Since I was 13 or 14 years old, I've had a fascination with all things spiritual. When my friends were meeting after school to play football, you could often find me sitting in a park tapping into the consciousness of the world around me, talking to the trees, and appreciating the profound emptiness of all things. There was a level of aliveness about the world that it seemed to me at the time, only I was aware of.

For most of my life I think I’ve been on a spiritual journey of discovery, which is to say, a being human journey of discovery. I’ve delved into many traditions, religions and philosophies over the years and discovered much about myself and the world around me.

Over the past, more recent decades I guess I have been inspired to some degree by the practise of Reiki. I came to it in the early 90’s, just as it was starting to get more known in the UK. When I first learned it, however, I was literally the only Reiki teacher for hundreds of miles in any direction, or so it seemed to me at the time. Reiki has served me well, over the past 25 years, as a small (and diminishing) part of my spiritual practice and I've written two books about it. It's a practice that isn’t of any great significance to me anymore, at least, not in the form that most people relate to it. I'm not big on energy healing. For me, Reiki is simply a training wheel for much more significant and impactful spiritual practises that come out of esoteric teachings, which are in the end, the origins of Reiki in any case. I think the point of Reiki is that one SHOULD grow out of it. I don’t think it’s something you want to simply stay with for ever. Reiki always had the exit door signposted and wide open, but most people don’t even see that it’s there.

I do despair sometimes at just how shallow an engagement with Reiki the world has. The Reiki community is not a community I associate with or have any affinity with really and I tend to keep away from it. Although I teach Reiki, I do try to steer my students away from the dominant expression of Reiki as some simple energy healing thing. I’m at great pains to cultivate in them an understanding that energy healing, as the Indian mystic, Sadghuru has rightly pointed out, is a dangerous and crazily immature thing to be involved in unless approached from a perspective of deep knowledge, care and a realisation that it’s not your business to make things happen in a healing context, just get out of the way and let the energy do what it needs to do. If you can mind your own business in energy healing, you can’t go too far wrong. In any case, a 5-year-old can do this. There’s nothing special or sophisticated about it. I try to cultivate in my students a deeper and more immersive relationship to the spiritual heart of the practice and to see energy healing as just one small fragment of a much wider range of spiritual tools that enable the practitioner to get a true understanding of their authentic selves. When you can orientate to the practice in this way, it becomes a thing of beauty, the like of which is barely hinted at within the energy healing mis-orientation.

My latest book, Mindfulness Meditation and the Art of Reiki, aims to refocus the engagement with the practice much more on to its spiritual core and away from energy healing. I hope that it serves some people.

As a professional artist I'm inspired by the work of Pablo Picasso, Mark Rothko and Edward Hopper, amongst many others. I adore Picasso’s work but am really very much wedded to the American Abstract Expressionists. For me Hopper, though not even close to the Abstract Expressionists in terms of his artistic oeuvre has, for me, a real affinity with the emotional and spiritual triggers of someone like Rothko. So, my artistic influences and interests are eclectic to say the least.

Art is my overriding passion. When someone asks me what I do, my answer is: artist and writer. It is never, Reiki teacher (or heaven forbid, that utterly dreadful term ‘Reiki Master’). Art is an opportunity, as I see it, for a deep spiritual engagement with the universe on a level outside of the mainstream of traditional spiritual practices. I guess you could say that it’s another form of meditation, even when the creative process is seemingly frenetic and mindlessly chaotic. Can frenetic mindless chaos be mindful? I think so.

When I practice Reiki, I do so in the context in which I practice art. It’s an expression of an inward journey that takes me to the core of who and what I am as a human being and as an emanation of the oneness of creation. Understanding this within the context of meditation and artistic expression, which is a process of destruction and creation, emptiness and stillness, is profoundly liberating. Art, whether that be writing, painting, drawing or sculpture are deeply personal experiences that reveal one’s true nature. When backed up by a serious spiritual practice such as meditation, can be explosive in their insights. My personal journey is now very much centred on my creative work. I may write another book in time. It will almost certainly be focused on art as a creative expression of personal spirituality. At least that’s my current thinking, but one thing that I have learned from life (including Reiki) is to stay in flow because you never actually know what is around the next corner. Life does that.

Nowadays I see having been rejected at birth by my father on account of being the ‘wrong’ gender as the greatest gift I’ve received in my life. If that sounds strange, I’ll explain: had I had the idyllic childhood that my two young grandchildren in Devon are at present enjoying, I would certainly have become neither a writer nor a therapist and – apart from my wonderful family – these are the two things that have brought me the most satisfaction. Being brought up strongly Catholic had instilled in me a belief in God that I treasure, yet it took many years and a great deal of excellent therapy firstly to be able to believe that I was lovable and secondly to rid myself of my father’s brainwashing that I was ‘stupid’.

When, at the age of forty-seven, I first became interested in holistic medicine, my religion initially got in the way of following my friends who believed in reincarnation. Then, in 1991, a lecture I heard about the strongly Christian 'sleeping prophet’, Edgar Cayce, caused an instant conversion! Furthermore, through subsequent study, I discovered that acknowledgement of reincarnation had been pretty much universal in the early Church – until the Council of Constantinople in AD 553, when the power-hungry clergy were happy to follow Theodora’s desire not to return to Earth as anything other than an Empress!

Joining the Edgar Cayce Association then led to my obtaining a ‘Past-life reading’ from Aron Abrahamsen, his one-time associate, who not only described five previous lives that rang true for me, but also said that I’d “come this time partly as a writer, to disseminate information on the spiritual life”. This resulted in my embarking upon a book entitled KARMIC RELEASE, which was aimed initially at showing from my personal experience how the past can affect the present. Later, however, after obtaining a Diploma from the Jungian psychotherapist, the late Dr. Roger Woolger, I completed the book by demonstrating in it how his unique brand of past-life regression (not using hypnotherapy and which he named Deep Memory Process therapy) worked in practice. I also at this point included self-help exercises at the end of each section. This book was published in 2006 by Sai Towers in Bangalore, but that company suffered a demise after my personal ‘guru’, the avatar Sathya Sai Baba, had left His body in 2011. Second hand copies, however, can often be found on the internet and I even still have four spares myself, which I would happily pass on at a low rate.

My second book, SOULS UNITED – The Power of Divine Connection, arose thanks to my youngest sister, Philippa Merivale (previously a colour therapist, Philippa was the founder of ‘Metatronic Life and Healing’), introducing me to the now very renowned clairvoyant, Edwin Courtenay. After he had explained to both of the concept of twinsoulship and I had also studied Edgar Cayce’s definition of the three different types of soulmate, Edwin suggested that I write a book on that subject. Then people who were either with their twin soul or suffering on his/her account started to land in my lap in my therapy practice! And I added to these clients’ case histories by researching obvious twin-soul relationships in history. This book, published in 2009 by Llewellyn Worldwide, USA, went out of print several years later, but again can readily be found on the internet and in this case I have fourteen copies remaining from those that Llewellyn sold me at a reduced rate.

The third book, DISCOVERING THE LIFE PLAN – Eleven Steps to your Destiny had a very different type of conception. As a ‘recovering Catholic’, one thing I had against the Church was that it taught nothing at all about the Afterlife and so I fancied the idea of writing a book giving information on that important subject. Although I was already learning a good deal both through reading and the practice of my therapy, I felt I needed more input on the esoteric side and so I approached the clairvoyant Lilla Bek. She then invited me to spend a day at her house to discuss the project. English not being her mother tongue, Lilla had already made use of ghost writers for her previous books, but the idea she came up with was much more comprehensive than mine, i.e. a book that would cover the whole of life in stages, starting from pre-conception and ending with the Afterlife. Back at home I typed up the notes we’d made between us, which Lilla then submitted to her publisher, Thorsons. They, however, had another project in mind for her, which left her with no time for continuing to work with me. So I hung onto the plan in the hope of finding another clairvoyant to give me the sort of information that Lilla had had in mind. I showed the plan to one or two people, who responded by saying “That’s a book that needs to be written!”, but eventually, as time went on with no other clairvoyant putting in an appearance, I decided that I had no choice other than to embark upon the book myself. It made sense to me to use for the various stages of life (which Lilla Bek had named the ‘Eleven Steps’) material gleaned from experiences of friends and clients (the latter of course always with their permission and more often than not with the names being changed). The end product was inevitably different from the original plan, but thus, in 2010, began my long and happy journey with John Hunt Publishing!

