Into Love Through Near‑Death – Tammy Lee Anderson – Transcript

Tammy Lee Anderson interview

Summary

• Tammy Lee Anderson had two near-death experiences before age one — during birth and under anesthesia — which she recovered memory of at 17 following a healing prayer from a priest
• Growing up highly sensitive and empathic, she could feel others’ emotions and had precognitive awareness of deaths before they happened, including her brother’s
• She channeled her intensity into Olympic-level kayaking and Aikido, eventually becoming a fifth-degree black belt and martial arts teacher
• A third NDE as an adult deepened her understanding of what the other side feels like and confirmed for her that earthly life offers a specific kind of love — embodied, chosen, contrastive — unavailable elsewhere
• She trained seriously in mediumship starting in 2018, studying with Suzanne Giesemann and at Arthur Findlay College in the UK, and began taking clients in 2023 after years of practice
• Her sessions frequently produce specific evidential details — names, images, physical objects — that clients verify after the fact

Key Takeaways

• Memory is not stored only in the brain — Tammy Lee’s recovery of infant near-death experiences points to what she calls “memory in the field,” consistent with research on non-local consciousness
• Human life is not a mistake or punishment but a specific environment for a kind of love that can’t be accessed in disembodied states — contrast, grief, and difficulty are part of the design, not defects in it
• Mediumship is a discipline, not a gift dropped in from outside — years of inner work, ego reduction, and practice in staying empty are what make accurate communication possible
• Healing from the inside out is the throughline of everything she’s done — psychotherapy, Aikido, medium work, and working in shelters all point to the same principle: you can’t give what you haven’t built
• Soul-to-soul communication, of the kind she experiences in mediumship, bypasses the misunderstandings inherent in language entirely — she sees it as a possible direction for human communication at a collective level

Full interview, edited for readability:

Tammy Lee: We’re not victims of our realities, we’re the creator of it. And at least that’s how I approach my life. I’m not a victim of my reality, I’m a creator of it. I wouldn’t change one thing in my life as far as the difficult things or the challenging things because they’ve allowed me to expand my love.

We’re not victims of our realities, we’re the creator of it. I wouldn’t change one thing in my life as far as the difficult things, because they’ve allowed me to expand my love.

Near-Death at Birth: Two Experiences Before Age One

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of conversations with spiritually awakening people. We’ve done over 750 of them now. I was going through old transcripts of previous interviews because we’re doing some interesting things with those. I always say this at the beginning. We’ve done over 250 of them now. Now it’s 750. And as always, if this is new to you and you’d like to check out previous ones, go to batgap.com and look under the interviews menu where you’ll see them organized in various different ways. This whole program is made possible through the support of appreciative listeners and viewers. We don’t run ads on the audio podcast and we run very minimal ads on YouTube. And the sole means of support is donations from people who appreciate it and would like to help support it. So if that’s you, there are PayPal buttons on every page of the website. My guest today is Tammy Lee Anderson. And Tammy Lee is one of these people, I said this to the guy that I interviewed two weeks ago also, but one of these people who seems to have packed about six lifetimes into one. I won’t even remember all the things she’s done, but she’s had several near-death experiences. She’s been an Olympic level kayaker, competitive kayaker. She’s a fifth degree black belt in Aikido. She’s a psychotherapist. She has lived as a monk at a very remote monastery. She’s worked with homeless people and in battered women’s shelters. She has a couple of master’s degrees and she’s now a professional medium in addition to being a healer in other respects. Oh yeah, she’s a rolfer, she’s got qualifications in that and now she’s working as a medium and other things which she’ll explain. How many things did I leave out there, Tammy Lee?

Tammy Lee: There’s plenty. That’s enough.

Rick: Did I get most of them?

Tammy Lee: Yeah.

Rick: Okay, good. So she’s no slouch. She’s been doing interesting things all of her life and her memories actually go back to her infancy. She didn’t always remember her infancy, but in her late teens, she had an opening which enabled her to recollect a couple of near-death experiences she had as an infant, one while being born and the other while undergoing some surgeries some months later. So, I know we’re not going to focus on your near-death experiences, but why don’t we start with that, since that definitely would be starting at the beginning.

Tammy Lee: Okay, thank you.

Rick: Being in labor for 38 hours with an umbilical cord wrapped around your neck.

Tammy Lee: Yeah. Well, thank you, Rick, for having me on your show. I’ve been watching you for years, and I just have so much admiration for how you present and the questions you ask. And So I’m just very honored to be here with you.

Rick: Well, it’s an honor to have you, and it’s my joy to do this. And I always feel like a work in progress. And I always beat myself up a little bit after every interview. “Oh, I should have asked that. I shouldn’t have asked that.”

Remembering the Unrememberable: How It All Came Back

Tammy Lee: Well, I like how you– in the beginning, you said that it’s an awakening process, an awakening journey, because it’s not a one-time event. and that’s what I’ve experienced. It is a lifetime of integration of these near-death experiences. I didn’t remember these two first near-death experiences until I was 17 after a prayer from a priest who just, it exploded, and I basically had a re-experiencing of these events. It wasn’t just a remembering. And people often say, “How in the world can you remember?” you know, it’s so young. And the only thing I can see now is that memory’s not just in the brain, it’s in the field.

Memory’s not just in the brain, it’s in the field.

Rick: That’s an important point. We could spend a whole interview talking about that, yeah.

Tammy Lee: And so somehow that was opened that experience and it caused me to understand a little bit why since I was little that I felt like I was in between. I was in between the seen and the unseen, and I remembered unconditional love, and I was like, “This is not it.” You know, there’s so many conditions in this environment, and I had… I can only say that as a kid, I felt like I had a broken heart. My heart hurt.

Rick: Interesting.

Tammy Lee: My heart hurt.

Rick: All the time?

Tammy Lee: Yeah, all the time. And I had this longing that just hurt inside and I felt like, “Where is that? Where is that?” And I was trying to remember, you know. And so that was quite, I was sensitive as a little kid. I could feel emotions of people, emotions that I wished I hadn’t felt because, you know, the ups and downs of people. And I had no boundaries whatsoever as far as that. I just soaked it all in, which made it challenging. And so I really was attracted to silence and quiet at a young age. And I would hang out in my closet as much as possible because it was quiet in there. And I felt held when I sat in the silence. And that’s never left. But as a child, I was affected by light, I was affected by sound, and I liked to be outside whenever I could, you know, because that was a grounding experience. So it set me up to be kind of in between. And I really worked at trying to get grounded through sports. one thing that helped me kind of ground myself out and feel like I could be here. But I still had depression up till age 23. And that experience happened then that kind of ended that.

Rick: Yeah, as I recall, you were even suicidal a bit. You were lying on the floor with a bottle of pills at one point.

Tammy Lee: Yeah, at 23 after my brother’s death, yeah. I had precognitive abilities from these experiences, these first two experiences and I would…

Rick: So in other words, the near-death experiences opened up some precognitive abilities.

Tammy Lee: Yeah, and I never saw it as a gift. I saw it as a burden, actually, to feel that. I wouldn’t take it away. Somebody asked me, “Would you want to have that ability?” And it’s like, “No, because it’s a part of my senses. I don’t know what I’d be without but I sure didn’t see it convenient because it’s not something I could change. I just felt people when they were going, and usually it was very visceral. I could feel it in my gut, you know, when my grandfather was about to pass or my brother, every time he turned around and walked away from me, I felt he was going away. And so I could pass by people, know, in grocery stores and I could feel it and it was not something that I valued very much. It was painful, actually.

Rick: Yeah. Couldn’t change it. As a matter of fact, you tell the story about how when your brother died, the police called and the phone rang. Nobody knew it was the police and you said, “That’s it, he’s gone. He died.”

Tammy Lee: Yeah, I said it wrong.

Rick: Your parents were upset.

Tammy Lee: Yeah, and they went through the roof. You know, why in the world would you say something like that, you know?

Rick: But they must have found out within seconds that you were right.

Tammy Lee: Within seconds. They wouldn’t say on the phone, but they said, “Please come to the hospital. Something’s happened. There’s been an accident.”

Rick: I see.

Tammy Lee: And so all the way to the hospital, which was a 45-minute ride, they had to suffer with knowing that possibly he was gone.

Rick: And you knew he was.

Tammy Lee: Yeah, I knew he was. And so you don’t say something before it happens. And people sometimes schedule appointments with me and say, “Am I going to die?” And it’s like, “Don’t do that, because I won’t tell you.” It’s none of my business and none of yours. So don’t. I just won’t.

Rick: Yeah. Yeah. But, I mean, you would probably agree that if we have some ability like that, if it dawns in us and we weren’t even seeking it, it probably did so for a good reason, and it’s not some kind of accident. Yes?

Tammy Lee: Maybe no. I don’t know if there’s a good reason, actually. I mean, I can’t see the reason except that it’s helped me have a sense. Like, there’s one story I tell in my book about Cassie, the little girl that was, I sensed her passing. The priest that I knew, he went in to pray for somebody and I didn’t know who he was going to pray with. But I just decided I would that they’re enjoying the prayer, the healing prayer. And so I sat in the chapel and she came to me. And she said her name was Cassie. She was just a little girl and I could see that she was leaving in a few days. And it was true. I told my sister afterwards, I said, “Let’s keep an eye on the paper because she’s going to pass in a few days.” And she did. Her name was Cassie, short for Catherine. And she was just, I think she was like seven years all. She was very young. She had cancer. And I had no intention or desire to contact the family. What I did, it was a confirmation for me, but also I felt like there was just a comfort in that passing. You know, just like, “See you later. I’ll see you again someday.” And it was just kind of like, there was no need to do anything except confirm or affirm, yes, this is…

Rick: So this priest, as I recall, you like to visit a particular chapel. You weren’t really into religion so much, but you just loved the feeling there, and you would sit there, and some priest noticed you and asked if you would like some kind of a blessing or something, and he gave you the blessing, and that’s what opened up this memory of near-death experiences?

Tammy Lee: Yeah, I was about 17 and I would like to go to this chapel because it was quiet. And I liked to go there when there was no one there. And this priest, every once in a while I’d see him cleaning or dusting or setting up for a mass or something like that. It was a Catholic church. And I didn’t know him at the time, but he had a gift of healing and he was known for that. People would come from all over for healing from him. And he one One day he walked up to me. I was sitting there and he saw me before so he was curious I think. And he said, “What brings you here?” And I said, “I can’t really verbalize it, put it into words. I love the silence. I love the quiet.” And he said, “Can I say a prayer for you?” And I didn’t know what to expect because I wasn’t brought up in a religious family. So I just said, “Okay.” And when he laid his hands on my head, I just felt this warmth go through my whole body. And then I felt it settle like in the solar plexus, and it was like honey going, and it was just like this cascade. And then it just exploded into this remembering, re-experiencing. And I experienced my mom in labor. I experienced it from so so many different positions. I experienced it from my mom’s point of view, from the people who were in the operating room. I experienced it from my point of view, but I couldn’t breathe because the umbilical cord was wrapped around the neck and I was in the canal for so long that basically by the time I came out I was blue and flat. And they just said to my mom, it didn’t make it. They didn’t say if it was a girl or a boy, it didn’t make it. And they whisked me off into another room and what I remember there is my mom like a beacon of light. It felt like her pulling me back. And I was in a space of complete peace and bliss. it was beyond words. It’s an experience of being home. It’s real. It’s soft. It’s all permeating because it moves through your whole being. Anyways, so when I go back into that, I can really just immediately go back into that fight easily. So they got me going and they immediately put me into a little incubator. At that time, in the early 60s, they didn’t even have prenatal care. I was four pounds, went down to three pounds, and that was kind of, you know, usually babies that small die. And they put me in a little bubble, in a little incubator, so I could develop more. And I was in the hospital for a couple months, and my parents would come once a week and look through a little window and look in the back and see me. So everything was a procedural, which is kind of an interesting beginning, you know. And I did get to come home early, about two months. and they ended up needing to do a surgery. And doing anesthesia on a baby is very precarious, especially if they’re preemies. And they set up for a surgery, I think it was about five months old, and they set up for a surgery and they never got to the procedure because the anesthesia knocked me out and I was out of my body. I’m very happy to be out of that body, because I found it constricting. I found it very small and not pleasant. But they got me going. It was quite an endeavor to get me going, but they got me back.

