Sacred Channels

Audio clips from my meeting with a medium: what my mother has to say.

Birch bark and moss, December 2020

I saw a medium this morning.

I used to be afraid to speak those words, to “out” myself to the world as… as what? A hippy? Unscientific? “Woo-woo?” A believer in something more than meets the eye?

Part of myself, a large part of myself, is a scientist. A knowledge gatherer, a questioner, and a skeptic who trusts data above all. Who wants, most, to understand.

I no longer want to parse between what is “religious” and what is “real.” Religion is real. As real as philosophy or economy or psychology or poetry. Spirit is what I hope to study.

In science, ‘materialism’ is the idea that matter is the only reality. The head researcher at Columbia’s Spirituality Mind Body Institute, Dr. Lisa Miller, is one of many researchers broaching ‘post-materialism.’ My current daydream is to work in her Spirit and Psychology lab.

There is no room within scientific materialism to explain the accuracy of, for example, mediums. (It also often fails to explain data on manifestation or near-death experiences or a bunch of other stuff, but we’ll save those for other blogs…)

Dr. Gary Shwartz is a psychologist who, along with Lisa Miller and other scholars, wrote the “Manifesto for a Post-Materialist Science” back in 2014.

Shwartz has studied mediumship for decades, conducting repeated experiments on the accuracy of channeled information.

According to a 2011 triple-blind study by Shwartz et al., mediums’ accuracy rates can be pretty variable (averaging from 40-80%) but are all statistically significant. Even 10% is gob-smackingly high, inexplicable by chance. That is to say, these guys aren’t just guessing. They can’t be faking it.

The mediums in the study were separated from who they were ‘reading.’ They couldn’t see them or hear them or ask any questions. Some of them were thousands of miles apart. Even the researchers collecting and analyzing data were blind to whose reading was done by whom.

One of my favorite sections in Oxford’s Handbook of Psychology and Spirituality is Schwartz’s chapter, addressing consciousness and materialism. He asks questions like ‘Does consciousness require a brain?’ I love it. Anyway, here’s what he wrote about the actual act of channeling:

Interestingly, the information received by research mediums does not appear to be “dead.” Mediums do not describe the process of receiving the information as if they are watching a movie or reading a book. They describe the information retrieval process as being dynamic, interactive, often surprising, and even sometimes confrontational. In other words, the information seems like communication with a living person.

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I walk into Ernie’s bungalow on the beach. It’s one room with white walls, a white bed, and a white ceiling. We chat a little bit beforehand—I’m sitting cross-legged on the white shag rug. The first thing he’ll do is check my chakras.

“Woah,” he says as soon as I stand up. “You’re not grounded.”

“You’ve been receiving a lot of information recently,” he says. It’s true. I’ve been reading voraciously, learning about this Spirituality Mind Body Institute and the work they conduct, and theorizing how I can manage to afford the program if I get in.

“But you’re not grounded. You’re not secure. And you’re not trusting your intuition—you’re half open there. You’re either opening or closing, I’m not sure, but you’re not listening to your gut.”

Also true. My intuition gave me a mighty “YES” to this program. But this week I was faced with reality checks: The Ph.D. program, statistically, is unlikely to accept me. The master’s could potentially sink me into tens of thousands of dollars of debt.

Still, my heart and conviction whir when I think of it. Something feels right.

But no, I’ve not been listening. And no, I’ve not been grounded. I’ve not been in the present moment. I’ve been in the future, imagining future rejection letters and future debts. My mind hijacked this application process—I don’t feel secure anymore.

At this point, I’m still talking to Ernie. It’s his normal voice, friendly and gravelly and deep. He’s reading my energy, but not yet channeling.

I lie down on a sarong spread on the bed. Ernie begins speaking “light language,” a slew of expressive sounds. Sometimes it’s guttural, sometimes nasally, sometimes hacking and wheezing. He moves the sound and the energy around and away from my body, or aura, or whatever you’re meant to call this thing. And eventually, words come.

“My dear, my dear, my dear, my dear…”

The channel always opens like this. It feels loving and familiar. I’ve been to Ernie once before. Both times, it’s not like he speaks for a specific person across the veil, but instead, channels a more universal voice. This voice gives guidance that resonates, that you’ve known to be true and felt inside yourself, but not yet put words to.

Later I’ll include some actual audio clips from his direct channeling of mom—but this more ‘universal’ voice feels too private to share directly.

“You will own your heart,” the voice says. It’s strained, higher than normal; different. It laughs a lot.

