PSYchic VampirE....Michelle Belanger's childhood could be a story straight from Ray Bradbury's October Country. Her small Midwest town featured a haunted public library, and it celebrated the return of flights of turkey vultures every year on the Ides of March.

She has been featured in a number of very informative television broadcasts and documentary films pertaining to today's "Vampire -new- Subculture". These interviews can be seen on the History Channel's "Vampire Secrets" as well as being featured the in A&E's "The Secret Life of Vampires". Michelle's Non-fiction works include the best-selling Psychic Vampire Codex, (Pictured: Weiser, 2004) Sacred Hunger, (Dark Moon, 2005) and Psychic Dreamwalking (Weiser 2006), The Psychic Energy Codex (Pictured: Wesier 2007), Vampires in Their Own Words (2007), and The Necronumina (Llewellyn, 2008).

Her home life was stranger still. Raised by her maternal grandmother, psychic experiences and ghostly phenomenon were common occurrences in the Belanger household -- but were only discussed behind closed doors.

Her estranged grandfather's family included healers, tea-leaf readers, and circus freaks who openly embraced their extraordinary gifts.

Afflicted with a life-threatening heart defect from birth, Michelle endured both out of body experiences and near death experiences before the age of five.

Her mother believed that these traumatic brushes with death made Michelle more sensitive to psychic phenomenon. Michelle herself believes that her skills arise from a combination of genetics, environment, and fate.

Michelle's psychic inheritance manifested in a variety of ways, the most remarkable of which was psychic vampirism. Michelle identified and came to terms with this condition while still in her teens.

Her pioneering work, The Psychic Vampire Codex (Weiser, 2004), details concepts and techniques that she learned through an intensive study of her vampiric experiences.

All of Michelle's other works similarly benefit from her unique combination of personal experience, intellectual insight, and intensive research..A firm believer that psychic perceptions are something that anyone can cultivate, she teaches a variety of techniques based upon a fundamental perception of psychic energy.

“My joys, my griefs, my passions, and my powers made me a stranger…”

--Lord Byron, Manfred

Tara Weston Ciampa - EDITOR:. Referring to page -42- of "The Psychic Energy Codex", you mentioned how some with energetic hypersensitivity can resemble some mental disorders and if such an individual is misdiagnosed and prescribed medications it can have a dampening effect on their psychic abilities.

• Do you have any stories or examples you can share in regard to this subject?

..Most of the examples I have deal with people who were diagnosed with social anxiety disorder. I have made contact with so many psychics and empaths over the years who have told me the same story, it’s almost impossible to keep track of them all. But my mother is a really good example. A woman I’ll call Martha is a classic example. As early as middle school, Martha noticed that she disliked crowds, and if she were forced to work in a crowded environment, she would get spacey, have a hard time concentrating, and eventually feel nervous and drained.

..Under certain circumstances in crowds, she would also experience sudden moodswings, which she described as having sudden and intense feelings wash over that had no connection with anything she herself should have been feeling at the time. She would brush past one person and become suddenly angry, and a few moments later, someone else would bump up against her and she would be moved to tears.

..First, she started avoiding crowds, but eventually she had to function in first a college environment and later a work environment. At that point, her issues with crowds had gotten so bad that even an office full of people was too much to deal with. She would feel overwhelmed the minute she walked into any common area where other people were working. Desperate to get it to stop, she saw a psychiatrist and was prescribed first one medication and then another as they tried to come up with something that worked. All of them made her feel sick, and some of them fixed an aspect of the problem, but often left other symptoms still getting through.

..For example, she might feel relaxed enough not to be overwhelmed in a crowd, but the moodswings would still be an issue. They finally hit on something that seemed to fix everything, but Martha found that the medication seemed to suppress everything. She had a hard time thinking and emoting, and the precognitive dreams she had experienced since her childhood completely vanished, replaced with dreams that were disjointed and made no sense.

