‘The brochure never said anything about sharks’: Kirstie Lilith’s unexpected spiritual journey

A conversation about animal communication, channelling Yeshua, and finally asking whether the path you are following brings you any joy.

By Anthony Larkin

Kirstie Lilith had imagined the boat would take her up to the whales. She would go down a ladder, float around admiring them, then climb back aboard. Job done.

Instead, she found herself facing dark Pacific water, strong currents and a swim that, she says, could be half a mile or more. There was no ladder for the graceful entrance she had pictured. She had to get herself and her fins over the side of the boat.

Then there were the sharks.

“The brochure never said anything about sharks. I was going to come and see whales, not sharks.”

She had never swum in the ocean before, was prone to seasickness and was not particularly keen on the sea in the first place. As she put it, “The film Jaws has got a lot to answer for.” Yet here she was, on a two-week retreat, with nine other people she described as mermaids and water babies.

Her reason for going? She believed a humpback whale had asked her to find him.

Kirstie is based in Nottinghamshire and describes herself as a channel, author and spiritual mentor. I wanted to hear how her journey had taken her from Reiki and mediumship to animal communication, and eventually to what she describes as channelling Yeshua, whom she identifies as Jesus.

There was plenty I wanted to ask her. But her account of swimming with whales also made one thing very clear about me: I was quite happy to hear about this from dry land.

“I do really like the water when it’s up to my feet,” I told her. “Maybe up to my waist, but I’ve still got to have my feet on the ground.”

Before the whales

Kirstie dates the beginning of her spiritual journey to 2014, following bereavements and pressure at work that led to what she describes as a mental breakdown.

She did not think of it as a spiritual awakening at the time. That was an understanding she arrived at afterwards, looking back at what happened during her recovery.

Alongside NHS counselling, she saw another counsellor who was also a Reiki master and worked with angels, crystals and shamanic practices. Those weekly sessions introduced her to ideas she had not explored before. She began training in Reiki, then moved into mediumship.

I recognised something in that sequence. My own interest in spirituality had developed when I hit rock bottom, and I told her how significant Reiki had felt for me. These were our personal experiences of finding support; in Kirstie’s account, her spiritual exploration happened alongside counselling.

I wondered whether it had arrived suddenly for her, as it had seemed to for me, or whether it had developed gradually.

For Kirstie, it felt more like remembering. Looking back, she recalled feeling different as a child, knowing or sensing things about people without understanding where those impressions came from. But that did not mean everything came easily once she started studying mediumship.

“The amount of tears that I cried over mediumship and learning to talk to what I refer to as dead people,” she said. “Oh my God, what a challenge.”

She compared herself with other people, found herself lacking and wondered whether she was any good at it. Still, she kept going.

The change came during a demonstration at the end of an eight-month mentorship programme. She realised that, although she might not receive the quantity of factual information others seemed to get, she felt able to convey emotion and the essence of the person she believed she was connecting with.

“I knew what I brought to the table.”

I told her that I did not have that confidence myself. I had recently said to another medium that I could never imagine standing on a rostrum, trusting what I thought I was receiving enough to give it to somebody else.

So I took Kirstie’s breakthrough to mean she had finally found the confidence to step forward. Her next sentence was not quite what I expected.

“I walked off stage and went, ‘Yep, done that. Never doing it again.’”

She continued with private readings for a while, but knew mediumship was not where she wanted to stay. Later, she says, Yeshua asked her a question that stopped her in her tracks: “Where’s the joy?”

She had been so occupied with trying to do mediumship that she had not really considered whether she enjoyed it.

Before we started recording, Kirstie had asked whether I enjoyed making the podcast. I had struggled to answer, talking instead about feeling nudged or pushed towards it. By this point, I could answer more clearly. I liked setting up the lights and microphone, working out the technical side, and hearing from people about experiences outside my own.

“So that’s my joy,” I told her.

A horse with an unexpectedly deep voice

Animal communication was something Kirstie says she fell in love with. Her horse, Blake, was a large part of the reason she wanted to learn.

She described him as her soulmate. They already had a strong connection, and the possibility of understanding him more deeply meant everything to her.

One morning, at about half past five, she was seeing to him before work when she heard what sounded like “Hello, good morning.”

Her immediate thought was that Blake had a much deeper voice than she had expected.

Then a man appeared on the other side of the horse.

“I was perfectly okay thinking my horse had just spoken to me,” she said. “The fact that there was a real-life human being there talking to me absolutely frightened the life out of me.”

“That’s so funny,” I told her.

I had asked what moved animal communication beyond wishful thinking for her. The experience she identified involved another horse on the yard, which had become unwell and was lying down in its stable. With the owner’s permission, she went in to sit with it and described where she felt it was experiencing pain.

“I can’t diagnose. I’m not a vet,” she made clear.

According to Kirstie, the yard owner later told her that a vet’s assessment matched the location she had described. She could not remember the precise medical detail during our conversation, but remembered how much that feedback had mattered to her.

“I thought, my God, I can do this.”

That is her recollection of the event, rather than a veterinary record we examined. It explains why her confidence grew. Veterinary diagnosis remained the vet’s role.

She now describes her work as communicating with living animals and animals she believes are in spirit, as well as supporting owners through loss. She also teaches, and spoke about the responsibility involved when working with people who may be grieving or carrying guilt about a pet’s death.

Giving animals a voice is how she describes the purpose of it. She wanted other people to learn, too.

