in the Body
Ancestral grief doesn’t announce itself with the clear signal of personal loss because it’s disguised as something that looks like a personal pattern, a personality characteristic, or a chronic physical state. Its disguise is so convincing that most folks who are carrying it have never considered the possibility that what they’re living with is grief rather than simply who they are.
It shows up as a sadness with no clear source. A low-level mourning that’s simply always present. It intensifies at specific times of year, around certain family gatherings, or in the presence of certain people without any obvious reason for the intensification. It doesn’t respond to interventions that personal grief eventually responds to because those interventions are aimed at a loss that can be named and this grief is aimed at losses that were never named.
It shows up as a body that holds tension in specific locations such as a chronic tightness in major parts of the body: chest, throat, stomach, and hips. It’s not attributed to current stress and it doesn’t fully release even in periods of genuine rest, because the body is holding something older than the current life situation. It’s something that’s encoded in the nervous system at a level that precedes conscious memory.
Clinically this is known as epigenetics. Read more about this from this article by Dr. Robert M. Post, MD, The Epigenetic Connection to Black Disparity.
It shows up as a sensitivity to specific kinds of loss (police brutality, encountering police, Black bodies found lynched in a tree, laws that push for racial discrimination), because the immediate loss is activating a grief that is much older and much larger and that has been waiting for exactly this kind of trigger to finally have a channel through which to move.
It shows up as an exhaustion that sleep can’t fix. What would it be like to move through the world without it?
Signs That the Loss You're Grieving Is Inherited Rather Than Personal
The clearest sign that what you’re carrying is inherited grief rather than only personal grief is that this grief feels older than you are, like an inherent trait. Asked to carry without being asked whether it’s wanted to be carried.
Another sign that grief is inherited is that there’s a pattern in the lineage rather than just a pattern with you. You can see and recognize the same emotional quality or the same kind of loss appearing across multiple generations in ways that suggest it’s being transmitted rather than independently generated.
Lastly, if the grief responds to ancestral practices than to personal processing, you know, such as creating the intention to sit with your (healed) ancestors or through engaging in an ancestral ritual that acknowledges what came before you, know that you are dong the healing work to heal your ancestral lineage…. And it works.
A Spiritual Way to Begin Tending Inherited Grief
The spiritual approach to inherited grief isn’t the same as the clinical approach. It’s not better or worse but it’s a specific approach of what inherited grief requires, because clinical work addresses the psychological and somatic impact of the inherited grief on the individual. The spiritual work addresses the relationship between the individual and the lineage that produced the grief and both dimensions need attention, though not necessarily simultaneously and not necessarily by the same practitioner.
Here’s a ritual practice for you to try if you feel aligned to work with it:
Begin by finding a quiet space, light a candle, and then speak aloud to your lineage, not to a specific ancestor if you don’t know their names, but to the collective, the whole of what came before you, and say something like: "I know I am carrying something that did not start with me, and I am acknowledging that now, and I am asking my healed ancestors to help me understand what I am holding and where it came from and what it needs from me to begin to move."
Then sit in silence with a journal open and write whatever arrives, without evaluating whether it is accurate or significant. The act of writing is the act of giving ancestral grief a form it hasn’t had before.
Do this practice regularly rather than once because inherited grief wasn’t accumulated in a single session and it won’t release in one either. Remember the relationship you’re building with your lineage through this practice is more important than any single piece of information that arrives in any individual sitting.
You Don't Have to Tend This Alone
📞 Spiritual Consultation Call with Amber is a free consultation to determine your spiritual needs. Whether that be a spiritual reading (Mediumship/Intuitive Tarot Reading), Spiritual Counseling, or Spiritual Development. This 15-20 minute call helps to identify needs and if there’s an alignment to work together.
Schedule your consultation here
🌿 The Grief Sanctuary is a space that provides ritual and meditation practices and a bit of psychospiritual information to help you understand yourself and your grief on a weekly basis. This space was designed to hold ancestral and inherited grief alongside personal grief, with women who understand the territory because they are navigating it too.
✨ The Inner Circle is for women who are ready for deeper, more personalized ongoing support as the ancestral grief work deepens and asks more than the monthly container alone can hold.
With care and intention,
Amber
How I Use Tarot as a Clinical Tool (Not a Fortune-Telling One)
What Happens When You Put a 78-Card Reflective Framework in the Hands of a Grief Clinician
Tarot has nothing to do with predicting the future and everything to do with accessing what’s already present not yet named. When tarot is held inside a clinical framework by a practitioner who understands grief, trauma, identity, and ancestral psychology, it becomes one of the most precise and ethically defensible reflective tools I’ve ever worked with.
Tarot first presented itself to me through a gift in 2020, because I told myself I wouldn’t work with tarot unless it was gifted to me and once it was, I taught myself to read intuitively.
What I discovered in that process was not a fortune-telling system but a reflective one, and that distinction matters tremendously for how I use it clinically. The clinical reflection of tarot works with the authority of the client, with the card functioning as an externalized mirror of what the client already knows but hasn’t been able to access through direct cognitive processing, and anyways, I don’t use tarot to fortune tell in my spiritual practice, because, well, I don’t have the ability of prophecy… I have the gift of guidance and process.
Why the Cognitive Processing of Grief Gets Stuck
To understand why tarot functions as a useful clinical tool specifically in grief work, it helps to understand why standard talk-based processing has limits with grief that it doesn’t have with every other clinical presentation.
Grief isn’t a primary cognitive experience, even though it produces cognitive effects like intrusive thoughts, difficulty concentrating, and disordered meaning-making. Grief is primarily a somatic and relational experience which lives in the body and in the disrupted attachment system. It’s important to know that grief resides within the parts of the psyche that most individuals need to process a significant loss and to acknowledge that it’s not always the parts that respond readily to direct verbal process. Direct verbal process requires the client to access and articulate what they’re experiencing from within the experience, which is precisely what profound grief makes difficult.
The question "how are you feeling about the loss?" asked to a person in acute or complicated grief often produces either a rehearsed answer that has been refined through repeated retelling and no longer carries much live emotional charge, or a shutdown in which the person cannot access the answer at all and reports numbness or confusion. This doesn’t mean that our client is resistant but because the direct pathway to that space is temporarily closed off by the grief that needs to be processed.
Tarot, used clinically, opens an indirect pathway, and indirect pathways are often precisely what grief requires.
What I Actually Do in a Clinical Tarot Session
When I use tarot as a clinical tool, my client doesn’t come to receive a reading in the conventional sense, which I make completely clear during the consultation call. Tarot is utilized as a projective surface, in the same way that a narrative therapy technique might invite a client to externalize what’s internal so that both the client and the Clinician can look at it from a slightly different angle.
I ask my client to hold a specific question, not "what will happen" but
"what is true right now that I have not yet been able to see clearly," or "what is my grief asking me to pay attention to," or "what is the part of this loss I have been most avoiding,"
and I ask them to identify how they want to work with the deck. Whether that be shuffle and then wait to see which card comes out (my method) or shuffle and spread the cards out to choose the card that feels warmest, or shuffle and then choose the card on top. This process is exploratory on its own. This is the act of slowing down enough to allow something from the interior to surface.
When the card is chosen placed on the table before them, I don’t interpret it for them, because interpretation belongs to the client rather than to me. I ask them what they notice, what the image brings up, what feeling arrives before any thought about what the card is supposed to mean, and I follow that feeling rather than any traditional meaning associated with the card, because the traditional meaning is a starting point at best and a distraction at worst when the goal is accessing the client's own knowing rather than confirming a predetermined interpretation.
What consistently emerges through this process is material that direct questioning wasn’t able to surface such as images, associations, and somatic responses that carry more live emotional charge than the narrative the client had prepared, because the card gave the unconscious emotions a vehicle that a direct question didn’t.
What This Looks Like for Ancestral and Identity Grief
Tarot is particularly suitable for ancestral and identity grief work, because both of those grief presentations involve something that resists a linear narrative, and the tool of tarot offer a non-linear, symbolic, imagistic language that is often more adequate to the experience than not.
A client grieving the loss of a religious identity built around her entire sense of self can’t always describe what she has lost in narrative terms, because the loss isn’t consecutive and it doesn’t have a clear origin point. That is when I would invite her to pull a card for "what the tradition gave me that I carry forward" and a card for "what I am becoming outside of it," the images give her something to respond to that does not require her to already have the story organized.
A client navigating ancestral grief for people she never met can’t describe in narrative terms the grief that lives in her body for losses that predate her own memory, but she can respond to an image on a card with a felt sense of recognition that opens space for direct questioning couldn’t access previously. This is clinical work.
What This Is Not
This work isn’t fortune-telling. The distinction isn’t only professional but ethical and a client in grief who comes seeking clinical treatment and receives a prediction about their future isn’t being served. In fact, she’s being harmed, because prediction in grief has a particular capacity to organize the grieving person's experience around an external authority rather than building the internal authority that healing actually requires.