..By the time Martha came to me, she had already taken herself off of all medications and was fairly embittered by the entire psychiatric community. While I don’t like to encourage people to resist using medications that they need, I agreed that Martha’s case might not have anything at all to do with mental illness. We worked on shielding techniques for when she was in crowds. I taught her to ground and center, and, most importantly, I taught her how to identify the difference between an emotion that was coming from inside of her as opposed to an emotion that she was psychically picking up from other people in her environment. Martha is what I identify as an empath – a person who is able to psychically pick up impressions of other peoples’ emotions.

..I know a lot of empaths who worry that they might have social anxiety disorders or that they are bipolar, because of those radical mood shifts. The first and most important thing to help someone like Martha to identify the difference is to help them discover those boundaries between inside the self and outside the self. If a person can identify the source of an emotion as something originating from outside of them, and then they can use techniques to block that emotion so they do not experience it unless they willingly let it in, their problem isn’t psychiatric – it’s psychic.

• At what age were you awakened to your own psychic abilities and can you reiterate the details of this awakening?

..Before I answer, let me clarify how I define awakening in relation to psychic abilities. I don’t place my awakening at that point in time when I had my first psychic experience. Instead, I identify awakening as that moment where I actually became aware that these abilities were psychic – it’s that personal epiphany where, in the space of one thought or one moment, the world seems suddenly changed because one’s internal perspective is changed. That being said, although I have seen spirits and had precognitive dreams and tons of other experiences that others would find extraordinary, my personal awakening came in stages and it was influenced by a number of factors. In fourth grade, I met another fourth grader named Pearl, who began teaching me about dreamwalking and other techniques. I tell a lot of her story in Psychic Dreamwalking, but the basics is that this other girl seemed tuned in to something much bigger than either of us, and she approached me because she had an intuitive sense of my own abilities. I wrestled for many years with the validity of what she taught me, partly because of my Catholic upbringing, but also because of the strong influence psychology had on my early life through an influential great aunt.

..I might have abandoned Pearl’s teachings, but the next year, I had a rare opportunity. My school system offered Saturday classes for gifted students who wanted to explore specialized topics. I learned dissection quite early through these courses as well as very early computer programming (we were working on Vic 20s, to give you an idea!). Well, that year, they were offering parapsychology, lead by the father of one of the teachers in the school system who was himself an investigator.

..I wish I could remember the name of the instructor, but I will never forget the lessons he gave. We explored the concepts of clairaudience and clairsentience, played with Rhine cards and dowsing rods, and learned basic ghost-hunting techniques through the study of such pioneers in the field as Harry Price. We even played around with capturing EVP (electronic voice phenomenon). The scientific aspect of the work really appealed to my skeptical side and it helped to provide a context for some of Pearl’s experiential techniques. I already knew by then that I was psychic, but having results with various tests that could help to verify that fact gave me confidence to further explore my gifts.

..Although all of this helped to influence my awareness of my gifts, I don’t officially mark my awakening until I reached a point in high school. I cannot remember what day it was, but sometime in my sophomore year, I started to suspect that I was doing something “weird” to peoples’ energy. I was an avid reader of horror, science fiction, and fantasy, so the icon of the vampire was not unknown to me. This led me to tentatively identify what I was doing as vampirism, even though I understood that I was neither undead nor immortal in any classic, physical sense. Becoming aware of that darker side of my psychic talents was the real awakening for me, because once the realization sank in, it changed the way I looked at everything. As long as my talents were in those safe and socially acceptable realms of mediumship and aura reading, I could get away with waffling back and forth in my stance about their legitimacy. But psychic vampirism – the inborn capacity to take energy from others – that demands both awareness and responsibility. So, in the end, despite many previous experiences and even some fairly intense training, I do not feel that I completely awakened to my abilities until that point in high school when I realized that they had a real and undeniable impact upon the world around me.

• How would you describe your own unique psychic abilities?

..I’m sensitive to what most people would call psychic energy. This encompasses a lot of things. I can pick up lingering emotions and impressions on objects and I pick up a lot from places as well – not just hauntings, but the emotional energy and psychic impressions that living people tend to leave behind. I get such constant input on this level that it’s just another natural sense to me. I walk into a place and process my psychic impressions with about the same effort that I process the color of the wallpaper and the scent of the potpourri.

