Praise for Psychic Development Level 4

“Much of what you learn in these pages not only enables you to channel the other side, but it also enhances your life day to day. The guided meditations and protections in this book work to ground and keep you clear and in tune with both self and nature.

Anyone interested in becoming a psychic medium would do well to study channeling and spirit communication as presented in The Anastasi System: Psychic Development Level 4.

I cannot say enough good things about what Sandy and her work have done for me. My personal growth and psychic abilities have exceeded my expectations. I continue attending Sandy's classes and reading her books to keep learning and growing. I do channeled and spirit communication readings that would never have been possible without Sandy's guidance. Thank you Sandy for your teaching and continued guidance.”

— Liz Bartow, Psychic Medium and Channel

“Sandy's book is a mystical quest into the inner-most self. It's a psychic journey of your soul to growth, knowledge, and inner peace as it strives for perfection. All the while this process awakens powers and mysteries that heal and expand your life in all areas mentally, emotionally, physically, and spiritually. She guides us along a path to wholeness, taking us step by step while making it fun and easy.”

— June Farrell, Psychic and Spirit Medium, Teacher of the Anastasi System

“Psychic Development Level 4 changed the way I look at death and the afterlife. After reading this book, I not only realized that we on the earth plane can communicate with the spirit world, but it also taught me how to do that. Using a step-by-step approach described in the book, I was able to connect with the other side. As a teacher of psychic development, this book offers many techniques for me to use when teaching students who are learning how to do spirit communication.

As with all of the books in the psychic development series, this book grows with the reader. No matter how often I read the book I always find something new within its covers.”

— Cheryl Bicknell, Registered Nurse and Teacher of the Anastasi System

Books by Sandy Anastasi

The Anastasi System Psychic Development Series:

Level 1: The Fundamentals

Level 2: Energy and Auras

Level 3: Tools and Toys

Level 4: An Introduction to Channeling and Spirit Communication

Level 5: Developing the Energy and Skill in Spirit Communication

Level 6: Healing in Spirit Communication (to be released)

Astrology:

Astrology: Art and Science

Intermediate Astrology

Tarot:

Tarot Reader's Workbook: A Comprehensive Guide from Beginner to Master

Kabbala:

Pathworking the Kabbala

Notices

The Anastasi System — Psychic Development Level 4: An Introduction to Channeling and Spirit Communication

Copyright © 2009 Sandy Anastasi

ISBN: 978-0-982-56699-2

Notice of Rights:

The purchaser of this book is permitted a very lenient, but limited terms of usage. The purchaser is allowed to store and read the e-book version in whatever electronic format he or she wishes. The purchaser is also allowed to print, bind, and maintain up to two (2) physical copies of the e-book version for his or her personal use only. The purchaser is allowed to freely distribute any support documents and worksheets that may come with this book. Brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews are also allowed under the fair use doctrine.

The purchaser of this book is NOT permitted to: 1) Distribute the print or e-book versions of this book (in part or in whole) to anyone else by any means without explicit permission of the author. 2) Place the print or e-book versions of this book (in part or in whole) on any website, file sharing service, or any other distribution network that grants others access to it.

And when in doubt, use common sense!

Notice of Liability:

Although the content presented in this book is instructive in nature, it is up to the reader to use the materials in a safe and ethical manner. The author, publisher, and distributors are not responsible or liable for any misuse of the presented material. Although the exercises contained within are generally considered safe for most people, persons with mental disabilities or a history of mental illness should seek guidance from a licensed professional before proceeding.

And when in doubt, use common sense!

Acknowledgements

The channeling and spirit communication portion of the Anastasi System of Psychic Development was developed at the request of my many students, to whom I owe enormous thanks. Without them this work would never have been completed. John Edward, who has been a constant inspiration to me in so many ways, is most deserving of my praise, both for what he has accomplished in the field and by blazing a trail for so many to follow. This portion of the Anastasi System would not have been created if so many of my students had not been inspired to follow in his footsteps, and needed the tools, guidance and protective techniques contained in these pages in order to make the attempt. And of course, my eternal thanks go to John Maerz whose talent, humor, insights, creativity, organizational and teaching skills, and powers of observation helped to create the actual classes on which this book is based. Thanks to him, especially, for allowing me to use so much of the material he personally developed in this written series. During all this time I have also been blessed by the support of some truly wonderful and special people. I want to take a moment to extend thanks to the following people, without whom it would never have come into existence: Ron Tourville, my husband, who has a way of making all things possible; John Maerz, who helped to develop and distribute the earliest versions of this book and series; my many students whose questions, interests, and problems led me to refine and redefine the way the material was presented until I finally arrived at the present version. Thanks to my good friend John Edward who has given his help and support in so many ways, not the least of which is through his own example; my family and friends for their belief, support and patience; Rick Rajter for his computer knowledge and excitement about the job; Emily Jack for her excellent proofreading and editing; and last but surely not least, Lisa Freeman, my personal assistant who has a knack for keeping track of it all... including me. You all have my deepest gratitude, and my love.

Table of Contents

Foreword

Author’s Foreword

Introduction

Chapter 1 — Channeling and Spirit Communication

Determining the Difference Between Channeling from a Higher Source Versus with Ego

A Little Bit About Psychic Protection

Preparing to Become a Channel and Keeping Yourself Clear

Chapter 2 — Psychic Protection in Channeling

Basic Defense Mechanisms

More Specific Defense Mechanisms

How to ‘Ground Out’ After the Fact

Chapter 3 — The Art of Channeling

Exercise #1: Invocation of the Four Archangels

Exercise #2: Higher Self Channel Opening Meditation

Figure 1: The Five Spirit Gates

Exercise #3: Opening Your Spirit Gates

Where and When to Use Your Psychic Abilities

Keeping Possessions from a Deceased Loved One

Exercise #4: A Guided Visualization to Open Your Channel

Chapter 4 — The Art of Spirit Communication, Part 1

Receiving a Spirit Communication Reading: Ethics and Self Defense

How to Give and Receive a Spirit Communication Reading

Summoning a Spirit

Spirit Retrieval

Healing Through Spirit Communication

Dealing with Depression

Methods of Opening

Psychic Self Defense as Applied to Spirit Communication

Chapter 5 — The Art of Spirit Communication, Part 2

Basic Symbols Used in a Spirit Communication Reading

General Advice for Giving a Spirit Communication Reading

Preparing and Developing Yourself for Spirit Communication

Breath Work Before Readings

Spirit Identification

Further Practice Techniques: Exercise #1

Further Practice Techniques: Exercise #2

Further Practice Techniques: Exercise #3

Further Practice Techniques: Exercise #4

Sample Spirit Retrieval

Conclusion

Foreword

The more we attempt to see ourselves as elevated or separate from our animal nature, the more we draw circumstances toward us to show us that this is not so. Haunted by this reminder we study psychology, philosophy, metaphysics, etiquette, social graces, economics, and a whole host of other perspectives with the intention of congratulating ourselves on the progress that we have made in becoming separate and superior over nature as a species. Yet, in the same breath we say we admire children and animals that don’t have the prior conditioning that we do, that would mask their abilities to see spirits and entities on other planes. Our child and animal natures are the parts of our awareness that contain the ability to recognize things beyond our physical senses. Our prior conditioning may provide a wealth of security for us in our sense of being grounded and belonging to our physical world, but it severely limits our abilities to see simple energy beyond our own nose.

As children, the majority of us have been told that we don’t see colors around people, there is no imaginary friend, we couldn’t know who is calling before the phone rings, and much more. What’s worse is that we’re told that if we do believe in such things, there is something wrong with us. If we hear this enough times we, ultimately, have to cave in to the badgering and accept this as true and bury the fact that it contradicts our own instincts and intuition. In doing so, we accept it as a “factual” part of our belief system. A curious side effect of this type of development is that it promotes denial of anything that is intangible; included within that is the muffling of that small intuitive voice within ourselves. Hence, it also precludes our ability to channel and communicate with spirits.

For me, learning spirit communication has not been so much of a developing of my skills as it was the arduous task of removing the prior conditioning that blocked me from perceiving what is not physical. Being the recipient of the above mentioned training, I had been very hesitant to pursue the very long road toward opening up again. This has been mostly due to my own insecurity and unfamiliarity with how to deal with feelings beyond the physical and mental. I have always been a very visual and tangibly-oriented person. My beginnings come from the safe and scientific study of astrology. Slowly, over years I became aware that I knew information that was helpful to my clients. I had no idea where this information came from. Yet, the capacity grew as if I was opening a faucet, letting the information “out of the bag.”

Through my connections to my friend, Maria Fix, and my past partner, Sandy Anastasi, I was gradually turned toward the light. Both of them turned me on to the structure of a world more inclusive than the one I lived in. Still, for me, it was initially an intellectual recognition. Not until I started reading the cards (Sandy taught me) did I start allowing a flow of information to come through me where I didn’t feel the need to verify every detail as factual. As I read the cards for fun and with a grain of salt, my readings became more accurate and my clientele began to grow. I knew something was coming from somewhere that I had no control of, but I continued in spite of the fear of losing control of what was happening. It was like riding a horse – I had little control, but could guide the direction. At some point I allowed myself to take a much larger leap by having some fun with channeling and spirit communication. I was floored by the results having never believed that this was something I could do, let alone well and with credibility. Since then I have learned to trust the inner urge and diminish the mental control I felt I had to keep. As a result, my readings have become more accurate and enjoyable.

I have also come to realize that all my artistic endeavors (I have an extensive background in music and painting), provided they’re not contrived or ego invested, augmented my clearing the way to my Higher Self and guides. I had never realized that becoming totally absorbed by the art work, with no thought of self consciousness, was actually working in channel. In my case, it was probably my involvement in the arts that accelerated my development because it was there that my initial trust in being open and vulnerable was the strongest. I’ve come to understand that this is, for me, the simplest way to move into channeling mode, which usually requires meditation and practice for its stability. Now I do both. So, if you have some creative endeavor that you can allow yourself to be involved with, with abandon and no thought of self consciousness, I strongly suggest that you involve yourself more deeply in the practice. It is very likely that this will accelerate your ability to open and be more trusting of your inner voice and guidance as it did for me.

The methods that Sandy and I developed and put into the workbooks (Levels 4, 5, and 6) are the result of endless brainstorming, personal trial and error, and many years of experience, ours and others, in the field. The result is a distillation of some of the quickest and best ways to develop a facility for channeling and spirit communication safely, accurately, and with a sense of humor, excitement, and enjoyment.

If you allow yourself to move at your own speed and approach this skill as a fun experiment, it’s quite likely that you’ll surprise yourself, as I have, in how easily you can develop the skill. Enjoy!

John Maerz, Owner of The Astrological Institute of Integrated Studies (Est. 1983)

Author’s Foreword

Let me tell you a little bit about myself and how the channeling and spirit communication portion of the Anastasi System of Psychic Development came to fruition.

I have a technical background, so it is natural for me to approach the psychic field from a scientific point of view (and that includes the areas of channeling and spirit communication). Early on, when I began teaching the first three levels of the system my students asked me to go deeper, to teach them spirit communication, but I resisted.

As a young woman I did not know that I was psychic. When I was in my late twenties I discovered that all of the unusual things I’d experienced as a child and thought were ‘normal’ were actually psychic. That realization changed my life. From early childhood I had a strong ability to connect with the other side. I was the day dreamer in my family. It was more enjoyable to me to live in the world of my dreams than in the real world around me.

I later understood that this is frequently characteristic of people naturally endowed with the ability to channel and become spirit mediums. However, they also leave one open to all kinds of negative forces and experiences, the most extreme of which is no longer being able to tell the difference between reality and fantasy. So, I continued to resist teaching techniques to open this level to my students. I sensed the real danger this could put them in, emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually. I realized that the application of these abilities without protection or proper use could easily lead to mental illness.

I eventually came to the conclusion that one of the values of my going into a technical field early on was that the necessary mental focus for that work created a wonderful wall of protection against anything that would have interfered with attention to the real world when I was so drawn to the world beyond my five physical senses. A strong mind, in and of itself, can be a wonderful protection. For many years it was mine. When I left those technical fields for a life as a practicing psychic channel I had to develop other forms of protection.

In fact, my life-long openness and sensitivity has made me especially concerned with psychic protection in all areas of psychic development – and it is in the area of spirit communication that the need for protection is most important. That is one major reason I chose to work with John Maerz to develop these last three courses in the series – Level 4 (An Introduction to Channeling and Spirit Communication), Level 5 (Developing the Energy and Skills), and Level 6 (Refining Skills and Healing through Spirit Communication).

With the attention being given to spirit communication in our world today, through the media’s focus on it, more and more people are jumping into it without understanding what they are really doing, and certainly without protecting themselves. The need for instruction was obvious. My students were asking for it. So, with John’s help, I set out to develop the last three levels of the Anastasi System.

We all have our areas of special talent. Mine is channeling. I have been channeling information from spirit for more than 30 years, since I began doing psychic readings. My books are mostly channeled, and I also channel as I teach. Often, the words come out and my students say, “Oh, wow,” and I say along with them, “Oh, wow...I didn’t know that.” Sometimes I think I learn more listening to what’s coming through when I’m teaching than my students do! So, in this Psychic Development Level 4 book, I developed most of the material regarding the art of channeling. I know a lot about it. I know how to open a channel that will help you reach to a level far higher than you will need in most of your readings. The entire first portion of this book teaches you how to channel, and how to do it safely. Channeling is my first love. A good psychic channel can get incredibly accurate future-oriented information directly from spirit that can help his family, friends, and clients to live better and more fulfilling lives. A good psychic channel can open a channel that can uplift the people around him spiritually.

If so many of my students didn’t want to learn spirit communication, I probably never would have developed the second portion of this book, which is also the primary subject of the last two books in the series: spirit communication. I love my students. Over the years, they have helped me grow. So, their desire to learn how to do spirit communication was responsible for me setting out to learn about it, investigate it, teach it, and eventually produce these books.

I first began to get involved with spirit communication when John Edward, the famous host of television’s Crossing Over mentioned me in his first book, One Last Time. People began calling me and wanting to talk to their deceased loved ones. Although I am not a psychic medium, often as I channel information, some of the guides giving the information to me during the session turn out to be the deceased loved ones of the client – stopping by to give some much needed advice! So, can I do spirit communication? Yes. Is it my favorite thing to do? No. My focus was, and continues to be, on the future of my client. Spirit communication readings rarely give that kind of information. If I am going to channel someone, I’d rather channel your highest spirit guide, who is likely not a deceased loved one. In fact, it wasn’t until I’d worked with several well-known mediums and come to understand their views on spirit communication and their reasons for loving it that I began to feel comfortable with the whole process.

For the record, I did not teach John Edward to be a psychic medium. As he discusses in One Last Time, I gave him basic tools. He did the rest. A born psychic medium, he was able to develop his ability on his own. In fact, in those early years when he studied with me the portion of this system dealing with channeling and spirit communication had not yet been developed. John Edward was inspirational to me, in fact, as I began creating this part of the system so that my students who needed more guidance and instruction could learn a safe method of doing spirit communication.

Spirit communication is not for everyone. All of you reading these words have differing reasons for wanting to study it. Some of you have had experiences of your own that you would like to understand. Others are fascinated by the process and wish to learn about it and perhaps see if they can develop the ability. Some of you believe yourselves to be especially gifted in this area and want to hone your natural talent into a real, marketable ability. Some of you merely want to learn to be more open to your own deceased loved ones, or to understand someone close to you who is already involved in this work.

I believe that everyone can learn to do spirit communication. But not everyone who studies this material will become a psychic medium. Both channeling and spirit communication are art forms. And just as in the art field, where anyone can learn basic drawing and painting skills, but not everyone will be a Picasso. In the psychic field anyone can learn the methodology of opening a channel and of connecting to spirit, but not everyone will become a great psychic medium.

In these pages you will learn safe methods of opening a channel, and safe methods of connecting to spirit to do a spirit communication reading. But it is up to you, the student, through your application and study, to develop your own natural talents and abilities in this area to the highest level you are capable of. The tools are all here. Your focus, your desire, your personal work and dedication, and your natural ability will determine if you will be the artist or remain the novice. You have my vote of confidence; if your heart is in the right place, you will get out of these pages exactly what you are looking for. I hope that you get as much joy and insight from reading this book as I did from writing it.

Sandy Anastasi

Introduction

Welcome to the first Advanced Psychic Development book in this series. This book, Level 4, introduces the processes of channeling and spirit communication.

I strongly recommend that if you have not yet studied Psychic Development Levels 1, 2, and 3, that you do that before beginning this book. Not only will you have far better results, but you also will be better protected and have a much deeper insight into all areas of the psychic field – I believe that everyone who aspires to become a channel or a spirit medium should have that foundation first.

The first half of this book is about the art of channeling. Every psychic medium must first be a channel, just as every channel must first be a psychic. The second half of the book is an introduction to the field of spirit communication. Throughout the book you will be schooled in proper etiquette. Good protection tools will be supplied, and will become more comprehensive as your need for them grows.

In this book, you will learn about some of the different techniques that many world famous psychic mediums use to open their channels when they do their work. You will see that they all use different techniques to get to the same place. I deeply admire their techniques, especially since each of these great spirit mediums has protection built right into the technique they use. This is especially admirable because, since most of them are self-taught, no one taught them that protection. It was something their own guides and experience brought them to. Each person who reads this book will have the advantage of having many of these techniques discussed and shown to you. It will shorten the process of developing your skills in channeling and spirit communication – but to finely hone these skills may take years. Many world-renowned psychic mediums have been studying and practicing spirit communication skills for most of their lives. Most would say they are still learning and growing in the field even after perhaps fifteen or twenty years of practice.

You are learning the basics here of what may very well become a lifetime of study for you! Isn’t that exciting?! You are about to begin a journey that can lead you to open new facets of your own being; you will be challenged, you will struggle, you will be amazed, and you will grow enormously as you read these pages. The universe is far bigger than you ever imagined it to be. And you will, perhaps, develop some tools in both the art of channeling and the art of spirit communication that can help many of your friends and family members.

Psychic Development Level 4 is written from the standpoint that your guides and the people who have passed on in your life are already there... they are right next to you... they are already wanting to communicate. If you are not already channeling them or getting information from them, it is because you are not listening! It is not their fault! They are struggling to be heard!

So, a big part of what you have to learn is how to listen. And in listening you will understand and develop a pattern for identification that will eventually be uniquely your own.

You will have patterns and techniques to follow to help you develop your listening skills. John Maerz has developed and contributed many techniques and exercises in the following pages to help you with the necessary patterns, tools, and skills. One is a straightforward technique that everyone will readily be able to employ. You’ll be able to tell what side of the family a spirit coming through in your spirit communication reading is on, whether it is a mother or father or friend or sibling; you’ll be able to tell the sex of the person, and what generation they come from. As you stick with and work with these guidelines, your growing familiarity with them will give you enough consistency so you can see the difference of what you did or didn’t feel and continue to develop your ability.

From time immemorial people have had channeling and spirit communication abilities. Spiritualism dates back to the mid 1800’s. Spirit communication and channeling go back to at least ancient Greece. Cassandra is probably the most famous seer from those times. What you are about to learn here is not new, and is an extension of your already developed psychic abilities. In fact, all of the skills and abilities you have learned to work with in reading live people in Psychic Development Levels 1, 2, and 3, you will learn to employ while communicating with those who have passed on, or with yours and your clients’ guides.

Our world is a realm of energy. Someday when we have the right tools we will be able to measure this psychic energy. Physicists are in the process of ‘discovering God’ in a philosophy of unity in the universe. Our guides and deceased loved ones are now energy beings on the other side of the veil. They are still very much a part of our world, as you will see.

Chapter 1

Channeling and Spirit Communication

How many of you have known consciously that information you are getting about the future or about something that you are doing is coming through from a higher level, or a higher plane, as if it is not self? That is called channeling.

Just about everyone reading these words has already had that experience; that means you have already channeled! Channeling is a normal human experience, and you have surely already opened to channel at some point in your life. In this book, I will teach you more about how to recognize channeling and also how to make it happen at will. It is very important to know how to go back and forth between the opening and closing of the channel.

A few years ago at a seminar in Barbados presented by John Edward, I had the pleasure of meeting another well-known medium, Robert Brown, author of We Are Eternal. During the course of the week-long seminar, Robert taught a session that included how to close down your chakras. At the time I was horrified. Robert was teaching people how to close their chakras, when I was teaching my students only how to open them. After some thought I realized that what Robert was doing was correct; he was teaching a much more intense channeling and spirit communication than what I normally do. He was not operating in a protected environment and he was assuming the people he was teaching would not operate in a protected environment all the time, so he was teaching that protective mechanism right from the beginning. I will include a similar exercise here.

