Jennifer Lisa Vest Transcript

Jennifer Lisa Vest Interview

Summary:

• Jennifer Lisa’s background: Jennifer Lisa is a scientist, philosopher, intuitive, and author of the book “The Ethical Psychic”. She shares her experiences of having psychic gifts since childhood, such as seeing spirits, remembering past lives, visiting other dimensions, and having precognition. She also talks about her training in various spiritual traditions, such as indigenous philosophy, Reiki, quantum healing, and mediumship.
• The Ethical Psychic: Jennifer Lisa explains the main points of her book, which is a guide for psychics, healers, and spiritual teachers to be ethical and responsible in their work. She discusses the traits of an ethical psychic, such as being of service, being authentic, being self-aware, learning from mistakes, and being humble. She also talks about the challenges and pitfalls that psychics may face, such as ego, arrogance, greed, fraud, abuse, and cultural appropriation. She gives advice on how to avoid these problems and how to maintain integrity and professionalism in the field.
• Other topics: Jennifer Lisa also covers topics such as the role of plant medicine and psychedelics in spiritual work, the nature of time and reality, the connection between physics and spirituality, the importance of training and apprenticeship, and the need for a spiritual renaissance in the world. She also answers some questions from the audience.

Full Transcript:

Rick:  Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of conversations with spiritually awakening people. We’ve done nearly 700 of them now. If this is new to you and you’d like to check out previous ones, please go to www.batgap.com and look under the past interviews menu. This program is made possible through the support of appreciative listeners and viewers, so if you’d like to help support it, if you appreciate it, go to the website and there are PayPal buttons on every page. My guest today is Jennifer Lisa Vest. Jennifer Lisa is a scientist philosopher intuitive. She holds a PhD in indigenous philosophy from UC Berkeley, an MA in history from Howard, and a BA in physics from Hampshire College. Her first career was as a philosophy professor at Seattle University and the University of Central Florida. Spiritually, Jennifer Vest is a medical intuitive and an Akashic Records healer, at least reader, is certified as a quantum healing hypnosis technique practitioner and a master Reiki practitioner and has been trained in the traditions of African-American Hoodoo, Native American sweat lodge, Jamaican revivalism, Trinidadian shango, and spiritualism from community elders. As you probably hear in our conversation, she’s big on training, not just sort of hanging out a shingle and doing your thing, but being adequately trained by people who are qualified to train you before trying to do something. So we’ll talk about that. But anyway, Jennifer wrote a book called “The Ethical Psychic” which I enjoyed very much, and as you may know, I’m part of an organization called the Association for Spiritual Integrity, and when I read the book I thought, “Well, we, the other folks in this, on the board of directors of that organization, need to read this too.” So Jennifer graciously allowed me to send them copies of it, and at least one of them is listening to the audiobook, I think. But that association doesn’t, you know, limit, it’s not just focused on psychics, although there are people in that sort of niche who are our members, but it’s, our membership, over disciplines and traditions, and what we’re doing, I think, is increasingly appreciated in the broader spiritual community. So we’re going to use her book as an outline of sorts, the chapter titles and the subtitles, to discuss various points that she considers important for a professional psychic, but all these points apply equally, most of them apply equally, to any sort of spiritual practitioner or teacher. Okay, so, but before I get into that, let’s talk a little bit more about you, Jennifer. It sounds like you had certain gifts from early childhood, and certain elders in your family and so on who recognized those gifts and encouraged you. So let’s start talking about your history a little bit before we get into your book.

Jennifer Lisa: Well, thanks for having me. Sure. Let’s see, where should I start? I remember my birth, I remember all the spirits in the hospital, and for as long as I can remember, I’ve always had all of these spirit teachers around me, guiding me and teaching me.

Rick:  Do you see them, or you just intuit their presence?

Jennifer Lisa: Well, you know, both. I don’t see them as much anymore. I can see them when I want to. When I was younger, it was more something where I was more aware of them, you know, visibly. I actually got to a certain point in my life when I was in my, I think, 30s, where I decided I didn’t want to have objective clairvoyance anymore. I didn’t want to be walking around and seeing spirits anymore, because I found it disruptive. And so I just said, “Okay, I don’t want, you’re not allowed to appear to me this way anymore.” And from that point on, I don’t tend to see spirits out in the world when I’m walking around. It’s when I sit down and make a, you know, and set the intention to talk to them, and I close my eyes to look at them, because I don’t like to have my eyes open and see spirits walking around, because then you don’t know. Are you seeing spirits? Are you hallucinating? Are you crazy? Right? So I had some friends when I was younger who did develop various forms of psychosis and schizophrenia and whatnot, and I think I decided at that point that I wanted to make sure that I was always tuning in spiritually and not having, you know, mental issues. And so I did start to kind of change the way I worked in light of those experiences with some of my friends. And so, you know, objective clairvoyance is when you just, your eyes are open and you’re just seeing spirits the way you see everything else. And subjective clairvoyance is when you see it in your head, you know, and close your eyes and you just see it inside. And so I switched to subjective clairvoyance at a certain point. As a kid, I would see spirits kind of out in the world, hear them, feel them, and I just had a lot of scary experiences, and that’s why I changed the way I worked. I also had some great teachers in mediumship who taught me that I’m in control of how I communicate with spirits. And when I was younger, I didn’t know that, and so, you know, I had a lot of scary experiences because I didn’t know that I was in control of the communication. When you’re a kid, you kind of think that you’re just the victim of, or at the receiving end of, whatever spirits want to do. And so I had, as a child, a lot of nightmares. I had a lot of, you know, dead people hanging out in my bedroom, talking about their deaths. I had, and so that made me have kind of a love-hate relationship with the gifts. At the same time, I had these spirit teachers who were taking me out of my body at night and taking me to spirit school, which was nice, and I was in this classroom with all these little balls of lights, and I had a very strong connection to this group of classmates that we were in what people probably today would call a soul family together, or soul grouping. And so I had this awareness very early on that I was in this group, that I was not alone, but I was angry. I remember when I was young, I was angry because there were 12 of us, or there were 13 of us, and 12 of them were on the other world, and I was the only one who incarnated. And I thought, “Why did I have to come to Earth? It’s so dark and dismal down here, and it’s so light and beautiful up there.” And they were like, “You’re the lucky one. You get to go to Earth.” And I’m like, “Doesn’t feel very lucky.” And so I was kind of angry about it when I was younger, but my guides would take me to different places also. Sometimes they would take me to different parts of the world. Sometimes they would take me into the future or the past. I was shown all my past lives when I was about 12, and I wrote them down. I remember I found the notes when I was older, where I just written down a list of all these lives and deaths. And the benefit of that was that I didn’t have a fear of death. From an early age, I had no fear of death because I remember dying many times, and it was always a nice thing. I mean, once you get to the other side, it’s always a nice thing. The dying part’s hard.

Rick:  You’re right.

Jennifer Lisa: But once you get past the dying part, it’s quite lovely.

Rick:  Yeah. Woody Allen said, “I don’t mind dying. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.”

Jennifer Lisa: Right? Right. Can we just skip that part? So I was always getting training from my spirit teachers. At a certain point in my 20s, I remember they showed me all of these catastrophes and genocides that were going to happen in the future. And again, it was very hard to watch. So again, I had this love-hate relationship with my gifts. Even in my 20s, I was like, “Do I really want to know all this?” And when I was a kid, I would see the auras around trees. And I used to spend a lot of time in nature by myself. And I would go into other dimensions. There was this one little hill near my grandparents’ house. And when I went up on that hill, you could look across this valley and see the other side. And sometimes I would go up there, and I would be in the same place, but I would just transition to a different version of that place, which I assumed was a different time or a different dimension. I’m not really sure. But the trees changed, the plants changed, and it was a different kind of a time. And so I used to do that as a kid. I used to see little people, what we call fairies or gnomes or whatever, when I was young. And I used to feel people’s… I was very empathic, and that was very challenging. I was feeling other people’s illnesses and feelings. I couldn’t be in hospitals because I could feel everyone’s sickness, but I could also… I was also aware of all the spirits in the hospital. The hospital’s haunted. It’s full of dead people who died in the hospital and who are very upset about it.

Rick:  Most hospitals are?

Jennifer Lisa: Yeah. And until they start doing ceremonies, it’s gonna always be like that. They should be doing ceremonies. All those people dying in the hospital without ceremonies, you know? And so you have people who died and they just weren’t prepared to die, or they were shocked by it, or they didn’t have the right understanding of death. And then they’re like hanging out in the hospital trying to get their body back or trying to, you know, fix the problem, or they’re angry with their doctors and they’re following them around, or they’re… There’s different reasons people stick around. But the hospitals are full of that, and it doesn’t have to be that way. That’s another conversation.

Rick:  Yeah. I interviewed a guy a year or two ago named Father Nathan Castle, who stumbled into this ability to help stuck souls cross over, and that’s what he does now. I guess he’s a regular priest, but he just has this ability and the church doesn’t give him a hard time about it. He manages to help people who’ve been, who were in some limbo state, you know, because they died suddenly and they’re not happy about it, to move on.

Jennifer Lisa: It’s such an important gift. We need to do that more often. I often tell people about Edith Fiore. She wrote a book called The Unquiet Dead, and she has a script in the back of the book that you can use to help guide spirits to the light. I’ve used that on occasion. I found it useful.

Rick:  Yeah.

Jennifer Lisa: Yeah, we need more people doing that work.

Rick:  Yeah. So, there are a few things in what you just said that I’d like to ask you more details about before we go on to other things. So, you know, you mentioned past lives. Is there anything noteworthy about that, or is it just a whole bunch of lives that you went through?

Jennifer Lisa: Well, you know, as a kid it was just a kind of a jumble. One thing that I remember, I don’t remember a lot of them, but I remembered that I had this strong memory of how peaceful drowning was. And yet, later on, when I was in my early 20s, I almost drowned in Santa Monica, and it was not peaceful at all.

Rick:  Must have been a struggle, yeah.

Jennifer Lisa: It’s because you’re fighting to live.

Rick:  Right.

Jennifer Lisa: I wasn’t trying to die, you know, I was young. But I do remember that kind of clearly, that peacefulness of being underwater and then dying. I remember that I was, the other thing I can remember about that is that I was every kind of person, and so I didn’t have any strong attachment when I was young to being like one gender or one kind of looking person or anything because it was clear that I had been everybody.

Rick:  Yeah.

Jennifer Lisa: I’d been Chinese, I’d been African, I’d been Indian, I’d been white, you know, I’d just been a lot of different males, females, I’ve been a lot of different things in past lives, looked a lot of different ways, had a lot of different types of lives. When I was older, I started to do a lot of past life regression work with hypnotherapists, and then I started to get more detailed past life information. And now, at this point in my life, I can just go in on my own and get information. So just a couple of days ago, I ended up visiting a past life. Now I’m forgetting what prompted it, but you know, sometimes something will happen and it’ll take me to a past life. Like, I’ll meet somebody and we’ll have a past life connection, and then suddenly I’ll go into that past life and see what our connection was.

Rick:  Yeah. Hey, I’m wondering something. I have a friend, good friend, who just the other day told me that she actually tunes into people’s past lives. She’d never told me about that. And I was curious because a couple of people who claim to have some psychic abilities told me that I was one particular person who was pretty famous. And I said, “What do you think? Was I him?” And she said, “I’m getting like 15%.” And I said, “What do you mean 15%?” She said, “Well, we’re kind of a conglomeration when we come into this life. We’re not necessarily one entire soul that existed in a previous life. We could pick up 15% of this one and 20% of that one.” And that differed from everything I’ve ever understood about this. I always assumed that the, you know, one soul transmigrates from life to life to life. But I guess in Buddhism they think of it more that way, like you take a bucket of karma from the ocean and it’s mixed with all kinds of things. Whereas in Hinduism, there tends to be more, you know, one particular soul evolves through a series of bodies. So, do you have any insights on that?

Jennifer Lisa: Yeah, I think my understanding matches more closely with like Vedantin philosophy. This idea that we have a soul and then above that, you know, we have an oversoul and above that we’re all connected in the Brahman, you know. We have a Atman, a little Jiva, a little personality on earth. That’s very similar to my experience. So, I’m aware that I have what might be called a soul or an oversoul, but that that soul has incarnated into multiple lifetimes. And the wisdom obtained from all those lifetimes is available to me if I know how to meditate and access the higher self and I can draw down from that wisdom. It was explained to me that our understanding of past lives as being sequential or linear is not quite accurate. It’s just the way that our human minds have to understand it. That in fact, we are living all of our lives simultaneously and that’s why different lifetimes that we’re living can inform other lifetimes that we’re living. So, I’ve had the experience, I mean, at nighttime, you know, a lot of us go out of our bodies. You know, I’m Seminole and the Seminole believe that everyone leaves their body at night and we just think of it as dreams, but we all leave our body at night. Some of us just float above, some of us go on journeys and depending upon your level of awareness and depending upon your life purpose and your soul purpose, you may be involved in different things at night. So, like at night, I’m involved in a lot of like healing and committee work out of body. There are other people that are going to spirit school. Like when I was younger, I went to spirit school. Some of us now teach spirit school when we’re out of body at night and some of us will visit our other lifetimes and so there was a time in my life when I used to wake up in the morning and have to ask myself, “Okay, which life is this?” Remind myself of my name and the location and the year. Okay, this is the Jennifer Lisa life where I’m living in the 21st century, right?

Rick:  Yeah.

