My spiritual journey began when I was a small child. I would sit at my grandmother’s knee as she read the tea leaves for her eager customers in the East End of London. It all seemed so colourful and exciting. At that young age I heard all sort of things a child shouldn’t hear, but that just made me even keener to develop a skill of my own. I decided by the time I was eight years old that I wanted to be a psychic, just like my nan. The problem was I didn’t appear to have any natural ability. Try as I might to have a premonition, nothing ever happened.
In my teens I vowed to find out how intuition worked, and to develop my own. Getting information was difficult in those days. We didn’t have the internet or the vast array of spiritual books we see in bookshops today. I soon realised that to find what I needed; I would have to travel. So, in my late teens I set off for the mystical centre of the world - India. At that time India was in the media because the Beatles and other famous people were heading there to meet gurus and to gain enlightenment. It was the place to go if you wanted to develop your spirituality.
Truthfully, I was pretty naïve. I expected to sit at the feet of some amazing guru listening to pearls of wisdom and assumed ‘it’ would all happen in the blink of an eye. In fact, I found myself sitting on a mat beside a very wise old beggar on a dusty roadside in Calcutta. Vikram taught me so much about intuition and how time works. He taught me about creating energy, and through him I became fascinated by reincarnation and past-life regression. His teachings made total sense to me and helped me to open up my psychic abilities.
On my return, I resolved to uncover my past lives. This was, in fact, much harder than I had expected; regressionists were few and far between, and it was a number of years before I had my first session.
By then I had met my next spiritual mentor, an incredible woman called Greta Gill. To this day I have never met anyone like her. Tiny, yet full of energy, she seemed to have a direct line to the Universe. Everyone who met her was touched by her warmth and insight. The spiritual path was still pretty new to me, but through Greta I met a whole range of fascinating people who would talk at length about their experiences and give me advice.
One of them, an astrologer named Shelley, had been regressed to several of her past lives. I could hardly breathe as she recounted her visions of having been a slave girl in one past life and a rich merchant in another. Now I was even more determined than ever to be able to access other lives. I pleaded with the Universe to find me a good past-life regressionist and my request was answered when I discovered a flyer advertising a past-life workshop in London with the famous American regressionist Denise Linn.
Together with my best friend Terri, I attended the event on a swelteringly hot day. Throughout the day I experienced several past lives, but the one that made the biggest impression was my first, in which I saw myself as a young black lad in North Africa. It was very odd to see myself with the long arms and legs of a gangly African teenager. The vision was short: I watched myself as I walked inside my home – a small hut – then, suddenly, a knife penetrated my abdomen. Next, I could feel myself floating out of my body and looking down on myself. It was not upsetting – much like watching a movie – and it left a big impression on me; now I knew I simply had to give this experience to others.
By now I was also becoming a competent Tarot reader (to this day, I still love working with the cards which ‘speak’ to me), as well as studying meditation and hypnotherapy, while remaining unwavering in my desire to work with past-life regression. For several years I looked for training, but just as I’d struggled to find a good regressionist, training was proving even more elusive. Luckily, however, I had built up a willing bank of clients to practice on and I discovered I instinctively knew what to do. Soon my clients were undergoing wonderful and profound past-life experiences.
That was my life for over twenty years – working with Tarot cards and past life regression, while fine-tuning my psychic abilities – until one day, two young soldiers dropped into my little office in Slough for a regression session. From that day on my life changed forever.
THE SOLDIERS
Steve and Dave had a deep fascination with regression, and they proved to be such outstanding subjects that I began to work with them regularly, always curious as to what the next session would reveal. Over weeks and months they uncovered many past lives they had shared together, sometimes fighting alongside each other, at other times against each other. I took them through my past-life training and they both became excellent past-life regressionists.
One day, in 2001, Steve told me, ‘Dave and I have both seen you in our practice sessions. We’ve all known each other before.’ He added, ‘I have a feeling there’s a reason why we have met again this time around.’
I’d had the same feeling myself and decided to find some answers. I brought in one of my best past-life students to take all three of us back to the life we’d shared together, to see if it held any clues. My student Dan began skillfully guiding us back to a previous existence connecting all three of us – but instead of going back in time, something strange happened: we all simultaneously jumped forward to a future event. At the time it made no sense to us; then, two weeks later, on 11 September, our visions were to become a shocking reality.
As we watched the scenes of the Twin Towers collapsing on our television screens, exactly as we’d foreseen, we were horrified. If only we’d seen more; if only we’d known enough to stop this terrible event. The question was: could we do this at will? Could we see future events in detail? Suddenly everything between us fell into place, and we knew we had work to do.
From that moment we began experimenting to see if we could predict more world events. Our results were consistently accurate. Within a fortnight Dave had predicted, among other things, that America would invade Iraq looking for weapons of mass destruction.
DISCOVERING FUTURE LIFE PROGRESSION
It was time to begin experimenting again, using a similar process to past-life regression, but now taking clients a few years into the future. Again, the results were amazing. They would see where they would be living, the people who were in their lives and how their work was progressing. Soon they were calling me to report that what they had seen was happening – but the remarkable thing was that events they’d seen many years ahead were happening much sooner than expected: things they’d seen occurring in five or ten years’ time would happen within months or even weeks. Clients were rapidly meeting their ideal partners, getting businesses off the ground and even resolving issues with their health or finances. In many cases, they had seen more than one possible future, enabling them to choose the best for themselves.
I realised that we were not just seeing the future; somehow, we were fast-tracking our futures. It was as if the very act of seeing them was bringing them forward into the now, as if bringing an event into our current consciousness enabled it to happen.
From that moment on our lives changed forever. We now teach FLP worldwide helping people to find a better future for themselves and the world. Today we are using FLP in many ways, we are developing: Future vision coaching, working with teens, addictions and so much more. Our FLP Practitioner training has given many people the skills to help others see the future.
Although I can look back now and see all the spiritual and paranormal events of my childhood, including out of body experiences, astral travel, channelled writing and seeing spirit; my conscious spiritual journey didn’t really begin until I was 21.
I had a bad case of sciatica, which I was complaining about to my mum over the phone, while browsing in a second-hand bookshop in West Wales. The owner of the bookshop waited until I ended my call, and then informed me that I should immediately seek out Peter, the local healer, to sort out my back trouble.
Slightly amused by this, but in so much pain I would have tried anything to ease it, I found myself climbing the tiny spiral stone staircase to a dimly lit room above the local hairdressers, to meet the healer.
What I found threw out all of my preconceived ideas of what it meant to be a spiritual healer. Peter was an ex-rugby player, who smoked, drank and swore in a delightfully strong welsh accent. During that very first session, whilst he was healing my back, Peter declared that I should be doing as he was, and healing people. I had heard of palm readings, but this was a whole other level.
Over the course of a few sessions, Peter showed me how to channel healing energy, protect myself from lower energies, and introduced me to dowsing.
Dowsing formed the backbone of my spiritual path, as I learned about Geopathic Stress, and how my health had been affected by stress lines throughout my childhood.
Over the next few years, I read everything I could find about crystals, life after death, angels, mediumship, healing and anything deemed to be under the ‘Mind Body Spirit’ banner. I also did crystal healing courses and practiced hands on healing.
At 24, I moved to New York and whilst working in a job with plenty of downtime, I read the entire spiritual section of the Westchester Library, including the majority of works by my favourite author of all time, Neale Donald Walsch.
I was fortunate during those ten months to attend a talk by Neale in the city, but when I met him, everything I wanted to say about how I resonated with his works, and how they were shaping my journey, flew out of my brain, and I just nodded and smiled as he signed my book.
Five years later, I flew to Oregon to attend his five day retreat, and this time, I was able to speak to him. I discovered how incredibly down to earth and humble he is, and how he merely saw himself as the messenger, not as an international bestselling author. His grounded attitude and his incredible books are what shaped my own writing career. As did his glowing comments on my first novel, which he said kept him awake until the early hours, because he had to keep reading.
That first novel, was The Earth Angel Training Academy. The idea had come to me when I was in New York, reading about Earth Angels.