‘You want me to find you?’

In 2021, Kirstie says she experienced a connection with a humpback whale while sitting in her workspace.

This was not a whale physically in front of her. She describes an inner encounter in which he showed her the Earth and connected her with whales around the globe. She saw something like a web of lights and heard different whale songs.

“I had tears streaming down my face,” she said.

Then came the request: she needed to find him, so they could swim together.

Her response was fairly understandable.

“You want me to find you, a whale, in all of the oceans on the whole of the Earth?”

She contacted someone she knew in the United States, who directed her towards a woman in Hawaii. Looking at that woman’s website, Kirstie says she recognised a pictured whale as the one she had experienced.

The woman was organising a retreat in French Polynesia. When Kirstie enquired, she was told it had just been moved to 2022 and that a place had become available. She booked it.

By the time she arrived, she had spent months feeling that the whale was guiding her preparation. What followed was the very physical business of getting into the ocean, coping with the conditions and swimming towards whales.

She says she managed a graceful slide from the boat about once in the whole fortnight. The rest of the time, it was a “giant kind of plop”. She joked that she could hear the whales announcing her arrival: “Yep, she is in the water.”

There was familiar self-consciousness underneath the humour. The other participants seemed so comfortable. She found herself judging her own efforts and worrying about what they thought of her.

Still, she went back into the water each day.

“There was me, first time ever being in the ocean and deciding to do this just because a whale told me to.”

She described the experience as life-changing, both because of the animals themselves and because of what it took for her to be there. She did not describe it as easy. Asked about doing it again, she said she would, but would not rush back.

I was pleased she had experienced it and could share the story with me. That was quite close enough for me.

The guide she was reluctant to name

When we turned to Yeshua, I wanted to know how that connection had begun. Kirstie could not pinpoint a first encounter. In her account, he started appearing occasionally and gradually became a constant presence.

She compared him to somebody who turns up and then never leaves.

For a while, she kept this private. Who would believe her? Who was she to say that Jesus was her guide?

Then, at a busy mind, body and spirit event, she gave a talk about connecting with spirit guides. She remembers walking into the marquee and initially assuming the previous speaker was still there. There were more than a hundred people waiting.

They were waiting for her.

She wanted to turn round and leave, but told herself to “get your big girl pants on” and get onto the stage.

Partway through the talk, she invited questions. A woman at the back asked who her guides were.

“Inside me, I was like, ‘Crap.’”

Kirstie answered in general terms, saying she worked mainly with ascended masters and goddesses. In this context, ascended masters means beings regarded within her spiritual practice as advanced teachers or guides. She thought that answer had dealt with it.

The woman put her hand up again. Which ascended masters?

Kirstie says she then experienced Yeshua stepping forward and asking, “Are you going to own me or what?”

By “own”, she meant acknowledge the connection publicly. She took a breath and told the audience that her main guide was Yeshua, whom most would know as Jesus.

She identifies that as a turning point. She went on to organise an online channelling event around the summer solstice in 2023, and the work developed from there.

I also wanted to understand what she actually meant by channelling. Her explanation was that it could happen at different levels: she might describe a message she felt she was receiving while remaining in an ordinary conversation, or enter a deeper altered state and allow what she experiences as the being’s presence and words to come through her.

That distinction helped me explain some questions about my own Reiki practice. Sometimes I have found myself saying things during a session and later barely remembering them. Was that coming from my heart, my head, or somewhere else?

Kirstie interpreted what I described as channelling. Her explanation helped me connect ideas about my experience, although identifying the source of those impressions is a separate question.

Bringing it into everyday life

The idea of being able to put questions to Jesus certainly got my attention.

“I’ve got a billion questions,” I told her.

One of them was why we are here. If we are loving souls, why enter lives that can involve so much pain?

Kirstie’s answer, which she attributed to Yeshua, was that earthly life allows souls to experience contrasts rather than simply know about them. She also believes many souls have come here to participate in a period of spiritual change.

These are spiritual explanations, not something our conversation could establish as fact. My question was about how she understood being human within that view: whether the limitations of a body allow an experience unavailable outside it.

For Kirstie, the aim is to recognise a spiritual identity while living an ordinary human life. She called it “much less of an ascension than a descension”: bringing what she sees as divine awareness into daily experience.

I asked how her relationship with Yeshua fitted alongside the relationship many people have with Jesus through religion. She said she does not experience the messages as instructions to worship him or follow a particular religious framework. She also stressed that she was not seeking to belittle people’s religious beliefs.

When I asked whether “divine essence” was something we find or remember, her answer was immediate: “It’s a remembering.”

Her book, Divine Living, grew out of the whale journey, but she says it developed beyond that account. Alongside material she describes as channelled, she wanted to address practical questions: setting boundaries, recognising choices, and understanding what people mean when they talk about healing.

“We can talk about the big concept,” she said, “but what does it mean in your day-to-day world?”

She also told me about Walking with Yeshua, a free community through which she shares messages she attributes to him, with both a Facebook group and an email option.

Before we finished, I asked my regular closing question: if she could leave one message with the world, from everything she had experienced spiritually, what would it be?

Her answer came back to the confidence she had struggled with herself: believing in your own wisdom and recognising what you have to offer.

“My aim is to reach as many people as possible before I exit this planet to really get them to trust and believe in themselves.”

Watch the full conversation

This article is based on my interview with Kirstie Lilith on the Anthony Larkin Podcast. You can watch the full conversation here: