Medium Sterling Moon shares practical advice for how to communicate with spirits!

You can find her recent book, Talking to Spirits: A Modern Medium’s Practical Advice for Spirit Communication at Amazon: https://amzn.to/3YwdULz

Here is a link to Sterling’s updated Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_sterling_moon/

Thanks Sterling!

TRANSCRIPT

[intro music]

This is the Paranormal Podcast with Jim Harold.

JIM HAROLD: Welcome to the Paranormal Podcast. I am Jim Harold, and so glad to be with you once again. Today we are going to have a fascinating discussion. We are going to be talking about Talking To Spirits: A Modern Medium’s Practical Advice for Spirit Communication – and in fact, we’re going to talk about a book with that very name with the author. We’re talking about Sterling Moon.

Sterling has communicated with spirits since childhood and began officially practicing mediumship in 2016. She’s been reading tarot since 1995 and teaching divination skills since 2013. She works with clients virtually and in-person at her private office, and we are so glad to have her on the show. She also teaches through her school, Sterling Moon Divination Academy, and is a long-time instructor at Ritualcravt School. She also apprenticed under Johannes Björn Gårdbäck. I’m not sure if that’s –

STERLING MOON: Gårdbäck.

JIM HAROLD: Gårdbäck, an internationally respected teacher and spiritual worker in the Swedish folk magic tradition of trolldom. She lives in Colorado, and we’re so glad to speak with her today. Sterling, welcome to the show.

STERLING MOON: Thank you so much for having me.

JIM HAROLD: And it’s an extra double bonus – I found out after we connected that you’re a listener. You go way back with the shows. I really appreciate that.

STERLING MOON: Oh yeah, huge fan.

JIM HAROLD: Thank you so much. So, practical advice. Some people might say mediumship is kind of spiritual, it’s kind of floating out there, it’s not really practical. How do you bring the practical side to mediumship?

STERLING MOON: I do this work full-time now, but I also spent – you can’t just live totally in the spiritual world. You have to also stay grounded in the mundane world. A prior career of mine involved a lot of technical writing, and one of the things that I loved – I really love teaching, and I did find that sometimes people who gravitate toward mediumship, it’s all spiritual and woo-y and you just have to figure it out, and I’m very concrete, “Please give me some step-by-step instructions,” and I didn’t really find that out there.

So as I started figuring out what to do with my own gifts, I started cataloging them and writing my own notes, and at a certain point I realized my notes were starting to look rather bookish. I like to believe I wrote a pretty fun book, but I’m not going to lie, it is kind of like the stereo instructions of mediumship. Hopefully a lot more clear, easy to follow, and also a little bit enjoyable to read. [laughs]

JIM HAROLD: I think that’s needed. When you’re talking about this stuff, sometimes it’s so much ethereal and above and in the clouds that there’s no way to put it into practice. So I think it’s useful to be able to take things and say, “Okay, the ABC of it, let’s go through it.”

Before we get to some of that ABC, let’s talk about the ABC of your journey. How did this knowledge that you’re a medium and all of this come about for you, and how far does it go back?

STERLING MOON: I’ve always been sensitive since I was a kid. That’s something I think a lot of people who are spiritually sensitive in different ways get told a lot growing up. “You’re too sensitive. Stop being so sensitive.” For some of us, that’s not really an option. But I definitely would have some spooky experiences growing up. My family also sought it out. We loved staying in haunted bed and breakfasts or seeing what we could perceive. And I was always a little bit more likely to have things happen around me.

I have experiences going back to – I think the first one I remember was when I was five. But they were more, like, popcorn-y. They would just happen, and there didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason, and they were not consistent – until I got pregnant with my son at age 35. That’s when things seemed to dial up. And then when I had him at age 36, all of a sudden I realized I was picking up on a lot, and it was all the time. I’d been reading tarot for a really long time at that point and started reading professionally and kept doing that, but I had the opportunity to work with a magical teacher named Danielle Vitagione. She’s sensitive to spirits as well, so she taught me some things.