I began writing the book in JFK Airport, as I headed back to England. I finished it two months later, but it wasn’t until I had written the sequel and another novel that I began to publish.
I considered taking the traditional route to publishing, but seeing as my genre was very niche and not even a category on Amazon yet, I decided to publish it myself. I also rather liked the idea of being in control of the process, and being able to choose my own cover artwork and have final say on the contents.
I began publishing in 2011, and for the next several years, I wrote and published two books a year. That first book became the first in a series, of which there are currently ten books, and I am planning on there being two more. In total I have 20 books in print, including a sweary, unicorn themed self-help book, a poetry book, the first two books in a children’s series, and a several standalones, including my latest novel for adults, The Girl Who Loved Too Much.
I had known from the age of 8 that I wanted to be an author. I would devour books and be left hungry for more, and I knew I wanted to be the one who created entire worlds with words. What I hadn’t known, at that age, was that the only subjects I would write about would be spiritual or paranormal in nature. In 2016, I went on a tour in the states with the five-year anniversary edition of my first book, and as part of the tour I was filmed by Crystal Dawne for her angel documentary, The Illumined Ones, and I also went on a morning TV show in Tucson, AZ.
I was also featured on podcasts and radio shows. In preparation for one of the podcast interviews, the host read all of the books available in the Earth Angel Series (six, by then, I think) and her very first question to me on that interview was – ‘Why do you only write about death?’
Having never really considered the overall themes of my books, I was shocked by her question at first, but then quickly realised that she was right. Death is the central theme of my books because it is such a huge trigger for most. As a teen I was terrified of death, and would have panic attacks at the idea of not existing anymore. I was in my 30s before I realised that my overwhelming fear of death was in fact my greatest gift. And not just because it provided the main theme of my novels to come, but because ironically, it was this fear that kept me alive.
One of the main things that Earth Angels feel is that they don’t belong. They don’t fit in. The longing to go home, to be with those who understand them, can be so strong, that they often check out and journey to the other side.
This is because Earth Angels are indeed not from here. They are from other realms and planets and dimensions. This is how I felt in my teens, but thankfully, my fear of death kept me alive long enough to realise that I had chosen to be here, and that I could find others who felt the same way, and form friendships that would help me to feel like I belonged, even though I knew that Earth was not really home.
Writing the Earth Angel Series helped me to connect to Earth Angels all over the world, and form lifelong friendships that have got me through even the darkest of moments. I have also heard from my readers who have found themselves relating to the books in a way that has made things a little easier for them, and helped them to find their way on this bizarre planet.
In an attempt to reach more Earth Angels, in 2018 I agreed to be part of an article in the Daily Mail about Earth Angels, and as a result was asked to be a guest on This Morning, where myself and two fellow Earth Angels spoke of what it means to be an Earth Angel, and that Holly and Phil are Earth Angels themselves.
Over the last ten years I have helped many other writers to become authors, by editing, proofreading and publishing their books with them. Though I have helped to publish books of all genres, the majority of them are spiritual in nature. These books have also helped people around the world to heal, create and find love and joy.
My favourite thing about this spiritual journey is that no matter how much I think I know or understand, I can always be shocked or awestruck by a new experience or revelation, that makes me realise that I know very little! The ability to adapt and shift is paramount, and to hold onto our beliefs and ideas as loosely as possible.
Going with the flow and being kind to yourself is also key, as is understanding that everyone is on their own spiritual journey, which might be completely different to yours. If you feel you would like to read about Earth Angels or life after death, my books are all available online, and on my website you can find links to interviews, videos and my YouTube show, EarthAngelTV.
I follow a path of pagan spirituality, but I was brought up a Catholic, developing a strong connection with Our Lady, whom I now recognise as my first contact with the Goddess. Since the age of thirteen, I earnestly studied all aspects of the esoteric, from reincarnation to astrology. I have always sensed the presence of spirit beings, often hearing their voices, or seeing words written by them in my mind.
The material world that we are all so absorbed in, is such a small part of the true picture! Believe this, and it gives your existence meaning and purpose, and everything will go more smoothly! This is one of the messages I try to convey to make this world a happier place.
Like so many of us, all my life I have been aware of the spirit world. I go through my days knowing that our accepted view of ‘reality’ is mostly illusion - although it is a very powerful illusion, that can cause us much unhappiness and confusion. I am aware of the power of Spirit in my daily life, causing events and opportunities to fall into a pattern. In my work, I call on my spirit guides for support, protection and inspiration, and I rely a great deal on my intuition in all I do.
I’m a counsellor, hypnotherapist, astrologer, Reiki master and EFT practitioner. I also offer Indian Head Massage, usually as part of a general relaxation package that includes creative visualisation and Reiki. A lot of my work is done via Zoom or FaceTime, and I regularly give talks on the subjects I write about. I also do broadcasts, currently with BBC Radio Gloucester, and I write a monthly astrology column in Spirit and Destiny magazine.
In my therapies and writing, I would like to call to awakening hearts to see wider, more inclusive perspectives, to question materialistic dogmas, to find acceptance, peace and a deep connection with Spirit. It is vitally important to me that the work I do helps others on their journey, opening the way to their own spiritual meaning.
The message of the Goddess in particular has never been more urgently needed, and it is one of the main subjects I write about. I feel that the idea of a female deity is deeply necessary, for it brings more gentle, less judgmental and more inclusive perspectives, emphasising the importance of personal experience and belief. Does it matter that God is usually called ‘He’? I would say it does, very much, for that simple pronoun speaks volumes.
We all need to realise we are co-creators of our destiny, to own our power and use it well. Astrology can help us with this, making us feel connected to a much wider reality, and putting our life experiences into perspective. One of the many truths taught by astrology is that ‘this too shall pass’ - very encouraging when you are going through a dark phase and can see that when a certain planet moves from its troublesome position you will feel better.
While my first two sons were growing up, I decided to formalise my astrological knowledge and learnt astrology with the Faculty of Astrological Studies. I gained their Diploma, Gold Medal and Veritas Award in 1989. At the same time, I trained as a counsellor with the Gloucestershire Counselling Service, completing my post-graduate placement in 1993.
I also trained as a hypnotherapist with the South Worcestershire College of Hypnotherapy. In the same decade, I became a Third Degree Wiccan High Priestess. Since then, I have also become a Reiki Master, qualified in EFT and gained an MA in Cultural Cosmology. I live in the Cotswolds where I run a coven and also participate as a Druid, with my Druid husband.
I have written over 50 books on astrology, paganism, shamanism, herbs, crystals, psychic protection, spirit guides, vampires, fairies, graphology, myths and Earth Mysteries.
Magazine features and columns have followed, including the ‘Stars’ page for Woman and other magazines. I now write regularly for Kindred Spirit, and Spirit & Destiny magazines, while practicing as a therapist.
My name used to be Teresa Moorey and I've written lots of other books under that name. These include: 'The Fairy Bible' 'The Numerology Bible' ‘Working with Spirit Guides' 'Working with Psychic Protection' 'Working with Hypnotherapy' 'Secrets of Moon Astrology' 'Silver Moon' and 'Witchcraft, a Beginners' Guide'.
The Little Book of Nature Blessings, is my latest book. In it I write about the blessings of the Sun, Moon, the four elements, trees, flowers, animals, waterways and the sea. What I write flows from instinct. I sit at my desk and go into a dream space, and in that place the words come. Simple practices can help you get to know yourself better, find nourishment for your soul and share in the delight and satisfaction that's offered to us all, for free.
You can read myths that bring to life the magic in nature, be taken into another world through visualisation, and encourage dynamic change with short rituals. Happiness, relaxation and greater meaning in life can be found for all of us. This is a message I wanted to spread in this book.
Moon Astrology has been re-released by Octopus/Godsfield, and in it you can find out how to align with the moon, for wisdom and self-empowerment, understanding how your moon sign affects you, encouraging you to bring your life into harmony with cosmic cycles.
