The Heart Chakra and Mediumship: Integration, Grief, and the Ethics of This Work
By Danielle Searancke, Founder of Spirit School Article adapted from a mini lesson taught inside the Spirit School Collective, Chakra Series Part 4
This is part four of my chakra and mediumship series. If you have not read the first three yet, start with the root chakra, then the sacral, then the solar plexus. Each one builds on the last.
The heart chakra is called the bridge chakra for good reason. Everything you worked through in the lower three centers belonging, discernment, ego maturation has to pass through here before it can become something you can genuinely offer another person. This is the center of integration. And it is the one I have been sitting with the longest.
The Heart as Bridge and as Essence
The lower chakras are deeply personal. The root asks who you are and whether you belong. The sacral asks what you are feeling and whether it is yours. The solar plexus asks whether you trust yourself enough to say what you know. These are human, emotional, lived experiences.
The higher chakras move into more spiritual territory. Truth. Vision. Divine connection. Faith.
The heart sits between them. It is the crossing point. And what I have come to understand after 13 years of mediumship is that the heart is not just a bridge between the personal and the spiritual. It is where your essence lives.
You have felt this in other people. You have walked into a room and known someone loved what they were doing before they said a single word. You have been hugged by someone and felt something shift in your chest. You have been with someone in grief and found your hand moving to cover your own heart without thinking. That is not just a gesture. That is your heart center responding to another human being.
When I teach developing mediums to sit in their own presence and then ask them where in their body they felt spirit animate, about 80% point to their hearts. The rest point to their throats. That is not a coincidence. The heart and the throat are where spirit work comes alive in the body. This is where we begin.
Grief: The Only Thing That Can Penetrate This Space
I have always experienced the heart chakra as an endless well of renewal. No matter what I went through in a day, no matter how heavy a reading, I could return to this center and find something there.
Until 2020. Until grief.
I did not experience capital G grief, the loss of a loved one, until 2020. And it destroyed me. It hurt to breathe. I genuinely wondered if you could survive that kind of pain. And I had been a medium since 2013 seven years in so I thought I understood grief. I had been sitting with people in it for years. I had even pursued end of life doula certification in 2019 specifically to understand it more deeply.
But I did not understand it. Not really. Not until it was mine.
And what I discovered was that grief was the only thing I had ever encountered that could close the heart space. The only thing that could interrupt the flow.
I could not do readings. My grief was so deep and so unprocessed that I could not access the heart center I had always relied on to begin. And the timing could not have been worse. I had left my career in First Nations healthcare just four months earlier to pursue mediumship full time. My entire income depended on readings. And I could not do them.
So I hired a mentor. Not to become a better medium. To learn how to be a medium with a broken heart.
What I know now is that I bypassed a lot of that grief. The pandemic was happening. I had two young kids. I was a brand new entrepreneur. I kept busy. I overworked. That is one of my trauma responses and I leaned into it hard. And unprocessed grief has a way of quietly closing the heart space over time, keeping it just protected enough that you can function but not quite open enough to give freely from a place of real service.
For those of us who hold space for people in grief regularly, who absorb secondhand loss as part of our work, this is not a small thing. This is the work. And it requires tending to, not just pushing through.
Ethics and Integrity: They Are Not the Same Thing
The last thing I want to touch on is something that does not always get said in development spaces: the heart chakra is where your ethics and your integrity live. Not in your about page. Not in your policies. Here.
They are not the same thing and the distinction matters.
Ethics is outward facing. What you stand for publicly. How you prepare your clients. The consent you seek. The policies you hold. The way you speak about your work. These are the visible, actionable expressions of your values.
Integrity is an inner world experience. It is what happens when nobody is watching. It is the alignment between what you know to be right and what you actually do. Only you know when you are in it and when you are not.
I remember staying in a job I did not want to be in because of the money. I remember how fractured I felt. And as someone who studies wholism and believes deeply that we are always whole even when we are unconscious of it, that fracturing was one of the most uncomfortable things I have experienced. Because I knew. Even when nobody else did.
That feeling, that fracturing, that is your integrity speaking.
In mediumship, which is an unregulated space where we work with people in some of the most vulnerable moments of their lives, the stakes of this are real. Ultimately I work for the spirit world. Every spirit that has ever communicated through me is someone I will face one day and I want to have made them proud. That is the level of ethics and integrity I am trying to walk.
Ethics magnetizes the right people to your practice. Integrity is what keeps them, and keeps you, whole.
JOIN US IN SPIRIT SCHOOL
If you want to go deeper on ethics and integrity in your practice, The Declaration is my certification program for practitioners in unregulated spaces. It is built around exactly this teaching.
This teaching is part of the chakra series I developed for The Initiation Mediumship Experience - If this is resonating and you want to go deeper, come join us.
The Spirit School Collective | The Initiation, Mediumship Foundations | Free Resources