Sharon Siubis is a medium, a spiritualist minister, and the Director and Co-Founder of the Inner Spiritual Center located in Fairfield, NJ. She has trained and worked as a spiritualist minister, speaker, medium, and healer for over 25 years. She uses her degree in Education, her background, and her understanding of teaching technique in her classes and seminars. And now she teaches in the center’s ongoing education program for Intuitive and Mediumistic Development, too. Along with her private readings, Sharon is a strong advocate of structure, quality, and integrity in the teaching and learning of mediumship so that each person can achieve his or her highest potential. She currently works, teaches, and demonstrates in New Jersey, in different areas of the United States, and in Switzerland. Sharon is also on the teaching faculty of Fellowships of the Spirit in renowned Lily Dale, NY.
IN THIS EPISODE, YOU’LL HEAR ABOUT THINGS LIKE:
- How her grandmother’s passing opened Sharon to spirituality.
- The differing types of mediumships, especially trance mediumship.
- How Sunday services at a spiritual center are different than what a person usually experiences in a traditional church.
- Sharon’s work on the teaching faculty of Fellowships of the Spirit in renowned Lily Dale, NY.
SOME QUESTIONS IRENE ASKS SHARON:
- During trance mediumship, does a Spirit usually take over a person’s personality?
- How do the new Celebration of life ceremonies differ from traditional funerals?
- Are your center’s Sunday services available on Zoom?
—
Watch the episode here
Listen to the podcast here
Sharon Siubis: Her Inner Spiritual Center Lights The Way To A Spiritual Lifelong Adventure And Path By Providing Sunday Services, Celebration Of Life Ceremonies, Healing Services, Classes Teaching Differing Styles Of Mediumship Including Trance Mediumship, And More. What Are These Offerings Like And What Role Does Integrity Play?
I am delighted to have this opportunity to interview Sharon Siubis, who is a medium, a spiritualist minister, and the Director and Cofounder of Inner Spiritual Center, which is located in Fairfield, New Jersey. I’m thrilled to say we’re neighbors. We live in the same area. It’s so wonderful to get to know you, Sharon.
Thank you, Irene.
Sharon has trained and worked as a spiritualist minister, speaker, medium, and healer for several years. She holds a degree in Education using her background and understanding of teaching techniques in her classes and seminars, and is in the ongoing education program of Intuitive and Mediumship Development through the Inner Spiritual Center. Along with her private readings, Sharon is a strong advocate of structure, quality and integrity in the teaching and learning of mediumship so that each person can achieve his or her highest potential.
She works, teaches, and demonstrates in New Jersey and different areas of the United States and Switzerland. She is also on the teaching faculty of Fellowships of the Spirit in Lily Dale, New York. I’m looking forward to interviewing Sharon about her work as a spiritualist minister and the differences between sensitivity, intuitive and mediumship development. Also, the differing types of mediumship including trance mediumship, how the new celebration of life ceremonies are different from the traditional funerals, and more for what is surely going to be both enlightening and interesting interview. Sharon, a heartfelt welcome to the show.
Thank you so much, Irene, for having me. Thank you also for doing this show for the people who are starting to maybe experience or think about these things, people who might be going through grief and people who have learned about these things but are hearing it differently.
The people who read this know my story and it’s part of a divine plan. All I do is listen and take that step forward. If you’re in this world, it’s not quite so amazing. You know you’re getting help and there’s a reason. I’m very humbled by how many people are telling me how this show helps them in their lives. I feel very blessed to do this and I feel blessed to get to know you too. It’s such a pleasure. Let’s get everybody to know who you are and how you came upon this. Were you intuitive throughout your childhood? How did your grandmother’s passing open you to spirituality?
I see it from people that I’ve worked with. I’ve been doing this for a while and what I’ve been finding, which I hope a lot of people have recognized, is that we are all souls on this journey. Whether we are 220 or 102, we all have the ability of that soul presence to have awareness. It’s not about telling the future or picking the lottery numbers. It’s about being sensitive and aware of the energy that surrounds everything in our world and everything in the world of the spirit.
My intuitiveness or sensitivity, I do remember being quite young and having some experiences which I couldn’t understand or put in the context of what was happening. To me, it was natural. I remember when I was probably 5 or 6 feeling like I was in a costume. It’s the best way I can describe it. This part of me was here but I felt like I was looking out through a mask out or a costume, which I couldn’t grasp but at this time, I can look at that and say, “That was my soul talking.” That was my awareness of body and soul, not only that we’re one mesh kind of thing.
In your early childhood, you were perceiving that your body was not all of who you were and that it was separate.
