The Secret Language of Symbols

What makes a raven feel different from a robin? Why do we wear wedding rings, tattoo symbols onto our skin, or instinctively recognise a heart as love?

In this episode of Psychic Whispers, I’m exploring the secret language of symbols—one of the oldest and most fascinating ways humans have ever made sense of the world.

Drawing on thirty years as a psychic medium and my new journey as a tattoo apprentice, we’ll explore why symbols appear in readings, dreams, folklore and everyday life, why there is rarely a single “correct” interpretation, and why the meanings we attach to them can become deeply personal.

Whether it’s a feather, a tarot card, an ancient rune or a tattoo you’ll carry forever, symbols have a remarkable way of speaking to us long before words ever can.

Perhaps the real question isn’t, “What does this symbol mean?” but “Why does it mean something to me?”

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello and welcome to the Psychic Whispers podcast. Hi there and welcome back to Psychic Whispers. You know, one of the things recently that I've been doing a lot more of is deliberately and intentionally restudying symbols all over again. And I say restudying because I, well, a little backstory context. My wife and I own a tattoo studio outside of me doing psychic mediumship. We have owned a studio for about five years now, and she is a tattoo artist. And as mentioned in my last podcast episode, I have just recently, and I do mean freshly recently, started to train to do tattooing because I want to do the psychic work in the tattoo and merge the two energies together to create something really meaningful and deliberate and intentional for people when they come into the studio. It's very exciting. And I'm doing this in the most traditional way possible. I'm doing it as hand poke or sometimes referred to as stick and poke rather than machine tattoos. So there's been a lot uh kind of going on the last few weeks in training. Back to the original story. That has brought me back into this world of imagery and symbolism. And I thought, you know what? This would make a great podcast episode. Let's talk about how we are so fascinated as humans by symbolisms and why symbols have become such a part of just human culture. You know, symbols have been part of my psychic work, well, my whole life. Part of being a clairvoyant has meant that I see things in pictures and imagery, which has meant that I had to become pretty proficient at interpreting what those things mean. And that was great because I had a natural curiosity for the world and all of the meaning that the universe held for us and still does in everything that I was learning as I grew up and as I become an adult. So to put it plainly, as a psychic, you know, symbols are my language. This is definitely how spirit chooses to communicate with me and certainly how I have learned to interpret energy when I pick up on it. Whether I'm reading tarot, interpreting dreams, working directly with the other side, or now creating uh tattoo designs, you know, symbols are everywhere. So today we're gonna explore this fascination that I've had for years. Why do human beings speak in symbols? I mean, symbols have been a part of human culture since basically the dawn of time. Ancient cave paintings are proof of that. Human beings have been using symbols to document their journey or honor their gods or just create meaning in their world since forever. I mean, look at ancient carvings, religious icons, even ruins, you know, family crests to mark and symbolize, you know, energy within a family lineage. Even countries. I mean, flags. Flags have been created with complete symbolism and meaning. You know, there's not accidental by design. It's not, ooh, fancy look of that one. Um, you know, no, they have been created with intention and meaning to represent a country. How amazing is that? And of course, wedding rings, you know, rings that symbolize the commitment and love of between two people and the promise that they make in this path in life with deep symbolism of not just any finger, but the finger that is directly attached to the heart. Things as simple as a logo, a symbol of a company, a brand, and emojis. I mean, we've even wanted to move from words and our text messages and add symbols in our communication with each other to represent different meaning and put different meanings to those things to communicate with each other, just to create a deeper sense of communication in this modern world. Our culture of humanity is so ingrained with symbolism. If I handed you a piece of paper with a little heart shape on it, you wouldn't think that its literal meaning was the anatomical organ pumping around in your body. You instantly understand that it means love. And I think that is extraordinary when you think about it. Even the fact that we gave an organ in our body an attachment to love itself and came up with a little symbol to represent that in a really like simple way. To me, isn't that fascinating? It's a pretty big thing, I think, in human culture that we put all of this meaning into these sometimes just these simple, simple drawings or symbols. It's just incredible. One simple shape can carry centuries of shared meaning. And I think that is just amazing. So my world is built on symbols, and let me explain why. As a psychic medium, you know, information doesn't often arrive as just neat dialogue. You know, here you go. This is what we need to do. Unfortunately, and I wish it did, it doesn't quite work as direct as that. When I connect with the other side, what I'm shown is a series, especially as a clairvoyant, I'm shown a series of symbols and symbolic meaning, feelings. Um, you know, there's a whole host of things going on. But when they show me pictures and imagery, it is my job to interpret those things, those symbols that mean something else. Sometimes they're