But at a certain point I was just on my own and trying to make sense of this and wandering around haunted places, trying to find spirits to communicate with, bumbling and fumbling around and sometimes getting myself into some tricky spots that I would sometimes have to seek out folks who knew more about it than I did. Then I was blessed to get an apprenticeship with Johannes Björn Gårdbäck, who you mentioned before. I had a friend who was studying with him. He’s in Sweden, and a large part of how he teaches magic also includes being sensitive to spirits of the dead, spirits of the natural world.

I had a friend who was apprenticing with him and I said, “Could you tell me a little bit about what you’re learning?” She said, “I’ll do you one better. He has an opening for an apprenticeship.” So I was blessed to study with him for almost two years, and that was when I was finally able to put some guardrails up around what I was able to do, explore the limits of some of that and just keep going. It’s been a heck of a journey.

JIM HAROLD: That’s great. In your book, you talk about different kinds of spirits. I think sometimes people think, “Oh, it’s just the spirits of dead people” or people are like, “There’s demons” and that’s the beginning and the end of it. Can you talk about the different kinds of spirits and how many kinds of spirits are really out there?

STERLING MOON: Number one, I don’t think we have any way of knowing how many different kinds of spirits are out there, which is part of the fun. As much as we can study this and become experts, I don’t know about you, but the longer I’m invested in this work, the longer I do this, the more questions I have.

JIM HAROLD: That’s exactly my line. That’s exactly what I say. I started this in 2005 and I thought, “This is going to be great. Six months, I’m going to have all this stuff figured out.” Not so much. [laughs] Not at all. I have more questions now than when I started.

STERLING MOON: And that’s what’s so cool about it. I’ll be perfectly honest: when I first started doing this work, I just assumed that everything was a ghost, a spirit of the human dead. And then I started noticing that that was not the case. Even prior to working with Johannes, I would notice that there were things that were – and this is where sometimes the ethereal, hard to explain quality comes in, because sometimes you just notice that something feels different. It would seem like, “Why am I out in nature and this tree has a vibe, or this boulder or this spot in a forest? It feels like there’s something here, and it doesn’t feel human.” I describe this in the book; there have been a few times that I’ve encountered things that don’t seem like they’ve ever been human that definitely are malevolent. Some folks would call that a demon.

The nice thing about working with spirits from a folk magic tradition is way back when, our ancestors were more focused on survival, so even when they would encounter these things that were big and scary, they would usually just address it as calmly as possible because they had to get back to work and all of that. I like that pragmatic approach to spirits.

So there’s spirits of the natural world, spirits of the dead, spirits of the animal dead, malevolent spirits, but then there’s also all of the fun pockets that you can go down, like what about aliens? What about cryptids? What about time slips or multiple dimensions? You can go wild thinking about the possibilities, and I think it’s all really fun to think about.

JIM HAROLD: We’re on the same page, Sterling. When we talk about communicating with spirits, how easy or difficult do you think it is for spirits to communicate with us? Is it difficult for them? Is it something that’s easy if we’re tuned in? What is it like from the other side, do you think? Nobody knows, but what do you think?

STERLING MOON: In my experience, it really depends on the living humans as well as the spirits we’re trying to reach. I’m just going to give a very recent “for instance”; I have somebody close to me who I’ve been working with their family because they had two very tremendous losses as a result of a car accident. These kids, frankly, their spirits are very, very strong. They’ve been trying to set records of – I mean, the ways they will come in to send really clear signs to their families – I’ve done some proper formal sessions with the family, and that has been incredibly easy. These kids are just very strong, and for whatever reason, it seems like they are able to come in and to give their family comfort and let their family know that they are okay.

Now, sometimes, there are spirits that for whatever reason, they move on really quickly. Especially for folks who have maybe been passed for a long time, because if you think about it, if we believe our souls transcend the death of our physical bodies and we go elsewhere, and maybe we have different lifetimes and things like that, if I’m sitting with somebody who wants to connect with an ancestor who maybe hasn’t worn the shape and the name that we are speaking out in a very long time, it might be a little harder for them.

And then there are folks that – I am one of those mediums that does believe that everyone has the ability to connect with something divine, and yet some of us have extra blocks for whatever reason. It’s like you have to have that perfect match. It’s maybe like dating. [laughs] There needs to be a match, like a personality match, and there needs to be two people that communicate well together. Sometimes you have a match and sometimes you don’t.