I was. Some people have experiences with the spirit world. They see people or they’re aware of people. I didn’t have those kinds of experiences when I was younger or if I did, I wasn’t registering them. My experience always seemed to be, “What’s my relationship in this world? What’s my relationship with myself in this world? What’s my relationship with other people in this world?” When I got a little bit older, I remember my mom driving someplace and we passed by where this graveyard was. They were having a funeral.
People are upset. They’re crying and weeping. They’re hugging each other. I remember saying to my mom, “I don’t understand it because that person that they’re crying about is right there.” It’s not like I saw them like I’m seeing you, but there’s an awareness of they weren’t in this hole in the ground. They were present with their family and loved ones. I had those kinds of experiences when I was younger and a little bit older.
My grandmother passed when I was a senior in college. It was very interesting to me how this unfolded because I had just seen my mom. I didn’t go to college too far away but I lived away. I was about an hour away from my home. I had been home that weekend before. I saw my grandmother in perfect health as far as we were concerned. She was in her 70s but was fine. I was like, “Bye, grandma. I love you.” I kissed her. I went home where I was. During that week, I was in my apartment and my phone rang. I got up. I was walking to get the phone, which was in the kitchen area on the wall. As I’m walking, I hear my grandmother in her voice say, “I’m okay.”
I’m going, “Why am I hearing my grandmother? It makes no sense to me.” As I’m picking up the phone, I hear this. It’s my mother saying my grandmother had passed an hour before. It was not expected. She was leading the prayer at her Baptist Church and when she sat down from leading the prayer, she fell out of her chair and was passed. There was something in that experience that said to me, there was a reach out from my grandmother in some way, shape and form to let me know she was okay.
That started me a little bit on a journey. I had college to finish. I started work. I ended up getting married. I had a child. I had all of these things happen in life but then I was able to take that experience and start to look at that when I had time in my life to start to understand why did that happen, how did it happen and how does that then work when we leave this costume. When we leave this physical world, what happens? How do we get to talk to our people?
What a blessing that you had that.
It was never expected. I’ve never had that same experience. I’ve never had somebody whom I’ve heard in that same way except my grandmother. I know with my grandmother, whatever work I do, whenever I’m doing either my work or working with other people on this journey, I know she’s there. When we work with students, generally a lot of times the first time somebody will say, “I’m aware of this, grandmother,” from the evidence, I know she’s there to help and will continue to help.
Tell us how your grandmother opened you but first, what were you doing before? I’m assuming it was nothing like what you’re doing now, which is so fascinating working with people and helping people to connect with the other side. What were you doing before you became a medium? How did that segue into becoming a medium and opening a spiritual center?
It’s crazy when you look at this path.
It was wonderful in a way but how did that all unfold for you?
I consider myself in terms of religious upbringing and all of that as a mutt because I’ve been dipping my toes into a lot of different things over the years. My grandparents were Baptist. When I was little, we went to the Baptist Church in Paterson, New Jersey. When we moved, that wasn’t convenient anymore so we went to the Presbyterian Church in town. I went to school. I went to college to be a teacher. Right after college, I ended up working at a Jewish-owned textile company. I married a Catholic and then I’m spiritual. There is all this kind of stuff.
You are a smorgasbord.
I am. I’m a mutt. God bless them because it’s a wonderful family. We’re down to five people. We’re all older but that company, I still work with like one day or a couple of days a week because we’re family. We are not a biological family but a family. In the times from when I was in my 30s, I started to look at spiritualism, which I didn’t understand. I didn’t know what spiritualism was. I didn’t have any background in that but I started to look into it and it felt right. You know when you get that sense of it fits. You feel you’re at home and peace with it.
The principles of spiritualism made sense to me and I started to look into that a little bit more and understand it more. In this area, there was a spiritualist church. My original teacher who came from England would come over 4 or 5 times a year to that church. I started with healing as many people do. I started to move into the understanding of the technique of mediumship. I’m not a person to say, “I can do this and that.”
I had no clue that awareness would be available to me other than this experience I had with my grandmother and some of these other experiences I had. When I started to work with it, it wasn’t perfect. It’s still not perfect but what it made me understand was that even though we don’t have a physical body, who we are continues. Who we are contain our memories, relationships, prejudices, loves, hates and all of those things.
Do they take their prejudices to the other side?
Prejudice is about anything. Only because we move into that vibration that we call the spirit world doesn’t mean we suddenly become good people if we’re not. It doesn’t mean that we become different from what we are until we decide that we are learning or growing as we do here.
There are healing spaces there also, aren’t there?
