Phsyical Mediumship Monmouthshire

Pathway to Spirit, via Joan Hughes is committed to promoting physical mediumship. Over the coming months we intend to expand the website to include articles on physical mediums, some well known, for example , and other mediums, less well know.

These county pages will be devoted to local groups where physical mediumship is of interest, and also provide a place for publication of physical circle activity.

Please feel free to send us an update from you circle's activities and let us have any news or articles you think relevant to physical mediumship. Contact Joan Hughes for advice on sitting in physical circles. See also information on the development circle at Swadlincote Spiritualist Church..

Notice Board for this Area

Nothing to post for this area as yet. In the meantime here is an extract from one of my favorite books, "The Power of Now".

As I said, you stop it from arising by being fully present. But don't become discouraged. There are as yet few people on the planet who can sustain a state of continuous presence, although some are getting close to it. Soon, I believe, there will be many more.

Whenever you notice that some form of negativity has arisen within you, look on it not as a failure, but as a helpful signal that is telling you: "Wake up. Get out of your mind. Be present." There is a novel by Aldous Huxley called Island, written in his later years when he became very interested in spiritual teachings. It tells the story of a man shipwrecked on a remote island cut off from the rest of the world. This island contains a unique civilization. The unusual thing about it is that its inhabitants, unlike those of the rest of the world, are actually sane. The first thing that the man notices are the colorful parrots perched in the trees, and they seem to be constantly croaking the words "Attention. Here and Now. Attention. Here and Now." We later learn that the islanders taught them these words in order to be reminded continuously to stay present. So whenever you feel negativity arising within you, whether caused by an external factor, a thought, or even nothing in particular that you are aware of, look on it as a voice saying `Attention. Here and Now. Wake up." Even the slightest irritation is significant and needs to be acknowledged and looked at; otherwise, there will be a cumulative build-up of unobserved reactions. As I said before, you may be able to just drop it once you realize that you don't want to have this energy field inside you and that it serves no purpose. But then make sure that you drop it completely. If you cannot drop it, just accept that it is there and take your attention into the feeling, as I pointed out earlier. As an alternative to dropping a negative reaction, you can make it disappear by imagining yourself becoming transparent to the external cause of the reaction. I recommend that you practice it with little, even trivial, things first. Let's say that you are sitting quietly at home. Suddenly, there is the penetrating sound of a car alarm from across the street. Irritation arises. What is the purpose of the irritation? None whatsoever. Why did you create it? You didn't. The mind did. It was totally automatic, totally unconscious. Why did the mind create it? Because it holds the unconscious belief that its resistance, which you experience as negativity or unhappiness in some form, will somehow dissolve the undesirable condition. This, of course, is a delusion. The resistance that it creates, the irritation or anger in this case, is far more disturbing than the original cause that it is attempting to dissolve. All this can be transformed into spiritual practice. Feel yourself becoming transparent, as it were, without the solidity of a material body. Now allow the noise, or whatever causes a negative reaction, to pass right through you. It is no longer hitting a solid "wall" inside you. As I said, practice with little things first. The car alarm, the dog barking, the children screaming, the traffic jam. Instead of having a wall of resistance inside you that gets constantly and painfully hit by things that "should not be happening," let everything pass through you. Somebody says something to you that is rude or designed to hurt. Instead of going into unconscious reaction and negativity, such as attack, defense, or withdrawal, you let it pass right through you. Offer no resistance. It is as if there is nobody there to get hurt anymore. That is forgiveness. In this way, you become invulnerable. You can still tell that person that his or her behavior is unacceptable, if that is what you choose to do. But that person no longer has the power to control your inner state. You are then in your power - not in someone else's, nor are you run by your mind. Whether it is a car alarm, a rude person, a flood, an earthquake, or the loss of all your possessions, the resistance mechanism is the same.

I have been practicing meditation, I have been to workshops, I have read many books on spirituality, I try to be in a state of nonresistance - but if you ask me whether I have found true and lasting inner peace, my honest answer would have to be "no." Why haven't I found it? What else can I do?

