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In many ways, then, you are 'dead' now - "Donna" was trapped in an agony of indecision. Her eight-year marriage to a man older than she, of another nationality, culture and religion, had never been easy. Now it was threatening to founder on the rocky shoals of severe financial strain and quarrels over in-laws. At age 29, she already had one child, a daughter nearly three years old. She was pregnant again. This time, Donna couldn't feel the joy so many other women experience on learning this news. She thought there was a distinct possibility that she could end up raising not one but two children by herself, and that thought terrified her. Should she carry the fetus to term? What about an abortion? The choice was overwhelming. Her husband didn't make things any easier. He said the decision was hers and refused to discuss his feelings about the pregnancy, leaving Donna more isolated and in greater pain. Then a friend suggested a psi session. "I didn't realize you could do one for an unborn child," Donna recalled. She contacted Jana Simons, a Sunan therapist. Jana agreed to conduct the psi session at the Sattva Institute, which she co-founded with Candace Talmadge. Although her husband didn't believe in all this "metaphysical stuff," as Jana calls it, he accompanied Donna and participated in the session, partly out of curiosity, mostly out of genuine if inarticulate concern for his wife. A couple who were friends of Donna and her husband also took part. Both of them, accomplished professionals, had never done anything like this before. At that time they were just becoming involved with and rapidly growing more interested in spirituality and alternative healing. Jana and Candace always emphasize one point about psi sessions. We don't have to be a professional psychic, or even consider ourselves to have any psychic ability, to take part in, contribute to and benefit from a psi session. We need only know how to send love. The little soul stands in the middle of the healing circle of psi session participants. He is undetectable to the five physical senses but perceptible to the four soul (psychic) senses. Tousled dark hair spills out from under a tight-fitting, old-style aviator helmet. He - this soul clearly presents his form as male - is wearing a jumpsuit and a scarf. In the hand that he holds up is a model airplane that dives and loops and curls when he waves his arm. Next to him is what looks like an architect's model of an office building, almost as tall as he. He is a self-assured soul with a genuine sweetness about him. There is also a hint of mischief and of a very strong will. He knows what he wants for this physical lifetime. He wants to fly airplanes. He tells us he has chosen Donna's husband as a father partly because her husband is a licensed pilot with thousands of hours in the cockpit. He also says he's interested in architecture and designing things. He has a very full agenda for his next sojourn on earth. He's so cute and bright and cheery that he moves some of us to smiles as we gather this information through our soul senses and pass it on to his would-be mother and father. Then Donna blurts out a few jumbled phrases. She can barely put her feelings into words to explain to this soul why she is so reluctant just now to continue this pregnancy. Her painful quandary and distress are so palpable, so immediate that my own eyes fill with tears. Others react the same way. The little aviator quickly understands. "I can wait," he assures Donna several times during the session. "If the time is not right, I'll wait." Before the session ends, the little aviator makes sure we all understand one thing. When he finally does arrive, by golly, he wants to be known by his father's middle name. I can't help nodding. The name suits him. For twenty years, "Clara" suffered an emotional and spiritual wound that refused to heal, despite some of the best psychiatric treatment in the world. Thanks to a psi session in 1987, she found the resolution that transformed her life. An elementary school teacher, Clara was brought up in a small Russian Orthodox community in Pennsylvania. Her mother and father were first-generation immigrants who, Clara realized later, used their intuitive (psychic) abilities to survive in a culture they didn't really comprehend. Her parents did understand one thing clearly. It was not safe to proclaim a Russian heritage back in the days of Joseph McCarthy and Congressional investigations of suspected Communist activities. Few if any dreamed of glasnost back then. Clara recalled being punished as a child for telling others about her Russian background. "My mother denied her past and lived a facade," Clara said. When cancer claimed her mother's physical body in 1967, Clara felt she had never had the chance to say good-bye to her real mother. In 1972, Clara became a patient at the world-famous Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas. The late Karl Menninger himself was her psychiatrist and she underwent three years of intensive therapy with daily sessions. "I felt like they literally dug me out of a grave," Clara says of the physicians who attended her. The doctors, however, were unable to help her resolve her feelings about her departed mother. During therapy, Clara would sense her mother's presence. Feelings that she had lived other lives also would take hold of her. The doctors wrote it off as Clara's imagination. They didn't know how to address her spiritual or emotional needs. Clara tried psychotherapy again in Dallas in 1986 and stuck with it for five months. The same thing happened. Traditional therapy could help her to a certain point. Past that point it was of no further use to her. "I felt a pressure that no one could help me with," she said. "When your problems touch on the spiritual, traditional doctors can't do much. I had a spiritual injury that I couldn't ignore." Prodded by her need, Clara was open to an alternative approach. Her search for healing eventually led her to the school through her daughter, "Laura".