Suzanne Giesemann Interview

Summary

Suzanne Giesemann presents mediumship as a practice that can be tested through specific, verifiable details and personal evidence. She discusses spiritual awareness during comas, dementia, and after suicide, along with the comfort, ethical responsibility, and healing such communication can provide.

Questions This Interview Explores

• What evidence suggests that consciousness continues after death?
• Can people in comas or with dementia remain spiritually aware?
• How can mediumship help people heal after the death of a loved one?
• How can we recognize possible signs or messages from loved ones who have died?
• What ethical boundaries should guide psychic and mediumship work?

Key takeaways

• Specific details that others independently verify can make mediumship claims more testable.
• A coma may limit bodily expression without limiting a person’s deeper awareness.
• Suzanne believes dementia affects the brain’s wiring, not the clarity of the soul.
• Mediumship can offer comfort by giving grieving people a sense of continued connection.
• Apologies, forgiveness, and expressions of love are best offered while people are still alive.
• Consent, privacy, and integrity are essential when attempting psychic communication.

Transcript

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people. I’ve done over 400 of them by now, and if this is new to you and you’d like to look at previous ones, go to batgap.com and look under the Past Interviews menu. You will see them all organized in various ways.

This show is made possible by the support of appreciative listeners and viewers, so if you appreciate it and feel like supporting it, there is a donate button on every page of the site.

My guest today is Suzanne Giesemann. I had Suzanne on the show about a year ago—I think it was actually last August—and we really enjoyed talking to her. We want to have another session in order to tell, or kind of give, more accounts of evidence, because she calls herself an evidence-based medium, and we felt like we hadn’t quite done justice to that in the previous interview. I was asking a lot of technical and philosophical questions and all, so we’re going to have another session with Suzanne.

Let me just read a bio. She is a spiritual teacher, an evidence-based medium, as I just said, and the author of 11 books, including Messages of Hope and Wolf’s Message. She is a former U.S. Navy commander who served as a commanding officer, special assistant to the Chief of Naval Operations, and as an aide to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. There are pictures with her arm around George Bush and things like that. She was actually in the last plane in the sky after 9/11 because she was heading over to Europe with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and he said, “We’ve got to turn around,” so they went back to Washington.

Suzanne’s gift of communication with those on the other side provides stunning evidence of life after death, of our connection with the greater reality, and of how she went from being this high-ranking naval officer to communicating with the other side. That’s an interesting story, which I think we told in the first interview, so we won’t necessarily be going through all the details of that in this one. She brings messages of hope, healing, and love that go straight to the heart. Her work has been recognized as highly credible by afterlife researcher Dr. Gary Schwartz and best-selling author Dr. Wayne Dyer.

For more about her work, her website is suzannegiesemann.com. So, Suzanne, welcome.

Suzanne: Thanks, Rick. Fun to be back.

Rick: Yeah, good to see you again. One other thing I didn’t mention about Suzanne is that she and her husband, Ty, are itinerants. A large part of the year—they spend about five months of the year—in a 42-foot RV traveling around the country. Right now, she’s in Phoenix, Arizona.

I just finished reading Wolf’s Message, that book, and there’s a lot of personal accounts of traveling around the country and getting all these messages and cognitions and so on. I just kept getting struck, again and again, with the impression that there’s never a dull moment in her life. Maybe there are some dull moments in the midst of long drives, but there’s always a lot of really interesting stuff going on with you.

Suzanne: It is, and I’m laughing because on our honeymoon I pulled a joke on my husband and had him rolling on the floor in laughter. I looked at him and said, “I promise your life with me will never be boring.” At that time, I had no idea I would want to be doing this work—none. I just knew that we needed to bring laughter into our marriage. Now it’s laughter and joy and awesome things that happen almost daily. I wake up every morning with excitement and say, “What is going to happen today?”

✨ Awakening to both worlds

Rick: Yeah, it’s really neat, and it will be more evident why it’s neat as we get into this conversation. You sort of have a foot in both worlds—this world that we all live in. I think you would say that everybody has a foot in both worlds, but maybe the foot in the other world has kind of fallen asleep for most people.

Suzanne: That’s a great analogy, and I think that’s what awakening is: awakening to the fact that we are in both worlds while we’re in human form. I’m not aware of the spirit world at all times. It still takes a shift to really get a good connection with those on the other side, but I’ll be sharing with you stories today, as time allows, of spontaneous awareness of that greater reality, and that’s really fun.

Rick: Yeah, and I don’t know if it would be desirable to be aware of the spirit world at all times.

Suzanne: Exactly. That’s what—in Wolf’s Message, Wolf had challenges because he said, “It’s busy in here,” and was diagnosed as schizophrenic when, really, he just couldn’t turn off his awareness of the greater reality. I’m not saying that that’s what all cases of schizophrenia or mental illness are, but you are right: it would be hard to function if you’re constantly walking that line.

Rick: I interviewed this woman named Jac O’Keeffe about five years ago. She was a regular, down-to-earth, agnostic Irish woman and not interested in this kind of stuff at all. She was a journalist or something, and she was sitting in a pub in Dublin or someplace, having a beer with friends. All of a sudden, pow, she just sort of snapped. She shifted into this perception of spooks. She was seeing entities all over the place.

Suzanne: Oh, yeah.

Rick: People can listen to her whole interview, but she actually became a professional ghostbuster for a while. She has gone through all sorts of shifts, but she was like, “Get me out of here. I don’t want this.”

Suzanne: Exactly, and that’s something that I prayed for—for a while. “Let me see the spirits,” because I still don’t. “Let me see them.” I have a good friend right here in Cave Creek, Arizona, Susanne Wilson—another Susanne—who had that experience where she saw the spirits. She said she had a spirit handing her towels in the shower. She says, “Trust me, you don’t want that,” and it took her a long time to turn it off.

Rick: Interesting. How could a spirit hand a towel? I mean, they’re sort of these subtle entities. How could they actually—I mean…

Suzanne: What a great question.

Rick: I mean, a casual observer—if there were a third party, like her husband, standing there—would he see this towel floating through the air and going over to the shower?

Suzanne: I have to ask her because I haven’t had that experience.

Rick: Yeah, yeah. Interesting.

Suzanne: Maybe it was a spirit towel.

Rick: I have some notes here, but not as extensive as I often have with people, because I want you to just talk a lot and not necessarily be interrupted by a lot of questions. Would you like me to ask you one to get you going, or would you like to just start out and tell us some stuff?

Suzanne: Yeah, ask a question. Ask away.

Rick: Okay.

Suzanne: I just have to be careful what you ask for.

Mediumship and the Interconnectedness of Two Worlds

Well, here’s one. I’m quoting from your book. You said, “Working as a medium has shown me how very connected we are with all that is. Our world is just a tiny part of a far greater world, and the two worlds are intricately interconnected.” So, how is that? Does that prime your pump?

Rick: Well, here’s one. I’m quoting from your book. You said, “Working as a medium has shown me how very connected we are with all that is. Our world is just a tiny part of a far greater world, and the two worlds are intricately interconnected.” So, how is that? Does that prime your pump?

Suzanne: Without a doubt. Oh, yeah, because once we realize that connection exists, then you start noticing the signs that those on the other side are sending us all the time. I think this is part of what my work helps people to do: to notice that.

Both Wolf’s Message is a perfect example of me catching what I call snags—why did that just catch my attention? Then I pull the thread, and there’s this evidence of the connection of the two worlds from that thing that snagged me. So, it’s learning to pay attention to why something grabbed my consciousness. Then, with that belief that there is an unseen world—unseen to our physical eyes here—we start stepping right into those magical moments.

Rick: Now, you know, there are a lot of skeptical people in the world. There are some people who even consider themselves professional skeptics, although I don’t know if there’s much money in it. There are certain people you couldn’t convince of certain things if it knocked them over the head, because they’re so entrenched in their paradigm and they’d always have an explanation for any evidence you offer them. So let’s put aside those people. I think most of the people listening to this aren’t of that mindset. Give us a few examples of what you mean by evidence that would be significant to the average, non-cynical person.

Communicating with a Woman in a Coma

Suzanne: Okay, let’s start with when I received an email from a group at a church where I was going to be speaking later that month. They said, “We have a woman in our church who has been in a coma for three weeks. We were wondering, since you’re a medium, if you might be able to connect with her soul and ask what her wishes are.”

With that one, I actually pushed myself back from the computer when I read it, because I realized they wanted me to see whether they should pull the plug or not—whether she wanted them to pull the plug. No medium is 100 percent accurate, so I wasn’t going to take on that responsibility until I remembered: Wait a minute, what is it that has convinced me we are all souls, whether in a body or not? It’s the evidence.

So, doing a little bit of self-science, I thought this would be an excellent experiment. I will do my normal shifting technique to connect with spirit, but with the intention of connecting with the soul of the woman in a coma. I will ask her to give me evidence—things about her that I couldn’t possibly know—and I’ll send those to the people who sent me the email. If they can validate at least 80 percent of those items, because that’s well beyond pure chance, then I’ll tell them what I discern as her wishes. If they don’t validate it, then we just leave that go.

I went into my study, where I do my readings, and got into a nice, expanded state of awareness. I shifted and realized I didn’t even know this woman’s name. I didn’t know anything. So my intention was: “I want to connect with the soul of the woman in a coma who is a friend of—we’ll call her Mary—who sent me the email. Please step into my awareness now.”

Immediately, I felt this lightheaded feeling that I feel when I do a reading and connect with spirits who have passed. So I just began asking her, “Tell me about your coma.” She said, “It is from a clot, not trauma.” I wrote that down.

“And tell me about you,” I said. She told me that she had an advanced degree in counseling. She told me the name of the hospital where she was. She told me that there was red hair near her in the hospital. She told me that members of the church stood around her bed in a circle every day, and one of them sang to her.

She went on and on with things like that. She gave me her mother’s name. Personality-wise, I could feel her, just like I feel every spirit in a reading. I described her as very upbeat, very loving, and generous with her time. She volunteers at the church. There was a whole list of things.

Then I asked her, “If your friends can validate this list of things, what are your wishes?” What she said made my jaw drop because it was so obvious, yet it’s something that so few of us think about. She said, “They can pull the plug if they want. If it’s my time, I’ll go. If it’s not, I’ll stay.”

It was really obvious, but I wasn’t going to write that. So I typed up this list of things and sent it to her friend.

Rick: There’s also “California Here I Come, Right Back Where I Started From.” That was part of it.

Suzanne: Oh, you know this story. Did I tell this?