From my understanding of the spirit world, there is a healing aspect to that development in the spirit side of life. From my understanding of, “This is not the end,” and the second part of that was, “If this isn’t the end and we continue, then some of the choices that we make when we’re in this world, this life and this understanding of ourselves, there’s not a decision that goes undone.” I always look at it as sometimes you’re on a toll road. In New Jersey, we have a lot of toll roads. We have the Parkway. We’ve got the Turnpike.
People, before E-ZPasses, will go through the cash lanes and don’t pay. We would say, “We got away with that. We got away with something.” You don’t get away with it. Everything that we do and every decision we make has a consequence to it. We have a personal responsibility in this world and life to do the best that we can. It doesn’t mean we’re perfect. It means we do the best that we can do.
We have a personal responsibility in this world and in this life to do the best that we can. Click To Tweet
As we go to the spirit side, those things are looked at. Those things have a consequence to them, good, bad and different. When we say, “I’m getting away with something here,” we don’t. We still have the ability to look at that. In terms of your question, when I started to work with mediumship, all of these other revelations started to come to me.
It’s understanding that this life is important. Whether we’re in grief, in disease or whatever we’re in and it doesn’t mean we get physically better sometimes but what it means is that if we can work to make it better for ourselves and we can work in this life to make it better for other people, there is a consequence to it that helps us when we move from this physical world.
Are you talking about that being the life review?
In some ways, yes. Some people call it a life review. From what I understand from the spirit world, it is where we have to look at those pluses and minuses. Not only look at that but we feel what that was for other people. If I did something to hurt you, whether it was intentionally or unintentionally, part of that review is to understand what your pain or what your feeling was. Not only that I had done something that rendered somebody hurt. There’s an awareness of the feeling of what happened.
When you look at these things, search out these things and experience these things, I look at this life from a little bit of a different lens that what we do each day is important. Even though we might be on days that are so hard and we don’t know if we can do what we need to do, even if we try, make an effort or do something, it gives us that little bit of understanding of what more can come. During my transition into mediumship, I’ve always worked another job. I started in my 30s into my 40s to start to incorporate mediumship in my life so it runs parallel.
It’s not an either/or. You have a parallel track going.
I have a parallel track because also, my feeling and it’s my opinion, we shouldn’t be on the spirit side 24/7. We have a physical life we have to have, do and experience. If we’re off in that altered space all the time, then we’re not living our life.
We shouldn't be on the spirit side 24/7 because we have a physical life we have to have, do, and experience. If we're off in that altered space all the time, then we're not living our life. Click To Tweet
We come here with lessons to learn.
I always look at this as if it is a parallel. I still have laundry and food shopping I have to do. I still go visit my grandkids. I still have all that stuff. I can’t be in the spirit world living my life. I have to be here living my life with an awareness of the spirit world.
You’re conscious in this lifetime. For those of us who are awakened or are waking up, for me, we’re more conscious of what we say and how we behave. We’re not fading away to nothingness at the end. There will be even more awareness when we crossover.
It’s for those people who are ready for more awareness. Like in this life, we have the opportunity and lessons. We have these decisions and opportunities that we take or don’t take. It doesn’t mean it’s right or wrong. It only means at that moment, that’s our decision but we have the same spirit world. We have decisions and opportunities. We have the availability to grow and learn but it’s not at the same pace as everybody else. As individuals as we are in this life, we are as individuals in the life of that energy of the spirit world.
It is so true because in mediumship, the way people identify the personality when they come through, the personality remains. The experiential mediumship gives you a tremendous viewpoint of that person. My husband’s sense of humor, descriptions of his body and the first meal I ever made him all come right through.
The one thing with that is also remembering that people can change. We change all the time in this physical world. If somebody goes into the spirit world who’s a little bit rough around the edges or a little difficult, very difficult or whatever the case is, we have the opportunity to shift that. In evidential mediumship, if I was in touch with that person and I said to the sitter, the person who’s coming, “This person is lovely and loving you, nice and comforting,” that wasn’t their experience and they wouldn’t recognize it. The communicator, the spirit person has to give us how they were before they can give us how they are.
People can change all the time in this physical world. Click To Tweet
I’ve seen both sides of that. The healing that happens when they acknowledge certain things that happen, they often apologize. There are so many different types of mediumship. A lot of our readers would be fascinated to learn about trance mediumship, Sharon. How does a person choose to specialize in that form of mediumship? Does the person, the spirit, the beings of light or whoever is taking over and coming through take over the body and the entire personality of the person? Many books are being channeled. A lot is going on in the world about trance mediumship. Could you tell us a little bit about that?