incredibly personal to the person that I'm talking to. And sometimes they'll show me symbols that mean something to me in order to communicate with me the deeper meaning of what they're trying to relay across. And of course, in my ordinary world or in the world in which I'm connecting with all of you, beautiful souls, there are people that bring me symbols for me to interpret, like, oh, you know, I found a white feather, you know, in my bathroom, uh, couldn't have possibly got in there. What does that mean? I was, you know, kept dreaming about a red door. What does a red door mean when my dream in my dreams? And I keep being reluctant to go through it. I keep seeing an owl, Messina. What does that mean? What does an owl mean? You know, a watch or a clock stops at a certain time. What does that mean? What do the numbers mean? I see one, one, one, one everywhere. Messina, what does it mean? So I had to get pretty good at interpreting symbols, gotta be honest. Uh, it took a while, and uh, I'm really glad that I did. But I was also fascinated, thankfully, by these things too. Noticing them in my world from such an early age, I got really savvy very quickly as to the fact that this stuff exists, this is the language of the universe, and I need to figure out what they're trying to tell me because I was so curious. And let me tell you the honest answer to what all that stuff might mean. And it's not gonna be a straight shooting answer, which I know you're gonna be very disappointed about. But let me tell you the real truth, it really depends. If somebody comes to me and they keep seeing an owl, you know, it's not gonna be the same interpretation for that person as it would be if the next client came in and said, Messina, I keep seeing an owl. Those two people might be seeing the same thing, but the interpretation of that symbol is deeply personal to them specifically. For one of them, that owl might represent wisdom. For another, it might be someone's grandfather who collected owl ornaments all of his life, and he's the one that's trying to come through with that symbol. Meaning is born from context. And that's something that I don't think a lot of people realize. I guess sometimes we we visualize or we imagine that symbols are somewhat one bog standard meaning. And if that was the case, then there'd just be one dream book interpretation, right? There'd just be one. Uh, there it is, all the stuff you need to know about your dreams. And quite frankly, if you look up dream interpretation books, there are like a bazillion out there. And they all sometimes say something completely different to each other. Other times you'll notice trends in some of the meanings. And where there are trends, there tends to be shared culture. I find personally that culture and our backgrounds and what we've been taught in our religious beliefs, our community beliefs, and our cultural beliefs also lays into what we interpret or what we learn different interpretations of symbols and what they are. If I'm speaking to my Americans, then we all know that the eagle represents freedom, right? That's what our American culture has taught us. That's our big symbol. I mean, and of course, here in England, we got the lion, you know, that lion represents that strength and that ferocious energy that we carry as a culture here in the UK. So each culture also has its own interpretation of what those symbols might mean. And we need to take that into account when we are interpreting our own symbols and the things that we're seeing. And those are exactly why when someone comes to me and they ask me, hey, Missina, I've been seeing that red door in my dream. What do you think it means? And I say, Well, how did you feel first? Obviously, I'm gonna tune in to what I understand of the feelings of that person were at the time. I'm gonna do my job. I promise you, I don't ask a lot of questions. But the one thing I do want my person in front of me to be acutely aware of was what did you feel in that moment? I often encourage people in when I teach intuition is to lean in to those feelings when we see a symbol or we see something that conjures the emotion because that's what makes symbols so powerful. We get to lean in and use our intuition to know exactly what that's communicating by our feelings or our thoughts or the first word that comes to us. As a psychic medium, I can do that with you. I can sometimes do that for you, but it's still encourage people to lean in and feel that themselves for that organic energy, because that's what makes symbols so powerful. Symbols, they kind of bypass logic. A photograph can just bring us to tears. A wedding ring on a finger can make you feel really safe, or a song lyric can transport us 20 years into the past. And I find that it's not the object necessarily doing that, of course, it kind of is in a way, I suppose. But the meaning and the power that is behind that symbol, that's what's prevent, that's what's bringing that energy into your being. And that's pretty powerful. That's where symbols really begin to speak to us in ways that just go beyond, hey, look at me. Having a tattoo studio for this last five years, and as a person who gets a lot of tattoos myself, actually prior to owning a studio, we got a lot of ink. Um, I've gotten to see and reaffirm my belief that people come in to cover themselves in symbols. I mean, tattoos are a way of covering our bodies with symbolic meaning, if you really think about it. And, you know, some people genuinely come in because they like the design and they just they don't they don't have any attachment to it. But there are a lot of people that come in and they choose something so meaningful. They want something to honor, a symbol to honor someone they've lost, or a symbol to honor a journey in their life, or something that represents strength and power for them because they feel like that's what they have overcome in their lives