Praise for Psychic Development Level 5

“Take it from someone who probably owns every psychic development CD on the market: I found the Anastasi Mediumship Method to resonate with me. The course was thorough and organized. I could hardly put it down! The exercises allowed me to learn hands on. I never would have thought that spirit communication could be so easy. There is a whole world out there waiting to explore. Sandy Anastasi's method helps to safely open that door to spirit communication. Her course has allowed me to see that love never dies. Death is only the beginning of a beautiful metamorphosis.”

— Erika Boussarhane, International Psychic Medium and Radio Host

“In January of 2001, I first met Sandy Anastasi when I began taking the Psychic Development Levels 1-6 classes at Starchild. By the time we reached Level 5, Sandy and her staff had taken a curious dabbler and transformed me into a person with a good foundation in many areas of psychic endeavor.

In Level 5 you will learn to maximize your energy and skills from a person you can trust, a gifted instructor with impeccable credentials, someone I am proud to call my teacher and friend, Sandy Anastasi.”

— Wade Andrew Jones, Psychic Artist-Medium

“I enrolled in Sandy Anastasi’s classes in 2000. It was the best decision I have made in my life. I had experienced many paranormal activities from a young age, but I really didn't understand what was happening around me, how to protect myself, or even meditate. Frankly, many things scared me.

Sandy helped me sort out what was happening and showed me how to work with my abilities to enhance my life and the lives of others. I was amazed at what was available to me. Sandy is a patient and articulate teacher who makes you think and experiment with the world around you. Her courses are fun and full of information you could not assemble by reading books.

There are so many new adventures in Psychic Development Level 5. It teaches advanced lessons on the basics and prepares one for using energy to the max!!! It also, prepares you for mediumship. I have learned so much and can never thank Sandy enough for opening my eyes to the wonderful world around us.”

— Cathy Jones, Psychic Medium

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 5: Developing the Energy and Skill in Spirit Communication

Copyright © 2009 Sandy Anastasi

ISBN: 978-0-982-56690-9

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 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 and a wonderful psychic medium, 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

Developing Your Skill as a Psychic Medium

Exercise #1: Opening Meditation Asking for Guidance

Chapter 1 — Clearing and Protecting Your Space

Exercise #2: Locking Down the Workspace, Invoking the Four Directions for Protection

Observations

Discussion

Self-clearing and Self-protection

Ethical Issues

The Problem of Fear and Negativity

Staying Positive

Chapter 2 — Working with Your Client

A Handout for Clients

Some Truths Regarding Spirit Communication

The Importance of Details

Understanding the Energy of Spirit Communication

Beware of the Empathic Client Connection

The Importance of Attitude

How to Get a Spirit Communication Reading

Don’t Be a Bad Psychic Medium!

A Word on Empathic Readings

Ethics

Interpreting Symbols

Be Compassionate, but Stay in Control

Chapter 3 — Spirit Communication: Developing the Energy and the Skills

Exercise #1: Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram

Exercise #2: Opening Your Channel or Spirit Gates

Sample Sessions and Critiques

Session 1

Critique 1

Session 2

Critique 2

Session 3

Critique 3

Continuation

Continued Critique 3

Session 4

Critique 4

Conclusion

Foreword

A new age is upon us and with the exploding acceptance of psychic ability throughout our world, it was imperative that someone create a book that would safely guide those people who are ready to take that next step in their own evolution. Sandy Anastasi has done just that with her Psychic Development Level 5 book.

To simply say this is a great guide to spirit communication would not do it justice. Among these pages you will find a plethora of knowledge that will help to unlock your own self-made boundaries. You will learn to expand your horizons, accept your experiences, and ‘tune up’ your awareness! Sandy teaches why protection is so very important when making connections to the other side, and that acknowledgement is a key factor in the process of mediumship.

We all make what I like to call simple connections to the other side. Those are daily life experiences that take no effort on our part; they just occur. Sometimes we recognize them as a smell, a feeling of someone standing behind us, something that triggers our mind to think about someone who has crossed over. In this educational tool that Sandy has developed, you will learn very useful techniques to help you identify spirit, interpret symbols, understand not just the process of making a connection to someone who has crossed over, but learn how to present that information in a way that is responsible.

After my father died I felt an amazing loss in my life and began searching for something that would help me know he was okay, that he was still with me, in a sense. I wanted to know that even though he was not here in the physical, he might still be available through spirit. And I talked to him, and he made himself known to me through a single red rose. That was one of the most warm, peaceful feelings I had felt since his passing, and I knew that I wanted to share that feeling with others. So, I searched for someone to teach me how to safely do spirit communication, and I found it, in this book and with this teacher!

If you are seriously considering making connections to the other side, or if you simply wish to expand your own boundaries of knowledge in this area, then this book is going to give you that opportunity. Thank you, Sandy, for writing something so easy to follow, yet so very important to the process of spirit communication and the skills needed to do this work safely and with ethics! Your contribution in this field is priceless!

— Lisa Freeman, Professional Psychic Medium

Author’s Foreword

Welcome to your continuing study of spirit communication. Students who have completed Psychic Development Levels 1 through 4 will find in Level 5 the next steps in developing expertise as psychic mediums. In these pages all that you have learned will come together.

In addition to learning more about technique and ethics, you will learn how to create and maintain the correct space and atmosphere in which to conduct spirit communication sessions. You will learn how to be sure that you and your clients are clear and protected as you work. There is also just enough review to allow you to build on the skills you have already learned. As always, there are plenty of developmental exercises and lots of practice to help you hone your skills. Most of these exercises were created by me in conjunction with John Maerz, co-developer of this portion of the series. I believe you will find them both enjoyable and effective.

It is my hope that in reading and working through the following pages you will come to a greater understanding of what spirit communication is all about and gain more insight into what it is to be a psychic medium.

Let me take some time here to address some common questions and observations you may have following your study of The Anastasi System Level 4: An Introduction to Channeling and Spirit Communication. Understanding that course material, as well as the tools learned in Psychic Development Levels 1 through 3, supplies the foundation to what you will learn here, in Level 5.

Many of my students have asked if the spirits that work with us at this beginning level of spirit communication get impatient with ‘fledgling’ mediums just seeking to practice what they have learned. Most spirits welcome your attempts at communication, even as a beginner, because they welcome you as a bridge between our physical world and the world of spirit. If you are constantly seeking to communicate with them, constantly pulling on their energy, they will not appreciate it. But if you are studying, working, and want to do something productive with it, and you make a connection to spirit, you are seen as an aid, not a hindrance. This is especially true when you study and practice in a group. Then the energy available to spirit is multiplied exponentially. The more people added to the study group, the easier it becomes for spirits to communicate because a wider, stronger, more powerful channel is created for that communication. This is one reason why gallery-type readings are usually so dynamic. It is also one reason why learning to channel, and to do it well, is a pre-requisite to becoming a psychic medium. Remember, a psychic channel must first be a psychic, and a spirit medium must first be a psychic channel. There are no short cuts!

When you have a large number of people connected to a single matrix or location where spirit communication is frequently practiced, the energy of the place itself not only becomes a great place and a safe place for people to work, it also becomes a sort of lighted beacon to spirits on the other side who are needing to communicate. It is interesting to note that most psychic readers who work in a location where spirit communication is practiced or taught eventually ended up becoming channels and/or spirit mediums, even though they may have specialized in a different psychic discipline when they first began doing readings.

Over time, spirit communication done in one place causes that place to become psychically attractive to people as well. This can create a place of enlightenment for people who come in to see what is going on. Often people may open up to the fact of spirit communication and the existence of life after death because they have become part of the experience. In a sense, any place where spirit communication is done with frequency becomes a sort of church or temple having the capacity to aid the process of enlightenment. That may be one of the reasons that the spiritualist movement developed into the religion of Spiritualism with its many spiritualist churches and centers. It is certainly a major reason why people participating in a gallery session usually finish the session feeling uplifted and often healed in some way, even if their own loved ones were not contacted during the session.

Remember, these tools you are learning have the ultimate purpose of helping to evolve consciousness, both that of people in the world of spirit and your own. When you approach your developing spirit communication skills from that point of view the spirits, and your guides, will welcome your attempts, and seek to help you to learn and develop them.

May the LIGHT be with you!

— Sandy Anastasi

Introduction

Developing Your Skill as a Psychic Medium

Sometimes the hardest part of practicing psychic development and learning the art of spirit communication is that you can get bogged down by trying to draw together too many of the things you’ve learned and trying to use them all at once. For example, psychic development students may not be sure before going to bed at night what they should do after they rub their Third Eye (i.e., ask to get a message from the Higher Self, ask for a lucid dream, talk to their guides, or astral project). Having learned all of these techniques, the choice of which tool to use and when to use it can be daunting. Here is an analogy to help you with this: If you are a carpenter, and you have a whole box full of tools, do you use them all at once? The answer is no. You use the best tool for the job at hand. In studying psychic development and spirit communication, you are stocking your unconscious mind with tools. When the occasion comes that needs a particular tool, you pull that ONE out and use it. So, then you need to ask yourself, “Which tool do I choose?” Usually, more than one tool will feel right, but you obviously can’t use them all at once. Using the previous example, you would ask yourself, “Do I need a message tonight, or higher guidance, or do I want to visit someplace on the astral?” The real question you need to ask yourself is, “What is the best thing to do given the current situation and its needs and time constraints?”

Let’s compare this to a program of physical exercise. If you have a whole routine of exercises that you need to do, but don’t always have time to do all at once, you divide them up. For example, you may do one set of exercises in the morning, something else in the afternoon, something else at night, and then by the end of the evening you have done just about everything you needed to do in your planned routine. In the same sense, you can rotate the practice exercises from your psychic development and spirit communication classes in a pattern until you get to the point you need something different. You adjust for whatever it is you need, and then go back into the pattern afterward. That way you cover all of the bases and don’t miss anything.

And of course, at some point you will get to a level where you are finished playing with the tools and can just add them to your ‘workbox’ to select a favorite when the need arises. In the beginning, when a tool is new, students always have a tendency to overuse it while practicing and ‘playing’ with it. But eventually, you become so familiar with the tools in your psychic workbox that you thoroughly know and understand the actual uses for them. For example, it will no longer be you rubbing your Third Eye and saying, “This is what I wantâ€¦.” You will not even need to rub your Third Eye because when the need arises it will automatically happen.

Let’s begin this continuing study of spirit communication with an opening meditation. This first meditation is a guided visualization to center yourself and to ask your guides for help with the work we will cover in this book.

*Note: You may want to record each of the guided meditations in this workbook in your own voice for you own use. Many students find that an aid to their mastery of the exercises.