When I was a young girl, I remember going into my local WHSmith with my mum and looking at the book chart for the week - especially the top shelf. I remember saying ‘Mum one day my book will be up there’ to which we both laughed and went on with our day. I still don’t know why that younger version of myself knew with such conviction she’d be an author, but I’d like to think even back then it was a sign from the Universe and my intuition coming through.
Throughout my teenage years I definitely would have said I was an atheist. I’d grown up exploring Buddhism and Angels briefly in books, but after years of experiencing depression, I didn’t know what felt true and the pressures of teenage life and school soon took over.
In 2012, at nineteen years old, I went along my first awakening journey after being left in £7,000 worth of debt by my then boyfriend. I was a banking manager at a well-known UK bank - a role which I’d fallen into (banking certainly wasn’t an aspiration of mine) and was heavily depressed. Very quickly after taking a loan out to help my boyfriend with his debt, the relationship broke down, and I was left to pay the entire loan. I also had to leave my job at the bank as I was surrounded by debt each and every day and this only deepened my depression and anxiety.
This is when I found Extreme Couponing. Here in the UK at the time, couponing was very taboo still and there weren’t many places to find them. The concept had me hooked and within a few months I’d cleared my debt and had a big stock pile of supplies. My friends pestered me to start a Facebook page to help other people do the same and so ‘Extreme Couponing and Deals UK’ my first business was born. After a year I monetized the business, as I really had no clue what I was doing or how to run a business! Throughout my entire life I knew I wanted to run a business, but had no idea what that looked like or how to start one.
I ran my wonderful couponing business for six years before manifesting a buyer. Over that time, it had accumulated over half a million followers here in the UK. I’d presented a regular money-saving slot on This Morning, and was known as the UK’s Coupon Queen from doing incredible press features too. I absolutely loved that business, but I knew it needed a team of people to grow it to new heights, and I too at this point wanted to put both feet on my spiritual path. So rewinding slightly back to 2016 when I had my spiritual awakening, I was in my second not so great relationship at the time and my depression had worsened over this time to a point where I was at absolute rock bottom.
Long story short that relationship broke down and the Law of Attraction came into my life, just like with couponing it was something that was such a positive distraction in my life at the time and gave me hope. Very quickly, I started to turn my life completely around. I healed my depression, learned what self-love was and created a healthier relationship with myself and others. This is when I started to incorporate manifestation into my existing YouTube and platforms and luckily my money-saving followers loved this content too!
In 2017, I decided to go full-time with my Spiritual Queen business and help people in a new way and I’ve been running it ever since! I found spirituality as a whole fascinating and almost like a remembering, not like I was learning something new. Stepping into my spiritual shoes fully wasn’t an easy journey, selling a six-figure business and starting all over again with a personal brand was a huge leap of faith, but I knew in my heart it was what I came here to do, and it never felt like work.
A couple of years into my spiritual journey, the want to write a book had always strongly been there. Because of my success with my couponing business, I honestly thought it would be a money-saving book but I’m so grateful I get to write about money, manifestation and spirituality now. I always joke that each book has my entire soul in it, and it’s so true - these books have been an initiation. I’ve lived the teachings in the book and have learned huge life lessons in these ten years, and I love being able to share these with people now and help them navigate life too.
Being an author is definitely one of my favourite hats I wear in my business. It allows me to be creative and writing comes very naturally to me even though my A-level results would tell you differently. I’ve definitely got better over the course of writing three books, but it feels like a full circle moment seeing my book on shelves all around the world and I’m only 29!
There of course have been hurdles and challenges with getting my books published, but the Universe truly had my back. I pitched my first book to over 30 publishers and literary agents and got rejected, so I ended up hybrid publishing this one. My second book was exactly the same even though I knew how incredible it was it got rejected once again and I felt like giving up - my intuition was screaming at me ‘this has to be distributed properly this time’. I’d done everything in my power and yet still no book deal.
In 2019, I remember my first publisher saying he couldn’t distribute it in the way I wanted it to be so I said to myself ‘Angels, Universe you want this book traditionally published, help me out I’ve tried everything’. Within six hours my first traditional publisher Watkins reached out to me and asked me to write a book on money and manifestation – little did they know I had a whole manuscript ready to go on just that exact topic!
Now I’m very lucky to have two incredible traditional publishers who publish my books so don’t give up hope, it only takes one publisher to say yes. My books have now sold over 16,000 copies since 2020 and I’m so glad I listened to my intuition and didn’t give up.
As I reflect on my 20’s and head towards my 30th birthday next year, I have so many wonderful things to reflect on - whilst I’m so grateful to have experienced these huge career successes so young that has also come with a lot of sacrifices and huge up levelling which was necessary but extremely hard in places too.
My books very much reflect the last ten years for me and the emotional and spiritual journey I’ve gone down to heal and find peace within myself. Many may not know how closely linked manifestation is to the inner work but both are vital when working with the Law of Attraction and that has very much been my journey. Healing deep trauma and childhood wounds have been the best gift my 20’s have given me, alongside two incredible businesses that have transformed so many people’s lives including my own.
In terms of what’s next? As I enter into a new decade of my life, I’m certainly excited to see what my 30’s have in store for me and the Universe too. I want to go slower this decade and get to enjoy life and travel more. Knowing who I am at my soul now after doing the inner work has created so much abundance in my life, so I really want to explore and embrace that now. Of course, I will write more books. I definitely have more ideas and opportunities which feels really exciting, but most of all - I want the Law of Attraction to reach and help even more people turn their dreams into an abundant reality! I’m grateful for all of the experiences I’ve had over the last decade, and as turbulent as some seasons have felt, I wouldn’t change a thing.
Emma Mumford is the UK’s leading Law of Attraction expert. She’s an award-winning life coach, 2x bestselling author of her books Positively Wealthy and Hurt, Healing, Healed, speaker, Law of Attraction YouTuber and host of the #1 spirituality podcast on iTunes ‘Spiritual Queen’s Badass Podcast’. Emma’s work helps people turn their dream life into an abundant reality using the Law of Attraction and spirituality.
I am an artist, art educator and spirit medium. I have been able to draw realistically since around the age of five, which coincided with the realisation that I saw and walked alongside many people who were invisible to others. These visions never frightened or concerned me, indeed I found them comforting and good company. There were many other spiritual events in my youth, including out-of-body travel whilst seeing my physical body comfortably lying on the bed. I also had, and continue to have, precognitive dreams which would be proven by the news in the following days. These are memories which have never left me, a vital part of my life.
As an artist I can draw or paint anything. Then, as an art educator, I realised that when I was teaching portraiture I could draw the people I saw in my mind’s eye. During one session, I was drawing an elderly man with whiskers and a beaming smile when suddenly a lady remarked, “That looks like my grandfather and what a good likeness. But he died many years ago.”
At this point in my life, I did not want to give away my secret that I saw people, places and objects that were not part of the physical world. Yet this one experience helped me to understand that indeed I had the ability to create portraits of those who had passed over into the afterlife. This was quite a revelation since I had no experience or understanding of what spiritualists call the ‘spirit world’. I thought that everyone saw what I saw!
My perception of the world around me had many more people in it than were actually visible to the physical eye and these visions would happen in the most extraordinary places. Many years ago, after a meeting in London, I visited the British Museum and sat in front of the statue of Sekhmet, next to a gentleman with a large black folder. I was curious and asked whether he was an artist; he said he was a poet and if I looked at the papers in the folder I could read one of his poems. His work was very ethereal and not what I had expected. When I had to catch my train I stood up to leave but realised I had not thanked him; when I turned to him, he had disappeared in a split second. I believe now that he was a spirit teacher encouraging me with my own writing.
When I was thirty I met Ged, a healer, and he took me to a meeting at the local spiritualist church in Liverpool. This was my first experience of a religious practice other than Roman Catholicism, and it was very different! The Scottish medium Mary Duffy gave the service and I received a message from her, saying that I was a spirit artist. Not understanding what to do about this, I said, “Well, I am an artist already.” She replied, “You also see those in spirit so you will be able to use your gift to draw them and help those who can’t see to understand.”
