An Interview with Joy Hicklin-Bailey

by Colin Whitby

Despite her busy schedule I was fortunate enough to be able to arrange a face to face interview with Joy in the Pierian centre in Bristol. She was just about to leave for her trip to Andalucia in Spain, where she would be leading an alchemical workshop which, she says “opens the heart in a simple, yet profound way, allowing a place of trust, confidence and sensitivity, where we meet others in authenticity and ease”. 

Colin – How did you find your way to your current lifestyle, what were the influences that led you to facilitating transformational retreats in Andalucia, Italy and the Hawaiian islands.

Joy – One thing I have realised today it that it is very rare for anyone to ask me a personal question so this is quite an unusual situation for me to talk about myself!

I was a very unusual little girl and I had a lot of the classic extraordinary metaphysical experiences when I was very young. In my early teens I poured a lot of my energy into reading spiritual books and spiritual poetry and didn’t think anything of it, that was just what I was drawn to do. I then went on to study literature and psychology at university and became very fascinated by Jung, all of which lead to psychotherapy training, but always with a spiritual focus, and always recognising the intelligence of life I was in touch with.

There was never any sense of what I would do with all this, there was just a love of the truth. Then my passion for psychology and healing came in Its one thing to know the truth when you hear it, it’s another thing to know what to do when a client is very challenged or in trauma or a dilemma, for example.

My passion is for people to be happy, and whatever I can offer to facilitate that is what I love to do.

Colin – So what drew you to Hawaii?

Joy  -  I’ve always been a wilderness person, so whether it was Hawaii, India, New Zealand, Greenland, the wilder spots of Europe and the UK, like spending 3 years in a bothy in Scotland, I’ve always been drawn to places that are a bit of a distance from normal society, from the hectic pace of city life. I was very drawn to indigenous cultures because of the sanity of it, the basic natural rhythm of life, the organic nature of ordinary life, and made so many journeys to Hawaii.

So during a 10 year period I travelled the world and naturally came into contact with people I resonated with, with village healers and people who taught me a lot about how to live on the planet happily.

Colin – How did that lead to the trips you now organise and the groups you lead?

Joy – It’s very difficult to answer that question because I’ve literally just put one foot in front of the other, I have no plan, I sometimes think that everyone else has this fantastic plan, but I haven’t, I just do what I do. I follow my passions, and I would say that to anyone, be what you are, do what you do, with totality.

This year has been quite challenging because I have been building a place where I can run workshops, but this has taken more time and effort than I expected, which has taken me away from my passion for a while. Nevertheless I just love waking up every day, I think it’s an amazing gift to be in a body, breathing, feeling. I love the work I do. It’s play to me. Playing in existence with beautiful beings who wish to live the truth and love that they are. The workshops which are listed on the website touch on all the themes that affect us all – intimacy, sex, birth, death, loss, living the one we are rather than the conditioned self, power, freedom, truth, joy. There is a lot of tenderness here for the vulnerable, fragile creative humanity we all share. I love to see the breakthroughs that create more simple happiness for those who come to my workshops. Miracles. That doesn’t mean those people, or myself, will never be challenged again, but challenges are so much more ok when there is a depth of realization of the emptiness, silence and love that pervades all life, that makes no judgements.

Colin – In this edition of the e-zine we are asking the question, ‘what is enlightenment?’, how would you describe it?

Joy – From this perspective, enlightenment is enlightening what is, whatever it is. That might be a feeling or circumstance the conditioned mind would not like, and the love we can hold ourselves in ANYWAY is the light, is the enlightenment.

Somehow the human mind is programmed to strive and try and get better and be separate and actually the truth is there is only being, there is no Joy, there is no Colin, there is no world, there is only being. This cannot be ‘taught’, only realized, and apparently being around certain situations, people, support, community, can create more likelihood of that realization.

It’s not about being like me though, I sometimes get that in my workshops, people will ask me how they can be like me. It’s human nature to say, ‘you’re better than me, give me what you’ve got’, but actually that’s the last thing I wish those I facilitate to think and feel. For me enlightenment it’s about taking your focus back to the silence and emptiness and life that you are, and then something happens to the human being you are -  the magic of your being can move and express, it’s not the same as my magic and you can find it for yourself. And there is just light happening. That light is you or me, it’s not personal, it doesn’t belong to us and nor can we control that light and life. When we let go, and relax, and drop the defences and misconceptions, the light, the life, finds its own perfect solutions.

People will often ask, ‘are you enlightened, what can I do to get where you are?’ and I’ll say to them that this is the most ordinary natural way to be in the world, every feeling, every experience is OK, just life arising now, that for me is enlightenment, it’s just human and ordinary, and I don’t know where all the complication comes from really. There is nowhere to get to, we are it.

Colin – I’m very interested in how you work with people, how you deal with relationships in your workshops, for example.

Joy – I do a lot of shamanic preparation before a group and there is a lot being done through me if you like. On a Sunday night as a retreat opens I’ll have a group in a circle and I’ll not know what to say to them really because for me it’s the most extraordinarily unknown situation to be apparently facilitating a group. Somehow the right words get said! I do not know what will happen between them, whether there will be combustion or bliss at any given moment. However I do know what extraordinary enlightenment, insight, love, grace, presence and truth is possible…and somehow that always gets manifested! Ive been working with people for twenty years now, I can generally see and feel what is ‘up’ for someone, where they need to go, and they have to do it for themselves, and there is a total trust in the perfection of what unfolds.