Exercise #1: Opening Meditation Asking for Guidance

Part 1

1. Relax and make sure your back is straight.

2. Slowly inhale through your nose, and expand your belly.

3. Let the weight of your body be what pushes out the air. Relax.

4. Now inhale again through your nose, relax and let the air push out.

5. Once more; inhale through your nose and relax – let the air push out.

6. Now, in your mind’s eye, step out of yourself and look at yourself.

7. See a point of white light in the center of your heart.

8. As you inhale and exhale, see that point of white light grow in intensity, clarity, focus, and brilliance.

9. As you continue to breath, powering yourself with the white light, see it expand to encompass your heart, your lungs, your chest, neck and head, your abdomen, your pelvis, legs, feet, arms, hands and fingers, until you are totally surrounded by a clean, clear shell of white light protecting, energizing, grounding, and relaxing you.

Part 2: 10-point exercise for relaxation.

1. With your mind, tell your face to relax:

a. Your mind tells the muscles, nerves, and vessels in your jaw, “Relax, let go, go limp, and sleep,” and your jaw obeys.

b. Your mind tells your lips, “Relax, let go, go limp, and sleep.”

c. Your mind tells your cheeks, “Relax, let go, go limp, and sleep.”

d. Your mind tells your eyes, the muscles in your eyes, “Relax, let go, go limp, and sleep.”

e. Your mind tells your forehead, “Relax, let go, go limp, and sleep.”

2. Your mind tells your head to relax:

a. Your mind tells the muscles in the back of your head and neck, “Let go, go limp, relax, and sleep.”

b. Your mind tells your scalp and your ears, “Relax, let go, go limp, and sleep.”

3. Now, let this relaxation from your head, face, and neck penetrate inward so your mind and brain are cool, calm, and relaxed.

4. In your mind’s eye, look down at your feet. With your mind, tell your feet, “Relax, go limp, let go, and sleep”.

5. Your mind now tells your legs – your calves, thighs, shins, knees, “Relax, let go, go limp, and sleep.”

6. Your mind tells your hips, your groin, your genitals, your buttocks, your lower abdomen, and digestive track, “Let go, relax, go limp, and sleep.”

7. Your mind tells the middle of your body – your stomach, your gallbladder, your liver, your pancreas, your kidneys, your lower back, “Relax, let go, go limp, and sleep.”

8. Your mind tells your heart, your chest, your lungs, your upper back, “Relax, let go, go limp, and sleep.”

9. Your mind tells your shoulders, upper arms, forearms, wrists, hands and fingers, “Relax, let go, go limp, and sleep.”

10. Now you are in the “10” state where your body is deeply asleep and your mind is bright, awake, and alert.

*This exercise for relaxation is loosely based upon the progressive relaxation exercise taught at the Monroe Institute of Applied Sciences in Fabor, Virginia.

*Part 3 is by John Maerz, co-founder of the Astrological Institute of Integrated Studies, and co-developer of Levels 4, 5, and 6 of the Anastasi System of Psychic Development.

Part 3: Asking for Guidance

1. In your mind, open your inner eyes. You see before you your worry box. Raise the lid and put into it all your worries, cares and issues. You won’t need them now. Then close the lid, and push the box behind you, out of sight.

2. Now, move into your workplace. Move into the center, and look around. See what, if anything, has changed since the last time you visited here. Make a mental note of any changes – they reflect changes and growth within you.

3. In the center of your workplace you see a spiral staircase extending upward. Begin to climb the stairs, moving from the first level to the second level, which is the level with all of the dials, all of the equipment in your psychic toolbox, and then continuing up still further to the next level.

4. When you are on the third level, if you look up, the light from that level is so bright you can hardly look at it.

5. Keep moving upward, until you are on that level. Step off your staircase onto that level. You are completely drenched in white brilliance. It is bright, clean, clear, refreshing, energizing, and calming. As you look into the white light you put both hands out in front of you. With your right hand you reach out and ask your Protector Guide to join you. As you reach out, your Protector takes your hand. You look into his (or her) eyes, and thank him for joining you.

With your left hand you reach out and you ask your Life Guide to join you. As you do, your Life Guide takes hold of your left hand. Again you look into his eyes and you thank him for joining you. And now you ask both your Life Protector and your Life Guide to aid you and to assist you in doing your best, to learn, to grow, to evolve, to become more aware of that which is beyond the normal range, or the accepted range of understanding, seeing, hearing, feeling, or tasting.

Ask your guides to help you today, to make contact with whatever guides, whatever energies, whatever abilities and potentials you need to make this work you do today effective, efficient, and heartfelt. Ask most of all for their assistance in remaining protected in the work that you do, and to protect those whom you touch while doing it.

6. Now, look at your Protector Guide and say, “Thank you for assisting me,” and let go of his hand. Then look at your Life Guide and say, “Thank you for helping me and assisting me,” and let go.

7. Turn around and descend back down the spiral staircase.

8. As you get to the control level, step off the spiral staircase. Move around the room and turn all your switches and dials to the positions that are most comfortable for you for hearing, for healing, for sight, for intensity, and for memory. Set all of the volume controls and all of the intensity controls at comfortable places for you.

Remember, when you are doing your work you can return almost instantly to this control room and adjust whatever frequencies or switches you need to, to adjust the connection or the conditions you are working with, both with the spirits and with yourself.

9. When you are satisfied with all of your adjustments, return back to the staircase and move back down to the bottom level.

10. On the bottom level, once again, take a look around to see what has changed, if anything. Make a note of these changes. Your workplace will grow as you do. Tools will appear as you gain them and/or as you need them. This is your place for creating whatever tool or aid you need to do the work you do.

11. Turn to the entrance to your workplace now, open it, step through and close it behind you. Move away from your workplace, but keep the energy, the feeling, and the sense that you have of the cleanliness and groundedness with you.

12. Inhale and fill your heart with light energy as you breath in. As you slowly exhale, expand the light to encompass the entire room that you are in, so that you are in a protected, energized, and loving space as you work today.

13. Now, count yourself back from 10 to 1 as you slowly bring your consciousness back to normal awareness.

You are now ready to move on to more advanced work, with the help of your guides.

Chapter 1

Clearing and Protecting Your Space

Now, before you begin any actual practice work you should also lock down, or in other words, protect the room. Here is how:

Exercise #2: Locking Down the Workspace, Invoking the Four Directions for Protection

1. Face East. Invoke the Archangel Raphael:
“Archangel Raphael, I invoke thee for protection.”
Colors are mauve and yellow in the Kabbalistic tradition.
The feeling sense is air.

2. Face South. Invoke the Archangel Michael:
“Archangel Michael, I invoke thee for protection.”
Colors are red and green in the Kabbalistic tradition.
The feeling sense is heat.

3. Face West. Invoke the Archangel Gabriel:
“Archangel Gabriel, I invoke thee for protection.”
Colors are orange and blue in the Kabbalistic tradition.
The feeling sense is wet.

4. Face North. Invoke the Archangel Uriel:
“Archangel Uriel, I invoke thee for protection.”
Colors are brown and green in the Kabbalistic tradition.
The feeling sense is cool earth.

5. Face back to the East and say:
“Uriel on my left, Michael on my right, Raphael before me, Gabriel behind me, I invoke thee for protection.”

*Exercise 2 is an ages-old method of protection taught by many religious groups; colors used may vary among groups.

Observations

Take a moment now to assess any sensations you had while you did the meditation or the protection. You may have actually felt a sense of moisture on your palms, or heat on your face or body as you faced west, or south. The room around you should feel quieter, as if it is insulated.

One past student described this feeling as a ‘cotton-headed’ feeling. Another student noted a feeling of pressure in his head each time he did this room protection.

One student, who is an elementary school teacher, reported using this protection with extraordinary results in her classroom at work. The children are more relaxed, and she is more relaxed. Many of the issues with other teachers, parents, and difficult children that she had to deal with in past years are no longer a problem. If she doesn’t do the protection, she often finds she has a ‘bad day’ with the students. This is interesting everyday proof of the strong affect of this type of protection.

Another student tried this in a hotel room, but got her directions wrong; she was concerned about the protections being effective if she was facing the wrong way when she did them. By putting yourself mentally back into a place where you are sure of the direction as you do this protection, you will be assured of calling the directions correctly. It is as if the place with which you are familiar superimposes itself over the one you are staying in and are unsure of.

In the same way that you have your workplace within you, and you take it everywhere you go, you can also tune into your home space or the usual place you do your psychic or spirit communication work. That becomes your anchor and your protection that you can take anywhere with you.

When you lock down the room or space in which you are working, you are actually disconnecting from the outer world. This takes you ‘out of phase’ relative to the surrounding environment, so you are no longer exposed to interfering wavelengths of energy that may come in.

You can also use your mind’s eye (i.e., your powers of visualization) to do much of this, once you become thoroughly familiar with it.

Discussion

So, why do we do these protections?

The protection is to protect yourself and your workspace from negative people, spirits or influences. The energy generated during spirit communication sessions sometimes attracts people or energies that may want to use the energy and the power that you have generated for their own purposes. This protection allows you to protect yourself, so that your own energy and the energy you generate in your work cannot be utilized by something or someone else.

What you are doing with this protection is giving yourself a grounding platform; you are creating that base to give you a foundation from which to work. This allows you to experience and to do the energy work itself, without losing that energy to something else. It is for protection of self, and of everyone in the room as well. Essentially, it is saying that whatever energy is going to go elsewhere, it is only going to go there by your choice.

And remember, after you’ve done your psychic, spirit communication, or healing work, you MUST remember to disconnect from your client, and the spirit, or your energy will keep bleeding off.

Protection includes grounding and centering, assessing your physical and emotional state before, during, and after working (taking your temperature), and then locking down the room. Then you know exactly what is you and what is not. You know the sensations and feelings that are yours versus those that belong to someone else. You’ve protected the room; you’ve focused and maintained your energy in that room.

You will find, in fact, that an Archangel or your Protector Guide will automatically show up if at any time you need that protection, so long as you have taken the time to invoke and call upon them at the start of your session.

The goal is to open your channel and to maintain your sense of self as you are doing this. By sense of self, I do not mean self-absorption. Rather, if you are keeping your sense of self and your reference to whatever energy you are working with and allowing the energy to flow you are not using your energy, you are directing the energy that is coming through. If you start investing yourself in terms of valuing yourself with the work that you are doing, it means that you are focusing on your ego needs instead of the needs of the client. As a result, you cut your channel off; you are now using your own energy to do all the work and you are depleting yourself. So, the more you become personally vested in the work you do, the less energy you have to work with.

Self-clearing and Self-protection

How do you clear yourself to get to that point where your ego is set aside?

The easiest way to be sure that your ego has not become involved is to center yourself. In addition to the above protections and visualizations, you need to detach yourself from the past, from what you can’t change, from what you’ve been through, including regrets and any hurtful things. You push them away. You also push away any kind of fears about what you can or can’t do. You must not worry about your self worth, whether you are ‘good enough.’ You focus only on the here and now. You place yourself into the moment. When you exist in the moment you cannot be personally invested because your selfish sense of self is based on what may happen or what has been happening, not on what is going on right now at this moment. Any meditation or grounding that you do, focusing on now and what you are doing now erases everything else. When you are in the moment everything else is gone. You are not personally vested. You can tap into the energy that is here now. When you tap into the past or the future, there is no energy there to help you. The energy you need to work with is here and now, it is where you are focusing NOW.