Fortunately, other people did understand and were ‘brought’ to me. As Head of Art in a girls’ school in Toxteth, I would occasionally have student teachers working alongside me on teaching practice. One of these was a young woman called Linda Nichols. She came and went and I thought nothing particular of it until a few years later when I was invited to a spiritualist meeting in Liverpool city centre. I had found it difficult to locate the building and was late. As I eventually walked through the door I heard the speaker say, “Ah, here she is, the lady in red.”
“Yes,” I said, bemused, “I changed into this outfit just before I set out for the meeting. How did you know?” She had a spirit drawing for me and a message. Whilst that was interesting enough, the amazing thing was that the artist was none other than the student teacher who had completed her practice with me in my school.
“The spirit world has many different ways of getting us to work with them,” she commented.
It seems that I had been slow in understanding that point. These early events, more fully described in my first book Portraits from Spirit, were taps on the doorway of my mind to understanding how the spirit world works.
Later, as an educator of art, I realised that ‘spirit art’ was not only unknown in the world of Art, indeed it was deliberately ignored. This much was clear from the rejections of my articles written for art journals: this “cuckoo form of religious art” had no place in art history. Despite being part of the Spiritualism religion since about 1852, the art and artists from its inception were not accepted within the British art world.
There has been a slow growth in public events featuring spirit art, such as the Georgiana Houghton exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery, London, and works seen at the Lily Dale Assembly, New York, the College of Psychic Studies in London, and The Ancient High House gallery in Stafford, England. Yet art historians still categorise such work as ‘Outsider Art’ when its creators are clearly spiritualist. My own work has come under a barrage of criticism both from art historians and theologians since I began demonstrating spirit portraiture publically in many European countries and in Britain.
However, I have never given up working alongside the spirit world and have dedicated over fifteen years to completing a book that collates the history and methodology of spirit art, classifying it for the first time into six different types. For someone with structural dyslexia, my second book, The Art of Spirit, was a hard task!
The most incredible of the paintings I have seen was brought to me by a friend, Annette Tollis. Featured on the front cover of my book, it was created by the Bangs Sisters in America and known as Pearl (c.1898). This painting was created by a technique called precipitation. Using spirit energies alone, with no human touch, materials from the spiritual ether had been dropped onto the canvas; when finished it looked like an oil painting of the most exquisite type.
Another was a pastel drawing of Hollie created through me at a public demonstration. There was an audible gasp from the audience as the drawing was completed and I said, “…and she has butterflies in her hair…” The grandmother had a picture of the child on her mobile ’phone with butterflies in her hair for her mother’s wedding. At that moment, the pure love for the child and from the child for the grandmother could be felt by everyone.
There have been many difficult times while progressing my knowledge of spirit art. Yet there has been great joy in knowing that I have helped people unknown to me by creating portraits of their loved ones without ever having met them. There is also pleasure in understanding that, spiritually, I cannot create the art alone: all spirit artists have a team of invisible helpers, including the person who receives the art. Without this spiritual support producing the portraits, landscapes and images of familial objects, the deceased person would not be recognised.
The process begins with the love that passes through the consciousness of the deceased and of the artist, and it finishes with an outpouring of love from the recipient. Without this channel, the drawing or painting would be worthless. It is the continuous love that matters.
Where do I go from here? As an educator, writing about the methodologies and processes that support the creation of spirit art alongside examples of it, I hope to be helping the ‘new wave’ of artists, some of whom are embracing new technologies in their work. I am also collating portraits of living people that I have drawn, so that healing may be given to them through the drawings. The work of the spirit through art continues and grows, helping ever more people on their spiritual paths.
Ann Bridge Davies is a professional artist and medium, and author of The Art of Spirit, published by Local Legend and available worldwide.
Colm Holland is a writer, teacher and therapist, publisher of 'The Alchemist' in 1993 and author of 'The Secret of The Alchemist' in 2020.
2023 is the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of the English language edition of the global bestseller The Alchemist by the Brazilian author, Paulo Coelho. The memory of that event holds a special place in my life because I was probably the first person in Australia to read the manuscript before publication, when I was working at HarperCollins Publishers in 1993.
For those who are unfamiliar with the book or its author, I should say that it is the third best selling book of a living author in the world; with over 160 million copies sold in 70 languages and sits at the top of the charts with Harry Potter and The Da Vinci Code. Of course when I read The Alchemist for the first time, like everyone I had no idea just how successful this book would be; but what I did know was that it was going to be a life-changing book for many people.
I was so convinced of its sales potential that I persuaded my colleagues to abandon printing a small run of an expensive hard-cover edition, that would come later, and go straight to paperback and print thousands more than originally intended and give it all the publicity of a popular crime or romance author by an established author. The result speaks for itself, and considering I had never requested such a risky activity before, I was happy to be vindicated by the incredible sales that have gone on and on for thirty years.
More importantly to me, I also got the chance to meet Paulo Coelho on his first visit to Australia. The story of our encounter is re-told in my book, The Secret of The Alchemist, but I want to say here, that it was one of the most significant turning points in my life and not something I was expecting at the age of forty. Paulo informed me he was a magician, in the spiritual sense, and he was so grateful for my faith in his book he had spent a day of his time working his magic with the universe, so that whatever I truly desired in my life would come to pass; all it required of me was to decide what I really wanted.
To discover what happened next you need to read my book, except I will say the magic he performed has shaped my life and those around me for the better for the last thirty years. Nothing had prepared me for the changes that took place. Where I had previously lacked the courage of my convictions - I now found a new confidence to step out of my comfort zone and take the risks to achieve my dreams. Where I had held back by fear of rejection from allowing myself to be centre stage in my immediate world - I now pushed ahead and found I had so much more to give and it was gratefully received. And finally, where I had previously accepted ‘my lot’ in life - I was now able to shape my destiny and bring joy, wealth and happiness to others, and myself.
Two years ago I finally published my story, full of the insights and benefits I now know can be discovered by taking Paulo’s book, The Alchemist, at face value and enter a life based on the ancient principles of alchemy; the forgotten art of ordinary magic that can be part of anyone’s experience. The pain and joy of personal transformation is all there in his story and it resonates with almost everyone because it is a living myth for our time. Carl Jung asked himself the question one day, ‘What is the myth I am living?’ Is it a tragedy determined by fate or can I choose my own myth; full of adventure, wholeness and joy?’
The Alchemist is the hero’s journey; a metaphor for the journey we all take through life and how we respond to the obstacles and opportunities that we are presented with and the choices we make at each moment. The principles of the ancient art of alchemy provide a guide in the person of the alchemist, a central character in the story, who does not make those choices for us, but supports us at critical times when we need to face our fears and risk all, or so it seems, to move forward towards our treasure, which is the gold of the alchemists.
So whether you read Paulo’s book many years ago, or if you haven’t read my book, can I recommend them both to you if you are at a point where you feel the need to reassess your own myth, and decide if it's time to rewrite your own story? May the power of unconditional love help you make the right choice.
My own creative journey as a writer is irrevocably linked to the story of my encounter with Paulo Coelho, but it was to be another twenty-four years before I would put pen to paper. In 2016; I was living on the Cote D’Azur and thinking about how my life has been a wonderful alchemical journey and how few people have written about personal transformation from that perspective.
My book The Secret of The Alchemist is the result of three years work that involved the application of the alchemical process to writing a non-fiction book that was part autobiographical; part a critique of the not-so-hidden alchemical references in The Alchemist; part a presentation of the history and processes of the ancient alchemists and part a treatise on the application of alchemical motifs that Carl Jung understood to be present in his own myth of Individuation. In that sense the success of my book is that I was able to use the same principles in the creation of a book that I lived my life by and taught to others in my online school.
The application of my alchemical spiritual process to book writing
My writing process went something like this: ( I should note that I was working full-time as a professional marketing consultant at the same time as writing.)