For me that’s the edge of my work, it’s very beautiful to work with people at such a loose level, to see what happens between us when we let go of our roles and conditioning, what can we learn, what has been touched in us, how total can we be in what we feel, what grace and presence can happen amongst us. The freedom of that means that people can realise the insights for themselves rather than being told, it is very powerful, it facilitates people in finding their own solutions and answers.

It’s all subjective, we are talking about subjective experience, the aliveness that runs through the body. I don’t have answers about what people should do in relationships, but as sure as anything if they are in a retreat or workshop those limits will be there for them, and probably for everyone else to see and hear. This is beautiful because when all the blocks or issues are there and witnessed, they are enlightened and dissolve. And then alchemical transformation happens if the ripeness is there for that so-called individual. And that ripeness has its own timing..In that sense there is no need to try!!

One thing I’d really like to say is that at the deepest level of life everything is a paradox, and that is OK. That’s why everything I say is open to total misunderstanding. At the deepest level of existence in the world everything must be paradoxical; there has to be light and there has to be dark, there must be love and there must be hate, and there has to be a thought that appears to be true and the opposite thought, which is also true. For example I could say I’m a good person, but I could equally say I’m a bad person, and both might be true.

When we go deeper into shamanic work we are going to find a world of paradox where honesty is required, and then underneath that there is simply being. When there is being, and the personality is out of the way not in its role of trying to get somewhere or do something, then there is no paradox, there is just the still silent flow that doesn’t belong to anyone, and if you can rest in that, that is a great way to relate.

So a lot of my work in intimacy and relationship is how do you let go of your preferences and demands, the fear and the hurt, the fear of being taken advantage of and such like. Once we are present intimacy is the best healing there is, because in presence there is never a problem. If you can speak from this place then you will never need a therapist or a course, or energy, because intimacy heals! Makes us whole.

The most important thing for me is who is giving you reflection in life, where are you being sustained and nourished, are you getting support for you highest intentions, and that is vital.

Colin – Yes and being honest with yourself too is important

Joy – The more congruent someone is about what they wish to do then other people will just naturally support them, and it is the same with our feelings. Many women will say to me ‘my partner hates it if I get disturbed or angry’ and I ask them ‘how disturbed are you by it?’, because if they can’t allow the natural human responses that arise in life, then the person they are living with will be frightened by those as well. If you are present with the whole of your being, then you are going to get total acceptance, if you love yourself, it’s simple. The greatest gift is to be – all that you are – and be free and loved in that.

Its great to be able to inspire people and show them that this intimacy is possible, and it’s not romance, it’s not the glamour you think it is, it’s just ordinary loving living, and its absolutely available to anyone.

Colin – On a slightly different tack, how do you see us taking this kind of knowing to our workplace?

Joy – One perspective I have is that I have met so many healers in business, because the business world is about people, so it does not mean that because you are in business you are not a healer, it means that you choose to take your energy into that realm. You don’t have to be weird, or a hippy, you don’t have to set yourself outside of that environment. Healing and enlightenment is really about simplicity, and awakeness and knowing life is just a great, amazing game that truly isn’t personal. Sometimes someone round the table at a business meeting, who brings their consciousness into that situation. Your presence is all that is required, there are so many amazing people in business, you don’t have to be running some energy based business to be valid. Everyone is making their contribution by being the way they are.

I also find business people can be ver open to working shamanically, with forgiveness rituals, inner journeys etc

How can we say what really matters, how can we know what we are meant to do, we just do what we do. Its all perfect. Any investment in ‘becoming enlightened’ or ‘becoming a better person’ is really a bit of a limitation or diversion.

Colin – Well thank you so much for your time today, and for your insights, it’s been a really enlightening experience.

http://www.secretgarden.eu.com/

An Interview with June-Elleni

By Colin Whitby

http://www.psychicartworks.com/june-elleni.html

In the true spirit of the Magic of Being , June-Elleni had approached us to see if it would be possible to contribute to this edition. She found us through a link on the Cygnus Books site http://www.cygnus-books.co.uk , which I had not even realised we had, so thank a big thank you to Cygnus for that!

June-Elleni was a commercial fashion designer and business woman for 20 years, and during the last 17 years she has been exploring perception, awareness and consciousness through Psychic Art. As one of very few pioneering teachers in this field she was inspired to write the first book about how to actually develop Psychic Art. ’The Art of Being… Psychic” shares some of the ideas and unusual experiences she’s had along the way.

Colin – When we were first talking about an interview you sent me through a link to a radio show you have been doing, how did that come about?
(you can hear June-Elleni at http://www.myspiritradio.com/3-obooks.html)

June-Elleni – The work that I do in Psychic Art is very fascinating, interesting and consuming and I had kind of got to the stage in my life where I thought, ‘this is it, this is the way forward’. Then I became very aware, all of a sudden, that it’s not the only way forward, why not get out there and talk to other people and see what’s happening.

It was about 18 months ago that I was invited to chair lectures at the college of Physic studies and I have so enjoyed it, and have met some wonderful people.

The opportunity to host my publisher’s radio show came about after a weekend retreat I was doing in Somerset. As part of the retreat I was teaching the making of mandalas, and one particular young guy decided that he was going to make a mandala to get himself a radio show. So he did one and it was so beautiful, it was really a lovely mandala, I was looking at it for a quite while. Then on the Monday afterwards I was offered the radio show, which I thought was just hilarious. I heard from the young man about three weeks later and he got his radio show too.
So I am interviewing other authors on the most recent books that are coming out, so I am getting the chance to read far more that I would have done, reviewing them for light and also interviewing them on the radio show. Its great to share different ideas and see so many common threads running through the different ideas and concepts people are working with. Do you find that?

