Paranormal Yakker
Interview on paranormal subject
Paranormal Yakker
Spirit Speak
Across cultures & centuries, people have tried to name & navigate the spaces just beyond ordinary perception: the realm of ancestors, guides, spirits & deities. In his interview on “Paranormal Yakker” visionary Ivo Dominguez Jr., author of “Spirit Speak: A Comprehensive Guide to Connect Beyond the Veil” explains how ordinary people can cultivate extraordinary sensing, tune their “radio dial” to the right frequency, and verify who they’re really hearing—without fear, and without surrendering their purpose.
If you’re curious about safe mediumship, channeling, divine embodiment, plant allies, spirit verification, or protection techniques, this conversation offers practical steps, language you can use, and a mindset that blends wonder with rigor.
Hi everyone, I'm Stan Mallow. Welcome to Paranormal Yakker. My guest on today's show is visionary Ivo Dominguez Jr. In the esoteric world, he's highly respected for being a well-versed practitioner in a variety of disciplines. He has also been an active member in the Wicca & Pagan community since 1978. I'll be talking with him a bout his book,"Spirit Speak: A Comprehensive Guide to Connect Beyond the Veil." It's a revised & expanded edition of his spiritual classic, "Spirit Speak." Ivo Dominguez Jr welcome to Paranormal Yakker. I am delighted to be here. When, Ivo, did you first find yourself drawn to the esoteric universe? What aspect of it got your attention?& what was your reason it did get your attention? I'm one of those people that really didn't have a choice in the matter. When I was a child, I had lots of experiences that in retrospect, I could call them prophetic. I could call them open to experiencing spirits so that when I was five, six years old, let's just say I realized that not all my imaginary friends were so imaginary.& probably the tipping point was there was a time that we were visiting my paternal grandparents,& I had the overwhelming knowledge that my grandfather was going to pass.& I told my mom & dad, & they didn't believe me, & they thought I was being terrible. But I made it a point of spending the day& trying to get out my little cassette recorder & recorded conversations with my grandfather& so on.& then that evening, he passed in his sleep. The next day at breakfast, I could see him sitting at the table, but he wasn't at the table.& then a few minutes later, grandma came down & said he had passed. So, I always knew that I was tuning into things that were different. So that put me on a very early quest to read everything & explore everything.& I would say that there was a period of in my tweens of all things. I think I was like 12 when I decided I was atheist for about a year.& then my experiences proved that I couldn't say no to things. So I don't think I had a choice. The only choice I had was whether or not I was going to embrace it or whether I was going to fight it the rest of my life.& I made the choice to embrace it. The range of non-physical beings people want to communicate with who reside in what's called the other side varies greatly. The spirits of loved ones to ancestors, guardian angels, guides,& historical figures, to name a few. Are the methods used to communicate with them the same or do they differ? I'm going to say the first part is that I believe that all human beings are gifted with senses that are open to & attuned to more than just the physical world. So I think we all have it.& indeed, if you believe in the idea that we have a physical body, but we also have an energy body, an aura, a subtle bodies, whichever terminology you like. When we are born, we aren't just incarnating a physical body, we're incarnating an energy body.& in that energy body, we have the other senses. So I think that the senses we use to do the work are the same. Here's the second part of the question, though. There are different ways that are more effective or less effective if you're trying to achieve clarity, depending upon the nature of the being. Let me give a quick comparison. It sounds simplistic, but I can almost always tell if somebody has animal companions, like dogs or cats, because dogs or cats that are strangers to them perk up& automatically expect that person to understand them. Because that person has learned how to hold their focus of consciousness in a place that overlaps where animal consciousness is. So it's sort of like you may have all the senses, but you still have to tune to the right place on the radio dial to pick up a particular kind of being, because they live within different frequencies or different planes. So that how you use what you have,& how you adjust that internal tuning, those are different techniques for different kinds of beings. So it's both, yes, it's the same stuff, but no, it requires different things.& I will say some things are so different, so, so different from us that you need a translator in between. Sometimes that translator is another kind of spirit that you have a connection with.