Jennifer Lisa: And that’s because I do, I have some awareness of some of my other lives. Most people don’t have an awareness of their other lives and that’s because it’s not necessary for their life purpose and so a lot of us, a lot of people who incarnate don’t have to remember their past lives and would find it distracting or confusing if they did and so there’s a veil of forgetfulness over them and they just kind of focus on this life. And then there are others of us who because we came here to do a certain type of work that requires us to be able to see things so that we can teach and help others. Those of us then are given access to other lifetimes and to a greater awareness of the soul. So the way I see it is like there’s little me, little Jennifer Lisa, this one little incarnation and then above that there’s this higher self or soul and like I see it like a triangle where it’s divided into little slivers. Each sliver is a different lifetime and there’s hundreds of lifetimes and they’re all kind of feeding information into this one soul. But then above that we have what you might call an over soul like Jane Roberts called the over soul where there are lots of souls that together create an even larger entity and then each of those is kind of feeding wisdom from our experiences into this larger understanding. If you go all the way up, we’re all one.

Rick:  One differentiated ocean. Yes.

Jennifer Lisa: All of our individual souls are all part of this larger creator. So that’s my understanding of it.

Rick:  That’s cool. I resonate with that myself and this whole thing about lifetimes being simultaneous. I’m just listening to the next person I’m going to interview. She’s a physicist and most of it is over my head but she’s talking about time at the moment and how it appears linear to us but that’s just sort of a human filtering mechanism and that in fact it’s not as linear as it might appear. So you know that could account for the simultaneous lifetimes thing.

Jennifer Lisa: Yeah, I did my first, when I was in college, I did my first independent study on the philosophy of time. That was the conclusion I came to. I was looking at philosophy and physics and that conclusion I came to was that it’s a perception that we perceive life this way. That we perceive time that’s just a construct that we need as humans because anyone who’s spent any amount of time out of the body will be aware of the timeless nature of existence and the way in which we can move through time as if there are no boundaries.

Rick:  Yeah.

Jennifer Lisa: Past and future.

Rick:  Well speaking of future, you also mentioned that early on you had, I guess you were in your 20s, you had some visions of catastrophic future scenarios, you know genocides and things like that. Have those come to pass or are we talking about something that might come in the coming decades that would be rather catastrophic?

Jennifer Lisa: I think they’ve come to pass. Like I saw things like the genocide in …

Rick:  Rwanda?

Jennifer Lisa: Rwanda.

Rick:  Yeah.

Jennifer Lisa: I saw these terrible, terrible images of all of these bodies stacked up in like warehouses or something and then later I saw those pictures in the news.

Rick:  Yeah.

Jennifer Lisa: That were reminiscent of the visions I had been shown in my, in my 20s but I think it happened maybe about 10 years later or something. And then a lot of the things I saw, the natural disasters I think we’ve seen, happening. You know having all these hurricanes and flooding and fires and…

Rick:  Which are probably gonna get more intense as we go along.

Jennifer Lisa: Yeah. I feel like I’ve seen a lot of it happen already.

Rick:  Yeah. I’m gonna interview another guy at the end of this month who wrote a book named called Breaking Together. His name is Jem Bendel and his basic premise is that all the whole society is structured unsustainably and that we’re inevitably headed for some kind of major collapse. Whether you look at economics or politics or climate change or you know this that or the other thing. Everything is based on the sort of the premise of the possibility of continuous growth and unlimited growth but the resources which would enable that are you know reaching an overshoot point where we can’t really rely on them anymore. So I mean do you have any prognostications about that sort of thing?

Jennifer Lisa: I do not. You know I do do some future work. I try to limit it. I’m not fond of precognition as a gift. It’s something I have but it’s not something I like. And it’s precisely because a lot of the things that those of us who see the future can see, we often see dramatic events. And the thing about the future is it’s not set. There’s no future that’s already there.

Rick:  right

Jennifer Lisa: There are possibilities and so anytime you predict the future you’re predicting a possibility and the timeline can change and we may not reach that possibility. And so I think when you hear about people like that saying oh the current system is unsustainable and we’re headed for a collapse. I mean certainly there’s a lot of evidence to make that claim scientifically but as a psychic I’m not going to forecast doom because it’s not consistent with my life purpose.

Rick:  Right.

Jennifer Lisa: So I don’t even when I get information that’s scary like you know in my podcast Journal of a Medical Intuitive I was talking a lot about the coronavirus during the height of the pandemic and I was getting a lot of you know high-level information including predictions and a lot of them did come to pass but I didn’t include on my podcast everything I got because anything I got that I thought might inspire hysteria or fear or you know doom I don’t share because that’s not consistent with what I came to do. I came to help shift the consciousness up and when people enter into you know, fear patterns they find it very difficult to move forward and to make positive change. So I do tend to avoid any predictions like that and then there were some people and maybe this author you’re talking about that’s their job like they came to do that work. They came to enlighten people about those, those scenarios and those possibilities. So yeah you know there were some things I predicted about the coronavirus which you know I didn’t want to because I was worried it was going to inspire fear like when it first hit people didn’t think it was a really big deal at first and I said right away it’s going to kill five million people and I got some pushback from some of some people who listen to my podcast and they were like how can you say that that’s horrible, that’s really scary

Rick:  And I think it might have killed 20 million worldwide I’m not sure if they know exactly but it did turn out…

Jennifer Lisa: Yeah, but there was something I was given about there was this, this kind of turning point that if we hit five million there was the potential for there to be real change and and if we went past like ten million or something that it would become debilitating and I don’t know there were different things in the prediction and some people were very upset about that and it did turn out to be the case whatever that number was but at the time it felt like that information was going to help people to kind of get serious about it and and take, and take steps in a positive direction you know and so that’s I you know that’s that’s something I think is important we’re doing when we’re doing predictions is it going to be helpful to people doesn’t have a purpose when we tell right this happen how’s it going to help.

Rick:  Right. And I’m with you on the elevating consciousness point because whatever the future may be the most important thing is for consciousness to be elevated and collective consciousness around the world that’s where the greatest leverage lies and that’s been a motivating factor for me since I was in my late teens early 20s it’s deeper it’s a sort of deep motivation for why even do this show but in any case and that’s what this guy Jim Bendel has come around to that sort of a spiritual renaissance of some sort is our our greatest hope in terms of mitigating you know much more dire consequences, anyway.

Jennifer Lisa: Yeah and I think that’s that’s the thing is that if we look at the current course we’re on we can certainly predict a lot of bad things and and yes it’s not sustainable but but we can also see that there is this incredibly there’s a there’s rising consciousness globally and that’s a whole different track that we’re on.

Rick:  Right

Jennifer Lisa: And if we get on that track then everything changes.

Rick:  And that might be why a lot of things are being shaken now because there are a lot of sort of entrenched systems that really wouldn’t fit very well in a society of much higher consciousness so perhaps their their foundations are being pulled out from under them a little bit.

Jennifer Lisa: Right. That’s usually the way we learn you know coz we’re hard-headed.

Rick:  Yeah. Yeah. All righty well let’s get into your book so the book is called, The Ethical Psychic; you have a copy of it there?

Jennifer Lisa: No.

Rick:  Don’t worry about it yeah.

Jennifer Lisa: When we started I was gonna get it and I we were talking and I didn’t grab it let me see if I can nearby you know my whole life is in a suitcase right now so…

Rick:  Yeah

Jennifer Lisa: Where’s my book? My sister has several copies downstairs like…

Rick:  Oh don’t worry about it. I’m sure it looks nice. I had the electronic version myself so I don’t think I saw the cover but I’ll put a link to it on on your batgap page and people can get it and so we’re gonna the outline of the book the chapter titles and sub and sub headings are a very nice outline that we can go right through and and strip to structure this conversation so the the first chapter and is called trait the traits of an ethical psychic and remember we’re not just talking about psychics here given the nature of this show we’re talking about spiritual teachers healers psychics anybody in this kind of genre this this, this area most of the points you make, apply to all of them so these traits traits number one and I think this is good that you made this number one is being of service. Why, what if that’s not your motivation why are you doing, would you be doing it?

Jennifer Lisa: Oh you know you’d be surprised a lot of people work as a psychic without being motivated by the goal of being of service and you could think of it the way you think about any gifts you know if somebody’s a very good carpenter or they’re very good at speak public speaking they don’t necessarily think oh how could I use this gift to be of service some people just think oh how can I make money with this gift and the same thing happens with psychics is some people are like oh I’ve got these great gifts how can I make money with it you know or how can I use it to kind of spring myself into into fame how can I get status or, or fame with my gifts and some people who go into it thinking they want to be of service can get really corrupted by the temptation of money or fame and so that’s part of why I wrote the book and why I put that in there is because I’ve seen that happen I’ve seen people who may start off with good intentions get a lot of attention get a lot of success start making a lot of money and then they kind of forget why they originally started doing this work.

RICK:  Yes, I’ve seen that too. It kind of goes to your head if you have all these adoring, you know people batting their eyes at you and you know all this you start making some pretty good money and so on and so forth it’s I think that’s why in many spiritual traditions there’s a kind of a long apprenticeship even if you achieve some spiritual awakening it’s like okay now wait another 10 years before you start to teach.

Rick:  Exactly. I mean that’s one of the things I’m always trying to impress upon my students and it’s kind of challenging in the kind of modern West that we’re in because there’s this expectation in our current society that you can just go take a weekend course and then call yourself an expert in something that you learned over the weekend and so people do that they take a weekend Reiki class and they’re like I’m a Reiki master now and it’s like no you’re not you know, the way I was taught Reiki it took a year just to get the training and then you’re supposed to spend a year you know practicing and then you’re supposed to spend several years before you even think about teaching it but it’s like in most in most indigenous cultures that if you are a medicine person or you have some gift first of all, the expectation is always that you’re using your gifts for the community to be of service and the expectation also is that you are being trained by somebody and that you are yeah, going to be in a long apprenticeship program of some kind and so because we don’t have all of those apprenticeship programs in place today a lot of indigenous cultures have been you know, eroded or stuffs had to go underground there’s been a lot of oppression of course a lot of indigenous practices, African, Native American Polynesian, have been outlawed for the last several hundred years and they’re just starting to rise back up and so there’s a lot of reasons why it’s not so easy to get the same training that maybe our ancestors were able to get but even though that’s the case there’s no reason why we can’t set that up as our goal and have our own you know, forms of apprenticeship so you know I got training by a whole lot of people and took a lot of classes. Thank you. My brother-in-law was nice enough to…

Rick:  Oh, there’s the book, there it is.

Jennifer Lisa: Isn’t it pretty

Rick:  Yes. It’s very nice and so and what you’re saying here obviously is something we would we would hope that our brain surgeon or our airline pilot or you know one of these other types of professions have had, you know…

Jennifer Lisa: I understand it in certain fields but what I tell people is that even if you’re not enrolled formally in an apprenticeship program you can treat your gift that way so like after I got so much training from so many people I still didn’t go into practice. I didn’t hang a shingle I went and I volunteered for many years. I helped everybody for free. I helped all my friends and family. I started volunteering at a church. I volunteered at metaphysical bookstores then I started working for people at very low rates right because I need the practice. You need the apprenticeship, you need to keep practicing and getting better before you’re actually going to make this a profession and so there’s ways for us to first of all make sure we get lots of training from as many teachers as we can and then also be slow and cautious before we start to kind of set ourselves up as practitioners, of you know of any of these whether it’s your healer or a psychic before you set up practice you you make sure have I gone through enough training have I have I practiced enough, you know.

Rick:  Yeah and I think all that relates to the being of service point because if we really want to be a service then we we don’t want to you know, be a rank beginner if we’re actually dealing with other human beings we want to make sure that we’re not going to disserve or harm them in any way by not knowing what we’re doing so it behooves us to you know be really well trained before we before we get serious about it.

Jennifer Lisa: Yeah. Yeah, you know that’s the thing is that you know what I what I argue in the book is that the way that you become an ethical psychic is you have to be very vigilant and very self-reflective about whether or not anything you are doing or saying could possibly harm another person.

RICK:  That’s a good one. Y. That’s point number three here being self-aware.

Jennifer Lisa: Yeah and so you know being self-aware is about a few different things knowing what your gifts are knowing what your limitations are knowing what your purpose is because we didn’t all come to do the same work and we don’t all have the same gifts and you, we could all take the same class and you know say Reiki or medical intuition but we wouldn’t all necessarily be good enough at it to really be of service in the world and so we have to figure out what is it I’m really meant to be doing what is it, what are my gifts really pushing me in the direction of and because what happens is sometimes people they want to become something because it’s popular it’s the new thing oh you know I want to become a psychic detective because that sounds cool but then they don’t really have the proper gifts to do that work and instead of, instead of kind of being self-aware of the fact that oh you know I’m not really that good at this maybe I should do something else they might just go ahead and advertise that they do that work people are coming to you who are who are dealing with really serious issues like missing children and and they’re counting on you and you’re not you’re not really helping them you may even be harming them and so not being self-aware of what your limitations are and what your gifts are can end up really hurting your client.

Rick:  And that relates to point number two also which is being authentic, not pretending to be something that you aren’t.