Colin – Yes very much so, I think the language changes depending on where you are, who you are and perhaps your audience, but certainly the ideas and approaches have a familiar feel to them.

June-Elleni – I was inspired by Roger Woolcoat Sperry, the Nobel prise winner, he did the first mapping of the brain and started to see that we have got conflict inside out heads which made perfect sense to me when I read it. The left brain is the logical, the judgmental, the side that gets hurt, the side that thinks it’s separate from everyone, then there’s the right side which doesn’t really understand language at all, and wants to have fun, to laugh, to do art and music and colour, and likes movement and all the things that are not logical.

So I thought if was have got these two sides to our brain and they are in constant battle with each other it must make sense to delve into it a little bit more and see what’s happening. That’s why I use art, because art triggers the right side of the brain, and when you put people in the space where in the right side of their brain is dominant then you can get peace, you can get co-operation and a oneness, this aspect of us that everybody feels that is connected.

Colin – Our theme this edition is ‘what is enlightenment’, how would you describe it?

June-Elleni – To me enlightenment is more about being rather than thinking, or trying or doing. During the teaching of psychic art we come to a place where we see the ego trying to control the drawing, trying to control what comes through, so I have to say to people’ stop trying, just allow it to be what it is, allow it to come through, and then trust whatever comes through will be easy and it will be so easy you probably wont value it’.
I have composers and artists and all kinds of people, when they go into that space they say ‘that was so easy’ therefore it cant be worthwhile, but when we listen to the music or we look the artwork, it’s just so incredible. When it comes from that space of oneness, from the right brain hemisphere, that’s the magic, that’s the zone where we can literally pull stuff out of the quantum field that hasn’t been invented yet, like Leonardo da Vinci did in the 1400’s.

When we look back at his work we see diving equipment and helicopters, so boy was he connected. He was quoted in saying, ‘where spirit does not work with the hand there is no art’. When the left brain takes over and creates from the ego then that’s when you are trying and then we create things we already know how to do. If we want to start to do the stuff that we don’t know how to do, we have to learn how to quieten that left brain that thinks it knows everything better than everybody else.

Colin – So presumably that’s where your book title comes from ‘The Art of Being – Psychic?

June-Elleni – This is where I can share my work to get people into that space, and I did some work with a couple of sound engineers, (soundologists composers) and we did a companion CD to go with the book and one particular track, track seven, was done to trigger people into the right brain. It’s very interesting because people say to me ‘I can’t even think straight when it’s on’, which is the whole idea, you’re not meant to be thinking straight, your are meant to be experiencing what it feels like to be in that space of connection, what the scientists call the quantum field, and pull out everything that’s in there that you don’t know that you already know.

So what is enlightenment? Well we are all enlightened, we just don’t know it. And we don’t know that we don’t know it, because the ego gets in the way.

Colin -– I’m intrigued, when you hold your workshops, are you getting all sorts of people coming along?

June-Elleni – Oh yes, I get so many people; teachers, policemen, nurses and of course artists, although they have been coming along more recently. If you are an artist the chances are you have learnt to draw with the left side of your brain and you know how to draw, so the whole time you are doing art you are trying, which can get in the way of the flow, sometimes referred to as artist’s block.

Colin – I can remember some time ago my wife picked up a book called ‘drawing from the right side of the brain’, which she enjoyed immensely.

June-Elleni – By Doctor Betty Edwards, yes a fantastic book, and that book goes into a lot of what I am talking about but does not go quite far enough for me. Most people are frightened of psychic ability and certainly a renowned doctor would not venture there.

However I kind of got hooked on going into the altered state when I was designing and I noticed, from a business perspective, that when I went into that space the designs that I was creating turned out to be my best sellers, I was selling thousands upon thousands of dresses that I had designed from this altered state.

In a way my left brain allowed my right brain to create in this way, even though it did not know what was going on, because it made me money, and you know 20 years ago was a big thing.

I was finding though, as a result of my using these abilities, that I was hearing voices, having dreams and out of body experiences that began to frighten me so much that I did not want to go to bed at night. It was like skiing down hill without being able to stop. I spoke to a friend who was developing his healing gifts and he advised me to go and see someone about this.

So I went to see a spiritual development teacher at the Spiritualist Association of Great Britain (SAGB) in London, and I was so in luck because she was interviewing to take people into a development class. I told her that the reason I was there was that I was having these experiences and rather than develop my psychic skills I just want to make them stop.

She told me that if I came into the development circle she would teach me how to make it stop, so in I went. What I learned however is that I can ski and stop, and start again, when I choose, which changed the balance of what I was doing.

Colin - So how did you discover your ability to do psychic art?

June-Elleni – Well I found that when people were asked what they had felt after an exercise, because the class was so large, by the time it came to me I had forgotten what I had experienced, and the conversation just went on to the next person.

So I started taking in a note pad and pen, so that I could make notes, and then when the lights were down when we would work to just a red light, I found that the pen would take a life of it’s own, and I would go into that state that I remembered from designing, but this time I was drawing people’s faces. When the lights were turned on people started to recognise them, which was a bit of an alarming situation to begin with, because I certainly had not intended it and did not really understand it either.