Remember the ‘double E dangers’ (coined by John Maerz) – energy and ego. When discussing protection, I am talking about this whole process, about your energy, using it both in a generative and receptive way, and about being able to detect where and how your energy is being pulled. And I am talking about your ego; about your tendency to let the channel become obstructed when your ego becomes involved. You must go through every entire reading maintaining a strong sense of self without ego involvement.

The whole process allows you to be able to maintain your sense of self, know who you are and know where you are coming from by assessing yourself throughout the reading. You don’t want to let your ego step in. Sometimes you can get so focused on doing the best reading you possibly can that your ego just takes over and you end up with a bad reading. You need to periodically step back and say to yourself, “I need to maintain a proper reading attitude, based on what I am sensing, feeling and hearing, not on what my opinion is.” So, being in control of your ego needs is very important.

Ethical Issues

You need to be aware that if your ego gets involved, you can end up harming someone mentally or emotionally through your reading and the information you are presenting. You are linking in to the person you are reading, connecting to him or her on a higher mind or Higher Self level, as well as to the spirit you are communicating with. You can easily set something into the person’s mind – a concept, a feeling, an emotion, energy, or a thought pattern. Here we start to deal with layers of ethics. You must be aware of your actions and their effect on your client at all times, and these should never stem from your own ego needs. Honest self-evaluation is required. This is where you really start to look at the ethical aspect of what you are doing.

You are getting in front of a group, or you are sitting one-on-one with a client. You are emotionally, physically, and energetically tied into what you are doing. You are giving the people you are working with information. You must be VERY aware of what you are saying and doing. Ethics become paramount from this point forward. In essence, you are planting seeds in the minds and emotional bodies of the people you work with. If you put doubts or fears in your clients’ hearts, you can inadvertently cause them to experience difficult situations in their lives. Psychic mediums need to be concerned with their presentation, with HOW they interact with their clients, not just whether they make a good connection to the other side. This is one of your most important responsibilities.

It is perfectly all right to leave the client with questions, or homework. Oftentimes such homework helps the client to prove the truth of the reading he or she received! If information comes through your channel, you give it. If it comes from or is sculpted by your ego, you need to not give it. Instead, step back from yourself and re-center. As a medium you are a telephone operator. You don’t offer opinions unless you make it very clear to the client that it is your opinion.

The Problem of Fear and Negativity

Let’s talk a little bit more about fear for a moment. Fear is probably one of the biggest drains and blocks to the use of energy. Fear wastes energy. We, as psychic mediums, often encounter the emotion of fear. Clients may be afraid of what they might hear, or of what they failed to do, or even of death itself. The best way to counteract fear is through encouragement. Say to the client, “You can do it. You can handle it. You’ve done it before. See it in your mind as done.” By stating things in a way that is positive and focused, as if it is already accomplished, it gives your client a mind-set or an attitude that allows you and them to proceed without fear or doubt, without difficulty. That is one reason you are being taught to protect as well as you are – it is so that you can operate in an environment that you create, where there is no fear. You must resist reflecting or picking up on any of your client’s negative emotions.

Certainly one of the most important things you can do for yourself and your client is to continually put out good thoughts because as you put out those good thoughts they do return back to you. What you put out is what you get back. If you put out positive thoughts, you are going to get back a positive life situation, and have positive people in your life.

When you are working in your spirit communication sessions with your clients you should try to maintain that positive orientation. You should never end a spirit communication session on a negative note. It is VERY important that you maintain some level of ‘up’ energy and positive thinking all the way through. Every experience a person goes through in his or her life is a lesson. Every lesson is ultimately positive, even though it may not seem like it at the time.

Make it a point to never leave negative emotions with any person on which you do a psychic, channeled, or spirit communication reading. Take the time to present things in a positive way; take the time to assess the mental attitude of your client before he or she leaves your session. Do not leave him or her with a sense of pain, despair, or fear. When spirit communication is approached in a positive and uplifting manner, it can be a totally healing experience, as you will discover in The Anastasi System of Psychic Development Level 6: Healing Through Spirit Communication.

In interactions with another person it is usually the last encounter that is remembered most intensely. So, you want that last encounter with your client to be positive, focused, and to make you both feel good. That is what your clients will remember, and that is what you will remember about yourself, as well as them. It will help you to create a positive environment every time you conduct a session.

Remember, not only are you doing a spirit communication session to be able to act as a telephone to the other side, but you are also developing yourself, and unfolding your own spirit. Doing a spirit communication reading can be a wonderfully satisfying and uplifting experience for both you and your client. If you end on a positive note each time you work with a client, you build and expand your own abilities in a positive, spiritual way. You begin to experience a lift in your own consciousness and an expansion of your spirit into an entirely new way of being. In this way your spirit mediumship affects your whole life in a very positive fashion. But if you begin ending on negative notes, if you begin harping on the hurtful and negative emotions of the client or the deceased spirit during your sessions, you begin to spiral down in your own consciousness. Negativity such as that gradually leads you into the darker aspects of mediumship, the lower levels, where both negative people and negative spirits will be attracted to you. That is a very dangerous route to take for yourself, as well as your clients, as it inevitably leads to depression and psychic vampirism, or worse. On the other hand, continually focusing on the light and the positive lifts the spirit, expands it, and leads to healing and heightened awareness.

Staying Positive

In order to be free of your own ego difficulties you need to have a strong ego, or a strong sense of self. That means you must feel, ‘I can do it,’ ‘I can accomplish it,’ ‘I’m honest,’ ‘I’m focused,’ ‘I can sleep at night with a clear conscience,’ ‘I like myself.’ As long as you are focusing on what it is you are doing and how you want to be doing it, and your intentions are as honest as they can possibly be, you will have a strong sense of self. When you start doubting that you can do something is when your ego begins to get in the way.

There are a lot of psychic debunkers in the world. Perhaps you used to be one yourself! Right now you are changing your concept of what you can do in this reality. Think about that. You are actually evolving your perceptions. You are creating a change in your belief system itself. This is the most important and most difficult thing to do. It takes months, sometimes years, to change a belief system. Recognize your own resistance and your own growth and you will be much better equipped to deal with the same attitudes when you find them in your clients.

You can have something impact you that alters your belief system immediately, but under normal conditions it takes months, at least. If you have worked through all of the psychic development classes and books in the series so far, you have already been working at altering your belief system for many months. You are changing your concept of reality. Stay away from TV shows and other media that are debunking what you are learning while you are going through this process. Seek out people and situations that support your growing abilities and insights. As you are learning, you must be careful how you allow into your life those things or people that introduce doubt into your mind. The goal in this process is to make a perceptual change in you. You should stay out of the battle between the believers and the non-believers. That battle does not serve you at all. Let the experts fight those battles, if they must be fought. You do not have to prove anything to anyone except yourself. Cultivate an attitude of openness and acceptance. It will serve you well as a medium.

As you are learning, you need to maintain a protective psychic bubble around you during your practice and in other situations where you may feel you need it. This will allow you to remain safely open so that your psychic, channeling, and spirit communication skills may unfold naturally. The energy balloon you learned in Psychic Development Level 1 will suffice. One of the ways you can enhance the effectiveness of that bubble through your own actions is by staying away from negative people and situations, and by staying away from those who would seek to undermine or block your progress. Another way is by focusing on positive thinking. You need to take that protective bubble and use it, not just physically and energetically, but also maintain it mentally. You have to protect yourself from the negative influences that enter your life. So, be aware of them, and remove yourself from them. Filter what you are allowing into your life right now. We know there is war, hurt, and pain in the world, but we do not focus on it while we are learning. Do not watch violent reality shows, or tune into the news to fixate on this negativity. It will take you down very quickly, and you will become blocked.

Remember, to focus on a negative is to close down possibility. To evolve spirit, we must bring light into the dark areas within our own being. We must be positive and think positively. That is a spiritual aid to you and your client.

Chapter 2

Working with Your Client

In this chapter we will be talking about client requirements. When a client comes to you, what is he or she expecting? Often, it’s not what you are getting ready to deliver. It is up to you to educate your client about your kind of spirit communication.

For example, don’t be surprised when you find that your client is expecting Uncle Harry to tell you where to find his Will; or that the client expects Aunt Sarah to tell you where she left something, or why she did something; or that the client expects Mother to say she forgives him, or wants his forgiveness.

Everybody has a different issue that they bring to you and that they are looking for confirmation from the other side about. In this respect, we run into a paradox. You see, when the spirit communicates with you he (or she) is going to take an image, a picture, or a feeling, and is going to incorporate as many messages as he can into that one focus. In many cases the person in spirit has been waiting a very long time for this opportunity to ‘punch a hole through’ to our plane of existence in order to communicate. That makes his communication both specific and intense. This makes your ability as a psychic medium to analyze, discriminate, and interpret very difficult. It is most effective to merely bring the message through, as accurately as you can, and to reserve your interpretation for afterward. The spirit is interested in getting HIS message across. Often what the client wants or needs to hear is something totally different.

Indeed, frustrating though this issue is to the psychic medium, and to the client, it is one way of telling apart the true psychic medium from the empath posing as a medium. The true spirit medium is connecting with the spirit, and the information and images come from the spirit, not from the client. That is why so many clients walk away from a true spirit communication reading with questions that can only be answered much later, through research into the deceased person’s life. You see, the true spirit/psychic medium can, and does, tell the client things he does not know about the person who passed; things that cannot easily be proven. That is the proof that the connection is real.

The empathic psychics who pose as psychic mediums give a very different type of reading (and some so-called psychic mediums who do this don’t even realize that they are not doing true spirit communication). They are usually spot-on with specific events and things that are exactly what the client came to hear, and that the client ‘knows’ are true – because they are given from the client’s very own perspective.

In truth, there are some excellent spirit psychic mediums who do both the empathic type of reading by connecting into the energy of the person in spirit through the person they are reading, while also communicating directly with the spirit. But in general, if all of the information being given is exactly what you already know, and especially from your own point of view, the mediums capability as a true medium is in question.

Clients who come to you want and deserve specifics. Although you will give your information from the point of view of the person in spirit with whom you are communicating, you need to work hard to be specific in order to make the reading worthwhile and meaningful to your client. This is not always easy! The spirits who come to you want to be as diversified and as broad as they possibly can be. They want to communicate a wealth of information in a moment, an instant, of time. The spirit is communicating in what appears to be broad generalizations, but you and your client want specifics. How do you handle this?

You have to be careful of focusing on getting specifics because if you answer the client’s desires, you run the risk of getting the information empathically from them, and in doing so, you close the channel for the spirit to come through further and further. As you delve into the little details the client remembers you open more to them and less to the person in spirit, and you gradually lose the energy required for the channel to remain open for the spirit to come through.

