A Bite of Sliced Bread
Words to touch
Music to feel
 

A Bite of Sliced Bread

A story from the book "Sliced Bread" by Rosemary Phillips
 



Sliced Bread - Notes from a Baker's Rebel Daughter


Who we are
By Rosemary Phillips (written in 1996)
"Sliced Bread" a book by Rosemary Phillips
Cover of "Sliced Bread"

Since my sitting with spiritualist medium Joe Benjamin in London in 1982 I had witnessed several mediums entering trance state and often heard them speak in different voices. In one such case, when transcribing the tape I had made of a session I found the information to have been spoken in complete grammatical accuracy, somewhat unlike our regular speech which can often be choppy and without cohesion of thought, sentence and paragraph structure.

Joyce Tarvin and I met once a week in my apartment. Joyce was developing her trance mediumship and I had offered to give her a hand. First I would give her a reflexology session to help her relax after a hard day at work. We would then sit opposite each other, with a tape deck on hand to record the session, and we would slowly go into meditative state assisted by the sounds of soft music. As Joyce began to nod off she would then sit bold upright and a cockney voice would come through. The name given for this spirit was George whose last life was as a fishmonger near the docks in London, England. His role was rather like that of a chairman of a meeting, to bring things to order and to introduce the different subjects or, in this case, the different entities who wished to speak. I had a set order of questions to ask, "Who are you? Where do you come from? What time frame were you here on earth? What do you have to tell us?"

To be successful in trance mediumship the medium must remove themselves consciously from the body and take the mind somewhere else to keep it busy, or let it drift away into some meditation or visualization. Joyce often had difficulty relaxing enough to just let go, so one evening George laughingly said, "She really likes to keep her nose in things, and won't get out of the way."

On one of the last evenings that we worked together, before my move to Campbell River in 1984, Joyce sat in the chair quietly after her reflexology session then her body started to jolt a bit. George did not make an appearance, instead Joyce's arm went up in a symbol of greeting and as I began to ask the usual questions a voice boomed through her, "Who we are is irrelevant. That we exist is important."

The light in the room had visibly increased, much like during the experience I had with Joe Benjamin. There was a heightened sense of energy as the spirit ignored my questions and continued, "We walked together through the desert as men of medicine, many years ago in the land known as Persia."

As the spirit withdrew Joyce slumped in the chair, and because her body had not yet grown attuned to such experiences she began to shudder and shake. I placed my hands on her shoulders to steady her and asked for healing to balance her, then as she regained consciousness she asked, "What happened?"

"We got some very good advice from Spirit," I replied when describing the energy in the room and the tone of the voice. "Who they are is irrelevant. That they exist is important."

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Copyright Rosemary Phillips, Quills Quotes & Notes Enterprises, 2009
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