How many of you have actually received a clear message, either while awake or asleep, from someone you know to be dead? That is spirit communication, often referred to as mediumship. If you have done this even once, it is very easy to repeat the process. But even if you have never done it, you will be able to after reading these pages, and following the exercises here. Everyone has the ability. It is my purpose to teach you to use the abilities that you have.

I work with my clairvoyance and empathic skill, as well as with certain symbols. I can often see the people that have passed, as if they are projections of my mind. John Maerz, founder of the Astrological Institute of Integrated Studies, works through symbols and names, similar to John Edward. Different psychics work in different ways, and all are correct. You will need to find the technique you are comfortable with. The information in these pages is intended to help you find your way.

Determining the Difference Between Channeling Information From a Higher Source Versus Channeling with Ego

This is the most important question of all. And every channel and medium needs to give himself a reality check periodically to make sure he is truly channeling. When ego gets involved you expose yourself to lower vibrations that can bring you down, and bring down the people you are trying to help.

Ego has two sides, and both are out of balance. One side says, “Poor me, I am so pathetic. Look how much I have suffered.” And the other says, “Yes, I am who I am, and I am great.” When people learn to discern what they are doing, we get to a neutral ground.

When ego gets involved you may just be telling yourself what you want to hear. It is also much easier to discern this when you are working for another person, a stranger, than when you are receiving information for yourself. I feel that ANY time I receive information for myself that information is automatically suspect.

Here’s an example from a Tarot class I taught. My class threw a spread on me about how my weekend would be. I interpreted the reading for the class. After the weekend was done, I came back and put the same spread out to see what happened. It was amazing. Every piece of information that was said before the weekend fit, but in a totally different context! It was a completely wrong interpretation of correct information. This is the problem when you are doing something on yourself. We try to fit information we receive on ourselves or people close to us into a framework of what we know. Often that information comes from a different place or a different perspective.

So, if you receive clear information on yourself, it may be right, or wrong. But if you are getting information on yourself about something you are emotionally vested in it is always suspect. Make note of it. In fact, write it down and date it. It may indeed be accurate. At a later date you can check back to see if it was.

The only time you can get accurate information on yourself is when you can maintain your personal objectivity, which is very hard to do. I have occasionally received information on myself I know to be correct because it came through in symbols that were not my own. With experience, you will begin to understand when it is not you creating the information because it is so different from anything you would come up with yourself.

Likewise, if you are doing a session for a client, and the client has a situation in his life that is similar to something you are going or have gone through that was extremely emotional, you will lack objectivity in dealing with the client’s problem. It is likely that you cannot read for that client. The instant you find yourself in a personal way concerned with what the person does, you have blocked your channel. Ego blocks the channel!

Also, you can only truly be effective when your ego is a healthy ego. You need to know your limits, and be objective about yourself. When you tap into someone else in a way that gets your emotions or your temper up, you cannot do an accurate reading.

A problem professional psychic readers encounter frequently is that people often come in with a preconceived idea of what they want. In such an instance nothing else will please them. It won’t matter if all of the information that comes through is correct or not, if you are missing the one thing they want, they leave unhappy with your work. Faced with client dissatisfaction, it is tempting to allow the ego to take over and to try to make them happy by sacrificing accuracy.

Many clients want extra personal attention from the reader. Remember, attention is energy. It is like food to many people. Some clients will do things or say things during your session with them that cause you to react in an ego mode. And as soon as you resent the client, think about him in a negative way, or have any personal, judgmental reaction, you are relating from your ego and you can’t channel anymore. You might be able to give the client telepathic or empathic information based on what is going on now, picking up what is going on from his energy field or aura, but you can’t bring in future-oriented information from a higher source. Your personal reaction closes the channel.

Your channel, by the way, comes in through the Crown Center, located at the top of the head. It connects you to your Higher Self and through your Higher Self to higher guidance and eventually, as you develop spirit communication skills, people who have passed on. Any lower personality or ego related reaction blocks it, as you can see from the above examples.

When you are getting a reading with a psychic, as soon as you see him lose his objectivity, you should be aware he also has lost his channel. He can no longer give accurate future-oriented information, and information will not have the depth it would if the connection to Higher Self was open.

But keep in mind that the people that you attract WILL reflect you, and your stage of development. You can never do a bad reading; but you will certainly have some that are better than others. So, for example, if you are having a problem handling money, then everyone you meet will either be rolling in money or just squeaking by. You bring to you the kind of vibration that you need to work through. You want to be nice and clear as a channel, you want to be objective, but everyone you attract brings your issues to you, which forces you to grow also.

It is not the ego that needs to be set aside, but the extremes of the ego that need to be set aside. For example, if you have a profession that you are good at, comfortable with, and don’t have to prove anything about, you are ego balanced relative to that profession. But if you are in a job situation where you have to prove something to someone or diminish yourself in some way, you have a problem with ego. It takes a really, really strong and powerful ego to give up the ego!

We need a strong enough ego to know if the information we are getting is correct. We also need a strong enough ego to let go of the need to be perfect. This is especially important in mediumship where it is common for people to develop psychic amnesia, a term John Edward coined to describe people’s inability to remember even important people in their lives, when they are put on the spot, or when they have a pre-conceived expectation of who they want to hear from in a reading.

One of my former staff members, for example, did a spirit communication session for a client who could not identify any of the people he brought through. He said, after the last ‘failure’ that it was best to terminate the reading. The client said, “This has never happened before, does it have something to do with me?” The psychic medium answered, “Sometimes it happens... sometimes the energy just isn’t right for the reading. Sometimes we just don’t place the people; it’s okay.” He did not let his ego get involved. If his ego were involved, he would have been upset. Instead, he went on to do more readings that day, all were good, and they all had strong connections. He was able to do those other readings well because he wasn’t ego-attached to the failed one.

There are techniques that you can learn to help put your ego aside, to become that clear channel. Some of those techniques will be presented as exercises in these pages, but even more are given in Psychic Development Level 1. If you need this balance (and we all probably do) you should be sure to read that, and then reread it! As a matter of fact, all of my Certificate students are required to complete Psychic Development Levels 1 through 3 before they are allowed to begin their channeling and spirit communication studies. Those studies set the foundation for all other psychic work.

You MUST be able to channel before you can become a medium. The two skills are very closely related. If you can’t do the one, you certainly can’t do the other. Just as a surgeon must first be a medical doctor, a psychic medium must first be a channel.

Once you have learned to channel, once you have learned to set your ego aside, then comes the difficulty of determining whether the information you are receiving is coming from your guides, or perhaps your dead uncle... You will learn techniques here to open your channel, and also a method of finding out from whom the message is coming!

Often in a channeled reading or mediumship reading you will not be able to relate to the information coming through. When that happens, let it go, write down what you get, and wait for confirmation to come somewhere down the road. Tell your clients to do that as well. As the channel or medium, there are many times you will have no understanding of what you are saying. Remember, in channeling the symbols you receive are usually symbols developed between you and your guides, but in spirit communication the symbols will be those coming from a deceased person. So, often neither the spirit medium nor the sitter have the slightest idea what the symbols stand for until somewhere down the road a third party gives the information clarity. In those cases, you need to just give the information, have the client write it down, and hope for eventual confirmation. This is called giving the client homework!

For example, I was doing a regular future-oriented psychic reading for a woman who had lost a child. (I had no idea of this at the time.) In the middle of the reading I saw this 9-year-old child dressed up in a leotard doing back handsprings down the aisle of an airplane, holding cheerleader pompoms. To make sure I knew it was an airplane, she started doing them outside on the wings. Now, it was apparent to me that this was NOT one of my symbols. So, she asked the client if the symbol meant anything to her. The woman said, “Oh, my God...” It seemed her younger daughter had died two years earlier; the older sister was getting ready to fly with her mom (my client) to another state to be in a cheerleader contest. The younger daughter was telling us she knew about the contest, she was excited about it, and she was going with them. That is what the back flips were all about. I would never have been able to interpret that.

When the symbol is not yours you need to give it to the client. It may mean something to him (or her), or he may be able to find someone in his own circle of friends and family that it means something to. By the way, the little girl had been a gymnast. That’s why she was wearing a leotard.

A Little Bit About Psychic Protection

Life brings to you what you need to learn. As far as defense goes, the only real things you have to defend against are the things you are drawing to yourself. If you have no issues with yourself, you do not attract their equivalent or their reflection. Unfortunately, most of us have many unresolved personal issues. So, working on your self is imperative.

Most of us have been brought up to put everyone else first. One reason that psychic self-defense is important is that most of us actually have to give ourselves permission to defend ourselves! Our ethics say we should let people walk over us because otherwise we will seem like selfish people. In order to be self-actualized you need to have some sense of selfishness, and also insight on where to draw the line so that people don’t encroach on you as a developing human being and inhibit who you are becoming. So in that respect, and others, psychic self-defense is very important.

If you are doing a psychic reading, perhaps geared toward the future and using a modality like cards or astrology, you don’t need tremendous amounts of psychic self-defense. The type of defense you need there is to remain clear and to keep the ego apart because you are not exposed to something other than self.

However, as soon as you begin to channel you are bringing in information and energy from another area. A good example is the one above that described channeling information from a deceased child in the middle of a future-oriented psychic reading. Supposing in that example instead of contacting this wonderful sweet and clear young girl, I had contacted a relative that had killed some people in pre-meditated murder and is earthbound and looking for a vehicle to work through. Then I’d have this negative, disgusting being that might give some good information as bait, but after the client left, I wouldn’t be able to get rid of him! I would feel dirty, I would be having these mean thoughts, and I would be wondering where these thoughts are coming from!

One of the big arguments against Spiritualism as it is commonly practiced in the United States is that most Spiritualists here believe since they trust in God they are automatically protected. Most believe that where there is enough love nobody gets hurt, so they don’t take enough steps to protect. In Great Britain and other European nations, more care is usually taken, and taught. But we Americans have that built-in attitude of invulnerability.

Pure physics tells us that like attracts like, and opposites attract. If you go through life trying to be ‘totally good’ you will attract two kinds of people: other people who are equally good, or people who are very bad. The same holds true for the people on the other side that you will attract. Sometimes it is easier to choose a middle of the road path... there is a lot less pressure on you that way. There will be fewer extremes.

So, why is psychic self-defense a part of this course of study? The answer is that any time we deal with channeling or mediumship, because we can’t ALWAYS tell where the message is coming from, we need to have taken protective steps first, so that we don’t have to wonder where the message is coming from (i.e., is it coming from an axe murderer, or from your client’s grandmother).

And remember, when you are reading for someone you are going into another person’s vibration anyway. Often psychics, in their egotism, will say they feel that if their vibration is high enough they can’t be affected by a negative vibration. I have seen some very good people, who are also good psychics, mediums, and channels get very hurt by this attitude of being above it all.

It is also important to note that on every plane those opposites exist. So, even if you are successful in raising your vibration to a very high level, you will still find an opposite energy there to affect you adversely if you allow it to.

The height to which you lift your vibration, generally speaking, will dictate the level of vibration of the being that you will be channeling when you read. Usually the higher the vibration, the less likelihood there is that the entity that comes in will be malicious or evil. But that is not 100 percent. There are also some negative entities on the higher planes. Our universe has a balance. High, by the way, usually means subtle, and more refined, more evolved, figuratively speaking.

If your goal is to become a psychic channel your first steps in your own development should be to work toward raising your own vibration, and keeping yourself clear.

Preparing to Become a Channel and Keeping Yourself Clear

Meditation is the best tool of all in your preparation to become a psychic channel. A lot of meditation and also any kind of real spiritually-oriented work will raise your vibration. It tends to make you a clearer channel not just for channeling information, but also for channeling energy.

Prayer also helps. Looked at as a form of meditation it is a wonderful way to still and calm the mind. In fact there are many forms of meditation that people do that they don’t even realize are meditation.

Anything that cleanses your physical body and clears your chakras (energy centers) raises your vibration and you begin to be the flame; the people around you who have not done this meditation and energy work are attracted to your flame because it feels like taking a bath in a clear mountain stream.

It is unfortunate but you can expect that the clearer you become and the more work you do on self the more you will attract people who have muddy auras and seek to clean themselves off in your space. You become a clean place to drop negative emotions and other forms of excess energies that people don’t know how to get rid of themselves. Haven’t you noticed, in your home, as soon as you clear the kitchen table, the rest of the family seems to be in a hurry to put their stuff back on it? It is like the clean spot just draws the garbage! When you work to clear yourself, you become the clean spot. You draw the garbage.

You will probably never be able to stop these ‘downloads’ entirely from going on. The clearer you become, the more your friends, family, and acquaintances will unconsciously seek to ground their overload of energy on you. It makes them feel clear. But you can do a lot of things that involve psychic self-defense that are subtle, that don’t alienate the people you love and care for, but allow you to side step the ‘dump.’ Remember, if you are going to do this kind of work you must keep yourself clear. You might even take the time to teach those close to you how to ground and clear themselves. As a result, you’ll find many of your relationships improving!

The experience of flying on an airplane provides a good example of why you need better defenses as you become a clearer and stronger channel. Suppose that you may be perfectly comfortable flying, but the passenger in the seat next to you is fearful. You are open to receiving messages, if you haven’t shut down psychically and protected. You can easily end up with an upset stomach and all the fear that actually belongs to that other passenger. That is why you must learn to shut down and protect, open and close, at will. If you become too open it can affect your entire life in an undesirable way. You pick up most strongly on the passenger next to you because your bodies are in such close contact that a very strong empathic link is formed.

It is also unfortunate that most people like to play with the psychic tools they learned in their early development. There is a temptation to reach out and feel everything and everyone, and that can get you into a lot of trouble. You need to realize that there is a time and a place to use your ability.

The clearer you become the more you are aware of other people’s telepathic responses, thought patterns, emotional states, and more. With experience you will learn to know – are you precognitively channeling information that there will be a rough landing or are you only picking up on your fellow passenger’s projection and fear? Are you picking up his nervousness during the flight in your physical body? That would be an empathic response. Are you worried? That would be a mental telepathic response. Your ability could even be working on all of these levels at the same time! Without psychic self defense you might be experiencing a miserable flight! But rest assured, those of you who are meditating, and clearing yourselves, keeping yourself in a ‘clean’ environment, the ‘cleaner’ you get spiritually the more you will pick up from the world at large. But you will also be able to tell the difference – is it yours, or his? If you want to keep being that clear channel, and continue to be able to get information that is unbiased, that works, that is clear, you must stay clear, you must keep meditating and keep practicing the many exercises from the first three classes in this series.

What happens when you channel that axe murderer and can’t get rid of him? Well, if you are truly that perfectly clear channel, HE CAN’T STICK. No matter how hard he tries, he can’t stick. That is why the Buddha says, ‘Be like a pane of glass.’ Let it go right through you.

It works the same way in your day-to-day work life. You need to learn that other people’s problems are their own, or you cannot function in your daily environment either. Taking on their problems is another form of muddying your vibration. You can listen, but then let them go. You need to understand that you are not responsible for other people’s moods, attitudes, or projections of other negative emotions.

The clearer you get, the more messages you receive. Many students initially feel that they should stay open all of the time to receive channeled information whenever it comes in. Others worry, if they are supposed to be shut down or protected constantly because of being such an open channel. The answer is that none of us are responsible for taking care of the world. All of us must be responsible to ourselves first. That requires some time to ourselves during which we can be shut down, to regenerate, to stay protected.

The problem with empaths (and most of us who enter the psychic field are highly empathic) is that we all have a save-the-world syndrome. When we pick up on another’s hurt or fear, we often internalize it as our own and thereby lose our clarity. If we are astute enough to identify it as not-self, very often we still feel such a need to help that we still give our energy to it and buy into it that way. We need to learn that when we are in psychic-mode dealing with a client, at that moment we ARE supposed to fix it. But, for example, when we are on an airplane reading our book and minding our own business we are supposed to be doing just that, not reacting to another passenger’s projected fear and trying to settle it (unless it has become so extreme that it is affecting not just you, but other passengers as well). You begin to realize that it is NOT GOD that has allowed you to pick up this information and needs you to fix it... it is just the combination of the other person’s projection and your empathy. If the other person wants to be upset, that is his or her choice. Get the information, accept that it is correct, and then let it go. Use your intellectual insight to determine if you WANT to act upon it. Don’t be drawn in by your empathy.

You should be aware, too, that there are many people who pray on the sympathies of empaths, although not all do it purposefully. Some people deliberately use their projection of anger, or fear, to attract the sympathies and energy of the surrounding empaths. It is a very good way to get energy.

Those of us who are empaths usually make the best psychics, channels, and mediums. But until we understand our empathic skills we are sitting ducks who attract into our lives the dumpers, the mood controllers, the people who are constantly in a mood because by doing it they have our complete and total attention all the time. Our ability can be more of a liability than help, until we learn to control it.

Chapter 2

Psychic Protection in Channeling

The kind of protection you need as a psychic channel is a lot more general than what you need as a psychic medium. How to protect yourself when in a public place, or from receiving a download of emotional energy from someone (as discussed in the last chapter), is an important part of protection for a psychic channel. Also, you will need to learn techniques for clearing yourself after the fact. These will also be useful in your studies and work as a psychic medium.

For example, have you ever talked to a good friend over the telephone that had a problem and by the time you got to the end of the conversation your friend felt great, but you felt horrible? Were you able to go to sleep that night, or did your mind keep turning and turning, and somehow you felt dirty, yet before the phone call you felt fine? It might be a good idea to not take phone calls for two hours or so before bedtime to prevent this kind of happening. There are, unfortunately, many people who unconsciously know that if they create a link to you just before bedtime, they can continue the download on you all night! And certainly, avoid doing this to your friends and family! Be self-responsible. We can’t expect other people to treat us well if we don’t treat them well! So, how can you get rid of this excess energy, ground it, even after you’ve picked it up? That is what this chapter is all about.

Basic Defense Mechanisms

The more you meditate or pray, then the more natural protection you will have. Showering, bathing, or swimming daily will help to keep you clear. You need to introduce things into your daily routine that will help to make and keep you a clear channel. Being a clear channel means being physically clear and emotionally clear.

The more you meditate, the less you find yourself becoming involved in the emotional quandaries of your life, and the people issues around you. Therefore, for those of you who don’t meditate, meditation needs to become a part of your daily routine. If you don’t you will be drawn into other people’s problems before you even know it is happening. And once your energy becomes muddy it is now too late to pull back. You have lost your emotional distance, energy has been exchanged, and now you have to go back to the initial stages of getting yourself clear again.

Here are some techniques you can use to meditate:

- Sitting meditation is usually done with the focus and concentration on the breath. This type of meditation is taught in detail in Psychic Development Level 1.

- Moving meditation is a great way for people who have trouble with sitting meditation to learn to meditate. Some examples of moving meditation are Hatha Yoga, T’ai Chi Ch’uan, Chi Kung, various other forms of martial arts, working out at the local gym, and even long distance running. It is a fact that pushing the body past a certain level of endurance pushes you into a clear-minded meditative state. In long-distance running this is called the pain threshold.

- Guided visualizations can be used as an aid to focus the mind and get used to the process of sitting meditation.

As a meditative person you will become a clear, stable, emotionally objective person who is a perfect vessel to channel information. The side effects are also very good. Meditation gives you the ability to recognize that there is energy other than the energy of self affecting you.

The first place to start with psychic self-defense for those learning to become a channel is to establish what I call a meditative personality – a personality that remains centered and balanced in every circumstance.

When you find yourself pushed off balance, you should immediately do what is called in Yoga, three deep Great Breaths, or as John Maerz calls them, belly breaths. First, you expand the ribs, bring down the diaphragm, then pull the breath deep into the lungs, expanding your abdomen as you breathe in. Let the exhale, or out-breath, take care of itself. Do three of these in a row, and make them as deep as you can. It is absolutely impossible to be in an emotional hype after you’ve done these three great breaths.

In fact, if you do these three great breaths like a bellows, pushing your aura out to fill the space around you, all of the people in your vicinity become calm and centered, or they leave. (Children usually resist this; they like to be hyper. And, of course, that is their right. You should never interfere with the free will of another – especially if it is not YOUR child! So, if you do this around a child, expect the child to leave the scene, leaving the adult people behind to regain their calm space!) These three deep breaths increase the alkalinity in your bloodstream. They stimulate the parasympathetic nerves of the body and calm you down. Shallow breathing, on the other hand, makes your blood chemistry more acid, a condition that stimulates the flight or fight reflex and the production of adrenaline.

When you want to raise your energy level, do Yoga bellows breathing – quick, short, sharp breaths. When you want to calm and center yourself, deep diaphragmatic breaths should be done. A combination of both increases your energy level and your ability to project it. Learn and use breath control, as described above. The following lifestyle changes will also greatly enhance your results:

- Leave places and situations that don’t feel right energetically. Now that you have your balance and centeredness, and you can pick up on vibration, if you walk into a place or find yourself dealing with a person and it doesn’t feel right, be smart enough to walk away! Don’t feel that you have to fix it for everyone. The whole key to this is being a centered and balanced person. Don’t be foolish enough to allow yourself to be drawn into these little issues that you won’t even remember at this time next year. Run your life with intellect and intuition, not with instinct and uncontrolled emotion. Instinct and uncontrolled emotion lead to fight or flight responses and you being totally out of control. Intuition gives you the information you need to make a calm decision about whether to stay, leave, or how to handle any situation.

