Wisdom from a Psychopomp

I discovered that I have an odd psychic ability entirely by accident.

Years ago I had a very old and sick calico cat. My wife and I were monitoring her closely and I noticed that she was increasingly withdrawn. One morning I noticed that she could no longer tolerate petting and seemed to be in a great deal of pain. A gentle physical examination revealed that her abdomen was full of gas pressing against the skin, and it was off to an emergency vet.

An x-ray revealed that her entire intestines were blocked, and the hospital wanted to operate. Given her already poor physical condition and age, we declined, a decision, which our regular vet absolutely supported. She would very likely either die in surgery or shortly thereafter. So while she was still under anesthesia, we opted to put her down.

My wife was at work, and I took her home and dug a grave. But I felt an unease that I could not explain and as a result, I could not bury her. I held her in my arms and walked around the yard, hoping to find closure, but it didn't help ease this strange feeling.

Finally, I sat on our front porch and really focused on her and felt her presence within the body and that’s when I finally knew what to do and when I acted, it all happened in an instant. I mentally told her that it was time to leave her body and at that moment, I felt something whoosh away. The body felt empty; I didn’t realize that this was the problem until it happened.

The unease lifted as I realized that the whoosh was the kitty’s soul. Our cat, who had died while still under anesthesia, didn’t know that her body was dead and hadn’t left it yet. Now that she was gone, burying the body was no longer an issue. I'm confident she would have eventually figured out that she had to leave, but this was undoubtedly a better outcome.

This experience triggered something in me that had long laid dormant. While I was familiar with New Age stuff and the ordinary pantheon of psychic abilities, this was something I was unfamiliar with. When people I knew, or one of my many cats passed on, I had no trouble connecting to them on the other side. That world was somehow familiar to me. I started researching this more deeply, and it turned out that there was a name for it: Psychopomp.

What Is A Psychopomp?

A Psychopomp is a guide between worlds and generally someone who helps with inevitable transitions. It’s the job of the Grim Reaper in popular culture and in the Bible, this is a task of Angels. In indigenous cultures it’s the job of the Shaman. While many of these are magical beings, the psychopomp can also be a person. A guide between worlds and generally someone who helps with inevitable transitions.

There have been TV shows about this role using supernatural beings. Dead Like Me and Touched By An Angel to name two of them. They show up when a person is either about to die, or has to undergo a life altering change.

The Makeup Of A Psychopomp Individual

One of the defining traits of a psychopomp is being non-judgmental, almost to an extreme. To a psychopomp, a person is their soul, not the body, so body types and skin colors don’t carry a lot of meaning to them. Likewise, to a psychopomp, the many different personalities that people have are just roles that they are playing in this life. For them, it’s not so much about your outward facing personality, but who you are as a person. People are viewed holistically and psychopomps understand that our physical existence is messy and complicated. People can have both positive and negative traits without being defined by one or the other; it’s not absolute.

While both mediums and psychopomps traverse between worlds, their intent is different. Mediums are there to facilitate communication between a living person and one who has passed. There may be revelations or a sense of closure during this communication, but this is not the primary goal. Psychopomps, on the other hand, are focused completely on enacting change and the successful completion of a transition. It’s their primary goal.

The Psychopomp Guide

A psychopomp is a temporary guide. They have a specific task to complete and once it’s done, they move on.

In western society, a living psychopomp is important for people who are dying because so many people fear death. The fact that a living person walks between worlds means that there are other worlds and that death is not the end.

Like any good psychopomp, I have a lot to share about the transition to death. The most important thing is that while you lose your body and the life you had, you take your personality with you, sort of.

You keep the deeper lessons of life and lose the small stuff. Were you once a legend in World of Warcraft? You keep some of the discipline you learned and some of the gaming skill and any warmth, friendship and kindness you learned along the way. The details of the game though, are lost.

You remember the people you loved, but from transition it is different. They can only feel your presence if they are sensitive to it and if their minds are quiet. You will see the temporary nature of their lives and when they die you’ll have to move on from the person they were. You don’t forget the lessons of love. You forget your pain, but not the lessons you learned from it, both helpful and unhelpful.

If you died horribly in battle, you never fully forget the trauma. You will have to transcend it. You could probably be able to imagine that kind of trauma very vividly and understand that it could be the consequence of soldiering. You might learn that just following orders can turn out really badly for you.

You learn most of your important lessons in life, not in transition. If you were a bad person in life, you won’t come back as a good one. You might come back though with a better opportunity to become good. The choice is always yours.

There are things that you came into this life to learn, and if you wasted your chances and didn’t learn your particular lessons, you’ll get another chance. Reincarnation is a well documented scientific fact backed by quite a bit of research, which I’ll address in a future article and there is no timeline and no way to compare progress.

In general, you’re supposed to learn how to manage your physical existence properly and manage a balance for creating your best life. This is absolutely not possible within a single lifetime.

To accomplish this you have to navigate being disciplined with your body, creating the conditions for maintaining a healthy one. You need to balance your responsibilities and take care of your relationships, learning how to give and receive in a way that keeps your important relationships strong and successful. Finally, as you juggle these two immensely vital aspects of your life, it is imperative to cultivate a deeply fulfilling and gratifying career that offers sufficient stability and security, freeing you from worries about it. They are all connected.

Illusion and Reality

Our physical reality is designed to test you with its illusion of separateness. Newbies in physical form lack the focus and energy to create the best conditions for themselves and often end up in dire circumstances. They are very difficult to help because they are failing in too many areas. They tend to fall prey to abusers and have trouble escaping poverty and are more vulnerable to disease.

We have to deal with our anger and traumas for several lifetimes, often creating more of it along the way until we progress far enough to not only overcome our old stuff, but prevent new anger and generational traumas from ruining our lives and the lives of those around us.

To make it easier, people seem to advance through lives in groups, often taking different roles, so someone that was a father in one life might be that person’s wife in another.

And through trauma, happiness, sadness, regret, terror and many other emotions, we gradually get an understanding of our physical existence and the discipline needed to master it. We spend more time on introspection and work on our empathy and boundaries. We learn to see the world not in black and white, but in shades of gray. We get less emotional over both our failures and successes and we learn to pay attention to holistic problems, both personal and beyond. We recognize the need to do our small bit for society not for any personal gain, but because it has to be done. We sink or swim together.

We can make changes to the life we have, but it only moves as fast as our ability to change, and that is ordinarily quite slow. There is a difference for example, between believing you deserve to be rich and making the necessary changes to your life.