Fortunately for me this was the time that Coral Polge, and internationally renowned psychic artist, was at the SAGB and she took a hand and helped my teacher to develop the portraiture, and I did some workshops with her and it just went from strength to strength and became more and more fascinating.

To me, from a logical left brain point of view, this was a way you could be objective about it, here was objective proof, pictures of people. How could I know what they looked like, I didn’t know them, they just appeared through the drawings. From that I went on to do other forms of psychic art, precognitive art and mandalas, which I am writing a book about at the moment.

Mandalas are the most fascinating tools for manifestation, and they are 40,000 years old and we are only just starting to realise the value of them now. Mandala is a Sanskrit word meaning container for essense, circle, totality, completion or primordial sound. It is the 'space' where the inner and outer worlds meet, a 'place' that can hold and represent the powerful energy of intention (creation). I use Mandala's in Psychic Art as 're-mind-ers' to shift the vibration of the perceiver,to the 'right' frequency to attract a specific 'goal' or 'quality'. Learning to create your own Mandala's is very empowering, and a great way to practice the art of focusing your mind.

Colin – A friend of mine, Saleena, has been creating mandala like vibrational art for some time now, she calls them vibrakeys, and they are very powerful too. http://www.themagicofbeing.com/reviewvibra.html

June-Elleni – Art is very powerful if it is done with intention, which is what mandalas are, you put the intention of what you wish to manifest into the mandala, and then whoever looks at the mandala picks it up on a conscious, sub-conscious and unconscious level.

So all three levels are working with you, looking at that particular piece of artwork, which doesn’t engage the left brain particularly, so your ‘I can’t do it’ and the person who normally sabotages you is kind of not invited in.

In my workshops I have people draw the energy of words, for example. How many times have you heard this conversation? ‘ How are you?’ – ‘Oh not bad’. Or ‘can you do this for me?’ – ‘No problem’. If only they knew the energy of these negative words and what it does to their aura, so I get people to draw the energy of the words.

Masaru Emoto http://www.masaru-emoto.net/english/eprofile.html has done some fantastic work to show the energy of words and what they can do to water and when you bear in mind we are 75% water and the words are coming out of our own mouths, so to have people draw the energy of words they can then see it, and it can be quite alarming for them. They will see graphically how the language they are using is affecting them.

So Art is a fantastic visual tool to show you what is happening on an energy level, on a level beyond what you can really see, and yet at some level we are able to capture it, and when we learn to speak the language of art we can interpret it.

Colin – Well thank you so much for spending some time today to talk about your work, it has been fascinating, and I look forward to reading your new book when it comes out.

An Interview with Elaine Thompson

By Colin Whitby

Elaine’s name was passed to me by Saleena, a long time friend from Hawaii, as she had just been given some sound therapy healing by Elaine and thought she might like to be featured on our web site ‘She’s from the UK, Bristol I think’, she says.

Well it turned out that Elaine lives just 5 minutes walk from where I live in Bristol UK, which is quite amazing considering it took someone from Hawaii to connect us. When we started talking at the beginning of the interview, I found that Elaine also knows a friend of mine who attends the same lightworkers meetings as me. It feels like we are making ourselves known to each other now, and these ‘coincidences’ are multiplying fast.

For this interview we focused on Elaine’s sound therapy work, which I hope you’ll find interesting. I have also reviewed her book ‘Voices From Our Galaxy’, which gives a great deal more background into her life and experiences with ET’s.

Colin – How did you first become interested in sound therapy, how did you come into contact with it?

Elaine – The beginning came many years ago when I was in Glastonbury when I had a dream, which is unusual for me because I never remember my dreams.

I woke up on this particular morning with a vivid dream in my head that sound could heal. At the time I translated that to mean musical or piano notes and thought that I could record them and play them to people. However as this was a particularly busy time in my life I put it to one side and carried on as before.

Then one day a woman came to my guest house and asked to stay who turned out to be Joan Ocean, and we instantly struck up a friendship, so much so that I suggested she stayed for free. In return she invited me to go stay with her in Hawaii, which is what I eventually did, I didn’t know at that time that she did dolphin swims with people.

Whilst I was there she suggested that I watch a video tape of Shari Edwards who was doing research on sound in Ohio, and this was an absolute eureka moment for me. At this stage she was at the very beginning of putting this work out, claiming that she could heal many different kinds of illness. I thought this is going to be the medicine of the future, the best thing since sliced bread.

I did not know how I would be able to afford to go to the states so soon after my visit to Hawaii, but another miracle happened and I was given exactly the right amount of money for the fare by a dear friend.

When I travelled to meet her I found that the sound therapy was everything she said it was, I saw people barely able to walk, and skipping out, less than an hour later.

There was a female police officer who lived locally and we were doing a test with her eyesight. With her glasses on she could read a paragraph in the newspaper, with her glasses off she could not read the text. When the sound was switched on, she could read everything without her glasses.

I saw how specific one can get with sound, and specific is a key word here. The range of frequencies we use is all within the brainwave range, which is low frequency, and this has a very dramatic and quick effect on the body.

From then on I have been consumed by the subject, I’m so passionate about sound healing because the world of frequency and sound offers an incredible scope for healing right across the board, emotional, physical and chemical.

Colin – How does the sound therapy work?

Elaine - Every frequency has another frequency that cancels it out, so for example there is a frequency for nullifying nuclear fallout, poison in the body, or a virus in the body. We do not need to name the virus or illness, we take a voice print which shows us where the peaks are and then feedback the opposite sound.