JIM HAROLD: That makes a lot of sense. That makes a lot of sense indeed. Now, in terms of speaking to the different kinds of spirits, you mentioned you read tarot, but what are the implements you use? Do you do different things to divine and get in touch with the other side? Whether it be tarot, Ouija boards, pendulum work. There’s a lot of different things. I think people tend to think it’s just one or two things. What are the different ways you talk to the spirits?

STERLING MOON: For me, to walk you through my steps – which I outline in the book, hoping they’ll be helpful for other folks out there – I always start with grounding. I need to feel anchored. There are different spirits I work with that I call to them to help me in my protection and my anchoring – because for me, I only want to speak to the spirit that I am trying to reach, and if they aren’t home – if I make the call and they don’t want to talk – then I don’t want to talk to usually anyone. Or maybe there might be somebody who’s related that I’m okay with, but I want to make sure that I have the mental state where I am grounded and protected. When I’m working with a client, I guide them through that as well.

Most of my sessions are me and one to two other people, although I do also host larger séances, which is also pretty fun. Once we ground, I’m a big believer that we all have highest spiritual guides, and our highest self can come in to support us. I like to call them in just to have our back, help us to maybe see things from a 30,000-foot view. And then we call to the spirit that we’re going to bring in.

What I usually have on my table is I have candles. The whole point of that is, one, there’s the folk belief that the light of the candle will help to light their way, but there’s also energy with fire. So that’s something they can draw from, the same way that you hear paranormal folks talk about the way that batteries get drained. So fire will offer that.

I always have a bowl of water. Water is thought to be a conduit. I usually have a bowl of water and then a glass of water, like “Please come and refresh yourself.” This may sound silly to some folks, but I always have snacks. I always have food offerings that you would give to a guest. It’s a way of saying “Please come and join us.” In my office I have a chair that I will often set – it’s like the symbolic chair of “Please come and join us.” I have found that that sometimes really, really helps.

In terms of my tools, I use pendulums a lot when I’m doing tarot, but I really love copper dowsing rods. I find that they are really helpful for yes/no questions, and also “maybe,” when a spirit is not really conveying, so they’ll kind of wobble side to side. I really enjoy having a K2 meter and a Rempod in the room. I know that those are incredibly fallible, but I also know my physical space, so I know the things that tend to set it off. And it is really cool when you’re having one of those moments where you can just feel the energy building in a room, or I say something, and suddenly little Rempod is going “dib-dib-dib” or there’s a spike on the K2. That is sometimes a little bit of like, “Okay.”

So those are the tools that I usually have. In terms of what I am doing – I’m going to be gesturing, so I’ll try to describe what I’m doing for your listeners. I usually have my eyes closed with my hand to my forehead. I will sometimes have people ask, “Are you reading body language? What are you doing?” I have to really go internal, and at a certain point my eyes are closed for most of the session. It’s just something that helps me.

Then when we’re done, there’s a process for releasing, and we all go on our merry ways.

JIM HAROLD: Well there you have it. When we get back, we’re going to talk to Sterling Moon more about talking to spirits, and I’m going to ask her: How do you know who you’re getting in touch with? Ooh. Right after this on the Paranormal Podcast.

If you love the Paranormal Podcast, be sure to check out Jim Harold’s Campfire, where ordinary people share their extraordinary stories of ghosts, UFOs, cryptids, and terrifying encounters. Find it for free wherever you listen to this podcast. Tune in to Jim Harold’s Campfire today. Now, we return to the Paranormal Podcast.

JIM HAROLD: We’re back on the Paranormal Podcast. Our guest is Sterling Moon. She is the author of Talking To Spirits: A Modern Medium’s Practical Advice for Spirit Communication.

Okay, Sterling, so here is a question for you. Let’s say that you are doing your methodology, regardless of what you’re using, and something comes through, and let’s say for the sake of argument it says “This is Aunt Mildred.” How do you know it’s really Aunt Mildred and it’s not something else – dare I say even something a little more sinister?