- Be sure to get the right amount and quality of sleep. If something is bothering your sleep pattern, find out what it is and change it! If you are working extra hours, find time during the day for a nap. In Yoga it is taught that sleep in excess of six hours is unnecessary, if you are getting the right quality sleep. Some people with very active minds need more hours of sleep a day, up to nine hours. More sleep than that can actually MAKE you tired!

- Eat a proper diet. Cut out sugar or cut it down. Cut back on carbohydrate intake. White sugar (or honey) and refined flours, in particular, deplete the body of its vitamin B, which you need for a healthy nervous system. If you are eating no other sugar and limiting carbohydrates, then fruit is fine. But if you are eating a lot of sugar and carbohydrates, the sugar in fruit will not be good for you. If you are eating the typical American diet, your nervous system has already been worn ragged, even supplementing with B vitamins is not going to fix it. Correct your diet! But I don’t want to recommend a diet because not everyone thrives on the same diet. You will need to experiment with yourself and find out which dietary needs you have, what works for YOU. Between food and sleep, discover what gives you a high energy level with NO downs, not even that 4-o’clock low that affects so many people. If you experience that 4-o’clock low, your diet is not correct. You should be able to go through the day on an even keel, with level emotions, no super highs or lows and no need to fall asleep. Foods, by the way, come in different densities. The less dense the food the more nourishment it provides because it requires less energy to digest. The highest density meat is pork, followed by beef, then fowl. On the next level up is fish and dairy, on the next are vegetables, and on the top are fruits and nuts. The denser foods are very grounding, but they take a lot of energy to digest. The higher-level foods take less energy to digest and so generate more energy for you. But bear in mind if you are thinking of going vegetarian that not everyone thrives on a vegetarian diet either. Remember to eat on the higher levels, though, when you are doing readings. Dione Fortune, a well-known metaphysician from around the turn of the last century, tells us that if you want to enhance your psychic ability, then you should become a vegetarian, eat lighter foods. If you want to become lighter in your own vibration, like a Yogi, eat fruits and nuts. But if you want to keep one foot firmly on the ground and be sure to deal with the world of everyday affairs, eat meat! So, remember, what you put in your diet makes a big difference in what you can and can’t cope with.

More Specific Defense Mechanisms

- Use white light for protection when you are outside your home. This is simple and quite effective. Bring a glow of white light down from above and surround yourself completely with it. Then, visualize a burst of brilliant white energy coming from your Heart Center, and feeling all of the light meeting and merging in and around you, so that when you are done you feel like a glowing ball of white light. The white light actually intensifies your energy. Remember, the best defense is a good offense. When you increase the white light around you the world will no longer be pressing in on you.

- Close off your chakras. Mentally visualize a little trap door on each of your chakras, except for the Crown Center, and close them up when you are not in reading mode. This will help to prevent you from picking things up indiscriminately from the people around you, even if you are in a trying situation. Leave the Crown Center open so that you can still replenish your own energy from the Universal Source. Remember to open them up again when you come back into your safe home environment. Eventually, you will train yourself into doing this. It is easy for many people to just do this by counting the chakras closed when they go out, and open when they come back in, or do psychic work. Remember to leave the Crown Center open. You can go from top to bottom, or bottom to top; it doesn’t matter. The difference between a closed chakra and a blocked chakra is simple. A blocked chakra is like a vein with arterial sclerosis. The chakra gradually narrows from residual energies blocking it (usually from accumulated emotional trauma) until it is finally closed. An open chakra is literally an open gateway through which life energy rushes. When we close them with a trap door that we visualize, it is a temporary protection over the chakra opening, not a block. We can open it at will, with a mere thought, or a response generated by that chakra. The more aware you become of your chakras, and the more energy you consciously push through them, the more energy you will be able to channel. One of the real dangers of all psychics is that many of us end up with very well developed upper chakras, but blocked lower ones. That eventually creates illness. The way to prevent that is to remain physically, intellectually, and socially active. Remember, too, that when you close your chakras, you are only closing off energy from the world around you from entering them, not channeled energy from the higher planes that can still enter through your Crown Center and move down to fill each chakra in turn. They are still functioning, they are still spinning, but they are doing it without opening up to the surrounding physical environment. There is more information on chakras in Psychic Development Level 1.

- Reflect unwanted energy back to the universe for recycling. Doing this is easy. Just surround that glowing white light that you’ve put around yourself with a brilliant blue reflective surface or shield of metal that you visualize. Blue, especially a bright, vibrant blue, is the most protective color.

- Use your breath. Blue is also the color of Shiva, an Indian God. The Indians have a living pantheon of Gods (to ease Western understanding, they may be likened to the Catholic Saints). When 5 or 10 million people a day are praying to a single entity, that entity becomes a very powerful force, whether you believe in it or not. It is a very powerful thoughtform. Shiva corresponds to your powerful Throat Center energy. When you bring the blue light of the Throat Center (the center of power) out with the breath of Shiva and blow it around you, you are not just protecting yourself with blue light, you are tapping into a thoughtform powered by millions of minds praying daily. This is a very powerful protection. Or, do the same thing but use the red and green light associated with Archangel Michael for strong protection. Again, the Archangel Michael has taken on the power of an intense universal thoughtform over the ages, in addition to being a protective entity in his own right.

- Protect yourself during sleep.

- Use your worry box (a box you visualize that you put all of your concerns and fears into – when you are done put it off of your property mentally, completely out of your space).

- Put your whole house in the white light, and put your blue shield up.

- If you are feeling very invaded, put a clockwise circle of salt around your bed. That will not just keep people out of your space as you sleep, but it will also keep you in bed, instead of wandering the astral!

How to ‘Ground Out’ After the Fact

1. The best and fastest way of grounding out AFTER you have already picked up something negative is to give yourself a 10-minute break. Find yourself an empty room at work or wherever you are, and lay down on the floor with the entire length of your spine against it. When you pick energies up, you usually pick them up along the spine. Those of you who are very psychically sensitive will actually feel this as if someone is touching your spine! The spine is essentially an antenna. So, if you can lay the spine of your back on the floor, and visualize white light coming down through your whole body and out through the floor, you can quickly ground out anything you’ve picked up. This is a good clearing technique.

2. Those of you who know a little bit of Yoga can also do some stretching of the spine that will ‘snap’ the energy free. I suggest you pick up one or two basic Yoga books that have some easy-to-follow photos in them.

3. A third technique that is simple and quick, and is good in an emergency when you don’t have time for a complete clearing, is to wash your hands under cold water, visualizing white light coming down through your head, filling your whole body, especially your spine, and visualize washing down the drain any negative or excess energy you have picked up.

4. When you get home at night throw a handful of sea salt or rock salt (not iodized salt) in your bathtub and soak in it for a half an hour. Salt water is an electrolyte that makes a wonderful grounding agent. Those who live near the ocean can take a walk on the beach; the salt spray is clearing. Swim in the water as well; it is an interesting and notable fact that a person possessed by a spirit cannot go into the ocean as the salt water shakes the spirit free. So, if you even think this has happened to you, go for a swim in the ocean. Instantly it will be gone! (Anyone can make the equivalent of the ocean in their bathtub by putting about 3 cups of any synthetic ‘instant-ocean’ saltwater fish-tank salt into their bath. Pick this up at any pet store!)

*Some mediums believe that rose water breaks the connection in spirit possession, but I do not find this to be the case. Rosewater opens to a higher vibration, but does not supply the electrolyte balance – the electrical charge that shakes a spirit free of you.

5. Iron, copper, and hematite are also good grounds. Wearing these in an item of jewelry when you are going into a difficult situation where you know you will want to ground negative energy as it comes your way is a healthy choice. It does not have to be touching your skin to be effective, merely in your space, or aura.

6. There are also certain protective symbols that can be used. Christians, for example, can successfully work with a cross. The best protection is probably the pentagram, a five-pointed star inside a circle. Wear it over you heart if you are moving into a situation where you are feeling threatened. (For those of you who are uncomfortable with a pentagram, thinking it is a symbol of witches, you need to be aware that it arises out of ancient Egypt and the Kabbala, and it far pre-dates Wicca, Witchcraft, Christianity, and even Judaism. It is found in all of the world’s major religions.)

7. You can also wear the sea salt in a pouch for protection.

8. Wear dragon’s blood in a pouch for protection. (Dragon’s blood is an herbal resin that is a good protection according to many magical herbalists.)

9. You can visualize a tornado passing through you and grounding negative or excessive energy into the ground, or even each chakra spinning so fast that it can throw off all of your negativity. This is a quick fix for you, but please do not use this technique to try to clear an object. It pulls the object’s energy through you and you will become contaminated by it instead of clearing it!

Remember – every person’s energy in you is, on some level, abrasive and therefore invasive, and so you will feel a need to ground and clear following any energy interchange with another person.

*Trance mediumship is an extreme of this. Personation is a lesser form of trance mediumship, being a precursor to it. Trance mediumship is literally taking the spirit’s energy into yourself, letting the spirit take over to use your body as a medium to communicate. Personation is a minor application of this, as for example, when a medium shakes his finger the way the deceased person did. Trance mediumship is when the medium completely turns his body over to the incoming entity, and has no conscious awareness of what is being done with it! I do not encourage this latter form of mediumship; most mediums that do this die young. It is like putting 50 volts of electricity into a 10-volt line... burning the psychic medium out. Your nervous system cannot handle the energy. Well-known examples are Jane Roberts, who channeled Seth, and died at age 55 and Edgar Cayce, the famous ‘sleeping prophet’ who died at age 67.

Chapter 3

The Art of Channeling

To channel you need to raise a lot of energy – the laid back, totally receptive mode doesn’t work! So, we will work with energy to raise energy. Eventually, you will be able to use light energy to raise your consciousness to a higher level, which works well in channeling.

Here is a good exercise to begin to develop the ability to bring that consciousness-raising light into your work, and protect yourself at the same time. It is an invocation. Before you do this, take note of how you are feeling. We call this personal assessment, ‘taking your temperature,’ psychically speaking. Anytime you are about to do any psychic work, or go into any new environment, take a moment to see how you feel first. Then afterward, check back to note any changes and see if you like them. Also, when finished, you should always be back to your ‘normal temperature,’ whatever that is! What you should feel for is what is going on with you, how you feel inside, your external feelings, and so on.

Exercise #1: Invocation of the Four Archangels

1. Face east. The first Archangel you will invoke is Raphael, who is the Archangel of healing. The associated colors are bright yellow and mauve. To call the energy of Raphael, say, “Archangel Raphael, I invoke thee for protection.” You should imagine a gentle wind penetrating your entire body. (When done in a group, as we do in class, this is truly dynamic!) Then take a moment to take your temperature again to see what you feel associated with this energy.

2. Face south. The second Archangel you will invoke is Michael, who is the warrior Archangel. Again, take your temperature. Now, invoke Archangel Michael by saying, “Archangel Michael, I invoke thee for protection.” Take your temperature once again. Allow yourself to perceive the difference between the first energy and the second. The colors associated with Archangel Michael are red and gold. You may imagine an intense radiation of heat associated with this Archangel.

3. Face west. The third Archangel you will invoke is Gabriel, who is the messenger and the gatekeeper between this world and the next. Take your temperature first. Then say, “Archangel Gabriel, I invoke thee for protection.” Take your temperature again. Feel the difference in the energy. The colors associated with Archangel Gabriel are blue and orange, and the associated feeling is a sense of moisture or flowing water.

4. Face north. The fourth Archangel you will invoke is Auriel who is the Archangel in charge of all earthly things. Take your temperature first, and then loudly and with authority say, “Archangel Auriel, I invoke thee for protection.” Now, take your temperature again, and feel the difference in energies. The colors associated with Auriel are green and brown, and the associated feeling is a cool, calm, and rooted sense of stability.

As you did this you should have perceived differences between each of the energies. When you are in your own home, your own space, and you want to channel the energy of a spirit, you can use the above invocation to clear the space before you begin. Likewise, you can use this in a public place provided you get there early. To be most effective, the names need to be almost sung out audibly. The vibration of sound connects you to the vibration of the Archangels. Doing it silently works, but is not nearly as effective.

We have also seen some psychics use an invocation of Shiva, or “Om Mane Padme Hum” from the Hindu tradition, or “Yod Heh Vau Heh” from the Judaic, to create a similar effect. If you were using this, you would chant the name four times, as above, taking your temperature each time to be able to identify the energy that is coming in. Anything that is in mass consciousness for a period of time becomes a powerful energy. The collective energy becomes a huge thoughtform. This is why we feel temples and shrines often to be blessed. A lot of that feeling is the energy that has accumulated around these places as believers congregated there. When we approach a place with hopeful expectation of healing, we imbue that place, or that being, or concept, with that energy. When many people do this it creates a very powerful energy.

Now, as you take the temperature in the room you are in once again, you should feel a very intense energy surrounding you, as the energy of all four Archangels surrounds you and fills the room. This clears, protects, and raises your consciousness. As with all other exercises, the more often you do this the more effective it will be.

The next step in raising your consciousness to do the work is to learn the Higher Self Channel Meditation, below. This is an energetic meditation. It uses breath work combined with visualizing light energy. We will bring the light energy as a funnel of light coming in the top of the head, going down the spine, curving around at the base chakra, and going back up and out the crown of the head again. It is greatly augmented if you can do it in a group setting, but very effective alone, too, especially if you do it frequently.

You will be working with all of the chakras. Unfortunately, channels, mediums, and psychics don’t usually work enough with the lower centers, so we have to become extra conscious of using them. If they are not healthy, it can hurt your work as a psychic, channel, or medium. Having these lower chakras blocked or atrophied is responsible for a lot of dysfunction in the psychic community. It is responsible for stomach disorders, pancreatic problems, stomach cancers, and male-female organ problems as well. All are stimulated, if not actually caused, by the lack of circulation of energy through these chakras.

Exercise #2: Higher Self Channel Opening Meditation

1. Close your eyes. Inhale three times through the nose and expand your belly as you do. Let the weight of your body be what pushes the air out on the exhale. Don’t control or force it. Just observe it happening.

2. In your mind’s eye step outside of yourself and look at yourself. See a point of white light in the middle of your heart.

3. As you breath in, power this light with your breath and expand it to encompass first your heart, then your lungs, chest, neck, head, shoulders, arms, hands, lower body, legs, and feet until you are completely surrounded by a shell of white light.

4. Now, push this light up through the crown of your head in the form of a counterclockwise spinning column as high as you can see, and down below you, clockwise, as deeply as you can see.

5. Allow your consciousness to travel, spinning up through light like an elevator. Your breath is the regulator of intensity and speed.

6. You have become a conscious part of that light, feeling and perceiving within it. As your perception moves higher you sense your Higher Self at the top of this column. To keep the column open and flowing is to maintain a connection to your Higher Self.

7. Now, bring your consciousness back to the room you are in, back to now, but leave yourself in this open channel of light from your Higher Self. You are safe. You are surrounded with protection.

8. When you feel fully connected return your consciousness back to awareness and open your eyes, ready to work.

After doing this exercise you should feel a shifting in your energy.

Some of you reading this may have felt physical sensations, as in a sense of a force pushing against you, or lightness; you may have perceived the colors, or even had a more intense personal experience.

Some of you will feel comfortable invoking the Archangelic presences first, and then going into the light. Others will use a different form of protection, such as our energy balloon from Psychic Development Level 1. Others will feel comfortable just going into the light, finding the protection they need there. Most of you reading this will almost become ‘high’ following this meditation. It is different from most meditations, because we are raising our vibration, and remaining calm while doing it.

The Higher Self Channel Opening Meditation is a way to protect, to raise our consciousness, and to clear ourselves. As we become clearer we become more open to that higher energy; we are able to perceive more of what we would call the God energy.

To summarize: You invoke protection via calling the four Archangels, then you clear yourself within the protection, using your breath, and finally you raise your consciousness up to a higher level using light and awareness of a supreme being or consciousness.

This exercise can also be used for healing the self. If you use it for self healing, don’t bring it back up to the channel mode; bring it all the way through your body, down your spine and down your body, then up again.

Some of you reading this may have studied the Small Circulation exercise utilized by some martial arts traditions, which is very similar to the above exercise. My partner in creating this portion of the series, John Maerz, says that in the Small Circulation you touch your tongue to the soft pallet in the mouth and squeeze the perineum on the pelvis floor (as if you are preventing yourself from urinating) to complete the circuit. Women know this exercise as the Kegel exercise. Begin at the perineum. The energy goes up the back or governing channel during the inhale and down the front or the conception vessel on the exhale. This is called the microcosmic orbit. It re-circulates and builds the energy, preventing energy loss through the arms or legs.

These exercises work on the nervous system, on other parts of your body, and they awaken and heal parts of your body. In focusing it into ourselves as God force energy, or the energy of ‘All That Is,’ we bring a higher power into ourselves.

You should also be aware that the invocation of the Archangels in Exercise #1 is a very protective technique that can be done anytime, anywhere, on its own for protection. When combined with the second exercise it gains a great deal of power and ability to raise your consciousness very high indeed.

Certainly, when you are going to do a reading for a client, doing Exercise #2, and1or the Small Circulation, is very important. Not only will you do a much better reading because of having raised your consciousness, but you also are much better protected while doing the reading.

Let’s talk about the Archangels for a moment, since we’ve invoked them here. Every culture on our planet has a representative of some form of these four Archangels. Every culture utilizes the energies of the four directions, which these four Archangels directly represent, though they may have different names for them. If you are more comfortable invoking only the directions, or the Archangels under different names, go ahead and do it! I work with the Hebrew names of Yod He Vau He for the east, Ehieh for the south, Adonai for the west, and Agla for the north.

Some people don’t use directions at all; they merely face east, then say, “Before me Raphael, behind me Gabriel, on my right hand Michael, and on my left hand Auriel.”

The Archangel Gabriel is very important to your channeling in particular because, as the Kabbala tells us, he is the gatekeeper between the physical plane and the lower astral through which all communications must flow. He is usually shown blowing his horn, by way of being a herald. He is a gateway, and a protector. The Archangel Michael is your primary protector in both channeling and mediumship. If you feel strange working with the Archangels themselves, work with the colors or the directions instead.

On the following page is another exercise you will use constantly. It is called Opening Your Spirit Gates.

There are five gates. These are not quite chakras, but loosely correspond to them. The uppermost is your top of the head, or crown – the Higher Self and the element of Spirit. Your throat is the element of air. Your heart is the element of fire. The base of the spine and sacral area is the element of water. Last, but certainly not the least, the feet are the element of earth. You vibrate or ‘sing’ each gate open in Exercise #3.

Here’s a diagram of them so you can place them in your mind.

Figure 1: The Five Spirit Gates

Each one of these energy centers or spirit gates is called by a different Hebrew God name in the traditional version of the exercise. The head, or Higher Self, channel is Ehieh, the throat channel is Jehovah Elohim, the heart channel is Jehovah Eloha Va Daath, the base of spine/sacral channel is Shaddhi El Chai, and the last channel, at the feet is Adonai Ha Aretz. However, since Hebrew names are difficult for most of us to pronounce, it is all right to use an alternative Hebrew name, Yod He Vau He (called the unpronounceable name of God, so pronounce it how you like!), using the same name, which means the highest form of God, for each of these centers until you feel comfortable with the traditional names. (Hebrew, for those of you who do not know this, is a dead language. Its present pronunciation was derived by comparing the written words to surrounding desert tribes when the present State of Israel was formed, since it was only a written language, unspoken for so many centuries. However, it is still an excellent idea to use it in your consciousness raising work, as it is also one of the only two remaining sacred languages, Sanskrit being the other. A sacred language is a language in which the actual vibration of sound IS the energy of the object being named.)

In Exercise #3 we will do a guided visualization to use sound, light, and energy to open these gates or centers. You can keep your eyes open or closed, but if it is easier to concentrate with your eyes closed, shut them.

Exercise #3: Opening Your Spirit Gates

1. You should stand to do this.

2. Focus your attention on the top of your head, your Crown Center. Vibrate or chant either Yod He Vau He, or Ehieh.

3. Do the chant a second time, and then a third time, seeing the light growing brighter and brighter.

4. Feel the light energy from your Spirit center moving down into your Throat Center.

5. Focus your attention now on your throat, your air center. Vibrate or chant either Yod He Vau He, or Jehovah Elohim.

6. Do the chant a second time, and then a third time, see the light energy at your throat grow brighter and more intense.