DELAYED DEPARTURE – A Beginner’s Guide to Soul Rescue, published in 2013, had a very different type of conception. Having attended an Introductory workshop on Shamanism given by the shamanic practitioner Simon Buxton, I leapt at the opportunity a few months later to attend a weekend with him on the topic of Death, Dying and the Beyond. On the first afternoon, after talking about the importance of freeing the souls who were unaware of having died and were consequently polluting our planet’s atmosphere, Simon drummed us into a journey to the underworld. To my astonishment, before that journey was complete, I heard a clear voice in my head saying firmly “You’re to continue doing this work at home on your own every Friday afternoon.”! Well, I had during various previous workshops I’d attended over the years made resolutions that I’d failed to keep for more than, say, two or three weeks, but this one was clearly different. So, before boarding my train home, I bought a notebook at the station in which to record my experiences.

At the time, following my husband, David Pearson’s, retirement from his Chair of Mathematics at Hull University, we were living in Ludlow and, on account of, for instance, the Wars of the Roses, that town is simply riddled with ‘ghosts’. It was consequently a particularly important place in which to be doing shamanic work of this nature. Although I wasn’t at home every Friday afternoon, I did meticulously record so many of my interesting and varied journeys that one day it suddenly occurred to me to gather some of them into a little book. Then my artist friend, Karen Roberts, kindly agreed to enhance it with several delightful illustrations. DELAYED DEPARTURE – A Beginner’s Guide to Soul Rescue was published in 2013. (Here I’ll just mention that bringing out that little book didn’t see the end of my interest in ‘Death, Dying and the Beyond’, but I won’t breathe another word on that before my final one, which I’m working on now, has been accepted for publication!)

David and I produced our first two children in fairly quick succession. While he was totally content with our ‘pigeon pair’, for me, having been the oldest of six, this was more difficult and he has ever been a very obliging husband. He had particularly strong views about not adding further to the world’s population and I anyway didn’t fancy being an ‘elderly tertia’. So, in November 1979, we were given the immense privilege of receiving into our home a two-week old son via Barnado’s. I, who had an enormous amount to learn, naïvely imagined that – apart from being saved the pains of childbirth and having some difficulty with breast feeding – it wouldn’t be that different from our previous exciting new arrivals. This was also long before I’d started to learn about reincarnation, but some years later I found out about various karmic links that all four of us had with our amazing Christopher (previously a basketball scholar in the US, then a highly successful player in Europe who also ran his own recruitment agency, now doing well as a Maths teacher, but – if only this country’s political climate could change in time! – with the potential of making an excellent Green PM. Here it is only fair to add that our two older children are equally amazing, Paul being a mathematician working in software development and Alice a digital editor.)

We, however, are among the lucky ones who adopt. As with the ‘twin soul’ book, after I’d conceived the idea of writing one on adoption and karma, people with relevant experiences (many of them clients) started landing in my lap. The book, whose gestation period was a good seven years, expanded to include the related topics of fostering and step families and THICKER THAN BLOOD? A Fresh Look at Adoption, Fostering and Step Families was eventually published in 2015. Like life, its stories range from heart-rending to very happy and, also like life, none of them is without its challenges.

Any experienced therapist will tell you both that, for profound healing to take place, a safe environment is essential and that it’s important for the therapist to continue working on her/himself. I was blessed all the way! When, at the age of twenty-nine, I managed to escape from the oppression of my family by going to Geneva, where I worked for five years as a Romance linguist, a friend recommended a psychotherapist and she became for a while a mother figure for me, giving me much that I’d missed out on as a child. She also nursed me through a devastating heartbreak, thus preparing me, when he came on the scene, for a much more suitable partner. David was doing research at the University of Geneva, on two years’ leave of absence from that of Hull, and so it was in the North East that we reared our family.

It was partly Christopher’s ‘bad behaviour’ that initially sent me to Mark Young, who runs the Ripon Natural Healing Centre, and he remains to this day my chief mentor. He it was who first encouraged me to study reincarnation in greater depth, who first told me that I should write a book and who supported my decision to train in Deep Memory Process therapy, ultimately inviting me to practise the therapy in his clinic. He knows me inside out, never hesitates to challenge me, is a great confidant and has treated me successfully with numerous homoeopathic remedies.

The Woolger therapy works, as its name suggests, on the deepest possible levels and this necessitates courage and insight on the part of both therapist and client. Looking back over the training workshops that I attended (always a whole week), my mind never ceases to boggle at the transformations that I witnessed. But launching out into working on one’s own with people who very often have truly profound difficulties requires a great deal of confidence. Here again I was greatly blessed because, when Roger decided that I was ready to be awarded his diploma, he invited me to present a case history at a Graduates’ weekend in Devon. This coincided with the one to which Kris Misselbrook had come over from South West France in order to receive his diploma. At the time he and his partner Steve (one of the world’s best chefs!) were running Le Moulin, a guest house there, and he came up with the wonderful idea of a group of us new graduates going to stay at their place in order to practise working on one another. The ‘Mouliners’, as we named ourselves, carried on meeting annually for a number of years until, inevitably, some went off on other paths, but during those precious weeks of profound work, well mixed with fun, laughter, French wine and delicious food, some major things occurred for all of us.

For me personally the most important of them all was when I at last solved the mystery of why, at the age of sixteen, I’d fallen so deeply in love with the composer Sir Edward Elgar that I’d believed I’d never get over the fact that he’d died six years before I was born. At the time I already had the idea for my eighth book, WOMAN THROUGH THE AGES, firmly in my head and at first I imagined that the story of that regression would simply be one section of that book. However, following a talk I went to in Elgar’s study in Plas Gwyn, where he’d lived during the family’s years in Hereford, a series of imaginary letters between the composer and his former fiancée, Helen Weaver, who had emigrated to New Zealand, started writing themselves in my head. So gradually a little book took on a life of its own and LIFE WITHOUT ELGAR – A Tale of a Journeying Soul was published in 2014. This publication gave rise to a fascinating follow up, which I recounted in the eighth book.

Before, however, that very hefty book finally saw the light of day, I realised a long-held dream of visiting the Galápagos. While there, to my great surprise, the giant tortoise that we’d narrowly missed seeing started telling me his story. I named him Carlos (after Darwin of course) and he was followed by a frigate-bird and then an albatross. Upon our return I typed the three tales up and then, not knowing what to do with them, I circulated them among a few friends and colleagues, one of whom suggested I make them into a little book, together with some of my photographs. At that point firstly a sea lion and secondly a Galápagos zigzag spider kindly obliged by putting their oars in. I saw this book mainly as a bit of fun, but between the five of them, the narrators gave quite a bit of interesting information about these ‘enchanted islands’, at the same as making cogent comments on matters both spiritual and ecological. (The frigate-bird even drew upon his scribe’s linguistic training!) John Hunt Publishing found the book “too short” and were also unable to reproduce my colour photos, so I self-published it in 2015.

Throughout these years of both writing and practising DMP therapy, with clients in Hull then Ripon and Ludlow, more of my own previous lives began to surface – often through flashbacks to other countries that I was visiting – and this caused me to hold in the back of my mind the notion of one day writing a follow up to my autobiographical first book. When, however, I finally embarked upon this new project, the idea came to me of focusing on womanhood and I soon realised that my own past-life experiences seemed between them to cover most aspects of that subject. Here, too, my rejection at birth no doubt played a role in my interest in women of the past who had either been initially ignored or subsequently forgotten purely on account of their gender. Sometimes I learnt on my travels about women I’d never heard of, but obviously should have. Upon returning each time, further research led to my discovery of other significant women in the country concerned. (The only problem was that, over the years of writing the book, I kept hearing of more and more remarkable women, but one has to be firm and draw the line somewhere!)

When it came to writing my own very long story, the fascinating thing for me was to find that a great change had taken place. This was because, on Woolger workshops, the students would learn from him how to get others into a relevant past life, guide them through it and then help them to release the samskaras, i.e. remaining traumas, from which they were still suffering. (This not only helps to gain healing for the present life, but also to note the learning from the past one.) Whereas now, after reflecting upon the glimpses that I’d had of the past, each time that I sat down to write each story, the details came of their own accord.

The worst that happened was on a visit to beautiful Myanmar, where I got bombarded with memories of being a dreadful queen who’d thrown Buddhists into prison. Not something one would at all want to remember, but fortunately I was with a close friend who was able to nurse me through it! In Ravenna, on the other hand, I saw not just one, but two past lives! One was of a martyr who’d set herself the task of ‘rescuing’ prostitutes by converting them to Christianity; the second was of a young girl who’d been forced into prostitution after losing all her family and their abode in a fire. Of course unpleasant in a different way, the latter gave me some insight into how brothels are run!

Rest assured, however, that not all of this book is that gruesome! When it comes to more recent times, I’ve recounted the marvellous stories of, for instance, the pioneering black tennis player, Althea Gibson, plus one of my personal heroines, Kadiatu Kanneh-Mason, mother of the seven siblings who are all brilliant musicians. At one point a chapter on ‘Loss’ felt appropriate and then the year 2020 seemed to merit one of its own. In conclusion (while not ignoring the horrors of, say, the Taliban) reflection upon the massive changes for the better that I’d observed in my then eighty-one years brought me much hope for the future. The completion of WOMAN THROUGH THE AGES suffered a variety of holdups – a massive downsize from a four-bed house in lovely Ludlow to an apartment in a new retirement village in marvellous Malvern being not the least of them! – but at least the lockdowns gave me some of the time I’d been craving and this book was finally published in the summer of 2022.