Let me start with evidential mediumship because it builds in that way. A medium that is working with the spirit world, people who have passed from the physical world into an energetic level, I call that the spirit world. Other people have different names for it but it’s not a place. We don’t have to take a plane to it. It’s a place that we walk through all the time. It’s like microwaves, radio waves or television waves. They’re around us all the time but when we have a tuning-in device, then we get the picture or the sound.
In this case, in evidential mediumship, the energy of the spirit world is around us all the time. An evidential medium with a breath brings our awareness to a slightly altered state of space, not where somebody’s not aware of what’s going on, where the blending of the energetic and the medium can bring in dialogue, conversation and thought exchange so that we can describe somebody. We can get the apology if it’s there. We can get the thoughts and the awareness of that person as they were and as they are.
In trance work, what happens is the blending process becomes a little bit deeper. In evidential mediumship, the evidential medium is aware of their awareness of say 90% to 95%. In the trance work, there are lighter states of trance and then there are deeper states of trance mediumship. In the lighter states, the blending might become 40% to 50%, where the energy of the spirit world is blended more than the energy of the medium and overshadows things like writing or speaking.
When we talk sometimes about channeling, it may be in those stages where we are getting a very strong inspiration of spirit to write, speak, sing or whatever it happens to be. At no point does the communicator, the spirit world take over anybody’s body. That’s all from science fiction. It’s all Hollywood. It’s all for the show, scaring and all that kind of stuff. The soul can only represent one person at a time.
Even though there’s been a lot out there on TV about that stuff like exorcism and all of that stuff, it doesn’t exist. When you get into deeper states of trance where there is a full trance experience, that’s where you may get the communicator working with the medium’s nervous system and vocal cords so that the speaker is the voice of the communicator. In physical trance mediumship, the spirit world works in a way where things can be produced that are visual. There may be an ectoplasmic representation of the communicator.
There may be an independent voice created like the way that I heard my grandmother’s voice in my dining room that day. You get the actual physical work that everybody can hear and see. Not only the medium and not just one person. That’s in full trance work. In the lighter stages, it may just be the medium’s awareness of the information. You’re aware of the channeling, the voice and what you need to write but not everybody else is.
It’ll help people understand it because a lot of people have that Hollywood viewpoint and there’s a lot of very valid trance mediumship going on.
There’s a lot of fear out there. That’s where I feel that people have to do the research and look at these things. Take TV and movies the way it is. They’re always going to try to up the game so that it becomes an event rather than a reality.
Your Inner Spiritual Center is a school for sensitivity, intuitive and mediumship development. Is there a difference between all of those? Is the training different for all of them?
Yes and no. They’re layers of our sensitivity. When we are intuitive, we can look at that in the sense of we all have an intuitiveness sensing of what we were talking about before. We have it because we were a soul within our bodies. It’s like our internal GPS. I’m sure everybody has had experiences where they’ve gone to a home, a store, a place of business or whatever it happens to be. You walk in and you’re like, “Nope. I’m out of here.”
You get the energy and it’s no good.
You walk in and you’re like, “I can stay here.” That’s our intuitive sensing. It’s our energetic field that is always out there with the feelers of what is and what isn’t. Whether we listen to it or not is a whole other story. Most of us don’t but when we do, it can be a telling indication of the energy that is around us. When we move into psychic work, psychic work is where a psychic or an intuitive, sensitive’s energy is working with somebody else’s energy who is here in the physical world.
If you and I were doing psychic work, my energetic field, sensitivity and energy would blend with your energy. Those auric and energy fields all carry information with us within our energy fields. A psychic is getting information from a particular person’s energy. It’s all well and good if it’s done fairly and well. If it’s not done well, it can be a disaster. If it’s done with bad intent, that’s where you have people saying, “For $500, I can take away the black aura around you.”
That’s why I made such a big deal when I introduced you. I said, “Integrity is so important.” Like in any other field, in this field, you have to be careful with whom you’re dealing with because there are people without integrity in this field also.
When we’re working psychically, good psychics can get a lot of great information but it’s one way in the sense that if I’m getting a psychic sense about something with you, Irene or anybody else and it’s not quite making sense to me, the only person I can talk to about that is me because I’m getting the energy in that way. When we’re working in mediumship, that’s where the medium is blending the energy just like in a psychic way but we’re blending it with a person from the energy of the spirit world.