& sometimes it's the equivalent of a phrasebook or Rosetta Stone of common symbols that over time we have developed that they recognize& we recognize. One of the reasons why people that work with mythological beings, God's goddesses, which I believe myth is real, or other sorts of things, I don't actually think that the names that we call them are their names. Those are the nicknames that we've come up for them, because we couldn't possibly say a name that is made more of energy than breath. But they have figured out, oh, when a human being is holding that word in their head, that means that they're trying to get my attention. Or they're putting on an altar, or they're creating a statue or an icon that has the following images that they're meditating on. So that they figure out in the same way that I'm not necessarily convinced that my dog knows its name, but it knows if it hears those sounds that I'm trying to get attention. When it comes to preparing oneself prior to attempting to communicate with the other side, is there a meditation or ritual you recommend a person engage in, one that will help facilitate the contacting of whatever non-physical being or entity they are seeking to contact? Yeah, I think that firstly, the more comfortable you are, the more you feel at peace, the less stressed out you are,& the safer you feel, the more open you're going to be. So that's the first thing. Just do check in on your state of heart& mind, because that makes a big difference. But here's the part that often people forget to do. & heaven forbid we actually do this, lets say we're about to do a 10-mile run together. It's not happening today. But if we were going to take on some kind of task, it would behoove us to stretch our legs& limber up a bit & warm up a bit, because we are less likely to strain ourselves& less likely to hurt ourselves. Well, I recommend that in addition to getting clarity& grounding& centering& meditating, that immediately before attempting contact, wake up the parts of your mind that do the following things. Like I will run through a couple of scraps of different songs in my head, a couple of lyrics from them, some poetry. I will imagine colors. If you're not good at imagining, get a picture book I will name the colors. I will visualize. I will try to hear. I am trying to wake up all my inner& outer senses, because when we experience communication, we are taking those subtle energies & we are translating them into things that we can understand, which means sight, sound, smell, sense of words & knowing. But the first thing you do is you warm up those parts of your mind, partly for you, because it's a warm-up, which allows you greater fluency once you are trying to make sense of the impressions. But there's another bit which I believe, & that is when we communicate with beings that are not completely or not mostly physical, they mostly experience our energy & our consciousness. If we, by thinking about colors& shapes & math & words& lyrics & music, we are lighting up the different parts of our mind so that they'll go, oh, I need to press there in order to produce the following reaction. So I think it's also giving them a chance to attune to what do we feel like, what do we sound like. Is there any way, Ivo, a person communicating with the other side can verify the being or entity they are communicating with is who they wanted to be & not a malevolent spirit? Honestly & unfortunately, the only way we can verify something is to verify it. In other words, the information the person receives has to be something that you can look in the real world & say, "Is that true?" So For example, many years ago, I did a fair amount of mediumship. If somebody is asking me,"Hey, somewhere in the house, so & so has passed away& he didn't leave instructions. We're looking for a copy of the life insurance or whatever." & if the spirit helps me to say,"Where in the house & which room& which filing cabinet it's in," that's verifiable that the information panned out. That's pretty easy. Or there are personal bits of life history that someone might share that had to be them or a very close family member. So the only way to test the spirits is actually to test the spirits. I mean, there are people that will receive something that feels like the person or they will smell something or hear something or get an impression that's something I so strongly associate with them. I can use that as a password or as a key to touchstone to make sure it's them. But it's still a slippery slope unless you actually have concrete evidence to verify this is indeed what happened. Here's the part where it gets a little bit iffy, & if we're talking about nature spirits or gods or goddesses or not, it's a whole another story. But if you're talking about human spirits that have passed on, I am not always convinced that the person that showed up is the person that was called upon. However, there was one time I had the distinct impression that the person who showed up was not the person's mother but was actually the person's aunt who had also passed on. & frankly, she gave comfort, she gave useful information. I'm still not convinced it was her mom. She believed it was her mom. & that's all that matters. & I think sometimes that we have other beings that come across because frankly, I believe that all spirits, including the spirits of the dead, still have an existence, still have things that they are busy with. I suspect that mom was busy at that moment & sent her sister to fill in for her. In that scenario, it may be a partial deception, but if it gave the person comfort, it's all good. Malevolence is a different thing.