and they're in a powerful and you know energetic space. And they might sort of, you know, look at the symbols that mean something so to them, and not necessarily what's traditional, but something that they draw their personal power or energy from. A tiny moon tattoo could represent just as much the universal divine feminine energy to one person and might actually just mean that it kind of attaches them to a loved one that they've lost. To one person, you know, a raven tattoo might be something that leans into that love of gothic stuff and that love of, I don't know, Edgar Allan Poe poetry. For someone else, that raven could really represent transformation. It could represent a sense of belonging. Each person comes in, I notice, with such different views on what their symbols and what their tattoos mean for them. And that's what drew me to want to learn. I've been doing psychic energy healing for a while, which I love. And I've also wanted to tattoo for a while, but in a way that was more ritual, more deliberate and intentional, helping people to mark their bodies with something that deeply represents a journey, a person, a character energy in themselves, you know, part of who they are, their identity. I wanted to incorporate symbols in a way that were really meaningful and powerful for people to wear on their skin, to transform, to instill energy, to heal, to mark something that's really powerful for them. And here is where symbols are bringing you something for the rest of your life, a symbol that has a meaning on you that you're choosing to carry forever. And I love that. I love that art, that that practice of using symbols to empower ourselves in that way. That's why when I do readings, symbols are so powerful because I don't translate from a universal book. Like I told you, they don't exist. I could tell you what an eagle means in America, and somewhere it might mean something completely different on another continent, to be fair to you, to other people. This is where the symbols and the meanings become so personal. I don't translate symbols, I interpret them for someone. And I get to be a part of that journey of understanding that language of symbology. And I've really relied on it to communicate with people via energy because ultimately that's what we're doing. We are using the energy of those symbols to communicate in this reading. When I'm reading energy and I'm seeing symbols, that's what's happening. I'm reading the energy, and all of those symbols help me interpret all the little facets and pieces of that energy between me and that person. And of course, for that person. But if we were in a position to communicate with somebody that didn't speak our language, we know that there are ways to use symbols to communicate with one another, at least in some crude way. And that's what I just feel so fascinated by. The fact that there is so much universal meaning behind the language of symbols, that even with no knowledge of how to talk to each other, we could find ways of communicating with arrows and hearts and you know, moon shapes and you know, all this stuff, pictures of animals, etc., things that would allow us to say, this means that and this is this. It's just fascinating to me that we could crudely learn to communicate with one another just just by using symbols. The truth is we are symbolic creatures. And I think that we give uh things meaning because I feel like that's one of humanity's greatest gifts, our ability to create meaning. We uh have put energy into, you know, things like crosses or pentacles, ruins, the eye of Horace, the Hamza, the Tree of Life. These are symbols that have survived centuries in humanity and still serve as powerful collective energy sources today. And they feel like the more sacred we have treated something, the more we have culturally decided that's a sacred symbol, or this carries the meaning, this connects me to a god or an idea or a journey. We have allowed ourselves to use and charge symbols with that kind of power because that's what humans do. We participate in this other side of ourselves, this magical, wonderful spiritual journey that we're here for. It's ingrained in us. Sins forever. Symbols are a way for us to bring this extra layer of meaning into our lives because we need our lives to hold meaning, because our lives do hold meaning. Because somewhere deep down we have a knowledge in humanity that there is more in this life than just physically what we can see, that there are accesses to other energies out there in the universe. And symbols are at times a way to build a bridge between us and the things that we don't physically get to see and touch. And maybe that's why symbols have survived every civilization. Empires have disappeared, languages have changed, but symbols, they've stayed. So many of them have. I think perhaps that's one of the oldest ways that we've ever told stories, not just to one another, but to ourselves. I think symbols are like humanity's way of saying there's so much more to this life. And these are the ways in which we're acknowledging that. So the next time you notice yourself drawn to a particular animal or a flower or a tarot card, or why you can't stop sketching moons in the margin of your notebooks, you know, instead of asking what does a symbol mean, don't go looking for some traditional meaning. Try asking yourself, what does this mean to me? That is where the real magic begins. Now, if you have enjoyed this conversation with me today, and I thank you so much for your time and taking it with me, then you can find more of me on psychic-wispers.com. Or if you're just here for the podcast, then you can go over to psychicwisperspodcast.com for more ways to get involved with deepening the work with me here or just supporting the podcast. Either way, I'd love to see you there. Now, until we meet again, trust your path, honor your truth, and always keep listening.