Jennifer Lisa: Yeah, so being authentic is about being authentic to your you know your lineage what’s your cultural background are you trying to culturally appropriate someone else’s culture and set yourself up as an expert on someone else’s culture without being given the proper training and permission because it’s popular or because you can make a lot of money doing it or have certain status by calling yourself a medicine person when you aren’t actually trained in that, in that tradition. You see this a lot with ayahuasca with shamanism with people calling themselves shamans or trying to lead ayahuasca ceremonies and they weren’t actually trained how to do them that could be very dangerous for a participant because whenever you’re taking whenever you’re working with plant medicine there’s the potential for you to have some out-of-body experiences, some travel to other dimensions and altered states to have spirits come and communicate with you and if you don’t have a medicine person they’re keeping you safe during that experience you can have first of all, a very bad trip a bad experience but you can also have some damage to your aura and you can have some kind of long-lasting impact. Some people even develop mental illness after doing too many bad you know, hallucinogenic trips because they didn’t have a medicine person there protecting them making sure they were properly prepared for the experience making sure that they were protecting them from whatever spirits showed up and so that you know you can really harm people by pretending to be a ceremonial leader but you don’t have the gifts like if you don’t if you’re not a clairvoyant if you can’t see spirit and you’re running a ceremony you’re not gonna see any bad spirits showing up creating problems and so you’re not gonna be able to protect those people and you have to not only be able to see spirit but you have to also know how to remove spirit that’s negative like you have to have spirit release gifts as well if you’re working in a ceremony like that so, so yeah when people are not being authentic they sometimes pretend to be something they’re not and on this …

Rick:  On the ayahuasca point, I mean as you know ayahuasca and psilocybin and other psychedelics are huge these days and you know going wild and there’s some really good serious research taking place at Johns Hopkins and there’s some really good practitioners who seem to be very well trained and, and, and serious about what they do but what is your sense of the ratio between the numbers of people engaging in these things and the numbers of people qualified to actually serve as shamans or guides.

Jennifer Lisa: Well, you know I do think it’s changing. I’m seeing that there are these programs being created by therapists where they’re creating kind of structured structured programs where their clients come to them and do micro dosing and sometimes macro dosing with psilocybin and some of these other kind of derivatives of plant medicine and they’re able to use that to help them with specific mental health issues like depression and they’ve done a lot of research showing that it’s very helpful with depression and bipolar and certain suicide PTSD there’s a lot of there’s a lot of ailments that can be helped by working with these medicines and so I do think that’s a good and that’s a kind of a new model that’s not a working with a shaman or a ceremonious that’s working with a therapist but the therapists are being trained in how to work with the plant medicine and so I think that’s very exciting that we have these kind of hybrid programs coming up which are you know kind of combining different traditions and I feel like that’s a responsible way to go about it because these people are actually getting trained to run these sessions. They’re not just going into their session rooms with their clients and saying let’s try some psilocybin this week you know. I read it’s good for your problems you know, that would be irresponsible but the people who are actually getting trained going to these institutes and getting trained how to be a psychotherapist who also works with plant medicine in a responsible way I just think that’s a different way to work and but what I what I’m concerned about when I talked about in the book is people who are who are not really being trained by anybody they’re just going down to Peru having a few experiences and coming up here and deciding to recreate those experiences with other people without really any preparation or training.

Rick:  Yeah, there’s just getting some acid or psilocybin from the local guy on the corner and going doing it with friends you know which is what I did in the 60s you have no idea what we were doing.

Jennifer Lisa: And the thing is sometimes that works out for people sometimes it doesn’t so it’s a risk that you take when you when you basically don’t respect the plant medicine so when people treat it like a recreational drug the way I have been trained that’s disrespectful to the plant to just treat it like it’s a drug. In a ceremony what you’re doing is you’re you’re, you have certain like rituals and protocols that allow you to show your respect but really a big part of the ritual is to get your mind in the right frame of mind and to make sure you’re ready to do it and so we do things like have everybody sit and play music or you know sing or chant or burn you know have smoke palo santo or sage burning and and that’s because it helps people prepare people to be in the right frame of mind to go into the experience and then we have people who you know and with a lot of these plant medicines if you go to a traditional ceremonialist they’ll have you restrict your diet before you take them you don’t just take it on a full stomach you might fast for a period of days or you might have a certain diet and that’s to to make sure you’re not going to have a bad experience you’re not going to be vomiting a lot you’re not gonna you know get sick they’re preparing you and then they’ll have talks with you before you do it like okay why do you want to have this experience with the plant medicine what what are your issues what are your problems what do you want to what do you want to deal with and they’ll help people go into the experience without a lot of fear because if you go into an experience that involves an altered state with fear that’s going to take you to the lower astral realm where you’re going to be engaging in all kinds of fear-based illusions you know you’re going to be caught up in and kind of nightmare scenarios and so you you talk to the to the person first and you find out and you help them prepare you know there’s just a lot that can go into you know preparing for a session and if you’re not if you don’t know how to do that you’re gonna have people coming to you who are coming to have an experience because they’re in crisis in their life and you’re not a therapist you’re not a medicine person you don’t know how to help a person in crisis but now you have a person in crisis in an altered state and that’s just a recipe for disaster.

Rick:  Yeah and I mean societal implication of all this is you know if, if it gets out of control and there’s and there are disasters and you know casualties then we might end up like we did in the 60s with the whole thing being clamped down again legally so I think a lot of people who are taking this seriously are hoping that it can be handled in a much more responsible way than it was back then and you know that people can be properly trained and certified and that it doesn’t become Wild Wild West again.

Jennifer Lisa: Yeah.

Rick:  Okay let’s well that actually leads into our four here point four, learning from mistakes and being humble that’s obviously something that we can all benefit you know take to heart and as human beings but it of course is important also for professional psychics and spiritual teachers many of whom I don’t know about the psychic realm but in the spiritual teacher realm I’ve known a number of them who very seldom would admit to making mistakes you know and even when their behavior is becoming quite nutty if someone calls them on it they will tend to you know ostracize the person or just not accept critical feedback which makes them vulnerable to becoming even more nutty you know because they don’t have any checks and balances.

Jennifer Lisa: It’s so important you know I talk in the book a lot about spiritual teachers and spiritual leaders who because of a lack of humility start abusing their gifts and abusing other people but it’s, it’s yeah being able to admit that you’re wrong is so basic and yet it’s so hard for so many people and I’ve seen this even with famous psychics and mediums that you might see on TV or the radio and sometimes I’ll hear them giving readings and they’ll be telling somebody oh you know I’ve got a grandfather here and he was very stern and he you know wanted you to do that and they’ll say no my grandfather was not stern and they’ll say well, well what I mean is you know and they’ll kind of change a little then they’ll say you know and he’s telling me that you’re very unhappy with your job and they’ll say well no I’m not unhappy with my job and then the psychic will say well think about it I think you are, you’re just not aware that you’re unhappy so there’s like this tendency to to just keep kind of pushing no I’m right I’m right just you know you don’t you’ll see by and by when really what what should happen is if I give someone some information in a session and they say that’s not right I’m supposed to respond with oh okay, I guess I got that wrong let me tune back in or maybe I say it right or maybe I misunderstood what I’m what I thought I was getting, let me find out why I’m getting it wrong right so the assumption should be that the client is right and I have somehow misinterpreted something and so one of the things I tell my students is you got to remember that the very best psychics in the world are only famous and so I tell them if you’re not famous if you’re not you know, you know doing extremely well with your gift if everyone isn’t telling you that you’re Assume that you’re probably less accurate than that maybe you’re only 70% accurate so that means you know three out of ten times you got it wrong so assume that and as you’re giving information you say that to your client you say things like you know everything I say is not going to be 100% accurate and you, you make kind of these comments as you’re as you’re giving people readings and say you know I’m you know I’m most of what I’m giving you you know should be accurate but there’s gonna be some things I get wrong and there just has to be that humility and it’s I think it’s hard for people when they go into business and their livelihood is tied to their work whether they’re a healer or a psychic that sometimes they feel like if they admit they’re wrong too much that somehow that’s gonna damage a reputation or people are gonna say oh they’re not that accurate but the thing is your work speaks for itself and you don’t have to actually convince people that you’re accurate by the things that you say or the way you the way you talk about your work because the work will convince people.

Rick:  Yeah, I mean the greatest baseball players only batted in the 300 someplace. They didn’t get on base most the time but they we consider them great.

Jennifer Lisa: Right. And you know with, with a lot of indigenous and a lot of indigenous traditions humility is just considered a normal part of being somebody who’s very gifted.

Rick:  Yeah.

Jennifer Lisa: And function is that if you’re very good at what you do you won’t have to brag or talk about how good you are because everybody else will talk about you.

Rick:  Yeah. That’s a good point. I remember Richard Nixon being interviewed by I think it was David Frost and I forget the question David Frost asked but Nixon’s response was well if the president does it, it’s not illegal and it kind of reminds me of some spiritual teachers who actually do all kinds of stuff you know getting involved with you’re sleeping with women around them and so on and so forth and then say and then excuse it by saying well I’m not the doer or it’s God doing it or something like that so you know which could be used as an alibi for doing virtually anything I imagine there have been some psychics who’ve been like that too.

Jennifer Lisa: Yeah and I talk about those spiritual teachers in the book because part of the goal of the book is to help psychics and healers and spiritual teachers not become unethical and kind of be aware of how to avoid some of these unethical paths but it’s also meant as kind of a book of red flags for you know potential clients and, and students what they should be looking for in a psychic and a healer in a spiritual teacher. One of the things you should be looking for is humility, someone who is excessively arrogant you know pride goeth before a fall. Someone who’s arrogant is gonna make mistakes.

Rick:  Yeah.

Jennifer Lisa: You’re so sure that you’re always right when you do get something wrong you’re not going to notice it.

Rick:  Right. You’re gonna you’re gonna insist it was right and therefore you’re going to be vulnerable to making even more mistakes because you don’t reckon you lose the ability to recognize mistakes when you make them.

Jennifer Lisa: Yeah. Yeah and I think it’s I think it’s it’s a difficult thing for some people to overcome the need to be able to admit that we don’t always get things right.

Rick:  Which I guess is to say that if you’re a psychic or a spiritual teacher or something like that I mean you can’t just feign humility it actually has to be ingrained in your being you know in in your makeup and and I think it can be cultured with the right approach and the right attitude but it should be I suppose, you know culturing genuine humility should be part of one’s training.

Jennifer Lisa: Right and I think you know that’s why we do have a lot of traditions there are a lot of spiritual traditions where the student is required to engage in certain kind of humbling experiences as a part of their training right where they have to sit a certain way or they dress a certain way or they have to use certain terms of respect with their teacher and you know in the West we don’t really like that we don’t really we think that’s problematic that oh you shouldn’t have to address your teacher a certain way or or serve them food or do it things that are servile but a lot of times in the West like yeah we don’t want to do any of that but the purpose of it the original intention of a lot of those practices is to yet teach humility to the student so that when they become a teacher and a leader and they become someone who has a lot of power they don’t use it in an abusive way now of course we have a lot of people who, who are trained in those type of programs like we have monks who become abusive. We have gurus right, who were trained to be humble by their gurus who then grow up to be abusive gurus and so it’s not a fail-safe technique but I do think it’s important to find some way of impressing upon people when they’re first developing that humility is very important.

Rick:  Yeah, you know too bad we don’t have a training school like that for politicians.

Jennifer Lisa: Right

Rick:  Okay the next point is being sensitive to client needs.

Jennifer Lisa: Yeah I think this is a problem for some people because sometimes you know if you’re a psychic you are, you know more than other people and you often know more about people than they know about themselves and so the temptation if you find yourself in that situation a lot is to think oh I know better than you what you need to do with your life and that can get you into a situation where you’re harming rather than helping so a lot of times like I work as a medical intuitive and when people come to me they’ll come to me with a very specific question oh I want you to tell me why my stomach always hurts I want you to tell me why I have ringing in my ear and while I’m doing a medical intuition scan I may pick up other issues in their body which feel more important than what they have come to me with. If I’m not being sensitive to client needs and I’m being a little bit arrogant as well I might decide well I know better than they do what they need to hear from me and what they need to know about their health. I know better than they do and so I’m gonna say well I know you came for your stomach but actually that’s not important let’s focus on your liver. That’s the real issue.

Rick:  But if I had ringing in my ear and I came to you and and you said you picked up that I have cancer I’d want to know about it. you know.

Jennifer Lisa: Well, yeah, so the way the way that you do it when you’re being sensitive to someone’s needs is you give them what they want and then you also offer them what you think they need but you don’t replace it you don’t say well what you think is important is not important so we’re not going to talk about that.

Rick:  Right

Jennifer Lisa: Have to be sensitive to what they need and also you have to be sensitive to what they’re ready to hear. There’s a lot of ways to be sensitive to a client you have to be sensitive to what they want to how they can hear it to what they’re available to receive to what kind of language that you need to use with them. You have to be sensitive to their cultural background to their beliefs you can’t just try to ram your own beliefs down their throat because you think that your beliefs are accurate and that they need to know.

Rick:  Yeah

Jennifer Lisa: So someone comes to me and I find out that they have a past life that’s informing their health issues but they don’t believe in past lives I don’t just say no you have to you have to deal with your past life because this is what’s causing your ailment no I have to be sensitive to my clients needs so that I have to say okay what can I tell them instead that’s going to help them how can I adjust the information I’m getting and give them something that’s going to be valuable to them right because sometimes you can talk about it in a different way it maybe doesn’t have to be in terms of a past life you can say well there are some underlying emotional issues which are influencing this physical condition and you can sometimes cover that without going into a past life origin of those emotional issues right so there’s just different ways that you can be sensitive to what is your client want because like for example some clients will come to a medical intuitive and they’re they’ve had so many bad experiences with so many doctors and health care practitioners and they’ve been invalidated and had to deal with so much medical gaslighting and and had no one listen to them that when they come they just want to talk about their condition or about their suffering and if that’s what that person needs if they need to talk then we need to listen and I may think I would I used to get irritated I remember when I first went into practice I would get irritated with the talkers must be like they’ve paid for an hour we only have an hour if they talk for 45 minutes I don’t have time to give them any information that’s what they’re paying me for and I used to get annoyed I had to adjust my thinking I had to realize okay that’s what I think they’re paying for right I think they need my information. Wwhat they actually need is to talk and that’s what the client needs and so that’s more important than what I think they need and so what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna let them talk and then I am also going to try to cram as much information as they can into that 15 minutes they give me to share what I got …

Rick:  And maybe then they’ll have another session and you can talk more in that one.