Rick: I don’t think you did, but I listened to a bunch of your other things, and that was significant.

Suzanne: That was part two of the visit. Anyway, the friend wrote back and said, “Absolutely. Her coma was caused by a clot, not trauma to the head. She has a PhD in psychology, is very generous, and volunteers at the church all the time. We prayer chaplains stand around her bed in a circle every day, and one of them sings to her.” She validated her mother’s name, and the red hair near her was a picture of her at a party wearing a red wig that her mother had taped to the bed over her hospital bed.

So I sent her the wishes, and as I was emailing those wishes, this woman’s soul in a coma dropped in on me right then and there. That’s when she said, “California here I come, right back where I started from.” Then she flashed before my eyes the image of a pair of toe socks. Remember those from decades ago? They looked like striped socks and, like a glove, they had separate places for your toes.

Rick: Oh, yeah. Each toe fits into a different piece of sock.

Suzanne: Yeah, a very clear visual. So I typed that up, and I said, “She’s showing me this and saying, ‘California here I come.’” Well, this was just the greatest thing she could have shown me, because it turned out that of those prayer chaplains standing around the bed, one of them was such a skeptic of mediums. He said they were all frauds. Don’t ask a medium what her wishes are.

Well, the woman in the coma had given that skeptic a pair of toe socks for Christmas the previous year. It was almost like her little dig: “No, this is really me. I’m here. Remember the socks?”

And the thing about “California here I come” was that the lead minister for this church hadn’t told anybody that he had come to that Midwestern church from a church in California. They had recently offered him his old job back, and he was undecided about what to do. He admitted to me later that, in his prayers, he had secretly asked the woman in the coma, “Maybe you can ask the big guy upstairs what I’m supposed to do.”

She came through me, the medium, to say, “California here I come, right back where I started from”—his old job.

Communication is possible, whether you’re in a body, in a coma, or on the other side.

The really neat epilogue to this story is that six days later—I didn’t know what they had decided to do—I was sitting in my daily morning meditation, and she dropped in on me. How do I know her? Because once you meet somebody, whether in spirit or here in person, you recognize them. I said, “Oh, this is you,” and she felt absolutely the same as she did on the previous two visits. She said, “It’s beautiful here. Tell everyone I’m fine and not to be sorry for me.”

I typed that up and sent it off. It was a Sunday morning. The minister wrote back right away and said she had passed at midnight.

Rick: Interesting.

Suzanne: It is just beautiful that she knew how to get a message to everybody through the medium, which is what a medium is: an intermediary for those who no longer have a physical voice. She felt exactly the same. The soul is a soul is a soul, whether you’re in a body and waking consciousness, whether you’re in a coma, or whether you’ve passed to the other side. Communication is possible.

Rick: Yeah, it sounds like even though she was still alive but in a coma, she had already kind of passed, because she had that ability to communicate. She tuned into you a thousand miles away, wanting to tune into her.

Suzanne: I’m not sure I agree with that, Rick, because I don’t think you have to pass to be able to communicate like that. I haven’t done the experiments, but I don’t know why I couldn’t, with a person’s permission, attempt to communicate with a soul offline. You see somebody who’s here, and that would be an interesting thing to try.

Rick: So you mean, let’s say you were communicating with me offline. Would I know you were doing so, or would you be communicating with my higher soul and I wouldn’t even know what was going on, but you could find out things?

Suzanne: Well, that depends on my ethics and integrity. I think I could try to do that for anybody, but I wouldn’t, because that’s an invasion of privacy. With your permission, we would say, “Let me try an experiment and tap into you, Rick.” That’s pretty much what psychic work is anyway. A psychic reaches your soul energy while you’re still in the body.

Question: With this woman being in a coma, I mean, that’s a very innocent state, so that would make a big difference.

Suzanne: Right. Her friends just had to trust that I wasn’t going to betray any confidences. I ask permission to share this story, like every story that I share with you here. I’ve asked the people involved, “May I share these details?”

Rick: Right. Of course, most people think that when somebody’s in a coma, it’s lights out. There’s no cognition or recognition or anything. Even in the ordinary sense, what you’re describing is a rather extraordinary ability to communicate and know things from—

Suzanne: It’s very nice to know that this same thing is true with people with dementia. Their soul is just fine. I haven’t tried to tap into somebody who has dementia while they’re still living, but I’ve tapped into hundreds of people after they pass. They show me, “Foggy here, foggy here,” but now they’re clear as a bell.

So I’m saying, “This is your dad. He had Alzheimer’s dementia, but of course, because that was poor wiring in the physical body, he’s perfectly clear now.” But they tell me that they were already playing on both sides while they were here.

Rick: This is good stuff for people here, because so many people go through this kind of thing with a loved one or a parent or something. I think it can provide a lot of solace.

Suzanne: That’s the whole point of doing this work: solace to those here, solace to those on the other side—not that they need solace in that loving environment in which they find themselves, but they get to say things that they didn’t say.

I just did a reading that was one of my top ten most healing readings ever, for just that kind of situation. I can’t share it because I didn’t have a chance to ask permission, but that’s the point: to give a voice to those who no longer have a physical voice.

Rick: Yeah, and I think I heard you say in some interview that it’s even more important for them than it is for us here. It’s like they really want us to communicate something.

Suzanne: That is the truth. But the big life lesson for all of us is: say your apologies now and get into forgiveness now, so you don’t have to find a medium or wait for your loved ones to find a medium. Guide them to a medium when you get to the other side.

“Oh, my God, I never said I love you. How could I be so blind? Hmm… There’s a medium. Call the medium from the other side.”

Rick: Interesting. Do you think there would be a lot of people, kind of like a waiting list, wanting to get to people like you to intervene with their loved ones or something like that? There would be sort of a pent-up demand?

🩺 Messages of healing after suicide

Suzanne: Yeah, yeah. That reminds me, and I guess I should talk about the fact that I’m working on a book now. It’s mostly with parents who have children on the other side.

I just did the most powerful interview. It’s going to be in the appendix, only because the book relates a true story that dealt with four couples who had children on the other side. But I realized we need to address parents of children who took their own lives. It’s really important that they not feel marginalized.

So I interviewed a mom whose son took his own life three years ago. She was a very interesting case because she was a born-again Christian, and absolutely, it was against the rules to go to a medium. But within one month of her son’s death, she went to a medium. I knew why, but I wanted to get it from her own words. I said, “So why did you go to a medium?”

She said, “Because I wanted to talk to my son.” That’s the bottom line. Your heart knows what’s right.

Rick: So can you give us some details of that particular case, since it’s going in the book? Is that a good one to talk about?

Suzanne: Well, I didn’t know her, and it’s not because I haven’t done a reading for her. What we discussed in the interview was how to get over, how to heal from that kind of a passing. This was a pure interview.

But I’ve had lots of evidence. We should talk about a suicide case. One of them involved a woman who came for a reading just devastated. I knew nothing about her. She sat across from me, and I tuned in. Right away, you just know why they’re so devastated.

I said, “You have a son on the other side. He’s right here, and he’s showing me he took his own life.” I have generic symbols for that. I’ll see gestures—a hand at the throat or a finger to the head. It’s very obvious that this is a suicide, but that’s just a symbol.

Then silently I said to him, “How did you do this?” I was surprised, because it was the only case I’d seen of this. I said, “Your son jumped off a bridge.”

She said, “Yes.”

I said, “This is in New York?”

“Yes.”

“Do you want me to tell you what bridge it was?” she asked.

I said, “No. He’s here. Let me ask him.”

He said, “It’s the Verrazzano Bridge.”

That’s right. I mean, this kind of evidence blows me away. I hope I never lose the awe of that.

He showed me a symbol that, to me, means bipolar: up and down, up and down. Then he showed me medication. It’s like a sign language. That’s what I see, because I don’t see him standing there; I see the gestures.

I said, “Your son is showing me he was off his medication. He was bipolar.”

She said, “I know. His girlfriend told him not to take his medication anymore.”

He came to say, “Mom, I’m okay. I’m not burning in hell.” He talked to me. He said, “You have a tattoo,” and a good friend of his had a tattoo. She rolled up her sleeve and showed me the tattoo about him. He showed me he was a musician. This is the evidence.

But the really cool moment in that reading was that we were getting ready to go on our six-month RV tour. Ty was outside during this reading, getting the bus ready. It was in the driveway. The woman’s back was to the window, so she couldn’t see him out there.

I realized that one of the big pieces of evidence I love to get in a reading is what kind of work somebody did when they were here. So I silently asked her son, “What did you do?”

Instead of saying the word, I saw his hand sweep out like this, and he pointed out the window. He said, “Exactly what your husband is doing right now.”

I looked over her shoulder, and Ty was kneeling down at the trailer hitch at the back of the bus, where we tow our car, stripping the electrical wires.

I looked at his mom and said, “Your son was an electrician.”

She said, “Yes, he was.”

That was huge, because she didn’t know what I had asked him, and she couldn’t see what my husband was doing. So for those who say, “You’re just reading your sitter’s mind”—a sitter is the client—“you’re reading your sitter’s mind,” well, that is not reading her mind. I was having a real-time, live, interactive conversation back and forth with a spirit.

Rick: Yeah, it would be impressive even if you were just reading her mind, knowing all those things.

Suzanne: That’s true. That is true. And it’s kind of scary for my husband, because I read his mind more and more.

Rick: He can’t get away with anything, can he?

Suzanne: No. I was meditating the other morning, and we were in the bus. It was before this trip we’d gone on—a little shakedown cruise, we call it a weekend trip—and I’m sitting there, and my guide said, “Your husband cannot find the dog food.”

He feeds the dogs in the morning, and I realized I had just thrown all the food from the house in one drawer, not where we normally put it on the bus. I’m thinking, “Well, I’m in a nice expanded state. I’ll wait.” And they said, “If you wait, he will be very irritable.” They said, “We’ll be here.” I said, “I’ll be right back.”

So I get up, I open the door to the kitchen in the bus, and Ty is standing there with this frown on his face. I looked at him and I said, “The dog food’s in that door over there.” He looked at me, he shook his head, and he said, “That’s really good.”

(Laughter)

Rick: It’s pretty good.

Suzanne: So, in this case, actually, I wasn’t reading his mind. My guides were making sure that I came out to a nice, happy husband when the meditation was over. But, you know, who puts our thoughts in our minds? Anyway, there’s just one mind. I’m coming to know that more and more. One mind, just the spirits—you know, what snags, what causes those snags we talked about earlier. That’s higher consciousness saying, “Pay attention to that,” and then they pull the thread, and it turns out to be something we need to know.