& tricksters, but there's a set of levels. Honestly, I will say that one of the very few things that I believe in wholeheartedly is the bell-shaped curve, the normal probability curve with the middle representing the average& also the largest chunk of the population. When it comes to unwholesome, unpleasant, malevolent, unhealthy, fill in your word, I think most of them are somewhere in the middle in terms of how big they are, how strong they are, how bright they are.& there are very few at the extremes. So that most of the time when something shows up that's unpleasant, it's more like a swarm of mosquitoes than it is a charging rhinoceros. But we can scare ourselves. Now, one of the things that is one of my tip-offs, the part of our brain& psyche that is connected to smell is part of the oldest part of our, it's deep in our brainstem& it's deep in our evolutionary history. If something smells wrong, if I get a scent of decay or something that has a sense of rot to it or sulfur to it, I go, no matter what it looks like, no matter what it feels like, if I'm smelling something that's off, then something is off. So I often do that. But the other bit is, & not everyone does this, but I think that any time that we are going to open up & communicate with anything, it is a good idea to set up some kind of protective boundary. & there's classically lots of ways to create a circle or have somebody be the warden for the ceremony. But I think that's always important. & by the way, not just because we are likely to be attacked by something huge & malevolent anytime soon, but frankly, do we want to be distracted from our work because of the equivalent of elemental delinquent, no. So, I always say put up some kind of protection. Here's the thing that I think people forget the most. Most people, & if you don't consider developing a relationship, have some kind of sense of some kind of powerful expanse of being. Some people will say God, some people will say Goddess is, some people will say archangel, some kind of divinity. I don't care what it is. But here's the thing, the ones that are truly positive & helpful to us honor the fact that we have free will & honor the fact that we have autonomy. & what that means is if you want them to do the most to help you before beginning a session, say I fully give you permission to have my back. & if I do something foolish, or if I'm in danger, I grant you permission to get in the way, do what's needed. But I think it's important to explicitly give permission so that they know that they can interfere rather than well, they want to try this on their own. Not so much. In the case, & hopefully it's a rare one, a malevolent spirit attaches itself to someone, how do you suggest that person go about releasing it? Firstly, I'm going to say that there's different levels of being& different kinds of attachments, so that it's not a binary either or. There's like gradations, everything from you've got the equivalent of an astral tick to you have something that's big & terrible attached to you. By the way, before we get to that, I'm going to say there's also. Something that can be perceived as an attachment that isn't so have you ever accidentally, you know, walking in the car, whatever accidentally make a turn & suddenly bam, the sun is right in your gaze so that then you have a blinking after image of the sun for X period of time. Or, or you've, or you've slept on a pillow funny & you wake up in the morning, you've got the imprint of all the folds that are impressed in your skin for X period of time until your skin returns to normal. Sometimes when we're in the presence of one of these unpleasant, unwholesome things, they don't quite breach the defenses, but they do leave an astral image or they do leave an imprint on your aura that will go away on its own unless you begin to fixate on it & become concerned about it because the more energy you pour into, I still see the thing or I still feel the thing, you're actually calling it closer & closer to it.& you may, you may actually encourage the attachment more fully at that point. So what's the easiest thing to do? Look, look for somebody that does energy healing. Look for somebody that can flush your energy field. It could be something could be as simple as the very benign thing like Reiki, or before resorting to someone who is going to do a full cleanse or a shamanic depossion or some kind of thing that is much more intense & intrusive, figure out if it's something that can be just fixed by somebody fluffing up your aura & flashing some healthy energy through it. Sometimes that's all it takes. How about this, the image of something or the imprint of something is like the name of the thing. So that that's why I'm saying getting clean off your system is fast because we all have spiritual immunity in the same sense that we have physical immunity, we have spiritual immunity, if you were outside working in the garden & you scraped yourself up, it's a good idea to go inside& clean the mud off before it actually causes an infection. But there are people that are practitioners that do this work. But I say go to a healer first if your own efforts didn't work.& if it's something bigger, go to somebody who has a track record of this is something that they do. I would love to say that simply praying on it or going to whichever kind of clergy suits you is enough. But I will say it's a specialist job.