Rick: Yeah, well, glad they made it. Glad they did.

Tammy Lee: Yeah, at this point in my life, I’m glad they did too.

Rick: Yeah, you’ve contributed a lot to the world in this life. And I’ve heard you say, and I’ve heard others say also that you’re confident that you’re not all the way here, and none of us are. In other words, a certain portion of our soul or whatever you wanna call it is still in the fourth dimension or on the other side, and then the rest of us is actually incarnate. I’ve even heard it said that a person could incarnate in a couple of lives simultaneously, a portion in this one, a portion in that one, and some of it still in the astral realm or whatever.

Tammy Lee: I imagine that’s very possible. I don’t feel like I’m in my body, I feel like my body is in me.

I don’t feel like I’m in my body, I feel like my body is in me.

Tammy Lee: It’s a point in within me that I experience when I put my attention there, and I can put my attention in other places as well. I can just turn my attention and I’m there.

Rick: Yeah, we were talking in the beginning about how growth and progress and evolution is a lifelong process. It’s continuous. There’s no final destination that we reach. And I’d like to think of it in terms of expanding and clarifying our multidimensionality, you know, rather than being locked into a narrow band on the spectrum, just beginning to live the whole spectrum and being able to navigate or function at whatever point in the spectrum our attention is needed. And I get that feeling from everything I’ve learned about you, that you’ve gone all the way from the intensity of Olympic athletic competition to mediumship and everything in between, all kinds of different dimensions.

Growing Up Between Two Worlds: Sensitivity, Grief, and Sports

Tammy Lee: Yeah. It’s been quite a journey. It’s been a journey of integration. I realized that at a really young age, I wanted to add, I realized that just being here, I caused pain. At least that little kid.

Rick: You mean to our mothers, you mean? Yeah, to the families. My parents weren’t married at the time, so that was really difficult for them. And then they had to get rushed to get married and my dad, it was just a lot of emotion there and so I felt as a kid responsible for a lot of that.

Rick: Your mother said you were conceived via a one dollar bet. What was that?

Tammy Lee: Yeah.

Rick: I bet you this doesn’t make, get you pregnant or what was the bet?

Tammy Lee: It was, yeah.

Rick: Was that it?

Tammy Lee: My dad made a one-dollar bet with his friend he could get the good girl, and he did. And my mom was a goody two-shoes, and he got her, and then they had to rush and get married, and then the secret was broken when I was delivered early. My mom loves her dad, and she would never want to disappoint him, and so that was quite a scary. And that’s another thing I was aware of is that I could feel all the emotions of my mom. I could feel her shame, I could feel her fear, lots of fear. And so, but just by walking on the grass, I remember sitting on the side of the house when I was like seven or so, I don’t remember the age, and I realized just by walking, you know I might squish a bug or you know and I thought I want to cause as much good as I can you know because we sometimes we unconscious in our unconsciousness we cause you know unhappy things to happen or we say something without thinking and it causes somebody to be sad or so that that has been something that I’ve really wanted to work on in my life is cause as much good or kindness as I could.

Rick: Yeah, that’s really nice. You know about the Janes who wear masks so they don’t inadvertently breathe a mosquito in or anything like that.

Tammy Lee: I’m not that, no. (laughing)

Rick: Yeah, but–

Tammy Lee: No, I never heard that.

Rick: But of course there’s, you know, within us there are cells dying from the thousands every second. and there’s non-human cells, our whole microbiome is dying and regenerating. So there’s a life and death thing going on all the time.

Tammy Lee: All the time.

Rick: And that’s part of life.

Tammy Lee: Yeah. So we’re dying and being reborn every moment.

Rick: Yep. They say even that after about seven years, every cell in our body has been replaced, except possibly in our teeth, everything gets regenerated.

Tammy Lee: Isn’t that amazing, yeah.

Surgery Without Anesthesia and the Reality of the Other Side

Rick: Yeah. So, your second near-death experience is when you had surgery on your skull because the fontanelles had closed and your brain was getting constricted and your skull needed to be open. Was there anything distinctive about what you experienced during that one or was it just more of the…

Tammy Lee: Well, when I had the near-death experience there, I mean, where I… that was caused by the anesthesia. when I actually had, when they rescheduled the surgery, you know, after a few months after that, then I had an experience, I don’t call it a near death, but it was an in-between. I was going in-between the whole time. And it was quite terrifying because I could, the contrast between being in the light and being held by familiar people, they were familiar beings, I felt like I had always known them, and that safety and that beauty and that love, And then being in that operating room when there was harsh lights, the contrast was just intense. I remember the shaking, my body was shaking. And I absolutely know that they didn’t normally use any anesthesia at that time because I think they were afraid to lose me. And there’s the idea that babies don’t remember. And this one did. And I remember…

Rick: So you were experiencing a lot of pain.

Tammy Lee: Yeah. Yeah. And fear. I wasn’t out you know, and so, and they had me anchored to the table, so it was just like, yeah, it was quite scary, frightening, and so I remember being in that, and so, yeah, it was quite an experience. I think that was the roughest of all of the experiences as a kid, was that one.

Rick: Yeah, it sounds rough.

Tammy Lee: Yeah.

Rick: What do you say to people who say that, well, yeah, a near-death experience isn’t death, death. So who knows what really happens when we actually die and these people who have a near-death experience and come back, they can’t really tell us the whole story.

Tammy Lee: Well, what is death? I mean, there really isn’t any death. I would say I would call it closer to near-life. It was a re-experiencing. That’s what’s more real than real. And so, you know, you were saying the body dies, you know, every moment, as being reborn every moment. So, yeah, I mean, I don’t have much to say, because how did I just say that? I know what I experienced. And it was very different than this constriction of a human focus, a human intention, human experience and it was home it was free freedom it was yeah so what would I say

Rick: I interviewed a guy a couple weeks ago one who has been studying all these different theories of consciousness and including very materialistic theories in which you know when you’re dead you’re dead that’s it that’s the end of your existence and I just made I made the comment of boy all those people are going to be so surprised when they die the people who espouse those theories are going to think, “Holy crap, how did I not know this?”

Tammy Lee: Yes, and I’ve had people, and I do the mediumship now, which I never thought I would ever do, but here I am doing it. But I have people coming back saying, “You’re absolutely right.” And I had a husband just the other day come in and he said, “Yeah, you’re rubbing it in now because she was making a session to communicate with him. And he said, “Yeah, you’re absolutely right.” He didn’t think there was anything afterwards. So that experience is, this is like a form of experience, and that is more formless, what’s hard to put into words, what it actually feels like.

Rick: But it’s interesting how dense earthly life is.

Tammy Lee: Yeah.

Rick: And how it kind of blinds us so profoundly.

Tammy Lee: Yeah. Yeah. I experienced that in the third one. My third near-death experience, coming back into my body, it was like I weighed a thousand pounds, you know? It was dense. It was heavy. It was so yucky that I thought, “I never want to do this again. I never want to go out of my body again and come back in,” because that was the hardest part. know it was so the density of it and the slowness of it and it’s felt like molasses you know and but the as I’ve gotten older and integrated over time I understand that this is the contrast we need these experiences is human experiences to have this contrast because love is relational it’s not isolation and it’s not, it’s, the contrast gives a depth to love that we wouldn’t have otherwise. You know, I can choose, you know, I grow into my yes, you know, can I even love this? Can I even forgive this? You know, it’s a different experience. It’s not, it’s not, it’s an embodied experience of love rather than an intellectual one. It’s, yeah, that makes sense. Here we get to embody love, here we get the opportunity to embody love. And when we’re out of these bodies it’s not an embodied experience. It’s way different, it’s hard to compare it. But I know that we choose, this is like the edge of love, it feels like, well we’re giving love the possibility to have the experience of choosing every moment.

The contrast gives a depth to love that we wouldn’t have otherwise. Here we get the opportunity to embody love.

Rick: Yeah, I was saying a few minutes ago about how life is multi-dimensional. Maybe you could elaborate a bit on the necessity of human life as in the course of our overall evolution and how we have opportunities here that we wouldn’t have if we were just in some ethereal realm disembodied as a spirit.

Tammy Lee: Yeah. I just believe, or know, it’s not a belief, it’s an experience that this contrast offers me a depth and love that I wouldn’t have otherwise. When I went out of my body in the third experience, I understood that everything was perfect. That the design of this, even though on a human point of of you, it’s not perfect. We have suffering, it’s you know, people. But this, having the experience of grief and loss and it gives us depth to love. I always thought I never wanted to meet somebody who didn’t have some dysfunction in our life because they would have no compassion. You know, they would have no, they don’t know what it feels like to lose a child or lose a loved one. If we look back at our life, I’m sure a lot of people listening, if you look back at your life, some of the most difficult things in your life have made you, given you a depth that you wouldn’t have had otherwise. At least that’s my experience. I wouldn’t have had the compassion. I wouldn’t have had the understanding. not up here, it’s in my heart. I know what it feels like to lose a partner. I know what it feels like to lose people I deeply love. And we don’t lose them, but on a human experience we do. And so there’s that experience. I get to experience that perceived loss. Although when we go into it, we don’t lose anything. Love is never lost. It’s just shifts and changes into more spaciousness and more depth that we can’t even fathom here.

Rick: If we take extreme examples like the Holocaust or Gaza or Sudan, places in the world where terrible things are happening. There was just a mass shooting in Louisiana today. eight children were killed in some kind of thing. I mean, how do you… I’ve talked to people who bring up points like that as argument for there couldn’t be a God, or if there is a God, he’s a sadist, you know. How do you respond to people like that?