You are still seeking outside, and you cannot get out of the seeking mode. Maybe the next workshop will have the answer, maybe that new technique. To you I would say. Don't look for peace. Don't look for any other state than the one you are in now, otherwise, you will set up inner conflict and unconscious resistance. Forgive yourself for not being at peace. The moment you completely accept your non-peace, your nonpeace becomes transmuted into peace. Anything you accept fully will get you there, will take you into peace. This is the miracle of surrender. You may have heard the phrase "turn the other cheek," which a great teacher of enlightenment used 2,000 years ago. He was attempting to convey symbolically the secret of nonresistance and nonreaction. In this statement, as in all his others, he was concerned only with your inner reality, not with the outer conduct of your life. Do you know the story of Banzan? Before he became a great Zen master, he spent many years in the pursuit of enlightenment, but it eluded him. Then one day, as he was walking in the marketplace, he overheard a conversation between a butcher and his customer. "Give me the best piece of meat you have," said the customer. And the butcher replied, "Every piece of meat I have is the best. There is no piece of meat here that is not the best." Upon hearing this, Banzan became enlightened. I can see you are waiting for some explanation. When you accept what is, every piece of meat - every moment - is the best. That is enlightenment.

Having gone beyond the mind-made opposites, you become like a deep lake. The outer situation of your life and whatever happens there, is the surface of the lake. Sometimes calm, sometimes windy and rough, according to the cycles and seasons. Deep down, however, the lake is always undisturbed. You are the whole lake, not just the surface, and you are in touch with your own depth, which remains absolutely still. You don't resist change by mentally clinging to any situation. Your inner peace does not depend on it. You abide in Being - unchanging, timeless, deathless - and you are no longer dependent for fulfillment or happiness on the outer world of constantly fluctuating forms. You can enjoy them, play with them, create new forms, appreciate the beauty of it all. But there will be no need to attach yourself to any of it.

Phsyical Mediumship Monmouthshire

Extracts from Robert Monroe's Journey's out of the Body

The reason why the romantic love relationship is such an intense and universally sought-after experience is that it seems to offer liberation from a deep-seated state of fear, need, lack, and incompleteness that is part of the human condition in its unredeemed and unenlightened state. There is a physical as well as a psychological dimension to this state. On the physical level, you are obviously not whole, nor will you ever be: You are either a man or a woman, which is to say, one-half of the whole. On this level, the longing for wholeness - the return to oneness - manifests as male-female attraction, man's need for a woman, woman's need for a man. It is an almost irresistible urge for union with the opposite energy polarity. The root of this physical urge is a spiritual one: the longing for an end to duality, a return to the state of wholeness. Sexual union is the closest you can get to this state on the physical level. This is why it is the most deeply satisfying experience the physical realm can offer. But sexual union is no more than a fleeting glimpse of wholeness, an instant of bliss. As long as it is unconsciously sought as a means of salvation, you are seeking the end of duality on the level of form, where it cannot be found. You are given a tantalizing glimpse of heaven, but you are not allowed to dwell there, and find yourself again in a separate body. On the psychological level, the sense of lack and incompleteness is, if anything, even greater than on the physical level. As long as you are identified with the mind, you have an externally derived sense of self. That is to say, you get your sense of who you are from things that ultimately have nothing to do with who you are: your social role, possessions, external appearance, successes and failures, belief systems, and so on. This false, mind-made self, the ego, feels vulnerable, insecure, and is always seeking new things to identify with to give it a feeling that it exists. But nothing is ever enough to give it lasting fulfillment. Its fear remains; its sense of lack and neediness remains. But then that special relationship comes along. It seems to he the answer to all the ego's problems and to meet all its needs. At least this is how it appears at first. All the other things that you derived your sense of self from before, now become relatively insignificant. You now have a single focal point that replaces them all, gives meaning to your life, and through which you define your identity. the person you are "in love" with. You are no longer a disconnected fragment in an uncaring universe, or so it seems. Your world now has a center: the loved one. The fact that the center is outside you and that, therefore, you still have an externally derived sense of self does not seem to matter at first. What matters is that the underlying feelings of incompleteness, of fear, lack and unfulfillment so characteristic of the egoic state are no longer there - or are they? Have they dissolved, or do they continue to exist underneath the happy surface reality? If in your relationships you experience both "love" and the opposite of love - attack, emotional violence, and so on - then it is likely that you are confusing ego attachment and addictive clinging with love. You cannot love your partner one moment and attack him or her the next. True love has no opposite. If your "love" has an opposite, then it is not love but a strong ego-need for a more complete and deeper sense of self, a need that the other person temporarily meets. It is the ego's substitute for salvation, and for a short time it almost does feel like salvation. But there comes a point when your partner behaves in ways that fail to meet your needs, or rather those of your ego. The feelings of fear, pain, and lack that are an intrinsic part of egoic consciousness but had been covered up by the "love relationship" now resurface. Just as with every other addiction, you are on a high when the drug is available, but invariably there comes a time when the drug no longer works for you. When those painful feelings reappear, you feel them even more strongly than before, and what is more, you now perceive your partner as the cause of those feelings. This means that you project them outward and attack the other with all the savage violence that is part of your pain. This attack may awaken the partner's own pain, and he or she may counter your attack. At this point, the ego is still unconsciously hoping that its attack or its attempts at manipulation will be sufficient punishment to induce your partner to change their behavior, so that it can use them again as a cover-up for your pain. Every addiction arises from an unconscious refusal to face and move through your own pain. Every addiction starts with pain and ends with pain. Whatever the substance you are addicted to - alcohol, food, legal or illegal drugs, or a person - you are using something or somebody to cover up your pain. That is why, after the initial euphoria has passed, there is so much unhappiness, so much pain in intimate relationships. They do not cause pain and unhappiness. They bring out the pain and unhappiness that is already in you. Every addiction does that. Every addiction reaches a point where it does not work for you anymore, and then you feel the pain more intensely than ever. This is one reason why most people are always trying to escape from the present moment and are seeking some kind of salvation in the future. The first thing that they might encounter if they focused their attention on the Now is their own pain, and this is what they fear. If they only knew how easy it is to access in the Now the power of presence that dissolves the past and its pain, the reality that dissolves the illusion. If they only knew how close they are to their own reality, how close to God.