The specific information you are looking for needs to be received from the person in spirit. As you get the person in spirit to focus on the specifics, the channel for communication between him, the physical plane, and you expand.

So, how do you keep your client open, accepting, and working with the broader picture, the picture that is taken from the memory of the person in spirit – not from the client’s memory? What can you do?

A good start is to ask the client to only give you yes and no answers to the information you are receiving. Another is to set the expectations of what the client wants versus what you can deliver upfront. Discuss it with the client first. Describe your process, let him know where you are coming from, listen to his expectations, then tell him what you might be able to deliver based upon your own experience of your work.

You will find that a lot of people will suddenly say, “You know, that is not the person I wanted to come through.” Spirit communication does not work that way. The spirit that comes through is the one that comes through. The person that comes through in a reading will be the person that is supposed to come through, for whatever reason. It might be that the person you are doing the reading for really needs that communication, or that someone who is directly or indirectly associated with him does, or that the spirits themselves need to communicate in order to heal and be whole on the other side.

One woman, a member of my staff, recounted her story about connecting with her father. She was attending a very large gallery (group) style reading. She knew that her father would never speak out in front of a group so large. So, before going to the session she prayed that he would find a way to make himself known to her in spite of that. During the session the spirit medium kept coming toward her and talked about feeling father energy, but each time brought through the father of someone sitting near her. By the end of the session almost every spirit who had come through was someone’s father. The woman realized that her father had indeed made himself known. He had helped all of those other fathers to come through.

Here is a quote from an unidentified source that you may find is a good thing to pass along to your clients ahead of time. It may clear up some potential misunderstandings in advance. You are welcome to print it out.

A Handout for Clients

“I am the spirit you are attempting to contact. I cannot predict your future. Like you, I can only make choices. I cannot fulfill your memories of me. I have only my own perspective. I cannot provide you with family members unless I’ve known them myself. I have not miraculously changed my opinion on ____________ just because I’ve passed; I still feel the same. I may not be able to connect with you, yet because I am still getting used to being here, please receive those who have been here longer than I paving the way for me, and helping me to become prepared to greet you through my own skill and under my own power. You may not want to talk to me because of past differences, but realize that I may be the one that is able to connect you to those whom you want to speak with, so please listen. You can reject me later if you still want to. I may not be your passed on relative or friend. I may know that you have a connection to someone that I wish to get a message to. Please be kind and deliver it.”

Think of expectations now. You have a lot of people wanting different things. I would suggest that you hand something along the lines of this to your client before your session with him. He needs to be made aware of what you are willing to allow in your session with him.

Much of this will cover the detailing that a client will expect of you. It will allow you to avoid wasting the energy and missing the primary message that dealing with the little particulars causes. There is a lot of energy required to do spirit communication, and most of it comes from you, as the psychic medium. You cannot afford to waste any more energy than is necessary on those expectations the client may have.

Some Truths Regarding Spirit Communication

A person who recently passed is still learning, but the one who passed over some time ago can give clearer and more specific information that the client really needs to hear. So, the one who passed long ago is the one that will come through. That is one reason why often the client may not hear from the person he wishes to. Also, the person who passed a while ago may be able to help the one who recently passed to communicate more clearly. In the same sense, think of the analogy of a baby coming into this world. That baby needs support and direction. The newly crossed over person needs to learn to communicate and to connect with people on this side of the veil. He does need the help from other, older spirits on the other side. He is often not yet able to clearly communicate, just like a baby here is not yet able to communicate its needs. Someone has to help.

In the same sense, when someone has just passed and has not been an aware person while alive on this plane, or had need of peaceful recuperation time from certain traumas here, after he passed, he will be ‘asleep’ for a while on the other side until he has gotten used to it and has started to grow into that environment and become accustomed to being where he is. Again, the spirit that is helping the person who is ‘waking up’ needs to be let in during your reading as a sort of spirit host so that the person your client wants to contact can come through on his or her energy.

You also can allow the client to ask the person who has passed over at an earlier time questions about the person he wishes to contact. However, you again run the risk of getting into those specific details that often cause the channel to close. Remember, the spirit comes in to give the information he wants to share, not to answer your questions, though in some cases that may be possible. If you do this, you must keep the flow moving so that the question gets answered quickly. Don’t get snagged on those details. Give the information, and if it is not immediately recognized, let it go. You can come back to it later, or the spirit may give related insight that explains it. If the client becomes bogged down in detail-oriented questions, the energy in the room will drop, and the channel will close.

You and your client are working together to open a channel to create the energy so the spirit can come through. It is a two-way street. It is as if you are dealing with a cave-in at a mineâ€¦ you have people on the inside digging to get through one side of the blockage, and you have people on the other side also digging to clear the blockage. Spirit communication is like that. The spirit is working from his side to create the channel; you are working from your side to create the same opening. Both you and the spirit need to work together to create the channel for communication.

Sometimes you may need to tell your client that you need to move on, that his (or her) questions are creating a blockage that will close your channel to the other side. This, again, is one reason why allowing the client only to answer yes or no is a good idea. It minimizes this tendency to get bogged down in the details. You can let your client tell you how it all fits together later, after the session finishes, if he feels the need to. Sometimes you may have to explain to the client that getting overly focused on details is shutting down the channel. You can ask him to wait until you are all done bringing through the information and then you can go back and talk about it from a detail-oriented perspective.

Most accomplished mediums do this in their readings, so many of you reading this have seen well-known psychic mediums in action and have observed this technique. The psychic medium usually gives the information to validate the spirit, and then at the end he or she will often ask those last questions to see if it is possible to get the answers the client is looking for. The spirit gets his information through first.

The Importance of Details

Over detailing, if it is to satisfy the client, is one way that the psychic medium is in danger of pulling in his ego and his own assumptions. It invites analysis, which brings in the lower mind, and also, it requires A LOT of energy to do.

To be a psychic medium requires a lot of psychic energy. When you are doing a reading on several people at the same time, or one person for an extended period of time, especially if you have had to chase down details, the end of the reading exhausts both you and your client.

In the scientific community details are a necessity for proof. I am not saying to do general readings; I am saying to let the spirit speak freely; do not get lost in trying to pin the spirit down to YOUR details. If the spirit has a message to get across, he will give the message. Your questions trying to get additional details out of the message distract from the focus of the message and drain off the necessary energy for the spirit to come through.

It is similar to having a conversation with someone in which you are trying to make a point, but can’t get to it because the other person keeps asking unrelated questions that lead you away from the point you are trying to make. Eventually, you lose interest in talking to that person; you know he or she does not want to listen. You leave. The spirit reacts the same way you would. Get enough detail for identification and a clear message. Don’t nitpick!

Detailing also requires a different headspace. That headspace of asking picky questions does not allow the open channel for energy. From a scientific perspective your client may push for details that are beyond the spirit’s capability to readily supply. Or perhaps the client is looking for proof of a hereafter for himself. As a medium you cannot afford to get sucked into this burden of proof. You are about doing a good reading, not proving anything to anyone. As soon as you start to reach for that proof your ego becomes involved. It becomes an, “I can prove this to you,” as opposed to an, “Isn’t this wonderful, we can speak to the other sideâ€¦ listen and learn.”

Ultimately, the only one you have to prove anything to is yourself. Your work as a medium will be about proving to yourself that spirit communication is not only possible, but it also is a fact, and you can do it. So, be scientific. Be rational. Look for your own burden of proof. Make it your own reality. You don’t need to prove it to anyone else. Not even the scientific community. If you can’t do it in a relaxed manner, if the proving is a challenge, then your ego has become involved.

You will soon find that some of the details you get are truly awesome. But they are details the spirit came up with on his own and communicated to the client through you, not details you wrung out of him through questions.

One goal of mediumship is to prove the truth of it to yourself, to change your perceptions of reality, and to move forward from there. It is important to get details. It is just as important to not get bogged down in trying to chase them down. In this way, REAL proof, both to you and the client, is provided by the spirit.

Understanding the Energy of Spirit Communication

In the next chapter we’ll learn how to do some gallery (group) style readings, giving examples and critiquing them in an effort to show you some of the ways these can be done, and what some of the pitfalls may be. It is necessary that you are familiar with the material in Psychic Development Level 4; I expect you to already know the processes involved in the identification of the spirit. As you review these, please look for the details, but also look for what happens when a reader gets so lost in the details that it brings the energy of the room down and closes the channel. You will be learning to raise the energy in the room in order to do these types of readings, and how to maintain the high energy level necessary to continue with a series of readings.

When you start losing your energy into the reading it creates a vacuum that sucks the energy out of the room. What should have been a positive becomes a negative. If something happens to break your channel, your connection, it takes a lot more energy to open the channel again. If this happens repeatedly, it may become impossible to continue the session.

When this happens, something has to change. You may need to take a coffee break, or get people to move their seats, or let people who’ve already had their readings leave the room. You have to be able to pull yourself out of that. It can take as much as 10 times more energy to reopen that channel. The goal is to try to avoid losing the energy into the channel.

It is like starting a job or a project over and over again. Not only is it hard to muster up the energy to get back into it, but also your attitude toward completing it changes and makes it even more difficult to do. You have to walk away, refocus, and then come back to it.

So, yes, look for the details. You must get some in order to validate to your clients who is coming through for them. Just don’t get lost in those details.

If someone comes in and wants to know about a specific person who does not come through on his own, you may be able to get information about that person, but by the time you do, you will be exhausted. If he does not come through of his own volition, you will have to follow a chain of connections from spirit to spirit to get connect with him. Even then, there is no guarantee he would respond. And even worse, if you linked to him empathically through the client in order to pull him in there is a question of ethics. If you drew the spirit in against his will, as opposed to allowing him to come on his own, then you have done something called summoning. To summon a spirit is to do black magic.

If you get a client who is totally unwilling to divulge any information to you and gives no feedback at all because he is looking for validation without input, how do you handle it? What do you say to him about the sharing of information, even a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ with you to enable you, as the psychic medium, to have enough feedback to know if you are on the right track instead of exhausting yourself seeking validation that is going unrecognized? How do you handle this? How does the person in spirit respond to this?

Two types of clients will do this. The first type is the person who is using this approach to drain off the available energy in the session. His lack of feedback to the medium may be a purposeful way to drain off that energy. The second type is the person who is looking for as many details as possible; he wants proof. This need comes from fear; he is having difficulty accepting the greater reality of the psychic/spiritual world that encompasses the world of spirit. You are dealing with a client here that is either coming to the reading from a ‘hungry’ perspective, or a fear-oriented perspective.

The first solution to this problem is to work with the client, make him feel comfortable with you, and with the process of spirit communication. Reach out to him. Allow him to come into your space so he will be comfortable with what you are about to do. Get him out of that mindset of “What’s going to happen?” Get him past his grief and into curiosity, ready to discover. Bring him into YOUR space. Remember, dwelling in the past and the future are the things that rob you of the present moment. Bring your client into the present moment. And as you do this, ‘take your temperature.’ Assess and reassess your own feelings about what is going on with your client. Trust your gut feeling. The minute you allow yourself to start getting into brainstorming the details needing to prove the existence of spirit to your client, you have lost the session, as well as a great deal of your own energy.