STERLING MOON: It’s such a good question, and sometimes there are spirits that will try to wear the mask of something else. That’s the thing we’re all scared of, right? That’s one of the dangers. There are two things that I always tell people when they come to see me. Number one, I can’t make guarantees that I will be able to reach the individual that you hope to reach, but the one thing I can promise is I will try my hardest, using all my tools. And I try to be delicate in how I word this, but we do have to make sure that we are reaching who we think we are. It is most helpful when people know who they – like they’re familiar, somebody they knew in life or they have a lot of family stories about, because then there’s things that you can take back and confirm.

There is a little bit of a leap of faith, but I will say a lot of the way that my skills come up is that I’m pretty clear – I’ve got the classic clairvoyance where I can see in my mind pretty clearly. Pretty good with clairalience, where I can hear things in my inner ear, and I get a lot of physical sensations. Not just emotions, although those sometimes come through, but physical feelings as well. So putting all those together, I am frequently able to provide things that can offer confirmation.

And sometimes my clients will have incredibly specific – for all mediums, one of the hardest situations is when people want dates, names, and really specific answers because sometimes spirits talk in metaphors. But I always will ask the question, and I give what I get back. That’s my job. I am often pleasantly surprised by how often I do get some confirmation. Even if it doesn’t come in that moment, I’ll get a text message or a phone call or an email later giving me some extra, “Oh, guess what I found out!”

Now, there have been times when I have been with clients and sometimes there are folks where, for whatever reason, they are a little bit more susceptible to nastier spirits that want to just mess with them and poke at them. It’s hard to really figure out exactly why, although I do have some theories. And there have been times where something tries to pretend to be someone else and you send them out immediately. There is a way. I do have methods of recentering. But that is when claiming your space, recognizing that this is our world, this world was made for the living, so in my opinion, we are stronger than any spirit simply by virtue of being alive – and that is when you send out anything that is trying to be sneaky or funky. We recenter and we can try again. But it’s always a possibility.

JIM HAROLD: As you know, having been a listener to the shows, we love stories. Do you have – I’m not going to say a favorite story, because I’m sure you have a lot of them, but maybe a favorite experience or something that’s happened to you in the process of this work? It could be in this book or not in this book, something that really said to you, “Wow, this is really amazing and just an incredible experience.”

STERLING MOON: I’ll give you two quick ones. One is just from two weeks ago. No, actually, it’s from last week. I was doing a session for the family that I mentioned earlier, the two very strong young people coming in. The family had asked, “Do you have any messages for these three particular friends?” I was very emotionally touched by the situation because these are individuals that I know and care about, so I’m getting a little tired at this point, but I’m like, “Okay, let’s do it. Everybody needs this.” At this point I’m just getting pictures.

One of the people they asked about was a friend of these two individuals, and I just kept getting a picture of a high school football field and bleachers. I said, “I’m getting something that feels really weird. Can you give me something that’s more clear?” Same image. I explain it to the family. I said, “I might just be getting tired, but you asked, I asked, this is what I get.”

Two days later, I get a text message – I’m not going to go into all the details because this was some mischievous, youthful shenanigans, but the individual I had gotten this message for, one of their most momentous times as friends was they were getting up to some mischievous, youthful shenanigans at a high school that they didn’t go to. It was one of those things where the mom had never heard this story, so then this poor kid has to share with the mom like, “Oh gosh, this is what we did.” But everybody thought it was so funny.

That was just really cool for me that I just see this picture that makes no sense, and a couple days later, somebody else is able to put all the pieces together.

One other quick story is when I had a student who had asked me if I would help her with some spirit activity she was having in a new home she’d moved into that was built in 1920. I go in and I talk to the spirits that are there and explained that there was a woman that seemed to come and go, had lived in the original structure of the home. All she wanted – she liked to come and sit in what she remembered as being her spot by the window where she could look out at the street. I said, “The name she keeps giving me is May.”

Then I also kept seeing this little black shadow darting around, which back in the day would’ve scared the heck out of me. I did ask, “Do you hear a cat?” My student said, “Oh my gosh, I hear little kitty claws. I hear an animal walking through here at night.” So number one, we figured out there’s probably a ghost cat there.

But a couple months later, my student was talking with her landlord, who had just happened to find some original window panes in another structure on the building where this woman had carved the date and her name into the window pane. Her name was Martha, but she went by May.

JIM HAROLD: Wow.

STERLING MOON: So that was cool.

JIM HAROLD: That is cool.