..As an energy sensitive, I’m also essentially a spirit medium, since spirits are comprised entirely of energy. The thoughts transmitted through telepathy and the emotions transmitted through empathy are all carried upon energy, and so I can pick up on these as well. I seem better at picking up emotions than thoughts from random people I pass on the street. I get a lot more telepathic input from people with whom I have established a conscious energetic connection. Spirits use both of these methods to communicate, so I can communicate with spirits fairly easily. To be honest, I spend more energy trying to ignore them and block them out when I’m not in the mood to talk to every dead person who wanders through my home …

..My awareness of peoples’ energy also gives me a great deal of insight into their physical and spiritual health. I’ve heard others who share this kind of insight describe themselves as “medical intuitives.” I’ve helped a couple of people catch cancer in its very early stages, and I helped one man get preventative care for a condition that would otherwise have led to a heart attack. In addition to perceiving health issues, I can also harness and manipulate energy in a variety of healing techniques. I can do Reiki, although I prefer using my own style of energy work to facilitate healing. It just comes more naturally to me.

..There are a couple of downsides to my abilities. First, like a lot of psychics, I sometimes have a negative impact on the energy of electronic devices. On days where I’m feeling exceptionally tired or frazzled, I blow out lightbulbs, drain batteries, interfere with television, radio, and cellphone reception, and sometimes make computers malfunction fairly severely. This effect has been documented by several of the television crews that I’ve worked with. A&E even worked the camera malfunction connected with me into one of their documentaries. My psychic vampirism is one of the other downsides. All of these psychic abilities seem to require energy to fuel them, and I need a little more fuel than most. That’s not the only factor in my psychic vampirism, but it does have an influence on the level of my needs.

• What would you say are the pros and cons of having abilities... blessing or curse?

..There are times when it’s hard to block all the impressions out. This used to be especially true when I traveled to a new city, where the psychic background noise was new to me. I’d spend the first few days processing everything and feeling overwhelmed by it all, until it grew familiar enough to become background noise again. The impact I have on electronics has become almost legendary among my circle of friends, and although we can laugh about it, blowing up the electricalsystem in my car or my computer just because I’m having a bad day can get expensive and seriously irritating.

..And that’s to say nothing of my psychic vampirism. I need to regularly and actively take in human vital energy, partly because I use so much psychic energy to fuel my talents and partly because I essentially self-heal certain serious physical conditions almost constantly (tachycardia/arrhythmia being the worst of them). For whatever reason, I seem limited to human vital energy for this self-healing, even though I am perfectly capable of harnessing other types of energy and using them to heal others (Reiki, for example).

..There’s something a little broken in my physical and/or energetic system, but I think this very flaw is what makes me so extremely sensitive in the first place. So, with that in mind, my abilities are both a blessing and a curse – everything I have comes with a price. Is it a price that I’m willing to pay? Absolutely. I feel that I my experience of the world is more wondrous and more profound than what is open to many other people. And in many ways, that wonder compels me to share that experience of the world with others. I see myself as the wound healer, the role so often ascribed to the shaman, for I have tasted death and I have come back changed, and my power comes from walking with one foot in the realm of the living and one foot in the realm of the dead.

• Do you tend to agree with the -Tibetan- or -Shamanistic- view of the different realms?

..I’ve tried to write a book without making a reference either to shamanic techniques or to material I’ve gleaned from the Tibetan Book of the Dead. However, both of these systems are so influential to my worldview, that it’s proven impossible, at least thus far. I find the maps of reality developed in both of these systems to be highly relevant to how I experience the world. And, since the ancient shamans and the enlightened lamas of Tibet took the time to explore that territory and enunciate it first, I have little desire to reinvent the wheel, as it were. So, yes, I agree very strongly with the way both of those systems believe that reality works.