Beware of the Empathic Client Connection

Sometimes, a person who is looking for details he (or she) would recognize, so that he has experienced real proof, is better off going to an empathic/telepathic reader who is actually ‘faking’ their spirit communication by reading the dead person through the client, instead of getting direct input from the spirit. Some psychic mediums who do this actually believe they are really doing spirit communication, but they are not. They are merely reading the clients memories and emotions concerning the dead person. Yet many people who want these specific proofs do better with this type of medium because the proof they are looking for is coming from their own experience, and put to them in words they would understand. When the communication comes directly from the spirit it is often unprovable, at least in the moment, because it is from the spirit’s mind, emotions, and experiences. You can see where an experienced psychic medium, one who can do true spirit communication as well as read the empathic connection to the client, can provide a wonderful and total experience for the client. But to do both at the same time and not lose the connection to the spirit takes many years of practice. While you are learning it is best to avoid the empathic connection altogether.

The Importance of Attitude

Every messages session you do is a lesson for you and your clients. You are always learning, always growing. For example, a spirit medium did a group session with five people in the room; one gentleman was extremely negative. He was the third person to be read. The first two people received very poor readings because this gentleman was literally putting up a wall that prevented the medium from creating the proper channel for spirit communication. The medium kept opening the channel, and this gentleman kept closing it. But when she finally got to him, the connection was instantaneous. He immediately recognized the spirit coming through, in spite of his negativity, and as he did, the wall dropped, the room ‘lifted’ and the remainder of the session was easy for the medium to do. It is really amazing how the attitude of a client can affect the readings. In this case, everyone in the room was lifted up, and understood what had happened. It was an educational experience for everyone.

You might ask, why did the medium continue with the session, when she kept getting cut off? Wouldn’t it have been better to end it? You do need to have a good balance here. You do need to let your Higher Self or spirit guides guide you, allowing your intuition to direct you where you need to go. But if you take this to an extreme, to the point where you find yourself saying, “Spirit made me do it,” you are absolving yourself of responsibility for your actions. You have to set up a very delicate balance between allowing your intuition to tell you where you need to go, how you need to conduct a session, and yet keeping responsibility for the decisions that you make and what issues you pursue. Don’t become a victim of spirit. Don’t give up your free will. Remember, you are responsible for what you do and say. Your client trusts you to care about how and what you are bringing through. We are back to ethics here. Take responsibility.

How to Get a Spirit Communication Reading

Some clients don’t know how to get a reading. This is why it is a good idea to have a handout describing what you do for your clients and any procedures you follow. It helps them to know what they can expect of you, and what you expect of them. The better you can delineate how you want your client to behave with you, the better a response you will get. It leaves much less to chance. A little preliminary work on your part here goes a long way.

Many clients get ‘psychic amnesia,’ a term coined by the famous psychic medium John Edward. If you have a client who is totally lost, there may be several reasons for that. One is that he may be in a ‘headspace’ he is not used to, and might feel disoriented so that he cannot recall obvious things he normally would. Another is that sometimes the spirit medium can be pulling energy from the group, and with the lowered energy psychic amnesia sets in.

Let’s look at the phenomenon of psychic amnesia. In your daily environment you are comfortable where you are, everything is connected, everything works correctly. But when you go into a new environment, you don’t know where things are, you forget things that you brought with you, because you are in a different space. The same thing happens to you when you go to a reading with a medium because when you are in his space it raises your energy into a plane you are not used to. One of the reasons you get psychic amnesia about certain things is because your head-space is somewhere unusual for you. It is different than your normal thinking space.

In a group session, one participant brought along a piece of jewelry from a deceased person he wanted to communicate with. Throughout the entire session, the jewelry was in his pocket. The medium doing the session brought the deceased person through and he was recognized. Then the medium drew a picture on the blackboard of the piece of jewelry. The person in spirit was telling the client he knew he had brought it. The client could not identify the picture – psychic amnesia. It wasn’t until the end of the session when the client put his hand in his pocket to reach for his wallet, and pulled out the piece of jewelry, that he realized what the drawing was of. Psychic amnesia is very common in mediumship readings. There is no doubt you will encounter it. Just expect it, deal with it when it occurs, and move on.

Sometimes, you may do a session and you will find that the spirit itself will not allow you to move on from a certain message or symbol. In that case, you either must close down the session or stick with it and pursue it until the spirit has finally made his point. In the instance above involving the jewelry, the spirit kept coming back to the symbol over and over again, and finally went completely around in a circle to draw the client’s attention to something else that was related to it. That way, the message of the jewelry finally came through.

Your intuition will let you know whether to follow the strong focus of the spirit or to end the session.

A last pointer: When you are reading your client or a group of clients, you want them to be sitting in a relaxed, open posture. Neither their arms nor their legs should be crossed. Their feet should be flat on the floor. You want them to be in an open posture so that they will be able to help with the work of opening the channel, not closing it.

Don’t Be a Bad Psychic Medium!

Unfortunately, there are some psychic mediums in the field that use their readings to take energy from spirit, and from their clients. They ask questions of their clients, prod them until they are sure they have found the weak, sensitive point, and continue to prod and poke until the client is very emotionally upset. That emotional upset releases a lot of energy. This is highly unethical. You do not want to do this. It is being a psychic vampire. This is not to say that every time one of your clients becomes emotional or cries that you are being a vampire. But when it is an all-the-time thing, when you find yourself constantly focusing on the hurtful and negative emotional experiences in the client’s memories, you are probably moving into this unpleasant territory. Assess yourself. Take your temperature. Recognize what you are doing, how you feel. And stop doing it. Your ego is involved again. Making a client cry is not a claim to fame for a spirit medium. Leading him to light and joy is.

The goal is to balance. Maintain enough of an ego to understand that you have free will in making your own choices. Know yourself, but also allow yourself to be guided. Listen to spirit. Listen to your intuition.

Some psychics and spirit mediums like to hold their clients’ hands while doing the session. I prefer you to not do this in your spirit communication sessions because the touching has a tendency to bring in your empathic and telepathic link to the client, which you are trying to avoid. You want that connection to the spirit, not the client. Again, some readers who do this are using their empathy to read the spirit through the client, taking a short cut; others may be using the physical contact to either take the clients energy, or ‘dump’ their own onto the client. The temptation to do these things, even unconsciously, is very strong when holding the clients hand during the session. Hand-holding on the part of the medium should only be to extend compassion the client. This is especially true for beginners who need to be constantly aware of the dangers of dropping into an empathic reading.

On the other hand, if you hold an object that belonged to the dead person while doing your session, you may be able to use your empathy/telepathy to connect into the spirit, and might be able to open a stronger, clearer channel by doing so. The object should also be something the client is not constantly wearing or carrying, otherwise you may very well connect into him again, instead of the departed person.

Also, be aware that just holding an object of a person who has died does not guarantee that the person will come to a session. It is only a tool. It can possibly help to bring the spirit in, but a danger is that you can get locked into using such a tool, and then you may become dependent upon it. The tool may make it a little easier for the spirit to come through, but is not necessary. Also, such a tool should never be used to summon a spirit, meaning to draw them in against his will.

As a spirit medium you will often feel the energy of a person in spirit around an object he or she had owned, even if someone else has been wearing it. The strength of the connection usually would depend upon how connected the person had been to the object when he or she was alive. But remember, if you are wearing something that has been handed down, at some point it becomes yours and the energy of the person who gave it to you will no longer be the dominant energy on it.

A Word on Empathic Readings

By empathic, I mean that you are making a connection on the empathy level. You are connecting to the client emotionally, on the ‘me – you’ level. What you are looking for in mediumship is a connection to spirit. That is not a horizontal, physical plane connection at all; it is a vertical connection that ideally is to your Higher Self, to the Higher Self of the person who has passed, and also the Higher Self of the person with whom you are working. If your client crosses his arms by the time you are done with the reading, he is shutting down the connection to his own channel, his own Higher Self; that means that he is no longer aiding as a conduit for the energy in the reading. If you are doing your reading as a true spirit medium, the client shutting down will have little effect on you, as your information is coming from spirit. If you are relying on empathy primarily, at that moment you begin reading the spirit through the client. It is the client’s memories, not the real spirit, with which you are connecting.

Ethics

Ethics are one of the most important aspects of your spirit communication. We have a social structure that we follow in our world, and we need to maintain levels of etiquette that usually arise out of common sense and decency, to uphold that structure. If you are in doubt about what your clients need or should hear, ask them. Remember that different people require different levels of privacy. Some people are very private, whereas others are very open. Those levels of privacy will dictate the information given out in front of others, as much as the nature of the information itself dictates. Always ask, if in doubt. Always remain non-judgmental. As soon as you become judgmental you can be sure you are violating those rules of ethics.

Another thing to note when discussing client requirements is the issue of privacy. If someone brings you a client who has lost someone and you do work with the client, the person who brought him or her may sometimes become very persistent in trying to find out details about your client’s session and the issues that may have come up during it. This is not any of that person’s business. Your response should be, “If my client wants to tell you, he will. I will not. It is not my place to do so.”

Privacy is very important. If you betray the privacy of a client, he will not come back, and you will get some very negative feedback in your own Karmic issues (what goes around comes around). And lastly, word of mouth travels fast and you will soon get a name for not being able to keep a confidence.

Sometimes, especially when doing a group session, you may have to generalize your information in order to protect the privacy of the individual being read. You have levels of privacy that need to be maintained. If necessary, do not be afraid to tell the particular person that you should see him privately to discuss the information further. It is different if the client involved opens right up and discusses the subject openly, but unless he takes the first step, you shouldn’t. There are also some incidents where the information coming through can make the rest of the people in the room uncomfortable. Sometimes, for example, the rest of the people in the room simply do not want to hear the details of a difficult death or a suicide. When doing group sessions, especially, it is important that you temper the information that comes through. There is etiquette. There are some things you just do not want to bring up publicly. This is not just ethics – it is psychic etiquette. Again, if you feel it is necessary, offer a private session. Psychic medium George Anderson has been known to use the metaphor that they (the deceased people or their guides) are ‘hanging up a sheet,’ meaning that they are indicating the information he is getting should not be openly discussed in public. In these cases, again, enough should be said to let the client know the deceased person is indeed coming through, but not enough to include any real details.

You may say, “There is an issue here that doesn’t need to be aired in public,” or, “I can go down this road, but this is really not the place to discuss this.” Or, you can say to the client, “They are showing me something about this person that is personal, do you want me to proceed?” Leaving your client the capacity for choice makes you feel good; you have indeed delivered the information, but you are not holding yourself responsible for what it is he or she is encountering.