& most people that I know& I know a fair number of folks that are mainstream clergy, one flavor or another, it's not in their bag of tricks. It's not something that they were trained for. Spirit Speak explores a number of concepts& I'll ask you about a few of them. What, Ivo, can you tell me about spiritual lineage? Let's start with the idea of group minds & egregors & such. If any group of people get together to do work together in a relatively short period of time, the thought forms that are collecting around the people will eventually emerge to form something that's a group mind that is the summation of that group of people. That happens whether you're working at a university or a farm or it doesn't matter where you have people working together, you create a group mind. Now, let's add that it is not just that kind of mundane group, but a group that does spiritual work or magical work of one flavor or another. Well, we are not just contributing our thoughts& our emotions into that group at that moment. We are engaging in expressing our spiritual powers or magical powers, which means that also gets folded into the mixture.& this creates a different kind of group mind, often an egregor. & if you want to think about it, egregor is basically a group mind with muscle. It has the capacity to do certain things so that when someone is inducted into, I'm going to say inducted, but you could also add the word initiated, ordained, fill in the blank for whatever your language is so that they are identified as being officially members of said group. Then the thing that is their collective resource of energy& intellect & power that has been accumulated over time is now something that that person has access to & also flows through them. They are part of it, but they & they also have access to it. Think of it like a mutual savings fund, or frankly, the way that healthcare should work where all are involved in the healthy help support those that are ill at any moment. So there's a power that now the thing is that also becomes an enforcer of the ethos or the logic or the beliefs of that system. So that it gives, but it also says within the boundaries of this. It also connect. Remember I said a translator, sometimes you need to translate between you& some spirits. Sometimes that becomes the translator between you & some things that are outside of you. So one kind of spiritual in ages, you are inducted you're ordained whatever& you become connected to the flow or the current that is in there. Now there's a different kind that's a little bit more intense. So I mentioned earlier the idea of subtle bodies & the aura, the chakras there's lots of ways of conceptualizing it. Now, if you have ever done anything that is complicated at first & then become simple like maybe knitting. Maybe riding a bicycle, something that at first you have to pay attention to every last thing you're doing.& over a course of time it gets offloaded out of your conscious workload into basically what we call muscle memory. There is a kind of muscle memory for magic & spiritual tasks,& it is held in our subtle bodies. It is possible from teacher to student, or whatever the relationship is to pass on the imprint from your muscle memory if you will from your subtle bodies from one person to another,& that is a different way to pass lineage. Sometimes it's an imprint while the person is alive, & sometimes in the person's last act, if you will, they bequeathed to somebody who has been selected within their community to be the holder of what has been accumulated. It's the same idea as the group mind in egregor, but it's much more intense & much more intimate. There's another kind of thing & then I'll move on, where the thing that is the spiritual images, you are passing on the agreement or the connection to particular gods, goddesses, spirits, ancestors that have forged a pact or a relationship with a community or a group of people,& basically what gets passed on is we as the community vouch that you have access to this being & know it by its special name that identifies it as ours. So there's different kinds of way that lineage,& you don't just have to have one, sometimes all several different systems of lineage are passing at the same time.& because I'm a little crazy I'm going to say this. If somebody is has cross trained cross ordained initiated whichever term in multiple things. Whenever they bring somebody in or initiate somebody or ordained somebody or train somebody, they mostly wouldn't focus on the thing that they are teaching or training, but there's an echo of everything that's in them that also gets passed on, not to the same degree, but in modern times you have people that are carrying multiple markers of connection. What is the mindset needed for proper spirit work? If we're talking about asking them to provide information, that's one mindset. If we're asking them to provide energy or direct action to help us do something, that's another mindset. If we are talking about some kind of divine possession where the person is in some level of trance & the being is riding in the front seat with the wheel in their hands, then that's a whole other thing altogether. Here's it is once again. Like the psychic senses, everybody has the same basic flavors, but you need different configurations depending upon what you're doing. For example, let's say that I have a friend who does massage work& they also do different kinds of healing modalities. With their client's