In this issue are the following articles - click underlined text to go directly to the article of your choice:

• Guess who is knocking on the door? How to identify spirit communications. By Janet Cyford

• Calls to Mystic Alice, written by Alice Rose Morgan; book review by Claire Greenberg.

• The Gift, written by Mia Dolan; book review by Claire Greenberg.

Have you ever wondered how to identify who the spirit is that is trying to communicate with you? Janet Cyford, our resident medium, explains how the process of mediumship and passing the messages through to her clients works for her.

In my work as a Spirit-trained Medium I give many speaking engagements and demonstrations of clairvoyance in the USA. I find that giving a short explanation of how I receive my information and where it comes from helps to educate people about the mechanics of mediumship. At a recently engagement I overheard an elderly lady, who had received communication from several members of her family, exclaim her surprise that I had picked information out of the air. She was pleased and surprised at my cleverness. However, one of the points I raise is that mediums do not call up the dead. I have often wondered how other Sspirit coworkers bring together those who need to 'phone home' during a private session, a telephone reading, or a public demonstration. Of course, the answer is very simple . . . they come with the client! And hopefully leave with them too.

I have found, and try to explain, that I have no control over who comes, in what order, or why - I am merely the telephone between two realities. The clarity of the contact depends upon the quality of the connection and the ability of the communicator to think clearly and precisely. Also, upon their ability to create a clear visual image of how they looked when alive. It is of no use to you if I say I have this wonderful light here who is telling me it is your father, mother, or son; and it certainly holds no evidence of their continued existence to the person receiving the communication. A detailed description is needed for identification. Even so, it can be a difficult task to describe in detail who has joined me in spirit. Sometimes I find a characterization of the close energy I perceive can be the most evidential point for the person receiving the message.

Names and communicating with Spirit

Names have always bothered me. To say I have a 'George' here before establishing my recipient brings a show of hands all claiming to know him. It is not evidential to just throw a name out there, after all, we can all find a 'George' in each of our families if you look far enough back to do so. I find when I have altered my level of awareness in preparation for my work, people in spirit shout names at me that have nothing to do with the client I am working with at that time. Many are desperate to let their loved one's know they are fine and death was not the end of life, as they had been led to believe. But, I continue to work on this aspect of my communications, and was pleasantly surprised recently when a strange name I had been given was recognized as the name of the street where a husband had lived with his wife before his transition.

Open for 'business'

Another surprising misconception is when the uninformed are amazed to find that I am not open to Spirit contact twenty four hours a day and seven days a week. I am not, I cannot, and will not, retain that level of contact. All Mediums know it would be damaging their health, nervous system and sanity, so why would I want to damage mine? I would be opening myself to all levels of intrusion and influence. You could liken this to leaving the door of my house wide open with an invitation to all to enter and misuse my space. One of the hardest but most necessary tasks a medium must learn is to open and close their level of contact at will. Spirit guides can show us how, but they cannot do it for us. We are responsible for learning to govern our sensitivity so that it does not govern us.

Life experiences and Spirit communication

Occasionally I am confronted by the 'New Ager' who believes that Spirit, or her loved ones who have passed on, can tell her what to do. A recently client demanded to know why she hadn't a decent love interest in her life, why her business as a Body worker wasn't flourishing and why she hadn't any money. A Guide of mine stepped in to give advice, but she didn't appreciate it. I eventually gave up, but insisted she brought a copy of my book and suggested she read and digested the chapters covering Spiritual Healing and Spiritual Healers. As a practitioner she was spending three hours on each of her patients using a complicated method that drained her and her patients of energy.

In fact, I wrote about the gift of Spiritual Healing in my June/July 2005 Newsletter, using the information that had been given to me for my book, 'The ring of chairs'. I consider it to be one of the most rewarding aspects of Mediumship and it is a very rare. The spiritual healer must be free from a strong ego and the desire for self-promotion. If you wish to receive a copy of my newsletters please send me an email requesting to join my email list:

JCMedsp@aol.com

Destiny can be fluid

Finally, and most importantly, please accept that our lives on this earth plane are not carved in stone. We have an allotted amount of time here on this earth and for some this time is to be very short. Our Soul has a purpose to fulfill and it will draw experiences to our personality that strengthens us. Hopefully, on our journey we will meet other like-minded friends, for this journey can be a lonely one without understanding loved ones and friendships. It helps to accept that we create our own reality with our thoughts and attitudes. If you wish to change the circumstances of your life, begin by changing how you think and see the world. Remember, nothing is carved in stone, each decision we make affects our destiny.