Drop-ins and unmistakable signs

Rick: So, you have your own set of guides.

Suzanne: Oh, definitely. We talked about them last time. They asked me to call them Sanaya.

Rick: Oh, that’s right. Sanaya, of course.

Suzanne: Sanaya means “flash of lightning,” which is how my stepdaughter was killed, by a bolt of lightning, and that’s what started me on this whole path. My guides spontaneously gave me a name that means “flash of lightning.” That, in itself, to me, is evidence of a higher awareness than little Suzanne right here.

Rick: That’s cool. So, what else have you got on your list there? You mentioned you jotted down some stories that are really nice evidential things.

Suzanne: Well, I would like to share with you throughout this interview a bunch of what I call the drop-ins, because they’re the most evidential of all to me. Again, you can’t put that away as reading somebody’s mind. The drop-ins are those spirits whom I may have met in a reading with their loved ones, who come back when I’m not expecting it, when I’m not with their loved ones, to just give them some information, and some that I haven’t met at all.

A year ago, when we talked, I was having very few drop-ins. My guides had told me they shut me up; they turned off the connection when I’m in social situations, or I would be on 24/7, which is probably pretty accurate. My husband would attest to that. I’ve come to know now that they’ve opened me up because I can handle it now.

So, I went to dinner some time ago in New Mexico with a woman who invited us to her town because they’ve had quite a few losses, especially children. I knew that she had a daughter on the other side but had not yet given her a reading. We met for the first time at a restaurant, we sat down, and I said, “I need to tell you I don’t normally see spirits in social settings, but we’ll get your daughter tomorrow in our reading.”

She said, “No, I’m not expecting to hear from her. That’s okay.” So, we’re just chatting away, having a normal dinner, and all of a sudden, she is across the table, just like you’re across from me in this interview. I saw her daughter appear—saw her in my mind’s eye. It’s not like she was objectively there, but I still am not seeing faces very clearly. What I did see clearly was that young girl was wearing a bunny suit. I saw it wrapped around her face, with big jackrabbit ears.

I remember even turning my head like this, thinking, “Am I seeing that correctly?” It’s really brilliant on the part of that little girl in spirit, because if she had just flashed the girl there, I might have blown that off too. Maybe I just imagined that. But I couldn’t make up a bunny.

So, I looked at her mom, and instead of saying, “Do you have any idea why your daughter might appear to me in a bunny suit?” I knew what I was seeing. So, I said with full confidence, “I need to tell you your daughter is standing beside you, and she’s wearing a rabbit suit.”

Her mother looked at me like I had two heads, and I looked at Ty because he’s sitting to my left, and he knows that I don’t normally bring through spirits like that. But I also know how to help the sitter figure it out. So, I said, “Help me out here. Did your daughter ever play a rabbit in the school play? Did she dress up as a rabbit for Halloween?”

Her mom thought for a minute, and she said, “Well, we always called her our little rabbit, and she has a rabbit collection.” She went on and on with all these rabbits.

Rick: All kinds of rabbit things.

Suzanne: Yeah. And now I look at Ty, he looks at me, and we kind of roll our eyes because this happens all the time in my readings. I’ll say something, and the people say, “No, I don’t know what that is,” because it knocks them off balance. That was probably the last thing she expected.

Once she got her feet back on the ground, she came to me for the reading the next day. She brought a picture of her daughter holding a real bunny. She showed me a picture of her daughter standing before a billboard full of rabbits, and she brought me this little rabbit from her collection of rabbit figurines.

I keep this where I brush my teeth, even on the road on the bus, to see it every day, just as a reminder. The spirits say, “We’re right here,” and they show up in a way that we can’t mistake it: dressed like a rabbit. Just a great, great story.

Rick: It reminds me of that Jimmy Stewart movie, Harvey. You know, Harvey?

Suzanne: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Rick: He had this eight-foot-tall rabbit that he palled around with all the time.

Suzanne: Could I go on with one that’s nice?

Rick: Yes, please. Do another one.

Suzanne: I have a lovely couple that I met at a workshop that I gave in Florida last summer. I walked in, and I recognized them immediately as members of a group called Helping Parents Heal, which I love to support. It’s a group for bereaved parents that allows an open discussion of the afterlife, which leads to the parents not grieving for the rest of their lives but realizing their kids are still right here. Their meetings can actually be uplifting because they celebrate the fact that their kids are with them.

So, I recognized this couple sitting on the couch waiting for the workshop to begin, but I didn’t know anything about who they had on the other side. I thought, “Oh, let me try to tune in and see.” I looked at them and I said, “You have a son on the other side.”

They said, “No, a daughter.” I thought, “Ah, this is what I fear. Trying to tune in just walking around doesn’t always work for me.” I thought, “I blew it.” I could tell they were disappointed, and I said, “We’ll do a reading. We’ll get your daughter.”

After the workshop was over, I did the reading, and it was lovely. The beautiful daughter, named Shana—her name means “beautiful light”—was 15 years old and died suddenly in her sleep. Nothing was wrong with her, like adolescent SIDS—adolescent death syndrome. I mean, we call this tragic for those of us who are left behind. Of course, Shana still exists, surrounded by love, and she showed that in the reading.

But she wasn’t finished with that reading, because during the reading she showed me this instant picture that I didn’t talk about because I wasn’t sure what it was. I didn’t think it was significant. Usually, there’s one or two things that come up in a reading that I don’t bring up. Usually, I regret that.

For the next couple of days after the reading, I kept seeing what looked like a Christmas decoration—a ball—but I knew it wasn’t a Christmas decoration. I think a couple of weeks passed since the reading, and suddenly there was that ball again. So, I sent an email to Shana’s mom and dad, Brian and his wife, Ty, just like my husband, Ty. I said, “Your daughter keeps showing me this thing that looks like a Christmas ball, but it has something to do with a Flower of Life decoration on it.”

I don’t know if you’re familiar with that, Rick, so I brought a picture of it to show you. This is the Flower of Life.

Rick: Okay.

Suzanne: It’s just a geometric design. And I said, “Do you know why Shana keeps showing that to me?” Her mom sent an email back immediately. She said, “I know exactly what that is,” and here it is. This is the ball that’s hanging in their kitchen. If you look really closely, it has that same pattern on it, kind of like the Flower of Life. It looks like a Christmas decoration, but what it is is a gift that Shana’s volleyball team sent to Brian and Ty after she passed, and it’s called a happy thought bubble.

So, what a beautiful thing for Shana to be showing me—talk about the happy thought bubble, because she’s just sending, “I’m sending you happy thoughts.” A nice visual, a nice drop-in. But it got better.

Seconds later, we finished the email or phone call—I don’t remember how we validated this—and I’m sitting on my lanai in Florida working on my computer. She fully drops in, and I just started typing: “Shana is here, and she’s showing me she’s acting like a cat. She’s holding up her hands like paws and little claws, and she’s going, ‘Meow, meow,’” making little meow sounds. “And now she is showing me whiskers drawn right here. What’s up with this?”

That’s what I wrote in the email. Minutes later, my phone chimed. It was a text. I looked down, and it was a text from Ty, Shana’s mom. She said, “I am in tears,” and this was the photo attached to the text.

Rick: Oh, cute.

Suzanne: Can you see it? It’s Shana with the whiskers drawn on exactly like a cat, and look at her hands, drawn up exactly like she showed me. That’s what I mean by evidence. You can’t make that stuff up. She’s obviously younger than 15 in that photo, but that’s a precious memory. Mom had that picture, and I just love the feeling of knowing how her family feels when, out of the blue, some medium says, “Oh, your daughter’s here showing me a cat picture.” That’s beautiful, that’s live interaction. That’s Shana saying, “My physical body may be gone, but I’m still with you.”

Rick: You know, for people on the other side, it must be like a game of charades, where they have to sort of try to convey something without necessarily being able to speak words all the time. “Come on, get it. I’m trying to do this. Don’t you know that?”

Suzanne: Rick, this is really an important point that you just raised. It’s totally dependent on the medium, and each medium has what we call a control or a gatekeeper—not one who controls this at all. It’s a guide who helps us, a main guide with mediumship, and they know how that medium best receives information.

So, my guides know that I am visual and also hear things, but I don’t see faces. So, don’t show up in front of Suzanne; she won’t see you. Act like a cat—she’ll see that.

Rick: So, they give little tips and hints to the person who is trying to communicate.

Suzanne: Absolutely. They train those who are about to have a medium. They actually rehearse how best to communicate—to the best of my understanding. Whether or not it’s exactly like this, this is how I understand it.

So, if they would go to another medium who’s very visual, very clairvoyant, they would just show up in front of them, and they could just stand right there. If somebody is very clairaudient, you would just do nothing but talk.

That’s why I have this library of symbols, and they know that if somebody passed suddenly, my guide will say, “You know, we’re just going to create this image in her mind. That means I passed suddenly.” That’s why mediums can get better with practice. The more you do it, the more you build up your symbols.

Rick: Symbols of vocabulary. Interesting.

Suzanne: But yet I could ramble on… Please.

Rick: Please…

Butterflies, memories, and continuing connection

Suzanne: I did a reading just a couple of weeks ago. I went home to Florida to visit my mom, who’s going to be 90 next August. I go home every six to eight weeks to visit her, and I got a call from a woman a month prior to that visit. She said, “You knew my mom where you live in Florida. You don’t know me, but my mom just died suddenly and rather mysteriously. Somebody told me I should reach out to you. Is there any chance you can give me a reading while I’m home, while I’m in Florida for my mom’s memorial service?”

I said, “Oh, I’m on the road now. I’m only going to be home at the end of May.” She said, “Well, that’s when the memorial service is.” So, it’s one of those setups from Spirit Guide.

She came over to my house straight from her mom’s memorial service. She told me she had a splitting headache, and I knew that was from the distress. When you go to funerals and cry, all that tension—not crying—causes terrible headaches. She was a little early, so I said, “Come on here, sit on my lanai.”

All of a sudden, I found myself mothering this young woman more than I normally treat people, and I realized her mom was right here and wanted me to mother her. I sat her on the lanai and gave her a glass of water. She had already taken some aspirin. I said, “You just sit here and be calm. We’ll do your reading when your headache’s gone.”

I went into my bathroom and was puttering around, washing my hands, and her mom dropped in, clear as day. She said to me, “Give her one of your butterflies.” That was very auditory, and I said, “Oh, really? Which one?”