This work also isn’t spiritual bypassing because the clinical use of tarot isn’t a way of skipping over the psychological dimensions of grief in favor of something that feels more elevated or more spiritual, because tarot is always in service of psychological and somatic work rather than a replacement for it.
Lastly, this specific work with tarot isn’t something any practitioner should pick up and use clinically without both genuine development of their relationship with the deck and a solid clinical foundation in grief, because the combination of those two things is what allows the tool to be used with precision and ethical accountability rather than imprecision and the appearance of depth. I received and continue to receive clinical guidance with tarot through Dreya Blume who is also a licensed clinician.
For the Clinician Who Has Been Curious
If you have been curious about integrating tarot into your clinical practice and have held back because you were not sure how to do it with professional integrity, the Psychospiritual Grief Method Training on October 17th, 2026 addresses spiritual interventions that align with culture. If interested reading more please read more below.
Take the Next Step
🎓 Psychospiritual Grief Method Training, October 17th, 2026 is for clinicians ready to integrate tools like tarot into their practice with full clinical and ethical grounding, alongside the complete ARISE Arc framework for psychospiritual grief work, with six CE credit through the NBCC.
Register at healingwithamber.co/the-psychospiritual-grief-method-training
🌿 The Grief Sanctuary is for women who want to use tarot as a reflective tool for their own grief work within an ongoing community container that holds the full psychospiritual framework.
✨ The Inner Circle is for women who are ready for deeper, more personalized ongoing support and expanded access to Amber as the work deepens.
📞 Free Grief Counseling Consultation are for California residents ready to explore grief support that integrates clinical and reflective tools like tarot into a single coherent framework.
Schedule free consultation here.
With care and intention,
Amber
An Intimate Evening with Spirit didn’t sell out, but this happened instead
August 15th was the date I chose for An Intimate Evening with Spirit group mediumship experience, but things didn’t follow through like I planned, and how things worked out better than I expected.
This time around was different. I actually promoted the event. Created content about the event and allowed myself to become excited for the possibility of showing up in a full group again to be a conduit for Spirit, but a full group was NOT what happened. To understand this expectation, you must know that the first time I held this event it was for a full group.
First An Intimate Evening with Spirit Event 1.30.19
I was extremely anxious, but I showed up and allowed Spirit to show out. The event was a success. I held multiple events that year and they were all fully booked and was AMAZING despite the anxiety leading up to the event. My last event was right before the emergence of COVID-19 in January 2020. It was another great event and even more important because it was the first time my twin sister saw me demonstrate mediumship. It was always something I talked about until she saw me in action. Even typing this out makes me feel so grateful for those past experiences, but this is the experience I had from Saturdays event.
Lesson Taught, Lesson Learned
I had the option to cancel the event because my expectations of a sold out event like previously held events were not met. I could’ve allowed my Ego to rule the show or I had the option to show up even if I had one participant. I chose to show up not just for the participant/sitter, but also for me too. Last week I spoke a lot about imposter syndrome pertaining to my mediumship. Deciding to show up for yourself and for Spirit is truly confidence and trust in Spirit. Trusting that Spirit will guide the way if I only allowed myself to get out of my own way. I reached out to the participant and asked to reschedule to an earlier time and the participant agreed. I communicated my disclosure about how I work with mediumship and informed them that I cannot control who comes in and what is said outside of my request that whoever comes in is one who has a close relationship with the participant and is also a good communicator. I transparently also communicated how anxious I was and thanked them for their patience in allowing me to work through my shit, honestly. An hour came and went and at the end of the reading the participant commended me for my ability and encouraged me to keep working with Spirit.
The lesson I learned was to get the fuck out of my own way and just show up for myself and Spirit will take me where I need to be.
Recent An Intimate Evening with Spirit review 8.15.26
Learn to get out of your own way, dammit
I share this story with you to encourage you to get out of your own way as well. What’s preventing you from either showing up for yourself, engaging in anything you want to, or even allowing yourself to grieve, heal, and grow? Think about it. What is it? How are you going to challenge yourself to arrive? What do you need in order to go where you want and need to go? If you need help I gotchu. I have several options to provide support.
📞 Spiritual Consultation is a free service Healing with Amber provides to determine your spiritual needs, which ranges from spiritual counseling to spiritual development and readings (mediumship and intuitive tarot guidance).
Schedule your consultation here.
🌿 The Grief Sanctuary issacred space of resources Black, Brown, Indigenous, and Asian including weekly rituals, meditations, and or journal prompts to aid in their healing and spiritual developing journey.
Join membership here.
✨ The Inner Circle, is for Black, Brown, Indigenous, and Asian women who are ready for deeper, more personalized ongoing support.
Join membership here.
Join me this upcoming Wednesday where I discuss how’ve integrated spirituality within the clinical field. Until then, continuing moving with…
Care + intention,
Amber Choisella
Why Every Medium Needs to Understand Grief Clinically (Especially Unethical Mediums)
The Blind Spot in Spiritual Work That Hurts the People We're Trying to Help
There’s a gap in how a lot of Mediums are trained that nobody in the spiritual community talks about openly, and that gap produces real harm to grieving people who come to Spirit work at the most vulnerable moments of their lives. The harm is almost never intentional and it’s also almost entirely preventable because prevention requires something that most mediumship training programs don’t include, a working clinical understanding of grief.
This post is for two people simultaneously.
It’s for the clinician who’s been skeptical of spiritual work and has wondered whether practitioners without clinical training are causing harm they’re not equipped to recognize, and honestly the answer is sometimes yes, and you deserve to hear that acknowledgement.
This blog post is also for the woman who is grieving and who is considering attending a mediumship event or booking a reading, because what you’re walking into matters and you deserve to understand what training the practitioner has before you open yourself to whatever arrives in the session.
Note that is NOT a bash on ethical Mediums and the work that they do because just as there’s professional ethics in clinical practice there’s ethical training within mediumship development. As I write this post, I’m thinking that perhaps a psychoeducation training into learning how to identify complicated/traumatic/anticipatory/disenfranchised grief is important for Mediums. Stay tuned.
What Happens Without Clinical Understanding
When a Medium delivers a message from Spirit to a grieving person without understanding how grief works clinically, several things can happen that the Medium doesn’t intend and might not notice at all.
The first and most common is that the message lands in a way that interrupts the natural movement of the grief rather than supporting it, because grief moves in a non-linear, non-sequential way that requires specific conditions to process effectively, so a message that arrives at the wrong moment in the wrong framing can actually freeze the grief in a particular position rather than helping it move. The grieving person then leaves the session feeling something they cannot quite name, which is that the connection they sought made them feel temporarily better and then somehow worse, and they do not have language for why.
An example of this would be:
A woman attends a reading eight weeks after her mother's death, still in the acute phase of loss, and the Medium delivers an accurate message that her mother is at peace and wants her to stop being sad and move forward. The woman leaves feeling momentary relief and then goes home and feels worse without understanding why.
What happened is that the message delivered without clinical understanding of where she was in her grief process essentially told her grieving nervous system that her ongoing sadness wasn’t what her mother wanted, which she received not as reassurance but as a reason to suppress grief that hadn’t been felt or processed yet. Suppressed grief doesn’t accelerate healing but delays it which can create complicated grief over time.
A practitioner with clinical grief training knows that eight weeks is still acute and that even accurate spirit communication needs to be framed in a way that supports the natural movement of grief rather than interrupting it.
I would’ve said, “Your mother acknowledges how sad you are and the difficulty with dealing with her loss. She also makes me feel like she didn’t like attention focused on her and wants to remember you that she’s still existing just in a different form, and she’s worried that you won’t move on”, depending on the actual energy that is felt (say this was the personality of the woman’s mother). See the difference?
Second is that a Medium who doesn’t understand complicated grief, disenfranchised grief, or anticipatory grief can easily misread what a client needs from the session and deliver something that is technically accurate but emotionally harmful in its timing, framing, or its emphasis, because the communication of Spirit through a medium isn’t fully autonomous but is shaped in part by the Medium's own understanding of what the person needs. A medium without clinical training/professional ethics is working with an incomplete map of what grief requires. Professional ethics are included in mediumship development so although it’s not clinical training it is a positive direction in how to not cause harm for those seeking spiritual work for grief healing.
Third, and the one most likely to cause lasting harm, is that a Medium who doesn’t understand the clinical picture of complicated grief can fail to recognize when a client needs clinical intervention rather than or alongside Spirit communication, and can inadvertently become the primary support for someone who is in a genuine grief crisis, not because the Medium is irresponsible but because they simply do not have the training to recognize the clinical presentations that indicate a person needs more than spiritual work can provide. I have always recommended grief counseling/therapy during sessions when I noticed it would benefit my client.
The Overlap That Should Exist and Rarely Does
Clinical grief training and mediumship training are rarely taught in conversation with each other and they’re almost never integrated into a single coherent framework, even though the populations they serve are largely identical and the moments when they are needed most are almost entirely the same.