Jennifer Lisa: There’s more that we could explore we don’t have enough time and if you want to come back we can do that but you know you have to adjust to what the client wants and not just what you think they need.

Rick:  Yeah. There’s a saying in India that when the mangoes are right,, ripe the branches bend down so that people can easily pick them so it kind of is used to illustrate that the teacher should be able to meet students at their own level and give them what they need appropriate to that level of development.

Jennifer Lisa: Yes, yes and that’s what it is and I but I often see this. I remember I had this one I might have put mention in the book I had this one colleague who used to who used to do past past life regressions and I started sending a bunch of people to them and these people were coming and complaining to me because they would go to this person and they would sign up to to to get like a past life regression from him and and then he would decide well what you need instead is spirit release and so I’m gonna devote the session to like removing all these spirits from you and that and then the clients would be upset that they weren’t getting what they signed up for and when I can when I confronted this practitioner he said to me, “Well they think they need to see a past life but I know what’s best for them and I’m communicating with their higher self and I’m not listening to them I’m talking to their higher self and we’ve determined that what they really need is spirit release” and so there was a couple of problems with that one is lack of sensitivity to client needs another is arrogance right I know better than they do what they need and then the arrogance to of I know I’m speaking to their higher self do you do you know you’re speaking to their higher self I mean do you have evidence that you’re speaking to someone’s higher self you might just think you’re speaking to someone’s higher self and really you’re just doing what you want to be doing because you’re more interested in spirit release than you are in past life regression right now so that’s what you’re gonna do. So this is something that can happen with practitioners that we can decide oh I’m really into this right now and I think everybody should get this treatment or this modality or this assessment but that’s not what people actually signed up to do you know I had sure I had some teachers in the spiritualist community who were teaching us spiritual healing and one of the rules that they had was that when you’re doing spiritual healing on somebody you do not do a reading on them at the same time and so like if you have someone on your table and you’re doing spiritual healing or if you’re doing Reiki or chronic healing or any other type of energetic healing and you suddenly get messages for them we were trained not to give the messages; Why? Because they said if a person came to you for healing you don’t know if they’re available or interested in messages and you might disrupt their healing experience because they just want to lay on the table and feel the energy they don’t want to talk to you and so what I had to learn to do was if someone came to me for energy healing I would say to them before the session started, “I’m a medium and so I sometimes get messages from spirit. Do you want me to give those messages to you?” And what I also would do is I wouldn’t give it to them during the session because that’s disruptive I would wait till the session was over we’d be sitting in the chairs and I would say okay this is what I picked up while I was doing the energy healing so that’s being sensitive to what the client wants. Just because I got a message from their dead mother that she wants them to know something doesn’t mean I’m allowed to give that message because if they didn’t sign up for that, that you know there’s no they came for something else.

Rick:  Yeah, okay good and then the final point in that, in that chapter is listening to a higher source.

Jennifer Lisa: Yeah so for some people this would be problematic because there are some people now who want to practice their gifts and they don’t necessarily want to be concerned with spirituality and so you don’t have to be a spiritual person to be psychic and I think sometimes people get confused about that. They think if someone’s really psychically gifted they’re also conscious and that’s not the case. Part of why I have this book.

Rick:  Conversely, spiritual people aren’t necessarily psychic.

Jennifer Lisa: That’s true as well.

Rick:  They’re independent

Jennifer Lisa: Yeah, and so but those who are psychic and also spiritual are going to be less likely to harm people because their work is guided by a power beyond them and that’s that’s kind of answers that question of humility too, you know if I think that I am the arbiter of the healing I might get kind of big-headed about it like oh I’m healing all these people.

Rick:  Yeah

Jennifer Lisa: But if I understand that I’m just a hollow bone and that there is energy working through me that there’s a higher source whether it’s your higher self or an angel or an ancestor or creator God whatever you want to call it if you understand that there’s something above you that actually has the power that’s working through you to help people that’s gonna keep you humble for one thing because you’re not going to start taking all the credit for it but also it means that when you you’re less likely to make mistakes right because if I’m just relying upon my little brain and my experiences in this life and my limited number of years on the planet and my limited number of experiences and the amount of training I’ve had if I’m just relying on that that’s not enough but if I’m relying on higher sources if I have angels coming in and saying oh this is what they need if I have ancestors coming in if I have guides coming in and advising me and counseling me and teaching me that I’m gonna be a much better psychic and healer because I have all these resources so that’s why I say you know the most you know if you want to be ethical make sure you are tapping into higher sources of information and healing and not limiting yourself to what your little human incarnation knows.

Rick:  Yeah and I mean isn’t it true and there have been plenty of movies depicting this kind of thing but that people can have psychic or other such gifts and yet be really in league with darker forces and I think maybe the same can be true of so-called spiritual teachers who present themselves as holy people but in fact are you know behaving in ways that seem very unholy.

Jennifer Lisa: Yeah and this is always the danger with mediums for example, so we have some teachers who are, some spiritual leaders who are mediumistic and if you’re a medium who is working at a high vibration then you’re going to be tapping into high-level beings right like spirit doctors, angels who are helping you to heal people but the same medium if they lower their vibration if they started getting involved in a lot of low vibration activities and start hanging out in low vibration environments and develop certain habits you know like addictions those same mediums can start tapping into very low vibration spirits, you know elementals or what is the word now I’m not getting the word but there are certain spirits …

Rick:  Like hungry ghosts or that kind of thing?

Jennifer Lisa: Yeah. You have the unquiet dead you know, the this attached yeah the attached ghost. You have the I’m feeling this word but it’s like there are these there are these spirits who are just kind of mischievous…

Rick:  Malevolent, mysterious, mischievous

Jennifer Lisa: You have malevolent ones, they’re different levels.

Rick:  Poltergeist, that kind of.

Jennifer Lisa: Yeah there are there are immature ones you have mischievous it’s funny to mess with people and they might just give you incorrect information and just because it’s funny to them.

Rick:  Yeah. Friend of mine once quipped just because you’re dead doesn’t mean you’re smart and I think perhaps it’s also true that just because you’re dead doesn’t mean you’re good.

Jennifer Lisa: It’s true and so the attached the spirits who are attached the spirits who are kind of hanging out you know stuck is it really quite the word because they’re never really stuck they could always leave but they perceive that they’re stuck or they more likely they’ve chosen to stick around so those unquiet dead who are sticking around they’re usually sticking around because they have some type of addiction they’re addicted to something in the physical plane that they can’t give up either they you know the money, the sex, you know alcohol drugs food there’s something about the physical plane that they just are very attached to and so those people those ghosts who are very attached to the physical plane they will you know, mess with people sometimes and you know try to influence people because they’re trying to live vicariously through people they’re trying to still have a human experience on the earth plane and they don’t have bodies and so they try to use other people’s bodies and so they can come down and influence a medium and give information that’s incorrect or that’s biased or that’s like you said stupid because they have different motivations they’re not high vibrational beings who are trying to be of service. They’re people who are just trying to find a way to still participate in, in the human drama.

Rick:  I have a couple of friends who have been on BatGap who, one of them was a sort of a distance healer kind of a person and the other was a guy I don’t he’s just basically a spiritual teacher but at a certain point they both independently of one another felt like they were being assailed by some subtle negative beings that somehow whatever they were doing or whatever stage they were at they had become open in a way that made them vulnerable to attack and I think they both worked through it eventually but it was a scary period for both of them.

Jennifer Lisa: Yeah it can be scary. I’ve experienced that. I certainly experienced it as a child I used to go out of body every night and I was conscious of living my body and we all got a body but most of us aren’t conscious of it and I was conscious of coming back in the morning and having to fight for my body and because there were always these beings trying to take over my body and you know I’ve had experiences like that. I’ve also had experiences where I’m going through something traumatic and then you know it’s affecting my gifts or I’m starting to have nightmares or you know I’m starting to have spirits, you know around me and we’re all vulnerable to that. If you’re a medium you’re a little bit more vulnerable because you’re already connected and it can happen to us for so many different reasons a lot of times it’s associated with trauma with grief with illness sometimes it’s just being in certain environments. I remember I had an apartment once that had these mischievous and like interdimensional beings that just kept coming in there and messing with me what do they call them change what do they call those again the word shapeshifters coming into my apartment and these were really scary and at the time I was doing a lot of like conscious out-of-body work I was I was reading Robert Monroe’s books and doing these conscious out-of-body exercises during the day and I started seeing these really freaky things and I did every kind of thing that I knew how to do. I was reading Edith Fiore’s script, Send Them to the Light. I was playing Gregorian chants.  I was playing all kinds of different high vibration music I had my girlfriend come and she was also psychic and she was trying to apsychic,said to me, “Look we can’t fix this. This is beyond. You need to move,” and I finally you know, it was hard for my pride because I had gone to so many people’s houses and done housecleaning. So as a kid you know here I was like in my 20s in college and grad school all my friends would say oh come over here and and clean our house for us you know spiritually and so of course I had a certain amount of arrogance or you know belief in my ability to do that and here I couldn’t do it my own house and after several months of trying everything I did move and I finally you know, years later I asked my guides you know, “what happened in that house why couldn’t I clean that house. Why couldn’t I get all those spirits out of that house?” and they said oh because there was a portal in that house it was kind of like a train station and it was just a where a lot of you know you would have had to know how to close that portal…

Rick:  Interesting

Jennifer Lisa: And I didn’t know how to close that portal so sometimes you can find yourself in a situation where there’s a vortex of portal and there’s just all of these beings coming into that space and it’s very hard to fight off that many, you know,

Rick:  Yeah. You should have called Dan Aykroyd and Bill Murray.

Jennifer Lisa: Exactly

Rick:  “Who you gonna call?”

Jennifer Lisa: Yeah. I thought I was a ghostbuster. I thought, “Nope, can’t handle this”.

Rick:  Yeah. Okay, so our next chapter, the risks of psychic work which we’re kind of touching on here right now and in fact, this segues into it nicely because you know you just mentioned you know out-of-body work with Robert Monroe and all and then there are a lot of people channeling do you think that certain things like channeling or related things could actually weaken mind-body coordination in such a way as to make a person more vulnerable to the kind of thing we’ve just been talking about.

Jennifer Lisa: Well yeah, in fact what you know when I used to do a lot I used to run a psychic and healing fair and I had a number of psychics mediums and energy healers that would work for me at this fair and we do many readings for people and and I did a lot of energy healing back then and what I was seeing was some of the mediums who were working at my fair we’re having to come to me periodically to get spirit release work from me because in their work as mediums they were getting all of these spirit attachments and so yeah, that is a risk with mediumship that if you are a medium who’s working with spirits and you don’t really know how to you know cleanse yourself you could acquire just a lot of people hang on hang around and that can you know and in some cases it’s something you can prevent with certain changes in your lifestyle so some mediums have a problem with too much alcohol and alcohol and and mediumship don’t really mix and there’s a reason why we call alcohol spirits because we used to understand that when you drink alcohol you do attract spirits to you and there’s a lot of alcoholic spirits who are looking for a body to attach to so that they can imbibe vicariously as that’s why a lot of people who are alcoholics or addicts the reason it’s so hard for them to quit is because it’s not just them they’re dealing with the cravings of several people that they have to contend with in their body their craving and then the craving of all the attachments and, and so you know mediums have to be really careful about that. When I was a kid I was aware as a kid that bars were full of spirits. My parents owned a bar and I could see all the spirits in the bar gathered around everybody and they weren’t they weren’t like high-level spirits you know they were low-level spirits and so yeah there’s a risk with with mediumship and channeling if people aren’t engaging in certain rituals and ceremonies and self-protection and also aren’t really actively trying to keep their life in a high vibration mode that they can start to attract these lower vibrational beings we saw that with a really famous healer in Brazil.

Rick:  John of God?

Jennifer Lisa: Yeah, who was channeling all of these very high-level spirit doctors and helping so many people but then you can see that later on he started to bring in some very low vibrational beings and started to engage in other activities and that can happen if you’re not careful you know.

Rick:  That’s interesting. I’d never heard that theory about what happened to him because obviously he did have a reputation for helping a lot of people and then things really went off the rails and so that’s a perfect example of the question I asked you know that you’re engaging in a certain practice and it ends up making you vulnerable to being used by unethical entities.

Jennifer Lisa: Yeah, so yeah

Rick:  Okay

Jennifer Lisa: Yes, many risks

Rick:  Yeah. Do you think that many people in mental hospitals and people like that are actually the victims of spirit possession or you know things hanging on I forget the exact phrase you used but is that I mean obviously they might have biochemical imbalances and all kinds of other things but do you think that that also is a phenomenon? My mother used to be in mental hospitals a lot when I was in my adolescence and tried to commit suicide a few times and I before, before I learned to meditate I used to visit her there or even after I learned to meditate of course and I would you know I could come in in a very clear state and just sitting with her in there for half an hour I would feel like my consciousness sort of shrink down and my mind get incoherent and it’s like the atmosphere was almost assaulting me and, and perhaps those who live there all the time are you know permanently under assault and full of negative stuff.