For me I have all the evidence I need to know that it works, but for the scientist it is too simple to work. So one of my aims is to show what can be done with it.

Colin – There are a number of books out there that are describing the new sciences, such as Lynne McTaggart’s ‘The Field’ , is sound therapy getting noticed?

Elaine - Well when I read Lynne McTaggart’s book I was so excited I wrote twenty pages of notes as I was reading it. Here she was talking about the field, which is frequency, the zero point field is about frequency, and at last people are putting things together. When we look at dimensions, they are also frequency, so in order to experience a different dimension it is just a matter of resonating at a higher rate, which comes from the kind of thoughts we think, how large our energy field is and such like. So sound and frequency is a universal energy, it touches into every single place you can possible think of.

Colin – When I see people listening to their iPods on the train and blasting their brains out with sound I wonder what kind of impact that is having on them.

Elaine – One thing to remember, the kind of sound therapy I do is very specific, and within a very particular part of the sound spectrum, and it also has a particular wave form. Music is generated in sound waves which are gentler on the body, and generally touch more into the emotional side of the psyche. In truth what kids are doing is enjoying what gives them pleasure, it lifts their emotions. It covers such a huge range of the sound spectrum they are getting a blanket effect on their emotional bodies.

Colin – Did you carry out research of your own or did you follow the findings of the people you were working with?

Elaine – One of the areas of research I have carried out was to do with Dolphins, when I helped a colleague in Tenerife. We measured and took data on children with severe learning difficulties. In this case we took readings before and after their swims with the dolphins. What we discovered was that the sounds from the Dolphins stimulated the children’s body’s chemistry in ways that we do not quite understand.

I then went on to do more studies with Dolphins in Hawaii with Joan and was invited by the Joyful Heart Foundation who help rape crisis victims. I volunteered to do before and after voice prints, and the results there were quite astounding. I found people had made huge emotional and physical changes.

The other area of research came from the data I had gathered from Germany. Some years ago I was with Shari Edwards in Hawaii at a power of sound conference and sound people from all over the world were there. A German called Nicky Reaman was there he helps to run a healing spa attached to a German clinic that helps people with skin diseases and that kind of thing,.

Nicky’s work is called liquid sound which is fantastic, and he invited me to present to the doctors there what I could do with sound. We invited an outside audience as well as the doctors who were there, and during the presentation I was guided to pick someone who was in a wheelchair. He agreed to have his voiceprint taken and I asked him what was wrong, and he advised that he had multiple sclerosis, and had suffered from it for 20 years. I asked him what mobility problems he had and he said “I can’t walk, but I can stand if I hold on to something”.

I was taking his voice print as he was talking and looking at the pattern, as certain diseases have particular patterns, and I thought that this person does not have an MS pattern, it didn’t look right. Intuitively, and sticking my neck out, I asked him if he had ever had an accident, such as falling off a bicycle or something?

At first he could not remember, then he recalled an accident that happened about a year before his problems with his legs started. What showed up on his voice print was that there was one vertebrae that had no energy at all. I decided on the off-chance to give him that frequency and took the risk of asking him if he would stand up, which he did. As I was talking to the doctors he took a huge lurch forward, and stood there and said he felt really strong. The doctors wanted to see this again and asked for a further demonstration the following day. I gave him the sounds on a box to play overnight and then he came back the following day.

We put the sounds on again and this time he took three steps forward, and that night we were all due to go out and he was able to walk up three flights of stairs and back down with only an arm on the doctor’s shoulder for support.

The news and television were called in and they put the whole story on RTL television, so we had a huge influx of people with MS, paralysis, strokes and Parkinson’s disease. So I was able to do the most amazing research on hundreds of people all with the same disease over a period of nine months. I was able to gather huge amounts of data about the different types of MS and the patterns that are there.

The rest of my data has come from years of experience.

Colin – So what was the key yes moment for your research?

Elaine – I’ve had hundreds of yes moments, every time I get a new disease, look at the patterns and I look at the evidence, I find I know the answer, that’s a yes moment.

Colin – So how did you move from the research to developing your own techniques and technologies?

Elaine – Many of the techniques I use now, like the computer programme, have been developed by practitioners for practitioners, which has been a great help. Much of the work I did was left brain work, to find out how these things functioned, but once I have things in my head I then allow myself to make the jump and use my intuitive sense to give my clients something that may not appear in the results.

The tone box was invented by a very dear friend of mine who was taking classes at the same time at me. He just happened to be a computer programmer and electronic engineer. He combined the work we were doing and said he could make a box that generated tones, to do exactly what you want. So the hardware came from him, and if we want any extra features on the box he can do them for us.

Many people will take what we do and use it in their own specialism, for example chiropractors will use sound to strengthen muscles, to shift energy and all kinds of things. Nutritionists use voice analysis to find out where you are deficient in minerals and vitamins and so on. So sound has grown it the applications it can be used in.

We have others who are mathematicians who are working on equations that describe nicotine for smokers, to see what works best.

Colin – How would a patient use the sounds you have prepared for them?

Elaine – Well it depends on how extreme their problem is, if we have someone with MS for example, I would advise them to go home and listen to the sounds 24x7, and that means using the tone box with a headset or an amplified speaker.