The following points are suggestions for those who seek to work more closely with spirit:

• Discover the inner power available as you invite the Divine Guest within to manifest in your lives.
• Learn to forge a stronger link with Spirit.
• Attune to the Healing Power that is available to all.
• Learn to use this Healing Power for the benefit of all.
• Learn to govern the sensitivity which comes with altered states of awareness.
• Develop the ability to open and close your awareness at will.
• Learn to cooperate with Spirit coworkers and be trained by them.
• Learn the difference between Meditation and the Attunement needed for Spirit contact.
• Be ready to lay aside previous understanding to incorporate further Spiritual Unfoldment.
• Experience symbolism as the Royal Road to Spiritual development.

© 2007 Janet Cyford
Go to the links page to reach Janet's own web site

Calls to Mystic Alice by Alice Rose Morgan
Published by Llewellyn;
ISBN 0738709360

Review by Claire Greenberg

This book has a dual personality; it is an autobiography and also an easy primer for 'teach yourself psychic development'. Does it work?

I found Mystic Alice's down-home country wisdom enchanting. Her personal story of family psychic gifts and how they manifested through her and her children (and mother) interesting. The vignette where her mother is searching for her father's good suit to be buried in is a case in point; you really get a feel for her family and its relationship with the dead:

Calls to Mystic Alice at Amazon.com Click pink text above or the image to visit Amazon.com. Prices range from $10.36 for new to $6.49 for used.

Calls to Mystic Alice from Amazon.co.uk Click pink text above to visit Amazon.co.uk. Prices range from £9.99 for new to £3.69 used.

"Mom was sad that she would not see Dad anymore, but did not doubt for one moment that she was still able to communicate with him. We found her in his closet the next day giving him the dickens because she couldn't find his good dress suit for the funeral. She was saying, "Not the green pants and orange sweatshirt, Al. It's just not proper. Now where did you hide the suit?" The suit turned up in the back of the guest closet out in the hall, the only item of Dad's clothing in there. She was firmly convinced he hid the suit, either before or after his death."

She looks at reincarnation and karma and has some interesting stories to tell us. One that I particularly liked was regarding herself and a past life as an alcoholic male doctor. It still had repercussions in her being unsympathetic regarding female problems; only to suffer them herself in this lifetime. Extrapolating from the hints she drops about being brought up a Catholic I just know that there is more of a back story that she did not tell us, the reader. One that would have made the autobiography even more fascinating had she been encouraged to go into more depth on the personal side. Instead space was given to developing your (the reader's) psychic ability.

The exercises are basic, helpful and encouraging. But there is nothing new here. You can read these exercises in any self-help psychic reader. She dresses them up with anecdotes from her client list. Like the autobiography, the anecdotes are much more interesting than the exercises. The main problem is that she repeats some of the stories for different chapters and different exercises so you get a 'ho hum here we go again' feeling. With so many years experience as a professional psychic she must have more stories she could have used rather than repeat herself. Perhaps the stories mentioned were the only ones she could get clearance from her clients to use? If so, she needed to have made that limitation clear for the reader.

Finally, this book suffers from a lack of an editor (if it had one they ought to be shot). The first chapter should never have been left in. Who wants to read an apology from the author for writing the book in the first place? The last chapter also needed to be cut; there is nothing worse than dating a book by including current affairs that have ceased to have any relevance to the reader. Who needs to know that the Y2K was a damp squib? We lived through it and realised it was an excuse to make us all buy more new computers and software! The 2004 Tsunami and the 9/11 events are both terrible and will have ramifications for years to come for anyone who deals with trapped souls, but devoting a mere few paragraphs to each event was unwise. Instead they could have done with books of their own. So can I recommend this book in either of its two roles? Yes, but only if you read it as an autobiography and ignore the first and last chapters. So buy the book, but if you want to learn how to develop psychic abilities please search out a good development circle in your area.