The Saturation Stage: (In four parts over a period of one year)
The Combustion Stage: (Another year in the making)
The Silence Stage. (Three months of waiting and another seven month’s writing)
The Action Stage. (Another year to publication)
In conclusion, I have found that the spiritual principles that have guided my life for so many years are the same tools I should apply to writing. ‘The Great Work’ as the alchemists called it is the process I have outlined above and I am applying the same principles to my first work of fiction - a three volume historical series - based on the factual existence of Alchemy in Elizabethan England and woven into the fictionalised story of one of my ancestors whose life stretched across eighty years into the early part of the seventeenth century. I am using the same process to create an alchemical magic that I hope people will want to read. If you want to discover the story of my personal spiritual progress then you will need to read my book and I trust you enjoy reading it as much as I did writing it.
When I was born, in the midst of a wild snowstorm, my grandma took one look at the caul over my face and turned to my mother, saying, “Yes, you have a gifted child here.” Grandma Mac was a seer, the local Wise Woman, and all the local people would come to her for advice; she could talk to spirits and angels but wasn’t allowed to develop her gifts because of the family’s Catholic faith. Nevertheless, as I grew up in the small Yorkshire mining town of Maltby, she taught me all she knew about natural remedies and opening the mind to the world of spirit.
At an early age it became clear that I had inherited her gifts of mediumship. I could see people’s auras and know if they were unwell or unhappy, I could read tealeaves and I always knew if there was danger ahead on our walks in the countryside. When my Grandad died, I saw a mist rise from his body, the silver cord breaking, and then heard him speak seriously to me in my mind saying, “You need to look after your Mam.” A few days later my father left us for another woman and Mam had a nervous breakdown; I suppose that caring for her and for my younger sisters was my first experience of nursing.
All the same, I had no ambitions for that kind of career. I wanted to be a circus acrobat or a mechanic in the Women’s RAF like my Mam, but I had no qualifications. It seems that the universe had a plan, though. There was a definite ‘presence’ beside me at the Job Centre and the first post I saw advertised was for a Nursing Auxiliary at the local hospital; perhaps they were short-staffed because I was offered the job immediately.
And so began the most extraordinary career…
For more than thirty years I worked in hospitals, especially the A&E departments, and in the community, rising to Senior Nurse and even gaining a Bachelor of Medical Science degree in Professional Nursing practice. I specialised in wound care, teaching doctors and other nurses. But every day, I was having to hold my tongue and not let on about the spirits, ghosts and angelic beings that I could see and communicate with in the hospital wards, resuscitation rooms and theatres! It would not have been appropriate to talk of these things because you never knew how others would take it.
For example, one day the Red Emergency Phone rang to tell us that people involved in a road traffic accident were coming in, one of them a lady who was eight months pregnant with internal injuries. She was losing a lot of blood and the doctor warned me that she may lose the baby. Indeed, he examined her and wrote down ‘No foetal heartbeat’ on her notes. Then I clearly saw a Chinese spirit, a man wearing a white coat and a gold earring, put his hand on her abdomen. The baby moved. The doctor and I were both stunned (for different reasons) and she had a healthy baby boy an hour later by Caesarean Section. Well, I couldn’t tell the doctor what had happened, could I?
Actually, though, I came to realise that many other nurses were quite aware of spirit visitors, especially the Grey Lady in a World War I nursing uniform, who often appeared to comfort a patient just before they passed over. My ‘secret’ was soon out and I would be plagued by requests for psychic readings during our lunch breaks.
Sadly, though, one day I hurt my back badly while helping a patient and had to retire early from the work I loved. I even then suffered a brain haemorrhage and was very ill for three years. But it turned out that I was just being prepared for a new career as a psychic medium and writer! I took a mediumship development course and began to develop an even closer relationship with the worlds of spirit. Before long, I met my principal guide Black Feather, a Native American, and realised why I could always smell burning wood when I did a reading. During a deep meditation, I clearly saw this craggy-faced man with one black feather sticking out of a headband, sitting beside a camp fire.
At one psychic event, a spirit lady with red hair and wearing a silver dress met me as I walked in. “My name is Lynne – with an E,” she stressed. “My friend is coming to see you today so please tell her I’m here.” As I started my eleventh reading that day, the lady reappeared and said, “This is my friend, we were school friends. Please say thank you to her.” My client gasped with delight when I described the spirit lady and passed on the message.
“Don’t you know who it is?” she said. “It’s Marti Caine, the singer and comedian. We grew up together and were best friends.” It turned out that the famous performer’s real name was Lynn Shepherd. But why she was so persistent about an E at the end of her first name? Her friend replied, “She thought it was posh so she used to add it to her real name.” So that was pretty good evidence of the afterlife!
I have now given hundreds of private psychic readings and have many regular clients. And in my area I have even developed a particular reputation for finding lost animals; normally I use a pendulum over a map for this but I am also often guided by Black Feather or other spirit people. In fact, I am a great animal lover and pets will also often appear during personal readings.
You could even say that my devotion to animals led to my third career, as an author, rather unexpectedly in my late sixties. Story-telling was always part of my family’s culture and of course by now I had so many ghost and spirit stories to tell, especially of my time as a hospital nurse. At first, I wrote several articles on the paranormal for national magazines and then had the idea of putting all my untold stories together in a book, to help and encourage others in their spiritual lives. But which publisher to approach? I asked my spirit guides for a ‘sign’ and when I then walked into my local animal charity shop, two Local Legend books practically jumped out at me…
My own book, Ghosts of the NHS, was accepted straight away and, to my amazement, became a number one bestseller on Amazon. This has been followed up by The Angels Beside Us, more stories from the NHS front line, and Furry Spirits, communications with spirit pet animals and accounts of the incredible psychic talents of animals.
I am happy that this wonderful life has given me so many opportunities to help others with my gifts and bring knowledge of the spirit worlds to the public. These days, you will often find me at our caravan in Whitby, writing and working at my hobby of making dolls. Then I may be people-watching at the harbour or sitting outside Whitby Abbey, waiting for the ghosts to introduce themselves!
Glynis Amy Allen’s bestselling books are published by Local Legend as paperbacks and eBooks. They are available worldwide at any book store and in all digital formats.
My most recent book, Awakening the Lotus of Peace is a spiritual workbook of yoga meditations to experience more peace in your life. This book, like all my previous books, sprang from a revelation: an influx of light, colour, concept and a feeling about what the book would encapsulate as a whole. These revelations arrive in that spiritually-charged moment between sleeping and waking when we are most receptive to spirit before we assume the mantle of the day. I feel like I have been charged with writing a book which has already been written in the astral world and all I, the body in the earthly realm, need do is to tap into its vibration and download it. This experience is magical! And rich to taste, touch, sound (like tinkling bells) and vision: the book appears in front of me so that I can see the cover and turn the pages in my mind. I feel my role is just to actually ‘birth’ it in the 3D world which has been conceptualised and empowered by higher vibrational beings than I.
My process of writing is to re-read the previous paragraph and then listen. Immediately, the next words pour into my mind as if they are being dictated. I type directly into the laptop: listening and typing for two hours. Once in while I take notes, an idea of supplementary material pops into my head to give context or aid the structure but largely, I type without taking notes.
There is a different creative process for the guided meditations in Awakening the Lotus of Peace. These were channelled through me to my yoga meditation classes during which we worked on embodying aspects of peace over an eighteen month period. First, I tune into God and my spiritual lineage through Paramahansa Yogananda with a prayer and ask for their guidance and blessing for my students. I experience that a second before I speak, the guided meditation script arrives as feeling and impressions via spoken words, mental pictures or feelings. Over the 5 years that I have been teaching meditation, I have come to trust that the guidance is always right for the group. Even if my ego-mind might question the relevance of a visualisation, there is always someone who later relates how much that was just what they needed to experience at that time.
As far back as I can remember, I’ve been aware of the unseen realm and a feeling of needing to live wisely to make this life count. That’s why I chose to go vegetarian in 1969 aged 6, the year of the 1st moonwalk. I was also waking in the night at this early age to a power and heat rising up my spine which expanded into elevated state until I illuminated the room as a sphere of blue light. Was I floating above the bed? Or simply beyond the boundary of my tiny physical frame? I had no words or frame of reference to describe it but after an hour or so, the power would recede and I could move the body once more. It didn’t seem strange and I don’t remember telling anyone. I just accepted the kundalini awakening as normal.
