I’ve always been a skeptic.  I needed a spirit to talk to ME before I really ever TRULY believed it was happening to others. And yet now, even after getting my proof, I’m still on the fence about “divination tools.”  Tarot cards, crystals, tea leaves- you name it. I mean,  maybe they work, but they really aren’t for me.  I would have lumped color into that category too.

So, it was a big surprise when I was at ghost school (i.e. the Arthur Findlay College,) that color was a big focus of our learning at the beginning. P.S., if i hadn’t made this clear in previous posts, it was sort of a running joke that my group and I were in the kindergarten class. We were the beginners, and everyone knew it, so it was sort of fitting that we were doing some coloring of sorts (see picture above.) What we came to realize, though, is that we had the last laugh, because we were doing some pretty FUN stuff that the others were not.  Which is not to say bringing messages through from spirits isn’t fun, but this particular exercise taught me a lot about connecting to someone “psychically, ” also something I would have easily dismissed before last week.

Before this exercise, we learned about the particular meanings each color has, and what information one can glean when colors show themselves in auras, readings, etc..  To further the lesson, our tutor, Sue, had each of us melt our choice of encaustic wax onto a 5×7 piece of specialized paper using a flat iron.  The idea here was to not think about it too much. Just to go right away with your gut, with both what colors to choose and how they melt: your guide would help you to make it just right for others to read.  (Thus, each persons card is individualized to them, and them only.)  The above image is what I produced.

We then took our cards and went around the room, reading each others’ wax works. The kicker here was to try to blend psychically with the other person, so that your messages to them are inspired by not only what they are projecting with their energy, but also possibly what your guides (and anyone they choose to allow in!) are telling you.

I can’t say I remember a lot of the particulars in the readings given to me. I think it had to do with nerves, and me worrying about having to go in the next group.  I do know that at least one person picked up on the “R” in the middle left of the image, which led them to bring up a very important father figure in my life who passed quite a few years ago.   Now flip the card around….

…and voila! More stories to tell. My favorite is the almost black and white closeup of the tide receding on the sand. See it there in the purple? And how it’s reflecting the sunlight?

What I do remember most from the card readings are the ones I did for other people. Before my first reading, I was a Nervous Nellie. I had never worked with color before, or even tried to read someone without a direct smack on the back from spirit. I was just sure I was going to sound like an idiot- “I see a lot of swirls which tells me you are very confused most of the time!” HAH!   Once I started, though, it was if the information just flowed almost effortlessly.  I would see a shape in their card, and it just triggered this knowing that I was then able to communicate back to them.  It wasn’t always literal- but for me it was as if my guide (or her aura?) would lead me to see something in particular. Once I saw the wax take form into some shape, I could then quickly surmise what it meant. (This is where you can’t think too hard, though, much like mediumship. Just trust the information you are being given in real time, because once you bring your own brain into overthinking it, you ARE gonna sound like an idiot.

One person in my group allowed me to share her card, so I could explain what I got from it. Check this out:

From this card- I asked the woman if she had two children. “Yes.” One boy and one girl? “Yes.”  Does the girl have more of an outgoing personality? “Yes.” Is the boy older? “Yes.”

Seriously. I didn’t get one thing wrong with these details.  Can you see anything there that would give you this information?

 

There they are. Two faces: one in the “blue”, one in the”pink” that told me about her family.  Boy is on top so he’s older. His “meh” face told me he wasn’t as social as the younger girl.

And yes, I’m still in shock.  My intuition/guide basically told me where to look and what to think.  That’s some weird shee-yat right there.

From then on- I felt like the psychic gung-ho master with everyone’s cards.  “You have unresolved issues with your father, don’t you!” “You’re really stuck in a rut!” HAHA! It probably did sound just that cheesy, but the thing is, I knew it was true!

I also took an aura photograph that I’m excited to share. I thought I’d get to it here, but this could quickly turn into a novel that way.  In the next post, I’ll share my photograph, explain what the colors stand for (which is also part of the wax reading, but I don’t know that I utilized that aspect very much in this exercise,) and what they meant (for me) where they fell into my aura.

Lovely. Now I’ve got myself all geeked about this wax stuff again and am looking on amazon for a quick start kit.  Let me know if you have any recommendations- brand? colors? And then c’mon on over and play- I’ll need the practice!