STERLING MOON: Those are two of my favorite stories. Thank you for listening.

JIM HAROLD: That’s fantastic. Have you ever had anything that’s truly frightened you?

STERLING MOON: Yes. I share one of the stories in the book, with full permission of the client that it involved. She was someone who had come to me and we had been communicating through email, which I get a lot of emails from people who live in homes that they think are haunted and they’re really scared. A lot of times they just need to talk it out, which I’m always happy to do. But this individual said that she’d been having these recurring dreams of this scary woman that did not like her. She was 15.

We talked through some things, and she came in for a session a few months later. Again, the whole story is written in the book and I don’t want to take too long on it here, but there were multiple things going on. She did have a spirit attachment of a woman who seemed to have lived on the property that this young woman had grown up on and was very jealous of her. But attached to both that spirit and my client, there was something that I would categorize as a malevolent spirit who had never been human, so technically a demonic type entity, that was goading on the situation.

It was something that I was able to be helpful in clearing and also working with my client to help her to recognize in case this situation happened again, because it turned out she’s very sensitive. She’d had a lot of scary experiences over the course of her life and encountered some things that maybe had followed her around for quite some time. By her admission, she said this thing seemed to try to come back two different times. Both times, she was able to say, “Uh-uh, go away,” using some clearing and grounding and home protection stuff that we had gone over.

At a certain point after the second time, she said it seemed to have left her alone. Both of them did. I know that that sounds very flashy, but it was scary and it was not fun. I don’t go seeking out those really nasty things. I don’t like going to haunted prisons or old asylums or places where there were really brutal crimes. I know that some folks like to go and investigate those places. For me, that’s not my jam. But I’ll get involved if I feel like it’s the right thing to do. If somebody comes to me with a need and it seems like I can be helpful, I feel like that is part of my obligation to use these gifts for good.

JIM HAROLD: A big part of what you do is communicate with those who have passed over, and I think that most of us, if we’re being honest, have a real interest in what the other side is like. Even nonbelievers, I think they wonder, “What if I do live beyond?” I definitely believe that we live beyond this life. What do they tell you about the other side?

STERLING MOON: I love that question so much. It seems like for most of us, there is a process. And I don’t know if it’s a mandatory process or just something we are encouraged to do, where it’s like a backwards review of our lives and the ways that we impacted others and the world. That is also maybe a time where we have to atone for things maybe we wish we had done differently, and also to see the ways that maybe we touched somebody else’s life in a positive way that we didn’t know about.

I see a lot of people, and I’ve certainly experienced this on my own, where it feels like loved ones come to visit right after they have passed. Sometimes I wonder – I do think there is part of that people just want to make sure their loved ones are okay, but sometimes I wonder if that review process involves – I always think of it as like Ebenezer Scrooge and the Ghost of Christmas Past, going through and checking in on folks and taking stock of their life.

Then what happens from there does seem to vary, from what I have experienced. There have been some spirits I have communicated with where they are purposefully obtuse about what it is that they are doing. Some will even say, “I can’t tell you.” There’s one that – I did a reading for somebody who had a very serious member of the clergy that was in her family, and we were able to make contact with him, even though I definitely got the sense that even in death, he thought this was maybe not totally appropriate, and he was one who was like, “I cannot tell you what I’m doing over here.” It was like, “Okay, noted.”

Another story that I share in the book is one of my favorites. One of my favorite clients had asked me to contact one of her friends, who had been passed away for a very long time. Often when I’m doing these sessions, it feels like the spirit comes into the room. In this case, the spirit did not come to us, but it was almost like a window opened into where we got to see what she was doing. She said that her job was “catching” the souls of babies who had passed and young children who had passed so they would have a warm and loving homecoming, and to be able to send down souls that were ready to be reborn.

JIM HAROLD: Aww.

STERLING MOON: I know, right? It was very joyous. The feeling in the room was just so sweet and palpable, and my client said, “Oh my gosh, that is exactly what she would be doing. That fits her so well.”

I have contacted other spirits, particularly those who had really rough lives, who it seems like they just get some quiet and some rest. And sometimes spirits who maybe did not behave honorably in their lives, they have the opportunity to get better and work on themselves and do good.