Jules is “The Colour Counsellor” and passionate about getting everyone into their true colours to shine in their own unique and brilliant way.  She is considered one of the UK’s leading colour experts, Head of Colour at the London College of Style, and author of How NOT to Wear Black, The Essential Guide to Mindful Dressing and her recent Amazon bestseller “A Colourful Dose of Optimism”.

She has appeared on TV; The Lorraine Kelly Breakfast Show, the Chrissy B well-being chat show, and the BBC Southeast 6 O’clock News. Having spoken on live radio globally, including Radio 4’s Today show, and “You and Yours” about the Wordle Green craze, she is often featured as the ‘go-to’ celebrity colour expert in the press on colour psychology and analysis for celebrities, royalty, and politicians.

Jules’ colourful comments in OK! Magazine for a fashion feature on the Queen titled “Dressing for a year like no other” appeared in the Historic Royal Collector’s Edition for 2021. She was nominated as one of Platinum Magazine’s over 50 influencers of 2020 and has been a guest feature writer for the magazine.  She has also written many articles for the media over the years and obtained a diploma in journalism in 2011. 

As a Colour Consultant and Personal Stylist, Jules works with a wide range of individuals and companies, from business executives and heads of industry to homemakers, students, and TV presenters. She presents workshops and talks on colour and style for corporate companies, such as BT, Microsoft, Champneys, and the UK Parliament. Jules also works with brands like the iconic textile company Kvadrat, Swarovski, HONOR phones, LRM personalised accessories, Ridley London Fashion and Diva Catwalk.

Her interest in spirituality began as a child being brought up by her mother who was a healer and qualified with the renowned scientist Harry Oldfield as an Electro Crystal Therapist in her 20’s and practiced this amazing therapy whilst living in Hong Kong.  A diploma in Astrology followed, opening her world to the wonderful powers of the planets and their positive influences on our lives. 

Knowing that she wanted to place the well-being of others into her work, Jules trained as a stylist and Colour Consultant in 2005.  She has cited many times that her “light bulb” moment came when working on her fifth case-study.  She saw the transformational boost in energy and appearance when the correct colours for that individual were placed on the body and against the face.  The instant smile, the glow of the complexion, the brightening of the eyes and the harmony that was felt at a deep level by this lady was so overwhelming, it was the moment she knew that colour would change not only her life, but others too.  Helping people step into their own power, feeling confident, attractive, and looking healthy always aiming to show everyone how to be their best authentic selves in the most holistic way.

One of the wonderful things about colour is that it crosses all boundaries, nationalities, gender, and age, and whilst different cultures appreciate colours in their own way, universally everyone can share in the positive and beneficial properties that colours offers.

In her inspirational new book, ‘A Colourful Dose of Optimism’ Jules puts forward simple, effective, colourful solutions to everyday dressing dilemmas and interiors, presenting ways to turnfearful, challenging situations into opportunities to feel more contented and confident. In the current climate of anxiety and uncertainty, she helps us to take control of the things we can change in a positive way, by giving ourselves a prescription for instant hope, joy, and optimism through the colours we wear and surround ourselves in our homes.

‘Just think for a moment about that instant surge of joy we get to experience when we see the first yellow daffodil after a long, dark winter. That hit of happiness is down to the powerful impact colours have on us, physically, emotionally, and psychologically’

Her research into the psychology and science of colours is brought together with the four-season analysis system, alongside a personality profile, to create a holistic colour diagnostics strategy.  She encourages us all to delve deep into our colour genetics, providing personal prescriptions to help us discover those all-important ‘happy colours’ to nourish ourselves and our environment.

Colour is light, which we see visually as wavelengths and can have a direct effect on our body temperature and behaviour. Certain colours at the hotter end of the spectrum, like passionate red, adventurous orange, and joyful yellow can be instantly stimulating to the senses.  They help us to feel uplifted and encourage us to get busy, start something new or simply be more positive and mentally active.

In contrast cooler colours can be experienced as calming, and wonderful stress busters in times of anxiety and fear.  Shades of blue, green, and purple, that are restful on the eyes can help us to feel more in control, to be more meditative and peaceful wherever we are.

As colour is fundamental to our well-being Jules’s aim in the book is to give us some tools to learn how to create balance in both our wardrobes and home.  How we can enjoy a sense of serenity and happiness through our colour choices, providing us with positive benefits in all areas of life.

Jules’s ‘Perfect Plan’ for clearing and detoxing wardrobes to feel uplifted and energised with an easy step-by-step guide will help to create an exciting, sustainable, colour-capsule closet, injecting an instant hit of happiness into every outfit. We will also learn how to shop well, online and in person, and enjoy the feel-good factor of having found our own colourful comfort zone in our homes, putting self-care at the centre of our worlds.

Having discovered our “happy colours” we can go to the “My Colour Prescription” link printed at the beginning of the book to see our visual images by season and shade, along with the psychological benefits of each. Then take advantage of the book’s inspirational USP, with the opportunity to pay a one-off fee and download a digital App personal fan with over 100 shades to keep on our phones.  What joy to be able to tap into our “Colourful comfort zone” in an instant, never making expensive mistakes again when shopping for clothes, make-up, and the home.  

Jules offers us all the opportunity to look and feel fabulous forever in our best colours, for ultimate well-being anytime, anywhere in the world!  A Colourful Dose of Optimism, prescribe your own Happy Colours to Feel Good NOW is published by O-Books and available at Amazon and all leading bookstores.

Roger Straughan’s latest book, The Medium and the Minister: Who on Earth Knows about the Afterlife?  (6^th Books, John Hunt Publishing, 2022), is his most recent foray into the area of psychical research, particularly afterlife research.  It has already attracted a lot of attention, being described by reviewers as unique, absorbing, balanced and lucid.  It explores, as no other book does, the tensions which have arisen from the conflicts between traditional religion, spiritualism and psychical research,  which he believes are a major reason why so many people feel uncomfortable about even considering the possibility of an afterlife.  Emphasis is laid on the challenges posed  by psychical research and spiritualism to orthodox institutional religion as the ultimate authority for information and teaching about the afterlife, with prominence given to the campaigns of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Sir Oliver Lodge, which aimed to publicise the psychical evidence for survival.  This is followed by detailed case studies of later psychical evidence and the defensive reactions of religious authorities.

Roger argues that one of the most important questions we can ask is whether or not we believe that there may be some form of life after our death. Anyone prepared to consider the possibility of life after death is faced with a fundamental choice: between a materialistic view of life and one which allows for the possibility of some form of spiritual dimension beyond the known limits of the physical world. That choice is a very stark one. Are we just a random cocktail of chemicals and atoms, destined to disintegrate when the cells of our bodies and brains die? If so, it must follow that when you’re dead you’re dead, and that’s all there is to it. Or is it conceivable that we might be something more permanent than that, something that has the capacity for survival and further development?  Could this life be part of a bigger picture which we can at present get only brief and disjointed glimpses of?  Which one of these two options we choose to accept cannot help but form part of our whole view of the world. That view includes our attitude towards others and ourselves, which in turn must shape the kind of person we become and the ways we behave.

Evidence is an all-important word in Roger’s vocabulary and he shows that there are various kinds of evidence available to us in making our judgment. He is at pains to emphasise that evidence must not be confused with ‘proof’ and that it’s a mistake to think in terms of possible ‘proof’ here.  It is as impossible to prove that there is life after as it is to prove that that there is not, if by ‘proof’ we mean 100% guaranteed certainty.  In fact, that degree of certainty isn’t possible anywhere.  Unshakeable proof does not exist in experimental science, as there is always the possibility of later experiments and findings overturning the provisional results of earlier ones.  On a more practical level, verdicts are reached and accepted in criminal courts of law on the basis not of absolute ‘proof’, but of reasonable probability as presented by the evidence. The same sort of judgment has to be made about the probability of life after death, and this book shows that there is a huge amount of relevant evidence to help us make it.

One source of this evidence is personal experience, and a mountain of data has accumulated over the years, based on people’s accounts of such phenomena as near-death experiences and apparent after-death communications of all kinds.  Some of these experiences can no doubt be ‘explained away’ by sceptics, but it is the cumulative effect of all this material that Roger finds so impressive and convincing.

