Your Spiritual Gifts Are Terrifying You and That’s Exactly How They’re Supposed to Arrive
What Your Ancestors Want You to Know About the Power You’re Afraid to Claim
You felt something you weren’t supposed to be able to feel. You knew something before it was possible to know it. You saw something in a dream that then happened. You sensed a presence so clearly that the rational explanation stopped being convincing, and the one that replaced it scared you more.
Your first instinct wasn’t wonder. It was fear.
That response is not a sign that something is wrong with you. It is, in fact, one of the most reliable indicators that something real is happening.
Why Emerging Gifts Feel Terrifying
Spiritual gifts, when they’re emerging, don’t usually arrive with a soft welcome or a clear instruction manual. They arrive in the gap between what you thought was real and what you’re suddenly experiencing. They land in the nervous system before the mind has a framework to receive them, which means the nervous system often responds the way it responds to any unknown, with alarm.
The gift doesn’t feel like a gift when it first arrives. It feels like something happening to you without your permission kinda like a curse… It can and does feel like that at time because you start seeing things you didn’t ask to see and knowing things you didn’t ask to know. You’re being affected by other people’s emotional states so acutely that you can barely distinguish/discern their pain from your own. You could also be receiving information in dreams or in waking moments that turns out to be accurate in ways you can’t explain.
These experiences are disorienting. The disorientation is not evidence that you are broken. It is evidence that your capacity is larger than the container you’ve been living inside, and that the container is in the process of expanding.
Fear Versus Reverence
There is an important distinction worth making here, between the fear that signals danger and the fear that signals the sacred.
Not all fear is a warning to retreat. Some fear is the body’s way of recognizing that something significant is happening, something that asks for a different quality of attention than ordinary experience requires. Many spiritual traditions same the belief that the shaking in the presence of something holy is not the same as the shaking in the presence of something threatening, even when both feel like fear in the body.
The fear that says “I am in danger” is usually accompanied by a desire to flee, to close, to protect. The reverence that looks like fear is often accompanied by something underneath it that wants to move closer, even when the surface of you is frightened. The awe that is on the other side of the alarm.
Learning to tell the difference is part of the work of living in relationship with gifts that are larger than you initially knew how to hold. You don’t have to be fearless. You just have to be willing to get curious about what the fear is actually pointing toward.
What Was Taken, What Is Being Reclaimed
For BIPOC people, the terror around spiritual gifts carries a layer that is worth naming directly.
Your ancestors had these gifts. The woman in your lineage who was called a healer, a dreamer, a medicine woman, a seer and the traditions your people practiced before colonization, before forced conversion, before the calculated destruction of Indigenous spiritual systems and the criminalization of African and Afro-Caribbean religious practice. The gifts that existed in your bloodline for generations before they became dangerous to express.
Suppression isn’t ancient history. The Yoruba religion was actively persecuted across multiple continents well into the twentieth century. Curanderismo and Indigenous ceremonial practice were interrupted through residential schools and forced assimilation within living memory. The “Strong Black Woman” framework that forbids vulnerability also, conveniently, forbids the kind of softness and receptivity that gifts require.
What you’re experiencing as terrifying might be, in part, a cellular memory of the cost of these gifts. Your nervous system holds the history of what happened when the women before you were seen with these abilities. The fear is not only yours, but some of it is also inherited and inheriting it does not mean you are required to stay inside it.
These gifts weren’t destroyed by suppression because they went underground. They moved through the bloodline in forms that were harder to name and easier to survive with. They are surfacing now in you, in part because you are living in conditions where it is finally safe enough to surface.
Common Experiences That Terrify People
If you are wondering whether what you’re experiencing counts, here is what I hear most often from the women who find their way to this work:
Knowing something about a person the first time you meet them, information you had no logical way of accessing.
Feeling other people’s emotions in your own body with such acuity that crowds become overwhelming and some people leave you depleted in ways that have nothing to do with what was said.
Dreams that contain specific, accurate information about things that then happen.
