Speaking Soul: How I Discovered I was just a Translator

“Were you able to determine how the baby died, then?”

“Actually,” the medical examiner says. “That’s more complicated than most people think. We medical geeks make a distinction between the way a person died and the actual change in the body that causes the termination of life.”

Small Great Things – Jodi Picoult

It is easy to poke holes in the messages spiritual mediums deliver. That is not lost on me. Their messages can be vague in some cases and seem to apply in a broad sense. There are exact details given, but spirit does not come forward and say…”Hi, I am Jim. I am Marge’s brother and I died in a car accident on December 12, 1982.” It is frustrating that this isn’t how spirit communication works. I have asked spirit why it doesn’t work this way at least a gazillion times.

“Why the heck do you make this so difficult?” I ask. Never a clear answer. This hasn’t stopped my brain from trying to piece together an answer that makes sense. The beautiful thing about spirit is that it will answer you; you just might have to pay close attention to what information you are given and have the patience to sort through it to find the answer.

As with all great realizations, it took time for me to discover why spirit communicates the way that they do.  Okay, maybe all great realizations don’t take years to discover, some people have found the easy way and realizations happen via Google searches or by asking Siri a simple question. Unfortunately, Siri doesn’t ever answer my questions or understand them correctly for that matter. However, ironically Siri did help. Siri’s inability to understand my request to make a phone call led me to consider how Siri, a machine, translates human language. I mean I am speaking to a machine, after all. It doesn’t understand our language exactly. It is translating it and morphing it into a language it understands.

I mean Siri does say our own words back to us after all. Spirit should do the same, right? But, no that isn’t how spirit communication works. This is how some things work with Spirit. Sometimes I do hear and am able to pick up on exact phrases; whole conversation pieces. On the flip side; there is a ton of information that isn’t ever verbally communicated that I am able to pick up and have to decipher.

But this idea of Siri, Spirit and translation are still rattling around in my head as we head out across the Atlantic Ocean or pond, (I had to refer to it that way so that I wasn’t focused on being in a metal can thousands of feet above a vast ocean for HOURS to get there. I know, I know flying is safer than driving…yadda.yadda.yadda) to Ireland.

While in Ireland, our family had the opportunity to visit a Celtic Club where we learned how to play Irish Games – Hurling, Irish Football, and Handball. We were introduced to these games through a bit of Irish Culture because these games are a way that the Irish people preserve their Celtic Heritage. One of the things that I found illuminating in this brief overview of history was that there are no definite words for yes or no in true Gaelic Irish. There are as many shades of yes and no as there are shades of green across the Emerald Isle. Isn’t that a truly wonderful thing that there are shades of yes and no? Some people like definite, I like the shades of color and variance, open possibilities. The example below from a blog on mindfloss demonstrates an example of how questions are answered with out yes or no directly:

I started thinking about how words translate from language to language and it occurred to me that being a medium is like being a type of translator. It’s funny that the idea of mediumship being simple translation didn’t occur to me until now. But there it is. Spirit speaks soul and as with any language, translations aren’t exact. Soul is going to have shades and variances that English, Spanish, French, Greek, Gaelic Irish or any other human language might not be able to capture. So of course, spirit isn’t going to come forward and say, “Hi, I am Mary Lawson. I lived 58 years and died of ovarian cancer.” Those are our spoken words. Spirit will have a whole other set of words to describe that experience.

When spirit speaks they try to exude their personality, show the way they looked and share other vibrant characteristics because in the language of soul, that is their name. Duh! I don’t know why it took my so long to see that. And if I were to describe myself to someone the last thing I would use would be my name. I would tell them about me. Yes, we might say our name, but it doesn’t describe who we are, we are more than a name. Especially a soul; it is so much more vast than just a single name.

Our names often mean something or stand for something and spirit may try to describe that instead because that represents more about them than just the name. For example, Briana means strength. So Briana’s soul may come through demonstrating strength and exuding her character rather than simply saying, “I am Briana.” Granted, I get why this would be easier and better for the scientific community, and for our human brains to understand, but this makes perfect sense to me. I have spent years trying to make sense of why and how spirit communicates the way it does and have had little else stand out as a better answer. This right here makes some solid sense.

An additional puzzle piece to solving this riddle came when I was reading Jodi Picoult’s, Small Great Things. A must read by the way. My fave book of summer. While reading, I came across the quote I opened the blog with and wham-o, brilliance like lightning can strike multiple times and often has to, to sink into this thick skull, there it was again a difference in perception and translation.

For soul, the reason the body stops working isn’t translated exactly to what we might determine as cause of death. It is like the fictional character describes, “We medical geeks make a distinction between the way a person died and the actual change in the body that causes the termination of life.” So does soul. They don’t use the actual words, “heart attack”, “Alzheimer’s”, “Parkinson’s”, “car accident”, etc. They give me the feelings that their body experienced and how their body stopped working and then I have to use those items, just like a medical examiner would, to determine what I think cause of death might have been.

So often a soul tells me that their heart stopped or that they had pressure on their chest and had difficulty getting enough air, they had a mass in their body that spread, they were just plain exhausted, or even their heart was in so much pain they could not continue on in life.  The focus for the soul is on the change in the body that caused the termination of life. Which of course makes sense because the body stopped working and the soul had to leave the body behind. A soul isn’t dead. A soul is still living, so it’s not going to say how it died; it didn’t die. Souls refer to themselves as alive.

We often expect spirit to communicate in our human languages and often knock mediums because spirit doesn’t communicate the way we expect it to. That needs to change. Spirit speaks soul. Spirits are no longer attached to a brain that translates their language into words we understand. They are doing the best they can to speak to a medium – soul translator – to help the living understand souls and what life is like without a body.

Spirit speaks soul. A language with a culture, tradition, and history older than time itself – literally. The words soul uses do not have direct translations to human word. We have to change our construct and expectations of how information is transmitted from spirit to human. Soul is emotion based. Soul is intuition. Soul is how faith feels.

All this time I have tried to define a spiritual medium in a way that makes sense to me and it comes down to this: a spiritual medium is a person who speaks soul. Spiritual mediums are able to understand soul enough to translate the messages they receive into human language. They do the best they can, but of course translations are going to be off from time to time. Of course signals can get crossed. For a medium it really is like communicating across radio waves.

Think about it this way, does your satellite radio lose its signal from time to time? Does your power or cable go out? Yup. Yep. Yeppers. Being a medium isn’t much different from that. They are translating one language to another across radio-like signals trying to help people and soul communicate so that they know they are not ever lost to one another. Don’t blame the medium or criticize their efforts; a great deal of solid information is translated clearly, but it isn’t always exact; no fault to either communicating party. They are all doing the best they can.

My hope is that in understanding that soul and humans speak two different languages that humans start to better understand soul and those who speak it fluently. In truth, we all speak soul, most of us have just forgotten how. The more you try the more fluent you become. And I say, don’t knock it until you try it.

Until next time,