Jennifer Lisa: Yeah I’ve often suspected that. I don’t feel like I have enough information to know if that’s always the case. It does certainly seem like it’s possible that a lot of mental illnesses is connected to possession or something like that I know that in a lot of traditions a lot of indigenous traditions there is that belief that when somebody develops a mental illness that there is you know possibly some either either there’s a couple of possibilities there’s a soul there’s spirit attachment you know low level vibrational, low vibrational beings attached or influencing the person. Another possibility is that they have soul loss and so when people do like have fragmented souls through trauma like they go through something traumatic or more more likely several traumatic events and then in each traumatic event they kind of lose a piece of their soul and then heard of that and I don’t know a lot about it so I don’t know if I’m using the right language but it’s called I think, soul fragmentation and I’ve done some exercises with people and they have found it useful so sometimes that can that can be considered a cause in certain indigenous context for mental illness and then there’s also imbalance imbalance is considered a cause of certain types of mental illness and live indigenous traditions where there’s an imbalance in the life maybe it’s an imbalance between the physical and spiritual world and balance between the person in their community maybe they’re in a you know toxic relationships and that’s causing the mental illness maybe their, their body is out of balance so yeah the chemical imbalance in the brain could be the result of other imbalances in their life and so imbalance is considered a cause of mental illness and a lot of indigenous traditions so I do think that if if we could bring in these types of modalities into mental health, if we could bring in medical and tutors we can bring in spirit release practitioners if we bring in medicine people and have them work with the therapist or the psychiatrist that we would would have a higher success rate of people actually recovering from mental illness.

Rick:  Hopefully that’ll be the future of it.

Jennifer Lisa: Yeah, that’s my vision for the future.

Rick:  And things turned out well for my mother by the way. She finally learned to meditate, and she went over and stayed in Switzerland with me for nine months in a whole group of people and really lived quite happily the rest of her life. So, our next question actually our next point is on client dependency, and someone named Gloria in Los Angeles sent in a question about it. “Is there any insight about seeing the same psychic for years I feel I created a bit of a dependency. I go when things are opaque turbulent or ambivalent but is there a time limit a limit of time that is healthy or advisable”?

Jennifer Lisa: Yeah that’s one of the things I talk about in the book is how it’s quite dangerous to have your clients become dependent on you and this is again where being focused on service is so important because if you have a client who’s paying you a nice sum of money and they want to see you all the time and they’re helping you to pay your car note it’s gonna be difficult to say stop seeing me right but you have to always be asking yourself you know am I being of service to this person by letting them call me every week. Am I really helping them and you have to put aside how it affects your finances because or how it affects your ego because of course we feel good when someone calls us every week, oh I really need you you help me so much I can’t live my life without you right. It stokes our ego and it’s it’s very tempting to be like yes, they need me I got to be there for them. I’ve had clients that I had to tell them I can’t I can’t see you anymore or I can’t talk to you for a month yeah I had to set limits with people because what can happen is people become so dependent on you providing answers for them that they’re no longer, taking the steps they need to be in charge of their life and so they’re like calling you for for everything or they’re or they’re they’re not able to make decisions on their own anymore they have to have your input every time they make a decision in their life that’s not healthy it’s not healthy for them to have that relationship with anybody. They should be making their own decisions and it’s okay to consult you know a psychic but if that should not be something you need to do in order to make decisions like I can’t make a decision unless I call my psychic. That’s dependency and so I think it’s the job of the psychic to say you’re becoming too dependent on me I can’t I can’t keep seeing you or I have a limit on how many times you can call me for a month or you know we’re the ones that have to set those limits because the person who is calling us is vulnerable. They’re going through something they’re not necessarily able to understand that they’re they’re getting themselves into a dependent situation but we are and so it’s our responsibility to kind of set those limits with them and that’s financial and it’s emotional. You know, we don’t want them to be financially, we don’t want them to be we don’t want to financially exploit them so like if I have a client who’s coming to me on a regular basis and they’re talking about their money all the time how they’re having all these financial problems but they’re spending a hundred fifty dollars to see me every week they obviously can’t afford to see me right and so I should not keep taking their money I should either, either I’m going to be available to offer them a discount session I’m going to be offering them a free session or I’m going to be limiting how many sessions they can, they can book with me you know because I’m you know we have power over people that’s one of the things I talked about in the book you said this is like it’s a starting premise you know you have to understand that if you’re psychic, if you’re psychically gifted we’ve always have what your work is whether you’re a healer you know some type of clairvoyant a medium whether you’re working as a spiritual teacher whatever your your role is if you have gifts and you’re using those gifts you have power over people who don’t have gifts and whenever there’s a power differential the person with more power has to be more responsible right and so we as psychics we have to always remember that I have more power than this person and so I have to be careful with how I use that power because I can hurt somebody without intending to hurt them just by not being reflective and conscious about how I’m hurting them.

Rick:  Yeah. This financial thing, I’m glad you brought it up. That’s our next point and it’s a biggie in the general spiritual community to not just psychics and there’s so many instances where spiritual teachers will you know there’s one guy who one of his students divulged that he had gotten a inheritance of about nine hundred thousand dollars and the guy’s reaction was oh my god it’s so good that you told me because there’s a suric energy attached to that money and if you hadn’t told me it would have destroyed you. I can purify it for you sign it over to me and the guy actually did and last I talked to him, he was legally trying to get it back but there are so many cases where you know people sign over their life savings or their inheritance or they just spend money they don’t have on one course after another and so on and very often from the student the teacher’s side they have they have built an empire you know they have a lot of overhead and they become reliant upon a certain income stream and they have mortgages to pay and all this stuff and so it becomes a sort of mutual unhealthy interaction. Anyway what are your thoughts on all that?

Jennifer Lisa: Yeah. You know we have a lot of confusion about how money and spirituality should should work together and so we have we have kind of these extremes you know we have some people who say you should never charge for any healing gifts, that’s a gift of God

Rick:  Yeah, go work at Walmart all day and do your healing in the evening right?

Jennifer Lisa: Provide it for free forever for your whole life and you know I had this friend who was a medicine man and he was, he was coming to me for some, some teachings and he was working full-time, in this really difficult job 40 hours a week and then he was working as a medicine man in the evenings and weekends and he had become quite sick because he was you know he never had time to rest.

Rick:  Burning out, yeah.

Jennifer Lisa: And because in a lot of indigenous contacts you know you don’t pay a medicine person, some you do like the Navajo they have extremely high rates of pay for medicine people if you want a ceremony put up in the Navajo you know it’s a high it’s a high price you have to pay and then there are other tribes where they’re like oh we don’t we don’t pay the medicine man he just helps everybody and so this guy was you know really running himself ragged trying to basically work two full-time jobs and one thing I said to him is you know traditionally medicine people were always supported by the communities they may not have been given money but their house, their clothing, their food and gifts their transportation everything was given to them in exchange for their service as a medicine person and so we’ve lost track of that and so I said you know talk to your tribe about giving you a salary and they were able to set him up with a salary and to go back to that more traditional way. A lot of people are kind of confused about that and they’re like well you know traditionally healers weren’t paid so you should just work for free but traditionally, healers were completely supported and so what healers have to do now is they have to charge so that they can have house and food and you know support themselves but there’s this tension of like you know how much should healers charge and if they’re being of service shouldn’t they have really low rates or be working for free and we don’t have that same expectation of say doctors. Doctors are paid very very high rates and we understand that you know they’ve got a lot of training weeks, they’re dealing with life and death issues but a traditional healer who is also dealing with life and death issues and also often goes through the long training period; sometimes are expected to just live in poverty in order to be a healer and so what I do say in the book is, “I don’t think you should expect to live in poverty in order to be of service you can be of service and still support yourself” right, there’s no tension between the two you can charge a decent rate so that you can support yourself and and there’s nothing wrong with that.

Rick:  But you also shouldn’t have 95 Rolls Royces or something.

Jennifer Lisa: But yeah but when you get into that up then you have the other extreme…

Rick:  Yeah.

Jennifer Lisa: People who are using their gifts to become you know multi-millionaires and they’re not paying any attention to how they’re impacting the people that they’re getting this money from so they’re not even it’s not even a fair exchange it’s not like oh you take these ten classes with me and you’ll be you’ll have these abilities that you’ll be able to go and market no, they’re taking money from people they’re not actually providing them with what they’re claiming they’re providing them they just want to make a lot of money and so they’re they’re exploiting people financially and you know with their gifts because they can’t because when you have certain gifts sometimes you can influence people with your gifts and get them to give you lots of money and but just because you can you know doesn’t mean you should. People who visit psychics and healers are often very vulnerable desperate people who are dealing with something and they’re in a position where they will be willing to spend money they don’t have because they’re so desperate for a solution to their problem and we can’t take advantage of that we have to be mindful of that when we’re thinking about what we’re charging for things and who we’re charging it you know. I have always had some people do sliding scale some people do when they charge for some things and they offer other things for free you know I used to have a fair where I had these little mini sessions that were only $20 that anybody could afford and but that but I was providing you know the same, the same level of work in those 15-minute sessions as I would provide an hour session someone who paid a couple hundred dollars and that was a my way of providing services to people who didn’t have the money. I’ve also done a lot of free sessions for people if they were of a certain income background or a situation and so there are ways that you can charge a lot for people who have a lot and charge less for people who have less or volunteer in certain situations. There’s there’s ways to do that and still do well financially but we have to be thinking of you know are we taking advantage of somebody’s suffering with our gifts you know.

Rick:  Yeah

Jennifer Lisa: You know sometimes the way you deal with that is you have to be able to say to somebody well, I can’t really help you.

Rick:  Yeah.

Jennifer Lisa: Because sometimes like say someone’s dying and they want to keep coming to you for healing sessions but you’ve already seen that they’re going to pass and that there’s you can’t change that outcome but they want to keep giving you money to do healing sessions you know the ethical healer is going to say you know I don’t, I can’t, I can’t help you anymore.

Rick:  Yeah

Jennifer Lisa: I’m at that I’ve been told that I’ve helped you that the most that I can and I can’t continue working you know you have to find a way that to let them know to stop spending the money on you

Rick:  Sure. Your final point in that chapter is making matters worse and I forget what you actually said in that chapter what was that one about?

Jennifer Lisa: What did I say?

Rick:  Well we can skip it we can go to a different one.

Jennifer Lisa: Yeah, largely I say largely channeled page 58 page 58 making matters worse. Oh yeah, so I talk about how sometimes you know I’ve seen this happen with some of my colleagues where they’ll do a session with somebody and the person will come out of the session and say oh I feel worse now than when I went into the session and I used to sometimes see this happen with the people that worked at my fair and this sometimes happened with with psychics who were all about being brutally honest no matter what and some people feel that that’s just like a value that I’m gonna be brutally honest and I’m gonna give whatever I get regardless and I obviously don’t agree with that because I think it can be harmful I think that if you’re gonna be brutally honest you have to at least maybe also figure out what you need to do to help that person handle your brutal honesty but I used to tell my my fair psychics and healers you know that that we couldn’t do the 3ds in a psychic for we couldn’t tell people that they were gonna die that they had a life-threatening disease or that they were gonna get divorced and some of my psychics were not happy about that and they said well that’s what I get that’s the truth that’s what they should hear and I would say well, this is someone you’re only gonna have in your session for 15 minutes you may never see this person again in life and you don’t know what they’re gonna do with that information if you tell someone off the street you’re gonna die and then they leave you know what’s gonna happen to them right you can’t really they don’t have your number they’re not gonna necessarily, you don’t have a relationship with them to help them navigate that bad news and so I would tell people you know you got to be careful what you say to people in that type of mini reading context but also if you have a client that you’re seeing in a more structured formal session where that you have their number and they’re in contact with you you do have to I think be mindful of not making matters worse so if somebody is coming to me because they’re sick and I see that they have a life-threatening disease I have to ask myself is telling them they have this disease going to help them or make matters worse right so like as a medical intuitive I can’t legally diagnose so there’s that but if but say I can’t diagnose what I can kind of imply you know you might have this condition are they going to get better? Is that information going to help them like is it going to lead them to go get a certain test are they gonna go see a health care practitioner, are they gonna go get a treatment plan what are they gonna do with that information is it going to help them or is it gonna make them worse? Another example is like telling someone that their spouse is cheating on them that can be very dangerous because especially if you’re telling that to a man they might go and harm their wife right there’s a lot of you know violence against women by men who think they’re cheating so that could cause a fatality so you have to think about that am I going to tell this person that their partner is cheating on them what are the possible repercussions is it going to make matters worse for them or would it be better to say something like, there’s a disconnect in your relationship there’s lack of honesty that needs to be addressed or your partner’s not being fulfilled like there’s other ways to give them the information that might help them to make some decisions that aren’t as rash and, and so you have to I think ask yourself are you making things worse or are you making them better and I do think we’re responsible for that. I do think that when someone comes to you for a session that they’re expecting you to help them with whatever they’re dealing with they’re not expecting to walk out of there feeling worse than when they came.

Rick:  Good. All right. Thank you. Okay, the next chapter looks interesting; interfering with the will of others and the first sub point is perverting the will of another and then this the next one we’re going to talk about is the misuse of sexual energy and then fake gurus so I think chapter applies to spiritual teachers as well as psychics so what would be an example of perverting the will of another?