Today, it addresses me as a woman, blossoming. It says that joy in my life will come from my inner strength as a woman, balanced with the wonderment of my little girl self. That I will inspire others by being, above all else, true to myself.

“This is me, with no apologies,” it says.

Cards are drawn from an oracle deck. Hope and happiness; Intuition; Vulnerability. Then, the overall card for the session: “Trust your own understanding.”

“You know what is right,” the voice explains. “Trust your gut, don’t let your mind disturb that. The mind wants to keep you in control.”

A sort of noise, like something being sucked out of a car window, comes from Ernie, and he’s back. We talk a little bit, then I ask him—Is there anything from my mother?"

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Reishi I found on my morning run, December 3 2020

He doesn’t usually do the showy, TV-style mediumship of talking for a person. But he can. “I’m really rusty,” he warns with a smile. He paces the room as he starts.

This is what he calls evidential mediumship—he doesn’t really know what he’s saying. He doesn’t know if it’s true or makes sense or if it resonates. He’s not part of any academic study, so he’s allowed to ask me questions. Usually, “does that make sense?”

After finished, we talked about it. “Ego gets involved a lot,” he admitted. “The ego wants to be right, so I question saying some things. But then, you know exactly what it means.”

I can’t really describe the process he goes through. He sees things and hears things. It sounds like a conversation, like what Schwartz describes.

Ernie can’t nail all the details. The next clip, for example, is about mom’s writing. It’s not just letters, but her journals and poetry that I have. I've got all of her writing from as early as 1989. So far, I’ve read up to 2006.

Interspersed in these deeper points, she slips in classic mom advice. That, I think, was my favorite part.

“Did you change your diet recently?” Ernie asks me. I just ended a three-day juice fast, yesterday. “She said she’s really surprised, she said that’s not like you, to diet.”

“This is weird,” he says. “I see her exercising.” He says she’s telling me to exercise, to keep my body moving, that it’ll help me quiet my mind.

He doesn’t know that she didn’t exercise, that one of her issues later in life was her disconnect between body and mind. But I know it. I understand the weight of the advice. She’s telling me to stay connected, to stay mobile, to not do what she did by living too much in the mind.

“You should be cooking more,” he says with a smile. “She says so.”

She loved my cooking. She was so impressed with what I could cook. On this island, I rarely, if ever, cook. I love cooking.

Because this isn’t him channeling a pure voice, Ernie is there. It’s like he’s on the phone, speaking for her to me. So he’s susceptible to being, well, as touched by what she says as I am. “Oh, I’m getting emotional,” he says a few times as he relays her messages.

The one thing that confuses me in our hour-long session is a reference to me, hiking. A reference to her and I walking together. He asks me if I took a hike. Well… duh. Thousands. One where she was with me either physically or in spirit? I’m not sure.

Could it be the one walk we took before she died? Or my attempt at through-hiking the Long Trail? Or the hike through the woods I took, searching for where Quentin died?

Or (and now, writing, I feel, I know that this is what she meant) was it the morning run I took before anyone discovered her body? December third, when I went out on the trail and watched the sun rise across the freezing ground, and found my first wild Reishi to harvest in a hemlock grove. Reishi, a red that matched the color of her hair. The spot where, months later, I would build a woodland altar for both her and Quentin.

There was great connectivity between the chakra reading, the channeling, the card reading, and then what my mother had to tell me.

“She wants you to use your fearless ability as a child; to keep on going through life in that way.”

For this next section, it’s worth mentioning that Ernie had no idea of my ambition to write a book about the two of them. He had no idea about this blog until I asked him afterward if it was okay for me to share his voice.

“Wow, that was big,” Ernie said just after the end of the clip. “Wow, that was huge.”

As I look at my life, my values, and my aspirations, I agree. It’s huge.

“It was not done to you, it was done for you.”

My life so far is a series of culminations. I would never have worked at Spring Lake Ranch without losing Quentin. I would never have moved to Thailand to teach yoga, to connect more deeply with spirit, without losing my mother.

Existence is a beautiful, bubbling progression of births and deaths. I have been a scientist, writer, helper, and mystic in turn. All of whom are alit with divine, brilliant curiosity about existence. All of whom intend to move forward through life and do as mom and Quentin say in the final clip, be it through writing or Columbia or some yet-known path:

“You can talk about our lives. You can talk about our lives and help other people.”

The sun rising on my morning run, Decemberer 3 2020