Tammy Lee: Yeah. On a human perspective, it’s like it doesn’t make sense. There’s no reason we should be doing stuff like this or experiencing stuff like that. And yet on another level, even in these depths, what I’m most amazed at is that how human beings can rise up in the most difficult times. There are many stories during the Holocaust where people rose up in prison. What was that priest’s name? I can’t think of his name now, but he was amongst the whole–Colby, Father Colby, I believe it was. He was in a group of Holocaust camp, and they were taking some people to starve them to death, and this man started crying and said, “I have a family. I don’t want to die.” And he put himself in that place and said I’ll go from this place and he ended up starving to death and that was his choice to take his place. I’m amazed at what arises in these most challenging experiences. In the worst of the worst, you find the most amazing souls rising out of the ashes. So it’s really like a phoenix in a sense, you know. So even in the most worst, terrible, horrific experiences, you find some of the most amazing souls rising up with love. And that’s the opportunity. Where do we, if we were going to design this game, where would we put the parameters? Oh, we can’t experience that. It’s like, it’s all possible, you know. And this is the opportunity. all possible. We can do the worst of the worst and we can do the most beautiful. We are both the death and resurrection, as far as I can see. We’re all of that, and we have the opportunity to live all of that.

Rick: Have you ever read Michael Newton’s book, Journey of Souls or Destiny of Souls? He was this psychotherapist that regressed people back through hypnosis to the between-life period, not just past lives but between lives. And he did thousands of people and he mapped and he found a lot of correlation between what they had to say and he mapped it all out and wrote a couple of books. But anyway, one of his points was that we pretty much sign up for any major thing that happens in our life. It’s not just capricious or arbitrary. We think, “Okay, as difficult as this will be, it’ll be an evolutionary opportunity for it, so sign me up.”

We Are Not Victims: Suffering, Free Will, and Soul Growth

Tammy Lee: Right. Yeah. That feels correct to me. It feels like we’re not victims of our realities, we’re the creator of it. At least that’s how I approach my life. I’m not a victim of my reality, I’m a creator of it. I wouldn’t change one thing in my life as far as the difficult things or the challenging things because they’ve allowed me to expand my love and my forgiveness. Can I even forgive this? You know, it’s taken me a long time to forgive some things, you know? And so that’s growing into and it’s expanding of my soul to grow into that depth of that.

We’re not victims of our realities, we’re the creator of it. I wouldn’t change one thing in my life as far as the difficult things, because they’ve allowed me to expand my love.

Rick: Good. Well, I wanted to dwell on this a little bit because sometimes people become cynical or disillusioned because of the tragedies in life, and they feel that life is meaningless or arbitrary or cruel, or there couldn’t be a God, or this or that. And I think it’s useful to discuss it and try to provide a perspective like this.

Tammy Lee: Yeah, it’s absolutely useful. Let’s discuss it. And it’s really hard to see when you’re in it. So the best we can do is practice, you know, breathing in and breathing out. You know, sometimes that’s the best we can do in the moment. And we feel the depths of, you know, this is not fair, this is not right. On some level, it’s not. You know, on a human level, for sure. So, to have the opportunity to feel the depths of that, “This is not fair, and God must not be real,” you know, to have that is part of the experience. And so, yeah, to go into that depth, it’s all part of it. So I don’t try to change somebody when they’re in that, you know. I just say, “I understand. It doesn’t make sense on one level.”

Rick: hat’s good. suggesting for a moment that we should say, “Oh, you signed up for this. This is your karma.” You know, I’m not saying that. Or that we shouldn’t bother trying to remedy these horrible situations because people signed up for it, so let them starve, you know. I mean, I’m not saying that.

Tammy Lee: I worked with the homeless in soup kitchens, and we were in Milwaukee, we were feeding 400 people in one day and that’s part of the opportunity. You know, we have a mess here. Can we bring love into this situation? And I found some of the most amazing people in the shelters and people you’d never expect. I remember the gentlemen who were always wiping down the tables. This was years ago. This had to be 30 some years ago. And I still remember looking into his eyes and being so moved. I was wiping down the tables and he was eating really slow. He’s an older gentleman. And he was the last one in the room. And there was a big cafeteria. And I was wiping down the tables and cleaning things up. And he looked up at me. And just the look in his eyes, it was like there was no server and there was no served. I was looking into a mirror. It was such a depth of love. It was soul to soul blending, and I’ll never forget it. So, you know, seeing the suffering, I mean, I’ve worked at battered women’s shelters, I’ve worked as a chaplain, I’ve worked in all kinds of things involved healing and being there. I’ve worked in jails. And so it’s not that we allow, we’re okay with all the things that are happening in the world. This is the opportunity. What will we do with this? You know? What will we do with it? Some people, you know, they just turn on the TV and go to sleep, you know? And so that’s a choice too. And so there’s no right and wrong here, it’s just what will you do with what’s presented in your life? Will you turn it into something beautiful? I mean I was amazed by Victor Frankl’s story. He was in the Auschwitz, the camp, and just his observations and his experiences of people. So yeah, it’s amazing, amazing stories in this life of people. Their courage rises in the most challenging situations. And everything’s relative. I had a priest once ask me, because I was protesting vehemently in my idealistic stage in my late 20s, I was protesting U.S. involvement in Central America. I had friends die there, and there was a lot of death squads at the time, people were dying just brutally. And he said to me one day, he said, “You live in the United States and you’re quite comfortable and you’re projecting…” He had worked in Central America, he lived there for many years, and he worked with the people and he said, “There’s a lot of projection happening because it’s all relative in a sense.” And I only I understood what he was saying later. We project our paradigm, our framework, our view of the world onto other parts of the world. We don’t know what they’re experiencing. He was saying something similar to what Viktor Frankl said. Viktor Frankl one time was walking in New York down the street and two ladies were looking at a magazine and they saw like seven or eight prisoners in the camps on this bed, this platform, basically it was just a wood platform and people would cuddle into this little place and they were saying, “Oh, how horrible this is,” and they were just going on and on. And he looked over their shoulder and said, “Actually, that was a fairly good moment there.” So they weren’t being beat up, they were safe, they were, you know, and so everything’s relative. We can project so much onto, you know, the world, it’s like, but if we come back to what we’re experiencing in this moment, almost like I’m saying, sometimes just mind what’s in front of us, you know? Mind, love the person in front of you, you know? And if that’s not happening, then, you know what I talk about in my book, the story of when I was doing those protests and one of the sisters, religious sister that I was with, she’s a Franciscan, and she was getting arrested. And I saw the anger in her eyes that she was getting arrested. This was a non-violent protest, so it didn’t compute that she would be offering so much resistance and anger to this police officer. And I saw in that moment that what she was angry about had nothing to do with what was happening. It was internal anger, something much deeper. And so I turned it on myself, what are you angry about? What are you projecting onto the world that you want to go save the world and you can’t even, for me it ended up I can’t even love my father in a way that’s you know respectful or at a depth that is needed. And so I packed everything up, drove 2000 miles and attempted to work on that relationship to have some kind of integrity and then that didn’t work. It was like we were at each other’s throats. And so I realized that I was asking him for something that he couldn’t give. And so, and I was asking for love from the outside in instead of inside out. And so I went deeper. I said, “You have to love from the inside out.” So many of us are trying to get love from the outside in, you know, and that’s or when happy. We hate you because you’re not loving me. When we come into a partnership with a partner, it’s like many people come into the relationship, “What can I get out of this?” rather than, “What can I give?” And love is, “What can I give? How can I love you?” If you’re in a relationship and you’re trying to get, then that’s not love. That’s a dysfunction. And so, anyway, so I worked, that’s why I ended up going into psychotherapy. I ended up becoming a psychotherapist and working over ten years. And what I found was I was able to integrate the spirituality at a much deeper level because I had worked on all the spiritual bypass where I had, you know, taken spirituality into place that, You know, I had a woundedness that I hadn’t been willing to look at, you know, and healing that. So healing from the inside out. If everybody, if all of us took note of healing ourselves from the inside out, the world wouldn’t have such terrible things as mass shootings and stuff like this. It’d be a different world. So it is a collective responsibility that’s happening in the world. You know, we think, “Oh, I would never be capable of that.” Yes, you right conditions. And we have, you know, we can sit here and say, “I would never do that.” Yeah, we would. Every single person would.

Rick: Yeah. Well, you made a whole lot of great points just then. Did you want to add something more?

Tammy Lee: No. Thank you. Go ahead.

Rick: Okay. Yeah, I was just making a brief synopsis. I totally get what you’re saying about in a relationship if two people are taking, trying to take, then nobody’s giving, so nobody gets because it’s like two vacuums trying to get something from each other or something. But if people are full within themselves, then they actually don’t need to get anything from anybody else. They can just give, and if two people find each other who are in that condition, then It’s like this infinite feedback loop of love and giving. And then just about the world, I totally agree. I think that all the world’s problems are symptomatic of the state of mind or development of all the eight billion people who live here. And sure, we need to do something on political levels and economic levels and environmental levels and all those other things. They need to be treated on their own level. But if we just do that and don’t enable people to blossom from within and unfold their full inner potential, then it’s kind of like watering the leaves of a tree and never giving the roots any water.

Tammy Lee: That’s a good picture, yeah. The roots need watering, nurturing, and love comes from the inside out, and then the flowers can blossom, and it’s all, you know, it’s a different point of trying to solve the problems from the outside in doesn’t usually work. It hasn’t worked so far.

Rick: No. No. Painting the roses red from Alice in Wonderland. And we also, we all have this infinite potential within us, this unbounded reservoir of energy, intelligence, love, peace, and so on. It’s just a matter of tapping into it. Tapping into it. And it’s a practice, it’s an integration, you’re never there. The perfection is in the imperfection. You know, we’re never perfect, so it’s not about being perfect. It’s a journey and having compassion, love for yourself, and this journey is very important. At least I found the self-love and moving out of fear, you know, that’s a big one.

Olympic Kayaking, Aikido, and a Warrior’s Path

Rick: So, okay, abrupt segue here. So at what age did you start really getting into kayaking and become competitive with it?

Tammy Lee: That was very young. I think I was in junior high school, so I believe it was 13 years old. I have to say I don’t have a very good ability with time because time is just… But yeah, it was in junior high, I saw my coach drive by with a 40-foot trailer with all these boats on it. I thought, “I want to do that.” I love to travel, and so there was competitions all over the United States and countries, and so I just jumped right in. I jumped into training with 100%, and was on the national championship team. We made national champion seven times. But yeah, it was an amazing journey. I got to, I wasn’t, the competition was interesting, but more I was just competing with myself.

Rick: Right.

Tammy Lee: You know, the challenge of getting up at 4.30 in the morning and running down to the marina and then working out for two hours. And I don’t know where that discipline went, because I don’t have it anymore. But I had a lot of discipline then and determination, and it was channeled. I did that until they boycotted the Olympics in 1980.

Rick: 1980. Jimmy Carter.

Tammy Lee: Yeah, 1980.

Rick: We were having a spat with the Russians and Carter pulled the US out of the Olympics.

Tammy Lee: And that really sent me, I was really disillusioned at that time about the politics in sports. And so I didn’t think that I wanted to dedicate four more years. And so I was upset and I joined the Air Force, which was not a good idea and not a good fit for me. At the time I had converted to causticism just a few months later, and I was just really deeply seeking I wanted to to um I was just a little bit lost during that time. Yeah, because I mean I had a 150% dedication and focus and then it was just like blown up in my face, so yeah

Rick: Well, and there’s some amusing stories about your Air Force tenure But I say people can read your book if they want to hear those from time on it right now Like the way you folded your clothes and that you never wore them so they all look always look perfectly folded Yeah And then when did you get into Aikido?