7. Feel the light energy from your Throat Center move down to your Heart Center.

8. Focus your attention on your heart, your fire center. Vibrate or chant either Yod He Vau He, or Jehovah Eloha Va Daath.

9. Do the chant a second and then a third time, as you see the light at your heart grow brighter and brighter.

10. Now, feel the light energy from your Heart Center move down to your Sacral/Root Center, or your water center.

11. Focus your attention on this area and vibrate or chant either Yod He Vau He, or Shaddai El Chai.

12. Do the chant a second and a third time at this center. Feel the energy intensify and get brighter and brighter.

13. Now, feel the energy move from your water center down to your feet.

14. Focus your attention on your feet, your earth center, and vibrate or chant either Yod He Vau He, or Adonai Ha Aretz.

15. Do the chant a second and a third time and each time see the light energy glow with greater brilliance.

Now, sit down. Feel the energy resonating within your entire being, from your head all the way down to your toes, vibrating, emanating, pulsating, and strengthening your connection with the infinite. As you relax into this energy, as you breathe normally into this energy, without effort you are connected.

At this moment if you are feeling an energy or impression that you feel you need to share, or to remember, write it down.

It is not uncommon to feel currents of strong energy, warmth, stability, or rootedness, like a tree would have, or be uplifted, or feel taller, or be shaky, or have various other physical or emotional or sensory reactions. Write down and note all of them.

Now, allow yourself to just be with this strong energy. Don’t hyperventilate. Just breathe normally.

Allow yourself to sense inside yourself for a moment. Take your temperature. Be aware. Sense information you may feel, or simply be aware of; thoughts that you may have that don’t have the ‘flavor’ of you about them, and that may not be of your own origin. Again, share these by writing them down.

You may be aware of your guides.

This type of energy is healing in a very special way. It helps to clear blocks. If you have any blocks within your emotional body, they are very likely to be brought to the surface when you work with this exercise. So, don’t be surprised if your throat locked up, or you felt like crying, or laughing. And if you do, don’t resist it. Just let it happen.

It is very important to let this energy flow through you without hindrance. It is opening your blocks. It is clearing channels.

- Sometimes when you are doing channeled readings your clients may interrupt the flow by talking to you about issues they feel are important. You stop to listen to them, but your guides are still channeling information to you. If you do not get this information out to the clients, it will block up your Throat Center. As long as the information, the energy, is flowing, it needs to be said, or released in some other manner. Many psychics who start to channel begin to have throat problems if they get blocked in this way. When the information comes through, its primary mode of expression is going to be verbal. It MUST COME OUT. If you are going to do psychic work for clients who aren’t ready to hear, who don’t want to listen, DON’T CHANNEL INFORMATION FOR THIS PERSON. Put on a hat if you have to that will block your crown. Shut it off. Tell your guides to go away. Otherwise, you will be headed for throat problems. When those throat problems release it often releases in laughter or tears. If you are faced with this problem of accumulated blocked verbal information, breathe through it, sing, or chant.

- You can also have blocks at other areas. For example, a block at the Heart Center may be released during this exercise, and might feel like a dam breaking or bursting open.

- Some may notice that during the toning of the God names your voice comes out differently. Or perhaps you even lost your voice at a certain point. Pay attention. Where your voice changed or you lost it, something needed to be worked on in that area. Work on it, but don’t own it. Let it go.

Following this exercise you should feel brighter and lighter.

All exercises like this one have more power when done as a group. But remember that the more frequently you do it, even alone, the more power will build up around it as it becomes YOUR ritual.

Once the channel is open, you can just hang out and enjoy the energy. Or you may use the energy for healing. Or, since your guides are also there on the other end of the channel you can approach them with a question.

To start the energy flow you do need to focus your attention on something. Usually, this occurs when we speak about something, or when you think about how you are feeling. As soon as you focus your attention in this manner, other things will begin to come through. You don’t get the channeled information by sitting back and waiting, or by being afraid to say what you feel or sense. You can create the channel, but until there is a need the energy will not come through. It is like a magnetic current. It cannot come through until there is something to draw it through.

When a message comes through try NOT to take it out of context to make sense of it, especially when you are working with clients. The message, if it is for them, may very well be in language or words that you would not understand, but they would. And if you take it out of context, they would likely lose what meaning the message had.

Imagination is your key. Without your imagination NOTHING can happen. Often, your message may feel like your imagination at work. So, tell what you received. Find out that your imagination aided you in receiving accurate channeled information.

Also, understand that you will get from your guides what you need to develop. If love is what opens you to a higher power, your guides will approach you through love, as Rebezar Tars did with Paul Twitchell, the fouder of Eckenkar. If what you need is a firm hand, your guides will only be serious; if you are insecure, your guides may approach you through lightness and comical associations. The same guide that would be light and loving with one person could be a harsh taskmaster with another... depending on what each person needs to develop.

We look at our guides as needing to access us in a certain way; perhaps there is only one way we can really open, or perhaps we only listen to information delivered in a certain way. But there is another side to this – perhaps your guides own experience dictates his or her approach.

For example, my main guide is also Rebezar Tars. Yes, the same guide that guided Paul Twitchell, the founder of Eckenkar. Paul Twitchell ended up focusing so strongly on the energy of love that Eckenkar, which was originally founded as a philosophical system, has now become a religion based on love. So, in guiding me, Rebezar Tars does not need to go over ground already covered. He doesn’t need another religion. He needs the information he has to give presented in more scientific terms, without religious connotations. He doesn’t want the energy and philosophy of love to shade every teaching. So, he is a firm taskmaster with me, and love has nothing to do with his approach in guiding me.

You need to get to know your guides better before you can realize that they, too, have needs. They have a reason for connecting with you and for giving you the information that they are giving you. You need to trust that your guides are there. You need to trust that the information you receive when you channel, as you are learning to do through these exercises, is coming from your guides and/or your Higher Self.

Sometimes you may receive channeled information from someone who is deceased as well. After death, some people determine to remain connected to some living person to act as a guide; more often, they might come in momentarily to guide only through a particular situation. In my experience as a psychic channel who channels her own and her client’s guides, many of those guides are relatives who have passed on but choose to remain as a guide. Sometimes this may be done out of love, and sometimes it is part of the spirit’s own growth, sort of like a school assignment. These spirit guides will usually be on a lower level than your main life guide and protector guide.

I believe that you have one specific guide that will come in with you at birth, and that is your life guide. You will also have one guide with you since birth that is your protector. In some cases these may be the same guide. But those guides can come in and out of your life according to your need. They can bring in other guides at different times, if you need something in your life that the new guide has to offer. However, they will always be there to guide and protect you, and even though they may sometimes look different, their vibrations will be identifiable to you as the same.

Your guides are your teachers on the other planes. They ARE THERE and they do have messages for you. If you are not hearing that message, it is because you are not hearing it, it is not because they are not there to say it, to give it, or to do it.

Those of you who think you know who your guides are already may be surprised after doing the meditations in Psychic Development Levels 1 and 3, and Seeing Beyond the Veil. Often they are different than the ones you know. Many of us think our life guides are spirits that are with us to give us love and support. But that is very different than your primary life guide, or a guide that is here to teach you and help you through your life lessons. And sometimes a spirit is just remaining with you for its own support, until it develops the strength and courage to move on. It often happens in sessions when you’ve opened to channel, then gone off-track and let the energy dissipate, that you need to bring it back. Here’s how.

To re-open your channel, use thought. Thought is real, and powerful. Close your eyes, and imagine yourself connecting to source, to your guidance, if you will. Imagine that strong connection, as though you are totally wrapped in that energy, and it is emanating from within you and around you and is a part of you. Allow yourself to just be with that energy for a moment. When you are ready, ask that energy what IT has to tell you, for yourself, or that you might share with another.

Let’s look at an example of channeled thought from the Higher Self. One student, doing this exercise, got the following:

“... I see a little girl with brown hair saying over and over, ‘Help me, help me...’ It’s not like she is in any immediate distress, but she is looking for some kind of help.” When I suggested she ask the little girl who she was with, she replied, “I am with you, but not for long.”

This image, this little girl, was a part of our brown-haired student, a part of her own psyche. When directed to perceive how SHE felt about the little girl, she only felt sad.

I asked the student to look at the little girl in her mind’s eye, and tell her, “I love you, and I will protect you. I love you so much. You make me so happy.” And the student saw the little girl looking back at her and smiling. When asked how this made HER feel, she said it made her feel like crying, but in a good way.

This student had just re-claimed a part of herself that had been lost.

Following this exercise another student had a ‘pain’ in her Heart Chakra. This is not an uncommon experience when receiving guidance of a personal nature, especially as a beginner, when your guides are helping you to remove and heal blocks. Allow the heartache. Let it ache. Most people who grieve in our Western society do not allow themselves to grieve. They are allowed to show the outer trappings, to show emotion, but we are required to get past it quickly, and we are not allowed to really hurt. You are not supposed to really feel it. If someone else should possibly pick up that you really hurt, he (or she) is going to quickly shut you down... “It’s ok,” he says, to stop you from expressing and making him uncomfortable.

Our universe is one circle. Everything is connected. What dies is reborn. When something dies the most tremendous release of the most beautiful life force occurs. But if you shut your grieving down, that life force cannot manifest. You have to be able to allow your Heart Center to remain open even though you have to experience the hurt by doing it. Don’t ever block that Heart Center. If you hurt, keep it open. You don’t need to download on other people, but you do need to keep it open because by keeping it open you allow that energy of grief to re-cycle, and it can come up like new bulbs in the garden. You allow something new and beautiful to be reborn in your life each time you grieve, by not shutting it down.

People who are able to keep their Heart Center open as they grieve go on to do bigger and better things. They manifest beauty instead of sorrow. People who close up are still feeling the same hurt 20 years later because they never allowed it to be purged.

As we are talking about Heart Center pain, it is noteworthy that in group situations it is common for everyone in the group to experience something of the pain of someone who is hurting. This is empathy.

Sound can also come in during these channeled sessions. Some of these can be spiritual sound, even hearing your own vibration, or getting verbal messages from guides.

It is also possible to receive universal messages through direct channeling such as this:

While using this technique for channeling I got a message from my guides to “make a lake” (i.e., hold my consciousness as still as the waters of a calm lake), so that the energy of the Higher Self, guides, and God-force may be clearly reflected in its waters. The image I received showed me with my students gathered all around the lake, and a Tibetan mountain complete with the Castle of the Master’s on the highest peak. The image speaks for itself!

A student using the Open Your Channel exercise received an image of the Chinese Goddess Quan Yin, whom some of you may know has a lot to do with channeling, but also Reiki healing, compassion, and the all-seeing mother essence. In the image, Quan Yin was holding a globe of the world. The student felt the image came because there was hurt of some kind, but didn’t know whether it was for her, or a universal message. That is a very good question we should all pay attention to when we channel information.

How do we know if the message is a personal one verses a universal one? We have to remember to check our feelings before, during, and after our channeling (take our temperature). Note the changes. In the above example, the student experienced a tremendous feeling of nurturance while channeling this image. She had a feeling of the image being much larger than her. This was a universal channeled message, which may have had personal applications as well. The best type of channeled information!

While using this exercise, another student received the message as a chant, “Be yourself, not what you’re told to be, not what you need to be, not what you want to be. Be yourself.” Again, this is a universal message with a personal connotation.

There are many levels that you can channel from. With these exercises, you can raise your level of consciousness to a very high level on which you are inclined to get more messages that have a universal value, as opposed to value for only one person.

When you are getting a message from spirit, it is also not unusual to pick it up in your physical body, or in your emotional senses. Your Higher Self uses any and every means at hand to communicate itself to you. For example, after doing this exercise, one of our past students felt a small circle of pain in her Heart Center that was quite different than anything she’d experienced previously. Then she realized as she pondered her message that her deceased son had been shot in the heart. That was spirit’s way of letting her know the message was from him. As soon as she realized that, the pain immediately went away. The disappearance of the pain was the confirmation that the message was from her son, who in this instance had come through as a guide for her.

Where and When to Use Your Psychic Abilities

There is a time and a place to apply your ability. All psychics, channels, and mediums need to know this. You do not go up to someone in the supermarket and say, “Excuse me, I’m getting this message about you...” In fact, you do not even do that to friends. To do that is an infringement on their space and their emotional sensitivity.

If someone asks you for a reading, then they want a reading. If someone is pushing a reading on you, you should say, “No, I am not interested in hearing that information now,” unless it is something you really do want.

Unfortunately, many psychics who have something of an ego problem do this. Do you have to prove who you are by pushing your talent as a psychic, a channel, or a medium on someone who has not asked for information? If someone asks for information, then that is an invitation and you have every right, indeed, sometimes even an obligation to give that information if it is within your power to do so. But if the person did not ask, he or she did not invite it, and you should NOT offer it.

Sometimes a person in emotional distress will go to psychic after psychic or medium after medium looking for more information about a single person or situation. If you realize a client is doing this, you should refuse to read him. The more information he gets, the deeper he goes into his obsession and the less likely he is to deal with the emotional issues behind it. He only becomes more confused, and goes deeper into the pain.

Again, it is unfortunate that in our field there are some psychics and mediums that actually stimulate the emotional distress of their clients as opposing to try to heal them of that distress. Some of these ‘professionals’ do this because it satisfies their ego need to have the client coming back to them again and again for information that only they can supply. Others do this because they are actually feeding on the energy released by the client during their emotional distress. You should be aware of your own actions and motivations in working with your own clients. If you are doing either of these things, you need to re-think your work as a psychic, channel, or medium.

Keeping Possessions from a Deceased Loved One

One student of mine recounted a story of ‘needing’ to wear a necklace that belonged to her deceased son who had died violently. During the time she wore the necklace her household was filled with anger and violence and she came very close to a divorce. Her husband kept insisting it was from the negativity of the necklace she wore around her neck, yet she could not bring herself to stop wearing it or throw it away, thinking him jealous of her dead son. Finally, in her emotional extremity, faced with the fear of losing her husband, too, she disposed of the necklace. Within days her household returned to normal, the stresses and violent emotions were gone. She went to a psychic a short time later who told her that her dead son “got what he deserved,” which was very hard for her to hear. But after the experience with the necklace she was able to understand that her son may have been a loving son to her, but had been a very negative person in the other aspects of his life.

Objects retain the memory of the people who have owned them. You may be able to ground excess energy from these, but certainly you cannot erase their memory of each person they’ve belonged to. It is not wise to keep, or certainly to wear, an object that belonged to someone you do not know much about, or that you know to have been a bad person! Through your empathy you can too readily absorb the emotional charge on the object, and begin to act in the same ways the dead person did!

On a different, but equally important note, do not buy something in an antique shop or accept as a gift an old piece of jewelry from someone unless you know the history of the piece, and feel good about the way it feels to you. Objects retain vibration. Excess energy can be cleared from them by immersing them in a light sea salt bath overnight, or grounding them by burying them under a tree overnight. But there is no way to erase an object’s memory of the person that wore it. There are some magical techniques by which you might seal in that energy so that it cannot affect you. But those are beyond our scope here, and you should be aware that if you employ them, the object will become essentially neutral in its vibration; that is, it will lose all character, and it is likely that whatever drew you to it in the first place will be gone.

Exercise #4: A Guided Visualization to Open Your Channel

(Developed by John Maerz)

If you work well with taped meditations, you may want to read this guided visualization into a tape recorder.

1. Breathe, as deeply as you can, through your nose. Very slowly exhale out through your mouth. Do this a second time, and then again a third time.

2. Do your 10-point Progressive Relaxation Exercise.

3. Now, in your mind’s eye, visualize a stairway going up. Begin to climb it.

4. Count the steps. As you continue to climb, continue to count.

5. You are channeling yourself as you move up that stairway, higher and higher, continuing your deep, even breathing.

6. Feel the clouds around your face as you actually climb upward through the cloud cover, and up still further until finally you come to a trap door.

7. Push on the trap door. There may be some resistance, which is the resistance of your own lower self to letting go, but the trap door will open.

8. It opens easily, finally, and you walk out onto a platform high up above the curve of the earth. You are at the level of your Higher Self.

9. In one corner of the platform you see a radio set. You go over to the radio set and sit down at the seat before it.

10. There are headphones attached to the radio set. You put them on.

11. The radio has knobs. You begin to turn the knobs, experimenting with them. As you turn each knob you find it activates a different channel. You begin to hear all sorts of different things. You begin to hear sounds that are beyond the range of your normal hearing. You begin to hear voices, and as you tune the knobs tighter and tighter the voices become clearer. You begin to realize that you can use this radio set to tune in to each one of your guides! It is as if each knob is a different voice, a different vocal vibration, and a different wavelength.

12. You turn each knob to where the voice you hear is the clearest. Take your time. Turn each to its sharpest, clearest, loudest point.

13. Now, you see a second set of knobs. This second set has to do with types of information. You realize that there is a channel that you can tune in to that will give you universal information. Information from your highest guides, information that is pertinent to mankind. So, take a few moments to tune that channel in. At first it may sound like static, but as you tune it in, the sounds you are hearing become crystal clear.

14. You move to the next channel. This is a channel that will give you names of your guides or people who have passed on, as well as words, dates and sentences. Turn that channel on now, too. It is soon crystal clear as you fine tune it.

15. Finally, turn the last channel on. This channel is tuned in to you own life situation so that you may receive information from your guides ahead of time about important events in your life, when you need it. As you tune this channel in, it gets clearer and clearer. Fine-tune it until the sounds are clear. You don’t necessarily have to understand right now what they are saying; tune it for clarity of sound.

16. Now, on the radio equipment you see another button. Press this button. It turns the radio off. All the sound and all the channels stop. You hear only silence. Your mind is peaceful and still. Now, press the button again, and the radio turns back on. You can tune to any channel you want merely with your focus and your intent.

17. Now, touch the lobe of your right ear. You find that the button on the radio turns off.

18. Touch the lobe a second time. The radio turns back on. The radio is with you all the time. By touching the lobe of your right ear you turn it on and off. With your intent you can tune in any channel. All the channels are tuned to perfect clarity.

19. Now, move clockwise to the next corner of your platform. Here you see a wall of televisions. They are off at the moment.

20. Touch your right eye and then touch the button on the topmost screen to turn it on. You immediately see the face of your Life Guide looking right at you.

21. With another touch of the knobs on the television you can turn the vision away from your guide to look at anything on this physical earth plane that you want to.

22. As you think this, the row of televisions beneath the top one begins to come on. Each shows a different scene. Whatever you think about, focus on, will determine what images appear on the various televisions sets on this wall. If you think about a girlfriend, her face and her situation appears on the first screen. If you think about an old acquaintance, where he (or she) is now, and what he looks like now appears on the next screen.

23. This is the opening of your Third Eye. Touching your right eye will turn on the television, touching it again will turn it off. Anything that you need to perceive clairvoyantly you can perceive in this manner, with perfect visual acuity.

24. Now, move to the next corner, still moving clockwise. Here you see a wind machine. It looks like a big fan. You touch the top of your left hand with your right to turn it on. The fan begins to blow on you. As it does, you feel the warmth of the air on your skin. This is the energy of empathy, or clairsentience. You can turn it on with a touch, and turn it off again by touching your right hand to your left.

25. As the fan blows air through you it blows feelings and sensations with it. You can feel sorrow, as air brushing against your chest – a feeling of heaviness, like water-laden air. You can feel happiness and buoyancy as a feeling of cooler air that wants to lift you up, buoy you up. This flow of air moving past and through you can change constantly. It has an infinite variation of emotions it can project at you.

26. To turn them off touch the back of your left hand. To turn them down touch the back of your hand again and hold it until they are turned up or down to the level that is comfortable for you.

27. Move clockwise again to the final corner of the platform. In this corner you see a giant tube that is hanging in the air. It stretches straight up and you can’t see its top. There is a helmet attached to the bottom of it. You sit under it, pull the helmet down over your own head, and you are immediately connected telepathically to all of your guides and helpers and to the other people that you might need to channel information from. By touching your right hand to your Third Eye, you can immediately put this helmet and tube assembly on. Touch your Third Eye a second time, and you take it off, silencing the telepathy.

28. Now, move to the center of the room and sit down. Turn on your radio by touching your right ear. Turn on your television by touching your right eye. Turn on your empathy, turn on your feeling by touching the back of your left hand. Turn on your telepathy and channeling ability by touching your Third Eye.

29. Your guides will channel information to you on a need-to-know basis. If you don’t have a need, all they will do is send you feelings of warmth and joy and a ‘Yes, I am here’ understanding. To receive information from them you must focus on a need. So, for now, focus on the area of your own life that you want some guidance.

30. Think about it. Make a picture in your mind, and send the picture up the tube over your head, so your guides can hear you.

31. Now, let your breathing deepen as you wait, with all of your channels and equipment turned on. You may receive your information, your answer, in a vision, in a picture, a word, a sound, a feeling, or a direct impression. Be open to how you may receive it.