..There was something I read in Thurman’s translation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead that has stuck with me always. In the commentary on the book, Thurman points out that, according to the Tibetan view, if a medium could perceive all of the spirits that exist on all of the levels of reality at once, he or she would go insane. In explaining this further, he reveals that, although the Tibetans divide reality up into several different realms, they see all of these realms as co-existing in the same space. Essentially, their worldview is a multi-dimensional approach to reality, where all of the dimensions intersect but do not typically interact.

..The shamanic view seems a little more separated than this, at least when it’s illustrated in terms of the World Tree, with the Celestial Realm, the Underworld, and the Middle Realm. But from the writings of people like Mircea Eliade, Holger Kalweit, and even Carlos Casteneda, it seems clear that these distinctions are at least somewhat artificial, and the many realms of the shaman do overlap one another in much the same way the Tibetan realms overlap. In many ways, the very attempt to express the difference in the realms is what leads to the sense that they are different places and not different perspectives or at least layers of the same reality. In my experience of the spirit world, there are farther reaches that exist somehow distant from the reality that we occupy as living human beings. But there is also a point of overlap, so that a spirit can be standing right in front of me, and the only difference is that he is only present as energy in my space, while I am standing there as a being of both energy and flesh. Our worlds intersect, just not completely.

..I think modern readers might have a better sense of the difference if they think of the realms as different frequencies. The radio waves for every single station are in the air all around us, but we cannot perceive those under ordinary circumstances with our normal human senses. Instead, we have to use a specialized mechanism (the radio) and, further, we have to tune that mechanism to a specific frequency in order to pick up the information carried on that frequency’s waves. I think our psychic impressions of the “otherworld” or the realms “beyond the veil” function much like our mundane radio. First, we have to have a working receiver that is capable of tuning in to the right frequencies. Then, we have to have the ability to “tune in” – for psychics, this is the mental discipline that it requires to focus on one impression over another.

..I believe that every human being has some ability to pick up on these frequencies, but I am not so naïve as to assert that everyone has the same level of ability. Some of us are simply born with more receptive “radios” than others, although practice and discipline can go a long way to supplement our basic “machinery.”

• What advice would you have for an empath who is struggling with being burdened with the ailments of others? What methods of dealing with that would you suggest... in addition to the grounding techniques in your book?

..One of the first things that someone who is sensitive should learn to do is a technique called shielding. Essentially, this is a combination of energy work and creative visualization wherein you learn to erect a barrier around yourself to keep unwanted energies out of your realm of direct experience. In many ways, creating a shield is just a matter of consciously erecting that bubble of personal space that most of us observe consciously, then shoring up its boundaries. Imagine yourself surrounded by a bubble of energy. Now make that bubble real. That’s a basic shield.

..The problem with shielding, of course, is that the simplest methods of shielding block everything out. Empaths and psychics can find this stifling. I often hear complaints from people who successfully shield only to feel as if they’re walking around with their eyes closed and with cotton stuffed in their ears. Why can shielding be a problem for people who are sensitive? Well, the self-same energy that is overwhelming their perceptions is also the energy carrying all their psychic impressions from the world around them. Shut off the energy and you shut off the flow of information. If you’ve never properly shielded before, it is hard to appreciate just how much you process this constant flow of information, just on an unconscious level. When all of that is suddenly gone, there is silence that feels blessed at first, but then starts to feel oppressive.

..The solution is a technique that I call filtering. It’s a little more advanced than shielding, and most people find it easier to learn how to erect a basic shield first before they play around with filtering. But a filter is based on the same concept as a shield – imagine a barrier that completely surrounds you, separating your energy from the energy in the rest of the world. The only difference is a filter should breathe. It should not be a static boundary, but something open that allows for a controlled exchange of energy. Think cheesecloth or gauze or even a coffee filter. Some things get through. Others are kept on the other side of the barrier. At advanced stages of visualization, you can get very specific about what you do and do not want to let in through a filter, selectively protecting yourself against anger energy or the energy of just one person who really gets on your nerves. In the case of an empath who has to be around someone who is sick all the time, you could learn to block out only the illness and its symptoms so you’re not unconsciously taking these into yourself all the time.