Avoidance of relationships in an attempt to avoid pain is not the answer either. The pain is there anyway. Three failed relationships in as many years are more likely to force you into awakening than three years on a desert island or shut away in your room. But if you could bring intense presence into your aloneness, that would work for you too.

Can we change an addictive relationship into a true one? Yes. Being present and intensifying your presence by taking your attention ever more deeply into the Now: Whether you are living alone or with a partner, this remains the key. For love to flourish, the light of your presence needs to be strong enough so that you no longer get taken over by the thinker or the pain-body and mistake them for who you are. To know yourself as the Being underneath the thinker, the stillness underneath the mental noise, the love and joy underneath the pain, is freedom, salvation, enlightenment. To disidentify from the pain-body is to bring presence into the pain and thus transmute it. To disidentify from thinking is to be the silent watcher of your thoughts and behavior, especially the repetitive patterns of your mind and the roles played by the ego. If you stop investing it with "selfness," the mind loses its compulsive quality, which basically is the compulsion to judge, and so to resist what is, which creates conflict, drama, and new pain. In fact, the moment that judgment stops through acceptance of what is, you are free of the mind. You have made room for love, for joy, for peace. First you stop judging yourself; then you stop judging your partner. The greatest catalyst for change in a relationship is complete acceptance of your partner as he or she is, without needing to judge or change them in any way. That immediately takes you beyond ego. All mind games and all addictive clinging are then over. There are no victims and no perpetrators anymore, no accuser and accused. This is also the end of all codependency, of being drawn into somebody else's unconscious pattern and thereby enabling it to continue. You will then either separate - in love - or move ever more deeply into the Now together - into Being. Can it be that simple? Yes, it is that simple. Love is a state of Being. Your love is not outside; it is deep within you. You can never lose it, and it cannot leave you. It is not dependent on some other body, some external form. In the stillness of your presence, you can feel your own formless and timeless reality as the unmanifested life that animates your physical form. You can then feel the same life deep within every other human and every other creature. You look beyond the veil of form and separation. This is the realization of oneness. This is love. What is God? The eternal One Life underneath all the forms of life. What is love? To feel the presence of that One Life deep within yourself and within all creatures. To be it. Therefore, all love is the love of God. Love is not selective, just as the light of the sun is not selective. It does not make one person special. It is not exclusive. Exclusivity is not the love of God but the "love" of ego. However, the intensity with which true love is felt can vary. There may be one person who reflects your love back to you more clearly and more intensely than others, and if that person feels the same toward you, it can be said that you are in a love relationship with him or her. The bond that connects you with that person is the same bond that connects you with the person sitting next to you on a bus, or with a bird, a tree, a flower. Only the degree of intensity with which it is felt differs. Even in an otherwise addictive relationship, there may be moments when something more real shines through, something beyond your mutual addictive needs. These are moments when both your and your partner's mind briefly subside and the pain-body is temporarily in a dormant state. This may sometimes happen during physical intimacy, or when you are both witnessing the miracle of childbirth, or in the presence of death, or when one of you is seriously ill - anything that renders the mind powerless. When this happens, your Being, which is usually buried underneath the mind, becomes revealed, and it is this that makes true communication possible. True communication is communion - the realization of oneness, which is love. Usually, this is quickly lost again, unless you are able to stay present enough to keep out the mind and its old patterns. As soon as the mind and mind identification return, you are no longer yourself but a mental image of yourself, and you start playing games and roles again to get your ego needs met. You are a human mind again, pretending to be a human being, interacting with another mind, playing a drama called "love." Although brief glimpses are possible, love cannot flourish unless you are permanently free of mind identification and your presence is intense enough to have dissolved the pain-body - or you can at least remain present as the watcher. The pain-body cannot then take you over and so become destructive of love.

Bettws Newydd-Monmouthshire (Near Usk) - Carrow Hill-Monmouthshire (Near Caldicot) - Chapel Hill-Monmouthshire (Near Chepstow) - Coed Morgan-Monmouthshire (Near Abergavenny) - Coed Y Paen-Monmouthshire (Near Usk) - Croes Y Pant-Monmouthshire (Near Abersychan) - Cross Ash-Monmouthshire (Near Abergavenny) - Crossway Green-Monmouthshire (Near Chepstow) - Earlswood Common-Monmouthshire (Near Caldicot) - Five Lanes-Monmouthshire (Near Caldicot) - Forest Coal Pit-Monmouthshire (Near Abergavenny) - Gaer Llwyd-Monmouthshire (Near Usk) - Goldcliff-Monmouthshire (Near Caldicot) - Great Oak-Monmouthshire (Near Usk) - Highmoor Hill-Monmouthshire (Near Caldicot) - Jingle Street-Monmouthshire (Near Monmouth) - Kemeys Commander-Monmouthshire (Near Usk) - Kemeys Inferior-Monmouthshire (Near Cwmbran) - Kilgwrrwg Common-Monmouthshire (Near Chepstow) - Little Mill-Monmouthshire (Near Pontypool) - Llanddewi Rhydderch-Monmouthshire (Near Abergavenny) - Llanelly Hill-Monmouthshire (Near Brynmawr) - Llanfair Kilgeddin-Monmouthshire (Near Usk) - Llanfihangel Crucorney-Monmouthshire (Near Abergavenny) - Llanfihangel Gobion-Monmouthshire (Near Abergavenny) - Llanfihangel Rogiet-Monmouthshire (Near Caldicot) - Llangattock Lingoed-Monmouthshire (Near Abergavenny) - Llangattock Vibon Avel-Monmouthshire (Near Monmouth) - Llangwm Isaf-Monmouthshire (Near Usk) - Llantilio Crossenny-Monmouthshire (Near Abergavenny) - Llantilio Pertholey-Monmouthshire (Near Abergavenny) - Llanvair Cross-Monmouthshire (Near Abergavenny) - Llanvair Discoed-Monmouthshire (Near Caldicot) - Llanvihangel Crucorney-Monmouthshire (Near Abergavenny) - Llanvihangel Gobion-Monmouthshire (Near Abergavenny) - Llanvihangel Ystern Llewern-Monmouthshire (Near Monmouth) - Llwyn Du-Monmouthshire (Near Abergavenny) - Mitchel Troy-Monmouthshire (Near Monmouth) - Mynydd Bach (Chepstow)-Monmouthshire (Near Chepstow) - Mynydd Bach (Swansea)-Monmouthshire (Near Swansea) - Nant Y Derry-Monmouthshire (Near Abersychan) - Newbridge On Usk-Monmouthshire (Near Usk) - Newton Green-Monmouthshire (Near Chepstow) - Over Monnow-Monmouthshire (Near Monmouth) - Pen Groes Oped-Monmouthshire (Near Abersychan) - Pen Y Fan-Monmouthshire (Near Monmouth) - Pen Yr Heol-Monmouthshire (Near Monmouth) - Penycaemawr-Monmouthshire (Near Usk) - Penyclawdd-Monmouthshire (Near Monmouth) - St Arvans-Monmouthshire (Near Chepstow) - St Brides Netherwent-Monmouthshire (Near Caldicot) - St Maughan-Monmouthshire (Near Monmouth) - Tal Y Coed-Monmouthshire (Near Monmouth) - The Bryn-Monmouthshire (Near Abergavenny) - The Narth-Monmouthshire (Near Monmouth) - Tintern Parva-Monmouthshire (Near Chepstow) - Tre Gagle-Monmouthshire (Near Monmouth) - Trelleck Grange-Monmouthshire (Near Chepstow) - Twyn Y Sheriff-Monmouthshire (Near Usk) - Upper Green-Monmouthshire (Near Abergavenny) - Woodcote Hill-Monmouthshire (Near Abergavenny) -

Pathway to Spirit 7 Princicpal of Spiritualism

Phsyical Mediumship Monmouthshire

Phsyical Mediumship Monmouthshire

Pathway to Spirit
7 Princicpal of Spiritualism