Tammy Lee: Aikido was when I was in junior college, so that was right after actually and that was in 1981 in ’81-’82, I believe, semester, and I was in junior college and I didn’t want to competitive sport again. And I heard about this non-violent, non-competitive martial art, and I thought, “Oh, I’ll take that class.” And the reason what got me is that I found that when I was training with my instructor there at the college that one day he had an observation, and he he said, “You have a lot of defensiveness in your body.” Anybody else would have said that to me, I would have punched him. But to him, it wasn’t judgmental, it was just a clear observation that… and it was true. I had a lot of defensiveness. One, just probably from my childhood, you know, and locked up. And so I found that the martial arts and Aikido, I could learn a lot about who I was through the movement. And I could learn to soften some of the defensiveness into the blending rather than fight. And fighting for me is definitely in my nature. I have to say even though there’s definitely a peacemaker and a soft side to me, there is a warrior. And that’s, I don’t know, part of my nature. I think that I felt like I was fighting from the first breath to breathe. Breathing from a baby was, I remember not being able to breathe. with my dad, it felt like if I lost the fight, I would die. So there was that complication of how do I learn how to blend rather than fight? And that’s been a lifelong integration.

Rick: So Aikido was really good for you in that respect.

Tammy Lee: Yeah, it’s been amazing. And so I’ve been in it ever since. I have my own school. And yeah.

Rick: Yeah, and you were a fifth degree black belt. There was some story in your book where some guy picked you up and gave you a ride and then drove off down some dirt road and obviously didn’t have the most altruistic motivations in mind and you somehow spooked him into taking you back to a hotel.

Tammy Lee: Yeah, that’s a pretty crazy experience. That story is about releasing fear and abandoning fear and one of the most powerful experiences in my life, but I feel like I had practiced that many years before, because there was a part of me that always knew there was a part of me that you can never touch no matter what happens to my physical body. I remembered that aspect of who I was that couldn’t be, it’s untouchable. And as long as we have that, there really is nothing to be afraid of. But anyways…

There was a part of me that you can never touch no matter what happens to my physical body. And as long as we have that, there really is nothing to be afraid of.

Rick: Still, but you still don’t want somebody to mess with your physical body either.

Tammy Lee: No, that wouldn’t have been pleasant at all, but I have a feeling he would have lost. So I was not hitchhiking, I was walking because the bus, I had five more miles to go, and he pulled to the side and said, “You want a ride?” And so I said, “Okay.” And so I jumped in, put my backpack in the back, and it was just a five-mile ride down to Antaise, which is an ecumenical conference and a gathering of young people around the world. Anyways, he had other plans and it ended up getting dark and he drove down a dirt road and everything in my body was just shaking in fear. And so it was like the cartoons when your knees knock, you know, the knees knock. And I felt like I was kind of out of of my body as he was driving down the road, I thought, “You know, you’re in a bad situation. You know, you don’t speak the language. You’re secluded here, and this is not good.” And I just started praying.

Rick: Oh, he was—this was not an English-speaking person?

Tammy Lee: No, he’s French. He was in France.

Rick: In France, okay.

Tammy Lee: Yeah, it was in the countryside in France. And he was trying to get seclusion by driving down this dirt road off the highway. And I just started praying, you know, and I said, “If this starts, one of us will not leave here tonight. He will kill me or I’ll kill him, but I would not be a victim. I will not be a victim.” And just that prayer, everything softened in me because I determined at that point there was only one way out of this, and yet there was a third way, which was he shifted. Because at that point when I let go of my life, there was only one life left to take, and it was his. And I would have killed him, and I wouldn’t have left him breathing. And some people say, “How can you be a non-violent person? It’s like, you know, I teach self-defense. I teach downright dirty self-defense to women. I have taught at the university for over 10 years and, you know, people say, you know, how can, you know, there was a story, I’ll continue that story in a minute, but, you know, there was a story when I was in college where I told at the university every semester where people would say, especially women, “I would never fight back because I can’t do that. I’d never poke their eyes out because that’s gross.” I was like, “Well, would you do it if your child was there?” “Yes, absolutely. Women will protect their children no matter what.” And so I said, “Well, not protecting yourself, then you’ve left your family with a lifetime. So we have a right to self-defense. And so, I haven’t given that over to nonviolence yet. That’s the warrior in me. And so, anyway, so I’ll continue. I can get off into a different story there, what I told every semester. But What happened was he turned the car off, was looking at me and I presented to him, I said, “You start this car and you’re going to take…” And at the time I had taken private vows, so I had a crucifix ring on my finger. I said, “You start this car and you take me to town and you’re going to take me to a hotel and tomorrow you’re going to pick me up and you’re going to take me where you should have taken me in the first place.” And I said it with such authority that he just melted. I mean, it…

Rick: And he understood enough English to get what you’re saying.

Tammy Lee: Yeah, he understood English.

Rick: Okay.

Tammy Lee: Yeah. And he understood the power of what was coming out of my presence.

Rick: Yeah.

Tammy Lee: And he felt death in his face. Because it just went like white. He looked like he had died.

Rick: Interesting.

Tammy Lee: And he started shaking as well. And then he started the car. He took me into town, and he picked me up the next morning. I was a bit surprised, but he did. And then when I, he took me to Taize, and then when he got out of the car, he had the audacity to say, “Be careful, it’s dangerous out there.” And I took a cross, a Franciscan cross, and I gave it to him. I said, “I’ll see you again someday.” Because I believe I will. I believe that, you know, I’ll see him in the next world, and that would be an interesting story. What I learned from him was, ultimately, we have nothing to lose in the most dire situations, whether it be in a prison or somebody… Love is always present. You’re never alone. If you know that deeply within yourself, no one can take that away. Not the meanest, baddest person in the world. They don’t have that power. And so letting go of fear to that level, yeah.

Rick: Good. Well, thank you. I’m glad you stood up to him. A couple of questions came in. Let me ask them. One is from someone named Damian Lewis who wants to know, “Following news nowadays can get depressing and exhausting. However, if the soul grows and learns the most through difficulties, maybe the apocalyptic doomsday scenarios are actually the best for growth of the souls. What are your thoughts on that?

Tammy Lee: Well, I think there’s a balance to that, Rick, because I think it’s important right now to be mindful of what we connect to, what we’re plugged into. At least for me it’s been, you know, who will I sit at my table, you know, every day. And because that’s what I’m vibrating at. If I, you know, I get in little pieces, I don’t want to be so disconnected, but my true work is within, and I really don’t feed into what’s going on unless I can do something about it. And what I can do about it is working on myself from the inside out, working on the relationships close to me. That’s what I have I can actually touch and engage with. But plugging into the program can be quite risky because you’re plugging into a program that, one, we don’t even know who’s designing this program and they’re moving people into states of such fear that, you know, fear works. You can have a lot of control over people. It’s always worked. If we can get the masses afraid. So everything is an opportunity for growth, but I would say be mindful of what we plug into. Does that make sense? Does that answer the question?

Rick: Yeah, I think so. I don’t know if it’s the doomed-to-stay scenarios that are the best for our growth, like obsessing about the horrible things that might happen, but if bad things do happen, as we were discussing earlier, then are they happening just capriciously or meaninglessly, or is there some kind of cosmic orchestration that in the big picture, if you could zoom out far enough, is most conducive to the growth of all souls concerned?

Tammy Lee: Everything is an opportunity. Everything is an opportunity for love. Everything is an opportunity. And so when we zoom out, this is an opportunity. Can I choose love even in the midst of this horrible thing that’s happening? You know? So when I zoom out, yes, that’s the question. And Viktor Frankl talked about this, “Man’s search for meaning.” What What meaning do we put to this? And so that’s a choice as well. What meaning will I give this? Y

Rick: eah. There’s a couple of bits from the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. One is a verse that says, “Avert the danger that has not yet come.” And I think of that in terms of, if you’re doing spiritual practice, maybe you have some kind of karma coming along, which is going to mean you’re going to break your leg. If you work up enough what they call “punya,” which means spiritual merit, then maybe you just stub your toe or something like that. And then there’s another verse in there which talks about how in the vicinity of spiritual practice, disharmony or chaos or incoherence remains at a distance. And I feel like if enough people were on a spiritual path in this world, then we wouldn’t have to end up with violent outcomes and wars and all the terrible things that happen. As we were speaking earlier, those things wouldn’t manifest because the ambient state of mind of humanity would just not manifest such things. It would be manifesting more positive things.

Tammy Lee: Yeah, that’s most likely, yeah, because it is a vibrational experience. I want to say too, though, that just because a person is practicing awakening or living a life with attempted taking everything as an opportunity to love, it doesn’t mean that challenging events don’t happen. And that’s not a sense of blame. not a sense of blame on the person, it’s just, it’s life, and it’s life in a human body that, you know, things happen, and there isn’t a homogeneous coherence happening in the world, so things do happen, and on a collective. And so, sometimes people suffer greatly, and there’s many stories of, you know, people who have suffered greatly, and they’re amazing, loving

Rick: Sure, like Jesus himself. Yeah. Yeah, but um, there’s a lot of things that can be averted though. Like we’ve been watching The Pitt lately, which is this medical drama, kind of like ER, but it’s a current one. And about 75, it’s about a hospital emergency room, and about 75% of the cases that come in are as a result of people doing something stupid. Like, you know, setting off a firecracker in their hand or some kind of accident that wouldn’t have happened if they hadn’t been drunk or had been thinking more clearly or whatever. So you can avert a lot of calamities by getting your act together here and here.

Tammy Lee: Yeah, that’s true. We learned the hard way sometimes.

Rick: Another question came in from Martin Klein, and we haven’t really talked about your spiritual medium work yet, although we’ve alluded to it and we’re going to talk about it more. And I think I know how you’re going to answer this question, but his question is, “Since you do spiritual medium work, do you, like so many, see cataclysmic events for the second half of this year?”

Tammy Lee: If I did, I wouldn’t tell you.

Rick: That’s what I thought you were going to say.

Tammy Lee: I don’t want to feed into this, “Be present now, right this minute, and we don’t know what’s going to come tomorrow.” So I just don’t feed into this fear that I think we were talking earlier about the podcasts and they’re stirring up this fear about what’s going to, the world’s can end tomorrow, you know, or cataclysmic predictions. And with every thought like this, we create a neurochemical response in our body immediately. So I just don’t take my thoughts there. I say, “What can I do now? Who can I love now?” You know, when I go to the grocery store, can I make a smile at this person, you know, even though I’m feeling not well today or whatever, you know, it’s just like make mindful practice every day. I just don’t agree that we should be feeding into the program, and that’s a program.

Rick: Yeah.

Tammy Lee: If that makes sense?

Rick: Yeah, I mean, who was it? It wasn’t you, I don’t think. Oh, I know who it was. It was this lady named Melinda Edwards that I interviewed about a year ago. And she had grown up in a very fundamentalist Christian family and had had it drilled into her head that if she wasn’t saved, she was going to hell.