It is very different, person by person, but those are some of the big themes. This is also something that goes along with it: spirits, the way they present when they choose to come back is often very different than my clients tend to remember them, particularly when they want to connect with grandparents and things like that. Grandparents usually want to come in looking their best, like they did in their twenties or thirties or forties, which is really funny. I’ll be describing this person and they’re like, “But that’s not how I remember my sweet old grandma.”

JIM HAROLD: Right. I’ve always heard that they present themselves in the prime of life.

STERLING MOON: Yes. I mean, my own grandma, shoot, I used to reach out to her all the time until finally she told me, “Stop it. I want to be doing other things.” Basically, “Quit remembering me as an old lady.” She wanted to be the hot young thing that she was in her twenties when she lived in New York and led this really cool, flashy life. I’m like, respect. I can feel that.

JIM HAROLD: I like it. Haunted places and spaces – I spoke to someone recently who said that basically almost any place can be haunted. It doesn’t have to follow one certain profile, like I think sometimes we think. What do you have to say a little bit about haunted places and spaces? I know you talk about that in the book.

STERLING MOON: I absolutely agree that pretty much everywhere is haunted. I was just having a conversation with my mentor, Johannes, recently where he was saying, “I really hate it when people start talking about the supernatural because that implies that that’s something outside of nature. Nothing is outside of nature!” He knows that I live in a home that is fairly active, and he’s like, “But you talk about it like it’s this external thing! Your house is in nature!” I’m like, “Yeah,” because maybe what’s happening here is rooted to the ground that lives underneath my home. It’s not necessarily the structure itself.

So that’s another way that thinking about different types of spirits can be helpful because sometimes you have spirits that will come and go because maybe they were connected to a farm or a natural space from a long time ago, and it just so happens to be there’s a house now in this area.

I think that in my experience, there are spirits who will come and go out of physical locations. I often don’t see spirits that are trapped. I do tend to see spirits that tend to come and go. I did have the experience once assisting with a haunting where it seemed to be a woman who had passed away of Alzheimer’s; it was fairly recent, and she was still in that confused state and had come back to her home and there were new people living there. That seemed to be confusing. But with the slightest provocation, that situation seemed to remedy itself.

Sometimes there are places that have just whispers of something that happened. I’ve always thought of it as imprinted energy. I know some folks call it residual hauntings. I think that’s how I describe it in the book. In my own home, that was something we experienced when we first moved in. My husband and I kept hearing whistling. It would just be this whistling that we would hear at night, but it didn’t seem to be connected with anything; it didn’t interact or anything like that. It was just whistling, and at a certain point it faded. So sometimes there’s things like that where it’s just a whisper of something that happened.

But yeah, I could go on and on because there’s so many theories, and every haunting is different.

JIM HAROLD: I applaud you because you have a section in the book about ethics. I think sometimes, particularly – I think this about paranormal investigators. Some, not all. Some. The people going into private homes and things. To me, paranormal investigation has kind of become like the old – people used to be in a bowling league and they’d all have shirts. So now, instead of that, we all get black t-shirts with our logo on it and become paranormal investigators. I mean, I’m being a little flip there, but you get my point.

STERLING MOON: Yeah, I totally do.

JIM HAROLD: I don’t think it’s that way for all paranormal investigators, but I have to think that, for example, paranormal investigators or people who have psychic gifts or believe they have psychic gifts, there is an ethical piece here, because you’re dealing with people with great loss or people who feel that their home is haunted. Maybe they feel threatened. It’s kind of like a loaded gun; you have to be careful with it. Can you talk about the ethical side of it? I think that is so important, and again, I applaud you for addressing that.

STERLING MOON: Thank you so much. Oh boy. Some of this commitment to always try to do my best, at least in regard to that, I spent 20 years as an advocate for survivors of crime. So I’m pretty comfortable working with people who have trauma, who are going through some of the hardest things of their lives. I wanted to make sure that translates over to what I’m doing in my work now because there are some really – there are fraudulent mediums out there.