It was in fact his own personal experiences that led Roger to write his previous book on this subject.  This was entitled  A Study in Survival: Conan Doyle Solves the Final Problem (O Books), and has been described as ‘one of the most fascinating books bearing on the survival question to be published in the last ten years.’  It tells the story of an astonishing and completely unexpected series of apparent communications from a man who died in 1930 and who also appears in the current book – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. That story is much too complicated to be retold in any detail here, but it strongly suggests that on some occasions at least a form of psychic link may exist or be established between the author and reader of a book.  Roger went to great pains to examine and analyse the extraordinary nature of his experiences to try to find other possible explanations for them, but was finally forced to accept that psychic communication was the only one that made any sense. The messages received via random readings from Conan Doyle’s own writings consistently demonstrated paranormal awareness of a wide range of events, convincing his daughter and last surviving daughter, Dame Jean Conan Doyle, of their authenticity.

Conan Doyle had himself drawn attention to this psychic link in one of his lesser-known books, Through the Magic Door, which described his own favourite books. Amazingly, Roger came across this book, which he had never seen before, at exactly the time when he was writing about the method of communication he seemed to be experiencing.  He believes that Conan Doyle’s words are worth pondering by any thoughtful author, even if they are not taken too literally:

Surely there would be something eerie about a line of books were it not that familiarity has deadened our sense of it…. Each cover of a true book enfolds the concentrated essence of a man.  The personalities of the writers have faded into the thinnest shadows, as their bodies into impalpable dust, yet here are their very spirits at your command …. The dead are such good company….  But best of all when the dead man’s wisdom and the dead man’s example give us guidance and strength in the living of our own strenuous days…. If you picked any book (of mine), you would be picking a little fibre also from my mind, very small no doubt, and yet an intimate and essential part of what is now myself.

Not surprisingly after reading this when he did, Roger was convinced that he was indeed in touch with a ‘dead’ author, and Conan Doyle’s words have been a strong influence on how he now views books and the whole activity of reading and writing them.

Roger’s previous books, written during his career as a university academic, were on various aspects and applications of philosophy, and he has often been challenged about how a tough-minded analytic philosopher could find himself writing about way-out psychical/spiritual subjects.  He insists that there is really no incompatibility here, as his approach as a philosopher is to follow in the footsteps of Socrates by always trying to clarify important issues and the language used to discuss them by asking the simple-sounding questions, ‘What do you mean?’ and ‘How do you know?  His many books and journal articles applied this method to a wide range of practical and ethical topics, ranging from teaching and education (eg. Can We Teach Children to be Good?)  to genetic engineering (eg. Improving Nature?)  This passion for clarification, analysis and evidence has found expression in all of Roger’s work, whatever the subject matter.

When Delphi Ellis was a child growing up in an average, industrial town in the UK, she had no idea that her home life was far from ordinary. 

Her name comes from the famous Oracle from Ancient Greece who, once upon a time, would provide insight and inspiration to all those who visited.  The black cat and statue of Aphrodite in her childhood home might have also been a clue that life behind closed doors was steeped in superstition, legend and ritual.  Watching her Mum take part in a past life regression was a standard evening activity and being asked “What did you dream last night?” was regular breakfast conversation.  But it was only when she went to school, she began to realize that life in her house was different to most other kids in the neighborhood. 

Fast forward a couple of decades and Delphi began her helping career, qualifying as a counsellor and mainly supporting those bereaved by murder and suicide.  “I didn’t design it this way” she says, “but as it turned out, without prompting, most people wanted to talk to me about the dreams they’d been having during such a difficult time in their life.  We would explore them helpfully together, alongside discussions about what might help them get a better night’s sleep.  Many people I saw were exhausted, not just physically but emotionally, from all they were going through.”

It was largely these discussions that started Delphi thinking about writing a book; that and several people telling her she should write one.  She explains, “Whenever I gave a talk or did a workshop, someone would ask me afterwards if I had a book coming out.  I had been trying to some extent to write it for years [the book took ten years or more to write] but I had got caught in the trap of thinking it needed to be “just right”, especially as there’s so much science around the topic of sleep.  Then one day, I was volunteering with a women’s refuge, talking about what might help the guests sleep better as they tried to rebuild their lives.  A woman told me “I wish I’d known this years ago.  You need to write a book”.  It was then I decided just to write like I talk.  To take the jargon and ‘mystery’ out of the topic, and bust some myths along the way.”

That’s how Answers In The Dark: Grief, Sleep and How Dreams Can Help You Heal was born. The book aims to join the dots between sleep, dreams and our mental health, specifically how grief shows up, even if no one has died.  Delphi speaks openly about her own experiences which prove she’s no stranger to grief.  She explains in the book that her father died when she was young, and this had a profound impact on the trajectory of her life, alongside other losses she faced without anybody dying.

She continues, “I am convinced it was Dad dying that put me on the path I am now, but I’ve also learned that grief doesn’t just belong to death – we can experience it for anything that matters to us that’s no longer there. I don’t hide that I was subjected to domestic abuse – it’s not my shame to carry - and I lost so much not just practically, but of myself during that time.  When I was able to leave that behind me, I remember someone asking me what my favorite music was and I didn’t know; I’d been told for so long what I could and couldn’t like.  All of this can take us, as I call it, down the plughole and it’s dark down there.  Knowing we can find our way back up and exploring helpful ways to do this is key.”

Answers In The Dark also challenges some of the “Big Myths” of sleep, and grief, and also elaborates on a number of what Delphi describes as “night-time phenomena” – things like hearing your name being called (when there’s no one obvious there) or experiences like Visitation Dreams.  She also provides a Sleep Cycle Repair kit as well as offering tips on how to decode your own dreams.  “One thing I make clear” Delphi explains, “is that Answers In The Dark is not a dream dictionary; I believe you as the dreamer are the best person to decide what your dreams mean so the book gives tips on what might help.”

The book went to #1 in Hot New Releases on publication day, #3 in the Best Seller List and is currently sitting in the Top 100 Most Wished For books in its category on Amazon.  Ultimately though, Delphi says, Answers In the Dark is a book of hope. She says her aim really, in writing the book was to normalize much of what we go through when we’re trying to find our way through a difficult time, and to provide insights and inspiration, much like the ancient Oracle, to help you find your way.

Is it really possible that an issue holding you back in this life can be resolved by tracing the root cause back to a trauma in a past life? I believe so and countless clients over the past twenty-five years would agree. My own severe claustrophobia was resolved in just one regression session with a hypnotherapist. It was the emotional experience of that session, and its effectiveness, that made me decide to study past life therapy and brought me to where I am today.

My first career had been in the corporate world in the UK and spirituality was not even on my radar. I moved to southern Spain in my mid-thirties and established my own companies on Gibraltar, far too busy for anything remotely spiritual. Yet it was there that I went to my first demonstration of mediumship with a young Mark Brandist. The accuracy of his messages was astounding and I was curious: how could he know such personal details?

Also while on Gibraltar I was introduced to complementary therapies by a naturopath called Sylta who ran a centre in the Algarve. Her diagnosis of my “Running-your-own-small-business-itis” and her remedies worked wonders and complementary medicine won me over. It was no coincidence at all, of course, that my gentle introduction to spirituality was with two people at the top of their trades.

A run-in with the government of Gibraltar led to my companies being put into ‘voluntary liquidation’; I was reduced to nothing and it shook me to the core. So when I got a call from Sylta asking me to take care of her Centre in the Algarve while she and her husband took three weeks’ holiday, I agreed immediately. The Centre was a peaceful place with people staying on retreat or for workshops and regular classes, and the first-class therapists offered treatments I had never heard of.

The office also housed a library, with books on everything from Ayurveda and Alchemy to Yoga and Zen, a lovely place to start my spiritual journey. With so many books of theory, complimentary treatments and workshops at the practice, I was exposed to a whole new world, a million miles away from corporate culture, and I loved it!

These new therapies were activating my system at every level and I wanted to learn more. As it happened there was a hypnotherapist working locally, a Scotsman called Ron who’d also had a corporate career and changed direction when he reached burnout. He ran a successful private practice and the more I learned about hypnotherapy, the more I liked the sound of it. When Ron announced he was going to run a certified course in psychotherapy and hypnotherapy, I signed up straight away.

My three weeks turned into three months, as Sylta’s husband had been ill, and I settled in the Algarve, becoming a freelance feature writer. A rare opportunity presented itself, a visit to a working salt mine for an exclusive feature… but then I remembered my phobia of being underground in enclosed spaces! I turned to Ron for help and we discovered a past life as an architect in ancient Egypt, trapped underground and left to die. A couple of hours and many tissues later, my phobia was healed.

I started practising as a hypnotherapist alongside other work in the Algarve, and gained valuable experience in dealing with all sorts of issues that clients presented to me. My professional training continued on visits to England with my mentor, Dr Keith Hearne, from whom I learned much about spirit release, soul retrieval and past life regression work.