I had a necklace right there with a butterfly on it. People give me butterfly things because my stepdaughter, Susan, sent us butterfly signs after she passed. I said, “Is this what you want me to give her, this necklace?” Her mom very clearly said, “No, give her that little butterfly that’s hanging from the doorknob in your study.”

I said, “Okay.” I went out, and her daughter’s headache was gone. I said, “Your mom is already here.” I sat her down in the seat in my study, went over, picked up that butterfly, and said, “Your mom said I’m supposed to give you this butterfly.”

She looked at me with a little stunned, kind of blank look, and I said, “Butterflies are often signs from the other side.” She said, “I know. I just learned that.”

At her memorial service, her best friend came up to her and was telling her a story about when that best friend’s husband passed. A butterfly flew around her and then flew around her kids. This spirit woman’s daughter, sitting in front of me, said, “At the memorial service, I looked at this woman and said, ‘When am I going to get a butterfly?’”

Rick: Pretty cool…

Suzanne: I said, “You just got it,” because her mom, of course, was at the memorial service. That’s something I’ve learned: Those who pass are at their funerals and memorial services. Her mom heard her say, “When am I going to get my butterfly?” Then she dropped in on me as I was washing my hands and said, “Give her one of your butterflies.”

Rick: Wow…

Suzanne: Isn’t that great?

Rick: That’s really neat.

Suzanne: Cool. That’s why I say every morning, “You know, what’s going to happen today?” These stories never end. They never end.

Rick: Yeah. A thought that pops into my head is, wouldn’t it be cool if we lived in a society that was so evolved that this kind of thing was just routine? Everybody experiences it, and it’s no weirder than having friends in Great Britain or something that you could call on the phone. It’s just part of the way things work, this dimension…

Suzanne: Yes. This is the way I see our world eventually. That’s all part of the evolution, and this is why I love this group, Helping Parents Heal. They take in parents who haven’t had this awareness, who are just devastated and want to take their own life, and suddenly they’re surrounded by other parents who are exactly in the world you just described.

We’ve loved our time here in Phoenix because I’m in the home of the co-founder of Helping Parents Heal, where I’m sitting. We came out here to spend more time with her and with the other members of the local chapter here. We went out to dinner with some of them the other night, and they’re the most loving people you can imagine.

We’ve all gone through the worst grief anyone can imagine, yet because we know our kids are right here, and because we know our parents who have passed are right here, and everybody who’s passed is right here when we think of them, we’re an incredibly loving group. It’s unlike many other relationships that most of us have with other people. It just takes you to this place where you forgive people their faults and love each other because you just get the bigger picture.

Rick: Yeah, and that’s one of the reasons I wanted to have you on the show. Some people have this sort of monochromatic notion of enlightenment or higher consciousness that has nothing to do with the kinds of things you’re talking about. But I feel that it really has to do with a full understanding of life in all its diversity, variety, and depth. A clear and correct understanding of the way the universe actually works cannot help but be helpful to people. It can have a huge impact on the way they function.

Forgiveness and Healing Messages from the Other Side

Exactly. One of the biggest issues that comes up in the reading is forgiveness. Sometimes those on the other side are saying, “I see a head hanging down,” and I say, “We have an apology here. Why are you apologizing?” Then we have the sitter end up crying and saying, “Please tell them it’s okay.” And I say, “No, they’re right here. You tell them.” We have these really healing moments.

Suzanne: Exactly. One of the biggest issues that comes up in the reading is forgiveness. Sometimes those on the other side are saying, “I see a head hanging down,” and I say, “We have an apology here. Why are you apologizing?” Then we have the sitter end up crying and saying, “Please tell them it’s okay.” And I say, “No, they’re right here. You tell them.” We have these really healing moments.

This connects to what you asked in the last interview: Do you find that mediumship is a distraction from your own path? It’s the greatest bonus. It’s what keeps me on the path. It’s what has caused me to ask, “What do I need to forgive? What do I need to forgive in myself?”

In the past year, the teaching for me has been the belief, at the highest level, that all of us are anything less than love. This teaching has really been coming at me full force from Sanaya in the last three weeks.

In fact, I had my own personal healing when I started saying, “Forgive me for thinking I’m anything less than love.” Right in the midst of having all of those thoughts about forgiveness, Sanaya gave me a message. I sat down on my couch to type it up, and the singer Seal’s song came on the radio. He was singing, “I need love, love’s divine. Please forgive me now. I know that I’ve been blind.”

Forgive me for thinking I’m anything less than love.

The tears were just pouring down my face because that’s exactly what the message was and is. That’s why we’re here: to not be blinded anymore to this whole separation from the greater reality.

This is what has come out of my discovering that I can speak with Spirit. It’s so much more than saying, “Your loved one’s right here.” It’s the big picture, yet look at all these fun evidential moments to keep us going.

✨ The grid of awakening

Rick: If I were to say to you, “Stellated dodecahedron,” what would that evoke—a story?

Suzanne: It sure would. That one brings me to tears, too.

Rick: Yeah, tell us that story.

Suzanne: I had gone home to visit my mom from one of our six-month journeys for our birthday. It was 2012, maybe 2013; I don’t remember when it was. I was called to buy several books at the bookstore. I hadn’t even opened them yet. When I’m in a bookstore, my guide says, “There are books here for you.”

So I go in and ask, “Which one am I supposed to read?” I bought about seven books. Ty puts up with the book bill.

I had taken them all back to the bus, the RV, with me. We were in New York at that time. They were sitting by my bedside, and I hadn’t even opened them yet. I went to sleep and was awakened in the morning. I was in that hypnagogic, half-in, half-out state of awareness as you’re waking up, and I heard, “Stellated dodecahedron.”

I thought, “What?” I wrote it down phonetically and wondered, “What is that?” I heard a couple of other things, and I thought, “If that is a real term, this is taking clairaudience—hearing the voice of higher consciousness—to a whole new level.”

Then I heard, “You will find it in that book there,” and they pointed out the specific book. I thought, “Oh, I don’t even dare look.” I pulled it out, went back to the index, went down to the S’s, and there it was.

It said, “Stellated dodecahedron,” and I looked at that on page 64 or whatever. It was this alleged Christ-consciousness grid, an energetic pattern of energy around the Earth.

Then I went into meditation, crying now, because that was real. This had come to me; it had been given to me. That’s the kind of attunement that I pray for. I said, “Tell me about this grid.”

They showed me one of those maps you might see—you could Google it on the internet—that shows where electricity and lights are around the globe. It shows the Earth as all black except for pockets of population. The desert is black, but cities are lit up.

They said, “This is how we see your world with that grid. There are pockets of brightness and pockets of darkness. As each one of you comes to realize you are the light, that you’re one with the light, that grid grows brighter because your light grew brighter. You add to the whole.”

That’s the web we were talking about at the beginning. That’s the interconnectedness. They told us not to despair when we feel that our world is becoming dimmer. Actually, one by one, people really are awakening, thanks to programs like yours.

You don’t have to go save the world, because just by turning your light brighter, you brighten the whole grid.

You don’t have to go save the world, because just by turning your light brighter, you brighten the whole grid. You strengthen that unity awareness—that Christ consciousness—and that is what is going to allow all of us to be joyous, like this group of parents who know the two worlds are connected.

Rick: Neat. I have this little spinning globe on BatGap, in the right-hand column, and it shows you, at any given time, who is actually on the site at that moment. It has a little flag for where they are. If you click in the right place, it’ll take you to a bigger version of it.

In any case, there’s a little red dot everywhere somebody has accessed the site from. It’s kind of interesting to see. The Sahara Desert doesn’t have any red dots, nor does the desert of Utah and so on, but otherwise all the populated areas of the world are pretty well lit up with red dots.

Suzanne: You did that? That is cool, Rick.

Rick: It happens automatically as the thing goes around.

Suzanne: Your program is reaching…

Rick: Yes, it reaches all over…

Suzanne: That’s what I mean.

Rick: And I started out thinking this was going to be a radio show on my local station, and I didn’t get any support for that idea.

Suzanne: You reminded me, though, about this connection of the two worlds with the grid. It reminds me of what happened in a reading. I’ve really tried, in the last year, to get my own doubts out of the way. When I see something in a reading that a spirit is giving me that doesn’t make sense, I say it anyway.

I was talking to a mom who had a son on the other side, and I said, “Your son in spirit is showing me a rainbow. Those in spirit often draw their loved one’s attention to an actual rainbow when they need it.” I said, “This rainbow ends at your heart, and it goes from your heart to him, and he says the connection is good.”

That sounds kind of silly. Why would he show me a rainbow going from your heart to him and say the connection is good? His mom said, “Oh, I’m so glad to hear that. You just validated my experiments.” I asked her what she meant.

She had been trying to improve the way she connected with her son in spirit. She’s trying to talk to him herself, which everybody who has someone on the other side should do. You don’t need a medium. Her visualization was of a rainbow from her heart to his, and he comes through the medium just to show me the rainbow and say, “Hey, Mom, the connection is good.”

Oh, I guess I’ve got goose bumps. It’s wonderful, and I encourage people to try any visualization like that, because what that does is show that this is a very real connection. All of us are connected from heart to heart.

Every time I do a reading, I visualize that connection between me and my sitter, and between me and the loved ones on the other side, knowing they’re already connected from heart to heart with their loved ones. So, it’s this triangle, and that strengthens the connection.

This mom said that by doing that visualization, she could actually hear her son and hear his messages. He validated, “You can trust this is me, Mom.”

Rick: That’s neat. You know what I love? I love your enthusiasm. You haven’t become in the least bit ho-hum about this, even though you’ve been doing it for a number of years. You’re like a kid in a candy shop every moment, like, “Oh, this is fantastic.”

Suzanne: Oh, so let me tell you another one.

Rick: Yeah, yeah, please.

Suzanne: Even though I know that when we die—when the physical body dies, and I’m afraid of saying “dying”—that we’re okay, I know how sad it is for those left behind. So, I was very stunned when a very dear friend of mine in Florida got a phone call that her husband had passed very unexpectedly.

I knew him from being at a few dinners with him, but I didn’t know him as well as I knew her. She’s one of my soul sisters. We are in a meditation group together. Her name is Gloria, and when I got this call, I heard, “Bob died. They took him to the ER last night, and he died.”

I said, “Can I go see her?” They said, “No, no, she’s really in a bad way. Let’s wait a while.” So, that was at nine o’clock at night.

The next morning, I was driving around, and I suddenly had the thought, “Just at least call her. That’s okay. That won’t bother her.” So, I picked up the phone. “Hi, Gloria, I heard the news.” I was commiserating, and suddenly I had this feeling: just go see her.

I said, “Would it be okay if I stop by and just give you a hug?” She said, “That would be fine.”

Well, I know now that these thoughts—when I say, “I had the thought to call her,” or “I had the thought to hug her”—are put there by loved ones. That’s the connection. So, I didn’t realize it was put there by her husband, Bob. He hadn’t even been gone for twelve hours.

As I pulled onto her street, I felt him in the car with me. As I pulled up in front of the house, I heard him say with wonder, “This is my house.” That gave me goose bumps, because that’s not something I would think. Of course this is your house, Bob. But when I thought about it later, from his new perspective, that must have been kind of cool. You know, “I’m seeing it from up here.”

So, I go to the door, and I’m sure that Gloria is expecting me to open the door, hug her, and say, “Oh, Gloria, I am so sorry.” Instead, she opens the door, and with that enthusiasm you were talking about, I barged right in. “Gloria, Bob is right here. He’s right here.”

He started telling me things about his passing. I said, “He’s going like this,” and I moved my jaw as though he had a problem with it. “Why is he doing this?” She said, “Well, because he had facial paralysis.”

I gave her evidence after evidence after evidence. I said, “He’s calling you ‘Nursey.’ ‘Nursey, Nursey.’” She said, “Oh, my God, that’s the nickname my granddaughter gave me.”

I said, “Gloria, I know you’re in a fog. We need to write all of this down right now so you don’t forget.” There were about fourteen different things that immediately lifted her, and this was less than twelve hours since he died.

The reason he was able to communicate so clearly was because he had not been well. I know that the soul was probably already practicing spirit communication, but he’s dropped in a couple of times. The most recent was really great.

I knew she was out of town. I knew she was coming back to Florida, and all of a sudden Bob dropped in. He showed me a flash drive, and then he showed me Gloria’s hand slipping under her pillow and bumping into something.

Well, I kind of forgot about that. Later in the day, I thought, “Oh, I was supposed to tell Gloria about that.” The timing was perfect, because I sent her an email—or I called her, whatever the case was—and she had just walked in the door to this empty house. She hadn’t been gone for a couple of weeks.

I said, “Gloria, Bob’s showing me a flash drive. What’s that all about?” She said, “Suzanne, I just came home from New York, where we lived, and one of our friends gave me a flash drive with over 250 photos of Bob and me on it—his whole life with me.”

Well, that’s Bob saying, “I know about that flash drive. Those are memories, but I’m still here.”

Then I said, “Why is he showing me your hand sliding under the pillow and bumping into something hard?”

She said, “Well, I haven’t been sleeping well since he passed, so I’ve been using mala beads. I know you know what mala beads are—like a rosary, but with 108 little beads. I use the mala beads to fall asleep, and I usually fall asleep somewhere during the 108 beads. They end up under my pillow, and every morning I have to reach under my pillow, and my hand bumps into those mala beads in their full amount.”

So, that is Bob saying, “I’m right there at your side.” It’s just so affirming that they still interact with us in our lives. They know what’s going on.

Rick: It’s neat. Related to that guy who was communicating just twelve hours after he died, here’s a question. We’ve heard that when we cross over, we’re in a state of existence that is interconnected to all things. We are connected to God in a very deep sense, and we go through a process of understanding our lives in our soul’s journey.

We go through this first, and then we get to a point where we can understand our lives in a deeper sense, after which we may have messages we want to deliver to our loved ones. In other words, we process our whole life and get better, so to speak, and then connect with loved ones.

If the soul is in that review process, could that be a reason they may not be able to connect right away? In other words, they’re kind of in a rehab mode, and they can’t immediately connect until they go through a certain amount of adjustment, or…

Suzanne: It could very well be, especially in cases of suicide. Not all of them, but many of them do go to a kind of healing place.

Rick: A halfway house kind of a thing.

Suzanne: Yeah, it is. But when they show it to me, I always see this soothing blue light that never goes out, and everybody is met by love and not judgment.

There are very few cases, happily, where I don’t tune into someone, but I have learned to wait usually about three months after passing, mainly because the sitter is so full of grief. That third part of the triangle I described—their energy pulls it down.

But I do understand that the life review does happen. I believe that if it serves the greater good, they’ll interrupt their healing. They’ll interrupt whatever they’re in to come and talk to their loved ones. I mean, hey, they’re sitting with a medium. Get busy.

Mediumship, miracles, and the greater good

Rick: Yeah, neat. There are a couple more notes from your book that will give you a moment to catch your breath, and then you can tell us another story. You say, “The more we open our minds to possibilities, the more miracles happen,” and you also say, “We’re on the verge of a massive shift of consciousness that will change how we relate to each other and how we feel inside.”

Suzanne: Yes, yes. Well, my definition of a miracle is when the two worlds come together in a way that we’re aware of it.

Sometimes it is the parting of the physical laws, setting those aside, that allows a feather to drop out of nowhere into your lap when that’s your sign from your son. That’s a miracle—when that greater reality becomes obvious.

But this massive shift of consciousness was a message that came from Wolfe. It’s not something that I made up. It came from my guides, and that shift, I believe, is due in part to technology that is allowing programs like this to let spiritually awakened people share the miracles with others on a global basis.

As we change one by one, that shift is happening faster and faster. I can now say the M word—“medium”—in a public place and not be burned at the stake. We’re not there yet, but more and more and more people are open to this, and it’s a good thing.

Rick: Forty or fifty years ago, you couldn’t even say the M word—meditation. People thought you were a total weirdo. Now they’re teaching it in Fortune 500 companies and so on, and in the military and so on.

Suzanne: Yeah, in the military. Yeah.

Rick: Nice. Okay, what’s the next story on your list?

Suzanne: Okay, how about doing a reading for a man whose father was on the other side? I’d given him a reading in the past, but he wrote to me and said, “I really need to hear from my dad.” I said, “Okay.”

It’s interesting: the first readings that I do with people are full of evidence—how I died, what kind of work I did, who’s in the family, that kind of thing. It’s like a laundry list. But the second readings, because they’ve already given all that, are so full of things going on in their loved one’s life now.

I thought that this was brilliant, how this dad showed me what was going on in his son’s life. I said, “Your dad’s showing me he’s raising a glass of champagne. You’re celebrating something.” Now he’s patting his belly. “My belly’s full. You’re going to have a baby in your family.”

He said, “Yeah, my wife is twelve weeks pregnant.”

I said, “Your dad knows about it. He’s celebrating from the other side.” Then I said, “Oh, he just showed me what sex it is, but I’m not going to tell you.” So, we went on, and his mom came through to the other side.

I said, “Oh, she just showed me what sex it is, too.” I wrote it down so I’d remember. I said, “Ask me in nine months.”

He said, “Well, we already know what sex it is. Show me.”

So, I held up the sign “boy,” and he said, “It’s a boy.” This is somebody who went from such sadness and missing his dad to knowing Dad’s not going to miss the birth of that child. He’s going to be watching, because he already knows about the pregnancy.

Rick: Interesting. You want to tell another one, or do you want me to ask you a question?

Suzanne: No, no, I’ll tell one. One of the most frequent drop-ins I have is from a wonderful, beautiful young lady named Carly. She died at age 24, the youngest recorded case of esophageal cancer. She’s going to be in the new book that I’m writing because I’ve become dear, dear friends with her mom, Irene, and her dad, Tony, her stepdad, Tony. The reading that Irene had with me absolutely changed her life, so I’m so grateful for that, but I had no idea when I did that reading that we would become such good friends.

There is a video on my website called Irene’s Healing. It shows how a second reading got her past the PTSD that she was feeling after having her daughter pass out in her arms just before she died. Carly is a very strong communicator and drops in quite frequently. Pretty much every time I talk to Irene on the phone, Carly drops in—well, not every time, because we talk often now.

Tony and Irene came to visit us last December because Ty and Tony share similar birthdays. I looked at Irene and said, “Let’s go talk to Carly.” She said, “Okay.” The guys were talking about sailboats in the living room, so we went into my study and sat down. Immediately, Carly was there.

I said, “Carly is showing me a special license plate. This is a personalized license plate that somebody just gave you.” She said, “Oh, yes!” They have a foundation called Carly’s Kids that raises money for a school in Mississippi, and somebody had made her a Carly’s Kids Foundation license plate and just given it to her. She had just put it on her car.

This was getting close to Christmastime, and I said, “Carly’s showing me there’s a room over your garage in your house. She shows me you taking boxes out of a closet and taking out Christmas decorations. She’s all excited. She’s saying, ‘Oh, Mom, remember this one. Oh, I love this one, Mom.’”

Irene told me that the room over the garage is called the bonus room. She had just been up in there in the closet, pulling out the Christmas decorations. It was three weeks before Christmas, so maybe anybody would have been doing that, but Carly noticed the exact room. The thing that was significant was that this was the first Christmas since Carly passed that Irene even had the emotional fortitude to pull out the Christmas decorations. She just couldn’t bear to pull out certain decorations from the boxes.

But here’s Carly with pure joy, saying, “Oh, remember this one, Mom. I love this one.” Then Carly says, clear as day, “I’m not a prima donna.” Irene started laughing because she is now the chapter head of the Helping Parents Heal group in Hilton Head, South Carolina. The previous Sunday, while leading one of their group meetings, Tony was telling a story about Carly and said, “Yeah, she could be a real prima donna.”

So here’s Carly coming to tell him what for from the spirit world: “Don’t be telling stories about me just because I’m not there physically. I hear you.”

Rick: Do they hang around constantly, listening to every little thing, or is it just sort of picked up?

Suzanne: No, but he is talking about them.

Rick: Oh, I see, yeah…

Suzanne: When you talk about your loved ones, they hear that. That heart connection just opens right up when you call on them. That’s why one of the things I say most often is, “Talk to them. They hear you.” Unfortunately, we don’t always hear them back. Maybe if we picture that rainbow and listen carefully, learn to quiet our minds through daily meditation—sitting in the power, I call it—then we might hear them more clearly.

When we think of them on special holidays and dates—birthdays, anniversaries, holidays, funerals, weddings, graduations—they are there. I know this because they tell me what happened at those parties and at the graduation. Somebody the other day just showed me that people put written things in his coffin at his funeral, and they had—I think it’s really cool.

And so Carly dropped in not too long after that. I called Irene and said, “Why is Carly showing me her teddy bear, Sebastian? She’s taking hold of his legs and walking the teddy bear, just like that.” Irene said, “Oh, my God. Her teddy bear, Sebastian! I put him in the closet because the grandkids were coming in and I didn’t want him out. I forgot he’s still in the closet.”

So this was Carly from the other side saying, “Walk him out of the closet, Mom. Get him out of there. Give him some fresh air.”

Rick: And Carly told you that his name was Sebastian?

Suzanne: No, I already knew this because she brought him up in the very first reading I did.

Rick: And said his name was Sebastian?

Suzanne: Well, Irene told me that later, but Carly showed me the teddy bear. That would be pretty cool. No, but somebody said, “My dog Champ is here on the other side,” and the dog’s name was Champ. That’s really cool. Oh…

Rick: Go ahead…

Suzanne: So, I could tell a pet story.

Rick: Yeah.

Suzanne: Yes, so our beloved pets—absolutely, animals have souls. If they’re domesticated animals, they have a personality, so we can tune right into those specific souls. They absolutely greet us when we get to the other side.

Animals and the other side

Meanwhile, I’ve tuned into dogs and cats and received evidence of how they passed, what they were like, and their favorite toys. I got ready to do a reading a couple of weeks ago. I do my readings on the phone or on Skype in the bedroom of the bus so Ty can get on with his life out in the living room. I bring my two little dachshunds, Rudy and Gretchen, to sit on the bed. They bring good energy to the room.

I was getting ready, five minutes before the reading, so I was expanding my consciousness and starting to shift. I said to the spirits, “You may come now. You may step in early if you want.” Suddenly, Rudy, the red dachshund, stood up, moved to the end of the bed, and stared at seemingly nothing.

I’m blind as a medium. I don’t see them sitting there, but I said, “Oh, he’s staring at it. He must see the spirit.” He made this funny little whine that he doesn’t make too often. He actually only makes it when he sees cats and can’t get at them. He went, “Mmm… mmm.” I said, “What do you see? Go sit down.” Well, he wouldn’t sit down.

I got the woman on the phone. I couldn’t see her, and I tuned in. I said, “There’s somebody here, but I can’t tell the relationship to you. I’m getting kidney disease because I feel pain in my kidney area. Then there’s somebody else, and my heart’s palpitating, so we have a heart challenge here.”

She said, “I have to tell you, Suzanne, the only ones I want to hear from today are my cats.” One had kidney disease, and the other had a heart issue. Rudy was still staring at nothing, and he went, “Mmm,” which is his cat whine. So Rudy sees spirits. He has shown that to me over and over again, and I know that cat in spirit was somehow appearing before my dog, who had gone crazy because he couldn’t get at it.

I took a picture of Rudy staring at nothing, sitting at the end of the bed, sitting up as if to say, “What is the cat doing in my bedroom?” It was really cool.

Wholeness Through Physical and Spiritual Integration

It’s cool. We heard some things, too, after a couple of our pets died. We were hearing things. You said that it is only when we embrace all sides of our true self—the physical as well as the spiritual—that we experience wholeness and the joy of pure being. When we focus on one side of our wholeness and ignore the other side, we are out of balance. It seemed like an important point in your book, and important, I think, for a lot of spiritual people who…

Rick: It’s cool. We heard some things, too, after a couple of our pets died. We were hearing things. You said that it is only when we embrace all sides of our true self—the physical as well as the spiritual—that we experience wholeness and the joy of pure being. When we focus on one side of our wholeness and ignore the other side, we are out of balance. It seemed like an important point in your book, and important, I think, for a lot of spiritual people who…

Suzanne: Yeah, and that’s why I said that my husband could attest to the fact that if I were seeing spirits all the time, I would be on 24/7. When you feel the bliss that comes from sitting in meditation sometimes, or when you feel the joy that comes from connecting with those in spirit, you would want to do that all the time. But we’re here for a reason.

If I were to focus on that all the time, my marriage would suffer, and that’s so important to me. If I’m here, I’m going to totally throw myself into that as well. So let’s try to find that balance every day, and I recommend that others do that, too—whether that means getting out in nature and then having time for yourself. It’s a balance.

Rick: Yeah, good point. I want to elaborate on it. Go ahead and tell us another story.

Learning to connect for ourselves

Suzanne: Well, as Spirit is urging me, I’ve been teaching mediumship for the past year, and it’s been very well received because I show that anybody can connect to the other side. In fact, I just surveyed the 600 students I’ve taught so far, and it’s interesting that only about 27% intend to work as mediums. The rest simply want to learn how to connect with their guides, their own loved ones, or raise their consciousness, and that’s happening through what I call my Serving Spirit class, which consists of two-day classes.

I was teaching a class in Albuquerque last year, and as part of the class, my guides had me demonstrate a one-on-one reading using one of the students because that’s what we’re working on: one-on-one, not group demonstrations of mediumship.

It was the morning of the second day, and I was a little drained. The first day had been pretty high-energy, and my guide said, “You will do a demonstration for that woman there.” They pointed out to me the one woman in the class who had sat there shut down, arms crossed, really serious the whole time. I was like, “Are you kidding me?” The whole point of this is to keep the energy high. We want somebody who’s going to make nice, good energy, a good vibration in a reading.

I said to the class, “We’re going to take a break now for a few minutes,” and I left the room and went across the hall to the hotel’s business center. Nobody was in it. I sat down, went into meditation, and said, “Look, I know you must have a reason, but if you want me to do a reading for that woman, you need to give me a really big sign.”

My stepdaughter, Susan, who helps me a lot with my readings, stepped in and said, “Suzanne, that woman is going to come right up to you at your book table in the back of the room when you walk back in.” I said, “Yeah, that woman hasn’t talked to me the whole time. Like that’s going to happen.” So I said, “Okay, thank you.”

Break was over. I walked back into the room, and the woman made a beeline straight for me at the book table. My jaw dropped open. She looked at me and said, “Suzanne, would it be okay if I leave? I’m really not getting out of this class what I thought I would.”

I said, “Well, you can leave if you want, but I would like to do a demonstration of mediumship. If you would be willing, I’d like to use you and give the reading to you. Would that be okay before you leave?” She said yes. She looked a little stunned, so I brought her to the front of the room and pulled two chairs together, facing each other.

I said to everybody else, “Gather round here. This is how a reading goes for me, and you can use this as a model.” I didn’t know anything about this woman. I asked her name, and she said, “Tracy.” I said, “Okay, Tracy.” She’s given me permission to share all of this.

She sat down. I knew nothing about her, and I was just saying, “Okay, guys, you know what you’re doing here. Let’s go.” I shifted, opened my eyes, and said, “You have lost a son, and he’s standing right by your right shoulder.”

She burst into tears. I looked at the group and said, “This is how you know you have a hit. You know you’ve scored a big one.” I took her hand. She was crying, and I said, “Your son is really tall. He’s showing me he was your greatest supporter. Now he’s showing me that he fell before he passed. There was something to do with medication, and then he just slipped away.”

His mom confirmed that he had a sleep apnea problem, so his doctors started him on new medication. He fell at work. That night, he went to sleep and didn’t wake up. So, very good evidence right off the bat.

He told me things about his dog and the way his dog barked—lots of great evidence. It was a wonderful reading. I said to Tracy, “Your son is showing me you’re going to be starting a chapter of Helping Parents Heal. There’s that group again. But you’re not ready yet. You need to heal first.”

I said, “You have no intention of being a medium. He’s telling me.” She said, “You’re right. That’s why I wanted to leave your class, because the only reason I came here was to hear from my son. When it became clear to me that I wasn’t going to hear from him, I wanted to leave.”

This shows me, Rick, that the spirit world knew she was getting ready to leave. You have to do this reading now, and that’s why she was so shut down. She was deeply in grief, and all she wanted was to hear from her son.

Once she did, she spent the whole rest of the class in the lobby calling every family member to say, “He’s here. He’s here. I heard from him.”

Three weeks later, I was at home in Florida, and I got this card in the mail and a little gift of infinity earrings from Tracy. Her son’s name is Aymen, and she said, “Thank you so much for reading from Aymen. I wanted to give you this gift as a thank-you.”

I immediately got on my iPad and started typing her a thank-you email for the card. Of course, because I was thinking of Aymen, he dropped in. He was suddenly present with me. I recognized him immediately, and I said, “Tracy, Aymen is here. He’s showing me pictures of a woman on a horse, and he’s showing me how you used to rub his beard and tease him about it. But now he’s talking about the tooth fairy. Why is he doing this? He was 27—or 29, I think 27—when he passed. Why would somebody that old be talking about the tooth fairy?”

Well, I thought, we’ll send this anyway. He’s here, and he loves you. I sent the email. She wrote back, overjoyed. The woman on the horse was his fiancée. She sent photos of her jumping horses; that’s what she does. She showed me a picture of her with him and his beard. She said she used to do that all the time.

But the coolest thing was that she said she could send me a picture of it—a screenshot of the text on her cell phone. Just two days earlier, she had found all her kids’ baby teeth, taken a photo of the baby teeth, and sent it in a text. On the text, she wrote, “The tooth fairy.” Her daughter wrote at the bottom, “OMG, don’t tell me those are our actual teeth.”

It shows you that Aymen knew all about that text because he brought it up three weeks after we talked. She wasn’t thinking of me at that moment, saying, “Hey, Mom, I know all about that text.”

She has now started an online chapter of Helping Parents Heal because of all this evidence from the other side. Her healing has advanced so much. She’s gone from this state of desperation one year ago to now starting her own online chapter to help parents anywhere. The miracles are ongoing and exponentially growing. That’s that shift in consciousness.

Rick: Yeah, that’s really neat. I keep saying things—I keep using the word “neat” for some reason.

Suzanne: Because it is.

Rick: But it’s great, because what you’re doing, and the knowledge and evidence that this reveals, can be such a balm for people. It can relieve so much grief that is really unnecessary grief.

Suzanne: Exactly.

Rick: So, it’s huge.

Suzanne: It’s huge. Part of the spiritual teaching is that grief is a choice. It’s natural, and people will feel it. I know that I will when I have further losses in my family. But when you realize they’re not permanent losses, then it becomes a choice.

They’re watching me. They see me desperate. They see me crying. Do I want them to feel that pain from me? They wouldn’t want that. So then you choose to say, “Okay, I’m going to go outside for a while. I’m going to get out of this house. I’m going to interact with other people. I’m going to reconnect at the heart with other people.” That’s what brings the real healing.

