Mystic, Shaman, or Something Else? A Field Guide to the Invisible
On consciousness, energy work, and finding your way back to yourself
What's Underneath
I still remember what I said to myself afterward.
It doesn't matter if that was real.
I had just come out of my first past life regression — not something I did, but something I received. I went in as a seeker, not knowing what to expect. And something shifted that I couldn't explain and didn't need to. Patterns in my present life that had never made sense suddenly had a shape. Energy I had been carrying for as long as I could remember felt lighter. I felt lighter. A wholeness of being I hadn't known was missing.
Whether those were literally past lives or something else entirely — I don't know. What I know is that something real moved. Something was released. And I walked out of that room different than I walked in.
That experience cracked something open. It was my first real glimpse of what I've come to understand as the invisible — the vast territory of consciousness that underlies everything we experience, and holds far more than we realize. I followed that crack deeper, into my own inner work, and eventually discovered I could see into that territory for others. That's how this work began. Not with a decision. With a door that opened.
What We Carry
Consciousness is not just personal. That's what the inner work keeps revealing.
We carry energy from our own histories — patterns and wounds and unresolved momentum that follow us across time, shaping present life in ways we can't always trace. The energy of past lives can live quietly in present patterns, creating weight and repetition that has no obvious origin in this lifetime. This is what a past life reading can reveal — not as abstract history, but as living energy still running in the present.
But we also carry energy that was never ours to begin with. We are sponges. We absorb the expectations of the groups we belong to — family, culture, community — until their energy runs quietly through us like a current we mistake for our own. And beneath even that, there are larger flows. Universal currents that move through all of consciousness, subtly altering the direction of our spirit without our awareness.
Most of us walk around carrying all of this without knowing it. Wondering why certain patterns repeat. Why something feels heavy that should feel light. Why there is a version of ourselves we sense but can't quite reach.
Here is the thing though. You don't even realize you are not yourself until you start doing the work.
That's not a criticism. It's simply the nature of it. You can't see what you're carrying from inside it. The weight feels normal because you've never known anything else. The patterns feel like personality. The heaviness feels like just the way things are. You might sense that something is off — that life feels more effortful than it should, that there is a freer version of yourself somewhere underneath — but you can't quite name it or reach it.
That's because it's invisible. And the invisible requires a different kind of seeing.
The Oldest Doorway
Every genuine tradition that has ever reached toward the unseen has done it through the same doorway.
Inner sight. Focused consciousness. The willingness to look at what cannot be seen with ordinary eyes.
The shaman has always known this doorway. The mystic has always known it. Long before any of these traditions had names, the first person who ever closed their eyes and looked inward — they found it too. It is the oldest human capacity we carry. Not a gift given to a few. A doorway available to anyone willing to turn toward it.
What changes across traditions is the language, the tools, the cultural clothing. What stays the same is the territory. Consciousness itself — individual, group, universal — vast, navigable, and holding everything we have ever carried.
My own path through that doorway kept unfolding after that first regression. Through it all I would always return to a Taoist understanding — that something vast and unnameable underlies all things, and that you can orient yourself toward it without ever fully defining it. That quiet truth became the thread running through everything I explored.
I followed what was true. Psychic development opened my ability to read energy directly — to see into what a person carries in their present life, and what moves around and through them. Psychic meditation became the foundation and steady practice underneath all of it. Working with the akashic records opened access to the deeper held memory of a soul — the patterns and contracts carried across lifetimes. Reading past lives as a psychic allowed me to see the specific energy from previous lifetimes that is still quietly shaping someone's present. Astral travel extended that further — moving through consciousness beyond the boundaries of the physical entirely. Shamanic journey taught me to navigate the invisible with intention, traveling through layers of consciousness with our animal guides to find what needs to move.
And then the natural world stopped me entirely.
I didn't come to animal communication looking for a modality. I came to it because an animal stopped me.
What I discovered is that everything I had been learning to see in humans — the carried patterns, the inherited weight, the energy running quietly underneath behavior — exists in animals too. They have their own histories. Their own unresolved momentum. Their own version of what we carry without knowing it.
And they will tell you about it. That is what still surprises me, every time. A dog with a story I wasn't expecting. A horse who has been patiently waiting for someone to finally ask. The specificity of what comes through — the details, the personality, the humor sometimes — never gets ordinary. I don't think it will.
What changes for the animals is real. What changes for their people, watching it happen, is often something they didn't expect to receive at all. That's the part I love most. Nobody walks away from this work unchanged — and nobody walks away without being a little astonished.
Each modality was a different angle of entry into the same invisible territory. Each taught me something about what lives there and how to help someone else see it.
Making Space for Your Own Spirit
What I've seen, again and again, is that energy healing — spiritual healing of any kind — isn't about adding something. It's about seeing what you're carrying — past life energy, inherited patterns, group expectations, universal currents running through you that you never chose — and finally being able to set down what was never yours.
What's left when that happens is you. Lighter. Freer. More yourself than you've been in a long time. Maybe ever.
You don't realize how far you've drifted until something shifts.
That's what I remember most from walking out of that first regression. Not a revelation. Not a dramatic awakening. Just a quietness. A sense of being back inside myself in a way I hadn't noticed I'd left. I had no framework for it then. I just knew something real had moved.
And here's what I want you to know — this territory, as vast and mysterious as it is, is also a place to play. To explore. To get curious about what is really moving underneath your life. The invisible isn't something to approach with fear or reverence. It's something to wander into with open eyes and a sense of wonder.
That's what I find most exciting about this work. Every session is an exploration. Every one reveals something unexpected. And on the other side of it is more of yourself than you knew was there.
Lesley Ames is a psychic medium, animal communicator, and photographer based in the Pacific Northwest. Her work is rooted in the belief that consciousness holds more than we realize — and that seeing into the invisible is a way back to yourself.