The Gift, by Mia Dolan
Publisher Harper Element; ISBN 0007154518

Review by Claire Greenberg

As you may have guessed from the previous review, I love biographies and autobiographies, so when our editor asked me to review 'The Gift' by Mia Dolan I relished the task. It did not disappoint this reader one little bit! I have to add that I have not been following Ms Dolan's television series broadcast in the UK so her story came as a complete surprise to me.

What did I like best about this book? Lots of things; firstly it was well written; secondly the structure was easy to follow - it was linear - no hopping about; thirdly she did not pull her punches. Most people would try and forget the nastiness of abduction followed by rape at the tender age of thirteen, and then blamed for that horrible experience by her peer group rather than their outrage being aimed at the perpetrator! But Ms Dolan let it all hang out. She told us about her past without trying to gloss over the mistakes she has made as well as the indignities forced upon her. Perhaps, wisely, she felt that as she and her gifts were the sum result of that past the truth was the best medium to tell us, the reader, of how she came to be where she is now.

The Gift by Mia Dolan at Amazon.co.uk Click underlined text above to visit Amazon.co.uk. Prices range from £5.49 for new to £2,25 for used.

The Gift by Mia Dolan at Amazon.com Click underlined text above to visit Amazon.com. Prices range from $4.81 for used and new.

She was brought up in a working-class family on the Isle of Sheppey during the 1970s; a British example of 'white trash' so loved by American urban myths of 'poor kid from the wrong side of the tracks makes good'. Practical day-to-day living and paying the bills featured more in her life than the paranormal; except that things happened to her. She would dream of accidents happening and then hear about them on the news; she would astral travel (OBE) without knowing what that was. Finally she realised that she had a psychic gift and embarked on the journey of learning how to use it.

One of her earliest encounters with a ghost was at the flat she lived in with her family at the Sheerness Docks. It was on the 27th January 1977 when she was in her teens. Mick, a friend of her brother Jed saw the ghostly lad with her:

"We decided to walk into town together. As we stepped out into the hall, we heard a scream. We ran to the balcony and saw a boy fall down the spiral staircase….We both started running down the stairs. We could hear the boy crashing and banging his head against the walls, tumbling and screaming. He hit the concrete at the bottom - then he disappeared. I had not taken my eyes off him for a moment yet he had vanished. There, in his place, were shafts of light with dust particles floating through them…It was his [Mick's] idea to see if we could find out anything about the boy. We went to the library and asked to look through their old newspapers. We sat with the front pages of every local weekly newspaper for fifty years and began our search. All we knew was that we were looking for a story about a boy in Blue Town where I lived. It took hours, but by late afternoon we had it…..We poured over the story of a tragic accident: a boy had fallen down stairs, fractured his skull and died…I peered at the top of the paper. 21 January 1927."

Apart from the odd experience it was not until she had had her family and had been through many traumatic experiences of the heart before the psychic world finally opened up to her:

"It was at the end of my sixth meeting [Spiritualist Church in Sheerness] and, along with the tea and biscuits, we were offered a session with a healer. We formed a queue. I had no idea what healing was, but it was my first chance to have a one-to-one with somebody who might be able to help me. I was determined to make her take the voice away…It was my turn. I sat in the chair with my back towards the healer and, without touching, she put her hands around my head. I could feel the heat from her hands even though they were inches from my head. Then my shoulders dropped. I had not realized I was so tense
'There's a lot of activity around you,' I heard her say. 'So much energy. You're having a frightening time.'
Suddenly I was telling her everything - it was tumbling out in a great torrent of words: the voice, the lights, the plane crash. Throughout, she kept moving her hands around my head and shoulders.
'Do you think you can take it away?' I asked.
'You have a gift,' the healer said. 'It's only scaring you because you don't understand. You need to know how to control it.'
'Yes, yes, … but can you get rid of it?'…
She told me, 'The voice you hear is your guide.'"

The healer then goes on to give Ms Dolan the first hint on how to develop and control her gift through a visualisation technique and starts her on the quest to develop her psychic gift. The rest, as they say, is history!

I recommend this autobiography as a very good read. Pick it up if you are at all interested in how a professional medium comes by their talent and makes it available to the wider public. Thank you Ms Dolan to being totally up-front about your less than salubrious past; you clearly show that having such a gift is not a bed of roses the non-psychic believe it is.

Book reviews © 2007 Claire Greenberg