When they had gone I sat quietly in the healing room, feeling thoroughly exhausted. Leaning my elbows on the healing couch I put my head in my hands and wondered what was going to happen next. I felt that I was being knocked sideways as each individual experience gave me more problems. Then I heard a voice calling my name. It was repeated three times. Silence. A few seconds passed and the voice said, ‘You must have faith, trust us.’ I stood up and threw my arms out and shouted, ‘Trust who? Who are you?’ Silence. I was so annoyed that I began to tell them just how I felt. ‘How do you think I feel?’ I said dramatically, still throwing my arms around. ‘Every day something different happens. I’m trying to give people privacy and then voices clamour to give survival evidence and it completely messes up my schedules, and tonight I have had to work myself to death trying to please.’ Still ranting like a drama queen, I went on, ‘There must be someone else you can go and bother, for Heaven’s sake!’ At the end of this tirade I felt wonderful, having released all the frustration of the past six months. Perhaps that had been the reason for the silence. Nothing made me more angry than a one-way conversation, spiritual or otherwise. I had found out the hard way that onesided conversations meant trouble. As I left the room, I prayed that I would be given a peaceful night’s sleep. This was granted. Perhaps my ranting had done some good after all.
Another, more personal problem was worrying me. People who I had thought of as friends were avoiding me, and one day I had the opportunity of asking one of them if there was a problem. He looked shamefaced, and told me that when he had told his mates in the pub about the wonderful survival evidence he had received they had ridiculed him. The bottom line was that he could not cope with this, and so had decided to stop seeing me. I argued that I had not changed, but was exactly the same person that I had always been. A trifle more perplexed perhaps, but the same.
‘Betty, the majority of people think mediums are frauds,’ he said.
‘And your friends think they’re the experts, do they?’ I was furious.
‘Why did you tell them in the first place?’ I asked. ‘You must have realized they would laugh at you.’
‘Well, I must confess I was pretty bowled over by what had happened, and wanted to share the experience.’ He smiled. ‘I’ve been an idiot, haven’t I?’
‘No,’ I replied. ‘But I think you’re being a coward.’ Upset, he turned around and left.
A few months later we talked on the phone. He told me that he had needed time to think about what I had said, and laughingly agreed that he was a coward at heart.
‘I am so intrigued, I can’t keep away,’ he confided. Eventually, the survival evidence, clairvoyance and healing won him over. He was to admit later that it had completely changed his life. During this time there was one question that he repeatedly asked. ‘As a believer, will I have to change my ways and become a goody-two-shoes?’ ‘Well if you do then I’m in serious trouble,’ I replied.
It was a thought that frequently passed through my mind, especially as my clients were obviously in awe of me. Like my friend, I did not want to change. I had led an extremely eventful life and I was the sum total of every experience I had ever had. And yet the thought continued to bother me.
My mother was religious and belonged to the Church of England, and so I had become part of that Church from my birth. After much coaxing from my mother, I was confirmed in Southwark Cathedral when I was nineteen. I was already beginning to feel disenchanted and hoped by making this commitment that things would change. It is only later in life that one realizes that it is not that easy. Eventually, after much soul-searching, I stopped being a member of the Church. And from that time on, I felt spiritually cleansed. In retrospect, it is obvious that it was part of the Grand Plan that had been mapped out for me. But here I was twenty-five years later, with yet another spiritual dilemma. It had to be solved if I was to have peace of mind. And yet, as with so many problems we have during our lives, this one was going to have to be put on hold.
Throughout the first year of my mediumship I tried to make all sorts of pacts with the spirit world; some worked while others did not. I could not understand why this should be so, and continued to experiment. It was through trial and error that I began to see a pattern emerging, and this was confirmed through survival evidence.
One evening I was healing a woman who was crippled with arthritis. Halfway through the session a spirit voice told me that he would like to speak to his sister. I passed the message on and the woman was delighted that her brother was communicating. With myself acting as the mediator, the communication was as follows:
‘Hello, Joan, we heard you were in trouble. I was elected to speak as we were so close when we were young.’
‘Bert, it’s so lovely to hear from you but who are the “we” you are speaking about?’
‘Oh, Mum, Dad, Ivy, Flo and many others who loved you.’
My patient began to weep. She said, ‘I am in such pain, I wish I could be with you.’
‘Joan, you will never be well until you have released all the hate in your heart. It is crippling you.’
‘I can never forgive him for what he did to me,’ she replied.
‘This hate is not hurting him, only yourself.’ Bert paused, then continued, ‘We cannot help you until you help yourself.’
For the next twenty minutes they enjoyed a private chat about their lives until Bert said goodbye. I asked my client who the ‘he’ was. She told me that it was her ex-husband, and that he had made her life hell.
Joan visited me again a fortnight later. She walked into my healing room, twirled around and said, ‘Look what you have done for me. My arthritis has gone.’
On questioning her about the last two weeks I found that she had rid herself of the hate she had inside her by mentally sinking into a bath and watching the black hate being released. Then she ran the water until it was clear.
‘So you have actually cured yourself,’ I said. She looked at me in silence for some time. ‘I suppose I have,’ she was perplexed. ‘But it was so easy.’ I smiled. ‘If I had all those people rooting for me in the spirit world I would find it easy. I think the evidence you received has been a valuable lesson for both of us.’
She visited me again a year later to tell me that she was getting married and was going to live in America.
It was a simple message, but a powerful one. Working in my capacity as a medium or healer I could not always be successful if the spirituality of the client had been badly affected in some way. I began to give myself mental exercises for cleansing, and felt so much better that I passed them on to my clients. It was whilst I was sitting at my healing couch writing them down that I heard a voice say, ‘We are going to try something.’
My hand moved rapidly, as I drew face after face on the blank paper. There were priests, nuns, clowns and children, and they were not all English. There were many foreign people with ornamental headdress. The drawing stopped as rapidly as it had started, and I was completely dumbfounded. I had never been able to draw at all, and here were most professional sketches. I tried to carry on, but I could sense that the force had left and with it my artistry. These sessions continued for about three weeks and I thought that I had found another talent. I was