My mother introduced me to yoga and I loved it! I received my first yoga book for my 9th birthday. Meditation naturally followed and I taught myself to meditate at 14, again with that gut feeling that it was vital to start early in life and I’ve rarely missed a day since. I feIt that there was no time to waste and a long road to travel to elevate my level of spiritual consciousness to make a difference in this world.
In my twenties, I was moved to train as a spiritual healer when I heard Ian De Coster speak at a MBS Fair in Glasgow. I was mesmerised by a electric blue surrounding his head which moved with him on the stage. I had seen my first aura! Afterwards, I plucked up my courage to speak with him and he directed me to train with National Federation of Spiritual Healers. That course was the obvious next step for me and it resurrected my dormant kundalini energy again. Suddenly, I was aware of my spirit guide and learned to trust his energy signature and his suggestions as ‘feelings’, not words. I could see streamers of energy between a person and the healer’s hands. I experienced being ‘donned like a surgical gown’ as my guides inserted their arms into mine, while I was channelling spiritual healing.
While I experienced an acceleration of my spiritual ascension, I also became acutely aware of dense, closed areas in my aura at the heart and sacral chakras: my ego issues. I have prayed many times to ask Christ to cleanse me of darkness and to fill me with Light.
For me, meditation is a process. Techniques to shed the density of living in a physical body and to raise one’s spiritual vibration higher and higher and to burn off lower vibration knots of karma in the crucible of concentration, on the Divine Oneness. Maintaining a higher and higher consciousness by handing over all issues and density with oodles of trust that the Divine is helping us at every turn. Even when things seem dark, being aware that everything is perfect for what we need to learn at that time, even when we don’t like the lesson!
The spiritual path isn’t all dry mechanical meditation. Love is needed too. My devotional heart burst open wide when I read Autobiography of a Yogi in 2015. Intuitively I knew that here was a man who could take me to God. At last, my spiritual soul searching (of many life-times) had led me to my spiritual master in Paramahansa Yogananda! His vibration fills me as I read his words. I know that this was waiting in the eaves as my path. After all the spiritual exploration of Spiritualism, Findhorn, Spiritual Healing, Shamanism, Dowsing and yoga, I have been guided to The One Path. I feel blessed.
At the time that I wrote ‘Awakening the Lotus of Peace: yoga meditations for inner peace’, I wasn’t to know just how important the inner search for peace was to become as our world spiralled into tumult. This book feels right: the right place, the right time for our stage in human evolution. It is each individual who endeavours to carry inner peace that helps manifest world peace.
Blessings on your own inner journey for peace, Om Shanti, Jenny Light.
As a child, I never minded being sent to bed! The nights were always full of vivid and intriguing adventures, dreams that stretched my young imagination and sometimes even seemed to foretell the future. When these events actually started happening in the real world later, I realised I was on to something. And since nobody believed me, I taught myself to wake up after a ‘significant’ dream and record it, so I could prove precognition and the power of the human mind.
Psychic and paranormal events became second nature then, from knowing what others were thinking to seeing ‘signs’ in everyday life that warned me of trouble (from the local bullies) or encouraged me when I felt lonely (unheard by my conservative family). I knew that I was not alone, even if I never knew who, or what, was guiding me. Mindfulness was not in fashion back then, but it was my way of life.
“To every thing there is a season
and a time for every purpose under Heaven.”
But the road can be tough when it never seems to be ‘the right time’ and you’re not sure what the purpose is. I found myself nudged along a path of science, engineering and Mathematics, living a rather uncomfortable life with one foot in each of two very different worlds. One must make a living in the material world and, to be fair, I loved teaching young people and exploring Maths, especially its irrationality.
Yet the inner world of the psyche was equally real to me, especially the utterly fundamental questions it poses about the nature of human consciousness, such as “How does telepathy work?” and “What happens when we die?” I ploughed the lone furrow of study and investigation of strangely gifted people, my scientific training saving me from swallowing the excesses of New Age gurus. One must never be so open-minded that one’s brains fall out.
So what has all this to do with books? From primary school age, I had always wanted to be a writer. (I still have my first ever book, an eight-page fully illustrated exposition on the life cycle of frogs. Possibly not very original, though.) Later, using every spare minute that career and family life allowed, I wrote a comedy novel set in the afterlife (surely that world is full of just the same narrow-minded and silly people that have just left this one?) and a detailed account of my hundreds of precognitive dreams and daily synchronicities.
And, like so many other aspiring authors, my special drawer filled up with rejection letters. Many of them were even very complimentary, which only seemed to make me feel worse. Yes, there were five books of mathematical investigations but they were never part of my ambition so they don’t count. One novel was even accepted by a major publisher – but they pulled out days before contract, citing their accountants who said that my work was “too risky”! It was beginning to look like a dead end for writing.
Then The Plan swung into action!
A spinal injury suffered in my twenties began to affect my mobility seriously and I had to retire early from teaching. And with just one year to go, I made a new friend who knew people who knew other people… and Spirit Revelations, my book of dreams and synchronicities, was published (kindly endorsed by the world-renowned scientist Dr Rupert Sheldrake). I was invited to give talks and lectures at festivals, the College of Psychic Studies and the Society for Psychical Research. Then my comedy novel Signs of Life was runner-up in a national competition. A new career beckoned.
But it was not the one I imagined. My publisher, Beth, with whom I was now friends, became ill and had to give up the company. But she had set it up in an ethical way, supporting authors who never get a chance with the Big Boys, and was unwilling to sell out to one of them. She offered it to me for £1.
Once recovered from the shock, it didn’t take long to accept. Here was the life of books that I had wanted since childhood, even though it meant caring for other people’s writing rather than developing my own. There was just one small problem: I knew absolutely nothing about the publishing business and Beth was too ill to help. So I made a nuisance of myself with the design and print subcontractors and picked every brain I could get hold of. To test whether I’d learned well, I then wrote and published Lighting the Path, a guide to using the extraordinary Chinese oracle I Ching, or Book of Changes. It worked (and the book still sells)!
I refocused the company, Local Legend, to the Mind, Body and Spirit genre that was always my true passion, maintaining its ethical and non-profit nature (I don’t take any salary for my administrative and editing work). I have expanded the company’s marketing, developed close relationships with leading MBS magazines and run spiritual writing competitions. Whilst unable to do much writing of my own, this has been a joy. Finally, with much guidance from Someone, Somewhere, I had come to understand one of the great spiritual truths:
“The purpose of life is to discover your gift.
The work of life is to develop it.
The meaning of life is to give your gift away.”
David Viscott in Finding Your Strength in Difficult Times, 1993
And yet… I knew there was something very important that I still had to write. As a callow and naïve youth, knowing nothing about girls or politics, I had fallen deeply in love with a Czech girl. This was A Good Thing. One month later, her country was invaded by the Soviet Union and its Eastern Bloc allies. A Very Bad Thing.
Broken Sea is my account of those times, a novel based on real events in which the characters and places are fictionalised whilst the historical and military facts are described truthfully. National runner-up in The People’s Book Prize awards, it is a story of the human spirit, in which two young people struggle to find their own freedom and identity in the face of their families’ rejection, while a young democratic nation is also struggling to achieve freedom and identity, savagely rejected by neighbours with tanks and fighter ’planes.
This book is a tribute to the human spirit, to self-belief and to never giving up on your dreams. And, when we really put our minds to something, we never know where life will lead us… The main characters of that novel kept whispering to me that their stories were not yet over and that I must pour everything I had learned in a lifetime of studying spirituality into one more book. The ideas swirled around my mind for a couple of years until my father turned up in a lucid dream and told me to “Get on with it, for Heaven’s sake.”
The Unbroken is that book, a story of deep human love and an adventure in mysterious worlds of the mind. It challenges all the common preconceptions about the nature of human consciousness, with some humour and a couple of twists that even I never saw coming…
“…takes the reader on a uniquely spiritual journey… makes us wonder more deeply about things we take for granted… a great, mysterious novel.”
