What the Grief Was Really About
A field guide to the invisible — on animal communication, past life energy, and what moves when we finally listen
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 experienced. I went in as a seeker. I didn't know what to expect. And something shifted that I couldn't explain, and didn't need to. That was nearly two decades ago.
I don't know if those were literally past lives. What I know is that something real moved. And once I felt that, I couldn't unfeel it.
That experience cracked something open. I followed it inward — into meditation, into psychic development, into learning how to listen beneath the surface of things. Over time, I began to notice I could sense into that same space for other people.
That's how this work began. Not with a decision. More like something that kept revealing itself.
What I keep noticing in sessions
What I've found, again and again, is that people arrive carrying more than what's visible in their current life.
Sometimes it shows up as grief. Sometimes as a behavior in their animal that doesn't quite make sense — a fear that seems disproportionate, a response that has no obvious origin in this lifetime. What looks like a problem on the surface is often something else underneath. Something neither the person nor their animal has had a way to see.
A client came to me because her dog was terrified of getting in the car. It had become a real problem — distressing for the dog, exhausting for her. There were many things it could have been. But what surfaced in the session was a past life they had shared. A crash. A different animal, the same soul. The fear her dog carried into this lifetime wasn't irrational. It was memory.
That landed for her. The recognition of something she hadn't had words for before.
That's what I keep finding. The behavior is rarely just the behavior. The grief is rarely just this loss. There's often something underneath it — something the bond itself has been quietly holding, waiting for the right conditions to be seen and released.
In a session with someone carrying deep grief over a recently lost dog, the dog came through clearly — not to perform a reunion, but simply to let her know he hadn't gone. That was real, and it mattered. But the grief she was carrying opened almost immediately into something older. A past life experience surfaced that finally explained why letting go had always been so difficult — not just with this dog, but in a pattern she'd felt her whole life without being able to name it.
By the end of the session, the heaviness had lifted.
Not because I had done something to fix it. But because something that had been invisible finally became visible. And once it was seen, it could move.
The animal isn't incidental to that kind of shift. In my experience, they're often the reason it becomes possible. They carry things too. And they'll tell you about it — if someone goes still enough to listen.
My dog Stanley was with me for sixteen years. Long before the end, he was already teaching me — about listening, about what animals carry, about what they'll tell you if you go still enough to hear it. He's part of why this work, rooted here in the Pacific Northwest, became what it is.
Near the end of his life, when I was facing one of the harder decisions that comes with loving an animal for a long time, I reached out to a colleague — another psychic — for help. I wasn't looking for a past life reading. But that's what arrived. What she showed me made exact sense of something I'd been struggling with: why a particular choice felt so impossible. There was a history underneath it that I hadn't been able to see. And I was ready to hear it — which is probably why it came.
Something lifted. Not everything. But enough that I could find my way through.
What this work actually is
People often ask me: are you an animal communicator, a psychic, or a medium? And the honest answer is that in practice, these don't stay in separate boxes.
Animal communication is direct listening — tuning into an animal's experiences, emotions, and what they want to say. A psychic reads energy: the patterns moving through a person's life, what's shaping their present, what they're carrying that they may not be able to see from inside it. A medium is a channel — a way for someone who has passed, person or animal, to communicate directly.
What I've found, particularly as an animal communicator working with grief, is that people rarely arrive needing just one of these things. In a single session, all three can be present. The animal arrives. The grief surfaces. The past life opens. Something lifts.
What I notice across all of it is that the tool is less important than the quality of attention underneath it. All of it requires the same thing: clearing enough of my own noise to actually hear what's there. Not projecting. Not deciding in advance what the session should look like. Just staying present with what actually arrives.
If something in this resonates
You don't need to already know what you believe about any of this.
Most people come simply noticing something — in themselves, or in their animal — that hasn't fully resolved through the more familiar explanations. A grief that stays longer than expected. A pattern that keeps returning. A sense that there is something there, just underneath what they can see. Whether they're looking for pet loss grief support, trying to understand a behavior that doesn't make sense, or simply curious about what their animal might say — that noticing is enough to start.
Curiosity is enough. That's usually where it begins.
Lesley Ames is a psychic medium, animal communicator, and photographer based in the Pacific Northwest. She works with living animals, animals who have passed, and the people who love them — and with humans navigating patterns, grief, and what they carry that they haven't yet been able to name. You can find her at lesleyames.com.