permissions, & they have to fill out the client to see if it's going to work or not, they will say, "I can just do the massage", or I can ask a Spirit that I work with that's a healer to come with me & their hands will be through my hands as well. In that case, the person is allowing & opening themselves up to having the energies & some direct guidance of their work to happen from a spiritual source. Their intellect & their training & their past experiences still at play, but it's kind of a dual consciousness that's required to do that. There are other times when people are doing work where they are mostly gone & are relatively unclear about what they said, what kind of work they did. Here's the thing. In some cases, the person has to get out of the way enough for the other being or Spirit to work with God or Goddess to work through them. That means you have to make room for them& that means you aren't necessarily fully present. I will say that there is at least something I work with & many others do is the idea that we have a higher self, a divine spark. We have the talking self, the conscious self that's doing this interview. Then we also have our primal self that is connected to the animal powers & the elements& so on & frankly instinct. For a lot of Spirit work, it is easier for our highest self & our lower self to do the work & it is hardest for our middle self to be there, which is one of the reasons I think that sometimes people don't recall or they get fuzzy is because the middle self tends to have the hardest time letting go of control & getting out of the way. The lower self & the higher self don't have that problem. In one sense, I'm going to say that even if it looks like the person has stepped aside, their higher self & their lower self are still fully present in whatever work is being done. So it's not like they're completely overridden. I will say that almost anyone can learn to do calling of a Spirit for information or for help in doing something. For example, I have a lot of grass to cut& I have helpers whose job it is to help move the turtles, the frogs, the rabbits, everything out of my ways. I'm cutting grass because I don't want to hurt anything. It is a fairly small request, but it's one that matters to me. I wouldn't call a god or a goddess to do something that is such a small level event, but there are plenty of local nature spirits that are more than willing to help in the preservation of the life that lives there. It also depends on the scale of consciousness. The more expansive the being is, the less of it will actually fit in your consciousness, there's a size limit as to how much can actually connect with you. Do you know the story of the wise men in the desert& the elephant? You can't grasp the whole elephant at once. If it's a very large being, by a large expansive being, there's a limit to how much is going to fit. We only have so much bandwidth as human beings. Could you explain what is meant by divine embodiment? I like the term divine embodiment because when you start saying the word possession, people get really weird. We're concerned, I should say, divine embodiment is actually something that people have been doing forever if we go back to the oracles at Delphi that were technically priestesses of Apollo, & that most of the, the Greek world & a lot of the ancient world would come for their guidance,& the God would speak through them. They were basically acting as conduits for that consciousness,& for those answers to flow through.& why is it divine embodiment. Well, if it is mediumship or channeling, even though mediumship& channeling are, to my mind, different things. But they are both primarily about simply conveying the information that's that different than astral ham radio. that different than astral ham radio. In some regards. Can you, Ivo, tell me the limits& potential of some of the many spiritual practices covered in your book? I will say that one of the reasons this book exists is because I included information about how to do first aid when things do go sour because there are things that will go potentially sour. But the benefit of communicating with spirits or doing divine embodiment, by the way, if you are embodying spirits or gods or goddesses that are congruent with what you care about, they will make you better. So for example, let's say that you are a poet or a crafts person & you with some regularity were embodying the goddess Brigid. Poetry & crafts are among her gifts. When you embody a spirit of any kind, inside you somewhere, there is a piece of you that resembles them, that resembles what they do.& when they are present, it is enlivened& the resonant reaction between the two make it more powerful. So over time, it's like you are developing those parts of yourself by exposure to somebody who is more practiced in the same way that a musician might learn by paying attention to a master at the violin or whatever it is they're trying to master so that you can grow in this process. Here is the downside because not all things are compatible with you. It can also stretch you in directions which are uncomfortable or that are not necessarily good for you. One of the problems with folks that are likely to encounter this work growing up in this culture is, & I was raised Catholic as a disclosure, if you are in, even if you're not from a religious household, we have a default setting that if a being that is more powerful & bigger, brighter, especially if they're in the category of divine, that we should do what they say, that we should believe in them, that they know better.