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!