Jennifer Lisa: So that’s when you’re kind of interfering with somebody’s, with somebody’s life path and in the book I talk…

Rick:  If they say, I want to marry so-and-so and you say no no you shouldn’t marry that person you should do you know marry this person or something that kind of thing?

Jennifer Lisa: Yeah and it can it can relate to living people and it can also relate to spirits you know we can we can interfere with somebody’s life spirit you know on the other side as well so I give some examples of people who like do curses so that’s an example of perverting the will of another…

Rick:  Oh, yeah.

Jennifer Lisa: You are engaging in certain types of magic where you’re trying to control another person with your

Rick:  Sticking pins in a little doll.

Jennifer Lisa: Yeah I mean there’s different ways to do it so we do unfortunately have this very negative media portrayal of voodoo as this as this black magic or negative practice which it’s not. Voodoo is a religion that involves that you know that’s tied to African religions in West Africa and then we have Hoodoo which is a form of African American magic but it’s not necessarily a bad tradition right there there’s always going to be practitioners who use it in a bad way but it’s not about harming people but every any magical tradition whether it’s a Brujeria or hoodoo or paganism any kind of witchcraft, any kind of magical tradition can be perverted. It can be used to control people and so if you’re using your gifts that way that’s what I call perverting the will of another so like I’m going to do a ceremony I’m going to do a spell, I’m going to do a curse to change your behavior. I want you to love me so I’m going to do a love spell on you and make you love me. I want you to hire me for this job so I’m going to do a spell to make you hire me I’m perverting your will I’m controlling you.

Rick:  And that can actually be done.

Jennifer Lisa: It can actually be done.

Rick:  Yeah.

Jennifer Lisa: By people who are powerful. I did it you know when I was young by you know, kind of by accident I mean I didn’t really know what I was doing and I learned my lesson but I did that when I was in my 20s I put a love spell on somebody and that person became obsessed with me and so obsessed that ten years later they like found me in another city in the other part of the country and I didn’t know at the time that I was doing it. I was young I was you know, silly I was egotistical, I just wanted this person to like me and so I did this little love spell and because I am somebody who has serious gifts it was a powerful spell and I learned from that don’t ever do that again but a lot of people don’t get that lesson and they they play around I’ve had a number of clients come to me with different conditions, health conditions and problems and I will trace it back to a spell that they cast when they were younger which got them involved with some low-level spirits and some low-level practices anytime you’re trying to control another person that’s unethical we don’t have the right to change people’s life paths to suit, to suit our desires just because we have the gift and ability to do it and so that’s something that I think people with gifts have to be very mindful of and you do see this with you know with these kind of corrupt spiritual leaders is that they will be using their gifts to control their students or their their community members because they do have that ability and and it’s not right because we all have a life path we all came here with our own life path and it’s not for someone else to decide oh, I want you to fall in love with me or I want you to hire me or I want you to sell me your house, I want you, it’s not for us to control other people just because we have gifts.

Rick:  Yeah and it’s interesting because I mean the same thing happens in larger social context such as certain politicians who can whip a crowd into a frenzy or certain media outlets which you know feed misinformation that kind of like missing that, that confuses millions of people or other example like the if you ever saw the social contract which is this documentary about Facebook and social media and how their algorithms take you and YouTube and take you deeper and deeper down certain rabbit hole of conspiracy theories and so on so these are all examples of the will of others being controlled either by technologies or by demagogues.

Jennifer Lisa: Well, yeah you know what I saw when I started doing a whole lot of readings back when I was in my kind of apprenticeship program and I was working for other people doing lots of psychic readings and like card readings and so I worked with all these strangers what I learned was that there are certain people who have very large, very magnetic auras and they’re able to influence people in in a much bigger way than, than the average person and those people will become, they’ll become like stars like we call them stars because we know this on some levels subconsciously we know that the people who become celebrities or stars, they have really big star-like auras.

Rick:  Yeah, like Taylor Swift, I mean she’s huge these days.

Jennifer Lisa: Yeah, when they when they talk or when they say things or promote things it has a big impact because they do have that power over people and same with politicians people who enter into leadership roles are often souls who incarnated already with these really big magnetic auras which allows them to influence a lot of people and that can be used for for good but it can also be used to control people or to harm people.

Rick:  Yeah, I mean Jesus is an example of someone who had a profound impact on large numbers of people whom he encountered and obviously in a very good influence so it’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Jennifer Lisa: Oh no it’s a very …

Rick:  He wasn’t perverting anybody’s will either I would say he was inspiring people.

Jennifer Lisa: Right and and you know that’s why we’re given those gifts we’re given those gifts to help and to and to serve and to be a benefit but we can always pervert them right we can always misuse them.

Rick:  Yeah.

Jennifer Lisa: The challenge and you know there’s all these traditions we have you know hoodo and Berheria and witchcraft which are all traditions where people can use gifts to help people and there are all traditions that are, that have ethics but there are people who want to get involved in those traditions without proper training who are really dabbling they don’t know what who do is they don’t know what witchcraft is they’re not really properly trained but they think they’re doing something that they’re calling witchcraft and Berheria or hoodoo but what are they doing they’re extracting practices out of the tradition and when they do that they’re they’re practicing without the ethics you know and all of those traditions have an ethics to them you know you can’t just you’re not supposed to practice those things without ethics but we have dabblers we have people who are like I’m gonna go watch a YouTube channel or I’m gonna go read a book and call myself a witch you know and start doing love spells I mean I’m gonna call myself a hoodooist. No no one’s ever trained me and I’m gonna just try to do spells on people to control my world and so you have people who they’re trying to control other people and again desperation so people who are desperate or who unhappy, their life isn’t going the way they want it they’ll start engaging in in practices what I call filthy magic where they’re trying to use get their gifts or certain rituals to control other people because they’re trying to control their life by controlling other people. It’s always the case that they’re coming at it from a low vibration of desperation or sadness or feeling that life is unfair and I’m going to fix it and that’s that’s not how the gifts are meant to be used and that’s not how the traditions are meant to be used they’re meant to be used for service.

Rick:  Yeah. The next one is a biggie which is the misuse of sexual energy that’s that’s usually the most common way in which spiritual teachers go astray and I imagine it’s also an issue in the psychic world perhaps we can talk about it generally for a minute maybe I can say a thing, say something that people haven’t thought about because most people have thought about this but it’s a, it’s a problem.

Jennifer Lisa: So I outlined, I’m gonna just read from the book, right here page 75, there are four ways that psychics and healers can misuse sexual energy, one, as healers they can stimulate the lower chakras during a healing session so I’ve seen that happen where I’ve had students in a healing class doing a healing on somebody and then the person on the table if it’s a man will suddenly get aroused as a direct result of the healing energy right number two they can use their large auras to attract others and provoke crushes so those of us who do have big auras, big magnetic auras you know when we’re around other people a lot of people will find themselves attracted to us you know really out of proportion to how attractive we really are so we’ll see that right you’ll see people in positions of power you often see this with men who are in positions of power in our society they’re not very attractive people but they have all of these women or they have like very young women or very attractive women who are interested in them.

Rick:  Harvey Weinstein, comes to mind.

Jennifer Lisa: Right, it’s like you know, you aren’t them, they aren’t actually attractive but they have attractive energy they have this ability to attract with their auras and so if you’re a healer, a psychic, you know you will find I have found this that a lot of people will have crushes on you and it’s not because of you it’s because of your healing or psychic ability, your large aura. Number three, they could use their gifts to subvert the will of others and get them to return affection so we were just talking about that example of putting a spell on somebody to get them to like you and then four, they can seduce people on the astral plane during dreams or meditations and this can lead to seduction on the physical plane. So this you’re going to see more with the spiritual teachers and the gurus people who know how to consciously go out of body or to actually interact with people on other planes of existence or different astral planes, the mental plane they’re just causal planes right, there’s different planes of existence that we travel to we’ve got a body a spiritual teacher who has perfected their ability to consciously travel out of body can go out of body and influence their clients or students out of body and then that can result in them having a sexual affair in the physical because they’ll go into the astral realm if I say during the clients, the student’s meditation, the student will have this like mystical experience with their spiritual teacher in another realm where they’re married spiritually and they’ll think it has huge significance and then they’ll consent to a physical interaction with them on the earth plane because they think it’s meant to be or God ordained and it’s really was just the results of an experience that was provoked by their spiritual teacher who because of you know, higher you know gifts and awareness is able to do this work.

Rick:  Yeah, good. Let me take a little shift because a few questions have come in I want to make sure we get to them and then we’ll get back to our systematic points. Dennis Sullivan from Beaverton Ontario Canada would wanted to follow up on your point about the comment that hospitals continue to have spirits until they start doing ceremony and he asked if you could elaborate on the type of ceremony hospitals would need to have to get rid of those spirits.

Jennifer Lisa: There’s a couple of things that could be done. One could be you know an honoring a lot of a lot of traditions throughout the world have ceremonies to honor the dead and we don’t just do that for the living and that’s part of why we do it right we’re grief stricken we need ceremonies to help us deal with our grief but we actually also do it for those spirits and I have talked to a lot of spirits after they’ve passed and I have consistently been told that they benefit by the memorials that we create for them. If they’re remembered whether it’s through a ceremony or a plaque or a scholarship or a book or whatever, it benefits them because we’re all as souls coming to earth hoping to make a positive difference on the earth plane and any evidence that we’ve made a positive difference in anyone’s life is going to be well received on the other side and so there are …

Rick:  You mean you will get kind of brownie points for it or something?

Jennifer Lisa: But it’s like brownie points that we give ourselves. It’s not so much that anybody is you know judging us or telling things up that’s not the case but it’s like our awareness on the other side is, oh I went to earth and we have this life review right people have always talked about the life of you like I the life review is real I’ve seen many many life reviews and what happens is the spirit goes over there they do a life review and in the life review they see everything they’ve done and said throughout their whole life and how it’s influenced other people and they don’t just see how it’s influenced other people they feel it and I think that’s what some people misinterpret as hell. If you were someone who harmed a lot of people and then in your life review you had to experience all of the harm that everybody felt at your hands you were a really bad person that’s gonna be a pretty awful experience for you and so I can see how that could be kind of misinterpreted that way but basically when you when you pass that becomes what’s most important to you is who did, how did I impact who and when people on the earth plane make a point of acknowledging your positive impact on them spiritually appreciate that so one thing is, is honoring the dead that could be done like when people die in a hospital they can have the nurses and doctors engage in some type of honoring ceremony acknowledging that they were grateful to those spirits for having come in the hospital and giving those doctors a chance to practice medicine for having taught them something.

Rick:  Yeah. When my mother died we asked the nurses and if we could do a Sanskrit puja in her room before they had to take the body away and the nurse said fine, no problem close the door and light the incense do the ceremony and you know so you could actually arrange that kind of thing and in some hospitals they’ll cooperate with it.

Jennifer Lisa: Yeah and so you know you can do that it’s beneficial for the for the doctors and nurses to witness that as well and for the other patients and for the other family members it’s beneficial for everybody but also a ceremony to help the spirit to move to the other side would be helpful because some spirits do get caught and get caught up in sticking around and so there could be some spirit release ceremonies as well so somebody let’s say you’re the person asking the question wants something just quick that they can do I would refer them to that either theory book where there’s this lovely script at the back where you talk the spirit into walking to the light and meeting with their with their guides or their or their ancestors. I think it would be great is every if every time someone passed in a hospital somebody read a script like that it doesn’t have to be that exact but something similar where you say okay now you you’re you know you’re no longer a part of the physical realm you know please walk, you know look around and see who’s there to greet you, be aware that you’re loved that you’re greeted and you know allow them to take you to the other side where you’ll be well received.

Rick:  I guess we kind of have that where the priest comes in and does last rites and all that but perhaps it could be more potent and more elaborate and more effective.

Jennifer Lisa: Yeah and for different traditions not just the right.

Rick:  Yeah so yeah and you know that’s something that I have done in my spirit release work and I used to do a lot of spirit release work and I didn’t intend to do it that’s true of many of my gifts that you know the gifts just keep showing up and then I keep being directed by my guides to practice certain things and so there was a time in my life when I was doing a lot of energy healing and I started getting a lot of clients with spirit attachments that were causing them problems in their life and so I had different angels come in and started showing me how to assist these spirits in, in releasing and this is the kind of things they told me to say is you know help them to see the that the other side is waiting for them, that there’s people there waiting for them that there’s love there that you know all of their needs will be met but the question to be answered help them to just kind of move in that direction and for most spirits that’s all they really need is a little bit of assistance because people die in confused states, they die in angry states, they die in traumatic, you know shocking states and the people who end up sticking around are often people who are very confused about why they died or how they died and and they just need a little help and so yeah that could be a regular part of people dying in the hospital is a little bit of spirit release you know guidance and then some honoring of their passing and then there could be regular sweeps like having, having spiritual you know leaders come in on a regular basis who are clairvoyants having mediums come into the hospital on a regular basis and assess okay are there spirits in this room okay let’s let’s cleanse this room.

Rick:  Spiritual janitors or something.

Jennifer Lisa: Exactly what we need.

Rick:  You made an interesting point which in your book which this one reminds me of which is that we can distract or interfere with the work of deceased loved ones if we constantly call them to earth you know to communicate with us they might they feel obligated to come but they might. It takes them away from other things that they’re supposed to be doing on the other side.