Never give up on your dreams!
Nigel Peace is the author of several spiritual books, and owner of the MBS publishing company Local Legend.
The problem with thought
A common theme in all mystical and spiritual traditions is the problem of human thought. Particularly our ‘I’ thoughts. As an NHS psychotherapist I have noticed that this is a feature of every patient’s inner world. At the core of people’s mental health difficulties are thoughts like: “I’m a failure, unlovable, a reject”. The rejected child does not just conclude ‘I was rejected but feels this personally in the form of ‘I am a reject, there’s something wrong with me’.
These thoughts are inevitably depressing and debilitating often leading to long term mental health problems.
In a mindfulness group recently a patient described a profound realisation: “Now I know I’m not my thoughts!” Her sense of liberation was life changing. She continued to have the old ‘I’ thoughts but no longer identified with them and as such was free. The effect on her mental health was immediate. She began to be in touch with her true nature beyond the story of her. Not only did she realise she was not her thoughts but also not her story. For example as a result of her childhood sexual abuse she had told herself, as many victims do, there was something wrong with her. When we stop identifying with these thoughts it leads to the realisation that there is fundamentally nothing wrong with us. We see clearly that our problems are merely on a functional level and are as a result of our conditioning not our true self. The conditioning of our families, our culture and the era into which we are born.
Belonging
I grew up in London in the early 1950’s. My mother was German and my father English/Swedish. I felt like an outsider and feared rejection from my peers and community. I did what I could to hide my background and fit in at all costs. Especially during playground war games when ‘we’ were killing Germans. Underneath I was determined that others would not see what I thought was the ‘real' me.
Later when training as a social worker and psychotherapist and as a long standing member of a meditation network I was still desperately trying to assimilate and fit in. All the time this was covering my core belief that ‘I don’t belong’. I felt I had to change. Psychotherapy and meditation seemed perfect methods of self improvement. It was only decades later after years of searching I came to see that this was futile - a dead end. This realisation arrived in one moment!
A French psychiatrist, who was giving a talk to the Royal college of Psychiatrists said:
“Stop searching! Be who you truly are!”.
Although given to an audience of over a hundred people these words felt directed at me. All the energy of my personal search dissolved in an instant along with the emergence of a profound sense of freedom.
I later learnt that the speaker Jean-Marc Mantel, now a friend and colleague, had been a student of Jean Klein who in turn had in been influenced by Krishna Menon all immersed in the teachings of non-duality - Advaita Vedanta.
For the next two years or so I too immersed myself in these teachings to bring an understanding to the experience of that afternoon. I came to realise to what we mean when we say ‘therapy without the therapist’, ‘no one teaching’, ‘no one writing’ or when it comes to sport ‘no one playing’.
The path (although no longer a path) was then not about self improvement or making progress - not about adding anything but more the stripping away of the conditioned self and enquiring into who we are beyond thought and story.
How did you sculpt the horse?
Sculptor ‘I just took away the bits that weren’t horse’.
Non-Duality and the creative process
Not surprisingly these realisations had a radical effect on my work and my life. Suddenly there was no path to take and as in the Zen poem there was:
Nothing to do
Nowhere to go
No one to be.
- Anon
When the struggles of ego began to dissipate more energy was liberated for living in the flow of life and welcoming each moment whatever it brought. It takes a lot of effort to resist when we don’t like what life brings and none to surrender to the flow.
Welcome every guest.
- Rumi
There also arose a strong impulse to convey these teachings in my work as a therapist and mindfulness teacher but also in writing. The work now, like the sculptor, seemed to be chip away at my story to clear the way for the spirit or true self. Like a musician clearing his flute for the music to flow through. In this way writing has emerged in the form of non fiction, fiction and poetry.
I had started a book on golf thirty years before. Now I could finish it!. Now the story had an ending. An ending that was aligned with the new sense of freedom that ran through my life. The player in the story could now end his search for self improvement and his struggles in the first half of the story and really hear what the mysterious stranger was alerting him too. He could let go of all the ‘I’ thoughts, of trying too hard, realise that intention is in tension, see how ego’s desire to win gets in the way and learn to trust in what is natural and instead be one with Nature and his surroundings.
Our thoughts are great separators, especially thoughts of ‘I’. We perceive things as separate entities. As subjects and objects, including ourselves. The non-dual perspective is not two, not separate. We can also call this reality as everything in the cosmos is connected as one. This is confirmed by quantum physicists as well as mystics over the ages. The 13th century Christian mystic Meister Eckhart said that if we could really see a tree we would never need to go to church again. As soon as we say ‘a tree’ we have separated it from the earth, the light, the moisture, the birds and insects without which it has no existence. Apply this to ourselves and we may get some glimpse our fundamental connectedness to our world.
Of course not only mystics and scientists help us to see things as they really are but this is a feature of great art, literature, music and poetry. The capacity to point to a deeper truth to go beyond the veil of duality.
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
- T.S.Eliot
On a personal level this meant a dissolving of the illusion that I did not belong into the realisation that this distinct form called ‘me' is merely a wave in the ocean of consciousness, completely one with the air that I breathe and the light that sustains life.
Martin Wells trained as a social worker, working in Brixton, London and later as a psychotherapist in Bristol. He has worked for the local mental health trust for over 35 years where he’s employed as consultant psychotherapist. He has been studying meditation for over 40 years and teaching mindfulness to his patients and staff for most of that time.
A profound experience of liberation led to a complete change in his mindfulness and psychotherapy practice and to an impulse to write. This began with non-fiction, the finishing of a book that had been on the back burner for 30 yrs and more recently to a book of poetry (out soon). This spontaneous outpouring of poems was a complete surprise to Martin and as a result he is open to whatever comes next, for example, a recent invitation from a concert pianist to collaborate in a concert on the theme of mindfulness.
When I was happy, I never really bothered about the fundamental questions – whether our spirits survive, whether there is a God, how and why the universe came into existence. The questions are profound, and I was intellectually curious, but only within the limits of an orthodox scientific materialism: I was a lawyer, for goodness’ sake, and a land lawyer at that. It wasn’t so much my professional training, however, as the fact that I had a wonderfully loving marriage which meant that I didn’t feel the need to question fate or worry about my purpose. I accepted life as it was and I enjoyed it.
And then that all changed. The sudden and unexpected cancer diagnosis and then the death of my husband Patrick three months later left me totally devastated. Suddenly I needed to know why we exist and what our purpose is, but above all else, I wanted to know if there is life after death. We had talked about the possibility before Patrick died, when we knew that his death was imminent. He said that he didn’t fear death, because it was either nothing at all, and so nothing to fear or, if existence did continue, that would be all right because he had led a good enough life. He felt that nothingness was the most likely scenario, and so did I. We did not close our minds completely to the thought of a surviving spirit, but we considered it unlikely.
After his death, I continued to think it unlikely, but I still consulted mediums in a desperate bid to make some sort of contact with Patrick. I wanted to know that he was okay. Actually, I wanted to know that he was happy and I wanted to send him all my love and gratitude. I wanted him to know just how much I loved him. In a classic case of cognitive dissonance, I both didn’t believe in an afterlife and yet worried about him being lonely or sad.
The first medium I consulted didn’t help me at all. She didn’t say anything that resonated, and indeed she became rather shirty with me when I kept on saying no, no, no. I could have given up there, but luckily I didn’t. I went onto the internet and found another medium whom I rang. She blew me away. I just told her that my name was Louise and that my husband had died in February – nothing else. This was about April. She responded by saying that it might be a little early to start making contact, but then she said, “Oh, he died in the middle of February, didn’t he.” I agreed. She carried on, “Oh, he died on the 16th of February.” “No,” I said, “he lost consciousness on the 16th but he died on the 18th.” “Well,” she said, “he’s telling me that he died on the 16th, and so that’s what I am going to write down.” This was extraordinary. She couldn’t have received the date by telepathy (though that is amazing anyway) because in my mind, Patrick had died on the 18th, but I could quite understand why he felt he had died on the 16th. When I went to see her the following week she said many more things that were true and that she could not have made up. I really felt that Patrick was communicating through her and I was truly comforted.