Rick: Yeah, it seems to me that if somebody is really grieving a lot, it sort of puts the deceased loved one in a difficult position because they don’t want to see their loved ones suffering, and they want to help. But if they can’t get through, then it would be frustrating. It’s also a courtesy to them to realize this stuff and not be so grief-stricken.

When communication is imperfect

Suzanne: You want a funny story? Those on the other side will use what is in my conscious mind. They’ll use recent conversations because it’s easy to grab those. They put that thought, image, or word in my mind if it can be evidential to their loved one. I’ve seen that happen over and over again.

So, I’m doing a reading, and I have a mom whose son is on the other side. I said, “Your son is here.” We validated that, but I said, “He’s showing me a conversation I had last night.” We were talking at the dinner table with a dinner guest about the movie A Fish Called Wanda, where the star eats the goldfish and it’s alive. You can see the fish’s tail flopping out of his mouth.

Our dinner guest said, “I did that once. I ate live fish.” Everybody around the table was saying, “Ugh,” so this conversation was very fresh in my mind. This kid on the other side was showing me that, and I said, “Your son is showing me he ate goldfish.” His mother said, “Oh, he ate them all the time. I had to keep him supplied.”

I said, “Really? Does it get any more evidential than that?” I asked if I could put it on Facebook because this was big, really huge: her son ate goldfish. She said sure. I like to share these stories, like I’m doing now, because it gives people hope.

So I went on Facebook and told the story. It got all these comments. People were going, “Ugh,” or, “That’s so awesome.” Then, around the 23rd comment down on my official Facebook page, this lady wrote, “Could she mean the crackers?”

I went, “Oh my God,” and emailed the mother. I said, “Did you mean Goldfish crackers?” She said, “Well, yes.” This is how the spirit world works. That was his favorite snack. She had to keep him supplied with Goldfish crackers.

It’s an insignificant little thing; it’s generic, but it’s not generic. That was his favorite snack. He used the fact that we were talking about actually eating goldfish in my conscious mind to get that through. This is how, because it’s not perfect communication, things get a little twisted around.

I’ll have readings, and I would say 50% of the time people listen to their recording later, they call me back and say, “You know, I missed this one thing, but now it’s so clear. This is what they were talking about.” I’ll tell them, “Yeah, that’s it,” or, “No, that’s a stretch. That’s not it at all,” because integrity is really important to me. I’m not going to stretch something just to get it checked and watched. But if it’s accurate, we celebrate that.

Rick: That’s neat. I was thinking as you were telling that story that you used to hear about people doing that as a college prank. Maybe it was a hazing kind of a thing or something, but this woman was actually enabling it—buying her son fresh goldfish. Weird relationship.

(Laughter)

Talk about an indulgent mother.

Suzanne: That’s a great question. There are times when the connection is just not there, happily. It’s very, very seldom, so I call the reading off and say, “I’m sorry, it’s just not here.” But we don’t know the reason why. As you asked that, I have to wonder: the need for love is inherent within us. It’s what helps us to know who we are, and so I think that need is always there to help us return home, to our true home.

So why would a spirit, if they’re in a good place and able to communicate with us, deny us the opportunity to open our hearts more? I don’t think it’s ever that they don’t feel like talking to us today, or that there’s no need. I just can’t imagine that. I haven’t experienced that.

So, if the connection is not there, one of the things I teach is, let’s not place the blame anywhere if we don’t know. I’ve had people say, “I had a reading with a medium, and she said my dad doesn’t want to talk to me today.” That’s a hurtful thing to say, and we can’t know that. We can’t.

I generally say, “I’m sorry. I don’t know why. It could be me, it could be you, it could be the other side. The connection is just off today for whatever reason.” And I’ll know to say, “Maybe you need to try another medium, or let’s try again sometime.” And we do.

Rick: Yeah. Like in my case, for instance, I think it’d be cool to connect with my parents and see how they’re doing.

Suzanne: We are going to do that, by the way.

Rick: Later on, you mean—not today? Yeah, yeah. It would be really interesting just to see how they’re doing and all. But it’s like, I don’t have this burning need. Maybe from their side there’s a need. Maybe my father would like to say a few things, or my mother, or whatever.

Suzanne: Oh, yeah, especially if there’s an apology, or they never said “I love you” and they want to say it. This is why I used to listen to what my sitter wanted. “I want to hear from my wife who passed, my dad,” and so we would set that intention. Then others would come in. In the very beginning, I’d kind of say, “No, no, they want to hear from their wife.” Realizing now, it’s not about what they want or what I want. When we just stop trying to control things, my intention always now is, “May the greater good be served by this session.” Then we’re open to whatever happens.

We’ve had people come in and the person, the sitter, will say, “I don’t want to hear from them. Make them go away.” And I’ll say, “Well, they’re here.” They’ll say, “You need to make them go away.” Well, they’re not going away because they want to apologize for the abuse. I know—I hear it. The sitter says, “I don’t want the apology.” They’re not ready to forgive, but that soul on the other side made their amends, and then they back away. It’s really interesting.

Rick: Yeah, it is.

Suzanne: You talked about love a minute ago, and here’s another quote that jumped out at me out of your book. You said, “When you place your focus on the heart, you find greater understanding of why humans act the way they do toward each other. You experience greater tolerance not just for others but for yourself because you realize that essentially, we were all the same, beautiful souls doing our best to carry out our human roles. With that awareness comes greater patience, not just for others but for yourself as well.”

Yeah, this is why I feel that mediumship has been a great path for me and not a distraction. My impatience with myself for being perfect in readings—and perfection just doesn’t happen—has gotten in the way. My desire to get greater evidence has gotten in the way. So, every step of my journey, I ask, “How can I get better in my readings?”

In fact, my guides came through recently and told me to go back and read the poem that is in Wolf Message. They said, “Read the very end of it.” I’ve memorized it because it’s so important: “Just sit back now and relax, as your desires you attack, and the ego you release. This is the road to peace.”

I realized my desires for a perfect reading were actually blocking the connection. So it’s all these life lessons about how to get the ego out of the way, how to get your human side out of the way—your fears, your doubts, your worries, your impatience, all of those things. If you just go to the heart and open up, then life flows.

What’s interesting, Rick, is that the very next reading I did after getting that guidance was for a gentleman whose reading I really didn’t want to do. I could tell he kind of had me on a pedestal, and I thought, “No, I’m not this perfect medium.” This is the challenge I’m sharing with you today: this is the potential here, but not every reading is like that. Most are really, really good, or I wouldn’t do this work.

But this guy—I knew he was expecting big wows, and I thought he was expecting evidence. So I didn’t want to do it, but I had promised him. The guides gave me that quote: “Just sit back now and relax, as your desires you attack, and the ego you release. This is the road to peace.”

I said, “I’m going to go into this reading with no desires whatsoever. If he’s pleased with it, fine. No desire.” So I just set it all aside and showed up for the reading. He got a little bit of evidence, but he got amazing guidance about his life’s path. There was a lot of psychic stuff, but his dad showed up. He said, “Please ask my dad this,” and it just flowed. It was the most amazing flow of guidance, and his dad—

You know what this guy said to me at the very end of the reading? “That was perfect, Suzanne.”

Rick: So, you’re still on a pedestal.

Suzanne: Oh, God! But see, I set aside the need to be perfect, and he got what, to him, was perfection. So it’s beautiful—the teaching.

Rick: Remember that Nisargadatta quote I sent you the other day?

Suzanne: I do.

Rick: It was something like, “When your desires melt into preferences, then everything will work through you and for you rather than by you.” Preferences rather than desires. You know, it’s like, okay.

Like Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane: “I don’t want this to happen, but after all, Thy will be done. Whatever.” You know, it’s like we’re not trying to run the show, realizing that ultimately there’s a bigger wisdom that we have to surrender to.

Suzanne: Yeah. I had two readings last week that were like a three-bar connection. I rate my readings like a cell phone signal. Five bars is great; three bars—it was like pulling teeth. I just—the sitter, I wanted her to be thrilled. There’s the desires again, right? But it was good. I could tell that her loved one was there, but at the end I felt a little let down.

Then the very next reading, that flow was back. This is my lesson: just show up, because I don’t control that. Maybe the lesson for that mom was exactly what she got.

My guides told me last week, “Yes, you serve those on the other side and you serve the sitter, but the readings themselves serve your soul’s evolution.” Every reading is an opportunity for me to release the ego, to release the perfection, and to release the desires. And for this Navy officer who still sits up straight, that’s still a challenge. So we’re not there yet.

Rick: I don’t know if there’s any “there” that you ultimately get to. I think we’re always a work in progress, you know.

Suzanne: Yeah.

Rick: Got another story for us.

Suzanne: You know, I had a huge aha a couple of weeks ago. I feel that my team, Sanaya, has been getting me ready for a big workshop I just gave with medium Susanne Wilson, and then for this interview—just teaching me more about the nature of duality and oneness. I’m really getting it in layers. I think we all do. We kind of get it, we think we get it, and then there are other layers and layers and layers.

But one thing they showed me is that the spirit world is part of the duality. That was just a huge aha to me, which seems silly, but we don’t die and go to perfection and oneness. The souls are still interacting with each other, so that’s duality. They’re still deciding whether to come back here and have another go at it. That’s part of the duality. We still continue growing on that side, still working our way, hopefully, toward that state of undivided consciousness, perfection, and love.

So it was just an interesting aha for me that it’s all part of the story. Even the spirit world is part of the dream illusion, but our interaction with that aspect of the dream, the illusion, and the separation still helps us to grow, whether on this side of the veil or the next.

Rick: Yeah, that’s an interesting point, and that’s one reason that some spiritual people dismiss the whole mediumship thing. They might believe that mediums are doing what they say they’re doing, but they might say, “Well, yeah, but so what? This world is illusory, and that world is illusory. So why dwell in another illusory world? Get beyond the illusion of all worlds and arrive at what is real.”

But the thing is, it takes a thorn to remove a thorn. We do all kinds of things as we interact with a world, and we take things seriously enough, even though we might understand them ultimately to be illusory. We don’t say, “Well, I don’t need to eat because food is illusory.” So the whole relative experience that we’re having is germane to our growth and our evolution. Why should that just be limited to the concrete physical world?

Suzanne: Yeah, and I’m glad that subject came up, because for those who think that there’s no purpose in mediumship, you can see that this interaction between the two worlds helps the evolution of the soul, no matter which side of the veil we’re on.

Rick: Yeah. And for those who are fond of Vedic literature, and who might be fans of Ramana Maharshi and Vedanta and so on, the Vedic literature is chock-full of stories of people in their earthly bodies communicating with subtler beings of various kinds and having them play a significant role in whatever the situation is—in their spiritual evolution or in some drama that’s taking place in the story.