32. Now, after you have received your own information, while your channel is still open, take a moment to focus on a person that you know well and who is open to this. Make an image of that person in your mind, and send a picture of that person up the channel, too, and a request to your guides to give you a message for that person. Again, keep your breathing deep and regular and wait for the answer.

33. Finally, you are ready to close your channel and leave this place. First, touch your right ear to close down your clairaudience, your ability to hear your guides. Touch your right eye to close your clairvoyance, your ability to see with the Third Eye. Touch the back of your hand to close down your clairsentience, your empathy. Touch your Third Eye to close off your channeling.

34. Shutting these off will not stop your guides from communicating any emergency information to you; it only shuts you down to random information that you do not need to receive in your normal waking life. When you return to your normal waking consciousness you will bring these tools back with you, and will be able to open and close all of these abilities at will.

35. Now, climb back down the stairway, counting yourself backward from 10 to 1 as you slowly return to normal waking consciousness, and the time and place that you are currently in.

Be sure to get feedback from your friend regarding whatever message you received for him or her.

This is one of the best ways to get information for you, as well as for other people. If you do this and receive information you do not immediately understand, or cannot relate to, merely date and record what you received, and go on to ask your next question. Often a second question can clarify the first. Or if not, after a period of time you may get enough other information, or stumble upon a connection in the real world that clarifies it for you.

Some people have great difficulty getting answers to questions for themselves. One of my students described this as asking the personal question, then immediately shutting down as if a part of her really didn’t want to know the answer. If this happens to you, this is a part of your lower self that is getting in your way and blocking your channel because the lower self part of you may not be ready to hear the answer. Yet your answer will still come through to you, usually in a more subtle fashion. Remember, you have multiple means for your guides and Higher Self to communicate with you now, and all of these were turned on in the exercise. The student mentioned above shut down as soon as she asked her question, and took the channeling helmet from her head. Then she found herself lying on the floor in the middle of her control room basking in the sun and feeling warm and secure. She ended up getting her information through clairsentience (i.e., the warmth of the sun and the secure feeling were affirmative responses to her question).

This is a good example of information coming through to us as we channel in ways that are not normal communication for us. Some of you doing this exercise will receive information audibly, or telepathically, others through a feeling, and still others will receive it in a visual expression. Each one of us gets a combination of effects. The more you work with all of these, the more you will get an intermingling of them. Your guides and Higher Self will usually use the most expedient and direct means of communicating with you. Often this means they will use symbols that have multiple meanings. For this reason it is a good idea for you to expand the symbol language at your command to give your guides and Higher Self a better field of information to draw on. Symbols can include anything from a study of numerology or astrology to having a good repertoire of songs! Your guides and Higher Self can turn almost anything where one item stands for a lot of information into a workable symbol. The symbol will be selected from your mind, your client’s mind if you are doing a reading, or the deceased person’s mind if you are doing a mediumship reading.

Often one question leads to another. And remember, most of the time when we don’t get feedback or input from our guides, it is not because they are not there, it is because we haven’t posed the question! But sometimes, your guides will not answer your question. There are times when the information is being withheld from you – usually because your guides know that with regards to the situation you are asking about, you need to make your own decisions. Your spiritual growth could depend upon you making your own choices and taking your own action.

And don’t be surprised if you get an answer you don’t want to hear. When you channel in this manner you get the information that is REAL, not the information you want. This exercise, this technique, takes you out of your own way. It allows the information from a higher source to come through unimpeded by the needs and emotional concerns of the lower personality.

Some of you doing this exercise also may have found that there were certain abilities that you didn’t have to turn on because they were already fully operative for you. Those of you who experienced this effect though, still benefit, because by using this exercise you now have a means of turning the ability off, or regulating how loud it is.

If you did this exercise on tape, or had someone read it to you, and drifted off, it could mean that your Higher Self put your conscious mind to sleep so that you could absorb the information directly into your subconscious. For those who did that, rest assured, you still got the information, and the ability to turn on your psychic senses. There may be some cases where someone just has a problem with attention, but even for you, your subconscious mind would have absorbed the information.

Once you have run through this exercise a couple of times, you will find that your channeling improves. You should continue to utilize the tools supplied earlier to protect your workspace, raise your consciousness, and open your channel when you work – and now you have additional methods to fine tune your abilities.

The more you practice your channeling the more proficient you will become at doing it. The better your channeling becomes, the better you will be at spirit communication, which is our next topic.

Chapter 4

The Art of Spirit Communication, Part 1

Receiving a Spirit Communication Reading: Ethics & Self Defense

In this Chapter I’ll be talking about the best way to receive a reading and ethics in giving readings including what information you should give, what you shouldn’t give, and how you present it. I’ll also be giving methods to get into the mode of listening properly to get the information. There are many different means that psychic mediums use to get into the altered state of consciousness necessary to connect with spirit. I will share the technique I use, and others I’ve come across along the way that are used by many well known psychic mediums including John Maerz, my co-developer of this part of the series. Toward the end of the chapter I’ll also talk about psychic self-defense as it applies to spirit communication.

How To Give and Receive a Spirit Communication Reading

The first thing you need to keep in mind is that setting the tone and raising the energy in the space is your responsibility as the psychic medium. If the energy level falls (i.e., there is a shift in the energy in the space you are using that is a lower vibration, such as upset, negative emotions), it needs to be cleared and a higher vibration conducive to doing a spirit communication reading needs to be brought in.

When receiving a reading one-on-one or in a group the first thing you need to be aware of is that you have to be careful NOT close the door to a spirit who is trying to come in. Often the first spirit to come in is merely the gateway for the others whom your client really wants to contact.

Additionally, if you or the client actively rejects a spirit that tries to come in to communicate, the rejection actually closes the gateway that you have opened. It takes a great deal of energy on your part to re-open that gateway for the next spirit to come through. Several such rejections during the course of a reading can deplete the available energy to the point that you can no longer do a viable spirit communication reading for your client.

Remember, spirits don’t have bodies. If they had enough energy to make a body, they would be here! So, during a reading, when a message is coming through, the only way it is going to be able to come through clearly is if it has enough energy to do it. That energy is either going to come from the group, from the psychic medium, from the client, or a combination of all three. Each time the person getting the reading says, “No,” and shuts the door, it drops the energy. The spirit actually loses the energy to come in as it is withdrawn. When the door gets opened again usually it is by way of the medium’s energy. If the door is opened and closed five or six times before the client accepts one hit, there is an enormous amount of energy lost in the process.

Interestingly, some clients will do this almost on purpose because they are unconsciously aware of the release of energy each time the door is closed, and they are able to absorb it themselves. If you read a client who is doing this, you should recognize it and terminate the reading. That client is not interested in talking to spirit. They are using your reading as a means of recharging themselves, at your expense.

Also in your reading, you should be aware of where your information is coming from. When a psychic medium works, he or she is receiving the information from the spirit, not from the client. However, many talented telepathic and empathic psychics can fake the mediumship reading by getting their information about the deceased person from the client. Often, unfortunately, these so-called mediums don’t even realize that they are not doing the real thing.

This is why so many well-known mediums have been studied under strict laboratory conditions that preclude any possibility of their getting information telepathically or empathically from the client. The only way mediumship can be proved (i.e., that there is really a spirit there giving information) is if it can be shown that there is no telepathy or empathy going on. However, remember that when the medium that is also gifted with telepathic and empathic skills uses these skills in contacting the spirit, the resulting reading can be truly amazing.

In a good reading, the client certainly doesn’t have to say yes to everything. A healthy skepticism is the best thing! It helps you to keep your feet firmly on the ground, whether you are the medium or the client, and is often the best means by which you can protect yourself from lower-level negative entities. However, rather than saying no, the client should say something like, “I don’t know,” or “I can’t confirm that.” As you see, those comments don’t give agreement, but they also don’t shut the door on the spirit or the message. They only put it on hold until further confirmation is given.

Often when doing a spirit communication (mediumship) reading the psychic medium feels like he or she is pulling teeth to get the client to give confirmation. In traditional spiritualism, when the medium gives a message, the client should respond either, “Yes, that’s correct,” or “I can’t relate to that,” or “I don’t know who that is.” Very often the client doesn’t recognize the spirit that is coming in because they have psychic amnesia for the moment, or because the message is from the spirit’s point of view, not the client’s, using the spirit’s words, not ones he can relate to, so the client just can’t immediately place the person or the message.

Many times a spirit may come in who the client doesn’t recognize. Perhaps the spirit really belongs to someone else in the client’s family or circle of friends, but your client is the most likely pathway available to get a message through. In cases like this it is a good idea to tell the client to just make a note of the information, and to consult with friends and relatives after the reading to see if the information given is for any of them. This can be very frustrating to the psychic medium because unless the client contacts him or her with feedback in the future, he or she has no way of knowing whether that information was correct, or a complete miss, yet he or she has to give it.

When you are going to see a medium, it is a good idea to either bring a tape recorder (check to see if it is permitted) or to take notes. If you do not know many people who have passed over, it is entirely possible that most of your reading may be from deceased people you never knew. Just because you don’t know them doesn’t mean that they don’t have messages for other people in your life! If you take notes and go over those notes with friends and family after the reading, you will be able to place many, if not all, of the spirits who came through. Most mediums will not allow you to bring a friend in to take notes for you, so you will have to take notes yourself. The problem with bringing a friend in to this type of reading is that then the spirits connected to the friend will be coming through, too. Obviously, the medium will want to charge you more in that case. The reason many mediums do not allow tape recorders is because, for some, it interferes with their focus, and in other cases the energy of the reading creates such static that the tape becomes unintelligible. But remember, in mediumship readings you need to have SOME record of what is said because very often you have no idea who the people in the reading are, or even what the messages you received mean.

When a spirit is trying to get a message through, he will use any pathway available. So, don’t be surprised if someday you get a message from a medium for the co-worker who sits next to you at work, whom you barely know, from her deceased mother.

Just remember that a lot of the people that want to come through to give YOU a message when you go for a spirit communication session aren’t the people you want to hear from! Many people have tunnel vision going into a this type of reading. For example, they only want to hear from their deceased husband or lover. And because of that tunnel vision much of the information may fall on deaf ears.

So, when you begin your spirit communication reading with your client (often termed the ‘sitter’), you should advise your client to say, if he or she doesn’t know the person you are bringing through, “I’m not recognizing this person, but I’ll think about it.” Tell him or her to write down the name, or description, and double check it later. This way the door does not close; the energy level in the room does not drop.

It is particularly important not to close the door on the first spirit to come through because often this is the spirit that has enough force of personality and energy to create the link and hold the gateway open for the other, perhaps less forceful, spirits to come through. Unless you make some kind of connection to that first one, often the others simply can’t come through.

It is also unfortunate that many clients are so interested in validation of life after death, and are so concerned with whether the reading is real, that they are afraid to give any confirmations at all along the way. Often the medium delivers hit after hit with the client giving no confirmation at all until the reading comes to a close. Then, finally, the validation of the information is forthcoming – but unfortunately too late to be the stimulus to more and deeper information that it could have been if it had come at the time the information was given!

Every medium is also different in how he or she is able to describe the spirits coming through. Some mediums are able to describe the spirits the way the client remembers them, emotionally and/or physically. Others see the spirits the way they remember themselves, which is often at the prime of their lives, not the way their family would remember them if they died in their later years. Some mediums are able to get the initials, and sometimes even the names of the spirits, but this is a rare talent. Most mediums give physical or emotional descriptions, and confirming information. There are even some times when spirits may come through as the age the client would remember them, and then changes to the age at which they see themselves. Or they may come through with a hair color the client remembers, and then they change it to the hair color they associated with themselves.

This question of how to get a reading from a psychic medium is such an important one, that many psychic mediums have flyers that they hand out to clients or postings on their Web sites to make the above information clear. This allows them to do better and deeper readings for their clientele.

Starchild Bookstore had a short notice posted in each psychic reading room stating, among other things, that, “I am going to do my best for you, but in order to do my best I require certain things of you. You should not bring anger or negative emotions into your reading with you, and you should be open to what I am saying, not necessarily believing every word, but willing to be open to it.” There is nothing wrong with you posting or handing out a similar notice for your psychic and mediumship readings. It helps to make your whole presentation more professional.

Most people simply do not understand what getting a reading from a medium is really all about. To them, it is like making a telephone call. They see no reason why the medium cannot simply get a direct message from the people they want. Most people do not understand that this is a complicated process involving many forms of communication, that arrive in the mediums’ minds much like the pieces of a puzzle that they, and their clients, need to fit together.

Often, when a spirit comes through, the client doesn’t recognize him, or cannot relate to the information because it does not reflect his or her own view of who that person was. Here are two examples:

In the first example, John Maerz’s father had come through during a reading he had with the internationally famous medium, John Edward. The information and conversation he received was something he could not relate to at the time. He wrote it down. When he re-read it and thought about it later, he realized that based on everything that his father had been through, and what he had to deal with in life, the way he dealt with John in the reading would have really been the way he would have related to him. He was telling John that he understood the situation and that he couldn’t do something different than he did because of the circumstances. John’s mindset at the time of the reading only allowed him to see his father in tunnel vision, perceiving him as the parent who failed, who didn’t come through for him; that attitude wouldn’t allow the message to come through with the clarity it should have. Many times spirits do make realizations when they cross to the other side. This is what gives mediums real joy, when they realize there has been a healing between the spiritual and the physical. And when you don’t allow it because you are stuck in your mindset, when you can’t accept your father’s explanation, or apology, for example, you are only holding onto your own pain, and still rejecting the spirit, and the potential healing the reading is giving you.

In the second example, a medium that worked for me did a reading for a client who had lost two young children. The client desperately wanted to hear from her children. This is not an unusual situation for a medium to be faced with. He was able to connect with the children, but the woman he was reading wanted the children to hug her, wanted them to be crying for her, wanted them to call her ‘mama.’ She wanted them to say, “I still have my teddy-bear that you gave to me.” These are the things that WE want from the person who has died. However, in this case, the seven year old kept showing her a finger-painting that he did for her. She said over and over again, “No, my son never painted.” She refused to accept the painting. She refused to accept that image as coming from her son. He showed her a toy horse he played with. She said, “No, my son had no toy horses.” Both children kept showing her, through the medium, items that were important to THEM. Each one, she rejected. Eventually, the children stopped showing her these things and went off to play together, and ignored her. She was very unhappy with the reading, and believed the medium had not made contact with her children. Now, do any of you reading this know of any children who have never finger painted, or made one for their moms? Or played with toy horses? This was a very sad example, but it happens more frequently than it should. It is very likely that when the child was alive she ignored his finger painting, just as she did when he tried to show it to her from the other side. It was his means of showing his love for her, and she rejected it. And as a result, no further information or messages were forthcoming.

Children are particularly hard to get information about or from because their messages are from their perspective, which is not on an adult level. In order for the client to really recognize his (or her) child he has to REALLY have known and been in touch with his child when he or she were alive.

Identification in mediumship readings is VERY important because the instant you, as the client, say, “Yes, I think I know who that is,” your channel opens. Your channel combined with the reader’s channel will give the spirit enough energy to come through and give you very strong information that can sometimes help to resolve issues that need resolution. But as long as you are keeping the door shut and as long as you are saying, “No,” the door will continually be shut.

In cases where there is a very strong emotional bond between the client and the spirit, whether it is positive or negative, the spirit may come through so that the tension of the bond can be relieved. The only bond that should remain is a comfortable, “I love you, I care about you, I can let you go now” feeling. That way, the spirit can go on to evolve because we do continue to evolve on the other planes. Our evolution isn’t just here. Ideally, we do not want to hold on to those we’ve loved and lost. We should want the people we cared about and loved when they were alive to go on and be able to grow and do whatever they are going to do on the other planes. I think of this as if the person has moved to a distant country, where there are no telephones or post offices, but where he will find what he needs to be happy. I can no longer talk to or see him every day, but I know he is still there, still going on with his life. Even then, he may still pick a time periodically when he comes through to give a message to someone here because he is in a realm where he can be totally aware of what is going on for all of the people that he has loved and cared for when he was alive. He can still come through and give you that occasional message.

There is also an expectation on our part for our deceased loved ones to appear to us in a certain way, usually the way we remember them. We may very well refuse to recognize them. We may even be in denial of them, because we don’t want to see them in this new, but actual, light. I have had many clients who came expecting to hear from a specific person on the other side and went home disappointed, only to have a friend or relative listen to the tape of the session and say, “Oh, that is the person... you just never saw him that way, but I did!”

Likewise, sometimes the spirit on the other side can get stuck in a negative emotional place because he has carried guilt or other negative emotions with him into death. In such a case, sending him prayers or positive memories via meditation is an enormous aid to helping him to move on. This work done by psychic mediums is commonly referred to as soul retrieval. For a better understanding of this, watch the movie What Dreams May Come.

Soul retrieval work involves seeing the deceased person in a good place; seeing him (or her) healed of the physical or emotional problems; reminding him of the joys he experienced in life; encouraging him to move on from the place he is stuck in. This is advanced healing work in spirit communication/mediumship.

Summoning a Spirit

Here’s another point of view: Early on in my career as a psychic I chose NOT to pursue spirit communication because I felt that in contacting people who have passed to the other side I was bothering them. I felt their need was to be left alone. In fact, I felt that people who were psychic mediums, who drew in spirits to talk to them, were interfering with those spirits’ growth and evolution because they were distracting the person on the other side from whatever they had to do there.

Today I still sometimes support that point of view. Pulling in a spirit against his will is wrong, but possible, and unfortunately, is done by many psychics and mediums. For example, a client may come for a reading and say, “I have to know how my dead husband is, I have to...” If you are a strong empathic psychic, you can make a telepathic/empathic bond to her (not to her husband because of course he is gone, and he doesn’t want to be bothered with her at the moment, since he’s off doing his own thing). You can’t reach him directly since he is not coming in of his own volition. But as a psychic you can make a telepathic bond to her and you can follow that bond of emotion between the two of them and through that you can connect with him. Just as if he were a kite on a string, you can reel him in whether he wants to come or not. You can force him to talk. This is wrong. It is a horrible thing to do to a spirit, just as it would be to do to a living person. You distracted him from his own life over there, from doing something that may have been very important to him. You forced your will on him. Essentially, you worked black magic on him.

Remember, it is wrong to draw a spirit in, in this manner. If the spirit wants to visit, wants to deliver a message, he will. He will come of his own volition.

Spirit Retrieval

The only exclusion for the previously stated rule is in spirit retrieval because that is healing for the deceased person on the other side. Here’s an example from a mediumship reading John Maerz did drawing in my grandmother. ‘Nana’ had been dead for about ten years when I visited her on the astral. Nana did not want to make any connection to me at all at the time; she had lived an unhappy and guilty life, and was living in her own version of purgatory on the other planes and was ‘paying’ for her sins. Not understanding she could be healed of her hurt, I left her there. Fifteen more years went by. One evening John was practicing his mediumship on me. He immediately picked up on Nana by linking through me as above. At first she completely ignored him. He was able to describe her easily. Then he began to tell me about things he saw her doing, like cooking, which she loved, and grocery shopping, which she also loved. Gradually, as he described her daily activities, taking them from Nana’s mind, he caught her attention. Soon, she began to show him more things about her life, the things that she had loved. He woke her up on the other planes; woke her up out of her limited existence in a purgatory of her own creation. He woke her up to joy. She has since continued to be a constant presence in my life, and has continued her own evolution on the other planes. So, here was the only good use of this technique of following the empathic or telepathic links to draw in a spirit – it can be used in spirit retrieval.

Remember, people on the other side are still human. When we focus on the positives, the happy times, the joys, in our prayers and our meditations, we get the person on the other side that we are focusing on into a growth state. What John did for Nana was a form of prayer; only he did it through his mediumship.

Healing Through Spirit Communication

A healing occurs on both sides in a good spirit communication reading. The focus should be on the positives, not the negatives. Since we are human, we may have to work our own way through the negatives before we can have the positives. See the movie What Dreams May Come with Robbin Williams. It demonstrates this idea so well. The deepest part of the movie is about spirit retrieval. In the movie, the planes of consciousness are beautifully portrayed, at least as good as we can portray in a human form. A spirit can try to help another spirit, as is depicted in this movie; however, there is a very real danger that the helping spirit can also be caught in the same trap as the one he is trying to help. If the energy the trapped or ‘stuck’ spirit projects is strong and resonates to the ‘saving’ spirit, both can become trapped. It is far safer, actually, for us to affect the spirit retrieval from our position here on the material plane. We can use prayer work, positive thought work, or positive visualization work through meditation.

A word about prayer: There are many kinds of prayers. A mandala can be used as a prayer. Meditation can be a prayer. Making or creating something can be a prayer.