Tammy Lee: Yeah, yeah. And she just had this deathly fear that bothered her, tormented her all the time as a child, that what if I die? And her family got in a car accident where they went over a cliff in Guatemala and they were just kind of stopped by a tree, otherwise they would have fallen 2,000 feet. But her immediate thought was, I’m not ready to die because I’m not saved and I’m gonna go to hell for all eternity. So there have been spiritual teachings that have drilled this into people’s head just to sort of use fear as a stick, rather than offering some kind of carrot that might be more appealing.

Tammy Lee: And they still use fear as a stick. Some of the, I don’t want to get anybody upset, but some of the people that have embraced the way of Jesus are some of the people that wield the stick hardest and talk opposite about what he taught, which was love, unconditional love, and the judgment that comes across. know, and the division that’s caused by, you know, “You’re not saved.” I remember going to a church, I remember that feeling. My parents went for a short time, I think it was only a month, but I remember the minister, you know, hammering on the pulpit. I think it was a Nazarene minister of some kind, and he, I remember his face, I was only like seven years old, but I remember his face turning blood red, and he looked like his eyes were going to pop out, he was screaming. And I was like, “That doesn’t look like love to me. It doesn’t feel like love to me.” So this fear base has always worked. It still does. So governments use it, churches used it, and they still do. And it serves no one. It’s part of a twisted program. It doesn’t have anything to do with love. There are many ways respect to who we are, which is, that’s who we are is love. I look at the future as a very, there’s a lot of wonderful potential. We live in an amazing time, and I’m absolutely excited to be here at this time in this world.

Rick: Me too, I’m very optimistic. I think we might go through a lot more rough stuff than we have yet gone through, but I think there could very well be a rainbow on the other side of it.

Tammy Lee: Yeah, I think so too.

Rick: Yeah, and a lot of ancient traditions predict that. They say, yeah, there’s going to be a rough period, but humanity ultimately has a bright future.

Tammy Lee: Yeah, and that seems like, if you look back in history, that seems like where big shifts have happened in rough times and then something wonderful happens. It’s just like, it’s like the heartbeat, you know, breathing in and out.

Rick: Yeah, we kind of learn in cycles, don’t we?

Tammy Lee: Yeah, seems to be.

Rick: Two steps forward, one step back, but we’re still proceeding forward.

Tammy Lee: Yeah.

Becoming a Medium: From Skeptic to Practitioner

Rick: Okay, so the mediumship thing is one of your current main focuses. Why don’t we get into that? So I think you were inspired by Suzanne Giesemann initially?

Tammy Lee: Yeah, I was inspired by Suzanne Giesemann. It was in 2018 I came across her documentary, Messages of Hope, and I’ve always been interested in spirituality. That’s been a thrust of my whole life since I was a kid. And I studied theology and philosophy because of that, and just, you know, lived in many monasteries searching and trying to get back to that sense of home. And when I came across her story, it was like, “Wow, somebody with such credibility talking about mediumship.” And I had these connections since I was a kid, but a medium to me was somebody you’d find at a carnival. I didn’t take it too seriously. And when she started talking about it, I took it seriously. And so I went to several of her trainings and got to know her and very impressed. I took all her trainings and then I ended up going to Arthur Finley College right in 2019. That’s the mediumship college in UK. Yeah. And I was there for a couple months. Usually people go for a week and I just stayed. And I thought it was fascinating.

Rick: You always plunge in 100% when you do.

Tammy Lee: That’s how I do it. Yeah. So I was doing it for my own spiritual practice. I had no intention ever to do this for work, you know. And it just, after COVID hit, my practice, my dojo, everything was closed. And so I had more time on my hands. And so I started practicing more. There was a platform called VerySoul and it’s an amazing platform where people can practice with practice partners. And so I started practicing like a martial art in the sense of, you know, the discipline and you know, every day and it just got better and better, polishing. And it’s a lot of polishing. It takes a lot of courage to do this because you’re trusting, you’re opening yourself up to communication with and you’re building trust that it’s not just your imagination. And that’s come over time. That’s come over time to build that trust. And I absolutely love it. At a certain point in my development, VerySoul said, “You know, the feedback you’re getting is so incredible. You need to be doing this for real, helping people that are in deep grief. So I thought about it for a while and I said, “Okay, well I’ll do a few sessions and see how it goes.” And it was amazing, and it’s been amazing ever since. You know, if you look at my life, Rick, I’ve done a lot of things. And the thing that I think is most interesting is that I’ve never identified with any of it. It’s not who I am, you know. I don’t make that whatever I do. It’s who I am and the doing, not the doing that defines who I am. So this is just another doing, and I’m enjoying it, but it’s not who I am. And So if that makes sense, I absolutely am having a great time doing the mediumship, but I don’t need to do it. It doesn’t define me, and I don’t need to. I’m doing it because it stretches me. It stretches my trust in the subtle aspects of spirit, and I see the healing that can happen. It stretches me because it takes a heck of a lot of courage when you have somebody sitting in front of you in deep grief and you want to deliver, you want to, and it’s like you realize you have nothing to do with it. You’re just an empty conduit. And healing, I’ve been healing longer than the mediumship, since I was 17. I was doing healing and energy healing, and I love that as well. But the emptier you can be, then that happens. The communications happen, the healing happens, it really is being empty and the no mind. So it’s very much like in Aikido we have Shoshin which is beginner’s mind and then we have Mushin, no mind, and then Fudoshin which is immovable mind. So these states of presence, immovable mind, you know in Aikido we have, we call it Randori which is a dance of chaos and you’re being attacked by several people at the same time. And your practice is, can you stay steady? Can you stay breathing? Can you enter and not back up? Can you engage with presence and direction rather than panic? And so I bring all these into the mediumship practice and it seems to work very well and it’s a challenge for me and so I’m enjoying it this time. I’m getting just a kick out of the stuff people don’t understand in the moment and they might understand later. And fun things, like I should show you, I don’t know if you can see a picture, I’ll turn my phone off, but some of the most amazing things is the information people didn’t understand in the moment. Like I told a lady, her son came through and I said, I’ve never had anybody do this before, in a sense, he said, “Spell the name.” He said, “It’s not B-R-I-A-N, it’s B-R-Y-A-N, and he said it twice. And I said to this mom, “Do you understand the name Brian?” She said, “No.” And I said, “Okay, well just write it down in your paper and see what happens.” Well, a few minutes after her session was over, she is writing me and she says, “Oh my gosh, I figured it out. My daughter’s getting married in three months.” And that was her brother in spirit, my son. “She’s getting married in three months and her surname is going to be B-R-Y-A-N. So this happens again and again where people connect to other people and they understand or they eclipse. Oh yeah, now I understand.

The emptier you can be, then that happens. The communications happen, the healing happens. It really is being empty and the no mind.

Evidential Mediumship: Stories from the Sessions

Rick: Tell the one about the little kid with the Easter basket pointing at his tooth.

Tammy Lee: Yeah, that’s a story I put in my book where this young man, he committed suicide. It was very devastating for his mom. They were very, very close. And he came into this reading just strong. He was just dropping all kinds of evidence. And then right at the end I said, “I know he’s showing me that he passed as a teenager, but he’s showing me a picture, what appears to be a picture of him holding an Easter basket.” And I saw he had his finger on his tooth like this.

Rick: And it’s just a little kid at that point.

Tammy Lee: Just a two years old. I said he’s a toddler, he’s a little kid with an Easter basket in this picture. And she said, “No, I don’t have a picture like that.” And I said, “Okay, well, just write it down and see what happens.” And you know, you have to just keep going and be willing to just, you know, trust what’s coming through. And if people understand it in the moment, they do if they don’t and you just keep going because you know it often often more than not it’s understood later. So anyways that very day her daughter comes home with a stack of photographs and said aunt so and so gave me this pictures for you to go through and give the rest back keep the ones you want give the rest back. She goes through these pictures and there it is he’s a two year old he’s holding his Easter basket he’s got his finger on his tooth like this. And so I got letters after that, emails after that from her friends and said this lady was suicidal at the time and that just put her in a whole different direction. Knowing that her son really is right there still with her just in a different way. Not in a physical way but he’s still, she’ll see him again. So that just shifted her whole direction. And And so that happens again and again and again. I had one lady where I said, I don’t know if I put this one in the book, where he was showing me he was in an accident. I was aware that he didn’t pass right away because I saw an ambulance go to the hospital and then I just felt like it went into a fog. And she said he went into a coma, he never came out. I had to make the terrible decision as mom to turn the machine off and I don’t know if I made the right decision Well, you had a lot to say about that and that would have been a beautiful healing reading in itself but then the next thing he showed me I laughed because I said he’s Reminded me of Tinkerbell going in the sky here because I see stars like she’s putting stars in the sky I didn’t know what I was saying when I was saying Tinkerbell But she did she said that was the name of his dog And Tinkerbell was about this big. He took Tinkerbell everywhere with him and Tinkerbell died in the accident with him.

Rick: I think that was in your book. I remember that now.

Tammy Lee: And then the next thing he showed me, let me see if I can find it, the next thing he showed me was a red and white flag. And I said, “Do you understand that?”

Rick: Same guy?

Tammy Lee: Yeah, the same guy. He gave me three pieces. And I said, “He’s showing me a red and white flag. Do you understand that?” And she said, “No.” And I said, “He’s got me looking up at a blue sky, and I see a red and white flag in the sky.” And she says, “I don’t understand that.” And then my mind jumped in, and that’s the part you have to keep out, at least I do, as a medium. It’s just good to be empty and report, report, report, report. But my thinking mind jumped in to try to solve it, and I said, “Did you release red and white balloons or something? Because I see red and white in the sky.” So I knew what I was seeing, and she said, “No.” And I said, “Okay, just write it down and see what happens.” And I’ve learned Because it’s happened again and again again, and that’s what I’m joy about this well two weeks later She’s taking a walk, and it’s his birthday weekend. She’s missing him deeply because anniversaries birthdays are hard and She’s feeling super sad, and she looks up in the sky and she sees that It’s it’s an airplane carrying a red and white flag. I can’t see

Rick: one of those banners that is yeah Yeah, I see it.

Tammy Lee: and it says Wawa, which is a place, a store they used to walk to together, and he would say, “Wawa,” it’s such a silly name, it makes me laugh. And so, just bringing that sense of ease and, you know, it’s okay. So, that happens again and again, and then sometimes it’s as clear as mud. This is a fun one, if I can show you. This happened just the other day, last week. In the reading, and this is how it can go, sometimes it’s like a static radio, and then sometimes it’s just BAM BAM you know dropping in. I don’t have control of it. Except my control is to relax. I find that coming into this, these communications with like a child like essence of wonder and awe without expectations and it really helps with the people. It’s not performance. It’s not you know and sometimes people come in and it’s almost feels like they want you to perform. It’s like, just relax. It’s a conversation. It’s a relationship. And so, anyways, this is a funny one because I don’t ask people who they want to hear from. And during this reading I kept seeing this possum. What to me looked like a possum. And And I said, “Do you understand a possum?” And she said, “Well, kinda.” And I said, “Okay, well you can just let me know later.” And this is who she wanted to hear from.

Rick: Yeah, it’s a dog and a possum.

Tammy Lee: Yeah, she put them side by side, but her dog looks like a possum.

Rick: Yes, he does.

Tammy Lee: So I was seeing her dog, and that’s who she wanted to hear from. This dog was with her 18 years and just her love and she was wanting to hear from her dog and so I thought that was pretty funny. And then I have the drawings, do you want me to talk about that?

Rick: Sure.

Tammy Lee: The drawings. So I was doing a reading for a mom in, I believe it was Washington, and I’ve never taken a drawing class. I’ve never learned how to sketch. I could basically do stick figures. And so I don’t know how to draw portraits. And I was doing a reading for a mom in Washington and her son came in and he said, “I was doodling on the paper just to get myself out of my thinking mind.” And he says to me, “Turn the paper over and start again and let go.” And I said, “Okay.” So I turned the paper over and I let go and this beautiful portrait came out. And come to find out, his name’s John and he was an artist, he was a portrait artist in this life. And so I get drawings every once in a while, 60 to 70% of the time, not always. And not always do people recognize them. But when they do, it’s quite amazing. Here’s a couple examples, you know, I don’t know if you can see those.

Rick: Wow, those are quite good. And you have no art training or anything?

Tammy Lee: No art training. And what I find interesting is they have different, each one, they’re not cookie cutter drawings, they have different feelings, you know.

Rick: Nice.

Tammy Lee: I have several here that I put in the book. I didn’t put the photographs next to them in the book because I didn’t want to deal with permissions and all that. But on my website I have.

Rick: You just doodle those while you’re doing the reading. Yeah, I don’t even look at it. I’m just doodling as I’m talking and not really paying attention. And then I look down and there’s a drawing there. So I enjoy this and and really it’s a discipline of letting go and Being present when there’s grief and I I’m most of time when there’s a lot of grief people You know people in spirit are right there with them. I had another fun one. You want to hear one more and it’s different It’s different. So this one is a little bit different Once in a great while somebody here still on a body will have something to share and usually what I find It’s there’s

Rick: Medium your medium meaning for a living person

Tammy Lee: We’re all living but just in different so

Rick: right an embodied person.

Tammy Lee: Yeah an embodied person and like one time I had a gentleman he came in and he and Have felt foggy. I felt like it was like an Alzheimer’s or dementia and I said he’s showing me two motorhomes Do you understand and she said yeah, that’s my boyfriend we’re going on our last camping trip and he’s taking his motorhome and I’m taking my motorhome because we get in arguments sometimes and we need our own space.

Rick: What’s funny?

Tammy Lee: And I said, “He’s saying if you communicate with me heart to heart, soul to soul first, then it’s going to be a beautiful trip. I’ll understand better if you come from that communication that’s unsaid but it’s subtle and he’ll understand because you’re communicating with him on a level he can understand.” So that was pretty amazing. But the second one was…

Rick: Were you able to help reconcile it so they could take just one motorhome?

Tammy Lee: He said, “No, I don’t know, I don’t know.” I didn’t follow up on that one.

Rick: Seems rather inefficient.

Tammy Lee: Yeah, it does. But anyway, so the second one was I had this mom and everybody came through. I had a family reunion. It was aunts and uncles and grandpas. Sometimes when I opened the door, it’s just like floods of people.

Rick: Oh, crowd.

Tammy Lee: But this whole time I said I had this young girl standing here, she’s about 10 or 11 years old, and I don’t often get ages, so that was unique, and I said, “She’s showing me what looks like a playhouse. I see toys inside the playhouse, and I see a structure, and then I see a pink blanket over the top.” And it didn’t end up being a playhouse. I said, “Do you understand this?” And she said, “That’s my daughter, she’s living now. She’s I think 10 or 11 years old and she’s nonverbal. She’s never spoken. And this is a picture of her bed. And it’s built that way to keep the light out. It has a pink blanket over the top. It has toys inside. And to me it looked like a playhouse. But it’s built that way to keep the light out because she gets seizures from light. But her message was incredible. Her message was, “Mom, we can communicate just like the medium because it’s a matter of the heart. And her mom says, “I can do this too.” And I said, “We can all do this.” There’s nothing special at all about mediums. They’re just crazy enough to keep practicing this, at least for me. But we can all communicate with our loved ones, and I’m sure, absolutely sure this mom has communicated with her daughter over the 11 years on the telepathic soul-to-soul level.

Rick: Have you listened to the Telepathy Tapes podcast?

Tammy Lee: I did afterwards, after this, because I was wondering if there’s other people who had experienced that and I was quite impressed. I did write them. I’d be very interested in working with more people like this because I think there’s a great potential in this kind of communication. To me it’s more than telepathic, it’s soul to soul. It’s a blending. That’s what I experienced in my third near-death experience. It wasn’t mind-to-mind, it was a soul-blending communication. Yeah. Yeah.

Rick: So as you were saying all that, telling me those stories, I was thinking about how probably everything in your life has contributed to your development to, you know, enable you to do what you’re doing now as well as you do it. You know, the near-death experiences and the Aikido and even the athletic training, the focus that that required, the discipline and meditation retreats and living in a monastery and all this stuff you’ve done. And now you say that everybody has the capacity to do this kind of thing, but that’s like saying everybody has the capacity to become a math genius or something, you have to take certain steps to develop an innate capacity. Or maybe that’s not a good example. Maybe it’s more universal than that. But obviously some people have lived their life in such a way as to culture subtlety and sensitivity and perceptivity and others have not. They’ve lived their lives in such a way as to become more dull. But I suppose if one has the desire to do this, then that’s the key ingredient right there. And you can make progress if you at least have the initiative. So, you know, what would you say in general? Is this something that would be good for everyone to pursue or, you know, for at least those who find it appealing and interesting, they could pursue it? And if so, how should they do so? And I’m throwing a lot of questions in all at once, but I also I want to ask you if you’ve ever had anything scary or deleterious happen to you as a result of this, like you opened yourself up to some negative entities or something like that, and if there are precautionary statements you’d like to make for people who might want to get involved in this kind of thing.

Tammy Lee: Yeah. Oh, so that is a lot of questions so far. I forget one or the other.

Rick: We’ll run through them again. So maybe start with, you know, how universal is this? There’s certain things that I think would be good for everybody, like getting regular exercise or eating a good diet or perhaps doing some kind of meditation or spiritual practice. Is this one of those things, or is this more like, eh, you know, if you’re really attracted to it then go for it, but it’s not necessarily something for everybody?

Tammy Lee: It’s kind of like, I think it’s true that my life, everything is culminating into this. It’s like it’s just arrived here after many years of, I believe, doing…

Rick: I just started to interrupt, and you can’t do your Aikido anymore because you had a neck injury in a car accident that could cripple you if you twisted it the wrong way. And maybe you can’t do the Ralphing anymore because that’s too physical at your age. Yeah, it’s like perfect for this stage of your life.

Tammy Lee: It’s a perfect thing for me to be practicing the principles of Aikido, which is harmony blending surrender not forcing Getting back up when it’s not so easy and staying centered so Everything that I’ve done definitely has contributed to the practice I’m doing now and you know all the years of therapy on myself because I think it’s important. When I was in graduate school in psychotherapy, I was amazed that there were actually people going to go into the practice of psychotherapy that never had therapy on themselves. And so I’m a proponent of walk the walk yourself. You can’t walk somebody in a direct way you’ve never been willing to do yourself. So it’s true that And everything has led me to this. And so, I guess, when I say that everybody can do this, I guess I want to lean away from this is a gift. Even though it is a gift, it’s not something that somebody dropped in. It’s like I’ve worked my butt off on this. I’ve practiced and I’ve polished a whole lifetime to get to this point where I can surrender into such communications. And I can honor somebody who’s in grief and be with them in that point. I mean, being a chaplain for watching people, you know, let go of their last breath over and over again. So I do have that background that adds to the mediumship practice. So I do believe because we’re spirit we can all connect and in a sense that we can connect to our loved ones. But I don’t think everybody should be practicing mediumship. No. It’s like body work. I’ve had body work from people who shouldn’t be practicing body work. They haven’t worked enough on their own self to be trying to help somebody else. And so it feels different when you’re receiving body work from somebody that has no boundaries for one and they’re just not centered. It feels different when you’re receiving it. But when you’re working with somebody that’s centered, I mean, one of the first body work sessions I had was from a a religious sister who had lots of training and she had a beautiful prayer life and she was incredibly centered and it was an amazing experience of trust. So I guess what I’m saying is that yes and no, we can all do this but not everybody should be doing it. It’s become kind of a fad in a sense. Everybody wants to be a medium now.

Preparing to Practice: Warnings, Ethics, and Like Attracts Like

Rick: Can you get yourself into trouble if you do it when you’re not really adequately prepared in terms of your inner purification?

Tammy Lee: You can hurt people.

Rick: You can hurt others and can you endanger yourself?

Tammy Lee: I don’t know if you can endanger yourself, but you can, you know, because when I, you’re talking about like negative energies, correct?

Rick: Yeah, like spirit possession and things like that, which I think I’ve seen evidence of and certainly heard stories about.

Tammy Lee: My view on this is that like energy attracts like energy. So if you’re not being in a state of loving kindness and centered in love, then you open yourself up to all kinds of stuff. I always tell the kids, if you want to be a lawyer, hang around with lawyers or doctors. If you want to be a drug addict, hang around with. Like attracts like. You start to vibrate with that frequency and it becomes a coherence in your reality. It’s experiencing that. So if you’re in a state where you’re not taking care of your center, you’re not coming from a place of love, loving kindness, and of service, because this definitely is a service, even though I do charge, and I don’t charge a lot compared to, I charge what I would charge for a therapy session. So basically, it’s for my time. I mean, I have over $200,000 in school loans, you know, for my education. So…

Rick: Still?

Tammy Lee: Not still. I’ve just paid them off.

Rick: Oh, good.

Tammy Lee: Oh, yeah.

Rick: Good.

Tammy Lee: It took me years to pay them off, but I actually paid it all off. But, you know, so I don’t apologize for charging for a session. I don’t charge $1,200 in a session for people, but I do charge a minimal fee so that, you know, I can serve people in this way.

Rick: Sure.

Tammy Lee: It really does come from a center of service rather than, it doesn’t come from a place of ego, and that can be dangerous when you’re, you can hurt somebody coming from that place.

Rick: Yeah.

Tammy Lee: They really do come from a sense of love and kindness and service. T

Rick: hat’s true of being a spiritual teacher in general. I mean, I’ve seen people go into it with a lot of immaturity still and a sense of ego, and then the attention they start getting just goes to their heads and the spiritual ego just goes bananas.

Tammy Lee: Yeah, and that’s one of the things, I didn’t start talking about this stuff until 2023. I never shared these experiences I had publicly.

Rick: You had been studying it for how long by then?

Tammy Lee: I started in 2018 studying this.