And not only Vedic—I mean, most of the world’s spiritual traditions have stories like this. So why would they be in there if they were irrelevant or not useful to spiritual development?

Suzanne: And we have these beings on the other side who are the bridge between the two worlds. We talked about this at length in the first interview, Rick—the spirit guides. And I’ll admit that because of my Navy officer training and my rigid background, I had a real hard time believing guides are real. Yet now I’ve come so far that I just led a workshop with another wonderful evidence-based medium named Susanne Wilson, and it was all about how to connect with your spirit guide.

Two weeks ago, she and I were getting ready to have an online meeting to discuss our latest ideas and the final plans for this workshop. That morning, we were scheduled to talk at four o’clock in the afternoon. I was due to give a reading to a woman at ten o’clock, so about 9:15, suddenly this man’s face was in my vision. It was in my mind’s eye, not really out here, but I saw him. He looked like a Viking: big, bushy beard and mustache, full hair, kind of reddish-blond hair, and a big nose. I thought, “Oh! Who’s that?” I don’t normally see faces like that.

About 15 minutes later, there he was again. I could describe him perfectly. I’ve been seeing faces more and more now. So, right before the reading started, this guy appeared a third time.

As the reading started, I got the woman on the phone and told her, “I need to tell you this man showed up for me three times in the last hour.” I described him, with the beard, the mustache, and the color of his hair. She said, “I don’t recognize that person at all.” I thought, well, okay, and I just put that aside and got on with the reading.

Four o’clock came, and I got Suzanne Wilson on Skype. We were sitting there having our little business meeting about our upcoming workshop on connecting with spirit guides. She said, “I’m going to show a picture of these drawings. This is what my guides look like.” She held up this picture, and one of the guys was the guy I had seen: the big, bushy beard, the mustache, and the hair.

I said, “This is a guy who came to me today. Who is that?” She said, “Well, that’s my main spirit guide.” I told her he had shown up at 9:15, 9:30, and right before my reading. She said, “Oh my gosh, at nine o’clock this morning I said to my guide, ‘Suzanne and I are having this meeting at four. Why don’t you go hang out with her spirit guides and get ready for the meeting?’”

(Laughter)

Rick: Wow, that’s interesting.

Suzanne: It blew both of us away. We’re both used to a lot of really cool stuff happening in readings, but to tell your guide to go talk to her guide, and then have him show up visually for me several times, was very affirming as I got ready to go tell people, “This is real. Your guides are real. Talk to them.”

Rick: Yeah, it’s amazing. I think some people must feel like, well, my life is kind of dull compared to Suzanne’s. She’s got so much going on.

Suzanne: But it could get better for anybody once they open the door to believing it’s possible, because mine used to be a very secular world. I wasn’t interacting with the spirit world at all.

Ty tells people that when I took him to see a medium after Susan died, he didn’t even know what a medium was, and now he’s married to one. He doesn’t meditate daily. I bring the spirit excitement and the stories into our lives, but he finds his connection in nature. He believes this now, so that’s how he gets into it. Other people need to get that belief going and then train their minds to be quiet. You never know what will happen.

Rick: Yeah. An email just came in from something totally unrelated, and the headline of the email is, “Wait, is magic real?”

Suzanne: Oh my gosh, don’t you love it?

(Laughter)

And with perfect timing.

Rick: That’s cool.

Suzanne: But it’s not magic. It’s as real as things get in this unreal reality. How’s that? It’s very real. When you ask, as I did in Wolf’s Message, over and over, “Why is this happening? What’s the meaning of this sign? What does this have to tell me?” that’s when it takes on real value.

You can say, “Oh, that’s really cool. Did that happen?” But why? What’s the lesson?

Rick: Carl Jung talked a lot about synchronicity.

Suzanne: Right.

Rick: I mean, one of my favorite themes is just that we’re sort of swimming in a sea of intelligence. There’s nothing but that. There’s nothing dead. Rocks aren’t dead. Trees are very much alive. The whole thing is intelligence, just sort of playing with itself and interacting with itself. There’s so much significance, meaning, and profundity in every little tiny thing.

Suzanne: And that’s the intelligence that I see when I do readings: the intelligence of a girl in spirit who would show up with the bunny suit, or the intelligence of a spirit who would say, “I did for my job exactly what your husband is doing now.” I see that intelligence all the time.

🩺 Returning to life and healing

I do believe that we come back until we get it right. In fact, I could tell one more story.

Rick: Oh, yeah.

Suzanne: I did a reading for a woman who I knew wanted to hear from her child, but I didn’t know what age the child was or how the child had passed at all. I had her on video—it was not an in-person reading. I tuned in, and right away I got cramps in my abdomen. Then I saw a gesture toward her that means, “This is you.” I said, “You’re having issues in your abdomen or stomach area.” She said, “No, I’m not.” I said, “Now, this is definitely you.”

“Okay, it’s nothing to be worried about. I don’t feel anything grave, but just remember that came up.” So I tuned in, and I said, “Oh, your child was just a baby. This was SIDS—sudden infant death syndrome.” She said, “Yes, it was.”

I said, “This is really strange, because your child is showing me this spiral and is saying, ‘I’m coming back to you. I’m meant to be with you, and I left because I had a defect that would have caused you greater pain in the future. You’re supposed to be my parents.’”

We can’t prove that. I’m not saying this is pure evidence. The child did die of SIDS. But the very next day, the woman emailed me. She said, “Suzanne, I just did a pregnancy test. I’m pregnant.” That was the cramping and the abdominal issue that I was being shown.

I truly believe that that little soul had some life lessons that were going to come out because of the connection with those two parents. It may not have had a viable life here, but it came back to try it again.

These are things we can’t prove, but that’s part of the magic, right? Opening your mind to believe. Whether or not it’s true, we’ll find out eventually. But what does it teach us now? What does it bring us now? Healing.

Closing thoughts

Rick: That’s great. Okay, so we’ve covered quite a bit. I always feel like we’re just scratching the surface, and there’s so much more that we could talk about. But an interview is like a little sampling, and I’m glad to have provided people with another taste of Suzanne Giesemann.

Suzanne: Thank you.

Rick: I think what you’re doing is beautiful, and you’re very interesting. You’re having so much fun, and you’re helping so many people. We’re all serving in different ways. Maybe I don’t think I’ll ever be a medium, and it’s not my role, but I have my role and you have yours.

Suzanne: Yeah.

Rick: You know, we’re all holding up our sticks.

Suzanne: It’s definitely a calling for me, and I can’t meet the demand for people who want evidential readings. My biggest advice to people who hear this and want to connect with their loved ones is to get a medium through referrals or word of mouth.

Ask, “Are they evidential?” if you need that. Not everybody does, but if you really want to know, “That’s my parent, that’s my spouse, that’s my child,” whoever it is you want to hear from, and the evidence is important, then ask somebody who’s had a reading or read testimonials.

We mediums who want people to know this is real, who are raising the bar for mediumship, want people to have a good experience. It’s possible. There are frauds out there; that’s the problem. It is possible to fake a reading. But I hope that, with the short stories I’ve shared with you today, you can see there are things here you absolutely can’t fake.

Rick: Yeah, like Whoopi Goldberg in Ghost, until Patrick Swayze kind of came along, and then she was a total fraud.

Suzanne: I love that scene, with the loved ones behind her saying, “I want to talk. Now let me in. Let me talk.” Sometimes that’s what it is. They just gather around and are so excited on the other side to connect with us again, to let us know, “I’m still right here,” which is the name of the book that I’m working on: Still Right Here.

They really are. They’re living their own lives in the reality in which they find themselves now, but they still keep an eye on us and help us, guiding us as needed. It serves the greater good.

Rick: Yeah, and you know what you said about mediums being a bit in short supply and so on—maybe try to find one. Hopefully, you can find a good one.

I would say, as a general rule, that whether or not you find one, one of your priorities in life should be to do whatever you can to accelerate and support your spiritual growth in whatever ways you can.

Suzanne: Yes, that’s the thing.

Rick: Whatever way it is, because that’s the bottom line. Not everybody needs a medium or needs to talk to loved ones on the other side. The essential thing—what the game is really about—is our spiritual growth, our spiritual evolution. So make that the priority, and everything else will fall into place.

Suzanne: That’s why I have free meditations on my website that people can download, so they can get an experience of who they really are, feel the love that’s within them, and make the connection themselves. That’s why I’m teaching mediumship. It’s like the old saying, “Give a man a fish in a reading, or teach him to fish.” Absolutely.

Rick: Yeah, just don’t swallow live ones.

(Laughter)

If you feel you must, go buy some crackers.

Suzanne: Good advice!

Rick: Okay, great. Well, thanks so much, Suzanne. I’m really glad we got to connect again. If you’re ever driving through Iowa, you probably should stop by.

Suzanne: Oh, yeah, I would love to.

Rick: Yeah, we’re not too far off the track.

Suzanne: Good. It will be good to see you in person. Thanks for your time.

Rick: Happy trails, and don’t hang up yet. I just want to make a few concluding remarks.

I was speaking with Suzanne Giesemann. I’ll be linking to her website. Rather than try to spell Suzanne Giesemann right now, just go to her page on batgap.com, click on the link, and you’ll find yourself at her website. Explore it to your heart’s content.

This is an ongoing series. Let’s see—next week I’ll be interviewing… Oh, I better not say. I’m talking to Suzanne; the person will probably cancel. That happened last time. I was doing an interview with Suzanne, announced the following week, and that person canceled.

But next week is a fellow named Lakota John—Lakota John, who is the first Native American guy I will have interviewed—talking about Native American spirituality.

If you’d like to be notified of upcoming interviews, just look on the upcoming interviews page on batgap.com. If you want to be notified when new ones are actually released, sign up for the email newsletter.

We appreciate support if you feel like supporting it. As I mentioned in the beginning, there’s a PayPal link there and a lot of other things. Just explore the website; it’s pretty self-evident.

You yourself have those messages from Sanaya. Do you still do those on a regular basis?

Suzanne: Oh, daily. You can sign up to get them by email, or just go on my website.

Rick: Yeah, we haven’t talked much about that, but Sanaya is the name for Suzanne’s guides, and she gets messages and sends out an email every single day with a message from them. So you might want to check that out.

Suzanne: And my Facebook page—they go on Facebook, so there are multiple ways.

Rick: All right! So, thank you all for listening or watching. Thank you, Suzanne, and we’ll see you next week.