 

 

Ghost school is evolving. We first started out learning the basics about it all: color meaning, pyschic energy, etc., but now we have actually moved on to real readings.  There are probably a lot of really fun stories inside the last two days, but I know that the really interesting part is the readings and the evidence – so let’s talk about that first!

I’m finding that one of the biggest things I will take away from this week is that messages from spirit are actually quite subtle. Remember how in the beginning of this journey I described it as being hit over the head with a “spiritual frying pan?” Well now, as one grows in their awareness, it’s kind of like they throw a feather at you. And it’s real easy to brush off that touch as nothing more than just a whisp in the air.

Being in the beginner class (with our instructor Sue) yesterday was the first day that we gave it a go. We all took a turn standing up in front of the group and seeing what came through. Some of us had an easier time than others, but again, a lot of that I think can be explained with how confident you are in your abilities. If you aren’t either confident enough or aware of your own being enough, then you will indeed disregard a piece of information as something in your own head (or start to make sh*t up, really.) But if you can sort of let go and just go with it – it can be pretty amazing what comes out of your mouth.

Our group was taking turns getting up in front of the class to try our first reading of the session. I volunteered to go second. My stomach was in knots and I was very unsure of how this was going to pan out. Our teacher is fortunately extremely encouraging, though, so I didn’t feel rushed to try and make some connection.  I sat there with my eyes closed for probably about 10 seconds- wherein I had all of these different sorts of relationships swirling through my mind: Grandmother, grandfather, sister, cousin… but only when Sue said “you’re brushing them all away!” did I finally think,

“OK I’m just going to pick the next one.”

The next piece of information that came into my head was very small and very quick, but it was a definite feeling of grandfather and “it” was actually about waist height and came through as sort of a triangle with the top pointed away from me to the left.  (Only after I was done did I finally figure out that the arrow was actually pointing to the person the spirit belonged to.)  I said, “I have a grandfather here.” Quickly after that I got a feeling that this gentleman was sort of meek in his presence. He didn’t have a big personality, and there actually seemed to be a bit of regret in this.  “What caused him to be this way?” the teacher asked.  I was impressed with the knowledge that it stemmed from his relationship with his mother, and her making him feel… unworthy, if you will. As I relayed this information to the group, I got a vision of some wood posts… sort of in the shape of a house that would just be beginning to be built, like a very simple frame. I also quickly saw the word “carpenter” or “carpentry.”  I took this to mean that this grandfather was probably a carpenter in his life. So I relayed that information, too.

The next thing I saw was a quick image of this man – almost like a headshot. It was an old man in his 80s or early 90s with one of those newsboy caps on that button in the front so that they’re flat. The man also had a pipe, but the pipe sort of flickered, and quickly went away, even faster than the image itself. I also saw some glasses, but again I was unsure of those as well. When you are in the moment, it’s kind of like “did I just see that?”  Because now if I say “this man wore glasses” and I got that wrong – I probably just have completely thrown off the person who this was intended for.

The teacher finally puts me on pause to see if anyone recognized this man as someone they knew.

Silence.

So she has me recap… “I have an old man, with a paperboy hat on who was more softspoken and behind the scenes, was a carpenter,” and then I finally revealed, “and he also showed me a pipe.”  This is when Amy, a girl in my class, finally raised her hand. She said, “everything fits… except that my grandfather wasn’t a carpenter.”

 

Hmmmm, I decided to explain what I had seen, which was simply a wooden frame, and then the word “carpent…” I truly never did get the last few letters, and also just assumed that this information meant his livelihood.  Amy spoke up again, “oh that’s the rabbit cage. We built that together.”  Aha! I then heard grandpa say to me, “that’s right!”… so I knew we had the right recipient.

I was still fairly nervous, trying to pull out any piece of information I could from the spirit.  (Believe me when I tell you, the few things I had just told the group are not even remotely up to the rigorous standards of this school, so thank goodness I’m in the beginning class. Anything else and they would have kept pushing and pushing for more: something I’m not quite confident enough to do yet. It’s gonna take some practice!)  The last thing he gave me was the feeling of giving her a gift, and that gift was the knowledge of his regret- that he wished she could learn from his desire to “speak up more! Be a part of the discussion and don’t be afraid to let your voice be heard.”