• If an empath comes in contact with a mentally disturbed person (i.e. the criminally insane, schizophrenic sociopaths), how might it affect the empath -physically- or -mentally-?

..Sometimes people in our culture toss around the word “crazy” a little too casually. When someone expresses an opinion that’s a little off the wall, there is always at least one person who is quick to call them crazy. These people cannot possibly have ever dealt with someone who truly suffers from a mental illness. From my experiences, there is a very distinct feel to the energy of people who suffer from severe mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia. If you are a telepath or even an empath, this can be very discomfiting. There is a disordered sense to these people, a chaos that is full of jagged edges and swirling voids. At the very least, it makes your skin crawl. At its worst, it can start to bleed over into your own consciousness, until you experience an echo of some of their symptoms, descending into that swirling darkness with them. In some cases, working with the mentally ill, I have felt physically sick around them, especially if their particular illness has a violent or destructive component.

..I think the most disturbing thing that I have experienced when exposed to a schizophrenic is the fact that at least some of the “hallucinations” she was responding to were perceptible to me as spirits. It was clear that she was also hallucinating, but she was also haunted, and witnessing this made me wonder about the exact nature of her illness. Jungian psychologist Richard Noll wrote a paper many years back comparing the experiences of the shaman with the experiences of the schizophrenic, and in the end, he observed that the line between them, at least from a psychological point of view, was very thin. It came down to volition. A shaman can control trances and his journeys into the other realms. A schizophrenic encounters spirits and demons with neither the ability to control their perceptions nor the ability to discern what may or may not be real.

• Of all the many talents you have, is there one in particular you are most passionate about?

..I’m going to read “passionate” here as “the one I use the most” because I think I’m pretty passionate about all of my talents, both the psychic and the mundane ones.

..I’m constantly processing the data carried on the energy that I pick up from the people and places around me, but this is as natural and as unconscious as breathing, so I don’t think it counts. But I do a lot of out of body work, and I do this very consciously. It’s not astral projection, exactly. Instead, I identify the techniques I use as dreamwalking and bilocation. Dreamwalking uses lucid dreaming or the hypnagogic state to reach out to others in dreams or vision states to communicate and interact. Bilocation, at least for me, requires the hypnagogic state or a light trance state, and then I focus on someone until I have strong perceptions of both where I am physically at and where I am projecting my mental/energetic self.

..I find the out of body state so liberating, I will sometimes do energy work on someone who is just in the other room by projecting to them rather than working on them in person. When I’m physically present, my physical senses can sometimes obscure or detract from my subtle senses, whereas when I’m out of body, everything is translated on that subtle level of pure energy. It’s so much easier. I have become notorious among my friends for using out of body techniques to make contact with them rather than bother with email or even a phone call.

..The out of body work also facilitates my work with spirits. Out of body, I can essentially meet with spirits on their own turf. Liberated from the flesh, I’m essentially a spirit myself, and I find it much easier to communicate with some of the ancestor spirits I work with when I’m in this state. I feel that I get so much benefit and insight from my ability to slip back and forth between the world of flesh and the world of spirit that I’ve been trying to come up with a system that lets others enjoy this freedom as well. The system is detailed in a forthcoming book, Walking the Twilight Path.

• What is your view on mind altering substances in relationship to the donor of ones psychic energy?

..I’m kind of a prude where drugs are concerned. When we’re talking about my own body, I’m unlikely to even take aspirin or cold medicine, let alone anything that might influence my consciousness. I frown on the use of mind-altering drugs in those close to me. I’m especially strict with the people who provide energy for me, because I’ve learned that some of the effects of drugs and alcohol can translate through the energy. I don’t think any of the physical components of the drugs can get passed this way, but I’ve experienced a contact buzz from someone who was drunk, and I had a fairly bizarre experience several years ago when I fed off of someone who had taken a tab of Ecstasy. Since then, I really try to avoid any significant interaction with people who have mind altering drugs in their system. I just don’t like the way they make me feel. I can block the effects out, but that takes a certain amount of effort and, as the Ecstasy experience taught me, if I slip up and let some through, I just might lose the mental discipline that allows me to shield and filter things in the first place.