Along the way I have worked with masters across a wide range of disciplines: mediums, healers, energy workers and even a shaman. My therapy tool kit contains elements from many modalities, but it is hypnotherapy and in particular past life regression for healing that is my passion. All my work has a spiritual dimension, inevitable with deep soul-level healing, and it is a joy to see clients, who had not considered such things before, returning from a past life journey with fresh awareness and understanding of who they really are.

Over the years, clients have presented me with many varied issues, although I have only had one request to find someone’s lost libido! The stories that emerge are usually quite traumatic. Of course, it is such trauma that the soul carries forward yet healing the past life also heals the issue in this life, allowing the client to move on.

Sometimes the connection is obvious. One woman, who was almost paranoid about her young children being physically sick, found a life in the Middle Ages. She was one of a large family struck by plague, the symptoms of which included people having a high fever and vomiting. All her siblings died but she survived and the guilt she felt then about not being good enough, unable to help her siblings, had rippled into this lifetime. Healing that trauma brought insights and understanding, and a healthier outlook towards her children.

Other times, the connection is more subtle. A young man whose life was in a mess and who had turned his back on his family and friends found a life as a young woman at the outbreak of WWI, a kitchen maid in a manor house. When she fell pregnant she was sacked and, instead of turning to her family for help, went to London where she became a prostitute, later raped and badly beaten and bleeding to death. Once he overcame his surprise at having been a woman and a prostitute, the client totally understood the deeper lessons and insights, and he gained a much clearer perspective on his behaviour in this lifetime.

My new book Past Life Healing is not an academic textbook but it does look at the concepts of past lives and reincarnation across history and cultures, and it does outline the research that has been done in the field both by academics and therapists. In between, there are more than thirty case studies of ordinary people whose ‘this life issues’ have been resolved by revisiting a past life, finding the real root causes and healing them at source.

Judy Sharp’s book Past Life Healing has won the Local Legend national Spiritual Writing Competition. It is available worldwide.

William Wildblood was born in London and after several decades living in the West Country, India and France returned to the capital. He has been an antiques dealer, written for magazines and run guest houses but his main interest since his early 20s has been in spirituality and religion on which subject he has written several books, the first being Meeting the Masters and the most recent Earth is a School. He has a blog dealing with various spiritual topics where he puts up about 8 articles a month. He also contributed to the online site of Albion Awakening which discussed the esoteric and mystical aspects of the story of Britain. That came to a natural end but there was a book of the same title published in 2020 of its principal contents.

But really the most interesting thing about him is not him at all but something that happened to him which is the subject of Meeting the Masters and also discussed in Earth is a School. This was an encounter over a period of 20 years with a group of spiritual beings from the higher worlds who instructed him on the spiritual path through a medium. It was they who first introduced him to the idea that our planet exists not in and for itself but as a training ground for the soul.

Meeting the Masters is the story of the first two years of this experience when the contact was at its most intense. It includes verbatim advice and instructions from this group of teachers who would be analogous to members of the Communion of Saints in the Christian tradition or enlightened Masters in Hinduism or Buddhism. They incorporated elements of both but also went beyond either as you would expect of beings no longer restricted by earthly considerations. Their knowledge came directly from the source of spiritual light without being processed in any way as is usually the case. The book is subtitled A Spiritual Apprenticeship which is what this was but after 20 years the direct communication ceased though with the promise it would continue on the spiritual plane through the method of impression. This involves ideas transmitted to the higher mind which then have to be interpreted by the disciple so he is responsible for the end product which may lead to error but is also the only way in which we learn to become spiritually mature ourselves.

Earth is a School is the result of this process. The title comes directly from the Masters but the development of the idea is the author’s though in response to the impression mentioned. This method of writing is probably more widespread than we imagine as our teachers in the higher worlds are constantly trying to bring us further up though they are restricted in this by the laws of life which dictate that at this stage of our spiritual development we must work things out for ourselves, albeit with inspiration and guidance.

Why are we here in this world? It seems that many people nowadays think there is no reason. We just are here and that’s all there is to it. We should try to live as happy and fulfilled a life as possible and when we die, we cease to exist. Religious people would go further and say that we should follow the guidance of our religion and hope for an afterlife in heaven or paradise or maybe get reincarnated in a better position than we are now with the eventual aim of breaking the cycle of manifested existence and being reabsorbed into the All. It depends whether we are materialists or spiritual believers. The former would say life on Earth is for living as best you can, here and now. You have only one life so make it count. The latter in practical terms often don’t seem so very different though they theoretically have one eye on the next world.

There is another possibility. It requires seeing the human being in a different light from the one to which we are normally accustomed. For a start, it takes the pre-existence of the soul as a basic fact so you do not come into life when you are born. You are already a spiritual being and your pre-existing soul takes birth in the material  world in a physical body for reasons to do with its own aims and goals not for the incarnate person’s development and fulfilment in material or worldly terms.

In this scenario the spiritual individuality, which is a created being, descends to the physical world to advance its evolution. It’s like a seed planted in the ground to germinate. The word descends is appropriate because the process is a falling away from the unity of the source into separation and limitation. At the same time, those two characteristics force the soul to develop in certain ways that would not be possible on its own natural level of oneness with the source where there is no conflict or challenge. The material environment provides both of these as we all know. Here we can truly become an individual self, obliged to rely on ourself and make our own way.  The development of individuality is an essential requirement given that the evolutionary purpose referred to is to make fully conscious creative gods, true reflections of their divine source, out of unselfconscious spiritual babes, beings bathed in peace and bliss but purely passive.

Earth, by which I mean this physical world, is a school designed with a purpose. The purpose is to brings souls to maturity. If we were to remain pure discarnate spirits we would certainly never know pain or suffering but then again we would not know real love either for real love requires a solid sense of self which is something that can only develop in a world of separation, a material world in which spirit and matter have been sundered. Our task is to put them back together again, consciously reassemble them, and from this marriage of Heaven and Earth arises something new which is the god we mentioned earlier. This is a being that can wield the powers of creation in full consciousness.

I will add something more for those who might think that love can be known by souls that have not experienced the material world. Not really. These souls can know a kind of balmy bliss and communion which is like love but it is an infantile kind of love like the love of a baby at its mother’s breast. True, serious, deep-feeling love can only be known and expressed by souls who have been touched by sorrow. Suffering may be the bane of our earthly existence but it is also a great spiritual gift as it prises open the heart. We cannot suffer on the higher planes but through pain we can enter into the lives of our fellow souls more than we ever could if restricted to those planes. It is through suffering that we come to real love.

The soul is created by God, the supreme I AM of the universe, out of himself. It is created in his image so has its own I am quality. It is individual but to be a true, fully functioning individual it must co-create itself. Otherwise, it would remain in spiritual bliss but spiritual ignorance. This is what the school is all about. The experience of duality is necessary for the knowledge of oneness. It is separation that leads to completion. But this oneness does not mean simply returning to God or becoming God. The whole process is to make the One many which is a spiritual enrichment of the One, and the many remain themselves even when they have completed the journey, graduated, you might say, and returned to the source. Now they can add to creation.

In fact, this is something we can already do in a clumsy fashion though only the great artists do it to any real degree. And note that you can create with God or against him. Here is a lesson many, especially now in the 21^st century, have yet to learn. God is truth. What is unaligned with God is untruth and therefore evil. That’s what evil is in the greater sense. Our task is to bring ourselves into harmony with the laws of creation and then we will find real fulfilment by working with them. The fact of individuality, which necessarily implies free will, means that things can go wrong. It would appear that things have gone wrong in recent times but it may be that, viewed with the eye of history, even the spiritual darkness into which we have fallen will bring some kind of future advancement. Perhaps we have to experience the consequences of wrong thinking to know how wrong it is. The scenario here sees souls coming to the Earth and being tested just as in a normal school. What is tested is the orientation of the heart. There is no choice on the higher planes to which the soul naturally belongs. What is, is. But down here there is a choice.

The world is very cleverly set up so that there is just enough evidence to convince those of the reality of God if they incline that way but not enough to persuade those who do not wish to believe. Here, and especially now in our day, you can follow whatever path you choose. Your heart is being examined. There is no coercion, no overwhelming evidence that would take away your free will. You show yourself for what you are. This might sound a little threatening but God is surely at least as compassionate as we are. Failure in life’s spiritual lessons may simply mean you have to repeat the course. Those who make the grade return to the higher worlds where, according to their spiritual station, they will be filled with the love and truth of God. Those who miss out on that proceed to worlds that reflect their current spiritual state which will no doubt provide them with new lessons to take them further on their journey.

The renowned Professor Albert Einstein said that “every scientist becomes convinced that the laws of nature manifest the existence of a Spirit vastly superior to that of man - that spirit formed his idea of God”. So, who or what is God and where does he/she hang-out or where can I find him? My quest for such answers came in 1992 when I was diagnosed with advanced cervical cancer and was facing my own mortality. I died on the operating table and was pronounced dead. I found myself floating out of my body and into the most magnificent light filled space.

