About my offerings…
Hey ya’ll, I offer intuitive readings and mediumship. Intuitive readings go to your deep self and I use my clairsenses to bring in information. In mediumship, I go to your ancestors and passed loved ones. This blog post is an explanation of my influences, my training, my process. Too many spiritual ‘influencers’ or Western practitioners obfuscate where they learn from, because they want to be seen a certain way and sometimes because they don’t even know. It’s the same whitewashing we’ve seen over and over again in White supremacy. But this shit is messy, and I am willing to put it all out there, trusting that you are exploring this work with many tools and modalities of ‘healing’ and self growth and as much critical thinking as possible. I am going to trust you are growing your own intuitive power and trust in yourself and your communities alongside me. Don’t ever take my word for it, listen within and build community that can hold you accountable. Easier said than done but just please try. There aren’t many schools you can go to for this kind of work. You have to build the learning yourself, and hopefully it’s not all on social media. I hope you can make the space to go deeper.
In general and as a quick ‘here’s what I think’, I do believe that the other side works mysteriously, that we live lives multiple times, in multiple places and planes, in order to experience and love more. I do believe in parallel lives, in unseen worlds we are connected to, and that each of has a soul, a deep self I ask for guidance. I’ve seen quite a lot here and know that my understanding will only deepen with time and experience. I don’t quite buy into the scary stuff, but I do know there are powerful energies, entities, and ancestors out there that could be scary. Though, the scary ghouls you see in movies are usually projections of your own human fears.
100% of the time when connecting with a person, I sense love, protection, and support alongside and overpowering any energetic hardship or blocks or karma. Even ancestors who have done wrong by us come through with perspective and love they couldn’t see or feel in life. It is us on earth who often have the problem letting go, and that makes sense. I do not believe our souls necessarily ‘choose’ our trauma in this lifetime, a common belief in Western spiritualism. In my experience I see what people mean by karma, not as punishment, but as ties and experiences we are meant to learn from. I will never blame you for the things you have experienced though, because it is not your fault. I don’t know what to do about the question of deep suffering and why it exists. I just know that sometimes, beauty arises from it. I wish it wasn’t so, and that people did not have to experience such great pain. I have heard that phrase that the price of having loved so deeply may be grief. That grief is love that has nowhere to go. In my experience with mediumship, we can still send our love across the boundaries of material existence. But it is only a small comfort in loss.
Feeling and hearing and seeing what ancestors send me has been the greatest salve and gift I have received. To know that universal love is expressed in these individual connections. To know that it is possible to use energy techniques to receive information that comforts us. I use my own intuition and practice, practice, practice in order to more deeply understand what is ‘true’ and what is a ‘belief’. Sometimes these can’t be separated, so it’s best to more deeply explore our subjectivity so that we don’t make claims that will hurt others. Or at least we can try not to do that harm of believing something is objectively true. In this case, practice means I keep up with my spiritual hygiene, taking care of myself and my mental health, trying to be a better human and spiritual being, not one over the other. Practice also means I practice doing intuitive and mediumship work. I ask for feedback, I ask for evidence. I test out my beliefs against my inner compass and against study, research, and in community. I deepen practices that build integrity, honesty, and loving experience. While some of this can’t be measured, how we do it, and how we try for what can be measured, all matters.
Do I believe our loved ones still have their personalities on the other side? Yes, I do. Because I have spoken to them like I speak to people, and I have received answers that there was no way of knowing. I believe science will explain what is happening in energy work some day (and there are now a lot of studies about neuroscience/meditation, psychic work, and near death experiences that are fascinating to read), and that we as a society will learn to embrace energy practices (including mediumship) even as some will continue to exploit them. That is human nature, too.
Once traumas are experienced, it is commonplace that a narrative arises which can be true and healing. With or without spiritual work. It isn’t that the stories we tell ourselves are real or aren’t real. This argument towards subjectivity or objectivity is a moot point for me. Much of this work is not yet measurable by science, so we must take extra care and humility as practitioners who have clairvoyance or divinatory skill. That skill can in fact be measured through practice. How often am I accurate? Sometimes, freakily so. Most of the time it is generally acceptable with a few punctuated moments of ‘how did you know that’? Sometimes, the person says they have no idea what I’m talking about. This is why I continue to practice and learn. Oftentimes I believe the experience is not about telling the future or fortune telling. It is relational, and educational, and more complex. I aim to grow my skill enough that I can answer your questions with care, connect to spirits that want and can help you, and I do want to know I am accurate and know when and how to share information I receive. Yet the future is never set, so please know you have choice in how you live, and take care of your own discernment, take care of who you go to for guidance and support.