A grieving person who seeks out a Medium is doing so because they are in the middle of one of the most clinically significant experiences a human being goes through. The Medium who works with them is doing so without the clinical training that would allow them to hold that experience with the full understanding it deserves, and the clinician who could provide clinical work is often operating inside a framework that has no room for Spirit communication and therefore can’t prepare spiritual practitioners for the moment when the spiritual and the clinical are happening simultaneously in the same session.
The overlap that should exist between these two domains includes:
· A working understanding of how grief actually moves through the body and through time
· How to recognize the presentations that indicate complicated or traumatic grief
· How to hold the continued bonds with the deceased as a legitimate and often clinically supportive dimension of the grieving process rather than as a pathology to be redirected
· How to give accurate expectations about what spirit communication can and cannot offer a grieving person and
· How to know when to refer, which is the skill that most directly prevents the harm that untrained spiritual work can cause.
A medium who has this understanding is not only a better practitioner ethically but is also a more effective conduit for the communication itself, because understanding grief clinically changes how a practitioner holds the person in front of them, and how the practitioner holds the person changes the quality of what the session can produce.
What to Expect at An Intimate Evening with Spirit Event If You Are Grieving
What I want you to know is that this gathering was designed with you specifically in mind, because my training is clinical and spiritual simultaneously and my practice holds both without asking you to compartmentalize your grief into the parts that fit a mediumship session and the parts that belong somewhere else.
What you’ll find in that room is a practitioner who understands that you’re not simply curious about whether your person still exists somewhere, but that you’re grieving.
What you will not find is a performance or a spectacle or a practitioner who is optimizing for dramatic moments over truthful ones, because neither of those things serves a grieving person and I am not interested in either.
The Gap This Training Was Built to Close
The Psychospiritual Grief Method for BIPOC Clients Training on October 17th, 2026 was built specifically to close the gap I have been describing in this post, for clinicians who want to integrate spiritual literacy into their grief practice and for spiritual practitioners who want to ground their work in clinical understanding, because the gap is not a natural feature of how these two domains relate to each other but an artificial separation that has been maintained by professional culture and training convention rather than by any evidence that the separation serves the people seeking care.
If you’re a Clinician who is also a Medium, a spiritual healer, a tarot practitioner, or any other kind of spiritual support provider who works with grieving people, this training was made with you specifically in mind alongside the clinicians who are its primary audience, because the overlap the field refuses to teach is exactly what this methodology is built to provide.
Non-clinical spiritual practitioners, if you’re interested, I can create a psychoeducational training to provide insight into complicated and traumatic grief that you could refer to a psychospiritual clinician for additional support. Let me know, and I’ll create it.
Come Find the Support You Actually Need
📞 Free Grief Counseling Consultation for California residents who are navigating loss and want support that holds the clinical and the spiritual together rather than asking you to choose between them. Schedule at healingwithamber.co
✨ An Intimate Evening with Spirit event in Auburn, CA this Saturday August 15th, 6 to 7:30pm. This is an intimate in-person gathering held by a practitioner with both clinical grief training and advanced mediumship development, for women who want to experience what the integration of those two things actually feels like in a room. Space is limited. Register at here.
🎓 ThePsychospiritual Grief Method for BIPOC Clients Training, October 17th, 2026 is for clinicians who are ready to close the gap between clinical grief understanding and spiritual practice, with six CEs provided through the NBCC. Full details at healingwithamber.co/the-psychospiritual-grief-method-training
With care and intention,
Amber
Imposter Syndrome has me F*cked Up!
I’m no longer allowing Imposter Syndrome to hold me back with my mediumship.
To be real I’ve been I have been sitting with this for too long…. I’ve been hiding a while, hiding behind virtual events for mediumship because of imposter syndrome. It’s not that virtual events don’t work rather than I feel like it’s a form of shielding, hiding a part of myself out of fear that I’ll fuck up and not be able to deliver. That’s performative. Anxiety reminds me of the last group event I held where the first message was great, and I struggled through the rest. That was not only embarrassing, but it made me question my ability.
Note that this isn’t form of criticism of practitioners who work virtually, because I also work virtually. I just need to show up in a more meaningful way and truly connect with my community in a tangible way.
Facing my Fear Head On
This isn’t a post about my embarrassment, I mean, part of it is, but the majority is a testament to show up for yourself despite what Anxiety/Fear is saying to you. Being behind a screen for mediumship feels safe for me because of the distance between myself and the sitter. I can still feel the tenseness in the body when a nervous sitter enters the meeting room and I can see tears that well up when evidence is given that creates that connection, I’m striving to bring into the space, but it’s still different remotely.
Working in a group in person invites a realness that virtual events can’t. It’s an experience of trusting in Spirit whole-souly and being grounded enough not to be directly impacted by the sense of visible emotions in someone I could tap on the shoulder. That’s an intimacy that can be difficult to face head on if I’m stuck in my mind afraid of what wrong could happen while channeling. My issue is that I’m afraid of causing harm because that’s the worst-case scenario yet evidence has shown that I can deliver powerful and healing experiences through Spirit from previous in person events.
I remember the first time I was invited to come to a home and offer a “platform demonstration of mediumship” to a group of ten individuals from a previous client and was almost deathly afraid to even show up. I asked a male cousin of mine to accompany me because, I didn’t know these people, and that was his first or maybe second time witnessing me demonstrate mediumship. Guess what, I did a phenomenal job, so why wouldn’t I do another phenomenal job again?
If you’re struggling with showing up for yourself and doing THE THING… allow this post to be your evidence that you too can do it. Show up for yourself, especially if you work with Spirit, especially if what you want to do will bring something amazing to the collective.
Intimate as a Rebellion
Let’s talk about the pressure in the spiritual business culture that focuses on scaling, reach, and attracting the largest possible audience for any given offering… the fact of the matter is that virtual formats are the primary mechanism for achieving that scale, because virtual removes the geographic constraints and the logistical limitations that in-person work requires, and more people in more places can access what I offer.
I understand that pressure and I obviously have felt it, which has created a freezing factor which has hindered my growth and Healing with Amber’s growth, specifically pertaining to my mediumship work. Choosing an intimate and in-person event is, in the current spiritual business landscape is a mild form of rebellion because it refuses the logic that bigger and more accessible is always better and instead insists that some forms of healing require physical presence. A smaller number of attendees and a room that is sized to the depth of what is being held rather than for the scale of whom can attend hits harder than the quantity attendees who attend the event. Intimate is just that, intimate, and that’s what I’m offering in rebellion to Imposter Syndrome.
The only event I’m interested in creating isn’t the one that reaches the most folks but the one that actually reaches the people who are present and who are sharing the experience of witnessing and being witnessed by people who are physically present with you in the same sacred space.
What to Expect on August 15th, 2026
This Saturday August 15th from 6 to 7:30pm in Auburn, California, I’m holding An Intimate Evening with Spirit in-person mediumship event and I want to tell you exactly what that means before you decide whether to come.
The group will be small by intention, because small is what allows the work to go to the depth it is capable of going, and because the intimacy of a small room is itself part of the healing, not a logistical constraint but a deliberate choice about what kind of space this is.
The tone will be warm and grounded and unhurried, because mediumship at its best isn’t a performance. It’s a genuine attempt at communication across time and space that requires presence, patience, and the quality of attention that comes when a group of people have gathered with shared intention and are willing to be fully there for the full length of what the evening holds.
Not everyone will receive an individual message, because that’s the truth of how this work operates. Spirit isn’t a request service with guaranteed delivery, but everyone in the room will witness Spirit and it’s very possible that everyone could receive an indirect message because Spirit works in mysterious ways.
I just ask that all attendees arrive with openness rather than expectation, presence rather than an agenda, and willingness to allow the evening to be what it is rather than what any individual hoped it would be.
Come Be in the Room
This evening is for the woman who has been curious about mediumship and has not yet had an in-person experience, for the woman who has had readings before and knows she wants to be in a room rather than behind a screen, and for the woman who is simply drawn toward gathering with other women in sacred space and trusting what arrives when we do.
An Intimate Evening with Spirit
This Saturday, August 15th,
6 to 7:30pm,
Auburn, California.
Space is limited and intentionally so, and registration is required because the size of the group is part of what makes the work what it is, and once the room is full it is full.
🌿 The Grief Sanctuary Membership is for women who want ongoing community and monthly practices between in-person gatherings, because the connection that begins in a room like this one deserves a container to continue inside.
[Join the Grief Sanctuary Here]
With care and intention,
Amber Choisella
The Future of Grief Support Won't Choose Between Clinical and Spiritual Care
Something is shifting in the grief support landscape, and if you have been paying attention to where the field is moving, you already felt it, even if you don’t have the language for what you’re sensing.
You know that two coined system that created a Westernized mostly White (Males) organized grief support for the majority of a century, the one that created a clear separation between clinical care and spiritual practice. The “required” separation between the evidence-based, the ancestral, and between the therapeutic and the sacred, is now beginning to dissolve, not because the field suddenly decided to be more open-minded, but because folks are seeking grief support that meets the complexity of their actual experience.