& I'm going to say that one of the problems with spirit work, if you're not careful, is you will believe & buy into their agenda & lose your own life agenda because I believe we all have purposes & they may or may not be congruent. So you have to not become a student of, become an ally of, but do not become a servant of. There's a distinction there that I think is very valuable. The other bit is that for some people, the experiences that they have with spirits is one of the ways that they come to terms with their own mortality. We as a culture don't deal well with death in general. I know that for many people, well, isn't that supposed to be about faith& that's, faith is all well & good, but I would prefer to have experiences that show me more about how broad & amazingly beautiful & complex the universe is, rather than relying on, I just have to take it on faith. & I will say that my personal take on working with spirits is that they will also nudge us when we need to. I think there's a huge number of people that are being drawn to doing this kind of work now with ancestors, gods, goddesses, nature, spirits, fae, beings that are from realms that we don't really have a name for. Because of the fact that the world is in a huge turning point, our physical environment is at risk, our pollution issues, the war issues. We're in the change, from my perspective, we're in the change between one astrological age& another. If I were a being on the other side, I'd go, it's all hands on deck. We have to try to reach out to as many human beings as possible, because what happens in the next century or two sets down the pattern, sets down the rhythm that we'll be following for the next 2000 & some odd years. So I think that there is a lot about, push from their other side, if you will. The newly revised edition of Spirit Speak contains a new forward by psychic witch author Mat Auryn, fresh updates& new chapters on plant spirits& aspecting. Could you provide a brief synopsis of those new chapters? The plant spirit one was one that I actually wanted to include in the first edition of it, but publishers tell you this is how many words & this is how many words. Because I actually think that we underestimate the plant spirits.& let me give you a, in my sense, by the way, I'm a vegetarian, so this is going to sound funny, but I actually feel a little guilty about eating the plants because in some ways I considered them to be, our elders & more spiritually evolved in some ways than we are. But here's the difference. Their consciousness is much more collective than ours. Most of their selfhood is invested in the common in the whole, rather than being invested in the individual plant materials.& they are the shapers of the planet. They maintain the chemistry that gives us oxygen in the air& recycling nutrients. So I think that plant spirits are something that are underutilized for many people. Indeed, every time that I need help, because we're going to have a bad weather situation, there's a very large tree on our property. & that's the tree that I think of as being the spokesperson for the green life, where, where I live. & I ask it, can you please, turn the leaves so that the wind please, you know, turn, turn the leaves so that the wind is softened a bit. If trees have to fall or branches have to fall, try not to fall on the house, et cetera, et cetera.& I've had good luck with that, by the way. So my point is that chapter explores ways to connect with plant spirits & ways to conceptualize them for people that work with angels. I think that there are physical avatar, I mean, my goodness, their existence, they live off of light. They take the four elements& turn them into food for all & everything to consume. They keep earth habitable. That seems like a pretty high level work for something that we take for granted. So the aspecting chapter is an expansion & a clarification on a technique for divine embodiment, for bringing in gods, goddesses& other kinds of beings as well, so that you may have a fair amount of lucidity & clarity in what comes out of your mouth when you're in that state of being. & also so that when you are doing something, their energy can flow more freely through your body. & why a protocol to do that? Well, to reduce the chances of mistakes The protocol of aspecting is there so that you are more likely to be lucid & clear, less likely to be entangled with the being in a way that is hard to separate yourself out from them. So that you can do it on demand, as opposed to just when it happens. There's about 12,000 more words than the previous edition. Should viewers of Paranormal Yakker want to buy Spirit Speak: A Comprehensive Guide to Connect Beyond the Veil, book a reading with you, find out your teaching schedule,& learn of other books you've authored, how, Ivo, can they do that? IvoDominguezJr.com. It's my whole last name+ the dot com. & I have a teaching schedule on my website. I list my other books.&, I do answer my email though, though it may take a while because it's a lot of email. Ivo Domingez Jr, I thank you for being my guest on Paranormal Yakker. Yakking with you has been a most informative experience. Blessed be. Blessed be. Thank you.