I used a mandala as a prayer to cross someone safely over and bring myself back. What had happened is that I read a client who had lost his wife and was deeply grieving, though he hid his grief well. During the reading, his wife came through to him clearly, even though the reading was supposed to be my usual future-oriented channeled reading. It was very comforting to him and allowed him to deal with the issues in his life at the time. A year later his grief had grown to an unbearable level for him, and he called me for another reading, and committed suicide on the phone within five minutes of the inception of the call. He knew he could connect to his wife through me, and used me as the link so that he could cross over to be with her. I, of course, contacted the local police and sent them to his house, and did whatever I could to hold onto him to prevent this death. This proved to be a mistake on my part. By the time the police arrived at his home he had already passed, but I had linked to him strongly enough to hold his spirit here, while he was also connected to his wife there. I felt the connection so strongly, it was as if he was actually occupying my body! That night I struggled to stay alive as he drew me gradually into death with him. So, I got up from bed, took a round Celtic style mandala that had a circular pattern (circles are symbolic of the patterns of life fading into death and vice-versa, in a never ending cycle of endings and beginnings) and slowly colored the mandala from the outside into the center, carrying his energy inward, to the other side as I did, then colored it back out, bringing my own energy back to health in our material world. That mandala was a lifesaver for me, quite literally.

I later found out that this man had a very difficult life, and that for many years the only person who had kept him sane was his wife. When she passed on, he held it together as long as he could, and then he just lost it. All he could think of was, “I have to be with her.” He did use me, as a medium to cross him over. He did this fully consciously. It was wrong for him to do this, but it should not be held against him – in his state of severe depression it was the only thing he could do. Yet his fear of death held him earthbound even after I had let him go – hence my use of a tool to cross him over into the light was necessary.

Dealing with Depression

Spirit retrieval is not confined only to spirit communication work; you may also do physical plane work in retrieving a person who may have lost connection to his spirit, or have become immersed in depression. When you are depressed your energy flow stops. It becomes depleted. That usually happens because you are focused or deadlocked on a situation that you either refuse to change or are unable to change.

Anyone who is depressed can use two very expedient methods to fight the depression. First, any kind of physical exercise gets the energy moving. By expending energy physically, you force yourself to open to your own ability to channel in new supplies for your use, thereby getting your energy flowing again. Running, swimming, jogging, calisthenics, etc., will all get your energy moving. When you are physically active your energy cannot remain dead and static. The second method is to focus your attention on something that you enjoy doing. Do you like to paint, or play music? Do it. Do you have a special hobby? Immerse yourself in it. When you are focused, you are working, you’re moving, you’re dealing with the inner you and whatever the cause of depression is, and it falls away. So, if you are feeling depressed, pick up something that you can do, to put your energy into and move with. It will swiftly get you out of those doldrums. Or, do some exercise.

Depression is a blockage of energy. Happiness, creativity, love, is an accelerator of energy. That says that if you have a physical infirmity that prevents physical activity, then put your energy into something creative. It will be just as effective as the physical activity. If you are not bed-bound or incapable of physical exercise, then get out there and do some physical activity, even if you have to force yourself into doing it!

Methods of Opening

Different mediums use different focuses to develop the headspace they need to work. For example, psychic medium George Anderson uses automatic writing as a focus to draw himself into the brain pattern (alpha state) he requires to do mediumship. If you were to look over George’s shoulder as he works, you would see mostly scribbles, and a lot of circles. The circles are spirit’s way of telling him to open, to bring his focus in, and to enter that state. The circle is a geometric figure that lends itself, through its continuing pattern, to bringing in your focus. It is an aid to concentration. An infinity sign drawn over and over is a similar aid. One of the things that YOU can do to aid your own focus, to raise your vibration to a higher (or deeper, depending on how you look at it) level, is to focus on a sense of concentric circles, or draw them. It doesn’t matter whether these go clockwise or counterclockwise; do what feels right at the time. Any symbol that has no beginning and no end can be used in this same way to bring about the state of empty mind and stillness. It also has the effect of opening the chakras. It creates a channel. Some psychics and mediums even use the spinning wheels of the chakras, or a particular chakra, as their focus in opening. For mediumship or channeling we would advise focusing your attention on the Crown Center. Most psychic mediums employ some form of meditation prior to their sessions to center and open themselves to higher vibrations.

A comment about the direction of energy – if you are moving clockwise, it is as if you are screwing a screw in with a screwdriver. Counterclockwise would be like unscrewing the screw. Whenever you spin energy clockwise, from your perspective the energy is moving away from you. When you spin it counterclockwise it is moving toward you from your perspective. So, to send something, spin it clockwise. To better receive something or draw it to you, spin the energy counterclockwise.

Energy sensitive psychics who feel vibration can use their sense of feeling to open. For you, drawing or feeling the spiral patterns, as noted above, will be an excellent tool. Psychics who are more visually oriented can use their sense of clairvoyance. For them, scrying can be a wonderful means of opening to spirit. Or they can work with a mandala to open their channel. The Crown Center mandala included in Psychic Development Level 1 is an excellent tool for this. Psychics who are clairaudient can train themselves to open through hearing a certain tone or sound. In fact, in Tibet, there is a whole science of sound and vibration, which is used for almost all psychic work. Some psychics can use all of these methods, but most psychics will choose one that works best for them.

Over time you will evolve your own system for focusing your attention and energy to open as a medium. For those of you who are beginners, putting the name of the person you are trying to contact on a sheet of paper, and getting yourself into his (or her) energy by saying his name to yourself several times, then pulling it back out, may be a good way for you to focus. It may help you to contact that person, bearing in mind the ethics I mentioned earlier – DO NOT PULL THAT PERSON IN IF HE CHOOSES NOT TO COME! Just put out the invitation. If he comes, he comes. If he doesn’t, just leave him be!

Psychic Self Defense as Applied to Spirit Communication

There are two main areas you need to understand about psychic self-defense as a beginning student of mediumship, or as some call it, spirit communication.

The first area concerns the normal, average, everyday areas all mediums need to concern themselves with. The second area borders on the realm of magic, an area that mediumship can flow into almost unintentionally. We will discuss basic psychic self-defense techniques relative to both of these.

Firstly, if you are going to do a session with a client, you should find out (if the client wants to try to contact a specific person) did that person die violently? You don’t need to know ahead of time HOW the person died, but you do need to know if he or she died violently. Many of us who operate as mediums do feel the experience of the spirit’s death in our own body, and this can be very unpleasant if you have not been warned first (i.e., it doesn’t feel good to get a knife in the chest if you don’t expect it). If you know ahead of time, you can keep your focus a bit more distant, and not experience the same intensity of feeling you might otherwise experience. If you haven’t first found out this information, my suggestion is to keep that distance about you, just in case! This is one area where spirit communication is particularly difficult for strong empaths, and one reason many empathic people do not enjoy this part of psychic development.

Also, find out before you begin, if the client is trying to contact a specific person, how long ago the person died. It is very common, if someone has died a short time ago, for the medium not to be able to pick up clearly, even if the spirit might otherwise respond to the invitation. You may find yourself opening the door over and over again, to no avail. John Edward’s description of this is that the spirit is ‘still on the bus.’ He may not even know he is dead yet, in some cases!

I believe that for some, death is like going to sleep. If the deceased person has not yet awakened on the other side, he will not respond. It will literally be like he is asleep and doesn’t hear you!

There are some mediums that can pick up on the spirit that has died yesterday. If you remember from earlier in this chapter, there is a way of using empathy and telepathy in conjunction through the person you are reading to make the connection to the deceased person your client wants to contact. A psychic medium who is also telepathic and empathic can use YOU as the link to connect to the spirit, pull him in, and give the reading. Once again, though, the person should NOT be drawn in against his will. Ethically, this whole procedure raises a lot of questions. Do you think that if someone died three days ago, and is trying to wake up on the other side and find his way there that it is really ethical to drag his attention back here? Give that some thought before you elect to do this.

I do not believe this to be ethical, so I encourage you to not do a reading trying to connect with a spirit that has been dead less than three months.

There are a lot of things you can do as a psychic that you could not and should not do as a medium. Through empathy, a psychic can connect with someone the client knows, and read his feelings, plans, even tell about things in his life. This can be done on people who are either living or dead. But that is not contacting the spirit directly. It is not true spirit communication. To do that requires mediumship. Mediumship is the creation of a direct channel, or as some psychic mediums describe it, ‘telephone line’ to the other side, to the person who has died.

Since we know that the aura, or energy field, of a person remains with the body after death for three days, we know that a person, unless released by such means as the last rites, cannot even completely cross over until after three days have passed. But, if a person manages to retain conscious awareness through the death experience, it is not unusual for him to go and pay his respects to the various people that he loved and cared for immediately after his death. And that is a wonderful thing. It is the spirit coming to YOU out of love and caring, not you drawing him in to you because of your need and hurt.

If you read someone empathically by linking to him through the client’s energy, the information obtained will be slanted from the client’s knowledge and insight into the person. If you take the next step and use the client’s emotional link to the person to connect directly to the person, you’ve done the ‘double jump’ psychically, and the information will then be directly from the person the client wants to know about, and it will no longer be filtered by the client’s viewpoint. Most accomplished psychics use this reading technique automatically. But they do not use the link created to draw the person to them!

A comment on ethics for psychics is in order here: Once a psychic has done the double jump to read a living person a client wants to know about, he (or she) has no right to use the connection to pry into the private life of that person. That is NOT the client’s business. Only what concerns or affects the client directly is his business.

Incidentally, sometimes you may receive a message for a person that you know will not be open to receiving a message from spirit, yet you may know that it is important to the well-being of both the spirit who gave it and the person it is intended for that the message be given. In such cases you may simply tell the person the spirit sent the message to that you dreamed about them and the message came to you in a dream. It is amazing that many people who cannot accept psychic or spirit communication readings are very open to dream visitations. They are distinctly non-threatening! Remember, too, we are messengers. It is not important how we deliver it, but that we deliver it.

My partner in developing this material, John Maerz, often says that a person who is controlling or dominating here in life, will probably be just as controlling on the other side in death. Such a person may have a lot of messages for a lot of people that he expects to be delivered, and give out as often as he can. But those messages are not so important to deliver; mostly it was just important to the spirit to give them! John has experienced this in his messages sessions (group gallery style), when one loud spirit dominated the entire session, coming through again and again, even in the middle of other people’s readings. Such a spirit needs to be dealt with gently, but firmly, and after the communication has occurred, the connection needs to be terminated.

Likewise, a spirit on the other side who is still obsessed about something he was trying to accomplish while he was alive, may still try to accomplish that thing by working through someone here with mediumship ability. This is not necessarily a good thing, as you will soon see.

Here is an example: One of my former students had contacted her deceased daughter, who had died as a high school senior, filled with dreams that she failed to accomplish. My student was thrilled to make contact with her daughter, and once the gateway was opened, did so daily. (I also don’t recommend this – it leads to a kind of addiction that is very unhealthy. Living beings are supposed to live here in the physical world.) Soon her daughter began instructing her to start to take the first steps toward following her dreams. However, these were not my student’s dreams, and she realized pursing them would not bring her happiness. Yet she felt almost compelled to do them because it was her dead daughter’s wish. I pointed out to her that when her strong-willed daughter was alive she would not have given in to that kind of manipulation; her dead daughter should be dealt with no differently. She realized the truth of this and went back to leading her own life, and stopped the too-frequent contact with her daughter.

Any strong-willed spirit that you make a connection to and that has left something unaccomplished on the physical plane will try to continue to complete the task in the world through you as a medium. This is a real danger, especially to aspiring beginner-level mediums. These are typically the type of entities that will be contacted through a Ouija board, which is what makes them so dangerous to use. Pendulums, crystal gazing, and automatic writing are all tools that open you the same way, and require additional protection because of that.

As a beginner, before your protections have become fully developed, you need to go through the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram (the exercise where we called in the Archangels from Chapter 2). You need to protect yourself and your environment, using the elements of the four directions by calling in the four Archangels, before you do a spirit communication reading. You need to put yourself in the light each time. You need to put yourself in a blue shield or the energy balloon you learned in Psychic Development Level 1, you need to connect with your own guides, and you need to say a prayer or use another means to hold the conscious thought each time that only something beneficial to both you and your client will come through! This protection may mean that some spirits cannot come through, but isn’t that better than you being stuck with them later on? This is essentially the same protection we used before doing any divination work in Psychic Development Level 3. You also need to clear and protect the environment in which you work.

You need to set yourself up so that you are not going to attract the really negative, lower-level souls at all. I want you to be aware of the need of certain spirits to attach to you, and through your awareness prevent that attachment. Such an attachment may even be made out of love. A loving grandmother, for example, may try to attach to you to remain close to the granddaughter she loved. If a medium is not careful, he or she can soon be surrounded by needy spirits.

If you do have a spirit attachment, you will swiftly recognize this because you will find yourself, as in the above example, constantly trying to make a connection to the spirit. You will find yourself obsessing about things that aren’t your things. You will find yourself wanting to do odd things that are not your normal behavior. These will all be the spirit motivating you! A spirit who attaches to you is not an evolved spirit, though many people who have these attachments would like to think so. A highly evolved spirit moves into its own progression of evolution, and only visits occasionally, if ever. It trusts those of us still living to make our own choices and decisions.

Something that we all need to remember as aspiring psychic mediums is that when a person has gone into spirit, we need to let him leave. If we hold onto him, we begin to manifest his characteristics, some of which may be negative, such as depression or sadness. Connecting to a spirit who died of a heart attack can make you feel that heart attack in the moment you channel him; if he attaches to you, it is YOU who will have the next heart attack! Many psychics and psychic mediums end up battling illnesses that are not their own because of this phenomenon.

Dione Fortune, a famous author from the early part of the 1900’s, mentions in her book, Through the Gates of Death, that we should stay away from graveyards. Indeed, she recommends cremation. According to her, when people die of an illness the illness is not just physical, it is also electromagnetic in nature. Illness manifests in the aura long before it manifests physically. We take the physical body that died of an illness and bury it in the ground and preserve it. In doing so, we preserve the disease that it died from. We preserve the toxic energy of the body – the physical cells that were diseased. According to this theory, if you have a pre-disposition in your nature for that illness or that disease, you can walk past that particular grave and become contaminated through the process of induction.

Illness begins in spirit. If an individual had a very prolonged illness, a spirit may have reached a point where he really identified with that illness. In the identification process as you draw the spirit in, if you keep focusing on the illness, again, through induction, you may draw it into yourself. It is very important to let go of everything you pick up during a mediumship session before you finish the session.

This is why I advise all aspiring psychic mediums to become psychics and channels first, and to study The Anastasi System of Psychic Development Levels 1 through 3 before beginning a course of study in mediumship.

Those of us who develop our psychic abilities have to be very concerned with visiting hospitals and sickbeds as well. We should be sure to be well protected when we do so. We are too psychically open.

Bear in mind that strong connections, like a sexual relationship, or strong emotions both negative and positive, act as a conduit through which energy may freely pass. So, our emotional connection to someone in spirit allows energy to readily flow between you, even between the planes of existence!

And remember, as long as you keep ego involvement out, you are generally safe. When your ego becomes involved, you are at risk almost immediately. Feelings like, “I’m responsible for your being healed,” or “I’m responsible for your being happy on the other side,” or “I’m responsible because you died”... any one of these feelings are egocentric.

When do we know we need help? Many mediums believe since they are good people, it can’t happen to them. But a spirit attachment can happen to anyone. And if you take your temperature, as we learned to do in Chapter 1, and do it regularly, always before and after a session, you will catch it the moment it happens. Remember, too, that when you find yourself unable to let go of a particular person or spirit, or a particular reading, there is an attachment going on.

To get rid of an attachment – take a salt bath; wear copper; lay on a piece of copper; put a handful of salt on the mattress under your sheet and sleep on it.

In addition to protecting yourself before each reading, you should also clear and protect the place that you conduct your sessions. In Psychic Development Level 1 there is an excellent clearing and protection technique that you can apply, if you don’t already have one. Also, the invocation of the Archangels is excellent for clearing and protecting the space before you read.

One of my more advanced students described a situation in which he had done a mediumship reading for the mother of a girl who had been raped and murdered. Expecting the violence involved, he was able to handle the energy from the dead girl with no problem. However, he was unable to cope with the negative emotional energy coming from his client, the girl’s mother. Following the session he was drained and depressed for days.

This is another area where all aspiring mediums need to learn to protect. More than any other kind of reading, mediumship opens you to the intense negative emotions of others. You MUST be able to avoid allowing these to affect you. You need to learn and apply basic psychic self-defense techniques during your readings.

This is one of the major pitfalls of our profession. There are some clients who come for the reading and do a download because they do not know how to ground their own energy and they feel tense and anxious. In the medium or psychic they find a nice receptive pole to put their excess tension into. Other clients come to you in a drained-of-energy state themselves; often their grief has taken its toll on them and they will take enormous amounts of energy from you as you read them, to replenish their own. Some of these latter people will be in a state of chronic depression, in which their depleted resources CANNOT be replenished. Those will just take, and take, and take from you. And worse, if they are hanging onto a negative emotion, such as guilt, you may absorb that emotion into yourself and begin to manifest it in your own life later, if you are not really aware of what is going on during the reading, and don’t take care to not absorb it. Some clients who have not worked out things with the deceased person you bring in may also unleash their negative emotions at that person (like anger, for instance) at you! Most of your clients are not like this, but you will get enough people who fall into one of these two categories that you do need to learn to handle them. And remember, there is nothing wrong with telling a client right up front that he or she is not yet ready to work with you. Remember, you can’t fix everyone. Trusting your gut reactions to people and limiting your sessions to people that you know can benefit from them is the best way to handle these things to begin with!

Additionally, when you bring in the Archangels, be aware that you are not just protecting from negative spirits, but you are also protecting yourself from picking up on the client’s negative emotions. Also, outside the front door of your home or reading area, you need to put in place another protection that acts like a little vacuum cleaner that clears people of their negativity before they walk into your space. You can use a crystal for this, a Feng Shui cure, or any number of things from different religious or magical traditions.

The things I’ve talked about here can be used in your personal life as well, not just in your professional life as a psychic, channel, or medium. The hardest people to be able to detach emotionally from are the people YOU care about. All of the defensive and protective techniques presented here can be applied there as well, but with much greater difficulty.

If the spirit of someone comes in by itself, when you did not protect because you did not expect it, it will usually just be there for a moment to deliver a message, or a feeling, and then move on; but if it tries to bond to you, immediately be aware of it. No matter how much you cared about the person when he was alive, you must disengage from him, push him away, and protect. You have your own life to live; he has his own existence to continue with.

So, you do daily maintenance on yourself; do daily protections, and daily meditations. It is part of your everyday life routine if you want to be a good psychic and medium. In addition, you do the extra protections when you do a reading. As a psychic/channel/medium, you are a magnet for the excess negative energy of others. You are the negative pole they can too easily download upon, not just during a reading, but in your everyday life, too. To be truly good at what you do you have to remain clear. To do this, you must use constant clearing techniques and protection.

Remember, too, that the more you focus your energy into the spiritual world – whether you are doing it by raising your vibration through becoming a psychic or a medium, or through meditation, or by going to church every Sunday, or working in the martial arts – the clearer you become and the more likely it is that you will attract the lower vibration that wants to place its excess energy in your nice clean spot. So, cleansing yourself must be a constant daily routine!

Cleansing and protection are two different things. Protection means you don’t get zapped to begin with. Cleansing means you get rid of the energy you’ve picked up because you got zapped.

Lastly, I hope none of you ever have the experience of dealing with black magic as practiced by Shaman of various cultures, witches, or magicians, in your practice. What we are about to mention is very hard to find information on because over the centuries it has been so well buried by occultists, but it is time it became common knowledge so that mediums could protect against it, as the practice of magic becomes more widespread in our society. It is possible for some specially trained ‘magicians’ to jump into the bodies of other people at their deaths, rather than continuing onto the other side themselves. Once in the body of the other person, they can use their strong will to subdue the will of the person they take over and continue their existence on this plane. Some of these jumping entities are by now thousands of years old, having taken over a succession of host bodies. Newly developing mediums, or people with strong undeveloped mediumship talent, are perfect hosts for these evil entities. Employing the protective techniques I’ve discussed here will prevent this from happening to YOU. DO NOT NEGLECT YOUR PROTECTION! Meanwhile, if you even have a suspicion that the person you will be asked to contact might have been a magic practitioner, don’t do the reading, just in case! You can’t know if the person was into white or black magic, so if you know they did magic or suspect it, just don’t take the chance! Don’t contact them. C.W. Leadbeater, one of the founding members of the Golden Dawn, goes into this in depth in his books on the astral plane. He says that one of the things the black magic practitioner will learn is how to not die – how to survive death in a conscious mode, and attach itself either to one of his acolytes who has been prepared to become a vehicle, or failing that, to anyone with the ability to readily take on another persona. The magician becomes a sort of rider in his apprentices mind. It is symbiotic relationship. The host gains the knowledge and ability of the dead magician; the dead magician gains the energy of the apprentice to work with, and gets to continue living through the apprentice. Carlos Castenada also talks about this throughout his books, from the point of view of the Native American tradition of magic.