This is where I make a prediction, which I would never do however, I believe that what I’m about to say is 100% accurate. There will be a shift occurring within mental health that will integrate and include spirituality for mental health treatment, because it’s already happening.
Why the Two Coin System Has Always Been Insufficient
The separation between clinical care and spiritual practice in grief support wasn’t inevitable, and it wasn’t based on evidence that one approach was more effective than the other for all folks in all contexts. It was actually the product of a particular historical moment in the 19th century when Western psychology was in the process of legitimizing itself as a science and distinguishing itself as clearly as possible from everything that could’ve been characterized as non-empirical, including spirituality, ancestral practices, and the communal dimensions of the human experience that didn’t fit inside an individualistic, secular, and materialist framework.
That distinction served certain professional and institutional interests, and it also left enormous gaps in the care available to grieving people, particularly BIPOC/BBIA folks whose cultural and ancestral understanding of grief, death, and the relationship between the living and the dead was never organized around that tow coin system in the first place.
For many BIPOC/BBIA communities grief has always been simultaneously psychological and spiritual, individual and communal, present-tense and ancestral, and the demand to choose between clinical support and spiritual practice in order to access either one has always been a demand rooted in a framework that wasn’t built with our experience in mind. The cost of that demand has been burdened by the folks who were already carrying the most.
What the Evidence Is Already Showing
The movement toward integrated grief support isn’t only a cultural or philosophical shift; it’s also being supported by a growing body of research that makes it increasingly difficult to maintain the binary system with intellectual integrity.
Research on meaning-making in grief has consistently demonstrated that the ability to find or construct meaning in loss, a process that is for many people fundamentally spiritual in nature, is one of the strongest predictors of adaptive grieving outcomes, which means that spiritual practice is not a supplement to effective grief support but a mechanism of it, and clinical frameworks that have no place for spiritual meaning-making are missing a clinically significant dimension of what helps.
The field of psychology is already discussing the impacting of integrating psychology and spirituality in reference to grief as evidenced by the article, The Integrated Process Model of Loss and Grief: An Interprofessional Understanding by Van den Berg, M., et al. (2023); however, The Psychospiritual Grief Method focuses on folks of Black, Brown, Indigenous, and Asian cultural backgrounds.
Research on intergenerational and ancestral trauma has established beyond reasonable clinical doubt that grief travels through generations and through both epigenetic and social transmission mechanisms, which means that a grief framework that locates the work entirely inside the individual client’s personal history is operating with an incomplete picture of what is clinically present in the room, and the ancestral and lineage dimensions of grief aren’t a spiritual addition to clinical work but a clinical reality that the work cannot fully address without them.
Research on somatic approaches to trauma and grief have demonstrated that the body holds what the mind hasn’t yet processed and that interventions that only work on the cognitive level leave the physiological dimension of grief largely untouched, which is exactly what many traditional talk-based clinical approaches have done, and why so many grieving folks report that therapy helped them understand their grief without ever quite reaching the place where it actually lived.
The evidence is pointing toward exactly the integration that a psychospiritual approach to grief has always held, and the clinical field is beginning, slowly and imperfectly beginning to follow where this evidence leads.
What the Future Actually Looks Like
The grief support model that’s going to define the next generation of care isn’t going to be the one that most closely resembles what the field has always done with minor cultural competency adjustments and it’s going to be the one that was built from the inside of the complexity it’s trying to hold.
It’s going to be built by practitioners who are clinically rigorous and spiritually literate, who hold their professional accountability and their ancestral and spiritual knowledge in the same practice rather than sequestering one from the other. It’ll be those who understand that evidence base practices and the wisdom of ancient traditions aren’tt in competition but are pointing toward the same truths about human experience from different directions.
It’s going to center the communities that have been most inadequately served by the existing model, BIPOC/BBIA communities whose grief has always been collective and ancestral as much as individual, who have always known that the two coined system was insufficient because their experience was never adequately contained by it.
It’s going to hold grief as sacred as well as psychological, as communal as well as individual, as ancestral as well as personal, and somatic as well as cognitive, because those dimensions are all present in every grieving person whether the clinical framework acknowledges them or not.
Why This Is Already Here
What I want to say to the folks in this community who are both the grieving women who have been searching for this kind of support and the clinicians who have been searching for this kind of framework, is that the future of grief support is no longer something you’re waiting for, because it is already here.
The Psychospiritual Grief Method wasn’t built as a prediction about where grief support is going, and it was built as a response to where it had already failed. The fact that the broader field is now moving in the same direction isn’t a validation of the approach, rather it’s a confirmation that clients who most needed something different were always right about what they needed.
The future of grief support looks like holding the clinical and the sacred without asking anyone to choose. It’s treating the lineage as part of the clinical picture rather than as background. It’s meeting grief in the body as well as the mind and bringing the full complexity of who a grieving person is into the room rather than leaving parts of her at the door because the framework wasn’t large enough to hold all of her.
That future is already available, and the women who are ready for it don’t have to wait.
Come Find the Care You Have Been Searching For
📞 Free Grief Counseling Consultation is for California residents who are ready to explore grief support that holds the clinical and the spiritual without asking you to choose between them, a consultation is where that conversation begins. [Book at www.healingwithamber.co]
🎓 Psychospiritual Grief Method Training — October 17th — for clinicians who are ready to stop improvising through the gaps and work from a framework that was built for the complexity their clients are actually bringing, this is the live training where the method becomes something you can use in your practice immediately, with 6 CEs provided through the NBCC, a small cohort by design, and direct access to Amber throughout. If you’ve been sensing that the field is moving toward this intersection and you want to be among the practitioners who are already there, this is where that positioning begins. [Register at healingwithamber.co/the-psychospiritual-grief-method-training
🌿 The Grief Sanctuary is ongoing space for weekly practices and a container built specifically for the future of grief support for women who are done with the binary and ready for something that holds all of who they are.
With care and intention,
Amber
The Ancestors You’ve Never Met Are Still Guiding You (How to Recognize Them)
You Don’t Need to Know Their Names to Feel Their Presence…..
You feel drawn to places you’ve never been. You have skills no one taught you. You know things without being told.
That’s them.
It’s not a coincidence or a quirk of personality and it’s certainly NOT something to brush past as interesting and then forget. The pull toward a specific landscape you’ve never stood in, the way your hands already knew how to do something the first time you tried, the inexplicable knowing that arrived before anyone gave you permission to trust it… these are points of contact. Your unknown ancestors, the ones whose names you don’t carry and whose faces you’ve never seen, are reaching toward you through the only channels they have: your body, your instincts, your unexplainable gifts.
You’ve probably felt them your whole life and called it something else.
Why the Ones You’ve Never Met Matter Just as Much
There’s a common assumption in ancestral work that only known ancestors count, that connection requires documentation, that you need a name to call on someone and receive something back. That assumption is wrong, and for many BIPOC women it’s also a form of harm, because it positions the deliberate erasure of lineage as a spiritual severing.
Your unknown ancestors are not less real because their names were taken, because records don’t exist, and because family memory doesn’t stretch far enough to reach them. They existed. They loved people and they carried knowledge, gifts, resilience, and a specific way of moving through the world that got passed forward, generation by generation, until it arrived in you. The documentation of their existence was never the source of their power. Their love was the source, and love does not require paperwork.
The ancestors you’ve never met may actually be the ones who work most actively to reach you, precisely because the connection was interrupted and they are determined to close that gap.
How They Show Up
You’ve already been receiving these signals. Here’s how to recognize them for what they are.
Unexplained talents in cooking, music, healing, or knowing/high psychic abilities. You made a dish for the first time and your hands moved like they’d made it a thousand times before. You picked up an instrument and something in your body already understood the rhythm. You sat with someone in pain and knew exactly what to say. These are not random gifts, they are transmissions, skills and sensibilities that lived in someone before you and that your body absorbed through the blood.
An attraction to specific places, particularly ancestral homelands. The inexplicable pull toward West Africa, toward a specific region of Mexico, toward land in the Deep South, toward a country you’ve never been to and whose language you don’t speak. Your nervous system recognizes something your conscious mind has no memory of. When a place calls to you with a longing that doesn’t quite make rational sense, pay attention. Someone from that land is calling back.
Physical features that seem to skip generations. You have your great-grandmother’s hands, the ones no one alive remembers except in an old photograph. Your bone structure echoes someone generations back. Your eyes carry a color or a shape that appeared seemingly out of nowhere. DNA is a record-keeper. Your body is a living archive of everyone who came before you, and sometimes that archive surfaces in the most literal, physical way.
Personality traits no one in your immediate family shares. You’re the only one who needs to be alone to recharge. The only one drawn to spiritual work. The only one who reads everything, who can’t stop making things with your hands, who has always had an inexplicable sense of justice. These weren’t invented by you. They were inherited from someone who didn’t have the conditions to fully live them, someone who passes them forward hoping you will.
Dreams of people you don’t recognize. A face that doesn’t belong to anyone in your life. An elder whose name you never learn. A woman who looks at you in a dream with recognition and love that moves you to tears. These are introductions. The unknown ancestors don’t wait to be formally invited once you open the channel. They show up, and they make themselves known through the most available portal there is: your sleeping mind.
Sudden, unexplained knowledge about cultural practices. You read about a specific ritual or ceremony and something in your body relaxes, like it was waiting to remember. You encounter a practice from your ancestral origin and feel not curiosity but recognition. This is cellular memory, the knowledge your lineage encoded in you before you were born, surfacing when the right context arrives to receive it.
The Specific Reality of Severed Lineage for BIPOC/BBIA Women
For many Black, Indigenous, and women of color, the absence of lineage records is not an accident and not a personal failure. It is the direct result of slavery, colonial displacement, forced adoption, immigration documentation barriers, and the deliberate erasure of names, languages, and family structures across generations.
This is a grief worth naming directly. The not-knowing is a wound, not a neutral fact, and it is also not the end of the story.
You do not need paperwork to claim your ancestors. You do not need a genealogy database to be in relationship with the people who made you. DNA memory is real. Epigenetic research continues to confirm what African, Indigenous, and diasporic spiritual traditions have always known: trauma, knowledge, and survival strategies are encoded in the body and passed forward. What was carried in your ancestors is still being carried in you, not as metaphor, but as biology.
Spiritual connection transcends documentation. The ancestors you cannot name are not waiting for you to find them in a record. They are already present in you. The work is not to locate them. The work is to turn toward them.
How to Begin Connecting
You don’t need their names. Here’s what you use instead.
Call in “those who came before me” without specification. Broad, open, and honest. You are not pretending to know what you don’t know. You are simply making yourself available. Try: “I call in all ancestors who are healed, who love me, who walked before me, known and unknown. I am here. I am listening.”
Use cultural or geographic origin as the bridge. If you know your lineage connects to the African diaspora, to Indigenous lands of Turtle Island, to the Caribbean, to Latin America, to Southeast Asia, name that. The land holds memory. The lineage recognizes itself even when specific names are lost. “I call in my West African ancestors, those who crossed the water and those who never left the shore.”
Trust what you’re drawn to without demanding explanation first. The food you make without recipes, the music that opens something in you, the spiritual practices that feel like recognition rather than learning. Follow these threads. They are trails your ancestors left for you.
Let them introduce themselves in dreams. Before sleep, say simply: “If any ancestor who loves me wishes to make themselves known, I am open. Come.” Then trust whatever arrives, even if it doesn’t look like what you expected. Write it down before the day erases it.
The Medicine of Mystery
Not knowing names doesn’t weaken the connection. There is something powerful in the open call, in the invocation that asks not for a specific person but for all who love you, all who walked before you, and all who are ready to guide you now.
Your unknown ancestors are not diminished by anonymity. They are, in some ways, freed by it. You can’t project onto them what you knew of them in life. You can’t carry complicated grief about their choices. You receive them as pure lineage, as the unfiltered love of those who want your flourishing without the weight of personal history.
Your blood remembers what your mind forgot…. so let that be enough to begin.
Come Closer This Month
💛 Free Grief Counseling Consultation is for California residents who are ready to explore grief support that holds the clinical and the spiritual without asking you to choose between them, a consultation is where that conversation begins. [Book at www.healingwithamber.co]
🌿 The Grief Sanctuary: Monthly ancestral practices, ritual guides, and a community of BIPOC women doing this work together. If this post opened something in you, the Sanctuary is where the ongoing connection lives. [Join here]
🕊️ An Intimate Evening with Spirit Event August 15th, 2026 Auburn, CA: Come connect with your ancestors/loved ones in person. I’ll be holding space for ancestral healing and spiritual connection in an intimate in-person gathering. [Reserve your spot]
With care and intention,
Amber Choisella
What It Actually Feels Like When Spirit Comes Through from a Psychic Medium
Most folks come to their first mediumship reading expecting something dramatic and most people leave surprised by how quiet, precise, and deeply physical the real experience actually is.
TV built a particular image of mediumship that has very little to do with what genuinely happens when spirit communication occurs. You know, all the dramatic revelations, theatrical moments, and the convenient delivery of exactly what the grieving person most needs to hear in the most emotionally impactful sequence possible… Just know that production does what it does to create compelling entertainment. They have to keep the entertainment going but in all actuality it’s a real disservice to the folks who arrive at a reading with that template as their reference point.
This blog will discuss what it actually feels like, from my side of the reading and from the side of the people who have sat across from me, because I think the honest account is both more interesting and more useful than the dramatized one.
What It Feels Like From My Side
Spirit communication doesn’t arrive like a voice from outside, projected into the room from a specific direction and audible for everyone present, nope. It arrives more like a knowing that lands in the body before it reaches the conscious mind, a shift in the quality of the internal environment that is distinct from my own thinking in a way I have learned, through years of development and training, to recognize and trust.
It often begins with sensing an energy whether dominantly feminine or masculine, then the relationship, before the personality. I see energy as though it’s being projected to me from behind and brought to the front of my awareness. That’s the best way that I can explain it, rather like an impression of how they want to present. I allow myself to connect more with their energy and ask them to come closer to receive rather than try. Trying happens when I get in my own way. Working is allowing Spirit in to share what they want me to share. The evidential occurs throughout this time and discernment is a learned skill in how I differentiate between my energy and the energy of Spirit, collectively.
The brightness reminds me of Spirit energy.
Although the moments of clearest connection have a particular quality that I can only describe as alignment, when what I’m receiving, what I’m saying, and what’s landing for the person across from me are all moving in the same direction at the same time, and in those moments something in the room shifts in a way that’s palpable to everyone present. The information that comes through in those moments tends to be the most specific, the most evidential, and the most impossible to attribute to generalization or lucky guess.
Most importantly know that before each and every session or event I ask for only loved ones who have had good relationships with the sitter and are good communicators to come in, because boundaries are absolutely necessary in this work.
What It Feels Like From the Other Side
The folks who have sat across from me describe the experience in several recurring ways that are worth naming, because they may be useful to someone preparing for a first reading or trying to make sense of a reading they have already had.
This was the funniest Spirit I’ve interacted with in a very long time. April 2026.
Prior clients have described a physical response before they have consciously registered what was said or even an experience of feeling a sudden welling of emotion or a warmth in the chest that arrives in the same moment that a specific piece of information is offered. Physical response is often the most reliable indicator that something genuine is occurring, because it’s too immediate to be the result of rational processing.
The most commonly reported experience isn’t the one folks expect, which was a dramatic confirmation of everything they most hoped to hear, but rather the arrival of something specific and unremarkable that only they could recognize, a particular word their person used, a detail about a specific object or memory or habit that had no place in any generalized description of grief, and the specificity of that detail is what makes it evidential, because it could not have been generated by a general understanding of what grieving people need.
Clients have also described the experience of feeling the presence of their loved one outside of simply receiving information about them, and this presence is often described along with an emotional quality that belonged to their loved one in life, and some even describe a particular kind of warmth or humor or steadiness that is recognizable even when it is not being articulated in words.
What Spirit Communication Is NOT
It’s not a performance and it’s not a guaranteed delivery of exactly what you came for, because neither of those things is in my control or in yours. You need to know that the communication is guided by whatever wisdom governs what the person on the other side offers and what serves the person receiving the reading in that specific moment.
It’s not always comforting in the immediate sense, because sometimes what comes through is challenging, clarifying, or pointing toward something you as the client has been avoiding. A reading that delivers only comfort without ever pointing toward anything difficult is a reading that may be reflecting the Medium’s wish to please more than the actual communication of Spirit, which is an experience you won’t have with me.
It’s also not a substitute for grief, because the connection confirms the continuation of the relationship but it doesn’t replace the process of moving through the loss, and the women I work with who receive the most from mediumship readings are the ones who are also doing the grief work alongside the spiritual work, not using one as an escape from the other.
Again, no spiritual bypassing bullshit here.
If You’re Considering a Reading
What I want you to know before you sit across from me either in person or virtually is that I will bring everything I’ve developed over 16 years of training, practice, and continued development to the session. You need to know that what arrives will be guided by something larger than either of our intentions, and that whatever comes through will be offered with full ethical accountability and full commitment to your wellbeing as the person receiving it.
I would also want you to know that the most open you can come and the less tightly you hold a specific expectation about what the reading should deliver, the more available you’ll be to receive what is actually present rather than evaluating everything against what you came hoping for.
Book a Reading or Come Find Us
🕊️ Mediumship Reading with Amber 30 minutes or 1 hour, evidential, ethical, grounded in advanced training at the Arthur Findlay College and continued mentorship with experienced mediums, available worldwide. [Book at www.healingwithamber.co for your free consultation]
🕊️ An Intimate Evening with Spirit in person mediumship group event will be held on Saturday August 15th in Auburn, CA. Tickets are $65 and the event will be from 6-7:30pm. If you’re in the area and interested, purchase tickets now. Only 10 attendees will be allowed. Click here to purchase your ticket.