A sense of presence in rooms that feels distinct from imagination.
Hearing a name, a word, or a phrase clearly in the space between sleeping and waking.
A sudden and inexplicable knowing about a situation or a person that turns out to be true.
These are'’t symptoms. They’re capacities and that distinction matters.
Why the Gifts Are Emerging Now
Grief is one of the primary activating conditions for spiritual gifts. This is not coincidence or poetic metaphor. The experience of profound loss disrupts the ordinary psychological and nervous system structures that keep certain kinds of perception filtered out. When the container of the normal life cracks open, what was being filtered sometimes comes through.
Tower moments do the same thing. Identity crisis, spiritual awakening, the loss of the structures you organized your life around, these are all conditions that open the veil in both directions. You become more permeable and the information that was always there but was previously blocked by the business of ordinary life begins to come through.
Your ancestors may also have made a choice. There are traditions across multiple cultures that understand spiritual gifts as something transmitted with intention from the lineage, often to a specific person, often at a specific moment in their life. If you are the one in your family who is doing the conscious work, who is naming what was unnamed, who is in the passage of transformation, you may be the one the lineage chose to transmit through. That is an enormous thing to receive. It is also, from the ancestral perspective, a form of trust.
What to Do When the Gifts Terrify You
The first and most important instruction is this: don’t shut it down.
Suppression does not make gifts disappear. It makes them louder and less organized. What does not flow finds other channels, and those channels are usually less comfortable than the one you were trying to avoid. Fear is understandable but I’m gonna tell you right now that suppression is NOT the answer to it.
Learn to ground before and after any experience of heightened perception. Intentionally place your feet on the floor and allow your body to make physical contact with something solid. Take slow and deliberate breaths. Grounding creates the container that makes the gifts navigable rather than overwhelming.
Find language for what you’re experiencing, if not with everyone in your life, then in a journal, in a community that understands, with a practitioner who can hold the full picture. The gifts become more workable when you stop having to pretend they aren’t happening.
Study what you’re experiencing within a tradition or framework that has held this before. You don’t have to invent the language from scratch. The traditions your lineage came from have language for this. Finding your way back to that language can be its own form of homecoming.
When to Seek Support
If your experiences are interfering with your ability to function, care for yourself, maintain basic safety, or stay connected to reality in ways that feel frightening rather than expansive, please reach out for support from someone trained to hold both the clinical and the spiritual dimensions, like me. A genuine spiritual emergency may need both a skilled spiritual guide and a clinical practitioner, and there is no spiritual integrity in refusing support when support is what the moment requires.
If your experiences are disorienting but you are functional, you are safe, and something underneath the fear recognizes what is happening even while the surface is frightened, what you likely need is not clinical intervention but spiritual accompaniment. Someone who can help you learn to live inside the expanded capacity rather than fight it, like me.
What Your Ancestors Want You to Know
I have been doing this work long enough to tell you, with confidence, what comes through again and again when I sit with women in exactly this experience:
They gave you these gifts because they trust you. Not because it will be easy, or because you won’t be frightened, or because you have your life perfectly arranged to receive them. They trust you because they’ve been watching you, they know what you’re capable of, they know that gifts emerging isn’t separate from the grief and loss you’ve been moving through. The Tower happened because they needed you open. The grief did what grief does because they needed you permeable. Your gifts are arriving now because now is when you can finally hold them.
You’re not going crazy. You’re coming into something and you are not alone in it.
You Don’t Have to Figure This Out Alone
📞 Schedule a spiritual consultation with Amber. If you are in the middle of an emerging gift and you need someone who can hold both the clinical and the spiritual reality of what you’re experiencing, a one-on-one consultation is where that conversation happens. This is where we assess what is unfolding, what kind of support would actually serve you, and how to begin building a relationship with what is emerging rather than fighting it. Available worldwide for spiritual consultation. [Book at www.healingwithamber.co]
Your gifts are real. You were chosen for them for purpose. Come find the support that helps you receive them.
With love,
Amber Choisella