Remember that your clients are ALL there because they want to be. Even if they were dragged there by someone, they are still there because they allowed themselves to be.

Being a medium is hard work because there are so many different dynamics you need to deal with. If you realize, incidentally, that the things that happened in the person’s life may have been dictated by a higher purpose, either for him or the people around him, it is easier to remain non-judgmental.

Interpreting Symbols

If you are giving your client information that you don’t understand yourself, don’t censor it. If it is something that you don’t see as being harmful (i.e., whatever information you are receiving, be it a picture, words, or a feeling), you give it to your client. The client will make the judgment about this information. If you are judgmental and filter what your client is getting, he may miss out on a lot of what he needs to hear. Just because you don’t understand it doesn’t mean it is not necessary and important for your client to hear it. For example, an image of the Queen Mary cruise ship could be giving you the name Mary, with some insight into her personality at the same time! One staff member received that image in a reading, told the client what he was receiving, and was astonished when the client told him that ‘Queen Mary’ had been the deceased person’s nickname. In this case the image had a double meaning, which is not at all uncommon in spirit communication. Do not get so bogged down in the symbolic content that you miss the obvious!

When we are dealing with symbols, remember, in spirit communication we have symbols coming from four different sources: these are your guides, your client’s guides, the deceased person’s life and memories, and his or her guides, too. You may be able to interpret your own symbols. You may be able to help your client to interpret his as well. But both of you must understand that the symbols from the deceased person are his alone, and it is likely neither you nor your client will interpret them except by knowing a lot about the person and his or her life. Remember, your symbols come from your experience.

This is the difference between being an interpreter and a translator. The interpreter puts his or her own perceptions and experiences on the material, but the translator does a verbatim translation of the message.

The ability to do spirit communication is an evolving process within you. When you first start you might get information during a reading (i.e., a grandmother will be passing soon), but you may not say anything about it for fear of causing hurt or harm. Gradually though, you will get to a point where you know you should say that the person on the other side giving you this information is making preparations for the grandmother to cross over. But the question arises, how do you say this to the client? This now has become an ethical question. Most of the time a dilemma such as this solves itself. When you finally get up the courage to say it, you may find that your client usually already knows about it, and accepts it as one of the validations that the deceased person giving the message really is still with them, and is still aware of what is going on in the world of the living. But before you can begin to give that sort of information out, you have to feel the justification to share that information inside of yourself. As you evolve as a reader, you will learn to rephrase to be less hurtful, still other information you will give exactly as it comes to you. This is possibly one of those times you would address the client directly, to ask if an older woman in the family, possibly a grandmother, is ill. That answer would help you to know how to proceed – delicately or directly.

Be Compassionate, but Stay in Control

In the art of spirit communication there are ethics and there are other considerations as well. You are dealing with a person’s human emotions, and with that person’s Higher Self. He (or she) is in a very suggestive state when he comes to you for a session. It is important that you maintain some level of control of yourself. That is one reason for your having a strong ego. The only one that you can control is you. It is not about sensationalism. It is not about you. Deal with your client with love. You are not there to make your client panic, cry, or become frightened. You are there to give a healthy message that can contribute to healing.

It is important to avoid the emotional aspects in your delivery. Sometimes that cannot be avoided, but every attempt should be made to avoid the sensationalism inherent in playing to the emotions of the client. Especially in a group reading, if the client you are working with becomes upset and begins to cry, it can change the entire energy of the room in a negative way that will prevent other information from the other participants from coming through.

Incidentally, when that happens, which it sometimes does in a group session, you may have to shut down the room for a few minutes for the energy to dissipate. That energy may be positive or negative, but either way it clouds the clarity of the readings. The readings begin to become empathic instead of true spirit communication. Take a coffee break. Send the person you were just reading from the room. When the crying is due to sadness the energy folds in the room. You lose the channel. When the crying is happy, or springs from an emotional release, it can raise the energy, but the tendency is to use it to move into an empathic reading. That is hard for most spirit mediums to resist. On the other hand, laughter and lightness changes the energy and lightens it to open the channel wider and strengthen it. Learn to feel and work with the energy in the room.

Just a note: In a group session it is best to minimize any crying. Don’t try to actively repress strong emotion or crying, but don’t go out of your way to encourage it either. Don’t get caught up in it. You, especially as a psychic medium, are vulnerable to the intense emotion because if you do get caught up in it, it can pull you down and cause you to lose your connection through your channel. And after that, the whole session becomes an empathy session, not a spirit communication session. When YOU get emotional, it gets personal. And when it gets personal for you, your ego gets drawn in. Your emotional connection to the client causes you to either tap into the past or the future, but either way it takes you out of the moment, and out of the direct connection to spirit.

If you receive a strong emotion from the deceased person that makes you feel like crying, this is part of the information being communicated, and you MUST maintain your detachment in order to properly deliver the information. It is only by maintaining that detachment that you can be certain the emotion is not your own or your client’s, but does indeed belong to the person who has passed. If the sad feeling is coming from the living person who is your client, you must ignore that projected feeling in order to maintain the integrity of the channel you have opened to the spirit world to conduct your session.

Remember, electronics tells us that electricity, which includes electromagnetic energy, will follow the path of least resistance. Since empathy is so easy and natural to all of us, since we all feel one another’s emotions so readily, your session will quickly turn into an empathy session the instant you allow yourself to buy into feeling and internalize your client’s emotion. You should feel compassion for your client who is hurting. You should demonstrate caring. But you should NOT allow yourself to feel the depth of the emotion your client is feeling, or to emotionally ‘buy in’ at all. Empathy is the path of least resistance. It is easier than connecting on the higher level. It is tempting for you to drop into that level to do your readings. But empathy is not true spirit communication when it alone is used to connect to the client. Often, the psychic medium using the empathic bond to the client to do the so-called spirit communication reading appears a better medium than the true psychic medium. Why? Because through empathy he or she can read all of the clients’ hot buttons, tell them all the things they desire to know about the deceased person, and feed into all of the clients’ emotional needs. But that is not true spirit communication, and often the information given in this manner is untrue. As many people as an empathic reading helps, it also may hurt.

It is much more difficult to get the information as a true psychic medium. That is following an energy path of greater resistance, and is less natural to most people in our present state of development. It requires you to raise your consciousness and open your channel. And remember, information obtained via empathy with the client is always to be held suspect. Information obtained via channeling your Higher Self or guides, or through direct spirit communication, is always much more accurate.

In fact, the true psychic medium may actually get much of his information before the client ever walks in the door, or even after the client leaves. The connection is to the deceased person, not the living one. And during a session, if the client does not understand the information that came through, give him homework. Tell him to research that information after he leaves. It came through for a reason, even if he doesn’t understand it in the moment! You want the client to go home and think about the session, to re-open the connection, in his mind, so that he can understand the message itself, and any lesson connected to it. Often in a true spirit communication session the information that comes through cannot be validated until days, weeks, or even months later. That is because it did not come from the mind or experiences of the living person; it came directly from the person who had passed on. It was his or her memory, his or her information!

Also remember, most of us live our daily lives primarily in that empathic mode, so that when we do a reading and drop into that mode to do it, after the session it is harder to break the links to the clients. You remain linked to them on the emotional/empathic level. If you are pulling your information from the world of spirit, as soon as you close your channel the link to the client is broken. If you did your reading empathically, the connection remains open. You really don’t want the last few clients you had last week still connected to you when you are moving into a new week and new clients! The bond to each client MUST be severed before you work with the next. Remember, too, if a client you read empathically has emotional issues about his work, those very same issues can begin to permeate your life and your work unless you resolve the bond.

If you cater to the emotions of the client during your session, you’ve actually closed the session before he has gone. Also, by feeding his ego needs via his emotions, you are encouraging him to become dependent upon you, another thing that you should avoid as a spirit medium.

Having made it very clear that it is a mistake to buy into the emotions of the client, it is now necessary to add a footnote. In a one-on-one session with a client it may be important to allow, and even help draw out, the client’s emotions. It may be part of the healing process. It is great if the crying releases a block. But as a spirit medium, part of your job is to lead the person into thoughts of the deceased person that are positive and happy. Convert the tears and sadness to a feeling of joy and acceptance. That is when healing can take place. Leave your client on an up note. Occasionally, if a person is open enough to the process, this can be done in a group session, but it is usually far too personal for your client to remain open enough to experience the freedom of releasing in this way before a group; and so instead, the energy is usually brought down instead of up. Remember, though, that the person probably would not even be in the session with you unless he was there to experience some level of healing. We will be discussing more about that in Psychic Development Level 6.

Remember, too, your own reasons for studying in this field. You are primarily studying, whether you know it or not, to improve your life. This information is not just to teach you to go out and do spirit communication, or to go out and be a psychic. It is to help you to take control of and to better your life.

Through all your experiences, the most important thing is to take what you learn here and to utilize it in your everyday life; at work, at home, with your family. Utilize these tools to help yourself grow.

Everything here is not just about becoming a psychic medium. It is about changing your perceptions of reality, expanding your awareness, and moving to a new level of awareness. Your excellence in spirit communication is a by-product of your personal growth. These tools can have a positive effect on you and on all those who know you as well.

In the next chapter we will be doing more hands-on work, especially relative to understanding and following the energy during your sessions.

Chapter 3

Spirit Communication: Developing the Energy and the Skills

In this chapter you will read about some actual spirit communication sessions with the idea of critiquing and understanding how the energy is actually flowing during each session. A critique follows the psychic medium’s presentation of information received, the client, as well as their client interaction, and how the energy is being used.

Remember, whenever you do similar practice at home you should always first lock-down (protect) the room where you are working by calling in the four Archangels, and then open your channel using the centers and chant in Chapter 2.

Here is a review of the exercise in opening your channel. For the room and your own protection, you will learn the complete “Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram”. This is an ages-old protection that many of you reading this will immediately recognize.

Exercise #1: Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram

Note: Hebrew names are written phonetically

1. Face east. Place the first two fingers of your right hand on your forehead and sing or vibrate, “Ah-toh.” (This means, in Hebrew, “To Thee, oh God.”)

2. Face south. Place your fingers on your sternum. Vibrate, “Malkus.” (That means, “Be the kingdom.”)

3. Face west. Place your fingers on your right shoulder and vibrate, “Ve Gevurah.” (This means, “And the power.”)

4. Face north. Place your two fingers on your left shoulder and vibrate, “Ve Gedula.” (That means, “And the glory.”)

5. Cross your arms over your chest and vibrate, “Le Olam, Amen.” (This means, “Forever, Amen.”)

6. Extend your right hand toward the east, and in the air draw an invoking pentagram or cross, starting in a downward motion. Invoking means to draw the energy to you. As you do this sing out the God name, “Yod he Vau He.” This is east and air.

7. Turn a quarter turn to your right, facing south. Sing out or vibrate, “E-Hi-Ah,” as you trace in the air another pentagram or cross. This is another name for God, linked to the south and the element of fire.

