Do we have a dilemma in the spiritual side of life about what we call ourselves? Our job title? I certainly find it hard to answer when people ask me what I do. And depending on who is asking and where I am I find I give different answers. Sometimes it’s because to say what I actually do requires a long list of things (any of which can be true at any time), or some of my job titles attract misunderstandings, or when I use certain words or phrases people fit me into a stereotype.

My dilemma began when I was deciding to provide a public service. I started off calling myself a medium & psychic. But was I a spiritualist medium? A trance medium? A clairvoyant? There are lots of ways to describe being the connector for the Spirit World and in the end I settled on being an Intuitive Medium & Psychic because I used my intuition as my means of connecting. I still get asked if I’m a clairvoyant because people don’t understand that this is one kind of mediumship using a particular sense (the third eye to see Spirit). Sometimes they aren’t clear about what intuition is either.

The bit about being psychic is also confusing. A psychic is a person who uses their intuitive senses to connect with living people’s energy. If someone connects with Spirit energy then they have moved into being a medium. Yet people approached me as a psychic asking if I could speak to their loved ones in Spirit. Using your psychic connection you can also use psychic tools like a pendulum, tarot cards, dowsing rods, oracle cards, crystals & much more. You don’t use any of them if you are connecting to Spirit people. We are all psychic to a greater or lesser extent depending very much on if we choose to develop those senses we were born with. So calling myself a psychic is also to say that everyone on the planet could use the word psychic in their job description.

As things moved on for me it seemed I was destined to be a teacher. One way or another my Guides wangled it that I wound up teaching the teachers. I had a lot of resistance to adding teacher to my job description as it conjured up more stereotypes & the faint feeling that I’m not an ‘expert’ enough in anything to be teaching. So I plodded on with being a spiritual counsellor, a pastoral counsellor, a facilitator and a spiritual coach. I was avoiding job titles like guru, master, sage, oracle. It seemed to me that these titles often resulted in more stereotypical misunderstandings or the distinct secondary question of ‘who says you are’.

Then it was time for me to improve my ability to channel healing energy. Off I went to become a Reiki Master/Teacher. More headaches about job title. I had the certification to say the I was both a master and a teacher. However, not a lot of people understood what Reiki was. Sometimes it still fits into the category of slightly strange & a little bit out there for quite a number of people. I felt as if my dilemma was getting more challenging. For the past couple of days some very lovely people have been helping me, knowingly or not, find a job title that is clear about what I do but, more importantly, says who I am. So I have to thank Dawn, Nixi and Alan for prompting me to think about how Annie Conboy describes herself to the world.

I’ve occasionally said about my work that ‘I’m a jack of all trades and master of none’ when I’ve been trying to name what I do. There are so many things that fall into my remit as an Intuitive Something that a list would go on for a really long time. Somehow that fact that I do lots of things (and can do them well) gets lost when put beside someone who has specialised in getting good at their one job. So it was really wonderful to be reminded that the follow on to that first line is ‘though often times better than master of one’. I am an ace integrater. I can take bits & pieces from everywhere and weave them into something that works, makes sense or has a creative outcome. Staying in one discipline would only have shown me one point of view. My dilemma is eased by knowing that my job title is valuable because it represents a willingness to learn, specialise for a bit & then go back to learning something different.

To reflect what is at the heart of everything I do a much truer title would be Master Energy Shaper. People still wouldn’t get what it means though. It doesn’t say what it is on the tin. So perhaps in the pursuit of spirituality there is an implied, comfortable, recognition that one job title isn’t enough. So today I was very much doing the Centre Director job, this evening I was doing the Intuitive Medium job and tomorrow, who knows what job title I’ll use.

Day 80 of my blogging challenge.