There’s fraudulent spiritual workers, and some of the ways that you can recognize that is, one – and I think this is maybe not fraudulent, but it is something that a lot of mediums who don’t do this work professionally will do. If they get a vision or they get a little hit on something, they’ll spring it on people. Don’t do that. I’m just going to say, this is Sterling Moon’s advice to anyone who has the gifts: don’t do that. We don’t just spring stuff on people when they aren’t expecting it, especially if it’s something that might scare them. That doesn’t feel like an ethical thing to do, in my opinion. There are ways that maybe you can work up to it if you know this person, but you do it in a kind and ethical way.

I think you always need to be really suspicious of any spiritual worker that maybe you go to them for one thing, but then they tell you on the way out the door, “Oh, by the way, you’ve got a curse on you” or “I can see this family member that has passed that needs your help,” and then suddenly it costs more money, and you pay them and that gets fixed, and then suddenly there’s something else that only they can fix. That’s so gross and yucky.

So there’s the client aspect, but then just the working with the spirits themselves. I always approach the situation as if you were working with somebody who – gosh, there’s so many layers to this. For investigators/mediums who are going into physical places, whether it’s a business or a home, I do think it’s important to speak with the person about what their expectations are.

Ask them what they want the outcome to be. I’ve had to learn this sometimes the hard way. Maybe they want evidence. Maybe they want to have somebody else who can say, “No, this is happening, and I’m not losing my marbles.” There you know your outcome. If they want the house or the business to be totally cleaned out, maybe it’s important to talk with them about some other ethical considerations of maybe it’s not for us to clear something out. Maybe there’s some hubris if something has been attached to the land and has been there since the beginning of time, you might not be able to clear it out. So what are some other ways to think about what it is that you want? You want peace, you want dishes to quit being knocked over, whatever.

I think a common misconception is that we can go in and do our work and that we will not make an impact. In my opinion, any time we go in, whether with investigation equipment or mediumship, if we try to interact with something that is there, it usually dials up because it’s like, “Oh, somebody can see me. They’re aware of me.” I’ve definitely had people that I have tried to assist where I wasn’t clear enough with them that the dialing up could happen, and that was a bad experience for them. That was something I had to learn, like, going forward, I will do better.

The last thing I will say is it is my approach that I always want the best for the living. You deserve to be safe and comfortable in your own space – and we also maybe need to look at spirits as sovereign beings, and maybe what is the way – how can we get to a point where everyone is good? That’s usually going to be an easier lift than trying to clear a space, which I know a lot of mediums like to say that they do. That’s another topic I could ramble on forever. [laughs]

JIM HAROLD: As we close out, you said you’re one of the psychics who believes this is really for everybody. Can you give us a couple of closing thoughts on that? That this isn’t just for a certain ordained few?

STERLING MOON: It is much like any – if you want to learn to play an instrument, you have to practice. You have to learn some fundamentals, and you’ve got to commit to your own growth. Same thing if you want to run a marathon. You don’t just decide to get your shoes and then sign up for that 26 miles or whatever it is. You have to build up to it. So it’s like anything; it takes commitment, it takes practice, it takes the willingness to invest in your own learning. And that’s not something that everyone – it’s not for everyone, and that’s okay.

But much like everybody has the ability to learn to play music or be musical or be athletic within the realm of their own physical abilities, everyone has the ability to explore their extrasensory perception or whatever you want to call it.

JIM HAROLD: Words of wisdom from Sterling Moon. Sterling, where can people find the book Talking To Spirits: A Modern Medium’s Practical Advice for Spirit Communication and everything else you do?

STERLING MOON: Well, if you would like to buy the book, I encourage everyone to purchase it from Ritualcravt. It’s craft spelled with a “v” instead of an “f.” Ritualcravt.com. That is where I rent my private office, so I’d love to be able to support their small business. You can also get it on all of the other major book platforms, Llewellyn’s website, and bookshop.org. And you can find me at my website, which is sterlingmoontarot.com. And I’m pretty active on Instagram; you can find me there @sterlingmoontarot.

JIM HAROLD: Excellent. Sterling Moon, thank you for joining us. Best of luck with the book Talking To Spirits.

STERLING MOON: Thank you so much.

JIM HAROLD: Sterling was great. Really enjoyed that conversation. Very thankful for her and all of our guests. And I’m thankful for you. In fact, being thankful, I should give you a gift. So let’s say that I do, and here I’m going to do it. So perk your ears up. [laughs] Very easy, very easy.

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