After class, I asked Amy some questions about her grandfather.  She said he always had that hat on, the paperboy hat, and she was just waiting for me to mention the pipe before she raised her hand.  I told her, “well I was unsure of the pipe, because it sort of flickered and went away.”  She then informed me that his pipe smoking was done in secret- that he would go outside to do it.  BING! 

Amy didn’t know much about his relationship with his mother (her great grandmother) so that is something she said she would check into.

I’ll let you know. 😉

It’s been two days now… I feel like I’m at camp! I got to the Arthur Findlay College on Saturday, with only five minutes to spare until the week officially started. It would have been 15 minutes but my taxi driver and I started talking about how the locals called this place “spook hall” and how he was only 96% convinced of all this stuff and that he had lost his son three years ago and he wasn’t sure there was much to live for anymore. Sigh. I would have stayed out there another 20 if it had meant I could give him some peace. I took a picture of his badge and vowed in my head to try to get a hold of him after this week was over and when I hopefully had some more tools in my kit. 
Night one was mostly getting acquainted with the place and the teachers. Having run a bit late, I missed meeting with the “headmaster” Paul, who had already chatted with the other students and parsed them into groups according to experience. So, after Paul’s first formal address to the group, I was finally “sorted” into Hufflepu, errr… Sue’s class. (Ha! I’m sure they haven’t heard THAT one before.) Sue’s class is the beginning group, which is exactly where I’d hoped to end up. I wanted to start from the beginning, even if it meant I’d rehear some things.

The pluses?

*Tea everywhere, and real milk to put in it! Hallelujah!

*Three solid meals a day that I don’t have to cook any of!

*We are in a beautiful Manor with more nook and crannies and doors and stairwells than I can count (we had the discussion yesterday of whether this was a castle and my new London friend gently offered “manor” as a more fitting term.)

*I’m meeting amazing new people who all get what I’m going through and trying to achieve (even if I don’t know exactly what that is yet…)

The petty negatives?

*Downtime is hard to come by, so I’m really having to carve out a few extra minutes to write some of this experience down!

*My roommate is a lovely older woman from France, but she really likes to keep the room hot. I wait until she falls asleep and I get down on the floor with my iphone flashlight and turn down the furnace. Sneaky! But then she wakes up in the middle of the night and closes the window. Ugh. I do feel like I’m winning this fight, though, because last night I woke up to find her blanket-less, hot, and splayed out on her bed. I shall use this against her tonight when the battle resumes.

*Electricity. I thought I was SOOOO on top of things when I brought my little plug converter. Turns out, though, that its actually a three prong to two prong, the one that a European would bring to the US to convert THEIR appliances. So… I have resigned to having terrible hair all week. Thank goodness I brought lots of hair ties.

Sunday was the first full day of class, and my beginner group worked on psychic communication (as opposed to mediumistic type.) I’m simplifying it, of course, but that means merging your aura with the aura of another physical person. This is something many of us do already, YOURSELF INCLUDED. It’s how we know things about people without them even saying. (We will begin to work on mediumistic communication in the coming days- and that is where the medium merges their aura with the aura of a NON physical soul. Get it?)

Sue also talked about one of the hardest things mediums have to overcome, which is knowing when the information coming through is actually from Spirit or simply our own imaginations. She had us do an exercise where we closed our eyes, quieted our mind, and tried to really start to identify what it feels like to be in our own aura. Then, she would ask our guides to merge with our aura, where we could then take note of if we felt any differently. For me, the change was subtle, but I could definitely feel like my surrounding space got tighter. Like as if the air around me became a form fitting security blanket. When Sue asked them to retreat, so did the air around me.

*Side note- I am chuckling over here in this castle manor because I cant believe we have come so far with this. My first blog post I was belittling crystals and tarots, and now I’m having a serious discussion about auras. Thank you for reading with a straight face, if you are. HAHA!

I now have only a few minutes left until I have to be in the sanctuary for our morning meditation… so I will wrap this up until the next “ghost school” update. I am excited to share some images of my new friends and my hot roommate. Cheerio!

Oh I just spotted Casper the Manor cat!