🌿 The Grief Sanctuary is where the spiritual and the grief work are held together in ongoing community and monthly practice, for women who want to continue the connection and the healing beyond any single reading. [Upgrade Subscription]
✨ The Inner Circle is for women who are ready for deeper, more personalized ongoing support and access to Amber as you continue the work. [Upgrade Subscription]
With care and intention,
Amber Choisella
The Part of Healing Nobody Warns You About: Grieving Who You Had to Be to Survive
Nobody tells you that healing will also feel like grief.
Folks tell you about the relief, expansion, the eventual return back to yourself, and the clarity that arrives when you finally put something down that has been heavy to carry……all of those things are true, but they’re not the whole truth. The part that gets left out is the part that catches most people off guard.
When you release a survival strategy you’ve been carrying for years or decades and begin to put down the armor that kept you alive through these conditions, something that functioned as part of you dissolves, and that dissolution is a loss, and loss produces grief, and that grief is real even when the releasing was necessary.
This is one of the most important and least discussed paradoxes of healing, and I want to talk about it directly because I have watched too many women interpret the grief of their own becoming as evidence that something has gone wrong, when it’s actually evidence that something is going exactly right.
Why Healing Triggers Grief
To understand why healing produces grief, it helps to understand what survival strategies actually are and what they actually do.
Survival strategies aren’t character flaws or pathologies, and they’re not evidence that something was wrong with the person who developed them. Survival strategies whether maladaptive or healthy were developed in response to conditions that required them.
The hypervigilance that kept you safe in a household where safety was unpredictable, the smallness that protected you in environments where being visible was dangerous, the over-functioning that gave you a sense of control in situations where control was otherwise impossible, and the suppression of emotion that made it possible to keep going when falling apart would’ve had perceived real consequences. These weren’t mistakes and they weren’t weaknesses. Remember that these things aren’t meant to be ashamed of because they were the specific and brilliant adaptations of a person doing what was necessary to survive something truly difficult.
The problem isn’t that you developed survival strategies because developing them was the right response to the conditions that produced them, and the problem is that they don’t update themselves automatically when the conditions change, so what was once protection becomes a cage, and what once kept you safe begins to keep you from the life that is possible now after the threat has passed.
When you begin to release a survival strategy, you aren’t only releasing a behavior pattern or a way of thinking, you’re releasing the version of yourself who needed that strategy. What is happening now is that you’ve become to shift toward something truer.
Healing triggers grief because becoming something different means something else ends and endings are losses. Understand that losses require grief and there’s no shortcut through that process, even when the ending is the one you have been working toward.
The Psychospiritual Cost of Outgrowing Survival Identities
For BIPOC/BBIA women specifically, the survival identities that are most commonly in need of releasing carry a particular weight because they weren’t developed in a vacuum, but instead as a response to systems and conditions that were dangerous and releasing them can feel not only like personal loss but also like a betrayal of the lineage that needed those strategies to survive.
The armor of the Strong Black Woman, the suppression of need and vulnerability and softness in service of family, community, and every person in the room except herself, wasn’t invented by individual women. It wasn’t a personal choice made from personal weakness, but an adaptive response to conditions that left Black women with no other viable option, because being seen as weak or needy or in need of care carried real consequences in a world that wasn’t designed to hold their/own fragility.
The permission-seeking that learned to make itself small, acceptable, and unthreatening in white-dominated spaces wasn’t a failure of confidence but a legitimate cost of being too much in environments that had made those costs clear, and the unlearning of that permission-seeking, even when it’s entirely necessary and entirely right, can feel like stepping into open air without knowing where the ground is.
The smallness that kept you safe in your family of origin, in your religious community, in the early professional spaces you navigated, that smallness has its own identity, its own relationships, its own familiar shape in the world, and when you begin to take up more space, the disorientation of the new size is real even when the new size is the right one.
Outgrowing a survival identity means grieving the person who wore it and that person deserves to be grieved, because she kept you alive, and she deserves to be honored before she’s released. She carried what she could with what she had, and she was doing her best under conditions that asked too much of her.
Honoring Who You Had to Be
This is the piece that most healing frameworks skip, because the cultural narrative around healing is organized around release and moving forward and leaving behind, and it doesn’t make room for the truth… that what you’re leaving behind was a real person who did real things and deserves a real acknowledgment before you go.
The woman who made herself small deserves your gratitude, because she read the room accurately and adapted accordingly. She protected you in the ways available to her, and the fact that you’re now in a position to outgrow that smallness is in part because she did what she did when she needed to do it.
The woman who suppressed her grief and kept going deserves your compassion, because moving forward was a perceived necessary, and the suppression was the price of moving forward. Judging her for that cost of her own survival is a form of abandoning her, and she deserves better than abandonment from the woman she became.
Gratitude and release can coexist in the same breath. Healing that honors both is more complete than the healing that only celebrates what’s being gained without acknowledging what’s being given up.
This Isn’t Regression. This Is Completion
When the grief of healing arrives and you find yourself mourning the identity you’re releasing or the relationships that are shifting, the most important thing I can tell you is this, what you’re experiencing is not evidence that you are moving backward.
Regression and completion can feel identical from the inside because both involve returning to something that was previously present, but regression is a return without integration and completion is a return with it. The grief of becoming is almost always completion rather than regression, because it’s the finally arrived acknowledgment of a loss that was always real but was never given adequate room.
The grief of letting go of your survival strategies is the last act of honoring them before you put them down, and it’s the first act of the liberation that comes after. This belongs in the process not as a complication of the healing but as an essential part of it.
Grief isn’t an obstacle rather grief is a passage, and this passage requires you to feel it fully rather than managing it efficiently, because what’s on the other side of it isn’t available through any other route.
You Aren’t Going Backward
You’re completing something that needed to be completed before you could go where you are actually going, and the woman who wore the armor and kept going and made herself small, who suppressed her grief and kept everyone else together isn’t someone to be ashamed of or outrun or left behind. She’s someone to be thanked, held, and released with the same quality of care and presence that you’re now learning to give to your grief, because she earned it, and she’s the reason you’re here to do the releasing.
Support for the Passage
🌿 The Grief Sanctuary is for women navigating exactly this kind of grief, the grief of becoming, the loss of survival identities, the disorientation of taking up more space than you were taught to take, with weekly practices and a container that holds every phase of the arc. [JOIN HERE]
✨ The Inner Circle is for women ready for deeper, more personalized support as the survival identities dissolve and the emerging self needs more than monthly practices to hold. [JOIN HERE]
📞 Grief and Spiritual Counseling is for one-on-one support in moving through the grief of healing with both clinical grounding and spiritual wisdom, because this particular passage deserves a practitioner who can hold the full complexity of what it asks. [Book at www.healingwithamber.co →]
With care and intention,
Amber
You Shouldn't Be Charging for Spiritual Gifts You Haven’t Trained for Yet
I’m going to say something that will make some folks uncomfortable….
Having a spiritual gift isn’t the same as being qualified to offer it to others for compensation. The two things are related but they aren’t identical and the gap between them is where a significant amount of harm in the spiritual healing space is quietly happening.
This post isn’t a critique of anyone specific, but rather a conversation about ethics, accountability, and what genuine spiritual development actually requires, and it’s also, a story about my own journey through that process, because I don’t think I have standing to talk about this without also naming what I have invested in my own development.
What I Did Before I Called Myself a Medium Publicly
In October 2019, I attended the Arthur Findlay College in Stansted, England for Advanced Mediumship training.
https://youtu.be/Ymbck7yoTK4?si=rQMBbZO4yuB1fRSR
Watch my 2019 vlog of attending the Arthur Findlay College.
If you aren’t familiar with the Arthur Findlay College, it’s widely considered one of the most rigorous institutions in the world for mediumship development and spiritual education, and it’s not a weekend workshop or an online certification, but an intensive residential training environment with a long history of serious spiritual education, where working with the evidence and with the ethics of mediumship is treated with the same rigor that clinical training applies to therapy.
I documented that experience on my vlog, up above. I want you to know that this type of training exists. I want you to understand that when I talk about the ethics of training, I’m not talking abstractly. I’m talking about something I invested in and continue to invest in within real time, real money, real vulnerability, and real surrender into before I offered mediumship professionally.
That training at Arthur Findlay wasn’t the beginning of my development. It was a milestone within a longer journey that included ongoing work with experienced mediums, continued mentorship, consistent practice with ethical accountability, and the sustained commitment to developing the gift rather than simply expressing it.
I still train and develop, because the learning doesn’t end when the practice has begun, and if anything, the deeper the practice goes, the clearer I become. I understand how much there is still to learn and how important it is to keep learning it.
The Arthur Findlay College isn’t the only organization to develop with. We cannot forget about ancestral practitioners in which practices are passed down through cultural trainings. Those are just as important too.
What Ethical Spiritual Development Actually Requires
I want to be specific here because vague calls to “do the work” are easy to dismiss. Here is what I mean concretely.
