During my energy healing work, I have come across a number of souls who are afflicted with dementia. This is a terrible illness in which the sufferer’s cognitive abilities gradually weaken until they are no longer able to live normally in the everyday world. Thought processes and memory are affected, they cannot respond to the people and situations around them, they seem to lose their very personality.
This is especially distressing, of course, to the loved ones who are caring for them. And naturally we cannot know what the experience is like for those who are afflicted themselves. However, I hope that sharing some of my astonishing experiences will give family members a little reassurance and peace while dealing with this debilitating disease. It may not be as bad for the sufferer as we have all assumed…
My work is ‘space clearing’, in which I am able to remove negative energies from properties, usually caused by historical traumatic events or disturbances in the land. All properties hold memories of the events that have occurred there, much like a person remembers both the good and bad significant events in their life. We can all think back to a really happy or sad occasion, reliving the feelings that we had and seeing the event in our mind’s eye.
It’s the same with properties, holding onto the residual energy of the past and affecting the wellbeing of the people living there, especially if they are sensitive or spiritual. But we can all remember some places that immediately felt comfortable and peaceful and others that we couldn’t wait to leave. We are picking up on the energy of previous events.
I have always had a fascination with properties and the stories they have to tell. I can see some of the history of a place just by walking in there and I have always been able to see things in spiritual worlds that others cannot. For example, on one of my first dates with the man who would become my husband, we visited a very old and beautiful English pub. The atmosphere was alive, not just buzzing with the living but also the dead – I could see several happy souls dancing above us. It was the most beautiful of sights, full of movement and colour, and surprisingly my date was not put off when I told him about it.
Nowadays, I am called in to help people who feel disturbances in their homes that they cannot understand, or even by estate agents who have desirable properties on their books that just won’t sell. As mentioned, this usually turns out to be due to some sad or violent past events. But it can also involve unseen spirit visitors.
In a first for me, it was one of these who opened my eyes to a different way of thinking about dementia. I had been staying in a friend’s house to look after her young son. While he was at school, I worked on space clearing a different property (I have learned to do this remotely using a basic floor plan). As I lit my candles and incense, used my white sage and rang bells over the plan, the most extraordinary thing happened…
I was visited by a spirit man who told me his name was John and that he wanted me to let his daughter know that he was “sorry for leaving so soon” and she should stop crying over him at night. When I passed on his words to the owner of the property I was clearing, she had no idea who John was and didn’t understand the message at all.
This was very unusual because I have come to trust implicitly the information I receive and, after all, John had been as clear as any living person in a room with me.
Quite a while later, I visited the same friend’s house again and remembered my earlier confusion; I had known that this friend’s Dad had passed over just the year before, but he had been in his eighties. However, there was John again, appearing to me with the same message. So I felt that I had to tell all this to my friend, who immediately burst into tears and confirmed that her Dad’s name was indeed John. She also confirmed that she cried a lot at night because she missed him terribly.
But here’s the thing: he had been diagnosed with dementia at the age of thirty and had spent many of the last years of his life in a care home. So it seemed that John himself believed he had left his body and passed to spirit fifty years before his actual physical death. This is why he was “sorry for leaving so soon”.
Later, I had the privilege to give an oracle card reading for my friend’s Mum and, sure enough, John popped in again with a beautiful message of love. He asked the family to remember the good times of his youth before his illness and said that it was now time for them to move on with their lives.
This experience was eye-opening for me but it proved not to be unique. I was asked to space clear two different properties, both belonging to a lady I knew well, and in the course of this work I was visited by two other souls.
The first was my client’s mother. I knew they had always had a stormy relationship, yet she turned up now full of love and support. I also already knew that she was suffering from dementia and was in a care home in the UK, whereas the property was in Spain. Well, she may not have been able to function normally – or even recognise her family in her living body – but her soul seemed to be free to move wherever it wanted, distance being no object, and was liberated from the pain and suffering the disease inflicts. Her spirit was free, not trapped in a fragile body.
The next soul I met was a man, but he did not come with love. When he had been well he had been a nasty piece of work, causing his family a huge amount of heartache and pain over the years and indeed spending time in prison for his actions. Again, this man was still alive and in a care home for dementia patients. Unfortunately, his soul still retained the character of someone who wanted to cause harm and bring chaos. Thankfully I was able to block him from affecting the property and its occupants.
Perhaps these remarkable experiences can help us all to reconsider dementia and see that those who are so cruelly affected by it may not be suffering in the ways we have always believed. Perhaps their souls, no longer burdened by the restrictions of material life, are indeed free to travel wherever they wish and it is only their loved ones who are in pain. If this is true, it may be of some comfort.
And it is, after all, not such an unusual way of thinking. There are very many well documented accounts by honest people of integrity about experiencing their consciousness travelling beyond their bodies – the out-of-body experience, or OBE. These people report that they can see their physical self resting below them yet find themselves free to move away, sometimes great distances, before returning safely and able to describe their adventures.
There is also, of course, the recent focus on near-death experiences, or NDE, in which cardiac arrest patients tell of travelling to alternative worlds before being resuscitated. Again, some of these patients have been fully aware of what was happening in the operating theatre, later able to report, to their surgeons’ astonishment, exactly what had been done or said while they were under anaesthetic. Both OBE and NDE have been reported during other moments of extreme stress and even during deep meditation.
Moreover, probably every one of us has a story about a vivid or lucid night-time dream in which we seemed to travel to strange or faraway places. Sometimes these dreams have been confirmed when a person later visits that real place in the waking world and recognises it, knowing where to go despite never having visited before. Could it be that we are in fact all soul tourists in our sleep?
I have myself experienced a rather different yet nonetheless revealing situation. More than once, soon after my daughter had been born, I would put her into her cot in her room at night, only then to see her soul appear by the side of my own bed. She appeared in spiritual form as a young girl yet completely recognisable.
This has some similarity with the cases of dementia I have described, although not with the associated sadness. In both situations we have a physical, live person not fully aware of the material world around them. It takes quite some time for a newborn child to understand where they are and gain a sense of their own and others’ identity. Yet their spiritual self is far more aware.
During my space clearing work I get to step back in time and see building in their former glory and I am also able to sense the energy within homes and work places. When there are negative memories and energies in a property they can be holding us back in our lives and affecting our wellbeing. None of us would want to spend time with a person who is always negative and draining our energy, and it’s the same with the places we live and work in.
But space clearing can have a really positive impact on people’s lives, on their health and family relationships. Properties that have been on the market for years suddenly attract interest from buyers, problems with tenants dissolve, legal and maintenance issues remarkably vanish, businesses begin to thrive and clients report a happier and more peaceful atmosphere at home.
I also get to meet some amazing spirit characters along the way – and they are not all dead. Perhaps these experiences can offer some reassurance to those going through the pain of caring for loved ones so sadly affected by dementia.
Sam Ritchie
Sam Ritchie is the author of Echoes Within Walls, in which she gives many accounts of clearing negative energies from homes and workplaces. It is published worldwide in paperback and in digital form on all platforms.