A universal love held me in sacredness as a God presence of total bliss enfolded me. I felt I was in the womb of creation; I was part of it, and it was all of me -we were one. I heard the most celestial music – it was so beautiful it soothed my soul. I felt a peace and tranquillity that I had never known before. I had no fear as this loving presence caressed my body, while doctors tried to resuscitate me.

As I was pulled further into this vortex of light, a hand appeared before me, almost like a stop sign which prevented me from going any further.  Next thing I remember was being sucked back into my body and hearing doctors saying, “she’s back – we have her back”. Days later my surgeon informed me that I was one lucky lady to be alive and that someone must have been watching over me. My father died the year previous, and I have no doubt he petitioned a Divine dispensation in my favour. I dedicated the following year to my recovery and healing, but the presence of this magnificent light never left me, it became my friend and constant companion. I understood then that there was a reason for my existence, but I needed to discover why. The promise of a place, a heaven, an afterlife was something I needed to explore.

I became a sponge for knowledge, I had an insatiable thirst for what lies beyond physical death. I read many books on death and dying, I travelled abroad to undertake workshops on various healing modalities. I became a Shaman, angel/ascension teacher, crystal healer, grief counsellor, Spirit Midwife, and teacher on spiritual awakening. I studied with amazing and inspiring teachers to mention a few, Louise Hay, Marianne Williamson, Deepak Chopra, and the renowned Dr. Brian Weiss who is an expert in the field of reincarnation. I soon realised that I was only scratching the surface of what truly lies beyond the veil of death and beyond the five senses. Through my healing work I was beginning to sense blockages within the energy bodies of clients. I was beginning to understand that a powerful energy was guiding me and working through me. This energy I knew was not the energy I was born with, but a spiritual energy that would enter me when I invoked it prior to working on a client. It was also the energy I felt when I had my first spiritual experience with Mother Mary at the age of sixteen.

This happened in an old monastery that was situated beside my school. So profound was the experience that I never shared it with anyone for fear of been called a witch or away with the fairies. I knew all too well that anyone with psychic gifts or communicated with angels or conversed with the dead were condemned. My grandmother was no exception to this rule, she was born with psychic abilities and everything she did was in secrecy and behind closed doors. My uncle was a 7^th son of a 7^th son which meant he came into this world with the gift of healing. My youngest brother was very gifted and psychic. So much so that he pre-empted his own death in 2002.

While I had many experiences as a child with the angelic realm, I decided the safest bet for me was to “steer clear” of all things spiritual or metaphysical. I studied the sciences and became a Serologist. Yet I maintained my own way of communicating with the invisible world, this was with pure heart communication and never reciting prayer after prayer as I felt this was merely lip service.

Becoming a serologist, was a major achievement in my life. However, being young and foolish I fell madly in love and left my career behind me. That time in Ireland it was deemed sinful to engage in sex before marriage, so being the good catholic girl, I refrained until I got the full licence. Soon the romance dwindled and the girl that was once happy and chirpy was now hiding behind a mask of pain, anguish, and hopelessness. In one year alone I experienced the passing of my father, diagnosed with advanced cervical cancer, moving house and the breakup of my marriage. This was surely my spiritual awakening, my faith and trust in God was a surrendering of myself to a higher power.

It was then I understood and came to believe that my spirituality was the cornerstone of my mental and physical health. I viewed my “spiritual-ness” as a sense of meaning and purpose in my life, with an ability to see what is possible in this universe.

An openness to love a potential to heal and a respect and awareness for one’s inner wisdom. I believe it is love – not religion – which generates spiritual growth. I believe that divinity is love and it is through divinity that all things come into being. My friend Einstein believed that love is the most powerful force on the planet because it has no limits. Nothing exists without love, and nothing is healed without forgiveness. In truth I believe that love is the real God, I know this because I have been in its presence.

Initially, I found it incredibly difficult to go through the process of forgiveness. I felt to forgive was to forget the perpetrations against me and pretend that shit didn’t happen. However, I remembered Mahatma Gandhi’s famous quote saying, “the weak can never forgive because forgiveness is the attitude of the Strong”. It was only then I realised that forgiveness had nothing to do with my ex-husband and everything to do with me. My true healing began the day I offered forgiveness to my ex-husband and to myself.  I realised I could no longer live happily in the present if I continued to stay stuck in my past. So powerful was my healing that I began to teach the forgiveness process in my workshops, night classes and to clients.

I began to see my world differently, in that I had found my tribe, people I could share my spiritual experiences with without fear of ridicule or judgement. I began writing articles for newspapers and magazines about Angels, Spirit Guides, Ascended Masters, Bereavement, Suicide, and the Journey of the Soul. All topics were channelled and inspired by my guides and one particular Arch Angel Galliannael, who predates biblical times. Often, I was guided to write healing meditations, mantras, invocations to suit whatever program I was running. Many times, I was asked “may I have a copy of that meditation as I found it really helped me”. As a result of that I recorded some healing meditations – two of which can be downloaded from my website.

My book “Where After” was birthed purely by Divine Intervention. My life was hectic, and I was burning the candle both ends of the wick. My hubby and I decided it was time to treat ourselves to a ski holiday.

I was only two days there when the worst nightmare happened. I was knocked down by an amateur snowboarder who fell on top of me and broke my pelvic and bones in my back. I was unable to walk or do anything for myself for months. It was during these restless nights that my Guides began showing me the outline of my book.

I would wake at night and see outlines, images, wisdoms, verses and so much more. I argued with them and said “I would never be able to write a book” I was told to trust, and they would guide me.

One particular night they showed me a pyramid shape and I asked, “what’s that got to do with writing a book”. My guidance was very clear, the pyramid represented three points, each point was to represent a section of my book, the scientific model as I understood the sciences, the medical model as many renowned doctors were now adding their names to afterlife proof, and the final point was the spiritual model gleaned from my own experiences with clients over many years.

The birth of “Where After” began and for two years I was guided and inspired through every page of my book. This book is transforming even the deepest sceptic and answers many of the questions one ever needed to know about death, dying and the immortality of the soul.

My purpose in writing “Where After” is to offer a new way of thinking about death and shine a light of hope into the hearts and minds of its readers. Death is not the end but a transition from one plane of existence to another. My book provides a compelling argument that beyond the veil of death the soul (which is the essence of who we truly are) is eternal and never dies.

Wishing you heaven in heart and starlight in your beautiful souls always.

I have always loved words, whether spoken, written or sung and, when I’m not scribbling in a fancy notebook, I can be found daubing paint on a canvas, knitting colourful jumpers or doing puppetry on TikTok. My writing career actually began at the age of ten when I proudly won a school competition with a poem about woodlice. However, my parents had other ideas and insisted I should train for a ‘proper job’, so writing took a back seat and remained a hobby for many years.

Yet it was my experiences as a teenager that would eventually lead to my second writing prize, this time a national one, for Love, Death and Beyond. As happened in many British families in those days, I was confirmed into the Christian Church; but it didn’t take long for me to reject the faith as patriarchal nonsense. I couldn’t believe in a wrathful old man in the sky who liked to blast people to Hell if they got things wrong.

Nevertheless, I became acutely aware of my own mortality and, with no supporting belief system, developed a terror of death. My fear of what awaits us all at the end of life dominated my thoughts for many years, making me miserable at teenage parties and equally dismissive of other world religions with their apparently easy answers. In fact, I did have a keen interest in spirituality and even had paranormal experiences of synchronicity, precognition and clairaudience, but I dismissed them all as coincidence or hallucination because I was so afraid of being ridiculed.

I had no idea at that time that it would be my deep connection with animals that was to lead to my eventual spiritual awakening.

As an adult, I trained to be an Occupational Therapist and also became a Buddhist for a while, influenced by my boyfriend’s wonderful mother! However, even though I read and travelled a lot, and found a lot of it helpful psychologically, meditation didn’t ease my fear of death. If anything, it made it worse.

The freedom to write full-time came, a somewhat mixed blessing, when I became physically disabled after a serious car crash. Unable to work anymore, I retreated into the wonderful world of words and, immersed in fiction and memoir, I was able to escape my physical pain and existential fears. A gently successful literary pathway followed with two stories on local radio, publication in anthologies and being part of a scriptwriting team for two BBC-produced docudramas. I also had three plays staged by amateur theatre companies and the Derby Shakespeare Company.

As I tried to recover from my injuries, I also began to write memoirs about my earlier wild travel adventures including a stint out in the South Seas surviving on a desert island with just one companion and a BBC camera. This memoir was long-listed by Mslexia in their 2014 competition.

Throughout all these efforts I was supported by my three dear pets. Timmy and Dolly were cats who lay across my feet as I dictated my words onto the computer, and my dog Betty gradually helped me learn to walk again, staying by my side and comforting me during my divorce. But after thirty years of disability, my health declined again; I was housebound and life was feeling particularly bleak.