Mentorship with someone who’s more developed than you, not a peer accountability group or a community of people at the same level of development all confirming each other’s experiences, but someone who has been doing this longer, who can see what you can’t yet see about your own practice, and who will tell you the truth about where your discernment is unclear or your ego is interfering or your gift is not yet ready for a specific kind of work.
Structured training in the specific modality you intend to offer, because mediumship has a body of practice, a set of ethical guidelines, and a tradition of development that has been refined over generations, just as tarot has its own depth of study, and energy healing modalities have their own requirements. Innate abilities open the door while training is what teaches you to walk through it without causing harm.
Ethical accountability for what you offer and how, which means being honest about what you can and can’t do, giving accurate disclaimers before readings (Just like this transparent blog I recently wrote) knowing the difference between what you genuinely received and what you wanted to receive or what the client needed to hear, knowing when a situation requires clinical support rather than or alongside spiritual support, and knowing when to refer out.
Continued development even after you have begun practicing, because the practitioner who stopped developing the moment they started charging isn’t a practitioner who’s honoring the gift and development isn’t a precondition for practice that you complete and then move past, nope, it’s a lifelong commitment that is part of what makes the practice what it is.
Honest self-assessment, which is the hardest of all, because it requires you to ask regularly and without defensiveness whether what you’re offering is actually coming from your clearest channel or from something less clear. It’s also very important to know whether your discernment is reliable, knowing if you’re operating inside your actual scope, and asking yourself whether your clients are being served or being harmed by what you offer.
Why This Matters for the People Who Sit Across From You
Every person who sits across from a medium or a spiritual healer is in some form of vulnerability, having come because something in their life has broken open, whether that it’s a death, a loss, a spiritual crisis, or a question about who they are or what their life means, or whether the person they loved still exists somewhere they can reach.
That vulnerability isn’t something to be exploited, even unintentionally. This is easily exploited by practitioners who haven’t done enough development to know the difference between what they’re genuinely receiving and what they are projecting. Who have not developed enough discernment to know when a client needs to be referred to clinical support. Who have not built enough ethical infrastructure around their practice to hold themselves accountable for the impact of what they offer.
The harm that comes from an underdeveloped spiritual practice that’s often invisible looks like this:
The client who received an inaccurate reading about her deceased mother and organized her grief around it.
The person who was told something specific about their health that was not true and made decisions based on it.
The woman who was kept in an emotionally dependent relationship with a practitioner because the practitioner’s unresolved need for significance was being met through the dynamic.
These things happen, and they happen less when practitioners take their development seriously.
The Spiritual Community’s Resistance to This Conversation
I know this conversation is uncomfortable because I have watched it make people uncomfortable when I’ve approached it before.
There’s a framework in some spiritual communities that suggests that the gift, because it comes from Spirit, is inherently ethical in its expression and that if the intention is love, the outcome will be love. Some believe that requiring training or accountability is somehow a Western, institutional imposition on a natural spiritual capacity.
I disagree with that framework, and I disagree with it specifically because I have seen the harm it produces and it’s bullshit.
The gift is real and the love behind the offering is real, but neither of those things are sufficient protection against the harm that comes from underdeveloped discernment, poor ethical boundaries, and/or practice offered before the practitioner is ready, because love and good intention are the beginning of ethical spiritual practice, not the entirety of it.
What I Offer and Why I Believe I’m Ready to Offer It
I offer mediumship readings not because the gift arrived and I began offering it. I offer them because I have invested 16 years of structured development, rigorous training at the Arthur Findlay College, ongoing work with experienced mediums, and consistent ethical accountability into developing the gift before and alongside offering it.
I offer spiritual development mentoring not because I have arrived somewhere perfect but because I have walked the specific path of developing these gifts with integrity and I know what that path requires and where its difficulties live.
I offer grief counseling not because mediumship and clinical work feel naturally connected but because I have done the specific work of integrating them, ethically, rigorously, and with full accountability to both the clinical and the spiritual standards that govern each.
I’m telling you this because I think you deserve to know what’s behind the offer before you accept it.
Book With Someone Who Has Done the Work
🕊️ Mediumship Reading with Amber 30 minutes or 1 hour. Evidential, ethical, grounded in years of rigorous development including training at the Arthur Findlay College and continued mentorship with experienced mediums. Available worldwide. [Book at www.healingwithamber.co]
🔮 Free Spiritual Consultation if you’re navigating spiritual experiences, developing your own gifts, or exploring what spiritual development mentoring could look like for you, the consultation is where we start. [Book at www.healingwithamber.co]
🌿 The Grief Sanctuary is ongoing space and monthly practices for women at the intersection of grief and spiritual development. [Join at $27/month at upgrade here]
✨ The Inner Circle is for women who are ready for deeper, more personalized ongoing support and access. [Upgrade Subscription]
With care and intention,
Amber Choisella
This Is Exactly How I Guide Someone Through Grief in the First 8 Weeks
Most grief support gives you coping tools.
You know that list of strategies for hard days you’re given, or breathing techniques for when the wave hits. Also, you’ve assigned journaling prompts to work through the cognitive dimensions of loss. Resources for the practical aftermath of death or divorce or the ending of whatever organized your life before.
These things aren’t without value, but they’re not what I do. If you’ve experienced that kind of grief support and felt like something essential was still not being reached, I want to tell you exactly what a different approach looks like, in practice, week by week, so that you can recognize the difference between grief support that manages you and grief support that actually moves you through something.
What follows is a map of the first eight weeks of psychospiritual grief work. The actual arc of how I guide women through the beginning of this process, and what each phase is designed to hold.
Two People Reading This
This post is for the woman wondering whether or not this approach is right for her and what she would actually be walking into.
This post is also for the clinician who has been searching for a more culturally grounded and more spiritually literate framework than what their training provided who wants to understand what this method looks like in lived practice before they commit to learning it.
Both of you deserve to know exactly what this work is. Here it is.
Phase One: Witness (Weeks 1 through 3)
The first phase of this work isn’t about moving anywhere. It’s about arriving.
Most grieving women who come to this work have spent significant energy managing their grief before they get here. Managing it for their families, who needed them to be functional, for their workplaces, which had a limited window of accommodation, for their communities, which had a cultural script about how long grief was supposed to last and what it was supposed to look like, and managing it for themselves, because the full weight of what they were carrying was too much to feel all at once without a container strong enough to hold it.
The first three weeks are about building that container and stopping the management.
In practice this means creating the conditions for a grieving woman to bring the full version of what she is carrying into the space, often for the first time. The grief that is ancestral and collective as much as it is personal. The spiritual dimensions of her loss that she has been carrying privately because no one in her life knew what to do with them. The anger that has been mislabeled as something more acceptable. The relief she has been ashamed to feel. The love that has nowhere to go.
Witnessing isn’t passive. It’s the active, skilled practice of being fully present with what someone is carrying without trying to redirect it, reframe it, fix it, or move it toward resolution before it has been fully seen. For BIPOC/BBIA women who have rarely if ever had this quality of presence offered to their grief, the experience of being genuinely witnessed is itself a significant intervention. Something physiologically shifts when a person feels that their full experience, including the parts they have been managing, is welcomed into the room.
For clinicians: the witness phase requires you to suspend the impulse to intervene. The instinct to offer a reframe, a coping strategy, a normalizing reflection, is strong. In this phase, the most powerful clinical move is often the one you don’t make. You stay. You hold and allow the full weight of what your client is carrying be present without immediately organizing it into a clinical framework. The framework comes later. First, she needs to know that the full picture is welcome.
Phase Two: Integrate (Weeks 4 through 6)
Once the grief has been witnessed and the container has been established, the work shifts. Phase two is integration, and it operates across all three pillars of the Psychospiritual Grief Method simultaneously.
Psychologically, integration means beginning to make sense of the loss inside the full context of the client’s life, including the ancestral and cultural context that shaped what this loss means and how it is being metabolized. This is where the lineage work begins in earnest, locating the current loss within the larger arc of what the client and her lineage have already survived and what they’re carrying from before.
Spiritually, integration means bringing the spiritual dimensions of the grief into the clinical work rather than treating them as separate. We integrate dreams, signs, and the sense of continued presence or its painful absence. The religious or spiritual identity that may have been disrupted by the loss. The ancestral practices that the client has been reaching toward without knowing their names. This is where the somatic and spiritual work deepens: altar practices, journaling as prayer, breathwork as a container for what the body is holding.
Somatically, integration means beginning to move what the body has been storing. Grief does not resolve through cognitive understanding alone. It lives in the chest, the throat, the belly, the held breath, and it requires practices that can reach those locations directly. The somatic work in this phase isn’t about forcing release. It’s about making contact, again and again, with what the body has been holding and creating the conditions for it to move when it is ready.
For clinicians: integration is where the full Psychospiritual Grief Method framework becomes most active. This phase requires you to hold the psychological and the spiritual and the somatic simultaneously, which is exactly what standard clinical training did not prepare you for. It is also where clients begin to show the most significant movement, which can be both exhilarating and challenging to hold. Having a rigorous framework for this phase changes what is possible.