8. Turn a quarter turn to your right again, now facing west. Trace an invoking cross or pentagram in the air and vibrate, “Ah-Don-I.” This Hebrew name for God is associated with the element water.

9. Turn another quarter turn to your right, facing north. Trace an invoking pentagram or cross and vibrate, “Ah-Gla.” This name for God in Hebrew is associated with earth.

10. Turn a quarter turn to your right again, facing east. In silence, trace an invoking cross or pentagram.

11. Extend both arms out to your sides, palms up. Vibrate or chant, “Before me Raphael, behind me Gabriel, on my right hand Michael, on my left hand Uriel, for about me flames the pentagram and within me shines the six-rayed star.”

12. Repeat steps 1 through 5.

*This is one of the strongest protections you can use. Be comfortable in it. Archangel Michael, in particular, will be with you to protect you directly, should the need arise, if you use this full protection before your sessions.

Now, let’s review the chant to open your channel from Chapter 2.

Exercise #2: Opening Your Channel or Spirit Gates

*These channels are known as spirit gates in the spiritualist community. Do not confuse them with the chakras or psychic energy centers.

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 Center grow brighter and brighter.

10. Now feel the light energy from your Heart Center move down to your Sacral/base of spine Center, 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 get brighter.

Here’s a diagram of the centers or gates referred to in the proceeding exercise:

Figure 1: The Five Spirit Gates

*Note that there is a correlation between Exercises #1 and #2 in that each name of God and each Archangel has a connection to a specific element. Yod-He-Vau-He and Raphael are air, E-Hi-Eh and Michael are fire, A-Don-I and Gabriel are water, and Ah-Gla and Uriel (sometimes spelled Auriel) are earth. As you bring the energy in to open each channel or spirit gate, you are in essence bringing the protection and opening of each Archangel and protective God-force aspect into the channel as well.

Following the exercise you should feel more open, more energized, fully protected, and ready to work.

If you recall, in Level 4 you started your spirit communication by learning to conduct a platform or gallery-type session. That is because it is the best way to learn to feel the energy coming in, and differentiate it from the person you are reading. That also taught you to identify which person in the room a spirit was connected to. And yet, you should know that is an advanced form of spirit communication.

That is the same technique used in this chapter. But that does not mean that you can immediately go out and be John Edward, doing gallery-type sessions of your own. However, it does prepare you well for your one-on-one work with clients in spirit communication sessions.

Sample Sessions and Critiques

The sessions shown here, and their critiques, are given to show you what you need to develop and work on in terms of receiving the information. These are teaching tools.

The following are some practice sessions I am recounting for examples. We will be using the same identification procedure as was utilized in Psychic Development Level 4. Note that although these were taken from actual sessions, the student spirit medium and the clients’ names are not given to protect their privacy.

Session I

In this first session, the student psychic medium identified the spirit coming in as a tall barrel chested male (to the client’s right side) who stands very straight and from a grandparent’s generation (two steps back) or a parent’s generation (one step back). Note that this identification may be made by actually stepping back, or just imagining how many steps you’d have to take back to complete the identification. The reader asked himself, “What color hair?” and received, “Blonde,” as his answer. He told that to the client. Then said, “I am hearing, ‘Peter or Rita.’” The reader got an image of how Laurence Olivier combed his hair in To Be or Not To Be. He passed that image along, not yet able to place its significance. The reader asked the client, “Are you of Greek heritage?” The client said, “Possibly; I’m Italian.” The reader said, “I thought Peter might have been ‘Pita’â€¦ indicating Greek.” The reader then asked himself, “What do I see this gentleman doing?” Immediately he saw the man in spirit sawing. He said, “He is sawing some lumber.” The client said, “If that is my grandfather that would really make sense!” She asked if it was all right to give more feedback now.

Here is the client’s feedback – “My mother’s grandfather owned a sawmill,” she said. “He was tall and broad and very proud and erect.”

The student psychic medium added more information: “It looked to me like he was wearing denim coveralls. And he was holding up four fingers. He also had a pair of binoculars. I saw him handing them to you.”

(The symbol of binoculars could be the student spirit medium’s symbol for telling the client to take a closer look at something in her life.)

The client gave more feedback, “My mom has four kids. Could that be what the four fingers signify?” The psychic medium pointed out that if the client’s mom was the favorite, that was possible, or that he may have lost one finger in a sawmill accident. The client was unable to confirm either possibility, but did say that he died in a sawmill accident. It is quite common for clients to go home with lots of homework (i.e., things to go home and check up on that are not confirmable at the time of the reading).

The student spirit medium continued, telling the client, “I see him. He is in the sawmill, in this large room, and there is lumber neatly stacked everywhere. I get this feeling of ‘look at this!’ He was very proud.” The client confirmed this. He gets the number 10, and asked the client if November was significant in any way. The client could not confirm this. That meant more homework.

The student spirit medium said he heard the words, “Topsy-turvy,” and he wanted to put his hands over his eyes like binoculars, again. Once again, it was obvious that there was a clear message coming through these symbols to the client, to look more closely at something in her life. Since binoculars were being used, it may have been something in the future, or physically distant from her. Now, the reader began to tap himself on the nose. Again, this was a message. “It is right under your nose; take a closer look.”

The client gave more feedback. She supplied information she only knew through stories. She said that when he died the family’s world was turned topsy-turvy because he left eleven children. His wife and his son took over the sawmill and ran it for as long as they could, but finally they had to sell it. She felt this could be the message.

The student spirit medium got more information. He heard a name. “Anderson, or Andy,” he said. He saw the deceased man open the door to the mill and saw vast farmland outside. The spirit pointed outside, and then inside. He told the client that he thought this meant that whatever she takes a closer look at, would help her to see more.

He also added that perhaps the symbol meant that the client needed to get outside of herself to take a closer look.

The student psychic medium continued with his visuals. He saw a silo. He felt the spirit was very content. He got another audio message: “Don’t leave it unfinished.” Finally, the spirit waved goodbye. It is a very clear message of, “I’m done.”

The client couldn’t confirm any of this, other than that the sawmill was in farm country, and that perhaps her grandfather was aware of the class she was in.

Interestingly, an audiotape made of this session became very static at the end of this session, which is not at all unusual during spirit communication, as the electromagnetic energy in the room often interferes with recording equipment.

Critique I

Energetically, the group felt an overall increase in the energy level in the room.

There was some initial difficulty determining whether the spirit was father or grandfather. Until the sawmill was noted there was uncertain identification. This is because the reader couldn’t be certain of the number of ‘steps back’ the gentleman in spirit was.

It is all right to start over again if you are not clear on the number of steps or other placement identifications. But if it still remains unclear, go on with your reading as this reader did, and often identification becomes clear as you move on, through the message or images given.

The student spirit medium reported after the session that as he went through this he felt like he must be making up a large part of it. When he got positive feedback he was initially very surprised. He felt that he needed more self-assurance. The client felt that he came across very well.

In this case, the client giving clear and concise feedback wherever she could was an enormous aid to the reader and helped him to get more information. She remained open through the entire session, which enabled the reader to continue to bring information through.

Overall, it was a very good session, and a good example.

Session 2

In this session the budding psychic medium needed a lot more coaching than the first one, since she had trouble asking herself the necessary questions to direct her to get information from the spirit. She picked up a woman on the mother’s side of the family (to the client’s left). She stepped back two steps, indicating a grandmother or great aunt, which would be another step to the left; she wasn’t sure which. She felt the woman in spirit as short, pudgy, and having a tall bearing. Her body shape, she said, was large hipped, small on top. Her eyes were blue and piercing; her hair was white or blonde. She saw the woman cleaning, and when prompted got the initials G and A.

At this point two people in the group wanted to lay claim to this deceased old lady, as the woman adjacent to the person she started reading as her client told her it could be for her. She focused for a moment, then asked the woman in spirit if she was here for that client, or the one she started reading. She got that she was here for the first one. Prompted again, “What is the message?” She saw the spirit hold up one finger. This could be an indicator of time, or a number of items, or the finger itself. Until more information is available this will remain unclear. Then she saw the spirit wipe the finger. Then it seemed more like the client was being told that she should wipe her hand or her finger of someone or something. Again though, the single finger could indicate the number of people or things needing to be let go, or the amount of time to do it in. Prompted, the student spirit medium asked, “Does the message involve clearing out or cleaning out?” She received a clear “yes” on this.

When the client began to give feedback, she had trouble focusing on whom the client could have been talking about because the description could fit several people in her family. This, she said, is why she remained open but gave no feedback during the session. She did relate to the ‘wiping off the finger’ symbol. The reader felt the lack of feedback made the session more difficult. It was totally blind. Without the prompts from the instructors she would have been pretty lost.

Critique 2

The difficulties the reader experienced in this session are common. First of all, when it comes to past generations most people are sadly out of touch and do have trouble knowing specifics unless they are the really obvious ones, such as the sawmill in the first session. This is one reason why it is so important to get real specifics, not generalizations. Also, it is a good idea to either have the client take notes during the session or to tape it, so they can have a record of the session to play for other friends and relatives who might have more information about the deceased person. Hair being either white or blonde is not specific enough for identification. To say the spirit is either a grandmother or a great aunt is far too general. This generalization is why the person adjacent to the client felt this might be for her.

Likewise, the initials A and G are too general, unless coupled with something more specific. It turned out they could have belonged to several people who have passed on in the client’s family. The best indicators of who the person in this reading was might have come from the description of the body type and the piercing blue eyes. That combination led the client to believe it was her grandmother. Yet this would not have stood up to close scrutiny, though the client felt good about it.

The student psychic medium should have spent more time at the beginning, to pin down whether it was a grandmother or great aunt, or friend of a grandmother coming through. More specifics relative to what the spirit was doing should have been sought. But even in this very general reading, the message could save the reading. In a reading when you don’t know who is giving the information, a good, clear message can make it worthwhile. And remember, you don’t need to know what the symbols and messages mean – only the client does. In this case it was the message the client related to the most. And remember, you are allowed to ask the spirits the questions. They are the ones coming in to give the information, so they will be the ones needing to help you to clarify it.

Would it be possible to move on in your reading from this spirit where feedback was not possible, to another where it was? Could you move on to another more familiar spirit without closing the door on this one? Could this one just be the one poised to open the spirit door to bring the others in?

Certainly this is possible. Sometimes the spirits themselves will bring someone else in with them, and in that case it is easy to move your reading from one to the other. In these cases it is as if the spirit who comes in first has learned the correct vibration necessary to come into the session to speak with us on this lower plane of existence, but the ‘newer’ spirit has not, and needs help. In other cases you just have to ask the spirit whom you cannot clearly identify to step aside so you can communicate with someone else.

It is not uncommon in a session to have a client actively resist the presence of a particular spirit. If that spirit is the one who is going to hold the door open for the others, this can create a real problem in doing a reading for that client.