If you want to learn about how this all got started, you can go further back in my blogs where I’ve shared some of this information. Other services I am receiving training in or have learned (currently not offered to the public): medical intuition (Dr. Jennifer Vest), reiki (Chanel Durley) and energy healing (Ken Jover, Art Giser, John Friedlander), breath work (Chanel Durley), Korean rituals (Mudang Dr. Helena Soholm). If you can’t find answers to your questions in my website, feel free to email me s.mihee.kim@gmail.com.
Like I mentioned, I have received training and am undergoing training in all of the above, in different lineages and systems. There are so many others who go more deeply into one system, and they should be learned from. Many of these systems stem from India, Korea, Japan, the broad ‘East’ and also the spiritualist traditions of the ‘West’ which have intimately interwoven with coloniality. Buddhist, Advaita Vedanta, Korean ancient practices, gnostic, Taoist, Hinduism etc…these are the traditions that take energy and energy work seriously. Westerners have created very interesting and useful systems that I don’t resonate with 100% but have learned so much from (including and especially grateful to these: Energetic Neuro Linguistic Programming - Art Giser, Transcendental Energy Work - Ken Jover, practical psychic - John Friedlander). And these systems have been built through international influence, which undoubtedly can have the tensions that come with how culture is commodified and influenced by imperialism. I have been trained in Transcendental Meditation, which I believe has its roots in Vedanta traditions from India but were packaged for the West as TM by David Lynch.
Don’t get me wrong though, just because I was born in NY doesn’t mean that I should opt into a Western way of interacting with Eastern spirituality. I just don’t know for sure if there is a moral line that can easily be drawn. We each have a responsibility to learn what that line is, with more respect, and more practice towards decolonizing. White people should continue to pause before calling themselves ‘shamans’ after having been invited into a sweat lodge. Should I practice Reiki if I didn’t grow up with a connection to my Japanese lineage? Should Asian Americans play Indigenous drums? Perhaps the community surrounding that person can answer better. These questions are ones I’m still grappling with.
Each of the teachers mentioned here have many many influences themselves and varying relationships and beliefs around how to enact spirituality in this world, and that is the case with many spiritual practitioners in the U.S.. This is to be expected, I am the child of immigrants after all. Not belonging in Korea anymore but being very proud to be Korean, a person ‘about’ the Western world. I am beginning the deep work of releasing and reconfiguring the intergenerational trauma that stitches itself into my body, often through lost (to me) Korean spiritual practices. My consciousness is one that has resisted and reformed Western ideology, benefited from it too. My lineage is one that has fled war. Many people shy away from spiritual work because it’s the Wild Wild West…literally got some imperialist, White supremacist underpinnings that are very dangerous. What could happen if we connect with our own cultural practices, which many of us have been ripped from, honor the indigenous land we’re on in the United States, as visitors, as guests, as transients, as colonizers? How do we hold that in balance with being an ‘Other’ wherever we are? How can we look at this life as one that is gorgeous, while suffering, while seeing the work that needs to be done to heal?
We cannot build a freer society without spiritual work. We cannot do spiritual work without living human lives. The material and spirit connect through our experiences. I am curious and have spent my various parts of my life learning about systemic oppression, neuroscience, meditation, phenomenology, religion and theology, race & gender studies, media and culture, art practice and poetics. I work in community arts because I believe art practice is a way into your intuition and spirituality when religion fails us.
I can recommend others with more experience in any of the services offered here, some are the teachers listed above, and others are people I have come across and worked with or heard of. But if you’re drawn to me and it feels like the right move…spiritual/woo/intuitive work isn’t something to be afraid of.
I am not here as a ‘healer’ but for now, as a practitioner of energy work who is a perpetual student and wants to share information, not ideology. My intuitive practice began with reading tarot 15 years ago, but I have been speaking to the dead since I was a child, I just did not know it. I explore these practices from an autonomous, decolonial, antiracist perspective, and that will take a lifetime of commitment. As someone who grew up with the cognitive dissonance of extreme fundamentalist religion, I am careful to protect my clients’ autonomy and my own.
I am not drawn to this work as a counselor (although I can counsel you, and surely there are many therapists with training that can help you too), and I do not wish to be a talking head or to ‘help’ others exactly. I am on a journey to understand my own art and creative practice, my own healing, and to question thoroughly why I am alive - this also means connecting, giving, and being with other people. This means being a human being with a love of science fiction, an addictive personality, wide feet, a penchant for teasing my close ones. I’m just a human with problems and dreams. I am made better by working with you, and we are made better working in solidarity. My approach is light, sometimes joyful, sometimes fun. But this is also no joke, and can get very intense by nature of our human grief and longing. I will try to create space for that, if you will do your work also.