Interestingly if you do not want to listen to the sound or do not have and amplified speaker you can unplug the headset and just carry the tonebox on your body and it still works. No-one knows how it works without the sound, but this is how we treat babies and animals. We can also provide the sounds on CD’s.

We need to keep up with technology to provide downloads, but we are not sure if MP3 players can provide the low frequency sound reproduction.

Colin - Do you find that the work you do with sound naturally complements the other work you have done as a healer and intuitive?

Elaine – Yes, if you can bring another layer to the cake by using your intuition then you are enhancing it tremendously.

I’d like to tell you the story of Derek. A number of years ago I was invited to do a radio program for Radio Bristol, and as a result of that I was contacted by a lady from Gloucester who’s husband was diagnosed with senile dementia. It had been coming on for eight years but had been clinically diagnosed for four years.

When Derek arrived it took four of us to carry him in to my sound studio because he had no concept of where his feet were. He could barely speak and the only words I could use for the voice print were ABC and I managed to get a very small print with his wife’s help.

Prior to people coming to me I always ask them to fill out a medical questionnaire so that I can look at the problem and check it out from all angles. I always look into the past history or a client, and it turned out that Derek suddenly came down with an attack of shingles some eight years previously. Not long after this he had gone to hospital to have his gall bladder removed which gave another angle to consider.

Whilst he was in having the operation they detected an aneurysm. When Derek came out he was Ok but he started to forget things, and slowly he became worse and worse until he was in the condition that I first saw him in.

I went on a fair slice of intuition as I had a very small sample and he could not respond to me. I noticed that Derek’s birthday note or frequency was very close to the antidote to the virus that causes shingles. Right next door to this was the neurotransmitter GABA – which I call my miracle Neurotransmitter.

So I began to think that the shingles may have knocked out this neurotransmitter which is where his problems began. I put on the sound of GAB onto the speakers, and he started to respond and scratched himself on the cheek.

All of a sudden he sat up on the couch, swung his legs over, looked at his watch and said to his wife, ‘don’t you think it is time we went home, we have to take the dog out?’

That was the first sentence he had spoken in 2 years. I put a combination of frequencies and put it on his head and it only took 2 of us to get him to the car. Within the next 48 hours he was walking talking and wandering around the house. By the end of the week he could pick up a knife and fork and feed himself, and after two weeks he could dress himself.

Although this did not cure his dementia, it gave him back enough quality of life for his wife to be able to support him at home and ask him questions and he could answer.

It’s things like this that makes everything worthwhile.

An Interview with Chandra Moon

By Colin Whitby

I was introduced briefly to Chandra for the first time when my daughter Jo took me to the launch night for Chandra’s new CD Full Circle. This was quite an amazing event which was the culmination of so many synchronistic events which Chandra alluded to in her introduction. It was this introduction, and her music, which later lead me to ask for an interview to find out more.

Colin – When did you start to think about making a CD, where did it all begin?

Chandra - I’ve always been quite musical but never considered myself an artist as such, I enjoyed playing the piano and playing along in other people’s bands, I did some backing vocals and some flute for people, but I had never done any writing myself.

A few years ago, when I had my 50th birthday a girlfriend of mine gave me a present, it was a book called ‘The Artist’s Way’ by Julia Cameron. The notion of that book is that everyone has a creative side, although some people are blocked and have never discovered their creative voice.

Although a little sceptical at first, the more I read the book and did the exercises the more I realised it really did work. The main part of the book encourages you to write every morning, doing something called ‘morning pages’. The idea is that you write for about 15-20 minutes or 4 pages of complete flow of consciousness writing, you just write whatever comes out. This was a 12 week course that took me 12 months.

By the time I finished the book I had started painting little portraits and was still doing my daily writing, until one day I sat down and wrote what I thought might be a poem, but later realised that it was a song. I then doodled about a bit and wrote my first song.

Colin – How did your song writing progress from there?

Chandra - I would arrive home from my African drumming classes and find after I had gone to bed I’d have these drum beats in my head, then in the middle of the night I would wake up and have words attached to these rhythms.

It was such a strong thing I had to get up and write the words down, then go back to sleep, wake up, get up, write some more and so on. This way I ended up with a song called ‘It’s over so quick’ which I played at the launch gig you came to last Friday. So that song came purely out of a rhythm.

My daughter took me to a song writing group in Bristol and I took along my drum and tried to sing the song to the group using the drum. This proved to be very difficult and I realised that if I wanted to carry on with this I would need to learn the guitar. That’s when I started teaching myself the guitar, and the beginning of my song writing.

Colin - So was song writing a kind of hobby at the time?

Chandra – Very much so, at that time I had no idea it would become such a large part of my life, I was still running a business then. Gradually it took up more and more of my time, and my confidence grew.

The song writing group is a very supportive environment where on the whole you get very positive feedback, and I know that I would not have continued writing if I had not been a member of that group, because I would not have considered my work good enough. Each week I’d work on something new to take to the group which gave me something to look forward to.

Colin – At the gig you mentioned some key events in your life that influenced you.

Chandra – The really biggest thing that happened was the Tsunmi in December 2004 because by Son Daniel was out in Thailand and he rang me on Christmas day to tell me he had just arrived on the Island, although I did not know which island.

On Boxing day my father rang me and said ‘have you seen the news?, there’s been a massive wave and everyone’s been swept away, where’s Daniel he’s not on the coast is he?’ . We put on news 24 and there it all was, it was such a terrible shock.
Thank God my Son was all right.