And that’s when I thought back to my meeting decades earlier with a cute, chestnut-coloured hamster called Beryl.

Although religions had tried to teach me about a world beyond this one, it wasn’t until I’d seen Beryl’s soul rise up from her body at the point of death, in a golden hamster-shaped mist, that my mind had begun to open to the possibility of spiritual worlds. Indeed, after this there had been many other paranormal events. I had also seen Timmy’s soul leave her body, heard clear psychic messages of comfort from Betty after her death, and eventually experienced undeniable angelic contact and human after-death communication.  

As a medical scientist, I had at first dismissed all such things as wishful thinking. But then, a scientist has to accept the evidence of their own eyes and ears – and there was a lot of evidence. I finally understood that many people have these experiences and that it was time for me to record my memoir – and lose my fear of ridicule – so that I could share my comforting message of personal transformation. Love, Death and Beyond is meant for anyone living in darkness who needs reassurance in the face of fear, as I did for many years, and it’s also a book for animal lovers who may wonder where their dear pets go after death and whether there is a Heaven for them too.

My rich and varied experiences have allowed me to view ‘the bigger picture’ and to revisit the great world religions, including Christianity and Buddhism, in a new light. This new confidence and belief was of incredible benefit when I collapsed with heart failure a few years ago: as I was taken to hospital, I felt real hope rather than terror. This positive attitude at a time of great need was nearly all down to the messages and visions given to me by my animals. Without them, I honestly believe I would have remained sceptical and living a life of fear.

In the future, I shall write about relationship, about how we treat ourselves, each other and the planet, with the particular backdrop of climate change. Rather than exploring the dystopia in which we live, we need books that bring inspiration and hope because surely there’s enough sadness in the world. It’s time for literature, music and art to come together in the spiritual awakening of humanity.

Love, Death and Beyond won the Local Legend national Spiritual Writing Competition.

Anna Tizard’s literary fantasies are born of questions about the nature of mind, and the realms of thought, psyche and spirit.

The surrealist word game of Exquisite Corpse is the perfect playground for her imagination, which she plays “live” on her podcast, Brainstoryum. The results have so far inspired two novellas and more than twenty short stories.

Originally, Anna was influenced by literary writers such as Jeanette Winterson and Margaret Atwood; a Christian upbringing and a crisis in faith during her early twenties became the underlying driving force for her deep, exploratory themes.

Discovering Carl Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious felt like a revelation and began to emerge in new, metaphorical forms in her writing, as if of their own accord. But these ideas were difficult to rein in and clearly formulate in the early days of her career: she was isolated in both her writing and her struggles with faith. Writing became a way to explore her internal world and search for answers, but this meant she was more led by unconscious impulses than by any learned ability to structure a plot. Her first novel became a kind of psychological labyrinth and went through countless rewrites. In the same way that she couldn’t find an answer to her own life’s questions, she was unable to resolve her novel.

She set aside her first project to experiment with other novels, using a professional editor to develop her craft. However, after many rewrites of the same books, a staleness began to set in.

It was the chance discovery of the surrealist word game of Exquisite Corpse that gave Anna the fresh material and sense of playfulness needed to spark her imagination.

Anna first came across the game while working in a call centre, where she and her colleagues had already been playing the parlour game, Consequences, from which Exquisite Corpse was originally developed. Passing slips of paper to each other and reading the results caused more giggling than they could risk while operating a customer helpline, so they continued the game in the pub after work – and laughed for two hours straight!

Exquisite Corpse was invented in 1925 by the French Surrealists. Each player writes a particular type of word or phrase without seeing what the other players have written, to form a sentence with the structure:

Describing word - noun - action - describing word – noun.

It’s called Exquisite Corpse because the first round resulted in: “The exquisite corpse shall drink the new wine.”

The results are often hilarious at first (and game play on Brainstoryum involves a lot of laughing), but these bizarre sentences are also suggestive of unusual characters and situations.

“The empty danger” was a phrase that turned up in one of her early, in-person games. The question of what dangerous thing could possibly be “empty” or intangible lingered in Anna’s mind.

Along came the pandemic and she had her answer: fear itself.

The Empty Danger explores the concept of fear as a universal, collective force and imagines what fear might actually look like as, in real life, people around the world were all feeling the same thing in early 2020. It was first written and released in episodes on Anna’s website for sharing through Twitter, until the story turned into a book.

Volume 2 in her emerging series, The Book of Exquisite Corpse, was inspired by a complete game result:

“The lofty portrait of my grandmother rapidly salivated at the estranged stairwell.”

Instigated by the image of a portrait coming alive, the initial idea was quite ghoulish, but the story delves into metaphysical themes about a dying artist who yearns for a kind of immortality, and an ex-lover who tries to claim that power as his own.

Anna began her podcast, Brainstoryum, to share reflections on inspiration, tips on the psychology and methodology of creative writing, and remote game play. Listeners are encouraged to send words and phrases to her “Play” page, which she then pulls at random from the Socks of Destiny!

As an experiment, Anna shared a first draft of a story based on a result: “The perfumed elf swapped boots with the midnight ship”, asking listeners for feedback on what should happen next. She discussed their feedback on the next show and used some of the ideas to develop the story further. The final draft having been shaped by this collaborative process, she decided to publish The Midnight Ship as a stand-alone e-book, free to download from her website.

Brainstoryum and the scrambled words of friends and strangers continue to be Anna’s primary source of inspiration. Since her fiction reaches into the depths of the unconscious and seeks to express the ways in which our minds connect, there’s a synchronistic rightness to this, as her creative journey is led by forces or patterns beyond her control.

In a positive sense I could define the spiritual as the Unseen Realm, or a place or state of Oneness where there are no boundaries or differentiation, just love, understanding and compassion. This also suggests the eternal nature of the soul, and from there, reincarnation, with there being no boundaries in time or space.

My earliest spiritual experiences were in my childhood, both of which might be seen by some as just 'odd' rather than spiritual. They were 'unseen' by everyone else but definitely seen by me. A fleeting one was my 'imagining' that there was a North American Indian totem pole in our back garden in Reigate, Surrey. My parents humoured me about this, and my brother and sister just thought I was competing for attention. But for me is was just a natural fact; there was a totem pole in our garden.

During a similar time, late 1940's to early 1950's, I once saw a flypast of UFOs above the road where I lived. It was in broad daylight and the UFOs were pastel coloured and balloon-like. I had the feeling that they were communicating with me. Something like 'We know you feel odd and alone, but we are always here for you'.

Again during this period I had another 'spiritual' experience when my brother and sister and I, along with friends who were also siblings, went off into the woods, took all our clothes off and made bracken skirts and ate tiger melons given to us by my mother's lover who owned a market garden.

This experience made me feel I was back in what I understood to be the Garden of Eden. I always wanted to do it again, but the rest of our gang never seemed to want to, and being the youngest I had no say. I'm still trying to "get back to the Garden", a feeling that to me sums up much of what the spiritual life is truly all about. Redemption?

A lot later, in the 1990's, I had become very immersed in the Maya of Southern Mexico and their sacred calendar or Tzolkin. The Maya were and still are a shamanistic culture and as such I realised that you were not just playing with concepts or ideas. You were getting in touch with occult forces and I had one episode where I was under attack from Mayan demonic entities for three nights. Their intention was to reduce me to a single-cell organism.

At one point I even thought that this was preferable to the fear they were inducing in me. But something told me 'No' and I fought my psychic corner until they eventually left me alone. Around this time I met a Mayan shaman or daykeeper called Hunbatz Men. He was the first of his kind to visit England and I was appointed as his 'guide' by the people who had invited him over for talks, etc.

Hunbatz was quite intrigued for he saw the Mayan in me, and couldn't understand why I was not taking it more seriously. During the time I was also practising past-life regression and a very fleeting memory/playback was of myself travelling down a great plaza with pyramids to the left and right of me. I was bedecked in the robes of a priest.

This links into my creative history and process, for Hunbatz was very taken with a poem I'd written to the Sun, the central Mayan deity. He couldn't understand how this middle class Englishman could have written it. He asked me for a copy to pin up back in his centre in Yucatan. It was originally written at the behest of an artist friend who was doing an exhibition of paintings of the astrological planets. As just mentioned, 'Oneness' is a word with strongly spiritual connotations, and another planetary poem was written to Neptune, which is symbolic of Oneness. If you wish to read these please click here (Sun on page 3, Neptune on page 50).

These poems were eventually published in 2005 by O Books in my book (with cards) entitled Divine Astrology in which I explore and promote the 'celestial art' as a form of religion, but one completely without dogma. To a degree, I presented it as a moral compass based upon how the planets are saying 'Do this and that happens; do that and this will happen.' The images I created for the reader/user to gaze or meditate on and thereby 'connect' with the planetary energies, are now presented on my website, https://www.lynbirkbeck.com/portals.html.