Rick: Oh yeah, so you had been doing it for five years before you…

Tammy Lee: And so when Suzanne invited me to do an interview, one, I was quite nervous. I’m an introvert by nature, and I have no desire to be out in the public eye. And here I am, and it’s not my natural state. When I became a teacher at Fresno State and taught, you know, big classes of 40 students, that was not my comfort zone. And my teacher invited me to teach that, and it stretched me. So I did it as a challenge to myself. And it is different when you’re trying to teach somebody. It’s like, “How do I do this?” You know, and you’re trying to teach in different ways. So yeah, the mediumship has just evolved into a really beautiful place. I don’t know how long I’ll do it until I decide not to, you know. But I love it now.

Rick: That’s great. And it seems to really be helping a lot of people.

Tammy Lee: Yeah.

Rick: Like just the examples you gave, it can be such a relief and a liberation to hear that some very evidential thing that is very convincing that shows you that your beloved child is still very much in existence.

Tammy Lee: Yeah, it just gives a sense of peace and a sense of, you know, they’re still here, just in a different way.

Rick: So when you’re doing it, you’re not like Edgar Cayce who was totally in a trance and couldn’t even tell you afterwards what happened or whatever, right? You’re just very much still there.

Tammy Lee: Yeah, I’m still there and I’m usually looking up and I’m on this blank wall. One lady accused me of reading off my screen. I said, “I’m not reading off the screen. I’m really deeply listening and I’m looking.”

Rick: So you have your eyes open and you’re just kind of putting your attention inward.

Tammy Lee: Sometimes I close my eyes but I try not to but yeah, yeah.

Rick: You’re scribbling on a pad but you’re not looking at it.

Tammy Lee: Scribbling on a pad, not looking at it.

Rick: And then what’s your subjective experience? So you’ll just actually get a clear visual picture of the kite in the sky or whatever?

Tammy Lee: Sometimes I’ll get a clear visual picture, you know, like the kite in the sky or the, you know, whatever it is, and sometimes I’ll hear things, you know, I’ll hear a name or hear, you know, something, and then sometimes I’ll feel like I had to excuse myself. I’ve never done this before. This happened last month where I sat down to do a reading and all of a sudden I had to excuse myself. I said, “I gotta excuse myself for a minute,” and I felt this incredible pain in my stomach. And I came back and I realized, I said, “That me. You have a mom in spirit that has something going on with her stomach and her mom had stomach cancer. Sometimes I’ll viscerally feel the pain or I’ll feel like, you know, fog when it’s, you know, sometimes if somebody had dementia or stroke or I’ll feel pressure in my chest and so I’ll feel in my body for a moment and that gives me a clue what they’re trying to get across, You know, sometimes it’s just feeling, you know, sometimes it’s just pure feeling emotion

Rick: Are there times when nothing happens? Yes, is it dud?

Tammy Lee: Yeah, sometimes nothing happens not very often. I I would say like Less than one percent of the time which is okay amazing to me. But uh Once in a while and usually it’s because i’m tight i’m feeling pressure either from the person on the other side I do tell stories as we get along to try to build up a rapport because I want people to come in with this relaxed feeling. And if there’s a lot of tension, I seem to get tied in. I just try to get a conversation going without telling me any information because I don’t want to know anything. Because when I know something, my mind thinks, which I can’t have it. But I do tell stories like I just told you, you know, to try to get the person to be comfortable. because some people come into the session and they are so nervous, you know, and I say, just let’s just have a conversation. Just like I’m sure you do with people that are nervous to come in. You just let’s just be real.

Rick: Yeah, that’s what it is. Just be yourself.

Tammy Lee: So when I start to feel that happen, then I move into the communication and it seems to work better. I see this as where all three work, you know, it’s the person receiving, And it’s the medium being empty as possible, and it’s those in spirit. Some people in spirit are better at it than others, I have to say. Some people are more just they’re right there. And then some people, you have to almost pull teeth to get them to step forward. So yeah, it’s different. It’s different every time. But I do every once in a while, I have somebody, and I tell you, if you’re coming in to test me, just don’t. it’s hard enough to do this without somebody pressuring you. I deal with it, but it’s not something I enjoy. I really want to come into this with person in the communication. We’re both coming into it with a sense of awe and wonder. Miracles happen. I had a lady, she was looking for one specific piece of information from her Dad. And she was understanding the information but I could feel her discounting it the whole time. And it was like ok, she’s looking for something and I don’t know what it is. But anyways I kept listening to him. And finally he never did give… she wanted to hear something about a crow I think or something, but what he did show was right at the end I said He’s showing me a ring or a piece of jewelry. It looks like a ring and it’s gold and I said it’s like a ruby. And that’s odd for a gentleman to show you a ruby. But he showed me like a ruby ring and it was right here. She said, “Here it is sitting.” This was his ring. It was his class ring and she had it sitting right in front of her. That was just about and you could feel when that happened. She just softened everything just went on.

Rick: Yeah.

Tammy Lee: It’s real. So Sometimes it just takes that for people but

Rick: You can’t blame some people for being skeptical.

Tammy Lee: I can’t blame people at all.

Rick: There have been a lot of fraudulent things.

Tammy Lee: Absolutely.

Rick: Telephone psychics

Tammy Lee: You know and I’ve dealt with that with body work all my life, you know Massage therapy and Rolfing, you know, people come in and what I have to say is I’ve only my whole career of that work is I’ve only had like not even one or two people that I felt like they have an alternate, you know, motivation to come here. And it’s because I set a presence of professionalism. So when people walk in, you know, they know that this is, this is not, know an alternative service and so the same with mediumship the medium sets an energy a presence of professionalism that people can relax and they know that it’s not you know you can feel when it’s a scam or you can feel when somebody’s you know full of ego you know and I’m pretty sure I don’t come across that way I could. I have a lot to be happy.

Rick: I don’t think you could.

Tammy Lee: Yeah, but that’s just not important to me. I really am. Yeah. So, but you can feel it when somebody has, you know, a sense of, you know, importance, and I have no sense of importance about who I am.

Rick: No, you don’t come across that way.

Tammy Lee: I come at this with a sense of joy, and I hope usually people feel that. But once in a while, it’s not felt and so that’s…

Rick: Do you do most of these over Zoom or remotely or do you do some in person or what?

Tammy Lee: Yeah, I work with people all over the world so it’s all over… Mostly remotely?

Tammy Lee: Yeah, it’s all remotely. Yeah.

Rick: Oh, okay. Yeah. And how many do you do a day?

Tammy Lee: I only do a maximum of two mediumships a day and one healing a day or one mentoring session. So I do mentoring, I do healing, and I do mediumship. And I keep it to a low number because I want to keep enjoying it. I don’t want this to be work.

Rick: Yeah. And after you do them, do you feel energized or drained?

Tammy Lee: Absolutely feel energized. Unless it’s a session that the person put, you know, there’s so much pressure and desperation, but usually I feel absolutely energized because there is just so much love, and sometimes I’m just flooded with that love. It’s just coming right through, and it’s like, it is such an honor for me. I feel honored to be a witness to some of the stuff that happens. I just like, “Wow, I get to do this.”

I feel honored to be a witness to some of the stuff that happens. I just like, “Wow, I get to do this.”

Rick: I’ve heard from people who have these kinds of abilities that people on the other side are really quite excited to find somebody who’s capable of You know hearing out of the way allowing them to communicate

Tammy Lee: Yeah.

Rick: Yeah, so there’s like a like be a whole line of people who would love to Avail themselves of your services if only their earthly loved ones would sign up for it.

Tammy Lee: Yeah. Yeah, and it’s getting better all the time. There’s some amazing mediums in the world. I’m still studying with my teacher after all these years.

Rick: With Suzanne or the person in England?

Tammy Lee: The person in England, yeah.

Rick: I think I heard you say that you envision a potential society in which this kind of ability is normal and commonplace.

Tammy Lee: I think at some point…

Rick: Was it you who said that?

The Future of Communication: Soul-to-Soul and Beyond

Tammy Lee: Yeah, I think at some point, it’s very possible that we move into communication that’s our natural communication, which is soul-to-soul communication. I think when that happens, there’s going to be a whole shift because there’s no secrets, all is known, there’s no judgment because you know from the other person’s point of view, there’s absolutely no, there’s just love. So when that happens though, the game is up because there’s so So many misunderstandings through just these words that we say. And so there’s a lot of misunderstandings and hurtful, but when you feel someone and you communicate with somebody in a soul-to-soul experience, it’s like there’s only love.

Rick: Some people say that perhaps extraterrestrial civilizations or something are so evolved that they don’t need to make audible sounds to communicate. There’s just a whole telepathic civilization.

Tammy Lee: Yeah, yeah. There are many like that, or it’s just, that’s how they operate.

Rick: How do you know that? I’m interested.

Tammy Lee: I don’t know how.

Rick: I mean, you said that with confidence.

Tammy Lee: I don’t know how I know that. I just, I know it inside.

Rick: Yeah.

Tammy Lee: My mom and dad once told me, I don’t remember this. They brought me home from the hospital, and my dad won’t talk about it anymore, my mom will, but they brought me home from the hospital, I don’t know at what point that was. But I was as big as a shoe, they put me in a drawer, they opened a drawer, and I made a little bed in the drawer in my grandmother’s house in the back room. But they had just come from the hospital and this extraterrestrial ship came above the house and it lit up the whole room above the apricot tree. And the whole room was just light. And all they remember is looking at it, and then it just went… And it was gone. And who knows what happened in that interim? I don’t know, but there’s no memories from them on that. But I know that we’re connected somehow.

Rick: Interesting.

Tammy Lee: Yeah. I’ve just heard…

Rick: So you’re one of them?

Tammy Lee: I don’t know who I am.

Rick: E.T. phone home.

Tammy Lee: No, you’re doing phone home. It probably closed my sutures down so much so that I couldn’t expand into that consciousness. Who knows, maybe they locked me down more, but I don’t know.

Rick: That’s cool. I love that stuff. Everybody loves a great Steven Spielberg movie or something, but given the size of the universe, the number of stars in each galaxy, the fact that there are There are planets around every star, pretty much, and there are trillions of galaxies, each of which have a hundred billion stars. I just think that there are countless trillions of intelligent civilizations scattered throughout the universe.

Tammy Lee: Absolutely. And even here on Earth, you know, we have microcosms and macrocosms, you know, worlds within worlds just on this planet that we haven’t even discovered. Why would it be any different in the universe, you know?

Rick: Yeah, all the subtle dimensions that are here on Earth.

Tammy Lee: Yeah, yeah. The body, I mean, I write that one chapter in the book about how the body, I see, I see the connective tissue, because I’ve generally worked with connective tissue so long, is that layers within layers. And I use this sea sponge as kind of a model, you know, and the nerves, the blood vessels, you know, the bones would be within this matrix. But this matrix, Look how detailed it is. And if we took everything out of a human body, we’d have a three-dimensional form. We’d also have memory, you know, because down to a cellular, the cytoskeleton, we’d have, you know, this connective tissue. And this connective tissue has a resonance like a crystal. So does cerebrospinal fluid. So this, I think, possibly this is the interface between our higher aspect of our soul to the physical vibration. It comes through the connective tissue network and the cellular network, the mitochondria. I see them as spinning vortexes of light. When I go far enough, it’s all energy, it’s all vibration.

Rick: Wow.

Tammy Lee: Yes.