As a Mother, as a parent, even though I knew my son was all right it was like I connected so strongly, powerfully and spiritually with the people over there, my heart had gone out there too. It was as if my own kids had been drowned and I became quite unwell for about 2 weeks, I could not stop thinking about it and felt terrible.

Out of that came the realisation that life is too short, it made me see through the areas of my life that were fake, it made me question things, I wanted to be doing things that were real as I realised that things could change in an instant. Being in my 50’s I thought that if I don’t do something now with my music, it really would be too late.

I decided to focus on my music and really make something of it. Way back then I had started doodling an album cover called Full Circle with my name on it and a picture of the full moon, because my name means the moon. The title song of the album is called ‘Full Circle’ and it’s about the jolt of the Tsunami and about the journey of coming back to the real me. At that point it was very much a fancy, and I did not think for a second at that point that I really would record an album.

It made me realise the power of visualisation and positive thinking, recognising opportunities and grabbing them1.

Not long after this I met the man who was to produce my album, I met him in Australia when I went to see my spiritual guru. It was one of those synchronistic moments where I met someone from Bristol in Australia, who just happened to be a music producer, and we got chatting. It was then that I thought why just record one track, why not record enough tracks to produce an album, so we started working on it last February (2007).

One thing you learn in the artist’ s way is how to fight off your inner demons or negative opinions of yourself. For example when I was learning my drumming there would be a voice saying ‘you’re a 50 year old woman, what are you doing learning how to drum, you must be mad, who do you think you are?’ and ‘You can’t sing’. I found the artist’s way gave me the tools to counteract these negative voices.

At the gig last week I wanted to say to people that it doesn’t matter if you think you are too old, or that you’re a woman, it’s never too late to have a go, to follow your creative voice. You have to discover what your own strengths are, to go inside yourself, and really work. Last year I think I have worked harder than I have in years, this is despite taking a year off work, there have been hundreds of things to do.

Colin - You have loaded your music up onto the Internet, how has that been working for you?

Chandra -– When I first started writing songs I used the Internet to upload the early recordings, sometimes just ideas, and people would read about me, look at my myspace www.myspace.com/chandramoonsmusic, giving me feedback and then watching how it improved. (not to mention youtube http://youtube.com/user/chandrajmoon). So now they can listen to sampled of the tracks and buy the album http://cdbaby.com/cd/chandramoon.

I have created a wide readership on my blog http://chandramoon.efx2blogs.com/
from all over the world, and I’ve sold albums in Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, America, Canada, literally all around the planet, all because I have created this on-line presence. I’m a sociable person in real life and this carries over to my on-line personality.

Pre-Internet I didn’t think that someone like me, a middle aged woman sitting in Bristol, would have been able to launch her music into the world without a record deal or a promoter. Now if you are a writer, a poet or a painter you can by-pass the need for an agent or manager, certainly in the early stages, by putting things out there on the Internet. There’s hundreds of free services, myspace is free, the blog is free, deviant art where I put my portraits is free, so it is all possible.

Colin - Thank you so much for sharing your journey with us today.

1 After the interview Chandra showed me the images she had created of her Album cover way before she had even thought of recording it. I have to say there was a tangible energy flowing out of them, difficult to describe, but very evident. Some words popped into my head, ‘observe the flow of creation’, and I felt such a strong knowing, this is how it is done.

(have a look at my review of ‘The Secret’ for more on this kind of visualisation) – Colin.

An Interview with Mark Townsend

 By Colin Whitby

When I read Mark’s latest book ‘The Wizard’s Gift’ I thought it would be great to interview him to find out a little more about how the book came about. It was Mark’s background that I found most interesting, here was someone who is both a Christian Priest and a member of the Magic Circle.

I really enjoyed our conversation, I hope you will too.

Colin - So Mark, how did you find yourself moving towards things Magical?

Mark – It goes back a long time, I think I was about 8 or 9 when I first became interested in the magical and the unknown. This would include the likes of Arthur C Clarke and the explorations into the unexplained as well as how to perform magic tricks.

I have always seen the two connected in some way, for example some of the ancient cultures use a certain amount of flamboyant trickery, not to delude or deceive audiences, but to awaken the magic within them. It was quite common in some native cultures to use fire illusions, for example, to create that magical environment to break down the rational mind.

So for quite a number of years I collected books about the unknown and at the same time explored how to do magic in the trickery sense.

Colin – At what point did you move towards becoming a priest?

Mark - I was about 18 years old when I became involved with the Church, first of all the Pentecostal Church, which in a way is a very magical church where there is a lot of emphasis on the supernatural. However any talk of ‘magic’ was very taboo, so I put that to one side for quite a few years.

I went to Israel for about 4 months which was both a frightening place to be but also some of the places I visited were to me very magical, and it had a profound impact on me.

When I came back I could not fit back into the Pentecostal Church so I eventually moved into the Church of England where they were a little more liberal. I found some of the more magical elements like I’d experienced in the Holy Land. I discovered traditions within the more ancient forms of Christianity which were all to do with creating the same sort environments that an illusionist tries to create – symbols that evoke wonder, awe and mystery. I loved the way you could go to a service and did not need to understand it as it was so symbolic, using all of the senses.

I then went on to theological college and that is when the conjuring magic came back into my life. I thought that if I became ordained I would need some kind of hobby, and so when I came back to Hereford I joined the local magic club. I do everything 110% and so within a few months I became a member of some of the bigger magic societies and eventually the magic circle.