The difference with that is the person’s soul or whatever word you want to use in the spirit world is a source of information and there’s an interaction that can take place. It’s not a download like a channel might be or a flat sense of what we get in psychic work. There’s communication. We can go back and forth with questions, answers and awareness. There’s somebody else to talk to in that way. They’re all layers of each other. We need our sensitivity and psychism in our mediumship to feel, sense and work through that but it’s not the same. In our training, we look and work with all of those layers but all of those layers are needed as a strong foundation to work well in mediumship.
The surprising thing for a lot of people reading is that there’s a lot of work that goes on into learning how to do this and preparing to do it well and with integrity.
It’s not only the structure of how we get into the spirit world, not without dying. How do we work with the spirit world? Where do we go with that information? When we get that information, how do we give it in a way that’s the truth of what we’re getting but where the sitter can accept it? Where do we go ethically on some of these things?
A lot of our training is the technical part of this, learning how to be consistent in what you do but it’s also navigating the difficult parts of this. The difficult parts of this are generally when there is a big problem. There’s a part where somebody may be having a very difficult time. How do you do that in a way that is genuine and that hopefully brings in the healing elements of what mediumship can be?
One of the greatest things about mediumship is the comfort and solace that it can bring to a person, especially someone who’s grieving.
It can be but then we’ve got the other part of that where there are also boundaries in mediumship. When somebody’s walking up to somebody and randomly giving them a reading, to me, that’s dangerous because you don’t know where that person is in their grief. For instance, if there was a member of the family that was verbally abusive to somebody or physically abusive to somebody and as a medium walks up to somebody and gives them that person and the receiver is not ready emotionally to handle that information, then we do more harm.
When we talk about boundaries in this work, there’s got to be boundaries and that’s also what we spend a lot of time looking at, working with and understanding that when we work, we work but when we’re done working, we are done. It’s not a matter of, “I’m open to the spirit world 24/7.” I’m not a drive-up 7-Eleven deli. It’s not good to be open and aware of the spirit world because we have to live this life.
I want to ask you. You work, teach and demonstrate in New Jersey and different areas of the United States. What inspires you to also bring your gift to Switzerland of all places? Tell us about your work on the teaching faculty of Fellowships of the Spirit in Lily Dale, New York. Switzerland is one thing but a lot of people don’t know about Lily Dale, New York, which is so famous. How did you get there?
In our journey, it’s very interesting where we end up. In Switzerland, the Cofounder of the Inner Spiritual Center, Bill Coller, is Scottish but lives in Switzerland. When we decided many years ago to start this center, Bill comes over 4 or 5 times a year, as my original teacher did for people. It’s a parallel to my own. It’s a pattern. I was very fortunate to be introduced to some people over in Switzerland through Bill where I got to work for several years. This was all before COVID.
Since COVID, I haven’t been back to Switzerland but I have been back working in England. It’s a little bit opening up again but we’ll see how that goes. That’s how I got into Switzerland. I got into England through the International Spiritualist Federation, which is a worldwide organization of spiritualists. It doesn’t matter your background or whatever the case is but it’s a worldwide community where you can get some support and experiences. We’ll be in England again with them.
Lily Dale in New York, which is up near Lake Erie, if I remember correctly, it’s about 1 hour and 15 minutes Southwest a little bit of Buffalo, New York. It’s in the cold country. It is the largest spiritualist community in the United States. It’s been around since the 1880s and it started as a summer camp where people from all over the country would take a train and spend the summer because it was cooler than the cities.
They would come in and they had people speak like Susan B. Anthony and some of the suffragettes from the early 1900s. They had people that would come in from all over the world and would fill this auditorium with thousands of people because that was how things got done that day. We can’t just get on Zoom. They couldn’t pick up a cell phone. There was a lot of talking development of mediumship.
Lily Dale is a lovely community that you do need to be a spiritualist to live there but anybody can visit over the course of the summer. It is also a place where over the years, they’ve had their challenges. They’ve had their difficulties and ups and downs like any community. The Fellowships of the Spirit were originally centered in Lily Dale and then they moved outside the gates with Reverend Elaine Thomas. They’ve been doing this for many years. I knew Elaine for many years because I was up and down from Lily Dale from the ’90s on. She had asked both Bill and me to be part of their mentorship programs. Once a year or twice a year, we teach their students in mediumship.
What a compliment to you.
I look at it as I’m very lucky and grateful for people like Elaine, you, Bill or whoever along my path has been there to be a little bit of light on that path. Hopefully, I do the same thing for other people but we never know that and nor should we sometimes. Hopefully, you’re that light when somebody needs it.
We’ll find out when we cross over, Sharon.
I don’t have any short-term plans on that, Irene.
Me neither. Let me ask you about the types of healing services that are offered at your center and how are Sunday services there different than what a person usually experiences in a church. For those who are reading this, are your Sunday services available via Zoom?