In addition to the deep memories, ancient cultures, astrology and poetry, my creative and spiritual sense of life has been, and still is, greatly concerned with Music.

Music evokes a sense of something finer and more beautiful than mundane life allows. I learnt to play the guitar when I was fifteen, inspired by black men such as Leadbelly, Blind Blake and Big Bill Broonzy, and eventually became professionally involved with performing, recording, A & R, and ultimately song writing. I wasn't hard-headed or confident enough to make that much of a success of it - co-producing the album Gorilla by the Bonzo Dogs possibly being the high point - but it was the process of writing songs that put me strongly in touch with my inner vision and sense of beauty - and more importantly with my own emotional centre, something which progressively leads to a deeper and deeper experiencing of my life as a spiritual event. So yes, writing songs was, for me, a spiritual exercise - and it still is, as too are the spiritual feelings evoked by such great musicians as Brian Eno, Nick Drake, Carlos Santana and many others.

I have to say that my career, since 1979, as an astrological author and consultant has, until recently, inhibited my creative impulses. I think this is because astrology provides one with a blueprint of what life is about at an energetic level. As such it does, to a degree, make one - or me at least - attempt to make one's creations fit that blueprint. This is in turn runs the danger of contriving as distinct from creating. Almost like painting by numbers. Where I have managed to get astrology to employ my imagination is in the way I have put astrology across, both in person and through my nine books on the subject. It has been gratifying to hear people say that they could never quite understand how astrology works, or what it was saying, until they had read my way of putting it across.

But still I was left with the ongoing feeling of creative frustration, born of having to keep to the rails that astrology had laid down, so to speak. This dilemma came to head a few years ago with, on the one hand, the writing and publishing of my latest book Dynamic Interactive Astrology, and on the other hand, with the commencement of writing an epic poem, The Song of Wayland - now over halfway at 3000 lines.

Dynamic Interactive Astrology is the summation and distillation of all my astrological work so far. This book concentrates on the idea that your fate is factored into you at birth, and the keyword and keyphrase method of the book effectively unlocks the various dynamics of your being by invoking one's innate creativity, rather than just describing them as a collection of character traits. As one student/user of this method put it "With each phrase I create a unique poem and can reflect upon and connect with the dynamic energy of my uniqueness which I find to be inspirational and reassuring in feeling that I have a purpose in my life."

The Song of Wayland is being written without any astrological blueprint to keep to - or for that matter any market driven material goal. So it leaves me free to flex my creative and emotional muscles while not having to keep to the astrological script or demographic.

However, I can also see how the storyline of the poem echoes my planetary transits as they occur though time. Paradox is also seen in the fact that over forty years of astrologizing has processed and progressed me to this very point of creative freedom. And to my mind, 'creative freedom' is another way of saying I am connecting with my spirit, that is, spirituality.

I hold that astrology, contrary to its popular conception, is a subject that directs rather than predicts. Living astrologically, according to cosmic dictates, has directed me to this point where I fly solo, and leave behind that which has, again paradoxically, both liberated and constrained me, and express what my personal journey is all about. The Song of Wayland opens with a quote, lines taken from a poem written when I was writing songs and getting into astrology at the same time in the mid 1970s.

"Beneath the sunburnt sky we fail
To see our souls above us tower
On memory's lonely ships we sail
As we await our final hour."

“There must be a trauma related incident from your past that has exacerbated this?” asked the therapist. I gripped each side of the armchair, feeling my nails start to bite into the soft fabric.

“Well, there’s the attack by a stranger when I was 7, my dad being killed in a road accident at 9, being mentally and physically abused from 13 to 19, being medically retired from the police force and finally the road accident that smashed my career as a famous psychic medium and that I’m like a 90 year old with chronic illness, where do you want to start?” I spat. My cheeks burned crimson as I knew that I was projecting my anger onto this poor lady who just wanted to help. The room was all ‘love and light’ with crystals, incense and spiritual pictures. ‘I want to smash every single picture and pathetic crystal,’ I thought with fired blood.

When I got home after the session, I cried. I cried for my old life and the fact that a road accident had created a vicious condition that raged through my body every single second of every agonising day. Bedbound for years with ME and Fibromyalgia, I had lost my faith and my reason for being. Darkness offered its comfort which I accepted refusing to embrace any light. I had lost everything, my home, career, life, health, soul, my connection to the angel and spirit realms and willed any end to it all, including death.

I had been psychic since birth carrying on the family legacy that had laced through us all for hundreds of years. I had started full time mediumship after being retired from Essex Police as a Major Investigations Detective. I would travel the world speaking in seminars, teaching in workshops, taking the public on spiritual retreats and paranormal investigations. I would adore my stage work bringing messages from the dead. I loved the selective spiritual TV programmes that I did. I was writing in many different magazines and had just written my first book and was riding high on a wave that took me to every shoreline to share my spiritual knowledge and experience. At that point however, on reflection, I wrote to a deadline and whatever I thought people would want to read about. I had no fire run through me with each word I expressed and typed out.

One night, when I again was grieving my old life back in the days of my chronic illness, I had a light bulb moment. It was surreal. I had delivered everything within me to help humankind but I realised that I had never embraced the power of spirituality for myself. I was a conduit passing on all of my ethereal knowledge but kept nothing for me. I walked into the garden in the early hours of the morning and realised that it was a full moon. I knelt on the damp grass and opened my arms out and surrendered my soul to the Universe. In between heaving gulping sobs, I asked for the angels and the Spirit World to assist me and take me from this darkness.

It was that simple. I can only describe that night as an awakening. Smashes and bangs in the house heralded their arrival. Small white feathers left in the most obscure places announced that my pleas had been heard. The next thing that took place I can only describe as a soul boot camp. I would dream very lucidly of all of my past traumas. In the morning I felt that I had to write out the dreams in my soul journal. As I did this, I would get a vision of whatever crystal I needed for that specific time to aid the healing. When that particular dream phase ended, the next trauma slotted into my dream state. My Nan in spirit showed me a drug that I have never heard of that when I got it allowed me to be released from my five-year bedded prison. Angels introduced themselves and guided me on what I had to do next.

My guide Julianus explained that I had had a fifth dimensional transition and the accident was a way to bring me back to a place that they could assist me. The feeling of not being alone was immense. I could feel my soul gathering pace and strength as each month of healing went by. New people were placed in front of me to help me heal, drum healers, massagers, gong bathers, hypnotists, therapists to name but a few.

I then had the most important dream of my life. A dream that fired a new obsession, writing. I felt I was actually there as I clearly experienced the most amazing fictional story of how God changes the Laws of the Universe in order to save humankind. I started writing that book that morning and finished it in three months. I now know that my spiritual dream and visions had spiritual truth in them as what I had written that I thought was fiction has come to pass in reality.

Within a year, I had a permanent home, cleared my debt, had three columns in magazines and I felt at peace with my past and a sense of gratitude for the smallest of things.

My guide had told me that I was to share my knowledge through writing as my body was going to take longer to heal. With this newfound passion and goals to set at my own pace I found a reason for living, a reason for looking forward. The most amazing shift has been my sense of peace and contentment. I have discovered selflove like never before. I sit and watch nature and smile at its magnificence. I am grateful for the smallest of things. The material world no longer pulls me into its heavy claws, the monster being ego, financial fear and physical gain. My body may still be broken, but my soul has now recovered to a strong, resonating mass of energy that has been awakened and now throbs with the pulse of the Universe.

In my darkest days of misery, I was so closed down that I could not see the tiny sparkle of light that kept glimmering, offering a way out. Surrender is the answer. By handing myself over to the Universe irrespective of my beliefs at the time, I found the answer and the path to enlightenment. It was then that I saw the irritating glimmer of light and realised that it was to grow into a doorway that led me from the abyss of darkness that I was so familiar with.

I lived to share my strength and how I moved from the darkness. I kept my soul journal during my ‘prison years’ and logged how I suffered, how I surrendered and how the magnificence of an unseen world embraced me and nurtured my passion to survive and thrive. I was encouraged to make my diary a book and through synchronicity, I was shown that I had to put it out to publishers, the last thing that I ever expected to do.

My diary, my sacred journey from horror to utopia now reaches people across the globe. I thought that having my memoir published would sate my appetite to share my secrets of survival and the magic of the celestial world, but no, it just made me hungry to share more of my esoteric knowledge. My second book is almost complete and ready to share with the world. I am amazed at how so much trauma has manifested into such beauty. The third is within me, bursting to be expressed on paper and I know that this will never end, the need to share my passion with the world.

Not even I could have predicted that I would go through such a transition from Police Detective to Psychic Medium to Author! One should never limit their beliefs, their potential or their future. The Universe is laden with gifts for each and every one of us, all we have to do is stop, ask and believe that we deserve it...