• Do you have any experience or personal views on hypnotherapy? (future -V I S I O N S .Magazine Online- article in the works on this topic)

..I have a friend, Martin Riccardo, who works as a professional hypnotherapist, and I’ve always been curious about the technique. I haven’t had any direct experience with hypnotherapy myself, but I think it can be a very useful technique. Of course, I’ve read the arguments against its use, especially in matters of past life recall and other lost memories. Detractors of the technique suggest that all hynotherapists unconsciously lead their patients, ultimately guiding them to implant false memories. While I think it’s entirely possible to guide someone into creating a memory, I believe that most hypnotherapists are both ethical and skilled enough to know to avoid doing this. I doubt my own ability to submit to the technique, however. I’m a very strong-willed individual, and I tend to be just a little bit of a control freak. So, were I to experiment with hypnotherapy, I would have to work with someone like Marty, with whom I have already established a good deal of trust. Like everything else out there, I think it’s a tool that has good uses, and it should be approached as such. Some people will find that they prefer a wrench or a handsaw, while others will find that this tool just cannot fix their particular problem. But that does not invalidate its usefulness as a tool for others.

• It was mentioned in your biography that you dealt with near death experiences in your youth?
• Can you elaborate on any of those experiences?

..I was born with a life-threatening heart defect that required several major surgeries to correct. I was expected to die before I was four if the problem remained uncorrected, and although some stop-gap measures were possible, what I really needed was open-heart surgery to implant a Teflon patch between my two ventricles to repair the problem. This surgery had to be put off until I was four and a half, because, at the time, they did not have a heart-lung machine capable of sustaining anyone under thirty pounds. The problem came to everyone’s attention when I went into cardiac arrest at the age of six months. I do not recall that NDE. However, there was another NDE connected with one of my surgeries that I do recall, at least in that hazy sort of way that one tends to recall experiences from early childhood. I had been prepped for surgery and I was being wheeled into the operating room. My mother and grandmother were closest to the gurney, but I think other family members were there as well. We had to wait for an elevator, I think, because we paused long enough for me to catch the attention of a janitor. At least, I’ll assume he was a janitor, since he was in a different sort of uniform and was holding the handle of a mop.

..He was an old black man, and he peered over the edge of the gurney to see my tiny little form, IV tubes already threaded into several veins. I think he asked the people around me what was wrong with me, then he came closer and said, “Don’t worry, child. Jesus is with you. Jesus is with you.” He held his hand above my head in a kind of blessing. Then the elevator must have come, because I was being wheeled away. I think the drugs they prepped me with were also starting to take effect, because I only remember bits and pieces after that, at least until a specific point in the actual surgery.

..I don’t know exactly what happened, but I was suddenly aware of the operating room. My point of perception was no longer focused from within my little body. Instead, I was perceiving things from a point closer to the ceiling. I could see the doctors and nurses below, but my attention was focused more on this huge shining steel lamp close to me. I stared at it for a little while because its shape was so strange, with this big arm and a bunch of bright bulbs inside, instead of just one. I felt no pain and I did not feel afraid, although I don’t think I understood enough about what I was experiencing to really be afraid. Then my attention was pulled away from the operating room and the fascinating overhead light by another light. This seemed at once close and far away, and although I could perceive it from where I was, it was clearly not a part of the operating room scene. I stared at it with about the same level of curious fascination that had held me in thrall with the more conventional light. And I remember thinking something like, “That must be what a Jesus is.” I felt no compulsion to move toward the light, and I don’t remember anything else after that initial thought about the light. I have a few hazy memories about waking up in recovery, but that’s about it. Out of body experiences seem to come second nature to me, however. Six months before my final open heart surgery, I had another out of body experience. This wasn’t connected with a near death experience, however. It just seemed to be a response to physical trauma.

..For either my birthday or Christmas that year (they’re both fairly close together), I had gotten a big rocking horse. Being an avid fan of the Lone Ranger television show at the time, I was happily riding said horse and imagining myself in the opening credits of the series (the fact that my mother had often played portions the William Tell Overture on her violin as I rode definitely facilitated my imagination). The rocking horse was in our living room, and not far behind the rocking horse was a marble-topped coffee table. At a crucial moment in my horse-riding frenzy, I threw both of my arms up over my head and cried, “Heigh-ho, Silver, away !” Of course, given the momentum I’d built up on the horse, my relatively diminutive size, and the fact that I was no longer gripping the handholds that sprouted out of either side of the horse’s head, I flew backwards and whacked my head on the edge of the marble table.

..My memory cuts to a scene outside. It was so natural for me to remember the world this way that I did not realize the peculiar nature of my perspective until I was recounting the incident with my mother more than twenty years later. I see the floodlight on the backporch, and I see the snow falling steadily in the beam. To the right and below me, I see my great aunt’s old green car running. I see my mother come out of the house, moving very quickly, and she’s not even wearing a coat, just the turtleneck sweater she’d been wearing in the living room. She’s cradling me to her chest, and I’m wrapped in one of my favorite blankets. There’s a lot of snow on the driveway, and I see my great aunt open the passenger side door from the inside, leaning over to hold it out as far as she can so my mother can get inside.

..My perspective for this entire seen is outside of my body, about ten feet above the proceedings. I am suspended in the air, even with the floodlight and about ten feet back from it, away from the house. There’s a kind of 360 degree quality to my vision as well. It’s qualitatively different from seeing through my eyes, but even now, I find it hard to explain exactly how it’s different.

..I hit my head and went out of body, probably to deal with the pain. And I never would have realized it if my mother hadn’t asked how I’d seen the floodlight, since I’d been bundled tightly with my face pressed against her chest. I was also allegedly unconscious throughout this portion of the incident, as well as through most of the car ride to the hospital. Which I understand was pretty sketchy itself, since I choose a stormy winter’s night to crack my head open. If my hair’s short enough, you can still see the scar.

• How do you feel that your out of body and near death experiences have impacted your life?

..There’s a lot of literature out there suggesting that near death experiences can open up or increase a person’s psychic abilities. Although psychic abilities ran in my family, my mother believed that my early brushes with death had an influence on the intensity with which my experiences manifested. After studying more about NDEs as well as immersing myself in shamanism and the Tibetan Book of the Dead, I tend to agree. Death and rebirth is a potent, transformative initiatory experience. Since 1996, I’ve been trying to come up with a way to harness the awareness and power that comes from an NDE in a system that modern readers can study and apply to their own lives.

..I’m not talking something like that 80's movie -Flatliners- where medical students play around with artificially creating NDEs, but something more ritual-based that uses meditation, guided imagery, and contact with the spirit world to help guide someone through that transition from the realm of flesh to the realm of spirit and back again. Our society in general has a negative view of death, and this translates into a deep-seated fear of anything related to death and spirits, at least for your average person. Near Death Experiences are also known for their ability to completely rid a person of their fear of death. I can attest to this. I might not look forward to the pain associated with the various forms of dying, but I know that even the worst pain is only fleeting, and the realm that opens up on the Otherside is intensely liberating.

..My new book, Walking the Twilight Path, is my formal exploration of these topics. It’s got a little bit of a Gothic flair to the rituals and imagery, because I think, barring actually physical Near Death Experience, one needs to connect with death by immersing themselves in its iconography. In the book, that means meditating on death and our attitudes toward it by meditating on the gorgeous cemetery photography of Patricia Gonzales. The book will be out this September, and I think quite a lot of people will be intrigued by its system, which blends aspects of shamanism, the Tibetan bardo, ritual, ancient Egyptian concepts, and spirit communication into a cohesive, modern initiatory tradition.

-BOOKING-

http://www.wolfmanproductions.com/