Yes, we’re available. Since COVID, we went on Zoom. We reopened up and we’re running hybrids. We have in-person and cameras up. We have Zoom and in-person at the same time.
People can get on your website and sign up to see your services on Sundays.
They don’t even have to sign up. If they go onto the website, it’s InnerSpiritualCenter.org, they can click on the Zoom link because it’s the same Zoom link every week. It is 10:30 Eastern time in the States every Sunday, except in 2022 because Christmas and New Year fall on a Sunday, and we all have family plans on Christmas or New Year’s. Every Sunday, we have a service. Everybody is welcome. There’s no test you have to take before you come into service. You’re welcome.
If a person goes to church or synagogue, it’s a different experience.
Anywhere where you go that’s a spiritual place, it’s a different experience. In our services, we always have an opening and closing prayer. We have some songs in between, although we’re not great singers. We have a speaker every week about some topic that’s in the spiritual realm. It has nothing to do with, “Open to this page and we’re going to read together.” It has something to do with life events.
The topic is someone who’s experienced something or they’re sharing their knowledge or experience about this world.
Yes. We also have a demonstration of mediumship each Sunday, which is about anywhere from 20 minutes to 35 minutes, depending on the medium we have and the period. The demonstration of mediumship is a connection or connection from the spirit world to people who are there or on Zoom. Not everybody gets a contact because we could be there for five days. We can’t do that. We’ve got a certain amount of time but it’s an awareness that the spirit world is around us.
With that is the evidence of that person. I’ve been to places where they’ve said, “There’s a woman by you and she loves you very much.” “Maybe, maybe not. I don’t know because you’re not telling me who it is.” We’ve trained people that if you’re going to somebody, you better know whom you have. It might be the grandmother on mom’s side, dad, mom, sister, brother or whomever it happens to be. This is the information about them that makes them them. The demonstration is there. We always have fellowship. If you’re on Zoom, you can hang out for a while. If you’re there, we always have coffee, tea and something to eat.
What’s also wonderful about it is if people are bringing forth in the demonstration, they’re bringing forth the deceased and it’s good reading that way. Maybe that person or someone in the audience who didn’t get their actual message wants to work with that medium now that they know the kind of work that the medium does.
It’s interesting, Irene because a lot of times, people think this is a cut-and-paste kind of world, the spirit world of mediumship. Not every medium is right for every sitter or every person in the spirit world and not every communicator is right for every medium. It’s like everything else. Some people we click with easier and some people we don’t and energetically, it works that way too. That’s a good point because again, certain people work better with other people.
It works here and it works the same way over there. What fascinated me also, and people would find this very interesting that you do this, is more people are talking about having a celebration of life ceremonies instead of traditional funerals. Sometimes people are having both. Could you tell us about that because I know you have a celebration of life ceremonies at the Inner Spiritual Center? People sometimes come from the traditional funeral or whatever to you. How does that work? What’s that about?
I came from a funeral for an older gentleman. He lived a long and great life. He had a great family life. It was all good and nice but the funeral was very cold for me. To me, they celebrated his passing but not his life. When we look at celebrations of lives for people who have passed to the spirit side, we look at what is it about that person other than their soul everlasting, what have they made a difference in for somebody? What have they done that we want to remember them for? It’s those things that we want to celebrate. It’s not just rote.
It’s not like, “You’re number five in the line. We’re going to say everything we said about the first four but change the name.” It’s very personalized. It has input from the family, the loved one or whomever it happens to be as far as what they want to have in this. Also, these types of things are not for the spirit world. People who’ve passed to the spirit world are in the spirit world. You’re either here or in the spirit world. There’s no in-between.
People who've passed to the spirit world are in the spirit world. You're either here or you're in the spirit world. There's no in-between. Click To Tweet
They’re already there. It’s for the people who are still here and have to work through their active grief. We have to look at what helps the family, what helps the loved one and what helps the partner, the wife, the husband or whatever it is to start the healing process of grief. We have their input as to what they want or how they want to celebrate their loved one. It becomes more personalized.
Regarding your question about do people come from other backgrounds, there are very few people in the United States that I know of the spiritualist group that was born into spiritualism. Usually, it’s found along the way somewhere. Everybody comes out of a different religious background or understanding. For whatever reason, that no longer works or functions for them and they look for something different.
We have a lot of people who sometimes in these ceremonies want some of the traditional things that they know incorporated. Here’s the way that I look at it. Our job as a minister in that scenario is to help guide the family or the person in this process and not do it for them. Do not say, “This has to be done.” You don’t have to prove that you’re a spiritualist to come in and have a celebration of life. Just come in.