I was comforted, but not totally convinced. While I was visiting mediums, I was also apparently receiving signs from Patrick. To start with, it had been my friends who were getting signs. The first one occurred just five days after his death. A friend who was psychic sent me a photograph of an unusual, tall thin flame coming from her neighbour’s garden. She explained that she had asked Patrick for a sign that morning – and she had specified a flame, but not a candle or in a fireplace. She had then gone about her daily business, and had rather forgotten her request until she went to draw her sitting room curtains that evening - and had seen this flame. She rushed to take a photograph of it, which she managed to do before it suddenly disappeared. She was sure that it was a sign from Patrick, but I was not so certain. I thought it could have been a coincidence.
Other friends also contacted me about signs they had asked for and received, but I continued to be sceptical. When I asked for a feather on a train, and the next day I found a feather on the vacant seat next to me in the train carriage, I was still not entirely convinced. Looking back on it now, I am very grateful to Patrick’s spirit for his determination to get through to me because I was a hard nut to crack. Even the first WhatsApps, which I detail in my book, were not enough to make me feel sure. It was not until the sixth of August that I finally realised that yes, our spirits survive.
On that day I had been walking my dog on Tooting Common with my phone in my pocket. When I got back to my son’s house, where I was staying, I pulled out the phone and the screen said that I had created two WhatsApp groups at 11.06am. One was called Hamlin Family and the other, Hamlins. One consisted of Patrick and me, the other of Patrick, his daughter and me. I stared at the phone. I absolutely knew for sure that the phone had been in my pocket at 11.06am and that I had not created the groups. To be frank, I didn’t even know how to create a WhatsApp group. I stared and stared at the phone, and I realised that the only possible explanation was that Patrick had created the groups. He had already shown that he could manipulate WhatsApp and send messages, and here was the final proof. It was an earth-shattering moment for me – I now knew for sure that our spirits survive death. There was no other explanation. This was the pivotal moment when I abandoned my old scepticism and understood life in a fundamentally different way.
Since that extraordinary day, I have understood that our bodily life is just a short interlude in our spiritual existence. I have read and I continue to read about life after death, quantum physics, reincarnation, other people’s spiritual lives and insights. The understanding that this bodily life is not everything is immensely consoling – our loved ones are not lost to us, and if we make wrong choices or grave mistakes in this life, it isn’t the end of the world because we will have second and more chances in the future. I now understand how everything is connected, and how amazing and magical the universe really is. I read about quantum physics because I try to understand how it all works, and of course I fail. But things like quantum entanglement show me that seemingly impossible things are real, albeit inexplicable. I love how our cutting edge scientists are now beginning to grope towards an understanding that our spiritual leaders have had for generations. Energy – or spirit – is the foundation of all life and everything is connected. Yes, those WhatsApp groups were my spiritual wake-up call.
As I detail in my book, many more signs and messages followed and I now know that one day I will be fully reunited with my love, and also able to look down on the material world I have left. I no longer believe in coincidences, and I feel confident that even the smallest act of kindness has repercussions well beyond one’s imagination. I think that this is what the spiritual leaders have been trying to tell us for generations, but strangely, it was a new technology that managed to convince me – that and a determined husband who managed to manipulate it so as to make contact with his grieving wife! Thank you Patrick.
I was born and grew up in Edinburgh where I spent a happy and secure childhood. Following school, I studied textile design in Scotland, which is where I also met the man who was later to become my dear husband, an engineer. We embarked on a travelling life, setting up homes in camps in the Sultanate of Oman, in the Middle East and the West African countries of Gabon and Nigeria. This life of travel expanded my vision and, despite many challenges at times, I learned to adapt to different cultures, searing heat and a plethora of frightening jungle creatures! It was an adventurous life and a very rich one in which to raise our two boys.
In these various communities, I steered clear of the amateur dramatic and musical roles that were presented, but I could always be relied on to turn my hand to set design and decorative projects as my contribution to camp life. I was very much in my element with this work and confident in my field. Whilst of course we missed our family in Scotland, being part of a community that pulled together in these unique settings made the sorrow sweeter.
But then things changed…
When our boys left for boarding school back in Scotland, a spiral of unhappiness ensued for both my husband and me and our solidarity as a couple began to pull apart. To a degree, this was masked by subsequent moves and the practical demands of life, yet each time we felt a little more deplete, less connected to one another. I began to spend more time behind the large canvases of huge flowers that I painted, working through my unhappiness.
A desperately low period in Gabon then saw me take to writing, and the words flowing easily, just as easily as my tears. Writing became all I wanted to do. Sitting in a corner of my house, listening to the jungle noises of the African grey parrots and trumpeting elephants, I delved deeply into the joy and the pain of the life I was experiencing. It was as though I were composing music, my fingers gliding over the keyboard as my heart told its tale in a concerto of emotions played out with the urgent tapping of my fingers connecting with the keys.
The result of this was, eventually, Spinach Soup for the Walls, which describes my descent into deep lows and then my steps to recovery, by learning to rediscover the beauty in everyday life, in all the things we so easily take for granted. The book is set against this backdrop of wonderful travel and strange, colourful cultures, with a good dose of humour to offset the darkness! Intended, in a way, as therapy for myself, I feel humbled that it was also recognised as uplifting for others, winning a Gold Award in a national competition.
When my spirit had bottomed out and I realised that I had to save myself by making changes, I moved back to Scotland alone, leaving my husband behind. He was thriving, the strange housing estate in the heart of jungle suited him well whilst, as he expanded into it all, I had become a very withdrawn and contracted version of myself.
In the peace of my art studio in Scotland, I would then work through emotions on huge canvases, at times barely able to see through the tears as I held my brushes. Gradually over many months, art brought a lightness and glimmers of hope that began to seep into my heart.
My work has now evolved significantly, whilst still very much representing a snapshot of the internal world. I have grown to adore still life paintings, particularly those depicting glass vases. Having once associated still life as the domain of elderly ladies who can’t get out much, I now herald it to be an exceptionally special form of art, regardless of age. As the artist sits in peace, connecting intimately with vases and flowers for hours on end, cocooned in stillness, this work presents an incredible space to quieten the mind and connect the soul to the world beyond the tangible.
Gone are the days of me painting from a base of trauma. Nowadays I am able to focus on joy and peacefulness instead. I would like to think that the light within my art is transformative and will continue to radiate and be felt by the viewer. Shine is available for us all. When we sit beside a glass object and really observe it, we see ourselves reflected back. The sun drops from the sky to fill the glass and there we are, merged and bathed and loved amidst the beauty of it all.
Home for me now is a traditional finca-type house, perched on the top of a beautiful mountain in Mallorca and surrounded by ancient olive trees. I am frequently visited by wild donkeys and regularly interrupted by goats looking in through the windows at me. It is no coincidence that artists have flocked to this area over the years to tap into this effervescence.
My art has also changed immeasurably here in this exceptionally magical setting and has been instrumental in raising my vibration. Many hours of painting have enabled me to shed the denser emotions and trauma that I had been fiercely holding onto. It is as though each painting allows a bit of space for light to enter. I am more able to see and choose peaceful energies in the life around me than I was previously, and worry much less about any cloud that may float past.
We can all do this by connecting with nature, either physically by going for a walk in countryside or mentally by immersing ourselves in art. In these ways we reach a different level of consciousness.
My village is surrounded by towering mountains reputed to have a very high quartz content, which turn an other-worldly orange at sunset. Witnessing this every day is the greatest connection to the Beyond. Living here, my energy balances to match the surroundings and my art in turn takes on a special quality of shimmer. Brilliance is very easy to add to a painting when it flows from deep within.
It is a privilege to be able to have such clear documentation of my spiritual evolution through my paintings.
Spinach Soup for the Walls has won the Gold Award of the national Wishing Shelf Awards. Spinach Soup for the Walls is published by Local Legend.