Phase Three: Reimagine (Weeks 7 and 8)
The third phase doesn’t arrive because the grief is finished. It arrives because the client has developed enough relationship with her grief that she can begin to hold a second question alongside it: who am I becoming on the other side of this?
Reimagining is not the grief equivalent of toxic positivity. It doesn’t ask the client to silver-line her loss or create meaning before meaning is genuinely available. It’s the natural emergence of a self that has been witnessed and integrated rather than managed, a self that has more room than it had before the work began, because the weight that was being suppressed has started to move.
In practice, reimagining looks like this :
A client who begins to speak about her loss with a quality of presence that includes grief and something else alongside it.
A woman who starts to articulate, for the first time, who she is outside of the roles and identities that the loss disrupted.
A practitioner-client who begins to see how her own grief has been calling her toward a specific kind of work.
A woman who picks up something she put down years ago, or puts down something she has been carrying for generations, because the eight weeks have created enough internal room to make a choice that was not previously available.
This phase isn’t the end. Eight weeks of psychospiritual grief work is a beginning, not a completion. What it offers is the foundation, the established container, the developed relationship with grief as something that can be moved through rather than managed indefinitely, from which everything that comes after can grow.
For clinicians: reimagining requires you to hold the emergence alongside the grief without rushing the client toward resolution. The new self is fragile in the first weeks of its arrival. Your role is to witness the emergence with the same quality of presence you brought to the grief itself, without collapsing the complexity into a narrative of recovery that isn’t yet fully true.
What This Work Isn’t
It’s not a program that promises to complete your grief in eight weeks. Grief doesn’t complete on a timeline.
It’s not spiritual bypassing dressed up in clinical language because the psychological work is real. The somatic work is specific, and the spiritual framework is held with ethical accountability.
It’s not one-size-fits-all support with a culturally diverse logo. The framework was built from the inside of BIPOC/BBIA women’s grief, by a Black woman who is a clinician and medium who grieved without a roadmap and built one from what she found in the dark.
It’s the beginning of a relationship with your grief that changes how you carry it. That is what eight weeks can do when the work is right.
Take the Next Step
For clients: If what you read here describes what you have been looking for and haven’t been able to find, a free grief counseling consultation is available for California residents. This is where we talk about what you’re carrying and whether this work is the right fit for you. [Book at www.healingwithamber.co]
For clinicians: The Psychospiritual Grief Method Training gives you the framework to guide clients through exactly this arc, with the clinical and spiritual rigor this work requires. Six CEs. Small cohort. Enrollment is open. [Full details at www.healingwithamber.co/the-psychospiritual-grief-method-training]
🌿 The Grief Sanctuary for women who want to begin this work with guidance who are moving through every phase of the arc. [Upgrade your Subscription]
Subscribe now
With care and intention,
Amber
Your Spiritual Gifts Are Terrifying You and That’s Exactly How They’re Supposed to Arrive
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
This Mercury Retrograde Didn’t Break Your Life. It Broke You Open
Mercury Retrograde, let’s get into it.
We’re in the closing days of Mercury retrograde in Cancer, and I want to talk to you honestly about what that actually means, because most of what circulates about retrograde season is either panicked or dismissive, and neither of those serves you.
Mercury stations direct on July 23rd which means that we’re almost through the retrograde, but we’ll be in the shadow period otherwise known as the integration window, through early August. You need to know that what you do with this closing stretch matters more than anything you did or didn’t do at the start.
So, let’s get into what this particular retrograde was for and what it’s still asking of you.
What Mercury Retrograde in Cancer Is Doing
Every retrograde has a flavor shaped by the sign it moves through. This one moved through Cancer, which is the sign of home, roots, family, emotional memory, and belonging. It did exactly what a Cancer retrograde does which was to it turn the review inward and made it personal.
If the past several weeks did the following, it energetically did its job:
Stirred up conversations with family members you didn’t expect to have.
Old grief surfaced without clear invitation.
You found yourself unexpectedly emotional about a memory, a relationship, a version of home that no longer exists or never quite did.
Someone from your past reappeared,
Questioned about where and how you belong came back louder than you expected,
Mercury retrograde in Cancer isn’t asking you to avoid your feelings. It’s creating the conditions for the feelings that have been filed away to surface, not to punish you, but show you that these emotions are ready to move. This energy is emotional, ancestral, and domestic in the deepest sense, not just in the house you live in, but the interior sense of home, of safety, and of which you carry with you from the people who raised you and the people who raised them.
For women in grief, who are in the middle of ancestral work, and who have been doing the psychospiritual work of examining what was inherited alongside what was chosen, this retrograde landed in the exact terrain that work lives in. Know that this isn’t accidental, it’s precise.
Mercury Retrograde Isn’t Your Enemy, Friend
I want to address the cultural narrative around retrograde directly, because it doesn’t serve you.
Retrograde seasons aren’t cosmically cursed periods to be survived. They’re structured invitations to slow down and do what most of us avoid doing when the energy is forward-moving and productive. It’s a time to review, revisit, reconsider, and integrate. The communication breakdowns, the logistical delays, the unexpected surfacing of old emotions and unfinished conversations, these are not Mercury retrograde attacking your life. They are the slower pace of the season creating space for what fast-moving energy tends to bypass.
For BIPOC/BBIA women specifically, the cultural instruction has often been to keep moving, not look back, and forward movement for survival. Mercury retrograde interrupts that instruction. It says, “there’s something behind you that is worth returning to. Don’t live in what comes up instead complete it. Process what wasn’t processed when it happened and have the conversation that got deferred. Give yourself permission to grieve what hasn’t been grieved.
This and every retrograde isn’t a disruption of your healing. It’s an accelerant of it, if you’re willing to receive what it surfaces rather than trying to manage it back into the box it came from.
What the Shadow Period Is Asking
Mercury stations direct on July 23rd, but the shadow period, that integration window, runs through early August. This is the stretch that most retrograde content ignores, and it’s often where the most important work happens.
The shadow period is not another round of retrograde chaos. It’s the time when what was stirred up in the retrograde begins to settle into clarity.
The conversations that were confused or interrupted start to resolve.
The old emotion that surfaced begins to show you what it was actually about.
The thing that resurfaced from the past starts to reveal why it came back now and what you are meant to do with it.
Here’s sound, practical, and spiritually grounded advice for this closing stretch:
Don’t rush to resolution. The shadow period isn’t a deadline. What surfaced during the retrograde doesn’t need to be fully processed before Mercury is fully direct. Give it room. Let it to finish surfacing before you decide what to do with it.
Have the conversation you’ve been avoiding. The retrograde in Cancer stirred up things that needed to be said, feelings that had been felt, and relationships that need attention. The shadow period is the window to say them, now that the most disruptive energy has passed and you can speak with a little more clarity.
Write before you decide. Whatever the retrograde surfaced, journal it before you act on it. The clarity that comes in the shadow period is worth capturing in writing because it often dissolves faster than you expect when ordinary life resumes its pace.
Rest before you relaunch. If you’ve been waiting for the retrograde to end before starting something new, the shadow period isn’t that time yet. Give yourself through early August to integrate what this season asked of you before you move into forward-facing action.
Trust what came back. If grief resurfaced, an old relationship appeared, a memory arrived that you hadn’t thought about in years, trust that it came back because it was ready to be completed. Not because you are moving backward. You’re ready to finish something that needed finishing before you go forward.
The Spiritual Truth Underneath the Astrology
Here’s what I believe is true, beyond the mechanics of any individual retrograde.
The cosmos isn’t random. The seasons of slowdown, the structured invitations to look inward, and the specific flavors of different astrological periods, these aren’t cosmological accidents. They’re the architecture of a universe that is organized at its most fundamental level.
Mercury retrograde in Cancer was and is for many of the women in this community a grief season inside a grief season. A time when what was already being worked on was brought into sharper focus, when what had been filed away surfaced without being invited, when the emotional, ancestral, and domestic dimensions of the self-demanded attention.
Remember that this isn’t punishment. This is the universe participating in your healing.
Receive it as such. Let what came up be what it is. Allow the shadow period to do its work and trust that what you’re moving toward, on the other side of this integration, is a version of yourself that is a little more complete than the one who entered this retrograde three weeks ago.
If This Season Stirred Something That Needs More Than Integration Alone
📞 Spiritual Consultation with Amber if Mercury retrograde in Cancer surfaced grief, ancestral material, questions about belonging, or anything else that feels like more than you want to integrate alone, a one-on-one spiritual consultation is where we look at what came up and what it is actually asking of you. Available worldwide. [Book at www.healingwithamber.co →]
🌿 The Grief Sanctuary is an ongoing support space through every retrograde, every grief season, every astrological passage that surfaces what needed to surface. Monthly practices and a container that holds you through all of it. [Join at $27/month by upgrading your subscription]
With care and intention,
Amber Choisella
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