Yes, we have a lot of people from different backgrounds and it could all be incorporated. There’s a lovely song from Enya from years ago that says, “All roads lead to one road.” That’s a lyric in the song. Whether you grew up in a temple, a church, a mosque or just in nature, it doesn’t matter. We all go to the same place. Let’s celebrate that with each other rather than looking at the differences in everything.
You’re celebrating that person. There’s more you can say about that person and the differences they made in people’s lives. People want to get up and talk about that. That is probably what the deceased person is experiencing on the other side, the difference that they also made to these people’s lives.
I’ll change one little wording because of what I found from the spirit side when they’ve talked about certain things. One of the things they don’t necessarily like is being referred to as dead because they are not. They’re only in a different form. It’s like taking water and freezing it or steaming it. It’s still water. It’s just in a different form.
How do they like to be referred to?
As them and not that they loved you. They love you. It’s an active now kind of thing.
It could be one of the most important things people are getting from this interview. They’re with us, they’re active and they still love you. It’s not that they loved you. They’re with you in your life.
They may still be angry at you. Who knows but there’s the presence with them and not in only memory. The physical body doesn’t go with us. There’s a memory of the physical body. There may be a memory of an illness or death passing but that’s not how they are. They’re not in the activeness of that. What they are in the activeness is their awareness of their loved ones, family, friends and people that they may have wronged and people that they did everything right for. It’s the awareness of the present rather than the message of the past.
Tell us about your ongoing core classes and courses of mediumship that are offered at the Inner Spiritual Center. I know that they’re available online. Do you have a special offer from the members of our audience?
We certainly can do that. We have ongoing individual classes throughout the year but we have four main courses throughout the year that start in January or February and meet every few months for 3 days or 2 days or whatever the particular course is. We have the development of mediumship, which is year one. It doesn’t mean that you’ve never done anything with it before. It only means that you haven’t done it with us.
We look at the structure and getting your confidence because that’s a big thing in mediumship, not feeling confident in what you’re doing. We work with that for the year. We then have a year 2 and 3 advanced group that works together. We also, during the year, put those groups together because as we know, we can always learn from each other. The students who have been around for a while can learn from the first-year students and they can also see their growth.
The first-year students learn a lot from the groups that have been involved there. We have some people that just started. We’ve got people who have been with us for years in their development because even though they’re working with their mediumship, they don’t want to make mistakes on other people. They want to make them in class. We have a range of people.
We also have an exploring trance class that’s led by Rev. Rosemary Calderalo. She comes up from Maryland to do that course force. It’s also online. All of these are worked hybrid. It’s exploring trance, understanding what the trance states are and getting comfortable with the trance states. We also have a trance to physical, which is tutored by Rev. Richard Schoeller. He comes out of New York. He brings those levels of exploring trance into the deeper state of trance work. The mediumship classes are tutored by Bill Coller and me.
We have these going on throughout the year. We have individual classes that are going on in our Sunday services each and every week. Anybody that’s reading this, if they want to do one of those classes, you may email Info@InnerSpiritualCenter.org saying that you got this information from Irene or the show, we will either give you $250 off in one of those courses, or if the courses are already in process, you can do it for the following year or you can take one of our standalone classes with no charge.
That is so generous and kind of you.
One of the things I feel, Irene, is that we’re all in this together. Even though the center has to run as a business to some degree because we have to pay our bills and all that stuff that businesses do, but there’s a different part of the business in this kind of work where we have to take care of each other. We have to be available for people and be able to work with people because not everybody can pay for a course off the top of their heads. We always have payment plans. I always work with people if they need to do it monthly because this world is hard enough. We don’t need to be unkind to each other.
That’s beautiful. Thank you, Sharon, for that. The whole crux of this show is about getting people to healing and opening to healing. You’ve said that healing encompasses the physical, emotional and mental aspects of who we are. Would you like to speak about that? Why is it important for people to do their healing work? You offer these healing opportunities for people. Why should people want to set aside their pain? What will that do for them?
I can’t answer what it will do for them in the sense of an individual person because we all have this journey in our ways but when we’re working with our mediumship, whether it’s in trans work or mental mediumship, in terms of the evidential part of the mediumship or whether we are walking around day-to-day life, when we are in pain, we process things differently. We look and react to different things differently.
I always tell our students, especially in mediumship, “When you start to work with this stuff, all the stuff you think you’ve pushed down will show up. It will show up in your reading, the way that the communicators give it to you or in parallel experiences.” It’s going to show up because what it means is that there’s the opportunity there to take this, not push it down and look at it, whether it’s with a psychologist, a psychiatrist, a healer or whatever it is and work through it like clay.