* When Clara found out about psi sessions and the possibility of contacting the dead, she asked for one, even though Laura had some doubts. "I knew the offer of a psi session was right. I felt it." Despite her confidence, Clara was taken aback by the proceedings. "It was shocking when I realized how real it was." A psi session - better known as a séance - is one of the most misunderstood and thus inadvertently abused of all spiritual healing practices. The very word séance immediately brings to mind what most people consider the unreal and laughable notion of "conjuring up spirits." Derided by some, proscribed by others, the psi session tragically has degenerated into the seance, a casual pastime with no more apparent significance or meaning than a Nintendo game. A séance begins as a lark or a joke, a way to alleviate boredom, to liven a party gone flat or to satisfy idle curiosity by seeing if something's "out there." Then, to the astonishment, dismay and sometimes real terror of participants, they discover that there actually is someone or something "out there." A whole lot of someones or somethings. "Tammy" found this out the hard way. Scared and bewildered, Tammy phoned the Sattva Institute in the summer of 1990, seeking reassurance and an explanation of the chilling and bizarre event she had just experienced. She and a friend had decided to use a ouija board to contact her late grandfather. Things went fine at first. The pointer, moving on its own, spelled out the nickname her grandfather had always called her. The pointer stopped abruptly. Something changed. The pointer moved again but no longer to any purpose, as though whoever or whatever was propelling it didn't recognize Tammy or her friend. It tried to spell out a word that appeared to be "help." Then it spun round and round in wild circles. The young women, now terrified, ended the session. At this point, all the tapes on top of the VCR dominoed and spilled onto the floor. No one was anywhere close to the tapes when they toppled over, Tammy reported. Just who or what Tammy and friend encountered remains fodder for a debate beyond the scope of this article. Clinical evidence that some sort of consciousness survives physical death does exist, however. It has been documented in exhaustive detail, through hundreds of case histories, by Drs. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross1 , Raymond A. Moody Jr.2, and others. Apart from such evidence, our experiences as alternative healers working in the energy of consciousness has led Jana, Candace and other Sunan therapists to accept that the soul exists independently of the physical body as energy-consciousness. We have learned, in addition, that the only thing we leave behind at death is the physical body. That's all. At physical death, the rest of self--our mental, emotional and spiritual awareness - remains intact. Through experience, we also have realized that the death of the physical body does not in and of itself endow the remaining awareness with wisdom or ultimate enlightenment. This assertion, of course, contravenes extremely ancient and well entrenched beliefs about life after death. These beliefs are rooted in many different religious doctrines. All of them in their own ways say directly or at least imply that we attain some sort of improved or possibly perfected state after death, providing we have been good enough (however that particular doctrine defines "good"). As a result, a lot of people who don't consider themselves formally religious are still convinced that a nonphysical being is bound to be enlightened and wise. This is why these people pay absolutely rapt attention to, not to mention big bucks for, messages from mediums in a trance state. This unstated belief is also why so many people conduct their own impromptu séances, hoping to contact some disincarnate master. They'll contact someone, all right. As Donna, Clara and Tammy and friend found out, it's really very easy to communicate with disincarnate beings. That's precisely the problem, and it can be devastating. Cosmic curiosity-seekers who conduct séances without knowing how to protect themselves often end up like Tammy and friend: frightened out of their wits. Why? Because they didn't contact some guru or ascended master. Instead, they had a close encounter with a disincarnate jerk, a being neither enlightened nor loving and only too willing to play mind-games with them. Remember, nothing dies but the physical body. If a person in a mental institution passes on while sincerely believing that he is Jesus Christ, that belief is not going to change merely because the physical body has stopped functioning. Although no longer in a physical body, that soul will still believe it is Jesus Christ. And it will be more than happy to convey the words of "Christ" to anyone willing to listen. Let's put this another way. Most of us would never open the door to our homes and yell "Come on in!" to just any passer-by. Nor would we consider a walk at 3 a.m. in New York's Central Park a very prudent thing to do. Spiritual voyeurs who conduct unprotected séances are doing the equivalent of throwing open their doors or walking in the park. Small wonder they often head straight into trouble. Are we saying that all messages from trance mediums or channelers, as they have become known, are from deluded or mentally ill souls? No, of course not. Are we saying don't ever conduct a psi session? Hardly. Having been trained to conduct them, Sunan therapists participate in psi sessions fairly frequently. The Sattva Institute also teaches students how to conduct psi sessions. We want a lot more people to know about psi sessions, to conduct and participate in them for the many blessings they can bestow. What we are saying is this: Be smart and prudent. Learn how to conduct a psi session safely. We will explain the steps shortly; they are very simple. We are also saying that the only valid motive for offering a psi session is the desire to be of service, not for self-aggrandizement or to