Jennifer Lisa: Yeah so I learned that just from experience working with a lot of spirits because I’m also a medium and I used to do mediumship sessions and people would come to me and they will want to talk to Uncle Joe I want to talk to grandma and sometimes they would want to come to me and keep speaking to that person. I had this one person I remember who’s very good friend died and he died very suddenly and in a shocking way and she was very grief-stricken and she came to see me several times to talk to him and I was allowed to keep calling him down because it was helping him as well like his teacher was saying oh it’s good for him to come and help her and and help process his death but then at a certain point when I went to call him he said, oh you know I’m in class right now and he was in spirit class and he had to ask his teacher permission to come talk to me and she said yes, it’s okay but I but I had a lot of experiences like that where sometimes the spirit was in spirit class, sometimes they were already engaged in a job over there and I was interrupting you know that work sometimes they were supposed to be doing their life review but they kept postponing it because they wanted to talk to the people down here and so over time I started limiting my mediumship sessions to only working with certain types of death, I only work with traumatic death and that was because with traumatic death the spirit who’s died usually benefits from having an ongoing conversation with the living it helps them to process their death and helps them to heal and because my life path is about healing I can’t do mediumship unless it’s healing for all the parties involved and what I learned from that is that you know you can interfere with a spirits kind of path if you’re keeping them too caught up in what’s going on down here and addressing the grief of their of their deceased of their loved ones when maybe they should be addressing some other things over there so this is another thing that you know. The book is written for every type of psychic and healer so this this whole section that I talk about this is about is for the mediums.

Rick:  Yeah

Jennifer Lisa: You know being …

Rick:  As I said many of the points applied completely outside the psychic and healer realm to you know other spiritual teachers and stuff.

Jennifer Lisa: Yeah I’ve gotten a lot of feedback like that from people who’ve read the book that it applies to therapists, it applies to …

Rick:  It really does. I mean a lot of these points you make are universal and could even apply to doctors and you know people like that.

Jennifer Lisa: Yeah.

Rick:  Yeah. Here’s a question from Karen Pellizzini in Mobile Alabama. When I first began to understand that there was something beyond the ordinary conception of being a human strange phenomena started to occur including other beings waking me in the middle of the night to communicate after a few meetings I asked that they not return and they did not. I found meditation and have been on a path for two decades. Might these beings try to contact me again?

Jennifer Lisa: It depends on what level the beings were on. So like once you start meditating and kind of adjusting your life to a higher vibration you’re going to attract a different level of being and the lower level beings won’t really be able to contact you at that point if you’re kind of vibrating at that higher level but you may attract other beings and so you’ll find, I certainly have found throughout my life that I’ve attracted different levels of beings throughout my life depending upon what work I was doing in my own spiritual development, and so you yeah you may still attract beings to you and there you know there’s different kinds like when I was a kid I always had beings that would come and get me when I was really young I had these beings that would come to me at night and they would wake me up and they would pull me out of my body and they were benevolent beings they were my teachers actually trying to take me to spirit school. As I got older I didn’t, I didn’t need them to pull me out of my body I developed the ability to just leave my body and so sometimes you have beings like that who are trying to help you in your spiritual journey, they’re trying to assist you and leaving your body or they’re trying to teach you something but then you can also have those like, lower level beings that I had when I was younger too that we’re trying to kind of get in my body like possess my body because they wanted to they wanted to live on the earth planet they didn’t have bodies and those were lower level beings that were a result of a lot of the trauma I was experiencing as a child which made me vulnerable, so whenever you’re going through grief or trauma or illness you can develop kind of holes in your aura or rends in your aura which can make you more vulnerable to attachments by beings that are not necessarily helpful.

Rick:  There’s a verse in the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali that even very advanced yogis can go through a phase where they are tempted by celestial beings and they’re being offered various sort of divine experiences and all but it could actually be a trap or you know it could throw you off and you’re supposed to just say, “No thanks, thank you very much I’m moving on.”

Jennifer Lisa: Some people say that the more high-level spiritual work you do, the more you will attract these low level beings.

Rick:  Okay so you’re probably familiar with the term walk-ins. I’m sure you are and I remember hearing some guy speak who claimed that Albert Einstein was a walk-in and he was now embodying the spirit of Einstein. I don’t know if he could have explained Einstein’s general theory of relativity but anyway there’s a guy named Cedric Orange here from California who asked, what is your opinion about walk-ins? Do they actually exist and how would we know if a walk-in is attached to us?

Jennifer Lisa: I don’t know if I can answer that question. I have had a couple people I’ve met who I remember doing some readings on some people and I was told that they were two souls occupying one body and I remember thinking is that what people mean by a walk-in?

Rick:  Here’s one way I’ve heard it explained. Let’s say someone dies.

Jennifer Lisa: I know what it is.

Rick:  The moment they die somebody else comes in and takes over and continues on with that body and the other soul has left.

Jennifer Lisa: Yeah, I mean I’ve read a lot about them how people make agreements with other souls that they’re gonna leave and let someone else take over and finish their incarnation.

Rick:  Yeah.

Jennifer Lisa: So I have definitely read about that but I haven’t really, I have only a couple of times encountered people who said that they were that. I don’t know if I have enough evidence. You know because I’m a psychic but I’m also I have a scientific background and I like evidence. So I was trained in evidential medianship as a medical intuitive it’s all about evidence right if I tell someone something they need to get a test and prove it. And so if I don’t have enough data then I’m not sure and I feel like I haven’t encountered enough people who were walk-ins for me to know if that’s if that’s I guess I just don’t know enough about it.

Rick:  Well that’s great. That’s a very ethical psychic kind of answer because you’re saying, “I don’t know”, you know, which is a wonderful thing to say if you don’t know.

Jennifer Lisa: Yeah I don’t think I know. I don’t think I know enough about that.

Rick:  Yeah. People should say that more often when they don’t know something just…

Jennifer Lisa: You know, I found out when I was a PhD we had to go through something called your orals, your oral examination when you have to sit in a room with all these professors for hours and they can ask you any question and and it tests how much you know and I remember that one of the things I learned from that I think maybe one of my professors explained to me at some point is that what what they’re looking for is not just how much you know but they’re looking for whether or not you know the limits of your knowledge. And so as a as a scholar when you’re giving a paper or when you’re in a situation like that there’s a certain point at which you should be able to say I don’t know the answer to that.

Rick:  Yeah that’s great, that some say the more we know the more we realize how little we know.

Jennifer Lisa: Yes, that was Socrates.

Rick:  That was if we’re honest about it. Socrates, was it?

Rick:  Yeah. Okay so we have basically one more chapter in the book and maybe I’ll just read all the points in the chapter and then you can kind of comment on them as a whole. So this is you know kind of the the final chapters and similar to the title of the book, it’s how to become an ethical psychic. And again I think this applies to people in other fields of spiritual endeavor or even worldly endeavor. I’ll just read all the points. Choose teachers carefully. Choose colleagues carefully. Examine your motives. Do the emotional work. Dedicate yourself to becoming a hollow bone. You’ll define that. And live a balanced life.

Jennifer Lisa: Yeah, so the choosing teachers carefully suggestion is also based on the premise that you are going to have teachers. So some people think oh I was born with these gifts I don’t need teachers. That person’s probably gonna harm somebody. I was born with gifts. I was born with a lot of gifts. Doesn’t mean that I was qualified to counsel people just because I had gifts. I had to learn how to do that. I had to watch teachers help people. I had to learn how to control my gifts. I had to get to the point where my gifts were on call. You know so a lot of us with gifts, we’re not we’re not always accessing them. You know we have periods of time where our gifts are dormant. We have periods of time when we’re extremely accurate. You have to train with a teacher to learn how to control your gifts so that they are on board as needed in a consistent and reliable fashion. So like if someone books a session with me and they get there I can’t just be like, oh I’m having an off day right? This person needs the answers. They’re sick. It’s important. I have to have the gifts on call, on demand and evidential and that requires training. So that’s the first thing is that people have to commit themselves to getting training, as much training as they can in how to control their gifts and how to use them to be of service. But we all have it we have to be careful who we get trained by and nowadays you know you can get trained by you know almost anybody one YouTube and get trained. You can read books and get training. That’s why I wrote the book so people get you know trained on ethics by reading the book. You could sign up for a weekend workshop. There are a lot of teachers out there and not all of them are ethical and not all of them know what they’re say they know. And so you know it’s important to choose to choose teachers carefully and you know one of the things I look for is humility. You also want to look for the reputation like what other people say about them rather than what they say about themselves. One thing I’ve noticed is that a lot of practitioners will have websites and they’ll have all of these you know reviews on their website that all their clients have said how wonderful they are. But then there won’t be any independent reviews like Google or Yelp, like you can you know, with Yelp, people can put a review on there and as a practitioner you don’t really have control of what people put on there. And so, if the person has no independent reviews. You know I’d be a little suspicious right, what, why don’t they. So you want to you want to really look at the effects of that teacher too. You want to see, you know what do their students look like or act like you know are their students good people?

Rick:  That’s a good point. Boy, students are very often a reflection of the teacher.

Jennifer Lisa: Right.

Rick:  Yeah.

Jennifer Lisa: And, as teachers we have to you know kind of take responsibility for them. I used to joke. I used to be a professor of philosophy and I used to joke with my students I used to say you know if you go out in the world and be an axe murderer you know I’m not gonna want anyone to know I was your teacher.

Rick:  Good point.

Jennifer Lisa: But if you go out in the world and do great things I’m gonna be claiming you. I’m gonna say, “That’s my student.” But the reality is regardless of what you go out in the world and do there is some way in which I’m responsible as your teacher. And, and so you want to look at you know what are their students look like. What are their students, what are they doing in the world? That’s what you’re going to get out of their teachings. You know so that’s that’s very important that you that you have teachers and that you also choose them carefully.

Rick:  Yeah the next one of those colleagues of course. So many traditions say that the company you keep is extremely important especially if you’re on a spiritual path you know.

Jennifer Lisa: Yeah, I learned that the hard way and that was part of the motivation for the book is I you know as somebody who was going through my apprenticeship and learning how to run a practice and see clients I ended up working with a lot of different colleagues of business associates and I saw a lot of things and I learned from those experiences what not to do sometimes. And what I realized too in those experiences that is that I couldn’t just separate myself from that and say, oh well I’m an ethical psychic and maybe my business partner isn’t but I’m not responsible for that person. I had to, I had to think about well, what what is it saying about my practice if I’m working with this person. Doesn’t that reflect on me that I’m, doesn’t it isn’t it kind of making it look like I implicitly endorse that person if I’m working with them. And, and so you know I think we do have to think about those things like if you’re if you’re making money working at a facility that’s unethical you know I did that at one point I was working for this metaphysical store and I found out that they were putting charms in their candles to make people come back and buy more. And I found out they started, I found it a lot of things that they were doing and and I you know I was getting my, my you know this was my sole source of income and it was a struggle to walk away. And I had that experience again and again with different business partners or places I was working where they were doing some things that were unethical and I kept trying to kind of convince myself that I wasn’t responsible for their bad behavior because I was an ethical healer.

Jennifer Lisa: But then my students who were coming to me…

Rick:  Gesundheit.

Jennifer Lisa: They were either buying products from those people or, or kind of going to see those people as clients because of my implicit endorsement, you know. They considered that person that since I was somebody who had strong values that I would not be associated with somebody who didn’t. And so in that way then I was responsible because then they were going and interacting with my colleagues and possibly getting harmed and I couldn’t really absolve myself of my, of my responsibility. So that’s one aspect of it is that you may be then indirectly harming somebody by endorsing somebody who’s unethical.

Rick:  yeah.

Jennifer Lisa: But also you just keep company like you said keep company with those people, they’re gonna influence you.

Rick:  Yeah like you mentioned in you know alcoholics can be possessed by or haunted by negative spirits. I mean if you hang out in a bar and that’s the atmosphere that you expose yourself to that even if you didn’t talk to anybody and just sat in the corner you’re gonna be influenced by that atmosphere.

Jennifer Lisa: You are and you know I do tell people that you have to choose your environments carefully, your friends. You know if you’re doing this work, yeah, if you’re around people who are or you know addicted to a lot of substances, if you’re around people who are very angry who are who are verbally abusive if you’re around people who are yeah if you’re hanging out in bars where a lot of those people are you know that’s gonna negatively influence your, your energy and make you more vulnerable. But but also like if you’re hanging out with colleagues who are you know, engaging in like financially dependent relationships with their clients you know they might start kind of talking you into thinking it’s okay well, you’re not responsible for how people spend their money you can’t be worried about that you know you, it’s gonna influence you if those are the people you’re hanging out with those are your colleagues and you’re all kind of comparing notes on your practice that might influence you to start doing things that you really know better than to do because they’re doing it you know.

Rick:  Okay examining your motives that’s a good one. We may have covered this to some extent but…

Jennifer Lisa: Yeah

Rick:  You know what drives, you why are you doing this to begin with?

Jennifer Lisa: Why are you doing this work you know that’s important.

Rick:  Yeah and then doing the emotional work I mean, I think this is an important one because I think you know Ken I don’t know if you’ve heard of Ken Wilber but he’s this philosopher and he one of his models is lines of development and you know emotional would be one line, intellect would be a line, consciousness would be a line, you know various different facets of our personality and they can be quite uncorrelated with one another you know one could be quite advanced along certain lines and really stunted in other lines and I think a lot of problems arise when teachers have you know, are stunted in certain ways particularly emotionally and that plays out in their behavior as teachers or I imagine, psychics.