You do not want something like this attached to you. The way to guard against it is not to channel a dead person who was, or is, involved in magic! Don’t make the connection to begin with. Don’t take the chance. You can’t fix them! In fact, if in your work you should come across another psychic medium that you believe may be possessed in this way, accept the fact that you CANNOT fix them. In fact, if you try, the entity may very well jump to you, or at least create a link to you so that it could jump if something happened to its present host. Instead, tell that person or medium to get either psychological help or religious help. The only cure for that is by someone who either doesn’t believe in it at all and can convince the host person to totally block out the magician, permanently and for all time turning off his psychic abilities (the psychologist) or the priest or minister who can banish the entity by way of exorcism, usually in salt water (which the entity will not be able to tolerate) and in front of a congregation, which can lend its energy to the process. DO NOT EVER TRY THIS YOURSELF.

Suggested Reading

The Art of Psychic Protection by Judy Hall

Psychic Protection by Ted Andrews

Psychic Self Defense by Dione Fortune

Psychic Self Defense and Well Being by Melita Dennings & Osborne Philips

Life After Death by Charles W. Leadbeater

Man, Visible and Invisible by Charles W. Leadbeater

Through the Gates of Death by Dione Fortune

The Eagle’s Gift by Carlos Castenada

Opening To Channel by Sanaya Roman and D. Packer

Healing Grief by James Van Praagh

How To Meet And Work With Spirit Guides by Ted Andrews

One Last Time by John Edward

Chapter 5

The Art of Spirit Communication, Part 2

The symbols and techniques of spirit communication presented in this introduction are a compilation from various well-known mediums, as well as various reference books and the personal experiences of John Maerz and me.

Basic Symbols Used in a Spirit Communication Reading

The first way to read symbols is to focus on what they mean to your client. If you are doing a reading for someone, you first give the symbols you get to the person you are reading for, exactly the way you get them. Then, if that doesn’t immediately mean something to the client, you give your interpretation, based on what those symbols would mean to you. Often your own guides will give you information in symbolic form for the client. If that still does not make sense to the client, ask him to apply his own symbolic interpretation, and to also put the symbol given on a back burner. It may fall into place later in the reading, or even after the client returns home. Remember, psychic amnesia can affect the client here, too.

Your guides and the spirit coming through will both work with you to create a symbol language for your readings. One picture is worth a thousand words.

In learning symbols for your readings, it helps to expand your own working knowledge of them. Get a dream dictionary and study it... that is a great place to start. Study other symbol systems such as numerology, Tarot, or even mathematics or music. Your guides, as well as whatever spirit you are channeling, will find communicating an easier job if they have a reservoir of material from your own mind to use as symbols. You will be most apt to understand these.

Here is an example of a symbol: Think of a sunset. What does a sunset mean to you? Some of my students came up with various meanings – time, an ending, romanticism, relaxation, tranquility, etc. A sunset isn’t just a picture. It evokes feelings. Feeling is very important to spirit. If a picture is worth a thousand feelings, then a feeling is worth a thousand pictures. If this particular symbol were received in a reading the medium wouldn’t just give the interpretation, he would also give the symbol itself, the image of the sunset, because it may mean something very different to the client. It may evoke the client’s memory of a special time with the person who has died, or a picture he painted or some other important memory. To withhold the actual symbol can actually be withholding the most important information in the session! It could even be the key to identification in some cases.

A major step in getting into communication with a spirit who wants to come in is through feeling. So, get in touch with your own emotions. Often a spirit will send an emotion or a feeling even before a picture symbol. Learn to interpret your feelings and emotions as symbols, too, and know your own feelings and emotions so that you may differentiate them from the feelings and emotions you may receive from a spirit. If you can’t do this, you will lose one major form of communication at your disposal.

When you become experienced at this, you will get a complete description, body type, hair color, you can even tell what the person died of, all within a fraction of a second. All of this information comes to you at the same time. It will take longer for you to communicate it to your client than it did for you to receive it! The more you try to guess or figure out what you are seeing or feeling, the less accurate your information will become.

Sometimes you may receive information through your physical body. For example, you may have the shooting pain down the arm and the heartache of a heart attack. Treat this as a symbol, too, a symbol of how the person died, and as soon as you are able to apply it in the reading it will be gone. Again, you must know your own physical state first, so you can differentiate your physical feelings from the diseased person’s. Take your temperature before the session, and at various times during the session. It will greatly help.

The best psychic mediums are clairsentient (clear feeling), clairaudient (clear hearing), clairvoyant (clear seeing), and telepathic. Information during a session may come to the medium through any of these psychic means, directly from the deceased person who is seeking to communicate.

Some psychic mediums are good at receiving initials, names, and dates. These mediums are highly telepathic. Yet others, who are also telepathic and are able to receive whole sentences accurately, are not good at getting the names of the deceased people. This is a highly individualized gift. I sometimes receive names, but they are usually the names of living people the dead person is saying, “Hello” to! It’s as if the person in spirit is saying, “Why would I want to tell her my name. I know who I am.” John Maerz frequently gets names of deceased people during readings. But every medium will display an entirely different set of abilities that are natural to them.

If your goal is to receive the names of the dead people you channel and it is not obviously a natural ability for you, it can still be developed over time. To develop this ability, in each reading that you do, offer an initial and a name. Let your client know that you may not be accurate; it is something you are working to develop. That will take the pressure off you. None of this can be learned under pressure. Then again, you may find other means of identification of spirit work just as well, if not better for you.

Also, your guides or the deceased person who is coming through may use your own life experiences as symbols. For example, you might be shown a past experience of your own because it is in some way important in your client’s life right now, or important to the information the person coming through is trying to communicate. Or you might be shown your own aunt because it is your client’s aunt who is coming through. Or you may be shown a person in your life that died of a specific illness because the person coming through died of that same thing. Or you may be shown your bathroom because the client is renovating his, or because there was a funny story concerning a bathroom that was a private joke between the client and the dead person.

Remember, your own experience is part of your archives. Everything relates. When you do a spirit communication/mediumship reading you MUST be a clear channel. Everything you receive at that moment is a symbol. It all relates to the reading, to the client, or the deceased person coming in. YOU are not there as an individual.

It is a good idea for you to give the client a chance to give yes, no, or I-don’t-know answers, but you shouldn’t give him the opportunity to go on at length because if he does, he also puts the spirit into that holding pattern and you may actually lose the connection.

Many times in your visuals of people you will find yourself focusing only on one part of them. If that happens, you are focusing on that part usually because it was an identifying feature. For example, you may find yourself looking at fuzzy eyebrows or large hands. These are particularly good symbols for identification purposes. Of course, not everyone has memorable features that stand out, but when they do, it makes for wonderful identification.

Hair coloring is always a problem, especially for women, and especially in today’s world where so many women color their hair. If it is your grandmother coming through, you might expect to see gray hair, yet she might show herself with her younger with dark hair. Or maybe she will come through with gray, as you remembered her. She is more likely to present herself as she sees herself, not necessarily as you remember her. I have already had a spirit come through and show a whole succession of colors to show the aging process and various hair colors she went through.

You will also be learning new symbols all the time, as your Higher Self and unconscious mind takes new things you experience, and builds them into new symbols for you!

Many psychic mediums have a system for identifying if someone is a mother, father, sister, brother, friend, etc. I’ll be discussing such a system here. Remember, any such system is really only training wheels. Eventually, with experience, your unconscious mind will process everything you receive with super speed and you will simply know who the person is, if he or she is a man or a woman, on the father’s side or the mother’s, or a friend, and so on. Even using the system I will show you that you still need to incorporate your intuition. For example, once you have identified the mother vibration, which mother are you really getting? Is it the mother that gave you birth? Or is it the mother that raised you, if they were two different people? These can be stumbling blocks to identification. The spirit will present himself usually as he sees himself relative to the client.

The system I use is simple and straightforward, though it may have some occasional difficulties, as noted above. In identification everything we do is mental. It is like going through a quick checklist that helps through the position we feel or see the person to be in to identify who he or she is. It is easy, and you will have no trouble learning to do it.

General Advice for Giving a Spirit Communication Reading

The general mood of the reading is set by the color and feeling in the space used. Pay special attention to this. Use colors that help YOU to work, and that sooth and heal. Keep the space clear. Protect it before you begin your session, even before the client comes in.

Take the time to recognize the feeling you get when you are in someone’s vibration. This will help you to know if the client is in the right state of mind to get a reading, or not. Learn to recognize feelings for what they are – expectant, hopeful, fearful, angry, and so on. Let your client know what you feel from him (or her) right at the beginning of the session. This helps to draw you into the reading more quickly, and also to be able to differentiate the feelings you feel coming from him from the ones that will be coming from the spirit(s) that come in. This differentiation, as we’ve pointed out earlier, is very important. It marks the difference between a true spirit communication and an empathic reading of the client’s relationship to the deceased person.

In messages sessions, or what some mediums call gallery sessions, you work with a group of people as opposed to one on one. When doing gallery work, always remain in front – people feel excluded when you move toward the back. There may be some exceptions; when grief or deep emotion is felt it may be necessary to move to the back to offer comfort. When you do platform work you will generally feel pulled to the person in the group whom a spirit is coming in for.

As you work, you need to take note of your feelings in the moment. You can actually do the reading totally with feelings, if you pay close attention to them. Your feeling is the place to start. Most psychic mediums start with feeling or emotion, or both. Some feel a pull in the direction of the living person to which the spirit is connected, and then quickly receive a barrage of pictures, or even telepathically receive a word or a name. But it is far more common to receive your first information in the form of physical or emotional feelings or sensations. Remember to take your temperature or re-center yourself before, during, and after a session. This is a good way to be sure the things you are feeling are not your own!

Never end a reading on a down note. It is your job to cheer up the person and help him to raise his rate of vibration. Always find something positive to say. You are a counselor and a healer with words.

Think about what makes you feel good about getting a reading. When you get a reading from someone, if it benefits you, if you learn from it and grow from it, you likely feel it is a good reading. Do the same for YOUR clients.

Be very aware of how you give a reading. On a down note, many people feel they have to have an emotionally intense spirit communication reading in order for it to be a good reading. In your readings be honest, don’t be sensationalistic, and give grounded and positive information. Many of the people you read will be depressed. They are coming to you because they need encouragement, they need uplifting, something to cling to; they need to hear something that is positive. Through your future-oriented channeling you may get a time fix for them as to when things will improve, and some data as well. Yet there are many spirit mediums that do not want to deal with this aspect of mediumship – dealing with the depressed clients. Many will just say, “Oh, you are going to be depressed for a long time.” This, of course, you should not tell them, unless you are giving it to them much as a warning, that they will remain depressed unless THEY do something about it! One of the biggest things you can do when you are reading someone is to empower them.

Preparing and Developing Yourself for Spirit Communication

It is important in your work as a psychic medium to be properly balanced and in the right mental/emotional space to best work with your clients. To do this you must become the meditative personality described in our Psychic Development Level 1 course of study. You should include daily sitting meditation in your schedule, with focus on the breath, until you can attain and maintain the still mind of not self required for true mediumship.

Practice your chakra exercise daily, also from Psychic Development Level 1, because this increases your energy level and your personal protection, and draws your energy up to your higher centers as well.

Follow up your own sitting meditations with personal sessions in which you ask your Higher Self and guides for guidance. Always bring them into your spirit communication work, especially your protector guide, whom you met in Psychic Development Level 3.

Get used to locking down your meditation room, just as you would your reading room, by calling in the four Archangels and doing the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram before every session.

Breath Work Before Readings

This is a modification of the basic chakra exercise, using your breath (chi energy) to focus:

Take five complete breaths, breathing in from the Crown Center all the way to the Root Chakra, then circulating it and breathing back out. On the sixth breath, bring it up and hold it in your heart as light energy. Even as you continue to breathe in a normal fashion, continue to hold the energy in your heart. Then when you feel ready, bring that up into the throat, and hold the energy there as you continue to breathe in and out. Then bring it to the Third Eye and hold it there for a time, then finally draw it into your crown as you continue to breathe. This energizes each center and lifts your consciousness. By adding the breath to the visualization it makes it much more powerful than mere guided imagery. This exercise combines basic yoga breathing with my own chakra exercise. If you add physical motion to this it would be Chi Kung, which is another excellent area to study as a beginning psychic medium, since it helps you to round out your energy.

Spirit Identification

Whenever you begin a spirit communication session you need to identify the spirit coming in. Different mediums use different methods of identification. In time, the identification process is quick and almost automatic. In the beginning though, it helps to have a road map to aid your identification. Here is the one I use and teach, derived from my own experience, as well as observations of well-known psychic mediums John Edward and George Anderson:

1. First, feel where the sensation of the spirit’s presence is coming from.
Some mediums feel the presence around themselves. I discourage my students from doing this. To allow yourself to feel the spirit around you is to invite him close, and for someone who is very susceptible, to invite him in. I feel this is an unsafe technique, though many mediums use it successfully. If you feel the spirit around YOU, you should tell him to go to the person, or leave. This also makes it easier for you to leave him behind at the end of the session! Many mediums that invite the deceased spirit too close end up quite literally going home with them, and before long have a whole following of spirit entities around them. You SHOULD feel the spirit’s presence around the person you are reading, since you (especially when doing a group reading) were pulled to that person (and the spirit) to do the reading. In some cases, where the psychic medium is clairvoyant, he or she will see the spirit standing near the client.

2. Once you feel the spirit’s presence around the person, these guidelines will help you to determine who he is (I am using right and left placement according to the Tree of Life):

a. If the spirit is on the client’s right and even with the client, he is male and is of the same generation.

b. If the spirit is on the client’s left and even with the client, she is female and is of the same generation.

c. If the spirit is above the client’s head, in the center, he is a guide or a spirit teacher.

d. If the spirit is on the right, but behind the client, he is male, but from an older generation. Think in steps. If you feel or see him one step back, the spirit is in the client’s parent’s generation; two steps back, the grandparent’s generation; three steps back, the great grandparent’s generation. And so on.

e. If the spirit is on the left behind the client, she is female, but from an older generation. Again, if you think in terms of steps you will know how far back place her.

f. Now, if the spirit is on the right side, but is in front of the client, the spirit is a male child.

g. On the left side, but in front of the client, the spirit is a female child.

h. If the spirit is almost directly in front of the client, the child is the client’s. Displacement slightly off to the right or left tells you if it is a boy or girl.

3. Telling which side of the family the deceased person is on is also easy. If the spirit is on the client’s right, it is his father’s side, and on his left, his mother’s side. Sometimes it may be difficult to determine if the deceased parent belongs to the client, or the client’s spouse. I find that, usually, if it is the client’s spouse, you get a feeling of displacement, as if the spouse is superimposed over the client.

4. To determine the height or weight of the person in spirit, you may compare him or her to yourself if you are standing, or to the apparent height and weight of your client. Is the spirit taller or shorter? Slimmer or heavier? By how much? Remember, you are seeing/feeling the spirit OUTSIDE of yourself, around the client. Sometimes seeing a very short person is another way of defining him or her as a child or baby.

A note here: Some psychic mediums instruct to feel YOUR SELF growing or shrinking to determine the size or height of the spirit. I absolutely frown on this. If you are a person who has the ability to be a trance medium or a physical medium, this can literally invite the spirit into your body. Since I do not advocate trance mediumship, except under very special circumstances, I advise you to NOT do it that way!

5. To determine the finer points in identification, you need to start to ask questions, and then rely upon your visualization/feeling nature to give you the answers. Some answers may need interpretation. Mentally ask yourself what color the spirit’s hair is, how he (or she) is dressed, are the clothes a give away to his profession, and if not, do you see or feel what that profession might have been? Do you sense or feel his emotional nature? Is he happy or sad? Do you see anything in his hands? This could be an important symbol for the client. What do you see or feel him doing? Again, this could be an important symbol for the client.

*Pay close attention to every detail. The details are your message. All of the dialogue is with spirit, in your head. You ask the questions silently. Give the message and other information out verbally.

Now For Some Practice:

Always start your session by clearing your space and protecting by calling on the Archangels as we learned in Chapter 3.

This first practice session should be done with several other people. Have everyone sitting in a circle. Let the person who will be the psychic medium stand in the center. The psychic medium should close his (or her) eyes and sensitize himself to the energy around him, and then move in the direction he feels pulled. Once he feels the pull, he should open his eyes and walk to stand in front of the person the pull was drawing him toward. This is the person a spirit that has come in is ready to talk with. Each person who is aspiring to be a psychic medium should practice feeling the pull of the magnetic energy drawing him to the person who will be receiving the reading. Obviously, if you are reading someone one on one, you don’t need to do this, though the magnetism will still be there.

Now that you have focused on the person you will read, proceed to determine identification and to ask the mental questions as described in the preceding section. If you should get information in another way, that is all right; but by using this as a basic roadmap, you will be sure to achieve success.

Here is a sample from one student who did this exercise:

1. First, she was magnetically drawn to the person she would read. Eyes can be open or closed.

2. Next, she picked up energy on the person’s left side. That is a lady.

3. When she asked if she was mother’s side or father’s, she stayed on the left. It was definitely the mother’s side.

4. How tall is she? The student saw/felt the spirit as being very short. This was a very small lady.

5. What color is her hair? She visualized it as brown.

6. What is her body type? The student saw/felt a large stomach.

7. How is she related to the client? The student felt her as an aunt. She was a step back from the client, and off one step to the side on the left as well. At this point, you might also get character. The student definitely picked her up as being stern.

8. How is she dressed? The student saw a print housedress. This also defined her as an at-home kind of person, and a casual person. Verification was correct.

9. What do the colors of the dress tell you symbolically? A yellow floral print says happy. One student saw glasses. Glasses can be a message to the client that he should look closely at something in his life, especially if the aunt didn’t wear them! Or, it may just be an identifier. Another student saw the yellow dress get more intense when he saw the glasses. He interpreted that as a need to look carefully at something that requires caution.

10. What is she carrying? A student saw her holding a white bud vase with a yellow mum and a dead and drooping red rose in it. The white vase holding two flowers could be symbolic of a marriage, the yellow mum could stand for happiness and fidelity, but the drooping red one for a lack of romance. When asked if she was having some marital difficulties the person getting read replied, “Yes.” This symbol was difficult. It came from the spirit and was her symbol. Neither the student who received it nor the person getting read would have understood that symbol without the aid of the instructors. This is why we need to study symbols and develop a good ability to interpret them. It is even possible that names of people could have been symbolically given through the flowers (i.e., Rose).

11. What is she doing? In this instance we saw her offering the bud vase to the person getting read.

12. All of this information had been received within 10 minutes.

In my sample readings with groups, as in the one above, I have noticed that if everyone in the group tunes in on the spirit, each person in the group will receive a subtly different rendition of the appearance of the spirit, and the message, though similar, will be delivered in different ways. This is because the spirit reaches each of us in a different way; each of us has a different capacity to receive the message. So, for example, in the above sample most of the students saw the spirit in her everyday floral print housedress; but several saw her in a going-to-church-on-Sunday dress. All saw her as short, but some saw her with a belly, some as fat, and some as thick. Some saw light brown hair, some dirty blonde hair. This is why psychics working together in a group DO NOT READ OVER ONE ANOTHER. That is a very important point of psychic etiquette. They understand that the same information can be coming through for both, but with a different slant depending on their ability to receive it, and interpret it. Additionally, when a channel is opened up, much additional information may come through not connected to this spirit at all. Another reader in the room might think it very important to give out this information, but if he does, it interferes with the reading the performing psychic medium is giving. So, if you are present when another psychic medium is working, keep your insights to yourself unless asked, and if you do offer them, be sure it is AFTER the session is done!

Further Practice Techniques: Exercise #1

For this first exercise, again, you should work with a group, but this time put one person (who is familiar with the histories and circumstances of many of the people who have died around him in his life so that he may give feedback) in the center of the circle. Many people who come to you for a mediumship reading only want to know who is around them. This exercise will help you to develop the expertise to explore that. You may find the person’s guides around him, or people who have passed on that are still with him either to give love, support, or even guidance. In some cases it will be people he is holding onto or vice versa.

Let’s look at a sample of this technique. You can base your own on this:

1. We put one student in the center of our circle, to read. We asked him, as the client, to not have his arms or legs crossed, which blocks the flow of energy.