Overall, considering there was no feedback at all from the client in this session, and it being a first attempt by this student, I thought it was a good, but not great, session.

The student doing the spirit communication in this session felt that she could improve her future sessions by asking more questions of the person in spirit. Now that she knows what to do, she will do that. When you ask those questions, keep moving through them. Don’t get bogged down in one, or try to overanalyze your results. Remember that if the spirit is here, but can’t get any feedback from your client, he will feel stuck. He will welcome your questions if you are able to move past that block.

If the energy becomes really stuck during a session, you need to do something to break it up. You can take a break, put that reading on hold and switch to another person if you are doing a gallery-style reading; you can ask the clients to change their seats around, or you can change the focus by moving yourself around.

Eventually, you will become attuned enough to the energies in the room to be able to feel them like currents as you move through the room, and you will know where and when the energy has to be lifted.

*A note on the energy in the room: During the first of these two sessions the energy was elevated, clear and crisp. During this second session the energy became thick and heavy, and as already noted, the audiotape of this session was filled with static, which totally disappeared as soon as we moved onto the next one. It is my experience that static is generally caused by a spirit struggling to get a message through with intensity. It is as if too much energy is coming through the psychic medium link from the spirit.

Session 3

The student psychic medium in this session picked up a female (client’s left side) and immediately felt a pain in the muscles up the back of her arm. She made note of that. The pain immediately went away. She felt the spirit’s energy was a step back, meaning a mother. She also felt, a few seconds later, a sibling on the father’s side (one step back, and to the client’s right). She felt it to be male, which meant it was another step to the right. She began to track the uncle. She complained that she couldn’t actually see the spirit, but had to convert her feelings into pictures. She saw him as tall, with brown hair. She felt stuck, so I gave her some help. Throwing questions at her quickly, too fast for her to think about the answers to them, helped her to push past her tendency to over-think the information she was receiving. In this manner she found that the uncle was partially bald, with his hair growing in a rim around the edge of his head. Then, she saw sunglasses, and eels.

The client’s feedback said that yes, her Dad had a brother who had passed, who had blonde hair from photos she’d seen of him when he was young, but that could have changed. She said the sunglasses were because he lived in sunny Miami, and he always lived near the water, so the eels could make sense because of their connection to the water.

Critique 3

This student psychic medium did a reversal of left and right sides in her identification that is quite common. Some people will receive the feelings of where the spirit is located in the exact opposite way it was taught in Psychic Development Level 4, by reversing the left and right, male and female, mother’s and father’s sides of the family. If you perceive that to be your case, then just go with it. It also is quite common for a reader to get stuck on one image or feeling. Getting the student spirit medium to ask questions got her to let go of what she was stuck on and move on with the reading, allowing more information to come through. She was uncomfortable receiving feelings instead of images, but that was apparently how this spirit was communicating at the beginning of the session. You must be proficient in all methods of reception in order to be the best receiver-translator for your client. The client’s feedback seemed like she was stretching to make the information fit. It would have been better to take the symbols of which she was unsure and research them later, after the session, but perhaps continue a bit longer once identification was thought to be made to see if more creditable feelings or images came through.

Continuation

We continued with this session. The student psychic medium saw clothes hanging on a clothesline, and a pointy hat. She got the words, “Be careful, and be on guard. You are doing OK.” The client was asked what she thought the significance of the laundry might be, if it were possibly a symbolic message. She didn’t know. The client interrupted her, saying the uncle had died a violent death, and was killed, in fact, by the mob. The student spirit medium asked the client if her uncle had been laundering money. The client said, no, he had stumbled on something he wasn’t supposed to know. The symbolism of the clothesline now became clear. The client’s uncle had found the mob’s ‘dirty laundry’ and was killed as a result. The eels symbol now became clear: Her uncle is ‘sleeping with the eels.’ The reader now began receiving images of insects. First, she received a spider in a web, which could indicate the network of the mob, or a plot, and then a scorpion, which the client was unable to identify. This client left with homework to find out if the uncle was born under the sign Scorpio. The client was later able to further validate most of this information via her uncle’s children who knew more about his life.

Continued Critique 3

The client still was unable to place the brown hair that the psychic medium saw, although the rest of the information was accurate. Note that sometimes a dirty blonde may look like a light brown (people do see colors differently). Also, another student said that perhaps the person who killed him had the brown hair. There was no way of validating that information. Relative to the continuing message to be careful, the client gave the feedback that her entire family had been warned to leave this alone and to not dig deeper into it. The client was asked to also look at her own life to see if there was any situation she was currently involved with in which she needed to be careful. Often, information received can have double applications and might contain a message for the client. At the time, the client was unable to identify with this, but some weeks later she was in a car accident that took many months to recover from. The warning to be careful was for her. So, the analogy wasn’t to an intrigue in the client’s life, but rather a need to be physically careful.

The reader felt she could have improved her session if she had been less nervous, especially in the beginning. Shaking off your hands and centering will make you less nervous at the start of a session. A little lightness and joking among the participants in the group, or with your client in a one-on-one session, will also remove the attention from yourself, and help to alleviate both your nervousness, as well as your client’s nervousness. In a gallery-type session, you will find that a little light interaction with the group before a session will relax both the group and the reader. Even in one-on-one sessions, this is a good way to set the stage energetically.

After the session the room felt heavy because this reading had been of an intense negative emotional nature. The man had been beaten to death. The reader complained of a headache.

Sometimes that happens when the Third Eye is opened so strongly. Rubbing it can help to alleviate the pressure, and seeing a door in the top of your head open to push any residual energy out can help, too.

*After this session I had the group focus white light into the center of the room and breathe into it. I told them to expand the white light to fill the entire building and then keep expanding it until it filled the entire complex, and pushed right out through the walls. After that, the room felt light again. Note that the room protections would prevent a negative spirit from entering, but cannot eliminate the negativity generated by a recount of a violent death experience such as this. Filling the room with white light afterward, and expanding it out, brings the lightness and energy back to the room so that you are ready to do another reading.

Session 4

The student psychic medium in this session kept her eyes closed as she walked toward where the energy pulled her. She kept her eyes closed as she felt the spirit on the client’s left side, the mother’s side, but then had trouble discerning if the spirit was male or female. She said it was as if she was having a battle. (The reason for this will become clear in a moment). Finally, she said it was directly behind and above the client, indicating a guide. She felt very light energy, and long, flowing hair. She saw the spirit as thin, tall, with soft features. The reader seemed stuck at this point; I helped her along with a question, “What is she doing?” The reader said that she was doing something with her right arm. She was motioning ‘come here.’ She said to the client, “She is saying, ‘Come with me.’” She saw the guide moving toward an opening on the left through which wide vistas could be seen, almost like looking down on the earth. She felt a sense of opportunities available. Remember, the left side is receptive; this could indicate that the client was being asked to become more receptive, to open to a world of possibilities. The student psychic medium said the guide’s clothes were in blue and purple tones, and flowed. She told the client, “It feels as if she wants to show you something that you need to be receptive to. It’s all laid out for you here, just come and look.” Then she opened her eyes, and found that she was not standing in front of her client.

The reader was focused between two participants in the group, and although she knew the spirit was a guide, she was unsure of which participant it was for. To qualify this, I directed her to associate one person to her right, and one to her left. She immediately felt a tug on her left and knew that was the client for which the guide was there. He asked the client if she could identify with any of the session so far.

The client related on the symbolic level. She was a gardener, very interested in the earth, and plants. She’d been working more and more in this area. She also said that in the earlier exercise, when the group had brought in their spirit guides, she did see a tall thin woman who fit this description.

The student psychic medium was directed to ask this guide if her message had anything to do with gardening, as with the Findhorn community. The guide gave back a feeling, “Something like that, but not in that sense.”

The reader kept getting more input that the client needed to ‘open her eyes’ to something, but not what the thing was – as if it was so much, that she couldn’t put it into words.

The client gave more feedback. She said that morning she’d had a dream in which she’d seen a vase out in her yard with all different colors spilling from it onto the lawn.

Critique 4

The client, of course, asked how you could check information about a guide. In the session, it seemed like the guide was telling the client that she was helping her to open the door to her own unlimited potential. Homework for the client in this case involved discovering what that potential was. This information might become available through both dreams and meditation. She could program herself to receive information from her guide in dreams, meditation, or even in the waking state, to hear messages from this guide. In this situation, the reader risked the danger of going into too much detail. Sometimes a clear message can be muddied by too much superfluous information. The first image was the message.

So, now you have seen four different types of readings, and this last one was not the spirit of a deceased person, it was a guide. Sometimes in your readings of clients you will get their guides. They are, after all, on the other side, too!

We asked the student psychic medium how it felt to connect with the guide. She said it was very comforting, very nice and calming, even blissful. Those feelings of almost angelic energy in readers can be conformation of a guide coming through. That type of energy is fairly typical. It is also quite possible she came through easily because of the group filling the room with white light just before this session, when they cleared out the negativity from the last session.

One of the other participants in the group also said that just before the guide started giving the information, he also saw a woman giving information through hand gestures. This is not unusual. When a wide enough channel is opened, other people in the group may also see the same information coming through, or even additional information. It is all right to watch, but not to ‘ride the channel,’ which absorbs the reader’s and group’s energy. Remember, riding or ‘jumping’ the channel is an extreme discourtesy to do to another spirit medium.

Now it is time for you to utilize the information and exercises in the previous chapters to work at honing your own skills as a spirit medium. Armchair insight and understanding is no substitute for practice.

Conclusion

The focus in the Anastasi System Level 5, Developing the Energy and Skills, has been to help you to become more adept and comfortable with the spirit communication process, and to help you to begin to evolve your own style of reading. As you continue on your own, remember to always use complete protection, even when practicing, and to remain clear, grounded and centered as you open your channel. Keep ethics and a positive attitude of utmost importance in your mind in dealing with both clients and other psychic mediums.

In this workbook many areas important to your work as a developing psychic medium have been discussed. Some of the most important include understanding the need for protection and protective techniques that you can use to eliminate possible dangers to yourself and your client. The client’s needs, the nature of spirit identification, and methods of interpreting message symbols have been covered as well. You would do well to read and re-read these sections. They are some of the most important cornerstones of your future work as a psychic medium.

Use all of the exercises in these pages until they become second nature to you. I encourage you to do a lot of practice, because if you don’t do spirit communication and explore it through practice, then there is no point in going further unless it is simply for curiosity that you have embarked upon this course of study. You are now at the point where further actual development as a psychic medium can only occur through dedicated practice. For some of you the development of these skills will be a quick process, for others it may take years to develop true expertise. You must proceed at your own pace.

Those of you already sensing that there is still more to the art of spirit communication are encouraged to continue on to study the last book in this series. The Anastasi System Level 6: Healing through Spirit Communication is about this most profound part of the field of spirit communication. It is in its ability to heal both the living and the dead that spirit communication reaches its peak of fulfillment for most practicing psychic mediums.

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.