When I was finally ordained I very quickly became know as the conjuring curate because I would use a lot of magical illusions in the talks I did. In those days, about 10 years ago, it was very safe to carry out illusionary magic, and I was very careful not to venture into any other kind of magic, where I would most likely be misunderstood.

Colin – So what kind of magic would you perform in the church?

Mark - A lot of the magic I performed would be standard illusions with great story lines, although I might be a bit embarrassed to go back and do them now, it was part of my development at the time.

I then made a big change and moved to (Leominster which is where I now live) and became the Vicar of the huge Priory Church. It was a pretty tough time. While the town’s people took to me (and my eccentricities) wonderfully, the expectations from the Church were impossibly high. I felt I did not have the right appearance and was not of mature enough years to gain the respect of some (more powerful) members of the congregation. A number of things added up to a pretty serious breakdown which is when I started branching out in the spiritual sense.

I started looking into things that perhaps a lot of Christians think they shouldn’t dabble in. I started to read some of the books you get in the MBS and New Age shops for example and became interested in some of the eastern mystics and the more modern day mystical writers/thinkers like Eckhart Tolle. I found their messages incredibly powerful and they made far more sense to me (to be honest) than much of what comes from mainstream Christianity. The Conversations with God books are quite breathtaking.

Colin – Yes both of those books have been very helpful in our household too.

Mark – There are a huge number of Christian writers who are inspired by Eastern thought, who I have a huge amount of respect for. Looking at my bookshelf now there are people like Elaine MacInnes, Anthony De Mello, Brother Martin, Bede Griffiths and Richard Rohr, who’s books are awesome. Then there is the Native American/Canadian inspired Oriah Mountain Dreamer’s ‘The Invitation’ which is a wonder, and Richard Carlson’s incredibly helpful his psychological books.

Colin - How did you come to write and publish books yourself?

Mark - One of my friends who ran a retreat in Winford in Bristol asked me if I would run a retreat involving magic. I came up with the idea of putting together a retreat called ‘The Gospel of Falling Down’ which reflected my life to a certain extent, I had perfected the art of falling down in my ministry, but for every fall a little bit of light came through.

My idea for this retreat would be that people could take a good look at their lives and begin to relax and start to be thankful for who they are rather than the usual religious notion that we have got to keep changing, achieving, climbing this ladder. To me it is in the falling from the ladder that we actually find ourselves, always back where we began but with new eyes.

So some of what I did in the retreat was to use magical stories, analogies and illusions that told that tale of people who went on a journey in order to come back and find what they were looking for, right under their feet. The way that they find that is by going out and looking for it elsewhere.

Colin -– That reminds me of the Alchemist by Paulo Coelho.

Mark – It’s the story of the Alchemist, the story of the prodigal son, the story of the Wizard of Oz, it’s in so many mythologies. The weird thing is we have the truth at the beginning of the journey but we can’t see it, and it’s as though we need to look for it in the wrong place in order to come back and find we had it all along.

What I did for that retreat was use a lot magical images to sort of hit home that point and then get people to open up and share those experiences, and it was very powerful, everyone was so open. The illusions and stories enabled people to share of themselves which really helped everyone learn from each other.

That then became the basis of my first book, The Gospel of Falling Down, which I was amazed that a publisher took.

What then happened over the last few years is that I have became more willing to say that magic does not have to be just about illustrating truths, it can also be something that we do not have to explain, so I now use magic to bring people back to a child like state where real magic is possible.

Mind oriented magic puts on hold the left brain, it quietens even the most sceptical mind, and brings it back to that state where anything is possible. I use magic to encourage that part of us that we don’t often listen to, the Wizard within or the voice of wisdom that guides us, and sometimes we just need to get the analytical mind out of the way in order to hear it. The magic works a little bit like a mantra for someone who meditates, and there are times when things happen that neither I nor the people involved can explain, which I find fascinating. It’s kind of ‘spiritual entertainment’ in a way, I’m feeling my way at the moment and it is terribly exciting.

Colin - You mentioned the Wizard, is that when you started thinking about writing another book?

Mark – I was drawn back to re-reading my spiritual journal and I realised that there were two very different voices, there was the wining, defensive and very worried person, always looking to try to please people and try to do his best. This is what I call the little me and is really the voice of the ego, the manufactured self.

The other voice was very calm and was almost in answer to the questions from little me, although both voices were me, but one of the voices was very calm, very mature, and only occasionally shows up, and this is what I call the divine me.

I think this is what comes out in books like ‘Conversations with God’ and other books that have been written like that. It may well be God, or our deeper self, but it is a conversation that I think is in us all the time. So my new book points us to the fact that we know our own answers, but sometimes those answers are so mind blowing we tend not to believe them the first time around.

I thing if more people looked for their Wizard within instead of looking external there would be a lot more peace in the world.

Colin - I think the encouraging thing is that there are many books like yours available for people when they are looking for guidance or new ways of looking at things.

Mark – Another book I love (and one I actually I mention in The Wizard’s Gift) is a real book written back in the 30s called ‘God Calling’. It is an amazing manuscript by two severely broken women who heard this inner voice of wisdom and wrote down their conversations with it.

Colin – Well Mark thank you so much for spending some time talking today, it’s been a great pleasure.

Mark – You’re welcome.

(have a look at Mark’s web site at http://www.magicofsoul.com)

You can also listen to Mark talking to June-Elleni on www.myspiritradio.com
Her show is called Feed Your Mind Change Your Life