2. We did our protection, calling in the Archangels.

3. Each of us individually did the visualization exercise for opening our channel.

4. John Maerz was our first reader. He picked up a spirit on the left side (female), one step back, and said based upon that he felt it was a mother energy – a mother figure or grandmother. He knew that she was at least one generation back on the father’s side since when he focused on what side of the family she was on she shifted to the client’s right. He saw her as short, average weight, with short hair in a flip. Her dress was a scooped-neck, pink dress with large pearl necklace and a lot of make-up. She was being very ‘cutesy’ or ‘girlish.’ She had reddish-brown hair and very pale skin. He felt two sisters around her, standing with her, also deceased. She seemed to relate to her husband, the subject’s grandfather, as if he was her child. The subject agreed that this defined their relationship, and that her appearance was accurate, in her younger days, from photos he’d seen. Also, pink was her favorite color. In fact, she was buried in it. John also thought he heard a name, Alice or Alicia... he was close. The subject said her name was Elsie. She did have two sisters. The subject lived with her as a child, so there was a very strong attachment.

To get into the correct mode for this reading, John had centered himself, using breath control. John is very visual, so you will notice that although he felt the location of the spirit, most of the rest of his information came through clairvoyantly or via clairaudience.

5. Now, while the channel for Elsie was still open, we asked the entire group to see if anyone there received a message from her for her grandson, the subject. Each person in the circle grounded and centered using breath control. Most did receive messages, which varied. One heard, “Go with the flow.” One saw a mirror (the subject remembered the mirror well – it had special significance). One saw him being lifted by light. Another heard the words, “Don’t fret.” Another just received a feeling of warmth and love for him. Another student saw one of his guides helping him to paint, which was interesting, since his grandmother was an artist, as he is. Each student, in open channel mode, received a message, which he or she delivered, and most received verification.

Now, often a client comes to you expecting to speak with a specific person. In these cases, it is usually either easier, or impossible to do. If the person on the other side does not want to be communicated with, he is just not there. If you are going to be honest and fair with your client, you must tell him if you cannot reach the person he has in mind to contact. Ask the client then, “Do you want to see who else is here to come through, or do you want to just end the session?” If the client agrees to proceed, that is great. Since the channel is already open, any spirits there will be easier to connect with because you have his or her willing participation, and the additional energy for the session that supplies. In fact, there probably will already be several people in spirit waiting to communicate their messages, and all they need is the client’s OK to proceed!

Indeed, I have noted that before a messages session at Starchild it seems that the room fills up with invisible people waiting their turn to be communicated to the clients coming in for the session. Unfortunately, this is also the area where there are more con artists in the field than in any other. If, for example I go to a reader to talk specifically to my grandmother who died, and I am convinced she is going to come to talk to me today, I am easily set up for the con. When the medium says, “Whom do you want to talk to?” and I say, “My grandmother,” the medium asks me for her name. I tell her, “Edna,” and the medium repeats her name, three times, and now, whatever the medium gets, whatever vague message she tells me, I am likely going to swallow because I came into the reading convinced that I was going to receive a message from my grandmother.

What we were doing before is much harder. We go in and we blindly pick up whoever happens to be around the person, and give accurate information on him or her. It takes us a few minutes to fine tune these readings because the person getting the reading was not specifically focusing on the spirit that comes in. Also, there could be several spirits there trying to get in at the same time. That can also split the energy and make it harder to focus on one. Eventually, one more dominant than the others will stand out, but this could take several minutes. This type of reading though is much more valid, and the information that comes through can usually be validated.

A comment on using a name as a connection device: For some mediums this is a good tool. For example, this will work well for John Maerz, who is name oriented. However, if you use this technique, make sure you really are connecting with the person. Don’t just use the technique as a con, as in the above example. If you say the name and there is no one there, just accept that the dead person is not coming in during that session. And remember NOT to use your empathy as a link to pull spirits in. Some mediums also will do well connecting through a title, such as mother or grandmother. People more naturally clairaudient or telepathic do best with these connecting techniques.

Also, the person who is getting the reading has natural capabilities that we may also draw on as we read. So, often our client can actually help us to expand our box of tools during his session, even if he is not aware of his own abilities.

Further Practice Techniques: Exercise #2

Now, in this next example, we have picked a spirit that the person getting read wanted to connect to. Much as would happen in a real reading with a client, he didn’t tell us who that was. Your client will have a particular person he wants to communicate with, but he expects you to just channel that person. So, in this example, I have a group of students telling me whom they are getting. I went around the group doing three things; first, each student described the person he or she was getting. Then, the student stated the relationship to the client. Lastly, he or she tried for a name. Let’s take a look...

First, I had the students do the exercises to open the channel and protect.

1. I started the exercise off. First I got an authority figure with salt and pepper hair that was a big person who sometimes wore a mustache. He had a slightly pinkish complexion. Next, I saw that he looked something like the client, so he’s evidently a relative to the client; the steps back indicate a father or a grandfather. I didn’t get a name.

2. John Maerz went next. He got a much younger person, about the same age, coloring, and stature as the client. He felt the relationship to be that of a friend, that was as close as a brother. He felt they went to school together. He received a name – either a Jim, a James, or a Jeffrey, something with a strong ‘J’ sound.

3. The next reading was by a student. She immediately picked up on a male figure with presence, on the left side, which would be the client’s mother’s side. She saw him with thick, dark hair and suspenders. She did not receive a name or initial.

4. The next reading was by another student. He saw a teenaged girl with sandy-colored hair; she was dressed in a long dress. He was unable to pick up on the nature of the relationship or a name.

5. A student again read... She saw a tall, thin woman in a blue dress. Similar in appearance to Mary Poppins from the movie, but could not pick anything up about the relationship to the client or any name or initial.

6. The next student reader couldn’t pick up on a person at all. What she saw was a cigarette lighter with engraving on it.

7. Another student reader received an elderly lady with fair coloring, and a ‘rectangular’ shape, being short and stout. She was wearing a royal blue suit, had salt and pepper hair, and had large earrings on. She received the name Nellie, but did not pick up the relationship to the client.

8. Still another student received a male figure to her right, indicating the connection is to the client’s father’s side of the family. He was very big, and jovial, and she associated him with the cook in the movie Lady and the Tramp. She couldn’t see a relative relationship, but did feel a mutual appreciation for one another between him and the client when he was alive. She felt he might have been someone, for example, who worked at the corner restaurant. She received no name.

9. Another student got a relative from several generations back, male, who had a salt and pepper beard and worked in Government, perhaps with Abraham Lincoln. She received no name.

10. Another student received the same person I did at the beginning, and saw him as a grandfather. He was big and boisterous. She also saw the occasional mustache, and saw him dressed like a woodsman or lumberjack. She received the name Carl.

11. The last student saw a very thin man with black hair and a mustache. She also saw him in a WWII uniform with braiding on it, sitting at a desk with a low light on it. He was writing and smoking. She did not pick up the relationship to the client, or the name or initial of the person.

Now, you will notice that in most of the above readings, the readers received entirely different people. They certainly could not have all been the one person the client most desired to hear from! This is typical of what you will encounter when giving your own clients’ readings. However, the client in this case was able to recognize most of these people.

In many cases though, the client will have psychic amnesia. He won’t be able to recognize most of the people who come in, mostly because his mind and his desire are on hearing from only one! This is when you give your client homework. It becomes his job to follow up on the people he didn’t recognize, to see if he gets validation on his own following the session.

Now, here’s feedback from the client on the above exercise:

The client was holding one person in his mind that he wanted to hear from. He felt that the group collectively picked up on that person and things and people in that person’s life, though no one got them right on. He also recognized some of the people as other friends and relatives that he was not focusing specifically on connecting with.

Further Practice Techniques: Exercise #3

Here’s a third exercise in which the entire group works to get information on this one spirit for the client. This is fun to experiment with, and a wonderful training tool, but do not do this professionally with another medium as it is considered exceedingly impolite – it is called over-reading.

1. Again, we cleared the space, opened the channel, and did our protection by calling in the Archangels.

2. We asked the client outright whom he wanted to hear from, and his relationship to him, but nothing else. This time we were all able to make a much stronger connection because we tried to contact the same spirit the client wanted us to reach in Exercise #2, so the spirit was already there and eager to connect with the channel still open and waiting. We tried to focus in on things, like how he died, what was important to him, and how he lived. We were looking for more information for validation.

3. The client said he wanted to hear from a male friend. We wanted no other information. If the client gives us more information, then he is leading us. Some readers may also want the name of the male friend to help focus, especially if the spirit is not there yet, but this is not always necessary.

4. Here is a list of what the people in the group got on this friend:

a. Medium brown hair, slightly older than the client with a down-home quality. A family man who loved his family, but not able to share himself with the family. He could be the center of attention, but couldn’t share his inner self.

b. Same age as the client, in school, dark hair, similar build, a ‘J’ name. The number 10.

c. Smiling brown eyes.

d. A male with light-colored hair, and face, around the same age as the client.

e. A fairly tall, thin, brown-haired man who wore glasses and was studious. Could be serious, but had a good sense of humor.

f. A hand-carved wooden cross hanging on a wall; not a person.

g. A black belt and cowboy boots with silver tips on the toes.

h. A man around the client’s age, a feeling of companionship, a sudden and unexpected death like a car accident, not a long term illness.

i. A slender, tall man, light coloring, build similar to the client.

j. The name Jean, feels Amish. A rural community with a lot of farming. Houses are spread out. People are emotionally close.

k. A man who looks like a lumberjack.

l. A sandy-haired man, surrounded by music or guitar playing. A sudden death, like an airplane crash.

The client again gave feedback:

His friend was a little bit older than him, and died at age 50 of illness. His name begins with ‘J’ and, in fact, he went by his abbreviated initials, one of which was ‘J.’ He had smiling eyes that were a standout feature, and salt and pepper hair. From Example 2, the military uniform was accurate, but he was a Viet Nam Vet, not a WWll Vet. He was a family man, and he did live on farmland, in the center of relatives who were very close, while the land was spread out. His complexion was dark; he was a sort of ‘swashbuckler.’ This description may have been close to the lumberjack type that one student saw. He was a very quiet man, serious, and did not relate to his family well, could not speak about his own pain to them, yet he was very social and loving with them. Perhaps so many of the student readers picked him up dying in an accident because from his point of view he felt that his life had crashed. However, he died of illness, and his life went through a melt down leading up to his death of alcohol-related illness.

Further Practice Techniques: Exercise #4

This is actually a continuation of the above exercise. We then proceeded to say the deceased person’s name aloud three times, to focus the energy more strongly. This time we were able to receive his energy more strongly. Let’s see how the students did with this one:

1. A white tablecloth with a blue shawl over it. A clear glass of alcohol on the table. A hammer with a long handle. Construction work.

2. He goes off by himself a lot. A backpack for camping, or perhaps a reminiscence of Viet Nam. Outdoors type of person. He didn’t let people in easily. A red barn. Piles and piles of grass, or hay, very messy. A large body of water is nearby. When he died it felt like asphyxiation of some sort. He couldn’t breath.

3. Sitting at a table and writing.

4. A bottle of scotch on a table.

5. A message – “You’re where you need to be... the past is where it needs to be.”

6. A wooden chair, a wooden table, a plain looking room... a blue hat, perhaps a ball.

7. He’s alone doing carpentry work with his hands. Basic repair work.

8. A heavily built table. Weight on his chest, congestion in his chest.

9. “Leave me alone.” A heart problem.

10. Boots. A military hat. A blood disorder – leukemia?

11. He’s floating... smiling... but can’t breathe.

12. A sense of extreme anger. He doesn’t want to be bothered.

Since there was so much anger, hurt, and a need to be left alone associated with this spirit, spirit (soul) retrieval was recommended. We accomplished this in this group through prayer.

Sample Spirit Retrieval

*Note that healing work through spirit communication, and soul/spirit retrieval, are covered in great depth in Psychic Development Levels 5 and 6.

Soul or spirit retrieval involves you thinking of the spirit you need to retrieve, and helping to bring him (or her) out of the negative place he is in through the power of positive thinking and prayer. Because this sample was done in a group, it was done as a group prayer, but it can easily be done by you alone as well.

Spirit retrieval is done with energy. You do it with energy, using the healing energy of the Archangels. We saw in our spirit retrieval of this soul a brilliant light coming from the Archangels Michael and Raphael, as they held open the door into the light for this spirit. We watched the spirit, in our minds eye, go into the light with the two Archangels. Each of us added a silent prayer of our own for the loved ones of this deceased person, and his own guides and helpers, to help him to solidly move into the light. We encouraged him to look back on the joys of this life, not the hurts, losses, or guilt.

Amazingly, when this spirit retrieval was finished, the room felt cooler, students felt as if they could breath more readily, and the general sense of oppression that had been building in the room earlier had lifted.

The client gave this feedback following the session:

The deceased person’s family was noted throughout the locality as being most hospitable – hence all the tables. The house he lived in was about 10 steps from a lake. He did wear a moustache on and off during his life. He died of alcoholism. He had a very difficult time with his wife and separated. The church got involved and put tremendous pressure on his family; they put him and his daughter outside of the church, which added to his emotional pressure. His father died, and he had flashbacks to Viet Nam, which added to his depression. He was a drywall construction worker, hence the construction tools and boots. The hat was the one he wore in Viet Nam. He had problems with his upper back and heart from the alcoholism.

The student who volunteered to be the client in this session was very grateful afterward, feeling that both he and the spirit needed this healing. After the session, though, he felt very drained and worn out. The only anger and negativity left at this point is from the client; the spirit has gone on. We reminded the student/client to apply the things he’d learned earlier, as you read earlier in the chapter, to ground and clear himself when he returned home. This involved taking a salt bath, going to the beach, and doing the two exercises from Chapter 4 to clear and protect himself. You should remember that when you have a client at some point who has to go through a similar spirit retrieval ritual, that you can show them the same exercises for grounding, clearing, and protecting himself.

You can also build, paint, draw, write, or sew the feeling into a piece of artwork, then either burn it to release the feeling, or leave it somewhere that it will do no harm. Symbolically, this is YOU leaving your own hurt and pain over the situation, or the person who has died, behind.

Conclusion

The Anastasi System of Psychic Development Level 4 is intended to introduce you to the arts of channeling and mediumship. It gives you a firm foundation from which you may further explore these areas. Psychic Development Levels 5 (Spirit Communication – Developing the Energy) and 6 (Spirit Communication – Refining the Skill and Healing) delve progressively deeper into the art of mediumship. I recommend that if you truly want to bring your mediumship skills up to a professional level that you read and study these as well.

The world of spirit is closely interwoven with the material world that we live in. It is as if it is a higher plane world that is a reflection of ours, just skewed enough from our vibratory rate that we cannot see or communicate with the residents of that higher plane without the training and development required to bring forth the skills of psychic mediumship. We all, to greater and lesser degree, have that ability. Those of us whose families are open minded and supportive of the world of spirit will have an easier time developing these skills than those who come from more closed minded and scientifically-oriented communities. But EVERYONE has the ability and can develop it, provided they are willing to apply themselves to the necessary work involved.

Having read these pages, you now have an idea of what is involved, and an understanding of both the dangers and the joys in spirit communication. You have techniques and exercises to practice. Ultimately, the difference between the person who becomes a great psychic medium and the person who remains a ‘wannabe’ medium is practice. So, practice... and practice. And follow the protections outlined here carefully. When you are comfortable with the ability to channel and with the basics of spirit communication, you should move on to Psychic Development Levels 5 and 6. These advanced levels go more deeply into the practice of spirit communication, and healing using spirit communication. Many of the spirits on the other side of the veil are waiting to communicate with the living. Perhaps you can become the psychic medium they are waiting for.

About the Author

Like many who realize their psychic gifts later in life, Sandy Anastasi awakened to her abilities in her late 20's. She understood that many people develop deep psychological problems because their psychic abilities are misunderstood and often blocked. These insights and an inner need to pass on her knowledge and abilities led her to begin teaching others to develop their own psychic gifts. She believes that if you are psychic, you MUST use your gifts, or at least learn to control them, or they will use you!

Sandy has many psychic gifts, but she believes her greatest to be the ability to identify and emulate the gifts of others. Because of that she is uniquely suited to teach people to open and develop those very gifts in themselves.

Sandy has been a professional psychic and astrologer since 1979. She holds a B.S. degree from Adelphi University and has teaching certifications in several fields. In addition to teaching, Sandy has worked as a Safety Engineer, and owned her own small book store for many years before retiring to become a full time psychic counselor, writer and teacher. Sandy's writings include books on Astrology, Kabbala, and Tarot, as well as Psychic Development.

Sandy has also appeared on many radio and television shows over the years, most notably Crossing Over and Cross Country – both television shows hosted by her good friend and former student, John Edward. She currently lives in Florida with her husband and four dogs.

Additional Products and Services

If you enjoyed this book, you may be interested in the many other products and services offered at www.SandyAnastasi.com.

Personal Readings With Sandy Anastasi

Are you interested in communicating with your Guides and Higher Self in order to obtain key messages that can help you overcome the challenges you will be facing in the future? Or would you like to revisit and learn important lessons from past lives you may have lived? Are you interested in finding out just how astrologically compatible you are with your friends, family, and significant others?

The benefits of having these insights are HUGE. Many people can live for decades without having access to such information, which can provide a critical insight in how to move on and move up in life. And there are many options to fit your specific needs, such as:

- Channeled Readings

- Past Life Reading Using Tarot and/or Astrology

- Death and Afterlife Charts

- Astrology

- Astrology Comparisons

For a limited time only, I am still willing, able, and excited to take on new clients. However, I can only handle so many one-on-one sessions in a given week and I’ll always give scheduling preference to my loyal client base. So if you’re interested, please book as soon as possible in order to get your spot! Rates and additional information can be found at www.SandyAnastasi.com.

Workshops and Classes

Many of my clients find that the workshop environment is an ideal way to make large gains in their skills and understanding of these topics. And I agree, because workshops provide many benefits and opportunities that cannot be wholly replicated in book format. These advantages include:

- In class demonstrations for hands-on experience.

- Immediate feedback from myself and other skilled instructors.

- The ability to meet with other highly motivated people that are interested in this area of learning and development.

- Question and answer sessions for those burning questions on your mind.

- An environment full of high energy from the instructors and other students.

- An affordable cost compared to one-on-one training.

For a current listing of available workshops, please visit www.SandyAnastasi.com.

Appearances, Interviews, & Lectures

I also am available for appearances, interviews, and lectures outside of the classes and workshops already listed. Please inquire for availability, topics, and (if applicable for the particular format) pricing.

Books & Audio CDs

If you’re like a majority of my friends, colleagues, and clients, then I know that an interest in one genre will turn into an eager desire to explore them all... and that’s a good thing! Often some your biggest insights and “ah ha” moments will come in areas you least expect it. So while your primary interest may be in spiritual channeling, experience in tarot reading may be the key to unlocking your ability (or at least guiding you into the right direction).

In terms of topics, my 30+ years of experience and training has allowed me to create over 100+ books and CD sets covering the following:

- Crystal and Stones

- Divination

- Dowsing

- Energy Healing

- Healing

- Kabbala

- Meditation

- Numerology

- Philosophy

- Psychic Development

- Psychic Protection

- Channeling and Spirit Communication

- Radionics

- Tarot

So regardless of which genre you’re on now, there is something for everybody and something to expand into to diversify your skills and talents.

Most Popular Products

- The Psychic Development Series (books and CDs). This six-part series will systematically teach you drills and techniques that will greatly improve your current psychic abilities, regardless of your current skill level. Topics covered include: energy balancing, how to send and receive information, remote viewing, radionics, channeling/mediumship, soul retrieval, and much more!

- Basic Tarot (books and CDs). Using the Rider Waite deck—The meanings of all the cards are discussed as well as their history and many uses. Students may use any deck utilizing 78 cards. The basic Celtic cross layout is used while finishing with students doing simple but accurate readings.

- The Astrology Series (books and CDs). This series will teach you the many components of reading, creating, and interpreting astrological charts. Part 1 begins with learning the basic meanings of the symbols, planets, and houses while the advanced levels cover the nuances of lunar nodes, interceptions, decans, and other important topics that are often ignored or misunderstood.

- The Psychic Development Workshops (transcripts and CDs). These expand upon the book series listed above, particularly in the following topics: psychic self-defense, seeing and feeling the aura, using the pendulum, astral travel, crystal gazing, and psychometry.

- Kabbala Pathworking (books and CDs). A unique experience in exploring the 22 paths of the Kabbala; an ancient system that becomes a roadmap to delineating the soul path to enlightenment. A series of guided visualizations on each Path are designed to open the doors of your unconscious to the energies of the Higher Self and the God consciousness within.

Free Support Materials

In order to help you get the most out of the content of the books and tapes, many of the exercise sheets and other support materials are freely available for download online at www.SandyAnastasi.com (For example the crown Chakra mandala and the Psychic Development Aptitude Test). There you will also find free gifts and bonuses, such as a downloadable Chakra meditation audio that you can use to balance your body’s energy system. You are allowed (and highly encouraged) to give and distribute these materials in whatever ethical manner you deem appropriate to others that have an interest in this type of journey.