Rick: Yeah. That’s inspiring. It gives me goosebumps to contemplate this stuff. So a few minutes ago when I was asking you about how many of these do you do a day, you said, “Okay, I do two medium things and then I also do a, what is it?”

Tammy Lee: Healing.

Rick: A healing thing and another thing?

Tammy Lee: And mentoring.

Rick: What are those things?

Tammy Lee: Mentoring.

Rick: Mentoring, training people to do what?

Tammy Lee: Mentoring is whatever people want to talk about. Some people want to talk about what’s going on in their life, so it’s kind of like a counseling, spiritual counseling.

Rick: I see.

Tammy Lee: It could be IADC, which is, you know, taking people who are in deep grief and softening them through that process. Yeah, there’s lots of reasons why people just want to talk about what’s going on in their life. Some people try to make a mediumship session to tell them about their life. That’s not what mediumship is for. Mediumship is to make connection. It’s not meant to answer questions. People in spirit aren’t going to tell you how to live your life. That’s our choice, what we choose.

Rick: And then the healing thing, do people call you up who have cancer or this or that and you do a remote healing on them?

Tammy Lee: Yeah, I do remote healing. And that remote healing started, I don’t know if you want to hear that story.

Rick: Tell us some stories about that, we have a little time.

Tammy Lee: So the remote healing, I realized, when I was doing an advanced training in Rolfing, my teacher at the time, he was having wrist problems and he was one of the top people in the field. And he was going to have to retire because his wrists were in such bad shape and he said, you know, can you come over and work on me after class? And that was an honor itself to be asked. So I went to work on him while I was there. And the last day when I was getting ready to fly out, he said, hey, can you work on me some more before you leave? And I said, I can’t, you know, because my flight’s in just shortly, so I have to leave. And it just went in my head, you know, how about we meet in the field and I work with you there. And so that’s how it started. And he would lay on his table, I would lay on my table and just go into a deep meditation. And I actually started working from the inside out, just like I would work layer by layer of the connective tissue. So I’d work his wrists from the inside out, and by being inside, which was really interesting. But what happened was about three months into this, all of a sudden in the middle of the night I woke up and I started working on him. And I thought to myself, “What are you doing here? You don’t have an appointment with him in the middle of the night. Go back to sleep.” And so I went back to sleep and I had a humongous, terrible, worst of the worst nightmare. I felt like I I was strapped to a table and I was choking to death and I couldn’t breathe. It was just horrible. I woke up shaking, trembling, and then I realized it wasn’t me, it was Emmett. And so I decided to go back in the dream and tell him he was going to be okay and I wouldn’t leave him alone. Well, when I went back in, he was surrounded by angels. He was just a young boy and he was getting his tonsils taken out and he wasn’t under all the way and they cut his throat. So he was choking on his own blood and they were holding him down by his wrists. He was 70 some years by the time we were doing this session. Anyways, I didn’t tell him for a few weeks and then after I told him and I had written everything down and he said that absolutely happened. I think he said he was 12 or some young age, and he said they were holding me down and I about died. And he never had wrist pain after that, which I thought was very interesting.

Rick: Interesting. So his wrist pain was actually the trauma of that experience when he was 12?

Tammy Lee: There was memory there. Our bodies can hold onto memory. And so I realized that remote healing is possible, and I started doing more of it.

Rick: Yeah, somehow by you having that whole experience of what he had gone through 60 something years before yeah, I’ll help to resolve the trauma for him. Interesting.

Tammy Lee: Yeah And so so I realized that that’s possible remote healing is possible that there really is no distance And we can sink into that and I’ve had amazing things happen for people So I teach them what was given to me and how I heal my own neck I was told I’d be a quadriplegic and never walk again if I was bumped one more time and By the time I went back for surgery. They did another MRI and it was completely healed and

Rick: So if you wanted to do you think you could do a aikido now and you will be safe Or do you think it’d still be vulnerable? I think I could do aikedo now as far as the MRI I mean asked him So I can do aikedo and he said yes, so And he said he’d never seen this heal, so he was quite surprised. In 30-some years of neurosurgery, he’s never seen it heal like this. This is not unique. There’s many people that have healed themselves of, you know, Joe Dispenza. There’s lots of people who’ve done this, and I think we can all do this. And so I teach people a practice that I did.

Rick: Do you have any clear, sort of dream-like or visual things where you undergo the experience of the person you’re healing in order to help neutralize or resolve it? Is that typical?

Tammy Lee: Yeah. I often, when I’m leading people through the meditation or the healing, I’m experiencing many things as I’m going through their body with them. And basically my orientation around healing of any kind is that all we do is create conditions for healing to happen. All healing is self-healing. Whether it be a surgery, whether it be a medicine, whoever you’re going to, ultimately the healing is coming from the inside out. So we set up the conditions for healing to happen. And so I take no credit for it except getting out of the way, same with mediumship. It’s creating conditions. And it was interesting in rolfing where people would come in and, you know, I’d do a beautiful session and you see the shift, they stand up and their whole balance would be different. And I’d watch them walk down the steps and they would just kind of slowly kind of unwind and they’d fall apart again. And so as we went through the session, people would be able to hang on to it longer, but it’s very interesting. What I feel is happening ultimately, even in structural body work, is it’s an informational exchange and the same with healing. Theoretically, it’s an informational exchange. Whether the person can integrate that into their field and into their, you know, knowing, internal knowing is another thing. So, but you feel it when you’re around people, you know, like beautiful teachers, you can feel the vibration and there’s information in that vibrational frequency. And sometimes, you know, people have, you know, awakenings just by being present with somebody and it’s because there’s information in the field and you start to vibrate. But not everybody can hang on to it.

Rick: Yeah, so I imagine the more you prepare the ground by just building a foundation of purity or clarity or whatever in your own life through various means, spiritual practices and so on, the more you’ll be able to retain the benefit from the kind of thing you’re offering.

Tammy Lee: Yeah, yeah. That’s why before the actual healing, I talk about different things in a person’s life they can do. Food, exercise, just all these things, you know. Basics, sleep.

Rick: Couple more questions came in. So this is one from Julian Hall in Newmarket, Ontario. Regarding the ETs that were present in your childhood, do you feel they were actually from another world or do you feel they are local, so to speak? I think by that he might mean like subtle beings who dwell on earth as opposed to coming from another place. Any other contact stories you can share? No, I don’t have any other contact stories that I’m aware of. I really don’t know. I wish I could answer that, but I don’t know where these beings were from. And I don’t I often think maybe there is no out there world, there’s just life. There’s just layers and layers like connective tissue. Maybe it’s just one world, one universe, one multiverse. Different layers. I really don’t know how to answer that.

Rick: I think there’s probably both. Have you ever heard of Indra’s net?

Tammy Lee: Yes, yes. I have. A long time ago.

Rick: Yeah, it’s the idea that everything is infinitely correlated. And then there’s this thing in physics called quantum entanglement.

Tammy Lee: Yeah, yeah.

Rick: Yeah, so something can happen to a particle over here, and on the other side of the universe, its twin particle instantly reacts. So it’s not limited by the speed of light or anything. So at some level, everything is infinitely interconnected and correlated.

Tammy Lee: It’s kind of like when I look at the human body, like if I stub my toe, I’m going to feel it through my whole body. You know, the whole universe feels it, you know. And so it’s instant. I feel that. But it happened in my toe, but how come I felt it through my whole body? It’s because it’s all connected.

Rick: And then, on the other hand, there are galaxies that are far, far away. But by virtue of the fact that everything is most very fundamentally interconnected, perhaps they might have the technologies to come here in an instant and not have to wait two million years of travel at the speed of light, which you can’t reach anyway, to get here.

Tammy Lee: Yeah. You know, in our perception, we see things as distance and time.

Rick: Right.

Tammy Lee: It might not even exist. That’s just a point of view.

Rick: Yeah. You know that if you could ride on a photon, that you would be here instantly from anywhere in the universe.

Tammy Lee: Yeah.

Rick: Because photons actually, there’s no time for them. They just go bink to where they’re going.

Tammy Lee: Yeah. And that’s what it’s like when you’re in the near-death experience. It was like as soon as you think you’re there, you know, your awareness, you know, as soon as I thought about being with Jesus, it was like He was right there. So it’s like it’s instant. So I step back from imposing time or distance into the universe. I really don’t know. Maybe that’s just a projection.

Rick: I think in general, would you agree that the more manifest things become or appear to become, the more constrained they are by time and space. The more deep you go or fundamental you go, the less constrained and the more these miraculous things can happen.

Tammy Lee: Yes, I would say that’s my experience for sure.

Rick: Yeah. And even from a scientific perspective, they say things like that, that it’s kind of a field of all possibilities down there, but once it gets manifest, then it’s only this or that.

Tammy Lee: Yes, yes, yes.

Rick: Okay, another question came in. this one from Martin Klein in Germany. Do you think we have free will other than having the choice between fear and love or awake and asleep?

Tammy Lee: This is how I answer this question, is that to the extent we’re conscious we’re free. To the extent we’re not conscious and awake, then we’re not free. We’re not making free choices. We’re acting from the program and the conditioning of generations. So to the extent that we’re awake, we’re free and making free choice.

Rick: That’s a great answer.

Tammy Lee: Yeah.

Rick: Yeah, I love that answer.

Tammy Lee: It’s taking me a time to come to that, but that’s the simplest way I can respond to that question, which is a good question.

Rick: Yeah. Forgive them, Father, they know not what they do. Why? Because they were not very awake.

Tammy Lee: Yeah.

Rick: They were just acting blindly.

Tammy Lee: Yeah, out of the conditioning, out of the fear. Yeah. Yeah.

Rick: Okay, well, we don’t necessarily want to end on conditioning in fear, but you made a good point. Is there anything you want to say in closing?

Tammy Lee: Well, if we tap into that fear, don’t be afraid, because anything is possible right now. We are beings of love and light. Ultimately, there is nothing that can touch us. So when fears arise, just sink into that aspect that knows that you are love itself. And if you And it truly is that what you’ve always sought is within you. And I learned that, and still learning that, that it’s not from the outside, it’s from the inside out that love is born. And so just keep letting that arise within you. And I just wanna thank you, Rick, for this opportunity.

Rick: Oh, thank you. It’s been wonderful spending a couple hours with you and also just getting to know you better through your book and your other interviews in preparation for this, it’s like, “Wow, what a wonderful life this person’s living.” I’m very honored to cross paths with you.

Tammy Lee: Thank you. Thank you for the honor. It’s been amazing.

Rick: Yeah. All right, so thanks to those who have been listening or watching. It’s always a pleasure to have you in on the live interview and submitting questions. And if you’d like to be notified of the live ones, you can actually sign up on the YouTube channel to be notified by YouTube, or you could go to our upcoming interviews page on batgap.com where you’ll see them scheduled and you can make a note to yourself to tune in on the live one. My next interview will be with Julia Mossbridge, who is a very interesting woman that I saw speak at the Science and Nonduality Conference several times. Very brilliant scientist who’s working on the subject of love. So that’ll be the next one. So thanks Tammy. And of course, I’ll be linking to your website, so people can get in touch and check out all these things you have to offer.

Tammy Lee: OK, great, thank you.

Rick: Great. So thanks everybody.