demonstrate how truly spiritual we are. A psi session certainly isn't going to convince a clinician that life exists after death, so we don't regard them as experiments. Nor do we hold seances as substitute entertainment when we've run out of videos. Instead, we conduct psi sessions only when there is a genuine need for healing resolution between a soul dwelling in a physical body and one that is not - the latter termed "dead" due to society's very limited understanding. Clara's case is typical; most of us want to say good-bye to a soul who has left the physical world. But those in Donna's or a similar situation could also benefit from a psi session. The soul is an eternal continuum of energy-awareness. It can be contacted before it assumes physical form as well as after it sheds the physical body. Always keep in mind that while people like Donna or Clara will benefit enormously from a psi session, there are many who will not. The motives of the person asking for a psi session are just as important as the motives of those conducting it. Jana and Candace took some lumps learning this. One of our students introduced an acquaintance who asked for a psi session. Jana's intuition waved a big red flag of doubt about this woman's true motives, but she was so insistent and emotionally needy that Jana agreed to do it. That proved to be a big mistake. The woman wanted to communicate with her late husband not for healing resolution, but to find out where he had stashed a mind-boggling sum of drug money. He was murdered because his drug connections knew he had been holding back on payments. Had that woman discovered the location of the hidden money, her safety - and possibly the safety of all those who had participated in the session - could have been in real jeopardy. We are much more careful now when screening those who ask for psi sessions. We call such a person the inquirer. We hold a psi session only for those inquirers who genuinely desire healing resolution. A request is the first guideline. Let an inquirer, such as Donna or Clara, request a psi session. Next, establish that the inquirer has some sort of emotional tie to the departed that is reciprocated. This two-way link can be through kinship or friendship; it doesn't matter and we don't need to know the precise nature of the relationship. But the love connection counts above all else. The emotional bond and recognition are what draw the soul in question to the circle of psi session participants. The preceding is obvious, if we think about it. If we were walking down the street and someone in the middle of a group called out our name, would any of us respond to the summons? We might, if we were to recognize and care about the person calling our name. If we didn't know anyone there, most likely we would ignore the call and continue on our way, probably at a little faster clip than before. This is precisely why adoring fans are more likely to contact a deceased Elvis Presley impersonator rather than the soul that once dwelled in the body of the king of rock and roll. There's no emotional draw to them on the part of Elvis, even if the fans worshipped their idol from afar. After an inquirer asks for a psi session, and after having established a two-way emotional connection between the inquirer and the departed, we use our intuition. This is another way of saying our psychic abilities or four soul senses. Those soul senses can be invaluable in helping our left brain decide whether or not this inquirer is seeking a psi session out of a genuine desire for healing resolution. Remember, just because someone has asked for a psi session does not obligate us to conduct one for that person. Check into the inquirer's motives carefully. We also not only have the right to feel comfortable with the inquirer, we actually need to establish some sort of rapport to help ensure the success of the session. Do not whatsoever force a session down the throat of a person whose fear level is too high. Such cases probably won't be helpful because that inquirer will be in a state of heavy denial. Next, choose a place to conduct the session. The stereotypical séance is held at night, in a small, closed room that has little or no light and plenty of dark corners to hide the special effects apparatus: the faked floating horns, thumping tables and disembodied moaning and groaning. We hate to disappoint anyone, but it is possible to conduct a psi session at high noon in the middle of a field - if that is what will make the inquirer most comfortable. Usually, Jana, Candace and other Sunan therapists locate the session in the living room of a house. During the session, we keep the curtains open. If the session is at night, the lights remain on but not glaringly bright. We arrange enough chairs in a small circle to accommodate all participants. We also put a box of tissues on the floor in the middle of the circle. They are always in demand after (and many times during) a session to mop up those healing tears. The person who issues instructions and keeps the psi session on track is called the conductor. The conductor invites the remaining participants and encourages the inquirer to bring trusted friends or relatives if the inquirer so desires. The best size group for a psi session is between four and eight people total. As stated earlier, participants need have no formal training in using the soul or psychic senses. Jana and Candace are always careful to include people who've never received any instruction because they bring fewer expectations to the session and thus often are more open to what does come through. The best participants are loving and open-minded. We avoid making the session more difficult by using it to try to prove something to that friend who thinks our interest in this stuff means we've gone off our rocker at last. Skepticism is fine. Denial energy, however, will hamstring the session by blocking the information flow. One important point: the less information about the soul in question and the inquirer that the conductor and other participants