We’re going to keep working it until we’ve made something out of that pain and grief that teaches us something. If somebody has lost a person to the spirit world dramatically, it is a grief that may be different for somebody who lost somebody who’s 94 and lived a full life. It may not be but it may be. If we don’t deal with our stuff, whether it is grief like that, anger, unresolved issues, fear or anything that as humans we go through, it is going to show up until we have the strength at that moment or the opportunity to look at it, work with it and heal it.
When that’s healed, it no longer shows up. It doesn’t have to. It’s a lesson learned but grief is not something that we can say, “In six weeks, you’re done.” It’s different for everybody. We have to be available for support in that process but also not allow people to remain in a catatonic state. That’s not life. How do we gently purposely live with grief? That comes with healing.
Healing grief can be an opportunity for people. It can bring them healing. At least, that’s one of the things that happen to me in heightened awareness. What is the famous Sharon tip for finding joy in life?
I don’t know whether you should go by me. One of the things that have been my lesson throughout my life that kept showing up and still does keep showing up when I forget about it is a little bit of a twofold. It’s one thing in terms of being able to be yourself, whatever that is and be happy in that version of yourself. The one thing about us is we should always be changing in some way somehow.
If we’re happy with our change at that moment, then we have the opportunity to spread a little bit of that happiness and perhaps be that light somewhere for somebody else but more importantly for ourselves because we have to champion ourselves in this world. My life lessons have always been finding my strength, being proud of that strength and then being able to take that and move it forward to hopefully help other people. That does bring me joy.
I see mediumship students get it and they’re like, “I did that.” I was talking to somebody who passed to the spirit world. They have a whole different perspective. When I see those things on people’s faces like, “I did it,” for me, it is joy. When I see somebody who’s been dealing with grief for so long have a moment of reprieve for whatever reason, whether their loved one came with information, they had some healing or they did something for themselves that they didn’t think they’d ever do again, when you see that spark of life return, even for a glimpse, even for a moment, I get the joy of, “This is life.”
I had a woman one time that came to me for a reading. I never knew her. I never met her before. I didn’t know why she had come but she came. She sat down. I was very aware of a daughter of hers in the spirit world. Children are hard sometimes to bring in, not for them but for you as the medium because your heart aches for these moms and dads. The daughter was there. The daughter gave information about herself, the mom, the family and all of this.
This daughter had passed from suicide. She had an emotional condition and she couldn’t handle the day-to-day world did that she ended her life. In the mom’s religious world, in her life, her priest told her that her daughter was not in heaven. For six years, this mom thought her daughter was somewhere but didn’t know. You’re either here in the physical or the spirit world.
You’re not walking. You’re not lost. You’re not in purgatory. You’re not anywhere except here or in that energy. When she recognized that her daughter had been around this whole time, there was something that lifted for that woman that when I think and talk about it, I get emotional because that woman came back to life. It wasn’t because of me or what I do. It was because she had that moment, connection, recognition and reunion with her daughter.
It was because you can do what you do that brought her that awareness. That was the blessing that helped her.
Yes, but I’m not saying it’s because of, “Look what I did.” It’s not like it’s a story that I refer to now and again because it reminds me of being humble in what we do. We never know what we’re going to say, whom we’re going to connect with and the healing potential of this but all we can do is plant the seed. There’s a humbleness about this work that I feel is important to say. I never say, “I did this or that.” This is the availability of this information and then the person can take that information and make their decision. Whether they like it, don’t like it, believe it, don’t believe it, can heal from it or can’t heal from it, or whatever it is, then that’s their journey.
That’s the most beautiful way to come to the end of this interview with what you said. Sharon, thank you so much for guiding and supporting people and planting those important seeds as they grow their spirit and connection to the spiritual realm for lighting the way with your significant contributions to your unique lifelong adventure and path.
I thank you from my heart for this is wonderful and enlightening. I told everyone it’d be super interesting and it was. Make sure to follow us and like us on socials, @IreneSWeinberg on Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter. If you’re watching here on YouTube, be sure you click subscribe so you’ll never miss an episode. As I like to say, to be continued. Many blessings.
Guest Links:
- Visit The Inner Spiritual Center website
- Inner Spiritual Center’s email: info@innerSpiritualCenter.org
- Follow Sharon on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter
- Fellowships of the Spirit – Referenced in this episode
- International Spiritualist Federation – Referenced in this episode
Host Links:
"Irene is a warm, smart, brilliant interviewer!"