Jennifer Lisa: Yeah you know because the person can be psychically gifted and emotionally immature and they don’t go together necessarily. A person can even be spiritually advanced, a spiritually advanced soul who’s had many lifetimes but they can be emotionally stunted in this lifetime and so people have to do the emotional work and so actually in the section on self-awareness that’s one of the things I talk about is you have to be, you have to be aware of what your emotions are and where you’re coming from so that doesn’t kind of influence how you interact with people and you don’t project your own issues on to other people, emotional you know, I teach my medical intuitive students to do emotional inventories before you sit down with a client you have to learn how to do an emotional inventory where you’re able to kind of take stock of what are your feelings, what have you been feeling over the last 24 years what is the range of emotions you’ve been going through and to just get in the practice of being aware at all times of what your emotions are so that and this is just good for everybody in general right is to just become aware of what your emotional issues are emotional what are you going through when you feeling and why and this is something you can learn from working with a therapist long-term. You can also learn it by working with you know sometimes with ministers or spiritual leaders or working in groups or you know reading a lot of self-help books. Some people do that do it that way but just becoming aware of your emotions is super important for any type of spiritual psychic or healing work because if you’re not aware of your emotions, your emotions are going to interfere with your ability to help somebody so for example if you have had a really difficult relationship with let’s say, a stepfather and every time you see someone who looks like your stepfather, it triggers you a client comes to see you and they look like your stepfather or they sound like your stepfather and you haven’t processed any of those emotions you had about your stepfather you may be giving them bad advice or projecting things on to them and misreading who they are because you have this emotional work you haven’t done and this happens. I’ve seen this a lot. This is also this also is related to biases and prejudices. One of the some of the biggest obstacles to psychic development that I’ve seen when I was a student in psychic classes with other students or people’s unresolved emotional issues and then people’s biases and prejudices and so what happens they sit down and do a practice reading with somebody and they’re bringing all this stuff right either they’re unresolved issues that that are being triggered by this reading or their biases about people who look like you or has your gender or your sounds like you or and then they’re making assumptions and I saw this time and again when I was a student myself where we were doing practice readings and I would see students giving readings that were just completely inaccurate because they were not readings of the client they were just readings of that person’s emotional state or their past or their past traumas or their biases and prejudices and so if a psychic doesn’t deal with that stuff they’re going to, it’s going to seriously interfere with their with their accuracy but also they’re going to you know potentially project it onto the client and you know inaccuracy is harmful in itself when you tell someone something that’s wrong and they then go run with it that’s harmful but you can also, you know tell someone something that’s that’s inaccurate that’s also insulting or that’s you know negative about them that’s not accurate because you are projecting something onto them.

Rick:  Yeah

Jennifer Lisa: It also makes you not compassionate if you’re dealing with your own unresolved emotions like I’ve seen this I saw this in like the class I just finished teaching so I teach indigenous medical intuition for the shift network and then I just recently taught an advanced indigenous medical intuition course and what I, and in that class I had a lot of practitioners people who already are in practice as some type of healer and they’re, and they’re just trying to kind of deepen their practice by learning the modality I teach and I saw a lot of, not a lot, I shouldn’t say a lot there was a handful of people enough that it was I was concerned of healers who were very judgmental of clients who they saw as what did they call it, people with a secondary gain to being sick and

Rick:  I don’t understand what’s that mean

Jennifer Lisa: Yeah I find it to be a really offensive way of talking about it but like when you when you think someone is at a psychosomatic illness or you think that they’re sick because they’re benefiting somehow from being sick

Rick:  Like they are hypochondriac or they

Jennifer Lisa: Right

Rick:  or they just want to know it for attention and that…

Jennifer Lisa: Yeah so the way that people talk about it now is they say there’s a secondary game like

Rick:  I see

Jennifer Lisa: It’s all, if they’re all versions of the same thing you’re psychosomatic, you’re hysterical, you’re it’s you’re a hypochondriac you just want attention you you’re getting something out of it right, regardless of what you call it what I saw with some people is a real judgment and lack of compassion and I see that as a lack of the person having done their own emotional work that when they see somebody who they think is complaining too much or or who maybe their illness isn’t really physical, maybe it’s there’s some other cause or maybe they’re not really sick but they they need some, they have some emotional needs that are not being met and the way that they’re meeting those needs is through their illness that instead of seeing this as somebody who needs help regardless of what kind of help they need they need help right and this is our job as healers just to help. They’re sitting in a place of judgment saying, “oh that person’s not really sick, they’re just getting a secondary gain from pretending to be sick.”

Rick:  And that’s very presumptuous because they may be sick. How would they know?

Jennifer Lisa: Right, so there’s the other, the arrogant presumption that you know that you’re such a good healer or such a good medical intuitive that you know for sure because you never know for sure right.

Rick:  Right.

Jennifer Lisa: As an intuitive you scan somebody and like I said, 80 to 90 percent accurate if you’re really, really good so you may not know for sure what’s wrong with them so there’s that arrogance but then also there’s that judgment of you know, something’s wrong with this person that they’re pretending to be sick or that they’re exaggerating their illness and so there’s that judgment that comes from somebody not having done their own emotional work right, the need to sit in judgment of people, the need to put people down or make them less than you that’s always about some type of emotional issue we haven’t dealt with in ourselves, some insecurity or some maybe we’ve been judged in the past and so that we have the need to judge people. There’s different reasons for it but when you’re not dealing with your own emotions it can make you a less compassionate healer and it can also cause you to project and to get triggered and to be you know, inaccurate, there’s just a lot that can come from not having dealt with your emotional health.

Rick:  Yeah, good. Two more points. and I want to make sure to cover these because they’re both important. Dedicate yourself to becoming a hollow bone.

Jennifer Lisa: Okay so the term hollow bone is from Fool’s Crow, a Lakota medicine man and there was a couple of books.

Rick:  You know Cynthia Lane? She’s an old friend of mine. I think she studied with him too but anyway go ahead. She’s been on BatGap a couple of times, yeah.

Jennifer Lisa: Okay so yeah, he was a medicine man and some books were written you know with him and about him and so that’s where I learned about the idea of a hollow bone and you do find something similar in a lot of different native traditions and I’ve been trained in some Native American traditions because that’s part of my heritage and part of my training and one of the things that I was taught you know by actually a number of teachers so they’re not always using that term was that, we are just vessels so like my teachers in Jamaica taught me this, my teachers in Trinidad taught me this, that when you are a healer you are merely a vessel for the the higher power energy that’s working through the healing energy you know in Reiki we call it you know Qi you know the Qi in chronic healer we call it prana but in lots of traditions you have a name for this but it’s, it’s always you know in acupuncture they call it Qi I think right?

Rick:  I think so

Jennifer Lisa: It’s always this idea that energy flows through us and the healer is helping right to kind of channel energy through the body and that’s what Lakota that’s what the Fool’s Crow was talking about when we talked about the hollow bone, he said as medicine people we are simply hollow bones and so your only job as a healer you’re not the source of the healing you’re the vehicle through which the healing occurs your only job as a hollow bone is to keep your bone clean and so you know what do we do to keep our bone clean we get out of the way get out of the way we’re trying to keep ourselves pure we’re trying to keep our vibration high we’re trying to engage in a lifestyle that keeps us at a high level vibrating we’re trying to get to deal with our emotional stuff get that out of the way we’re trying to get ourselves our ego out of the way when we get all that stuff out of the way we become a hollow bone we can then channel the healing energy or the healing messages and sort of wisdom directly to the client or the student and so this is how you become an ethical psychic is you always think of yourself as a hollow bone and how can I stay and become a kind of very clean hollow bone.

Rick:  Yeah I think almost everything we talked about today pertains to that because unethical behavior clogs up the bone so to speak and and you need to purify or hollow out the bone in order to be ethical and not have all kinds of your own inner tangles interfere with the transmission of that higher energy.

Jennifer Lisa: Yeah, it’s so important.

Rick:  Yeah, okay and finally, live a balanced life. I hope that includes exercise I see too many people that are sedentary and you know like to meditate a lot which I do but I feel like we should, all aspects of life should be taken care of and that includes physical health and that includes exercise.

Jennifer Lisa: Yeah, a lot of people are in balance, they can be in the other direction too so like in the US we think yoga is a form of exercise.

Rick:  Right

Jennifer Lisa: And so misguided about yoga because yoga involves exercise and it also involves meditation, it also involves psychic gift development, it also involves philosophical conversation right, there’s many different forms of yoga but some people get caught up and only like you’re saying only meditating those are only doing that practice that yoga, some people are only doing the you’re the stretching exercises and we need balance so in in so in the Native American tradition which I’ve been trained balance is the key to everything especially to health but also to practice to being a teacher to being a healer, to being of service, you know we have to have our intellectual world, our physical world, our spiritual world in balance.

Rick:  You know it says that in the Bhagavad Gita too – Krishna says to Arjuna, this yoga is not for him who sleeps too much or too little, eats too much or too little is too active or too you know sedentary, is it’s like and of course I think Buddha and the Middle Way were all about balance also…

Jennifer Lisa: Yeah also

Rick:  Buddha went to extremes before he kind of brought it back into a more balanced lifestyle.

Jennifer Lisa: Yeah, also the Confucius and Chinese philosophy talks about the balance also in African philosophy, Wiccan philosophy, there’s also a big focus on you know the wise person is living in balance, in terms of working as a psychic or a healer, what I’m talking about is also being having a balanced life in terms of your relationships. What we see with with these fake gurus, fake shamans who are abusing people with their gifts is that they often have imbalance and so there’s a temptation. I can see the temptation. I know what it’s like to be a teacher and to have all of these students gathered around me and to have all of these students have crushes on me and that’s just a part of what happens when you have a certain type of gift and if you don’t have balance in your life like let’s say you don’t have a social life outside of your work as a teacher and the only people you’re interacting with are students then you’re gonna end up picking your romantic partners from your students which isn’t appropriate because you have power over them and so there’s an imbalance in your life there you don’t have an equal time for like your family, your social life your entertainment and also your spiritual and vocational work so you have to have that balance in your life otherwise you’re going to become here kind of kind of fall prey to certain behaviors that really aren’t healthy and and that’s true also with physical yeah, if you’re always meditating but you’re not exercising your body you’re going to develop disease and the same with food like some people are extreme and that they overeat unhealthy foods and that’s one form of imbalance another form of imbalance is people who fast all the time.

Rick:  I went through a phase like that back in the 70s.

Jennifer Lisa: I did too. I used to be always fasting and…

Rick:  Yeah

Jennifer Lisa: not eating and people can get too caught up in that where they do much that their bodies not they’re actually suffering from malnutrition or there or yeah, or there or they’re meditating so much that they’re not they’ve lost the ability to communicate with other people because they’re just always by themselves and and then they start having you know problems in their life because they don’t know how to communicate because they’ve been so focused on the inner.

Rick:  Yeah

Jennifer Lisa: So there’s a lot of forms of imbalance that can interfere specifically with our ability to help people. It’s also the case if we, if we if we’re just too focused in one way…

Rick:  Obsessive.

Jennifer Lisa: Yeah, we’re not going to be available to help a broad range of people if we’re only focused in one way. I mean I can think of an example that comes to mind that I’ve seen a lot of recently is that some people get really obsessed with a particular diet and they get so obsessed with it that they think it’s the key to everything and that everybody should eat this one way and if you get obsessed with a certain diet and you’re a healer you might try to get all of your clients to follow your diet and then oh you’re not going to get better if you’re eating meat or if you’re eating if you’re consuming alcohol or if you’re you know eating nightshade vegetables right, there people get really obsessed with particular dietary restrictions as the key to health or the key to spiritual development and that can create an imbalance where, that you’re overly focused on that one thing and there might be some people in your in your class, your congregation and your clientele for whom that’s not really going to work and you’re missing out now on an opportunity to help that person because you’re not open to helping them in other ways, you’re only open to helping them by having them get on this diet.

Rick:  Yeah

Jennifer Lisa: You see that with a lot of healers that they get caught up in one particular type of treatment. Everyone has to get this treatment.

Rick:  Yeah, we all have a fanatical streak you know that we can we can fall prey to I think

Jennifer Lisa: Yeah, so anything and a balance like that can affect your ability to help people and even cause you to harm.

Rick:  Yeah, well, great I really enjoyed this conversation and I really enjoyed your book and I highly recommend it. There are a lot of interesting points in your book that we didn’t get a chance to cover obviously and so I’ll put a link to it on your page on BatGap and a link to your website and you know as you mentioned you’re doing some stuff with the shift network;

Jennifer Lisa: I have classes on my website that people can demand. I can have a class about auras and I have a medical intuition class on my website.

Rick:  You still do private consultations?

Jennifer Lisa: I’m not doing private consultations right now. My guides have me on a break from that. I’m just writing, some teaching classes but I also have a you know, a podcast and I have a mighty network community that people can join so yeah, there’s a lot of stuff on my website

Rick:  Okay well, I’ll link to that. People can explore it. Okay, well thank you very much I’ve really enjoyed this and thanks to those who’ve been listening or watching and my next interview will be with a quantum physicist which is a stretch for me because I don’t really know you have a degree in physics don’t you but I don’t and so it’s really but there’s so many people in spiritual with spiritual interests who are referring to quantum this and quantum that and I want to talk to her about you know some of the concepts that are bandied about in the name of spirituality and physics and whether those are valid or not from a physicist’s perspective. Anyway that’s what we’ll do so thanks Jennifer Lisa.

Jennifer Lisa: Yeah, thanks for having me. Yeah, I started out in physics and so I love that I love the connections between the new string theory and you know interdimensional work.

Rick:  Yeah, all that stuff. Yeah, good. All righty. Well, thanks. We’ll be in touch.

Jennifer Lisa: All right, thanks.

Rick:  Okay, bye bye.