possess the better. This helps assure the inquirer that participants received their information only from the soul in question and not from some other source. Another important point: Sunan therapists do not charge for psi sessions. Let's face it: among the general public, séances have a worse reputation than used-car dealers or TV evangelists. Some religious fundamentalists erroneously regard a psi session as a form of devil worship, which it most emphatically is not. We will be the first to agree that a lot of people have faked phenomena during seances to prey upon others' emotional vulnerability and bilk them out of lots of money. We avoid this issue simply by never charging for psi sessions and we encourage the students we train also to conduct them for free as a community service. The inquirer always sits exactly opposite the conductor, who decides where everyone else will sit. Again, our soul senses help us attain an overall impression of the different soul energies of the participants. Then alternate a more masculine energy with a more feminine. This doesn't mean always alternate men and women. Some males have a very gentle energy, while some women's energy is strong, more push than pull. The mix of the two helps balance the energy flow around the circle. After seating participants, ask them to join hands, their right palms covering the left palms of the person to their right. Make sure they are comfortable, as they may spend as long as an hour or more in this position. The conductor then directs all present to close their eyes and focus on their breathing. Those who know any basic biofeedback techniques for slowing down the breath rate should share them with the group now. It's an excellent way to calm everyone down and clear the mind for what's next. Once participants have relaxed, the conductor asks them to send out love from their hearts, down their right arms and toward the person on their right until the love flows all the way around the circle. Ask them to use their soul senses to visualize that love or feel its vibration, to be aware that it is there or simply to understand that it is present. It is this love, which is magnified considerably by group energy and which includes the special love of the inquirer, that will draw the soul to the circle and help keep it there. Conductors can skip almost everything else written so far. But always heed this at least, even if it sounds silly and doesn't seem to make any difference anyway: ALWAYS ASK ALOUD FOR PROTECTION. Just as psychiatrist M. Scott Peck concludes in The Road Less Traveled, we have protection all around us all the time3 . Dr. Gerald Epstein, assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Mt. Sinai Medical Center in New York, refers to this protection as the "inner guides" that often appear to his visualization patients 4. Sunan therapists call them simply guides; another name for them is angels. Folks, whatever we call them is just dandy so long as we call on them. As Dr. Epstein notes, they won't act without a request. So please please please, conductor, always be sure to ask aloud for each psi session participant's protectors to stand just outside the circle and allow in only the soul sought by the inquirer. They'll be delighted to comply. What's the point of this exercise? For starters, it eliminates completely the kind of spook bully that scared the bejeezus out of Tammy and friend. Jana, Candace and other Sunan therapists have either conducted or sat in on dozens and dozens of psi sessions. We have never encountered any strange or scary phenomena precisely because we know to request protection. Enough said. Simply ask for protection and then we can be about our resolution mission in peace and complete safety. After requesting protection, the conductor then tells the inquirer to speak the name of the soul in question. The inquirer verbalizes the soul's full name two times and a pet or nickname the third time. Sometimes, the soul hesitates to enter the circle precisely because there are strangers present. In such instances the conductor should ask the inquirer to repeat the same name sequence aloud once more. Other times, the soul is so eager to enter it doesn't wait until the inquirer has finished speaking for the first time. Usually, the soul will pass into the circle over the inquirer's right shoulder, but occasionally the entry point is different. It doesn't really matter. Once the soul is in the circle, the conductor's job is to keep it there by sending additional love straight from the heart. The task of participants other than the conductor or inquirer is to verbalize what is called evidential material or trivia. Most souls realize they need to assure the inquirer of their true identity. They almost immediately begin sending highly personal and sometimes very specific information about themselves. If the soul in question doesn't know what to do at this point, participants may ask it for evidential material and explain why the inquirer needs this information. How does the soul send information? How do participants ask it questions? Simple: through thought-energy. The thought-energy of the soul is received as inner visions, vibrations, words or an awareness by participants' own four soul senses. The way to communicate with the so-called dead is through what we label intuition without understanding its full implications or its spiritual import. Trusting what we receive through our soul senses is a real issue for most psi session participants. There is widespread ignorance about the soul senses in this society, which leads to pervasive and deep-rooted lack of trust in the information the soul senses convey. This is why there is a need to teach people how to function as psi session conductors in the first place. Provided the conductor is comfortable and confident with the process, other participants can be less assured and still be very helpful. It is vitally important that the conductor emphasize to other participants except the inquirer that they are to verbalize every single piece of information they receive. Do not edit. Again, this is where our general inability to trust our soul senses can really hamper our efforts. Time after time, psi session participants have pulled information seemingly "out of thin air" about people or events that only the inquirer or the soul in question could have known. Yet they just as often hesitate to say anything, which can be counterproductive. For example, Jana was participating in a psi session and could tell that the man sitting next to her kept receiving something but was holding it back. After this happened three times, she asked him to speak up. "This is really silly," he said hesitantly. "It just doesn't make any sense. I see a white picket fence, but it's not standing upright. It's standing on one end." The inquirer gasped, "Now I know it's my son!" Years earlier, as a boy, the inquirer's son had taken an old piece of picket fence, turned it so that the posts were horizontal and nailed it to a tree trunk so that his dog could climb up and join him in his tree house. It was something only his grieving parent and he, of all the participants in that psi session, would have known. During her session, Clara was finally convinced of her mother's presence when one of the participants talked about seeing a field of red poppies, waving in the wind. Then another person mentioned a cross; Laura immediately said that she saw a skull. "I knew it was my mother then," Clara explains. "Red poppies were my mother's flower. She had them all over the house when I was growing up. The Skull of Adam forms the base of the Russian Orthodox cross. My daughter wouldn't know that. She was brought up Presbyterian." The point is this: the information the soul is sending is for the inquirer, not the other participants. That is why it often seems strange to us and we tend to shift into our left brains to analyze it. Don't do that. Instead, speak up. The conductor will have informed the inquirer before the session begins to respond to each piece of information verbalized in one of three ways: "yes," "no," or "I don't know." Sometimes the soul in question provides information that the inquirer isn't sure of or simply doesn't know but can check out later with family or friends. That picket fence was the key piece of information the parent needed to be certain that the group really had contacted the right soul. The red poppies and the skull were the key pieces trivia Clara needed to be certain of her mother's presence. After receiving this type of key information, inquirers become emotionally prepared to continue to the next part of the psi session. If the conductor isn't certain of the inquirer's willingness to move on, it's fine to ask gently if the inquirer is indeed ready. This second phase consists simply of giving the inquirer and the soul the chance to talk to each other, assisted by the other session participants. The second part of a psi session is always very emotional, if for no other reason than the inquirer finally has some evidence that a loved one thought dead and lost forever is, in fact, still living and very much found. The evidence is provided partly through the trivia, which is necessary to satisfy the left brain. The heart, however, is much more open to messages from the soul. As the second half progresses, inquirers on their own often begin to pick up thoughts and especially feelings from the loved one in the circle. The joy of such a reunion is impossible to comprehend except through direct experience. Resolution replaces anguish. Tears flow freely from relief, not grief. The healing spreads from the inquirer and the soul to every member of the circle. Through a psi session, Clara finally made peace with her mother--20 years after her mother's physical body died. Through a psi session, Donna was able to free herself to make a decision about her pregnancy. Both women reaped totally unexpected dividends from their psi sessions. Immediately after hers, Donna found that the nausea she had been experiencing in the early stages of her pregnancy simply vanished. "My whole attitude changed. The pregnancy became something I accepted. It did something else for me," Donna said of her session. "It made me realize that even if my marriage didn't stay together, I still wanted the baby. It gave me more confidence in myself." The little aviator touched down on planet earth in the spring of 1989. "I'm so glad now I chose to keep the baby," Donna added. "He came to help me with balance." Following her session, Clara found that other areas of her life also were healed. She felt more at ease with herself and less compelled to be with other people just to avoid being by herself. Equally important to her was that she now had some terms for the psychic abilities that were always so natural to her and her parents. "It was a tremendous eye-opener to realize the reality of life after death and that other people felt this way," Clara said. Ironically, it was an unorthodox psi session that reconciled Clara to the Russian Orthodox Church, which she rejoined. "The church is not open to this subject, but I'm in a whole different space." Now, when Clara makes the sign of the cross and follows other rituals, she's aware of a much deeper, spiritual dimension to them. The ceremonies hold a rich and very personal meaning for her. The rites are no longer just empty motions, done by rote and handed down as someone else's truth. It's possible to rig up a floating horn or an "ethereal" voice in the dark. But no psychic or medium, however well versed in deceptive practices, can fake the feelings - the profound and powerful sense of relief and release that surrounds and embraces the inquirer, the soul and the other participants during a properly conducted psi session. It's the kind of healing that transforms lives forever. (To schedule a psi session, contact any Sunan therapist listed on this website.) These are fictitious names for real people used to ensure privacy. 1Kubler-Ross, Elisabeth, M.D., On Death and Dying,
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